PROJECTS

KATHRYN BARULICH

Fore-word to Issue 2. 

CLARISSA CHOY

Even though we perform different versions of ourselves in different spaces, the identity uploaded onto the internet can become inflexible. The right to be forgotten online cannot extend to the world offline...

ALEX CRUSE

Cruse’s video essay combines sourced and computer generated material in order to examine the shipping container within a global and capitalist framework.  In what way is a shipping container, a ubiquitous and nondescript object used in the transfer of consumer goods, also an integral part of shadow capital, insourcing and outsourcing, as well a receptacle and conduit of information?

SIMÓN GARCÍA-MIÑAÚR

This performance of the “unconvincing female” opens a space for the queer imagery . . . Herein lies the failure to perform and the birth of another kind of performance, one that happens everyday on the stage of ordinary life.

MATT GOLDBERG with CHRISTOPHER SQUIER

Editor Christopher Squier interviews Matt Goldberg about his new drop-in ceramic classes at SOMArts Cultural Center. Goldberg is a graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute (MFA 2015) and the University of Colorado, Boulder (BA 2012). He received the Recology Artist Residency (2014-15) and the Palo Alto Art Center’s “45 Days of Clay” Residency (2016). His ceramic and assemblage sculptures remix American pop cultural icons through a comic, cut-and-paste aesthetic.

HADAR KLEIMAN

Hadar Kleiman takes on the symbolic and historical weight of the diamond, offering unwieldy wooden diamonds on a grand scale that parody the advertising pretenses surrounding engagement and marriage ceremonies. 

SAI LI

Li’s dream comics give form to the immaterial and irrational situations experienced while sleeping. “This is a conversational and confessional collaboration with my other self,” she writes. “It is a ritual of glorifying my mundane frustrations, deeply hidden fears and desires.”

CHRISTOPHER SQUIER

Clark Ashton Smith and the Lovecraft Circle’s stories of the grotesque updated horror for a modern age in which superstitions had been overturned by science. Smith’s carvings established new nightmares and unconscious terrors, communicating the modern anxiety of a shared set of American writers in the early 20th century.

SANIYA TALHOUK

For Lack of a Better Word ruminates on what it means to use a surface that was already used because one feels so strongly the compulsion to put something down, lest one forgets it. How does one face the possibility of erasure and leave a memento of one’s impermanence behind – pulled from the (im)material remains of what was once already there?

ZULFIKAR ALI BHUTTO

Thank you for clicking on the link to this visual and written piece. Let us now begin.

NA CHAINKUA REINDORF

Reindorf's immersive installation project, Reveal||Conceal, introduces a less familiar art of the West African masquerade and functions as a contemporary strategy to undermine the unobstructed male gaze, while attempting to redistribute power structures that surround body ownership and policing. This project combines themes of feminism, cultural exploration, the public/private and the mystification of the observed body.

JACKIE VALLE

What does it mean to engage the body’s avisual senses to tap into registers of knowledge missed by sight? How does smell, as a sense inherently complex, intimate, and uncontainable, work through a more tactile logic than sight?

JOSEPH DWYER

Often noted for their visual spectacles of sexual and violent excess, the films of Park Chan-wook present reoccurring themes manifested through the body. From his early work Sympathy for Mr Vengeance to his latest film The Handmaiden, haptic forms of communication offer a different perspective on themes of exploitation, the ferocious nature of capitalism, and muted desire.

IRENA AZOVSKY

"In my work, I tend to explore the potential of collage outside of the "cut and paste" limitations. I like to push the boundaries to see how much texture and layers I can fit into one piece without actually needing to glue anything down. This may involve weaving, cutting and intertwining and on occasion a little assistance from artist tape behind the scenes. As part of the nature of this process, I have worked in aspects of the collages that are non-static, that are intentionally free to move about the piece within the enclosed environment provided. This creates a new dimension where the collage work can take on a life of its own."

JASON RASMUSSEN

Object performance, touch as a cure, and irrational ritual: as we interact with the physical world, patterns occur. Household objects gain magical value and therapies are formed out of belief. Rituals develop around the way we interact with the people and objects around us.

DIANA LI

We are participating in a digital seance. The screen you are looking at to read this article is your medium, connecting you to the streaming afterlife of the writer’s thoughts and memories.

An Open Letter from Dissolve to the Spambots at Facebook.

When today’s social and cultural archives are being forged in the sharing economy of Facebook news feeds—as our own role in these systems becomes more removed and the mechanisms behind them more automatic and opaque—Dissolve asks that Facebook attend to the particularities of its users’ individualities.

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Una Carta Abierta de Dissolve a los Spambots de Facebook

Cuando los archivos sociales y culturales de nuestros tiempos se forjan en la economía de las actualizaciones de Facebook—y mientras que nuestro rol en estos sistemas se vuelve cada vez más disociado y los mecanismos tras de ellos cada vez más automáticos y oscuros—Dissolve pide que Facebook atienda las particularidades de las identidades de sus usuarios.

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Juan Pablo Pacheco and Harper Brokaw-Falbo

Foreword to the fifth issue of Dissolve.
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Prólogo para la quinta edición de Dissolve
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Paula Mendez

From the perspective of an urban architect, Paula Mendez traces the limitations of urban cartography to translate our experience of public space.
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Desde la perspectiva de una arquitecta urbanista, Paula Méndez hace una revisión de las limitaciones y contradicciones metodológicas que generan las cartografías tradicionales.
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Moira Roth and Joanne Easton

For this issue, Roth contributed two enigmatic texts on abstract applications of mapping, presented in conjunction with Joanne Easton’s new work, Untitled (Insatiable).
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Para esta edición de Dissolve, Roth contribuyó dos textos enigmáticos sobre las aplicaciones abstractas del mapeo, presentados junto al nuevo trabajo de Joanne Easton Sin titulo (Insaciable).
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Halim Badawi

A través de este artículo, Halim Badawi, fundador de Arkhé, explica los ejes conceptuales presentes en una de las colecciones del archivo: el archivo Queer.
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Through this article, Halim Badawi, founder of Arkhé, will explore the conceptual axes of one of the main collections of the foundation: the Queer Archive.
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Kylie White

Kylie White charts the landscape as both an artist and as a geologist.By tracing the limits of geology, as one “cannot draw the clouds,” she begins to collapse the fields of geology and art, expanding the potential of each practice in the process.
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Kylie White traza paisajes como artista y como geólogo. Al trazar los límites de la geología, donde uno "no puede dibujar las nubes", ella comienza a colapsar los campos de la geología y el arte, a la vez que expande el potencial de cada práctica. 

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Manuela Ochoa

El 4 de diciembre de 2016, varias mujeres de distintas regiones de Colombia, víctimas del conflicto armado, envolvieron el Palacio de Justicia en Bogotá con cientos de telas tejidas por ellas mismas. Manuela Ochoa explora la constitución de estas mujeres como sujetos políticos, a través de acciones artísticas colectivas.
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On December 4th 2016, women from various regions of Colombia who are victims of the civil war, wrapped the Colombian Palace of Justice in Bogotá with hundreds of fabrics stitched by them. Manuela Ochoa explores how these women become political subjects, through collective artistic actions.
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