January 11, 2013

Jon Rubin and Felipe Castelblanco's "The Foreigner" Brings Foreign Policy Home

For Immediate Release

Download PDF Press Release: http://www.spacesgallery.org/files/pr/2013/130111-spaces-rubin-pr.pdf
Download Press Release Packet (PDF + Images): http://www.spacesgallery.org/files/pr/2013/130111-spaces-rubin-press-kit.zip

Cleveland, OH, January 11, 2013—Starting February 1st, SPACES will be partnering with Pittsburgh-based artist Jon Rubin with Colombian-born artist Felipe Castelblanco to produce a series of public interventions that will bring Clevelanders face-to-face with an Iranian citizen, but with a more familiar face.

Everyday Clevelanders will function as real-time physical avatars or local proxies for citizens living in Iran. Through simple, mobile technology each Cleveland proxy will be connected live to an Iranian citizen. The Iranian will then speak only to the proxy (through an ear piece) and direct them in who to approach and what to say, as they walk through various public spaces. In this way citizens of Cleveland will be introduced to someone who is currently living in an entirely different cultural circumstance through the body of a local citizen right in front of them.

The Iranian citizens and Cleveland proxies will be selected from all walks of life, from children to seniors. Therefore it will be possible for a teenage local girl to be the proxy for an 80-year-old Iranian man.

Happening at various public venues ranging from malls to public libraries, "The Foreigner" presents an uncanny circumstance where the separation between self and other, local and foreign, is collapsed and confused, and the geopolitical distance between the United States and Iran is made personal and local.

ARTIST BIOS
Jon Rubin creates interventions into public life that reinvent social and political conditions and create new platforms for agency, participation, and exchange. His projects include starting a radio station in an abandoned steel town that only plays the sound of an extinct bird, running a barter-based nomadic art school, and operating a restaurant that produces a live talk show with its customers. He has exhibited at The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Mercosul Biennial, Brazil; The Shanghai Biennial; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard, New York; The Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico; The Rooseum, Sweden; The ParkingGallery, Tehran, Iran; as well as in backyards, living rooms, and street corners. He is currently short-listed for the International Award for Participatory Art. More information at: http://jonrubin.net/

Felipe Castelblanco is a multidisciplinary artist working at the intersection of participatory, socially engaged and new media art. His work seeks to create new experiences of publicness and coexistent (if sometimes contentious) encounters through urban interventions, video, interactivity and networked installations. Most recently, he has constructed an invisible wall connecting children across two continents (Children's Museum of Pittsburgh); collaborated with participants from 10 countries to turn the world upside-down (Future Tenant Gallery); and assembled a team of day laborers to paint houses-on canvas-in the streets of Portland, Oregon (Open Engagement). His work has been shown internationally, including at the FAD festival in Brazil and the Valenzuela Klenner Gallery in Colombia, as well as in storefronts and on street corners across Pittsburgh. Felipe attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2012. More information at: http://www.felipecastelblanco.com/