International Women Artists' Salon is thrilled to announce visual artist member Silvana D'Mikos is participating in the exhibition C A R T at Current Gallery in Baltimore, MD, USA, July 9th through September 4th, 2011, with opening reception on July 9th.
"Soap Series"
Silvana D’Mikos participates in
C A R T
July 9 - September 4, 2011
Opening Saturday July 9, 7-10pm
Current Gallery
421 N Howard, Baltimore, MD 21201
Opening coinciding with 30th Annual Artscape
"Soap Series"
C A R T
The average American makes two trips to buy groceries each week, making supermarkets, mini-marts, and corner stores essential and incredibly influential parts of our everyday lives. All items are bought and sold at these stores using money. Money is earned through labor, and labor comes in countless different packages, much like our food. Through our labor we are inspired and we are exploited. We progress and we are repressed. We survive.
Art is created through labor, but unlike some of the more negative forms labor takes, art stimulates our minds, challenges our imaginations, and expands our vision for the world. Art is at the center of humanity’s continuous evolution, but it remains extraordinarily undervalued by mainstream American society, which is almost solely focused on the seemingly endless cycle of labor and consumption. This limited view of life is slowly eliminating our ability to imagine, dream, and think freely.
Through C A R T, Current Gallery is positing that art is not optional, but essential. It affects all of us internally, whether we are aware of it or not, and it should therefore be considered as fundamental to our daily lives as the products we purchase at grocery stores every week. Therefore, Current Space will be transformed into a fully functional mini-supermarket, complete with aisles, window displays, shopping baskets, and cash registers in an attempt to explore the exchange of artists’ labor for profit in a familiar, everyday setting.
Curators: Michael Benevento, Monique Crabb and Andrew Liang
Silvana D’Mikos is an interdisciplinary installation artist from Uruguay. Her installations are characterized by a variety of aesthetic languages; sculptures, digital images, sound and animation, also through the use of different materials. D’Mikos’s work explores social conflicts derived from human feelings, emotions and relationships.
In 2004, she obtained a Bachelor in fine Arts degree from the Fine Arts School of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. There, she taught art history to high school student in deprived neighborhoods, worked in carnival as a sculptor, and participated in urban art, community and recycling art projects.
In 2005 she moved to Miami, Florida, where her work began to change direction by the incorporation of new media elements. She also worked as a graphic designer, and, as an art teacher with at-risk high school students at the Young Men's Academy at MacArthur South.
D’Mikos’s work has been exhibit internationally. In 2007 she moved to France to participate in the international curatorial program of L’ecole du Magasin, Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble. At the L’ecole, she researched and studied contemporary art collections, focusing on the Belgium collection of Annick and Anton Herbert. Research that originated the exhibition “Hypothèse pour une Histoire”, a selection of documents from the collection archives, from 1989 and 1990 emphasizing the relationship between the collection and the socio-political events of that period. Also, the publication, “Access to documents/ Access through document”, magazine Hors d’Œuvre, on the access of documents in contemporary art practices and researches.
The following year, she has attended an international summer program in New Media at Transart Institute, Danube University, Berlin, Germany. There she participated in workshops and seminaries about Identity, Sensory perception and Newness.
"Soap Series"
Artist Statement
My training as a sculptor began at the Universidad Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. After graduation in 2004, I worked as an interdisciplinary artist, and produced a number of works reflecting my views on the controversial aspects of society. The Invisible Blood Sucker, my instillation that exposes the economic crisis of 2008 exemplifies this idea.
I see art as an experimental process originating from daily human interactions, and use a variety of media; sculptures, sounds, digital images and motion to express it. My work, I Cannot Understand, which focuses on the problems of communication between people of diverse ethnicity, is a good example.
At present, I am working with a variety of materials and to uncover and hope to uncover a new meaning and potential to highlight life’s transformations and impermanence. My recycled paper installation and soap sculpture project are based on this idea.
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