Christa Joo Hyun D’Angelo: Winner Takes All

Christa Joo Hyun D’Angelo

exhibition

Christa Joo Hyun D’Angelo, Ausschnitt Poster, 2016.

Exhibition

23.10.-3.12.2016 //
Wed.-Sat. // 16:00-19:00

Opening

22.10.2016 // 19:00

Artist Talk

Christa Joo Hyun D’Angelo and Desiree Förster
10.11.2016 // 19:00

Images

Bilder Eröffnung

© alpha nova & galerie futura

Bilder Ausstellung

© Christa Joo Hyun D’Angelo

Press

video, neon sculpture, wallpaper, collage

alpha nova & galerie futura is delighted to present a solo exhibition by American artist Christa Joo Hyun D’Angelo. Entitled Winner Takes All, the works in the exhibition explore the rarely depicted world of thoroughbred horse racing from myriad angles. These themes are playfully introduced in Sex, Money, Freaks, a video collage that combines footage from the auction block, commercial promotions for horse breeding, mainstream television documentaries, and irreverent quotations from The Simpsons to deconstruct the consumer side of the grooming and horseracing enterprise catering to the mega-rich.
The center piece of the exhibition is the 22 minute length video Labor of Love with an original musical score composed by Tami T, in which D’Angelo dissects the freelance labor conditions of professional horseracing through an endearing series of portraits of several German-based international jockeys. From the side of the tracks, horseracing appears as a sport rooted in pedigree, exclusivity, and elitism; at the opposite end of the spectrum is the reality of the jockeys’ existence. Many of them come from immigrant backgrounds, and sacrifice family life, health, safety, and material comfort in their dedication to the sport they love. While their voices are rarely heard in the mainstream sports world, the jockeys in D’Angelo’s work speak freely and openly about the pressures and dangers of their everyday lives and careers, which are held to a delicate precipice and impending expiration date owing to such factors as body weight, age, and injury.
Another video work, And What About Go for Wand?, re-creates in agonizing detail a true story, when a champion thoroughbred suffered a fatal injury in the midst of a race on live television on 27 October 1990. With a voice-over re-creating that day’s events from the perspective of the jockey, And What About Go for Wand? is a painful and visceral examination of life-and-death in the world of competitive horseracing.
The themes in these video works are further elaborated and explored in a series of works on paper, C-prints, installations, and a neon piece. Collectively, the works comprising Winner Takes All form a probing interrogation of the intersection between neoliberalism and the world of sports, with stunning implicit parallels to the contemporary art market, and serve as a provocative defining statement from one of Berlin’s premier emerging artists.

text by: NN

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Christa Joo Hyun D’Angelo is an American artist based in Berlin. She attended the Maryland Institute College of Art and later the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow Poland where she later obtained her BFA. Over the last few years D’Angelo’s work has evolved into a more research based art practice that encompasses political issues concerning the politics of representations regarding class, race, sexuality and gender paradigms that exist within our shared media landscape. Her work attempts to reconstruct conventional modes of identification, while rejecting the restrictive categories of identity in order to adopt a more plural way of experiencing race, gender and sexual relationships. D’Angelo’s work has been featured in Art in America, The Huffington Post, Artforum and she has exhibited in Volta Artfair, Galerie Suvi Lehtinen, September Gallery, and was the 2014 studio grant holder from District Berlin.
http://www.christajdangelo.com/DAngelo_HOME.html

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