Exhibition Catalogue "INTERFERENCES: Scott MacLeay & Guests" by Scott MacLeay

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cover photograph: COMING & GOING from the series AM, AM NOT ÂŠ 2013 Scott MacLeay

I N T E R F E R E N C E S There are no new subjects, only innovative personal ways of perceiving them conceptually. The only thing I can say with any confidence about my perception is that it is rooted in the co-existence of my absolute insignificance and relative significance in relation to others and to the environment in which I evolve. All of my photographic work deals with this duality and the uncertainty it generates about who I am and what I think and feel. This need not constitute a reason for inaction, for we can be riddled with doubts of all kinds and in some strange way, feel confident about working through them. To me, life, like art, is one long balancing act whether we acknowledge it or not and the more curious we are and the more risks we take, the more we are able to perceive the multiple vectors of interference that disturb our existence as sources of growth and development bringing a much-needed semblance of balance to what is, in reality, a permanent state of disequilibrium. The social scientist in me might say that life is a set of unsolvable simultaneous equations.

I N T E R F E R E N C E S Interference and the doubts it generates are fundamental to our development and the work that results. They oblige us to work to maintain the required dynamic state of lucid confidence. The direction taken by our lives is often dictated in large part by some form of interference, whether self-imposed or of external origins, sometimes expected, other times surprising, often of a positive nature but sometimes disastrously negative in consequences. Interference of diverse varieties affects not only our personal lives but our professional lives as well, leading us into uncharted waters and forcing us to dig deeply into our latent capacity for survival in conditions that permit us to continue evolving. Interference is what separates our dreams from what actually happens to us. It is omnipresent. It is also one of the only ways we have of provoking change in ourselves, of challenging ourselves to be brutally honest about what we feel and what we think and questioning the true nature of our motives. The ability to auto-interfere is, in my view, a pre-requisite to being an artist. But sometimes we need a push, some external interference that is powerful enough to initiate a long-term evolutionary process. In January 1975, in Vancouver, Canada, I was a bored PhD student at the University of British Columbia and I enrolled in a weekly evening photography class taught by American photographer / architect / graphic designer Ted Scott. I chose the course simply because I had received a 35 mm camera as a gift several months before and decided that learning B&W photographic techniques would be a good way to relax and take my mind off my doctoral studies. The day after the 8-week course was completed in the month of March 1975, I quit my doctoral studies determined to become a photographer. To say that both the giving of the camera as a gift and the meeting with Ted Scott interfered with the direction of my life would most certainly qualify as an understatement. Within 3 years, I too was teaching in the Continuing Education Department of Langara College in Vancouver, pursuing a successful commercial photographic career in fashion and editorial portraiture and desperately trying to find enough time to undertake my personal photographic research. The open sharing of information and experiences free of any hidden agenda was always a priority for me as it was for Ted Scott. While Ted Scott went on to teach at universities and colleges in Vancouver and Toronto, I moved to Paris in 1979, dedicated myself fulltime to my artwork and founded the Photography Department at the American Center for Artists in Paris, later becoming the Director of its prestigious Center for Media Art and Photography. 2

From the outset I was interested in visually representing what I felt and thought rather than what I saw. This preoccupation required less figurative images, symbolic of the world around me, something considered quite eccentric at the time. I began studying the relationship of a specific form of high-key lighting with various types of fabric employing innovative exposure/development combinations for colour slide film to generate flat, detail-free forms that were far more abstract in nature than those proposed by traditional techniques designed to yield supposedly faithful photographic reproductions of reality. This led to research into the use of multiple images, multiple layers and a multitude of forms of movement all in the service of representing increasingly intangible subject matter. With hindsight, almost everything I was interested in exploring involved some form of interference with how things normally appeared. I was focused on developing processes in the service of concepts rather than techniques in the service of content. By the end of the 1980s I felt I had exhausted what analogue colour work could offer me and turned fulltime to composing contemporary music for video art, contemporary dance and for my musical research group Private Circus. The digital revolution was already well underway in the audio domain and I felt at home in a universe where I could interfere on a multitude of levels. Around 2004 I returned to making photographs because the digital revolution seemed to offer the possibility of continuing to move forward from where I had left off in 1990. Upon moving to Brazil in 2010, I devoted myself full time to digital photography, new media and digital audio research. In 2011 I founded an informal movement “The Creative Process” dedicated to the development of Santa Catarina as a hub for new media artwork including transmedia research. The idea was to present a program of residences/workshops for talented young Brazilian artists interested in developing new perspectives in photography, video and web-based media art. Over the past three years workshops have been organized in photographic festivals such as Floripa na Foto and Foto em Pauta em Tiradentes as well as in institutions/associations in Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, Curitiba and Florianópolis, not to mention the online courses also available for persons in Europe and North America. Young artists began coming to Florianópolis to take personalized residency workshops for up to four weeks at a time. In 2012, the Creative Process participated in organizing ICP’s first international transmedia workshop with ICP and the New School in Athens, Greece. In 2013 we further enlarged our perspective to include finding and developing opportunities inside and outside of Brazil for students to develop their art. 3

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I N T E R F E R E N C E S In late 2012 the city of Florianópolis approved a photographic exhibition project in the context of the city’s cultural incentive legislation designed to promote local cultural development and overseen by the Franklin Cascaes Foundation. The result is the exhibition “INTERFERENCES - Scott MacLeay and Guests: The Road to Florianópolis” - a 70-image exhibition of contemporary photography dedicated to the notion of interference and the important role it plays in our lives and in our work from both practical and conceptual points of view. I think it is interesting to note in passing that if Ted Scott had not interfered with my plans in 1975, this exhibition would certainly never have existed. It is the first major exhibition of work undertaken by artists participating in Creative Process activities in Brazil and abroad. It is concerned with the importance of voluntary meddling in a wide variety of ways with simple visual representations of what we think we see in order to achieve an image more relevant to what we feel and think about what we believe we see. A desire to explore intangible concepts such as ambiguity, doubt and time rather than more material subject matter has an important role to play in such a schema, as does the ability to manage uncertainty, risk-taking and failure, progress’s most faithful allies. However, to restrict it to this theme alone would be ignoring another important aspect of the event, that concerning the obligation of all artists to generously share their experiences and knowledge with the next generation of artists, knowing that such efforts improve the overall quality of life of those concerned as well as of all those who have the opportunity to share their journey for a time. Such exchanges and the on-going dialogue they generate are quite simply essential to the growth and maintenance of a dynamic, innovative creative environment. Life is a bit like a relay race. There is an ideal moment for passing the baton, in our particular case the baton of knowledge and experience. The exhibition therefore pays homage to the notion of interference and its inherent focus on researching new conceptual processes as well as to the multitude of forms of interference generated by the free and open transmission of information. The notion of creating artwork and teaching go hand-in-hand for me. I confess that I have never understood what a teacher who is not, and never was, an artist could possibly have to teach that would be of practical, long-term use to young artists and that couldn’t be found in existing reference books, as I have never understood artists who have no time to teach and by neglecting this noble pastime forfeit the opportunity to be challenged and stimulated by young minds almost always more agile and more in tune with contemporary society than their own. 4

The exhibition includes the work of three generations of artist-teachers: that of my only professor, American architect/photographer/designer, Ted Scott, my work of the past three years and that of a new generation of artists who have participated in Creative Process residencies and workshops that I have created in Florianópolis since 2011. The condition for participating in these programs is a thirst for exploration, a passion for risk-taking and a solemn promise to assume the responsibility for sharing all their knowledge and experience without restriction with the next generation. It is a serious responsibility and one that must not be taken lightly. Like my professor, Ted Scott, I have always considered the layering of information as a fundamental form of interference. While Ted’s interests lie in the graphic design potential of this process, mine are more focused on its potential to enhance the power of movement and textural considerations in the service of psychological themes. The juxtaposition of multiple information types in multiple layers combined with the incredible colour control offered in the digital domain, have opened up new avenues of research concerning the visual representation of intangible concepts. This has lessened photography’s dependence on simply representing reality as we it see and that we often mistakenly think is universally perceived in the same manner. The digital world is nothing more or less than the perfect complement to the analogue world and there is no reason for tension to exist between them. The capacity of multiple layering and multiple images to simultaneously generate harmonious and conflicting perspectives has permanently altered photography’s potential as a medium for self-expression. It has opened the door to exploring the immaterial. Investigating ways in which to synergize these developments with other mediums including video, painting, drawing and performance art have made the past two years particularly rich in experiences, both for myself and for those artists with whom I have had the pleasure of working in Creative Process workshops and residencies. This exhibition bears witness to the indelible traces left by these experiences and to the wealth of varied perspectives that result when our focus is transferred from the content of our images to questions related to the conceptualization of this content and why the approach undertaken is relevant to our intellectual, emotional and psychological perceptions of reality. There is perhaps no more powerful motor for innovation in perspective than the prioritization of process. Florianópolis, março de 2014 Scott MacLeay Curator of the exhibition INTERFERENCES: SCOTT MACLEAY AND GUESTS 5

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I N T E R F E R E N C E S SC OTT M ACLEAY: Can a di a n ne w m e di a a r t i s t / c om po se r / w r i t e r

MacLeay began his career in Vancouver, Canada, in the mid-70s. He lived in Paris and worked in Paris and New York for thirty years before moving to Florianópolis, Brazil in 2010. The first important phase of his exhibition photographic work stretched from the end of the 70s to the end of the 80s before dedicating himself fulltime for more than 15 years to contemporary musical composition and audiovisual project development. His photographic work was represented by the Marcuse Pfeifer Gallery (NYC) and by the Galérie Créatis (Paris). He has exibited widely in private galleries and museums in Europe and N. America, S. America and Japan, including: Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Museu de Arte e História de Friburgo (Switezerland), Münchner Stadt Museum (Munich), Rencontres Photographiques d’Arles (France), The Museum of Fine Art Houston (USA), The Space Gallery (NYC), Ao Gallery (Tokyo), The American Center for Artists (Paris), Ton Peek Gallery (Amsterdam), Fundação Badesc (Florianópolis) and the Museum of Art of Sanata Catarina (Florianópolis), among others. His work has been widely published and documented in the press worldwide: Art Magazine, Art in America, Clichés, Zoom, Camera Arts, Empreintes, Photo Magazine, among others. He was named Rockefeller Foundation Artist in Residence at the American Center for Artists in Paris for his 1982 multimedia exhibition “Fragments, Cycles, Sounds”, created for the biennial Month of Photography in Paris. the same year his work was included in the Time-Life collection dedicated to the History of Photography in the volume entitled “The Art of Photography”. His work is included in the permanent collections of Museums such as the Brooklyn Museum of Art (NYC, USA) and the Museum of Fine Art, Houston (USA). In addition to his exhibition work, he founded the Photography Department at the American Center for Artists in Paris and became Director of its Center for Media Art and Photography (CMAP) in the mid-80s, creating a cultural crossroads for international exhibitions, festivals, co-productions, seminars and pedagogical programs in the technological arts. The CMAP was an international hub of avant-garde media activities and audio-visual productions, collaborating with the most important French cultural institutions and television networks (Centre Pompidou, Musée d’Orsay, Cité de Sciences et de l’Industrie de la Vilette, Canal +, Arte). Upon moving to Florianópolis in 2010, he once again began dedicating himself fulltime to photographic, video and new media creations as well as to his passion for sharing his experiences and knowledge with a new generation of young artists in Brazil. In 2011, he founded the CREATIVE PROCESS, a movement devoted to the promotion and development of innovative work in the technological arts. This same year he joined the team of writers at the Brazilian periodical Photo Magazine, contributing articles on the philosophy and art of photography and new media work. He is currently finishing a book of essays on the same theme scheduled for publication by the Brazilian publisher Editora Photo in mid-2014. Since moving to Brazil, much of his new media work in the photographic domain has been concerned with the notion of traces and the distorted, ephemeral qualities of our souvenirs of both remarkable and banal events/situations. One particularly interesting aspect of this work involves developing ways in which to provide spectators with an alternative reading of a piece of work depending on their viewing distance from the work, thereby linking the notion of physical proximity to emotional and psychological perspective. Several examples of this can be found in the images presented here. www.scottmacleay.com

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WHY PanelITIIfrom (of IV) thePROVOCATIVE series Provocative Barcodes ©©Scott 2013 INHALING thefrom series BARCODES 2013MacLeay Scott MacLeay

SIGNS (Panels II & IV) from the series AM, AM NOT ÂŠ 2013 Scott MacLeay

I N T E R F E R E N C E S TED SCOTT: American photographer / architect / graphic designer In addition to his architectural and visual arts work, Ted Scott is a dedicated professor and passionate traveller. At the start of his creative adventures, he was drawn to all things jampanese that he encountered while earning his masters degree in Japaese Architectural History from the University of Waseda in Tokyo, over time becoming fluent in Japanese. At the conclusion of these studies he spent a number of years photographing the daily life and culture of contemporary Japan. From there he moved to Vancouver, Canada and continued to to study and lecture extensively Japanese gardens and architecture. Ted Scott has been making photographs for more than three decades, and teaching photography for more than two at Vancouver Community College, The University of British Columbia, The Ontario College of Art and Design, Ryerson University, The Art Gallery of Ontario, and The University of Toronto. He has exhibited widely in galleries, universities and cultural institutions across Canada: The Ryerson Gallery, The Bau Xi Gallery (Vancouver and Toronto), The University of Toronto, The Art Gallery of Victoria, The Burnaby Art Gallery, The University of British Columbia and others. He has published two books of his travels and architectural expertise: Photographs of Provence and Imperial Japanese Gardens. He currently resides in Toronto, Canada. Speaking about his exhibition work he recently remarked â&#x20AC;&#x153;Most of my images are isolated then extracted from ordinary scenes. The identity of the original subject is sometimes lost in that translation from scene to print, from three dimensions to two dimensions; the scale of it often becomes ambiguous. Sometimes, in making an image, the highest levels of technique are invaluable; at other times they are irrelevant. In a few cases, the printed image never existed; it was created layer by layer on film or digitally, one exposure after another, one fragment after another, so that the final image is a blended accumulation of selected pieces, a re-assembly, giving birth to an entirely new image.â&#x20AC;? http://www.ecm2art.com/#!__ted-scott/ 20

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MOAB from the series RAGS ÂŠ 1983 Ted Scott

SKYWALK from the series RAGS ÂŠ 1983 Ted Scott

UNTITLED (Ref: 7309A) from the series WALL ÂŠ 2012 Ted Scott

UNTITLED (Ref: 6479) from the series SUMI-E ÂŠ 2011 Ted Scott

I N T E R F E R E N C E S NEW PERSPECTIVES FROM THE CREATIVE PROCESS PROGRAM The Creative Process pedagogical program is made up of a series of conceptual workshops, public lectures and portfolio critiques given in photo festivals and other events organized in Brazil as well as a series of private and semi-private workshops custom designed for the specific needs of individual artists seeking to challenge their know-how by exploring new processes in the technological visual arts (photography/video/film and including those specific to the Web-based universe of interactive transmedia work). Over the past year, the program of activities has been expanded to include the promotion of work undertaken by Creative Process program participants in Brazil and abroad via curatorial and art direction services designed to promote and showcase their work. Recently, we have further expanded services to include counseling for artists wishing to study in media programs or participate in residencies, workshops and hackathons in Europe and the United States. This program is a celebration of the multiple perspectives opened up by the ongoing development of new media formats, platforms and programs over the past decade, mixing analogue and digital formats and integrating concepts and practices from other forms of expression including performance art, painting, design, music, theatre and dance. Since courses were initiated in 2012, in addition to local Florianópolis residents, over a dozen Brazilian artists have come from Belo Horizonte, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Curitiba and Santos to participate in workshop residencies in Florianópolis. Others in New York, London, Paris and Grenoble have participated in online programs and benefited from various project development services. The exhibition “INTERFERENCES - Scott MacLeay and Guests” pays homage to the work of these new artists and underlines their obligation to keep the flame of interference and defiance of the status quo alive and well for future generations. In order of appearance in the following pages, the artists invited by Scott MacLeay to participate in the exhibition are: • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Suelen Pessoa: new media (photography, video, performance) - Belo Horizonte, Brasil - www.suelenpessoa.com Marilda v.r.: photography - Santos, Brasil Lauro Andrade: mixed media / photography - Curitiba, Brasil - www.lauroandrade.com Patout: photography - Rio de Janeiro, Brasil - www.patoutphotography.co.uk Marco Giacomelli: photography - Florianópolis, Brasil - www.marcogiacomelli.com Otávio Nogueira: photography - Florianópolis, Brasil - www.flickr.com/people/55953988@N00 Gela Borges: mixed media / photography - New York, USA - www.gelaborges.com Fátima Lourenço: photography - Rio de Janeiro, Brasil - www.fatimamlourenco.com Laura de Avelar Fonseca: photography - Belo Horizonte, Brasil - www.lauradeavelar.com Sandra Arruda: new media (photography, video, performance) - Belo Horizonte, Brasil - www.sandraarruda.com Luma Jochims: photography - Londres, Inglaterra - www.lumajochims.wix.com/en Guilherme Ternes: photography - Florianópolis, Brasil - www.guilhermeternes.com Ana Carolina von Hertwig: transmedia, photography, cinema - Florianópolis, Brasil - www.anacarolinavonhertwig.com Fabrício Sousa: photography - Florianópolis, Brazil - www.fabricio.fot.br Rodrigo Ormond: photography - Florianópolis, Brasil - www. ormondart.com.br Antonio Carlos Lima: photography - São Paulo, Brasil - www.flickr.com/photos/antoniocarloslima) Luiza Christ: ceramics, photography - Florianópolis, Brasil - www.luizachrist.com Helena Leão: photography - Belo Horizonte, Brasil - www.helenaleaoarts.wordpress.com Cris Sales: photography - Rio de Janeiro, Brasil - www.cris-sales.com Kris Moisson: photography - Paris, France - www.ecm2art.com/#!__kris-moisson---port

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Pﾃグﾂｩ 2012 Suelen Pessoa

The realization of this document was made possible thanks to the generous support of the following sponsors: CANSON, EDITORA PHOTO, EPSON and IMPRESSUL

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