FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Arlington Arts Center Media Contact: Laura Devereux 703 248 6800 [email protected] www.arlingtonartscenter.org

BY PROXY: ARLINGTON ARTS CENTER’S FIRST ONLINE EXHIBITION

BY PROXY On view: July 9 – September 7, 2020 Exhibition Launch: Thursday / July 9 / 6-6:30pm

EXHIBITION WEBSITE arlingtonartscenter.org/exhibitions/current

BY PROXY ARTISTS Gal Cohen, Maps Glover, Jeremy Hutchison, Mariah Anne Johnson, Ivetta Sunyoung Kang, and My Husband

Gal Cohen, Sharon’s House of Dreams by Quarantine Dream House Machine ARLINGTON, VA – Featuring new and recently created work, By Proxy explores the tension between solitude and solidarity that has characterized public and private life for many people since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. While the experience of quarantine has brought on a heightened sense of isolation, at least for those who are in a position to stay home, the pandemic has also made strikingly clear the limitations of the individualist ethos that has long dominated the American imagination. This period of isolation from one another has only served as a reminder of our need for both direct personal contact and, on a broader scale, for social solidarity and mutual aid. The work in By Proxy exists along this spectrum, from the sense of isolation to the desire for connection and communication. Presented entirely online, the show can’t help but grapple with the mediated togetherness offered by technology. Several artists in the exhibition take advantage of social media and other technological platforms in order to engage with wider audiences and launch interactive projects. These artists reimagine the possibility of social practice for an age of physical distancing, collaborating and creating relationships with participants from afar. Others consider the implications of social media itself, subtly critiquing these platforms through their engagement with them. AAC’s website will act as the hub for the exhibition, but exhibition artworks, performances, and artist talks will also live on Instagram, Zoom, and YouTube. By dispersing the exhibition across multiple platforms and continually launching new work throughout the exhibition, By Proxy takes full advantage of the virtual format. See below for a full schedule of exhibition programs.

PUBLIC PROGRAMS Exhibition Launch: Thursday / July 9 / 6-6:30pm Join us live on Zoom to celebrate the launch of By Proxy, AAC’s first online exhibition. Structured to take advantage

- page 1 - of the virtual format, By Proxy will feature work across platforms and include an active schedule of online programs. Blair Murphy, AAC’s Curator of Exhibitions, will discuss the exhibition, introduce the artists, and give an overview of the programs, performances, conversations, and other activities taking place as part of the show.

My Husband Presents: SHTF (Shit-Hits-The-Future: Saturday / July 11 / 6pm In their first Zoom performance forBy Proxy, artist duo My Husband performs a conversation about emerging from the physical structure of an underground survival bunker into a post-collapse society. The two characters in the work discuss a changing landscape of emergency and consider alternatives to the autonomous mindsets of individualist preppers.

Artist Talk with Mariah Anne Johnson: Thursday / July 16 / 5-5:30pm Join artist Mariah Anne Johnson as she discusses Habitat Actions, her recent performance series currently on view in By Proxy. The artist will discuss how she approached making work in quarantine and the connections between this new series and her previous performance and installation work.

Artist Talk with Gal Cohen: Thursday / July 23 / 5-5:30pm My Husband Pamphlet Launch: Thursday / July 23 Artist Talk with Ivetta Sunyoung Kang: Thursday / August 6 / 5-5:30pm My Husband Performance: Saturday / August 8 / 6pm Jeremy Hutchison Talk and Video Premiere: Saturday / August 15 / 2pm Maps Glover Artist Talk: Thursday / August 20 / 5pm

BY PROXY ON INSTAGRAM Maps Glover @grow.with.intention Project: July 9 – September 7 Ivetta Sunyoung Kang IG Live Series: July 13 – 31 / Mondays – Fridays / 6pm Mariah Anne Johnson IG Takeover: July 13 – 17 Gal Cohen IG Takeover: July 20 – 25 Jeremy Hutchison IG Takeover: August 3 – 14

Ivetta Sunyoung Kang’s IG Live Series and all artist IG takeovers will appear on AAC’s Instagram feed @arlingtonartscenter.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS Gal Cohen / New York, NY In Gal Cohen’s Quarantine Dream House Machine, the artist translates the desires of others into drawings, creating digital interpretations of the fantasy quarantine homes of friends, acquaintances, and strangers. Cohen lives in a 4th floor walk-up in New York City with her wife and daughter, and after the city’s lockdown began, she started imagining what her dream home for quarantine would be like. Rather than drawing her own dream abode, she posted a call to Instagram inviting people to send her descriptions of their own quarantine dream homes. Cohen executes the drawings in the order she received the requests, working on the drawings in the evening, after her child has gone to bed. She draws on her own personal history to create the drawings, incorporating images from the neighborhood where she grew up and memories of the homes of family and friends. While the project takes place in the context of isolation and the homes themselves often express a desire for more private space, the project has also created connections and community, as participants share their thoughts and feelings with her and, in return, she interprets their desires into a new vision. Gal Cohen is a New York City-based visual artist who works in painting and printmaking. Cohen is an artist in residence at Cornerstone Studios, a Scholarship Artist at Manhattan Graphic Center studios, a recent alumni of AIM fellowship at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and a Chashama ‘Space to Connect’ artist in residence for 2019-2020.

- page 2 - Cohen earned her MFA in Fine Arts at Parsons School of Design, The New School in 2018 and her BFA in Fine Arts at Bezalel Academy, in 2009. Cohen has participated in residencies, solo, and group exhibitions in , Canada, France, and the US, including The Other is You: Brooklyn Queer Portraiture at BRIC Gallery (Brooklyn, NY) in 2019, and additional exhibitions at Clemente Art Center, Spring/Break Art Show, and Bluewolf (New York, NY), Hanina Gallery (, Israel), The Artist Project (Toronto, Canada), and The Collectors Show at The Hub as part of ArtPrize (Grand Rapids, Michigan).

Maps Glover / Washington, DC For the exhibition By Proxy, Maps Glover presents Grow with Intention, an interactive project that transforms online interactions and individual intention into growth and positive change in the world. Through an online form, participants are asked to set a goal or intention for the future, and to explain how that goal will impact their community. Meanwhile, in a rural area of Maryland, Glover is planting and cultivating sage, using this period of physical distancing and general disruption to grow plants for the first time. Throughout the exhibition, he will document his cultivation of the sage plants on social media, posting regular updates to the Instagram account @grow_with_intention. Through the work, Glover documents his own efforts to think and live intentionally by slowing down, focusing on a new challenge, and growing something from the earth. He also encourages others to set intentions and consider the ways they might build and grow something for the future. At the end of the exhibition, Glover will harvest some of the sage and dry it to create tea. Each individual who sends Glover an intention as part of the project will receive a batch of tea he has grown and dried – the result of Maps’ commitment to his intention and a reminder for them to follow their own. Maps Glover creates work inspired by human behavior and pervasive social issues. He illustrates how time affects behavior, and how observation alters perspective. He constructs portals in which the characters he creates exist and experience the world or maps around them. Often the works addresses thought conflicting colors and distorted characters. Glover has created works at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Smithsonian Arts & Industries Building, Transformer, and more. His unconventional approach to expressionism evolves the birth of something new.

Jeremy Hutchison / London, UK Dear Mr. Zuckerberg is a one-way dialogue between Jeremy Hutchison and Mark Zuckerberg. The correspondence takes place via the artist’s channels on Facebook and Instagram - the social media platforms owned by the tech billionaire. In Hutchison’s short communications, he references personal anecdotes alongside global crises, as if writing to a distant acquaintance. In moments of collegiality, he acknowledges the similarities between Zuckerberg’s life and his own. Each is white, male and privileged. Each is quarantined at home with his kids. Each is protected from the chaos of the outside world. In these moments of identification, the artist grapples with what he calls his own “entanglement with histories of white male power.” But the formality of his address also hints at the hierarchy between them. Considering that Zuckerberg’s companies generate revenue from their users’ online labor, Hutchison could be considered an employee, dutifully reporting to work. In recent posts, his letters appear with short animations of Zuckerberg’s face, presented on maquettes. While the letters humanize Zuckerberg, imagining him as simply another human being, the animations present him as a symbol—an icon of wealth and power. This ongoing work acknowledges the trap set up by social media. It is a business model that relies on the commodification of the self: experience, expression and identity. Jeremy Hutchison is a British artist based in London. Working across performance, sculpture, and video, he constructs situations that insert disobedience and confusion into hegemonic systems. Many of his projects intervene in systems of production, exploring the relationship between consumerism and Empire. He has recently exhibited at ICA London, Modern Art Oxford, V&A London, Z33, Kunstverein Weisbaden, EVA Biennale, Saatchi New Sensations and Fondazione Prada. He received a distinction from the Slade School of Fine Art and was a fellow of the Whitney Independent Study Program, NYC. He lectures at Goldsmith’s College and London College of Communication.

- page 3 - Mariah Anne Johnson / Los Angeles, CA In her Habitat Actions series, Mariah Anne Johnson approaches her body as a material and her own living space as a new and unfamiliar environment. Johnson stages performances in her domestic space, documenting them through video and posting them online. Navigating her physical environment in careful and meticulous movements, she seemingly attempts to bond with the space and furniture around her. In several videos, Johnson’s carefully calculated movements seem to be in service of mundane tasks, like removing a tissue from the floor or retrieving toy cars from underneath the sofa. The artist makes the mundane domestic space strange, drawing humor from an undercurrent of absurdity. While they seem informal at first glance, the tableaus in Habitat are carefully staged, based on specific memories and amalgamations of previous movements. The objects in the scenes suggest the presence of other people, who perhaps need to be cared for and picked up after. But the artist’s most intimate relationship in the videos seems to be with the spaces she inhabits, as she quietly shapes herself to fit its form, trying to bond with her environment through physical proximity and intimacy. Mariah Anne Johnson is a native of Little Rock, Arkansas, where she attended art classes at the Arkansas Arts Center and studied ballet with Sally Riggs and Deborah Rawn. She studied art and literature at Rice University and earned her MFA from the University of Illinois in 2006. Mariah’s paintings and installations have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions around the country, in Los Angeles, New York, Houston, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., where she lived and worked from 2009 until 2018. Johnson has undertaken several international artist residencies, including the Riddergade AIR Fellowship at Viborg Kunsthal in Denmark, and performed with Hayley Cutler’s darlingdance company. From 2011-2018 she was a lecturer in painting and drawing at The George Washington University. In the summer of 2018 she relocated to Los Angeles, where she continues to find the adventure in art making.

Ivetta Sunyoung Kang / Montreal, Canada Ivetta Sunyoung Kang’s Proposition 1: Hands began as an interactive installation, presented in early 2020. The work transforms a common South Korean children’s game, known as Make Electricity on Hands, into a participatory therapeutic exercise, a social interaction that, as the artist phrases it, can help you “tolerate the uncertainty of your future.” In a video, two people participate in the exercise, as text instructions prompt the viewer to follow along with a partner. One holds the other’s hand by the wrist, slapping, massaging, and pulling on their partner’s hand and, eventually, touching a finger to their own tongue and using their saliva to warm the outstretched palm. In any context, the work would suggest intimacy and care, with an undercurrent of discomfort. In the context of the pandemic, the physical interactions between the two participants takes on a different resonance, both unsettling and alluring. Kang’s poetic instructions suggest that the significance of human touch as a way to soothe anxiety goes beyond material interaction, speaking to our more deeply held need for connection. For By Proxy, Kang will present Tenderhands, a new series of performances taking place on Instagram Live. In Tenderhands, Kang will explore the somatic anxiety resulting from the pandemic, including the heightened awareness of our hands as a possible vector for infection. Ivetta Sunyoung Kang is an interdisciplinary visual/video artist and writer, currently based in Montreal, Canada. She studied film directing in South Korea and earned her MFA in Film Production at Concordia University in Canada. She has presented short films and videos at film festivals and galleries around the world, including at Jeon-Ju International Film Festival in South Korea, Chennai International Women’s Film Festival in India, Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery and M.A.I. in Canada, and at SomoS Art House, Berlin, Germany. In 2016, Kang was shortlisted for the Simon Blais Award in Canada. She recently published a poetry book entitled Absent Seats. Kang is a co-founding member of an artist collective, called Quite Ourselves, and an A/V duo called CCVX?. Quite Ourselves experiments with public interventionism in search of alternative spaces for artistic presentation, exhibition, and gathering. CCVX? presents improvisatory A/V performances that are produced with found and long-archived A/V footage. CCVX? is composed of Ivetta Sunyoung Kang and Eric You. My Husband / New York, NY My Husband is the name adopted by artists Annika Berry and Eliza Doyle for their collaborative practice, which

- page 4 - explores questions of autonomy, interdependence, fragility, and threat. Working in collaboration with self-identified survivalists throughout the New York area, the artists combine methods drawn from filmmaking, including writing, composing, recording, and editing, with strategies of survivalism, such as tracking, hunting, storing, and moving. In videos, lectures, and booklets, My Husband combines character, images, appropriated text, and memes to create narratives that highlight the tension between the survivalist desire for autonomy and self-sustenance and our inherent interdependence. Now that COVID-19 has created a crisis scenario that many of us would have found unfathomable mere months ago, the broader sense of emergency long experienced by survivalists and preppers might be seen as prescient. And yet the focus on self-reliance that characterizes the world view of many in those subcultures seems woefully unsuited to this particular crisis. For By Proxy, My Husband will debut a pamphlet and two new performances, to take place on Zoom. In their first Zoom lecture, My Husband will perform a conversation about emerging from the physical structure of an underground survival bunker to a post-collapse society. The two characters in the work discuss a changing landscape of emergency and consider alternatives to the autonomous mindsets of individualist preppers. Begun in 2016, My Husband is the collective practice of Annika Berry & Eliza Doyle. Compelled by narratives of heroism and self-reliance, My Husband frequently collaborates with those who define themselves as autonomous. My Husband has delivered lectures internationally, including at the Rhode Island School of Design, the École Nationale d’Art in Paris, SAR’s 11th Conference on Artistic Research in Norway, and at multiple venues around New York. In 2019, My Husband was featured by Project Anywhere’s Global Online Exhibition platform.

ABOUT ARLINGTON ARTS CENTER

Location: 3550 Wilson Blvd, Arlington, VA 22201

AAC’s exhibitions and their attendant lectures, workshops, and panel discussions offer opportunities for dialogue, and ultimately serve to illustrate the value of contemporary art —specifically, what it is, how it works, and why it matters in our daily lives. Established in 1974, Arlington Arts Center (AAC) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit contemporary visual arts center dedicated to enriching community life by connecting the public with contemporary art and artists through exhibitions, educational programs, and artist residencies. AAC is housed in the historic Maury School, and boasts nine exhibition spaces, working studios for twelve artists, and three classrooms. AAC is one of the largest non-federal venues for contemporary art in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. For more information, visit www.arlingtonartscenter.org or call 703.248.6800.

Arlington Arts Center (AAC) is an independent, 501(c)(3) organization. Our programs are supported in part by The Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation; Arlington County through the Arlington Cultural Affairs division of Arlington Economic Development and the Arlington Commission for the Arts; the Virginia Commission for the Arts/National Endowment for the Arts; the Washington Forrest Foundation; and generous individual donors.

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