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I like to think of my recent work as a Frankenstein-like stepchild of the Hudson River School. Thomas Cole and his companions used to hike the Catskills with sketchbook in hand returning home to assemble landscapes of the sublime. I lug a backpack full of expensive technology to capture fragments of nature, and then sit behind a computer screen to seam the scraps together into large, threatening behemoths. Sure, my Frankensteins bear only the faintest family resemblance to their splendent pictures.
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| The “landscape” is a metaphor. The work is in progress, and it points to a task that is never finished. There are many layers of meaning and complexity in The Painter’s Studio. Courbet’s vision of the world shows itself twice over, with a small painting in progress within a large painting, also a work in progress. The artist, the citizen as poet or the poet as citizen, speaks and stands alone, assuming responsibility for the vision. The Painter’s Studio makes evident the interaction between artist and society, whether visitors are attentive or distracted. The artist must keep working and share what is discerned of the world. In an ongoing process, the artist is always naked, and has no place to hide. The development is always in public.
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| Broadway Gallery recently presented Wappen Field: Work in Progress by sculptor Michelle Jaffé. At this evolutionary stage of its development, the installation has six suspended chrome plated steel cutaway helmets with speakers in the top of each providing sound. The empty space below each helmet implies where a body would be. Taken as a whole, the work creates an eerily suggestive, ghostly experience. With Wappen (German for “coat of arms”), the installation can be viewed from two basic perspectives—seeing it as one unified sculptural piece, or instead, placing one’s head into any of the snug-fitting helmets and looking out its eye slit to see a constrained vista of the surroundings and feel a bit claustrophobic. This visceral effect suggests Wappen as an allusion to the dizzying feeling of a narrow way of seeing the world.
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Over the past few decades, philosophy has become manifested in art. The project Personal Structures: Time—Space—Existence takes this development as its point of departure, and aims to present contemporary artists’ perspectives on the concepts of time, space, and existence. For Personal Structures, Max Cole gave an interview about her work. The paintings of Max Cole (Kansas, 1937) consist of parallel horizontal and small vertical lines and give an impression of purity and focus. Stripped from compository elements and color, Cole’s work is a search for content, content which she describes with the word “infinity.” The content of the work is that what exceeds the physicality of the painting. Cole finds this in a process of being lived: her art is an internal endeavor toward the ultimate mystery.
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| My work is fundamentally based on drawing, but this is reinvented through large-scale site-responsive installations, interventions, drawings, and animations. All my work intends to sketch morphing and imaginary environments. For me, the ability to transform is key, and installation allows spaces to become immersive, fragile environments into which the audience can enter. I want the work to be playful and beautiful but undercut by a tension and darker uncertainty. I’ve made a conscious choice to base a contemporary practice in a rural
location (Cambridgeshire, England), and have allowed the rural to
impact through the work. Influenced by the overgrown uncultivated
boundaries of the low, wide-skied landscape of East Anglia, nature is
consistently themed throughout the work.
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| Last summer was huge for Beijing because of the Olympics. Coinciding with the world-famous athletic competitions was Ludus, a group exhibition of several international artists, at NY Arts Beijing Space. The group exhibition showcased works by Renée Breig, Angela Earley, Robert Freimark, Stephen Gostt, Tove Hellerud, Malgorzata Paryzinska, Margareta Petré, Julien Vonier, and Katherine Wood. These Western artists came together and presented their diverse body of work in an Eastern setting. The juxtaposition brought out a visual contrast that was unexpected and refreshing. “Ludus” is the Latin word for “game.” A game indeed was the show, and a fun one. The featured artists toyed with notions of geometric shapes, daring pigments, and texture of paint. Abstraction and Realism interplayed from canvas to canvas.
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There is a basic animal need to ascertain and define what is going on within a space. My work exploits this by setting up scenarios for experiences without trying to control the end experience. My work tests the limits of human perception and cognition, catalyzing curiosity for mixed feelings of doubt and unease. I am interested in the cool tension that results from the efforts of the mind to create connections between disparate elements before they are understood. Scientists refer to these cognitive phenomena as apophenia. Interspace (2008) is a fully immersive video installation shown at Quality Pictures Contemporary Art, Portland, Oregon, in spring 2008.
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area3 is a group of artists, designers, programmers, and musicians founded in Barcelona in 1999. It is a craft studio in which research, development, and experimentation are the basis for high-quality projects of technology, music, or graphic design. With the exhibition in NY Arts Beijing, area3 celebrates its tenth anniversary. The discursive axis from which area3 develops its work reflects on the social environment. area3 utilizes humor, and irony as a strategy, the contemporary as a goal, the originality and the creativity as a starting point, the experimentation as their means—all because they believe that the art requires a commitment with the world since every art is political.
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Mieke Kooistra: Why did you call this show Trauma? What does the title mean?
Dumith Kulasekara: “Trauma” is a Greek word for “wound.” It is a physical injury or an extreme emotional shock that may lead to traumatic neurosis. This exhibition is called Trauma because I want to confront the spectator through my work with the anguish humanity is facing, but that we are all trying very hard to ignore. My work describes the anxiety caused by losing the value of culture, of human relationships, friendship, brotherhoods, and spirituality. The many limp penises in my paintings symbolize the death of the masculinity and of its creativity.
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| In the video installation Night Watch, a watching eye gazes down at passers-by. The piece is a dialogue on the concepts of safety, conspiracy, and the mechanics of control. Night Watch premiered at the Art under the Bridge Festival in 2006 in Dumbo, Brooklyn. The Manhattan Bridge is considered a main terrorist target, and consequently is packed with hidden surveillance cameras and other security. The idea was to make a very visible watching eye. Night Watch was shown again in Shanghai as part of Intrude Art & Life organized by the Zendai MoMA in 2008. Initially Night Watch was proposed for the watchtower of an old
fire station overlooking downtown Manhattan. The manager refused as he
found the piece too political. A similar reaction occurred in Shanghai.
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| A brief over view of Kehinde Wiley’s short career reveal many bodies of work. There are the equestrian paintings based on theme of war, religious work, and ceiling frescoes installations created for Miami and the Brooklyn Museum, a body of works inspired by late French Rococo art, and more recently, a series of painting reflective of more global cultures. Wiley’s emphasis on narrative scenes derived from close-ups; almost cinematic retooling of the classical in the form of the black body proposes his overwhelming metaphor—the black body as the ultimate unknown in which skin and coloration
(race) becomes the fundamental symbol of separation between the
internal and external, between power and the disempowered. |
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| Thanks to the intrepidness of its founder and chief curator Paolo De Grandis and his hard-working staff—among them Carlotta Scarpa, De Grandis’ co-curator for the past three editions—Open, the international sculpture and installation exhibition held annually on the Lido Venice, has been growing in size, reputation, and vision, ever since its inception 11 years ago. The fact that Open runs concurrently with the Venice Film Festival, and overlaps with Venice’s art and architectural biennales—a clever move by its director—makes this exhibition something of a celebration. All that hoopla on one small breathtakingly beautiful strip of land is one heady cinematic experience. This year the work of 44 artists from 15 countries decorated the
island’s lush walkways, overlooked the beach, and graced the porticos
and lobbies of Lido’s two swankiest hotels. Extending its reach beyond
the Lido for the first time, Open mounted a separate exhibition independently curated by Gloria Vallese on the island of San Servolo. |
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| My work addresses ambiguities in perceptual experience. It reveals simultaneous connections and divisions between site and image, interior and exterior, reality and illusion. As the installation immerse the audience, viewpoints shift and unfold. The physical experience of the work opens up new relationships between the viewer, space, and image. My installations are environments that connect to the architectural setting. They consist of abstract animations that are projected onto large sheets of acrylic and integrated into the chosen site. The shifting pattern of black-and-white animation tracks along the
surface of the architecture, mapping and articulating it, and then
subtly diverging from it.
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Home lies at the exit of every train stop, in every traveler’s mind. They travel around for their ideals and their lives. But home is where their hearts lie. To make someone feel touched sometimes all it takes is a rose; to fall in love sometimes all you need is a detail. Sometimes you end a relationship with a drop of tear, but you spend the rest of your life getting over the break-up. Maybe that’s why love is great. I feel the world with my senses. Although the emotions died, my sorrow always gets past the dead emotions, and I cling on to the happiness in the past. The details once buried in my memory seem so vivid now. They rekindle the unforgettable memory.
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I am fascinated by the emotional and cultural dislocation that has been enabled and accelerated in our media-centric society. I believe what is mainstream today has largely become relevant simply as a result of exposure and distribution, while content itself has been pushed to the margins, and is often generic. My work is often a comment on the “media noise” found in this information age. I re-contextualize the familiar into an exaggerated version of itself, and hope to present the viewer with the paradoxical feeling of being seduced while alienated, or compelled to watch something they may find disturbing. By saturating the work with production value, the visual impact comes close to the point of sensory overload. In doing so, I hope to subvert the subject while elevating it into something more mythic and iconic than it would be in its original context.
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