Rick Silva

Work from The Silva Field Guide to Birds of a Parallel Future with a short story by Claire L. Evans

In an old growth forest along the Oregon coast, an ornithologist is hiking across a loamy bed of pine needles. She is three weeks into a census, cataloguing birds in the deep woods. Every night, she’s pitched tent in damp boughs along the thundering, craggy sea. The spotted owls are up. The vesper sparrows are down. White-grey sky and the smell of cedar.

She stops. The woods are dense with moisture. She is alone with the music of the trees; far above, in the canopy, a gentle rain falls, the sound like papery chimes. The forest groans under the weight of itself. With binoculars, she scans the low-hanging branches until she spots a nest. It appears to have been built drunkenly, the weft of twigs at improbable angles, a deflated parallelogram. She looks again. Unusual. Perhaps it’s been tampered with. But she’s far off the public trailheads, alone in these woods.

The nest, she determines after hiking closer and half-scrambling up the tree, has not been tampered with. Its form is strange but natural, built with the focused precision of a roosting animal. It’s marvelous, though—like a sculpture. Against her better scientific judgement, she reaches for the nest. It’s nearly weightless, and as she is pulling it from the branches, the clouds above the canopy begin to clear, pouring sun through the leaves onto the forest floor. In the new light, she notices a kind of iridescent hum, shifting as she cradles the nest and turns it around in her hands. There is something inside.

That night, she tucks the nest near her pillow, wedged against the edge of the tent, wrapped in a blanket. The hum keeps her awake. She doesn’t know what to do. It seems insane to leave it behind, but carrying it with her feels like a kind of madness, too. Drinking gritty campfire coffee in the morning, she mutters to herself, weighing her options: she is afraid to open it, afraid to leave it behind, afraid of it.

Somehow, she continues the census, recording bird calls, counting terns, plovers, sandpipers and hawks, the mysterious nest growing heavier and heavier in her backpack each day until it’s impossible to carry and she must leave it in her tent, at the foot of a gnarled Sitka spruce, checking back every few hours like a mother hen.
Seven days later at dawn, the nest moves. She is already awake and she sees it happen distinctly. It shifts and crackles, brushing against the nylon tent wall. She pulls up close to the nest, sleeping bag up to her ears, frozen with horror and awe. She senses a metallic tang beneath the brine in the warming morning air. Slowly, the nest falls away, shedding its delicate architecture.
Coiled like a snake inside is a humming geometry. A warped, mechanical thing with opalescent planes where its wings should be. It undulates like a manta ray, and the planes shatter into shadows, ghosting trails of probability in spirals around its body. It seems to exist in several states at once. She sits up, and as she moves the thing blinks in and out of sight, like a one-sided coin, disappearing with a glint as it’s tossed. The forest and the roar of the ocean fall mute.

Somehow she knows what the thing is—not here, but somewhere. She reaches over the shattered nest and slowly unzips the tent. She throws open the flap, letting in a whiff of salt and pine, light, the world. The thing makes an alien screech and flies away into the forest; each wing flap lasting a century. For a long time she watches it. In her tent, by her pillow, it had been the size of an apple; now it aged as it flew, molting and transforming around an invisible mold. By the time it’s only a few feet away, it has the wingspan of an albatross, an airplane, the universe wrapped around a feathered heartbeat.

At the exact same moment, elsewhere, a robin’s egg cracks open. A new life flutters into existence, dewy, feathers matted from birth. It peers above the edges of its nest. It’s not a nest at all. The egg has been laid into a non-Euclidean world, where clouds whorl in ribbons, without origin, without end. Quantum sound waves ebb on the horizon, growing smaller as they approach, larger as they recede. There is a glow in the air; it tastes metallic. A forest of quivering forms bend like fractals in the hot Möbius wind.

The robin knows nothing of the difference. It rustles and unfolds its wings. It perches on the sloping edge of a Penrose triangle and sings.

B. Ingrid Olson

Work from her oeuvre.

“If it should be a novel, we’d hope for it to be one written in verse. Said novel would be for two sisters, a secret life and a normal life. Their ground is unstable ground, but usable nonetheless. Between the verses, as the peripheries start their blur, we find our limits – the edges of our attention and the areas not yet seen. Neither one likes what they are reading, so, each sister models for the opposite; one draws the other, the other photographs the one. These two are a coming of age; together, their normal and secret lives: maybe a perfect life. The secret sister and the normal sister each have recurrent dreams. We do not know if these are the same dream – they’re neither repetitious nor episodic. In this poem, we wait in the refrain – from these grounds we look to the face of our experience, the combinations of verses recurrent. Such moments mark the ending and beginning but neither distinctly.

This is the place where we should want to be relaxed by our memories, when what we saw as the cutting room floor now stays present. That foot again, twice.
The circular mirrors again. Also again: Three ways of looking (2013) but this time different – (and should it be three ways of looking, does it benefit us to ask what those three may be? And once determined, how are they ranked? 1) eye 2) mirror 3) camera or 1) eye 2) mirror 3) viewer? That was an easier question before this image here: mirror, mirror, eye, camera, viewer, or halfway through: “mirror mirror mirror mirror mirror mirror mirror mirror eye? camera viewer”) – It’s less easy to take these photographs one by one, they spill into each other; they are each already somewhat an adjacency, or, per J.D.: “…an arrow cannot / be said to have parts because the parts are all / something else until purpose connects them.”” – Cura Magazine

Clement Valla

Work from Surface Survey

“Surface Survey is comprised of digital prints and 3D printed sculptures, structured around concepts of archaeology, computer software, meaning-making, and images that are not meant for human consumption.

To explore these themes, Valla collects digital artifacts produced by software that turns photographs into 3D Models. The arranged fragments are left untouched, exhibiting the software’s process as-is. The work is comprised of both 2D images meant to be processed by the computer (but never seen by humans) and 3D printed fragments that indicate how the software pieces the shapes together.

Valla’s subjects are varied: from sculptural antiquities he photographed in the Metropolitan Museum’s collections, to contemporary ephemera, to 19th Century inventions. The work uncovers subtle shapes and textures that illustrate these objects in unexpected ways and cast a new light the algorithms that digitized them.

Valla’s work reflects on the human potential of meaning-making in unfamiliar, software-created images. He is interested in the relationship between how what a computer reads is so distant from what a human will understand. This interest extends into the language of computer image-making, suggesting an archaeology of computer software, whose extractions reveal the computer’s systematic logic.” – Transfer 

Dan Holdsworth

Work from Mirrors FTP.

“The mirror as a tool for the receptacle of representation has been utilised ever since the early progressions of the camera obscura and of course its traces are left within the very process of film-based photography, in regards to the imprint of light and time onto the negative and the subsequent process of chemical reversal. Within ‘Mirrors ftp’ Dan Holdsworth utilises the motif of the diagonal incision and an inversion of one half of the photographic image, creating a mirror effect where cascading boulders and winding ravines begin at either end and begin to centrally converge. Following ‘Forms ftp’ this newest series of images contain the photographs recorded in crater glacier in Washington (USA) but present a further scrutinising of imagery, a collision of glacial mass within a single solitary frame.

The ‘ftp’ of the title refers to what is known to scientists and astronomers as false topographic perception. Cited as a defect of long-distance cartographic techniques and remote sensor imaging, it is said that the recorded topographies of the moon and of mars have rendered aspects to be indistinguishably concave or convex, thus resulting in a lack of classification of mountainous and cavernous terrain. In turn this caused a multiplicity of issues with astronomical expeditions, as the photographic phenomenon has been a technical stumbling block ever since the topographic mapping of planetary landscapes began. Dan Holdsworth’s consideration of this phenomenon however, isn’t with an emphasis on the anecdotal of such occurrences, nor the formal aesthetics of this estranged scientific delineation; instead the artist explores a re-configured model of its affect.

It is the sentiment of ‘ftp’ that reveals itself within the photographic series – a sentiment that raises questions around certain empirical truths and how they are affixed to the mediated photographic form. What surfaces is the action of viewing and viewing again, or the suspended and contested perceiving of ‘realities’ within each photograph. In each ‘mirror’ a dualism appears; the preliminary doubting gaze is met with the secondary assertive glance – one to the other in a perplexing binary, it is perceived and persists anon.

It transpires that the consequence of a sudden inversion of the flow of visual matter can effect how we as the viewer categorize particular empirical details within an image. The ‘mirror’ of the work is thus conjured aesthetically, formally, but also reflexively as an awareness of one’s own perception of reading the work. The French 19th century philosopher Milan de Biran once coined the term ‘coenesthese’ to express ‘one’s immediate awareness of the presence of the body in perception’. Here, each fractured photograph begins to warrant a corporeal reading, a bodily reception, or a mind’s eye grasp on the looping rhythms contained within each pulsating dialogue of geological movement. ‘Mirrors ftp’ is thus embedded with undulating patterns that at once protrude and extrude, as if the very complexities of concave and convex forms are captured within the centre of each coloured plane.
It is clear that the diagonal motif of ‘Mirrors ftp’ is exemplary of a simple and refreshing intervention that represents that playful artist tactility with the photographic image: when a rotation and an incision render an experiential perspective entirely anew. The cut also represents the simplest of disruptions to the formal photographic plane, creating an image that essentially falls inwards – splintering perspective and stretching content into a renewed composition of rhythm and form.” – Joshua Wilson

Marc Horowitz

Work from his oeuvre

Marc Horowitz graduated from USC with an MFA in 2012. Currently, his projects are in dialogue with a diverse range of subjects, including entertainment, advertising, the built environment, commerce and the quest for daily meaning. “In my own day-to-day, I am constantly making lists of potential inventions, neologisms, moneymaking schemes, jokes, drawings, websites, characters and impromptu videos. It is my hope that these projects speak to “the moment”: that they reflect and critique American idealism and expansionism – and parody pop culture so successfully as to become reappropriated by it.”

 
Avery K. Singer

Work from her oeuvre.

“If one views the past, be it in glances through old magazines, in movies of lost eras, or in visions of what was to come, the stream of history is laid bare, flowing forward to the present day. If one stops at a certain point and ignores what has followed, the stream opens up and the flow is forced to take whatever path we fancy.

The Artists presents a romanticized and slapstick vision of how we are or are not living. Staged figures occupy the realm of unrealized buildings or monuments, their geometric stylization skewing human forms into architectural plottings. The eyes of the dreamer rest upon both a forgotten vestige and a future transpired, with a sense of sentimentality overshadowed by a cold and uncanny pallor. These opposing viewpoints converge to produce glimpses of alternate timelines, where idealized visions of contemporary life and bohemia are filtered through past conventions. The mythologized status of the artist as a social being is examined as it exists and as it has been fantasized.

The works’ colorless palette and constructivist aesthetic hint at records of nonexistent times, commemorating absurd regimes that never came to fruition. Noirish shadows spread under expressionistic backlighting; the breezy theatricality of a performance piece freezing into history painting, a communion between artist friends becomes enshrined in neoclassical simplicity. Contemporary media, meshing with bygone trends of the historical avant- garde, produces a perspective of aesthetics that falters to find a foothold on the accepted timeline of art history.” – Avery K. Singer

Guido van der Werve

Work from his oeuvre.

“Dutch artist Guido van der Werve makes the kind of films Caspar David Friedrich might have dreamt up if he had had a sense of humour and access to a camera. Saturated in an atmosphere of melancholy, loss and loneliness, preoccupied with dead composers and centuries-old dance forms, yet fired by a love of both the piano and slapstick, Van der Werve’s beautifully shot vignettes include: the hapless artist narrating the history of Steinway pianos while sitting mournfully on a piano stool; trudging slowly before an icebreaker in the Gulf of Finland; standing for 24 hours at the geographic North Pole, refusing to turn with the world, surrounded by stately dancing ballerinas after being knocked down by a car on a depressing suburban street; and meditating on meteorites while building a space rocket in his living-room. The films are usually accompanied by Romantic piano music played by Van der Werve, who trained as a classical musician. Frédéric Chopin is his favourite composer (because ‘his music often sounds very simple, and I think you have to reach a really high level of understanding in order to be able to do that’), although he is also fond of Sergei Rachmaninov, Sergei Prokofiev and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Recently he has begun writing his own lush scores. Happily, despite skating close to pathos, Van der Werve’s films never quite fall into it. A crescendo of melancholy can abruptly shift key and tone and segue into a light-hearted mood of absurdity at the least predictable of moments.

In the classic tradition of slapstick Van der Werve’s films are fuelled by the creative possibilities of aural and visual dislocation, or, more simply, by an awareness of how simultaneously lonely and absurd life can be and how much solace can be found in abstract forms of expression. Witness, for example, the shifts in mood, setting and meaning, in the 12 minutes of Nummer vier: I don’t want to get involved in this, I don’t want to be part of this, talk me out of it (2005). The film opens with words, spoken in Dutch and written in English on a black screen: ‘I woke up early and watched the sun rise. I felt it came up just for me.’ Cut to an image of the lonely back of the artist; he is gazing out over a slate-blue sea. Very slowly the camera pans up to the sky; a small plane flies by, dragging behind it a banner emblazoned with the words ‘it was not enough’. Cue the achingly wistful chords of Chopin’sNocturne No. 1 in B flat minor, performed by the artist. The camera gradually pans down to an image of Van der Werve playing the piece on a slightly out-of-tune upright piano, perched on a pontoon in the middle of a misty lake. When the piece comes to an end, the scene changes to a barge drifting down a river. Gradually the faint strains of Mozart’s Requiem Mass are discernible, and it is apparent that the choir and orchestra performing the piece are actually on the boat. Intimations of death, and more particularly the island of the dead, become overwhelming. Eventually everyone disappears, and we are left with the gentle sounds of wind and birds. Then, without warning, the artist drops from the sky and into the river.

It is impossible, when witnessing such overwrought, touching and often hilarious scenes, not to think of Van der Werve as the love child of Bas Jan Ader, another Dutch artist preoccupied with the slapstick possibilities of isolation, sadness, alienation and the elements, especially water (into which, of course, Ader eventually and tragically disappeared). They share a sensibility that Jörg Heiser has termed ‘Romantic Conceptualism’: a condition of ‘voluptuous bliss’ that overwhelms ‘the rigidity of the Conceptual execution’ to which Van der Werve, with his tight framing and multifaceted references to history and time, is obviously in thrall. Here, for example, is Heiser discussing Ader’s video Farewell to Faraway Friends (1971): ‘We see the lone artist at the edge of the sea, silhouetted by a beautiful sunset, alluding both to Caspar David Friedrich’s scenes and to the kitschy picture postcard tradition that developed after them. It is as if Ader is mourning this history of devaluation itself, as if the faraway friends were the early Romantic artists who once, with fresh eyes, discovered Sublime nature as a mirror of their soul, and whose discovery is now obsolete.’ It’s a description that could equally apply to Van der Werve.” – Jennifer Higgie, Frieze Magazine

Katja Novitskova

Work from Spirit, Curiosity, Opportunity.

“The objects found in this fossilised collection look like cubes, polygons, slots, arrows, round holes, bones, feathers and even artistic impressions. It may have resulted from a variation of the same basic process which forms fossils on Earth, where mud replaces organic material over time. There is a small possibility that some of the original artifacts are still present around the crater.

A few artifacts have been minimally sharpened or enlarged for clarity purposes only. No manual “pixel twiddling” was ever performed on any image in this exhibition. Panoramic camera source images for these artifacts were only available in JPEG form on the NASA archive servers.

Not all images here can be dismissed as natural rock formations. Red outlines show unusual shapes: note the indentations on the rocks in the back of the image (arrows). Could this be a fossilised life-form or a mechanical artifact? Perhaps these two heavily censored images of a scrambled sky and altered ground surface originally displayed real objects on the planet, which we are not allowed to see. This perfectly formed object is outlined by the sun’s shadow and resembles a bird or vehicle. Does this rock have lettering? And what is that if not a female figure, and a possible child and man near it?” –

Der Grund ist nicht Licht, sondern Nacht at Christian Ehretraut.

“
Through their surfaces, structures and the ways in which they are assembled, the works in the exhibition move in direct relation to the surrounding exhibition space and installed artwork. In their use of optical irritations, often intense color and repetitive rhythm, they oscillate between playful sensuality and analytical concept.
 The title of the exhibition comes from the diaries of Paul Klee, who in 1908 was beginning to build up his works on a black ground (rather than white), remarking that darkness was the “natural state” of things, and light was that which made it visible.

Julie Oppermann’s work pushes the limits of visual perception, making paintings that are physically difficult to perceive. The scintillating effects arising through the calculated layering and juxtaposition of contrasting colors through repetitive line patterns elicit shuttering afterimages, optical flicker, and disorienting sensations of movement. The paintings, on one hand, reference the digital, looking as if they might be computer-generated, vector-based interference patterns; up close, however, they reveal a gestural, intuitive approach.
Glitches, bleeds and mis-registrations rupture the illusory field of the moiré, creating visual noise and also highlight the basic tools at work: taped-off line patterns and paint on canvas.

Yorgos Stamkopoulos’ paintings are composed from a variety of multi-layered, flashy, minimalist color fields. Once a layer has been applied with the air-brush, it is masked in a gestural act with countless drippings in a “Pollock-style” manner only to be painted over again. Stamkopoulos repeats this process over and over until the canvas is fully covered; only then are the layers of masking removed to reveal the final image. Similarly to Oppermann, Stamkopoulos builds up layer upon layer, but relinquishes the final control over the painting, leaving room for the unconscious, the unplanned and the random.

Alexander Wolff’s works from the past six years are assembled from different fabrics, printed on, dyed and sewn together. Individual parts of an image are repeated, rotated and mirrored, combining print- and painterly techniques. Wolff continuously questions the possibilities of painting in general, of the image and of representation. He integrates found materials, paint, light and photography as well as the exhibition space itself: A large installation on the gallery’s brick wall is staged both as an autonomous image as well as the backdrop for the whole exhibition.” – Christian Ehretraut

Screen Play

A show of documentations of artworks by:

Kathryn Andrews, Brendan Anton Jaks, Eva Berendes, Simon Denny, Carson Fisk-Vittori, Patrick Hill, Tilman Hornig, Dan Rees, Philipp Timischl, Anne de Vries

at SWG3 Gallery, Glasgow

Curated by Camille Le Houezec & Joey Villemont.

“As artists we create images, as curators we believe in their potential; their potential to be seen, to travel, to expand and inspire. Thanks to Hight Definition, one can now see the actual colors, textures or materials of an artwork, from behind a screen. With the Internet, it is now possible to get a better idea of a show, a museum collection without even visiting it in the flesh. To be honest, we never had the chance to contemplate most of these exhibited artworks for real and this show is the occasion to experiment with a ‘Real Life’ exhibition format in the digital age.

Every artist now has to consider the ‘second life’ of his/her work. Once the exhibition is over, the work goes back into storage while its documentation starts a career online (and the photograph better be a good one!). By using some controversial and subjective selection criteria such as the online virility of the image, its visual impact, the quality of the picture taken, Screen Play reveals a primordial aspect of contemporary art production today. We find something very primitive in exhibiting images we see online each day. Playing back and forth between 3D and 2D, we re inject these documentations of artworks in their natural environment in a way to see what it does to show images of artworks within the exhibition space. Obviously, nothing can replace the sensation of seeing a work in the flesh, but could its representation create something else, something you can’t get with the actual artwork?

We created itsourplayground.com four years ago to host online exhibitions built around documentations of artworks mixed with found images, GIFs, videos and texts. The site’s homepage is a playful, immaterial space that picks up on the qualities that are inherent to the internet (ease of access, practically without monetary charge, rapidity), to produce surprising narratives, deconstructing the hierarchy that usually reigns among documents.

Screen Play is//pursue a reflexion around the mode of diffusion and propagation of artworks through their documentation and could also be seen as an experimental human scale model of our website. Screen Play will also be the occasion of an online show which will be launched this summer on www.itsourplayground.com”