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4\TaVX]V EXbX^]b Arts Council of Sonoma County awards three young artists grants
By Dani Burlison, Gretchen Giles and Gabe Meline
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or the fifth time, the Arts Council of Sonoma County has awarded $5,000 grants to three emerging artists to allow them greater freedom in exploring their craft. Established in 2006 (and taking a year off in 2007), the Emerging Visual Artist Award is one way that Sonoma County is trying to better invest in the arts. Partnering with United States Artists (USA), the council decided to make these grants in conjunction with various national foundations after a USA study found that while 96 percent of Americans appreciate the arts, only 27 percent believe that artists contribute to the good of society. Bleech and bah! In addition, the study discovered that the median reported income for artists from their artistic work was only $5,000. Surely we can all do better than that. Culled from some 95 applicants, who underwent a rigorous two-part judging process, we’re pleased to introduce to you Tramaine de Senna, Andrew Sofie and Laine Justice.
Beauty of the Mundane It is forbidden to enter unless the visitor first slips on a pair of cardboard huaraches. Hand-woven and oversized to accommodate feet still clad in shoes, the slippers protect the cardboard-covered floor and make a comfortable swishing sound as one glides about, circumnavigating the weightlifting torsos hanging from the ceiling. These carefully rendered muscles of bulky men are drawn on more cardboard and twirl in any slight breeze, turning to reveal their origins as paper towel cartons. Tremaine de Senna, 29, has created this installation at Healdsburg’s Hammerfriar Gallery. A TV loop showing body builders at the gym plays silently in the background, the camera honing in on painfully veined male pecs as large as any trophy bride’s plastic breasts. On the walls are drawings of what de Senna calls “bodybuilding buddies,� homoerotic evocations of twinned men exercising in postures easily mistaken for lovemaking, and under a clear plastic vitrine on a table in the main room, gaudy hot pink and garish gold paint frame small paper plates upon which juicy red meat
cuts are depicted. There’s a lot going on in here. “It’s kind of dumb how it started off,â€? de Senna later explains by phone from her Occidental home. “[Hammerfriar owner Jill Plamman] asked me to do something for the beginning of the year, and I thought of New Year’s resolutions and getting fit, so I went to the grocery store and started looking at magazines.â€? She pauses to laugh at herself. “But it ties into my themes of ritual and display and decoration,â€? she says more earnestly, “and I found the whole idea of body building—when people are really big and bulky as opposed to just being healthy—really intriguing. I love the beauty of the mundane; the cardboard came into place and it’s just such a common material.â€? The garishly decorated paper plates, she explains, were inspired by her recent residency in Germany, where strangely elegant scalloped disposable dishware are used to serve up the quick street food of the masses. “I like taking the association with fast food and greasiness and then turning it into art,â€? she says. During her time in Berlin, de Senna worked extensively with mutable materials, eventually recladding her entire room in cardboard and tinfoil and building all her furniture, save her bed, from more cardboard. “I worked at Make magazine,â€? she says, “and there I was really inspired by the idea, particularly in this economy, that you can teach yourself a skill set, like how to be less of a consumer, and I took it literally. It’s a continuation of the residency and a ‘decorative mendacity’ installation where I lived there and also created artwork. It was influenced both by my time at Make and by Japanese interior architecture. The Japanese treat very common materials like paper and wood very elegantly.â€? Spending even a small amount of time talking to de Senna, one is struck by her breadth of interest and experience. In addition to her magazine stint, she worked as a costume designer for American Conservatory Theatre and as an architectural draftsperson. The sitting-sewing work of the former was too “cattyâ€? for her tastes; the latter, too robotic. “You’re a CAD monkey, and your hand is transferred into the computer,â€? she sighs. Because what de Senna really wants to do is to draw. Her video work is already quite sophisticated and she plans a series of diptychs marrying the video with the drawing. Planning to spend her EVA money on the rent, de Senna has won a residency in Switzerland later in the year, where she’ll stay in a small Baroque city and create site-specific work. What’s guaranteed is that she’ll keep on challenging herself. “I’m using and trying to understand materials and their chemistry, like how cardboard is corrugated,â€? she says. “I get so much pleasure from that, and it allows me to produce a false world. Being a materialist, you’re in a world of dĂŠcor and fakeness and everything underneath it is a fake pillowy marshmallow.â€?—G.G. '*
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