With the upload of Eva and Franco Mattes‘ contribution, Studio Visit – my curatorial project for the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève online platform, the 5th Floor – is now complete. Following the link above, you can now enjoy 6 newly commissioned videos by Lu Yang, James Bridle, Petra Cortright, Oliver Laric, Aria Dean and Eva & Franco Mattes, sharing with us the intimacy of their desktop studio while they work.
Studio Visit invites artists to allow us access to their desktop studio and their working process. In Studio Visit, the desktop studio is shown off as the real space where an artist’s practice manifests. The focus is both on its furniture – files, tabs, programs – and on the artist at work – their favorite tools, their rhythm, their automatism, the way they find a balance between focus and distraction, between managing and creating, between online life and work. Thanks to the generosity and openness of the participating artists, through the project viewers can silently enjoy how Lu Yang gives shape to his imaginary worlds and fictional characters, how Bridle make research for their future projects, how Laric investigates the circulation and dispersion of his own iconography; they can attend the genesis of Cortright’s digital paintings as well as see how drawing, reading and collaborating with external producers intermingle in Dean’s practice.
In Eva and Franco Mattes‘ proposition, the focus is on various presentations of the Personal Photographs installation, in which invisible images and personal data travel along steel cable trays installed in the exhibition space: Franco sketches a future presentation in Wiesbaden, comments upon some installation pics Eva just sent from C/O Berlin, and looks at the documentation of their solo show at Fotomuseum Winterthur, fresh from the photographer. This workflow is from time to time interrupted by smaller tasks, from sending emails to trimming a video to adjusting their half cat sticker.
The Mattes’ studio visit follows the publication of Oliver Laric and Aria Dean’s propositions. In his video, Oliver Laric makes online research about the circulation and reuse of his 3D scans by professionals and amateurs, digging into various online platforms – from Artstation to Nexusmods, from Deviantart to Bilibili, from Google Images to Twitter.
Along her studio visit, Aria Dean is working on her upcoming show at Greene Naftali, New York, based on a series of etchings and sculptures. The etchings are generated from analog drawings and existing imagery, and the sculptures are 3D object collages made of objects she has made, found real and digital objects and organic shapes in Blender.