The Cruelest Month
Video and Artificial Intelligence Reports
By Jon McKenzie, Jack Stenner, Ralo Mayer, and Yann Malka
Opening Friday April 3 from 4-9 pm
Continuing April 4, 10 and 11 from 4-8 pm
Artist talk on Saturday April 4 from 4-6 pm
"April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain."
T,S. Elliot,The Wasteland
Seasons and the geology of gestures suggest that Creation, creativity, and other generative acts nurture alien movements deep within those places we call home: body, soul, Earth, mind. This exhibition reveals and documents gestures and spirits embedded in everyday and extraordinary lifeforms.
Jon McKenzie
Globally, the sharing of aesthetic practices at individual and collective scale increasingly unfolds via transversal media, transient ideation, and algorithmic processing by any media necessary. Given the multiple cascading crises of world-making and unmaking: Who or what makes and unmakes worlds today, what composition of players constitute contemporary cosmographers or world destroyers? What aesthetic practices, materials, and structures enable and/or disable contemporary subject for-mation, creative and critical collaboration, and shared world making? To what ends – if any – might such world-making or – unmaking proceed, and for whom or what? What signposts or onto-historical markers might guide or hinder these ways of proceeding toward or beyond the all too human?
Ralo Mayer
Ralo Mayer is an artist, filmmaker and researcher based in Vienna. Informed by the multivalent notion of plot and a practice of performative research, he examines objects and places from space exploration, science fiction, or everyday life, and translates his research into artistic storytelling across media. From 2003-2008 Mayer was a co-founding member of the self-organized Manoa Free University, where he also started the research series HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORLDS. In his artistic research PhD “Space Un·Settlements”, Mayer investigated the interrelations of scenarios for future life in space and rather earthly realities here, on our planet. Ralo Mayer’s work has been presented at international museums, film festivals, conferences, and theaters and has been awarded several prizes and scholarships. For the “Routledge Handbook of Social Studies of Outer Space” Mayer contributed a chapter about the closed ecosystem Biosphere 2 as an experiment of un·Earthing. In 2024, the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Austrian Science Fund awarded him a "Disruptive Innovation" PostDoc grant for his transdisciplinary research project “Plots of Un·Earthing.”
Jack Stenner
Jack Stenner synthesizes culture, hardware and software to create conceptual art taking forms such as networked installation and experimental cinema. His work explores how ideology, power and material conditions coalesce through technology to produce tangible effects on our lives. Social and economic inequality, climate change, racism, war and hunger are symptomatic of the failure of ideological and material power structures inadequate to our contemporary needs. His practice is engaged with issues of place (chora) grounded in personal experience (mystory). The psychogeography of place unmasks the operation of ideology, power and materiality, providing a means with which we might enact change through the questioning of our core assumptions and the creation of new institutions that support well-being and a just society.
Yann Malka
Born in Madrid (1972).
Studied music, first finishing Grado Superior de Piano at the Real Conservatorio Superior de Música de Madrid, and then studying analysis and composition in Paris (Conservatoire d'Issy-les-Moulineaux, IRCAM).
In 1997, after working on a stop-motion short film based on a scene of Alban Berg's Lulu, he starts working in advertising; first in his father's studio and production company, as an editor and vfx composer, and later as a director.
Specializing in high-speed photography for food and cosmetics, he creates his own production company Toyann S.L., working for international clients such as Mcdonald's, L'Oréal or Ferrero.
Gradually stepping out of the commercial paths again, and returning to his native love for music, he progressively and painstakingly builds his own visual language; trying to reach a sort of "in-between" the static and the moving image, trying to escape from the pitfalls of meaning conveyed by the too direct representation photography and cinema offer, he tries to convey an emotional response that is closer to our perception of painting or music.
After almost 20 years working on and off his first attempt in this new path ("it's Mystery Time" 1998-2017), he is now working on a sort of aesthetic meditation around the work and the figure of one of his most beloved idols, the french symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé ("Prose (pour Mallarmé)". 2019-ongoing).
www.yannmalka.net