I am a Los-Angeles based visual artist working in installation, performance, video, painting, and sculpture. My work examines the relationship of art and freedom through the lens of art education. The paintings and objects I create represent artifacts rescued from the ruins of an imaginary art school: the State Art Academy, Zürich (SKZ). My paintings represent student exercises taken from the school’s curriculum. I expand on the story through installation, performance and video.
My work is drawn from an invented narrative about the imaginary State Art Academy, Zürich (SKZ). My paintings represent student exercises taken from the school’s curriculum. I make sculptural plywood furniture rescued from the ruins of the school. These objects are used as studio furniture in my day to day practice as an artist. They then become installations in which audiences participate in performative “drawing lessons” which demonstrate the forgotten pedagogy of the SKZ. Through objects, installation, performance and video, I ask questions about the possibilities and problems we confront when attempting to realize our creativity and freedom.
“Drawing Lessons from the SKZ” is a series of performative art lessons for children and adults that takes place in an installation environment. The lessons are taken from the curriculum of the State Art Academy, Zürich (SKZ), an imaginary art school set in fictionalized 20th century Switzerland. The lessons play on the utopian desire of modernist art education to discover a universal visual language through form, composition, color, and material, but hope to convey a deeper message about the difficulty and importance of finding free creative expression within the limitations set by contemporary life.
The first Drawing Lessons from the SKZ performance took place at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in October 2016. An expanded version took place at American Jewish University in 2017. In both cases participants painted black and white geometric abstractions using a technique called “straightedge and compass construction,” which dates back to Ancient Greece. They then performed a formal analysis of the completed paintings using categories such as line, weight, motion, scale, etc, that they brainstormed. The performances took place in an environment made up of sculptural objects and furniture built in standard metric sizes that reinforced the sense of harmony and proportion of their paintings. I have performed variations of the lessons at USC’s Roski School of Art, at the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art in Berlin, Germany, as well as privately in my studio.
In the summer of 2019 and in January and February of 2020 I began a new series of installation/performances inspired by the Kindergarten attached to the imaginary art school. “SKZ Children’s Painting Workshop” is an experiment in collaboration with children. The workshops drew inspiration from Friedrich Fröbel’s original 1837 concept of the Kindergarten: a living garden that promotes natural learning and creative growth. Children were invited into an installation environment with sculptural painting easels, hand-painted smocks, and brightly colored banners on the walls. They painted on large abstract silkscreened coloring-book pages. They were not given any instructions. Depending on their age or temperament, they could choose to color inside the lines or not, and whether or not to take visual cues from their painted aprons and the wall banners. Their interactions with the visual environment of the classroom, and with the printed coloring-book pages were intended to invite reflection on creativity and freedom.
A year ago I began developing a new piece called “Chance Operations.” This lesson makes use of a game of chance which is also a pedagogical tool that teaches basic principles of painting such as form, color, and composition. I built a prototype of the board game as well as a maquette of the specially designed classroom, itself designed partially according to chance, in which the lesson would take place.
My work is about the need to find a space for free creativity and problem solving within the limitations given by everyday life. Each element in the installations: the aprons, the easels, the pieces of paper, even the walls and floor, are made up of the same metric standard rectangles governing paper sizes. This creates a sense of harmony between the student paintings and their surroundings, and also serves as a lesson on the need to be aware of one’s surroundings. As an undergraduate, my favorite professor taught us that before we even begin a painting, we have made a very important decision in choosing what size and shape canvas to paint on. In these performances, the rectangle of the canvas represents the limits to our creative freedom set by necessity. The lessons teach the need to be aware of the boundaries set by our environment. Whether we choose to paint inside the lines, outside the lines, or across them, we should be conscious of what we are doing.