INSITE LAB

In recent years, there has been a pronounced shift in the dynamics of art. The lines that divided research, production, and exhibition making have been blurred as both artists and institutions look for new ways to project art from other spaces of action, giving rise to art closely attuned to the public sphere. Art education has more than ever focused beyond traditional techniques and is privileging research as a crucial part of artistic creation—understood not only as an artist’s method to reach a goal, but also as a nuanced creative stage in the artist’s trajectory. In the public realm and other areas of art investigation, the research process and artistic practice are increasingly conceived as complementary modes of intellectual exchange and knowledge.

The INSITE LAB is a roving platform for artists on both sides of the border (San Diego, US-Baja California, MX) designed to instigate conversations and experiences around process and research in art making. The LAB offers an innovative framework outside of academia where artists engage with specialists from a variety of disciplines and reimagine the region as a laboratory for research.

As the first of its kind in the region, this bilingual, binational lab seeks to challenge the formal language of academia, bridge the distance between artists and collaborators across the region, engage artists imaginatively with their own contexts through travel within the region and engagement with other disciplines, and above all, provide a unique platform where art and curatorial practices can come together to unpack the potential of research, experimentation, exchange, and conversation for art making.

INSITE LAB was developed by guest curator Carlos E. Palacios in collaboration with Andrea Torreblanca, Director of Curatorial Projects at INSITE. After a six-month process of studio visits and conversations with artists in Baja California and Southern California, the curators invited nine artists from different generations who are interested in a wide range of themes that emerge from their experiences living in different cities in the same region, such as Ensenada, Mexicali, Tijuana, and San Diego: from queerness and technology to surveillance, landscape, the body, and experimental drawing. With such a wide range of interests, the artists were eager to re-engage in conversations about their projects, this time with new interlocutors and through collective research experiences that involved immersing themselves in a binational framework and gaining insights from the practices of other specialists.

The INSITE LAB was configured through meetings and involved traveling throughout the region between San Diego and Baja California to meet with interlocutors from other disciplines in their workspaces. These visits included conversations and workshops with choreographers, astrophysicists, designers, native plant specialists, and enologists, as well as discussions of selected readings and working sessions aimed at connecting these experiences—rooted in this geographic context—with their own theoretical frameworks.

INSITE LAB: The exhibition is the culmination of this collective experience. In keeping with the nature of the program, the exhibition is intended as a reflection of its experimental and conversational nature, and as a space for the exchange of ideas and research in an effort to push the boundaries of artistic practice.

Designed as a discursive space and based on a series of interventions by the artists in the space, the exhibition will allow the public to participate in the experience, not only as an immersion in an aesthetic space, but also from the value of conversation as an alternative form of artistic engagement.

The INSITE LAB is realized through a collaboration between INSITE and the haudenschildGarage.