States of Exception

Oscar Rene Cornejo

Barelife 2017

White enamel, cedar wood, birch wood, pleather, red wax thread, nails, Ukiyo-e on handmade paper (Japanese woodblock)

Date:
September 6–December 22, 2018

Recess Assembly
370 Schermerhorn Street
Brooklyn, NY 11217

Public Hours:
Thursday – Saturday, 12-6pm

From September 6th to December 22, Assembly’s public storefront gallery will host States of Exception a project by Oscar Rene Cornejo exploring printmaking as a vehicle for engaging the ways trauma and memory are shaped by institutionalized violence, displacement, and exile.

Throughout his project, Cornejo will stage conversations and print workshops adapting the deconstructive methods of Argentinian artist Monica Giron and her investigation of seven aspects of life: the physical, the emotional, the sentimental, the confirmation of itself/the self, the structure of thinking, the soul, and the spirit.

Using a site-specific inquiry responding to the architecture, floor layout, and spatial volume of Assembly’s gallery space, Cornejo will construct modular structures for study and workshop, as well as display a curated selection of books, poems, articles, music, and essays addressing the cultural and socio-political histories of Latin America, US foreign policy, and the Cold War. Inspired by the personal histories of Assembly collaborators and guided by conceptual rules derived from public and international law, Cornejo’s project, will probe how personal and political resilience can emerge from radical self expression.

In addition to his work on States of Exception in the Assembly gallery space, Cornejo will participate as a guest teaching artist during the Recess’s educational diversion program. He will collaborate with the program’s Lead Educator to incorporate material from his project into the program’s curriculum. Cornejo will also guide program participants in creating final projects that will appear alongside his work in the storefront gallery.

About the artist

Oscar Rene Cornejo

Artist

Oscar Rene Cornejo is an artist who was born in Houston, Texas, and splits his time between New York and western Massachusetts. With a background in pedagogy and activism, Cornejo’s socially engaged practice draws together histories of abstraction in the U.S. and Latin America with personal experiences of the construction site, family memory, and historical forgetting. He earned an MFA from Yale School of Art, a BFA from the Cooper Union, and was a recipient of the J. William Fulbright Scholarship for research in El Salvador. In 2004, he cofounded the Latin American Community Art Project (LA CAPacidad), where for seven years he directed artist residencies to promote intercultural awareness through community art education. He is a founding member of Junte Adjuntas, an artist project based in Adjuntas, a town in the mountains of southern Puerto Rico.

Cornejo’s work has been included in exhibitions at Radiator Gallery, The Queens Museum, Recess: Assembly, Princeton University, and Diverseworks, among other venues. He has attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Residency, and Yvonne Residency in Guatemala. Cornejo taught at the Cooper Union, Hunter College, and Yale School of Art’s Painting and Printmaking Department. He is an Assistant Professor for Art at Cornell's College of Architecture, Art, and Planning and is a Fresco Instructor at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Projects

States of Exception

Website

In January 2017, Recess launched Assembly to serve as an artist-led alternative to incarceration while empowering young people to take charge of their own life story and imagine a positive future through art. Through the 40-week Peer Leader program, our young people are exposed to various mediums of art making, careers in the arts, and internships at arts and culture spaces around the city as a pathway to a career in the arts. A guest artist joins each new cohort of the program and collaborates with youth on a project in our public storefront gallery.

Learn more about Assembly