EFA Project Space announces Companion, an exhibition of artworks contextualized with the source that influenced their creation. A project conceived by Marisa Jahn, who used the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Studio Project as her curatorial foundation, Companion culls cultural projects that draw inspiration from history, culture, and science.

Pablo Helguera’s 'What in the World' replicates a popular television show from the 1950’s in which artifacts were presented to a team of archaeologists, artists, and aficionados to decipher. Adapting the show’s theatrical conventions for a You Tube generation, Helguera departs from the objects to focus on the eccentric museum staff, positioning the institution itself as the subject of the ethnographic inquiry. For Companion, Helguera includes videos of the original television show and his remake.

Referring to Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s 1966 cinematic masterpiece entitled 'Memories of Underdevelopment (Memorias del subdesarrollo)', Karina Skvirsky’s Interiors/Exteriors (from Memories of Development Project) is a series of photographs of domestic settings in Guayaquil, Ecuador that depict a story about self-presentation and class distinction.

Karina Skvirsky, Memories of Underdevelopment, 2009

Tom Bogaert’s installation centrally features a photograph he took while working as a human rights worker in Burundi, Africa. A picturesque photograph of an illuminated window taken from inside a dark room belies a story of horror: as the artist came to learn, the room was a former site where hundreds of Tutsi women and children were burned to their death in 1993. The window functions not only as an architectural division between death and those who lived but as a emblem of Bogaert’s role as a mediator and witness.

Cui Fei presents an installation of thorns whose assemblage resembles the hash marks used to mark time. Presented as an installation, the hundreds of thorns reference the daily passage of time during the second Sino-Japanese war (1937-1945)—a painful memory rife with atrocity.

BIOS

Tom Bogaert documented genocide and human rights abuses in Africa and Asia for fourteen years for Amnesty International and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Five years ago, he resigned to become an artist.

Jimbo Blachly was born in Orange, NJ in 1961 and moved to New York City in 1990. One-man shows of his work have been organized at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, NY (1999) and at Esso Gallery, NY (1997). His work has been featured in group exhibitions at Gallery Campo + Campo in Antwerp, Belgium (1999), at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (1997), at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, NY (1995), and at the Drawing Center, NY (1993).

Born in Jinan, China, Cui Fei received her BFA from Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now China Academy of Fine Arts) and received her MFA at Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 2001. She has participated in over fifty gallery and museum exhibitions worldwide. Cui has been cited in publications such as Art in America, The New York Times, and The New Yorker Magazine. She has received awards such as the NYFA Fellowship from New York Foundation for the Arts, the BRIO Award from the Bronx Council on the Arts and was selected into the Artists-in-the-Marketplace program at the Bronx Museum of the Arts.

Pablo Helguera (Mexico City, 1971) is a New York based artist whose work often adopts the format of the lecture, museum display strategies, musica l performances and written fiction. Helguera has exhibited or performed at venues such as MoMA, PS1, the Royal College of Art, London; 8th Havana Biennal, PERFORMA 05, Havana; Shedhalle, Zurich; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; Brooklyn Museum;MALBA museum in Buenos Aires, Ex-Teresa Espacio Alternativo in Mexico City, The Bronx Museum, Artist Space, and Sculpture Center. His work has been reviewed in many art publications such as Art in America, Artforum, Frieze, Afterall, and the New York Times. He has received awards such as the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and a Creative Capital Grant. He is the author of eight books including The Pablo Helguera Manual of Contemporary ARt Style (2005) and Theatrum Anatomicum (And other Performance Lectures) (2009). He is currently the Director of Adult and Academic programs at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Rachel Lears is a filmmaker, musician, and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. She holds an MPhil in cultural anthropology and an MA in ethnomusicology from New York University, as well as a BA in music from Yale University, and she studied documentary video production at NYU's Program in Culture and Media. In 2005, she received a Fulbright grant for the production of the feature documentary Birds of Passage, about young songwriters in Uruguay; the film was finished in 2009 with support from the Film Institute of Uruguay (ICAU) and is currently in distribution internationally. In 2008 she received a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship for work on her PhD dissertation on the visual culture of popular music in Uruguay. She performs her original music with the band The Mystery Keys, and currently serves as Managing Editor of e-misférica, the trilingual multimedia journal of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics in the Americas.

Margaret Mead (1901-1978) is a renowned anthropologist who popularized the insights of anthropology into modern American and Western Culture. The 23 books she authored include Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), Male and Female (1949), and Culture and Commitment (1970). Mead was an energetic spokesperson regarding human rights and social issues including women's rights, child development and education. Mead served as president of major scientific associations, including the American Anthropological Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History for over 50 years, and she received 28 honorary doctorates. Her husband, Gregory Bateson (1904-1980), was an anthropologist, social scientist, linguist and cyberneticist whose work intersected that of many other fields. Some of his most noted writings are to be found in his books, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1973), and Mind and Nature (1980).

Sarah Oppenheimer received a B.A. from Brown University in 1995 and an M.F.A. in painting from Yale University in 1999. Her work has been exhibited at such venues as the Drawing Center, the Sculpture Center, the Queens Museum, Skulpturens Hus (Stockholm), the Saint Louis Art Museum, and the Mattress Factory among others. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship 2007, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Art 2007, an NYFA fellowship (in the category of Architecture/Environmental Structures) 2006, and a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Fellowship 2003. Ms. Oppenheimer joined the Yale faculty in 2003 and was appointed critic in painting/printmaking in 2005.

Lytle Shaw is a New York-based writer whose books include Low Level Bureaucratic Structures: A Novel (Shark, 1998), Cable Factory 20 (Atelos, 1999), The Lobe (Roof, 2002), and Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (Iowa UP, 2006). Since 2004 Shaw has co-edited the Chadwick Family Papers with the artist Jimbo Blachly.

Karina Aguilera Skvirsky is a photographer and video artist who has exhibited internationally and in New York at Momenta Art, Sara Meltzer Gallery, Jessica Murray Projects, The Center for Book Arts, Bronx Museum of Art, Smack Mellon, and others. She has received grants from NALAC, the Urban Arts Initiative, the Puffin Foundation and others. Skvirsky’s work is in the collections of CBRE Development Corp., El Múseo del Barrio, the Samuel Dorsky Museum, the Brooklyn Museum of Art Library, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art Library, The Indiana University Art Library, Mills College Library, The School of the Art Institute Library, The New York Historical Society, NY, and more.

Edward Stanley has collaborated with architects and designers for more than twenty years. The collaborations often involve precise integration of a structural system into the overall design.  Edward Stanley Engineers LLC was founded in 1996. Edward Stanley is a critic in the Yale University School of Architecture. He received a Bachelor of Science from Columbia University.

Born in Okinawa, Japan in 1973, Yuken Teruya received his MFA from the school of Visual Arts, New York in 2001. In 2007, he had a solo exhibition at The Asia Society in New York. His work was included in Greater New York 2005 at P.S.1 Contemporary art Center and was featured in the Yokohama International Triennial. Recent exhibitions include the Kunstwerein Wiesbaden in Germany; Free Fish at Asia Society in New York as well as various gallery exhibitions in the United States, Europe and Japan. In 2007, his work was featured in Shapes of Space, an exhibition at Guggenheim Museum New York. This fall, his work will be included in “Okinawa” at The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan.

Saya Woolfalk is a New York based artist whose work spans multiple media from sculpture, installation, and painting to performance and video. She holds an MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA from Brown University, and completed the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2006. She has exhibited at PS1/MoMA Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, NY; the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, IN; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, IL; University at Buffalo's Center for the Arts; and Momenta Art in Williamsburg, NY. She received an Art Matters grant to Japan and a NYFA grant (2007), a Fulbright Fellowship to Brazil (2005), and a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA grant (2004), and was a participant at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Yaddo, and Sculpture Space. In 2008, Woolfalk was a resident artist at the Studio Museum in Harlem and was a recipient of a Franklin Furnace fellowship.