ARTiculAction Art Review // Special Issue by ARTiculAction Art Review

Anniversary Edition

Special Issue

Move Me, 2014 Installation/Photography by Annemarieke van Peppen

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Katarzyna Zimna

Alon Peretz

Inga Lineviciute

Annemarieke Van Peppen

SĂŠverine Assouline

Katie Boyle

Poland

Israel

United Kingdom/ Lithuania

The Netherlands

France

Ireland

Artists adopt various strategies. I belong to those working with the topics coming from the direct experience. I need this personal impulse for my work, but in general it is not indispensable for making art. Both strategies have their limitations. When your art is very personal it is narrowed down to the certain range of topics, it may be hermetic, repetitive. When you reach for inspiration out of your box, look for exotic subjects, it may be superficial. However, in some way every subject and idea, even if it comes from the outside and is completely disconnected from the artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own experience, becomes part of this experience during the creation process.

Moments of real clarity and stillness are very rare in life, these moments are also very evasive. I need art, both as audience and as an artist to remind me of these seldom moments when everything seems to quiet down, and an acute sense of reality takes over.It might seem odd to search for a sense of reality in art which is all about making things up, and even odder to search for quietness with sound. But for some reason this detour seems to work, and whenever I encounter a good work of art â&#x20AC;&#x201C; in any medium, I get a glimpse of that special kind of awareness

As a person who is living in a generation bombarded by information and new forms of social interaction, my work is about how I feel and how I think in this time period and culture. I am interested in the progress of emotions like stress, anger or happiness etc, and how we act or react to these emotions. How our emotions changes and what motivates that change, and how people deal with the current social environment and what people believe in or do not believe, interests me a great deal. I love to play with colors and space, installation work and clay sculpture are proven mediums supportive of this love.

Since my work is the study of people the aesthetic can change greatly depending on the topic I am attempting to explore. I let the concept strongly influence how the art will be conceived.

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For me the portrayal of the idea is the important part of the artwork and it is why I work in many different mediums. The aesthetic challenge for me is how to evoke the topic to the audience to create a dialogue. By moving into video was to simplify the expression of the concept which was ideal for my last two artworks.

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Emily Lewis

lives and works in Portland, OR, USA

Alon Peretz lives and works in Tel Aviv, Israel

Katie Boyle

lives and works in New York City, USA

Annemarieke van Peppen 60 A lives and works in Bergen op Zoom, The Netherlands

Inga Lineviciute

lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark

Séverine Assouline Emily Lewis

Valérie Bourquin

Taly Oehler

USA

France

USA

Lewis works collaboratively on comic and zine publications, is the leader of Time Arts Collective where she leads student-artist community based events, has been awarded a residency at Arbitrary Hill in Texas, and has exhibited her work in galleries and institutions nationally. Lewis is an interdisciplinary artist.

My predilections mediums are video, electronic music, 3D modeling… I lead a reflection on music and electronic culture that has its historical roots in the cut-up by Brion Gysin and defined by W. Burroughs. The connections between music, sounds, images and space are some of my concerns and my research. Interactions that produce these different mediums between them are complex, allowing me to develop distinct ideas. These connections are multiple as far as they can be due in particular at random what allows me to keep the errors, the deletions in my process of production. They also cause indeterminations as well as random events.

My process relies heavily on intuition, so I always carry at least one camera with me (a DSLR, and/or a cheap film toy camera, which is a great alternative for the more poverty stricken artist). I prefer walking to driving as it allows a more intimate view of the world. The process is one of looking, assessing, finding that thing that intrigues me. I tend to go for immersion without pretension, trying to become a part of whatever environment I find myself in so that I can capture it in a respectful and honest manner. Sometimes, the world dictates the project, while other times, I impose my will on the world.

She incorporates drawing, sculpture, installation, animation, and comics into experimental narrative formats that investigate themes of identity, place, and trauma. Lewis is currently in her final year in the Master of Fine Arts Program in Contemporary Art Practice at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon.

lives and works in Paris, France

Taly Oehler

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lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA

Valérie Bourquin

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lives and works in Paris, France

Katarzyna Zimna

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lives and works in Lodz, Poland On the cover Move Me, 2014, Installation/Photography by Annemarieke van Peppen

Special thanks to Haylee Lenkey, Martin Gantman , Krzysztof Kaczmar, Joshua White, Nicolas Vionnet, Genevieve Favre Petroff, Sandra Hunter, MyLoan Dinh, John Moran, Marya Vyrra, Gemma Pepper, Michael Nelson, Hannah Hiaseen, Scarlett Bowman, Yelena York Tonoyan, Haylee Lenkey, Martin Gantman , Krzysztof Kaczmar and Robyn Ellenbogen.

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Emily Lewis Emily Lewis was born in 1991 in Houston, Texas. In 2013, she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Fibers and Textiles at Texas State University. Lewis works collaboratively on comic and zine publications, is the leader of Time Arts Collective where she leads student-artist community based events, has been awarded a residency at Arbitrary Hill in Texas, and has exhibited her work in galleries and institutions nationally. Lewis is an interdisciplinary artist. She incorporates drawing, sculpture, installation, animation, and comics into experimental narrative formats that investigate themes of identity, place, and trauma. Lewis is currently in her final year in the Master of Fine Arts Program in Contemporary Art Practice at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon.

Neighborhood, 2015 Installation

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Emily Lewis An interview by Dario Rutigliano, curator and Barbara Scott, curator articulaction@post.com

Multidisciplinary artist Emily Lewis' work explores the intimate relationship between the notion of place and identity with a lively gaze on contemporary art making. In her recent installation Neighborhood that we'll be discussing in the following pages, her unconventional approch draws the viewers into the liminal area in which perceptual categories are subverted and recontextualized into coherent unity. One of the most convincing aspects of Lewis' work is the way it provides the viewers with a multilayered experience in which they are urged to evolve from mere spectatorship to conscious participants . We are very pleased to introduce our readers to her refined artistic production. Hello Emily, and a warm welcome to ARTiculAction. We would start this interview posing you some questions about your background: ayou have a solid formal training and after having earned a B.F.A. of Studio Art Fibers and Textile, you joined a Master of Fine Arts in Contemporary Art Practice that you are currently pursuing the at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon. How do these experiences inform the way you conceive and produce your artworks and to the aesthetic problem in general?

Hi, good question, before I answer Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d like to thank you for inviting me to

present and discuss my work in your publication. My experience as an undergraduate student studying Fibers and Textiles at Texas State was more of a formal art curriculum than the interdisciplinary graduate Studio Practice program I graduated from at Portland State University. However, there are a lot of similarities between the two. Fibers was tiny, there were six other students in my major in a school made up of hundreds of art students. I learned how to weave, sew, embroider, and make paper. I quickly fell in love with repetitive processes. After my first year I used that technical knowledge of craft and started experimenting with installation and drawing practices. Portland State is made up of twelve students. We each have our own studios, but are responsible for finding any resources necessary for making our work. The small art programs Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been in have made me idealize community art making and seek out collaborative opportunities with small groups. My good fortune in almost consistently having a lot of space to work in has made me comfortable with making large pieces. Lastly, my training in craft and design coupled with the need to experiment while

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Neighborhood, 2015 Installation

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being resourceful is a part of my very raw, layered aesthetic. You are a versatile artist and ranging from Drawing to sculpture and installation, from animation to comics, your experimental practice encapsulates such variety of techniques that reveal an incessant search of an organic symbiosis between a variety of viewpoints. The results convey together a coherent sense of unity, that rejects any conventional classification: so before starting to elaborate about your production, we would suggest to our readers to visit http://emilylewis.us in order to get a synoptic view of your multifaceted artistic production: while walking our readers through your process, we would like to ask you if you have you ever happened to realize that such multidisciplinary approach is the only way to express and convey the idea you explore.

I like to think of my installations as theatrical. So much of my work is based around narrative content. I combine video, drawing, and sculpture to translate a world of senses similar to how we experience the real world and its various sights, sounds, and feelings. I have some smaller projects that are more conventional, like drawing on paper, singular comics, and prints. I tend to feel more satisfied after Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve pulled together a project that nearly seems impossible both in size and itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s various materials. The large installations are challenging physically and conceptually, where the smaller projects force me to work in a more controlled way. For this special issue of ARTiculAction we have selected Neighborhood, a stimulating mixed media installation that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. Reminding us of the notion of non lieu elaborated by French anthropologist Marc

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Augé, this project has at once caught our attention for the way your inquire into the concept of identity as a reflection of home creates an harmonic combination between the antithetical notions of presence and absence: when walking our readers through the genesis of Neighborhood, would you shed a light about the way you combine together the materials you choose for your works?

While artists as Manfred Pernice often manipulate and decontextualize the relationship between architecture and space, your work seems to addresses the viewers to a more intimate level, indicing them to rethink such erratic concepts on an unitary viewpoint: how would you describe the nature of space in your work?

way those old plantations and buildings were talked about. The appreciation of community, lineage, and great craftsmanship for the way things were built and passed on from on generation to generation were to me, synonymous to the tradition of storytelling. I really appreciate that idea of an old home that can stand the test of time to protect your memories. Of course with these particular mansions in the south there is also negative stigmas attached of slavery, abuse, and the very obvious separation of the classes. I tend to be sensitive to these things, which I think removes the nostalgia aspect to my love of how we personify architecture. I don’t really yearn to live in another time, I’m only interested in the way we record and express time. My interest in heirlooms and a house that has been lived in for generations is linked to my relationship with living spaces. I don’t consider any singular house I’ve lived in as child as my childhood home. My family didn’t live anywhere longer than six years, a pattern that seems to have rubbed off on me as an adult. Additionally, I continue to use architecture as content for my work because the more that I read about them in comic theory and novels, the more that I’m convinced that they are just an endless well of rich conceptual and visual material for topics like history, memory, politics, economics, family, trauma, and the center point of where everything public and private happens in our lives.

As I mentioned before, my parents moved from Mississippi after they were married. I spent a lot of time in Mississippi to see family, and there was always a lot of romanticism around the

Your work pervaded with a subtle but effective narrative that in the intersting installation entitled Henry captures non-sharpness with an universal kind of language, capable of

I made Neighborhood shortly after moving from Texas to Oregon last year. I had a lot of anxiety about suddenly moving far away from my community and having to start over. I started thinking about my parents and how they initiated the first step of moving out west from Mississippi to Texas. The Neighborhood drawing is an accumulation of homes and buildings in Mississippi, Texas, and Oregon. My animation component of the piece was after I had lived in Portland for a few months and began learning more about how rapidly the area was changing because of the increase in population. When I sought out materials for making the installation, I used materials like wood, house paint, and found objects like a tv and chair that would be in home.

Neighborhood, 2015 Installation

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bringing to a new level of significance the elusive but ubiquitous relationship between experience and memory, to create direct relations with the spectatorship. What is the role of memory in your process? We are particularly interested if you try to achieve a faithful translation of your previous experiences or if you rather use memory as starting point to create.

Henry is kind of a special case for my works related to memory, in that it almost has nothing to do with me. They are all the memories of a Vietnam War veteran named Henry Topf. I think that work was a starting point for me in thinking about how art can be a tool to tell stories. This turned into primarily telling my own stories. I wasn’t interested in having a political viewpoint on the Vietnam War. In fact, I think since I wasn’t even alive until decades after the war it would have been foolish for me to take any stance on it after the fact. I was only interested in Henry’s experience there. He sent me at least 20 photos a few years ago and had stories for each one. They were so intense, funny, beautiful, and painful that I wanted to share them and put them into a context that felt iconic, which at the time meant a twenty foot embroidered scroll. I’d say that the piece, Henry was as faithful as a secondary perspective can be. I used his actual voice from an interview he did, and tried to order the photos chronologically and distinguished by year through a different color of thread. I also personally interviewed him a couple times and got a general feeling of the way he felt about certain relationships. I tried to convey that through the line in the thread. If he felt that a person or event was very rigid or orderly the line

was also rigid and orderly. If it was chaotic, the line turned to a tangled mess. My current works function more as biographical fiction than nonfiction. I think it’s nearly impossible for visual

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Neighborhood, 2015 Installation

artists to be 100% faithful to anything they believe is true since whatever we make goes through a filter of aesthetics. Even photographers aren’t really recording reality, it’s a flattening of a moment, which is one aspect to a person or thing. That being said, I usually begin

projects wanting to have a real translation of memory through a quick, immediate drawing with ink. That process of recollection through drawing is kind of fascinating to me. It’s like stream of consciousness writing. It’s unfiltered, wobbly, and a little messy. I’ve been

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Neighborhood, 2015 Installation

introducing more fictional elements to my work as a means to discuss the intersections of psychology and folklore. I feel that this combination of memory, psychology, and fantasy speak to the complexity of human nature. In my experience, humans tend to contradict

themselves almost constantly. We have this desire to be all one way or not at all this other way. These expectations for absolutes are unrealistic, and tend to result in someone being dubbed a hypocrite. I think being a hypocrite is a

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as Gerhard Richter once remarked, "my concern is never art, but always what art can be used for": what is your opinion about the functional aspect of Art in the contemporary age?

good thing, it’s sign that we can be extremely flexible and adaptable beings. The fruible set of elements you draw from universal imagery triggers the viewers' primordial parameters concerning our relation with physicality:

I was under the notion that most contemporary artists were resisting functionalism. I can’t speak for all artists, but I feel that most are working provisionally. Unmonumental was an exhibition of artists taking functional objects and making them nonfunctional. I can’t help but feel this was a reaction to everything that’s happened in western culture in the last fifteen years. Rapid innovations in technology, growing environmental concerns, increase in international trade, decrease in manufacturing jobs, and an unstable economy have affected the way we make art. This idea of mastering a discipline is rare. Most artists I know have interdisciplinary practices, I’m one of them. If I happen to find an old tv or some wood outside, I’m going to draw on them or make them into a multimedia installation. I don’t think of that as a concept that fuels my art, nor do I think of myself as an environmental artist. I think it’s a fact that we have a ton of stuff on this planet, and it’s just practical to reuse it to make something else. I know a lot of artists that are also designers. This is also a practical reaction to the last fifteen years. I don’t believe that art is functional in the literal sense. If an artist made something to be sat on everyday, then it’s probably a chair, and that chair was designed. I sometimes hate distinctions that come with being an artist, I usually have a pretty dramatic eye roll reserved for pretentious art school divisions that the rest of the world doesn’t care about. I do agree with

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Gerhard Richter in that it’s unfulfilling to make art that exists solely to look beautiful. Art is functional in that it’s an intellectual discipline. It’s meant to be interacted with, discussed, analyzed, and to spread new ideas. Your works convey both metaphoric and descriptive research. A distinctive mark of Paper Thin is the successful attempt to construct of a concrete aesthetic from the dichotomy between the intrinsic fragility of the materials you have combined together and the reminders to solidity of buildings. As the late Franz West did in his installations, this work shows unconventional features in the way it deconstructs perceptual images in order to assemble them in a collective imagery, urging the viewers to a process of selfreflection. Artists are always interested in probing to see what is beneath the surface: maybe one of the roles of an artist could be to reveal unexpected sides of Nature, especially of our inner Nature... what's your view about this?

It’s interesting that you brought up Franz West in relationship to Paper Thin. There’s a humor to that installation that isn’t present for others, although it’s much more cynical that West’s work. I’m not sure that I can really speak to the unexpected sides of human nature other than my belief that we’re pretty a hypocritcal species. I’m hesitant to speak for others, which is why I tend to primarily speak for myself or my own experiences in the hopes that others relate. I do think Paper Thin came from a shared feeling I know others my age were and continue to experience. I was feeling the after effects of the recession, and decided to make art about the housing market crash. I knew I wanted to make these houses seem impossible, flat, and mostly unattainable because that’s how I

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Built From Thread, Installation

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Henry, 2015 Installation

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often feel about the possibility of owning a home anytime soon. I grew up with the idea that the American dream was attainable. I don’t really think that’s realistic anymore. My parents’ generation were lucky in that they could work a part time job and pay for their college. They also were homeowners by age 25. Something that’s extremely rare for most 25 year olds now. I made the work out of cheap tracing paper, created a complex system of drawn wood plank webbing between them, and I made sure that they would fall apart after a while. I can’t tell you how satisfying it is to purposefully make art that falls apart. They withstood the exhibition period, but when you took it home the drawn stack of houses would literally collapse, tear, and crumble. I did feel a little guilty about selling my art knowing that it would make others distress over it’s fragility and eventual demise. I don’t think I’d do anything like that again, but I’m glad that I did it. It’s good to turn frustration into comedy, even if that means you’re temporarily a prank artist. Among the theme you explore, the way you develope the notion of trauma establishes a channel of communication between the subconscious sphere and the conscious one, to unveil the manifold nature of human perceptual categories and to draw the viewers into a multilayered experience. When walking our readers through the genesis of AfterLife, we would like 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?

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I think that those two processes can function well together, but can also be completely exclusive. I think it’s natural to associate almost everything we see to something we know. For instance, even abstract expressionist painters gave their work names related to literature or seasons. It’s hard to separate that experience when analyzing art. I do think it’s possible to create without purposefully attaching a personal experience to something. I personally feel that art is more engaging when I know it’s personal. Among your remarkable experiences, it's important to mention that you are the leader of Time Arts Collective where you lead student-artist community based events. It's no doubt that interdisciplinary collaborations are today ever growing forces in Art and that some of the most exciting things happen when creative minds from different fields of practice meet and collaborate on a project... could you tell us something about this effective synergy? By the way, artist Peter Tabor once stated that "collaboration is working together with another to create something as a synthesis of several practices, that alone one could not": what's your point about this? Can you explain how your work demonstrates communication between several artists?

I think there’s this common misconception that artists are hermits. There’s a little truth to that, but mostly we thrive because we find other people to work with and they help us see what we can’t. Maybe somewhere there’s artists who maintain successful lifestyles producing art without collaborating or finding a community, but that’s a hard routine to sustain by yourself. Working with a group of artists to produce something, whether it be an exhibition, a book, a single work, or event it’s so incredibly rewarding. I’m usually pumped to start making something new after a critique or

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Henry, 2015 Installation

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Henry, 2015 Installation

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studio visit. I’ve worked in a studio filled with artists, and I’ved worked alone. I’m always more productive when I’m working next to other working artists. I get to ask questions about materials, and seek feedback all of the time. I think the art always benefits from it. As far as my time leading Time Arts Collective. It’s just basic to me that if I have the opportunity to use resources to give to other artists and bring them together, I’m going to do it. We tend to do more events and exhibitions than making work together. The collaborative projects I’ve worked on always end up being zines that work more like an anthology. There’s a conversation and a joined effort to make something, but it’s not like making a movie or a large set. Those I feel are more along the lines of what Peter Tabor was talking about. Over these years you works have been exhibited in several occasions, including your recent solo Paper Thin, at the Bower Bird Gallery, San Marcos. Your work is strictly connected to the chance of establishing a direct involvement with the viewers, who are urged to evolve from a mere spectatorship to conscious participants on an intellectual level, so before leaving this conversation we would like to pose a question about the nature of the relationship of your art 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 is used in a particular context?

I think about my body a lot when I’m making work for a particular space. I think about how my body has to fit and move within that space, and since I’m fairly petite, I’ll give a little extra breathing room. How I feel, and where I’m looking is

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important too. There’s a lot of maneuvering, measuring, and comparing for installation work. These things prepare me for the reception of the piece. Installation has to demand the viewer’s attention. It’s immersive, and provides a potential thrill if you aren’t careful. I need for people to be engaged and be conscious of their surroundings. If they aren’t, well I pretty much consider it to be a failure. For my more narrative works, there’s a whole different set of rules. It has to have a flow that eases you into a private world that is believable, even if it’s totally fictional. Time is an important consideration for how it flows as well. If it’s really condensed, I can make my reader feel anxious, which needs to be intentional. If it’s spacious it can seem very slow and dull. I always ask myself what I want my viewer to experience and what I’m doing to increase the chances that they will experience it. There will usually be a wild card in the audience, which can be exciting. I know I can’t control what experiences people have and how they’ll relate to something, but I can control the aesthetics and the timing of my work. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Emily. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects. How do you see your work evolving? I didn’t mention my most recent large work that I completed a couple months ago, Beetle Song. The project involved a graphic novel, three stop motion animations, large prints, and an installation. It’s probably the largest exhibition I’ve ever done. The entire show was centered on this comic, Beetle Song about a young girl from South-east Texas who has an abusive father. The bulk of the

story takes place in the girl’s dream where she believes that she has escaped her house, only to find creatures in the woods that can harm her. I was interested in making the story seem like a folktale. I used a lot of numerical rules in it like threes and sevens. I also made her journey into a quest involving the “monsters” of the woods. My goal for this story wasn’t to necessarily place blame on abusive parents, or to tell victims to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. My goal was to show a complicated relationship between a parent and a child and how cyclical violence is in personal relationships. I won’t give away the ending, the book is for sale on my website if any of the readers wish to purchase it. Currently I’m working on a piece similar in concept to Paper Thin except it’s not about home ownership or the housing market, as it is about the depreciation of value for craft and labor in America. The piece will be shown at Bronco Gallery during the Time Based Arts Festival in Portland, Or in September. I’m also working collaboratively with a writer named Peter Holmstrom on a comic called “Abandonment.” We’re at the really early stages of the comic, so I can’t say much about it yet. The book will involve an analysis of trauma and religion. If readers wish to stay updated on that work, they can visit my portfolio to find out more. Thank you.

An interview by Dario Rutigliano, curator and Barbara Scott, curator articulaction@post.com

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Beetle Song, Installation 29

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A lon Peretz Lives and works in Tel-Aviv, Israel

An artist's statement

oments of real clarity and stillness are very rare in life, these moments are also very evasive. I need art, both as audience and as an artist to remind me of these seldom moments when everything seems to quiet down, and an acute sense of reality takes over. It might seem odd to search for a sense of reality in art which is all about making things up, and even odder to search for quietness with sound. But for some reason this detour seems to work, and whenever I encounter a good work of art â&#x20AC;&#x201C; in any medium, I get a glimpse of that special kind of awareness My interest as an artist is to find new ways to evoke that feeling in myself and ultimately in my .viewer/ listener I work with sound, sound happens in space and through time. So I find myself as a composer and as a sound artist constantly arranging and rearranging these three elements. Out of these three

elements time is probably the most difficult one to graspÍž it's also a very deep and fundamental part of our lives. In my works I try to emphasize this element of time by spreading sound in wide spaces. When a single sound (or a seemingly single sound) travels in a space the spreading of sound through time becomes more evident as well. For example, If I spread speakers in a large room and play a row of sounds through the speakers I can experience time "oh, that sound in the third beat of the second bar is way over "â&#x20AC;Śby that chair, and this weird sound in the first bar is right over hear where I stand .Being a musician I Know that sound, any sound, carries with it an emotional content Between the abstract of time, the objectiveness of space and the emotional content of sound I .try to find a magic balance that might evoke that deep sense of clarity

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Alon Peretz An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Dario Rutigliano, curator articulaction@post.com

Alon Peretz's work is centered on a multilayered exploration of the balance between the abstract of time, the objectiveness of space and the emotional content of sound. His approach draws the viewers into an immersive experience that urges them to rethink ordinary perceptual categories One of the most convincing aspect of Peretz's practice is the way it accomplishes the difficult task of opening new sound spaces that invite the audience on an inner voyage: we are very pleased to introduce our readers to his multifaceted artistic production. Hello Alon and welcome to ARTiculAction: to start this interview, would you like to tell us something about your background? You have a solid formal training and you hold a B.A and a Master's degree in interdisciplinary music composition, that you received from the Jerusalem Academy of music and dance: how do this experience influence the ay you currently conceive and produce your works? And in particular, does your cultural substratum inform the way you relate yourself to the aesthetic problem?

First of all thank you for having me, Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a nice opportunity to talk and rethink some aspects of my work. So thank you.

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Alon Peretz photo by Uri Pinner

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In the first year of my composition studies in the Jerusalem Academy of music, one of the Professors said that their goal is to teach us all of the unimportant elements of composition. Years later I still find myself thinking about that statement, and it proves to be rather accurate. Music is a discipline ripe with skills and techniques one needs to acquire before having the ability to write truly original music. Formal studied gave me a deeper understanding of the language of music and sound, and freed me to begin my search for the important elements of art and composition. Cultural background is a different story, probably more abstract and influential. When I conceive a new work I have no choice but to relay on my own cultural background. For example in my new piece “The tower of Babylon” which is now in production, I try to investigate the idea of urbanism, and I use the biblical story of Babylon as a starting point from which I develop my piece – in this case a tower of speakers that play cut off syllables from different languages that together make up a Hebrew sentence from the original biblical story. So cultural background always plays a major role in my work. Using your instrument as a starting point for your creative journey, your approach coherently encapsulates both performative feature and sound installation and reveals an incessant search of an organic symbiosis between a variety of viewpoints. The results convey together a coherent and consistent sense of harmony and unity. Before starting to elaborate about your production, we would suggest to our readers to visit http://www.alonperetz.com in order to

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get a synoptic view of your multifaceted artistic production: while walking our readers through your process, we would like to ask you if you have you ever happened to realize that a symbiosis between different approaches is the only way to express and convey the idea you explore.

As a composer I have tried to search for new sounds and concepts that will be groundbreaking but still listenable, but I have found that the entire cultural structure of the way we consume new music is very restricting. It is expected from the audience to seat and listen – start to end – through a whole piece which is in many cases idiosyncratic and difficult to comprehend, the music is expected to be dissonant and thus conveying a specific range of emotion (mostly rather unpleasant ones), it is expected that the concert should happen in one side of the room while the audience is on the other side. In my sound installation I feel I found an approach the refreshes the possibilities of artistic expression. When I take speakers and align them or shape them in a certain way I can let the composition happen in space rather in time, and by the way freeing the listener from the start to end containment and let everyone be inside the composition rather than in front of it. All of this is accomplished by the symbiosis of art and music, borrowing from each other in order to convey some idea. For this special edition of ARTiculAction we have selected Email to self and 16 by 3, a couple works that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. What has at once caught our attention of your inquiry into the range of new sounds is the way it accomplishes the difficult task

of establishing a channel of communication between the subconscious sphere and the conscious one, to unveil and challenge the manifold nature of human perceptual categories. So while asking you to walk us through the genesis of these works, we 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?

These two works represent the two different approaches in my works abstract and textual. 16 by 3 is a row of 16 individual controlled speakers standing in a long row, digital oscillator sound are being played “through” the row of speakers creating the illusion of moving sound. “Email to self” began from my habit to Email myself memories of dream every morning (I dream a lot), I later took these emails and converted them into computerized speech. The work itself is made up of 12 speakers in a circle, the speakers play a collage of these computerized speech dreams. These two works take two different paths – 16 by 3 began from a purely aesthetic interest – how will it feel if the same sound was to “move” across 16 speakers in a large room? What emotion would come about? What will it mean for the audience? In other words- the work has no textual content in the broad sense of the word. In Email to self ,on the other hand, the text was the initial idea and the sound world and speaker placement followed to complete the dream like experience. For me these two works are very different from each other, although I guess it could

16 by 3 photo by Adi Bar Yossef

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also be perceived as two sides of the same coin. As for personal experience and Its role in the creative process â&#x20AC;&#x201C; in Email to self it is clear that my own dreams are a major part of the work. In 16 by 3 it is not as clear but a while ago I was looking for something in my studio and in a bottom of the drawer I found a short composition exercise for a string quartet the had a remarkable resemblance to the idea of a single sound moving through the speakers, so I guess it must have some unseen origin too. The installation Tower of sound, inspired by the story of the tower of Babylon, accomplishes the difficult task of establishing deep involvement with the viewers, providing them with an immersive experience: as you have remarked once, your interest as an artist is to find new ways to evoke a sense of reality in yourself and ultimately in your audience. How do you see the relationship between public sphere and the role of art in public space? In particular, how much do you consider the immersive nature of the viewing experience?

Being physically in touch with the piece is at the heart of my work. In my work as a record producer and guitar player I experience the huge gap between the magic that happens in the studio or in a live show and between the often shallow experience of listeners often meet the recorded music â&#x20AC;&#x201C; namely a 20 seconds of a youtube link somewhere online while the listener is probably occupied with five other things at the same time. Creating works that physically meet the viewer/listener is irreplaceable, we are used to consume sound and music as space less, with headphones and

From the feature film Awakning photo by Amit Berlovic

smartphones. creating a work that demands standing in a room with other people and feeling the sound happening is my way to pay well deserved respect to the phenomena of sound.

Alon Peretz

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As you have remarked once, in your works you try to emphasize the ele ment of time by spreading sound in wide spaces: your successful attempt to accomplish an exploration of the notion of time works on both

subconscious and conscious level. As the late Franz West did in his installations, this work shows unconventional features in the way it deconstructs perceptual images in order to assemble them in a collective imagery, urging the viewers to

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from The Mutes House photo by Zvi Landsman

a process of self-reflection. Artists are always interested in probing to see what

our inner Nature... what's your view about this?

is beneath the surface: maybe one of the roles of an artist could be to reveal unexpected sides of Nature, especially of

I couldn’t agree more – a viewer I search for the artist’s point of view of matters

Alon Peretz

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we listen to the way he feels time, when we listen to Miles Davis we share his sense of time. My way of feeling time in my installations is by spreading the sound sources (the speakers) in such a way that time is represented by actual space. When a sound is heard from one source it happens both in a specific time and in a specific place. In this way time reveals itself to us, we can unconsciously be in touch with one of lifes greatest forces – the movement of time. The way your works communicate without words unveils the flow of information through an effective non linear narrative, establishing direct relations with the viewers: German multidisciplinary artist Thomas Demand once stated that "nowadays art can no longer rely so much on symbolic strategies and has to probe psychological, narrative elements within the medium instead". What is your opinion about it? And in particular how do you conceive the inner narrative for your works?

that shade new light on the inner nature of human life. I am particularly interested in the way we experience time. In music time is the canvas on which the composer paints, when we listen to Bach

The question about narrative brings about the fascinating relationship of music and sound with other arts. I write music for film and dance and the dialogue with the directors or choreographers often calls for a “psychological investigation of the medium” as Demand puts it. My job is to search for the psychological and emotional role the music needs to play in the piece. For example in Tamar Kay’s Documentary film “The Mutes House” I had to find a way for us to hear the sound of the soul of Yusuf – a child living in the military occupied city of Hebron. The search demanded finding sounds that will be imperfect and conflicted and yet full of life and optimism, just like Yusuf. This is a search for the inner nature of sound itself. A different example will be music I wrote for the modern dance piece

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“The unnamed Tiug” by choreographer Liron Ozeri. In this piece the content was a lot more abstract, is it often is in music for dance. The only guideline regarded the sexual energy at the heart of the piece, so my search was for the sexual potential of sound and music. Your pieces often induce the viewers to abandon therselves to free associations: when artists leaves thier works open to interpretation, it is like giving the viewer permission to see anything in your works without anyone ever being wrong. Has that ever proven to be a problem?

I have to say that I struggle with this problem. On the one hand misinterpretation of the audience could mean that I was not clear enough in what I am trying to say, that’s an important criticism I need to pay attention to. On the other hand, on more than one occasion what seemed to be misinterpretation at beginning, proved to be a new standpoint that I myself could not have anticipated. So I guess I object to the generalization that art can never be wrong and at the same time I’m learning to listen more deeply to the unique way different people respond to my works. You are also a well-known producer and guitar player in the Tel Aviv Indie music scene: it's no doubt that interdisciplinary collaborations are today ever growing forces in Contemporary Art and that the most exciting things happen when creative minds from different fields of practice meet and collaborate on a project... could you tell us something about this effective synergy? By the way, Peter Tabor once stated that "collaboration is working together with another to create

the unnamed tiug photo by Kobi Ben Shushan

something as a synthesis of two practices, that alone one could not": what's your point about this? Can you explain how your work demonstrates communication between two artists?

Alon Peretz

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As a producer and band member the skill of working in collaboration is super important. But I have to say that from my experience symmetric collaboration in which the two artists are equal â&#x20AC;&#x201C; seldom

works. At least for me. When I produce I need to know that I have the last word, in a way it makes room for the collaboration to be free. Everyone is expected to say anything, and its fine cause someone will

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From the feature film Awakning photo by Amit Berlovic

have the last word. Having said that, I canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t imagine myself not sharing thoughts about art and music with other people, it is a necessity, even a mere

social necessity for me as an artist and as a person. Over your career your compositions have been performed in festivals around the

Alon Peretz

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this conversation we would like to pose a question about the nature of the relationship of your art with your audience. 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 is used in a particular context?

Israel writer Dorit Rabinyan said once that a writer cannot write for an audience, only for a person, a specific person the author knows, respects, and feels that the specific novel is being written for him. I feel very much the same, I find myself thinking about someone specific in every piece I make, it helps me focus and feel intimate communication throughout the process. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Alon. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?

As far as the sound installation goes It’s an exciting time – the basic technique of spreading speakers in different shapes and arrays has open a door for endless possibilities. The relationship between time, space and sound is a fertile ground for more works, so I will continue down this path. My dream is to scale the projects to much larger sizes, not just for the effect but also for the amplified sense of time which will be more evident in large spaces. I want to thank you again for this interview and you’r insightful questions. world: one of the hallmarks of your practice is the capability to create a deep involvement with the viewers, who are urged to evolve from a condition of mere spectatorship. So before leaving

An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Dario Rutigliano, curator articulaction@post.com

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Dalia Smayze

Lives and works in Dallas, USA

An artist's statement

hen I was four years old, I had a near death experience while having an open heart surgery. My heart stopped beating, my body temperature went low, a heart-lung machine kept me alive. Coming back from that threshold, I knew that opposites are bound together and that I encompass both. It left me fascinated with edges and yearning for meaning. My works are born from that same simultaneous sense of vertigo and stability. They deal with a dichotomous - the realization that one reality can reflect many and there is no one definition. The truth is endlessly evolving and expanding. I try and reconcile conflicts and contradictions such as beauty that encompasses crudeness, weakness as a source of strength and disillusionment that feeds innocence. The early works (“Red Heart”, 2007-09) are naïve drawings of bodies and situations, subtle yet disturbing. Minimalist figures floating in white space. With time, layers appear

(“Illusions & Reality”, 2010-13). Through intricate drawings and installations I struggle to weave together the past, present and future. Recently I’m fascinated with transformation (“Release”, 2014-15). The Sisyphean process evolved to a new set of rules, which dictates different materials, gestures and speed. The new paintings are large and expressive, made in one continuous session, like an intense ritual. I see my studio as a cross between a womb and a lab. My practice is a tool for understanding myself as well as the world of phenomena around me. My goal is to generate a change that shapes perspectives and actions, thus enabling for something new to occur - symbolically, conceptually and tangibly. I have a distinct feeling that there is something beyond me, a life force, which I can’t put into words but I can channel into art.

Huanglu Shi

Katie Boyle

My own practice involves an exploration of human interaction. My artwork investigates dialogue, translation, body language, communication and the idea of a global language. I create installation artworks, short films and sound art pieces.

Katie Boyle

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Katie Boyle An interview by Josh Rider, curator and Barbara Scott, curator articulaction@post.com

Highly moving in its communicative concreteness, The Statement is a stimulating work by artist Katie Boyle. While walking the viewers through an unconventional exploration of the nature of human communication, she accomplishes the difficult task of challenging the viewers' perceptual parameters, walking them through the liminal area in which the ambivalence between presence and identity solves it into an unexpected point of convergence. What mostly impressed of Boyle's work is the way her investigation about the phenomena of human perception provokes reflection about contemporary age unveiling unsuspected but ubiquitous connections drawing the viewerrs to a multilayered experience. We are particularly pleased to introduce our readers to her multifaceted artistic production. Hello Katie and welcome to ARTiculAction: to start this interview, we would like to pose you a couple of question about your background. You have a solid formal training and you hold a B.A. (hons) in Visual Arts Practice that you received from the Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology: how do this experience influence the way you currently conceive and produce your works?

Firstly, I would like to thank you for interviewing me. I feel extremely honoured to have this opportunity to discuss my art practice. Receiving four years of visual arts training at IADT in Dun Laoghaire was detrimental to my creative process now. I had the most wonderful artistic journey where after four years I believe I found my voice as an artist. I was lucky to have studied under some of Ireland’s most prestigious, currently practicing contemporary artists. I originally trained as a sculptor but in my final self directed year learned how to shoot video and edit which has helped me form a multidisciplinary practice. I wouldn’t have found this process or learned how to develop my ideas without the help and guidence of the lecturers and students at IADT. Whislt in college I learned how to think! How to conceive ideas and produce art from them. The very first year there is focused purely on concepts and getting your braining thinking about what is art and how to create idea machines. It was such an amazing four years! In particular, how does your cultural substratum inform the way you relate yourself to art making and to the aesthetic problem in general? My cultural upbringing in Ireland has definitely affected how I create art. I grew up in a divorced home and lived half my

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Katie Boyle

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life on an Irish farm and the first half in a suburb of the city which are two very different life styles. My environment has hugely influenced how I produce artworks. Both environments were very different with separate ways of life which has changed how I see the way people interact. My art always starts from something personal and becomes more general throughout my creative process. I try to see how what I have experienced might be relateable to someone else and what similar experiences they have had, people in general. I think coming from a divorced family there was always a question of who said what, how and why and different ways it was interpreted. I believe watching this is the root of my interests in communication. Whilst attending IADT I worked full time as a waitress. I find sometimes producing art can be quite an alone individual process. Waitressing had me constantly interacting with all sorts of people on a daily basis and this has definitely also led me to the study of human interactions and experiences in my art practice. Now that I live in New York City, I have never encountered as many cultures or rapidly changing environments in such a small diameter in my life. I am sure that it will hugely influence my current and next body of work. Since my work is the study of people the aesthetic can change greatly depending on the topic I am attempting to explore. I let the concept strongly influence how the art will be conceived. For me the portrayal of the idea is the important part of the artwork and it is why I work in many different mediums. The aesthetic challenge for me is how to evoke the topic to the audience to create a dialogue. By moving into video was to simplify the expression of the concept which was ideal for my last two artworks.

You are a versatile artist and your approach encapsulates several techniques and media, ranging from installation to short films and sound art, revealing a stimulating search of an organic symbiosis between a variety of viewpoints. The results convey together a

Katie Boyle

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coherent sense of unity that rejects any conventional classification. Before starting to elaborate about your production, we would suggest to our readers to visit https://katieboyle1990.wordpress.com in order to get a synoptic view of your

multifaceted artistic production: while walking our readers through your process, we would like to ask you if you have you ever happened to realize that such multidisciplinary approach is the only way to express and convey the ideas you explore.

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For my practice I believe I can only produce artwork through a multidisciplinary practice. I start with an idea and then explore the best medium to convey it in which to hopefully open up a discussion with the audience. My work is

based in human experience. I try to capture that and different mediums help me work out the different concepts I am questioning. Also I get excited testing out different ways to express the concept. I love to

Katie Boyle

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experiential installation but after a long time of sketches and tests I created a written piece which led to a script which eventually led to a short video. This whole process is my favourite part. Firguring it all out, crafting and sculpting out an idea. Pushing the medium to represent and express and evoke the concept. For this special issue of ARTiculAction we have selected The Statement and The Conversation a stimulating couple of videos that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article and in which you explore the different ways we can use our body and voice to communicate and how this can change the whole context or interpretation of a conversation. What has at once caught our attention of this work is the way your inquiry into the perceptual sphere creates an harmonic mix between a vivid, performative approach to the evokative reminders conveyed by the ideas you combine together: when walking our readers through the genesis of these works, would you shed a light about usual setup and process?

try or mix different mediums and explore what best expresses the notion I have found particular interest in. It is actually the most enjoyable part. Trial and error. The Conversation for example started of with the idea of communication and I had originally seen the artwork as a

The Conversation was inspired from listening to people retell stories and watching how humans interact in conversation. I find it fascinating how we express our emotions and use our voice and bodies to communicate. That is how I started to think of the idea that anything can be said in any way and retold mupltiple different ways. How words are nothing without emotion and body movements, our gestures and tones of voice. As I said above originally the artwrok was going to be an installation but through out the process I started to document conversations and then decided to create a short film to convey this concept. I chose a restaurant scene as I believe it's a good example of a work environment and can be

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relatable to many spectators. It's important to me that anyone can have a dialogue with my art works. I asked the actors to act out the same script in many different senerios with different tones of voice and body language. I shot the video in a restaurant to set the scene and edited the shots together. I wanted the video to be visually captaving to immerse the viewer to create the element of surprise with each change to show how monotone words are not the most important part within communication not the most reliable. The ambience that pervades The Statement invites the viewers to a multilayered experience and the way you explore the elusive notion of meaning accomplishes the difficult task of constructing a concrete aesthetic from experience, working on both subconscious and conscious level. So we would take this occasion to ask you if in your opinion personal experience is absolutely indispensable as part of the creative process? Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience?

For me, no. All of my artwork is created from some experience of a sort which has inspired the idea. I don't believe anyone can do anything disconnected from previous experiences. It's what makes us individuals and influences every decision we make. I do believe an audienece member can have a different interaction with the artwork depending on the experiences they have had with the topic or concept or the physical artwork. The Statement was a follow up piece on how one tries to judge a past event on word of mouth. How people retell an event, can it ever be unbiased, can one retell an event exactly as it happened, which version is the truth? I believe we are faced with this everyday. I chose to layer the footage to try to aesthectically convey the overload of

information we can recieve and the hard choice of information to choose is correct, if any version can ever be correct retelling of events. My father is a policeman and this has always intrigued me how hard it must be

Katie Boyle

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when interviewing suspects. I started to think how we constantly have to make decisions on information we are given everyday and how we have to choose what is true or false and is it ever just true or false when people can read a situtauiton so difeerently to the next

person. This idea was inspired by an unresolved sexual assault case in a work environment where it was a â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;he said she saidâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; and nothing was ever solved. Your approach accomplishes an effective investigation dialogue, translation, body

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language and communication to explore the nature of human interaction. In your exploration you often use reminders to symbols and evokative elements: German multidisciplinary artist Thomas Demand once stated that "nowadays art can no longer rely so much on symbolic

strategies and has to probe psychological, narrative elements within the medium instead". What is your opinion about it? And in particular how do you conceive the narrative and especialy the visual unity for your works?

Katie Boyle

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constructed to portray the idea to an audience. In college I read alot of psychological theories centered around the human body and space and memories. Which I believe influenced how I explore my ideas and create the artworks. My artwork is an exploration of people so for me I would agree with Demands satement in regards to the ideas and topics I explore. I had orgionally honed in on specific experiences but as the work has important to think about the medium and how it will express the idea. I do have a narrative in my artworks especially my earlier ones. I am inspired by stories but I try to strip it down to the basics of the idea to reflect the general human experience. Mediums can be pushed and investigated to the best way to express the idea. That's why I chose to mix and layer the videos in The Statement to use the medium to reflect the experience symbolically.

I agree and just like Demand, I would consider myself a conceptual artist with any medium being the creative process of the concept. The medium can be molded to evoke the idea the issues can be expressed. The medium, be it video or painting or performance etc, can be

Another interesting work of yours that has particularly impacted on us and on which we would like to spend some words is entitled Siege: an installation inspired by Ned Kelly. In particular, you have remarked once that you find really interesting that different viewers can have different experiences depending on their projection of their own memories. As the late Franz West did in his installations, Siege shows unconventional features in the way it deconstructs perceptual images in order to assemble them in a collective imagery, urging the viewers to a process of self-reflection. How woudl you define the relationship between memory and experience?

With Seige I wanted to recreate the experience not the physical environment. I want the material to evoke the feelings of the story. This why I created the immersive environment of Siege.

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I would define relationship between memory and experience as inseperable of each other. I believe that everyone's experience is deiffernt depending on their life experience, culture and background. We can project our own memories and no one has the same memories. I attempted to convey that in this artwork, how depending on your life experience certain objects can induce a different experience. How smell, light, sound, smells, can evoke different memories in different people and thus create a wholly different experience. Siege is an attempt to recreate the enviornmant and experience of the events that led to the capture of Ned Kelly. I wanted to create a dicussion of how people could have different reactions and experiences within an installation. 7) Siege provides the viewers with an immersive experience: how do you see the relationship between public sphere and the role of art in public space? In particular, how much do you consider the immersive nature of the viewing experience and how much importance has improvisation in your process?

The role of art in the public sphere always fascinates me. It brings art to people who might not normally visit an art museum. It makes art more accessible to everyone. I create immersive artworks to inspire free flowing ideas within the spectator. Immersive for me would hopefully allow the viewer to allow their body to make connections with the art. To feel aswell as think about the idea, to evoke memories and construct experiences. I believe it depends on the idea. The Statement and The Conversation I chose video form because I felt the immersive installation wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t conevy the idea and I find video can be very immersive and captivating in a different way. Video can allow one to be immersed while subjective while immersive installations can be more experiential.

I wish everyone was more exposed to art but unfortunately that is not true. I purposely want anyone from any walk of life to be able to have a dialogue with my art and I think this is why I study human

Katie Boyle

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interactions. I want to be able to create a dialogue between art and any human.

permission to see anything in your works without anyone ever being wrong. Has that ever proven to be a problem?

Your works often induce the viewers to abandon therselves to free associations: when artists leaves thier works open to interpretation, it is like giving the viewer

It actually helped me to inspire future works. I think art for me is a idea starter. I want the viewer to interact and come

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away with their own ideas or intepratations. Not yet has this been a problem but I do expect it could be. I prefare to work in dialoge with the audience I want them to be apart of the art and love that there can be different interpretations. The art is

nothing without their engagement. As I said it hasnt been a problem yet but of course I can imagine that maybe it could be but I try to make it clear but also enjoy open interpretations

Katie Boyle

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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?

Yes as I mentioned a little I feel the audience is integral to the creation of my art. I try to make art work that can be relatable and hopefully inspire conversation or spread ideas and start a dialogue. I want to subtly highlight what I myself have noticed and create art from that. The hope is that everyone comes away with a similar idea but also a different experience depending on their own reflection of a similar experience. I always consider how the audience will recieve the artwork. Relatable and an understanding with out pretense is my goal. I want to make art for everyone. My work is about day to day general human experience and the audience reception is crucial. I want the art to inspire convesation with audience. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Katie: would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?

Over these years you works have been internationally exhibited in several occasions: one of the hallmarks of your works is the capability to establish direct relations with the audience, deleting any conventional barrier between the idea you explore and who receipt and consequently elaborate them. So before

The last year I have started doing stand up comedy. I am working on a short documentry on how audience react to a premise set up by a comedian and then delieved in multiple different ways. I want to explore the art of stand up and storytelling and how words can inspire laughter, surprise and emotion depending on how it is said or perfromed. Thank you so much.

Annemarieke van Peppen

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Annemarieke van Peppen An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Barbara Scott, curator articulaction@post.com

Bergen op Zoom based multidisciplinary artist Annemarieke van Peppen's (Rotterdam, 1971) work explores the notion of identity in our media-driven age: her works could be considered as visual biographies of the ubiquitous consequences of contemporary technosphere and urges the viewers to rethink the dichotomy between physical and digital realms. In her recent MOVE ME that we'll be discussing in the following pages, she accomplishes an insightful investigation about the notion of self-identity to question and reframe our everyday relatiosnp with ourselves, to show that people can be human again: we are really pleased to introduce our readers to her stimulating artistic production. Hello Annemarieke and welcome to ARTiculAction: to start this interview, would you like to tell us something about your background? You have a solid formal training and you graduated from the ArtEZ Institute of the Arts: how does this experience influence your evolution as an artist? In particular how does your cultural substratum inform the way you relate yourself to art making and to the aesthetic problem in general?

At the Academie for Arts & Industry (AKI, now Artez) teachers helped me to

develop, deepen and explore my way of looking, I think it helped me thinking in a conceptual way. I was very young when I started (17 years) and left just before graduation. I can't exactly remember why I left back then, it probably had something to do with the rebellious character of me as a young adult. When I left the academy I worked as a waitress to support myself, in the meanwhile I started working with polaroids en exhibited with that work. I had great ambitions and wanted to become a wellknown artist. After a while I kept asking myself; 'What do I contribute in this world? Is making beautifull pictures enough?' The small successes I had back than made me feel shallow and I was not satisfied. I changed course; First I travelled through Asia and Australia, the different cultures, way of living and surviving on a very small budget had an influence on my way of thinking. Back in The Netherlands my partner and I became fosterparents of children with a mental disability. Being a fosterparent demands empathy for the often weard behavior of traumatized children. This learned me to view people in another perspective. Not judging the book by its cover, knowing that in the end we all have a backpack wich makes us react the way we do. The combination of all the above is probably the matrix of my work and I'm happy to

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say that I find satisfaction in my work again, because in a very small way i feel like I contribute. Your approach reveals an incessant search of organic investigation about the relationship between our being human and the pervading technosphere that marks out our mediadriven lives that affects our unstable contemporary age. The results convey together a coherent and consistent sense of harmony and unity: before starting to elaborate about your production, we would suggest to our readers to visit http://www.annemariekevanpeppen.nl in order to get a synoptic view of your multifaceted artistic production: while walking our readers through your process and set up, we would like to ask you how did you develope your style and how do you conceive your works.

I think my way of working is pretty intuitive, I don't want to be destracted by technique. I always look for a certain directness and rawness. I like to bring my models, even if I am the model myself, out of their comfort zone, it often gives a reaction or emotion wich helpes me forming the image and the development of my concept. Once I process the images, I like to work with my hands and experiment with materials and shapes. I think rawness and a particular way of repetition it is a common thread in my work. For this special edition of ARTiculAction we have selected MOVE ME, an extremely interesting installation, that consists of 40 portraits which are currently displayed in the Markiezenhof museum in Bergen op Zoom hat and that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. When walking our readers through the enesis of this project, we would like to ask you what is the role of chance in your process: how much improvisation is important for you?

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Although it seems that all the pictures were taken by chance, they are very thoughtful and directed. These photos are the result of the fact that my models, now much more than twenty years ago, had difficulty relaxing. Beacuse of selfies and social media, people are so much more aware of how to look at their best in an image, they tend to draw a portrait look, a look that is totally not interesting for me. One of the things I made them do to relax is letting them move their faces. In this movement I saw them precisely in a way that I found very powerful and magical, I started to deepen and explore it. Of course you have to make a lot of pictures just to catch that one movement and look, but I always know in advance what I want and when I have the right picture. You draw a lot from your personal experience and MOVE ME could be considered a successful attempt to create a body of works that stands as record of existence and that captures nonsharpness, going beyond the elusive relationship between experience and identity in our globalized mundanity. Even James Turrellâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s obsession with light and color is often associated with his early experiences as a pilot... So we 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?

I believe a creative process can never be disconnected from direct experience. In my opion everything you do, listen to, taste and touch are ingredients and part of all inspiration. You allways need input to be able to create new work, wether you are a chef, an engeneer or an artist. My

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brains are constantly getting new imput and thus new ideas, it never stops. The challenge is to filter and focus. MOVE ME also inquires into the interstitial space between personal and public spheres, providing the spectatorship with an immersive experience that forces such a contamination the inner and the outside: how do you see the relationship between public sphere and the role of art in public space?

Although I don't make my work with an audience in mind, once it's ready I need public. I hope my work will challenge people to have a reaction, this may be an emotion, a confrontation, dislike or a sence of magical experience. It does not really matter what kind of reaction, as long as there is a reaction, as long as it moves people. Public is ultimately essential. I also like to communicate with the public, I am curious as to what it does to them and hope they challenge me in their turn with their questions or remarks to me. For me art in public spaces doesn't have to please, as long as it moves people. Your photographs seems to be the result of a lot of planning and thought, but at the same time they convey a sense of spontaneity that is a hallmark of your style. You seem to be wanting to move beyond standard representation, capturing a trascendental kind of universality: creating what at first appears to be a typical photographic portrait but subvert its compositional elements, making the viewer realize that your work has a different message. How important is it that people bring their own character to portraiture and not just the character that you as the photographer impose on them?

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Each portrait is a days work, I talk with the models, set them at ease, be in contact with them, which is important to me. I obeserve them, looking for a certain look, their strength or vulnerability, which they show when they're talking to me. Such calls are often deep and intense, a bond arises in a relatively short period of time. Once in front of my camera that bond is important so the models trust me and surrender themselves to me. At that point their personal character is no longer relevant to me. I see them like sculptures I can shape and I portray the way I have in mind. Perhaps, it ultimately shows a part of their character. It touches me that they are willing to share so much with me, a unique and precious encounter, I still see that in the portraits. Your incessant search for the imperfection also accomplishes an effective investigation about the relationship between imagination dued to the way we reelaborate our personal substratum and the universal imagery we draw from to create an immediately fruible set of symbols. German multidisciplinary artist Thomas Demand once stated that "nowadays art can no longer rely so much on symbolic strategies and has to probe psychological, narrative elements within the medium instead". What is your opinion about it? And in particular how do you conceive the narrative for your works?

We are flooded with imagery and everything is so momentary that I plea for more depth. I don't know if language should be added. I allways hope my work is challenging enough that it raises questions, so subtitles are not necessary. During my exhibition at the museum I was

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artist in residence, I could communicate with the visitor, personal contact in my opinion is the best way to tell your story. When inquiring about how we show ourselves as we want others to see us seems to convey a subtle but effective socio political criticismYour work conveys a subtle but effective criticism concerning the materialistically driven culture that saturate our contemporary age. But while artists from the contemporary scene, as Ai WeiWei or more recently Jennifer Linton, use to express open sociopolitical criticism in their works, you seem more interested to hint the direction, inviting the viewers to a process of self- reflection that may lead to subvert a variety of usual, almost stereotyped cultural categories. Do you consider that your works could be considered political in a certain sense or did you seek to maintain a more neutral approach? And in particular, what could be in your opinion the role that an artist could play in the contemporary society?

I dont think my work is political. I can be surprised about current social developments. My point of view is not that important, but I want to invite to reflect. I get irritated when we follow everything blindly. I believe we continuously have to think critically and ask ourselves or our environment why things happen. I don't judge, I'm also often struggling with how certain developments evolve and how to relate to it. I think an artist has the responsibility to help people view differently, with a broader perspective, whether it involves meaningless images or developments in society. One of the hallmarks of your practice is the capability to create a direct involvement with the viewers, who are urged to evolve from a condition of mere spectatorship. So before leaving this conversation we would like to pose a question about the nature of the relationship of your art with your

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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 is used in a particular context?

How the audience receives my work should have no influence on the process, as I said before I beleave it is my responsibility to help the audience reach a broader view. It is my interpretation that may invite to an emotion, action or conversation. Once I'm into account in advance with the public, I have to ask myself if I make pure and honest work. While recognition is nice, it is also dangerous, as soon as I make work to please I have to do something else. It should never be a trick for recognition. I'm not sure what you mean by :in terms of what type of language is used in a particular context? Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Annemarieke. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?

I just spent half a year as artist in residence in the musum, working on the community art project. 7 days a week I have been in the spotlight, I have met hundreds of people and portrayed them. Tommorow I'll go for a month to Bali to relax and let everything settle. I look forward to the peace and silence of my own studio when i'm back. Now that I'm almost 45, I love it that I've lost the ambition I had in my twenties. I want to start again from scratch every time, not working towards succes, but staying close to me, myself and I.

An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Barbara Scott, curator articulaction@post.com

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Inga Lineviciute p

My art is focused on social and cultural issues that I try to express through drawing using traditional techniques and modern methods. I find drawing to be the perfect medium to investigate things that happen around me. In my work I analyse various situations, question the boundaries between private and public behaviour and the bounds of ethics and freedom. I also explore identity, consumerism, traditions and values. I enjoy sketching in public spaces as this is how I collect stories and ideas for drawings and Lives and works in Dallas, USA animations. Working with animation helps me develop narratives and experiment with new ways of drawing. I like to maintain the sketchy and unfinished aesthetics of the final work. Using a variety of tools, I draw carefully in order to accomplish the fragility of movement. I investigate the motion of the line and construct compositions concerning the subject matter. I mainly use pencil, watercolour and ink to capture the innate curiosities and enchantments of the everyday, examine people's reactions to the unexpected. I try to catch certain moments of common situations and An artist'sexamine statement critically the effects of consumerism and social displacement upon how people behave in public.

I see my studio as a cross between a womb and a lab. My practice is a tool for They deal with a dichotomous - the understanding myself as well as the world realization that one reality can reflect of phenomena around me. My goal is to many and there is no one definition. The generate a change that shapes truth is endlessly evolving and expanding. perspectives and actions, thus enabling I Adopting try and reconcile conflicts and an observational approach, characters in my work become unbelievable, but remain for something new to occur - symbolically, contradictions beauty that personal. Thesuch mainasattention has to be drawn to the motion of the situation and the story. conceptually and tangibly. I have a encompasses crudeness, weakness as a distinct feeling that there is something I use multiple media as drawing, painting, printmaking, animation and installation to source of strength and such disillusionment beyond me, a life force, which Ipresent can’t put deconstruct everyday life and weave together lost narratives, spaces where the that feeds innocence. The early works into words but I can channel into art. collapses and images of strangers and their actions. I use drawings to create wall (“Red Heart”, 2007-09) are naïve installations, where each drawingsubtle could be read individually, but all together they function drawings of bodies and situations, as a map, they are all related and form a comic like narrative. My animations tell a story and yet disturbing. Minimalist figures floating portray experiences yet I want to show them as drawings. This is whyInga theyLineviciute are projected in in white space. With time, layers appear order to make them more dynamic and to create an illusion of a moving drawing. I like to show all of my work as an installation, using white walls, images without frames or any hard materials. It has to be simple and delicate. 16

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Inga Lineviciute An interview by Dario Rutigliano, curator and Barbara Scott, curator articulaction@post.com

Inga Lineviciute's work rejects any conventional classification and establishes a consistent synergy between traditional techniques and contemporary sensitiveness to extract a compelling narrative out of a variety of social issues that affects our unstable age. In her hybrid installation Good morning, good afternoon, goodnight that we'll be discussing in the following pages, she walks the viewers on the thin line that marks the boundary between Tradition and Contemporariness, to explore the notions of inner conflicts, lack of communication and self-control, drawing the viewers into an area in which the perceptual dimension and subconscious sphere merges together into coherent unity. One of the most convincing aspects of Lineviciute's work is her successful attempt to draw the viewer's attention to real situations in which we all might take part and reflect the problems of current society, ethics and appropriate behaviour: we are very pleased to introduce our readers to her multifaceted artistic production. Hello Inga, and a warm welcome to ARTiculAction. We would start this interview posing you some questions about your background: you have a solid formal training and you hold a BA(hons) of Fine Arts that you received

from the University of Central Lancashire. How has this experience influenced your evolution as an artist? And in particular, how does your cultural substratum inform the way you deal with the aesthetic problem in general?

I have both traditional and contemporary art education. Before I entered BA, I studied traditional arts and crafts at Kaunas Art Gymnasium in Lithuania, and dreamt of becoming a painter. Unfortunately I wasn't accepted to BA Painting course in Lithuania, so I decided to look for an art course abroad. Studying in a small town, in North West England has changed my point of view and conception of what art is. The system was unusual and new to me, so it took me some time to understand that I am here not just to learn and perfect skills, but to be an artist from the beginning. And make something new, contemporary. Thanks to university tutors, staff and students, they demolished my old school thinking and led on the right path. Moving abroad was exciting yet very difficult to get along people, places. I was home-sick and felt lonely most of the time. I started making drawings and illustrating the literal meaning of some lithuanian idioms together with what I am facing. Changing environments made me an observer and to see

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differences between various cultures. Depends on what project I am working with and where it is based on, it alters my work aesthetics, although I tend to keep the drawing traditional, yet simple. You are a versatile artist and your media ranges from drawing, painting and printmaking to animation and installation, showing an organic synergy between a variety of expressive capabilities. Before starting to elaborate about your production, we would suggest to our readers to visit http://ingacontemporary.eu in order to get a synoptic view of your multifaceted artistic production: while walking our readers through your process, we would like to ask you if you have you ever happened to realize that such multidisciplinary approach is the only way to express and convey the idea you explore.

I always thought that to be a great artist you have to be experimental and research a lot in order to find the best way, material and presentation for your artwork. This is why I use more than just one medium. Also, every project needs its way to be shown, thou it always starts from the drawing. I like to explore ways and analyse every subject of my project individually, so I can develop it and fulfil my visions. When I get asked what I do, I answer that I draw: it is always a drawing nonetheless in which media the work is represented. I knew that I have to be versatile and gain a variety of skills since I was attending school in Lithuania, but later I focused on drawing and my goal was to keep it dominating. The art I make can never be the same: with every new project I choose different

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papers, colours and I have to work on finding an applicable stylistic. For this special issue of ARTiculAction we have selected Good morning, good afternoon, goodnight, a stimulating project that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. What has at once caught our attention of your inquiry into the themes of inner conflicts, lack of communication and self-control is the way it accomplishes the difficult task of creating a channel of communication between the conscious sphere and the subconscious sphere. When walking our readers through the genesis of Good morning, good afternoon, goodnight, would you shed a light about the role of metaphors in your process?

Whenever I am out in public, I analyse my surroundings: I can follow people or watch them eating in a cafĂŠ, or listen them talking. Sometimes I am fortunate to experience and be a part of unusual situation, often I take photographs or sketch, so I can use it as a reference when I get an idea. Therefore, I create or interpret various situations using mostly folklore or mythological motives. When I was a kid, I loved reading tales and myths, and until now I keep researching and reading about traditions, values and believes while people were worshipping gods. By knowledge of this, my mind always brings up associations of experienced actions and I start to create my own story, which would communicate and question certain behaviour whether it's a lack of dignity or pure freedom. Good morning, good afternoon, goodnight

is a project consisting of short animated stories based on social etiquette in public and with a use of metaphors I could quickly narrate a story. Moreover, such symbolism and comparisons helped to execute some

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actions and once it is surreal, later it becomes real. When raising the question of who is responsible for the conflict and incidents in public, you seem to address the viewers to get free of the

costraints that affect contemporary unstable societies. Many artists from the contemporary scene, as Judy Chicago or more recently Jennifer Linton, use to include socio-political criticism in their works. It is not unusual that an artist, rather than urging the viewer to take a personal

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position on a subject, tries to convey his personal take about the major issues that affect contemporary age. Do you consider that your works are political in this way or do you seek to maintain a neutral approach? Do you feel that itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s your responsibility as an artist to teach and raise awareness of

certain issues?

With my work I am seeking to maintain a neutral approach, because I don't feel like I can be judging while I am a part of this contemporary society. It feels unfair to dictate my views or reveal my posi-

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tion, as I aim my work to stay hypothetical and in some cases educational. I am influenced by Dan Perjovschi, whose work is bold and simple, in addition to, talks to an audience about current issues both in political world and modern culture. I adore his straightforwardness and sense of humor, for which I am aiming too, however I would like my works to be seen as didactic rather than political art. As an artist I feel like I have to express my thoughts and concern, drawing a viewers' attention to look at themselves before judging somebody else. Another interesting work of yours that has particularly impacted on us and on which we would like to spend some words is entitled Festive night: this body of works explores a variety situations that occur in various public places at night. A distinctive mark of the way it constructs a concrete aesthetic from experience and memories and symbols, working on both subconscious and conscious level. Moreover, you once remarked that animations tell a story and portray experiences yet you want to show them as drawings: so we would take this occasion to ask you if in your opinion, personal experience is absolutely indispensable as part of the creative process? Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience?

I think, for the artist personal experience is unneseccary, on the other hand before I begin something I always refresh my memories, check my notes, drawings or photographs. I often get an idea or a vision, because I just recently saw or experienced, but during development it shifts and becomes either a new or an improved form. Nonetheless, in a creative process I focus on and look for ways how my work

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would communicate within audience, and how without words I can deliver a message. Festive night it was one of my experiments, where I was aiming for a diverse effect. I wasn't using materials I accidentally found or were a part of any incidents, I was exploring and wanted the best result. In my opinion, creative process often is spontaneous, unrestricted and uncontrolled; it could be easily separated from direct experience. I see it as a separate and independent case. Festive night also seems to remove any historic gaze from the reality you refer to, inducing the viewers to rethink the notion of time in such a static way. At the same time, the fruible set of elements you draw from universal imagery trigger the viewers' primordial parameters concerning our relation with physicality: as Gerhard Richter once remarked, "my concern is never art, but always what art can be used for": what is your opinion about the functional aspect of Art in the contemporary age?

Art can be a powerful form to deliver a message, it was always a reflection of the world and it portrays current events, including politics, culture, social changes and many more. In my opinion, art is the only form where you can raise awareness or criticise untrusted actions in the contemporary age. However, it is often an individual opinion, seeking for a support and to be acknowledged. Your pieces encapsulate both traditional techniques and modern methods you merge together to create a coherent unity, that rejects any conventional classification and that invites the viewer to explore the liminal area between Tradition and a vivacious contemporary approach. What is in your opinoin the relationship between Tradition

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ad Contemporariness? Do you think there's a contrast or do you rather think that Contemporariness could be considered an evolutive stage of Tradition?

I think contemporariness cannot survive without tradition: it is either a foundation or inspiration. There were always rules and methods which never changed, but kept evolving. Although, traditional art it is more about skills, beauty and it is more understandable to an audience, whereas contemporary art is more about a concept: raising questions and reflecting politics, mass culture, technology and about artist's individuality and expression. In my opinion, combining both can create successful and powerful image. Contemporariness does not necessary mean it has to be something current, whatsoever was made today might be considered as tradition after a period of time. All in all, there are few things I must mention: originality, quality, inventiveness and a message are keys to a successful artwork. Your successful attempt to produce a dialectical fusion that operates as a system of symbols creates a compelling non linear narrative that, walking the thin line between conceptual and literal meanings, establishes direct relations with the viewers. German multidisciplinary artist Thomas Demand once stated that "nowadays art can no longer rely so much on symbolic strategies and has to probe psychological, narrative elements within the medium instead". What is your opinion about it? And in particular how do you conceive the narrative for your works?

Nowadays art can be anything: there are

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no rules or boundaries, but methods or processes which are fashionable and dominating. There is a lot of good art and as much as of bad art, by reason of that nobody can ever rely on something. Art is diverse and in the end, the success depends only if an audience understands it. I equally spend time on an idea and on the medium; both aspects are very important and one without another cannot exist. Some works consist of more mythological symbols, some only presented through metaphors, but without it my work wouldn't work. It is crucial. Medium helps me to execute an idea. Over these years you works have been exhibited in several occasions: you participated to 7th edition of Incubarte in Valencia and you recently had the solo Carnival, A Small View, Liverpool. Your work is strictly connected to the chance of establishing a direct involvement with the viewers, who are called to evolve from a mere spectatorship to conscious participants on an intellectual level, so before leaving this conversation I would like to pose a question about the nature of the relationship of your art with your audience. 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 is used in a particular context?

I make art not for myself, I would like people to pay an attention and have an opinion about it. I don't expect to receive positive or negative feedback, thou it is important, yet I want spectators to be in my place for a moment and

see the world the way I do. Before I begin to work, I always sketch and analyse the idea, as well as I am looking for ways how to make my work engage with an audience and convey the meaning of it. During the process of my work I look into and analyse all the details, and I have to be selective of elements that could interact. In some cases, my work can be controversial, but it is a play â&#x20AC;&#x201C; I hyperbolize my story, so I can attract viewer's attention. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Inga. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects. How do you see your work evolving?

First of all, I would like to thank the ArticulAction team on selecting me: it is a pleasure to be a part of this edition and talk about my work. After I completed Carnival, I have moved to Copenhagen, where I am still adopting myself. In meantime, I have collected stories and prepared scripts for my animations, and I am exploring ways of developing it. I would like my work to be more engaging or interactive, thus I have to learn new techniques in order to make my project work. Although I recently collaborated with Kyle Nathan Brown and we are working on our upcoming exhibition, which is at early stages at the moment.

An interview by Dario Rutigliano, curator and Barbara Scott, curator articulaction@post.com

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S éverine Assouline Lives and works in Paris, France

An artist's statement

éverine Assouline, vit et travaille à Paris. Elle produit des sculptures, réalise des performances, des vidéos ainsi que des installations. L’Alterité est au coeur de son travail et ses créations questionnent les signes et “mythes” contemporains pour déchiffrer l’individu, de ses choix intimes jusqu’à son appartenance au collectif, culturel, politique et social. Ses créations explorent un certain nombre de paradoxes à travers des notions empruntées à l’inconscient collectif. Elle interroge essentiellement la notion de mascarade, les paradoxes du désir, le naturel/l’artificiel, la relation entretenue par l'homme avec la Nature, ainsi que le pouvoir d’attraction de l’angoisse, la dyade mère-fille, la dyade masculin-féminin. Après des études de Lettres et Langues mention médiation culturelle, Séverine Assouline devient rédactrice en chef du magazine culturel WebCity avant d’organiser, à partir de 2000, des “safaris urbains” interactifs, notamment sur l’art contemporain.

Plus tard, très influencée par l’oeuvre de Giacometti, elle se passionne peu à peu pour la sculpture sous toutes ses formes. A l’écoute de Françoise-Claire Prodhon dont elle suit les cours d’histoire de l’art à Drouot, à propos de Joseph Beuys, elle découvre à quel point son questionnement sur les thèmes de l’humanisme, la sociologie et surtout l’anthroposophie font écho à sa propre réflexion et débute une recherche personnelle à travers la sculpture, les installations et la vidéo. Elle commence par des sculptures éphémères , gâteaux réalistes , comme moyen d’expression directe, pour petit à petit les rendre plus pérennes. Elle peaufine sa technique de sculpture monumentale auprès d’Eugène N’Sondé, pour publier en 2012 sa première pièce emblématique : Devorcal. Très vite, elle élargit sa pratique et explore des matériaux peu utilisés dans la sculpture classique comme le sucre et ses dérivés. A travers la psychanalyse, elle insuffle à son travail une autre dimension.

Ă&#x160;tre Square various plastic materials, 33 x 46 x 17 cm, 2014

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Séverine Assouline An interview by Josh Rider, curator and Barbara Scott, curator articulaction@post.com

Multidisciplinary artist Séverine Assouline's work explores the notion of identity. In her works that we'll be discussing in the following pages, her unconventional approach draws the viewers into an area in which the rational categories and imagination merge together into coherent unity. Her sculptures and installations could be considered visual and tactile biography of our unstable and everchanging contemporary age and raise questions about the themes of humanism, sociology and especially anthroposophy. One of the most convincing aspects of Assouline's work is the way it thrives on paradoxes and notions borrowed from the collective unconscious to provide the viewers with a multilayered experience in which they are urged to evolve from mere spectatorship to conscious participants. We are very pleased to introduce our readers to her refined artistic production. Hello Séverine and a warm welcome to ARTiculAction. To start this interview we would like to pose you a couple of questions about your rich

background. After your studies in Literature and Languages u8203 with a major in cultural mediation, you started your career as chief editor and later as a high tech entrepreneur: how does the relationship between such apparently opposite disciplines influence the way you currently conceive and produce your artworks? And in particular, how does your cultural substratum inform the way you relate yourself to the aesthetic problem?

Hello there, and thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to share my works in this fascinating review. I started my career in the burgeoning startup ecosystem of the late 90s/early 00s. It was a highly creative and stimulating environment where I saw myself offered a lot of responsability simultaneously with a lot of freedom. It was an incredible chance I was happy to seize: imagining contents and services in an innovative and challenging company and later creating and developing my own.

Capturing the Unicorn headdress-sculpture, polyurethane, synthetic hair, sugar, 101 x 57 x 32 cm, 2014

Guimauve ZentaĂŻ sandstone, melted marshmallow, dye, glass and wooden bell, 39 x 26 x 38 cm, 2012

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This gave me hands-on experience with adressing a large audience through a medium that was inventing itself at the time, autonomy acquired through the trial and error method as well as adaptability to a fast paced industry. To that extent, it has been a fabulous education for my artistic career ! Entrepreneurship is a an enthralling adventure, but the focus on ROI and the impossibility to “step out”of the world to think and elaborate wasn’t for me. I particularly enjoy my solitary moments in the studio and find more freedom here and now.

such variety of techniques, your approach reveals an incessant search of an organic symbiosis between a variety of viewpoints. The results convey together a coherent sense of unity, that rejects any conventional classification: so before starting to elaborate about your production, we would suggest to our readers to visit http://www.severine-assouline.com in order to get a synoptic view of your multifaceted artistic production: while walking our readers through your process, we would like to ask you if you have you ever happened to realize that such multidisciplinary approach is the only way to express and convey the idea you explore.

Later I had a very interesting experience discovering 3D modelization and outsourcing laser/3D printing for the central sculpture of “Fusion non miscible”

Honestly, and to put it bluntly, being self-taught and a late bloomer for an artistic career, I consider myself an ever-learning beginner. Therefore, medium and techniques are never an obstacle, rather challenges that help me explore the complexity of some notions, especially when their contours are usually blurry. This gives me complete freedom and helps me focus on the ideas and emotions I want to delve into and convey. It is also what makes studio work (difficult but) so challenging, exciting and fulfilling. Lately I also realized that diversifying techniques is a wonderful way of meeting incredibly interesting and enthusiastic individuals.

You are a versatile artist and the multidisciplinary nature of your approach allows you to encapsulate

For this special issue of ARTiculAction we have selected To be Square, a stimulating sculpture

In terms of production, coming from a “business of virtuality” during my first few years as an artist I fet the urge and absolute necessity to “make”things using my hands and confront myself to “matter”as much as I could, hence the series of terracotta and sugar sculptures I first produced.

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that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. We have found really impressive the way you have combined such variety of plastic materials is the way it accomplishes the difficult task of drawing the viewers into a multilayered experience, reminding us the sense of geometry that pervades Manfred Pernice's early works: when walking our readers through the genesis of this project, would you shed a light about the way you combine together the materials you choose for your works?

I’m a jazz lover, and in the 1940s, a “square”was someone who did not appreciate the medium. “To be square”means to be a dull , rigidly conventional individual in english but in french, the way I heard it growing up , “il est carré”always meant that this person was someone you could count on. This sculpture is made of pieces of IKEA drawer organizers. It’s a balancing act, but it actually stands. I also added chicken wire. I like to play around with the idea of things not being what they are supposed to be. I like that you link this work to Manfred Pernince’s canning and general idea of loss of meaning because that’s exactly my thought. Big organizations, social conventions, all of these rigid structures are connendrum to me. They are not always as balanced as they look and the compartments of volunteered

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Devorcal, sandstone, china, 100 x 90 x 125 cm, 2012

France, sandstone, Indonesian scarf, pigment, 25 x 13 x 5 cm, 2014

Peau-Cession, sandstone, melted marshmallow, tulle prints, scoubidou candies, 53 x 38 x 34 cm, 2012

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Peau-Cession, sandstone, melted marshmallow, tulle prints, scoubidou candies, 53 x 38 x 34 cm, 2012

confinement are more fragile than they seem yet ever more attractive. Also, funnily, the way this sculpture was combined was accidental as I was first using it flat to make an experiment with test tubes and was out of a test tube holder. When I took out the test tubes to wash them and the holder I had built for it was standing to dry, it caught my eye and

got me thinking for quite a moment. I knew this was the piece I had wanted to make. We have appreciate the investigative feature of your exploration about emerging visual contexts: the way you draw inspiration from the human body as you did in France, challenges our perceptual categories urging the viewers to rethink about their inner

Fusion non-miscible, installation project, various dimensions, 2015

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>> Mémoire à débordement//BUFFER OVERFLOW <<, video installation, 2015

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identities, forcing them to a process of recontextualization of the Self. What is the role of your inquiry into the notion of identity in the way you relate yourself to the aesthetic problem?

I have always beens very interested in questions of identity in regards to alterity and here, community withdrawal. To me , Identity starts with gender and possessing a female body has a lot of intrications I was interested in exploring. About France, tattoes are a very powerful way of introducing oneself to the world. It is a way of thinking skin in a cross-discplinary fashion, as something inside and outside or even not part of the human body at all. The skin becomes not a wall of sepration between outside and inside the body anymore but a place where they collide. This tatoo is a bit particular because I applied an indonesian scarf as a patina. Exhibition or camouflage of the female body seem to be evermore scandalous and at the heart of larger identity debates in France. But to me, the real scandal is crossing paths with either veiled or scantily-dressed young women, realizing they are claiming the same thing and that the more they will claim it the more violently they will be resented for it. What has at once caught our attention of your approach, is the way it accomplishes the difficult task

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of establishing a channel of communication between the subconscious sphere and the conscious one, to unveil the manifold nature of human perceptual categories and to draw the viewers into a multilayered experience. So we 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?

As far as I am concerned, certainly not. But from where I stand, it seems to me that some creators like to veil the connection between the creative process and their experience. Hiding it from the audience as well as from themseves that is. As put by D.W. Winnicott ,“Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.” Beyond the fear of being seen, I have the need to communicate, pass on, and get in touch with others throughout the result of my experiences, reflexions in the shape of artistic creation. My opinion is that even when the creative process seems disconnected from experience, the result is of the same nature than Freud’s screen memories. This is actually a theme I will bring up in my next solo show at La Ralentie gallery with a scenography based on potentially universal screen memories.

Manipulating unconventional materials, including sugar and its derivatives, you urge us to rethink about the notion of materiality itself: highlighting the evokative potential of the juxtaposition between the materials you incorporate in your pieces, you also challenge the relation between our cultural substratum and our limbic perceptual parameters. To quote

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How big is too big ? sandstone, melted marshmallow, chocolate, 200 x 35 x 42 cm, 2013

Simon Sterling's words, this could force things to relate that would probably otherwise be unrelated. Do you agree with this interpretation? And in particular, how would you define the relationship between the universal imagery from which you draw from for your reminders to physicality and the cultural or even personal substratum to whim belongs the words you use? We

daresay that you would to go beyond such dichotomyâ&#x20AC;Ś

Yes I agree. I love that an art object may need beyond one level of perception to be grasped because this is exactly how we human beings experience the world from the day we were born.

Untitled -from Buffer Overload, various dimensions, 2016

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I have what french people call “l’esprit d’escalier”but I take it to be close to free association. When I first started using sugar , it was melted marshmallow fluff because it was what came closest to the general idea of skin I had in mind. So definitely halfway between physical perception and limbic approach. The texture, color and taste of the medium were just as important and seemed just as relevant as the stickysweet evocation of childhood, mixed with sensuality and a general heartburn sensation… Also , I like to think that objects can look familiar and provoke a habitual response but then something make you rethink about them , as if they could also have a more complex personality that makes you re-assess them and why not, yourself and your own set of references. As you have remarked once, you have been strongly influenced by the work of Giacometti: how would you consider the relationship between Giacometti's work and your current pratice?

Breton said, Giacometti “achieved to synthesize his inner preoccupations” Later, I discovered his ”symbolically operated objects”and felt very close. Works like “la boule suspendue”or “le nez” made captive in huge frames or cages echo my own obsessions. As well as his lines, so thin they are obliterating themselves and contain as much presence as absence. Your unconventional approach brings to a new level of significance the relationship between plasticity and the instrinsic ephemeral natiure of the concepts you explore, to construct a concrete aesthetic that works on both subconscious and conscious level. As the late Franz West did in his installations, Capturing the Unicorn plays on the notion of ambivalence to force the viewers' perceptual parameters. Artists are always interested in probing to see what is beneath the surface: maybe one of the roles of an artist could be to reveal unexpected sides of Nature, especially of our inner Nature... what's your opinion about this?

I couldn’t agree more. I have not grown up in a cultural environment. When I encountered Giacometti’s works, they came as a shock. I was 14 and had never realized that beyond esthetics, art could actually touch your soul, it was one of those breathrough moments of adolescence and I was very moved. As

Archeologically, costumes and their representation are highly significant when it comes to comprehension of lost civilizations and traditional societies. Peau-Cession and How Big is too Big ? were sculptures that I had imagined as retro-futuristic relics. With

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Capturing the Unicorn I decided to take it one step further and wear the sculpture. There is a so-called childlike aspect to costuming that is always a creative way to explore one’s unchartered aspects of identity or suppressed desires. But Capturing the Unicorn is also a kind of trophy because once you have unearthed and captured some of your natural unexepected sides, it kind of feels like some sort of accomplishment you would want a reminder of. It is my reaction to what Lacan called “the feminine mascarade” Not the mask of an idealized self but a mask of social belonging and revelation/occultation of ones (see

being a crucial component of your decision-making process, in terms of what type of language is used in a particular context?

My first pieces have remained hidden (with myself) in the back of my studio for a quite a few years before I could decide what would happen with them. And for some of my works, I still need to believe they will not have an audience in order to be able to create them. But another aspect of my work is my involvment with psychoanalysis as a form of individual activism. And in that regards, pieces such as Fusion non-miscible or Memoire à debordement are created with the audience in mind and the strong desire to spark reactions and actions.

Levi Strauss and the mask). Over these years you works have been internationally exhibited in several occasions and you are going to have a solo show at La Ralentie gallery, in Paris. One of the hallmarks of your practice is the capability to create direct involvement with the viewers, who are urged to evolve from a condition of mere spectatorship. So before leaving this conversation we would like to pose a question about the nature of the relationship of your art with your audience. Do you consider the issue of audience reception as

Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Séverine. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects. How do you see your work evolving?

Thank you ArticulAction, it has been a wonderful experience.

An interview by Josh Rider, curator and Barbara Scott, curator articulaction@post.com

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Core, 90 x 80 x 45, 2015 29

Taly Oehler Lives and works in Los Angeles, California, USA

Using her background in psychology, Taly Oehler (ay ' ler) works with visual art to cultivate a questioning environment in which we are free to challenge status quo definitions of reality. Taly Oehler uses her camera to continually answer the question of how can she, honestly and respectfully, encapsulate a moment? Taly Oehler is a photographer and writer. She obtained a Masters of Science in Psychology from Cal State University, Los Angeles, CA. Her images have been exhibited in various group shows throughout Los Angeles, CA, including the Duncan Miller Gallery, XIX Studios, Zen Studios, Shoshana Wayne Gallery, and LA Music Center. Her artwork has also been awarded the Director’s Honorable Mention at the Center of Fine Art Photography, in Fort Collins, Colorado. Taly Oehler’s art and writings have been published in various online and print magazines, including LensCulture, Vine Leaves Literary Magazine, The Tolucan Times, Prompt Literary Magazine, and Half Baked Journal.

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Taly Oehler An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Barbara Scott, curator articulaction@post.com

Investigating about the notion of reality, Taly Oehler's work rejects any conventional classification and shows a consistent synergy between traditional techniques and contemporary sensitiveness to extract a compelling narrative that draws the viewers to a multilayered experience. In her project What defines a moment? that we'll be discussing in the following pages, she examines the relation between the ephemeral nature of our perceptual process and the outside world we relate to, walking us into an area in which the perceptual dimension and subconscious sphere merges together into coherent unity. One of the most convincing aspects of Oehler's work is her successful attempt to draw the viewer's to challenge their limbic categories to draw them into an unconventional journey: we are very pleased to introduce our readers to her multifaceted artistic production. Hello Taly, and a warm welcome to ARTiculAction: we would start this interview posing you a couple of questions about your background. How do your studies in Psychology influence your evolution as an artist? And in particular, how does your cultural substratum inform the way you relate

yourself with artmaking and with the aesthetic problem in general?

Thank you. It is my absolute pleasure. I spent years studying behavior on an academic level. Now, I am exploring psychological concepts on an artistic level. My artwork explores the malleability of the brain, a muscle-like organ that I believe is highly underused in its flexion abilities. The psychological question of what is normal is at the core of my art productions. I like to go beyond the â&#x20AC;&#x153;pretty pictureâ&#x20AC;? and take an artwork into the realm of the intellect. Ultimately, I like to bridge the gap between fine art and conceptual art, where aesthetics push the viewer into critical thought, blending the poetic and the philosophical. You are a versatile artist and your approach reveals a successful attempt of urging the viewers to challenge status quo definitions of reality. The results convey together a coherent and consistent sense of harmony and unity. Before starting to elaborate about your production, we would suggest to our readers to visit http://www.talyoehler.com in order to get a synoptic view of your multifaceted artistic production: while walking our readers through your process, would you shed a light about your usual process and set up?

My process relies heavily on intuition, so I always carry at least one camera with me

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(a DSLR, and/or a cheap film toy camera, which is a great alternative for the more poverty stricken artist). I prefer walking to driving as it allows a more intimate view of the world. The process is one of looking, assessing, finding that thing that intrigues me. I tend to go for immersion without pretension, trying to become a part of whatever environment I find myself in so that I can capture it in a respectful and honest manner. Sometimes, the world dictates the project, while other times, I impose my will on the world. For this special issue of ARTiculAction we have selected What defines a moment?, a stimulating body of works that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. What has at once caught our attention of your inquiry into the notion of reality and its relationship with the ephemeral nature of our perceptual parameters is the way it accomplishes the difficult task of creating a channel of communication between the conscious sphere and the subconscious sphere. When walking our readers through the genesis of What defines a moment?, would you clarify the importance of psychological contemplation in your work? What Defines a Moment, also known as (not) Los Angeles, was created during a

time which I felt most detached and alienated from the world around me, due to an unwelcome illness. As the disease overtook my life, it resulted in a crisis of identity. Through psychological contemplation, giving myself the freedom to reassess my perception without judgement, I began to formulate

a diverging definition of reality, and a new understanding of the world around me. The images in this series were created as a way of communicating this new way of seeing. This body of works includes diptychs, each of which depicts a slightly different version of the same moment. A distinctive mark of the way you construct a concrete aesthetic from experience draws the viewers through a multilayered experience, to explore the relationship between perception and memory. So we would take this occasion to ask you if in your opinion, personal experience is absolutely indispensable as part of the creative process? In particular, how would you describe the role of memory in your process?

I believe it is our responsibility as artists to communicate from a totally honest place, which means we are communicating from within our own experiences. Once again, this theme of perception emerges in the process of art making. This leads directly to the next part of your question, which asks about memory. In my graduate studies in Psychology, we investigated the fallible nature of memory in eyewitness testimony. This fallibility often reveals itself in my art productions. In What defines a moment?, I explore the idea that memory and perception are relative, and are solely based on the observerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s perspective. The series focuses on focus, revealing the complexity of a moment, by focusing both in and out, foreground and background. What is important in the foreground may lose its relevance in the background. This multilayered approach

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challenges the viewer to consider other ways of seeing, other interpretations, and shows how perception and memory can be manipulated.

5) You also seem to address the viewers to remove any historic gaze from the reality you refer to, inducing the viewers to rethink the notion of time in such atemporal way. At the

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same time, the fruible set of elements you draw from universal imagery trigger the viewers' primordial parameters concerning our relation with physicality: as Gerhard Richter

once remarked, "my concern is never art, but always what art can be used for": what is your opinion about the functional aspect of Art in the contemporary age?

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can be used for something, now more We are oversaturated with meaningless

than ever, in our increasingly visual

imagery, which results in a cheapening

world where the image is losing its

of visual art. I want to create art that

power. This is why I change the

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perspective within the image, as a way to re-instill a sense of power back into the photograph. Art is function, its role is to expand views and urge discourse.

In your hyperrealism series you drawing from highly symbolic and evocative elements from urban and environmental imagery, to establish

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direct relations with the viewers to beyond the surface of communication. We find this aspect particularly interesting since it is probably the only way to accomplish the vital restoration you pursued in this series, concerning both the individuals and their place in our ever changing societies: how do you see the relationship between public sphere and the role of art in public space? In particular, what kind of reactions did you expect to provoke in the viewers?

Our environment has an amazing ability of affecting our moods, our wellbeing. At the same time, anything in the public sphere can be turned into art. The graffiti artists and muralists have been doing this for years, adding beauty and asking questions in a public platform. Stretching digital photographyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s informational nature and putting it through a heavy filter mill, the hyperrealism series exposes the public sphere as an art form, by turning so called bland reality into a surrealist experience. The resulting dream-like aesthetic aims to elicit a sense of wonder and maybe even a moment of meditation from the viewer. As the late Franz West did in his installations, when overprocessing your images, you evoke a surreal, dream-like environment showing unconventional aesthetics in the way it deconstructs perceptual images in order to assemble them in a collective imagery, urging the viewers to a process of selfreflection. Artists are always interested in probing to see what is beneath the surface: maybe one of the roles of an artist could be to reveal unexpected

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sides of Nature, especially of our inner Nature... what's your view about this?

Of the many purposes of art, I think its ability to dig deep beneath the surface is the one I seek. With art, hopefully, one can come closer to oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s inner truth, or inner nature as you call it, through the process of self reflection and again, honesty. In the poetics of an image, we can find a myriad of emotions that move the viewer closer into the photograph and into themselves. Hyperrealism as well as What defines a moment? are moodbased projects that have helped me unravel layers of BS to get to a more truthful definition of who I am. If an artist can be of service to people in such a way as to promote self reflection, then that is an amazing accomplishment. Another interesting project that has particularly impressed us and on which we would like to spend some words is entitled NOTES on a VIOLIN, a short documentary film which follows a violin teacher who wants to promote beauty in an otherwise dissonant world. What has at once caught our attention of this video is its successful attempt to produce a dialectical fusion that operates as a system of symbols creates a compelling non linear narrative that, walking the thin line between conceptual and literal meanings, establishes direct relations with the viewers. German multidisciplinary artist Thomas Demand once stated that "nowadays art can no longer rely so much on symbolic strategies and has to probe psychological, narrative elements within the medium instead". What is

your opinion about it? And in particular how do you conceive the narrative for your works?

To me, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s essential that my works take on a story. I approach each image, each project from a storytellerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s perspective, so that I can find a cohesive narrative.

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NOTES on a VIOLIN was conceived

purely by accident. On a bike ride around town, my better half and I heard the sound of violins among a cacophony of street noise. Approaching the live music, we saw Darren Briggs, the subject of this film, giving a violin lesson

to his student, Jeff. I was immediately drawn to Darren and his incredible efforts of spreading the classical music “gospel” to anyone who is willing to listen and learn. Darren’s story emerged long after I wrapped shooting, after I watched all the footage. What this and

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other projects have taught me is that all I need to do is be there and listen, observe and pay attention, and the story or narrative of the work will reveal itself. Over these years you works have been exhibited in several occasions, including your recent participation to

Water at the Center for Fine Art Photography. Your work is strictly connected to the chance of establishing a direct involvement with the viewers, who are called to evolve from a mere spectatorship to conscious participants on an intellectual level, so before leaving this conversation I would like to

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The main purpose of my artwork, regardless of the specific project, is communication. I love to connect with the audience in a deep way. However, the audience reception is not a crucial consideration when I produce. My projects are developed from a deep and honest place, and as much as I hope for the receptivity of the audience, I don’t like to consider it when creating artwork, as I don’t feel that is a truthful and productive approach to creating my art. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Taly. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects. How do you see your work evolving?

pose a question about the nature of the relationship of your art with your audience. 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 is used in a particular context?

You’re very welcome. Thanks a lot for the very interesting questions. I would love my work to take a more nuanced approach, dealing with more specific psychological concepts. Maybe even be as fearless as Jo Spence and create productions that force us to confront uncomfortable truths. Maybe at the end of the day, I’m more like a drug addict than an artist, forever chasing after some semblance of truth, and the more I give chase, the further away it goes, and the chase continues. In my case, the expression of this chase is manifested through visual art, and all contradictions, debates and hypocrisies are absolutely welcome.

An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Barbara Scott, curator articulaction@post.com

Valérie Bourquin An artist's statement

y predilections mediums are video, electronic music, 3D modeling… I lead a reflection on music and electronic culture that has its historical roots in the cut-up by Brion Gysin and defined by W. Burroughs. The connections between music, sounds, images and space are some of my concerns and my research. Interactions that produce these different mediums between them are complex, allowing me to develop distinct ideas. These connections are multiple as far as they can be due in particular at random what allows me to keep the errors, the deletions in my process of production. They also cause indeterminations as well as random(unpredictable) events. One of my intentions is to transfigure reality. I proceed by fragmentations Fragmentations of sounds, images ... to break up and dissolve the reality. I manipulate images, sounds through overlays that create multiple zones parasitized and interdependent. I use the space to reinvent inducing spooky exploration unconscious. This can help to open other dimensions that

we do not necessarily perceive the limits. I often proceeds by analogy by establishing relationships that can be seen as metaphorical. I use light to change the space I film. The light and inlays that I use repeatedly produce abstractions that accentuate the immateriality, the chimeric aspect of my productions. I wonder about the concept of virtual space, mental, fictional that turn out to be infinitely modifiable. I seek to explore our subjective relationship with the world and reality playing among others with the signifiers and signified and practicing diversions, deviations. One of my goals is to use it in some way real; to create the virtual; and virtual to create real. The repetition is an important aspect in my work, it brings the concept of cycle of noncycle. The frequencies that it induced cause a sometimes immutable order, sometimes fickle. Qualified as disturbance incidents break the cycle or cycles.

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Valérie Bourquin An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator articulaction@post.com

Unconventional and moving in its refined composition, Monde Inversé is psychologically elaborated work by french artist Valérie Bourquin. Via a succession of statics shots, the viewers are addressed to recontextalize the notions of time and space, that draws them into an unconventional, multilayered experience. Bourquin's use of temps mort provides the viewer a strong involvement and what mostly impressed us of her refined work is the way her careful gaze on contemporary age unveils the creative role of the spectators unveiling connections in our limbic parameters. We are particularly pleased to introduce our readers to her multifaceted artistic production. Hello Valérie and welcome to ARTiculAction: to thart this interview, we would like to pose you a couple of questions baout your background. You have a solid formal training and you hold a Diplôme National Supérieur d'Expression Plastique that you received from the prestigious Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Lyon: moreover, you come back from a residency in residence at Skaftfell: how have these experiences influenced your evolution as an artist? And in particular, how does your cultural substratum dued to your French roots

inform the way you relate yourself to art making and to the aesthetic problem in general?

Hello, firstly, thank you for this interview proposal. I kept very fond memories of my studies at the ENSBA. This period has been important to me. It allowed me to begin to define my personal project which some axes are still present in my current work and choose media, mediums that I wanted to use. The formation I followed at the ENSBA allowed me to develop more consistently critically on the images, regardless of their origins. It also facilitated me the opening on other centers of interest which was not mine at the base.. My evolution during and after the studies at the ENSBA was different. The context is not identical. I come back effectively to a residence of three months in Skaftfell in Seydisfjordur in Iceland. Seyðisfjörður is a fjord located east of the Iceland. Skaftfell is located in an exceptional setting. It was a very rewarding experience at all levels. The environment, landscapes, the special atmosphere of Seyðisfjörður and the Iceland... influenced me in my way of understanding the concepts that constitute my approach, artistic practice, to evolve practice by exploring new avenues in my work, a different

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reflection. That also enabled me to clarify certain things. I was in total immersion during three months in a country with contrasted energies, the fabulous landscapes and with a single light. All this has permanently influenced my artistic work and myself. It is quite complicated for me to explain what my French roots bring me in my artistic practice and the level of the aesthetic problem in general. I am

admittedly influenced by the importance of culture in France and French culture. France has a solid cultural background. My influences are many and varied: Arts, cinema, music, philosophy, literature... Your multidisciplinary practice encapsulates elements from sound as well as from visual into an organic symbiosis: while crossing the border of different disciplines have you ever

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multidisciplinary practice. My artistic practice also requires the use of several mediums in order to achieve my intentions to implement my thoughts and to draw so what constitutes my artistic approach. The zones of connections which produce the sound and visual elements interact between them, which they are filmed images or images 3D. Certain concepts which are found in my work; such as: virtual space, mental space, fictitious space… require interactions between various visual and sound components. The reflexion that I carry out require incorporation, the coexistence of various elements, of various media to produce dynamic, connections, disconnections whether order visual or audible. We would like to focus on your artistic production beginning from Monde Inversé: an interesting work that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article: and we would suggest to visit https://vimeo.com/140576195 in order to get a wider idea of it. In the meanwhile, we would take this occasion to take a closer look at the genesis of this interesting project: in particular, how did you come up with the idea for it? happened to realize that such synergy between different disciplines is the only way to express the concepts you explore in your works?

Indeed, I attach so much importance to the sound and visuals in my work. I lead a reflection on music and electronic culture that has its historical roots in the cut-up by Brion Gysin and defined by W. Burroughs which implies a

I have tried several times in the past on two videos to sequences of images based on the reflections caused by the light on objects and that it induces subsequently visually, metaphorically... The result is not convincing I searched for a way to put it in a more conclusive manner by filming night glare on the windows of a house from indoor and outdoor lights. This allowed me to

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induce the notion of mental space and therefore complicate my remarks from the two videos that I made previously using the phenomena of reflection of light. Monde Inversé reveals an unconventional structure in its narrative flow. What’s your writing process like?

I analyze the images, the sounds when I produce them. The analytical process often arises at this moment. A part of intuition sometimes appears in the implementation of my projects. My writing process was done at the time of the assembly of the video if I has one in the sense that I do not write a synopsis . I made of many trials, experiments at the time of the realization of the images and editing. It was not strictly speaking a conventional narrative that emerges from the images. My point was not to produce. There is a search for compositions with the intention of producing abstract, unspecified, undefined images... I sought to highlight affects, percepts who lead towards an unreality who confronts himself with filmed real space. I am trying to deconstruct the time to modify the space, causing cracks,ruptures, cuts. Monde Inversé reveals a particular care in the way you choose the static shots and we have been impressed by your peculiar use of temps mort. Could you comment this peculiar aspect of your work?

I haven't used foot for camera in order to give an impression of floating images (images are in motion but not) maybe

the use of temps mort is accentuated by this in the direction where the pictures as time seem suspended in a time and a non-space that coexist without exist. Time is dislocated, it undergoes a distortion due to reflection (some images are reversed), how to film to music which makes the compositions of

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the various sequences disconnected a form of reality, which undergoes a modification in its temporal dimension. The sequences are multiple and interrelated zones. The real is perverted as the images and music tend to extract what constitutes its reality. The music consists of box rhythms for child whose

sounds have been crushed, it contributes to disturbance of the filmed spaces. Space is neither open nor closed, it becomes abstractif. It is dematerialized (transfiguration and fragmentation). I seek to explore our subjective relationship with the world and reality playing among others with

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the signifiers and signified. them repetition is an important aspect in my work, it brings the concept of cycle of non-cycle. The frequencies that it induced cause a sometimes immutable order, sometimes inconstant. This changes the time or the time of sequences in particular in this video.

Sequences follow each other in a nonlinear way. The result is a distortion between the space and time. One is changing at the expense of the other. The space becomes mental. Space passes the bulkhead to decompartmentalization, time is suspended, this causes a contrast.

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concept of time in such a static way: this 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. How do you conceive the rhythm of your works?

There is a regularity / irregularity between the space and time. Implicit contact real/unreal and the senses DĂŠferlements is a time-based work that seems to induce the viewers to abandon therselves to free associations, looking at time in spatial terms and I daresay, rethinking the

The rhythm in my work depends largely on the type of images, "materials", sounds... that I produced and which eventually induce the rhythms of the work produced and ends. Thus it may be convoluted, fluctuating, constant... Repetition plays a key role in my creative for this process, I would like to mention two citations that were decisive for me in my approach to this notion according to Gilles Deleuze, "It is the difference which is rhythmic and not the repetition which produces it" and Karlheinz Stockhausen, "The repetition is a way of exceeding the language." A contrast, a relative opposition settle between images that are induced by their different nature which produces dynamic and changes the perception of time and space. I proceeded by accumulation/subtraction. The filmed sequences were modified by effects speed during the assembly (accelerations, decelerations). That disrupts the rhythm of the video (the flow has virtually changed) and the time or times of the video. Filmed space is transformed partly by the encrusted images, by the assembly. Its perception is distorted by it. His perception is distorted. A new space is somehow suggested. I manipulate the images, the sounds by the means of incrustations which create parasitized multiple zones and interdependent. The video consists of strata (stratification process). This

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implies different levels of reading and a different perception. The sound is characterized by vibrations made up of noises heavy and deaf, it disturbs the perception of the images. The reality is deconstructed somehow.Time is abstractively faded. Another dimension is suggested implicitly. Another interesting work of yours that has particularly impacted on us and on which we would liek to spend some words is entitled Visions oniriques: the ambience created by your careful juxtaposition between Audio and Video has reminded us the concept of non lieu elaborated by French anthropologist Marc AugĂŠ. This approach urges the viewers relate with your work in a more absolute way, removing any historical gaze from the reality you refer to and highlighting an effective combination between experience and imagination. German sculptor and photographer Thomas Demand once state that: "nowadays art can no longer rely much on symbolic strategies and has to probe psychological narrative elements within the medium instead". What is your opinioin about this? And in particular, 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?

On some sequences, the speed has been substantially increased in order to make more visible the changes of forms of light halos which metamorphose somehow during each plan. The filmed images are immaterial, disembodied.

Light reflections, sound change the apprehension of space in distinct ways. These are illusions caused by a form of reality. Filmed space rocks in the onirism. It seems to emerge from the

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unconscious. It becomes mental, abstractive, even chimerical. Space is modified, transfigured. The vacuum is highlighted by the light halos. The sound consists of larsens of white noise which

evolve during the video. It modifies the apprehension of images. Reality with the capacity to generate unreality and consequently the virtual one. The light and the incrustations which I use

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récurremment produce abstractions who accentuate the immateriality, the chimerical aspect of my realizations.. Abstractions highlight of percepts, affects what caused a confrontation

between filmed real space and a form of unreality. Tactics and the disappearance of the ephemeral. I do not know very well the anthropologist Marc Augé as well, I filled

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neither historical, neither temporal, nor identity”. I also retained the fact that it states the "non-lieu" of case like spaces interchangeable, transitory space time. Indeed, certain concepts that Marc Augé created in his concept of "non-lieu" of case can be adapted to this video, space proves to be not very definable, the limits seem non-existent or they have an extremely reduced visibility. The images are evanescent, which makes space unreal and therefore without identification and it gives a form of timelessness. I agree with the quote from Thomas Demand . It seems to me that the psychological narrative elements are exciting to fathom. My creative process can be disconnected from any direct experience in some cases. But for me, an antagonism lies in the sense that personal experience can be necessary in certain realizations or at the time of the implementation of various projects. Experience can evolve consistently some thoughts that I have in my work. These experiences can be of different levels: Visual, cultural... So in my case, personal, direct experience is not an indispensable element in my creative process in the sense where it appears virtually never in my work or in a fugacious way.

in order to respond to your question about his concept of "non-lieu". Marc Augé speaks about the "non-lieu" of case as of a space where the limits are not very definable, “space which is

Over your career you have showcased your works in several occasions: so before taking leave from this interesting conversation we would like to pose a a question about the nature of the relation with your audience: in particular, do you consider the issue of

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audience reception as being a crucial component of your decision-making process in terms of what type of language for a particular context?

The reception of the public during the construction of my project does not form part of an essential component. I attach importance to the place and thus to the

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evident in my decision-making process. Subsequently, I think much more at the reception by the public at the time I finished and my production will be presented. I take into account with great interest the public reception when my work is presented. I remember carefully the remarks, made by public opinions. I search the dialogue with the public. It seems to me that this is very important as an artist. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, ValĂŠrie. Finally, would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see your work evolving?

Thank you, too. I wish to continue my current thinking, my present work developing my writing and production process. I am thinking that I have recently started on the duality and reciprocity between perception and apperception of a psychological and empirical point of view based on the senses. I am developing a research on the interdependencies between space and the look. I want to initiate a reflection on dematerialization and spatial and temporal. My production process is focused on research and experimentation, but also on the work in progress as some of my work can be reevaluated and modified according to the places and contexts. I consider that the devices I set out to move are not finished with additions and deletions, amplifications and deletions. space which influences my process in an undeniable way. Of course, I think at the reception of the public during the production of the project, but it is not

An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator articulaction@post.com

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Dalia Smayze

Katarzyna Zimna K p

Lives and works in Dallas, USA

Katarzyna Zimna is a Polish artist and An artist's statement researcher, based in Lodz. Graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Lodz, Faculty of Graphic Art and Painting (2002), and Faculty of Visual Education (2004). She obtained her Ph.D. from the School of Art and Design, Loughborough University, UK in 2010, with the thesis: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Play in the Theory and Practice of Artâ&#x20AC;?. Participant in numerous national and international exhibitions, residencies and conferences on contemporary art and aesthetics. She was twice awarded a grant from the Fran Masereel Centre of Graphic Arts, Kasterlee, Belgium. A participant of the Impact International Printmaking Conference (Bristol 2009, Hangzhou 2015). In 2014 her book Time to Play: Action and Interaction in Contemporary Art has been published by I.B. Tauris Publishing House in London and New York. The ontology of print is the main focus of her practice, which also includes painting, textile and object art. Since 2011 assistant professor at the Institute of Architecture of Textiles, Lodz University of Technology.

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MEMO, game and installation Lodz, 2016

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Katarzyna Zimna An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator articulaction@post.com

Katarzyna Zimna is a Polish artist and researcher, based in Lodz. Graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Lodz, Faculty of Graphic Art and Painting (2002), and Faculty of Visual Education (2004). She obtained her Ph.D. from the School of Art and Design, Loughborough University, UK in 2010, with the thesis: “Play in the Theory and Practice of Art”. Participant in numerous national and international exhibitions, residencies and conferences on contemporary art and aesthetics. She was twice awarded a grant from the Fran Masereel Centre of Graphic Arts, Kasterlee, Belgium. A participant of the Impact International Printmaking Conference (Bristol 2009, Hangzhou 2015). In 2014 her book Time to Play: Action and Interaction in Contemporary Art has been published by I.B. Tauris Publishing House in London and New York. The ontology of print is the main focus of her practice, which also includes painting, textile and object art. Since 2011 assistant professor at the Institute of Architecture of Textiles, Lodz University of Technology. Highly stimulating in its communicative concreteness, the MEMO project is a compelling work by artist and researcher Katarzyna Zimna. While walking the viewers through an unconventional exploration of the nature of memory and

experience, she accomplishes the difficult task of challenging the viewers' perceptual parameters, walking them through the liminal area in which the ambivalence between presence and identity solves it into an unexpected point of convergence. What mostly impressed of Zimna's work is the way her exploration of the intersections of aesthetics and everyday life unveils unsuspected but ubiquitous connections between art producing and the audience. We are particularly pleased to introduce our readers to her multifaceted artistic production. Hello Katarzyna and welcome to ARTiculAction: to start this interview, we would like to pose you a question about your background. You have a solid formal training and after having earned your MFAs in Fine Arts and Visual Education you nurtured your education with a PhD in Contemporary Art Theory, that you received from the Loughborough University, School of Art and Design, UK. How do these experiences influence your evolution as an artist? In particular, how does your cultural substratum inform the way you relate yourself to art making and to the aesthetic problem in general?

I did my Master degree at the Academy of Fine Arts in Lodz, Poland at the Faculty of Graphic Art and Painting. I was lucky to study with great professors – printmakers and I learnt there to pay

Tetris Chlodna Contemporary Art Gallery, Suwalki, Poland, 2013

MEMO, game linocut on felt, 2016

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attention to workshop, craft and tradition. My diploma project was a series of aquafort and aquatint prints complemented with painting. However, I also studied at the studio of woodcut techniques led by prof. Andrzej Bartczak and since graduation I have been faithful to relief printing techniques. Although my practice also includes painting, textiles, object art and interactive projects – in most cases printmaking is my starting point, the way of thinking about artistic production. As you mentioned I did my second MFA in Visual Education – the more theory-oriented course, where I received training as an art teacher. I developed there interest in art theory but also psychology of art and child’s art. The natural continuation was my doctoral project in contemporary art theory entitled “Play in the Theory and Practice of Art” (2010). It was a coincidence that I did it at LUSAD, in the UK, but it turned out to be a life experience. I confronted myself with a completely different type of art education that I knew from Poland. I had to read a lot of philosophy books from Kant to Derrida and initially it was a great challenge. Luckily, one of my supervisors was dr Malcolm Barnard who really helped me a lot during the whole process and was the one to suggest that my thesis was worth publishing as a book. In 2014 the edited version of my thesis was published by I.B. Tauris as “Time to Play: Action and Interaction in Contemporary Art”. I think that my initial, traditional education in painting and printmaking has formed my artistic identity, even if I challenge these rules and conventions in my present work. Studies in the UK opened my mind to the conceptual side of art, the role of research,

they gave me courage to experiment and avoid the routine. You are a versatile artist and your approach encapsulates several techniques and media, revealing a stimulating search of an organic symbiosis between a variety of viewpoints. The results convey together a coherent sense of unity, that rejects any conventional classification. Before starting to elaborate about your production, we would suggest to our readers to visit http://kasiazimna.net in order to get a synoptic view of your multifaceted artistic production: while walking our readers through your process, we would like to ask you if you have you ever happened to realize that such approach is the only way to express and convey the idea you explore.

I always start my work with the topic I want to explore, with the idea, sometimes a word, a phrase or emotion. The formal solution is something I come up with during the creation process, rarely I do have it in my mind before I start working. The choice of medium, the way I use this medium is an important element of this process. As I already said, my way of thinking about the form is the thinking of a printmaker – I think with matrices, layers, printing process, printing substrate – paper, textiles, etc. Relief print – woodcut and linocut – are very traditional techniques, but I always try to play with this tradition, rules and conventions and use my medium in the analytical way. The aim of my artistic game is to combine the artefact and the process of its production in one coherent aesthetic, conceptual and emotional entity. My art is versatile but I think there are main topics that keep returning – identi-

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ty, memory, passing, life cycle and a general one permeating all I do – nature (experience, expression, vitality, chaos, play) versus culture (representation, control, order, game). I agree with Derrida that these “opposites” constitute each other, in my works I look for balance between these elements. They are always contained in the concept but I also try to make them visible in the form. I equally love expressionism and minimalism and I do not think they exclude each other… For this special issue of ARTiculAction we have selected MEMO project that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. What has at once caught our attention of this work is the way your inquiry into the notion of memory and how our cognition influences the reality we perceive creates an harmonic mix between a vivid approach to the evocative reminders conveyed by the materials you combine together: when walking our readers through the genesis of MEMO project would you shed a light about the role of metaphors in your process?

Memo is a popular memory game for children – I used it as a point of reference in my project. The search for two identical pictures has been treated as a metaphor for the functioning of memory. Memory is fluid, as the perception of reality is. We try to find in it certain and immutable reference points, but under the influence of present events they are subject to continuous change. Playing memo is therefore the utopian search for stability. The project consists of two separate pieces. The first one Fluid memory is a graphic installation consisting of 80

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MEMO, game and installation, 2016

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MEMO, game, linocut on felt, 2016

prints 8x8 cm that can be arranged in any random configuration on a gallery wall. These are original linocuts, 16 images printed in different shades of blue.

Images represent views from the 9th floor of the huge communist panel building in Lodz, I used to live in for the most of my life. I made this work just before

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images – linocuts printed on felt. The game can be played by the visitors during the exhibition. The difference between Memo and the original version of this game is that the pairs of images are not identical – they are printed with different shades of colour – which points to the fluidity and uncertainty of memory. It also makes the game more difficult to play. The compelling ambience that pervades MEMO project invites the viewers to a multilayered experience and the way you explore the ambivalent relation between the intrinsically ephemeral nature of our perceptual processes and the sense of permanence of the notion of memory accomplishes the difficult task of constructing aesthetics from experience, working on both subconscious and conscious level. So we would take this occasion to ask you if in your opinion personal experience is absolutely indispensable as part of the creative process? Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience?

moving out when I realised it is impossible to pin down my memories. Memo is the actual memory game consisting of 30 blocks made with the above

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during the creation process. Also, the choice of specific problems to explore is usually dictated by personal issues, even if it happens on a subconscious level. MEMO project provides the viewers with an intense, immersive experience: how do you see the relationship between public sphere and the role of art in public space? In particular, how much do you consider the immersive nature of the viewing experience and how much importance has improvisation in your process?

Printmaking is a very traditional medium but this is exactly what inspires me to push it into unusual contexts. Traditional print is something to be admired through the glass – being framed and hung on the wall. I often invite my audience to cross this boundary – touch a print, play with it or even use it as a “colouring book”. However, I do not negate usual “passive” contemplation of traditional artefacts – great works of art evoke highly immersive experience, emotional and intellectual interaction. I just like to see how my work can live a new life when it is manipulated by the viewers. In such cases improvisation is a part of the viewing process. The characteristic feature of printmaking is the possibility of multiplication, this makes it a perfect medium for the public space – I can always print a new version to place it in a new context. My exhibition is usually a mixture of traditionally presented works and those inviting viewers participation. Another interesting work of yours that has particularly impacted on us and on which we would like to spend some words is entitled TETRIS: what has

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memo - the yard, linocut on felt, 2014

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mostly impressed of this work is the way it forces the viewers' perceptual parameters in order to question the ambiguous dichotomy between the elusive notions of presence and absence. How did you come up with the main idea?

Your observation comes as a surprise to me, I have not considered this work in such a context. Tetris is a title of a big textile piece and also it was a title of my solo show where I exhibited works related to my experience of motherhood. This is a wordplay – it refers obviously to the game but also to tetra nappies popular in older times. In my Tetris exhibition I use these nappies as a main material for my works – I print on them, dye them, use for the installation. I do not think these works address in particular the issue of presence and absence – this is rather covered by the series Colouring book – prints with images which are empty spaces coloured later by the viewers. Tetris is about the experience of the new reality with a baby, performing various roles, changing identity, process of becoming a mother observed through the eyes of the artist. The ambience created by TETRIS reminds us of the concept of non lieu elaborated by French anthropologit Marc Augé: conveying both metaphoric and descriptive research, this work constructs of a concrete aesthetic that works on both subconscious and conscious level. As the late Franz West did in his installations, this work shows unconventional features in the way it deconstructs perceptual images in order to assemble them in a collective imagery, urging the viewers to a process of self-reflection. Artists are always interested in probing to see what is beneath

memo - the yard, linocut on felt, 2014, detail

the surface: maybe one of the roles of an artist could be to reveal unexpected

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sides of Nature, especially of our inner Nature... what's your view about this?

Deconstructing and rearranging the elements of reality in order to question tradition, rules and the natural way (it

Colouring Book Sanshang Contemporary Art Gallery, Hangzhou, China

Colouring book (layers of memory), linocut, 2014

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Colouring book (sparrows), linocut, 2014

seems) “things go”, is the most exciting aspect of making art. I often use this tactic – extract some banal everyday objects, places or situations and observe them in a slightly different context, play with the regular figures but on a different game board. This is the tactic of play. As I write in my book, play initiates movement in between chaos and order, reality and potentiality, ‘here’ and ‘there’, I and the Other, serious and non-serious; it sets ideas, con-

cepts, thoughts, images and identities in motion. It reveals the unexpected and can be used as a great tool of self-reflection. When developing a multi-layered language, you capture non-sharpness and bring to a new level of significance the elusive still ubiquitous relationship between experience and memory. In particular, your approach seems to accomplish an effective investigation about how our minds impose categories upon a chaos.

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Colouring book (parking), linocut, 2014

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German multidisciplinary artist Thomas Demand once stated that "nowadays art can no longer rely so much on symbolic strategies and has to probe psychological, narrative elements within the medium instead". What is your opinion about it? And in particular how do you conceive the narrative and especially the visual unity for your works?

I try to combine my narratives, experiences that I want to deconstruct, with the narratives that belong to my medium. With printmaking there is a set of key notions that keep inspire me, for example: a matrix (meaning a womb in Latin, carries connotations with female body and the processes of biological reproduction); edition – multiplication of identical or varying images (points to the democratic and social potential of a print); the process of cutting the matrix, subtracting the material in order to create an image (refers to the ideas of creation and destruction, presence and absence); layers (printing with multiple matrices that can be treated as children’s blocks to be improvised with, but also as layers of experience). I take some bits from my life, filter them through the medium – the process of creation – and they become ‘something else’, they gain certain aesthetic quality that you call the visual unity. I just try to make it as simple and universal as possible but to avoid explicit interpretations. Over these years you works have been internationally exhibited in several occasions, including your participation at the group show Milagro/ Cud in Costa Rica. One of the hallmarks of your works is the capability to establish direct relation with the audience, deleting

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28 linocut, 2016 Differences,

Reagan Lake

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November 2, linocut, 2015

any conventional barrier between the idea you explore and who receipt and cosequently elaborate them. 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 decision-making process in terms of what

type of language for a particular context?

I think I still learn how to communicate with the audienceâ&#x20AC;Ś My first motivation to make art is always to say something and to make something. I do not really analyse to whom I address it. Obviously, good art is universal, it touches different people

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on different levels: conscious, subconscious, visual, emotional, intellectual. This is why I pay attention to the aesthetic, visual side of my works and to the technical mastery. Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Katarzyna: would you like to tell us readers something about your future projects? How do you see

your work evolving?

I definitely want to keep exploring printmaking medium. Subtraction, using cutoff spaces to create an image is something I develop in my present works. As to the topic â&#x20AC;&#x201C; I am back in the garden, immersed in the natural world, seasonal changes, planting and harvesting. I hope

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something interesting would grow out soon. My husband is a sound director and composer, I hope to do some collaboration with him and incorporate sound in the graphic installation I am currently working at. In general, I would love to do some more collaborations. I guess I will also keep experimenting with textile substrates. I teach at the Institute of Architec-

ture of Textiles, Lodz University of Technology, which is a continuous source of inspirations. In fact, you never know where your art would lead you, this is what I love about this profession. An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator articulaction@post.com

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