Amber Jamilla Musser writes about my Dark Matter photography series for her essay Sensing Brownness: On Racialization, Perception, and Method. She states that “visibility comes down to a question of valuation. In this way, Catbagan reminds us that our experience of art, museums, and even knowledge production more broadly is framed by work, people, and spaces that are often marginalized.” Her article is featured in the March 2022 issue of After Image.
Object II Body Studies - ARoS, video still, 2021
Object II Body Studies on view at La Mama Galleria
Object II Body Studies is currently on view in La Mama Galleria’s Window Videos Program from 02.20-03.06.22 curated by C. Finley.
Object II Body Studies is a collaborative performance and video project with artist IV Castellanos that utilizes industrial objects found in various art institutions, restructuring their use to investigate the multiple dynamics between labor and tension. The movements focus on intimate object to body transfers.
Passages: New Museum Stairwell, NY, 2014-15
The Family Show at La Mama Galleria
Catch my piece at the final days of The Family Show at La Mama Galleria at 47 Great Jones Street, NYC. The show, which runs from December 17, 2021 - January 7, 2022, is a long standing tradition to celebrate community.
Founded in 1984, La Galleria is a nonprofit gallery committed to nurturing experimentation in the visual arts. La Galleria encourages an active dialogue between new media, performance, the plastic and visual arts, curatorial projects, and educational initiatives. It serves the East Village community by offering diverse programming to an inter-generational audience, and expanding the parameters of a traditional gallery space. As a non-profit, La Galleria is able to provide artists and curators with unique exhibition opportunities that are largely out of reach in a commercial gallery setting.
Object II Body Studies - ARoS, video still, 2021
Performance is Alive x Satellite Art Show - Art Basel and Miami Arts Week
Object II Body Studies, my performance and video collaborative project with artist IV Castellanos, screened at Performance is Alive x Satellite Art Show, Miami’s only Performance-Based Art Fair during Miami Art from 11/30-12/4.
Curatorial Statement: “In the wake of the pandemic, this program represents the re-emergence and reclamation of the body. The selected artists recognize the revolutionary power of the body through actions that often serve as a release from the trauma inflicted through centuries of heteronormative and colonial conditioning. In addition, this year’s program seeks work that actively rejects the systems perpetuating injustice and serves as a safe space for historically marginalized communities. This is the liberation of the body.” -Quinn Dukes
Grounding and Automatic Drawing at Governors Island
Halloween Sunday was a magical day to connect and draw with the earth.
Thank you to everyone who was part of Sympoietica, specially @sholehasgary for linking us with sonic atmosphere and @e.connolly123 for the videos and pics, @governorsisland, @flux_factory, #CityArtistCorps, @nyfacurrent, @NYCulture, @madein_ny, and @queenstheatre.
Sympoietica Performance
Join me for a grounding meditation and automatic drawing event on Saturday, October 31, from 2-3pm @governorsisland with soundscape by the amazing @sholehasgary.
Sympoietica is a participatory performance that creates a space of solace, recuperation, and creative expression through our relationship to the earth and its multi-species inhabitants. The audience is invited to participate in a guided soundscape, movement, and reflection exercise that connects them to Governors Island’s biodiversity and history while expressing their associations through automatic drawing. The performance combines the connective practice of earthing, the Surrealist technique of automatic drawing, and feminist theorist Donna Haraway’s concept of sympoiesis or "making-with.” Through sound, movement, and reflection, the performance generates a collaboration between bodies, place, and other living things that center systems of care, embodied knowledge, and collective well-being. Sympoietica is made possible by the New York Foundation for the Arts’ #CityArtistCorps Grants. Special thanks to @flux_factory, @nyfacurrent, @NYCulture, @madein_ny, and @queenstheatre.
America is in the Heart Performance for Enduring Apocalypse
On October 16, my collab project Abang-guard Duo performed “America is in the Heart” based on Carlos Bulosan’s novel for the “Enduring Apocalypse” performance marathon curated by Jenna Hamed at the Abron’s Art Center Amphitheater. Artists responded, contended with, expanded on all of the ways apocalypse befalls us, and ways to endure the ongoing man-made disasters happening to us and around us. Special thanks to @j7md and @abronsartscenter. Photo by @e.connolly123.
Object II Body Studies - Art Quarter Budapest
Object II Body Studies - Works in Progress
Object II Body Studies is a collaborative performance project with artist IV Castellanos that utilizes industrial objects found in various art institutions, restructuring their use to investigate the multiple dynamics between labor and tension. The movements focus on intimate object to body transfers. The project is a series of works in progress for the Flux Factory Residency in ARoS Museum in Aarhus, Denmark and Art Quarter Budapest in Hungary, Budapest.
Artist Talk with Sholeh Asgary at Real Time & Space
I’m excited to have a conversation with artist, Sholeh Asgary as we relate our work to the multiple conceptual and cultural aspects of shadows, fog, and immaterial art. Real Time & Space will be hosting the event via Zoom on Wednesday, July 28 5-7 pm PDT / 8-10 pm EDT.
Crush Living Room - NFT Still
Every Woman Biennial x Superchief Gallery NFT
The 2021 Every Woman Biennial is presenting MY LOVE IS YOUR LOVE, its 1st NFT Biennial, taking on and diversifying the NFT world. Their aim is to give women and non-binary artists a platform to experiment with new technology and mint NFTs. The exhibition is presented at Superchief Gallery NFT’s online platform as well as its physical space from June 24-July 3 in New York. Click on the above image to view my first NFT work.
Brooklyn Rail - Art Books Review
Amber Jamilla Musser reviews all three shows at the Center for Book Arts Spring 2021 exhibition including my show Lights, Tunnels, Passages, and Shadows. She connects them as manifesting “theorist Donna Haraway’s concept of sympoiesis and use the forms of the book to enlarge what constitutes knowledge and being together.” The review is featured in the June issue of the Brooklyn Rail.
Shifting Sights/Sites - A Participatory Performance Event
The audience will be invited to participate in a guided sound, movement and reflection exercise by Abang-guard duo Maureen Catbagan and Jevijoe Vitug along with sound artist Sholeh Asgary. The performance will be followed by a lecture focusing on systems of care that re-envision the body as a dynamic, multi-layered site of interconnected trajectories and possibilities. The body becomes an entry point that touches upon themes of hidden histories, embodied knowledge, symbiotic relations, and modes of recuperation.
Note: Center for Book Arts will hold this event entirely online. A Zoom link will be sent in an email to all registrants.
Lights, Tunnels, Passages & Shadows - Center for Book Arts
Lights, Tunnels, Passages, and Shadows exhibition examines the transcendent possibilities of peripheral spaces within museums. A utilitarian passage transforms into an ethereal opening. A mundane corner vibrates with a change of light. An invisible worker’s movement conveys visual poetry. Stairwells become illuminated, meaningful, and spiritual. Shifting the visual paradigm of these spaces, objects, and people changes their meaning and the viewers’ relation to them.
The photographic series is featured in a boxed folio containing three fold-outs that enable the images to be arranged into multiple compositions creating abstract narratives that connect the peripheral to the sublime while focusing on the museum worker as mediator. These re-configured fold-outs act as architectural interventions illustrating that while the marginal is designated towards boundaries, it can also be the edge towards boundlessness.
A Spirit of Disruption
My collab video Abang-guard Work Habits: ARoS with artist Jevijoe Vitug is part of media in the round section of A Spirit of Disruption exhibition commemorating SFAI’s 150th anniversary. Curated by Margaret Tedesco and Leila Weefur the show focuses on “celebrating the history of the institution and prioritizing untold stories from those who haven’t historically been included or made visible.” The exhibtion will be on view from March 19-July 3 and was currently featured in Hyperallergic.
Three Turns: Turn 2 at SFAI Towers
Featuring 26 artists, Three Turns stems from the concept that engaging artworks provide a viewer with three different entry points, prompting a deeper exploration into the work itself. Projected on the historic SFAI Tower at 800 Chestnut Street, which houses the Institution’s 150 year old archive, Three Turns will echo the notion of traveling three turns in time and space by showing the selected alumni video works on the Tower in dialogue with video works selected from the SFAI archive.
Archive works were selected by Margaret Tedesco and Leila Weefur, curators of the upcoming 150th anniversary exhibition Spirit of Disruption. My collab video with artist Jevijoe Vitug Abang-guard Work Habits was juxtaposed with Yin-Ju Chen’s Three Decades of Static. Props to artist Sholeh Asgary for creating the new soundtrack.
Empricial Noise Daily - Artist Feature
Honored to have my photography series “Dark Matter” featured in Empirical Nonsense Daily (END), an online art project, which will run for 365 consecutive days from August 1st, 2020 through July 31st, 2021.
The project was organized by the Empirical Nonsense (EN) team of Edward Joseph Rossa, Ethan Shoshan, and Katherine Wozniak as a response to “the constant barrage of terrible news reports alongside the closure of galleries, theaters, and music venues because of COVID-19.”
END features a different artist contribution every twenty-four hours for 184 days. The remaining 181 days will be dedicated to curated exhibitions. Through these small acts, established and emerging artists – some of who invited their friends – and artists who submitted their work through Empirical Nonsense’s website, unite in solidarity in an effort to offer everyone a chance to take refuge from today’s strenuous times.
The Brooklyn Rail - Art Seen
“Catbagan’s insurgent method of making time and meaning amid the durative is instructive for many of us now, as we each seek to work through the morass of upheaval and destruction…We work through much time and many thoughts with Catbagan, but how (like life) is up to us—we can move through them quickly or pause for more contemplation.” Amber Musser Jamilla writes about my recent painting/drawing series Notations, which are journalistic and diagrammatic interpolations of my daily thoughts and experiences that I have posted via Instagram @moofro.
LOSS, A Virtual Exhibition - Woman Made Gallery
I’m excited to be part of this virtual group exhibition in Woman Made Gallery that is on view from September 4-27. "Every loss that we experience is individual, and how we navigate through it is also a varied experience. Those around us may try to comfort us in various ways, but often don’t know what to say or do, because we all experience grief or loss in different ways. Not only that, when we think of loss in the broader since of the word, that can encompass a great many other things. With the advent of Covid-19, some people are experiencing loss in the form of loved ones, jobs, divorce, businesses, independence, travel, family celebrations, and so on. How has loss impacted you?" -Felicia Grant Preston , Curator
Abang-guard Museum of Secret Talent - A Participatory Performance
As part of Flux Factory’s Remote Edition series, Abangguard duo Maureen Catbagan and Jevijoe Vitug will guide a participatory performance via Zoom on Thursday, August 6, from 7-9:30pm. During these intense and difficult times we find some solace and release through intangible personal knowledge, story telling, guilty pleasures, and modes of non-productivity. Abang-guard will host a digital museum space as a repository of hidden talent and secret expertise from artists including Sarah Dahlinger, Carlos David TC, Shannon Stovall, Anthony Janas, Eleni Theodora Zaharopoulos, Jess Rolls, Hui-Ying Tsai, Sholeh Asgary, Julio Jose Austria + Patricia Lim and more..Followed by “open secret mic” participation
Follow @FluxFactory on Instagram for all updates.
Notations Series Instagram essay @a_jamilla
Instagram essay of Notations Series by Amber Jamilla Musser
“The place where these images and words meet can always only be specific to every person’s history and memory; an elusiveness that illuminates the instability that all representation is built on. Words and images are always fictional attempts to produce communication.” Amber Jamilla Musser is is an Associate Professor of American Studies at George Washington University, who writes about race, aesthetics, and sexuality and is the author of Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (NYU, 2014) and Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (NYU, 2018). Her brief essay about my Notations series is on her Instagram @ a_jamilla.