Performance Drawing on Opening Night 2005 Charcoal on Paper 50” x 48”
— as Instagram https://www.instagram.com/sethpsexton — increases, how would in your opinion change the relationship with a globalised Audience? Seth Sexton: I am really grateful for the opportunities to have my work, the objects and the performances, relate to people in a physical way. I still privilege the idea that a certain ethos comes from being in physical proximity to the practice. But, I think there is also something really romantic in the notion that we can unite the world in the same ethereal space and time, as computers endeavor to do. And I guess I’m rather romantic at times. Being online and sharing in the ways that we can has been a necessity for school. So while recognizing the immateriality of the online world as a medium can be incredibly useful, I think we have to remember that even though community is gained a real luxury of information is lost. At a certain point the poverty of information doesn't justify the extent of community. Though I certainly appreciate the global audience, I’m at a place in my career where most of my attention and physical energy is spent on a more immediate community and quality of interaction. On top of that, my work is very slow, I don’t create at the current speed of global attention and consumptive habit. 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, Seth. What projects are you currently working on, and what are some of the ideas that you hope to explore in the future? Seth Sexton: I’m working on a manuscript describing some of the key ideas I have mentioned here; It's an experimental writing at the intersection of auto ethnography, poetry, and critical analysis. I draw on authors from the lineage of the antipsychiatry movement to deconstruct mental illness and madness as necessary counternarratives to intersections of pathologization. It attempts to suggest an alternative to accepted reading structures and challenges the ambiguity of truth and voice. I’m also working on a set of accretive drawings inspired by the essay written by Malcom McCullough called “Ambient Commons:Attention in the Age of Embodied Information” (2013). I will also be participating in the 2020-21 Codex Project at the Works on Paper Gallery in Philadelphia, PA. this September. Seth Sexton scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator [email protected] Photos by Joseph Lambert
Hello Matej and welcome to LandEscape. Before starting to elaborate about your artistic production we would like to invite our readers to visit https://www.matejmlakar.com in order to get a wide idea about your multifaceted artistic production, and we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your background. You have a solid formal training in Mechanical Engineering and you are a basically self taught artist: are there any experiences that did particularly influence your artistic journey? In particular, what does appeal you of post-impressionism and early expressionism? Matej Mlakar: First of all thank you for showing your interest in my artistic production and for inviting me to this My art comes simply from inner necessity to create. I usually get inspiration while I am outdoors immersed with nature. Sometimes when I see something interesting that start running my neurons I just take a shot with my cell phone and use a picture as a starting reference. The finished painting is usually quite different as I imagine it at the beginning. I usually need some starting point but then I expressionistically go with the flow. Sometimes I finish my painting in one go but other times I might fight with it many many times and even left it for a while. Some are also overpainted later or recycled. I am expressionist by my heart although I’ve been painting also realism and much more impressionism in the near past. I am now mostly engaged with spontaneous brushstrokes and vivid colors and not paying so much attention to a nice finished look of a painting. I am mostly stylistically driven from post-impressionism and early expressionism and I get huge inspiration from artists such as Cezanne, Van Gogh, Kandinsky, Jawlensky, Munter and other from this period. An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator [email protected] Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW LandEscape meets Matej Mlakar
Starry Night-Departure, detail, oil on linen,2020
interview. I am very grateful to be a part of it and happy that you gave me a chance to introduce myself to your readers. As you already mention my formal training is anything but artistic. I am an engineer by profession. I have a Bsc of Mechanical Engineering and I was trained as a pilot. As a child I was obsessed with airplanes and already at that time decided to become a professional aviator. All other things were just subordinate to that. On the other hand I always liked to create,draw and paint, as usually almost every child does, but stops when they grow up. I admired paintings of great and famous painters from books and magazines. At that time I was especially struck by impressionists how they were able to convey a feeling of light. I liked messy brushstrokes and vivid colours in their paintings. I was really in love with Van Gogh heavy brushstrokes. In our Primary School art classes the teachers mainly introduced to us our local artists from art history and the most I liked were four of them from the beginning of the 20th century - Rihard Jakopič, Ivan Grohar, Matija Jama and Matej Sternen. You most probably never heard of them but I highly recommend to google them. They had some really interesting stuff. So already at that time I fell in love with a rather more expressionistic way of painting. At the end of primary school the art teacher who probably saw some little talent in me tried to convince me to follow artistic path but I stubbornly turned her down. In the years that followed I realised my need to create in a more practical way and that was in building model airplanes and flying models. I paint very rarely then and after I start flying in local aeroclub almost quit entirely. When I was at University the times for aviation in our country were really bad. There were practically no jobs. But life as a student was fun and carefree so I extended my study and found again some time for painting. I also tried to enter the local Fine Art Academy but I took it too easily and I wasn’t accepted. After I finally start my flying career I dedicate all my time to that and to my growing family. After more than a decade of flying I started to realize that I was slowly losing my health due to an unhealthy working environment. Daily breathing of toxic air in airliners put me to the hardest decision in my life. I quit my beloved job and forgot about aviation. I turned again to my art. But not only the painting, I also started to learn digital art, illustration and game design. During sleepless nights I study painters and art history, watch their paintings endlessly on the web and discover so many new artists unknown to me at that time. I started where I finished so many years ago - with impressionists. But everything opened to me with Cezanne whom at first I didn’t like at all because his paintings seem ugly to me. And it was almost an overnight revelation. Suddenly I see beauty in his structured Elaine Crowe scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land
brushstrokes, his different use of colors unfamiliar to impressionists. I started to love the flatness of the painting, deformed and tilted elements and bent perspective. I suddenly started to see beauty in things that I couldn’t before. Fauvism, cubism, expressionism, ..etc. I started to admire the spontaneity and immediacy in terms of color, line or brushstroke and use of that to convey a feeling instead of representing a real world. I was struck by color combinations of Matisse or Kandinsky, or powerful, long brushstrokes and rough textures in Munch or Nolde paintings. And cubism as bringing flatness and perspective distortion to the limit. I like flatness in painting because it brings all elements to the front, it’s all there in front of you so you have a feeling that you are a part of the painting, not just the distant observer. You don’t need to go beyond the frame and enter the scene like in paintings before where you had the atmospheric illusion and perspective which was still the case with the impressionism. I started to see a painting more like a song where the certain colors, linework, shapes, textures etc. forms a rhythm and a melody of that song and where the lyrics of that song(that is to say subject or narrative of the painting) becomes unimportant or have only a second importance. Those are the things that appeal to me of post-impressionism and expressionism. I think for me the period of Modern Art is the most important because it introduced the freedom to art scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition
Matej Mlakar scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Emsho, 80x60cm, oil on linen, 2020
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Pomjan, 65x50cm, oil on linen, 2020
Matej Mlakar scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land and that is the most important element of art for me. It allows the soul to have all available resources to speak without limitation. Yes, it was the Renaissance which improved painting hugely in terms of craft but for me for example the songs of the cave paintings sing more beautifully than the renaissance symphonies. 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 has at once impressed us of for the way it invites the viewers to capture beauty in daily experience: when walking our readers through your usual setup and process, would you tell us how do you usually develop the initial ideas for your artworks? Matej Mlakar: Thank you. I really don’t have a certain process nor do I follow the same rules every time I make a painting. I don’t make a series and every mine painting is a story of its own in terms of process. When I start painting it’s like going on a trip and every trip is different. It's true that at the beginning I need an idea or some sort of initial kick. I almost never start in front of a blank canvas and just start painting without even slightest idea what I am going to do. I only sometimes play and do small sketches in a way to maybe get some ideas or just to loosen myself. But for the “real” painting it all depends on how developed my idea is.
Sometimes I just see something that strikes me, it can be just an interesting shadow or maybe a beautiful evening light and see a nice color combination or do I find a certain place that starts burning my imagination. In that case if I see something interesting and want to make something out of it, but I don’t know where exactly I am going to end, I just start sketching directly on canvas. That was the case for the painting “Window” . But more about that later. Sketching can be with charcoal or if I am more sure it can already be with oil paint. Sometimes the sketch is very rough and I don’t follow it blindly. Just to have started somehow. After that I start blocking in the areas of color that I think will work but usually don’t. Then I start correcting colors, start adding details and develop ideas that appear during the process. During the process I might find other ideas and then the painting can go in a totally different direction. Rarely I finish the painting in one go. A lot of times it's just not working right and I need to scrape it down partially or entirely and start all over. When I know exactly what I want, then the process is easier. That was the case for example for the painting “Starry Night-Departure”. I’ve got an idea, make some sketches with watercolor to determine the composition and color scheme and when I was satisfied started on canvas with oils. I surely made changes but the overall composition and idea of the painting remain the same during the process. It is quite relaxing and joyful to paint that way because you already know scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition
Matej Mlakar scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Game On, 90x70cm, oil on linen, 2020
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Game On, 90x70cm, oil on linen, 2020
what you are doing and so you just indulge yourself and enjoy painting strokes. And then there are really rare moments when all just feel right and you just grab the brush and immediately get inspiration. And then go with furious energy and finish a painting in one go and most probably in a very short time. And then you leave it and never touch it again. It usually happens when I make sketches on paper or painting with watercolors when I am not burdened with empty white canvas. I also made a “Pomjan” painting that way. I started this painting on rare occasions painting plein air when I was still painting more in an impressionistic way and wanted to depict this village in real life. At the end I wasn’t satisfied with the painting and tried to fix it several times in the studio. It was scraped many times and at the end it really got a nice worn out texture on the linen surface. I finally lost hope over it and I put it aside. And then one day, maybe a year or more later, I just grab it, put it on an easel, make some swift outlines and just throw the paint on it in one go. And it was there, one of my favorite paintings. We have particularly appreciated the rigorous sense of geometry that marks out your artistic production and that — more especially in Game On and Emancipation of the Scapegoat — creates such unique ambiguous atmosphere, that becomes even unsettling in the interesting Emsho: would scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Matej Mlakar Land
you tell us more about this important aspect of your works? In particular, do you transpose geometric schemes? Matej Mlakar: Yes,it’s true that I made preparatory drafts for both Game On and Emancipation. In both paintings I wanted to have a more geometric feel as you already found out. But in Game On I was more exploring the relations between different geometric shapes and textures of those shapes while in Emancipation I went for color relations of shapes. The idea for the first painting came out from memories of my past flying job. So many times after take-off I was observing how the shadow of the airplane was beautifully sweeping across the fields with different kinds of crops and crossing swiftly all kinds of textures and colors. And a dark shadow had always a beautiful, subtle halo glow around it. And just as an interesting fact, if you carefully observe your own shadow in early morning or late afternoon light you can see a bright glow around it and that glow is the brightest just around the shadow edge where your eyes would be. So just around your head shadow because the sun is right behind, on the same line. I’ve used that effect also in painting Extinguishing. So if you carefully examine some photos of airplane shadows taken near the ground you can tell from the position of the brightest glow where the person who took the photo was sitting. And to continue,the Game On was drawn totally from imagination while Emancipation was drawn after a real location from the beautiful river Soča Valley, but greatly simplified into more geometric shapes. The geometry of Game On changed quite a lot because I found compositional problems along the process while the composition of the Emancipation painting didn’t change. Here I was searching relations, some kind of a melody between color fields and also subtle relations between hues inside the same color field for example green, blue and cyan in the sky, orange and magenta in the backmost mountain, blue and purple in the hill on the right side or yellow and green in the grass. That produces interesting shimmering because of subtle temperature variation of slightly different hues. So I would say that the hues inside a geometric shape are the tones that make one chord and then all shapes are different chords that at the end make up a melody of this painting. For the Emsho painting it was different. I didn’t make any drafts. It was the power, the energy of one abandoned place of old ruins in Istria. I took a picture while I found it during my mountain biking tour and some time later used it as a basis for my painting. Although I took my expressionistic freedom to paint it it still quite resembles the real place which was mysterious and at the same time quite beautiful in its slow decline. Maybe that’s why it is more unsettling. Obviously I was able to capture the energy of the place :). scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition
Matej Mlakar scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Window, 100x120cm, oil on linen, 2020
Window, 100x120cm, oil on linen, 2020
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Night Trolling, 100x120cm, oil on linen, 2020
A work of yours that has particularly impacted on us is entitled Window and we were struck not only by its effective composition, but especially by an apparently secondary detail: the red little bird leaning in front of the boy at the window. Would you tell us something about the genesis of this stimulating work? In particular, how do you select the locations that you depict in your artworks? Matej Mlakar: There is a story behind this painting. One day walking down the street of a small mediterranean town I saw a little cute window with nice green shutters, situated on a house with a reddish-ochre facade. The shadow of the opposite house was falling on that house below the window and made an interesting contrast. There were also flowers on the shelf, the window was closed with nice rustic curtains behind it. Nobody was at the window. I took the picture of it because of the nice colors and contrast. Then I forgot about that picture and it was a year or two later when I found it again on my computer and it immediately striked me again. Then I knew that I had to do something about it. I knew that I wanted similar composition and similar colors, I wanted to have a textured surface and I wanted to have that shadow of the opposite house below the window. That was the main drive for that painting. All other options were opened. After the initial sketch I started blocking with colors and quite soon realized that the painting won’t work. I struggled with composition and somehow the window felt strange in the painting. I scraped down the color a few times, took a picture of a painting and left it for a few days. I usually do that when I am at dead end and don’t know how to continue. Then at home in the evenings I usually lay on my couch, open my photo of a painting in photoshop (and maybe a beer) and just start playing around and improvise what works and what doesn't. Maybe I get new ideas that way, sometimes I find a solution, sometimes I don’t, but definitely I save some precious oil paint, time and nerves by doing that. That way I realised that I need a shadow above and over the window and that this could be a shadow of the roof over the window. Then I needed something below the window. I didn’t know what it could be. I just felt that something must be there. Then it suddenly struck me and immediately got it. I need a cat at the window. There will be a cat looking up at the birds sitting on the opposite house. Next day I wasn’t sure about the cat anymore. It was the time that just the corona virus started to spread around and there were restrictions to move freely around the country. We were all unhappy because it was the springtime with nice sunny days but we couldn’t go far from home. And then finally the story just wrote itself. I took a picture of my son to get a pose, made a sketch of him, went in my studio and started painting. From that on it scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Matej Mlakar Land
just went with the flow. I changed the shadows of the birds to be sitting on a cable wire instead on the roof and made some yearning graffiti on the facade to spice up a bit everything and there he was. A boy in the middle of quarantine longing for better days to come. But of course this was just my idea which enabled me to finish my painting. Everyone can have his story when looking at the painting. As you have remarked in your artist's statement, you are now mostly engaged with spontaneous brushstrokes and vivid colors and not paying so much attention to a nice finished look of a painting: how do you consider the creative role of randomness and improvisation playing within your artistic practice? Matej Mlakar: I always try to be relaxed and spontaneous as much as possible. It’s not always easy, it really depends on your state of your mind. I am sure that randomness and improvisation play a big role in the creative process and I would like to have them both in my paintings but all that needs experience and mileage. You need to be self-confident to make a spontaneous brushstroke that makes an impact and to throw the colors on canvas that make sense. First you have to learn and study things a lot so that you get some kind of automatism. I think that only then you can fully open up to your subconscious and start using randomness and improvisation in your scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition
Matej Mlakar scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Emancipation Of the Scapegoat, 120x100cm,oil on linen, 2021
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Emancipation Of the Scapegoat, 120x100cm,oil on linen, 2021
favor. I am at the very beginning in that sense but at least I know that I must work on that. If you take into consideration randomness, a lot of times it happens that you get something interesting just purely by accident. But then you also must see it as an opportunity and take advantage of it. A happy accident Bob Ross would say :). I think that watercolors are a perfect medium for that if you know how to use them in the right way. So, right now I see my artistic development in the direction of using improvisation by means of gestural painting, usage of color and texture combinations to make more impact with that and less with narrative. For me Matisse is a beautiful example of improvisation mastery. And also Kandinsky in his “Blaue Reiter” period and Jawlensky. You usually get inspiration while you are outdoors immersed with nature, and Saffrons seems to be a clear example of this aspect of your artistic practice. We like the way you draw from reality to create works of art marked out with stimulating combination between reminding to figurative elements and subtle still captivating dreamlike ambience: how do you consider the relationship between reality and imagination playing within your artistic practice? ? In particular, how do your memories as a professional pilot and your current everyday life's experience fuel your artistic research? scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Matej Mlakar Land
Matej Mlakar: Experiences in life are very important. This is our raw material from which we build. Like clay. I am really an outdoor type and I like to absorb images, colors, and smells like a sponge. I like to collect impressions from nature or generally from life. It all adds to your subconscious which later fuels your imagination that helps you to express your feelings, state or whatever. Our personality is built from genes of our previous generations and from our own experiences. So it is important that you walk around the world with your eyes wide open and do a lot of interesting things in life, not just art. That way you become more open minded and more individual and you can add something personal to your art. So in a way I just use reality and shape it according to my needs to express something that is within me. And that is for me what expressionism is about. The reality just helps me to get me started and trigger my imagination. That’s why I think it’s quite natural that a lot of artists progress later to abstract art because they don’t need figurative elements or reality any more and are so experienced that they know how to trigger the imagination without that. So to sum up, I use my memories and everyday life experiences as impressions that help me to express myself. And I like to express myself through painting because it’s easier for me than talking. We have appreciated the thoughtful and at the same time intense nuances that mark out your artworks, and that in Extinguishing draw the viewers to a state of mind where the concepts of time and space seem to be scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Saffrons, oil on linen, 100x65cm, oil on linen, 2019
suspended. How does your own psychological make-up determine the nuances of tones that you decide to include in an artwork and in particular, how do you develop your textures in order to achieve such brilliant results? Matej Mlakar scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land
Matej Mlakar: The Extinguishing is really quite personal painting and also psychological. It was the year that I stopped flying and I was with my son on a hill that we often go on a walk with my family to get some fresh air. The sun was setting scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Recycle 1-19, 130x90cm, oil on canvas, 2019
behind our backs and our shadows were slowly eaten by the rising shadow of the night. The glowing orange light of the forest with white trunks of birches was extinguishing and there were vapor trails of airplanes over the sky as a reminder of a promised future. I was quite down at that time and very touched by the scene. The first idea was that I want to make a bleeding sky that is flowing through the forest down into the cold, dark area of a painting. Then I changed my mind and decided to develop the painting around the boundary line between the cold and warm area - the rising horizont of the night. There are still some traces of that bleeding sky in the painting. That coarse texture of the forest developed on its own because of so many applied layers and scrape downs. At the end I just applied very thick lines of oranges, reds and purples with the palette knife to get some sort of feel of fire. The cold, bluish part of the painting was quite different at the beginning and I overpainted it later after my first consideration that the painting is finished. I wanted to make that area very cold, unfriendly, that you don’t want to enter but unfortunately you have to because you can not stop the sun going down. At the end this area of painting came out really cold and ugly, textured with fat, thick paint. So in a sense how this painting was made it makes it quite unhappy or dark but I see it differently now. It just represents the transition from one light period through the darkness to another light period. At the end the sun still comes up every day, doesn’t it? And you can see the opposite effect every morning. So scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Matej Mlakar Land
how do I choose the nuances - I try to convey a certain feeling or effect. I try to do that also with textures but sometimes they develop on their own and I let them do so. Through sapiently structured visual quality, Recycle 1-19 challenges the viewers' perception to evoke a sense of mystery, inviting them to switch between opposite interpretations. How important is 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? Matej Mlakar: I actually don’t think about how somebody would understand my painting and I don’t want it to be an object to think about. I rather wanted to be an object of joy or as you already said an object to trigger the viewers imagination. If I put a subject or narrative into it, it is then just an option for interpretation and I usually put that more for compositional reasons. I sometimes choose the title that can also have some meaning and it can be used as an interpretation of the painting, but in most cases I make it up only after the painting is finished or even change it later. So there's actually nothing to understand here in my art. It’s just to like it or not to like it, feel it or not to feel it. Does it trigger something or not? The Recycle 1-19 painting was made out of three different paintings that I made long ago and I didn’t see them interesting anymore. I first wanted to use the canvases to repaint them and make totally new paintings but then I got the idea to combine all three of them into one surface and try to make a new composition with the use of some existing elements. It was a pure improvisation. I wasn’t thinking, I was just playing with the colors, strokes and texture. At the end I only left one element from each original painting - nude, fish and a sailboat. Whatever else was created or can be seen and interpreted is just a coincidence, random shapes. But it is interesting to see how human brains always want to find something tangible. I made another painting in a similar way, Recycle 2-19, but out of only two old canvases. 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 as Instagram —increases, how would in your opinion change the relationship with a globalised audience? Matej Mlakar: As I started painting more seriously only a few years ago I really don’t have any direct audience yet, except my friends. Until now I only had few online exhibitions so my public is mostly from the internet. I regularly post on my Instagram account ( https://www.instagram.com/mlaki_art/ ) and also update my web page occasionally with some new updates. With social media it scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition
Matej Mlakar scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Extinguishing, 100x120cm, oil on linen, 2019
is certainly much easier now to start and get your first audience established than it was before the internet revolution. It is much more likely that somebody who will really love your work discovers you. The base of potential audiences is really huge, practically the whole globe. But on the other hand you never know how honest this online relationship is. I think the online platforms are great to start but at the end there still must be a psychical contact with the painting. It is really difficult to judge a piece of art through the computer screen and it’s always a pleasant surprise (sometimes also unpleasant ) to see the painting for real scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Starry Night-Departure, oil on linen,2020
after seeing it online. For me it’s like food. You can watch and admire it on the screen but at the end you must eat it to really taste it. And how would increasing move to online platforms change the relationship with an audience? I think in most cases it will become more superficial. 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, Matej. What projects are you currently working on, and what are some of the ideas that you hope to explore in the future? Matej Mlakar: At that very moment I am dedicating almost all my time to digital animation. I am making an animation for a proposal and at the same time learning new things in that specific area. Presently I am not able to make a living out of painting so I am trying to earn my money from other projects that are somehow connected with the things that I love to do, and that is art. Animation is one of those things. I would also like to start making some funny cartoons and start publishing them on my social media on a regular basis.I have certain ideas and I just need to get started. Recently I also bought myself a black indian ink and a nib pen for the first time because I would like to make ink drawings combined with watercolors. But for now I haven’t done anything specifically yet. And there is a blank canvas waiting for me in my studio already for a month and as soon as I get some time and inspiration I'll start working on a new painting. My wish is to start making bigger paintings because I started to feel a bit limited with the present sizes. I started to have needs for a more gesturally style of painting and for that I need to have more space available. I will continue to explore the color, stroke and texture relations in my paintings and I would like to become more immediate and spontaneous in my work. And finally maybe a less pleasant part for me is that I will need to start working more in social areas and get me started with physical exhibitions. At that point I would really like to thank you for this lovely opportunity that you gave me with your interview and for your interesting questions. I was a bit sceptical about having to deal with all of them because I don’t have a formal artistic education but then it just opened up. On the other hand, I hope I didn’t sound too pretentious. I wish you and your readers many great artistic experiences and all the best. scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Matej Mlakar Land An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator [email protected]