#; borrego aesthetic | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

houseofvans · 5 years

Photo

SKETCHY BEHAVIORS | INTERVIEW WITH PEARL C. HSIUNG

LA based multimedia artist Pearl C. Hsiung explores the relationships between humans and nature through her various paintings, sculptures, videos and installations. In a collaboration with the Borrego Boys & Girls Club as well as members of the public, Pearl recently created a site-specific sculpture using wood, plexiglass and non-recyclable plastic waste. She’s also unveiling a large-scale tile mosaic commission in 2022 at the new 2nd/Hope St Metro station in downtown, LA. We’re excited to find out more about Pearl’s artwork, collaborations, and what she’s got coming up for the rest of the year.

Take the Leap!

Photographs courtesy of the artist.

Could you introduce yourself to everybody? Hi I’m Pearl C Hsiung, I live and work in Los Angeles. ‘Hsiung’ is pronounced ‘shung’ and means the animal bear in Chinese. I have a pet mini-Rex named Rambo who lives free- range in my apartment.

How would you describe the art you create? How would you describe your particular technique? I’d say that my practice uses the landscape as a starting point for thinking through our connection to it and towards the idea that we are inseparable from the matter around us. If all matter in the universe combusted out of the same material then our current, subjective reality, where we behave as if we’re defined apart from everything around us, is an illusion.

In past painting, video and installation works this is performed through metamorphosing, flowing and eruptive forms bursting out of their geological, biological, technological, and cultural skins. In works like Full Gorge (2017) and Original Face (2018), I was thinking about the interconnection of all that is natural, human, more-than-human and artificial through an experience of immersive presence in material space.

For me, these free-standing paintings point to a certain moment of presence, not unlike the moment I experience sometimes after reading certain zen kõans or Daoist phrases; it is an instant moment, a moment of clarity where I understand it all. But it is fleeting, it is a momentary experience that precedes, challenges or completely eludes language. Maybe this is not unlike a moment experienced when in nature, during sex or laughter (during both?), plugged into VR or while coding.

What are your favorite things to paint? What should folks take away from your works? I enjoy painting on canvas, paper, MDF, wood… Actually I hope people bring to my works. I encourage the exchange that I make the work and viewers bring their perceptions and interpretations.

What’s a typical day in the studio for you like? And what are you currently working on in the studio? My studio schedule is fluid depending on the season. It also depends on how much I’m teaching, I may only get one full day and a couple half days a week for the studio, other times I’m 5-6 days a week. Time spent in the studio varies a lot and can include research, reading, sketching, painting, writing, building, cleaning, organizing, accounting, correspondence, grant proposals, teaching applications, pacing, prepping for big work/big actions, paint experiments, materials tests, staring, repotting plants…

I’m starting on new work for a show at Visitor Welcome Center in Koreatown in November 2019.

When you’re working on and developing a new painting or piece, how does it begin - take us from sketchbook, to color choices, to finished painting? New work is always a continuation of themes and ideas from previous works and research. The form changes as the focus shifts on those ideas or approaches. The decisions on everything from composition, structure, color palette and presentation are informed by this new focus as well as the new context of making that work. Personal, experiential, studio environment, cultural influences, topical events all seep into that. The sketchbook is full of garbage, I let it sit there to compost and sometimes it sprouts a new bud…

What tools will someone always find you using at your studio? What are your preferred materials? Tools have changed through the years. More recently you’ll see squeegees and plastic paint guides (that I use like a squeegee) rather than brushes for the paintings. Consistently, I use white paper and tape as painting tools. The computer, the internet and books are always studio necessities for research and admin tools. I use paints and inks that comes tubes, tubs, tins, buckets, bottles, spray cans, jars, sets on canvas, cold-pressed paper, MDF, cardboard. I’ve been experimenting with painting on non-recyclable plastic I’ve tried to make into it’s own substrate but it’s not yet working out.

How do you unplug yourself so to speak? What do you do to center or re-focus yourself if you find yourself stressed out about deadlines, art shows, and the sort? When the stress piles up it helps if I do yoga first thing in the morning in my living room, but the best way to deal with the stress is to work through it. When I feel overwhelmed by anxiety relating to projects, teaching, or deadlines, it usually helps me to become more prepared, using research, preparation and experimentation to deal with the parts that can be addressed. For short term refocusing, I step outside and stare at things: the sky, the plants outside of my studio, the birds on the telephone lines, the clouds. Or I’ll take a walk around the block, change my daily routine like driving a different route, take the bus, walk through the grocery or thrift store before getting to work.

For longer term re-centering, if I can, I leave town or just go stare at the ocean. Staring is like open-eyed meditation for me, I try to empty out my thoughts, blank out and spend unscheduled time. Sleep well and spending time with family and friends are also priceless rechargers.

You recently worked with AIR Talks: Candlewood Arts Festival collaborated with folks you met at the Borrego Boys & Girls Club? Tells us about the festival, the project and about the various workshops you helped conduct? Why was this event so important to you? This was the inaugural Candlewood Arts Festival, a temporary public art event in the town of Borrego Springs located in the Anza Borrego State Park. Tanya Aguiniga, Devon Tsuno, Kor Newkirk, Mario Ybarra Jr and I created different site- and community-specific sculptures and happenings during the last weekend of March 2019. Most of our works were located out in Galleta Meadows, an open, outdoor lot amidst the expansive desert landscape.

For my sculpture Holocene Screen, I collaborated with youth from the Borrego Boys & Girls Club as well as members of the public during a workshop at the Borrego Art Institute to create a sculpture using wood, plexiglass and non-recyclable plastic waste that considered the simultaneity of nature, human and artificial as a landscape within a landscape.

As part of the Holocene Screen workshop process, the students had to brainstorm words that fell into three categories: nature, human and artificial. Then they were asked to write a short story, poem or single sentence using one word from each category which they painted onto a plexiglass window in the sculpture. It was interesting to learn how easy it was for them to identify elements from nature and human, yet struggle with artificial.

We had discussions about what artificial is and what items from their everyday lives fall under that definition. Their next step was to visualize and compose a singular picture or narrative that threaded all three. I think that was a good example of how easily we can grasp, and even romanticize and/or idealize the relationship between nature and human, and the difficulty or resistance to imagining the artificial in our aesthetic compositions or picture of reality.

My intention, for both workshop participants and myself, was to place these three elements in one view, one image in order to de-emphasize the space between natural and unnatural. What does that look like and where does that lead us to.

What do you enjoy about collaborations? What would be your dream collaboration? The best aspect of collaboration is giving up control and the sharing of ideas and labor. Working in the studio is so solitary that it can be a great relief to open up to working with someone else or others.

Earlier this year you also showed works and visited with the Paramo Galeria in Guadalajara! Tell us a bit about the overall experience and exhibition. I had paintings included in New Suns, a group exhibition curated by Kris Kuramitsu at Paramó, it was the first time I’ve been to Guadalajara. It was thrilling to be showing with such a strong group of artists, Sherin Guirguis, Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, Nasim Hantehzadeh and Gabriella Sánchez among them. I went for the opening back in December and also spoke on a panel with Sherin, Kenyatta and Kris at the Guadalajara International Book Fair, which I learned is the largest book fair of the Americas and the second largest in the world.

Another first was speaking to an audience while being translated sentence by sentence. We had a really furtive conversation though regarding the themes that our practices share.

Something else that was new for me, was having an experience that someone might call…spirit related. Ghost or undead related? I told you about it later and you also had a ghostly experience the same weekend but in Big Bear?

All I will say is that it was a disturbance by very young thing that was too visceral to be a dream.

You’ve worked in various mediums from murals to sculpture to painting to video / animation. Is there a medium you’ve yet to try that you want to get into? I like an answer that Gertrude Stein gave during an interview from 1935. It regards the forms that writing takes, i.e. the novel, the autobiography etc, so I’m taking it out of context a bit, but the interviewer asks her “What has passion got to do with choosing an art form?” She answers “Everything. There is nothing else that determines form.” So I think I’ve let form, or choice of medium come from the initial impulses of the work I end up making. Maybe there is a VR piece or mural in bronze in my future….

What’s the most challenging aspect of what you do? How do you overcome these obstacles? What keeps you going? Financial sustainability. Keeping the studio open while also preserving time to work in it. I live off a financial collage composed of hustling - teaching, selling work, artist lectures, panel discussions, grants, commissions - but the stress of keeping it together has taken years off my life!

Share with us some artists you’re really excited about as of late. York Chang,The Signal and The Noiseat Vincent Price Art Museum, April-July 2019. What I like about York Chang’s works in this show is that he uses information, text, images and sound to magnify the chaotic and disorienting feeling that comes with checking your phone, radio or tv for news or information. Facts and truths are just atoms floating around in a giant cosmos of distorted narratives, info, and transmissions, you cannot locate the signal or its source amidst the noise. The show’s installation makes you feel swallowed up in this, it’s enveloping yetliberating to be lost in, setting you up to enjoy the weird connections that York makes.

Carolina Caycedo’s Apariciones / Apparitions, a video exhibited at the Huntington Library last summer (you can see it on view at the Vincent Price Art Museum this summer, June 15 - December 21, 2019.) This video is gorgeous and powerful. Female, black, brown and queer dancers twirl, flounce, throb and glide throughout the colonial-style and asian gardens and libraries of the Huntington. Sometimes they are totally fluid bodies in motion and at others times quite still and making spellbinding eye-contact with the viewer. You are watching a conjuring of the bodies and spirits of those whose representations and histories are missing throughout the art, books and histories archived in the Huntington’s collections.

Christina Quarles But I Woke Jus’ Tha Same at Regen Projects, April-May 2019. I suggest people see her paintings in person, they are really engaging. They are figurative, figures coupling, moving into and through each other, embracing beyond recognition by the brain and into recognition by the flesh. Materially they are gymnastic, virtuosic but not stuffy and make me want to paint. York Chang, The Signal and The Noise at Vincent Price Art Museum, April-July 2019. What I like about York Chang’s works in this show is that he uses information, text, images and sound to magnify the chaotic and disorienting feeling that comes with checking your phone, radio or tv for news or information. Facts and truths are just atoms floating around in a giant cosmos of distorted narratives, info, and transmissions, you cannot locate the signal or its source amidst the noise.

Dynasty Handbag (Jibz Cameron) is a performance, video artist who lives in LA right now. She’s the sharpest, funniest, slipperiest, grotesque-adjacent comic performer in the universe. When you see her live, she reads the room, the crowd and herself so spontaneously that you’re always on a mood-swinging rollercoaster. She’s so distortedly vulnerable, proud and charming that you’re not only laugh-crying with and at her, but you’re mostly dying over how culture makes us schizo and insane. She hosts a monthly queer performance night called Weirdo Night here at Zebulon.

What are your favorite Vans? SK8-His that are all solid black w/ black soles.

What do you have coming up that you can share with us? I’ve got a show opening in November 2019 at Visitor Welcome Center in Koreatown, LA and a large-scale tile mosaic commission at the new 2nd/Hope St Metro station in downtown LA, opening in 2022!!

FOLLOW PEARL | WEBSITE | INSTAGRAM

#Art #Vans #Vans Art #Vans Girls #Sketchy Behaviors #Pearl Hsiung #painting #installation #recycling #borengo springs #interview

26 notes · View notes