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Wow, I love Vasconcelos and I love the sound of her name and where she lives and her trajectory as an international artist.

From the interview I posted earlier I will get something that is very interesting/important to me at this stage in my practice, when I would like to play with objects and repetition.

She says that:

“To work with objects is to do decoration, is really simple, you just put things and it looks well. To work with ideas is completely different because then you have to find the right objects to go with your idea”.

This has been a good reminder. It also poses the question. Less-is- more? Keep- it- simple? More-is-more? Could this be depending on the issue and the magnitute of the emotion, how we solve different things at different times depending on the moment?

This statement has made me stop and look at my pile of lampshades in my studio and to allow myself to really think why I want to use them and what else, if needed, needs to go alogside with them. I know they resemble the female body to me, perhaps because of the pink/cream colour, the curves they formed and because they are pretty much like corsets. Their fabric glued to the meal frame to create the lampshade, like a corset squezzed in a woman’s stomach to create a slim waist.

I have received today the book Women, Art and Society from Thames & Hudson as I think this book will help me to postion and understand myself as a contemporary female artist today. This book explores the evolution of feminist art history and pedagogy since the 1970s, and reveals how artists have developed and subverted the strategies of feminism with examples of some of the most significant international women artists that have emerged in recent years incluiding Wangechi Mutu, Pae White, Yael Bartana, Jenny Saville, and Teresa Margolles.

With this book, my ideas and Joana Vasconcelos statement, I think I will be sorted for the rest of the afernoon.


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http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/837387/joa…

In your current exhibition at Haunch of Venison, you are showing Full Steam Ahead (Red#1) (all works 2012), a kinetic, flower-shaped sculpture composed of working steam irons. Could you tell me about this more mechanical strand of your practice?

I’ve been developing these mechanical pieces related to the domestic environment for a long time — they have to do with this idea that your house can become another world, with a different identity. These daily objects transform our daily life into an easier place to be in, but at the same time, they can trap you because you can’t live without them, so there’s always this ambiguity. I wanted to give these iron pressers the organic and violent look they have.

There is a clear tension between the aesthetic of the flower-like shape and the aggressiveness of the heat and steam coming out of the metal petals.

It’s aggressive, but it’s poetic too. Things can be looked at from different perspectives. You can look at your life in a very terrible way, or you can have a poetic view of it. That’s exactly what I’m trying to do with that piece. In the “The Transformers” movie, it’s always trucks and cars that transform into warriors — manly objects, never feminine objects. Here, we have an object, which is more associated with women, transforming itself into something else. But instead of a warrior, it’s a flower.

Looking at your production, one cant help thinking of a particular art historical tradition which has appropriated female crafts: Louise Bourgeois, Rosemarie Trockel, Tracey Emin. Do you feel part of this lineage?

Of course. All of them, in their own way, tried to develop this notion of looking at the world from a different angle. Being a woman offers a different perspective, so why should we have to look at things in the same way? From these women, I learnt that you could look at things differently. I try to give my own perspective, in accordance to my way of looking at the world.

On the gallerys top floor, theres a monumental Valkyrie — the largest in your series so far and the first one visitors can actually step into. Can you tell me about this body of work?

In the Finnish tradition, the Valkyries are figures that fly over the battlefield and give a new life to the bravest warriors who died fighting. All of the pieces in this series have a special identity. I did “Victoria,” in honour of Queen Victoria, “Royal Valkyrie,” “Golden Valkyrie”… This one is “Valkyrie Crown,” in honour of the Jubilee. It’s the first Valkyrie in which you can really be a part of piece. It’s a new thing I’m experimenting with: You go inside, understand how this piece is made and how it works around you, like a crown.

What interests you in the idea of excess? Everything is so over-the-top in your work.

It’s not excess. What happens is that when I see a place, a building, a room, or a museum, I try to connect with it. The architecture is what is going to define the size of my piece. I try [for the work] not to be decorative, an accessory, but to interact with the space.

You are representing Portugal at the next Venice Biennale, but theres no building. Ive been told you are considering doing a floating pavilion. Could you tell me more?

The floating pavilion will be a traditional, industrial boat from Lisbon, its equivalent to the Venetian vaporetto. What I want to do is connect these realities: the city of Lisbon, the city of Venice, and the working class crossing the river everyday in both cities. The boat will be transformed with my textile work, it will become a different world. There’s an historical connection between Lisbon and Venice: All the traffic between the Orient and European cities was made through Venice, but Venice ended up suspended in time because we, Portuguese, discovered a faster way to bring things from the Orient. What I want to do is not to take us back in time, but to link this history to the present.


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Querida Vasconcelos, te admiro. (Dear Vasconcelos, I admire you)

Joana Vasconcelos is a Portuguese artist. She was born in Paris in 1971 and now lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal.

Much of Vasconcelos’ work deals with feminism, as well as social and political issues. Vasconcelos appropriates, decontextualises and subverts pre-existent objects and everyday realities into sculptures, installations, performances, and video or photographic records, to reveal an acute sense of scale and mastery of color, while combining in the materialization of concepts that challenge the prearranged routines of daily life. Vasconcelos’ operations of displacement, a reminiscence of the Ready-made, Nouveau Réalismeand Pop, provide a vision that is complicit and critical of contemporary society and the notions of collective identity, especially those related to the status of women, class distinction or national identity. This process originates a discourse around contemporary idiosyncrasies, where the dichotomies of hand-crafted/industrial, private/public, tradition/modernity and popular culture/erudite culture are imbued with affinities that are apt to renovate contemporaneity’s usual fluxes of signification.[2]

In June 2011, the installation “Contaminação” opened the group exhibition The World Belongs to You, held at Palazzo Grassi. In 2012, Vasconcelos showed her work at the major annual contemporary art exhibition in the Palace of Versailles, thus continuing the contemporary art programme initiated in 2008. Following in the footsteps of American artist Jeff Koons, the French Xavier Veilhan and Bernar Venet, and the Japanese Takashi Murakami, Joana Vasconcelos was the first woman and the youngest contemporary artist to exhibit in Versailles.[3]

The work exhibited in Versailles was not appreciated by all in Versailles. Vasconcelos’ goal for the portions of the show in the Galerie des Glaces was to have her pieces, A Noivaand Carmen, were to be displayed on opposite ends of the hall, but according to what Vasconcelos was told, “…they are sexual works not appropriate at Versailles.” [4]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joana_Vasconcelos


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“Banana Dog” was born from thinking too much, worrying too much and not having too much fun with my work at that moment. This was the result, a petite marionette? just to see thing walking, making noise with whatever I had on my studio table.

“Banana Dog” 2013


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2nd part of today’s progresses.

When I thought it was all going to crumble, I found light and hope on the form of 13 pretty pink Victorian lampshades in a kind of market thing on my way back to pick up the Arduino from the post. The man was generous and he gave me a really good deal. They look gorgeous, some prettier than others, and some are beige and some bigger and some smaller but they look good when together. I have come across to a lampshade, a pink one, the other day and the shape ticked something on my brain. They look like hats. I did even looked at Alibaba.com to buy a big bulk of lampshades from Asia so finding those here in Brighton has been a big encounter. I keep seeing works of art that are made of repeated material or with the same object. Frieze has been an example about this and a sensente that I read a while ago: “Repetition is your friend” keeps intriguing me and I would like to explore repetition in my work. I like committing to something, to spend time on something, to be resilient. So yes, tomorrow I would be picking up these lampshades from the North Laines and then taking them to my studio. If you see a turquoise Micra full of pink and beige lampshades and a 34 years old “girl” singing loudly around 10am in that area, that’s me.

What else? I have been looking at transparent pignments for water based resins. OMG they look like jewels, pretty material. I want to cast the high heels from last year so this also in my plans, I’m just waiting to buy the right materials, but I want to get it right as the last thing I want to do it is to waste money, so decisions needs to be studied and re-studied and search the country for the best prices.

I feel like undergraduated was easy peasy, I could do it all with my eyes closed, this is more challenging, it is more like the real deal, but only for me at this stage I guess.

I must carry on… time for next task.

Oh ah, and the “Banana Dog” yesterday was another starting point for the journey…

It is all happening, or slowly getting there… AGAIN.


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