I AM is curating an immersive exhibition for March 2020 in celebration of International Womxn's day. We are currently in the process of reviewing over 30 applications from artists of all disciplines from all over the world. By December 1st the review panel, which includes myself, photographer Liz Barry, artist Karina Curlewis, and performer Karina Ikezoe, will select 8-10 womxn artists for this meaningful, multidisciplinary exhibition.
I thought it would be important to share some of the facts that I collected before deciding to do this project. I want womxn to feel seen, heard, and included. These articles show how challenging it still is for womxn to successfully pursue and perpetuate a career in the arts. Happy reading. Happy autumn! Happy art-making! Kate Learn about gender inequity in the arts with some eye-opening facts. https://nmwa.org/advocate/get-facts Why Is Work by Female Artists Still Valued Less Than Work by Male Artists? #femaleartists #wearewomxn #artists https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-work-female-artists-valued-work-male-artists It’s time to make womxn artists visible in the art world. #wearewomxn#artists https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/galleries-focus-on-females-to-tackle-divide Motherhood and being an artist is beyond challenging. When male artists become fathers their income increases. WTF? This needs to change. https://www.theartnewspaper.com/feature/bringing-up-baby-making-motherhood-work-in-the-art-world Curators and gallerists say women-only exhibitions are long overdue, and can shine a light on neglected artists. #nytimes #arts #womenonly #wearewomxn https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/03/arts/design/the-resurgence-of-women-only-art-shows.html Womxn only exhibitions and showcases are STILL needed despite what male curators may believe. https://www.artbasel.com/news/havens-prisons-women-only-exhibitions
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Maybe the most important masterpiece is the journey. Maybe any artist’s body of work and the transitions and the choices and the stillness and the frustration and the anxiety and the doubts and the falls and the highs and the victories and the well-received work and the failures and the commercial and the experimental -- maybe all the explorations, the curiosities, the tenacity...Maybe we’re the masterpiece. Maybe our lives are the masterpiece.
Maybe the legacy we can leave and the best masterpiece artists can provide as a gift and personal contribution to the world are our values and our convictions. The entire journey. And the best way to allow this masterpiece to be made and manifest wholly is to just believe in ourselves. Just believe and trust in the choices we make, the paths we are all forging…. Most importantly, what makes a journey, the breadth of any artists’ work so masterful isn’t just the how or the what, its the why. This is how I personally derive meaning from my own creative path experience. I realized in order to understand my real worth I need to be honest with who I am and be sincere with my journey. This involves making choices that give me the highest feelings of purpose, fulfilment, and meaning in that moment. If I’m doing the best I can at any given point in time, then I’m creating my masterpiece consciously. The journey is the masterpiece. A life of creative development and evolution - of your artistic voice - the accumulation of what you express and create - it’s the whole thing - not one isolated event or particular destination - your voice is not a singular, isolated thing but it’s the entirety of who you become, what you have done, how you have changed, why you created, for whom you created. Your masterpiece is your whole voice and it will undoubtedly take a lifetime to create. SO just relax. Relax and enjoy the in between moments, the moments of stillness, the bullshit, the hard times, the amazing highs, the comfort and discomfort. It all leads to one place - forward along your journey - it all helps you forge a unique path. Your path is your masterpiece. So relish the waiting periods. Relish the rejections. Relish the travels, the paychecks, the free work, the stop lights, the green lights, the turbulence, the bad weather, the good weather, the light, and the dark. Nothing could be more beautiful. Sink deeply into the uncertainty like it’s a blank canvas. You make the choices as to each color, each strike, each line, each curve, every expression - it’s your choice. The canvas is blank, there are no right or wrong choices. This big canvas - life - a creative life - it’s going to be a masterpiece because it’s your voice being shared and realised. Just like the canvas of your paintings, or a studio, the beauty is truly in not knowing how the painting or the piece will turn out. Uncertainty provides infinite possibilities - breathe through this with joy and excitement. The world is your canvas. You have a lifetime to create your masterpiece. You are and are becoming your greatest piece of expression. I wanted to share a bit more about I AM's journey into the visual art world which naturally is a result of my own choice to combine my passions of painting and dancing. I started this process in my subconscious years ago and then suddenly one day right before I left Hong Kong to move to New York - nearly 4 years ago, I found myself experimenting in an empty apartment. As soon as my body touched the paint and the paint touched the canvas on the floor, I knew in my gut it was a turning point for my artistic voice and hence, for I AM's artistic explorations. I am and so, we are. I shared a video of my first painting dance experimentation and I received such positive feedback that I decided to go deeper with the process. Now, I find myself and I AM walking down a glorious new path I never anticipated. This is because I honoured my organic curiosities and embraced uncertainty.
Here's my updated artistic statement regarding this arts collision. With I AM as a platform for my voice as well as a vehicle for feminist creativity, I hope to continue to share this marriage of visual and performative with audiences and curious artists across the globe. I create kinetic paintings with my body. I call this creative process outpour. Outpouring is a technique I realised by combining my passions of dance, performance, painting, and improvisation. Before I started making visual art in this way, I had been painting in a traditional method: with my right hand holding a brush. Using the convention of these materials, I always felt like my visual work lacked something. Then one day an epiphany struck: as a professional dancer and performance artist, my body needed to be in direct contact with the paint and canvas to access a more intuitive visual acuity in my outputs. Using the body as my painting tool means I am able to express through a deeper, enlightened connection to the core of my creativity and the true essence of who I really am. By painting with my body in motion and in stillness too, nothing impedes my artistic voice reaching the canvas directly and instinctively. As a result of abandoning brushes, my paintings have gained a pulse, a rhythm, a wisdom -- my paintings and process are truly kinetic and are an expression of life's true movements. Outpouring is my life purpose. I am a performance artist & an improvisation master. I create paintings with my body and my soul. I use emotions to tell my story, her story, our story. I imagine and build immersive experiences. I conceptualise & revolutionise. I reveal what words cannot. I honour my femininity. I believe in presence. I trust spontaneity. I am unfolding. I pioneer. I AM…present not perfect.
I take a breath, close my eyes, and feel grateful to be right there in that instant - the exhilarating juncture just before magic happens… The unfurling moment before a performance is when I feel most alive— most present. Through accumulated experiences, I have learned how to cultivate this presence by releasing control at the time right before the proverbial curtain is lifted; surrendering just at that edge of unpredictability. Through an inspired abandonment of expectation/certainty/pursuit of perfection, presence readily materializes and spills out into the performance space. If I’m very fortunate, my presence resonates with those I am sharing the space with, impacting both other performers and audience members alike, and manifesting as a deep feeling of connection and co-creation. True presence is an elusive slice of timelessness; of spaceless-ness; and of placeless-ness. It transcends context, identity, ego, circumstance, and any other strictures distracting us from the power of the here and now. Feeling this transformational force during a live performance is like being swept up by the wind and carried to new unimaginable heights. Some schools of thought describe it as flow. Some cultures describe it as duende. Some athletes may link it to adrenaline. Perhaps it is simply a surge of inspiration that comes from our most authentic selves. Others can recognize it as something indescribable — a ‘je ne sais quoi’ quality which can’t really be defined. Whatever it is, wherever it comes from, it serves as a channel liberating creativity and joy. This ethereal and, quite often, inexplicable presence bonds audience, performer, time, space, place, and the universe into a profoundly moving memory — a dynamic testament to the beauty of the tumultuous human experience. In an artistic and personal quest to champion the inevitable inconsistencies and fluctuating complexities of not only live performance, but also of life as a whole, I have become totally devoted to the realization of presence. In my line of work, one becomes acutely aware of how powerfully affecting genuine presence can be both in self and witnessed in others. One also observes, however, it isn’t just an isolated phenomenon only found in the realm of dance and theatre. Presence can be found everywhere: in the dining room of a restaurant, a conversation with a stranger, walking along the water’s edge, a dialogue with a friend, kissing a significant other, cooking a meal from scratch, piloting an airplane, or responding to a crisis. Moments of sincere presence and, in particular, a shared awareness of presence provide sensorial gateways to buried treasures like raw emotion, expression, purpose, and ingenuity. No matter how much we rehearse or try to perfect our techniques, life will always serve up the unforeseen. Accordingly, I always tell performers before a show: do not strive for perfection, strive for presence. Inevitably, to do this requires trust in serendipity, spontaneity, gut instincts, and intuition. Look beyond attaining the ideal, fixed expectations, desired outcomes, curtain calls, or good reviews; strip away the fear of failure or uncertainty… and, what remains is something much more robust and meaningful: freedom — guised as a readied imagination. Almost 10 years ago, I was completing my MA in Choreography in London. I was experimenting with repetition, ritual, aesthetics of risk, and gestures that were particularly representative of ‘femaleness’. I played with different body movements, body positions, stillness, exhaustion, and ultimately, I was curious about innovative ways to express womanhood through the dancing and performing body. This is a journey I’m still on and although the outputs are evolving, it still inspires me to share the strength, power, and vulnerability of being a woman. Most significantly, I have always been drawn to really making the audience feel something and feel like they are a part of the world I am creating. I was and am still very much interested in pushing boundaries and creating different modes of communication and exchange for performers and audience in order to create a dynamic, genuine moment for everyone to share. Whether it’s one of our original productions or entertainment for an event, I want the audience to experience dance and performance in ways where they can wholly feel the passion -- the strength, the endurance, the joy, and the humanity. I respect the stage and the traditional division between performer and audience, but I also think it’s not the only way to experience the performing arts. In fact, I personally believe removing boundaries and the spectatorship of a performance, we make room for spontaneity, unexpected interactions, connection through eye contact, new sensory modes of perception, new experiences of a body’s pulse and rhythm-- through this new way of experiencing performance, intimate revelations can be shared. This is why I make immersive work. Essentially, I have discovered through my decade of creating non-stage work that by transforming conventional exchanges between audience and performer, genuine connection is possible. This is the power and the beauty of immersive experience. In changing the modes in which the audience relates to and discovers my body’s expressions as a performer I discovered the following: traditions of male gaze are disrupted; the importance of meaningful connection through empathy and intimate proximity is reinforced; the performers feel empowered; and the audience feels a more personal relationship to the art. All in all, immersive performance truly connects us to the present moment. A decade ago this felt very revolutionary. ‘Immersive’ has become a buzzword recently. I have it as a google search word and when I get an alert for ‘immersive dining’ I get excited thinking innovative experiences are being embraced somewhere in the world. Unfortunately, all too often people think they can throw entertainers or any artistic element or random artistic elements to a space or event and call it an immersive experience. Immersive experiences are such because they consider connection, presence, space for personal micro-transformations, and unexpected interactions. Immersive means genuinely creating a world for audiences and artists alike. And although the work I have been doing for so long suddenly feels trendy, I believe erasing the archaic relationships between artists and patrons remains innovative and honourable -- when it is done with intention and artistic merit. I AM commits to their immersive work as always being developed and performed in the spirit of truth and revolution. |
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November 2019
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