Apr 1-Oct 31,2018

HOW TO: Forget More of These Kinds of Things About You Every Day, is part of a series called HOW TO, which runs concurrently with the online poetry collection tutorials, by Martin Jackson. GeoVanna is making work for each of the poems in the collection, as a form of open source translation, a way of versioning or reappropriating the ideas and language of the poetry. This installation was created after the poem Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.

The installation is an attempt to both embody and remake the poem:

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons

It’s not exactly

a great garden

but space smells

pleasantly metallic

reminding you of

a summer spent

arc welding, walnuts,

roasting or roasted,

over-worked motorbike

brake pads, burnt

almond cookies, wet

laundry carted in

from a day thickly

snowed on.

Burned steak. Damp

ashes in an old fireplace.

Spent fireworks in rain.

Grill-glanced knuckle

skin.

 

Based on spectrums from

the center of our galaxy

Sagittarius B2 is racked

with ethyl formate,

an ester we know

smells like rum

and tastes like

raspberries.

 

I forget more of these

kinds of things about

you every

day.

/

 

Throughout her work she is interested in translation and forms of communication – and miscommunication – in today’s technological and consumer-driven culture. She translates the dominative virtual-visual realm back into the haptic-human world, as a way of opening up different and deeper ways of seeing-through, being-in, and changing our environments.

GeoVanna Gonzalez is a Berlin-/Miami-based artist and curator. Her practice explores the influence of both the organic and the technological in our shifting notions of gender and identity. She constructs and combines sculptures and installations, and uses video and photography to recontextualize, obscure and interfere with how the digital environment curates and dictates the way we experience various our multiple and multiplying realities. GeoVanna was born and raised in Los Angeles California where she received her BFA at Otis College of Art and Design. She is part of queer feminist collective Coven Berlin, working on exhibitions and events that focus on body politics, gender, labor, sexuality, and art. She is also the cofounder of READ WHAT YOU WANT!, a reading club and performance collective established in 2014. She recently gave a talk about identity at NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Upcoming exhibitions included Horse and Pony Fine Arts, Berlin Germany; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin Germany; NGBK, Berlin Germany, 5 Car Garage, Los Angeles; and ArtCenter South Florida.