Intimate Simulations with Susy Bielak, Dream Addictive Lab, Elle Mehrmand, Zac Montanaro, Priscilla Lazaro Rabago (curated by Katherine Sweetman, Micha Cardenas and Felipe Zuniga) :: March 14, 2009; 7:00 - 9:00 pm :: Lui Velazquez, Jose Maria Larroque 271-2nd floor, Colonia Federal, Tijuana, Baja California, México.

Lui Velazquez, a space for transborder, transdisciplinary dialog and art located just a few feet from the turnstiles of the US/Mexico border crossing, would like to announce our two new expansions. Lui Velazquez will be moving into a new space, three times the size of its previous location. The new location will be the site of Lui Velazquez’s series of programming for the year entitled Poetry, Politics and Pedagogy, focusing on the intersections of these three topics. The series includes performances, workshops and discussions including Dream Addictive, the ALTBIT project, Upgrade! Tijuana, UCSD MFA candidates Elle Mehrmand and Lesha Rodriguez and many other artists and collectives from Tijuana and San Diego.

We are very happy to announce our expansion and are happy to accept project proposals from artists who seek to further our mission of creating cross border community and a space for critical dialog supported by transdisciplinary practice.

In addition to this exciting new move, Lui Velazquez is announcing the inauguration of its new advisory board. The board consists of Teddy Cruz, Adriene Jenik, Ricardo Dominguez, Louis Hock, Lucia Sanroman, Robert J Sanchez and Bill Kelley. The board’s role will be to provide valuable feedback on our direction, to help establish relationships with artists and institutions and to suggest possible avenues for funding.

Teddy Cruz work dwells at the border between San Diego, California and Tijuana, Mexico, where he has been developing a practice and pedagogy that emerge out of the particularities of this bicultural territory and the integration of theoretical research and design production. Teddy Cruz has been recognized internationally in collaboration with community-based nonprofit organizations such as Casa Familiar for its work on housing and its relationship to an urban policy more inclusive of social and cultural programs for the city. He obtained a Masters in Design Studies from Harvard University and the Rome Prize in Architecture from the American Academy in Rome. He has recently received the 2004-05 James Stirling Memorial Lecture On The City Prize and is currently an Associate Professor in public culture and urbanism in the Visual Arts Department at UCSD in San Diego.

Ricardo Dominguez is a co-founder of The Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT), a group who developed Virtual-Sit-In technologies in 1998 in solidarity with the Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico. He was co-Director of The Thing (www.thing.net) an ISP for artists and activists from 2000 to 2004, as well as Senior Editor from 1996 to 1999. He is a former member of Critical Art Ensemble. Ricardo s performances have been presented in museums, galleries, theater festivals, hacker meetings, tactical media events and as direct actions on the streets and around the world.

Louis Hock began making films when he was studying psychology and poetry at the University of Arizona, graduating with a BA in Psychology in 1970. In 1973 he received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Before joining the Visual Arts Department in 1977, he established the film program at the University of Texas at Arlington. In the fall of 1997 Hock participated in inSITE97, an international exhibition spanning the U.S./Mexico border region with his installation, International Waters / Aguas Internacionales. Poinsettia, a multimedia installation by Hock, was commissioned by the Ex Teresa Arte Actual in Mexico City in 2000/01. The work centered on the Flor de Noche Buena (the Poinsettia plant), and its emblematic relationship to U.S.& Mexico. La Panaderia in Mexico City exhibited Hock’s Piramide del Sol: A monument to Invisible Labor in 2002. In the fall of 2003 the International Center for Photography in New York showed Hock’s photos, Nightscope Series, in their traveling (through 05), Only Skin Deep exhibition, curated by Brian Wallis and Coco Fusco. At LAMOCA in the fall of 2004, Hock screened a new media installation, FERAL, as part of the LA Freewaves event. A single channel version of the work was then screened in Chile, Argentina, and Israel. Also in 2004, Hock screened a new digital version of his 1979 cine-mural, Southern California, at the Getty Center a one person event. Hock has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants including the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Film Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation, and California Arts Council (2002). At the University, his research is associated with the Center for Latin American Studies (CILAS) , Center for U.S./Mexican Studies, the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA), and the University of California Digital Arts Research Network (DARNET).

Lucia Sanroman is a contemporary art curator and is currently Assistant Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. She was born in Guadalajara, Mixico, and educated in Victoria, British Columbia (M.A., 2003, art history, University of Victoria; B.A., 1997, University of Victoria; Fine Arts Diploma, 1989, Victoria College of Art). She has held the position of assistant curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego since 2006. At MCASD, she has curated numerous exhibitions, including Material Actions, Suburban Sublime, Memory is Your Image of Perfection, and Drawing the Line, critically celebrated group exhibitions that combine collection artworks with new work by invited artists. She is primarily responsible for selecting the artists and organizing the acclaimed Cerca Series of solo exhibitions, where she has worked with regional and international artists, including James Drake, Yvonne Venegas, Brian Ulrich, Hector Zamora, Peter Simensky, William Feeney, Iana Quesnel, Joshua Mosley, Nina Katchadourian, and Javier Ramirez Limsn. Her current projects include co-curating, with Director Hugh M. Davies, MIX: Nine San Diego Architects and Designers (summer 2009), and an upcoming exhibition of San Diego contemporary artists, as well as a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Ruben Ochoa. In 2008 Sanroman co-curated, with Ruth Estevez, the group exhibition Project Cmvico/Civic Project the inaugural exhibition for El Cubo, the Centro Cultural Tijuana s new museum expansion. She lives in Tijuana, Mexico, and has published extensively about contemporary art of this city.

Adriene Jenik is a telecommunications media artist who has been working for over 15 years as an artist, teacher, curator, administrator, and engineer. Her works combine “high” technology and human desire to propose new forms of literature, cinema, and performance. She received her BA in English from Douglass College, Rutgers University and her MFA in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Prior to joining the UCSD faculty, Jenik was employed as an engineer in the Blast Jr. development team for Disney Online’s Daily Blast. Over the past 15 years she has taught a broad range of electronic media classes at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), UC Irvine, University of Southern California (USC), and UCLA’s New Media Lab.

Bill Kelley, Jr. is an educator, independent writer, curator, and critic based in Los Angeles. Bill is the former director and current Editorial Advisor of the journal LatinArt.com and is pursuing his Ph.D. in contemporary theory and criticism at UC San Diego. His most recent projects include Proyecto Cmvico: Dialogos y Interrogantes for CECUT (Tijuana, Mexico 2009) and Laboratorio de Arte y Espacio Social for Museo del Banco Central (Quito, Ecuador 2008).

Robert J Sanchez is an internationally exhibited and collected artist and arts educator. A Chicano born in Austin, Texas in 1952, Robert graduated with a B.F.A. from Memphis College of Art, a M.A. from The University of New Mexico, and did post-graduate work at Cornell University. His solo and collaborative work includes painting, drawing, text, installations, performances, and video projects. His conceptual base is essentially narrative and the content reflects an on-going interest in the symbiotic relationships between artistic expression and cultural issues that shape community and society. He has had solo exhibitions at the Centro Cultural de la Raza San Diego, the Porter Troupe Gallery in San Diego, at Terrain Gallery in San Francisco, and Casa de la Cultura in Tijuana. Important group shows include the Venice Biennale, the Istanbul Biennial, Fundacio Joan Miro Barcelona, Artist Space New York, and Newport Harbor Museum Biennial. Texts on Sanchez have been published in Barcelona and Helsinki and most recently in Contemporary Chicano and Chicano Art , Bilingual Press, Tempe, AZ. He has worked in collaboratives such as BAW/TAF, Los Anthropolocos, Mobile Toy Theater, and currently is a member of The Infinity Lab. He resides in San Diego and is an Associate Professor of Art at San Diego Mesa College.

Lui Velazquez is a contemporary art project that takes the form of a space, a collective practice and a platform. As a project, Lui Velazquez started as an extension of research dealing with relational aesthetics, which included projects from Shannon Spanakhe, Camilo Ontiveros, Felipe Zuniga and Sergio de la Torre dealing with performative, social, media and conceptual gesutres. As a collective practice, Lui Velazquez has established a strategy of interdisciplinary promiscuity, collaborating with dj s, poets, graphic designers, net labels, musicians, television producers, curators and media activists. As a platform, Lui Velazquez functions as a facilitator of producers outside of the mainstream art world . Lui Velazquez functions as a flexible organization that hosts residencies, collaborations and productions which aims to trouble the flows of distribution and production of cultural expressions in the transborder region of Tijuana/San Diego.

Katherine Sweetman is an artist, educator, curator, and internationally exhibited artist in the fields of new media art and documentary video. Her current work deals with online social networking sites and the issues surrounding personal disclosure in the public realm of the World Wide Web. Katherine has a B.A. from Cal-State San Marcos, and an MFA form the University of California, San Diego. She is also currently a part-time instructor at Cal-State San Marcos and has recently completed a summer teaching fellowship the University of California, San Diego.

Micha Cardenas / dj lotu5 / Azdel Slade is a transgender artist, theorist and trouble maker. She is an MFA candidate at the University of California San Diego and holds a Master’s degree in Media and Communications with distinction from the European Graduate School and a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Florida International University. She is a researcher at CalIT2 and the Center for Research in Computnig and the Arts. Her interests include the interplay of technology, gender, sex, desire and resistance. She is a founding member of a number of art/activism collectives including Sharing Is Sexy, the borderlands Hacklab and the City Heights Free Skool. Her work has been exhibited internationally at museums, galleries, conferences, community spaces and public spaces. She blogs at http://bang.calit2.net/tts and http://secondloop.wordpress.com .

Felipe Zuniga’s (Mexico City, b. 1978) installations and videos have been shown in Mexico as well as internationally in venues such as the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, Poland; El Centro Cultural Espaqol (CCE) in Miami, Florida; the Consulate General of Mexico in Los Angeles, California; and Casa del Lago, Mexico City, among others. His recent artistic practice has been focus in the interconnection between body, communication and space. This broad equation has been contracted and expanded regarding he is working in an private-intimate space such as my studio or public spaces such as the border between Tijuana an San Diego. His working field is developed in the intersection between performance, language, and video. There is also an important component about the individual-personal and the collective-social that fluctuates from project to project, i.e. the use of speech quotation of a selected group of people regarding identity politics in one case, to the insertion of intimate statements in the public realm.
http://bang.calit2.net
http://bang.calit2.net/tts
http://secondloop.wordpress.com
http://katherinesweetman.com/