List Projects 21: Rami George

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Projected color still of a playground and 4 paper works on black are shown on white walls with exposed wood framing.

Installation view, List Projects 21: Rami George, MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2020. Image courtesy the artist © 2020 Rami George. Photo: Peter Harris Studio.

Location
Bakalar Gallery
Featured Artists
Rami George
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Working in installation and video, and with found images and texts, Rami George uses autobiography to reveal broader untold histories and reappraise enduring civic and social issues.

For their first institutional solo exhibition, George presents a new body of work that extends their ongoing inquiry into their family’s entanglement with the Samaritan Foundation, a New Age spiritual cult that was active in the 1990s. In 1993, George’s mother became engrossed in the group’s doctrine and took her two children from their home in Somerville, Massachusetts, to join the Foundation’s commune in an abandoned prison in Guthrie, Oklahoma.

Within an exhibition architecture loosely based on the floorplan of the Seminar Room that was part of the group’s encampment, George premieres the video essay Untitled (with my father) (2020) alongside an earlier video, Untitled (Saturday, October 16, 1993) (2015), and a group of new works on paper that collage dowsing charts and other instructive texts generated by the Samaritan Foundation with family photographs. Bringing together the Samaritans’ teachings with legal documents and recollections from the artist’s father, George’s new works look beyond the artist’s early memories, and media-driven narratives of the group’s activities to complicate the notion of an authoritative account of events or a coherent, objective truth. At the same time, George’s works invite larger questions around the social formations of so-called intentional communities and probe how trauma, idealism, and a desire for refuge or belonging circulate within these groups and might motivate those affiliated with them.

Rami George (b. 1989, Somerville, MA) lives and works in Philadelphia. Their work has been presented in group exhibitions and screenings at Anthology Film Archives, New York; Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow; the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York; Grand Union, Birmingham; the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; LUX, London; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and others. George received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and their MFA from the University of Pennsylvania.

List Projects 21: Rami George is organized by Selby Nimrod, Assistant Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center.

Sponsors

Exhibitions at the List Center are made possible with the support of Karen & Gregory Arenson, Fotene & Tom Coté, Audrey & James Foster, Idee German Schoenheimer, Joyce Linde, Cynthia & John Reed, and Sara-Ann & Robert Sanders.  Additional support for List Projects 21: Rami George is provided by John Makhoul. Additional funding for List Projects is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

General operating support is provided by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the Council for the Arts at MIT; Philip S. Khoury, Associate Provost at MIT; the MIT School of Architecture + Planning; the Mass Cultural Council; and many generous individual donors. In-kind media sponsorship provided by 90.9 WBUR. The Advisory Committee Members of the List Visual Arts Center are gratefully acknowledged. 

Images

Projected color still of a playground and 4 paper works on black are shown on white walls with exposed wood framing.
Mounted on white wall, 3 paper works with assemblages of color photos and black-and-white diagrams, text, drawings on black
Wood bench in front of 4 paper works mounted on 2 constructed walls and a monitor on the floor between the 2 back walls
A page of black-and-white squiggly-line drawings and a list of “Virtues” above a color photo of dad and baby on black paper
Seen from waist up, a man in shirt and tie speaks into tape recorders and mics in this still shown on a floor monitor.
5 paper works on black displayed on white walls, a monitor on the floor sits between 2 constructed wall sections.
In a constructed alcove, projected still of hand holding a photo of a crater with distant blue mountains above a wood surface
A floor monitor shows a black-and-white still of 2 boys in cowboy costumes and 2 men in suits, 1 holds a framed certificate.
Exposed wood frame of the back of a wall, 2 paper works on black, wall text and a partial view of a monitor on the floor
Still of papers, on top, a partial page with yellow-highlighted text above a black and white, 3-frame “Brenda Starr” cartoon
2 rotated color photos of child with an adult, black-and-white charts, diagrams and small anatomical drawings on black paper
4 color photos, page of black-and-white circular charts, small world map, a skull and spine drawing assembled on black paper
In a constructed alcove, a projected still of a child’s drawing titled “Dead Dog” in an old notebook with bright blue cover
3 color photos, a black-and-white diagram and a chart of “Uniquely Elemental Drawings” assembled on black paper on white wall
Seen from chest to knee, man in shirt and tie stands behind a cluster of microphones as other men point recorders toward him.
Black-and-white still of 2 men in suits, 1 about to present a framed certificate to 2 boys dressed as cowboys

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