Ilana Ellis PORTRAITS OF FRIENDSHIP: Oil on Canvas
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These past few years, my work has been fueled by two passions that tugged me between them. The first is that I want to be a painter of great skill. And the greatest skill takes years of continuous training and practice, which I still need. The second is that I want to paint life. I want my works to be so real they almost breathe, and so fluid they seem caught in motion. So when I focus on the ongoing problem of increasing my skill, I often have technical realizations that allow me to see the world as if I have never seen it before. After a few days of being stunned by the overwhelming beauty of everything, I am desperate to capture what I see in paint. Which leads me right back where I started, because inevitably there is something wonderful about the physical world that I don’t yet have the skill to reproduce.
This cycle is what led me to produce my most recent body of work. In these past few months, I painted a series of three portraits: a self-portrait accompanied by portraits of two of my close friends. These paintings are very personal, because they commemorate two important relationships from this phase of my life. And what better way to capture life than to capture my current friendships? I got to honor my friends and express everything that made me care about them while at the same time honing my skills in one of the most exacting and traditional forms of art out there. I love portraits, because I love faces. The human face is unique in its ability to reveal so much while concealing almost everything concrete.
Portraits are very much collaborations between the painter and the sitter, and with these pieces much of the structural decisions were spontaneous. I painted the clothes they happened to be wearing, because people’s daily presentations reveals so much about them. I painted their hair as they wore it. In the painting of my friend Myya, this meant I had to change her hairstyle halfway through the piece. Myya has an eclectic sense of fashion and is always changing her hair. In this case, she left for spring break with caramel extensions and came back with her hair natural. So I altered the painting to match.
I try to strike a balance between the structured and the spontaneous with my work. I am very aware of structure and think it’s hands down the most important element of art—more than idea, more than technique. This is because structure provides a body to house the soul or spirit of the piece. But structure that is too composed often houses dead art, I feel. So I have been training my eye to pick out patterns and shapes from real life that are strong enough to support a piece, so when the time comes to plan a composition for a painting I can trust my instinct and not overthink it. With these pieces I put my friends through a variety of poses until I found ones I liked. When people sit for the first time they are often shy, and this makes their poses stiff and unnatural, something I try to avoid. Once I have the right pose I let my friends talk to me while I work, even if this means they move around a bit, because I want them to be alive in my paintings.
These pieces are studies of reality as much as they are my way of capturing people I care about so that I will always have record of who they are at this moment. For this same reason I am drawn to self-portraiture—you never fully see your immediate self, at least not as clearly as you can see the person you were a year or more ago. Self-portraiture is my attempt to preserve that immediate self. Change is constant, but the present is beautiful and is worth honoring. As I continue to grow and study, I hope I will be able to render life’s beauties and complexities in paint.
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The Paintings:
Self-Portrait in Profile, Oil on Canvas, 16 x 20, 2014.
Myya, Oil on Canvas, 16 x 20, 2014.
Elisa, Oil on Canvas, 16 x 20, 2014.
Elisa and Liv, Oil on Canvas, 16 x 20, 2014.
Helen, Oil on Canvas, 11 x 15, 2013.
Self-Portrait, Oil on Canvas, 8 x 11, 2013.
Ilana Ellis has just graduated Williams College, where she received her degree in studio art. She is excited to attend the Florence Academy of Art in Italy next fall, to begin academic training as a professional realist painter. Ilana Ellis was recently the recipient of the Frederick M. Peyser Prize in Painting.
On the last Saturday morning of April, my husband and I put our two young children in the car for the hour-long drive to New Canaan, Connecticut. We were on our way to attend the opening event for my aunt Fujiko’s newest art installation, Veil, on display at architect Philip Johnson’s former residence and National Trust Historic Site, the Glass House.
Fujiko Nakaya, or “Fuji” as her family calls her, is an artist working with fog as a medium. As many times as I’ve described her work, I am always surprised by what should be, by now, a predictable reaction of bewilderment. That morning, my five-year-old son was no different:
“But Mommy, how does Fuji make fog?”
“She uses nozzles to turn water and air into fog.
“Can Fuji make ice like Elsa from Frozen?!”
“No, just fog.”
The author’s son in the fog at the Philip Johnson Glass House, April 2014. Photo: Myra Lotto
Across a forty-year partnership with Mee Industries, a fog nozzle company, Fuji developed a technology and art out of spraying potable water into the air, creating natural water fog clouds that can hover, billow, or flow away in response to existing environmental conditions. Mee’s nozzles are found in grocery store produce cases, greenhouses, and other spaces that need to maintain consistently high levels of humidity. Like most of us, my son had seen this technology many times, but not yet understood it as art.
At the Glass House, Fuji’s Veil shrouds the house for 10 to 15 minutes every hour. The small, rectangular, transparent building vanishes under the cloud, peeking out, disappearing, and reappearing as the fog dissipates. As I approached the entrance, I watched the fog flow quickly past the building, reacting to a strong gust of wind. I shuffled slowly to prevent slipping on the slick walkway as my son sprinted past me, running full speed into the mist.
The adults laughed nervously, responding to our own temporary blindness, hoping not to bump into each other or into the glass. My son’s laughter was of quite a different sort. Once inside, the volume of the fog’s moisture was apparent. Streams of water cascaded down the outside walls, which were mostly opaque. Johnson’s sparsely furnished residence has only a bed, sitting area, dining set, a small service kitchen, and little else. The house, with views of the landscape in every direction, boasts “expensive wallpaper,” as Johnson once called it. Turned white with fog, the space felt suddenly tomb-like.
The Glass House, the surrounding buildings, and the 49-acre property are a mix of contrasting aesthetics. Classical and modern influences combine, uniting the austerity of Palladian architecture with the sculpted nature of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century landscape painting. Into this mix, Johnson inserts spare, angular buildings like Da Monsta, completed in 1995, a black and red behemoth, almost cartoonish in appearance, drawing on German Expressionist design.
Veil enters this hybrid landscape as an equalizer, seeming perfectly at home against a natural backdrop or swirling around the foot of a bunker-like, minimalist house with expensive wallpaper. A cloud feels disorienting to the person standing inside of it. Viewed from afar, fog creates a preternatural scene, rolling across the ground as if the sky had fallen. Humorous in either context, Fuji’s fog relies on nature as its ally and ultimate designer.
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Fuji’s first sculpture was presented at Expo ’70 in Osaka, the first Worlds Fair in Japan, which was organized on the theme of “Progress and Harmony for Mankind.” In late 1968, Fuji was surprised to receive a call from engineer and Bell Labs veteran Billy Klüver, who wanted to hire her as the local coordinator for the Expo ’70 Pavilion.
Fuji had heard of Klüver by reputation. An important figure in the art world, Klüver was director of Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.). Klüver had heard of Fuji as well, from Robert Rauschenberg and David Tudor, who accompanied the Merce Cunningham Dance Company to Japan in 1964; she had been enlisted to help with local performances.
In Rauschenberg, Fuji found a close friend who invited her to his home whenever she was in New York. He loved Japanese food, and with so few Japanese restaurants in the city at the time, she would buy fish at Fulton Street Fish Market, whipping up her own versions of Japanese dishes in the antique kitchen of Rauschenberg’s studio on Lafayette. Rauschenberg, in return, treated her to Texas-style stew with chunks of beef, beans, and tomatoes that had simmered on the stove for hours.
Rauschenberg and Tudor had collaborated with Klüver since the start of E.A.T., hosting press conferences, exhibitions, and occasionally bankrolling the project. As E.A.T. grew, so did its ranks. Performance artist and Robert Whitman and engineer Fred Waldhauer were also founding members; the eventual roster of artists included John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Öyvind Fahlström, Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton, and Yvonne Rainer.
Klüver, a magnetic personality and a person of seemingly bottomless creativity, also became a dear friend. He passed away in 2004, but Fuji still recalls with great fondness how she could rely on him to think with the objectivity of a scientist while still being moved by the beauty of humanistic thoughts and practices. Klüver was a democratic thinker confronting an American art scene very much associated with capitalism. He always operated in the spirit of democracy, where he grounded his aesthetics and his practice.
Fog Bridge # 72494 at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.
E.A.T. was founded to promote collaboration between artists and engineers, providing the research and infrastructure necessary to realize challenging, interdisciplinary projects. The goal was not simply to convince engineers to lend their technology to artists, but instead to find opportunities for genuine collaboration. John Cage described their work as “not about artists and engineers talking; it’s about hands on, working together.”
With only eighteen months left before the Pepsi Pavilion was due for completion, E.A.T. sent their artists and engineers to work on site in Osaka. In subsequent months they made more than 100 trips between New York and Osaka.
Artist and filmmaker Robert Breer, Whitman, Tudor, and sculptor Frosty Meyers designed the Pepsi Pavilion, with Kluver, Waldhauer, and Rauschenberg contributing. Their idea was to build an exhibit encountered through sensory perception. They hoped to overcome the conventional relationship between artist and audience—ending the practice of showing and being shown—by providing a live environment filled with sounds and images where people could form their own experiences. The exhibit would react to its visitors, transforming itself.
The Pepsi Pavilion was designed as a white, spherical, air-structured balloon, with an internal mirrored surface, requiring maintained air pressure, durability, and a strategy to deter vandalism. It measured 27 meters in diameter: the largest spherical mirror ever attempted. In theory, images should appear as holograms in mid-air, just one of a range of optical effects that would occur inside the dome.
Breer designed seven white, dome-shaped moving sculptures, placed on the plaza in front of the Pavilion. Their movement and sound were barely perceptible, but they would immediately change direction when they encountered something. Meyers designed a triangular mirror to follow the sun, reflecting its rays onto the Pavilion.
Early in the design process, the artists decided to shroud the Pavilion with an artificial cloud. Fuji quickly took interest and volunteered to assist. Her late father, my grandfather, formerly a low-temperature physicist at Hokkaido University, left Fuji with relevant contacts at the Department of Meteorology. Klüver immediately put her in charge of the cloud. She began the long process of learning. Was it possible to create and maintain a large amount of natural water fog outside, at the peak of summer? If so, how?
There are many ways to generate artificial fog, but most cooling methods are prohibitively expensive. Dry ice was not feasible with such quantities; it would have posed a hazard, expelling CO2 and attracting mosquitos. Fuji decided it would have to be natural water fog, so she embarked on a search for a fog spraying system, but could only find sprayers to produce a misty rain. The 20-30 micron diameter droplets of water required seemed impossible to fabricate. Although she expressed concerns, Klüver remained optimistic.
In May, Fuji began a series of experiments on-site, using a model of the topography surrounding the Pepsi Pavilion, testing wind patterns via wind tunnel simulation. By June, Klüver had located Thomas Mee, whose company had just developed an artificial fog made with ammonia and chloride, used for farming. Fuji insisted the fog be breathable, so that people could play in it, so she asked Mee to modify his system for use with potable water. Shortly after, her first fog sculpture was realized.
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In the decades since Expo ’70, Fuji has produced more than 50 fog installations and performances featuring natural water fog, including 14 permanent installations. Her Fog Sculpture #08025, “F.O.G.” is installed at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, cleverly named for the architect of that building, Frank O. Gehry. Fog Sculpture #94925, “Foggy Wake in a Desert: An Ecosphere,” is a permanent installation in the Sculpture Garden at the Australian National Gallery, Canberra.
Fog Sculpture #94925 “Foggy Wake in a Desert: An Ecosphere,” Sculpture Garden, Australian National Gallery, Canberra
Asked to describe her art, Fuji immediately notes its whimsical nature. Fog conceals features of a landscape, hiding them from sight while also rendering the invisible as visible. She designs her pieces to obscure, like the Glass House, but she is also conscious of what her clouds reveal: the pathway of the wind, the humidity of the atmosphere, and the environment to which her art responds.
Fuji’s art also reveals a prejudice against fog. As a potential hazard to travelers, fog is assumed to be disruptive. It is something to avoid and view only at a distance. Aerial photography of cloud cover is stunning from afar, but up close a picture of fog looks like a photographic error: white, blurry, and overexposed.
Fog Sculpture #08025 “F.O.G.,” Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain
The first time I saw a fog installation in person, I was in my late teens, and throughout my childhood, “fog art” and “fog sculpture” had sounded completely absurd. Language, I later realized, had failed to describe an art so powerful as to blind and deafen its audience, entering the body with every inhalation, covering the skin with a thin sheet of water.
Instinctively, adults do not know how to react to fog, but children do. Those who visit Fuji’s installations are charmed by the immersive, multi-sensory experience. For the young ones, it can be terrifying and liberating. Finally, something they are encouraged to touch, where play is an integral part of appreciating the art. For the grown ups watching them, it is similarly novel.
Veil is Fuji’s second recent installation in the U.S., following Fog Bridge #72494, installed in April 2013 for the opening of the San Francisco Exploratorium. Until recently, few had heard of her work, and with so many barriers of description and access, even fewer could experience or understand it. But following these installations and an extremely successful project at Paris’s Place de la République, titled Fog Square (2013), Fuji is busier than ever as the size of her audience swells.
Social media technologies and camera phones have played a role in popularizing fog sculpture and making it accessible to global audiences. Visitors are obviously enchanted and eager to communicate the feeling of stepping into the fog. But when Fuji visits one of her installations, it’s the children she likes to watch: they are her most ardent fans. She knows that children love something about fog that the rest of us have outgrown. When children step forward, they are delighted by how the fog steps back. They dive in as the fog wraps around them. When they look, it hides. When they chase, it disappears. When they emerge, they’re typically soaking wet, a bit breathless, and flushed in the cheeks. But they are happy, and so is she.
Veil is on display at the Glass House through November 30, 2014.
Fujiko Nakaya is an artist living in Tokyo, Japan. Her sculptures can be found in art museums, parks, theaters, and public squares around the globe. Representative works include Foggy Forest at Children’s Park in Showa Kinen Park, Tokyo (1992), and installations for the Yokohama Triennale (2008) and the 18th Biennale of Sydney (2012). In addition to her work with fog, Nakaya has long been regarded as a pioneer of video art in Japan. Since 1971, she has created video artworks based on the theme of communication. In 1972, she co-founded VIDEO HIROBA, Japan’s first video art collective, and in 1980, she opened Video Gallery SCAN in Harajuku, Tokyo, where she organized workshops and competitions to promote young video artists. For four decades, SCAN hosted video exhibitions and international festivals for cultural exchange. Photo credit: Nelson Oliveira/New Canaan News
Myra Lotto is a scholar and teacher living in New York City. She writes about rural-themed literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, landscape and garden architecture, laboring-class literature, and disability. She has taught courses on British Literature, poetics, writing, and communications at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University. Her ongoing pedagogical interests involve forming communities to promote learning and employing interactive technology in early childhood education.
Regardless of which creative field you look at, there is always talk about process. This postmodern world has rendered form and content inextricable in many ways, so when I look at work, it is always the same question that comes to mind: how does the form inform the content? Are there traces of the process in the work the artist presents?
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Much of the writing that I love does not humor such inquisition. Even lines related through a colloquial voice are likely to have been subjected to meticulous editing, were crafted in the grand scheme of the piece. Without access to the revision process of admired work, I often find my own attempts to write plagued—paralyzed, even—by self doubt. This project began very much like every other attempt, which is to say, by an overwhelming of imagery and inspiration from the world, and the unsuccessful attempt to wrestle it into the screen.
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In order to contain some of the ideas and connections speeding through my mind (which came and went at a much quicker pace than the “official” writing), I began to collect these shorthand notes in a document. In the first submission for class critique, my professor commented on the lyrical interest of the notation. Encouraged in taking a more organic approach to writing, I proceeded to generate both texts simultaneously, that of the short story, and its primal fragments. It wasn’t long before I took to the concept of presenting a finished product in conjunction with the process that transpired to put it there. Seeing behind the curtain is something I always desire, so enabling this experience for the reader felt only natural.
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What happened next validated my trust in this approach. I noticed that the notation moved much quicker than the short story, which developed from a more painstaking trial. The notation came about impulsively, in rapid spurts of inspiration. Instantaneous transcription of the thoughts preserved not only their energy, but the honesty in their expression. Where the story concealed its relation to me, distorted the truth in its transformation to fiction, the notation shrieked with the concerns and hurts I was scared to voice, or declare important enough to be read by others.
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Soon, I had spreads filled with “notes”, while the short story remained untouched. The most unexpected consequence of writing in this way was also the most poignant. The moment of revelation for me while writing doubled as the climax of the story. The texts’ trajectory—the rising action, climax, resolution (likewise reflected in the pacing of its visual design), is essentially a documentation of my own trajectory while writing. Giving the notes a voice forced me to listen to the emotional aftermath of revisiting my birth country, and recognize that perhaps my raw story was more important to tell than one seamlessly crafted.
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In the end, though the notes pushed the short story from visibility, the information they relayed served to develop the fiction, flat though it was on its own. The short story likewise provided context for the notation. The seemingly disparate parallel narratives formed a unified whole, a fossilized process.
Anastasiya Shekhtman is a senior Communication Design major at the University of Pennsylvania, minoring in Russian and Creative Writing. Displaced from Ukraine at the age of four, Anastasiya is currently chasing childhood images, sorting the real from the imagined, only to blur them again in her work. Until recently, Anastasiya Shekhtman lived in a love triangle between writing and design. Then she found her heart in the overlap.
“Porcelain Armor” (detail) Dimensions visible: about 10” x 12” x 2” Unglazed porcelain, hand dyed wool yarn, bookbinder’s thread. 2013.
Laura Mecklenburger “VULNERARY” AND AN ART WITCH
When I try to describe my artwork to others, I often say that I make ritual objects and installation art. But I didn’t set out to make installation art from the beginning, and I certainly didn’t expect, when I decided to make art my career, that it was going to explicitly include magic and ritual. I still blush when I tell people I am an initiated witch. I am faintly surprised at myself that I have made such an intimate part of my life so public. But the path I took to reach this work has felt inevitable and rewarding. As my favorite author, Neil Gaiman, told the graduating class at the University of the Arts here in Philadelphia, “The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you’re walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside . . . [is] the moment you may be starting to get it right.”
I didn’t plan this either, but after spending two years building a portfolio on my own in Philadelphia, I spent four years in graduate school for fine art, in three different ceramics programs. While making art nearly all day every day for that long, with little privacy, losing sleep, and arguing for my work in critiques and on paper, I realized that my art had to be personally fulfilling, as well as “good,” to give me the energy and courage to continue. Art school can help distill your work into a clear and focused voice, and research and experience can teach you what it takes to “make it” in the art world, but I knew that neither the quality of my art nor the success of a career could make me happy by themselves. One can be famous and brilliant and still miserable.
“Vulnerary” Dimensions: variable. Terracotta with india ink, porcelain, black stoneware, steel, linen, spices, quinoa, mixed media. 2013 Edwin W. Zoller Gallery, Penn State Photo credit: Negar Fadaei
“Vulnerary” Photo credit: Negar Fadaei
I believe (and positive psychology research backs me up) that one of the main keys to happiness in life is to find something that comes naturally to you, and then offer it to others who need or want it, and I don’t just mean for its market value. It could be heart surgery, office management, baking really good cupcakes, or union organizing. It doesn’t matter how much it pays, or how much society rewards it, or whether you’re performing in stadiums or raising a single child, as long as you feel like you’re offering something from your deepest self that others need. Okay; easier said than done. “I am making art” is far too vague. What kind of art comes from my deepest self and is rewarding in this way? If art is my life, what kind of a life do I want? It took me years to ask these questions honestly, and to begin to answer them.
I fell in love with art as a very young child, and it is in my childhood that I began to find answers. I’ve always found some of my deepest satisfaction in making things as gifts for those I care about, especially if it was something they were going to use. Also, I’ve always admired artists—including songwriters, authors, and filmmakers—who created and wrote things that deeply resonated with others. I craved art that makes you feel less alone, that works as protective armor or pulls the floor out from under you, art that feels like it has colors you’ve never seen before. Art that opens a door and makes life bigger or richer or stranger, somehow. And often, when my favorite artists make this world-deepening art, it starts to form a community around them, or it is in response to a close community, and community and artist become a kind of symbiotic system. This is something else that positive psychology research considers a vital way to happiness. Even if I’m going to spend much of my time alone in the studio (which I love to do), I want to be connected and reaching out, as well.
“Transition Cradle” Dimensions: 35” x 37” x 10” Salt-fired porcelain, stoneware, thread, wood, sea urchin spines, shells, rose petals, cloves, surgical gauze. 2012.
“Transition Cradle” (detail)
Graduate school was a lonely experience for me. True, I had incredible new friends and mentors, and the school communities were vibrant. However, the work and stress made it difficult for me to keep in touch with family and older friends, and the competition and internal turmoil sometimes made me feel isolated and alienated among people who didn’t yet know me well. I had to move too often. I felt uprooted. At the same time, a few of my dearest friends and my family, far away, were going through extremely rough times—with rape, suicide attempts, and cancer—and I felt helpless to support them. I wasn’t able to be home as long as I wished, with my grieving family, as we dealt with the death of my grandfather. I watched the Occupy movement unfold online, wishing desperately that my own personal goals weren’t keeping me from participating on the street. I worried for my friends who were Occupying as activists and medics, some of them transwomen and people of color who were especially vulnerable to police attack or harassment. I felt a fierce tenderness and empathy for the struggles going on around me, and fury at the structures that caused them.
“Conversion in the First Matter” Dimensions: about 7’ x 5’ x 5’ Stoneware, polymer clay, bronze, steel, watercolor on cloth and paper, sea salt, quartz and magnetite crystals. 2012.
“Conversation in the First Matter” (detail)
In response, I started making my art more and more about relationships and community. I made an alchemy-inspired piece to help people going through difficult personal transformations, based on an imagined ritual using the human digestive system. I built shrines dedicated to the protection of loved ones and vulnerable communities, especially relating to queer and trans issues and survivors of assault, using the forms of butterfly chrysalises and insect larvae. I made porcelain armor to shield people from emotional attack. I made ceramic and mixed media amulets and ritual vessels designed for specific people I knew. Finally, I turned the gallery into a temple with a shrine dedicated to everything that viewers/participants wanted to protect and nurture, and defense against harm. I called the shrine “Vulnerary,” an old medical term meaning anything that soothes and aids in healing, such as aloe vera.
“Vulnerary” was a culmination of nearly everything I learned in graduate school and in Philadelphia. In several ways, it was a blueprint for how I want my work to continue. “Vulnerary” was a ten foot long, four foot tall, over 700-pound terracotta shrine in the form of weathered, rotting tree roots. It had realistic wood-like detail and a glowing, deep reddish tone created by washes of india ink over the bare orange clay. I spent three weeks barefoot, coil-building its facade in my studio with coils of clay the size of small pythons. Hidden in crevices, among the roots, and hanging from protrusions were small amulets, talismans, and garlands that I hand made out of porcelain, spices, and other media. These represented specific hopes, dreams, things to be protected, and protective charms. Multiple sharpened steel spikes emerged from the top with papers impaled on them representing things that people wanted to defeat. Japanese incense burned from the shrine’s sides, ritual vessels held mysterious contents, and a vast sweep of black linen cloth stretched down the back of the shrine and across the room. There was a pillowy, white cushion underneath the shrine for people to kneel upon, edged in piles of cloves and cinnamon. I surrounded the walls with an incantation I had composed and hand written, I worked all night drawing patterns of energies across most of the gallery floor in dry brown quinoa with my bare hands, and I invited people to bring in their own offerings to leave on the shrine during the opening and every day. At the opening, I led a dedication ritual, singing and blessing the shrine with a coven of witches and with the help of a trance-inducing performance by a professional tuba player, my amazing friend Sean Kennedy. The warmly lit gallery became a temple.
I have been forming my own visual and sensory vocabulary to communicate my own experience and practice of magic. The plant and animal sources I use in reality or in image—like real seed pods and bones, or ceramic garlic cloves and hand-sculpted maggots—I research thoroughly. I use them with layers of meaning: scientific, cultural, metaphorical, personal. Certain categories have become fixations of mine. For instance, I know a bit too much about fungi and lichens of all kinds, the life cycles and dwellings of insects, herbal medicine, and the morphology of bones. I also have become particularly focused on religions and magical systems that give me useful frameworks, for instance Shinto, Yoruba, alchemy, and the Judaism with which I was raised. I do my best never to appropriate imagery from others’ beliefs, but instead to honor them. And I try to make sure that my work still has plenty to offer a non-believer.
“Nigredo” Dimensions of installation variable. Ceramic roots: 25”w x 19”h x 15” Unglazed stoneware, polymer clay (not pictured), drawings, found objects. 2011.
This work is never just metaphysical and personal, it is political. By making and promoting ritual art I want to work towards society’s acceptance of the open expression of beliefs and promote respect for traditional and unique craft and art made by every class and gender. I believe that valuing world cultures in art can also influence how we interact with those societies, for instance by respecting intellectual property rights when pharmaceutical companies use indigenous knowledge or by helping to preserve native languages and traditions. If we cling to words like “primitive” and “superstition” and think of people who live in the present as some kind of remnant of the past, we disrespect and dehumanize people and discount efforts to strengthen their communities and rights. This includes every community from the San, to the Hopi, to the Hoodoo root workers, to the traditional Irish, to the Tibetan monks. No one should be seen as backwards for learning and sharing non-Western wisdom. A vision of the world’s future must be an inclusive vision, in art as in everything.
When I made the transition from thinking about my art as metaphorical to actively practicing magic and ritual with it, I felt the way I feel when I’ve lost my voice for a long time and finally get it back. I wrote to my graduate committee that in discarding the framework of surrealism, “My artwork just woke up.” And as I researched to support the validity of what I was doing, I discovered that I was echoing most of art history. Most of the history of art, including its present reality in many parts of the world, is art in the service of religion, magic, and the spiritual world, but contemporary “ritual art” is often marginalized in today’s art world. I am in awe of those artists who are already well-known for making contemporary ritual art, artists like Lucas Samaras, Pedro Reyes, Huang Yong Ping (especially his “House of Oracles” and “Pharmacy” series), installation artist Renee Stout, and Ana Mendieta. The research I did to combat the resistance to my work over the years in graduate school became a passion of mine, itself, and I would love to teach a class in ritual art, history, and critical theory. My oral thesis defense was so long and full of quotes that my graduate committee gently cut me off in the middle, told me I’d said enough, and suggested that my defense was already a course curriculum. I delivered a much shorter version in a lecture about the relevance of contemporary ritual art at the National Conference on Education in the Ceramic Arts (NCECA), and I got an overwhelmingly positive response.
“Wishing Lines” Dimensions: variable. Velvet upholstery trim, construction paper, ribbon, tissue paper, cloves. 2014. at Get Lucid Activist Dance Party Photo credit: TCD Photography:
After graduating with my MFA from Penn State University, I felt that, far more than kilns or residencies, I needed community. So, I moved back to West Philadelphia and devoted myself to my neighborhood, a community full of magic and queer pride and DIY spirit, and genuine, unconditional affection. I have especially fallen in love with my “Faemily,” the Philadelphia Radical Faeries. My recent art is solely in non-ceramic materials such as yarn, paper, spices, and beads; in particular, I’m crafting custom wands for friends and ritual jewelry. I just had the wonderful opportunity this January to do an installation at a fundraising art event, the monthly Get Lucid Activist Dance Party. I called it the “Wishing Lines,” and really, it is a simplified and more colorful version of some of the ideas behind “Vulnerary.” Participants wrote their wishes and hopes for others on colored paper tags and hung them on the gold-edged “Lines,” creating a jewel-toned haven of sacred space on the margin of the party. It was an amazing experience with over 200 people participating. I felt that I had tested the waters for the potential of future large interventions, and received a resounding “yes!”
My current work represents the loving, ecstatic, and welcoming community I have found here in Philadelphia. Now that I have begun to make a place for myself, I want to give back with all of the experience and skill I have. I recently organized and led an amulet-making workshop in my own neighborhood, similar to one I’d led in the midst of “Vulnerary.” It went so well that I have decided to do more of these. Also, I’ve met so many amazing artists here whose interests intersect with mine, and I hope to collaborate. And finally, I feel that I need to go back to ceramics soon; some things just work better in clay. I want to make ritual vessels for healing tea and herbal medicine, for instance, and also to make some objects that survive outdoors. I miss the potter’s wheel and the sensuousness of carving porcelain. Clay has even become part of my magical practice, and I will probably never stray too far away from it now.
Photo credit: Judith Mecklenburger
I might be seen as following multiple paths, but to me, these paths are all facets of the same identity. I am a fine artist, and also a local witch who wants to serve her community, and an academic theorist, and a teacher. I could be none of these things in the same way without the others. I loved teaching ceramics classes when I was a grad student at Penn State, and now that I have amassed all of this technical and scholarly treasure, I’m not just going to sit on it silently forever. However, I won’t go back to academia until I feel like I have more to offer than theory and technique. I want to bring my real experience of this witchy, connected, city life to students, too. I want to hold nothing back.
Laura Mecklenburger is a recent MFA graduate in Ceramics at Penn State University, living in Philadelphia. Her ritual-based installations and objects consist of mixed media and works on paper as well as clay, and sometimes involve performance. Mecklenburger has taught introductory Ceramics at Penn State and with the Claymobile outreach program at the Clay Studio, and she has presented on the topic of ritual in art at the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA). Mecklenburger received her BA at Swarthmore College, and went on to study at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and Tyler School of Art before arriving at Penn State. She hopes to build an integrated art practice that truly serves the community.
Where does your fascination with faces come from? When I was a young girl, I went with my mother on a regular basis to visit her sisters. She was the youngest of nine children. The three youngest sisters—my mother Betty, Cassie, and Tucker—were the core of the group, but others would join in on different occasions. You never knew who was going to be at the kitchen table when you arrived.
These visits were either at my Aunt Tucker’s house (Sylvia was her birth name, but, due to her resemblance to the actress Sophie Tucker, she is still called Tucker at 90 years old), or my Aunt Helen’s house, the oldest sibling, in South Jersey. Aunt Tucker always had a homemade cake, and most always a pot of pasta sauce slowly simmered on the stove all day, filling the house with an incredible aroma. Aunt Helen had a homemade pie to serve with the tea, and a cat curled up on her large, soft chest. When I wasn’t shamelessly throwing myself at Alvin or Sam, the dogs, I listened to the conversations about my aunts’ lives and studied their faces.
The personality of each aunt seemed quite apparent at first glance. Helen was serene in her beauty and kindness. Though her life had been quite difficult, she was such a good person that her inner beauty radiated despite the sadness in her eyes. Thelma was quite the opposite of Helen. There was a coldness about her that seemed to set in her mouth, eyes, and tongue. The absolute worst of these visits were when Uncle Raymond, Aunt Helen’s ex-husband, was present. I feared him terribly and panicked at the sight of him at the table. He wore mean all over his face.
I’ve always been extremely intuitive and hyper sensitive to my surroundings. As a cripplingly shy child, I sat quietly, observed, and felt deeply. I never stopped.
What do your portraits suggest about age? When middle age hit, I was faced with the effects of aging. As always, painting is how I coped. Aging is a privilege, but we sure go through so much on the way to old age. All the troubles, difficulties, and heartaches take a toll on us, both mentally and physically. Often, a face will be so painfully sad or burdened that my heart sinks at first glance. People carry so much with them. I once heard a quote that I’ll never forget (though, regrettably, I do forget who said it). In his interview on PBS, an author said, “Be kind. Everyone is carrying a heavy burden.”
That is what I felt when I saw the men and women at work in the South Jersey glass factories, where I earned my tuition money. They worked hard in difficult conditions. It showed on their faces.
Would you consider your portraits critical or sympathetic? On occasion, I am critical in my portraiture, as in “The Gossips.” But mostly I aim for empathy. Having struggled with major depression since age eight, I often feel things too deeply. At times, it seems that I can feel the pain of the whole world, which becomes overwhelming and unbearable. While I’m focused on the feelings I read from each person I paint, it’s impossible not to project my own emotions onto them. I’ve been asked why so many of the people in my portraits look sad. That comes from me.
What aspect of painting people appeals most to you? My love of paint was immediate the first time I used it. In kindergarten, my wonderful teacher gave us all a large sheet of paper and tempera paint. We were allowed to paint on the floor. I was next to my best friend, Tim. It was one of the happiest days of my life. The paper was slick and smooth, and the paint was thick and fluid. I fell completely in love with the feel of the paint gliding across the paper. I couldn’t stop myself from completely over-painting my picture. I knew then that I wanted that to be my life.
Now my medium is oil paint, but I still must have a slick surface to work on. I prepare my panels to be as smooth as possible, a continuation of my happy kindergarten painting experience. The language of the paint is as important to me as the subject matter itself. I’m completely drawn to loose, fast, thick paint strokes. My work is never loose enough for me, so I keep working on that.
You feature both strangers and acquaintances in your work. How does your level of relation to the subjects affect their portrayal? Whether I am painting a stranger or an acquaintance, my approach is the same. What do they tell me about themselves that I hope to capture? What are they thinking? What is it that weighs on them? I know the answer to some of these questions when painting someone I know, but have to guess with someone I see at random whose face interests me so much that I have to paint it.
THE PORTRAITS
1. Frank, 2013, oil on panel, 6 x 6 inches Frank Smith was a self-proclaimed preacher from a small town in southern New Jersey. He and his sister were close with my mother’s family.
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2. Black Suit, 2013, oil in panel, 6 x 6 inches
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3. Woman with a Pink Hat, 2012, oil on panel, 6 x 6 inches My husband and I lived across the street from a church in West Grove, Pennsylvania. We saw many members of the congregation come and go each Sunday including the Woman in Pink Hat.
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4. Liquor, 2009, oil on panel, 5 x 8 inches Liquor was my Uncle Jim’s nickname. He both enjoyed it and made it during Prohibition and after. He was severely abused by his father, a veteran of World War II who fought on the front lines, and my mother’s oldest brother.
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5. Woman with Oxygen Tube, 2012, oil on panel, 6 x 6 inches I saw this woman at a family function from across the room during the social time of the event.
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6. Woman in Wheel Chair, 2011, oil on panel, 5 x 7 inches The day I saw the Mummies of the World exhibit at the Franklin Institute this particular woman caught my eye.
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7. Woman With Thinning Hair, 2012, oil on panel, 6 x 6 inches Many of the people in my paintings I’ve seen while waiting for my prescriptions at the drug store, including this woman.
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8. Black Tie, White Shirt, 2013, oil on panel, 6 x 6 inches Another man from a family function.
Donna Festa has paintings and drawings in both public and private collections, including the State Museum of Pennsylvania. She has exhibited in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Miami. Donna Festa’s work has been published in Fresh Paint Magazine, October, 2013, INPA, vol. 1 , 2011, INPA, vol. 2, 2012, and New American Paintings, Mid-Atlantic Region vol. 51, 2004. Donna Festa is a graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she earned a four year certificate in painting; the University of the Arts, also in Philadelphia, where she received a BFA in painting and teacher certification; and the University of Hartford in Hartford, Connecticut, where she received an MFA in painting. Donna Festa’s studio is in her home in Bangor, Maine.
Anastasiya Shekhtman is a senior Communication Design major at the University of Pennsylvania, minoring in Russian and Creative Writing. Displaced from Ukraine at the age of four, Anastasiya is currently chasing childhood images, sorting the real from the imagined, only to blur them again in her work. Until recently, Anastasiya lived in a love triangle between writing and design. Then she found her heart in the overlap. Her website is www.anastasiyashekhtman.com.
What made you decide on ink as a medium? Precision of the ink line. I love precise lines and was able to show that even in my first independent works. They were abstract, probably influenced by Russian Constructivism, De Stijl, and Soviet Nonconformists, many of whom were abstractionists. I saw their work at various apartment exhibitions in Dnepropetrovsk and Moscow that I participated in.
The compelling mood of the images, a certain wintry bleakness, is evocative of Soviet Russia. What role, if any, does your national background play in your work? Dnepropetrovsk was certainly bleak, Soviet Moscow even bleaker and wintrier. My background plays every role in these pictures. Although I call myself an American or Russian-American artist, they are neither Russian nor American. If one calls them Soviet Nonconformist pictures, I would accept the label. USSR is no more but my art still lives there, “nonconforming” to the state’s cultural dictates and proscriptions.
Some of your work is quite political. All artmaking is political. “Koch—Mayor of the City of New York” and “Doctor Kissinger,” also called “In seine Hand die Macht gegeben,” are explicitly so. They belong to a series called Iconography. Inspired by prints after Anthony van Dyck’s drawings which collectively bear the same name, it includes portraits of living artists, writers, politicians, distinguished soldiers.
What is the concept behind the title? “Exiled from Truth: Nine Allegories” is the title of a series of allegorical pictures, possibly more than nine; the series continues to develop. They are united by color, style, and technique, so I view them as a homogeneous collection of drawings. Allegory, drawn or written, is a product of that mind which regards truth as existing-in-absence: it does exist yet is absent from our view. Allegories like mine would not be needed if truth were openly present.
What motivated you to make these works? I distinguish between narrow and broad motivations, which may not always interact. The latter type of motivation is a desire to speak as an artist. Silence, especially artistic, is painful. The former involves being challenged by narrower, often technical problems—arranging successfully a group or one-figure portrait, succeeding as a landscapist, still-life painter.
Why do you label them narrow or broad? I view expression of one’s artistic feeling as broader, more significant than technique.
What moves you as an artist? I find moving whatever helps me to begin or finish a picture. It may cease to move me tomorrow, be totally unmoving to someone else today, but I am always willing to be moved by anything that contributes to the picture-making effort.
Please name an event or thing or person that moved you to paint. So many events, persons! I conceived “Bush-Maliki News Conference. Baghdad, December 2008” after seeing that video of the shoe incident with Muntadhar al-Zaidi.
What are your inspirations, and what are not? I call nothing uninspiring, although it may be that today. On another day, inspiration will begin emanating from a source that I never felt could inspire.
Blue applied to flat, decorative imagery is reminiscent of domestic objects, particularly plates and cups. Is this a reference you intended? No. Blue harmonizes with the very white paper I like to draw on better than other colors. But “Odalisque in Red Satin Pantaloons (after Matisse)” and some prints of mine are red. I have drawn with black ink on yellowish paper too.
Why is “Odalisque” red and white? I tried to connect this picture not only with Odalisque à la culotte de satin rouge, Matisses lithograph, but also his famous painting L’Atelier Rouge, both in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Hopefully, the red I chose for this drawing will be seen as harmonious with the paper’s white.
Can you tell us a little about the meaning of the text in “Wildbirds?” The text in “Wildbirds Among Branches” is Matthew 6:26, “Behold the fowls of the air, for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?” or “See how the birds of the air never sow, or reap, or gather grain into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them; have you not an excellence beyond theirs?” From King James and Knox Bibles respectively. When this drawing was made, for about one year, I considered it my style to attach written statements to drawings. Now I avoid this but may return to the practice, having always loved calligraphy.
Describe “The Making of Brothers.” This drawing is an allegorical interpretation of the ceremony of adelphopoiesis, which I translate as “the making of brothers,” hence the drawing’s name. I started drawing it in ’98 simply as a ceremonial double portrait with a reptile; two Polish youngsters posed for this as yet unnamed ceremony during one afternoon. Unsure of the ceremony’s name and purpose, I left the drawing unfinished for about five months. When something reminded me of adelphopoiesis, which I read about in the book called “Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe,” ’95, I rushed to finish the drawing. It was finished in January of last year and is about 42 by 37 inches. The reptile, which could be a crocodile or an alligator, symbolizes homoerotic yearning.
Was this double portrait commissioned? How did it come about? Two thoughts led me to draw “The Making of Brothers,” which was not commissioned. Firstly, I saw a yellowish 1950’s photograph on eBay of a preteen girl riding a wooden crocodile. It reminded me of my being photographed by somebody in Yevpatoria on a similar photographer’s prop when I was four or five. Such reminders are valuable because they allow one to personalize a found image. Secondly, I was challenged by some technical difficulties: the youngsters were sketched at different scales, one sketch was nearly twice as large as the other. If I can organize them into a coherent portrait, I thought, my abilities as a portraitist would be strengthened.
How do you find a subject or theme to draw? Good, timely themes for a picture are found everywhere—internet, newspapers, food bills. I make written notes regarding a possible theme on the back of those bills, and usually accompany them with a little sketch. After a period, which could last weeks or months, I go over what was sketched and all the writing. Whatever excites me the most then is developed into a fuller work.
Which of your pictures would you like to work on some more? I continuously work on all of them, improving lines and background stippling.
Editor’s note: These images by Dmitry Borshch have also appeared, in earlier versions, in Superstition Review, Flyway, Pank, The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, Rabbit Catastrophe Review, and others. Regarding his practice of publishing revised artwork, he states,“Periodically I edit them, correcting lines and background stippling, then photograph each new state of a drawing. States that have been published I do not submit for publication again. There are five states of Wildbirds and Daughters, and four of Brothers, each with small but important differences.”
THE DRAWINGS (click to view in high resolution)
1. The Making of Brothers, 2010, ink on paper, 37 x 42 inches
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2. Daughters of the Dust, also called The Undertaker”s Pale Children, 2010, ink on paper, 26 x 21 inches
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3. Wildbirds Among Branches, 2008, ink on paper, 15 x 20 inches
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4. Betrothal of the Virgins, 2009, ink on paper, 25 x 20 inches
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5. Blue Architects, 2009, ink on paper, 22 x 28 inches
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6. The Budding Patriarch, 2009, ink on paper, 33 x 33 inches
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7. Odalisque in Red Satin Pantaloons (after Matisse), 2011, ink on paper, 28 x 10 inches
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8. Koch – Mayor of the City of New York, 2011, ink on paper, 50 x 27 inches
Ed Koch posed for this portrait in May of 2011 at his law office, Bryan Cave LLP.
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9. Doctor Kissinger, also called In seine Hand die Macht gegeben, 2012, ink on paper, 32 x 17 inches
Henry Kissinger posed for this portrait in November of 2011.
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10. Bush-Maliki News Conference. Baghdad, December 2008, 2009, ink on paper, 42 x 26 inches
Dmitry Borshch was born in Dnepropetrovsk, studied in Moscow, and now lives in New York. His paintings have been exhibited at the National Arts Club (New York), Brecht Forum (New York), ISE Cultural Foundation (New York), and the State Russian Museum (Saint Petersburg).
Anastasiya Shekhtman is a senior Communication Design major at the University of Pennsylvania, minoring in Russian and Creative Writing. Displaced from Ukraine at the age of four, Anastasiya is currently chasing childhood images, sorting the real from the imagined, only to blur them again in her work. Until recently, Anastasiya lived in a love triangle between writing and design. Then she found her heart in the overlap. Her website is www.anastasiyashekhtman.com.
How do you begin a painting? I often start a painting using a level and making several horizontal lines, varying distances apart. Then, using black acrylic, I use gestural lines to overlap them. Finally, I add color. I often use memories of places I have walked or otherwise experienced. The painting and content emerges over a long period of not painting.
The transformation of paint, a loose substance, into rigid lines and geometric shapes in your paintings is particularly intriguing. How does the form of your work play into the content? For twenty years, I worked as a lead artist for the Mural Arts Program. When creating a muraI, I use a grid to work up my concept for the wall, using a 1″ to 1′ ratio. About nine years ago, I decided to use a grid for my studio work. Rather than make me more rigid, it served as a freeing experience. I began reading about the history of grids and discovered that ancient Polynesian fishermen used a grid construction of sticks to navigate the waters; I liked the idea of this moveable grid. As I often depict layers of water, this was so exciting to discover. The grid is a never ending source of inspiration for me. It leads me to a more abstract way of painting that I really like.
In a palette primarily dominated by blues and similarly cool hues, the color red creates a jarring effect. What role does color play in your paintings? I use color as a vehicle to loosely represent some aspects of landscape. Most of the time, the blue is sky or water, but it takes on a life of its own as the painting progresses. I often use red to catch and guide the viewer’s eye. Other times, I think of the changing color of a leaf, or a lily pad dying on a pond. In many of these pieces, I limited my color palette to simplify the experience, and focused on creating an illusion of space.
You speak about the canvas as an entry point into more meaningful spaces. Please tell us about the philosophical concerns you explore in this series. My philosophy concerns the process of making lines, color, and form, and seeing where they lead me. In Triangulation, I was not at all sure where I was headed. Then, it became clear that the layered horizon lines, vanishing points, and planes of colors functioned as levels of water, reflections, and floating shapes; the process built itself. In this way, I discover meaning that goes beyond the personal, which is how my work sometimes starts out. I like removing myself. Sometimes, I feel I should go further and further into the picture plane, and hopefully will in the future.
THE PAINTINGS
1. Triangulation, 2013, acrylic on paper, 26 x 26 inches
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2. Currents, 2011, oil on mylar, 24 x 24 inches Painting with oil and acrylic on mylar for the first time, I loved the way the paint worked on the surface. I think this piece has a real translucence that I can achieve because of the mylar. There is an illusion of space that seems very immediate.
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3. Mapping, 2012, acrylic on paper, 26 x 26 inches I used blue tape to mask areas, repeating the process of adding and removing tape to create spaces that did not receive the paint. When the painting was finished, I felt like it had led me to a new place, the way a map would.
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4. Crossroads andCairns, 2012,acrylic on paper, 26 x 26 inches In Maine, where I spent every summer since I was five, I have hiked the same trails many times over. Some years, one trail is my favorite. The next year, I find a new favorite. Cairns are the markers on the trails. My work has always represented some aspect of my life in Maine—on the trails or mountains, on the water, or walking around a pond. When I removed the tape I use, I discovered a cross in the middle, with all the direction lines and vanishing points crisscrossing.
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5. Sounds of Fog, 2013, acrylic on paper, 12 x 12 inches
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Tish Ingersoll’s paintings have been featured in solo and group exhibitions in museums and galleries, including the Woodmere Art Museum, the Paley Museum, the LG Tripp Gallery, the JMS Gallery, and the Nexus Gallery in Philadelphia; the Allegheny Museum of Art in Pennsylvania; the Ganser Gallery of Millersville University in Pennsylvania; and the State Museum in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; the Art Space Gallery in Richmond, Virginia; and the Ethel Blum Gallery of the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine. In New York City, Tish Ingersoll work has been exhibited at the Krasdale Gallery, the Viridian Gallery, the Prince Street Gallery, and the Phoenix Gallery. She is the recipient of many awards and fellowships and was a lead muralist for the renowned Philadelphia Mural Arts program, 1992-2003. Tish Ingersoll resides in Philadelphia. Photo credit: Jack Ramsdale
Anastasiya Shekhtman is a senior Communication Design major at the University of Pennsylvania, minoring in Russian and Creative Writing. Displaced from Ukraine at the age of four, Anastasiya is currently chasing childhood images, sorting the real from the imagined, only to blur them again in her work. Until recently, Anastasiya lived in a love triangle between writing and design. Then she found her heart in the overlap. Her website is www.anastasiyashekhtman.com.
Toisha Tucker INDIVIDUATION, IDENTITY, AND THE PARENTHETICAL
My conceptual works provide a foundation for introspection of the self and the other. They are distillations of ideas transformed into controlled environments or objects. Through text, sound, photographs, paintings, and immersive installation, I ruminate on literary modernism, magical realism, and the notion of benign indifference. Or I offer thought propositions to the viewer—some declarative, some open-ended—that are platforms for questioning or thinking more broadly about the social constructions we have come to accept as truths.
Ultimately, my works are traces of thoughts and the interplay between the accepted realities and constructions of the spaces we inhabit and my own abstracted perceptions of them. Each work manifests my exploration of memory, time, and place while seeking to universalize the personal. Through my conceptual work, I continue to explore the landscape of my memory and my preoccupations with the malleability of language, history, literature, and epistemology.
untitled (ash), inkjet print, 16 x 20, 2012
ash
Ash is a body of work that explores the pseudo-myth of my birth: I was born on May 18, 1980, the exact day that Mount St. Helens erupted in Washington State. Ash from the eruption settled across much of the Northwest and in one isolated pocket across Oklahoma, falling over my birthplace, Tulsa, during the first days of my life. Ash consists of three components:
A humidifier disseminating an “ash cloud”, using ash from the eruption,
A modified “notice” sign,
A photo book.
ash, book excerpt, printed material, full color ink on paper, 8.26 x 5.81, 46 pages, 2013
Ash is ultimately about how my uniqueness is affected by those individuals that enter the space during the hours that the ‘ash cloud’ is in the air. I posit that my birth myth makes me unique. By recreating the opportunity to participate in that uniqueness for the participants, those who inhale or choose not to inhale the ash, I beg the question of who is the interloper and who is not. Who is affecting whom in this gesture? Is my uniqueness affected by someone else’s inhalation? How so? And what of the boundary of individuation, if any, formed between the group of individuals who inhale the ash and the larger group that exists that has not?
Clothes|Lines
My grandmother used to warn me that if I wore other people’s clothes, I would become them. In Clothes|Lines barcodes of identity the wardrobes of three individuals have been photographed and will be turned into ‘barcodes’ representing each identity. I am exploring clothing as a manifestation of both how we see ourselves and convey that with our clothes and how we are perceived and remembered and judged by that clothing. The ‘barcodes’ are then projected and the participant is afforded the opportunity to ‘wear’ the clothes—to have the lines engulf their body and to fully ‘become’ another individual.
thirty-two | female | tulsa dallas hartsdale oklahoma city ithaca south orange new york san francisco Philadelphia (clothes|lines) video projection, variable, 2013
[time passes in the parentheses.] The text piece[time passes in the parentheses.] is after the ‘Time Passes’ section of Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, in which life is subordinated to parenthetical notations interspersed among a description of a house being closed for the season. This piece seeks to reinvest the parenthetical moments—the living of our lives—with meaning while dually acknowledging that perhaps our lives are simply insignificant notations of the passage of time. There were seven parentheticals placed throughout Philadelphia in April of 2013.
[time passes in the parentheses.] vinyl, variable, 2013
Lines of Demarcation
I started this piece, Lines of Demarcation, the first day that I began working in my studio at the beginning of my second year at PennDesign. Each line traces the light and shadow through a southern facing studio window at the moment of my departure from the studio on days that I made something. It could be from sunlight, moonlight, or streetlight. The title is a historical reference to Portugal and Spain and the worlds that lay within the known and the unknown and choice and fate and finiteness. It represents the typography of making and the moment when the making ceases.
Lines of Demarcation (detail), ink on vellum, variable, 2012-2013
Lines of Demarcation (detail), ink on vellum, variable, 2012-2013
Toisha Tucker
Toisha Tucker is a conceptual artist, painter, and creative writer. She received her BA from Cornell University in 2002 and her MFA from PennDesign in 2013. Her work explores language, literature, history, and epistemology and how one can engage them in knowing and re-contextualizing time, place, memory and social construction. She recently completed an Affiliated Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome and you will next be able to see her work in Art in Odd Places 2013: NUMBER street festival October 11-20 in New York.
Jim O’Loughlin teaches in the Department of Languages & Literatures at the University of Northern Iowa. He is the coordinator of the Final Thursday Reading Series and publisher of Final Thursday Press. Read more here.
My artwork is a product of the ground beneath my feet. I do not own a car, so my experience of a place is created entirely through biking, walking, and the occasional use of public transportation. Because of this, I have a very intimate relationship with sidewalks, as well as the buildings and streets with which they are connected. I am endlessly curious about the things that people discard onto the streets, a no-man’s-land of both public and private space in which no one is held accountable, allowing for a strange sort of freedom. This concrete space between roads and homes has proven to be one of the greatest influences in my work.
In the morning I go to buy milk from the bodega across the street, where the shopkeeper’s knowledge of English is limited to “hello” and “thank you.” I like them there. People loiter in the doorway of the tiny corner store, socializing with the shopkeepers who talk to them from behind scratched bulletproof glass complete with transparent compartments with every sickly sweet candy wrapper meticulously organized into its own secure drawer. In this wonderful community gathering space, however, people are constantly separated by these peculiar safety glass barriers, by a need for security that implies distrust. This observation led me to create a series of barriers in which I replicated three different models of bulletproof transaction windows using sheet mirror. By making these forms reflective, I wanted to make the viewer aware of the physical and metaphorical barriers that exist between humans and even within the individual. The mirrored surface also displays the great extent to which people are shaped by their environment.
Barriers 1, 2, & 3, Sheet Mirror, 22 x 24 x 3 inches each, 2012
During my extensive walks through the city, I began to notice all of the empty drug bags strewn about the streets of Philadelphia, blown into concrete corners and against fences by the wind. I find these tiny objects, suddenly useless and cast away into the world, to be evocative vessels that are deeply and tragically symbolic of the issues plaguing my community. As objects completely foreign to me, the drug bags fascinated me for their specialized purpose. Their range of specific sizes, colors, and prints indicated a sort of forbidden language. I began to obsessively collect these tiny bags and cast them in various materials such as glass, wax, plaster, and paper pulp, transforming the scorned and rejected vessels into a ghostly wall tapestry.
There are over 40,000 vacant lots within the city of Philadelphia, each overflowing with weeds, shattered glass, mismatched shoes, telephone poles, scrap metal, broken televisions, food packaging, concrete rubble, and almost any thing you could ever imagine. Given the fact that these treasure troves of rejected objects are particularly common in my neighborhood, I find many abandoned and decaying objects as sources to include in my artwork. For this untitled work, I selected a car tire from an empty lot, as it is an ever-present yet unnoticed object that also holds iconic significance within the history of modern and contemporary art. In this untitled sculpture, thousands of flame-worked, thread-like glass creatures drip with wax and creep out of the inside of the tire, mimicking the way that nature inevitably reclaims abandoned man-made objects.
Untitled, Found Tire, Flameworked Glass, Wax, Approx. 1 x 2 2 feet, 2012
Untitled, Found Tire, detail
While walking to my studio each day with my head toward the ground, eyes scanning for objects to inherit, I tend to trip over large cracks in the ill-maintained sidewalks. These cracks, although commonly seen as a testament to a neglected and crumbling community, are a beautiful symbol of nature’s way of creeping into our very controlled and harsh human architecture. I wanted to find a way to express to others the beauty I saw in those fractured sidewalks, and to change people’s negative perceptions of a public space. In Maintenance, I repaired and hand-filled every crack in my studio with various colors of plaster in order to fix, yet accentuate and highlight, the imperfect networks of crevices beneath our feet. This highly labor-intensive performance resulted in colorful bolts of lightning, veins rushing across the ground in a map of harmonious, poetic lines that only nature could create—illuminating the very cracks that humans try so hard to contain.
I view disregarded urban communities as places where artists are needed most in the world. In this body of work, I have been ritualistically collecting the mundane residue of urban life and reconfiguring it into a conceptual, artistic vocabulary, thereby infusing it with a sense of permanence and spiritual significance that transcends its previous connotations. This will allow people to reimagine their cities how to interact within them. I create these installations with the goal of sharing my ideas, improving communities, and, ultimately, revealing the spiritual beauty I see in the urban world.
Morgan Gilbreath is a mixed-media artist, art historian, and community activist whose work deals with concepts of place, labor, and urban life. She is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a concentration in Glass, a Bachelor of Arts in Art History, and a Certificate in Community Arts from Tyler School of Art, Temple University in Philadelphia, PA. Morgan is a Saint Andrews Society of Philadelphia Mutch Scholar, through which she studied the History of Art at the University of Edinburgh in Edinburgh, Scotland in 2012-13. She was most recently awarded the Tyler School of Art Partner Scholarship to study kiln-formed glass and public art at Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington in the summer of 2013. Morgan Gilbreath currently lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.
Spicing up realist landscapes with fantastic nudes and infiltrating austere family tableaux with whimsical eroticism, American Arcadia is a mixed distillation of artful irreverence and subtle mischief. Here is the story of its making.
In 2005, my partner Daniel Isengart and I took a trip to Madrid, where we spent many hours at the Prado and the Reina Sofia. On the day of our return to the States, we found ourselves aimlessly browsing through the souvenir shop at the Madrid-Barajas airport, where a pocket-format deck of cards depicting famous nudes by (mostly) European masters—some of which we had seen at the Prado—caught my attention. On a whim, I bought it. Back in Brooklyn, I happened to walk past a stoop sale one late morning and, among the usual junk and knick-knacks, made out an extra-large deck of playing cards with prints depicting “American Life, Manners and History” by the popular 19th-century lithographer duo Currier & Ives. I bought it for $1. To my amusement, the stack included a legend that informed me that the original prints had been “hand-colored by a dozen or more women in a assembly-line manner” and that the deck of cards I held in my hands was “Printed in Hong Kong.”
At home, armed with scissors and glue, I married the European and American decks, superimposing classical nudes by the likes of Cranach, Boucher, and Goya over Currier & Ives’ illustrations of town views, weather scenes, steamboats, trains, and sports events. I was most enthralled to see how each rarified nude blended in—or clashed—with Currier & Ives’ all-American populist imagery. The extreme pleasure of conflating frivolous High Art with puritan American 19th-century culture felt like slowly turning a kaleidoscope and watching a whole new New World magically, neatly fall into place.
The offset four color printing process by which both sets had been cheaply produced facilitated my playful mixing and matching of the wildly varried pictures, each new pairing conjuring up new scenarios: at the very least, the homogenized, matted color palette of both sets prevented any chromatic clashes. Whatever stood at odds in terms of iconography I “rectified” through proper (or gleefully improper) alignment. Still, as I went on cutting and pasting, I remained keen on highlighting the tension within each chosen pair of cards, striving less for seamless harmony than for the kind of dazed ecstasy reminiscent of the culture shock I experienced 25 years ago (and often still do) in New York City as a newly arrived, expatriate European artist.
The fact that each card of th American deck had its own title only added to the fun: by keeping the titles intact, I practically inserted the European Masters into an American context. As a result, what puritanism and patriotism dictated to Currier & Ives in terms of subject matter, moods and colors, has been radically transformed. It now appears as if the titles had not been penned by the earnest (though business-savvy) American duo but rather by some divinely deviant madman whose comedic cosmic whimsy adds a touch of deadpan irreverance to the dream-like permutation of serious and light imagery, demoting much of Currier & Ives saccharine vision of America to a kind of slapstick that juxtaposes New and Old World values to hilarious effect.
In retrospect, I recognize that the excitement I derived from making these surrealist collages (an art form I am proud to call part of my Belgian heritage—just take a peak at the risqué collages of my compatriot Marcel Mariën) is connected to my admiration for the American expat Gertrude Stein and her deep fascination with words and pictures. Fittingly, she stressed in her Lectures in America: “I like a picture, that is an oil painting to do anything it likes to do.”
THE CARDS:
The Four Seasons of Life: Middle Age. A sorrowful Lucrecia by Lucas Cranach (1533) is magically transplanted inside the elegant foyer of a mid-nineteenth century American household. Alas, Lucrecia is not about to luxuriate. Oblivious to the domestic bliss that surrounds her, she remains cloaked in her own darkness. Lucrecia has no eyes for the glorious summery Hudson River-like landscape visible from the front porch, no eyes for the freshly groomed little boy standing at her feet next to the family dog, and no eyes for the pretty blond girl descending the staircase with her look-alike doll. Instead of joining the fun and tumble or, rather, carrying on with her domestic duties, Lucrecia is about to stab herself to death. This absurd scene of domesticity gone awry recalls Tennessee Williams’ ability to mix outright poetry with a macabre, almost crude sense of humor. In a strange way, we all understand why Lucrecia wants out.
♠
Home From the Brook conflates Renoir’s Bather with GriffonTerrier (1870) with yet another cliché image of the joys of wedlock by Currier & Ives. Husband, clad in full fishing gear with hat and boots, and bookish stay-at-home wife relax on an elevated terrace in serene seclusion surrounded by natural wonder. She holds a book in her lap, possibly a romance novel, but her attention is now exclusively on him. Separating the two and possibly interrupting the light colloquy about fishing, or acquaintances, or politics, or servants, stands a voluptuous bather. At her feet is her black terrier. As if aware of the prudish couple, the mermaid-like nude, undoubtedly the catch of the day, covers her pubis while clutching her bridal-white undergarment for cover. A naughty accent of red ribbon calling to mind virginal bloodstains brilliantly punctuates the immaculate transparency of the scene. Renoir seems to be saying under his breath, Silly prudes Currier & Ives!They try in vain to dress nature in undergarments closed at the throat, but look at what I found on my way the brook!
♥
The Life of a Fireman No. 1. For some reason or other, Currier & Ives considered that there is nothing more picturesque and universally fascinating than a good fire. Like savvy television producers more than a century later, they staged a number of dramatic fire scenes. In this one, firemen are seen answering the call of duty in the middle of the night. Possibly foreshadowing what they’re about to witness, Beauty and Death confront each other in the foreground. The ominous presence of the “Two Young Girls” (Deux jeune filles—LaBelle Rosine by Antoine Wiertz, 1847) both underscores and resists the blatantly heroic narrative staged by the two American lithographers.
♦
American Winter Sports. Here is another fishing moment courtesy of Currier & Ives, but this time with a catchy Cupid as bait. Caravaggio’s Amor Victorious (1602) illustrates a line from Virgil’s Eclogues: Omnia vincit amor et nos cedamus amori (“Love conquers all; let us all yield to love!”). If all sports are linked to sensual pleasures, Amor is my all-year-round favorite sport. And if ever there were to be another Winter Olympics in Salt Lakes, I pray this Ace-winning Cupid be outfitted with a pair of figure skates and become everybody’s favorite quadruple-jump challenger.
♣
Winter Pastime. Baby It’s Cold Outside! Gabrielle d’Estrées and her Sister in a Bath (1595) are nonchalantly checking out each other’s tiny pouting flower buds, which await voluptuous blossoming in the coming spring. For them, winter pastime means sensual hibernation inside as opposed to frolicking in the snow outside. The Two of Hearts befits the moment just right.
Filip Noterdaeme is an artist-provocateur best known for his Homeless Museum of Art (HOMU), a pastiche of the contemporary art museum he created in 2003. He holds a Bachelor in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York and a Masters of Arts from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. He writes a blog about art for The Huffington Post, lectures at the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum, and teaches art history at the New School, New York University, and CUNY. Noterdaeme was born in Brussels, Belgium, and lives with his partner Daniel Isengart in Brooklyn. His conceptual memoir, The Autobiography of Daniel J. Isengart, written as an homage to Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, was published in March 2013 by Outpost19. Visit the Homeless Museum atwww.homelessmuseum.org. Learn more about his book at www.outpost19.com/Autobiography
Leah Koontz BIPRODUCT: Drag, Societal Identity, and Gender Equality
BiProduct is a project I embarked on which considers drag queens, art, female expectations, and the media. This series features four of my works which address gender roles, equality, and social construction. BiProduct features sculpture and performance, created from nylon, spandex, foam, digital media, and plastic. Drag Queens possess many progressive qualities. However, I feel that certain aspects of Drag should require more careful consideration. Over the past two decades, drag has transformed tremendously. What exactly is drag in 2013?
A drag queen is a man, usually homosexual, creating a female illusion through clothing and performance. This illusion ends when the costume comes off. There are many genres and subgenres of drag. Not every drag queen agrees or identifies with all of the categories and genres that have been named. Some queens do not approve of various terms that are currently used in certain gay communities. Sometimes these categories can divide the drag community, which some feel is unproductive. Certain genres of drag queens aim to be “fishy,” meaning as close to a biological woman’s aesthetics as possible. Other genres are more “androgynous.” This genre relies on gender bending, the act of confusing preconceived notions. There are many types of drag. Check out Misty’s definitions of drag genres:
In the eighties, the gay rights movement took off, and drag queens began to hold drag balls in Harlem, NY. These balls were a place for drag queens to come and express themselves. This was a positive alternative to drugs, prostitution, and becoming an HIV statistic. Due to the prejudice that the gay community experienced for existing outside of what mainstream society thinks of as normal, many gay individuals lived in poverty and were forced into living undesirable lifestyles. This set up a standard where it was nearly impossible for those who identified as gay to be treated as equals.
The work that drag queens do can be a productive rebellion and commentary against patriarchal society. When a man dresses as a woman, he is making a brave choice to exist outside of what is considered normal. He is, therefore, broadening the definition of normality. Drag queens perform as females and an androgynous queen potentially be identifying with both sexes during their performances. This is accomplishing new realms of possibilities for the roles of gender in society. Female illusion empowers women and allows femininity to be positive and celebrated instead of oppressed.
Some forms of drag exhibit qualities which I think should be seen as fine art. Contemporary art is valued for its aesthetics as well as its ability to educate and push the audience to think critically. Androgynous drag helps us progress and serves as an art medium manifesting itself to make important statements. This is not just art for art’s sake; drag accomplishes the unique goal of being true to itself and making social commentary at the same time. The alluring visuals of a queen’s costume and makeup reinforce whatever concept that they are addressing. These queens are able to achieve their goal through simply being their character, which serves as the art medium. Drag that is androgynous blurs the idea of what is feminine and what is masculine. In doing this, we reach the conclusion that we cannot separate the two and privilege specific ideas within these categories.
Performance drag should be viewed as fine art as well. Many queens in this genre implement criticality and magnificent aesthetics in their performances. Drag queen Sharon Needles, who is from Pittsburg and was popularized on Season Four of RuPaul’s Drag Race, is known for his controversial and critical performances, as well as his spooky androgynous drag looks. Needles’s performances greatly consider context; he carefully thinks about the space and audience before the performance. Pre-Ru Paul, Needles had been known to dress up like a blond female Nazi and lip-sync to Walt Disney songs during his performances. This caused great deal of controversy but as a Jew I do not find myself offended. In this performance, Needles is outing Disney for being anti-Semitic, while making a mockery of Adolf Hitler. Needles shows his careful consideration (he is not just being controversial for the sake of it) by using his identity as a drag queen performing in controversial costumes to point out the absurdity of Hitler’s frightening ideas. Needles is relying on his open minded audience (they are there to see a drag queen after all) to understand this message. Some of these scary ideas are the Aryan race, the final solution, and the idea that any human being could be less than another. I think Needles is also making a comment on the lack of civil rights and equality in America today, especially for to women and the gay community. He stated that he is not “just wearing these things for no reason.” Oftentimes during performances, Needles speaks about uplifting those who are not accepted in society:
Drag should be considered fine art for its alluring visuals. Needles has previously based his illusions or looks off of women who have had excessive amounts of plastic surgery. Some of these have included bandaging and even a syringe, which is held up to his lips and used to mimic collagen being injected. I feel that this is intense commentary that shows the pressure that the media places on body image. This pushes an unrealistic idea of beauty onto ] society. People should be able to choose what they want to do with their own body, and not feel forced into anything. This artwork reminds us of the controversial performances of Orlan, a woman who has committed herself to a life of repetitive plastic surgeries in the name of art. Orlan’s project and its place in the art world are often debated within the art community, while the work of Sharon Needles is not even on the radar of most people in the fine art community. Needles makes advanced and sophisticated artistic critiques, which are being overlooked by the art world.
In my art, I explore questions surrounding female expectation and equality. I think critically about drag queens and their role in this conversation. This can be understood through the works’ formal qualities. BiProduct Photos from Performance documents a one-hour performance, which is done in solitude. BiProduct: Containment was created first; it showcases a clear glass jar containing excess foam, which was made from the process of sculpting foam pieces from other works in the series.
BiProduct Containment
BiProduct Performative Objects was created during the one-hour performance. This piece consists of the nylon and foam wearable products that were used during the performance. These are now installed as an empty skin on the wall. Separately from these works, BiProduct: Pile was made, and these sculptures are responsive to the other works in the series. BiProduct: Pile is wrapped with a range of neutrally colored spandex, which wrinkles and restricts around the foam.
BiProduct Performative Objects
BiProduct aims to examine some of the sub genres of drag and break down the commentary that particular categories may make about women in relation to society. In “BiProduct: 40 Images from Performance,” I apply a sculpted idealized padding, created from foam, to my body. Padding is a practice done by some drag queens in which foam inserts are applied to the body in order to obtain an idealized female form.
My padding is applied directly after binding my torso in a duct tape corset and casing the rest of my body in restrictive nylon and spandex. This is also a practice observed by some queens to achieve a feminine body. Next, I spread bright drag-inspired makeup onto my face. I then dress in loud revealing clothing to finally create my version of the overly idealized female through the lens of a drag queen.
This is not an acceptable way of viewing women. Placing importance on the physical body over intellect is offensive. It is important not to flatten women into one dimensional beings. BiProduct explains to the audience the dangers that come along with stereotyping of women, members of the gay community, and, in particular, drag queens.
The negative view of these groups is socially constricted and perpetuated by the media’s reinforcement of negative stereotypes, and old-fashioned ideas. It is not only unnecessary, but also harmful for anyone to participate in the advancement of negative ideas, particularly from one marginalized group to another.
BiProduct uses materiality that is raw, neutral, and tactile to reinforce its ideas of body image, social construction, and expectation. These materials are both visually exuberant, as well as stale and muted in color.
This allows the project to discuss both the positive and negative sides of this conversation. In doing this, the conversation between drag queens and women is promoted as important. This is essential in order for both parties to grow and make progress toward equality. The constructive process directly references the notion of a constructed norm. Its raw immediacy and materiality recalls something which is void of preconceived notions or attachments. This forces the viewer to consider societal expectations and social acceptance.
The idea of hypocrisy is closely considered in BiProduct, especially relating to drag queens and women. The project highlights genres of drag that depict women in a stereotypical light which might present a limited understanding of femininity. BiProduct also considers genres of drag which are portraying a more progressive illusion. The objects in BiProduct are representative of female body parts which, in turn, objectifies women. This points out how objectification is manifesting itself in many places within western society, including the drag community. For the majority of our community, men control the way women are viewed. The notion of an ideal body constructed through the male criteria reinforces the idea that a woman should be valued through male criteria. This removes women’s power and forces unrealistic, negative expectations of women in society.
Drag that reinforces negative views of women shows one-dimensional characters and values the physical over the intellectual. In this case, the individuals depicting this view are promoting one minority and demoting another. This is not as successful as a drag queen that can promote minorities and deconstruct socially constructed norms. Often times, we can participate in contributing to these stereotypes if we are not self-aware.
Whilecritiquing the narrow definition of femininity, BiProduct also challenges drag which perpetuates outdated ideas. It also begins a conversation about the topic at large situated in the context of related issues. It is important that all groups of people be viewed as equal and that society participates in taking action to make this a reality.
–Leah Koontz
June 2013
Leah Koontz
Leah Koontz grew up in Louisville, Colorado near the foot of the Rocky Mountains. In the early 2000s she moved to Philadelphia, where she lives now. With the support of her amazing family, she was able to connect with her love for art. Currently she attends Moore College of Art and Design where she is majoring in Fine Art and minoring in Curatorial Studies. She expects to receive her BFA in 2014. Leah spends her time creating art, reading books, protesting patriarchy, and of course attending local drag shows.
RITHIKA MERCHANT Works on Paper: Comparative Mythology
I began working on a series of paintings dealing with Comparative Mythology about two years ago. My work explores the common thread that runs through different cultures and religions. Similar versions of many myths, stories and ideas are shared by cultures all around the world. I use creatures and symbolism that are part of my personal visual vocabulary to explore these narratives.
I am currently continuing in the same vein but focusing now on a branch of Comparative Mythology that deals with Joseph Campbell’s theory of the Hero/Monomyth. The Monomyth refers to the journey of the Hero. There is a pattern that involves seventeen steps that the hero passes through during his journey.
The seventeen step journey is spilt up into three phases– the departure, the initiation and the return.
This pattern is found in many narratives from different cultures and religions and time periods. I am making a series of paintings based on this, but I am re imagining this story from the perspective of the Heroine instead. It is my personal and contemporary interpretation of this theory.
Supernatural Guides is the third step of the departure phase. My Heroine has encountered her supernatural helpers, who will guide her and help her when she is in need.
Meeting With The Goddess and Apotheosis are both part of the initiation phase. In Meeting With The Goddess she encounters the all powerful unconditional love of her mother. It is her return to her creator to which is inextricably linked and whose power fuels her.
Apotheosis is the period of rest in the journey, right before she begins her return. The heroine takes the time to enjoy the peace and fulfillment of her journey so far. She is seen leaving behind the material realm and ascending to the spiritual realm.
The Magic Flight and The Return are both part of the return phase. In The Magic Flight she must escape with the boon she has fought for. She is able to make her escape, closely guarding the boon while the baser creatures who only value power, fight over it.
As she reenters the world, she is now faced with figuring out how to share and integrate the wisdom her boon brings with the others. In The Return she offers the boon to the masses, which symbolized by smaller simpler versions of herself who are similar to her state in the material realm of Apotheosis.
Through the course of her journey, my Heroine transforms her state. Her colours and patterns reflect her inner being as well as the outside influences. Sometimes two versions of her are shown the same time and demonstrate her evolution from one state to the next.
Supernatural Guides, 2012, 70 x 70 cms, Gouache and Ink on Paper Meeting With The Goddess, 2012, 80 x 70 cms, Gouache and Ink on Paper Apotheosis, 2013, 100 x 70 cms, Gouache and Ink on Paper The Magic Flight, 2013, 50 x 70 cms, Gouache and Ink on Paper The Return, 2013, 70 x 50 cms, Gouache and Ink on Paper
–Rithika Merchant
June , 2013
Rithika Merchant
Rithika Merchant is an Indian visual artist. She was born in 1986 in Mumbai, India. She graduated with a BFA in Fine Arts with Honors from Parsons the New School for Design in New York City in 2008. In 2006 she traveled to Greece to study painting and conceptual art at the Hellenic International Studies In the Arts in Paros, Greece. Following her graduation, Rithika has exhibited widely in Europe as well as select venues in Mumbai, New York and Montreal. She had her first major solo exhibition in Mumbai in 2011. The following year she was represented as a solo art project at Swab Art Fair in Barcelona, Spain. Rithika is currently preparing for her second solo exhibition, which will open in October 2013 in Mumbai. She divides her time between Mumbai, India and Barcelona, Spain. See more of her work at www.rithikamerchant.com
I have always made art including drawings and works on paper. This selection is from 1972 to 2013 and is a good sample of the themes, images and mediums that have always interested me for over forty-three years as an artist. My training was in commercial art. I began working in the advertising field in 1966 upon completing a two year course at New York City Community College, as it was then known. This training was outdated. In any event, I had little trouble in finding jobs. However, these jobs depended on skills that I really didn’t have, and my heart was not really in the ad game.
I want my art to go through slow constant changes, but at the same time I want vast abrupt changes. Nature does the same. Since 1969, I have been making small scale sculptures and miniature environments that have been boxed, floored and walled.
Within these small spaces a wide range of images have been constant and consistent. Houses, mountains, trees, bodies of water and land masses. My work over the years has changed, as I’m always experimenting with my language.
Nature frightens. No slow early autumn walks in the country for me. Nature is a mother with a knife, ready to pounce on us without warning.
Mountains collapse, rivers reclaim, skies open up and caves swallow. But there is also a beauty in this destruction. Keeping myself far away from all things that are natural is what I have a sweet tooth for. The landscapes of my mind reach out for other minds in beautiful acts of aggression.
“Head.” 2012. Collage, paint and ink on paper. 9 1/2″ x 12 1/2″
“Box.” 2012. Collage, ink and paint on paper. 9 1/2″ x 12 1/2″
“The Couple.” 2013. Ink, paint and collage on notebook paper. 9 3/4″ x 7 1/2″
“Brick wall with burnt trees and houses.” 1972. Crayon on notebook paper. 9 3/4″ x 7 1/2″
“Man with two heads.” 2012. Collage, paint and ink on notebook paper. 9 3/4″ x 7 1/2″
Abstract. 1977 paint, collage on notebook paper 9 3/4″ x 7 1/2″
Ira Joel Haber was born and lives in Brooklyn New York. He is a sculptor, painter, book dealer, photographer, and teacher. His work has been seen in numerous group shows both in USA and Europe and he has had nine-one man shows including several retrospectives of his sculpture. His work is in the collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York University, The Guggenheim Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and his paintings, drawings, and collages have been published in many online and print magazines. He has received three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, two Pollock-Krasner grants, the Adolph Gottlieb Foundation grant and, in 2010, he received a grant from Artists’ Fellowship Inc. Currently he teaches art at the United Federation of Teachers Retiree Program in Brooklyn.
William Sulit & Beth Kephart CHICKEN DANCE, DIGITAL 3-D DESIGN
A conversation between a writer wife and her artist husband, in a quest to understand
Important Subject: A chicken
BK: You spend hours in your garage studio (among the ghosts of a skinny car, in the shadow of night visitors, within walls yellowed by old fuels) fiddling with electronic pencils and twinned screens, and you come up with … a chicken? Why a chicken? How did your chicken begin?
WS: It began with a sphere about the size of a golf ball. I’m sure electrons are involved but what is really being manipulated are vertices. This chicken was really a way to test 3D printing technology (color and all). No lofty idea—just that as someone who works with 3D “art,” I wasn’t going to leave that stone unturned.
BK: And I thought I had married into lofty. Didn’t you promise me lofty? Okay, then. You began to pull and poke at this thing, began to manipulate these vertices. The computer can’t resist you. There isn’t any tactile feel to this material, no smell, nothing that gets your hands dirty. Do you still consider this art? Because, at the very least, I married into art. Didn’t I?
WS: That part feels more like a craft than an art to me. I am usually making images that will exist in two-dimensional space (printed or on a computer screen). What I like about the process is the flexibility of constructing something in virtual space and then “walking” in or around the object to determine which view will work best for my purposes. I don’t have to capture the decisive moment right away. I can capture the whole moment and then decide later.
BK: I married a craftsman? Now you tell me? You married a writer, by the way. And she’s never changed her professional tune. In any case: You painted your chicken, you hollowed it out—all virtually, of course. What, precisely, were you hoping for as you worked? How did you know you were done? I know it wasn’t when I called you for dinner, because you showed up late. Repeatedly.
WS: It was done when I felt it made a big enough contribution to the cultivation of the human spirit.
BK: As you do. Every day. What does this new art replace, in terms of traditional, tactile craft?
WS: You can now turn very intricate and complex geometry into a precise physical object, something that would be very difficult to do by hand. You can, for example, make an object based on a mathematical equation (like a gyroid). With this process there are fewer limits on producing what you can imagine.
BK: You make me afraid, very afraid. I have had encounters with your imagination.
WS: (silence)
BK: Then answer this: What can never be replaced in terms of traditional, tactile craft?
WS: Nothing can replace the story that hands leave on an object.
BK: Such a nice sentiment. You make me fall in love all over again. (With you, in case you were wondering.) How does this 3D stuff compare to the actual pottery work you have begun to do—in a real studio, with real people, real dust, real kilns?
WS: They are completely separate things for me. When I work with 3D software I need to have a clear path to where I’m going with it. I need to know what I’m trying to make in order to figure out how to do it. With pottery I’m still part of my own audience; I don’t really know what it will be or how it will turn out, even though there is a certain amount of preconception in pottery. Things like gravity, the properties of the material, tools, dexterity etc. all play equal parts along with the brain.
BK: How does this change what is possible for artists? Because you are, also, still an artist. Right?
WS: I think it opens up another door for those who are in the business of making things. 3D printing has been around for a while but it has recently become more available and affordable to everyone. I’ve seen 3D printed jewelry in galleries and there are also people studying how to use similar technology in large-scale products (such as architectural components). The use of 3D software in general is just another tool in the shed. Creative types will always find ways of putting it to good use—either as a way of making images and/or physical objects.
William Sulit, a photographer and an award-winning illustrator, received his master’s degree in architecture from Yale University. Today he is the design partner in the boutique marketing communications firm, Fusion Communications. His photography and illustrations have appeared in Ghosts in the Garden (authored by Beth Kephart) and Zenobia: The Curious Book of Business (authored by Beth Kephart and Matthew Emmens) and will be featured in the forthcoming Dr. Radway’s Sarsaparilla Resolvent, a novel of 1871 Philadelphia written by Beth Kephart (Temple University Press/New City Community Press).
Beth Kephart, an award-winning writer of fifteen books, is the strategic writing partner in Fusion Communications. She teaches creative nonfiction at the University of Pennsylvania, writes essays and reviews for a number of national publications, and blogs daily atwww.beth-kephart.blogspot.com. Her most recent novel, Small Damages, was named the year’s most lyrical young adult novel by The Atlantic Wire.
This series of images were all taken at the Michael Allcroft Antiques shop in Disley, Cheshire. I was born on the Cheshire-Derbyshire border and have lived there all my life. I love to take photographs in museums and in cities, but as I am not often able to travel alone long distances, I have to look for subjects a lot closer to home.
The red lion sign is a favourite of mine and makes me think of all the old pubs and of the social life they used to generate in local towns and villages near to me. Only across from the road from Michael Allcroft’s, lies an abandoned pub which will now probably face its future as living accommodation as apposed to a busy hive in the community. Here is a photo of the sign in the Michael Allcroft catalogue.
The luminous chairs are a wonderful vibrant contrast. The blue tinge and the vicious red match together well. The white running over the red and the almost flour like covering to the blue makes me want something this vibrant in my home if I were to furnish my surroundings.
The floral patterns on the furniture close up in black and white are to my memory part of a big screen. I enjoy textures heavily as can be seen in my work and they are very important to create depth.
I love the kitsch of the old tennis racket with the photograph on it , the warm hues I feel compliment the smile of the vintage black and white portrait.
Antique, boutique, and thrift shops have proven invaluable for my catalogue of work. I have created many, many images from objects in my own neighbourhood, whether they be at the bottom of the road five minutes away or already in my garden. My three most-exhibited images were all taken within half a minute’s walk of each other at my home:
Eleanor Leonne Bennettis a 16-year-old, international award-winning artist. Her photography has been exhibited globally in London, Paris, Indonesia, Los Angeles, Florida, Washington, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Canada, Spain, Germany, Japan, Australia, and many other locations. She has been selected for theCIWEM Environmental Photographer of the year Exhibition. She was also the only person from the UK to have her work displayed in the National Geographic and Airbus run See The Bigger Picture global exhibition tour with the United Nations International Year Of Biodiversity 2010.
Blake Martin The Rise of the Selfie in the 21st Century
Click on any photo to see it at full size.
Why do we take self-portraits?
As someone who has always felt the urge to take pictures of myself, I don’t have a ready answer.
For the longest time I felt shame for this urge to see myself through my lens. Blame it on the Christian ethos of original sin that shaped my early life, but this habit of posing for my own camera felt like an exercise in vanity. Up until the Instagram era, I rarely, if ever, shared my self-portraits with others.
There is one self-portrait from 2001 that I printed and gave to a friend, but the image is out of focus, blurred and impressionistic like a Monet, and you’d never know I was sitting in the windowsill of the Rodin Museum in Paris basking in the June afternoon light. It’s the perfect non-self-portrait.
Since then, I have come to understand that my human experience is shaped by mental illness: depression. Understanding and accepting this diagnosis was the first hurdle, and required me to eschew more palatable labels like “over sensitive,” “the creative temperament,” and that Dr. Phil standby “just feeling sorry for yourself.”
The most acute moments of depression sail on the wings of despair like an albatross pumping her ancient wings. The wind makes you squint and you wonder if the ride will ever end. In my experience, the most painful symptom is the inability to enjoy basic social interactions. In my late 20’s and early 30’s, how often did I stand around at parties faking my mood while the back of my brain recalled happier times when I used to enjoy talking to friends, meeting new folks around town, taking joy in the shifting night landscape of a city or a friend’s company?
My hiatus in taking self-portraits, from 2007-2011, coincides with a dark chapter in my emotional life that’s at odds with what I was accomplishing on the surface. By November of 2011, I had a burgeoning small business, professional faculty over my creative skills, a body in excellent physical shape, and a mental landscape that threatened to fracture at any moment. All that I had was built on the intense manic spells I suffered through, and all that I had achieved seemed to teeter in the strong winds of my illness.
Around this time, in December of 2011, I downloaded Instagram. I thought it was just another app that offered filters for your iPhone photos. My second Instagram was a self-portrait as I walked to a party. Within an hour an old boyfriend that I was fond of left a comment. I felt connected: connected to another and connected to myself in a way I had not felt in a very long time, and in a way that was less public (at the time) than Facebook. In those early days of Instagram, it felt like a club for the sensitive, over-observant nerds.
I threw myself into Instagramming, relishing how a filter would transform an image, how textures and colors and light were celebrated or muted with the tap of a finger. And in the midst of this exploration I included plenty of self-portraits and it seems in some way that this app helped me to see myself in a way that kept my depression at arm’s length.
Through Instagram, I came to understand that my urge to take self-portraits was akin to cutting. That is to say, through the years I turned to self-portraits much in the way sufferers of depression use cutting. I took self-portraits to feel alive, to disassociate from the pain and confusion in my brain, to see myself in this moment now, alive, pulsing with life, beautiful and vibrant, exquisitely calibrated for my own perfection.
By late August of 2012, Instagram was my lifeline to a thriving creative life. The pictures speak for themselves. There I am traipsing through the empty dunes of Provincetown’s famous salt marshes. I could barely believe what I was capable of expressing to the world, and then, plop! my phone tipped over on its tripod into the Atlantic and I had just enough time to send my last few pictures to a friend’s gmail before the phone shut down forever.
For about 2 days I was lost to myself. And then I realized what was next: to shoot in this spirit with my professional camera. Instagram had prepared me to take this pursuit seriously, to listen to my most primal instinct to create, and what followed was an extraordinary period of personal exploration painstakingly documented for myself, and perhaps for the larger conversation I desired to be a part of.
Self-portrait in the salt marsh, Cape Cod, September 2012
Self-portrait in the salt marsh, Cape Cod, September 2012