Issue 12

Spring E

ue Iss

dit ion ,

2 12, 019

Art Maze Magazine is an independent artist-run and ad-free international print and online publication dedicated to showcasing and promoting experimental and progressive contemporary art, which reflects modern society and its environment, provokes conversation and action; and fosters innovation and diversity of mediums which make today’s art scene so intriguing and versatile.

SUBMIT FOR PRINT AND DIGITAL PUBLICATIONS

SUBMIT FOR ONLINE PUBLICATIONS

We invite guest curators from internationally renowned galleries as well as independent art professionals to select works for each issue. We try to give spotlight to artists and engage with our readers and followers everyday through our social media, website and print and digital issues.

If you wish to submit to our online blog, you are welcome to fill in the application form on our website.

Artists are welcome to submit works in any medium: painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, printmaking, photography, textile, installation, mixed media, digital etc.

Artists or any art organisations on behalf of artists from all countries are welcome to submit.

WRITERS

Please visit our website for more details on how to apply for print publications: www.artmazemag.com/call-for-art/ or see p. 11 Artists are welcome to submit works to our online blog.

This opportunity also provides a chance to be published in print issues.

FIND US ONLINE www.artmazemag.com facebook.com/artmazemag instagram.com/artmazemag

GENERAL ENQUIRIES: info@artmazemag.com

Featured image: Ken Gun Min Up side down rabbit glue, oil paint, korean pigment, glass bead, crystal on raw canvas 53 x 68 inches more on p. 106-107

ArtMaze Magazine is printed in London, UK, five times a year

by Park Communications Ltd.

For more details on blog submissions please visit our website: artmazemag.com/submit-for-blog-feature/

You are welcome to submit an article, review or interview for consideration for online or print publications.

Please send us an email to info@artmazemag.com

ISSUES Please visit our website to find out where to purchase print and digital copies of ArtMaze Mag: www.artmazemag.com/shop

FRONT COVER: Zander Blom The Transatlantic Passenger oil on linen, 198 x 150 cm more on p. 30-47

BACK COVER: Emil Robinson Tulips 2 oil on custom panel, 17 x 12 inches more on p. 88-89

© 2019 print ISSN No. 2399-892X online ISSN No. 2399-8938

Registered office address: ArtMaze Magazine Ltd. G06, Binnacle House 10 Cobblestone Square E1W 3AR, London United Kingdom

® ArtMaze Magazine is a registered trademark

Art Maze Magazine is an independent artist-run and ad-free international print and online publication dedicated to showcasing and promoting experimental and progressive contemporary art, which reflects modern society and its environment, provokes conversation and action; and fosters innovation and diversity of mediums which make today’s art scene so intriguing and versatile.

SUBMIT FOR PRINT AND DIGITAL PUBLICATIONS

SUBMIT FOR ONLINE PUBLICATIONS

We invite guest curators from internationally renowned galleries as well as independent art professionals to select works for each issue. We try to give spotlight to artists and engage with our readers and followers everyday through our social media, website and print and digital issues.

If you wish to submit to our online blog, you are welcome to fill in the application form on our website.

Artists are welcome to submit works in any medium: painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, printmaking, photography, textile, installation, mixed media, digital etc.

Artists or any art organisations on behalf of artists from all countries are welcome to submit.

WRITERS

Please visit our website for more details on how to apply for print publications: www.artmazemag.com/call-for-art/ or see p. 11 Artists are welcome to submit works to our online blog.

This opportunity also provides a chance to be published in print issues.

FIND US ONLINE www.artmazemag.com facebook.com/artmazemag instagram.com/artmazemag

GENERAL ENQUIRIES: info@artmazemag.com

Featured image: Ken Gun Min Up side down rabbit glue, oil paint, korean pigment, glass bead, crystal on raw canvas 53 x 68 inches more on p. 106-107

ArtMaze Magazine is printed in London, UK, five times a year

by Park Communications Ltd.

For more details on blog submissions please visit our website: artmazemag.com/submit-for-blog-feature/

You are welcome to submit an article, review or interview for consideration for online or print publications.

Please send us an email to info@artmazemag.com

ISSUES Please visit our website to find out where to purchase print and digital copies of ArtMaze Mag: www.artmazemag.com/shop

FRONT COVER: Zander Blom The Transatlantic Passenger oil on linen, 198 x 150 cm more on p. 30-47

BACK COVER: Emil Robinson Tulips 2 oil on custom panel, 17 x 12 inches more on p. 88-89

© 2019 print ISSN No. 2399-892X online ISSN No. 2399-8938

Registered office address: ArtMaze Magazine Ltd. G06, Binnacle House 10 Cobblestone Square E1W 3AR, London United Kingdom

® ArtMaze Magazine is a registered trademark

13

10

84

110

interviewed

call for art

curated selection of works

editorial selection of works

Straddli ng t he t wo and t hre e - di me n sional with M illy Pe ck . . . . . . . . .......................................................................... 14

Su mmer E d itio n: Issue 13 ........................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1 Lior Modan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 Em i l Rob i n son . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 Tahnee Lon sdale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 0 M ar i ah Fer rar i . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 2 Rachel Hor vat h . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 3 Si n Par k . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 4 D ave B opp . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 6 G ar y Petersen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 8 Nigel Howlet t . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 0 I an Thom a s M i ller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 A mb er B oard m an . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 Chr i s Ca p oy i anes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 A nd rea Fer r igno . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Ken G u n M i n . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 Leonora Loeb . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108

A n na Weyant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1 2 A my B u towic z . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 14 J i m G aylord . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 16 Kayla Plosz Antiel ....................................................................118 A n na Skov Ha ssi ng . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1 9 M at t hew M ahler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 20 Si ara B er r y . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 22 Ellie Fr it z . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 23 Cody Tu mbli n . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 24 Wendeli n Wohlgemu t h . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 26 Tsai li ng Tseng . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 27 Hannah Cosac Naify ................................................................128 Amadeo Morelos .....................................................................129 Chr i st i an M ickovic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 30 B Cheh ayeb . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 31 Nick McPh ail ...........................................................................132 Lee John son . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 34 Em i Avora . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 35 Çağla Ulusoy ...........................................................................136 Ser p i l M avi Ust u n . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 38 A m mon Rost . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140 Adrian Kay Wong .....................................................................142 M i les D eb a s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144 A net a Ka j zer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 M adelei ne Pfull . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146

“ I want to p ai nt li ke t he re ’s no tomor row”— i n c onve rs at ion w it h Z ande r Blom ................................... ................ 30 B et we e n int uit ion and i nte nt ion: draw i ng s by Na si m H anteh z adeh . ........................................................... ............... 48 Henr y C u rchod: “ T he more you k now, the le s s you k now.” ........................... ................ 60 K now you r h istor y: i n conve rs at ion w it h galle r i st Tr i st i an Koe n ig . . . . . . . . . ......................................................................... 74

108

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Contents

114

13

10

84

110

interviewed

call for art

curated selection of works

editorial selection of works

Straddli ng t he t wo and t hre e - di me n sional with M illy Pe ck . . . . . . . . .......................................................................... 14

Su mmer E d itio n: Issue 13 ........................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1 Lior Modan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 Em i l Rob i n son . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 Tahnee Lon sdale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 0 M ar i ah Fer rar i . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 2 Rachel Hor vat h . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 3 Si n Par k . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 4 D ave B opp . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 6 G ar y Petersen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 8 Nigel Howlet t . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 0 I an Thom a s M i ller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 A mb er B oard m an . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 Chr i s Ca p oy i anes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 A nd rea Fer r igno . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Ken G u n M i n . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 Leonora Loeb . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108

A n na Weyant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1 2 A my B u towic z . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 14 J i m G aylord . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 16 Kayla Plosz Antiel ....................................................................118 A n na Skov Ha ssi ng . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1 9 M at t hew M ahler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 20 Si ara B er r y . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 22 Ellie Fr it z . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 23 Cody Tu mbli n . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 24 Wendeli n Wohlgemu t h . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 26 Tsai li ng Tseng . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 27 Hannah Cosac Naify ................................................................128 Amadeo Morelos .....................................................................129 Chr i st i an M ickovic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 30 B Cheh ayeb . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 31 Nick McPh ail ...........................................................................132 Lee John son . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 34 Em i Avora . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 35 Çağla Ulusoy ...........................................................................136 Ser p i l M avi Ust u n . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 38 A m mon Rost . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140 Adrian Kay Wong .....................................................................142 M i les D eb a s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144 A net a Ka j zer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 M adelei ne Pfull . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146

“ I want to p ai nt li ke t he re ’s no tomor row”— i n c onve rs at ion w it h Z ande r Blom ................................... ................ 30 B et we e n int uit ion and i nte nt ion: draw i ng s by Na si m H anteh z adeh . ........................................................... ............... 48 Henr y C u rchod: “ T he more you k now, the le s s you k now.” ........................... ................ 60 K now you r h istor y: i n conve rs at ion w it h galle r i st Tr i st i an Koe n ig . . . . . . . . . ......................................................................... 74

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from the editor Dear Reader, Welcome to the new Spring Edition 12 of ArtMaze!

This issue’s guest curator, Tristian Koenig, a Melbourne-based gallerist has created a selection of artworks which highlights the beautiful materiality and outstanding skill of each artist. He founded his gallery in 2011, which is housed in a large old sawtooth style factory, and has developed an extraordinary portfolio of exhibitions shown in his own space as well as at international fairs and popups across Australia. Amongst some of the prominent emerging artists whose works he has shown are Henry Curchod, Seth Birchall, Jiaxin Nong and others. Take a closer look through Tristian’s selection of works for our Spring Issue on p. 84-109 and get a better feel for his curatorial vision through his interview on p. 74-83.

Our Editorial Selection (p. 110-147) is comprised of the works of twenty-five artists featuring various visual mediums along with thought-provoking concepts and ideas. In particular, the satirical figurative paintings of Anna Weyant, which draw influence from a wide range of sources and periods, including Dutch paintings of the seventeenth century, the Italian Renaissance, popular culture and social media; the work of Aneta Kajzer, which incorporates motifs of corporeality, sexuality, embarrassment and failure, as well as associated emotional states; the storytelling work by Madeleine Pfull, inspired by performance and mannerisms which can provide a whole backstory to a portrayed person; Serpil Mavi Ustun’s work which is structured around internal conflicts, defense mechanisms, the need for attention, and the daily struggles of the every day life; the work of Amadeo Morelos through which he attempts to understand his relationship to others and his own search for belonging in a hyperdomesticated world; intricate mixed media pieces by Jim Gaylord which grew out of a response to the physical characteristics of the heavy watercolor paper he’s been using, treating his work as something between painting and sculpture; and others…

Our interviewed artists’ section (p. 14-73) presents you with the work of four international artists based in South Africa, Australia, USA and UK. Their unmistakably strong and moving artworks have been an inspiration to our community as we’ve been following the progress of their developing practices. Cover artist Zander Blom, who has been working with abstraction for quite a while has switched his focus to figurative notions creating intriguing collage-styled narratives, which capture the viewer’s attention instantly. Dazzling mixed media installations by Milly Peck display the sense of a three and twodimensional cartoonish-like world of mundane scenes with smooth humour while emphasizing details of every day life. Iranian-American artist Nasim Hantehzadeh’s pieces are filled with both abstract and figurative motifs shaped through a bold palette and mark making, work which is for the viewer to derive their own read. Henry Curchod’s candid and heartfelt responses do not fail to inspire us about the ways he looks at contemporary art and finds ideas creating his enthralling painterly narratives.

We are delighted to be working on our next Summer Edition 13 with Chris Sharp, who is a writer and independent curator based in Mexico City, where he co-runs the project space Lulu. Formerly news editor at Flash Art International and editor-at-large of Kaleidoscope, he is a contributing editor of Art Review and of Art-Agenda, and his writing has appeared in many magazines and on-line publications including Artforum, Fillip, Frieze, Afterall, Mousse, Metropolis M, Spike, Camera Austria, artpress, and others. Please read more details about this curated publishing opportunity on p. 10-11 and on our website.

As our community continues to constantly grow and flourish, it inevitably brings to our attention more and more talented people across the world. If you submitted work to our publication, picked up a print or digital copy or follow our publication online, we want to thank you for your support and interest in ArtMaze and we hope this issue will help you discover something new and fascinating from the emerging contemporary global art community which we are so passionate to promote.

Featured image: Çağla Ulusoy 350 gr acrylic and pastel on canvas 135 x 200 cm more on p. 136-137

Yours truly, Editor and Founder Maria Zemtsova

from the editor Dear Reader, Welcome to the new Spring Edition 12 of ArtMaze!

This issue’s guest curator, Tristian Koenig, a Melbourne-based gallerist has created a selection of artworks which highlights the beautiful materiality and outstanding skill of each artist. He founded his gallery in 2011, which is housed in a large old sawtooth style factory, and has developed an extraordinary portfolio of exhibitions shown in his own space as well as at international fairs and popups across Australia. Amongst some of the prominent emerging artists whose works he has shown are Henry Curchod, Seth Birchall, Jiaxin Nong and others. Take a closer look through Tristian’s selection of works for our Spring Issue on p. 84-109 and get a better feel for his curatorial vision through his interview on p. 74-83.

Our Editorial Selection (p. 110-147) is comprised of the works of twenty-five artists featuring various visual mediums along with thought-provoking concepts and ideas. In particular, the satirical figurative paintings of Anna Weyant, which draw influence from a wide range of sources and periods, including Dutch paintings of the seventeenth century, the Italian Renaissance, popular culture and social media; the work of Aneta Kajzer, which incorporates motifs of corporeality, sexuality, embarrassment and failure, as well as associated emotional states; the storytelling work by Madeleine Pfull, inspired by performance and mannerisms which can provide a whole backstory to a portrayed person; Serpil Mavi Ustun’s work which is structured around internal conflicts, defense mechanisms, the need for attention, and the daily struggles of the every day life; the work of Amadeo Morelos through which he attempts to understand his relationship to others and his own search for belonging in a hyperdomesticated world; intricate mixed media pieces by Jim Gaylord which grew out of a response to the physical characteristics of the heavy watercolor paper he’s been using, treating his work as something between painting and sculpture; and others…

Our interviewed artists’ section (p. 14-73) presents you with the work of four international artists based in South Africa, Australia, USA and UK. Their unmistakably strong and moving artworks have been an inspiration to our community as we’ve been following the progress of their developing practices. Cover artist Zander Blom, who has been working with abstraction for quite a while has switched his focus to figurative notions creating intriguing collage-styled narratives, which capture the viewer’s attention instantly. Dazzling mixed media installations by Milly Peck display the sense of a three and twodimensional cartoonish-like world of mundane scenes with smooth humour while emphasizing details of every day life. Iranian-American artist Nasim Hantehzadeh’s pieces are filled with both abstract and figurative motifs shaped through a bold palette and mark making, work which is for the viewer to derive their own read. Henry Curchod’s candid and heartfelt responses do not fail to inspire us about the ways he looks at contemporary art and finds ideas creating his enthralling painterly narratives.

We are delighted to be working on our next Summer Edition 13 with Chris Sharp, who is a writer and independent curator based in Mexico City, where he co-runs the project space Lulu. Formerly news editor at Flash Art International and editor-at-large of Kaleidoscope, he is a contributing editor of Art Review and of Art-Agenda, and his writing has appeared in many magazines and on-line publications including Artforum, Fillip, Frieze, Afterall, Mousse, Metropolis M, Spike, Camera Austria, artpress, and others. Please read more details about this curated publishing opportunity on p. 10-11 and on our website.

As our community continues to constantly grow and flourish, it inevitably brings to our attention more and more talented people across the world. If you submitted work to our publication, picked up a print or digital copy or follow our publication online, we want to thank you for your support and interest in ArtMaze and we hope this issue will help you discover something new and fascinating from the emerging contemporary global art community which we are so passionate to promote.

Featured image: Çağla Ulusoy 350 gr acrylic and pastel on canvas 135 x 200 cm more on p. 136-137

Yours truly, Editor and Founder Maria Zemtsova

p.84-109 curated selection of works

p.110-147 editorial selection of works

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p.84-109 curated selection of works

p.110-147 editorial selection of works

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Summer Edition: Issue 13

call for art DEADLINE: May 23rd, 2019 Guest Curator: Chris Sharp writer and independent curator based in Mexico City, co-founder of project space Lulu

Submit your work for a chance to be published in print and digital issues, as well as online on our website and social media.

ELIGIBILITY: The competition is open to all artists, both national and international, working in all visual mediums. Artists are welcome to submit works in any medium: painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, printmaking, photography, textile, installation, mixed media, digital, film etc.

DISTRIBUTION: ArtMaze Magazine is an independent international publication which is distributed both nationally and internationally via book shops, galleries and museums, art events and via the online store: artmazemag.com/shop HOW TO APPLY: please visit our website for more details and fill in the online form via the following link: artmazemag.com/call-for-art OTHER OPPORTUNITIES: Artists are welcome to submit their works to our online blog.

Please visit our website for more information: www.artmazemag.com or contact us at info@artmazemag.com

Featured image: Tahnee Lonsdale Big Spoon, Little Spoon spray paint and oil on canvas 70 x 64 inches more on p. 90-91

Summer Edition: Issue 13

call for art DEADLINE: May 23rd, 2019 Guest Curator: Chris Sharp writer and independent curator based in Mexico City, co-founder of project space Lulu

Submit your work for a chance to be published in print and digital issues, as well as online on our website and social media.

ELIGIBILITY: The competition is open to all artists, both national and international, working in all visual mediums. Artists are welcome to submit works in any medium: painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, printmaking, photography, textile, installation, mixed media, digital, film etc.

DISTRIBUTION: ArtMaze Magazine is an independent international publication which is distributed both nationally and internationally via book shops, galleries and museums, art events and via the online store: artmazemag.com/shop HOW TO APPLY: please visit our website for more details and fill in the online form via the following link: artmazemag.com/call-for-art OTHER OPPORTUNITIES: Artists are welcome to submit their works to our online blog.

Please visit our website for more information: www.artmazemag.com or contact us at info@artmazemag.com

Featured image: Tahnee Lonsdale Big Spoon, Little Spoon spray paint and oil on canvas 70 x 64 inches more on p. 90-91

interviewed:

Milly Peck Zander Blom Nasim Hantehzadeh Henry Curchod Tristian Koenig

interviewed:

Milly Peck Zander Blom Nasim Hantehzadeh Henry Curchod Tristian Koenig

www.millypeck.com

Straddling the two and threedimensional with Milly Peck The soft humour and definitive emphatic detail of mundane scenes in the work of Milly Peck are hypnotizing. Playing with the motifs of gestural elements, historical peculiarity and every day ‘life’ of specific exhibition locations, Milly creates stage-like interior installations comprised of an ensemble of two and three-dimensional paintings and sculptures which emphasize the outstanding characteristics of each space. Every piece within the installation is coexisting with the others in a building/room/location in a very distinct link, correlating each other’s role within the nature of the given interior. Her sophisticated portrayal of such spaces creates a strangely familiar yet illusory feel of the surrounding environment in which you stand.

Having earned her MA at the Royal College of Art, London and BFA at the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford University, Milly has been successfully showing work across the UK and Europe including her recent solo exhibitions at Assembly Point and Tintype Gallery. Her most recent project is a stand-alone installation for Jerwood Space SURVEY show, which is a travelling exhibition across the UK. Located in the south-west district of London, Milly’s studio is compact and equipped with the necessary tools and machines which allow her to produce large scale three dimensional pieces as well as flat images. We speak to the artist over a cup of morning coffee about her life as an independent artist after graduation, her developing practice, current projects and the way she sees her work looking in the future.

interview by Maria Zemtsova

Featured image: Milly Peck Untitled emulsion on board 360 x 168 x 5cm Pressure Head, Assembly Point, London Photo courtesy of Assembly Point, photo by Ben Westoby

www.millypeck.com

Straddling the two and threedimensional with Milly Peck The soft humour and definitive emphatic detail of mundane scenes in the work of Milly Peck are hypnotizing. Playing with the motifs of gestural elements, historical peculiarity and every day ‘life’ of specific exhibition locations, Milly creates stage-like interior installations comprised of an ensemble of two and three-dimensional paintings and sculptures which emphasize the outstanding characteristics of each space. Every piece within the installation is coexisting with the others in a building/room/location in a very distinct link, correlating each other’s role within the nature of the given interior. Her sophisticated portrayal of such spaces creates a strangely familiar yet illusory feel of the surrounding environment in which you stand.

Having earned her MA at the Royal College of Art, London and BFA at the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford University, Milly has been successfully showing work across the UK and Europe including her recent solo exhibitions at Assembly Point and Tintype Gallery. Her most recent project is a stand-alone installation for Jerwood Space SURVEY show, which is a travelling exhibition across the UK. Located in the south-west district of London, Milly’s studio is compact and equipped with the necessary tools and machines which allow her to produce large scale three dimensional pieces as well as flat images. We speak to the artist over a cup of morning coffee about her life as an independent artist after graduation, her developing practice, current projects and the way she sees her work looking in the future.

interview by Maria Zemtsova

Featured image: Milly Peck Untitled emulsion on board 360 x 168 x 5cm Pressure Head, Assembly Point, London Photo courtesy of Assembly Point, photo by Ben Westoby

AMM: Hi Milly! Please tell us about how your work developed in its current form.

rather than a three-dimensional rendering created through our usual stereoscopic vision.

MP: I’ve always made work that straddles the two and three-dimensional, working between printmaking and collage in the past, drawing, sculpture, painting and installation. Flat image attempting to mimic properties of threedimensionality and conversely, sculptures being rendered graphically in cartoonish forms and simplified matt colours. I have previously drawn influence from commercial window displays, advertising, logos and the various processes of ‘flattening’ which occur in these modes of communication. I’ve always been interested in the proliferation of the reproduced image through these means and particularly, the imitation and manipulation of natural forms within these. My work now consists for the most part of routed works which are both pictorial and three-dimensional to an extent, by nature of the process. Working freehand with this machine consistently as a tool for drawing, images undergo a process of simplification— butting up against the practical limits of the tool itself and my ability to handle it. In this way, I think that this practical process of making becomes a way to unpick how we attempt to understand reality through representations.

Someone wrote to me recently in relation to this and said “a window is not a only a window, but also a compilation of all the windows we have ever seen” which I think maybe explains what I mean better than I can articulate!

AMM: How do you begin to create a single piece and how does an installation evolve?

AMM: How does exploring the area between the flat image and the three-dimensional object influence your practice?

MP: I think I’m most interested in how flatness can exist in a sculptural context. I remember reading something an artist had written about how sculpture is somehow unsettling for its inability to reveal all its facets at the same time.

You can’t optically experience a sculpture at once because there is always a reverse you can not see. It historically requires you to rotate around it. I’m interested in the notion of a front and a reverse of an image. In much of my work, I’ve tried to draw attention to these vantage points, changing the lighting or revealing the construction of the work to signify a front and back. Similarly, in more wall based works, I have played with depictions of drop shadows and shadow puppetry. They often have cut out voids which create their own real drop shadows. The routing technique I employ also has this strange quality of being a graphic form of line drawing but also a physical interruption to the surface of the work. There becomes an interplay between the representation of depth and depth itself. I don’t think these works are painting or sculptures but are very much in a middle ground. I often think about this medical condition called stereoblindness where some people are unable to perceive stereoscopic depth meaning that they visually see the world as a flattened image. There is speculation that Rembrandt had a form of stereoblindness and that this may have been advantageous in his ability to accurately portray things as he was perhaps already seeing things in image form photo by Maria Zemtsova

MP: I quite rarely think about works being singular autonomous pieces. I usually think about them in bodies or groups and their positioning and installation is often codependent. Motifs will reappear at times such as windows or chequered floor tiles. I often make works which are in dialogue with particular spaces both in their imagery and in their installation.

AMM: From your last solo show ‘Pressure Head’ at Assembly Point in London you made work in direct response to the gallery space, extending your composition directly from existing architectural features within the building. This is fascinating; can you tell us more about your work on this particular show?

MP: The gallery space at Assembly Point is interesting. I think it was once a Methodist church so it intrinsically has this frontward facing emphasis on entering. Metal columns lead towards the back wall with a sort of central aisle. It’s very stage-like. Though the space has obviously been altered since, it still has these old, iron Victorian radiators and I used these as a physical starting point to the show. I made a fictional, faulty plumbing system which crept across the gallery in a diagrammatic arrangement. All the works in the show loosely related to water in domestic or everyday settings—a blocked shower drain, a stagnant pond, a drive through carwash. Isolated hands carrying out everyday tasks in these scenes becoming unwitting performers. It was important that the rudimentary construction of the plumbing system was left visible, works becoming stage flats on a theatre set. I was lucky to have quite a generous install period for my show which meant that I could work in the space, building and designing the fake piping system on site, adjusting and changing it as it grew. I think there’s only so much that models or drawings can do before seeing something emerging in real space in relation to your own body. The install changed from my original drawings quite a lot. I’m interested in the idea of the works existing as three-dimensional collages and creating vantage points where different parts of works frame or dissect one another teasing our sense of depth perception.

The piping system which ran through the gallery acted as a linear drawing in itself which could probably have taken a number of different configurations but I think this sense of mutability and adaption is crucial to the work— that it’s something more akin to a set in mid turnaround between scenes containing some sort of latent, performative potential.

AMM: How long does it take to prepare/create an installation like this? What are the main aspects you had to consider whilst planning it?

MP: I usually always start with drawing. First, quite playful quick sketches and then later slightly more thorough scaled drawings. I also often

17

“I’m most interested in how flatness can exist in a sculptural context.

I remember reading something an artist had written about how sculpture is somehow unsettling for its inability to reveal all its facets at the same time.

You can’t optically experience a sculpture at once because there is always a reverse you can not see. It historically requires you to rotate around it. I’m interested in the notion of a front and a reverse of an image.”

- Milly Peck

make clumsy digital collages on Photoshop. But these are really just a starting point. I’m pretty un-technological, I think in part because I’ve never really been particularly drawn to systems which aid or remove the potential for error carried by the hand. It’s a strange stubbornness that translates into my freehand use of a router as a tool for drawing. I try to do everything on my own when making and installing my work. I think that in a way, having this vague limitation creates a sort of measurable pace to the work and gives me a feeling of control. It ends up often having quite a direct relationship to the physical limits of my own body; the reach of my arms, my height and what I can counterbalance or carry.

Maybe this will change at some point depending on the project. When I need metalwork, I work closely with a blacksmith whose forge is local to where I live. We’ve worked together to make framing structures for different projects.

It’s quite a unique situation so the process is organic and flexible. It seems that small scale industries like this are becoming much harder to sustain because of rent increases and so on.

The industrial estate he works on will be sold for property development soon so I really value this relationship whilst it lasts.

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12, Interviewed: Milly Peck

AMM: Hi Milly! Please tell us about how your work developed in its current form.

rather than a three-dimensional rendering created through our usual stereoscopic vision.

MP: I’ve always made work that straddles the two and three-dimensional, working between printmaking and collage in the past, drawing, sculpture, painting and installation. Flat image attempting to mimic properties of threedimensionality and conversely, sculptures being rendered graphically in cartoonish forms and simplified matt colours. I have previously drawn influence from commercial window displays, advertising, logos and the various processes of ‘flattening’ which occur in these modes of communication. I’ve always been interested in the proliferation of the reproduced image through these means and particularly, the imitation and manipulation of natural forms within these. My work now consists for the most part of routed works which are both pictorial and three-dimensional to an extent, by nature of the process. Working freehand with this machine consistently as a tool for drawing, images undergo a process of simplification— butting up against the practical limits of the tool itself and my ability to handle it. In this way, I think that this practical process of making becomes a way to unpick how we attempt to understand reality through representations.

Someone wrote to me recently in relation to this and said “a window is not a only a window, but also a compilation of all the windows we have ever seen” which I think maybe explains what I mean better than I can articulate!

AMM: How do you begin to create a single piece and how does an installation evolve?

AMM: How does exploring the area between the flat image and the three-dimensional object influence your practice?

MP: I think I’m most interested in how flatness can exist in a sculptural context. I remember reading something an artist had written about how sculpture is somehow unsettling for its inability to reveal all its facets at the same time.

You can’t optically experience a sculpture at once because there is always a reverse you can not see. It historically requires you to rotate around it. I’m interested in the notion of a front and a reverse of an image. In much of my work, I’ve tried to draw attention to these vantage points, changing the lighting or revealing the construction of the work to signify a front and back. Similarly, in more wall based works, I have played with depictions of drop shadows and shadow puppetry. They often have cut out voids which create their own real drop shadows. The routing technique I employ also has this strange quality of being a graphic form of line drawing but also a physical interruption to the surface of the work. There becomes an interplay between the representation of depth and depth itself. I don’t think these works are painting or sculptures but are very much in a middle ground. I often think about this medical condition called stereoblindness where some people are unable to perceive stereoscopic depth meaning that they visually see the world as a flattened image. There is speculation that Rembrandt had a form of stereoblindness and that this may have been advantageous in his ability to accurately portray things as he was perhaps already seeing things in image form photo by Maria Zemtsova

MP: I quite rarely think about works being singular autonomous pieces. I usually think about them in bodies or groups and their positioning and installation is often codependent. Motifs will reappear at times such as windows or chequered floor tiles. I often make works which are in dialogue with particular spaces both in their imagery and in their installation.

AMM: From your last solo show ‘Pressure Head’ at Assembly Point in London you made work in direct response to the gallery space, extending your composition directly from existing architectural features within the building. This is fascinating; can you tell us more about your work on this particular show?

MP: The gallery space at Assembly Point is interesting. I think it was once a Methodist church so it intrinsically has this frontward facing emphasis on entering. Metal columns lead towards the back wall with a sort of central aisle. It’s very stage-like. Though the space has obviously been altered since, it still has these old, iron Victorian radiators and I used these as a physical starting point to the show. I made a fictional, faulty plumbing system which crept across the gallery in a diagrammatic arrangement. All the works in the show loosely related to water in domestic or everyday settings—a blocked shower drain, a stagnant pond, a drive through carwash. Isolated hands carrying out everyday tasks in these scenes becoming unwitting performers. It was important that the rudimentary construction of the plumbing system was left visible, works becoming stage flats on a theatre set. I was lucky to have quite a generous install period for my show which meant that I could work in the space, building and designing the fake piping system on site, adjusting and changing it as it grew. I think there’s only so much that models or drawings can do before seeing something emerging in real space in relation to your own body. The install changed from my original drawings quite a lot. I’m interested in the idea of the works existing as three-dimensional collages and creating vantage points where different parts of works frame or dissect one another teasing our sense of depth perception.

The piping system which ran through the gallery acted as a linear drawing in itself which could probably have taken a number of different configurations but I think this sense of mutability and adaption is crucial to the work— that it’s something more akin to a set in mid turnaround between scenes containing some sort of latent, performative potential.

AMM: How long does it take to prepare/create an installation like this? What are the main aspects you had to consider whilst planning it?

MP: I usually always start with drawing. First, quite playful quick sketches and then later slightly more thorough scaled drawings. I also often

17

“I’m most interested in how flatness can exist in a sculptural context.

I remember reading something an artist had written about how sculpture is somehow unsettling for its inability to reveal all its facets at the same time.

You can’t optically experience a sculpture at once because there is always a reverse you can not see. It historically requires you to rotate around it. I’m interested in the notion of a front and a reverse of an image.”

- Milly Peck

make clumsy digital collages on Photoshop. But these are really just a starting point. I’m pretty un-technological, I think in part because I’ve never really been particularly drawn to systems which aid or remove the potential for error carried by the hand. It’s a strange stubbornness that translates into my freehand use of a router as a tool for drawing. I try to do everything on my own when making and installing my work. I think that in a way, having this vague limitation creates a sort of measurable pace to the work and gives me a feeling of control. It ends up often having quite a direct relationship to the physical limits of my own body; the reach of my arms, my height and what I can counterbalance or carry.

Maybe this will change at some point depending on the project. When I need metalwork, I work closely with a blacksmith whose forge is local to where I live. We’ve worked together to make framing structures for different projects.

It’s quite a unique situation so the process is organic and flexible. It seems that small scale industries like this are becoming much harder to sustain because of rent increases and so on.

The industrial estate he works on will be sold for property development soon so I really value this relationship whilst it lasts.

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12, Interviewed: Milly Peck

AMM: You’ve used a similar approach in the group show at Three Works last year creating an install titled ‘Plain Run’. Through this work you’ve highlighted the history of the exhibiting gallery space, which used to be a pharmacy, a newsagent and more recently a car parts centre. What makes you focus your work on the theme of the history of the building where you exhibit?

MP: I guess it’s a way of paying homage to the places that we pass through and inhabit.

So much of how we interact with the world has become digitalised, virtual and invisible, especially within the art sphere where many physical gallery spaces have had to close in recent years. I am also interested in design and architecture more broadly as well so inevitably this feeds in. Chris Shaw who runs Three Works in Scarborough was really keen for the works to be site-specific. He’d restored the space beautifully, maintaining some original features very sensitively so I wanted to echo this in that work. I think of it often as this strange sort of fictional agreement with the building, a kind of respect being paid for its hospitality and the work being a record of a particular point in time - a place marker of sorts. The space is memorialised by traces of it existing in the work beyond the show. I spent some time at Assembly Point helping Jemma Egan install her show in 2017 prior to my own. For some reason, maybe to do with the particular weather at the time, there were loads of blue bottle flies everywhere.

In one of my works for the show (which is a direct copy of a section of the windows at Assembly Point), I incorporated these flies onto the window sill as a sort of antiheroic relic of this particular space and atmosphere.

AMM: Most of your work is large scale; is scale important?

MP: In the last few years, everything in my work has been relative to human scale which creates another sort of limitation in terms of the objects/scenes I choose to depict. What objects can fit on the picture plane and where must a work hang so that a hand drops at the waist of the viewer. In this way, the set-like potential of the work is important and the human scale enables individual works to become backdrops or stage flats, pulling the viewer into a flattened world where a fictional narrative has the potential to develop.

AMM: Your visionary approach has simplistic, cartoonish and graphic qualities—you mostly use black and white tones adding colour quite rarely, giving preference to linear compositions—can you tell us more about the ideas behind this?

Image:

Image:

Milly Peck Untitled emulsion on board 85 x 113 x 5cm

Milly Peck Untitled emulsion on board, concrete, polystyrene 70 x 93 x 5cm

MP: I tend to apply a consistent register of hand-drawn, routed lines and a limited colour palette of matt paint to every surface in order to flatten everything into a similarly pictorial, cartoonish state. Using routing as a tool to draw, the lines cut into the wood have a physical depth to them which for me, tries to deal specifically with this tussle between the two and three-dimensional by being both lines depicting an image and physical interruptions to the object’s surface. I also mostly use trade ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12, Interviewed: Milly Peck

18

19

AMM: You’ve used a similar approach in the group show at Three Works last year creating an install titled ‘Plain Run’. Through this work you’ve highlighted the history of the exhibiting gallery space, which used to be a pharmacy, a newsagent and more recently a car parts centre. What makes you focus your work on the theme of the history of the building where you exhibit?

MP: I guess it’s a way of paying homage to the places that we pass through and inhabit.

So much of how we interact with the world has become digitalised, virtual and invisible, especially within the art sphere where many physical gallery spaces have had to close in recent years. I am also interested in design and architecture more broadly as well so inevitably this feeds in. Chris Shaw who runs Three Works in Scarborough was really keen for the works to be site-specific. He’d restored the space beautifully, maintaining some original features very sensitively so I wanted to echo this in that work. I think of it often as this strange sort of fictional agreement with the building, a kind of respect being paid for its hospitality and the work being a record of a particular point in time - a place marker of sorts. The space is memorialised by traces of it existing in the work beyond the show. I spent some time at Assembly Point helping Jemma Egan install her show in 2017 prior to my own. For some reason, maybe to do with the particular weather at the time, there were loads of blue bottle flies everywhere.

In one of my works for the show (which is a direct copy of a section of the windows at Assembly Point), I incorporated these flies onto the window sill as a sort of antiheroic relic of this particular space and atmosphere.

AMM: Most of your work is large scale; is scale important?

MP: In the last few years, everything in my work has been relative to human scale which creates another sort of limitation in terms of the objects/scenes I choose to depict. What objects can fit on the picture plane and where must a work hang so that a hand drops at the waist of the viewer. In this way, the set-like potential of the work is important and the human scale enables individual works to become backdrops or stage flats, pulling the viewer into a flattened world where a fictional narrative has the potential to develop.

AMM: Your visionary approach has simplistic, cartoonish and graphic qualities—you mostly use black and white tones adding colour quite rarely, giving preference to linear compositions—can you tell us more about the ideas behind this?

Image:

Image:

Milly Peck Untitled emulsion on board 85 x 113 x 5cm

Milly Peck Untitled emulsion on board, concrete, polystyrene 70 x 93 x 5cm

MP: I tend to apply a consistent register of hand-drawn, routed lines and a limited colour palette of matt paint to every surface in order to flatten everything into a similarly pictorial, cartoonish state. Using routing as a tool to draw, the lines cut into the wood have a physical depth to them which for me, tries to deal specifically with this tussle between the two and three-dimensional by being both lines depicting an image and physical interruptions to the object’s surface. I also mostly use trade ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12, Interviewed: Milly Peck

18

19

emulsion paint which has a limited variety of premixed colours but these limitations are quite freeing. In the same way that much of my work is rectilinear, it creates this pre-set boundary or format which means the imagery has to respond and yield directly to these perimeters. Using a limited colour palette also allows more continuity, different works optically collapsing into one another, existing together across a common ground. The works become like instructional diagrams or image cells from a comic strip.

AMM: Does humour play a big role in your work?

MP: Humour is really important - and is at its best when it sits really uncomfortably and unexpectedly close to horror, boredom or tragedy. My work broadly researches ideas surrounding imitation, fakery, reconstructed environments and the potential comedy found in clumsy discrepancies between the artificial and the real. Some of the imagery within my recent work nods towards the slapstick-banana peels, familiar objects or scenes which hint at potential moments of embarrassment or slip-ups where we find ourselves at our most human and most vulnerable. Humour has the ability to become a vehicle or access point for something more quietly critical to arise about the way in which we collectively and individually deal with a lifestyle of relentless image ingestion and production, mostly through digital technologies and advertising, and how this affects our visual and physical handling of real, tangible things in the world.

AMM: Last October at ‘SURVEY’ in Jerwood Space you created a free standing ‘stage’ composition, which is shown alongside other works, not to mention that this year the whole exhibition is touring around the UK. Tell us more about this venture and how do you find showing work alongside other artists?

MP: SURVEY has been a really great experience. It came rather serendipitously quite shortly after I had received a Jerwood Visual Arts Artist Bursary to initiate some research into Foley sound production. Foley is the re-creation of everyday sound effects in post-production for film, television, radio, gaming and other media. So naturally, this seemed an apt time to develop this research and make work as a result for the show. We were all nominated by a national selection of mid-career artists and then we submitted proposals and were chosen from a shortlist.

As it is quite a big group show with fifteen of us in total, it was a challenge to make something which I knew needed to be self contained to an extent, especially for the tour.

The reinterpretation of a section of a Foley stage seemed like a good physical resolution accompanied by an audio piece which I recorded with DIY Foley sounds made by myself in a very rudimentary, experimental way. Some of the participating artists I knew personally before and some I did not but the show (and the tour) has been such a great experience to spend time with these artists, learning about their diverse practices and

being able to show the work together in cities that I haven’t had much of an opportunity to explore properly before.

AMM: How did you find practising art after graduation? How easy was it to establish yourself as an independent artist in London?

AMM: In terms of selling your own work and making a living as an established artist in future: how do you see galleries or yourself selling your installations or parts of them, taking into account the very sensitive process of creating each element coexisting in direct link to others in each show?

MP: I was really lucky to receive the David Troostwyk/Matt’s Gallery Studio Award on completion of my degree show in 2016 which provided me with a free studio for a year, mentoring from Robin Klassnik (director of Matt’s Gallery) and Jordan Baseman (artist and the then head of Sculpture at RCA) and a show at Matt’s Gallery (Studio Space) at the end of the award. This was invaluable in giving me the financial flexibility to spend lots of time in the studio and provided me with an end goal of a show. This helped me to structure my time effectively in this ominous initial period of leaving the support structures of an institution and the social support structure of a peer group you are with every day.

MP: I find this idea of thinking about works in a ‘sellable’ capacity really difficult as it’s something which is never really at the forefront of my mind when I’m making work.

As I have often built parts of installations on site in response to the space, I guess the work sometimes has an inherently and stubbornly temporary quality. Similarly, often when I make some wall based works in series which are made together or linked thematically with the intention of being viewed in relation to one another, I’m not particularly preoccupied with how they might function independently beyond this context. I suspect that if I started thinking too much about challenging or changing that, the focus would shift and you’d notice it in the work. But obviously, it’s great if the work can function and be seen in new ways so I’m not averse to it! In terms of making a living solely from my work, I think it’s quite an unrealistic prospect. I don’t think I know too many artists who can do this without subsidising themselves with other forms of income, certainly in London. I think it’s good and healthy to have other types of work outside of your own practice. Most of my jobs have been or are related to art in some way, either through teaching, technical assistance or working for other more established artists all of which I’ve learnt a lot from.

AMM: You completed an MA at the Royal College of Art in 2016. How did this course help shape your work? Were there any particular highs and lows?

MP: I think that most people would unanimously say that a Masters, wherever you choose to study, goes alarmingly fast.

And this pace means that it forces your work to evolve perhaps more quickly than it would outside of an institution (not necessarily for the better or for everyone). I think the best thing for me about the Sculpture course was meeting my peer group. As well as the technical support provided from the workshops. Inevitably art schools are becoming increasingly overfilled, overworked and overcapitalised and it feels like it often falls onto the resilience and resourcefulness of staff on the ground and students to bung the holes. One of my highlights at the RCA was receiving one of the Villiers David travel awards which enabled me to visit Japan for the first time in order (in part) to visit the area in Tokyo where they manufacture ‘sampuru’ which are plastic replicas of food dishes which are displayed in restaurant windows as visual representations of meals for customers. These are amazingly complex and often totally ridiculous, noodles suspended statically in midair from floating chopsticks.

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12, Interviewed: Milly Peck

20

AMM: What or whom are you inspired by?

Anything or anyone in particular…?

MP: There are plenty of artists I admire and who have inspired me, including artists I’ve been taught by or who I have worked for.

But for the most part, things I find inspiring are often quite dumb or ridiculous. I went to a dinosaur themed crazy golf course last year which was incredible. It had waterfalls which were dyed bright blue because regular water was not hyperreal enough. Beyond the miniature steaming volcano, a fake crocodile eating a man’s arm floats in the water around hole 5. Totally surreal and wonderful.

There are a couple of notable books too which have influenced me - probably ‘Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art’ by Scott McCloud and ‘The Foley Grail: The Art of Performing Sound for Film, Games, and Animation’ by Vanessa Theme Ament being my recent favourites and have helped me immensely with my work.

AMM: What are you currently working on and where do you see your work going in the future?

MP: I’m currently thinking about developing more work around my research into Foley sound production, focussing more closely on the props used. Continuing my ideas around fakery and mimicry, I am also visiting a number of zoos, wax work and natural history museums in addition to amusement parks. I am interested in the ubiquitous use of dioramas and other imitative display devices within these artificial settings.

Particularly, those that mimic scenes from the natural world and the points at which the ‘real’ world breaks through and interrupts these illusionary spaces to (sometimes unintentional) comic effect. My next project is an outdoor commission for Village Green Festival in Chalkwell Park, Essex. This is alongside three other artists and includes a week’s residency where we will familiarise ourselves with the site in order to make works which will be exhibited during the festival and over the summer. I’ve only made a few works for the outdoors before so I’m looking forward to the challenge.

Image: Milly Peck Landing Good Sync Will Pay Dividends emulsion on board, painted steel, microphone with stand and headphones with audio, 275 x 125 x 125 cm Image courtesy of Jerwood Arts, photo by Anna Arca

emulsion paint which has a limited variety of premixed colours but these limitations are quite freeing. In the same way that much of my work is rectilinear, it creates this pre-set boundary or format which means the imagery has to respond and yield directly to these perimeters. Using a limited colour palette also allows more continuity, different works optically collapsing into one another, existing together across a common ground. The works become like instructional diagrams or image cells from a comic strip.

AMM: Does humour play a big role in your work?

MP: Humour is really important - and is at its best when it sits really uncomfortably and unexpectedly close to horror, boredom or tragedy. My work broadly researches ideas surrounding imitation, fakery, reconstructed environments and the potential comedy found in clumsy discrepancies between the artificial and the real. Some of the imagery within my recent work nods towards the slapstick-banana peels, familiar objects or scenes which hint at potential moments of embarrassment or slip-ups where we find ourselves at our most human and most vulnerable. Humour has the ability to become a vehicle or access point for something more quietly critical to arise about the way in which we collectively and individually deal with a lifestyle of relentless image ingestion and production, mostly through digital technologies and advertising, and how this affects our visual and physical handling of real, tangible things in the world.

AMM: Last October at ‘SURVEY’ in Jerwood Space you created a free standing ‘stage’ composition, which is shown alongside other works, not to mention that this year the whole exhibition is touring around the UK. Tell us more about this venture and how do you find showing work alongside other artists?

MP: SURVEY has been a really great experience. It came rather serendipitously quite shortly after I had received a Jerwood Visual Arts Artist Bursary to initiate some research into Foley sound production. Foley is the re-creation of everyday sound effects in post-production for film, television, radio, gaming and other media. So naturally, this seemed an apt time to develop this research and make work as a result for the show. We were all nominated by a national selection of mid-career artists and then we submitted proposals and were chosen from a shortlist.

As it is quite a big group show with fifteen of us in total, it was a challenge to make something which I knew needed to be self contained to an extent, especially for the tour.

The reinterpretation of a section of a Foley stage seemed like a good physical resolution accompanied by an audio piece which I recorded with DIY Foley sounds made by myself in a very rudimentary, experimental way. Some of the participating artists I knew personally before and some I did not but the show (and the tour) has been such a great experience to spend time with these artists, learning about their diverse practices and

being able to show the work together in cities that I haven’t had much of an opportunity to explore properly before.

AMM: How did you find practising art after graduation? How easy was it to establish yourself as an independent artist in London?

AMM: In terms of selling your own work and making a living as an established artist in future: how do you see galleries or yourself selling your installations or parts of them, taking into account the very sensitive process of creating each element coexisting in direct link to others in each show?

MP: I was really lucky to receive the David Troostwyk/Matt’s Gallery Studio Award on completion of my degree show in 2016 which provided me with a free studio for a year, mentoring from Robin Klassnik (director of Matt’s Gallery) and Jordan Baseman (artist and the then head of Sculpture at RCA) and a show at Matt’s Gallery (Studio Space) at the end of the award. This was invaluable in giving me the financial flexibility to spend lots of time in the studio and provided me with an end goal of a show. This helped me to structure my time effectively in this ominous initial period of leaving the support structures of an institution and the social support structure of a peer group you are with every day.

MP: I find this idea of thinking about works in a ‘sellable’ capacity really difficult as it’s something which is never really at the forefront of my mind when I’m making work.

As I have often built parts of installations on site in response to the space, I guess the work sometimes has an inherently and stubbornly temporary quality. Similarly, often when I make some wall based works in series which are made together or linked thematically with the intention of being viewed in relation to one another, I’m not particularly preoccupied with how they might function independently beyond this context. I suspect that if I started thinking too much about challenging or changing that, the focus would shift and you’d notice it in the work. But obviously, it’s great if the work can function and be seen in new ways so I’m not averse to it! In terms of making a living solely from my work, I think it’s quite an unrealistic prospect. I don’t think I know too many artists who can do this without subsidising themselves with other forms of income, certainly in London. I think it’s good and healthy to have other types of work outside of your own practice. Most of my jobs have been or are related to art in some way, either through teaching, technical assistance or working for other more established artists all of which I’ve learnt a lot from.

AMM: You completed an MA at the Royal College of Art in 2016. How did this course help shape your work? Were there any particular highs and lows?

MP: I think that most people would unanimously say that a Masters, wherever you choose to study, goes alarmingly fast.

And this pace means that it forces your work to evolve perhaps more quickly than it would outside of an institution (not necessarily for the better or for everyone). I think the best thing for me about the Sculpture course was meeting my peer group. As well as the technical support provided from the workshops. Inevitably art schools are becoming increasingly overfilled, overworked and overcapitalised and it feels like it often falls onto the resilience and resourcefulness of staff on the ground and students to bung the holes. One of my highlights at the RCA was receiving one of the Villiers David travel awards which enabled me to visit Japan for the first time in order (in part) to visit the area in Tokyo where they manufacture ‘sampuru’ which are plastic replicas of food dishes which are displayed in restaurant windows as visual representations of meals for customers. These are amazingly complex and often totally ridiculous, noodles suspended statically in midair from floating chopsticks.

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12, Interviewed: Milly Peck

20

AMM: What or whom are you inspired by?

Anything or anyone in particular…?

MP: There are plenty of artists I admire and who have inspired me, including artists I’ve been taught by or who I have worked for.

But for the most part, things I find inspiring are often quite dumb or ridiculous. I went to a dinosaur themed crazy golf course last year which was incredible. It had waterfalls which were dyed bright blue because regular water was not hyperreal enough. Beyond the miniature steaming volcano, a fake crocodile eating a man’s arm floats in the water around hole 5. Totally surreal and wonderful.

There are a couple of notable books too which have influenced me - probably ‘Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art’ by Scott McCloud and ‘The Foley Grail: The Art of Performing Sound for Film, Games, and Animation’ by Vanessa Theme Ament being my recent favourites and have helped me immensely with my work.

AMM: What are you currently working on and where do you see your work going in the future?

MP: I’m currently thinking about developing more work around my research into Foley sound production, focussing more closely on the props used. Continuing my ideas around fakery and mimicry, I am also visiting a number of zoos, wax work and natural history museums in addition to amusement parks. I am interested in the ubiquitous use of dioramas and other imitative display devices within these artificial settings.

Particularly, those that mimic scenes from the natural world and the points at which the ‘real’ world breaks through and interrupts these illusionary spaces to (sometimes unintentional) comic effect. My next project is an outdoor commission for Village Green Festival in Chalkwell Park, Essex. This is alongside three other artists and includes a week’s residency where we will familiarise ourselves with the site in order to make works which will be exhibited during the festival and over the summer. I’ve only made a few works for the outdoors before so I’m looking forward to the challenge.

Image: Milly Peck Landing Good Sync Will Pay Dividends emulsion on board, painted steel, microphone with stand and headphones with audio, 275 x 125 x 125 cm Image courtesy of Jerwood Arts, photo by Anna Arca

Milly Peck Landing Good Sync Will Pay Dividends (detail) emulsion on board, painted steel, microphone with stand and headphones with audio 275 x 125 x 125 cm Image courtesy of Jerwood Arts, photo by Anna Arca

22

Milly Peck Untitled emulsion on board 87 x 120 x 3cm

23

Milly Peck Landing Good Sync Will Pay Dividends (detail) emulsion on board, painted steel, microphone with stand and headphones with audio 275 x 125 x 125 cm Image courtesy of Jerwood Arts, photo by Anna Arca

22

Milly Peck Untitled emulsion on board 87 x 120 x 3cm

23

Images (p. 24-25): Milly Peck Installation view details Pressure Head, Assembly Point, London Photo courtesy of Assembly Point, photo by Ben Westoby

24

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Images (p. 24-25): Milly Peck Installation view details Pressure Head, Assembly Point, London Photo courtesy of Assembly Point, photo by Ben Westoby

24

25

Milly Peck Plain Run emulsion on board, painted steel Three Works, Scarborough

26

Milly Peck Plain Run (detail) emulsion on board

27

Milly Peck Plain Run emulsion on board, painted steel Three Works, Scarborough

26

Milly Peck Plain Run (detail) emulsion on board

27

Milly Peck Untitled emulsion on board 85 x 112 x 5 cm

28

Milly Peck The Physical Layers In The Actual Making (left), An Impact Sound May Be Necessary (right) emulsion and wood dye on plywood each 91 x 70 x 5cm Thames-Side Studios Gallery, London Photo courtesy of Cypher Billboard, photo by Scarlett Platel

29

Milly Peck Untitled emulsion on board 85 x 112 x 5 cm

28

Milly Peck The Physical Layers In The Actual Making (left), An Impact Sound May Be Necessary (right) emulsion and wood dye on plywood each 91 x 70 x 5cm Thames-Side Studios Gallery, London Photo courtesy of Cypher Billboard, photo by Scarlett Platel

29

www.zanderblom.info

“I want to paint like there’s no tomorrow”— in conversation with Zander Blom “I have believed in the idea of perpetual change as a vehicle for innovation and discovery in painting for a long time,” South African artist Zander Blom wrote in the statement accompanying his 2016 solo exhibition at Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town. For over a decade, he had been reflecting on the conceptual and material parameters of abstraction through experiments in non-figurative painting. But a change was in the offing. In his subsequent solo show, in 2018, the scribbles, doodles and sketchy creature-figures that occupied his drawings now found their way onto his canvases, heralding a new phase in his painting that is still unfolding.

Zander’s current work features fantastic beasts, scrawls and riffs on famous art works from the European canon. Working in oil pastels and oil paint on irregular pieces of loose canvas which are then collaged onto larger stretched canvases, these works, playful and irreverent in tone, continue his deep fascination with the language of mark-making and material.

For his most recent solo exhibition earlier this year, Zander wrote: “there has only ever been one constant, one permanent [focus]: an endless infatuation and frustration with painting and mark-making—a stubborn, impatient desire to will paint into a compelling composition or expression of some sort.” While the style or direction of his work may change, Zander’s commitment to art and the life of an artist never wavers. Working incessantly and prolifically, his art reflects his deep fascination with material, art history, and process.

Zander’s start in the art world was as part of a three-piece collective wryly named Avant Car Guard who created satirical mock-art poking fun at South African art history and institutions. Around the same time, in his independent practice, he was engaged in photographing and documenting the process of creating elaborate installations. Following this he deep-dived into abstract painting following an ever-tightening set of compositional rules and guidelines. Zander’s work has been exhibited widely in South Africa and Europe. In 2014 he was the recipient of the Jean-François Prat Prize for contemporary art in Paris, and is included in Phaidon’s latest anthology of contemporary painting, Vitamin P3: New Perspectives in Painting (2016).

interview by Layla Leiman

Featured image: Zander Blom Zombie Swan oil on linen 240 x 170 cm

www.zanderblom.info

“I want to paint like there’s no tomorrow”— in conversation with Zander Blom “I have believed in the idea of perpetual change as a vehicle for innovation and discovery in painting for a long time,” South African artist Zander Blom wrote in the statement accompanying his 2016 solo exhibition at Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town. For over a decade, he had been reflecting on the conceptual and material parameters of abstraction through experiments in non-figurative painting. But a change was in the offing. In his subsequent solo show, in 2018, the scribbles, doodles and sketchy creature-figures that occupied his drawings now found their way onto his canvases, heralding a new phase in his painting that is still unfolding.

Zander’s current work features fantastic beasts, scrawls and riffs on famous art works from the European canon. Working in oil pastels and oil paint on irregular pieces of loose canvas which are then collaged onto larger stretched canvases, these works, playful and irreverent in tone, continue his deep fascination with the language of mark-making and material.

For his most recent solo exhibition earlier this year, Zander wrote: “there has only ever been one constant, one permanent [focus]: an endless infatuation and frustration with painting and mark-making—a stubborn, impatient desire to will paint into a compelling composition or expression of some sort.” While the style or direction of his work may change, Zander’s commitment to art and the life of an artist never wavers. Working incessantly and prolifically, his art reflects his deep fascination with material, art history, and process.

Zander’s start in the art world was as part of a three-piece collective wryly named Avant Car Guard who created satirical mock-art poking fun at South African art history and institutions. Around the same time, in his independent practice, he was engaged in photographing and documenting the process of creating elaborate installations. Following this he deep-dived into abstract painting following an ever-tightening set of compositional rules and guidelines. Zander’s work has been exhibited widely in South Africa and Europe. In 2014 he was the recipient of the Jean-François Prat Prize for contemporary art in Paris, and is included in Phaidon’s latest anthology of contemporary painting, Vitamin P3: New Perspectives in Painting (2016).

interview by Layla Leiman

Featured image: Zander Blom Zombie Swan oil on linen 240 x 170 cm

AMM: Hi Zander! In an interview in the book 9 More Weeks you say that “The only thing I know for sure is that I want to be an artist and make paintings.” How has your understanding of yourself as an artist changed over the years and where is it at now?

ZB: I think that, for me, being an artist ultimately has to do with freedom and purpose. It’s about finding a way to be free both in a practical everyday sense and in what you pursue intellectually—to be able to make and think and live with the fewest constraints from society. Basically it’s about being able to do your own thing, whatever that might be.

So what is my own thing? I’ve had a longstanding interest in art history, particularly painting and modernism. I like working with drawing, photography, collage, video, but painting has always been at the top of the hierarchy for me. To be a painter, and to live the life of a painter, has been a dream since I was very young. What that dream entails, in practical and intellectual terms, is: I get to choose what I look at and think about. I choose what I make and the hours I work. I work from home and get to be by myself in a studio all day, to work with my hands, to experiment endlessly, and to take part in a visual conversation that has been going on for a very long time. But the dream is also caught up in the desire to do something of value with my life, and to find some kind of meaning and purpose that goes beyond just surviving.

Perhaps it also has to do with an imagined sense of belonging. In art I’ve found a place where I feel at home, a place of refuge. This is a total projection, of course, but that doesn’t make it any less real for me.

I don’t know if I understood this when I was younger. But I read somewhere that we are way too critical of our younger selves— looking back we tend to judge very harshly, thinking that our current selves have a much better grip on things, that we’ve made progress. I’m probably more similar to my 18-year-old self than I would like to admit.

AMM: What is your earliest art-related memory?

ZB: My childhood is full of art-related memories. I’ve been lucky in that art was a big part of my mother’s life. She created a kind of cocoon of art and craft that I grew up inside. My memories range from making pottery and jewelry, and painting murals on the walls of our house with my siblings, to extra art classes and visiting museums. There are some images from art books that feel like they’ve been burnt into my retinas because I spent so much of my childhood looking at them. In a way what I do today is merely a continuation of the cocoon that my mother created for her children and herself.

“... for me, being an artist ultimately has to do with freedom and purpose. It’s about finding a way to be free both in a practical everyday sense and in what you pursue intellectually— to be able to make and think and live with the fewest constraints from society.

Basically it’s about being able to do your own thing, whatever that might be” - Zander Blom

AMM: A few years ago your work changed focus significantly. What influenced this shift and what ideas are you currently exploring in your work?

ZB: The most drastic change is the shift from abstraction into figuration. This change felt massive at the time, but now it feels like just another small and inevitable step towards the artist I want to become. I had been working exclusively with abstraction for such a long time that I exhausted my infatuation with it.

I’ve also started bringing more humour into the mix—something that I tended to reserve for side/group projects. At the moment I want to paint like there is no tomorrow, like I have nothing to lose. Still, I find it challenging to work in a mode where everything is permitted, because I can’t completely escape my own rules. I can be pretty stiff and conservative when it comes to painting, and there are many things I haven’t explored yet.

I’m slowly making inroads and loosening up, but what I’m really trying to do is push myself and all my bullshit rules and mental limitations off a cliff.

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12, Interviewed: Zander Blom

32

Image courtesy of Zander Blom

AMM: Hi Zander! In an interview in the book 9 More Weeks you say that “The only thing I know for sure is that I want to be an artist and make paintings.” How has your understanding of yourself as an artist changed over the years and where is it at now?

ZB: I think that, for me, being an artist ultimately has to do with freedom and purpose. It’s about finding a way to be free both in a practical everyday sense and in what you pursue intellectually—to be able to make and think and live with the fewest constraints from society. Basically it’s about being able to do your own thing, whatever that might be.

So what is my own thing? I’ve had a longstanding interest in art history, particularly painting and modernism. I like working with drawing, photography, collage, video, but painting has always been at the top of the hierarchy for me. To be a painter, and to live the life of a painter, has been a dream since I was very young. What that dream entails, in practical and intellectual terms, is: I get to choose what I look at and think about. I choose what I make and the hours I work. I work from home and get to be by myself in a studio all day, to work with my hands, to experiment endlessly, and to take part in a visual conversation that has been going on for a very long time. But the dream is also caught up in the desire to do something of value with my life, and to find some kind of meaning and purpose that goes beyond just surviving.

Perhaps it also has to do with an imagined sense of belonging. In art I’ve found a place where I feel at home, a place of refuge. This is a total projection, of course, but that doesn’t make it any less real for me.

I don’t know if I understood this when I was younger. But I read somewhere that we are way too critical of our younger selves— looking back we tend to judge very harshly, thinking that our current selves have a much better grip on things, that we’ve made progress. I’m probably more similar to my 18-year-old self than I would like to admit.

AMM: What is your earliest art-related memory?

ZB: My childhood is full of art-related memories. I’ve been lucky in that art was a big part of my mother’s life. She created a kind of cocoon of art and craft that I grew up inside. My memories range from making pottery and jewelry, and painting murals on the walls of our house with my siblings, to extra art classes and visiting museums. There are some images from art books that feel like they’ve been burnt into my retinas because I spent so much of my childhood looking at them. In a way what I do today is merely a continuation of the cocoon that my mother created for her children and herself.

“... for me, being an artist ultimately has to do with freedom and purpose. It’s about finding a way to be free both in a practical everyday sense and in what you pursue intellectually— to be able to make and think and live with the fewest constraints from society.

Basically it’s about being able to do your own thing, whatever that might be” - Zander Blom

AMM: A few years ago your work changed focus significantly. What influenced this shift and what ideas are you currently exploring in your work?

ZB: The most drastic change is the shift from abstraction into figuration. This change felt massive at the time, but now it feels like just another small and inevitable step towards the artist I want to become. I had been working exclusively with abstraction for such a long time that I exhausted my infatuation with it.

I’ve also started bringing more humour into the mix—something that I tended to reserve for side/group projects. At the moment I want to paint like there is no tomorrow, like I have nothing to lose. Still, I find it challenging to work in a mode where everything is permitted, because I can’t completely escape my own rules. I can be pretty stiff and conservative when it comes to painting, and there are many things I haven’t explored yet.

I’m slowly making inroads and loosening up, but what I’m really trying to do is push myself and all my bullshit rules and mental limitations off a cliff.

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12, Interviewed: Zander Blom

32

Image courtesy of Zander Blom

AMM: Your recent show at Stevenson continues your experiments with a pictorial language, which you describe as “frenzied figuration”.

What limitations and possibilities does this figurative language offer you?

ZB: There’s a kind of freedom in abstraction.

You don’t have to engage with the visible world, you don’t have to tie yourself up with real objects or subjects. With figuration you are plunged back into the world of people and things. I’ve been enjoying the change, reconnecting with figuration, probably because I stepped away from it for so long.

AMM: We first saw these figurative elements appear in your work in mixed-media drawings.

How did you develop and translate these scribble and loose marks into your painting idiom?

ZB: It started with these rough and irreverent drawings I was doing on reproductions of Mondrian paintings in the pages of books.

I really liked the quality of the lines I was getting with grease pencils (Sharpie peeloff china markers) on glossy paper. I also thought that there was room to expand the language of scribbles and monsters into something more complex. I wanted to move this language onto canvas and find a way to get the same quality of line and texture on a bigger scale. Then it was a case of experimenting with different mediums and techniques until I found the right tools for the job. I currently use oil sticks and big oil pastels predominantly. Sometimes I’ll scrape oil paint onto a canvas roughly with a palette knife, but there is no detailed palette knife or brush work. In general I’m trying to stay away from mediums and techniques that will allow the perfectionist in me to come alive— I need my pedantic OCD self to stay dormant in order for these works to succeed.

AMM: What role does colour play in your work?

How do you work with it?

ZB: My colour palette isn’t very sophisticated.

I tend to grab oil sticks impulsively—almost randomly—and just make marks on canvas.

I’ve never been too academic about colour.

It’s been either black and white or anything goes. I only seem to have two speeds. That said, the oil sticks that I’ve been using come in quite a limited colour range. For example, if I want to use blue I only have a couple of different blues to choose from. So it’s also a case of having to make it work within the limits of what’s available.

AMM: Your work has always been positioned in relation to art history. In your current paintings monster-beasts are mashed up with reproductions and riffs on modern art classics – Picasso, Mondrian, Pollock. How do these seemingly disparate elements fit together?

ZB: A surprising aspect of the current work is Zander Blom® Courtesy of Stevenson Cape Town and Johannesburg

35

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12, Interviewed: Zander Blom

AMM: Your recent show at Stevenson continues your experiments with a pictorial language, which you describe as “frenzied figuration”.

What limitations and possibilities does this figurative language offer you?

ZB: There’s a kind of freedom in abstraction.

You don’t have to engage with the visible world, you don’t have to tie yourself up with real objects or subjects. With figuration you are plunged back into the world of people and things. I’ve been enjoying the change, reconnecting with figuration, probably because I stepped away from it for so long.

AMM: We first saw these figurative elements appear in your work in mixed-media drawings.

How did you develop and translate these scribble and loose marks into your painting idiom?

ZB: It started with these rough and irreverent drawings I was doing on reproductions of Mondrian paintings in the pages of books.

I really liked the quality of the lines I was getting with grease pencils (Sharpie peeloff china markers) on glossy paper. I also thought that there was room to expand the language of scribbles and monsters into something more complex. I wanted to move this language onto canvas and find a way to get the same quality of line and texture on a bigger scale. Then it was a case of experimenting with different mediums and techniques until I found the right tools for the job. I currently use oil sticks and big oil pastels predominantly. Sometimes I’ll scrape oil paint onto a canvas roughly with a palette knife, but there is no detailed palette knife or brush work. In general I’m trying to stay away from mediums and techniques that will allow the perfectionist in me to come alive— I need my pedantic OCD self to stay dormant in order for these works to succeed.

AMM: What role does colour play in your work?

How do you work with it?

ZB: My colour palette isn’t very sophisticated.

I tend to grab oil sticks impulsively—almost randomly—and just make marks on canvas.

I’ve never been too academic about colour.

It’s been either black and white or anything goes. I only seem to have two speeds. That said, the oil sticks that I’ve been using come in quite a limited colour range. For example, if I want to use blue I only have a couple of different blues to choose from. So it’s also a case of having to make it work within the limits of what’s available.

AMM: Your work has always been positioned in relation to art history. In your current paintings monster-beasts are mashed up with reproductions and riffs on modern art classics – Picasso, Mondrian, Pollock. How do these seemingly disparate elements fit together?

ZB: A surprising aspect of the current work is Zander Blom® Courtesy of Stevenson Cape Town and Johannesburg

35

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12, Interviewed: Zander Blom

that the combination of all these elements in a single painting makes it into a kind of selfportrait. The juxtaposition of these various images ends up saying quite a lot more as a whole than I anticipated. I also think the paintings are generous in that they give the eye so much to look at. Most people will recognise the art history references because they are so universally known, and this creates a sense of familiarity. These paintings often look like a teenager’s end-of-year art presentation, and I like that too. In general there is a weirdly celebratory, joyful quality to these works.

Art history has been a kind of hook for me to hang things on. Because it has been such a big part of my life, it feels like home. Who am I without these references that I spent so many years looking at? My identity is all caught up in it, probably because I didn’t want to hang my identity on anything else that was around me when I grew up. I still don’t know where to place myself, or how to really deal with my context in any other way. What is there in this world that is worth attaching yourself to, other than art? I know this isn’t a remotely logical argument, and sometimes I’m not sure if I’m exploring art history or hiding inside it, but I know I have to throw the net wider and dig deeper. The monster-beasts are at least a start in that direction.

AMM: There’s a playfulness in your current work which was absent in your abstract paintings. The paintings look like you’re having fun making them. Is this the case?

ZB: I’ve been thinking a lot about the balance between being absolutely free and making the best work that you can possibly make, being the best artist you can be. Often these two things don’t align and you find yourself doing tedious work to achieve some technique or effect in order to make a better painting. This is not ideal, but it’s also no use having a great time in the studio that delivers mediocre results. Sometimes you have to refuse to do things that are painful or boring in order to keep your sanity, and other times you have to bite the bullet and sacrifice fun in service of the work. But you have to keep a healthy balance because if you want to be an artist in the long run you can’t afford to lose your love for the job.

For sure, I’m having fun making these new works, but it took a lot of frustration and failed attempts before I worked out all the kinks concerning technique and visual reference material. It’s flowing very nicely right now, and that feeling of breaking new ground can carry one very far—as it did when I was doing pure abstraction. But it is still early days for this vernacular, and it’s going to be interesting to see how long it will go in this direction before another big break becomes necessary.

AMM: What is the appeal for you in scribbles and seemingly naïve mark-making?

ZB: Mark-making is its own kind of language.

You can make happy, sad, angry, lighthearted or demented marks; you can make virtuosic, pompous or amateurish marks. You can make stingy or generous marks. There is so much you can say with the quality and shape of a line or mark. It’s like acting in the way that it allows you to play different characters.

Sometimes I scribble in a very deliberate way because it signifies something specific in a composition, but other times I scribble just because I don’t know what else to do. A lot of the time I don’t know what a painting or drawing is going to be—I just start by making marks randomly out of frustration or excitement and hope that something interesting will happen.

“Books feed me in a way that is different from the internet, maybe because they hang around, they are here in the room, physical matter, not just immediately forgotten like so much stuff you see online.

They are like the bricks that I build my house with.”

- Zander Blom

AMM: Process has been a central aspect of your work over the years. Can you tell us more about this, and also how your approach has changed in more recent work?

ZB: In the early 2000s, when I was working on a project called The Drain of Progress, I realized that the process and the motivation behind the handmade objects I was making was very often way more interesting than the objects themselves. So I made the documentation of the process the primary focus of the project. This quickly led to a practice of making more ephemeral installations in my bedroom which I photographed and then dismantled. That way of working ran its course and after another two projects like it (The Travels of Bad and The Black Hole Universe), I became less interested in documentation and process and more interested in making handmade objects.

37

I still document the evolution of the studio but it isn’t at the forefront of what I show on exhibitions these days. It has become more of a secondary narrative, and in a sense the studio isn’t performing for the camera anymore.

Perhaps I realised that the focus on process was stopping me from becoming a painter.

I was going down a road of conceptual photography that relied heavily on explanatory texts and titles. So I pulled my focus back to painting, and working towards putting everything of importance into the final handmade object. This is of course impossible, because so much of how we look at a painting or any kind of art object is informed by the history and information around it, but I wanted to try to make things that had a bit more of a chance at standing on their own. Not to mention how satisfying it was to put the camera down and focus on the materiality of paint and canvas, after years of looking at a computer screen grading images in Photoshop, and tearing my hair out trying to choose the best shot out of 700 images that all looked pretty much the same.

AMM: What does a typical day in studio for you look like?

ZB: I wake up, make coffee, come sit in the studio. Have a smoke, check email, look at my diary. The diary is full of lists of things to do. I cross out some, add new ones, and then loiter about for a while, walking in circles.

Eventually I start doing whatever needs to be done: drawing, painting, research, edit a video, master some tracks for a side project, do my tax stuff, organise the studio, clean working utensils, order stuff from the hardware store, etc. More coffee at some point, then a snack, then perhaps I’ll look at an artist interview online or catch up on exhibitions around the world on Vernissage TV. Then back to work, maybe a podcast is playing in the background. Hours go by, and at some point it’s dinner time. My wife Dominique and I make dinner together, and then watch a bit of Netflix. Then it’s back to work for a couple of hours, more coffee, get distracted, watch some more YouTube videos, read artist interviews and look at random stuff on the internet, more coffee, work a bit more, get tired, pour a night cap or two, pass out on the couch, wake up two hours later, crawl into bed.

AMM: You seem to work prolifically. What are your daily rituals that feed you creatively?

ZB: I feel like I can’t not be prolific because I have to work through things in reality, not just in my head; I end up making a lot of physical objects as a result. The process of making does tend to feed itself, because it’s like pulling a string: one thing leads to the next and the next and the next. But making isn’t everything. I look at a lot of art – it’s pretty much all I look at. I have many bookmarks of art websites and YouTube channels that I regularly check, and I look at stuff in art books. I love buying books—

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12, Interviewed: Zander Blom

that the combination of all these elements in a single painting makes it into a kind of selfportrait. The juxtaposition of these various images ends up saying quite a lot more as a whole than I anticipated. I also think the paintings are generous in that they give the eye so much to look at. Most people will recognise the art history references because they are so universally known, and this creates a sense of familiarity. These paintings often look like a teenager’s end-of-year art presentation, and I like that too. In general there is a weirdly celebratory, joyful quality to these works.

Art history has been a kind of hook for me to hang things on. Because it has been such a big part of my life, it feels like home. Who am I without these references that I spent so many years looking at? My identity is all caught up in it, probably because I didn’t want to hang my identity on anything else that was around me when I grew up. I still don’t know where to place myself, or how to really deal with my context in any other way. What is there in this world that is worth attaching yourself to, other than art? I know this isn’t a remotely logical argument, and sometimes I’m not sure if I’m exploring art history or hiding inside it, but I know I have to throw the net wider and dig deeper. The monster-beasts are at least a start in that direction.

AMM: There’s a playfulness in your current work which was absent in your abstract paintings. The paintings look like you’re having fun making them. Is this the case?

ZB: I’ve been thinking a lot about the balance between being absolutely free and making the best work that you can possibly make, being the best artist you can be. Often these two things don’t align and you find yourself doing tedious work to achieve some technique or effect in order to make a better painting. This is not ideal, but it’s also no use having a great time in the studio that delivers mediocre results. Sometimes you have to refuse to do things that are painful or boring in order to keep your sanity, and other times you have to bite the bullet and sacrifice fun in service of the work. But you have to keep a healthy balance because if you want to be an artist in the long run you can’t afford to lose your love for the job.

For sure, I’m having fun making these new works, but it took a lot of frustration and failed attempts before I worked out all the kinks concerning technique and visual reference material. It’s flowing very nicely right now, and that feeling of breaking new ground can carry one very far—as it did when I was doing pure abstraction. But it is still early days for this vernacular, and it’s going to be interesting to see how long it will go in this direction before another big break becomes necessary.

AMM: What is the appeal for you in scribbles and seemingly naïve mark-making?

ZB: Mark-making is its own kind of language.

You can make happy, sad, angry, lighthearted or demented marks; you can make virtuosic, pompous or amateurish marks. You can make stingy or generous marks. There is so much you can say with the quality and shape of a line or mark. It’s like acting in the way that it allows you to play different characters.

Sometimes I scribble in a very deliberate way because it signifies something specific in a composition, but other times I scribble just because I don’t know what else to do. A lot of the time I don’t know what a painting or drawing is going to be—I just start by making marks randomly out of frustration or excitement and hope that something interesting will happen.

“Books feed me in a way that is different from the internet, maybe because they hang around, they are here in the room, physical matter, not just immediately forgotten like so much stuff you see online.

They are like the bricks that I build my house with.”

- Zander Blom

AMM: Process has been a central aspect of your work over the years. Can you tell us more about this, and also how your approach has changed in more recent work?

ZB: In the early 2000s, when I was working on a project called The Drain of Progress, I realized that the process and the motivation behind the handmade objects I was making was very often way more interesting than the objects themselves. So I made the documentation of the process the primary focus of the project. This quickly led to a practice of making more ephemeral installations in my bedroom which I photographed and then dismantled. That way of working ran its course and after another two projects like it (The Travels of Bad and The Black Hole Universe), I became less interested in documentation and process and more interested in making handmade objects.

37

I still document the evolution of the studio but it isn’t at the forefront of what I show on exhibitions these days. It has become more of a secondary narrative, and in a sense the studio isn’t performing for the camera anymore.

Perhaps I realised that the focus on process was stopping me from becoming a painter.

I was going down a road of conceptual photography that relied heavily on explanatory texts and titles. So I pulled my focus back to painting, and working towards putting everything of importance into the final handmade object. This is of course impossible, because so much of how we look at a painting or any kind of art object is informed by the history and information around it, but I wanted to try to make things that had a bit more of a chance at standing on their own. Not to mention how satisfying it was to put the camera down and focus on the materiality of paint and canvas, after years of looking at a computer screen grading images in Photoshop, and tearing my hair out trying to choose the best shot out of 700 images that all looked pretty much the same.

AMM: What does a typical day in studio for you look like?

ZB: I wake up, make coffee, come sit in the studio. Have a smoke, check email, look at my diary. The diary is full of lists of things to do. I cross out some, add new ones, and then loiter about for a while, walking in circles.

Eventually I start doing whatever needs to be done: drawing, painting, research, edit a video, master some tracks for a side project, do my tax stuff, organise the studio, clean working utensils, order stuff from the hardware store, etc. More coffee at some point, then a snack, then perhaps I’ll look at an artist interview online or catch up on exhibitions around the world on Vernissage TV. Then back to work, maybe a podcast is playing in the background. Hours go by, and at some point it’s dinner time. My wife Dominique and I make dinner together, and then watch a bit of Netflix. Then it’s back to work for a couple of hours, more coffee, get distracted, watch some more YouTube videos, read artist interviews and look at random stuff on the internet, more coffee, work a bit more, get tired, pour a night cap or two, pass out on the couch, wake up two hours later, crawl into bed.

AMM: You seem to work prolifically. What are your daily rituals that feed you creatively?

ZB: I feel like I can’t not be prolific because I have to work through things in reality, not just in my head; I end up making a lot of physical objects as a result. The process of making does tend to feed itself, because it’s like pulling a string: one thing leads to the next and the next and the next. But making isn’t everything. I look at a lot of art – it’s pretty much all I look at. I have many bookmarks of art websites and YouTube channels that I regularly check, and I look at stuff in art books. I love buying books—

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12, Interviewed: Zander Blom

I have piles and piles of them. I make pilgrimages to bookshops every once in a while and usually return with a box or two.

Books feed me in a way that is different from the internet, maybe because they hang around, they are here in the room, physical matter, not just immediately forgotten like so much stuff you see online. They are like the bricks that I build my house with.

AMM: What is The Bad Reviews all about?

ZB: The Bad Reviews is a collaboration between myself and art critic Sean O’Toole.

Together we make music, music videos and various art objects. Sean is quite the music junkie, and I have dabbled in music throughout my career. We got together through this shared interest. While Sean had never made any music, he was curious enough to let me drag him into the studio and start recording random improvisations.

After a couple of sessions like this it just snowballed into a full-on multimedia art project. Sean has a wealth of content and a beautiful weirdness inside him that just bubbles up to the surface when you put him in front of a microphone. It’s been amazing for me to try and find the best musical forms/ styles to complement what comes out of him.

While he gets into his anecdotes and rants I’m on a synthesizer making the music, so we both react to each other in the moment and that’s how we make songs. Our final recordings are chopped out of these long sessions. The whole thing is very amateurish of course, and I think that’s what makes it special—it has a very Dada punk vibe.

Collaborations breathe new life into my usually solitary world. I try to make a point of getting involved in collaborative projects from time to time because it is an excuse for me to hang out with other people and get out of my own head. I would be a very different artist had it not been for all the things I learnt from all the people I’ve collaborated with over the years.

Arthur C. Danto’s dramatically titled After the End of Art, and a book called The Books that Shaped Art History, but I don’t think I’ve gotten further than 10 pages in with either. I’m a big sucker for the DVD sections in museum gift shops, and the YouTube channels of the big art institutions like Tate. MoMA has all these videos about art restoration on their channel that I really enjoy. I’ve got bookmarks for gallery websites and some Instagram feeds that I regularly check out, although I’m not on any social media myself. There is also this guy James Kalm’s YouTube channel—he films openings around New York with running commentary; it’s casual but informative, I find them pretty enjoyable. And I love Vernissage TV—they film important exhibitions around the world in a very professional and neutral/slick way.

I recommend checking out their channel for anyone who doesn’t have access to the real thing— sometimes these are enjoyable to watch purely as sociological documents of the art world and the people who show up for it at this moment in time. I listen to a bunch of different podcasts, probably the usual suspects, and for music I tend to download whatever gets a decent Pitchfork rating.

AMM: Lastly, do you have any interesting projects coming up? What’s next for you?

ZB: I’ve had a pretty busy schedule for the last six or eight months, and things are just starting to slow down now. I’m going to try and extend this peace in the studio for as long as I can, read a book or two from cover to cover, and go into a deep dive of research and experimentation for the next batch of paintings.

AMM: What are you reading, watching, listening to right now?

ZB: I speed read through a lot of stuff on the internet, as we all do. I just read about two-thirds of a review of Matthew Barney’s new show on Artforum today, and I generally check out what Jerry Saltz has to say, but I haven’t read a book from cover to cover in quite a while. I’ve just been too distracted.

My literature of choice is mostly artist biographies and interviews. The last stuff I gave a proper read was a bunch of HansUlrich Obrist interview books; a short book of Duchamp interviews by Calvin Tomkins; Portraits: John Berger on Artists—this is a fantastic read; and Gauguin’s Ramblings of a Wannabe Painter—also a great and often hilarious read. I’m currently trying to get into the Henri Cartier-Bresson: Interviews and Conversations book as well as the biography of him by Pierre Assouline, but I keep dropping the ball. I’ve also started

39

Image (p. 36): Zander Blom Cubist Study oil on linen 163 x 130 cm

Image (p. 38): Zander Blom Man with a Straw Hat and Ice Cream oil on linen 82 x 82 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12, Interviewed: Zander Blom

I have piles and piles of them. I make pilgrimages to bookshops every once in a while and usually return with a box or two.

Books feed me in a way that is different from the internet, maybe because they hang around, they are here in the room, physical matter, not just immediately forgotten like so much stuff you see online. They are like the bricks that I build my house with.

AMM: What is The Bad Reviews all about?

ZB: The Bad Reviews is a collaboration between myself and art critic Sean O’Toole.

Together we make music, music videos and various art objects. Sean is quite the music junkie, and I have dabbled in music throughout my career. We got together through this shared interest. While Sean had never made any music, he was curious enough to let me drag him into the studio and start recording random improvisations.

After a couple of sessions like this it just snowballed into a full-on multimedia art project. Sean has a wealth of content and a beautiful weirdness inside him that just bubbles up to the surface when you put him in front of a microphone. It’s been amazing for me to try and find the best musical forms/ styles to complement what comes out of him.

While he gets into his anecdotes and rants I’m on a synthesizer making the music, so we both react to each other in the moment and that’s how we make songs. Our final recordings are chopped out of these long sessions. The whole thing is very amateurish of course, and I think that’s what makes it special—it has a very Dada punk vibe.

Collaborations breathe new life into my usually solitary world. I try to make a point of getting involved in collaborative projects from time to time because it is an excuse for me to hang out with other people and get out of my own head. I would be a very different artist had it not been for all the things I learnt from all the people I’ve collaborated with over the years.

Arthur C. Danto’s dramatically titled After the End of Art, and a book called The Books that Shaped Art History, but I don’t think I’ve gotten further than 10 pages in with either. I’m a big sucker for the DVD sections in museum gift shops, and the YouTube channels of the big art institutions like Tate. MoMA has all these videos about art restoration on their channel that I really enjoy. I’ve got bookmarks for gallery websites and some Instagram feeds that I regularly check out, although I’m not on any social media myself. There is also this guy James Kalm’s YouTube channel—he films openings around New York with running commentary; it’s casual but informative, I find them pretty enjoyable. And I love Vernissage TV—they film important exhibitions around the world in a very professional and neutral/slick way.

I recommend checking out their channel for anyone who doesn’t have access to the real thing— sometimes these are enjoyable to watch purely as sociological documents of the art world and the people who show up for it at this moment in time. I listen to a bunch of different podcasts, probably the usual suspects, and for music I tend to download whatever gets a decent Pitchfork rating.

AMM: Lastly, do you have any interesting projects coming up? What’s next for you?

ZB: I’ve had a pretty busy schedule for the last six or eight months, and things are just starting to slow down now. I’m going to try and extend this peace in the studio for as long as I can, read a book or two from cover to cover, and go into a deep dive of research and experimentation for the next batch of paintings.

AMM: What are you reading, watching, listening to right now?

ZB: I speed read through a lot of stuff on the internet, as we all do. I just read about two-thirds of a review of Matthew Barney’s new show on Artforum today, and I generally check out what Jerry Saltz has to say, but I haven’t read a book from cover to cover in quite a while. I’ve just been too distracted.

My literature of choice is mostly artist biographies and interviews. The last stuff I gave a proper read was a bunch of HansUlrich Obrist interview books; a short book of Duchamp interviews by Calvin Tomkins; Portraits: John Berger on Artists—this is a fantastic read; and Gauguin’s Ramblings of a Wannabe Painter—also a great and often hilarious read. I’m currently trying to get into the Henri Cartier-Bresson: Interviews and Conversations book as well as the biography of him by Pierre Assouline, but I keep dropping the ball. I’ve also started

39

Image (p. 36): Zander Blom Cubist Study oil on linen 163 x 130 cm

Image (p. 38): Zander Blom Man with a Straw Hat and Ice Cream oil on linen 82 x 82 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12, Interviewed: Zander Blom

Zander Blom The Snail oil on linen 198 x 150 cm

Zander Blom Car Alarm oil on linen 250 x 198 cm

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Zander Blom The Snail oil on linen 198 x 150 cm

Zander Blom Car Alarm oil on linen 250 x 198 cm

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Zander Blom Figure (Paulo en costume d’Arlequin) oil on linen 95 x 61 cm

Zander Blom Lazerquest Mondrian Car Crash oil on linen 151.5 x 120 cm

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Zander Blom Figure (Paulo en costume d’Arlequin) oil on linen 95 x 61 cm

Zander Blom Lazerquest Mondrian Car Crash oil on linen 151.5 x 120 cm

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Zander Blom Camouflage oil on linen 198 x 140 cm

Zander Blom Leaving The Factory oil on linen 122 x 85 cm

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Zander Blom Camouflage oil on linen 198 x 140 cm

Zander Blom Leaving The Factory oil on linen 122 x 85 cm

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Zander Blom Composition with Stuff oil on linen 240 x 170 cm

Zander Blom Composition with Pollock and Mondrian/TV Dinner oil on linen 72 x 69 cm

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Zander Blom Composition with Stuff oil on linen 240 x 170 cm

Zander Blom Composition with Pollock and Mondrian/TV Dinner oil on linen 72 x 69 cm

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www.nasimhantehzadeh.net

Between intuition and intention: drawings by Nasim Hantehzadeh The organic, amorphous forms that populate Iranian-American artist Nasim Hantehzadeh’s large-scale drawings occupy a space between abstraction and figuration. She describes her work as responding to the liminal space between memory and experience. At first glance the forms seem purely abstract, but as your eye travels across the plane of the drawing a subtle narrative begins to suggest itself within the composition.

Do the shapes depict stylised figures or flora and fauna making up a landscape? Circular forms recur, reminiscent of seedpods and fertility motifs. Nasim’s visual language embraces and heightens this ambiguity, as she explains “I allowed the forms to create a sense of narrative or a sort of figuration.” It is up to the viewer to derive their own read of Nasim’s visual language and compositions.

Working in oil pastel and graphite pencil, Nasim employs a loose and repetitive style of mark-making. Using circular strokes, she laboriously colors in areas of the drawing and builds up depth whilst leaving the paper still visible through the marks. This style of working draws attention to the mark-making and process of creation. The interplay between positive and negative space as well as tactile sense of surface pulls the viewer towards the drawings, to explore the details and begin to decipher the narratives.

Nasim received her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles.

She has participated in numerous group shows and solo presentations as well as been invited on residencies in Italy and the US. This summer she will join the MacDowell Colony artist residency programme and has a solo show scheduled for the end of the year in Mexico.

interview by Layla Leiman

Featured image: Nasim Hantehzadeh Cloudy Day oil and oil stick on canvas 84 x 72 inches courtesy of Gildar Gallery

www.nasimhantehzadeh.net

Between intuition and intention: drawings by Nasim Hantehzadeh The organic, amorphous forms that populate Iranian-American artist Nasim Hantehzadeh’s large-scale drawings occupy a space between abstraction and figuration. She describes her work as responding to the liminal space between memory and experience. At first glance the forms seem purely abstract, but as your eye travels across the plane of the drawing a subtle narrative begins to suggest itself within the composition.

Do the shapes depict stylised figures or flora and fauna making up a landscape? Circular forms recur, reminiscent of seedpods and fertility motifs. Nasim’s visual language embraces and heightens this ambiguity, as she explains “I allowed the forms to create a sense of narrative or a sort of figuration.” It is up to the viewer to derive their own read of Nasim’s visual language and compositions.

Working in oil pastel and graphite pencil, Nasim employs a loose and repetitive style of mark-making. Using circular strokes, she laboriously colors in areas of the drawing and builds up depth whilst leaving the paper still visible through the marks. This style of working draws attention to the mark-making and process of creation. The interplay between positive and negative space as well as tactile sense of surface pulls the viewer towards the drawings, to explore the details and begin to decipher the narratives.

Nasim received her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles.

She has participated in numerous group shows and solo presentations as well as been invited on residencies in Italy and the US. This summer she will join the MacDowell Colony artist residency programme and has a solo show scheduled for the end of the year in Mexico.

interview by Layla Leiman

Featured image: Nasim Hantehzadeh Cloudy Day oil and oil stick on canvas 84 x 72 inches courtesy of Gildar Gallery

“When I am in my studio, I think about the conditions that social structures impose upon the movement of human bodies in public, inside domestic space, and in nature.

In particular, I am concerned with the violence that human civilization continues to perpetuate, whether consciously or subconsciously, and the way society normalizes this violence through the oppressive patriarchy that is concealed in systems such as nationalism, colonialism, and religion.”

- Nasim Hantehzadeh

Photo courtesy of Nasim Hantehzadeh

AMM: Hi Nasim! Growing up, did you always know that you wanted to make art? What is your earliest art-related memory?

NH: Hi Layla, I knew that I wanted to become an artist since I was nine. I started drawing the images from my childhood sticker collection with color pencils when I was around the same age. I would draw them on A4 paper exactly the same as how

they look. Sometimes I would change the color combination. As a child they were so precious to me.

AMM: How has your art changed over time?

What has inspired or informed these changes?

NH: My work is relevant to my memories and experiences. Now is an experience, the minute before now is a memory. Memories and experiences can merge. Like how you taste a food in a new restaurant and the experience reminds you of a memory, like the food that your grandmother made for you when you were a child. That is when you have the memory and the experience merge. For me, location and time are elements that would influence the memories and experiences the most.

AMM: In what ways does your art express your own emotional and psychological state of being?

NH: For me, the process of making artwork is personal, however when the artwork is finished and on view in the world, it actively becomes social. It is not about my emotional and psychological state of being, it is about the conversation that the artwork creates with the viewer.

AMM: You’ve developed a stylised abstracted visual language of organic-like forms. Please tell us more about this and why you’re drawn to abstraction.

NH: When I moved back to the United States from Iran, I started a process of making everyday drawings in my sketchbook. Overtime, that mark-making in my sketchbook developed into a visual language. I allowed the forms to create a sense of narrative or a sort of figuration.

The process is intuitive, yet intentional as I decide to keep the marks and gestures on the surface of the paper.

AMM: Do the abstract forms within your compositions have figurative associations for you? How should we begin to understand the narratives in your work?

NH: They do, I look at them as entities, or figures that do not have a specific social identification. For me, even the background is an entity.

My work taps on the juxtaposition of experience and memory, the state of being in between them, or have them overlap, separate, or become one. When I think about memories and experiences there is always a feeling there, an emotional state. During the process of making, the memories and experiences are also being processed inside my head. However, the process is so immediate.

I would like the viewer to enter the work starting from the colors and slowly move on to the gestures. I want the viewer to experience the process, similar to how

51

I experienced it when I made the work.

However, after the work is finished, I have to spend time with the work in order to understand it. In order to clarify what those emotions are loudly speaking about. And then I start the titling process. The titles are inspired by the conversation that I have with the work when it is finished. As if I am becoming the viewer of my own work.

Usually the duration of my conversation with the finished work until I get to the titling point is a month or two. The title can be a clue for the viewer as well in order to get access to the narrative.

AMM: What does your studio look and feel like?

Do you have any rules or rituals for the space?

NH: My current studio is located in Downtown LA. I spend most of my time there. I have dedicated a small space for reading and office work, and the rest of the space is being used for art making. My art materials are usually placed in the middle of the studio, and I use the walls to make work. I can’t really store anything by the walls.

I usually read, write, or do research in the morning, spend the afternoons for running errands outside studio, and spend the evenings on making art. I can switch my schedule around but it usually looks like that.

AMM: In what ways do you use art as a form of social and political commentary?

NH: I don’t think I use art as a form of social and political commentary. I practice art. When I am in my studio, I think about the conditions that social structures impose upon the movement of human bodies in public, inside domestic space, and in nature. In particular, I am concerned with the violence that human civilization continues to perpetuate, whether consciously or subconsciously, and the way society normalizes this violence through the oppressive patriarchy that is concealed in systems such as nationalism, colonialism, and religion.

AMM: What themes or ideas are you currently exploring in your work?

NH: Currently I am interested in the freedom and the limitation that my studio space suggests. If I think of the human body as an entity or a solid form in space, my inclination to categorize people as I have been categorized diminishes, and I no longer think about otherness. Having that in mind, I imagine my studio space as a metaphor for social spaces. I cover the entire studio wall with paper and start with applying forms and gestures on the surface using a graphite stick. I walk from one side of the studio to the other. Sometimes I climb a ladder to reach the top of the paper and draw from the top towards the middle, while climbing down. After I apply the final

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12, Interviewed: Nasim Hantehzadeh

“When I am in my studio, I think about the conditions that social structures impose upon the movement of human bodies in public, inside domestic space, and in nature.

In particular, I am concerned with the violence that human civilization continues to perpetuate, whether consciously or subconsciously, and the way society normalizes this violence through the oppressive patriarchy that is concealed in systems such as nationalism, colonialism, and religion.”

- Nasim Hantehzadeh

Photo courtesy of Nasim Hantehzadeh

AMM: Hi Nasim! Growing up, did you always know that you wanted to make art? What is your earliest art-related memory?

NH: Hi Layla, I knew that I wanted to become an artist since I was nine. I started drawing the images from my childhood sticker collection with color pencils when I was around the same age. I would draw them on A4 paper exactly the same as how

they look. Sometimes I would change the color combination. As a child they were so precious to me.

AMM: How has your art changed over time?

What has inspired or informed these changes?

NH: My work is relevant to my memories and experiences. Now is an experience, the minute before now is a memory. Memories and experiences can merge. Like how you taste a food in a new restaurant and the experience reminds you of a memory, like the food that your grandmother made for you when you were a child. That is when you have the memory and the experience merge. For me, location and time are elements that would influence the memories and experiences the most.

AMM: In what ways does your art express your own emotional and psychological state of being?

NH: For me, the process of making artwork is personal, however when the artwork is finished and on view in the world, it actively becomes social. It is not about my emotional and psychological state of being, it is about the conversation that the artwork creates with the viewer.

AMM: You’ve developed a stylised abstracted visual language of organic-like forms. Please tell us more about this and why you’re drawn to abstraction.

NH: When I moved back to the United States from Iran, I started a process of making everyday drawings in my sketchbook. Overtime, that mark-making in my sketchbook developed into a visual language. I allowed the forms to create a sense of narrative or a sort of figuration.

The process is intuitive, yet intentional as I decide to keep the marks and gestures on the surface of the paper.

AMM: Do the abstract forms within your compositions have figurative associations for you? How should we begin to understand the narratives in your work?

NH: They do, I look at them as entities, or figures that do not have a specific social identification. For me, even the background is an entity.

My work taps on the juxtaposition of experience and memory, the state of being in between them, or have them overlap, separate, or become one. When I think about memories and experiences there is always a feeling there, an emotional state. During the process of making, the memories and experiences are also being processed inside my head. However, the process is so immediate.

I would like the viewer to enter the work starting from the colors and slowly move on to the gestures. I want the viewer to experience the process, similar to how

51

I experienced it when I made the work.

However, after the work is finished, I have to spend time with the work in order to understand it. In order to clarify what those emotions are loudly speaking about. And then I start the titling process. The titles are inspired by the conversation that I have with the work when it is finished. As if I am becoming the viewer of my own work.

Usually the duration of my conversation with the finished work until I get to the titling point is a month or two. The title can be a clue for the viewer as well in order to get access to the narrative.

AMM: What does your studio look and feel like?

Do you have any rules or rituals for the space?

NH: My current studio is located in Downtown LA. I spend most of my time there. I have dedicated a small space for reading and office work, and the rest of the space is being used for art making. My art materials are usually placed in the middle of the studio, and I use the walls to make work. I can’t really store anything by the walls.

I usually read, write, or do research in the morning, spend the afternoons for running errands outside studio, and spend the evenings on making art. I can switch my schedule around but it usually looks like that.

AMM: In what ways do you use art as a form of social and political commentary?

NH: I don’t think I use art as a form of social and political commentary. I practice art. When I am in my studio, I think about the conditions that social structures impose upon the movement of human bodies in public, inside domestic space, and in nature. In particular, I am concerned with the violence that human civilization continues to perpetuate, whether consciously or subconsciously, and the way society normalizes this violence through the oppressive patriarchy that is concealed in systems such as nationalism, colonialism, and religion.

AMM: What themes or ideas are you currently exploring in your work?

NH: Currently I am interested in the freedom and the limitation that my studio space suggests. If I think of the human body as an entity or a solid form in space, my inclination to categorize people as I have been categorized diminishes, and I no longer think about otherness. Having that in mind, I imagine my studio space as a metaphor for social spaces. I cover the entire studio wall with paper and start with applying forms and gestures on the surface using a graphite stick. I walk from one side of the studio to the other. Sometimes I climb a ladder to reach the top of the paper and draw from the top towards the middle, while climbing down. After I apply the final

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12, Interviewed: Nasim Hantehzadeh

gestures, I use oil pastel and color pencil to introduce color to the surface.

AMM: What does working sculpturally offer you?

Though there is an implied freedom in this process, limitations still exist—like those that my studio space gives my body while I am making the work, affecting my decisions in making marks on the surface.

My decision-making changes as the space in which I work changes.

NH: The process of making threedimensional work is inspired by the forms in the large-scale drawings. I carve the forms out of Styrofoam with a hotrod knife, as if I am drawing. The choice of material is based on the concept of the series that I work on.

When the work is physically in the space, it challenges the forms in the way that they are being perceived.

AMM: Can you tell us more about the interplay between intuition and spontaneity for you while you’re working? Have you always worked this way?

NH: Sure, the moment that I start the process of mark making on the surface, I let the marks become the leader, however, that does not mean that I don’t have any control over the marks. Every mark that I decide to keep on the surface is intentional. I have started working this way after I moved back to the United States about eight years ago.

AMM: Your color palettes are restrained, and in your current work are muted and earth-toned.

How does this relate to the subject of your work?

NH: I use color as a tool to attract the viewers’ eyes. The affection that color creates between the work and the viewer slowly leads the eyes towards forms.

AMM: How do you use materials to explore the concepts or themes in your work?

NH: I am interested in experimenting with materials. There are so many possibilities in the simplest materials. Every time that I go back to the studio, I would like to re-teach myself different ways of using materials that I personally enjoy.

AMM: In many of your artworks there is an interesting tactile element. Please tell us about your thinking around surface and texture in your art?

AMM: What is your process of working?

NH: I don’t plan my work in advance. Every mark I keep on the surface is intentional, but I intuitively approach the process.

AMM: What are you reading, watching, listening to right now?

NH: I like reading and listening, not a fan of watching. Right now, I am listening to a few audio books such as The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin, Orientalism by Edward Said, The Golden House by Salman Rushdie, Xenogenesis by Octavia E. Butler, Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi, and Discipline and Punish by Foucault.

I am always thirsty for poetry. Recently I have started to re-read Gulistan by Saadi Shirazi, and Jimmy’s Blues and other Poems

by James Baldwin. I am also interested in reading diaries, notes and writings of other artists. My favorites so far are Louise Bourgeois and Maria Lassnig.

AMM: Any exciting projects we should know about? What’s next for you?

NH: Making art is the exciting project. I am happy that I will be joining the MacDowell Colony artist residency this summer, and working towards a solo exhibition that will be placed at Paramo Gallery in Guadalajara, Mexico towards the end of this year.

NH: I move the oil pastel in a way to keep parts of the paper visible, that way the viewer is aware of my hand movement over time, similar to when the viewer looks at brush strokes in a painting.

AMM: Where do you look for daily inspiration?

NH: I don’t look for them, they surprise me.

AMM: What mediums do you work in and why?

Image: Nasim Hantehzadeh Sweat is running on my skin oil pastel and graphite on paper 99 x 60 inches

NH: Right now, predominately working with oil pastels, color pencils, and graphite on paper. I am interested in the immediacy and the directness of the material. For instance, using a graphite stick is a way to balance the movement of my hand with my conscious and subconscious decisions. That way I am able to translate that decision-making to a visual language on the surface.

53

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12, Interviewed: Nasim Hantehzadeh

gestures, I use oil pastel and color pencil to introduce color to the surface.

AMM: What does working sculpturally offer you?

Though there is an implied freedom in this process, limitations still exist—like those that my studio space gives my body while I am making the work, affecting my decisions in making marks on the surface.

My decision-making changes as the space in which I work changes.

NH: The process of making threedimensional work is inspired by the forms in the large-scale drawings. I carve the forms out of Styrofoam with a hotrod knife, as if I am drawing. The choice of material is based on the concept of the series that I work on.

When the work is physically in the space, it challenges the forms in the way that they are being perceived.

AMM: Can you tell us more about the interplay between intuition and spontaneity for you while you’re working? Have you always worked this way?

NH: Sure, the moment that I start the process of mark making on the surface, I let the marks become the leader, however, that does not mean that I don’t have any control over the marks. Every mark that I decide to keep on the surface is intentional. I have started working this way after I moved back to the United States about eight years ago.

AMM: Your color palettes are restrained, and in your current work are muted and earth-toned.

How does this relate to the subject of your work?

NH: I use color as a tool to attract the viewers’ eyes. The affection that color creates between the work and the viewer slowly leads the eyes towards forms.

AMM: How do you use materials to explore the concepts or themes in your work?

NH: I am interested in experimenting with materials. There are so many possibilities in the simplest materials. Every time that I go back to the studio, I would like to re-teach myself different ways of using materials that I personally enjoy.

AMM: In many of your artworks there is an interesting tactile element. Please tell us about your thinking around surface and texture in your art?

AMM: What is your process of working?

NH: I don’t plan my work in advance. Every mark I keep on the surface is intentional, but I intuitively approach the process.

AMM: What are you reading, watching, listening to right now?

NH: I like reading and listening, not a fan of watching. Right now, I am listening to a few audio books such as The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin, Orientalism by Edward Said, The Golden House by Salman Rushdie, Xenogenesis by Octavia E. Butler, Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi, and Discipline and Punish by Foucault.

I am always thirsty for poetry. Recently I have started to re-read Gulistan by Saadi Shirazi, and Jimmy’s Blues and other Poems

by James Baldwin. I am also interested in reading diaries, notes and writings of other artists. My favorites so far are Louise Bourgeois and Maria Lassnig.

AMM: Any exciting projects we should know about? What’s next for you?

NH: Making art is the exciting project. I am happy that I will be joining the MacDowell Colony artist residency this summer, and working towards a solo exhibition that will be placed at Paramo Gallery in Guadalajara, Mexico towards the end of this year.

NH: I move the oil pastel in a way to keep parts of the paper visible, that way the viewer is aware of my hand movement over time, similar to when the viewer looks at brush strokes in a painting.

AMM: Where do you look for daily inspiration?

NH: I don’t look for them, they surprise me.

AMM: What mediums do you work in and why?

Image: Nasim Hantehzadeh Sweat is running on my skin oil pastel and graphite on paper 99 x 60 inches

NH: Right now, predominately working with oil pastels, color pencils, and graphite on paper. I am interested in the immediacy and the directness of the material. For instance, using a graphite stick is a way to balance the movement of my hand with my conscious and subconscious decisions. That way I am able to translate that decision-making to a visual language on the surface.

53

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12, Interviewed: Nasim Hantehzadeh

Nasim Hantehzadeh Floating on the river oil pastel, color pencil, and graphite on paper 58 x 76 inches

Nasim Hantehzadeh When the moon is out oil pastel, color pencil, and graphite on paper 46 x 60 inches

54

55

Nasim Hantehzadeh Floating on the river oil pastel, color pencil, and graphite on paper 58 x 76 inches

Nasim Hantehzadeh When the moon is out oil pastel, color pencil, and graphite on paper 46 x 60 inches

54

55

Nasim Hantehzadeh Sniffing the Ground oil pastel, color pencil, and graphite on paper 60 x 60 inches

Nasim Hantehzadeh In the garden, behind the bushes oil pastel, color pencil, and graphite on paper 62 x 60 inches

56

57

Nasim Hantehzadeh Sniffing the Ground oil pastel, color pencil, and graphite on paper 60 x 60 inches

Nasim Hantehzadeh In the garden, behind the bushes oil pastel, color pencil, and graphite on paper 62 x 60 inches

56

57

Featured image: Nasim Hantehzadeh Bani Adam oil pastel, color pencil, and graphite on paper 95 x 178 inches

Featured image: Nasim Hantehzadeh Bani Adam oil pastel, color pencil, and graphite on paper 95 x 178 inches

www.henrycurchod.com

Henry Curchod: “The more you know, the less you know.”

Our preoccupation with nostalgia is something that interests IranianAustralian artist Henry Curchod. Reflecting on the etymology of the word, Henry is interested in developing a rich visual language borrowing from myths and archetypal symbols that respond to the problematic nature of memory and our desire to return to an idealised— and often fictionalised—past. In each composition, Henry develops a complex narrative that plays out between an ambiguously identified protagonist and antagonist. The scenes resist moralistic readings and instead explore the space between comedy and tragedy and the secular and spiritual.

The symbolic subject matter of Henry’s paintings belies his serious approach to painting. He says: “It’s important to be conscious of every single stroke. Every gesture or stroke should be scrutinised and questioned. Paint’s application should not be too cavalier, as people are looking for meaning in the stroke.” To test the mettle of his painting, Henry dedicated two years to only painting water—typically one of the most difficult things to render in pigment on canvas. The outcome of this undertaking is less important than the deep understanding of paint and surface and light that Henry gained through the process and which he brings to bear in his current work. This is balanced with an equal acknowledgement of the need for spontaneity to maintain life and an element of surprise within a painting. Using fluid but precise brushstrokes, Henry’s paintings convey a sense of movement and poised tension. His colour palette is similarly emotive and deliberate adding textural layers to his symbolic language.

Today Henry lives and works in Sydney. He was the recipient of the Fortyfive Emerging Art Award and the Belle Magazine Art Prize amongst other achievements, and has presented his work nationally in both solo and group shows.

interview by Layla Leiman

Featured image: Henry Curchod The throning oil and synthetic polymer on canvas 102 x 76 cm

www.henrycurchod.com

Henry Curchod: “The more you know, the less you know.”

Our preoccupation with nostalgia is something that interests IranianAustralian artist Henry Curchod. Reflecting on the etymology of the word, Henry is interested in developing a rich visual language borrowing from myths and archetypal symbols that respond to the problematic nature of memory and our desire to return to an idealised— and often fictionalised—past. In each composition, Henry develops a complex narrative that plays out between an ambiguously identified protagonist and antagonist. The scenes resist moralistic readings and instead explore the space between comedy and tragedy and the secular and spiritual.

The symbolic subject matter of Henry’s paintings belies his serious approach to painting. He says: “It’s important to be conscious of every single stroke. Every gesture or stroke should be scrutinised and questioned. Paint’s application should not be too cavalier, as people are looking for meaning in the stroke.” To test the mettle of his painting, Henry dedicated two years to only painting water—typically one of the most difficult things to render in pigment on canvas. The outcome of this undertaking is less important than the deep understanding of paint and surface and light that Henry gained through the process and which he brings to bear in his current work. This is balanced with an equal acknowledgement of the need for spontaneity to maintain life and an element of surprise within a painting. Using fluid but precise brushstrokes, Henry’s paintings convey a sense of movement and poised tension. His colour palette is similarly emotive and deliberate adding textural layers to his symbolic language.

Today Henry lives and works in Sydney. He was the recipient of the Fortyfive Emerging Art Award and the Belle Magazine Art Prize amongst other achievements, and has presented his work nationally in both solo and group shows.

interview by Layla Leiman

Featured image: Henry Curchod The throning oil and synthetic polymer on canvas 102 x 76 cm

AMM: Hi Henry! Have you always painted or did you find your way to painting via other mediums?

What have been some of the defining points that have shaped you as an artist?

HC: I wanted to become an architect, so I went to do a few weeks of work for a prominent Australian architect, who sat me down after two days and said that I should probably go to art school.

I was taught to draw technically by my uncle and grandmother. Their relationship with art continues to have a profound impact on me. They take it very seriously. The rest of my family are engineers, so I had a healthy obsession with Lego and building things.

I think most children do. Most children stop and move on, and instead I think I just kept going. The obvious next step was painting.

These two inherent but conflicting sides of me, the engineer and the romantic, are key to what has shaped me as an artist. I cherish this process of the imagination being respectfully crushed by the unforgiving starkness of manifestation.

AMM: Your paintings depict mythical or dreamlike scenes that suggest complex narratives.

Please tell us about the subject matter in your art.

HC: Yes, the narrative allows me to conspicuously communicate with the audience, which I really like. They are very social paintings. But also I guess they are kind of disastrous fantasies. There’s often an antagonist and a protagonist, but like any traditional myth or story it’s often unclear as to who is what. Often the antagonist is a personified object. It’s more useful to personify an object than to objectify a person.

These dream-like fantastical elements allow the works to be disarming and invite a sense of curiosity. The narratives generally explore this space between comedy and tragedy, or the secular and the spiritual, where all good things sit. There are these situations in life that the more you know, the less you know; the great irony in everything; and these things make me smile, and they are worth painting about.

AMM: Is each painting a standalone narrative, or do you develop themes across a body of work?

HC: Each painting is its own story. I do develop broader themes and that’s entirely incidental. But in a way each image is more a rebuttal to the image that was made before it. In that sense, they stand alone, and are in a sense more interesting on their own, and the larger body of work is one continuous argument.

I may experience a situation in the day to day that I find to be so perplexing or morally ambiguous, that it causes me to conjure up narratives around it. Small details of the before and after. Then I draw every outcome of that situation, and I may get attached to

“Each painting is its own story. I do develop broader themes and that’s entirely incidental.

But in a way each image is more a rebuttal to the image that was made before it. In that sense, they stand alone, and are in a sense more interesting on their own, and the larger body of work is one continuous argument.”

- Henry Curchod a certain gesture or feeling in one of those drawings, and so I try to build up the image around that.

The initial thought becomes a distant overarching theme, and as each chapter or painting comes to the surface, it reveals smaller things which are far more important than the moral of the story. And that’s the beauty of the process: I let the contrivance of theme or subject go out the window and give way to something more honest and organic. And that’s when things actually get interesting for me.

AMM: Who are the figures in your work?

HC: I guess they are sort of ghosts of people in my life. There’s this thing whereby I will draw someone over and over again from memory. Slowly, their likeness is lost in this repetitive process of linear abstraction, until only what I see as their quiddity remains.

Then by transferring this onto canvas and rebuilding onto this linear foundation with colour and form, I get a chance to reinvent this person. I really like that. I have painted my girlfriend as a demon and she has been very understanding.

AMM: What themes or ideas are you currently exploring in your work?

HC: At the moment I’m really interested in the way we experience nostalgia.

Traditionally, nostalgia is this escapist affection for memory and the past; generally positive. The word nostalgia originally comes from the Greek words ‘nostos’ (homecoming) and ‘algos’ (sickening), which is actually more a sentiment of loss. We have this tendency to actively seek nostalgia when looking at images and often it’s a very confused experience. It becomes a sort of hunger for uncomfortable sentimentality.

I do this all the time when looking at paintings.

So, I’m really exploring this in my construction of images. Both technically and conceptually, I am trying to find symbols and cues that engage this idea of a confused familiarity.

I think that by illuminating the visual triggers of this ‘paradoxical nostalgia’, there is a valuable opportunity to confront what we fear and what we’ve left behind or tried to conceal.

AMM: What is your process of working? Do you sketch and plan out your compositions or follow a more fluid and spontaneous process?

HC: The way I work is kind of similar to baking in that I produce work in clear stages and batches. Initially, I sketch from my imagination, without any tangible reference, for a month or so. No painting. I then flesh out, or collage the drawings into a series of images. I then slowly start to build the images up with paint. I develop this dialogue with each individual work, where I’m forced to abandon whatever plans I had for it and let it become its own thing, and I work hard to justify that process to myself and to the work.

AMM: What does a typical day in studio look like for you?

HC: Physically it’s sporadic. I’d say it’s 50% just sitting there and staring at the works, forcing myself to have difficult internal conversations about minor decisions.

Each decision leads to a new challenge and I must face that as it comes. The more finished a work becomes, the more challenging, complex and intense these internal conversations become. That can be quite a difficult time. When I’ve finished having these initial ‘morning’ conversations, I am ready to paint. Then I’ll paint for hours and hours. At some point I stop and kick myself out of the studio, before I ruin everything. But when I’m in the studio, it’s all about painting. There’s no recreation or procrastination. It’s strict.

AMM: Your use of colour and fluid brush stokes creates a very emotive quality in your paintings.

Can you tell us more about this?

HC: I’m glad they seem emotive, but they are very considered. Which I think is the opposite of emotional? It’s important to Image courtesy of Henry Curchod

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12, Interviewed: Henry Curchod

62

AMM: Hi Henry! Have you always painted or did you find your way to painting via other mediums?

What have been some of the defining points that have shaped you as an artist?

HC: I wanted to become an architect, so I went to do a few weeks of work for a prominent Australian architect, who sat me down after two days and said that I should probably go to art school.

I was taught to draw technically by my uncle and grandmother. Their relationship with art continues to have a profound impact on me. They take it very seriously. The rest of my family are engineers, so I had a healthy obsession with Lego and building things.

I think most children do. Most children stop and move on, and instead I think I just kept going. The obvious next step was painting.

These two inherent but conflicting sides of me, the engineer and the romantic, are key to what has shaped me as an artist. I cherish this process of the imagination being respectfully crushed by the unforgiving starkness of manifestation.

AMM: Your paintings depict mythical or dreamlike scenes that suggest complex narratives.

Please tell us about the subject matter in your art.

HC: Yes, the narrative allows me to conspicuously communicate with the audience, which I really like. They are very social paintings. But also I guess they are kind of disastrous fantasies. There’s often an antagonist and a protagonist, but like any traditional myth or story it’s often unclear as to who is what. Often the antagonist is a personified object. It’s more useful to personify an object than to objectify a person.

These dream-like fantastical elements allow the works to be disarming and invite a sense of curiosity. The narratives generally explore this space between comedy and tragedy, or the secular and the spiritual, where all good things sit. There are these situations in life that the more you know, the less you know; the great irony in everything; and these things make me smile, and they are worth painting about.

AMM: Is each painting a standalone narrative, or do you develop themes across a body of work?

HC: Each painting is its own story. I do develop broader themes and that’s entirely incidental. But in a way each image is more a rebuttal to the image that was made before it. In that sense, they stand alone, and are in a sense more interesting on their own, and the larger body of work is one continuous argument.

I may experience a situation in the day to day that I find to be so perplexing or morally ambiguous, that it causes me to conjure up narratives around it. Small details of the before and after. Then I draw every outcome of that situation, and I may get attached to

“Each painting is its own story. I do develop broader themes and that’s entirely incidental.

But in a way each image is more a rebuttal to the image that was made before it. In that sense, they stand alone, and are in a sense more interesting on their own, and the larger body of work is one continuous argument.”

- Henry Curchod a certain gesture or feeling in one of those drawings, and so I try to build up the image around that.

The initial thought becomes a distant overarching theme, and as each chapter or painting comes to the surface, it reveals smaller things which are far more important than the moral of the story. And that’s the beauty of the process: I let the contrivance of theme or subject go out the window and give way to something more honest and organic. And that’s when things actually get interesting for me.

AMM: Who are the figures in your work?

HC: I guess they are sort of ghosts of people in my life. There’s this thing whereby I will draw someone over and over again from memory. Slowly, their likeness is lost in this repetitive process of linear abstraction, until only what I see as their quiddity remains.

Then by transferring this onto canvas and rebuilding onto this linear foundation with colour and form, I get a chance to reinvent this person. I really like that. I have painted my girlfriend as a demon and she has been very understanding.

AMM: What themes or ideas are you currently exploring in your work?

HC: At the moment I’m really interested in the way we experience nostalgia.

Traditionally, nostalgia is this escapist affection for memory and the past; generally positive. The word nostalgia originally comes from the Greek words ‘nostos’ (homecoming) and ‘algos’ (sickening), which is actually more a sentiment of loss. We have this tendency to actively seek nostalgia when looking at images and often it’s a very confused experience. It becomes a sort of hunger for uncomfortable sentimentality.

I do this all the time when looking at paintings.

So, I’m really exploring this in my construction of images. Both technically and conceptually, I am trying to find symbols and cues that engage this idea of a confused familiarity.

I think that by illuminating the visual triggers of this ‘paradoxical nostalgia’, there is a valuable opportunity to confront what we fear and what we’ve left behind or tried to conceal.

AMM: What is your process of working? Do you sketch and plan out your compositions or follow a more fluid and spontaneous process?

HC: The way I work is kind of similar to baking in that I produce work in clear stages and batches. Initially, I sketch from my imagination, without any tangible reference, for a month or so. No painting. I then flesh out, or collage the drawings into a series of images. I then slowly start to build the images up with paint. I develop this dialogue with each individual work, where I’m forced to abandon whatever plans I had for it and let it become its own thing, and I work hard to justify that process to myself and to the work.

AMM: What does a typical day in studio look like for you?

HC: Physically it’s sporadic. I’d say it’s 50% just sitting there and staring at the works, forcing myself to have difficult internal conversations about minor decisions.

Each decision leads to a new challenge and I must face that as it comes. The more finished a work becomes, the more challenging, complex and intense these internal conversations become. That can be quite a difficult time. When I’ve finished having these initial ‘morning’ conversations, I am ready to paint. Then I’ll paint for hours and hours. At some point I stop and kick myself out of the studio, before I ruin everything. But when I’m in the studio, it’s all about painting. There’s no recreation or procrastination. It’s strict.

AMM: Your use of colour and fluid brush stokes creates a very emotive quality in your paintings.

Can you tell us more about this?

HC: I’m glad they seem emotive, but they are very considered. Which I think is the opposite of emotional? It’s important to Image courtesy of Henry Curchod

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12, Interviewed: Henry Curchod

62

“Naming works is fun. I’m not in the market for misleading people for the sake of it, but I’m generally against pure reiteration. It’s a chance to be poetic, or a chance to make a joke or it’s a chance to finally finish the painting.”

- Henry Curchod be conscious of every single stroke. Every gesture or stroke should be scrutinised and questioned. Paint’s application should not be too cavalier, as people are looking for meaning in the stroke, so we must give every stroke as much meaning and purpose as possible. If you are vacant whilst painting, it shows. But that thinking can also give way to tight and emotionless painting, so often it’s an intense battle between the civilised and the primal. I know every serious painter has a different relationship to this idea.

AMM: The titles of your paintings are very descriptive without actually giving anything away. How do you go about titling your work?

HC: Naming works is fun. I’m not in the market for misleading people for the sake of it, but I’m generally against pure reiteration. It’s a chance to be poetic, or a chance to make a joke or it’s a chance to finally finish the painting.

AMM: You spent two years painting water. What was your intention for this and what did you gain from the process?

HC: I was trying to make the perfect painting of water, as the sublime subject of all subjects.

It’s a long time to undertake an impossible task, and of course I consider it a failure. But in that time I learnt more about the materiality of paint and the process of dilution and restraint than I could have done doing anything else.

Layering and patience and gesture. I studied paint’s strengths and boundaries. I still think they are good paintings, but I’m not as hard on myself as I was then.

AMM: How does your personal history influence you artistically? Does this come through in your work?

HC: For a long time I was reluctant to explore my Persian heritage. Iran has a lot of problems, and I am not qualified to get politically involved. But the rich history of the aesthetic, and carrying it through to modernity is something I am interested in. The Persian side of my family were all thrown out during the revolution, so there is this embarrassment and shame that went along with that. The aesthetic has started to come through a lot, which I’m really exploring. I used to make drawings from the Disney film Aladdin when I was really young. I loved Aladdin. It was this safe, mainstream, Americanised connection to my culture. Pop-exoticism. Of course now I realise that it had nothing to do with Iran. It was just blanket Middle-Eastern references. It’s riddled with cultural misappropriation, which I tend to find more amusing than offensive. But looking back, Disney films had a huge impact on me.

AMM: Besides art, what are some of your interests?

HC: I am very passionate about cooking.

Cooking a meal is the precursor to sharing a meal, which is life’s simplest primal pleasure.

It’s like this wonderful alchemy born of survival. The amount of time I spend thinking about cooking might be considered unhealthy.

AMM: What is the Australian art scene like? How do you feel like you fit in (or not)?

HC: Australia is beautiful island in the Pacific that has been blessed with the internet. It’s also an amazing place to live. The art world here is just like anywhere else now, because of the internet. There are many fantastic artists who are constantly pushing the boundaries.

I think a lot of people here are working hard to bring the Australian public up to speed. Sport is big here and people are very comfortable.

And comfort can make people complacent.

The void here between the decorative and the academic is huge. It’s a bit of a tug of war in a way, or two opposing sides. It’s come from underfunding in the arts and no respect for arts education. It creates a divide. But it will even out with a bit more internet.

influence, I’m influenced by everything: the people in my life, the internet, other artists, books, myths, anything. Painting is a sort of digestion for me. I take everything in my life and churn it through this grinder and try to come out the other end with some pictures.

The more interesting my life becomes, the more interesting my work becomes.

Then there’s inspiration. Inspiration is a hard one as I don’t really get inspired until I’m deep into the process or act of painting.

What motivates me to get to that point is so difficult to say. It’s very hard to describe the feeling. It’s more of a frustration or internal swelling. For example, once I saw this man crying on the bus. I couldn’t wait to draw it. I drew it in my head over and over. Then, when I finally got a piece of paper I started to play with it and manipulate elements of the image until the drawings were nothing like what I experienced. I drew ‘crying men’ for months until I finally made a painting.

Anyway, there’s no feeling like having a gesture or image in your head and not having materials around to invent it. That’s what drives me. That’s inspiration. I still love drawing ‘crying men’.

AMM: What have been some of the high points or learning curves of your career thus far. Do you have any advice to share with other young artists?

HC: The entire thing is a giant high/low.

Being an artist is equal parts terrifying and thrilling. What a thing to just take these very personal and important things and show them to everyone and wait for a response. And many people don’t like your work and that’s hard. It has been difficult understanding that you’re never finished learning. There is no finish line and you’re only as good as your last painting. So there’s this infinite mountain ahead, and it gets higher and higher and it’s there forever.

My only real advice is to always assume everyone else around you knows something that you don’t.

AMM: Do you have any new projects coming up that we should know about? What’s next for you?

HC: Yes, there are some things developing around Europe and locally. A few great things in the oven. I can’t really talk much about them yet but really I’m trying to stay focused in the studio, just make good work.

That’s all that matters. I’ve got this one black book of drawings that are going to be paintings soon. I’m very excited.

AMM: What inspires and influences you artistically?

HC: What inspires me and what influences me are two very different things. In terms of

Henry Curchod If a tree falls in a forest oil and synthetic polymer on canvas 155 x 124 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12, Interviewed: Henry Curchod

64

65

“Naming works is fun. I’m not in the market for misleading people for the sake of it, but I’m generally against pure reiteration. It’s a chance to be poetic, or a chance to make a joke or it’s a chance to finally finish the painting.”

- Henry Curchod be conscious of every single stroke. Every gesture or stroke should be scrutinised and questioned. Paint’s application should not be too cavalier, as people are looking for meaning in the stroke, so we must give every stroke as much meaning and purpose as possible. If you are vacant whilst painting, it shows. But that thinking can also give way to tight and emotionless painting, so often it’s an intense battle between the civilised and the primal. I know every serious painter has a different relationship to this idea.

AMM: The titles of your paintings are very descriptive without actually giving anything away. How do you go about titling your work?

HC: Naming works is fun. I’m not in the market for misleading people for the sake of it, but I’m generally against pure reiteration. It’s a chance to be poetic, or a chance to make a joke or it’s a chance to finally finish the painting.

AMM: You spent two years painting water. What was your intention for this and what did you gain from the process?

HC: I was trying to make the perfect painting of water, as the sublime subject of all subjects.

It’s a long time to undertake an impossible task, and of course I consider it a failure. But in that time I learnt more about the materiality of paint and the process of dilution and restraint than I could have done doing anything else.

Layering and patience and gesture. I studied paint’s strengths and boundaries. I still think they are good paintings, but I’m not as hard on myself as I was then.

AMM: How does your personal history influence you artistically? Does this come through in your work?

HC: For a long time I was reluctant to explore my Persian heritage. Iran has a lot of problems, and I am not qualified to get politically involved. But the rich history of the aesthetic, and carrying it through to modernity is something I am interested in. The Persian side of my family were all thrown out during the revolution, so there is this embarrassment and shame that went along with that. The aesthetic has started to come through a lot, which I’m really exploring. I used to make drawings from the Disney film Aladdin when I was really young. I loved Aladdin. It was this safe, mainstream, Americanised connection to my culture. Pop-exoticism. Of course now I realise that it had nothing to do with Iran. It was just blanket Middle-Eastern references. It’s riddled with cultural misappropriation, which I tend to find more amusing than offensive. But looking back, Disney films had a huge impact on me.

AMM: Besides art, what are some of your interests?

HC: I am very passionate about cooking.

Cooking a meal is the precursor to sharing a meal, which is life’s simplest primal pleasure.

It’s like this wonderful alchemy born of survival. The amount of time I spend thinking about cooking might be considered unhealthy.

AMM: What is the Australian art scene like? How do you feel like you fit in (or not)?

HC: Australia is beautiful island in the Pacific that has been blessed with the internet. It’s also an amazing place to live. The art world here is just like anywhere else now, because of the internet. There are many fantastic artists who are constantly pushing the boundaries.

I think a lot of people here are working hard to bring the Australian public up to speed. Sport is big here and people are very comfortable.

And comfort can make people complacent.

The void here between the decorative and the academic is huge. It’s a bit of a tug of war in a way, or two opposing sides. It’s come from underfunding in the arts and no respect for arts education. It creates a divide. But it will even out with a bit more internet.

influence, I’m influenced by everything: the people in my life, the internet, other artists, books, myths, anything. Painting is a sort of digestion for me. I take everything in my life and churn it through this grinder and try to come out the other end with some pictures.

The more interesting my life becomes, the more interesting my work becomes.

Then there’s inspiration. Inspiration is a hard one as I don’t really get inspired until I’m deep into the process or act of painting.

What motivates me to get to that point is so difficult to say. It’s very hard to describe the feeling. It’s more of a frustration or internal swelling. For example, once I saw this man crying on the bus. I couldn’t wait to draw it. I drew it in my head over and over. Then, when I finally got a piece of paper I started to play with it and manipulate elements of the image until the drawings were nothing like what I experienced. I drew ‘crying men’ for months until I finally made a painting.

Anyway, there’s no feeling like having a gesture or image in your head and not having materials around to invent it. That’s what drives me. That’s inspiration. I still love drawing ‘crying men’.

AMM: What have been some of the high points or learning curves of your career thus far. Do you have any advice to share with other young artists?

HC: The entire thing is a giant high/low.

Being an artist is equal parts terrifying and thrilling. What a thing to just take these very personal and important things and show them to everyone and wait for a response. And many people don’t like your work and that’s hard. It has been difficult understanding that you’re never finished learning. There is no finish line and you’re only as good as your last painting. So there’s this infinite mountain ahead, and it gets higher and higher and it’s there forever.

My only real advice is to always assume everyone else around you knows something that you don’t.

AMM: Do you have any new projects coming up that we should know about? What’s next for you?

HC: Yes, there are some things developing around Europe and locally. A few great things in the oven. I can’t really talk much about them yet but really I’m trying to stay focused in the studio, just make good work.

That’s all that matters. I’ve got this one black book of drawings that are going to be paintings soon. I’m very excited.

AMM: What inspires and influences you artistically?

HC: What inspires me and what influences me are two very different things. In terms of

Henry Curchod If a tree falls in a forest oil and synthetic polymer on canvas 155 x 124 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12, Interviewed: Henry Curchod

64

65

Henry Curchod Tell me of the birds you know oil and synthetic polymer on canvas 155 x 124 cm

Henry Curchod Setting the table oil and synthetic polymer on canvas 155 x 124 cm

Henry Curchod Tell me of the birds you know oil and synthetic polymer on canvas 155 x 124 cm

Henry Curchod Setting the table oil and synthetic polymer on canvas 155 x 124 cm

Henry Curchod Night shade oil and synthetic polymer on canvas 155 x 124 cm

Henry Curchod Fish Whispers oil and synthetic polymer on canvas 124 x 112 cm

68

69

Henry Curchod Night shade oil and synthetic polymer on canvas 155 x 124 cm

Henry Curchod Fish Whispers oil and synthetic polymer on canvas 124 x 112 cm

68

69

Henry Curchod Bring your cup closer oil and synthetic polymer on canvas 155 x 124 cm

Henry Curchod The second last yawn oil and synthetic 137 x 112 cm

70

71

Henry Curchod Bring your cup closer oil and synthetic polymer on canvas 155 x 124 cm

Henry Curchod The second last yawn oil and synthetic 137 x 112 cm

70

71

Henry Curchod She said ‘sure’ synthetic polymer on canvas 102 x 76 cm

Henry Curchod Turn off oil and synthetic polymer on canvas 102 x 76 cm

72

73

Henry Curchod She said ‘sure’ synthetic polymer on canvas 102 x 76 cm

Henry Curchod Turn off oil and synthetic polymer on canvas 102 x 76 cm

72

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www.tristiankoenig.com

Know your history: in conversation with gallerist Tristian Koenig For Melbourne based gallerist and curator Tristian Koenig, art is the driving force of life. Having worked across a range of fields within the art industry over the past two decades, from emerging art fairs to museums to artist-run spaces, Tristian now runs his own eponymously named gallery in the inner city suburb of Collingwood. With a particular focus on painting, Tristian organises shows by a broad scope of emerging and mid-career artists.

For much of his career, Tristian worked at creating platforms and spaces for emerging and young artists to gain traction in the commercial market. While the scope of his gallery has broadened somewhat, Tristian remains deeply committed to and excited about developing the market for emerging artists. He recently hosted a solo exhibition of new works by Henry Curchod, a young artist quickly gaining attention (and also featured in this issue of ArtMaze Mag). Other recent shows include a solo show by Elyss McCleary, whose abstract paintings explore the interrelation between vibration and colour, and a group show entitled The Window is the Door: New Paintings featuring work by Henry Curchod, Lukas Orsanic and new-comer Lily Holmes.

His passion for discovering new artists makes Tristian the perfect guest curator for issue 12 of ArtMaze Mag. We caught up with this busy gallerist in between hanging new shows and planning family trips to find out more about Tristian Koenig the gallery and Tristian Koenig the person.

interview by Layla Leiman

Image courtesy of Tristian Koenig

www.tristiankoenig.com

Know your history: in conversation with gallerist Tristian Koenig For Melbourne based gallerist and curator Tristian Koenig, art is the driving force of life. Having worked across a range of fields within the art industry over the past two decades, from emerging art fairs to museums to artist-run spaces, Tristian now runs his own eponymously named gallery in the inner city suburb of Collingwood. With a particular focus on painting, Tristian organises shows by a broad scope of emerging and mid-career artists.

For much of his career, Tristian worked at creating platforms and spaces for emerging and young artists to gain traction in the commercial market. While the scope of his gallery has broadened somewhat, Tristian remains deeply committed to and excited about developing the market for emerging artists. He recently hosted a solo exhibition of new works by Henry Curchod, a young artist quickly gaining attention (and also featured in this issue of ArtMaze Mag). Other recent shows include a solo show by Elyss McCleary, whose abstract paintings explore the interrelation between vibration and colour, and a group show entitled The Window is the Door: New Paintings featuring work by Henry Curchod, Lukas Orsanic and new-comer Lily Holmes.

His passion for discovering new artists makes Tristian the perfect guest curator for issue 12 of ArtMaze Mag. We caught up with this busy gallerist in between hanging new shows and planning family trips to find out more about Tristian Koenig the gallery and Tristian Koenig the person.

interview by Layla Leiman

Image courtesy of Tristian Koenig

AMM: Hi Tristian. How did you get into curation?

Is this something you’ve always pursued or has it been more of a roundabout journey?

TK: So I’m based in Melbourne, Australia, and I guess ‘culture’ as we’re talking, isn’t really something someone is surrounded by here. My father emigrated to Australia from Germany, so I grew up going back there a little, and I guess going to museums and such led me down this terrible path….

At High School I was pushed into a STEM type stream, which resulted in me starting a Bachelor of Science. Obviously that didn’t end up working out, I transferred across to a major in Art History, then everything sort of happened from there.

A defining experience was volunteering at a museum, The Museum of Modern Art at Heide here in Melbourne, which really opened up the world to me—artists, writers, dealers, curators, collectors—the whole rich ecology, then things went from there, which happened fairly organically.

TK: The present space is a 1st floor of about 125m2 (1250ft2) in a large old sawtooth style factory. We have large internal window sills like a massive bench that are great to sit on, and the windows here face south, which is in direct natural light. Large Oregon beams are exposed in areas, and the space is divided into two rooms that are essentially Vitruvian in proportion. Then there is a small office, storage etc. at the rear. The atmosphere is kinda informal, maybe a little grunge with an edge—God, I don’t know.

AMM: What do you look out for in artists to work with?

TK: Historical understanding, good materiality, the ability to be able to communicate their practice both affectively and effectively to both the lay and initiated— there are other things, but that’s it in the main.

TK: It’s variable, really. A solo show is different to a two-person show, a threeperson show or group show is different again.

Collaborative is best, but probably with a bit of auteur thrown in.

AMM: Do you represent a stable of artists or have a more fluid programme. Please tell us a bit about your gallery model and focus.

TK: Hard one… ouch!? I’d probably say read and know your history, and in that context say it sits somewhere between Alfred Barr and Harold Szeemann?! Certainly there is some kind of empiricism involved, but intuition, ‘gut’ and the like are also important.

So too is exposure to artists, practices and experiences that are out of your comfort zone.

AMM: When did you open your own gallery?

What’s the backstory that led up to this?

Works by Louise Gresswell Prosopagnosia installation view Tristian Koenig Gallery

AMM: How would you describe the space and atmosphere of your gallery?

AMM: What is your approach to curating? Do you work quite collaboratively with artists or take the lead?

AMM: What is your understanding of the role of curator? How does personal preference fit into the schema?

Image:

it has probably just moved more and more in that direction. Also, I started this gallery and the one prior exclusively with emerging artists, which has now changed too. Where is it headed? No idea. If I knew that, what’s the point?

TK: I worked in a partnership establishing a gallery in 2006, leaving in 2010. In 2011 I started on my own, and have occupied two different spaces in that time, with a brief hiatus between locations. It happened really out of need, with zero plan, as there weren’t really many opportunities for younger artists to level up into working commercially— remember, this was pre-Instagram, so exposure, sales and the like were heavily mediated by traditional avenues.

AMM: How has your gallery changed over the years? Where’s it heading?

TK: Principally I’m interested in painting, so

77

TK: It’s both representation and fluid. One thing I’ve found is that not having ‘a list’ of artists’ names on the gallery website really does affect responses. Superficially, if people don’t see names, or want names, we’re probably not a good fit for them. However, if people look at the program, and see who is exhibiting or repeat exhibiting, if they can make connections between the artists and the exhibitions, they can maybe get a sense of the gallery and what we are like, then, generally, things progress quite well from there.

AMM: For you, what makes an exhibition a success?

TK: To be more than the sum of its parts?

AMM: Which artists or artistic trends are you excited about right now and why?

TK: Not really a particular trend or anything, but in terms of my remit, predominantly painting, it’s nice to see a lot of references to late 19th century French painting— in some senses there is a post-colonial or de-colonialisation and reclamation happening to this visual language, in another sense it’s purely the formal possibilities, experimentation and freedoms that painting of that era encapsulates. Weirdly I guess, but maybe conceptually; and this is a very vanilla perspective on this, but maybe the kinda societal changes happening then mirror in

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12, Interviewed: Tristian Koenig

AMM: Hi Tristian. How did you get into curation?

Is this something you’ve always pursued or has it been more of a roundabout journey?

TK: So I’m based in Melbourne, Australia, and I guess ‘culture’ as we’re talking, isn’t really something someone is surrounded by here. My father emigrated to Australia from Germany, so I grew up going back there a little, and I guess going to museums and such led me down this terrible path….

At High School I was pushed into a STEM type stream, which resulted in me starting a Bachelor of Science. Obviously that didn’t end up working out, I transferred across to a major in Art History, then everything sort of happened from there.

A defining experience was volunteering at a museum, The Museum of Modern Art at Heide here in Melbourne, which really opened up the world to me—artists, writers, dealers, curators, collectors—the whole rich ecology, then things went from there, which happened fairly organically.

TK: The present space is a 1st floor of about 125m2 (1250ft2) in a large old sawtooth style factory. We have large internal window sills like a massive bench that are great to sit on, and the windows here face south, which is in direct natural light. Large Oregon beams are exposed in areas, and the space is divided into two rooms that are essentially Vitruvian in proportion. Then there is a small office, storage etc. at the rear. The atmosphere is kinda informal, maybe a little grunge with an edge—God, I don’t know.

AMM: What do you look out for in artists to work with?

TK: Historical understanding, good materiality, the ability to be able to communicate their practice both affectively and effectively to both the lay and initiated— there are other things, but that’s it in the main.

TK: It’s variable, really. A solo show is different to a two-person show, a threeperson show or group show is different again.

Collaborative is best, but probably with a bit of auteur thrown in.

AMM: Do you represent a stable of artists or have a more fluid programme. Please tell us a bit about your gallery model and focus.

TK: Hard one… ouch!? I’d probably say read and know your history, and in that context say it sits somewhere between Alfred Barr and Harold Szeemann?! Certainly there is some kind of empiricism involved, but intuition, ‘gut’ and the like are also important.

So too is exposure to artists, practices and experiences that are out of your comfort zone.

AMM: When did you open your own gallery?

What’s the backstory that led up to this?

Works by Louise Gresswell Prosopagnosia installation view Tristian Koenig Gallery

AMM: How would you describe the space and atmosphere of your gallery?

AMM: What is your approach to curating? Do you work quite collaboratively with artists or take the lead?

AMM: What is your understanding of the role of curator? How does personal preference fit into the schema?

Image:

it has probably just moved more and more in that direction. Also, I started this gallery and the one prior exclusively with emerging artists, which has now changed too. Where is it headed? No idea. If I knew that, what’s the point?

TK: I worked in a partnership establishing a gallery in 2006, leaving in 2010. In 2011 I started on my own, and have occupied two different spaces in that time, with a brief hiatus between locations. It happened really out of need, with zero plan, as there weren’t really many opportunities for younger artists to level up into working commercially— remember, this was pre-Instagram, so exposure, sales and the like were heavily mediated by traditional avenues.

AMM: How has your gallery changed over the years? Where’s it heading?

TK: Principally I’m interested in painting, so

77

TK: It’s both representation and fluid. One thing I’ve found is that not having ‘a list’ of artists’ names on the gallery website really does affect responses. Superficially, if people don’t see names, or want names, we’re probably not a good fit for them. However, if people look at the program, and see who is exhibiting or repeat exhibiting, if they can make connections between the artists and the exhibitions, they can maybe get a sense of the gallery and what we are like, then, generally, things progress quite well from there.

AMM: For you, what makes an exhibition a success?

TK: To be more than the sum of its parts?

AMM: Which artists or artistic trends are you excited about right now and why?

TK: Not really a particular trend or anything, but in terms of my remit, predominantly painting, it’s nice to see a lot of references to late 19th century French painting— in some senses there is a post-colonial or de-colonialisation and reclamation happening to this visual language, in another sense it’s purely the formal possibilities, experimentation and freedoms that painting of that era encapsulates. Weirdly I guess, but maybe conceptually; and this is a very vanilla perspective on this, but maybe the kinda societal changes happening then mirror in

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12, Interviewed: Tristian Koenig

some sense what’s happening now? Maybe…?

Other than that, artists exploring technology formally, experientially and as subject matter, or content.

AMM: You’ve worked in various capacities in the art industry. Can you tell us a little about the influence these different roles and experiences have had on your career?

TK: Having experience across a number of roles and organisations is great in terms of developing the skill sets necessary for running a small gallery; client liaison and toilet cleaning, patching walls and talking to gallery directors, working with collectors or local council—all fundamental.

different venues is a great example of what I’m trying to articulate… I guess.

AMM: What’s next for you personally and for the gallery?

TK: A family trip to New Zealand to see my wife’s family, an upcoming relocation of the gallery (watch this space), and also some backend reconceptualisation, as we’re about to head into a recession here—we’ve the OECD record for longest running member without a downturn, which is about to hit, I think pretty hard. Also looking at some interrelated opportunities—one involving some cloud-based gallery applications, and the other, if I told you, I’d have to kill you.

AMM: Alongside the creative aspect of working with artists there’s also the business side to running a gallery. What are some of the learnings and challenges you’ve negotiated along the way?

TK: I think building capacity to begin with, then understanding the necessary moments to outsource certain tasks is key. It is a moveable feast though, so implicitly being flexible with workflow and timing is crucial.

AMM: What advice do you find you most often give to new collectors?

TK: Obviously, buy! Your tastes will change and develop, and I don’t conceive of maybe works you outgrow as ‘mistakes’, but stepping stones. You do really need to live with art to begin to deepen your appreciation, as well as discover what you’re interested in—conceptually and aesthetically.

If you listen to Sean Kelly’s podcast ‘Collect Wisely’ pretty much all great collectors retain the first pieces they acquired.

AMM: Please give us a snapshot of the area where your gallery is located. How does this environment influence and inspire you?

TK: We’re located in the inner city suburb of Collingwood, which I suppose you could say is like the ‘Inner North Borough’ of Melbourne with the next suburb over, which is called Fitzroy. It is currently undergoing significant gentrification, which is placing massive pressures on the character of the area—galleries, pubs, artist’s studios, live music and such. I guess one upshot is that high-end hospitality is abundant, that does draw people, or maybe even just familiarise them with the area—come to a gallery viewing, then maybe grab a glass of wine.

Image: work by Seth Birchall Where Are My Feelings installation view Tristian Koenig Gallery (Sydney pop-up)

AMM: What keeps you interested in art?

TK: What keeps me interested in life—it’s the same thing? Each day is the same, but different… say you love a song and listen to it a lot—the listening changes on the context, or the associations or something. I guess for the immutability of art, it’s always different, yeah? Seeing the same museum show in two

79

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12, Interviewed: Tristian Koenig

some sense what’s happening now? Maybe…?

Other than that, artists exploring technology formally, experientially and as subject matter, or content.

AMM: You’ve worked in various capacities in the art industry. Can you tell us a little about the influence these different roles and experiences have had on your career?

TK: Having experience across a number of roles and organisations is great in terms of developing the skill sets necessary for running a small gallery; client liaison and toilet cleaning, patching walls and talking to gallery directors, working with collectors or local council—all fundamental.

different venues is a great example of what I’m trying to articulate… I guess.

AMM: What’s next for you personally and for the gallery?

TK: A family trip to New Zealand to see my wife’s family, an upcoming relocation of the gallery (watch this space), and also some backend reconceptualisation, as we’re about to head into a recession here—we’ve the OECD record for longest running member without a downturn, which is about to hit, I think pretty hard. Also looking at some interrelated opportunities—one involving some cloud-based gallery applications, and the other, if I told you, I’d have to kill you.

AMM: Alongside the creative aspect of working with artists there’s also the business side to running a gallery. What are some of the learnings and challenges you’ve negotiated along the way?

TK: I think building capacity to begin with, then understanding the necessary moments to outsource certain tasks is key. It is a moveable feast though, so implicitly being flexible with workflow and timing is crucial.

AMM: What advice do you find you most often give to new collectors?

TK: Obviously, buy! Your tastes will change and develop, and I don’t conceive of maybe works you outgrow as ‘mistakes’, but stepping stones. You do really need to live with art to begin to deepen your appreciation, as well as discover what you’re interested in—conceptually and aesthetically.

If you listen to Sean Kelly’s podcast ‘Collect Wisely’ pretty much all great collectors retain the first pieces they acquired.

AMM: Please give us a snapshot of the area where your gallery is located. How does this environment influence and inspire you?

TK: We’re located in the inner city suburb of Collingwood, which I suppose you could say is like the ‘Inner North Borough’ of Melbourne with the next suburb over, which is called Fitzroy. It is currently undergoing significant gentrification, which is placing massive pressures on the character of the area—galleries, pubs, artist’s studios, live music and such. I guess one upshot is that high-end hospitality is abundant, that does draw people, or maybe even just familiarise them with the area—come to a gallery viewing, then maybe grab a glass of wine.

Image: work by Seth Birchall Where Are My Feelings installation view Tristian Koenig Gallery (Sydney pop-up)

AMM: What keeps you interested in art?

TK: What keeps me interested in life—it’s the same thing? Each day is the same, but different… say you love a song and listen to it a lot—the listening changes on the context, or the associations or something. I guess for the immutability of art, it’s always different, yeah? Seeing the same museum show in two

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12, Interviewed: Tristian Koenig

Image (p. 80): work by Jiaxin Nong installation view Tristian Koenig Gallery

Image (p. 81): works by Lara Merrett Lady Luck installation view Tristian Koenig Gallery

Image (p. 80): work by Jiaxin Nong installation view Tristian Koenig Gallery

Image (p. 81): works by Lara Merrett Lady Luck installation view Tristian Koenig Gallery

Image: Ry David Bradley Not To Be Digitised installation view Tristian Koenig Gallery Sydney Pop-up

Image: Ry David Bradley Not To Be Digitised installation view Tristian Koenig Gallery Sydney Pop-up

curated selection of works

by Tristian Koenig, Melbourne-based gallerist Featured image: Tahnee Lonsdale Chameleon oil on canvas 52 x 53 inches more on p. 90-91

curated selection of works

by Tristian Koenig, Melbourne-based gallerist Featured image: Tahnee Lonsdale Chameleon oil on canvas 52 x 53 inches more on p. 90-91

L i o r M o d a n

Lior Modan (born 1983 in Tel-Aviv, Israel) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His practice is in a constant slippage of distinct territories: painting and objects, abstraction and figuration, digital appearance and analog origin. He received an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University’s Sculpture + Extended Media program (2013), and a BFA with honors from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, Israel (2009). He was Artist-in-Residence at the LMCC Workspace Residency (2013-14, NYC, NY), and in the Seven Below Arts initiative (2013, Burlington, VT). Modan has been the recipient of the America-Israel Cultural Foundation Award (2008-10); the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem Excellence Prize (2009); the Phi Kappa Phi award (2011-12); the Feed Biennial finalist award (2013); a VSC fellowship supported by the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts Research grant. His work has been shown at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel; Marinaro Gallery, New York; Peana Projects, Mexico; Peninsula Art Space, Brooklyn; Neiman Gallery, New York; Coustof Waxman Gallery, New York; Hometown Gallery, Brooklyn; Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Israel; Haifa Museum, Israel. Recent solo exhibitions were held at Triumph, Chicago (2017); Golconda Gallery, Tel Aviv (2016); NURTUREart Gallery in Brooklyn (2015).

Entitled “The Visual Cortex of the Cat”, this is my most recent body of work. It consists of a series of wall reliefs that reinvent domestic still life. A wristwatch, a lamp on a table, a necktie, paper clips. These are run of the mill household items, but here they appear in an indeterminate space as if the house itself has faded away. The items in these compositions are constructed (by hand or by casting) from materials such as foam, wire, plaster, and wood. Once the scene is emerged, a sheet of velvet is vacuum-cast around the stretcher (this step entails a melding of several structural and dermal layers over a period of weeks). The outer velvet is embossed before being affixed to the work, acting as another dimension of mark-making. Finally, there are custom-cast belts around the perimeters of each work. These function for me as a reminder of the boundaries of the works and of their existence as bodies in space. Using a vocabulary of intimate objects and familiar materials, these works evoke a sense of collective memory, and maybe even bits of nostalgia. I think of these works as being nocturnal, representing the sort of activity that occurs when all the lights are out and while our attention is headed elsewhere.

www.liormodan.com

Image: The Night Watch velvet, aluminum wire, clay, cardboard, epoxy putty, brass in cast artist frame 18 x 22 inches

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Often my works echo their most immediate surroundings, and are affected by mundane situations. However, they are also reflective of various moments in time, or histories of art and modern design that I mediate on. I am fascinated by the meeting point between painting and fashion, a trajectory that evolved for me as a result of researching early modernist abstraction by Eastern-European artists. Predominantly women who, as an extension of their art, designed different kinds of apparel.

Image (left):

Image (right):

Heat Wave velvet, nitrile, epoxy putty in cast artist frame 18 x 22 inches

Open up your heart velvet, wood, plastic, nitrile, cardboard, epoxy putty in cast artist frame 18 x 22 inches

87

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: curated selection

L i o r M o d a n

Lior Modan (born 1983 in Tel-Aviv, Israel) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His practice is in a constant slippage of distinct territories: painting and objects, abstraction and figuration, digital appearance and analog origin. He received an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University’s Sculpture + Extended Media program (2013), and a BFA with honors from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, Israel (2009). He was Artist-in-Residence at the LMCC Workspace Residency (2013-14, NYC, NY), and in the Seven Below Arts initiative (2013, Burlington, VT). Modan has been the recipient of the America-Israel Cultural Foundation Award (2008-10); the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem Excellence Prize (2009); the Phi Kappa Phi award (2011-12); the Feed Biennial finalist award (2013); a VSC fellowship supported by the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts Research grant. His work has been shown at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel; Marinaro Gallery, New York; Peana Projects, Mexico; Peninsula Art Space, Brooklyn; Neiman Gallery, New York; Coustof Waxman Gallery, New York; Hometown Gallery, Brooklyn; Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Israel; Haifa Museum, Israel. Recent solo exhibitions were held at Triumph, Chicago (2017); Golconda Gallery, Tel Aviv (2016); NURTUREart Gallery in Brooklyn (2015).

Entitled “The Visual Cortex of the Cat”, this is my most recent body of work. It consists of a series of wall reliefs that reinvent domestic still life. A wristwatch, a lamp on a table, a necktie, paper clips. These are run of the mill household items, but here they appear in an indeterminate space as if the house itself has faded away. The items in these compositions are constructed (by hand or by casting) from materials such as foam, wire, plaster, and wood. Once the scene is emerged, a sheet of velvet is vacuum-cast around the stretcher (this step entails a melding of several structural and dermal layers over a period of weeks). The outer velvet is embossed before being affixed to the work, acting as another dimension of mark-making. Finally, there are custom-cast belts around the perimeters of each work. These function for me as a reminder of the boundaries of the works and of their existence as bodies in space. Using a vocabulary of intimate objects and familiar materials, these works evoke a sense of collective memory, and maybe even bits of nostalgia. I think of these works as being nocturnal, representing the sort of activity that occurs when all the lights are out and while our attention is headed elsewhere.

www.liormodan.com

Image: The Night Watch velvet, aluminum wire, clay, cardboard, epoxy putty, brass in cast artist frame 18 x 22 inches

86

Often my works echo their most immediate surroundings, and are affected by mundane situations. However, they are also reflective of various moments in time, or histories of art and modern design that I mediate on. I am fascinated by the meeting point between painting and fashion, a trajectory that evolved for me as a result of researching early modernist abstraction by Eastern-European artists. Predominantly women who, as an extension of their art, designed different kinds of apparel.

Image (left):

Image (right):

Heat Wave velvet, nitrile, epoxy putty in cast artist frame 18 x 22 inches

Open up your heart velvet, wood, plastic, nitrile, cardboard, epoxy putty in cast artist frame 18 x 22 inches

87

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: curated selection

E m i l R o b i n s o n

Emil Robinson is an artist known for paintings of evocative interior space. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Cincinnati. Presentations of Robinson’s work include a solo exhibition at Waterhouse and Dodd in London, a prizewinning painting in the Smithsonian, and ongoing exhibitions throughout the US and Europe.

www.emilrobinson.com

My paintings rely on innovations from modern art history yet build a personalized approach to the image and painted surface. The photographic source coupled with the divided attention of a grid names the subjects clearly but invites a lateral investigation of the painting as field or screen instead of a picture plane. The natural changes in my quality of focus and speed as I paint each unit one by one invites a prolonged engagement for the sensitive viewer. The subjects themselves are close at hand, a broken bumper on my walk to school, an architectural detail near my house, a recent bouquet from my dining room.

Image: Tulips 5 oil on custom panel 25.5 x 18 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: curated selection

88

Image (left): Tulips 3 oil on custom panel 25.5 x 18 inches

Image (right): Tulips 4 oil on custom panel 25.5 x 18 inches

89

E m i l R o b i n s o n

Emil Robinson is an artist known for paintings of evocative interior space. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Cincinnati. Presentations of Robinson’s work include a solo exhibition at Waterhouse and Dodd in London, a prizewinning painting in the Smithsonian, and ongoing exhibitions throughout the US and Europe.

www.emilrobinson.com

My paintings rely on innovations from modern art history yet build a personalized approach to the image and painted surface. The photographic source coupled with the divided attention of a grid names the subjects clearly but invites a lateral investigation of the painting as field or screen instead of a picture plane. The natural changes in my quality of focus and speed as I paint each unit one by one invites a prolonged engagement for the sensitive viewer. The subjects themselves are close at hand, a broken bumper on my walk to school, an architectural detail near my house, a recent bouquet from my dining room.

Image: Tulips 5 oil on custom panel 25.5 x 18 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: curated selection

88

Image (left): Tulips 3 oil on custom panel 25.5 x 18 inches

Image (right): Tulips 4 oil on custom panel 25.5 x 18 inches

89

Ta h n e e L o n s d a l e

Tahnee Lonsdale, born 1982 in Reading, UK, now lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Lonsdale’s work is about sex, gender roles and female empowerment.

But it is also about love, being loved and needing love. The push pull of what it is to be a woman and a mother. Bending and folding yourself to the needs of others. A longing to receive back what you are giving. Love, intimacy and nurturing. There is an ambivalence to the figures in her paintings. Contradictory in their vulnerability and power.

An expression of what it is to be human.

www.tahneelonsdale.com

Image:

Image:

4 In A Bed spray paint and oil on canvas 70 x 64 inches

We Kneel spray paint and oil on canvas 70 x 64 inches

90

91

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: curated selection

Ta h n e e L o n s d a l e

Tahnee Lonsdale, born 1982 in Reading, UK, now lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Lonsdale’s work is about sex, gender roles and female empowerment.

But it is also about love, being loved and needing love. The push pull of what it is to be a woman and a mother. Bending and folding yourself to the needs of others. A longing to receive back what you are giving. Love, intimacy and nurturing. There is an ambivalence to the figures in her paintings. Contradictory in their vulnerability and power.

An expression of what it is to be human.

www.tahneelonsdale.com

Image:

Image:

4 In A Bed spray paint and oil on canvas 70 x 64 inches

We Kneel spray paint and oil on canvas 70 x 64 inches

90

91

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: curated selection

M a r i a h

F e r r a r i

R a c h e l

H o r v a t h

www.mariahferraripaintings.com

www.rachelhorvath.cargocollective.com Mariah Ferrari was born in 1996 in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. She attends the University of WisconsinMilwaukee and will be receiving her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing in the spring of 2019. She has had multiple shows in the Midwest.

As human beings, we communicate and move throughout our space with our bodies. We navigate through movement of our limbs and interact with ourselves and others through touch. By deconstructing the figure to perform only these basic functions, the figure is forced to discover its reality using movement and touch alone. By eliminating facial cues, content is created through body language and the figure’s physical interaction with the environment. These figures exist both in reality as a nonliving model and in an illusion of space on the canvas giving the impression of life, forming a duality of real and unreal. I use dramatic light, shadow, and color to support the plausibility of this constructed world, as well as give a sense of presence within the figures to support believability of their form and movement. Color and shadow become site specific, giving these figures an authentic reality and sense of place. These forms are painted in a loose way to break the illusion, showing how it was painted while still remaining conceivable. This emphasizes the simulation of reality, challenging the presence of the figure as a model and in representation.

Although I am painting an artificial body born through models, I am portraying them as if they are or were real bodies capable of movement. This brings into question what gives a figure consciousness versus stillness, and what is needed to portray a human presence or lack thereof. With these parallels between physical existence and manufactured life, I call into question what it looks and feels like to be alive.

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: curated selection

Through a combination of analog and digital languages, my work creates a contemporary dialogue between formal abstraction and improvisational discovery. My subject material is derived from spontaneously generated forms and invented spaces created through preliminary drawings that are subsequently “sewn” together through a process of digital collage and finally translated into formally abstract paintings. I hope for them to be initially read as such, before their complexities and nuances reveal themselves upon deeper examination. I’m interested in breaking down the degrees of representation within these processes and mutations, and exploring new ways to comprehend and represent space through form, color, and materiality.

My studio practice marries traditional modes of rendering with new methods of discovery, which plays a pivotal role in its dialogue with contemporary art history. This combination is a vehicle now central to how our intellectual nature is shaped, becoming the defining characteristic of our creative cultural moment. I encourage the viewer to question and discover how our perceptions of space, depth and formal ambiguity evolve over time.

In other words, how the verb looking evolves alongside the nouns of the looked at.

Image:

Image:

Strawberry Sweats oil on canvas 48 x 48 inches

Cardinal oil and acrylic on canvas 41 x 55 inches

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93

M a r i a h

F e r r a r i

R a c h e l

H o r v a t h

www.mariahferraripaintings.com

www.rachelhorvath.cargocollective.com Mariah Ferrari was born in 1996 in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. She attends the University of WisconsinMilwaukee and will be receiving her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing in the spring of 2019. She has had multiple shows in the Midwest.

As human beings, we communicate and move throughout our space with our bodies. We navigate through movement of our limbs and interact with ourselves and others through touch. By deconstructing the figure to perform only these basic functions, the figure is forced to discover its reality using movement and touch alone. By eliminating facial cues, content is created through body language and the figure’s physical interaction with the environment. These figures exist both in reality as a nonliving model and in an illusion of space on the canvas giving the impression of life, forming a duality of real and unreal. I use dramatic light, shadow, and color to support the plausibility of this constructed world, as well as give a sense of presence within the figures to support believability of their form and movement. Color and shadow become site specific, giving these figures an authentic reality and sense of place. These forms are painted in a loose way to break the illusion, showing how it was painted while still remaining conceivable. This emphasizes the simulation of reality, challenging the presence of the figure as a model and in representation.

Although I am painting an artificial body born through models, I am portraying them as if they are or were real bodies capable of movement. This brings into question what gives a figure consciousness versus stillness, and what is needed to portray a human presence or lack thereof. With these parallels between physical existence and manufactured life, I call into question what it looks and feels like to be alive.

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: curated selection

Through a combination of analog and digital languages, my work creates a contemporary dialogue between formal abstraction and improvisational discovery. My subject material is derived from spontaneously generated forms and invented spaces created through preliminary drawings that are subsequently “sewn” together through a process of digital collage and finally translated into formally abstract paintings. I hope for them to be initially read as such, before their complexities and nuances reveal themselves upon deeper examination. I’m interested in breaking down the degrees of representation within these processes and mutations, and exploring new ways to comprehend and represent space through form, color, and materiality.

My studio practice marries traditional modes of rendering with new methods of discovery, which plays a pivotal role in its dialogue with contemporary art history. This combination is a vehicle now central to how our intellectual nature is shaped, becoming the defining characteristic of our creative cultural moment. I encourage the viewer to question and discover how our perceptions of space, depth and formal ambiguity evolve over time.

In other words, how the verb looking evolves alongside the nouns of the looked at.

Image:

Image:

Strawberry Sweats oil on canvas 48 x 48 inches

Cardinal oil and acrylic on canvas 41 x 55 inches

92

93

S i n

P a r k

Sin Park is a visual artist and PhD candidate in Fine Art Painting at Glasgow School of Art. She completed an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art 2017, and a BFA in painting from Ewha Womans University 2007. Park has exhibited nationally and internationally. Her recent works were featured in group shows including London, Bristol, Lichfield, Preston, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Milan, Harlösa, Dusseldorf and Seoul.

Park was awarded the RK Burt & Co. West Yorkshire 2018 Prize. She was also shortlisted in the Ashurst Emerging Artist Prize 2018, the Winsor & Newton Young Artist Award 2016, and The Lichfield Prize 2016.

She participated in residencies including Summerhouse Dusseldorf 2018 and ARNA 2018.

My relationship to painting is connected to the idea of delivering surface or of a space, also, abstracted image function on the surface as metaphors for subjectivity, memory. The real is transformed from one thing into another in the process. It explores memory through the creation of space for invisible visibility and familiar unfamiliarity. In a mysterious moment when uncertainty takes effect the whole painting shifts into the unknown, a metamorphosis that happens often from a lack of control, fear, and failure, a form of uncertain certainty in the painting surface. Momentary gestural action delivers that perhaps timeless desire to become one with another sought within instant intuition and improvisation. Therefore you could say that I fall to the surface, into the unforeseen results. The sensory apparatus makes this possible, makes textural surface and surface of emotional sense an extended moment of absolute proximity and distance, all at once. Images from the source of drawing have replaced the actual color and juxtaposition of a dot, line, plane, and an image has therefore fallen away in place of this more exhilarating abstraction.

Painting is an apparatus of fantasy driven by desire, the desire of the artist, the subject, and the viewer.

Within this notion of memory, the work of art remains within a perpetual process of becoming, the idea of space never quite imaged or captured, forever eluding the present, always already lost but always potentially bringing or delivering familiarities.

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: curated selection

www.studiosinpark.com

Image:

Image:

Cherry Blossoms acrylic and oil on canvas 130 x 130 cm

Like a puff of smoke oil on canvas 230 x 190 cm

94

95

S i n

P a r k

Sin Park is a visual artist and PhD candidate in Fine Art Painting at Glasgow School of Art. She completed an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art 2017, and a BFA in painting from Ewha Womans University 2007. Park has exhibited nationally and internationally. Her recent works were featured in group shows including London, Bristol, Lichfield, Preston, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Milan, Harlösa, Dusseldorf and Seoul.

Park was awarded the RK Burt & Co. West Yorkshire 2018 Prize. She was also shortlisted in the Ashurst Emerging Artist Prize 2018, the Winsor & Newton Young Artist Award 2016, and The Lichfield Prize 2016.

She participated in residencies including Summerhouse Dusseldorf 2018 and ARNA 2018.

My relationship to painting is connected to the idea of delivering surface or of a space, also, abstracted image function on the surface as metaphors for subjectivity, memory. The real is transformed from one thing into another in the process. It explores memory through the creation of space for invisible visibility and familiar unfamiliarity. In a mysterious moment when uncertainty takes effect the whole painting shifts into the unknown, a metamorphosis that happens often from a lack of control, fear, and failure, a form of uncertain certainty in the painting surface. Momentary gestural action delivers that perhaps timeless desire to become one with another sought within instant intuition and improvisation. Therefore you could say that I fall to the surface, into the unforeseen results. The sensory apparatus makes this possible, makes textural surface and surface of emotional sense an extended moment of absolute proximity and distance, all at once. Images from the source of drawing have replaced the actual color and juxtaposition of a dot, line, plane, and an image has therefore fallen away in place of this more exhilarating abstraction.

Painting is an apparatus of fantasy driven by desire, the desire of the artist, the subject, and the viewer.

Within this notion of memory, the work of art remains within a perpetual process of becoming, the idea of space never quite imaged or captured, forever eluding the present, always already lost but always potentially bringing or delivering familiarities.

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: curated selection

www.studiosinpark.com

Image:

Image:

Cherry Blossoms acrylic and oil on canvas 130 x 130 cm

Like a puff of smoke oil on canvas 230 x 190 cm

94

95

Born in 1988 in Basel, artistic education from 2009 - 2011 at Zurich University of the Arts and 2011 - 2018 at Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design. Solo Exhibitions at Michael Sturm Gallery in Stuttgart (2015 and 2017), Klaus Gerrit Friese Gallery in Berlin (2018), Mark Müller Gallery in Zurich (2018), Bäckerstrasse 4 in Vienna (2017) and Galerie Stadt Sindelfingen (2018). Group shows and Art Fairs (selection) in Kunstmuseum Stuttgart (2018), South Korea (Pyeongchang Biennale 2017), Galleri Kant in Copenhagen (2019), Cindy Rucker Gallery in NYC (2018), Art Untitled Miami Beach (2015), Zona Maco, Mexico City (2017 and 2018), ArtBo Bogota (2016).

D a v e

B o p p

www.davebopp.ch

My studio is the space where I experiment, make painterly discoveries in the process of action and reaction, which are being preserved in my pictures continuously. One central issue in my painting is to trigger self-reinforcing tendencies—via different analogue painting techniques, but through computer based programs just as well and especially by the reciprocal effects between these two dimensions I seek to let the creational process become independent. I consider my artistic presence in this process on the one hand rather as a catalyst, who reinforces some developments, and on the other hand as a moderator, who chooses from the sheer endless surplus of possibilities. It is important to me that my works overwrite each other constantly, intermediate stages are being processed further, thus allowing the sovereignty of my pictures to stem from their own creation. For me painting—as a genre—is an essential means to materialize different states of perception and to create counter-ideas to quotidian reality. In the process I explore both the experience of a pure physical appearance—autonomous, as paint, as skin, as body— and the potential of narration and association.

Image:

Image:

Korona acrylic resin paint on aluminum composite board 165 x 165 cm

Deep Field (Klaus Gerrit Friese Gallery) acrylic resin paint on aluminum composite board 200 x 300 cm

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: curated selection

Born in 1988 in Basel, artistic education from 2009 - 2011 at Zurich University of the Arts and 2011 - 2018 at Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design. Solo Exhibitions at Michael Sturm Gallery in Stuttgart (2015 and 2017), Klaus Gerrit Friese Gallery in Berlin (2018), Mark Müller Gallery in Zurich (2018), Bäckerstrasse 4 in Vienna (2017) and Galerie Stadt Sindelfingen (2018). Group shows and Art Fairs (selection) in Kunstmuseum Stuttgart (2018), South Korea (Pyeongchang Biennale 2017), Galleri Kant in Copenhagen (2019), Cindy Rucker Gallery in NYC (2018), Art Untitled Miami Beach (2015), Zona Maco, Mexico City (2017 and 2018), ArtBo Bogota (2016).

D a v e

B o p p

www.davebopp.ch

My studio is the space where I experiment, make painterly discoveries in the process of action and reaction, which are being preserved in my pictures continuously. One central issue in my painting is to trigger self-reinforcing tendencies—via different analogue painting techniques, but through computer based programs just as well and especially by the reciprocal effects between these two dimensions I seek to let the creational process become independent. I consider my artistic presence in this process on the one hand rather as a catalyst, who reinforces some developments, and on the other hand as a moderator, who chooses from the sheer endless surplus of possibilities. It is important to me that my works overwrite each other constantly, intermediate stages are being processed further, thus allowing the sovereignty of my pictures to stem from their own creation. For me painting—as a genre—is an essential means to materialize different states of perception and to create counter-ideas to quotidian reality. In the process I explore both the experience of a pure physical appearance—autonomous, as paint, as skin, as body— and the potential of narration and association.

Image:

Image:

Korona acrylic resin paint on aluminum composite board 165 x 165 cm

Deep Field (Klaus Gerrit Friese Gallery) acrylic resin paint on aluminum composite board 200 x 300 cm

96

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: curated selection

G a r y P e t e r s e n

Gary Petersen was born in Staten Island, New York. He holds a BS degree from The Pennsylvania State University and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts. Awards have included The MacDowell Colony Fellowship 2017; The American Academy of Arts and Letters, Hassam, Speicher, Betts, and Symons Art Purchase Fund Award 2014; The Sharpe-Walentas Foundation Studio Program 2010-2011, in Brooklyn, New York; The New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Painting Fellowship Award for 2011, 2002, 1993 and the Edward F. Albee Foundation Visual Arts Fellowship Award, 1988. His work has been exhibited widely in New York City and throughout the United States.

Recent solo exhibitions have included McKenzie Fine Art (2016); Theodore:Art in Brooklyn (2015); The Visual Arts Center of New Jersey (2014); Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Philadelphia (2014). Recent group exhibitions have included Kunst Pakhuset, Ikast, Denmark (2018); Mindy Solomon Gallery (2018); The Curator Gallery (New York, 2017); Carroll and Sons (Boston, 2016); Curator’s Office (D.C., 2016); The University of Massachusetts at Amherst (2015); Morgan Lehman Gallery (NY 2015); The University of Hawaii, Manoa (2015) and The American Academy of Arts and Letters Invitational Exhibition (2014). His work has been reviewed and covered by Hyperallergic (John Yau, 2016); ARTnews (2015); Art in America (2012 and 2005); The Philadelphia Inquirer; Knight Arts Foundation; The New Criterion; The Wall Street Journal, HaberArts, NY Arts Magazine; Whitehot Magazine; The New York Times; The Boston Globe, and The Partisan Review. His work is in several private and public collections including The Dallas Museum of Art; The United States Department of State, Roanoke College and The University of Texas Hospital, Dallas, Texas. His studio is currently in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

www.garypetersenart.com

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: curated selection

For the past several years I have been making paintings that are sometimes referred to as hard edge geometric abstraction. But that does not mean I adhere to a pure or reductive ideology. Just the opposite is true, my geometric abstraction addresses issues of our current predicaments: uncertainty, imbalance and insecurity, with a bit of humor thrown in. Also, there is a range of references from architecture, cartoons (The Jetsons), advertisements and graphic design as well as the rich history of geometric art. Most notably Al Held and Nicholas Krushenick.

Image:

Image:

Balancing Act acrylic on canvas 24 x 20 inches

Hollywood Square acrylic on panel 12 x 12 inches

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99

G a r y P e t e r s e n

Gary Petersen was born in Staten Island, New York. He holds a BS degree from The Pennsylvania State University and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts. Awards have included The MacDowell Colony Fellowship 2017; The American Academy of Arts and Letters, Hassam, Speicher, Betts, and Symons Art Purchase Fund Award 2014; The Sharpe-Walentas Foundation Studio Program 2010-2011, in Brooklyn, New York; The New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Painting Fellowship Award for 2011, 2002, 1993 and the Edward F. Albee Foundation Visual Arts Fellowship Award, 1988. His work has been exhibited widely in New York City and throughout the United States.

Recent solo exhibitions have included McKenzie Fine Art (2016); Theodore:Art in Brooklyn (2015); The Visual Arts Center of New Jersey (2014); Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Philadelphia (2014). Recent group exhibitions have included Kunst Pakhuset, Ikast, Denmark (2018); Mindy Solomon Gallery (2018); The Curator Gallery (New York, 2017); Carroll and Sons (Boston, 2016); Curator’s Office (D.C., 2016); The University of Massachusetts at Amherst (2015); Morgan Lehman Gallery (NY 2015); The University of Hawaii, Manoa (2015) and The American Academy of Arts and Letters Invitational Exhibition (2014). His work has been reviewed and covered by Hyperallergic (John Yau, 2016); ARTnews (2015); Art in America (2012 and 2005); The Philadelphia Inquirer; Knight Arts Foundation; The New Criterion; The Wall Street Journal, HaberArts, NY Arts Magazine; Whitehot Magazine; The New York Times; The Boston Globe, and The Partisan Review. His work is in several private and public collections including The Dallas Museum of Art; The United States Department of State, Roanoke College and The University of Texas Hospital, Dallas, Texas. His studio is currently in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

www.garypetersenart.com

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: curated selection

For the past several years I have been making paintings that are sometimes referred to as hard edge geometric abstraction. But that does not mean I adhere to a pure or reductive ideology. Just the opposite is true, my geometric abstraction addresses issues of our current predicaments: uncertainty, imbalance and insecurity, with a bit of humor thrown in. Also, there is a range of references from architecture, cartoons (The Jetsons), advertisements and graphic design as well as the rich history of geometric art. Most notably Al Held and Nicholas Krushenick.

Image:

Image:

Balancing Act acrylic on canvas 24 x 20 inches

Hollywood Square acrylic on panel 12 x 12 inches

98

99

N i g e l H o w l e t t

I a n

T h o m a s

M i l l e r

www.ianthomasmiller.com

www.nigelhowlett.co.uk

Nigel Howlett is an artist from London. Working with bright acrylic paints on canvas, his work depicts a fragmented amalgamation of cartoony narratives that form social commentaries exploring what it is to be human right now.

Ian Thomas Miller (American, b.1993), lives and works in St. Paul, MN. He received a BFA from Columbia College Chicago in 2015.

My recent work focuses on the simultaneous construction and deconstruction of meaning through painted images of specific objects and posed interactions. Often subtle, these interactions are bound by, and explored through specific framing, composition, and juxtaposition. A shift of an angle, an intentional omission or inclusion of visual information, an altering of a focal point, all of these approaches have proven to be valuable ways of searching and investigating individual and interpersonal interactions, influences, and the experiences produced by one’s surroundings.

I think that searching is an adequate word to describe these paintings. I see them as analogies, as statements ending in question marks.

Much of the imagery I’ve recently employed is directly tied to my immediate surroundings. The objects and spaces I frequent, that I find significant, or more often, the things that seem insignificant, but when uniquely paired or divergently utilized, take on new meaning, or conversely, lose their original/intended purpose. I find that much of this imagery, though specific, is also relatively universal in its appearance and in its ability to function as a proxy for expanded signification and interpretation. The paintings are a way of coming to conclusions that some things don’t have conclusions, only implications, that the space between meaningful and meaningless is often narrower than one might think.

Image: Thanks Very Much acrylic on canvas 80 x 60cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: curated selection

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Image: The View oil on paper mounted on panel 36 x 36 inches

101

N i g e l H o w l e t t

I a n

T h o m a s

M i l l e r

www.ianthomasmiller.com

www.nigelhowlett.co.uk

Nigel Howlett is an artist from London. Working with bright acrylic paints on canvas, his work depicts a fragmented amalgamation of cartoony narratives that form social commentaries exploring what it is to be human right now.

Ian Thomas Miller (American, b.1993), lives and works in St. Paul, MN. He received a BFA from Columbia College Chicago in 2015.

My recent work focuses on the simultaneous construction and deconstruction of meaning through painted images of specific objects and posed interactions. Often subtle, these interactions are bound by, and explored through specific framing, composition, and juxtaposition. A shift of an angle, an intentional omission or inclusion of visual information, an altering of a focal point, all of these approaches have proven to be valuable ways of searching and investigating individual and interpersonal interactions, influences, and the experiences produced by one’s surroundings.

I think that searching is an adequate word to describe these paintings. I see them as analogies, as statements ending in question marks.

Much of the imagery I’ve recently employed is directly tied to my immediate surroundings. The objects and spaces I frequent, that I find significant, or more often, the things that seem insignificant, but when uniquely paired or divergently utilized, take on new meaning, or conversely, lose their original/intended purpose. I find that much of this imagery, though specific, is also relatively universal in its appearance and in its ability to function as a proxy for expanded signification and interpretation. The paintings are a way of coming to conclusions that some things don’t have conclusions, only implications, that the space between meaningful and meaningless is often narrower than one might think.

Image: Thanks Very Much acrylic on canvas 80 x 60cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: curated selection

100

Image: The View oil on paper mounted on panel 36 x 36 inches

101

A m b e r B o a r d m a n

Through the invention of alter ego characters, Amber Boardman’s paintings explore the ideology of the American Dream and the endless desire to transform and improve the body as promoted by Internet and social media culture.

www.amberboardman.com

Boardman has exhibited her paintings and animation throughout the US, Australia and internationally including BAM’s Next Wave Festival in NYC, and the 2018 Archibald and Geelong Prizes in Australia. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including Juxtapoz Magazine. She has been the recipient of multiple awards, notably, Most Provocative Award (Atlanta Biennial), and the Joan Sutherland Fund Visual Arts Grant. She holds an MFA in Fine Art from the School of Visual Arts in NYC and a BFA in Studio Art from Georgia State University in Atlanta. Boardman holds a PhD from the University of New South Wales in Sydney. Her works are held in numerous private and public collections including the High Museum of Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, the University of Kentucky Art Museum, the City of Sydney, and Artbank Australia. She has worked commercially as an animator for Cartoon Network’s [adult swim], Comedy Central and Google.

Born in 1981 in Portland Maine, Boardman maintains close ties in New York, New England, Atlanta, and Sydney Australia. Boardman is a founding member of shared studio/exhibition spaces in Brooklyn and Sydney. Her work is represented by Sandler Hudson Gallery in Atlanta.

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: curated selection

Image:

Image:

Multipurpose Crowd oil on polyester 72 x 85 inches

The Shapes of First Class oil on polyester 72 x 72 inches

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103

A m b e r B o a r d m a n

Through the invention of alter ego characters, Amber Boardman’s paintings explore the ideology of the American Dream and the endless desire to transform and improve the body as promoted by Internet and social media culture.

www.amberboardman.com

Boardman has exhibited her paintings and animation throughout the US, Australia and internationally including BAM’s Next Wave Festival in NYC, and the 2018 Archibald and Geelong Prizes in Australia. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including Juxtapoz Magazine. She has been the recipient of multiple awards, notably, Most Provocative Award (Atlanta Biennial), and the Joan Sutherland Fund Visual Arts Grant. She holds an MFA in Fine Art from the School of Visual Arts in NYC and a BFA in Studio Art from Georgia State University in Atlanta. Boardman holds a PhD from the University of New South Wales in Sydney. Her works are held in numerous private and public collections including the High Museum of Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, the University of Kentucky Art Museum, the City of Sydney, and Artbank Australia. She has worked commercially as an animator for Cartoon Network’s [adult swim], Comedy Central and Google.

Born in 1981 in Portland Maine, Boardman maintains close ties in New York, New England, Atlanta, and Sydney Australia. Boardman is a founding member of shared studio/exhibition spaces in Brooklyn and Sydney. Her work is represented by Sandler Hudson Gallery in Atlanta.

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: curated selection

Image:

Image:

Multipurpose Crowd oil on polyester 72 x 85 inches

The Shapes of First Class oil on polyester 72 x 72 inches

102

103

C h r i s

A n d r e a

C a p o y i a n e s

F e r r i g n o

www.chriscapoy.com

www.andreaferrigno.com

For those who don’t wholeheartedly believe, religion acts as a carnival ride in the minds of many. It exists all around us, and it is up to you as to whether or not it is amusing or terrifying. Real or fantasy. This, I believe is where superstition decides to make an appearance. Superstition at times makes your decisions for you, and so, are you in control? Or simply placed on one of the rides? Sat in one of the seats? Price for admission is dismissed and the ticket has already been collected. My recent body of work aims to explore these ideas through characters in Catholicism and dreams half remembered. When Robert Crumb illustrated The Book of Genesis, his audience was surprised to find that his rendition was void of satire. Reading the text, he claimed it to be bizarre enough as it were. He created the entire thing, word for word, without being overly gratuitous with sex scenes and denying any slight urge to poke fun.

I think anyone who rejects religion is still captivated by it, and there exists a line between sincerity and mockery. The approach to my work walks this line, expressing two separate attitudes toward theology. What does superstition look like?

My work is inspired and informed by systems extracted from mathematics and science. These systems serve as a trellis to engage the spiritual and emotional dimensions of being. In my studio practice, the freedom to continually search, question, and push into new territory is of the utmost importance. Recent work has been an obsessive investigation of color and form. My color is informed by memory of specific forms and spaces, particularly the lush landscapes of the Midwest.

I hope through color to tap into the emotions of the viewer. My forms are discovered through the processes of making and strive towards the specific, and increasingly figurative, yet resist arriving at one particular read. I am interested in what the viewer brings to the image. I hope the imagery moves the viewer towards a contemplative state.

Image:

Image:

Paradise Lost oil and acrylic paint 24 x 30 inches

Social Media Survivor oil colour, acrylic colour and image transfer on cotton 50 x 65 cm

104

105

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: curated selection

Andrea Ferrigno was born in Des Moines, Iowa. She received her BFA from Kansas City Art Institute and her MFA from the University of Iowa. Ferrigno has exhibited nationally and internationally. She was recently included in exhibitions at Blue Mountain Gallery in NYC, and Big Idea at The Painting Center in NYC. This past summer she was an artist fellow at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA). She has also been a resident at DRAWinternational in Caylus, France and Vermont Studio Center. Her work “Turning Time” was awarded the Helen Longmire Prize at the St. Louis Artists’ Guild. Ferrigno is currently Assistant Professor of Fine Art at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois where she lives and works.

C h r i s

A n d r e a

C a p o y i a n e s

F e r r i g n o

www.chriscapoy.com

www.andreaferrigno.com

For those who don’t wholeheartedly believe, religion acts as a carnival ride in the minds of many. It exists all around us, and it is up to you as to whether or not it is amusing or terrifying. Real or fantasy. This, I believe is where superstition decides to make an appearance. Superstition at times makes your decisions for you, and so, are you in control? Or simply placed on one of the rides? Sat in one of the seats? Price for admission is dismissed and the ticket has already been collected. My recent body of work aims to explore these ideas through characters in Catholicism and dreams half remembered. When Robert Crumb illustrated The Book of Genesis, his audience was surprised to find that his rendition was void of satire. Reading the text, he claimed it to be bizarre enough as it were. He created the entire thing, word for word, without being overly gratuitous with sex scenes and denying any slight urge to poke fun.

I think anyone who rejects religion is still captivated by it, and there exists a line between sincerity and mockery. The approach to my work walks this line, expressing two separate attitudes toward theology. What does superstition look like?

My work is inspired and informed by systems extracted from mathematics and science. These systems serve as a trellis to engage the spiritual and emotional dimensions of being. In my studio practice, the freedom to continually search, question, and push into new territory is of the utmost importance. Recent work has been an obsessive investigation of color and form. My color is informed by memory of specific forms and spaces, particularly the lush landscapes of the Midwest.

I hope through color to tap into the emotions of the viewer. My forms are discovered through the processes of making and strive towards the specific, and increasingly figurative, yet resist arriving at one particular read. I am interested in what the viewer brings to the image. I hope the imagery moves the viewer towards a contemplative state.

Image:

Image:

Paradise Lost oil and acrylic paint 24 x 30 inches

Social Media Survivor oil colour, acrylic colour and image transfer on cotton 50 x 65 cm

104

105

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: curated selection

Andrea Ferrigno was born in Des Moines, Iowa. She received her BFA from Kansas City Art Institute and her MFA from the University of Iowa. Ferrigno has exhibited nationally and internationally. She was recently included in exhibitions at Blue Mountain Gallery in NYC, and Big Idea at The Painting Center in NYC. This past summer she was an artist fellow at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA). She has also been a resident at DRAWinternational in Caylus, France and Vermont Studio Center. Her work “Turning Time” was awarded the Helen Longmire Prize at the St. Louis Artists’ Guild. Ferrigno is currently Assistant Professor of Fine Art at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois where she lives and works.

K e n

G u n

M i n

Ken Gun Min was born in South Korea and lived in San Francisco, Zurich and Berlin before relocating to Los Angeles, California. Because of living/working in Eurocentric capitals for almost two decades, his work often comes from challenging the first-world-oriented perspective. For the past few years, his work focused on the creation of cross-cultural figures and space by using a mixture of oil painting and Asian pigment with collected beads and vintage crystal on raw canvas. He studied western painting and Art History & Theory in Hongik University in Seoul, Korea and received an MFA from Academy of Art University in San Francisco.

In our daily lives, we are constantly encountered with imagery, navigating through smart phones, monitors and textbooks, etc.; everyday there are countless numbers of visual information being dumped into your awareness. These images are being infinitely reproduced and distributed, passing through your cognition filters to either be remained or to be trashed. I collect selective images in my material bank from time to time. I can find almost everything I am interested in online. My paintings often combine references sourced from this collection; my own photography or commercial illustrations with an array of seemingly random copies or vintage animation clips or screen captures from random twitter feed. These juxtapositions occur side by side or are reconstructed on canvas. I am more interested in looking back on my selection process; how I select and use these images artistically.

The flows of images show and influence the way I make art, more specifically, influence the way I see or I live. The diversity of categories, media and historical references become materials to use. As this material bank is not only growing exponentially but it also evolves to compress its data into many layers of “seeing”. These layers are always encountering each other and creating new context and flow. I am fascinated by this moment of encounter. This moment guides me to find out how I see.

www.kengunmin.com

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: curated selection

Image:

Image:

Boy with a cat rabbit glue, oil paint, korean pigment, glass bead, crystal on raw canvas 50 x 60 inches

Moon Light rabbit glue, oil paint, korean pigment, glass bead, crystal on raw canvas 48 x 38 inches

106

107

K e n

G u n

M i n

Ken Gun Min was born in South Korea and lived in San Francisco, Zurich and Berlin before relocating to Los Angeles, California. Because of living/working in Eurocentric capitals for almost two decades, his work often comes from challenging the first-world-oriented perspective. For the past few years, his work focused on the creation of cross-cultural figures and space by using a mixture of oil painting and Asian pigment with collected beads and vintage crystal on raw canvas. He studied western painting and Art History & Theory in Hongik University in Seoul, Korea and received an MFA from Academy of Art University in San Francisco.

In our daily lives, we are constantly encountered with imagery, navigating through smart phones, monitors and textbooks, etc.; everyday there are countless numbers of visual information being dumped into your awareness. These images are being infinitely reproduced and distributed, passing through your cognition filters to either be remained or to be trashed. I collect selective images in my material bank from time to time. I can find almost everything I am interested in online. My paintings often combine references sourced from this collection; my own photography or commercial illustrations with an array of seemingly random copies or vintage animation clips or screen captures from random twitter feed. These juxtapositions occur side by side or are reconstructed on canvas. I am more interested in looking back on my selection process; how I select and use these images artistically.

The flows of images show and influence the way I make art, more specifically, influence the way I see or I live. The diversity of categories, media and historical references become materials to use. As this material bank is not only growing exponentially but it also evolves to compress its data into many layers of “seeing”. These layers are always encountering each other and creating new context and flow. I am fascinated by this moment of encounter. This moment guides me to find out how I see.

www.kengunmin.com

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: curated selection

Image:

Image:

Boy with a cat rabbit glue, oil paint, korean pigment, glass bead, crystal on raw canvas 50 x 60 inches

Moon Light rabbit glue, oil paint, korean pigment, glass bead, crystal on raw canvas 48 x 38 inches

106

107

I work with installation, video, photography, and sculpture, and there is usually an overlap between modes of working. My studio time involves a translation from one medium to another, and a great deal of editing. For example, most of my video work incorporates sculptural sets which I build in the studio, and often the ideas for the constructed sets are generated by photographs I take, or video stills from previous work.

The ceramic Flag series begins with photographs taken during a succession of walks through the city. During these destination-less explorations visual connections between fleeting glimpses of the environment are made and the appearance of building facades, graffiti, textiles, and jewelry are bound. The ceramic flags are memory collages of those visual bonds—peeled off remnants and imagined fossils.

Leonora Loeb is a visual artist from NYC. She received her BA in Fine Art from Pitzer College, CA; and received her MFA in NYC from the School of Visual Arts in 2010. A dual citizen of the USA and Italy, Leonora has worked in the US and abroad; and received support from institutions such as Mabou Mines, NYC; Chashama North, NY; Makor/Steinhardt, NYC; and La Llotja, Barcelona, Spain. She has participated in numerous exhibitions in the NYC area including Perry Rubenstein Gallery, NYC; Momenta Art, Bushwick, Brooklyn; Front Room Gallery, NYC; Gallery Satori, NYC; and The Gateway Project, Newark, NJ. Leonora has worked on collaborative multi-media projects for venues such as The Clocktower Gallery (No Longer Empty); LIC, Queens; and Northside Town Hall, Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

She curated a multi-media group show at Vaudeville Park, Williamsburg, Brooklyn; and co-curated two solo shows at Opus Projects, NYC. Leonora is based in NYC and is fulltime faculty in the Visual Studies department of LIM College.

L e o n o r a

www.leonoraloeb.com

L o e b

Image: Flag 9 (side b) glazed porcelain 4 x 7 x 9 inches

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Image (top)

Image (bottom):

Flag 9 (side b) glazed porcelain 4 x 7 x 9 inches

Flag 8 (side a) glazed porcelain 5 x 7 x 8 inches

109

I work with installation, video, photography, and sculpture, and there is usually an overlap between modes of working. My studio time involves a translation from one medium to another, and a great deal of editing. For example, most of my video work incorporates sculptural sets which I build in the studio, and often the ideas for the constructed sets are generated by photographs I take, or video stills from previous work.

The ceramic Flag series begins with photographs taken during a succession of walks through the city. During these destination-less explorations visual connections between fleeting glimpses of the environment are made and the appearance of building facades, graffiti, textiles, and jewelry are bound. The ceramic flags are memory collages of those visual bonds—peeled off remnants and imagined fossils.

Leonora Loeb is a visual artist from NYC. She received her BA in Fine Art from Pitzer College, CA; and received her MFA in NYC from the School of Visual Arts in 2010. A dual citizen of the USA and Italy, Leonora has worked in the US and abroad; and received support from institutions such as Mabou Mines, NYC; Chashama North, NY; Makor/Steinhardt, NYC; and La Llotja, Barcelona, Spain. She has participated in numerous exhibitions in the NYC area including Perry Rubenstein Gallery, NYC; Momenta Art, Bushwick, Brooklyn; Front Room Gallery, NYC; Gallery Satori, NYC; and The Gateway Project, Newark, NJ. Leonora has worked on collaborative multi-media projects for venues such as The Clocktower Gallery (No Longer Empty); LIC, Queens; and Northside Town Hall, Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

She curated a multi-media group show at Vaudeville Park, Williamsburg, Brooklyn; and co-curated two solo shows at Opus Projects, NYC. Leonora is based in NYC and is fulltime faculty in the Visual Studies department of LIM College.

L e o n o r a

www.leonoraloeb.com

L o e b

Image: Flag 9 (side b) glazed porcelain 4 x 7 x 9 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: curated selection

108

Image (top)

Image (bottom):

Flag 9 (side b) glazed porcelain 4 x 7 x 9 inches

Flag 8 (side a) glazed porcelain 5 x 7 x 8 inches

109

editorial selection of works Featured image: Aneta Kajzer Gremlin & Lady oil and acrylic on canvas 70 x 65 cm more on p. 145

editorial selection of works Featured image: Aneta Kajzer Gremlin & Lady oil and acrylic on canvas 70 x 65 cm more on p. 145

A n n a

W e y a n t

www.annaweyant.com

Anna Weyant (born 1995) is a Canadian-American painter based in New York City. Her satirical figurative paintings draw influence from a wide range of sources and periods, including Dutch paintings of the seventeenth century, the Italian Renaissance, popular culture and social media.

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: editorial selection

Image:

Image:

Tit Tat oil on panel

Step 1: Denial oil on canvas 3 x 4ft

112

113

A n n a

W e y a n t

www.annaweyant.com

Anna Weyant (born 1995) is a Canadian-American painter based in New York City. Her satirical figurative paintings draw influence from a wide range of sources and periods, including Dutch paintings of the seventeenth century, the Italian Renaissance, popular culture and social media.

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: editorial selection

Image:

Image:

Tit Tat oil on panel

Step 1: Denial oil on canvas 3 x 4ft

112

113

A m y B u t o w i c z

My studio practice moves fluidly between painting and 3-dimensional structures that intertwine the traditional crafts of sewing and weaving. I use clothing patterns and furniture forms as a point of departure for improvisation and creative decision-making. My working process is one that leans on my intuition and the hand-made over the manufactured. Through a lexicon of painted soft forms, salvaged furniture frames and objects referencing the handmade, my work explores the absurdity of life through a lens of theatricality. I extract latent sexuality and buried histories from found forms and then conjoin them into ambiguous bodies. My sculptural cast of characters is often built from salvaged furniture and plays with the intersection of image, support and control. They are humanized with both physicality and interiority. I arrange my paintings and objects into phrases that eschew a concreated temporal moment. The relationship between the works and their haptic sensibility creates an oscillation between tangible object and metaphysical presence. I question the foundations of truth and memory through a strong physicality of contradictions.

www.amybutowicz.com

Image: Secrets Don’t Behave antique privacy screen, sewn canvas, acrylic paint, leather string, foam, and red velvet sand bag 69 h x 55.5 w x 17 d inches

114

I received my MFA from Hunter College in 2018. While at Hunter, I was awarded a solo exhibition at Hunter Projects and a travel grant from the Kossak Painting Program. Residency fellowships and scholarships include Salem Art Works in Salem, NY; Vermont Studio Center; Virginia Commonwealth University’s Summer Studio Program; Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts in Saratoga Wyoming, and Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass, Colorado.

My recent solo exhibitions include Pantomime at The Dairy Center for the Arts in Boulder, Colorado; Inhabit at Anderson Ranch Arts Center, and A Room to Hoist at Hunter College, New York City, and Hiding in Plain Sight at Underdonk, Brooklyn, New York.

Image (left): Underwire acrylic and spray paint on cut and sewn canvas 64 h x 36 w x 4 d inches

115

Image (right): Kissing Buttercup acrylic on sewn canvas stuffed with canvas waste 96 h x 36 w x 12 d inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: editorial selection

A m y B u t o w i c z

My studio practice moves fluidly between painting and 3-dimensional structures that intertwine the traditional crafts of sewing and weaving. I use clothing patterns and furniture forms as a point of departure for improvisation and creative decision-making. My working process is one that leans on my intuition and the hand-made over the manufactured. Through a lexicon of painted soft forms, salvaged furniture frames and objects referencing the handmade, my work explores the absurdity of life through a lens of theatricality. I extract latent sexuality and buried histories from found forms and then conjoin them into ambiguous bodies. My sculptural cast of characters is often built from salvaged furniture and plays with the intersection of image, support and control. They are humanized with both physicality and interiority. I arrange my paintings and objects into phrases that eschew a concreated temporal moment. The relationship between the works and their haptic sensibility creates an oscillation between tangible object and metaphysical presence. I question the foundations of truth and memory through a strong physicality of contradictions.

www.amybutowicz.com

Image: Secrets Don’t Behave antique privacy screen, sewn canvas, acrylic paint, leather string, foam, and red velvet sand bag 69 h x 55.5 w x 17 d inches

114

I received my MFA from Hunter College in 2018. While at Hunter, I was awarded a solo exhibition at Hunter Projects and a travel grant from the Kossak Painting Program. Residency fellowships and scholarships include Salem Art Works in Salem, NY; Vermont Studio Center; Virginia Commonwealth University’s Summer Studio Program; Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts in Saratoga Wyoming, and Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass, Colorado.

My recent solo exhibitions include Pantomime at The Dairy Center for the Arts in Boulder, Colorado; Inhabit at Anderson Ranch Arts Center, and A Room to Hoist at Hunter College, New York City, and Hiding in Plain Sight at Underdonk, Brooklyn, New York.

Image (left): Underwire acrylic and spray paint on cut and sewn canvas 64 h x 36 w x 4 d inches

115

Image (right): Kissing Buttercup acrylic on sewn canvas stuffed with canvas waste 96 h x 36 w x 12 d inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: editorial selection

Jim Gaylord’s work has been exhibited internationally and is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the West Collection and Progressive Corporation. He received his MFA from the University of California, Berkeley, has completed residencies at the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo and received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Joan Mitchell Foundation and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Jim lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. My recent work grew out of a response to the physical characteristics of the heavy watercolor paper I’ve been using over the past ten years. As I cut up and layered the paper together, the surfaces gradually began to build up in three-dimensional space. Light and shadows cast by the raised areas soon became as important as the colors painted with gouache. Now, treating the work as something between painting and sculpture, I’ve looked toward the tradition of bas relief. The depth and contours of a figure are communicated sparingly and efficiently in space while ultimately operating on the picture plane. With this in mind, I’m focusing on minute (sometimes microscopic) features of the body, isolating and reducing them to almost architectural forms and presenting them in specific yet open ended ways.

J i m

G a y l o r d

www.jimgaylord.com

Image:

Image:

Chevron Face cutout and abraded 300 lb. watercolor paper, gouache 30¼ x 23¼ inches

Meme gouache on cutout and scored 300 lb. watercolor paper 30½ x 23½ inches

116

117

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: editorial selection

Jim Gaylord’s work has been exhibited internationally and is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the West Collection and Progressive Corporation. He received his MFA from the University of California, Berkeley, has completed residencies at the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo and received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Joan Mitchell Foundation and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Jim lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. My recent work grew out of a response to the physical characteristics of the heavy watercolor paper I’ve been using over the past ten years. As I cut up and layered the paper together, the surfaces gradually began to build up in three-dimensional space. Light and shadows cast by the raised areas soon became as important as the colors painted with gouache. Now, treating the work as something between painting and sculpture, I’ve looked toward the tradition of bas relief. The depth and contours of a figure are communicated sparingly and efficiently in space while ultimately operating on the picture plane. With this in mind, I’m focusing on minute (sometimes microscopic) features of the body, isolating and reducing them to almost architectural forms and presenting them in specific yet open ended ways.

J i m

G a y l o r d

www.jimgaylord.com

Image:

Image:

Chevron Face cutout and abraded 300 lb. watercolor paper, gouache 30¼ x 23¼ inches

Meme gouache on cutout and scored 300 lb. watercolor paper 30½ x 23½ inches

116

117

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: editorial selection

K a y l a P l o s z

A n t i e l

A n n a S k o v

H a s s i n g

www.annaskovhassing.com www.kaylaplosz.com Anna Skov Hassing lives and works in Copenhagen. She holds a BFA from Hochschule für Bildende Künste Hamburg, and an MFA from Malmö Art Academy 2018.

Kayla Plosz Antiel (‘87) is a Canadian born artist currently living and working in Raleigh, NC. She has exhibited in numerous group and solo exhibitions throughout the Midwest and East Coast, including Burnet Gallery; Hillyer Art Space, and the Soo Visual Arts Center, as well as featured in many online publications and art blogs such as Art Hound, Create!, YoungSpace, and Metal Magazine. Antiel received her MFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2012.

My work arises from an acute obsession with the “stuffness” of Paint, and my process involves a psychosomatic dialectic that accounts for its substance, sensuality, color, and mutability. My paintings often begin with a particular—whether an image, texture, feeling, or shape. As the paintings advance, I vacillate between a sort of intuitive bodily sensuality and more logically driven formal decisions so that the initial things get buried, altered, or deconstructed. Each work, then, evolves through the free-play of the paint’s color and form.

Image: Troupe oil on birch panel 11 x 14 inches

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There is something crooked and uneven, which I try to capture, a sort of forgotten maladaptive love story. I have started to move my way backwards. I watch the ceiling, I observe the corners, I look underneath my cushion. Interactions between gathered items.

I see receptacles in remains that bear a connection to you. Tracing the path back to its place of origin. Knowing, nothing starts out alone and isolated. Nevertheless, I am always landing in the same bed. The bed, from where you and I take our beginnings, where we devote ourselves, where we let go and slip into a state of sleep, alone side by side. You are there when I wake up. I am there when you fall asleep. I watch you sleep. The dark clings around your face. It falls eternally loyal, in faithfulness with the pact, which both of us have forgotten, but jointly lashed into our cells, so as not to deviate from the finest. The colour flows further downwards, and merges with the blanket on which you are lying. You do not need the words any longer. The evening is nameless, and we dive into a liquid substance. At one point, you start to plait the darkness into a braid. The light from the setting sun strikes the braid and reveals an enigmatic colour spectrum as it undulates down along the back of the bed. We meet at daybreak, with sleep in our eyes and two different tales to tell. The window is open and lets the wind take us. It is impossible to chronologically recreate the order that we came from. I recognise fragments of a narrative and feel like I’m finding ends that stick together. However, new pairs have been formed. In incidental beds, with strange partners. It´s a collective intimacy that, by virtue of its greatness, dissolves contours.

The lines that otherwise write their categories into my skin, senses, and mind are being dissolved.

Image: My sisters have no skin acrylic on canvas 185 x 205 cm

119

K a y l a P l o s z

A n t i e l

A n n a S k o v

H a s s i n g

www.annaskovhassing.com www.kaylaplosz.com Anna Skov Hassing lives and works in Copenhagen. She holds a BFA from Hochschule für Bildende Künste Hamburg, and an MFA from Malmö Art Academy 2018.

Kayla Plosz Antiel (‘87) is a Canadian born artist currently living and working in Raleigh, NC. She has exhibited in numerous group and solo exhibitions throughout the Midwest and East Coast, including Burnet Gallery; Hillyer Art Space, and the Soo Visual Arts Center, as well as featured in many online publications and art blogs such as Art Hound, Create!, YoungSpace, and Metal Magazine. Antiel received her MFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2012.

My work arises from an acute obsession with the “stuffness” of Paint, and my process involves a psychosomatic dialectic that accounts for its substance, sensuality, color, and mutability. My paintings often begin with a particular—whether an image, texture, feeling, or shape. As the paintings advance, I vacillate between a sort of intuitive bodily sensuality and more logically driven formal decisions so that the initial things get buried, altered, or deconstructed. Each work, then, evolves through the free-play of the paint’s color and form.

Image: Troupe oil on birch panel 11 x 14 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: editorial selection

118

There is something crooked and uneven, which I try to capture, a sort of forgotten maladaptive love story. I have started to move my way backwards. I watch the ceiling, I observe the corners, I look underneath my cushion. Interactions between gathered items.

I see receptacles in remains that bear a connection to you. Tracing the path back to its place of origin. Knowing, nothing starts out alone and isolated. Nevertheless, I am always landing in the same bed. The bed, from where you and I take our beginnings, where we devote ourselves, where we let go and slip into a state of sleep, alone side by side. You are there when I wake up. I am there when you fall asleep. I watch you sleep. The dark clings around your face. It falls eternally loyal, in faithfulness with the pact, which both of us have forgotten, but jointly lashed into our cells, so as not to deviate from the finest. The colour flows further downwards, and merges with the blanket on which you are lying. You do not need the words any longer. The evening is nameless, and we dive into a liquid substance. At one point, you start to plait the darkness into a braid. The light from the setting sun strikes the braid and reveals an enigmatic colour spectrum as it undulates down along the back of the bed. We meet at daybreak, with sleep in our eyes and two different tales to tell. The window is open and lets the wind take us. It is impossible to chronologically recreate the order that we came from. I recognise fragments of a narrative and feel like I’m finding ends that stick together. However, new pairs have been formed. In incidental beds, with strange partners. It´s a collective intimacy that, by virtue of its greatness, dissolves contours.

The lines that otherwise write their categories into my skin, senses, and mind are being dissolved.

Image: My sisters have no skin acrylic on canvas 185 x 205 cm

119

I make paintings that explore the painting process, often incorporating tools or strategies to act as an intermediary between the surface and my hand. I work with rote imagery derived from my drawing process of filtering images culled from the consumer landscape. Logos, textiles and ancient symbols inform my personal lexicon intending to connect it to past, present and future in a direct way.

My current body of work loosely channels instructions listed on the internet to make an abstract painting, (via wikiHow), in an effort to capture the Zeitgeist of the time. Chosen for its accessibility, history, and economy, I paint on burlap. I am drawn to the fabric for its recognizable texture as much as its historic link to commodity. This body of work uses masking tape cut to various widths as a barrier to block out areas on the surface. Layers of pigment are applied liberally over masked areas resulting in an image born of both intention and chance.

M a t t h e w M a h l e r

Image: Untitled (#painting) acrylic on burlap 24 x 18 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: editorial selection

120

www.matthewjmahler.com

Image:

Image:

Untitled (#painting) acrylic on burlap 24 x 18 inches

Untitled (#painting) acrylic on burlap 24 x 18 inches

121

I make paintings that explore the painting process, often incorporating tools or strategies to act as an intermediary between the surface and my hand. I work with rote imagery derived from my drawing process of filtering images culled from the consumer landscape. Logos, textiles and ancient symbols inform my personal lexicon intending to connect it to past, present and future in a direct way.

My current body of work loosely channels instructions listed on the internet to make an abstract painting, (via wikiHow), in an effort to capture the Zeitgeist of the time. Chosen for its accessibility, history, and economy, I paint on burlap. I am drawn to the fabric for its recognizable texture as much as its historic link to commodity. This body of work uses masking tape cut to various widths as a barrier to block out areas on the surface. Layers of pigment are applied liberally over masked areas resulting in an image born of both intention and chance.

M a t t h e w M a h l e r

Image: Untitled (#painting) acrylic on burlap 24 x 18 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: editorial selection

120

www.matthewjmahler.com

Image:

Image:

Untitled (#painting) acrylic on burlap 24 x 18 inches

Untitled (#painting) acrylic on burlap 24 x 18 inches

121

S i a r a

B e r r y

E l l i e

F r i t z

www.siaraberry.com

www.elliefritz.com

Berry studied at the Kansas City Art Institute in Kansas City, Missouri. Graduating in 2015, holding a degree in Sculpture and Creative Writing, she traveled to London to study woodworking and upholstery. After returning, Berry began working professionally as a fabricator and project director, while maintaining her studio practice in Milwaukee, WI. Berry explores notions of the home, self, and ideas of ‘care’ within her work.

Ellie Fritz produces large-scale works on paper and panel that combine various printmaking techniques with painting and drawing. She has exhibited in New York at Art on Paper and Miami at Context Art Fair; Art Market San Francisco; Minnesota Street Project, San Francisco, California; Vulcan Gallery, Birmingham, Alabama as well as The Diego Rivera and Swell Galleries at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI). Fritz completed both her BFA (2004) and MFA (2008) at SFAI and has received several honors, including the Spring Show Award (2004), and a Teaching Assistantship (2008). In 2008, Fritz was featured in Studio Visit Magazine and began working as an artist-in-residence at Kala Art Institute where she continues her printmaking studio practice today. Since 2016 she has been represented by K Imperial Fine Art, San Francisco, CA and debuted with a solo exhibition “Weight and Levity” in June 2016. She has participated in multiple group exhibitions and art fairs and had a solo exhibition Geometry & Chance at K Imperial Fine Art in February 2019. In addition to her studio practice, she has taught through extension programs in San Francisco, including ACE at SFAI. In September 2018 she spent two weeks at The Alabama School of Fine Arts teaching printmaking as a visiting artist. In January 2019, Fritz began a one-year residency at the Marin MOCA in Novato, California which will culminate in a solo exhibition in December, 2019.

Fritz lives and works in Marin County, California.

The intention of my work is to prompt associations to the domestic structure and the laborious commitments to one’s surroundings, and in turn, the commitment to one’s self. I find that the work illustrates the complexities of such relationships, while also addressing issues of functionality. How would one use this object? Who would one use this object with? What issue would be resolved with this tool? All of these questions remain at the forefront of my practice. I use everyday materials like bristles and bed foam to convey a sense of familiarity, while challenging the form through exaggeration and impracticality. I feel this amplifies the tension between the recognizable and unfamiliar, the comfortable and the troublesome.

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: editorial selection

These hybrid works evolve from a dialogue between painting and printmaking. Painting introduces gesture and form, while collage imprints positive and negative space. The final stage of embossing introduces conversations between thick and thin, transparent and opaque, soft and hard, and light and dark. Geometric forms and chance coverage in an unexpected moment.

Image:

Image:

Getting Over quilted fabric, rope, roofing shingles, wood 7’ (h) x 4’ (w) x 30 “

Spring Loaded Fragments, Part 2 ink, acrylic and embossing on paper 30 x 22 inches

122

123

S i a r a

B e r r y

E l l i e

F r i t z

www.siaraberry.com

www.elliefritz.com

Berry studied at the Kansas City Art Institute in Kansas City, Missouri. Graduating in 2015, holding a degree in Sculpture and Creative Writing, she traveled to London to study woodworking and upholstery. After returning, Berry began working professionally as a fabricator and project director, while maintaining her studio practice in Milwaukee, WI. Berry explores notions of the home, self, and ideas of ‘care’ within her work.

Ellie Fritz produces large-scale works on paper and panel that combine various printmaking techniques with painting and drawing. She has exhibited in New York at Art on Paper and Miami at Context Art Fair; Art Market San Francisco; Minnesota Street Project, San Francisco, California; Vulcan Gallery, Birmingham, Alabama as well as The Diego Rivera and Swell Galleries at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI). Fritz completed both her BFA (2004) and MFA (2008) at SFAI and has received several honors, including the Spring Show Award (2004), and a Teaching Assistantship (2008). In 2008, Fritz was featured in Studio Visit Magazine and began working as an artist-in-residence at Kala Art Institute where she continues her printmaking studio practice today. Since 2016 she has been represented by K Imperial Fine Art, San Francisco, CA and debuted with a solo exhibition “Weight and Levity” in June 2016. She has participated in multiple group exhibitions and art fairs and had a solo exhibition Geometry & Chance at K Imperial Fine Art in February 2019. In addition to her studio practice, she has taught through extension programs in San Francisco, including ACE at SFAI. In September 2018 she spent two weeks at The Alabama School of Fine Arts teaching printmaking as a visiting artist. In January 2019, Fritz began a one-year residency at the Marin MOCA in Novato, California which will culminate in a solo exhibition in December, 2019.

Fritz lives and works in Marin County, California.

The intention of my work is to prompt associations to the domestic structure and the laborious commitments to one’s surroundings, and in turn, the commitment to one’s self. I find that the work illustrates the complexities of such relationships, while also addressing issues of functionality. How would one use this object? Who would one use this object with? What issue would be resolved with this tool? All of these questions remain at the forefront of my practice. I use everyday materials like bristles and bed foam to convey a sense of familiarity, while challenging the form through exaggeration and impracticality. I feel this amplifies the tension between the recognizable and unfamiliar, the comfortable and the troublesome.

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: editorial selection

These hybrid works evolve from a dialogue between painting and printmaking. Painting introduces gesture and form, while collage imprints positive and negative space. The final stage of embossing introduces conversations between thick and thin, transparent and opaque, soft and hard, and light and dark. Geometric forms and chance coverage in an unexpected moment.

Image:

Image:

Getting Over quilted fabric, rope, roofing shingles, wood 7’ (h) x 4’ (w) x 30 “

Spring Loaded Fragments, Part 2 ink, acrylic and embossing on paper 30 x 22 inches

122

123

C o d y Tu m b l i n

I primarily describe myself as a painter to most acquaintances, but I feel my work is more heavily rooted in material investigation. Sifting through piles of cloth, loose threads, remnants of failed paintings, dyed color studies, snippets of photographs, scraps of splatters and drips cut out from old works—I constantly recycle the remnants of my process so that I may reanimate small portions of my soul and further dive into the mystery of making. Bleaching and re-dyeing old paintings or photographs is a kind of washing and baptizing of memory. Only fragments remain as one work carries into the next, and these shadows act as guides to create new forms and rhythms. Stains and drips are cut out of older works and reattached as glorified jewels of adornment to heavenly bodies of magenta and azure. I sometimes imagine these leftover fragments are painful scabs I’m peeling off and reattaching to new bodies, testaments to the wounds that created them, but also reminders of growth and healing. In my studio, a constant cycle of making and unmaking allows me to slowly unravel moments of my restless psyche.

Cody Tumblin (b. 1991 Nashville, TN) is a painter who currently lives and works in Chicago, IL where he received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013. Tumblin has held solo and two person projects at Devening Projects (Chicago IL); SPF 15 (San Diego CA); LVL3 (Chicago IL); mild climate (Nashville TN); C for Courtside (Knoxville TN); Skylab Gallery (Columbus OH); The Packing Plant (Nashville TN); The Outlet Gallery (Milwaukee MI), and other spaces. His work has been exhibited with a number of galleries in the US and abroad including Andrew Rafacz Gallery; No Place Gallery; 57W57 Arts; Chicken Coop Contemporary; Kris Day; Annarumma Gallery; Big Medium; Circuit 12, and Lunchmoney Gallery. Tumblin is also a recent finalist of the Hopper Prize Grant. This Spring, Tumblin is releasing a community collaborative cookbook titled Today’s Special with Extended Play Press.

www.codytumblin.com

Image:

Image:

Warm and Familiar Starlight dye and acrylic on muslin 24 x 30 inches

Warm in the Veins dyed cotton, dye, acrylic, muslin, thread 32 x 40 inches

124

125

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: editorial selection

C o d y Tu m b l i n

I primarily describe myself as a painter to most acquaintances, but I feel my work is more heavily rooted in material investigation. Sifting through piles of cloth, loose threads, remnants of failed paintings, dyed color studies, snippets of photographs, scraps of splatters and drips cut out from old works—I constantly recycle the remnants of my process so that I may reanimate small portions of my soul and further dive into the mystery of making. Bleaching and re-dyeing old paintings or photographs is a kind of washing and baptizing of memory. Only fragments remain as one work carries into the next, and these shadows act as guides to create new forms and rhythms. Stains and drips are cut out of older works and reattached as glorified jewels of adornment to heavenly bodies of magenta and azure. I sometimes imagine these leftover fragments are painful scabs I’m peeling off and reattaching to new bodies, testaments to the wounds that created them, but also reminders of growth and healing. In my studio, a constant cycle of making and unmaking allows me to slowly unravel moments of my restless psyche.

Cody Tumblin (b. 1991 Nashville, TN) is a painter who currently lives and works in Chicago, IL where he received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013. Tumblin has held solo and two person projects at Devening Projects (Chicago IL); SPF 15 (San Diego CA); LVL3 (Chicago IL); mild climate (Nashville TN); C for Courtside (Knoxville TN); Skylab Gallery (Columbus OH); The Packing Plant (Nashville TN); The Outlet Gallery (Milwaukee MI), and other spaces. His work has been exhibited with a number of galleries in the US and abroad including Andrew Rafacz Gallery; No Place Gallery; 57W57 Arts; Chicken Coop Contemporary; Kris Day; Annarumma Gallery; Big Medium; Circuit 12, and Lunchmoney Gallery. Tumblin is also a recent finalist of the Hopper Prize Grant. This Spring, Tumblin is releasing a community collaborative cookbook titled Today’s Special with Extended Play Press.

www.codytumblin.com

Image:

Image:

Warm and Familiar Starlight dye and acrylic on muslin 24 x 30 inches

Warm in the Veins dyed cotton, dye, acrylic, muslin, thread 32 x 40 inches

124

125

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: editorial selection

W e n d e l i n

W o h l g e m u t h

www.wendelinw.com

I am a German-American oil painter who received a BA in Studio Art with a minor in Philosophy from Western Washington University in 2013. My central interest lies in exploring the paradoxical functions of oil paint. My canvases display the medium fluctuating between two distinct functions—both as an illusionistic medium that can be used to view something distant in time and space and as a purely physical substance.

The process begins with images that I capture from low-resolution online archived film reels. I manipulate the images using a variety of digital tools before beginning the painting process. The reference image is then painted meticulously on canvas or wood panel and stands in contrast to further layers of disruption. In these layers I employ various techniques of experimental paint application through the use of squeegees, solvents, and other non-traditional tools. These techniques disrupt the illusionism in the layers below. In this way my oil paintings resemble over-painted photographs where the initial photographic image becomes distant and distorted through layers of color and texture. All of the subjects are blurred, both metaphorically and literally, giving the sense that the contents of the paintings are fleeting, unstable, and insignificant. Many of the images were caught in view of the camera by accident—as if they are trying to document something just before it slips out of view. The blur suggests a photographic indifference where everything in the image is given the same degree of emphasis. This effect also seems to put the subjects on a different visual plane than the surface of the canvas. Thus they feel preserved, like viewing an object through a window or a mirror behind the marks on the glass. The blur encapsulates the gradient; the spectrum; the scientific truth that natural objects are vague, boundless, and without essential properties. This approach to painting reflects my general concern about human identity as we witness modern scientific materialism clash with humanity’s ancient conception of itself as distinct from the natural world.

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: editorial selection

Ts a i l i n g

Ts e n g

www.tsailingtseng.com

Tsailing Tseng (b.1991 Taipei, Taiwan) received her MFA in the Painting and Drawing Department at School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018, and her BFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in 2016. Tseng is interested in the relationship between daily life and imagination. By letting the process lead the way, Tseng creates a world from what is between consciousness and dreams using image as her language of self-exploration.

My studio practice focuses on transforming my daily life experiences into visual form. I work to capture the process of transformation itself—I want not only to make images, but also to use a canvas as a space to think through the possible relationships between art and experience. Colors are the initial marks on my canvas. I try to find light within these colors, which becomes the main character for me to visualize an unknown yet familiar event of the painting. Images of landscapes, plants, animals, and humans are products of discovery within my painting process. I relinquish control over any specific narrative and allow it to happen spontaneously, whenever images collide.

The objective is not only to surprise viewers, but to surprise myself with these unexpected collisions.

Image:

Image:

Child oil on panel 75 x 75 cm

Everything Everything oil on canvas 50 x 55 inches

126

127

W e n d e l i n

W o h l g e m u t h

www.wendelinw.com

I am a German-American oil painter who received a BA in Studio Art with a minor in Philosophy from Western Washington University in 2013. My central interest lies in exploring the paradoxical functions of oil paint. My canvases display the medium fluctuating between two distinct functions—both as an illusionistic medium that can be used to view something distant in time and space and as a purely physical substance.

The process begins with images that I capture from low-resolution online archived film reels. I manipulate the images using a variety of digital tools before beginning the painting process. The reference image is then painted meticulously on canvas or wood panel and stands in contrast to further layers of disruption. In these layers I employ various techniques of experimental paint application through the use of squeegees, solvents, and other non-traditional tools. These techniques disrupt the illusionism in the layers below. In this way my oil paintings resemble over-painted photographs where the initial photographic image becomes distant and distorted through layers of color and texture. All of the subjects are blurred, both metaphorically and literally, giving the sense that the contents of the paintings are fleeting, unstable, and insignificant. Many of the images were caught in view of the camera by accident—as if they are trying to document something just before it slips out of view. The blur suggests a photographic indifference where everything in the image is given the same degree of emphasis. This effect also seems to put the subjects on a different visual plane than the surface of the canvas. Thus they feel preserved, like viewing an object through a window or a mirror behind the marks on the glass. The blur encapsulates the gradient; the spectrum; the scientific truth that natural objects are vague, boundless, and without essential properties. This approach to painting reflects my general concern about human identity as we witness modern scientific materialism clash with humanity’s ancient conception of itself as distinct from the natural world.

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: editorial selection

Ts a i l i n g

Ts e n g

www.tsailingtseng.com

Tsailing Tseng (b.1991 Taipei, Taiwan) received her MFA in the Painting and Drawing Department at School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018, and her BFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in 2016. Tseng is interested in the relationship between daily life and imagination. By letting the process lead the way, Tseng creates a world from what is between consciousness and dreams using image as her language of self-exploration.

My studio practice focuses on transforming my daily life experiences into visual form. I work to capture the process of transformation itself—I want not only to make images, but also to use a canvas as a space to think through the possible relationships between art and experience. Colors are the initial marks on my canvas. I try to find light within these colors, which becomes the main character for me to visualize an unknown yet familiar event of the painting. Images of landscapes, plants, animals, and humans are products of discovery within my painting process. I relinquish control over any specific narrative and allow it to happen spontaneously, whenever images collide.

The objective is not only to surprise viewers, but to surprise myself with these unexpected collisions.

Image:

Image:

Child oil on panel 75 x 75 cm

Everything Everything oil on canvas 50 x 55 inches

126

127

H a n n a h

C o s a c

N a i f y

www.hannahcosacnaify.com

This body of work, developed through a reductive process of painting, researched for specific emotions, helps in personal narratives, spaces and memories. I begin my paintings freely and expressively with an ambiguous concept, a sequence of color, or textured brush stroke. The paintings will slowly develop to a Surrealist and magical atmosphere with figures that play with scale and perspective depicting dreams or nightmares. There are maternal and sexual relationships that emerge as well as animals and mythological creatures depicted from my imagination that emphasize the ghostly presence and disconnect between the characters and their environment. The pieces have many layers which allow me to remove the applied paint to create new relationships through color and texture. There are various techniques that allow me to create endless textures, such as carving, scratching, sanding the paint itself and adding material to the paint such as canvas and sand.

The piece is “finished” when she feels as though she has created an atmosphere that reflects emotions from a specific and a personal experience.

A m a d e o

M o r e l o s

www.amadeomorelos.com

Morelos was born in Morelia, Mexico and gained a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016.

What brings meaning to one’s life? Is it beauty, divinity, weightlifting, supplements, flowers, muscles, crowns, thongs, tanning lotion, masculinity or spot lights. My work is an attempt to understand my relationship to others. It is my own search for belonging in a hyperdomesticated world. I look for depth within the surface of culture as a source for understanding more intrinsic human qualities. I am concerned with the relationship between the lust for admiration and the pursuit of empathy. My paintings often borrow from classical art, philosophy, mythology. I set together contemporary, mythical and autobiographical symbols. It is a pathetic attempt to relate my mundane and fleeting experience with the glorious spectacle of ancient myths.

Depictions from body building function as surrogates for the vulnerability that comes with putting oneself on display. Bright and contrasting color in combination with grotesque figures and contemporary artifacts create poetic and sensorial scenarios, and self-portraits intended to embody hopes, dreams, mental and emotional states. A “freak” sculpted by the desires of contemporary society. I wander within in the space between narcissism and the state of becoming.

Hannah Cosac Naify b1995 graduated from Rhode Island School of Design in 2017 with a BFA in painting.

Based is Brooklyn NY, she continues to develop her studio practice.

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: editorial selection

Image:

Image:

Late night bath oil on canvas 18 x 24 inches

Reading Hercules oil on canvas 46 x 36 inches

128

129

H a n n a h

C o s a c

N a i f y

www.hannahcosacnaify.com

This body of work, developed through a reductive process of painting, researched for specific emotions, helps in personal narratives, spaces and memories. I begin my paintings freely and expressively with an ambiguous concept, a sequence of color, or textured brush stroke. The paintings will slowly develop to a Surrealist and magical atmosphere with figures that play with scale and perspective depicting dreams or nightmares. There are maternal and sexual relationships that emerge as well as animals and mythological creatures depicted from my imagination that emphasize the ghostly presence and disconnect between the characters and their environment. The pieces have many layers which allow me to remove the applied paint to create new relationships through color and texture. There are various techniques that allow me to create endless textures, such as carving, scratching, sanding the paint itself and adding material to the paint such as canvas and sand.

The piece is “finished” when she feels as though she has created an atmosphere that reflects emotions from a specific and a personal experience.

A m a d e o

M o r e l o s

www.amadeomorelos.com

Morelos was born in Morelia, Mexico and gained a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016.

What brings meaning to one’s life? Is it beauty, divinity, weightlifting, supplements, flowers, muscles, crowns, thongs, tanning lotion, masculinity or spot lights. My work is an attempt to understand my relationship to others. It is my own search for belonging in a hyperdomesticated world. I look for depth within the surface of culture as a source for understanding more intrinsic human qualities. I am concerned with the relationship between the lust for admiration and the pursuit of empathy. My paintings often borrow from classical art, philosophy, mythology. I set together contemporary, mythical and autobiographical symbols. It is a pathetic attempt to relate my mundane and fleeting experience with the glorious spectacle of ancient myths.

Depictions from body building function as surrogates for the vulnerability that comes with putting oneself on display. Bright and contrasting color in combination with grotesque figures and contemporary artifacts create poetic and sensorial scenarios, and self-portraits intended to embody hopes, dreams, mental and emotional states. A “freak” sculpted by the desires of contemporary society. I wander within in the space between narcissism and the state of becoming.

Hannah Cosac Naify b1995 graduated from Rhode Island School of Design in 2017 with a BFA in painting.

Based is Brooklyn NY, she continues to develop her studio practice.

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: editorial selection

Image:

Image:

Late night bath oil on canvas 18 x 24 inches

Reading Hercules oil on canvas 46 x 36 inches

128

129

C h r i s t i a n

M i c k o v i c

www.cargocollective.com/christianmickovic

Christian Mickovic was born 1989 in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned a BFA in painting with a drawing emphasis from the Cleveland Institute of Art, and an MFA in painting from the Cranbrook Academy of Art. He maintains a studio practice in the Detroit area while exhibiting in cities as far as Portland and New York.

I intend for the paintings to embody a stare gone on too long, to deal with the middle distance and an anxious internal dialogue run together. Overall overanalyzed, even the spaces between points of focus are activated, resulting in an atmosphere just beginning to vibrate and sour.

Within these images I find an analogy for painting as a self-conflicted literary device, which cannot entirely activate its own history. Narrative is broken and timeliness are skewed leaving us with augmented and overwrought likenesses of propaganda posters, illustrated myth, album covers, and formulaic compositional tropes in painting.

Images and systems become lenses, used to sight a field of tumbling painterly approaches—these are attempts at alien images of our own wandering toward a greater whole unknown.

Image: Moonlander oil on canvas 46 x 49 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: editorial selection

130

B

C h e h a y e b

www.bchehayeb.com

B Chehayeb is an artist living and working in Boston, Massachusetts. She is currently finishing her MFA at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Chehayeb’s work consists of writings, paintings and installations. Her pieces belong to a wide range of collectors from coast to coast in the United States.

The works shown belong to a large 50-painting installation entitled ‘conversations in a crowded room, (50 poems)’. The concept behind the work is to illustrate the process of how things “carry on” in crowds or groups of people. I’m interested in trains of thought that are interrupted but somehow continue afterward. A poem while a song is playing.

Talking to someone in a room full of people. Writing something down before you forget it, or even more difficult, as it is happening. In the dream that continues after you wake up. I’m interested in skin and often reference the bodies of people around me. Living in the city, life is never noiseless or still but there seems to be a hum that orchestrates the chaos before it becomes chaos. This work is about the hum, the harmony.

Image: conozco oil paint 8 x 10 inches

131

C h r i s t i a n

M i c k o v i c

www.cargocollective.com/christianmickovic

Christian Mickovic was born 1989 in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned a BFA in painting with a drawing emphasis from the Cleveland Institute of Art, and an MFA in painting from the Cranbrook Academy of Art. He maintains a studio practice in the Detroit area while exhibiting in cities as far as Portland and New York.

I intend for the paintings to embody a stare gone on too long, to deal with the middle distance and an anxious internal dialogue run together. Overall overanalyzed, even the spaces between points of focus are activated, resulting in an atmosphere just beginning to vibrate and sour.

Within these images I find an analogy for painting as a self-conflicted literary device, which cannot entirely activate its own history. Narrative is broken and timeliness are skewed leaving us with augmented and overwrought likenesses of propaganda posters, illustrated myth, album covers, and formulaic compositional tropes in painting.

Images and systems become lenses, used to sight a field of tumbling painterly approaches—these are attempts at alien images of our own wandering toward a greater whole unknown.

Image: Moonlander oil on canvas 46 x 49 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: editorial selection

130

B

C h e h a y e b

www.bchehayeb.com

B Chehayeb is an artist living and working in Boston, Massachusetts. She is currently finishing her MFA at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Chehayeb’s work consists of writings, paintings and installations. Her pieces belong to a wide range of collectors from coast to coast in the United States.

The works shown belong to a large 50-painting installation entitled ‘conversations in a crowded room, (50 poems)’. The concept behind the work is to illustrate the process of how things “carry on” in crowds or groups of people. I’m interested in trains of thought that are interrupted but somehow continue afterward. A poem while a song is playing.

Talking to someone in a room full of people. Writing something down before you forget it, or even more difficult, as it is happening. In the dream that continues after you wake up. I’m interested in skin and often reference the bodies of people around me. Living in the city, life is never noiseless or still but there seems to be a hum that orchestrates the chaos before it becomes chaos. This work is about the hum, the harmony.

Image: conozco oil paint 8 x 10 inches

131

N i c k M c P h a i l

Nick McPhail is a painter and ceramist that lives and works in Los Angeles, California. His practice sits at the precipice of painting, drawing, sculpture, and other more functional objects. His paintings function as a contemporary exploration of history painting, and range in subject matter from immediate landscape based work to minimal line paintings. Most recently he held a solo exhibition ‘Pictures’ at Holiday in Los Angeles. In 2018 he completed a six week residency at 100 West Corsicana in Corsicana, TX, and in 2017 he was awarded a grant to attend a residency at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT. His work has previously been exhibited throughout Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Michigan.

McPhail is the founder of Half Ceramics and Half Gallery LA, both based out of his Los Angeles studio. Half Ceramics (founded 2015) is a design based ceramics studio focusing on handmade functional wares. Half Gallery LA (founded 2014) is an artist run exhibition project concentrated on showcasing emerging Los Angeles artists in a domestic setting.

My practice is based around everyday occurrences that reside in our periphery. In that sense I’m also interested in attention and focus, and where it is allocated. My work employs overlapping textures and disorienting compressions of space, with a focus on distorting the perception of foreground and background. I source imagery from iPhone photographs that I take on walks around my neighborhood, and I’m interested in how the phone screen mediates our interaction with the world, and how it controls attention and interpretation. I’m intrigued by how we navigate spaces, and how architecture restricts and commands our movement using stairs, walls, fences and entryways.

www.nickmcphail.com

Image: Driveway oil on canvas 18 x 24 inches

132

Image (left):

Image (right):

Step Housing oil on canvas 30 x 40 inches

Wall oil on canvas 16 x 20 inches

133

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: editorial selection

N i c k M c P h a i l

Nick McPhail is a painter and ceramist that lives and works in Los Angeles, California. His practice sits at the precipice of painting, drawing, sculpture, and other more functional objects. His paintings function as a contemporary exploration of history painting, and range in subject matter from immediate landscape based work to minimal line paintings. Most recently he held a solo exhibition ‘Pictures’ at Holiday in Los Angeles. In 2018 he completed a six week residency at 100 West Corsicana in Corsicana, TX, and in 2017 he was awarded a grant to attend a residency at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT. His work has previously been exhibited throughout Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Michigan.

McPhail is the founder of Half Ceramics and Half Gallery LA, both based out of his Los Angeles studio. Half Ceramics (founded 2015) is a design based ceramics studio focusing on handmade functional wares. Half Gallery LA (founded 2014) is an artist run exhibition project concentrated on showcasing emerging Los Angeles artists in a domestic setting.

My practice is based around everyday occurrences that reside in our periphery. In that sense I’m also interested in attention and focus, and where it is allocated. My work employs overlapping textures and disorienting compressions of space, with a focus on distorting the perception of foreground and background. I source imagery from iPhone photographs that I take on walks around my neighborhood, and I’m interested in how the phone screen mediates our interaction with the world, and how it controls attention and interpretation. I’m intrigued by how we navigate spaces, and how architecture restricts and commands our movement using stairs, walls, fences and entryways.

www.nickmcphail.com

Image: Driveway oil on canvas 18 x 24 inches

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Image (left):

Image (right):

Step Housing oil on canvas 30 x 40 inches

Wall oil on canvas 16 x 20 inches

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: editorial selection

L e e

J o h n s o n

www.leejohnsonstudio.com

Shopping as leisure activity; accumulation of goods as evidence of existence. Yet ultimately it is not the object that satisfies, but the elation that stems from desire, and the act of acquisition. This is the territory my recent paintings find themselves.

And there are things which are happening at midnight - that evocative and enticing transition from the day past to the day of tomorrow, the future you. It is a curious pastime, chasing midnight. And it is this space - the transition, the in between - that fascinates. In the paintings it is depicted through repetition, where one similar shape or object becomes—or is— another. And the joys and freedoms of wild swimming—of giving oneself to nature in seeming abandonment—are curtailed somewhat by the entrapping nature of the vegetation that surrounds the figure. Freedom becomes claustrophobic, there is no escape.

E m i

A v o r a

www.emiavora.com

Emi Avora (1979) is a Greek born, London trained and Singapore based artist. She has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad. Solo projects include the National Theatre of Greece Athens, South Square Arts Centre, Bradford, UK, The Apartment Gallery, Athens, Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, New York and Gallery Truebenbach, Cologne. She has participated in a number of group shows including Studio Voltaire, London, The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, The Whitechapel Gallery, London and the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki. Her work can be found in private as well as public collections in Europe and the USA, including The Wonderful Fund Collection UK and Marsh Collection, UK. She has also been an Elizabeth Greenshields recipient and her work has been in various publications including the New York Times, Future Now, Aesthetica Magazine and Defining the Contemporary, The Whitechapel in association with Sotheby’s.

Drawing subject matter from sketches and images from public and personal spaces with a focus on the interior and still life my works are entering a dialog with painting’s modernist historical canons as well as pondering on our ambiguous relationship to colonial narratives, exoticism and taste.

Sometimes dreamy, sometimes intense and with the use of light on the driving seat, the work allows space for invention, creating a gap between looking and making, between the real and the imaginary.

On a parallel reading,the very process of making opens up a platform to investigate painting’s power to transcend imagery by breaking it down to the basics of colour, shape, pattern and composition.

Image: Yoga Amongst the House Plants oil, oil pastel, charcoal on canvas 135 x 125 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: editorial selection

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Image: Crab Dinner acrylic on canvas 120 x 140 cm

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L e e

J o h n s o n

www.leejohnsonstudio.com

Shopping as leisure activity; accumulation of goods as evidence of existence. Yet ultimately it is not the object that satisfies, but the elation that stems from desire, and the act of acquisition. This is the territory my recent paintings find themselves.

And there are things which are happening at midnight - that evocative and enticing transition from the day past to the day of tomorrow, the future you. It is a curious pastime, chasing midnight. And it is this space - the transition, the in between - that fascinates. In the paintings it is depicted through repetition, where one similar shape or object becomes—or is— another. And the joys and freedoms of wild swimming—of giving oneself to nature in seeming abandonment—are curtailed somewhat by the entrapping nature of the vegetation that surrounds the figure. Freedom becomes claustrophobic, there is no escape.

E m i

A v o r a

www.emiavora.com

Emi Avora (1979) is a Greek born, London trained and Singapore based artist. She has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad. Solo projects include the National Theatre of Greece Athens, South Square Arts Centre, Bradford, UK, The Apartment Gallery, Athens, Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, New York and Gallery Truebenbach, Cologne. She has participated in a number of group shows including Studio Voltaire, London, The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, The Whitechapel Gallery, London and the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki. Her work can be found in private as well as public collections in Europe and the USA, including The Wonderful Fund Collection UK and Marsh Collection, UK. She has also been an Elizabeth Greenshields recipient and her work has been in various publications including the New York Times, Future Now, Aesthetica Magazine and Defining the Contemporary, The Whitechapel in association with Sotheby’s.

Drawing subject matter from sketches and images from public and personal spaces with a focus on the interior and still life my works are entering a dialog with painting’s modernist historical canons as well as pondering on our ambiguous relationship to colonial narratives, exoticism and taste.

Sometimes dreamy, sometimes intense and with the use of light on the driving seat, the work allows space for invention, creating a gap between looking and making, between the real and the imaginary.

On a parallel reading,the very process of making opens up a platform to investigate painting’s power to transcend imagery by breaking it down to the basics of colour, shape, pattern and composition.

Image: Yoga Amongst the House Plants oil, oil pastel, charcoal on canvas 135 x 125 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: editorial selection

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Image: Crab Dinner acrylic on canvas 120 x 140 cm

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Living within three distinct cultures, Ulusoy has experienced the history and traditions of both east and west. Her work is inspired by the clash of cultures that she embodies. Moving between digital artwork through her background as a graphic designer into the raw materiality of painting, her visual language takes fragments of information from the patterns of digital versus real matter that we experience in the periphery of our vision. Colliding onto the surface in a network of narratives.

Ç a ğ l a

U l u s o y

My paintings come to life and gain their “thingness” through a process of overlay and compositional changes, an evolution of sorts. As the surface receives layers of moments through this process, they ripen and accumulate lived experiences. Confronting me, to unravel an enigmatic narrative, that remains hidden in the process of the paintings. I structure spaces, abandoned and ambiguous. They do not belong to the familiar. Within these non-identifiable spaces, constructed with a repetition of generic patterns, objects imbued with a rich history begin to emerge throughout the surface. Creating dualities between the generic and the familiar translate into an unsettled feeling of both nostalgia and disorientation. These dualities are translated through heavy layers of paint conflicting with nonchalant and light brush marks. A complex and chaotic surface, with interacting and co-existing elements circulating and floating within the limits of the canvas. Until the whole finally finds its ultimate order and balance. The process is similar to the simple domestic act of setting up a table. Placing each element carefully on the table, deliberately. Expecting for the whole to find a balance as the elements add up and create a satisfying visual harmony. Thinking of “What will be the final touch that will finish the table?”

The table is no longer a place to eat, the food loses its importance. The elements remain nonspecific, ambiguous and in between. The same way I am floating in between different cultures. It is now, all about the process of embellishment.

Ulusoy completed her education with an MA in Visual Arts from Creapole ESDI in Paris. The same year in 2013, she moved to New York where she started attending classes and assisting influential American artists at the Art Students League of NY. She graduated from the Royal College of Art (MA painting) in June 2018 and now works from her studio based in Bermondsey, London.

www.caglaulusoy.com

Image:

Image:

Brittle Carapace oil on canvas 131 x 171 cm

The juggler oil on canvas 125 x 155 cm

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: editorial selection

Living within three distinct cultures, Ulusoy has experienced the history and traditions of both east and west. Her work is inspired by the clash of cultures that she embodies. Moving between digital artwork through her background as a graphic designer into the raw materiality of painting, her visual language takes fragments of information from the patterns of digital versus real matter that we experience in the periphery of our vision. Colliding onto the surface in a network of narratives.

Ç a ğ l a

U l u s o y

My paintings come to life and gain their “thingness” through a process of overlay and compositional changes, an evolution of sorts. As the surface receives layers of moments through this process, they ripen and accumulate lived experiences. Confronting me, to unravel an enigmatic narrative, that remains hidden in the process of the paintings. I structure spaces, abandoned and ambiguous. They do not belong to the familiar. Within these non-identifiable spaces, constructed with a repetition of generic patterns, objects imbued with a rich history begin to emerge throughout the surface. Creating dualities between the generic and the familiar translate into an unsettled feeling of both nostalgia and disorientation. These dualities are translated through heavy layers of paint conflicting with nonchalant and light brush marks. A complex and chaotic surface, with interacting and co-existing elements circulating and floating within the limits of the canvas. Until the whole finally finds its ultimate order and balance. The process is similar to the simple domestic act of setting up a table. Placing each element carefully on the table, deliberately. Expecting for the whole to find a balance as the elements add up and create a satisfying visual harmony. Thinking of “What will be the final touch that will finish the table?”

The table is no longer a place to eat, the food loses its importance. The elements remain nonspecific, ambiguous and in between. The same way I am floating in between different cultures. It is now, all about the process of embellishment.

Ulusoy completed her education with an MA in Visual Arts from Creapole ESDI in Paris. The same year in 2013, she moved to New York where she started attending classes and assisting influential American artists at the Art Students League of NY. She graduated from the Royal College of Art (MA painting) in June 2018 and now works from her studio based in Bermondsey, London.

www.caglaulusoy.com

Image:

Image:

Brittle Carapace oil on canvas 131 x 171 cm

The juggler oil on canvas 125 x 155 cm

136

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: editorial selection

Born in Çanakkale, Turkey in 1979, Serpil graduated from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Neş’e Erdok Studio in 2008. Her work has been exhibited and sold in Istanbul and across Europe since 2006. She has been living in London since April 2016.

Serpil’s latest works are structured around internal conflicts, defense mechanisms, the need for attention, and the daily struggles that border on the neurotic as the individual goes about their daily life; trying to shape it to suit the standards of the society in which they operate. Through her main character, Serpil underlines and draws attention to these little tensions despite life appearing to be on track for her subject. She places her characters in the centre of the scene, putting them in simulated environments with symbolic objects. This helps to reference the character’s story whilst strengthening their expressions and evoking empathy in the audience.

S e r p i l

M a v i

U s t u n

www.maviustun.com

Image:

Image:

Take Me Home Where I Belong oil on linen 122 x 91 cm

Life Is All About You oil on linen 76 x 101 cm

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: editorial selection

Born in Çanakkale, Turkey in 1979, Serpil graduated from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Neş’e Erdok Studio in 2008. Her work has been exhibited and sold in Istanbul and across Europe since 2006. She has been living in London since April 2016.

Serpil’s latest works are structured around internal conflicts, defense mechanisms, the need for attention, and the daily struggles that border on the neurotic as the individual goes about their daily life; trying to shape it to suit the standards of the society in which they operate. Through her main character, Serpil underlines and draws attention to these little tensions despite life appearing to be on track for her subject. She places her characters in the centre of the scene, putting them in simulated environments with symbolic objects. This helps to reference the character’s story whilst strengthening their expressions and evoking empathy in the audience.

S e r p i l

M a v i

U s t u n

www.maviustun.com

Image:

Image:

Take Me Home Where I Belong oil on linen 122 x 91 cm

Life Is All About You oil on linen 76 x 101 cm

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: editorial selection

Using an improvisational method, Ammon Rost’s abstract works open a portal to the subconscious and broadcast the hidden self onto canvas. By creating each composition in the moment, Rost allows his paintings to take on a life of their own. This practice, Rost says, “seeks the manifestation of a fragment of the unconscious world.” Contrast between raw brush strokes and careful lines conveys an elusive spirituality; the language of his bold forms and colors gives voice to primal emotion. The work is a meditation on romantic relationships, and a fascination with its temporality. How can an emotion that was center stage, fade to an unrecognizable trace? Rost paints symbols that hold sentiment, by abstracting and reshaping objects, numbers, places, names. Relishing and playing with the power certain imagery can trigger—are able to unpack a set of emotions, memories, very quickly. There is restraint not to overpaint, and spacing between each image to communicate essence. Rost’s work can be experienced as a perfect poem, repeatable, and always bitter sweet.

Ammon was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan where Buddhist philosophy ingrained in Japanese culture taught him the criticality of looking inward.

He received his BA at UCLA in painting and has exhibited in LA, New York, and Europe.

A m m o n

R o s t

www.instagram.com/ammonrost

Image:

Image:

I Watched You Disappear oil, flashe, spray paint on canvas 66 x 72 inches

Reverse Journey oil, flashe, spray paint on canvas 78 x 127 inches

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: editorial selection

Using an improvisational method, Ammon Rost’s abstract works open a portal to the subconscious and broadcast the hidden self onto canvas. By creating each composition in the moment, Rost allows his paintings to take on a life of their own. This practice, Rost says, “seeks the manifestation of a fragment of the unconscious world.” Contrast between raw brush strokes and careful lines conveys an elusive spirituality; the language of his bold forms and colors gives voice to primal emotion. The work is a meditation on romantic relationships, and a fascination with its temporality. How can an emotion that was center stage, fade to an unrecognizable trace? Rost paints symbols that hold sentiment, by abstracting and reshaping objects, numbers, places, names. Relishing and playing with the power certain imagery can trigger—are able to unpack a set of emotions, memories, very quickly. There is restraint not to overpaint, and spacing between each image to communicate essence. Rost’s work can be experienced as a perfect poem, repeatable, and always bitter sweet.

Ammon was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan where Buddhist philosophy ingrained in Japanese culture taught him the criticality of looking inward.

He received his BA at UCLA in painting and has exhibited in LA, New York, and Europe.

A m m o n

R o s t

www.instagram.com/ammonrost

Image:

Image:

I Watched You Disappear oil, flashe, spray paint on canvas 66 x 72 inches

Reverse Journey oil, flashe, spray paint on canvas 78 x 127 inches

140

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: editorial selection

Adrian Kay Wong observes the intimate and familiar by depicting daily life in isolated, encapsulated moments. Composed with a deliberate and measured simplicity, his paintings preserve a stillness that feels cohesive, sentimental, and familiar.

Wong often employs a visual alliteration that manifests itself in the basic construction of his shapes, use of repeated forms, and reoccurring motifs. By segmenting his surfaces into forms that are collectively representational, but independently functioning as abstract shapes, these modular elements explore interactions between primary subject and contextual elements. Wong’s puzzle-like arrangements are intensified by a flatness that subverts the usual perception of depth and visual hierarchy.

The paintings are distinctive in a sensitivity to the quieter, more mundane, and ordinary settings of the everyday. Wong attempts to discover and glorify the sentimentalities in these scenes often overlooked—the sedentary, the subtle, the unnoticed.

A d r i a n

K a y

W o n g

Wong was raised in the east San Francisco Bay area and now lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. after receiving his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013.

www.adriankaywong.com

Image:

Image:

I Could Hear the Lights Left On oil on paper 18 x 18 inches

Orange in Blue oil on paper 18 x 20 inches

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: editorial selection

Adrian Kay Wong observes the intimate and familiar by depicting daily life in isolated, encapsulated moments. Composed with a deliberate and measured simplicity, his paintings preserve a stillness that feels cohesive, sentimental, and familiar.

Wong often employs a visual alliteration that manifests itself in the basic construction of his shapes, use of repeated forms, and reoccurring motifs. By segmenting his surfaces into forms that are collectively representational, but independently functioning as abstract shapes, these modular elements explore interactions between primary subject and contextual elements. Wong’s puzzle-like arrangements are intensified by a flatness that subverts the usual perception of depth and visual hierarchy.

The paintings are distinctive in a sensitivity to the quieter, more mundane, and ordinary settings of the everyday. Wong attempts to discover and glorify the sentimentalities in these scenes often overlooked—the sedentary, the subtle, the unnoticed.

A d r i a n

K a y

W o n g

Wong was raised in the east San Francisco Bay area and now lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. after receiving his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013.

www.adriankaywong.com

Image:

Image:

I Could Hear the Lights Left On oil on paper 18 x 18 inches

Orange in Blue oil on paper 18 x 20 inches

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M i l e s

D e b a s

www.milesdebas.me

A n e t a

K a j z e r

www.anetakajzer.de

In Aneta Kajzer’s work, images of corporeality, sexuality, embarrassment and failure, as well as their associated emotional states, exist alongside intuitive formal decisions, all of which inform each other. Abstraction and figuration are clearly interwoven in her paintings. Both the reflection on painting and the reflection on one’s own existence—as a body, as a woman—are treated with humour in Aneta Kajzer’s images.

Born in France and raised in coastal Massachusetts, Miles Debas grew up among practitioners of Hindu meditation while studying with South Boston Jesuits. The disjunction of these influences sparked the development of a skeptical humor and outsider’s sensibility that imbue his work. His paintings are executed on raw fabrics, dyed with ink and painted over, often extracting collage elements from other works-inprogress. The works are vivid fabrications that diagram the interaction of discordant ideas and explore his relationship with the structures and systems that he inhabits.

Aneta Kajzer (born 1989 in Katowice, Poland) studied Fine Arts at Kunsthochschule Mainz (Germany) under Prof. Anne Berning, Prof. Shannon Bool and Prof. John Skoog, where she earned her Master’s degree with distinction. In 2017 she received the Winsor & Newton Scholarship for Painting, granting her a six-month residency and solo exhibition at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. In 2018 she participated in the Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt, a postgraduate program for emerging woman artists. In 2019 she received the Stiftung Kunstfonds Scholarship and had a solo exhibition at CONRADS Gallery in Düsseldorf. She lives and works in Berlin.

Image: Image: I look up to U ink, acrylic, collage, on muslin 32 x 24 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: editorial selection

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Old White Man oil and acrylic on canvas 97 x 95 cm courtesy CONRADS Düsseldorf

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M i l e s

D e b a s

www.milesdebas.me

A n e t a

K a j z e r

www.anetakajzer.de

In Aneta Kajzer’s work, images of corporeality, sexuality, embarrassment and failure, as well as their associated emotional states, exist alongside intuitive formal decisions, all of which inform each other. Abstraction and figuration are clearly interwoven in her paintings. Both the reflection on painting and the reflection on one’s own existence—as a body, as a woman—are treated with humour in Aneta Kajzer’s images.

Born in France and raised in coastal Massachusetts, Miles Debas grew up among practitioners of Hindu meditation while studying with South Boston Jesuits. The disjunction of these influences sparked the development of a skeptical humor and outsider’s sensibility that imbue his work. His paintings are executed on raw fabrics, dyed with ink and painted over, often extracting collage elements from other works-inprogress. The works are vivid fabrications that diagram the interaction of discordant ideas and explore his relationship with the structures and systems that he inhabits.

Aneta Kajzer (born 1989 in Katowice, Poland) studied Fine Arts at Kunsthochschule Mainz (Germany) under Prof. Anne Berning, Prof. Shannon Bool and Prof. John Skoog, where she earned her Master’s degree with distinction. In 2017 she received the Winsor & Newton Scholarship for Painting, granting her a six-month residency and solo exhibition at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. In 2018 she participated in the Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt, a postgraduate program for emerging woman artists. In 2019 she received the Stiftung Kunstfonds Scholarship and had a solo exhibition at CONRADS Gallery in Düsseldorf. She lives and works in Berlin.

Image: Image: I look up to U ink, acrylic, collage, on muslin 32 x 24 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: editorial selection

144

Old White Man oil and acrylic on canvas 97 x 95 cm courtesy CONRADS Düsseldorf

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My work is about storytelling. I am fascinated with performance and mannerisms which can provide a whole backstory to a person they portrayed. I believe my paintings are familiar people for my audience. They see someone they know, someone whose life they are able to add on to.

At the moment I am representing women in similar age ranges and whose lives center around the everyday living of a suburb. They appear as the quotidian details of middle class suburbs.

They can appear fed up or bored but I think it is more of a sense of importance and stoicism.

I also think there is an exploration of pride. I am preoccupied with the everyday and the worth that comes from living an ordinary life. Painting beautifully the mundane heroism is a large aspect of my work.

My work articulates my fascination with taste and expressing one’s social status and personal pride through material things. For these women, the ones that try the hardest to appear superior are the ones most uncomfortable with their lack of taste. This duality to their identity, of inferiority and superiority, is exaggerated by the medium of painting, where time and oils add prestige to their kitsch.

M a d e l e i n e

P f u l l

My process involves creating characters through dressing up. I source the clothes, the wigs, the jewellery and the setting. I dress myself and age myself with makeup to take reference photos.

This has become an integral part of my process. I am exploring my many potential futures, which terrify and fascinate me. As the future becomes more uncertain it is hard for me to picture myself as the middle-aged women I see with the same seemingly banal worries when it feels like the comfortable world, as we know it, is going to end.

www.madeleinepfull.com

Image:

Image:

Gossipers oil on canvas 60 x 72 inches

Sisters oil on linen 60 x 72 inches

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: editorial selection

My work is about storytelling. I am fascinated with performance and mannerisms which can provide a whole backstory to a person they portrayed. I believe my paintings are familiar people for my audience. They see someone they know, someone whose life they are able to add on to.

At the moment I am representing women in similar age ranges and whose lives center around the everyday living of a suburb. They appear as the quotidian details of middle class suburbs.

They can appear fed up or bored but I think it is more of a sense of importance and stoicism.

I also think there is an exploration of pride. I am preoccupied with the everyday and the worth that comes from living an ordinary life. Painting beautifully the mundane heroism is a large aspect of my work.

My work articulates my fascination with taste and expressing one’s social status and personal pride through material things. For these women, the ones that try the hardest to appear superior are the ones most uncomfortable with their lack of taste. This duality to their identity, of inferiority and superiority, is exaggerated by the medium of painting, where time and oils add prestige to their kitsch.

M a d e l e i n e

P f u l l

My process involves creating characters through dressing up. I source the clothes, the wigs, the jewellery and the setting. I dress myself and age myself with makeup to take reference photos.

This has become an integral part of my process. I am exploring my many potential futures, which terrify and fascinate me. As the future becomes more uncertain it is hard for me to picture myself as the middle-aged women I see with the same seemingly banal worries when it feels like the comfortable world, as we know it, is going to end.

www.madeleinepfull.com

Image:

Image:

Gossipers oil on canvas 60 x 72 inches

Sisters oil on linen 60 x 72 inches

146

147

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 12: editorial selection

We are looking for more artists to publish and promote If you would like your work to be featured in our upcoming issues, please find out more details on how to apply to be considered.

See p. 11 or visit our website: www.artmazemag.com We have an open call for art for the next print issue which provides publishing opportunities, as well as the ongoing open call for online blog.

For any questions, please contact us at info@artmazemag.com

149

We are looking for more artists to publish and promote If you would like your work to be featured in our upcoming issues, please find out more details on how to apply to be considered.

See p. 11 or visit our website: www.artmazemag.com We have an open call for art for the next print issue which provides publishing opportunities, as well as the ongoing open call for online blog.

For any questions, please contact us at info@artmazemag.com

149