NY ARTS MAGAZINE | nyartsmagazine 1.5 - Voices - Voices Logical Perspectives Spring 2010 - Voice... | nyartsmagazine 1.5

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Voices

Spring 2010 - Voices

There are always multiple ideas that I could choose from when I am making another piece of work. As boring as it may seem, I choose it very logically and mechanically. I simply choose the idea from my notebook that is the least like the work I just made. It acts like smelling salts, wakes me up, and puts me in a position where I have to start thinking from zero again. The jump from, say, being a tailor to making a fictional feature film to architecturally designing an art school based on Bentham’s Panoptican, is massive but means that I find myself in a place that is so unfamiliar that I push myself to reassess everything. As painters may use color, I use “stuff.”

Redeemable Reminiscences

Spring 2010 - Voices

The Ishihara Color Test is the most common clinical test for red-green color vision deficiencies in humans. It comprises 38 plates, each containing a circle of dots randomized in color and size, which form a number that is visible to people with normal color vision. However, the number in the dots is invisible, or difficult to see, for those with a red-green color vision defect. But, like mirages and memories, the Ishihara numbers are just optical phenomena. Each shows an image of things elsewhere, where refraction and reflection coexist and, to some extent, can be captured on camera. My project, Attentional Landscapes, undertakes quasi-scientific experiments by photographically stripping and manipulating intended meaning and function.

Telling Tales

Spring 2010 - Voices

I’m a visual artist and filmmaker, and recently moved back to Belgium after a ten-year stay in Norway. For a few years I have lived and worked in Brussels. My work is broadcasted, screened, and exhibited worldwide on both visual art platforms and film festivals. I’ve earned awards and screenings at festivals, including the Sundance Film Festival, the San Francisco International Film Festival, Cinevegas, the Berlinale, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Viennale, and the Locarno Film Festival among others. I work with found footage. I write and direct short and mid-length fiction films, and this summer I will shoot my first feature film, The Invader, a social thriller about an anti-heroic illegal African immigrant in Brussels and his struggle for economic and emotional survival in the new world.

Memory’s Outlook

Spring 2010 - Voices

In my series, Inside, I address the issues of childhood memories in meticulously composed conceptual photographic tableaux. An essential tension animates almost every picture with an immediacy, an articulateness of gesture, a strong sense of color and composition, and an unusual perspective. The narrative is filled in single frames, intriguingly poised between abstraction and figuration. My staged photographs elaborate on seemingly insignificant moments I have experienced, investing otherwise benign, forgettable gestures and routines with imaginative potency by restaging and embellishing them with extreme close-ups and oblique perspectives. They become an open-ended description of something that we think we know, but most often overlook or bluntly ignore—such as the hair torn from a brush, only to be discarded.

The Common Clay

Spring 2010 - Voices

The Super 8 films were made in the 1970s, shot as a parallel activity to my studio work and my drawing practice. With these films, my artistic output was enriched with an entirely fresh visual vocabulary, a product of hands-on reflection that intended to resist whatever was being imposed and established by the military dictatorship at that time in Brazil. Later on video technology and photography came to replace the Super 8 medium.

Spatial Relations

Spring 2010 - Voices

I identify my art practice in three key elements: experiencing space, materiality, and rethinking the context of space. I am interested in exploring the ideas of experiencing space in relation to psychological sensation that are involved in certain activities or in visual forms. This form of interaction reflects the structure or systems of contemporary world that I find characterize our society such as speed, chaos, force, fragility, and temporality. I am interested in social tension, in particular how everything forms within the infinite continuum of deconstruction and reconstruction, and how the systems and structures of our world rely on this autonomy.

Fragmented Framework

Spring 2010 - Voices

I came of age as an artist and filmmaker with the punk movement in the late 70s, making Super 8 films of my friends and family and various local celebrities in Pittsburgh, PA. The countercultural impulses and progressive energies of that era continue to inform my work and method. Horror films, low-budget exploitation films, and home movies, along with the teachings of feminism and the desire to represent stories of women’s lives, provide me with inspiration. Martina’s Playhouse (1989) is a film that offers a deceptively casual and ultimately complex investigation of feminine identity. The camera is focused on Martina, age 3, with scenes of Martina, her mother, and an adult female friend, comparing and contrasting their behavior, desire, and performance.

Spring 2010 - Voices

My work has always represented human situations through the use of anthropomorphic paintings. I discovered that once you break or distort paintings, they have a language of their own. Ashamed, A Broken Painting Makes a Reverence, and Homeless (1995-6) were the first broken paintings I made. I found it easier to express feelings of some kind when something was broken.When I was studying I felt painting to be very male-dominated, and that to be a painter you had to have a certain spirituality, which I felt I lacked. Painting was presented as an institution, and I dreaded it. So I decided since I love painting so much, to incorporate humor—my work is not reverential, it is very influenced by slapstick humor and film in general.

Fantasy Translator

Spring 2010 - Voices

A contract of mutual self-delusion exists between the caller and phone sex operator. The caller imagines he is speaking to his most secret fantasy, and the operator willingly plays the part. A phone sex operator must be able to understand the caller’s wants. But more importantly, they must be able to decrypt the unspoken desires. Those things that are too preposterous, too scandalous, or humiliating to articulate. From a few mumbled words, a phone sex operator must weave a finely detailed fantasy encounter. It requires a vivid imagination, acting ability, and above all, a deep understanding of the human appetite.

Mane Attraction

Spring 2010 - Voices

Although usually hairnets are viewed as something ordinary, functional, and familiar, a second glance at a hairnet reveals an object of beauty and oddness. The webs of hairnets are delicate pathways capable of securing and unraveling in equal measure, designed to serve the often opposite desires of freedom and control. Hairnets have been found in gravesites and archaeological digs dating from the 13th century onwards. The nets used to make these digital photograms were made from real human hair in the 1920s to 50s. They are delicate and often hand-woven. The fact that these were made from real human hair sets up all kinds of musings.

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