FOREST ISLAND RESIDENCY - MAY 2018
MONO CULTURE
The Forest Island Project is pleased to announce its May 2018 Artist Residency session with the participation of Los Angeles-based Spanish-American painter Patricia Fernández, Minneapolis-based Argentine sculptor Alexa Horochowski and Los Angeles based Curator Matthew Schum. The Session’s curatorial title – Mono Culture – is an allusion to both the stereotypes which aim to reduce rural life to simplified-singular-coherent and easily-compartmentalized populations, as well as a play on our region’s literal name, Mono County, California (an area immortalized by the early twentieth-century landscape photographer Ansel Adams and mythologized in contemporary art by the Super-8 films of of Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer and Nancy Holt from the late 1960’s).
Through the work of Resident Fellows Fernández and Horochowski, and through the writing Schum will be producing on the Forest Island website over the course of the month, Mono Culture will attempt to thoughtfully consider the long historical dichotomy of city/country, which currently dominates American political polarity; the assumed benefits of urban cosmopolitanism, which entail unquestionable devotion to a city; the complicated identity of “rural-ness”, which may register as simultaneously idyllic, backwards or frontier; and, lastly, how these tropes configure and limit the ways we are able to move into the future together, locally, nationally, and internationally.