Cyprien Gaillard

Cities of Gold and Mirrors

October 27 - December 5

Film and Video Gallery

French-born, Berlin-based artist Cyprien Gaillard’s wide-reaching practice includes sculpture, painting, photography, video, performance, and large-scale public interventions. Inaugurating Arthouse’s Film and Video Gallery is Gaillard’s Cities of Gold and Mirrors (2009), a non-narrative 16 mm film that continues the artist’s investigation into built environments as sites of memory and loss, particularly as manifested in decaying postwar Modernist architecture. Cancún, Mexico provides the backdrop for the film and its anachronistic landscape of glass-veiled hotels adjacent to Mayan ruins binds the film. In five different chapters, the juxtaposition of modern hedonisms against the physical ruins of the once-mighty Mayan Empire creates an atmosphere of displacement and apprehension.

Mequitta Ahuja

Automythography II

October 27 - January 2

Mary Yancy Gallery (1st Floor)

Automythography II continues Mequitta Ahuja’s on-going artistic investigation into the construction of gender, cultural, and ethnic identities through self-portraiture. Referencing the term “biomythography” coined by black feminist author Audre Lorde, Ahuja combines history, myth, and personal narrative to create her own unique practice of visual autobiography. Beginning with private performances in front of the camera, Ahuja photographically documents herself using a remote shutter control. Then, through preparatory drawing as well as a lengthy process of making and revising marks and images made directly onto the canvas or paper, she develops the invented elements of the work. For this exhibition, the artist appears in multiple iterations and pictorial approaches within an imaginary, self-constructed world where figural forms and landscapes collide and intertwine.