Disappearance Landscape is a virtual workshop designed and facilitated by artist Maria Gaspar that uses the body to interrogate and intervene in highly contested sites. Using green screen strategies, participants will examine jails, prisons, border walls, conflict zones, and other places of power in order to mediate, flip, dissect, transpose, or dismantle forms of oppression and confinement.
The Henry Art Gallery will be mailing kits, free of charge to workshop registrants, that include paper and adhesive to construct an individual greenscreen that will serve as a zoom background for the participatory workshop. Once registered for this event, please email your preferred shipping address to ians@henryart.org. Because this workshop requires a mailed component, please register by January 26 to ensure receipt of your kit. Kits should arrive the week of February 1. Due to timing and shipping constraints, mailed kits will be limited to registrants residing in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.
Maria Gaspar is an interdisciplinary artist whose work addresses issues of spatial justice in order to amplify, mobilize, or divert structures of power through individual and collective gestures. Through installation, sculpture, sound, and performance, Gaspar's practice situates itself within historically marginalized sites and spans multiple formats, scales, and durations to produce liberatory actions. Gaspar's projects have been supported by the Art for Justice Fund, the Robert Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellowship, the Creative Capital Award, the Joan Mitchell Emerging Artist Grant, and the Art Matters Foundation. Maria has received the Sor Juana Women of Achievement Award in Art and Activism from the National Museum of Mexican Art, and the Chamberlain Award for Social Practice from the Headlands Center for the Arts. Gaspar has exhibited extensively at venues including the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; MoMAPS1, New York, NY; and has led a decade’s long social practice project inside and outside Cook County Jail, Chicago. She is an Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, holds an MFA from UIC Chicago, and a BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY.
Disappearance Landscape is presented in the context of the Bugs & Beasts Before the Law Colloquium, an interdisciplinary forum that examines the way sociolegal systems mediate and oppress personhood, while leveraging the power of art to explore possibilities of survival and collective liberation. The colloquium takes inspiration from the film
Bugs & Beasts Before the Law (2019) by the artist collaboration Bambitchell, and which is scheduled to be on view at the Henry in winter/spring 2021. Visit the colloquium microsite to learn more:
https://bambitchell.henryart.org/
CREDITS
The Bugs & Beasts Before the Law Colloquium is organized by Nina Bozicnik (Curator, Henry Art Gallery), Mita Mahato (Associate Curator of Public and Youth Programs, Henry Art Gallery), and Carolyn Pinedo-Turnovsky (Associate Professor of American Ethnic Studies, University of Washington) and supported by the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington.
