CALL CARD

Roski MA 2021 Practicum Project 
On view May 15 - June 12, 2021
Los Angeles Contemporary Archive

Opening reception: May 14th 5pm-8pm
(Masks and social distancing required)

Visiting: Los Angeles Contemporary Archive is open by appointment and for drop in visits Friday-Sunday from 12-6pm.

Location: 709 N Hill Street, Suite 104-8 (upstairs), Los Angeles, CA 90012

Participating Artists: Moyra Davey, veronique d’entremont, Miko Revereza

Curatorial Team: Hugo Cervantes and Kate Rouhandeh

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

“Dearest child, I received your letter and hope you’ll write often.” This line, sent by a mother to her daughter, opens Chantal Akerman’s 1976 film, News From Home. The mother, at home in Belgium, writes to her daughter in New York as a means of processing her recent departure. She reads her letters—mundane and anxious, about the weather, relatives, if the daughter needs sandals or money—over static shots of New York City. The correspondents, separated by the Atlantic, are both absent from the frame. New York’s public spaces and the voice reading the letters give form to the distance between them.

Letters pile up and make their way into organized forms, or disappear forever. The work of Moyra Davey, veronique d’entremont, and Miko Revereza, the three artists featured in this exhibition, gestures towards such forms. Like call numbers or calling cards, these artists make works which identify and index, constructing archives of familial and geographic separations, transits and crossings, and textual memory.

Moyra Davey’s photographs and videos operate intertextually, conceptually connecting text and images. Davey’s practice includes an ongoing epistolary project for which she folds up photographs, placing stamps and addresses directly on the prints, and mails them to friends, curators, and others. The prints are subsequently unfolded and presented in calendar-like grids, with the signs of their journey intact. In Réunion (2021), a pair of photographs taken in Paris, Davey captured the wares of stamp vendors, attending specifically to the texture and materiality of correspondence as medium.

veronique d'entremont blends personal narrative with mythology, proposing ways of healing from intergenerational trauma, and prompting the imagination of pedagogical and social formats capable of administering care. The sculptural and sonic installation, Her Body Became an Antenna, Transmitting the Message of God (2019), features a bust sculpted by the artist’s mother recast in beeswax and honeycomb, with sound transmitted from inside of a beehive.

Miko Revereza utilizes time-based media to present displacement as subject and material in films which explore distance as both circumstantial and metaphorical. In DISINTEGRATION 93-96 (2017), Revereza narrates his migration to the United States at five years old over his family’s deteriorating home movies. Featuring a playlist of films by diasporic filmmakers, Distancing (2019) constructs spaces of geographic and psychic transit.

The curators would like to thank the artists, Ted Gerike, Jenny Lin, Nicolas Linnert, Hailey Loman, and Karen Moss for their generous support of and contributions to this exhibition.