VertexList has the pleasure to present “New Blood”, a group exhibition which “probes the empty, vacant, and vacuous nature of a world full of things where perception and the direct experience of “real-life” are blurred by the dense atmosphere of media, consumption, and entertainment.”

Feturing video, new media and installations by Nao Bustamante, Sasha Dela, Sergio De La Torre, Double Happiness, Sujin Lee, Jeanne Verdoux and Lance Wakeling

Curated by Charles Beronio.

“New Blood” marks a turning point at vertexList and the beginning of a new 5-year plan of growth and development. The work in the exhibition looks back several years through the different subjective lenses of the artists and also considers our current cultural landscape. The artists of New Blood examine their experiences and surroundings to engage and embrace the world we live in to reveal its’ submerged and hidden meanings and narratives. Examining the banal, absurd, and sublime nature of the overlooked, day-to-day surface manifestations of our consumerized culture and its deeper (il)logic, inner structure, and architecture—– New Blood reveals the forces at play in the spaces and places we inhabit and reside in as well as the concealed range of emotional experiences that occur in these settings– from boredom, loneliness, and longing, to desire, love, and violence (both bodily and economic). The exhibition probes the empty, vacant, and vacuous nature of a world full of things where perception and the direct experience of “real-life” are blurred by the dense atmosphere of media, consumption, and entertainment. Charles Beronio

Nao Bustamante is an internationally known performance and video artist originating from the San Joaquin Valley of California. Her (often precarious) work encompasses performance art, sculpture, installation and video. Bustamante has presented in Galleries, Museums, Universities and underground sites all around the world. She has exhibited, among other locales, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Arts, and the Kiasma Museum of Helsinki. In 2001 she received the prestigious Anonymous Was a Woman fellowship and in 2007 named a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, as well as a Lambent Fellow. Currently Bustamante holds the position of Associate Professor of New Media and Live Art at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. www.naobustamante.com

Sasha Dela, originally from Atlanta, currently resides in Houston and has recently completed a residency at the Museum of Fine Arts’ Core Program. Dela’s work embodies her concerns regarding the intersection of ecology and the marketplace. Her sculpture, installation, digital photography and video investigate the complex issues surrounding resource use and the potentially unexpected and unforeseen outcomes of industrial production and its impact on culture, society, and its relation to ecology. She completed her Master of Fine Art in San Francisco at California College of the Arts in 2005, and her Bachelor of Fine Art at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2000, and was awarded the DeCosse Fellowship, to study at the Accademia Di Belle Arte, Florence, Italy in 2000. In 2009 Dela will be presenting a large-scale pubic project on location at the Mexican American Cultural Center in Austin for the Texas Biennial. Currently Dela has a solo exhibition, Natural Commodity, at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary. Dela’s recent exhibitions include the Texas Biennial, McKinney Avenue Contemporary, the Houston Area Exhibition at the Blaffer Gallery, the Museum of the University of Houston and the Arthouse traveling exhibition.

Sergio De La Torre works have focused on issues regarding immigration, tourism, surveillance technologies and transnational identities. These works have been exhibited in a variety of venues both national and international. He has received grants from the NEA, The Rockefeller Foundation, Creative Capital, the Protrero Nuevo Fund and the Creative Work Fund among others. De La Torre’s latest project MAQUILAPOLIS |city of factories|, an hour long video documentary done in collaboration with film maker Vicky Funari and the Tijuana based NGO Grupo Factot X has partivipated in more than 50 international film festivals and has received many awards, among them the Outstanding Achievement Award at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2006. De La Torre is an Assistant Professor at the University of San Francisco’s Art + Architecture Department.

Double Happiness is a research institution and 4-person collective founded in 2007 and dedicated to constructing new frameworks for the artifacts of failed systems of logic. They are located online at http://doublehappiness.ilikenicethings.com/, and at various outposts throughout the world. They are currently testing methods of merging our online and offline operations.

Born in Seoul, Korea, Sujin Lee is an interdisciplinary artist who works in a combination of video, performance and text. She currently lives and works in New York. Sock monkeys and gummy worms are comforting. http://www.sujinlee.org

Jeanne Verdoux was born in Paris. She lives and works in Brooklyn. She is a MA Graphic Design recipient from the Royal College of Art, London (1990) and a BA Visual Communication recipient from ENSAAMA, Paris (1987). In 2008, she participated in the Artist in the Marketplace program at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. She has shown her work at Galerie Magda Danysz (Paris, 2007), The Bronx Museum (How Soon is Now?, 2008); Pulse, NY (2007); ‘80+80, photo_graphisme’ (Galerie VU, Paris, 2007); Scope Miami (2006); Scope NY (2005). She received the Villa Medicis “Hors-les-Murs” prize (1999), The International Studio Residency (NY, 1999), the Rotunda Gallery/BCAT artist residency (2006) and the Centre National des Arts Plastiques Grant (Paris, 2006). http://www.jeanneverdoux.com/

Lance Wakeling was born in 1980 in Tacoma, Washington. He grew up working in sign shops and moved to Brooklyn, New York in 2004 where he now works in magazine publishing. He has shown work at Consolidated Works, Western Bridge, Exit Art, Dam Stuhltrager, Artists Space, Leonard Pearlstein Gallery, and Pierogi 2000. http://canarymagazine.net/some-work/