In Conversation: Artist MPA with Curator Dean Daderko (FotoFest 2016 Biennial)

Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH) presents In Conversation: Artist MPA with Curator Dean Daderko.

Join artist MPA and Curator Dean Daderko for a discussion focusing on MPA’s three-year investigation of the future of Mars, possibilities of current life on the red planet, and the prospect of human colonization in years to come.

The program will feature an in-depth conversation on MPA’s commissioned installation, THE INTERVIEW: Red, Red Future, exposing concepts and processes that led to the materialization of a completely new body of work by the artist, which includes a dynamic installation that combines sculpture, light, and photography; a participatory work; and an artist’s publication.

Following their discussion, the audience will be invited to participate in a brief Q&A.

Admission is free; seating is limited.

About the artist:
MPA (b.1980) has explored a range of meditative, durational, theatrical, and actionist modes of performance to engage “the energetic” as a potential material in live work. Enriched with ritual, her performances and installations critically examine behaviors of power in individual and social spaces.

She has proposed questions on the global arms race, patriarchy as governance, and the dysfunctional union of art with capitalist commodity.

MPA’s work has been exhibited at the Swiss Institute and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE); the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, The Netherlands; and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, Mexico.

Her dynamic body of work Directing Light onto Fist of Father (2011) at Leo Koenig Projekte in New York combined a looping 16mm film and a plaster cast of her father’s fist in an installation that incited threedurational performances. In Trilogy (o) (2012), presented at Human Resources in Los Angeles, NASA sound recordings of dying stars accompanied 31 photographs of Nike war missiles arranged as an orbiting moon calendar.

A frequent collaborator, MPA is a visible muse for many contemporary photographers, painters, and performers. After receiving a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant in 2013, MPA relocated from New York City to 29 Palms, CA to continue her research on somatic practices.

About THE INTERVIEW: RED, RED FUTURE:
THE INTERVIEW: Red, Red Future is a solo exhibition by the artist MPA that includes photography, sculpture, and performance, all commissioned for its presentation at CAMH. MPA has developed a series of exploratory topics—which she calls “landings”—drawn from the cultural imaginary surrounding the red planet.

Consider, for example, the colonial implications of establishing communities on the planet that astrologers link to war and revolution, or why extraterrestrial encounters suggested in ancient mythologies are routinely dismissed as impossible.

Visitors will encounter UV-sensitive sculpture in which aerial views of the Nasca Lines in Peru are alternately concealed and revealed by exposure to ultraviolet light in CAMH’s Zilkha Gallery.

Combining advanced technology and Minimalist aesthetics, MPA’s work seeks to shed light on invisible forces and power.

Pictured: MPA, “Untitled,” 2015. Archival pigment print, 7 x 7 inches. Courtesy the artist.