ISSUE
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MARCH 2015
ART CRUSH MARCH 2015
Contents ....................
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Jonathan Josefsson
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Kari Lorenson
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Maggie Nelson
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Melissa Leandro
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Caitlyn Mclaughlin
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Editor’s note
Featuring
(cover) Rug #115 Jonathan Josefsson 2014
ART CRUSH, Brooklyn NY www.ihaveanartcrush.com facebook.com/ihaveanartcrush ihaveanartcrush@gmail.com
(left) Kari Lorenson (rear cover) detail from Hop Scotch Melissa Leandro
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Staff Player 1 Player 2
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Brandon Elijah Johnson Valerian Pacifico Ocampo
Editor’s Note March 20th, 2015 What would the world be like without fiber? Pretty cold, we would all be naked right now, and that’s just for starters. In this installment of art crush we are pleased to introduce to an assortment of artists working with fibers/textiles in a variety of modes, grouped together by intuitively and by medium. This approach to curation makes it next to impossible to make blanket statements about these artists... Inside Jonathan Josefsson woos you with his wooly abstractions, Kari Lorenson provides installation shots of a massive performance piece, Melissa Leandro discusses her fiber paintings and installation work, and Caitlyn McLaughlin shares a variety of recent projects from bookmaking to sculptural wall pieces. - Brandon Elijah Johnson
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Jonathan Josefsson
Rug #123 2014
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(left) Ollio September 2014
Ollio Totems 2014
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How does your work relate to your environment? I try to always relate my work to the environment around me. But this differs a lot to which work I’m doing. When I do my street based artworks its the feeling around me in the area I’m working that affects the result of the artwork. I like to repeat colors and forms that surround the painting. When I do gallery shows I always try to adapt the hanging of my works with the room and place where the exhibition is. This easy sometimes, but also kinda tough on some locations.
Describe your relationship with fibers? Since I work a lot with tufted rugs, I’ve got a close relationship to different fibers. I’ve fallen in love with pure Wool and natural fibers. These are so overwhelming nice to work with. The plastic versions is no good, not in my work or in others. For example I would never in my life by any of the synthetic/ polyester rugs that many companies sell.
What are your thoughts on craft? I don´t think about craft that much and don’t like the separation of craft vs. art, I really think its all the same creative business and I like them all. Though, when I look at art I’m really into paintings, I love to see paintings that are big and small, in the galleries and in the streets. I also follow the International street art scene that right now seems to have its peak, with lots of big murals being done all over the world.
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Rug Ollio 2014 11
What is your process like? Very Improvisational. I like to work without sketches and plans, just be there and let the hand guide me. I do a lot of sketches but I always leaves them outside the studio. I often work very fast, and never redo anything, I like speed and direct contact. I love to do art outdoors, especially big walls.
How does your background in graffiti inform your current work now? Constant affects me, after 18 years in the Graffiti scene I still think its the most Inspiring to see works of good street painters, specially the ones that dare to experiment with the medium. Even though I don’t think that my rugs shall have a graffiti style when I do them I think my background affects me and that you can recognise some of that feeling in them.
What drew you towards fibers as a medium that you wanted to work with? I was in a experimental phase of my artwork evolution, and through my art education I got the opportunity to try Tufting. I realized that this method of doing rugs really felt like painting and that I could think in the same manners. So I gave it some weeks to try it out, and after that I was in love with the Tufting machine. Easy to work with, the speed is there and the results was fascinating. I´ve tried many of the other textile methods and tufting is my favorite.
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Rug #124 2014 13
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(left) Ollio 2014
Ollio 2014 2014 15
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Sandys (Thailand) 2014 17
Kari Lorenson
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Maggie Nelson
How does your work relate to your environment? Thinking of it as the people and places that surround me, my work is inextricably intertwined with my environment. I need to think hard about the people that get involved in it, the audience experiencing it, and the its context (time/place/location...) in order to make work that is authentic to those factors as well as any intent of mine. What is so exciting about making objects that are defined by their context is that they are constantly changing before my eyes, they are constantly something new- when I take my rug home, into an art space, into a new group of people, bring it to camp- which makes the possibilities endless and the work is always alive.
How does your work function? FUNCTION is a big word for me. I take it quite literally compared to a lot of artists, and it is very much linked to my craft process. It is easier to think of things you could DO with a rug or a vessel or a book- they are traditionally “useful� objects that ask to be touched and interacted with more than a traditional painting does, as things that are closer to the body and to the everyday. That being said it is the function that viewers and participants assign to my objects that give them their value- the way that people use my rugs, vessels, books, etc. defines what they are to me, so I never really know until they are out in the world. The same goes for my socially engaged project, Art Camp- the group of people involved in each program ultimately decide the function and value of whatever game, discussion, or activity we’re doing, regardless of my concept or intent.
Describe your relationship with fibers? For me as an artist fibers will always be linked to craft and to the body even if this is not explicit. I 34
have a very visceral reaction to things made of fibers or with a craft process- I instinctively want to touch it and experience it with more senses than just sight, and I think this is a very powerful audience reaction to artwork. This immediately throws so many factors into question: artist authorship, ownership of a piece, the supposedly sacred distance between work and audience... In terms of my whole art practice fibers also makes sense in tandem with my socially engaged work because of all of these questions it poses, and because in a practical sense my fibers pieces can be used in partnership with works like, say, an Art Camp discussion program or ritual.
What are your thoughts on craft? To me craft and fibers are synonymous. They are rooted in tradition and history and yet, in the context of art practice, they can transcend all of that and connect to viewers through touch, play, and imagination. The felted “pockets” I make in various sizes and colors are using centuries-old crafting techniques and could potentially be steeped in conversations surrounding artisanship, women’s work, and the art object, but instead they act like children’s building blocks or funny hats to try on or stuffed animals to hold and pet. In contemporary art this is where I think craft is most successfulwhen it can choose whether or not it acknowledges its historical baggage, and still have meaning in its special kind of object-ness still different from that of the non-craft Art object.
Tell us about big red rug? The Big Reg Rug was made when I was a sophomore taking a fibers class and thinking about nomadic objects that create a charged, communal space wherever they go, that have some sort of power over those who encounter them but also are defined by their use by a particular group. I was read35
ing and looking at a lot of central Asian rugs and textiles. My teacher told me this fantastic story about how the Mongolians used to make huge panels of felt by spreading the wool out in a field and throwing water on it and beating it with sticks and then tying it to horses to run with it rolling behind them, and somehow this would create the material that would cover the yurts they lived in. The Big Red Rug did not involve horses or fields but it did take an entire semester of wet felting with hot water and needle felting on a machine. It lives inside a round nylon bag that I sewed which also functions as a protective bottom layer so I can take the rug anywhere. Which is the most interesting thing about the rug- it has been everywhere, to the summer camp where I work in Maine, back home to Massachusetts, in all of my various apartments in New York, and now it sits in my studio with various other felted pockets and wool pieces on it. It’s been slept on, it’s been sat on by many many different people over the last two years, and now I hope for it to be a site for Art Camp to happen in. Though I made it intending it to be a communal object and the property of the sitters, it has become fascinatingly a part of me, almost like an extension of myself as I welcome people onto it to participate in conversation, games and critique.
Tell us about socially engaged art? Socially engaged art is a funny term because it is the name that other people (mostly art historians and critics and curators) use to refer to work like mine- work that stands in this wonderfully confusing and complicated gray area between art and life/activism/therapy/education/community. It’s had a lot of different names over the last few decades- relational aesthetics in the 90s, happenings before then, community art, participatory art... They’re all a little different but mostly refer to the same basic intent. 36
It’s more about doing than making. It’s more about the process than the product. It’s more about all the people involved than the artist. My project Art Camp is my effort to create group programming inside the studios of SVA in order to create community and create space for being silly, ridiculous, emotional, and playful as if at summer camp. Art Camp recognizes that we are not just artists but also people, and likewise recognizes me as a person who is an artist and equally importantly a camp counselor, a facilitator, and a Quaker. I learned how to be a socially engaged artist at a Quaker summer camp in Maine- I am sewing together all the disparate parts of my life to live a whole practice, not just an art practice.
What is your process like? I want to build a house for love.
What drew you towards fibers as a medium that you wanted to work with? I’ve been crafting for as long as I can remember- sewing lessons at age 7, knitting at 9, wearing handmade clothes through high school... so working with fibers is something that has always been a part of me and my process regardless of whether I was using it for my art practice. I was always going to keep knitting but it wasn’t until I took soft sculpture in my sophomore year of art school that I realized (duh) that I could knit art as well as socks (are socks art??). This opened up a whole wonderful piñata of possibilities and processes to learn and I haven›t picked up my oils since.
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Melissa Leandro
What are your thoughts on language? Language play is present in many of the titles of my work. I often use “spanglish” in my daily life and feel that it is crucial to have the work maintain a sense of my cultural identity. I am a Latin American female living in the U.S. Having visited my native country of Costa Rica during my upbringing; I believe that Western society afforded me more freedoms and privileges that I may have not been exposed to otherwise, had my family not immigrated. In response to these cultural differences, I create work that explores ideas of duality in form and material.
How does your work relate to gender? I’m interested in working with techniques and processes that have historically been in the realm of woman’s work or female past times. What I think is interesting about adopting these “crafts”: weaving, embroidering, stitching is there ability to situate themselves in contemporary art. I regularly experiment with displaying my textile and stitched work as paintings. The dichotomy between these two realms forms a tension that I’m working to suspend. How do material choices dictate the importance of art and to what degree it is regarded. Painting has largely been a male dominated field. This is something I believe should continue to change until we reach a more balanced playing field.
Describe your relationship with fibers? Volatile. You soon discover that every process involving fibers is laborious and time consuming. It demands patience and a willingness to be process oriented. Usually things move in steps, its difficult to jump ahead without fundamentally destroying the integrity of the structure. However, sometimes 40
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the disruption of the form is exactly what I’m after in my work. There’s an enormous history of fiber-based artist, which stretch back centuries. The discipline carries with it so much cultural relevance. I appreciate exploring this art during a time when creating with one’s hands can be limited.
What are your thoughts on craft? Culture is inherently informed by craft because of its participatory nature. It is a visual documentation of human interaction and development throughout history. Craft will always thrive because of its usefulness and utilitarian nature. It is the output of objects that make up our daily lives. For me, cloth is large part of who we are. We have an intimate connection to this material, because it physically lives on our bodies, and moves into our spaces. It forms processes that allow individuals to impact their environments. Even as we continue to be consumed within a digital world, we still crave to use our hands, to create physical things, to master our own making. To our benefit, craft has always been a social practice. It’s about communicating skills to each other, passing them down, and refining the techniques. But fundamentally, it’s about social interaction with others. These are processes that generally require an overload of time, patience, planning, and labor. I think through that shared labor, lies the reward - at least for me, that’s how I can rationalize making work that can be so laborious and methodical.
What is your process like? Fluid, often in transition between materials and method. I’m interested in the juxtaposition of opposing objects, materials, and forms. My time in the studio is 43
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often spent figuring out ways to manipulate material until it is several translations away from where it first started. I’m interested in degradation through cutting, ripping, crumpling, soaking, etc., in order to design a whole new substrate. These new substrates then become building blocks for other forms, they build up or multiply through weaving, dying, stitching or fusing. These substrates take many stages, and so repetition plays a large role in the final outcome. My aim is to have the process be slightly ambiguous to the viewer. Creating curious objects that offer them a kaleidoscopic view of an imagined space.
How do you approach your instillations in comparison to your “woven images” A different part of my personality takes over, there is a social motivation that happens with my installation work, while my woven images are much more introspective in nature. With installation, I’m after visual stimulation and the “wow” factor from my audience; often interactive (requiring physical action from the viewer: eating, sitting, kneeling, listening). I aim to have the viewer walk away with a certain sensation, usually whimsical or otherworldly. I’m interested in the genre of magic realism; so unrealistic elements get muddled with natural or familiar objects, shapes, and colors. My woven images are often a clear reaction to my architecture, place, and culture. Nostalgia for “home” and cultural identity are frequently the trigger, and lead me to draw and paint imagined and indeterminate spaces. Weavings connote a familial and intimate feeling. Cloth is unthreatening but has substantially more body and form than paper. This tangibility makes it well suited for the final stage of my initial image.
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What drew you to fibers in the first place? Walking into a room full of floor looms... It was something I’d never seen before. The idea that cloth MUST be woven was a process completely foreign to me. When I took a closer look at some of the textiles in process, that was all it took, I was completely enthralled with the fibers.
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Needle in the ... dyed synthetic batting, 38 x 55� 2013
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Hop scotch dyed syntheti batting, braid 2013
ded yarn (wool) 38 x 57�
Palmers dyed synthetic batting, appliqued fabric, 36 x 36� 2013
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Self Portrait cotton, stitch on woven fabric, wool roving, 15 x 13� 2013
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Untitled dyed synthetic batting, appliqued fabric, 44 x 55� 2013
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Waist Side felted wool, woven cloth, thread, dyed synthetic batting, plastic 2014
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Rounding folds tapestry warp remnants, wool roving, yarn 2014
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Caitlyn Mclaughlin
Trees 2014
Cabin embroidery 2014
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Describe your relationship with fibers for us? Fabric, thread, wool, etc. are an essential, yet semi- under appreciated part of all our lives. For me, fibers extends beyond its utilitarian objective and into the realm of a conceptual piece of art. Working with fibers is a natural way for me to exhale in my practice, and a way to express my formal tendencies in my work. I was taught how to sew by my mother and my grandmother when I was very young, so fibers has become a second nature act incredibly rooted throughout my childhood, and furthermore into my current work as an artist. It’s important for me to recognize where my work has started, that being practicing crafts, to where my work has landed - that being craftsmanship.
How does your work deal with the medium itself? A lot of my work is created using traditional techniques. That being, tying, dyeing, crocheting, weaving, sewing. This is essentially the intertwining of threads that combine to make a physical form. Besides these means of working with fibers, I also use digital machines to help me make my work and allow me to experiment. I’ve done a lot of digital embroidery, and using a knitting machine to make work faster and more efficiently. It’s also fun to work with the mistakes that computers give a traditionally hand completed task.
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What are your thoughts on craft? “Craft” is a recreation of tradition. “Craftsmanship” is learning how to perfect that specific tradition and use it to understand why we make. Using craft helps me get from point A (that being the initial spark of inspiration) to point B (the completion of a work). Craft also connects artists and skilled workers (an artist in a different sense of the word) through a universal language. It reminds me of the domestic, the necessary, and the appreciation of the regular.
How does your approach vary when creating sculptural works as opposed to images? The idea that my images and my sculptures are separate entities doesn’t actually occur to me when I’m making them. Some ideas need to be two dimensional, whereas some need to be three dimensional. I’d like to think that my images and my sculptures have a conversation with one another that support one another and yet state their individual differences. The fluidity of ideas through forms, regardless of their dimensionality, is what I strive for.
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Fashioan Face mixed media 2014 59
What is your process like? To be honest, my process of art making is quite chaotic. It is a series of experimentations that accidentally lead to some kind of end (which in actuality, is actually the start of something else). I wish my thought process was as simple as saying “I have an idea, I make it, and everything is awesome!” For me, to make art is to experience and pretend you know what you’re doing. I’ve learned that to make is to just roll around in my studio without any high expectations of a finished product. Once I’ve done that, I can find what I’m looking for in an assortment of work scattered across my studio.
Tell us a little about the books you’ve been making. Bringing my work to a singular artist to audience level is extremely important to me. It’s essential to be able to relate to the tangible aspect of my work in order to understand it completely. That said, I feel that books bring art to a more solitary interaction rather than being just a visual participant in a group. I personally don’t feel fully connected to an embroidery or a piece of fabric until I can physically touch it, so I wouldn’t expect my audience to understand my work without touching it. What I also love about a book, is that the reader can control how long a piece of art is visible to them. They can also chose what to look at longer without any outside distractions. Books also have a domestic and familiar existence which is what I aspire to have in my series of books.
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Fashion Face 2 mixed media 2014
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(above) 1 2014 (center) Rope 2014 (left) Net 2014
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Net 2 2014 (left) Soft Knits 2 2014
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(left) Amsterdamn 2014 (center) Trajectory 2014 (above) Trajectory 2 2014
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