• Syzygy & Polemicee •
December Virtual Program
Presented in Partnership with Woodland Pattern Book Center
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Join us for a casual conversation about the program Friday, December 3, 2021 @ 7:00 PM Central Time!
Reunification of the Motherland • Franek Wardynski
10 min 57 sec • video
Synopsis:
The afterlife of a Stock photo is increasingly taking place in sales brochures from last year, the ones that were printed in twenty thousand copies and stored in boxes on floor minus four. What if the afterlife of a Stock photo was a spiritual reunification with its suggested origin, placing it back to the environment that it had the ambition to depict?
Franek Wardynski’s intriguing intervention between rendered and real landscapes embraces conventions of images employed in stock-footage, establishing the notion of natural looking imitations installed in actual locations. Reunification of the Motherland (2018) explores the particular moment of truth when a fake forest is reunited with a real one.
The short film portray a stock footage banner forest on its pilgrimage back to reality. The artwork deals with the issue of life as a journey, recognition and the struggle of self. For Wardynski ‘It is about liberating the forest montage, a bit like when you buy a turtle in the market and let it go because you want it to be free.’
A middle-aged man is looking at the banner in the forest and states, un paysage dans un paysage—a landscape in a landscape. He takes his time to stop and look. Is this land art? His partner calls it bizarre or strange and wonders if it is hung to hide something. The sun is bright on this October-day in the French Alps, projecting yellow and orange leaves in the mirroring surface of the mountain lake. The banner is moving in the wind, perfectly hung along the lake sore’s walking trail. A woman passes by and calls the banner ugly; she says does not understand it. At least a hundred other people pass the banner that afternoon.
There is an evident fight for acceptance taking place, with the rendered banner trying to blend in at the site. In architect and author Carol Burn’s essay On Site (1991), she suggests that there are always two landscapes: one, which we physically perceive, and another that we mentally construct. She goes on to suggest that the most successful earthworks are those, which generates both. Burns also argues for a third landscape—a latent one—proposing a situation, an intervention that becomes a reading, dialogue and critique of existing conditions, or a recording of a social trace.
The work of Wardynski sits between art and design, repeatedly exploring projects of cultural criticism, making a constant contribution to the reading of landscapes through print, moving image and sculpture. His approach to research and methodology is investigative, resulting in critical outputs of text, reproductions, prints, collages, video and large-scale objects.
The short film and prints featured in Reunification of the Motherland show us a collective judgement of a fake forest, going on an imaginary and an actual journey to a forest. Here we see the dialogue and the truth. As in any reunification, the banner is struggling with reality, moving uneasily in the wind. However, the artist also shows us the effort of blending in, being embedded in shadows, reflecting perfectly in the water, swaying in rhythm with the other trees, no one can blame the banner for not trying.
Where did it come from? What is this? Wardynski’s work shows an online render trying to find peace in the real world—and we are secretly observing its struggle. The fact that the artist has brought the banner on several trips is beside the point. It is about letting something become what it was meant to be. Inviting people into the reading of imagined, actual and mirrored landscapes.
Artist Bio:
Franek Wardynski (b. 1989) is a multidisciplinary artist and designer based between London, Warsaw and Stockholm. Wardynski’s main focus is ways of narrating, through critical art explorations, field projects and research adventures. He explores concepts such as cannibalisation of culture, land art and matters of translation, through a diverse range of media as well as printmaking, sculpture and performance.
Educated at Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art, Wardynski founded his studio in 2015. During the past years, Wardynski has engaged in multiple art residencies and field projects, such as the Alps Art Academy for Land and Environmental Art, Switzerland and the Land Arts of the American West program 2019, as well as the Land Arts Adaptation program 2020, Texas, USA.
Specialising in visual experiences and new perspectives, his work incorporates multi-media creations and installations for museums, theatres and operas.
His work has been exhibited worldwide in galleries such as the Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong, //Galerie 102, Berlin, Art Dubai at Madinat Jumeirah, Art Safiental Biennale, Switzerland, Convex Warehouse, Kyoto, SW1 Gallery, London and TR Warszawa, Warsaw.
Wardynski is also a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art London, Central Saint Martins and Chelsea College of Art, where he teaches Critical Practice, Visual Communication and Graphic Design.
The Asphodel Phases • Edwin Rostron
23 min 27 sec • animation
Synopsis:
Music by Dean Honer
An exploration through a series of mysterious and often abstract spaces. Desolate landscapes, hypnotised bureaucrats, ancient stone figures and geometric patterns emerge from the darkness, accompanying us on a drifting journey towards something alien deep within.
Artist Bio:
Edwin Rostron is an artist based in London. He has been making animations for over 20 years and his work has shown at international exhibitions and film festivals including Ann Arbor Film Festival, GLAS, and Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation. He runs Edge of Frame, a blog and ongoing programme of screening events focusing on experimental animation, and teaches on the MA Animation Programme at the Royal College of Art.
Thuy & T. • Anh-Thuy Nguyen
7 min 13 sec • video
Synopsis:
Thuy & T. video externalizes internal struggles that I experience as a Vietnamese American woman, artist, mother, and the cultural expectation that weighs on me.
Wearing a traditional Vietnamese dress or áo dài, my female protagonist boxes alone in front of a pitch black backdrop. She staggers her feet while swiftly punching forward, looking ahead with determination and a glint in her eyes.
The piece took on a another meaning and urgency as it was created during a new wave of anti-Asian hate rippling across the United States in early 2020. The production for this video piece occurred right before and after the Atlanta shootings in March 2020, when a man targeted women of Asian descent killing eight people. The punches represent my frustration, anger, pain, and sadness towards the experiences of being immigrant, of being Asian and of being of Asian descent in the United States of American.
Artist Bio:
Anh-Thuy Nguyen is a multi-media/transdisciplinary artist, whose work spans from photography, video to installation and performance art. Using her personal history as a resource, Anh-Thuy's work delves deeply into conflicting emotions, feelings, and thoughts through the portrayal of often strikingly strange yet hauntingly beautiful visual manifestations of gain and loss. She received a BFA in Photography from The University of Arizona and an MFA in Photography/ Video from Southern Methodist University. Anh-Thuy has exhibited and taught photography, painting, linoleum, performance art, and concept-driven workshops nationally and internationally. Her works are in permanent collections of Amarillo Museum of Art, Tucson Museum of Art, Center for Photography at Woodstock among others. She is based in Tucson, Arizona, the United States, where she is the head of the photography program at Pima Community College.
Speaking of Flowers • Shelby Dillon
7 min 13 sec • video
Synopsis:
“Speaking of Flowers” is a short experimental film that examines the relationship between objective and subjective reality. In the film, two actors come into conflict on set while their film work becomes indistinguishable from the reality of their relationship. The film jumps between their conflicts on set and an abstracted space where the actors physically express their increasingly complicated emotions towards each other, and towards their toxic director.
Artist Bio:
As a filmmaker and photographer, Shelby Dillon sees her work as single frames from a film, or photographs in motion. She uses a mix of street photography, conceptual photography, and filmmaking to explore her role as a participant in and creator of her own surreal stories—which she writes, directs, and edits herself. She graduated from Wesleyan University with a BA in Film Studies in 2016 and has worked with moving and still images ever since. Her photography has been exhibited and published internationally, and her short films have been screened in the US and abroad. She’s currently based in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Website: http://shelby-dillon.com
Instagram: @tellmeitsshelby