Bringing deep reflections to Santa Monica, Camera Obscura’s new Studio Artist-in-Residence is Grace Joanne Hwang. From January 4 to April 15, Hwuang will present a comprehensive series of papermaking and movement workshops addressing themes of memory, forgetting, grieving and hope.
The residency launches withHwang and collaborator Heisue Chung-Matheu collecting oral histories and creating images, words and movement to reflect on and memorialize the 1992 Los Angeles Uprising.
This work will be presented in part at the Hammer Museum’s Rhizomatic Performance Lab January 24, and in full during Highways Performance Space’s New Shoes 11 program February 10 and 11. The balance of Hwang’s residency will focus on weekly investigations and public workshops, with a culminating performance and exhibition April 15 at the Camera Obscura Art Lab. The public is invited to work closely with Hwang in her workshops and inform the creation of these performances.
Hwang is a multidisciplinary artist and educator whose movement practice is fueled by the improvisation of new forms through ensemble work and rule-based play. Often working with artists of different disciplines, she is deeply invested in the relationship between agency and collectivity in collaboration.
The first of Hwuang’s workshops “Collaging Remembrance and Forgetting” takes place tomorrow, Saturday Jan. 7 from 10.30 a.m. and is repeated Jan. 28. Hwaung will be using archive images from American and Korean news sources about the 1992 LA Riots/Uprising, which is a special focus during her residency. Participants are invited to respond through techniques of cutting, pasting, and layering to these events, or are welcome to collage based on another historic occurrence or the formative events in their personal lives as source material for their own artwork. Some images are provided; participants are invited to bring their own.
“The Los Angeles Uprising, performance excerpts by actor Vivian Bang” with discussion moderated by Grace Hwang takes place Jan. 14 and is free and open to all.
Visit the website at smgov.net/camera to see a chronological list of classes and to RSVP.
