Nina Zingale and Gina Rymarcsuk

knock-off

March 3 – 27, 2005
Reception: Thursday, March 3, 6–8pm

knock-off is an installation of interrelated elements which initiated from the collaborators' 72–day excursion to Italy in 2003. Responding to the unique environment in Rome and its abundant souvenir trade, the artists, Nina Zingale and Gina Rymarcsuk, documented artifacts and later manipulated the images. The images are photographs of small figurines of religious and historic figures found at souvenir shops, miscellaneous stores and outdoor street vendors. They were documented in-situ within the shops, through storefront windows, and on the street: sometimes with permission but usually furtively. The work playfully investigates, in a mix of scale and digital media, the notion of identity—religious, cultural and national—co-existing with commerce and consumption.

Zingale and Rymarcsuk borrowed the curbside Fotobooth's ability to produce passport photos and then staged selected souvenirs into photo-ID poses (clustering them together in four repeated images). Later they enlarged the images, reproducing them into B&W posters and installed them in temporary outdoor sites. From the moment each of these figures was initially documented, they have gone through a series of permutations imposed by the artists. This process of transformation is elemental in this work. The transformations mirror the reality of Michelangelo's David being reduced to a commonplace four inch plastic figurine, displaced from Florence to a vendor's stand in Rome, to a curio cabinet in suburban USA. This interplay of past and present ideologies, conflated into small mass-produced figurines, explores the concepts of transformation and displacement.

The artists have worked individually and collaboratively in photography, digital animation and video, sculpture and installation.

knock-off is the first opportunity to exhibit this collaboration in the US.

Artist Biographies

Nina Zingale, originally from New York City, received an MFA in Sculpture at the University of Washington, Seattle, and a BFA in Fine Arts, Parsons School of Design, New School University, NYC. Various awards and residencies include: Seattle Print Arts Scholarship, Pratt Fine Arts, Seattle; Gerberding Graduate Fellowship for study in Rome, University of Washington Graduate School; and New Mexico Endowment for the Humanities Grant for Recuerdos/Memory Wall public workshops and exhibit. Solo and collaborative projects include temporary and permanent street installations/public art in Seattle and Redmond, WA; San Jose, CA; Rome, Italy; and Santa Fe, Albuquerque and Cuba, NM. Exhibits include MFA Thesis Exhibition, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; Urgente, Piazza del Biscione, Rome; Water: A Juried Exhibition, Albuquerque Museum; and Women Artists From the Land of Enchantment, LewAllen Contemporary Gallery, Santa Fe.

Ms. Zingale continues to pursue her interest in public spaces, appropriated media/advertising messages and artifacts that are created and discarded. She is intent on manipulating what is found, collected and recalled, encompassing ideas of temporality, transitions and residue.

Gina Rymarcsuk, Photographer, born Chicago, 1973. Received MFA, University of Washington, Seattle 2003 and BA, Columbia College, Chicago, 2001. Awards and residencies include: PONCHO Artist-in-Residence Scholarship at Pratt Fine Arts Center, Seattle and The Junior Residency Fellowship at Oregon College of Art and Craft, Portland. Exhibitions include: A Notation of Multiple Languages in Simultaneous Translation, 24HR Art - Northern Territory Centre for Contemporary Art, Darwin, Australia; Artist in Residence Exhibition, Hoffman Gallery, Portland, Oregon; and 8th annual summer summit, Lipa Gallery, Chicago.

Ms. Rymarcsuk's artistic pursuits are deeply rooted in photography and range widely from research in linguistics to the study of optics. She explores the manner in which humans collect, process and analyze information. Her work reflects an obsessive tendency to assemble and systemically arrange data through photographic and digital media.