Join us at the PS1 Northside gallery for a reception with artists Harper Folsom and Heather Steckler!

HOLD ON/LET GO is a participatory community art project and exhibition by Iowa City artists Heather Steckler and Harper Folsom. The project explores the intersection of memory, purpose, and the act of releasing the things we carry with us. What conditions make it okay to release control over physical possessions, and how does giving up that control allow us to have agency in other aspects of our lives?

Reclaimed & Recycled is a group exhibition featuring artworks by members of the Iowa Print Group (IPG), a member-based student organization at the University of Iowa. The exhibition highlights the vast range of IPG members' studio practices within printmaking and many differing conceptual and material interpretations of the show title, Reclaimed and Recycled, including artworks made from trash, salvaged materials and conceptual approaches of appropriation and reclamation.

Featured artists: Jake Burr • Emily Edwards • Jessica Chavez • Lya Finston • Mariceliz Pagan Gomez • Annie Klein • Veronica Leto • Lauren Krukowski • Sean Maxwell • Anna Miller • Al-Qawi Tazal Nanavati • Lilah Ward Shepherd • and more!

Iowa Print Group (IPG) is a member-based printmaking organization at the University of Iowa. The group was established in 1945 by Mauricio Lasansky and his students, including Miriam Schapiro. Today, IPG is led by student volunteers and represents undergraduate and graduate students. The group works collectively to provide access to professional resources, opportunities, and community. @uiowaprint

Join us for an opening reception as part of Iowa City’s Downtown Gallery Walk, 5-8pm

time now for ghosts is the exploration of traditional nature, centered spiritualities, and realities as they are interpreted through the practices of Black artists working with an afrofuturist lens and hand. This is an exploration of the future, as we return to our pasts. time now for ghosts looks into the intersections of time and relativity, to expand our understanding of when - what does it look like for our ghosts to come from the future? along with the presence of the Black body, the Black consciousness within the natural world. Whether that world is terrestrial or  beyond the cosmos.

time now for ghosts is a world of Black experiences concentrated into a living archive of sorts. These practices, and the works that culminate from them, are a living archive of the black body and the black consciousness within nature and beyond time. 

Artists Keren Alfred, Kearra Amaya Gopee, Liz Gre, Franchesca LaMarre, and Ashley Page come together to present a living library of our collective pasts.

Curated by Jamillah Hinson, Center for Afrofuturist Studies curatorial resident, in the Public Space One gallery.

UV Island

Technologies like machine learning programs have enabled computers to be creative through neural net algorithms. 3D printers are beginning to replicate the surface level detail long-relished by painters. As technologies like these continue to advance, it is important to reconsider what is human about painting.

Through the Automatic Painting series, I play with elements of computer-authored art while asserting the role of the human hand. I 3D scan an everyday object, and the computer generates images that represent a flattened out version of a 3D model of that object. Next, I meticulously paint these images to get a painting with machine aesthetic but painterly textures.

To further explore, the relationship between the computer’s artwork and the human made artwork I have created a virtual space mirroring our own. This introduces a symmetry line between the physical and virtual worlds.

Monuments

The Automatic Painting series is paired with another series of paintings steeped in observation, recording mundane spaces. These paintings feel empty one lingering on a threshold of a restroom, others on the detritus found in public spaces. In each of these paintings a real space is mimicked in paint. The ability of painting to simulate place is considered while being paired with a virtual scale model of the gallery that is an arguably more engrossing complete simulation.

Download the virtual gallery exhibition (for Windows or Mac) at: https://austincaskie.itch.io/public-space-one

Learn more about Austin: www.austincaskie.com

Julia J. Wolfe is a multidisciplinary artist based in Iowa City, IA.  She holds a M.A./M.F.A. from the University of Iowa and a B.A. from Rhodes College, and she received a certificate from Brandeis University.  Her work has been exhibited nationally in numerous solo and group shows, including the Every Woman Biennial 2019 in New York City, "I'm Happy to Sit Here Beside You" at Western Illinois University, "Pitch In!" as Public Space One in Iowa City, and "Repurpose" at Core New Art Space in Denver, CO.  She is the current artist-in-residence at Public Space One in Iowa City and has completed artist residencies at New Pacific Studios in Vallejo, CA and at Burren College of Art in County Clare, Ireland. Her work was included in Studio Visit Magazine, Vol. 42 and will be included in the upcoming New American Paintings MFA Annual Issue #141.

Wolfe creates brightly-colored paintings, drawings, and installations based on observations of the public and private human experience. Drawing primarily from the American landscape, she layers imagery of mass-production with a childlike and whimsical aesthetic, playfully combining comedy and satire with a mishmash of weightier subjects. The work provides laughter, optimism, and inward-looking thought and/or critique. It is playground-esque and humorously innocent, yet simultaneously comments on our culture of consumption. Images of her work can be found at www.juliajwolfe.com.

THE GATEKEEPERS

An eco-mythological, multi-channel video and sound installation
By Zen Cohen made in collaboration with
Violeta Luna, Yunuen Rhi, Chiron Armand and Walker Fisher

on view through July 6

“Since 2015, I have been collaborating with performance artists who identify as gender-fluid, queer shamans, and ‘border crossers.’ These artists created visual performance personas based on the intersections of their own trans-cultural, political and spiritual identities. The culmination of this footage as an installation is an attempt to magnify and illuminate these personas. To create a mythology inhabited by new idols and archetypes wherein these personas, or gates, are seen as symbolic figures at the threshold between the human and non-human world.

In each projection, the performers appear enacting rituals that merge body and land juxtaposed with layers of visual and auditory symbols. In other moments, the performers directly confront the viewer, staring towards the fourth wall. Through this convergence of projection and viewer, my hope is to initiate a remembrance that Nature is not something outside the Self but inherently linked to persona.”

Zen Cohen uses video, photography, installation and performance. Her practice explores the complexities of our ontological experience through creating works that merge ritual, mysticism, and technologies. 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 presented at the deYoung Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SFMOMA, SOMarts, The Lab, The Montalvo Center, ARTSpace New Haven in CT, Vanity Projects in NY and internationally at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City and Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno in the Canary Islands. Additionally, she worked as video editor for Al Jazeera America and owned a media production studio in San Francisco, which produced short documentaries, music videos, photo shoots and graphic designs for artists and organizations. She recently relocated to Iowa City.

For more information:
www.zencohenprojects.com
Instagram: @zen_cohen
Facebook: @ZenCohenStudio

Public reception for alea adigweme’s project The Roslyn Forbes-Adigweme Memorial Library: an interactive reading room blurring the lines between public and private; celebration and mourning; and the temple, the stage, and the archive.