Antioch College and Herndon Gallery present:

Interface - Interfase
by Paloma Dallas & Juan-Sí González

Interface-Interfase, a collaborative mixed-media installation show by Paloma Dallas and Juan-Sí González, will be opening at Antioch Collegeís Herndon Gallery in Yellow Springs on February 18th, 2005. There will be an opening night performance by the artists and a reception from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. The exhibition will run until March 29th, and the artists will hold a talk to discuss their work on March 18th from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. This is the third in a series of collaborative exhibitions by the artists. Juan-SÌ Gonz·lezís last solo show in this area, ìPragmatic Initiation,î was featured in Dialogue magazine and the Impact Weekly. His work has been featured in Art Nexus, World Art, Flash Art, Art & Antiques and the Miami Herald.

Geographically, linguistically, ideologically and professionally, the two artists come from different worlds. Juan-Sí was born and raised in Cuba, and English is his second language. He has been working as a visual artist for 15 years, exhibiting in museums and galleries throughout the US, Latin America and Europe. He is a 2004 recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship. Paloma was born and raised in Yellow Springs, and Spanish is her second language. She has worked as a writer and journalist with local and national publications and national and international organizations, focusing on US-Latin American relations.

They first began to collaborate in New York City in 2001, when they were hired to work together on a series of journalistic projects. From the beginning, working together was easy, even familiar. Their collaboration soon expanded to other aspects of their lives, and they began to leave the rigid boundaries of their individual domains. The two have lived and worked in Yellow Springs since 2002.

Artists' Statement

Interface - interfase

n. 1. a surface regarded as the common boundary of two bodies or spaces. 2. a common boundary or inter-connection between systems, equipment, concepts, or human beings.
s. 1. una superficie considerada como la frontera com?n entre dos cuerpos o espacios. 2. borde com?n o inter-conexiÛn entre sistemas, herramientas, conceptos o seres humanos.

This mixed-media installation show is an interpersonal, bilingual reflection on the common boundaries that both join and divide individuals. They are the boundaries that we try to permeate when we seek physical or emotional union with someone else, and they are the boundaries that inevitably imprison us within ourselves when those unions are not found and sometimes even when they are. In a work of collaboration, whether artistic or otherwise, this boundary or interface is omnipresent as the zone of negotiation.

In this show, we have chosen to delve into this zoneóexploring the frontiers of language, gender, sexuality, age, nationality, politics and origin. We use photographs, found and constructed objects, text, drawings, documents and sound as tools of communication. Instead of looking to the experiences of others, we have adopted a sort of auto-focus in which we are our own subjects of investigation. We have tried to uncover the parts of us that exist in the hidden, dark corners of the mind; we have tried to be honest with our own experiences.

Memory as a subjective and selective account of our own lives is a central theme that runs through this show. Moments, sensations, ideas and occurrences all make up links in a fragile chain that secures us to our past, regardless of whether we choose to actively remember or actively forget. Our physical and emotional selves are repositories for these memories that often serve as triggers for our particular fears, complexes, traumas and neuroses.

Language is another theme that runs through the show. Each of the titles of the pieces is a word that is a cognate in Spanish and English; a word spelled nearly the same way and with the same meaning in both languages. In this way, we play on the similarities, instead of the differences, between our two languagesóand we encourage people to rely on intuition when confronting a text. We see language as a living, malleable and often capricious tool of expression, and as native speakers of two different languages we enjoy playing, especially along our shared borders.

Our work in this show explores the tension between the self and the other; a tension drawn taut or made slack by oscillating feelings of fear and trust. For us, creating is an act of cultural and ideological resistance. It is a way of living, a way of further learning about ourselves and each other. It is a personal obsession with mutual recognition to which the spectator is invited to participate as a voyeur.

For more information call 937-769-1149

To contact the artists directly, e-mail JPparalelos@aol.com or call
937-767-2096.