2010-PRESENT (BERLIN, GERMANY / LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM; SELECTED)
Echoed in Flesh and Fodder
This Autumn 2019 the CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF SUBSTRUCTURED LOSS is proud to host international interdisciplinary artists and researchers Alannah Dair (AU), Max Gabarre-Grindrod (FR), Laura Nicholson (GB), Katimari Niskala (FI), and Renni Xie (HK).
Drawing on the movement that leads to a shift in course and experience, each artist structures the phases that depict a history personal and removed; challenging the structures in place, feeling, or time.
Through her use of flesh-like textiles and medical hardware Alannah Dair constructs object bodies which stretch, contract, and are held in tension from within. Dair’s expanded paintings stand to challenge current hegemonic constructs of health, illness, and further exist as manifestations of her experience with chronic illness.
Max Gabarre-Grindrod and Katimari Niskala present pieces from their work in progress entitled, Nightingale, a play about navigating loss. The multidisciplinary collaboration aims to develop a language enacted through body; communicating aspects of memory and repression of emotion on stage, while seeking to reunite unique individual experiences of grief through abstract physical expression.
Laura Nicholson’s work explores the treatment and experience of shell-shock during the First World War using image and text. The articulation evokes a state of being lost, not only within the body, but between cowardice and incapacity; discipline and treatment; language and sensation.
Through the lens of Hong Kong, Renni Xie’s paintings document the present while providing political/social context and commentary. Figures, and their relation to each other within the landscape begin to map feeling, examining collective realities of post-colonialism and inequality, as well as personal experiences of grief, memory, longing, and desire.
In gradually tracing the gestures that bestill the body; a personal and historical landscape mass is depicted through a level of metaphorical severity and continues to echo as flesh or through meaningful fodder.
Works installed, performance, and artists present.
PUBLIC EVENT:
19 NOV 2019 – 22 NOV 2019
That Which Is Gone Is Never Gone
This Autumn 2019 the CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF SUBSTRUCTURED LOSS is proud to host international interdisciplinary artists and researchers Rebecca Aldammad (US), Michelle Gialanze (MT), Matthew J. Trafford (CA), Carrie Tuhy (US), and Sanae Yamada (JP).
Shifting between stages along with metaphors drawn from personal experience, each artist navigates their experiences through artistic draft and works in progress.
Rebecca Aldammad’s Elements of Adaptation, Change, and Preservation draws on the stages of personal experience as they intertwine with nature to portray the involuntary adaptation of pain and trauma. The change, depicted through mixed media, underscores the desire to preserve oneself despite the circumstances.
Michelle Gialanze’s Momentum layers historical storytelling through illustration and written text; imparting oil techniques as transparent and opaque distillations of familial relationships, lineage, and intergenerational dialogue.
In Parallel Pages, Matthew J. Trafford depicts excerpts from his novel in progress, Love in Parallel. Allowing carefully rendered paragraphs to exist in isolation as possible components of a finished whole; echoing the narrative exploration of potential and the interplay between the intended, the imaginary, and the real.
Employing the metaphor of a garden and rebirth, Carrie Tuhy’s work developed from the sudden death of her daughter, Catherine Champion Coreno, on March 18, 2019. Tuhy combines Catherine’s paintings with fragments of poems, writings and references to loss and mourning. The result is an assemblage of life, death and transformation. Highlighting that nothing is ever truly lost but magically recreated.
In The Heaviness of the Weightlessness, Sanae Yamada examines a UK cliff commonly known as a site for suicide. By depicting the cliff’s visible damage through a lens of sympathy, Yamada weighs the inherent pain that may lie invisibly and unspoken.
Elaborating on stage as a current iteration, each artist’s translation mirrors the charged and abrupt whole, depicted as an unfinished and evolving poetic part.
Works installed and artists present.
PUBLIC EVENT:
17 OCT 2019 – 20 OCT 2019
Answering In Epilogue
This Summer 2019 the CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF SUBSTRUCTURED LOSS is proud to host international interdisciplinary artists and researchers Constance Brady (US), Michelle Hall (IE), Julie McCreedy (US), and Elyssa Sykes-Smith (AU).
Answering In Epilogue is a visual discourse and dialogue on artistic boundar- ies, personal relationships, documentation, and experimentation.
With her series of monoprint doormats titled Entering History, Constance Brady interrogates the symbolically and socially charged forum of grave tenure. Inci- dental to Berlin’s use of time-limited renewable burial constrictions, also known as grave leasing, are unnoticed piles of neglected headstones. From one such pile, Brady has captured these ethereal impressions in prints and photographs. She invites the viewer to influence the outcome of the piece, which is subject to continuous change. By stepping on the doormats the viewer assumes the role of participant, and is thereby compelled to confront their own willingness to deface these ephemeral silhouettes.
Investigating and challenging binding forces of social perception around recov- ery practices, Michelle Hall employs use of symbolic gesture through this series of works. Her research deals with lived experience, aftermath and processes of recovery through reconstructive offerings that address the intersections of how we learn and how we may achieve new iterations of collective and individual empowerment.
In Julie McCreedy’s Emotional Resolve, interconnecting themes merge in and out of multiple two-dimensional works. Influenced by a single letter written by McCreedy’s deceased son, she documents memories, dreams, and correspon- dence concerning loss, love, and trauma. To navigate the space, a suspended canvas encourages the viewer to engage multiple dimensions. At the core, the work examines her son’s Opioid Use Disorder and the innate need for solace and redirection. An archive containing the artists renderings lend meaning and inform the familiar or unfamiliar emotional territories being charted.
Questioning the perception and psychology of memory and place, Elyssa Sykes-Smith enquires into dissociative experiences, anxiety, trauma and grief, by utilising sensory exploration and architectural metaphors.
Personal dialogue disrupts as it redirects an enquiry and provides course for meaningful navigation. Varied is their experience as each artist interprets their answer while Answering in Epilogue; allowing discourse to surface alongside the very disruption and cause.
Works installed and artists present.
PUBLIC EVENT:
05 SEP 2019 – 08 SEP 2019
Of Lines and Familiar Thresholds
This Summer 2019 the CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF SUBSTRUCTURED LOSS is proud to host international interdisciplinary artists and researchers Bastian Schwenteck (DE) and Heather Sincavage (US).
Of Lines and Familiar Thresholds is a study of movement and metaphoric space; utilizing emotional assets to navigate the edges of the unknown.
In Glare, Bastian Schwenteck meditates on the games we play with reality and the shared emotive realm of presence and loss. Heather Sincavage surveys the residue of personal trauma and the act of establishing emotional boundaries in response to archetypes one encounters throughout life in the body of work titled, The Dividing Line (Shifts). A precarious process, Sincavage uses the body as a tool to perform within internalized space while accumulating fragile emotional thresholds in relation to learned circumstances.
In examining personal processes and adjusting to internal environments through this accumulation; the encounter is gradually defined and a complex study of boundaries is woven Of Lines and Familiar Thresholds.
Works installed and artists present.
PUBLIC EVENT:
01 AUG 2019 – 04 AUG 2019
In The Bird’s Mouth
This Autumn 2018 the CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF SUBSTRUCTURED LOSS is proud to host international interdisciplinary artists Catherine Bell (AU), Tess Cassidy (UK), Kristen Roles (US), Diane Rosenblum (US), Elyssa Sykes-Smith (AU), and Lauren Altman (US).
The artists in residence used this intensive period to navigate relationships of materiality and meaning, skimming surfaces and dwelling below them to map grieving processes mutably and mutually. In the Bird’s Mouth is the culmination of this time and a point of pause in ongoing praxes.
In To Grieve, Will Daddario engages the metaphor of a Rumi poem to consider malleability and attentiveness in “allowing (oneself) to acquire a new shape” in the wake of loss. Daddario offers, “The answer tucked away here determines that we must let go of questions like how and embrace, instead, ‘this is.’ This is how it is…To scrutinize grief as one observes the bird on the minaret is to locate the secret in the bird’s mouth…Acceptance is the hair that the bird carries.”
Emancipating private and communal reflection on ones’ final resting place; Catherine Bell investigates death as a provocation for creative practice and creative practice as a provocation to discuss death. Through ritual visceral mark making, Tess Cassidy explores a deep embodied loss which cannot be said, and the memories which cannot be remembered; a process which ultimately grapples with the sharing of private, solitary emotions. The work is an act of allowing. In the translation of memories (infinite renegotiations of a finite archive), Kristen Roles is grappling with dissolution as an avenue of constant becoming, and becoming as a form of acceptance. Diane Rosenblum works through grief, replaying conversations with her mother and other family members in the abstract language of her ink brush drawings. Like distilled EKGs, the drawings map the striations of a now vanished territory, recording its reverberations in memory. Questioning the perception and psychology of place Elyssa Sykes-Smith enquires into dissociative experiences, linked to trauma and grief, by utilising sensory exploration and architectural metaphors. Lauren Altman is exploring emotional and physical sites of memory. She is developing new and ongoing insights into processes of loss and looking, finding meaning in active remembrance.
Collectively, through introspection and exchange, we peer into the bird’s mouth.
Works installed and artists present.
PUBLIC EVENT:
29 NOV 2018 – 02 DEC 2018
The Immaterial Weight Left Behind
This Autumn 2018 the CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF SUBSTRUCTURED LOSS is proud to host international interdisciplinary artists and researchers Jessica Carlsen (US), Talia Frank (US), Cecilia Tricker (UK), Melissa Joseph (US), Cecilia Whitney (US), and Fiona Trumper (WAL).
The Immaterial Weight Left Behind is a multidisciplinary navigation of personal storytelling and bereavement highlighting experiences of death, trauma, illness and collective histories; moving storytelling into the public sphere and into a wider community.
Jessica Carlsen’s works explore the recomposition of the layered self, amidst the aftermath of sexual assault. Talia Frank’s works focus on the health and resiliency of the human condi- tion following a period of loss or grief. Utilizing papercuttings and sculpture, she shares what she’s learned from a young woman eager to de-stigmatize cancer through dialogue and public awareness. Cecilia Tricker’s works attempt to map theoretical frameworks of grief typically deployed in interpersonal experiences of loss onto processes of environmental decay, and the resulting loss of nonhuman life. In doing so, it seeks to destabilise the binary between human and nonhuman agents, working towards de-anthropocentrising the traumatic imaginary. Me- lissa Joseph’s tender cover of pavement stones are intentional empathic acts inviting others to consider the (in)visibility of marginalized groups. Cecilia Whitney’s works thematically draw upon sociological notions of the private/public divide in relation to the emotional through resear- ch on the psychological; personal narrative rooted in past mid-late adolescent trauma; and the notion of material as memory. Symbolism and metaphor are represented through conceptual sculpture and installation. Fiona Trumper’s works explore personal bereavement narratives through audio transcription, drawing, and handwriting; communicating how grief feels and the process of reconciliation.
In uncovering grief as theme and narrative; identity and environment; it is brought to the fore- front, making the invisible – visible, the unfamiliar – familiar, and the intangible – tangible.
Works installed and artists present.
PUBLIC EVENT:
18 OCT 2018 – 21 OCT 2018
By Which We Unravel: Identity and Nationhood
This Summer 2018 the CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF SUBSTRUCTURED LOSS is proud to host international interdisciplinary artists Meenakshi Nihalani (IN) and Jonathan Davis (UK).
In investigating historical and political climates and their present day shift; evidence is depicted as a personal installation of story and process for those that follow, of those that challenged, and for those that are unable to speak. Presenting a call to action- research as artefact and craft as ritual are as performative as they are illustrative, and the structures, by which these artists unravel: identity and nationhood.
Meenakshi Nihalani’s works are seen as multidimensional and conceptual representations of forms which narrate human and gender-based confrontation as a core struggle in the unrepresented and unseen layers of society. Traditional embroidery, thread, and textile can be seen depicting the conflicting duality as structures within visual forms over their intended practical and functional uses in ‘There is No Finishing Line’ and ‘The Torch’.
Jonathan Davis’ works explore nationhood as linguistic challenges mount historically dangerous pressures that emanate from current policy and pose questions about the nature of current political and social discourse. The four works, which include ‘We’re All Strangers Now’ and ‘The Storytellers’ are mixed media pieces that stand together as a metaphor for the apparent power of stories over empirical information and the strange powers that lie behind them.
Works installed and artists present.
PUBLIC EVENT:
13 SEP 2018 – 16 SEP 2018
Matters of Lineage
Continual Shift
This Autumn 2017, the CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF SUBSTRUCTURED LOSS is proud to host international interdisciplinary artists Gina Ricker (US), Annalisa Furnari (IT), Michelle Hall (IE), and Sophie de Vos (NL).
As time unfolds, pathways are continually re-written by experience. Each new understanding reframes how positions are viewed and approached. Points of rest and reflection allow for movement and authorship alongside, within, and in spite of lineage.
In negotiating these applied, perceived, and inherited threads of lineage, structures have been navigated alongside separate and collective experiences of loss. These aspects of knowledge and histories have been untangled to allow for new foundations to manifest. In addressing and confronting these histories – new details have been brought to the surface. Through process-driven, research- based practices, space has been created for the continual shift of parameters between perception and realization through a range of disciplines.
Ricker’s work illuminates and confronts societal gaze centering on themes of ostracism and personal loss; manifesting within performative movement and installation. Furnari’s works depict the survival of the technological memory in relation to human life and the reconstruction of the lived and imaginary. Hall’s research is a process-led investigation into trauma and modes of recovery presented through text, drawing, and installation. De Vos’ photographic works reflect upon the concept of time and the physical/emotional weight it carries.
Performance, works installed, and artists present.
PUBLIC EVENT:
30 NOV 2017 – 03 DEC 2017
To Permeate
This Autumn 2017, the CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF SUBSTRUCTURED LOSS is proud to host international interdisciplinary artists and researchers Louise Prévert (FR), Lynn Imperatore (UK), Edward Williams (FR), Lauren May (AU), and Karla Suler (IE).
The dictionary would define this phrase “to permeate” as action or element which passes through, seeps into, pervades. Each artist suffuses this sensibility into practice, each finds their way into unique method, media, and articulation. The work in the exhibition represents on-going processes which address various encounters with loss. By referencing intimate histories as well as testimonies of collective experience, these works endeavour to permeate limits of surface, diffuse expectations of memory, and saturate silence with tonalities yet unheard.
Works installed and artists present.
PUBLIC EVENT:
20 OCT 2017 – 22 OCT 2017
Boardering Grief
This Summer 2017, the CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF SUBSTRUCTURED LOSS is proud to host international interdisciplinary artists Lieselotte Fontrodona (NL), Anna Piatou (GR), Stefani Kuo (HK), Katherine Fiona Jones (WAL), and Debbie YJ Lin (CAN).
Boardering Grief is each artist’s sensitively constructed process-driven accession through loss by way of familial mental illness and role; trauma and distant separation; containment and dialogue; linguistic archetypes of translation and decay; and silence through censorial self-observation and historical text. Developed by way of personal experiences and rooted in evolving internal structures; parallel is the maternal identity, familial body of discourse, migrational, linguistic interchange, and woven silenced censorship by which change is inherently marked, navigated, and depicted.
Works installed and artists present.
PUBLIC EVENT:
15 SEP 2017 – 17 SEP 2017
Holding Space
This Autumn 2016, the CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF SUBSTRUCTURED LOSS is proud to host international interdisciplinary artists and researchers Rachel Giles (UK), Jenna Knapp (US), and Nine Yamamoto-Masson (FR-JP).
The three artist-researchers make work that commemorates what is often elided, marginalised, and even pathologised. They strive to articulate in their works a new language, as well as, rituals for their deeply personal and politi- cal resistance against silencing, shaming, erasure and forgetting.
Absence is a common theme in the three works presented: Giles’ paper and textile-based pieces are meditations on infertility and childlessness, Knapp’s reflects on memory and archives the life of a lost loved one, and Yamamoto -Masson’s installation explores the politics of silencing/erasure of the (mostly women) victims of unredressed state violence.
Each artists’ engagement with grief and loss is deeply personal, rigorously forensic, and poetic. Their works echo Audre Lorde: “the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation and that always seems fraught with danger.” They understand art as an interface and impulse that can transform silence, break taboos, and commemorate the past, thus opening up possibilities of language, recognition, solidarity, remembrance and justice.
By holding space for those we’ve lost and have never known, we acknowledge the shape we have carved out for them despite their absence.
Works installed and artists present.
PUBLIC EVENT:
01 DEC 2016 – 02 DEC 2016
A Memorial to the Fragmented Self
This Autumn 2016, the CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF SUBSTRUCTURED LOSS is proud to host international interdisciplinary-conceptual artists and researchers Helen Kirwan (UK), Sharona Franklin (CAN), and Ilyn Wong (US).
Challenging the interwoven and sometimes indistinguishable processes that serve loss – A Memorial to the Fragmented Self aims to depict a personal search through the historical, metaphorical-mythical, and present day journeys of each artist. While integral parts of these iterations relied on research; the navigation was led by personal experience. The works, presented as ceremonial-performative and transmutations of documentary processes, draw on the complexity of loss and losses; portraying the imbalance of source as cause – evolving as a living artefact while contributing to our awareness at present.
Works installed and artists present.
PUBLIC EVENT:
15 OCT 2016 – 16 OCT 2016
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