at
Sea and Space Explorations
4755 York Blvd, LA, CA 90042
http://www.seaandspace.org
Gallery is open for events only during this project
Tel.: 323-982-0854 . email: info@seaandspace.org

In conjunction with the intensive artist's residency, Genesis Project, happening this August at Sea and Space Explorations, Genesis Extension, offers the public a way to interact with the resident artists, and to learn about/participate in body-based art making practices and methodologies.


August 15, 8pm – Workshops
Genesis invites you to join in an evening of short workshops that experientially introduce participants to various practices and/or methodologies that work with/through the body for the purposes of exploration, training, and/or creative production.

The resident artists of the first annual Genesis Project LA will spend 3 hours a day, 5-6 days per week over the course of one month alone in a studio with their body/mind as their primary material and inspiration. The artists are not required to produce anything during their residency, but are instead encouraged to explore and potentially develop or expand upon a methodology for working. The residency's structure is largely inspired by legendary post-modern choreographer Deborah Hay, who, for many years, has employed a rigorous, full-bodied daily practice when creating and rehearsing individual works, and in the development of her ever-evolving artistic methodology as a whole. Many other artists, whether working in video, performance art, conceptual practice, dance, or theater have developed such specific approaches that they employ to create work, and which they sometimes teach to others. While these practices and their resulting works of art may be discussed and appreciated as objects of artistic production, their power and rigor may be most readily understood through embodied participation. Workshop details available soon at www.genesisprojectla.org.

August 28, 7:30pm – Closing reception/discussion
Join the five 2008 Genesis artists along with the Genesis Project advisory board, other LA-based artists, presenters, and organizers for a closing reception and discussion. Genesis artists, in dialogue with other members of the LA art community, will talk about their experience during the residency; working alone in the studio for 3 hours each day with their body/mind as their primary material/inspiration, and the exchange that transpired with their fellow residents.

Fall 2008 Screening
Date and location TBA (www.genesisprojectla.org for more information)

In the fall Genesis Extension will host a film screening featuring a diverse array of works for video, documentation of performances, and raw footage of practice sessions, followed by a discussion. The works screened will offer viewers of a wide variety of examples of body-based art practices, approaches, and final products. Date, location, and screening details TBA.

Genesis Project, Los Angeles is a collaborative, artist’s residency catering to artists whose practice exists between disciplines and works with and through the body. The project is modeled after Genesis, Dublin, Ireland, which began in 2004 when dance artists Julie Lockett and Ella Clarke, in conversation with seminal post-modern choreographer Deborah Hay, asked the question, “As an artist, what do I need?”

Genesis facilitates an environment wherein creativity IS the act of investigation rather than what is produced from it. Our mission is to support artists in accessing space in which to work and fortify a practice and a community from which to act globally. By asking artists to commit to regular inquiry without focus on a final product, Genesis aims to heighten productivity of the collective at work in the project and to sharpen the potency of each artist’s daily practice.

This year the project will support five body-based artists; Cheryl Banks-Smith, Cesar Garcia, Alison O’Daniel, Liz Atkins, and Brooke Smiley, in engaging in daily, autonomous practice while providing opportunities for regular and focused exchange. Each of the five artists signs a contract with Genesis, agreeing to work in the provided space at Sea and Space Explorations for 2-3 hours a day, 5 or 6 days a week throughout the month of August. In addition, participants will arrive 15 minutes before the start of their individual designated practice time and will sit in on the practice time of the preceding artist. This overlap window could include observation, dialogue, or collaboration as determined primarily by the artist already in the space. Each Saturday the participants will gather for more structured exchange as a group.

On Friday nights throughout the month Genesis Project, in collaboration with Art 2102, will host panel discussions, film screenings, and/or lectures, which will focus on various aspects of inter-disciplinary practice and/or process-based artistic methods.

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Genesis Project, LA 2008 Resident Artists

Liz Atkin is a visual artist based in London. She is interested in skin as a constantly transforming surface, ripe with memory, a flesh canvas. With a background in theatre and dance, physicality underpins her creative practice. Her work is situated in the tradition of Live Art performance and abstract expressionism. In her portraits, Liz works with her face and the surface of her skin, exploring texture and transformation through body focused repetitive behavior. Drawing with light, current photographic pieces are produced through flatbed scanners.

Brooke Smiley recently moved back to Los Angeles from London. She is a performer whose work investigates facial management and its affect on the body.  By employing the use of white, non-expressive masks as a tool for the abandonment of the self, her work performs a body in the act of re-identifying itself, challenging and framing the body's behavioral impulse to move by re-negotiating anonymity as a means for transformation.

Alison O’Daniel is a hearing impaired former Texan ice skater turned double dutcher with an insatiable interest in handling materials, living abroad, being constantly engaged in education, making collaborative love, and participating in political gossip. In her own work she is interested in breaking from the historical language of representation and power that often defines film, documentary, and feminist theory, by constructing plastic, false situations and stepping back to watch how vulnerability grows over these facades like an uncontrollable landscape.

Cesar Garcia is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and cultural activist currently living and working in Los Angeles. His current research interrogates the erasure of locality in the context of biennial exhibitions, homogenizing global culture, and the ongoing technological revolution. His performance and body-based practice is rooted in intercultural collaboration, emphasizing the body as a communicative tool across cultural & generational differences and bringing attention to movement (of populations, ideas, and the body itself) as a platform for critical exchange and reflection.

Cheryl Banks-Smith is a dancer, choreographer, dance educator, improviser and interdisciplinary arts “explorer” who has collaborated in numerous projects with contemporary and internationally renowned jazz artists, musicians, performance artists, poets, writers and visual artists. While trained in the theory and craft of choreography, she considers herself to be a movement "smith" who explores and designs movement works from an intuitive, non-linear approach, like sketching with broad strokes and then filling in the lines and details later as the process reveals itself.  She has performed and taught throughout the U.S. and globally and currently serves on the dance faculty at Pasadena City College.   

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Hana van der Kolk, Project Director
Hana van der Kolk is a Los Angeles-based artist. Her choreographic projects combine elements of conceptual practice with the techniques of postmodern choreography and take place in a wide range of sites, including the stage, studios and galleries, in writing, on film, and in outdoor, public spaces. Hana brings to Genesis her experience with daily investigation as a body-based artist as well as her commitments to building community and considering her work in a wider social context. She is highly influenced by her long-time engagement with the work of legendary post-modern choreographer Deborah Hay, whose work she has been learning and adapting since 2000. Hay’s methods for rigorous daily practice deeply shape Hana’s work as an artist and inspire her as a teacher and director of Genesis Project. Her various adaptations of Hay’s The Ridge and Boom, Boom, Boom have been performed/screened throughout the country. Most recently Hana has collaborated with Robby Herbst, Jesse Aron Green, and My Barbarian and is engaged in a long-term collaboration with scholar/performer Carolina San Juan, creating an intersection between disco and minimalist video and performance. Hana holds an MFA in choreography from UCLA.

Arturo Vidich, Associate Director
Arturo Vidich is an inter-disciplinary artist from New York City. His approach to experimental performance uses technology and movement to identify and reflect upon the way we process information through the senses. He is interested in treating the performer's body and sculptural materials as interchangeable objects, and in the possibilities that emerge out of resistance and limitation. Arturo is a Movement Research Artist-in-Residence 2008-2009 and participated in Genesis Project, Dublin where he was the first Red Stables International Artist-in-Residence in 2007. He is a founding member of Culture Push, an organization dedicated to creating links between people and supporting artistic endeavors, going beyond the world of specialization so that people of all backgrounds gain boundless access to life-changing ideas.

Genesis Project Advisory Board
Esther Baker-Tarpaga
Rae Shaolan Blum
Jesse Aron Green
Robby Herbst
Carol McDowell
Ron Milam
Adam Overton
Michael Parker
Christine Suarez
Flora Weigmann

This exhibition is made possible in part by the generous support of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

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