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kill switch May 5 - July 29, 2017 PRESS RELEASE Gema Alava Graham Fagen Suso Fandiño Misha Bies Golas Travis Somerville Melissa Vandenberg six contemporary international artists invite us to reflect on displacement, loss, and hope A kill switch, also known as an emergency stop or e-stop, is a safety mechanism used to shut off a device or machinery in an emergency situation in which it cannot be shut down in the usual manner. Unlike a normal shut-down switch/procedure, which shuts down all systems in an orderly fashion and turns the machine off without damaging it, a kill switch is designed and configured to completely and as quickly as possible abort the operation (even if this damages equipment) and be operable in a manner that is quick and simple (so that even a panicking operator with impaired executive function or a bystander can activate it). Kill switches are usually designed so as to be obvious even to an untrained operator or a bystander. Gema Alava (b. 1973 Madrid, Spain) lives and works in New York City. Her work, in the form of installation, drawing, photography and art projects, deals with what she calls "contradictory truths", and the capacity to "create a maximum by reversing a minimum.” Alava's art projects, in the form of dialogues, verbal descriptions, rumors and random encounters, explore notions of trust and intimacy, and use language as a medium to investigate the interconnections that exist between public, private, educational and interpretative aspects of art. In 2012 she was appointed Cultural Adviser to the World Council of Peoples for the United Nations, (WCPUN). Graham Fagen (born 1966) is a Scottish artist living and working in Glasgow, Scotland. He has exhibited internationally at the Busan Biennale, South Korea (2004), the Art and Industry Biennial, New Zealand (2004), the Venice Biennale (2003) and represented Scotland at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 in a presentation curated and organised by Hospitalfield. In Britain he has exhibited at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Tate Britain and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. In 1999 he was invited by the Imperial War Museum, London to work as the Official War Artist for Kosovo. Suso Fandiño (born 1971 in Santiago de Compostela, Spain) and his fellow students became part of an emerging movement in Galicia in the early 2000s. Known as “Generation Atlántica”, their approach was close to the neo- expressionism of the early eighties. One of Fandiño's early works, a huge stainless sign with the text “tontoelquelolea” (“dumb who reads this”), illustrates his interest in art as language, and his reassessment of the art establishment’s relevance. Visual language filled with irony and sarcasm are integral part of his practice, such in his typewriter work alternative facts. Fandiño continuously appropriates imagery and forms from works by renown artists, in ways that undermine conventional notions of originality, artistic mastery and authorship. In his work My selfportrait as a fountain - a video referencing Bruce Nauman’s work of the same title - Fandiño uses urinating instead of Nauman’s original gesture. Misha Bies Golas (born 1977 in Lalín, Spain) is an artist trained in photography and design. His work includes areas of different disciplines, most of his work using appropriation. Recent recipient of the Mardel Prize for Painting in Spain, the artist addresses authorship, as well as the sublime or the absurd, often creating a visual abstraction of an original thought or object. His oeuvre being mainly comprised of visual assemblages or text, such as his work “S/T (carpeta doce cabezas, de Luís Seoane)” (shown on right) in which the artist photographed the empty interior of one of artist Luís Seoane’s folder of prints entitled Twelve Heads, one of the most important publications of the author, edited by the Bonino gallery in Buenos Aires (Argentina) in 1958, where the Galician born artist had immigrated to during Spain’s Civil War. The black & white photograph, being a non-figurative re-reading exercise of this folder’s interior, originally created to hold figurative images, results in a geometric abstract aesthetic relating to the early Soviet avant-garde works by El Lissitzky or Alexander Rodchenko, yet profoundly vehiculates the essence of loss and displacement. An empty folder, a memory of what it contained, yet without a trace of its former content, nor a hint as to its relative importance or meaning.
