A Solfège Souche is by definition the root of a forgotten connection with nature. In our time of rapid advancement in technology, we stand on a Vantasner Meridian. Is it dangerous if we do not know what we stand to lose? The video works with movements, light, body, sounds reminiscent of a basic fiber of existence: humans are part of nature. In an effort to portray a relationship with nature, instead of a dominance over nature.
Rachel Wolfe was born in Illinois, and trained in dance, piano, and voice. Her meditative works are informed by observation and inquiry into beauty and sensual feeling. A world experienced through synesthesia informs her inquiry into the Vision and Body relationship through themes of water, terrain, sound, and ways of embodied knowing. Value, depth, texture, colour as related to our feeling of intelligence. At times the work appears otherworldly, saturated, sublime, nearly unreal-but the images and installations made are always about aspects deeply tied to reality. Wolfe holds a Master of Fine Art from Otis College of Art and Design, and a Bachelor of Art in Advertising, with studies in Interior Design. Awards and artist residences include Trélex Residency (Switzerland), PRAXIS Oslo ad Praxis festivalen Tricia Brown (Norway), First Place by the Jury, Imagining New Eurasia Exhibition (South Korea), Woelffer Scholarship and Academic Merit Award, Otis College of Art and
Design (USA), Academic Scholarship for Social Psychology (Japan), Historic Pathways, Indiana State University (USA). The Print Ateliér of Montréal, represents images from Human Needs.
The video (blatantly) depicts fetishisation modern pop culture made out of nature as a means for marketing to machine assisted generations. In the absence of physical labor, mental and emotional labors are extracted as modes for perpetuating life processes. Audio by Ben Sound
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Genesis 1:1
As if out of nothing, after two years of cogitating the possibility of making an exhibition that would speak deeply of our longing for a reconnection of body and spirit, Ex Nihilo comes together embracing difference and individuality. Even though the titled, Ex Nihilo, was chosen two years ago, Pieve di San Cresci, a special place-space emerged out of nothing presenting us with the very same question, which we have thrown in the deepest void vacuum of ideas, and desires that reside nowhere but within us. Building blocks began falling into place until it physically appeared in the most magical way, building our confidences and throwing us back into the unknown. This exhibition was conceived to be a communion and an exchange among those artists, with themselves and with the space that it inhabits. The display of the art objects was designed in harmony with what is, to create what it can be. Creation, therefore, becomes a movement from inside out outside in, in the particularity of everyone’s heart.
Ex Nihilo installation is dedicated to putting form to an ongoing dialogue with 5 international, women artists.
In our attempts to make sense of the strength and fragility of human life, we began to speak about how things come together, take form, and from what often appears as out of nowhere from nothing.
Latin for ‘of nothing,’ Ex Nihilo installation focuses on existence, conditions of the body, and the ‘Barely There’ nature found in artwork of women.
Ex Nihilo looks at the emergent qualities of a given situation and the space from which the exchange, like 5 elements of nature, 4 plus void, the appearance of nowhere comes from a combined dynamic.
What artist Rachel Wolfe calls: “la beaux monde creatif,” is the ‘Barely There’ thing that emerges from an ongoing conversation of trust, collaboration, and witness as it forms the basis for making, it’s also an often over looked, because of its immaterial qualities. While immaterial, the ‘thing’ made from emergence is for sure not “no-thing.”
When artist Sweet Samson invented the term: “Nesslessness,” ‘ness’ the essence of something denoting quality and state, -‘less’ “without,” the state of being without state, the essence of empty, what does this feel like? Something so empty, it becomes full, full of possibility.
The question Points of Connection, Ex Nihilo continues to ask: How to make present the sense of mercurial absence, from which life force flows?
In continuing the work of Ex Nihilo, we 5 artists working together realize and expand themes of work to include ways women-as-seers historically have been made ‘Barely There.’ We take this quality into our forms, and let it inform, in a positive way together.
When we see each other, presence takes shape as an offering, a gift, and the ‘Barely There’ echo of possibility transformed into the something emergent from Ex Nihilo.
– Jamie Grace Davis, exhibiting artist in residency at La Macina di San Cresci
Shroud, 2017 Hand patched silk, mirror, and wig 79 x 56 and 79 x 56 cm
Mimicking the church floor considers the importance of primitivism. The conquering of countries development of their own hegemony, we now call identity. I believe humans are more ritualized than before. Black satin emphasizes mourning we are born with and how a self is in juxtaposition with pedagogy. A mirror beside the satin checkered tile rug symbolizes freedom of the underworld as our ancestors believed, the wig signifying a once lively eternity.
The Bones Sculptures, 2017 Unfired clay and wood sticks 295 x 138 cm
Form and Formless, an abstraction from the core of our bodies, there, but unseen. We all share: “bones.” These are imagined bodiless bones made of clay, turning to dust.
The Garden, 2017 Installation design, co-curation by Marcella Gottardo.
“The Garden” is an exploration in what artist Andre Feliciano calls “Floressiance.” By themselves these paintings are small moments of ‘nothing.’ Together, the whole experience becomes something to take in, all at once, a feast for the senses. The room is heavy in orange fragrance. 🍊
Soudad, 2015-ongoing Acrylic painting on bed sheet Queen
“Soudad” An Arabic word, about ‘journey’ loosely translated: “to see from the highest place of your dreams.” I have been taking this painting with me to every location of Points of Connection. It has all the indexical marks from all the other paintings I have made along the way. It’s a registration. The shapes form themselves through layers of time, trust, and highly calculated risk. It’s the thing that’s always underneath all the other paintings, the thing most unseen. It has become the provisional, situational foundation.
“If I take this thing and reposition it, over and over and do things to and put it in different circumstances, when and how will that thing take on that ‘Barely There’ quality? Things that are the most discarded have this. Things that travel a lot have this. What goes into making something that has a magnetic presence no matter how simple it appears?
I’m interested in how an aura is actually formed. What is the mechanism?
Walter Benjamin wrote: “We know that the earliest art works originated in the service of a ritual—first the magical, then the religious kind. It is significant that the existence of the work of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual function.”
Ritual is a form of repetition, a way of participation, to build a relationship with, to belong. Ritual is transforming discomfort into comfort, discord into balance and harmony, senselessness into meaning. When I think about this as relates to dance, I think about it in terms of gesture and posture. Gesture, an action repeated over and over and posture, a fixed shape. Posture emerges from the gesture itself, sometimes as a stop, a pause, a wobble, of its own volition. This can be applied to mark making in a painting.
All the pours, casts, imprints and registrations: are from gesture. The fixed appearance of movement, posture.
Between the two things of gesture and posture is something else -something ‘Barely There.’
The Language of the Sun, 2016 Ceramics, plaster, and galvanized iron 430 cm x 320 cm
Soon after moving to Italy, after living twelve years in the United States, I again became an immigrant. The burden of language, it’s limits, beauty, grace, and the continual sense of being misunderstood -even when standing in my own country, Brazil, granddaughter of Italian immigrants. The weight of the stars hit me, crush me, torn me upside-down, inside-out, fired me, freeze me as an un-programmed thermostat. Under yellow orange green brown oak trees, I walk, surrounded by ancient histories and mountains; I ponder the heart of lost civilizations buried beneath my feet. Homeland less, walking this land crushing leaves and bones, smelling blood and crying out, looking up and looking down, my littleness, meaningless existence.
While the morning dew reveals the spider trap among sweet purple flowers, the undisturbed mud beneath the water pond hides death and decadence. An accelerated unsettle heart craves more, beats thunders welcoming what cannot be possible known within words.
Teknovisuell Experience, detail of detail #5, 2015-2016 34 x 134 cm Photograph on vinyl
Memoria Technica is a series of 5 monolithic film exposures realized as seasons, axiomatically marking the vertical landscape in relationship with the human body in magnetic resonance imaging. The monolithic image as marker in the sense and perception of passage through time.
Works in Ex Nihilo: Summer, a caustic season; Spring, a vernal pour; Autumn, a hieratic vessel.
Teknovisuell Experience is a series of 7 images. Dimensions vary relative to Architecture. Images of water emphasize ethereal qualities of digital imaging technology and engage viewers in a physical relationship with the image/vision and body/space.
Rachel Wolfe (b. 1984) is an American-born artist and photographer, living in Norway since 2015. Her work is realized in mediums of images, installation, drawing, painting, video, performance, and traveling objects. The Print Atelier represents images from Human Needs.
Rooted in disciplines of dance, painting, drawing, piano, voice, Wolfe has been making solo and group projects, working with land, space, light, and photography since 1999. Theories in Chinese medicine influence her work navigating themes of beauty, sense, feeling.
Awards and scholarships include: 2015 First place by the jury, Imagining New Eurasia exhibition in Gwangju, South Korea. 2015 Woelffer scholarship and 2014 academic merit award from Otis College of Art and Design, 2013 Academic scholarship for social psychology study in Matsuyama Japan, 2009 Historic Pathways winner from Indiana State University.
QA:
U: Who are you and what do you do? RW: I am Rachel Wolfe I make art considering the site and utilizing materials and images of photography, including light, video, sound, and performance of body.
U: What characterizes your work? RW: Sensory dynamics in the nature of desire. Human, felt experiences are important in a bottom-up approach to understanding versus a concept-to-completion mode of working. Beauty services the process in various forms as elements of nature are always in the work.
U: How would you describe your personal style? RW: Based on what I am learned about style I would say everything must always be in service of dynamic movement.
U: How do your own experiences influence your work? RW: Synesthesia is something I thought everyone has but later came to find out, they certainly do not. I use my sensory sensitivities and route them through a process of omission relative to the site, and to a history I am interested in daisy chaining with.
U: What will you be showing at the uncontaminated festival? RW: I’ll be exposing ways of gazing upon a horizon to consider the perception of motion through time. This sense of temporality as a form of continuous movement and how that relates to bodily senses.
U: What do you want to communicate through your work? RW: Reverence as an important tool in agency. Trade economics are sometimes spoken of as a force in opposition of life, and in the sense of hurriedness or performance anxiety, one could certainly become at odds with their lives and relationships. My work is demanding in a subtle way of slowing down, that most to gain by giving in to what is working through choices with what’s there. My hope is locating an orientation of intrinsic desire and value-to go forward from an aesthetic experience with an embodied sense of wholeness.
U: Do artists of today have some kind of social responsibility? RW: Responsibility is such a rich space for conversation. Artists have the responsibility to keep making work, and to start talking with people in a way that doesn’t create an intellectual paywall.
U: What does uncontaminated mean for you? RW: Uncontaminated is an idea about an ideal. For example, the idea of blue blood or a form of purity that in reality is an impossibility. For example, mud is still always dirt. That kind of aspirational dreamstate feels a lot like a mental space one could achieve through traditional forms of meditation.
U: What is the most important thing in your life? RW: Being alive.
U: How do you feel right now? RW: I feel like having a proper bath. Where are all the bathtubs here?
U: If you could change one thing in the world today, what would it be? RW: Remind people the generative quality of cooperation and the value of a well-considered no.
U: What are the main reasons you are joining us for the festival this year? RW: I am interested in art and fashion and want to connect with people to learn about what they desire-what brings people out of their homes to connect with each other in public spaces.
U: Who or what do you value as a great inspiration for you creatively? RW: Opposing points of view from books, family, and friends. Paying more attention to noticing phenomena in nature. How many different ways can something I think I’ve seen a million times reveal something new about itself?
U: Can you elaborate on an important moment in your life where you experienced a big change, chose to make one or another event which altered your way of thinking or your approach to creativity? RW: Deciding to be the author of my time, which is a never ending dance I still trip over my own footing with. After decades of training, the red thread is making something out of the desire to make and create value in the satisfaction of the making process.
U: How does digital and social media affect or inspire your life and creations? RW: Being prone to affective disorders, I really try to keep an arms distance with the broadcast version of life. I wonder a lot about the ways in which the intimacy of viewing a distant life up close affects psychology and if there could be some kind of epigenetic change relative to the emotional change in media technology.
U: What do you define art? RW: Art requires discipline, something that is worked on by an artist and through a diligent practice and vision work is made. Is Duchamp’s urinal art today? No, that was an artefact as a testament of a notion that somehow art is one thing or another-that art is about ideas or feelings or one thing or the other. Art is art. To conflate art as anything other than the word itself services rhetoric or belief-both of which I am interested in being free from. I have a great faith in people and the ability to know. Art and artefact can have a close relationship but they are different. I as one among many people practicing art today may be in a practice of making artefacts more than art, and that’s something I’m always looking closely at within my work as well. Does this diminish what artists are making; I don’t think so. I do find the conversation valuable moving forward.
U: What is your definition of artistic freedom? RW: Discipline. Having gone through a phase of coming undone, and going in many directions, I’m in a process of refining.
U: Is there a difference for you between art and commercial/commissioned work? RW: Commissioned work has always been easier for me, to work in a dialogue. Making art for myself entails far more responsibility which then requires a lot more time. A few months at a residency can accomplish a lot, but it is still not the same as having years to work on art.
U: Do you struggle to find artistic freedom in the span between commissioned work and your personal needs to express yourself? RW: Personal expression is not an area I struggle with or work with in my art.
U: What do you aspire to? In the near future? In life in general? RW: Aspire is a great word. I wouldn’t go panting after doing I do though. The question I’m often asking myself now is what is truly essential and can I live with today, tomorrow, and 50 years from now.
U: How do you feel art and fashion intervene? RW: Aesthetics and function. The formal qualities of how something looks conveys a great deal of ideas. Aesthetics as signs of ethical choices isn’t a new concept. There’s a lot of value in considering what aesthetic choices are relative to fashion, and then wondering the function, does this work. And if it doesn’t work, ie can the body stay warm, does the systems circulate healthfully, this kind of questions have a lot to do with the intersection of art and fashion. The head and body need not be severed from the other, you know?
U: What is a great example of a fashion art collaboration in your view? RW: I cannot look at fashion and not see art. When I see art, I have a desire to somehow become the art I see. I have seen so much incredible and daring fashion and art these past years, I am afraid I can’t call out anything specific right now.
U: Where do you think art and fashion is heading in our digital age? RW: People are demanding more from each of their purchases. Less is not more now. More in fewer items is the thing. A lot of the digital future is already available today but not yet on a wider scale. Someone once advised me to invest in black clothing, that this pigment would become rare in the future. For some reason this stuck with me.
Oslo, Norway 오슬로, 노르웨이 OMNISCIENT 전지(全知)
Rachel Wolfe 레이첼 볼프
The wisdom of water is the emergence of the emotional body in social practice. Water, according to the Chinese theory of five elements, serves as a symbol and material pathway to the movement and expression of emotions. Water, as symbol and material pathway for energy, is viewed in the new society as sacred to the human experience. The water is to be protected, cherished, and shared amongst people to create a more humane society.
물의 지혜는 사회적인 삶에서 분출되는 감정과도 같다. 고대 중국에서 말하는 5대 원소 중의 하나인 물은 움직임과 감정 표현의 상징이자 도구다. 과거 깨끗한 물 관리에 소홀했던 때와 달리 새로운 세계에서는 물을 소중히 여긴다. 새로운 사회에서 물은 에너지로 통하는 길이자 에너지의 상징이다. 이것은 성스러운 인간 경험이다. 그러므로 더욱 인간적인 사회를 구현하기 위해 물을 보호하고 소중히 다루어 모든 이가 공유해야 마땅하다. 물을 아끼고 존중하는 것은 곧 우리 인간 사회를 구성하는 감정을 아끼고 존중한다는 뜻이다.
Installation with Security blanket (troubleweed), 2015, installation, Bolsky Gallery, Los Angeles, California, traveling object. Materials: Photographic print on bathing towel (troubleweed), wooden monkey, dried roses, clear plexi, twine, golden clamps, cotton bags of salt labeled “take me.” A few left with visitors to the exhibition.
The installation explores symbolic and literal functions of narrative. Symbolic objects specifically arranged to materialise ideas, or cognitive “things”: Boundary, Grief, Security, Transparency, and Choice.
Troubleweed (photographic print on bathing towel) was sent via USPS & photographed by artists, continuing the installations thematic elements: Trust, Transparency, Choice, Cooperation, Resource. The tumbleweed, as an associated symbol of the western desert, found its way into the Los Angeles River during a drought. During a time of environmental drought, the representation of a prickly ball on a soft surface continued to travel across the United States, depicted by artists in their location and within the relationship of their praxis of art and ways of living.
The traveling Troubleweed bathing towel looks at the question: Can an inanimate object traveling through space and time, via the interdependent wills of artists offer insight into the values which constitute a nation?
After the installation transformed into an ongoing body of work, the archive became an accumulation of bodies of labor, in the time of the internet, where communication and the quality of sincerity is questioned to exist and critiqued as sentimental. The travel archive and final resting place of the work, extends the original metaphor and metaphysical propositions of the original installation.
There were no time constraints on the project. The premise of not having a time constraint looks at the line or levy of personal will. The USPS, once carried by horse and now by horse power and machine sorting assistants, still require the human as critical points within a functional system. The project works as an aggregate of an experiment. At each destination, the towel encounters photographic documentation. The act of imaging as a personal motive and labor are made as free choice.
As much as records provide proof, the archive seeks to underline the existence of motives rooted in: care, play, trust, and free-will, within systems of commodity and capital. Connecting people across Time (zones) and Space (geography), factors often considered to destroy human bonds, the Troubleweed bathing towel project reveal the peculiar value ascribed to an inanimate object is not in the object itself, but in the intangible values that constitute its traverse through Space and Time. As Douglas Adams once described in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: a towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have.
In 2020 the Troubleweed bathing towel, hitchhiked through the labors of artists, found its resting place in Santa Rosa, California, where the towel found a home. Alas the story inevitably continues, though outside the parameters of surveillance the record of archives the traveling component of this work imposed .
Original film image of an Ojai tumbleweed in the Los Angeles River at Culver City.
Troubleweed bathing towel photographed as hypothetical bathing towel at Bygdøy Sjobad, Oslo, Norway, 2016.
