[inter/meta/trans] Aesthetics of Foreignness, panel presentation, SCMA Conference this Saturday

[adam overton]

i'm excited to be a part of this wonderful panel, 'Aesthetics of  
Foreignness', put together by Dorit Cypis, to be hosted at Pepperdine  
University this weekend for the Southern California Mediation  
Association's 2006 conference...

more info on our panel is pasted below, and info on the conference  
can be found here: http://www.scmediation.org/FallConferenceBrochure.pdf

hope all is well,
adam


. . .



Aesthetics of Foreignness
SCMA Annual Conference
November 4, 2006

Developed by Foreign Exchanges, Dorit Cypis,
with Micol Hebron, Michell Kane, Adam Overton, Sholeh Wolpe


How is foreignness to ourselves and to each other
shaped by simultaneous political and psychological forces?
What is the "art" of identity?


There are endless subtleties implicit in identity. Who we are to  
ourselves and to each other? The notion of foreignness is a highly  
charged contemporary axiom, from the stranger next door, to the  
undocumented worker, to the party with whom we are in conflict, to  
the unidentified terrorist. Who is the foreigner? How are we each  
foreign? Why do we define “the foreign”?

Aesthetics of Foreignness celebrates the foreign as inclusive of  
everyone and everything. What is foreign is always what we feel  
alienated from. It could be our self, another person, an object, an  
environment, a belief or an entire culture.
The mere fact that we exist as separate beings in separate bodies  
renders us each foreign to each other. Add our cultural and physical  
differences and it is easy to see how conflict can spawn between us.  
Yet we are humanly the same even as we each are different. Difference  
is simple in its humanness yet complicated in its need for cultural  
and psychological recognition and understanding.

Aesthetics, the philosophy of form, questions the mundane,  
intercepting what we think we know, allowing for a space of  
uncertainty. Uncertainty is a necessary context for creativity,  
growth and transformation of consciousness. As a destabalizing force  
in culture, aesthetics, the foreigner, offers subtle strategies of  
questioning our beliefs about foreignness offering opportunities for  
recognition and understanding.

The professional artists participating in Aesthetics of Foreignness,  
moderator Dorit Cypis/artist and mediator, Adam Overton/ composer and  
performer, Sholeh Wope/poet and writer, Micol Hebron/visual artist  
and performer, Mitchell Kane/ artist and designer will present a  
performative hour, engaging the audience of mediators through person- 
to-person engagement, poetry reading, excavation of architectural and  
corporeal spaces and text text/image presentations.

Let us welcome Aesthetics, the foreigner in the room.



Biographies

DORIT CYPIS is an artist (MFA, California Institute of the Arts,  
1977) and a mediator (Masters of Dispute Resolution, Pepperdine  
University, 2005). Her work mines aesthetics and ethics, exploring  
relationships between the psycho-mythological, the corporeal, and the  
political. Cypis’ museum exhibitions, since the late 1970’s, are  
immersive laboratories abstracting forms, positions, gestures, and  
meanings to shed light on the paradoxes of identity, while her public  
works/actions are social/political extensions, mediating aesthetic  
abstractions into living life. Here form truly meets function and  
ideology shifts back to experience. Through Foreign Exchanges, Cypis  
offers training, consultation and experimentation on engaging  
identity and social relations to leaders in culture, education,  
business and philanthropy. Her artwork, "Sightlines", is currently on  
view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in the exhibition  
Consider This…For more information visit www.doritcypis.com

MICOL HEBRON, video and performance artist, teaches photography  
history and theory at Art Center College of Design, Los Angeles. She  
is the founding member of the artist collective LA Art Girls, and a  
co-founder of the performance trio The Elizabeths. Most recently she  
has performed at the Getty Center of Art and at Los Angeles  
Contemporary Exhibitions. Micol is also an Editorial Board Member and  
contributing writer at X-tra magazine, a Los Angeles-based journal of  
art and culture. Hebron received her Masters of Fine Art in New  
Genres from UCLA, 2000.

ADAM OVERTON, composer, performance artist and sound artist, explores  
the subtle performance of the invisible and the interpersonal through  
instrumental, electronic, and movement-based sound performance. He is  
currently working to finish a book-and-DVD collection of performance  
texts and writings entitled i am sediment, set to be published in  
2007 with the assistance of Fifth Planet Press. Adam received a  
Masters of Fine Art in Experimental Sound Practices (ESP) from  
California Institute of the Arts, 2003, and currently teaches  
multimedia courses in Orange County. For more information visit  
http://plus1plus1plus.org

SHOLEH WOLPE, writer and poet, is the author of The Scar Saloon (Red  
Hen Press, October 2004) (http://www.redhen.org/scarsaloon.htm) and  
has a CD by the same title (Refuge Studios, 2005.) Her poems,  
translations, essays and reviews have been published in many literary  
journals, periodicals and anthologies world-wide. She was born in  
Iran but spent most of her teen years in the Caribbean and Europe,  
ending up in the U.S. where she pursued Masters degrees in Radio-TV- 
Film (Northwestern University) and Public Health (Johns Hopkins  
University). She is the recipient of several awards for her poetry  
and is the director and host of Poetry at the Loft… and more, a  
successful cultural arts venue in Redlands, California. She divides  
her time between Redlands and Los Angeles, California. For more  
information visit:  http://www.sholehwolpe.com

MITCHELL KANE, visual artist, exploring the methodology of  
creativity. From  1989 -1999, Mitchell was Director/Curator of Hirsch  
Farm Project, a traveling, experimental arts-based think tank  
networking individuals in the arts, sciences and humanities through  
cross disciplinary discussion. He has taught art, environmental  
design, and industrial design at Otis College of Art, Art Center  
College of Design, The University of California – Los Angeles and  
Riverside. Mitchell has exhibited work in numerous national and  
international exhibitions, most recently “Exercises in Precarious  
Equilibrium: Convento” in Guadalajara Mexico. Mitchell received a BFA  
(1979) and MFA (1985) from The School of the Art Institute in  
Chicago, as well as numerous awards for his work in graphic design.  
Mitchell is currently Director of the Fine Art Department, Art Center  
College of Design. For more information visit http://www.mksurface.com


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