August 2011

TEL AVIV, ISRAEL: Maya Pindyck

I have an Israeli mother and a North American father. Though we primarily resided in the States, we visited my mother’s family in Tel Aviv every year. During my last visit to Israel in April 2011– this time with just my partner– I made “This Place/Displace.” By noting my daily experiences and conversations with family members, I tried to make sense of my attachments to Israel by exploring notions of personal identity that create a quiet violence. Like my relationship to Israel, “This Place/Displace” surrounds my mother, Nurit, whose name means fire buttercup. This written drawing threads memories, experiences, and perspectives that come from both a place of love (my family, the sea, the mint tea) and a place of questioning (nationalism, tribalism, blood lines). I leave the last section for the reader: Who are you in relation to this place?

BAMAKO, MALI: François Deschamps

I was working in Bamako, Mali for 11 months in 2010-11 taking cabs many times a day in this dusty, polluted, traffic-choked city patrolled by corrupt police, with temperatures often reaching over 100 degrees. I wondered at the life of the drivers who rent the cabs for $20 per day and sometimes even lose money after a long hot day of driving. I always rode in the front seat to engage in conversations, to better see the scenes outside and to admire the personal items displayed on the dashboard as the crumbling taxis sat stalled in traffic or careened along the dusty city streets. These juxtapositions seemed a perfect metaphor for the inside of the drivers mind as that driver negotiates the thrillingly dangerous and complex roads of the capital. These also seemed a perfect metaphor for my own experience in Bamako, inside a mobile glassed cage, close yet separate.

USA: Karla Wozniak

When I travel I take hundreds of pictures. I snap them through the car window, driving around strip malls, or while parked at rest stops. I’m fascinated by in-between spaces and the stories they tell about our culture. In a way these landscapes can be “read” as your eye takes in the fractured strings of words and phrases on signage as you drive by. This fragmentary language is fine-tuned to grab and hold our attention—and then there’s everything else around it that you may not have noticed.

In my studio I make paintings based on composite views of these places, which are very much re-imagined. Images are culled from the original locations, but I also add abstract, tactile elements to the work that evoke lighting, surfaces, graphic advertising, weather, and time of day. Taking visual information from landscape as a jumping-off point, the pictures become personal and almost hallucinatory reinventions of a certain highway strip, rest stop, or Main Street, rendering these mundane drive-by places specific and memorable through painting.

Artist Bios:

Maya Pindyck grew up in Newton, Massachusetts and Tel Aviv, Israel. She is the author of the collection of poems Friend Among Stones (New Rivers Press, 2009), and the chapbook, Locket, Master, which received a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship (PSA, 2006). Also a visual artist, she has exhibited her work widely. Maya earned her MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and her BA in visual art and philosophy from Connecticut College.

Francois Deschamps is a professor at the State University of New York in New Paltz, NY where he teaches photography and related media. As a photographer and book artist he has produced over 10 artists’ books including the following: The Return of the Slapstick Papyrus (Visual Studies Workshop, 1986), Particle Theory (Nexus Press, 1992), Memoire D’un Voyage en Oceanie (University of Auckland, 1995), Sombras Rojas (Visual Studies Workshop, 1999) and most recently Drone 1/2/3 (2010). His photographs are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, NYC, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as two artists’ fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2002, he was awarded a residency at the Cite Internationale Des Arts in Paris. In 2004, he was included in the exhibition “Pieced Together: Photomontages from the Collection” at the Art Institute of Chicago. He was awarded a Fulbright grant to Mali, Africa for 2010-11.

Karla Wozniak (b. 1978 in Berkeley, CA), received her MFA from the Yale School of Art and BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. Her recent exhibitions include two solo exhibitions at the Gregory Lind Gallery, San Francisco, CA (2011, 2008), and the Rebecca Ibel Gallery, Columbus, OH (2010). Recent group exhibitions include Bronx Calling, Bronx Museum of Art, Bronx, NY (2011); Weasel, Inman Gallery, Houston, TX (2010); Rhyme, Not Reason, curated by John Yau, Janet Kurnatowski Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2010); and Brooklyn Redrawn, Brooklyn Historical Society, Brooklyn, NY(2009).

Wozniak’s distinctions include participation in the Artist in the Market Place, Bronx Museum (2011), a Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program Grant (2009-10), two MacDowell Colony Fellowships (2005, 2007), and an Alice Kimball English Traveling Fellowship from the Yale School of Art (2005). Her work has been noted in a number of publications, including the Houston Chronicle, the Village Voice, Art Fag City, and Harper’s. Wozniak has taught at Pratt Institute, RISD, and Yale. Starting in Fall 2011, she will be an Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.