Peripheral ARTeries Art Review December 2014

December 2014

Fabien Jakob

From the Inversion series

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December 2014 Jesús Manuel Moreno

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"In art, my approach is genuinely and fundamentally intuitive.

“Apeles, believed that the colour black created deepness and that white created proximity. His principle is oa premises on which the occidental painting is based. I show the opposite, something the ancient Chinese painters already knew.

Silvester Stöger " A work of art is a creation that allows people to identify themselves with it in one way or an other.

Of course, this is a highly subjective process, but there lies the big strength and freedom of art. "

Lance Turner

Fabien Jakob

There is no formal process as such but a kind of a light ecstatic trance I usually fly into while travelling and being disconnected from my daily concerns"

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Carlos Agamez This art project seeks to connect ‘homelessness’ with the reality of international refugees and Internally Displaced People My conception has been influenced by the pholosopher Martin Heidegger’s thoughts on the nature of ‘dwelling’ and the “transcendental homelessness” of contemporary technological civilisation

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"My work has evolved out of my need to correct what seems to be a flaw in Photorealism as it was originally validated as a process-based form of Conceptualism. "

Shana Molt "My art expresses who I am, who I want to be, and where I want to go.

Most is based on deep emotional experiences and the impact it has had on me.

I use vibrant colors for movement and thick palette and brush strokes for texture. "

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Krusty Wheatfield

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"You could put a glove on a carrot, spray paint it gold, and dangle it over a mousetrap in your kitchen, and people would probably just think you were very bored and/or strange.

But if you put that in a museum and get just the right lighting and pretty flyers, people will be flocking around it like seagulls to a cheetoh. "

Renata Gandra

My work is about the human element and our intra, inter, and trans personal relationships. The human condition and our existential crisis is one of the only aspects of life that remains relevant and endures through time.

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Jodie Woodcock would say my art is mostly abstract. I like different, always have. The way I create my work haschanged since I started painting, I have changed.

"I define a work of art as one which can convey feelings to the viewer : for example "The Kiss" by Klimt, which conveys passion, tenderness and beauty and " The Scream"

by Munch that conveys anguish and existential despair . I believe that the work of art has to be able to touch somehow the viewer"

David Wilde

Tonya Amyrin Rice

I started painting in 2010 and for awhile I could hardly stop. My ideas and Visions just flowed out of me. I been into drawing since I was young.

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The process of creating and the presentation of art is a fundamental blessing and encouragement for human society that arises from the artists' ability to open to the primal elements of life's appearances. Feeling the heart of events and finding the freedom to express that in media and terms beyond the distortions of ego is a liberating thing that wakes people up to the natural benevolent vividness of circumstances.

Erin O’Malley “With digital macro photography I have been exploring the interaction of light with transparent and reflective surfaces.

I consider my photography a series of experiments, a process of trial and error that builds upon past succes-ses through the manipulation of variables”

Feel free to submit your artworks to our art review: just write to peripheral_arteries@dr.com http://peripheralarteries.yolasite.com/submit-your-artworks.php

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(Spain)

an artist's statement

Jesús Manuel Moreno was born in a village of La Mancha, a province in Spain. When he was 3 years old, his parents moved to Valencia where he completed his university studies. After that, he lived in Barcelona and Granada. In 2007 he returned to Valencia.

He has painted since he was a child, but he is also interested in sculpture, etching and photography among other aspects of art. He has published theoretical texts on art and its teaching.

Since 2005, he has been working on the so-called “White line”, as he named his last contribution to painting. This term refers to the emptiness in which human relationships are being transformed.

Formally, it consists of a detailed study of the white spaces among the painted figures; spaces that take center stage in the paintings.

“Apeles, the classic painter, believed that the colour black created deepness and that white created proximity. His principle is one of the premises on which the occidental painting is based. I intend to show the opposite, something the ancient Chinese painters already knew.

In the early 20th century the Spanish commercial photographers left the figures encircled by a white background.

Later, many fashion photographers would use the same technique.

Around 1965 in Spain, especially in Valencia, a group of painters called ‘crónicas de la realidad’ (in English chronicles of reality) emerged. This group included artists such as Canogar and Genovés, and they used white backgrounds in many of their paintings. In 1975, when I was 18, I joined this trend, but it was only a resource, a technique. Nowadays I use it as a style. I have been dedicated to the study of the emptiness for years; my works revolve around this concept. Now the emptiness has become a reality in my works.” http://jesusmanuelunico.wix.com/jesusmanuelmoreno

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Gold, (background Svetlin Velchev, detail)

Muanrafak

Mixed Media on van canvas, 2012 photographer Theo Prooijen Business & Pleasure Mixed Media, 2011 Oil on canvas.

71x71 in7(180 x 180 cm).

2005

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Jesús Manuel Moreno

An interview with

Jesús Manuel Moreno

by Patricia Mir Soria

You claim that the contemporary painter is an inventor that possesses in his DNA the desire to discover new forms of artistic expression.

How is Jesús Manuel Moreno’s laboratory of investigation? Which is the main course of action of your works?

JM In my case, I feel like a medium. There is a general worry in my field, but only a few people are elected to express them either with words, music or visual arts, this is why I feel privileged.

Aware of this, I have always defended the authenticity of what I have done, without allowing myself to be conditioned by external agents.

The essence of my painting is constancy, painting or drawing every day, along with taking photographs and other things. I cannot stop doing this, even though it is difficult to dedicate oneself to teaching art and practising it at the same time.

If I did not practise, what would I teach my young students? The main line of work is life itself; transforming life into art. Painting is only one sample of this task. If you are the same person when you paint than when you talk to people, if you demonstrate that you are alive, you will never run out of ideas in front of a canvas.

In order to advance in whichever discipline, first you must know the status of the issue, in your case, the history of art. You come from a place in which the Valencian school was developed, becoming the focal attraction in two historical moments such as the baroque (with Ribalta, José Ribera, Jacinto de Espinosa…) and later the period between the 19th and the 20th century with masters like Sorolla and Pinazo. Taking into account all

Jesús Manuel Moreno Self-portrait at the Wallace Collection. Photo this cultural background, what influenced you the most?

JM Pinazo, without a doubt. He is a painter from the time of the impressionism, not very popular outside Valencia, but he was, probably, the most advanced of his time, especially for his concept of finish. For him, as well as for any artist, a piece of art is finished when what had to be said is said, and it does not matter if it looks like a sketch. Moreover, I admire the beauty of his work as a whole. However, the Valencian school is not the only one that has influenced me. In my case, the influence lies on the attitude that

Jesús Manuel Moreno

Beach

seller

“Vendedor

playero”.

The Oil on canvas. 16x13 in (41 x 33Dance cm). 2012 4

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Jesús Manuel Moreno

The poster blank “Cartel en blanco”. Oil on canvas. 25x32 in (65 x 81 cm). 2009

I have observed in one artist, Vermeer de Delf.

He is the one I most identify myself with nowadays. Also, some specific works in the production of certain artists, like for instance El Bodegón de los Cardos, by Sanchez Cotán, preserved in the Museum of Fine Arts of Granada. I also consider that the English painters

of the 18th and 19th century have influenced me, and I always learn something from them every time I come to London.

There was a new movement of Valencian prosperity in the 1970s, when you were taking your first steps in painting. An especially

Jesús Manuel Moreno

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Concha and Pablo “Concha y Pablo”. Oil on canvas. 35x40 in (90 x 100 cm). 2012

interesting generation that you lived in first person. Could you describe what connected these young creators? What common interest did they have?

JM Well, I was 18 in 1975. I had already done two individual expositions. There was a group of

young artists about 15 or 20 years older than me that became popular since the 1960s. They were Genovés, Canogar, Equipo Realidad and many more. I was particularly impressed by the first expositions of Martí Quinto and Eva Mus. It was a time of changes in Spain and the youth lived it (background SvetlinChanging Velchev, detail) with a lot of excitementGold, and curiosity.

Mixed Media on van canvas, 2012 photographer Theo Prooijen Business & Pleasure 7 Mixed Media, 2011

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Jesús Manuel Moreno

Traffic lights in London “Semáforo en Londres”. Oil on canvas. 46x77 in(117 x 195 cm). 2014

from a dictatorship to a more liberal system was a challenge for all of us, now we dared to express ourselves freely. Most people in Spain had the same concerns. After that, Spain experienced some years of prosperity, and then the post avant-garde and a neo-modern period.

There were important social difficulties during the 70s, something that did not happen again until these days, and it was due this social change that many people who used to live well started to have economic difficulties. Nowadays, in Spain, the working class is being destroyed, and the migratory flow is also shaping a very different society.

From that moment on, you started forming your own personality as an artist. In your

works we find a special mark that shakes and fascinates the spectator at the same time. The coetaneous and plausible figures move on an immense white background. Could you explain what that means?

JM Every time I work on figuration, I realise that the most contemporary thing to do is to show my contemporaries just the way they are, they move and act. Showing the reality around us is sometimes the easiest and the most difficult task. I started working on this, without knowing.

Painting a boy that walks in his sandals after buying some bread gives you a lot of information about the way he feels and understands life;

Shana Molt

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Traffic lights in London “Semáforo en Londres”.

Detail

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JesĂşs Manuel Moreno

Dead self-portrait “Autorretrato muerto. Graphite and collage on paper. 30x197 in (75 x 500 cm). 2013

but when you paint several people walking on a zebra crossing you realise that there is a profound loneliness among human beings. Until some decades ago, people talked in the bus with the person sitting next to them, something strange to see today, something unusual. This is why my backgrounds are white, because they are emptiness, just emptiness, created among ourselves or created for us. In the 1970s, it was very common for the intellectual class to discuss about the so-called dominant psychology, and it was taught to young learners at school, but this is no longer done. Perhaps because it is not beneficial that they become aware of it. Let us wonder which is the dominant psychology these days, what is believed now to be the monolithic thinking. When only one way of thinking is accepted in our globalized world and those who reject it are treated as strangers, we must think that there is something wrong, something missing in our human freedom. During the 20th century, the artistic critique favoured nihilism, which explained everything. The human spiritual life was pushed into the background, to the world of fantasy of only a few people. This way, a

new false conscience was created, trying to make us believe that the human being was another animal, just like the rest, with no soul.

But this is not true. In the exhibition of the National Museum of Natural Science in London, which closed a little more than a month ago, it was clearly shown how the Homo Neanderthal did not carry out any kind of decorative or artistic work; unlike the Homo Sapiens Sapiens, that is to say, us. Because the difference between all apes and men is that the human being has a soul, a spirit that is manifested in different ways, including through art. Similarly, all the modern painting was seen since the same nihilistic perspective, explaining abstraction as a dehumanization of art, like Ortega y Gasset stated. In reality, the origin of abstraction, at the beginning of the 20th century, was a necessity of the spiritual reality of humans. Great thinkers, since the end of the 19th century, were deeply religious, like CĂŠzanne. Kandinski would not be understood without his orthodoxly Christian thinking. Starting a new millennium, we have the moral duty of looking back to the origin of Europe, of our civilization, now that many people

Jes煤s Manuel Moreno

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hand no matter how many times we look at it.

Same thing happens in my painting. Unlike photorealism, my painting has a pictorial quality related to visual reality, in a more emotional than physic composition. I intend to reproduce the society which I live in, trying to provoke a reaction to its countless lies. For example, in La modelo, I attempt to paint a poor girl to show a bikini in an attractive way. However, if we have a look at her figure and its shadow, despite that first impression of beauty, we find a girl who needs to visit a clinic to treat her anorexia and her serious back problems. In Deforestaci贸n, we observe how the development of society at all costs may leave us with nothing, since we will have no air to breath if we burn all the forests.

apostatize of everything that has given rise to the way we are. This is why, in my opinion, many identify themselves with my paintings, because in these white backgrounds they infer their own existential emptiness and the necessity of recreating it.

Emptiness seems to be a crucial concept in your work and the way you understand art.

Tell us a bit more about this emptiness and its current context, its relation with our society.

JM If we were just evolved apes we would not feel the need for art. The human being is the only being on the earth with the capacity of abstraction; that is the reason why my paintings are very plastic, as well as photographic. At first glance they look like photographs, but after a detailed analysis we discover that they are pieces of abstraction, like in any other drawing.

As Umberto Eco expounds in Signo, when you draw a hand, the only quality that the hand does not have is the line, which is an abstraction that humans do to distinguish between the figure and the background, something nonexistent in a

Apart from the depersonalization of the developed world, the 21st century is also full of social tragedies like wars or immigration.

Your work is very sensitive to this fragile collective that goes over long distances in search of an Arcady that fades away. What do these characters express in your paintings?

Gold, (background Svetlin Velchev, detail) Mixed Media on van canvas, 2012 photographer Theo Prooijen Business & Pleasure 7 Mixed Media, 2011

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JesĂşs Manuel Moreno

Crossing with red light “Cruzando en rojo�. Oil on canvas. 59x59 in (150 x 150 cm).

JM They teach us how to look at things in a different way, and especially, they help us discover that the problems of the human being today are the same as they were at any other time in history. We tend to think that foreign cultures form completely different beings from

us, but due to immigration, this proximity of people from other places makes us realise that we all have one same soul, that apart from filling our stomachs with food, we all have the necessity to satiate that emptiness that no prosperity can satisfy.

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Shana Molt

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Two Young men “Dos jóvenes”.

Oil on canvas. 40x32 in (100 x 80,5 cm). 2013

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JesĂşs Manuel Moreno

Ready-made. Oil on canvas. 79x79 in (200 x 200 cm). 2013

Since 2007, after returning to Valencia, we

from a different perspective. In that moment

find numerous swimmers in your paintings.

of your career, which is the importance of

This city inspires you once more, even though

your closest surrounding?

Jesús Manuel Moreno

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Two girls and Morandi “Dos niñas y Morandi”. Oil on canvas. 32x40 in (81 x 100 cm).

JM The consciousness of being a painter of the Valencian school makes you look at that sunny landscape without any prejudices. A great number of contemporary artists tend to reject the autochthonous painting school.

Nevertheless, after enjoying the Valencian landscape, its beaches and light, you must do a tough exercise of hypocrisy not to feel influenced

2013

by it. In Paseo vespertino or Esperando el autobús, for instance, this influence is appreciated.

In the last few years your work has entered into the phase of the so-called White Line, which consists in leaving the painting’s Gold, (background Svetlin Velchev, detail) background white. Could you describe the Mixed Media on van canvas, 2012 photographer Theo Prooijen

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Jesús Manuel Moreno

At an English museum “En un museo inglés”. Oil on canvas. 49x71 in (125 x 180 cm). 2014

main characteristics of this type of aesthetics? How can we discover its specificities?

JM The White Line consists, basically, in the white of the priming of the clothing among the figures. In 2005 I was not sure about how to fix it. It was almost a discovery. I did some works such as El silencio de las sirenas, painting the whole background with oiled white, but when I was working on Muanrafak, the finding was astonishing. Once the figures were painted, nothing else was necessary. Even though I did

not assume this completely in the beginning, I soon realised that it was the key to express everything I felt about the modern world. It is easy to know its characteristics, since it is suitable for every kind of painting, that is to say, for any type of technique, oil, airbrush, photography… In my case, its function is symbolical, as I said before. I think its real value resides on this, since using a whole white background to make the clothes that a model is wearing stand out has nothing to do with what I do.

Shana Molt

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Two Young men “Dos jóvenes”.

Oil on canvas. 40x32 in (100 x 80,5 cm). 2013 4

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JesĂşs Manuel Moreno

Your work has a simulated effect of freshness and speed of execution that hides, on the contrary, a conscientious, precise and very rational task. How is that apparent contradiction possible?

JM I do not believe it is a contradiction. It was this way in Velazquez, and it was also the same after him, in all the best artists until today.

Vermeer, Canaletto, Corot‌ Almost every painter is aware of this, but few of them are able to carry it out in their work. The painter must know how to let the audience’s eye accomplish its function. If you give the spectator the work done, he feels a strange feeling of selfsufficiency from the artist. This happens with the majority of the hyperrealist painting. The paintbrush must infer more than say, knowing that the painting is not finished until the spectator does so. As in any other process of communication, the receptor has the last word.

Are you one of those non-conformist artists that have not signed his definitive work yet?

What would that painting need to have to satisfy you?

JM The surprise of the divine, the certainty that God has put his finger on it, like in the Natalis day, that is to say, the day in which one dies, when there is no longer any doubt about the truth.

An interview by Patricia Mir Soria

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Jesús Manuel Moreno

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Looking at El Greco “Mirando a El Greco”. 2014 Inc on paper. 11x17 in (28 x 42 cm) Gold, (background detail) Mixed Media on canvas, 2012 Business & Pleasure 7 Mixed Media, 2011

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Exit

Fall

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Gold, (background Svetlin Velchev, detail) Mixed Media on van canvas, 2012 photographer Theo Prooijen Business & Pleasure 7 Mixed Media, 2011

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Fabien Jakob

An interview with

Fabien Jakob Hello Fabien and a warm welcome to Peripheral ARTeries. I would start this interview with my usual introductory question: what in your opinion defines a work of Art? Moreover, what could be the features that mark the contemporariness of an artwork?

My conception of art is probably highly subjective; I understand it as a certain ability to represent, symbolize, question and project certain intellectual, emotional or esthetical intuitions and convictions Would you like to tell us something about your background? Are there any experiences that have particularly influenced you and that impacted on the way you currently produce your Art? By the way, what's your point on formal training? I often ask to myself if a certain kind of training could even stifle a young artist's creativity...

Quoting Voltaire, "education develops the faculties, but does not create them! " I studied law, international history&politics and psychology, so the diversity of mine fired my creativity rather than extinguished it!

In art, my approach is genuinely and fundamentally intuitive.

Before starting to elaborate about your production, would you like to tell to our readers something about your process and set up for making your artworks? In particular, what technical aspects do you mainly focus on your work? Can you describe what your postprocess workflow is like?

There is no formal process as such but a kind of a light ecstatic trance I usually fly into while

Exit

Fabien Jakob

ARTiculAction

The Dance

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Fabien Jakob

From the Inversion series

From the Inversion series

travelling and being disconnected from my daily concerns

started to admire in the introductory pages of this article: and I would suggest them to visit your website directly at http://www.fabienjakob.com/en/travaux.html in order to get a wider idea of your artistic production... in the meanwhile, would you tell us something about the genesis of this project? What was your initial inspiration?

There is some kind of dissociation between time of shooting (the artist letting inspiration monopolizes the drive and the attention) and that of selecting the most appealing photos, finding the appropriate medium, printing and promoting… (the agent being somehow a bit more pragmatic)…

Now let's focus on your artworks: I would like to start with Nuance that our readers have

As you contemplate a landscape, you inhale the fragrances, allow the beauty of flowers to relax you and by the time you realize how warm the autumn sunshine is, the breeze cools you down,

Fabien Jakob

Peripheral ARTeries

From the Inversion series

the languishing winter nostalgia is here!

This is what I experienced in this series. I tried to convey atmospheres of harmonious beauty, mystery and to incorporate the power of the grey colour palette to communicate the process of continuous evolution and timeless questioning.

I have found Nuance very ambitious in terms of resources and creative scope: from a compositional viewpoint, I have highly appreciate the way this series establishes

such an atmosphere of memories, using just little reminders of human existence: how much do you explicitly think of a narrative for these images? By the way, I would like 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?

Each photo is necessarily an integration of my reality as I see it, an anchor in which perception Gold, (background Svetlin Velchev, detail) is shaped by my own experience Mixed Media on van canvas, 2012 photographer Theo Prooijen Business & Pleasure 7 Mixed Media, 2011

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Fabien Jakob

From Inversion series Another interesting project of yours that have particularly impressed me and on which I would like to spend some words is entitled Inversion, an extremely interesting series which I have to admit is one of my favourite ones... I can recogize such a subtle but effective social criticism in it... although I'm aware that this might sound a bit na誰f, I'm sort of convinced that Art in these days could play an effective role not only making aware public opinion about socio political issues: I would go as far as to say that nowadays Art

can even steer people's behavior... I would take this chance to ask your point about this.

Do you think that it's an exaggeration? And what could be in your opinion the role that an artist could play in our society?

Social criticism involves discernment of values, capacity of a reflective examination of their validity and limits and a significant amount of self-conviction to believe to be able to influence them. I am not dogmatic enough, this would be far above my ambitions.

Shana Molt

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Fabien Jakob

Fabien Jakob

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Fabien Jakob

9 Manipulation in photography is not new, but digital technology has extended the range of possibilities and the line between straight and manipulated photographs is increasingly blurry: especially in these last years we have seen a great usage of digital technology, in order to achieve outcomes that was hard to get with

traditional techniques: do your think that an excess of such techniques could lead to a betrayal of reality?

Photos are often betrayals of reality; some are caricatures. I love poetry as much as satire One of the features of Structures that has

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Fabien Jakob

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that some informations & ideas are hidden, or even "encrypted" in the environment we live in, so we need -in a way- to decipher them. Maybe that one of the roles of an artist could be to reveal unexpected sides of Nature, especially of our inner Nature...

A photo is a visual testimony of some facets of reality to which access is necessarily obscured by filters, projective and introjective processes, cognitive abilities, emotional, neurological components and history of each one.

I am busy trying deciphering my own interaction with reality, fighting for my own individuation while mediating the dialogue with these different facets; this is probably an exercise for everyone too.

mostly impacted on me is the way you have been effectively capable of re-contextualizing the idea of landscape and of environment... so I would like to stop for a moment to consider the "function" of the landscape suggested by your works: most of the times it doesn't seem to be just a passive background as in the interesting Enigmatic... by the way, I'm sort of convinced

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Fabien Jakob

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From Inversion series

Your works have been exhibited in several occasions and you recently had the solo at the The Swatch Group SA, moreover, I think it's important to mention that you recently received a Special Recognition Awards for the All Photography Art Exhibition. It goes without saying that feedbacks and especially awards are capable of supporting an artist, encouraging him: I was just wondering if an award -or even the expectation of positive feedbacks- could even influence the process of an artist... By the way, how much important is for you the feedback of your audience? Do you ever think to whom will enjoy your Art when

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Fabien Jakob

From Inversion series

you conceive your pieces? I sometimes wonder if it could ever exist a genuine relationship between business and Art...

weigh means losing one’s intimate characteristics. I concede that the balance is not always easy

Not listening to the others is to opt for exclusion; giving others ’opinion too much

Thank you for your time and for sharing with us

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Fabien Jakob

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your thoughts, Fabien. Anything coming up for you professionally that you would like readers to be aware of?

(March 2016) I was happy to share this moment with you

The next exhibitions are due at Galata, Museo del Mare, Genoa (March 2015) and Artifact, New York

an interview by Dario Rutigliano, Curator peripheral_arteries@dr.com

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(Austria)

"It is never just a surface."

Gold,Triptychon (background Svetlin Velchev, detail) Impact Distribution (Magenta) Mixed Media on van canvas, 2012 photographer Theo Prooijen 50x65cm each, 2013 Business & Pleasure 7 Mixed Media, 2011

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Silvester Stรถger

An interview with

Silvester Stรถger Hello Silvester, and welcome to Peripheral ARTeries. I would start this interview with my usual introductory question: what in your opinion defines a work of Art? Moreover, what could be the features that mark an artwork as a piece of Contemporary Art? By the way, do you think that there's a dichotomy between Tradition and Contemporariness?

In my opinion a work of art is a creation that allows people to identify themselves with it in one way or an other. Of course, this is a highly subjective process, but there lies the big strength and freedom of art. A piece of contemporary art then, would allow the identification to evolve through aspects of contemporary life. If the work of art addresses the emotions or the intellect of the recipients in a way that associations of daily life are activated. Tradition I would classify as an aspect of behavior and cultural standardization in art production. Rules and codes are developed over many decades, centuries or in fact since the existence of human beings. So traditional art would make use of codes or techniques that have already an established framework. Therefor I think contemporary art can incorporate traditional elements, and most of the time does in order to be readable. This is the reason why a classical painting can have a strong impact on the person looking at it even if it was made hundreds of years ago. Maybe the contemporariness is sometimes even overrated, as basic human needs, dreams and hopes don't change at all over time. A categorization between the two would only be possible when aspects are abstracted or in the extreme case, when people nowadays cannot anymore associate with a piece of art, for example if the code for understanding it and

therefor interpretation was lost. I assume that a person with a well developed iconographical knowledge can easily find also contemporary aspects in classic art, what again blures the dichotomy. I think tha tradition and contemporariness are not terms that are oppositional.

Would you like to tell us something about your background? You have formal training and you have studied Fine Arts both in Belgrad and in Vienna, where you are currently based: moreover, you hold a wide experience as film restorer. I would like to ask you how much these experiences have impacted on your artistic approach and on your evolution as an artist.

Well, as you said my background is influenced by academic art education in places with slightly different institutional practices. This for sure has an effect, maybe a conceptual approach is more encouraged when going through art academia.

Currently I am based in Vienna, where I live and work, but traveling is still an important aspect in my life. As you mentioned I also follow a career as film restorer. This includes working in archives with analog historic films. So for me the biggest influence this had, was the growing awareness for the materials, on which a society is guarding its memories and cultural artifacts.

What does this tell us of a society and what impacts does this have. Let's compare an oral culture to stone carvings, paintings or analog photographic artifacts. How can those memories be carried into the future, what is the time they will survive and what different possibilities does each carrier offer to the people working with it.

Currently the biggest task in the field of film archiving and restoration is the digitization of audiovisual heritage. This implies a transition of the carrier, a kind of technology dies and it needs to be replaced by and transformed into a surrogate. Three aspects in this process are worth mentioning: the market logics in digital technology, its unsolved fast obsolescence and the question of long term archiving. It tells us a lot about the world we live in if we analyze how

Silvester Stรถger

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Impact Distribution Triptychon (Yellow & Black), 50x70cm each, 2014

we guard our memories! And the influence in my own art? I guess I started to appreciate again analog means like ink drawing. The computer is a breathtaking powerful tool, but there are some hidden, for me repulsive downsides to it that I will mention later on.

Before starting to elaborate about your production, would you like to tell to our readers something about your process and set up for making your artworks? In particular, what technical aspects do you mainly focus on your work? And how much preparation and time do you put in before and during the process of creating a piece?

This highly depends on the very piece I am working on. Generally speaking I would say the

initial process is a spontaneous straightforward one. If I have an idea I think is worth following I gather the materials and start working. The process of working time spent varies then. Some works are finished rather fast while others develop to be a very long and slow process, especially in the ink drawings that consist mainly of a repetitive texture that simply needs to be drawn and that takes time. But this is a very enjoyable aspect for me. It allows me to shut down and work without interpreting, reflecting or readjusting the action. Nearly meditative states sometimes. The technical aspects did change over the time. It was noticeable how recently I reduced the amount of using Computers for producing my art and how I preferred to work with my hands and some very analog media like

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Silvester Stรถger

Impact Distribution (object), ink and opaque white on MDF, 24x18cm, 2013

ink on paper or analog Photography. It was the tiredness of using the PC for everything in everyday life, but also the satisfaction of drawing a line and having it right there, without any corrections, export or encoding. Also the human error is a very welcomed detail I embrace. For me it is a pleasure to see an error that is not anymore correctable if I don't want to start from zero again. In digital you can always undo your actions or readjust settings. Maybe this gives me a feeling of being human.

Now let's focus on your art production: I

would start from your Impact Distribution series, an extremely interesting couple of works that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article, and I would suggest them to visit your website directly at http://www.silvesterstoeger.net in order to get a wider idea of your artistic production. In the meanwhile, would you tell us something about the genesis of these works?

The genesis of Impact Distribution reveals one of the most intense thematic developments in

Silvester Stรถger

Peripheral ARTeries

City fragment (1 of 10): 10 fine art pigment prints mounted on dibond, 38x28cm, 2009

my works so far. For answering this I really need to start quite some time ago. With an interest for cartography I was extremely excited with the options and possibilities applications like Google Earth / Maps offered to its users. But very fast I started to create some doubt. One of the most important implications in cartography is the fact that it is a writing to be read. So what is not written can not be read. Censorship comes to mind. In Cartography there is the term of the "white spot", the area of the paper where nothing is inscribed. Be it because it is not know,

not interesting enough or simply should not be shown. Cartography is in the end nothing else than a power tool. It is a way to describe the world by showing how the world objectively is, and this is always a lie.

So if you have digital cartography it is simply a very powerful illusion. This is the basis for my digital collages. First in "City Fragments" I copied elements of cities from Google Earth and arranged them in a new way using the "copy and Gold, (background Svetlin Velchev, detail) paste" option of digital media.

Mixed Media on van canvas, 2012 photographer Theo Prooijen Business & Pleasure 7 Mixed Media, 2011

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Silvester Stรถger

This way I created small but dense units, like parts of an unknown digital representation of the world. I understood them like suggested puzzle stones.

Later I changed to big formats and created panoramas of "remixed" cities in the same technical way. In those works the whole image space was filled with visual information, that

Silvester Stรถger

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Tokyo, digital collage, Lambda print mounted on dibond, 180x90cm, 2010

suggests a continuation of motive outside the frame. The result were complete composites consisting of fragments taken of the very city from the net. Single trees, textures, streets,

houses, everything was cut out, transformed and rearranged. Only the title suggested the motive, but what is seen did never exist outside of the image.

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Silvester Stรถger

Silvester Stรถger

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These were painstaking long process, but very important to reflect on my ideas on cartography.

The process was continued in "Fortress Europe". In the same process I remixed places known through media for its tragic deaths of migrants to Europe.

Here I was more fascinated by the fact that you believe to see everything in nearly "real time" in online cartography, but in the end you just see a texture of a landscape and nothing that is happening there.

As a result a few elements of those places were reconfigured to a repetitive ornament, nothing else than a surface. You can't see anything in it, maybe it is possible to identify a house, but thats the maximum already. The titles of the collages nevertheless bring in the whole context of the places.

Fortress Europe (Lampedusa) digital collage, color foto print Gold, (background Svetlin Velchev, detail) 40x30cm, 2010 Mixed Media on van canvas, 2012 photographer Theo Prooijen Business & Pleasure 7 Mixed Media, 2011

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Silvester Stรถger

Borders, black ink on paper, 35x28cm, 2010

This was the moment that the subjective and physical act of drawing seemed to be very appropriate.

By drawing borders I introduced hatching to my artistic method.

So the repetitive line texture signifies for me the landscape and the people in it. From then on the drawings somehow developed their own dynamics.

Borders black ink on paper 35x28cm, 2010

Silvester Stรถger

Peripheral ARTeries

Captions

suggests a continuation of motive outside the frame. The result were complete composites consisting of fragments taken of the very city from the net. Single trees, textures, streets,

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houses, everything was cut out, transformed and rearranged. Only the title suggested the motive, but what is seen did never exist outside of the image.

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Silvester StĂśger

Viral Wars (U.S.S. Independence) pigment print mounted on dibond, 60 x 90 cm, 2013

Another interesting project of yours that have particularly impacted on me and on which I would like to spend some words is entitled Viral Wars... I appreciate the way your skilful usage of digital manipulation is capable of creating a bridge between the unsuspecting image and the truth about what happens there, bringing a new level of significance to the contest... By the way, I can recognize that one of the possible ideas underlying this work is to unfold a compositional potential in the seemingly random structure of the space we live in... Even though I am aware that this

might sound a bit naĂŻf, I am wondering if one of the hidden aims of Art could be to search the missing significance to a non-place... I am sort of convinced that some information and ideas are hidden, or even "encrypted" in the environment we live in, so we need -in a wayto decipher them. Maybe that one of the roles of an artist could be to reveal unexpected sides of Nature, especially of our inner Nature... What is your point about this?

Viral Wars is a series of photographs and in its

Silvester Stรถger

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Viral Wars (F-117) pigment print, 43 x 58 cm, 2013

nature somehow different to other works of mine. It started with an experiment of taking photos with a Camera Obscura. So you have images stemming from a very analog source. To take those images into a dimension of digital manipulation I find very interesting as two spheres of the artifacts can be observed. Analog grain and dust as well as digital pixelation and encoding error.

This obscures or misleads the reading of the character of the images. Further on, the motifs

trigger an iconic interpretation as we know the objects depicted from news. So this vacuum of instant deciphering an image is a core idea of art, to be able to be read in different ways. Why do we have certain associations, how did we learn codes for reading images? And how is this knowledge applied in popular media? These interpretation dynamics are the ones stimulated in Viral Wars.

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Silvester Stรถger

Shape : Extrude (1,2,4) wooden wedges, glue, acrylic paint, approx. 30x34x7cm, 2014

Multidisciplinary is a crucial feature of your current approach: you also prduce sculptural works as the recent Shape: Extrude, a project which as you have stated once, introduces a digital aesthetic in a sculptural form. Do you think that crossing the borders of different techinques in order to realize such synergy between different disciplines is the only way to achieve some results, to express some concepts?

This aspect I became myself actually aware of just when I was working on my ink drawings. It was a very awkward feeling to see me producing this constant repetition that reminded me a lot on state of the art visual aesthetics in digital generative art.

At some stages it looked like there is a hidden algorithm behind these lines. As if you see some code performing its own creation. This aspect I found of major interest, nothing conspirative or

esoteric, more like an exquisite aesthetic familiarity. This idea follows me since then. So for "Shape : Extrude" the process was a very straight forward one. I found this box of wooden wedges for constructing stretcher frames for painting. So I thought: What would happen if I release an algorithm that creates itself by using the wedges, just that I would be its mechanism.

Well the command was the program: "Shape: extrude". But i absolutely don't believe it is necessary to cross borders of different techniques to introduce a digital aesthetic in a sculptural form.

There are many different and extremely interesting strategies for doing so. For me the question was more to produce something "digital" with my hands as well as very limited material resources and observe where the hypothetical algorithm ends and my human imaginative power starts.

Silvester Stรถger

Shape : Extrude 3 wooden wedges, glue, acrylic paint, approx. 30x34x7cm, 2014

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Silvester Stรถger

Digital technology has extended the range of possibilities and the line between straight and manipulated photographs is increasingly blurry: especially in these last years we have seen a great usage of digital technology, in order to achieve outcomes that was hard to get with traditional techniques: do your think that an excess of such techniques could lead to a betrayal of reality?

Not at all. Those possibilities are just another tool and our reality is created by the use of those tools. For example a state of the art high dynamic range photography has more in common with human vision of reality as we may imagine. It tries to encode the very sensible logarithmic human vision into a linear digital signal. The same attempted Casper David Friedrich in its paintings. An aspect that is nevertheless interesting in my opinion is, that we create a imaginative image of the world that does not exist and this can lead to creating dreams that can never be accomplished. The only way is to develop a digital visual literacy in order to be able to interpret our digital manipulated imagery of the world. In an optimistic manner i trust that the generations after us will be more able to decipher images created by the computer. And if this is not possible, at least have more awareness available. The line of argument whether photography represents reality or not is conducted since nearly two hundred years now and simply continues under different premises nowadays.

As we already mentioned when talking about Viral Wars, it is also interesting how a very digital "look" of images, or their very blurry identification (because of motion blur, bad lightning, low resolution or hand camera) even is attributing certain images with a higher "documentary value" as it is exactly not perfect.

Why do we believe in youtube videos or news feeds about an event more, if the object is not even shown in a clear and perfect way?

Silvester Stรถger

Peripheral ARTeries

When the earth was covered by dark clouds, black ink applied to the emulsion side of clear film, mounted in projectable dia-slide frames, 56 images, size variable, 2012

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Silvester Stรถger

Your art practice strictly connected to establish a deep, intense involvement with your audience, both on an intellectual aspect and - I daresay - on a physical one, as in When the earth was covered by dark clouds, an extremely stimulating series that effectively mixes anguish with the impulse of knowledge that pervades all your works... So I would like to ask you if in your opinion personal experience is an absolutely indespensable part of a creative process both for creating a piece and in order to "enjoy" it...Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience?

Yes indeed, I really expect from the recipient of my works to follow me on a certain level on a small intellectual trip. I appreciate your association with "When the earth was covered by dark clouds", that you imagine also a physical level of involvement as it really is the case. Not just that it is an installation of projected slide images in which the people can wander around in an thus become part of it, but as there was also an auditive level of immersion that I would classify as a physical one in the exhibition. In the anyway dark space, a soundscape of rather loud drone sounds was present created by a small analog synthesizer. This enhanced the impact of the crispy and sharp intense analog projections. The immersion was still enhanced by the fact that the sound synthesis was open for interaction and people could change the frequencies audible in the exhibition. This happened in a complete random way and with surprising results. As a sequencing automatism was active a certain level of repetitive looping was included that let the audience drift further into the experience. To sum it up: the evening became quite intense.

Personally I find it very enriching if a physical involvement is asked from the recipient of a work of art. The senses are not just visual, even thought the visual sense is the most important for humans. Always when an artwork provides stimulus not just for the eyes, but also for the ears or body I find it immediately more deeper to experience than to just look at an image.

Silvester Stรถger

Peripheral ARTeries

When the earth was covered by dark clouds, black ink applied to the emulsion side of clear film, mounted in projectable dia-slide frames, 56 images, size variable, 2012

Peripheral ARTeries

Silvester Stรถger

Since 2005 your work has been exhibited in many occasions and you recently had the solo Impact Distribution in Wien... it goes without saying that positive feedbacks are capable of supporting an artist: I sometimes happen to wonder if the expectation of a positive feedback could even influence the process of an artist, especially when the creations itself is tied to the involvement of the audience... By the way, how much important is for you the feedback of your audience? Do you ever think to whom will enjoy your Art when you conceive your pieces?

The response an audience provides to my art is always interesting and welcomed. It can easily uncover so far unknown aspects of the works. As I said in the beginning, the subjective perception is the strength and core of art for me, but to react in my production to the feedback of the people I generally find rather difficult, as my practice is a very spontaneous one. In many projects I started again from a zero point without prior experience. So it is simply not possible to change production for pleasing certain expectations.

Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Silvester. My last question deals with your future plans: what's next for you? Anything coming up for you professionally that you would like readers to be aware of?

Thank you for the interview, I am happy sharing my work.

About the future I want to point out that there will be some shows in spring next year, but until then I will use the winter to calm down, safe energy and prepare for the next season.

an interview by Dario Rutigliano, Curator peripheral_arteries@dr.com

Silvester Stรถger

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Peripheral ARTeries

(Colombia/USA)

an artist's statement

This art project seeks to connect ‘homelessness’ with the reality of international refugees and Internally Displaced People (IDP’s).

Globally, 7,6 million people fled their homes last year, of whom 1.1 million were refugees and 6.5 million internally displaced. This is equivalent to a new refugee or internally displaced person every 4.1 seconds.

My work in Colombia with the Artists’ Diaspora Collective (Pedro Romero Vive Aquí) on the plight of IDP´s inhabiting the megaslums of Colombia´s urban poverty belt, informs my artistic visión.

I have attached a dossier illustrating my experiences with desplaced inhabitants of a favela in San Jacinto, located two hours from Cartagena in northern Colombia. These experi- ences were crystallised in a collective art project realised in collaboration with the people of San Jacinto, expressing their individual stories and sense of homelessness, alien- ation and displacement.

I have explored the issue of international refugees and the plight of IDP´s as symptomatic of the collapse of the distinc- tion between centre and periphery: international refugees (15.4 million), flee from the ‘Third World’ periphery to the metropolitan centres of the OECD, and IDP’s are driven from rural hinterlands to the cities, where they occupy a margin- alised existence in the slums and favelas on the edge of these cities. All this in the context of a globalised economy where capital moves freely across borders from the metro- politan centres to the undeveloped periphery with impunity, in its relentless pursuit of profit in the form of cheap labour and raw materials.

This project envisages the construction of an installation consisting of a favela dwelling constructed from the affluent metropolitan centre’s recycled detritus.

Slums, semi-slum, and superslums …... to this has come the evolution of cities.

My conception has been influenced by the pholosopher Martin Heidegger’s thoughts on the nature of ‘dwelling’ and the “tran- scendental homelessness” of contemporary technological civilisation, and the ideas enunciated by the geographer Mike Davis, in his studies of the plight of the modern metropolis in his seminal works Planet of Slums and Dead Cities.

Carlos Agamez

Peripheral ARTeries

Business & Pleasure 7 Mixed Media, 2011

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Carlos Agamez

Peripheral ARTeries

An interview with

Carlos Agamez

by Dario Rutigliano

Hello Carlos, and a warm welcome to Peripheral ARTeries. I would start this interview with my usual ice breaker question: what in your opinion defines a work of Art? By the way, what could be the features that mark the contemporariness of an artwork? Do you think that there's a dichotomy between tradition and contemporariness?

Hello and thank you so much for this invitation to be part of Arteries, it is a pleasure for me. It is a tough one, but I would put it in that way: a work of art for me is an expression from deep inside of our feelings that it has a sense of universality as a reflect of the reality but also it has a strong connection with others and involve a process, a work of art is made by an artist. For me a feature of contemporariness is to use the tools we have nowadays, the materials is to be recursive and imaginative using elements to put the art out there and let people swing in a reality with a different view, invite people to think and feel again. Probably the dichotomy is more in the way we look backwards in arts and not seeing what is happening now, we are actually reusing a lot of the concept from the history of art to portray topics and I think is more on the way we work now the dichotomy between tradition and contemporariness is found in the materials and tools but as I said we are using similar concept like DADA or Pop to create pieces of art using found materials and using the consumerism to showcase our modern society.

Would you like to tell us something about your background? You have formal training and you hold a BA of Graphic Design that you received from the Jorge Tadeo Lozano University,

Carlos Agamez moreover, you have attended many workshops: how have these experiences impacted on the way you currently produce your artworks? By the way, I sometimes I wonder if a certain kind of formal training could even stifle a young artist's creativity... what's your point?

Well, I did my degree in Graphic Design but before that since I was little I was attending art classes such as oil paint and drawings for such as I never was good enough but I enjoyed the fact that I was doing something that I like then I went to University thinking Graphic Design is

JesĂşs Manuel Moreno

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Carlos Agamez

close to art but is not even though we have similar points and we use creativity is a quite different process on the way we work always for someone, but you can have a lot of fun being a Graphic designer as did. All the courses I have taken more in the art field was just to found out history and what others have done in arts, which it has really helped me to produce artworks using references and common topics throughout the art history. I consider for the last query that sometimes if we get stuck in our way to produce an artwork this formal training it doesn’t help is confusing and try always to stop you from creating and let things flow easily it can be the stifle for someone who wants to create and express and say something to others in some way I think every artist is a kind of rebellious with a cause that just need to say and produce and confront people to see what they normally don’t.

Before starting to elaborate about your production, would you like to tell to our readers something about your process and set up for making your artworks? In particular, what technical aspects do you mainly focus on your work? And how much preparation and time do you put in before and during the process of creating a piece?

It is a process that I have to say at this point that graphic design as a discipline helps me to find a better way to clarify ideas and place things together, in graphic design we have steps to create and those are useful for every creative process besides my intuition is another one, whenever I am planing or before to start producing an artwork I talk deeply to myself and connect my feelings with what I want to say so, I write a lot, notes, phrases, words and I always carry on my notebook or sketch book and write things that I might be using later, music is another of my strongest inspiration I listen to music and a certain type of music to pick up words and create my own poetry then with images, also the news is mostly where I get inspiration from. I cut out from newspapers those particular news that are directly relate with my

topic. When I have to start to produce I play music and place all my sketches together. I use my notes and look for similar topics that others artist have worked in, then I just picture on my mind what I want and start to produce my artwork.

Now let's focus on your art production: I would like to start with A Little Piece of Heaven, an extremely interesting project that our readers have already started to get to know in these pages: and I would suggest to visit your website directly at http://carlosagamex.tumblr.com in order to get a wider idea of your artistic production: in the meanwhile, would you tell us something about the genesis of this project? What was your initial inspiration?

I believe “A Little Piece of Heaven” is this kind of project without ending, it is a complex process that started about 4 years ago back in my country when I approached for the very first time a community of displaced people victims of the armed conflict in Colombia. This artwork describes the feelings of people that are away from home, finding a place, trying to settle in a land where they don´t belong and the attitude of people toward these topic is a very challenging situation and make the process of settling more difficult. After my arrival to Australia to complete my Artist in Residence I started a comparison between IDP´s and Refugees and found many similarities that drove me to start the art installation “A Little Piece of Heaven” . As a representation of their situations living in a Limbo and with no roots to ground. The art installation reflects and speaks about being locked, being in a floating world.

As you have remarked once, A Little Piece of Heaven seeks to connect the concept of ‘homelessness’ in a comparison with the reality of international refugees in Australia and the Internally Displaced People (IDP’s) in Colombia, your homeland... so I would like to ask you if in your opinion personal experience is an absolutely indespensable part of a

Carlos Agamez

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Gold, (background Svetlin Velchev, detail) Mixed Media on van canvas, 2012 photographer Theo Prooijen Business & Pleasure 7 Mixed Media, 2011

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Carlos Agamez

situation have definitely influence my artwork throughout the years and my personal experience. I agree that a personal experience has more content and helps the creative process itself.

creative process... Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience?

I consider that both can be use in a creative process but not always a personal experience is part of a imaginative process but it really helps in terms of art and delivering a concept is more efficient when you have lived. In my case living in Colombia my early childhood and my teen ages was a first hand experience from news and experiences in my neighborhood and all these

I daresay that by exploring peoples' dreams for better future you succeed in achieving a subtle but effective socio political criticism...

By the way, although I'm aware that this might sound a bit na誰f, I'm sort of convinced that Art in these days could play an effective

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Carlos Agamez

role not only making aware public opinion about socio political issues: I would go as far as to say that nowadays Art can even steer people's behavior... I would take this chance to ask your point about this. Do you think that it's an exaggeration? And what could be in your opinion the role that an artist could play in our society?

I think is very important the role of an artist play today in our society, they way we can deliver issues and putting out there situations that

Peripheral ARTeries

barely media talk about, aspects of our reality, even though is not easy for an artist access to certain information we always need to go further, to showcase things that are hidden.

However, it is important to say that using metaphor we are pointing out topics that mostly are relate with politics, in my artwork I speak out for a lot of people have no voice or are unable to speak and tell they way it feels because our society lock them and marginalize them. The way we use art now days is to complete the

Peripheral ARTeries

Carlos Agamez

Transeuntes (Transients)

access to information that always remains incomplete and reveal aspects of our life that need to be shown and people need to see them and talk about them. Art in my concept is a strong tool and is part of the historical process of every age. Although art is an expression for a persona, today art can be used for many other aspects to express and engage people´s behavior towards a topic and create a wider concept of a singular thing.

the community of Villa Maria: I strongly believe that interdisciplinary collaboration today is an ever growing force in the all form of Art... and I daresay that most exciting things happen when creative minds from different fields of practice meet and collaborate on a project: the artist Peter Tabor once said that "collaboration is working together with another to create 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 several people?

Another interesting project of yours that has particularly impacted on me and on which I would like to spend some words is entitled Transeuntes (Transients) and it is a group of sculptures that you created with people from

I believe that in Transients a collaborative artwork I aim to communicate, express and 9

Carlos Agamez

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Gold, (background Svetlin Velchev, detail) Mixed Media on van canvas, 2012 photographer Theo Prooijen Business & Pleasure 7 Mixed Media, 2011

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Carlos Agamez

Transeuntes (Transients)

deliver all the different feelings the community has experienced within the process of settling that wouldn´t have been the same without them so in that way I strongly agree with Peter Tabor when says Collaboration is working together.

Sharing common experiences and helping each other is something that really enriches the process, personally I really enjoy working with people to assemble my artwork for me is like a collaborative artwork that allows me to be more patient and listen to people more carefully as when we are working with community they can come up with ideas that really blow your mind and can be the twist of the artwork, I want to share my artwork it is not longer mine, is part of a collaborative creation when I started an artwork I always seek people that can say similar

things and invite to work with me. Also, part of my process is work with people is a construction of a social pattern that we over the time have left behind and we are becoming more individual. No one really can build a thing, without another.

And I couldn't do without mentioning Live art (My Dark Side Has Grown) a performative piece where you explorate the bundaries between art and music and show: I have highly appreciate the intense and stimulating synergy that you have been capable of establishing in this piece... so I would ask you if in your opinion crossing the borders of different techinques in order to realize such

Carlos Agamez

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Carlos Agamez

Window Gun

Window View

from My dark side has grown series

from My dark side has grown series

synergy between different disciplines is the only way to achieve some results, to express some concepts.

spiritual as well, I try to connect socio political issues and try to put them out of us.

Furthermore, I consider an artist should explore different technics and let the topic finds a variety of materials until it finds a better way to represent, although the relationship between technique and artist is a dilema it is not a always a statement that you need to work with a technique you feel comfortable the most, it is more about the relationship between theme and material.

Well, I think My Dark Side Has Grown is a very experimental process that I decided to do in a very special moment of my life, was a very confusing and no really bright period of my life and I really wanted to explore music and live drawing sessions, when I got the chance to do it I felt that I released part of something I was taking for a while with me, my artwork is always very

Carlos Agamez

Peripheral ARTeries

Gold, (background Svetlin Velchev, detail) Mixed Media on van canvas, 2012 photographer Theo Prooijen Business & Pleasure 7 Mixed Media, 2011

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Myself from My dark side has grown series 11

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Carlos Agamez

During these years your artworks have been exhibited in several occasion, across Europe and the United States. It goes without saying that feedbacks and especially awards are capable of supporting an artist: I was just wondering if an award -or just the expectation of a positive feedback- could even influence the process of an artist... By the way, how much important is for you the feedback of your audience? Do you ever think to whom will enjoy your Art when you conceive your pieces?

I agree that every artist take impressions from the audience to improve the create artwork and creative process and to establish a better relationship between the artwork and the audience. For me feedbacks are very important I always invite other artists from different disciplines to perceive my artworks and say something about it.

However, it is important to say that every creative process need to be fulfilled with feedbacks to develop a stronger base for the artwork. Talking about awards, I believe they are very important today to support and allow artists to keep on creating and produce. It is the bridge that allows us to work in our beliefs and every award is an opportunity to make something real to make things come through as we know how difficult is for artists create from nothing and find opportunities to support financially an artistic process. Whenever I create or conceive an artwork I don’t really think in a specific audience to enjoy or for whom I create a piece of art however, I do think my artworks are in someway targeting those people that are unaware about what is happening in the world, race awareness about certain issues that might be political relate.

Thanks a lot for your time and your thoughts, Carlos. My last question deals with your future plans: what's next for you? Anything coming up for you professionally that you would like readers to be aware of?

My next step is keep on working in my concept

of home building my own concept of home living away from home dealing with situations that I still don’t understand. At the moment of writing this interview I am producing and exhibition a new project that would be great talk about in the next few lines. I am here, I am living, is my new art installation that deals with kids in a detention center in western Sydney and that I wasn’t allow to get the access to complete a workshop with the kids there. As the law has changed and new security conditions are in use here in Australia, after the recent conflict in the middle east, the rules to visit detention centres in Australia have increased the security conditions. The artwork that is best described as a maze where people can walk through and in the walls the audience is able to read real stories of the children that remain locked as a part of a policy in Australia stop the boats. During this process we organized a visit to the center, which was denied and I found different ways to get information with people that work in the center and is able to tell stories. The Maze is a construction made of net and fencing, which reflects the actual feeling and impossibility to be free for those children. My future plan is keep connecting people in my artwork and get collaboration from different disciplines to build my pieces of art also, I am applying to study a master of Contemporary Art in Australia in Melbourne.

Carlos Agamez

Peripheral ARTeries

Gold, (background Svetlin Velchev, detail) Mixed Media on van canvas, 2012 photographer Theo Prooijen Business & Pleasure 7 Mixed Media, 2011

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Lance Turner (USA) an artist's statement

My work has evolved out of my need to correct what seems to be a flaw in Photorealism as it was originally validated as a process-based form of Conceptualism. It is the act of transcribing photographic information through paint onto a canvas, yet the large, obsessively detailed images emphasized the painting as an illusion and not a process. I show the grid and emphasize the markmaking process within its increments to show that the painting is an object, after all the process and materials are real, and not a photographic illusion.

I've incorporated space and stripes as measurements into my paintings to further emphasize the painting as a real object.

Taking "the real" one step further, I have related the subjects of my work to my own ideas, perception of Art History and the internet, and my own aesthetic stylizations. The faces that I paint are only the product of my experience. Therefore, they more accurately depict what I believe to be the essence of painting, which is self-reference.

My paintings are about my thought process as I create fictional characters through the relationship of stylistic devices.

Because the subjects of my paintings are about a single identity, they are like avatars made for the internet. They reveal a sense of isolation that comes with specialization and distortion of the real through ideas and simulations such as Facebook. As the objectives of my painting have become a quest to find what is real and true, the subject matter of my work has become an exaggerated unreality of constructed identity.

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Secret Level (Infinite Self-Portrait) digital collage, 2014 Gold, (background Svetlin Velchev, detail) Mixed Media on van canvas, 2012 photographer Theo Prooijen Business & Pleasure 7 Mixed Media, 2011

Peripheral ARTeries

Lance Turner

An interview with

Lance Turner

by Dario Rutigiiano

Hello Lance, and a warm welcome to Peripheral ARTeries. I would start this interview with my usual ice breaker question: what in your opinion defines a work of Art? By the way, what could be the features that mark the contemporariness of an artwork? Do you think that there's a dichotomy between tradition and contemporariness?

A work of art is anything that you use to expand or define the idea of Art. I see a traditional landscape painting in a commercial gallery, and it is hard for me to believe it is art. Art, and especially painting, has changed so much even since the 70s. I think contemporary art reflects a visual culture where there is so much to see that there is a reluctance to reflect and define what's going on. I see a lot of clean but intuitive experimentation with surface and texture in painting, a lot of artwork about a state of transition, and a lot of artwork about cool stuff like pizza and cats likely because of Instagram.

Contemporary artwork is different because it is made in a time when you can find a million cool images of anything you want on tumblr. In my own work, art could be defined as a reaction to the search engine.

Would you like to tell us something about your background? You have formal training and you hold a MFA in Painting from Savannah College of Art and Design: how does this experience impact the way you currently produce your artwork?

From the beginning, I thought Conceptual Art and Photorealism of the 60s and 70s was the best art.

I wanted to combine the two to have art that looked good and was well thought out. At

Self-Portrait with Break Up, digital collage, 2013

Savannah College of Art and Design, they encouraged me to consider a formal and intuitive way of making art that reflected contemporary culture as opposed to trying to further define Photorealism and Conceptualism.

Before starting to elaborate about your production, would you like to tell to our readers something about your process and set up for making your artworks? In particular, what technical aspects do you mainly focus on your work? And how much preparation and time do you put in before and during the process of creating a piece?

I might think about an idea for a couple of years before it finally turns into a work of art. I make paintings that take as long as 1500 hours to make, and I make new cover photos for my Facebook profile that take 30 minutes or less. I have Photoshop on my laptop, and that is where

Lance Turner

ARTiculAction

Scary Self-Portrait

The Dance digital collage, 2011 4

Infinite Studio Displacement digital collage and acrylic on canvas 108in x 108in, 2012

Peripheral ARTeries

Lance Turner

almost all of my artwork starts. I make artwork in/on pretty much any space that is available to me. I like to think of supervisual ideas like infinity and gravel driveways in the 5th dimension and represent them as images.

Technically, I end up digitally manipulating paintings and photographs to achieve that effect.

Now let's focus on your art production: I would like to start with Window Glitch an extremely interesting video that our readers have already started to get to know in these pages: and I would suggest to visit directly at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wd_n36QcYY in order to get a wider idea of it: in the meanwhile, would you tell us something about the genesis of this project?

What was your initial inspiration?

When I was planning this video I was finishing up grad school; I was trying to keep up with 5 or 6 online art communities, instagram (@laaaaance), and Facebook; I saw all the art at Art Basel; and there was too much going on for one person to keep up with. I wanted to use video to recreate that feeling because its possible to have more simultaneously occurring things in a video than a person can keep up with.

I also wanted to convey this idea of becoming isolated by getting too involved with keeping up with all of this extraneous information, which is why I chose to create this window inside of a window inside of a window thing. Its a process of being further removed from reality. I wanted it to look crazy and volatile to reflect contemporary culture, but maybe that was just me being in grad school haha!

And I couldn't do without mentioning your Digital series, a body of work that clearly reveals the synergy between Art and Technology... Digital technology has extended the range of possibilities. The line between straight and manipulated photographs is increasingly blurry: especially in the last 15 years we have seen a great usage of digital technology in order to achieve outcomes that were hard to get with traditional techniques: do you think that an excess of such

Lake, acrylic on canvas, 60in x96in, 2013 techniques could lead to a betrayal of reality?

Absolutely. Its not only the visual representation

Lance Turner

Peripheral ARTeries

of reality that betrays reality. Ideally, the more

only defined what your interpretation of that thing

you try to define something, the more you have

Svetlin Velchev, detail) is. Practically speaking, IGold, know (background not to trust the Mixed Media on van canvas, 2012 photographer Theo Prooijen

Peripheral ARTeries

Lance Turner

Secret Level (Infinite Self-Portrait), digital collage, 2014

news or the way a model looks in a photograph.

If I make Realistic art, then it only represents reality as I have depicted it, and ideally I will have betrayed reality as much as possible.

I dare say that Secret Level and Selfportrait Window eloquently succeed in expressing harmony in the contrast: moreover, I would like to stop for a moment to consider the "function" of the background of the frames in this stimulating work: it has suggested to me

the concept that some information & ideas are hidden, or even "encrypted" in the environment we live in, so we need -in a wayto decipher them. Maybe that one of the roles of an artist could be to reveal unexpected sides of Nature, especially of our inner Nature... what's your point about this?

Maybe I was trying to reveal an unexpected side of nature. I wanted to figure out how unreal or artificial art can be by pushing the selfreferential and distancing aspects of the image

Lance Turner

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Infinitely Interrupted Self-Portrait, digital collage, 2012

into infinity. A frame is a network of things or ideas that define a subject. I made systems of

frames that seem to be about framing to show Gold,or(background detail) reality as something absurd even transcended Mixed Media on canvas, 2012 Business & Pleasure 7 Mixed Media, 2011

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Lance Turner

in "Self-portriat as Infinite Window". I wanted to make an insane world. I found that there is a point where clarity dissolves as things get more specialized or appropriated.

One of the features of your Super Hard and Toy Skull that has mostly struck on me is the dynamism, the sense of movement that you have been capable of impressing on your works... and I have highly appreciated the nuance of intense tones which creates an interesting synergy rather than a contrast between such bright tones... any comments on your choice of "palette" and how it has changed over time?

I think the fervent energy and acidic colors were inspired most by garage rock, and the fact that I was tired of the color blue. Thee Oh Sees and Ty Segall are some of my favorite musicians, and I think their music inspired a lot of the repetitive and psychedelic aspects of my work.

As you have remarked once, your paintings are about your thought process as you create fictional characters through the relationship of stylistic devices... so I would like to ask you if in your opinion personal experience is an absolutely indespensable part of a creative process... Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience?

I can't imagine an art making process that isn't an experience. Even a situational work of art is defined by parameters that the artist made, and that idea is a product of the artist's previous experiences. I think that every mark you make reveals something about your thought process.

When it comes to making something as complex as a portrait, then everything that frames the image from the objects that the subject is paired with to the size of the canvas reveals something about you and your relationship to the person you are painting. How can a creative process be disconnected from a direct experience? You can make machines or gifs that

Super Hard, digital collage, 2011

work on their own forever, but you are the one who initially created them.

So far your works have been exhibited on several occasions and I think it's important to mention that you recently had your solo show entitled "Lance Turner: Process and Documentation" which was included in the Memphis Flyer's Best of 2008 as "one of the most wildly imaginative shows of the year"... It goes without saying that feedback and especially awards are capable of supporting an artist: I was just wondering if an award -or just the expectation of a positive feedback- could

Shana Molt

Toy Skull, digital collage, 2011

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Lance Turner

Lance Turner

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Gold, (background detail) Greater than the Sum of Its Parts Mixed Media on canvas, 2012 Business & Pleasure 7 Mixed Media, 2011 digital collage, 2010

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Lance Turner

even influence the process of an artist... By the way, how important is feedback from your audience? Do you ever think of who will enjoy your Art when you conceive your pieces?

Cumulatively, I think support is important because it confirms that you are communicating to other people. It confirms a social function for your artwork. I think a lot of people make fun of the Facebook "like", but it is a measure of support. I am influenced by positive feedback for better or worse. It makes me more productive. If people explain to me why my artwork sucks, then their opinion is even more influential. I do think about who will look at my work, but usually that is after I have already made it. If your work is intended to be didactic at all, then it is important that people see your work. My artwork is sometimes made specifically for certain people to see, like a profile picture. Conversely, I painted a painting that took up an entire half of 2013 that wasn't intended for anyone.

Thanks a lot for your time and your thoughts, Lance. My last question deals with your future plans: what's next for you? Anything coming up for you professionally that you would like readers to be aware of?

I just finished a painting in Memphis, TN. I am finally able to catch a break after 2 straight years of work. Its time to get back in the studio and start on some new stuff! You can keep track of my artwork and upcoming exhibitions at www.lanceturnerpainting.com

an interview by Dario Rutigliano, Curator peripheral_arteries@dr.com

Bodybuilder Dolly with Woo! Wolves digital collage, 2012

Shana Molt

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(USA)

an artist's statement

My art expresses who I am, who I want to be, and where I want to go.

Most is based on deep emotional experiences and the impact it has had on me.

I use vibrant colors for movement and thick palette and brush strokes for texture.

My works often contain a hidden or an explicit message.

I am very guided by music which I try to capture with every painting through color, light and space.

Shana Molt

Fall

Jane Gottlieb

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Gold, (background Svetlin Velchev, detail) Mixed Media on van canvas, 2012 photographer Theo Prooijen Business & Pleasure 7 Mixed Media, 2011

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An interview with

Shana Molt Hello Shana, and welcome to Peripheral ARTeries. I would start this interview with my usual introductory question: what in your opinion defines a work of Art? By the way, what could be in your opinion the features that mark an artworks as a piece of Contemporary Art?

Contemporary Art is art that is relevant, passionate, speaks to those who are viewing, and speaks or comes from the soul of the creator. It evokes something even if just a calm.

Experiences of people and places and things in all medias. Our time is diverse as should be art.

Would you like to tell us something about your background? Are there any experiences that has particularly impacted on you as an artist and on the way you currently produce your works?

That is a tough question to answer. I am a woman, a nurse, a mother and a wife. I have seen the worst of humanity and I still have hope.

I have lost so much in this life. My son, my twin, my friends. My life is my background. It is filled with longing and regret and happiness and sadness and such deep immeasurable love which sometimes sears the most. It is full and bright and lonely and dark. I feel. I paint what I feel.

Before starting to elaborate about your production, would you like to tell to our readers something about your process and set up for making your artworks? In particular, what technical aspects do you mainly focus on your work? And how much preparation and time do you put in before and during the process of creating a piece?

A teacher once said, "never be afraid of the

Shana Molt

canvas." I have heard that from writers and actors as well. Just start it. Don't hesitate, change it or leave it alone. But above all else, start. Sometimes the brush does the painting for me. The way the paint drips or blends tells the picture my mind can't. I usually start by taking down the white. That is the door that needs to open.

Once there is color, even if that color changes as the piece changes, its difficult for me to start until the canvas is covered. Bringing the figures and objects out of the background is my process.

Shana Molt

ARTiculAction

The Dance 4

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Shana Molt

Alone

Angel Numbers

Michelangelo said every stone has a sculpture inside, that is also true of canvas. You just have to get rid of what isn't needed. As for preparation time, I need none. My paints and canvas are at the kitchen table. They are ready to go any time. My family has gotten used to me being in the center of the room waiving my hands around and then announcing I'm done. I have to paint fast. If I think too much about any one piece it becomes a chore and doesn't give to the feeling it was meant to have.

started to admire in the introductory pages of this article: and I would suggest to our readers to visit https://www.etsy.com/shop/etsyloft in order to get a wider idea of your artistic production...

In the meanwhile, would you like to tell us something about the genesis of this project?

What was your initial inspiration?

Now let's focus on your art production: I would start from The Dance we Dance and Forest for Trees that our readers have already

The Dance we Dance at first glance is of two dancers. But the inspiration was from a place of feeling if they only knew what this dance covered, exemplified, masked, led too, led away, loneliness while in sync, etc.

Shana Molt

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Forest for the Trees

I think we all have to dance through life. Some dances are carefree and some so painful every minute marks an agonizing measure of time. We smile because we don't want the questions, we laugh because we were told to in order to be polite and we disguise our pain and even our happiness to fit the situation. In life we have partners for this dance, our parents, our lovers, our children, our mentors. At the end of the

dance we are left with accomplishments or failures, but we danced either way.

The Forest for the Trees is a bit clichĂŠ. But unique to the individual. We see what we want to see, what makes us whole which sometimes makes us sacrifice the big picture. Sometimes it lets us survive for if we saw the whole forest the weight of it would burden our soul to its Svetlin Velchev, detail) extinction. At different Gold, points(background in our lives Mixed Media on van canvas, 2012 photographer Theo Prooijen Business & Pleasure 7 Mixed Media, 2011

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Shana Molt

Revealed

Reach

different parts of the forest will become more illuminated, more important. At others it will fade to the background and become insignificant to the path we are on. The forest is our life and what we choose. No right, no wrong, just the trees. Sometimes all a tree means is a tree, nothing more.

interesting Birch in Winter and especially in Waiting, which I have to admit is one of my favourite pieces of your... by the way, any comments on your choice of "palette" and how it has changed over time?

One of the feature of these works that has mostly struck on me is the dynamicity, the sense of movement that you have been capable of impressing on your works... and I have highly appreciated the nuance of intense tones which creates an interesting synergy rather than a contrast between such bright tones of red, as in Alone and in the extemely

I have always been blind in my right eye and have relied heavily on my left. This year my vision has decompensated to the point I could no longer drive at night or read without significant magnification and lighting. I chose the colors so I could see them. Last week I had surgery and was actually surprised at what I have been painting. This whole time I thought the colors were dull and muted and I could not convey what

Shana Molt

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Loss 4

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Shana Molt

Frustrated

Loss

I really was feeling. All the while, the colors were there all along. I don't know what this new found vision will bring in the future but I'm so excited to find out. I love the color red and ice blue. It is emotional and sharp. It cuts and burns. Its cold and warm at the same time. It illuminates and focuses. It moves with light and draws you to energy. Both colors acted as a beacon of sight for me. I could see what I felt and I could make others see and feel.

Embrace I and II are capable of establishing a deep involvement with the viewers, both on an intellectual aspect and - I daresay- on a physical one... they often seem to reveal such an intense inner struggle... so I would like 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?

As you have stated once, most of your paintings are based on deep emotional experiences and the impact it has had on you: I daresay that your works, as Frustrated and

I am so glad your impressions of my work is exactly what I wanted to portray. I am very frustrated all the time. I am frustrated with the inability to get over loss, I feel longing for things

Shana Molt

Peripheral ARTeries

Gold, (background Svetlin Velchev, detail)

Embrace

Mixed Media on van canvas, 2012 photographer Theo Prooijen Business & Pleasure 7 Mixed Media, 2011

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Captions

Shana Molt

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Captions

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Sky of fire

I can't have or have back. I want and need and can't have. I play the game to appease but the burden of the faรงade breaks and my act is revealed. As I have said earlier, I have loved and loved so deeply. I have also lost more than anyone should ever have to in one or 20 lifetimes. I have survived. I put one foot in front

of the other. I stood up after sitting down. It has changed me. I am no better for it and most of it never had meaning or some deep spiritual connection to karma. It was what is was. Love, loss, pain, despair, more love and more loss. I could never separate what I feel from what I paint. I actually tried. I was commissioned to do

Shana Molt

Alone 2 4

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Shana Molt

Self

a mothers day series and was told what the subject matter was. I hated every minute. It was painful and unfulfilling. It was math on canvas. It was no longer my art, it was a request and I job I had to accomplish.

Many of painting center around sleep or lack there of. I long for sleep that never comes. This life act has eluded me for decades. When I do dream they are so wracked with pain and guilt

and remorse and sorrow, I long to wake. Once awake the memories of my life and the pain the dreams brought makes me beg to be free of it.

The only way to escape I believe is to truly and uninhibitedly sleep which will never come. Sleep can be lonely and scary and comforting and safe.

I can't do it regularly so I paint it.

An I couldn't do without mentioning Red Sunset and Bridge We Cross which are part of

Shana Molt

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Perspective

your landscape series... I would daresay that these works eloquently succeed in express harmony in the contrast: moreover, I would like to stop for a moment to consider the "function" of the landscape suggested by these stimulating works: it has suggested me the concept that some informations & ideas are hidden, or even "encrypted" in the environment we live in, so we need -in a wayto decipher them. Maybe that one of the roles of an artist could be to reveal unexpected

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

Sunsets usually mark the end. The end of light, the end of the day, the end of work. For me sunsets are beginning. The hope to start over.

The last fire that is humanity before it charges up for the next battle. The colors that are revealed are remnant of the war and a (background Svetlin detail) welcomed reprieve fromGold, the battle.

Its aVelchev, blanket Mixed Media on van canvas, 2012 photographer Theo Prooijen Business & Pleasure 7 Mixed Media, 2011

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Shana Molt

of color that disappears as soon as its noticed.

Its the brightest and most colorful when your eyes are the weakest and need the help to see what lies ahead.

cause of the day. I only started selling them because of the urging of family and friends. They said, "The world needs to see these." I really had no idea they would touch so many lives. I am always honored when someone likes my work.

When a person brings such a personal part of me into their homes and lives and it impacts them when they see it daily, that is the biggest accomplishment of all.

Bridges signify the bridges we cross in life. They are connections to what is wanted and longed for to where we came from. They are scary and narrow. They are lonely. They can evoke fear and continuity. They connect and separate and lift away from what is below.

Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing your thoughts, Shana. My last question deals with your future plans: what's next for you? Anything coming up for you professionally that you would like readers to be aware of?

Self was done in layers and bright colors.

Outwardly I am pretty gregarious. I laugh, I love, I make people laugh, I care. My eyes are closed because behind it all I am actually silent. I watch and see and when seeing is too much, I close my eyes.

By the way, many contemporary landscape artists have some form of environmental or even political message in their works: do you consider that your images could have such a political connotation in this way or do you seek to maintain a neutral approach?

This year has exploded with possibilities. I feel with a purpose now. I feel so I can paint and I paint so I can feel. I started working with mixed medias and textures and am hoping to work those more into my pieces to further bring life to what I create. I am honored to speak with you and touched that you took time to get to know me.

I am neutral by nature. I empathize with many.

I internalize only to the point that I ponder how the socioeconomic landscape could effect me and my family and in turn the worlds individuals and their families. Most of my paintings have only to do with what I feel and do not try to conquer the temperature of the world.

Thank you again.

During your career your works have been shown in several occasions: what impressions did you receive from these experiences? By the way, it goes without saying that feedbacks and especially awards are capable of supporting an artist: I someteimes wonder if the expectation of a positive feedback- could even influence the process of an artist... By the way, how much important is for you the feedback of your audience? Do you ever think to whom will enjoy your Art when you conceive your pieces?

an interview by Dario Rutigliano, Curator peripheral_arteries@dr.com

I painted for years and gave them away. I donated to hospitals and organizations for the

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Shana Molt

Left Behind

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Krusty Wheatfield (USA) an artist's statement

I work with what is around me, what finds me: an accidental smear on paper becomes a creature, the sound of eating an apple sounds just like footsteps in the snow.

My paintings and sculptures all stem from my belief that the world is full of humor that is both intentional and accidental, a mixture of chance and choice.

Being human gets weirder every year and art-making is one of the stranger things we do.

Whether I work in sculpture, painting, or illustration, I hope to amuse and confuse, so we all come out a bit more limber at the other side.

Krusty Wheatfield

detail from Swamp Atlas #2: The Three Wise Men

Secret Level (Infinite Self-Portrait) digital collage, 2014 Gold, (background Svetlin Velchev, detail) Mixed Media on van canvas, 2012 photographer Theo Prooijen Business & Pleasure 7 Mixed Media, 2011

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Krusty Wheatfield

An interview with

Krusty Wheatfield

by Dario Rutigiiano

Hello Krusty, and a warm welcome to Peripheral ARTeries. I would start this interview with my usual ice breaker question: what in your opinion defines a work of Art? By the way, what could be the features that mark the contemporariness of an artwork? Do you think that there's a dichotomy between tradition and contemporariness?

I think a work of art is a figment of the imagination: you could put a glove on a carrot, spray paint it gold, and dangle it over a mousetrap in your kitchen, and people would probably just think you were very bored and/or strange. But if you put that in a museum and get just the right lighting and pretty flyers, people will be flocking around it like seagulls to a cheetoh.

By calling it a figment of the imagination I do not mean it is useless or frivolous: money and gender and authority are constructs that influence the world in tangible ways and so does art! Art for me is something that makes my heart beat faster. But all these things are determined by memory, association, education: the constellation of mental connections that bestow upon an outside object a halo of meaning that is unique to each person (but influenced by other people, of course).

Sometimes art can become too self-referential for me and that turns me off--I love art history, but what interests me is how a piece extends into the real world, how we can engage with actual events and ideas rather than just mutually stroking each other's fragile egos.

I'm still trying to figure it out though!

Nowadays (not that I know directly what it was like in yesteryear) it seems like contemporary art is boundless, and we can attribute that in large part to the ever-proliferating capacities of

modern, digital technology. 3D printing, advanced image and computing software, the INTERNET, cell phones cameras--these things have fundamentally shifted how we look at, make and disseminate art, not to mention how we move through space and approach other people and carry out mundane tasks. It's totally nuts! You can create (virtually) anything, and see most everything that has ever been made with a few searches. I think the constant rebounding between the past and the future that the internet has made possible has led to some pretty exciting stuff in our visual landscape. And some crappy nostalgia-soaked drek too, but that can be fun to look at if you are in a certain mood. I don't think there is some big red line separating tradition and contemporariness: in order to make something contemporary there has to be some knowledge of what came before.

Contemporary art is just pre-ossified tradition, just like the rebels of today are the tyrants of tomorrow (or however that saying goes).

Not to be pessimistic, I suppose I think they all bleed into each other: we experiment and then once we find something new that works we use it until it isn't new anymore. I think being an artist and interacting with "tradition" is a bit more hairy than being a spectator and visually enjoying a work of art, though: at least in my experience, the vastness, the impossible quantity of artists that have come before me is both inspiring and terrifying, depending on how much coffee I've had. I don't think its helpful for me to consider these things in terms of a dichotomy, I'd prefer to think of it as a spectrum.

There isn't one without the other but the borders are fuzzy, they depend on each other for existence and can sometimes seem to switch places when you aren't looking.

Would you like to tell us something about your background? You have formal training and graduated from UC Berkeley with dual degrees in French and English Literature, moreover, you are currently attending a Master's Program in Comics at the École

Lance Turner

Swamp Atlas #3: Drippy Invisible Lattice

Peripheral ARTeries

Scary Self-Portrait

The Dance digital collage, 2011 4

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Krusty Wheatfield

Detail from Swamp Atlas 4: Scorpion Dream

EuropĂŠenne SupĂŠrieure de l'Image (EESI): how do these experiences impact on the way you currently produce your artworks?

I sort of fell into English Lit and French because they were the two subjects I felt most comfortable in. Both of my parents are writers and my grandpa was an insane language whiz who would just reel off these encyclopedic stories about Li Po or some russian declension, so there was this kind of mystical prestige around any kind of intellectual pursuit that involved words or esoteric knowledge. I had learned French as a kid and ended up in the major because I got to read depressing books and write about them and that fit into my worldview ("woe is me, first love hurts, I'm a sad girl" was my modus operandi for wayayayay too long) at the time. Before going to Berkeley I had gotten really interested in art and (what I

thought was) experimental music at the end of high school---I briefly considered going to art school and went to some open houses and such, but balked at the last minute, instead deciding I was better off studying at a "real" school and doing academic things (ha!). Throughout college I began making and sharing comics on the internet/through snail mail, but only really started giving it more space in my life when I met my art-star-friend, Anjelica Colliard. She's the best. We met while we were studying in Bordeaux, and it was like a miracle: I had finally met someone else who saw the world as I did: full of great material for art! Anjelica really encouraged and inspired me to just keep making stuff in a way nobody else had before, and we collaborated, which was really a new thing. I was used to just drawing in private and in stolen

Kelsey Wheatfield

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Gold, (background Svetlin Velchev, detail) Mixed Media on van canvas, 2012 photographer Theo Prooijen Business & Pleasure 7 Mixed Media, 2011

Swamp Atlas #4: Scorpion Dream

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moments, but she made me realize that making things with other people is so much better!

We moved in with 3 other artists when we came back to Berkeley, and from that point on I was both knee-deep in literary studies but I would come home every day to this completely different environment that was all colors and music and energy. While I was living at this house we started the zine Come Find Out, which still exists, as well as made a strange one-act pirate musical, concocted experimental pizzas, and threw some truly bitchin' release parties for our zine and for life in general.

The 2 years after I graduated I was very confused about what to "do with my life": I was ricocheting back and forth between academic aspirations and bohemian anarchy, and I worked a bunch of weird jobs: waitress (fired), book binder (twice: once fired and once as a year-long apprentice), bookseller, babysitter, poet's assistant, illustrator, and I had this sweet job where I just watched French movies all day and wrote down all the words in every scene. My new years resolution of 2013 was to start a band and I did and it was so great that we took a 6-month hiatus because I was too overwhelmed by the power of it. I also somehow got an art show through craigslist and that's when I made the paintings that got me into this magazine! I did a mural, and experimented with sculpture and installation. It was such a stroke of luck that really made a lot of other things happen. At this point I was also living with all my friends in Oakland in a tiny duplex, it was a wild hodgepodge group of Berkeley and Santa Cruz kids that called itself Squirf Nation, and we kept making zines, throwing these crazy release parties, and being alternately funemployed, slave-wagers, and broke-as-a-joke. It was both extremely fun and extremely exhausting. By the end of this adult merry-go-round, I realized I loved the world of words as much as the world of images, and I decided to apply to EESI with all my accumulated comics and artwork, and much to my surprise I got in!

Now I'm at EESI and it's totally great so far, but I'm definitely still adjusting. I brought virtually nothing and had been so ensconced in my Squirf Nation world that it was distressing that I had to start from square one with new people, create a whole new network-but now it's started to make sense, meaning I've found people to collaborate with (thank god)! Angoulême is like the complete opposite of Oakland but I'm trying to find my way into the grimy little punk pockets that have to exist somewhere here‌they must! I've been drawing a LOT and that alone makes it all worth

Krusty Wheatfield

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it. Being a student again is very strange, like putting on a really old sweater that got kind of crunchy from being folded for so long.

I'm a bit loath to be back in an academic setting, even if it is artsoriented. I got pretty burnt out on the whole thing by the end of Berkeley, and now it's not as easy to concentrate on these abstract concepts that did me very little good in the real world the first time... but you never step into the same river twice, right? The future isn't the past, so I have hope!

Before starting to elaborate about your production, would you like to tell to our readers something about your process and set up for making your artworks? In particular, what technical aspects do you mainly focus on your work? And how much preparation and time do you put in before and during the process of creating a piece?

I like to work with chance and improvisation in acquiring my materials as much as when I'm making pieces. Things that I find and things that are given to me are of chief importance: using them is like acquiescing to some cosmic sign, giving space to something that I might ignore otherwise. I've been trying lately not to judge or dismiss people or things so quickly, and this has extended into my art-making I guess: if I sit and think about an object long enough, I can find some way to make it interesting, and that makes the whole world ripe for the picking! For example, I've been drawing in this enormous bible-like dummy book that my old roommate Geo gave me before I left the states in mid-July-I LOVE drawing in it because I think of him every time, like we are in a way collaborating on this project across time and space.

I have a few things I always use: really teeny-tiny micron pens, india ink, watercolor---but beyond that I usually just make do with what is around me. Confession: I'm also kind of a cheapskate and I still have the knee-jerk student revulsion towards spending money, but there's also something satisfying about using what has just fallen into my lap. I'm also horrified of contributing to all the junk and plastic and waste in the world, so buying new things is only for truly necessary tools that I can't find in some other way. I guess you could say I'm always working because I'm always studying things and seeking their hidden potential, but that makes me sound boring: I like looking at the world, and that helps me to make stuff.

Camouflagellum

I will sometimes spend a day or two brainstorming for a big project, but I find that my questions answer themselves once I stop considering every possibility and put something out into the real world.

Traffic lights in London “SemĂĄforo en Londresâ€?.

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Detail from 3 Wise Men

Tom Porcellino introduced a book of King Cat comics and said something I really hung onto, along the lines of "I don't have time to draw this perfectly, I have things to say, god dammit! And I'd rather you see a few wobbly lines and know that a real person drew this anyway!". But when I'm making something, I am very concentrated.

That is to say, I'm drinking coffee and listening to the news and getting up every 20 minutes to dance to a fugs song. But all of those things converge in a kaleidoscopic cloud of inspiration that keeps me concentrated and receptive to new ideas that happen to be floating in the ether.

I've always been documenting and collaging things I find because I was obsessed with being a spy as a kid, after I read Harriet the Spy. Something about the combination of watching people and/or scenes passing me by, writing about them, and being hidden, but doing this because they were interesting or puzzling (not to humiliate or blackmail them) has been a part of my life ever since.

Now let's focus on your art production: I would like to start with The Ballad of Scarman and Turnip Librarian and The Three Wise Men an extremely interesting couple of

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Gold, (background Svetlin Velchev, detail) Mixed Media on van canvas, 2012 photographer Theo Prooijen Business & Pleasure 7 Mixed Media, 2011

Detail from 3 Wise Men

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pieces that our readers have already started to get to know in these pages: and I would suggest to visit your website directly at http://www.krustywheatfield.com in order to get a wider idea of your artistic production: in the meanwhile, would you tell us something about the genesis of this project? What was your initial inspiration?

The whole thing sprung from a drawing I did in a zine called Metamorphosketch that Anjelica and I did in mid2013. One person did a drawing in a notebook, and the other person had to draw something on the next page that both echoed the previous drawing but was also a new image: a kind of visual game of telephone, where everything builds on a chain of (mis)interpretations. The very first "creature cloud" as I call the process happened at the very end of the Metamorphosketch project. I was trying to draw a cloud of smoke/a musical fart and realized all of a sudden that I needed to make every little swatch of color into a creature: and they just blossomed right out of the page as soon as I had the idea. It was very psychedelic! Nothing new either: surrealists were practicing decalcomania way before I was gallivanting around. I created The Ballad of Scarman and Turnip Librarian & The Three Wise Men as part of a 4-painting commission for Singlewide Gallery, where I had my first show. They were about 100x bigger than the very first creature cloud so they were so much more work, but it was very fun to make them. I made a mural in the same style, and I guess I should go even bigger now! So basically these pieces are me barfing out all my visual associations and color experiments onto a huge piece of paper, trying to reconsider what makes a face or a hand; why my brain will interpret things in one way and not another, how my drawing abilities and memories converge in the intuitive motion of my hand. Sometimes I would reach impasses and have to turn the paper 90 degrees or go scream into a pillow because my brain kept seeing the same shapes and I wanted to re-scramble my point of view. It was a very fun and revealing experiment, with a great sense of accumulated satisfaction at the end.

As you have remarked once, your works all stem from your belief that the world is full of humor that is both intentional and accidental, a mixture of chance and choice... so I would like to ask you if in your opinion personal experience is an absolutely indispensable

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part of a creative process... Do you think that a creative process could be disconnected from direct experience?

I think every part of your life feeds into the next part--my dreams determine my day as much as the weather, my memory, the look the garbageman gives me as I step out the door. Whether I acknowledge it or not all these things play into my approach to anything I encounter later, and the very act of acknowledgement can create possibilities whose effects will only be noticeable much later. The creative process to me is a way of transmuting or sublimating my personal experience into an experience everyone can have, and that is why it is so important and so powerful. It is a vehicle for empathy, for humor, for whatever flavor you might want to share with another person or even just see from a degree of remove. So many times I will write something or draw something and think ahh this is crap. But when I come back to it a few days later or a month later I will sometimes realize--hey, i actually had something to say but I was too distracted by my ideas of how I should say something to actually look at what I actually did!

Swamp Atlas #1 The Ballad of Scarman and Turnip Librarian

I think art is a direct experience in itself, really--I mean, I guess you could put someone in an isolation chamber and deprive them of all contact with any kind of "experience"-but them being deprived of experience would become their direct experience! People become artists, it seems to me, when their approach to experience, both good and bad, leads them to some kind of 3rd realm where they can observe their experience and transform it into one that is outside of time.

Without experience what would we have to work with? I have an artist friend Tobias Richardson that I met during my residency in Senegal this summer, and he is a master at depicting his experience in a specific place in his paintings and sculptures. He was talking about how he wanted to do an artist residency in a prison or a similarly blank environment, because he said he would probably do something using dust and saliva and food, because those would be some of the only things available to him. I think this is the best kind of an attitude an artist can have, one where what you have is exactly what you need, and any experience can feed into something bigger and more meaningful if you take the time to sort through all the forces that influence our perception of and reaction to events.

Traffic lights in London “SemĂĄforo en Londresâ€?.

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I daresay that the humour that pervades your works succeed in achieving a subtle but effective socio political criticism... By the way, although I'm aware that this might sound a bit na誰f, I'm sort of convinced that Art in these days could play an effective role not only making aware public opinion about socio political issues: I would go as far as to say that nowadays Art can even steer people's behavior... I would take this chance to ask your point about this. Do you think that it's an exaggeration? And what could be in your opinion the role that an artist could play in our society?

I don't think this an exaggeration. Images carry so much weight today--not just because we are in an increasingly narcissistic navel-gazing kind of world but because, I think, the people in power who have been wielding words have consistently let us down, and art very often has an immediate and oblique way of piercing through bullshit and touching on a truth that words can only dance around.

I certainly believe that art can steer people's behavior: I mean look at what that girl who carried her mattress around Columbia all day until her school expelled her rapist: that shit was badass! But also look at ISIS: their social media campaign/recruitment videos are all kinds of viral--one might argue that its not art because its propaganda, but that seems besides the point.

These are audio-visual creations that have brought about actual human contact and incited what has now become a pretty formidable campaign of violence that is unpredictable, due in part to the tenacity and originality of their media efforts. Art is so often clothed in the dreary garb of elitist-intellectual jargon, but there are so many different channels through which to discuss and share art now that I hope this plateau of "good taste" will someday crumble/build some sturdy stairs so every day people are more involved in the exchange.

I think this goes back to your question about experience: art transmits experience, and this experience has an effect on the viewer in one

way or another: it can create empathy, despair, joy, angry etc, all very often on a subconscious level, through lines and colors instead of bald words and concepts. Art creates a wild chain of cause and effect that is impossible to predict but often very fun to watch!

The role of the artist is to question, whereas the role of mainstream media is to tell and sell: I come from the V. Vale school of Pranks as Art (read Pranks! by Re/Search publications ASAP!!)-so I firmly believe that artists should cause trouble where trouble is needed, where codes are stagnating, symbols deflating, morale dwindling: artists just mix up the visual landscape, reframe reality, remind you anything is possible, which is not in the interests of the military-industral-megalomania that governs the global media landscape. Poking fun can poke a hole in the field of windbags that pretend to speak for us!

Multidisciplinary is a crucial feature of your approach: besides illustrations and sculptures, you are involved in musical projects as well... do you think that crossing the borders of different techniques in order to realize such synergy between different disciplines is the only way to achieve some results, to express some concepts?

http://www.krustywheatfield.com/musicalprojects.html Not the only way, but for me it is the only way I know how! I am always eavesdropping on people in public places, writing down something I saw on the bus, listening to kora players while I draw-I find the everyday intensely fascinating because it is so bored with itself. Virginia Woolf talks about moments of "being and unbeing" in life, and I like to catch people when they are between moments of being. It is a complete lack of performance that I find eerily revealing of the modern condition, where we are constantly moving from one performative arena to the

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Gold, (background Svetlin Velchev, detail) Mixed Media on van canvas, 2012 photographer Theo Prooijen Business & Pleasure 7 Mixed Media, 2011

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other, always needing to prove our worth and show we are worth somebody's precious time. When we finally have a moment of repose and solitude, it is not surprising that we cease to "be" as we are normally, being without a referential source of meaning. I read Life: A User's Manual

by George Perec and that really flicked my switch: if you study the details of someone's desk or the stairwell of an apartment complex for long enough, all kinds of good stuff starts oozing out. That book and so many others that I have read reminded me that I have to keep all the windows open, and try to look out of all of them as well.

Doing music and performance is so much different from sitting in my room drawing, but I'd much rather keep re-orienting myself than stay planted in one spot doing the same thing over and over again. It actually feels AMAZING to scream and shout and look people in the eye after being silent and hunched in my room. When people are reading my comics there's always a delay between their experience and our interaction: I am not the comic so I cannot feel their eyes reading me, whereas when I'm on stage in a glittery jumpsuit, I feel and respond to the energy of the crowd immediately--otherwise the show would be so boring! Being able to see and move between the different modalities of art helps remind me why I make it in the first place: it is always challenging in different ways, and it forces me to be honest with myself about what I know and what I want to say.

To express some concepts, border-crossing does seem to be the only way, because certain ideas work best in sound, others in painting, another in a performative gesture, and so on. One doesn't have to try every art form but I think even just learning about a wide variety of creators and creations is indispensable in order to have an original perspective in the already-saturated art-world. Either you experiment or you don't! There is so much to be said, though, for those who dedicate themselves fully to one thing and become super-geniuses. Maybe I'm too restless, some fidgety child of the digital age who can't seem to pick which toy she likes, but I think the world in general is far too interesting to only focus on one tiny slice of it.

By the way, I strongly believe that interdisciplinary collaboration today is an ever growing force in the all form of Art... and I daresay that most exciting things happen when creative minds from different fields of practice meet and collaborate on a project: the artist Peter Tabor once said that "collaboration is working together with another to create 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 several people?

My whole art life is basically grace Ă Anjelica Colliard, but then I suppose if I go back far enough in time I find my childhood friends were super

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important in teaching me about the hilarity that could come from a few lines on paper--I still have this vivid memory of my friend Carissa and I drawing this guy "Dok" with these insanely bulbous hairy feet and just dying of laughter in the middle of a "life science" class in 6th grade…it still makes me laugh! Having finally tried out playing music with people really makes me realize how righteous musicians are--it's such a different temporal space to collaborate in. I loved practicing because there was a sense of exploration and adventure, the people I were playing with just wanted to keep making noise until something beautiful came about, and that really led me to appreciate the world of sounds around me more: I started sampling all the beeps and blorps and gurgles around me this past year and that has been stupendous! I made a kind of dream collage mixing people's stories and all kinds of field recordings (my favorite being a recording of a casino on a cruise ship, so magical and so dark at the same time).

But yes COLLABORATION: I think whenever I work with someone else, a different aspect of my practice is revealed/created, without a doubt. I think its something about the observer effect: knowing that someone else will be a part of the process alters your behavior in subtle and non-subtle ways. I think I work harder when I'm collaborating: since you're both implicated in the final outcome, there's a kind of double responsibility both to the future audience and to the creative/participatory audience of the collaborator. I haven't had a negative collaboration experience in a while (group projects in high school come to mind--but that's not voluntary so it doesn't really count). I think collaboration works best and REALLY works when there's a balance of power and a fluid stream of communication, and a real respect and interest in the ideas of the other.

detail from Drippy Invisible Lattice

That way you can access the "third mind", which Burroughs and Gysin so savagely demonstrate in their collaborative book of the same title.

I think collaboration can even extend to the outside world in a way: you can be "collaborating" with a construction worker who happens to be making an amazing variety of melodies with a jackhammer outside yr window. Collaging is collaboration with the paper detritus of our media-saturated environment. We are collaborating with some now-dead LIFE photographer who tramped through some russian wheat fields in 1927-- its so cool! Making zines has been probably the most rewarding act of collaboration I've participated in: we have worked with so many artists and poets from the US and elsewhere, and it is really exciting to get a glimpse of the world outside of my own. None of our publications would have been possible without these artists, and this has taught me how important it is for artists to work together to push the limits of their work and reach as many people as they can.

Traffic lights in London “Semáforo en Londres”.

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It goes without saying that feedbacks and especially awards are capable of supporting an artist: I was just wondering if an award -or just the expectation of a positive feedback- could even influence the process of an artist... By the way, how much important is for you the feedback of your audience? Do you ever think to whom will enjoy your Art when you conceive your pieces?

I have only recently begun showing my work in any serious way, so feedback from people other than my close friends is an entirely new concept to me! My generation was raised on a bedazzled bottle of self-esteem supplements (and social media doesn't help so much in the realm of delayed gratification either), so getting awards and positive feedback sets off deep-rooted pleasure centers, but also feels meaningless because it was so gratuitously doled out from my earliest memory. I remember getting trophies as a young tyke just for being on a softball team, when all I did was chew on my baseball glove in the outfield and pick daisies!

Grants and such are very important these days for artists to achieve some kind of economic freedom and be able to dedicate themselves to a complex project: the cost of daily life makes winging it as an artist a very scary affair. Having a job and making art can certainly be done, but the time you have to reflect on yr work and be able to experiment is diminished when half of yr day is spent counting detergent boxes or writing memos for yr snotnosed colleagues. I do think that working toward an award can be a positive force if it motivates you to really explore yr capacities and be fearless, but negative if you become too focused on winning the hearts of judges. Having a deadline is great for me--otherwise I never get anything done!

I try my best not to be influenced by my future audience when I'm making a piece: I think this specter of judgement severely hampers my creative abilities, makes me fearful of judgment and takes me out of my mind-set of free association and puts my gross need for approval front and center. Of course it's impossible not to think of your audience (its like saying "don't think about a white horse"--the idea is already there!), but even just being aware of this element in your thinking can be helpful in acting in accordance with one's truly-felt beliefs and tempering the urge for likes and reposts and what not. That being said, I like to make things I would want to look at, and sometimes it helps to put on the audience-hat and look at a piece through that point of view because I'm too closely involved in the production that its hard to see the thing without all the tangential information. I kind of wish I had more negative feedback actually--everyone I've shown my work to has been so nice that I

detail from Scorpion Dream

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am not sure what works or not, where my ideas are not clear, what areas I could explore more. Maybe its because it is mostly among friends that I have shown things that this is the case-perhaps I do not want this kind of feedback, but I do think it is a natural and important part of making art to want to know what it is like for the other half of the equation: what effects does your work have on someone and how. It is fascinating to hear what people get from your pieces that you may have never intended to express, and communicating regularly with other people about your work is great, if you take critiques with a level head and adapt your work in a way that still stays true to your intentions (which may change over time as well). It is TRICKY, really. I think you just have to be as honest with your viewer as you are with yourself, and remember why you make art in the first place.

Thanks a lot for your time and your thoughts, Krusty. My last question deals with your future plans: what's next for you? Anything coming up for you professionally that you would like readers to be aware of?

WELL! I'm making some zines here with friends in Angoulême that I will hawk at the Angoulême comics festival at the end of January. One is a sort of shared sketchbook with two artists in my master's program, and the other is a comics-zine with this amazing girl Emeline that we are still in the process of figuring out. I made a 70-something page book of comics after my artist's residency this summer in St. Louis Senegal which I did right as the Ebola crisis was becoming dire. I've never done anything that soul-baring before, but I think it's pretty funny/intense…it's called "Bringing Sand to the Beach", and it'll be in print in time for the festival as well. I've been putting together a collaborative art zine (Come Find Out #11) about Paradise with Anjelica back in Oakland, and I'm going to make another sound collage in the coming months with all the stuff I've captured recently. Hmm…what else? I'm talking to the lovely ceramicist (a childhood friend) Lorien Stern who lives in the desert in southern california in these industrial storage containers and hoping to arrange a residency there, where I will make ceramicomics…or something! I may be in a show in San Francisco around February of next year, but that's still in the planning stages. This is all alongside my studies, which I am already knee-deep in. It's going to be a great few years!

Traffic lights in London “Semáforo en Londres”.

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