nocommercialvalue.org

Dear NCV community,

The Issue # 21 has been in the works for awhile now. Our friend and netizen Katie Zien wanted to explore various facets of our ever-changing identity on the internet. Coincidentally enough we only know her through the net! After seeing her humorous and thought-provoking play with Facebook status updates, we decided it was time to do a show. Katie is currently living in Panama working on various projects including a doctorate degree in theatre. Read more below.

Hope you enjoy the show, passing the mic on to Katie..

Curator’s statement:

This installment of No Commercial Value examines the many manipulations, disguises, avoidances, and convergences that happen daily in the complicated dance of identity, play, and intercourse transpiring on the internet. As we manufacture, mask, maneuver, and manipulate ourselves and each other through digital channels, we must make fast decisions that result in meaningful material consequences for our emotional states, subjectivities, perceptual faculties, and social and ideological structures. A slip in the façade, an unintended moment of intimacy, and the seemingly ephemeral liquid of the internet inflates, gains weight…

contd. @ No Commercial Value Issue: 21

FEATURING:

Katie Zien is a doctoral candidate at Northwestern University currently researching Latin American and Caribbean theatre history and U.S. imperialism in Panama with a Fulbright fellowship. Her dissertation investigates the twentieth-century history of theatre and performance in the Panama Canal Zone in the context of collective identity formation, racial inequality, and spatial politics.

In Katie’s own performance/art practice, as well as in her personal life, questions around Internet-based social networking, virtual relationships, and the digital archive surface frequently. For this reason, she invited her artist friends to contribute memes of their own and others’ making for a collection that would explore some manifestations/ramifications of the culture of our epoch, what Katie envisions as a swirling sea of (generally) garbage, with a few gems occasionally clearing the clutter to resonate for a while.

Jason Lazarus is a photographer based in Chicago. Jason’s work has treated themes such as the cult of celebrity and the elision of images, blurring the lines between events and their representation.

Aay Preston-Myint, also based in Chicago, alludes to a variety of subjects in his work – punk and queer sensibilities abound, along with remastered recapitulations of past watershed moments in the understudied histories of suppressed subcultures.

Awilda Rodríguez Lora and André Austvoll have danced together as part of the New York-based company D UNDERBELLY, in addition to their own solo performance practices. In the piece included in this edition of No Commercial Value, they collaborate across time and space, dancing between Norway and California.

Colleen Asper, based in New York, is interested in exploring interfaces through which people communicate and transmit information. She also works with the materiality of the internet and its spatiotemporal traces.

Jorge Nieto, based in the Dominican Republic, is a visual artist whose collages represent various levels of globalized pop spirituality.

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amir husak

prem sooriyakumar

www.NoCommercialValue.org

info@nocommercialvalue.org

Dear all,

After a long, long… well, a very long break, we are back with more delight!

The issue #20 is all about the magic of urban space. We are very happy to feature three pieces from the InnerCity project by Noelia Santos, plus a selection of sound works by Raqs Media Collective, Daijuin Yao/Beijin Sound Unit, and ru*mor* (Rui Viana Pereira) created exclusively for the 2002 Invisible Cities sound installation project . Please read below for more information about the works and their creators.

We ask that you stay tuned, as NoCommercialValue will be getting a new look (hello, Web 2.0!) plus a series of shows to celebrate our FIRST ANNIVERSARY (yes – we’ve been around for a full year now, folks!). As always, your comments and suggestions are more than welcome. If you have an idea or a piece of work that you would like to exhibit at NCV, please write to us. And now, let’s look what we have for you today:

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Dear all,

This week we welcome back Ashley Singley as our guest curator.

Ashley selected a series of photographs by Dreamboats Collective, a new agency featuring four young photographers: Adam Golfer, Joe Leavenworth, TJ Proechel, and Daniel Shea. Unlike our previous shows, this one can be experienced both online and in person (if you happen to be in New York City). The exhibition will be on view from November 5th through December 22nd, Monday through Saturday 11–6 pm, at Umbrage Editions gallery in Dumbo, Brooklyn. As a special holiday feature, each artist will make available a limited edition 8”x10” and 11”x14” affordable print series (ranging from $35 to $200) for sale at the gallery.
About the show:

As a group, Dreamboats adds to the growing disambiguation between working personally and working editorially. Membersof the collective, who met at Maryland Institute College of Art, are primarily engaged in contemporary fine art and social documentary practices, but their professed intention is to circumvent the traditional photographic establishment to create a self-sustaining network of distribution and support for the creation of new photographic works. The works selected for the exhibition are from each artist’s recent body of work:

Adam Golfer’s series, Kin*,

Joe Leavenworth’s Pictures from Home,

TJ Proechel’s Dream House, and

Daniel Shea’s Untitled (Baltimore).

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Dear NCV friends,

We would like to welcome you back to another installment of nocommercialvalue.org.   This week, we recruited some friends to helps us continue the discussion generated by the last week’s show, “Who’s hungry?.”  So, we continue by going to the farm.

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Dear all,

We hope you have enjoyed these last few days of summer. Hopefully our last show inspired you to bring more play into your life.

As we enter September, NoCommercialValue.org goes from play to… ahem, hunger. This week, we start by asking: who’s hungry?

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Dear all,

We hope you didn’t forget us after this long break. The summer is almost over, but we hope you had enough time to play. If not, you will probably think more about it after you check out this week’s show. We welcome back Valeska Populoh with another great installment – and this time it’s all about playing!

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Dear NoCommercialValue friends,

This week we continue with the second installment of the “Art + Service” show . Our guest curator Eric Leshinsky has prepared an intriguing selection of images, text, audio, video and websites that will help you delve deeper into this topic. Read on and explore…

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Dear NoCommercialValue family,

After a very long (and unplanned!) break, we are back with a brand new show ! This week we are very happy to welcome Valeska Maria Populoh as a guest curator with the “Art + Service” issue. Valeska lives in Baltimore, Maryland. She is on the faculty at the Maryland Institute College of Art and works in collaboration with a variety of community arts organizations. Her costume and performance work, often created in collaboration with other artists, is informed by street theater, festival and parade traditions, variety entertainment and puppetry.

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Hello everyone,
We would like to apologize for our delay in delivering you this weeks show. Thank you for your patience and understanding, so without further delay here is this week’s show and our launch into summer: Jamaican Sound System Pt. 1 contributed and curated by Tristram Keefe and Prasanna Balasundaram.

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Dear all,

This week nocommercialvalue.org brings you fake love, fake babies, and fake divorces. Our friends Ellie Brown and Zach Webber embarked upon a little experiment, engineering a 7-day relationship via Craigslist.
The results are now in front of you. We hope you will enjoy it.

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