The Crossing Over Place
Ka’ila Farrell-Smith, David Huffman, Nadia Myre, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Justen Waterhouse
INCA: 2 West Roy St. Seattle, WA, 98110 Exhibition: September 10–October 8, 2016 Opening: Saturday September 10, 3–6pm Opening hours: Wednesday-Saturday 4-8pm Curated by Justen Waterhouse ———————————————-
I crossed oceans and histories to speak with you—it is hard work.
The Crossing Over Place is an exhibition about negotiation. It is about navigating irreducible and unresolved cultural and racial borders. Featuring artists who cross these borders, this exhibition invites viewers to consider the alienating and strategic labor of cultural navigation, especially in the context of a “progressive” and fast-growing American city. Seattle—a city of professional global transplants and historically displaced peoples—reverberates as a site of translation, mimicry, intersection, and “crossing over” between peoples and living history. Appropriately, the exhibition is titled after the Whulshootseed Salish place-name for Seattle.
Often these irreducible borders intersect. How does one live in between these untranslatable cultural borders? How does one speak, standing just outside a crossing over place? This labor of negotiation invites and implicates.
We abandon the idea of fixed being …. The history of a transplanted population, but one which elsewhere becomes another people, allows us to resist generalization and the limitations it imposes. —Édouard Glissant
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Events
September 18, 6pm: Dinner Table: a casual conversation about cultural negotiation This meal is a continuation and revisiting of Nadia Myre’s project, A Casual Reconstruction.
September 24, 4pm: Screening of Surname Viet Given Name Nam by Trinh Minh-ha
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Ka’ila Farrell-Smith Ka’ila Farrell-Smith is a contemporary Klamath/Modoc visual artist based in Portland, Oregon. She works as an art mentor/teacher and is a co-director for Signal Fire and One Flaming Arrow: Inter-tribal Art, Music & Film Festival. Farrell-Smith was awarded a Ford Family Fellowship and a Regional Arts & Culture Council Professional Development grant to attend a 2015 Caldera Artist-In-Residence and a 2016 Djerassi Resident Artist Program. She has work in the permanent collection of the Portland Art Museum and has exhibited at the Archer Gallery, Vancouver City Hall, Washington History Museum, Museum of Northwest Art, and the Tacoma Art Museum. Farrell-Smith received an M.F.A. in Contemporary Art Practices Studio from Portland State University in 2014.
David Huffman David Huffman is an artist whose paintings and videos navigate the concerns of modern African diaspora, the aesthetics of science fiction, urban vernacular, and the idioms of abstraction. Best known for his paintings, Huffman interrogate the politics of race through poignant and charged iconography. David Huffman has exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Institute of Contemporary Art London, UK; and the Watts Tower Art Center, Los Angeles, CA. He lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
Nadia Myre Nadia Myre is a visual artist from Quebec and an Algonquin member of the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg First Nation. For over a decade, her multi-disciplinary practice has been inspired by participant involvement as well as recurring themes of identity, language, longing and loss. Myre is a graduate from Camosun College (1995), Emily Carr (1997), and Concordia University (MFA, 2002), and a recipient of numerous grants and awards, notably: Sobey Art Award (2014), Pratt & Whitney Canada’s ‘Les Elles de l’art for the Conseil des arts de Montréal (2011), Quebec Arts Council’s Prix à la création artistique pour la region des Laurentides (2009), and a Fellowship from the Eiteljorg Museum (2003).
Trinh T. Minh-ha Born in Vietnam, Trinh T. Minh-ha is a filmmaker, writer and composer. She is the recipient of numerous awards, grants, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment of the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Film Institute, The Japan Foundation, and the California Arts Council. Her films have been given over fifty retrospectives in the US, Europe, Brazil, Canada, Japan, India, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Jerusalem, and were exhibited at the international contemporary art exhibition Documenta 11 in Germany. Her films have shown widely in the States, in Canada, Senegal, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as in Europe and Asia. Trinh Minh-ha has traveled and lectured extensively—on film, art, feminism, and cultural politics. She is Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies and of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley.
Justen Waterhouse Justen Waterhouse is a project manager, graphic designer, and artist. She was raised in Taiwan and was transplanted to Seattle in 2012. Previously at the Jacob Lawrence Gallery as gallery assistant, she is currently works at the Frye Art Museum. She holds a BFA from the University of Washington in Painting+Drawing.
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The screening of Surname Viet Given Name Nam by Trinh Minh-ha is sponsored by Scott Lawrimore.