@VIRAL_RE_COLLECTION
CURATED BY ESAU BETANCOURT AND ABBY FOGLE
SEPTEMBER 11TH - OCTOBER 16TH, 2020
Explosions of online content result in an “ultra-quick digital memory” and attention span whereby we consume and discard imagery just as quickly as it pops up on our digital interface. The ease of consuming and discarding digital data radically alters our relationship with fashion and apparel life cycles, ultimately contributing to the inhabitability of our planet. By examining the interdependencies of desire, digital images, and physical clothing objects, in mass production consumer markets, @viral_re_collection invites the consumer to question the impact of digital and physical over-consumption.
Curated by Abby Fogle and Esau Betancourt, with works by new media artist Jenna Boyles (@jennajunk), sculpture by artist Erin Smego (@colorsnob), and garments designed by Kate Walz for Querencia Studio (@querenciastudio), @viral_re_collection asks how this ultra-quick digital memory influences the way we consume, while suggesting alternative futures of clothing consumption. The exhibition’s critical conversation about sustainability and commodity is staged across platforms on social media platforms, Amplify Art’s website, and IRL at Amplify’s Generator Space.
Virtual Generator Grant programming is presented with generous support from the Nebraska Arts Council and the Nebraska Cultural Endowment.
Installation Images
@VIRAL_RE_COLLECTION Exhibition Walkthrough
Exhibition Videos
Jenna Boyles, 2016.xlsx
Conscious Consumer Guide: Omaha
Omaha Second Hand Guide
About the Organizers
Abby Fogle is an arts administrator and art historian whose research focuses on the intersection of modern art and 20th century fashion and the construction of American femininity. She earned her BA in Art History from Creighton University in Omaha and her MA in the History of Art from The Courtauld Institute of Art in London.
Esau Betancourt is an independent curator focused on social justice and equality in general and Latin American and Latinx art in specific. He earned a BA in Latin American studies with a focus in Art History from the University of Nebraska Omaha.
About the Artists
Jenna Boyles aka Jenna Junk is a multimedia artist who gleans information from objects labeled trash or obsolete. Driven by a desire to collect and sort through both digital and physical refuse, she expands upon the concept of waste as a form of storing and accessing memory. Her work articulates the ubiquity and resonance of unwanted things while playing on the sensitivity between the soft-body and the hard-wired machine. Based in Chicago, Jenna is faculty in the Art and Technology Studies Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Chicago in New Media Arts, and the Audio Art and Acoustics Department at Columbia College. Recently, Jenna was a New Media Artist in Residence at Mana Contemporary Chicago. She has exhibited and performed in Chicago, IL; Baltimore, MD; Pittsburgh, PA; and Miami, FL. Her installations, costumes, and objects often appear outside of gallery spaces in performance venues, children’s museums, in parades and forests, and on rivers and beaches.
Erin Smego is a sculptor and installation artist who lives and works in Chicago. Smego makes sculptures which function as a conceptual practice to assay and deconstruct gender expectations via fashion ready-mades and industrial materials while simultaneously existing as fun art objects. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2011). Smego was an Artist-in-Residence at HATCH Projects, Chicago Artists’ Coalition (2018). She has exhibited in numerous group exhibitions in the United States including: 65Grand, THE SUB-MISSION, baby blue gallery, The Fulton Street Collective, The Art Center Highland Park, Bloomsburg University, The Lee E. Dulgar Gallery at South Suburban College, Chicago Artists’ Coalition, and 22. Smego has exhibited solo installations at The Hermosa Walls, Ignition Projects, and Stumble Chicago, and forthcoming at Boundary in 2020. She has also exhibited internationally at the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art Museum in Gyenggi-do, South Korea. Smego was awarded the Edna L. Cushing Annual Memorial Prize in a juried show Elements of Abstraction (2015) at the St. Louis Artists' Guild and the Working Artist Organization Grant (2018).
Kate Walz is originally from Omaha, Nebraska, and moved to New York in 2015 to pursue her BFA in Fashion Design at Parsons School of Design. Kate is the Creative Director and Lead Designer of Querencia Studio, as well as the Creative Director of The Canvas by Querencia. Kate's work often explores key themes of the future of trash, capitalism and the climate, silver linings, punk DIY, time capsules and the NASA Voyager Missions, and Max-Neef’s fundamental human needs.
THE EARTH SUIT PROJECT
Kate's initiative of THE EARTH SUIT PROJECT explores future fashion systems through a collection of technical and speculative garments based on fundamental human needs. The purpose of this project is to address increasingly uncomfortable and unpredictable conditions as a result of climate change, particularly from the rapid proliferation of temperatures, water levels, air pollution, and excess of waste.
Through this work, Kate aims to provoke a conversation surrounding what a modern day “Earth Suit” might look like by stylizing a potential future reality that is closer than it may appear. By studying the spacesuit in partnership with Pacific Spaceflight, the garments take inspiration from the construction of spacesuits, as they serve as a model for surviving in climate conditions that are conceivably harsher than our own.
Through conducting primary research with New Yorkers, the pieces are designed specifically for individuals in coastal cities who are already facing the effects of climate change. The work also includes an ever-evolving "EARTH SUIT MANUAL", in order to make the project and research open source, so that the concepts are accessible to those most affected by the climate crisis.
QUERENCIA STUDIO AND THE CANVAS BY QUERENCIA
Querencia Studio began with the mission of introducing an alternative option for clothing that did not sacrifice sustainability for aesthetics or vice versa. After showcasing work and participating in pop-ups around the world, the Querencia Studio team felt like an individual effort as a brand was not all they had to offer.
Founders Devin Gilmartin and Tegan Maxey began to take observation of empty retail space around New York City. This led the Querencia Studio team to experiment with a new concept: The Canvas by Querencia. The Canvas began within the former Hunter College bookstore in the summer of 2018. There, they developed partnerships with brands, companies, and people that are making fashion fairer, more accessible and more connected.
In November of 2018, The Canvas by Querencia expanded to a different location in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Since then, they have grown their network to a global community of over one hundred and twenty brands spanning six continents. The Canvas by Querencia has since opened a second location in Antwerp, Belgium, and a third in the Bowery of Manhattan, NY.
The only way industries can change is by working together, and disrupting unsustainable systems. The goal of The Canvas by Querencia is to create a place where ideas can be sparked and creativity can flourish. Using the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals as a framework, The Canvas selects brands and partners to join their "team" in hopes to change what's broken.