slag mag issue 2
DESCRIPTION
The ReturnTRANSCRIPT
A PUBLICATION OF THE OLD FURNACE ARTIST RESIDENCY
SLAG MAG, Issue 2© 2014 | PUBLISHED BY JON HENRY WITH GUEST
PUBLISHER MARTHA SKINKEREDITED AND DESIGNED BY ELIZABETH YGARTUA
A PRODUCTION OF THE OLD FURNACE ARTIST RESIDENCY
The Old Furnace Artist Residency is an ongoing artist project curated by Jon Henry. The residency is located in Harrisonburg, Virginia. It is open to all forms of artistry: sculpture, painting, video, sound, conceptual, poetry, fiction writers, critical theorists etc. Special
attention is given to practices which are focused on social justice and being socially en-gaged. Emerging artists are especially encouraged to apply. O.F.A.R. is accepting residents
through 2015. Visit oldfurnace.tumblr.com for more information and to apply.
FEATUREDARTISTS
ANTHONY [email protected]
DANIEL [email protected]
ANSLEY [email protected]
LESLIE [email protected]
NGOC-TRAN [email protected]
PETER T. [email protected]
JACLYN [email protected]
KATRINA [email protected]
CRAIG [email protected]
HOWARD [email protected]
MARIO LAUTIER [email protected]
LAUREN [email protected]
INTRODUCTIONJON HENRY, artist and creator of SLAG MAG & O.F.A.R.
It is with great pleasure that I present the second issue of SLAG MAG. The first issue received a variety of praise and support that it seemed appropriate to continue with publishing SLAG MAG. I am honored to have Elizabeth Ygartua return as the co-editor for this edition. I am also pleased that a few of OFARs residents – Daniel King, Ngoc-Tran Vu, and Peter Christen-son – are featured in this issue. The second issue has the theme, The Return, which explores the reoccurring themes, imagery, or symbols in an artist’s work or a series of works.
The theme arose through the intersection of conversations and interests about psychoanaly-sis, history, and the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. SLAG MAG strives to interrogate artistic prac-tice and creativity in a playful yet approachable rigor. This issue is an opportunity for readers to engage directly with the artists and authors featured.
Artists were invited to submit three artworks that emphasize reoccurring topics, images, or symbols in their practice. They also provided their own textual analysis of the work. Our read-ers are invited to submit their own analysis to the readers through the provided emails. This is an opportunity for those interested in psychoanalysis, close reading, pen palling, critical theory, journalism, cultural analysis, constructive dialogue, and criticism.
Within my own practice, I have noticed the reoccurrence of various materials: water, glass jars, and glitter. These materials connect to my own personal histories and memory. I believe they speak to the fluidity of identity and attempts to document practice, memory, and geo-history. They speak to a utilitarian materiality with associations to my upbringing.
For this issue we turned to Kickstarter to fund printing costs for SLAG MAG. I would especial-ly like to thank Anna Lise Jensen, Tracey C. Taylor, Yolanda Anyon, and Tyler Bugg; without their robust support, we would not be having a print version. While antiquated, print mate-rial still fosters a tactical relationship that isn’t comparable to digital forms. Also, I am excited to announce that James Madison University’s Carrier Library will now be archiving the print copy of SLAG MAG in their Special Collections!
I hope you enjoy this new edition and will reach out to the featured artists with your own analysis of their work.
2 SLAG MAG
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“My current practice draws on, and aims to pair, the natural and the unnatural. I aminterested in the proceeding relationship developed/formed/forced between the two, and the idea that everything outside eventually comes inside. The following works revolve around this idea. By placing two objects together, it forces one to act as a sort of frame for the second. What is curious is the power struggle that seems to occur. Some objects display dominance over the partner, while others seem to peacefully coincide.”
- Anthony Meadows
1. je fais, je fait2. Green Tomato Chutney3. Virgin declining an idea1
SLAG MAG 3
1. Roadside-Scrolling Route332. Haptic Surfaces3. Grounded
“Trash, detritus, garbage, debris, ruins, and dust. Our life experiences happen between ever growing layers of noise. This chaos, inherent to all systems, is a funda-mental aspect of physics, biology, and communication theory. Despite our attempts to design and order the world around us, entropy serves us rubbish, dust, and noise. Within my archive of photographs, 15 years using the camera to understand the world around me, I’ve unintentionally piece together a set ideas, sticky subjects recorded over time.
Entropy as symbolic of the passing of time, and the ruins which are indexical of entropic forces, can be recorded in the architectures of our cities, the surfaces of our commerce, and the spaces we neglect. I find it in the south west deserts of Arizona, and along the road-side in rural Ohio. Recently, for a project I am calling Haptic Surfaces, I recorded the traces of fingerprints, dust and hair left on the glass surfaces of flatbed scan-ners in public institutions - the dirty labour of archiving and digitizing physical data. These traces of entropy are both microscopic and architectural, on the surface and embedded into our human relationship withtechnology.”
– Daniel King
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1. Untitled 12. Untitled 23. Untitled 3
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There was no contact with anoth-
er human being and the silence
was so profound it pressed upon
the eardrums... the emptiness
was disorienting, and the loneli-
ness and silence a daily torment
of existential dread.1
- Jill Ker Conway,
The Road from Coorain
“I am not always alone; sometimes some-one is with me. But for many hours each week, I am alone. Being by yourself this much does something - it changes you. Especially for me, as it is such a drastic dif-ference from childhood, when I was never alone. Before now, I barely knew what loneliness was. Now, it is my constant.
I have learned to like the privacy and soli-tude, and now a trip to see my family for more than a day or two is overwhelming. And yet, each night that I am alone there comes an hour when the stillness and quiet feels crushing. When I am aching for human presence and my desire for intimacy is so strong.
My interiors, which depict my personal space, are a portrayal of my search for in-timacy even within the emptiness. These rooms are empty; they quietly exist with-out us, waiting patiently for our return. They wait, silent in a paused moment. It is these silent rooms that fascinate me, the rooms which wait silent, softly mimick-ing my own emptiness. In this way, these paintings have become less about a depiction of the room and more a depic-tion of myself.”
– Ansley Adams
1. Jill Ker Conway. Marcus, Clare Cooper. House as a Mirror of Self. The Road from Coorain. 135.
SLAG MAG 5
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“Recently I’ve noticed a tendency beginning to take root in my street photography. It’s not something I’m consciously aware of when shooting, but when I get home, I invariably notice a tension in the subjects I’ve captured: a push and pull between isolation and connectiv-ity. So many of the people in the street seem to be reaching out to one another through communication devices, while simultaneously they are physically and visibly drifting away from their society. It’s as though they have cut themselves loose on ice floes, perhaps hav-ing subconsciously self-diagnosed some terrible social disease and fearing that they are contagious. But their physical isolation somehow fails to stem the spread of their illness. They continue to exchange minute-by-minute reports of their symptoms, and yet their un-derstanding of the epidemic only shrinks further into the growing distance. Their intimacy slowly disappearing like a star over the horizon.”
– Leslie McAllister
1. Connective Isolation 12. Connective Isolation 23. Connective Isolation 3
6 SLAG MAG
I did not know what to expect when I decided to take a weekend road trip to Harrisonburg, Virginia with my friend and artist Miho Tsujii. The weeks leading up to the trip in November, I have been in conversations with Miho and host Jon Henry regarding the Old Furnace Art-ist Residency (OFAR) in which we were about to participate. We talked about the James Madison University campus and its surrounding areas, a place that seems so foreign for me traveling from Brooklyn, New York. Miho and I have known each other for the past year since we both graduated from of New York University’s Tisch Arts and Politics graduate program. When Jon contacted us about participating in OFAR, Miho jumped at the opportunity and invited me to come with her. I could not resist.
We rented a car from the airport early on Saturday morning and navigated our way out of the fog that surrounded the city and onto the road for the next seven hours. On the scenic route, Miho and I watched the abundant trees and skyline change from location to location. We saw exit signs one after the next with names ending in “Burg” and exchanged stories mixed with laughter. Halfway to our destination, we stopped at an amazing Vietnamese restaurant in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania by the name of “Ninh Kieu.” The owner was a kind Vietnamese man who reminded me of my father. He offered free meals to hardworking students and those unemployed. The restaurant even had a big sign out front that stated free Pho (Viet-namese noodle soup) on Wednesdays for a penny. I knew right away we were in the right place and on the right path.
By the time we arrived in Harrisonburg, the sun was setting and the sky lit up in a beautiful descending red color. We met Jon at his home and the resident for OFAR artists. We were grateful to have made it safely and to smell the fresh Harrisonburg air.
We then went to meet Nolan at his gallery space and began planning for the performances that Miho would do later that evening. While they were setting up, I went about the house and street of the gallery and took some photos. It felt great being around nature again and being with people who are living with the land and its resources. Nolan, for example, has a beautiful house where he creates lots of crafty projects to complement its usages. I felt like I could learn a lot from someone like him and many other people Miho and I would meet in the next several days.
We both presented our works and they were well received. As an artist and organizer who works with the Southeast Asian community in the Bronx across transnational identities, it can be hard to showcase my work and even harder to have an engaged audience. In Har-risonburg, I felt a sense of freedom in presenting what I wanted in the flexible expressions I saw fit. In addition, I felt a sense of connection with the people that we presented to and the place that we were immersing ourselves into. Jon was truly a great host, residency curator, and friend who introduced us to his networks of artists, friends, and colleagues in various pockets of his life in and around Harrisonburg.
Our time with OFAR was indeed a magical weekend. Miho and I often think back on our memorable, enjoyable, and fulfilling time there. Thanks for having us. We shall be back soon enough.
Journey to and in HarrisonburgNGOC-TRAN VU
SLAG MAG 7
“Faith In Superstition is a durational performance and ‘public installation’ series explor-ing and questioning the organized faith-based religious systems in the United States by inviting community members to observe and participate with the artist in a series of ritualistic, superstitious endeavors performed at various religious sites including churches, synagogues, mosques and temples. Within the performance, the aforementioned practices manifest as simple and poetic gestures drawing a subtle correlation between one’s faith in an organized religion and an adherence to antiquated superstitious observation. The en-closed images examine the superstitious thought arising from early Christian teachings that an object with three points represents the Holy Trinity: God the Father, God the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Because a ladder is a physical representation of three points, it was once thought that to walk under a ladder implied an individual’s being in league with Satan.”
– Peter T. Christenson
1. Faith In Superstition (Documentation of Durational Performance Series)
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I never recognized her except in frag-
ments, which is to say that I missed
her ‘being’...
– Roland Barthes
“In this work, I am examining the paradox of viewing myself through the guise of a third person. I often question my perception of myself and wonder how others perceive me. Is my internal reality greatly dissimilar from the perception of my external persona? I am interested in the duality of viewing this way, to simultaneously see and be seen. I am at-tempting to reconcile my internal and external conflicts through this paradoxical view.
Photography is a means to further detach my gaze from my interactions. My recollection of a particular experience is fragmented and endlessly dissipating. I took the photograph, I placed myself in the frame, I experienced the moment but in viewing the image, I no longer feel connected. The moment, the experience, the interaction no longer feels like mine. This detachment allows me an attempt to view myself through a seemingly impossible gaze.”
– Jaclyn Wright
1. Untitled 12. Untitled 23. Untitled 3
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SLAG MAG 9
1. Limelight, Spotlight, G Spot2. Crowned3. Gain, Feign, Feast
“My work centers around feminine histories and aesthetics, with a particular emphasis on Western weddings. I examine reoccurring wedding customs and traditions and analyze their contemporary social impacts, such as vanity, consumerism, sex, identity, the gaze and the spectacle. Another repeated theme in my artwork is the use of art history and female representation particularly by male artists - Fragonard, Sargent, Robert Mapplethorpe (his 1982 photo of Louise Bourgeois), Vermeer and 1950s advertising. By exploring historically gendered art, traditions and rituals, my artwork endeavors to examine the nature of our customs, how they affect women and create a conversation about what it means to be a modern woman today.”
– Katrina Majkut
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“In July 2009 I discovered my home was haunted after I saw a solid silhouette of a man (mi-nus legs) in my apartment. Soon after my home became extremely active with unexplained noises, phenomena and further visitations from this intruder I dubbed ‘the shadow man’ occurring daily. Yet I told no-one. My frustration at the ongoing phenomena and distur-bances, as well as a need for answers, lead to direct communication with the spirits (note the plural – it turns out there are five present) through regular séances as well as a research exercise into the building’s former occupants.
A recurrent motif that quickly emerged during this whole experience was that of a masked man which came about after I randomly found an old rubber Halloween mask in my home studio. Donning the mask gave me an unexpected sense of security. I also felt surprisingly empowered and somehow able to take on the invisible at their own game. Startled by my own fearful reflection, I suddenly knew what it was to become fearful - to become like them - to evade attention and fight back.
A series of self-portrait photographs in this new guise lead to further exploration in draw-ing, painting, various mixed media pieces, more photography and a video where I ex-plored the purpose and nature of this masked figure - only to have it multiply and interact with manifestations of itself and that figure in the corner of the room that gave rise to its creation.”
– Mario Lautier Vella
1. Evil i2. Mimic3. Still from Domestic
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SLAG MAG 11“These drawings possess the reoccurring theme of a celebration of life from beyond the grave and were created at Greenwood cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. I live fairly close by and visit the cemetery whenever I can. I have been working in the context of a project, the Anna Pierrepont series, for about three years now. In the forest of obelisks and angels that populate the grounds of the cemetery, these sculptures stand out. One of the most striking works is a grandfather dancing with his granddaughter. Does it represent the sculptor, patron, patron’s family? Represented in this piece is the singularly interesting summation of the lives of these two attached individuals, their mutual affection and their exclusion of others in that affection. Their love and intimacy has been frozen in time for all eternity. A second work is a bear straddling a tombstone of a gentleman named Beard. Why a bear? The work, like the first example, certainly brings attention to something left behind by the deceased and does not dwell on others’ feelings of loss, nor speculates on the promise of the hereafter. The last monument, Frankie, speaks with great feeling for a game little boy. Frankie stares out impassively, he has his slingshot perpetually slung over his shoulder, a little David, forever frozen in anticipation of the marvelous game whose play stands as his ultimate legacy.”
– Howard Skrill
1. Grandfather and Daughter2. Bear3. Frankie
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12 SLAG MAG
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1. winds of your being2. light from the shadows3. impasse
“When creating my art, many of my ideas stem from a fascination with how things are con-nected both literally and figuratively. I utilize space to create an intimate setting that is filled with both objects that I have created and found. The use of space is very important to this work. I am interested in how these objects function within a given space; how they occupy it and the relationships created with other objects in that area.
The form of the house can be found throughout my work. The symbology of the house is significant in that, for many, it is a representation self. In many of my sculptures, I place the house with other objects that hold their own inherent meanings to create metaphors on how we as individuals or groups of individuals have an effect on our surroundings. Although these groupings of objects have a certain meaning and value to me, my intention is to develop a dialogue with the viewer and thus, I depend highly on them to interpret the work based on his or her own life stories and to create their own metaphors.
In some of my pieces, for myself, the house becomes a symbol of family. It then expresses stories about familial relationships, and the inclusion or isolations therein. “
– Craig Robb
SLAG MAG 13
“In my work I am constantly discovering openings. Sometimes the openings are literal – through or into an object – sometimes they are pictorial openings, or depictions of those literal openings. They appear across all of my work, when I have placed them there delib-erately, or subconsciously, or even when I have attempted to exclude them. They arise as the symbol of a controlled vulnerability – they are the desire to be seen but only so much. It was once said to me that whatever we fear, we also desire. It is this tension that constantly guides my work – tension between a fear of being seen and a desire to be laid open.”
– Lauren Hulse
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1. Scissors Drawing2. Dream Vessel No. 53. Blessing Stone
oldfurnace.tumblr.com