Always Stand On The Bright Side Of Life (2019)
steel walker, pipe extension, lamp shade, light bulbs 
250 x 80 x 55 cm (H x W x D)

Through the careful selection of materials, Nicolas Vionnet succeeds in merging two completely different objects in a humorous and believable way. Although irony is clearly in the foreground, at second glance the work addresses serious themes such as aging, loneliness and loss of control. 

Always Stand On The Bright Side Of Life

Cutting through the space with the base principles of perspective, light and construction, the piece evokes a simplicity in it's palette and form. Each carpet thread used is knotted and constructed to create a grid; akin to any urban landscape and the idea of scaffolding. Taking from Einstein's theory of the space time 'fabric' and planetary objects having a depth in the grid, the knots are meant to show moments in time that are significant and moving thorough a controlled space. The threads are  golden yellow, the same colour of turmeric that is very close to my heritage. This also establishes a delicate thread of inquiry into the symbolic significance of the spice and the colour as well. Rooted to the earth, suspended in the space, light to touch and translucent in form; every detail is significant. 

The constructed deconstruction is meant to be light and easily installed, hanging or even static on the ground - architecture is essentially liquified to resemble a fabric of sorts and is yet solid in it's appearance. The fluidity of concept and thought is prevalent and yet gentle. 

Space moves

KAREN-B-GONE, a fantastical spray for the exclusive use of Black folx to rid them of harmful “Karen’s” Made in response to the May 25, 2020 Central Park Bird Watching Incident: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/14/nyregion/amy-cooper-false-report-charge.amp.html
Where Amy Cooper a white woman knowingly falsely accused a black man Christian Cooper (no relation) of assaulting her. 

With the known police violence in the US, this false accusation could have been a death sentence for Mr. Cooper. I imagine KAREN-B-GONE as a life saving measure—in the style of mosquito spray.

The piece was ran as an Instagram Ad on the @fubufactory profile to underscore the consumerism of the “moment”

KAREN-B-GONE

Walker (2017)

FeedScanner is a Chrome extension that automatically scrolls down your Facebook news feed while scanning it. As it scans through the feed, the extension filters out all the irrelevant ads and suggested posts by Facebook that contaminate your feed. The content you would care about - posts from friends, family and your trusted news sources - are transferred to a much cleaner interface which necessitates more focused reading.

FeedScanner eliminates all the distracting aspects of the Internet - multimedia, interactivity, hyperlinking, searchability, recommendations, and infinite scrolling, all of which are put out there by tech companies for the sake of “user friendliness” and “user engagement”. In reality, however, all these irrelevant features are competing for our attention and constantly disrupting us from paying sustained attention to what really matters.

The reading interface that accompanies FeedScanner liberates users from the outward train of passing stimuli in order to engage their attention more deeply with an inward flow of words, emotions, and ideas, an ability that many Internet users have been gradually losing due to long-time training of our brains to do more “efficient” reading on the Internet.

FeedScanner

Soviet DDR export TV-Set Telestar 4040 tuned into a pirate queer signal, translating quotes by various gender and queer theory writers and activist.

Referring to the notion of (gay) propaganda and television as its medium, this work explores the process of text transformation, as queer theory is transmitted through layers of digital analogue, and analogue to digital conversion, while glitch distortion refers to the censorship and misunderstanding.

PROPAGANDA

                       Der Mistelstand
                      Collage auf Pappe
                          70x50cm


                   

                   Der Zeitpunkt ist gekommen.
                      Wir werden eingeholt.
                      Die Natur erhebt sich,
  heftet sich an die Erzeugnisse unseres technologischen Hochmuts.
             Unser Dasein bedingt diesen Wendepunkt.
             Der langgehegte Traum der Megamaschine
                  sieht seinem Ende entgegen. 


                   

                       

DER MISTELSTAND  (2017)

Two partly dismantled motorbikes face each other. Their hectic honking and the aggressive pulling of the ignition remain a failing attempted rapprochement: None of their motors is ever been turned on. Both vehicles are exposed to a different movement inevitably, which’s consistent progress seems to have removed some of their parts already: Their own decay.

The horn, a universal sign of warning, becomes a mono-vocabulary language: A primitive dialogue is suggested that humanizes the mopeds, providing a dystopian picture: Disintegrating machines face each other as human equivalents in a social encounter, against their nature in restraint to standstill – Yet connected by their distant, disharmonious dialogue, that is based on warning signals. 


Ghostriders

The Project "Where is Zuhause?" funded by Berliner Projektfonds Kulturelle Bildung, it started with the artist Helena Mancelos together with the filmmaker & art director Carlos Vin Lopes creating a series of workshops with 12 refugee children living in Berlin.
The objective of the workshops is to offer a platform for expression and connection for refugee children, and collect the material produced by them in response to a series of visual and narrative stimuli.

This was a way to let the children manifest their emotions, exploring visual paths ranging from figurative representation to more abstract drawings. Subsequently, visual artists  connect each one of these visual expressions with a feeling, by writing down notes, some in the form of small paragraphs, others as single words.

​
In a secondary phase, the art directors Carlos Vin Lopes together with valerio Nicoletti reconverted these notes into visual compositions. Most of these pages are the result of a handmade process, using natural elements such as leaves, seeds, fruit and vegetables, wood, cotton, soil and mixing them with other “domestic” tools, such as fabrics, paper and cardboard scraps, shoelaces, cotton swabs, playdough, chalks.


The visual content of this project is organized into four sections, representing our attempt to connect with the children’s experience: the departure from their countries (journey), the welcome in Germany (arrival), the integration into this new reality (adaption) and the next steps (future).

 

We hope that this small project can help us navigate this process together and cast a colourful light on our common tomorrow, by continuing to look into each other’s shoes. 

Where is Zuhause? - Art project with refugee kids in Berlin

This series contains 3 pieces. "Home" (Lar, in PT); "Jantar" (Dinner, in EN); Machuca as Mãos (Hurts Hands, in EN)

Analog cut-pasting of architecture and design magazines, supported on steel nails fixed to the wall.

13 x 16 x 2 cm (each one)

Silhouette and dimensions similar to those of a Taurus G2c - .40 S&W pistol, which became one of the most sold in Brazil after a decree signed by the federal government in 2019. Until then, this weapon, of greater power, was for restricted use by the armed forces and police, and it cannot be offered to ordinary citizens.
In December 2020, the G2c - .40 S&W costs approximately four minimum wages.

Domestic use (2020)

Norigae is the most famous accessory of Hanbok (Traditional Korean cloth), which hung from the ribbon of Jeogori (Goreum). It is basically comprised of a string, decorative knots, jewelry, and a tassel. As beautiful as Norigae is, it was a symbol of chastity and fidelity; as traditional Korean culture valued purity in women before marriage, having Norigae provided a sense of security and confidence to ladies. Although the size of Norigae often reflected on social and economic status, it represented more of women's virtues and sense. Therefore, this accessory was very popular among Korean ladies in all classes and statuses including married/unmarried/common/noble. 
As an artist, I wanted to personify these finger toys/accessories which provided a sense of safe place and confidence in every woman. To fit the theme of modern globalization, I wanted to expose such an authentic piece of culture with a genuine and friendly approach to share the experience of cultural popularity in a small nation to the general public. My works were made to various human sizes, from a young child to an adult, to emphasize the power of such a tiny accessory which made it possible by cultural belief and human faith. While traditional colors and materials were maintained to keep the authenticity, scale enlargement, and utilizing modern shapes would magnify curiosity to scrutiny. 


Reminiscences

Solve et coagula, is composed by bonsai tees, a fossilised ivy root and salt crystals that I've grown on the trees. I was interested in creating a hybrid between botanical and mineral elements, where the trees leafs are actually composed by salt crystals. Salt has been and is still used to prevent grass and other biological elements to grow and spread, so it was fascinating for me to create an oxymoron between form and content

solve et coagula

I work across many mediums; photography, video, performance and installation are all a part of my practice. I often revisit themes and rituals from my ancestral home in my works - manipulated images of my family members, ceremonial flower arrangements and radically embroidered quilts offer hints into my upbringing in Turkey’s south. During the lockdown, I have started making freehand machine embroidery and tried to capture a vision for a post-pandemic future, along with a journey through my creative influences and history. 

 

When l start making each work with this medium, however, l make plans and lay out all the yarn with colour coordination, but in the end, improvisation leads me. The randomness of mistakes make sense when you look at the work from a few feet away. The process becomes quite satisfying after adding hundred of meters of thread and suddenly, an impression appears. 

 

First I prepare a digital collage and turn that into a physical work by using sewing machine embroidery. It takes a long time and involves a lot of improvisation as well as mistakes that lead me to take new directions. 


I particularly enjoyed sewing the section depicting a sack of thread or a pile of textiles. While the thread is the fabric of the piece, it also becomes the object. I also noticed how time is captured when making these images. The needle with the thread; green, red, yellow, blue, shapes a memory. Two weeks elapse and these works remain. 

​

Days into Nights

Title: Screw Up, Repeat: Lockdown Installation
Materials: tissue paper, found objects and spaces
Dimensions: size varies

Screw Up, Repeat: Lockdown Installation is a project undertaken in McDonnell's home during the first lockdown of 2020. It is comprised of hundreds of sheets of black tissue paper repeatedly crushed and flattened in a repetitive, obsessive manner and heaped up in small domestic spaces or interacting with workaday objects. ‘Screw Up Repeat’ engages with the sublime nature of bipolar mania, embodying psychomotor agitation, where pointless repetitive tasks are involuntary and grandiose projects are compulsive.

Screw-Up, Repeat - Lockdown Installation, 2020

The FUTURE MEMORY series combines the research and usage on artificial intelligence (AI) with historic photographs of the Cold War. 

Together with Casper Schipper, Daniela developed an AI system that learned her 'style' by being fed with images from Daniela's previous painting series. The AI system thus created an own imagery style and was then again fed with another material, that is the historic iconic photography. Daniela used these AI-images of the Cold War as basis for her new body of work. This new series deals on the one hand with the questions of authenticity of authorship and on the other with the truth of photographic material, that is still in such a way acknowledged by people, while at the same time never been more aware of its unreliability. Through this approach, Daniela Schwabe emphazises the potential and challenges of new technological developments such as AI that have brought the artificial and the human closer together than ever, creating neural networks that can be creative, intuitive and unpredictable.


FUTURE MEMORY

„Einfach so“
2020

Aquarell/Acryl/Pigmenttinte auf Papier
100cm × 140cm (Diptychon)


Einfach so

"Marmaros"



What happens when the material body is scanned in, compressed and reconfigured virtually? Where does this non-body now exist? How do we navigate titillation and desire in relation to the simulated, representational acts of sexualised behaviour performed by virtual women? If we can access 360º scans of naked women online without restriction, what does this mean for their bodily autonomy?


Léna Lewis-King was considering these questions when she began to make "Refigure", a short ballad-turned-striptease video inspired by Blue Velvet, Roy Orbison's "In Dreams", and the otherworldly performances of Italian singer Mina.


Over the course of the 3:31 video, you see a human-like figure swaying above a stage, slowly peeling off each layer of skin-clothing, stripping down to floating lingerie and eventually disrobing into nothingness. In all this layering and delayering, you might wonder where the physical footage begins and ends - how much was performed in reality, and how much was constructed virtually. This indecipherability adds to the feeling of the 'uncanny', the same feeling evoked by interacting with photogrammed, hollowed out virtual 'people' that exist within computers and VR headsets.

Refigure

INSIDE –OUT
The concept Inside-Out illustrates the desire for discovery, for bringing out the inner emotions. The personal interior structures let themselves eviscerated and uncovered, showing their secret face to the world, the outcome being sometimes surprising even for his own creator. Within each of us exists a mysterious universe, a world defined by sensitivity, vulnerability but also power, which the artists is trying to bring out and evoke it using his best ways of expression. Even though this world can never show its whole beauty, the piece of art can create a bridge with the outside world. 

Ark, 2017

The border between fantastic and real is crossed over by the Ark, from which explodes the tumultuos inner self, incarnated in characters that preserve the naivity, playfulness and abstract.
Visions metamorphosed into creatures that keep a cold relation between the material reality and the playful and unformulated,  ambiguous inner self.
Game and equilibrum, inside- outside, intuitive drawing translated into ceramics. 

Mouse power, 2017

In a world that animates itself with a click of a mouse, we need to be conscious that every action becomes reality.


Inside-Out

In the set theory, the intersection A ∩ B of two sets A and B is the set that contains all elements of A that also belong to B (or equivalently, all elements of B that also belong to A), but no other elements.
The intersection is a binary operation whose arity is two, and whose two domains and one codomain are (subsets of) the same set. Schnittmenge, German word for intersection, means literally the quantum of objects cropped together. 
Deriving from different sources they are not only congruent but shared, could even stand for the average. The work follows the idea of perception of belonging, affinity or extraneousness to nature, the Italian and the German one, which are not imposed by men like culture, mentality or urban landscape, but by climatical and geographical conditions. Flora and fauna can overlap, interchange, contrast, but finally they belong to the same idea of instinctive and inherent nature, following also Novalis’ romantic vision of nature as ‘Heimat’. Single parts of photographs are extrapolated and reassembled, creating circular spotlights that include overlays but also exit the frame, representing the (non)punctum that encloses more detailed key elements, alternating larger views of German and Italian landscape with fractions. A kind of personal perimeter, reflecting on pattern and its laws: do elements set the structure or does pattern precede the elements?

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