Collaborative Projects
Interwoven: Icons and Ideas
Interwoven: Icon Exchange
This was an international collaboration between five artists from around the world and one anthropologist organized by artist Mary Corey March by invitation of the Transcultural Exchange Center in Boston for their "Here, There and Everywhere" show.
Collaborators
Jordan Kraemer (anthropologist, USA), Mary Corey March (artist, USA), Sophie Menuet (artist, France), Annysa Ng (artist, Hong Kong/USA), Simone Stoll (artist, Germany), and Lina Puerta (artist, Columbia/USA).
Each collaborator submited one icon (an image that can be unpacked into larger cultural or personal meaning) and one concept or idea. Collaborators then selected at least one of each to inspire a piece in any media
Icon submitted by Jordan Kraemer
Jordan Kraemer (anthropologist)
Idea: Worldling
The idea of “worlding” emerges from work in science and technology studies (STS), as well as my own field of anthropology, to describe how people generate the social and cultural worlds in which they participate and interact. Worlding, according to scholars such as Donna Haraway, is about ways of being in the world, in everyday, often minute interactions with other people, objects, and ideas. Through worlding, we all participate, albeit in different ways, in producing our shared worlds, both imaginatively, symbolically, interactionally, and materially.
Contribution
Jordan Kraemer is an anthropologist studying social effects of online media. Her product from the project will be exploring how the icons and concepts relate to her research questions as an anthropologist. In particular, she will be taking up the ideas generated by the artists' work and by collaboration as a whole, and thinking through how it helps us understand everyday experiences and interactions. She contributed in commentary on the group blog over the course of the project.
Icon submitted by Mary Corey March
Mary Corey March (artist)
Idea: Liminal Space
Liminal space is a threshold between worlds, thoughts, personalities… nearly anything. It can be a psychological space, a physical space (usually a ritual space), or a conceptual space. It is that ambiguity between phases, between male and female, black and white, civilized and wild. It is the place between adult and youth, or the period after experience but before the growth from that transformation settles. It is defined by being undefined, always between, neither fully this nor that.
In folklore it is often symbolized by a period of time “in the woods”. The hero/ine goes into a space where the rules of society are temporarily suspended, where they exist outside of rules and conventions, but at the same time are not participants in the real world. They generally have a transformative experience there and emerge into society a different sort of player.
There are people who live perpetually in some sort of liminal space- transgender people, perpetual travelers, people from multiple cultures or races. Liminality takes on new meaning when it is incorporated into one’s everyday life, when one is always one foot in one world, one foot in another.
I find it intensely interesting as an idea. It is the brink of transformation, the ambiguous state which is often unmarked, and yet is so very important.
Used for She Reveals Hidden Color piece:
a combination of Sophie Menuet's Mask image together with a combination of Annysa Ng's "See the Visible Invisble" and Sophie Menuet's "Unquiet Mind".
Icon submitted by Sophie Menuet
Sophie Menuet (artist)
Idea: Extension
My idea is developed around a space tense or relaxed. Knots, just extend a substance disorder, an object, a body. Perceiving a stretch, extension, elastic thinking. A reflex may be impaired, paralyzed, flaccid. A boomerang with a start seems irregular.
Used for dedale nacre piece:
a combination of Lina Puerta and Simone Stoll's images and Sophie Menuet's "Unquiet Mind" concept.
Link to video of work: dedale nacre
Icon submitted by Annysa Ng
Annysa Ng (artist)
Idea: See the Visible of the Invisible
How a symbol or an object elevate to an artwork? Through which, the body or the soul, we can experience truth? The tangible and the unearthly matters always fused together like the indetachable yin-yang as they complete each other. In the image of the teapot, the body is solid while the spout is hinted by a dashed line. The virtual part completed the function of the object while the tangible part stimulate the thoughts of that and more.
Used for Belowwater piece:
A combination of Simon Stoll (soap) and Sophie Menuet's (mask) images and Simone Stoll's Unquiet Mind concept.
About Belowwater:
This image is taken from part of the assemblage. A mask (persona), labeled with laundry symbols: machine washable, bleachable, tumble dry, iron, and dry clean, is displayed on the top of a tripod, like the ice tip in Freud’s iceberg metaphor. The mask can be washed and re-painted. Below the water, it is the unconscious mind, as the Pandora’s box, which is represented by a group of boxes chained, locked and sealed with labels bearing the laundry symbols: do-not-wash, do-not-bleach, do-not-tumble dry, do-not-iron and do-not-dry clean. The “box” that holds the hidden memories, suppression, fears and desires seems to be inaccessible and inerasable.
Icon submitted by Lina Puerta
Lina Puerta (artist)
Idea: Baggage
Used for untitled piece
A combination of Mary March's image and Sophie Menuet's concept of extension.
Icon submitted by Simone Stoll
Simone Stoll (artist)
Idea: The Unquiet Mind
The mind is perceived as a separate space opposed to body space; though mind can also be understood and experienced as a physical space; a space one wonders through, one discovers incessantly and one, that is in constant state of learning and unlearning, a state of transition. The ‘Unquiet mind’ communicates, with the other, the inner and the outer other. The term ’Unquiet Mind’ is taken from Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison, a psychiatry professor who wrote on her personal experience of manic-depressive illness.
Used for Lost piece:
A combination of Jordan Kraemer's image and Mary March's concept of "Liminal Space".
About Lost
Simone set out to make a video exploring the psychological aspect of Liminal space that occurs in a moment of great distress and leaves the mind and body in disbalance, nor here nor there.
International Exquisite Corps Project
Mixed Media Online International Collaborative Project created for the Transcultural Exchange Center's "Here, There and Everywhere: Anticipating the Future of Art" show. (2009)
About
The Exquisite Corps project is based off of the classical DaDA/Surrealist drawing exercise “Exquisite Corpse” in which one artist begins a drawing and passes it on to another to add to. There have been many variations on the rules, but that is the essential aspect. Exquisite Corps gives meaning to the original nonsense words by simply dropping an “e”. "Exquisite" meaning carefully selected or flawlessly executed, while "Corps" is a group of people with a common activity acting under common direction.
Process
Artists who joined the project participated in a form of the Exquisite Corpse exercise online. They were invited to use any media that could be translated into 2D and uploaded for other artists to alter. Because of the digital nature of the work this project (unlike the original exercise) could track multiple variations on the same drawings, creating branches of interpretations of single pieces that formed "trees".
Each artist:
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submited one beginning stage work-in-progress (represented by a black rectangle in this diagram).
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added to at least three pieces without finishing them,/li>
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finished at least one piece (marked by a black frame both online and in the gallery installation of the "trees")
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There was no limit to how many they could alter and finish.
Participants
Participating artists were invited from all over the world based on information I was able to find online. They were selected to form as diverse a group as possible in style, media, location, identity, age, conceptual framework and career experience. There were limitations, especially at the time as to who I could reach online and work with via translations (for example, finding even a single participant in the entire continent of Africa failed despite my best efforts).
Artists: Jose Luis Anzizar (Argentina), Peng Bo (China), Megan Faye(Scotland), Michela Griffo (USA), Aldo Carhuancho Herrera (Peru), John Himmelfarb (USA), Mary Corey March (USA), Annysa Ng (Hong Kong/USA), Jan Kolling (Netherlands), Sachin Kondhalkar (India), Lorenzo Noccioli(Italy), Cereinyn Ord (England / Canada), Shaida Parveen (Pakistan / England), Javier Puertolas (Spain), Renate Reisky (Germany), Ewa Robel (Poland), Constantion Severin (Romania), Simone Stoll (Germany), Gosia Wlodarczak (Australia), Andreas A. Zingerlie (Austria).
Programmer: Chris Saari