Fridays & Friends #4 – Sarah Gotowka
February 03, 2012
It was this time last year that I was happily freezing in Banff, and so looking back fondly, February’s Fridays & Friends feature goes to the talented Sarah Gotowka, a lovely lady I met in the snowy mountains.
*****
Sarah Gotowka, 21st Century Embroidery Sampler, Hand embroidered multi-coloured cotton thread cross-stitch on cotton, ~30" x 42", 2011
Roselina Hung: How did we first meet?
Sarah Gotowka: We first met at Banff’s winter residency called “What’s Love Got To Do With It?” I remember we sat next to each other in the circle discussion group during the introductory meeting. You were sitting to the right of me and wearing magenta, I think. I remember thinking you had nice skin and that you were super shy.
Sarah Gotowka, 21st Century Embroidery Sampler (detail), 2011. This pattern is based off of M.I.A.’s “Afrika” leggings, which can be seen in the photograph on the right that Sarah downloaded from an ex-boyfriend’s Facebook album.
RH: Tell me a bit about yourself…
SG: Well, I was born in a town called Uijeongbu in South Korea on September 2, 1984. (That makes my sun sign a Virgo, my moon in Sagittarius, with a rising Taurus.) I was adopted when I was three months old to my loving family, the Gotowkas. I am the middle child between two brothers, both who are fraternity jocks that enjoy shooting guns. We grew up in a suburb outside of Rochester (RIP Kodak) in upstate New York. I got my BFA in Fibres at the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2007, back when it was a 5-year program, and am currently in my third year at Concordia’s MFA Fibre program in Montreal, Quebec.
Sarah Gotowka, Miami, Double weave pick up, blue & white cotton, ~4” x 48", 2011 (detail on top)
RH: Tell me about your work…
SG: I work mostly in textiles and video, but I also write and draw a lot, mostly in sketchbooks and journals as opposed to finished pieces. I really consider myself a weaver, or at least a maker of cloth. To me, cloth is the richest medium because of its inherent history of archiving cultural and historical narratives. I love the idea of stories, myths, symbols, magic, spirits, and identity being embedded into cloth by its maker. Today in Western society we have lost a lot of connection to cloth, where it is made, who it is made by. In a place where everyone is eager to buy the same fashionable leggings from the same fashionable leggings store, colours and symbols no longer (or rarely) exist to communicate the wearer’s belief system or tribal affiliation. Right now, I am using textiles to document narratives of romantic courtship and/or cessation in the 21st Century. I see myself as an anthropologist who is researching/making/collecting these tangible remnants of love in an age of text messaging and Facebook, where the boundaries of intimacy between public and private are completely blurred.
Sarah Gotowka, It’s Complicated Sample, Hand woven jacquard - cotton, 36” x 12”, 2012 (detail on right). This is a test using a technique Sarah developed where the material is all black cotton, but using different structures for the 3-D text allows the words to pop in specific light.
RH: What are you currently working on?
SG: Right now I am working on weaving candid photos of people grinding that I’ve downloaded from random people’s Facebook or Flickr pages. I’ve been reading about how grinding is being banned from high schools and even middle schools all across North America. These images of women bending over and dry humping a man’s groins is so prevalent in our visual culture, we don’t stop and think about how it is shifting our society’s romantic ideals, expectations, and language. Through laboriously weaving these throw-away, only-exists-on-your-computer-
RH: Where can people find your work?
SG: My website saagoto.tumblr.com & my YouTube page.
Sarah Gotowka, How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore?, Hand woven glow-in-the-dark plastic lacing, ~30” x 36”, 2012 (detail on right)
RH: Tell me one fun fact about yourself.
SG: I have never “ground” in a club with someone, and never will, yet I practice grinding moves while listening to R&B almost every day for a work out.
Thank you, Sarah! <3
If you happen to be in Montreal, you have until the end of today to catch her exhibition at the FOFA Gallery at Concordia University in Montreal, where she is showing How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore?, pictured above, which you can read more about here. The title of this exhibition is taken from Prince’s heart wrenching post-break up song. The giant sad face is charged from lamps hanging from the ceiling. They are hooked up to a circuit which turns them off, revealing the glow-in-the-dark-ness of the material.
Please visit saagoto.tumblr.com to view more of Sarah’s work.
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Love Songs – Past & Present
January 28, 2012
She Had a Mouth Like Yours, Coloured pencil on paper, 8 x 10 in, 2012
This past year or so, text has started showing up in my work again. During my undergrad, I worked with text in some of my paintings and it was not perhaps the most successful use of text, looking back. I kind of left it out of my practice for a long time, along with installation, sound and photography – other mediums I dabbled in around the same time. These were things I experimented with but never fully developed. I focused on painting and solely painting for many years. It has only been in the past couple of years that I renewed my love of drawing. Recently, text has come back into my work, and it got me thinking about the type of text that has been showing up. The text was always there, just not in the actual painting itself but in the title of the works.
"and it's driving me mad", Digital print, 18 x 24 in, 2011
As a painter, I often work alone, and the only company I have is the music I am listening to. And more often than not, they are songs about love – being in or losing love – but all love songs, in one form or another. There are some paintings that are closely related to a specific song or album by an artist that I had on repeat while creating the one piece of artwork. Lately, lyrics have started to creep into my work again, but in the form of text. Thinking about this though has made me realize lyrics have always been important to my art. I would often listen closely to the words being sung, and in a lot of ways, they infused my paintings with specific emotions that I was feeling, while painting, or that were related to the subject of the painting. I can remember how I felt while creating a certain painting with a song lyric title because of the song it references.
Saint-Germain-des-Prés, February 2001 - "A matter of complication", Oil & acrylic on canvas, 36 x 28 in, 2005
This first started when I was working on my La Mélodie de la Nostalgie series, hence the title. The title of each painting in this series corresponds to lyrics of specific songs, although some have been changed slightly so that they make more sense as titles on their own. And then every so often, a lyric would turn up as the title of a self-portrait or of a series of work. I used to try to hide it a bit more, to make it more of a subtle nod that wouldn’t be caught by many. More recently, however, I have been more unapologetic in my use of the song titles or lyrics, without altering them. I didn’t feel the need to hide this aspect of my work anymore, although I still think it is not always obvious unless pointed out.
how can something so bad be so good (bears) - 2011
Art and music have always been my two main passions. When lyrics or song titles aren’t used, musical terms sometimes show up in my paintings, such as reprise and coda…
Judith's Reprise (detail), Oil on canvas, 18 x 24 in, 2010
And so, here is a sampling of some of the songs and musicians who have turned up in the titles of my works – some more obvious than others.
- The Power of Orange Knickers - Tori Amos
- When It Hurts So Bad - Lauryn Hill
- The One You Love – Rufus Wainwright
- Shut Down the World / Leaving You - Rufus Wainwright
- Bizarre Love Triangle - Frente!
- The Way We Were – Barbara Streisand
- I Want to Break Free - Queen
- A Case of You – Joni Mitchell
- I Want the One I Can’t Have – The Smiths
- Heroes - David Bowie
Comments (0) | Tags: Art, Influences, lyrics, music, painting, text | More: Art, Influences
The Arctic Wolf & The White Hart
January 27, 2012
The White Hart - The Wilton Diptych
I recently delivered a couple of portrait commissions that I had been working on for the last few months. Ryan and Chloe first saw my work at the Eastside Culture Crawl a couple of years ago, when I was still at the William Clark Studios. I remember meeting them then, and Chloe really liked my Self-Portrait as a Polar Bear painting and enquired about buying it, but it was not for sale. The next year, I saw them again in my Parker Street studio, and a few months later, they got in touch and asked about commissioning two portraits similar in style to the polar bear painting.
Self-Portrait as a Polar Bear, Oil on wood panel, 9 x 12 in, 2009
Similar to past commissions I’ve done, Ryan and Chloe had an idea of what they wanted but also wanted me to create something that was true to my work and practice. The starting point, for Chloe, was a painting that she always loved: one section of the Wilton Diptych that pictured a white hart – an albino stag – which was the personal emblem of Richard II, for whom the diptych was painted. I was really keen on working with this because I had actually gone to see this painting many times at the National Gallery in London, as my school Central Saint Martins was just up the road from there and I used to pop in for inspiration and a bit of quiet time on a hectic day in the centre of downtown London. I had always been drawn to that particular piece of art, as the piece stood in the middle of the room on a plinth in a case because there were paintings on both the front and the back of the piece. To this day, I vividly remember the colour of the blue angels on the inside panel, set against the gold leaf background.
Inside right panel of The Wilton Diptych
So we started with the idea of the white hart and the mythic significance of the albino deer, because of its rarity. Working with that idea, we needed to find an animal of equal importance. It was finally decided that the white arctic wolf and the albino deer were going to the two animals I would work with, for both their spiritual significance and visual impact. And I was more than happy to be able to paint these animals, since it loosely tied in with my Of Myth and Men series.
Ryan (Arctic Wolf) & Chloe (White Hart), Oil on wood panel, 9 x 12 in each, 2012
All in all, this project has been a year in the making, since I first started brainstorming ideas with Ryan and Chloe after I got back from my Banff residency early last year. After many back and forth e-mails and sending pictures and sketches, the paintings were finished at the beginning of this month. I am really happy with the results and even happier that Ryan and Chloe are really thrilled with the paintings and that the portraits are now hanging in their home and will be passed down in their family, for generations to come.
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Winter is waving hello
January 14, 2012
A windy winter's day in Vancouver
It’s a chilly day out in Vancouver, and it snowed a little bit over night. There’s not much snow left in the city where I am, but I love waking up to white mountains. There’s nothing quite like standing on the beach overlooking the ocean on a sunny winter day, with snow capped mountains in the background.
The windy weather makes for beautiful waves, and I thought I would take some photographs. I accidentally left the white balance on my digital camera set for indoor tungsten lights and didn’t realize until half way through my photos, so there is a bluish tint to some of the photos.
I think the blueness actually emphasizes how cold it was standing next to the ocean with the wind blowing in my face. Ahh…winter!
Happy winter, wherever you are.
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Fridays & Friends #3 – Lucy Gough
January 06, 2012
Happy New Year! To start the year off right, here is the first Friday & Friends of 2012. Introducing Lucy Gough, a good friend of mine that lives in London, UK.
*****
Lucy Gough, The Great Bear, Screenprint on paper, 42 x 59 cm, 2008, Limited edition of 25
Roselina Hung: How did we first meet?
Lucy Gough: We first met in a cramped, smelly basement office whilst working for Central Saint Martins during the summer of 2006. Since you left London, we have caught up in person a handful of times and have kept in regular contact with a succession of emails, usually ending ‘write when you have time’. I can keep up with your artistic practice by following your blog and Twitter. It is a truly modern phenomenon to correspond in this way, but it works really well for us. I’m very much looking forward to a real life hook up in spring 2012!
Lucy Gough, A Factual Diagram of Love and Marriage, Screenprint on paper, 30 x 42 cm (image size), 2009, Limited edition of 50
RH: Tell me a bit about yourself…
LG: I was born and raised in Newmarket, which is a horse racing town in Suffolk, England. It was a very outdoorsy childhood, mainly spent running around in the garden with my two little sisters. I studied art between 1999-2002 at Norwich School of Art and Design. I took Creative and Cultural Studies, which was a combined visual arts and creative writing course. When I began the course, I intended to follow the creative writing path, but at the end of the first year I elected to focus on visual arts and have never looked back. This had a huge impact on the work I make now as text features predominantly in many of my artworks. I have been exhibiting regularly since graduating, almost a decade ago. Shortly after graduating, I moved to London and have lived here ever since. I have made some of my best friends here, and it has been hugely beneficial for my artistic practice. London has a way of sucking you, I think Samuel Johnson was right!
Lucy Gough, Ice cream, Digital photograph, 2009
RH: Tell me about your work…
LG: Due to my unorthodox art education, I have dabbled with a few different mediums, but always seem to route back to screen printing and photography. The bold, flat colours of screen printing suits the graphic nature of my work whilst photography enables me to produce work with a completely different ambience. I have also undertaken several commissions for University College Hospital London where I have been responding to a brief and working in a very different way. I thrive from having a variety of styles, mediums and projects concurrently running alongside each other.
Lucy Gough, Puzzle ceiling tile design, commissioned by University College Hospital London, 2011
RH: What are you currently working on?
LG: I am currently preparing for a very exciting project. I regularly show with Jealous Gallery and Print Studio, who are taking on a week long live screen printing residency in the window of Heals on Tottenham Court Road. I have long been an admirer of Heals and the beautiful, classic designs that they have produced over the years. The residency runs from January 30th - February 5th and at some point during this week, I will be taking my turn to print in the window. I have created a new piece of work especially for the residency. I am interested in the way patchwork was used to send messages during the abolition of the slave trade. I have adapted the flying geese patchwork design for my newest work and have used a 1950′s inspired colour palette as a nod to the inspirational designs which have been produced by Heals.
Lucy Gough, Flying Geese (work in progress), 2012
RH: Where can people find your work?
LG: Jealous Gallery & Print Studio, Heals, my website www.lucygough.com, and my blog.
Lucy Gough, Our Future is in Space, Archival digital print on paper, 59 x 42 cm, 2011, Limited edition of 75
RH: Tell me one fun fact about yourself.
LG: I have a birthmark in the shape of the United Kingdom (excluding Ireland) on my right knee. Not a lot of people know that.
Thank you, Lucy! Please visit www.lucygough.com to view more of Lucy’s work.
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ROSELINA HUNG
Artist living and working in Vancouver, Canada
tumblr: randomly ruminate
Atlantic, Oil on canvas, 8 x 10 in., 2002
Going through old pictures on my computer…found this old self-portrait.
I wish it was summer.
