Burning Books, Theater Grottesco, and Axle Contemporary

SURVEY / Santa Fe For Art's Sake

 

June 17-26,  2022

BROADSIDE exhibition at Axle Contemporary Mobile Artspace

Theater Grottesco performances at CURRENTS and other Santa Fe places. (more info here)

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Santa Fe For Art's Sake

Santa Fe For Art’s Sake treats the “survey” as a new art form for generating experimental theater and visual art. Bouncing between the absurd and the suddenly profound, questions and answers address topics relevant to the arts and culture of Santa Fe, New Mexico, while engaging nationally and internationally with generous respondents. The exhibition and accompanying book are distillations of the “greatest hits” from the (unedited) survey responses, as well as some pertinent background information with, hopefully, a few entertaining facets of today’s inscrutable world. Book available at Axle and online here.

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SURVEY

Theater Grottesco, explores themes of Art Meets History through the lens of physical theatre. Burning Books, Axle Contemporary and Theater Grottesco have collaborated on an absurdist vision of surveys, social media’s iconic contemporary information gathering tool. Laced with New Mexican history, Theater Grottesco will turn the questions and answers over to its post-modern Greek chorus for a biting physical performance. 

Rica Maestas

We Protect Each Other

 

July 1-3, 2022

Axle Contemporary Mobile Artspace

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WE PROTECT EACH OTHER is a presentation of Maestas’ YUCCA, a surreal entity she has been developing for the past year.

Through photo and video performance documentation Maestas invites us to collectively manifest a kinder future through offerings.

 

Through video and large images on the exterior of Axle’s Mobile Artspace, the artist invites the audience to engage, connect, and make offerings of their own.

Karl Whittaker and international printmakers

Ambos Lados, Tortilla Press printmaking

 

July 10-24, 2022

Axle Contemporary Mobile Artspace

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For the past several years, arts organizer Karl Whittaker has been working with groups of artists in New Mexico, El Paso, Texas; and in Ciudad Juarez, Guadalajara, and Oaxaca, Mexico on a series of international print exchanges and exhibitions.  Axle is pleased to present prints from this series. We will also host Karl and collaborators for a live printmaking session using a modified tortilla press to create prints from linocuts. His press was made by the Tres Gatos group, collaborators from Guadalajara.

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On Sunday, July 10, Axle will also be making fresh tortillas, embossed with a linocut process, cooked and served warm on site.

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The exhibition and demonstration are part of Tim Jag's PRINTED MATTER printmaking fair taking place in the Santa Fe Railyard on July 10, from 10 am-4pm, involving many local printmakers showing, selling, and demonstrating myriad printmaking processes in use today.

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Jason Garcia and Vicente Telles

And She Dances...

 

July 29 - August 22, 2022

Axle Contemporary Mobile Artspace

 

Artists Jason Garcia and Vicente Telles met while both participating in Axle’s 2015 “Slices of Wonder” exhibition. Since that time, the two have become fast friends. For the past two years, they have been working together both on works that parallel each other and works that they are creating collaboratively. Their comic book inspired works invoke the traditional artworks of their cultures (Pueblo and Hispanic), and explore shared meanings and overlapping traditions and values. The exhibition in the Axle Contemporary Mobile Artspace will open during the Spanish Market weekend and run through the Indian Market weekend.

Axle Contemporary

E Pluribus Unum: El Norte

 

August 26 - October 23, 2022

Axle Contemporary Mobile Artspace

 

This will be the fifth in our ongoing series of E Pluribus Unum projects throughout New Mexico. We plan to visit communities spread across the northern part of the state: Los Alamos, Santa Clara/Kapo Pogeh, Espanola, Okay Owingeh, Pojoaque, Cimarron, Raton, Clayton, Chimayo, Truchas, Penasco, Questa, Costilla, Taos, Dixon, Roy/Mosquero, Tucumcari, Las Vegas, Mora, Abiquiu, Chama, Dulce, and Tierra Amarilla.

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Participation is free to all. Participants bring a small object of personal significance, and enter the mobile studio and sit for a black and white photo portrait while holding the object. The objects brought are as diverse as the participants.

 

Two copies of each portrait are immediately printed with the gallery’s solar-powered printer. One is given to the participant, another is pasted to the exterior of the vehicle, creating a mobile and growing exhibition throughout the span of each regional project.  At the close of each project Axle Contemporary Press publishes a book containing all of the portraits, and one image on the cover blending all off the hundreds of portraits into one face, representing the entirety of the community of participants. After each project the portraits are also exhibited in regional exhibitions.

Sally Blakemore and Andrea Cypress

incognito: discovering Her

 

October 28 - November 20, 2022

Axle Contemporary Mobile Artspace

 

This installation is composed of selections from thousands of photographs taken by an anonymous woman in Arizona. The trove of images was found in a yard sale. The artists have selected images and recreated a story about the individual and the culture at large.

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The installation is a tribute to an anonymous life, recorded in snap shot documentation. Her fascination with the medium intrigued her for her entire life. The motivation to become a photographer, most likely came from Kodak marketing in America during the 40s,50s, 60s. She would moist likely not consider herself a photographer, but each photograph was valued, saved, trimmed and stored in tidy albums. If the medium is the message, then in this case, self-identity found in these printed images, become the evidence that she lived.

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