AQUARIUM
A Reclamation Installation and Event Series
February 13th through March 6, 2010
               
RECEPTION  February 13th, 8pm

Installation shots. Piping made from recylced water bottles only. Water recylced and poured through piping to outdoor terrarium.
Installation shot. Outdoor terrarium.	Installation shot. Piping going through the back studio/office through the back window.
Performers with Chat Roulette from Ritual/Music night.

AQUARIUM EVENTS CALENDAR
Admission to all events is FREE.

February 13             Opening Reception, 8pm

February 19             Out of the Fishbowl: Spatial Interventions, 9-11pm           
                                 Performances by Jib Kidder and Gerhard Schultz

February 20             RITUAL/MUSIC: Part 1, 8pm - 2am
                                 “Music Making Making Myth”
                                 Featuring Performances by Big Whup, Emily Lacy, and Actually Huizenga

February 23            An Epic Reading Under the Aquarium, 7:30pm
                                 Curated by Daiana Feuer
                                 Performances by Gedda Ilves, Corridor, Aaron Drake, Sarah Ibrahim, Gerard Olson & Teira Johnson, Daniel                                  Pelt, Daiana Feuer, and Amanda Jo Williams with a pamphlet by Maxi Kim    

February 26             Out of the Fishbowl: Spatial Interventions,  8pm         
                                 Performances by Sarah Cole and *SADIE

February 27             RITUAL/MUSIC: Part 2,  8pm 
                                 Dublab + Human Ear Music + Leaving Records Collaboration
                                 Featuring Performances by Golden Hits, Julia Holter, Matthew David, and
                                 Visuals by Jessilisa Moretti

February 28             Reclamation Reads,  7pm 
                                 Curated by Caroline Chang and Jared Woodland  
                                 Performances by Maya Gingery, Narinda Heng, Janice Lee, Alex Mack, and Stephen van Dyck

March 4                    Wilderness Boundary,  3pm 
                                 Presentation by John Matthew Heard

March 6                    Closing Reception + RITUAL/MUSIC: Part 3,  6pm 
                                 “Some Kind of Family: Big Whup Industries and the Ritual of Musical
                                 Friendship”
                                 Featuring Performances by Drew Denny, Geoff Geis, God=Genocide, Michael
                                 Nhat, and Nicole Kidman 

..

In a greenhouse of worship, the artist collective Reclamation aspires to force a change in the discourse on environment and religion.

Visitors climb a ten foot staircase to feed reclaimed water into a plumbing system consisting of hundreds of used plastic bottles filled with sand, charcoal, gravel, and rocks suspended from the ceiling by the strength of hundreds of plastic bags. With the power of gravity, the water snakes and zigzags through this aqueduct/filtration system and empties purified into a modular pyramidal garden composed of food-producing, carnivorous, and water plants. And this is only the beginning of AQUARIUM.

The work of Reclamation members Drew Denny, John Matthew Heard, Kyoung Kim, Edwina Portocarrero, and Claudia Slanar, as well as the CalArts Community Arts Partnership (CAP) students of Michelle Richter, Niki Rousso-Schindler, Drew Denny, and Juan Renteria at the Whitman Continuation School, AQUARIUM is an installation that transforms the gallery space into a meeting place. Under AQUARIUM, visitors and participants address the question “What if people took the environment as seriously as religion?”—a question that has become increasingly pressing in the wake of the failed 2009 UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen and the rise of popular belief in the global warming hoax.

A series of events including musical performances, readings, and lectures held in the space throughout the duration of AQUARIUM’s exhibition will allow participants and visitors to further the discussion. Big Whup, Dublab, Emily Lacy, Human Ear Music, Gerhard Schultz, and *SADIE are among the musical guests who will take on and interpret the concepts behind AQUARIUM. Caroline Chang, Daiana Feuer, and Jared Woodland will present readings that include original work by writers who both promote and challenge Reclamation, and John Matthew Heard will launch his latest project, Wilderness Boundary.

AQUARIUM is the second in the Reclamation series, co-founded by Drew Denny and Kyoung Kim in January 2009, which recombines and recontextualizes environmental practices and faith into a pseudo-religion. Reclamation investigates issues of collective consciousness, group versus individual think, and belief systems. It incorporates shared elements among religions and systems of belief, including the need for a space in which to congregate, contemplate, and connect by referring to shared text, vocabulary, and rituals.

Reclamation’s installations are environmentally-conscious in form and content; they consist of recycled materials and use kinetic energy generated by individuals. Unlike “green” art created with new technologies inaccessible to most people, Reclamation spaces are created using DIY methods accessible to everyone. Additional Reclamation spaces are Planetarium, Solarium, and Terrarium, which correspond to the elements of air, water, fire, and earth. Planetarium was installed July-October 2009 at Environmentaland in Los Angeles; Terrarium will be installed September-October 2010 at Hotel MariaKapel in Hoorn, Netherlands; and Solarium will be installed in 2011 at a location TBD.

AQUARIUM is on exhibit from February 13, 2010 through March 6, 2010 at Sea and Space Explorations located at 4755 York Blvd in Los Angeles, CA.

More information, including a calendar of AQUARIUM events, is available at www.reclamationproject.org.

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AQUARIUM EVENTS
Admission to all events is FREE.

RITUAL/MUSIC
A combination of music that is traditionally perceived as religious or ritualistic (i.e. Balinese gamelan, North Indian ensemble, shape note choir) and local performers who are adventurous enough to create site specific performances that represent, consider, or react to the concept of ritual music. Performances by Actually Huizenga, Big Whup, Dublab, Emily Lacy, God=Genocide, Human Ear Music, Leaving Records, Michael Nhat, Nicole Kidman
Dates 2/20, 2/27, 3/6

Out of the Fishbowl: Spatial Interventions
A series of performances dealing with spatial interventions in the actual gallery space. By emphasizing the surrounding gallery space that has already been transformed by the installation of "aquarium", questions about the implications of merging two spaces–simultaneously expanding and imploding them–are raised: Is an aquarium really so different from the white cube? And if it's not, can the "fishbowl" still function as device to finally return the gaze that normally identifies and controls from the outside? Performances by Sarah Cole, Jib Kidder, Gerhard Schultz, *SADIE Dates 2/19, 2/26

Reclamation Reads
Readings and performances of original work that are inspired by, consider, promote, question, and/or challenge Reclamation. Curated by Caroline Chang, Daiana Feuer, and Jared Woodland Date 2/23, 2/28

Wilderness Boundary
John Matthew Heard will launch his in initiative to blur the boundary between protected and unprotected “land.” The presentation will include a slideshow of wilderness boundaries, social boundaries, personal boundaries, and cover all of the conflicts, failings, happy accidents, and epiphanies that are part of Reclamation. Distribution and application of Reclamation stickers that announce that the stickered area is a demarcated wilderness boundary will be produced. Date 3/4

Bath Music
Drew Denny will collect her bathwater over the course of Aquarium. She will bring the bath water to Sea and Space in tubs and mic those tubs. She will smack and slap and splash the water like she once did as a child in the bath tub. She will record these water smacks and slaps and splashes, loop them, then play keys and sing on top. She hopes to write and record an EP of Bath Music with the participation of her fellow Reclamationers and Aquarium visitors. Dates Ongoing

Silent Auction
Found poisonous household products will be auctioned to the highest bidder. Date TBD

Topography & Constellate
Instructional piece that explores ritual and interpretation asks the public to recreate natural formations with their bodies. Constellate, in which individuals and groups recreate constellations of their choosing with their bodies, was created for Planetarium; similarly, Topography will ask individuals and groups to recreate river formations with their bodies. Topography will take place before and after all events. Constellate and Topography will also be performed in conjunction with Islands of LA and Fallen Fruit. Dates Ongoing

Utilitarian Confessions
Part guestbook, part confessional, part research, Utilitarian Confessions is a book that will be in the space and asks visitors to write down their environmental transgressions. Reclamation will use these “confessions” to determine obstacles many of us face on a daily basis in carrying out eco-friendly practices, and seek experts and suggestions that help ameliorate these problems. Dates Ongoing

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RECLAMATION BIOS

Drew Denny (Reclamation co-founder) was born in Texas but escaped at 18 to research the relationship between sweatshop labor and the sex trade in Southeast Asia and the Movement of Landless Workers in Brazil. After graduating with Honors from the USC Cinema Production program, Drew grew her practice through teaching, writing, installation, curation, terrarium construction and gift/ game composition. Drew performs in Big Whup, teaches eco-art, and is directing a documentary about the Mineros San Juan settlement of displaced miners in Bolivia. Drew is the Art Editor for LA Record and is pursuing an MA in Aesthetics and Politics from CalArts where she engineers Brain House and performs Balinese gamelan. She co-founded Reclamation with Kyoung Kim in January 2009.

John Matthew Heard, born John Matthew Mortimer Heschel Heard, spent his youth in the northeastern United States attending so-called progressive institutions where he learned to live communally. John began his higher education studying Religion at Oberlin College before deciding to be an artist. He has since practiced the forms of performance, sculpture, and performative sculpture at Otis College of Art and Design and the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles.

Kyoung Kim (Reclamation co-founder) was born in New York. She received her BA in History from Yale University and her MFA in Writing from the California Institute of the Arts. She is an artist, writer, and researcher, and is currently the Assistant Managing Editor of the literary magazine, Black Clock, edited by Steve Erickson. Kyoung co-founded Reclamation with Drew Denny in January 2009.

Edwina Portocarrero was born and raised in Mexico City. She's lived in Brazil, Honduras, Boston, LA and Mexico. Serendipity, causality and synchronicity has led her life, teaching her experience is the ultimate authority. Interests in exchanges, transmissions, transitions, attachments, inhabiting, rites and objects have led her to work in documentary film making, theatre design and animation. Aiming to have a greater impact in the practical world, she is doing research at the Center for Future of Storytelling and is part of the Object Based Media Research group at the Media Lab, MIT.

Claudia Slanar was born in Vienna, Austria. She studied business administration, art history and film studies, worked as freelance writer, curator and art educator for fine arts and film/video art, then came to Los Angeles as a Fulbright Scholar to study Aesthetics and Politics in the MA program at the California Institute of the Arts, and decided to stay a bit longer. Claudia is currently pursuing her MFA in Writing at the California Institute of the Arts. In her theoretical and practical work, she wants to challenge forms of representation, narration and seemingly fixed identities. She loves to design pseudonyms, invent fake companies and work in collectives.

reclamationproject.org . info@reclamationproject.org