This Fall the Goethe Pop Up is partnering once more with Seattle-based German artist and gallerist Anna Mlasowsky to present the Pop Up Fall Showcase at
Das Schaufenster as a Covid-safe way to experience new art in our city.
An artist-run experimental window space working to bring interesting, joyful, and thought-provoking art to the Ballard neighborhood, Das Schaufenster is mounting an ambitious, international Fall program, consisting of four successive monthly exhibitions.
These solo exhibitions showcase artists from different national and cultural backgrounds, to highlight their practice. Each artist will bring their individual experiences, culture, and understanding of their place in the world to the space.
About the artist in October:
Stefan Leandro Gonzales is an indigenous (Prio / Manso / Tiwa), trans/non-binary individual. Stefans practice centers around decolonizing Art and its institutions. This effort is backed by being an arts educator, set out to leverage radical pedagogy as a tool of decolonization. Stefan received an undergraduate degree from Cornish College of the Arts and an MFA in Photomedia from the University of Washington. In 2020 Stefan received the de Cillia Teaching with Excellence Award. For the exhibition at Das Schaufenster, Stefan Leandro Gonzales will revisit their work and create a new piece.
About the work on display in October:
Trans-Earth Objects
Stefan Leandro Gonzales
"The politics of my work is in constant flux. Maybe this is because my own identity is in a constant flux or maybe it is because the rapid movement of information today keeps one in a constant state of questioning. My primary investigation for the last several years has gyrated between decolonizing and feminizing the aesthetics of 60s–70s land art/earthworks. As much as I appreciate the mythological imprint of works such as
Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson or Michael Heizer’s
Double Negative, I could not let go of the fact that there was something missing. They were talking about big, open, free, desolate, absent of people, geological locations, but what about the land that
Spiral Jetty sat on. Who occupied that land first? Had that land been 'empty' in the past? The myth-building of these artists required no such acknowledgment. This is what the indigenous individual inside of me had to say. How could someone make land art but leave it free of the history of the people who occupied that land, to begin with? I can trace my blood through photocopied tribal cards and family trees. I am Prio / Manso / Tiwa, a collage of colonization. Ideally, my work is displayed in a domesticated space, leaving some objects only one or two steps away from their original home. An awkward stance where the objects now dominate the space, they take it over and render it unusable based on its original use. Something happens in this exchange from domesticated objects to art object. A near-complete separation at its handoff from home to gallery. In the gallery, my objects are a medium to be used in the field of minimalism. When they are at home, they may be paperweights, door stops blankets for a guest, fire pits, art, ashtrays, greenhouses, furniture, and so on. When they are in a gallery, they are being exhibited. They are an object used to perform the roles of minimalism. Decisions are made on their structure, color, weight, reflexivity, mass, and how those various qualities interact with each other." (Stefan Leandro Gonzales)
Save the date: Stefan Leandro Gonzales will speak about their work on @das.schaufenster’s Instagram live on Tuesday, November 9, at 10am PT!
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