Thursday, March 28, 2024 @ 4:45 pm - 6:30 pm

MENDI + KEITH OBADIKE

Join us for a special screening of The Sun, followed by a Visual Voices lecture/Q&A with the filmmakers, Mendi + Keith Obadike.

Mendi + Keith Obadike are artists, composers, and writers. Their works sit at the intersection of art, music, and language and draw upon histories of experimental media art and performance. Their early collaborative works were pioneering pieces for the Internet. See their website, BlackSoundArt, here.

The Sun is a 42-minute music and film work. It is made up of voice, analog synth, harmonium, and bell plate. The piece uses pulsing images of light on film and Akhenaten’s Hymn to the Aten structural guide. Made during the summer of 2020 protests, the work is bookended by the Igbo proverb, "The sun will shine on those who stand before it shines on those who kneel under them.” It has been presented as a two-channel audio and quadraphonic audio.

This event will be held in Johnson Center Cinema on the GMU Fairfax campus, and via Zoom. RSVP is required for Zoom link.

The Johnson Center is building #30 on the campus map. The nearest paid visitor parking is available at the Mason Pond Parking Deck.

A note from the filmmakers: 

"In our practice we often think about how listening alters our sense of time. When listening, a repeating pulse can cause us to lose our grip on the passage of time. It can lull us, taking us out of time, or a sudden crash can awaken us to the moment. A musician may experience a moment differently because of how one divides time or pulses. 

"This time-work is most evident with drummers. The great drummer JT Lewis, who plays with us on The Sun, seems to be able to occupy multiple time domains at once. One of rhythm’s gifts is its ability to reorient us in relation to time and space. Listening also engages the index of our memories. One may be pulled into the past when listening to an old melody or one may be pushed into the future by new and inspiring sounds. That internal place where our favorite refrains live is the infinite timezone of the imagination.

"With The Sun, we wanted to make a musical film about the oldest metronome (the sun) and all that happens under this star. In this piece we are thinking about the sun as a pulse and a guide across time. During the screening, we invite you to meditate on the constancy of the sun."

This event is presented by Visual Voices; Mason Exhibitions, Visiting Filmmakers Series; College of Visual and Performing Arts; Film at Mason; GMU School of Art: and Inclusive Collaborative Arts at Mason (ICAM). 

Thursday, March 21, 2024 @ 4:45pm - 6:30 pm 
LATE COMEBACK PRESS

Late Comeback Press is a Northern Virginia micropress run by Rachna Soun and Caroline Kim, specializing in avant-garde zines. Communication and existentialism are the center of their art, flourishing in the space before choices are made, when the possibilities can seem paralyzingly endless or distinctively finite.

This event will be held via Zoom. RSVP is required to receive the Zoom link.

Please contact Jeffrey Kenney with questions/concerns (mailto:jkenney5@gmu.edu)

Thursday, February 22, 2024 @ 4:45 pm - 6:30 pm 
MARIA GASPAR

Maria Gaspar is an interdisciplinary artist negotiating the politics of location through installation, sculpture, sound, and performance. Gaspar’s work addresses issues of spatial justice in order to amplify, mobilize, or divert structures of power through individual and collective gestures. In collaboration with George Mason University’s data mapping and art history scholars, Gaspar will continue to realize her goals of abolishing carceral spaces by adding  prints of current prisons, jails, and immigrant detention facilities in Virginia to the Disappearance Jails project, which will ultimately be obscured through perforations by exhibition visitors.

This event will be held via Zoom. RSVP is required for Zoom link.

Contact Jeffrey Kenney with questions/concerns (mailto:jkenney5@gmu.edu)

Visual Voices is an online lecture series hosted by Mason Exhibitions and the School of Art and Design. This event will be held via zoom on Thursday, October 12 @ 4:45pm-6:30pm. RSVP is required to receive the zoom link:

Aimée Beaubien is an artist living and working in Chicago. Beaubien reorganizes photographic experience while exploring networks of meaning and association between the real and the ideal in collages, artists books and immersive installations. Her work has been exhibited widely, including SF Camerawork, San Francisco, CA; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; Houston Center for Photography, Houston, TX; Gallery UNO Projektraum, Berlin, Germany; Marvelli Gallery, New York, NY; Virus Art Gallery, Rome, Italy; Demo Projects, Springfield, IL; The Pitch Project, Milwaukee, WI. Aimée Beaubien is an Associate Professor of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL where she has taught since 1997.

Questions about this event should be directed to Jeff Kenney at jkenney5@gmu.edu

Visual Voices is an online artist talk and Q&A offered by Mason Exhibitions and the School of Art and Design. Tonight’s speakers are BLACK KIRBY.

RSVP: https://app.e2ma.net/app2/audience/signup/1979454/1912535/

BLACK KIRBY is a shared pseudonym that is Stacey Robinson and John Jennings (Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, UC Riverside). Black Kirby functions as a rhetorical tool by sampling and remixing comic legend Jack Kirby’s bold forms and energetic ideas combined with themes centered around Afrofuturism, social justice, representation, magical realism, and using the culture of Hip Hop as a methodology for creating visual communication. It also utilizes the notion of an alter-ego as a symbolic allegory for DuBoisian “double-consciousness” theory. 

Stacey Robinson is an artist from Albany, NY, who creates graphic novels, art exhibitions, and other multimedia works of art that explores the ideas of “Black Utopias” through an Afro-Futurist lens. Robinson graduated from Fayetteville State University with a Bachelor of Arts, and went on to complete his Master of Fine Arts as a Arthur Schomburg Fellow at the University of Buffalo. Stacey Robinson is currently an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design in the School of Art and Design and Illustration at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 

John Jennings is a Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California at Riverside. Jennings is co-editor of the Eisner Award-winning collection The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of the Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art. Jennings is also a 2016 Nasir Jones Hip Hop Studies Fellow with the Hutchins Center at Harvard University. Jennings' current projects include the horror anthology Box of Bones, the coffee table book Black Comix Returns (with Damian Duffy), and the Eisner-winning, Bram Stoker Award-winning, New York Times best-selling graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler's classic dark fantasy novel Kindred. Jennings is also founder and curator of the ABRAMS Megascope line of graphic novels.

Visual Voices is an online artist talk and Q&A offered by Mason Exhibitions and the School of Art and Design. Tonight’s featured speaker is Koyoltzintli Miranda-Rivadeneira.

RSVP: https://app.e2ma.net/app2/audience/signup/1979453/1912535/

Koyoltzintli Miranda-Rivadeneira is an Ecuadorian American artist and curandera from Queens, New York who investigates Indigenous ways of relating to the land, through photography, video, ceramics, and sound. The artist captures within a multifaceted exchange between herself and the land, achieving levels of intimacy as both a creator and a subject, an intimacy that is often withheld through the Westernized lens of photography and video’s history of colonial bias.

Miranda-Rivadeneira has exhibited at the United Nations and Aperture Foundation, both NY; and the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC. She has been an artist in residence in the United States, France, and Italy and has taught at CalArts, School of Visual Arts, International Center of Photography, and City University of New York. Miranda-Rivadeneira is a recipient of multiple awards and fellowships including the NYFA Fellowship, and the Photographic Fellowship at the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris. Her first monograph, Other Stories, was published in 2017 by Autograph ABP. Her work was featured in the Native America issue of Aperture (no. 240) published in fall 2020, as well as in the book Latinx Photography in the United States: A Visual History by Elizabeth Ferrer, published in January 2021.

Visual Voices is an online artist talk and Q&A offered by Mason Exhibitions and the School of Art. Tonight’s featured speaker is Jaewook Lee.

RSVP: https://app.e2ma.net/app2/audience/signup/1979452/1912535/

Jaewook Lee is an artist, writer, amateur scientist, semi-philosopher, and sometime curator. Lee is the founder and director of Mindful Joint (mindfuljoint.com), an annual symposium that focuses on non-hierarchical knowledge sharing in contemporary art.
Lee is the recipient of awards such as the 4th SINAP (Sindoh Artist Support Program) and the SeMA Emerging Artists and Curators Supporting Program by the Seoul Museum of Art. Lee has participated in exhibitions, talks, performances, and screenings at such venues as Museo de Antofagasta in Chile (2020), Hong-Gah Museum in Taiwan (2018), Art Sonje Center in Seoul (2017), the Guggenheim Museum in New York (2017), the Asia Culture Center in Gwangju (2016), MEINBLAU Projektraum in Berlin (2016), NURTUREart in New York (2014), the Museo Juan Manuel Blanes in Montevideo (2014), MANIFESTA 9 parallel event in Hasselt (2012), and the Chelsea Art Museum in New York (2011), among others. Sculpture Magazine featured the oeuvre of Lee’s work in May 2017. Lee’s work is in the permanent collections of several institutions, including the Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art in Ansan, South Korea, and the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts in Amman, Jordan.

Lee received MFAs from Carnegie Mellon University and the School of Visual Arts. Lee previously taught at the University of Chicago, the School of Visual Arts (SVA), and SUNY Old Westbury. Lee is an assistant professor of New Media Art at Northern Arizona University.

Visual Voices is an online artist talk and Q&A offered by Mason Exhibitions and the School of Art and Design. The featured speaker tonight is Saki Mafundikwa.

RSVP: https://app.e2ma.net/app2/audience/signup/1979116/1912535/

Saki Mafundikwa is the founder and director of the Zimbabwe Institute of Vigital Arts (ZIVA), a design and new media training college in Harare, Zimbabwe. He was educated in the USA with a BA in Telecommunications and Fine Arts from Indiana University and an MFA in Graphic Design from Yale University. He returned home in 1998 to found ZIVA after working in New York City as a graphic designer, art director and design instructor.

Mafundikwa’s book, Afrikan Alphabets: the Story of Writing in Africa, was published in 2004. Besides being of historical importance, it is also the first book on Afrikan typography. His first film, Shungu: The Resilience of a People, a feature-length documentary had its world premiere at 2009’s International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA). It won the prestigious Ousmane Sembene Award at Zanzibar International Film Festival and Best Documentary at Kenya International Film Festival both in 2010 and has screened at some of the top film festivals in the world. The film is an objective, in-depth look at the causes and effects of Zimbabwe’s political and economic decline through the voices of ordinary Zimbabweans.

As an educator, Mafundikwa urges African designers to learn from the past and draw on the history of Africa’s written words and symbology for inspiration. “The dream,” he says, “is for something to come out of Africa that is of Africa.”

Thursday, November 3, 7:30-9 PM
Online Artist Talk

Ellen Lesperance’ paintings on paper, rendered in gouache in universal knitting shorthand, can be followed as patterns to recreate historic garments worn by women activists, warriors, and cultural figures. For the past decade, she has additionally archived protest knitwear worn by the separatist feminists of the Greenham Common Women’ Peace Camp who demonstrated against U.S. nuclear weapons storage in Berkshire, England (1981 to 2000). In 2020, Lesperance published a book of this archive titled Velvet Fist.

Learn more at https://ellenlesperance.com/.

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Thursday, October 20, 7:30-9PM
Online Artist Talk

Silas Munro engages multi-modal practices that inspire people to be the best versions of themselves in order to effect positive change on society as a whole. He is particularly interested in the often unaddressed post-colonial relationship between design and marginalized communities.

His design studio, Poly-Mode, primarily works with cultural institutions and community-based organizations, which have led to everything from information design of NYC Public Schools, graphics for protesting activists at Housing Works, publication design for Jacob Lawrence, and the identity of an entire formerly predominately Puerto Rican neighborhood.

Learn more at https://www.polymode.studio/about.

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Thursday, September 29, 7:30-9 PM
Online Artist Talk

Jon Henry is a visual artist working with photography and text, from Queens NY (resides in Brooklyn). His work reflects on family, sociopolitical issues, grief, trauma and healing within the African American community. His work has been published both nationally and internationally and exhibited in numerous galleries including Aperture Foundation, Smack Mellon, and BRIC among others. Known foremost for the cultural activism in his work, his projects include studies of athletes from different sports and their representations.

Learn more about Jon Henry’s work at https://www.jonhenryphotography.com.

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Thursday, September 15, 7:30-9pm
Online Artist Talk

Bahia Shehab is a multidisciplinary artist, designer, political activist and historian whose work focuses on the interaction and intersection of modern identity and ancient cultural heritage. Her imaginative combination of calligraphy and Islamic art history produced cutting edge, beautiful, impactful street art during the Arab Spring and continues to inform her work as an educator and designer.

Learn more at https://www.bahiashehab.com/.

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