Harrell Fletcher, Rigo23, and Ken Worthy Discuss "Art in a Dissociated World"

Harrell Fletcher, Rigo23, and Ken Worthy Discuss "Art in a Dissociated World" October 27

Art in a Dissociated World
Speakers: Harrell Fletcher, Rigo23, Ken Worthy

Series:
The New New Masses
Discussions About Art and Politics

Location
San Francisco Art Institute Café
800 Chestnut Street
San Francisco, CA 94133

October 27 at 7:00pm
free and open to the public

We are separated from the things we make. We are separated from the people who make the things we use. We are asked not to look at the world directly. We think this situation is untenable. We must confront reality and not deny the destruction and alienation that surrounds us.

Harrell Fletcher has worked collaboratively and individually on a variety of socially engaged interdisciplinary projects for over a decade. His work has been shown in the Bay Area at SFMOMA, the de Young Museum, Berkeley Art Museum, and Yerba Buena center for the Arts; in New York at the Drawing Center, Socrates Sculpture Park, the Sculpture Center, the Wrong Gallery, and Smackmellon; Signal, Malmo, Sweden; Domain de Kerguehennec, France; and the Royal College of Art, London. Fletcher is represented by Jack Hanley Gallery, SF/LA; Christine Burgin Gallery, NY; Laura Bartlett gallery, London; and Galerie In Situ, Paris. He was a participant in the 2004 Whitney biennial. In 2002 Fletcher began Learning To Love You More, a participatory web project with Miranda July. He is the 2005 recipient of the Alpert Award in Visual Arts. His current exhibition The American War originated in 2005 at ArtPace in San Antonio, TX, and is currently traveling throughout the US. Fletcher is a Professor of Art at Portland State University.

Rigo23’s most recent projects include the fifth installation of the nomadic institution, Tate Wikikuwa Museum, at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT, through February 2007; the caging of the four stone lions guarding the entrance to St. George’s Hall in the Liverpool Biennial 2006; and in 2005, the dedication of a twice life-size sculpture of Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the San Jose State University campus.

Ken Worthy is interested in the larger questions concerning the global environmental crisis: Is there anything more fundamental than economics or population? Why are modern modes of human/environment relations destructive on such a large scale? What particular historical, philosophical, and ethical factors contribute to the current crisis? In pursuit of such questions, Worthy has developed a theoretical framework based on the concept of dissociation, which helps to reveal the ways in which the material disconnections of modern life—of people from nature, from the processes of production that they rely upon, and from other people in the larger community—work to proliferate environmental and social harms. Dissociations, he asserts, undermine personal ethics and community politics. His interdisciplinary research in philosophy, anthropology, and psychology sheds light on the conceptual roots of material dissociations. Worthy received a PhD in Critical Environmental Theory at UC Berkeley in 2005.