OS-58-artist

Emily Mae Smith’s work combines references to artistic movements of the past, including Symbolism, Art Nouveau, Surrealism, and Pop Art, with a profoundly contemporary sensitivity, influenced by the linguistic devices of digital and computer graphics. In a delicate balance between the analog, manual and traditional aspects of oil painting on the one hand and a reference to the accuracy of the digital production of images and graphic design on the other, her works convey an entirely personal visual universe, inhabited by a lexicon of signs and symbols dominated by the artist’s avatar, an anthropomorphized broom. The reassuring and disturbing figure takes on ever-changing forms and roles to convey reflections on disparate contemporary issues, from gender to sexuality, from capitalism to violence. This element—both concrete and imaginary—is both symptom and protagonist of a visionary reinterpretation of reality. Smith’s works are proposed as openings on dreamlike worlds, almost windows that allow one to peek at remote landscapes and postures known to the history of art, in a contamination of worlds and imaginations that blend together in a completely new iconographic apparatus. The series of works on paper especially produced for the 58th October Salon represents a synthesis of recurring themes in the artist’s production, reflects the variety of her subjects and the eclecticism of her sources of inspiration.

The question of the individual is a central subject matter in Guan Xiao’s art, particularly the challenges of how one should not only navigate but harness the logic of time and speed and influx of technology while changing understandings of materiality and the burden of history. Using sculpture, installations and videos, the artist creates a suspended, rhythmic narration, in which traces of organic elements from the plant and animal world—such as leaves, flowers, tree trunks, bones—reshaped and distorted ordinary objects, and artificial materials stripped of their original function express a novel hybridization that challenges any visual or semantic hierarchy. Personal experience, past artistic traditions, digital materials, and everyday reality come together in Guan Xiao’s works in a vocabulary which is at once primordial and speculative. In the exhibition in Belgrade, the artist presents Rest In (2017), originally conceived for public display as part of the High Line Art program in New York. Through the presence of footprints and vertebrae-like casts, the work embodies an unidentified creature, alluding to a kind of paleontology of the future. The title suggests a moment of pause for these roaming corporeal subjects.

Drawing inspiration and material from the world of advertising, mass media, the Internet and the technological universe in general, Jordan Wolfson produces works that develop the potential of a wide range of expressive languages, including video, installation, robotics, augmented reality and photography. Instead of simply appropriating found material, the artist creates his own unique content, which frequently revolves around a series of invented, animated characters. This creative impulse becomes the starting point for disturbing narratives deeply linked to his personal imagination, through which he analyzes the cultural, social and political contradictions of today’s America and lingers on the deepest folds of the human spirit. Autobiographical references, mass culture heroes and heroines, stereotypical characters, or his own avatar leak out. The frequent use of CGI animation, facial recognition software, virtual-reality viewers, as well as other cutting-edge technologies, allows Wolfson to carry on his investigation into individuals’ relationship with the media, the information and the image economy. The recent work ARTISTS FRIENDS RACISTS (2019-2020) uses a new holographic technology, based on the presence of fans whose spinning blades are covered with micro LEDs. Animated characters, videos, symbols and words thus seem to float in space, similar to ghosts that go beyond the boundaries of the media systems in which they circulate. Drawing directly on the semantics of advertising devices, made up of recurring logos and pressing claims, the installation escapes from these recognizable coordinates to display a holographic, glowing and convulsive poetry. Initiated in 2019 and completed in January of 2020, just as the COVID-19 crisis began, this work reflects growing tensions as well the troubling socio-economic and political climate in which it was composed. Disturbing images of Dutch people in Black face, depicting Zwarte Piet, along White people seeing themselves as angelic figures, address the contradictions of racism in neo-liberal society. Inherent systems of racism that maintain White privileged are depicted here as some of the most overt problems in the contemporary world, that withstand despite indisputable injustices, and the madness of Trump and COVID-19 have made this as apparent as ever. Following the police murder of George Floyd in the United States, there has been a reckoning with Whiteness and supremacy structures. This piece serves as a snapshot of the world preceding this breaking point.

Moving among various languages, including performance, sculpture, installation, drawing, collage, video and sound experimentation, Nico Vascellari pursues an artistic path that conveys different and contrasting forces and energies to disrupt the established order of things. His research is contaminated with the alternative underground scene, feeding on popular culture, folklore and an intense relationship with nature, to define a personal alphabet of gestures, signs, actions and images in constant growth and transformation, always balancing between individual perspective and collective experience. An almost shamanic, ritual dimension spreads from Vascellari’s projects and interventions, whether these come to life in genuinely artistic contexts or invade different spaces. The idea of layering, sedimentation and excavation is often the basis of the artist’s research, in an everlasting yearning for the exploration of deeper levels of the phenomena around us. The series of the Nidi [Nests] is a precise expression of the attempt to understand—or, rather, decipher—the language of nature. Following a careful selection of fallen nests, thus not purloined from their original location, the artist starts a long process of dissection of the individual components that make up the temporary abode of a bird. Twig by twig, the result of the dissection is arranged neatly on a board in the always unique and irreproducible structure of natural alphabets, the result of an exchange between artist and animal. The Nido presented for the first time in Belgrade is therefore testimony of a modus operandi that typifies various aspects of Vascellari’s practice, always fascinated by limits, whether natural or human, and by the desire to overcome them. A liminal thrust in terms of physical resistance, exposure to dangerous situations and loss of control, often expressed in the artist’s performances, is also present in the video Visita Interiora Terrae (2020), part of the Film Program. Vascellari evokes the poetic and scientific experiments carried out around the figure of the flying man, from Leonardo da Vinci onwards, with a reference to cinema in quoting the opening scene of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960).

Nora Turato contends with the porosity of language in contemporary media landscapes through sonorous, spoken-word performances and typographical artworks composed of found textual materials. She is known for her ability to syphon the textual idiosyncrasies of the internet into her work, appropriating language from books, advertising, social media, and everyday exchanges, and pouring it into performance scripts and visual works, which range from wall murals and videos to artist books and posters. For the 58th October Salon, she is creating a new audio piece and sound installation which derives from her research into the politics of accents, identity, and Hollywood. This piece marks a new direction for Turato, who has been working intensively with a dialect coach to exercise the full range and potential of her voice. Through a process of rigorous observation and dissection, Turato is learning to embody the sounds and speech patterns of multitudinous accent types. As such, she has developed an internal repository of sorts, a vocal cache of accents, dialects, and idiolects between which she can rapidly alternate. The piece is a sound study of Turato’s growing vocal arsenal, within which she emulates the tones of familiar Hollywood personas and character archetypes. The piece is both a rhythmic display of the artist’s vocal acrobatics and a commentary on the way accents are primed and commodified in the entertainment industry.

Jenna Sutela operates with sounds, words, and living creatures to create works that aim to investigate social, material and biological phenomena, engaged in a relationship with the codes and mechanisms of technology. The symbiotic, ecosystemic relationship that the human universe has with the rest of the world—organic or synthetic—is the basis of a reflection carried out using many languages, ranging from the production of publications to that of sound-based, poetic, performative and sculptural works, often generated by an expanded, non-linear and non-centralized collaborative process. Sutela’s approach, open to chance and contamination, shuns anthropocentrism and geocentrism, to instead go looking for alien and unexplored dimensions. The vehicles used in this exploration can be bacteria, artificial intelligence, neural networks, as well as the endless transformational possibilities of language, seen as a living and thriving element. The audiovisual manifestation of the nimiia cétiï project (2018), on exhibition in Belgrade, is an example of this investigational approach. The artist’s reiteration of the vocalizations of the 19th-century French medium Hélène Smith, who claimed to be able to communicate with Martians, together with microscope footage showing the movements of the Bacillus subtilis bacteria, considered a life form potentially capable of surviving on the “Red planet,” become the learning elements of a neural network that creates a new language. The communication between different species, the interaction through distant dimensions, the collaboration of biological and artificial entities define an alternative world. In addition to nimiia cétiï, a piece from the sculptural series I Magma (2019) is exhibited in Belgrade, featuring a cast of the artist’s head in the form of a lava lamp. In this work, neural networks, psychedelia, pareidolia—i.e. the tendency for incorrect perception of a stimulus as an object, pattern or meaning known to the observer—take part in the creation of an “other” universe of meaning.

Personal, family and collective memory is the pulsating center of the multiform practice of the artist Diamond Stingily. The memories of her childhood and adolescence, as well as, in a broader sense, of the American subcultures and Black culture, are the starting point of her reworking of (often found) household and ordinary objects, placed in a language which alludes to more extended narratives and meanings. Nothing is only what it appears to be; everything, starting from one’s own materiality, detaches itself from the naturalness of the physical world in order to open autobiographical narrative scenarios or to recall further dimensions: control, violence, surveillance or emotional relationships, beauty, joy. Through sculpture, installation, video, as well as poetry and stories, the artist thus expresses a sober lyricism. The series Elephant Memory, which Stingily launched in 2016, is connected with this peculiar translation process from the material realm to a narrative one: steel chains are woven with artificial hair in always unique and different patterns. Hair, part of Stingily’s family memory, as she grew up in her mother’s hair salon, are a reference to the bonds that formed the artist’s identity.

The migration of forms between different registers, such as nature, art and architecture, is at the center of Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s multimedia practice. His works, which include film, drawing, sculpture, environmental and sound installations, define landscapes in which the borders are constantly questioned: between organic and artificial materials, between man and the environment, between subject and object, nature and culture. Each element of his compositions is intended as part of an ecosystem, in an interdependent relationship with the context and its components. The immersive aspect of many of the artist’s works aims to insert the observer in a relationship of ontological continuity with the work and the rest of the world. An example from this research path can be found in the piece presented at the 58th October Salon, A Dream Dreaming a Dream (2020), consisting of a continuously self-generating online animation featuring a panther wandering within a tropical forest. The animal’s dream takes on different forms each time, stopping and starting incessantly, imbued with the vague misperception of a half-sleep state, between new oneiric images and repeated awakenings. A Dream Dreaming a Dream blends different forms of knowledge, from indigenous wisdom, to the relationship with animal and plant beings and with the spiritual entities of the forest, from the images and sensations of dreams, up to the mechanics of artificial intelligence, thus defining novel ways to relate to the real, virtual, and dream world.

The photographs, videos and sculptural works of Colin Snapp investigate the mediated visual experience through which we perceive and catalog the world around us. Focusing in particular on the present American landscape, the artist reminds us that the way in which we look at and represent reality is never neutral, direct, and objective. Screens, frames, lenses, both figuratively and concretely, are the filter of apparitions that do not coincide with the essence of things but open up new perspectives on them. Snapp’s creative process starts from images considered ordinary or banal in order to then frame them and look for a new meaning. The act of photographing or filming becomes a conscious ritual of translating reality, a way of defining an unprecedented conceptual landscape. His voyeurism, far from any morbidity, takes on analytical and scientific characteristics. At the 58th October Salon, Snapp presents a new video featuring American shopping malls. The artist activates a thorough and detailed investigational process, undertaking weeks of research and filming, aiming to map these nonplaces where the mechanisms of consumerism seem to go ahead regardless of the ongoing economic and social crisis. The film’s soundtrack, composed by Mauro Hertig starting from found sounds, is a perfect commentary to the contradiction of images that move between the dullness of the ordinary and the disturbing universe of a recurring dream.

Marianna Simnett’s artistic practice includes film, installation, drawing, sculpture and performance. At the heart of her work is a preoccupation with the body, exploring the ways it is perceived and imagined. Simnett probes social and cultural norms to expose their fallibility. The bodies in her work are mutants, shapeshifting according to their desire, moving fluidly between transient states, creatures, organs, machines, and other imaginary beings. In her disturbing, fantastical stories, she invents worlds in which identities, genders and species are not already given but waiting to be found. The Bird Game (2019) is a deliciously dark fairy tale in which six children are seduced into playing a deadly game by a talking crow. The winner gets to transform into a bird and never have to sleep again. Birds are known for their remarkable ability to survive on little to no sleep, a phenomenon which scientists are trying to steal to keep humans awake for longer. The film takes place in a secluded mansion without adults, in which all the rooms are like different cavities of a sick brain. This brutal tale of childhood and transformation will infect your dreams and give you nightmares.