Elaine Gan
Considering Rice

"Considering Rice" is a constellation of images that experiments with mapping the Ifugao Rice Terraces (northern Luzon, Philippines) as an entangled web of shifting and historically constituted relationships.

A patchwork of video stills builds up to a 180-degree tracking shot of 2000-year-old rice terraces in Batad. Around it, image fragments hint at multiple forces that sustain this living, dynamic system: from animals and insects, to plants and forests, rain, water and air, seed varieties and genetically-modified hybrids, village life and displacement, tourism and world heritage agencies.

This is part of an ongoing research project.

Artist Statement:

As neoliberalism activates “ever new” networks and mobilities that re-engineer parameters of human production and domestication, it is also inciting fundamentalist politics, violent antagonisms, and massive dispossessions. Elaine Gan’s practice is a search for a method of mapping otherwise, or a method of mapping entanglements, assemblages, and dynamic sites of encounter where neoliberalism is not the dominant circuit, but simply one among many effective charges. Other worlds are possible. They are, in fact, constituted historically—and already here. Gan uses installations, interventions, and digital media as speculative tools for making alternate worlds sensible, as experiments in mapping otherwise. What tools might an artist today propose? Not just more maps or better-looking maps. But different maps, perhaps even partial maps — mapping that instantiates difference.

About the Artist:

Elaine Gan produces site-driven installations, performative interventions, and multimedia narratives as different means of mapping territory, collectivity, and subjectivity. Her practice has earned grants and fellowships from organizations that include Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York Foundation for the Arts, Jerome Foundation, NY Department of Cultural Affairs, and Puffin Foundation. Her
projects have been exhibited at art venues that include Soap Factory in Minneapolis, Toronto Free in Ontario (Canada), Third Guangzhou Triennial (China), and in New York at Artists Space, Exit Art, Bronx Museum, P. S. 122, Socrates Sculpture Park, and the Armory Show. Gan currently serves on the Artists’ Advisory Committee of the New York Foundation for the Arts - Interdisciplinary Arts. She participated in the Whitney Museum - Independent Study Program in 2006-7 and holds a B.A. in Architecture from Wellesley College. She is from New York and Manila.

Elaine Gan is one of six selectees from our open call for emerging artists, Step Up.

Step Up 2009 was made possible through the support of our members, the Alexander A. Goldfarb Memorial Trust, Howard and Sandy Fromson, Greater Hartford Arts’ Council United Arts Campaign, Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism, the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, Travelers Foundation, Robinson and Nancy Grover, Gary E. West, National Endowment for the Arts, Lincoln Financial Group, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Nimoy Foundation, and the Ensworth Charitable Foundation.

• Artist's Website