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WĂźnderflater Stanford University MFA exhibition 2009
Curator’s Foreword (P.4)
Mike arcega (p.20) reed anderson (P.26) kazumi shiho (P.32) cobi van tonder (P.38) jina valentine (P.46)
Curator’s Foreword Gail Wight
A Masters in Fine Arts demands hard work, deep thought, and perseverance. Accompanying this is a fabled art history of extraordinary times peopled by remarkably talented individuals with resonant sympathies. This is often how “schools of art” or “movements” emerge. As with all extraordinary time and events, it provokes the expression: “You had to be there.” Reed Anderson, Mike Arcega, Kazumi Shiho, Jina Valentine, and Cobi van Tonder collectively had one of those experiences, so much greater than the sum of its very significant parts, and they want to invite you to “be there.” It coalesced with a graduate seminar this past winter. We came together to discuss global warming, and the ways in which artists were responding, or not responding, to this crisis. Our plan was to spend the quarter in discussion, and to present some art to graduate students from another school in the final week, as part of an exchange. Also involved were first-year graduate students Jeremiah Barber, Jamil Hellu, Juan Luna-Avin, and Armando Miguelez. We attended a lecture on ocean turbines, confessed our eco-guilty sins to each other, read articles on waste water and Dutch communes, played a telling and amusing game we dubbed “environmental pictionary,” battled ethics with a visiting philosopher, and then seemingly out of nowhere, the “iceberg cometh.” Reed and Jeremiah suggested a play for our final exchange, and this swiftly evolved into a full-blown happening. Reed and Mike turned a roll of Tyvek into an enormous inflatable iceberg. Guests were invited inside, where Kazumi sat motionless, dressed as a polar bear, breathing to
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Cobi and Juan’s eerie soundtrack of moaning ice floes. The iceberg was equipped with an inspired umbilical portal through which Armando and Jamil poured trash into our icy haven: water bottles, plastic bags, flea market ephemera, champagne, newspapers, feather boas, speakers, old carpets, deflated balloons. The deluge wouldn’t stop. Our guests drank champagne and began spontaneously to sort the trash for recycling. We set up the speakers and big band filled the air. The iceberg glowed, lit from outside with shadow-plays of hybrid corporate logos, Jina’s furious writing, and silhouettes of the lurking polar bear, who had long ago run out howling. It was the sinking of the Titanic, the end of time - you had to be there. Inevitably, the experience of “iceberg cometh” changed things, and the graduating MFAs of 2009 realized that their two years together had been marked by much collaboration and cross-pollination. They decided that, rather than cordoning off the gallery into lonely exercises of individual, scintillating brilliance (and they are), they would create a collective experience and share it with you. As Cobi said, “We’ll be sharing a ride. That is what culture is - to share the journey and find beauty through a process of ‘removing ourselves’ and simply become ‘an act: doing/making’.” After an eleven hour meeting, which included a trip to Alice’s Restaurant for whatever residual light it might shine on their deliberations, they found their answer: Wünderflater. It would be a new inflatable space, one that would embody their collective – and individual – efforts. While they confess to making up the word, it does have a redolent etymology: wünder = wonder (german), and flater = blunder (Afrikaans). Wünderflater harkens back to those fantastic seventeenthcentury collections of the world’s beautiful idiosyncrasies, and to a Dadaist aesthetic as well, particularly that of the Menil’s Witnesses to a Surrealist Vision, or even a kind of giant, inflated Flux Kit. Mike says of the dirigible itself: “The soft structure has been described as iceberg, monolith, wave form, mountain, bubble, meringue, inflatable,
totoro, puffy, and so on. But oddly, we agree on it - as indescribable as it is.” It is a space within a space, turning the gallery’s inside into outside, and offering a second interior, which in a sense, takes one out of the gallery. Of this inner interior, Mike continues: “Now the site holds our intangible ideas that auditorially traverse our studios and is the place which physically presents our inspirational objects. “ Live sound from their five studio spaces, drawings, thinking objects, inspirational flotsam and jetsam, light from the sky, a cool breeze – it’s good to be here. I applaud these five artists who, in a field that still thrives on a cult of personality to fuel a rapacious and speculative market, in a time when the economic future looks bleak at best, and in a country whose government can’t see the worth in asking pennies per citizen to support our cultural legacy, have found strength and inspiration in their friendship and in their wonderful blunder. Jina says it best: “From the burnt-out embers— all those dashed notions of work hanging idly and independently in separate areas—we will erect a new model for working collaboratively.”
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MIKE
Suspension in Transitional Spaces Samuel Johnson Mike Arcega’s recent work marks a pivot point in his on-going concern with trans-national spaces. The most durable theme in Arcega’s work in this regard has been language. Through polyvalence, specifically crosscultural puns, Arcega has continually endowed the asymmetrical power relations of pidgin and creole languages with a measure of lightness that belies the seriousness of his work. With 2008’s Loping Honoring, however, Arcega’s work underwent a shift away from a concern with the specificities of place and location, usually the point of emigration, to the act or movement through transitional spaces. With the latter, Arcega’s use of language acquires a more general, abstract aspect of spatiality unknown to the pidgin works. Prior to Loping Honoring, Arcega’s work takes up what he calls “cultural residues,” a kind of excess or remainder of the immigrant experience that provides a remnant of the point of emigration. Movement in these pieces is usually that of goods or of the dominant power, not of the native culture. The spam in SPAM/MAPS (2001-2007, ongoing) functions according to its exchange value at a specific location—abundant among U.S. soldiers, rare in the Philipines—which, just as in the coincidence of mutually foreign sounds in a creole word, bears the trace of a point of prolonged contact. Similarly, the route of El Conquistadork, sailed by a scale-model ship constructed from manila folders, marks a specific trade itinerary from the perspective of the Spanish; here Manila is both proper name and commodity, marking both the location of the exchange and
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the abstraction it produces, whose specificity is precisely its anonymity. Loping Honoring is pivotal for Arcega because it both maintains the continuity of his strategy of using cultural residues and marks his first wholesale production of such residues. Whereas both SPAM/MAPS and El Conquistadork had found traces of the point of emigration within readymades, Loping Honoring creates an extended text composed solely of such residues by ‘correcting’ the text of the Filipino national anthem with Microsoft Word’s spell-checker. The logic of exchange present in the sign ‘Manila’ is fully comprehended by Loping Honoring, with the sound of the Tagalog words subordinated to the English written form. It is only from the perspective of subsequent works, however, that Loping Honoring begins to appear as a true departure. If Arcega had not begun the series of pedestrian objects caching hidden interiors exemplified by Concealarium (and at a larger scale, SAFE), one could not understand that a shift from the surplus value of location-bound exchanges to a logic of camouflage and concealment had taken place within his use of language: the English ‘translation’ of Loping Honoring is no exchange, only an empty container. Likewise, the words themselves have no location, no site, but simply mark transit as such. This logic is vividly portrayed in both Concealarium, whose crushed-velvet interior ironically undercuts the industrial mode of transportation, and in Walnut Traverse, a series of climbers’ hand-holds with the appearance of placards whose chief subject is the tenuous suspension of the body in space and the tremendous effort required to traverse the merest distance. Arcega’s most recent work produces not only abstract, intransitive spaces but also the claustrophobia of inhabiting such these spaces, a feeling equally palpable in the cheap comfort of Concealarium’s interior and in the nationalist construct of the Filipino anthem.
“El Conquistadork”
“SPAM/MAPS” (2001-2007)
“Concealarium”
“Loping Honoring”
REED
Dissecting Craft Emily Eastgate Brink An outgrowth of meticulous incisions, repetitions, and extractions, Reed Anderson’s work reveals the potential of the cut as both a medium and a craft. For Anderson, the cutting of paper is a dissection of the creative process, a way to shape structure through voids and build form through deconstruction. What emerges is, according to Anderson, a new ‘species of abstraction,’ an intermingling of animal and floral contours that suggests the patterns of nature and systematization of craft. As hybrid forms, Anderson’s works are as much a new species as they are new specimens, examples of a cross between fine art and craft and the grafting of pop onto pattern. Anderson’s craft consciousness began with printmaking. The seriality, populism, and mechanical mediation of prints offered a contrast to the singularity of painting, while also providing a new approach to creative production. A process of intricate cuts, printmaking became an emancipation, a liberation from the hegemony of contemporary art through a practice that privileged technique before expression. The technical mastery inherent in craft inspired Anderson’s transition from prints to paper cutting, a handwork tradition that imposes new formal and mechanical constraints. With specialized tools, Anderson creates patterns through a careful process of paper extraction, producing images from a methodical layering of holes, silkscreen, and collage. Like printmaking, paper cutting requires technical mastery and the capacity to render absence as presence. By combining the subtractive method of print production with an attention to light and shadow, Anderson’s forms ultimately express the performativity of paper craft, the repetitive process of creation and the theatricality of voids in space.
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While Anderson’s work builds on the process of paper cutting, his images also challenge the conventions of the craft. Often assuming the dimensions of an Ab-Ex canvas, Anderson’s paper tableaux invite the viewer to engage with handwork on a bodily scale, creating an experience of paper forms that is at once detailed and monumental. Built from cellular networks of contours and cutouts, Anderson’s images are re-imaginings of craft and nature, an investigation of production as both a creative and biological force. Beasts and plant-life fracture, fuse, and recombine, creating organic abstractions that reflect the interconnectivity of the natural world. In their form and execution, these works respond to the modern decline of craft and decay of natural ecologies, constructing a new system of production based on the generative possibilities of handwork. Through a return to technical skill and a reliance on systems and patterns, Anderson confronts the stakes of handwork in the digital age. Anderson’s cutting process shares many of the qualities of twenty-first century hyperactivity and repetition, similarities that suggest a new role for contemporary craft. Visual manifestos for what Anderson terms, ‘Hyper-craft,’ these paper forms suggest a reconciliation of contemporary aesthetics, modern living, and craft traditions, an organic network of creative production that begins with a cut. “SLOrk” (2008), 52” x 54”, Acrylic, collage and sumi ink on cut paper
“Cloud Splitter” (2008), 108” x 96”, Silkscreen, collage, acrylic and airbrush on cut paper
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“Hurted The Head” (2008), 56” x 54”, Acrylic, collage and sumi ink on cut paper
“Old Joy” (2008), 51” x 47”, Silkscreen, collage, acrylic and airbrush on cut paper
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KAZUMI
material confrontations Ellen Yoshi Tani For Kazumi Shiho, life consists of junctures: in the mind, between individuals, and among societies and nations. As an artist committed to engaging with contemporary reality and remaining aware of its effects on the individual and society, she assigns her work to the critical task of constructing sites, both physical and cognitive, for interrogation. Her move to the United States from Japan in 2007 presented inspiration in the form of discomfort and acclimation, particularly that of linguistic difference. Prompted by the human response to foreign meaning and cultures, she investigates the possibilities of a non-linguistic language, asking: How can you respond to something through form? Deeply connected to her practice is the concept of kazari, a lineage of Japanese decorative aesthetics associated with creatively fabricated devotional images, often temporary and at grand scales. Meaning is never recognizable and present on the face of the works; rather, it seeps out of them as the viewer parses his/her own cultural knowledge with an immediate subjective response to material, scale and form. The work’s content avoids concrete ideas, instead constructing a set of conditions that provokes myriad questions. For example, the sun (2007), Kazumi’s first piece completed in the United States, calls upon the viewer’s material literacy to construct meaning out of his/her own bodily or cultural associations to the work. A gently slumped swath of white silicone rubber, emblazoned with a large red circle, at first recalls a soft sculpture of a Japanese flag. At once grotesque and welcoming, the object’s materiality recalls the spongy texture of tripe or mochi, the luminosity of skin, or the use of silicone to
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create the jarring hyperrealism of Hollywood’s rubber masks and plastic surgery. The interrogation of our relationship to the work inevitably leads to inquiries about how we, as bodies, relate to the world. The piece belonged to the show inexterior (2008), for which she constructed a series of foam blocks in and out of the Thomas Welton Stanford Art Gallery. A massive assemblage of two blocks angle outward imposingly at the viewer and obscure the building’s entryway. While the work seems to contradict its site, the two in fact share much in common. Styrofoam block, an economical and sustainable building material, comprises many building foundations around campus. Although the sculpture itself is temporary, stone and Styrofoam help a building withstand the elements in surface and depth, respectively. They are bonded in their functional permanence as materials. In several earlier works, feedback systems stimulate the viewer’s senses to modify or catalyze new meaning. Family (2005) and a sensitive room (2005) respond to human interaction with the space and material of the work, while Sabi-Gumo (rusting cloud) and iRecord (2004 and 2005, respectively) create themselves, in a sense, through a material response to the natural conditions of humidity and sunlight. The tension between the motivated agency of the body and the uncontrollable forces
“The Sun” (2007)
of nature, both used to provoke a sensation, feeds into larger political and cultural concerns regarding the phenomenology of the regulated body. A paper mache doll (2008), consists of a paper mâché form of an old mannequin, presented as a surface for bold red circles, whose wouldbe appendages have been rounded to sensuous mounds. Like the sun (2007), the doll inhabits an obscure material space, one in which its solid bone-like form contrasts with its light, hollow construction. But the work is also a performance in which the artist binds the doll in handspun silk thread, covering the painted surface with a tactile surface. Is this process a reference to the Shinto ritual of wrapping sacred objects/ bodies in rope, a nod to bondage, a tug-of-war between sculpture and painting, or the transformation or obfuscation of form? What are the implications of this process when one takes up the matter of control and containment on a social or political scale? The act of obscuring form, surface and marking as nodes of meaning in a paper mache doll resonates with the act of obscuring language in the 2008 work CAUTION DANGER. In this documented performance, Kazumi takes the language of caution tape, used in police and construction sites, as a superficial barrier and a metaphor for the absurdity of difference. By rubbing out the word “caution” or “danger” from the yellow or red barricade tape, respectively, the artist’s material transgression erases the tape’s culturally specific meaning and speaks to the arbitrary nature of surface when stripped of culturally specific marking (in this case, language). These scenarios press the viewer to draw, from their own cultural sourcebook, a set of associations that respond to the work and, subsequently, turn that response out to the world. Intercultural contact fuels the shifting tensions between material function and material meaning. Rather than accept meaning as given through a presented “artwork”, Kazumi highlights the openness of material identity, asking the viewer to do the “art work” through subjective inquiry.
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“Inexterior” (2008)
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COBI
Call and Response
On the Recent Work of Cobi van Tonder James Merle Thomas A deliciously onomatopoeic term, the ping carries a number of rich valences. Ping is the sound your car makes when you finally notice something needs attention, the chirp of a bat flying in a darkened cave, the blip of an object on a submarine’s radar screen. More recently, ping has been casually repurposed as a verb; we ping a server each time we wish to know how long it takes a signal to travel from our computer to Google or any other site; an abstraction of copper wire, (a)ethernet connections, expanses of cable, all transcribed into tidy milliseconds, a shorthand for measuring the ping. And yet the ping carries something more than just these technological and phenomenological definitions. The ping is also a basic existential device, the ur-utterance, a two-fold accounting of-and-for the self: We make a sound first to articulate our very being, then wait for the sound to come back to us, transformed, transfigured, in order that we may place ourselves in a broader landscape. Through a series of multi-channel audio installations, Cobi van Tonder has taken into account this very nuanced understanding of the ping, in ways that extend beyond the merely auditory, and into the political, social, and psychological ramifications of defining and situating oneself within a larger system. At the heart of the artist’s practice lies a gleeful insistence upon the psychological necessity of sound – the desire to acknowledge how frequencies resonate inside of and around us, how we absorb and respond to our surroundings. That we eat, for example, so that we may hear crunching and swallowing. That we build machines, so that
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we can hear the sounds they make. It is through this engagement with perception, and the limits to which such human faculties are attenuated, that South African-born Van Tonder is easily in artistic dialogue with any number of critically acclaimed millennial sound magi; compositions by William Basinski or Christian Fennesz spring readily to mind. Similarly, Van Tonder’s recent years of traveling throughout Asia, South America, and Europe have resulted in a hybridized aesthetic, one that rewards the patient listener, one open to attempting to listen to the world listen to itself. However, due to her embrace of extremely minimal sounds, her ability to capture minute gestures in ambient recordings, and what might be best described as engagement with an aural sense of “closeness,” Van Tonder’s work might best be compared to that of consummate listener Chris Watson, whose extremely intimate—and nearly unmanipulated— field recordings of wild animals sleeping capture a poetics of proximity. In the wake of hearing universes unfold in rise and fall of a lion’s snore recorded inches from its source, synthesized sound seems derivative. Indeed, the suggestion of such an unbridgeable distance seems to be at play in many of Van Tonder’s compositions and installations, represented here in part through a recent series of video and multiplechannel audio works entitled Vuurvangerkindmens (2009). The title, which translates from Afrikaans loosely as “fire-catcher child person,” refers to an anonymous figure starting a small fire on a mountainside. Filmed from a voyeuristic perch atop an adjacent mountain, the video functions similarly to much of Van Tonder’s audio compositions; one is instantly forced to grapple with the significance of reaching to tender lengths, not unlike Watson, of sounding out across the void. Yet at the same time, in returning to the almighty ping, all of this begs a question at once technical and existential: what happens when the signal in question begins to break down? Shot on digital video at extreme distance and utilizing a telephoto zoom that begins to pixelate wildly, Vuurvangerkindmens is a study of evaporation and sublimation as much as it is an oblique nod to anthropology and what it means to capture, to
catch. In a flickering grid that suggests a painterly smear as much as a surveillance camera, the subject blends with and becomes fire, smoke; all of the players and figures in the scene take on a submerged quality, a process that in turn has led the artist to consider the implications of the viewer drowning within the piece. Other recent works similarly attempt to spark heightened consciousness via immersive environments. A recent installation, 888 (2008), consists of a simple space for listening: black cloth draped over an eight-foot cube shaped frame, installed anywhere it will fit: the artist’s studio, a field, etc. While explicitly in dialogue with the legacy of minimalist sculpture, 888 is equally engaged with what one might call the hegemony of modern vision; The work functions (albeit unintentionally) as a riff on the camera obscura, a darkened space one may enter into and grow accustomed to, even gain heightened awareness of, the space that surrounds the box. Van Tonder has also continued her innovative work with increasingly elaborate multiple-channel installations. Here, in a second contribution to the thesis show, sounds from a series of site-specific locations from throughout the globe are linked and assembled, real-time, via a novel web interface, into a decentralized feedback loop. Each location is equipped with a microphone recording a speaker, then relays the accumulating signal to the next node in a closed circuit: the ping of a ping. Because of the digital network’s ability to send and receive data via internet protocol, the project is capable of literally spanning / scanning the globe in rapid fashion. Here, Paris, Johannesburg, and any other place where Van Tonder has erected a node become more than sites in a network; they are signs of Van Tonder’s own political and biographical mapping, indices of her itinerant and highly mobile practice. More proximal to the theme of the current exhibition, and forming the bulk of what visitors will hear during the exhibition, the artist has collaborated with her peers, placing nodes in the studio spaces adjacent to her own, in what might signal an interest on the part of the artist and her peers to address the
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significance of collaboration, innovation, and education as it unfolds within an institutional setting. Here, inside of what the artist has deemed a “recombinant acoustic space,” listeners will take into account their own location within global and very local networks, and experience the phenomenon of a sound listening to itself.
The artist’s gratitude goes out to the programmers and technologists who made The Audio Tunnel possible: Jason Sadural who programmed a special router and mixer in SuperCollider, Juan-Pablo Caceres and Chris Chafe, SoundWIRE Group at CCRMA, Stanford University who wrote JackTrip. For each remote node the piece uses Jamlink devices, which are currently being developed Musicianlink.
“Vuurvangerkindmens” (2009)
“Ephemeral Gumboots”
“Skatesonic - Electronic Skateboard”
JINA
Pop Particulates (Singular Versions) Dan David Hackbarth In 1945 the French painter Jean Dubuffet began collecting the art of children, the mentally ill, and the developmentally disabled, revitalizing this field of study under his neologism, “Art Brut.” One component of Dubuffet’s “enterprise” is academic and connoiseurial, based on the conjecture that a correct understanding of a sufficiently primitive Other might revitalize modernity. Another of its aspects problematizes such ends, proposing instead an open-ended process generated by a paradox within the very idea of Art Brut. Dubuffet sought an art that that would show the very origin of human creativity, a post-natural Nature and pre-cultural Culture, a contradiction in terms or infra-thin hypothetical. Dubuffet would thus, in his own words, “…seek out, …grope about in hopes of finding…” his pure Art Brut, destabilizing notions of Nature and Culture in the process.1 A similar pursuit underlies Jina Valentine’s own folk art-inflected practices. Valentine fantasizes such a third term with both sincerity and ironic distance, recognizing her position inside modernity while scouring its material culture for a means of producing its exterior. She privileges the quotidian, especially pop music and its materialization in vinyl LP records, which she finds at flea markets and thrift stores. As she digs through their ever-present crates, she is interested less in the rare and the valuable than in the rough that surrounds such collectors’ diamonds, the musty and abraded cardboard sleeves from those undesirable albums one finds in every crate, in every store, in every city. 1. Letter to Jacques Berne, Paris, Aug. 3 1970, in Lettres à J.B., 1946-1985 (Paris: Hermann, 1991), 175. As quoted in Lucienne Peiry, Art Brut: The Origins of Outsider Art (Paris: Flammarion, 2001), 132, footnote 15.
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Just as these unremarkable records constitute the very substrate through which most flea market archaeologists search for objects of value, the songs etched into their surfaces amount to a kind of white noise, the easylistening soundtrack that happens to play at a given historical moment. Take, for instance, her Johnny Mathis Series, fashioned for a demographic of “little old ladies” from records by their namesake singer. Onto the jackets’ worn surfaces Jina projects a palimpsest of line drawings, which she traces with the edge of an X-Acto knife and peels from the surface of the cardboard. Depicting icons from 1960s radical politics, anti-war protests, Black Panthers, and Women’s’ Liberation movements, these images are far less soothing than the cozy dens and dewy glades in which Mathis’ photo shoots were staged. As they dehisce from their support, these lines indicate an unsettling tension between the comforts afforded by consumer goods and a palliative entertainment media and the political and social struggle from which they insulate middle- and upper-class America. Riven with gashes and absences, the title of one Mathis album, Open Fire, Two Guitars, shifts in reference from outdoor recreation to war, protest, and concomitant police suppression. The relationship of her drawn lines to the photographs upon which she bases them resembles that between the linear groove of the record and the spatial stereophony it transposes and miniaturizes. However, Valentine’s interest is not merely in fidelity, but instead in the physical and mnemonic processes which both inscribe and erode history, the needles which commit the song to vinyl and convert it back into sound, subtly wearing away subtle detail with each play until the difference is one day audible. As she incises and removes her drawings from the once-sturdy record covers, Valentine hastens the decay they would suffer in thrift store purgatory. However, her drawings are not merely disintegrative, but also, more profoundly, deformative, participating in the processes of informe described by the philosopher George Bataille. In competition with the cover photograph for prominence and, often, simple legibility, their product is rich interference, rather than a zero-
sum. Once extracted from the cardboard, the dense web of lines reveals glimpses of the black and white gatefold through the full-color exterior, itself reduced to shards of negative space. As this relief figures both sides of the album, Jina’s strictly subtractive intervention unexpectedly pushes the flat images towards a sculptural condition. The work thus troubles pre-existing notions of figure and ground, line and plane, depth and flatness, representation and presence. Valentine’s latest work, Lot’s Wife, takes disintegration to its logical conclusion of homogeneity through her isolation of uniform particles from which she casts and molds her objects. She makes paper from its smallest workable element, flax beaten for twice the recommended length of time, producing a gelatinous pulp of fine, short fibers, which she molds around thrift-store oil lamps to create a set of delicate, decidedly non-functional replicas. The overbeaten pulp is difficult to handle, resulting in a mottled, translucent paper the artist prizes for its likeness to parchment, fried chicken skin, and cicada husks. Beyond the iconographic reference to metamorphosis (even transubstantiation), this material blurs the distinction between flax and skin, plant and animal, making a fantastic idea of hybrid intermediacy available to the senses. The installation makes its most explicit reference to the Biblical story of Lot’s wife and her transformation into a pillar of salt (Genesis 19) with a Corinthian column cast from sifted soil. This object itself functions as a mold, a surface around which a second column is formed, and from which it is cut free. The contrast between brown mud and the beige paper hints at a racial allegory, encouraging the viewer to allow his or her ideals and anxieties to play-out upon the work’s surface. The paper lamps become a more literal type of screen, illumined with projected drawings, depicting a pantheon of musicians who died early deaths, from Jim Morrison and Mama Cass to Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur. Spanning genre and generation, the list is unified by conspiracy theorists’ belief that the CIA murdered these figures for their subversive activities, a re-writing of history that itself constitutes a kind of projection.
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“Lot’s Wife”
Lot’s Wife has a further element outside the gallery space: a second column installed in the hole from which Jina dug its soil. This is only the most literal evocation of one fiction, which seems to motivate her art more generally: that the artwork might spontaneously generate itself. Searching for readymade objects and groping through subtractive and disintegrative processes, she thus approaches the origin of her art with each individual work.
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“Five Damned Cities: Romance”
“Riots & Rations: White Corn”