Surpik Angelini and the Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology in Houston, Texas, are delighted to present The Cloud Chamber, a solo exhibition by Madrid-based artist Linarejos Moreno.
The exhibition, produced at the Alcobendas Contemporary Art Center (Madrid), will serve as a starting point for an artist-in-residence experiment during which Linarejos, together with invited critics, will work toward the production of seminal texts that expand and contextualize her work, while developing her artistic project, How to Catch Cosmic Rays at Home.
Moreno’s practice explores subjectivity as a mode of resistance to reification, focusing on the non-productive uses of industrial spaces and on scientific representation as a tool for interrogating modernity. Her research interests include the sociology of science/technology and the relationship between Capital and contemporary forms of Romanticism.
In the research-based Cloud Chamber exhibit, Linarejos takes advantage of the formal and temporal (1911) convergence of two documents – the first photographs of cosmic rays and Wassily Kandinsky’s first published text – to interrogate the origin of pictorial abstraction as a break from representation. With How to Catch Cosmic Rays at Home, the artist turns to a project that will incorporate everyday, domestic objects into experiments for visualizing cosmic rays. In so doing, the project brings humor, humanity, otherness, and a gender-based perspective to the area of Art/Science production.
The Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology in Houston is a non profit, private foundation that supports experimental work at the intersection of art and anthropology. The AIA award-winning building is located in the museum district of Houston, Texas at 1412 West Alabama Street, near the Menil Collection. Visits by appointment only.
RELATED EVENTS
From October 26 to February 16: On view, Cloud Chamber by Linarejos Moreno.
October 29 at 6:30PM: Book presentation of Art Forms in Mechanism by Linarejos Moreno, in conversation with Dr. Fabiola López Durán.
November 2 from 4:00 to 6:00 PM: Open House.
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Biographies
Linarejos Moreno
Artist, scholar and associated professor in Design and Fine Arts at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), Linarejos Moreno has been an invited Fulbright scholar at Rice University in Houston and a visiting professor of The School of Art in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Houston.
Her work explores subjectivity as a mode of resistance to reification, focusing on the non-productive uses of industrial spaces and scientific representation as a tool for interrogating modernity.
Linarejos’s site-specific practice focuses on photographic documentation of the interventions that she enacts upon spaces in ruin, and their later expansion in the exhibition space. This practice led her to her doctoral thesis, Ruin as Process: Robert Overby, Francesca Woodman, Gordon Matta Clark and Their Legacy, in which she traces the origins of these practices and their connection with the crisis of capitalism and the development of anthropology. Her research interests include the sociology of science and the relationship between capital and contemporary forms of Romanticism.
She belongs to the research group “Prácticas artísticas y formas de conocimiento contemporáneas” (Artistic Practices and Contemporary Epistemologies, Cod.588, UCM), and she forms part of the I+D+I Project “Interacciones del arte en la tecnosfera” (Art Interactions in the Technosphere, MINECO, 2018-2021). She cooperate as a curator with the National Museum of Science and Technology (MUNCYT). Her recent book, Art forms in Mechanism, was published by Turpin Editorial in 2017.
Linarejos’s work has been internationally recognized and abundantly exhibited, recently in the solo exhibitions The Cloud Chamber, Alcobendas Centro de Arte (Madrid); Tabularia. Laboratorios de Ciencia e Imaginación (Tabularia. Laboratories of Science and the Imagination) 2017 in the Royal Botanical Gardens (Madrid), and La construcción de una ruina (The Construction of a Ruin) 2017 in the Tabacalera. Promoción del Arte (Madrid) – both of which formed part of the international photography festival PHotoEspaña PH16; and Artifactual Realities, 2016 in the Station Museum (Houston). Linarejos is represented by the Pilar Serra gallery (Spain) and the Inman Gallery (US).
Surpik Angelini
Surpik Angelini is a Houston based artist, independent curator, and writer. Her work is rooted in the overlapping disciplines of art, architecture, and cultural anthropology. Trained in art at Mills College and Cornell University (1966-68) and in architecture and urban planning at the Universidad Central de Venezuela (1971-76), she obtained her BArch from the University of Houston (1979). With artist-theorist Abdel Hernandez, she founded the Transart Foundation: a workshop for Art and Anthropology based in Houston, TX. Surpik has directed since 1996, pushing the foundation's mission to support artists and scholars involved in relevant social, anthropological and interdisciplinary research.
Surpik’s artistic vision was impacted by her collaborative performances with John Cage and Gordon Matta Clark (1966-68); her theoretical studies with Thomas McEvilley (1990-1994) at Rice University and her association with the Rice Department of Anthropology (1997), when they co-sponsored Transart’s Artists in Trance: New Methodologies in the Work with the Other, a semester program of lectures, documentary films and cutting edge exhibitions of anthropologically based art, she co-curated with Hernandez in 1997. As an artist she exhibited in solo and group shows in Houston. As a cultural researcher, she lectured in universities and museums throughout the country. Her critical essays have been published in art magazines, academic journals, artist's catalogs and monographs.
Fabiola López Durán
Adopting a transnational and interdisciplinary perspective, Fabiola López-Durán’s research and teaching focuses on the history and theory of modern and contemporary European and Latin American art and architecture. Her book, Eugenics in the Garden: Architecture, Medicine and Landscape from France to Latin America in the Early Twentieth Century, investigates a particular strain of eugenics that, at the turn of the twentieth century, moved from the realms of medicine and law to design, architecture, and urban planning—becoming a critical instrument in the crafting of modernity. Her work analyzes the cross-pollination of ideas and mediums—science, politics and aesthetics—that informed the process of modernization on both sides of the Atlantic, with an emphasis on Latin America.
López-Durán earned her Ph.D in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art from MIT. Prior to joining the Rice University faculty, she was the 2009-2011 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the Department of History of Art at UC Berkeley. Her awards include predoctoral fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, Dedalus Foundation, CLIR, Harvard Center for European Studies, Camargo Foundation, Samuel H. Kress Foundation and the Fulbright Program. Her work has been published in Europe, Asia, South America and the United States.
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Production of these artworks, events and catalogue were funded by the generous support from The Transart Foundation for Art and Anthropology in Houston, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Alcobendas, Madrid and The Royal Scottish Academy of Art & Architecture.