sharing your thoughts, Niko. What projects are you currently working on, and what are some of the ideas that you hope to explore in the future? Niko Kapa: Developing approaches to the diverse ways we inhabit the world, I am assimilating architectural design and construction techniques into the field of scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Niko Kapa Land #1from Everything series
Fine Arts trying to strengthen the ties between sculpture and architecture. Defying the conventional classification of design disciplines, their interwoven nature provides a platform for further research, creating a dynamic experimentation that hopefully will enable me to establish my position in a constantly changing scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Occupied from Everything series
environment. Affected by the pandemic condition, my recent work produced during isolation reflects on the emotional impact of personal experience as experienced through the artist’s creative process. Niko Kapa scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator [email protected] Meteorite from Everything series
Hello Angela and welcome to LandEscape. Before starting to elaborate about your artistic production and we would like to invite our readers to visit https://linktr.ee/Angelakincaid in order to get a wide idea about your artistic production, and we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your background. You are currently pursuing your BA in Contemporary Art Practice student at City of Glasgow College: how do these formative years influence your evolution as an artist? Moreover, how does your cultural substratum address the direction of your current artistic research? Angela Kincaid: Hello, I am delighted to be here and given the opportunity to talk to you about my work. I actually graduated last year after 4 years of studying, and it was what I would describe as a journey, of not only developing my artistic practice, but of self discovery into why I am driven to ceate the art that I do. I have My process-led practice is based on my personal engagement with the natural environment. In particular I am fascinated by the geological history of the Scottish landscape, and the movement of the sky, land and sea. As a starting point, I use my surrounding environment to research and develop visual documentation through the use of photography, film and drawing which I see as a collaboration between myself and the landscape. This approach often develops into site specific installations, sculptures and paintings that could be seen as having a performative aspect to them. In all my work, I hope to bring about an awareness of location that facilitates not only the exploration of place, but the emotive feelings of tranquillity and solace that can be felt, when we allow ourselves to fully experience the elemental nature of the ever-changing landscape An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator [email protected] Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW LandEscape meets Angela Kincaid
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Fragments of Time, silicone and corn flour
always loved art, even as a young child I would lock myself away for hours on end each day to draw. But speaking about my art was not something I was used to or had ever been expected to do until I began studying for my Art Degree. Most of us do not really get the chance to explore or follow our curiosity when we are young. We tend to learn all the same things as our peers, at the exact same time, and live a life consumed by the mastery of these things instead. Long hours of seated study in early education leaves our minds overwhelmed, trying to memorize facts, and that leaves very little room for free thinking. When I began studying for my degree I was not just encouraged, but expected to talk really openly and honestly about my work. At first this made me feel extremely vulnerable, but it pushed me to start questioning how I engage with my surrounding environment, and to make work that was more true to myself. You are a versatile artist and your multidisciplinary approach often develops into site specific installations, sculptures and paintings: how important is for you to experiment with different techniques and materials? Angela Kincaid: Although I would primarily describe myself as a painter, I also see my sculptures and installations as paintings which has come off the canvas to interact with their surroundings. So I guess I see each technique as an extension of painting; it is all just a process of discovering what feels right for each specific project. Sometimes a painting is the final piece, and sometimes it will lead me to do something else, the possibilities are endless. When I am out walking, or standing watching the waves at the beach, the artistic process has already begun. Allowing myself to really immerse myself in my environment is the starting point, and where my ideas and inspiration come from. For this special edition of LandEscape we have selected Absent Spaces, a stimulating site responsive art installation that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article. What has at once captured our attention of your artistic production, is the way it unveils the connection between space and human nature, inviting the viewers to capture beauty, as well as feelings of tranquillity and solace. When walking our readers through the genesis of Absent Spaces, would you tell us something about your interest in the geological history of Scottish landscape? Angela Kincaid: I think that when you really love something you naturally want to know more about it. If you think about it in terms of human relationships, when we fall in love we find ourselves wanting to know more about that person, as this helps develop our understanding of them, It is the same process with my artwork. I wanted a greater understanding of the Scottish landscape, why it looks the way it does, and what formed the hills, mountains and lochs. So I began researching the geological history of Scotland, and learned that during the last the Ice Age meltwater rivers left channels and distinctive landforms. This is how Scotland’s landscapes Angela Kincaid scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land
continued to take shape even after the glaciers had melted. This fascinated me and I had the urge to create a body of work that would bring about a connection to the past. A sense of putting back into the absent spaces where glaciers once existed. In a previous installation “Here Comes The Waves" I sewed together large pieces of blue and white voile, and then draped them over the rocks at my local beach. This was to represent the waves bringing the objects I had collected there to the shore. I held onto this material as I knew one day I would use it for something more powerful. For Absent Spaces, I expanded the existing material by sewing on more shades of blue. I then took it to various locations throughout Scotland where glaciers had once existed, and used it my installation. I decided to let space dictate how each installation took shape, rather than have a pre confirmed idea in my head of how I wanted it to look. I worked freely and responded to my surrounding environment and this was how each installation took form. The work was temporary and existed only for the period of time that I was there. I then took it to the next location, where it took on a new shape according to that space and surroundings. Along the way it collected dirt, sand, residue, and rain, but this only added to the beauty, and it connected each location to the next. You draw inspiration from your surrounding environment, and — as you have remarked in scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition
Angela Kincaid scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Fragments of Time, Installation, gallery view
your artist's statement — you are fascinated by the geological history of the Scottish landscape: how do you select specific locations and how do they affect your creative process? In particular, how does your everyday life's experience fuel your creative process? Angela Kincaid: I often head out on road trips scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Fragments of Time
Angela Kincaid scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land with my son who has a keen interest in geography, as we both love exploring. Sometimes a place just truly captivates me, like Glencoe, and I am drawn back to it again and again. Other locations I have chosen by doing some research, or seeing a photograph, and this has prompted me to visit and do work. The awareness of my surroundings comes not only Absent Spaces, Site responsive art installation, Pease Bay
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition from looking, but from listening to the wind, feeling the rain on my face and watching the waves at the beach. I can only describe it as a feeling of tranquillity and a sense of peace, that takes me away from the stress of every day life. And so as well as taking a physical journey, it is also very much an inner journey. We appreciate the way your works invite the viewers to fully experience the elemental nature of the landscape, communicating such a wide variety of feelings, to address them to appreciate also ordinary aspects of life: how do you consider the nature of your relationship with your audience? Angela Kincaid: Last year I was working on my “Fragments of Time” project, and was doing a lot of research and work based on rock Absent Spaces, Site responsive art installation, Glencoe
formations. I was visiting lots of places and doing work outside, but then life as I knew it began to change. The UK had entered into the first lockdown due to the Coronavirus, and everything came to a standstill. Access to my studio space was no longer an option, neither were the long drives to distant locations, or making working outside. All the ideas and plans I had would no longer be possible, and I felt quite lost. I had been working on a series of rock sculptures, and making casts by taking a direct imprint from the rocks at my local beach and this was not something I could continue to do. As the days went past and I contemplated how to take my project forward in a practical way, the concept of Fragments of Time began to change. I began to develop a deeper Angela Kincaid scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Fragile Layers, Weather Beaten Canvas, mixed media, emulsion, acrylic, ink, pastels
understanding of, what I was trying to communicate through my work, and why I felt so motivated to do it. I began to view my silicone rock casts as a visual metaphor for the fragility of Human life. A rock is a symbol of strength and stability, a solid object that depicts stubbornness and inflexible behaviour. My sculptures gave the appearance of a solid object, when in fact they were fragile, hollow, and some almost almost weightless. I wanted to communicate this fragility to my audience, during a time when things were so uncertain and we all needed a little hope. Many of us are uncomfortable with fragility, as it makes us feel vulnerable. But contemplating on the fragility of life connects us with our own vulnerability, and helps us to face up to the fact that we only have a temporary place in this world. This should be reason enough to apply a degree of clarity and purpose to our day. In contrast to a rock we are ephemeral beings, here only for a short space of time. Angela Kincaid scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Fragments of Time, Installation, gallery view
Fragile Layers feature balanced combination between rigorous sense of geometry and careful choice of colors, showing that vivacious tones are not strictly indespensable to create tension and dynamics. How do you structure your process in order to achieve such brilliant results? In particular, how does your own psychological make-up determine the nuances of tones that you decide to include in your artworks? Angela Kincaid: I think sometimes and in particularly with Fragile Layers it was about allowing myself to let go and work very feely and intuitively. Again this piece was created during a time when Covid-19 and lockdown were dominating most of our lives. I was limited to where and how I made work and so found myself working extremely vigorously, pouring ink over the canvas, making bold marks and ripping bits off, before leaving it scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Fragments of Time, Installation, gallery view
Fragile Layers, Weather Beaten Canvas, mixed media, emulsion, acrylic, ink, pastels
Absent Spaces, Site responsive art installation, Glencoe
outside for days to let the wind, rain and sun do the rest. I think I was rebelling against the restraints that were implicated on me at that time, and was trying to break free. With its unique visual ambivalence, Fragile Layers draws the viewers through the liminal area of perception where reality and imagination find such unexpected point of Angela Kincaid scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Exhale, Oil on deep edged boxed canvas, 30 x 30 cm
convergence: how do you consider the relationship between reality and imagination playing within your process? Are you particularly interested in arousing emotions that goes beyond the realm of visual perception? Angela Kincaid: While working on Fragile Layers I focused on memory of place rather than naturalistic representation. So it was less about reality and more about my thoughts, feelings and memories of the locations I had visited. Often it can be a mix of reality and my imagination working together. I always try to communicate what my artwork is about to my audience and hope that people can take something personal from it. Sometimes people will see something different in my work, because it’s their own personal perspective, and I like this because it means it has touched them or got them thinking. As the move of Art from traditional gallery spaces, to street and especially to online platforms — as Instagram — increases, how would in your opinion change the relationship with a globalised audience? Angela Kincaid: I think we live in a time where online platforms such as Instagram and Facebook have the power to reach a much wider audience than gallery spaces can. But visiting a gallery or exhibition is so important, because you get real sense of the Artwork on a deeper level. Platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter can encourage people to do this by promoting galleries and exhibitions. I think one of the advantages of social media, is that new and emerging artists now have the opportunity to get their work seen by a global audience. I have also been able to connect with some really amazing Artists, and communicate to my audience on a more personal level. I personally find Instagram an amazing platform to show my work, and it means I can stay updated with other Artists and the creative industry too. https://www.instagram.com/angelakincaidart We have really appreciated the multifaceted nature of your artistic research and before leaving this stimulating conversation we would like to thank you for chatting with us and for sharing your thoughts, Angela. What projects are you currently working on, and what are some of the ideas that you hope to explore in the future? Angela Kincaid: I appreciate that and have really enjoyed our conversation. Right now as well as continuing to make Art, I am continuing my studies towards teaching art within an educational and community environment. This is something I feel passionate about because I know first hand the benefits Art can bring to our mental health and wellbeing. I want to encourage others to express themselves in a creative way and gain a new perspective of the world around them. scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator [email protected]
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Angela Kincaid Land Aig Star (meaning: From A Distance, in Scottish Gaelic), Oil on deep edged canvas 30cm x 40cm
Hello Seth and welcome to LandEscape. Before starting to elaborate about your artistic production we would like to invite our readers to visit https://www.sethsexton.com in order to get a wider idea about your mulifaceted artistic production, and we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your background. You have a solid formal training: you hold a BFA from the University of Washington, Seattle, and your are currently pursuing your MFA at the prestigious School of the Art Institute of Chicago: how did those formative years — as well as your experience at the Velocity Dance Center — influence your evolution as an artist? Moreover, how does your cultural Seth is a Seattle based multimedia artist whose current work emphasizes large scale painting choreographies. Raised on a farm in Chimacum, Washington, he spent his childhood summers alternately mowing fields, stacking hay bails and studying ballet. He left dance to pursue an education in biochemistry at the University of Washington and later went on to receive a BFA in painting. He began a successful collaboration with metal artist Cathy McClure called SID INC. This collaboration focused on multi-media installations and led to subsequent collaborations with artists internationally. Seth moved to Panajachel, Guatemala and spent 3 years studying Tzu'tu'jil and the indigenous arts and rituals of the Mayan people of the Atitlan region. Having returned to Seattle and to Modern and Contemporary Dance practices, he continues to incorporate the labors, rituals and patterns of agrarian society with visual and performing arts. He has showcased his collaborative multimedia choreographies at Seattle based institutions such as Velocity Dance Center, On the Boards, Jack Straw New Media Gallery, Hedreen Gallery, Soil Gallery, Bumbershoot and others. He is currently self-represented and takes clients on a limited basis. Inquire about his availability for commissions and collaborations An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator [email protected] Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW LandEscape meets Seth Sexton
substratum direct the trajectory of your current artistic research? Seth Sexton: Hi LandEscape. All of these are great questions. Thank you for taking the time to propose them and allowing me the space to share my thoughts. I want to talk about the cultural substratum first. I grew up in rural America. My parents were initially subsistence farmers but after their divorce I spent a lot of time working on a certified organic cattle farm. I think people tend to forget that rural America privileges a different kind of knowledge. This fundamental knowledge is broadly about space and time and materiality?. It's also about an emotional and physical positioning within the landscape. You become tethered umbilically to the moon and the sun. You become acutely aware of yourself in relation to weather, herd migrations, water cycles, plant growths, and also what becomes the quotidian labor of maintenance and progress. In effect you become a fractal body within nature. This kind of knowledge isn’t always accessible even there, though. America has been driven towards a cultural class war primarily through the extraction of resources and cheap labor, the deleterious effects of religious and political ideas, and a lack of quality education in general. scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition
Seth Sexton scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Polyhedra I, 22.5” x 30”, Pen and Ink on Paper, 2019
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Polyhedra I, 22.5” x 30”, Pen and Ink on Paper, 2019
My mother enrolled me in ballet classes before I was enrolled in public school. While I was formulating an understanding of the labors and cycles of the natural world on the farm, I was simultaneously concretizing a language of art, around multi-media performance. My dance instructor, Betsy Frazee, would hand-sew the costumes, paint the sets, make the props, stage the choreography, set the music, and prepare sound cues and lighting for our performances. While I was training my body to be a fluid vessel, rigorously for 10 years, I was also gathering information on how to do all of these other haptic things rather osmotically. Eventually and for various reasons I stopped dancing around 13, but one of the critical reasons concerned how I saw myself in relation to performances of gender. Ballet has a long tradition of encoding misogyny, elitism, colonialist narratives, and what we would consider white supremacy today, in its repertoire. And because ballet sits at a difficult intersection for boys in rural communities, contending with my queerness and disclosure became a constant anxiety that centered around safety both inside and outside of my family. When I first entered the University of Washington, I was enrolled in the biochemical engineering program for the first several years, with the hopes of contributing to knowledge of neurodegenerative disorders. You see, the early context, behind the backdrop of Seth Sexton scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land
dance on the setting of the Farm, was growing up with an abusive mother with severe Obsessive Compulsive Hoarding Disorder. The tidal pull of labor, the training, the maintenance, the progress and the acts of obsessive repetition were profound. It's beyond my body and the environment. These notions have been so deeply central to my life, and my relationship to them remains complicated. So it’s no surprise that I heeded the sonorous echo and returned to art as a painter and drawer for the final years of my undergraduate degree. What brought me to Velocity Dance Center, nearly 20 years after I stopped dancing was a kind of reclamation of my past, born of a new kind of agency around self-awareness and self-love, and most importantly, a healthy mind and body connection within a healthy community. You are an extremely versatile artist, and your practice encompasses, among the other, Painting & Drawing, Printmaking, Sculpture, Performance, Video, Mixed Media and Photography: what directs you to such an omni disciplinary approach? In particular, are there any experiences that did particularly help you to develop your attitude to experiment with different techniques? Seth Sexton: As I mentioned I was learning about various artistic media through this branching tree whose trunk was constructed from Dance. It was easy for me to recognize the branche: listening to Bach and Beethoven on a record player in an old clapboard church while doing Grand Jetes under the dusty light of stained glass windows, learning french horn and making elephant sounds for giggling pre-teens in Junior Highschool Orchestra, playing Deputy Governor Dansforth from Arthur Miller's Crucible, or Si Crowell from Thornton Wilder's Our Town, singing “My god is an awesome god” in the Lutheran Church Choir, darning socks with my mother, pouring bronze salmon sculptures with Tom Jay at the local foundry, and taking my first life drawing class in high school. My point is that, growing up I was allowed to, and encouraged to, access open spaces, to climb trees. I had an understanding and confidence in my body that allowed me to swing from branch to branch. As I got older, I realized that art was not just the tree, and all of the recognizable media we call art its branches, but it was also everything below. My tree was rooted on a farm, so as I got older, I began to take a closer look at the roots, at the ontology of the tree. It’s not terribly far-reaching to say fixing barbed wire fences or stacking wood is a kind of sculpture making, or digging a 100-foot trench is land art, steaming offal from a fresh slaughter on green grass is mark-making, or raking hay in a field on a tractor is a ritual performance on a grand scale. This secret poem ??. As an adult this intermingling of new materials and scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition
A work created in collaboration of Rachel Green
A work created in collaboration of Rachel Green
abandoned practices lead me even further into a conceptual discourse. How do I understand the ecology of the soil that this tree is planted in? This is what the incredible queer Latina author and philosopher, Gloria Anzaldua, calls the shadow work. This work, my work now, though still serial and very much rooted in the body, is not about the object or the aesthetic as much as it is about the effects of the laboring mind and heart, the artefact as consequence of thought and feeling. The body of works that we have selected for this special edition of LandEscape and that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article, have at once captured our attention for the way you create such unconventional combinations between visual and performing arts, to shed a whole new light on the concept of meditation: would you mind walking our readers through your usual setup and process? Seth Sexton: I’m going to talk about a particular kind of work that I do that intersects dance with drawing. But first I think it’s important to tell you that I have been practicing Bikram, Vinyasa, Mysore, and Hatha style yoga for two decades. I have learned so much about the ritual self in relation to the world but the most important thing I’ve learned, in relation to this conversation, is this: Yoga is first conscious breathing, then unconscious breathing, and finally, conscious breathing again. I use this principle of connecting breath to movement when entering into all of my somatic practices. I rely on the memory of the body, not just its autonomic resource, but it’s ability to access experiential history in other places besides the brain. This is not a novel idea; Art Therapists often say that trauma is stored in the body in this way- and the same with joy. If you believe in this, it's easy to predict its noetic potential and recuperative effects. When I make dance compositions on paper this is what I’m doing. I’m changing the speed, the energy, and scale of the drawing and transferring conscious and further, selfconscious thought, to the unconscious, to [purely physical ?] thinking. This frees the mind to practice nothingness. Where typically drawing is localized between the hand and the material at the scale of the hand; I begin by making a page in scale and relation to the size of my body. DYBBUK began on a durable paper in 2017. At that time I was reflecting on the notions of restorative justice. This thought was an echoing lament in my body. When I was a child my mother had begun collecting feverishly at my step-father’s farm. She would gather recyclables, garage sale materials, moving leftovers, thrift store refuse, abandoned materials on the side of the road. Anything she could find really. It was our duty to assist her and I resented her for it. Our family and the community Seth Sexton scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land
knew that she had a severe anxiety disorder, but she believed that she was being commanded by God to prepare for the “End Times”. Slowly our house and the surrounding acres began to fill with junk. The house fell into disrepair, and the face of the land appeared as a scrapyard, pocked with mounds of processed materials of all sorts. Before we moved to that farm, I remember it being well manicured, shrubs trimmed, lawn moved, flowers sprouting in the garden out front, and otherwise a minimal footprint of human intervention. As a child I would pray for God to stop talking to my mother, and for life to return to the way it was. I held onto this notion that someday I would have to unfetter the land of garbage, that it was my burden, my promise, my destiny, and that I was somehow tied to its freedom. I felt possessed by it, not just as an object of my mother, but that I was attached to her Karma. These ideas were nuanced with feelings of love, loss and scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Shroud (Nuclear) Pen and Ink on Paper 6” x 9” 2020 Pink Skull Shroud Pen and Ink on Paper 42” x 54” 2021
Seth Sexton scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Aureole, Pen and Ink on paper, 38” x 50”, 2020
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition study for Memory of Water, 2018, 8” x 11”, Pen and Ink
desire. This is how I usually begin, by consciously examining the ontology of recurrent actions, ideas, thoughts and feelings that reside in my memory. Concurrently, I stage large format paper, and allow an unconscious drawing response with my whole body, it proceeds with a conscious organization of repertoire. I use the term repertoire to describe the physical patterns that make the drawing. In this way the drawing is both a palimpsestic artefact and score that can be taught to other performers. After sharing my intentions, one of my performance collaborators, Israeli born Gil Bar-Sela, offered the Jewish Folklore Dybbuk as a way of understanding the possession and exorcism of memory and thought. My performance on paper was conceived as a loose re-interpretation of the original play by Russian author S. Ansky, Michal Waszynski’s film noir adaptation (1936), and a Jerome Robbins production for the New York City Ballet (1974). I even found some inspiration from Yvonne Rainier’s quotidian Hand Movie (1966). Dybbuk is memory work; that strange existence of identity formation in liminal spaces. DYBBUK remains a work in progress haunted by these past creators and yet more. With their unique sense of geometry and a bit enigmatic visual quality, your artworks seem to unveil the bridge between the real and the imagined. Scottish painter Peter Doig once remarked that even the most realistic paintings are derived more from within the head than from what's out there in front of us, how do you consider the relationship between reality and imagination, playing within your artistic production? Seth Sexton: I think this question can be interpreted in many ways. But I have already revealed so much about how critical identity formation is to my art making, that I’ll continue down that path. I begin with an obvious truth. I believe how we see the world is a reflection of ourselves. In order to know who I am, I need to see what is real in me. To help clarify, I would like to invoke the words of Jeanne de Salzmann from the Reality of Being “We are all, such as we are, under the influence of our imagination of ourselves. This influence is all-powerful and conditions every aspect of our lives. On the one hand, there is this imagination, this false notion of myself. On the other, there is the real “I” that I do not know. I do not see the difference. It is as though this “I” were buried under a mass of beliefs, interests, tastes and pretensions. Everything I affirm is the imagination of myself. What I cannot affirm-because I do not know it-is the real. “I.” It calls to be known and has a nostalgia for knowing.” Salzmann continues by saying “I try to understand why I came. I see that it is my scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Seth Sexton Land
Memory of Water I 2018 pen and ink 22” x 30”
ego, my person, who is here, to which I cling, and I see, If I am sincere, that it is mixed up in large measure with what led me here” It follows then, that the next obvious truth is that we see the world as a reflection of others. It can often cast a great shadow across the light of our imagination. But it can also bring us to the edges of what is real within us. This is why art making can be such a powerful tool for understanding the ontology of your being. The vibrancy of your imagination really depends on the quality of the source of light within and without you, and in turn, directly affects the reality of the world around you. And of course, all of the objects, movements and utterances you put into it. You draw a lot from your personal sphere, and especially your current work is about your relationship with your mother: how does your everyday life's experience and your memories fuel your artistic research? Seth Sexton: My mother had severe mental counter-orders. She was very self-absorbed, narcissistic, and delusional at times. This was the nature of her OCHD. She had no sense of appropriate boundaries physically and sexually. She would talk for hours, without a question in return. As I’ve alluded to, and because of this, I was buried under a pile of debris in many ways. I villainized her as a way to cope with an inchoate sense of mental illness. What I have grown to understand is that Mental illness or madness is not a trait of the mind but a relation to others and a result of relations of power. I think normalizing disclosure is an important pathway for myself out from under this debris. I understand that it’s a certain privilege; It’s not safe at some intersections of marginalized communities to do so. But I think a reader can gain a certain empathy here. I present my trauma as an artistic case study, for psychiatric evaluations of “mental disorders'' in order to permiss and relinquish the anxiety that I may be similarly afflicted. I counter that with deeply biological explanations and representations to arrive closer to an understanding of the indomitable spirit. I am my own Doctor and Shaman; the compiling, the programming, and the transcripting author and artist, through selfdisclosure, highlights the inconsistencies in the overarching social architecture of both reason and madness, both in psychiatric and biological etiologies. I offer my highly iterative, repetitive, obsessive, and durational performances and their artefacts as a way to continue to unfold the complicated dialectic around order and disorder. Your work has more than one story to tell: we daresay that your artistic practice seems to aim to look inside of what appear to be seen, rather than its surface, providing the spectatorship with freedom scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition
Escapism Pen and Ink 30” x 22.5” 2020
to realize their own perception. Austrian Art historian Ernst Gombrich once remarked the importance of providing a space for the viewers to project onto, so that they can actively participate in the creation of the illusion: how important is it for you to trigger the viewers' imagination in order to address them to elaborate personal interpretations? In particular, how open would you like your works to be understood? Seth Sexton: I have no expectations for other people’s interpretations of my work. I am just grateful that they would arrive to face it. Meaning is so very relative even to me, it changes constantly through space and time, and it’s certainly hard to predict what I might understand my work to be communicating to even myself in the future. We sometimes tend to ignore the fact that a work of art is often a physical artefact, and we have particularly appreciated the way your approach reevaluates the physical language behind the mechanism of art making itself, inviting your audience to treat the work of art more as a window, or a even as a portal towards new kind of perception: as a choreographer and performer, how do you consider the role of the physical act of creating your artworks, of being there, when your artworks take birth? In particular, how do you consider the relationship between space and the body playing within your artistic practice? Seth Sexton: I’d like to complicate the notions of movement, space and choreography for a moment. So I’ll focus on my circle drawings. My circle drawings are mimetic, really an ongoing investigation of how I have been influenced and partly formed by counter-orders (other forces too of course). This is difficult to articulate, but they are a kind of performance, a dance, about my mother, of epic duration, a performance for me, as an audience of one. My body often betrays what my mind thinks is true. This performance is laden with irony and ambivalence. It looks like an obsessive meditation, and in some ways it is. This slackline between order and disorder is suspended over a chasm of powerful forces consisting of conventions, religions, ideologies, and mental health. And then these forces are represented on the surface of the paper. Making the drawing is more important than the drawing itself in this regard. I struggle with sentimentality and ego in relation to making and keeping a surplus of objects. Of course this may be the result of living with my mother’s OCHD. Not to say that the resulting drawings or image can't be sacred, or rather, immortalize a certain questioning. Previously, I cited Yvonne Rainer’s Hand Movie (1966) and I’ll mention a similar work by Richard Serra called Hand Catching Lead (1968), now. Both films frame the body as potent vehicles for communication. They scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Seth Sexton Land
House Head Pen and Ink on Paper 24” x 18” 2021
also explicitly mark the space where physical communication can be construed as the dance. This minimization and reductive device, made possible through the framing of the camera, can be taken even further, into the internal realm of imagination. The body doesn’t need to move to continue to communicate and dance. The mind and the organs and bones will continue to do so, even in apparent stillness. I think of myself as dancing even when it’s just the tips of my fingers holding a pen for several hours. The circle drawing Spiritual Escapism is a good way to recapitulate the preceding ideas. American Evangelicalism, as an example, has convinced people that the mythological hero Jesus will return to take people up to heaven in an act called the Rapture in a period of disaster called the “End Times”. My mother cites both of these religious ideologies as being the root of her collecting behavior. My mother, like many others, also believes in alien abductions. In the yogic traditions, the ones I participate in, reaching the final stage of spiritual enlightenment or Nirvana is accomplished through ascension meditation. The difference between these “Rising Upwards” allegories is internal, as opposed to external forces. I understand this internal force as agency. Agency, as I am describing here, also refers to the tautness of the aforementioned slackline. The questioning in Spiritual Escapism is; if I’m meditating through art all the time, making tiny circles for hours and hours every day for years on end, making art via an internalized dance, a flick of the pen, a conscious breath, and depending on an ascension meditation for me to rise above the suffering inherent in the body- am I really living fully? Or is this a form of Escapism from a necessary condition of life? This goes without saying perhaps, but these are inherently about patterns. Patterns of thinking created by and in response to forces within our society. Hence Patterns show up on the surfaces of my work. Your choreographies last from several hours to several days, and are generated through repetitive mark making and a mixture of rehearsed movement and improvisational dance: how do you consider the creative role of chance and improvisation playing within your artistic practice? Seth Sexton: This is a fantastic question. I use the terms improvisation and chance very loosely. I have years of movement and dance training. This training, taken in its entirety, is about establishing patterns within the body. When I am asked to improvise movements I’m drawing from an exhaustible library. The limitations of this library are evidenced depending on the duration of the “improvisation” and the scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition
Seth Sexton scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land
Black Chokmah 2018 22.5” x 30” Pen and Ink
extent of my physical capacity at that time. An improvisation of several minutes is unlikely to visually repeat itself. Given several hours or days, however, one might begin to notice repetitions of quality, speed, phrasing, direction, and stillness of the dance. This becomes even more clear when we ask someone with less training to improvise. This is a great example of the ways that the body betrays the mind. We think we are operating by chance, but our body reveals the patterns of physical behavior. Since attending Chicago Art Institute you have become more acutely aware of the therapeutic nature of your art practice, and you have developed your attitude to address the theme of mental health through empathetic conversations as well as art practice: do you think that art making could be considered in general as a kind of therapy, especially in this current hectic and unstable version of society? Seth Sexton: I think our patterns of history and behavior are transformed through selfawareness and agency. I think I’ve come to know more about how my patterns imbricate the patterns of the agents around me. I have become more aware of that on a deeper level. I just don't think I have come this far in my life by chance. I’m recognizing my intuition is my Higher Self. The more I have become aware of the systems at play in society, in the body, in the world in general, the more clearly I see negentropy acting in the universe. This is exactly why our thoughts and intentions are so important. Art can certainly be a form of therapy if you think that it is, and I do. I want to create emotional closeness and sensitization of and with the psychic self. I want to change my energetic pathways at the very root of me, I want to affect the organization beneath the flesh and bone to the level of DNA. There are curious pathways between trauma, memory aversion, mood disorders, psychological pathologies, and physiological responses at the cellular and proto cellular level. I have, over the course of my reclamation, been offered the advice to let go of my trauma, to focus on the accumulation of joy, and to stay intently focused on the present self. But I have come to believe that remembering trauma, harnessing its power, has changed me for the better, potentially at the level of DNA on the level of spirit. Over the years your artworks have been showcased your collaborative multimedia choreographies in several Seattle based institutions such as Velocity Dance Center, On the Boards, Jack Straw New Media Gallery, Hedreen Gallery, Soil Gallery, Bumbershoot and others: how do you consider the nature of your relationship with your audience? By the way, as the move of Art from traditional gallery spaces, to street and especially to online platforms scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Seth Sexton Land