Among Body Marks

A m o n g B o d y Ma r k s Curated by Nathalie Alfonso

The Projects / FATVillage 523 NW 1st Ave. Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33301 fatvillageprojects.com fatvillage.com

Opening Reception Sat, 01.31.15, 6-10p Workshop (open to public) Sun, 02.15.15 9a-1p Artists’ Talk Wed, 02.25.15, 6-8p Closing Reception Sat, 02.28.15, 6-10p Baby Portrait Workshop / Michael Namkung will help your infant (pre-crawler) make his or her own Baby Portrait monoprint. Using a prone (tummy time) position, your baby's weight and movement will create a portrait in ink—a unique visual record your baby's developmental stage.

Featuring work by Nathalie Alfonso and Michael Namkung

Thank Yous Introduction About Nathalie Alfonso Alfonso’s Performance About Michael Namkung Namkung’s Peformance Artists’ Talk Video Contact List

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I want to thank all the following people involved in the planning, production and presentation of Among Body Marks at The Projects–Fat Village: Michael Namkung for his immeasurable support and encouragement as my mentor during the last two years, Professors Dustin London and Lidu Yi for facilitating and providing the knowledge to enrich my practice, Leah Brown and Peter Symons for providing the space, tools and assisting the construction of the exhibition. Valeria Guillen for her input during the creation and the support throughout the development of ideas, Andres Ramirez and KEPRL Films for providing the required tools to document, to record and to structure the video “Among Body Marks”, and Kelley AntoniazziTaksier and Henry Taksier for photographing and designing this online catalog.

–Nathalie Alfonso

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This exhibition presents at The Projects-Fat Village large-scale installations, video projections, and concepts of performance by Michael Namkung and Nathalie Alfonso.

These artists investigate the language of mark making and drawing through the rigorous use of the body, and make drawings that manifest the physicality of movement through intense practice and repetition.

This exhibition also offers a rare insight into the role of the studentteacher dynamic in the development of emerging art practices. As a professor at Florida International University, Namkung has deeply informed Alfonso’s work by facilitating critical dialogue, and encouraging her to develop approaches and vocabularies of drawing that derive from her own unique experiences. Namkung’s twenty years of Ultimate Frisbee practice directly influences his work. Using his own body or the bodies of others, he combines traditional drawing tools with a language of physical training and athletic performance to make drawings that reflect spatial and temporal measures of the body. Alfonso investigates the value of labor by building large-scale installations where the movements of cleaning are repeated for long periods of time with charcoal.

n athalie alf o n s o

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Nathalie Alfonso’s (b.

1987, Bogota, Colombia) work investigates the value of manual labor, the degeneration of the body, and notions of impermanence through drawing, installation, and video. Her work has been exhibited in La Factoria-Ecuador, The Miami Performance International Festival, Florida International University, Buena Vista Bldg., Pompano Citi Centre and Broward College. Nathalie currently lives and works in Miami, Florida.

Nathalie ’ s P e r f o r m a n ce Alfonso’s work originates from the necessity to merge the practice of cleaning and art making.

Her constant obsession with cleanliness is manifested in the repetitive movements used to apply and remove the charcoal in different surfaces: walls, rags and paper. Hidden Marks of Exhaustion utilizes the contrast of surface and material to embrace the impulse to challenge body and mind. The uttermost satisfaction comes as she experiences the paradoxical nature of the material, which is untidy in essence but becomes neat as she manages to confront it with physical effort.

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Among Body Marks Works by Nathalie Alfonso and Michael Namkung Dimensions vary 2015

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Among Body Marks Works by Nathalie Alfonso and Michael Namkung Dimensions vary 2015

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Hidden Marks of Exhaustion 140 Minutes of Scrubbing Charcoal on wall 48’ x 4’ 2015

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Hidden Marks of Exhaustion 140 Minutes of Scrubbing Charcoal on wall 48’ x 4’ 2015

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Hidden Marks of Exhaustion 140 Minutes of Scrubbing Charcoal on wall 48’ x 4’ 2015

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Hidden Marks of Exhaustion 140 Minutes of Scrubbing (detail) Charcoal on wall 48’ x 4’ 2015

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Hidden Marks of Exhaustion Stains Charcoal on rags 11’25” x 18’ 2014

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Hidden Marks of Exhaustion Stains (detail) Charcoal on rags 11’25” x 18’ 2014

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Hidden Marks of Exhaustion Stains (detail) Charcoal on rags 11’25” x 18’ 2014

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Hidden Marks of Exhaustion Stains (detail) Charcoal on rags 11’25” x 18’ 2014

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Hidden Marks of Exhaustion Stains (detail) Charcoal on rags 11’25” x 18’ 2014

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Hidden Marks of Exhaustion Stains (detail) Charcoal on rags 11’25” x 18’ 2014

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Hidden Marks of Exhaustion Stains (detail) Charcoal on rags 11’25” x 18’ 2014

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Hidden Marks of Exhaustion 280 Minutes of Scrubbing Charcoal on vellum paper 36’ x 10’ 2015

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Hidden Marks of Exhaustion 280 Minutes of Scrubbing (detail) Charcoal on vellum paper 36’ x 10’ 2015

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Hidden Marks of Exhaustion 280 Minutes of Scrubbing (detail) Charcoal on vellum paper 36’ x 10’ 2015

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Hidden Marks of Exhaustion 280 Minutes of Scrubbing (detail) Charcoal on vellum paper 36’ x 10’ 2015

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Hidden Marks of Exhaustion 280 Minutes of Scrubbing (detail) Charcoal on vellum paper 36’ x 10’ 2015

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Hidden Marks of Exhaustion 280 Minutes of Scrubbing (detail) Charcoal on vellum paper 36’ x 10’ 2015

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Hidden Marks of Exhaustion 280 Minutes of Scrubbing Charcoal on vellum paper 36’ x 10’ 2015

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Hidden Marks of Exhaustion 24-drawing series Charcoal on paper 16” x 8” each 2015

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Hidden Marks of Exhaustion 24-drawing series (detail) Charcoal on paper 16� x 8� each 2015

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Hidden Marks of Exhaustion 24-drawing series Charcoal on paper 16” x 8” each 2015

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Hidden Marks of Exhaustion 24-drawing series (detail) Charcoal on paper 16� x 8� each 2015

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Cleaning the Line Single-channel video projection 1:36:13 2014

Cleaning the Line (still detail) Single-channel video projection 00:08:56 of 1:36:13 2014

Cleaning the Line (still detail) Single-channel video projection 01:25:20 of 1:36:13 2014

m ichael n a m k u n g

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Michael Namkung (b. 1971, Oakland, California) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Miami, Florida.

Drawing on the language of sports training and athletic performance, Namkung’s work explores the sensory experiences of drawing under physical strain. Through performance, video, installation, and the participation of others, he investigates questions of process, materiality and perception, specifically in terms of their relationship to the body.

Namkung holds an MFA in Drawing and Painting from San Francisco State University, where he received the College of Creative Arts Master’s Hood in 2009. He has performed and exhibited at SFMOMA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Headlands Center for the Arts. Honors include the 2010 James Rosenquist Artist in Resident in Fargo, North Dakota, an Individual Artist Commission Cultural Equity Grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission and an Investing in Artists Grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation in 2011, and a Tanne Foundation Award in 2012. Namkung is currently Assistant Professor of Drawing at Florida International University.

Michael ’ s P e r f o r m a n ce Inspired by its history as a concrete tile factory, Michael Namkung makes athletically intense chalk drawings that respond to The Project’s architecture.

Namkung inscribes the walls with Presence Begets Absence, composed of twelve wall sit drawings that delineate the interior of the space and the physical limits of the body. In Asynching Feeling, he uses his body as a compass to draw two identical circles that attempt to mirror each other, but fail to synchronize. Finally, Namkung swings upsidedown from the ceiling, struggling against dizziness and disorientation as he attempts to draw A Straight Line. Video stills courtesy of Andres Ramírez.

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Asynching Feeling Two chalk circles on concrete floor and two single-channel video projections 10’ diameter each, 4:53, 4:10 2015

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Asynching Feeling Two chalk circles on concrete floor and two single-channel video projections 10’ diameter each, 4:53, 4:10 2015

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Asynching Feeling Two chalk circles on concrete floor and two single-channel video projections 10’ diameter each, 4:53, 4:10 2015

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Asynching Feeling (detail) Two chalk circles on concrete floor and two single-channel video projections 10’ diameter each, 4:53, 4:10 2015

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Asynching Feeling Two chalk circles on concrete floor and two single-channel video projections 10’ diameter each, 4:53, 4:10 2015

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Presence Begets Absence Series of 12 Chalk on wooden wall Dimensions variable 2015

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Presence Begets Absence Series of 12 Chalk on cinder block wall Dimensions variable 2015

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Presence Begets Absence Series of 12 Chalk on wooden wall Dimensions variable 2015

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Presence Begets Absence Series of 12 Chalk on cinder block wall Dimensions variable 2015

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Presence Begets Absence Series of 12 (detail) Chalk on wooden wall Dimensions variable 2015

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Presence Begets Absence Series of 12 Chalk on cinder block/wooden wall Dimensions variable 2015

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Presence Begets Absence Series of 12 (detail) Chalk on wooden wall Dimensions variable 2015

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Presence Begets Absence Series of 12 Chalk on cinder block wall Dimensions variable 2015

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Presence Begets Absence Series of 12 Chalk on cinder block wall Dimensions variable 2015

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Presence Begets Absence Series of 12 Chalk on cinder block wall Dimensions variable 2015

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A Straight Line Single-channel video projection 6:52 2015

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A Straight Line Single-channel video projection 6:52 2015

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A Straight Line Single-channel video projection 6:52 2015

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A Straight Line Single-channel video projection 6:52 2015

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A Straight Line Single-channel video projection 6:52 2015

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A Straight Line Single-channel video projection 6:52 2015

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Baby Pictures In Baby Pictures, Namkung created a monotype printmaking system that allowed his son to make drawings using the pressure of his body to register his movement on the ground. The work is a meditation on the artist's attempt to understand his role as a father, and his desire to arrest moments in time as they actively disappear.

Baby Pictures (numbers 3,9,22,26,29,34,42,43, 45,48,50 and 52 in a series of 70) Monoprint/cyanotype 25� x 37� each 2012-2013

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Baby Pictures No. 09 (in a series of 70; detail) Monoprint/cyanotype 25” x 37” 2012-2013

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Baby Pictures No. 34 (in a series of 70; detail) Monoprint/cyanotype 25” x 37” 2012-2013

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Baby Pictures No. 52 (in a series of 70; detail) Monoprint/cyanotype 25” x 37” 2012-2013

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Baby Pictures No. 03 (in a series of 70) Monoprint/cyanotype 25” x 37” 2012-2013

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Baby Pictures No. 34 (in a series of 70) Monoprint/cyanotype 25” x 37” 2012-2013

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Baby Pictures No. 42 (in a series of 70; detail) Monoprint/cyanotype 25” x 37” 2012-2013

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Baby Pictures No. 43 (in a series of 70) Monoprint/cyanotype 25” x 37” 2012-2013

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Baby Pictures No. 45 (in a series of 70; detail) Monoprint/cyanotype 25” x 37” 2012-2013

A r ti s t s i n C o n ve r s ati o n Interview and

with Nathalie Alfonso Michael Namkung

Moderated

by Dustin 02.25.15

London

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Dustin // Describe the way your “non-art” activities in cleaning for Nathalie and athletics for Michael have influenced your work and the relationship the two have to one another, and how or why it moved into art.

Nathalie // Hidden Marks of Exhaustion includes five works created with the same intention and process through the use of different materials. In all of them, I’m investigating the action of cleaning in relation to art-making. While I was attending school, I found it prolific and appropriate to clean houses for a living, but at the beginning, I wasn’t content with this decision because I wasn’t able to understand my own nature as a housekeeper. Then, Michael became my mentor and his work allowed me to think about this idea of making artwork as an extension of the body, specifically when it comes from repeating muscle memory movements. Then, I started to think about a way to merge both actions—the act of cleaning and the act of art making—using different materials from which I gave myself the tools to apply the movements of cleaning into different surfaces.

Michael // When I started graduate school, I was making charcoal drawings that were maps of all the places I’d lived. Google Maps hadn’t launched yet, and the availability of satellite imagery on the web was still a new thing. There was something amazing about typing in an address and seeing a bird’s eye view of a place that previously only existed in my memory. I’d moved thirtysome times in my life to different places that I considered home, so I started using satellite images of the neighborhoods that contained the places that I lived in as compositional structures.

I was trying to locate myself in and feel connected with these

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particular places but was also trying to understand myself as a product persistent dislocation. I have always been athlete. I played soccer since I was little, and for the last twenty years I’ve been playing Ultimate Frisbee on a very competitive level.

I wanted to have this physical way of using my body in the work, and I began to explore different ways of hitting the paper rhythmically with charcoal and erasers. It felt like drumming.

I was in a critique and I was trying to explain the significance of why I had to be physical with these drawings. My teacher, Mario Laplante, said something like, “I hear what you are saying and I understand that this must be very important to you—but so far, I just don’t believe you. I don’t believe that this is very physical for you.” I was taken aback, to be questioned so directly. But he was right—the physicality of the marks was minimal in relation to the way I understood the physicality of my body. After that, I didn’t make any work for a few months.

I spent a lot of time reading and writing and thinking about my work and what I wanted from it. During this time, I began to understand the role of parameters, and for the first time, gained a sharp awareness of the parameters that I had been using in my own practice. I also went to see Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit exhibition, which are essentially sets of instructions on how to make a variety of art “pieces”—some could be followed literally, but most were highly imaginative or fantastical. I saw these as recipes, or a series of steps to follow, and I began to see a way of using the structure of athletic training regimens as a new way to think about parameters in art-making.

Dustin // Discuss the interest that you have in impermanence and ephemerality and the importance of time in your work.

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Michael // Making these drawings on the concrete surfaces of this space means that this work will literally be gone soon; they won’t endure as physical entities. Partly, I am after a deeper understanding of my own humanity or my own mortality. Being in a body is something that is constantly changing, and knowing that I am making something that I will erase brings the experience of making it in the first place into a sharper focus for me. I’ve been doing the wall sit drawings and the circle drawings for many years now, but they are never the same and the experience is never quite the same doing them. I titled this wall sit drawing installation Presence Begets Absence, because my experience of living in a body seems to oscillate between these two states. One of my ongoing preoccupations is to understand the bodily experience of time outside of time’s incessant markers that seem to infiltrate consciousness at every opportunity. Being physically repetitive allows me to dwell in this space in which time seems to momentarily stop. Sometimes these moments stretch out and become full of nothing but the bodily sensations of engagement with the materials and the task, and these stretches of experience are blissful. In the end, this bliss is broken by reaching bodily limits, or by measures and markers of time that bound the experience.

Nathalie // I started to comprehend ephemerality a lot after I was doing this work. It originated from my constant obsession with cleaning and always trying to keep things immaculate; this is a struggle I have had since I was very little. When I decided to clean houses, it became my therapy because I was doing something that I really enjoyed, but having not been able to connect my daily professional life with art was frustrating. Therefore, this

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approach to art showed me the path to embrace both actions and their impermanence in several ways. For example, I started to use charcoal to trace the movements of my arms as if I was cleaning.

The fact that this material is so difficult to control revealed my next challenge. That’s how my first piece, “The Black Line”—an installation created during three months where I was scrubbing charcoal against a wall, and where I had masked paper to create a perfect line at the same height of my face—made me feel an immaculate sensation of gaining the challenge over the charcoal by that moment where I removed the tape and the paper to find the perfect edges of a straight line. After, I realized I had to find a way of detaching myself from that emotion as well as from the piece. So cleaning the line after many months of effort was the exercise to practice this. As a result, the rags I used to do this were just tools to accomplish removing the charcoal.

Through this process I realized that the stains and marks gave certain character to each rag and that’s how I decided to create a collective composition by sewing them together, and then making of the stained rags an art piece.

Dustin // What you are talking about passes through a lot of Buddhist notions and I’m wondering if your trip to China and thinking about the cultural history and history of thought while you were there had anything to do with how your work has developed since you have been back from China and if that has anything to do with the impermanence that is going on.

Nathalie // Throughout the past two years, just when I started taking the drawing class, I also started doing martial arts and practicing Zen meditation. At the same time, I was taking Art

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History classes with one of the art historians at FIU, Professor Lidu Yi, a Chinese scholar teaching Buddhist Art and Contemporary Chinese Art. Through these classes, I started to be very passionate when she showed me artists such as Xu Bing, Lan Zhenghui, or Huang Yong Ping, who have used also notions of detachment, meditation, and Buddhism to create their work, and in addition I was even more fascinated when I saw that they would spend several hours, months, and years to do what for many may look meaningless. In a way it resonated with me because cleaning is very important for me but at the same time is meaningless and hard to control because no matter how clean I leave a space, it’s going to be dirty again. So by putting myself in an environment where I was constantly doing the marks for long hours allowed me to get into this zone where I didn’t just understand my own nature but also where I understood the dynamics of my own foundation because I come from a working class family. For example, my mom has been a housekeeper and that’s what she has done for her entire life, so this process helped me to understand her and be more compassionate with what she has done to support us because before I was never compassionate about that effort; I was always judging the fact that she was never home and always working and that absence of the mother wasn’t pleasant at all when growing up. But this work has showed me that if that is what she wants, then that is her choice and she does it very well so I wanted in a way to master the cleaning part to honor her.

Dustin // Discuss the importance of family in your practice.

Michael // Most recently, I made monoprint portraits of my son Clyde during his first year of life as a way to record his physical development, sort of from his point of view. I really just set up

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the conditions—he was the one making the drawings according the way he wanted or needed to move. During my daughter Iris’s first year of life, we took photos constantly—thousands, probably. It struck me as a very strange thing to be doing this, this compulsion to incessantly capture and record everything. What was it all for?

The project with Clyde allowed me to slow things down, and it was a way for me to spend time with him and keep making work, to blur the line between art and life. Which is really the larger project here. I didn’t choose athletics as a subject of my artwork. It entered because I wanted to make work that came directly from my life and my experience of living, and that operated in both art and non-art realms simultaneously. So, when Clyde developed the strength, musculature, and coordination to crawl off the paper, he literally crawled out of the project, and that was the end.

Life conditions bring their own parameters, not just artistic decision-making.

Dustin // It’s interesting talking about Clyde and the piece being done when he crawled off the paper, like it seems that you are always looking for a natural ending to the piece. I wonder how you think about the relationship of your practice to space that you are in while making, but also when it comes time for us to see it in a public space, and in this space in particular.

Michael // I got excited about working in this space as soon as I walked in here—it’s so vast and cavernous, its architecture completely exposed. The first thing I do in any space is to orient my body, examine the physical structures of the space and the materiality of its surfaces, and I begin to think about different ways of moving and drawing. This site used to manufacture concrete

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tiles and so it made a lot of sense to work directly with the concrete floor and walls. I enjoy how the chalk drawings seem to embed themselves into the surfaces more than sit opaquely on top of them, disturbing the figure-ground relationship or even reversing it. The building also has an expansive vertical space—the ceiling is about 30-feet at the center—so I knew I had to do something in which my body could play with that height. It took a lot of trial and error to figure out how to hang from up there, just on a technical level. All of this work is based in performance, so the question about what remains in the end is always important. I try to activate spaces in a way that closely mirrors my own experience of making, so in the video I often focus on camera angles that highlight the mark-making and use carefully placed mics to capture sounds as I experience them, as opposed to on-board mics which record sound from the perspective of the camera. In the end, I want the work to elicit a bodily response, and the decisions I make on what to include and what to leave out revolve around this desire. I was extremely pleased by the way the floor projection of A Straight Line inspired children to run and jump through the video, in an attempt to either jump over or on top of the image of my body as it swung back and forth through the space.

Nathalie // The challenge was to enrich and to celebrate the action of cleaning and this meant for me that it had to be big. I think it’s because I’m very physical and it’s very hard for me to work in a little piece of paper, so utilizing the dimension of the space to manipulate different materials was just the right thing to do in order to accomplish what I was looking for.... ...During the creation of the work, I realized that making all the pieces on the ground—scrubbing for several hours on my knees and then

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hanging them up—was my way to glorify such action.

Dustin // One thing about this exhibition struck me immediately when I came to the opening is the sense of theatricality to it; it feels like a stage for all these happenings. I feel like I’m part of that and I wonder—kind of attached to the space question—how do you think of the viewer in this situation, because it seems like both of you have this practice where you have this very specific experience about mark making and I wonder if the viewer comes into your thought process while you’re making or not?

Nathalie // I think for this space specifically, the experience of the viewer became more important for me. For example, after the piece 280 Minutes Scrubbing I wanted to show the marks of my hands. That’s why I decided to use vellum paper because the translucency allowed me to reveal the traces of the marks without telling people that I did it by scrubbing. In opposition to the black line 140 Minutes Scrubbing where I’m not thinking of the audience at all, but more I’m questioning myself the value of art and cleaning by presenting a very minimalistic line where there is no trace of the body at all.

Michael // The concept of the audience or the viewer feels really abstract to me. It’s strange to think about, I mean you’re making the work and making these decisions about how to put things together and in the midst of this process it’s almost impossible to consider how others will enter the work. I do sometimes project myself into the role of the viewer as I’m making, but I actually think this is almost always unhelpful, because it feels one step removed from addressing the questions that drive the work in

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the first place. It’s a difficult balance, because eventually you need to reckon with questions of how others enter and experience the spaces you create, but doing this too early can close down possibilities. It’s important for me to satisfy myself first, to try and make something that surprises me somehow, or feeds back into my thinking and my practice.

Dustin // We talked about how athletics and cleaning informs the art practice. I wonder: how does the art practice inform athletics when you go back to play a sport or when you go back to clean, if it makes you wanting to make those things less because you are putting all the energy into the work or just how the works talk to the other part again?

Michael // In a really seamless way I think, to a point where I don’t know that there is a qualitative difference for me anymore, other than sometimes these activities are seen in art venues versus sometimes these activities are seen by people I’m playing with or against, or by no one except myself. I can’t, or maybe I don’t want to draw that distinction anymore.

Nathalie // I don’t have an audience when I’m making the artwork or when I’m cleaning a house. So the whole idea about labor is very invisible, is not seeing but it happens and it has a result; a result that will be valued either by the owner of the house or by the audience that walks in here. Therefore, I don’t see any distinction in the action itself because it remains the same, but I’m curious about confronting the perception of owners of the houses that are not familiar with my art practice and then the people who see the artwork that are not familiar with the way I clean.

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Dustin // What are some of your primary artistic influences?

Michael // John Cage’s 4’33” was very influential in my thinking about the experience of time—the way that it operates on so many levels for both performer and audience, yet so incredibly simple in its structure. Bruce Nauman’s playfulness with materials and his body as material, his sense of being repetitive and experimenting within structures. The first time I saw his video Stamping in the Studio, I was hypnotized, and it enabled me to understand so much about the possibilities of repetition, endurance, and sound, and to connect them with what I already knew from athletic training.

In his video called Setting a Good Corner, which documents him digging a hole and setting a fence post to hang a gate, he makes a direct link between a task of physical labor that he needed done on his ranch and the craft and attention required to do it right.

This is also like athletic training—there are right and wrong ways of doing things. If you don’t set a good corner, the gate doesn’t swing properly, eventually needing repair. If you don’t use proper form in asking your body to perform, you will injure yourself.

Another strong influence is Morgan O’Hara. She makes drawings called Live Transmissions. She holds bunches of pencils in both hands and then follows the movements of someone else immersed in activity—cooks, farmers, politicians, musicians, etc. She observes their movements with intense concentration, and makes marks in real time that correspond to the quality and intensity of their movements, herself becoming a conduit for the transmission of human energy. She’s been doing this for over 25 years and has built a deep lexicon of drawing that is incredibly sensuous and nuanced in line quality. Looking at her work has taught me a lot about attention in the body and the way that marks can carry meaning.

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Nathalie // Directly Michael, not only because I have studied his works but also because he is constantly generating questions that have allowed me to expand my own practice. Also, the works of Xu Bing—a contemporary Chinese artist known for works that challenge language and its impact in society—influence me. He has created pieces where he invented characters that look Chinese but in reality none of them hold any meaning; a work named Book from the Sky. He also made a work called Book from the Ground where he used icons that anyone is able to recognize.

During eight years, he collected these icons from all over the world, then wrote a book that anyone can understand, and then developed a program where this new animated language can be translated from words to icons through the use of a computer.

This idea of how he approaches the meaning of things and how he transmitted this to the people is what I like about his work.

On the other hand, the 280 Minutes Scrubbing made of hanging paper is inspired by the Ann Hamilton piece The Event of the Thread. When I went to New York to see this piece at the armory, the installation had a very long piece of cloth hanging in the middle of the space and it was attached to the top from several strings that connected to swings; these swings were designed for people to sit in there and actively swing like children, so when the swings moved, the strings would move, allowing the piece of cloth to synchronize with the force. Therefore, the movement of the cloth strictly depends on the participation... ...of the people having fun in the swings. The fact that this piece invites the audience was something that I loved and somehow inspired me to look forward into the movement of the paper in this installation. Both of these artists inspired me to create a bound between the art piece and the public who is reading it.

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Dustin // I was also curious about how do you generate the questions or the problems for yourself or how do you generally generate them?

Michael // It’s not always clear when there’s a problem. In doing these works repetitively; I sometimes do feel that I may be setting a trap for myself, and that perhaps I’m not doing anything different than I’ve done before. That’s hard to know going in. But at other times, I do the exact same thing I did before, yet somehow it raises a new question. So it’s really only in retrospect, when I analyze it and feel that it’s giving me something back that I know I’m onto something. But if it doesn’t generate new thinking, then that’s a problem. There’s no real methodology there, but it does seem to happen as a result of all the variables that come into play. Problems and breakthroughs both arise unexpectedly; they seem to originate from blind spots.

Nathalie // I want to give an example about this work: I spent a lot of hours in front of the paper just doing the movement of cleaning and I couldn’t understand what was going on, so that was a problem. However, I decided not to give up and continue until I had a better idea of my actions. By doing this, I started to realize that I was very fixed with the marks and was very attached to the ending result, so I developed a strategy to do the marks for long periods until they started to disappear and here is when I started to find new questions. For instance, with the black line I was so aware of the marks that I felt I was cheating, because I already had an expectation. Then, this action started to be manifested in different ways through different materials but using exactly the same methodology and process, it opened new doors

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every time. I was running away from the marks and then the marks came back again but every time I had less and less control of the marks and instead I became more united with the action itself.

Dustin // What made you choose this specific size for this line height?

Nathalie // When I first did the black line I used exactly the same walls that you guys see there but instead of arranging the walls horizontally, as you see, I installed them vertically and the idea was to make the line right in front of my face as a form of selfportrait to use this exercise to confront myself. Now when we got the opportunity to move the walls to The Projects I was thinking about the process and I decided to make the marks on the floor so I had to make all the pieces on my knees instead of standing against the wall. The whole idea of these pieces was to challenge myself by putting more physical effort through longer periods of time.

Dustin // What is interesting is this concept of endurance in both of your works. Why do you think that is part of what you want to do?

Why do you have the need to have this thing that you need to endure?

Nathalie // Actually what happened when I first saw Michael’s work was that it resonated a lot within myself because I practiced speed walking for ten years so I have this background in athletics and when you are training or putting yourself in a situation where your body cannot handle the pain anymore but you have to push through as long as you can, you enter in a state of mind hard to describe. It’s like not having thoughts anymore during that period of time. This is a unique experience: a culmination between the separation of body and mind that makes you want to feel that over

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and over again. I could relate that feeling with the word “bliss” and in my art practice I am able to experience that same feeling after long periods of cleaning and exhaustion.

Michael // I don’t think I’m masochistic—there’s not really a sense of enjoyment, but there is a sense of fulfillment. Part of it is a need to understand pain or to understand my body and the sensations that it has. And this comes from athletic training, right? In athletics you train to endure pain and then you go further and keep pushing to see how far you can go and then you go some more. This is a of part of the psyche of an athlete...I don’t label it as pain or discomfort; it’s more like a recognition of sensation that allows me to negotiate with it and better understand it. It’s only when I start to reach these moments of extreme discomfort that I feel the markers of time fall away. It’s a shift of consciousness in which you lose your sense of self and you become the thing that you are doing. And it’s the desire to enter this state that compels me do this work over and over; it seems to help me better understand these notions of ephemerality, eternity, embodiment.

Dustin // What are the next steps in terms of your work? Are there any other plans? Or any other questions or problems that you have for yourself?

Michael // For the past several months, I’ve been doing five different drawings as part of a regular exercise routine. The drawings build themselves up slowly, layer by layer—I want to see if I can make drawings that closely reflect my experience of bodily repetition over time. I’m asking the drawings if the changes they experience

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over time can mirror my own sense of physical change and my own perception of time. It’s very challenging to me because the more the surface builds up, the less I see the drawings changing. It very much reminds me of watching my children grow. They’re clearly transforming over time, but the transformations are too slow to be perceptible on a daily basis. Yet we have faith that the commitment of time, energy, and attention we give them are making a difference in the way they grow.

Nathalie // For the next six months, I want to evaluate my role as an artist because of the transition I’m going through from getting off school and embracing the art world. I’m going to try to see how can I manifest this intimidating feeling of not being at school anymore. I want to focus the rest of this year to create a body of work that shows that transition and charcoal will be part of that process.

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Andres RamĂ­rez

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C o n tact L i s t

Nathalie Alfonso nathaliealfonso.com nathaliealfonso@gmail.com Michael Namkung michaelnamkung.com michael@michaelnamkung.com Leah Brown leahbrownart.com leahbrownart@yahoo.com Peter Symons petersymons.com peter.alexander.symons@gmail.com The Projects–Fat Village fatvillageprojects.com 523projects@gmail.com Valeria Guillen cargocollective.com/valeriaguillen guillenval6@gmail.com Andres Ramirez ramirezandres.com andros13441@gmail.com KEPRL Films vimeo.com/keplrfilms Kelley Antoniazzi-Taksier kelleyanton@gmail.com Henry Taksier htaksier@gmail.com

Š2015 A ll w r iti n g a n d i m a g e s he r ei n a r e c o p y y r i g hte d b y thei r r e s pective a r ti s t s catal o g P h o t o g r aph y a n d De s i g n b y H e n r y a n d Kelle y ta k s ie r i m a g e s o n pa g e s 1 0 , 1 1 , 1 6 , 1 7 , 7 4 , 7 5 & 1 5 2 c o u r te s y o f A n d r e s Ra m � r ez i m a g e s o n pa g e s 6 8 - 7 1 c o u r te s y o f n athalie alf o n s o