Big City Forum #11

Kim Stringfellow, Abandoned Trailer, Bombay Beach

Rebeca Mendez, Weatherscape #15

Big City Forum invites you to a round table conversation about our relationship to nature, issues of perception, land use and the built environment.

Saturday, Jan. 30th, 2010
4 - 6 pm

Honor Fraser Gallery
2622 S La Cienega Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90034
(310) 837-0191

Featuring:
Rebeca Mendez
Kim Stringfellow

Rebeca Méndez is a professor at UCLA, Design | Media Arts who works in photography and video art installations to explore issues of perception, specifically our relationship to technologically mediated nature. Méndez’s works are included in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, National Design Museum, NY, and Denver Art Museum, among many others.

Rebeca Méndez was born and raised in Mexico, D. F., received her BFA and MFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena and is professor at UCLA in the Design | Media Arts department, Los Angeles. She has exhibited widely in museums and galleries internationally. Recent gallery shows include The Beall Center for Art and Technology, Irvine, curated by Christiane Paul of the Whitney Museum, Minotti, Los Angeles, Haaz Gallery, Istanbul, AndLab Art, Los Angeles, Alyce de Roulette Williamson Gallery, Pasadena, and the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Center, Los Angeles. She has been the subject of solo exhibitions including, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Brandstater Gallery, Riverside, California and the Laguna College of Art and Design, Laguna Beach. Méndez has participated in numerous group exhibitions including the ARCO Madrid, Spain, XBiennial in Cuenca, Ecuador, Smithsonian, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York, Freitag Historical Museum in Hanover, Centro Cultural de Belém in Lisbon, Portugal, the Muséo José Luis Cuevas, México D. F. and Pompidou Centre, Paris. Méndez lectures internationally and has been reviewed extensively by renowned publications worldwide such as The Los Angeles Times, Eye Magazine, Metropolis, I.D. Magazine, (US), Idea Magazine (Tokyo, Japan), Ronda Revista (Santiago, Chile), Plazm (US), ENE-O (Mexico, D. F.), Items (Amsterdam), and 34 Magazine (Istanbul, Turkey). Her work is represented in private and museum collections including Enrique Norten Collection, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Denver Art Museum, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Méndez has received extensive national and international recognition including two Platinum Awards and two Gold Awards from Graphis, two nominations for the National Design Award (Smithsonian), and in 2008, she was awarded an art residency at the Gunnar Gunnarson, Skriduklaustur in Iceland.

Kim Stringfellow is an artist and educator residing in Los Angeles, California. She teaches multimedia and photography courses at San Diego State University as an associate professor in the School of Art, Design, and Art History. She received her MFA in Art and Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2000.

Her professional practice and research interests address ecological, historical, and activist issues related to land use and the built environment through hybrid documentary forms incorporating writing, digital media, photography, audio, video, installation, and locative media. Her work investigates repercussions of human development within the western United States evolving out of a rigorously researched area of interest focused on a particular subject, community or region to discuss complex, interrelated issues of the chosen site. Within her research, she attempts to expose human values and political agendas that form our collective understanding of these places. Ultimately, her projects are designed to create awareness, educate, and create a rich dialogue in relation to the subject at hand.

Stringfellow’s projects have been commissioned and funded by leading organizations including the California Council for the Humanities, Creative Work Fund, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and the Seattle Arts Commission. Awards include Best-Art Related Website at the 1999 SXSW Interactive Festival. Her work has been exhibited at the International Center for Photography (ICP), the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, SIGGRAPH, the Rachel Carson Institute, and San Francisco Camerawork. Internationally, she has exhibited at ISEA’04 in Tallinn, Estonia and at the José Martí National Library in Havana, Cuba in 2002. During the spring of 2000, she attended the Civitella Ranieri Center Residency Program in Umbria, Italy through a grant from the Atlantic Center of the Arts. Her photographs are included in the Margulies Collection at the Warehouse in Miami, Florida and the Nevada Museum of Art. Publications include New York Times, SF Camerawork Quarterly, Sculpture, Photo Metro, Leonardo, and Artweek. Her first book, Greetings from the Salton Sea: Folly and Intervention in the Southern California Landscape, 1905–2005 was published by the Center for American Places (CAP) in 2005. The Web site for Greetings from the Salton Sea was featured in Ecotopia: The Second ICP Triennial of Photography and Video in New York City in 2006/07. Invisible-5, a collaborative audio project completed in spring 2006, funded by the Creative Work Fund was featured on NPR’s California Report on October 13th, 2006 and was included in justspace(s) at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) in fall 2007. Her second book project with CAP, Jackrabbit Homestead: Tracing the Small Tract Act in the Southern California Landscape, 1938–2008, was published in 2009. The California Council for the Humanities awarded Stringfellow a California Story Fund production grant in 2008 to develop and produce the Jackrabbit Homestead audio tour.