Upcoming: Dorit Cypis
Price Not Announced
The Sighted See the Surface
Out of Stock
Product Description
The Sighted See the Surface will extend over 2013 to engage a variety of audiences in research and discussion exploring aesthetics, ethics and engagement. Cypis is designing a series of conversation structures to take place at a variety of private and public sites. The first of these participatory conversations will be a tribute to the late Los Angeles artist Michael Asher and will take place at the Braille Institute, Los Angeles. Asher’s brilliant questioning of how institutions play with what is made visible and what remains invisible to the public lays the groundwork for an extended public conversation on the nature of seeing. This conversation is in collaboration with writer Susan Morgan and co-sponsored by East of Borneo.
Each conversation in this series will be accompanied by a text-based work created by Cypis questioning the liminal qualities of identity and social relations. The limited edition lithography prints will be published and made available by LM Projects.
BIOGRAPHY
Dorit Cypis has been exploring the role of aesthetics and the artist for many years with a practice that has ranged across many media and contexts, moving fluidly between a personal studio practice, education and community building. Cypis’ art, over a landscape of 30 years, has utilized the genres of performance, photography, text and immersive installation to explore the crevices of identity and history where psychological, physical and political dimensions of life intersect like a morphing tapestry.
She has exhibited internationally including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, International Center of Photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Musee d’Art Contemporain in Montreal, Musee des Beaux Arts/Bruxelles, Walker Art Center, Orange County Museum of Art, and locally at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Bank, Las Cienegas Projects, Tom Jancar and RedCat. The practice Cypis continues elaborates on the principal that identity is within and between, individual and collective. Cypis will be honored with a survey exhibition of her work at the University Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach in 2014.
In Los Angeles Cypis is recognized for the formative work she took on, 1979-1982, reshaping Foundation for Art Resources, FAR, as a model for partnering with artists and public sites to produce engaging public interaction and discourse. FAR has continued since then in the hands of a new group of arts professionals every several years. In 1992 Cypis founded Kulture Klub Collaborative, Minneapolis, partnering with artists, homeless youth, social service, arts organizations and funders to develop programs to bridge survival and inspiration. KKC is thriving 20 years later having partnered with hundreds of artists, youth, social service staff and local organizations. In 2007 Cypis founded Foreign Exchanges to offer mediation and capacity building for engagement across private and social conflict. FE brings together tools and skills from mediation and aesthetics to innovate on growing generative relations.
Cypis has taught on identity and social relations across the USA, Canada, Holland, France, Switzerland, Germany and Israel. She has received numerous awards and fellowships including Japan Foundation, Bush, McKnight, Jerome, Ordway and Durfee Foundations,City of Los Angeles Cultural Arts, Fellows of Contemporary Art, three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. She holds a Masters of Fine Art from Californian Institute of the Arts, and a Masters of Conflict Resolution, MDR, from Pepperdine University.