Interviews by Gregory Ito

 

 

This is a two part editorial piece of small interviews with Kala Art Institute’s Fellows from 2011, currently on view at Kala (Oakland, CA) till September 15th, 2012.  Be sure to see the show before it comes down next month.  The interviews are with the following artists: Michele Carlson, Alison OK Frost, Seth Koen, Vanessa Marsh, Sandra Ono, Francesca Pastine, Lauren Rice, and Gail Wight.  Below is a desciption of the fellowship awards courtesy of Kala Art Institute.  

 

 

The Kala Fellowship, an international competition, annually grants nine artists a cash award, unlimited access to Kala’s facilities for up to six months, and a culminating show in the Kala Gallery, through a highly competitive jurying process. The Fellowship Award is geared towards supporting artists in completing specific projects or bodies of work that would benefit from Kala’s specialized equipment. This year Kala reserved one of the nine awards for an artist working in the discipline of Social Practice. Another of the nine awards is designated for a California artist living outside of a main metropolitan area with funding provided by The James Irvine Foundation. Hosting nine new artists at Kala each year helps to ensure that the artistic energy and vision of Kala’s entire community of artists in residence is continually re-energized and rejuvenated.

 

 

 

INTERVIEWS Part 1: Francesca Pastine, Alison OK Frost, Seth Koen, Vanessa Marsh, and Seth Koen

 

 

 

 

 

Francesca Pastine:

 

GI: What are you current activities in the art community? 

 

FP: I just had a show in Los Angeles, “Finds! The Unusual Object,” curated by Kristin Calabrese and Joshua Aster. I was represented at Artpad by Eleanor Harwood Gallery, and had a preview in Art LTD. By Dewitt Cheng from my upcoming show at Eleanor Harwood Gallery. My solo show at Eleanor Harwood Gallery, Unsolicited, opened May 26 and will end on July 7. In conjunction with this show, I was reviewed by Kimberly Chun in the San Francisco Chronicle. “Unsolicited” was also reviewed by Kenneth Baker in the San Francisco Chronicle. I was on Margaret Tedesco’s live-streaming show, Roll Call, on KUSF in Exile. I am currently teaching a “Watercolor Workshop” in the City College Extension Education program.

 

GI: Can you discuss the concepts that drive your artistic practice?

 

FP: I re-contextualize and subvert icons of cultural production using the folk tradition of paper cutting or other hands-on processes. I have been using printed media such asARTFORUM magazine and the New York Times in order to conflate socio-economic and political conditions with my lived experience.  The work embeds within the time of its making and the trace of my hand making. Creases, folds, stains and other imperfections are allowed to exist in the work.

 

 

I began my “ARTFORUM Excavation” series as an unsolicited collaboration with the magazine and the cover artist. My process is time intensive and follows an inner logic I devise for myself. Starting with the covers, I cut, bend, manipulate, pull, and dig my way through their pages, revealing a visceral topography of art trends. Maintaining a strong connection to the physicality of drawing, my X-acto blade mimics a pencil, subtracting rather than adding. The magazines becomes a geological strata as in an eroded or excavated landscape.

 

I also intricately cut into the pages of the New York Times stock-report pages transforming them into lace-like spider webs. In Blackout, Section A Series, I blotted out the entire section using a 9B pencil, thus dismantling the medium’s visual language. The blacked out pages retains the materiality of the Times, both structurally and visually, allowing the viewer to have an open-ended interpretation of form and meaning. For my Fellowship show at Kala, I have created masks from the financial pages in the New York Times and photographed them so that they resemble documentation of archeological digs from an earlier era.

 

My manipulations map out a tangle of associations, unique contradictions, and paradoxes through curious juxtapositions. I consider my interaction with printed media as a meditation on materiality that results in a palpable complexity between form and information.

 

 

GI:  What kind of materials/artists do you look at for inspiration?

 

FP: I’m interested in the external world and how we perceive it through our relationship with printed media, received images, and common, everyday objects. I am also intrigued by the imperfections that give life and breath to objects. Even though I respond to work that is obsessive, tactile, and process oriented, the work must have a strong merging of content and material to speak to me.

 

At the moment, I am completely inspired by the African and Pacific Rim collection at the De Young Museum.  Contemporary artist that inspired are Paul Thek, Dieter Roth, Louise Bourgeois, and Bruce Conner. I also respond to the emotional beauty brought to every day objects in the paintings of Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin, and the social content and ambition in the paintings of Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix. I saw a huge Gianlorenzo Bernini exhibit in Rome two years ago and was impressed at how he could breath life into stone. Other fantastic exhibits that moved me is one at the Philadelphia Museum of the fashion of Elsa Scahiaparelli and, most recently, the work of Polish artist, Alina Szapocznikow, at the Hammer. The urban grit and graffiti in my Mission District neighborhood is a daily inspiration. I am a very eclectic in my choices so the list goes on. Ultimately, I react to work, Asian, Greek, African, European, American, and both ancient and contemporary art, that expresses an authentic response to a moment in time through the confluence of materials, concept and attentiveness.

 

 

GI: What do you have coming up in the near future?

 

FP: I will be in a couple of group shows:

 

HALSEY INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, Charlotte, NC, Rebound: Dissections and Excavations in Book Art: Francesca Pastine, Noriko Ambe, Brian Dettmer, Long-Bin Chen, Guy Laramee and Doug Beube

 

RADIATOR GALLERY, Long Island City, NY, The Craft of Collage, curated by Michael Lee

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ALLISON OK FROST:

 

GI: Tell us some history about yourself before being awarded with Kala’s Fellowship.

 

AF: I have been living and working in Oakland for 5 years. During that time, I have shown at Kala Art Institute, Headlands Center for the Arts, MacArthur B Arthur, the Compound Gallery and other spaces in San Francisco and the East Bay. Before coming to the Bay Area, I lived in New York, where I pursued my MFA at the School of Visual Arts. I was born and raised in Los Angeles, CA.

 

GI:  What are you current activities in the art community?

 

AF:  I currently have a studio space at The Compound Gallery and Studios. I also work as a gallery assistant there, and curate the Artists Gallery. I participate in Live Drawing events, including Flourish fundraiser for Art Murmur and Southern Exposure Monster Drawing Rally as well as smaller local events.  I teach art at a local private school.

 

 

 

GI: Can you discuss the concepts that drive your artistic practice?

 

AF: My work alludes to an end of a civilization. The imagery I paint reflects a shared global experience of humanity’s effect on the planet and the inverse. My paintings highlight a resistance to the logical outgrowth of our destructive tendencies, while also shedding light on the vulnerability of these impulses. In this way, these paintings refer to a micro-apocalypse, and the ways in which the drive to insulate and self-destruct can manifest on a personal level.

 

GI: What is your process like when creating your work?

 

AF:  I collect hundreds of images from news articles I read and Google Image Source. These are combination of news photos, snap shops, ads and movie/television stills. I compose images by combining these pictures and choosing parts to distort or remove, and paint them in watercolor.

 

 

 

GI: What kind of materials/artists do you look at for inspiration?

 

AF: I watch a lot of movies for inspiration, in particular zombie or apocalypse-themed movies. I draw a lot from the way that the scenes are composed and how light and color is used on film. Contemporary painters that have had a great impact on me include Luc Tuymans and Elizabeth Peyton. I often find myself looking at German Expressionist works.

 

GI: What do you have coming up in the near future?

 

AF:  In addition to the Kala Residency Project show, I have curated a show and created a catalog for “The Artist as Storyteller” at The Compound Gallery, running July 21 through August 19. Thisshow explores the use of multi-panel narrative in the work of five artists.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Vanessa Marsh:

 

GI: Tell us some history about yourself before being awarded with Kala’s Fellowship. 

 

VM: Well, I grew up mostly in Seattle, but also moving around a bit up and down the West Coast. I went to undergrad in Washington and Grad school at CCA in SF. Since graduating, I’ve worked in the art world in a variety of contexts, at an art shipping company, a museum, galleries, a fabrication plant, all the while pluggin away in my studio, developing different ways to work with miniatures and memory.

 

GI: What are you current activities in the art community?

 

VM: My primary current activity is making art at Kala. I also work part time for an art consultant and as with many artist, my social life can pretty much revolve around openings and hanging out with other artists.

 

 

 

GI: Can you discuss the concepts that drive your artistic practice?

 

VM:  I think a lot about memory and imagination, the ways in which our memory is affected by our imagination and the way our imagination can dictat our reality. I try to make images that have a sense of something real but that are actually based in fantasy. Also about the conflation of beauty and the apocalyptic and the relationship between human and landscape.
GI: What is your process like when creating your work?

 

VM: Usually the beginning stages of making an image come while I am driving. I’ll take lots of reference shots out my car window which later get translated into drawings in my studio. I make the drawings with black pen and ink on clear mylar. Once in the darkroom,I use these drawings as well as actual miniatures to create a paper negative from which my final prints are made.

 

 

 

GI:  What kind of materials/artists do you look at for inspiration?

 

VM: Honestly the most inspiring things for me is the actual landscape. I love long drives looking out the window. Beyond that, my go to artists for inspiration include Robert Adams, James Casebere, Uta Barth, the Hudson River school of painting, pretty much any western landscape painting even when it’s cheesy. Also the clouds and the Bay Area sky.

 

GI: What do you have coming up in the near future?

 

VM: I have the exhibit at Kala and I’ll be included in a group show at the Camera Club of New York in August.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SETH KOEN:

GI: Tell us some history about yourself before being awarded with Kala’s Fellowship.

 

SK: I relocated from Boston in 2000 to attend Mills College, where I received my MFA in 2002. Since then, I have continued to work from studios in Oakland and Sacramento and show at various galleries around the country, including Gregory Lind Gallery in San Francisco.

 

GI: What are you current activities in the art community?

 

SK: I continue to maintain my own studio practice while also working for the sculptor Ron Nagle.

 

 

 

GI:  Can you discuss the concepts that drive your artistic practice?

 

SK: I am interested and motivated by how objects occupy space, and the reactions they can ellicit.

 

GI: What is your process like when creating your work?

 

SK: It is pretty intuitive, starting with the seed of an idea or an impression of a form and reacting to the results as I proceed. There is a lot of mundane, meditative work, such as carving and sanding wood or crocheting yarn.

 

 

 

GI: What kind of materials/artists do you look at for inspiration?

 

SK: The book, Flatland, Bruce Nauman, Ellsworth Kelly, Brice Marden, Frederick Law Olmsted, J. M. W. Turner, John Singer Sargent, Thomas Eakins, Eva Hesse, Richard Serra, Cy Twombly, Tom Friedman, Tony Cragg, Anish Kapoor, Martin Puryear, Richard Tuttle, Winsor McKay, Daniel Clowes, antique postcards, sculptural architecture, bridges, bikes!

 

GI: What do you have coming up in the near future?

 

SK: Gregory Lind Gallery is currently showing “Decade”, a tenth anniversary group show. Also, two solo shows upcoming in 2013, at Lind and B. Sakata Garo in Sacramento.

 

 

 

The Fellowship competition is juried by Kala’s Directors and an invited Bay Area arts professional. This year Kala welcomed Dr. Stephanie Hanor, Director of Mills College Art Museum as Kala’s invited Fellowship juror for the 2012 competition.

 

Kala is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2012 Fellowship Awards:

 

Stella Ebner, New York, NY
Chris Fraser, Oakland, CA
Kyung Sook Koo, Sacramento, CA
Margaret Leininger, Chandler, AZ
Colin James Lyons, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Sanaz Mazinani, San Francisco, CA
Osvaldo Ramirez, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Clint Wilson, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Noah Wilson, Oakland, CA
Honorable Mention Awards:
Jeff Eisenberg, San Francisco, CA
Theodora Varnay Jones, San Francisco, CA
Michael Koehle, Oakland, CA
Daniel Nevers, Berkeley, CA

 

 

 

http://www.kala.org/exhibitions/current.html