Join us for a virtual tour of Ballroom Marfa’s current exhibition, the Tom Morton-curated Äppärät, on Vimeo …

Äppärät at Ballroom Marfa from Ballroom Marfa on Vimeo.

The short film, shot by David Fenster, includes commentary from Morton and a walkthrough of the show, which features work from Ed Atkins, Trisha Donnelly, Melvin Edwards, Cécile B. Evans, Jessie Flood-Paddock, Roger Hiorns, Sophie Jung, Lee Lozano, Marlie Mul, Damián Ortega, Charles Ray, Shimabuku,and Paul Thek. More info on the exhibition here.

Brigid McCaffrey
Paradise Springs, 2013
Digital video still
33 minutes

Cine Internacional de Artistas – Brigid McCaffrey
Comisariado por Laura Copelin

sábado, 14 de noviembre
10:00 – 18:00 Proyecciones de selecciones internacionales de AFI
19:00 Proyección destacada de cortometrajes por Brigid McCaffrey
Crowley Theater
Marfa, Texas

domingo, 15 de noviembre
13:00 – 15:00 Camino y conversación de geología
Chihuahuan Desert Research Institute
Fort Davis, Texas

Organizado conjuntamente con Whitechapel Gallery, Londres, a Ballroom Marfa le complace presentar la temporada 2015 de Artists’ Film International, un programa que muestra artistas internacionales que trabajan en cine y animación. Este año Ballroom Marfa destacará las obras de la cineasta Brigid McCaffrey, basada en la ciudad de Los Angeles.

Las películas recientes se establecen en paisajes que transmiten precariedad y flujo. Su forma de realizar documentales se enfoca en ambientes y gente en transición, y ella mantiene en mente a estos sujetos por largos periodos de tiempo. Estas obras meditan en la tension entre individualismo y comunidad en el medio de realidades instables económicamente y ecológicamente. Formado por el proceso de retrato, las películas responden a los cambios fiscales y emocionales de sus personajes, creando documentos que fusionan representaciones del mismo y del lugar.

Ballroom Marfa tendrá una proyección gratuita de una selección de la obra de McCaffrey, que incluye su película de 2013 Paradise Springs, la cual se sigue a Ren Lallatin, un geólogo que estudia el Desierto de Mojave. Lallatin traza sus actualidades volcánicas y sísmicas; localiza fuentes de agua y reliquias de habitantes anteriores; y identifica características de paisajes que ocultará su refugio a vista del publico. La película consiste en una sucesión de soliloquios errantes y cruces de terreno. El geólogo deambula mientras describe sus interacciones con el mundo natural, y declara su rechazo de regulación de tierra y privatización.

Las películas de McCaffrey serán proyectadas al lado de selecciones de otras instituciones internacionales del 2015 AFI en el Crowley Theater en Marfa. Las proyecciones serán presentadas de formato loop todo el día. La cita es el sábado, 14 de noviembre, 2015. Una conversación con McCaffrey y Lallatin seguirá en la tarde.

Entre las actividades también incluirá una conversación y caminata de geología al aire libre dirigida por Lallatin y Jesse Kelsche, una conferencista de geología de la Universidad de Sul Ross. La caminata/lectura tomará lugar en el instituto sin fines de lucro, The Cihuanhuhan Desert Research Institute. La cita es el domingo, 15 de noviembre, 2015. Todos los eventos son gratuitos y abiertos al publico.

Las proyecciones de películas como parte del evento del sábado de AFI incluye las selecciones de las siguientes instituciones:

Belgrade Cultural Centre, Serbia
Centre for Contemporary Arts Afghanistan (CCAA), Kabul
Cinematheque de Tanger, Tángier
City Gallery, Kfar Saba
Fundación PRÓA, Buenos Aires
GAMeC, Bergamo Italia
Hanoi DOCLAB, Hanoi
Istanbul Modern, Estanbul
Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Varsovia
National Centre for Contemporary Arts (NCCA), Moscú
Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlín
Para/Site, Hong Kong
Project 88, Mumbai
Tromsø Kunstforening, Tromsø
Whitechapel Gallery, Londres

Brigid McCaffrey (n. 1978) es una cineasta experimental y documental quien recide en la ciudad de Los Angeles. Ella trabaja en cine y video. Sus películas han estado en varios cines incluyendo BAFICI, Bradford Internacional Film Festival, Cinema de Reel, DocLisboa, L’Alternativa, el Rotterdam International Film Festival, Torino International Film Festival, Other Cinema in San Francisco, y el Los Angeles Filmforum. Su película Castaic Lake estuvo galardonada como la mejor cinematografia en el Ann Arbor Film Festival en el 2011. Paradise Springs recibió el Marian McMahon Award en Images Festival en el 2014. Ella recibió una maestría en Cine y Video de CalArts y una licenciatura en Fotografia y Cine de Bard College.

Rhyannon (Ren) Lallatin es un lama budista de ascendencia celta y indigna norteamericano. Como profesor, Ren ofreció cursos de pregraduado y postgraduado en geología/geofísica, ecopsicología y los estudios indignas norteamericanos, y todo ello entretejido en su conjunto educativo. Un jardinero ávido del Desierto de Mojave, diseñador de los ecosistemas y herbolario, Ren prospera de la relación recíproca inteligente con el consciente, la tierra viva, y el universo. Ser transgénero, Ren utiliza esa palabra en el sentido de ser trascendente de género. Esto indica la plenitud original no limitada por los dictados de la cultura o la personificación actual.

Jesse Kelsch ha estudiado y trabajado como geóloga en su lugar favorito, al suroeste de los Estados Unidos, desde 1993. Ella tiene una licenciatura en Geociencias de la Universidad de Arizona y una maestría en la Tierra y Ciencias Planetarias de la Universidad de Nuevo México. Ella trabajó como hidrogeólogo en Nuevo México y el oeste de Texas hasta que se mudó a Alpine, Texas en 2006. Ella ahora enseña geología en la Universidad de Sul Ross. Su objetivo en la enseñanza es conseguir que sus estudiantes dejen el salón de clases y salgan al campo tanto como sea posible, para fomentar la investigación entre los estudiantes universitarios, y fomentar la investigación científica a todos aquellos que lo deseen.

As part of the Chinati Foundation’s Made in Marfa schedule of events over Chinati Weekend, Ballroom Marfa will host a tour of Äppärät, on Friday, October 9 at 5pm.

Curated by Tom Morton, Äppärät is a show about the mammalian hand, and the tools it touches, holds and uses. Taking its title from the name of a fictional, post-iPhone device at the center of Gary Shteyngart’s 2010 near-future novel Super Sad True Love Story, Äppärät is concerned with labor, play and the uncertain zone between the two; with the extension of the body, and the self, through technologies ancient and contemporary; with things (to borrow Martin Heidegger’s formulation) “present-at” and “ready-to” hand; with compulsion and with death.

Äppärät features 13 artists from across Europe, the Americas, and Asia, from major art historical figures to practitioners in the early phase of their careers, including Ed Atkins, Trisha Donnelly, Melvin Edwards, Cécile B. Evans, Jessie Flood-Paddock, Roger Hiorns, Sophie Jung, Lee Lozano, Marlie Mul, Damián Ortega, Charles Ray, Shimabuku, and Paul Thek.

The tour will be led by Ballroom Marfa Associate Curator Laura Copelin. Complimentary champagne will be served in the Ballroom Marfa shop.

Äppärät is on view through February 14, 2016. Read curator Tom Morton’s exhibition notes here.

Scenes from the September 25, 2015 opening reception for Äppärät. The event featured performance works from Sophie Jung and Roger Hiorns, and was followed by a DJ set by Mike Simonetti. Thanks to everyone who came out!

All photos by Alex Marks.

Forever Sucking Dry, Daniel Chamberlin’s cetacean-mind-communion soundtrack to Ballroom Marfa’s Desert Surf Films series in August is now streaming. Many thanks to Travis Bubenik and Gory Smelley for help recording and editing the mix for broadcast. The setlist includes songs from Aloha Spirit, Emeralds, Former Selves, Sun Araw, These Trails, Buffy Sainte-Marie and more, underscored by surf ambience, whale songs and dolphin conversations.

You can find an 11” x 17” print of the Forever Sucking Dry image as the centerfold of Stay Golden, a desert surf films ‘zine designed and edited for Ballroom Marfa by Hilary duPont, Liz Janoff and Ian Lewis. Available for $10 in the Ballroom Marfa shop. The ‘zine also includes prose, poetry and artwork from Joshua Edwards, Tim Johnson, Eileen Myles and Brandon Shimoda.

Daniel Chamberlin is Ballroom Marfa’s communications director,

Some notes on Äppärät

This is a show about the mammalian hand, and the tools it touches, holds and uses. Taking its title from the name of a fictional, post-iPhone device at the centre of Gary Shteyngart’s 2010 near-future novel Super Sad True Love Story, Äppärät is concerned with labor, play and the uncertain zone between the two; with the extension of the body, and the self, through technologies ancient and contemporary; with things (to borrow Martin Heidegger’s formulation) “present-at” and “ready-to” hand; with compulsion and with death

Äppärät begins with Jessie Flood-Paddock’s Just Loom (2015), a wall painting-cum-sculpture based on an illustration of a worker operating a loom from Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie (1751-72), one of the first attempts to record and systematize all human knowledge in published form. Writing on this image in his 1964 essay The Plates of the Encylopedia, Roland Barthes observed that the operator of this proto-industrial machine is “not a worker but a little lord who plays on a kind of technological organ [who] produces an extremely fine web”. Just Loom combines this Enlightenment-era depiction of labor (or is it leisure?) with a very 21st-Century sculptural tableau, in which a bolt of mesh-like Kevlar fabric becomes the ground for several rubberized casts of the artist’s hand and forearm. Looking at Flood-Paddock’s work, we might think of a contemporary “prosumer” prodding at his or her smartphone, leaving a meniscus of greasy residue on its screen as they do work disguised as play.

From the Stone Age to the digital age, from the pre-human to the post-human, Äppärät suggests not only a neglected history of touch, and of tools, but also how this might help us arrive at what Barthes termed “a certain philosophy of the object”. Originally conceived to hang from the ceiling of Sigmund Freud’s study in Hampstead, North London, Damián Ortega’s The Root of the Root (2011-13) is a sculpture formed from implements created by a community of chimpanzees in the Gashaka-Gumti National Park, Nigeria, gathered by the artist on a research trip in the company of a group of UCL primatologists. (While tool use is common in the animal kingdom, from insects to crustaceans, birds to monkeys, their symbolic use is restricted to the higher apes). If we might read this work, as Ortega has said, as an index of how “the hand transforms nature”, it is also a technological precursor to the objects displayed by Shimabuku in a pair of museum-like vitrines entitled Oldest and Newest Tools of Human Beings (2015). Here, Neolithic hand-axes are set beside web-enabled Apple products of the same dimensions – tools created by members of the same species, albeit millennia apart. The artist’s deadpan presentation inevitably invites questions: which technology might be more usefully substituted for the other, which will persist the longer, which constitutes the greater evolutionary leap? In the Ballroom’s North Gallery, Marlie Mul presents a pair of sculptures that take the form of oversized steel grills, of a type commonly used by street smokers to stub out their cigarettes. Burned, ash-smeared, nicotine stained and stuck with discarded butts, these compositions prompt thoughts about our addiction to handheld “devices” (whether they deliver nicotine, or a constant stream of data), and their inevitable passage from pristine objects of desire to (self-) disgusting trash. Mul has also created an onsite intervention at the Ballroom, Cigarette Ends Here (2015), using spent cigarettes gathered from the Marfa bar, The Lost Horse.

Äppärät guest curator Tom Morton spoke with Tom Michael of Marfa Public Radio about the group exhibition that opens this Friday at Ballroom Marfa. Stream or download the Äppärät edition of “West Texas Talk” from Marfa Public Radio.

Images from the first Desert Surf Films program at Ballroom Marfa, held on the weekend of August 28-29, 2015. The program featured screenings the visionary ’70s surf features Morning of the Earth (1971) and Crystal Voyager (1973) alongside short films by Sam Falls and Joe Zorrilla, and Ian Lewis.

More high desert surf vibes can be found in Stay Golden, a Desert Surf ‘zine designed and edited by Hilary duPont, Liz Janoff and Ian Lewis. It includes contributions from Daniel Chamberlin, Joshua Edwards, Sam Falls, Rae Anna Hample, Nicki Ittner, Tim Johnson, Eileen Myles, Caitlin Murray, Brandon Shimoda, and more. Check it out in the Ballroom Marfa shop.

All photos by Lesley Brown of Marfalite Studios.

Created in collaboration with a group of musicians, this limited edition, blue-marbled vinyl stems from a sound piece by Sam Falls, which plays on a loop in Ballroom Marfa’s gallery as part of his 2015 solo exhibition. The limited edition record features a woman’s voice repeating the word “now” alongside simple chords played by four musicians. The LP that plays in the exhibition contains a thin metal strip that causes the record to skip, creating an original composition with each rotation. This sound work speaks to another work in the show, Falls’ video piece Untitled (Now), where he continuously writes the word ‘now’ into sand with a stick before it gets repeatedly washed away by waves at the ocean shore. Roshe Run For Womens
Together the works reflect the artist’s interest in capturing the passage of time and its elements, providing viewers with various mediums in which to consider the present.

Sam Falls
Untitled (Now, record), 2015
12” Vinyl LP with turntable and speakers
17 x 13 x 5 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Ballroom Marfa
Photo © Fredrik Nilsen

“I wanted to visualize how we can see or hear time as it passes to be reminded of its unified past, present, and future; every moment is ‘now,’ or will be ‘now,’ or was ‘now.’ ‘Now’ is a temporal shifter as I see it, and so these works regenerate the word to inform the moment both as specific and as the works progress elliptically ‘now’ becomes abstracted and wholly representational.” — Excerpt from Sam Falls artist statement

Click here to read more in the Ballroom Marfa shop. See more of our limited editions here.

A solo exhibition of Falls’ work will open at Ballroom Marfa on March 13, 2015.

This show comes from a few different ideas and places, one of which is the influence of Donald Judd and Marfa. It was my second trip to Marfa that struck me most, the unchanging nature of the place and sculptures, and while my own work has always been informed by minimal aesthetics and continues to be, the element I knew I wanted to incorporate, especially with my sculpture was change. This change has entered my work through incorporating the environment, so that the art reflects time and place, rather than denying or defying it. The reciprocal object exposed to time and environment beyond the artwork is the viewer. The piece which most readily responds to all these issues is the outdoor sculpture made from a 1984 Ford Ranger. When I moved from New York to California in 2011 I bought a new Ford Ranger, so in conceiving this sculpture I first wanted to find the same model truck from the year I was born. The truck had at some point been repainted red from its original tan color, and as humans regenerate their skin cells every seven years, I reversed the process on the truck and had it sandblasted in a random patter down to tan lines and then all the way to steel. Some of the panels of the truck were clear-coated to preserve the visible “skins” of the truck, while others are left to rust in the elements, exposed. The “life” of the truck was removed and repurposed with a new life, substituting the engine block with a marble block and potted cactuses, and the truck bed became a soil bed of succulents native to southern North America. As the copper pots of the cacti oxidize they’ll leave their mark on the white marble, and the succulents inside the truck and in the bed will take on the heart and purpose of the machine, growing with the environment and viewers.

The works on linen in the show were hand dyed on-site in Marfa and left outside to fade in the sunlight, creating images that were masked out by minimal shapes in pictographic images from the ancient Chinese tangram game. The idea came to fruition when reading Judd’s 1994 essay Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular, namely near the end when he states:

“Color of course can be an image or a symbol, as is the peaceful blue and white, often combined with olive drab, but these are no longer present in the best art. By definition, images and symbols are made by institutions. A pair of colors that I knew of as a child in Nebraska was red and black, which a book said was the “favorite” of the Lakota. In the codices of the Maya, red and black signify wisdom and are the colors of scholars.”

I had already begun working with the tangram puzzles but not found the perfect situation for their form. I wanted to use the images on the fabric and then create tables with the game pieces in their resting assembled rectangular form. I was always interested in the divide between Judd’s furniture and artwork, how the designs were quite similar but separated by space and function. In this work the tables function first as productive tools for the artwork, and then secondarily as furniture. I also wanted to mix the media, using some industrial materials that would weather (copper and bronze), along with more static and classical material (marble). The quote above led me to take interest in the history of tangrams and source Chinese marble for the project, while also using the colors red and black in a site specific homage to Judd. The other works on linen are also durational and natural “photograms” which came about in Marfa after seeing the cattle fences everywhere, the grid appearing even out in the middle of the country. I wanted to work with something so familiar to rural Texas as well as the aesthetics of art history, an American theme ever-present in everyday life, its representation, and its abstraction.