SAN ANTONIO, TX.- Artpace San Antonio unveiled its 10.2 International Artist-in-Residence projects. Guest curator Patrick Charpenel, independent curator from Mexico City, presented new works by Monika Sosnowska (Warsaw, Poland), Corey McCorkle (New York, New York) and Jamal Cyrus (Houston, Texas), which will be on display to the public through September 12, 2010.

The Artists
Monika Sosnowska is renowned for her architecturally structured installations that dramatically transform a viewer's perception and experience of a space. She creates her works in response to a given setting, with an interest in places encumbered with error and dysfunction, while intervening with radical ideas and implementations. For her Artpace exhibition Emergency Exit, Sosnowska took her cue from local architecture, inspired by the ubiquitous emergency stairwells that scale the sides of older buildings throughout San Antonio . The image of the zig-zagging fire escape has become intuitive within Western architectural iconography. In response, Sosnowska has fabricated her own stairwell, stripping it of its functionality, dismantling the main elements of the apparatus, and giving each component its own autonomous sculptural identity. Together the pieces would comprise a small, working fire escape; but taken apart the segments are misshapen and warped beyond use, presented as a series of vignettes in their own space.

Corey McCorkle infuses different elements of nature into his works, from fields of a garden to the angle of the Earth’s axis. His projects, which explore the ideas of isolation and the ideals of Utopia, have been exhibited in the United States and throughout Europe . McCorkle develops these works through spatial modification and a variety of scrupulously crafted mediums, including sculpture, photography and video production. There are two primary works in McCorkle’s Artpace exhibition. In the first part of his installation, he presents a film featuring the reversed monumental signage of the Robert E. Lee Hotel , located less than five blocks south of Artpace on West Travis Street . The scene, which was captured from the roof of the hotel, displays the inverted hotel sign paired with its urban surroundings, including neighboring buildings and the sprawling rooftop heating, ventilating, and air conditioning units. The second part of the installation stretches throughout the interior of the Artpace complex. McCorkle articulates the industrial and domestic space by bringing the respiratory system of the building to the public foreground, reconstructing and rerouting the once inner air conditioning system. The elaborate path of the operational ducts first unfolds in the ground-level exhibition space, ascends through the building's staircase, serpentines through the Hudson (Show)Room on the second floor, and ultimately finds sequestered refuge within the artist’s residential space upstairs. The meandering, organic quality of the formal piece is also a diagram of constant unrelenting circulation.

Jamal Cyrus is a member of Otabenga Jones & Associates, a collective whose work highlights the complexities of representation throughout the African Diaspora. Cyrus explores the construction of histories through deconstruction and reconstruction of oral, visual and textual sources. Cyrus’s multimedia artworks explore the space between radical social justice movements and their untold histories. The artist’s adaptations of iconic and historical material create an evocatively new awareness of the African-American experience. Jamal Cyrus’s Artpace exhibition, Phonic Substance, is comprised of four components. The first is a large-scale drawing that uses an image of a UFO sighting, a record procured through the Freedom of Information Act signed into effect in 1967, which mandated the disclosure of documents and information controlled by the United States government. The image is duplicated in the first three frames of an enlarged 16mm filmstrip; subsequent frames feature increasingly specific scenes from nature. The second component in the installation is a bronze conch shell, resting atop a pyramidal base modeled from the Pyramid of the Sun in Mexico ’s ancient city of Teotihuacán . There is also a bass drum closely surrounded by clusters of microphones capturing even the slightest reverberation. The fourth component is a freestanding platform, empty, another reference to the monumental Pyramid of the Sun.