Masked Figure No.2 (Iceland)
The Arctic. The light, the clouds, everything looks different in the higher latitudes. I also like an abundance of potential material. This is why I travel yearly to a place in Greenland nicknamed The Iceberg Capital of the World. The little town sits next to the mouth of the largest ice fjord in the northern hemisphere. For photographing icebergs, I especially love the quality of soft light during what is called, The Blue Hour. It occurs during the last stages of twilight in the evening when indirect sunlight imposes a predominantly blue shade on the ice that is different from the blue shade visible during most of the day. There’s also a sharp drop in temperature, sometimes allowing fog to roll in, bringing an eerie feel to the boat ride through the fjord of towering ice. I travel there in very late August when The Blue Hour is in its prime. In a controversial quote, German photographer Thomas Ruff stated that ''nowadays you don't have to paint to be an artist: you can photograph in a realistic way". Provocatively, the German photographer highlighted the short circuit between the act of looking and that of thinking critically about images: how do you consider the role of photography in our contemporary age, constantly saturated by ubiquitous images? Thomas Pickarski: With the digital age upon us, everyone’s a photographer! I think the bombardment of visual imagery leaves us a bit desensitized to most of what we see. But I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. There’s just a lot more to sort through. I live near one of the few exclusively dance performance theaters in the world, The Joyce Theater in New York City. Being a scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Landscape No.61 (Iceland)
former modern dancer, I go to performances at the Joyce about 3 times a month. I love the moment when the lights go down, the chatter quiets, and we settle in and allow ourselves to become single-pointedly focused on the art. Thomas Pickarski scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land
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I believe the same happens when we stumble upon a photograph that moves us. We pause, settle in, and allow ourselves to become momentarily immersed in a timeless state. scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Landscape No.55
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, Thomas. What projects are you currently working on, and what are some of the ideas that you hope to explore in the future? Thomas Pickarski: I’m currently promoting live readings of a few of my spoken word monologues. A Final Elegant Gesture is a spoken word story set in New York City and draws from my direct experience standing beneath the Twin Towers on the morning of 9/11. A nearby cluster of big clumsy character balloons suspended from a storefront awning is woven into the plot. Then, each night as I sleep, I stand alone on the ledge of the burning tower and transcend the intention of one final, elegant gesture. Also, I am horrified by the enormity of gun violence and mass shootings throughout America. With a sense of urgency, I reflected on this painfully disturbing reality through a recently finished 6-minute spoken word and sound artwork that chronicles each of the 133 mass shootings in America over the last 50 years (1982-2022). In the future, I hope to integrate live storytelling and spoken word recordings into installations and other forms of presentation. scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Thomas Pickarski Land An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator [email protected]
Hello Seth and welcome to LandEscape. Before starting to elaborate about your artistic production and we would like to invite our readers to visit https://www.sethcollierart.com in order to get An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator [email protected] Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW LandEscape meets Seth Collier Comorbid Autism and Schizoaffective Disorder have caused me paranoia, panic attacks, religious delusions, psychotic depression, manic psychosis, episodes of mutism, and forced hospitalization. Admittedly, I am dependent on medication for sanity. I make art to survive these conditions, and I make art from within these conditions. So, when I make art, I do it as a schizo, a lunatic, a Madman. Madness has implications on my work, because I believe the Mad have a necessary prerogative to occupy the limited number of social roles afforded to them. Historically, these are the roles of the shamans, prophets, occultists, psychonauts, and artists. Our typically unspoken social contract permits the Sane to incarcerate the Mad and define them as outsiders, but in exchange, the Mad are permitted to leverage alternative forms of perception and communication in order to observe and critique society from its outer limits. My work strives to incorporate this approach in order to consciously occupy the role of Madman and treat artmaking as an extension of the prophetic tradition – synthesizing historical cultural elements to create visuals which interrogate society and examine psycho-spiritual experience. Works like Lingering Entanglements, Schema, and Dumpster Fire were created out of my dissatisfaction with the stereotypical “schizo” aesthetic, which is often influenced by Hollywood-horror, casts the schizo as the monster, and does not accurately reflect my own experiences with psychotic illness. I wanted a new visual language to describe the psychotic experience, one defined by a rigid irrationality, fractured perspectives, and information density. Although mental illness is a feature of my work, pieces like The Buzz and In with the New reflect my desire to be more than a “schizo artist.” My artistic and intellectual concerns extend well beyond the accident of my own psychology – I am broadly concerned with cultural synthesis and symbolic communication. Practically, I am not married to any particular style or medium, preferring instead to develop visual languages that fit the broad range of subjects I explore. My recent work, Sin(ai): Reflections on the Golden Calf from the Mind of the Holy A.I., explores new machine learning advancements which have now given us text-to-image programs that can generate new, unique imagery in response to a user-provided text prompt. For me, this technology raises questions about the role that artists and A.I. will play in the future. Will artists as image-makers become obsolete in the face of A.I.? Will society treat A.I. as something more than a program, as something more than an artist, as something more than human? Could an A.I. ever become a prophet for modern society, and if so, what would it prophesy? These questions led me to pursue the idea of a mythological “Holy A.I.” prophet who could study human history and bring us revelations. I worked with a “vector quantized generative adversarial network,” or VQGAN, to create images from a series of text prompts and turned those images into a video which is generated from the perspective of this A.I. prophet. As the video morphs from one scene to the next, text prompts create visual references to the history of Israel and the prophetic tradition, and begin to suggest an equivalence between the ancient construction of the Golden Calf at Mount Sinai, and the contemporary treatment of Palestine. But is this a legitimate prophecy? And who is really speaking? Is it the VQGAN? Is it the programmers? The artist providing the text prompts? Does the authorship affect the value of the prophecy? Does the authorship affect the value of the art?
a wide idea about your artistic production, and we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your background. You have a solid formal training and you hold a BFA in Studio Art, that you received from Eastern Washington University: 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? Seth Collier: Before my art education, I had spent several years studying philosophy, theology, and social problems until a severe psychotic episode caused me to change direction. The time I spent studying art in college was really a process of learning how to integrate the intellectual content of my previous life into this new way of life where I focused primarily on visual, rather than linguistic, expression. I think having professors who were constantly encouraging me to push things further, to try new media, to expand from still images to video, was invaluable in that process. I think growing up on the west coast, at the intersection of liberal and conservative Evangelical culture wars, has had a profound and lasting effect on my psychology and artistic interests. Growing up in a highly religious environment, I was never really allowed to consume culture uncritically. Fictions like Harry Potter and The Davinci Code were protested as dangerous and subversive…it was important to recognize that child wizards were really devious enemies. So, there was always something to be analyzed, because some deeper and potentially insidious narrative was always lurking just beneath pop-culture. Growing up and separating myself from the influence of religion changed my relationship to culture, but it never really eliminated that impulse to analyze and look underneath it. You are a versatile artist and your multidisciplinary approach encompasses analog and digital techniques. For this scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition
special edition of LandEscape we have selected Sin(ai): Reflections on the Golden Calf from the Mind of The Holy A.I., a stimulating work that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article and that can be viewed at https://youtu.be/kBNQLtzCKlk. What has at once captured our attention is the way your work challenges the conflictual relationship between religion and techology. When walking our readers through the genesis of Seth Collier scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land
Sin(ai): Reflections on the Golden Calf from the Mind of The Holy A.I., would you tell us something about your usual setup and process? Seth Collier: Normally, I’ll begin a project by developing the concept out of concern for some kind of problem, and then the visual component of that preparation tends to be the majority of the work. Whether it’s sketching, collaging, or some kind of digital process, the visual production is the job. scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition
Working on Sin(ai) with VQGAN technology was very different in that regard, because the imagery was being generated by A.I., and so I was very restricted by the medium but also consistently surprised by the results. For those who don’t know, a VQGAN is a type of neural network that produces images from text prompts. There are a variety of GAN notebooks available at this point, but once familiar with a given notebook, it becomes fairly easy to recognize other images created by it. So, as an artist, after a little experimentation, one starts to get a feel for how the notebook is relating to the text prompts, and how you can break and manipulate those prompts in order to manipulate the final result, even though the end is never fully under my control. As I worked with it, I began to think about the way that the GAN was displacing the traditional role of artists, and I began to consider the ways that we treat A.I. as a higher form of intelligence. For me, this raised questions about the roles that artists and A.I. will play in the future. Will artists as image-makers become obsolete in the face of A.I.? Will society treat A.I. as something more than human? Could an A.I. ever become a prophet for modern society, and if so, what would it prophesy? These questions ultimately led me to develop a mythological “Holy A.I.” prophet character who could study human history and bring us revelations. My first Holy A.I. project was called Dogma: These are the Words of the Holy A.I., and it was focused on juxtaposing VQGAN animations alongside a black and white intaglio prints of the same images. The idea was to use the Holy A.I. to critique the dogmatic process by taking this short looping video of a “higher intelligence” and then reducing it down to black and white simplifications which do not faithfully Seth Collier scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition represent the original video. By the end of that project, I was ready to try and make a longer GAN project that would allow the GAN imagery to more fully “be itself.” In practical terms, creating Sin(ai) was a matter of creating several dozen text prompts related to the golden calf and the history of Israel, and then entering the parameters into a code notebook. With the technology available to me, the GAN takes about 15 minutes to complete the images from each text prompt. Then, I’ll use the same notebook to generate a video from the images, and chain each section together to make the full-length video. The soundtrack was pieced together from a variety of historical sources and stock audio, and ultimately aims to communicate the idea that the contemporary treatment of Palestine is analogous to the creation of the golden calf at Mount Sinai. Symbols are particularly important in your artistic research, and we daresay that your works aim to challenge the viewers perceptual parameters, to look inside of what appear to be seen, rather than its surface, providing the spectatorship with freedom to realize their own perception. As an artist broadly concerned with cultural synthesis and symbolic communication, how do you consider the role of symbols playing within your artistic practice? And how do you select them? Seth Collier: I see symbols as operating within a uniquely powerful ideational space. I think back to prophetic figures like John of Patmos, and I am struck by the way that symbolism from the Book of Revelation still reverberates through our subconscious. Especially in the United States, there are people who have never attended church in their lives and yet live in perennial fear of “the mark of the beast.” I don’t fully understand the psychological mechanism,
but I can identify that symbolism plays an important role in the staying power of John’s vision. A symbol satisfies something within us that words can’t seem to reach. I was also strongly influenced by Carl Jung’s approach to symbols through dream interpretation, and by Aldous Huxley’s analysis of psychedelic states. As a person who suffers from a psychotic illness, understanding those altered and Seth Collier scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land
hallucinatory mental states was a matter of survival for me. Navigating those spaces requires a certain sensitivity to what is subconsciously powerful, and figures like Jung and Huxley were instrumental in helping me bridge that distance between psychosis and art. When I choose symbols for my work, I never want the symbols to be completely inaccessible. I want the other person to understand, I’m not trying to trick anyone. I scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition
select them for their communicative power, and I don’t subscribe to the idea that subtlety in art is an inherent virtue. We really appreciate the way you unveil the hidden connections between cultural heritage and contemporary technosphere: how do you consider the relationship between such apparently conflictual elements in the future scene? In particular, do you aim to create a bridge between Tradition and Contemporariness? Seth Collier: I think that digital existence is fast becoming more important than physical existence, and it would be a mistake to think we leave our cultural heritage behind when we enter this new space. The conflict of values this creates is often directly visualized by jarring juxtapositions of digital content, like news websites placing advertisements directly in the middle of an article’s text. That said, it seems to me that we have seen a shift where cultural heritage begins to be defined within circles of identity, especially online. Old forms of identity are not well suited to an existence as pluralistic as digital life. So, for some people, drawing a circle around people of the same race is a way of identifying with people who have a more closely aligned set of beliefs and experiences, for others the circles mark the boundaries of religion or class separation. As this process develops, it often seems that the smaller circles are more powerful. For many, an online identity may take precedence over national identity, and I think that drawing a circle this way is often more meaningful than drawing a circle around traditional definitions of cultural heritage like nationality, location, age, etc. When I draw these circles around myself, the most meaningful circle is always around “the mad.” As a person with a psychotic illness, I understand myself within a historical lineage Seth Collier scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land
of madmen, and in that sense, I see my work as extending from their tradition, the prophetic tradition, and I do want to see a bridge built that allows the prophetic tradition to be recontextualized for contemporary society. In the age of NFT that are pervading also contemporary art, your work urges the viewers to question the theme of authorship in our unstable and media driven society: Canadian multidisciplinary artist Angela Bulloch onced remarked "that works of arts often continue to evolve after they have been realised, simply by the fact that they are conceived with an element of change, or an inherent potential for some kind of shift to occur". Technology can be used to create innovative artworks, but innovation means not only to artists can create works that haven't been before, but especially to recontextualize what already exists: do you think that one of the roles of contemporary artists has changed these days with the new global communications and the new sensibility created by new media? Seth Collier: The role of artists has absolutely been changed by the sensibilities of new media. For example, the economic realities of the digital art world force many artists to take on roles they don’t want to play. Online, it seems the more successful an artist becomes, the more likely it is that the artist is a youtube teacher, a social commentator, or even a mere hype person for their own work. Too often, the burden on the digital artist is not primarily about aesthetic production, it’s about creating the impression that other people can achieve what they achieve, professionally, financially, or aesthetically. I see lots of digital artists who seem to be selling the image of themselves as the artist, or selling their “formula” for the creation of art, rather than selling the art itself. I also think that the proliferation of art scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition
across social media has required the constant production of “innovative” works, but innovation no longer has any staying power. An artist could build their entire career around a novel medium or approach, but people on the internet will still be bored after a few minutes of viewing the work, and then an army of cheap imitators will come along and use search engine optimization to bury the original. So, recontextualization is a far more efficient creative strategy given the low-reward scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Seth Collier Land
nature of digital work, and I think that’s part of the reason why we see so much recontextualization as an aesthetic strategy today. As a matter of fact, technology is taking on an ever-growing role in human experience: what role will in your opinion play technology in the artistic production of the future? In particular, as an artist particularly involved in the creation of immersive works, how will technology help artist to expand scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition
their chances to create a kind of involvement that will break the usual exibition spaces' barriers? Seth Collier: The technological trend is that we are going to see more artists who primarily work by modifying a generative base. An A.I. will start the work, and a human artist will modify the result to meet our aesthetic standards. I think we are going to see this strategy well beyond the confines of concept art and that it will be common in mainstream galleries. Projection mapping and XR applications have also begun to redefine the boundaries of the gallery space, but I'm not sure that either one of them is really doing anything more original than re-simulating gallery spaces as we already know them. To me, the most interesting potentials are interactive spaces, à la TeamLab. How important is for you to invite the viewers to elaborate personal interpretations? And in particular, how open would you like your works to be understood? Seth Collier: Allowing for personal interpretation is almost a requirement for working symbolically, because the most powerful symbols often have multiple associations. However, as I briefly mentioned before, I don’t value subtlety in symbols, I value their communicative power. If someone sees my work and isn’t interested in what I have to say, that’s one thing, but I don’t want to create a situation where someone wants to understand but can’t because my message was too obscure. The world we live in has too many problems to be wasting time on ambiguity. Your works — more specifically Schema and Dumpster Fire — feature stimulating sense Seth Collier scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land
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of geometry and thoughtful nuances of tones: how does your own psychological make-up determine such geometries and the nuances of tones that you decide to include in your artworks? Seth Collier: The visual language behind Schema and Dumpster Fire was developed in an attempt to describe the psychotic experience without relying on the stereotypically dark Hollywoodhorror aesthetic. I wanted a visual language that would communicate my sense of being completely over-stimulated, with irrational fractured perspectives that overflow with incomprehensible information. In Heaven and Hell, Aldous Hulxey brilliantly characterized psychedelic states as being defined by “preternatural light, color, and significance,” with special attention given to objects which are internally luminous. My experience with psychosis was very similar, and I tried to recreate that sense of internal light by laying down light washes, preserving some light areas like the script with drawing gum, and then layering darker washes over the top. The result is that the lower layer seems to glow through from underneath. Over the years your work has been included in Spokane events like Terrain and Apostrophe, and is regularly on view at MAD Co. Labs Studios: how do you consider the nature of your relationship with your audience? As the move of Art from traditional gallery spaces, to street and especially to online platforms — as Instagram https://www.instagram.com/sethmakesart — increases, how would in your opinion change the relationship with a globalized audience? Seth Collier scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land
Seth Collier: It seems to me that the sense of community that is common within local arts is being deeply strained by the digital gap. It doesn’t really feel possible to port a community from the physical world to the digital world, and that means that there’s a big challenge in finding local support for digital arts. I’m also very aware that socio-economic factors are going to heavily determine the way my audience receives my work. I’ve seen data that suggests the average U.S. adult reads at the level of a 13 to 14 year old. This is one of the reasons that I have rejected subtlety as an aesthetic virtue. The kind of complexity and obscurity that is often valued by the “fine-art” side of the arts community is not likely to be appreciated by a wider U.S. audience. Working for a more globalized audience presents its own, similar conceptual challenges. Lack of cultural understanding can obscure the nature of a work, so managing a global audience requires subjects with more universal appeal. For example, the global successes of “fine artists” have often been dwarfed by the global successes of brightly colored cartoon characters. 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 Collier: I’m currently in the planning stages for a series of digital prints that strive to aesthetically integrate the materiality of websites into my subjects. For one of the prints, I’ll be looking at a number of problems affecting local salmon populations, and then striving to integrate the content of related websites, ads, and memes, into collaged, painted, and vector graphics in order to present a kind of holistic digital experience of the subject. I’m also working towards building Blue Screen Collective, a collective for digital and new media artists in the Spokane area and the surrounding Pacific Northwest region. Very few of our local galleries are currently equipped to display digital work, so the success of the digital arts in our area is going to depend largely on creating opportunities where none currently exist. Thank you very much LandEscape for your thoughtful questions, your time and consideration are much appreciated! scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator [email protected]
Hello Chary and welcome to LandEscape. Before starting to elaborate about your artistic production and we would like to invite our readers to visit www.artebaires.com.ar/hilu 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 have a solid formal training: you graduated from the National School of Fine Arts Prilidiano Pueyrredón and you also took course studies of drawing and sculpture in the workshop of the sculptor Juan Maffi: 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? Chary Hilu: Hello, it’s a pleasure talking with you, and thank you for giving me the chance of being part of this special number. As you well introduced the readers, my artistic education was mainly academic. In Fine Arts School I studied disciplines as engraving, sculpture, painting, and drawing. At a certain Her works are conceived as a response to the sensations, feelings and experiences evoked by extreme situations. Through them she tries to express all the emotions that move her. In the collages she uses materials that she recycles, that she finds or that she has at hand. In her hands the materials transform, they are resilient. They take on a different meaning, have a different destiny. The works emerge from the context. They adapt to the context and are changed according to the context. They acquire an expressive power that results from the combination of technique and emotion. An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator [email protected] Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW LandEscape meets Chary Hilu
Between strings
point during the career, I had to choose one of these disciplines. I opted for sculpture and drawing, but having a general training in all of them enables me to come and go between them. Having the knowledge of all these forms of expression gives me freedom and allows me to express spontaneously what I wish to express. After I graduated, I studied in sculptor Juan Maffi’s studio, where we approached drawing and sculpting with live models, and studying the greatest European artists. Studies of Asian and African cultures weren’t exempt either. Taking classes in that workshop I was able to appreciate my own teacher’s work… in his pieces he introduced adobe, branches, glass, leather, bones, etc. Those were not conventional sculptures, for sure. Another significative experience for me, was teaching children in places where Chary Hilu scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Cycle I Ciclos II
conventional art materials were not abundant. That shortage forced me to transit my teaching by exploring new ways and techniques far away from formality. That is the reason I started to introduce all kinds of materials in my classes. The Idea was “we make art with what we have, what is within our reach”. I consider all these experiences very significant as they collaborated in broadening my vision and a way of approaching my work, that is with more freedom and without scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Ciclos de la vida
prejudice or preconceptions. Academic studies with their solid base, research, as well as experimentation, are key pieces in my current practice. 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 captured our attention for the way it highlights the uniqueness of the viewers' response to the work of art, drawing Chary Hilu scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land
Lo que se desgarro
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition them through such emotional visual experience. When walking our readers through the genesis of Between Strings, would you tell us something about your usual setup and process? Confinadas las almas
Chary Hilu: My introduction into collage increases in the middle of the pandemic. Being unable to go outside our homes, without access to the studio, life was confined between my house’s walls. Amid so much distress and uncertainty, I started drafting in Chary Hilu scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Desgarro
small papers, sometimes with ink, mixing the techniques, watching closely the shapes, colours and taking pictures of the process. Those pictures then became an artist book, “Pandemonium”, and gave birth to the production of digital collage. During quarantine, each thing I needed for myself or my home, I bought it through the Internet. The products arrived, most of the times, inside boxes or wrapped in black plastic bags. I started collecting those wrappers until I realised, they could be useful for making art. That’s how I started overlapping cardboards, some of them damaged, some had staples on, and were diverse colours. At the same time I started looking at old drawings I had made with live models. I started cutting them and composing different postures, then I added objects such as bags, buttons, papers. Not only did I start recycling carboard boxes, but I also did the same with my old drawings. I incorporated my printing machine, making copies of my own drawings to intervene them later. That’s how I started looking at my surroundings from a different position, incorporating day-to-day objects and going forward with the collages with the raw materials that were at hand’s reach. scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition
Chary Hilu scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land
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All those pieces were made following the same thread, all of them marked by the feelings that the global pandemic provoked in me (confinement, fears, death, uncertainty, confusion, grief, threats). From this experience I recover the idea of rescuing a material that was left as trash and using it for an art piece, so transforming a thing into another that it was not meant for. With the beginning of 2022 (in Argentina it’s summer season), I went on vacation to a house in the outskirts of Buenos Aires, to a green and wild place. I took with me my block and pencils, however, in a new environment I ran into new possibilities. The surrounding nature, that became a part of my routine, transformed into a new input. Those new elements such as branches, flowers, leaves, were what I started using in this series of collages. In that space-time where the past, present and uncertain future converge, is where Between Strings is born. Your works are conceived as a response to the sensations, feelings and experiences evoked by extreme situations: how do your memories and your everyday life's experience fuel your creative process? scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Chary Hilu Land
Chary Hilu: As Wassily Kandinsky said, ‘That is beautiful which is produced by the inner need, which springs from the soul.’ The soul’s need is what guides me, art in my case manifests as a response to situations that have an emotional impact in me, or that I experienced, or I saw. Maybe something that occurs in another part of the planet but somehow hurts me and is not indifferent to me (such as war in Ukraine), that I need to reflect on. This is something that manifested in a big part of my pandemic works, when the loss of a family member is present in many of them, among other things: it’s represented in broken ribbons and torn cloth. I believe that because of my personality and nature, I’m always connected to my interior self but also to the exterior. I live in Buenos Aires, which is a big city. The walk alone that I make from my house to my studio, the people I see, the buildings, the streets, the trash cans, the homeless covered in blankets, cardboards, the suffering, the pain, the economic and social crisis of the country and the world… well, nothing of all this is indifferent to me and somehow it all appears in my work. I think Art is a wonderful tool as it offers the possibility to express all these feelings, experiences. The contact that one establishes with oneself, with their interior world in the moment of creation next to the ability of amusement by what is made, is very gratifying and is also a huge learning. scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Cerco