past exhibition
Caroline Kent and Zach Kleyn
10.4.2013
Opening Friday, October 4, 7-10pm
How I Tell It To Myself
Caroline Kent
Elephant is pleased to present the exhibition How I Tell It To Myself, an exhibition by Minneapolis based artist Caroline Kent. The exhibition brings together text and abstraction in painting to explore the construction of personal history. Utilizing film dialogues, scripted manuscripts, and abstract painting, Kent interrogates the performative aspects of language and how they become constituted and comprehended against highly subjective social and cultural landscapes. Caroline Kent lives and works in the Twin Cities, MN. She is a practicing artist with an interest in the orientation and navigation of reality as it relates to the social and the individual. Working in the mediums of drawing, painting, sculpture and video her practice is informed by film, travel, and abstract painting. She received her MFA from the University of Minnesota in 2008. She is a recipient of a Jerome Fellowship ('09) and a recent 2012-2013 Creative City Making grant recipient. She has show at the Soap Factory (Minneapolis), Juxtaposition Arts (Minneapolis), The California African American Museum (Los Angeles), Burnet Gallery (Minneapolis), and The Suburban (Chicago). She is co-founder of the Bindery Projects, an artist run space founded in 2012 in St. Paul, MN.
I've Got a Mind of My Own
Zach Kleyn
Performance starts at 8pm
Part ventriloquist vaudeville, part Christian story-hour, part musical, and part purification ritual, I’ve Got a Mind of My Own is a performance that unravels the imprint of religious ideology upon individual subjectivity. Sprouting from a previous project involving the creation of a fictitious twin brother, the performance uses a doppelgänger ventriloquist puppet as a surrogate for the artist as he unearths the latent residue of growing up in a fundamentalist Christian family. Entertaining and disturbing in equal measure, A Mind of My Own is an expressive musical journey that is generated live by the artist looping and layering his voice in ways that are inspired by the language and worship of his religious upbringing. Moving beyond narcissism or shock, the performance opens up a vulnerable space in which the audience is allowed to witness a human creature struggling with understanding who he is in relationship to the larger forces that shaped him. Zach Kleyn is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work is an examination into the ways in which ideologies weave themselves into the tapestry of a human personality. His projects have been shown at the Torrance Art Museum, the New York Center for Art and Media Studies in New York, Cirrus Gallery in Los Angeles, Monte Vista Projects in Los Angeles, and Espace Curtat Tunnel in Lausanne, Switzerland. His writing has been published inThe Art Book Review and Notes on Looking, and his artwork has appeared in several literary journals, including LIT, VLAK, and SPECS. He received his MFA from CalArts in 2010.
