social residency 2020

untune and Human Resources present Social Residency, March 13 to 18 – an all new iteration of what initially began in 2017 at untune with Alison O’ Daniel, Kathleen Kim, Marcia Bassett, and Angel Chirnside. Joined by Fiona Connor and other members of the Varese Group, artists reconstruct separate ideas involving tone, slur, entropy, action, and residency under the binding umbrella of Social.

Social Residency attempts to shift the structure of an artist residency into a process – one that develops, much like a group exhibition does – through ongoing conversations, discussions, feedback, and exchanges, with emphasis placed on the interactions between individual process and group interventions that have formulated remotely.

Marcia Bassett, given the concept Social Entropy, explores the idea of social theory where social and natural worlds have constantly shifting relationships. Sound collected from participants and the environment will be assembled, collaged, processed and transformed into a quadraphonic sound installation. She will be activating her installation with a live performance on Saturday March 14th at 9pm.

Alison O’ Daniel, given the term Social Tone, will be processing a series of Skype sessions – a live collaboration with hard of hearing friends where repeated, indecipherable, and filtered communication of parts of her film script will then be utilized as new text, dialogue and sound within the script.

Social Slur presented by Kathleen Kim, a prolific advocate for civil and immigration rights, will present an impromptu dialogue on social justice themes present in her work while allowing for sound improvisation involving audience participation to blur and bleed into the conversation – a starting point for communication about social issues. This will take place on Sunday March 15, 4-6pm followed by a cosmic grooving with an Avant Jazz ensemble later in the evening at 8pm, providing a capstone to Social Slur.

And as most stories have a beginning, middle, and end, Angel Chirnside will prove otherwise. Intercepting with Bassett’s relational intersections, Chirnside provides the most significant building block to Social Action – literacy. In a participatory intergenerational (kid-friendly) reading room, she will facilitate storytelling with visitors, with special attention to kids, utilizing colorful felt cutouts she has made, with no scripted story in mind, that can be rearranged by visitors to tell new stories with varied outcomes. The felt pieces provide catalysts for a variety of narratives. You’ll be able to find her in the reading room at various times between 11am and 1pm on on the 14th, 15th, and 16th.

Bringing forth and integrating the very essence of the term Social Residency, we are also extending a warm welcome to the Varese Group, founded in 2017 by Fiona Connor with an intention to meet consecutively until 2021 in Northern Italy. Taking the form of one-week symposiums, the group consists of artists, designers, architects, writers, and curators, engaging in dialogue and conversation about ideas and their projects, intercepted by shared meals and excursions. The materiality of location is a central aspect to their exchanges. Every year a press release is produced (as the only public presentation) – this year’s iteration will be presented in this show as well as a screening of Ten Minutes in Binio by Sasha Portis that is comprised of a collection of 1 minute videos taken by members of the group when they met last year. The screening will take place Saturday, March 14 at 8pm.