Mariángeles Soto-Diaz: Unconfirmed Makeshift Museum

Unconfirmed Makeshift Museum (UMM) @ Klowden Mann Gallery
From October 21 - November 11, 2017,  the Unconfirmed Makeshift Museum (UMM) will present an art exhibit and event series at Klowden Mann in Culver City, California. The exhibit includes works from UMM’s Impermanent Collection as well as a Participatory Project titled And Tossing and Turning And. In addition, on three consecutive Saturdays, UMM will present Untested Address, a series of performances and presentations by diverse artists and writers.

About the Unconfirmed Makeshift Museum (UMM)
The Unconfirmed Makeshift Museum (UMM) is a flexible project space with a playful utopian sensibility, conceived as an intervention in suburban Irvine, California. As a curatorial experiment conceived to decentralize circulation of contemporary practices, UMM integrates the sensory, poetic, political and affective dimensions of the everyday. UMM’s mission is to provide a shifting creative platform for contemporary art through exhibitions and social practice in a community setting. UMM is infrapolitics, digging for the pleasure of doubt in the debris of heroic certainties. UMM is a space made visible by iteration over time, a way to simultaneously render and erase the lines dividing private and public, quotidian life and art, a house becoming art space and an art space welcoming neighbors. UMM is slow and shifting, kaleidoscopic and puzzling. UMM is conceived and directed by artist Mariángeles Soto-Díaz.

Untested Address Event Series:
Untested Address is an open-ended platform for in-progress work including poetry, unpredictable improv games, moon absorptions and short experimental work. The series of events has taken place at UMM’s neighborhood and for this exhibition, UMM’s copper-pipe, malleable patio platform has been transposed to the Klowden Mann Gallery along with a seating structure designed in collaboration with architect Ed Ogosta. The presenting artists and writers for Untested Address during UMM’m exhibition at Klowden Mann is as follows:

October 28: José Alvergue, Fabián Cereijido, Cognate Collective, Alana de Hinojosa, Jacobo Sefamí
November 4: Jessica Ceballos Campbell, Kristin Cerda, Adriana Johnson, Laura Vena, Semi-tropic Spiritualists
November 11: Los Angeles Road Concerts

And tossing and turning and (installation in Klowden Mann’s Project Room)
And tossing and turning and is a participatory project by Mariángeles Soto-Díaz. As with previous projects sponsored by UMM, this work draws on materials collected from UMM’s local neighborhood, in this case from residents responding to the question “What recent news headline has caused you to lose sleep?” Soto-Díaz collected the responses to create an installation using bedsheets also from the neighborhood, as a way to capture the affective dimension of our current political moment.

UMM’s Impermanent Collection
On exhibit in the gallery throughout the three weeks are works from UMM’s Impermanent Collection, which houses works that are made from 90% almost-dumped landfill materials and outmoded media collected from neighbors. These works channel the collective memory of a time, highlighting the importance of this historical moment which will likely be remembered as the end of the mechanical era. As obsolete media awkwardly articulates failure, out of sync but in its own rhythm, analog time rubs slowly and imprecisely against our digital landscape.