Lavatory Self-Portraits In The Flemish Style - Nina Katchadourian - 2011












Nina Katchadourian travels a lot. She’s clocked up 102 flights since March 2010, mostly for exhibitions, projects, teaching and lectures. She could, as many of us do, drink gin and tonic, watch five films back to back and sleep. But Katchadourian makes better use of her time. Using her camera phone, she takes photographs of amusing still-lifes improvised from the objects around her. The series, Seat Assignment, includes more than a dozen sub-projects: in Provisional Shelters, Katchadourian builds edifices from crackers; in Buckleheads, she snaps portraits of her neighbours reflected in her seatbelt buckle; and in Sweater Gorillas, she has created abstract, simian faces from the folds of a black sweater. They’re the sort of daft things a bored teenager might come up with, but Katchadourian’s gonzo-style shots and the repetitive, taxonomical nature of each study lend her otherwise slightly silly photographs a certain thoughtfulness.Lavatory Self-Portraits In The Flemish Style is her most creative vignette. On a flight from San Francisco to Auckland, she put a paper toilet seat cover on her head and took a picture in the mirror. Well, who wouldn’t?
The image, she realised, evoked 15th-century Flemish portraiture. So she experimented: a neck pillow and napkins serve as a medieval wimple; and an eye mask, napkins and a paper cup echo Vermeer’s Girl With A Pearl Earring. Katchadourian often strung up her scarf as a background, and insists she didn’t hold up the queue for the toilet, making her forays mostly when other passengers were asleep.
Aspects of Seat Assignment were first exhibited in February 2011 in Dunedin, New Zealand. In what is probably an artistic first, the bulk of the work was created on the flight from New York. Katchadourian is currently on show at the Turner Contemporary in Margate, and may well inspire visitors to get creative on their summer holiday flights this year. Photograph: Nina Katchadourian/Catharine Clark Gallery

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Factory Night @ Old Telephone Building - Stoke-on-Trent

Image
About Factory Nights 2009/10 (click here) We went to the top of the Old Telephone Building, space I had always dreamed of visiting because of its windows .... I was dreaming of a studio space there, but the windows are quite high up. The light is just amazing, though and I was drawn to it. Light and openings .... I had a go at trying something (see video). I like the simplicity of the action (changing positions around a window) and the nuances in light, colours and view that result from it. I'd love to explore this in trying to cover all the view spots possible for one window .... http://vimeo.com/16596664 from Celine Siani Djiakoua on Vimeo .
Read more

"Bodies of water" - The Dream and the Underworld by James Hillman

I like James Hillman's writings, even though I often find them disturbing and not so easy to read if you don’t know what he refers to (here : alchemical psychology). They always bring new perspectives into my thinking and imagination and seem to be echoing deeply within me. In his book, The Dream and the Underworld, he brings new perspectives to the “conventional” interpretation of dreams. Here is for “water”. Bodies of water Concerning   bodies of water   in dreams (oceans, rivers, lakes, pools, baths), let us bypass the symbolisms of lustration and baptism, of doctrinal wisdom and uterine mother, and also the too general meanings of life energy, Mercurius, and the unconscious. Instead, let us take a lead from Heraclitus (frg. 36) : "To souls, it is death to become water ...," and (frg. 77, Freeman): "It is delight, or rather death, to souls to become wet..." Jung has expanded upon the death of the soul through water in his classical work on the Ro...
Read more