Archives: Artists

Statement

I construct physical, emotional, and conceptual spaces to investigate the intersection between history, memory, and fiction. My work often oscillates between large historical narratives and intimately personal ones. The space created by these seeming dichotomies is also one where conceptual rigor can co-exist with personal and emotive impulses – where the tongue-in-cheek is also utterly sincere.

An ongoing mixed-media project titled An Archaeology of You proposes “you” as both the site of an archaeological study as well as the relic. It is the coming together of several research interests that first grew out of the notion of historical amnesia that describes the experience of the second half of the 20th century in many post-conflict countries, including my own – Taiwan. If “you” is regarded as an archaeology, it exists only in the past and can be only understood through fragments and hypotheses. If you belong to a history that is unknowable, and I can only understand myself through you, then I cannot fully know myself – my history is in fact, an amnesia.The project is a study in a poetic subversion to the dominant and patriarchal forms of historymaking, one that focuses on collective “we’s” and demonized “they’s,” so that “you,” a decidedly unacademic pronoun, one that surfaces in epistolary writings and popular music, also suggests a kind of empathy towards the subjects “we” investigate.

While in residence at GlogaurAIR, I intend to continue working on several projects as well as start a new body of work that investigates the caricarization of the monstrous and demonic as a way to describe historical violence.

GlogauAIR Project

Last summer I had the opportunity to attend seminars with Doug Ashford and Maha Maamoun, two international contemporary artists tackling the idea of the “Non-human.” Because the seminars took place in Austria, I started researching the local traditions of monsters, particularly the Krampus. I started wondering what the utility and economy of monsters are, and what they can tell us about being human and animal. I found it curious that even though monsters are beings we’ve created, they seem to know more about our place in history, as well as the perils of our futures.

The 2012 Taipei Biennial, curated by Anselm Franke, was called Modern Monsters: Death and Life and Fiction. In the introductory text, Franke writes that “The Chinese experience of the twentieth century […] can be characterized as a raging Taowu [mythical monster] – an experience not merely of hitherto unheard of evils and suffering, but an experience of undermined human intentions, seeding not reason and liberation, but waves of repression and countless inhuman and irrational terrors committed in the name of humanity, rationality, or a social order that must be installed or defended against all threats.” The identification between monster and history has been an apt analogy in my research in Chinese and Taiwanese history. In a way, it seems, the idea of a monster, has perhaps unfairly alleviated the complex tension of the structural violence that ties victim to perpetrator through the course of the twentieth century.

At Glogauair, I wish to continue this research on the relationship between monsters and history. How have the conditions of our present, with global unrest, racial tensions, environmental decline, mass migration, and so on, become a version of this monster that haunts us? What kind of monsters have human created and will create in the age of the Anthropocene? What role does gender and femininity play in the construction of the monster as history? I wish to create installation and performance works that evokes this idea of a border-line human existence occupied by monsters as well as humans and animals.

So many people in my generation, particularly in Europe, have personal and familial experiences with the structural violence of World War II and its aftermath. I want to incorporate some of these interviews or conversations that will serve to highlight the ways in which historical violence seeps into the lives of families, into the fabric of our most intimate lives. In some ways, perhaps we need to accept that these barbaric figures portrayed as monsters are in fact, our own kin.

CV Summary

b. 1982, United States

Education

• MFA 2013 Parsons The New School for Design, Fine Art
• MA 2009 University of Amsterdam, Art History
• BFA 2005 Washington University in St. Louis, Painting and Art History

Exhibitions

• 2015 Loops, Inside/Out Gallery, Somerville, MA Roots, On The Ground Floor Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
• 2014 Fictions, as Usual: Recent Works by Ilyn Wong. J & J Smith Gallery, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY
• 2013 Hobby Group #1. Jo-Ann Fabric and Craft #2104, Allen Park, MI (curated by Isaac Richard Pool and Crystal Palmer) Present Futures, Mandrake, Los Angeles, CA (curated by Kaitlynn Redell and Sara Jimenez) The Intelligence of Things, The Kitchen, New York, NY (curated by Wendy Vogel and Jessica Wilcox) React: Feminine Mystique at 50, Arnold & Sheila Aronson Gallery, New York, NY (curated by Natalie Balthrop and Deborah Engel)
• 2012 Transparency, 25 East Gallery, Parsons The New School for Design, New York, NY Eloquent Delinquents, 25 East Gallery, Parsons the New School for Design, New York, NY (curated by Simone Douglas and Andrea Geyer) Out of Iceland, Walker Space, New York, NY Over Sensitive, 25 East Gallery, New York, NY (curated by Anthony Aziz, Simone Douglas and Andrea Geyer)
• 2011 The Beauty of Minor Matter, Skalitzer 140, Berlin, Germany
• 2010 Small Works, Lorem Ipsum Books, Cambridge, MA Thirteen Under Thirty, Rubin-Frankel Gallery, Boston, MA False Face, Brewer’s Mansion, Brooklyn, NY Little Critters, Nave Gallery, Somerville, MA Hey I Know That Guy, Washington Street Art Center, Somerville, MA
• 2005 Washington University BFA Show, Steinberg Gallery, St. Louis They Put Us at The Corner of the School, Des Lee Gallery, St. Louis, MO
• 2004 The Romance Issue, Des Lee Gallery, St. Louis, MO

Curatorial Studies

• 2014 I scarcely have the right to use this ghostly verb. Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries, Parsons The New School for Design, New York, NY

Awards, Honors and residencies

• 2016 Picture Berlin, Berlin, Germany (upcoming) ACRE, Steuben, WI
• 2015 Truth, Lies, and Lore The Banff Centre, Banff, Canada EnterText Arteles, Haukijaervi, Finland 33 Officina Creativa, Toffia, Italy The Non-human with Doug Ashford, Summer Academy, Salzburg, Austria They Were Like Animals with Maha Maamoun, Summer Academy, Salzburg, Austria
• 2013 Tiny Circus Winter Residency, New Orleans, LA
• 2012 Stop Motion Animation – Recipient of the Archie D. and Bertha H. Walker Foundation Scholarship, Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA Ripping Yarns: Stories and Fibers – Recipient of the Windgate Charitable Foundations Grant, Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, Gatlinburg, TN
• 2011 Takt Kunstprojektraum Residency, Berlin, Germany Somerville Arts Council’s Local Cultural Council Grant Recipient, Somerville, MA
• 2010 Montana Artist Refuge, Basin, MT
• 2007 Amsterdam Merit Scholarship Recipient, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
• 2006 Taiwan American Education Trust Recipient

Publications and Symposia

• I (co-editor), in conjunction with I scarcely have the right to use this ghostly verb, 2014
• Black Lines and Shards in Memories Can’t Wait: Conversations on Accessing History and Archives Through Artistic Practices, eds. Malene Dam, Bridget de Gersigny and Kate Levy. International Center of Photography, 2013
• Artists Panel Discussion at React: Feminine Mystique at 50 Symposium, Parsons The New School For Design, Feb. 23, 2013
• Memory Attachee: Bridging Past and Present Through Family Photographs at Memories Can’t Wait Symposium, International Center of Photography, Dec. 14, 2012
• Cultural Integration or Cultural Hegemony?: The Ambiguity of the EU’s Cultural Policy Simulacrum, Vol. 16, No. 2, March, 2008

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Statement

Hannah Jones (b. 1990, US) works with painting, drawing, writing and video. She holds a BA Studio Art from Oberlin College and is based in Detroit, MI. She was a co-producer of the former literary collaboration, Underword, whose works included publications and an experimental performance series. Most recently, she has exhibited work in Detroit at Trinosophes, What Pipeline, Cave, and Round About in Lisbon, Portugal where she was an artist in residence. Her video works incorporate original performances, sets and costumes featuring fictitious characters with interweaving narratives that explore relationships often accompanied by trauma, repression, jealousy and forbidden desire. These vignettes touch on the absurdity of reality, particularly the young, artist’s reality including feelings of desperation and self-compromise in order to support larger goals or beliefs. The characters are often performed in sexually exploitive manners, constituting a double-edged attempt to repossess bodies that do not always feel like their own.

GlogauAIR Project

The themes I will be working with are; forgotten space, the story telling abilities of objects and structures, the layers of history found in artefacts, the displacement of people and non-living entities. I’m interested in how social inequality and the failures of perpetual economic growth manifest in physical forms over time, and how the body’s lived experience is imprinted on a place even when the body is absent. I’d like to make a series of large oil paintings, which will reference photographs I’ve taken in my surroundings of preserved moments when previous activities seemed to abruptly stop. These images include deserted storefront window displays, empty Laundromats, or those I have found on Craigslist from inside homes, both inhabited and unoccupied. Reminiscent of Sophie Calle’s voyeuristic photographs of hotel rooms, while these images do not include people, I consider them to be portraits rather than landscapes. The scenes I have in mind possess a lonely and minimal quality, yet are simultaneously sensuous. Depending on my findings in and around Berlin I may elaborate on the theme with sculptures which will evolve out of repurposed materials or, “artefacts” found on walks. As writing is an intrinsic part of my practice, I will keep a journal of poetic visual findings and commentary on related texts, such as “The Origins of the Urban Crisis” by Thomas J. Sugrue.

CV Summary

EDUCATION

• Bachelors of Fine Arts, Oberlin College, USA 2013
• Pont-Aven School of Contemporary Art, France 2011

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS/PERFORMANCES

• 2017
  • Eric Schmid is an Idiot, Cave, Detroit, MI
• 2016
  • Ever get the feeling we’re not alone in this world?, What Pipeline, Detroit, MI
  • Open Studios, Round About, Lisbon, Portugal
• 2015
  • Material For Living, Trinosophes, Detroit, MI
  • Throat Eye and Knuckle Bone, Frontera Festival, Hyde Park Theater, Austin, TX
  • Book of Chapters with Bebe Yama, Masonic Temple, Detroit, MI
  • Heritage Works, African World Festival, Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, Detroit, MI
• 2014
  • DON’T UNPLUG ME, The Sco, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH
  • Underword Pt. III, 1480 Gratiot Ave, Detroit, MI
• 2013
  • “This is Just to Say,” SEED House, Oberlin, OH
• 2012
  • The Halftime Show: Senior-Studio, Fisher Gallery, Oberlin, OH
  • Off the Wall, Fisher Gallery, Oberlin, OH
• 2011
  • Cut-Up, CIAC, Pont-Aven, France

SELECTED WORK EXPERIENCE

• 2016
  • Assistant to Charles Ross, Star Axis, Anton Chico, NM
  • Mural Artist, Homes and Places of Business, Detroit, MI
  • Studio Assistant, Chris Schanck Studios, Hamtramck, MI
• 2015
  • Illustrator, Bangla School of Music, Hamtramck, MI
• 2014
  • Dancer, Heritage Works, Detroit, MI
  • Assistant to Ryan Seng Clothing Design, Royal Oak, MI
• 2013
  • Co-chair, Oberlin College Film Co-op, Oberlin, OH
  • Exhibition Intern for Corin Hewitt, MOCA, Cleveland, OH
• 2012
  • Artist Assistant to Rebecca Cross, The Morgan Conservatory, Cleveland, OH
  • Co-Curator and Organizer, Wundercloset: Experimental Microcinema, Oberlin, OH

WORKSHOPS

• 2016
  • “Heaven is just a Blue Disguise of Hell” with Joana von Mayer Trindade, Forum Dança, Lisbon, PT
  • Butoh with Yuko Kominami, Teatro Municipal do Porto, Porto, PT
  • Companhia Limitada with Madalena Victorino and Pedro Salvador, Largo Residencias, Lisbon, PT
  • Impro-Wise with Marina Nabais, ACCCA, Lisbon, PT

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

• Spring 2013: Wilder Voice, Volume 8, Issue 14
• Fall 2012: Plum Creek Review

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Statement

In my work, I move along the shifting line between the random and the structured, revealing different facets of my preoccupation with the powers and handicaps of perception. From two-dimensional works such as painting and photography to sculptural mirror works and film/video, I work with a variety of techniques to make visible not only the constructed nature of imagery but also the potential to change them. Each of these works has a secret twist. The tension between what we initially notice and what is actually there resonating through our encounter.

GlogauAIR Project

My upbringing in Germany and my time spent in America have afforded me the possibility of parsing a nuanced presentation of media images in today’s society. In the United States, I have been collecting Data, Magazines, re-photographing images from media, creating detailed close-up shots in Photography and Film, documenting my daily environment. During the residency at GlogauAIR I intend to re-visit my old neighborhoods in Berlin and document the city in Photography and Video.

As an artist, I am interested to investigate how the image is influencing our existence while at the same time I hope to question our media image driven society. Flashes of information, sensations, details, playing with the known and un-known of images and memory in Time and Space. As an end result I imagine a multi layered installation with enlarged detailed photographs and projected video images, scenes… creating a virtual field that connects to an intuitive feeling rather the reading of context.

In my artistic practice during the residency, I hope to further explore the boundaries of ‘image making’, abstractions combined with fragments of reality as well as I often also experiment with reflections, mirror elements and illusions so that the viewer questions the so-called reality and experiences a Kaleidoscope of impressions. The reflective elements such as transparent layers of plastic or Glass as well as mirror like surfaces interact with the viewer’s perception, and the layers of Glass and mirror elements are also simulating our daily interaction with screens from i-phones, computers, etc, raising further questions about illusion and reality – an original and a copy – describing an awareness between the existing conditions and a fictional environment.

In the present age, almost all aspects of our surroundings and our lives are recorded every second. The obsession with collecting data has long gone beyond the limits of our planet. Yet we still need our eyes to evaluate the collected flood of data! It is precisely in this tensional field of trusting our own observations that I plan to create visual echoes and poetic narrations.

CV Summary

Emily Casden Art Historian and Art Advisor September 2017

• As a graduate student in Berlin, Kille was involved in several independent art initiatives, including 241, an art ‘fanzine’ named for the room number in which she and her fellow students developed the project. Intended as a forum for the burgeoning art scene of Berlin, 241 helped launch Kille’s career, gaining her the attention of galleries, collectors, and curators in Germany. Most notably, 241 brought Kille into dialogue with high profile members of the international art community, which inspired her to travel to New York. Feeling more creatively liberated in the United States, in 1998 Kille made New York her home, and embarked on a productive period that would mark her maturation as an artist.
• The artist’s Cosmic Series include her earliest mature works to demonstrate this tension of perception. These black and white paintings use various painting techniques to mimic celestial phenomena: some employ abstract expressionist effects, which, contrary to expectation, have a photographic illusion from a distance; others reject the painterly brushstroke to create neutral images of the serene static of the Universe. Works from the Cosmic Series were included in the artist’s first group show in New York at John Gibson Gallery in 2000. Kille continued to explore perception and reality in multiple media: she broke mirrors “to break away from superstition,” only to reconstruct them into a new broken reality; she created large photographic exposures called “rayograms,” honoring her own art historical lineage to Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy; she created ink washes that balanced a persistent inquisition of concepts of time, space, and self, within ominous, Rorschach-like dual dimensions.
• Throughout the first decade of the 21st century, the artist enjoyed consistent exposure in galleries throughout New York, although she increasingly felt a need to separate herself from what she described as the “sensationalism” of the New York art market. In 2009 the artist moved to a Zen center, living in the Buddhist community for thirteen months. During this incredibly focused time of self-reflection and meditation, the artist was “free of the pressure of the market and at the same time continued my interest about Time, Space, and Existence.”
• The resultant body of work, which includes photographs, drawings, and video documentation, is far more introverted than her previous pieces, with a more concentrated interest in nature, the body, and the relationship between the two. In a video documenting drawings made from stenciling her own body, the artist acknowledges the influence of Haiku poetry, which is an art more of “showing” than “telling.” Kille’s self-isolation from the art market was a fruitful and inspiring experience. Ultimately, she decided to follow in the footsteps of other artists and curators in her circle and moved to Santa Fe in 2012, where she still resides today.
• Her current work still explores perception and our relationship to reality: in the series The Definition of Abundance, “close up” photographs dissolve into high-keyed abstractions of color and light; in Under the Moon, enamel paint, iron dust and silver nitrate produce otherworldly images, their painterly strokes in tension with the glossy alchemy of its media. These works elude easy definition —indeed, the artist herself seems loathe to offer a clean explanation, preferring morsels of intangible insight: “Our world is saturated with depth illusions. Actions are plotted by pictures on screens for places we have never even seen or sensed. Our bodies have become disconnected from all kinds of processes, we have lost our bodies as places of knowledge. Stuck behind surface, we are filled with illusions what we have mastered matter. Instead its definition keeps slip-sliding away.” Isolde has shown domestically and internationally at venues such as: Kunstwerke and Kunsthaus Bethanien in Berlin, Germany; John Gibson Gallery, John Weber Gallery; Lital Mehr Gallery, Chelsea, New York, NY; Bass Museum, Miami Beach, Florida, among others.

• studied visual communication at the art academies in Berlin and Dresden, finishing her studies with a master’s degree in fine arts (Meisterschüler) at the University of Arts in Berlin, Germany.

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