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TBA:09 ON SIGHT
TBA ON SIGHT A collection of installations, exhibitions, projections, and gatherings by visual artists, curated and organized by Kristan Kennedy, Visual Art Program Director, PICA. ON SIGHT projects are FREE and open to the public from September 03 — October 18, 2009 and are (mostly) located at Washington High School: 531 SE 14th Avenue Portland, Oregon 97214. ON SIGHT Opening at THE WORKS at Washington High School Thursday, September 03 at 8 pm, FREE ON SIGHT Gallery Hours at THE WORKS at Washington High School September 04 - September 13, every day from 12 - 6:30 pm September 17 - October 18, Thursday - Friday 12 - 6:30 pm & Saturday - Sunday 12 - 4 pm TBA ON SIGHT Residencies are funded in part by the Kristy Edmunds Fund for New Work, Leslie B. Durst, and National Performance Network’s Visual Artists Network whose major contributors are the Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and the Nathan Cummings Foundation. Supported in part by LAIKA/house, Perfect Fit, Catherine Volle, & Hampton Lumber. TBA ON SIGHT projects are supported in part by Lufthansa German Airlines, makelike, Comcast, TC Smith and Showdrape Inc., Bill Boese, David Rosenack, Moe Caviness, Pacific Northwest College of Art, Reed College, Milepost 5, Josh Berger & Tiffany Brown, Elise Bartow, Derek Franklin, Kent Richardson, Lyndsay Hogland, and the Prints for PICA artists, with special thanks to TODAYART Studios. RELATED PROJECTS at TBA:09 Broadcast, curated by Irene Hoffman, September 8 - December 13 The Ronna and Eric Hoffman Gallery of Contemporary Art, Lewis & Clark College. Psychedelic Soul, curated by Kristan Kennedy and Stephanie Snyder, September 1 - December 5 The Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College. Luke Cage and Prescott Sheng, Crock: The Motion Picture Carter, Erased James Franco Kalup Linzy, Churen Trading Mess: Conversations Wit De Churen Episodes I-VII Melody Owen, Circles and Spinning Wheels & If I Could Crowd All My Souls Into That Mountain Fawn Krieger, Dramas robbinschilds, C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience) Ethan Rose, Laura Gibson, Ryan Jeffery, YOUNGER Hitoshi Toyoda, NAZUNA & spoonfulriver Tyler Wallace & Nicole Dill, Between Us PICA.ORG FOR locations & Details
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No Such Place
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second floor 107 217
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TBA ON SIGHT Robert Boyd - at PNCA Antoine Catala - Room 107 Peter Coffin Brody Condon - Room 106 Jesse Hayward - Room 202 Johanna Ketola - Room 210/211
Fawn Krieger - Room 217 Kalup Linzy - Room 108 Brian Lund - at PNCA Ma Qiusha - Room 104 robbinschilds + A.L. Steiner - Room 102 Ethan Rose - Room 203 Stephen Slappe - Room 201
No Such Place is a phrase that might be written on a banner or flag hung high on the building that these exhibits inhabit. Or it could be a stamp on a map of a suspicious landmass. It is sometimes a loose translation of the word utopia. Right now it is a title for a series of projects about an amorphous time: one reflected by artists in numerous ways, one that poses more questions than it answers. When I set out to program this constellation of projects, I was thinking about the art world's recent obsession with utopian visions and how collectively we seemed to be searching for meaning. Then as our country faced a stunning and glorious regime change, it felt as if a giant balloon had been popped. All of the air went rushing out—there was a great relief, there was talk of hope, there was great celebration. Still we were at war, and even worse we could not hide from the mistakes we made: we could no longer blame our leader; we had to blame ourselves. In this moment everything looked different, including art. People started asking, "What does it mean to be here in this place? In this time? What will define us/it?" Artists are always future forecasting, and the artists included in this program are no different. The ways they describe, question, and predict are varied and unexpected. They document and reinterpret memories and melodramas, they set up stages for you to direct the action, they remove information or distort it, they create soundscapes, dream states, altered states. They possess hope, but they also are not afraid to hint at our anxious reality. They talk as much about loss as they do about love. They are mining the now, the then, and the soon to be. They are making a new world, one that does not yet have a name, one not yet defined. One called, for now anyway, No Such Place. —Kristan Kennedy, Visual Art Program Director
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Robert Boyd - antoine catala - Brody condon
Strieber, the author of Communion, and Louis Turi, a metaphysical doctor who was abducted while en route to his brother’s disco in the south of France.
Robert Boyd Conspiracy Theory
Robert Boyd’s Conspiracy Theory, the first part of his forthcoming project TOMORROW PEOPLE, is a synchronized two-channel video installation. Conspiracy Theory addresses issues of social paranoia and civil distrust in an era of questionable politics using excerpts from syndicated radio talk show hosts, international conspiracists, amateur documentary filmmakers, and the mysterious Commander X. Here, Boyd has submitted a top ten “Conspiracy Countdown.” Originally published in the P.S.1 newspaper on the occasion of his exhibition there in January of 2008.
7. Anthrax, Smallpox, Vaccinations and the Mark of the Beast, 2005 Leonard Horowitz presents “little known facts regarding threatened outbreaks; the science, economics, and global politics underlying bioterrorism and forced vaccinations,” and the mark of the beast. 6. Loose Change: 1st edition, 2005 Dylan Avery theorizes in an online expose that “9-11 was an inside job.” 5. Dark Secrets: Inside Bohemian Grove, 2000 Alex Jones infiltrates the Bohemian Grove in Monte Rio, CA to expose “the occult playground of the global elite.” 4. The Strecker Memorandum, 1988 Robert B. Strecker theorizes that AIDS is a manmade disease that was introduced into the human population through medical injection programs. 3. Communion, 1989 Film adaptation, starring Christopher Walken, of Whitley Strieber’s bestselling novel about the author’s personal experiences of being abducted by aliens. 2. The Secret Underground Lectures of Commander X, 2004 A retired military intelligence official reveals the “shocking truth about the New World Order, UFOs, Mind Control and more.”
Figure I: An Installation View of Robert Boyd’s Conspiracy Theory.
10. Welt am Draht (World On a Wire), 1973 The made-for-TV science fiction film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder portrays a computer programmer who is working on a project called Simulacron that is able to simulate a full featured reality, only to discover that he, and the world he inhabits, is a simulation. 9. Secrets of the Matrix, 2004 David Icke presents a 6-hour lecture about “a network of interbreeding (reptilian) bloodlines that have been pursuing an agenda for thousands of years to impose a globally centralized fascist state with total control and surveillance of the population.” 8. UFO Abductions: A Global Phenomenon, 1998 Michael Hesemann’s documentary about alien abductees features Rauni-Leena Luukanen-Kilde, a former medical officer from Finland; Whitley
1. V: The Original Miniseries, 1983 A race of reptilian aliens attempt to take over Earth. About Robert Boyd’s work has been exhibited at venues such as the Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong Kong (2009); P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, NY (2008); Sundance Film Festival, Park City, UT (2008); Pinchuk Art Centre, Kiev (2008); Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA (2008); The Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Indianapolis (2007); 303 Gallery, NY (2007); PKM Gallery, Beijing (2006); Kunst-Werke, Berlin (2006); and Participant Inc, NY (2006). His work is included in several public collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Fondation Louis Vuitton pour la Création in Paris. www.robertboyd.info
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No Such Place
Antoine Catala TV
In this series of works, Antoine Catala uses complex technology and simple physical transformation to alter television images in real time. By altering mundane day-to-day television and displaying it in a quasi-cinematic way, Catala instigates a new, near-psychedelic experience of the familiar medium. TV is treated here as a continuous, unfiltered flow, regardless of its content. Catala brings a physical dimension to video, in what he calls “video scuptures,” to develop a new psychological relationship between the viewer and the medium.
I am not uniquely attached to news, I also like to use weather channels – which stand more on the wallpaper side of TV entertainment. Weather channels’ weather maps are absolutely mesmerizing when turned into TV Blobs. I also favor cartoons, because their primary colors and contrasted content tend to work especially well with TV Blobs.
KK: Are these pieces video or sculpture? Or something else entirely? AC: TV Blobs are video trompe l’oeil, flat projections of moving images that look like solid shapes. They are not really videos (because they do not produce new video content), nor are they sculptures (because they are immaterial projections), but they are a bit of both, they are video sculptures. TV Blobs are sculptures made out of a TV stream that introduces a new physical relationship between the viewer and the moving images. Video sculpture comes from a tradition of video art, pioneered by artists such as Wolf Vostell. Vostell was a fluxus artist that was one of the first to introduce a TV set into an art piece. One difference that distinguishes TV Blobs from the work of my predecessors is that I am exclusively treating the TV stream, while they were most often working with TV sets. About
Figure II: Antoine Catala’s video sculptures in TV.
KK: Why blobs? AC: The Blob is the title of a horror movie, about an amorphous creature that terrorizes a small community. Blobs are grotesque, terrifying shapes. TV Blobs come straight out of a b-movie: the TV stream is a familiar companion that has been re-incarnated into a new body. KK: Why news channels? AC: A TV Blob is a television signal transformed in real-time into 3D multi-spherical spinning shapes that are projected human size onto a wall. I often use news channels as a source for the TV Blobs, because news channels are up-to-date around the clock and provide great entertainment. They act as a window to the outside world that functions especially well in a secluded environment like the exhibition space.
Antoine Catala’s practice, aside from making video, includes performance-based works and curating as a medium. A New York-based French artist, Catala holds a BA in mathematics and was schooled in sonic and fine arts at Middlesex and London Guildhall Universities in London. His work has been exhibited internationally at le Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Galerie Christine Mayer (Munich); GAM (Mexico); The Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh); and numerous venues in Bordeaux, Berlin, London, Los Angeles, Mexico, New York, Munich, Paris, Toulouse, and Saint-Etienne. www.aaaaaaa.org
Brody Condon Without Sun
Named after the Chris Marker video Sans Soleil, Condon’s Without Sun is an edited compilation of “found performances” of individuals on a psychedelic substance. Images and sounds from the
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Brody condon - Jesse hayward
various clips collected from the Internet overlap and combine into one seamless experience, creating a 15-minute pseudo-narrative focused on the exterior surface of their “projection of self” into visionary worlds. Condon’s global players in Without Sun have this time recorded themselves looking at the camera. Taking up where Marker left off, these (inner) travelogues question memory, perception, and the effects of current participatory media and technology on culture. Condon’s work is notable for its influence on the repurposing of existing computer and live games to create sculpture, performance, and software installations. Youth of the Apocalypse, a series of self-playing game modifications based on Late Medieval Northern European religious paintings, is just one example.
when I made my video. By using that reference, I am saying that I am now sitting next to it, thinking about it. Thinking about what Marker’s film could possibly tell us about this collection of inner travelogues from the future that were recorded and put into this nebulous public digital space. It’s a strange situation where they have intentionally traumatized themselves and attempted the emotional time travel of post traumatic stress therapy all at once. KK: At what point in the process of making this piece did you decide to add a performative element or companion? How are the two works related (video + performance)? BC: I decided to add the performative element a year after the video was finished. It was a natural transition, my videos have consistently been “collections of performance documentation,” whether it is recording myself playing a game or collecting found performance footage from others. In the case of Without Sun, I reversed the process. The video collection turned out to be the perfect choreography document and script for a performance. KK: In the festival we present work by both visual and performance artists, and some artists like yourself cross these boundaries. Do you think of these genres as being two different worlds? Is it important to have a distinction or should we just invent a new term for how artists interpret the world?
Figure III: A Video Still from Condon’s Without Sun.
KK: You have spoken to me about your work, in particular your video, Without Sun, to be about in some part, “the projection of self.” What do you think it is about humans, firmly planted in one world, who go to all sorts of lengths (drugs, psychotherapy, role-playing, religious ritual, dreaming, magic) to conjure up other worlds? BC: It would take lifetimes to fully answer that question. I will break it into a thousand smaller bits for now. What do people look like when they are on psychoactive substances that dissociate conscious perception from the body? What are the visible ways over-identifications with fantasy affect culture? Etc. KK: In the Chris Marker film Sans Soleil, on which your video is based, he opens the film with the Racine quote, “The distance between countries compensates somewhat for the excessive closeness of time.” How do notions of time figure in your piece? What about sense of place?
BC: I don’t know if a radical distinction is necessary, and somehow the terms are still useful. This crossover has been going on in recent Western art history at least since the early 20th century avant-garde, then cropping up again with force in the 60s and 70s. Meaning artists my age who studied sculpture and installation came into the game 30 years after its re-adoption of experimental theatre and performance, so integrating performative strategies into our work was common. About Born in Mexico, Condon received his MFA from the University of California, San Diego in 2002. He attended residencies at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in 2004 and Skowhegan 2001. Past exhibitions include 2004 Whitney Biennial, Pace Wildenstein Gallery and New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York; the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Santa Monica Museum of Art and Machine Project in California. www.tmpspace.com
BC: I didn’t actually have Sans Soleil in mind
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No Such Place
AD: Something about you is wall drawing. ence is like,
Jesse Hayward FOREVER NOW AND THEN AGAIN
Whether it’s with painted toothpicks that participants stab into an amorphous armature or, as is the case with FOREVER NOW AND THEN AGAIN, with several hundred painted, stackable boxes presented for our collaboration, Jesse Hayward creates installations that are intended for direct audience manipulation. Utilizing repetition and ritual, he builds and paints objects in his studio that are then reimagined through a collaborative installation practice, articulating a space wherein boundaries are blurred. The sculptural commingles with the painterly, the coactive with the drawn. Hayward’s work exists in diminished hybridization, with multiple genres collapsing parasitically one upon the other. Rhythms of color and form soften and obscure their own structural underpinning, foreshadowing the instability and immateriality of all future outcomes. This text has been transcribed and edited for print by Kristan Kennedy from an audio interview between Arcy Douglas and Jesse Hayward in the summer of 2008 for “Daisy Chain,” a project of artist-to-artist interviews initiated by artist Sandy Sampson for Parallel University. www. parallel-university.org AD: Tell me where your work is right now, what are you working on? JH: Stuff, boxes.
that a lot of people might not know that you helped Sol Le Witt do a I was wondering what that experiand if it has stayed with you?
JH: It definitely has. I almost feel that I have been subconsciously re-creating that experience, working with people collaboratively, having them create abstract art with me. So now I have embraced it, I consciously do it. So the boxes came from something Le Witt did, actually some of my least favorite work by him, he did a series of boxes...I really liked his instructional drawings, pure conceptual abstraction, the early stuff, beautiful ideas. And then later there is some lush sculpture and some watery painted pieces, those geometric pieces. Right after the early stuff and before the lush stuff he did this really esoteric study of cubes. You could have made instructions for those—how to make them, they were white structures, made up of edges with various bits and pieces missing... AD: The “open cube” series? or “incomplete open cube” series... JH: Open cubes! Yeah and all of those variations... If that word incomplete is not in the title it should be. Having one of those experiences when I was young, it is one of those things...I can’t really calculate how important it was to me. Because it looms, it is an echo, or it is like getting hit in the “kiwis”...it aches but it comes and goes. So the new box project is really a manifestation of my feelings about his incomplete cube series. I was very much thinking about how that was an idea that could be worked out more. AD: It seems that in your last two shows that you embraced having your friends, other artists, or people from the community actively participate in the arrangement or composition of your project...
Figure IV: A sampling of Jesse Hayward’s painted boxes.
JH: Well, yes...so the last show at Jáce Gáce was the first time that I had people who came to the show, or some of the events and paint lines on the wall of their choosing. I basically gave them a choice of colors and a brush—that was a lot of input on my part—the continuum to my experience with Sol LeWitt’s work is amazing to me. I also see this tie to surealism—there is a long thread of this kind of thing—John Cage’s music...not that I would listen to it! But that becomes interesting too. I think those Le Witt cubes were almost un-lookable. It feels like
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Jesse Hayward - Johanna Ketola
a different thing to look at his work and to physically participate in making it. When you make one of his drawings, even though there are instructions, you are reacting to the physical space, the corner of a wall, the architecture, your hand, the people around you. His cubes felt devoid of that human experience, they seemed computer generated. My work is about letting that back in. AD: In those shows when you are collaborating with people that you invite in, what do you see as their role and what do you see as your role?
things, give visual directions. Still, at any point in the show it has to be right and real to me. So I have to go back in there, and bring it back to my process. If you are in a zone making things you want to stay there as long as you can— you want to have the objects to have this life. They are your children—who wants their children to go live out their lives in some rich person’s living room? Or in some collection stored in an unlit room? I want to manipulate, organize and disorganize. I want the objects to have a longer life. I am notorious for deconstructing my own work and reassembling it.
JH: The show at Jáce Gáce had people coming in all the time... The most interactive pieces were the painted sticks that people could stick in the wall or stick in my foam sculptures. People took great liberties with them, they did crazy strange things with them. The more you give up personal control—it is not that you are giving one person control—it obliterates anyone’s control and it becomes a collective drawing. Working with curators is a collaboration; when you make things, you are going to be interacting on some level with other people. You might as well use it.
AD: Which is like giving it a new life, or maybe it implies that any one work cannot reach a perfect form. You change and the work changes.
AD: Your boxes are painted differently on each side, so you have the physical language of the cube but you have the visual language...
The boxes tell you, in a quiet way that you can re-stack them.
JH: In order to make an impactful number of boxes, I wanted to make about 150 in a year, about three boxes a week. Each box is made up of six square foot paintings screwed together. This way of working brought my painting down to elemental things. It became about the imperfections...the cracks and the smudges. It has been great to tile and sort them, like a puzzle. I just recently painted some lines on my floor with enamel sign paint, and in the end it turned out to by almost 350 yards of line. You’re almost a different person after that. Your first line will not be like the last. To paint them changes you.
JH: Right, all of this stuff back here are old paintings that I have cut up and re-stretched over new forms. Then it gets even more absurd. There were the old paintings that I screwed together and reworked and then after I lived with them for a while, I started unscrewing them, and there they had all of these weird sections where they were painted on one edge and not on the other. They revealed something.
The thing that really inspired these boxes is that I have been reinvigorated about the idea of elemental forms. Just seeing their history repeat itself, even in the short life I have had is something special. Looking at them forces you to relate to the other grids in our lives. A project like this is a big part of my life, I never try to hide the seriousness it has to me. I care about the things I make, I want to make them safe and to have them survive. In the past I made immaculate work, and then when I put it out there, it got hurt. One scratch and it doesn’t work anymore. It’s over. Now I make things that if they get scratched it is just another truth. About
So I had to decide, were these cubes made up of six paintings from one day, or six paintings made over six months? AD: So the element of time is really important then? JH: Yes, it is about the fourth dimension. AD: When you talk about the 4D experience of your work what do you mean? I do things where the objects in the show are changed, or are moved...over time. I plant
Jesse Hayward received his MFA from California College of Art in 2002. His work has been exhibited at PDX Contemporary Art Window Project in Portland, OR; Southern Exposure and Eleanor Harwood Gallery in San Francisco, CA; and at The Affair at The Jupiter Art Fair. In 2006, Hayward’s work was included in the Oregon Biennial at the Portland Art Museum. His work has been reviewed in The Oregonian, PORT, PDX Magazine, Willamette Week, and The Portland Mercury. Most recently, Hayward was shortlisted for the Portland Art Museum’s Contemporary Northwest Art Award.
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No Such Place
The commission and exhibition of this piece is supported in part by the Kristy Edmunds Fund for New Work.
Does audio from the radios which are broadcast in real-time locate us in the here and now or is the ambient soundscape meant to dislocate us from our current moment?
www.jessehayward.com
Johanna Ketola The Walls of My Hall in collaboration with Jan Wolski
The Walls Of My Hall is a multichannel video installation referring to the human body as a place to exist—a structure—related to its built environment. The work happens in “selected reality” as bodies are at rest and in calculated motion. The surroundings they inhabit and the furniture they sit upon are radically removed. Stark black, empty spaces still reflect what was once there and what has been erased. An audio soundtrack of live radio broadcast is pumped into the spaces by small radios, an echo of the present world colliding with these suspended people. Although dark and eerie, the piece also reflects a certain sense of humor, a moment of hope that we carry on even when we are represented in real or fictionalized space that is void of support.
JK: In a way, the work is not bound to any specific moment of the day and in this way also not to time. This has been left open. But because of the “space” character of the work, the radios, on the contrary, are supposed to remind us of the current moment and of the fact that the figures in the work are actually doing everydaylike things. KK: What was the process of making this work? Is it like a reductive drawing? Was there ever a building to erase? Or is it all illusion? JK: There were lots of very rough sketches for each image! For the apartment building image there was a sketch which existed only on a graphic computer program, but never in the program that was used to make the final image. Only calculations or intuition were used to find the right location for each character. The characters were originally recorded on HD-video, taking into account the right perspective and distance to match the final location in the final image. Each one is a live recording of a being and is not manipulated. In a way the images are like digital collages of a bunch of time-based images and are actually more a character of adding than reducing. It is all illusion and imagination combined with the personal life of the author. KK: Define “sweet hopelessness,” a term you use to describe the emotional impetus of your work... JK: I often have to explain why I use the word sweet when describing hopelessness. I still haven’t found the exact answer for that nor have I dropped the word out; it belongs there.
Figure V: An installation view of Ketola’s The Walls Of My Hall.
KK: How are buildings related to bodies? JK: The bodies are carried against the gravity by imaginary (and in this case invisible) buildings, spaces, furniture and other man-made structures. The structures can be imagined by the viewer by observing the compositions of the bodies and their relations to each other. KK: How is your work reflecting a sense of time?
I get touched by people and by a sort of absurd hopelessness, that is connected to the condition of being human. The confusion that inevitably happens when being a human in the unintelligible world and having to deal with the impossibility of certainty is touching, a bit funny and a bit sad and therefore beautiful. I’m interested in this beauty, that can be also described as “sweet hopelessness of being a human being.” In other words, it is some sort of tragi-comical experience of the world. The word sweet stands for touching and is even funny after all, it really is, so that this hopelessness makes me laugh; I feel sorry but also laugh at myself and at all the poor people in the world, in a way it’s a relief; to get out of some angst and to be able to laugh, bit black, but not at all mean laugh. I find the work that is shown in TBA humoristic too, despite the spacial and even serious
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Johanna Ketola - Fawn Krieger
character of it. Hopelessness stands for a basic condition of a human. I try not to be violent, I am looking for some sort of peaceful and a bit humoristic position against this basic feeling that I am preoccupied daily with. Humor and hope are important for me, I don’t want my work to have a hopeless atmosphere. KK: In the festival we present work by both visual and performance artists, and some artists like yourself cross these boundaries. Do you think of these genres as being two different worlds? Is it important to have a distinction or should we just invent a new term for how artists interpret the world? JK: There are always certain qualities, not the most important ones, in works that can be understood better by understanding a bit about the media. But the best works don’t make the viewer preoccupied with these qualities. These kinds of works are only so rare! Although I think distinctions can be almost a waste of energy, they sometimes help one to talk about certain details of a work, if necessary. Those kinds of works exist that are very occupied by the qualities of a certain media and the content is almost only about the media. That kind of art couldn’t exist without distinctions(personally I don’t find that kind of art interesting). In my own work I don’t think about genres too much and work with what ever seems to suit the best. On the other hand I end up using mostly video and find my work belonging to the visual art genre. At the moment when I am thinking of making a “living image” work, I catch myself thinking: I am drawn more to performance art... I would really like to hear the term for how the artists interpret the world! I am sure it would not be able to cover everything...How would it come to life? By democratic voting?! About Working in video and photography, Finnish artist Johanna Ketola reconstructs narrative that is built upon her quotidian observations of life. This results in both fictional and autobiographical characters and stories, which often reflect her state of being as affected by a kind of sweet and absurd hopelessness about the human condition. Her work has been exhibited at Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum in Helsinki, Finland; in Holden Gallery in Manchester, UK; in Espace Croix-Baragnon in Toulouse, France; in Amos Anderson Art Museum in Helsinki, Finland; in the following Finnish museums: Jyväskylä, Rauma, Oulu, and Mikkeli; and in Gallery Jangva in Helsinki, Finland, among others. www.johannaketola.com
Fawn Krieger National Park
During her residency at PICA, Krieger will construct a stage set as national park. The structure takes its cues from Lewis & Clark, museum dioramas, Superstudio, and the U.S.’s post-war middle-class tourism pastime, the roadtrip. Inspired by the artist’s own family cross-country trip in 1984, she creates an inside-out, indoor landscape and a meditation on mobility. The sprawling plateau of faded and fleshy territories includes plush, upholstered hills, craggy cement valleys, and cliffs of fragmented cabinetry, while exploring notions of the untouched and preserved. KK: I remember you showing me pictures of your family on a cross country trip you took with them in 1984. You pointed out that even though you were there to commune with one another and a majestic landscape, your family snapshots communicate an entirely different scenario...one that placed your bodies at odds with one another, and that felt disconnected with the scenery. For this installation, you have chosen to create a set of sorts where people can supplant themselves in the landscape. Do you think under these constructed conditions people will connect and commune more readily? Is this even a concern? FK: I’m not sure if people will connect or commune with one another or the structure more so than the way tourists do at sites also made expressly for staged experience. What I’m interested in is making labs of sorts, where a collective kind of situation or context can be semi-simulated, so that a person entering into it—you or me or someone’s mom—are both inside and outside of it at the same time. Not unlike the way places like Colonial Williamsburg function, except I’m not interested in recreating historical spaces, but materializing fantasy sites, where social ruptures and perceptual collisions can occur, in the present tense. What’s important is that everyone’s as much a member of these laboratories as they are a performer within it; nobody’s on the outside, even though everyone who visits National Park will be “outside.” Actually, since it takes place in the library space of Washington High School, we’ll really be outside inside. But definitely not inside out. KK: What is it about standing on, climbing up, building or regarding a mountain that inspires us? Man-made or otherwise, we have a reverence for peaks and valleys. What is your own personal
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No Such Place
interest in these landmasses? Where is it leading you and your work? FK: For a number of years I have been researching a phenomenon from Post WWII Germany in which the rubble remains of the most demolished cities were collected and distributed—primarily through female labor—to various dump sites that became so substantial that these locations transformed into mountains—which still exist today, and mostly remain unmarked. The research has informed a lot of my recent ideas of hand-constructed landscapes (particularly woman-made), when wreckage (failure) and rebuilding (hope) occupy the same territory, and the inherent conflict between the monument and the monumental. KK: Is your installation a stand-in for nature? A set? A fraud? or does the piece’s honesty—its obvious makeup of “un-natural” materials—make it something else entirely? FK: It’s a fake thing that’s really real. Because it exists, and it is what it is because we say so, not because a public agency tells us to say it is so—or isn’t so. This is how we reinvent the world we live in—making fake things real. So yes, it’s nature, but not a depiction of nature...it’s actual, real nature, born out of human curiosity and personal agency. KK: In your past work you have often found ways to collaborate with the public or with an audience, other artists or an institution. How have these interactions shifted your practice? How do they change the works you have proposed? Which collaborative strategies are you employing in National Park?
challenged—and were translated into structural concerns that dealt with architectural horizontality, material uniformity, scale and spatial compressions, and equalizing elevations. It’s interesting to me that in performance-based spaces there’s all of these strict regulations and codes dealing with fire safety and structural security. If you don’t adhere to them, the city will ensure your work is dismantled immediately— after sometimes-unannounced inspections. With art spaces there’s no such thing like this. I find myself drawn to establishments that are concerned with the care of people, as well as to establishments that allow for transgression and serious risk. These pulls have informed the way I think about what I do, who it’s made for, where it goes, what it’s supporting, and how it could be engaged. It’s also led me to think a lot about the distinctions between good safety and bad safety. National Park is the effort of many people who help to realize, build, and ultimately dismantle the work. It’s the result of questions and correspondences between you and I that have spanned over a year. As an installed piece, it makes room for people to enter into it, to interrupt its narrative in the process, and to subsequently continue its realization as a work. I’m also thinking a lot about things that happen in national parks that accidentally become focal points—like a bear sighting or Old Faithful not blowing its load at the time promised. I’m thinking of these moments as “anti-events” and will be planting some with a number of individuals throughout the run of National Park... unannounced moments that some people will get to witness and others won’t.
FK: Creating works that can be interrupted or partly shaped through their interaction and development means that I am constantly asking myself questions of control, safety, and access. It also means that accountability and communication must be part of the fabric of my work way before it meets a public. And most especially, it reveals the seams and ruptures—allowing for chaos and the unexpected to inform the identity of a piece, as well as my understanding of the work. With ROOM—a set of collaborations I did with Wynne Greenwood for her band Tracy + the Plastics, from 2005-2006 at the Kitchen in NYC and the Moore Space in Miami—Wynne and I intended to create space that could support performative domestic narratives dealing with 70s Feminist consciousness-raising groups. I was thinking a lot about breaking down the power structures of the stage that separate or remove performer/s from their audiences. So a lot of my questions were about power—how it’s socialized, embodied,
Figure VI: A video still from Fawn Krieger’s Dramas.
KK: Can you talk a bit about Dramas, the short vignettes that are being broadcast on television
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Fawn Krieger
Figure VII: A study for Fawn Krieger’s National Park.
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No Such Place
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Fawn Krieger - Kalup Linzy
and via the web? Are these videos related to National Park in any way? Are they commercials? If so, what are they selling/ promoting? FK: The Dramas came out of a commissioned project I did called COMPANY between 2007 and 2008 at Art in General’s storefront space in New York City. COMPANY was a shop-as-work-of-art and looked at commercial exchange, value, and positions of consumption. I designed the interior of the shop and made “merchandise” to fill it, later bringing other artists and writers into the project to make their own lines. As the merchandise was selling, I began to get totally freaked out that it would all disappear and I would never see it again. I didn’t have the time to reflect on the work, to form a bond with it as I would with a more conventionally structured exhibition. So I began making secret videos in which some of the objects would be permanently mine, on tape. I started to think of these short recordings as mini-glimpses of tactile intimacy with objects, somewhere between a commercial and a movie. As they accumulated in number, I also began to notice that each featured object slowly became the subject (of their respective narrative), and the subject, or protagonist—mostly friends and colleagues—became sort of like a prop or structure in which to elevate the object’s transformation. This transference of roles was really where my challenges with COMPANY landed, though I never showed the Dramas publicly, until now. The Dramas are souvenirs of staged intimate moments with the material world. They are the remnant or trace of the site in which contact transforms public domain into private ownership. And as commercials aired on TV, they represent a stage for consumption and desire that is tangible, intimate, and anti-corporate. To me all of these things relate to my questions of the history and industry of our US National Park system, a public institution founded on commercial interest, mythologies of the untouched, and the preening of “American lifestyle.” KK: You have said that visitors to National Park will become performers, and you have asked a choreographer to use the space and installation to “rehearse” in. Why is it important for you as an artist to have your installation become a performative space? FK: I believe that every space is performative. It’s just that some spaces are underutilized, and some movements are not witnessed, acknowledged, or recognized. About Fawn Krieger is a New York-based artist whose multigenre works reimagine everyday sites like
the shop and home. Her “stages” are inhabitable sculptures that transform spectators into participants and examine the politics of ownership and exchange. Krieger’s Flintstonian tactility and penchant for scale compressions reveal an unlikely collision of private and public space, where intimate moments also serve as social ruptures. She received her BFA from Parsons School of Design, and her MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited at The Kitchen (NY), Nice & Fit Gallery (Berlin), The Moore Space (Miami), the Rose Art Museum (Boston), and Neon>fdv (Milan). Krieger is the recipient of grants from Art Matters Foundation (2008) and the Jerome Foundation (2007). This project is made possible in part by a grant from the National Performance Network’s Visual Artists Network. Major contributors are the Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and the Nathan Cummings Foundation. www.npnweb.org. The commission and exhibition of this piece is supported in part by the Kristy Edmunds Fund for New Work. www.fawnkrieger.com
Kalup Linzy Conversation Wit de Churen VII: Lil’ Myron’s Trade
Kalup Linzy continues his episodic soap-opera series Conversation Wit de Churen with Episode VII, in which Linzy portrays the melodramatic life of a fictional family. This storyline follows Katonya and several other characters through misguided love affairs punctuated with dreams and distraction. The artist serves as writer, director, cinematographer, editor, and actor— and, in a distinctive strategy, also voices and overdubs the dialogue of multiple characters. Episode VII combines live action with animated dream sequences which were developed in residency at PICA and in collaboration with LAIKA/ house. From his original take on the soap opera and family drama to his foul-mouthed music videos and filmic shorts, Linzy’s work is an exploration of the emotional realities of aspiration, disappointment, sexuality, and belonging. KK: Your characters speak in a mash-up of different dialects and you do all of the voice overs. Can you speak about this? Where do they come from?
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No Such Place
KL: Most of the dialects in my videos are based on the one spoken in my hometown, a close-knit rural community. I also use standard english without eliminating my southern accent. In addition, some characters have more drawl than others.
beyond excited. I hope I can continue to do more work in this way. As for the process, I recorded all the dialogue, created the drawings, met with them and discussed what I wanted and what were the possibilities. The idea was to go deeper, but keep the rawness there.
KK: There is a fair amount of institutional critique in your films, they call out the art world in several ways. Why did you choose to have one of your characters be an artist?
KK: We both have a deep appreciation for pop music and the intersection between art and “the other.” When you listen to music from now or way back when, what gets you going?
KL: I created a character that was an artist not necessarily to call out the art world, I think the art world is insular and vast at the same time. My intentions were to explore some issues I and others have to consider as an emerging artists. I also explore the anxiety around it all.
KL: Whitney Houston any day. Others include Aretha Franklin, Dionne Warwick, Gladys Knight, Mavis Staples, Labelle, Chaka Khan. I am also a fan of Booty Bass. As well as some good ole Funk as well as some DISCO!!!!
KK: How did your work branch out into performance? Who writes and sings these songs, you or Taiwan? KL: I’ve always performed. How it came about in my graduate work is that I wanted to continue performing, but also explore my theatrical style of performing with the visual work I was creating in the context of the contemporary art world. I write the songs for the characters. I have written songs for myself which have later been given to Taiwan, but I also perform some some songs in different attire. Sort of like, covering Taiwan, or myself so to speak.
KK: In the Festival we present work by both visual and performance artists, and some artists like yourself cross these boundaries. Do you think of these genres as being two different worlds? Is it important to have a distinction or should we just invent a new term for how artists interpret the world? KL: Create a new term and organize a world tour and make sure I’m on it!!!!! About Kalup Linzy was born in 1977 in Stuckey, Florida. He received an MFA in 2003 from the University of South Florida in Tampa. He has received awards from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Creative Capital Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation. Linzy’s work was recently featured in a major solo exhibition at the Studio Museum of Harlem. He has had solo exhibitions in The Moore Space, Miami, (FL); Taxter & Spengemann, New York, (NY); and P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, (NY). Linzy’s work was included in Prospect.1 New Orleans, (LA) in November 2008. Linzy lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, (NY).
Figure VIII: A video still from Linzy’s Lil’ Myron’s Trade.
KK: How do your drawings fit into your work? What was it like to get deeper into animating them in collaboration with LAIKA/house? What was the process? KL: The drawings are created through Katonya, the artist in the video series, Conversations wit de Churen. I am so loving the animation. I am
Conversation With de Churen VII: Lil Myron’s Trade is made possible in part by a grant from the National Performance Network’s Visual Artists Network. Major contributors are the Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and the Nathan Cummings Foundation. www.npnweb.org. The commission and exhibition of this piece is supported in part by the Kristy Edmunds Fund for New Work. www.kaluplinzy.net
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Brian lund - Ma Quisha
next to the appropriate place in the drawing. I also use short, straight lines that act as dividers, symbolizing where the cuts are in the film sequence. I can do this, of course, with any film, or any recorded event or production that is documented in time from start to finish.
Brian Lund Curated by Mack McFarland
Brian Lund works primarily in the medium of drawing. His recent series of works on paper combine the visual vocabularies of two cinematic sources: Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987) and Busby Berkeley’s choreographed dance sequences from Depression-era Hollywood musicals. Every character and/or action in every edit of Wall Street and the Berkeley dance numbers has been graphically translated to a series of marks. These marks cluster and expand to form a maplike surface. Through an interweaving of these diagrammatic forms, Lund interprets a complex and layered multimedia experience.
Figure IX: A detail of an untitled drawing by Brian Lund.
Mack McFarland: Your drawings, which map out every character and/or action in every edit of the selected films, are created from a graphical language consisting of colored dots and squares, as well as squiggly lines and bits of text. How and when does this system develop? BL: I study a film at first, making a list of all the characters and/or events that are present in every shot, noting the cuts in between. From there, I create a set of symbols and marks that signify the main cast of characters from the film on a separate card. These symbols and marks will comprise much of the visual vocabulary for the actual drawing. Next, I’ll then complete a drawing by essentially going through the entire sequence of the film from beginning to end, so that the drawing will end up abstractly translating the whole film. I’ll usually indicate every fifth cut or every tenth cut by jotting down a number
I also have been creating drawings that begin with a vocabulary from a film source and then completely take it in different directions, becoming highly experimental in the way the marks are expressed, really deviating from the order of the original film. These works no longer follow the pattern of the original film; they become something else altogether. MM: When I first saw your drawings you were working with Showgirls, Diehard, and Rambo: First Blood Part II. For your show at Smith-Stewart you chose the films of Bob Fosse, Sweet Charity, Cabaret, Lenny, All That Jazz, and Star 80, and now you’re working with Wall Street and Busby Berkeley’s dance sequences. Wall Street seems very timely selection, how are films chosen? BL: I have a very broad appreciation of all types of motion pictures. In terms of selecting film sources to work with, I usually allow myself time to settle and see what particular film surfaces for me and why. If the right components all seem to come together in an interesting way, my interest will build up to a point where I begin to study the film and chart the edits. Although there are many other factors, the editing seems to serve as a dominant factor in terms of the way the drawings are made. Showgirls, Diehard and Rambo II all feature lengthy running times with a large number of cuts—well over 1000 for each. That, in itself, was a high priority for me at the time. Fosse’s films were also comprised of numerous cuts, as well as a highly distinctive (and, for me, fascinating) approach in how one shot cut to the next; I ended up exploring all five of the films he directed. By comparison, Oliver Stone’s Wall Street was a source that seemed to go elsewhere, with significantly less edit cuts and a fairly standard running time. I do pay a strong amount of attention to the content of the films I choose as well, with numerous themes and situations that have a tendency in my mind to overlap each other. Wall Street is a film I briefly worked with last year and recently took up again, specifically so I could integrate that source with the newly-discovered Busby Berkeley film sequences from the Depression-era Hollywood musicals. With Wall Street being a dramatic business film featuring characters that live and work in the world of finance, I really wanted to experiment with the movie’s characters and edit cuts and try to explore a number of new visual possibilities with what I had discovered through
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No Such Place
Berkeley. In doing so, the main characters from Wall Street would be able to cross over into the Busby Berkeley-inspired compositions, then grow and multiply. Incidentally, Busby Berkeley as a potential source was first brought to my attention by a colleague from Austin, TX, who came to see my show at Smith-Stewart. Good sources can certainly originate through suggestions by other people.
ries about her value to society as an artist and a daughter. Her speech is muddled and stunted by the cutting blade. The video is both psychological portrait and performance document.
MM: What has been more important for you, Hollywood films or Sentences on Conceptual Art by Sol LeWitt? BL: Currently, it is the former. I’ve been spending a great deal of time in my studio lately on YouTube, navigating sources in an unpredictable fashion from one to the next, often times with motion picture research in mind. I have yet to add Sol LeWitt into that mix. Right now, it’s interesting for me to imagine where that might take me. Figure X: Quisha’s No.4 Pingyuanli to No.4 Tianqiaobeili video still.
About Brian Lund’s work has been exhibited at numerous venues including Smith-Stewart Gallery, New York (2009); Frederieke Taylor Gallery, New York (2009); Newark Arts Council, Newark, NJ (2008); Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT (2008); b42 Gallery, Oakville, Ontario, Canada (2008); Moti Hasson Gallery, New York (2008); Josèe Bienvenu Gallery, New York (2008); The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY (2008); The Drawing Center, New York (2008); and chashama, New York (2006). His work has been reviewed in several publications including The New York Times, Time Out New York, Art Review, and The Journal News. Lund is represented by Smith-Stewart, NYC. Courtesy of the artist and Smith-Stewart.
Ma Qiusha From No.4 Pingyuanli to No.4 Tianqiaobeili
Ma Qiusha presents her diaristic video No.4 Pingyuanli to No.4 Tianqiaobeili, a simple confessional that explores the artist’s conflict with personal, parental, and societal pressures to be successful. Holding a razorblade on her tongue, the artist tells short stories about her life as a young artist. She describes being compelled to strive for perfection and she talks about a search for meaning and understanding. She wonders about her parents’ approval and wor-
KK: When I saw your work in Shanghai, it was part of a group show called Refresh. The show highlighted the work of a new generation of Chinese artists. Most of the work that I had seen up until that point seemed focused on overtly political commentary related to the Cultural Revolution. In contrast, the work by younger artists in Refresh, seemed to be about identity politics, the state of the self and the search for self. Where does your work lie? What do you think accounts for this shift in thinking? 我在上海看到一个团体的表演 “Refresh”. 这个表演展示了中 国新一代艺术家的作品。在 “Refresh” 之前，我看过很多有 关于文化革命，充满政治风味的表演。“Refresh” 在相比之下 是一个强烈的对比，这些年轻艺术家的作品似乎是有关于自我的 意识与想法，一种寻找自我的过程。 能不能麻烦你形容你的作品 （完全自我主义？还是有政治的风味）？为什麽现代艺术家有这 么不同的想法？ MQ: Refresh was planned and organized by a young Chinese curator/artist. Compared with other exhibitions, Refresh had an emphasis to showcase very excellent works by young Chinese artists. The curator himself wears many hats—his job was the planner/curator for the exhibit, but he is also an artist. I think this is the reason why the audiences viewed the art of young Chinese at this exhibit from a different angle. As an excerpt from my work From No.4 Pingyuanli to No.4 Tianqiaobeili, “I was born in Beijing in the 80s…,” most of the artists featured in Refresh were born in the late 70s and the early 80s; the Cultural Revolution era ended before we were born. In fact, our fathers’ generation has more memory of it. For an artist, “self-exploration” is a theme in which we can base our work forever.
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Ma Quisha - robbinschilds + A.L. Steiner
“Refresh”是一个由中国年轻策划人兼艺术家策划的中国年轻艺 术家的展览，相比较其他的展览它更多是关注中国非常优秀的年 轻艺术家的。策展人的身份也更加多元，他的工作是策展，而实 际上他也是一位艺术家，我想这也许会带给观众另外一个视角去 看中国年轻人的艺术。正如我作品 “From No.4 Pingyuanli to No.4 Tianqiaobeili” 中描述的那样“我出生在80年代 的中国北京… …”，“Refresh” 展览上的艺术家大多出生在上 世纪70年代末和80年代初，中国文化大革命的时代在我们出生前 就已经结束，事实上留给我们父辈的记忆更多。而对于艺术家来 说自我的探索是作为一个人可以永远追寻的主题。 KK: (maybe this is the “same question as above” you can decide to answer either or...) How does your work about a personal history relate to a larger cultural history? 能不能告诉我们，你的自我历史性的表演与中国的文化历史有什 麽关系？ MQ: I was born and raised in Beijing, and I witnessed the daily changes in this city, for a period of time, Beijing had a different look everyday. It’s like you are looking at your hometown but you can’t really find in your memory the part of it that once belonged to you. It has bothered me some and made me contemplate. In this ever-changing era, I guess the discovery of “personal history” is a must, being a Chinese, any personal history can be reflected upon the larger cultural history in our country. 我生在北京长在北京，目睹她日新月异的变化，有段时间几乎北 京天天一个样。你看着自己的家却找不到属于你的那部分的记 忆。这曾使我困惑，另我思考。在一个变革万千的年代，也许“ 自我历史性”的发掘是首先必须要做的事情，而作为一个中国人 的自我历史性是可以从中国文化历史中的抽取的一个范本。 KK: In your other videos you also tell a sort of psychological narrative; however, they are less direct and more dreamlike, perhaps divorced from reality. In this piece you look us directly in the eyes, speak right to the viewer. Even if we do not understand your language we can see your pain. What about this work made you turn towards the camera and tell your story? 在你其他的影片演出里，你告诉我们一些有关于内心深处的故 事，但是这些故事都是比较不直接的，有点像做梦一样，和事实 有点距离。在这部影片里，你把摄影机转到你自己身上， 很直接 地对观众说话，你的眼睛直接与我们观众接触，虽然我们不懂中 文，我们可以感觉到你的痛苦。这部作品有什么麽特别的原因让 你决定面对摄影机来用这种非常直接的方式来诉说你的故事？ MQ: From No.4 Pingyusnli to No.4 Tianqiaobeili is a piece filled with love and pain. In China, family relations are very strong, and parents give children their selfless love with a sense of forcefulness. This story is not only my personal story but it is also a story of many people in my generation. Therefore, many Chinese audiences
can easily relate to the love and pain after they watched the video. I have designed a very simple and straight-forward backdrop for this video, one that is very similar to the image of an ID photo. My language and my face are two clues/paths in this video. There is one obvious clue that indicates pain, and there is also another clue that indicates the pain hidden in my mouth, both clues have the same destination— pain. One is the psychological pain, the other is the physical pain. For someone who doesn’t understand Chinese, he/she can reach the final destination at the first viewing, he/she can understand the physical pain (because I spoke with a painful expression). After the first viewing, he/she can rewind the video and watch it again with the English subtitles which would act as the vehicle that works as an effective narrative for the pain. For Chinese audiences, they can foresee the outcome by reading the synopsis, (where the psychological pain is more vividly portrayed). At the end of the video, the moment when the razor is taken out of the mouth becomes the entrance to another path: it will then return the story to the beginning of the video. “From No.4 Pingyusnli to No.4 Tianqiaobeili” 是 一部充满了爱和疼痛的故事。在中国，家庭观念非常强大，父母 给予子女的爱是无私的绝对的甚至带有强迫性的。这个故事不仅 仅是我一个人的成长经历，它涵盖了绝大多数与我年纪相仿的人 的经历。所以有很多中国观众看完后都觉得是在说属于他们的爱 与痛。我预设了一个简单直接的场景——一个类似证件照片似的 画面。语言与我的脸是2条路径。在这部片子中，故事性的叙述 是一条明显可以追踪的路线，而藏在嘴里的隐隐的痛是一条时隐 时现的线索，它们的终点都是伤痛，只不过一个是心理上的一个 是生理上的。一个不懂中文的观众在第一次看的时候也可以到达 终点，他可以完全感知我的生理上的痛，（因为我诉说时表情的 痛苦）他可以折返回片子的开始，认真的阅读字幕，这时字幕就 成为对于疼痛的有效的补充；而对于中国观众，他可以通过阅读 故事性来遇见终点，（那更明显的是心理上的痛）而最后刀片从 口中取出的那一刻就变成了另一条路的入口，它又返回到片子的 最初。 KK: In the Festival we present work by both visual and performance artists, and some artists like yourself cross these boundaries. Do you think of these genres as being two different worlds? Is it important to have a distinction or should we just invent a new term for how artists interpret the world? 在TBA, 我们邀请艺术家来展示视觉艺术以及表演艺术，有些艺术 家，就像你一样，超越视觉/表演的界线来表达自己。 你认为这 两种艺术是完全不同的吗？你认为我们是不是应该坚持这两种艺 术的差别，或者是我们应该为这些超越界限的艺术家的作品另外 下一个新的定义？ MQ: Isn’t the end result of performing arts also conveyed through visual arts?
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No Such Place
表演的最终呈现难道不是通过视觉来传达的么？ About Ma Qiusha was born in 1982 and currently lives and works in Beijing, China. Her work was recently featured in Personal Space, 24HR Contemporary Art Center, Australia; Landscape Topology, Magee Gallery, Beijing, China; Madrid, Spain; Anything is Possible, CCRN Luxembourg; and REFRESH: Emerging Chinese Artists at the Zendai Moma, Shanghai, China. Group exhibitions include the 35th International Film Festival, Rotterdam, Netherlands (2006); Rumor Décor, ddmwarehouse, Shanghai, China (2005); Beijing Documenta—Producing HIGH, Beijing, China (2005); 920 Kilograms, Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai, China (2005); Archaeology of the Future: the Second Triennial of Chinese Art, Nanjing Museum, Nanjing, China (2005); 2004 Automat Contemporary Art Exhibition, Suzhou Art & Design Technology Institute, Suzhou, China (2004); and SCARIFY—China Present Independent Video Exhibition, Beijing, China (2004). Ma Qiusha is represented by Beijing Commune in Beijing, China. www.beijingcommune.com
robbinschilds + A.L. Steiner C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience) with AJ Blandford and Kinski
set to a score by rock quartet Kinski and edited in succinct rainbow-hued sections. Each sequence features robbinschilds in monochromatic outfits, acting in contrast and communion with their surroundings. The artists traverse through desolate desert landscapes, darkened parking lots, and geological formations, responding to the environment through choreographed duets. In a style that is obsessive, persistent, and often humorous, robbinschilds reveals their observations of the human imprint on the world. KK: When we first spoke about presenting C.L.U.E., I mentioned my initial thinking about the mass of projects that make up the program. I was interested in the illusion of hope and the potential for newness, utopian visions in concert with dystopian realities. Between then and now we have sorted out all kinds of details, and your installation is now housed in a deconstructed geo-dome structure. How did the decision to adapt the piece for this specific site come together? What are the implications of showing C.L.U.E. in the dome? robbinschilds: A geo-dome is an organic structure made of many triangles, sort of like a snowflake or a crystal, repeating shapes clumped together until they become structural and semispherical. Our dome is representative both of a human made architectural form and a quasi-natural formation resembling the slope of a mountain glacier or dune or an animal dwelling. Our partial dome, covered in carpet, like kudzu overgrowth or moss, grows up out of the schoolroom’s carpet tiled floor. Referring to the locations within the video, often abandoned, or seemingly uninhabited or disregarded decaying places, this built dome expresses the meeting place of the natural and unnatural worlds. In our video, through editing and our choice of locations, we join together dystopic disposable architecture-human imprintwith the unceasing natural world. Our eroded half dome is either unfinished (like many buildings in New York city lately) or in the process of decay or both. Not perfect and in a state of flux, shifting and responsive. In this way, we allow the schoolroom to have influence on the work, to locate the viewer and invite participation in this process of seeing and experiencing their present surrounding.
Figure XI: robbinschilds C.L.U.E. photo: A.L. Steiner
Inhabiting the intersection of human movement and architecture, robbinschilds presents a fullspectrum video with acutely visual live dance,
AJ: A geodesic dome is an instantly perceivable merging of nature and humanity—or a re-merging of humanity with nature. It is a flower, a crystal; it is math, engineering; it is a linear sphere— rigid and soft. And so an eroding and morphosing dome, melting into (or is it emerging out of) the carpeting of the world is all those qualities
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robbinschilds + a.l. Steiner - ethan Rose
inverted, or extended. The hooded night dancer on the misty country road.
Figure XII: robbinschilds C.L.U.E. photo: A.L. Steiner
KK: Your project traverses many distinct landscapes; they feel connected to something: a trip, a journey, a statement, but, they also highlight isolated moments. Can you talk about how the film came together. Is the piece uniquely American or is the landscape of “another world” or “nowhere”? Is it of this time or another? robbinschilds: The experience is non-linear, with no fixed starting or ending places. We share our curious and available state, jumping from one location to another linking fragments of time and place, a simultaneousness with this moment now. Saturated color (represented in our outerwear) becomes the vehicle to commune with place and time, like a pair of glasses to see through or a vantage of feeling and experiencing. Yes, I’m talking about a psychedelic state of being. At the same time, I think we are expressing something uniquely American for sure. The American road trip has a long history of exploration, westward expansion, manifest destiny. We filmed in 2005 at a time when I think a lot of us were less proud to be American than we may be today. When we set out for eight days filming through desert, mountains and costal California, we were liberated and sharpened, heightened by the ritual of the car=freedom and the vastness of natural beauty and the sadness of all the spoil and the sense of pure discovery of all of it so big. And then there is also that kind of nostalgia that is immediate from communing with the past and present at once. AJ: States of industrial decay evoke feelings of bittersweet nostalgia. In looking at a forgetten cement factory we imagine the lifeline of the factory, its construction, the hustle and bustle of its hey-day, and the gradual slowing
down of operations until its total abandonment, and then the slow creep of nature, rusting and rotting it down until it has completey re-merged with earth. All of those seperate moments are experienced in the instant we see it and they waver in and out of the periphery of our minds as we continue to look and inhabit that imaginary timeline. But the melancholy of the process of “dying” is subliminally enlivened by the excitement of witnessing the process. At the front of our minds we see decay and ruin but inside we understand that we are witnessing the same majestic processes that make up and mellow down the mountains. Each landscape, each moment in the film is the same place, the same process, of rising up and falling down, slithering across. All of time and all the places compress, unify together into one, and then in the next instant the image jumps, the mind blinks and suddenly the chaotic, infinite, and historical vastness of everything is exhiliratingly back. KK: What is robbinschilds’ favorite color? robbinschilds: every color, we are decadent like that. AJ: Magenta. Steiner: Rainbow. KK: In the Festival we present work by both visual and performance artists, and some artists like yourself cross these boundaries. Do you think of these genres as being two different worlds? Is it important to have a distinction or should we just invent a new term for how artists interpret the world? robbinschilds: This is a can of worms that I could talk about for a long time. There are some big differences in the two worlds. For one thing the venues themselves: the drama of the theater space offers the power to control the staged environment: lighting, sound, raked seating and the expectation of the audience that they are your captives for an hour or so...versus the wandering attention spans of the gallery-goers in brightly lighted flat rooms for one thing. When we were making C.L.U.E., we thought that we’d make a video and it would be a finished product and we’d be thrilled with a feeling of completion of a thing. But we’re a very experiential collaborative team, so naturally the work is never finished or finite. We describe C.L.U.E. as: A work permanently in progress, adapting to the space it temporarily occupies. In an ongoing collaboration, we continue to find an activated state of seeing and being and wish to
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share the discovery of that state. robbinschilds is enjoying the straddle between the visual and performance worlds. We like mixing it up and being trans-genre. About robbinschilds (Layla Childs and Sonya Robbins) have presented choreographed and video works since 2003 in venues including P.S. 122, Marfa Ballroom, and The New Museum. robbinschilds has created original choreography for David Byrne’s 2009 world tour and recently premiered their newest evening-length work, Sonya and Layla Go Camping, at The Kitchen (NY). A.L. Steiner uses constructions of photography, video, installation, performance, and curatorial work as seductive tropes channeled through the sensibility of a cynical queer eco-feminist androgyne. She is a collective member of Chicks on Speed and a founding member of the activist group Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.). Steiner is based in Brooklyn, NY, and is represented by Taxter & Spengemann.
KK: It seems since the player piano piece and your performance earlier this year at Oaks Park on the Wurlitzer that your interest in antiquated instruments is becoming more visual. Not only are you using them in recordings, but, now their physicality, fragility and “objectness” are exposed. What led you from composing, recording and performing to installation work? ER: I was originally drawn towards these instruments not only for their sounds, but also because of their visual and tactile presence. On the initial recordings that I made I was interested in sonically capturing this sense of physicality. Because the pieces are built not only from the pitched tones of the instruments but also from their mechanical sounds, there is a textured quality that results within the finished compositions. After composing these pieces in the studio I began to feel that I could create work that would more directly expose the processes and ideas that I had developed. By placing the mechanism before the viewer I hope to engage them with the work in a more visceral and direct way, effectively describing the interaction that has evolved between myself and the instrument.
AJ Blandford is an artist and constructor. She works with individuals, architects, artists, and organizations to help create and build environments, sets, and artwork. Kinski is a four-piece rock band from Seattle. www.robbinschilds.com www.kinski.net
Ethan Rose Movements
Movements, Portland-based artist Ethan Rose’s latest sound installation, consists of over one hundred altered music boxes, carefully timed and methodically displayed across the gallery walls. The tinkering creates a sensation of a shifting texture, housed in a visually stimulating acoustic environment. Rose uniquely blends electronic devices with instruments of the past, including player pianos and carillons, creating sounds and compositions of new sonic possibility, rather than musical preservation. Antiquated acoustic instruments remain a consistent element to Rose’s work, with the 1924 Wurlitzer organ housed at the Oaks Park Roller Rink providing the music for his most recent album, OAKS, released in January.
Figure XIII: A detail of Rose’s Movements photo: Eric Fisher.
KK: Many of the machines, instruments and objects you use to make soundscapes harken back to “olden” times, do you feel their sounds are of yesterday or today? ER: Many of the instruments that I have worked with are the precursors of more modern musical technologies. My work is definitely informed by the history of these instruments, but I’m not interested in treating them with a sense of preservation. Instead I work to reframe their cultural context and guide a transformation that leads from the old to the new. I think the history of the instruments remains apparent in my
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ethan Rose - Stephen Slappe - Thank You
work, but it acts a point of departure instead of resolution. Defining this approach within my practice has greatly influenced the development of my compositions and installations. KK: How much in Movements is left up to chance? Are we hearing a conducted piece of music or is it variable? Does the composition change over time, or because of the nature of the instruments? ER: Movements works to blur the line between my own artistic inclinations and the intentions of the instruments at hand. By randomly bending back tines on each music box I have intervened and reduced the melody of each instrument. Because of the inexact nature of the motors and the timer switches that turn the boxes on and off, the piece changes continuously over time, never obviously repeating itself. Ultimately I see this as a conversation that takes place between myself and the devices, where I act as a guiding force as each music box maintains aspects of its original identity within the piece.
ety in order to reflect upon notions of home, transience, and physical and psychological escape. KK: The photos you are collecting for your scrolling army We Are Legion are being edited in small ways. Can you talk about the removal of information and how that changes the context of these images? SS: By removing all extraneous contextual information in the photos, We Are Legion creates a virtual space where all of the images are equal and more or less outside of their original time. Including depictions of a 1970s living room or a 1950s front porch would pull the individuals apart when my intent is to unify them in order to reveal commonalities and trends.
About Over the past ten years, Rose has released recordings, created sound installations, scored films, and performed internationally. He has worked with a number of artists and organizations including Gus Van Sant, Molo Design, and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. His work was recently featured in a project curated by Tilt Export at Gallery Homeland (OR). Upcoming exhibitions and projects include an original score for the feature film Nothing Personal and a collaborative installation with glass artist Andy Paiko at the Museum of Contemporary Craft. Rose was recently awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Oregon Arts Commission. Movements was originally commissioned by and presented at Ambach & Rice (WA). www.ethanrosemusic.com
Stephen Slappe We Are Legion
Stephen Slappe creates a never-ending army of costumed youth in a web project that mines your photo albums for evidence of what the artist calls “contemporary cultural indoctrination.” Collecting images of you and yours in Halloween garb, Slappe will string these images together into a scrolling defense line of masked society. Slappe’s work blends humor, absurdity, and anxi-
Figure XIV: Stephen Slappe’s We Are Legion.
KK: You have mentioned to me that halloween costumes act as cultural literacy. What do you mean? SS: Masks and costumes have represented cultural literacy since they originated in prehistory. Ancient cultures used masks for communicating with deities, frightening evil spirits, healing the sick and other important rituals. Masks allow the wearers to step outside of themselves, to take on a role or create a new identity. When this project began, my question was “what do our masks say about us as a culture?” Halloween costumes are considered benign by most Americans, religious kooks aside. I love the playful prankishness of Halloween and the act of dressing up is harmless fun. That being said, costume choices reveal more than personal taste, particularly when worn by children. For example, the photo in the TBA catalog depicts two children, me and my younger brother. I was dressed as Gene Simmons from Kiss and my brother was dressed as Cookie Monster from Sesame Street. This single photo speaks volumes about the type of cultural information we were receiving at the time and possi-
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No Such Place
bly reflects who we have become as adults. KK: Legion comes from the word “legere” or to choose, for your project people can choose to “serve” by adding their image, why was it important to have an element of participation? Will the conscription of this legion ever end? SS: The conscription will continue as long as viewers send images! The participatory nature of the website brings others into the visual conversation and examines current technological and social trends: rapid file exchange, personal image sharing, social networking. I see this project as a way of playing with “the archive” as an idea full of creative potential, as opposed to a brick and mortar repository housing dusty information. Thanks to technological innovation, the archive can be decentralized with nodes reaching from my website to others’ computers to every photo album buried in closet. We Are Legion, like Facebook or Flickr, encourages us to remove our personal images from one context (desktop image folder, family photo album) and to insert them into a typology that reveals something about the collective. Obviously, We Are Legion is more specific and blatantly aestheticized but the mechanism is similar. KK: What is this legion fighting for, or what is their line of defense? SS: We Are Legion is meant to be both humorously nostalgic and potentially disturbing. It’s hilarious to see Darth Vader hanging out with Big Bird! Recognizing ourselves (literally if you’re a contributor) in this parade of costumed characters is evidence of our shared experiences, for better or worse. There is nothing inherently right or wrong about the costume choices but there are questions to be asked about the society which made the choices available. The legion isn’t really fighting for anything and maybe that’s the point. About Slappe is an artist and curator whose work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the South Carolina State Museum; The Centre for Contemporary Art in Glasgow; The Sarai Media Lab in Delhi; Artists’ Television Access in San Francisco; and The Art Gym at Marylhurst University in Portland, OR. Slappe was the recipient of a Couture award from the New American Art Union in Portland for Shelter in Place, 2009. www.stephenslappe.com www.welcometothelegion.org
A Note of Thanks. Kristan Kennedy, Visual Art Program Director, PICA
When I entered the Washington High School building many months ago, I felt completely inspired by its faded hallways and desolate classrooms. My colleagues felt the same. There seemed to be no other choice but to figure out how to make this place ours, for a short while anyway, for TBA. Now many months later sitting in my ad-hoc office in a former school nurses station, I am in awe of the subtle but remarkable transformations that have happened here. There is a phrase we toss around at PICA, which is “no old problems, only new ones.” The school we now inhabit certainly had its share of problems. Years of neglect and some tragic vandalism had left it in need of some serious care. At every turn we found a wire cut, or a crack in a pipe, and at every turn dedicated, selfless people with the right skills helped us out. Our artists solved problems too; they come on board at such an early time in the festival’s planning, putting aside worry and skepticism and dive right in. And then there are the volunteers, many of them artists and craftspeople whom stop by every day to build up the exhibitions that now surround you. It is because of all of these people, everyone of them, named and unnamed, that these exhibitions have come to be. I am so grateful for all they have done. I must start by thanking Jörg Jakoby, who cares so deeply for every project, artist and detail in the On Sight Program, and who is responsible for exhibition design and so much more. I respect him immensely and I hope he never forgets it! I would be lost without Kent Richardson, Andrea Raijer, Sam Korman, and Melanie Mclain who have worked diligently beside Jörg and me from start to finish on install, gallery operations, and everything else. Thank you TC Smith whose brain/man power make the impossible possible, and whose sense of humor kept me buoyed through buildout. Thank you to Bill Boese who is always one of the first to show up and confidently brings us that buzzing electricity that makes it all work. Thank you to our remarkable interns Andrew Billing and Alex Cole. A giant shout out to Fawn Krieger’s interns Jax Gise, Michelle Liccardo, Tom Mickelson, Lydia Rosenberg, her assistant Annabel Roberts-McMichael and the many volunteers who contributed to her project, especially Mel Ponis, Darya Farhoodi, Nic Peterson and Sarah Gottesdeiner. Thank you to Teryl Saxon Hill for her keen eye and generous spirit. All of these
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Thank You - Peter Coffin
individuals’ talent and time were a true gift to the artist and to PICA. Thank you to Catherine Volle and Gary Hermanson at Perfect Fit and to Hampton Lumber for providing materials. Thank you to Milepost 5 for providing shelter for artists, to the Ace Hotel for putting up Kalup Linzy. Thank you to LAIKA/house, especially Lourri Hammack, Kirk Kelley, Alix Iverson, Eric Wiese, Jenny Kincade, Alex Inman, Terrence Jacobson, Josh Tonneson, Wendy Fuller, Greg Kyle, Chris Ohlgren, Allan Steele, and Michael Corrigan with special thanks to Downstream and Lance Limbocker for their support of Kalup Linzy’s residency and their beautiful work on his new video. Thank you to all of the volunteers who helped prep the galleries for install, especially Ned McSheey, Teague Douglas, David Griess, Patrick McGovern. Thank you to all of my colleagues at PICA: Luisa Guyer (car pool confidant!), Scott McEachern(words, ribs!), Patrick Leonard (reminders!), Cynthia Williams (checks!), Jessica Burton(everything!). They have been fighting the good fight back at the “real” office and are in my hearts mind every day. Thank you to Philip Iosca (deadlines!), for being my sounding board on so many things and for your work on the visual language of the Festival. Thank you to Victoria Frey (punch lists!), PICA’s Executive Director, who astounds me with her energy, compassion, and commitment. Thank you to Erin Boberg Doughton and Cathy Edwards for our fruitful collaboration! Thank you to all of the Festival contract staff, especially Noelle Stiles(tickets!), Rob Kodadak (gobo!), Jason Hildner (fix it!), Sarah Farrell (volunteers!), Russ Gage (hot tix!), Lisa Maurine(Work it!), Amy Scott (infusions!), and most of all Lyndsay Hogland who was my compatriot at the WORKS. Thank you to Cynthia and Trip Williams who piqued our interest in the building and connected the dots for us in the very beginning. Thank you to Kerry Hampton who keyed us in that very first day and who saw the potential in a raw idea. Thank you Sean Bishop who carefully watched over the building (and us) and whose pride in his job is evident every day. Thank you to the Portland Public School District for being open to an unorthodox partnership and for keeping the spirit of WHS alive. Thank you to the Buckman Neighborhood Association, in particular Susan Lyndsay, whose tireless work to preserve the integrity of the building and to steward its future is an inspiration. Thank you to Todd Putnam at Framing Resources for welcoming us to the neighborhood and for introducing me to all of the great Stark St. business owners. Thank you to Berg Electric for restoring the power to the building and for their generosity of time and materials. Thank you to our favorite neighbors, David Rosenak and Moe Caviness for letting us roam their garden when we needed respite (and fresh basil!). Thank
you to the PICA board past and present, for showing up and rallying for our cause and for bringing us nourishment on long work days. Thank you to PICA’s founder Kristy Edmunds who got me into this beautiful mess in the first place. Thank you to Taxter and Spengemann, Yvonne Lambert Gallery, PKM Gallery, Andrew Kreps Gallery, Smith Stewart, Beijing Commune, ICI for lending work and administrative time and for supporting the work of artists. Thank you to the Pacific Northwest College of Art, especially Linda Kliewer for her work acting as PNCA’s TBA liaison, Mack McFarland for his work on behalf of the Feldman Gallery and his support of Robert Boyd’s exhibition, Sean Patrick Carney for organization of artist visits, Greg Ware and Tom Manley for their support of our program, and to Arnold Kemp for his friendship and continued conversationwelcome to Portland! Thank you to Reed College and Stephanie Snyder for your constant collaboration and support, and for taking the long walk with me through the Kreider exhibition/catalog process. Thank you to Peter Kreider for patience and grace—we did it! Thank you to makelike who knocked out one killer catalog and who always say yes. Thank you to our funders, private, public and otherwise, who provide important ballast to artists and those who present them. And finally thank you to my family and friends, who put up with me through every unwieldy and fantastic TBA. You are my fuel. I love you.
On the Cover: Peter Coffin Untitled
Peter Coffin was born 1972 in Berkeley California. He lives in New York City and exhibits internationally, including most recently a solo exhibition at the Barbican Gallery, London; the Aspen Art Museum, Colorado; the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco; Centre d’Art Contemporain, Fribourg, Switzerland; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France; le Confort Moderne, Poitier, France; The Horticultural Society of New York; Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, NY; Herald St., London; Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris; and has participated in group exhibitions at the Museo D’Arte Contemporanea, Rome; Saatchi Gallery, London; Tate Britian, London; the Museo de Arte Contemporanea de Vigo, Vigo, Spain; and the Tate Modern, London. Peter Coffin is represented by Andrew Kreps Gallery, NY; Herald St., London; Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris; and Galleria Fonti, Naples. www.andrewkreps.com, www.galerieperrotin.com www.heraldst.com, www.galleriafonti.it
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