Daniel Terna

UCLA’s New Wight Gallery presents “Compassion Fatigue” in its New Wight Biennial, Oct. 2-16. Curated by graduate students Damir Avdagic and Abigail Collins of the UCLA Department of Art, the exhibition highlights the work of 15 artists from around the world. The artists use installation, performance, video, sound and photographic art to depict an intimate view of political crisis.

In addition to introducing these artists and their work, the show is intended to foster an investigative exchange between graduate programs at UCLA and other institutions.The New Wight Biennial was founded by UCLA professor and artist Mary Kelly in 1997, when she was chair of the Department of Art.

Sajjad Abbas
Noor Abed
Christina Blue
Julien Bonnin
Josephine Callaghan
Carolina Caycedo
Yaron Guerrero
Ju-Hyun Lee
Yuki Kishino
Jason Mena
Omar Mismar
Lee Relvas
Daniel Terna
Milos Trakilovic
Katja Verheul

Curated by Elizabeth Ferrer, BRIC Vice President, Contemporary Art; Jenny Gerow, Assistant Curator; and guest curators Leslie Kerby and Fawz Kabra 

In fall 2014 BRIC launched a major new initiative, the BRIC Biennial. These exhibitions present the work of emerging and mid-career visual artists working across artistic media, with each edition focusing on different areas of Brooklyn. The first Biennial surveyed artists based in downtown Brooklyn and adjacent neighborhoods, a fitting focus given the location of BRIC House in downtown Brooklyn at the edge of Fort Greene, traditionally, an important cultural center in Brooklyn. This exhibition series intends to demonstrate the rich wealth of talent to be found throughout Brooklyn.

Among the artists to be featured in the BRIC Biennial: Volume I, Downtown Edition, were ruby onyinyechi amanze, whose large-scale works on paper have been influenced greatly by her cultural hybridity, as well as by textile design, photography, print-making and architecture. Scherezade Garcia, known for working with found objects, created a major installation from copies of the Village Voice upon which she will reproduce an image of the sea. Jenna Spevack, an artist whose art practice is based in sustainable design, created an audio installation that took place in a reclaimed wood outhouse in the gallery. Vince Contarino’s paintings simultaneously embraced a graphic language in tandem with the gesture and materiality of abstraction.

Artists: Fariba Salma Alam, Richard Baker, Katie Bell, Isak Berbic, Ben Thorp Brown, Youmna Chlala, Vince Contarino, Joe Diebes, Seth Michael Forman, Scherezade Garcia, Valérie Hallier, Nene Humphrey, Nina Katchadourian, Despo Magoni, Karyn Olivier, ruby onyinyechi amanze, Jenny Polak and Dread Scott, Eleanor Ray, Wendy Richmond, Niv Rozenberg, Jean Shin, Jenna Spevack, Daniel Terna, Penelope Umbrico, Daniel Wiener, and Martha Wilson.

The six works in this show are part of the larger project Living Los Sures, a collaborative documentary about the Southside of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, produced by UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art.

From 2010 through 2014, UnionDocs is producing a collaborative web documentary about the Southside neighborhood in Williamsburg, Brooklyn where the organization has been situated for nearly a decade. Part omnibus film, part media archeology, part deep-map and city symphony, the project uses Los Sures, a brilliant work of cinema verite directed by Diego Echeverría in 1984, as a starting point for the investigations of more than forty artists over the course of four years. Collectively, their projects tell the story of a longstanding Latino community that is defeating displacement and surviving the growth machine. Living Los Sures is a multi-part project that restores a lost film, remixes local histories, reinvestigates Williamsburg’s Southside today, and hopes to reunite a neighborhood around a sustainable future.

In the late seventies and early eighties, the Southside of Williamsburg was one of the poorest neighborhoods in New York City. In fact, it had been called the worst ghetto in America. Los Sures, a documentary from 1984 by Diego Echeverría, skillfully represents the challenges of this time; drugs, gang violence, crime, abandoned real estate, racial tension, single parent homes, and inadequate local resources. Yet, Echeverría’s portrait also celebrates the vitality of this largely Puerto Rican community, showing the strength of their culture, their creativity and their determination to overcome a desperate situation.

UnionDocs has partnered with Echeverría to develop Living Los Sures, revisiting his powerful film to pursue four primary goals. RESTORE: Bring the original film back to life and make it accessible online for the first time, working with the local community to update, annotate, and challenge the narrative through a participatory platform. REMIX: Expand the experience of the original through deeply interactive audio/visual experiments. REUNITE: Activate the community to engage vital civic issues for a more sustainable future. REINVESTIGATE: Create new short documentaries to illustrate the issues the community faces today.

To date, over thirty such reinvestigations have been created by members of the UnionDocs Collaborative Studio. Each year since 2010, UnionDocs has hosted twelve Collaborative artist-fellows who work together to produce short documentary projects about the Southside today. These projects cover a wide range of topics and forms -- from short videos to soundworks, audio walks, installations and interactive media. The works in this show represent the variety of form and subject matter, as well as the common concerns, that characterize the Living Los Sures project.

The Wild Project presents Kidding, a solo exhibition featuring new work by Daniel Terna. Transforming everyday snapshots into the drama of the quotidian, Terna’s photographs—shot in New York, Los Angeles, and Switzerland—capture the showmanship in our daily lives. With an unfixed narrative, Terna homes in on ambiguous scenery and the pose, drawing out the artifice in seemingly natural situations. Moving fluidly across photographic genres, the artist combines staged studio work with personal documentary photographs, a mechanism that acts as another form of visual deception. – Kkory Trolio