House Arrest July Focus: Emilio Rojas
Ash To Ash
Performance Art Exhibition and Artist Residency
Emilio Rojas
July 10- 25, 2021
Opening Reception: July 10, 1-5p
Open Saturdays & Sundays 1-5p and by appointment
Admission is free, reservations required
Ash to Ash, is a durational performance and installation by Mexican artist Emilio Rojas as part of his residency at Glasshouse, continuing his series Instructions for Becoming, where he works with trees and nature as tools to embody themes of displacement, migration, roots and belonging. Seeing trees as archives and witnesses in space and time and symbiotic to human existence. Rebecca Schneider writes about this series: “ Between human body and tree… the weight of a limb might bend to the weight of a limb without distinction as to which limb bends first, which second, or where one limb begins and another ends. Human and non-human come undone in each other.”
The piece Ash to Ash, utilizes Ash trees that have died in the surrounding landscape due to the Emerald Ash Borer, a pest that has decimated ashes across the United Sates and Canada by the millions since it was introduced in 2002. The title, a pun on the phrase “ ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust” references the return of our body to the ground and the cycles of death and rebirth that surround us.For the duration of the residency Rojas, will engage with this trees through processes of transformation and purification through fire, water, and his body. As well as show previous work from this series in the exhibition, and the installation with the Ashes from the tree will slowly evolve through the duration of the residency.
About Emilio Rojas
Emilio Rojas is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily with the body in performance, using video, photography, installation, public interventions and sculpture. He holds an MFA in Performance from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA in Film from Emily Carr University in Vancouver, Canada. As a queer latinx immigrant with indigenous heritage, it is essential to his practice to engage in the postcolonial ethical imperative to uncover, investigate, and make visible and audible undervalued or disparaged sites of knowledge, narratives, and individuals. He utilizes his body in a political and critical way, as an instrument to unearth removed traumas, embodied forms of decolonization, migration and poetics of space. His research based practice is heavily influenced by queer and feminist archives, border politics, botanical colonialism, and defaced monuments. Besides his artistic practice, he is also a translator, community activist, yoga teacher, and anti-oppression facilitator with queer, migrant and refugee youth.
His work has been exhibited in exhibitions and festivals in the US, Mexico, Canada, Japan, Austria, England, Greece, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Holland, Colombia, and Australia, as well as institutions like The Art Institute and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Ex-Teresa Arte Actual Museum and Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, The Vancouver Art Gallery, The Surrey Art Gallery, The DePaul Art Museum, and The Botin Foundation. Rojas is currently a Visiting Artist in Residency in the Theater and Performance Department at Bard College in New York, since 2019 and the inaugural resident of the Judy Pfaff Foundation. Where he developed a new commission for Live Arts Bard at the Fisher Center, which which premiered November 2019, focusing on the theme of Borders. Currently working on a new video commission in collaboration with poet, artist and activist Pamela Sneed, for the newly formed Human Rights and Arts Centre at Bard.
House Arrest
A house-wide performance art installation and a series of performance exhibitions by artists in residence Sindy Butz, Emilio Rojas and Donna Kukama.
The term ‘House Arrest’, which serves as the theme for Glasshouse's opening season, generally refers to a legal measure confining a person to their residence; most recently domestic confinement became a symbol of our time; yet the motivation behind the theme of ‘House Arrest’ is to embody the historic role of the home in the evolution of the archive, especially that of performance as a social theater, focusing on the performativity of the domestic archive, it’s fluidity in showcasing what is intentionally archived and how life interferes and intertwines with the archive and its keepers. The artists in residence, their work displayed, the audience watching and keeping record are all part of that performative "arrest”.
About Glasshouse-
Glasshouse is regularly organizing, producing and hosting performances, thematic exhibitions, festivals and a residency program alongside an ongoing installation spread throughout the house. Some of our notable programming over recent years include The Neo-domesticities 100h Performance Art Festival (2017), Sites of Absence- Post Presence in Performance exhibition (2016), Archiving The Now (2013), The Cinema of Transgression Festival (2013) and many more.
Glasshouse is also the art installation of artists Lital Dotan & Eyal Perry. When not hosting performances an exhibition of performance based works- video installations, works on paper, documentations and sculptures, spread thematically throughout the premises- comes to life. Guided tours can be scheduled by appointment.
Alongside Glasshouse's public program the unique nature of this domestic environment allows a deep research into the nature of performance, exploring themes such as unannounced gestures, one-to-one performances, extended durational work, accumulated performances and archives of presence and absence; thus expanding the taxonomy of performative practice. These activities as a whole are being interweaved with and by our daily practice and life.