Temple Contemporary
Tyler School of Art
Distinguished Alumni Mentoring Program exhibition
Curated by Sarah Biemiller
May 4–July 15, 2016

Hope Ginsburg
Breathing on Land: Bay of Fundy

Gallery Text
Notes on the Show:
Hope Ginsburg makes live work situated within or just at the edge of what can be considered everyday life. She uses a variety of strategies such as video, photographs and installation to represent these activities. For this exhibition, Ginsburg has produced a new video work and her largest video production to date, Land Dive Team: Bay of Fundy. In the piece, four scuba divers sit at the shore of the bay, which has the highest tidal rise on the planet, meditating as the tide flows in and continues to rise until they disappear beneath it. The Breath Portraits comprise a new series taken from video footage shot during the production of Land Dive Team: Bay of Fundy. The bubbles forming at the surface of the bay represent a single exhalation of a diver below. Every participant in an event of the Land Dive Team becomes a certified “Land Breather”, in a workshop involving an introduction to meditation and a brief scuba orientation followed by the project’s meditation with scuba equipment. A duplicate set of all certifications, earned by both participants and supporters, is on view in the exhibition. It’s an ongoing archive reflecting the diversity of sites where Land Dives have taken place since the project began in 2014 and honoring the generosity and commitment of the participants. The Sea Creature Library, also an evolving collection, was initiated through this Distinguished Alumni Mentorship Program. Since December of 2015, Misha Wyllie has been extracting images of marine invertebrates from two guides to marine invertebrates and cataloging their common and scientific names. These cutouts will be used in future drawings and projects.

Acknowledgements:
It has been an honor to participate in the Distinguished Alumni Mentoring Program and doing so on the twentieth anniversary of my graduation from Tyler has made the project especially meaningful. The advocacy, energy and insight with which this work was incubated at Temple Contemporary have been nothing short of extraordinary. Huge thanks to Sarah Biemiller, Adam Blumberg, Rob Blackson and the entire team at the gallery. I would also like to express my deep thanks to the Office of the Dean for supporting this exhibition so generously. The occasion of this show has been an opportunity to reflect on the stellar faculty and peers with whom I had the great fortune of working from 1992-1996 and my gratitude is enduring. Thanks go to fellow artist Misha Wyllie for her many contributions and congratulations too for the production of an alumna exhibition of her own. A special thank you goes to each and every participant in the Land Dive Team events that are at the core of this show. My husband Joshua Quarles gets credit not only for recording and composing the score for the video, but for his spot-on feedback, unwavering support and positivity. And finally, I must thank my parents Carol and Marvin Ginsburg for dispatching me to Tyler in the first place.

Press Release
Hope Ginsburg: Breathing on Land: Bay of Fundy
Misha Wyllie: Out to Lunch

May 4 – July 15, 2016
Opening Reception: Wednesday, May 4, 6:00 – 8:00 pm
Gallery Hours: Wednesday – Friday, 11:00 am – 5:00 pm
and by appointment

Tyler School of Art
2001. N 13th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19122

Tyler School of Art is pleased to announce the 2015/16 Distinguished Alumni Mentoring Program exhibition: Hope Ginsburg: Breathing on Land: Bay of Fundy and Misha Wyllie: Out to Lunch. This is the culminating exhibition of Tyler’s fourth annual Distinguished Alumni Mentoring Program. These exhibitions are the result of the work produced during a six-month mentorship between Hope Ginsburg (BFA ‘96) and the exceptional recent Tyler graduate, Misha Wyllie (MFA ‘14). The exhibition will open on May 4, 2016 with a reception from 6:00 – 8:00 pm and will continue until Friday, July 15, 2015.

The purpose of the Distinguished Alumni Mentoring Program, which is sponsored by the Office of the Dean at the Tyler School of Art, is to foster continuing relationships between Tyler’s distinguished alumni and its recent graduates. Tyler School of Art at Temple University is thrilled to see this vision come to fruition through these two exhibitions, Hope Ginsburg: Breathing on Land: Bay of Fundy and Misha Wyllie: Out to Lunch. As part of this internship program, Ginsburg delivered a lecture in 2015 at Temple Contemporary in which she spoke about her work and its inspirations. Subsequently, Ginsburg and Wyllie’s work together over the past year, has included trading studio visits, attending Mildred’s Lane for an experimental artist’s project and residency, assisting and producing two projects: the workshop, Land Dive Team: Future Pond Site, Mildred’s Lane, and the exhibition Land Dive Team at the Complex(ity) Project Space in Narrowsburg, NY, and the development of an exploratory project of Ginsburg’s, which she is calling Sea Creature Library.

Hope Ginsburg’s Breathing on Land is a recent body of work that takes meditation with scuba gear as a starting point to refocus attention on our bodies, their contexts and implicitly the health of our atmosphere. The practice of breathing on land with scuba gear makes for a kind of assisted meditation – the mild, if not moderate, discomfort of the equipment keeps the wearer in mind of his or her physical presence. For this exhibition, Ginsburg has produced Land Dive Team: Bay of Fundy, a single channel video projection with sound, which is her largest video production to date. Ginsburg situated this Land Dive on the shore of the Bay of Fundy, a body of water that has the highest tidal rise on the planet. Waters at the head of the bay in the Minas Basin inlet can rise and fall up to fifty feet twice a day. To orchestrate this Land Dive, Ginsburg worked with dive shops in Richmond, VA and Lincoln, New Brunswick Canada, as well as with two Dive masters, three advanced divers and a production team. On a cold October day, Ginsburg and three participating divers sat in meditation on a rocky beach as the tide flowed in with the fits and starts of incoming waves, and rose over their heads until their bodies were completely submerged. An audio score, composed by Joshua Quarles, captures the change in the sound of their breaths as they shifted from the hiss of breathing on land to the gurgle of breathing under water. Also included in the exhibit is a series of 7 Breath Portraits, taken from video footage shot during the production of Land Dive Team: Bay of Fundy. Each image depicts bubbles forming at the surface of the bay and represents a single exhalation of a diver, who, overtaken by the rising Fundy tide, continues to breathe below.

The production of Land Dive Team: Bay of Fundy has been jointly supported by the Temple Contemporary Distinguished Alumni Mentorship Program and by Mass MoCA for the exhibition, “Explode Every Day: An Inquiry into the Phenomena of Wonder” at Mass MoCA, which will open on Saturday, May 28th, 2016.

Misha Wyllie’s Out to Lunch is a new body of work that employs the aesthetics of institutions in order to see their impact on what and why we learn. Through education, we acquire knowledge and skills in order to use them for another purpose. How do we decide what that purpose is, and how does this purpose shape the process of learning itself? Out to Lunch seeks to address these questions by treating institutional strategies for managing knowledge as a skill-set to be learned and used in art making. A series of works on paper that repurpose dictionaries and bureaucratic documents employ strategies for organizing information in order to understand the systems that organize knowledge for us. Accompanying this work is an installation of fragments from the interior spaces of learning institutions, directing the attention to the simultaneous, yet discordant, experiences that happen at once in these institutions.

Graduating from the Tyler School of Art with a BFA in 1996, Hope Ginsburg makes live work situated within or just at the edge of what can be considered everyday life. She uses a variety of strategies such as video, photographs, installation and object making to represent these activities. Ginsburg has exhibited nationally and internationally at venues such as MoMA PS1, Kunst-Werke Berlin, Contemporary Art Center Vilnius, Wexner Center for the Arts, Baltimore Museum of Art and SculptureCenter. In 2010, her Sponge HQ project space, classroom and workshop opened at the Anderson Gallery at Virginia Commonwealth University, where was sited through 2015. A 2011 Art Matters Grant enabled her to learn to scuba dive so that she could finally see living sponges in their reef habitats. Ginsburg’s 2013 project for the 9th Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil took inspiration from that investigation. In 2014, at a Rauschenberg Residency in Captiva, Florida, she began her newest body of work entitled “Breathing on Land”. In 2015, Ginsburg presented these projects at the Creative Time Summit at both the Venice Biennale and at Boys and Girls High School in Brooklyn, NY. She has recently celebrated the fifth anniversary of the Sponge HQ with a portfolio designed for a book about the Anderson Gallery, to be published in April 2016. Hope Ginsburg is an Associate Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts. She lives and works in Richmond, VA.

Misha Wyllie’s drawings, sculptures, animations, and projects question the way aesthetics shape relationships between people and knowledge. Often with sense of absurdity and playfulness, Wylie’s work reinterprets familiar objects and images produced by culture under late capitalism in order to critically engage that culture. Recent projects have explored the social-psychology produced by minimalist design, science fiction narratives as a context for reimagining our relationship with commodity culture, and abstracting advertising to explore the way they manage excess and desire. Wylie earned a BA in Liberal Arts at the New College of Florida in 2010, and an MFA at Tyler School of Art, Temple University in 2014. Her projects have been exhibited in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Sarasota, Atlanta and internationally.

With this exhibition the Distinguished Alumni Mentoring Program will see its fourth year of success. The first Distinguished Alumni mentor was The Heads of State (Jason Kernevich, BFA Graphic Design ‘01 and Dustin Summers, BFA Graphic Design ‘01), who oversaw an internship with Woody Harrington (BFA Graphic and Interactive Design ’12). Our second iteration was shared by Polly Apfelbaum (BFA Printmaking, ‘78) and Dan Cole (BFA Painting ‘10) and the third iteration included Paula Scher (BFA Graphic Design ’70) and Keith Hartwig (BArch Architecture ’11).

The Tyler School of Art educates, motivates and inspires individuals who will enter society as artists, architects, art historians, designers and educators with the highest aspirations for achievement, producing innovative work that is publicly presented and critically considered. Founded upon the ideals of progressive education emphasizing exposure to a variety of experiences the objective of the Tyler School of Art is to create an engaging and critical environment.