New Exhibition Opening - Coastal Boarder

SAN PEDRO, Calif. - Aug. 8, 2017 - PRLog -- Coastal/Border is an exhibition of original site-responsive performance and installation work with corresponding public programming curated by Raquel Gutiérrez and Martabel Wasserman. Taking as its starting point the landscape and history of the area surrounding Angels Gate Cultural Center, six Southern California based artists will interrogate how the coast is fortified as border, and how in turn that impacts the Latino/Latina communities of Los Angeles and beyond. In asking artists to develop a performance or public programming component of their work, the curators seek to emphasize the ways in which historical connections between Los Angeles and Latin America are embodied in the present.

The exhibition will be open to the public September 16^th and run through December 17^th 2017.  Angels Gate Cultural Center is a proud member of the South Bay/Long Beach HUB (SB/LB HUB), a collective of local arts institutions partnering with the Getty for PST: LA/LA. Our opening reception on September 23^rd and 24^th will be a two-day celebration in collaboration with the South Bay / Long Beach PST LA/LA Hub, with free shuttles between participating institutions from 10am-5pm each day as well as performances and events on campus. Learn more about our partners and find information about upcoming HUB events our website: https://sites.google.com/artlab21.org/southbayshuttlearttour

Mecca Vazie Andrews will develop of movement-based social practice project entitled Fringes. Andrews will draw on her background as choreographer to understand housing, migration and Latino communities in the Harbor region. Following up her Spring 2017 workshop, she will offer a free workshop on October 29^th from 11-1:30pm. Her workshop focuses on body mapping, a term she uses to describe the practice of understanding the individual body in collective struggle through pantomime. Her installation will feature images generated from research and workshops and will culminate in a performance activating the AGCC campus on November 4^th beginning at 3pm.

Edgar Fabián Frías will present Give Us Home Spider a series of ritual performance reenacting the Wixarika's sacred journey to Wirikuta, superimposed on top of channels that distribute goods which arrive in the Port of Los Angeles and move through predominately Latino communities of Los Angeles, the Inland Empire and Coachella Valley. Frías will present a workshop with activist Demi Espinoza on Environmental Racism at 1pm on September 23^rd.

Dany Naiermanwill present Port Capa. Exploring in and around the San Pedro region, layers of an exploded image portray the significance of how time made a lasting memory based on the fantasy of inclusion. PORT CAPA dissects the flattening of events recorded by landscapes. The happening, a total
environment excursion, exposes the thin threshold membranes of unique landscapes by scaling up historical layers, and allows a shift of perception about what is inside and what is outside. The video installation presents the genealogy of puppetry as integral to the advent of industrial automation at the Port of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Automation inherently creates distance manufactured by post-modern industrial architectures. The performance will take place October 21 at 6pm.

Paul Pescador will produce Greetings Friends, titled after one of the films that Disney produced, "Saludos Amigos." In 1940, the United States government created the Office of Inter-American Affairs out of concern for the potential Nazi infiltration in Latin America. They hired Walt Disney to produce animated cartoons, most of which focused upon Latin America as subject, some of theses videos took on health issues, such as malaria, water-treatment and tuberculosis. In Pescador's project, he will reconsider these films and their relationship between cultural diplomacy and colonialism.  Pescador will present his film followed by a Q + A on October 7^th at 7pm in Main Gallery II.

Jimena Sarno will create "from sea to shining sea" (FSTSS). FSTSS is a site-specific live sound and choir performance  to take place at on September 9^th at White Point Nature Preserve. Documentation will be on display at Angels Gate Cultural Center. The project responds to San Pedro's militarization process as a coastal city and the historical significance of the site. With a rich history of immigrant populations, San Pedro's history also aligns with WWII notions of national security, as they still relate today to patriotism and xenophobia. FSTSS connects the history of this militarized, man-made landscape to the normalization of the U.S.'s exceptionalismto legitimize military interventions worldwide, and its ambivalent relationship to the displacement of immigrants and refugees, often a direct result of such interventions. Borrowing its title from the last line of the song "America the Beautiful", the project utilizes the acoustic qualities of the site, ballistics data and weapon sounds as re-structuring parameters to deconstruct and rearrange the song for a choir performance. The C3LA Choir will re-perform the score at 7pm on November 4^th in Main Gallery I.

Sebastian Hernandez will be creating FTZ, a long-term research and performance-based artwork that will take place at Angels Gate Cultural Center in 2017. FTZ will critically engage the history of San Pedro as a main trading port on the west coast, its relationship to the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement and the widespread ramifications of global capital on the city of Los Angeles. He will ground the work with further material, sourcing from his personal lived experience as a queer brown body contending with notions of space, power, ephemerality and reclamation. Scores and gestural actions will be set based off research findings to influence the materiality, movement, sound and installations. Hernandez will present the closing performance on December 17^th at 5pm in Building H.