Looking Forward while Looking Back:
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 ...
Conversations
2019, Season III & IV
@estherhovers
waves. At times I feel blessed by the focus and stillness of this time and how it is helping me to create. Other moments I long for face-to-face discussions and the chance to experience art in a physical space rather than online. But I am grateful to be in good health and to have this time to focus on my different projects at the moment.
What are you working on right now?
I am working on an audio walk for a park in Amsterdam. The project has started to take on another meaning in our current situation because it deals with walking in solitude.
Next to this I am researching for another photographic project, but it is too soon to say very much about that.
Is there something specific that you hope to explore in the future?
There are so many things that I hope to explore in the future. From the top of my head, I want to master more kinds of printmaking, languages and to learn how to sew. I like the idea of not sticking with what I already know or as Pippi Longstocking put it “I have never tried that before, so I think I should definitely be able to do that.”
Can you tell us a bit more about the process for creating the work presented in this exhibition?
I created the presented works during my residency at NARS in 2019. I used street photography in Manhattan to create a series about the mathematical Traveling Salesman Problem. This is a mathematical problem about efficiency of movement. We try to solve this problem every day, by predicting optimal routes for our routines, deliveries, rounds, travels, commutes, etc.
My works deal with the collective need for efficiency, predictability and control. I investigate technological tools we create to try to control our lives. With my work I hope to find poetic approaches to technology that help us understand it from a more human perspective. Rather than solely looking at control within the urban environment, I use the city as a metaphor for the unpredictable. The protagonist might as well be a modern version of a flaneur; someone who walks without aim.
How are you doing these days? Is your artwork being influenced by or providing an outlet from the current quarantine?
I think for most people, myself included, our moods in quarantine come in
NARS Alumni, 2015 - Season II
@magaliduzant
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.
NARS Alumni, 2018 - Season III
@terry.bleu
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).