We take a look back at AIR 14's final show, titled Way In/Way Out, at Textile Arts Center for our second part of Exhibition Diaries.
In Way In/ Way Out the artists draw from their shared histories and unique experiences to explore and imagine future possibilities and build alternate realities within our landscape. The cohort explored concepts around emotion, beauty, chaos, value, and protection, with heart and humor.
During their final exhibition we had the chance to sit down with some of the AIR 14 artists and learn a little bit more about their work. In this second blog post we’ll share what Jasmine Murrell, Kat Sours, and Cynthia Chang had to share about the passions and inspirations behind their practice.
Jasmine Murrell
Jasmine Murrell is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary visual artist born in Detroit, Michigan. Murrell is an abstract artist who pulls from various mediums to create spaces that are familiar but also otherworldly. She strives to create work that feels like being somewhere beyond this planet while being a part of this planet. The raw material is never neutral and the work that is generated from these materials carries the power of its story.
She has exhibited nationally and internationally in venues such as the Museum of Contemporary Art; the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Bronx Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the African-American Museum of Art, and the International Museum of Photography.
Murrell has been a resident artist at the Bronx Museum AIM program, Baxter St. Gallery workspace, BRIClab contemporary art residency, Textile Arts Center and Block Gallery workspace. Her work has been included in the book MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora, and The New York Times, Time Magazine, Hyperallergic, The Detroit Times, Ebony Magazine, The Washington Post, ArtNews, and several other publications.
Romina: In your statement, you talk about historical erasure. Is it in relation to the women's role or could you expand on it?
Jasmine: Well, there's a whole history of how the black body is used in photography. And definitely in the modern ages, we have more than ever before more diverse perspectives of the black body and especially the black female body in photography, in film, or in art, or in textiles. And I wanted to, as I know that like we're all growing and we're all kind of dying and we're all like everything is really not meant to live forever. And I think that psychologically this fear, as humans, we're kind of like stuck in that of trying to capture and stay at this moment in time and not really finding how such miraculous life is and to be around someone that has been on the planet for a century or half a century and how, you know, that this is like something really special.
I personally, even as a young artist, I never really was really interested in capturing younger bodies, you know, and I felt like there was always this presence of when the female body was in the frame that it was these kind of like just hypersexual kind of just stereotypical Yeah, inventions and myths of being a woman, you know, and even in art, you know, and I was really drawn to the imperfections, you know, the scars and the folds and that really described the story that are that's within our bodies. And it also is really healing for me to deal with the pressures of me being a young woman and feeling that me being inadequate and my body being imperfect and never at this right place.
And I wanted to create art where, that we can actually look at the elders in our family in a different light and not have this kind of generational gap.
Romina:Because with that, I want to ask you about the pieces, about the work of art that you have in the room that now, right now, that is titled Heavenly Bodies, that I think relates beautifully to what you just described. Could you tell us a little bit about the pieces we're seeing?
Jasmine:
I wanted to create work where, like, some of these photographs are... They were all taken from me, and they're printed... on fabric, and they're sewn, and they're, some are woven, and there's a kind of mixture of sculpture and photography and painting as well. And I was really thinking about formally like how could I create these kind of portraits where when I was taking these, these were kind of women that were working with the water crisis in Flint and Detroit, where like 30% of the population doesn't have access to water, which has affected the infant mortality rate.
And I didn't want to do something that was like a literal kind of interpretation, but I wanted to show these kind of matriarchal women that were like, mothers and grandmothers that were really invisible in the fight, but they were like the grassroots organizations that are most of the time you don't ever get to see who they are, but they're like the ones that are like making sure that everyone's OK and everyone has water and and they're really fighting with limited resources. So I wanted to show something about these women that are creating their own medicine, but within a really toxic environment and how miraculous and how phenomenal and powerful they are. So yeah, that's really, yeah, those are really are kind of the backbone of them. And I was thinking about For instance, I'm really obsessed with hands and I think anyone is. Think about where those hands come from and who the hands that go into making something and that we have no idea where it comes from. What someone's life is being used to make this plastic thing. And so I wanted to formally use color texture in the tapestries to really describe yeah those kind of ways in like a formal, abstract way and mixed with photography and thinking about like the fragility of hands and especially our elders hands. and the power of those hands.
Jasmine: I can't help but every time I use a material or something that it has already, it has its own history. And even though I'm using this material, I'm buying it, or I'm finding it, or I am weaving it, or sewing it, it has this kind of history. And I'm collaborating with that history. I wanted to... I wanted to really think about the kind of complexities of this space, you know, like living, being an American artist and being on this land and knowing this land has a certain history and especially a certain history to people of African descent. And I'm always thinking a lot about like where these materials come from, and the labor that comes not only just from machines, but kind of like slave labor somewhere else.
Kat Sours
Kat Sours is a New York-based artist who connects physical and emotional feelings through textiles. Kat combines traditional textile practices like knitting and embroidery with unconventional mediums, such as latex, rubbers and vinyl. She is constantly pushing the limits of materiality and considers herself and her practice to be that of a scientist experimenting in a lab. She desires an understanding of how texture and form can evoke a psychological response. She seeks to create textiles so visceral they can almost be felt with the eyes. Sours investigates connections between the physical and psychological, considering how feelings, memories and words can be experienced through tactility, form and color.
Romina:Hi, Kat. Could you please introduce yourself, tell us your name, where you're from, where you're based, and a little bit about your practice?
Kat: Yes. Hi, I'm Kat Sowers. I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, and I'm based here in Brooklyn, New York. A little bit about my practice. It's kind of at the convergence point of art and science, and I investigate the duality of feeling and touch. So like to feel an object and to feel an emotion or touching something physically and being touched by something psychologically, like those, the paradox between the language around touch and then like, you know, to touch and to feel touched and a lot of my practice is about material exploration. I would consider myself to be a material artist, so I'm, I compare myself often to a scientist in the lab. So I'm going in and exploring materials and going through a scientific process where I'm making hypotheses and then doing experiments and going through trial and error to come up with conclusions and ask more questions, and it's very cyclical. Previously, before I started the residency, my work was mainly about yeah, like physical touch, like touch deprivation. I recently graduated or not recently, but like two years ago, I graduated with my degree in fibers and my thesis was about touch and the lack of touch that we had during COVID or a touch being sort of like a privilege and also studied different psychological like disorders or different like ways that we desire touch or are repulsed by touch or different textures. So I studied children with autism and how they are averse to certain textures. I grew up when I was younger, I had this disorder called sensory responsivity disorder, where I would have these really violent reactions to certain textures and also would be super attracted to certain textures and I outgrew it. A lot of kids outgrow it, but it's typically manifested in different things in adulthood. I have OCD and I am very responsive to certain tactile environments as comforting or stressful and anxiety-inducing. I just was thinking a lot about touch and connectivity. And then after I finished that body of work, I'd sort of stepped away from those ideas and wanted to start exploring something new. And I was thinking about like, you know, where I am in my life and in my practice, like being out of school and probably going to go back to school at some point and being in this residency.
And also culturally, like kind of where I we are, after years of being inside and not knowing how to exist in the world, and I started thinking about liminality and sort of the space in between what is and what will be, and, like, liminality isn't always true. It's sort of like a distortion, is like how it's defined and I was exploring how liminality could be captured through a tactile or visual experience. And at the same time, I started exploring new materials. So before, I'd mainly been working with resins, rubbers, a lot of petroleum-based plastic that are, honestly, they're great materials in terms of how they behave and what they can do, but they're... not great for you or the environment. You have to work with them in really controlled, safe, ventilated environments that I didn't have access to. So I started exploring bio materials, bio alternatives to those materials that I was using. And I kind of fell in love with the process of working with these bio materials and compiled a lot of research and I became so consumed with the process of experimenting with materials and then seeing what would work and what didn't work, and sometimes what didn't work or work out how I thought it would ended up being the answer to whatever question I was asking. Interestingly enough, as I was thinking about liminality and liminal spaces, biomaterials themselves are in a sense, liminal, because they're constantly in a state of transition. They're basically living, or they're made from, like, living ingredients, so they're not stable. Like, this eventually will turn into, like, a goo that is not, like, it's going to warp and change color, and if you put it in water, it'll dissolve. So, yeah, it's subject to change in the way of, like, it's liminal. Yeah, I like to call the bioplastics liminal materials to make a liminal object. Yeah. Nice.
Romina:
And you also mentioned that it's going to disintegrate with time. I see one part that is already separating itself. Yeah. How do you feel that temporality enters into play in your work?
Kat:
Yeah, it's so difficult for me, kind of, or it was. Like, I feel so attached to my work, and I love it because I made it, and it's, you know, like labor, but also it's a part of me. So at first, when I started working just with these types of materials, I was really... Like, I feel like I would say, like, oh, well, it's temporary, and that is, you know, important to the work, and that's what the work is about. But I would say it kind of with, like, a grimace on my face.
And it actually is... Now I think there are ways to preserve it, but it is beautiful that it can just actually have a life and... change the way that we change and grow and die and Yeah, so I mean I mean I still actually feel a little It's weird like I'm not it's not something that I'm used to But it's even with the other Like when I was working with petroleum plastics, they changed too. They don't stay the same forever like some of my work from college is starting to turn yellow and, like, leak different substances. The plastic changes um I like often reference, uh, Eva Hess in my work. Um, she's, was, like, the pioneer of material artists, um, process artists. And, um, yeah, I mean, her work now is completely different. It's, like, almost, some of it you can't, can't be shown anymore. It has to be restored because it's made with fiberglass and latex that has turned yellow and brown. So yeah, I mean, I like to think of this in a similar way. Like maybe this will exist in 30 years, but it will look different or it just won't exist at all. And that's in a way kind of amazing because there's so much stuff that just exists in the world that, this has, you know, grown and lived and died and yeah.
Romina:
Also, you mentioned the lack of resources to learn from this, and you told me previously that you start giving classes. How do you see the communal aspect of this?
Kat:
Yeah, I think it's amazing. It's not what I expected to happen for me starting to explore these materials, but I think it's amazing being able to share this information and see other artists apply these materials to their practice. It honestly brings me the most joy. Like I just love it so much. I love teaching and sharing information and yeah, building community around biomaterials because people interpret them in different ways and use them in different ways. And it really just takes having a synthesized like source of resources and recipes. So yeah, I'm excited to keep teaching here and sharing that information. And I mean, I'd like to eventually be able to, you know, synthesize all of the information into like a book or like a, just a, like a place where it can all exist together. And someone like me who is looking for, you know, all the information, they can just find it in one place. And I'm so happy to provide it. Um, yeah, especially for artists, not necessarily people, you know, cause it's, it's science, but you know, some, um, we're not all scientists, so making it more accessible for artists and not feeling so daunting or like they have to go to the ends of the earth to seek the information out.
Cynthia Chang
Cynthia Chang is dumb like a dog dragging their butt across the pavement, but smart and resourceful even, because that’s a good way to scratch an itch, but maybe a good idea is just incidental. Through textiles, ceramics, wood, performance, sound, tattooing, and whatever else they can freak, Chang labors and explores the aesthetics of humor with a heavy and imprecise hand.
Cynthia Chang (b. 1990, they/them/theirs) is a multimedia maker living in Queens, NY. They are the founder of defunct fashion brand Something Happening and perform as a dollar store budget popstar under the moniker boiled wool.
Cynthia: This work is part of a larger series that I'm working on that the culmination of will be a video that's sort of exploring this world that I'm creating with my collaborator Divya Gandangi. It's using themes from tarot and astrology and Jungian archetypes to explore the ways in which we're, I feel like in a specific social group, looking to those forms of divination as for answers in this world that everything is falling apart, everything is feeling super uncertain. I'm working on these pieces that are combining my sound practice with my garment making and my background as a sculptor, wanting to create these objects that also function to make noise and then use the noises from them to sample them and create soundscapes using those noises.
Romina: I'm interested in the mention of collaboration and accessibility. Could you tell me how that enters into play in your art practice?
Cynthia: Well, with making clothes, because a lot of the collections I've done, my models have been my friends who are mostly queer and trans people of color. I think they have definitely informed like how the clothing ends up because I always want to make sure they're comfortable. And I did do a project that was interviewing different people around like what would be validating or what they like to wear and then constructing those clothes out of clothes that they found were causing them dysphoria, and then having them receive those clothes as gifts. But it's hard to balance those things. And I think I'm trying to collaborate more to navigate those types of relationships or to figure out, in individual circumstances, how much people want to give, how much I feel comfortable taking, when is it a collaboration, and when should someone just be getting paid.
Romina: Okay. I get it. Thank you.
Romina: Going back to this piece, I'm interested in the choice of materials. Could you talk about that?
Cynthia: Yeah. I... I mean, to me, well, with the chewing gum, I think... I think because I was working... Everything felt so technical, like doing a lot of woodworking, sanding, using a torch, hammering, trying to shape it in a certain way, that it felt like a relief to me to have that looseness. And there was also a point at the end where I was trying to attach things, and the hardware store was closed that day, so I couldn't get dowels. And then I was like, colored pencils, that's great. And that also felt like a relief to me because I think, yeah, spending so much time trying to make this work that is about humor and then I feel like so serious in making that work, it's like I need to just like fall on my own banana peel or like punch myself or like have a bucket above my head full of, it's too, it becomes too, like when I'm taking myself too seriously, it feels bad to be making that work in that way.