INNER SPACE
A Chamber Gallery
Currently INSTALLING
Andrew Ortiz
Measured Disorder
Opening 11.03.2018 4-7pm
Closing 11.25.2018 2-5 pm
g
Andrew Ortiz’ work is a highly personal narrative of the struggles with seizure disorders. Dark in both emotional content and physical appearance, that seek to express the intense psychological impact of dealing with physical challenges. Having had epilepsy for over thirty years, Andrew has not broached such autobiographical subject matter until recently. Self-portraits in the traditional sense, through digital manipulation and collage, express a process and an experience – the seizures; the medical “measuring” one undergoes on an ongoing basis.
Upon a closer view, his work is also dealing with the concept of neurons and chromosomes, and the changes that differentiate between normal and abnormal brain functioning. He imagines the neurons as lines of communication -- branches that reach out to convey information. Sometimes there is a breakdown, and one end does not understand the other. Cells touch each other with violent bursts of electricity; messages go astray; connection lost. Sometimes disembodied, sometimes clinical, occasionally mystical, images that communicate the varied experiences with epilepsy.
BIO: Andrew Ortiz was born in Los Angeles, California and has been a resident of Arlington, Texas since 1997 when he began his teaching career with the Art & Art History Department of UT Arlington. In 2004 he earned tenure and was promoted to associate professor. He currently teaches photography and digital imaging to undergraduate and graduate students at the university.
Andrew received his Master of Fine Arts degree in photography Fine Arts degree in visual studies from SUNY Brockport’s Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY. From documentary photography that presented “found moments” or broad snapshots of urban society, his work has transitioned into computer manipulation of imagery used to explore personal narratives about ethnicity and identity through large-scale digital collages. Over the past twenty years, his work has been featured nationally and internationally in over one hundred and twenty exhibitions.
He is the recipient of many awards including the “New Photography Award” from En Foco in New York City, first prize in the Gordon Parks Competition, several juror’s awards from competitive exhibitions throughout the country, and the “Best of Show Award” from the prestigious Art in the Metroplex exhibition hosted by TCU in Ft. Worth (2009), and a grand prize for faculty portfolio from the Photo Imaging Education Association (2010).
2011 Surreal Salon III at the Baton Rouge Gallery, Center for Contemporary Art in Baton Rouge, LA; The Subject Behind the Camera Acceptance, Joy Wai Gallery Midtown South Facility, New York, NY. 2013 San Francisco, International Photography Exhibition. Ortiz was a Gold Finalist and 3rd place award winner. 2016 The House on Mango Street: Artists Interpret Community, which traveled to both the National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago, IL and the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque, NM.
Iris Dittler
the incommensurable movement of spacing
Iris Dittler´s work can be located at the point of intersection between contemporary dance and visual art practices. She investigates physical states in various media like drawing, installation, performancevand video.
The focus lies on the perception of the body, sentiently felt configurations of tensions and tactile – kinaesthetic experiences. She is interested in what can be found there in latency as an internal physical and psychological architecture. Her drawings can be seen as seismographic notations of those internal processes. The objects are manifestations of physical states in collision with the material of the everyday world.
Her installations are choreographed situations. Groups of objects are set into spatial relations and frequently presented in combination with live performances. She is interested in how a sequence ofvgestures can create a body and reflect upon what it actually means to make a sculpture.
Her projects are process-oriented and demand an active confrontation with the given architectural space. She oscillates between galleries and theatre spaces, creating site-specific installations for thevaudience to be drawn back to their own physical constitution in the very presence.
BIO: Iris Dittler, born 1985, is a visual artist and performer based in Vienna, Austria.
She studied at the École nationale supérieure des beaux - arts in Paris, France, and at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.
Her transdisciplinary work creates an interplay of elements from the fine arts and contemporary dance. Resonances develop between bodies, objects, sound, and space. Grammars of the respective medium are investigated in terms of their potentials for transfer and translation into other media. She frequently collaborates with dancers, choreographers, fine artists and filmmaker Nicolai S. Gütermann.
Among her latest solo exhibitions are:
« Issir » (Le 3bisf, Aix – en Provence, France, 2017), « Incongruent sites » (MUSA, Vienna, 2015), « Abita sotto la lingua » (Palazzo Bottigella Gandini, Pavia, Italy, 2014).
Her installations and performances were shown at the Tanzquartier Vienna (2013), scaPes festival for choreography and music (Vienne, 2015) and in the frame of the performance festival Still Moving (Théâtre de l´Étoile du Nord, Paris, 2018).
In 2013 she participated in the Advanced Research Lab for Visual Arts with Matt Mullican in Italy.
She received a scholarship for an artist residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in 2014.
She obtained the Austrian State Scholarship for Fine Art and the City of Vienna Promotion Grant for Fine Art in 2016 and was awarded the Theodor Körner Price in 2018.