adplus-dvertising
Connect with us

Art

Seven public art installations bring Oakville together – Oakville News

Published

 on


At the intersection of creativity, inspiration, and community emerges a Public art installation geared to delight Oakville residents in the purest form of communication – Art. From July 1st throughout summer, residents are invited to engage in “ConNextions” – an art installation showcasing the work of seven local emerging and professional artists, including:

The event is created as a platform to spark a sense of belonging in the community and help Oakville residents create connections (explaining its name Connextions ). More than an art exhibit, it is a medium of communication bridging the mind of Oakville’s creative spirits and the heart of the larger community. In fact, Toni DI Risio – culture program supervisor with the Town of Oakville, weighed in on the event.  “Public art plays an important role in building community, promoting dialogue, and fostering a sense of belonging. Over the course of the summer, the Town of Oakville hopes that residents will take the opportunity to engage, explore, and be inspired by the works of local emerging and professional artists with strong connections to Oakville.”

Read on to unearth the installations set up at this innovative event, and meet the people bringing this to reality.

300x250x1

Hannah Veiga – A Seat in Serendipity

Installation at Pondview Pond Walk – 490 Pondview

“I wanted to create something that would inspire others and provide a moment of observation to the elements of nature we often overlook.” These are the words of Hannah Veiga, a multi-disciplinary artist living in Oakville and graduate from the University of Waterloo Honours Fine Arts Program, speaking about her piece ‘A Seat in Serendipity.’

 1) What inspired you to create this piece?

“I’ve been doing pyrography, also known as wood-burning, for a little over 6 months now. I was so excited at the opportunity to make something that would get more public recognition and would hopefully be exciting for the community to experience. I frequent this trail on my bicycle rides, and every time I pass through Pondview, I need to stop and take a few minutes to enjoy the life that exists in this little nook of the neighbourhood. I wanted to create a piece that would incorporate all of the little elements of nature that we often overlook and provide a pleasant surprise for anyone else who enjoys this trail regularly.”

2) What does Oakville need to know? 

“The designs on this bench have been drawn and then hand-burned with a heat pen tool. All of the elements that you will find within the design are plants and creatures I found in this park. I encourage everyone to spend as much time as they’d like with the piece and find all of the different plants, birds, and insects!”

3) What is the importance of appreciating this exhibit?

“I think the beauty of this exhibit is how every artist has expressed their connection to Oakville in different ways. It is an amazing opportunity for the community to explore the different parks of Oakville and discover local artist’s work.”

4) Anything you wish to express.

“I’m grateful to call this beautiful city my home and to be given such an amazing opportunity with ConNextions!”

Heather J. A. Thomson – Minor Alterations: Oakville

Installation at Shell Park – 3307 Lakeshore Road West

“Our dire environmental situation and how people are informed about it is the driving force behind my piece,” explained Heather J.A. Thomson describing her piece ‘Minor Alterations’ – an installation of six painted picnic tables, with exceeding significance. The piece not only inspires the viewer to take action towards a sustainable future, but it also draws a parallel between how small steps can make a huge impact.

1) What inspired you to create this piece?

“I think it’s important to share the facts, but I also think continual bad news is counterproductive. At a certain point, Climate Change can become so overwhelming that taking action feels pointless. I created Minor Alterations Postcard in 2019 to start an optimistic dialogue and show how small things really do make a difference. My piece for ConNextions is an expansion of this project.”

2) What does Oakville need to know?

“The painted picnic tables at Shell Park are only part of my piece for Connextions. I’m also creating a digital sustainable habits resource and want to hear from the community. Information submitted through my website or the onsite QR codes will be included in the resource and shared on Instagram because sustainability is better when we do it together.”

3) What is the importance of appreciating this exhibit?

“It’s important to remember that we as individuals have power. We can make a difference. Plus, living sustainably doesn’t have to mean radical changes. I share my habits to show sustainable living isn’t difficult and to hopefully inspire others to embrace it as well.”

4) Anything you wish to express.

“ConNextions presents an opportunity to engage with new audiences, and I’m honoured to be a part of it.”

Shahrzad Amin – Bridge Obscura

Installation at Oakville Centre for the Performing Arts – 130 Navy Street

“My inspiration came from two bridges in Isfahan, the Khaju and the Allah Verdikhan,” explained Shahrza, an Iranian-Canadian interdisciplinary artist based in Oakville, illustrating the creative direction of her piece ‘Bridge Obscura.’. Examining diasporic and socio-cultural subjectivities through the lens of art-making, sensory ethnographic filmmaking, architectural design, and language, the installation is inspired by Shahrzad’s interests in human rights, equality, and migration.

1) What inspired you to create this piece?

“My inspiration came from two bridges in Isfahan, Iran. The Khaju and the Allah Verdikhan. In the Safavid era, they were initially used in support of imperial aspirations for staking out and controlling territory. Later, they became integral to improving communication and facilitating trade. Along the way, their significant and majestic architectural details turned them into desirable places for recreation and leisure, giving them a function that was unforeseen by the builders.

Today, they are spaces where opposites meet, connect, and collide; young and old, traditional and modern, conservative and progressive are all spotted together, sharing common ground under the arches of these bridges.

I walked on these bridges often when I was in Isfahan. Since then, they have fascinated me for their social functions, beauty of forms and patterns, historical significance, and power in highlighting the cultural and artistic strengths of a place. My relationship with the bridges changed and intensified in the absence or with distance, as they have become emblematic of the cultural connections that I have lost in moving to a new country across the ocean. When preparing the artwork, I tried to tap into my memories and biographical details to invoke the vibrancy of these bridges and provide insights into the range of elements (spatial, aesthetic, architectural, cultural and affective) that they connect. Here, I use the word connect intentionally to make a reference to the way bridges function as connectors not only in a physical sense but also in the sense that they link individuals to place, history, and culture.”

2) What does Oakville need to know?

“I wish that the viewers of my work know that, as an immigrant, I always look for a metaphorical bridge between my Iranian roots and culture and my new nationality as a Canadian citizen. Lack of connection makes me afraid, specifically because the opportunities for Iranian people to connect with the rest of the world are becoming increasingly scarce due to political and religious differences. The bridges of Isfahan are sites of memory/experience in themselves, as well as being locations of culture; therefore, I see in them the potential to act as potent metaphors for the cultural connections that are missing. Through art practice and sensory ethnography methodology, I experiment with my installation to create a space of cultural and experiential exchange in a climate of isolationism and to alleviate cultural misperceptions about Iran as a country that represents alterity, threat, violence, and terror.”

3) What is the importance of appreciating this exhibit.

“My hope is that it encourages contemplation on socio-cultural connectivity and allows people from different cultural backgrounds to experience a part of Iranian vernacular life in a way that they weren’t familiar with before.

It might be worth noting here that, nowadays, the world finds itself in a state of global isolation due to the pandemic. This occurrence suddenly gives my project new significance. More specifically, people and institutions around the world felt the need to transcend physical and political boundaries to create alternative and virtual spaces for communication. In that climate, art and artists stepped in generated alternative channels to give people a sense of togetherness and awareness of common interests and needs. Overcoming isolation highlighted the need for and potential of creativity. This occurrence made me think about the potential of my own piece in a new light, in terms of generating a space for highlighting isolation as an effect that can be shared and, perhaps, overcome through compassionate and collective engagements.”

4)  Anything you wish to express.

“I want to express my sincerest appreciation to the Town of Oakville for giving me this opportunity to exhibit my artwork at such an appropriate location.

Thank you to all the viewers of my sculpture installation. Their attendance to visit my work means a lot to me.

Special thanks to Tonia Di Risio (Program Supervisor-Culture at Queen Elizabeth Park Community and Cultural Centre) for organizing this project. Her help and support to facilitate the process of making and installing the art pieces are appreciated and valued.

I also want to thank Andrew Moyer (Technical Services Coordinator at Oakville Centre for the Performing Arts) for his Technical support.

Last but not least, special thanks to my brother-in-law, Ali Reisi, for assisting me in preparing the piece to install in the public space.”

Melanie Billark – Stronger Together – Upcycled Plastic Bag Textile

Installation at Westwood Park – 170 Wilson Street

“The dichotomy between our efforts in becoming a more sustainable country and how the pandemic forced us to increase our use of single-use plastics inspired this piece.” Melanie Billark, recipient of the Client Arts Award (2019), the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects Ground Award (2017) and Sheridan College and OCAD alumna, spoke about her piece ‘Stronger Together’.

1) What inspired you to create this piece?

“I was inspired by Canada’s Single-Use Plastic Ban that was supposed to be put in place this year; however, it will likely get pushed due to the pandemic.  The dichotomy between our efforts in becoming a more sustainable country to how the pandemic has had the opposite result, pushing our consumption of single-use plastics. With the ban approaching, I wanted to create a new life or purpose for all of these bags instead of then going into the landfill, so I created a textile with the bags to make a subtle but colourful installation using the bags collected from the community.”

2) What does Oakville need to know? 

“This installation is made from 668 plastic bags that were collected from community members and woven into the existing pavilion. I created a reusable and waterproof textile that I can reuse for different works of art after the installation!”

3) What is the importance of appreciating this exhibit.

“I wanted to create a space for conversation and contemplation. I hope this installation allows people to think about sustainability and inspire them to upcycle – thinking about how we consume and how we can use and repurpose our waste to make something beautiful.”

4) Anything you wish to express.

“For further information and my process, please check out my social media; you can find me on  Instagram and TikTok @melanie.billark or check out my website at: www.melaniebillark.com

Tazeen Qayyum –  Hope is the Thing With Feather 

Installation at Memorial Park – 120 Oak Park Boulevard

“Since the outbreak of COVID-19, the face mask has become the symbol of the pandemic. On the one hand, it represents the hardships, separation, distance, and restriction, but at the same time, it is also a symbol of survival, care, resilience, and protection,” says Tazeen Qayyum, a contemporary artist living and working in Oakville who is also a recipient of the ‘Excellence in Art Award’ by Canadian Community Arts Initiative (2015).

1) What inspired you to create this piece?

“It is a timely inspiration considering the ramifications of the pandemic. Collecting and repurposing used masks from the community, inspired by collected stories, I wanted my work to be uplifting and convey a festive mood with the message of hope and love. 

As a practicing artist, I have specialized in miniature painting of the South Asian and Persian tradition, and many times my work is inspired by this unique vocabulary. In this work, within the natural setting of the park, I have created a fantastical landscape inspired by the Indian Ragamala paintings that conveys a festive and uplifting mood, transcending cultures.”

2) What does Oakville need to know?

“Along with the installation, the project has an engaging component of community participation. I am requesting residents of Oakville and beyond to send their personal reflections on the past year and their experience during the pandemic. All the collected stories are compiled on the project’s website and will continue to grow as our collective reflection, highlighting the community’s ongoing struggles, resilience, and inspirations.”

3) What is the importance of appreciating this exhibit.

“As a community project, this artwork celebrates the spirit of community building and the unquestionable strength in coming together as a nation in such difficult times. Like Emily Dickinson’s poem, ‘Hope Is The Thing With Feathers’, the installation portrays a hope that lives within us all, and that must be protected, nurtured, cherished, and shared no matter how hard the times get.

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, the face mask has become the symbol of the pandemic. Obligatory in many countries, the mask culture has now become part of our daily lives, customs, discussions, and practices. On the one hand, it represents the hardships, separation, distance, and restrictions, but at the same time, it is also a symbol of survival, care, resilience, and protection. It can be rightfully said that this simple, inexpensive object has become a powerful image and representation of our collective experience. 

As a community project, it celebrates the spirit of community building and the unquestionable strength in coming together as a nation in such difficult times. Like Emily Dickinson’s poem, ‘Hope Is The Thing With Feathers’, the installation portrays a hope that lives within us all, and that must be protected, nurtured, cherished, and shared no matter how hard the times get.”

To read all the collected expressions, visit http://tazeenqayyum.com/hopeisthethingwithfeathers/ ,  and to add your own story, email the artist at [email protected]

@tazeenqayyum

Quinn Hopkins – Generations 

Installation at Lions Valley Park – 1227 Lions Valley Road

Aerosol paint, acrylic paint, canvas, plywood, plexiglass, and augmented reality on Instagram. These are only some of the things that make Quinn Hopkins, a 23-year old multidisciplinary Anishinaabe artist, someone whose work you need to see at ConnectXions. 

1) What inspired you to create this piece?

“The park heavily inspired this piece, the moccasin trail that runs through the park, the people that visit the park, and the animals that live in the park.”

2) What does Oakville need to know? 

“On the inside of this piece is a stretched canvas that represents a piece of deer hide that is traditionally used to make moccasins and clothing. The patterns cut out of it are for seven pairs of moccasins that represent seven generations. This piece is called generations because I want you to think about the lives of the next few generations; what will they need to have a good and fulfilling life? I believe passing on greenspaces and protecting them is an important role in this.”

3) What is the importance of appreciating this exhibit.

“To respect our green spaces, to take care of the land, cleaning up after ourselves and others. To see the beauty in diversity.”

Ignazio Colt Nicastro – An Echo of Oakville

Installation at Glen Abbey Community Centre – 1415 Third Line

“My sculptural practice is relatively new, especially as an emerging artist overall. Within it, I have really enjoyed working with shattered mirrors,” said Ignazio Colt Nicatro – an emerging multi-disciplinary artist, curator, and writer based in Oakville.

1) What inspired you to create this piece?

“My sculptural practice is relatively new, especially as an emerging artist overall, but within it, I have really enjoyed working with shattered mirrors. The mirrors allow for a literal and metaphorical use of self-reflection, allowing my viewers to reflect on whatever subject I present them. With this piece, I immediately knew I wanted to reflect something onto the residents of Oakville, but I truly didn’t know how to convey a community of identities in one piece – so I let them decide for themselves. I gathered community submissions on words, places, feelings, or places that came to mind when thinking about Oakville and came with a list that mostly highlighted the Oak Leaf and Lake Ontario/Lakeshore. Now when they look at the sculpture, they not only see a physical representation of themselves but also the conceptual result of the community’s submissions. This type of reflection is exactly what I try to create with my mirror sculptures. 

For my digital sculptures, I’ve recently become interested in the digital arts and wanted to try something new – virtual reality painting. I wanted to focus more on the history of Oakville but more so to honour and acknowledge it rather than provide a step-by-step history. Without these histories, the physical sculpture couldn’t exist.”

2) What does Oakville need to know? 

“With work that is inspired by our community members and the town’s history, I think Oakville needs to do more work in educating, acknowledging, and honouring its history and past community members. I am guilty of not knowing much about the history of the work I created until I started researching it for this installation, but after doing so, I have much more agency to uncover more about what this land has offered and continues to. “

3) What is the importance of appreciating this exhibit?

“Having seven artists spread out across the wards of Oakville is something that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before – and not just Oakville wise. It’s not often that a town gives its own local artists this much support, specifically their emerging artists. So by visiting and appreciating this public installation exhibition, you’re really supporting a new movement of art in Oakville’s History. The seven of us work so differently in our mediums as well, so this show also showcases how vast the world of the arts can be. 

4) Anything you wish to express.

“This project overall was honestly a big challenge for me. I’ve never made public artwork or digital paintings before, so everything about this experience was new to me. Ensuring that one of my sculptures would need to withstand nature’s wrath was something I’ve never had to do before either – it was a very exciting challenge. Putting this much time and energy into a public piece really opened my eyes to this experience and has made me appreciate public art so much more.

Aside from my involvement here as an artist, I am also the Curator and Director of a digital gallery known as IC Contemporary, where I develop free digital art galleries for emerging artists. I have also recently published my debut fantasy book ‘The Trials of Salahan’ which is available for pre-order now! “

For more information on this captivating exhibit and to get more details, look at the artists’ backstories, inspirations, and more – check out the Town of Oakville’s Website here.

Adblock test (Why?)

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Art

Nick Cave on love, art and the loss of his sons: ‘It’s against nature to bury your children’ – The Guardian

Published

 on


Nick Cave has a touch of Dr Frankenstein about him – long, white lab coat, inscrutable smile, unnerving intensity. He introduces me to his two assistants, the identical twins Liv and Dom Cave-Sutherland, who are helping to glaze his ceramics series, The Devil – A Life. The twins are not related to Cave. His wife, the fashion designer Susie Cave, came across them one day, discovered they were ceramicists and thought they would be able to help him complete his project. It adds to the eeriness of it all.

Cave, 66, is one of the world’s great singer-songwriters – from the howling post-punk of the Birthday Party and the Bad Seeds to the lugubrious lyricism of his love songs (Into My Arms, Straight to You and a million others I adore) and the haunted grief of recent albums such as Skeleton Tree, Ghosteen and Carnage. He is also a fine author (see his apocalyptic novel And the Ass Saw the Angel), thinker (his book of conversations with the Observer journalist Sean O’Hagan, Faith, Hope and Carnage), agony uncle (at his website, the Red Hand Files), screenwriter (The Proposition) and now visual artist. Which is where he started out half a century ago.

Cave studied art in Melbourne in the mid-70s before being chucked off his degree course. He reckons he was too fascinated by the subject for his own good. He spent all his time talking about art to the older students and didn’t find the hours to do the actual work. Now, he is making up for lost time.

300x250x1

We are at the headquarters of Susie’s business, where she makes and stores the beautiful dresses she designs as The Vampire’s Wife. For now, it’s doubling as Cave’s studio. He gives me a tour of the 17 ceramic figurines, which will be exhibited at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels next month. The pieces are stunning in a creepy, Cave-esque way, all blood-curdling pastoral idylls. But it’s as a series that they are most powerful. The sculptures, inspired by Staffordshire “flatback” ceramics from the Victorian era, forge a shocking and deeply personal narrative.

Initially, we see the devil as a child – a cute little lad, dimple-cheeked in a white jumpsuit sitting next to a red monkey. “Look at his little face,” Cave says, lovingly. We see the devil getting up to erotic mischief with a sailor, then ecstatic with his first love. “I’m extremely happy with this one,” Cave says. “His impish pleasure and her just drained of life.”

We see the devil going to war in a field of flowers, wading through a field of blood and skulls on his return, getting married. Then the series takes a traumatic turn. “This is The Devil Kills His First Child,” Cave says. “It’s a little Isaac and Abraham thing. Then he’s separated from the world. Life goes on. Then he dances for the last time.” And now we are at the final piece. “He bleeds to death. He’s found washed up and the child is forgiving him, leaning out to him with his hand.”

It’s impossible to know how to respond when Cave reaches the story’s conclusion other than to gulp or weep. After all, this is a man who has lost two sons over the past nine years. In 2015, 15-year-old Arthur died after taking LSD for the first time and falling from a cliff near his home in Brighton. In 2022, 31-year-old Jethro, who had schizophrenia, died in Melbourne. Death and grief have informed all of Cave’s work since Arthur died. But this takes it to another level.

We say goodbye to the Cave twins, who continue painting pubic hair in gold lustre on the devil’s first love. “We’ll see you, guys! Slave away, my children!” Cave says.

Liv smiles.

“I’m already dressed like a Victorian child’,” Dom says.

“A pint of stout for lunch!” Cave says.

We move into Susie’s office to chat. It’s dark, gothic, a dream home for bats. He whips off his lab coat to reveal an immaculate three-piece suit and sits behind the desk. Before I sit down, I ask if I can do something I have wanted to do for the best part of a decade. I reach over the desk and clumsily hug him.

“Aaah, man! Here, let me stand up.” The last time we talked was 16 years ago. He was making a video that featured Arthur and his twin brother, Earl, who were then seven, gorgeous and already musical (Arthur was playing drums, Earl guitar).

Cave became famous as one of the bad boys of rock – a ghoulish junkie with a feral live act, equally fixated by the Bible and Beelzebub. But he is one of the nicest people I have met. In 2008, I turned up knowing sod all about him. I tell him that he was so generous with his time and nonjudgmental about my ignorance. “Really?” he says, surprised. “That’s good to know. I tend to have a low opinion of myself back then. I see a cutoff point around the death of my first son of a change of character. But it’s not as black and white as I thought.”

Every Cave story seems to begin with a death. Take the origin of the figurines. He went into the studio to start work on them the day his mother, Dawn, died. He had planned to start on that date – 15 September 2020 – for a while. “Susie made me go. She said: ‘Get there and do your work.’” He adored Dawn – she had always stood by him, no matter what trouble he was in. (The day his father died in a car crash, she was called to the police station to bail out 19-year-old Cave after he had been charged with burglary.)

Did he have any idea what he wanted to create in the studio? No, he says, but there was an inevitability about the subject. “Even when I’m trying to use art to escape certain feelings and sorrows I have, everything just seems to fall into the slipstream of the loss of my son. And even when I was glazing these, Jethro died, so it’s like …” He comes to a stop. “What I’m trying to say is these losses are just incorporated into the artistic flow and they move in a direction that is beyond your capacity to rein in. They’re just sitting at the end of everything you do. In the end, the ceramics are a story about a man’s culpability in the loss of his child, and addressing that in a way I wasn’t really able to do with music. That’s what happened without any intention.”

Does he feel culpable for the death of his sons? “I think it’s something that people who lose children feel regardless of the situation, simply because the one thing you’re supposed to do is not let your children die.” He comes to another abrupt stop, almost as if he is dictating notes. “Forget that. The one thing you’re supposed to do is protect your children.”

He returns to the final figurine. “You have this hollowed-out old man with a little child, possibly a dead old man, dead in a pool of tears – a biblical flood of tears, shall we say – and the little child is reaching down in forgiveness. It’s called The Devil Forgiven.” He smiles. “I hope this isn’t too abstract, too woo-woo. Art has a way of bringing to you the things you need to know. It feels to me that art knows what’s going on more than the artist knows what’s going on.”

Does he feel culpable because drugs were involved in Arthur’s death? “There could be some element of that, yep. Look, these things are in our DNA, they’re inherited. I don’t want to make any assumptions about Arthur, who was just a young boy. It’s not like he was into drugs … On a fundamental level, it’s against nature to be burying your children. And there can’t help but be feelings of culpability.”

Cave believes he is emerging from his losses a different man. He has a point. It is hard to imagine the old Cave curating the Red Hand Files, a website in which he invites fans to ask questions about anything they want, many of them profoundly personal.

Soon after Arthur’s death, the family moved to Los Angeles for a couple of years: “We were triggered too much by things. We were just down the road from where it happened.” Everybody seemed to know what had happened to Arthur, because it was so widely reported, but he says that ended up being a positive. “I was forced to grieve publicly – and that was helpful, weirdly enough. It stopped me completely shutting the windows and bolting the doors and just living in this dark world.”

He was overwhelmed by the kindness of strangers. “I had letter after letter addressed to ‘Nick Cave, Brighton’. It was a really extraordinary thing. And that attention, and sense of community, was extremely helpful to me. I think people are usually just on their own with these sorts of things. Susie met somebody whose son had died seven years previously and she still hadn’t spoken to her husband about it. These people are utterly alone and maybe full of rage. So I can’t overstate that I’ve been in an extraordinarily privileged position in that respect.”

Did his experience of bereavement help after Jethro died? “Yes. It really helped, because I knew I could get through. I’d been through it.” Did he feel cursed? “No. No, I don’t feel cursed, no.” He says it would be wrong to talk publicly about Jethro – he didn’t meet Jethro till he was seven and their relationship was complex; although they became close, it would be disrespectful to his mother, who brought him up. (Cave’s first two children, Luke and Jethro, were born 10 days apart to different women.)

Cave says one way in which he has changed is that he appreciates life more. In the past, he has described learning to live again, refinding happiness, as an act of defiance. But he no longer thinks it’s an appropriate word. “Defiance has a fuck-you element to the world; we’re not going to let it get us down. That sounds a little too heroic now. I’m pretty simple-minded about things. It says something to my children who have died that I can enjoy my life now. It’s what they would want. I think it’s a softer relationship we have to the world now.”

Rather than a two-fingered salute to fate, it goes back to culpability and his Christian (if questioning) faith. “Look, this is extremely difficult to talk about, but one of the things that used to really worry me is that Arthur, wherever he may be, if he is somewhere, somehow understands what his parents are going through because of something he did, and that his condition of culpability is not dissimilar to mine. And I think that’s the reason behind a lot of what I do. It’s to say it’s OK. I mean it’s not OK, but we’re OK. We’re OK. I think Susie feels that, too.”

He stresses that he is not just talking about his personal tragedies. “What’s it saying to all those who’ve passed away in their multitudes if we lead lives where we’re just pathologically pissed off at the world? What does it say to those who have left the world to be in a perpetual state of misery and fury and depression and cynicism towards the world? What legacy are they leaving if that’s how we manifest the passing of that person?”

He thinks people sometimes misunderstand what he is saying about loss. It’s not that there is more joy in his world than there was – far from it. But when it comes, it tends to be more intense. “Joy is something that leaps unexpectedly and shockingly out of an understanding of loss and suffering. That’s how Susie and I are. That’s in no way saying we’re not affected, or we’ve somehow gotten over it, or we’ve had closure or even acceptance. I think closure is a dumb thing. Even acceptance is, like: ‘Just give it a few years and life goes back to how it was.’ It doesn’t happen. You’re fundamentally changed. Your very chemistry is changed. And when you’re put back together again, you’re a different person. The world feels more meaningful.”

He knows plenty of people disagree with him. “I get people, mothers particularly, occasionally saying: ‘How dare you suggest there is joy involved in any of this?’ People are so angry, and they have every right to be enraged by the fucked-up cosmic mischief that goes on, and it’s deeply unfair. But it’s not personal. It feels like it is, but it’s just the vicissitudes of life.”

Cave feels he is misunderstood in another way, after saying recently that he has always been “temperamentally” conservative and attacking the “self-righteous belief” and “lack of humility” of woke culture. This has led some to assume he is supping with the “alt-right”, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

“Conservatism is a difficult word to talk about in Britain, because people immediately think of the Tories. But I do think small-C conservatism is someone who has a fundamental understanding of loss, an understanding that to pull something down is easy, to build it back up again is extremely difficult. There is an innate need in us to rip shit down, and I’m personally more cautious in that respect without it being a whole political ideology that surrounds me.”

Is he a Tory? “I’m not a Tory, no.” Has he ever been? “No. No, I’ve never voted Tory.” And is he really anti-woke? “The concept that there are problems with the world we need to address, such as social justice; I’m totally down with that. However, I don’t agree with the methods that are used in order to reach this goal – shutting down people, cancelling people. There’s a lack of mercy, a lack of forgiveness. These go against what I fundamentally believe on a spiritual level, as much as anything. So it’s a tricky one. The problem with the right taking hold of this word is that it’s made the discussion impossible to have without having to join a whole load of nutjobs who have their problem with it.”

He hates dogma, whether religious or political. His work has always embraced uncertainty. “People don’t like me to say this, but I do feel it’s in my nature to constantly be redressing the balance of my own ideas about things. My mother was exactly the same – she always saw the other side. It was incredibly frustrating. You’d be angry about something and she’d go: ‘Yes darling, but …’”

Like his mother, he has never shied away from the trickiest “buts”. When he talks about his appalling loss, he also knows he has been lucky. Not only has he been able to express his grief in his work, but it has also fed his creativity. Even at its bleakest, he has found it cathartic. “Making art is in itself the great expression of joy and optimism, in my view. That’s why we need it. Music, art, reminds us of our fundamental capacity to create beautiful things out of the fuckeries of life. Even when I’m making The Devil Kills His First Child, I’m not depressed, I’m like: ‘Wow! Look at the head!’ It’s a joyful occupation, no matter what. And when I’m singing a very sad lyric, it doesn’t mean I’m sad inside.”

The forthcoming Bad Seeds album is the first thing he has created since Arthur’s death that isn’t “set through a lens of loss”. He is funny when talking about his work – so angsty and uncertain early in the process, almost messianic by the end. “The new album is really good. It’s really strong. Great songs,” he says.

Similarly with The Devil – A Life. He has got over the doubts and now he is buzzing with self-belief. Is he nervous about the exhibition? “No, I’m excited. I think the ceramics are really good and really strange.” But he feels unusually protective towards his figurines and the story that they tell. “These guys feel extraordinarily vulnerable. They are vulnerable little things, and they are saying something deeply personal.”

Nick Cave: The Devil – A Life is at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels from 5 April to 11 May

Adblock test (Why?)

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Art

Appreciating Richard Serra, who made us giddy and afraid. – The Washington Post – The Washington Post

Published

 on


Richard Serra made modern sculpture exciting. He did it by creating the feeling that it might fall on you.

Facetious as that may sound, it’s somewhere near the heart of what made Serra, who died Tuesday at 85, both a wonderful artist and intermittently vulnerable to accusations that he was a bully.

If you don’t find his works beautiful, you could easily hate them for being ugly, imposing and in-your-face. But attitudes toward modern art — even minimalist sculpture — changed enormously over Serra’s lifetime, and he personally played a role in converting millions of people to the possibilities of abstract sculpture. After years of operating as an edgy, uncompromising avant-gardist, he began to make things that, losing none of their toughness — and only growing in ambition — were undeniably seductive, dazzlingly original and just very cool.

300x250x1
End of carousel

I don’t know what he was like to work with, but as an artist, he was no bully. Rather, he was a physicist. He wanted you to know, and to feel in your bones, that weight isn’t just a thing — it’s a force. It’s mass times acceleration.

As such, it carries an inherent threat.

Sculpture, for Serra, wasn’t just something over there — passive and separate. It was right here, all around us. And it wasn’t just active, it was involving.

A pioneer of process art, Serra loved verbs — action words like twist and roll — and spent part of his early career thinking about materials in terms of what he could do with them (as opposed to what they would become once things had been done to them).

But he also came to love nouns. And you can’t talk about Serra without tossing around big heavy nouns — words that most of us would never otherwise use but which make you feel suddenly tough just uttering. Cor-Ten steel and antimonial lead, for instance.

Serra used antimonial lead (an alloy that makes soft lead very hard) for “One Ton Prop” (1969), a key piece from his early mature period. The sculpture was four pieces of lead leaning against each other like the walls of a card house. No welding. No plinth. Nothing propping them up except each other.

“One Ton Prop” proposed a strange — and strangely intimidating — new way to think of sculpture. It was physical — emphatically so. But it was also psychological. It involved you in ways that had nothing to do with stories or sentimentality but that somehow went beyond pure form. “One Ton Prop” — like a lot of Serra sculptures — was about as ingratiating as a sewer cover, but it induced fear and giddy excitement, and you wanted to linger with it.

Most people’s favorite Serras — and mine too — are the ones he made after “One Ton Prop.” For the enormous, bending, exquisitely balanced sculptures he called Torqued Ellipses, he used Cor-Ten steel. Sometimes used for the prows of ships, Cor-Ten is weathering steel, protected from corrosion, that changes color in the open air. There, it takes on seductive shades of orange and textures as rich and streaky as the surface of Gerhard Richter paintings.

The colors and textures (and the spiderwebs and other marks of the organic world they can play host to) are important. They pull you in to the sculptures’ surfaces, even as you’re conscious of your body’s relationship to something that is overwhelmingly large — almost too big to grasp, and definitely too big to explain.

Engaging with them reduces the brain to the status of a six-year-old tugging at the sleeve of an adult with a checklist of unanswerable questions: How do these things stay upright? How were they made? How did they even get here?

The engineering behind Serra’s late works was indeed mind-blowing. But the pleasure of his greatest creations is afforded by a sensation of the mind giving up, and the body yielding. He dealt out stimulants to sublimity like a croupier dealing aces.

Serra was a practitioner — I would say the greatest — of what was sometimes called “walk-in modernism.” That’s to say, you don’t just admire his sculptures from afar. You walk into and out of them. Looming over you, they close in on you, then veer away from you. And they make you conscious of time as you make your way through, along or around them.

They sometimes induce vertigo. But they’re also remarkably liberating. You can come out of them with feelings of secret and victorious expansion, as if you were Theseus after slaying the Minotaur.

Serra’s sculptures fulfilled the primary purpose of minimalist sculpture — making you acutely self-conscious of yourself in relation to the thing you’re looking at or walking around. But they did something more. They challenged and seduced with psychology and undeniable emotion. They turned nouns into verbs, things into actions, and stray thoughts into lasting feelings.

Placed outdoors, they aren’t merely sculptures, of course. They do double duty as architecture, landscape design, urban planning. Ways of ordering space, in other words, often on a large scale.

It’s true that some of Serra’s outdoor sculptures prevent you getting from A to B, and that this has sometimes proved controversial. In the art world, an air of legend lingers like romantic fog over the “Tilted Arc” affair. Serra’s rude division of an open plaza in Manhattan with an enormous, hostile-looking steel arc, 120 feet long and twice the height of most humans, was one of the last moments of meaningful tension between public opinion and an uncompromising artistic avant-garde. In the end, the work came down.

Works like “Tilted Arc” made it easy to dislike Serra for being domineering. I can appreciate that line of thought, and I’m happy that there are other kinds of art, keyed to transience and delicacy, art with a light and poetic touch. But I love what Serra achieved. In fact, I’m in awe of it. At the Guggenheim Bilbao, at Glenstone, at SF MoMA and in St. Louis — in so many places around the world — Serra’s adamantine sculptures act on you. And they activate everything around them. Life quickens in their presence. We have lost a great artist, but we have not lost that quickening.

Adblock test (Why?)

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Art

For Richard Serra, Art Was Not Something. It Was Everything. – The New York Times

Published

 on


When Richard Serra died yesterday, I flashed back nearly 30 years to a morning at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, looking with him and with his wife, the German-born art historian Clara Weyergraf, at Jackson Pollock’s splash and drip painting from 1950, “Autumn Rhythm.”

We had decided to meet as soon as the museum opened, when the gallery, at the far end of the Met, would still be empty. Taking in the painting, Serra had the air of a caged lion, pacing back and forth, moving away, to see it whole, then back in to inspect some detail.

“We evaluate artists by how much they are able to rid themselves of convention, to change history,” he said. Which was Serra’s bottom line — in his case, nudging sculpture into new territory. Why else be an artist? This was how he thought. Old-school. Old Testament. For him, art was all or nothing.

300x250x1

Of course he wasn’t alone in his thinking among American artists of his generation, the offspring of postwar American power and arrogance, of titans like Pollock.

That said, not many artists accomplished what he set out to do, in the process seeing public perception of his work flip 180 degrees.

All these decades later, a wide swath of the public today continues to be baffled and occasionally galled by Pollock, just as it didn’t get Serra for years. “Tilted Arc,” the giant steel sculpture by Serra, was still a fresh wound when we visited the Met. Public officials had removed it from a plaza outside the courthouses in Lower Manhattan in 1989. Fellow artists objected to the removal, but office workers who ate their lunches in the plaza implored City Hall. They saw it as an intrusion, an ugly wall, dividing their precious open space. Serra still wore his fury like a badge of honor.

“I think if work is asked to be accommodating, to be subservient, to be useful to, to be required to, to be subordinated to, then the artist is in trouble,” he said.

It was now two decades later and thousands of his adoring fans filled an auditorium in Brazil. He and I had flown to Rio to do a public talk. The audience had come to hear the lion roar. By then, he and his voice had softened. But not his message.

He compared art with science. You don’t advance science by public consensus, he said. Then he described the time he had splashed molten lead against the wall and adjoining sidewalk of a museum in Switzerland, an act that so appalled uptight Swiss residents that the work was removed after only a few hours.

He was thumbing his nose at the stuffy sanctity of the museum, he explained, claiming the side of the building as part of his sculpture, and at the same time swapping industrial materials like lead, steel and rubber for the traditional tools and conventions of his craft, like marble, pedestals and clay.

Around the same time, he lifted up the edge of a sheet of discarded rubber scavenged from a warehouse in Lower Manhattan, making a kind of tent, balanced just so — a topography, implying action. He wasn’t trying to make something crowd-pleasing or familiar or beautiful, he recalled. It wasn’t beautiful. It was an experiment.

Was it art?

That was the question.

It was the same question Pollock raised when he painted “Autumn Rhythm.” Pollock had also stalked the canvas, as it lay on the floor of his Long Island studio. He prowled its edges with sticks, dripping and ladling paint. Lines in the picture recorded his choreography.

“Autumn Rhythm” was a pure abstraction, depthless, describing only itself, not an image of anything else — a floating field of wild, exquisite tracery that viewers would need to navigate and decipher for themselves. Even Pollock wasn’t sure what it signified.

Pollock “had to have remarkable faith that the process would lead to fully realized statements,” Serra said. “After all, he didn’t know where he would end up when he started.”

Serra had started his meteoric career as a volcanic presence in the downtown art scene of the 1960s, which today has the bittersweet whiff of a faded Polaroid. It was a cobblestone and cast-iron version of Russia in the 1910s, driven by ego and revolution. Serra occupied a loft with the sculptor Nancy Graves without running water that cost about $75 a month and he fell into a community of ingenious and groundbreaking composers, dancers, writers, filmmakers, musicians and other artists, among them Trisha Brown, Joan Jonas, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Spalding Grey, Michael Snow, Chuck Close, Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer. The list goes on. Cheap rent, available real estate and restlessness. The cocktail of urban creativity and change.

“There was a clear understanding among us that we had to redefine whatever activity we were doing,” is how Serra described the scene to the crowd in Rio.

By then, a global public had come to adore his elliptical mazes of twisted Cor-Ten steel, the culmination of his sculptural pursuits. They were democratic adventures, depending on what you brought to them. A moviemaker once told me that walking through them reminded him of an unspooling film, with twists and turns leading to a surprise ending. A writer on the Holocaust once likened their high walls to pens.

I always found them to be serious fun. They concentrate the mind, stirring fear and anticipation, changing inch by inch, step by step. Serra magically transforms folded, tilting walls of rolled steel into what can almost resemble planes of melted wax. Passages, like caves or canyons, narrow and looming, suddenly open onto clearings. When Serra was given a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 2007, one of the most spectacular shows of the current century, I found a trio of half-naked sunbathers reclining on the ground inside “Torqued Ellipse IV,” which occupied a patch of the museum’s garden.

So what changed over the years to bring the public around?

I’m not sure it was Serra, who stuck to his guns. There is a work by him called “1-1-1-1,” from 1969, which consists of three tilting steel plates held erect by a pole resting on top of them, itself stabilized by a fourth plate teetering on its end. It looks scary and precarious, but the balancing act can also remind you of Buster Keaton.

It used to be described as obdurate and menacing. But that is not, I don’t think, how Serra ever saw his work. After the MoMA retrospective, I passed a late summer afternoon in Italy, watching Serra patiently, quietly accompany my older son, who was still in grade school, around the ancient temples at Paestum. Serra spoke, as if to an adult, about the swell of the weathered columns, the weight of the stones, the way the stones balanced on top of one another and held each other up. For him, sculpture distilled to its essential qualities — mass, gravity, weight, volume — was our shared language and legacy, an eternal poem to which great artists add their contributions over the centuries.

“I don’t know of anyone since Pollock who has altered the form or the language of painting as much as he did,” he told me back in that gallery with “Autumn Rhythm.” “And that was, what, almost half a century ago?”

It’s hard to think of artists who have done more than Serra over the last half century to alter the form and language of sculpture.

Adblock test (Why?)

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Trending