Artist Statements

Art Hijack

Elana Rubinfeld

Rick Haatj travels the globe looking for great art. And great art, in its own masterful ways, travels to Rick Haatj. From the holdings of a little known yacht, to the Richelieu Wing of the Louvre, to the canals of Venice, the collection of Rick Haatj knows no acquisitional boundaries.

Somewhere in Venice, on the eve of the 2005 Biennale, Mr. Haatj has brought a selection of his legendary trove to an undisclosed residence for an exclusive private soiree. One can only guess what lucky devils will be in attendance. The occasion is to welcome Mr. Haatj's latest art catch - an oil by one of the big three cinquecento Venetian masters is all that has been revealed. Is it an obscure portrait by Titian, or an early Veronese landscape perhaps? Our collective breath awaits.

Avelino Sala

"La Espera project is the metaphorical answer to many questions which appear in everyday life for all of us.

Who is not waiting for something fantastic? Who is not dreaming with complete happiness?

The surfer is waiting for the wave, a wave that is never arriving, but that doesn’t matter, he keeps on waiting, is he a hero or an idiot?"

Aviva Rahmani

We settle around water then foul it. When artists address water, we are speaking from our hearts to the heart of our world, that depends on water. Our global water ills are a body that has "trigger points", as in acupuncture. These trigger points, the most degraded urban areas in our landscape, once restored, could provide healing for much larger areas. Art is healing because it is passionate. Passion is a trigger, cleaning what has been fouled.

Bradon Ballengée

"Love Motel for Insects"

While exploring the rainforests of Central America in 2001, I was overwhelmed by the intense diversity of insects. In an attempt to attract these arthropods, I set-up primitive structures made from black (ultra-violet) lights and bed-sheets placed on the forest floor.

Within moments hundreds of flying visitors came to the piece- fluttering moths, blood-

sucking Hemipteras, clunky beetles, delicate caddisflies, ants, lacewings, and many more- the diversity of colors, shapes and sizes was fantastic! Female moths released chemical pheromones to attract mates and consequently “painted” the piece, beetles hungrily lumped one upon the other while releasing vibrant colored eggs and primordial

fluids- a kind of arthropod rite of Bacchus and abstract expressionism. On the second night, spiders and their predacious kin began to visit. They laboriously decorated the sculpture with their own form of geometric abstraction. Attracted to movement, other predators such as tarantulas, mantids, scorpions, bats, and amphibians began nightly visits. I counted, photographed, recorded predator/prey relationships, and attempted to identify each species that interacted with the sculptures. Fascinated and inspired by this initial experience, I began creating these temporary black-light works at varied ecosystems around the world. To date I have photographed arthropods in Asia, Central America, Europe, and North America. This edition of photographs is a selection of these ‘arthropod collaborators’.

Dana Shea

The Waterways Project

Mural

The mural I created for the WATERWAYS PROJECT is in part derived from the canals in Venice. With the intention of avoiding the structure of the canals rather creating a-back and forth-underlying flow of saturated blue paint; mixing the dichotomy of water-base- paint mural on a boat. I play with images of our association and utilization of water, in this process I toy with the brains labyrinth type of construction.

Digital Images

This project for me brings about issues of our natural control systems rain/snow and to what extent in our contemporary society do we control water to heat or freeze or in other parts the world to keep our houses warm or cool. Our society’s efforts to re-use and treat contaminated water. Our society’s efforts to control water seem like a recent occurrence but in actuality- it can be placed back as far as our first villages and now corporations.

Emmanuelle Gauthier

To refer to the theme of Waterways, on environmental issues, I gave a lot of thought to which of my photographs will best address these concerns.

I choose 2 photographs that I took of TV news coverage in 2003 during the first American invasion of Iraq. I was horrified and at the same time drawn to the apocalyptic images of these oil fields burning. These ultimate symbols of devastation and pollution express my feelings powerlessness and angst. As there is a screen between my lens and what is so surreal, there is disengagement, as there always is when you watch war or events on TV. Yet, when you freeze something through photography, there is time to analyze it. I hope the images will transcend the audience to become more aware and conscious.

Eva Mantell

Shade Museum is part of a larger group of works that includes birds, flowers and studies of nature made from medical x-rays. For me it's freeing to draw on top of and reconfigure these x-rays, rather than work with materials with no history. The mark of the body will always be more important than anything I can do, and this situation frees me to explore secondary stories.

I know I just can't get past myself to get to anything, anyone or any place. Shade Museum embodies an acceptance of myself as a container/template/shaper of my own experiences and memories. To think about the state of our oceans, rivers, bodies of water, I don't get past us either and I see our human bodies in overpopulated ecstasy, the bodies of our ancestors and the bogging down of memory within the outline of this problem of water. Plastic bottles pile up like so many fears. Amphoras line storerooms, filled with clean drinking water, or piled up, ruined, in a basement of a museum. With bottles, amphoras, there are feet, body, shoulders, arms, neck. Each bottle is a body and each body is a bottle.

G-Local - a project of the Group of 77.

What is the correlation between production and destruction? Culture is changing nature and nature is changing culture.

We are building a body of knowledge, a cultural map, a physical guide that is relevant to the present and continually evolving. Our machine, G-Local, measures the effects and byproducts of production on indigenous matter, vernacular customs and exchanges. Here, we use the city of Venice during a time of cultural activation as a control to determine the interchange, dependence, and disparity between nature and culture.

The comprehensive use of the G-Local is to measure the (de) evolution or (non) progress of a place, since environment and culture are linked inexorably. It has two sets of sensors: Cultural (measuring the ephemeral fluidity of the exchange of ideas) and environmental (measuring concrete evidence of physical change). Its primary sensors read person-to-person exchanges in the form of eye contact, dilation, stance, blood flow, stride, odor, and conversation as well as synthetic-to-nature exchanges including noise levels, water composition, chemical and organic emissions, gases, and ultraviolet radiation.

The theory of the 77 global cultural index is manifested in the Reader's ability to create maps through specific poetic and algorithmic readings captured in diverse communities through sampling and recording. The result can be found locally in the participation and awareness of the Reader, or it can be found globally and quantified in the near future at

www.theG77.org

Jeannie Weissglass

Water lust... water warm and basic... water transforming and spiritual. Water is almost always at the root of my work as a source of inspiration. I think the idea of gathering the art and showing it on the boat where it can travel and be seen surrounded by water is quirky, appropriate, and pretty great.

John Breiner

Decay, progression, my work interacts and revolves around life. My surfaces, although man made, are rescued from life—and they show it. Whether discarded on the street, out the trash or just found, I search out objects that show the path of their travels. Stained by Water, dirt or light, these objects provide the curious with the insight into their past life and provide me with a point to make my connection. I observe life’s marks and add my own, providing evidence of another stop in the object’s travels. I create the work with the idea of being viewed as artifacts, to give my take on things in addition to life’s impact on it. The pieces created are some times commentary, documentations or warnings but the goal is to reach people and make these once discarded and ignored objects valued possessions again. Hopefully in the process it will cause people to slow down a bit and understand that there is value in all that surrounds them.

Lisa Schilling

My work is a blending of my two interests: materiality - the language of objects and materials - and phenomenology. I have found that both focuses, however disparate, can be served through the exploration of the planet, its elements and its varied systems. By recasting what I observe out of human-made materials, I am better able to understand and appreciate the deep beauty and power of the natural world, and, ultimately, my relationship to it.

Waterways presents a unique opportunity for me to put my work into an arena wherein both the specific discussions about art and the larger dialogues of global issues will be availed simultaneously. I am very excited to be a part of the Waterways project because its creators are intent on making a space for serious art practices and personal ethics to coexist. By re-humanizing the corporate art fair experience, Waterways offers by example a way for all participants to reenter into their own relationship with society and the world at large.

Mary Mattingly

Waterways is a collaborative organization directly in line with my own concerns. In my artwork, I think it is important to predict future conditions through what is happening today, with the environment as well as within relationships, as these relationships become contained within a reified and mediated space. I create weareable homes for a resulted nomadic condition, and make sculptural installations that meld the real and fake in environment. I then photograph these spaces to be documents of what our world could become. The work focus’s on the human condition and the conditioning of humans within a globalized world.

One of my main concerns is the future of water. As we begin to commodify and privatize this natural resource, many things happen. In most cases it becomes cleaner and healthier. However, simultaneously, water becomes unaffordable for many people. I will show two sculptures in Waterways. They are both necessary for living in the future. One sculpture is a model made from ordinary recycled materials. The plans for this sculpture will allow many people the ability and ease to drink cleaner water where once they could not afford it (in Bolivia, for example, 20% of a family’s income is put towards clean water even now after their local privatization scandal) through the reuse of everyday materials. The second sculpture is a floatable, wearable home. One can be nomadic, traverse land and sea, essentially remaining protected and not needing much more. Both of these sculptures will be necessary as a pair; although water levels will rise and we will lose land, we will gain salt water and be in constant battle for drinkable fresh water.

Michelle Vara

Writing an artist statement to me is more difficult that actually producing art.

I see the world through pictures and objects.

My statements all visual & emotional are evoked by many means.

The mediums I choose are paint, drawing and metal sculpture.

I do and want to do nothing more than produce art.

My income is from visual objects that I produce. Some times designed around a client, world, Issues, emotions a space or a use.

If you as the viewer have an emotional reaction (good, bad indifferent) to my work I have achieved my goal.

I am an artist always collecting and organizing visual information for review by the world.

My work is my existence.

That is why the waterways gave me the perfect opportunity to speak out on pollution and the miss- use of our natural resources.

Miranda Lloyd

Hybrid ecosystems, familiar yet unidentifiable landscapes, and ant farms of mutant botany collide in a world of visceral beauty. Spanning sculpture, photography, and etchings, New York based artist Miranda Lloyd uses plastics, wax, resins, and sometimes flesh creating mythological environments fueled by the human instinct to pick apart, examine, conclude, mutate and display. The need to adapt in order to survive and how that propels progress are at the core of these works both physically and emotionally.

www.mirandalloyd.com

Naoto Nakagawa

LIFE, LOSS, DEATH, REBIRTH

My subject has always been nature. Nature's beauty, and rage, and fragility. I am always trying to paint nature in a new way, to create a completely different kind of landscape painting.

Venice's struggle is the struggle of man and nature. No city's architecture is more uniquely linked to the natural world, that it rises from, that envelops it. On my first visit, over thirty years ago, I fell in love with the city. Her struggle is rich, and I offer her my hope.

The format of this work is a historical slide presentation, from the original marshes to the glory of Venice as Europe's most prosperous capital, to the environmental destruction that threatens the city. It is painted on clear plastic so that the paintings can be seen against the backdrop of contemporary Venice.

Nina Teglio

The human or animal body hides organic and anatomical imperfections, and an unconscious narrative/descriptive force that allows continuous transformations, and the assumption of different forms.

In many of my photographic and video works I have used images of animals and bodies, to explore the complexity of the body as an organic entity, and as a metaphor of emotional human feelings; but not yet as a social entity. This is first time though, that I have used real animals and that I have chosen the installation as language and as a modality of direct communication with the audience.

The idea of working with both the environment as the boat and the concept of the Waterways (allowing another interpretation of the term "environment" as related to natural resources), revealed to be very stimulating in relation to my work practice, but also very difficult to deal with. Being the Vaporetto a public space, it easily tends to become dispersive. This difficulty drew me towards the necessity of having a direct contact with the audience, and therefore to develop an installation work that utilizes the concept of Choice. - Through the way that people respond to such a "small thing" as the life of a fish, we can take a sample of how they behave in relation to bigger issues on the environment.

The audience can interact with the installation by deciding the fate of the fish, which are placed in various spots of the Vaporetto, inside plastic water bags. They have the freedom to choose if either freeing the fish in the Venetian Lagoon, or keeping them in "captivity" and letting them die.

As a consequence, and in both cases, the existence of the installation completely depends from the decision/interaction of the audience.

Orly Cogan

The flag, hand stitched embroidery on Italian print fabric, evokes a historical reference while intermingling contemporary context and concept with the lost art of embroidery. It is a narrative – waiting for the safe return of an old ship, wearied after a long and treacherous journey. The woman, canonical figures, are the ephemeral mascots, forecasting the destiny of the voyage.

While on the one hand exploring common feminine archetypes, my work also aims to represent the fusing of old and new as we see in Venice – figures intermingled with existing images from the pages of old books.

Raphaele Shirley

I have been interested, in my work over the last 10 years, in what I would call “circumstantial collisions”, moments where multiple situations come to meet and cross, yielding sometimes very unusual results. These ensue from the fusion and convergence of unlikelihoods, the outcome or moment of inter-occurrence becoming the art: a semi psychedelic, loose sociological, physical and/or urban experiment.

In these projects, planned with people, events and objects, sometimes in the public, sometimes in more classical venues such as museums or interior spaces, momentum picks-up as their realization progresses, diversities merge, generating a powerful supercharge of energy.

Waterways contained much of this circumstantial potential and power of convergence, borne through hope and generosity but also through the willingness to take great risks, to put oneself out there - “in the cold” or “in the wet” so to speak- without too much care for institutional rescue, rafts or guarantees of smooth cocktail sippings. Relying mainly on its own sense of orientation, Waterways with Renee Vara & Company- heroically set out “in the uncertain” and “in the hope”, to Venice, with the intentions to a great project. With absolute openness and Zen acceptance of the flux of incoming occurrences and divergences, Renee lead the boat out on a pirate tour of the bay of Venice improvising its route in response to the web of witnesses and participants. The boat, with its incongruous installations, functioning outside the map, outside the quadrant, amused, bemused and/or perplexed Biennale and Venice folk alike. It lent itself to the flow of elements.

I had the honor, as a participant, to affect the course of this marvelous event. Bumping into fellow French mischief-makers in one Bellini clad palace we dared extract a large group of Gallic palazzo-goers to our improbable floating experiment. Deep in the 1am night we danced and deleriumed into some remote waters, cruise-embarkation- military-zone of the bay of Venice, now strong of 50 festivity makers. As we attempted to join, through uncertain yet confirmed invitations, the much more glamorous “Octopus” of Paul Allan, a tres elegante woman threw herself in the water twice (and was rescued once), others winged and yet many more, with a Goddard sense of humor stood bemused at the unlikely cinematic circumstantial cocktail. Here we made a new Venetian legend. The venture of the “Vaporetto artsitico” into the dark nights of la Citta del Acqua Alta.

The project now belongs to those who stood on the boat or watched it pass by, as much as to those who instigated it in the first place. Its ecology is based on the all-encompassing, on something that takes IT all in and then reprocesses the IT for positive and regenerative forces and outcome. This is the true future of any ecological endeavor and Waterways, in its realization was a living example of what can be done with openness, faith and strength of vision. When stray parts converge with constructed projections, and those divergences are led to meet, magic occurs!

Rune Olsen

"In our culture, the decisive political conflict, which governs every other conflict, is that between the animality and the humanity of man. That is to say, in its origin Western politics is also biopolitics." Giorgio Agamben, The Open, Man and Animal, p 80

I want to contribute to the incredible exciting project, Waterways (2005) because it is vital we spotlight and contextualize the effects of the current sociopolitical ideologies on our planet’s diversity. Presenting the project on a boat is such a perfect venue—beyond the obvious Noah's ark reference—it is a political vessel carrying goods and ideas, reflecting on the water as a source to sustain life currently being unsustainably exploited. My life-size animal sculptures examining the interplay among desire, power structures and society. They are all made from what I refer to as "social materials." These are environmentally friendly and recycled materials readily available, such as newspaper and tape.

For Waterways (2005) I have chosen to contribute "Rattus Novegicus" (2004) a sculpture that explore the problematic relationship between ethics and capitalism. "Rattus Novegicus" (2004) was made in response to the investment policies of The Norwegian Oil Fund, a more than a 100 billion dollar mutual fund through which Norway re-invests the income from oil sales. Though it has a moral clause set by the government, investment managers were still placing money in multinational conglomerates, whose investments are hard to trace as they are everywhere. Similarly "Rattus Norvegius", or the Norwegian Brown rat, is the most wide spread rat in the world. Ironically, as a Norwegian, the sculpture also became a self-portrait, reminding me of my own hypocrisies.

For the portfolio box cover I have made the drawing "Holy Killer Whales" (2005), representing two killer whales mating. Both ferocious and endangered, the two killer whales represent the problem of sustainable diversity and elevating nature into an icon. Once chosen as an icon, like many animals we like, are they not representing human beliefs rather than their own natural dynamic? Though this might be a paradox hard to avoid, I believe it is important to continue questioning our perception of nature.

Tamar Hirschl

My artwork, while mainly political, aims to ultimately connect people, I am concerned about the effect that global water systems have on the environment, and would like to call attention to the availability of new methods for the treatment and reuse of water to conserve available resources. I am especially interested in how this relates to agriculture and architecture, since we are constantly modifying the landscape around us for human use, disturbing the wild animal habitats previously extant in that environment. Projects like construction projects for irrigation, ditches, tunnels and walls in cities. These projects prevent all the wildlife that had previously inhabited the construction sites from being able to reach their nests, and changed the balance of nature for miles around the sites. I hope that my participation in Waterways will draw attention to the disturbances that both peacetime commerce and wartime conflict create in our environment.