August 28 & 29, 2020 / 8:30 PM - 10:30 PM
The practice of intervening public spaces and architectural facades with video projections has long been used by artists from Portland to New York. It is a readymade answer for the time of social distancing, and a desire for communal art experiences. This project transforms the city into a stage for art; illuminating new ways of experiencing our city through the act of projecting light. A forum for local artists and media makers to imagine their work outside the bounds of a gallery and reach new audiences where they are.
Using the platform and community of Public Space One to expand our audiences beyond the Northside neighborhood, the Open Art Media Festival is a pilot program that could be replicated or updated on a regular basis to continue to expand the reach of arts in public, beyond permanent installations or “plop art.” It is an alive and responsive medium that creates ephemeral events that expand the notion of public art and inspire new relationships to sound and moving images.
In consideration of COVID-19, we ask that you follow Iowa City’s mandate of wearing a mask in public while also maintaining a 6 ft distance from others as well as our artists. The sonic component for each installation will be broadcast over KRUI radio station throughout the program, creating safe viewing opportunities from your vehicle—this will also be a bike friendly event!
Organizer & Curator: Zen Cohen
Participating Artists: Jake Jones, Caitlin Mary Margarett, Anaïs Duplan, Dan Fine & Dana Keeton, and Adam Bryant
OPEN AIR 2020 was supported by a matching grant from the City of Iowa City Public Art Program.
Schedule & Locations:
8:30 >> Mobile Site 1: Stuff Etc (Side wall in parking lot) 851 US-6 E 41°38'44.4"N 91°30'42.7"W
8:50 >> Jake Jones: MAC Lab Media Arts Co-op: 206 Lafayette St 41°39'09.1"N 91°31'55.7"W
9:10 >> Mobile Site 2: Elrays Live and Dive (Alley between Dubuque and Linn St) 41°39'38.4"N 91°31'57.4"W
9:30 >> Anaïs Duplan: Back of PS1 (Dr Smollen parking lot) Public Space One: 229 N Gilbert St. 41°39'52.2"N 91°31'50.1"W
9:50 >> Caitlin Mary Margarett: PS1 front porch Public Space One: 229 N Gilbert St 41°39'50.9"N 91°31'51.5"W
10:10 >> Dan Fine & Dana Keeton: Iowa City Press Co-op: 225 N Gilbert St 41°39'52.0"N 91°31'45.9"W
10:30 >> end
Please note: these times reflect live performances and sound broadcast on KRUI from each location. All locations except the mobile unit stops will run projections throughout the two hour program.
KRUI Iowa City is proud to be working with Public Space One and the Media Arts Co-Op to amplify local art and music through community-based radio. The director board, made up of UIowa students, is thrilled to have experimental radio programming that contribute to KRUI as Iowa City’s Sound Alternative. Tune into 89.7 FM or online at KRUI.fm to listen.
About the ARTISTS:
JAKE JONES: The Word for Wisconsin is Wetlands
The Word for Wisconsin is Wetlands is part science fiction, part experimental documentary exploring the relationship between nature and the state.
Site: Media Arts Co-op (MAC)
Jake Jones (they/them/theirs) is a third year MFA student in Intermedia at the University of Iowa. Born in Oklahoma City, they earned a BFA in New Media from the University of Central Oklahoma before moving to Iowa City for graduate school. Under the name "Jake Jacobs", Jones creates art that moves between performance, video, and sound art contexts. Their research interests include experimental radio, sound as a community-building device, and queer identity.
jacobharrisonjones.com
IG: @jakejacobsjakejacobs
ANAIS DUPLAN: The Lovers Are the Audience Who Watch
The Lovers Are the Audience Who Watch is video-poem borrowing its title from a line of poetry by Juliana Huxtable. The sequence is constructed from found footage, largely sourced from music videos and art documentaries that focus on a beloved public figure. The video attempts to excavate moments of intimacy and shared attention from mass-produced digital artifacts.
Site: back of PS1 House
Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the author of a forthcoming book of essays, Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture (Black Ocean, 2020), a full-length poetry collection, Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016), and a chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus (Monster House Press, 2017). He has taught poetry at the University of Iowa, Columbia University, and will teach at Sarah Lawrence College and St. Joseph’s College.
His video works have been exhibited by Flux Factory, Daata Editions, the 13th Baltic Triennial in Lithuania, Mathew Gallery, NeueHouse, the Paseo Project, and will be exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in L.A in 2021.
As an independent curator, he has facilitated curatorial projects in Chicago, Boston, Santa Fe, and Reykjavík. He was a 2017-2019 joint Public Programs fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem. In 2016, he founded the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based at Iowa City’s artist-run organization Public Space One. He works as Program Manager at Recess.
worksofanais.com
Daniel Fine, Dana Keeton, Loop 2.4.3: Impermanence
Site: Iowa City Press Co-op
Impermanence Project Description:
Impermanence is a 20-minute performance by Daniel Fine and Dana Keeton combining live mandala creation, projection mapping, real-time video, and music by percussion ensemble Loop 2.4.3. Informed by our shared experiences during the pandemic, Impermanence contemplates cycles of change, repetition, creation, destruction, loss and regeneration.
Creative collaborators and life partners, new media/video artist Daniel Fine and still photographer Dana Keeton create art that explores their interest in natural forms, scale, photography, video and projection.
Daniel is an artist and technologist working in immersive, responsive, mediated environments for interactive users, audiences and live performance. His work combines traditional forms of storytelling with that of cutting-edge, interactive digital media technologies in order to engage the imaginations and hearts of contemporary audiences. He has been recognized as a “creative disruptor…exploding traditional disciplinary boundaries.” Daniel is on faculty at University of Iowa in Theatre, Dance and Public Digital Arts.
Rooted in the documentary tradition, Dana’s interests have evolved from photographing people, events, and man-made spaces to the dynamic natural world. Her most recent work explores the drama inherent in natural forms, cycles of creation and destruction, beauty found in the processes of decay, and the power of regeneration.
Loop 2.4.3 is an "open format", collaborative ensemble, led by composer/performer Thomas Kozumplik (Clogs, Yale Percussion Group, Newband). NPR’s Fresh Air described Loop 2.4.3 as an original voice that "sounds like part of a well-thought-out tradition. Only the tradition has never existed until now.”
Caitlin Mary Margarett: Performance a Day
This project is a series of one hundred performance videos created over the course of one hundred days (March 1st, 2020 - June 8th, 2020
Site: Public Space One front porch
Caitlin Mary Margarett is a Midwestern artist, born and raised between Minnesota and Iowa. She is currently working across disciplines and holds a BFA in performance art and a BA in art history from the University of Northern Iowa (2018). Since leaving undergrad, CMM has been analyzing her local, rural ecology and considering the Midwest landscape as an article of history in and of itself. In her video and performance work, she has been predominantly featuring rural cemeteries, vast fields, and female bodies which evoke an essence of the queer pastoral. Through her Performance A Day project, a series that cataloged much of her surrounding rural landscape and her own domestic rituals for 100 days, CMM generated work that considered time, ecological and cultural erosion, and grief. Through her art practice, she is attempting to make sense of her own feminist spirituality regarding systems of flourishing and suffering, queerness, and the importance of specificity regarding time and place- and, ultimately, the impact these coalescing themes have for our ecological survival. In the past year, her work has been shown throughout the Midwest, at Louisiana State University for the Queeramics Symposium, in Ceramics Monthly, Emergency Index V. 8, and Aesthetica Magazine. She is currently preparing for her research trip and solo show in Berlin, Germany, at LiTEHAUS GALERIE & PROJEKTRAUM, slated for fall 2020. She is currently living and making work in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
caitlinmarymargarett.com
Adam Bryant is a 3rd year MFA candidate at the University of Iowa Center for the Book. Prior to pursuing a life in the book arts he earned his BFA in Media Arts from the University of Tennessee and worked in documentary post production. In 2011 he partnered with Cory Floyd to make A Land Community, a feature length documentary about the efforts within a northern Tennessee town to organize and educate around the issue of land. His short, Walt Talks to a Butterfly, was inspired by the infamous portrait of the author posing with a paper butterfly, the poem "An Ode to Walt Whitman" by Frederico Garcia Lorca, and Whitman's own poem "I Dreamed in a Dream".
About the curator:
Zen Cohen is a time-based media artist working with video, sound, digital photography, installation and performance. She received her MFA in Art Studio at the University of California at Davis and her BFA in Media Art from the California College of the Arts in Oakland, CA. Her work has been exhibited throughout the San Francisco Bay Area at the deYoung Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SFMOMA, SOMarts, The Lab, The Montalvo Center, and nationally at ARTSpace New Haven in CT, Vanity Projects in NY, Public Space One in Iowa City, and internationally at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City and Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno in the Canary Islands. Her photographs have been published in Hyperallergic, Art Practical and Southern Illinois University Press. In 2013, she received an Individual Artist Commission Grant in Media Arts from the San Francisco Arts Commission. Additionally, she curated monthly moving image programs and group exhibits at an artist run space called the Climate Theater. Her production experiences include working as a video editor for Al Jazeera America and owning a media production studio in San Francisco, which produced short documentaries, music videos, photo shoots and graphic design for artists and organizations. She moved to Iowa City in 2018 and is Assistant Professor of Media Art and Film Studies at Coe College.
zencohenprojects.com
