PLAY
PLAY is a dedicated showcase for video and new media, serving as a platform to encourage discovery within the digital realm. This edition if guest curated by Joey Lico, Independent Curator and Director of Programming at The Cultivist. View the selections in entirety at PULSE New York 2016.
Curatorial Statement
To enter a dialogue in which one’s own worldview is on the line-to jettison one’s inherited role in the game of truth and falsity-is to give up one’s patrimony of the world. - Thomas McEvilley
One of the common social functions of art has been its role in shaping and sustaining the sense of Western European identity. Post-Modern art, in particular, presented objects that invited a bonding of communal identification around a shared understanding of their meaning.
The videos selected for PLAY challenge this communal understanding and actively illuminate the contemporary knowledge that when one culture regards the rituals or landscapes of another, those scenes are instantly incorporated into a foreign mental framework. They are helplessly interpreted through some habit of thought different from the habit of the artists.
In Shapeshifter, New York based artist, Les Joynes, recontextualizes Joseph Beuys’ I Like America and America Likes Me (1974) during his journey to the Khovsgol Province in Northern Mongolia. Exploring nomadic identity, Les Joynes performs this shamanic ritual expanding his Selfhood in the adaption of the Other.
Forget me not, as my tether is clipped, conveys Zachary Fabri’s relationship to the cultural history, the ideologies and beliefs that define his identity, and his transformation as he gains experience and knowledge through his performance near Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem.
Leif Huron’s The Valley depicts a man’s journey through an unforgiving rural landscape - a totemic representation illustrating a highly focused sense of identity through one’s struggle to find a place of belonging.
Each video’s use of ritual encourages the viewer’s skeptical eye towards the value stance of communities other than their own, and in effect, invite us to broaden our sense of self--approaching the goal of becoming not universal in a metaphysical sense, but global in a more empiric sense.
PULSE New York 2016 PLAY Selections:
Les Joynes | Shapeshifter (trailer). Courtesy of the artist and 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel, New York, NY.
Zachary Fabri | Forget me not, my tether is clipped, 14 minutes, 15 seconds. Courtesy of the artist and Garis & Hahn, New York, NY.
Leif Huron | The Valley, 11 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Uprise Art, New York, NY.
About the Curator
Joey Lico is an independent curator and currently working with The Cultivist as the Director of Programming. Lico has previously worked with Independent Curators International (ICI) and the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), managing and expanding curatorial, development, and marketing projects with both emerging and established artists across all disciplines of art. Focusing primarily on bringing unknown and unrepresented international artists into the US and giving them exhibition opportunities, Lico’s experience working with artists to independently promote their work and develop their practice has brought her all over the world including universities, museums, galleries and art spaces in: Amsterdam; Berlin; Bogota; Cambodia; Frankfurt; Guadalajara; London; Los Angeles; Paris; and Tel Aviv.
Lico graduated summa cum laude from Fordham University with a Dual BA in Contemporary Philosophy and Finance; received her MA from NYU’s Gallatin School in the Culture and Economy of Visual Contemporary Art; and her PhD in Art History from The University of Amsterdam. She is on the Executive Committee for the Whitney Museum’s Contemporaries, the Acquisitions Committee for The Guggenheim, and on the Advisory Board for NYFA. In addition to her museum affiliations, she is working with The White House as an advisor on their ACT/ART Committee, bringing contemporary art back into the forefront of public policy. She currently lives in Brooklyn and Berlin.