Conversation with the Artists: Erika Harrsch, Pete Hoffecker Mejia, and Andrew O’Brien
Joined by Curator, Mike Calway-Fagen
Moderated by Olivia Wolf
Olivia Wolf, Assistant Professor of Art History at UTC, sits down with the Erika, Pete, Andrew, and Mike to speak about their work, what drives it, and how artists and curators can play a role in shaping the conversation around social issues.
Conversation starts at 4 PM. Please visit our calendar page for more information about the panelists.
About the Moderator:
Dr. Olivia Wolf is an Assistant Professor in Art History at The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where her teaching focuses on art and architecture from a global perspective, with emphasis on Latin America, the Middle East, and South-South connections. Her research highlights issues of migration and identity in visual culture and built environment, with a special focus on the artistic production and patronage of diasporic communities. Her work has been supported by a Fulbright-Hays DDRA fellowship, the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Wolf has served as a Camfield Fellow for the Latin American collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), and will be a Visiting Scholar at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum this May 2019. Her research has been published in Hemisphere: Visual Cultures of the Americas and the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, among other scholarly publications.
About the Artists:
Erika Harrsch:
Born in Mexico City, Harrsch has lived in several cities throughout the country, as well as Italy, Germany, and Brazil; for the past fourteen years she has lived and worked in New York City. She has been defined as a multidisciplinary artist, employing traditional mediums along with new media and technologies to articulate her concepts and interests. The formal aspects of her oeuvre and languages investigate diverse fields to achieve visual, multisensory, and interactive experiences: a comprehensive reflection about the body and identity, sexuality, desire, the space that defines us and the one we wish for, the limits and vertiginous freedom that lead to a continuous corporeal and ideological migration.
Pete Hoffecker Mejia:
Born in Bogotá, Colombia and raised in the United States, Pete Hoffecker Mejía’s work assembles indigenous patterns of Latin America, retail and home décor motif, and Modernist geometric abstraction, to explore the intersection of contrasting cultural influence, the mediation of identity, and conflation and caricature in the representation of otherness. His structures investigate the blurred points of contact resulting from estrangement, while also looking at hierarchies of representation, and the continuing impacts of colonialism.
Andrew O’Brien:
Andrew O'Brien is an Assistant Professor of Photography and Media Art at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. His current work looks at the social, historical, and cultural motivations behind landscape formation and the built environment. Projects range from collections of photographs, to sound, video and installation work. Since receiving his MFA from the University of Oregon in 2009, O’Brien has lived and worked in Los Angeles, New York City, and Tennessee.
Mike Calway-Fagen, Curator:
Mike is an artist, writer, and curator based in Tennessee. Recent solo exhibitions include the University of Arkansas, University of Nevada in Las Vegas, the Soo Visual Arts Center in Minneapolis, with group shows at Dimensions Variable in Miami, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, and LAXArt in Los Angeles. Recent reviews and essays have appeared in Art Papers, Temporary Art Review, and BurnAway. Mike’s background as artist and writer gives him a unique perspective in his curatorial practice, allowing him to weave thoughtful yet complex narratives in consideration of the artwork, artist and viewer.