LandEscape A r t
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LISA BIRKE ALISON ALFREDSON RUDIGER FISCHER ANTONIA CACIC IRENE POULIASSI ROSALYN SONG SIMA YOUSEFNIA ALISON WELLS MONIKA SZPENER Patron Saint of Regret Installation by Irene Pouliasi and Kyriakos Bournas
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Alison Alfredson (USA)
My paintings aren't complex in subject matter, however I try to find a unique perspective when representing an object or scene. I've been focusing on acrylic medium recently because the drying time allows me to create immediate overlaps without the risk of muddy paint. Wood panel and stretched canvas are my typical surfaces. The subject matter and my desire for a certain paint application leads me to choose one
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Rosalyn Song
Irene Pouliassi (Greece)
Monica Szpener RĂźdiger Fischer
Poland
My artwork takes a critical view on the narration of time and its effects exploring the human body as a manifestation of nature and universe. I implement time as both a tool and an idea so it attains temporal qualities as it experiences change and fluctuation. My work reproduces familiar visual stimuli such as the temporary nature and distortion of the human image transformating artwork to a memento mori.
Serbia
Monika Szpener, uses characteristic materials, e.g. various recyclable materials, worn out and useless items. Most of her works are interdisciplinary and combine various artistic techniques. In 2011 she got a doctor degree in fine arts at the university. She deals with sculpture in a wider sense, including portraits, installations, objects, and artistic actions.
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My work is of narrative nature, it opens up a space from which the recipient can think ahead. The works contain one (or more) questions that you can talk about. Mostly my questions research the relationships between reality and possible reality, between sign and matter. You can say: I am suggesting a narrative. And as well: I am creating a situation.
USA
Alison Wells (USA
Our awareness of our surroundings and our lives is often based on what we can perceive. A mistake sometimes made is not acknowledging what is absent, what is not there. Our lives seem lacking when we are bored with nothing to do. But this emptiness is something. It is the lack of something. And until we can appreciate and see the “nothingness� we are only seeing a portion of what is around us.
Landscapes are constantly changing, being constructed and deconstructed at a rapid pace much like the process in my paintings.I am particularly fascinated with the tactile nature of cities along with their emotional energy and their dominant structures. I translate these three aspects in my work through abstracted mixed media paintings on canvas.
In this issue
Lisa Birke Lives and works in USA Mixed media, Installation
Alison Alfredson Lives and works in East Lansing, Michigan Painting
Rosalyn Song Lives and works in Washington DC, USA Mixed media, Istallation
Monika Szpener Lives and works in Szczecin, Poland Mixed media, Installation, Sculpture
Sima Yousefnia
Antonia Cacic Lisa Birke (USA)
When you think of fairy tales, youmight think of a beautiful princess with long golden hair, ahandsomeprince in shinning armor, or a fairy godmother performing miracles.Think again. The sweet,innocentchil dren's tales known today did not always endwith “happily ever after”. The meaning, toneandcontent of older versions of these fairy tales,collected by the Brothers Grimm, was dark, evenugly.
(Croatia)
I visited several sites in Peru: I'm impressed with their rich culture and the great vibrancy. Fascination with their culture, origins, habits, way they dressing with lots of color, the psychological impression of their physiognomy and the dramatic landscape of the Andes, all mixed into one conglomerate that I had remembered gave me a strong incentive for exploring the painting surface.
Sima Yousefnia
Lives and works in Teheran, Iran Fine Art Photography
Iran
Most people think and dream in private and they do not want anyone to know about their thoughts or dreams or they are afraid to express them to others and society.
Antonia Cacic Lives and works in United Kingdom Mixed media, Installation
Rudiger Fischer Lives and works in Lübeck, Germany Mixed media
Silence is one of the most profound feelings that we, as humans, often can sense in our lives. But when it engulfs us, it turns all our thoughts and feelings into a mysterious serenity.
Alison Wells Lives and works in USA Mixed media, Painting
Irene Pouliassi Lives and works in Athens, Greece Mixed media, Installation
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LandEscape 40 Art Review
“Pictures in an Exhibition” six channel digital video installation at the University of Waterloo Art Gallery, video projections left to right: red stripe painting; walking the line; red carpet (left), Fragonard’s swing; Miss La La; hung out to dry (right), ), 2013 (image credit: Brian Limoyo)
LandEscape 2 Art Review
Lisa Birke Lives and works in Canada
An artist's statement
L
isa Birke is a Canadian artist who situates between the tradition of painting, digital video and performance art. She received an MFA with distinction from the University of Waterloo in 2013, where she held the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Master’s Scholarship and the University of Waterloo President’s Graduate Scholarship.
She has had solo exhibitions across Canada and her short films have been screened at film/video festivals and media centres internationally, including amongst others: Athens International Film + Video Festival (USA), ARTVIDEO LAB (France), InShadow International Festival of Video, Performance and Technologies (Portugal), Cologne OFF X (USA, Israel, India), Cyprus International Performance Art Festival (Greece), Cold Cuts Video Festival (Canada), International Short Film Week Regensburg (Germany), and Videoholica (Bulgaria).
Recently, Tea Service was presented at the National Art Centre’s “Ontario Scene Festival” at SAW Media Art Centre in Ottawa (Canada) and Calendar Girls was awarded a “Jury Award for Creative Achievement” at the Arizona International Film Festival (USA) in April 2015. Lisa Birke examines notions of ‘self’ through the lens of gender, bringing the cultural tropes of woman into focus and into question. Filmed unaccompanied in the Canadian landscape, absurd yet insightful performative acts become entangled in nuanced and complex narratives in single and multi-channel video works that make reference to art history, mythology and popular culture. Revealing what lies beneath the surface of femininity, her work toys with a conclusion that is problematic, comi-tragic, and most essentially, human.
Lisa Birke
LandEscape 3 Art Review
LandEscape meets
Lisa Birke An interview by Dario Rutigliano, curator landescape@europe.com
Lisa Birke explores the notions of ‘self’ through the lens of gender, bringing the cultural tropes of woman into focus and into question: through an incessant process of recontextualization, her multidisciplinary approach combines painting, digital video and performance art into a consistent and lively unity, to provide the viewers of an extension of the ordinary perception, accomplishing the difficult task of evolving from a passive audience to conscious participant, inviting us to rethink about the way modern society's cliché that unsuspectedly nestle in gestures, symbols and situations I'm particularly pleased to introduce our readers to her multifaceted artistic production. Hello Lisa, and welcome to LandEscape: to start this interview, would you like to tell us something about your background? You recently graduated with a MFA from the University of Waterloo: how has this experience influenced you as an artist and impacted on the way you currently conceive and produce your works?
Thank you so much for having me in LandEscape, it is such a vibrant forum in which to express ideas and creative vision and I am so happy to participate. Yes, I came to my video art practise somewhat by accident. Before 2011, I Juerg Luedi
Lisa Birke
LandEscape 4 Art Review
Semiotics of the {Postfeminist} Kitchen (after Martha Rosler), performance/promotional image (image: Lisa Birke), live performance at Sounds Like Audio Festival: AKA Artist Run, Holophon, and PAVED Arts, 2014
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Lisa Birke
Art Review
was engaged in a twelve year painting, drawing and installation practise that was concerned with the overflux of information and the accumulation of material goods in our digital and commodity-based society. Alongside my more contemporary themes I also had one foot firmly planted within art history and was particularly enamoured with the narrative of the figure within the landscape. The winter before beginning my MFA, I spent six weeks at the Ted Harrison Artist’s Retreat Society (THARS) that runs a Residency Program at Crag Lake, an isolated community in the Yukon, in northern Canada. It was January—and extremely cold—yet also stunning and undeniably magical. On a whim, while taking a break from painting, I decided to take my tiny point-and-shoot camera and filmed a type of endurance performance outside in the nude, in the snow. I was inspired by the Arctic Games and was looking for an outlet for the current obsession with Yoga that was playing-out at the time in my home of Vancouver. I thought it would be both humourous and interesting to transplant the Yoga pose even further out of its original context into this unhospitable (and quite literally cold and white) environment. In order to introduce ourselves to the MFA program at the University of Waterloo, all incoming grads were asked to participate in an exhibition upon our arrival. As I could not afford to ship my large canvases, I decided to show the videos that I had made in the north. After this point, everyone thought that I was a video artist and my fate was somewhat sealed. This was terrifying as I considered myself a luddite and technophobe at the time. My extensive background in dance cushioned my transition and producing the videos has, surprisingly, felt quite intuitive and natural. Before starting to elaborate about your production, would you like to tell to our readers something about your process and detail from myFunerals, Performance
set up for making your artworks? In particular, what technical aspects do you mainly focus on your work? And how much preparation and time do you put in before and during the process of creating a piece?
Usually, the works happen quite organically. I
Lisa Birke
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“Pictures in an Exhibition ”
a six channel digital video installation at the University of Waterloo Art Gallery, video projections left to right: Leda and the Swan; pool toy; plastic pornography, lost; Stella; looking glass(es), Sisyphus yogi ; Renaissance woman; somersault, and white on white, marrying the wind; runaway bride, 2013 (image credit: Brian Limoyo)
get a snipit of an image or even a fully formed idea in my head that won’t stop pestering me until I realize it. These ideas may be inspired by previous projects, something that I hear on the radio, or they appear randomly as I am looking for costumes at the Thrift store or am making my props. As many of my projects are
filmed over a long period of time (up to a year or more), some of these ideas build in complexity as I am going along and other ideas take several tries until they coalesce. Other ideas end up on the cutting room floor as soon as I see the first footage. There are always several projects happening at the
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Art Review
red stripe painting; walking the line; red carpet (red carpet), video still, digital video loop, 20min, 2013
same time so cross-pollination happens. Because, I go through a lot of physically demanding scenarios when I am filming many of the things that happen in the scenes are accidental and unplanned. These failures also lead to new ideas. I spend a lot of time scouting locations—this is
where my painting background comes in—and I tend to choose very traditionally “romantic” settings and compositions. I want the final scene and overall image to appear ‘constructed’, Picturesque or already mythologized in some way. Then I wait for weather. I often wake up at 3-4am to assess
Lisa Birke
LandEscape 8 Art Review
equipment into the field, so I have to consider being able to get both in and out of the locations I shoot in. When it is below -20 degrees celcius this becomes a very serious consideration. I have very nearly gotten myself into some trouble with the cold in the past, so I am a little bit more careful now. As in all film and video production a lot of time is spent with the editing (and I am happy to report that I have shed my ludditeness and have become a bit of a techie). My work utilizes a lot of invisible loops and changes in play speed. The audio tracks are generally constructed from the live-capture sound in the camera, field recordings on a digital audio recorder and manipulated tracks of my own voice. The soundtrack for “Pictures in an Exhibition”, for example, took several months and underwent several versions before it was completed. “Pictures in an Exhibition” came together over the course of one year. Because I was in a graduate program, I was able to dedicate most of my time to this project. Now let's focus on your artistic production: I would start from Pictures in an Exhibition, an extremely interesting project that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article: and I would suggest our readers to visit directly at http://www.lisabirke.com in order to get a wider idea of your multifaceted artistic production. In the meanwhile, would you tell us something about the genesis of this interesting project? What was your initial inspiration?
the weather situation and then decide whether I head out or go back to bed. Dawn always provides the best light and there are usually no other people around. Logistics are also always part of the picture because I always work alone on my projects, start to finish. I have to carry all of the gear, props, costumes, and camera
There are a number of lines of inquiry that I attempted to tackle in Pictures. Firstly, representation, and more specifically our expectations of the representation of the female form as embedded, performing, or perhaps even trapped with the natural landscape. There is a tradition of depicting the female as part of Nature: she is considered
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naturally part of or at home in the natural tableau in various levels of undress. These mythologized views are very interesting to me and I wanted to see what would happen when I physically played-out some of the historical narratives. Of course, the result is anything from glamourous. It is muddy, there are bugs, and it is often really cold and prickly. Ergo—the female form is not naturally at home in nature. Following this, I was interested in unravelling some other myths. As the project built—and because of a certain reluctance in being able to let go of my comfort zone, the medium of painting—I decided to make an installation of six moving ‘paintings’, but all in the video medium. Each ‘tableau’ took its inspiration from an art historical or modernist painting that reveals the act of looking or challenges the materiality of the art form and thus challenging representation itself. The paintings were also selected to posit interesting themes that I could work with: spirituality/transcendence, pornography/sexuality, control, scopophilic viewing and the modern gaze, and entrapement. I wanted to viewer to be aware that they were looking at a constructed image, thus bringing awarneness to the “looking” and “interpreting” process—one that was both familiar and unnervingly uncertain here. I attempted to present stories, objects, and symbols that are already embedded into our cultural consciousness but worked to confuse the signification of these tropes and rendered their meaning uncertain. For example, in “red carpet” we are presented with the symbol of the movie industry: the red carpet. The symbol of fame, stardom and presentment, it is a powerful emblem that is usually only seen off screen and not in it—in “red carpet” is has been transplanted to the center of the frame. A woman walks the carpet, yet there are no media scrums and she is seemingly alone in her
poised and stoic journey. She is not presenting herself ‘to’ the camera but rather walks endlessly away from it, forcing the viewer to follow behind her throughout the passage of the seasons. Thus, while it subverts cinematic space, it is also a tale about transcendence and literally walking the line, negotiating loneliness, and coming to terms with the human condition. It also reawakens a warning given in Agamemnon by Aeschylus, the first Greek play to use the symbolism of a mortal walking upon tapestries. It is a warning that has long since been silenced: beware all mortals who attempt to act as gods and walk upon such extravagences [artist’s paraphrase]. Out of interest sake, the paintings that inspired “red carpet” were Barnett Newman’s “The Wild” (1950) and “Achilles”(1952), two of Newman’s red “zip” paintings . The works in Pictures attempted to subvert the viewer’s expectations and also frustrate him/her in not providing a concrete resolution to the narratives—things are not always what they seem or are ‘seen’. Art, for me is an investigation into how we construct meaning for the world. Both power and danger lie therein: we often take what is presented to us as truth—especially when a certain image or narrative is repeated over and over again without questioning. The church understood the power of the image in the middle ages, yet we often don’t challenge tropes or mythologized representation in contemporary society. I should add that if there is further interest in some of the background information on the source paintings and the mythologies explored in Pictures my MFA thesis on this body of work can be found here: http://www.lisabirke.com/writings/pdfs/lisabirk e_thesissupportdocument_2013.pdf . I have appreciated the way Pictures in an Exhibition takes an intense participatory line on the conception of art. In particular,
Lisa Birke
LandEscape 42 Art Review
"Pictures in an Exhibition� six channel digital video installation at the University of Waterloo Art Gallery, video projections left to right: white on white, marrying the wind; runaway bride (left), red stripe painting; walking the line; red carpet (centre), and Fragonard’s swing; Miss La La; hung out to dry (right), 2013 (image credit: Brian Limoyo)
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Lisa Birke
Art Review
your investigation about the intimate aspect of constructed realities has reminded me of Thomas Demand's works: while conceiving Art could be considered a purely abstract activity, there is always a way of giving it a permanence that goes beyond the intrinsic ephemeral nature of the concepts you capture. So I would take this occasion to ask you if in your opinion personal experience is an absolutely indespensable part of a creative process... Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience?
That is a great question. No, I feel that sometimes we artists like to feel that we can separate ourselves and/or our personal lives from the ‘greater concept’ we are working towards, but I feel that this is an impossibility. Of course, all our direct experiences cannot but wholly influence what we produce. Even when suppressed, the everyday, the mundane, our individual fears, joys, insanities and all of our processed experiences will filter out into the work in some way, if not directly than indirectly. In my own work, I have really had to contend with the fact that I am physically present in the work—even if only as a physical stand-in for an architype, or as an abstracted concept. Initially I used my own body because it was cheap, it was willing to do questionable things for the sake of the art and it was always available to me. It has been a challenge to present the work publically because of that thing we all carry around, called shame and self-consciousness. I have learned to let this go, for the most part. I have become more interested instead in both the physical endurance and discomfort of making the work and in the awkward director/actor relationship that heightens the tension and questions the methodology of control in the image. I hope that because I am just a regular person (and not a trained stunt double) putting myself into these scenarios, that there is a certain degree of
Calendar Girls, video still, digital video, 4 min, 2014
empathy that strengthens the issue of direct experience for the viewer.
Lisa Birke
LandEscape 12 Art Review
Humourism plays a relevant role in your
effectively question the societal expectations
practice and in the Calendar Girls you
of woman not only as a stricly human
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Calendar Girls, video still, digital video, 4 min, 2014
aesthetic symbol but especially highlighting her spontaneous, direct position in a wide, natural environment. In this interesting project I can recognize a subtle but effective investigation about the emerging of language due to a process of self-reflection, and what has mostly impacted on me is the way you have been capable of bringing a new level of significance to signs, and in a wide sense to re-contextualize the concept of a track of our existence. This is a recurrent feature of your approach that invite the viewers' perception in order to challenge the common way to perceive not only the outside world, but our inner dimension... By the way, I'm sort of convinced that some informations & ideas are hidden, or even "encrypted" in
the environment we live in, so we need -in a way- to decipher them. Maybe that one of the roles of an artist could be to reveal unexpected sides of Nature, especially of our inner Nature... what's your point about this?
It is really important to me that the viewer can bring their own experience and interpretation to the work—the vulnerability and awkward humaness that are revealed in my acts and epic failures hopefully allow for a relateability of sorts. I believe that humour can uncover some of our deepest hang-ups, misconceptions and perhaps even hint at an unfettered truth. Calendar Girls was initially a reaction to the “selfie” culture and all of the amateur dance
Lisa Birke
LandEscape 14 Art Review
Calendar Girls, video still, digital video, 4 min, 2014
videos that are produced for Youtube. This is working alongside the more obvious commentary on the tradition of the Calendar Girl and the objectification therein. Both of these media forms are facinating arenas of objectification and presentment/masquerade. The joke was that I was presenting myself to the camera but had my face covered, frustrating the purpose and also making the audience again more aware of the other signs at play. Although their faces are not revealed, I attempted to portray a more rounded and complex female character type(s)—rather than the usual flat yet aesthetically ample pin-up girl. The reoccuring Nature theme was at work again too: women associated with the seasons, the passing months
and with passing fancy. I am also playing with some social cues and narratives, ie. dancing with a lampshade on one’s head, living with a box on one’s head, or becoming a social deviant by stretching a nylon stocking on one’s head. I carefully combined these symbols with a very specific and culturally significant and charged ‘dance’ outfit, and yes, positioning them within a larger environment—both natural and sociocultural. When the women enter their natural stages, we expect that there will be a performance or spectacle and we already know what it will look like, as determined by the outfits—this is a type of encrypted knowledge for sure. And this ties back to some of the things that I was discussing earlier.
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Knock yourself out (after Muybridge), digital image, digital print on fine art paper, 2012
I am making the point also in this work that we often feel like we have to hide our inner ‘Natures’ in order to ‘fit-in’ to societal expectations and norms. This is very confining and makes it difficult to see where we are going, literally and metaphorically. When all layers (and clothes) are pealed away in the month of December, an overt sexuality is not displayed, as one would expect. Rather, a silly yet heartfelt joie de vivre is expressed restoring the Calendar Girl’s humanity. As Marina Abramovich once stated, "to be a performance artist, you have to hate theatre", to reject the idea of a fictional representation of the reality you are questioning in your works. But when it comes to investigate about symbols and semiotic labeling as you did in House Broken it is almost impossible to split form from substance: social clichés embedded in a male-constructed culture are conveyed by apparently innocuous epithets that refer to
a fictious reality in order to convince people to take it as true... what's your point about this? In particular, the capability of discerning the essential feature of a concept to translate it into an accessible visual is a key point of your practice: how much do you explicitly think of such communicative aspect for your work?
I am always working with double meanings, puns and literal subversions in my work. I really like how language is contradictory: it is slippery and difficult to pin down yet weighs very heavily when imposed onto a subject or group of individuals with the intention of locking it/them down with a definitive definition. I think that people are generally more comfortable when things are categorized into neat boxes with tidy labels. When we are presented similar stories and representations over and over again, we are happy to accept these as truths because these categorizations make it easier to define our own selves in
Lisa Birke
LandEscape 16 Art Review
relation to them. We know where we stand and where we belong, so to speak. This is both a relief and comforting...until one realizes that one is being suppressed or controlled. In a number of the images from “House Broken” I take advertisement-style domestic scenes and turn them into surreal tableaus through building on our lexicon of reference points and subtle meanings, manipulating these through our system of language and semiotics. In “House Bunny” and “Cougar” I am working with the ‘animalization’ of the female. In Canadian English, a male usually has other words that are associated with his penis used against him if the intension is derrogatory (odd, considering these words are still symbols of power and thus not really degrading.) Women are much more readily associated with the animal kingdom—again that pesky Nature! So my intention was to reveal this language use in a purely visual form. In “House Bunny” it is not the female domestic that is the house bunny as
we would expect from the title. Instead, our subject has been surprised and rendered offbalance while washing the dishes by a giant kitsch ceramic bunny visible in the window—a literal House Bunny intruding on her space. We often don’t see these subtle power dynamics at play in our language systems—or maybe we don’t want to see them—like the big bunny in the window or the elephant in the room. The “Cougar” (an older woman who preys on younger men) in my image has been stuffed and put in the museum with the other curiosities. Again, it is through the overt humour and lightheartedness in the work that I hope these sytems of signification become apparant to the viewer. So yes, I think about the accessiblity of my imagary and I use the tropes and stereotypes that are already familiar to the viewer and understood by them on a subconscious level. In subverting these cues, I see the potential in saying something meaningful by upsetting the normative social
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Art Review
code. Another interesting work of yours that has particularly impacted on me and on which I would like to spend some words is entitled Semiotics of the {Postfeminist} Kitchen. This stimulating performance parodies the idea of hometown domesticity, subverting the stereotyped imagery about femininity through a visual and semantic détournement. It is pervaded with a subtle but perceptible sadness, however, you seem to imply that in our hectic, entropic contemporariness there's seem to be space for a glimpse of hopeful humanness: in this sense, you shows such a way out from our problematic society, urging us to evolve from being a passive spectator to more conscious participants... By the way, although I'm aware that this might sound a bit naïf, I have to admit that I'm sort of convinced that Art -especially nowadayscould play an effective role in sociopolitical issues: not only just by offering to people a generic platform for expression... I would go as far as to state that Art could even steer people's behaviour... what's your point about this? Does it sound a bit exaggerated?
Just a quick note about the work you reference before I tackle the bigger question here. Semiotics is an homage to Martha Rosler’s original performance-for-video Semiotics of the Kitchen made in 1975. The original work is morose and Rosler’s actions with the kitchen implements show a constrained frustration and implied violence that serve as a catalyst for both comic relief and powerful social commentary. I felt that the contemporary semiotics of domesticity are quite changed in their mood and I wanted to address these changes in the tongue-in-cheek {Postfeminist} version. The kitchen has become much more sexualized since the 70’s and some of the boundaries between, bedroom, bathroom and kitchen have blurred. The contemporary
House Bunny, digital image, 2012
kitchen is also much more plugged-in, so in my version the din and then roar of the electric gadgets as they are cumulatively turned on drown-out the spoken semiotics, confusing the linear order and creating a type of white noise. Now to get to your question: you have probably
Lisa Birke
LandEscape 18 Art Review
Cougar, digital image, 2012
already realized through this interview that I also have some pretty lofty ideas about the power of art! I think one has to remain hopeful that one may still be affecting some change in the world—if only very minimally. Art is difficult—it is not just entertainment made for
the purpose of escape. Most people are tired from their everyday stresses and do not want to have to think when they are at home or come home from work or school, they want to winddown with entertainment. In order to really understand or “get” art you have to think for
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Art Review
yourself, put the effort in and ask difficult questions. Thus art is not usually mainstream enough to have an immediate and wide ranging impact. However, I believe that art works more like a dormant virus that festers under culture’s skin until it has the opportunity to come to the surface. Once that wound opens, it spreads. This takes a lot of time, education, external resources and global platforms. The internet and digital art forms are definitely emerging as a potential for changing the geo-political landscape as more and more people have access to these expressive media, so I do see a lot of hope in this regard. I also beleive that the world would not function without forms of art, so I have no fear of them ever dissappearing. I read an interesting article lately that claims that most people secretly don’t trust or even like creative thinkers—creative thinkers rock the boat and bring about uncertaintly. I hope that society will continue to realize the depth and value that artists and art bring to the human experience. In evolution, isn’t it often the mutant in a group that allows the species to survive? Before taking leave from this interesting conversation I would like to pose a but cliché question, but an interesting one that I'm sure will interest our readers around the world... it goes without saying that feedbacks are capable of providing an artist of an important support, which is for sure not absolutely indespensable, but that can stimulate to keep on with Art: I was just wondering if the expectation of positive feedback could even influence the process of an artist... In particular, how would you define the nature of the relation with your audience?
I am terrified of the audience yet art is made for an audience, so therein lies an inexplicable paradox for me. I have only attempted a few live performance projects and each time I nearly passed-out. This is why I hide behind the
Sisyphus yogi ; Renaissance woman; somersault, video
screen—the audience can see me, but I can’t see the audience—at least not when the work is being filmed. No, quite seriously (and there is a lot of truth to that first statement), I often have an unexplainable impulse and urge to do what I do (and I realize this is also cliché). I have attempted to stop producing work for short periods of time and witnessed my health and mental well-being deteriorate surprisingly quickly. The difficulty of making art is a life-long challenge that I can’t seem to dissengage from. That being said, I also usually make the work and don’t think about having to present the work to a live audience until much later in the process. Despite my irrational fear of audiences, I am not afraid of negative feedback. When it does come my way it really helps me figure out how the work is communicating or miscommunicating. All
Lisa Birke
LandEscape 20 Art Review
still: digital video loop, 3min 20sec, 2012
responses to the work are equally valid and helpful. Of course, positive feedback is very heartening and gives me the impetus to keep working. When even one other person ‘gets it’ and the work is able to impart just a bit of contemplation or emotion, it is very rewarding. And it feels just a little less lonely. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Lisa. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects. How do you see your work evolving?
I have a number of projects on the go, some very long term that I will hopefully work on for decades and others much shorter in scope. Currently, I am interested in exploring simple video special effects (still involving the figure and landscape) and hopefully will have a new
work finished by the end of the summer. I am also very excited that I received a grant from the Ontario Arts Council to produce a collaborative video work with my Mom who is a textile designer and craftsperson extraordinaire. This will go into production in late summer/early fall. This should be another adventure with just a few of those continuing growing pains thrown in for good measure! So I hope that the work will evolve in scope and complexity. Maybe one day I will even start painting again. Thank you so much for having me and asking such engaging questions.
An interview by Dario Rutigliano, curator landescape@europe.com
LandEscape 40 Art Review
Morning Light Through the Dining Room, acrylic on board
LandEscape 5 Art Review
Alison Alfredson Lives and works in East Lansing, Michigan
An artist's statement
A
rchitecture and cast shadows, whether it's interiors or among the natural landscape, is where I find the most interest to study various types of natural light. Landscape paintings give me the opportunity to stretch my imagination and play with different hues, layers, and texture. My most recent ‘Neighborhood’ series is meant to give the viewer the feeling of having been there before; perhaps walking down that particular road, visiting that small town, the view of your neighbor’s house. Then there’s the classic still life. My compositions and surface area tend to be much smaller and of very few objects. I enjoy finding the details and working with controlled brushstrokes. There is very little blending. I much prefer to let each mark stand alone.
I have many artistic influences ranging from master painters like John Singer Sargent and Edward Hopper, to contemporary artists; John Redmond, Carol Marine, and David Lloyd. Each of these painters share one particular trait: they focus heavily on light and shadow. You will find most of my works lean the same direction. My paintings aren't complex in subject matter,
however I try to find a unique perspective when representing an object or scene. I've been focusing on acrylic medium recently because the drying time allows me to create immediate overlaps without the risk of muddy paint. Wood panel and stretched canvas are my typical surfaces. The subject matter and my desire for a certain paint application leads me to choose one or the other. Occasionally I will use watercolor paper for a drybrush look. I mix and mix and mix paint with my pallet knife, hold up the knife to the painting, mix again, check, mix again. In my B.F.A. studies a painting professor told the group we should spend at least, if not more, time mixing paint than applying it. I believe this to be evident in my paintings. I strive to create the most subtle hue overlaps and vary the saturation and intensity.
Alison Alfredson
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Art Review
Alison Alfredson An interview by Josh Ryder, curator landescape@europe.com
Alison Alfredson's paintings reject the tradition of mere decor and establish a permanent interplay between inscrutability and beauty: her careful approach conveys memories and perception of the ephemeral feature of the emotions she captures in a multilayered combination that invites the viewers to a lively experience. While dispensing with the theoretical precepts of minimalism, her works keep independence from the context they explore, so the stimulating paintings that we'll discuss in the following pages can be viewed as an aesthetic testing ground for the autonomy of painting and its historicity. I'm particularly pleased to introduce our readers to her stimulating artistic production. Hello Alison, and welcome to LandEscape: to start this interview, would you like to tell our readers something about your background? You have a solid formal training and you hold a B.F.A. in Painting that you received from the Maine College of Art: how did this experience influence your evolution
as an artist and how does it inform the way you currently conceive and produce your works?
First off, thank you! I’m please and flattered LandEscapes has taken an interest in my work. To answer your question...I was referred to as an artist by my family and friends by the time I was 5. I was always creating something during my youth. Once it was time to off to college my goal was to find an occupation to allow some artistic freedom while still having stable employment. This lead to a Visual Communications degree from the Art Institute of Philadelphia. I interned at a large advertising agency and loved it. It was a career I saw myself doing for the long haul. However, once I realized I had to start my first three years designing newspaper coupons (being this is the preinternet era) I was too discouraged to continue. I moved back to Michigan and immediately enrolled in painting courses and art history at the local community college. My next plan; to get my B.F.A. in painting. I had confidence in my work when I arrived at Maine College of Art as a Junior. Oh, but was I wrong! My professors Juerg Luedi
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detail from myFunerals, Performance
Sunset in the Bedroom , acrylic on board
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Sun on the Roof in January, acrylic on on canvas, 16" x 20"
told me to forget everything I ever knew about painting and start over. I had to learn a new language. The questions they asked me were, “Why did I paint?” “What did I want to paint?”and “How was I going
to convey those answers through brushstrokes?”I was completely lost. After nearly failing my first year, I finally figured out what the instructors meant. My paintings became something
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personal. I absorbed myself in color theory and studied various techniques until I felt like I had a style. The weather in Maine is completely different than in Michigan. The sun shines and the sky is blue nearly everyday. I started painting light and cast shadows. Those are still prominent themes in my work 20 years later.
breathe the moment is lost. Fortunately, I can go back and study the scene, minus the exact lighting. I’ve spent the last seven years as a stay-at-home mom raising my three daughters. My life has been constant chaos. This past year they all went to school full time and finally there is quiet. I feel my paintings reveal this stillness.
Now let's focus on your artistic production: I would start from the Morning Light Through the Dining Room and Sunset in the Bedroom, a couple of interesting pieces from your recent Interior series that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article: and I would suggest to our readers to visit directly http://www.alisonalfredson.squarespace.com in order to get a wider idea of your artistic production. In the meanwhile, would you tell us something about the genesis of these interesting projects? What was your initial inspiration?
Your images always appear to be trying to tell us something, and taking still life subjects you give them a real emotional charge. As you have remarked once, you paint to express a mood and to show simple moments that are sometimes overlooked: what kind of experience have we had in the weather that transformed your surroundings and that created such a beautiful peace?
My husband and I bought a home built in 1909. The place was a shambles. When visitors ask why we bought a house that needs so much work, I tell them I was drawn to the floors and doors. That’s really all that sold me. Sometimes there is a moment when the sun comes in and highlights what I love most about our home. I run for my camera since within a
The winters in Michigan the last two years have been extremely cold and snowy...even for our northern climate. However, we have experienced more sunshine during those months than average. Cast shadows on white snow have always been one of my favorite things. It’s hard to describe exactly, but the stark contrast of blue on white is so striking. Take “Sun on the Roof in January”for example. I stopped the car while driving through my neighborhood when my eye caught that moment. It was such a dramatic image I quick grabbed my camera. After seeing the photograph I
Alison Alfredson
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Alley In Winter, acrylic on board
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Empty Jam Jars, acrylic on board
Alison Alfredson
Alison Alfredson
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knew it would be a subject I had to paint. As for “Alley In Winter”this was just after a massive snow fall. We live in an old neighborhood where alleys are plentiful. Again, the shadows played on the snow and really spoke to me. This is my home and also a memory of a major event. It was probably -20 degrees F this day. Since people were stuck indoors, the surroundings were untouched and so peaceful. Though it was impossible to do this en plein air due to the temperature, being this is right out my door I can refer to the subject on site as often as needed. As you have remarked in your artist's statement, the scene is real and your goal is to represent what’s really there and still use a painterly approach: Philippe Dagen once established in his Le Silence des peintres, the coming of a straight realism has caused a progressive retenchment of painting from a representetive role of reality. With exception of Hyperrealism movement, Painting is nowadays more and more marked out with a symbolic feature. Do you think that the dichotomy between Representation and Painting is by now irremediable? Moreover, how much do you explicitly think of a narrative for your works?
The way I approach my subject matter is rather simple. My primary concern is how I
apply what I see, not necessarily the subject’s meaning. I ask myself if the feeling I get when I’m inspired by a scene is what will translate in the viewer’s mind. If you were to walk in my neighborhood would you be as struck by the moment as I am? I don’t take many liberties when representing what is in front of me. I avoid being too tight or too loose. I’ve found my voice with my brushwork and it falls right in between. For me, there is a fine line between realism and representationalism. My work leans towards the latter. I like the way your Still Life works plays with little reminders to everyday domestic life: while conceiving Art could be considered an abstract activity, there is always a way of giving it a permanence that goes beyond the intrinsic ephemeral nature of the feelings you explore and convey in your paintings. So I would take this occasion to ask you if in your opinion personal experience is an absolutely indespensable part of a creative process... Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience?
Still life can either come across as intense and full of allegory, or the exact opposite; a view of the simplicity of life and the objects that surround us. When I choose objects to paint, I look for color contrast and shape interplay. I ask myself what mundane items can be seen as something beautiful. Many artists paint food, glass, and random household objects. Clearly I’m
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doing the same thing, it’s just how I’m placing them or representing then that’s the challenge. That darn spoon resting on the jar and the line for the fork in “Empty Jam Jars”was troublesome. I spend a lot of time arguing with myself about how I need to lay the paint down and have it read as I see it. The viewer knows it’s a fork because of the context surrounding it even though all we see is a silver curve. Another interesting piece of yours that has particularly impacted on me and on which I would like to spend some words is the Evening Horizon II. I have to admit that this is one of my favourite work of yours: the multilayered experience that comes from the symbiosys between light and shadow suggests me a deep dynamism, and despite its apparent static nature, there are several way I can relate my perception with this piece, and I think this is related with the way you use to highlight a particular part of the subject area focusing on how it can stand independently brings a new level of significance, to the usual idea of lanscape... At what point does something become beautiful? Does it only occur when "true art" emerges or is it simply an effect of creation, the process of creation? Do you think there's a real standard for beauty?
“Evening Horizon II”is my companion piece and foray into painting after a long hiatus from my studio. These paintings forced me to loosen up and play with brushstrokes, layers and saturation while concentrating on a simple subject: a horizon line. Using the same layout, “Evening Horizon II”focuses more on light and distance. Though, traditionally I get my landscape inspiration from life, I may elaborate and adjust the colors and temperatures. In this case, being I didn’t have a reference, I went at the canvas with an abstract approach. I didn’t know where I was going with it or what I’d do next. The viewer may feel the same way when viewing the work. The painting has a wandering quality about it. You may ask, “Where is this place? How far will it take me to get there? What will I find?” I definitively love the way you extract a peaceful vision of reality from the general the idea of the environment we live in, as in Quiet Day in Old Town and Shallow Water on Lake Huron. Many contemporary landscape artists as the photographer Edward Burtynsky or Michael Light have some form of environmental or political message in their works. Do you consider that your works are political in this way or do you seek to maintain a neutral approach? Moreover, how important is the aesthetic
Alison Alfredson
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Dried Hydrangea and Jar, acrylic on board
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Head of Garlic and Clove, acrylic on board
Alison Alfredson
Alison Alfredson
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problem for you when you conceive a work?
Definitely a neutral approach. “Shallow Water on Lake Huron”was based on vacations I take to the beach every year with my family. We spend hours sitting in the sand and walking the long strip of beach. If you’ve never traveled to Michigan then you can’t imagine lakes that look and act like oceans. The surface can be still as glass or have crashing waves. This particular day it was peaceful and sunny. The clouds didn’t even seem real. I found inspiration in the contrast between the flat water and dimensional cloud forms. While capable of conveying personal emotions, each of your brushtrokes seem to keep away from mere instinctive approach: rather, you seem to be particularly careful with the way you choose colors and juxtapose shapes: does your process allow you to get an univocal idea before you start to paint or do you follow the evolution of the painting? By the way, any comments on your choice of "palette" and how it has changed over time?
I approach my work very similarly in the beginning stages. Based on whether the subject is a still life, interior or landscape, I have an initial vision of my color scheme. I tone the surface with a complimentary hue or neutral ground depending on what will
pop through just enough to lend a depth and unexpected touch. I was initially drawn to this technique from artist Wayne Thiebaud. His red underpaintings really appeal to me and separate his work from most of his contemporaries. When I was first starting out I worked in acrylics since that’s a natural starting point for inexperienced painters. I used way too many pre-mixed paints. It wasn’t until I studied painting formally did I learn oils and methods for mixing paint properly. I’m back to using acrylics for a variety of reasons. In addition, I’m limiting my palette more and more. I rarely use more than 6 different hues per work and typically I choose the same tubes for each painting. My goal is to create images that hold their own, look different enough from one another, but are still obviously painted with my hand. It’s exciting to see how many shades of red I can come up with only using crimson, or how I don’t need green to make green. A color is only a color based on what’s it’s next to. This phrase is something I recite to myself continually. It keeps me from falling towards the obvious. During these years your works have been exhibited in several occasions and you recently had a solo as well. So, before taking leave from this interesting conversation I would like to pose a a question about the nature of the relation with your audience: in particular, do you
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consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decision-making process in terms of what type of language for a particular context?
I’m not one to take center stage, but I found having a solo exhibit was crucial after taking time off from my art career. So, instead of approaching a gallery to feature my work, I rented a “popup”gallery space for 3 days. I invited about 100 people and held a one-night exhibition and reception. We had an amazing turn out. I sold 9 paintings that night and 5 more within the following 2 weeks. It was the kick start I desperately needed to keep going. It could have been a total flop, but it was a chance I was willing to take. After that I applied to a few different juried shows across the U.S. and was accepted into three. It was exciting to ship my work to Montana, Kentucky and Illinois all within two months. The work that sold at my solo show covered the gamut. It wasn’t just the landscapes that went. Therefore I had encouragement that the subject matter wasn’t important...it was the work and technique in itself that appealed to the buyer. I joined the artist guild in our area and have had an opportunity to exhibit with them in our surrounding area. I have decided to host another solo show in the same space as last year. This
time I will open it up to the public. I feel like my guard is down and I’m ready to let the world in. Thanks a lot for this interesting conversation, Alison. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?
Thanks again for the interview! I’m currently building my portfolio. Many of the subjects remain the same however I’m trying to have more collections of works rather than a couple here and there. I’d like to have gallery representation within the next two years and will continue to apply to shows that fit my work. A large project I have coming up is painting a mural 40 feet long and 40 inches tall for my children’s school. The shape of the mural was a trick to design. I’ve been painting murals since I was 20 so that’s not new, but I’ve never worked on this large of scale. I’m very much looking forward to the experience and excited that the school community will be able to enjoy it for many years to come.
An interview by Josh Ryder, curator landescape@europe.com
Alison Alfredson
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Evening Horizon II, acrylic on canvas
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from all that we had lost in desert series
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Rosalyn Song Lives and works in Washington DC, USA
An artist's statement
O
ur awareness of our surroundings and our lives is often based on what we can perceive. A mistake sometimes made is not acknowledging what is absent, what is not there. Our lives seem lacking when we are bored with nothing to do. But this emptiness is something. It is the lack of something. And until we can appreciate and see the “nothingness” we are only seeing a portion of what is around us. “Nothingness” to me is forgotten memories, the surreal ruins that
scare and inspire me. It is the indescribable feeling of absence. It is this feeling that I try to capture when I look through the viewfinder.
Rosalyn Song
LandEscape meets
Rosalyn Song An interview by Dario Rutigliano, curator with the collaboration of Katherine Williams landescape@europe.com
Rosalyn Song's camera structures the events in their natural setting: focusing on urban and natural environments, she draws inspiration from the signs of absence that pervade the reality we inhabit, In the series All that we had lost in desert that we'll be discussing in the following pages , she explores the ambiguous and subtle coexistence of forgotten memories and everyday experience. One of the most convincing results of her intriguing approach is an insightful investigation about the hidden narrative that pervades contemporary age and the way we establish perceptual relationships with it. I'm very pleased to introduce our readers to her refined artistic production. Hello Rosalyn and welcome to LandEscape: to start this interview, would you like to tell us something about your background? As an artist you are primarily self-taught: are there any particular experiences that has influenced you? Moreover, do you think that your studies in Cultural Anthropology have informed the way you conceive your works?
I don't believe there was significant influence from my Cultural Anthropology back on my art. My major takeaway from my study of Cultural Anthropology was more of a philosophical epiphany than actual academic knowledge: that everything can be seen equally. That is, Juerg Luedi
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things can exist simply for its existence. I respect every single thing that suround me and I love it. I simply appreciate it for itself. I adapted this philosophy to my art as the core mindset to how I approach my art. This allows me to remain consistent and true to myself. I remember the very first time when I held the camera. I was very young, and even then instead of taking family pictures I was more interested in trees and dirt or even mountains rather than people. My parents didn’t like the way I use their camera because they thought I was wasting film for no reason. They would say, “why did you take this picture? It’s useless.” Their idea of photography was that making family photos as a historical relic. It was years later in 2008 when I had a chance to play with an old Nikon manual camera that I was reintroduced to photography. I shot anything that caught my eyes and I played with the camera just like when I was a young child. The results? They were terrible. I found myself wondering why the results were bad? What was wrong with it? I wish I could make photographs just like famous photographers do. I want my photos look beautiful. That was my motivation to do photography. I studied other photographers composition, colors, even their philosophy and finally I have found my own. Now let's focus on your artistic production: I would start from All that we had lost in desert, an extremely interesting project that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article: and I would suggest to visit http://www.rosalynsong.com in order to get a wider idea of your multifaceted artistic production. In the meanwhile, would you tell us something about the genesis of this interesting project? What was your initial inspiration?
From 2009 to 2012 I worked on this series. I detail from myFunerals, Performance
Rosalyn Song
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from all that we had lost in desert series
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from all that we had lost in desert series
Rosalyn Song
Rosalyn Song
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am a dedicated to my art, but I didn’t make many efforts to travel just to make photographs. At that time I was in Phoenix, Arizona and my camera never left my side. I simply sought to capture the moments that was my life at the time. For example, if I went to the supermarket and saw something I felt connected to, I try to capture that moment on film. Nothing remains forever. I can walk down the a street everyday, which may seem the same each day, but sometimes when you observe closely enough, you can see small differences. This facinates me the most because it happens spontaneously. It is hard to explain what really catches my eye, but it is a magical moment that only it exists only at that time and it disappears immediately. Nothing is forever. There is no time to embellish the moment with a camera. The moment will not be coming back. The pictorial ambience you capturated in All that we had lost in desert and the concept of nothingness that hallmarks your research has reminded me the concept of non lieu elaborated by French anthropologist Marc AugÊ and what has mostly impacted on me is the way you have been capable of bringing a new level of significance to the signs of absence, and in a wide sense to recontextualize the concept of the environment we inhabit in. This is a recurrent feature of your approach, that provides the viewers of an Ariadne's Thread, inviting them to challenge the common way we perceive not only the outside world, but our inner dimension... By the way, I'm sort of convinced that some informations & ideas are hidden, or even "encrypted" in the environment we live in, so we need -in a wayto decipher them. Maybe that one of the roles of an artist could be to reveal unexpected sides of Nature, especially of our inner Nature... what's your point about this?
Very interesting idea of interpreting my work. Yes, of course there are some secrets in my
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from long ago(and far away) series
works. I would like to listen to others' interpretation of my work to see if they have found my real intention. I have met a few people who have discovered these hidden meanings, but I don’t really tell them what my real intention is. I believe that artists always hide hidden meanings in their work. While some contemporary photographers Edward Burtynsky or Michael Light use to
convey in an explicit way their environmental or socio political message in their photographs, your works seek to maintain a more neutral approach: rather, and you seem to invite the viewers to a personal investigation about the themes you touch on. Maybe that the following assumption is stretching the point a little bit, but I think that All that we had lost in
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from long ago(and far away) series
desert reveals the connection between different cultural spheres which describes such a real-time aesthetic ethnography: you seem to be drawn to the structured worlds we inhabit and how they produce a selfdefining context for our lives and experience... do you agree with this analysys?
Briefly speaking, when it comes to art, I do not
want to have a certain intention to persuade to the audience. The world it is already art itself. The function of being an artist isn’t convincing to the audience what they should feel through form of art. I want them to experience from their personal thoughts and state of their mind. Art should be personal experience, not planned by an artist. I want the audience to experience and be free to interpret the art.
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Another interesting work of yours that has particularly impacted on me and on which I would like to spend some words is the The Tourist when I first happened to get to know with this work I tried to relate all the visual information to a single meaning. I later realized I had to fit into the visual unity suggested by the work, forgetting my need for a univocal understanding of its symbolic content: in your work, rather that a conceptual interiority, I can recognize the desire to enabling us to establish direct relations... Would you say that it's more of an intuitive or a systematic process?
‘The Tourist’ is an on-going series based on my travels in Guam that I've been working on since 2014. What inspired me to do this work was actually a tourist’s brochure. The pictures in the brochure looks perfect, and beautiful enough to attract people. But if you really go to the places, the scenic places shown in the brochure, there is no beautiful sunset and exotic local culture. After you experience the real scene, you will find yourself feeling bored, you would feel scammed by the brochure. For this series, I, as a photographer, want to make photographs that attract people to visit this small island. "The Tourist" is my version of a tourist’s brochure from tourist’s point of view who has an honest heart. Your photography is intrinsically connected to the chance of creating an area of intellectual interplay with the viewers, that are urged to evolve from the condition of a merely passive audience. In particular, process of semantic restructuration of a view that I can recognize in Long ago(and far away) has reminded me of the ideas behind German photographer Thomas Demand's works, when he stated that "nowadays art can no
Rosalyn Song
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from the tourist series
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from the tourist series
Rosalyn Song
Rosalyn Song
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longer rely much on symbolic strategies and has to probe psychological narrative elements within the medium instead". While conceiving Art, even in the case of Photography, could be considered an abstract activity, there is always a way of giving it a permanence that goes beyond the intrinsic ephemeral nature of the concepts you explore. So I would take this occasion to ask you if in your opinion personal experience is an absolutely indespensable part of a creative process... Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience?
This work “Long ago (and far away)" was my very first work when I started my career as a photographer in 2009. At that time, I has almost no connection with people. I would rather spend time alone and do nothing. I would not deny that the time I have spent being an ‘outsider’ influenced my work. I wanted to communicate with others but I had no idea how. My desire was to find a good friend to share what and how I see the world. But I never tried hard to ‘create’ for of art. That would be conventional and boring to me. I want to find a friend that I can be honest and someone who also sees the world purely as it is, as I do. Your works are always pervaded with an inner narrative, but you reject an explicit explanatory strategy: rather, you seem to offer to the viewer an Ariadne's Thread that allows to find personal interpretations to the stories you tell through your photographs... How much do you think to a narrative for a series?
There is no good answer for this but I spend all day thinking about my work, even when when I sleep. During these years your works have been exhibited in several occasions, including your participation as a finalist in the Professional Photographers Award UK in 2010 and your
from the tourist series
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from long ago(and far away) series
recent solo exhibition, counterfeit chicks. So, before taking leave from this interesting conversation I would like to pose a a question about the nature of the relation with your audience: in particular, do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decisionmaking process in terms of what type of language for a particular context?
My series, "Counterfeit Chicks" was unintentional. One day I woke up and walked around in my back yard. I realized, the sunlight
was quite beautiful and thought I could have fun with my Barbie dolls (I am a Barbie collector). I picked out some dolls and posed them for the shoot. The dolls were just conveniently present when I saw the opportunity to shoot. The reason I posed them erotically was to do something that was completely opposite from the typical Barbie catalogue. Also I wanted to try portrait photography which I have never done it before- those dolls were just perfect for the shooting. Honestly speaking there is no significant changes in context between
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from long ago(and far away) series
Counterfeit Chicks series and other works. Although I used iPhone 4s for the shoot, I approached each shot as I would with more professional gear. The results were better than I expected. The dolls were like real people and I came to a realization that nothing is impossible with camera-you can give a soul to a doll. I showed these pictures to several curators and one of them wanted to do a solo show with the pictures. Everything happened spontaneously and without effort.
Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Rosalyn. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?
Sharing thoughts and feelings is the most important thing when it comes to art. I want to find a good way to communicate with the audience. I don't know how my art will evolve, but I am certain that I will devote all my effort and heart into all future work.
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from nieDAsie project Audiovisual installation on trashy items, Detroit 2014 Photo by Pani Pawlosky
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Monika Szpener Lives and works in Szczecin, Poland
M
onika Szpener, visual artist/sculptor, born 1979, lives and works in Szczecin, Poland. In 2003, she completed sculpture courses leading to a master's degree at Nicolaus Copernicus University of Thorn, fine art faculty.
In 2011 she got a doctor degree in fine arts at the university. She deals with sculpture in a wider sense, including portraits, installations, objects, and artistic actions. She uses characteristic materials, e.g. various recyclable materials, worn out and useless items. Most of her works are interdisciplinary and combine various artistic techniques.
Monika Szpener is the author of many individual and collective exhibitions in Poland and abroad e.g. - Performance Intermedia Festival, Szczecin/Berlin, Germany - Draft. YOUTH FESTIVAL in Szczecin, Poland - Transmediale Festival, Berlin, Germany - Pro-exictence Festival, Schloss Brollin, Germany - individual exhibition, National Museum, Szczecin, Poland - International Symposium of Sculpture , Switzerland - POL-EKO exhibition, climate summit COP 14 Poznan, Poland - art action, Museum of Contemporary Art ms², Łodz, Poland - „CITY OF DREAMS” international Festival, individual exhibition „Vertical Objects”, Katowice, Poland - individual exhibition "reNEW", inSPIRACJE “Apocalypse 2012”,International Festival, Szczecin, Poland - International Symposium of Ceramic, Ukraine - collective exhibition, SCOPE Miami 2012, USA - collective exhibition, “Kontejnery k světu / Plzeň”, International Festival Plzen, Czech Republic - exhibition as a Group nieDAsie, “OMO Trip” Dlectricity Festival, Detroit, USA
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Monika Szpener An interview by Josh Ryder, curator with the collaboration of Katherine Williams landescape@europe.com
Monika Szpener explores the liminal area between the expressive potentials of traditional media and the emerging languages that comes from a careful multidisciplinary approach. Her gaze on contemporariness doesn't simply deliver a mere report on new aspects of reality but also offers a personal view on what's behind our the experiences mediated by our perceptual process. Her work nieDAsie (noCANdo) that we'll be discussing in the following pages clearly shows the multifaceted nature of Szpener's approach: I'm very pleased to introduce our readers to her refined artistic production. Hello Monika and a warm welcome to LandEscape: to start this interview, would you like to tell us something about your background? You have a solid formal training and after graduating with a master's degree in Sculpture at the Nicolaus Copernicus University of Torun, you eventually pursued a Ph.D degree in Fine Arts. I would like to ask you how these experiences have influenced your evolution as an artist and how training has informed the way you currently conceive the works that we'll be soon discussing.
Artistic studies are not anymore concentrated around only traditional techniques but they inspire personal research within the ways of seeing, perceiving the world. Studying in Torun
was a very important part of my artistic development and has strongly influenced my artistic, aesthetic and general consciousness. It is extremely important in the contemporary world to be able to define and express each personal perception on the world and ways of its investigation. However, the same importance has to be paid to flexibility and fluidity that are inherent moments of the world. Then, studying both practical subjects and theoretical ones helped me to make my personal artistic perception conscious and to define flexible borders of the things in the world, which are all interconnected. Of course it has also allowed me to understand my reasons for creation that are mostly based on intuition and non-verbal emotions. Due to that I have achieved another level of investigation of my sources of inspiration and I have learned to formulate my beliefs passing them into the art and creating my own picture of contemporary world.
Now let's focus on your artistic production: I would start from nieDAsie, an extremely interesting piece that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article: and I would suggest our readers to visit directly at http://www.szpener.pl in order to get a wider idea of your multifaceted artistic production. Meanwhile, would you tell us something about the genesis of this interesting project? What was your initial inspiration?
nieDasie project is an experimental piece, fluid and developed with logic of intuition. It is Juerg Luedi
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Art Review
based on the connection and juxtapostion of two disciplines: video art and installation, which has appeared as the result of artistic cooperation and friendship with Pani Pawlosky. Then, it is hard to point at one exact point when and how it had started, as the mutual influence of two different artistic personalities with different but complementary perceptions on the matter of rubbish, was a river-like process, with the beginning well hidden in the depth of subconscious mountains and caves. The first work had been done for a design fair, for which I have been invited to prepare an exhibition of objects from recycled materials. During the preparations there had appeared an opportunity to elaborate another project with a use of video art, for which I had invited a friend of mine, Pani Pawlosky; together we constitute the duet or crew „nieDAsie“. The work together was hard as our strong artistic personas were clashing. In order to finish it, we had to reach numerous compromises. In that way we did the first work “My Room“, which has evolved into a series shown during many festivals in Detroit last year. You can see its effect here: https://vimeo.com/87133354 https://vimeo.com/115853224 I have appreciated the way you investigate the psychological nature of the cinematic image: in particular, when I first happened to get to know nieDAsie I tried to relate all the visual information and the presence of primary elements to a single meaning. I later realized I had to fit into the visual rhythm suggested by the work, forgetting my need for a univocal understanding of its symbolic content: in your work, rather that a conceptual interiority, I can recognize the desire to enabling us to establish direct detail from myFunerals, Performance
Monika Szpener
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from nieDAsie project Audiovisual installation on trashy items, Detroit 2014 Photo by Pani Pawlosky
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Monika Szpener
Art Review
from nieDAsie project Audiovisual installation on trashy items, Detroit 2014 Photo by Pani Pawlosky
Monika Szpener
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relations... Would you say that it's more of an intuitive or a systematic process? As I have already mentioned above, the nieDasie project is the intuitive synthesis of two artistic visions and experiences of two persons creatively working, each one on her own. Together we try to synchronize our perceptions, which is possible when we intuitively go back to common experiences from childhood.
Children perceive the world with all the senses much stronger than the adults, concentrated on rational thinking and isolated visual perception. Then our exploration has got a sense of synthesis and can be understood as the effort to return to this holistic type of experience. This is possible due to the use of different media and materials, which create a kind of sensual space. Contemporary electronic media and art as such have the power to return us to ourselves, to the sensual integrity as it was forseen by the prophet of the new media – Marshall McLuhan. This integrity has got its changeable form which materializes in an experience of spectactors – vusers (as Mirosław Rogala relates himself to participants in interactive art). Each experience is a tad different; however, it is also possible to be commonly shared, thanks to the rhythms sensed under the skin. By creating in that way, we try to change the human perception of the world, not just for a moment, but for a longer period of time. We try to open not only the human mind, but most of all human senses. Meble (furniture) has some references to the concept of heterotopia elaborated by Michel Foucault and has given me the same sensations that I experienced when I first happened to get to know Gabriel Orozco's early installations. In particular, I have appreciated the way you have been capable of bringing a new level of significance to signs, and in a wide sense to re-contextualize the concept of the environment we inhabit in. This is a recurrent
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Monika Szpener
Art Review
feature of your approach that invite the viewers' perception in order to challenge the common way to perceive not only the outside world, but our inner dimension... By the way, I'm sort of convinced that some information & ideas are hidden, or even "encrypted" in the environment we live in, so we need -in a way- to decipher them. Maybe that one of the roles of an artist could be to reveal unexpected sides of Nature, especially of our inner Nature... what's your point about this? You are right when relating the Foucauldian idea of heterotopia to the Meble project, as I use to materials excluded from the world of life, materials that are excremental, that are to be eliminated from the space of the “always-thenew” of consumerism. In that way I try to contribute to the fight against the hegemonic position of late capitalism; fight – not in the aggressive meaning but softly, not trying to break anything but to transform our perception and understanding, and due to that also to change our worldview and the ways we act in everyday life. This is the responsibility of the artist – not arguing, but acting on the level of form and senses, as well as of emotions and intuitions. Of course, here again appears the another Foucauldian idea that our fights can be only local and dispersed. We cannot and we should not try to make any sort of bloody revolution as this changes nothing. We should change the way people relate themselves to the world thanks to the small transformation of relations with this what is the Other to the system: to the sensible body of us and of other beings and things in the world. The hegemony of “the use”, “the function” should be tresspassed. This is a truly liberating practice. We should not just ask about the function, as many years ago Herbert Marcuse had already been writing; we should ask different questions and liberate our sensibility on all the levels. For this the project Meble is done. It calls us to ask
Monika Szpener
LandEscape 97 Art Review
From "Stones" series 2013 Objects made of bottle caps Photo by Andrew Golc
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Monika Szpener
Art Review
From "Stones" series 2013 Objects made of bottle caps (photo by Andrew Golc)
different questions: what is it?, what is it made of?, what is its matter?, why?, how do I feel it?, what kind of meanings I can find in that? €
One of the most epiphanic feature of your work is concerned with the relation with Perception and Experience in the contemporary unstability: the way you question the intimate consequences of constructed and imposed realities: while conceiving Art could be considered a purely abstract activity, there is always a
way of giving it a permanence that goes beyond the intrinsic ephemeral nature of the concepts you capture. So I would take this occasion to ask you if in your opinion personal experience is an absolutely indispensable part of a creative process... Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience?
Considering a history of contemporary art one can argue that the artistic creation can be disconnected from direct experience as it was shown best by conceptualism. However, I do
Monika Szpener
LandEscape 42 Art Review
not agree it is the right way and I propose the way through the body, emotions, perceptions and thinking that are interconnected creating an integral experience. Foucault himself in his late writings had been pointing at the body where the change should appear. The body, its senses and perception is a field of battle for the better, less exclusive world. The modernity had gone to the pick with its rationalization processes that lead – as we already know – not to the better future, but to administrative, rational nightmare, where the human being disappears. We have to reclaim
our bodily experience, both in artistic practice and in everyday life. In art it is already well noticed by many theoreticians and artists, who refer either to the concept of soma esthetics as Richard Shusterman does, or underline the importance of bodily experience as Arnold Berleant in pragmatist aesthtetics does or reflect in the anthropological way on the triangle imagemedium-body as Hans Belting does. The importance of body and bodily experience is explicit on both sides, not only on the creative side but also on the side of reception. Arnold Berleant and Wolfgang Welsch (however Lamp Object made of used PET bottles Photo by Andrew Golc
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CYFRA+ Objects made of satellite dishes, 2012 Photo by Andrew Golc
Monika Szpener
Monika Szpener
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Monika Szpener
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each one in a slightly different way) argue against the Kantian disinterestedness and show how the art is created and received because of reasons different than only showing off the social, cultural, educational and/or economical status. I totally agree with them at that point. Your artistic production is pervaded with a subtle but effective sense of narrative and although each of your project has an autonomous life, there's always seem to be such a channel of communication between your works, that springs from the way you juxtapose the ideas you explore, recontextualizating found objects, as in odNowa (reNew) German sculptor and photographer Thomas Demand stated once that "nowadays art can no longer rely much on symbolic strategies and has to probe psychological narrative elements within the medium instead". What's your point about this? And in particular, how much do you explicitly think of a narrative for your works? You actually touch the point here. I am transforming meanings that are well connected to objects that we meet in our life, objects of everyday use and objects with sacred meanings, as crucifixes and figures of catholic saints. The rejection of dominant ideologies – as I have already explained – cannot be done just politically. Revolts without depths or internal changes do not lead anywhere. In the end we find ourselves back on square one and the only difference that appears is the difference in the dominant group. In order then to diametrically reformulate the dominant narratives: religious, economic and political ones, we have to juxtapose their ideas and recontextualize their characteristic elements. In that way we can effectively, although within a rather small dimension, refute the dominant strategies, narratives and structures. This does
Monika Szpener
LandEscape 103 Art Review
"Swimming pool" from "reNEW" series 2012 220x120x60cm Photo by Roman Wnuk
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"Picnick basket " from "reNEW" series 2012 60x 40x 30cm Photo by Roman Wnuk
Monika Szpener
Monika Szpener
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not mean telling or imposing new narratives, it is rather questioning, stratifying the previously coherent layers, creating or making visible a new network of relations between elements of our surrounding: material, mental and emotional. The figure of Jesus Christ „jumping” into a blue swimming pool, which is the main part of the installation odNowa is precisely this kind of work of ethical value. Although at the first sight it can stir fright (especially in Poland) of attacking religious values, it is directed at the recycling of meanings due to the change of context. It is critical to overproduction in the world of commodities, of art and of religion. However, this critique has got deep moral sense pointing at my belief that the renovation/ regeneration of the world is possible mostly by means of art. It is also important to notice that I have already been working with religious symbols before, as in the work from the year 2010 „Crucifix” or in others resembling altars. You seem to be in an incessant search of an organic, almost intimate symbiosis between several viewpoint out of temporal synchronization: moreover, the reference to the universal imagery that recurs in your works seems to remove any historic gaze from the reality you refer to, offering to the viewers the chance to perceive in a more atemporal form. In this sense, I daresay that the semantic juxtaposition between sign and matter that marks out your art, allows you to go beyond any track of contingency To add to the previous explanation, the concept of time is the right move. The atemporality you mention surges from the transformation of dominant narrations, one based on functionality and the other on the eternal life that awaits us somewhere there. Both of these narrations are linear as the religious narrative in its most common version can be reduced to the Saint Augustine's concept of linear time that has started with the creation of the world by God,
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Monika Szpener
Art Review
has had its culmination point with the birth and death of Christ and is leading us to the end of time. The time embodied in my realizations is of different nature. It is not a functional time, as the (fixed) functionality is one of the concepts that I oppose the most. The time that you can find in my artistic practice is the time lived, experienced and embodied. It is the time of being and not only doing/ using/ going to. However, it is important to stress that this time of being is not immobile and mute. The being to which I refer is not of Platonic nature, absolute, universal and immobile, but it is a living being, a being that is embodied and so: changeable, relational, transformable. Then, trying to understand my art, you cannot only read it, trace semantic trails in order to get to the one, right point. You have to feel it, integrally, as it was said many times: integrally, with your body, senses, emotions and mind. There is no one definition and no functional aim of my pieces, what does not mean that they are contingent. They are and are not. They are deliberately paradoxical, as the paradoxes are liberating, also for the time: due to them the time is liberated from the service to functionalism and comes back to our multilayered experience. Multidisciplinarity is a crucial aspect of your art practice and you seem to be in an incessant search of an organic, almost intimate symbiosis between several disciplines, ranging from Sculpture and Video: have you ever happened to realize that a symbiosis between different disciplines is the only way to achieve some results, to express some concepts? Closing oneself into a defined frames and the use of only one kind of material can be considered as reductive for an artistic
practice, however in my opinion it is the reason to deeply investigate one plastic, artistic area. Drawing from a defined source allows to specialize in a concrete area, as it opens new paths both technological – related to new media – and mental ones. It helps in construction of artistic posture and a specific relation to the world open for various possibilities. I am of the opinion, as McLuhan was stressing, that the interdisciplinary symbiosis is inevitable and – furthermore – it is developing our synesthetic experience, which transforms a human and their way of functioning in the world. During the se years your works have been exhbited in several occasions, both in Poland and abroad: so, before taking leave from this interesting conversation I would like to pose a a question about the nature of the relation with your audience. Do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decisionmaking process in terms of what type of language for a particular context? Definitely. Today, everyone expects quick and clear information. They are bored with too complicated message and does not want to take excessive lengths to get the answer they need. They also reluctantly decides to visit a gallery. Often the question about the reasons for doing so comes the reply of the ordinary lack of time and will. Therefore, one of the primary objectives of my project was to go out there with the exhibition into the urban space, or generally public space. The city has its own characteristics defined by its functionality and architecture. People moving along it are not inclined to pick up the message associated with the art. Thus, the response to a piece encountered is clean and more authentic, expressed with emotions amplified by curiosity. According to
Monika Szpener
LandEscape 42 Art Review
"Gate" 2010 Object made of used pressed PET bottles 600x300x100 cm Photo of Monika Szpener
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Monika Szpener
Art Review
psychologist Edward Nęcki, emotional arousal increases the likelihood of producing an unusual associations, positive emotions allow to reach a more abstract level of conceptual knowledge. Thanks to an abstract reasoning we associate distant facts better and we easier see similarities, use analogies, or synthesis or concept revolution. If the object or situation is surprising, but it raises our positive associations, it will encourage us to pursue further interpretation and increased intellectual effort. These processes are also held at levels of unconsciousness. Here there is a simultaneous combination of facts allowing for the collection of ambiguity. In this way, the recipient can accept different content and take other reasons. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Monika. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving? My next work is a continuation of exploration in white, which I undertook last year. It is search in the plurality of particles and wilderness of metaphors. From the original unity – into the multitude, of monolith - into dispersion. I am heading toward the existential areas - the transience of states and reactions, variation of life, inconstancy, being in motion.
Commotion, constant changes, pouring sand, time, decay and solidification of matter. I am returning to the elementary sculpting as the formation of matter, accompanied with accidentality. The inclusion of its unpredictability, puzzling into the circle of artistic activities planned.
An interview by Josh Ryder, curator with the collaboration of Katherine Williams and Dario Rutigliano landescape@europe.com
Monika Szpener
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Photo of the artist by Piotr Miazga
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Sima Yousefnia Lives and works in Iran
Sound of Silence - An artist's statement
M
ost people think and dream in private and they do not want anyone to know about their thoughts or dreams or they are afraid to express them to others and society. Silence is one of the most profound feelings that we, as humans, often can sense in our lives. But when it engulfs us, it turns all our thoughts and feelings into a mysterious serenity. Silence eyes, silence lips, silence hands. Some break it. Some never awaken its voiceless voice forever inside. Today, the modern human lives differently than his predecessors. He lives in large or mega cities. His life is full of chaos and challenges. Life presents many opportunities, from what he eats, drives, and wears to his hobbies and recreations. He travels and visits many places. One can conclude that he also
thinks and deeply examines his feelings. He only goes in nature in order to understand himself and discover the wonders of the natural world, while his predecessors lived in nature, in harmony with it. He is destroying the natural world and builds with a greater intensity and velocity. Everything happening around him emanates utter chaos and commotion. A chaos that is no longer within his control! I am in search of modern human’s inner feelings and I am wondering what is happening inside?
Sima Yousefnia
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LandEscape meets
Art Review
Sima Yousefnia An interview by Josh Ryder, curator with the collaboration of Katherine Williams landescape@europe.com
Sima Yousefnia's work snatches the essential spirit of an image: rather than lingering on decorative aspects to seduce the viewers, her insightful approach draws concepts from Reality to convey experience and memories in a lively and coherent unity, providing the viewers of an extension of the ordinary human perception, and inviting them to snatch the spirit of ubiquitous meanings behind the world we perceive. I'm particularly pleased to introduce our readers to her stimulating artistic production. Hello Sima, and welcome to LandEscape: to start this interview, would you like to tell us something about your background? You have a multidiscipinary training and after earning your Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Software Engineering from Shomal University, you take several class in Fine Art Photography. How did these experiences influence your evolution as an artists and how do they impact on the way you currently conceive and produce your works?
Well, at first I would like to thank the LandEscape magazine and I must say I am proud that my work was selected for the magazine and I'm happy about it. In the case of my educational background, I have to say that half of my family members have been
enrolled in technical fields. But on the other hand, my mother is interested in art, nature and craft and she used to paint seriously for a while. In addition the way that I grew up in the family produced a tendency through art in me. However when I wanted to go to the university I chose to continue in computer field. But after entering the university I realized that it is completely unfamiliar with my personality and interests. As a result I started photography with compact cameras, although my photography at that time was quite primitive and aimless, but seeing the work of other photographers, I realized that photography has an enormous size and I am interested in it. After graduation I registered in an institute for a complete 9 months course in photography and bought a DSLR camera. After completing the course I became a member of a photography club in the institute and we had a group exhibition. Then I participated in specialized courses in photography and my work was selected for the group exhibition in the Photography Museum of Tehran. I can't say if educating in computer has any impact on my artwork or not but since my university was in the North of Iran and I went almost every week from Tehran to North and seeing different landscapes and different people along the way it can’t be affectless. At the beginning my photography started with landscapes that I saw on the road. Slowly, and with further study I realized that what I am Juerg Luedi
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Sima Yousefnia
Art Review
interested in is the fascinating world of photography and art in general. Dealing with your process and with your technical equipment, how do you adapt your setup to the work you are working to? In particular, how have digital techniques impacted on your approach?
I also like the other photographers have experiences with analog and Pin Hole cameras and I think if we want to enjoy photography itself, working with old cameras and experiencing different techniques is very interesting and enjoyable and has interesting results. But I don't need working with old cameras and techniques for my projects, digital cameras are easier and suitable for me. They provide more facilities during and after photography that I don't have with analog cameras. Now let's focus on your artistic production: I would start from Sound of Silence, and interesting series that our readers had already had the chance to get to know in the introductory pages of this article: would you like to tell us something about the genesis of this project? What was your initial inspiration?
The basic idea of the sound of silence, as I mentioned in my statement is modern human concerns and knowing what is happening inside? What impact does modern life, surroundings and all the problems that people face them today have on them? In my opinion you can see these impacts on people when they are thinking in their privacy. People who have been photographed in this series are all from my family and friends. I can say that I had seen my family in these situations before taking these pictures and my pictures are pretty much close to reality. During photography I used the decoration of the place and in open environments I didn't change anything. While detail from myFunerals, Performance
Sima Yousefnia
LandEscape 65 Art Review
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Sima Yousefnia
Sima Yousefnia
LandEscape 67 Art Review
photographing the subjects I didn't ask them to do anything or to show any feelings I just ask them to be relax and try to think, usually after some shots I could reach what I wanted. I like the way Sound of Silence shows a symbiosys between the abstract idea of night that evokes such an indefinite impalpability of the idea of Silence: while referring to an easily "fruible" set of symbols as starting points, you seem to remove the historic gaze from the reality you refer to, offering to the viewers the chance to perceive in a more absolute form, in order to address us not only on a mere contingent view but especially to invites us to rethink about our future. So I would take this occasion to ask you if in your opinion personal experience is an absolutely indespensable part of a creative process... Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience?
I think creativity of the artist in any field has a direct or indirect connection with his life. It means that our childhood memories, people who have been in contact with us, things we have seen and events that have happened to us, all have their effects on the artist and the works he/she creates. Apart from memories and what we have in mind from the past, which is stored in our conscious or subconscious, there are some issues which are connected to our daily life. Our observations from childhood to the present that we walk in the street, things we see or in general what is happening around us or in the whole world, all has a direct or indirect impact on what an artist creates and is not separate from it. About the Sound of Silence I prefer that others tell me what they see. But certainly in this project my life, my memories and the environment have their effect.
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Sima Yousefnia
Art Review
A relevant feature of Sound of Silence that has particularly impacted on me is the way this series raises a question on the role of the viewers' perception, forcing us to going beyond the common way we perceive not only the outside world, but our inner dimension... I'm personally convinced that some information are hidden, or even "encrypted" in the environment we live in, so we need to decipher them. Maybe that one of the roles of an artist could be to reveal unexpected sides of Nature, especially of our inner Nature... what's your point about this?
I think this is absolutely true, the world that we are living in now, about the last hundred years, is much more complex than before and we are unaware of most of the things that happening around us. Although we live in an era that there is access to information more than ever, but it seems that there are lots of things that we are not aware or we can’t be aware of and it’s all because the pace of life. Another dimension of this issue is the modern human’s inside, I think his mentality his concerns and his lifestyle has changed and is more complex. In that condition one can call himself/herself a true artist that can slows time to observe life in fine detail without ignoring even insignificant events. Most of the times the artist creates a new world and teaches us to see differently. Which is creating new insights that is necessary to analyze and understand the contemporary society. In fact, we won’t have a dynamic society if artists do not create artworks, and undoubtedly they have their impact on the entire world. Your work seems to be pervaded with an inner narrative, but you reject an explicit explanatory strategy: rather, you seem to offer to the viewer an Ariadne's Thread that
Sima Yousefnia
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Sima Yousefnia
Sima Yousefnia
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allows to find personal interpretations to the subject you question. How much do you explicitly think of a narrative for your works?
As you mentioned there is no explicit narrative for The Sound of Silence, and I prefer that anyone has its own perceptions and interpretations. In reality I like one examine his/her inner self through my perspective without limiting his or her vision. In my opinion there are narrations for this project in the number of people who see it. I have highly appreciated the way you explore the blurry boundaries between Imagination and Experience: in particular you seem recontexualize the idea of Silence in order to disclose the unrevealed narrative behind the instant you capture. Accordingly, I daresay that imagination acts as cornerstones for the fullfilment process of the viewers that has reminded me again Thomas Demand, when he stated that "nowadays photography can no longer rely much on symbolic strategies and has to probe psychological narrative elements within the medium instead": what's your point about this?
I believe that photography has passed many tests and errors and we are not in an era that needs exciting experiences such as still life photography, nude photography or playing with light and form. This type of photography is still attractive today, but it's not in the genre of Fine Art. The thing which is important in this genre is the idea behind pictures and the photographer encoded world that makes it unique; it’s a world that we’ve never experienced. During this years you have exhibited your works in many occasions, including a recent show at the Photography Museum of Tehran and I think it's important to mention that you have been shortlisted for the incoming Two Land Art Festival, at Hormoz Island and
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Sima Yousefnia
Art Review
Khorram Abad. So, before taking leave from this interesting conversation I would like to pose a a question about the nature of the relation with your audience: in particular, do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decisionmaking process in terms of what type of language for a particular context?
Usually artists are active through different majors in art, such as sculpture, painting, land art and…. The whole idea is the same but the artist uses different mediums to express it. I don’t think about my viewers when I want to choose a medium to show what I have in mind, its mediums potentials that make me choose. Photography has its own potentials it can enter into philosophy and you can also find many layers in a picture, but environmental art is connected with environment and natural materials and what produced in each medium is different. Thanks a lot for this interesting conversation, Sima. Finally, I would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects. Anything coming up for you professionally that you would like readers to be aware of?
Thanks for the interview; I’m working on a new project which is different with the Sound of Silence, because Sound of Silence was kind of stage photography. But my new project is in wide landscapes and everything is natural. I’ve just started this project and it doesn’t have solidarity to share with the readers. In the field of land art readers can see my works through this link: https://sites.google.com/site/siyouart/ . And here is my email address: simisi.y@gmail.com I am looking forward to receive emails from the readers and I would like them to share their opinions with me.
Sima Yousefnia
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Peruvian Andes 130 x 160 cm, acrylic/canvas, 2015
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Antonia Cacic Lives and works in Zagreb, Croatia
An artist's statement
I
am painter from Croatia. 20 years ago, when I was a child, here in Croatia was a war and the fall of communism. Now Croatia is member of the European Union. Last year I spent four weeks in Peru (in a small village in the Andes; Chacas). I saw that people live in terrible conditions. But I was moved by their serenity despite the merciless conditions of life. I visited several archaeological museums and sites in Peru (for example Chan Chan, city in the sand near Trujillo). I'm impressed with their rich culture and the great vibrancy. As I said, motive was developed through time spent in the Peruvian Andes where I stayed four weeks among native population, descendants of the Incas who live at an altitude of 3500 m.
Fascination with their culture, origins, habits, way they dressing with lots of color, the psychological impression of their physiognomy and the dramatic landscape of the Andes, all mixed into one conglomerate that I had remembered (it seemed all like an entirely different world ) gave me a strong incentive for exploring the painting surface. Antonia Čačić
Antonia Čačić was born February, 20th 1976. 1994/2000. Croatia, Zagreb - graduated design on Faculty of Architecture 1997/2002. Croatia, Zagreb - graduated painting on Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb 2002/2006. Slovenia, Ljubljana specialized study of painting on Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana. She exhibited on many group and solo exhibitions.
LandEscape 6 Art Review
LandEscape meets
Antonia Cacic An interview by Josh Ryder
Antonia Cacic's paintings reject the tradition of mere decor and establish a permanent interplay between Trascendence and perceptual Reality: she conveys memories in a multilayered combination that invites the viewers to a lively intellectual experience, and while dispensing with the theoretical precepts of minimalism, her work keeps a marked independence from the concept she explore. So the evokative mix of tones and shapes that hallmarks Cacic's recent works can be viewed as an aesthetic testing ground for the autonomy of painting and its historicity. I'm particularly pleased to introduce our readers to her stimulating artistic production. Hello Antonia, and welcome to LandEscape: to start this interview, would you like to tell us something about your background? You have a solid formal training and after graduating at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb you have atpecialized study of painting on Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana: how have these experiences influenced your evolution as an artists and how do they impact on the way you currently conceive and produce your works?
I think that in order to find some new challenge in painting one have to constantly be open and curious. Formal education helps to acquire knowledge or skill and accomplish technique, but if the skills and techniques achieved in the process of training end in themselves, then it is limitative. Of course, art education is not Juerg Luedi
Welcome Croatia 150 x 200 cm, oil/canvas, 2013
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Antonia Cacic
Art Review
Peruvian Andes, 160 x 260 cm, acrylic/canvas, 2015
necessary and the only requirement for research, and sometimes even can be an aggravating factor. Accepting the challenge is a process that sometimes leads all learned in question and requires a passion that drives to rise new spaces.
directly http://www.saatchiart.com/antoniacacic in order to get a wider idea of your multifaceted artistic production. In the meanwhile, would you tell us something about the genesis of this interesting project? What was your initial inspiration?
I would start to introduce our readers to your current production from Peruvian Andes series, an extremely stimulating series of performing paintings that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article: and I would suggest to our readers to visit
Motive was developed through time spent€ in the Peruvian Andes where I stayed four weeks among native population, descendants of the Incas who live at an altitude of€ 3500 m. Fascination with their culture, origins, habits, with the way they dressing with lots of color,
Antonia Cacic
LandEscape 9 Art Review
Peruvian Andes 130 x 160 cm, acrylic/canvas, 2015
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Antonia Cacic
Art Review
Peruvian Andes, 160 x 260 cm, acrylic/canvas, 2015
and the dramatic landscape of the Andes gave me a strong incentive for exploring the painting surface, dealing with the ways in which colors dominates in traditional costumes, in a dramatic landscape, in the psychological impression of their physiognomy, all mixed into one conglomerate colors that I had remembered. It seemed all like an entirely different world. My research consists of the following processes: place the horizontal format€ then spontaneously shed a few colors on it (it is important to pay attention to the correct consistency of the paint in order to obtain the corresponding result) then
pick up the excess paint scraps, leave to dry and then intervening in some parts as they are dropped, and the mapping of some white to these parts after repeated procedure bleed, mapping, until the composition is closed in a meaningful whole. Result depends on a lot of coincidences that occur during leaking. The manner in which it will correspond with other colors and what will give impression when rags collect excess paint. It is somehow built inside, there is a general vision of what I want to get, but this is largely due to coincidence mode impossible to predict, it is an experiment.
Antonia Cacic
LandEscape 13 Art Review
Peruvian Andes, 160 x 260 cm, acrylic/canvas, 2015
This process began two years ago when I painted portraits of the former Croatian president in an ironic gesture, and then continued through a series of paintings called Mirroring, a kind of self-portrait. The abstract feature that that hallmarks your recent works creates an area of visual interplay with the viewers, that are urged to evolve from the condition of a merely passive audience. In particular, your process of semantic restructuration of a view has reminded me of the ideas behind Thomas Demand's works, when he stated that
"nowadays art can no longer rely much on symbolic strategies and has to probe psychological narrative elements within the medium instead". While conceiving Art, even in the case of Photography, could be considered an abstract activity, there is always a way of giving it a permanence that goes beyond the intrinsic ephemeral nature of the concepts you explore. So I would take this occasion to ask you if in your opinion personal experience is an absolutely indespensable part of a creative process... Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience?
LandEscape 14
Antonia Cacic
Art Review
A difficult question, at first glance I would say that it is difficult to separate the process of direct experience. But when I paint it looks to me like some kind of trance and then what we call 'thinking' is no longer handled by the same terms as when things are trying to verbalize. I would even say that in painting there is something a priori, something that is in front of the experience, even something elusive for experience. I could say that now I want to snap just that what is in front of image. Of course, we wonder what is it that others recognize if in painting there is something a priori. The act of painting is surely direct experience in material. There were times when I stopped to paint because I felt it was no longer anything to say in that medium. But I really missed pigments, brushes, and all others painting substance in all its meanings, so I returned to painting. The nuance of delicate tones that pervade your canvas, and I can admire especially in Manta tejida has suggested me such a tactile sensation: any comments on your choice of "palette" and how it has changed over time?
I wanted in Manta Tejida to transfer that magic I met while I stayed among the Indian population in the Andes. I do not know what it was, maybe it was because of altitude (lack of oxygen), and when I came back I wanted to put that particular impression on canvas. Dynamic changing light in the Andes have left an impression on me, also continuous changes of light changes the color palette. Light is one of the principal demands of painting, and there is a marvelously light in Andes. Another interesting project of yours that has particularly impacted on me and on which I would like to spend some words is the triptych Mirroring. The multilayered experience conveyed by these anthropomorphic shadows is capable of
Manta tejida, 130 x 160 cm, acrylic/canvas, 2014
bringing a new level of significance, to the usual idea behind the concept of perception: and I would go as far as to state that in a certain sense it invites the viewers to challenge the common way to perceive not only the outside world, but our inner dimension... By the way, I'm sort of convinced that some informations & ideas are hidden, or even "encrypted" in the environment we live in, so we need -in a wayto decipher them. Maybe that one of the roles of an artist's gaze could be to reveal unexpected sides of Nature, especially of our inner Nature... what's your point about this?
Actually, something like that was on my mind when I was doing this series of paintings.
Antonia Cacic
LandEscape 42 Art Review
Manta tejida 130 x 160 cm, acrylic/canvas, 2014
LandEscape 14
Antonia Cacic
Art Review
Mirroring, 130 x 160 cm, acrylic/canvas, 2014
Mirroring, 130 x 160 cm, acrylic/canvas, 2014
Specifically, I wanted to show self-portrait in the reflection, in the morning when I look in mirror, while I'm not fully awake yet. So this is the sense between full consciousness and dreaming. I wanted to snap exactly that moment, that impression when we do not sleep but not awake yet. This is also painting between perception and memory, because it cannot be paint by observation but by the remembered impression.
it into an accessible visual is a key point of your works and plays a crucial role in your process: you seem to reject mere decorative aspects, in order to focus to the inner nature of the stories you tell with your paintings. How much do you explicitly think of a narrative for your images?
While characterized with a deep abstract mark, your works seems to provide the viewer of a subtle narrative, as in President: the capability of discerning the essential feature of a view and to translate
This series of paintings is also about catching an impression. In this manner of painting you do not know exactly what you're going to get, but in the process it happens to be lots of coincidences that take you to the definition of the image. Therefore, it is possible to say that I’m thinking about the narrative all the time, but in a way that it is not a literal and unambiguous; painting is different from the
Antonia Cacic
LandEscape 42 Art Review
Mirroring 130 x 160 cm, acrylic/canvas, 2014
LandEscape 14 Art Review
Indios head 130 x 160 cm, acrylic/canvas, 2014
Antonia Cacic
Antonia Cacic
LandEscape 42 Art Review
verbal narration, it is not possible to determine its existence in time because image is all present at once, but can be observed and analyzed in long time and in lots of layers and narratives. In this series called President I wanted to get impression of President, manipulate with the color in order to achieve resemblance of character and meanings. I daresay that your works can be also considered allegories of the conflictual relation between Perception and Memory: your paintings seems to be pervaded with an inner narrative, but you reject an explicit explanatory strategy: rather, you seem to offer to the viewer an Ariadne's Thread that allows to find personal interpretations to the stories you tell through your colorful plasticity. How much do you explicitly think of a narrative for your works?
I like that expression; between Perception and Memory - Indian Heads are exactly that, something between perception and memory. Perception took place in direct contact, but when I came back it took some time to settle impressions in some kind of no-factually memory, I had impressions in some kind of smear, glance, like someone look at you and quickly turn his head, it was something that is pure essence of painting, that can be reached only by color and surface. In my memory their hair seemed purple, violet, and their faces something like pink-red. I like the way your brush strokes create an intimate unity between past, present and future, establishing a vivid involvement with with the viewer. At the same time, you seem to remove the historic gaze from the reality you refer to, offering to the viewers the chance to perceive in an absolute and almost atemporal form... do you think that this
Indios head, 130 x 160 cm, acrylic/canvas, 2014
might be interpreted as a reject of acceptance of the contingence of your work?
It could be said that I'm little flirting with contingency here. In this kind of process there is a lot of contingency, especially because some parts of paintings literally depend on coincidence (the way I pick up color with a towel, etc.). However, I want to get a result that is not just contingent. The way I paint I'd call processed coincidence. I repeat that procedure a lot of times if necessary until I get a result, until I see that the painting is visually consistent. And when we are talking about visually consistent I thing we are already in some kind of rejection of acceptance of the contingency of work.
LandEscape 14
Antonia Cacic
Art Review
Mirroring, 130 x 160 cm, acrylic/canvas, 2014
President, 130 x 160 cm, acrylic/canvas, 2013
During these years you have exhibited your works in several group and solos. So, before taking leave from this interesting conversation I would like to pose a a question about the nature of the relation with your audience: in particular, do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decisionmaking process in terms of what type of language for a particular context?
for communication. Painting is quite recluse process and I always wondering if anyone else sees what I see in particular painting. I think that the only truth of the works can reach universal, and so does the audience.
When I paint I don’t think about anything other than of visual integrity of work. I paint what motivates me inside, in this matters I cannot make compromises. When the process of painting is completed then there is a tendency
Thanks a lot for this interesting conversation, Antonia. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects. How do you see your work evolving?
I think I will go towards some kind of reduction, but I cannot predict. Thank you for inviting me.
Antonia Cacic
LandEscape 42 Art Review
President 130 x 160 cm, acrylic/canvas, 2013
LandEscape 40 Art Review
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Rüdiger Fischer Lives and works in Lübeck, Germany
An artist's statement
M
y work is of narrative nature, it opens up a space from which the recipient can think ahead. The works contain one (or more) questions that you can talk about. Mostly my questions research the relationships between reality and possible reality, between sign and matter. You can say: I am suggesting a narrative. And as well: I am creating a situation. Some situations do not seem to be possible (like “Moving Cities) at all and some fictions seem to be more attractive than the real history (Genealogy). Some fiction I created (like the series “Entertainments”, the name basing on David Foster Wallace character “James O. Incandenca”, an underground director in
his novel “Infinite Jest”) is drawing dystopian stories of the future. The series is examining the way we are constructing future and especially failed futures. What kind of signs do we prefer? And can I overwrite a special sign, which is usually used in another context? That’s what I am doing, and I call it art.
Rüdiger Fischer
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LandEscape meets
Art Review
Rüdiger Fischer An interview by Dario Rutigliano, curator landescape@europe.com with the collaboration of Theresa S. Sutton
The work of Rüdiger Fischer accomplishes an insightful exploration in the blurry area in which memories and imagination coexist in a static, almost atemporal dimension: his incessant search of an organic symbiosis between several viewpoints out of temporal synchronization offers to the viewer a multilayered experience that to urges our imagination to fill the missing pieces of the story that he has deliberated omitted. One of the most convincing aspects of Fischer's practice is the way he creates an area of intellectual interplay between perception and memory, that invites the viewers to explore the crossroad between contingency and immanence: I'm very pleased to introduce our readers to her refined artistic production. Hello Rüdiger and welcome to LandEscape: I would start this interview, posing you some questions about your background. Are there any experiences that have particularly influence your evolution as an artist and that informs the way you currently conceive and produce your works?
During my work as a copywriter at an ad agency, I discovered the possibilities of the basic form of a print ad. You see – there is a headline, a picture and a copytext. This is a
highly structured approach of telling a story, not unlike a Haiku or a Limerick or symbolic systems like traffic signs or emoticons. But I always regretted it was used to tell rather lame stories about brands and things someone should buy. So I began to use the basic form of a print ad to tell stories I found to be interesting. That’s how it all started for me as an artist. I used to write short stories since I was 13 or 14 years old, later I studied philosophy. I was – in some way – prepared to do what I am doing now: formulate questions and hypotheses about time, experience and our behaviour in a space of possibilities - and than put it in a container defined as art. In all of your multifaceted artistic production there's a recurrent sense of narrative: although each of your project has an autonomous life, there's always seem to be such a channel of communication between your works, that springs from the way you juxtapose ideas and media: German multimedia artist Thomas Demand stated once that "nowadays art can no longer rely much on symbolic strategies and has to probe psychological narrative elements within the medium instead". What's your point about this? And in particular, how much do you explicitly think of a narrative for your works?
Symbolic Systems are based on an almost intuitive understanding of signs, embedded in a specific culture. But in a global system of art Juerg Luedi
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Rüdiger Fischer
Art Review
Patchworks Of The Past details
production, you have a limited pool of symbols which will work for you. Iconographic symbols like crosses or skulls where excessively used not only by the advertising industry but media production at all. So what is the meaning of a skull? The Hamlet Skull, the Ed Hardy Skull, the Pirates of the Caribbean Skull, the Damien Hirst Skull? Maybe after all that “skullism”, it does not mean a thing, nothing specific, it is detail from myFunerals, Performance
just a skull. But that’s pretty boring, isn’t it? You cannot work precisely with it. So what I am doing in “Entertainments” for example is, I take pictures of pictures in newspapers and rearrange them to another picture. I use them to create a kind of visual film-script, telling a dystopian story. I like science fiction and I like the stories I am
R端diger Fischer
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Patchworks Of The Past details
telling, but I am as well interested in the multiple transformation process of signs. What does my rearrangement prove? Does it prove anything at all? Where is the meaning of the single and than rearranged sign? Has it just vanished? Now let's focus on your artistic production: I would start from "Patchworks Of The
Past", an extremely interesting project that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article: and I would suggest our readers to visit directly at http://www.rouvenfischer.de in order to get a wider idea of your multifaceted artistic production. In the meanwhile, would you tell us something
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RĂźdiger Fischer
Art Review
Patchworks Of The Past details about the genesis of this stimulating project? What was your initial inspiration?
Unlikely to my other works, Patchworks Of The Past started not with an idea but with the material - photo slides and film negatives from my grandpa. Each specific slide - for example from our 1978 journey to Berchtesgaden, Bavaria – can be seen as a symbol. It contains
memories about a certain period of my life. It contains or stimulates a reconstruction of me, a question maybe: how have I been? The Slides contain pictures of public places, people passing by, elements of nature like mountains and trees, relicts of civilisation. Each slide represents a slice of time. So the obvious question to me was: what kind of representation is established by all of these
RĂźdiger Fischer
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Patchworks Of The Past details
slides? And how can I ask this question as an artist? I began playing with the slides, cutting them into slices and recombining them, mashing them up. The people and times and stories intertwined. I revealed unknown and new relationships, an untold history, and a possible past. The new recombined slides are containing
gaps- gaps of knowledge and meaning. I drew attention to these gaps by “marking� them with monochrome slices. When I first happened to get to know with this work I tried to relate all the visual information and the presence of primary environmental elements to a single meaning. But I soon realized that I had to fit
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Rüdiger Fischer
Art Review
Patchworks Of The Past details
into its visual unity, forgetting my need for a univocal understanding of its symbolic content: rather that a conceptual interiority, I can recognize the desire to enabling us to establish direct relations... Would you say that it's more of an intuitive or a systematic process?
Actually I try to prevent the attitude of symbolism, but during the process of arranging
all those slices I have cut, “strong pictures” are forming almost by itself. I have to make a decision. I don’t want the recipients to reveal a hidden meaning, but ask themselves: What is happening here? What is this? How can this fit together? Yes, I am establishing direct relationships and sometimes it works for me and sometimes it doesn’t. It is important to accept, that not each of my suggestions make
R端diger Fischer
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Patchworks Of The Past details
sense. I like it very much when a system fails. Within all the sense I am producing, it gives a special feeling of freedom to me when I can stop making sense. The ambience created by "Patchworks Of The Past" has reminded me the concept of Heterotopia elaborated by French social theorist Michel Foucault. What has mostly
impacted on me is the way you have been capable of bringing a new level of significance to the signs of absence, that invites us to a fulfilment process that involves the viewer's personal memories. This is a recurrent feature of your approach and you seem to deconstruct and assembly memories in order to suggest a process of investigation: maybe that one of the roles of
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R端diger Fischer
Rüdiger Fischer
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an artist could be to reveal unexpected sides of Nature, especially of our inner Nature... what's your point about this?
You are absolutely right: I see my work as an investigation, a research for new knowledge objects. Each work represents a question and an invitation: let’s talk about it. What is this? I hope my works are creating doors to unknown rooms. In each room you can talk differently about a specific topic. “The limits of my language are the limits of my world”, Ludwig Wittgenstein stated in Tractatus Logico Philosophicus. That’s why I am trying to create new forms of expression: I want to expand the boundaries of my world. To me, questions have always been more important and more powerful than answers. For example: The sentence “A man who lived in his town as if it where the sea” creates a complete different set of associations than the sentence “A man who lived in his town as if it where the woods”. I once was working on a set of pictures, just made out of one sentence like the ones above. And this can be enough to create a complete universe, a whole story, a different point of view and a wide range of possibilities. This is – more than anything else – my conception of art: Creating spaces and giving the recipient the ability to explore them by his own. I like the way your practice is intrinsically connected to the chance of creating an area of intense interplay with the viewers, that are urged to evolve from the condition of a merely passive audience: in particular, your investigation about the intimate consequences of constructed realities: while conceiving Art could be considered a purely abstract activity, there is always a way of giving it a permanence that goes beyond the ephemeral nature of the concepts you capture. So I would take this occasion to ask you if in your opinion personal experience is an absolutely indispensable part of a creative process... Do you think that a
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Rüdiger Fischer
Art Review
Meine Matchboxautos in gefährlichen Situationen
creative process could be disconnected from direct experience?
of simulation and semiotics, media, psychology or physics to create a personal tale of research.
To me, the research on my own history will always be part of my work. More than that, my association set is very private. It is my key to the understanding and rearrangement of my world. When I state, “Well see, this picture is pure theory, got it?” I am lying from time to time. It is not. It is the attempt to use theories
Can the audience transform my suggestion to a more general point of view? And if they do it – will they recognize me? Will they remember me? You seem to be in an incessant search of an organic, almost intimate symbiosis between several viewpoint out of temporal
Rüdiger Fischer
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Meine Matchboxautos in gefährlichen Situationen
synchronization: moreover, the reference to the universal imagery of childhood that recurs in "Meine Matchboxautos in gefährlichen Situationen" seems to remove any historic gaze from the reality you refer to, offering to the viewers the chance to perceive in a more atemporal form. In this sense, I daresay that the semantic juxtaposition between sign and matter that
marks out your art, allows you to go beyond any track of contingency...
The series “Meine Matchboxautos in gefährlichen Situationen” (my matchbox cars in dangerous situations) came up from the desire to construct situations like the ones I created in my childhood: rather wild combinations of matchbox cars, puppets, building blocks and so on. In my series, I combine them with toys my
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Rüdiger Fischer
Art Review
son used to play with. So there is a line from the past into the present. And you are right – timelines are flowing into each other and creating a special moment. And this is because while one plays, he is out of time and out of space. Nevertheless, the situations refer to games that have played before, to games at all. The works of this series remain in abeyance. Because the relationships of the elements in the dangerous situations to one other are doubtful, they have a certain degree of freedom to interact. But I make a suggestion – at least these are dangerous situations… That’s not unlike another piece of work, reflecting on the way we are constructing our past. “Frozen Time – Three Generations” consists of a freezer with a glass-door. Inside are about a dozen blocks of ice, in which things are frozen, things of me, my son and my grandfather. Matchbox-cars and photos, ties and books and glasses and Play Mobil figures and so on. Again I make a suggestion what the past might be – a collection of things I can look at or take in my hands. And that’s one special way we construct a past – by taking one incident after the other into our mental hands and putting them together into a line and then say: So, this is how it has been. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Rüdiger. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?
To my birthday from my friends I wished as a gift slides or photo-negatives from them. I am going to do something with that, working on with “Patchworks Of The Past”. Also, I added some works to the series “Entertainments” and “Genealogy”. Maybe I will do something
with a special toy the five years old daughter of my woman gave to me as a gift – a pink castle, in which unicorns are living, with two unicorns as a basic “staff”. A kind of examination of game play and the possibilities of the unicorn narrative. I am also very interested in a subject I call rear-view-mirrormojos – all that stuff people are putting on the rear-view-mirrors in their cars. These “mojos” to me are a condensed tale of their wishes, hope and their history. I don’t know what do to with my fascination by now, but when it is time, I will have an idea. And so it goes…
R端diger Fischer
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LandEscape 40 Art Review
LandEscape 5 Art Review
Alison Wells Lives and works in New Bedford, MA, USA
An artist's statement
T
he urban landscape has always been a source of fascination in my work because it pulsates with a pure energy that provides me, the artist with an array of visual and emotional stimuli.€
Landscapes are constantly changing, being constructed and deconstructed at a rapid pace much like the process in my paintings.I am particularly fascinated with the tactile nature of cities along with their emotional energy and their dominant structures. I translate
these three aspects in my work through abstracted mixed media paintings on canvas. I use mostly a neutral and limited palette along with varied textures, geometric shapes and organic forms, to create individual worlds of rhythmic movement.
Lisa Fu
LandEscape meets
Alison Wells An interview by Dario Rutigliano, curator witht he collaboration of Katherine Williams landescape@europe.com
Alison Wells's brushstrokes convey the urban environment's pulsating energy to create an area of interpaly with the viewers capable of providing of a mutilayeres experience, that invites to find the connections between the outside world and the way we relate to it. One of the most convincing aspects of her approach is the way her narration of the ephemeral and emotional dimension of subjectivity condenses the permanent flow of the perception of the reality we inhabit in. It is with a real pleasure that I would like to introduce our readers to her stimulating works. Hello Alison, and welcome to LandEscape: to start this interview, would you like to tell us something about your background? You have a solid formal multidisciplinary training and you hold a MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. How do these experiences influence your evolution as an artists and how do they impact on the way you currently conceive and produce your works?
I did my undergraduate degree at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Jamaica and at that level art school for me was about learning the fundamental techniques. I learnt about artists and art movements, I trained under mentors and gathered as much information under my belt as possible - It was about learning the rules. These were extremely Juerg Luedi
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Alison Wells
Art Review
Spring Fiesta Acrylic and Paper Collage on paper 8"x10" 2014. Private Collection
Alison Wells
LandEscape 9 Art Review
important years in my art career as it gave me a solid foundation and set the stage for me to go off on my own and explore and experiment with the knowledge I gained. After my undergraduate training I practiced as a professional artist for seven years exhibiting and selling my art. The business of art although a wonderful experience when one is successful at selling one’s art can sometimes be detrimental to the raw creative experience. At this point I knew it was time to return to art school. I knew it would be a way for me to creatively delve whole-heartedly into my work and learn new techniques and rules to play by. On the contrary my graduate studies at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth was less about learning techniques and rules. Instead it was more about critical thinking, learning to question everything as well as breaking and reinventing the rules with just enough structure to keep me focused. It gave me a place to better grow into myself as an artist as it was also about social interaction, working and feeding off the creative energies of others in a community. Now 8 years after graduating with my MFA I find myself reaching back to that state of mind in my studio anytime I feel the business of art compromising my creativity and so I strongly believe that my solid training in the arts was and continues to be invaluable in the way I conceive and create my artwork. Before starting to elaborate about your production, would you like to tell to our readers something about your process and set up for making your artworks? In particular, what technical aspects do you mainly focus on your work? And how much preparation and time do you put in before and during the process of creating a piece?
Particularly in my abstract urban landscapes my main focus is capturing visual and tactile textures in and on the surfaces of the work. The surfaces of my paintings are very important in my process as they reveal the history of the piece, and the process of layering in the
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Alison Wells
Art Review
Belly of the Beast, Acrylic & Mixed media on canvas, 50"x50" each
work. These layers provide depth, both physically and emotionally layered with a variety of materials such as acrylics, oils, tar, wax, sand, paint mediums, bonding agents and found objects. From these materials my urban landscapes are unearthed through experimentation and exploration and it is in the most open and honest explorations that
sometimes everything comes together all at once. It is during these times that it seems like I’m outside of himself, like an observer not in control, instead merely the medium for the art to go through. To me, that is what it is all about, where my best works come from. It’s about clearing the mind, getting out of the
Alison Wells
LandEscape 11 Art Review
way, not being precious with the work and allowing the art to flow through me. Now let's focus on your artistic production: I would start from your Belly of the Beast series, that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article: and I would suggest to our readers to visit yur website directly at
http://www.alisonwells.com in order to get a wider idea of your artistic production... In the meanwhile, would you like to tell us something about the genesis of this interesting project? What was your initial inspiration?
The urban landscape has always been a source of fascination in my work because it pulsates
LandEscape 12 Art Review
Alternate Landscapes Acrylic & Mixed media on canvas, 50"x50" each
Alison Wells
Alison Wells
LandEscape 13 Art Review
abstract beauty that goes beyond a stereotyped idea of landscape and brings a new level of significance to images: this challenge the viewers' perception in order to going beyond the common way to perceive not only the outside world, but the way we relate to it... I'm sort of convinced that some informations & ideas are hidden, or even "encrypted" in the environment we live in, so we need -in a way- to decipher them. Maybe that one of the roles of an artist could be to reveal such unexpected sides of Nature, especially of our inner Nature... what's your point about this?
Belly of the Beast, Acrylic & Mixed media on canvas, 50"x50" each
with a pure energy that provides me, the artist with an array of visual and emotional stimuli.€Cities are constantly changing, being constructed and deconstructed at a rapid pace much like the process in my paintings. My initial inspiration is my love for tactile surfaces along with the grit, the grime, the beautiful and the grotesque aspects in and of city life. I am also inspired and fascinated by the dominant structures and geometric forms of the buildings that create remarkable interplays of negative and positive shapes. A feature of your Urban Organic series that has particularly impacted on me is the way your works seem to unveil the subtle connection between environment and the way we perceive it. The sense of geometry that pervades these canvas speaks of an
Throughout time and history, Artists have always used their creativity to reveal the world we live in, in new and interesting and sometimes unexpected ways. My work focuses on the physical world through the dynamic and natural state of randomness that occurs in nature but is perceived differently by everyone. It is this difference in perception that moves me to go beyond a stereotyped idea of landscape and for a more abstract portrayal based on emotions and senses. I agree that one of the roles of an artist is to reveal unexpected sides of the nature of life because it brings up the question of the role that our emotions play in our perception of nature. If we have a strong emotional association with a particular sense like a sound or smell or taste, we start to observe it more often and it starts having different meanings for us. I hope to portray my perceptions in ways that opens up the viewer to experience their own perception of nature and its many hidden messages. The rhythmic movement suggested by the synergies of different media creates an area of deep interplay that establishes a vivid involvement with with the viewer.
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Blue-Moon Eclipse Acrylic on paper, 9"x12" Framed
Alison Wells
Alison Wells
LandEscape 15 Art Review
At the same time, you seem to remove the historic gaze from the reality you refer to, offering to the viewers the chance to perceive in an absolute and almost atemporal form. So I would take this occasion to ask you if in your opinion personal experience is an absolutely indespensable part of a creative process... Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience?
Personal experience is definitely an invaluable aspect in an artists’ work whether consciously or subconsciously but yes a creative process can absolutely be disconnected from direct experience. In that case it becomes solely about formalism and the act of reacting to the elements and principles of design. The visual elements provide an essential starting point for the artists in their process as well as the viewer in understanding a work of art. Today, art is open to new interpretations because it is too free and fluid to be tied down to any one thing or way of creating and viewing. I have highly appreciated the way you explore the boundary between Imagination and Experience in your interesting Spring Fiesta and I would say that imagination play a role in the fullfilment process of the viewers that reminds me what German artist Thomas Demand once stated: "nowadays art can no longer rely much on symbolic strategies and has to probe psychological narrative elements within the medium instead": what's your point about this? And in particular, how much do you explicitly think of a narrative for your works?
Narratives in my work are not always clear cut and don’t necessarily include an obvious plot. I am not only interested in the stories of my cultural heritage and past but also the stories I tell about myself and to myself whether imaginary or real that engages the past, present, and future. In a lot of modern art, formalism fights the integrity of the narrative and therefore it is a struggle in my work… though a good struggle, forcing me to delve into both territories and see where it takes my paintings.
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Alison Wells
Art Review
Swampy Moonscape 1
Swampy Moonscape 2
Acrylic on paper, 9"x12" Framed.
Acrylic on paper, 9"x12" Framed.
I would define Blue-Moon Eclipse a dynamic painting: the soft nuances of red on the dark background works as a springboard to the opaque that light that burst out of the canvas... Such nuance of red that has suggested me such a tactile sensation, a feature that I can recognize in the works from your Swampy Moonscape series as well... to by the way, any comments on your choice of "palette" and how it has changed over time?
important formal ideas and concepts in the work and therefore color needed to be secondary at that point.
My Urban organic series started out with a very limited palette - this was because I was exploring
However as the work began to develop and take amazing directions so did my palette as I reintroduced color in new an exciting ways leading to the color play you see on “Blue Moon Eclipse” and “Swampy Moonscape series” Besides producing the stimulating works that our readers have admired in these pages you also teach and you are currently Adjunct Art
Alison Wells
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Swampy Moonscape 3
Misty Mangrove Moon
Acrylic on paper, 9"x12" Framed.
Acrylic on paper, 9"x12" Framed
Professor at Bristol Community College: have you ever happened to draw inspiration from the works of your students? By the way, I sometimes I wonder if a certain kind of formal training could even stifle a young artist's creativity... what's your point?
mistakes and it is the working through of these mistakes and discoveries that are invaluable to everyone.
I have been teaching for 15 years and I have discovered quickly that education isn’t just a one-way street. As a teacher I learn from my students everyday and I find myself simultaneously enlightened and inspired by the lessons I learn from them. I also learn from their
In terms of formal art training for young artists, I strongly feel that if they make that choice to go to art school they need to go into it with a critical eye, responding to everything and questioning everything. Personal creativity can definitely be developed and nurtured with formal training but it’s definitely not for everyone and it can stifle the creative process of many budding artists.
LandEscape 18
Alison Wells
Art Review
For some it is all about gaining knowledge of technique in the studio, reading countless books, taking class after class, but for others‌ they learn best through the experience of trial and error. Before taking leave from this interesting conversation I would like to pose a a question about the nature of the relation with your audience: and during these years your works have been exhibited in several important locations around the worls as the D’art Contemporaine in Pont Aven, The New Bedford Art Museum and the Mutual Life Gallery in Kingston. What impressions have you received in these occasions? And in particular, do you consider the issue of audience reception as being a crucial component of your decision-making process in terms of what type of language for a particular context?
Many artists (myself included) sometimes act as if an audience reception of their work means nothing to them and that they are solely interested in expressing their message and fulfilling their creative calling. However this is not always the case and many of us still feel a need for validation knowing our hard work was not in vain and that someone even just one person got what we were trying to say or just responded positively to our work. Sometimes even a negative reaction is better than none at all. It must be a conversation between artist and viewer because we will not get far clapping with one hand. Thanks a lot for this interesting conversation, Alison. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects: anything coming up for you professionally that you would like readers to be aware of?
One of my dreams ever since I could remember was to own and run my own Fine
Underground Railroad Montage Acrylic, paper collage, monoprint & graphite on paper
Arts Gallery and I am very proud and happy to say that this dream recently came true. Therefore my future plans would be to work hard at it and to continue to ensure its growing success. I plan to keep creating artwork and to continue traveling and experiencing what life has to offer, as much as possible. I also intend on continuing to inspire others by sharing my talents through formal teaching – and teaching informally through my art. Thank You
Alison Wells
LandEscape 42 Art Review
Other Side of the Harbor Acrylic & paper collage on canvas, 62"x 48" 2013
LandEscape 40 Art Review
LandEscape 40 Art Review
The Direction Molded Plaster and Oxidized iron, 2015
LandEscape 5 Art Review
Irene Pouliassi Lives and works in Athens, Greece
An artist's statement
M
y artwork takes a critical view on the narration of time and its effects and it explores the human body as a manifestation of nature and universe. With influences of Vladimir Veličković and David Altmejd 's bodies and studing the tryptych Nature -Human-Genesis I want to state human has with its own nature. I implement time in my work as both a tool and an idea so it attains temporal qualities as it experiences change and fluctuation. Having engaged subjects as desintegration and existentialism my work reproduces familiar visual stimuli such as the temporary nature and distortion of the human image transformating artwork to a memento mori. The iron rusts being free in nature just like a human ages. Landscapes seek resemblance with lying bodies reminding us that human and nature has the same design. While I use a variety of mediums in each project the
methdology is the same: Design-DesintegrateNarrate. I travel from one medium to another citating a continuity among the projects. The subject defines the medium and the “Landscapes” as well as the “Bonescapes” serve as storyboards viewed under the microscope. As my main materials I use plaster and iron, Oxidated or not. And I use them with a purpose on creating flesh and bones through minerals and resembling the prossess of aging through oxidization. The time narrates its own process and let the ''Landscape'' reach both zenith and Nadir at the same time. Seeing something as it matures, you can accept more easily the passage of time. ''Given sufficient time, oxygen, and water, any iron mass will eventually convert entirely to rust and disintegrate''
Irene Pouliassi
LandEscape 6
LandEscape meets
Art Review
Irene Pouliassi An interview by Dario Rutigliano, curator landescape@europe.com
Marked with a stimulating multidisciplinary feature, Irene Pouliassi's work provides the viewers of an extension of the ordinary perception, in order to manipulate it and releasing it from its most limbic parameters: rather than lingering on merely decorative aspects to seduce the viewers, her interdisciplinary approach allows her to conveys the evokative potential of different materials to create a coherent work marked with a lively and consistent unity. I'm very pleased to introduce our readers to her refined artistic production. Hello Irene, and welcome to LandEscape: to start this interview, would you like to tell us something about your background? You have a solid formal training and as soon as you received a B. A. from the AKTO College you have been accepted with distinction at the School of University of Western Macedonia, where you are currently studying in the 3rd Visual Arts Lab. How do these experiences influence your evolution as an artists and how do they impact on the way you currently conceive and produce your works?
Hello and thank you for selecting me in LandEscape Art Review. From a very young age I was a fan and avid reader of graphic novels. The ability to narrate through illustration, the compelling compositions and visual storytelling made a lasting impression
on me and I realized it was a way of expression fitting to my artistic approach. Combining visual arts with graphic design helps me to evolve as a creative individual and to impose critical thinking and analysis on my thought process. The principles of Design and foundations of human anatomy help me solve the technical issues and concentrate on storytelling. I find inspiration in human body and by studying its anatomy I can understand its mechanics and physiology. In my opinion a solid foundation renders you able to articulate and visualize every kind of idea you might want to express. Before starting to elaborate about your production, would you like to tell to our readers something about your process and set up for making your artworks? In particular, what technical aspects do you mainly focus on your work? And how much preparation and time do you put in before and during the process of creating a piece?
It is a lengthy process, I would really like to be more productive but before I start a piece I explore variants numbering in hundreds. My field of study is time, space and the effect of desintegration on the human body. I see human body and energy as a manifestation of nature and universe. First and foremost, studing human anatomy, I am exploring for the forms. The a very interesting thing about the Juerg Luedi
LandEscape 8
Irene Pouliassi
Art Review
Human Landscape Plaster and Oxidized iron, 70X120 cm, 2014
body is that under a microscope you can observe forms that narrate the passage of time and prove our physical existence. Then after many sketches and story drafts, I lay down a visual composition and start detail from myFunerals, Performance
experimenting about technical aspects. I prepare the right surface,oxidize the iron and arange its color variations. Firstly, I place the metals and then I pour the liquid plaster. As the water evaporates the plaster dries and
Irene Pouliassi
LandEscape 9 Art Review
Human Landscape Plaster and Oxidized iron, 40x40cm, 2014
our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article: and I would suggest to our readers to visit your website directly at http://irenepouliassi.blogspot.it/ in order to get a wider idea of your artistic production... In the meanwhile, would you like to tell us something about the genesis of this interesting project? What was your initial inspiration?
rust emerges. For a lengthy period of time its form is in flux until it reaches a stable peak. Now let's focus on your artistic production: I would start from Human Landscape that
As I mentioned,it all started with anatomy studies. I am very fond of illustration, sequential art and narrative drawing. It led me to visualise the anatomy as microscopical storyboards and it allowed me to connect factual ideas of human existence as part of a natural order. I consider it to be a similar narrative contructed of different matter but
LandEscape 12 Art Review
Human Landscape Plaster and Oxidized iron,70x90 cm 2014
Irene Pouliassi
Irene Pouliassi
LandEscape 13 Art Review
Detail of the Bonescapes series, Plaster and Oxidized iron, 2015
with entropy as its common denominator. It focused my attention to the passage of time and the afflictions it lays upon the human body as it experiences change desintegration and eventualy death. Its a neverending circle which you can observe in every aspect of life. Regarding materials when I began “Human Landscapes” I was already working on “simulacrums” and it made me realize that iron which also exists within the human body bears a striking resemblance to the skin as both of
them are harshly affected by the passage of time. An important aspect of "From Bodies to Landscape" that has particularly impacted on me is the way you unveil the inner connection between Man and Nature: you seem to appreciate an abstract beauty and sense of geometry that goes beyond a stereotyped idea of landscape, bringing a new level of significance to images and I would go as far as to state that in a certain
LandEscape 14 Art Review
Bonescape study Watercolors on paper, 50x70, 2015
Irene Pouliassi
Irene Pouliassi
LandEscape 42 Art Review
Simulacrum study Watercolors on paper, 50x70, 2015
Earthly Tether Acrylic on Canvas, Part of "From bodies to landscapes"series 60x120 cm, 2014
sense your works challenge the viewers' perception in order to going beyond the common way to perceive not only the outside world, but our inner dimension. . . By the way, I'm sort of convinced that some informations & ideas are hidden, or even "encrypted" in the environment we live in, so we need -in a way- to decipher them. Maybe that one of the roles of an artist could be to reveal unexpected sides of Nature, especially of our inner Nature. . . what's your point about this?
This is a very insightful description,regarding ou inner dimension. In my opinion, draws
LandEscape 8
Irene Pouliassi
Art Review
Patron Saint of Regret Collaborative Installation with Kyriakos Bournas, 2015
Irene Pouliassi
LandEscape 42 Art Review
inspiration from an archetypical ideal. For every person there is a fixation in such an ideal although artists strive to articulate both the fixation and its source, as human beings. They are challenged by the magnificent size of such ideals and the effort it requires comprehend internalize and express it through their art. In my opinion there are no unexpected sides of nature only unseen and misunderstood, Because creating art is such a personal and at the same time universal thing, each individual artist presents an unique insight on the core of those matters. Art has educational investigative and critisizing purposes it tries to make us aware and realize of what we subconsiously already know yet we refuse to aknowledge. In ”From bodies to Landscapes“ I expose a part of the prossess as “Simulacrum“ is becoming “Landscapes”. Personally, I consider my artwork to be a visualization of the archetypical concept of death. No part of death can be considered unexpected: everything and everyone eventually die. What I can offer is an opportunity for the viewers to witness that natural process through my understanding as a transition of energy and not just the end of something. As you have remarked once, "given sufficient time, oxygen, and water, any iron mass will eventually convert entirely to rust and disintegrate" I can recognize such a political value in this statement: in a wide sense, your vision often re-contextualizes the idea of the environment we live inviting the viewers' perception in order to challenge the common way to perceive the world we inhabit in... Many artists as the photographer Michael Light and Edward Burtynsky often reveals some form of environmental or political message in their works. Do you consider that your works are political in this way or do you seek to maintain a neutral approach?
Both of them are amazing artists and I can visually identify myself with their work. My
LandEscape 14
Irene Pouliassi
Art Review
Bonescape Molded Plaster and Oxidized iron, 2015
questions are not political, but existential. Although living in a country with in such political turmoil, talking about politics is going for the low hanging fruit. Maybe it is a subconsious reflex to being exposed everyday in such a political climate. Nowdays you can use politics to justify every way of action and as such I try to maintain a more neutral approach. The symbiosys between organic materials and iron provokes a reference to parts of
human body, as in the interesting Bonescape: in this sense, your art practice takes such a participatory line with the viewer and one of the features of "Bonescape" that has mostly impacted on me is the way you create an intimate involvement with with the viewer. At the same time, you seem to remove the historic gaze from the reality you refer to, offering to the viewers the chance to perceive in a more atemporal form. So I would take this occasion to ask you if in
Irene Pouliassi
LandEscape 42 Art Review
The master of all organs Molded Plaster, installation, 2013
your opinion personal experience is an absolutely indespensable part of a creative process... Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience?
Mastery over your mediums is a crucial requirement. Only having attained that you may be able to express your artistic character through them. When I started exploring my materials I had technical issues with the ratios, I had to understand their nature and
work with it and not against it. When I achieved competency I had yet to implement my personal esthetics on it. Is is a continuous balancing act beetween the how, why and what. It works the same way you would might explore yourself, asking the right questions and finding not just correct but fitting answers. �Bonescapes� is a detail of somebodys identity, there is underlined irony and controversy. In one hand you have a Molded replica of teeth, your post mortem identity, static in time and then you have
LandEscape 14
Irene Pouliassi
Art Review
rust changing time over time. You depict a infenently small time window which originates from a temporal eternity. I have highly appreciated the way you explore the boundary between Imagination and Experience and the interesting Simulacrum you seem to take advantage of Collective unconscious about the idea of human body in order to disclose the unrevealed narrative behind the instant you capture. Accordingly, I daresay that imagination acts as cornerstones for the fullfilment process of the viewers that has reminded me again Thomas Demand, when he stated that "nowadays art can no longer rely much on symbolic strategies and has to probe psychological narrative elements within the medium instead": what's your point about this? And in particular, how much do you explicitly think of a narrative for your works?
Narration is the key,”Simulacrum” contains narratives and ideals considering our body and its nature. In “Definition” I let the hands define the space . According to Aristotle,the hand is the “Master of all organs” the one that can defne space. And in the “Patron Saint of regret”, I remove the vertebrae and I replace them with fingers. I think it posseses a sense of theatricality. Everything starts from concept exploring sketches. With every project being either a sequel or a prequel in a ongoing personal narrative. Art had always a narrating purpose which even in symbolistic approaches, the events narrated had a place in a temporal line. Multidisciplinarity is a crucial aspect of your art practice and you seem to be in an incessant search of an organic, almost intimate symbiosis between several disciplines, taking advantage of the
Irene Pouliassi
LandEscape 42 Art Review
The Crown Part of the bonescapes series, Molded Plaster and Oxidized iron, 2015
LandEscape 14
Irene Pouliassi
Art Review
creative and expressive potential of Sculpture as well as of Painting and Drawing: while crossing the borders of different artistic fields have you ever happened to realize that a symbiosis between different disciplines is the only way to achieve some results, to express some concepts?
If you want to narrate a story or a concept, you have to consider and chose your words wisely,as you enrich your visual vocabulary you produce a highly compelliing and articulated result. I am very interested in discovering and becoming aquainted with new mediums, its similar to be knowledgeable of several spoken languages. In my work the narration transitions from one medium to another. A continuous shift between two dimensional and three dimensional art with time being the only constantly present variable. I try to fulfill the requirements that are present in every concept, but sometimes it feels as being a slave to them. Thanks a lot for this interesting conversation, Irene. Finally, I would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects. Anything coming up for you professionally that you would like readers to be aware of?
Thank you for Asking me all this chalenging questions and for this productive interview. Many things coming up, First of all my final thesis Project which I will exhibit next June under the coordination of Harris Kontosphyris and Thomas Zographos. But for now I will participate in Incumbarte International Art Fair in Valencia, Spain and in Art Athina as a member of artistic team En Flo.
An interview by Dario Rutigliano, curator landescape@europe.com
Towards Heaven from the simulacrum series, 2013
Untitled Part of the Bonescapes series Molded plaster and oxidized iron 2015