See more of Muse's work in the FlatFile here!
Featured image credit: Muse Dodd, Washed Away, 2020, Digital Collage on archival rice paper, 13"x19"
]]>Watch Chef Brandwein explain one of her favorite FlatFile artworks by Aphra Adkins, and how it relates back to her life.
Amy Brandwein: TASTE, SIGHT from Transformer on Vimeo.
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Childhood
I have some musical gaps compared to other people born in the 90’s. My early exposure to music was whatever my parents played on the radio while driving, which for my mom was classical and old country music and for my dad was 70’s rock.
My first real independent musical taste was David Bowie. After seeing him in Labyrinth for the first time, I went through my parents CD’s and found a single David Bowie album, which I begged them to play. It was definitely a learned taste, but my love persisted and you can see the David Bowie poster in one of my drawings.
Middle School
Most of my musical tastes as a pre-teen came from my self-identified emo friend and iTunes’s free single of the day. I was not allowed to have a Myspace, so sitting in the back of the bus and sharing earbuds while my friend scrolled through their latest tracks was one of the few ways I could hear new music. My first foray into adolescent rebellion was listening to the songs that had been marked *explicit* on my friend’s pink iPod mini.
Teenagers - My Chemical Romance
Time to Pretend - MGMT
Sleepyhead - Passion Pit
High School
I branched out more in high school when I got an iPod of my own. Lots of Kanye’s Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and Bon Iver. I was still influenced quite a bit by the people around me, like my bff’s older sister who would blast dubstep everyday when she drove us home from school and let us stay with her in her NYC dorm room spring break of our senior year. She was (and still is) the coolest.
Scary Spirits and Nice Sprites - Skrillex
Gorgeous - Kanye West
We Are Your Friends - Justice, Simian
College/young adult
There are several musicians and groups that I started to listen to during my 20’s whom I admire for their lyricism and how beautifully they express their chosen themes. When I was starting out in school I was more concerned with the technique and compositional elements of my painting, and less with narrative development. Listening to music with strong, poetic lyrics taught me the value of using narrative devices in my work to more deeply express the themes I’m exploring.
Lana del Rey is one of my big influences from this time (my drawing “Video Games” is a nod to her song of the same title), and more recently I’ve gotten into Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Cave is a prolific singer and songwriter, so their discography is quite large with tons of lyrical fodder for inspiration. Everywhere by Fleetwood Mac inspired my drawing, “Ooo, I wanna be with you everywhere (Nostalgia Daydream).” To me, the glitteriness of the intro feels like the auditory embodiment of that initial warm and fuzzy feeling nostalgia creates.
Video Games - Lana del Rey
Swept Inside - Future Islands
Blind - Hercules & Love Affair
Drew Barrymore - SZA
You’ll miss me when I’m not around - Grimes
I let love in - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Listen to MK Bailey's Spotify playlist, and browse through her FlatFile works here!
]]>Shop Katana's FlatFile artworks here.
]]>Transformer first presented Mica Scalin’s artwork in the June 2002 exhibition Mica and Misaki, also featuring the artwork of Misaki Kawai. Taking a criss-cross look at Japanese and American pop culture from each artists’ touristic perspective, this inaugural exhibition established Transformer’s ongoing focus of fostering cultural exchange and dialogue between DC based artists and their national and international peers.
For Evoking the Senses, Mica Scalin has created “touch2020” in response to Yoko Ono’s Touch Poem for Group of People which reads: “Touch eachother. 1963 winter.” It was created as a performative poem to encourage physical contact in response to lack of touch among people.
Scalin went two months without physical touch last year. Since then, she’s only had physical contact with one person. “I miss the casual touch I once took for granted,” Scalin says, “brushing past a stranger in a narrow hallway; an accidental collision in a crowded bar; shoulders and arms pressed against each other momentarily on the train.”
“Ono’s poem took on a new meaning to me,” Scalin continues. “What to do when human touch and human survival are at odds? What aesthetic experience could possibly replace those odd intimacies?”
Scalin was compelled to update and reinterpret Ono’s poem in response to 2020’s ongoing “Don’t touch each other” messaging. Scalin felt the necessity to have the reinterpreted poem performed, but lacked an audience so became creative with her resources.
“My paper dancers are immune to disease, but they were also resistant to following my direction to move in unison, like Tricia Brown’s dancers. I exhale and my breath carries them across the floor, colliding like particles.”
Scalin has a BFA in Photography from The Corcoran School of Art, and is the Managing Partner of Another Limited Rebellion, an art and innovation studio.
View Scalin’s new FlatFile artworks just added to the program January 2021 here!
Mica Scalin: TOUCH from Transformer on Vimeo.
touch2020, Mica Scalin, 2020, video and sound, 1 minute 20 seconds
]]>On the anniversary of their collaborative exhibition LUMINIFEROUS AETHER, presented at Transformer Feb-March in 2017, Kelley and Long invite you to think about how we create meaning and mark time and intention. How do we use physical objects to aid in our processing of experience as physical and emotional animals? Is the idea of ritual meaningful to you? What ritual could you construct to honor, cleanse, protect, defy?
View Kelley and Long’s ritual starter kit here, which features a collection of images that contain ingredients with the potential to “evoke” each of the senses – with the evocation at the sole discretion of the viewer and potential participant. Results may vary.
Here is a sneak peek of seeping triangle - Matt Hollis’ digital love letter to the philosophical ideas and thinkers that have extended his artistic intentions in all directions, created for Evoking the Senses.
A sexy, awkward, fumbling flirtation with French philosophy; detours through new materialism; and the messy ecstasy of undoing all spill across the pages of this barely-held-together collection of ideas and imagery.
You can view the full digital zine here: http://www.enoughforall.com/seeping-triangle
Matt Hollis is an artist based in Los Angeles. He has shown his work extensively in the DC metro area and in L.A. Matt was part of Transformer’s 2015 International Sister Cities Program in Paris, the 2013 Expansions exhibition, and a featured artist in numerous Transformer Annual Auction events. He recently earned his MFA at Otis College of Art & Design, graduating with an Academic Excellence award in 2019.
See his FlatFile portfolio of work here.
Images all courtesy of Matt Hollis
Rapheal Begay (Diné) is a photographer and curator from the Navajo Nation. Currently based in Window Rock, AZ, he serves as a Public Information Officer for the Navajo Nation Division of Human Resources Administration.
As a storyteller, Begay invites us to view his surroundings and observe the inspiration, beauty, blessings, teachings, and history that it contains. This video is closely related to his series, “A Vernacular Response,” that represents everyday moments and diverse aspects of the Navajo Nation.
In support of the visual legacy of the Diné way of life, the documentation of environment creates a moment that celebrates and interrogates its source of creation. As a form of contemporary Navajo storytelling, Begay’s series also acts as a (re)collection of intimate moments tied to his own understanding and relationship to his surroundings.
Video Credit: Rapheal Begay, “A moment from home,” 2021, video and sound, 3 minutes 5 seconds.
Rapheal Begay: SIGHT from Transformer on Vimeo.
Shop Rapheal Begay's FlatFile works here.
]]>One night, as he laid awake in bed, he could hear the train’s whistle and was transported back to his first train trip as a young boy to the south of his native Chile. Enveloped by nostalgia of his youthful journeys, Belmar was inspired to create a homage to his trusty steel friend and the reminiscent sounds it makes.
Video credit: Railroad Tracks, by Joan Belmar, 2021, sound and video, 3 minutes 18 seconds.
Joan Belmar: SIGHT, SOUND from Transformer on Vimeo.
Belmar also created the playlist, “The Railroad Sound,” that he created just for this program.
Image Credits: 1. Yar Koporulin, “Far North,” 2016, Silkscreen and acrylic on paper. 2. “Bubbling Over,” photograph courtesy of Tony Lawson. 3. Hill Prince Recipe, “Bubblig Over.” 4. Yar Koporulin, “Untitled,” 2017, Intaglio on paper. Photograph courtesy of Tony Lawson.
]]>Watch a home performance presented by Voids in the Archive, a collaboration between photographer Ding Ren and her partner, who is a musician. Debuting their newest member, this performance was recorded at and nearby the artist’s home in Amsterdam, and provides viewers an intimate glimpse into Ren’s inner world.
For the past 7 years, Ren has had to change the way she lives and exists in the world due to a rare medical condition. During that time, Ren would write poetry about her experience, which her partner used as lyrics. These songs have been kept rather private, much like how Ren kept her condition, because it was too heavy and unknown.
Now, Ren finds herself free from the personal lockdown, as her condition resolved itself after the birth of her son. As she emerged from her personal lockdown, the world started to embark on a communal, universal lockdown, with the same unknown and heavy feelings clouding over us. With this in mind, Ren thought it would be a fitting moment to share some never-shared-before music, that was created with the spirit of a slowed-down, quieter, and liminal time in mind.
Ding Ren was born in China, grew up in the United States and is currently based between MD and Amsterdam (NL). Through a cross-cultural, field driven approach, her analogue photography seeks to draw the viewer's attention to the subtle details of spaces they already inhabit. You can purchase her works from our FlatFile shop!
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At home performance by Voids in the Archive for "Evoking the Senses" Transformer’s Flatfile exhibition from Dec. 2020 - Feb. 2021. Cozy winter vibes and debuting their newest member. The sweaters they are wearing are hand knit by Ding Ren.
what do you see
off in the distance
nettle tea -- collected from the forest
grains of white sand
between hairstrands
wild bursts of light -- crippling slowly
quiet bouts of welcome solitude
quiet bouts of welcome solitude
into the distance
into the distance
until it arrives
and becomes true
and becomes true
and becomes true
the green of rolling hills
off in the distance
our reflections on a train window
the barks of trees
the grooves of history
purpose as defined as a solid rock
quiet bouts of welcome solitude
into the distance
into the distance
until it arrives
and becomes true
and becomes true
and becomes true
(a floating kite
off in the distance
shadows flowing in the evening breeze
landscapes of gestures
and fleeting textures
moving forward
grasping for balance*)
*in this performance the 3rd verse is omitted
single droplets on the window
merging bodies to form one shadow
the cold breeze sinking into my skin
soft linen sheets bright and thin
and the darkness surrounds
and the rain pelting down
and the patterns of sound
of the rain pelting down
the smell of the night settling in
and the rustling of the wind
flickering lights all along the coast
what i yearn to see the most
and the darkness surrounds
and the rain pelting down
and the patterns of sound
of the rain pelting down
i can smell the night
i can smell this night
i can smell the night
i can smell this night
lightening strikes
i can smell this night
lightening strikes
i can smell this night
flickering candlelight
i can smell this night
flickering candlelight
i can smell this night
and the darkness surrounds
and the rain pelting down
and the patterns of sound
of the rain pelting down
falling slowly
into billowing dust
shivering to the bone
falling slowly
into billowing dust
i don't want to feel alone
We are vessels of observation, according to artist Felipe Goncalves. Our senses - touch, taste, sight, smell, sound - allow us to interpret the particles of existence around us. Watch as Goncalves explains why we don’t create, but rather manipulate what already is.
Felipe Goncalves creates work which entices viewers to enter a world that is normally obscured by reason and fear. Death, childhood, and glitter are nostalgic devices meant to leave one giggling in the face of terror. Goncalves graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2004, and has exhibited his works throughout the country.
View more of Goncalves' work in the FlatFile here.
Video Credit: Directed by Felipe Goncalves and filmed and edited by Thomas LaGrange, “Mourning Wood,” 2021, 4:54.
New to the FlatFile, artist Bonnie Crawford and her partner JB Hunter have collaborated to create a video of intimacy in their home. Featuring footage filmed by Crawford, from in and around her home, and accompanied by both diegetic sounds and synthesized sounds added in by JB, this video reflects the personal, everyday occurrences within Crawford’s home.
Crawford’s Insomnia Drawings are all created in her bed at night when she has difficulty falling asleep. The images and sounds featured in this video are some samples of what reverberates in her memory as she draws.
Along with the video Crawford writes:
This video is a list. A phone placed in a pocket accidentally records video during the early days of the global pandemic. It is spring, and we are spending a lot of time outdoors with the children. Filled with uncertainty, we are planning a large vegetable garden in case the food supply is interrupted in the coming months. We are scared, but undertake this activity as if it's a fun and exciting project with the kids. Cut to a shadow of JB's fuzzy head, and my fingers, playing with the hairs. JB is telling me something personal, and I am getting my dumb phone out to capture the shadows of his head. He tolerates this kind of thing from me often. I remember my late mother telling me about how she stopped crying suddenly once when she was a child because of how beautiful the light looked sparkling in her teary eyes. A piece of tape stuck to my finger, catching the light; sunlight passing through some pieces of broken glass I found by the stream in the park. The kids are finding beautiful rocks, and rocks to toss in the water. These delightful, cheap, twirly toys. A display at the science center from before—when we still went to museums—that uses sound to vibrate a fine silica-type substance, the disco ball filmed through a rolled up piece of paper at a Laurie Anderson performance. Some foul dish water reminding me of Anne Boyer's writing about doing the dishes: That doing the dishes is an attempt to "block ruin's path." A beeping baby snake we found in the yard one night. More tape, more beautiful shadows. This time, from a sign hanging on a chain link fence in downtown Miami, November 2019. We had no idea. More dishes, more beautiful light.
When I wake up at night and begin to draw, my movements, and the clinking sounds of my brushes in the water, the light from my phone, they sometimes wake JB. Sometimes he is already awake. He never seems bothered that I woke him. We chat briefly. He bobs back off to sleep. I finish whatever I'm working on and roll over. We make plans to honor these nighttime stirrings with tea or warm milk, having both read the same article about humans sleeping in two phases. In the past, my insomnia has gotten out of control, making my brain hostile. These days I don't have room for that, and I'm grateful for tenderness in the wakings.
Crawford is a Baltimore-based artist and mom whose work explores how intimacy, risk, and harm inform habits of care. She began working this way when she became a single mother of two and in turn became dependent on extralegal, queer family structures for support. JB Hunter is from Texas, and has lived in Baltimore since 2008. He has been a touring musician, singer, songwriter, and producer for over 15 years. Since the onset of the global pandemic, he has become a step-dad who enjoys toying around with synths.
View more of Crawford's FlatFile work here.
Video Credit: Video Credit: “Learning to Crawl,” video by Bonnie Crawford, soundtrack by JB Hunter, featuring the voices of Emmet and Hank Kotula, 2021.
11 years ago today, FlatFile artists Jessica Cebra and Zach Storm collaborative exhibition, Snow Globe opened at Transformer. Converting Transformer’s storefront project space into a life-size, interactive, winter wonderland, the exhibition became a diorama-like theater that audiences were invited to experience from both inside and outside.
Cebra and Storm playfully incorporated painting, drawing, mixed media collage, and sculptural elements to create a winter-themed installation (the globe), with dancers from The Washington Ballet (the snow), performing a series of new pieces choreographed by the then-Artistic Director Septime Webre.
Cebra and Storm have come together to collaborate again for the Evoking the Senses programming. Listen to their conversation about the writings of Don DeLillo, experience mediated by digital technologies, non-digital existence, energy and sensation, accompanied by a pandemonium of parrots!
View more of Cebra's work in the FlatFile here.
View more of Storm's work in the FlatFile here.
Video courtesy of Cebra & Storm, 2020.
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One of our new 2021 FlatFile artists is Muse Dodd (they/them), a multidisciplinary artist, curator, and DJ from Severn, MD currently based in New Orleans. Through the act of remembering, Dodd uses their body to map the lived experience of Africans in America. Dodd channels trauma to connect with, process and alchemize pain; both personal and collective through movement, ritual and collective dreaming.
Dodd created a playlist exclusively for Transformer’s Evoking the Senses programming series, created to inspire relaxation and stillness in listeners. Their playlist includes guided meditations, instrumentals for meditation and transcendence, as well as vibey soundscapes, all aimed to tune out the world and to reflect inward.
See more of Muse's work in the FlatFile here.
]]>Artist Christopher Kardambikis loves 📚books. A lot. Here are some of his top favorite artists’ books from 2020.
Christopher Kardambikis explores space, process, and form through books, printmaking, and drawing. He has co-founded three artist book and zine projects: Encyclopedia Destructica in Pittsburgh, Gravity and Trajectory in San Diego, and 90 Proof Press in Los Angeles. He received his BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and MFA from the University of California, San Diego.
Christopher is the host of Paper Cuts, a podcast that documents the contemporary world of zines and DIY publishing. In the fall of 2016, Christopher joined the faculty at George Mason University as an Assistant Professor and the Director of Navigation Press.
View more of Christopher's work in the FlatFile here.
Image Credits: Love, Raisul by Raisul Tintin, published by Homie House Press
See all Evoking the Senses programs here.
]]>A few months into the shelter-in-place period, Jessica Cebra had the opportunity to move to a more remote, coastal town in California. As she connected to the nature around her, she began to feel her sanity reserves be replenished and nourished.
In futures, Cebra reflects upon her surroundings - the nearby oceans and their fluctuating wave cycles and tides; the blazing wildfires that were just starting their season as Cebra moved; her own backyard garden - and meditates on how human behavior impacts these forces of nature.
Jessica Cebra, from southern California, graduated from the Corcoran College of Art + Design in 2006, and lived and worked in the Washington, D.C. area until the end of 2017. She also studied Library and Archival Science, and Historic Preservation at the University of Maryland which has inspired themes of permanence and ephemerality, preservation and loss, in her work. Jessica is now based in the Bay Area of her home state.
See more of Jessica's work in the FlatFile here.
Video Credit: Jessica Cebra, futures, video, 14.42 minutes.
Listen to “Gabo,” a sound interpretation created by Carolina Mayorga, in her experimentation with frottage, a Surrealist technique of creating “automatic” works. “Gabo” is part of Carolina’s ongoing series, Pink Automatism, which includes hundreds of improvised artworks.
Carolina transforms surfaces and words to reach the subconscious, turning textures and touch into blended sounds.
Carolina Mayorga is a Colombian-born and naturalized American interdisciplinary artist who has exhibited her work nationally and internationally for the last 20 years. Mayorga’s artwork addresses issues of social and political content. Comments on migration, war, identity, translate into video, performance, site-specific installations, and 2-D works.
See more of Carolina's work in the FlatFile here.
Video credit: Carolina Mayorga, “Gabo,” 2020, video and sound, duration: 2 min 4 sec.
Artist MK Bailey is deeply inspired by her everyday surroundings, and incorporates them into her works.
MK created this featured work, Nostalgia Daydream, in the spring when she was deeply nostalgic for the time she had spent in college, living in close quarters with all of her girlfriends. “The scene is modeled after my room senior year,” MK reminisces, “complete with a poster of David Bowie’s Rolling Stone cover that was a fixture in all five of my rooms during my time in college.”
MK Bailey creates narrative figure-based paintings and experimental landscapes that reflect her experience of the world. She uses oil, acrylic, and digital mediums to explore themes of loneliness, nostalgia, and femininity.
See all of MK's work in the FlatFile here.
Artwork credit: MK Bailey, “Nostalgia Daydream Details,” 2020
Birthday
This chair is from my first residency at Capitol Hill Arts Workshop in early 2020. It sat in the studio space for weeks, a piece of the set left behind by the in-house theatre company after their latest show, still waiting to be picked up and brought to its new home. You can find the chair silhouette in a number of pieces from the Fever Dream series I created in the five weeks I spent at the residency.
Artwork credit: MK Bailey, Me, on my 26th birthday (Feb 2020), 2020, Digital drawing on archival fine art paper, 11”x14”, Edition of 15.
I saw my ex
I drew ‘I saw my ex…’ near the beginning of quarantine, when the sources for my work were whittled down to whatever was present in my immediate surroundings. The flowers sat in a small glass jar on my windowsill, and as they wilted over time, I couldn’t help but notice their downturned heads mirrored the pose of the figure in this piece.
Artwork credit: MK Bailey, I saw my ex on Instagram, and now I feel bad (Mar 2020), 2020, Digital drawing on archival fine art paper, 11”x14”, Edition of 15.
TV Dinner
This drawing is part of a long-term project I’ve been working on - a mini-series using stills of Joan from the TV show Mad Men. I listen to a lot of media while creating (new albums, television shows, movies, podcasts, etc.), it all influences my work in some way.
Artwork credit: MK Bailey, TV DINNER, 2020, Digital drawing on archival fine art paper, 11”x14”, Edition of 15.
Video Games
I often have specific color preferences, so sometimes as a challenge, and to round out my palette, I’ll use the color select tool to find interesting colors in an image. Lucky Charms is a cereal that holds a lot of childhood nostalgia for me, and the color of the figures in this piece are inspired by the purple-gray color the marshmallows turn the milk.
Artwork credit: MK Bailey, VIDEO GAMES (May 2020), 2020, Digital drawing on archival fine art paper, 11”x14”, Edition of 15.
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Like many, artist Ziad Nagy is attracted to conspiracy theories, such as Ong’s Hat. For Ziad, the immediate allure to conspiracies is the fact that they are unpopular truths, but even in their knowing fictionalizations, he is compelled.
Listen to Ziad’s rendition of Ong’s Hat, which he composed for Radiophrenia in Glasgow. The sound piece is devised of hollow samples, set to a drawn-out structure, so that what comes next is hard to predict, but familiar. The process becomes like trying to understand an emulation of what is natural.
“Hence,” says Ziad, “Ong’s Hat is a strange truth that we seek alternative realities barefaced, whether the conspiracy of the inter-dimensional gate is true or not.”
Ziad Nagy (1989) is an interdisciplinary artist. He uses found material in an array of mediums to create interventions that are broadly existential: identity, life, death, and time.
See more of Ziad's work in the FlatFile here.
Sound Artwork credit: Ziad Nagy, Ong’s Hat, 2020, sound/music, duration: 13 min 53 sec.
Watch artist Lily deSaussure create Seventeen, a work in progress stitched entirely by hand. Can you feel the texture of the thread and the importance of touch, in navigating each and every stitch?
Lily deSaussure studied at California College of the Arts and the University of San Francisco, earning a BFA in drawing and painting. She received an MFA in painting from American University. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
See more Lily's work in the FlatFile here.
Video credit: Lily deSaussure, “Seventeen,” 2020, duration: 1 min 10 sec.
At the start of Covid this spring, artist Hannah Spector gave in and bought herself a synth she had wanted for years. Watch and listen to Hannah’s visual poem that relates both to her drawing and linguistic practices.
Included in this video are original compositions, created by Spector.
Hannah Spector is an interdisciplinary video and performance artist, poet, and curator. Spector's work is concerned with confounding our usual ways of seeing and speaking, and in doing so, opening up new possibilities of interaction. She is a current MFA Candidate at The University of Texas at Austin.
See more of Hannah’s work in Transformer’s FlatFile here.
📺 Tune in with @transformerdc Wednesdays & Saturdays for Evoking the Senses programs with FlatFile artists, collectors, and special guest collaborators.
]]>We're kicking off the online programming for our new exhibition, Evoking the Senses.
Watch as FlatFile artist Victor Koroma plays around with his fictitious scenes before finding the perfect combination of light, contrast, and narrative.
Victor is a photographer and visual artist born in Sierra Leone, raised in Alexandria, VA and currently living and working in Los Angeles. Victor's mission is to find new ways to construct and reconstruct what a photograph is. He considers his process similar to computer hacking; altering the software and hardware of conventional photography in order to reprogram the medium with new directives. A mixed media synthesis. He uses elements of painting, illustrations, and sculpture as a way of making an image rather than taking a traditional photograph. His objective is to morph the medium to the point where audiences question what is considered a photograph anymore.
See more of Victor’s work in Transformer’s FlatFile here.
See Victor’s video artwork presented by Transformer at The Asbury Hotel here.
📺 Tune in with @transformerdc Wednesdays & Saturdays for Evoking the Senses programs with FlatFile artists, collectors, and special guest collaborators.
Title: Behind the Scenes Victor Koroma
Year: 2020
Duration: 2:13
Medium: Video
Credits: Editing: Victor Koroma Cinematography: Victor Koroma
Song: 1234 by Victor K.