DiverseWorks Announces Inaugural Exhibition at the MATCH

DiverseWorks is pleased to announce the opening of its inaugural exhibition, What Shall We Do Next? curated by DiverseWorks' Associate Curator Rachel Cook, at its new location at the MATCH (Midtown Arts and Theater Center Houston) on January 14, 2016. The exhibition will be on view in the gallery at 3400 Main Street through March 19, 2016.

What Shall We Do Next? is a group exhibition that examines how technology and advertising have shifted our relationships to our physical bodies, our shaping of subjectivity, and notions of the real. The exhibition is comprised of a variety of works across mediums - including drawings, paintings, video animations, and performance - that all acknowledge and incorporate the effects of technology, commerce, and advertising. The artists brought together in this exhibition, Danielle Dean, Kristin Lucas, Julien Prévieux, and the artist collective Versace Versace Versace (Loriel Beltran, Domingo Castillo, Aramis Gutierrez, and Jonathan Gonzalez), consider ideas of the real in relation to physical materials, technology, and advertising, as well as how the body can act as both material and ideological subject.

Contemporary artists and curators are embracing and being fully embraced by technology and corporate branding structures. Artists are considering digital tools as a way to create physical stories. The creative class is no longer a small elite group of individuals and a handful of galleries and museums. From large-scale fashion houses to DIY design wearable ventures, to music videos, animation, and video games, technological devices have blurred and disrupted the boundaries between pop culture, advertising, and art. The exhibition takes its title from a video and performance work by French artist Julien Prévieux that is based on an ensemble of hand gestures that have patented by a variety of global tech companies. Prévieux's work speaks to a series of paradoxes in our over-technologized and copyrighted world. The artist asks a number of fundamental questions: Why do we move the way we do? Who owns our gestures? How will we move our bodies in one, ten, or a hundred years?

The legacy and influence of our gestural movements can have both a physical and a conceptual dimension. Austin and New York-based multimedia artist Kristin Lucas considers digital tools as a way to create physical stories out of these conceptual ideas. For example, in her notable work Refresh (2007), Lucas appeared before the Superior Court of California to become the most current version of herself by legally changing her name from Kristin Sue Lucas to Kristin Sue Lucas. This conceptual work considers the action of clicking to refresh a web browser's window as an offline, physical gesture to literally "refresh" one's identity. In Lucas' video work Air on the Go (2015), she performs a monologue that tells a story about staying current, connected, and calibrated in a fast-changing, data-driven, and hyper-monitored world. In all of her works she attempts to harness the language and expertise of others to describe the condition of existence under the influence of techno-capitalism.

What Shall We Do Next? also considers the realms of advertising, branding, and retail marketing. British-American-Nigerian artist Danielle Dean (currently based in Houston) is interested in how advertising shapes subjects. Utilizing language from Nike commercials and political speeches as the basis of an assemblage video-performance script, Dean investigates how a particular Nike athletic shoe shapes our subjectivity-from our behavior and imagination to the very concept of what it means to be 'human.' Additionally, her work focuses on how Nike has targeted African American markets framing the shoe as an aspirational achievement. Her work seeks to unravel such power structures by reframing the creativity that Nike seeks to capitalize on.

Ideas of branding and marketing in fashion also appear in the work of Versace Versace Versace, the Miami-based collective formerly known as Guccivuitton. The four artists, Loriel Beltran, Domingo Castillo, Aramis Gutierrez, and Jonathan Gonzalez, each have individual artistic or design practices. The collective, founded in 2013, created a storefront gallery in Miami's Little Haiti neighborhood. The space and the collective's activities have staked out a unique position that meditates on the history of artist-run organizations while presenting authentic regional material about the vernacular culture of South Florida. What Shall We Do Next? will include individual works by Beltran and Gutierrez, as well as a collaborative work that comments on the slippery nature of artists embracing and being co-opted by corporate structures.