Issue 19 by artmazemag

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Featured image: Elise Lafontaine Pendentif oil, acrylic and lead pencil on wood-mounted canvas 51 x 41cm more on p. 85

ArtMaze 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.

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ArtMaze Magazine is published five times per year and announces a competition-based curated call for art for each issue every 2-3 months. We invite guest curators from internationally renowned galleries as well as independent art professionals to select works for each issue’s curated section of works.

We accept works to be sent to us for consideration only via our annual competition-based calls for art for print publications. Please visit our website for more details: www.artmazemag.com/call-for-art/ or see p. 11

ArtMaze print editions offer its readers a continuous art experience which includes interviews with our guest curators and featured artists from recently published issues; as well as our carefully curated selections of artworks which offer an insight to the inspiring progress and success of an extraordinary amount of emerging contemporary artists from all over the world who have been applying to our competition-based curated calls. Artists are welcome to submit works in any medium: painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, printmaking, photography, textile, installation, digital, film, performance, any mixed media etc. Artists or any art organisations on behalf of artists from all countries are welcome to submit.

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FRONT COVER: Rebecca Munce Funeral oil pastel etching 20 x 16 inches more on p. 84 BACK COVER: ASMA Still Life pyrography drawing on vintage leather jacket, bronze cast with oil paint size variable more on p. 48-65

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interviewed

call for art

A way of b e i ng in t he wor ld: A g ne s e G uido . . . . . . . . . . ........................................................... ................ 14

Anniversar y E d itio n 20 .............................................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1

Mar y He r b e r t ’s p a stel- h aze d top olog y of the u nc on s c iou s m i nd ....................................................................... 32 T he bu t te r f ly in t he mud: i n c onve rs at ion w it h ASM A ............................................... ............... 48 B ig art c ru she s : In c onve rs at ion w it h t he P rojet Pangée cu rators ............................ 66

Contents

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curated selection of works

editorial selection of works

Virgi n i a Paradi s e ...................................................................76 L au re nc e Ve ri ..........................................................................78 Magdalena Kreinecker .............................................................80 G ab riel Ros a s Ale m án .............................................. ................8 1 M ikaela Kau t zky .....................................................................8 2 Reb e c c a Mu nc e ........................................................................8 4 E lis e L a font ai ne ......................................................................8 5 Je s sic a Willi am s ......................................................................8 6 Je s sic a D z ielin sk i .................................................... ................8 8 Olga Ab eleva . ........................................................... ................89 A ndrew Adolphu s G i st .............................................................90 Kaley F lowe rs ..........................................................................91 M a gdale na Kar p i ńska .............................................. ................92 S oph i a Belk in ..........................................................................93 Julia Za st ava . .......................................................... ................94 Jane Mc Ke n z ie .........................................................................95 S h ana S h arp . . .......................................................... ................9 6 Steve n R iddle ..........................................................................98 Brig Wang . . . . . ........................................................... ................99 S ae Ye ou n Hwang ...................................................................10 0 Trevor Bai rd ........................................................... ...............101 Ros an na G ra f .........................................................................102 L aï la Me st ari . . ........................................................................103 Bet h Frey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 4 Kare n Bar b ou r .......................................................................106 Lacey Hall ...............................................................................107 Luc Parad is . . . ........................................................... ..............108 Yuko S oi . . . . . . . . ........................................................... ..............109 M anuel Bis s on ......................................................... ...............110

Lian Zh ang .............................................................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 14 Fabiana Martí nez Peláez ...................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 16 Kayla Taylo r ........................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1 8 Victo r B .P. B engtsso n .............................................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2 0 Vinna B egin ........................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2 1 Stephen Deffet ....................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2 2 Rachelle B ussières ................................................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 23 Will iam S ch aeuble ................................................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 24 Lola Katan .............................................................. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2 5 Antho ny Pad illa ...................................................... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2 6 Ani Gu rashvil i ........................................................ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2 8

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Featured image: Rebecca Munce Duel with a witness oil pastel etching 20 x 16 inches more on p. 84

from the editor I would like to start this editorial by thanking our community for its tremendous support during this challenging year and the subsequent audience growth ArtMaze has experienced – this was an incredible feedback for us to receive in the midst of such global events. Your enthusiasm for ArtMaze means a lot to us! Cheers to this new Autumn Edition 19! We want to thank our team of guest curators from Projet Pangée Gallery (Montreal, Canada): Julie Côté, founder and head curator; Sophie Latouche and Michelle Bui, gallery associates, for selecting an array of extraordinary artworks for this Edition’s curated section (p. 74-111). Julie, Sophie and Michelle strongly believe in their unified teamwork and highlight how many facets of their qualities, skills and experiences come into play when selecting works for a show or sculpting the gallery’s curatorial vision that depends on the harmonious nature of this powerhouse trio. We chat with Julie (p. 66-73), founder of the gallery about how their venture evolved and how team effort has helped strengthen Projet Pangée platform and made it stand out in today’s multiplicity of contemporary art projects worldwide. It is a great pleasure to receive so many thoughtful applications for our print editions and we never cease to feel amazed how many remarkable makers are yet to be discovered and how we are honoured to be encountering new intriguing work through our open calls. Our Editorial selection (p. 112-128) showcases striking new finds of makers we have not come across before, and newly developed work of some makers who have been previously published. We enjoy helping further the practices of our previously published artists and are honoured to offer our readers the opportunity to take a deeper and more candid view into the work of many, and in particular, in this edition, Agnese Guido, our Issue 17 cover artist, artist duo ASMA and Mary Herbert (p. 14-65). Agnese’s poetic animated objects explore human feelings through playfully depicted tragicomic narratives, which have also taken a new direction by expanding into a ceramic medium apart from her brilliantly mastered skill of working with gouache and cotton paper. Matias and Hanya, working behind their branded duo ASMA, share a detailed insight into their approach of making and constantly looking beyond the apparent limits of all things, which makes them drawn to, in their words, “how this transcendence occurs by creating interrelations”. The intricacy of their sophisticated ideas leads them to create a portfolio of works from a broad range of materials, which require many skills and, of course, harmonious team work. Mary Herbert’s hazy dreamlike pastel drawings explore ideas of fluidity and plurality of images and symbols and, as she describes: “how one thing can embody several opposing forces at once”. Mary suggests that the depiction of otherworldly and mythic narratives may be a reaction to the current moment that we find ourselves in the midst of, in the UK and globally. Our upcoming 20th Anniversary Edition’s curated selection will be led by Zoe Fisher who is the founder and curator at @zoefisherprojects and co-owner and director of Fisher Parrish Gallery, NYC. Zoe has been recently paving the way with her own new venture @zoefisherprojects after successfully finalising her profound journey within the Fisher Parrish Gallery that has compiled dazzling shows with many prominent emerging artists that we admire. We applaud Zoe’s courage and determination in continuing to nurture and showcase emerging talent that we strive to support so eagerly through our platform as well. We look forward to seeing the development of Zoe’s new and exciting endeavour and how our Anniversary edition will shape up with her generous input! If you are interested in submitting your work and appearing on ArtMaze’s pages, please feel free to check out our website for more information (www.artmazemag.com) and hopefully we’ll be able to work together in the near future.

Yours truly, Editor and Founder Maria Zemtsova

p.74-111 curated selection of works

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p.112-128 editorial selection of works

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Anniversary Edition 20

call for art DEADLINE: October 15th, 2020 Guest Curator: Zoe Fisher founder and curator at @zoefisherprojects and co-owner and director of Fisher Parrish Gallery, NYC

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: painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, printmaking, photography, textile, installation, digital, performance, film, any mixed media etc. DISTRIBUTION: ArtMaze Magazine is an independent international publication which is distributed worldwide via select book shops, and via our 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 Please visit our website for more information: www.artmazemag.com or contact us at info@artmazemag.com

Featured image: William Schaeuble Best In Show oil on canvas 24 x 18 inches more on p. 124

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erviewed:

Agnese Guido Mary Herbert ASMA Projet Pangée Gallery

www.agneseguido.com

A way of being in the world: Agnese Guido The whimsical and weird world conjured up in Italian artist Agnese Guido is both an escape from and product of the real world around us. It is populated by a cast of anthropomorphic characters who animate pop culture icons, old technology hardware and everyday objects. These characters embody anxiety, media fatigue, loneliness, hallucinations and other projections of contemporary life. But they’re also just inanimate objects with complex, often comedic, and involved lives. In trying to piece together the cryptic narrative scenes in Agnese’s paintings, we leave our world behind and become lost in another where cars wear lipstick and coffee pots sing, where buildings have eyes and leaves smoke cigarettes. In this world time has its own fluid logic and the past and future coexist. Like a dream, Agnese’s art takes us on a journey that is at once confusing, exhilarating, nostalgic and often just plain weird. Storytelling is important to Agnese. Each artwork conjures up a dense and darkly humorous but often illusive narrative. Using featureless brushstrokes and flat gradient backgrounds, Agnese’s compositions are deceptively naïve. She draws reference from a mix of high and low brow sources—the surrealist and symbolist art movements and cartoons. “In cartoons especially the characters have a strong expressiveness that is very essential and straightforward, and so empathetic”, she says. Agnese’s visual language is highly stylised and symbolic, using the hybrid characters as poetic symbols with which to tell perplexing and irreverent tales. But while communicating the story is important, Agnese leaves interpretation open and up to us to decide for ourselves. Agnese studied at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, and lives and works in Milan. She has taken part in several group exhibitions and is currently working with Federico Luger Gallery in Milan.

interview by Layla Leiman

Featured image: Agnese Guido The desperate stupid ghosts of the city gouache on cotton paper 80 x 65 cm

portrait by Nicola Serra

AMM: Hi Agnese! To start us off, can you share an early memory related to making art or creativity and tell us a little about how you decided to be an artist? AG: I remember that as a child I drew a lot and it was a means of communication and a refuge for my excessive shyness, I preferred drawing to doing any other social or sporting activity. I loved to immerse myself in any painting found in someone’s home to enter another world by observing its brush strokes and shades. Then with my family I visited the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and there I think I decided to become a painter. Obviously growing up I had many different influences: Japanese cartoons, comics, art studied at school... over time I absorbed a lot but certainly the initial approach was and is the need to create a world, to communicate with my own language, a way of being in the world. AMM: How has your approach to your work and career developed and changed over the years? What have been some of the things that have influenced you? AG: To attend the Academy of Fine Arts I moved to Milan from southern Italy, where I had the opportunity to see many exhibitions and compare myself with other artists, and I also started exhibiting and working. I learned how others see what you do, how your work is received and I also understood what I didn’t want to do; even not wanting these things affect you but they are part of the creative process itself and it’s good. You understand that things are working when even painting for yourself you welcome the outside world into your work in a natural and spontaneous way and it also becomes a necessity to do so. I experimented a lot as an artist, but only when I stopped going too far and started joking about it did it become much more interesting. AMM: In your work the divide between objects and humans is blurred and malleable. Can you tell us more about this and what interests you about this in-between anthropomorphic space? AG: Animated objects are very poetic to me, they stand between the dramatic and the comic, they make me think of stories of Japanese spirits and old haunted objects. I have a strange pleasure in painting them, it is like a kind of hypersensitivity because, in reality I am talking about human feelings, and the objects give me that detachment and at the same time the possibility of adding other meanings that derive from the bond we have with those certain objects or to the function they have. I can create further meanings in the image because a humanised object belongs to two worlds; painting a yawning coffee pot is not like painting a yawning man

“Animated objects are very poetic to me, they stand between the dramatic and the comic, they make me think of stories of Japanese spirits and old haunted objects. I have a strange pleasure in painting them, it is like a kind of hypersensitivity because, in reality I am talking about human feelings, and the objects give me that detachment and at the same time the possibility of adding other meanings that derive from the bond we have with those certain objects or to the function they have. I can create further meanings in the image because a humanised object belongs to two worlds; painting a yawning coffee pot is not like painting a yawning man making coffee, it’s more poetic, more fun; it says exactly what I mean.” - Agnese Guido

making coffee, it’s more poetic, more fun; it says exactly what I mean. AMM: How would you describe the world that is depicted in your art? AG: Paradoxically realistic. But also tender. AMM: Who are the characters that populate your work? AG: In a way they are anyone, and by anyone I also mean anything, like an employee, a leaf, aliens, body parts, microbes, ghosts, thoughts, words, leftovers, vices, good or bad intentions, feelings. Everything can tell about itself. AMM: Your work mashes together iconography from popular culture and mythology, dreams, feminism and technological nostalgia. What do these recurring motifs represent? AG: It’s like a mille-feuille cake, like society. I couldn’t help but talk about it, what I see enters my work, I’m not interested in pursuing abstract ideas. I like to observe, a bit like in William Hogarth’s art, or Goya’s Los caprichos series. AMM: You’ve recently introduced ceramics into your practice—adapting some of your recurring characters in three-dimensional form or as a surface on which to paint. Where did the initial impulse to work in this medium come from, what has it brought to your work as a whole? AG: In the past I was not interested in sculpture at all perhaps because I was still looking for my “pictorial” identity. Recently, perhaps because I am in a very creative period, I felt the need to expand into the third dimension. In fact, the beauty of making ceramics is that I get a three-dimensional shape to paint on and I can go into it to give it depth by adding a story within the story. I usually decide first which shape to model, and I don’t know immediately what will happen next, that shape can be transformed by painting on it. I also like the fact that, not being an expert sculptor, the shapes I create have a naïve and childlike quality, and I don’t try to change it. And it’s even more fun to get your hands dirty! AMM: What other mediums do you work in and why? AG: Working with tempera and gouache, the canvas does not seem to me a suitable support, it does not render as the cotton paper does, which enhances its depth and velvety qualities. I used wood instead, I prepare the board with chalk and it works very well especially with egg tempera, I work on it in layers meticulously and it is very satisfying. I recently tried coloured pencils as well, and I think I will again, but still I always prefer gouache on paper.

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 19, Interviewed: Agnese Guido

AMM: You use the hashtag #storytellingpottery on your Instagram account, and narrative is evidently an important part of your work. Please tell us more about this.

and ancient culture in contrast to the modern design of the rainbow on the shirt, or it’s probably just a boy studying, merging and growing in the ruins.

AG: It’s true, but then in life I’m not a big talker and I don’t tell many stories, but I believe in the importance of doing it and knowing how to do it, without the stories it seems to me that nothing remains. Then perhaps in my work there is not only that, I mean, I tell of the small situations of ordinary life that no one would notice or to which we are all so accustomed, but above all I want to reveal what is underneath, what the character lives, what he feels, the subterranean mood. And I think I can because I have often had people say to me “this is how it feels” or “that’s me”, and it’s very nice to me. I like to tell what we are or what we could be.

Surely De Chirico is one of my favourite artists, together with Magritte and much of Surrealism, I am interested in their connection with the psyche, the unconscious and the game, irreverence and mystery. I also love artists like Alfred Kubin, Louis Wain and Boris Artzybasheff who are considered more illustrators than painters, but have created an amazing and unique world in a personal and intimate way. I really like the pictorial style, detailed and meticulous, of medieval painting, even

AMM: There is a sinister undercurrent in your work that is off-set by a playfulness and dark humour. Please tell us more about this duality and finding the right note with dark humour? AG: It’s great when art or mythology has a sense of humour, you can feel immediate involvement that transcends time. I think life itself is tragicomic, and I love that it is. I believe that the sinister aspect in my work is not deliberately researched or measured, it is more a natural way of seeing things, like a lens through which I see the world. AMM: Let’s chat about your visual language, which seems to borrow from the world of cartoons and illustration. How did you find or develop this style of working? What is your intention behind your stripped back, deliberately naive and low-fi aesthetic? AG: I think it is related to the fact that as a child I copied my favourite cartoons and comics and I still love this language because it is direct and raw. They were mostly Japanese manga or anime or Disney comics. In cartoons especially the characters have a strong expressiveness that is very essential and straightforward, so necessary and so empathetic and that’s what interests me. I work very spontaneously and I am not so interested in aesthetics or style, if I need to draw a shoe in the painting, then I draw a shoe. I am interested in telling stories, revealing mechanisms and feelings, drawing or painting are a means to do it, and I do it the way I am able to. AMM: Your painting Ruines exquises with a figure standing atop a pile of bones with hands on hips mirroring the scroll of the Ionic column set against a sombre gradient background is like a homage to de Chirico’s The Disquieting Muses. Do you draw reference from any specific art movements? How do you orientate your work? AG: That painting of mine is particularly mysterious and evocative. I wanted to represent something that evokes the past

“It’s great when art or mythology has a sense of humour, you can feel immediate involvement that transcends time. I think life itself is tragicomic, and I love that it is. I believe that the sinister aspect in my work is not deliberately researched or measured, it is more a natural way of seeing things, like a lens through which I see the world.” - Agnese Guido the crudest one in which the figuration is more stereotyped and static. Painters such as Giotto, Cimabue, Paolo Uccello or the Flemish, especially Bruegel, for his direct way of representing abstract ideas. In his painting Flemish Proverbs he literally represents hundreds of sayings and idioms in a figurative sense, a grotesque scene in which everyone seems crazy, but in reality it seems much more realistic than others. A little as if thoughts and instincts materialize. It is a great inspiration to me. I really like the German Neue Sachlichkeit too, it’s so starkly realistic.

AMM: Outdated technology often features in your work. Is this a form of nostalgia? In a recent interview you gave, I read that you are trying “to recreate a personal and generational archaeological site.” Can you tell us more about what you mean? AG: It is something personal, but not only. All those of my generation almost fondly recognize an old Sony Walkman or a VHS, they are objects related to childhood and adolescence and necessarily have something emotional, connected to memories. It is nice to resurrect the ancestors of technology, they create a map of emotional memories in your head, because there is a connection between us and our objects and that bond is the subject I am talking about. AMM: What is your process of researching and working? Do you work from references and make sketches before starting a painting or just dive right in? AG: Internet is often a great starting point for finding inspiration and images, or sometimes ideas come from chatting with friends or just looking at objects on the table or around my studio, or something that happens to me during the day or that I read. Sometimes I start several drawings together starting from a background, like a sky, a flat field, or some hills or a room, a city, and I wait for the right idea, for something to happen; other times I immediately decide what to represent and prepare a pencil sketch. In short, it is often an unknown, but that is the most fun aspect: I proceed a bit like an investigator in search of clues, and when I solve the case it has something revealing and satisfying. AMM: What ideas or themes are you currently exploring in your work? AG: In this period I am working on a large drawing on paper depicting a map, a large geographical and emotional map of late capitalism. Who knows how it will turn out. At the same time I continue to make ceramics, some related to the map, others not, and I continue to work on other smaller paintings. AMM: Have you been working during the pandemic? What effects do you think this radical time has had on you creatively? AG: Yes, I worked a lot during the pandemic, isolation and tranquillity were favourable to me but obviously the events influence the issues of work. This is not necessarily bad or good. Creativity is always there! Fortunately my loved ones and I have been healthy and this is important.

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 19, Interviewed: Agnese Guido

AMM: Do you anticipate any lasting changes to the art world or broader society as a result of the pandemic? AG: In Italy following and during this pandemic it was used to say “everything will be fine” but most likely “everything will be the same”. I don’t know what will happen. Surely there are missing contact, the sharing and the tranquillity in human relations. Everything now seems to be pervaded by anxiety and this is very sad, the world before covid-19 and sanitizing gels seems something so exotic. AMM: Do you have any daily rituals or routines that feed you creatively? AG: I don’t think I have any rituals, but I’m a person of habit. I like to wake up early in the morning, have breakfast at the bar and listen to music or podcasts in the studio. Every Sunday I take a tour of the flea market, by now I have filled my studio with strange old objects and funny figurines! AMM: When you’re not making art what are some of the things you enjoy doing? AG: Some days of the week I teach art to children, it is very interesting and stimulating to understand how you can teach art and creativity to others, because it is something that has to do with freedom and rules at the same time. In my free time I like going out with friends, watching movies, visiting exhibitions, playing with my cat or taking care of my plants. AMM: Do you have any projects or exhibitions coming up? What’s next for you? AG: In October I will have an exhibition in a gallery in Venice along with three other Italian artists, and there are other things planned but we will see how it goes with this health emergency. It’s a complicated time to make plans, so I’ll keep focusing on my work.

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 19, Interviewed: Agnese Guido

Featured image (p.18):

Featured image (p.20-21):

Agnese Guido Shakespearean experience gouache on cotton paper 24 x 31 cm

Agnese Guido It’s hard to put on makeup in the car gouache on cotton paper 23 x 31 cm

Agnese Guido Ruines exquises gouache on cotton paper 26.8 x 35 cm

Agnese Guido Aspettare, quando non c’è più nemmeno il tempo gouache on cotton paper 24 x 31 cm

Agnese Guido Solo ingrosso a chinatown gouache on cotton paper 31 x 24 cm

Agnese Guido Summer is gone, spider prevail gouache on cotton paper 31 x 24 cm

Agnese Guido Painting, progress and tea time ceramic 20.5 x 26 x 0.5 cm

Agnese Guido Virus ceramic 27.5 x 20.5 x 0.5 cm

Agnese Guido Sex in the city with despair gouache on cotton paper 31 x 24 cm

Agnese Guido The disaster ashtray gouache on cotton paper 31 x 24 cm

Agnese Guido Sore notes egg tempera on wood 40 x 60 cm

Agnese Guido Sunset gouache on paper 18 x 26 cm

www.mary-herbert.com

Mary Herbert’s pastel-hazed topology of the unconscious mind Mary Herbert’s art exists as a sustained engagement with and exploration of that which is elusive and shifting—memory, dreams, indefinable sensations, the terra incognita of the unconscious mind. Working primarily with pastels on paper, the London-based artist creates visions that appear both intimate and distant, familiar and uncanny, solid and spectral. Landscapes and figures drift just beyond the reach of conscious seeing, like half-remembered faces surfacing in the hazy realm between sleeping and waking. Mary’s monochrome drawings evoke the quality of blurred photographs taken on black and white film, recalling her early work during her undergraduate degree which focused on the materiality of photographs. In Mary’s current work, informed by her postgraduate studies at the Royal Drawing School, this fascination with photo-documentation has evolved into a scepticism of the purported capacity of the photograph to deliver an objective vision of reality. Her smoky greyscale images are, like photographs, composed of light and shadow, and yet, rather than attempting to convey a photographic reality, the blurred landscapes and subjects instead attest to the unreliability of that represented reality. The concepts underlying Mary’s practice of image-making converge in her colour pastel drawings. Distant mountains loom over seascapes and forests; plants and animals appear to radiate with an ethereal, phosphorescent glow; figures and faces emerge only to dissolve at the threshold of clear perceptibility. Cool, muted hues and swathes of shadowy charcoal are disrupted by bright flares of vivid reds and oranges, like a dusky dreamscape giving way to moments of startling clarity. Mary’s images gesture towards the aspect of Jungian psychology which theorises the existence of a “collective unconscious”, a kind of memory vault in the unconscious mind connected to ancient, ancestral, universal knowledge. The pastel haze of Mary’s drawings offers a vision of this known unknown, glimpsed through the fog of memory, or through the hazy veil between the conscious and the unconscious.

interview by Rebecca Irwin

Featured image: Mary Herbert Another Sea soft pastel on paper 14 x 25 cm

AMM: Hi Mary! What have been some key moments that led to you pursuing art as a career? Have you always known you wanted to be an artist? MH: It’s been a slow coming to terms I think rather than something I have always known. I think a lot of artists say a similar thing, but it’s something I can’t not do. I was lucky to have a home environment growing up which encouraged play in all its forms, and art was one of the places where I could explore ideas and feelings and ask the questions that were rattling around in my head without needing to give concrete answers, and so I think my curiosity ended up being funnelled into it. It’s taken me a long time to grow in confidence but there have been a couple of moments in my life which gave perspective on it and pushed me to do it, usually involving a loss of some kind.

“Things which symbolise fear don’t always make us fearful in dreams, and this idea of the fluidity or plurality of images and symbols fascinates me—how one thing can embody several opposing forces at once.” - Mary Herbert

AMM: Between your undergraduate studies in fine art and your postgraduate focus on drawing, how have your work and your practice evolved? MH: My foundation and undergraduate courses were really expansive in terms of using everything as material for work, and my practice at Goldsmiths was quite sculptural, although the source material was usually photographic imagery. I spent a few years after graduating working in museum and gallery education, where I became interested in the therapeutic potential of art, and learned a lot from making work with those who don’t necessarily identify as artists—including children. One of the discoveries through this work was reconnecting to drawing, and seeing myself as someone who could do it. I think there is a myth that we are told about drawing in school which is pretty toxic and which

I have experienced a lot in working with people. There is a fear that we’ll do it wrong and that if we can’t represent reality as photographically as possible, that we can’t draw. I think non-verbal communication is undervalued in our education system and this excludes many people and forms of learning. Doing a postgraduate course in drawing was a decision to go back to square one in a way, and practise making work with the simplest materials possible, as well as focusing on putting the hours into this one practice. I think all of these experiences have formed the work I’m making now, but drawing definitely feels like the most natural way in to making work for me. AMM: Can you tell us about some of the materials you use in your work? Do you find any particular advantages or disadvantages related to your chosen medium? MH: At the moment, I’m mainly working on paper, and I’ve got a bit addicted to a particular kind of watercolour paper. Surface is really important, not that it has to be new and pristine—I love working on found bits and pieces and in fact the more precious the surface and time invested in preparing it, the more blocked I feel about working on it, but it’s nice when the surface feels good to work on and feels right for what you’re trying to do on it. I feel like different materials lend themselves to different modes of working for me. If I’m working with some imagery that I have an idea of already, then soft pastel is my first point of call, but if I’m just trying to get stuff out then I might experiment with materials that I feel less fluent with, like paint, ink and oil pastel. Not to have to think too consciously about things whilst working is really helpful for me so I think I’ve gravitated towards materials that can just be picked up without too much technical knowledge. I’m one for over-complicating things when I think too much, so simplifying materials helps! AMM: We love the short descriptions which accompany your posts on Instagram—we notice that you reference dreams a lot. Are dreams and the interpretation of dreams important in your practice? Do you keep a dream diary? MH: Dreams are something I’ve fairly recently become conscious of drawing from in my work. I think a seed was planted when I talked about a dream I had in therapy. When we spoke about this particular dream, the therapist asked questions I never would have thought to ask. I was able to imagine what I would say to someone or how the darkness or a fire made me feel (in this dream the fire was burning down a house but it felt liberating). Things which symbolise fear don’t always make us fearful in dreams, and this idea of the fluidity or plurality of images and symbols fascinates me—how one thing can embody several opposing forces at once. I think this opened out a little door

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 19, Interviewed: Mary Herbert

in my work, a reason to accept and take responsibility for some of the imagery that kept on recurring in my work before. I think one of the things that keeps me drawn to dreams is how they function as a door into all the stuff we can’t control or logically explain, the unknown, and how the activity of dreaming links to memory, particularly in a trans-generational or collective sense. Jung had this idea that dreams are a sort of embedded knowledge that we have of ourselves and what came before us, as well as sometimes providing foresight. I think the state of dreaming goes against a lot of how we are conditioned to see things—it is a nonlinear activity, linking to feminine, cyclical, spiral conceptions of time rather than a completely forward and upward progression. I don’t keep a dream diary as such but my sketchbook functions as a kind of dumping ground and then a place to sift through these things. There’s no judgement in there and it’s full of small scribbly thumbnail drawings. Since lockdown started I can see there are more regular drawings which relate to dreams. I think having less sensory input from the outside world has somehow enabled more access to the inner one. It’s fluid too, and I’m interested in how these images feel when I’m consciously making them, in wakeful hours. AMM: The hazy quality of your images is very compelling—can you tell us about this use of a blurred gaze? MH: It’s something that evolved through drawing a lot, and in parallel to coming to know that it’s the stuff that is inside that I’m trying to get at. A completely sharp focus or a perspectival approach to image making always felt a bit jarring for me when I tried to do it, like there was too much information and it wasn’t leaving enough space, yet there is definitely something about making images of recognisable things that appeals to me. I find the idea of illusion very interesting. We know a two dimensional image is an illusion, but when it is a photograph we also can’t help but read it as a documentation of something that truly exists. We’re constantly communicating through photographic images and the more we do, the more blurry and subjective they become as documents of truth or reality. So perhaps this blurred gaze is poking around in this photographic realm, and maybe operating just a little outside it, but borrowing from it. There is also something about energy or charge with the blurred image—it’s not smooth and sleek but crackly and fuzzy. I want the images to feel charged even when serene and perhaps the hazy sensation is one way I’ve found to do this. AMM: There is a definite vein of the mythic and otherworldly running through your work—can

you expand on the thinking behind this? Are you presenting imagined narratives, making allusions to pre-existing stories, or rather crafting scenes according to imaginative intuition and memory? MH: I’m definitely acting on what’s coming up rather than making allusions to pre-existing narratives consciously, but I love the feeling when images that come up might hold the same space as these ideas. I’ve recently been allowing myself to play more freely with this imagery. I have been finding that when I finish a drawing, sometimes I’ll have a moment at which I can directly associate the imagery with something that’s going on inside or around me—it’s quite a strange feeling. I would like to read more around myth and its connection to the unconscious. I have a copy of Women Who Run with the Wolves as a starting point. I also see the otherworldly and mythic reflected in the work of a lot of my peers and contemporaries and I wonder if it’s a reaction to the current moment that we find ourselves in the midst of in the UK and globally. Our systems, ideas of progress, capitalism and patriarchy which are breaking, environmental destruction, abuse of power and oppression, and all of them constantly reflected back at us through imagery—the consumption of which has been heightened during the pandemic. I feel like in these circumstances the imagery that we make as artists is perhaps bound to be otherworldly. AMM: What do you hope to make the viewers of your art see or feel? MH: When someone feels something about a work I have made, it makes me want to keep going. I feel a bit like I’m digging inside of myself for things which might make some kind of sense to me, and by extension others—if someone feels something then this ‘charge’ I’m searching for is activated and it’s working. That’s a really good feeling. I hope that the things a viewer might see or feel are nuanced and maybe conflicting, and perhaps not the same as when looking at the work for a second or third time. AMM: What kind of visual references influence your work? Are there any particular artists whose work you feel resonates with your own? MH: There are so many artists and visual references like layered strata that influence my work. I find landscape itself and the imagery of nature to be a rich source, as well as the various ways people have depicted it over time. I’ve recently been looking at optical phenomena such as the Brocken Spectre (something I saw while walking and didn’t know it had its own name) which is a kind of halo of light around a shadow cast over mist.

Eichwald whose paintings I keep returning to. Often small scale and intimate, her work feels like it has a lot in common with the kind of writing I love, where a lot is said with just enough. I admire the way she can paint an image that explores the edges of many things—they can feel sinister, humorous and sensitive, otherworldly and everyday all at once. Maja Ruznic is a painter whose work really resonates for me at the moment. Her process of making is intuitive and the resulting paintings seem to vibrate and appear and disappear from the canvas. I admire the way she talks about her process and the influences in her work. She talks about trans-generational trauma and healing, nostalgia, and also a spiritual connection with the world and her work, which is something that a lot of the artists whose work I admire have some level of enquiry into. I also feel really lucky that I have creative relationships with other artists whose work really resonates with me and who I learn from. Holly Mills and Cheri Smith are two artists I feel particularly close to and talk about work a lot with. AMM: Beyond the visual, where do you find inspiration—for example, writing, philosophical theory? MH: I find reading really important, although I am quite slow as I’m constantly writing out quotes. I don’t often directly reference text while making, it’s more that it seeps in and comes out in unexpected ways. A few texts have been really influential for me recently: Rebecca Solnit’s A field guide to getting lost, Maggie Nelson’s Jane: A Murder, Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, Bessel Van Der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, and Sventlana Boym’s The future of nostalgia. These texts variously explore ideas of dreaming, the unconscious, embodied experience, our relationship to nature, loss, illusion, nostalgia, collectivity, and trauma and how it’s held in the body. Most of them come from a personal enquiry into these things, which I find really compelling. I have also been slowly reading Jung’s autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections. It’s an autobiography made up of accounts of inner experiences rather than descriptions of things that happened to him. I found this idea of writing a life story purely through inner experiences helpful, and reading it has given a bit more form to my understanding of the idea of the unconscious—although I still feel like it’s a slippery concept, which makes it all the more interesting. He even at one point describes it in spatial terms: “everything which arises out of the unconscious has a top and a bottom, an inside and an outside”.

I’ve recently discovered the work of Katelyn

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 19, Interviewed: Mary Herbert

Featured image (p.34-35):

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Mary Herbert In the water, in the night garden soft pastel on paper 14 x 14 cm

Mary Herbert Holding onto something soft pastel on paper 14 x 21 cm

Mary Herbert Smoke dream soft pastel on paper 16 x 13 cm

AMM: What is your process when it comes to creating a piece of work? Do you work from photographs, memory, imagination? MH: With my recent small pastel works, they usually start with thumbnail drawings in my sketchbook. These are sometimes recollections of dreams, memories and streams of consciousness (although the distinction between these three things is pretty negligible and often they’re all three at once). The thumbnail drawings tend to dictate the format of the paper. I’ll often start a few versions of the same thing so I can work between them. Sometimes I’ll have an idea of what colours make up the image and other times I have to find it through the drawing. I’ve been using lots of different source imagery for reference which I sometimes find because I need to reference a specific thing and sometimes I’m not sure what I’m looking for and stumble across it. AMM: How has your time participating in artist residencies impacted or changed the way you work? MH: Residencies have been really formative for me and I feel very lucky to have had those experiences. Both residencies have been in Scotland, and experiencing that landscape played a big part in the making of the subsequent body of work. The first residency was actually the first time I’d had a whole studio to myself and this was a big discovery too—I was able to work without the feeling of being watched. Meeting and working with other artists on the residencies was also brilliant—it’s a really special way to get to know another person and their practice as you are in a sort of art-making catalyst. AMM: What is your setup like when working? MH: I like to switch between working small and large scale, and so I’ll sometimes work at a desk and sometimes on the walls or floors in my studio. My lockdown discovery has been having all my pastels out on my desk. I would usually have them in tupperware boxes and cart them between the studio and home in case I wanted to draw something I saw, but since lockdown I’ve had all the colours out on my desk and for once I can see them all together. It sounds like a really small thing, but this has definitely impacted the way I’m using colour in the drawings.

excuse to get out into big open space. I also miss swimming a lot at the moment, and am dreaming of going to the sea or a lake. I have discovered skipping during lockdown—I never learned to skip as a child but recently I had one of those moments where something clicks, and suddenly I could skip. It reminded me of when I learned to tie my shoelaces. AMM: What do you like about the artistic community in London? Do you find much opportunity for collaboration and creative exchange? MH: London is like a swirling pool of many art worlds, and so it can feel a bit overwhelming at times. I feel really lucky to have collected peers from different pockets of artistic communities in London during my time here. In particular, I have a really strong creative relationship with many of my peers from the Drawing School, for which I am really grateful. AMM: We see you’ve taken part in online exhibitions during the Covid pandemic—what do you think is the role and significance of art in times of crisis? MH: Some of my favourite artworks have been made in times of crisis or in response to change. I think art can reflect back and visualise what we are experiencing, and to give voice to these things is powerful and potentially transformative. It can also be a doorway into imagining other worlds, and other ways of doing things. It’s part catharsis in the moment, and part documenting something that can last as a reminder. AMM: What aspirations do you have for the future of your artistic practice? MH: My biggest aspiration is to be able to keep doing it. To have a long, sustained practice which grows slowly and is able to go down the various paths that present themselves would be amazing. I feel like it’s been a long journey to get to this point and so I’d like to keep going!

AMM: When you’re not making art, how do you spend your time? MH: I like to walk—at the moment this involves walking as many different routes around local parks, but usually I’ll find any

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 19, Interviewed: Mary Herbert

Mary Herbert A blanket on fire soft pastel on paper 13 x 10.5 cm

Mary Herbert In the soil, in the night garden soft pastel on paper 20 x 15 cm

Mary Herbert A map soft pastel on paper 14.5 x 17 cm

Mary Herbert Wait a while here soft pastel on paper 26.5 x 23 cm

Mary Herbert What the light says we are (after Ocean Vuong) soft pastel on paper 19 x 26 cm

Mary Herbert The watchers soft pastel on paper 15 x 24 cm

Mary Herbert Slipping through fingers soft pastel on paper 17 x 28 cm

Mary Herbert A mirror soft pastel on paper 14 x 21 cm

www.asmaasma.com

The butterfly in the mud: in conversation with ASMA “…a mythological open narrative of an encounter at the shore of a lagoon”. This is the opening line of the exhibition text for a show titled Half Blood Princess by Mexico City based artist duo ASMA. This liminal image of the lagoon, a fluid, fluctuating transition zone where fresh and salt water meet is one of several recurring metaphors in the pair’s work that speak to duality, permeability and metamorphosis. Mythology and science fiction are likewise central tropes in ASMA’s work. The duo are interested in the chimeric and hybrid figures that exist between worlds or forms and which allude to the coexistence of differences. The two-faced god Janus in classical Roman mythology, and the title of their most recent exhibition, signifies beginnings and endings, transitions, time and duality. With his two faces looking in opposite directions, he sees both the past and the future and acts as a passageway between worlds. In her seminal feminist essay A Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway writes that “my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities”. She argues for rejecting rigid boundaries notably those separating “human” from “animal” and “human” from “machine”. The text for Half Blood Princess continues: “Some fragments of this narrative suggest a hybrid being, a recognition of otherness and an embrace of different bodies: two facing characters that become everything and change over and over into the landscape. This speculative fiction takes place in a possible ancient past or a faraway future where technologies have become organic.” This idea of permeable boundaries and embracing otherness is a radical antidote to our hyper-polarised and burning world. ASMA is artists Matias Armendaris from Ecuador and Hanya Beliá from México. The duo work exclusively through active collaboration and their sculptural practice is guided by a poetic approach to making that is receptive to experimentation and intuition. They are deeply interested in materiality and the relationship between surface and support. ASMA extend their conceptual interests into tactile forms, and frequently mix ancient craft techniques with futuristic materials. Their artworks often resemble screens, wings or membranes. These are installations in configurations that interact with and affect the space around them creating psychological and sensory environments. In this interview we speak with Matias and Hanya about their way of working together and speculative imaginaries for the future.

interview by Layla Leiman

Featured image: ASMA Veneno pigmented micro paraffin wax relief, apple seeds, oil paint, metal cast with silver bath 25 x 43 x 15 cm

“All things and beings have this inherent capability of containing beyond their apparent limit and we are drawn to how this transcendence occurs by creating interrelations. The hybrid as a main character in our work comes from our desire to escape ideas of purity or an “ideal nature”. We search for impurity as we believe it represents an even more natural state of things where everything becomes polluted with its environment and its cohabitants and becomes nourished by these mixtures.” - ASMA

AMM: Hello Matias and Hanya! To start us off, please tell us the story about how you met and started working together as ASMA? ASMA: Hi! We first met casually in a café in Mexico City and started hanging out, we eventually started collaborating organically as we began to share a studio together and slowly our work became very influenced by each other. It was at the beginning of 2018, during the last semester of the MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, when we decided to start a collaborative identity and focus all our energy on ASMA and develop its own aesthetic and conceptual language. After that semester we did a residency in Saõ Paulo at

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 19, Interviewed: ASMA

Pivô where we felt that our project really took shape and direction. AMM: You evidently share points of common interest, but what differences or distinct perspectives do you think you each bring to the partnership? ASMA: We both grew up in particular creative environments with both our parents being non-practicing artists in their own way. Hanya had more contact with theatre, literature, photography and music while Matias grew up around drawing, printmaking and gaming. One of us is more painterly by nature, observing forms, silhouettes, colour and composition while the other is more linear, finding symbology and graphic components in the work due to their drawing and printmaking background. We both are responsive to materiality without being too knowledgeable so our curiosity for sculpture brings us together. There was a clear interest in gender and identity politics by one side of our collaboration and the other was more drawn to fictions and anthropology but through collaborating we have made these common interests for both of us. AMM: You describe your practice as “developing work produced exclusively through active collaboration”. Please tell us more about this creative approach and why it works for you. ASMA: We are interested in a practice that isn’t fixed, that changes constantly and accumulates nuances. As individual artists we often found ourselves limited by our own moulds and self-perceptions. ASMA allowed us to free ourselves from our own definitions and linear investigations. Our process in the studio starts with ideas conceived through conversation and it begins to transform as we work on its materiality. It becomes a completely different thing towards the end. The works in the making often leave the trace for the new curiosities or explorations ahead. This process cannot be planned, as we constantly face ourselves with the need to add and subtract each of us from the works until there is no clear division line and feels like a cohesive and integrated object. We believe a collaborative practice is in a way our small attempt to learn how to coexist and practice integration, horizontalization and tolerance. AMM: Your emphasis on collaboration and interest in hybrid and mixed media suggests a kind of radical openness to experimentation. Does this notion ring true? In what ways are you aligning or challenging conventional art discourse in your work? ASMA: We are interested in experimental processes and that is why we often choose to attempt new techniques and play a lot in the studio allowing our own imagination and naivety to inform the process of making. We can’t really tell if this openness to play is radical in relation to other art practices and discourses but it certainly is radical in relation to ourselves as it is our desire to expand

exponentially as we continue to produce collaboratively hoping to arrive at wider ranges of our own creative endeavours. We are not consciously attempting to challenge convention but by allowing change and not inhabiting a clear category we believe we can bring something fruitful to the conversation of possible fluid and affective ways of making. AMM: The idea of the hybrid and liminal is central in your art. Please tell us more about this concept in your work. ASMA: We are attracted to the potential of all things to become something else, transcend their own definition and acquire a new life or meaning. All things and beings have this inherent capability of containing beyond their apparent limit and we are drawn to how this transcendence occurs by creating interrelations. The hybrid as a main character in our work comes from our desire to escape ideas of purity or an “ideal nature”. We search for impurity as we believe it represents an even more natural state of things where everything becomes polluted with its environment and its cohabitants and becomes nourished by these mixtures. As a continuation of this desire for impurity we look into the liminal as a tool to explore the way in which different bodies become hybrid and polluted. We think of division lines as connecting membranes, that at the same time become containers, environments or even creatures in themselves. A lot of our bodies of work attempt to inhabit the barrier in a metaphorical way and contain elements from different worlds simultaneously. AMM: The shapes and forms in your work are at once futuristic and primordial. What are some of the references that influence this visual language? ASMA: We are very inspired by natural forms specially insects and how they have appeared both in an ancient and alien imaginary. One of our exhibitions really began as a result of an encounter with a strange insect exoskeleton standing intact on a branch while we hiked up a mountain. We were very absorbed by its form and its poetic feeling and made us think about armours and bodies. We don’t really search for specific references to make a work but often stumble into things that catch our attention. We also like craft and how there is a certain beauty in the way things carry the marks of their process of creation and we like to infuse our work with those traces that come from the life of objects. AMM: Extending this idea of the hybrid, your visual aesthetic interestingly often incorporates quite ancient materials and techniques—such as wood carving and bronze casting. What informs your choice of media and what is the relationship between materiality and concept in your art? ASMA: We choose to use traditional techniques and materials to provoke antinatural or unorthodox results as we are not really classically trained in any of these processes, this pushes us to create with

portrait by Andres Navarro

intuition. A lot of the time we need to problemsolve and discover new ways of making while navigating the technicalities and the qualities of each material. We frequently pair ancient techniques with a certain artificial or synthetic materiality that brings the object out of being a mere echo of the past. A lot of the times when we make objects we make decisions based on the feeling we want to convey. We try to create some tension and even confusion on the nature of our object and their meaning hoping for a feeling of intrigue. AMM: You’ve developed an alphabet of symbols, signs and notations that recur in your artworks and which you use to contextualise your work in the digital space on your website. In a video on your website you say that you “think about objects through the language of painting”. In what ways do you engage with poetics of language, both in a specific and symbolic sense, in your work? ASMA: We like to think we have a poetic approach to making more than a critical or discursive approach, specifically when thinking about how we want our pieces to be experienced. Our process is very much sculptural but contains a clear painterly spirit, as we are actively developing a specific personal vocabulary. We look at a lot of paintings and really love the way they hold mystery and romance and something that goes beyond its materiality. Most of the time when we want to make paintings we inevitably incorporate sculptural qualities as we consider a lot the relationship between the surface and the support. When starting our collaboration we read the book of short stories by Clarice Lispector “Para No Olvidar” where we thought some of her stories felt like paintings, where the real and the psychological collide and a nonrational affectivity is delivered with an internal resonance that opens up within through the use of poetic figures and symbolic gestures. Since then we have tried to deliver in a similar fashion through our work, focusing a lot on narrative and how to construct an inner world for our exhibitions. AMM: Please tell us about your interest in text and intertextuality in your art. ASMA: Reading and writing is a big part of our private process in the studio and it informs the way we make decisions. We find ourselves constantly finding new references which interconnect with works we are making or we made in the past and we like to continue to build a constellation of intertextuality that expands their meaning. A lot of the time these texts reveal new avenues and push the new body of works into different facets of our general motifs. We use narrative and word play in our exhibitions as a way to create synapsis between works which helps tie them with an overall feeling. We often develop stories and

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 19, Interviewed: ASMA

characters as tools for developing figuration and symbolic elements in the works but hold back from making it too clear or apparent to allow for multiple interpretations. AMM: Working in installations requires an engagement with space. In addition to the physical exhibition space, your work also references separate and intersecting organic and built environments. Can you tell us more about your interest in space, place, and real and imagined habitats. ASMA: When we travelled to Brazil for the first time we stayed at a small room in the historic downtown area of Saõ Paulo which eventually became our muse for an entire

“We frequently pair ancient techniques with a certain artificial or synthetic materiality that brings the object out of being a mere echo of the past. A lot of the times when we make objects we make decisions based on the feeling we want to convey. We try to create some tension and even confusion on the nature of our object and their meaning hoping for a feeling of intrigue. ” - ASMA body of work entitled “fantasma”. Because it was such a new experience we paid attention to a lot of details both in the city and its architecture as well as in the room and all the objects that were contained in it. We learned there how to bring a lot of elements into the work from the things that were around us, not only from the physical but also the sensorial and evocative experiences. A lot of the time when conceiving a show we start by defining how we want to transform

the feeling of the space. Sometimes these gestures are subtle as just changing the way you will naturally move through it, sometimes it is by defining connecting windows or semipermeable divisions and sometimes it can be highlighting certain architectural features to heighten the presence of the space in the room. We don’t necessarily work in hyper complex installations but we do think a lot of how the space affects the pieces and vice versa and how the experience of the viewer is affected by these two things together. We also play a lot with a fantastical or imaginary space that exists parallel to the physical space and slightly spills out through the various elements contained in the works. This alter-space can be very symbolic and psychological, and plays between an evocative world and a material visceral experience. AMM: One gets the sense that your practice is research-led. Have you developed a particular way of working together, or does this change depending on what you’re working on at the time? Please tell us about your work process. ASMA: We have a very organic way of working and don’t really have any equation to make our research. We constantly bounce ideas together no matter where we are and what we are doing, a lot of the times we find connections everywhere, it can be while watching a movie, playing a board game or reading an essay. We collect everything together with our phones, sometimes we record our conversations, take snapshots of objects we find or collect PDFs and online images and we save it all in shared folders. AMM: Like your most recent body of work, Janus, your art seems to simultaneously look backwards to ancient civilizations and mythology and forwards towards technology and speculative futures. How does this relate to contemporary experiences and this particular moment in world history? ASMA: When we began working on “Janus” there was a lot of speculation about 2020 and at the same time there was an eerie feeling about impending chaos. When we arrived in Puerto Rico to install the show a meteorite fell close to the island while we were landing. “Janus” in a way was addressing a figure of transition, a door or passageway. A month after our show opened the pandemic hit hard and it felt like a series of catastrophes and world tensions had unleashed after that. In that respect to us “Janus” feels like a premonitory show about a possible end of the world which hopefully brings a new beginning with it. In our thoughts about the future we have incorporated a mythological imaginary as we speculate of a possible return to a fantastical hybridity that is organic in nature instead of a mechanical cyborg projection of the future body. This translates into our work as a mixture of mythological and sci-fi visual references. We are intrigued by the concept of Hauntology

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ASMA Doppelganger iron chain, white micro-paraffin, cast in silver-plated metal alloy 111 x 11 inches

ASMA I’m a beast of shapeless form white micro paraffin, encaustic paint, mdf 26.5 x 37 x 4 cm

as defined by the philosopher Mark Fisher and how it describes society’s attraction to apocalyptic narratives as a consequence of neoliberal experience and a feeling of negation of possible alternative futures. We believe imagining other narratives work as a way to change our fear towards difference and alternative outcomes. Our work fantasizes about this point of transition but it occupies a very allegorical structure to speculate about the future. AMM: What ideas or concepts are you currently exploring in your work? ASMA: We are currently thinking a lot about the concept of monstrousness and also thinking about what constitutes weirdness. How do we avoid alienating what feels different to us? How does our rational understanding of the world limit our capacity to experience magical or supernatural phenomena that might happen around us? Why does our society mock alternative knowledge and how can we reclaim these tools as valid avenues for experiencing the world? Another concept we have in our mind is the idea of the sentient robot or the idea of romanticism as an inherent human quality that perdures through time and ties together our past with our future. AMM: Your studio is located in an old building in the historic centre of Mexico City. What does your shared space look and feel like? Do you have any creative rituals or routines? ASMA: Our studio is a 4x5m room in a 3rd floor apartment, is a little bit small for two people but we have a special love for it. In the last couple of years we have been able to build practical furniture that makes our work easier. The rest of the apartment is the home and studio of our friend Bernardo who is a programmer and has a huge library. We live in one of the downstairs apartments, so we spend so much time in the building. It has a very unique ornamented Neo-Baroque facade that is so inspiring to us, we feel very lucky to have found this place five years ago for a good price. We are night owls and we don’t have a lot of very clear rituals or a routine, but the one constant for us is to have lots of conversations amongst ourselves as some sort of shared introspection. AMM: How did you come up with the name for your collaboration? What’s behind the name ASMA? ASMA: We both have asthma (asma in Spanish), and that was one of the first things we knew about each other when we met. When thinking of a name we thought of asma as something we both had in common. After researching about the history of the word we found that the philosopher Hippocrates coined the word and defined it as the symptoms of a divine or supernatural presence. We were interested in how something that could feel very clear and singular in meaning could have more than one way of understanding it. In this sense asma embodies what we attempt to

contain within our work as something with shifting essence and multiple readings. AMM: Have you been working during the pandemic? Has this affected you creatively? ASMA: We are lucky to have our studio and our home in the same building so we have kept working in the studio while being in quarantine but it has obviously shifted our ideas and affected our life in many ways as it has affected everyone. The pace of things has slowed down as everything in our agenda got postponed or cancelled. Nonetheless, we have taken advantage of this change of pace to dwell a little longer on ideas and processes which has affected the end result of our upcoming body of work. We also got carried away at some points and imagined very crazy but possible scenarios of the end of the world as it felt closer than ever. AMM: Does your relationship extend beyond your artistic work? When you’re not making art, what are some of the things you enjoy doing? ASMA: As we are a romantic couple we spend a lot of time together outside of the studio. We like to tattoo, alter old clothes and play board games when we have free time. Sometimes we visit a small town outside of Mexico City which has a lot of character. It is a really close and inspirational place to us. We hike up the mountain there and eat really fresh food. AMM: What are you each watching, reading and listening to right now? Does this influence your art at all? ASMA: As we make our work in some sort of chapters, we allow the different situations and surroundings we are involved in at the time to filter into the work. We often get inspired by the movies and the music we listen to while producing. We relate some specific movie or text to each project and then during the production we create a playlist to listen to when we work in the studio. We recently finished watching the series DEVS and The Outsider, which we found amusing and related to our work in some ways, but we are now on a vampire wave when it comes to movies. We also just got “The Philosophers’ Secret Fire” by Patrick Harpur which was a great find and feels quite aligned with our current interests. AMM: Do you have any projects coming up? What’s next for ASMA? ASMA: We hope things get a little better and we can travel more next year. We recently sent some works for an exhibition that is going to be part of Manifesta Biennal in Marseille and we are really excited because it’s our first time showing in France and it takes place in a really ancient church, the Abbey Saint-Victor. We have some group shows towards the end of the year and a solo exhibition in March at the Orange County Museum in Santa Monica. We are also looking forward to a solo show in Montreal with Projet Pangée next summer.

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 19, Interviewed: ASMA

ASMA Vampiro pigmented micro paraffin wax relief, oil paint, mosquitoes, metal cast with silver bath 41 x 36 x 8 cm

ASMA The Hand Feeding the Snake felted steel wool, steel frame, chain 74.9 x 58.4 cm

ASMA Soft wax night white micro paraffin, encaustic paint 40 x 53 x 5 cm

ASMA Verdad indiscutible epoxy resin, copper wire, tin 40 x 53 x 5 cm

ASMA The Nymph by the Window bronze cast fence , patina and felted steel wool size variable

ASMA The Nymph by the Window (detail)

ASMA The Breeder bronze cast sculpture, gypsum, volcanic sand 35.6 x 15.2 x 10.2 cm

ASMA Nude bronze cast frame with oil paint, foami 27.9 x 22.9 cm

ASMA Mountains Shadow acrylic, colored pencils, dry pastels on brass with steel frame 33 x 25.4 cm

ASMA Floating in the Swamp acrylic, colored pencils, dry pastels on brass with steel frame 33.7 x 23.5 cm

www.projetpangee.com

Big art crushes: In conversation with the Projet Pangée curators Run with heart and enthusiasm by a trio of female artists, Projet Pangée in Montreal, Canada is a hybrid project-commercial gallery space with a playful and critical curatorial approach that promotes aesthetic and theoretical dialogue and collaboration within the arts community. Under the direction of founder and head curator Julie Côté together with Sophie Latouche and Michelle Bui (gallery associates and curators), Projet Pangée represents an international lineup of emerging and midcareer artists that the curators are personally excited about connecting and working with. “We always have an important part of our programming open to punctuate collaborations,” Julie explains. “We love discovering new artists that we think the work is so good we just need to show them! It’s such a thrill to contact them and then start dreaming of a show together.” Thematically, Projet Pangée prioritises a focus on materiality in its programming, together with personal narratives and women, non-binary or queer perspectives. The curators are interested in a range of media and get especially excited about bringing together artists from different geographies that are exploring common themes or sensibilities in their practice. The Projet Pangée team work closely and symbiotically with each other and the artists that they showcase. Through conversations and engagement with the artists and their practice, they allow the artworks to dictate the curation for each exhibition. Currently, Projet Pangée is operating out of an historic hundred-year-old building overlooking the luscious Mont-Royal city park. While the global pandemic has affected the way art galleries do business, the team are optimistic and interested in the possibilities offered by new technologies and following a flexible and fluid approach that can reframe what a gallery for artists by artists can be. Having featured several artists from the Projet Pangée archive in this publication, it was a pleasure to work with the team as guest curators on this edition of ArtMaze Mag. Here, we chat with Julie Côté, founder and head curator of Projet Pangée, to find out more about their work together with Sophie Latouche and Michelle Bui, gallery associates, and the art world more broadly.

interview by Layla Leiman Featured image: What Makes Life Worth Living artist: Joani Tremblay (Montreal) Projet Pangée Gallery

Left to right: Michelle Bui, Julie Côté, Sophie Latouche

AMM: Hi Julie! Let’s start with the backstory to Projet Pangée. How did the gallery come about? PP: The Belgo space previously hosted Galerie Pangée, a gallery that opened from 2006 to 2013. I worked there as an assistant in its last years of operation and had curated a fair booth for them. The owner left Montreal and now works mostly in Europe, focusing on other projects but he kept the gallery lease in Montreal and used it as an office and storage space. After a few years of seeing the gallery empty, I asked him if I could use it to start a project space, and it’s with that grand act of generosity that Projet Pangée started! The main idea was to engage with our community and invite others, mostly young artists to participate and take part in spontaneous exhibitions, moving away from the usual gallery model of representation. At the time there were not a lot of artist-run galleries and project spaces in Montreal, having access to the space was a good motor, I had to do it. When planning the second exhibition, I asked Joani Tremblay if she wanted to show her current research, she was in the last mile of her MFA at Concordia and wasn’t ready so she suggested we would curate a show together. We had such synergy and loads of common interests that we decided to keep going and worked on a program, co-directing the space for 2 years. She then left the project to concentrate on her practice, I’m forever grateful for her relentless spirit and vision! We’re still great friends and exhibited her work last summer, it was a perfect reunion. Just before Joani left, Michelle Bui, artist, joined the Projet Pangée’s team. A few months later we met Sophie Latouche, also codirector of Galerie Galerie, an online platform dedicated to the production, promotion and restoration of digital and web art. Sophie loved

what we did and we got along wonderfully so she joined us. And that’s our current team! We’ve been together running the gallery and curating together for the last 2 years. AMM: Projet Pangée seems to sit at the intersection between a project space and a commercial gallery. Please tell us more about how the gallery is positioned and why this works for you. PP: From the start, Projet Pangée was serious in its engagement towards the practices it was pushing forward. Also located in a building where our neighbours were commercial galleries and artist run centers that were open 5 days a week with regular hours pushed us to do the same. In its structure it started as collaborative and upon invitation versus solely representation. It’s this intersection that allows us to be in constant dialogue with the art community, to take the risk of giving first exhibition and international art fair experiences to artists with whom we find kinship! That’s how we started, inviting emerging artists we had big art crushes on, they all amazed us and still do! That intersection also allows us to invite spontaneously artists from different communities to work on a duo or a group show together, their work engages, they meet, and grow new relationships from their collaboration. Then, there are artists that we naturally develop a stronger relationship with and after working multiple times together we decided to start representing: Trevor Baird, Delphine Hennelly, and Darby Milbrath. It’s great to create a market and encourage the development and sustainability of their artistic practice in the longer term. We take this turn slowly and organically, we wish to always have

an important part of our programming open to punctuate collaborations. We love discovering new artists that we think the work is so good we just need to show them! It’s such a thrill to contact them and then start dreaming of a show together. AMM: Running a gallery requires various creative and business skillsets. What is each of your backgrounds and what do you bring to the unique mix of skills and expertise needed to run Projet Pangée? PP: We’re all artists at the core and have the multiple skills that it takes to run the gallery but naturally, by working together for the past 2 years some of our qualities have been put forward in our triade. The whole team is involved in the identity and programming of the gallery but we do tend to fall into our various strengths using them to run the gallery daily. Michelle is completely invested in her own practice and translates her skills as an artist to create beautiful and powerful imagery in the writing of the exhibition texts. Sophie is working on many mediums right now and co-running Galerie Galerie. She’s also our tech wiz! And besides dedicating most of my time to the gallery, I’m raising a little girl so I have put a pause to my practice for now. I have the most experience as a gallerist as I have been working with collectors and helped build collections for the last ten years. AMM: From a personal perspective, how has Projet Pangée grown and challenged each of you creatively and professionally? PP: I have had the chance to meet so many great artists, created links between communities, developed and witnessed new collaborations and saw friendships grow since the early days of Projet. Being a young gallery in a time where the models are evolving and multiplying allows for creativity. The idea of a model is not as anchored as it used to be and the paradigms are constantly shifting, it’s a real pleasure to take part in envisioning what a gallery can be. AMM: Your list of exhibited artists is long and diverse. What do you look for in artists to work with? PP: A practice that we admire, that is fascinating, exciting, makes us wonder, touches us, challenges us, a practice that we think is important and meaningful, and sometimes not yet recognized. Platforms and projects and IG accounts like PPP, Art Viewer, Young Space, Assembly Room, and of course, Artmaze Mag have facilitated the discovery and encounter of many emerging artists we have shown. We have also come across the works of many artists, galleries and project spaces through the participation of international art fairs such as Material Art Fair and NADA. These encounters have been a fruitful way to deepen the

conversation between our Canadian community of artists, and the global one.

“We are definitely interested in the return to materiality, personal narratives and women, nonbinary or queer’s perspective. I’m personally interested in a return to the importance of the gesture and its poetry, the exploration of materiality as a sensorial experience. I’m also very drawn to painting as a medium and interested in the return to figuration. As we follow the emerging scene internationally, it’s always really exciting for us to bring together artists from different communities that have common themes or sensibilities in their practice. I wouldn’t say that’s a “theme” but it definitely forges the character of Pangée.” - Julie Côté, founder and head curator of Projet Pangée

AMM: Please tell us about the main curatorial themes in the Projet Pangée programme? PP: We are definitely interested in the return to materiality, personal narratives and women, non-binary or queer’s perspective. I’m personally interested in a return to the importance of the gesture and its poetry, the exploration of materiality as a sensorial experience. I’m also very drawn to painting as a medium and interested in the return to figuration. As we follow the emerging scene internationally, it’s always really exciting for us to bring together artists from different communities that have common themes or sensibilities in their practice. I wouldn’t say that’s a “theme” but it definitely forges the character of Pangée. In the last four years we have curated a series of exhibitions, inviting emerging and mid-career, with a focus on women, nonbinary or queer artists to engage in theoretical and aesthetical conversations. Sustaining a dialogue with the art communities, fostering collaborations and creating meaningful and inspiring relationships between artists has been one of our main focuses. AMM: How would you describe Projet Pangée’s style and approach to curation? Do you work collaboratively with artists or take the lead? What is your understanding of the role of the curator? PP: The approach is fitted to every exhibition, open and sensible to the work, as opposed to rigid or overly methodical. We rethink the space with every exhibition, creating fair context to the works and the artists’ practices while engaging them in a conversation. It happens that the work itself dictates the curation. If you are really attentive to their materiality and what they imply visually a lot of the answers can be found there. As to working collaboratively, some artists know exactly how they want their work to be curated and installed, while others love to let us take over this aspect completely. We also have invited curators, most of the time artists themselves, in that case we simply support their vision. As of our role as curators, we always stay attentive to the practices and take great attention into understanding them. Then we are mostly interested in creating context, dialogues and correspondences with other practices. I think the curator researches, creates moments while bringing ideas and concepts closer in dialogues and correspondences. AMM: In thinking about the role of curator more broadly, how do one’s preferences and aesthetic sensibilities influence curatorial work? PP: It’s always a difficult question to answer, I have been asked that many times. Without crystalizing anything, I think we can feel certain common threads. Many of the artists we work with are women, some of their practices propose links to art history,

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 19, Interviewed: Projet Pangée Gallery

sometimes citing male masters but integrated in a contemporary woman’s perspective. I observe a return to craft, to practices that are fluid and feel spontaneous. Materials and their sensuality, poetry, is also something I’m heavily drawn to, I’m sure it’s reflected in my curatorial work and the direction of the gallery. There is also the human aspect without being overly social, I have always loved to connect people so maybe that’s a sensitivity there as well. I take such pleasure in bringing artists from different communities together and creating links.

to watch! And I should talk about tofeelclose, hosted by AKA (Saskatoon, SK). It’s a wonderful platform to discover! It was created during the crisis and invites artists to share thoughts, notes, observations and researches both individually and collectively. It’s quite intimate, and great to explore, to get lost in! New content is added every second week.

AMM: Is it apt to talk about a curator’s ‘eye’? What skills does it take to do what you do?

PP: The building dates from 1907 and is almost in its original state, with its architectural details and strong persona. It’s also located at the border of the Mont-Royal which is the largest park of the city. Looking out through some of the windows you could think you are in the forest, that implies connecting the work to the outside, to nature, to the past. So far all of the artists we have exhibited at the Consulate have been seduced by its intersecting qualities and are excited to present their work in a context that differs from the white cube.

PP: I consider myself really lucky to get the chance to curate exhibitions and I’m grateful to have such trust from the artists. I look at Bonnie, my four year old daughter, and her stuffed animal collection’s daily arrangements, she’s already doing it! What it takes? Maybe curiosity, open mindedness, passion, respect to the intersect materiality of artworks, self doubt, and intuition. AMM: Are there any curatorial or art industry developments or trends you’re following and excited about right now? PP: I think the global situation and the digital turn is really exciting! As much as I cherish physical exhibitions and would not want to ever see them disappear, there are so many possibilities to explore with new technologies. The viewing rooms and virtual tours are an entry point to what we can really construct. The crisis pushed us to explore the representation of physical artworks in virtual environments. Allying forces with artist Katerine DM, we created our first virtual 3D exhibition. L’île déserte is inspired by our current context, a world where galleries and exhibition spaces are abandoned and stripped of all human presence, inviting the viewer to discover a place where nature unfolds quietly amongst artworks. This was a first opportunity for us to involve artists in the creation of a virtual context for the representation of physical artworks. I believe the most revolutionary ways of exploring the digital possibilities will come from artists themselves! We are currently working on a virtual solo exhibition with Alicia Adamerovich that will take place in a donjon, that’s also really exciting!

AMM: You relocated to the former Czech Consulate for your summer programme. In what ways does your curatorial work engage with and respond to the dynamics of physical space?

AMM: What have been some of the standout shows over the years and why? PP: Every exhibition is as important as the other. Having the chance to put in perspective and witness the dedication of the artists we have worked with in the past four years is a blessing. I feel like every show has been building on the prior, the programming becomes a growing force, fed collectively by the artists we show. AMM: Success can take various forms and mean different things to different people. How do you measure success for a show and for the gallery as a whole? PP: I think there is success when the artists are happy and satisfied with the exhibition. It’s an important moment for them, who have grown an intimate relationship with their bodies of work, sometimes uncertainties as well. There is this vulnerability that arises with showing the works in a gallery. When the artists are satisfied and have a feeling of accomplishment, I do as well. Then when the visitors and community are getting into the practices, and I witness keen interest, that’s also a reflection of success. Featured image (p.70-71):

Like I was saying earlier, Sophie Latouche, gallery associate, also co-directs and runs Galerie Galerie, a platform pushing forward and entirely devoted to virtual art. They are doing amazing work and it’s very interesting

Radiant Immensity artists: Oda Iselin Sønderland (Oslo) + Laurence Veri (Montreal) Projet Pangée Gallery

Springs artist: Angela Heisch (Brooklyn) Projet Pangée Gallery

Although the wind artist: Darby Milbrath (Toronto) Projet Pangée Gallery

curated selection of works by Projet Pangée Gallery (Montreal, Canada): Julie Côté, founder and head curator; Sophie Latouche and Michelle Bui, gallery associates and curators Featured image: Sophia Belkin Neuro-condensation printed chiffon and embroidery on dyed cotton 18 x 22 inches more on p. 93

V i r g i n i a P a r a d i s e

www.cargocollective.com/virginiaparadise

Image: Paraíso (detail 2) stoneware relief 20 x 15 x 1 cm

Virginia Herrera lives and works in Madrid. She has a degree in Fine Arts from Santa Isabel de Hungría University. Also she received a scholarship to specialize in Ceramics at Lisbon University of Fine Arts and Constantin Meunier Academy in Brussels. Previously she studied at the Art schools of Seville and Málaga where she obtained superior degrees in graphic design, illustration and serigraphy. She has participated in different individual and group exhibitions both nationally and internationally such as: A la manera de… Rafael Ortiz Gallery, Seville; Symballein, Triana Ceramic Museum, Seville; Paper Cuts, Saatchi Gallery, London; Got it for cheap, Art Athina Fair, Greece. Her work has been selected in different competitions and for grants, highlights: XIX Biennial of Ceramics Angelina Alós, Barcelona; XIX International Call Luis Adelantado, Valencia; BBK Grant from the Bilbao Arte Foundation. Virginia´s works address concepts that liaise between the abstract and intangible, such as spirituality, memories or mystery. There is an interest in discovering certain aspects that are hidden in our memory like vestiges of information that remain in our collective subconscious. Her work focuses on the representation of issues related to anthropological enigmas and nature, searching for her own language through an almost intuitive process where the resulting ceramics have the particular characteristic of being interchangeable and modular, in this way the piece always remains alive. This mutable quality allows her to play around and be amazed with every possible outcome, composing a map of elements, shapes and symbols which generate an intricate puzzle that can be solved in many different ways.

Image: Paraíso (detail 1) stoneware relief 20 x 15 x 1 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 19: curated selection

L a u r e n c e

V e r i

www.laurenceveri.com

Image: Misérable Nuit porcelain, sand, ilmenite 37.5 x 30 cm

Laurence Veri (b. 1993) lives and works in Montreal (CA) and holds a BFA in Visual Arts from Concordia University. Her pieces explore the natural world and its ideas of physicality, growth and decay through all imaginable permutations. Veri considers the ceramic process as an extension of her sensibility, becoming a research tool to observe and mark our changing world. By the elusive nature of clay, its permanence and its flow, but also its potential to generate narrative impulse, the artist questions our relationship to the organisms and systems that surround us. The figures stamped and engraved in the clay, often surrounded by natural forces, refer to a range of myths, storytelling and lived experience. They adapt to the surface, evolve and metamorphose, seeming to be in an ever changing state that communicates fragility, strength and selfrenewal. The addition of various fragments to the clay and connection of the pieces with organic transformation attracts and intrigues, thus disrupting the conventions of the ceramic object.

Image (left): Hylidae porcelain, stoneware, glaze 23 x 25 cm

Image (right): Untitled glazed porcelain 13.5 x 15 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 19: curated selection

M a g d a l e n a

K r e i n e c k e r

www.magdalenakreinecker.com

Magdalena Kreinecker, born 1993, studied graphics and printmaking at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. She lives and works mainly in Vienna as a visual artist and printmaker. At the moment, Magdalena works a lot in collaboration with other artists. Interested in Printmaking as a form per se Magdalena Kreinecker works methodically in print to analyze and play with our current visual culture. Her work follows a certain logic where the original material is digitally prepared to be later physically transformed. The technical part is inherent in the form and thus inevitably given to the substance of her artistic practice. She works with various materials mostly in relation to printmaking such as silkscreen, etching or relief printing, in large and small scale. At the same moment she sees herself also as a mechanic bursting layers of copies through endless repetition and transformation of the ever same. Whether information engraved on copper plates or scraped out of wood or linoleum—the process is particularly physical. Essentially, concepts such as power and propaganda are objects of her analysis. Through the significance of the pictorial, images not only depict reality but with them we define reality. There has never been a time in which images have spread, traveled or edited at a higher speed and intensity. So, making pictures orbits spirally the realm of haziness and speculation. Through that blurriness, Magdalena compiles associative room installations and produces mostly analogue large-scale prints from digital material. Image: Print 017 multi coloured linocut and screen print in oil on paper mounted on fibre board 135 x 95 cm photo by Anna Sophia Rußmann

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 19: curated selection

G a b r i e l

R o s a s

A l e m á n

www.gabrielrosasaleman.mx

Gabriel Rosas Alemán’s oeuvre attempts to analyze the different modes of interaction and communication that operate within the context of galleries and museums. Rosas Alemán defines certain paradigmatic moments such as the initial encounter with the work of art, the dynamics of movement within the exhibition space, and the dialogs that emerge from the esthetic contemplation. These situations are broken apart in order to isolate the gestures, the social agreements and the emotional dimensions that live together in these contexts. The stagings of Rosas Alemán involve the creation of narratives, some of which speculate on the contemplative experience and its repercussion on interpersonal relationships, others address the possibility of a secret life of the works of art, as autonomous entities that do not depend on the spectator to remain active. The intentions and the emotional motives that exist as the substrate under works of art, spectators, artists and other characters, are elaborated into participatory fictions. The possibility to channel these experiences has as the objective to reveal the sensitive tapestry that underpins these types of cultural institutions and their respective peculiarities. Gabriel Rosas Alemán lives and works in Mexico City.

Image: Suspensión del estado de conciencia cotidiano polished iron 210 x 210 cm

M i k a e l a

K a u t z k y

www.mikaelakautzky.com

Image: Lucky Star Water Vibes (side one) naturally dyed cotton, quilted found fabric, safety pins, a flower, soy milk and earth pigment paint on canvas 62 x 86 inches

Mikaela Kautzky is a queer, interdisciplinary artist living and working on the unceded territories of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations (now known by the name “Vancouver, Canada”). The mediums with which she works are guided by methodologies of place, community, and reciprocity. Her works emerge in the forms of natural dyes and textiles, clothing/costume design, homemade pigments and paper, re-worked found objects, installations, social practice, land art, performance art, skateboarding, photography, and film. She is currently working on an art publication called Skate or Dye which looks at how natural dyeing and earth based textiles can be used as design precedents for creating more inclusive and diverse landscape architecture in skateboarding.

Image: Lucky Star Water Vibes (side two)

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 19: curated selection

R e b e c c a

M u n c e

www.rebeccamunce.com

Born in 1991, Rebecca Munce works with drawing and text to map out ecologies surrounding cosmological fear and individual earthly narratives. Munce has had numerous exhibitions in Canada, the United States, Europe and Japan. Most recently Munce has exhibited at McBride Contemporain (2020); Stewart Hall Gallery (Montréal 2019); Deux Poissons Gallery (Montréal, 2018); FOFA Gallery (Montréal, 2018); Momozono Gallery, (2017, Tokyo), École des Beaux-Arts de Montréal (2017 Montreal) and Goodyear Gallery (2017, North Carolina) among others. She holds a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts from York University, and a Master’s in Visual Art from Concordia University. Drawings begin in reference to older versions, incorporating past figures into an unknown landscape, a narrative is formed. These characters are forced to adapt, losing or growing limbs, fighting or at leisure, they are drawn over and over, living out a new path each time. As a result the drawings can explore moments of heroism, ritual and futility within a mythos that is both nostalgic and at risk of cataclysmic change.

Image: Giant Wrestling oil pastel etching 40 x 32 inches

E l i s e

L a f o n t a i n e

www.eliselafontaine.ca

Most of my painting projects are developed during immersive residencies. My objective is to destabilize myself through experiential research in specific places that I know nothing about. Their capacity to suspend time and, thus, provoke a discrepancy with reality is a quality that I wish to privilege in the current context. For instance, I have slipped in the prehistoric caves of the Pyrénées Ariégeoises (France), various prison and psychiatric settings, and the Carmelite monastery in Montreal (Canada). Through my private quests within closed communities and cloistered sites, I try to capture what is invisible. In a spirit of openness, I archive my stays and visits in words and images. These materials, which serve as sources for my paintings, consolidate my interest in architecture and in certain issues related to bodies: from those that are imprisoned to those in full expansion in a given space. As a consequence, each series of paintings is linked to particular aspects of a place in abstract language: light, transparency, volume, iconography, the senses, and the history of the site and its occupants. Graduating with a master’s degree in visual and media arts at the University of Quebec in Montreal, I also have a bachelor’s degree in visual arts from Concordia University. I took part in the artist residency Malévoz Quartier culturel, Switzerland (2018), Vermont Studio Center, United States (2012) and Leipzig International Art program, Germany (2015). Soon I will exhibit at sothu Gallery (Switzerland) and participate in the group exhibition at the Werkschau at Spinnerei, Germany (summer 2021). My projects have been presented in individual and group exhibitions, in particular at McBride Contemporain, Montreal (2020); Nicolas Robert Gallery, Montreal (2019); Maison de la culture, Plateau Mont-Royal, Montreal; Usine C, Montreal (2018); Spinnerei Autmn Gallery Tour, Leipzig, Germany (2015) and at the Art Mûr gallery, Montreal (2014).

Image: Voûte 7 oil on canvas mounted on wood 101.60 x 121.92 x 4 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 19: curated selection

J e s s i c a W i l l i a m s

www.jessica-williams.com

Image (left):

Image (right):

Self portrait at dusk oil on canvas 16 x 20 inches

The Trance oil on canvas 54 x 66 inches

I use painting to explore subjects on the psychological edge. My paintings exist in an imagined realm between reality and illusion, and I seek to express my subject’s longing on the precipice of fulfillment. I am both enchanted and haunted by my memories and dreams, by the stories I learned in childhood, passed down from generation to generation. Painting itself is a compression of time, revealing its construction and simultaneously obscuring itself. My imagery, inspired by my immediate surroundings, navigates through my desires and fantasies, and in each painting I navigate through a new dream on the verge of reality. Jessica Williams (American, b. 1983) lives and works in Los Angeles. She is a Visiting Lecturer in Painting & Drawing at UCLA School of Art, and has an MFA from Colombia University, and BFA from Rhode Island School of Design.

Image (left):

Image (right):

My dreams are filled with swans and demons oil on canvas 30 x 36 inches

The Phoenix oil on canvas 32 x 38 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 19: curated selection

J e s s i c a

D z i e l i n s k i

www.jessicadzielinski.com

Sourcing thematic and visual influence from warped memories, daydreams, public observations, found ephemera, and a penchant for the supernatural, my practice involves constructing ambiguous spaces and narratives which often converge and overlap. I view my work as both highly personal and mythological—I make images and stories in which figures and objects often become entangled in the spaces they inhabit, where colors and patterns act as fragmented meditations, and mundanity & mysticism, humor & urgency, and life & death are all imperceptibly linked. Jessica Dzielinski was born in Detroit, Michigan, raised beside the Superstition Mountains in Arizona, and currently resides in Iowa City, Iowa. She will receive an MA and MFA in Painting & Drawing from the University of Iowa in 2022. She has self-published a number of zines, distributing them at various small press expos throughout Arizona. She has exhibited other work throughout Arizona, Iowa, and Mexico.

Image: How Could I Ever Apologize To All The Bugs I’ve Killed? spray paint, oil paint on found fabric 53 x 42 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 19: curated selection

O l g a

A b e l e v a

www.olgaabeleva.com

Abeleva’s painting practice resembles a soap opera: there are recurring characters, splintering narratives, and cliffhangers. Some paintings are autobiographical, some take up rumours about celebrities, others are imagined scenarios. Working through fractured narratives, the paintings sculpt a theatrical space, where an unreliable narrator tells the constantly fluctuating story. Drawing from personal experience of immigrating to Canada in her teens, Abeleva’s paintings express the cultural and linguistic awkwardness, anecdotal slip-ups, and mistranslations that take place while the main character shies away from the spotlight. Real memories are retold through the medium of painting with the fracturing, dramatizations and exaggerations that occur in oral storytelling. Surrounded by theatrical elements such as spotlights and red curtains, the actors in the paintings are charged with the knowledge that they are caught up in a plot which they cannot escape. The symbology of the stage is clearly charted out for them, but beyond the spotlight is a mysterious world of which they have no control over. Reluctantly following their script, the clairvoyant characters search for a way out. Interested in different visual conventions used to communicate the passage of time in a two-dimensional space, Abeleva’s paintings borrow from comic books to combine multiple events or points of view into a single picture plane. These divisions challenge the smoothness of the painting as a unified object, and leave the narrative open-ended: each episode is to be continued... Image: Basement Dreamer oil on canvas 36 x 42 inches

A n d r e w

A d o l p h u s

G i s t

www.instagram.com/veryfinesandpaper

My work consists of automatic and immediate objects, detailed and whittled towards an expression of situations and emotions on the fringe of familiar feelings. I enjoy the automatic and immediate. I sculpt and draw abstract shapes. I try to create objects that are a tactile expression of emotions. One half of me embraces the fun of letting loose, while my other half enjoys the analytical, and detail oriented. I spend the majority of time working on scrutiny, fleshing out objects, or moments that are capable of existing but not quite attainable. The majority of my experience is in drawing this way, but I have been enthralled by the magic of 3D this last year. Since playing the dark fantasy game “Dark Souls” on a whim, something sparked in me. The game combines an eerie, connected world, looping in on itself and out again, accomplishing a story that requires the viewer’s attention and imagination to create an environment with emotions relatable in this world but not quite able to exist in it. This connection to another place through the fringe of emotions that exist in our world is the interest I desire to attain through my art.

Image: Anime Heart 3D models using Zbrush and Blender

K a l e y

F l o w e r s

www.kaleyflowers.com

Kaley Flowers explores ideas of digital culture, online trends, and technology in relation to nature, through a mythology of characters and the creation of “cyber-artifacts”. This practice is the attempt to solidify the fleeting, virtual imagery of our past and present into tangible objects. Ceramics are an ancient and lasting material, and through the use of traditional craft methods, whether it is a meme, GIF, Bitcoin wallet, avatar or online relic of the past, Flowers can transform these digital objects into physical form. Within the current climate crises, organic patterning and natural forms that flux and collide with highly detailed technological imagery are increasingly informing her work. Flowers is a graduate of OCAD University and works as an Artist-in-Residence at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre. Her work has been shown internationally and across Canada in galleries such as Hashimoto Contemporary (San Francisco), The Hole (NYC) and the Dunlop Gallery (Regina). In 2019, Flowers attended ACRE Artist Residency (Chicago) and the Picnic Art Festival (Shanghai), and was awarded Jurors’ Choice at the Salt Spring National Art Prize (Canada).

Image: New era ceramic, glaze, lustre, laces 10 x 4 x 6 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 19: curated selection

M a g d a l e n a

K a r p i ń s k a

www.magdalenakarpinska.com

Magdalena Karpińska is a painter from Poland. While creating paintings on canvases, paper, and textiles Magdalena explores the arrangements of forms in the surrounding nature, their references, and mutual relations. She casts doubt on the truth of the painting’s representation of nature, breaking down the image into prime factors. With a focused attention to detail, she often approaches her work both as a composition and as a visual rebus, moving smoothly between the realism dictated by the observation of nature, and its deconstruction that leads to abstraction. In her search to answer nagging questions, Karpińska often goes back to the Renaissance, its characteristic motifs and symbols. Submitted work is from the new series of large-format paintings called “The Sunshine’s gone” and created during the lockdown. When the pandemic began the sunshine had suddenly gone—it turned out that the good times were over. Painted in the evening light, Karpińska’s paintings have something of taming anxiety. The whole series focuses on plant care, which for many has become a form of coping with the daunting reality. Plant care and gardening help to repress the ever-present sense of guilt that appears when we blame ourselves for passivity, uselessness, and hidden egoism. Taking care of plants, similar to taking care of our body and helping others, may give us a momentary release from that haunting sense of guilt. A list of Magdalena’s other exhibitions is available on the website.

Image: Watering egg tempera and oil on canvas 200 x 165 cm

S o p h i a

B e l k i n

www.sophiabelkin.com

Sophia Belkin (b. 1990 Moscow, Russia) currently lives and works in New Orleans, Louisiana. She earned her BFA in drawing and printmaking from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2012. She has participated in residency programs in Vermont, Norway, Russia, and most recently the Narva Art Residency in Estonia. Recent solo and two person shows include Á Condition at Calaboose in Montreal, Fossil Bloom at The Front in New Orleans, and Stone Belly Dweller at Wild Flower Baltimore. Sophia Belkin uses dye painting, embroidery and textile collage to create intricate and dynamic compositions that reference natural processes. She works from a collection of original photographs that are printed on chiffon and sewn onto dyed backgrounds using a CNC embroidery machine. The appliqué technique references craft and fashion, while the content of the work mimics biological structures and movements. Like membranes within the body, or cell walls of a flower, the forms appear both permeable and rigid. Calibrating between intuitive gestural mark making and the controlled line of the CNC, the textile paintings create layered, multidimensional environments that imply a constant state of regeneration, expansion and flux.

Image: Electric Silt printed chiffon and embroidery on dyed cotton 36 x 26 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 19: curated selection

J u l i a

Z a s t a v a

www.juliazastava.com

Julia Zastava is a visual artist working with drawing, video, sound, installation, stage design and performance. She was born in Moscow where she studied ballet and multimedia directing. In 2006 she got her MA in Moving Images. In 2012 she moved to Vienna, Austria and enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts. She graduated in 2018 with the degree of Mag Art. She lives and works between Vienna and Berlin. My practice is based around processes of transition, questions of narrations, ideas of the uncanny, sexuality and social surrealism, drawing inspiration from soviet cartoons, news headlines and vintage erotic magazines. I usually work in series, inventing stories with polymorphous characters, to then loosely connect them through a broken narration in which different modes of coexistence are possible. The works of the new series Sky Intro depict scenes of the life of others in my immediate surrounding, in which genderless cross-species avatars live moments of failure, despair and anxiety.

Image: Sky Intro 1 pencils on paper 65 x 50 cm

J a n e

M c K e n z i e

www.janemckenziestudio.com

Jane McKenzie (b. 1972, USA) studied fine arts at the University of Montana (BFA 1994) and completed graduate studies at Syracuse University (MFA 2000). Her work was selected for the Everson Museum Biennial in Syracuse, NY (2000) and the ArtsWorcester Biennial in Worcester, MA (1997). In 2005, her paintings were included in Matzo Files, a flat-file gallery in New York City. She has exhibited her work in group shows in Canada, USA, and Japan, including a solo show at Galerie Nota Bene in Montreal in 2010. McKenzie was invited to participate in the GIFC travelling art shows in 2018, and her work was selected by White Columns Curated Artist Registry in 2019. She lives and works in Montreal. My current body of work was born out of a pragmatic strategy to sustain a daily painting practice while also working as a full-time parent of two young children. My paintings over the last several years focus on nocturnal observations painted each night between sunset and midnight in my backyard using ink, watercolor, and gouache on small pieces of paper, working in relative darkness with only incidental light provided by the urban light-polluted sky, my neighbors’ porch lights, and quite often, the moon. During the frozen nights of winter, I continued my practice from the windows of my home. Either way, the paintings are made with quick intensity, because even the dark of night is ephemeral. It became a consistent nightly meditative practice in which I use paint to translate the energy in the landscape around me. There is also an interior, intuitive vision at play. This project has evolved into an investigation of urban backyard habitat. Currently, I am researching for a series of paintings based on ecological and micro-seasonal observations within my backyard. I am passionate about the potential for art to deepen the human connection with the urban habitat—the “mini-biome”—of one’s backyard or urban green space. Image: Blossom moon watercolour on paper 30 x 23 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 19: curated selection

S h a n a

S h a r p

www.instagram.com/shanasharp

Image: The Grove oil 14 x 14 inches

Shana Sharp (b.1953, Sacramento, CA, USA) is a self-taught painter who lives and works in Sonoma, CA. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Et al., San Francisco (2019), Third Floor, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York, NY (2019) and Lulu, Mexico City (2018). She presented her work at NADA Fair, Chicago Invitational with Et al., San Francisco (2019) and NADA, Miami with Lulu, Mexico City (2018). Her work was also featured in “City Prince/sses” at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2019) Long-term Bay Area resident Shana Sharp paints the world around her, whether it be the idyllic or the endangered landscapes around Sonoma & Napa, flowers from her garden or the architecture of Roma Sur in Mexico City, what she depicts is almost always experienced first-hand, photographed, and then painted with disarming honesty and directness. It is almost as if things were suddenly, yet carefully seen and then portrayed as such. How does she do this? Unencumbered by any conventional , academic training, she manages to preserve the relative purity of a personal idiosyncratic vision of the world while foregrounding the sensual immediacy of paint. In other words, the work is refreshingly bullshit-free (the near impossible dream of every painter). If becoming a painter is a process of learning everything and forgetting it in order to develop one’s own language, then Sharp seems to have skipped this process and gone directly to her own mark making and pictorial idiom. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to see echoes of say Alice Neel or Fairfield Porter in the intimacy of what she makes. Some have remarked parallels to the work with Lois Dodd or Charles Burchfield, but what and how Sharp paints is irreducibly her own. Of her painting, critic Andrew Russeth has written in ARTnews “They’re lush and, at times, tender. A vase filled with white lilies, seen from a low angle, has some of the meaty intensity of a Marsden Harley, while swaying trees in one landscape and a close-up view of a cactus recall the otherworldly spirit of Charles Burchfield—nature revealed as something unknowable, alluring, and strange.”

Image: Full Moon oil 11 x 14 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 19: curated selection

S t e v e n

R i d d l e

www.steven-riddle.com

The submitted images were imagined during the COVID-19 spring/summer quarantine in Brooklyn, New York. Like many others during quarantine, I felt physically and emotionally isolated from work, family and friends. This void of contact and responsibility gave me the opportunity to reflect and recharge my creative process. I found myself finding a new routine that did not revolve around a paycheck and social obligations. These new routines focused on self-care and reconnecting with the creative self. The rooftop of my apartment building became my solace away from the world. It became my studio where these solar prints were made.

Image: Within the apple we find the self, a self amongst others searching solar print mounted on panel 18 x 24 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 19: curated selection

B r i g W a n g

www.contactbrig.myportfolio.com

Brig’s works are light and auspicious. Her works subtly direct viewers towards reclaiming the cheerfulness in existence.

Image: Beachtini colorpencil and pastel 22.9 x 30.5 cm

S a e

Y e o u n

H w a n g

www.saeyeounhwang.com

These are a selection of paintings portrayed in a screenshot format. Screen is a digital manifestation of one’s headspace, which gets messy sometimes. I do not want to shy away from the fact that everyone will see my work through the screen in 2020. I am also interested in the format of a screenshot as a time stamp, not just because you can see the date on the top, but technology ages much faster than us. The folder icons, header bars etc. become a time stamp of their own. It marks the 2020, which will be a huge chapter in history. For good or bad. Mostly chaotic. Sae Yeoun Hwang (b. 1994) works in London and Seoul. She received an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in 2020. She has exhibited in London, New York and places in between. Her work is a collection of memory, experience and imagination; together, they create a visual story. She is interested in humour and how it functions. “Getting the joke,” reveals socio-economic, cultural and political understanding of the viewer and questions the root of the joke. Humour is used to diffuse the heaviness of the subject and also used as a defense mechanism. The visual stories might not be defined by a single theme, but that is closer explanation of micro and macro interest of self and life itself.

Image: Fabulous Screenshot digital screenshot image size varies

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Tr e v o r

B a i r d

www.trevormbaird.com

Trevor Baird (b.1990, Vancouver, Canada) lives and works in Montreal. He has studied at NSCAD University, Halifax, and holds a BFA in Ceramics from Concordia University. His work has recently been exhibited at the Eli and Edythe Broad Museum, Lansing; Harpy, Rutherford; The Hole, New York; Projet Pangée, Montreal and Arsenal, Toronto. He was recently shortlisted for the Winifred Shantz Award in 2019 and has an upcoming show at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (Canada). Baird’s practice combines the ancient language of ceramics with the contemporary aesthetic of comic books, creating hybrid objects that blend the sentimentality of DIY with the idealized perfection of industrial productions. Playing off the histories of function, decoration, labour and temporality, Baird reinforces the tension between the preciousness of porcelain and its home-crafted aspect. Through repeated gestures of molding, casting, and screen-printing, his work retains and highlights a process where intervention and error are introduced and cultivated through each step.

Image: F3 (from Inside the Actor’s Studio) underglazed porcelain 48 x 17.5 x 17 cm

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 19: curated selection

R o s a n n a G r a f

www.rosannagraf.com

Rosanna Graf, born 1988 in Munich, studied Fine Arts at HFBK Hamburg and at Goldsmiths—University of London as scholar of the Art School Alliance programme. She’s working mainly in video and performance art with a focus on the creation of text and an affinity for deviant and clichéd characters, ideas and images. She draws on cracks and irregularities in these smooth projection surfaces and lets the characters take action against their determination through the use of language. In recent works she’s interested in permeating and bending the character of the witch and is exploring the use of collective magical practice as a tool for societal change and progress. Characters like Prepper Witch and Chaos Witch are appearing in interactive performances and video works and question established concepts of body and mind, the collective and our relation to nature. Graf received the Deutschland Stipend by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the annual stipend by the Society of Friends of HFBK Hamburg, e.V and the Stipend for Fine Arts by the City of Hamburg. She is winner of the Karl H. Ditze Prize and is a current participant of the Goldrausch artist program, Berlin. Her work is shown at for example Galerie Conradi, Hamburg; Kunsthaus Hamburg; Strizzi, Cologne; Art Space One, Seoul; Deichtorhallen Hamburg/Sammlung Falckenberg and at Jahresgaben 2018 at Kunstverein München. Furthermore she creates video work for theatre productions at for example Volkstheater München, Kampnagel Hamburg and Volksbühne Berlin. The artist is currently living and working in Berlin.

Image: Mercury in Retrograde (Part 3: Funeral Service for Hekate) performance, 30 min., Nominees, Kunsthaus Hamburg, video still

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 19: curated selection

102

L a ï l a M e s t a r i

www.lailamestari.com

Laïla Mestari (born 1992, Casablanca, Morocco) is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Montreal. Since receiving her BFA from Concordia University in 2017, she has developed a mixed visual language where Maghrebian craftsmanship, Western painting and North American popular culture collide. Mestari addresses the hybrid nature of her identity through installation, performance, video, photography, sculpture, textile and drawing. The recipient of several awards and grants (Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec, Canada Council for the Arts, Irene F. Whittome Prize in Studio Arts, Prix Ada Lovelace), she has recently presented two solo exhibitions in Canada (La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse and VU, 2019), and one in Spain (Espacio PINEA, 2017). Her work has been shown locally in Montreal (Dazibao, SKOL, Arprim, Musée des maîtres et artisans du Québec, Monument National) and has notably been acquired by the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. This year, Mestari is an Artist in Residence at Centre SAGAMIE (Alma) and LA SERRE-arts vivants (Montreal). Inspired by collage, my practice is fed by a continuous dialog between living arts and visual arts. Compelled by the power of resonating forms, I collect rhyming objects to compose poetic and enigmatic images. In this recent series, I question the conceptual distance that separates nature from its representation and the embodied experience from its documentation. Charged with a bizarre nostalgia, my photographs reflect contemporary idealism of natural lands. Regarding notions of homeland and dislocation, I interrogate how this thinking specifically affects diasporic identities today. Image: Laying digital photography 58 x 42.5 cm

103

B e t h

F r e y

www.bethfrey.com

Image: Self-isolation playlist watercolour on paper 22 x 30 inches

104

Beth Frey (born Calgary, Canada, 1980) divides her time between Montréal and Mexico City, where she creates drawings, paintings, and videos. Through her wry, absurdist sense of humour, Frey playfully draws out contradictions in her subject matter, be it gender, the body, social media, mental health, or spirituality, often integrating representations of herself into the chromatic cartoon-like world she has created. She has an MFA in Painting and Drawing from Concordia University, and a BFA from the University of Victoria. Frey has shown across Canada as well as in Mexico, the US, and Morocco, most recently: Agony Aunt at Casa Equis (Mexico City, 2019); Boom Boom Bloom Doom at Galería POPOP (Montréal, 2019); Relamida at Clavel Clavel (Mexico City, 2019) and Unfinished Busyness at Galería A4 (Tlahuelilpan, Mexico, 2019), among others. The leaky, chromatic worlds that I create are populated by characters caught mid-gesture, always restless within the moment, and who, despite their anxieties and absurdities, are trying their best at being. Contradiction plays a role in my work as much as the fragmented cartoon actors we see living out their lives. There is often a sense of disquiet, but painted with a vibrant palette, a celebration of the difficult or unnerving as part of the experience of living. It is not only the bestial characters that are alive: their surrounding environments are pulsating with movement, and there are few boundaries that demarcate figure and surrounding. All exist within a common ecosystem, guided by the loose gestures of my initial stroke on the page, which is then sculpted into shape with precision.

Image: Let it burn! watercolour on paper 22 x 30 inches

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 19: curated selection

K a r e n

B a r b o u r

www.karenbarbour.com

I have a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from UC Davis. I’ve shown at Jack Hanley Gallery and Anthony Meier Fine Arts and am represented by Fouladi Projects Gallery. I’ve been interested in doing fantasy landscapes with trees and towers etc., using gouache, flashe, and watercolor on paper, sometimes using cut paper to build up the surfaces. Some have spire-like structures that reach for the sky or they’re inside a room or on a stage. I work on them for years, cutting paper and making patterns and changing them over and over. I’m thinking about the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden and good and evil, tamed and untamed plants, trying to control nature, making decorative shapes of rainbows, flowers, lakes, and rivers.

Image: Where the Fruits on the Trees Are Jewels flashe,gouache, and watercolor on paper 22 x 30 inches

106

L a c e y

H a l l

www.laceyhall.com

Lacey Hall is a mixed-media artist born in Pittsburgh, PA in 1992. She has a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and lives and works in Pittsburgh, PA. She creates surreal spaces where she invites the viewer to feel immersed in her unique worlds. Her work is often intimate and small in scale. Detailed paintings of imaginary rooms and landscapes are filled with imagery from her daily life, such as nightgowns, slippers and dogs along with a well-curated collection of source images from her favorite films, shows, and books. Her work draws from her experience of sadness, isolation, and escapism. Rolling hills and rivers flow through a girlish fairytale land inhabited by emotional and lonely women, whose companions are mostly dogs and rabbits.

Image: Harpy’s Wish acrylic on panel 4 x 4 inches

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 19: curated selection

L u c

P a r a d i s

www.parisianlaundry.com/en/artists/lucparadis

The work of Luc Paradis is grounded in various media at a rhythmic and steady pace. This multifaceted practice includes painting, sculpture and drawing. Collage serves as a guiding principle, appearing both independently as individual works and as the preface to the assemblage and installation of the various elements of his oeuvre. Paradis’ interest in collage suggests the Bauhausian axiom of the total work of art—where design, craft and fine art meet and the distinctions between various creative endeavors are blurred. Paradis moves in and out of works of abstraction and invites us into a realm of many aesthetics. His pronounced attention to the process of making and a long view of the work he produces bestows his practice with its own sense of totality. Peppered throughout Paradis’ work are loose tenets of modernism, exercises that are appreciated for their subtlety as he intuitively sources a rich history of art and culls from a vastitude of visual stimuli. The results are entirely unique and new, yet inextricably linked to the past. Paradis is also an accomplished musician, and his synesthetic response to the diversity of media with which he works can be gleaned from the staccatos of patterns, repetition of form and composition of his abstract and representational designs. There is something musical to the colour of line and to the definition of form. This reciprocity between media is the foundation of a practice that is dedicated and generous in its approach. He currently resides in Montréal and is an influential figure in this vibrant artistic community. Paradis has presented solo exhibitions at L’oeil de Poisson, Québec; Centre Clark, Montréal and PARISIAN LAUNDRY, Montréal. He has collaborated with musicians from across North America to produce artwork for their various projects. He was in residency at Les Recollets (Paris) in 2015, and has a confirmed residency at NARS foundation in January 2021. Paradis was a participant in the 27th Symposium of Contemporary Art in Baie-St.-Paul and was asked to participate in the prestigious Canadian Art Foundation auction in 2013. His work is found in various private collections as well as the public collection of the Collection Prêt d’oeuvres d’art of the Musée National des beaux-arts du Québec.

Image: The Pearl acrylic on wood panel 30 x 40 inches

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 19: curated selection

108

Y u k o

S o i

www.yukosoi.com

Born 1985 in Japan, I was drawing with colored pencils for 13 years. I’ve recently been drawing abstract art, but before I was drawing like this artwork, which were created using only colored pencils. One of the biggest themes that I am working on is life, the other would be feelings of thinking about someone. Each artwork takes about one month to create.

Image: Sad woman colored pencils on paper 73 × 52 cm

109

M a n u e l

B i s s o n

www.manuelbisson.wordpress.com

Image: Fume show oil on canvas 20 x 24 inches

110

Manuel Bisson creates his images from a reflection on color, blurring, vibration and the scale of multiple perception. His language from drawing and painting operates both through digital culture and in the artist’s studio. The images he creates act as interfaces between the real and the improbable in a transpictural space on the border between video games, painting, drawing and fantasy. For him, a drawing always remains a landscape. The airbrush rendering of certain forms found in his images, recall the culture of the tag and street graffiti. The world of concrete, the monolithic forms of Bauhaus architecture or Brutalism have always informed his approach. But beyond this surface language, the environment, nature and animal world remain at the heart of his concerns. In his current work, Manuel Bisson uses different printing materials and methods to bias and foil his own knowledge of the image. Oversized, reduced or transferred to new materials, Bisson endeavors to migrate his images to new realities of perception. He summons the public to enter a spatial alchemy bordering science fiction, the occult and a magical and poetic formalism. Manuel Bisson lives and works in Montreal. His artistic approach is distinguished mainly by two disciplines, namely: performance and painting. He completed his Bachelor of Visual and Media Arts at UQAM in 2011. However, his multidisciplinary artistic practice has spanned more than 15 years. Since 2014, Manuel Bisson has been represented by the Galerie Bernard in Montreal where his works have been included in group and solo exhibitions. He has participated in many Contemporary Art Fairs like PAPIER 14-15-16-19 and in the exhibitions of several auctions in artist run centers: galerie CLARK, galerie B-312, centre CIRCA, L’écart... In addition, his works have been exhibited in culture centers in Canada and Italy.

Image: Creepers labyrinthe oil on canvas 16 x 20 inches

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 19: curated selection

editorial selection of works Featured image: Victor B.P. Bengtsson Finding the head of Orpheus oil on jute 160 x 110 cm more on p. 120

L i a n

Z h a n g

www.lycheeone.com/wp/artist/lian-zhang

Image: Sprouts oil on canvas 31 x 22 cm

114

Lian Zhang was born in 1984 in Hangzhou, China, and currently lives and works in London. She received her first MA in Painting from China Academy of Art, Hangzhou (2007-2010) and second MA from the Royal College of Art, London (2011-2013). She has won several painting prizes including Curators’ Prize The Open West 2014 and Hine Painting Prize 2013, and was shortlisted for Valerie Beston Award 2013. Recent exhibitions include Constellations and Folds (solo), Lychee One, London, 2020; Bone Memory, Lychee One, London, 2019; Rifts in silence (with Ding Wu and Zhao Qian), M Art Center, Shanghai, 2018; Flickering Boundaries, MadeIn Gallery, Shanghai, 2018; Mingled Spaces (with Caroline Walker and Gareth Cadwallader), Lychee One, London, 2017; The Open West, the Wilson |Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum, Cheltenham, 2014; Deserts of Humanity, Display London, 2014; Painting Show & Performances, Winter Projects, London, 2013; Young Masters, Sphinx Fine Art, London, 2013; The Masks We Wear, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London, 2013. My working practice is based upon a practice of assembling constellations of images through which a serial network of fractured narratives start to emerge. Partly this involves a splicing together of the imaginary and reality in ways that break up the logic of both realms and syntax of images. The process of fracturing opens out the process to differing velocities so the paintings might appear in a state of arrest or suspension, as being in slow motion or even subject to the blur of speed. It is as the underlying laws pertaining to physical reality are transformed but the way in which images might start to cohere into their departure from the habitual. If images are subject to the process of fragmentation, then temporality is likewise, and in this way, new and surprising conjunctions might yield from the folding operations of interiority and exteriority. There are two types of drawing in my work, one pertaining to the inscription of figures and forms and one that draws lines pertaining to invisible abstractions. Painting is the means of discovering just how these two orders of inscription might cohere together. Recently a shift has started to occur in my work. There is the same kind of multiplicity and fragmentation, but it is directed away from the memory of either collage or cinematic montage toward the construction of imaginary mood-scapes in which traces of memory surface but without definite anchorage. They might be drifting apart from any sense of fixed determination or stylistic will. I might say that this is born out of hybridity as a critical concept but that is a far too lazy term because it implies a critical operation or device. Instead the word fascination comes to mind because it evokes the suspension of both time and will.

Image: Ginseng elixir oil on canvas 30.5 x 24 cm

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F a b i a n a

M a r t í n e z

P e l á e z

www.instagram.com/fabiana_mapel

Image: Three Chit palm leaves and a liana oil over linoleum 50 x 70 cm

116

Fabiana Martinez Pelaez (Fabiana Mapel) currently studies at the National School of Sculpture, Painting and Etching ( Escuela Nacional de Pintura Escultura y Grabado, “La Esmeralda.”) at Mexico City. In her work she investigates the concept of Nature through the use of different mediums, such as painting and installation. She is interested in specific cultural and geographical contexts, mainly the Mexican Jungle of Quintana Roo. The place in which she stays is of great physical and creative stimulation. She tries to connect to the landscape through observation, experimentation, analyzing and doing research of the plants´ uses within the place.

Image: Two Chit palm leaves and a liana oil over linoleum 50 x 70 cm

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K a y l a

Ta y l o r

www.kaylaerintaylor.com

118

Kayla Taylor is a Chicago-based artist, originally from Lewisville, North Carolina. Currently finishing her Bachelor’s at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she is a painter, sculptor, and scientific illustrator. My practice stems from the desire to communicate science and nature visually, working to articulate an understanding of the world. I have found a home working in painting, drawing, sculpture, and the spaces between these. Painting mines the depths of landscape, science, and surreal imagery. Sculptures tend to function as interventions of the natural, utilizing the environment and found materials. My most recent work investigates fantasy and worldbuilding through papier mâché and handmade clay. The object’s decorated surface expands the conventional (two dimensional) notion of painting, setting painting and sculpture side by side. I am trying to elicit emotional responses to landscape and beauty through color, materiality, imagination, and fantasy, hoping to inspire people to engage with their world with a sense of animism, beauty, intrigue, and wonder.

Image (p.118-119): Wetland Fountain paper mache, handmade paper clay, tin foil, cardboard, moldable plastic, acrylic paint, custom tubing, water pumps 40 x 20 x 22 inches

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ArtMaze Magazine Issue 19: editorial selection

V i c t o r

B . P .

B e n g t s s o n

www.instagram.com/victor.benzin

My work is based around a dreamy depiction of humans and animals having an intimate relationship in a warm and yet sometimes gloomy outdoor scene. Inspired by idyllic periods in Danish and international art-history, such as the Danish golden age and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, I too try to imitate nature in an almost fairytale like fashion, seen through a dreamy and slightly blurry temper. The figurative and the historical scenery of the paintings are supported by the blunt colours and the raw materials, the naked jute and the thin layers of undissolved oil-paint, in that they help create an earthy image in an indefinable point in time. The scenes I choose to present and the way I use the materials, give me the feeling of being drawn into something dreamlike where I can feel the texture of the flowers, the earth and the water together with the man or woman and dog or other animal present in the story. The relationship between the human character and the animal(s) also gives me a sense of tension and story unfolding in the painting. I can project emotions into that relationship. I get the feeling of looking back in time, without knowing when or where, to a bio-romantic symbiosis between human and nature in a story I can’t precisely comprehend.

Image: Palus oil on jute 180 x 130 cm

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V i n n a

B e g i n

www.vinnabegin.com

Trained in both painting and photography, Begin completed her MFA at the Academy of Art University, San Francisco in 2001. Her work delicately balances the intertwining of shape, colour and light amid the organic geometries often found in nature. Her interest in the transcendental is mirrored in her meditative approach to making, where the soft, hazy sensations of lucid experience are communicated through visual means.

Image: The Entrance pastel on paper 9 x 12 inches

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S t e p h e n

D e f f e t

www.stephendeffet.com

Salvaged from the internet and thrift stores, the imagery of Stephen Deffet’s paintings are sourced from strangers’ VHS home movies. Vacations, celebrations, and holidays are inherited as commodified memories. These abandoned moments are introduced into the collective consciousness, now re-birthed in a more tangible, accessible form, as a painting. However, upon closer examination, we are reminded of each work’s original context: while the surfaces are smooth and the paint sits flat, the edges are irregular, as though they are ripped from the screen that once held the entirety of the fleeting moment. Stephen Deffet (b. 1993) is an artist currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York. He holds a BFA in Painting and Drawing from Ohio University, and his work has been shown in exhibitions both nationally and internationally.

Image: High standard oil on linen stretched panel 24 x 18 inches

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R a c h e l l e

B u s s i è r e s

www.rachellebussieres.com

Rachelle Bussières (b.1986, Quebec City, Canada) received her MFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 2015. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her practice is at the intersection of photography and sculpture, moving through a collision of materials and forms through the lumen photographic process. She fabricates and assembles objects that are stacked, folded, and arranged as a point of departure to make new documents while applying the lumen print process through a series of different exposures on gelatin silver paper. She is the recipient of the Penumbra Workspace Award from Penumbra Foundation and the Award for Excellence from the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation. She has had recent solo exhibitions at Johansson Projects (Oakland, USA) and Robert Koch Gallery (San Francisco, USA). Some recent group shows include Seattle Pacific University (Seattle, WA); Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Brooklyn); Soil Gallery (Seattle, WA); the General French Consulate (San Francisco, CA); The Wing (San Francisco, CA); the Center for Fine Art Photography (Fort Collins, CO); Minnesota Street Project (San Francisco, CA); Galerie l’Inlassable (Paris, France); Headlands Center for the Arts (Sausalito, CA) and Present Company (Brooklyn, NY). She was awarded residencies at Penumbra Foundation, Banff Centre, Minnesota Street Project and Headlands Center for the Arts. Her work is present in various public, corporate and private collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, SFMOMA Library and Archives, Facebook (commission mural) in Sunnyvale, Instagram Inc. in San Francisco and Penumbra Foundation in New York City. She is part of the first cohort in the new residency program at the World Trade Center, the Silver Art Projects. Her solo show at Penumbra Foundation was scheduled to start for September 2020.

Image: Porte (12 heures, pluie, Victoria) lumen print on gelatin silver 20 x 24 inches

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W i l l i a m

S c h a e u b l e

www.williamschaeuble.com

William Schaeuble is a painter and illustrator from the American Midwest. He is currently based in Chicago while getting his BFA, but spends much of his time back home in rural Iowa. His paintings often begin as fast instinctual drawings in his sketchbook drawing from personal narratives and life experiences. These quick studies are then dissected, rearranged, and sometimes even combined to create more slow-burning works on canvas. Over the years he has created an (ever growing) inventory of forms and figures. Through creating his own painterly language, he has begun to develop a series of works which, when viewed together, begin to untangle a vast web of life experiences within a greater understanding of universal dilemmas. Small moments captured through a train window, lazing in the grass at home, and simply moving through life reveal much larger truths. Though Schaeuble’s paintings are deeply rooted in personal histories, he warns against seeking to find the original origin of each painting. While every work will have a meaning true to him he believes deeply in each viewer assigning new meaning personal to them and their experiences. At the end of the day, there is a limit to what paint and paintings can do but the human imagination is limitless. Schaeuble seeks to activate that in each person.

Image: A Gift, An Offering oil on canvas 18 x 24 inches

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L o l a

K a t a n

www.lolakatan.com

Lola Katan lives and works in New York City. She attended Rhode Island School of Design where she received her BFA in Painting, though ceramic became her primary medium. Lola sculpts low relief imagery into ceramic slabs, drawing on spaces relating to death and remembrance. The visual compositions include structures present in cemeteries, and varying afterlife motifs such as pyramidal structures, dogs and gates. Using hand mixed glazes, she layers and paints the ceramic surfaces with high temperature glazes to create variations in color, texture and luster. The merging of ceramic and painting forms the pieces into objects of memorial in themselves.

Image: Fountain Hereafter Table glazed stoneware 8 x 11 x .75 inches

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A n t h o n y

P a d i l l a

www.anthonyzpadilla.com

Image: The crown oil on canvas 14 x 11 inches

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My name is Anthony Z Padilla; I’m an artist working and living in Brooklyn NY. My main focus is on the natural world and the unique qualities it offers. I like to use light and shadows to create depth and a feeling of enclosure within my paintings. Recently I’ve begun to add animals to my work to give an added sense of emotions and relatability.

Image: The intruder oil on canvas 14 x 11 inches

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A n i

G u r a s h v i l i

www.anigurashvili.com

I was born in 1990 in Tbilisi, Georgia and graduated from Tbilisi State Academy of Arts with a BA in Media Art. In 2012 I moved to Vienna where I have lived and worked since then. Currently, I am studying for a Master’s degree in Painting at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna. My interest is rooted in the medieval books of Bestiary, where the diverse imagery of the mysterious animal world is representing human beings’ timeless attempts to communicate with a higher reality, a world of myths and faiths, beliefs and religions depicted in symbols. The content might still be accessible to a modern spectator, but often it appears to be absurd. This ambiguous and metaphorical visual language is continuously repeating itself in a wider range of mediums, be it painting, manga, video games etc. Observation enables the tracing down of how similar topics and representations were shapeshifting through different times. Mystery and familiarity are counter senses. However, painting is the medium where their coexistence builds the chemistry and works without obliterating one another. Canvas becomes a carrier of limitless capacity and I try to build maze-like narratives. A single detail or a group of details are constructed as ambiguous hints that slip through one’s fingers. The images are recognizable, but presented in a mysterious disguise, at times backlit by an artificial glow to challenge the blending in its own habitat. To me the act of painting is a training of patience. To trigger the viewer to examine the surface with similar patience, I provide different elements scattered over the canvas, that requires shifting focus and promotes new perception of composition and space.

Image: Untitled 4 oil on canvas 90 x 90 cm

ArtMaze Magazine Issue 19: editorial selection

We are looking to discover more emerging artists and to publish and help further promote their work 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. For any questions, please feel free to get in touch with us at info@artmazemag.com

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