Closing & Performances for Psychical Research

Psychical Research  Works by Cindy Rehm

Elephant 3325 Division Street Los Angeles, CA 90065 

Closing reception & performances: Sunday, March 29th, 5-9pm with performances by Rebecca Bruno, Chelsea Rector, and Cindy Rehm

Rebecca Bruno will perform a b y s s, an embodied installation developed through attempts to imbed her body into the architecture while in a state of private inquiry. Bruno will perform for the duration of the closing from 5-9pm.

 Cindy Rehm will perform her new work, Phenomena of Materialisation inspired by the text of the same name that documents séances by the medium Eva C in the early 1900s. The book includes detailed accounts of the medium’s gestures, vocalizations, and materializations. Rehm will perform at 7:30pm.

Chelsea Rector will make haunted sounds through her eerie blend of vocals and synth tones. Rector will perform at 8pm.

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Psychical Research

Possession and the séance experience, therefore, bore witness not to the emergence of particular sexual drives or needs as in the binary model of sexual difference, but rather to the discourse of the polymorphous, paradoxical, deviant, erratic, eccentric, even scandalous nature of desire—and its enactment. The materialisation séance, like a theatrical or fantasized scene, established the conventions which made possible the staging of desire.

                                      —Alex Owen, The Darkened Room       

Cindy Rehm’s exhibition, Psychical Research, features a series of collage drawings and video inspired by Victorian mediumship and the book Phenomena of Materialization. The text documents séances between 1909 and 1914 featuring the medium Eva C., and includes reports of sittings, maps of the séance room and detailed accounts of the medium’s gestures, utterances, and materializations. Like women stricken with hysteria, the mediums of the early 20th century fell into trances and challenged conventions of proper feminine conduct through a wide variety of erratic behavior including bodily contortions, spontaneous vocalization, automatic writing, channeling sprits, and the production of ectoplasmic forms.

 Rehm looks to the liminal space of the trance as a rich site for the creation and vocalization of potent female narratives. She blends fragmented found images of the body and natural forms to reflect on the expansiveness of female experience, spirituality, and desire. In her video Double Thread two young women engage in an imagined preparation for a séance. The women enact quiet rituals as they interact with mysterious materials that mimic the white gauzy substance known as ectoplasm. The looping video speaks to the intimate bonds between women and to the ceaseless generative potential of their performing bodies.

 The exhibition will close on Sunday, March 29th with performances by Rebecca Bruno, Cindy Rehm, and Chelsea Rector. The closing will run from 5-9pm with performances commencing at 7:30pm.

 

Poster Featured in Art in America

My poster for the Gallery Tally Project was featured in the December issue of Art in America in an article written by Andrea Bowers.

The Unconsummated Act

New works by Cindy Rehm

Winslow Garage
3540 Winslow Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90026

September 19-October 10

Opening Friday, September 19, 7-9pm

Unleashed and raging, she belongs to the race of waves. She arises, she approaches, she lifts up, she reaches, covers over, washes a shore, flows embracing the cliffs least undulation, already she is another, arising again, throwing the fringed vastness of her body up high…

                                                                        Hélène Cixous, The Newly Born Woman

For her first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, Rehm has taken the title of a cryptic and sparsely documented work that dancer Hélène Vanel performed at the opening of the 1938 International Exhibition of Surrealism. While details vary, all accounts describe the work as an erotically charged hysterical fit performed on disheveled beds beneath Duchamp’s coal sack covered ceiling. The evocative photographs of Vanel’s performance served as the symbolic inspiration for Rehm’s new series of drawings that continue her exploration into the complex relationship between the female body, representation, and myth.

 While The Unconsummated Act has been noted as the first surrealist dance, Vanel has been nearly erased from history and multiple sources report that she perished in a concentration camp. In fact, she lived into her eighties and in later life penned a memoir of her rich life in the avant garde of Paris and London.

The exhibition is accompanied by an artist pamphlet featuring a collage by Rehm and a text by Sara Fowler.

Videotag

THINHSTUDIO PRESENTS - VIDEOTAG 

Opening: Saturday, September 6 2014, from 6 – 10 pm 
Exhibition: September 6 -13 2014 by appointment 
Location: 13709 Cordary Ave. #14, Hawthorne CA 90250

Only on the opening night September 6 from 6-10 PM thinhstudio inaugurates – Videotag event – where the entire facade of the industrial complex will be "tagged" with video projections. The event is a convergent between public art, graffiti art, and video art curated by Thinh Nguyen showcasing a group of international artists including, Michele Beck, Tom Blanchard, Jorge Calvo, McLean Fahnestock, Mathiew Greenfield, Zoe Gruni, Jenny Herrick, Michael Powell, David Prince, Cindy Rehm, Enid Baxter Ryce, Yoshie Sakai, Christine Wang, and Kim Ye.

Margin Release Right

My poster will be included in the show Margin Release Right as part of Micol Hebron's  collaborative initiative (en)Gendered (in)Equity: The Gallery Poster Project

Curated by Kio Griffith

WEST LOS ANGELES COLLEGE ART GALLERY

9000 Overland Ave. Culver City, CA 90230

http://wlacgallery.org/

CLOSING RECEPTION: November 7, 2013 7-10pm

See a gallery of the posters here.

VOLLEY

Four weeks of artist talks, screenings, and performances ...and some ping-pong in between

Screening of Mady Schutzman's Dear Comrade with research on Llano Del Rio presented by Craftswoman House & Hinterculture

Thursday, November 7, 7pm

Greene Gallery, 2654 La Cienega Ave, Los Angeles, California 90034

 Written and directed by CalArts faculty member Mady Schutzman, Dear Comrade is an experimental essay film that documents the story of Llano del Rio (1914-18), the most important non-religious communitarian experiment in western American history. Llano is offered as a site to explore the struggles, courage, frustrations, fantasies, and Sisyphean efforts of innumerable idealists who have assumed comparable struggles in spite of tremendous odds. The story is told through archival footage, surreal re-enactments, interviews with ex-colonists, local residents and historians, and the meanderings of a silent nomad through the ruins of the Llano colony in the Mojave Desert. Through the intersection of stories, a seemingly traditional documentary morphs into a montage of parallel universes, political commentary, clownery, and a palpable desire—failings and disappointments notwithstanding—to give idealism and cooperation another try. Karyl Newman and Cindy Rehm will present their research on the colony and join the filmmaker in a question and answer segment following the screening. 

Secret Book

On Saturday, October 12th, I will present my new performance Secret Book at Mains D'oeuvres in Saint-Ouen, France in conjunction with Alexandra Grant’s Forêt Intérieure/Interior Forest. Secret Book reflects reoccurring themes drawn from Hélène Cixous’ Philippines, including telepathy, doubling, and the relationship between dream-life and the limitless imagination of childhood. I will transverse the space using the professed secret books of Hélène Cixous and Alexandra Grant, while enacting a private ritual that explores transference between the interior and exterior body through quiet meditations and symbolic gestures. 

Haunted

October 5-25

Opening reception, Saturday October 5, 6-9pm

Cultural Alliance of Long Beach
Bungalow Art Center
727 Pine Avenue. Long Beach, 90813

Featuring works by: Evah Hart, Tina Linville, Annelie McKenzie, Mary Anna Pomonis, and Cindy Rehm

Performances by: Ali Kheradyar, Chelsea Rector, and Semi-Tropic Spiritualists 

Video Screening with works by: Ursula Brookbank, Min Choi, Anne Colvin, Micol Hebron, Nina Lassila, Elizabeth Leister, Shana Robbins and Alberto Roman, Simone Stoll, Tracy Abbott Szatan and Marisa Williamson.

For the month of October, Craftswoman House Temporary Residence partners with Long Beach Riot Grrrl to present an exhibition and series of events at the Cultural Alliance of Long Beach. The exhibition Haunted will open on Saturday, October 5, from 6-9pm. The opening event will include a series of performance works and a video screening. The show closes on Friday, October 25 with a LB Riot Grrrl Show from 6pm-Midnight.

Throughout history, creative works by women have often been devalued, dismissed, and even buried. While women’s contributions to art and culture have been more visible in recent years, blind spots still exist. Feminist art of the 1970s serves as a profound antecedent to contemporary art, but rich bodies of feminist work are barely acknowledged in discussions on current art practices including relational aesthetics and the prevalent use of informal and domestic materials. The artists in Haunted explore the hollows of history, to wake ghosts and channel hidden voices. These artists express a fluid exchange between the body and memory through a focus on tactile experience, manifestations of the repressed female body, and an emphasis on process as a means to capture the immaterial.

for more information and a full list of events:
http://tempresidence.blogspot.com/2013/09/haunted_9.html