seeMag, ISSUE 2 Spring 2014 by Morgan Cadigan

see issue no.2

seeMag strives to simply represent the works and words of both established and emerging fine artists in order that readers may readily see, identify, and pursue beauty in all its many forms. Issue 2, Spring 2014 seemagazine.net

Gallery Guard in the Hammer Museum, 2014 Morgan Cadigan Nikon FM2 Kodak Portra 400 film

*John Berger, Sven of Seeing. London:

Blomberg, Chris Fox, Michael Dibb, British Broadcasting Corporation and

and Richard Hollis. Ways Penguin Books Ltd, 1972.

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR May 3, 2014

“We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.” Ways of Seeing, 1972.* Dear Reader, It gives us great pleasure to present to you the second installment of seeMag. No longer in the cool, subtle sphere of Seattle in issue 1, but in the bright, saturated world of Los Angeles in issue 2. As done moving into any new place, seeMag has sought out its own sort of local amenities: the museums, galleries, and festivals that the LA art scene feeds on. Selected from these cultural hotspots, we are honored to share with you eleven artists who, in both art and thought, particularly stand out from the medley of creative energy here. At LA Zine Fest held in Culver City, we encountered Julie Orlick’s timely black and white photographs. At Actual Size gallery in Chinatown, we happened to meet Athena Thebus the one day she was gallery-sitting. We were struck by Lorenzo Hurtado Segovia’s work while on a gallery visit downtown at CB1 Gallery, and we frequently made visits to the city’s museums so that maybe even a fraction of their vitality would rub off on us. We chose to look, and now we challenge you to do the same. Like the gallery guard pictured, we are about to walk into a green entanglement of culture. But like the guard, we invite you to stride headlong with us, driven by a sense of duty and desire to scope out and inquire about your artistic surroundings. Moreover, we hope that you choose to prolong your shift into the night, when all other visitors and patrons have left, fervent to continue protecting, looking at, and seeing the many and various pursuits of beauty. Sincerely,

Morgan Cadigan Founder & Editor in Chief

Editor in Chief & Creative Director Morgan Cadigan morgan@seemagazine.net Executive Editor & Contributing Writer Aminah Ibrahim Contributing Designer Lizzie Zweng Special Thanks Michael and Kathy Cadigan, Lorenzo Hurtado Segovia, Julie Orlick Cover Photograph by Morgan Cadigan. For inquiries please contact info@seemagazine.net. ISSN 2372-8779

Issue 2

Los Angeles

The Hyphenated Individual “I love Los Angeles.. the light is inspiring and energizing. It fills me with the feeling that all possibilities are available” - David Lynch. When I first visited LA as a tourist, I was enchanted. I loved the way all of LA seemed to be bathed in sunlight. It made the city and the people in it vivid, dazzling and just that much more glitzy. I remember standing amongst the whiteness of the Getty looking down at the view of LA —this amazing, sprawling city with its mesh of unique neighborhoods that I had yet to fully discover — and thinking, “It would be amazing to live here.”

meet a bright-eyed and beautiful German-American studentactress who moved here to pursue a film career, a proud IranianAmerican father-restaurant owner whose son studies at UCLA, a passionate Italian-American teacher-artist-uber chaffeur who is inspired by geometric shapes. Which is why, on one of the many seeMag excursions around LA, I was not surprised (but still delighted!) when we found a random row of authentic-looking (and tasting!) French cafes in the middle of an otherwise conventional, American street in Los Feliz.

A couple of years later, having moved to LA, I can say with full conviction that I am still enchanted. In fact, even more so.

These kind of hidden and unlikely treasures are abundant in LA, a city full of chance encounters and nonchalant contradictions for locals and tourists alike. All you have to do is open yourself up to the possibilities.

To walk around the city is akin to walking amongst places and spaces under high exposure, I feel even myself illuminated. Los Angeles is beauty, instagrammed.

This is a city that embraces difference instead of sweeping it under a rug — a city of people who are proud of being hyphenated individuals.

The city has within it an infectious feeling of potential, possibility and diversity that inspires— encouraging both creation and expression.

This is the city that I, as a fellow hyphenated individual (a Malayian-French-Chinese-Arab student-traveler-aspiring writer) have found a place to call home.

On any ordinary day in the city of LA, you could (and I have) by Aminah Ibrahim, Executive Editor & Writer

seeMag

presents:

FEATURES

10 Lorenzo Hurtado Segovia 22 Shiva Aliabadi 32 Kristen Perman SELECTED WORKS

20 Samuel Partal 30 Athena Thebus 40 Julie Orlick EMERGING ARTISTS

42 Jae Kim 44 Marco Soriaga 46 Chloe Hassenfrantz 47 Gianna Iacone 48 Kevin Moore

A painter, a sculptor and a weaver, Hurtado Segovia seeks to find the boundary between fine art and craft. seeMag asks the artist about the concepts behind his recent show at CB1 Gallery, located in downtown LA, and discusses the relationship between abstraction and representation.

FEATURE

LO R E N Z O H U R TADO SEGOVIA

Papel tejido 41 (Él hace que salga el sol sobre malos y buenos, y que llueva sobre justos e injustos), 2013 Lorenzo Hurtado Segovia Acrylic on paper 68” x 68“

How did you start art? Well I grew up in Juárez, Mexico, and, like most border town families we crossed the border back and forth in the mid ‘90s on a daily basis. Go to school and work and then back home. We rented a small apartment, we would cross, go to school and work and every weekend we come back home to do all the maintenance on our house.

LOR E N ZO H U RTADO S EGOVIA Lorenzo Hurtado Segovia, born in Juárez, Mexico, allows his heritage to influence his art - creating pieces that are modern, yet rooted in tradition. Having originally studied to be an engineer, his mathematical mind and artistic education are woven, quite literally into his work. As well as being a devoted father and husband, he is currently being represented by CB1 gallery in downtown LA, and is a professor in the Communication Arts department at Otis College of Art and Design. To view more of Hurtado Segovia’s art, visit hurtadosegovia.com. Image courtesy of the artist.

In high school I was a math and science kid and I spent most of the summer in math and science camps. Once I graduated, I got a full scholarship to study engineering at a university, and that was my path. I was set. It wasn’t until the last elective I took in my junior year, it was a drawing elective, that I decided I would try more art. For a while, I tried to do the engineering program. There was some minimum requirements for maintaining the scholarship. So I had to keep a certain GPA and to take a number of classes just to fulfill that, so I was doing that and also taking as many art courses as I could on the side. Eventually it got to the point where I was not caring about the engineering anymore and I was a senior, but because I changed so late in the game, I was going to take longer to graduate anyways. And so as I got interested in art, I realized that my favorite living artists were all teaching at UCLA. So that was when I transferred to UCLA. And at the time, Mary Kelly was there, Chris Burden was there, Nancy Rubins, Charles Ray, Larri Pittman was there and also in the Art History department, the faculty that taught there that I was involved with were Julie Carson and Mary Kelley, she was studio, but she was doing a lot of Interdisciplinary Studies. From there, I went to Otis to study with John Knight and Roy Dowell. But I was really fortunate that the artists that I was interested in were still alive and teaching, and so I was able to learn from them. So those three: Larri Pittman, Roy Dowell, and John Knight were the three touchstone faculty and artists that I was able to learn from and really shape my way of thinking about art. Was there a smooth transition from graduating to exhibiting? Oh, no! [Laughs]. When I was an undergrad, many of my friends and classmates were pursuing exhibitions and I was not.

FEATURE

I was new to the city, I didn’t really know the venues. I wasn’t driving for the first year. So that kept me a lot in the studio. And then I also started dating my wife, so I was either in the studio or with her. I didn’t feel like I was quite ready to pursue a long commitment of an exhibition career at that point. I thought I was still a student. So I wanted to focus on my studies. I was fortunate though that one of my printmaking professors at UCLA, Francesco Siqueiros, who runs a press in downtown LA, knew of a job printing. He knew that I was able to print, so he recommended me and so I went and I started printing there. And so my senior year, the last year at UCLA, I was a student and I was also working printing, and then once I graduated from UCLA I just kept printing at that place for maybe three years. And I decided that I was ready to go to graduate school to pursue more art. I already knew the faculty there that I wanted to study with, so I just applied there and started in 2004. [I was] still not exhibiting, a lot of my classmates were pursuing that, I’m not so careerist oriented. My priority, was making the work. And I thought, that, maybe this wasn’t the smartest way to go about it, but I thought, if I build it, they’ll come, I just better make something really good, focus on this, and then eventually maybe it’ll catch on. So yea, I made my work, graduated, still no exhibitions. It wasn’t until a year and a half later that Clyde Beswick, the gallery owner of CB1, was looking for artists as he prepared to open his gallery. How do you choose what your show will focus on? How do I choose? It’s not quite a straight line. I might be thinking of some themes, some materials, some techniques to explore while I’m working on something. And if I think of it long enough, then I figure that it’s probably important enough. But also, I try to make the work in a way that is not so one-liner. Although, everything seems to be falling within some large themes of high-craft versus lowcraft, fine art versus craft, the secular and the faith and theology. So that’s a big part. How did the weaving and painting first come to fruition? The real story, and it’s not that interesting, *laughs* but in grad school we talk a lot about painting, and so we discuss and over-analyze things as a way to really understand the culture. And so I really appreciate that, and I was very active in that and those discussions. One of the over arching themes was pre-modernity, modernism and post-modernism. In that I thought [about] the use of the grid: so how does the grid come as a picture-making tool? So you think of say Piet Mondrian. Painting is about the surface being flat. The grid helped to organize that flat space. The grid was also a sort of universal element. So I thought, well there’s some truth to that, but the grid is also pre-modern.

It didn’t have to go through Mondrian, and all of that to get through the grid in painting. If you look at say museums of anthropology, like the Fowler Museum at UCLA, they have an extensive collection of textiles, and those very basic textiles from all over the world – they’re grids. There are very elaborate weaving techniques, but the most universal, the most basic, which is also the one that happens independently in tribes from around the world is the very basic one-over, one-under, oneover, one-under. So one night, I was making dinner and I was using a Mexican stove-top grill, it was woven out of metal strips, and I had all of these discussions from grad school in my head, and as I was heating it up, I saw that it turned color as the metal got hot, and [I thought] ‘Wow, this is really cool! Color! And hey, there’s a grid! Oh wow!’ and all of these things started to come together. The ethnographic, the western thought, the painting discourse, and all of those other issues just kind of clicked. And this is towards the end of grad school, and I went and started doing a painting and cut it

cranking out the same thing over and over again. That’s not so exciting for me. That’s what I was doing in engineering. *laughs* Could you talk a little bit more about the actual process of the weaving? The way I’m working on them now is that I start on a sheet of paper, and paint one side. Once that dries, I flip it and paint the other side. I use many painting techniques: brushes, rags, rollers, sponges and just all kinds of different things. It’s all acrylic because acrylic, one, dries faster, and two, it goes on paper. Oils or other materials would deteriorate over time on paper. So this is the material that works best and also creates a film. Acrylic is basically plastic, right. Once I paint that and the sheet is dried on both sides, I cut it into strips with just a knife and a ruler. I cut that into quarter-inch strips, and that was the right size. Smaller than that was tearing too much, and wider than that, the painterly aspect was too big. There was too much information. Also I am able to do more intricate weaving with that, like the relationship between the quarter inch to the overall

“...everything seems to be falling within some larger themes of high-craft versus low-craft, fine art versus craft, the secular and the faith and theology”

in strips to put it together. And from there, it just became a matter of developing this technique.

size, the scale, the proportions to that I think is working really well.

The first two were one-sided. There was this other back-side that had potential, and was under-used, and from there they became two-sided. And now it’s not a two-sided painting it’s now more of an object, so it’s more like a painting/sculpture.

Then I weave it together by hand on a regular table, so there isn’t a loom, it’s free-hand. I just weave it. And then the ends are held together by thread. So there’s hemming involved. I didn’t want to use glue, the first few had glue, but I didn’t want to use any more glue because glue in image-making to me is very much about collage, and collage in cubism and art history is very pre-determined, very much a western thing and also a fine art thing.

So the first few were about 8 inches, 12 inches squared – small things. For me, as with everything, it’s not just about the making process, but what does it mean, how does it mean it, what is it. At my first show that I did of the weavings, there were a lot of expectations of me being this Mexican weaver; so I make these serapes and blankets and I thought, well that’s one way surely, but I’m interested in Scottish tartan instead of these serapes. So I developed the whole show around Scottish tartan. For me, making work especially work as it’s making its way into the public is about injecting moments of surprise or maybe having a disruption of assumptions. Like what it is that I might do as a Mexican artist, say as a painter, and then trying to create work that disrupts it. That work for me is interesting because I’m not so interested in

I wanted to push it away, since it was already a painting and was already a collage, so I simply replaced the glue for the thread to have a textile. So that was another way in working within the highart and craft dichotomy. And I think the thread also looks better. That’s how they’re made. And they’re hung with clamps. I made these aluminum clamps that are very minimalist. You made them? Oh wow. When I was looking for ways to hang them, I thought of other clamps like those big strong clamps like shop clamps would bring with

FEATURE

Papel tejido 40 (Él derrama lluvia sobre la tierra y envía agua sobre los campos), (recto), 2013, Lorenzo Hurtado Segovia, Acrylic on paper, 158” x 110“

Papel tejido 40 (Él derrama lluvia sobre la tierra y envía agua sobre los campos), (verso), 2013, Lorenzo Hurtado Segovia, Acrylic on paper, 158” x 110“

them too much of a shop, and I didn’t necessarily want that. Other clips would bring the applications of the office, like paper clips and I didn’t want that either. *laughs* So I made those very slim aluminum clamps and those seem to be neutral. Do you predetermine how the design will turn out on both sides, or how does that work out? For this body of work that was based on the tartan, I did. Scotland has a natural registry of colors. Oh they do? I didn’t know that! In order to register a tartan it has to fit certain specific unique qualities, and that has to do with the number of strands, the number of colors, and the frequency those colors repeat, that the sequence

beautiful gesture. The rainbow also is the promise after Noah, after the big flood, then came the rainbow, there wasn’t going to be a new flood, and the raising like that of humanity. To me this side is very democratic and has a very positive promise of a blessing. Then, the other side, I thought if the front side has a certain mood, certain color palette and certain content, what can I do with the other side so it’s not redundant. So, I went with an almost opposite. It is a type of infernal fire. It’s orange and makes the back of the room glow with the orange. As one enters [the gallery], one is in the middle of a spring scene with trees and it’s very jovial and

in reference to it. The bulk of the show was sculpture. The bulk of sculptures are these long poles cetros. Cetros are all coded and they stand in, there’s a tree, there’s a flower. It’s set up like a forest, which is reinforced by the landscape in that paper weaving. As you look into the show, your mind set is already placed as though you were entering a landscape. The cetros for me is primarily outside of fine arts. There are hierarchical structures such as the military, various militaries use scepters as a way to signify rank. In various religions, they use scepters also for rank, and symbolically that comes from the shepherd’s walking stick.

“...once you make that cross over a very thin line, right, it’s just the thickness of the paper, a few millimeters, you enter an opposite realm” repeats. For that body of work, I set out a sequence that is like an algorithm that had a number of color strips, number of different colors, and the frequency that sequence would repeat on both directions, on the X and on the Y-axis. So depending on that, that’s how I determined one side. Since that one side was very Scottish, I thought I’m going to go somewhere else, and maybe go with the Malan Caspe, a weaving technique for textiles. It’s a way of dying the thread so that it fades from color to color. It’s a transition. It gives it a soft edge. The one side, the tartan, was very hard edge, the other side was a lot softer. So I wanted the two to have those different formal qualities. One per side. When I set my sequence on paper, and I’m ready to go, it produces something like this, but then it gets formally visually boring for me, and I wanted to disrupt that so I disrupted that with these architectonic figures. So as you go on you see all these grades and these architectonic shapes, and you turn around and there was this softer side and these things. Can you expand on the significance behind your largest piece? [see page 14] The title for it is Èl derrama lluvia sobre a tierra y envía agua sobre los campos. It’s a promise taken from the Bible, from Isaiah. Basically it says that He, God, makes it rain over the flowers of the field. Rain, in popular culture, like Bob Marley says, when it rains it doesn’t rain on one man’s household, it rains on everyone, and so I thought that’s a very democratic promise. If it’s going to rain, there are some promises, some lessons that are going to affect everyone. I thought that was a really

FEATURE

happy, and once you make that cross over a very thin line, right, it’s just the thickness of the paper, a few millimeters, you enter an opposite realm: this fire, glowing red, an intense space. To me it’s like wow, how big the difference of a few millimeters can be, in mood, and formally I thought that then this piece, by having two sides, with having the content as it is, it makes it a richer piece, it’s more complete, it has a broader range of content. But also like I said earlier, I’m interested in the theology but also the secular aspect. In art history, western art history, the major patronage of Renaissance and earlier was religious, right. The role of art was religious. And then came modernity, it came to secularization. The secularization and the emphasis of materiality, and the processes of what the form and material is. The one side, the landscape side, could be interpreted as an abstracted landscape still holding on to notions of space through color and through the formal composition. The other side has two references, one is color flow of painting, where it’s non-spatial aesthetic and all over composition. And also it has a reference to ikat, which is an Indian textiles technique. So for me, I’ll always pursue, even for my own amusement, pursue and reach reference in the work, and also through that, reach content. Being able to enter the work from different angles, but always being able to incorporate it with the work. It’s a very impressive piece. It’s huge! I think the director told us it took you four months? I had to work on that, it was such a big piece, I wanted to focus on it. I planned it so it would be the anchor of the show, everything else would be

There’s a cluster of them and they’re all coded. The bands are coded. The symbols are taken from popular culture. There are hearts, birds, arrows, stars, fleur de lis, just different icons that become non-meaningful because of their ambiguity or they are just everywhere. But all those items at one point were very loaded with meaning. The fleur de lis for example symbolizes the Trinity, but now we see it mostly as decoration. My strategy was to reinject some meaningfulness. The larger themes are about Christianity, about fine art-craft, about high design, about love – there’s a lot of love in all of the work. Most of the text have to do with love and words of endearment. I feel like that they’re all issues, because I’m going through the faculty that I studied with, and also being very aware of feminist theory and work, I think a lot of these issues have been fought by these artists and these movements. I’m not trying to say ‘Hey, look a man is doing women’s work’, I mean I think that’s really interesting to me, but I’m doing this very aware that women artists have done that since the ‘70s, ‘80s. For me it’s being aware of the work before, and building work on top of that, continuing that work. But at the same time, I’m aware that this work really appeals to people waiting for the bus outside of the gallery. A lot of people just walk in from the sidewalk to look at the work, from that point it serves some sort of political purpose. It’s also the point for me where all those issues are still relevant even if they are not as politically, or theoretically engaged as they were in the ‘70s where they were

Papel tejido 41 (Él hace que salga el sol sobre malos y buenos, y que llueva sobre justos e injustos), 2013 Lorenzo Hurtado Segovia Acrylic on paper 68” x 68“

Cetro 14, 2013 Lorenzo Hurtado Segovia Wood and cord 144” x 1.5” x 1.5”

FEATURE

first taking ground. The pieces in the front lobby, these two [see page 7], and another on an opposite wall, it always started with a painting of an eye of providence. The eye of providence I would then cut up into strips and then weave it into a piece. So all of the information that makes up the eye of providence is there but it is now rearticulated in a way that at first glance you can’t see it. It’s only until you know the history of how this thing was made, that you know that there is content: the literal content, the formal content of the eye of providence painting there. For me that was a way to have both, the representation and the abstraction. But like I said a representation is always an abstraction because of stylization how one stylizes a representation, it’s always an abstracted way. And even the most abstracted forms, like say Jackson Pollock, all of those high modernist abstract painters they always represent the ideology and knowledge behind the production. So in a sense one needs to understand Greenburg and the extension in order to appreciate those works. Who do you paint/create for, do you create for yourself, an audience, or God? That’s a good question because I think some pieces I make just as a way to move an argument forward. I don’t necessarily make it for a person or entity in mind, it’s more for the rhetoric of the work. That’s one. Sometimes some pieces or maybe even aspects [of the pieces] I make with someone in mind. Most of the terms of endearment I make thinking of either my two kids or my wife. Or sometimes I make it, like I had a friend who found this old vintage jacket that had an embroidered pattern on the back and I thought it was really stunning, and I took that and I made a riff, a reference to it. It’s in one of the poles [see adjacent page]. But the majority of the work is rhetorical, to further an argument, based on the content, theme or subject of the work. I try and employ the formal techniques that best advance that argument. So do you think that’s the importance of art in general is to advance that rhetoric an argument? For me the best work is always making an argument, whatever it is. I mean it doesn’t have to be a very direct argument, but I think anything that we make will advance something, it’s an advocate for something. Works that resonate with me the most are beyond pathologies, self-enclosed, self-referential – to me that work is not interesting at all. Actually I don’t think that work exists anyways. I think that even those artists working today making work that is called quote ‘art for art’s own sake’ and ‘selfreferential’ to me is a paradox, because even that is an argument. For me that argument is boring and has already been played out.

What did you get from going to art school or UCLA? The value of studying of art, education? The biggest thing that I learned was articulation, how to discuss objects, work, and art, and in my case mostly painting. How to articulate that with words and actual language, without making a hierarchy, that the work is not less important than the words spoken about it or the other way. I think to be a contemporary artist, it’s a necessity but it’s very important to have the = ability to understand one’s production in context – from the history that preceded it to what is around society right now. Also the importance of self-teaching, being able to continue exploring and learning. I went in to UCLA and Otis, and they didn’t teach us technique, we were left to figure it out, because by doing that I feel like I was then able to define a problem, a physical problem, and be able to come up with a plan to work through it and be able to have the words to asses it, and asses my results. That’s a really important skill.

I realized that waiting around for inspiration was a lot of down-time and that inspiration might not come. For me it was a matter of work habits. Developing work-habits where I could go in day in and day out and work. One way that helped that is having different bodies of work and having multiple pieces, so if I’m having an artist block on one piece, I can move on to another one. While I’m thinking of something subconsciously, I might be thinking of another piece so I can move on to that. Also the work is very labor intensive, so even if I don’t have an inspiration or I’m not feeling the most artistic, I still have to go in and put things together. Manually do things. February 15, 2014

It’s helped me be aware of where my work is, where it’s going, where I want it to go and how to not let other people take it and do something else with it. I think there was a time when painters in particular were able to paint and then let the work speak for itself, but I just don’t think it can speak like that. Do you think that’s the engineer side of you? The problem/solution? Maybe. I do set up a lot of these experiments. After every body of work I give myself a month or two of experimenting or exploring different things and so those I think of as experiments or problems. In terms of the image or the art work itself, I don’t think that’s a problem, I think that’s a proposal. The research and development session, I think that never goes out. It’s never meant to be art. I sometimes make furniture, sometimes make toys, sometimes make different things with the purpose of learning new techniques and exploring materials. Those I think differently than when I make art. When I make art I don’t think of it in terms of a problem, because I don’t think there’s one solution. I think there’s always proposals, what one is advocating and putting forward, but it’s really important to have that time in between bodies of work. It’s also really important to have that contemplative time once I made work to assess what it means, how it means it, and where the work is going. I think in making there’s a lot of subconscious choices, a long series of minute decisions, that I sometimes can take for granted. So, I have to take some time to see what all of those decisions are amounting to. Is it always a go-go-go for you? It’s always kind of a go-go-go because early-on

SELECTED WORK

The visual and formal mechanism for these meditations on the status of the photographic image is the painting of the developed film with bleach, simultaneously obscuring and abstracting the underlying image and at the same time, as emulsion is dissolved, allowing more light to pass, unobscured, uncolored, through the film and into the print/screen/retina.

The images operate on multiple dichotomies; examining the interplay between the reproducibility of the photographic print and the unique mark of the painted gesture, as well as the tenuous status of the contemporary film image, which exists in multiple states at once as physical print, digital image, and projected, disembodied light.

This photograph is taken from the ongoing series â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Aletheia,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; a set of photographic prints made from 35mm slide film painted with bleach.

samuelpartal.com

Samuel Partal

untitled (from Aletheia), 2013 Samuel Partal C print from painted 35mm slide, bleach on velvia 100 film stock

FEATURE

SHIVA

ALIABADI

Facing the busy San Vincente Blvd. in Brentwood, seeMag sits down with artist Shiva Aliabadi a day before she leaves for her residency in Amsterdam to consider precarious records, existentialism and the nature of Aliabadi’s ever-changing art.

TRACES, 2013 SHIVA ALIABADI HOLI POWDER, PLASTIC ROLL 51” X 24” X 2.5”

Underbelly, 2014 Shiva Aliabadi Wood, paint, charcoal

FEATURE

SHIVA ALIABADI Shiva Aliabadi graduated with a MFA from Otis College of Art and Design. Her sculptural work focuses on temporality and records, using precarious materials such as holi powder and thin copper sheets. Currently, she is working on hybrid art pieces while abroad in Amsterdam for a residency. For more information about Aliabadi and her art, visit shiva-aliabadi.com.

How did you get started as an artist? I knew being in art was something I wanted to do since I was younger, but I came from a family of doctors. That was supposed to be my legacy and I ended up becoming an English major because that was my other passion. After awhile I decided that I didn’t just want a degree in English, I also wanted a degree in Fine Arts. I taught for a few years in English and then I ended up applying to schools and I went to Otis [College of Art and Design]. I got myself in the art scene, and it’s been good so far. It’s intense - a lot of work, but it’s been enjoyable. How would you describe your art? I’m just staying with the word ‘installational’ for a while and we’ll see where it goes. It has a sense of... I used to call it ephemeral but I think the more appropriate term is like it has a sense of temporality to it. I’ll take some pigment powder or charcoal and I’ll dust a structure with it, and that dusting is temporary so it’s only up for the installation and when it’s cleaned up, it’s over. What I keep is maybe a wooden piece that I hold on to and I use that for the next installation so it has a sense of direction to it. I kind of like that because I’ve been thinking a lot about traces and leaving traces in work - showing the viewer a trace of something. So whether it feels

like a drawing, charcoal or feels like a painting with dry pigment, there’s kind of a trace on there. You say that was the main concept behind your show? How was it different from your previous shows? The last year I’ve been trying to develop the concepts that I’m really interested in. I noticed that I was very interested in traces, imprints and making documents that are documents or records that are kind of precarious. So for a while I was doing a lot of imprints of various objects, like domestic objects from my kitchen: forks and knives, also parts of the car like a bumper or a car door. I was making records of them onto latex which degrades over time, sort of like in the tradition of Eva Hesse and some postminimalist artists. I was fascinated with how you could collect a record or a trace of something and that thing is gone. A lot of the time we throw the objects away and so you couldn’t access the original piece and I couldn’t access it anymore... all we’re left with is that record, that imprint - and that imprint is starting to degrade. So there was this interest in existential state behind all of it. It’s not in a really sad way, I mean, just kind of more like a matter of fact, you know.

So your art ages, it’s just like life. Absolutely, yeah. It ages, it changes. If I were to remake a piece it would always be technically, a different piece. Everything’s always changing, in flux. And that’s interesting for me, I somehow want to keep bringing that into my work, for a while and I’ll see where it goes. How did that concept come up? I wanna say naturally, I know that can sound vague but it came up naturally. You know for a while you work on so many different things and as a student you experiment and I experimented for like four years. I just kept going and going in a studio. Finally after a while I realized that with all the different materials I was using even though they might all seem completely different from each other, I was just trying to hold on to something, but hold on to something temporary. So it was like a paradox. I started to examine that and I think I like examining the sense of things changing, impermanence and how do you show that in an artwork that’s non-representational or at least give a sense of it to the viewer.

What influenced your choice of specific materials? I mean I have a real love of materiality. For awhile I was working with roofing tar and things like that, it’s very gushy and thick and has a strange black color that if you spread thin it’s brown. I was really delving into these industrial materials that are all difficult to work with. First of all because they’re harder to control then just traditional paints.

about how we kind of have to let go, because we have no choice and so I had to go through it with my own work and just let go.

elements of what I am doing now.

But now, my newer work, I keep a piece of it because I reuse it to make a new piece or a second version, so I sort of have something to hold on to.

I will make a piece before I get into the gallery, a wooden piece that’s pre-made and I’ll have that ready, and then I’ll come in. So the rest of it can happen naturally, organically, and unpredictably in some ways. Planned, but not planned.

Granted, I have digital documentation, so sometimes people ask about that because you could

Once I installed it [Underbelly], I knew I wanted to powder the bottom of it, and once I did, everything

“They use it [copper] in monuments they want to last, like the statue of liberty is copper. So I was thinking about how to use that in a non-monumental way - use that same material to make a record that falls apart” Some of them, like I use a lot of holi powder (the Indian powder that they use in their annual festival of renewal and it’s the powder that they throw at each other), I wanted to use that instead of regular pigment powders because it’s tied to a history, it’s tied to a tradition, and a festival, and it has to do with renewal! Since I was thinking so much of records degrading and things being temporary, I wanted to bring in something a little bit positive into the mix, and try to use this powder that’s tied to renewal with the record that’s changing or the trace that’s temporary to mix it up and talk about the cycle - a cycle of rebirth. We were definitely drawn to the bright colors of the powder too. Yeah, for my thesis show I used a pink color and a purple color that were both hard to photograph. I like the fact that they were hard to capture, because again, it went with the idea of the record that is hard to keep. So the photographer was able to match the colors up, he had to do it in Photoshop to find the right purple that the actual powder was. So the fact that I have a photoshopped purple that matches it, that it’s not what was actually in the room is for me fascinating - because it’s gone forever. It’s gone now. How does that feel? When I first was doing this kind of work (this was last year and the year before) it was a little nervewracking, because you put so much into it, so much into it. The purple piece [see adjacent page] took the longest even though it looked like it would be easy. It took forever. I couldn’t allow anyone in the room, no one could open the door so the powder wouldn’t move. I had to do it for so long to be able to let go and say ‘that’s okay’. I think it’s amusing because I’m talking about that

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say that the digital is forever. I don’t think anything is forever or permanent, but it does last longer. I keep them, first of all, to have a portfolio, to have a sense of what I’ve been working on, and to have something to show people too. If everything disappears then no one knows what you’ve been doing *laughs*. So I think that’s why I keep the digital even though it seems to work differently from what I am saying about the record. Do you make the work in the gallery itself? Yeah, a lot of it is on site, some of it is site specific if there is a gallery space that is interesting. The studio I had in Otis had a floor that had cuts in it from people who were there before and I would use that for the installation. But the Bolsky gallery where we have our thesis shows is very clean, pristine so it was a little harder to do something site specific because I couldn’t find too many anomalies in the space to work off of or use that as a starting point to get all excited about it. I really had to rely on the piece itself to somehow comment on the space - activate it. One of the pieces I did in the thesis show was called Left to Our Own Devices. It’s five panels that are on the wall and they look like they are coming out of the wall and then going back into the wall. I was thinking about how do we activate this white wall that we use over and over again. Almost by default you don’t think about it. I thought, ‘Let’s try to talk about this whiteness, this wall, and this structure’. So that was in a way site specific. Do you have one particular piece that encompasses what you are all about? Well, I wanna say most of them do. The piece Underbelly [see page 24] was my favorite in the thesis show that I just did. Because I think it had

else just took over and that’s what happened with the charcoal and I let it be. I took photos over time because people came close and stepped on the charcoal so I have images of people’s sneakers from over the week... *laughs* which is fine, because again, that plays into the trace. At first I thought, ‘Well, I could put a white line around it, so people wouldn’t step over it’, but then that would become automatically a part of the piece and I didn’t want that. I wanted something interactive and natural. How did that shape come about? The waterfall shape? That actually happened naturally. As soon as I threw the powder at the bottom of it, it just fell down the wall. Charcoal powder is so soft, and almost misty. When you open it, it just starts to fly out. It just naturally gripped the wall and cascaded to the floor. Did you put anything on the wall to make it stay? Nothing, it’s so fine and the walls have so much texture, it just held on. I didn’t touch it, I just let it be. Can you talk about the shape in Traces II ? Some people have talked about a portal. It’s kind of dark, but others have said, ‘Oh it reminds me of a gravestone, and the mirroring of the stone to the ground’ and I was like, ‘Okay, that’s interesting’. I was thinking more portal, especially because after you came in through the doorway, you’d see it. It wasn’t right in front of you it was a little bit to the left, but it was right there - so there was this idea of doorway to doorway, maybe to suggest a opening.

Traces II, 2014 Shiva Aliabadi Holi powder, plastic roll

Untitled (car door), 2013 Shiva Aliabadi Latex, holi powder, paint

Imprints, 2013 Shiva Aliabadi Copper, body imprints from various artists

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What influences the names of your work? We’re especially curious about Underbelly. So Underbelly was because I was thinking of it literally under the belly of the wooden piece. Traces II because it’s based on the other version, the pink one. I was thinking about traces at the time and collecting traces from installations I would do in my studio with powder. Then I would take this plastic, I would lay it on top, take it off and it would be an imprint of whatever the installation was, and then I would clean up the installation and that was gone and all I had left of it was this trace. Some of them are just literally what is, and then others, like there’s a copper piece in there that I called He Said, She Said. It was there because I was thinking about some of the clichés of minimalism and post minimalism. A lot of times when, at least in the education that I had, there would be a lot of male names for minimalists and then more female names for post-minimalists. They would be both using repetition but minimalists used repetition as a structured cut shapes and angles, versus the post minimalists with their organic repetition. I had the gold leaf that was supposed to be playing on that and the rigid pipes that went through the wall as the male. And just kind of being snarky with that one after having an education *laughs*, leaving it as He Said, She Said because I wanted her to have the last word. *laughs* Do you think you are going to stick with this kind of concept for your upcoming residency? The residency will be a different body of work. When I come back I definitely want to continue with some of these pieces - try to further them, because I had so many ideas after I did the Underbelly piece. I thought that this had so much potential and I was so eager to continue. I am looking forward to a period of space where I can do that. The residency is going to be more about creating hybrid forms out of stereotypical cultural, I guess, icons, you could call them icons. The clogs that are so popular in Netherlands, I’m going to be taking those and creating these sculptural moments from them by putting Islamic patterns on them. Islamic patterns, they are lovely but they are also, if they’re used a lot, can become a little cliché, like patterns. I’m trying to take these pieces from these two different cultures and bring them together. Part of it is that right now in Europe or in the Netherlands, there’s not a positive reception towards Muslims and I’m kind of tired of it. I want to bring them together and create these beautiful pieces that would create an object where people could consider forms that are from two different regions together. Which has been done many times before, but sometimes I think people can forget, so I feel like the role of the artist is, in some ways, to remind people that these kind of

hybrid forms can exist and/or to see patterns in a new way. Because I feel like art has a way of coming into your unconscious and affecting your other ideas, without you knowing that it’s all connected, it just affects the rest of it. Could you talk more about the role of the artist and their audience? For me, I honestly just want the viewer to have some instance to consider, to linger in, and be interested enough that they really get sucked into it. I think using powder, charcoal, pigment powder has been great because I think people are drawn to the way powder spreads and also the colors. It’s aesthetic of course, there’s something beautiful about it, but I’ve also created some rubber pieces. There’s something ugly about it - something visceral about it, but people would still stare. It’s something about having people linger. I think my role so far has been wanting the viewer to take a moment and to sit with the work, because it’s really hard to do. Like with some of my rubber pieces, people don’t actually recognize the object but they kind of sense that they know what it is. I want it to trigger things, whatever it is, you know, some memory, some instance, now gone. It’s that whole cyclical thing.

Then it’s almost a new object every time, even though it’s the same object. It’s similar to how we have these stories that are passed down from centuries ago, it’s the same basic story, but it changes over time. Because there’s no way the environment isn’t going to affect it and change it in some way, imprint on it. Which is what’s so great about, I keep the latexes and I keep the copper pieces and they are wrapped, but they are still exposed to air, I allow that. The latex has white spots on it now, the imprints from everybody [on the copper] is starting to turn green. I let that happen. I mean, I think that’s what’s so interesting about it. If you’ve read that article about how they are trying to preserve Eva Hesse’s work, and they are having problems doing it because latex’s shelf life is like 20 years. It’s been decades since she created them, and they are trying to preserve them, and it’s really difficult. Are they really going to be successful in that? I don’t think it was meant to be preserved like a Van Gogh painting. And even then, they are trying so hard to make sure the oil and the colors stay. February 27, 2014

This is actually copper [see adjacent page], what I was doing with the copper was I was thinking about imprints, but this time I was trying to hold imprints of all these artists’ bodies. So people came in and they imprinted the copper with their oily residue and the copper catches it immediately. I wanted to hold a trace of them, some of them [the people] I don’t see very often, some I might not see again because they’ve moved. And this again is their record. But it’s precarious because the copper sheeting is very thin, it tears easily. It’s interesting to move because you need three, four people to move it if you wanna keep it exactly as its crumpled. So for me, again, that ties back into all those things I was telling you about with the record. They use it [copper] in monuments they want to last, like the statue of liberty is copper. So I was thinking about how to use that in a non-monumental way - use that same material to make a record that falls apart. Ideas change and I think it’s really funny how we try to hold on to it and you have this statue of liberty. What does that mean? The meaning behind it shifts, and not everyone has the same meaning tied to that object, so I think there’s something interesting if not a little bit silly that we have that ‘this is what we’re about’.

L.A. DREAMZ, 2012 Athena Thebus Styrofoam, fimo, printed acetate, flocking 20 x 15 x 12cm

SELECTED WORKS

Athena Thebus 4/16/14 2:24pm SEEMAG Hi Athena! Thanks for chatting with us today!

ATHENA THEBUS Hey gals :) How are the two of you?

We’re doing great! Thank you for asking. :) We would love to ask you some questions about your work, specifically your piece “LA DREAMZ”, if that’s okay with you! Yes please go ahead! 2:34pm First of all, could you tell us a little about what inspired you to make it?

My inquiry into LA started by this one magical moment - driving along Brisbane’s ICB on a golden afternoon in my beat-up 1990 Suzuki Sierra. For a moment I was transported to LA. Later, I realized I was really transported to what I felt was LA, what was informed by media, largely the internet. I realized I had this unconscious collection of LA facts, fictions, and mirages. It surprised me how vivid my idea of LA was and that’s what really pushed me to start making works like LA Dreamz and XSTAL Dreamz Especially using materials that I felt had this kinship to LA, my idea of LA gathered from the internet as a far away outsider Materials like styrofoam, concrete, silicon 2:54pm Now that you are here, do you think your art will change? Will it still be inspired by LA?

I came to LA so that my work would change! A lot of my work prior was about the dream of LA And a lot of people didn’t want me to go in fear that it would destroy the dream, but I was getting tired of making the same work. My work prior to LA was driven by the momentum to just get here Now that I’m here that momentum is waning and I’m inquiring optimism more than I did before Which, to me, is still very much inspired by LA LA seems like a beacon for dreamers - you gotta keep your chin up and persist! Optimism is a strange kind of crazy Undercurrent of blindness and brave desperation. athenathebus.com

kristen Sitting poolside at the beautiful Viceroy Hotel in Santa Monica, seeMag meets with Kristen Perman over tea to discuss photography, film, self-portraiture, and her transition into the fine art world. Kristen relates to us how her current body of work explores the relationship between identity and temporary spaces.

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Untitled, 2012 Kristen Perman Polaroid SLR 680 Impossible PX 680 gold frame edition film

Self-Portrait, 2014 Kristen Perman Olympus OM-2 Kodak Portra 400 film

Untitled no. 3, 2010 Kristen Perman Polaroid Spectra Camera expired Polaroid Spectra film (double exposed in camera)

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How did you start photography ? Okay, so a hundred years ago, during undergrad I was in interior design. I went to the Academy of Art [University], San Francisco, so I have a BFA and I was so passionate about it. I got to the top of where I could go with design and I burned out. I stopped looking at art or anything and became an acupuncturist. I practiced acupuncture for fifteen years, really stopped doing anything at all. I was blogging, and a friend said, ‘Do The Artist’s Way with me,’ and I said, ‘Oh, I don’t know, I don’t need to do that... I’m done with that.’ But I picked up a point-and-shoot. I lived in New York and it was really easy to start shooting. It was never really the thing that I thought I was going to do because when I was in school, the commercial people were really separated from the fine art. You knew where you stood. I took a photography class and I got hammered in that class. After that I

rid of your film camera, why would you waste your money.’ The point is what is going to make you shoot the most, and what’s going to be the fastest return. I think that if you are going to be commercially driven there’s something with being able to shoot quickly and I think you have to be able to know how to use a digital camera efficiently to be relevant. So, I get that argument but I like talking about it a lot with different people because it’s interesting. I prefer the way film looks, I feel like my pictures look better, they convey more of what I want to be saying. If I was able to say exactly what I wanted to say about my work, it would be the way they look in film. Sometimes there are certain projects that warrant itself to digital. Like I’m shooting a 365 self-portrait; I’ve done a picture a day.

kristen perman Kristen Perman graduated with a BFA in Interior Design from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. After working for a number of years and starting a family, she became a freelance acupuncturist in New York City. With a renewed passion for photography, she moved to Los Angeles where she is currently working on one of her many projects: Polaroid Girls, an ongoing online collaboration of Polaroid diptychs with Darlene Kreutzer (based in Canada), catching the eyes of magazines and other Flickr users alike. For more information on Perman’s photography, go to kristenperman.com. To see more Polaroid Girls go to hippyurbangirl.com/polaroidgirls.

cut off all heads, I really couldn’t frame a picture. It’s so cliché but I am like that Artist’s Way’s frustrated person, who didn’t even know that I was a frustrated artist. I realized I didn’t have to be just an acupuncturist, but I could be both, I could be an artist and an acupuncturist. When we moved here [LA], I didn’t want to take the licensing exam and my husband said, ‘You don’t have to work right now, why don’t you be a photographer?’ So, that’s where it’s gone. I started digitally, but I always had Polaroid cameras, even as a kid, because you know, they’re fun. I had those little I-zones which were like a little sticker strip. They were so cute and when my daughter was born, I made my husband a ‘day in the life of our daughter’ in a strip. But shooting film and Polaroid really is how I learned to frame a picture -- it wasn’t digital. So what drew you to film in the first place? I like the instant. I like the Polaroid, I really do. I had a lot of 600 film that I had bought that I thought would last forever. I like the way it looks. I think that it looks better. In fact I’ve had this conversation recently with a friend about it because a lot of the fine art photographers, that originally started in film, only shoot digitally now. I took this workshop last fall and they said, ‘Get

I’m pretty okay with taking self-portraits and I’ve been relying on my phone more than I wanted to. But with film, the color was not rendering the way I want it to because the project is color based. I decided to make up my own color wheel: so each month there’s a color. I thought that taking a picture of myself is so lame everyday. I should have shot the whole project digitally. But, whatever. You know how that goes. And what did I throw in my purse today? I mean, I can’t carry my DSLR, cause that thing is a beast, it’s so heavy. You know, I’m just going to stick with my film and not feel bad about it. I’ve also just walked into the media of medium format because I got so bummed out about the Polaroid film not being stable... and it’s been four years! For this long, it should be better. I still like 35mm a lot but I think there’s more information on medium format, so we’ll see. I’m not very good at marketing myself I just kind of do my thing, I post a lot on Flickr, I shoot a lot and I’ve had some small successes. I’ve sold some images recently to Elle UK, which is nice, and I’ve been in a couple of group shows. I decided that I wanted to be a little more serious about fine art and the fine art world, so I started taking some classes at the Julia Dean School

of Photography in West Hollywood (they’ve changed it over to the LA Center of Photography). That’s really opened up my eyes to what’s going down in the fine art world, it’s really so different than anything you can think of. What photos did Elle UK like? I did a lot of double-exposed self-portraits a couple of years ago, so they bought a lot of those. There’s this one section where they do memoirs apparently, and the naval gazing, introspective... that kind of stuff... that’s where they’ve been putting those pictures which is kind of awesome. My pictures are personal and are about memories and introspection and loneliness and all of that, so my pictures are in the right place. The person found me again, on Flickr. I’ve been trying to be more proactive with myself, but I hate promoting myself. I’m not good at it. I hate talking about it. I hate trying to write artist statements. You have to have a statement for every body of work and it’s rough. It’s rough to not sound like an artspeak dweeb, you know. Because they make fun of you immediately, it’s very interesting!

Friday is the bottom, and the following week the big image arrives. How would you describe your photography? I would say right now. I’m about self-potraiture though I’ve got a couple projects are going on. I would say, it’s about exploring emotion and the lonely places in a way, but still finding the moments of beauty, light and hope. I know that sounds very cliché, but that’s sort of what we’re all looking for. I like the empty spaces, to see what’s before and what’s after - that’s where my work is focused on lately. Even though you wouldn’t know that from my website. I struggle with when to show stuff you’re working on when to put it out there. I hold things very close. I don’t necessarily need feedback, but because I’m putting myself out there in the arena, it’s making myself really vulnerable and it’s not super comfortable. It’s scary, but good. What is it about self-portraiture that appeals to you? I’ve always been drawn to it. Even back in art school.

Oh, it’s a beautiful project, my husband jokes that she [Darlene Kreutzer] cheats (which I know she doesn’t) but he just likes to laugh because the serendipity of our pictures is really... perfect. We don’t tell each other, I send it to her and she doesn’t look. We both take it for the week, whatever subject and then I send it to her and then she puts it up. Mostly she does all the computer stuff because I’m not very good at that. Darlene and I met online through blogging, we both had said something about being sad about the film and she said, ‘Hey, what do you think about collaborating?’ and it just seemed like a good thing to do. It’s really cool how our work has evolved over the years. When I lived in New York, there were still four seasons so we had coinciding seasons. Now, there’s a good contrast in our pictures because of the LA weather. It’s interesting because when we started, she was an avid photographer and now she doesn’t really shoot that much anymore, she’s more of a writer and athlete. It’s an interesting thing seeing the trajectory of how people go in and out of photography, if they’ve started it as an online thing. What do you find most valuable about the project?

“I prefer the way film looks, I feel like my pictures look better - they convey more of what I want to be saying. If I was able to say exactly what I wanted to say about my work, it would be the way it looks in film.”

There’s some pictures that you have on Flickr that feature slices of photos...? That’s my own project. That one is called exquisite corpse. It’s based on the surrealist parlour game of exquisite corpse. In the ‘20s they would play this game - they would draw a little bit and then fold it over... and it’s usually based on the human form. It’s a concept of top, middle, bottom. So I started thinking about it in terms of photography, and how cool it would be. We would do the same thing. I made it complicated, unfortunately. So, whoever who was on top set the theme, it could be whatever you wanted it to be - and then you have a size image for the master which would be revealed later. You could slice wherever you wanted, wherever you wanted the story to start and it really depended. The top was easy because you could just slice wherever, but if you are in the middle you don’t want to put a foot shot but sometimes its hard. You also can really lead somebody if you wanted to. Like if I took a picture and the picture was of you but I just did your knee and your elbow, no one is going to see the rest of you. I was accused by my friends that I was always tricky. And I wasn’t trying to be tricky *laughs* it was just because I wanted it to be more interesting because the reveals were so cool. Monday would be the top, Wednesday is the middle,

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For an art history class, I had the coolest teacher. Instead of sitting and watching slides for the year, he had us make our own art history books. So we could do either 100 images, or two books of 50. You could choose your subject and explain why you chose it and why it went in. I was obsessed with Celtic art, so I did that. Another book I did was on the human form. I chose tons of Cindy Sherman. I have always resonated with self-portrait artists. Do you think your love for the human form manifested itself in the exquisite corpse project? That’s interesting, it could be! Maybe I sort of have always been obsessed with this the whole time. And there’s my acupuncture too. I do miss that, the anatomy and the body. I guess I really am obsessed with the human form. I don’t think I set out to be that, I’ve taken a lot of pretty pictures and yet, I’ve always thrown myself in there to express how I’m feeling. It honestly started from Flickr a hundred years ago. When Flickr first started there was this thing called ‘SelfPortrait Tuesday’, and I never was comfortable putting myself in front of the camera, but I did it for so many years that you just get comfortable with it. Tell us about your Polaroid Girls project!

It makes me pick up my camera every week. It really does, even when I’m in a slump, it still forced me to take at least one picture a week. Always. We would stockpile sometimes. For the past few weeks I’ve used the Portland trip, but it’s usually for vacation. And it’s really a lovely marker too, because I get to see what we’ve been doing for the past four years. And there’s been times where we’ve been together and taken them, and that is kind of cool. I’m actually going to Edmonton this July, and we’ll have that. And I like that it’s still going. Have you ever thought about putting it together in a show where you can see your progression? We haven’t. It would be beautiful. We went to an art retreat once a few years back, and we sold a bunch of them. We sold the prints, and we made it where you had to buy both. I think the photos were dreamier when we had 600 film. They just were. They were beautiful. She shoots with her SX-70 and she’s really skilled with it, especially with 600 film in it. I have always used a 680 and that thing is just amazing. It has a beautiful depth of field and seems to make everything really milky. What are you showing at your next group show, Through the Lens ? I have nine pictures. It’s called Laura Brown, it was inspired by The Hours by Michael Cunningham. There are these three segments of women that are in despair:

NYC, 2009 Kristen Perman Polaroid 680SLR expired Polaroid 600 film

Edmonton, 2009 Darlene Kreutzer Polaroid SX-70 expired Polaroid 600 film

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, and then this character Laura Brown. The character Laura Brown is questioning motherhood and being in the position of having all of this need and want coming at her. She would go to hotels, rent a room, and read books by herself. This was in the ‘50s, and it was set in Los Angeles. When my sister was ill, my sister passed away three years ago, I had done a lot of traveling to Vancouver where she was living, and stayed in hotels by myself. I started really getting in to this time alone. I wasn’t a mom or a wife or anything other but myself. So I started identifying with that Laura Brown character. I mean not really identifying, because she leaves her family and it’s just this tragic sort of story, but I can identify a lot of those feelings with isolation and loneliness and being a mom. For me, I had always worked, and so I didn’t really relate to the stay at home moms, and the ones I did relate to, worked full-time, so I was kind of in this world between. I just think people don’t really talk about what really goes into it. There’s a lot of loss of identity. It’s about trying to find yourself in temporary places and spaces. So I shot most of it in a lot of different hotels. And there a few self-portraits in it. It’s all in black and white. I think it’s beautiful, but I don’t know. It’s hard to know. My teacher liked it, and she’s no push-over *laughs*. I love the work and I do, and it is part of a bigger series. So I am excited. The people I’m showing with are freaking amazing. I’m so honored to be showing with these people. This one [see adjacent page] was taken in Vegas at the Golden Nugget, those are the city lights and it was in the morning. And that one is really too gray. I worked on some for the contrast. It was a dilemma for me. I have never edited any of my pictures. I crop them, I don’t edit color or any of it and I’ve tried to stay somewhat of a purist about that. But I don’t feel bad with black and white because in a darkroom you would play with the darks and lights. And that’s how I’ve justified it. Who or what do you take pictures for? I take them for me, I really do. I think it’s to get it out. My husband teases me sometimes saying, “Are you going to be the old lady with boxes of photographs that nobody ever sees?” But I don’t’ really care. I just really enjoy doing it myself. I like the process more than any other thing that I’ve done artistically, too. It’s just held up. I started in 2005 and it’s been consistent, which I’m not usually. That has been a keeper. Do you think that’s the importance of art or photography? Well I think that’s what will sustain you in the end. I’ve been very careful, and I think that my previous art career affects how I see it now, because I don’t want to burn out on it again. I think once you monetize something as a career, I think it’s very difficult artistically to keep your passion for it. And that’s why I always loved being an acupuncturist. I loved being an acupuncturist. I was always good at it, but it wasn’t my passion. One of my friends said to me, ‘It’s so weird because you’re doing it

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[acupuncture] to support your film habit.’ And I thought ‘Wow, you’re right.’ I was so grateful that I liked my job. I got to a point when I was a designer that I hated my job so much and I just never wanted that to happen again. Had I not had to take a test to practice I probably would still be practicing. I loved it. I could make my own hours, I could help people and talk to people, but I can also send them on their way. It’s like a revolving door, I don’t keep people forever, you come a few times and you go. But it was enough money to where I did not have to work a ton of hours, I could be a mom, it was a great gig. Maybe that’s why I never wanted to be a commercial photographer. So I guess that’s for me, that’s what sustains it: it has to be for me. How did you distinguish between liking something versus having a passion for something? I only learned about it later, probably The Artist Way let me see it. I guess it was once I picked up the camera again, once I started being creative again, once I allowed myself to be artistic again. I think that’s when I saw that [acupuncture] was my job and not my passion. I was passionate about it, but it wasn’t my fuel. I wasn’t reading those books on the side, I wasn’t trying to take workshops, I wasn’t living and breathing it like other people did, but I just saw clearly there was that line for it and I was okay with it. April 2, 2014

36.9448N, 115.516W, 2013 Kristen Perman Polaroid 100 Land Camera Fuji 3000b film

Aaron Preacher, 2012 Julie Orlick Canon Eos Rebel, Tri-X 400 rated at 250 printed on Ilford multigrade fiber art paper

SELECTED WORKS

untitled #1 coffee houses are funny full of caffeinated freaks and people with a point to make its very important our lives my life and this drink right now

-julie orlick

Some of my best ideas come to me while caffeinated. I’m a photographer born and raised in Los Angeles. I’m pretty obsessed with pastries, coffee, film & photography...which can explain my photo series “Coffee and Portraits”. I’ve shot at over 20 diners and coffee shops in L.A. and am continuing my series in New York City. I’ve been writing a lot of poetry here as well.

crackuniverse.tumblr.com

Undormanted Dragon Jae Kim Otis College of Art and Design Mixed Media (spray paint, acrylic, photo collage)

EMERGING ARTISTS

California Sunsets Marco Soriaga Santa Monica College Digital photograph

EMERGING ARTISTS

Untitled Chloe Hassenfratz Marymount High School Black and white photograph

EMERGING ARTISTS

The Joy of Seclusion Gianna Iacone Marymount High School Digital photograph

Subtle Light Kevin Moore UCLA Digital photograph

EMERGING ARTISTS