Open Showcase “Garment Girl” by Jennifer Vanderpool

Work installing: 15 – 18 May 2018, 10 am – 12 pm
Opening: Sun 20 May 2018, 6.30 – 8.30 pm
Showcase: 22 – 30 May 2018, 10 am – 5 pm (Tue – Sun)
Heritage Space

From Heritage Space:

Heritage Space cordially invite you to the Opening Reception of ‘GARMENT GIRL’ – an Open Showcase of Los Angeles-based artist Jennifer Vanderpool.

Not displaying as a traditional art exhibition, Jennifer Vanderpool’s showcase will expose to public the process of installing artwork in the gallery space: a multi-faceted combination of costumes, wall paintings and photographs. Viewers will be able to directly observe the entire jobs of installing exhibition, and have conversation with the artist for inquiries regarding the show. They will also have the opportunity to be invited to take part in helping some setting up job.

The motivation for “Garment Girl” developed from “Worker”, an exhibit that artist created while she was the artist-in-residence at Claremont University, Pitzer College in 2010-11. The source materials for, Worker, began with Jennifer’s immigrant working class family’s story. The narrative was based on her grandmother’s reminiscences about working as a cook in a sweatshop in the Alleghany Mountains and her mother’s stories sewing shirt collars in order to pay her college tuition. The exhibition interlaced artist’s matrilineal family stories of struggle with the work of unseen laborers toiling in sweatshops located in downtown Los Angeles.

Employing “Worker” as a foundation, the current exhibition “Garment Girl” at Heritage Space develops a transnational narrative between the garment industry in Los Angeles and Việt Nam, evoking questions about the global textile industry as its subject. The exhibition will be multifaceted and include a large-scale three panel mural. Each panel will be an archival digital print consisting of imagery evoking questions about workers and the apparel and textile industry. The second component will include poetic documentary videos shown as two projections. The videos will include interviews with Vietnamese refugees who worked in the Los Angeles garment sweatshops that artist met while creating “Worker” as well as conversations with apparel industry scholars, activists, and workers. The third component of the exhibition will include textiles that she is designing which will be displayed as material objects and also as garments.

The Reception of showcase on Sunday late afternoon, May 20, are two parallel events: the official opening of “Garment Girl” and an unusual costume show: models wearing new clothing from the “Remade Workshop” of two artists Jennifer Vanderpool and Hanoi-based artist-designer Pham Hong in the previous week.

About the artist:

Jennifer Vanderpool is a Los Angeles-based new genre artist who works across mediums to reveal relationships between physical landscapes and the unseen forces that shape them, knitting together narratives about forgotten institutions, people, and communities. Her 2017 exhibitions included Super Natural, which opened at the National Centre for Contemporary Art in Moscow, Russia, and traveled to Nepravilnyi Prikus, Simferopol. She
exhibited Flores Para El Trueque initially with Mercadito & Mentidero, Bogotá, Colombia, and then with No Lugar – Arte Contemporáneo and La Huerta y La Maquina, Quito, Ecuador. Vanderpool’s video work was included in the 2017 Festival M.A.R.S. | Music & Art ReSound, Los Angeles and Twenty/20 at Edward Cella Art+Architecture, Los Angeles.

She has been awarded exhibition funding from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, Kunstrådet: Danish Arts Council, Kulturrådet: Swedish Arts Council, and Malmö Stad as well as a National Endowment for the Arts Challenge America grant for her community art outreach work and a National Endowment for the Arts: Art Works grant for her curatorial work. Vanderpool has been a Visiting Lecturer at UC Santa Barbara, UC Los Angeles, Otis College of Art and Design, Universiteit van Amsterdam, and Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá.

Her website is http://www.jennifervanderpool.com/

Heritage Space is a combination of an art gallery, a library, a concert hall, co-working office, residency space, artist studios and some open-stages, which has the capacity to host art exhibitions, music events, educational programs, multi-creative forms, artist-in-residency programs and others. Run by a group of curators, artists, researchers, musicians and architects, Heritage Space’s mission is to become a HUB for individuals and groups working on multi-disciplines from both inside and outside of the country to support and develop the creative industries in Vietnam.

Heritage Space 1st Floor, Dolphin Plaza 6 Nguyen Hoang (for car) | 28 Tran Binh (for bike), My Dinh 2, Hanoi Tel: 024 6254 3319 – Hotline: 090 282 6769 Email: [email protected] Website: heritagespace.com Facebook: fb.co/HeritageSpace