The international project CROSSOVER [KC-Bs As] was exhibited from October 17th until November 14th, 2014 at the Mallin Gallery, Kansas City Artists Coalition, Kansas City, USA. Organized

ALEJANDRO THORNTON I WRITE / I DRAW

PLACE AND MEMORY – Kansas City Art Institute students participated in the Foreign Travel Led Program to Buenos Aires. Upon their return they created a series of works made in response to their experiences in Argentina and Uruguay. These visual sources, or tokens are being adapted and processed around notions of the found print and memory recollection.

CROSSOVER [KC-Bs As] is an in-progress international collaborative printmaking project between artists questioning the established norms of the original production and authorship of artistic works. In this project one’s work, property and egos became irrelevant, as artists have to trust each other allowing themselves and their counterparts to place their hand-marks, images and matrixes on one’s previous works. In April 2015 the project will be received by the Western Gallery at Western Washington University in Washington States, United States, completing a successful project carried out as an initiative of ‘ace in 2013.

Check pictures of the exhibition here
Check catalogue on line at issuu

CROSSOVER [KC – Bs As] is the 4th edition of an in-progress international collaborative printmaking project between artists questioning the established norms of the original production and authorship of artistic works. In this project one’s work, property and egos became irrelevant, as artists have to trust each other allowing themselves and their counterparts to place their hand-marks, images and matrices on one’s previous works.

Adriana Moracci, ´ace‘s Master Printer, inspired by a set of woodcuts matrixes that artist Miguel Rivera left behind during his residency with us in 2011, launched the ideas that initiated this CROSSOVER session.  The international project was completed at Proyecto ’ace/Artist-in-Residence International Program in Buenos Aires Argentina, and directed by Alicia Candiani, from February to June 2013.

Crossover has been designed as a collaborative project between artists questioning the established norms of the original production and authorship of artistic work ,leading to the collaborative work between artists from around the world.One’s work, property and egos became irrelevant, as artists have to trust each other allowing themselves and their counterparts to place their hand-marks, images and matrices on one’s previous works. Each piece made in this series is unique, these works are not editions, as individual pieces are worked on and circulated among its participants. All artists aimed to evolve in their own practice by finding common points of view and theoretical discourse. CROSSOVER [KC – Bs As] re-semantized 15 woodcut plates carved with digital techniques by artist Miguel Rivera at KCAI workshops in the USA. During three different sessions, participants joined to create new works based in Rivera’s matrixes.

Last but not least, Rivera himself participated in the different sessions in Buenos Aires given talks and delivering critiques via video-conference. Later on, he travelled for the opening of the exhibition at Sala Políglota in ‘ace on May 15th, 2013. The exhibition travelled to the USA and was exhibited at Maller Gallery, Kansas City Artist Coalition, Kansas City and Western Gallery, Western Washington University in Bellingham.

Click HERE to see pictures of the three sessions @ ´ace

ABOUT CROSSOVER

Crossover is an ongoing art project started by artists Cara Jaye and Miguel Rivera. It began as goal oriented project in 2006 in the US and in Mexico, with Cara Jaye working in Bellingham, Washington and Miguel Angel Rivera in the historic city of Guanajuato, Mexico. Both artists traveled between their home countries to create these layered works on paper, which use various printmaking and photography techniques, Vandyke brown print, digital imagery, collage, fur, drawing and painting.

After having two successful shows in Guanajuato and Seattle, a continuation of that initial project became necessary after Rivera moved to Kansas City. This new body of work included a broader range of artistic practices using the immediate dialogue among artists.The project continued in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 2011, during the residency that Miguel Rivera did in Proyecto´ace where he started some pieces in collaboration with artist and ´ace director Alicia Candiani. The pieces was overtaken later while Alicia was in the Kansas City Art Institute as a visiting artist, where it was finished and exhibited as part of the Candiani solo show in Maller Gallery in the Kansas City Art Coalition in October 2011.

In 2012 a new group included its two initial artists in addition to Patricia Villalobos Echeverria, a Nicaraguan-American artist working in Kalamazoo, Missouri; Melanie Yazzie, a Navajo artist working in Boulder, Colorado, and Michael Schonhoff, artist and curator from Kansas City, Missouri in the USA. Crossover at the Kansas City Artists Coalition residency required artists to trade “half finished” works at the beginning of the residency and allowing their counterparts to intervene their pieces and finishing them. One’s work, property and egos became irrelevant, as they had to trust each other allowing ourselves and our counterparts to place their hand-marks, images and matrices on one’s previous works. Each piece made in this series is unique, these works are not editions, as individual pieces are worked on and circulated among its participants. All artists aimed to evolve in their own practice by finding common points of view and theoretical discourse. Jaye addressed issues of migration and adaptation to harsh environments while Yazzie used a trickster approach to bring attention to Native American political unsolved issues. Villalobos, Schonhoff and Rivera shared similar opinions about place, borders, language, conflict and fear towards unknown entities such as violence, viral threats and identity.

This exhibition, presented in the July 19th, 2017 ´aceNITE, was the result of the 3rd International Project of Graphic Interaction and Printing, The Fold / Double Unfolded, with the participation of 17 artistic, training, creation and research centres from 11 countries (Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Spain, United States, France, Mexico, Portugal, Serbia, Taiwan). With a total of 224 artworks in the form of a sheet of paper, this project seeks to promote the cultural circulation that allows graphic editing across borders, revalorizing the format of the book from its basic module: the fold.

The Fold/ Double, Unfolded was organized by the dx5 Group of the University of Vigo in Pontevedra, Spain in collaboration with the Department of Philosophy and Arts of the University of Quebec in Canada. Proyecto´ace was one of the participating centers of this project. In 2016, ´ace invited 19 artists to produce their works by intervening a sheet of paper folded in 2, using print media and / or other resources that generate multiple images and editing them in several prints.

STATEMENT The Fold/ Double, Unfolded 

The space of The Fold is meant as a whole fragmented into four separate linked spaces, in which opposition relationships, reflexivity, contiguity and sequencing are established. The fold, like the book, opens and closes, withholds, shows and hides at the same time. The bonding of different folds makes a book; a device that works as a nest through its emergency zone and the matching that is the fold, which acts like as an unfolding hinge.

By the Law of Periodical Repetition, everything which has happened once must happen again and again and again-and not capriciously, but at regular periods, and each thing in its own period, not another’s, and each obeying its own law…the same Nature which delights in periodical repetition in the skies is the Nature which orders the affairs of the earth. Let us not underrate the value of that hint. 

Mark Twain

For the first ’aceNITE of the year, named Memory, an International Project developed during 2014 with the participation of 25 artists from Argentina, Australia, Canada, Spain, USA and New Zealand, called Cycles, was exhibited.

ABOUT [CYCLES]

Cycles was an initiative through which we were able to make spaces available for work in print media to be created, as well as spaces for the interaction among artists from different nationalities. Each of the participants created a print inspired in the idea of [cycles] from their own multiple perspectives, alluding to the idea of movement, rotation, beginning and end, of mythical return of what was and ended, what opens and closed or what is repeated indefinitely leading to multiple visual interpretations.

After this project, 28 portfolios had been made, were 25 of them were donated to the artists, and the rest, were donated to two public collections at Frogman´s Print Workshop in the USA and the Talleres Nacionales de Gráfica in Mexico, as well one portfolio is part of the Fundación ´ace Art Archives.

Cycles Portfolio was selected through an open call for exhibition during Frogman’s 35th Anniversary Print Workshop. The exhibition was featured at the University of Nebraska Omaha’s Weber Fine Arts Building . After the exhibition, the portfolio was donated by Fundación´ace to the Frogman´s Print Workshop collection.

ABOUT FROGMAN´S PRINT WORKSHOP

Frogman’s Print Workshop began humbly back in 1979 when Professor Lloyd Menard led five school teachers from Sioux City, Iowa to the Black Hills of South Dakota, USA, for a drawing class. Prints were first introduced in 1981 and the workshops evolved into the Black Hills Print Symposium which took place at various sites in Western South Dakota, USA.

The Black Hills set an amazingly beautiful backdrop to the workshops, but by 1996, the workshops had outgrown the confines of the Hills and were moved to Beresford, South Dakota, home of Frogman’s Press & Gallery. The workshops would only spend two years based out of Beresford before moving to nearby Vermillion and the University of South Dakota.  Frogman’s would call USD home for nearly twenty years.

Later on, in 2016, Frogman’s made the big leap to Nebraska and the University of Nebraska at Omaha, where the Frogman took his first ever print class over 50 years ago. Currently, Frogman is directed by Lloyd Menard´s son, Jeremy Menard who is also University of Nebraska at Omaha as their Curator & Visual Resource Manager.

ABOUT UNO (University of Nebraska)

UNO is Nebraska’s metropolitan university — a university with strong academic values and significant relationships with its community that transforms and improves the lives of those on a local, regional, national, and international level.

UNO is dedicated to the city and state of Nebraska. As the University of Nebraska’s metropolitan university campus, no fences or barriers separate students from the opportunities offered by the greater Omaha area. It addresses real issues, providing relevant learning opportunities that uniquely prepare our graduates as professionals and active members of their community.