Otto von Busch – Fashion Safehouse

 

The current show at the Museum of Contemporary Craft, Fashioning Cascadia, takes two provisional, speculative spaces as its object. The first is fashion, and the second is the region known as Cascadia.

Cascadia can be a different place, depending on whom you ask. The term was originally deployed by sociology professor David McCloskey to refer to the Pacific Northwest—from northern California to British Columbia—as a distinct “bioregion” in 1970. Since then, the exact boundaries of Cascadia and its purpose have been drawn differently for every person making a map. Activists use the name and dreams of eventual autonomy from the United States and Canadian government as a platform to talk about environmentalism, indigenous rights, and various criticisms of the federal government. Local and regional government, on the other hand, makes use of the term to discuss development plans, referring to the urban corridor of Interstate 5 as a transportation and economic region with its own characteristics. Businesses use the regional pride inherent in the term to market products. Everything from local beer to Portland’s Major League Soccer team have adopted the “Doug Fir” Cascadian flag for branding.

Michelle Lesniak – Decay Collection

 

The show at the Museum of Contemporary Craft uses the term to create a spatial imaginary: a place where visitors can observe spatial proposals made by fashion designers, and think about clothing in a new way. By invoking the idea of Cascadia, the show thinks about fashion as a separate spatial dimension to our daily life. Clothing surrounds everything we do, but outside of this utilitarian reality, where does fashion reside? It is a potential idea, a possibility of existing in space differently. Neither fashion or the secession fiction Cascadia can fully change reality, but they can change the way we think about reality.

Sarah Margolis-Pineo, in her curatorial statement, talks about Portland as an “un-fashionable” city. This is not, she writes, to say that Portland doesn’t have style. But it separates itself from trends in a way that gives its clothing a stronger vitality, a connection to the more material ends of land and labor. The show certainly emphasizes the space of process. Anna Cohen’s work for Imperial Stock Ranch and Michelle Lesniak’s Decay Collection speak to both creation and destruction, the former emphasizing the rich wool textures emanating from Oregon sheep farming, and the latter the leafy, forest loam coating the backs of the mountains and valleys in the Pacific Northwest. In one sense, these designs simply celebrate a particular aesthetic. We are familiar with clothing that looks rugged, warm, and worker-like, just as we are with outfits that look a bit punk and distressed. But the clothing speaks to the interaction with place, not the look of the place.

Liza Rietz – Crescent Dress & Points Dress

 

The presentation of the garments in the show make fashion a spatial, sculptural art. Rather than portrayed flat, via photographs of models wearing the garments, they are fitted onto headless and legless dress forms, shown in the middle of the gallery space, in some cases hanging from the ceiling. Liza Rietz’ Assymetrical Tiered Dress and Crescent Dress are not only puffed out, three-dimensional forms in and of themselves, but they show a potential, experiential space within them. What other sculpture is presented with the intention that viewers should imagine themselves crawling inside the work, and then venturing out into the world, conducting their daily life wearing the sculpture as a second skin? Clothing, presented as spatial augmentation, invites us to imagine a world in which we look different. The world suggested by Fashioning Cascadia is one in which the daily utilitarian coverings we don have changed shape and texture. As the viewer walks through the exhibit, feeling fabric swatches and looking at the displayed process of design from sketching, to fabric cuts, to pattern making, to stitching, one doesn’t imagine a fashion lifestyle that one might be invited to buy into, but a specific practice of clothing oneself, a means of altering one’s personal space we might all adapt, regardless of what we wear.

Liza Rietz – Crescent Dress

 

The political reality of Cascadia may be untenable. And one feels the abstract character of claims that fashion could “change the world”. Otto von Busch’s more literal sculpture, Fashion Safehouse, is a political performance, a simple wooden structure that claims to “displace” the power of fashion, “a hypothetical platform for alternative fashion production and strategic overview of how to escape from the dominant logic”. But in the sense that all politics is speculative, idealistic, and performance, this reminds us that fashion and politics are very similar. As in architecture, facades may differ, but the walls remain. The default clothing and regional character we assume will always have an effect on shaping our space. So why not think speculatively? Imagining one is climbing inside a different reality, even if only for the time that one is wandering through the show, can only be a healthy experiment.

By Adam Rothstein

Nicholas Galanin. Inert, 2009. Wolf pelts, felt. 72 x 48 x 30 in.
Collection of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, Seattle

 

Step into the Frye Art Museum for Your Feast Has Ended and you’ll likely feel more than a twinge of guilt. The exhibit features work by Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes (Seattle), Nicholas Galanin (Alaska), and Nep Sidhu (Toronto) who have created works that prompt reflection on cultural power plays, and provide a lesson in how to turn historical hurts into contemporary triumphs.

Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes, Wait! Wait! Don’t Shoot (An Incantation for Jazz and Trayvon), 2013–14. Incantation; vintage fibers, filaments, and hides, including late 19th-century French batting, mid-20th-century jackets, Nike running shoes, and chenille patches 52 1/2 x 36 x 2 in. Courtesy of the artist

 

A few feet into the entryway Galanin’s mass of porcelain arrows fly overhead spanning two separate galleries. Elevated from weaponry to the ranks of art, they don’t threaten to strike a physical target. Instead they hit their mark by showing how the facade of a cultural heritage is often adopted at the expense of the guts. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Galanin’s floor-bound sculpture Inert in which a lone wolf resurrects itself from its trophy-kill skin. The back of the beast, ostensibly the past, lies dormant while the head and torso surge forth into the future. As Galanin explains “Mainstream society often looks at Indigenous or Native American art through a romantic lens, not allowing a culture, like my Tlingit community, room for creative sovereign growth.”  Not only does Galanin’s wolf rise from his ashes, he looks pretty pissed off about being put there in the first pace.

Like Galanin, Alley-Barnes calls upon the power of skins and clothing to express identity, both individual and collective. His pelt series combines thrift store finds in the way of jackets, shoes, vintage fabrics and patches that pieced together form personalities from the artist’s world, as well as those from our collective consciousness. Wait! Wait! Don’t Shoot (An Incantation for Jazz and Trayvon) references Trayvon Martin—the 17-year-old African American teenager shot in a gated community of Florida by a neighborhood watch volunteer who claimed that Martin looked “suspicious.”

Sidhu creates mandala-like wall-hung sculptures and wearables that go far beyond merely protecting their owners from the elements. Instead, his clothing and jewelry line, Paradise Sportif, protects and enhances modern day ceremony. “When understanding the power of our past messengers and healers,” writes Sidhu, “the garments that they wore played significance in their function as much as their understanding of nature rhythm, dance and medicine.” He incorporates ancient texts into pieces that function as talismans, prayers, portals into the spiritual realm, and weapons in their own right.

Nep Sidhu, (Re) Confirmation A, 2014. Acrylic and ink on paper, chromed steel, marble veneer, brass
86 x 86 x 3 in. Courtesy of the artist

 

With all the jewelry, clothing, audio, video, pelts, and ephemera on view it’s hard to establish what is art and what is life—which is exactly the point. This is hardly work fit for the white cube, except that thankfully it finally is. Could life be stranger than art? Although the majority of works on view “contemporarize” traditional practice to make their point, one piece in the exhibit needs no embellishment at all: a tiny pair of handcuffs used to lead Native American Indian children away from their families. The Frye has been the gatekeeper of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century German art since 1952. The impressive gilt-framed collection remains on view at the back of the museum where viewers can get their gaze on ogling masterfully painted pastorals. Then they can stride into the gallery next door for a dose of reality and some serious attitude. Originally titled “Oh, Ye Parasites, Your Feast has Ended,” this exhibit doesn’t pull any punches, which is precisely what makes it such a knockout.

By Suzanne Beal

Akiko Kotani Process with Plastic Bags.

 

Artist Akiko Kotani has been preparing Soft Walls for over two years. Walls covered in cascading white material take center stage, each row of the textile hand crocheted by Kotani in her studio. Originally from Hawaii and currently based in Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, she retired in 2000 as a Professor Emeritus of Art at Slippery Rock University. With a BFA in painting from the University of Hawaii at Honolulu and an MFA in Fibers from Tyler School of Art, she combines her training as a painter with her affinity for fiber work to create large, imaginative, handmade installations and drawings. Also influenced by Bauhaus, Buddhism, Mayan weaving, Mbuti bark drawings, and her travels, the work maintains a lightness, grace, and sense of playfulness that stems from Kotani’s constant exploration.  Utilizing simple materials and methods, Kotani introduces complex ideas and an incredible patience to create dynamic and monumental forms.

Kotani with Soft Walls

 

To see more of Kotani’s work, please visit her website.  Soft Walls is on view at Women and Their Work in Austin, Texas from July 12 to August 29, 2014.

First, talk about a little bit about your upcoming exhibition at Women and Their Work in Austin, TX. How did this work come to be and how has it progressed in the process of its creation?

Like much of my work, the enormous Soft Walls and The Black Sea arose through responsive intuition that guides my hand as the creative process develops. Although the image of Soft Walls came to me spontaneously, it’s fashioning required 2+ years of labor as I cut and crocheted thousands strands of plastic trash bags. Memories of the actual Black Sea (I lived in Istanbul for 2 ½ years) inspired this dreamlike pointillist piece made of stitched bamboo threads on paper. I am delighted beyond words that these pieces will be exhibited at Women and Their Work, since the original impulse that gave rise to them came from my own lifelong concern to celebrate the work of women.

Using methods and materials that have strong ties to women’s handicraft as well as an ecological angle, how do you place yourself within feminism and sustainability? 

Embedded in my work is my training in painting.  For me “the image” is the primary source of the “work.” The material and the method always come after the image is located. Thus, the plastic trash bags of Soft Walls serve for me as a complex commentary on a material that both resists sustainability and allows for a gesture of respect for the centuries old household service of women.  My methods echo those of my mother and of countless women: obsessively working with one’s hands crafting works to enhance one’s home and body. My artistic imperatives trump categorization; nothing trumps my celebration of women’s lives and work.

Akiko Process in the studio

 

How does your interest in space and purity combine with the traditions of women’s work that you employ? How do you choose materials and how do they dialogue with these ideas? 

When I think of space and purity I imagine objects in space. Space now becomes a solid and the art objects function as punctuations in space. This is how I enter my imaginative world to create my work. I feel that sensing the space around the objects solidifies and makes that space resonate. Thus the art object’s boundaries do not end within the parameters of the solid but will expand by activating the space that surrounds it.

Now, how to relate this to traditional women’s work? Once again, my work starts with the image, then the supporting materials and methods follow. In the work Soft Walls, the solidity of the work in the wooden structure that suggests the strength of a woman in her home. She is recognized as a stalwart and the basic structure of the family. (This has complex ramifications as do societal roles, etc.) The work’s soft surface and texture images her gentle and delicate role within this universe.

The-Black-Sea-Detail

 

You seem to have an interest in the simplification of materials and methods combined with a complexity of ideas to create a particular sense of space and visual texture. How do you meld the essential and the spatial?

I have always been drawn to the essential method of a technique. When studying Guatemalan weaving with Mayan Indians in Guatemala, I wanted to be taught the earliest weaving designs. When examining the American Indian textiles, I wanted to know where the designs started. The Mbuti scratching’s on bark also pointed me to abstractions of pure imagination of cycles of their real and imaginative world. My attraction to these matters is deep in my work. It seems that the choices I have made reflect the use of the simplest methods to produce heavily laden and complex hidden systems that have endured.

By Gracelee Lawrence

Admittedly, Tom Corbin’s exhibition The Figure: Portrait and Symbol at the University of Mississippi Museum brought to mind a different idea then what the work actually invoked. The work is fairly traditional with figurative bronze sculptures and photorealistic portrait paintings. However, there is a complexity in the work, in its entirety, that feels like subversive action is taking place. This appears to occur through observation of the basic elements of everyday life, exploiting memories and emotions to create some idyllic and subjective reality that comes directly from the artist.

Bronze Bunnee, bronze with Indiana limestone base, 2010

 

Corbin takes from his immediate surroundings to create the whimsical sculptures and paintings, a constant synthesis of past, present and future idealized. The work included is from the past five years though a development from roughly three decades of working in multiple mediums. Featured are a variety of influences whether young adults with their carefree attitudes while enjoying a beach vacation or menial household tasks and movements, these moments become models for the art. Corbin uses the family dog, his daughter or personal muse, but largely the female form, one most easily romanticized.

Small sculptures show female figures standing in a boat, balancing each other on a see-saw and mowing the lawn. The paintings included in the exhibition bring distinct detail to the work, allowing a shift between photorealistic portraits and details of objectivity to the abstracted sculptures of a subjective realm, more of the human condition that Corbin refers to. Sarah offers a cupcake in both sculptural and painted space but one is obviously based off of a truer reality.

Girl on Trapeze, bronze, 2013.

 

The titles are very basic and refuse to add any guidelines or substantial value for viewer. The artist could have gone with more profound statements or philosophical titles, encouraging specific thoughts regarding each piece, however this may have taken away from a more universal experience that seems to be important for the basis of Corbin’s work. Without complex titles, the viewer is allowed to work their own personal experiences into the dialogue of the exhibition.

In The Figure: Portrait and Symbol, elements of Calder’s Circus show through, undoubtedly from a similar entwining of the artist’s personal associations with the activities and elements of daily life and the actors. Although specific examples, such as Girl On Trapeze and Horse and Rider II, allude to such an event, the interplay of the each element of the exhibition creates a narrative with a strong essence of a play or circus. With such deviation from realities, Man on Diving Board could be the opening act in the freak show before the Bronze Bunnee appears. The grotesque distortions immediately call to mind a surreal and fantastic lens that Corbin uses to shape his creative reality.

Corbin was born in Dayton, Ohio in 1954 and studied marketing at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He is owner of Corbin Bronze, a studio located in Kansas City.

For more information visit: corbinbronze.com or museum.olemiss.edu/corbin

By Jake Weigel

Permission for use of photos given by the University of Mississippi Museum. Taken by author.

Installation view. Courtesy of the artists, Anca Poterașu Gallery and Bucharest Biennale. Photo by Sorin Florea.

 

I have been off the bus for approximately ten minutes before I come to the slow acknowledgement that I am definitely on the wrong street. The directions to my hostel contain no street names and my initial sure footed confidence in striding out from the bus stop has slowly turned into the muted realisation that I could very well have been going in the wrong direction since I set foot on this massive central boulevard in Bucharest.

I am here to cover the 6th edition of the Bucharest Biennale, an exhibition that was initiated as more of a festival than a Biennale in 2005 by Pavilion Centre for Contemporary Art and Culture, and since 2006 has been held every two years in the Romanian capital. During the Press Conference the next day, co-founder Răzvan Ion characterises Pavilion and its wider work as “15 years of resistance,” and this socially and politically engaged emphasis is a useful framework with which to approach the exhibition and its surroundings.

Marilena Preda-Sânc (Globe, object, world globe, nails, 35 x 35 x 35 cm, 1999), Zoltán Béla (1-11683, WWII helmet, nickelled with chrome plating, buzzard wings, 66 x 55 x 44 cm, 2014), Gabriel Stoian (Peace, assemblage, taxidermy bird and olive branch, 40 x 30 cm, 2014), János Sugár (Mute, ongoing project, installation, five video loops between 10-20’, 2005). Courtesy of the artists, Anca Poterașu Gallery (Zoltán Béla’s work) and Bucharest Biennale. Photo by Sorin Florea.

 

Set across four main venues throughout the city, with a host of collateral events in Bucharest and as far afield as Tel Aviv and Zagreb, this iteration of the Biennale is curated by 21 year old Gergő Horváth under the title Apprehension. Understanding Through Fear of Understanding. The main exhibition contains the work of 19 artists from 11 countries, with performances, talks and other events taking place from May 23 until July 24. The exhibition itself is a fascinating mix of works within a unique framework which feels very much tied to the context of its location. The significance of the Biennale’s claim as “the only contemporary art biennial in Central and Eastern Europe” is also clearly important to the organisers.

Marilena Preda-Sânc (Globe, object, world globe, nails, 35 x 35 x 35 cm, 1999), Dan Beudean (The Hunter, mixed media on canvas, 165 x 80 cm, 2013). Courtesy of the artists, Zorzini Gallery (Dan Beudean’s work) and Bucharest Biennale. Photo by Sorin Florea.

 

Obviously to try and review the exhibition in its entirety would go beyond the focus of re:sculpt, however there were several sculptural highlights which stood out amongst the body of works on display which may be of particular interest to readers of this blog.

For me personally the highlight of the whole exhibition was Hungarian artist János Sugár’s work Mute, an installation on view at the Romanian Peasant Museum. Consisting of five muted television screens, the work presents the heavily choreographed political leader’s debates from five different countries, all playing with no sound. Instead, subtitles running along the bottom in the relevant languages play off jokes and stereotypes within the politics of contemporary arts.

“What were the media artist’s last words?”

“Relax, I know what I’m doing.”

As self-reflexive criticism the work feels sharp and effective, addressing the hierarchies of medium, gender, money, position and bureaucracy. Sugár’s inclusion at the Biennale feels significant given the political undertones of much of the exhibition. His dubious honour as the first artist within the EU to be prosecuted in court for their work (in 2008 for Wash Your Dirty Money With My Art) makes Sugár feel like the ideal participant in a Biennale which began with another work, BB+, conceived byCezar Lăzărescu & 1+1 being cancelled due to a contracted car company pulling out of its role due to the work’s perceived criticism of the Romanian government.

Equally pointed is Romanian artist Marilena Preda Sânc’s work, Globe. The small sculpture measuring just 35 x 35 x 35 cm and also on display at the Romanian Peasant Museum consists of a battered globe, distressed, torn apart and riddled with rusty nails. In one place it seems to have split with its contents sticking out like a worn teddy bear losing its stuffing, nestled on a bed of more bent and rusty nails. There is an accompanying video work by the same name (not on display at the Biennale but available on Youtube

which appears to show its creation. The artist’s destructive gestures as she scratches the surface of the globe with a box cutter, sets to it with a small saw and then proceeds to pound nails clumsily into its surface feels like a particularly timely political statement. All of the initial gestures are focussed on the European Continent and somehow echo the mood of many after the recent elections for the European parliament, where an unprecedented number of far-right extremists gained seats amongst widespread dissatisfaction with the political status quo in Europe.

A third and final highlight for me would have to be American/Filipino artist Stephanie Syjuco’s massive installation Free Texts: An Open Source Reading Room, which takes up the top floor at the Institute for Political research at the University of Bucharest. The display is spread across three walls and features posters of varying sizes advertising the URLs of a host of texts which all relate to the open source movement, copyright, digital reproduction and file sharing. At the bottom of each poster tabs with the URLs can be ripped off and taken home, like ‘Help Wanted’ ads on a lamppost. While there is clearly a commentary being made about access to cultural and academic resources, the artist also draws a link in her accompanying text with the struggle for physical and natural resources, and the way large companies are trying to patent genes of plants and animals as well. It raises striking questions about the so-called gate keepers within society and serves as both an attempt to shine a light and a kind of call to arms.

Stephanie Syjuco (FREE TEXTS: An Open Source Reading Room, installation, dimensions variable, 2012). Courtesy of the artist and Bucharest Biennale. Photo by Sorin Florea.

 

The political emphasis of the works within the framework of the Biennial as a whole makes it an altogether different animal from larger exhibitions in cities like Venice and Berlin. One journalist I spoke with seemed to think this was inevitable given its location and the challenges of holding it in a country like Romania, not just in terms of the difficulties faced by the contemporary arts establishment within the country but also because of the widely imbalanced portrayal of the country propagated outside its borders, especially in the West. Certainly the responses from people I experienced in both Bucharest and back in London supported this idea of the city and the country as a whole facing complex pressures for multiple sides. As a form of engagement with these myriad obstacles, the Biennale certainly feels like a fitting forum to try and address them.

By Will Gresson