Across the Room From Each Other
We are pleased to present the catalog for hazel batrezchavez and mk’s incredible exhibition Across the Room From Each Other. The catalog features a forward by sheri crider and an essay by Alicia Inez Guzmán. This book was made possible by Sanitary Tortilla Factory’s Exceptional Visual Artist Scholar Award and the Urban Enhancement Trust Fund.
SV Randall: Antonym
Antonym
SV Randall
December 10, 2021 – January 14, 2022
Opening Reception: Friday, December 10, from 5-7 pm
Sanitary Tortilla Factory presents Antonym by SV Randall. Rendering a speculative system of senses as sculptural objects, Antonym examines ocularcentrism and the estranged mechanisms of perception.
The eye reaches out for objects like a lantern, crawling at first, then illuminating, then apparition, entire atmospheres reconstructed, unfurling from contorted knots, tendon to tendril, all limbs and limits reverberating, ricochet, a bell in everything, even absence. This is a site of interface and interference between organ and object.
SV Randall creates work which encompasses a range of media including sculpture, installation, painting, and performance that address the various ways in which objects mutate in nature and function across time. He explores how we situate ourselves in the world; principally highlighting larger issues of social visibility, class structures, technological obsolesce, and spatial politics. In his latest exhibition, SV explores speculative receptors of contact between the individual and the outside world.
ARTIST BIO:
SV Randall is an interdisciplinary artist from Buffalo, NY. He received his MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from VCU and his BFA from Alfred University. His work has been exhibited at David & Schweitzer Contemporary, Brooklyn, NY; the El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, TX; Ditch Projects, Eugene, OR; and the Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juárez in Mexico. SV is the recipient of the Toby Devin Lewis Fellowship Award and has most recently participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (Skowhegan, ME), Sculpture Space (Utica, NY), the Fine Arts Work Center (Provincetown, MA), the Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), and the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program (Roswell, NM). He is currently an Assistant Professor of Visual and Performing Arts at the University of Texas at Dallas.
HERE
Nikesha Breeze, Collette Marie, Cynthia Cook, Erin Currier, Jodie Herrera, Caroline Liu, Joanna Keane Lopez, Tigre Mashaal-Lively, Anita Rodriguez, Cara Romero, Rose B. Simpson, and Maye Torres
November 5 – 30, 2021
Opening Reception: Friday, November 5th, 5-9pm
open Thursdays + Fridays 12-5pm and by appointment
Masks Required at all events
Sanitary Tortilla Factory presents, HERE, an exhibition curated by Jodie Herrera, centering around New Mexican womxn and non-binary artists of color. This exhibition was created to celebrate the great talent and impact that these important artists have contributed. They have been “Here” and will continue to show up with a remarkable and undeniable presence, not only in the visual arts community but in our creative histories of this region and beyond.
Adaptive Immunity
Toni Gentilli
Adaptive Immunity
October 1 – 30, 2021
Opening Reception: October 1, 5 – 7 pm
Sanitary Tortilla Factory presents, Adaptive Immunity, an exhibition by Toni Gentilli that renders the entanglement of human and environmental health, specifically the disproportionate impacts of autoimmunity on women and other chronic conditions linked to ecosystem degradation, through a compendium of naturally dyed textiles, weavings, paintings, sculptures, chlorophyll prints and botanical hydrosols.
Over the past five years Gentilli has worked almost exclusively with cottonwood trees as both subject and material. In the Middle Rio Grande Valley where she lives, the majority of cottonwoods are in decline and struggling to regenerate due to disruption of the flood cycle and riparian ecology. Moreover, extended droughts resulting from climate change are causing weakened immune systems in cottonwoods, and so they increasingly fall victim to fungal infection and other environmental stressors. Beyond living among them, Gentilli feels a deep kinship with Rio Grande cottonwood trees because she has a chronic case of Coccidioidomycosis, also known as Valley Fever, a pulmonary infection caused by microscopic soil-dwelling fungus endemic to the Southwestern United States. Coccidioidomycosis is on the rise due to global warming, intensified dust storms, and desertification, and further fueled by sprawling urban expansion, industrialized agriculture, and other disruption of soil ecosystems.
Gentilli’s continued reflection on these issues has led her to understand that the climate crisis is a shared immunological plight which upsets longstanding notions of humans apart from nature, self and other, and individuals with discrete bodies versus interdependent communities of organisms. Her adaptive response has been to conscientiously reinsert herself into the web of connection between people, plants, the Earth’s regulatory systems and our mutual wellbeing, and she invites you to join her on this journey toward collective healing.
Space Race UNCLASSIFIED
Space Race UNCLASSIFIED
Michelle Murphy
September 3 – 25, 2021
Opening Reception: Friday September 3, 2021 at 4-9pm
Performance: Saturday September 4th, 2021 at Noon
Masks Required at all events
Sanitary Tortilla Factory is proud to present Space Race UNCLASSIFIED by Michelle Marie Murphy (M.M.M.). M.M.M. shares artwork + artifacts + opinions after a decade-long contract with NASA. The artist was previously a photo-based propagandist for science + the US Military and now insights with social + body-based practices, research, and provocation, the goal of being & becoming: civil rights & knowledge sharing.
MMM reveals NASA’s Unclassified human history: Operation Paperclip [Nazi Scientists who were given employment and citizenship in America at the end of WWII to work for the US Government], Civil Rights era missteps, and collaborations with Disney.
What did it feel like to become irrationally attracted to the Moon, the pulse of our tides, the reflection of our life star, ONLY to discover that 12 square white American men have gone? MMM sold telescopes and STEM toys at the downtown mall in Cleveland from 1998-2003. MMM went to Adult Space Camp as “Lady Apollo” in 2003 on a credit card and found their-self 2 years later in a full term contract with the government as a NASA Photographer. They then left this “lifelong” career because eventually they knew exactly how their work contributes to weapons in war. MMM is a pacifist, an artist, a scholar that was swept into a brilliant sparkling whirlpool of DREAMS (and Power) and lost sight of the point. To love. To work together. To dream together. To die together. To live together. They are imperfect and tired (sometimes) but “light up” with every person they are privileged enough to speak with. MMM will be here for part of the duration of the exhibition. They would love to meet you, to listen, to share insights, to speak about space and the future, to see.
From photographic archive digs to solo stunts at White Sands National Park & Missile Range, MMM’s work is a series of art, actions, and revision notes. They combat supremacy through site visits, conversations, education, and embodied practices. MMM finds the truth and responds to American amnesia, and the pervasive culture of “Explorers” that continue to “dream” and traverse without human and eco care. The Artist reveals human-based histories (oppressive and lesser-known) and inspires new culture-in-the-making.
Bio
Michelle Murphy (they/them/theirs) is a visual and performance artist based in Chicago, Illinois. Their work and research orbits around lesser-known sites and histories of the American Space Program.
Murphy earned a MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) as a New Artist’s Society Fellow and a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art. Murphy has participated in several artist’s residencies including: Mana Contemporary Miami, SITELAB at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Elsewhere (Greensboro, NC). Murphy’s interdisciplinary work has been exhibited in NYC, Paris, Switzerland, Guatemala City, Chicago, Miami, San Francisco, Albuquerque, Detroit, and Cleveland. Murphy co-curates the art and culture publication MAKE8ELIEVE with Swiss Artist + Designer named Cetusss. From 2013-2015 Murphy was Director and Founder of an Artist’s Residency Program and Gallery, Micro Art Space, in Cleveland Ohio which provided solo exhibitions, support, documentation, and mentorship for 18 Artists over 3 years. Murphy has lectured at SAIC, University of New Mexico, University of Chicago, Ithaca College, University of Utah, Loyola University, Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland State University, and Cuyahoga Community College.