Southern Constellations
Elsewhere Artist Collaborative, Greensboro, NC.
Now entering its second year, Southern Constellations is a curatorial initiative that supports the creation of experimental new works at the museum and connects contemporary art practices in the South.
Funded in-part by the National Endowment for the Arts, the program embeds six fellowship artists into Elsewhere’s artist residency for the production of site specific projects and participation in dialog on the conditions of experimental art production. It is grounded in Elsewhere’s commitment to promoting local wisdom and regional participation in global contemporary conversations. We aim to fore front, on the one hand, the process by which new art objects and practices emerge, and on the other, the way that art practices guided by local conditions develop new social frontiers.
Jina Valentine, an artist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill is the program’s consulting curator this year. She is working alongside Production Curator, Jennie Carlisle, to design this years program.
Throughout the season Southern Constellations Fellows participate in process talks, exhibitions, member events, public studios, and first friday events that connect audiences directly with artists. The curatorial initiative culminates with an annual convergence event that brings together critical perspectives on experimentation in the South from across the region for an afternoon of focused conversation and intensive collaboration.
LOOKING FOR GHOSTS, 2014
Izel Vargas’s Looking For Ghosts is a mixed media collage series based on Elsewhere’s collection of mass produced toys that presents the haunting effects of past popular forms that continue to linger past their cultural moment of inception, reminding us of our binds to the past and its forms as well as the unsticking effects of forgetting. These collages are installed in a bookshelf on the first floor of the museum, as theatrical backdrops where visitors can create tableaus using toys in the collection in response to them.
