Barbara Krupp scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land role of chance and improvisation playing within your artistic process? Barbara Krupp: Intuition is a major facet in my life. I have cancelled trips because something inside said “don’t”. I quit my X-ray career in a moment one day. I walked in and said, I am quitting. I am going to be an artist. They said they would hold my job for a couple of months. They thought I would be back. But I knew and I acted. Some may call it impulsive but I think it is intuitive. The role of chance in my art is almost 100%. I never know where my painting is going but once I start the weaving of colors, lines and thoughts, I am on my way and there is no turning back. I look at my painting and when my breathing is even, the painting is finished. If my breathing is ragged, I keep going. I have never felt labored while I am working. Sometimes when I stand back and look at what I have done, I say, “Umm it looks like I worked hard at that” but I don’t call it labor, just love. You are an awarded and established artist: your artworks are in many public collections, and over the years your works have been showcased in many solo and group exhibitions, including your recent participation to Five At Grand Harbor, curated by Meredyth Hyatt Moses: 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/barbarakrupp—
increases, how would in your opinion change the relationship with a globalised audience? Barbara Krupp: Yes, my last show was at Grand Harbor in Vero Beach, Florida. It is a lovely gated community of like-minded scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Mind Games 2, 72x72 Acrylic Painting
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Barbara Krupp Land Solar Eclipse, 40x30, Acrylic Painting
individuals. They are looking for a safe, beautiful place to live. The show was during Covid, so guests were limited. The ones who came were generous with compliments and congratulations. My relationship with my collectors sometimes turns personal. I usually take the painting to their homes and help them find the correct place to hang it. They are gracious and offer me a glass of wine. It becomes a friendship. I am their artist. When I would travel to art fairs, I would deliver paintings to a collectors’ home and a friendship would often happen and continue through the years. I knew when I was ready to move on past the art fairs. I was happy not to put up my tent early in the morning and take it down at the end of the show. Life was not easy on the street but the traveling was very rewarding. Staying at lovely places and eating at fine restaurants made life good. I took good care of myself because it was my life. After I left the art fair scene, I sold through art galleries. This was the next part of my art life. I would still travel but not as often. I would deliver paintings to my galleries. I painted and renewed their supply of my newest paintings. A few problems occurred when I changed styles. It made some of the galleries happy and others worried that their clients would not like my new work. Somehow, the collectors always saw the same thread of Barbara Krupp in each piece. It was during this time period that the University of Tampa, Tampa, FL, USA purchased fifty-three of my paintings for their Graduate and Health Studies Building. The public is invited to visit them at any time the building is open. The gallery scene worked for about 15 years. Now most of them have closed and I am online with my art. scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition
Barbara Krupp scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Mind Of Blue, 60x180, Acrylic Painting
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition NFS in collection University Of Tampa
I am still trying to feel my way through the internet. I am of the age when I was not born with a computer in my hand and all the computer knowledge already in my head. At least that is how I view kids today. They know all the computer answers. I am still learning the questions. I love Instagram, in fact I believe that is where you found me. I also embrace Facebook. It has renewed relationships with old neighbors, classmates, friends and relative who would have been lost to me over time. 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, Barbara. What projects are you currently working on, and what are some of the ideas that you hope to explore in the future? Barbara Krupp: The goal for my new paintings is to paint larger and simpler. I want to say more with less. My goal for the future is to be included in the Venice Biennale. I would like to be represented by major galleries around the world. This is my next goal. I am hoping that this article will fill the missing links that will enable me to continue to the next pinnacle of my artistic goals. I would like to say thank you for interviewing me with the most interesting questions I have ever answered. scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Barbara Krupp Land An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator [email protected]
Hello Josh and welcome to LandEscape. Before starting to elaborate about your artistic production and we would like to invite our readers to visit https://joshalvies.photos 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 and you graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a degree in communications, focused on the art and design of advertising: how do these formative years influence your evolution as an artist? Josh Alvies: I leaned heavily into the commercial art and design aspect of advertising, particularly for print and online advertising, during my university time at the While I’ve spent years with a camera in hand, it’s only recently that I have begun to publish my art for a wide audience. As part of that, I have focused on the art of the world around us that we can't quite see. In the past, this has taken the forms of long exposure, wide angle, time-lapse and high-key photography in various combinations and with various subjects. More recently, I have combined these features with faux-color photography in the infrared spectrum. My desire is to use filtered near-infrared light in my photography in an effort to show others that what we are able to see as humans is not the limit of what exists in the world around us. There are many different ways to perceive everything we see, but our brains are mostly set in their ways and primarily see what they have been trained to see through our experience as people. Recognizing the differences in what is real to us and what is just outside the real can transform the mundane into something a little more special and I'm excited to share these subtle differences with a wider audience so that they might see things a little differently as well. An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator [email protected] Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW LandEscape meets Josh Alvies @joshalviesphotos joshalviesphotos
Jackson Square, Pink Foliage, September 2020 Jackson Square Pink Foliage
start of the century. Digital production was growing rapidly at the time, though digital photography was not yet within most people’s reach – and while this meant that most of the time I was using stock imagery or illustration for my work instead of my own photography, it certainly helped me to build an eye for composition that is not completely different than what a photographer does through a camera. 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 sheds a whole new light on the concept of human perception, unveiling the connection between what is perceived as real and what goes beyond our ordinary parameters, highlighting at the same time Josh Alvies scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land ida Up from the bayou
the uniqueness of the viewers' response to the work of art. When walking our readers your usual setup and process, would you tell us something about your technical equipment? Josh Alvies: I’d like to think that I am a good argument for the idea that you don’t have to work with top-of-the-line equipment in order to produce the photograph that is already in your mind. I do a great deal of my photography with relatively basic equipment; my standardcolor camera body is a Canon T3i, and my full-spectrum body is even older, a Canon T1i converted by LifePixel. I enjoy shooting wide most of all, so the lens on the body for the majority of my photos taken over the last decade is a Tamron 10-22mm wideangle. I do a lot of work with a Canon 50mm f/1.8 prime as well, but I’m not afraid to pull out an old Canon kit zoom when I’m working against time and need something flexible. Of course, to convert full-spectrum images into what people recognize as infrared images, I have a variety of filters for different diameters and wavelengths too. For my HDR and long-exposure photos, I mount to a heavy Manfrotto tripod with ball head. With their unique aesthetic quality on the visual espect, your works seem to be laboriously structured to pursue such effective and at the same time thoughtful visual impact, and we really appreciated the way you captured such unique nuances in Timeblend: how important is intuition for you? Josh Alvies: Intuition is vital to me as a scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Timeblend
photographer, as I’ve never had any formal training in the art. Of course, this is no different than a great many photographers in the world, perhaps even most of them. It’s rare that I step into a location knowing exactly what photos I want to make that day, and because of that I regularly need to feel my way through to finding Josh Alvies scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Swing
Josh Alvies scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land compositions that I think will work down the line. Timeblend is a slightly different take on that idea; while in the location one evening with my daughter and no camera, I could picture the idea clearly while looking out over the lake, but it took me months to get back and set up for the eventual shot. While I often find that things don’t work out quite how I expected, that image is one that truly did map exactly to my original intuition for the shot. We have been impressed with the way your works more specifically — Dark Water and Winter Stream — capture the idea of nonlieu elaborated by French anthropologist Marc Augé. Drawn heavily from the peculiar specifics of the environment, your works highlight such insightful resonance between the landscapes that you captured and states of mind: how do you select the specific locations and how do they affect your creative process? Josh Alvies: I think this largely goes back to your question regarding intuition, frankly. A lot of how I select locations comes down to where I’m able to access at a given time based on where I’m living or where I already have some travel planned, and more recently, revisiting locations that are within easy reach that I truly love. Both of the images you mention were taken within a half-hour of my current home. In truth, that’s the case for a great deal of my portfolio, with many of my best pieces created quite near to where I lived at the time. When I’m in places like these, the specific locations are the ones that catch my
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition eye with respect to the lighting and weather, and that means they’re different every single time I see them. It’s very helpful to know that the world around you can help give new nuance to a place you’ve seen dozens of times. You travel a lot: originally from Central Illinois and now living on the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain in Louisiana, you have had the chance to live in Chicago, near New York City, Boston, and Kansas City. Moreover, you have visited Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asiahow does your everyday life's experience and your memories fuel your creative process? Josh Alvies: I would absolutely love it if all the places I’ve lived and traveled were my everyday life’s experience! So many of the places you mention have been brief, onetime visits, or short stints living in any one place; in fact, I’ve been in Louisiana about seven years now and that is twice as long as I’ve lived in any other single place since I left university. All of the places you mention, though, clearly bring a different set of parameters to my same process, which boils down to something simple: see what everyone else has seen, and then make it your own in small ways. Whether you’re looking at a lake in your hometown or the Dead Sea, the most famous statue in America or an epic tower in Malaysia, it’s all about seeing something slightly different in it than the person before you saw.
Josh Alvies scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Heavens Cross
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Disinclination
As you have remarked in your artist's statement, recognizing the differences in what is real to us and what is just outside the real can change the mundane to something a little more special, We daresay that your artistic production aims to urge the spectatorship to a participative effort, to realize their own interpretation: 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? Josh Alvies: In most cases, the setup for each individual work I produce is pretty minimal; the tableau is readily apparent for those who might have the opportunity to see it themselves. It might seem like that could close the door for individual interpretation, but I think if I’m doing my job right, it actually works in the opposite direction. I think the interpretation comes into play in the detail, particularly in my best work; each individual can pick out in their own time the parts of the image that are not quite what they would expect. Does the final image play with natural color? With the passage of time? With perspective or viewing angle? I think that I am often able to tweak those aspects subtly enough that they can be discovered only by a viewer willing to look a little closer than just a passing glance. Both the works from your Architecture Collection, as Heaven's Cross and Marrakech Tile, and the ones from your Josh Alvies scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land
Animal Collection, as the interesting Plumage, reveal refined sense of geometry: would you tell us how important is for you to create works able to highlight the geometric structure of the subject that you capture? scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Plumage
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Josh Alvies Land Indigo Sunset Shore
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Moss over sunset
Josh Alvies: We are all attracted to patterns, consciously or subconsciously, and I love being able to bring them out in an image even if they’re already obvious. Capturing a pattern, particularly one that thrives on symmetry such as in Marrakech Tile, is a real challenge for any artist, and it’s particularly true in street or urban photography where your chances to get it right are limited by time and traffic. It’s a real joy to be able to get the shot you want in tricky circumstances, and when you nail it in an image such that the viewer can enjoy that pattern just as much as you did in the moment, it’s a wonderful feeling. I love getting the opportunity to make photos like that and create something absorbing. Brilliantly shot, Stata, Cambridge features sapiently structured sense of composition Josh Alvies scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Suspended Leaf Monument
swing
and keen eye for details: what were your aesthetic decisions when shooting? Josh Alvies: Sometimes you get the benefit of having the aesthetics given to you, to an extent. I think that’s true especially with architectural photography, especially when you’re looking at a building designed by a master architect. It’s hard to create a bad photograph of something created by Frank Lloyd Wright, or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, or Zaha Hadid, because they were such masters of their craft and style. In the case of this photo, the building was originally designed by another big name in architecture, Frank Gehry. When you’re shooting someone else’s work like this, especially someone with a signature style, the best way I feel to not be derivative of the original work is to shoot the details, and that is very much the example here; the scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition Noma Bridge stata
photo is framed to capture only about 10% of the overall fascia of the building, allowing it to be recognizable for its overall design but still providing a very different perspective than you would see by simply walking past on a snowy day like I did. Marked out with such powerful narrative drive, your portraits - as the interesting Spotlight and Disinclination - unveil hidden details of the identity of your characters to manifest: what’s your philosophy on the nature of portraiture? How do you select the people that you decide to include in your artworks? Josh Alvies: Truth be told, I very rarely work with people. I would love to do it more often, but I find that I’m not really the best director of live models and still have work to do in improving my communication with subjects who often have their own expectations for their time in front of the camera. For me, it’s a tricky thing and I am always envious of those who have mastered it! The two pieces you mention, they work well because they feature two people who I know extremely well; the former piece is my own daughter, and the latter is my wife, though the photos were made a decade apart. My daughter, in particular, grew up an extremely willing model, as I began her life with a project to shoot a quality photo of her every single day of her first year. Now that she’s nearly a teenager, she is much more resistant to spending time in front of the camera, so I’m glad that I had that experience with her when she was much younger! In a controversial quote, German photographer Thomas Ruff stated that ''nowadays you don't have to paint to be an artist: you can photography 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? Josh Alvies: I think that this is the true struggle of the age for photographers, or at least it is for me. I think it’s really at the core of my overall aesthetic that you’ve mentioned already, in fact, because so many of the photos I make are taken directly from the same natural environment that we all can experience. In order to create something that people want to think about and not merely look at, it has to be something worth thinking about, and not the same photo that is taken by dozens of tourists at the same time and the same place. That said, on some level I love that photography has become so ubiquitous. As someone who didn’t have an opportunity to learn things like darkroom technique growing up, I know that I wouldn’t have started down the path I’m on now without the democratization brought about by digital photography, and if the “price” we have to pay for this is that everyone is a scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Josh Alvies Land The Fields
Spotlight
photographer, I think on balance that’s a good thing. The audience who wants to see something different than a tourist photo will always seek out the art, and that audience will only grow as more people work to hone their own skills with a camera. How do you consider the nature of the relationship with your audience? More specifically, 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? Josh Alvies: I myself am very new to Insta (and can be found @joshalviesphotos) so it’s all a learning experience for me. As someone whose day job is in the tech industry, I find some aspects of the modern, always-online methodology of finding an audience to be tiresome, and the reliance on finding something that goes viral to make a name for oneself is daunting. But as I said earlier, the democratization of the art that has been unlocked by technological advances is inspiring, and to be sure I would certainly not be having this conversation with you today without it. I came into this field loving the idea of having printed and framed work in a gallery space, where everything is just so present and really lends itself to examination, no matter what the media. But as I’ve started to learn more about the thousands of people out there with their own points of view on using the same resources I have, I find it really refreshing. Of course, a few thousand new followers on Instagram wouldn’t break my heart, they’re welcome any time! 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, Josh. What projects are you currently working on, and what are some of the ideas that you hope to explore in the future? Josh Alvies: Thanks so much for including me, it’s been a real pleasure. I recently returned from a very quick trip to see a friend in Pensacola, Florida, and had just enough time to get a few quick infrared photos from their lovely beaches that I hope will be interesting when I find time to process them. With autumn around the corner, I’ll again become the unofficial sports photographer for my daughter’s soccer team, which is always a fun pursuit in its own way. And, of course, I will always be on the lookout for something new here in southern Louisiana as the seasons change. From there, who knows? I hope your readership will find out with me. Josh Alvies scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator [email protected]
Hello Alice and welcome to LandEscape. Before starting to elaborate about your artistic production we would start this interview with a couple of questions about your background. You have a solid formal training: you hold a Bachelor of Arts in Environmental Sociology, Dance, and Sustainable Agriculture, that you received from the Hampshire College: how do these formative years influence your evolution as an artist? Alice Grendon: One of the greatest influences Day Dreamin’, is a screendance created by movement and performance artist Alice Grendon of Growing Wildhearted. The film is a product of the time in which it was created, during the heart of the corona virus pandemic lockdown. Day Dreamin', explores the Ground Hog Day nature of containment and isolation, contrasted with the escape offered through dream space. The film tells the story of a person struggling to get out of bed, preferring the excitement of the semi-lucid morning dreamscape to the presumed monotony awaiting in the day ahead. Filmed along the shorelines and forests of the Salish Sea the film invites the viewer to connect with the landscape and the more-than-human world as place of wonder and imagination. In their body of work with Growing Wildhearted, Grendon consistently works with the natural world as collaborator(s) in the process of making. Their movement is informed by the land, water, and species they dance on and with, as exemplified in their other works such as Koi and Company | Pond Portal and Ruminations on Water. Day Dreamin’ is no exception to this collaborative practice. In their art making practice Grendon aims to use dance film, installation, and live performance as a medium for facilitating connection between the viewers and the natural world. They wish to inspire greater care for and curiosity about the spaces and places where we dwell, and they strive to weave the cultural context and history of place into the work they create. This site-based film contains an emotional range reflected in the colors of the landscape: from a grey depressive state, to vibrant fanciful delight, as told through the movement of the body. The film connects with the viewers own range of emotion and experience living through the early 2020’s, offering a common shared experience as an entry point into the world of Day Dreamin’. An interview by Josh Ryder, curator and Melissa C. Hilborn, curator [email protected] Land scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW LandEscape meets Alice Grendon
on my evolution as an artist predates my formal training in undergraduate school. I grew up under the mentorship of dance pedagogue Anne Green Gilbert who created The Brain Dance and a whole pedagogy of “Brain Compatible Dance Education” and Creative Dance that has been taught all over the world. Anne believes in empowering even very young children with the tools to express their innate creativity and part of her pedagogy includes teaching composition and choreography techniques as early as age 7. Hence I have been making dance since I was a very small child, and I feel incredibly lucky to grow up with that kind of dance training. In my formal dance education within the Five College Dance Department, via the Hampshire College Dance Program I was nurtured by so many amazing teachers and mentors, in particular Deborah Goffe of Scapegoat Garden. Deb was the first person to tell me, while watching rehearsal footage of a piece I was making, that I had a cinemagraphic eye, and to encourage my explorations into dancefilm as well as influencing and supporting my inclinations towards multi-media, audience involved performance art, and dance in nontraditional settings. Hampshire College as a whole is a very unique institution where students guide their own course of study and “create their own majors,” as a result it is extremely interdisciplinary, which greatly influenced the way I make dance through/with a variety of mediums and the ways that present and share dance. Additionally, because Hampshire is a space for self-starters and one has to do so much self-motivating, I really had to learn how to identify exactly what I needed for any particular project and learn to then seek out the resources to accomplish it. This has proved to be incredibly important in my life as an artist. For this special edition of LandEscape we have selected Day Dreamin' a stimulating performative dance video — and that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article — and that scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition
can be viewed at https://youtu.be/wWyVTqcApk. What has at once captured our attention of your work is the way it unveil the connections between ordinary life experience and the dreamlike dimension, highlighting at the same time the uniqueness of the viewers' response to the work of art. When walking our readers through the genesis of Day Dreamin', would you tell us something about your usual setup and process? Alice Grendon scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land
Alice Grendon: I created Day Dreamin’ during the heart of the Coronavirus lockdown. I was thinking a lot about constriction and confinement and the way for many of us our homes began to feel like a trapped place. At this time both the outdoors and my dream life were places of freedom and expansiveness. So I wanted to play with those two places – the space of confinement, and the space of playfulness and freedom – which is what lead scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition
to Day Dreamin’. I was also thinking a lot about the “Ground Hog Day” (the 1993 film) nature of life in pandemic, in which every day easily could run into the next with very little change. At times my dreams changed a lot more than my waking hours, and so this contrast between adventuring in ones dreams and monotony in the waking hours became another thread in the creation of Day Dreamin’. Day Dreamin' reflects a conscious shift regarding the reciprocal dialogue between environment and performative gestures: how would you consider the relationship between the necessity of scheduling the details of the performance and the need of spontaneity? How importance does improvisation play in your practice? Alice Grendon: Much of my dance practice is built out of improvisation, particularly when I am dancing outdoors, with a particular place, or natural element. In many of my other dance films, all of the movement is improvised, or set within a loose improve score (a score is a set of directions or tasks, but does not typically set specific movement or choreography). My favorite dance partner is the pacific ocean and I am currently working on a piece called Sea Inside, in which the movement is heavily directed by the tides themselves. Interestingly, Day Dreamin’ by contrast to my other films and site-specific work was largely set, choreographed movement. I had created a couple initial movement phrases that we filmed in different locations throughout Woodard Bay, the conservation area where Day Dreamin’ was filmed. I believe that even in the most precise choreography there is always an element of improvisation in performance, because dance is never quite the same twice. And because each individual dancers execution or interpretation of choreography is unique to their body and Alice Grendon scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land
scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition expression. With site-specific choreography the landscape itself presents yet another factor, and so as I do the same phrase of movement in different locations throughout the conservation area the movement is influenced by the changing ground beneath my feet, by the direction of the wind at that very moment, and by the birds and plants that make their way into the movement and into the frame of the camera. Some parts of the film involved interaction with specific places and life forms within Woodard Bay, such as the stand of trees that act as a “portal” of sorts between the dream world and the scenes in the bedroom, these parts of the film required a type of presence with those places and beings, such as the trees, that only improvisation could provide. Hence, those portions of the film are entirely improvised. We definitely love the way your mise-enscène that mixes the ordinary and the surreal. More specifically, we appreciate its visual ambivalence, able to urge the spectatorship to a participative effort, to realize their own interpretation: how do you consider the relationship between reality and imagination, playing within your artistic production? Alice Grendon: I have always been a lover of surrealist art, because to be it makes visible what is already very real within the mind. I have a very active and colorful imagination and experience of the world which I try to bring across in my art, especially in working with film. I am not sure that reality and imagination or really all that separate and so I like to play with combining and contrasting the sense of the two as differing states which can blend together. I believe our dreams both at night and our day dreams are a very important part of creative life force, eros, presence, there are many words for it, that force that brings us alive. The film is an invitation to realize and find that energy amidst the mundane day to day of living which we come to understand as our reality. There is an
expansiveness in dreaming that invites us to new and different ways of being and which we can follow until it becomes our reality. To me that is the importance of dreams and of imagination, it can shift and change entire lives and societies. I don’t believe anything can become reality if it’s not imagined first. So it feels like a Alice Grendon scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land
powerful line to play with and to blur. Your artistic production offers a critical political point of view of the ways the human body is perceived, utilized, and valued in relationship with the landscape in the current time. Artists from different art movement and eras — from pioneer Richard Morris, passing through scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition
Thomas Light and Andy Goldsworthy, to more recently Kelly Richardson— use to communicate more or less explicit messages in their artworks: do you think that artists can Alice Grendon scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land raise awareness to an evergrowing audience on topical issues that affect our everchanging society? In particular, as an how do you consider the role of artists in our globalised and unstable society? Alice Grendon: Yes, I believe artists play a crucial role in shaping politics and society, in large part due to what I articulated above about imagination and reality. Art acts as a botha mirror to soceity and a portal. It can be a mirror showing society what it is in the present, and through the power of imagination and creation it can be a portal to knew realities. I think often of the age old question “is it art mimiking life or life mimiking art?” This is why I feel it is very important to be intentional as an artist about what I create, I want to create work that both in the procecss of making it and in the work itself embodies the values I hold around justice and care of eachother and the earth. As the threats brought on by climate change worsen we are poised in a moment where we have the opprotunity to work globaly towards our collective safety, health, and well being, at the same moment that socieites and governmnets throughout the world are falling apart or falling into deep dysfunction and coruption. I think that Art has a unique way of touching our deepest places of knowing, and touching the heart that unites all people. In this way I think art and artists play a critical role in this time where we have the choice to unite as a global community to protect our common home and eachother, or let greed strip of us what is commonly held. In my view Art belongs to the commons and is a vechicle for the commons and for change. The artist both sounds the alarm bell and gathers the masses, and the artist lights the way forward through thier vision.
Drawing inspiration from the specifics of Salish Sea's environment, Day Dreamin' is shot with a keen eye to details able to highlight the resonance between human body and the qualities of its surroundings: we daresay that this aspect of your practice addresses the viewers to unveil the ubiquitous bond between our inner landscape and outside reality. How do you consider the relationship between space and human body playing within your artistic research? Alice Grendon: I am always working at the intersection of the body/dance/and movmement and the land/environment/and place. One of the aims of my art is to help viewers see themsleves in the land and the places we reside, in hopes that if we can see ourselves as integrally connected with place we will take better care of the palces we dwell. On the molecular level my bones and tissues are made up of the foods from the place I grew up and minerals in the water I drank as a child, my body is literally from this land and this watershed, and it will return to it someday. In this way I feel that I am not sepearte from the landscape and the natural world, and so it will always be an influence and a collaborator in anyting I create. Spending so much time dancing with specific places and landscapes I have come to feel that land shapes my movement in both direct and indirect ways. The topography below my feet will directly shape the movement I do because it directs what is physically possible in a given spot. The feeling in my that is evoked by a particular view of the sea or sound of a sea bird or smell of the sea life will shape what movement comes out to express the feeling evoked by the landscape. I think too about how the movement of the natural world, such as waves or wind, is echoed inside the human body in the movement and functions of our organs, and can be echoed in our expressive movements and dancing as well. I hope to be in life long conversation and communion with my environment in this way. scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition
Sound plays a crucial role in your dance video and we have highly appreciated the way it provides the footage of Day Dreamin' with such poetic ambience, able to create such multilayered involvement with your audience: how did you structure the combination between the performance and music in order to achieve such brilliant result? More generally, how would you consider the relationship between performative gestures and sound? Alice Grendon scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land
Alice Grendon: My process typically invovles choreographing in silence or with just the sounds of the world around me, birds chirping, cars passing, the wind blowing, indistinct chatter of neighbors. I then follow that with finding music or sound that feels like it fits the movment. I can frequently be found trying out a phrase with 20 different songs until I find the right one. I know it’s a fit when the music seridipidously aligns with scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition
the existing movement and gesture in a way that accentuates or brings out a gensture at just the right moment. It’s like find a well fitting pair of trousers, the body is already there, and the right tayloring bings out this or that curve. This is where the dancing comes into collaboration with the sound because the sound pulls out new emphasis. For Day Dreamin’ I knew I wanted to use Mozart. I was looking for a particular playful quality that classical music when paired with the right mise-en-scene, can evoke. I played raw footage back with dozens of Mozart compositions and arrangments by different ensambles, until I found the one that brought out the particular quality I was seeking. You are a versatile artist and your production encompasses dance film, installation, and live performance as a medium for facilitating connection between the viewers and the natural world. Many artists express the ideas that they explore through representations of the body and by using their own bodies in their creative processes. German visual artist Gerhard Richter once underlined that "it is always only a matter of seeing: the physical act is unavoidable": how do you consider the relation between the abstract feature of the ideas you aim to communicate and the physical act of creating your artworks? Alice Grendon: In my proccess I trust that the ideas I am thinking about don’t just live in my brian they also live in my body. So I will go into the studio or into the landscape/place I am working with and after meditating on the subject mater invite whatever movment comes to arise, using that as the basis of chroegorpahy. When working with multiple dancers I often design improv scores or questions to seed movement with that structures the movement around a particular idea or concept. Sometimes this also looks like a mix of discussion followed by movement, followed by discussion. Even if there is not scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Alice Grendon Land
spoken text in the final product of what I create, which there frequently is, it’s usually the case that speaking through ideas while moving, almost as a stream of consiousness can be part of my making process. I believe that bodies are not nuteral, we each carry our own cultural context with us, as does the viewer. So I understand that regardless of the ideas I hope to communicate through my body, the viewer will always read my body and its movement through the lens of culture and the various naratives we hold about differnet bodies. This aspect of creating is outside of my control, it is part of what feels vaulnerable about making art and offering it up publicily to others, it is always open to interpertation. And that is part of the beauty of it too. I let it move through me and then I surrender it to the world and to others to hold what they witness however they expeirence it. It is an act of faith in many ways. 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? In particular, how do you consider the nature of your relationship with your audience? Alice Grendon: With the expansion of the internet as a globalizing force the nature and presentaion of art is certianly changing. Because so much of my work is site specific and place based I really value nurturing relationship with a local audience and attempt to use live performance as a vehcile for community building at the local level. That said, because I also work in film I have the ability to share my work with a much wider audience. Many dance artists began to explore working in film a lot more as a reslut of the coronavirus pandemic because it was the only safe way to share our work. Although I had been working with screendance for several years, I too was caught up in this wave. scape CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW Land Special Edition