The Back of Your Face, 2015, by Holly Hendry

For full documentation of the artwork go here.

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Romantico Elegante

My work spaces have changed a lot over the last four years or so. Actually, it is difficult for me to afford a permanent studio so I try to rent one for a while every time I have to make work for an exhibition. I also have another job that does not allow me to spend that much time in the studio, although it does allow me to pay my bills and to finance the production of my pieces.

The first studio I rented was a super small place in the house of a very conservative and Christian lady who failed to greet me when one day she came in to clean the space and found a pop-up edition of the Kamasutra I bought in an antique shop (I’m a big collector of useless things). After a while, along with my cousin, who is a photographer, I rented the bottom of a house in Chorrillos. We were evicted quickly because the owner decided to sell it. We felt sad because it was a very nice and quiet place to work and especially to get together, drink beer, and talk about our work (and problems). I still have not paid the phone bill for that place. The best studio I’ve ever had was one that I subleted from a friend to make work for a solo show last year. A nice, big house, located in one of the most beautiful areas of Lima, a place that sometime ago hosted La Culpable, an artists collective that is very important for the local art scene of Lima. After that I traveled to New York for three months to do a residency at Flux Factory, where I had a studio which was also my room. I had a tiny space between the bed and the wall to walk and a desk in which I drew a lot. The prettiest light ever came through that window.

So I have not been in permanent studio for more than a year, but I have been constantly changing my work space according to my needs and possibilities and many times I had to limit myself to work in my room or in my office desk (making a mess in the process). Less than a month ago I moved my studio to the house of a great friend I’ve had since I was a teenager. She bought this house in Barranco and lives there with another great friend. I’ve been very lucky, not only because the space is quite big and comfortable and because I rent it at a much lower price than it is worth; I can also spend time with my friends and laugh a lot. The house is located near the sea.

Las Princesas Solas En Mesa

Now I’m working on a new project which will be presented during Glasgow International this April  in the Project Room of Many Studios. It’s been a big challenge because it is the first time I work on a video but very exciting at the same time. The video shows part of the Peruvian Amazon Uiniversity, a modernist structure built in the Amazon rainforest that embodies a number of contradictions. It was supposed to be created as a response to the demand for a higher education institution in the area, as voiced for decades by the local communities. But this building is just  evidence on how the government spends a huge amount of money building structures that show its power instead of investing on a decent educational system. Although I find the architecture fascinating, the building imposes itself over nature, interfering with its order, and doesn’t respond to the community’s necessities.

The video progressively shows all spaces of the university revealing what the important structure contains: a precarious space in which learning is not fostered and where the lack of it is concealed. I talk about a particular contrast between modernism and lack of progress one constantly finds in Latin American societies. To shoot the video, I spent several days in the jungle. It was a hard work, especially because of the weather in Iquitos, but luckily I had the best team working with me.

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‘Where I Make’ invites readers behind the scenes of artists from many disciplines to share photographs and a little insight about where they create their masterpieces. See more from the series here.

Tsunami

Blowing your own Trumpet

One Step

Recent residencies I have undertaken tend to use collaboration as a modus operandi, and include a Creative Lab at CCA Glasgow, 2012: a Collaborative Residency for Counterflows Music Festival 2013, with Berlin based sound artist, Annette Krebs, at CCA Creative Lab; a Rough Mix cross platform collaborative residency for Magnetic North Theatre Co, at Tramway March 2013; a Protest and Propaganda Lab at Metal Liverpool; and a Team Effort residency at South Side Studios, Govanhill, Glasgow.

Recent exhibitions include Sluice Art Fair, London; Turin & Marseille Artists’ Exchange for WASPS’s Studios; ‘Rough Edit’ at InterviewRoom11, Edinburgh Art Festival 2014, ‘East End Transmissions’ at the Pipe Factory: ‘New Wave’ at the “Old Hairdressers”, ‘Seven Inch’ and ‘Record Store’ at Monorail Records, Glasgow and Avalanche Records, Edinburgh; ‘Fools Gold’ at the Briggait Project Spaces.

Wealth

I am currently President of Scottish Artists Union, (the main representative voice for visual and applied artists living and working in Scotland, campaigning for better working conditions for the artistic community); I am also a Freelance Representative for Engage, the National organisation for gallery education; and a Regional Advocate for the Paying Artists Campaign.  These involvements doubtless have an indirect influence on my practice through an ongoing preoccupation with the politics of creativity and cultural engagement.

At the moment I’m up on Lewis, about to start a project for ‘Mapping The Arteries’ through An Lanntair, using the bus routes of the islands as a starting point to develop artworks that will be sited in the iconic bus shelters of the islands. This commission will be an interesting way to develop new works that further consolidate different aspects of my practice.

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Are you willing to participate?, 2015

With the help of the objects and sculptures that I produce or select, I lead an investigation of what objects communicate and are able to modulate within social relations. Through my work I tend to question the impact and subversive potential of our material environment in our lives. I use fiction as a means to negotiate reality: it allows me to explore and point out the artificiality of what is engraved as being intuitive, natural or presented as the norm.

Lately video has taken a substantial place in my practice. I write the scenario at the same time as I produce the objects that will later play a part in the video. In this sense constructing the characters happens both in words and through material research. Therefore the two processes influence one another in the construction of the narration. I see exhibitions as occasions to extend the fictional space developed in videos through sculptures and installation that generate new directions for the work. Likewise the installation of a video can engender another installation, until it reaches a sense of exhaustion.

When I arrived at the Cooper Gallery Summer Residency in July, I’ve just finished the video Nothing Remains, Only Us and freshly set it up in a group exhibition. The video presents a man recalling a community he was part of. The people living in this community aimed to inhabit together a shared house in a way that will disturb their way of living and therefore create new means of experiencing and acting in society. The only rule which is said to have existed and been stressed was to produce a new object a day “which implied as a tacit agreement to break one thing beforehand”. The work shown in Dundee extends the research explored in the video on strategies of resistance towards productivity and participation. It addresses what relations and ways to inhabit the world can material empowerment invent. The sculpture presented acts as a body that spatially regulates the three approaches to material production in relation to individual withdrawal to the logic of labour.

One side of the sculpture shows the video on a flat screen TV. Viewers are invited to sit in this space filled with objects being in a bad mood or displaying their feelings and weaknesses. They express their dissatisfaction toward their functionality echoing a broader contemporary requirement of being happy, complete and accomplished but also functioning and productive. Inter-dependence is put on focus when care is applied to wherever the sculpture needs to: bandages cover flat angle brackets that needed to be added during the install to fix the fleshy beam as for the cushion that stands where the beam needed support.

During the residency, I started to reflect on notion of productivity within an artistic practice when responding to invitations to work. That’s what the opposite side of the sculpture draw upon. There, a drawing of an open mouth made with pink glitters rests on a curvy wall. The hole is cut out which allows to see the inside of the structure. Through this hole I’ve thrown the genuine and organic ceramic objects I made in the first weeks of the residency when aiming to populate and decorate my working environment Dundee. Performing a mindless and wrecker maker seemed to be an appropriate reaction when thinking of perpetual mobility and immediacy of production. I came here reading over The Lesbian Body of Monique Wittig again. The author is known for a statement she made in The Straight Mind, which was that lesbians are not woman since woman is nothing but a social class that they refuse to be part of. What is interesting is how she implies that lesbians refuse to become or to remain heterosexual, implying a conscious decision over passing a simple desire to revolt by taking concrete action endangering the patriarchal society. In The Lesbian Body she recalls the physical, material and mental love from one woman to another. This desire is mediated through the consumption of every bit of the partner’s body. A carnivorous, violent and destructive experimentation where the body has to be eaten and digested in order to be understood adored and re-invented. That was an opening point in considering the motif of destruction as a form of empowerment over one’s existence. This is extremely present in the video and I extend this aspect in the back of the sculpture when thinking of my own relation to labour.

Finally, on top of the structure, I’ve placed a terracotta pot that my mum made before I was born. We had a discussion around this pot a couple of days before I left for Dundee. It served as a proxy to discuss her long life living-and-working economy in which I was raised.  My stepfather and her started to rehabilitate a house whilst we were living there decades ago. Once the house was ready, it was sold in order to buy a new site. This process happened over and over and merged work and life. The pot is one of the rare objects that remain from all the relocations. Family and friends already appeared in some of my works, either through their material production or featuring some videos. Florent Dubois who plays the interviewee in the video presented at the Cooper Gallery is also a friend of mine. It was his first experience as an actor and for me the first time I asked someone to enact a well-defined role and to deliver a script. We spent three days together in what used to be my studio in Lyon and shot the whole thing on green screen.

Anouchka Oler will exhibit at Cooper Summer Residency Exhibition 2015: THINGNESS? until 10 October.

Images courtesy of the artist and Cooper Gallery DJCAD, University of Dundee. Photographer: Ross Fraser McLean.

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Down and Out in Berlin with Otto Dix by Bristol based painter, Mark Hollis. Hollis works mostly with acrylics and has a keen interest in colour and composition.

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Estilo Lion Man by Brazilian designer, Eduardo Sá (aka Benguele).

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Disposition by Montana based artist, Pamela Caughey. These works are part of a series exploring a variety of different media including watercolor, acrylic, gouache, collage, photography, ceramics, sculpture, printmaking and metals.

Caughey is currently on the faculty at the Bitterroot College of the University of Montana in Hamilton where she teaches courses in Visual Language-Drawing, 2D/Color and Design, and 3D Foundations courses.

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Growing and collecting vegetables in the Allotment Garden from a series of Writers Retreat Prints by Emma Dragovic.

Cargo

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Transition Collective #002, 2012
Screenprint on Metallic paper, Perspex (46 x 47 x 15cm)

This week, Ironbbratz Studios are taking over Central Station with featured work and blogs. Today’s featured work is by Luna Jungeun Lee who is working at Ironbbratz as part of the Graduate Residency Programme 2012/13.

Luna Jungeun Lee applies traditional western printmaking techniques and historical Korean compositional rules to the mass of amateur imagery that has bloomed with the newest digital distribution networks. Every morning, while still half-asleep, Lee has a discipline of spending an hour trawling the Internet for new images, appropriating anything that catches her attention as she slowly shifts from a semi-dream state to full waking consciousness – a process that might be understood as a contemporary equivalent of the surrealists’ automatic writing technique.
- by Art Critic, David Barrett (Associate Writer, Art Monthly)

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melody by Daria Zapala