Participating artists: Bimbi Larraburu, Boryana Rusenova - Ina, Elaine T. Nguyen, Carol E Moses, Jingbo Zou, Javier Zamora Valdes, Louise Omer, Nishmi, Pauline Shongov, Ruta Matuleviciute, Reenie Charrière and Sejin Moon.
In July 2020, World of Co@Home Online Artist Residency was hosting twelve great artists from different parts of the world. Here you can learn more about the participating artists and the works they created as a part of the July program.
Boryana Rusenova Ina
Boryana Rusenova Ina is a visual artist from Bulgaria and her work focuses on ideas on nationhood and belonging. Boryana earned an M.A. in Art, Design and Architecture Education from the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland in 2009 and an M.F.A. in Painting and Drawing from The Ohio State University in 2016. While living in Scotland she was a visiting artist through the GOALS Project, a nationwide initiative, which focused on bringing artists into Scottish classrooms. Her work has been exhibited in her native Bulgaria at City Gallery Plovdiv as well as in the USA including the Museum of Fine Arts at Florida State University (FL), the Carver Center for Arts and Technology in Baltimore (MD) and the Zanesville Museum of Art (OH). In addition, Boryana has served as the Vice President of Roy G Biv Gallery For Emerging Artists and was a founding member of the Couchfire Art Collective. Most recently, her current project Against the Constable Skies was exhibited at Tennessee Technological University (TN) and sponsored by the Center Stage Series and an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council (OH). Currently, Boryana lives in Lubbock, Texas and teaches at Texas Tech University as an Assistant Professor in Painting.
Against the Constable Skies
Series of prints and paintings
”My current project Against the Constable Skies appropriates the work of 19th century painter John Constable, known for his quintessentially English landscapes, to question how something as capricious as the sky could become characteristic of national identity. Constable’s sky studies have become a backdrop to a set of cardboard boxes, which function as props on a stage. Each box is covered in prints of his skies and blends at times seamlessly with its own background. Through disguising these props, I am pointing to the ambiguity of skyscapes in contrast to the historical association between Constable’s work and “the English sky”. The boxes are also made up of seams and folds, they trap air and open and close like a border. Utilizing them as subjects is a metaphoric way of addressing the idea of boundaries within a nation/state construct. The paintings in this project have a trompe-l’oeil quality that signifies the sky as both material and image: it is an ephemeral space still restricted by its own architecture.”
Sejin Moon
Sejin is a visual artist from Scotland and graduated from the Edinburgh College of Art in 2010 with an MFA in photography. Sejin’s body of work sets out a personal narrative and depicts her journey as a female in the modern world. Her art practice involves exploring and questioning herself regarding gender equality and cultural identity. Sejin’s work depicts a critical view of social and cultural agendas this includes memories of childhood to an ongoing struggle with the awareness and emotions of growing old. Having the perspective of living in two distinctively different but yet similar cultures, South Korea and the UK, allows Sejin to produce a collection of unique and refreshing images. Her works are mainly created using the medium and large format film photography but also incorporates alternative photographic processes and media.
Cataclysmic misfits (2020)
Photographic series of analogue Mixed-media collages
The creature has mutated. Life is an uncontrollable force. A body, a self, perhaps perceived as sad and ugly, is also beautiful.
Cataclysmic misfits is a collection of analogue mixed-media collages, inspired by surrealism and made from my own photographs and organic materials (plants and food). I see them as self-portraits, exploring womanhood, ageing and sexual intimacy, and encountering the shadow.
This work is a response to worldwide upheaval, the explosion of resentment and violence, and my feelings of powerlessness and hopelessness that have caused me to examine my inner world. The photographs were shot out of focus, blurring boundaries and emphasising ambiguities.
Influenced by Hannah Hoch, Man Ray, Cindy Sherman and Sarah Lucas, I hope to provoke a visual dialogue. Cataclysmic misfits builds on my previous work, which addresses gender struggle and the representation of women through Jungian archetypes: the ways in which the psychoanalyst believed elements of the psyche and the unconscious are expressed. Jung’s four major archetypes are the Self, the Persona, the Anima/Animus, and the Shadow. Now, I am beginning the excruciating work of self-examination, taking the secret pathway through deep psychology, and confronting my own vulnerability.
COLLABORATIVE PROJECT
Louise Omer
Louise Omer is an Australian writer born on Kaurna Country and now based in Dublin. Her journalism, criticism, stories and poems have been published in Ireland, Australia and the UK. She is working on a memoir, Holy Woman, which combines travel writing, feminist theology, and psychogeography to interrogate modern religion and give a personal exploration of spiritual life under patriarchy. She writes to discover what she really thinks, what she really feels, experimenting with poetry, erotica, public art and visual text. Obsessed with intimacy, desire, and transcendence, she is compelled by the body as the encounter between the interior and the exterior, and seeks to express an embodied spirituality.
www.louiseomer.com / @shahouley
Javier Zamora Valdés
Javier graduated from the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro (Cuba) in 2012, specialising in printmaking. He has shown work in Cuba and El Salvador, where he lived for several years, participating in national, collective, and personal exhibitions. He has made sculptures and murals in Spain, working in funded and collaborative projects in Andalucia and Catalonia, where he now lives. Interested in intuition and philosophy, as much as science, religion and politics, one of his principal objectives is to disturb the fixed borders of opposing concepts and ideas. He conceives of art as constant transformation that leaves a footprint beyond the physical expression of its representation; therein lies its ability to change people. He is interested in revealing the patterns that interconnect this community, this ecosystem, of human species.
Sin Tocar // Without Touch
Series of collages and videos
A distance has been placed between us. Masks, shields, screens; everywhere we go, there are new barriers against human connection. How can we transcend the borders of separation? Using collage, we are experimenting with the self as canvas and the skin as material to explore the intersection of dualities: exterior and interior, spirit and flesh. All photos were taken through Zoom and Instagram, on phones and laptops; referencing the limits of screen connection. Through art we can create a common place, speak a common tongue. We can touch.
Bimbi Larraburu
‘’ I’m visual artist. I born, I live and I work in Ciudad de Buenos Aires, Argentina. My work explores repetition, order and chaos. I use the architectural language working on abstract forms in different techniques such as drawing, painting, printmaking and mixed-media. These forms and productions owe as much to the urban environment that surrounds me as they do to the influence of the deconstructive architects of the 90s. I search for new forms of expression where architecture, painting, sculpture and installation alter the perception of surfaces and spaces, inviting the viewer to a new phase of reading the space.’’
The Wormhole project
July 2020. The world is in lockdown. Everything has changed. There is nowhere to escape.
Maybe in space movies I found a way to connect to other realities.
¨Wormhole¨ is a window to my own universe where I mix all my expressive elements looking for a self acknowledgement.
Papers, acrylics, oils, markers, micro pen, paper cut and assemblage. Each “Wormhole” has different layers of papers cutted and assembled, with the possibilities to change the layers and create a new “wormhole” with the same layers.
Motivated with the idea of escape to another universe, I invite the viewer to navigate in inusual images and feelings.
Elaine T. Nguyen
Elaine T. Nguyen is an artist, curator and community organizer working in San Francisco, CA. Her work explores the intersection between love and mental health. Capturing and commemorating different moments in her life, she uses art as a means of evaluation and expression of the self. Her work is confessional, exposing, and vulnerable, ultimately created with the intent to connect, share and begin conversations with her audience on personal memories and struggles.
Blue Talks
Blue Talks is born from the quiet nature of suburbia and the memories of teenage years staring up at the sky wondering what lies ahead in life. I am living an immigrant’s American Dream, complete with a nuclear family, wooden fences and whiteness. I am not white. I am beginning to understand this.
Underneath pergolas I am sharing secrets with my first loves and searching for shapes in clouds the way my works float against wooden awnings now. I don’t understand these words, intergenerational trauma, manic depressive disorder…fetish.
It is blue hour, the final hour before the sky becomes dark. When everything is bathed in a deep blue and the color is as still as time. I am 19 and I am beginning to understand the complications of life.
Reenie Charrière
Reenie lives in Oakland, California. She received her MFA from Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine in 2009.
She has received two Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants, and a Roderick Dew Travel Grant. She has been awarded Artist Residencies by FaveLAB in Athens, Greece Become/Become in Sardinia, Italy, Buinho in Portugal, Draw-International in France, Hannacc Can Bourni in Spain, Maine College of Art, the La Napoule Art Foundation in France, SF MOMA, Arts Benicia and Vermont Studio. Her work has been exhibited in venues internationally, including Athens, Greece, Sardinia, Italy in 2018, Galeria Espai B, in Barcelona, 2017, and the Bojagi Forum in Seoul, Korea, 2016, and at the La Napoule Art Foundation in France, 2014 as well as all over the United States.
Her work has been commissioned by San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery in 2011, as well as by the Marin Sanitary Service in 2014 and by the Peoria Playhouse Children’s Museum in
Souvenirs from Here and Beyond
How can one reimagine the space around them while sheltering in place? As a collector of memories and physical artifacts, is it possible to transform one’s daily habits and turn urban throwaways into treasures? My father was the chief industrial engineer at a plastics factory until he dedicated his later years to inventing a recycling loop. My grandfather took walks in the neighborhood and picked up little objects he found along the way. He put them in glass jars, and I perceived them as treasures.
HERE
As an installation artist Reenie Charrière gathers everyday discards and repurposes them into surprising arrangements. In Here, she uses her collections from home and her neighborhood that include recycled cloth, plastic bags, a broken wooden fence, jewelry box stuffings, and broken concrete to refashion her studio into a dreamlike setting. The installation blurs the connection between inside and outside by a juxtaposition of architectural and textile elements.
BEYOND (drawing series in progress)
In these drawings, Reenie is working with photographs of buildings from actual and imaginary travels. She is drawn to the beauty of ruined sites or places that have been reconstructed. The actual locations are obscured by her use of black glue and watercolor. During this pandemic, she quiets her restless urge to travel by reconceiving places she has visited or would like to visit in the future.
Nishmi
Nishmi is a video artist based in São Paulo. Her research has unfolded from poetic experimentations of film-essay and the usage of found footage material often connecting text interventions, personal archives, and performance. Moved by bending structures and disclosing affections, she creates narratives that explore the relationships between communication, body, gender, and science. Recently, she has developed an interest in video mapping and installations as a way to explore moving images in the physical space.
Dynamics of Narrative Appropriation
The film essay uses found footage to meditate about narrative appropriation as a sort of mutation. What is the code that replicates itself on the strand of time, if not the violent, sexist, racist, speciesist? A dramatic opera of the dynamic transformation presenting the harmony of matter.
Ruta Matuleviciute
Ruta Matuleviciute is a multidisciplinary artist based in Vilnius, Lithuania, focusing on painting, also creating the following media: performance, installation art, photography, and curating as well.
Ruta Matuleviciute has a MFA degree in Fine Arts, VIlnius Academy of Arts, is a member of Lithuanian Artists’ Association and co-founder of Tapytoju Studijos (eng. Painters’ Studios) 6 women artists’ contemporary art project space in Lukiskiu 9, Vilnius, Lithuania. Artist curated exhibitions and participated in them.
In her artistic practice and research, Ruta Matuleviciute reflects the fascinating beauty of Life, Nature and their emergence from consciousness. This makes her focus on holistic worldview, comparative culture studies.
www.rutavm.com / @raganos
Memory Fragments of the Sacred Works
Painting Series
The ongoing painting series by Ruta Matuleviciute, working title Memory Fragments of the Sacred Works is being established on the base of the classical roots of the mythological and sacred art.
Combined with various media, the new impressionist approach to painting, as well as the classical portrait, the series are bringing spectator to the field of experience of the Self and the world emerging from it.
Carol E Moses
Carol E Moses, a visual artist in Massachusetts, USA, works in watercolor and oil painting, and portrait photography. Influences include mathematics, science and nature, and a drive to communicate, describe, record. This Bulgaria Image and Interview series is the fifth photo portrait and interview project, following series in the US, Iceland, Shetland, and Germany.
In painting, Moses sets aside her ‘logical’ thinking tendency. Her themes are connection, relation, isolation, distance. The colors and forms resolve or enact forces, and balance. Moses also creates word-paintings, with text and paint, in response to confusion, grief, or other thoughts, and makes small black and white drawings when away from the studio.
Moses exhibits regularly in Boston, and has been chosen for three international residencies, in Reykjavik, Leipzig, and with World of Co, in Sofia.
Image and Interview: Meeting with Bulgaria
Image and Interview: Meeting with Bulgaria includes 12 photo portraits and excerpts from personal interviews with a range of Bulgarian people. The interviews and photographs were done online in July 2020, during the residency with World of Co. Moses has completed five Image and Interview series, in different countries. The portrait concept was partially inspired by the work of Felix Nadar. The interview questions were created by Moses and are the same for all. Together, they generate a rich sense of the person at that time, and in that context with the artist. Moses has previously created the series in the US, Iceland, Scotland, and Germany.
Accompanying the Image and Interview: Meeting with Bulgaria, Moses includes 6 paintings made in this residency period – the 3 oils were done prior to beginning the interview meetings, and the 3 watercolors were completed during studio co-working periods with her fellow artists.
The paintings respond to the pandemic, as well as connecting with Bulgaria, and with the fellow artists.
Pauline Shongov
Pauline Shongov is an artist who activates urban, architectural, and environmental sites to address visuality and visibility, ruination and nostalgia, and embodied practices of lack and excess within the banal. Her research includes an affective approach to landscapes as screen surface through archival studies, oral history, and cultural techniques. Her work is largely informed by experimental film, global cinema, and minimalism.
off side walk, гледай напред
Photo series
‘off side walk, гледай напред’ observes urban sites as embodied forms of resistance, endurance, and possibility contingent upon systemic and structural ruination. By engaging urban matter with the historical valence of site, these photographs reframe how sites command vision and visibility, exposure and transparency. Weathered by physical duress, political actants and social forces, the built environment remains amplified through deficiencies and failures. The sidewalk leads to missing and uprooted pavers, crumbling edges, abrupt differences in ground levels, and sudden ends. ‘off sidewalk’ is hence a stepping off and circling around a walkway’s intended purpose. ‘offside walk’ speaks to the evocative play that material inconsistency raises to fair governance. ‘off side walk’ goes through the motion of small bodily progressions that the urban space both demands and receives. Due to these surface topologies, one’s sight is relegated away from surroundings and re-directed towards the humbling act of looking down at one’s feet. As a twofold gesture, meaning both “watch your step” and “keep moving forward,” ‘гледай напред’ is a cautious reminder, a preventative measure, and a hopeful remark. In a simultaneous act of inertia and transformation, urban matter carries productive force in re-evaluating structural integrity and civic responsibility.
Jingbo Zou
Jingbo Zou, graduated from London College of Communication, currently finishing a Fine Art master degree in Chelsea College of arts. His work presents a fusion of traditional Chinese philosophy and Western contemporary art often through photography, moving image and installation, exploring the balance between ancient and modern, tradition and contemporary, complexity and pureness.
A friend of mine, No.2
/screenshots from a video work/
This is a friend of the artist. It presents a personal exploration to self-awareness in a somewhat joyous approach.
Leave a Reply