Curated by Lara Pan
Organized by Juan Puntes
May 3 – 12, 2019

 
As our entry into FRIEZE Art Fair’ VIP program “In The City”, WhiteBox Harlem will host Lara Pan’s curatorial Differing Facets In Our Distinct Future by three succinct installation artists: Michelle Jaffe, Arnaldo Morales, and Charles Juhasz-Alvarado, with WhiteBox’s guest Edwin Torres films in the lower level Project Space. Their audience-interactive works thematize, viewed through each particular ‘visual lens’, aspects of contemporary social modes of subjugation to surreptitious, seductive consumer economies of desire morphing into utter confusion and discomfort, wisely filtered through their various analytical approaches including the psycho-aesthetic, environmental and the socio-political offerings as foils or meditations upon the postmodern individual’s confusing, tumultuous existentialist present. Beauty, always, the binding element.
 
 
Michelle Jaffe SOUL JUNK immerses its audience in a 3-channel audio / video installation that explores raw emotions, power & intent conveyed & betrayed by the human voice & facial expression. In the age of the selfie, Soul Junk places people inside a mind at work. Soul Junk juxtaposes emotionally raw insights and confessions about family trauma, love and loss with observations about the cocksure attitudes of those in power. Narcissistic & patriarchal behavior is probed, exposing the political, economic & ethical landscape of our time, where decisions by power brokers in government or corporations prevail at the expense of individuals, families, & communities.

Arnaldo Morales Blue-Power No. 19, 2019, Industrial Materials. This work is an outsized variation on a developing series, “Blue Power” an installation about the relationship between law enforcement and its citizens. Blue-Power No.19 focuses on the police baton, and the ubiquity of violence in the U.S.: how those hired to “protect and serve” are instead trained to strike, rather than mediate. The baton is an instrument of their power, serving to keep order through fear. And so we have to ask: “protect and serve—Who?”

Charles Juhasz-Alvarado Cantos en Madera, 2017 Tropical Hardwood, Stainless Steel, and Hardware. Part of a growing collection of unique sound pieces, Juhasz-Alvarado started the investigation on sound as part of the shoeshine project which he have been developing as a nomad artist.
For Waiting for the Garden of Eden, I concocted several ‘frictions’ based on the sound making possibilities influenced by an Audubon ‘birdcall-sound-decoy’ model in which the turning of a metal stub inside a softwood orifice produces a bird-like chirp. Eventually, following my interest on the wonders of this medium, I developed several trinkets doing away with the metal part, instead of producing the bird chants/cantos, rubbing wood on wood. Since then, I have been combining tropical hardwoods to produce unique bird sounds through friction as an ongoing study/inventory on an archive of the acoustic properties of these woods perennially thinking of ways to group them into distinct sound artworks. Specifically, for the piece titled “Cantos en Madera“: (Here lies Juan, Here lies Miguel, Here lies Milagros, Here lies Olga, Here lies Manuel)”, I grouped fifteen of these combinations into a quintet tree-like sculpture that references the sentences cried out by Pedro Pietri on his mordant poem “Puerto Rican Obituary”. The inspiration and lead for this reference came from Raul Zamudio and Juan Puntes’ curatorial invitation to participate in the exhibition titled Waiting for the Garden -Homage to Pietri and East Harlem. Lately, I have furthered my research via a series of collaborations with musicians using the ‘Cantos‘ as instruments for sound pieces. The term “cantos” is a play of both meanings in Spanish: chunks/edges (of wood) and songs/airs (of wood).