An Evening with Short Stories

Join Guest Curator Isla Leaver-Yap along with exhibiting artists Iman Issa and Ben Schumacher in discussion of their work in the exhibition Short Stories. Open to the public.

Iman Issa (born Cairo, 1979, based in New York) works with photography, video, sound, objects, and texts, to reconstruct images of personal places and explore collective memory. Her practice asks if place might be independent of history, and questions how the frame of the image informs our understanding of context.

For Short Stories, Issa has developed a new body of work that uses the form of the book as its starting point, and foregrounds the movement between reading and viewing art work. Written by the artist, the book Thirty Three Stories About Reasonable Characters in Familiar Places (2011) comprises a series of vignettes that examine events occurring in highly specific sites. The book is presented in the space.

Behind this reading area sits a room of 'missing details' multi-part installation comprising videos, sculptures and photographs. These works abstract Issarios in material form, where missing details from the book are reformed as partial objects. Together, these individual pieces construct an imaginary setting that is neither language nor form, but a liminal and associative threshold on the verge of becoming place.

Location, reproduction, and distribution are central to Ben Schumacher's practice. Schumacher (Kitchener, Canada, 1985) creates images and installations that conceptualize and present art, both in-situ and online. His work is engaged in the collapse between object and image, as well as the discrepancies that might occur as one state is transferred to another. Schumacher uses images and objects culled from seemingly inconsequential online sources and order-on-demand readymades: an archive of unattributed signatures gathered from expired online receipts, customized car accessories rendered alien by their lack of context, Google Sketchup's virtual models rendered as physical objects through the process of 3D rapid scanning.

For Short Stories, Schumacher has created a new installation that draws attention to discrepancies between surface and substance, image and object. The dispersion and circulation of images is presented here as an uneasy surrogate or doppelganger of the gallery-based object, where both image and object present visual fictions of one another, thus exposing the true fiction of the original's

After the exhibition's run, Schumacher will present customized documentation of his project in the Short StoriesReading Room.

The Reading Room features reading material selected by the artists. Using the word ive term, rather a merely than a descriptive one, artists will read extracts aloud in the space. These readings will be recorded and added to the Reading Room throughout the run of Short Stories. The Reading Room is configured in collaboration with Angie Keefer. The Reading Room also features works by artists Sarah Chacich, Matt Keegan, and Rita Sobral Campos that each examine the act of reading or being read. Additional material selected by all the Short Stories artists will also be on display.