Kala Art Institute has been continuing their endeavors of awarding fellowships for Bay Area artists for a while now.  I started to interview the fellows from Kala in 2011 and continue with the most recent 2012 awardees.  The interviews talk with artists about their history, practice, and driving concepts to their work.  This is Part 1 of 3 features that will be published on our website featuring 3 artists at a time.  We hope you enjoy the interviews and find time to go by Kala and check out the programming and facilities in Oakland.  Enjoy.

 

-Interviewed by Gregory Ito

 

 

 

Chris Fraser:

 

 

 

Tell us some history about yourself before being awarded with Kala’s Fellowship.

 

I work with light across various media – installation, performance, photography, and video. Even though I work with light, it is not my subject. I see light as an agent of connection. Vision alone is beautiful, but so is the way that it draws us into the world. Light bridges distances and allows us to know things outside of our immediate grasp.

 

 

 

What are you current activities in the art community?

 

I’m both an artist and an educator. I maintain an active studio practice and exhibit regularly. I also teach photography part-time at a community college near Sacramento. My experience in front of a classroom has forced me to systematize my thoughts and working methods. It’s easy to dodge questions in the studio, but agonizing to do so in front of students. They make me a more thoughtful artist.

 

Can you discuss the concepts that drive your artistic practice?

 

Using the camera obscura as a point of departure, I pursue an experience of light that engages the unseen in everyday phenomena. I craft spaces that frame ambient light, revealing a glimpse of the complex order around us. The camera is not a device, but a situation. Wherever light slips into dark, a picture will be seen. These specters fill the air around us. We walk into them, wear them, change them.

 

 

 

What is your process like when creating your work?

 

Work comes to me when I am relaxed and patient. Most arrives when I am sleeping-in or staring out a window. Very little has come out of direct experimentation in the studio.

 

Much of my working method involves the reframing of a subtle phenomenon. I take things on the periphery of perception and move them to the center. I develop ways of amplifying experiences that commonly go unnoticed.

 

While work often arrives in an instant, the execution can be excruciating. I spent the last four months researching and developing a project that seemed so simple in the beginning. I often ache for the two weeks following a big install. I was unable to use my right hand for several days after finishing a particularly demanding space.

 

 

 

What kind of materials/artists do you look at for inspiration?

 

I admire many artists, but they are not the source of my inspiration. New work only comes when I allow myself time to float and stare. I steal mercilessly from nature.

 

What do you have coming up in the near future?

 

I just installed new work for a show called Personal Structures at the Palazzo Bembo as part of the Venice Biennale. The work involves the creation of prismatic halos that follow the viewer, paired with the illusory nature of visual depth. In the fall, I will be taking part in a show called Lightopia at the Vitra Design Museum in Wei am Rhein, Germany. I have designed a new light room that will create two pyramid shaped images – one of the skylight about, the other of the incandescent lamps in the room.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Clint Wilson:

 

 

 

Tell us some history about yourself before being awarded with Kala’s Fellowship.

 

I have ben a practicing visual artist in Canada for over 15 years having exhibited projects across North America. Eight years ago I founded Integrated Wilderness Systems as a platform for research around the intersections of Science, Art, and Human Passion

 

What are you current activities in the art community?

 

Finding Morris has been a three year project through which I have been looking at the relevance of late Victorian romanticism to a growing turn away from contemporary industrialized consumerist culture. Comprised of filmwork, painting and sculpture the project will culminate in a retracing on horseback of William morris’s journey through the west of Iceland to translate the Icelandic sagas into English

 

 

 

Can you discuss the concepts that drive your artistic practice?

 

I have been fascinated by wild states for some time and have recently been integrating my creative practice as a visual artist and recreational outdoor activities which have resulted in objects that function both as survival gear and as carriers of ideological positions.

 

What is your process like when creating your work?

 

There is an early period of heavy research followed by a manifestation of this research through physical means, often object like in nature.

 

 

 

What kind of materials/artists do you look at for inspiration?

 

I look at very little contemporary practice in the visual arts, being inspired more by experimental film and music.

 

What do you have coming up in the near future?

 

I am currently opening an exhibition called Memories of a Naturalist that explores systems of knowledge in museums and zoological gardens. Comprised of photography and kinetic video, the exhibition is currently on at Paved Arts media centre in Canada. This fall I will be returning to Kala to complete the Cloud Kayak and put it to use as a mobile waterborne painting studio in the waters surrounding Berkeley.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Colin James Lyons:

 

 

 

Tell us some history about yourself before being awarded with Kala’s Fellowship.

 

I was born in Windsor, Ontario in 1985.  I spent most of my childhood in Petrolia, Ontario, ‘Canada’s original oil boomtown’.  I think that my work has certainly been shaped by this experience; growing up in a place where the markers of past industrial glory were all around, yet the town’s best days had passed more than 100 years ago.  I received my BFA from Mount Allison University (Sackville, New Brunswick) in 2007, and in 2012, I completed my MFA at University of Alberta in Edmonton.  Over the past five years, I’ve shown my work widely within Canada, and more recently, in the United States.  I’ve had the opportunity to take part in other artist residencies in St. John’s, Saint John, Moncton, and Montreal.

 

 

 

Can you discuss the concepts that drive your artistic practice?

 

My recent work explores industry through the lens of fragility and impermanence.  I am interested how much of our industry is inherently sacrificial: the continual extraction of resources naturally bringing an economy nearer to collapse.  In considering these issues, I tend to make work that is quite labor intensive, yet ultimately, self-destructive.  I use printmaking as a kind of re-enactment of the rise and fall of industrial economies, bringing an etching plate from raw material, to finished product, and then to ruination.    Most of my recent projects have looked into the possibilities after obsolescence, from abandonment and decay, to renaissance or memorialization.  These projects consider the nature of what we choose to preserve – to hold up as markers of an era.  I aim to create processes that evoke an alchemical creation of time, memory and historical aura.

 

 

 

What is your process like when creating your work?

 

Some would say that I’m more like a scientist when I make my work.  There’s a lot of experimentation that happens in my studio, where I test chemical reactions and historical electrical processes.  After the testing is done though, my process is quite meticulous and craft based.  Weeks can go into etching and soldering the plates for an industrial replica, before it gets submerged in the chemicals that will inevitably destroy it.  I tend to create projects that are technically complex, but have very little tangible purpose: a kind of inefficiency on an industrial scale.  While preparing my most recent project, The Conservator, my materials required clearance from homeland security.  It’s difficult to explain why one might need 60 litres of ferric chloride to make a battery.

 

 

 

What kind of materials/artists do you look at for inspiration?

 

Over the past several years, I’ve had an ongoing obsession with the etching plate, and what function it can serve once it is no longer needed for printing.  I think this parallels my fascination with boomtowns, and obsolete architecture and technology.  After printing my plates, I mark the end of the edition in deliberate ways: by soldering the plates together, scraping away at their surface, making batteries from them, or transforming them into ruins.  This interest has opened up to include the chemicals and acids involved in the etching process as well, which intrigue me for their functional aspects as well as their often stunning visual side.  Another material that I’ve recently begun to work with is industrial architecture itself.  I’m interested in our almost habitual impulse to polish the architecture, cleansing the space of its industrial heritage.  I try to reverse that practice, where the act of polishing brings a sharpened awareness to the labor that was once performed within the space.  I also draw from historical artifacts, archives, and museum displays.

 

 

 

What do you have coming up in the near future?

 

Following the fellowship residency at Kala, I will be returning to Kamloops, British Columbia, where I work as a Studio Technician at Thompson Rivers University.  In October, I will be part of a three person sculpture exhibition at Judith & Norman Alix Art Gallery in Sarnia, Ontario.  This project is focused on industry, craft and labor.  In January 2014, I’ll be presenting a number of print based sculptures at Centre[3] in Hamilton, Ontario, as part of a group exhibition of architectural printmaking work.  Also in January 2014, I will be presenting a solo exhibition, Automatic Ruins at Artspace in Peterborough, Ontario.  This solo project will then tour to OBORO in Montreal, Quebec in March 2014, and later to SPACES in Cleveland, Ohio in November 2014.

 

This concludes Part 1 of 3 of interviews with the 2012 Fellows from Kala Art Institute.

 

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