Here Nor There

Adriana Barrios & Barbara Justice

An exhibition of experimental prints and photographs

NO LAND
54 1/2 E. San Francisco St. #7
August 19-October 1, 2017

Opening Reception: Saturday, August 19, 6-9 pm
Special Reception | Readings from Here Nor There: Friday, September 22, 7-9 pm

Like many early career artists, Barbara Justice and Adriana Barrios have blazed a trail with quite a few switchbacks. Since meeting at the University of Texas-San Antonio, they’ve lived in far-flung places, from Santa Fe, New Mexico to Madison, Wisconsin and Florence, Italy. This summer, Justice and Barrios return to New Mexico for a show of experimental prints and photographs. Both artists reflect on presence and displacement, competing forces that they must contend with as emerging artists. Here Nor There opens at No Land, Strangers Collective’s art space, on Saturday, August 19th from 6-9 pm. A special reception hosted by Katie Johnson and featuring readings from nine local writers will take place on Friday, September 22 from 7-9 pm. Featured writers include Austin Eichelberger, Melinda Freudenberger, Juro Gagne, Steffen D. Garcia, Bucket Siler, Stephanie Thompson, Michael J. Wilson, and Marina Woollven. Here Nor There is on view through Sunday, October 1st. 

Justice and Adriana Barrios are used to creating and exhibiting artwork together – this is their fourth duo show, and they have been a couple for almost ten years. They were married in Santa Fe last July. While studying art for their undergraduate degrees, they were involved in San Antonio’s art community, even running a gallery together for four years in a downtown 1,100-square-foot warehouse. “It was an exhibition space, studio space, and also our living space,” Justice says. Somehow they found the time to put on a new exhibition every month.  But as the rent went up, and the area became more and more gentrified, they decided to move to New Mexico – Justice is from Las Cruces – and they settled in Santa Fe for three years in an attempt to focus on their own artwork (this was from 2012-2015).  Since then, they both completed seven-month artist residencies in Italy, and Barrios was accepted into the MFA program at University of Wisconsin-Madison, which led them to their current location up north. 

Currently pursuing her MFA in printmaking, Barrios’s artwork in Here Nor There combines landscape-based cyanotype photography with patterns of intaglio-printed signs and symbols that play with repetition, variation, and layering. She began creating her ethereal images several years ago while she was completing her artist residency in Italy. “I was pulling out aspects of the landscape and trying to highlight others,” she says. “I’m interested in the lack of relationship that we have with the world around us, and looking at the way that this affects us all.” These one-of-a-kind prints are the result of a complex process that involves drawing, printmaking and photography, through techniques that span the historical and the cutting-edge. “Printmaking continues to change with technology,” Barrios says. “In that sense, past and present are always right there in the studio with you.” 

Justice is a photographer, and her large-format work in Here Nor There plays with double-exposed film. In her photographs, nature-based imagery is juxtaposed with what she calls ‘visual landmarks’ – momentary glimpses within her current urban setting that register to her as extraordinary.  Her time living in Madison has at times consisted simply of a search for the space and quiet that she remembers as being so bountiful in New Mexico: “It’s the space,” she says. “Where I am now, I can’t just go out to a desert where there’s nobody else around.”  Fittingly, when she goes out on a film shoot, she makes sure to do it in the early mornings, when it’s just her and the landscape. Even though her vividly colored double-exposures evoke a sense of overlap between two simultaneous realities, they also serve as a means of grounding herself in her current one, earnestly depicting her reflections on what it means to be present in an environment.  

Adriana Barrios

Artist Statement

Altered Landscapes: Over the years I have had the opportunity to spend time in many unique places: Diablo Canyon, Canyon De Chelly and the Black Place, all of which are located in the southwestern United States. For each of these visits, my initial reaction was an intense amount of excitement and fear as I was confronted with something which I recognized as much bigger than myself. I think these reactions were in part due to the vastness, overwhelming beauty, and sense of strength and power from the scale of these environments in comparison to my own body. I attempt to highlight these experiences through printmaking in hopes that they are more than documentations but rather a set of aesthetic experiences that emphasize a larger context. The act of making is an important aspect of my work: utilizing skill and interest in techniques I used printmaking and alternative photography processes to make this body of work. I stated with photographs and drawings that serve as notes and documentation of these experiences, then begin working in the darkroom and printmaking studio. Combining as interest in semiotics and geology I use repetition and layering as a way of formulating content and context. While making these prints, I took into consideration basic fundamental art principals such as form, space and color. I am also very interested in experimenting with composition and how it can impact the outcome of the work. The prints are often worked and reworked again and again until they have reached a point of completion.

Bio

Adriana Barrios was born and raised in San Diego, California. In 2009 she graduated from the University of Texas at San Antonio where she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree with an emphasis in printmaking. In 2015 Adriana attended an international artist residency in Florence, Italy at Santa Reparata International School of Art. Currently, she is pursuing a Master of Fine Arts Degree at The University of Wisconsin-Madison where she is a recipient of the Education Graduate Research Fellow Scholarship. Her work has been exhibited regionally in Texas, New Mexico and Wisconsin and internationally in Italy and Mexico. Her most recent work involves her revisiting the coastal landscapes of her upbringing. She is interested in exploring the ways we observe, interact and respond to land in which we live in. She uses printmaking, photography and video to explore these ideas.

website. 

Barbara Justice

Artist Statement

Be Excellent To Each Other is a visual collection of my experience in Madison, Wisconsin. I document surroundings of my new city by photographing details that have become familiar to me on a regular basis. These subjects have become guides for me; they are reference points, in my new environment, and with them I have established a sense of familiarity and comfort. Rather than looking outward into a vast desert southwest landscape of my upbringing, I am now focusing on a place that is new, and therefore attempting to characterize my connection to Madison. I photographed all of the images with a Mamiya RB67 ProS medium format camera and have carefully rewound and reused rolls of film to create double exposures. Although this is somewhat experimental in technique, the pairings of the images are deliberate and planned out. The results of two layered images reveal a visual metaphor for the time I have spent here, covering and uncovering relevant details that play a role in the discovery of my new home.

Bio

Barbara Justice (b. 1975, El Paso, TX) is a southwest native, who grew up in southern New Mexico and west Texas. At a young age, she discovered that making photographic images was her passion and thus completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Photography from The University of Texas at San Antonio in 2009. While living in San Antonio she created Justice Works Studio, and over the course of four years she exhibited emerging and established artists of south Texas. In 2015, Justice completed a seven month artist residency at Santa Reparata International School of Art in Florence, Italy.  Her series On The White Sands was published in PRYME Magazine, a quarterly publication dedicated to instant film. She is a member of Film Shooters Collective an international collective of film photographers.  Her work has been exhibited in Oregon, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Louisiana and Texas.

website.

Dancing Over 50 Book Launch

featuring co-author Emmaly Wiederholt
Saturday, June 17, 5-8 pm

NO LAND
54 1/2 E. San Francisco Street #7

To many professional dancers, early retirement seems like an inevitability. Santa Fe dancer Emmaly Wiederholt spent most of her 20’s in San Francisco, performing in contemporary dance companies. When she was 28, she moved back to her home state of New Mexico, but didn’t leave dance behind. Instead, she embarked on a quest to interview dancers who are decades past their ostensible expiration dates. 

On a series of crowdfunded expeditions through San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland and Seattle, Wiederholt and photographer Gregory Bartning gathered the stories of 54 dancers ranging in age from 50 to 95. The words and images they captured became the independently published book Beauty Is Experience: Dancing 50 and Beyond, which makes its official debut at No Land on Saturday, June 17 from 5-8 pm. Wiederholt will speak and sign books at this special reception, and limited edition prints of Bartning’s photographs from the project will be available for purchase. 

“Our culture celebrates youth and athleticism, but what if we also celebrate the inherent wisdom that comes with a body that has life experience?” says Wiederholt. This idea first came to her in 2012, when she attended a retrospective performance by septuagenarian butoh dancers Eiko Otake and Takashi Koma Otake. The couple, known professionally as Eiko & Koma, have been dancing together for over 50 years. “I was really moved by their capacity as dancers to convey things so simply, clearly and powerfully,” Wiederholt says. “With life experience comes the capacity to emote and to creatively express something that maybe a younger person hasn’t fleshed out or even felt.” 

Wiederholt teamed up with Bartning and began interviewing older dancers for her blog, Stance on Dance. They called the project Dancing Over 50, and sought out practicing dancers in a variety of genres, from ballet and Argentine tango to African and contact improvisation. After each conversation, Bartning photographed the subjects in motion. “We were looking for people who’d been dedicated to understanding themselves through dance for a long period of time,” Wiederholt says. Early in the project, they connected with then 93-year-old Anna Halprin, a pioneer of postmodern dance. “Interviewing her was a pretty big turning point, because we had a big name,” she says. “That helped the project take shape, and other dancers started to come out of the woodwork.” 

By 2015, Wiederholt and Bartning had completed 32 interviews in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland and Seattle. Late that year, they mounted a monumental road trip to all four cities and conducted 25 additional conversations. They also hosted a number of fundraising events to promote an Indiegogo campaign that would help them compile the Stance on Dance blog posts into a book. They completed Beauty Is Experience this year, and the book launch at No Land marks its official debut. The 210-page, 9 x 12 in., hardcover, full color photography book features 54 interviews and over one hundred photographs. The event kicks off Wiederholt’s book tour to each of the cities where interviews were conducted. 

“Emmaly has contributed powerful performances to a number of Strangers Collective exhibitions,” says No Land co-director Kyle Farrell. “When she showed us this project, we were blown away by the dynamic imagery and inspiring insight of these remarkable artists.” Strangers Collective's new art space, No Land, features solo and small group exhibitions by artists, writers and performers. Dedicated to those ready to take the next step in their careers, No Land invites emerging artists to develop and show complete bodies of work. 

For more information and high resolution images, please contact No Land co-directors Jordan Eddy, Alex Gill and Kyle Farrell at strangersartcollective@gmail.com. 

*All photographs courtesy of Gregory Bartning, Belle Images. 

Marcus Zúñiga: YA VEO

NO LAND
54 1/2 E. San Francisco St. #7
April 8 - June 11, 2017

Grand Opening | Saturday, April 8, 6-9 pm
Artist Talk | Saturday, April 15, 6 pm
Closing Reception | Saturday, June 10, 6-9 pm

Strangers Collective’s NO LAND art space transforms into a futuristic planetarium for its inaugural exhibition. In his solo show Ya Veo, Marcus Zúñiga incorporates cosmic imagery into new media projections and sculptures, opening windows into the universe by manipulating footage that he captures through a telescope. Mapping the constellations has helped Zúñiga trace his Mexican-American roots—and tell a story that traverses human history. Ya Veo, meaning “I see” in Spanish, is an invitation to viewers to ponder their place in the universe.

The debut of the show on April 8 coincided with the grand opening of NO LAND on Saturday, April 8 from 6-9 pm, and it runs through June 10, 2017.  Zúñiga conducted an artist talk at NO LAND on Saturday, April 15, 6 pm. The exhibition's closing reception (June 10, 6-9 pm) coincides with the opening weekend of the Currents New Media Festival 2017. The two-week festival features new media art from across the world, and partners with art spaces around Santa Fe to present satellite shows and events. 

“My work is about perception of the universe,” says Zúñiga. “It’s part of a conversation that spans millennia, and can’t be resolved with a simple yes or no.” He first tuned into this cosmic exchange as a child growing up in New Mexico. Zúñiga was born in Silver City, and his family lived in seven different towns throughout the state during his youth. “I would win science fairs with projects about the solar system, and watch eight-hour documentaries on the chemical compositions of stars,” Zúñiga says. He was excited to learn that his Aztec ancestors were equally attracted to studying the stars. Perhaps cracking cosmological mysteries could help him understand his own DNA. 

In 2009, Zúñiga enrolled at the University of New Mexico to study video art. “I never pursued astronomy seriously because it always seemed too dry to think about it in a very scientific way,” he says. “Through art, I could experience concepts of the universe—and create those experiences. That’s what set me off.” Near the end of his time at UNM, he created a video collage of a hawk in flight overlaid on the sun. The piece felt like a breakthrough, and he tried to replicate its success after graduating with his BFA in 2013 and taking an internship at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson. It wasn’t until he moved to Santa Fe in summer 2014 that his first body of work started to take shape. After completing an internship with SITE Santa Fe, he took a job at Peters Projects, and connected with new media artists who became his mentors. 

“Peters had this five-monitor installation by Steina Vasulka,” he says. “It was an electronic, monumental piece with a very Fluxus feel to it. The fact that a gallery was supporting experimental art, that showed me new possibilities.” Another new media work by Lita Albuquerque inspired him to study her efforts to bring serious scientific conversations into the art world.

By summer 2015, he was spending his evenings with a camera pressed against the viewfinder of a telescope. He would capture cosmic events and send them spinning into the digital world, editing the imagery and inserting fragments of computer code to aesthetically communicate specific scientific concepts. “The technological aspect of video is, to me, what keeps the medium I work with so relevant to the world,” he says. “Video is so important to how we receive information every day.”

Ya Veo, Zúñiga’s first solo exhibition, represents two years of astronomical exploration. The eight works in the show include videos, photographs and new media sculptures. High quality prints will also be available for purchase. “Strangers Collective’s goal with the NO LAND project is to spotlight emerging artists who are ready for the next phase of their careers,” says Kyle Farrell, co-director of NO LAND. “Marcus showed us this rich, diverse body of work that is conceptually rigorous but also captures unbridled wonder.” He is currently in preparations to participate in the Art Center College of Design Graduate Art MFA program in Pasadena, CA for the fall 2017 term. Zúñiga has appeared in two Strangers Collective group shows: Narrows at Santa Fe Community Gallery in spring 2016, and Long Echo at Center for Contemporary Arts in fall 2016. 

To title his works, Zúñiga incorporates Spanish and Nahuatl (Aztec) words and phrases. It’s a nod to the highly personal experience of viewing the sky, which connects to a universal human experience. “This is what the moon is called in Spanish, or Nahuatl,” Zúñiga says. “It might feel foreign at first, but everyone has an experience of the moon. If we start thinking about the cosmos in ways that Egyptians or Chinese or Indigenous people think about it, all of these narratives converge. It just becomes this world in the sky.” 

For more information and high resolution images, please contact NO LAND co-directors Jordan Eddy, Alex Gill and Kyle Farrell at strangersartcollective@gmail.com. 

1905 Magazine Benefit Show

A Pop-Up Event Presented by Strangers Collective
54 1/2 East San Francisco St. #7
Saturday, February 18, 2017, 7-10 pm

There’s a fashion movement brewing in Santa Fe, and the proof is in the pages of 1905 Magazine. Editors Mariah Romero and Darnell Thomas founded the quarterly digital publication in 2014, with the help of their fellow students at Santa Fe University of Art and Design. Now they’re taking their first steps into the larger fashion industry, and ushering a community of young style mavens to the cultural forefront in Santa Fe and beyond. Strangers Collective is pleased to present the 1905 Benefit Party, a pop-up fashion event at 54 1/2 East San Francisco Street on Saturday, February 18 from 7-10 pm. Artwork and merchandise from the magazine will be available for purchase at the reception, in support of Thomas and Romero’s sweeping vision for the publication. This event is free and open to the public, and will include complimentary refreshments. 

Thomas and Romero dreamed up 1905 Magazine in a typography class at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design in winter 2014. Romero was a sophomore graphic design student, and Thomas was a junior majoring in business and graphic design. Both of them were interested in fashion, but SFUAD didn’t have any classes on the subject. “We were both working on fashion-related projects, to have something in our portfolios,” says Romero. “We knew other people were also doing photo shoots, and we wanted to create a community to bring it all together.”

The duo chose the title 1905 Magazine as a reference to the birth year of legendary designer Christian Dior, and put together their first issue over winter break in 2014. Up-and-coming designers, photographers, writers, stylists and chefs quickly filled their masthead. For almost a year, they produced monthly issues. Thomas, Romero and their contributors produced editorial fashion spreads using borrowed clothes from local thrift shops, cooked up stunning culinary features in the kitchens of their college apartments, and designed style guides that encouraged their readers to embrace their individuality. 

“We give off the message that you don’t have to be trendy to be stylish,” says Thomas. “It’s not about what’s on the runway at fashion week; that’s what everyone else is doing. You don’t need a lot of money to have an eye for style.” The SFUAD community quickly embraced the new cultural platform. The graphic design department helped fund a print edition of 1905 in spring 2015, and a film student made a documentary about the magazine. That fall, Thomas and Romero switched to a quarterly publication schedule and got serious about polishing up the design and content. The monthly issues often ran over 100 pages, but they worked hard to edit it down to around 60 in 1905’s seasonal manifestation. 

“We want it to look as professional as the magazines we’re looking up to,” says Romero. They’ve examined every detail of Darling, Kinfolk and other arts and culture publications for inspiration. “We want to be at that level,” Romero says. “This isn’t just a student project any more, it’s what we want to do.” Their hard work paid off in 2016: the wildly popular social networking app Snapchat featured some of their images in its Discover feed, and an LA author profiled them for an upcoming lifestyle book. 

Thomas graduated from SFUAD in 2016, and Romero will get her diploma this spring. They didn’t think twice about carrying 1905 Magazine into the professional world with them, and they’re bringing their collaborators along for the ride. The 1905 Magazine Benefit Show will feature photographs and designs by a number of contributors to the publication. SFUAD graphic design professor David Grey, who has mentored Thomas and Romero, will contribute artwork to the exhibition. Andie Fuller, who has contributed recipes to the magazine’s culinary section, collaborated with Romero and Thomas to design a cookbook that will debut at the event. A new line of 1905 Magazine merchandise will also be available, at a price range of $5-$50.

“1905 Magazine represents a new vanguard of local, talented fashion professionals,” says Strangers Collective co-director Kyle Farrell. “They’re already shaping Santa Fe culture, so we’re calling on the community to further elevate this inspiring project.” For more information and high resolution images, contact Jordan Eddy at strangersartcollective@gmail.com. 

Contributors: Lydia Abernathy, Jennifer Carrillo, David Grey, Laura San Román, Mark Baker-Sanchez, Amy West, Jonathon Duarte, Callan Ramirez, Keynan Johnson, Andie Fuller, Jennie Johnsrud, Mariah Romero & Darnell Thomas.