April Banks, Make, Believe (2011), Audio visual installation, Dimensions variable

April 16 - May 22, 2011
re-FABLE | April Banks + Amanda Williams

Opening Saturday, April 16, 2011 6-8pm
Artist Talks, May 12, 6pm

Swarm Gallery welcomes a two-person exhibition of recent work by Oakland-based artist April Banks and Chicago-based artist Amanda Williams. In the pair's collaborative debut, re-FABLE, they use information derived from ancestral DNA tests to explore the gaps that exist between science and history, fact and memory. April and Amanda use photography, video, sound, mixed media installation and works on paper to visualize this liminal space.

The ancestral DNA test isolates a microscopic bit of information (with billions of parts) to explain an entity that has not changed over 35,000 years. The two scales of information are simultaneously massive and acute, leaving much to the imagination. Mismatched pieces of information culled from oral histories, family photos, heirlooms and online databases of historical records is the starting point for the artists. Although these histories are elusive, ephemeral and fading, April and Amanda imagine and fabricate what science cannot tell them. re-FABLE studies this dissonance of both knowing and not knowing.

The works by April take both a serious and humorous look at what is fact and what is fable. Her installation of plaster sculptures studies a missing heirloom, a violin, which is the source of family fables. The negative space of the violin explores its physical absence and whether such objects missing or present can serve as a catalyst or placeholder for oral histories. Heirlooms are markers of time and their 'facts' often morph into myth as time passes.

Amanda charged herself with the task of creating art objects that fabricate imagined inheritances. In the absence of physical items to pass along from one generation to another, Amanda experimented with how to visually express the notion that as we move further away from 'facts' of family folklore, the less legible the true details become. Simultaneously those same stories become more embellished and cherished. Amanda uses the one image that remains of her great-grandmother of the same name, over and over again in an installation ironically titled "My Grandmother was Not One to Repeat Herself." Seventy-six wood blocks of varying sizes are arranged in a sequence that questions how much visual information is required for us to accept something as legible or 'true.'

re-FABLE also includes a video and sound piece by April in the project space, and three other mixed media installations, each exploring and questioning fact vs. memory.

Amanda Williams, Still Growing in Favor #1 (2011), Dipping snuff and mixed media on paper

ARTIST BIOS:
April Banks is a conceptual artist. Her image-based installations explore issues relating to international trade and commerce, farmer's rights, and race and human rights. Though the subject of her work varies, the common thread is the disparity of access and economy. She straddles disgust and desire making work that is simultaneously attractive and repulsive. The sensitivity of the subject is tempered by a touch of humor or irony, making the work a mutual effort between the artist and viewer. Her installations pay keen attention to detail and form. They are the result of deep and immersive research processes, including travel to other countries to gather first-hand experience. She experiments with new materials and processes and ways to combine photography, sculpture, video and sound to distort and re-image the "image." April graduated with a Bachelor of Architecture from Hampton University in Virginia in 1996 and a Master of Science in Environmental Design from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in 1999. She has exhibited in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, Minneapolis, Cleveland, Daytona Beach, New Hampshire, Maryland, New York and Zurich, Switzerland. Banks has lectured at universities around the San Francisco Bay Area and taught a photography workshop at a refugee camp in Amman, Jordan. In 2009 she was one of six recipients of the Visions from the New California Award.

Amanda Williams is an artist and architect whose work explores themes of personal freedom and identity. She has cultivated a signature style that blends her spatial sensibilities with a love of color. Amanda integrates fragments of material from sources as varied as parking tickets, historic legal documents, found objects, rap lyrics, and old family photos. Best known for her abstract oil paintings, she is also an accomplished photographer and installation artist. Williams grew up on the Southside of Chicago. She received her Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University. Amanda practiced as an architect for 6 years before shifting to a fulltime career in fine art. She has exhibited extensively throughout the US, including the Studio Museum in Harlem, DePaul University in Chicago IL, the August Wilson Center for Art and Culture in Pittsburgh PA, the Soap Factory in Minneapolis MN and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco CA. Williams has been the recipient of much recognition including the Eidlitz Travel Fellowship to Ethiopia, the Hennessy Cognac Emerging Artist Award, the San Francisco General Hospital Foundation's Heroes & Hearts Public Art Commission, being selected as a 'featured artist' by the Department of Cultural Affairs for Chicago Artists' Month, and most recently being selected as a contestant on the inaugural season of the Bravo channel's reality competition, "Work of Art: Next Great Artist". Amanda has also served as an Adjunct Professor of Architecture at both the California College of the Arts (CCa) and the Illinois Institute of Technology.