Participating artists: Gong Won, Fiona Boler and Siddharth Pathak
In May 2020, we launched our first edition of the World of Co@Home Online Artist Residency. During the month, three wonderful international artists from India, South Korean and the USA, were learning new skills with WOC Alumni, sharing ideas and creating together, even though online.
Below you can learn more about the participating artists and the works they created as a part of the program. In each of their works are inspired by experimental filmmaking and video art and were a response to the currently turbulent time the world is enduring as a whole.
Siddharth Pathak
Siddharth Pathak is a multi-disciplinary artist from India with a wide-ranging practice, in which he explores themes of Recovery from Trauma. He typically works with found objects, residual material fragments, and traditional mediums while incorporating specific video and audio art components, performance arts practices, and builds basic mechanical contraptions that assist in the creation of his work. Most of his projects are envisioned as long term undertakings in the study and documentation of Unconscious Conflict.
www.siddharthpathak.art / @artistheantidote
House of Correction
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The terrifying mundaneness of routine, a desperation for human touch, mounting loneliness & crumbling mental peace, and the infeasibility of an escape plan; House of Correction is a
3 minute 50 second long interpretation of solitary confinement through the currently ongoing pandemic, that alludes to the many facets of suffering brought on by isolation.
Gong-won
Gong-won (Su-young Park) is multidisciplinary artist from South Korea. She has been working on the phenomenon of interacting with individual experiences when a specific point or connection remaining in the body is encountered in unexpected places. It can be extended to individuality or collective ethnicity. The act of using different elements to work with, which had painted traditional Korean paintings, found a connection between them. “The act of drawing” and “the act of moving” can be interpreted as the basic elements of human behavior: “See,” “Touch,” and “Think.” Through this, she works to bring up the history of an unconscious individual from herself. After all, she’s an expedition to herself. It’s a question to audiences. www.hellosuyoung.com / @gong_won01MAP
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If you look at the map, it changes according to various factors. The reason is that it changes into territorial expansion, industrial expansion, etc. The boundaries continue to change. Even the land we think we’ve divided now can be temporary in the end. So, is what has accumulated to me, temporary or absolute? When the body is perceived as a map, at what perspective does the map change over time? Why? I have changed from hip-hop to art to industrial dance to modern dance performances.
When I observed myself, I recognized that what penetrated was the accumulation as my body, of an artist living in that era. Back pain as an art work, muscle use on the outside due to industrial dance and pelvis use, alignment and central movement used in modern dance and performance, and sensation used in improvisation dance; these are intertwined like maps on subway lines. Even this is a history of my movements. My situation in the late 1990s and memories of my school days connected to certain events are also a memory of history. This creates a link between personal history and modern history.
The family that’s inside my body is the story of the body accumulated in a huge historical group. When a new place is connected, another map is formed. My< Map 2020> is evolving like that now. The process of finding a connection between Bulgaria and me was important even in a quarantine caused by the Pandemic.
Bulgaria and Korea also suffered a financial crisis in 90′ and are making efforts to find a better direction now. We’re mapping each other in a particular place.
We’ll meet soon even if we lose connection for a while.
2020.Map. Sofia / Seoul
Fiona Boler
Fiona Boler is mixed media artist from Minnesota, USA. The work she does is all about layering. Fiona uses three main mediums to communicate: Film, poetry, and collage. Each allows her to story tell in specific ways and explore her fascination with the complex systems that surround us. Fiona has a degree in sociology and explores sociological concepts with art. She sees using layers as a way to communicate the complexity of the socially constructed world juxtaposed with the complexity of the natural world. Fiona’s first projects have consisted of pulling back the layers of herself, deconstructing her own socialization and seeking answers not from society but from nature. Her mission is to communicate through many mediums that everything is interconnected.
www.wonderingpondering.com / @wondering_pondering_
Chaos Theory
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Essay
Is chaos a perception?
Does Chaos exist in nature?
These are the questions I asked myself during my residency with World Of Co.
My practice strives to communicate the wonder and beauty of complexity.
I hear the word CHAOS being used a lot lately, to describe the current state of the world. I wanted to meditate on this word, research this word, and on this word, deconstruct this word.
First came the Collage.
I always feel like my collages create themselves.
Like I am just the messenger.
I spend time collecting materials,
Looking through my old photographs for picture that stand out to me,
Buying old books from the thrift store (because I know one day I will come back to them)
But in the end I find material I forgot I had,
I cut up pictures I never thought I would,
And allow myself space to play and experiment.
I trust my gut when collaging.
My stomach always seems to know what I want…
The Chaos Collage consists of:
Photographs from a day when the clouds were pink outside of my home.
I edited these photos, transforming the sky from
Pink to Green to Red to Purple to Orange to Blue.
I used photographs from my time in South Korea and at the DMZ
(De-Militarized Zone in-between South and North Korea)
I cut out pictures from the 1979 “Catalogue of the Universe”
I loved the idea of the universe being the base
The beginning.
If you look closely you can make out the shape of a mediating woman
Her body and hair made from cut outs on flower print wrapping paper.
I wrote a poem while constructing the collage.
That I wrote on three different photographs in permanent marker.
It took me four days to construct the CHAOS collage.
It took me over six months to collect the material.
Material I had no idea would become this piece.
Collage as a Still Movie
Once I finished constructing my collage I knew it was a film.
Though I did not know how.
I packed a bag with my camera and lenses
And with my collage in hand I trekked into the woods.
I have a secret spot I always go to.
Wild daisies covered the field.
When I saw them I knew I had to film my collage in the flowers.
From there I just started experimenting.
Nothing was pre-planned.
The wind kept blowing my collage away.
It was all play, one act leading to the next.
After I was satisfied with filming I sat down to write.
That is the second half of my film
“A Cure To Chaos”
I wanted to use the word cure because of how ridiculous it sounds.
Because of how human it is to want to CURE something
There is much I wish I could cure
I must be a human.
This must be ridiculous.
I use my glasses to distort the images in the second half,
To communicate the instability of perception.
The illusion of reality.
My process in rooted in the subconscious.
A place I feel most comfortable in..
Nonsense makes the most sense
When you realize everything you know has no sense.
By: Fiona Boler
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