Flamin' Hot!

Justin Favela

Growing up I always thought Flamin' Hot Cheetos were marketed toward Latinos. The fiery, tingly tang of the snack reminded me of the spicy chili flavor of elote, the grilled corn sold by street vendors across Latino neighborhoods. That's why I was excited to learn of the flavor's origins. It wasn't created by food scientists in lab coats, but by a Mexican American janitor at the California Frito-Lay plant. Now the flavor is ubiquitous across the Frito-Lay brand and is one of the company's top sellers. But for Latinos, it represents something more — a piece of our culture. I like to celebrate my culture in my work, and I always thought that food was a good way to share your culture. What better way to share my culture than through an exploration of Flamin' Hot Flavors!

Justin Favela is a Las Vegas native working in the mediums of painting, sculpture, and performance. His work draws from art history, popular culture and his Guatemalan/Mexican heritage. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Studio Arts from UNLV and has participated in exhibitions across the United States. Las Vegas venues include the Contemporary Arts Center, Trifecta Gallery and The Clark County Government Center. Favela has curated many shows throughout southern Nevada, at spaces such as UNLV’s Marjorie Barrick Museum to El Porvenir Mini-Market in North Las Vegas. Recent exhibitions of note include the group exhibition Tilting the Basin: Contemporary Art of Nevada at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno; Con Cariño: Artists Inspired by Lowriders, at the New Mexico Museum of Art and is currently in the Denver Art Museum’s exhibition, Mi Tierra: Contemporary Artists Explore Place, featuring site-specific installations by 13 Latino artists that express experiences of contemporary life in the American West. When not in the studio, Favela is probably watching tv or co-hosting his podcast Latinos Who Lunch.

A N T I G R A V I T Y

Ernesto Walker

This project consists of a series of video - holograms entitled "Antigravity" that are projected from gadget screens through an instrument that creates the effect of a floating object and helps the image emerge from the screen.

The general idea has been developed for its exhibition at the Museum of Pocket Art, a disruptive exhibition space that’s contained on the inside of an Ipod. In these regards, Antigravity is directly related to the nature of MoPA and intends to generate reflections not only about the artwork, but about the platform itself.

The holograms are played with the help of an instrument that’s attached to the screen and provokes the effect of three-dimensional objects floating outside the device. Having the image emerging from the screen seeks for an experience that expands the visual possibilities of this museum and generates a yet more ephemeral content. These gestures are combined with the fact that the artwork can only exist by the combination of the played file and the screening instrument. In this regards, the contemplation of the pieces can happen only in specific situations which contradicts the usual repeatable and omnipresent dynamics of video contents on the internet.

The messages:

The project branches into 6 independent videos that explore some of the most recurrent theories and technologies related to the disruptive scientific efforts for developing antigravity effects. Each one of them is visually resolved integrating one of these approaches summarized in this project in six concepts: negative geometry, antimatter, acceleration, deceleration, reversion, and magnetism.

The subject of antigravity becomes meaningful for reflecting upon the cyberspace and its effects on the weight, behavior, range, velocity, and mass of information. Also, these phenomena echo with the often scientifically disregarded efforts for generating antigravity and the types of ambitious jet illusory effects of their technologies and elaborations so far.

Being presented at an exhibition in a dual venue that combines a virtual space (MoPA) and the facilities of a museum at the port of Galveston (GAC), these data illusions metaphorically arrive represented as floating messages in cybernetic bottles.

Ties That Bind

Elaine Bradford

Bradford is a collector. She mines thrift and antique stores to find discarded pieces of people’s lives. The collectibles, which viewers might find on a shelf in their house, are transformed. For the Museum of Pocket Art exhibition she is embroidering vintage photographs.The found family photos have been repurposed. The pieces in the exhibition become physical representations of mental relationships, real or imagined. The extensions of embroidery represent hopes, thoughts and fears that can bind people together, or tear them apart. The fibers are literal portrayals of being wrapped up in another person, and the distance or closeness that can be created between them. There is a lot about longing and unrequited love.

Elaine Bradford lives and works in Houston, TX. She holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (2003) and a BFA from the University of Texas at Austin (2000). Her work has been included in shows both nationally and internationally. She was one of the founding members BOX 13 ArtSpace, an innovative artist run studio and gallery space in Houston’s East End. She was a resident artist at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft in 2010. In 2011 she completed a permanent civic art commission for the City of Houston at Vinson Neighborhood Library. Throughout 2017, she worked with Houston poet Sara Cress on a project called Routine Fables, where they created a “sculpture poem” every week of the year, which can be viewed at routinefables.com. Their collaboration will be exhibited at Lawndale Art Center in May 2018.

A Testament to Their Fortitude

Rebecca Marino

Food evaluations are conducted approximately eight to nine months before the flight. During the food evaluation sessions, the astronaut is given the opportunity to sample a variety of foods and beverages available for flight. A pack of information is given to each astronaut to use in planning their personal preference menus. Astronauts will choose 28 day flight menus approximately 120 days prelaunch. Additions, deletions, or substitutions to a standard Space Station menu will be made using a Space Station food list.

The packaging system for the Daily Menu food is based on single service, disposable containers. Food items will be packaged as individual servings to facilitate inflight changes and substitutions to preselected menus. Single service containers also eliminates the need for a dishwasher. A modular concept that maintains a constant width dimension is utilized in the package design.

Excerpted from http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/shuttle/reference/factsheets/food.html

Rebecca Marino is an Austin-based visual artist whose work focuses on cosmic perspective. For the past three years she has acted as co-director and curator for pump project and is co-editor and co-founder of Conflict of Interest.

Personal Distemper

Bug Davidson

When is the last time you let it all out?

Short “OVER emotional” 30-ish second video work. Davidson’s program features artists investigating the whole gamut of human flavored guts.

Personal Distemper artists include, Irina Contreras, Zilla Vodnas, Coe Lapossy, Alex Beriault, Noelle Fitzsimmons, and Coorain Devin.

View videos here

The reason and the end

Gil Rocha

Since the invention of fabric, its purpose has become vast. From clothing, to art, it may be transformed into almost any form yet it has no defined form in many ways. With this series of works I embrace the gestural forms a fabric maintains while at rest; as it awaits to become something "useful". I love the way fabric hangs, the way it melts unto the floor when thrown, the way it tells a story. By embellishing and hardening fabric with vivid colors and tangled forms, my intention is to visually destroy every object around it. I want it to take a stance and visually yell, "I am not here awaiting another use! I will no longer abide to your will and time. After today you will see me everywhere!"

Suffragette Series

Margaret Meehan

In a time of congressional witch-hunts, these Suffragettes painted on 18th cabinet cards are updated in attire and urgency. Drawing strength from the past they are ready to keep the protest march moving forward for all equality.

Release Under Police Freedom of Information

Russell Etchen

Did you and your Computer-Human-Friendlist pillage a small deserted formerly Gated-Private-Community or Loft and discover something overlooked?

Palpable Networks

Jenny Odell

"Art tends to give shape and weight to the most invisible processes. When entire sections of our existence spiral into abstraction as a result of economic globalization, when the basic functions of our daily lives are slowly transformed into products of consumptions … it seems highly logical that artists might seek to rematerialize these functions and processes, to give shape to what is disappearing before our eyes." –Nicolas Bourriaud

The images in this series are attempts to rematerialize that which becomes ever more elusive even as it envelops us completely: the communication networks that enable us to talk, to order something online and have it arrive on our doorstep, to be telepresent. If it is jarring to hear that data centers require huge amounts of water and energy to keep from overheating (for instance, Facebook recently placed a data center in the Arctic Circle), it is because communications technologies so intensely reflect our fantasy of disembodiment. But jpegs and iMessages are no less material than we are. And like the power grid, we may not realize this until the servers, wires, towers, generators, cables, switches, and screens fail us as materials. Until then, these small collections are meant to render palpable the otherwise diffuse components of our day-to-day networked existence.

emoemoji : bear

Dan Boehl

emoemoji : bear is a visual performance that operates by invoking surprise and soulshame, a vulnerable emotional state within us connected to our appetites and desires. The GIF poems combine flickering images and text, in most cases appropriated from third party sources. By reading the poem superimposed over the GIF image, the viewer is transformed into the performer.

The performer must decipher the text by moving the printed reticulated image back and forth as she reads.

The movement of the images heightens the sense of surprise in the performer as the full ramifications of the text reveal themselves through the repeated movement of the images. The surprise and discovery of soulshame in the performer has a transitive effect upon the audience.

By decontextulizing popular and hyper-realistic images from the web and refocusing their meaning through superimposed text, emoemoji : bear seeks to create a state somewhere between Maryln Minter and "abuse of power comes as no surprise."

Dispatches from a Doomed Future

Ken Castelli

Ken Castelli moved to Tangier Island, Virginia five years ago as the inaugural Artist in Residence at the Tangier History Museum. After three years of building exhibits and learning the local dialect (an accent, much like most Tangiermen eccentricities, wholly unique to the island), he decided to make Tangier his home. But this home is disintegrating, bit by bit, chewed away by winds and tides. Tides that swell and surge through the town, unearthing the dead, encroaching on homes, and drowning the marsh. In this exhibition, Castelli, whose larger body of work documents the landscape and lifestyle of Tangier and the Eastern Shore/DelMarVa Peninsula region of the United States, sketches out vignettes of the inevitable. Abandoned by local politicians and put on hold by scientists and studies, the people of Tangier stand on land that is ever sinking and shrinking, waiting for the water to reach their necks.

This series of drawings is both a warning and a dirge. The rhythm of Castelli's linework rings out a threnody for a piece of American history. This tiny world speaks to the universality of our entropy.

Thanks for Sharing

Curated by Jen López

I, like most Americans am inundated with sharing. It takes seconds to share. For better or worse, my networks generate the vast majority of the visual, political and cultural content I see. The artists in this collection of videos were selected because for years I have admired their work and their sensibility has influenced me in some way and what they care to share consistently displays one of two qualities that I prefer to see: Poetics and Things that Make Me Laugh.

To the artists: The world can be a bitter and disappointing place some days, but you guys surprise me, remind me, teach me, inspire me and crack me up! Thank you for your contributions to this project. Thanks for sharing.

Jen López lives in Chicago, Illinois and completed her MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago in 2004. She is a recovering academic, makes art for pleasure, curates for fun and the majority of the time is a champion of artisan cheese.

The View from There

Kevin Chen

Chen has been involved in the San Francisco Bay Area arts community for over 12 years as a curator, arts administrator, and visual artist. Since 1998, he has been the Program Director at Intersection for the Arts. He is a graduate of Columbia University.

C –, Frederic Church in Color, After Mathew Brady Studio

Ben Ruggiero

Ben Ruggiero's work has shown both nationally and internationally including Art and Commerce's Festival of Emerging Photography, Fotofest and Austin Museum of Art's New Art in Austin Triennial.

His recent solo project "After Icebergs with a Painter" was shown at Testsite in 2010 and addresses the mythology and visual legacy of Romanticism and its relationship to Photography as realized by Frederic Church and in particular his painting "The Icebergs."

His work was on display this summer in the membership show curated by Ariel Shanberg at the Houston Center for Photography, as well as upcoming work being included in the Museum of Fine Art's Photo Forum 2011. He is a graduate of Bard's MFA program, a Lecturer of Photography at Texas State University as well as a member of the Austin photography collective Lakes Were Rivers.

Seven Years of MoPA, a Retrospective at the Bruno David Gallery

Opening September 9th in St Louis at the Bruno David Gallery, this exhibition features hundreds of intimate small-scale artwork from the first seven years.

How Micro Can You Go? The Museum of Pocket Art's Spring Video Show

Curated by Portland's Grand Detour

With the proliferation of video recording devices and the variety of ways in which to view video, the video artist's intent can get muddled. The initial experience of watching video meant for a large screen fluctuates greatly from seeing it on YouTube. For the 2nd annual exhibition, the Museum of Pocket Art invites video artist to submit work with the intent of seeing work on a mobile device.

Abstract Small

Curated by Mario Trejo

Abstract Small showcases some of Trejo's favorite contemporary painters. The first MoPA show to focus specifically on painting, Abstract Small will utilize the unique parameters of the Museum to explore the intimate processes of the painter, showing works that more than hold up to their large-scale counterparts.

All Business All the Time

Curated by Hannah Piper Burns

This exhibition will "employ" the standard business card as a jumping-off point for an exuberant skewering and subversion of corporate language and structure.

Jan Blythe

Using catalogues, magazines, books, and postcards referencing art, textiles, furniture, interior and industrial design, Jan Blythe's mixed-media collages fracture and re-combine found images into formal exercises far removed from their original source imagery. This solo exhibition is an extension of Blythe's broader art practice, which allows materials to combine and transform in her hands as she manipulates them to unexpected ends.

Inaugural Film and Video Exhibition

Curated by SEO Wan-Tae

With the proliferation of video recording devices and the variety of viewing platforms, the video artist's intent can get muddled. The initial experience of watching video meant for a large screen fluctuates greatly from seeing it on YouTube. For the inaugural exhibition of an annual series, the Museum of Pocket Art invites video artists to submit work meant to be viewed on a mobile device.

Incognizant

Curated by Robert Jackson Harrington

Cognition and decision-making is an inherent aspect to any art practice. This process makes the artist fully aware of self while developing work. This show attempts to remove the decision process from the work and thus provide an insight into the unconscious artist.

Ten Wallets: The Museum of Pocket Art 2006 to 2009

An evening at the Lab featuring our last 10 exhibitions with work from over 40 artists.

Reception on Friday, December 4th from 5 to 9pm. Exhibition continues Sat the 5th, and Sunday the 6th, 1 to 6pm, in conjuction with the Postcard Show 13.

Titanic Piano

Curated by Nancy deY Elkus and Laura Boles Faw

Contemporary society lives in a state, a cultural condition even, of anticipation. The title of the show, Titanic Piano, is an anagram for "anticipation." This incarnation of the Museum of Pocket Art acts as an actual site of anticipation, ultimately reflecting the cultural state of contemporary subjectivity. Whether inventive, escapist, or evocative of anxiety, anticipation propels us into an unknown future. We asked fourteen artists to consider the grand nature of Titanic Piano, with its touch of humor and hint of doom, as it relates to our current global social and economic climate.

Holy

Eric Shultis

Eric Shultis is a painter and photographer whose work explores personal history, memory, and gender. He has exhibited his work nationally in galleries and museums including the Illinois State Museum in Chicago and Springfield (solo and group exhibitions), Dadian Gallery in Washington D. C. (solo exhibition), the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Michigan (solo exhibition), the Chicago International Art Expo, I Space in Chicago, Sheldon Art Galleries and the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis.

Shultis received his M.F.A. from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, and his B.F.A. and Associates Degrees From Kendall College of Art and Design. Shultis has taught at Florissant Valley since 1998. Previous teaching includes the University of New Mexico, Trinity Christian College in Chicago and Kendall College of Art and Design.

Minor Landscape

Curated by Mario Trejo

 

Immediate Thought

Curated by Mario Trejo

MoPA invited artists and architects to submit sketches, ideas or reactions to the fictional International Museum of Arts. The proposed space houses the world's largest collection of art, from antiquities to contemporary work in an urban space, housed in over 4 square miles of footage. The initial idea for the show was inspired by Frank Gehry's quick sketches of his plans for future designs on napkins. The show hopes to explore the simple elegance and communicative power that a sketch can convey.

Intimate Cartography

Curated by Hannah Piper Burns and Alexandra Chowaniec

 

Spring 2008 Juried Exhibition

Curated by Clark Buckner

 

Humble Pi

Featuring work by Los Angeles artist Robert Moya.

Spring 2007 Exhibition

Featuring work by artists Priyanka Gupta and Matthew Cella.

Fall 2006 Juried Exhibition

Curated by Jeannene M. Przyblyski

 

The Fluffer | Once Upon a Time…

Featuring work by artists Manuel Guerra and Susan Klahr.

Fall 2005 Juried by Exhibition

by longtime MOPA supporter Richard Smit.

Spring 3ver

Work by artists Odin Perez, Marvin Hill and Adrianna Corral.

Fall 2004 Juried Exhibition

Curated by Jose Enrique Krapp and Cindy Krapp

 

Inaugural Spring 2004 Exhibition

MOPA's inaugural exhibition.