LOSING YOURSELF IN THE 21ST CENTURY
Maryland Art Place, Baltimore
February 4 – March 27, 2010
Opening Reception and Gallery Talk with Artists and Curators: Thursday, February 4, 5 - 8 pm
4:00 pm LY Artists and Curators Present the Project
March 6: Contemporary Art and the Internet, 2:00-5:00 pm
Stacia Yeapanis Talk | Copyright Workshop with Maryland Lawyers for the Arts
March 18: Susan Lee-Chun Artist Talk and Public Art Demonstration, 6:00-8:00 pm
June 23: Lee-Chun’s public performance of Let’s Suzer-cise! in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor
Featured artists:
Katherine Behar, New York | Amber Boardman, New York | Milana Braslavsky, Baltimore | Kate Hers, Berlin/LA | Susan Lee-Chun, Miami | Noelle Mason, Tampa | Shana Moulton, Brooklyn | Renetta Sitoy, Bay Area, CA | Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Baltimore | Amber Hawk Swanson, New York | Stacia Yeapanis, Chicago |Saya Woolfalk, New York
LOSING YOURSELF IN THE 21ST CENTURY is a unique online curatorial project to be presented in a gallery exhibition and a series of public events at Maryland Art Place from February 4 to March 27, 2010. The exhibition features new work by young U.S. based women artists working in interactive and performative media to explore the idea of “self” in the 21st century. Their projects reveal how new media, information systems and consumer culture encourage personal expression at the same time they diffuse our sense of self and control our behavior. The artists alternately embrace, critique and transcend contemporary female identity.
Collaborative curators Cathy Byrd, Executive Director, Maryland Art Place, Baltimore; Susan Richmond, Contemporary Art Historian, Georgia State University Welch School of Art and Design; and Jillian Hernandez, Ph.D. Candidate in Women’s Studies, Rutgers University, developed the project and selected participating artists through the site losingyourself.com. A virtual exhibition and curatorial essays will be posted online in February 2010.
LOSING YOURSELF IN THE 21ST CENTURY is premised on the notion that contemporary media, information systems and consumer culture foster flexible and diverse notions of self and community while simultaneously, and increasingly, regulating new spheres of personal life and conduct. By producing spaces in which individualism and personal choices are simultaneously encouraged and curtailed, this network of cultural discourse blurs traditional distinctions between private and public, self-empowerment and self-surveillance, consumerism and activism. The exhibition examines this phenomenon through the perspective of emerging women artists.
