2019
Eileen Isagon Skyers engages with identity and new media
To Feel What I Am is an exhibition that looked at how the constant dialogue between person and screen both reveals and conceals emotional vulnerabilities below the surface. The group exhibition, curated by Eileen Isagon Skyers and Iris Williamson, featured a compendium of works that survey the power and failure of communication in a digital age. Installation view at the Hap Gallery in Portland, Oregon, 2015.
Eileen Isagon Skyers is FCINY and Frame Contemporary Art Finland's 2019 curator-in-residence. Skyers’ second residency period in Helsinki takes place in September, in conjunction with Frame’s Rehearsing Hospitalities Program, and includes a presentation of her online exhibition and publication at Gathering for Publications event on September 10.
Gathering for Publications
Yvonne Billimore, Jussi Koitela, Vidha Saumya, Eileen Isagon Skyers
September 10, 2–4pm
Frame Contemporary Art Finland, Ratakatu 1 b A 9, Helsinki
In Gathering for Publications, Frame Contemporary Art Finland launches a series of collaborations and commissions responding to and resulting in various forms of publications.
Eileen Isagon Skyers, Finnish Cultural Institute New York and Frame Contemporary Art Finland's curator-in-residence, uses this occasion to publicize her work resulted from her first residency period in Helsinki in May 2019. It takes the form of an online exhibition and printed publication, presenting the curator’s research alongside the work of artists Jennifer Chan, Militza Monteverde and André Filipek Magaña.
‘Reading List’ by Vidha Saumya, the first work in a series of artistic commissions at Frame Contemporary Art Finland’s office space, commissioned in the context of Rehearsing Hospitalities, will be launched. The poem, ‘Reading List’, painted as a wall mural, proposes a list of 96 authors from India who should be in global reading lists. This list is potentially endless.
The event is organized in collaboration with Frame, the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York and Alfred Kordelin Foundation.
Eileen Isagon Skyers is a curator, writer, and artist based in New York City. Skyers engages with identity and new media, positioning each against a contemporary society that has grown increasingly alienated as it grows accustomed to artificial intelligences and processes. She is a founding member of HOUSING, a migratory gallery concept that is guided by a desire to stimulate public discourse through the work of artists and creative practitioners whose works show critical commentary and intent. Part of HOUSING's motivation is to support artistic practices and aesthetic experiences that contour the limits of visibility, and advance the conditional inclusion of artists of color.
In her curatorial work, Skyers focuses on digital art and culture. More specifically, she contends with technology’s capacity to both connect and disarm us, with an emphasis on works that engage with VR and screenic transparency. Her residency in Helsinki is divided into two parts. The first one in May includes studio visits and research within local context, followed by a second stay in September. The residency will conclude in a project that will be presented as a part of Frame's public program Rehearsing Hospitalities.
Eileen Isagon Skyers has worked with contemporary art and non-profit arts organizations including The Whitney Museum, David Zwirner, Rhizome, the New Museum, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, and the Digital Museum of Digital Art (DiMoDA). Her first book, Vanishing Acts, was published by LINK Editions (Brescia, Italy) in 2015, and her writing has been published in NATASHA, Wreath, Glass Press of the Future, Web Safe 2k16, Printed Web, and New World UNLTD, among others. Her moving image work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in the U.S., U.K., France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Mexico. Skyers holds a BA in Philosophy and a BFA in Studio Art from the University of South Florida (Tampa, FL) and an MA in Critical Studies at Pacific Northwest College of Art, (Portland, OR).
Skyers’ curatorial residency is organized in collaboration with the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York and Frame Contemporary Art Finland’s Frame Curatorial Fellowship Program. This curatorial residency is a continuation to the residencies enabled to visual arts professionals by the Kordelin Foundation. Read more about the collaboration here.
RESET II and Virtual Reality featured the VR exhibition DiMoDA 2.0: Morphé Presence. The exhibition opened in Munich, Germany in Fall 2017. Curated by Eileen Isagon Skyers and Helena Acosta. Photo courtesy Tina Sauerländer.