Conceptual art – visual arts news

The marks left behind

vanews — Tue, 08 Jul 2014 02:24:44 +0000

For more than 20 years, Denise Hawrysio has continuously pushed the boundaries of printmaking, shifting traditional printmaking techniques into the realm of contemporary art while reflecting modern realities. Hawrysio removes the walls between her studio and the outside world by taking her etching plates into everyday public spaces, where she finds unique and unexpected ways of mark-making. The resulting prints tell stories of social interactions and her explorations of different situations.

Hawrysio, a Toronto born artist currently living in London, England, will be part of the Summer Visiting Artist Series this July at the Anna Leonowens Gallery, presenting her exhibition I am @ here Alive from July 15-26.

“We encourage the use of the gallery to become a sort of lab for the artists with the potential to show new work, try new installation strategies, experiment and get feedback from our community,” says gallery director Eleanor King. “I’m personally excited about Denise’s work because of how she adeptly moves through media—she engages with material in a way that I really admire.”

In this online exclusive interview for Visual Arts News, our writer Kaylee Maddison catches up with Hawrysio about her upcoming trip to Halifax and her artistic practice.

KAYLEE MADDISON: You’ve had many exhibitions and residencies all over Canada, but never the East Coast until now. Why did you decide to come to Halifax for this residency?

DENISE HAWRYSIO: I’m surprised it’s taken until this point in my life to get to the Maritimes, and I’m really looking forward to it! NSCAD has long fascinated me as a magnet for interesting things in the art world, so that’s a major draw for me, but I’m also excited about seeing new landscapes and old friends.

KM: Many art schools and universities throughout North America have closed or are contemplating closure of their printmaking departments. How do you hope your work may influence printmaking education and practice?

DH: I find that interesting because some schools in London, particularly the Royal College of Art, have made big investments in their printmaking departments. My own approach is interdisciplinary and conceptual, both of which are not generally associated with printmaking, but seem to be on the rise within the discipline. My pedagogical approach involves imparting my own belief that, despite its marginalisation over recent decades, print can occupy a important position in contemporary art. We need to extend the theoretical discourse around print media, develop its bespoke processes in conjunction with more ‘industrial’ methods of reproduction, work with new web and digital technology and—perhaps most importantly—push the conceptual borders of ‘the print.’

I do see some encouraging signs of a global shift within printmaking as it expands and reinvents itself conceptually and technologically, pushing the area into new, post-modern terrain. The medium’s new identity can be seen in print blogs such as Printfreak, Printeresting, Magical Secrets and Outlaw Prints and Printmakers; in the development of new publications and websites; in the innovative ways print is being explored by artists like Christiane Baumgartner, Tal R, the Chapman Brothers, Xu Bing, Kiki Smith and Julie Mehretu, and at the grassroots level by groups like Drive By Press, Evil Prints, Bikini Press International and The Print Circus.

KM: What do you hope to achieve and get out of your time in Halifax and the residency?

DH: I’ve been working on ideas for a new print installation in my studio in London, and I will continue that process during the residency. I’m interested in questions of control, improvisation and the indeterminate play of meaning that arises through the process of making. This new project will involve a direct and intimate relationship with materials; the procedures of formal decision-making will be tempered with the spontaneity of site-specific mark-making.

KM: I understand the idea of impression or mark-making in your work embodies more than a technical process?

DH: My intention to continue with imagery saturated in ‘imprint’ (the direct impression of objects or gestures) and ‘touch’ (the direct intervention of the artist) is strengthened by my engagement with critical conceptualism, both as an aesthetic attitude and as a political stance. For me, technique is primarily a means to an end.

KM: What first inspired you to use print as a method of social engagement?

DH: Since my undergraduate days, I have tried to work with print in innovative ways, both materially and in terms of a kind of social engagement developed from the tradition of process art. At Queen’s University, Nick Wade [Hawrysio’s tutor] introduced me to conceptual and social art practice: we took a trip to New York to see the Beuys retrospective at the Guggenheim, and his blackboard drawings were hugely influential for me in relation to my printmaking practice. I was also inspired by Beuys’ ideas about art as an ongoing, open-ended process that can be “materialized equally in words, things, images or actions.”

Other influences were Serialism in music and the visual arts as a way of challenging and expanding traditional notions of composition and control. Sol LeWitt was another early influence—his ideas of machine-made art and the way that “process interested him as much as thinking.”

KM: Where do you find inspiration for the non-art situations in your work and the “construction of events?”

DH: I have a longstanding interest in structural film, in which duration is a critical element. As AL Rees puts it in A History of Experimental Film and Video, “duration reveals perception as an act of becoming rather than as the presentation of what has already become.” I use the etching/print plate like the frame of the camera, but instead of a continuous measuring of light, the plate becomes a method of measuring time and its exposure to movement is revealed through the marks left behind. Mark-making happens all around us, an inescapable part of life.

On the road with David Askevold

vanews — Mon, 09 Sep 2013 16:13:57 +0000

David Askevold, What is Church? Rural Churches of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, (2001). Ink jet on canvas, 152.4 x 528.3 cm. Purchased by Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in 2004.

One day, in the spring of 1995 in some innocuous field in rural Prince Edward Island, David Askevold—already established as “one of the world’s most important contributors to the development and pedagogy of conceptual art”— was retracing his steps, searching for his glasses.

Terry Graff, then curator of contemporary art at Confederation Centre Art Gallery in Charlottetown, had grown accustomed to such incidents. The pair had been driving around the Island, snapping photographs for what would become Askevold’s exhibition Cultural Geographies.

They spent about five days in Graff’s blue GMC Jimmy, and Askevold would often get so excited about something they would happen upon that he would lose track of things like his glasses or lens cap.

It took about an hour, combing the grass somewhere on P.E.I., before Askevold’s glasses were found, but it was during these misadventures that the artist found something else, too—something that shaped the final 15 years of his great career.

It’s something that isn’t overtly emphasized in his most recent retrospective David Askevold: Once Upon a Time in the East, exhibited at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia from April 13 – May 7, but is very much on display in pieces such as What Is Church?, a large inkjet-on- panel piece, a kind of collage of churches and religious iconography he had documented from around Nova Scotia and P.E.I. on road trips with his wife Norma Ready.

Conceived before he died in 2008, Askevold wanted this Nova Scotian retrospective to emphasize his then current production, in which the artist-as-traveller’s works reflected his chance encounters and happenings. Askevold, who first came to Halifax from the United States in 1968 to lecture at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, was notorious for his Projects Class and “unorthodox approach to making art.” For this he was famous, but like too many senior artists, his current work didn’t have that patina of legend. As such, he envisioned that his early work would be used to showcase his continued production.

In the end, David Diviney—who curated the retrospective—opted for a more balanced presentation, one with the hopes to, “bring a newfound awareness to his significant contribution.” But what of this work, particularly from the 1990s, that saw Askevold hitting the road, travelling?

“I would argue it was something that was present in the earlier work too, but manifest in different ways,” Diviney says, noting Askevold’s photo-textual work, dream sequences, habit of juxtaposition and interest in chance operations, systems, play and adhering to conceptual frameworks. “These ideas of travel and escape can be found in his mode of storytelling.”

Askevold ended up working with the roadscape and small craft harbours along the coast in Nova Scotia, P.E.I. and B.C., before expanding to Maritime churches, Yellowstone National Park, Los Angeles, the Halifax Harbour, Germany and Latrabjarg, Iceland.

Writing about his 2005 exhibition The Burning Bush, The Burned Bush, The Bush Trap, Askevold hinted at what his decade-long use of travel was about: “The pictures had a time-lapse feeling—film-like and it feels like there is a juncture of time showing itself.”

Although, for that show, Askevold was specifically speaking to the technique of layering photographs he was using to make the work, it’s a characterization that sums up his other projects of the time. He was taking photographs of everything and anything, turning photographs into “an idea of a random event.” Travel became a kind of locomotive laboratory.

“It just opens up the whole terrain. Without doing that [travelling] it wouldn’t happen,” says Graff. “That’s where those

special moments of synchronous synergy, just creative thought, occurred—out of those experiences.”

“I think he really liked the speed of it, and I think that was a part of making the work, his real experience of the place. It wasn’t just a cursory thing. We weren’t just fulfilling all the harbours. We got out and walked, questioned things, talked with people and thought.”

Much is made about the supernatural aspects of Askevold’s work in the accompanying book for David Askevold: Once Upon a Time in the East. In her essay “Haunted Past,” Irene Tsatsos refers to him as “a kind of aesthetic anthropologist … fascinated with memory, storytelling, and allusion; history, news, and popular culture; and the stated and implied narrative of it all.” Exploring meaning and mystery, Askevold sought to exhibit the ethereal, taking what Diviney calls a “path of alternative enlightenment … a lot of his work carries you along that journey he was along himself.”

“Here’s the thing. When David started to work, he would do things and it would seem, like, really simple to everyone else around him,” says Norma Ready, Askevold’s widow and long-time collaborator. “And what would eventually evolve is something … haunting—something would come out. If it didn’t come out, he would make it come out. It was just who he was.”

Ready remembers their road trips as a collaboration. Askevold was a phrenic peripatetic, so being on the road suited him. But not only that, travelling with another person offered a kind of non-stop collaboration, one without a punch clock and at the mercy of chance.

“You know what’s interesting about David? … When he’s there something happens,” Ready says. “He wasn’t a preconceived, premeditative kind of human being. Obviously he had a larger idea in his head, but it completely dissolved until something he sees occurred.”

Ready can’t say whether not Askevold would have created his later work if he was travelling alone. She and Askevold would just drive around, say, looking at churches, until they were compelled to stop. Or Askevold would pull over their gold Honda out of the blue and set his camera up in the road on a brick.

“It was kind of free flow. I have to be honest with you. It was a road trip … it was kind of random in a way, and yet it was specific,” Ready says. “It was totally amazing is what it was. It was like a freedom palace. Really.”

After their trip around P.E.I., Terry Graff and Askevold immediately had their photographs developed and spread them over every surface in Askevold’s hotel room in Charlottetown. And Askevold photographed that as well. And from those shots came a triple exposed image, of the hotel room and two other island landscapes.