Exceptional Visual Artist Scholar Award Recipients
Congratulations to University of New Mexico MFA Candidate’s Viola Arduini and Teena Lee Ryan on receiving Sanitary Tortilla Factory’s Exceptional Visual Artist Scholar Award! The Exceptional Visual Artist Scholar (EVAS) series offers professional space for two Master of Fine Art graduate students per year as their final thesis show. The culminating exhibition launches them into their profession as an artist. With the series, we underscore exceptional artists attending regional institutions while highlighting Albuquerque’s innovative contemporary art scene.
Viola Arduini, 2018
Viola Arduini is an Italian, multidisciplinary artist currently based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In her work, she investigates the relationships formed by humans, nature, and technology. Arduini specifically addresses ideas of ecologies through stories of embodiment. These stories are told through empathy and her unique visual language which utilizes appropriated and reconceptualized scientific concepts, structures, and procedures. Arduini’s practice illuminates scientific language to compassionately make visible the more-than-human, in order to foster connections from micro to macro.
Arduini received a Bachelor of Arts from NABA New Academy of Fine Arts, Milano, Italy in 2010 and a Master of Arts in Documentary Photography from University of South Wales, Newport, UK in 2015. She is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Art & Ecology from the University of New Mexico. Her work has been included in group exhibitions in the US and Europe, including Santa Fe Art Institute (NM), Ffotogallery in Cardiff (UK), and VIII Edition of Centrale Fotografia (IT). She is current recipients for the Maryann Evans Scholarship for Graduate Students in Art Studio and the Andrew Mellon Foundation for Art & Ecology Fellowship.
Teena Lee Ryan, 2018
TEENA LEE RYAN is a visual artist living and working in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Currently, she is pursuing her MFA degree in photography at the University of New Mexico.
She received portfolio scholarships from The University of Cincinnati – D.A.A.P. and The Art Academy of Cincinnati, where she attended Art Studio and Art History classes at both schools before graduating Cum Laude with a BA in Anthropology from the University of Wisconsin.
Since 1999 Teena’s work has been featured in group and solo exhibitions throughout the southwest and midwest, as well as in the Photographer’s Forum Best of Photography 2014 publication.
207
Darby Photos, Sandy Hook Elementary, Newton, CT., mixed media, 60 x 80 inches, 2018
207 by Darby Photos
Nov. 9th, 2018 – Jan. 4, 2019
Closing Reception: Jan. 4, 2019 5-8pm
In 207, Darby Photos’ depicts schools that have been the sites of mass shootings. The quilts these schools are depicted in represent safe spaces that have become scenes of horror and destruction. Buildings such as Sandy Hook, Columbine, Virginia Tech and Marjory Stoneman Douglas, as well as lesser, discussed schools like Red Lake High School in Michigan and West Nickel Mines school in Pennsylvania became physical manifestations of our society’s willingness to sacrifice our children to gun culture. The quilts confront the audience with the new banality of mass murder.
Collateral Damages
Collateral Damages
Friday, September 7th, 2018
6-9pm
Jeremy Adonis Carlson, sheri crider and Gary Sanchez will lead public participation notating the walls of the gallery with the collateral impacts of maligned policies of criminal justice on our local communities (focused on felony convictions- eviction from public housing, ineligibility for federal education loans and grants, and a ban from food stamp programs).Live screen printing by DRY MTN, poetry by Manuel Gonzalez and daughter . Large scale building projection & 200 free tacos (El Paisa Express)
Informed by SMART JUSTICE Campaign (ACLU) participants hope to shift criminal justice policy and build meaningful narratives that move criminal justice reform.
Project is a part of Our Town an Albuquerque City Wide project sponsored by the NEA.
Ariadne + Analog Therapists
Sunday, August 26th, 2018
7:30-10:30pm
Sanitary Tortilla Factory proudly presents an experimental concert featuring new media artist duo Ariadne and a trio project from
Stue Tory, Christian Newman, and Raven Chacon.
ARIADNE
https://ariadnedigital.net/
ARIADNE is an experimental sacred music and new media art duo whose work explores the intersection of mysticism, dream analysis and the failure of digital systems through a synthesis of music performance, digital and interactive art, poetry and dramatic experience. Much of ARIADNE’s output consists of interactive a/v performances which employ custom-built hardware and software, real-time 3D animation, and machine learning to create immersive and captivating experiences. ARIADNE’s body of work includes feature-length audio/visual albums, web-based virtual reality, and a/v installations.
ARIADNE’s work has been presented at National Sawdust Summer Labs Residency, Brooklyn; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Ende Tymes Festival, Brooklyn; Lafayette Electronic Arts Festival, Colorado; Garner Arts Autumn Electronic Festival, Garnerville; Made in NY Media Center by IFP, Brooklyn; CURRENTS New Media Festival, Sante Fe; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; Elastic Arts, Chicago; Gamut Gallery, Minneapolis; Big Pictures Los Angeles; Harvestworks, New York; Reverse Gallery, New York; Superchief Gallery, Brooklyn; among others. Visiting Artist experience includes School of the Art Institute of Chicago; University of Utah College of Fine Arts; University of Denver Emergent Digital Practices; Prichard Art Gallery – University of Idaho.
Suggested $10 donation
Beautiful Test Sites / Now I am become death
Beautiful Test Sites / Now I am become death
July 13 – August 31, 2018
Opening Reception: Friday, July 13, 2018, 6 – 9 pm
In Beautiful Test Sites / Now I am become death, Mitchell Squire and Nora Wendl make full use of their research-based and architecturally-founded practices to present a series of photographs that meditate upon “beautiful test sites”: spaces and bodies wastelanded by the American techno-utopian imagination of the 20th century. For Squire, this means unearthing a series of inherited mid-20th century photographs taken by an amateur photographer—who at the time served as Executive Secretary of the Iowa Industrial and Defense Commission (1941-45), the first Director of the Iowa Development Commission (1945-53), and State Director of Civil Defense during WWII and again in the 1950s—and whose subjects were both women and nuclear blasts, whose images Squire alters through the strategic use of gilded frames, veils, and glass vases. Nora Wendl presents a series of photographs taken during her recent occupational performance of the all-glass Farnsworth House, designed by Mies van der Rohe for Dr. Edith Farnsworth in the mid-20th century—a house that was conceived the same year as the first American nuclear test. Wendl pairs these with a series of archival photographs of women within this house who have commonly been mistaken as being Dr. Farnsworth, which she heavily annotates with autobiographical and biographical information, thus bringing specificity to women who are otherwise anonymous within the visual discourse of architectural history: researcher and subject alike.
Above Image: Mitchell Squire, all your fears are caused from novel reading, 2018
The mode of operation in viewing visual information today, and particularly photographs, is that even a casual observer must work as a journalist to determine veracity. At the same time, the photograph is a way to arrest beauty, to prolong it, and to catalog even those places and bodies that are wastelanded until a future time when they can be read and named.
Mitchell Squire: Mitchell Squire is an artist and educator whose practice encompasses architecture, visual art, and the study of material culture. His work employs techniques of assemblage and informational strategies of collection and archival presentation, toward understanding the sociopolitical complexity of material and immaterial artifacts. He holds the position of Professor of Architecture at Iowa State University.
Nora Wendl: Nora Wendl is a writer, artist and educator who uses disciplinary strategies drawn equally from literature, visual art, and architecture to amplify overlooked or suppressed narratives within the built and unbuilt environment. She holds the position of Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of New Mexico.