Installation shots of defunded/defunked! Thank you @user0name01234 for the hand modeling 😽
I hold this show so tightly to my heart - so much meaning and personal growth embedded in the two months that went into co-organizing this show, all of which wouldn't be possible without Paul and Taina laying the foundation of this opportunity. Defunked started out as a written expression of these secret feelings of nostalgia and romanticism I harboured for 70s surrealist art. To have SGA take a chance on me and realize these desires and set them out into the world was both daunting yet liberating at the same time.
To be able to work alongside so many talented, hardworking people and realize I can contribute to something that could give back to my community was incredibly meaningful and profound. Ever since, defunked evolved from its historical starting point to become something much more raw, timely, and delightful in its sincerity.
My heart goes out to @paulfauller@t4inarocha@artscollaborativemedford@smfa_sga for allowing and trusting me with this opportunity.
Thank you to all the amazing artists for your brilliance and trust, I'm forever inspired @coandlee.studio@danaart27@deejaaynnnn@d____jego@elanjcohen@helena_nasser@grace_gior@juliamcgehean@kaibarkerdennett@kalim.l.f@ammaisanartist@matilda777love@art.msims@pao.la.silva@paulfauller@shiyeon.k@01.drawing 💗💗
More to come soon 💐
Mai Phạm (born Sài Gòn, Việt Nam) is a visual artist working across painting and sculpture. Currently, her practice operates between archival recovery, linguistic slippage, and the material residue of economic transformation. She’s interested in how visual language - particularly the vernacular forms of commercial signage and state propaganda - carries the unresolved tensions of postsocialist Vietnamese history. Working primarily with fabricated industrial signs, installation, and text-based objects, she constructs irreverent and or funny signs, to see how meaning becomes unmoored during moments of rapid social change. Manipulating between modes of replication, to abstract or absurdist turns, Mai hopes to offer a practice that is as much about visual processing as it is about circulation.
She is the co-curator of Temperaments and the curator for defunded/defunked!
Mai is going to get her bachelors by the end of this year and continue working in the arts.
She will be at Three Dog Night from April 28th - May 4th.
I'm very excited to announce "defunded/defunked!', a group exhibition at @artscollaborativemedford that will be on view from April 9th through May 4th, with an opening reception on April 17th from 6-8PM.
Featuring 18 artists working in Boston and the New England area, defunded/defunked! takes its name from the wordplay of funk, fund and defunct, tracing this relationship/binary between the artist and their material reality throughout time. Through the surrealism and imperfectability of works from artists such as Claes Oldenburg, Robert Arnerson, and Wally Hedrick, Funk art in the 70s, as narrated by curator Peter Selz, is "a matter of attitude...It is symbolic in content and evocative in feeling." Thus a never-ending knot throughout history that folds in on itself depending on the time period in which it's inflected - many artists rejected the Funk label because it denies a shared goal or motive, others because of the term's "datedness" and obtuse formality.
This exhibition is asking the same questions again about Funk, but with lower stakes and fewer answers. If Funk assumes an ungainly, loud, and bizarre position, defunked asks how funk objects can elicit laughter and humor besides irony. From J Grace Giordano and Julia McGehean's series of "utterance" objects, to Shiyeon Ku's depiction of sublime and metastasized bodies, as well as Daria Jin's performance with her intercontinental grass, defunded/defunked! holds space for artists to be irreverent, playful, and committed in a politically and technologically charged moment. Like Selz says about Funk and by extension defunked, "If there's any moral: it's for you to find out."
There will be performances from Paola Michelle Silva Lizarraga and Daria Jin on the night of the reception from 6:30-8:00pm as well as more programming on May 2nd. Shuttle buses from Granoff Music Center in Medford will run every 20 minutes throughout the opening reception.
Text translates to: "Coppy - Saigon Sun - Karaoke Computer - Sounds of Despair"
Pulled this relic from online and have been obsessed since last year over the idea of a generously funny, nihilistic sign with no audience, just chilling out there. Bby mockup for love 💕
Vinasign II
Gesso, French cleat, box, led lights
14 x 17 in
Read a good deal of eerie stories last semester and realized we're always one layer of camouflage skin away from becoming illegible to ourselves. By giving it a second life, perhaps the economy of signage is no longer about its circulation? Perhaps it's a narrative landscape, a vessel, a body, a wall...anything but a sign?
Vinasign I
22 x 7 x 33 in
Taken at ISS's fall show and 'after life'
My first entry point into a year long fascination with industrial signage...So much momentum and inertia gathered in the slow process of making this fast object.
Lucky Pet Hotel is open to the public 😸🐾
