Art 365: Cathleen Faubert by Kirsten Olds
Eyakem Gulilat, Norman, Untitled (From the Collaborative Self Series), Archival pigment ink print, 24” x 50”
Cathleen Faubert, Norman, Mixed Grass Prairie, Photograph, 2012. Faubert began her Art 365 project with research on Oklahoma’s eco-regions, such as this one represented in a diorama at the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History.
This is the fourth in a series of articles profiling artists selected for Art 365 2014, an Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition (OVAC) program that supports five artists’ innovative projects over the course of a year. Projects are nurtured in consultation with guest curator Raechell It seems like such a simple question: what does “home” smell like? Yet people’s responses are complex, drawing on a host of sensory memories and emotions that they associate with scents. In her project for Art 365, Assistant Professor of Photography and Video in the Art, Technology & Culture Department at the University of Oklahoma Cathleen Faubert has delved deep into this question, becoming, at times, botanist, apothecary, anthropologist, perfumist, explorer, inventor, and artist. Motivating her inquiry is the desire to investigate how we understand “place” and how we locate ourselves within it. “I like the idea of being able to convey something about a place through a different sensory experience in the gallery,” she reveals. Although
4
p ro f i l e
Smith, Director of the H&R Block Artspace at the Kansas City Art Institute, and culminate in the Art 365 exhibition, which opens February 28, 2014 at [Artspace] at Untitled in Oklahoma City and then travels to the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa’s Hardesty Arts Center in Tulsa in May 2014.
her expertise lies especially in lens-based media, she turned to our sense of smell as an artistic tool, attempting to harness its ability to tell stories, to prompt our deep-seated memories, and to provoke a meaningful aesthetic response. Her interest in scent began when she was in graduate school, pursuing her M.F.A. degree in the joint program of Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. For her thesis exhibition I want more power over my fantasies, she created an installation with video projections, sculptural objects, and even a large spinning cotton candy machine—all of which she described as “a photograph you could walk into.” Taste, tactile, and visual realms
collided; viewers could see, handle, and ingest cotton candy through this mixed-media, multisensory experience. Sticky and sweet, glowing and unearthly, Faubert’s cotton candy invoked both pleasure and something more grotesque, a distorted childhood fantasy. More recently Faubert has been thinking about landscape after having spent time in a two-week artist’s residency in the Austrian Tyrol. There she roved with her camera, exploring the untrammeled Tux Valley, and thinking more deeply about the transformations nature engenders as part of its life cycles and those that art enables. In her ongoing series Dust and Ash, woodchips