Ivan Stojakovic & Paula Winokur
WILDSCAPES
Wildscapes Ivan Stojakovic & Paula Winokur February 24 – April 23, 2016
Ivan Stojakovic born: Belgrade, Serbia
Photo by Sanja Stojakovic
INTERVIEW WITH IVAN STOJAKOVIC by Thais Glazman
TG:You grew up in a big city like Belgrade but you seem to have such a strong established relationship with nature. Where did that come from? IS: It came from an obvious love of nature as a child, this fascination I had with watching insects and plants and just wanting to cross the boundary of known territory. When Yugoslavia was falling apart, the cultural climate was so harsh and not inspiring for me. I’m not the kind of artist who is inspired by the culture of breakdown. I was inspired by the breakdown but not the culture of it. I was still a student and I had strong opinions, but the artist in me, and the individual creator, was more interested in something else. I found refuge in going further into nature, almost as an escape, but also I found that another world existed, regardless of cultural political breakdowns or successes. Simply, I went on many hikes for many days and nights. What was fascinating was that natural beauty was juxtaposed to the fresh state of being part of a society that was falling apart. These realizations opened a door for me to engage in my life long passion to explore nature as a theme in cultural context and ways in which both nature and culture are fabricated. TG:You spoke about the fact that you studied painting in school. Do you consider yourself a painter, even though your present work is more sculpture-based? IS: I consider myself more of a sculptural painter. I make wall art, but it’s very sculptural. Even when I was painting, the texture of paint was reaching out. I was sculpting already. I always liked the materiality of the paint. In the way that an artist is considered today, I feel much more like a maker and producer of images and visual experiences. I choose to make wall art because it is a sustainable way to make art. On the other hand I produced few freestanding sculptures that merge my sculptural painting process with furniture design. These sculptural tables are part of the same body of work. They come to life irst as wall pieces that later end up being positioned horizontally on a table frame. TG: How has your work been inluenced by art historical references, techniques, and materials?
IS: Thematically, my work explores environmental topics and the relationship between water, vegetation and architecture. I create environmental wall art installations, incorporating vertical gardens with live and preserved plants. They come to life as paintings and they pay equal tribute to the institution of painting and wall relief. My sources include environmental maps, Arte Povera, and contemporary architecture and design. While drawing from these sources, I foster a formal painterly balance between abstraction and representation. In this way, I simulate a vision of ecological (dis)balance between the natural and the man made world. One strain in my work, which is closer to representation, draws visual information from the storm water zones and aerial maps of speciic landmasses such as Manhattan or New York State. The other strain in my work is closer to abstraction, drawing conceptual strategies and visual inluences from Arte Povera artists, such as Alberto Burri and Lucio Fontana, and from landscape architects and designers such as Robert Irwin and Patrick Blanc. I see the early cave paintings as environmental artworks. I ind that ecstatic landscapes by Van Gogh have a spiritual environmental component. I view the “Garden of Earthly Delights� triptych by Hieronymus Bosch as an environmental work that explores three forms of relationships with the environment. All these works deeply inluence my practice in different ways. I am also fascinated with the aesthetics of Modernism, while simultaneously critical of the modernist legacy. My way of resolving this conlict of taste and intellect is to always have nature re-claim modernist-looking structures in my work. TG: Is there a conceptual difference between your work with live plants and your work with preserved plants, which you now often display in plexiglass vitrines? IS: My works with live plants encompass a full span of growth and change through a metamorphosis of live plants and human interaction. The works that contain preserved plants explore natural environments in the context (and future) of natural history. I display these archived and conserved artworks in vitrines so they appear as if on display in a natural history museum. I position my work so that the viewer is confronting nature and facing it head on. The verticality and surface of the wall allows for that. In a way these are maps of environments, territories and topographies. The plants often refer to forested areas.
TG:You say that you want your work to be sustainable. Does this mean you want your work to live and to be kept alive, or is it meant to decay naturally? IS: I designed my work with live plants to be long term sustainable. Natural growth, decay and replacement are all part of the sustainable model. On the other hand, my work with preserved plants relies on a different kind of sustainability – the preserved plants are conserved to be archival and they are meant to last. Sustainability is a hot topic globally, as we are in transition from the oil based economy to renewable resources. My work thematically addresses this kind of sustainability in environmental context. Thais Glazman is a visual artist, writer, and curator based in Hudson, NY (First version of the interview published online by Wave Hill, NY)
Ashes to Ashes, Plastic to Green, 2015
River E, 2015
Plastic Skyline, 2015
White - Hot, 2015
Island X, 2016
Metamorphosis, 2016
Battery Park, 2015
Green Point S5, 2015
Green Stage 1, 2015
CHECKLIST
Ashes to Ashes, Plastic to Green, 2015 48” x 48” x 2” Archival quality preserved plants, honeycomb core, wood, melamine, mixed media/paint River E, 2015 21 ½” x 21 ½” x 2” Archival quality preserved plants, honeycomb core, wood, melamine, plexiglass, mixed media/paint Plastic Skyline, 2015 21 ½” x 21 ½” x 2” Archival quality preserved plants, honeycomb core, wood, melamine, plexiglass, mixed media/paint White-Hot, 2015 48” x 48” x 4” Archival quality preserved plants, honeycomb core, wood, melamine, mixed media/paint Island X, 2016 30” x 30” x 9” Archival quality preserved plants, honeycomb core, wood, melamine, plexiglass, mixed media/paint
Metamorphosis, 2016 24” x 24” x 7” Archival quality preserved plants, honeycomb core, wood, melamine, plexiglass, mixed media/paint Battery Park, 2015 32” x 38” x 8” Live succulent plants (sustainable vertical garden), archival quality preserved plants, wood panel, plexiglass, corrugated plastic, honeycomb core, and mixed media/paint Green Stage 1, 2015 48” x 24” x 21”(frame dimensions) Archival quality preserved plants, stainless steel and regular steel, wood, melamine, honeycomb core, wire grid, plexiglass, mixed media/paint Green Point S5, 2015 12” x 10” x 3” Archival quality preserved plants, honeycomb core, wood, melamine, plexiglass, mixed media/paint
SELECTED SOLO AND TWO PERSON EXHIBITIONS 2016 2015 2014 2012 2009 2007 2002
“Wildscapes,” Christian Duvernois Gallery, New York, NY, USA “Battery Park,” Site-speciic public installation, Art-in-Buildings-Program, New York, NY “Urban Wild,” Honey Ramka Project Space, Brooklyn, NY “GARDEN X,” Consulate General of the Republic of Serbia, New York, NY “Wetware,” Belgrade Public Library, Belgrade, Serbia “Global Nature,” Bridgette Mayer Gallery, Philladelphia, PA “Red Shift,” Gallery 401, Toronto, Canada
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2015 2015 2015 2015 2014 2014 2012 2012 2011 2010 2009 2007 2005
X-Contemporary Art Fair, The Hollows Art Space, Miami, FL “the 2% precipice,” BronxArtSpace, Bronx, NY “WILD,” Gallery Nine5, New York NY “Flux Art Fair,” Harlem, New York, NY “TD Forests: Art for Trees,” Vanderbilt Hall at Grand Central Station, NYC Highline, NY “Playdate,” ARPNY’s bcs gallery, Long Island City, NY “On the Edge,” Cheryl Hazan Gallery, New York, NY “Nature’s Return,” Arsenal Gallery, New York, NY “Blossom II, Naples Museum of Art, Naples, FL “Heavy Metal,” Boston Children’s Museum, Boston, MA “Mother/mother,” A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY “Things Fall Apart,” Rush Arts Gallery, New York, NY “Closed Circuits,” Belgrade City Museum, Serbia
SELECTED AWARDS AND RESIDENCIES 2015 2014 2012
Wave Hill Winter Work Space artist in residence, Bronx, NY Work commissioned for ‘Million Trees NYC partnered with TD BANK, pop up exhibitions in Grand Central Station, Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and Highline, New York, NY Bernard Bierman award / 1st place Haym Salomon Arts Awards Competition, for artist collaborat ing with children (Model City from recyclables), New York, NY
EDUCATION 2001 2005
OCAD University, Toronto, Canada, BFA Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY, MFA
SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTIONS Temple University – Alter Hall, Philadelphia, PA US Department of State, US Embassy, Belgrade, Serbia Boeing, Seattle, WA; City Library of Belgrade, Serbia SELECTED PUBLICATIONS 2015 2015 2014 2014 2010 2010 2007
Village Voice: Nomadic Existence by Alanna Schubach, NY SciArt in America: ‘Artist Ivan Stojakovic’s Mixed Media Ecology’ by Danielle Kalamars, NY Inhabitat.com: ‘Tiny Forest in a Suitcase Pops Up at Grand Central Station’ by Yuka Yoneda Art Rated’s Picks: Bushwick Open Studio 2014 by Jon Beer, Art Rated, NY, “Alter Hall Art Collection at Temple University”, hardcover book with essay by Gerard Brown, Philadelphia, PA “Heavy Metal: Reclaimed and Recycled Artwork’, The Boston Globe, Event Pick of the week by Junn Wulff, Boston, MA Philadelphia Weekly, editor’s pick: Ivan Stojakovic: ‘Global nature’ by Roberta Fallon, Philadelphia, PA
Paula Winokur born: Philadelphia, USA
Photo by Paul Smith
Paula Winokur’s Poetic Earth
Though Paula Winokur’s work alludes to the long and fascinating traditions of craft and useful objects, she explores questions of space, place and form with a sculptor’s eye. Engaged with the history of her medium (for 30 years, she was a professor at Beaver College, now Arcadia University), Winokur is as much inluenced by geological, meteorological and culture transformations of landscape as by porcelain’s own functional past. Winokur stresses the importance of travel in the development of her imagery. The landscapes she observed in her travels to the American Southwest, Scotland, Alaska and elsewhere have been absorbed into her work. Her sculptures do not report on the landscape, but rather condense it into a new, miniaturised form. These reduced, distilled landscapes retain considerable force as if their deining traits were now visible in concentrated form. It is important to stress that Winokur’s engagement in the lanscape as subject matter is not a process of mimesis but of reinvention. Winokur is emphatic in her effort to avoid imitations of the natural world, and her works are “made to look natural”. Surfaces with smoothness that evokes the erosion undergone by stone over eons of rain are contrasted in other works by drier surfaces whose smoothness suggests wind-blown plains. Tears and fractures evocative of rock formations ripped apart, erupted through or shattered in layers and reassembled are present in unexpected combinations. These are as much statements of the material possibilities of porcelain as allusions to landscape. Suggestive of the details of a given place, each of these speciicities has been absorbed, synthesised and re-imagined as sculpture using porcelain as a vehicle. Scale and point of view are signiicant issues in Winokur’s sculpture, which maximises the strangeness we experience through variations of placement and implied scale. By setting work on the loor, on pedestals, on the wall, or on tables, and by shifting back and forth between works that appear to come out of a vessel tradition and others which describe aster spaces, Winokur subtly tweaks our idea of the size of the worlds she invents. Looking at sculpture on the loor- a table
or pedestal, one often has the feeling of lying over a landscape that is tiny and far-removed. This sense that one is outside of normal time - like the sensation a traveller experiences in transit - is part of the package. Works that barely exceed a few feet in any direction imply a vastness that hints at the sublime. In its engagement with the landscape and sense of the sublime, Winokur’s work reveals her interest in a rich vein of 20th century sculpture. It calls to mind the Earth Artists of the late 1960s and early 1970s, especially Michael Heizer. Heizer’s colossal quasi-archeological works have a curious miniature analogue in Winokur’s sculpture. She also utilises the Minimalist vocabulary of pure geometric forms and interest in repetition. Works such as the Repetitions (Wasp Ledges), 2003, and Segments Erraticus I and II (both 1999) display a post-Minimalist sensibility in step with much current sculpture and installation. Despite such echoes of Minimalist and Earth Art, Winokur feels closer to the earlier generation of Abstract Expressionists whom she admires for their elegance rather than their aggression. Painter Clifford Still, in whose wide-open canyon-like spaces one can detect a precursor to Winokur’s work, and sculptor Stephen DeStaebler, whose works allude to the actions of erosion on ancient art, are important inluences. Paula Winokur’s re-inventions of the landscape, with their allusions to the impact of culture on the natural sphere, are powerful and timely works in an age where the inluence of humanity on its environment is overwhelming.
Gerard Brown (First version published in Ceramics: Art and Perception No. 59, 2005)
Segments Erraticus, 2000
Black Ice Interruptions I, 2005
Ice Core Column with Rock, 2005
Above and Below, 2009
Four Globes in a Box, 2006
Iceberg / Split, 2015
Glaciers Edge: Section II, 2015
CHECKLIST
Segments Erraticus, 2000 Each part 20 x 22 x 6” Porcelain
Four Globes in a Box, 2006 4 x 14 x 13” (each globe 5” diameter) Porcelain
Black Ice Interruptions I, 2005 21 x 32 x 5” Porcelain
Iceberg / Split, 2015 20 x 24 x 5” Porcelain; Lucite shelf
Ice Core Column with Rock, 2005 33 x 3 3/4” Porcelain
Glaciers Edge: Section II, 2015 20 x 24 x 6” Porcelain
Above and Below, 2009 38 x 24 x 8” Porcelain; Lucite shelf
SELECTED SOLO AND TWO PERSON EXHIBITIONS 2016 “Wildscapes,” Christian Duvernois Gallery, New York, NY, USA 2015 “Material Legacy,” Philadelphia Art Alliance, Philadelphia, PA 2008 Goggleworks Art Gallery, Reading, PA 2006 Art Gallery: Arcadia University, Glenside, PA 2005 Design Museum, Helsinki, Finland 2004 The Contemporary Museum Honolulu, Hawaii 2003 Clay Art Center, Port Chester, New York 1999 Helen Drutt Gallery, Philadelphia l995 Long Island University, Southampton, N.Y. l992 Helen Drutt Gallery, Philadelphia l991 Napa Valley College, California l990 Helen Drutt Gallery, Philadelphia l980 College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, V l976 Contemporary Crafts, Portland, OR SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2010 “Beyond Sublime: Changing Nature,” Walton Art Center, Fayetteville, AR 2010 NCECA Invitational: Earth Matters, Moore College of Art & Design, Philadelphia, PA 2010 Three Person Exhibition during NCECA 2010, Rosenfeld Gallery, Philadelphia, PA 2004 “Standing Room Only,” 60th Scripps Ceramic Annual, Claremont, CA 2003 Poetics of Clay: Houston Center for Contemporary Crafts, TX 2001 International Biennial, Ichon, Korea 2000 “Color & Fire: Deining Moments in Studio Ceramics,” LA County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA l998 NCECA Honors & Fellows Exhibition, Fort Worth Museum of Modern Art, Fort Worth, TX l997 “Ceramic Still Life: The Common Object!,” California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, CA l997 “Ceramics from the International Ceramics studio (Kesckemet Hungary ),” Aberystwyth Arts Centre Wales l996 NCECA Endowment Exhibition, Strong Museum, Rochester, NY l996 “East & West & South: International Ceramics Symposium,” Tolgyfa Gallery, Budapest, Hungary l996 “Architectural Clay: The Clay Studio,” Philadelphia, PA l992 “A Decade of Craft: Recent Acquisitions,” American Craft Museum, NY l992 “Contemporary Ceramics,” Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA l990 “Contemporary Philadelphia Artists,” Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA
l986 l984 ll980
“Craft Today: Poetry of the Physical,” American Craft Museum, New York, NY “Porcelain ‘84,” Liberty Gallery, Louisville, KY “American Porcelain,” the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC
EDUCATION l958 l958
BFA, Tyler School of Art, Temple University Philadelphia, PA SUNY Alfred, College of Ceramics, Graduate Study Summer
GRANTS & AWARDS (selected) 2005 2003 2002 l998 l994 l988 l983
Visual Arts Fellowship, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Professor of the Year Arcadia University Fellow, American Crafts Council Faculty Development Award: conference in China Faculty Development Award: International Symposium, Hungary Visual Arts Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, National Council on Education in the Ceramic Arts
COLLECTIONS (selected) 2013 2010 2005 2004 2000 2000 l998 l994 l993 l992 l976 l972 l970
Racine Art Museum, Racine, WI Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX Design Museum, Helsinki, Finland The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, HI Mint Museum of Crafts & Design, Charlotte, NC Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA Jingdezhen Ceramic Art Institute, China Renwick Gallery, Museum of American Art, Washington DC Montreal Museum of Decorative Arts, Montreal, Canada American Craft Museum, New York, NY Utah Museum of Art, Salt Lake City, UT Delaware Museum of Art, Wilmington, DE Philadelphia Museum of Art. Philadelpha, PA
648 Broadway, Suite 804 New York, New York 10012 212.268.3628 info@ChristianDuvernois.com Tue - Sat, 10AM to 6PM