{"id":26583,"date":"2017-04-21T08:48:55","date_gmt":"2017-04-21T14:48:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/?p=26583"},"modified":"2017-04-21T15:54:02","modified_gmt":"2017-04-21T21:54:02","slug":"uccs-galleries-of-contemporary-art-to-open-cybercy-at-downtown-goca121-gallery-friday-may-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/?p=26583","title":{"rendered":"Galleries of Contemporary Art to open Cybercy exhibit May 5"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>An exhibition exploring how the Internet affects perceptions of public and private spaces, as well as how people navigate the real, the digital, and\u00a0the hyper-real opens May 5<\/a> at the UCCS Galleries of Contemporary Art downtown GOCA121 gallery, 121 S. Tejon St.<\/p>\n

Cybercy features artists Signe Pierce\u00a0and\u00a0Alli Coates of New York and Los Angeles,\u00a0Chris Coleman and Laleh Mehran, Denver, and Los Angeles artist collective Finishing School.\u00a0Caitlin Goebel, in collaboration with Daisy McGowan, director, GOCA, is the exhibit curator.<\/p>\n

A free public reception featuring a performance of Finishing School\u2019s \u201cPsychic Barber\u201d will be 5-9 p.m. May 5<\/a>.<\/p>\n

About the exhibit, curator Caitlin Goebel writes:<\/p>\n

\u201cNearly thirty years after the Internet permeated our global consciousness, our fate as digital citizens is clearly inescapable. The intangibility of our digital idiosyncrasies begets a need to align both our avatars and our in real life selves. Through reflexive performance and self-fulfilling prophecy we secure our roles in a virtual condition \u2013 a cybercy.\u201d<\/p>\n

The exhibit will be on display through June 24. Gallery hours are noon to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays, or by appointment.<\/p>\n

Multiple events are planned throughout the exhibit, including pre-opening Artist Talks with\u00a0Pierce, Coates,\u00a0 members of the Finishing School Collective, Goebel and McGowan from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.\u00a0 May 4, and with Coleman and Mehran\u00a0from 5:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. June 2.\u00a0\u00a0Additional events include a Chit Chat on the topic of absinthe\u00a0 and trans humanism\u00a0 June 9, and GOCA\u2019s Brilliant art party June 24. See the GOCA website for additional details.<\/a> All events are open to the public.<\/p>\n

About the Exhibition<\/strong><\/h3>\n

American Reflexxx<\/strong> is a short film directed by Coates that documents cyber-feminist performance Pierce as she struts down a busy street in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. The unscripted social experiment resulted in a heart wrenching technicolor spectacle, and a cinematic critique of gender stereotypes, mob mentality, and how suggestions can quickly become truths.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Psychic Barber <\/strong>is a collaboration between Los Angeles-based artist collective Finishing School and New York based artist Yucef Merhi, an interactive installation that conjures intimacy and transformation in a private setting situated in a public space. Enclosed in a glass-walled structure, hairstylists who also possess a psychic gift will cut and style participants\u2019 hair based on insights gained via the experience of a psychic reading. Originally presented as part of Side Street Projects, and then later at the Riverside Art Museum, a third installation with planned performances at GOCA moves the project into an antecedent loop of projection and performance on a national scale.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>W3FI: Colorado Springs<\/strong>\u00a0 Denver-based artists Coleman and\u00a0Mehran’s large scale installation is a social movement, a philosophy, a path to responsible connectivity between\u00a0online\/offline lives and to each other, complete with a project manifesto. The W3Fi installation, which has been exhibited nationally and internationally, is reimagined for each iteration, making it at once site-specific and archival, a tangible model of the Internet.\u00a0W3FI: Colorado Springs merges physical place and perspective with\u00a0digital actions. Coleman and Mehran articulate the human position of standing on the threshold between IRL and digital life.<\/p>\n

About the Artists<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Finishing School <\/strong>\u00a0Established in 2001, Los Angeles-based Finishing School is a socially engaged artist collective that playfully explores an expansive range of subject and media territories at the many intersections of art, play, power, politics, praxis, participation, and the everyday. The collective has five members who represent a broad range of skills and research interests:\u00a0Nadia Afghani,\u00a0Matt Fisher,\u00a0Ed Giardina,\u00a0Jason Plapp, and\u00a0Jean Robison. Yucef Merhi, collaborator on the Psychic Barber project, is based in New York City. Finishing School produces interdisciplinary actions, installations, workshops, design, publications, film, studio art, performance and new media.<\/p>\n

Signe Pierce<\/strong>\u00a0is based in New York City and Los Angeles. A self-dubbed reality-artist, Pierce works across performance, photography, video art, GIFs, and web\u2013based art, investigating\u00a0gender, identity, sexuality, and the perception of reality within a digital society. Pierce received her BFA from School of Visual Arts, New York.<\/p>\n

Alli Coates<\/strong>\u00a0is a multimedia artist based in New York City and Los Angeles. She has been\u00a0dubbed a “Creative Ninja” due to her flexibility across media: photography, video art, print design, window installations, web design, and art direction.\u00a0Coates grew up in Manassas, VA, and graduated with a BFA from George Mason University. Her photography and design work have appeared in\u00a0Vogue,\u00a0W,\u00a0Dazed and Confused,\u00a0VICEMagazine,\u00a0GQ,\u00a0New York Magazine,\u00a0Complex, and\u00a0ELLE.<\/p>\n

Chris Coleman<\/strong>\u00a0has an art practice that spans control systems, chaos and order, digital interaction, physical interaction, borders, animation, appropriation, technological decay, art as activism, audio\/video manipulation, systems in nature, and object creation. Coleman received a BFA in sculpture from West Virginia University where he also spent a number of years studying mechanical engineering, and MFA at SUNY Buffalo specializing in interactivity and real-space electronics. He is a faculty member at the University of Denver in the emergent digital practices program.<\/p>\n

Laleh Mehran<\/strong>\u00a0has an art practice that engages with the intersections of art and science, media politics, Eastern and Western philosophies, and emerging forms of time-based media. Mehran’s work has manifested as interactive installations, videos, and performances. Mehran received\u00a0a BFA in creative photography from\u00a0the University of Florida, and\u00a0an MFA in electronic time-based media from\u00a0Carnegie Mellon University. She is currently graduate director in emergent digital practices at the University of Denver.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An exhibition exploring how the Internet affects perceptions of public and private spaces, as well as how people navigate the real, the digital, and the hyper-real opens May 5 at the UCCS Galleries of Contemporary Art downtown GOCA121 gallery, 121 S. Tejon St. (More)<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26585,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1,12,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-all","category-events","category-upcoming-events"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/1200_WebSlider_CybercyLogo_2017.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1mBpJ-6UL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26583"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26583\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26586,"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26583\/revisions\/26586"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/26585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/communique.uccs.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}