|
|
|
|
HECHOENCASAlHOMEMADE
a curatorial project by Alberto Aguilar and Jorge Lucero @ Cobalt Studio, Chicago.
June 10 - June 24, 2011
A program of events that verge on acts of domesticity. Behavior that
touches upon ideas of home, the local, hospitality, homemade-ness and
the personal, all within an exhibition space. This series of events,
which will take place at Cobalt Studios in the Pilsen Neighborhood of
Chicago will be accompanied by a collection of objects and artworks
that each invited artists found to be in conversation with the ideas of
“home” introduced by this series of events. These objects can be viewed
during the scheduled event hours.
Participating artists:
Alberto Aguilar & Madeleine Aguilar; James Kubie; Jorge Lucero; Gwenn-Aël Lynn & Hermes Santana; Bryan
Saner & Teresa Pankratz; Christopher Santiago; Vanessa Smith; Samuel Sotelo-Avila; Hui-min Tsen; Lisa Walcott. |
please scroll down
|
|
| Artist and educator Christopher Santiago kicked off the month-long series of events by hosting a House (dance) party on the first Friday of the show. Open to the public, Santiago provided a DJ, a cooler full of water, and a strobe-light. At this point in the exhibition's trajectory no objects had been installed in the space. Santiago decorated the space with three strings of Christmas lights. Thumping music was had by all.
|
|---|
|
The day after the house party every artist participating in the exhibition was invited to install an object or series of objects within the exhibition space. Contributions were encouraged to "not necessarily" be art objects. Some artists contributed unadulterated objects from their homes, some contributed art objects, and some contributed objects that troubled the definition of both the art and the everyday object. We called this event, which took the entire first Saturday of the exhibition, a day of "interior design" where we asked the artists to keep in mind "the ideas of 'home' introduced by this month-long series of events". Objects remained on display throughout the duration of the exhibition and were viewable when no scheduled event was occurring. Objects on display: restored furniture, spray painted lawn ornaments (pictured), local weeds, stacks of Vanity Fair magazines, photographs, a bottle of cologne, weapons made out of duct-tape, discarded slippers, a glass case full of toys, some folded clothes, a piece of luggage and a weather journal.
|
|---|
| On the first Saturday morning of the exhibition Alberto Aguilar (pictured) opened up the exhibition space for a community pancake breakfast and Saturday morning cartoon viewing. Another event that was open to the public, this morning attracted participants of all ages. Episodes of the Nickelodean cartoon Avatar: The last airbender where shown for all to enjoy while eating their pancakes made from scratch.
|
|---|
| Immediately after the pancake breakfast, seventh-grader Madeleine led a duct-tape and cardboard dagger-making workshop. Tapping into her deep expertise and years worth of making various articles of defense (e.g. light sabers, utility belts and medieval-like weapons) with these home materials, Madeleine provided participants of various ages the opportunity to create their own cardboard and duct-tape daggers. Some of Madeleine's work was on display in the gallery for the duration of the exhibition. |
|---|
| Gwenn-Aël Lynn, an artist who works with ideas of locality,
making “interactive smell installations and food/scented performances,
which problematize further the relationship between olfaction, taste,
hybridity, and hegemony” led a scent workshop open to the
general public. The workshop lasted over three hours. Photographic documentation of this event does not exist because as Lynn says "cameras can be intrusive" so the documentation of the work only lives in those who participated in the event. Visit Lynn's webpage to see more of his work www.gwennaellyn.com. Lynn also conducted a meal with Hermes Santana on the final weekend of Hecho en Casa (scroll down to read about that event).
|
|---|
 | The final event of the first weekend of Hecho en Casa saw the Cobalt Studio converted into a theatre. Chicago artists Bryan Saner and Teresa Pankratz demonstrated, constructed, and performed about and with a "homemade DIY home entertainment system". Using cardboard boxes and kraft paper, inspired by toy theaters and shadow boxes, the event included
both a lecture demonstration of how to make a DIY home entertainment system at home, followed by a ten-minute demonstration that was both moving and inspiring. Click on this picture to see a short video of the performance.
|
|---|
| The second weekend of Hecho en Casa was opened up by Alberto Aguilar to all gallery visitors who wanted to collaborate in the making of a 50 ingredient mole. During the evening Aguilar discussed the
history of mole with the participants, and created an accompanying sound piece with some of
the mole-making participants. |
|---|
| The same evening that the mole was made, artist Samuel Sotello-Avila invited members of the public to break his Minimalist Pinata. The silver-painted rectangular form was filled with candies identical to the one's found in Felix Gonzalez-Torres' famous Untitled (portrait of Ross in L.A.) of 1991. This event took place immediately outside of the Cobalt Studio and included both passerby and gallery attendees of all ages.
|
|---|
 | Lisa Walcott concurrently performed a performance the evening of the mole making and pinata breaking. She created a sparse space full of
gestures, scents, actions, sounds, spaces and materials all allusive to
being home. Multiple batches of bread dough were made and then
discarded into a swelling pile within the site-specific installation. Wallcott's frequent use of the the theme of accumulation through
repetitious and monotonous tasks especially relating to domestic space, were evident that evening and particularly the next morning when the doughs yeast had not only exponentially expanded the pile of dough, but had also filled Cobalt Studio with defining scent of working yeast. |
|---|
 | On the second Saturday morning Jorge Lucero held a "school" or workshop that attempted to collect narratives of homegrown knowledge. Home grown knowledge can be defined as learning that
is produced, achieved, and examined outside of the context of
institutional schooling. Lucero began the morning with a short lecture expanding the potential conversations that could occur around the idea of homegrown knowledge. After this the participants were given simple prompts that aimed to elicit personal narratives from the participants, which could later be shared during a conversation. After writing for about forty minutes the participants shared out some of their narratives and the conversation was recorded. The transcript of this conversation will be made into a book and PDF document that will be available for public examination. Amongst the stories that were shared that morning there was a woman who shared about her experience being homeschooled until she entered college; another woman who shared stories of her grandmother's plight as immigrant worker and mother of seven; and yet another woman who had recently returned form a 26 month tenure with the Peace Corps in Benin, West Africa.
|
|---|
 | The evening of the second Saturday saw a guest list of fifteen people show up at Cobalt Studio to partake in a full dinner served by Alberto Aguilar, which included the mole that was communally prepared the previous evening. At this dinner Alberto and Sonia Aguilar served the meal, led all the guest in table games, and gave some of the participants henna tattoos. A short film that Aguilar made with a group of seventh graders was also shown. At the conclusion of the evening, which included a dessert of fresas con crema, Aguilar gifted a small package to each attendee that evening. Among other things, the package contained an individual work of art created by Aguilar for each particular guest.
|
|---|
 | The same night that the mole dinner was served up, artist Hui-min Tsen presented a slideshow along the lines
of a narrated vacation slideshow/armchair travel/after dinner
parlor show. Instead of being a slideshow of an actual journey, though,
it was more like a story of staying in one place and looking
elsewhere. Tsen modeled her travels on the explorer Alexander von
Humboldt by observing the weather and collecting data down by the
lakefront near her home in Chicago. Interspersed with Tsen’s
stationary travels was the stories of Alexander von Humboldt, who
introduced the importance of working within a network of people
communicating their finding in order to predict the weather. That evening Tsen also told the story of Elisha Kent Kane who was an avid follower of
Humboldt's method, went to explore the Arctic and reported back that he
had found "the open polar sea," a warm region at the North Pole where
the water never freezes. This presentation was actually shown on two separate nights: first for the mole dinner, then for Lynn and Santana's BalckXican Pozole dinner (see next image).
|
|---|
| On the final Friday of Hecho en Casa Hermes Santana (who grew up in Pilsen) made a
BlackXican pozole, while Gwenn-Aël LYNN served it in a performative
way, emphasizing its olfactory dimension. Participants were invited to smell all the ingredients as part of the evenings festivities (pictured). The dinner was sonified with the "Pilsen"soundscape. The conversation was rich and the food was delicious. A great time was had by all.
|
|---|
 |
Throughout the duration of the exhibition potted beautiful plants among the weeds
of Chicago that Vanessa Smith had foraged for, accentuated the space. They became Cobalt's house plants. On the closing Saturday of Hecho en Casa, Smith gave a will a tour of them to the visitors touching on the plants history, culinary and medical uses. |
|---|
| Following the weed/house plant demonstration James Kubie closed out Hecho en Casa by leading a workshop on how to make herbal candies
used in traditional southern folk medicine. Starting with whole ginger
roots and bunches of horehound, participants processed botanicals to
produce candies used to soothe the stomach and the lungs. All
participants were able to take a portion of the candies home for
their use. |
|---|
|
|
|---|
Images courtesy of Alberto Aguilar, Adriana Baltazar, Jorge Lucero, and Michael Metts, 2011.
|
|
|