AUTOTRANSLATION
AUTOTRANSLATION | Yana Dimitrova & Annesofie Sandal
March 2 - 12, 2017
266 West 37th Street
New York, NY
(between 7th and 8th ave.)
Nearest Trains: A, C, E, 1, 2, 3
On view 24/7, through storefront window.
Please note: the gate will be down (i.e. the exhibit will not be viewable), on nights when the temperature falls below freezing.
Opening Reception: Thursday, March 2, 6-9pm
Closing Reception & Performance: Saturday, March 11, 3-6pm
N.B: The performance by Amelie Gaulier-Brody was cancelled due to the weather.
Open Hours:
Friday, March 3rd, 12-6pm
Saturday, March 4th, 12-6pm
Sunday, March 5th, 12-6pm
Other hours/days available by appointment, contact: yana@yanadimitrova.com
Autotranslation happens when words, shapes, and meanings are exchanged between people, places, and cultures. It is a dialogue between two friends, two immigrant women, who while observing and traversing spaces, while collecting bits and pieces of information, develop and map a new kind of fictional place.
This presentation is a chronicle of Yana and Annesofie, their appropriation of spaces and their re-constructed memories.
Yana Dimitrova is interested in various social systems and the precise role of images and their production within those. Her work aims to construct a deceptive space where the hidden lack of participation, or the direct use of participation, create tension between the viewer, the process, and the image, while questioning the proposed values of everyday. Her most recent works consist of paintings, drawings, and embroidery employing various forms of actions: analyzing public space, surfing digital mapping tools, conducting questionnaires. She uses these techniques to identify how images can serve as a tool for the production of common space.
Annesofie Sandal works with modification of inexpensive and discarded materials in site specific installations and objects. She is interested in how cultural and social hierarchies are exposed through the handling of waste and addresses her own conflicts with cultural production through working with used cardboard only. This allows her to distort the aesthetics of status and value and indirectly talk about social class and hyper-consumerism. She looks to create work in which multiple sources of identity, culture, memory and emotion reminds us of being connected to history, society and each other.
Through their collaborative installation integrating paintings and objects, the artists offer a dialogue between their observations and spaces they both have traversed. Their works are adapted and developed into maps of fictional places that question what is real and what is imagined and how the value and meaning of objects and images change from one place to another. Yana and Annesofie wonder whether a temporary space can exist permanently and what might get lost in the translations of emotion and the recollections of the mind.
More About the Artists
Yana Dimitrova is a Brooklyn-based artist, working in painting, embroidery, performance and Installation. Formally trained in both Bulgaria and the U.S. Yana received her MFA in Painting and Printmaking at the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2009. Her practice raises social and ideological questions focused primarily on concepts of space - physical and conceptual, as they best relate to the human condition. Her most recent exhibits have taken place at The Rockefeller Brothers Fund in New York, Walke (Brussels, Belgium), OAZO (Amsterdam,The Netherlands), Gallery Twenty-Four (Berlin,Germany), NXNW (Manchester, UK), Sofia City Gallery Museum and Credo Bonum (Sofia, Bulgaria) amongst others. Dimitrova currently is a lecturer at Parsons The New School for Design and the New School for Public Engagement in New York City.
Annesofie Sandal is a Korean born, Danish adoptee who lives and works in New York and Copenhagen. She holds an MFA from The Royal Danish Academy of Visual Arts in Copenhagen, from where she graduated in 2005. In 2007, she founded the exhibition group Island Life together with Charlotte B. Johansen, Christina Hamre and Nanna Starck with whom she still collaborates. Inbetween solo projects, she organizes group shows with a roster of international artists. More info can be found on Sandaleum.org.
