Studio Visit is a curatorial project inviting artists to allow us an access to their desktop studio and their working process. “Why?” – you may wonder – “we haven’t seen but desktops along the last year; desktops with speaking faces in online classes, streaming conferences, TV programs; give us something real!” In Studio Visit, the desktop studio is shown off as the real space where an artist’s practice manifests. The focus is both on its furniture – files, tabs, programs – and on the artist at work – their favorite tools, their rhythm, their automatism, the way they find a balance between focus and distraction, between managing and creating, between online life and work. Half documentary, half performative, Studio Visit is a huge dive into an artist’s mind, and an effort to capture how artists are performing their daily routine in the here and now. Enjoy! – Domenico Quaranta
Studio Visit is a project by Domenico Quaranta. Six videos have been commissioned to James Bridle, Petra Cortright, Aria Dean, Oliver Laric, Eva & Franco Mattes and Lu Yang. A new studio visit will be availble each Thursday, from February 25 to April 1, 2021.
Studio Visit – Lu Yang
Through this studio visit, we share Lu Yang’s desktop while he’s adjusting a 3D urban environment inhabited by a giant female figure.
Lu Yang (b. 1984) is a multi-media artist based in Shanghai. Mortality, androgyny, hysteria, existentialism and spiritual neurology feed Lu’s jarring and at times morbid fantasies. Also taking inspiration and resources from Anime, gaming and Sci-fi subcultures, Lu explores his fantasies through mediums including 3D animation, immersive video game installation, holographic, live performances, virtual reality, and computer programming. Lu has collaborated with scientists, psychologists, performers, designers, experimental composers, Pop Music producers, robotics labs, and celebrities throughout his practice.
Studio Visit – James Bridle
In this video, Bridle carries out research into an upcoming expedition to Uzbekistan, reading papers, watching maps, writing emails and reviewing data about bird flights.
James Bridle (b. 1980) is a writer and artist based between Athens and London. Bridle works across technologies and disciplines. Their artworks have been commissioned by galleries and institutions and exhibited worldwide and on the internet. Their writing on literature, culture and networks has appeared in magazines and newspapers including Wired, the Atlantic, the New Statesman, the Guardian, and the Observer. New Dark Age, Bridle’s book about technology, knowledge, and the end of the future, was published by Verso (UK & US) in 2018, and they wrote and presented New Ways of Seeing for BBC Radio 4 in 2019.
Studio Visit – Petra Cortright
Petra Cortright takes us along a half an hour session of digital painting, generating colorful still lifes out of two prepared .psd files with dozens of layers, running automated scripts and doing some manual editing.
Petra Cortright (b. 1986) is a contemporary artist whose multifaceted artistic practice stems from creating and manipulating digital files. Cortright’s digitally-conceived artworks physically exist in many forms – printed onto archival surfaces, projected onto existing architecture, or mechanically carved from stone. A notable member of what became known as the ‘Post Internet’ art movement of the mid-to-late-2000s with her YouTube videos and online exhibitions, Cortright later began to laboriously craft digital paintings by creating layer upon layer of manipulated images in Photoshop which she then rendered onto materials such as aluminum, linen, paper, and acrylic sheets. Cortright’s role as an artist is a blend of painter, graphic designer, editor, and producer; culminating in a singular artistic reflection of contemporary visual culture.
Studio Visit – Oliver Laric
Along this studio visit, Oliver Laric makes online research about the circulation and reuse of his 3D scans by professionals and amateurs, digging into various online platforms – from Artstation to Nexusmods, from Deviantart to Bilibili, from Google Images to Twitter.
Oliver Laric (b. 1981) is a Berlin-based, Austrian multimedia artist whose work is centered around issues of authorship, originality, and ownership—with a specific interest in visual culture in the digital age. His work and broad research addresses an ongoing history of the mutability of objects and images. From ideas of copyright to examples of iconoclasm (the destruction of religious iconography), Laric’s focus is on how objects and images are continually re-represented, appropriated, remixed, augmented and modified. Since 2013, Laric has collaborated with a range of museums to make 3D scans of sculptures available and free to download online. All these scans are now available at http://threedscans.com/
Studio Visit – Aria Dean
In this studio visit, Aria Dean is working on her upcoming show at Greene Naftali, New York, based on a series of etchings and sculptures. The etchings are generated from analog drawings and existing imagery, and the sculptures are 3D object collages made of objects she has made, found real and digital objects and organic shapes in blender.
Aria Dean (b.1993, Los Angeles) is an artist, writer, and curator who questions the structures of collective and individual subjectivities, with a focus on deconstructing and reconfiguring their relationship to networks of visibility, representation, and power. Often taking Blackness as a starting point and borrowing from the formal languages of minimalist sculpture and structural/materialist film, Dean grapples with traditional histories and investigates the potential of other narratives attuned to material, political, and technological realities. Dean’s artistic practice serves as the impetus for her writing and curating, the two activities offering prescriptive signposts that order how she makes objects in the service of the aforementioned ideas.
Studio Visit – Eva & Franco Mattes
Various presentations of the Personal Photographs installation, in which invisible images and personal data travel along steel cable trays installed in the exhibition space, are the main subject of this studio visit: Franco sketches a future presentation in Wiesbaden, comments upon some installation pics Eva just sent from C/O Berlin, and looks at the documentation of their solo show at Fotomuseum Winterthur, fresh from the photographer. This workflow is from time to time interrupted by smaller tasks, from sending emails to trimming a video to adjusting the half cat sticker.
Eva & Franco Mattes have been investigating the internet’s effects on the ethics and politics of our daily lives since the 1990s, reflecting on how networked images increasingly interfere with and define our private and social behaviour. In the process, the artist duo dissects the opaque mechanisms of our networked society, its infrastructures and forms of online spectatorship – holding up a mirror to the viewer in a manner that is at the same time unsparing and darkly humorous.