Find CalArtians in Analog Currency at The Mistake Room

‘Analog Currency’ at The Mistake Room includes Martine Syms’ ‘Reading Trayvon Martin,’ 2012, Website. (Image: Courtesy of the artist and Bridget Donahue, New York )

Analog Currency, a group art exhibition currently on view at Downtown Los Angeles’  The Mistake Room, includes works by CalArts’ School of Art faculty member Martine Syms and alum Michael Mandiberg (Art MFA 03). The show, which opened on July 8, closes this Saturday (Aug. 26).

The exhibition is centered around the radical shifts transpiring with the advent of digital technology and more specifically, the Internet. The Mistake Room notes:

These innovations that allowed for instantaneous global communication and access to seemingly boundless data also facilitated the capitalization of information itself—making it the currency of a new knowledge-economy that would eventually come to re-structure the economic, geopolitical, and social dimensions of our world.

Syms piece Reading Trayvon Martin is an ongoing project and website cataloging and bookmarking the articles, essays and primary documents relating to the fatal shooting of 17-year-old African American Trayvon Martin at the hands of George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer who was ultimately acquitted of murder. Another aspect of the project includes public readings in which Syms explores the role of the reader as a political activist.

Mandiberg’s contribution to the show includes excerpts from his project, FDIC Insured, an archive of abandoned logos from failed banks. The 527 logos are individually inscribed into the covers of financial guidebooks, with titles such as Total Money Makeover, Investing by the Stars and Nothing Down: How to Buy Real Estate with Little or No Money Down. The project was inspired by the 2008 financial crisis and is also ongoing.

Other artists featured in exhibition include Sophia Al Maria, John Houck, Miguel Monroy, Pratchaya Phinthong, Tabita Rezaire, Jimena Sarno and Daniel Schwarz.

The Mistake Room, a nonprofit gallery, opened in 2014 as a space for international exhibitions and interdisciplinary work. Analog Currency was curated by Assistant Curator Hanna Girma.

A post shared by The Mistake Room (TMR) (@themistakeroom) on Jul 22, 2017 at 12:57pm PDT