01.12.2013 - 07.02.2014
It has been a while since I have written about particular residents on this blog. I started out with the intention of honouring everyone of my guests with a short personal summary of their practice as I had experienced it in Trelex. But blog writing is quite time consuming, and I can sense that it's a bit of hassle for the residents too.
The intention of the blogs by residents and by me was also to give so many windows into what it is like to work and live in Trelex and of the variety of Artists that are welcomed (though we could do with more writers and musicians, it seems to me!).
Still, I wanted to share just two little pieces by Luuk and Hesoo who came for a few months to Trelex. You will have seen photos on the FaceBook page for the residency of the screen printing facilities they constructed: drying rack suspended on pulleys from the rafters, screen printing table with recycled bottle counterweight, and UV exposure box complete with storage for two screens.
And in between all this, Luuk and Hesoo managed to contribute to a group show in Fribourg and make a lot of work.
For the first one, I am rather relieved I wasn't in the studio. Luuk is walking in a figure of eight on the rafters and the two 4m walls on caster wheels (!) giving us a very unusual view of the part of the studio which is double height. The piece is caller Measurement 3 and is consistent with previous works by Luuk (website here) in which he uses video to measure or pace out a space following an almost mathematical logic. Works like these are almost always shown as a loop: the artistic measurement is never complete somehow, has no obvious beginning or end, like more classical scientific measurements. And so the measurement becomes formally useless and perfectly absurd.
Hesoo shone a projector out of the window of the residency, onto the little copse in the garden, on a very foggy night. The intention was to experiment with creating one of her floating frames of illumination which she then photographs for works that are both dramatic and oddly mundane (see examples on her website here). Instead the mist was so thick that the light never quite reached the trees and just seem to hang in the air. On the floor below, my husband got out of bed to look for the moon that would give such strange light. It was a very special moment and one which feels emblematic to me now. The residency looks like a lighthouse, created wonder and curiosity. It has attracted many people who are cautiously curious about contemporary art and has been a forum for many a discussion about what it is all about. I can't help but hope that there will one day be a network of these places: safe havens for artists and guiding lights for everyone else.
