Exhibitions on view through June 2016
Opening:July 31–August 2, 2015
PoorFarm
E6325 County Highway BB
Manawa, WI 54949
Exhibition: Listening and Making Sound
“Now is the sublime. I used to hate that word, I was interested in subjectivity, in painted rooms, diary entries. But now my ’I’ feels very small. The global inversion is occurring when everything ’out there’ is now ’in here’ and entrails heaving, we pant. The world has brought me to this point. This tiny point. From this point, certain artists and activists I have known will show work. Over phone calls and emails in the past year, we have discussed the past: our shared pasts and what we can sense of the present. Listening and Making Sound. The gerund. The present tense, active, ongoing, ever-urgent NOW. ’Now’ is a palimpsest, a simultaneity. Politics and art. Horrible bedfellows, wretched confusion. Beneath the words we use, the rhetoric we vomit and the ideologies we breathe in, there is sound itself, the rhythm of our time. Can we hear it?”
–Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, 2015
Cary Cronenwett’s film Peace of Mind documents Flo McGarrell’s time in Jacmel, Haiti, before Flo’s untimely death in the 2010 earthquake. Wynne Greenwood pieces together the video backstory to Tracy and the Plastics, thinking about rivers now instead of mountains. Dana DeGiulio has built a double of black clay, stuffed it in a suitcase and smuggled it through TSA. Danny Giles is working through forms of Horror Noire in the real political violence inflicted on black citizens and the analogous fictional violence in the genre of horror. Josh Ploeg cooks. Amy Yao does her work underground. Gregg Bordowitz curates videos from the Video Data Bank, including Dan Graham’s Rock My Religion. CauleenSmith and Bryan O’Keefe will speak about the SDS and show his recent video, Something Has to Change, which documents the evolution of a friendship through spectatorship and the desire for mutual recognition, shot in three self-parodic phases. Matthew Evan Taylor will lead a noise workshop. Neil Gravander (courtesy Microlights), a Poncili Creación parade, Kirsten Stoltmann’s suffering, Katy Cowan indexing of the “sit-in” and others will also convene at The Great Poor Farm Experiment, July 31 through August 2. Conceived and curated by Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, with assistance from Nicholas Frank, the Experiment promises a deafening roar, a belly laugh, renewed energy, a respite, a return.
Other 2015 Great Poor Farm Experiments include:
A selection of work by participants in the The Drawing Center’s Open Sessions; Summer School, an annual informal gathering of students, faculty, and artists exploring experimental forms of dialog and education guided by artist Aaron VanDyke; John Riepenhoff and Richard Galling, hosting their annual “Lazy River, Keep Showing Me Your Rafts,” which includes a raft-building competition and a float down the Little Wolf River; and the pedagogical platform Lifetime Achievement and Packing My Library 2014–2015, with Molly Zuckerman-Hartung’s library evoking Walter Benjamin: ”For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order?”
The Poor Farm hosts year-long exhibitions at the former Waupaca County Poor Farm (built 1876) in rural Little Wolf, Wisconsin. The first weekend in August kicks off exhibitions with an annual Great Poor Farm Experiment.
