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San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art
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ICA Curator Picks
 
2015 marks the third year of the popular Curator Picks by the ICA curatorial team illuminating a small sampling of amazing works included in this year's auction. This weeks picks represents six works from the Silent Auction, which takes place on Saturday, October 10th.  
 
The picks are selected by Executive Director and Chief Curator Cathy Kimball, Curator Donna Napper, and Curatorial Assistant Emily Fayet.

 
 
Issue 2 Curator Picks include pieces donated by:
Alyssa EustaquioUlrike PalmbachLordy Rodriguez,
Leah RosenbergVanessa Woods, and Imin Yeh.

 
Alyssa Eustaquio
Keeping FEMINISM Fresh, 2013
Mint chewing gum, paper, plastic sleeve, and Wrigley's foil chewing gum wrappers
3 x 2.5 x .5"
Courtesy of the Artist

Alyssa Eustaquio’s works reflect ideas associated with identity and gender roles established by cultural and social expectation. In addition to presenting performance art pieces, she creates two- and three-dimensional works in which she repurposes a variety of unconventional materials such as cosmetics, toys, panties, and chewing gum to discuss the issues surrounding feminism and what it means to embrace this attitude in the 2010s.
 
To initiate the discussion, Eustaquio’s Keeping FEMINISM fresh associates a reference to feminism with an icon of popular culture as a strategy to raise awareness and attract a younger audience. By keeping it fresh and colorful, the artist shows that feminism is not an outdated idea frozen in time, but rather an evolving concept that needs to be renewed with each generation.
 
The pink color of the piece also demonstrates that feminism and femininity are not mutually exclusive, which is one of Eustaquio’s main concerns in her quest to understand the relationship between her self-perceived role and the one society expects her to play as a woman. In her opinion, “pink is the perfect color for my feminist charged work because it is unassumingly feminist.”

Eustaquio recently graduated from San Jose State University with an MFA in Spatial Arts. Her work has been featured at several venues in northern California, and Keeping FEMINISM fresh was selected by ICA Curator Donna Napper for the Bay Area MFA show at Root Division in 2013. Eustaquio inaugurated the new ICA Live! program with a participatory installation in April 2015. - EF
 

Ulrike Palmbach
Untitled (Sardine Cans), 2014
Ink, thread, fabric, and rope
4.5 x 15 x 2"
Courtesy of the Artist

 
What catches one’s eye when viewing Ulrike Palmbach’s sculptures of ordinary objects is the visual playfulness and incongruous materials. Previously, Palmbach used wood and fabric to construct what appeared to be cardboard boxes, and she has used army blankets to make what looked like ubiquitous plastic storage crates.
 
To create the auction piece Untitled (Sardine Cans), the German-born artist utilizes felt, which bears a kinship with fellow countryman, FLUXUS artist Joseph Beuys (1921-1986), whose famous works with felt and animal fat held both physical and symbolic meanings.
 
In Untitled (Sardine Cans), the medium and conceptual aspect share the work’s theme. Palmbach pays a tragic/comic homage to a can of sardines, a type of fish sometimes associated with a plebeian source of protein. She uses the sardine can to represent a less prosperous human existence in society, namely homelessness.
 
The can functions as a place of shelter with the thick material offering warmth. The fish appear to be huddled together for comfort, bringing to mind the phrase “packed in like sardines,” referring to crowdedness. Palmbach describes her sculptures as “effigies that combine value with absurdity, that intertwine irony with anxiety, that turn yearning into deception and comfort into illusion.”
 
Currently based in the Bay Area, Palmbach graduated from San Francisco Art Institute. She has exhibited her work regionally in venues such as the San Jose ICA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and The Museum of Art and History in Santa Cruz, as well as abroad in Switzerland and Italy. - DN

Lordy Rodriguez
Untitled (Islands 005), 2004
Ink on paper
16 x 7"
Courtesy of the Artist and Hosfelt Gallery, SF


Filipino-American artist Lordy Rodriguez has worked with cartography for nearly two decades. It began as a way to overcome being homesick while he was studying in New York. He explains, “Whenever I felt homesick, I would look at my maps of Houston until one night I drew a map of Houston and New York next to each other.” Today, he continues to create abstract ink drawings of fictional maps that chart a particular narrative – one that may emphasize history, culture or global relationships. He is interested in the power of the cartographer to control what is included on a map and more specifically, what is excluded (like all the states and roadways between New York and Houston). As Rodriguez notes, before Google Maps and other GPS aids, we would plot our journeys on those exasperating multi-fold paper maps. The highlighted route represented a singular narrative among the myriad of options created by the cartographer. With our route plotted out, the other details on the map became inconsequential.
 
Rodriguez’s work is based on extensive research and on his personal experience and heritage. He is a man of multiple origins including Chinese, French, Spanish and Filipino. He was born in the Philippines and raised in Louisiana and Texas. He received a BFA from the School of Visual Art in New York and an MFA from Stanford University. His work has been exhibited in California, New York, Texas, Nevada, Wisconsin, New Mexico, Maryland and Maine as well as in Istanbul, Turkey and Paris, France. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at San Jose State University. - CK

 

Leah Rosenberg
Paint Roll, 2015
Acrylic paint and gold leaf on mirror
15 x 15"
Courtesy of the Artist


Leah Rosenberg is a painter, sculptor and a pastry chef who uses a pure, unabashed love of color and an inventive use of materials to create her work. Before it closed, Rosenberg worked as the lead pastry chef for the rooftop coffee bar at SFMOMA where she applied her love of art, artists and cake-making to concoct desserts that celebrated the works in the permanent collection or on display in an exhibition.
 
Paint Roll is the perfect embodiment of Rosenberg’s diverse interests. It consists of layers of paint that Rosenberg has rolled into a colorful confection, covered in gold leaf and then cut in half. The rings of paint visible in the circular loaf are like rings in a tree, revealing a registration of time and effort, days and experience – sorrows, joys, pains, loves, fears and hopes.
 
Leah Rosenberg was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She received her BFA in Visual Arts from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, British Columbia and her MFA from the California College of Art, where she wrote her thesis on the artistic possibilities of cake. Her work has been exhibited throughout the US and Canada and has most recently been included in several Bay Area exhibitions including Happiness Is…at Montalvo Arts Center and Bay Area Now 7 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. She lives and works in San Francisco. - CK

 

Vanessa Woods
(In)Visible, 2014
Original collage
11 x 14" framed
Courtesy of the Artist


Draped cloth has been used throughout art history as a way to help tell a story of emotion, from bereavement in Michelangelo’s Pietà (1498-1499), to passion in René Magritte’s Les Amants [The Kiss] (1928). Bay Area-based artist Vanessa Woods created a body of work entitled (In)visible, in which she used images of fabric-covered heads, limbs and torsos to serve as a metaphor for the beginning and end of the life cycle.
 
The series began during Woods’ first pregnancy, a time that also coincided with her grandfather’s death. She first received her baby bundled in a hospital blanket, and when her grandfather’s body was taken away, he was covered with a cloth. Using fabric as a way to reconfigure and reimagine history, time, and the body, Woods states “I was thinking about the furling and unfurling of life and how mysterious and arbitrary it can be – how there is a constant sense of unknowing or invisibility.”
 
For her collage piece in the auction, Woods combined found paper ephemera into an arrangement of black and white cut outs anchored by a dramatic stream of deep red. An anthropomorphic image with exquisite curves reveals only a single elegantly posed arm, resulting in a simplistic yet poetic composition.
 
Woods earned her BA from Barnard College, Columbia University and MFA in Film/Photography from San Francisco Art Institute. She has exhibited her artwork and films internationally, and received several awards such as the Ella King Torrey Award for Innovation and Excellence in the Arts, and Murphy & Codogan Fellowship for Film. - DN

Imin Yeh
Paper Power (Bolts + Outlet), 2015
Rives BFK paper
Dimensions variable
Courtesy of the Artist


Imin Yeh is a sculptor, printmaker, installation and performance artist. Her series Paper Power explores the unseen labor and production that goes into the manufacturing of ubiquitous, everyday objects. Her meticulously crafted paper replicas of electrical outlets, nuts and bolts, elevate these taken-for-granted necessities of modern society to precious works of art. Yeh explains, “The near invisibleness of my laborious projects, the utter lack of utility in either function or value, the absence of color, and the small, softly placed interventions are all a provocation to think about how much time and energy is invested in things we cannot, or choose not to see.” Yeh chooses to use paper for these conceptual sculptures because it too, is a commonplace material.
 
Yeh received her BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and her MFA from the California College of the Arts (CCA). Her work has been exhibited at various museums and galleries in the Bay Area. She is an Adjunct Lecturer at Stanford University, San Jose State University, and CCA, and was recently awarded a Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation. - CK 

 
Add the auction events to your iCal calendar: 
Silent Auction and Party, October 10, 6-9pm:   iCal   
Live Auction Gala: October 24, 6pm:   iCal   
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San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art:
560 South First Street
San Jose, CA 95113

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