RiGHT now

Daniel de Paola at Black Box: Exchanges

• • 6:00pm until 9:00pm

• BLACK BOX: EXCHANGES One-evening Solo Projects June | July | August | 2012 Curated by Isaac Aden Monday, August 20, 2012 | 6 – 9pm Daniel De Paola: Transubstance “Black Box: Exchanges,” is a new initiative dedicated to showcasing solo projects for one night only. This summer join us every Monday for an intimate evening with an exciting group of emerging and mid-career artists. Black Box will provide access to artists whose work emphasizes new media and the latest technologies. Conceived by artistic director Juan Puntes with the exhibition space studiously designed by architect Ana Catalina Rojas, Black Box is an enclosed cubical black hole, all six surfaces hued in a dense black ultra-flat finish paint that throws the normal perception of visual elements off kilter, defying gravity as if floating in space, where the artwork can define a new independent spatial identity and is free of the traditional exhibition format. Black Box aspires to tap into White Box’s new Media Lab, which as it further develops will expand into an invitational for artists from around the world to present in real time, using the internet highway and new telecommunications means, their latest gamut of various media, performative, interactive and sonoric artworks. While the build-out of the new Media Lab is in the process of receiving capital funding, Black Box provides artists with a creative, truly in-kind collaborative opportunity and forum, one that builds on intern and professional in-house talents. Week thirteen opens with Daniel De Paola’s performance, entitled Transubstance, which investigates the connection between theological uses of language and our perception of our environment. De Paola says religions employ dogma to determine perceptions of reality, which further a unified worldview that can be used to both empower and persecute. By manipulating philosophies to reconstruct the nature of physical materials, Catholicism succeeds in transforming bread and wine into flesh and blood: “Bread and wine as such cease to exist and the full reality of Christ comes to be present under their appearances… The accidents of bread and wine thus remain without any substance in which they inhere, and the substance of Jesus Christ becomes present without any of His sensible accidents or characteristics.” [1] Transubstance incorporates both bread and wine, which De Paola received while attending Catholic masses over a period of weeks, witnessing their consecration. His work focuses on removing the walls that define our understandings in order to open up new spaces to continually reinterpret reality and focus on concepts of animism, ritual, sacrifice, and the duality, between the sacred and profane. [1] Dr. Peter Kwasniewski, Substance, Accident, and Transubstantiation. The Latin Mass, Vo. 18, No. 1 (Spring 2009) IMAGE: Daniel De Paola, Transubstance (detail), 2012. Bread and wine on fabric. Dimensions variable.