lisapradhan

Sowing Agency

2023-03-272023-03-27lisapradhan

Sowing Agency is inspired by the fight for environmental justice, activating our Asian Pacific Islander communities to engage in the issues of today’s climate crisis. With a number of artistic disciplines represented, the pieces featured in the show work to realign our relationships with the Earth through introspection and collective leadership. The exhibition’s broad coalition of community partners amplifies calls for increased action to challenge extractive industries, monocultures, corporate greed and colonization. Weaving local and global climate resistance into our cultural consciousness, Sowing Agency is a visual and poetic address to the grief and resiliency rooted in “seeding the future.”

Presented by the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center as part of the 24th annual United States of Asian America Festival: Forging Our Futures – SoMa & Chinatown.

As a curator for this show, I worked with Asian Women Artists Association, SOMARTS and multiple community groups to plan, develop and present this show physically, virtually, in 4 online events and through print.

Exhibitions

Friends with Benefits

2018-08-21lisapradhan

“Friends with Benefits” Exhibition by Bethanie Irons
In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of PhD, Art Education.
Dates: August 20 – 24, 2018
Reception: Friday, August 24, 4:30-6:30pm

Exhibition Statement:
“Friends with Benefits” is an exhibition by University of Missouri student Bethanie Irons, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of PhD, Art Education. This exhibition focuses on the marriage between materiality and technology and examines how artists, teachers, and researchers can embrace the potentials of engagement with online art communities. Through this collaboration, thematic lines of inquiry and collections are shared, re-orienting the thought process of the viewer and establishing them as both a participant and maker of content and cooperative experiences.

Biography:
Bethanie Irons is an artist, educator, and curator. She earned her BFA in painting from the University of South Dakota and her MFA in painting from the University of Missouri. She is currently a PhD student in Art Education at the University of Missouri, with an emphasis in college teaching and teaching with technology. Bethanie has shown her work internationally, including exhibitions in Germany, United Kingdom, and Australia and has been featured in numerous print publications including New American Paintings and Friend of the Artist. Since 2015, she has curated the online-only gallery PLEAT.

Participating Artists:

All photos by Tony Irons @i_r_o_n_s_i_n_t_l

Work

</3 Code

2018-05-032018-09-25lisapradhan

Appendix Collective
</3 Code, 2018
Inkjet ink

</3 Code is a collaborative piece made using Quick Response (QR) Code arranged eponymously. QR codes are a type of two-dimensional barcode. </3 Code creates a collective archive of links of digital media addressing API heartbreak. Contributors chose to approach this as broadly as linking to profiles of artistic influences, their own art pieces, forgotten hxstories, poems about ancestral longing, and digital moments of levity. As contributor, Priti Sherchan said, “…being able to create and be heard as an API is itself a challenge…I did not try to pressure myself into – ‘Oh it just has to be related to my pain, it has to be related to my culture, but rather just the fact that I create is important here for me.’” If you have an iPhone with 11 OS installed, just open your camera app, point to a QR code, and scan away! (For all the rest of us, download a QR App from your nearest app store.)

Contributors: Diana Li, Vida Kuang, Marlene Iyemura, Lisa Pradhan, Karen Chin, Shelley Kuang, Jes Tom, Nicole Martin, Anum Awan, Lisa Sy, Sasha Vu, Jessica Nguyen, Priti Sherchan, Erina Alejo, Mariela Montero, Sandy Maldonado, Coco Spenser, Rosemary Gardner, Tina Kashiwagi, Anne Wong, Hanna Chen, and Ari Peck.

This piece was conceptualized by Lisa Pradhan, designed by Shelley Kuang, and assembled by Shelley Kuang, Lisa Pradhan, Karen Chin, and Erik Swedberg.

EXHIBITIONS

2018 </3 , SF LGBT Center, San Francisco, CA

Exhibitions

Appendix </3 Install @ SF LGBT Center

2018-05-012018-05-03lisapradhan

Work

Hopes and Dreams II

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Hopes and Dreams II, 2018

Created many months after Hopes and Dreams I, Hopes and Dreams II, reinterprets </3 through the lens of retrospect. Hopes and Dreams II, is a diptych depicting Hopes and Dreams I – a decoupaged USB softly cloaked in dried flowers, small script, and a little bit of Copenhagen – from 3 angles (left), and a QR code linking to the glitched, digital innards of an unfinished artistic project with a former flame (right). By glitching the ephemeral remnants, this piece simultaneously removes identifiable markers, and subtly points to the way time disrupts memory.

EXHIBITIONS

2018 </3 , SF LGBT Center, San Francisco, CA

ITERATIONS

2018 Hopes and Dreams I

Readings

Fresh Off the Starships – Diasporic Asian Narratives

2018-04-302018-05-01lisapradhan

Hmodern Hmong & Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA) is celebrating their 40th Year Anniversary during Asian Heritage Month with Fresh Off the Starships – Diasporic Asian Narratives.

Location: San Francisco Public Library – Main, Koret Auditorium
Address: 100 Larkin St, San Francisco
When: Tuesday, May 15, 2018
Time: 5:00 PM – 7:30 PM

FREE TO THE PUBLIC

I’ll be headlining along with Bryan Thao Worra, Lauren Andrei, and Hauntie!

Exhibitions

</3

2018-04-082018-05-03lisapradhan1 Comment

~*~ 21st Annual United States of Asian America Festival: Regenerative Community ~*~

Presented by the API Cultural Center- San Francisco, SF LGBT Center, and the Queer Cultural Center:

Appendix Collective brings </3.

</3 embodies the unspoken heartache in relationships with family, home, lovers, work, neighborhoods and ancestral colonial trauma. The exhibition provides a space specific to the experiences of API womxn and GNC, queer and allied artists who pull from their experiences of resistance and healing to address, navigate and interrogate heteropatriarchal and homonormative forms of love, care and representation.

OPENING RECEPTION

May 10 @ 6:30-8:30pm

Features local QTPOC DJs, light refreshments, and live readings and happenings.

EXHIBITION DATES

May 1 – May 31, 2018

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS

Erina C Alejo Karen Chin Mariela G. Montero Marlene Iyemura Shelley Kuang Diana Li Lisa Pradhan Dorothy Lee Mallika Roy and more.

ABOUT APPENDIX

Appendix is a growing collective of multi-ethnic API womxn and GNC, queer and allied artists whose practices in the Bay Area work to reclaim personal, intimate and diasporic narratives of intergenerational memory, healing, and trauma. Formed in 2016, through an eponymous exhibition at the Pacific Heritage Museum, Appendix artists draw from a wide variety of 2d, 3d, experimental, and digital media and conceptual frameworks, such as Asian Futurism, Fluxus, and autoethnographic modalities. Folx in the collective blend together art, education, and organizing, with the goal of creating cultural change through tender moments of healing. In community, Appendix members work with Kearny Street Workshop organizing APAture, show and learn from the Asian American Women Artists Association, produce community art with the Asian Art Museum, and organize SoMapagmahal an Alternative Exposure-funded youth photography mxntorship program at Galing Bata.

IG @appendixcollective

COMMUNITY PARTNERS

Asian American Women Artists Association

API Wellness Center

BFF.fm- Best Frequencies Forever

Kearny Street Workshop

Project Voice

FEELS Issue 05: Wanderlust Launch

2018-04-022018-05-02lisapradhan

Come celebrate the official launch of Feels’ fifth issue, Wanderlust!

Bring your friends, grab a treat & a copy of the issue, and chat with creators Hannah Browne & Sarah Vardy and some of our lovely contributors.

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We’re very excited to be launching this issue at Antikka – Cafe & Records! A lovely new shop at Queen & Ossington.

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Back issues will also be available in limited quantities, as well as our ‘Feels’ enamel pins.

** Sales table for FEELS will be cash only **

Issue 05: Wanderlust features:

Aaron Manczyk, Frank Turner, Theo Wong, Maia Boakye, Chloe Hill, Emily Hines, Megan Joyce, Miguel Garcia, Holly Edwards, Amelia Best, EA Douglas, Ryan Stewart, Grace Batista, Rebekah Maurice, Rebecca Leach, Lindsay Rosset, Sophie Berg, Lisa Pradhan, Jared Durelle, Colleen Conroy, Christopher Manousos, Spencer Folkins, Anu Randhawa, Anjie Beltran, Julia Hawthornthwiate, Amanda Caswell, Jean-Phillipe Allamby, Jason Patrick Anderson, Erin Pehlivan, Jessica Felicity Kasiama, D Carey, The Wanderly + many anonymous contributors.

Readings • Work

Chhori: Mummy Yo Mhyah – Holding on for Dear Life

2018-03-162018-05-03lisapradhan

This photo was taken at a performance of Chhori at Dear Mother at San Pablo Gallery in March 2018. Actors seen are Diana Li (left), and Erina Alejo (right).

Chhori: Mummy Yo Mhyah – Holding on for Dear Life, 2018

When my mother moved to America she brought two suitcases filled with shoes, clothes, sarees, and jewelry. Objects not included: How to Raise an American Daughter. Chhori: Mummy Yo Mhyah – Holding on for Dear Life is a process zine modeled after the language and conception typified in Yoko Ono’s conceptual art book Grapefruit. By replicating the Fluxus attitude and language of scores and instructions, Chhori, explores the magical realism of hyphen American mother-daughter relationships with humor. It asks — in the disorientation of diaspora, what do we pass down to our children? By stripping the complicated, transnational identity construction of diaspora to the lowest common denominator of most basic interactions, Chhori documents how the liminal world of gestures replicates larger contemporary Nepalese matrilineal of care and renegotiations of hegemonic cultural scripts.

This zine explores themes of Queerness, Sexuality, Arranged Marriage, Formation of Community, Destruction of Community, Abstinence, Dating, Womanhood, Hospitality, Respectability politics, Consumerism, Guilt and nonverbal communication. Additionally, this zine serves as a manual, documenting what’s already been lived through while describing the potential for time travel, space travel, and the exploration of the perhaps, leaving room for something wild to occur.

PERFORMANCES

2018 Dear Mother, San Pablo Gallery, San Pablo, CA

EXHIBITIONS

2018 Dear Mother, San Pablo Gallery, San Pablo, CA

5/30	6 PM	San Francisco, CA	SF LGBT Center	</3 Closing Reception
6/3	2 PM	Oakland, CA	Wolfman Books	Signs Point to Yes
6/18	9 AM	Detroit, MI	The Alley Project	Without a Doubt
6/18	7 PM	Pittsburgh, PA	Phosphor Project Space	Magic 8 Ball: A Performance by Lisa Pradhan
6/19	8 PM	Pittsburgh, PA	Trampire State Building	Decidedly So