Sou uma passageira. Tô em trânsito. (I’m a passenger. I’m in transit.)

Artists, residents and directors at Largo. The photo was taken at the end of the opening. We are facing a mob of flashing smart phone cameras. Standing from left to right: Consuelo, Devaney, Sarah, Ricardo, Timea, Bodo, Miguel, Julia. Sitting from left to right: Raphael, Tobi, the medicine man, Marta, Felippe, Carla, Fred, and Anthon. I'm wearing a dress/accessory that I made for the occasion. It is actually the title of my installation It reads "Sou uma passageira" in the front and "Tô em trânsito" in the back. 

Wednesday, April 29th is the exhibition at Largo das Artes. The day starts with the overwhelming smell of floor polish and the sounds of vacuum cleaners. Two cleaning ladies maneuver around artist and artworks patiently. We are turning our work spaces into a gallery. As an exhibition space, Largo is a very proper one. It used to be a commercial art gallery under Miguel Sayad, whose brilliant idea it was to reopen it as a studio/art center that houses and supports artists.
Largo's remarkable artistic director, Consuelo Bassanesi is tirelessly running around all week, finding us space, equipment and solutions for tough problems that inevitably arise. We are expecting a lot of people, as it is a double event: Ricardo Castro is presenting a solo show of his work from his 3-month long residency. Ricardo, a Paulista (person from São Paulo), won a national art award, which also presented him with the Rio residency. The four of us international resident artists are doing a group show of the work produced this month. 

Late in the night, people are hanging out around the beautiful windows.

There is a cachaça brand that sponsors our event (and serving up shots of cachaça, a distilled spirit made from sugarcane) and security, hired for the night, at the door. Guests arrive and leave in cabs, which is quite common in Rio due to he poor public safety and low taxi rates. There is a definite festive and glamorous atmosphere to the celebration. Having been to many art events in the past month, I learned that each place takes pride in being good hosts: serving up drinks and refreshments, sometimes entire dinners, carefully planning information materials (in our case, a brochure with introduction to each artists' work by curator, Carla Hermann) and being open as late as there are souls still lingering in the gallery.
On top of all this, Marta's sound installation is planned to be opened by a shaman, an indio (Brazilian indigenous people) medicine man, whom we met at the Day of the Indio celebration. 

Indio medicine man performing a ritual purification before Marta Ferracin's sound installation. The speakers hold spices and herbs collected from indigenous and colonial cultures and they vibrate and spew their contents with the imploding sounds of Rio.

Ricardo de Castro's video installation, called Hora Mágica (The Magic Hour) is full of spiritual symbolism. Mirrors bouncing the rays of the sun while performers act out some kind of mystic ritual.

I'm presenting two larger pieces. Both were made with the same technique, cutting synthetic-leather (upholstery vinyl) with X-acto knife and scissors. I haven't been doing hand-cut work since it became extremely popular in the artworld. I felt that I've run out of things to say with it when I stopped but here in Rio it makes sense again, having not much more than a few basic tools with me. 
I like the large size of these and the potential to drape them over objects, which is exactly what I'm going to try in order to finish the black piece, pictured below. Having been inspired by the gates and fences that I see everywhere, it is, in a sense, a soft barrier.

Untitled (for being still work in progress) cut upholstery vinyl. 1.5meters by 2 meters. Inspired by colonial tile patterns and wrought ironwork, both ubiquitous in Rio.   

While the pattern is extremely ornamental and tight, the actual piece has a sense of freedom and irregularity that is part of the process and evident in the detail. In order to make it, I create a drawing in photoshop—based on a collage of actual patterns that I photograph—then project the drawing and draw it directly onto the vinyl. Following the drawn lines with scissors and a knife is simple enough but can still be confusing at times: when zooming to work on a tiny detail I sometimes lose a sense of the bigger picture. I'm interested in what gets lost in this transcription process and how the form—abstracted and approximated at each step of the process—changes. 

The fallibility of translation is also part of my daily experience in Rio, struggling to get by using Portuguese. This filters a bit into the second piece, a video installation, which consists of a projection onto the large golden hand-cut Rio map and gold text wrapping around on the dark walls. Mainly, I've been thinking a lot about what makes a place, how it is inhabited, how we make sense of it as outsiders (travelers) and insiders (inhabitants). 

Entrance to the black room with my video installation entitled Sou uma passageira. Tô em trânsito. (I’m a passenger. I’m in transit.)
There is gold vinyl lettering on the wall that one catches the glimpse of word by word. The text reads: 

Uma paisagem pode ser um lugar, se explorada ou vivida. Continua a ser somente uma paisagem se for apenas observada. (A once lived-in landscape can be a place, if explored, or remain a landscape, if simply observed.) which is our collaborative yet amateur translation from Lucy Lippard's Lure of the Local. 

Inside the black room: A video of ants carrying pellets of food swarming on a sandy ground that is projected onto a golden map of Rio. https://vimeo.com/126359452 The scale difference creates a surreal feeling of looking down on another planet from space, seeing both the micro and macro world. The text on the wall circles around the space. This part reads: 

It’s a peculiar human habit to make a home in just about any environment. This is my translation of Hungarian emigrant writer, Imre Kertesz, from Europe's Oppressive Legacy.

Rio! Rio? Rio.

After much procrastination, here I begin a record of living and making art in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
I had been fortunate to be selected for a two month residency at Largo das Artes, one of the prominent art studios/galleries in the Centro area of this bustling megapolis. This is my first time in South America, at a location below latitude 32° N, and it is also the first time to have managed to wrangle our schedules to coordinate research travels with my husband, Sándor Kovács.
While I'm working at Largo das Artes,  Sándor is a guest researcher at IMPA, which is located in the beautiful Jardim Botânico district in the "Zona Sul"(South Zone). Although the residency was kind enough to offer housing in the historic Cosme Velho neighborhood, we decided to split the commute difference between our respective work places and rent an apartment in Copacabana. With advise from local friends, we narrowed down our apartment hunt to Bairro Peixoto, a lovely residential block tucked away between the mountains. For those never been to Rio, this area is a gem: Entirely peaceful, with weekly fresh produce markets (feira), kids on the playground, retirees walking their tiny-apartment-sized dogs, housewives carrying loaded grocery bags, and older men watching soccer on the TVs of the ubiquitous mini-bars that spill their battered plastic seating to the sidewalk. The beach (praia) is only 5 blocks away—a completely different experience.

Map of Rio Centro and Zona Sul, with home and both of our work places marked. This map shows only a fraction of metropolitan Rio de Janeiro. 

View of Zona Sul from Christ's feet (Corcovado Mountain).

Largo das Artes is a short flight of stairs up from a bustling street in the heart of SAARA (pronounce: Sahara), which stands for Sociedade de Amigos das Adjacências da Rua da Alfândega. In former life SAARA was where immigrants from the Middle-East had settled and established a market. Now, it is the place where everyone goes to snatch up some bargains. Absolutely everything is available here, from useless plastic trinkets to serious professional materials like leathers, fabrics, construction materials, uncommon spices and semi-precious stones. In between the shops, stalls and street vendors feed the hungry shoppers with fried foods and sweets. What an inspiring location for art making! A cacophony of sounds and smells from SAARA waft through the open windows into the cavernous spaces of Largo das Artes all day long. My walk from the subway station to the studio is a constant and exciting exploration of possibilities for new sculptural materials.

View of the square in front of Largo das Artes. This place is a tiny oasis in the crowded maze of alleyways of the SAARA. This photo was taken during a participatory project by resident artist, Marta Ferracin. Marta offered to give away cooler boxes in exchange for people's creativity of wrapping these with colorful tape. Many of the street vendors and homeless were eager to participate. We were all sitting on the pavers, wrapping, laughing, and making awkward conversations in Portugese.
More about the project on Marta's terrific blog: http://martaferracinartblogtwo.blogspot.com.br/2015/04/largo-das-artes-day-74.html

Largo's banner with our beautiful floor to ceiling studio windows.

At Largo das Artes, the studios are hopping with international and Brazilian artists who are part of the residency program, and also with local artist who rent studios here. This month, besides Marta Ferracin (Italy via Australia), there are Bodo Korsig (Germany), Sarah Beatty (USA) and Ricardo Càstro (Brazil). We are joined by several other Brazilian artists, including Devaney Claro, Júlia Hartung and Pablo Ferretti. 

Perhaps not surprising that my first project has been a map. I carry a large Rio map in my bag and it is my to-go reference for every sight, store, or bus-stop that I need to locate. I'm intrigued by how we make sense of maps in relationship to the real physical space and what these maps reveal and leave out. For example, the favelas don't have any maps. Many of them are not even on the map. The same is true for exclusive government, police or military facilities, which Rio has plenty of. The city has a real temporal and spacial existence. Many of the stores, restaurants and bars have no street presence outside of their open hours. During the time when they are closed, business hide behind unmarked metal shutters and locked impenetrable gates. 

Drawing the map on the back of a large sheet of synthetic leather. Photo by Marta Ferracin. 

Working on the map. It took about a week to cut out all the spaces between the streets.

Wearing the map (half-done). Photo by Ricardo Castro.
I forgot to mention: The map is GOLD. More about this in the next blog entry. 

Community and Craft: Ellensburg - A History Lesson

Ellensburg may not seem like an exotic destination for someone from the Northwest but the small Central Washington town (population about 20,000) offers much in terms of its history, a beautiful location in the otherwise arid landscape, and its thriving community arts and culture.

Davidson building from 1889. Now home of Gallery One.

This year, Gallery One Visual Arts Center inaugurated a new ceramics residency program in order to reinvigorate its clay studio. I was excited to be offered an opportunity to visit and create work there, since my work of the past few years is strongly oriented towards building structures, architecture, and interaction with various communities. In our discussions about the scope of the residency with director Monica Miller, we had discovered common threads in our goals: to create an engagement between my research and Ellensburg residents, by drawing people into the studio and also by hooking me up with some members of the community, in order to mine and record some of the oral history of the town.

Kittitas County Historic Museum

My residency takes form in three stages: First stage is a preliminary research, which, by now, I have completed. The second is a community workshop, which will take place at the end of July, and the third is a public presentation in August of the pieces made in the workshop.

Barge Hall on the CWU campus

During the past week, I've been wondering around town on my own photographing the buildings, getting tours from generous and knowledgeable gems of Ellensburg residents, like David Wheeler, a local historian and building aficionado, Mollie Edson, proprietor of the historic 420 Building, and Jane Orleman of Dick and Jane's Spot, a painter.

The Art Deco 420 Building.

From what I was able to observe, Ellensburg is a combination of three things that signify the place and keep being intertwined mutually facilitating the growth of one another over the past century and a quarter: community, culture and history, - creating a perfect place for an artist.
Another facet of a small town is the unhurried way of life, and the social contract created by everybody knowing everyone (for better or worse).

After I settled into the studio and made a few tests with the materials available, I headed out in the company of David Wheeler to get my first history lesson on Ellensburg.
While the Kittitas tribes has used the valley as trade and council grounds for many decades before the first white settlers laid an eye on the beautiful location by the Yakima river, it was not a permanent settlement site until the mid 1800s. In barely more than two decades after the first permanent white settlement was established, a flourishing town complete with a bank, a few hotels and eateries, many saloons, stables, schools, stores and various other businesses was welcoming the travelers en-route in their grueling journey from the Midwest to the Pacific Coast or from the traders conducting business of cattle, and natural resources from the Columbia river northward. The Northern Pacific Railroad built a depot in 1886, and the town was growing so rapidly that in 1889, when Washington territory became a state, Ellensburg became a strong contender in a bid for the state capital. The milestone moment came 125 years ago, on the 4th of July, in the form of a blazing fire that destroyed much of the downtown core. The expansion was only momentarily stunned by the destruction, but only to rebuild with even more resolve, quickly and furiously. Much of the building materials had already been ordered amidst the vigorous expansion and these became the fundamental first-aid during the process of the rebuild, which actually happened in only 90 days!!!
In the following decades, many other events promoted the renewal and redevelopment of the town, now shaping itself to be a center of education (Washington Sate Normal School in 1891, pilot training during WW II. - now Central Washington University) and trade (a special type of hay for race horses).

Downtown street corner with mural.

Dick and Jane's Spot.

Dick and Jane's Spot.

Looking at the details of the buildings and listening to David retelling these stories, two things stand out for me from all this history: Community and Craft.

Community:

The old YMCA building now.

Both after the Independence Day Fire and upon the return of the veterans of World War I and II, or even now during the time of our current economic ailments, a strong sense of inter-reliance and shared responsibility for the future permeates all the discussions. One example for that is values and ideas represented and promoted by the stellar Gallery One Visual Arts Center and the other is the brand new community radio station.








Craft:

Check out the brick work!

During my week-long residency, I've met more artists, crafts people, makers, creative-types, innovators and entrepreneurs - both living in Ellensburg or visiting, than I meet in a usual week back home in Seattle.
Another aspect of Craft comes from having only limited resources, creating a more resourceful approach to making it due with what's available. This is clearly visible in the brick work on the building fronts. This kind of resourcefulness of pushing and pulling the bricks to create endless variations of patterns is a testament to the craftsman's technical savvy and design ingenuity.






On one of my walks I found a curious looking residential home, affectionately named Dick and Jane's Spot. On the fence is a loud sign: "What is This?" - exactly a question in my mind. The next day, I was lucky enough to meet Jane Orleman, the lady of the house, for a discussion and a tour of her home. Jane gave me another chapter to Ellensburg history: from the 1970's to the present. As young artists and graduates of CWU's art program, she and Richard C. Elliott bought a run-down house, which over the following three decades they developed into a whimsical sculpture garden, equally for their own amusement and that of the tourists' who have been curiously peeking over the fence ever since.

Dick Elliott's trademark pattern work with reflectors. He developed a mathematical algorithm to produce permutations of the design. One of his public artworks is on the North part of the Henry Art Gallery on the UW Seattle campus.

Jane spoke about the local support she received in showing her then "outrageous" paintings about domestic violence and child abuse, and how Dick (who was a renowned public artists with numerous commissions nation-wide) and her considered Ellensburg their home-base and center.

Jane Orleman in her studio.

While I was working in the Gallery One clay studio many visitors made a stop for casual or inquisitive conversations.

This is one of the larger and more complex pieces. It's not directly referencing any of the buildings but still has a few design elements mixed together.

I learned about "moon gardens," the local hay business, a general lack of art education in the school system, the efforts going into making the town a cultural center and a destination, the Ellensburgians wary to utter the word "wind". (Instead you have to spell it out: W-I-N-D, in order to avoid it returning. The wind can be quite unsettling in its relentless presence. I went out for a run on a moderately windy day and got almost blown off my feet while going through the open fields. I felt like a fool out there struggling to move forward while barely keeping my balance.)

Although I made quite a few things in the studio while there, much of this experience will shape into its final form later in my own studio and during the community workshop at the end of the month. Again: Ceramics is such a process! - from start to result. Takes a while to test and get the materials ready in the beginning, and it takes a while to get the end result fired and finished.
I also noticed a certain adult bias to relegate working with clay to be either a functional craft or children's art. It may be just some shyness, the adults thinking of purpose and utilitarian product.
I hope the upcoming workshop to sway that. Here is a great inspiration:

I actually found this picture in the Ellensburg online archives. It is so intriguing. I believe the building was on fire in the dead of winter, so the water froze on it as it was being sprayed by the firemen. The ice has a visual relationship to the way I use the slip to hold the pieces together in my structures.

And below are some work in progress:

Working with slip and glaze inlays to add pattern. These are stoneware slabs, a lot thicker than my usual work with porcelain.

Little structures are going into the kiln.

Out of the kiln.

The good-byes

The final week has come and gone. I'm writing these last few posts on the plane to Seattle and uploading them from home.
The frenzy of finishing my project, packing the work, and exiting the program lasted with intensity into the final day. By Friday noon, I had everything that I made, along with my molds and tools packed and paletted at the loading dock in the factory, and we watched it being put on a truck to start its journey to Seattle.

Everything I made is boxed up and ready to put on palettes for shipping.  40 boxes, 1790 lbs. total weight

I cleaned out the studio for the next resident and, on my way out, disposed of the safety glasses and the "clown shoes" (clumsy, heavy, steel toed work shoes) that we all have to wear at all times in the factory. My badge expired at 5pm and, after that, I could no longer enter the factory. The residency was over. "The Garden of Eden" is closed forever. Kind of a sad moment, especially considering that the factory was a home away from home for 13 long weeks. It has been a place in Kohler I was the most familiar with, where I was the most comfortable at, and where most of my social interactions took place.

Finally, exchanging these...

...for these

Going from a newbie who does not know anything or anybody, screws up, gets in the way, and generally clueless about the world of the factory, to be accepted and welcomed, showered with questions and silly stories, greeted by smiles and small talk every time I walked through the factory. Being addressed by various versions of my name (the idiosyncrasies of pronunciation of which I would always find entertaining, while being appreciative of the sincere effort) and being looked after by these rough and gruff men of heavy physical labor made the factory a very comfortable place. They joked on my vegetarianism and petite physique; fixed my bike; fed me from their lunchboxes; kept tabs on my comings and goings, on how much I worked and how little I rested; wanted to know what an artist does and how much money it makes (zero?!); what my life of university teaching was like; and how we "out there" in the state of Washington are doing in this bad economy.
I learned to love the factory, and to very much appreciate the workers and their lives.

In late November, I realized that a natural next step for me is a second but no less involved project that uses the same molds toward a different conceptual direction. One that directly addresses the laborers. When we talked, the associates often complained about their perception of the management who sits in their high ivory towers and of being treated by them not as individuals but as numbers and parts of a machine only designed to hit a certain quota of production.
Day after day in talking with these men, it became clear to me that the sluggish economy is an undertone of all these conversations. The labor that they do and the respect and pay that it receives are in the forefront, a concern for their families and for the negative health effects of the repetitive and heavy physical work are much on their minds.
The idea for the new project occurred to me in an instant: Taking beautiful portrait shots of the associates and accompanying them with pieces of these mold fragments that are personalized by using the graphics of the worker's favorite work shirt. I talked to them about the fact that the molds were tools being used for a while then discarded after no longer being found useful. I often wondered if they  understood this to be a metaphor the same way as I did, as an analogy of their own lives of physically consuming labor.

ceramics pins I made as good-bye presents for the associates

I was amazed when I got the go ahead Kohler (most of the factory can be red tape galore!) and then received the help to make the photo portion of this project possible. Getting it all organized in less then a week was no small effort, which required all the diplomatic skills and connections of the wonderful A/I program assistant, Cara Camp, and amazing pottery technician, Shari McWilliams. Out of the 16 workers I asked to let me take their pictures, most obliged and we took the photos in two sessions on the week before my final week of residency. Two photographers helped me to make it possible, Brad Allen, of Kohler, and Jeff Machtig of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center.

one of the casters, Jerry in his (and my) favorite T-shirt

and the same graphics inlaid with color slip on the piece

Each associate posed somewhere around his own work area. The poses reveal powerful and manly characters while the actual photo-shoot  will always be memorable for me for the awkward exposure and intimate momentary connection created by being stuck on either side of the camera's lens while the shutter opened.
I only had time to make one test piece, out of one of these photographs (see above). I would need months of testing and execution to develop the work into what I imagined in my head.
 For that, I would have to come back to Kohler sometime soon, or attempt to finish the project by holding on to the initial inspiration at home.

biking home from the factory in early December with the sunset in my back