To Re-center

Curated by Elisa Gutiérrez Eriksen

Nov 13 – Dec 3, 2020

NARS Foundation is happy to present “To Re-center” as part of the Looking Forward while Looking Back Series. This iteration presents the works of Sanie Bokhari, Lisa O’Donnell and Yohana M. Roa.

Starting from ritualistic, historical, and personal narratives, Bokhari, Roa and O´Donell entwine elements that create different portrayals, each of them with a singular approach based on the opposition of elements: beauty vs fright, transmission of information vs knowledge, the historical context vs memory.

They have developed a unique language that edifies new tales built from historical archives, elements of folklore and traditions, and memory. They center their attention in the expansion of the female perspective as a path to re-signify the present.

Sanie Bokhari  (USA)

NARS Alumni, 2018 Season IV
@saniebokhari

Exploring Pakistani folklore, my practice reimagines the female figure as a protagonist and idol. In some works female figures gracefully swim and dance. In others they triumphantly carry swords and severed heads. Water becomes a channel of both leisure and danger as I embrace opposed forces of beauty and fright. This bizarre mix of rituals could never exist in reality and develops into a unique ceremonial language. By constructing intricate visual and psychological spaces through painting and drawing, my narratives intend to evoke a sense of disquieted joy that comes from upturning the tenets of tradition, whilst also attempting to understand their evolutionary significance in a historical context. 

Lisa O´Donnell (Ireland)

NARS Alumni, Season IV, 2014
@lisa_od26

London based, Irish artist whose painting practice uses feminist and revisionist methodologies to expand and interpret the narratives of ground-breaking 20th-century Irish women’s histories. She is currently completing a practice-led PhD at the Royal College of Art London. She explores the notion of contemporary history painting and her work reconsiders, transforms and expands collected archive material. The paintings create imagined and altered scenes and scenarios, facilitating a space for invention and expansion of incomplete and partial narratives.

Can you tell us a bit more about your process when creating artwork?

My process involves taking cues from, and studying art history: from Mughal miniatures to Greek sculptures, old Egyptian paintings, Buddhist statues, religious Christian paintings, religious altars, ceramic tiles, textile tapestries etc. I also love looking at kinetic sculptures, and bring some of the same dynamics of movement in my two-dimensional work with overlapping drawings, and repetition in imagery.

I begin my work with lots of sketching, planning a painting or a sculpture on Photoshop and, sometimes, making small cardboard maquettes if I am planning a large installation. When I’m working out a piece digitally, I usually use my own photography, where I pick and choose elements from different images and put them together as a collage. This acts as a ground to start from, that keeps changing as I begin working on a piece, sometimes completely different from the original idea.

How are you doing these days? Is your artwork being influenced by or providing an outlet from the current events in the world?

I believe the month of March 2020 was when Covid-19 was officially declared a pandemic, and the world underwent a lockdown. Quarantine became mandatory, and human contact was seen as a potential life threat. I found myself back at the house I grew up in, in Lahore, Pakistan and continued to make work, not necessarily responding to the situation consciously- but knowing the effects of what was going on would inevitably influence my work. I was noticing a shift in my definitions of the ‘First’ and ‘Third World’, where my work in this time became increasingly interested in the disparities that seem to arise through the innocuous process of globalization, while grappling with the modern human condition in light of the pandemic.

Experiences became universal, the virus became the great equalizer, our biologically ingrained survival mechanisms were all suddenly unified against a common threat.

How do you see the role of art and artists in society today?

I believe an artist's role is to make sense of the world, but I cannot speak for others’ - however, I strongly believe in the role of activism in art, and art being a catalyst for critical dialogue. I acknowledge the limitations that come with this, where work exists in white cube spaces, which may not necessarily be widely accessible and inclusive. ‘Activism’ can also be at the risk of appearing as a marketing tool, which can often be at odds with reality - My work grapples with some of these questions and concerns. I wish to relay my experiences as a South Asian woman growing up in Pakistan as authentically as possible, hoping to reconstruct conventions and engage in dialogue that ultimately results in reconstructing preconceived notions that govern how individuals live their lives.

Is there something specific that you hope to explore in the future?

I hope to continue to deeply explore the emotional intensity that my work can induce, and wish to do that in a way that understands and embraces traditions, but also critically challenges and reconstructs oppressive mindsets of a patriarchal society. In the context of the medium, and physicality of my work, I wish to keep exploring and understanding the medium of paint. Even after a BFA and an MFA in painting, I believe there's a whole world of it, I have yet to explore - especially on a larger scale. Having recently visited the Vida Americana exhibit at the Whitney Museum, of mexican muralists from the 1920-1950’s- I was extremely energized to push the dialogue of my work with scale further.

Can you tell us a bit more about your process when creating artwork?

At the beginning of every project, I start with a process of collection, selection and reflection - gathering source material from sources including dedicated archives, written biographies and documentaries. Where possible I try to go to physical archives so I can get even closer to the source, although I am fully aware archives are not objective places in themselves. My processes and methods in the studio are constantly evolving but my most recent methods involve making digital collages and studies from collected material which then become starting points for the paintings. The extensive biographical research is important because when it comes to making the paintings of these women's lives and experiences I want to feel like I have done my due diligence and that I know them. Then it is through the collaging and painting process that I actively engage subjectivity in my decision making.

How are you doing these days? Is your artwork being influenced by or providing an outlet from the current events in the world?

I have just commenced the second year of my PhD at the Royal College of Art which I am pursuing on a part-time basis. This means that even before the pandemic hit all of my studio work was done remotely and I am also very privileged to be on a fully subsidised residency program at Carpenters Wharf Studios in East London. I was however confined to working from my kitchen table for the first 4 months of lockdown which did have an effect on my work. I started making small A5 paintings on paper, working through multiple versions of the same photographic starting point. They started off as just studies/prep work but now I'm feeling like they could be something very productive, even generative and serve to expand on my research related to the multiple subjective interpretations and views possible in relation to any aspect of history.

How do you see the role of art and artists in society today?

I think the role of art and artists in modern-day society is not easily confined into a short sentence. The type of art I’m interested in making is something that attempts to make a contribution to something I feel deeply connected to; a feminist questioning of accepted histories. I think art and artists play a vital role in questioning and challenging power structures that are at play in modern-day and in the past. Then at the same time, I think it is arts role to take people out of their everyday life; empower them, distract them, entertain them, shock them, give them pleasure - ultimately to provoke some kind of feeling and reaction be it good or bad. 

Is there something specific that you hope to explore in the future?

My current research project is a long term endeavour and I hope to continue to refine and expand my methods, methodologies and studio work and I hope to contribute to the genre of contemporary history painting. The four women the project will cover include Sheila Tinney (1918-2010: mathematical physicist), Jocelyn Bell Burnell (b.1943: astrophysicist), Doris Fleecson (1901-1970: political journalist and war correspondent) and Carmel Snow (1887-1961: editor of Harper’s Bazaar). As these women’s biographies and achievements were under-explored and under-documented, the possibility of explicitly editing, adding to and repositioning the imagery and narratives seems a fruitful strategy. I will continue to research comparative strategies and methods used in history writing and painting making, looking at what each may have to offer the other in relation to feminist revisionism.

Can you tell us a bit more about your process when creating artwork?

 My practices around art focus on the uses of memory, the archive and the historical materiality of objects. I am interested in making statements that reveal obstructions, voids and deficiencies in the different forms of production and transmission of information, knowledge and history; in particular the transformations and resignifications of the images, which arise from the relationship between stories, contexts and geographical places. For me, the past is something that we can constantly build, twist and transform.

How are you doing these days? Is your artwork being influenced by or providing an outlet from the current events in the world?

I am interested in current events, sometimes my work has a specific situation as its theme, for example I just participated in an exhibition at WhiteBox Harlem, where they asked the artists for an opinion about the electoral process and I responded with a textile work.

And at other times I focus on social structural problems, for example the marginality of knowledge produced by women in the writing of history, I developed the project: the past Instructions for use, individual exhibition that is currently open at Manifest Gallery Cincinnati.

How do you see the role of art and artists in society today?

I genuinely consider that the role of the artist is relevant, not only in the production of aesthetic objects, artistic production encompasses social and spiritual spheres and everything that concerns us as human beings. We are a kind of social thermometer, art is a powerful possibility to express what we see in the world and connect with others by sharing ideas and emotions.

Is there something specific that you hope to explore in the future?

Since the quarantine began, a large part of everyone's life has been linked to virtuality. I am recently reflecting on that change in our relationship with our bodies.

A Part of it All

Second Segment

Curated by Elisa Gutiérrez Eriksen

Oct 23 - Nov 12, 2020

NARS Foundation is happy to present “A Part of it All” as a continuation of the Looking Forward while Looking Back Series. This iteration is divided in two segments. In the second one we present the works of Linda Loh, Tadasuke Jinno and Philippe Halaburda.

Through the use of simple gestures related to actions, patterns, colors, structures, or even moments, this group of artists investigates the ways in which perception operates and responds. Just as time doesn't pass identically to everyone, looking at images/perception is not an identical experience. In this sense, the works in this two part exhibition explore cognitive stimulation and interactions with different fragments of the unconscious mind. 

While exploring visual illusions and playing with perception to find the dividing point between what is real and what is not, these artists build a sensorial vocabulary –made of light, objects, patterns and colors– that serves as a path towards awareness, emphasizing that, over all, we´re not external observers but a part of it all. 

Philippe Halaburda (USA)

NARS Alumni, 2015 Season II
@halaburda

Based on feelings or memories, my work process delves into the complex undercurrents of intimate and collective interactions.
The blurry boundary between perception and experience always inspired me: I am interested in the randomness of emotion through art by imaging abstract visuals based on the subconscious.
Exploring forms and lines in my map compositions, I form disaggregated grids and imaginary topographies exploring social tensions and relationships, instead of addresses and landmarks.

Tadasuke Jinno (Japan)

NARS Alumni, 2014 Season I - II
@tadasukeart

My art works are like an entrance or exit across the border between reality and unreality. It is like a “Gate”. The works cause viewers to experience visual illusion or new perception with colors, shapes, materials, composition and environment.

I believe that experiencing visual illusion or new perception through my works will open your entrance or exit connecting the reality and unreality, by the feeling that you have never had before. It is expressed not only in terms of effect, but also in color, shape, arrangement and so on.

Linda Loh (Australia)

NARS Alumni, 2018 Season IV
@__lindaloh__

Linda Loh is currently in Melbourne, Australia, but she has been based in New York City on and off for the past two years. As a multi-media artist, most of her work has its origins in sources of light. She distorts and transforms these, exploring the elusive form and materiality of digital space.

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CONVERSATIONS

A Part of it All

First Segment

Curated by Elisa Gutiérrez Eriksen

Oct 2 - 22, 2020

NARS Foundation is happy to present “A Part of it All” as a continuation of the Looking Forward while Looking Back Series. This iteration will be divided in two segments. In the first one we present the works of Leah Hewson, Elisabeth Smolarz and Denise Treizman.

Through the use of simple gestures related to actions, patterns, colors, structures, or even moments, this group of artists investigates the ways in which perception operates and responds. Just as time doesn't pass identically to everyone, looking at images/perception is not an identical experience. In this sense, the works in this two part exhibition explore cognitive stimulation and interactions with different fragments of the unconscious mind. 

While exploring visual illusions and playing with perception to find the dividing point between what is real and what is not, these artists build a sensorial vocabulary –made of light, objects, patterns and colors– that serves as a path towards awareness, emphasizing that, over all, we´re not external observers but a part of it all. 

Leah Hewson (Ireland)

NARS Alumni, 2018 Season IV, 2019 Season I
@leahhewson

Hewson is an Irish artist based in Dublin. Her work is continually searching for ways to access and explore the unconscious mind with the equal desire for excavation and escapism. An instinctive and impulsive approach to image making is adopted to find an abstract sensory vocabulary that activates and celebrates this area of brain activity. Hewson investigates the level of importance that pattern, colour and structure has to the human psyche and how it creates cognitive stimulation from an unconscious level.

Elisabeth Smolarz (USA)

NARS Alumni, 2016 Season III
@elisabethsmolarz

The Encyclopedia of Things is a photography series in which I collaborate with individuals in their home environments. Each individual selects personal objects that are meaningful to them, which they arrange for the camera in a temporary installation. Whether memento or heirloom, everyone has their own talismans: objects containing a value only significant to its keeper.
The meaning of such objects gets assigned silently, internally, and yet, reveals so much about who we are. The objects are often portals that allow us to travel to key moments in our lives, and we keep them to create a sense of permanence against the impermanence of reality.

Denise Treizman (Chile/USA)

NARS Alumni, 2014 Season IV - 2015 Season I
@denisetreizman

My sculpture and installation repurposes found and ready-made objects, often combined with clay components and woven elements that I intuitively create. Precariously assembled, the works are wild and wacky, yet in balance as they ride up a wall or come tumbling across the floor. My process embraces chance, explores relationships and relies on resourcefulness. I improvise and play, allowing objects and materials to surprise me with their infinite possible combinations. Discarded things that most people overlook, I instead make noticeable. Working on the street and the studio, I examine how worthless fragments and simple gestures can be transformed into unexpected art experiences.

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Can you tell us a bit more about your process when creating artwork?

I like to approach my painting practice impulsively and instinctively. It’s important to me to try to work in a flow like state to reach my unconscious. Listening to techno music through headphones helps! I think my work acts as a type of escapism in this way.

The multitude of cohesive and combative layers throughout my painting confront the complexity of the human unconscious. I am searching for an abstract sensory vocabulary that activates and celebrates this under-estimated part of the brain that is often taken for granted but is crucial to our survival. I like to poke at people’s visual perception by adding intriguing elements that question form, structure and light.

How are you doing these days? Is your artwork being influenced by or providing an outlet from the current events in the world?

I have been fairly good and have never been busier which is great! We are back into lockdown here in Dublin but my studio is not far from where I live so I have been able to go in to work the whole time which I am very grateful for. I did completely unravel in the first few weeks though and found it hard to motivate myself. Over time I regained structure which I have come to realise is fundamental for humans to live.

It usually takes me a while to process big events so currently my work hasn’t seen any change but perhaps something might appear in the future. I am incredibly grateful to have a creative outlet to give me respite from the outside world, especially because my work seems to lean towards joy and optimism. Perhaps this is a rebellion against all the crap that’s going on!

A Self in Construction

Curated by Elisa Gutiérrez Eriksen

Sept 11 - Oct 1, 2020

NARS Foundation is happy to present “A Self in Construction” as part of the Looking Forward while Looking Back Series. For this iteration we present the works of Sophie Barbasch, Jinhee Park and Louise Tate.

The practices of these 3 artists converge in the attempt of constructing a definition of the self. They present their existence as something nourished by the environment, the family, their childhood, the cities they live in and even history. These definitions have fictitious and dreamy aspects that call for a reflection through the notion of identity. 

In a constant tug between interior and exterior, the individual and the collective, Barbasch, Park and Tate, create poetic narratives based on the complexity of becoming.

Sophie Barbasch (USA)

NARS Alumni, 2017 Season I
@sophiebarbasch

Sophie Barbasch is a New York based photographer. She earned her MFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design and her BA in Art and Art History from Brown University. Selected grants and residencies include the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, the NARS Foundation, and a Fulbright Fellowship to Brazil.

Jinhee Park (South Korea)

NARS Alumni, 2018 – Season III
@zzin84

Jinhee Park (Born 1984 in Seoul) paints mindscape by way of “space of own” that is isolated yet connected to a network of metropolis. He studied at School of Visual Arts, New York (BFA Fine Arts in 2013), Royal College of Art, London (MA Painting in 2017) and He have worked in Kumho Art Residency; Korea, Changdong Residency run by National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; NARS Foundation Residency, New York, U.S.A; Leipzig International Art Program (LIA), Germany. He is selected as Honorable Mention of ArtSlant 2016 Grand Prize Winner.

Louise Tate (Australia)

NARS Alumni, 2019 – Season II
@lo.lou

Louise Tate is a Melbourne-based painter and writer whose practice explores personal and historical narratives of women, care, and the Australian landscape. Her work weaves a story that is personal, national and fictional, offering up possibilities for new ways of being in the world. Recent achievements include: semi-finalist in the Brett Whitely Travelling Art Scholarship (2019) and the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize (2019), finalist in the 'churchie' national emerging art prize (2019), finalist in the Hopper Prize (2020), and an artist residency at the NARS Foundation in New York (2019).

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CONVERSATIONS

Guiding Principles

Curated by Elisa Gutiérrez Eriksen

Aug 21 - Sept 10, 2020

The artists presented in this iteration of Looking Forward while Looking Back: Guiding Principles, are Martin Désilets, Shoko Masunaga and Monica Mazzone.

From a set of defined variables following a series of instructions, to the use of geometry as a guiding principle for rationalizing emotions, these works are the result of processes based on predetermined rules and protocols.

But even if a structure is in place, the interactions along the way and the multiple external variables can generate results that inform, simultaneously, the process itself and the viewer. Among the variables are weight and gravity, optical illusions, and spatial structures that reveal a path for contemplation of ideas, memories and relationships as they change, transform and appear. 

Martin Désilets (Canada)

NARS Alumni, 2019, Season IV
@martindesiletsart

I wander through the museums. I photograph every art work, one at a time, and make them disappear by superposing the images in a single digital file. I will do so, following a protocol, until full black is achieved—a monochrome containing virtually every art work. I wander through the cities. I photograph the places and monuments using a camera body without a lens, a blind camera. Beyond the subjects, and the shadows, color and light remain.

Monica Mazzone (Italy)

NARS Alumni, 2018, Season II
@monicamazzone_artist

Monica Mazzone is an Italian visual artist, lives and works between Milan and New York.

Her research is a study into the idea of being able to perceive and visually express the obsession for perfection, proposing geometry as a guiding principle of the creative act to rationalize one’s own emotions and the happenings of the world with spatial structures perceived as parts of a rhytm implicating the body itself and its own proportions; all of her works are handmade by herself.

Many private and public venues, in Italy and abroad, exhibited her works including: MASS MoCA North Adams, Temporaneo Navile Museum Bologna, La rada Foundation Locarno, NARS Foundation e The Border New York, Palazzo Reale, Studio Maraniello, Giuseppe Pero Gallery, Arthur Cravan Foundation, Fabbrica del Vapore, Isimbardi Palace – Milan, Museum of Contemporary art Lissone, Spazio Thetis Arsenale Venice, Satzyor Gallery Budapest.

Shoko Masunaga (Japan)

NARS Alumni, 2019, Season I, II & III
@shoko_masunaga

Shoko Masunaga has been working mainly in Tokyo, Japan, using painting as her base.  Her work is influenced by the surrounding environment, interaction is considered.  There are many variations of her work, but the main feature of her work the variability itself, whether in medium or discipline, such as sculpture or architecture. The works can oftentimes be rearranged, and are frequently altered from place to place.  

She got the grant  Agency for Cultural Affairs Scholarship program of Japan 2018, spent one year in New York. Her main exhibition in recent years was a solo exhibition at Cooler Gallery in Brooklyn in 2019. 

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In Touch

Curated by Elisa Gutiérrez Eriksen

July 31 - Aug 20, 2020

This iteration of Looking Forward while Looking Back: In Touch, presents the work of Bonam Kim, Christine Rebhuhn, and Claudia Cortinez.

The practices of these artists question different subjects related to the idea of adaptation. In an inquiry about the tensions that exist when attempting to define boundaries, when extrapolating borders, when bending and adapting languages and systems, when finding thresholds, they create new ways to build relationships with the world.

Rooted in the poetic relations that arise from the touch of different objects and thoughts, they position the body––sometimes their own––as the bridge within each attempt to create poetic pieces and actions that function also as acts of resistance. Physically and conceptually, the intersection of trajectories and histories, along with the gathering of narratives create encounters with the architecture of a place or space, memories, and hidden thoughts.

The works have multiple overlaps that are expressed as raw moments, reproduced to explore ideas of ephemerality and permanence, substance and resistance, while analyzing formal aspects of a place and its relevance and influence in daily life.

Bonam Kim (South Korea)

NARS Alumni, 2018, Season II
@bonamkim

Bonam Kim is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Kim holds a bachelor’s degree in Sculpture from Hongik University in Seoul, Korea and a mater’s degree in Sculpture from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. She was featured as an emerging artist from DongBangYoGae, Art in Culture magazine in Seoul, Korea. She has participated in the residency program at Trestle Art Space in Brooklyn, New York and awarded the Stutzman Family Foundation Graduate Fellowship for her residency at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT. She completed a three-month residency at NARS Foundation in Brooklyn, NY and the Wassaic Project in Wassaic, NY.

Christine Rebhuhn (USA)

NARS Alumni, 2016 – Season III
@christine.rebhuhn

Christine Rebhuhn is sculptor based in New York City. She received an MFA in Ceramics from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2015, and a BA in Psychology and Studio Art from Kalamazoo College in 2011. Rebhuhn has had solo exhibitions at NARS Foundation in Brooklyn, NY, Soo Visual Arts Center in Minneapolis, MN, and at Makeshift in Kalamazoo, MI. Her work has been included in group shows at Tiger Strikes Astroid, New York, the Boiler in Brooklyn, NY and at Stove Works in Chattanooga, TN and she exhibited at the 2015 Gyeonggi International Ceramics Biennale in Incheon, Korea. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Vermont Studio Center (VT), Elsewhere (NC), NARS Foundation (NY), and Makeshift (MI). Her work was published in ArtMaze Magazine and Maake Magazine.

All documentation images are by Dario Lasagni.

Claudia Cortínez (USA/Chile)

NARS Alumni, 2018, Season IV.
@kaatziza

Veils of Myth' is a project by Claudia Cortínez (exhibited at WICK Gallery in 2019), a series of architectural interventions made throughout NYC. She cast paper onto keystone figures of historic building facades, leaving these onsite to be encountered by passersby, often being worn down by the elements. When removed, the paper holds its dimensional form and is exhibited as a sculptural work. Viewers can peer out from the cracks within the figures’ faces and see the buildings’ dust and residue embedded into the paper.

Claudia received her BFA from RISD and MFA from Yale. Select awards include the Yale Norfolk Teaching Fellowship, Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant, Alice Kimball Fellowship, and Blair Dickinson Memorial Grant. She has exhibited her work in solo and group shows in the US, Latin America, and Europe, and has curated exhibitions at the Eduardo Sívori Museum, Shirley Fiterman Art Center, and Loisaida Center, bringing together artists of Latin-American descent. Residencies include the Lower East Side Printshop, LMCC Swing-Space, the NARS Foundation, and Loisaida Center, among others. She is co-founder/director of LAZO, a platform for Latinx artists. Claudia is currently an artist-in-residence at the Center for Book Arts in NYC and at Silver Art Projects at the World Trade Center.

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History Interplays

Curated by Elisa Gutiérrez Eriksen

July 10 - 30, 2020

This iteration of Looking Forward while Looking Back:History Interplays brings together the works of Derek Sargent & Jess Miley, Elizabeth Moran and Martin Smith. It is an exploration and reconstruction of history from different perspectives that includes research based work, autobiographical elements, and a particular focus on alternative historical archives.

When thinking of history and its facts, what gets to be highlighted and documented and what remains hidden? Fixed beliefs, accepted truths, and diverse points of view show that source, context, and the use of information will transform and adapt depending on the approach and circumstance.

Derek Sargent & Jess Miley (Australia)

NARS Alumni, 2017, Season III
@derek_sargent_

Derek Sargent and Jess Miley have been collaborating together for over three years on their performative research project, “The Grave Project,” which researches historic individuals who have had an impact on queer and non-normative culture. The project examines the way the queerness of these people is used in the construction of their biographies and how, where they lived had a profound effect on their queer story. These biographies act as a framework to examine ideas around queer existence. This research culminates in a pilgrimage to their burial sites which is documented in photography, film and text to create an alternative historical archive.

Elizabeth Moran (USA)

NARS Alumni, 2018 Season II & III
@elizabethcmoran

Guided by a preoccupation with the subjectivity of facts, Elizabeth Moran uses forms of documentation to examine the reliability of information and how evidence is often far from evident. TIME will tell is part of an ongoing project including extensive research of the TIME, Inc. corporate archive and an investigation of the earliest history of the first professional fact-checkers.

Moran’s work—from technological to linguistic mediation—reminds us that fact-checking is not simply a process of confirming the veracity of a piece of information. Fact-checking is yet another form of myth-making.

Martin Smith (Australia)

NARS Alumni, 2017, Season IV
@jennifer_cheeseman

In response to… is a part of life-long project where I am writing an auto-biographical novel where each letter is hand-cut from a photograph. The series began in 2004 after the death of my father and currently there are 45 unique components.

The combination of text and photography to create meaning is ubiquitous within contemporary communication, it is used in advertising, press, fine art and through the verbal ribbon that accompanies family photography. The text is written in the voice of a narrator that is explaining the details of an image. The stories are usually 300 words long and detail embarrassing events, formulative relationships, reflections and mundane musings on life in a humorous and relatable voice

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CONVERSATIONS

Rose (East) (still)
2020
Digital video recording

Here is a still from a video I have unsuccessfully attempted to finish since March. In December of last year, the New York Public Library granted me access to work in the Rose Reading Room outside of normal visitor hours. This room is where fact-checking was invented by a small team of women who have since been forgotten. Before March, I looked up towards the Reading Room's gloriously painted ceiling of billowing clouds to gaze upon its sunset. 7 floors of stacks of the NYPL now sit empty. Archives around the world are being condensed and edited and stories, like those of the first fact-checkers, may be forever lost. But I also saw a sunrise. Even with the continued concern of misinformation, more people have more access to information than ever before. Now, halfway through July and a million years since December, this never-ending sunrise and sunset feels more familiar as time seems to be standing still. But time is far from still. Collectively we are witnessing an end of an era and, simultaneously, the dawn of a new awareness that we all exist under the same, shared sky.

A Wave of Happenings

Curated by Elisa Gutiérrez Eriksen

June 19 - July 10, 2020

The circumstances and events that have developed in the past weeks have brought feelings of despair, tension, anger, fear and frustration, only to name a few. In the middle of a series of protests the question of how we each fight for justice arises. 

For this iteration of Looking Forward while Looking Back we have brought together the work of Freya Powell, Sophie Dupont and Io Makandal. Their works intersect as expressions of recognition of different contemporary tragedies (states of unease); as ways of confronting, challenging, dissenting and honoring what has been lost.

 “Pervasive forms of inequality have established that some lives are disproportionately more livable and grievable than others” (1). In this context, Only Remains Remain, by Freya Powell, pays homage to the lives of unidentified migrants in mass graves by exploring the mournful potential of the human voice through pitch, intonation, breath, movement, and pause, invoking the silence of their burial and acknowledging our collective complicity and grief.

Sophie Dupont´s Body Full of Breath performance investigates what it means to be alive by fully filling her lungs and emptying them –evoking the cycle of life and death– at a time where the ability to breathe becomes an act of resistance that enables a voice, a movement, and a shared wind.

For Io Makandal, monuments reflect societies that are obsessed with a distorted idea of progress. They act as fictional spaces and places that illustrate an ambiguous relation between dreamed and created environments. In Life in the Entropics, Makandal rebuilds structures with detritus of the city of Johannesburg as material expressions of chaos and dis-order.

From material expressions of entropy, to the collective power of the voice when mourning, and asserting our equal state as human beings at the moment of existing, these works explore different ways in which, from the personal to the collective, we aim to recover our rights to mourn, to be named, to demand change, to re-build, to breathe.

(1) Judith Butler, The Force of Non-Violence

Freya Powell (USA)

NARS Alumni, 2018 Season I-II
@freyapowell7

Most recently I have been working on Only Remains Remain which is a 15-person performance that was going to be premiering at PS1 last month but was postponed due to the pandemic. Footage from a rehearsal at the Center for Performance Research edited with footage of a rehearsal via Zoom during the Covid-19 pandemic can be watched here.

Only Remains Remain, uses the structure of a Sophoclean chorus to create an elegy for the hundreds of unidentified migrants buried in mass graves in Sacred Heart Cemetery in Brooks County, Texas. Working with an ensemble of 15 performers, I have been exploring the mournful potential of the voice. Through a collaborative process, the work utilizes pitch, intonation, breath, movement, and silence to embody a contemporary tragedy drawn from the story of Antigone.

Sophie Dupont (Denmark)

NARS Alumni, 2019 Season IV
@sophie__dupont

The center of Body Full of Breath is one of the most basic mechanisms of the human body: Breathing.

A copper plate shaped like a lung is hung on a wall. For 60 minutes, the artist applies a small hole in the copper plate for each exhale she takes. Between the exhalations, she either stands still or breaks out, until her lungs are filled with air again and emptied, while a new hole is inserted in the copper plate.

Io Makandal (South Africa)

NARS Alumni, 2016, Season III

@iomakandal

Life in the Entropics is an installation piece that formed part of Io Makandal’s solo show of the same name in July 2019 at the Kalashnikovv Gallery in Johannesburg. Comprised of a collection of urban detritus collected from the streets of Johannesburg, an African cosmopolitan city obsessed with its progress, Makandal reflects on its contradictions and the material expression of entropy in a time conditioned to ambiguity. Life in the Entropics presents an ephemeral monument to the Entropic; an (imagined) place in a time of uncertainty where dis-order and dis-ease is the mode of being while leaning into the trouble. 

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CONVERSATIONS

Speculative Interiors

Curated by Elisa Gutiérrez Eriksen

May 29 - June 18, 2020

The new iteration of Looking Forward while Looking Back: Speculative Interiors, presents the works of NARS Alumni Alina Grasmann, Cathleen Clarke and Matthew Cronin.

What does memory mixed with visual archives become when these are constantly revisited in an effort to reconstruct a narrative? 

The works of Cronin, Grasmann and Clarke become familiar, yet strange. They change, expand, and transform into a distant interior  –stuck in impermanence.

As these artists converge, a dialogue connecting painting and photography arises. Their aesthetic qualities live in a threshold between a formal language and a vaguely kin fiction that triggers a synapse within the memories of the observer as it enters into a collective speculative interior.

From images from childhood to iconic events or places inserted in quotidian landscapes, interpretations of objects and images from old catalogues, these works redefine the meaning and feeling of an old souvenir, and capture the passage of time by mixing what was once with what could be. They can be seen as eternal moments where time and place become subjective segments, connected to a story that rises from an eternal interior place, stuck in memory. 

While reconstructing a present –and even projecting a possible future– the works in this exhibition live in a multiplicity of dimensions. Places become content and the content becomes a place.*

*Emanuele Coccia, The Life of Plants

Alina Grasmann (Germany)

NARS Alumni, 2017 Season IV
@alina_anila

Alina's paintings almost look like photos. They are very precise and detailed. The light on the walls or the reflection in the pool for example are carefully painted. You could nearly believe that they are exact replicas of the original photos. But something seems off. Sometimes you can notice that light and shadows don't fit together. And the wallpaper with the painting of Breugel – is it really there or was it added by the artist? Alina's work always lies on the boundary between fact and fiction. Traditionally, a photo is considered a true document. In contrast, paintings are viewed as fiction - composed, manipulated, unreal.
They're not real, they're made up. But the unstoppable development of digital media has changed this difference between photography and painting. CGI enables the creation of previously unthinkable realistic fantasy worlds. Alina brings this new aspect of the photo - its capacity for the fictional - back into painting. Her paintings are almost theater-like. They invite us to come in and stay in them.
(M. Wisniowska)

Matthew Cronin (USA)

NARS Alumni, 2020 Season I
@matthewcroninstudio

Matthew Cronin is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. His process makes use of pre-existing imagery which he reimagines through montage and multiple exposure. For the series “Dwelling”, Cronin transforms photographs produced during the 1970s for J.C. Penny Catalogs. He creates new, speculative interiors that explore the relationships between comfort, class, and tradition.
Cronin holds an MFA in Studio art from the University of Texas at Austin as well as a BFA in Photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. In 2020, he participated in the NARS Foundation's Winter Residency.

Cathleen Clarke (USA)

NARS Alumni, 2019 Season I
@cathleenclarke

Inspired by childhood and the enigmas that surround it, Clarke’s work explores themes of memory, mystery, and the passing of time. The figures in her paintings appear distant, confronting the viewer as if from another time. Sometimes isolated, these individuals are absorbed into their backgrounds, evoking the anxiety of being controlled by one's surroundings. Referencing old family photos, childhood memories and found images, Clarke allows the paint to interpret what is often overlooked or forgotten. In this way, the reference becomes a small piece in her process, and the end result is the memory and feeling she has from it.

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Can you tell us a bit more about the process for creating the work presented in this exhibition?

"The Montauk Project" is a series of 15 oil paintings, which I have painted in my studio in Munich from late 2018 to early 2020. The idea for this work however came to me already in the summer of 2016 during a stay in New York. I had read about the coastal town “Montauk” in the eponymous novel from 1975 by the Swiss author Max Frisch. Contrary to the descriptions in the book, the place then seemed very touristy and crowded to me. Before I started my residency at NARS, I visited the place again in fall 2017 - this time not during the tourist season, which made it very easy for me to get involved in this literary place.
Max Frisch’s book appears as a fictional narrative, but actually it certainly is a factual report. It tells the story of a weekend trip to Montauk Frisch made with a young American woman from his New York publishing house. I think the playful way he deals with reality and fiction in his book was the trigger and also remained the guide for my series.
I want to show sceneries from Montauk that could be like that, but don't have to be that way. I want to open a space for the viewer with my paintings in which he can always be somewhere between fiction and reality.

How are you doing these days? Is your artwork being influenced by or providing an outlet from the current quarantine?

Certainly the circumstances were not as difficult for me as they might have been for others. My daily routine is to work alone in my studio anyway but the quarantine situation had no direct influence on the topics of my work. I was also told that I am probably least at risk of getting infected of all people here in Munich because being self quarantined is my everyday life :)

But seriously, of course I did miss my friends and family. That was particularly bad during the lockdown. But there are already some easing of the restrictions here and it at least feels like we’re slowly getting back to normal.

It is more difficult for me to accept the uncertainties and the fact that the next time cannot be planned at the moment. I actually wanted to go back to the US for a few months in October this year, aiming to discover new places and to travel a bit. I'm now trying to learn to give up control. I think it's a very important process for me.

Can you speak about your influences as an artist?

As a painter, everything that surrounds me and with what I surround myself probably inspires and influences me in some unconscious way. At the moment it is mainly places in the US that touch me so much that I already decide in the moment I visit them to devote a whole series to them.
This might probably be because of the feeling of familiarity that American urban landscapes trigger in me. Despite all the differences to the European environment in which I live in, despite the fact that I actually am a foreigner when I travel in the states and despite being far away from home, I don't feel the US is a very foreign
place to me or to anyone else from the western world. It is a strange, in-between feeling that you have as an European in the US, having grown up in an Americanized western world, having read american books and having consumed american movies since early childhood.
So I would say that probably films and literature have a major impact on the mood in my work.

What is your dream project?

This is easy. My dream project is actually always the project I'm currently working on. I have just started a new series on Paolo Soleri's experimental town Arcosanti in the desert of Arizona. Four large-format works from this series are to be shown at Fridman Gallery in NYC this November - on the condition, of course, that the situation calms down somewhat worldwide.

Can you tell us a bit more about the process for creating the work presented in this exhibition?

My process is centered around the reinterpretation of preexisting imagery. For the pictures included in this exhibition I have been working with photographs commissioned by J.C. Penny during the 1970s for use in their catalog. I begin by making high resolution scans of the source photographs. I then layer multiple scans on top of one another and digitally montage them together.

The montaging process is pretty intuitive and involves a lot of trial and error. With each attempt I find little moments in the composition that seem to work, like the way different bed sheets merge together, and I’ll try to hold on to them. After dozens of attempts I will have incorporated those moments into a single picture. At this stage the picture looks super messy and chaotic so I will recover elements from the source images. Essentially blending the strangeness of montage with the familiarity of the advertisement.

How are you doing these days? Is your artwork being influenced by or providing an outlet from the current quarantine?

All things considered I am doing pretty well. Being able to work in the studio has been a saving grace during this. However, making new pieces has been pretty difficult. So, I have really focused on experimentation. Right now I don’t have the pressure to make things that are resolved. I am free to fail, and it feels great!

I think it’s too early for me to understand how my practice is being shaped by the quarantine, but it has definitely magnified certain themes in my work.

Take the Dwelling pictures for example. On one level they have always been

about disrupting the perceived comfort of the home, but now that aspect has taken on more importance. I keep thinking back to the history of the word “disease” and how its original meaning didn’t refer to illness, but rather being uncomfortable. It just seems so relevant to these pictures.

Can you speak about your influences as an artist?

My influences come from all over. I have my visual influences that seem to find their way into my work. For the last few years I have been looking at a lot of German artists. Specifically, the photographers of the Dusseldorf school who studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie.

Beyond the visual, I actually think my biggest influences come from music. It’s not something that can necessarily be seen in the final image but can definitely be felt in the process. I love composers like Terry Riley and Steve Reich. I am totally fascinated with their writing process and try to find the visual equivalates. I think a good example is their use of field recordings or tape loops. Both use found audio and find a way to transform it. I actually think about the two of them a lot when I am working with found imagery.

What is your dream project?

This is such a tough question and I am not sure if I can ever think of a dream project. In a perfect world I would have access to the entire archive of J.C. Penny photographs. I feel like that could really be amazing, but there is something nice about the challenge of having to work with the small collection that I have.

Whatever it is, I am sure it involves a giant collection of photographs that I can sift through…

Can you tell us a bit more about the process for creating the work presented in this exhibition?

My process begins with searching for inspiration from my collection of old family photos or found images that catch my eye whether it be online, in books, movies, etc. Once I find an image that affects me in some way, I’ll take a closer look. I consider the subjects in the photo, what was happening in this photo, who is this person, do I want to continue this story onto my canvas or do I want to use this photo merely as a reference and create a completely new story with it? I might zoom into the image, crop it a certain way, decide to change the colors, and the end result is usually something completely different than where I began. I think that’s the wonderful thing about painting, it is the ability to tell a story that the human eye could not see otherwise.

How are you doing these days? Is your artwork being influenced by or providing an outlet from the current quarantine?

I’m doing ok. I have a full time job and I’m extremely fortunate to be able to continue working from home for the time being. My studio has always been just a corner of my apartment, so I’ve been able to continue painting as usual, although it’s a pain to find art supplies lately.

I’ve always found inspiration from solitude, and the quiet moments in everyday life. There’s a yearning that comes with looking at an old photo, of somewhere that seems far away, so being stuck in a small apartment for 3 months with all the solitude I need has only contributed more to my desire to paint.

Can you speak about your influences as an artist?

My biggest influence would be memories from my childhood, how unclear they are to look back on and how mysterious everything felt at that time, that idea really influences my work. I’m also really influenced by music, which is a necessity for me while painting. Musicians have a way of storytelling that I really admire.

What is your dream project?

I’ve thought about how cool it would be put on a show in an abandoned house out in the middle of nowhere. I spent my teenage years living in a small country town in northern Illinois, and there were a lot of abandoned houses, some that you could barely see because they were submerged in overgrown plants. There’s so many memories in these old houses, and I think it’d be great to bring one back to life for just a little bit.

Reassertions

Curated by Elisa Gutiérrez Eriksen

May 15 - 28, 2020

The new iteration of Looking Forward while Looking Back: Reassertions, presents the works of NARS Alumni Helina Metaferia, Katya Grokhovsky and Julia Kwon.

The works in this exhibition speak out against racial, ethnic and sexual violence, stereotypes, prejudices and injustice to create subversive actions and present them as gestures rooted in care and the empowerment of all identities.

Manifested mostly through patterns, collage, textures, installations, and performance, the works are open invitations to discuss civil rights, agency, oral history, stereotypes and identity politics. The results are performative gestures –strong statements that are loud, unapologetic, fearless and profound reassertions of the self.

Julia Kwon (USA)

NARS Alumni, 2019 Season II
@artistjuliakwon

Julia Kwon's newest project "Unapologetically Asian" is made with layers of cotton and patchworked Korean silk. The work is sewn in response to the fact that preventative mask worn especially by Asian people has largely been perceived as an unnecessary overreaction, a proof of illness, or an open invitation to commit hate crimes during the coronavirus pandemic. Now a growing number of officials and health experts argue that people should wear non-medical fabric masks in public to help prevent spread of the virus. Julia's work unapologetically celebrates her ethnic identity to confront coronavirus-related racism while also promoting public face masks to help flatten the curve.

Helina Metaferia (USA)

NARS Alumni, 2019, Season III
@helina.metaferia

My interdisciplinary series, "By Way of Revolution," examines the impact of civil rights eras of the past on today's social justice movements. The project centralizes women of color as its main protagonist. It combines archival research and oral histories with performative gestures to produce collages, video, and social engagement. In our trying political climate, where black and brown lives are continuing to fight to matter, and women are summoning the courage to speak out against sexual violence, my work seeks to combine the fiery of previous generations with the direness of today in order to imagine a better collective future.

Katya Grokhovsky (Australia)

NARS Alumni, 2013 Season I
@katyagrokhovsky

Grokhovsky works in installation, performance, sculpture, video, painting and drawing, exploring ideas of gender, identity, alienation, labor and the self. Through research and autobiographical experience, Grokhovsky builds worlds and characters, through which she examines and underscores stereotypes, assumptions, prejudices and injustice. She is interested in the histories of migration and displacement, whilst enacting the bodies of the historically oppressed, in relation to the preconceived social order. Many of her projects deal with protest and freedom through failure, via radical and humorous actions: reclaiming the body through pleasure, chaos and refusal, residing in the space of absurd grotesque and nostalgic kitsch.

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Can you tell us a bit more about the process for creating the work presented in this exhibition?

Many Asian people in the U.S. are currently living with a sense of anxiety due to the drastic rise in anti-Asian sentiment. After hearing racist rhetoric spoken by top government officials and reading the news of anti-Asian hate crimes, I became deeply aware of how I may be misperceived not only as a perpetual foreigner, but also as a carrier or cause of the COVID-19 virus. I started to create vibrant Korean patchwork face masks to unapologetically celebrate my ethnic identity and confront coronavirus-related racism prevalent today. Furthermore, the work promotes public face masks to help flatten the curve.

How are you doing these days? Is your artwork being influenced by or providing an outlet from the current quarantine?

It is difficult to carry on in the studio as usual while knowing there are so many lives that have been lost due to the COVID-19 outbreak in the U.S. and all around the world. The pandemic has directly influenced my current studio work as it motivates me to think of what I can contribute and how I can acknowledge this difficult time. I am grateful for the hard work of essential workers who allow me the privilege to spend time with loved ones, reconnect with the earth, and reexamine the existing social, political, and economic systems that we take for granted. I have been focused on completing day-to-day tasks, reevaluating priorities, and appreciating social interactions. I am grateful for the sense of

community, which reminds me that physical isolation does not have to mean social alienation, and art-making that allows me to be profoundly present within this current moment.

How do you see the role of art and artists in society today?

I believe that the role of artists is to bring awareness to important contemporary issues, provide us opportunities to think differently and feel intensely, and spark conversations on ways we can create a more compassionate and equitable society for all. Moreover, artists allow us to take pleasure in art and remind us of our own sense of humanity especially in difficult times like these. To be an artist is to share ideas, build communities, and deeply engage with and care for the world around us.

Is there something specific that you hope to explore in the future?

I plan to continue my examination on issues regarding gender, ethnicity, and identity through a mixture of first-person research and collaborative projects. Each of our circumstances together form larger patterns of oppression. Agonizing over our own sufferings often precludes an understanding of the predicaments of others, and too often, this blinds us to potential solidarities. I hope to shift the focus from the search for authentic origins and clear categories to the uncertainties of translation and complexities of globalism, hybridity, and intersectionality.

Can you tell us a bit more about the process for creating the work presented in this exhibition?

My full practice is interdisciplinary, ranging from performance, video, sculpture, and mixed media collages. My collage process begins with research, be it archival, gathering oral histories, or sensory bodily performance investigations. This prompts me to facilitate social practice / performance workshops for those who identify as women of color at institutions around the country. The workshops deconstruct historic protest gestures in an effort to heal trauma stored in the body.

I then work with the archival relics that activism leaves behind, turning these residues into art objects. In mixed media collages, images of historical activism are transformed into crowns of adornment on images of contemporary women, all of whom have participated in the workshops. I aim to facilitate more workshops nationally in diverse geographic locations to produce an “army of 50 women" via life-sized portrait collages, symbolically representative of the 50 states.

How are you doing these days? Is your artwork being influenced by or providing an outlet from the current quarantine?

My work is inherently social, and involves travel, participation, and collaboration. It's been particularly difficult and humbling to have shows, talks, performances, and residencies postponed, as these projects all fuel my studio practice. I am grateful for the curators and cultural workers who reached out to me to brainstorm how we can keep projects alive. It made me realize that there are people who do care if I produce art, and that makes me feel like there is value in what I do, even in the midst of a global pandemic. These gestures have sustained me. Quarantine forced me to pivot and build a new body of work while my existing projects are on hold. This new work involves collaboration with a writer, and includes painting, collage, and text.

I get to fulfill my social impulses by working with her over zoom meetings and email while keeping a social distance.

How do you see the role of art and artists in society today?

It can feel secondary to think about art and culture when so many are focused on basic human survival. However, we’ll look back at the art and culture that was produced during this period as a marker of history, and for direction on how we can envision a better collective future. The role of the arts is vital. We teach people how to see beyond limitations. Our creativity can open up collective imagination, and that has a purpose, even in a global pandemic. Art isn’t going anywhere, it’s been here forever and will always be here. What will change, hopefully, is the systems that sustain it. Those culture keeping systems are often capitalistic, institutional, elitist, and outdated. Hopefully there will be a new art world born out of this era, and it will be one that is more just and serves a diverse public in a better way.

Is there something specific that you hope to explore in the future?

I’ve never seen New York move so slowly, and I must admit I love it. Through shelter in place I realized that I need to slow down and travel less, nurture and care for my body more, and reach out to friends, family, and community more. It’s reprioritized my life. Thankfully, it will be a while before the art world will get back to all the international fairs, biennials, and events that keep us racking up frequent flyer miles. I want to incorporate this slowness once we get back to our new normal, it’s making me a much more attentive human being and increases my quality of life. Maybe that means living on a farm in the middle of no where, or at least finding an internal rhythm that is less overcome to the stressors of urban living. Basically, how do I keep this Roni artist residency going?

Can you tell us a bit more about the process for creating the work presented in this exhibition?

The images in the exhibition represent examples of some of my installations, sculptures and performances. I work a lot with found objects and materials, focusing on assemblage in combination with paint, plaster, wood, fabric, toys, paper mâché and video, as well as live performative activations. I am interested in investigating consumerism and desire as a type of masquerade in the overflow of discarded goods around us, as seen through the eyes of an immigrant and a woman.

How are you doing these days? Is your artwork being influenced by or providing an outlet from the current quarantine?

More than anything, I am exhausted and stressed right now. I am focused on self care, survival and sustainability. I am observing, processing and exploring, rather than producing. My work will eventually be influenced by the current situation overall, however I need time to internalize this abrupt change of life. The uncertainty worries me greatly and making art, such as digital paintings or conceptualizing various new projects, provides a much needed mental respite and a welcome outlet.

I am consistently imagining a new universe to inhabit and I am enjoying that aspect of isolation.

How do you see the role of art and artists in society today?

Art is a communication tool, acting as a conduit, now more than ever. Connecting to other artists and culture makers through online programs has been an important lifeline for me at this time. Our role is crystal clear. We ARE essential to the development and sustainability of imagination, humanity, passion, intelligence and civilization. Beyond the physical, we all have inner worlds which need to be explored, enriched, analyzed and shared. We are musicians on a sinking ship.

Is there something specific that you hope to explore in the future?

I am hoping to explore new ways of being an artist, new modes of working, new skills, tools and ideas. I am making lists, testing and ideating new projects and ideas, such as an experimental online platform called school of low expectations, a conceptual fashion label, and my own virtual curatorial space. I am learning from this moment and plan to move forward and adapt my work and my life to the new tomorrow.

On Repetition and Depth

Curated by Elisa Gutiérrez Eriksen

May 1 - 14, 2020

The new iteration of Looking Forward while Looking Back: On Repetition and Depth, presents the works of NARS Alumni Brigitta Varadi, Ellen Bleiwas and Ren Zi.

The works of these artists are deeply rooted in an infinite search for interiorness, for the unseen, and the ritualistic. They exist in a permanent threshold –a constant tension between movement and stillness, between the inside and the outside, between the other and the self.
Through repetitive, meditative gestures, these artists shape and create works that encourage slowness, sensory perception and the exploration of the various meanings of life.

As our daily lives have become spaces of repetition and pause, the practices of these artists lead to a perspective in which our daily actions can become generative, even magical.

Brigitta Varadi (Ireland)

NARS Alumni, 2014 Season I

@brigitta.varadi

Exploring the Invisible features a room-size installation of nearly 2,000 ceramic tiles and 19 felted-wool panels. The minimalism of Varadi’s art and rawness of her materials belies an intensively laborious process. Instilled with a meditative rhythm, she repeats the same gesture several thousand times as a tile is formed, or wool felted. Brigitta Varadi explores the unseen, everyday rituals of working life. In 2019, Varadi visited Shelburne Farms as a BCA artist-in-residence where through a series of workshops, she led community members in creating handmade tiles as she engaged them in conversations on sustainability and cultural heritage.

"Exploring the Invisible" is at the Burlington City Arts and Shelburne Farm, from February 21 - June 7, 2020

Photography courtesy of Sam Simon @samsimonimaging

Ellen Bleiwas (Canada)

NARS Alumni, 2020, Season I

@ellenbleiwas

Ellen Bleiwas’ sculptural practice is rooted in space, the body, slowness, and sensory perception. She draws upon tunnelling and interiority to create holey enclosures that can be gradually permeated, framing heightened experiences with self. She probes materials including latex, clay, beeswax, and industrial felt, repeating single actions until process generates form. Bleiwas holds an MFA from York University in Toronto (2017), and a Master of Architecture from McGill University in Montreal (2010).  She recently completed a residency at the NARS Foundation (2020) with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

Ren Zi (Singapour)

NARS Alumni, 2015 Season II

@ren_zi

Ren Zi’s investigation into the construction of reality through the myth is premised on philosophical idealism, the Taoist concept of entangled dualities, + Halberstam’s theory of queer failure.

Also informing their approach are temporal models, quantum, superstring + chaos theories, complexity, cosmic flux, science-magic confluence, agency + disobedience. Which likely accounts for a practice that resists categorization – while centered around the digital atelier, their oeuvre encompasses mixed-media objects, installation, video, sound, the textual + performative.

Since assuming mantle of "the ghost of Singapore future”, the artist has embarked on a survey of the country’s alternate futures within the context of its contradictory narratives + the Anthropocene.

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Can you tell us a bit more about the process for creating the work presented in your exhibition at BAC?

The Exhibition is the culmination of my research-based artist residency and workshops, a partnership between Burlington City Arts and Shelburne Farms. Combining the missions of both organisations, I led conversations about social and cultural issues impacting the Vermont landscape and its community. I was fortunate to have a studio at the Museum of Arts and Design during the summer where I could meet visitors from the US and the world, becoming part of this project through conversations and through making tiles with me. The video Exploring the Invisible, captures the laborious practice of processing clay sourced locally from Shelburne Farms to transform it into hand-built tiles emulating historical tiles that were once mass-produced in the late 19th century. Spent months of research developing the clay body, from clay I dug and the wood ash glaze from the historic cottonwood trees, taken down at Shelburne Farms. The felted raw wool panelling made from Navajo Churro wool, sourced from Shelburne Farm and accompanied by single-channel video, excerpts from conversations with Sam Dixon, Dairy Farm Manager and Renee LaCoss, Herdsman.

How are you doing these days? Is your artwork being influenced by or providing an outlet from the current quarantine?

Processing the news every day, I think it is the hardest for me. It is emotionally hard to focus on anything else than what is currently happening in the world right now. My practice delves into tradition, craft, and the everyday rituals of

working life through examining the disappearing traditions and daily activities of small, secluded communities. Sitting in my studio day after day, I slowly realize, how my work became urgent facing the unknown future and its challenges.

What are you working on right now?

I have an ongoing project since 2016, working with Elaine J. Davis, and her two special Icelandic Sheep, Niko and Bart from her flock located in Upstate New York in the town of Hebron. Each year I create a 63-63 inches piece from the wool shorn from these two sheep. The subtle changes in the work trace the sheep yearly cycle, the changes in their life related to weather, food condition and lambing. I am working on the 4th piece ‘Niko and Bart 2019’ .

Is there something specific that you hope to explore in the future?

I have several projects, ideas in development. I am developing a project, focusing on documenting the daily life of the shepherds and the seasonal migration of their sheep flock. Transhumance is a type of nomadism, a seasonal movement of livestock between summer and winter pastures and was practiced in Europe from prehistoric times. Like all my projects, it takes years of research before I can start working and secure funding and support. I also need to get use to walking 100s of miles and live the nomadic life style. During this quarantine time, I walk 6-7 miles nearly every morning as I live right next to a forest with interlinking trekking trails, that hardly anyone uses and doing research on different communities that still practice this disappearing tradition.

Can you tell us a bit more about the process for creating the work presented in this exhibition?

The earliest of these works, the white industrial felt open-mouthed Enclosure No. 170419, was created in 2017 during my MFA. Here, each long felt strip is wrapped around itself again and again, resulting in dense spherical masses that are knotted together, delineating a hollow interior. This way of working - repetitive process generating form - underlies my approach. During a residency in 2018 at 401 Richmond in Toronto, this process extended into latex. Seen in Protrusions No. 180818, sisal spirals around and around each tubular rubbery enclosure, enmeshed within a latex skin. These vertical tunnels again invite viewers into a hollow interior. Most recently, during a 2019 residency at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Ontario, these hollow masses were furthered in clay in Lithic Innards. Their interiors are mirrored, engendering a vastness within tight enclosure. Repetitive process again has a direct relationship with form: a continuous coil of clay is spiraled vertically onto itself. As I coil, I press each new layer into the one below. This process generates the finger pressed exterior, and spiralling interior.

How are you doing these days? Is your artwork being influenced by or providing an outlet from the current quarantine?

It definitely is a strange time! As it happens, I was in my final weeks in residence at NARS as the pandemic made its way to New York and everything ground to a halt. I made a split second decision to return to Canada for the lockdown, but didn't have a place lined up, and did my mandatory 14 day quarantine upon entering the country on my generous sister's sofa. Her coffee table became my bedroom and studio for those first weeks, where cyanotypes, drying clementine peels, and stamped toilet paper found table space between stacks of socks and underwear; my work became physically intertwined with my daily life in ways

I'd never anticipated. I also have been thinking a lot about slowness. I am feeling a strong resistance to pump out work; I find this time silently screams of a paradigm shift, including a questioning of the pace at which artists are expected to make and show.

What are you working on right now?

Mainly, I am just really interested in sitting within this historic moment. I've been taking in quite a bit of news, getting back into following some scientific journals, learning too much about the Spanish flu, watching the arc of narratives that governments and businesses are telling, and trying to take distance. I am thinking about slowness: I don't feel compelled to immediately make work, and sense that this time opens up unique opportunity to question the relation between speed and depth in the art world. I'm thinking about solitude: my work has long taken this up, creating spaces that challenge viewers to be with themselves - a challenge that seems to have renewed urgency as folks struggle with this during unexpected isolation. I'm also thinking about the accumulation of days: every night before I go to bed, I take one square of toilet paper off the roll, and stamp it with the date of this day that has just been completed. I will continue doing this for every day of quarantine.

Is there something specific that you hope to explore in the future?

Well, I am anxious to get back to New York! I definitely look forward to things getting to a point that borders can safely reopen. And I look forward to continue to tease out the thread of this emerging work - furthering explorations around time, accumulation, slowness, solitude, and immersing in the evolving nature of this historic time. Also, when the world opens up enough for sculpture facilities to be in operation, I hope to further develop the clay sculptures. I am new to ceramics, and want to experiment with a kiln to create future iterations of these sculptures using different types of clay.

Can you tell us a bit more about the process for creating the work presented in this exhibition?

Spurred by Anthropocenic anxiety, growing xenophobia here (+ globally), the continuing refugee crisis + Singapore’s refusal to accept any – despite being a nation descended mostly from immigrants, we began investigating Singapore’s “beleaguered fortress” myth after interrogating New York’s while at NARS

“Singapore Twlight” is a superfiction set in an alternate near-future, where this narrative escalates internal + external tensions amidst climate change, leading to the island-nation’s third + final fall. In desperation, the last surviving Singaporean turns to their animistic heritage + sets out to appeal to the primal forces to restore its lost homeland, confronting its ghosts en route

We adopted a layered strategy, with works linked directly to the story + others viewing it from a meta-level. This opened the possibility for conceptual richness, multivalent readings + deeper exploration of the various issues by weaving together photography, mixed-media objects, installation, text + sound

How are you doing these days? Is your artwork being influenced by or providing an outlet from the current quarantine?

The largely solitary life of an artist inoculates one from the psychological recoil of isolation. If anything, we miss being able to step away from our digital atelier whenever to bug friends + folks, haunt museums, galleries + libraries or take aimless bus rides

As a germaphobe, we have long instituted a clear separation of inside from outside. Our elaborate ablutions shaped by warnings as a child to beware things that follow one home. This compulsion to be cleansed of the spiritual + microbial is carried into our practice. For instance, insisting visitors remove their shoes,

wash their hands + feet upon entering the studio; sweeping + disinfecting installation sites which we perceive/conceive as “sacred” space

These once seemingly excessive behaviours are now considered the new normal. It is disappointing to see one’s idiosyncrasies become so very quotidian lol

What are you working on right now? Is there something specific that you hope to explore in the future?

With projects in limbo, the question we keep returning to is: How can we take things into our own hands? What opportunities can we create for ourselves + our creative community?

For this to happen, we first need a deeper appreciation of our antecedents + context. How we all connect to one another – as well as those who came before + their struggle to foster a viable community. This motivates our research into Visions + Illusions, a 2004 grassroots initiative which was ahead of the Singapore Biennale in rallying our fledgling contemporary art scene to engage the wider society across various non-gallery venues within Singapore’s historical civic district

More germane to our own practice, we are looking into strategies to enfold our theoretical underpinnings within a new material language

The one we find most exciting merges manual processes with digitally-rendered elements to reinstate evidence of the artist hand. On one level, this complicates structural issues within art-making such as the valuing of certain techniques or media over others. On another, shifting desire for highly-controlled, machine-output results acknowledges the paradoxes, messiness, ambiguity, serendipity of a universe – physical, social, psychological – shaped by chaos, complexity + multivalency

Let's take this outside

April 17 - 30, 2020

Curated by Elisa Gutiérrez Eriksen

For the first iteration of this virtual exhibition series we bring together the work of three artists that will take you “out for a walk”. 

In the presented works, Esther Hovers, Magali Duzant and Hugo Rocci look at New York City through lenses that might appear different, but despite those differences they  all try to respond to unanswerable questions in a period of uncertainty.  The query oscillates around mathematical problems about movement, esoteric searches in the NYC Subway System, and narratives embedded in the city’s store fronts.

They portray the city as a space that allows for data collection, as a metaphor for the unpredictable, and most importantly as a space that beholds, perceives and considers its inhabitants –tourists, strollers, commuters and other types of professional and amateur walkers, in parallel intensity.

Esther Hovers (Netherlands)

NARS Alumni, 2019 Season III & IV
@estherhovers

Traveling Salesman is based on the simple idea of a narrative about a walk. The story is about a traveling salesman. This idea is taken from a mathematical problem called ‘The Traveling Salesman Problem’. This problem asks the following question: ‘What is the shortest route through a list of cities in which you visit each city exactly once and return to the starting city?’

In an age where there is a pervasive need for everything to be controlled and quantified, I use the city as a metaphor for the unpredictable.

The final work is a collection of photographs, screen prints, and image transfers. Through my work I reflect on (intangible) power structures in public space. To what extend are our movements determined by the architecture, surveillance and norms of this space?

Magali Duzant (USA)

NARS Alumni, 2015 - Season II
@magaliduzant

The Moon and Stars Can Be Yours is a pocket-sized guide to modern mysticism by way of the NYC subway system, published in late 2019 by Conveyor Editions. This collection of writing and photography includes a short history of psychics in our popular imagination and more than a dozen vignettes about humorous and historical forays into new age beliefs, alongside a curious collection of artifacts and archival images from the NYPL Picture Collection.

The book follows a freewheeling investigation into the rise of contemporary spiritualism in an age of uncertainty. Each chapter is presented in the form of an unanswerable question—Will I find happiness? Is there luck in my future? Will I find love that lasts?—and meanders into the murky world of palm readings and impromptu sauna astrology sessions, to name a few.

The Moon And Stars Can Be Yours, launched at the NY Art Book Fair in September.

Hugo Rocci (France)

NARS Alumni, 2018 - Season III
@terry.bleu

The new exhibition at the Patty Morgan showroom is an installation of Hugo Rocci’s most recent work, made during his residency at the New York Art Residency and Studios (NARS) Foundation. Inspired by the New York shop windows, which Hugo encountered during his strolls around the city, the artist came up with the idea to create his own shop fronts, that offer a glimpse in the everyday life of these New York shops. Every facade suggests its own narrative and focuses on the mysterious choices of decoration by the shop owner. Neon signs, flower pots, air-conditioner, hand-written notes, and dust are the main actors in Hugo’s most recent work.

Hugo noticed that the craft of hand painted signs is vanishing. The smaller works in the exhibition therefore emphasize the hand painted signs in shop fronts that serve the purpose of communicating the absence of the owner for a small period of time. For instance the post-it note that says the owner will be back in 5 minutes ...

Can you tell us a bit more about the process for creating the work presented in this exhibition?

I started collecting flyers in 2012, always meaning to do something with them but never quite sure what. It wasn’t until I more firmly moved into bookmaking and text that something started to form. I realized that on the most basic plane if I used myself as a bit of a guide or a test subject I might be able to pull something together, take the viewer on a trip with me. I wanted to be able to talk about humor but also fear, uncertainty and history, visual tropes and the kaleidoscope that is NY. As I sifted through the flyers I started looking into the varying services on offer, noting how often women were involved, mapping locations and communities. It led me to think about how universal the search for answers is and in that space how personal and specific our questions are. Research and writing became the structure, the chapters are each a question that I was asking but also that many ask - about love, happiness, location.

How are you doing these days? Is your artwork being influenced by or providing an outlet from the current quarantine?

I am ok. I normally work from home so I haven’t needed to worry too much about figuring out that transition and am lucky to still be working my part time job. My mother is a nurse in NYC and my father is over 80 so that’s been a constant point of anxiety and emotion. It’s taken me a few weeks to come up with a routine and a way to process and deal - there has been a lot of cooking, I bought a jump rope, I’ve buried myself in books. Making work has been very difficult but also very hopeful in its own way. I’m holding onto the fact that there is no need to “make the most out of a pandemic.” I’m taking it day by day and thinking about art as an open field, it happens as it happens

and sometimes reading a book is my studio time, sometimes going through my notebooks, sometimes editing photos, or writing lists, or going for a walk.

What are you working on right now?

I’ve been puttering away bit by bit in the past on a new book work that looks at the ways in which light and celestial phenomena have been described and visualized over the course of history, both in art and science. I found a beautiful coincidence in which both a witness to A-bomb testing in the 40s and another witness to a meteorite in Siberia in 2013 used the same phrase, “a light at the end of the world” to describe what they saw. That line is the bridge that the work is built around. This is the first time that I’ve really decided to sit down and focus wholeheartedly on it so I’m in the real beginning phase of research and image editing.

Is there something specific that you hope to explore in the future?

There are so many things; I have a notebook of ideas for future projects that I’m dying to get to. I received a grant to work on a project about tree dedications in the city and as time has gone by the ideas around the project have shifted and circumstances with lock down have played a part in that - not being able to go out and travel around the city. I have folders full of images that I’m trying to work through and organize so I can have a clearer idea of what might come next. I’ve been caching away notes and research around language and dementia, which my father suffers from, both as a way to process and help navigate. Often I look back at projects and realize how much of myself and my own questions have gone into them, more than I ever realized whilst working on them.

Can you tell us a bit more about the process for creating the work presented in this exhibition?

"Back in 5 minutes" was mostly developed during my residency at the NARS Foundation, inspired by the New York shop windows that I encountered during my time living in the city, I recreated shop fronts that I crossed in different part of the city, every facade suggests its own narrative and focuses on the mysterious choices of decoration by the shop owner. Neon signs, flower pots, air-conditioner, hand-written notes, and dust are the main actors in that series. After being back in the Netherlands, I worked on some extra pieces that I did not have time to finish during my 3 months residency, I presented the entire series of 18 works at Patty Morgan gallery here in Amsterdam.

How are you doing these days? Is your artwork being influenced by or providing an outlet from the current quarantine?

I am doing good, thank you! but the exhibitions, book release and book fairs I had planned for the coming months have been cancelled, but here in Amsterdam we are still allowed to travel around and be with a maximum of 3 people, so I can everyday go to my studio, and work a lot.

What are you working on right now?

I am working on a new screen-printed book that I drew this winter, I am printing and binding it these days. I am also working on a new series of paintings for UNFAIR, a nice art fair here in Amsterdam, that was suppose to happen beginning of April and now postponed to August.
This new work is an architectural front, pushing my series of paintings "back in 5 minutes" to another level, by creating a whole facade, constituting of different canvas. A play between geometrical window frames, patterns, glass reflections, curtains, and hanging laundry blowing in a breeze.

Is there something specific that you hope to explore in the future?

I am trying to get back to "audio visual" work, I used to work much more with the idea of "moving paintings", but I got away from working with animation and films and having a final digital art work. I asked Vanessa Kowalski (former curator at NARS) to produce a text piece for this new work, I am planning on having an audio piece with my new series, a way to have the viewer experiencing the work differently, with a visual and an audio language. I am curious to see where this idea will develop and how it will come together for the UNFAIR exhibition in August (hopefully).