ARTISTS

 FLORENCE AELLEN

About the Work

The graphic bouquets arranged on the paper with apparent lightness by Florence Aellen first attract attention through the regularity and delicacy of the patterns. Beyond the ornamental character of the composition, which brings us back to wallpapers and decorative arts, these works challenge by their symbolic content as well as by the ambiguous sensation they convey. When our gaze isolates each element of the whole, it discovers an assemblage made of plants, natural relics, but also organs and bones. A discomfort sought by the artist, who plays with the finesse and elegance of the execution and the representation of obvious symbols of mortality. By mixing, among other things, botany and anatomy, Florence Aellen revisits the memento mori from a past century and invites us to reflect on the finality of all things. Simultaneously, she builds bridges between grace and repulsion, between life and death, between health and disease and questions the links between organisms, especially plants and the human body.

Biography

Florence Aellen grew up in the Jura Mountains of Switzerland, where she developed a keen interest in the plants that surrounded her. Through consulting books on botany and created herbaria in a quest to gain intimate knowledge of what surrounded her. During her Bachelor of Arts studies at ECAL in Lausanne, themes related to biology and the organic and an interest in death and its representations began to make their way into her work. Relocation to Biel in 2007, she collaborated on scenography productions for the theater and started a carrier as an educator. A residency in Brussels in the Spring of 2013 allowed her to pursue an interest in naturalistic illustration and to develop an anatomical and botanical universe close to pattern. Her work explores mixing diverse media and genre while focusing on the human body with connections that unite it with nature, developed in practice through individual and group exhibitions.

More Infos: http://www.florenceaellen.com

 

 URSULA WALDBURGER

About the Work

Embroidery in the age of computer-assisted image processing has been the focus of Ursula Waldburger’s artistic practice for over a decade. With the belief that embroidery should develop its own visual language, much of her time has been searching for a solution between investing in faster and more rational production methods and the arts of traditionally implemented embroidered image. Just as in fabric printing, digital plotters have brought many new possibilities that could not be achieved with traditional methods such as screen printing. In search of novel and modern implementations for the medium of embroidery, Urusla Waldburger has pursued questions of the use of abstract imagery, posing questions and finding solutions when attempting to integrate concepts of "fog" "blur" or "dissolution" into things embroidered. What the artists has and which the industry seems to be avoiding is to harness informatically supported image processing to tailor it for embroidery, to explicitly address issues of resolution and pixilation with different parameters than the conventional digitizing programs. The concept of resolution and pixilation in embroidery has been translated in a process of exploring the questions of how much area can be between stitches without the image falling apart, or how the stitches must look between stitches. Although much of her work is done by hand because the existing computer apps remain underdeveloped due to an all too narrow focus on textile heritage rather than innovation, Ursula Waldburger remains focused in the future and imagines new works of shimmering thread created by using digital brushes on the large digital canvases that cover large interior spaces. 

 

Biography 

Ursula Waldburger is a Swiss textile artist and designer who was born in Pasadena and now lives in Arbon, Switzerland. She studied architecture at the EPFL Lausanne and began her studies in the arts with the Basic Course at the University of the Arts in Basel. and concluded her education with studies in Design and Textile at the University of the Arts in Zurich. Most important to her, was the research she undertook for her thesis "from tapestry to computer designed embroidery", which she put into praxis during an internship in research and development at Leemann, Lichtensteig, and Bischoff Textil in St. Gallen. In 2003, her research brought her a nomination for the Design Award Switzerland. Her first solo art exhibition was in 2008 at Tuchinform in Winterthur as part of the four exhibitions entitled "a passion". In 2010 she designed a carpet for the Ruckstuhl Edition using embroidery on wool. She has received several awards including the Preis Prix Ramstein Basel in 2010 and the Masterpiece-Preis von Formforum in 2018. Moving to Arbon in 2017, she founded the Label Waldburger Stickerei Manufacture with which she explores generative methods for tapestries between the arts and for commercial designs.

More Infos: https://www.waldburgerstickerei.ch

WAYNE DE FREMERY

About the Work

The exhibit "Awareness of the Mechanism” focuses on technologies of memory and loss. It materializes versions of canonical Korean poems as three-dimensional objects. The aim is to illuminate the institutional and technical systems of cultural memory that we call literature. To foster an awareness of how we are remaking our cultural inheritances with digital technologies, the exhibition presents three objects made by mapping the abstract values of encoded data (Unicode values) associated with canonical Korean poems into three-dimensional space. To materialize the digital abstractions, the models are printed using 3D printers and placed on display. However, for this version of the project, augmented reality technologies are used to display the models virtually, allowing viewers to intimately examine the data objects using the interface tools common to smart devices.

Biography

Wayne de Fremery is an associate professor in the School of Media, Arts, and Science at Sogang University in Seoul and Director of the Korea Text Initiative at the Cambridge Institute for the Study of Korea in Cambridge, Massachusetts (http://www.koreatext.org/). He also currently represents the Korean National Body at ISO as Convener of a working group on document description, processing languages, and semantic metadata (ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34 WG 9). Wayne’s recent research projects have concerned technology and literary translation (paper forthcoming from Translation Review), the integration of privately generated textual heritage information into the information management systems of the National Library of South Korea (Library Hi Tech, 2020), and the use of deep learning to improve Korean optical character recognition (OCR, funded by the National Library of Korea, 2020). Books and journals designed by Wayne have appeared from the Harvard Korea Institute, the University of Washington Press, and his own award-winning press Tamal Vista Publications. Films Wayne has produced have appeared at festivals such as MITAK (Moving Image Technology Association of Korea) 2020 and his artwork has been exhibited in various venues, including the National Science Museum of Korea and the Corner Gallery in Seoul. 

 More infos: http://www.pwdef.info/index.html.

ARTHUR CLAY

About the Work 

“Nine! Eight! Seven! and so on...” celebrates the concept of the countdown that is used for starting a simple foot race to the launching of a rocket to the moon, and picks up on the interest that artist have had to place artwork in space by creating artworks for a synthetic zero-gravity environment where they can float and rotate as if they were suspended in space and subject to orbital ebbs and flows. Content wise, the work consists of a collection of abstractions of artworks that were created with the intention of having them exhibited in outer space. Some of the artworks referenced are sitting on the moon or orbiting the earth, and others never survived the launch or are simply waiting for their countdown. The more trained eye schooled slightly in the history of Space Art might come to recognize constellations of stars that are reminiscent of works in space by Andy Warhol, Paul Van Hoeydonck, Trevor Paglen, Carl Sagan, Robert Rauschenberg, Forrest Myers, David Novros, and Claes Oldenburg, works that seem appropriate to launch into space but which have not yet reached their count down have also be sighted and include works by Arthur Clay, Hannes Malte Mahler, and a doodle by Kurt Vonnegut. Each of the abstractions used in the work form part of a constellation gallery that is filled with works that were created to be viewed from all sides as they circle orbit around the viewer, who is immersed into a galaxy undergoing constant change and endless variation as rotation unfolds on diverse orbital planes. 

Biography

Arthur Clay is an artist and collaborator who was born in New York and twitters between his life in Basel and world presence working between the borders of art, the science, and society. As an artist, he has been awarded prizes for performance art, media art, design, music theater, and composition. He has exhibited in major museum across the world and is at present involved in many long running projects including a performative sound art tour and in several larger exhibitions featuring his work including a solo retrospective for 2022. He has been supported by governmental agencies, art councils, private foundations, and industry partners such as Presence Switzerland, Pro Helvetia, Swissnex China, Swissnex Singapore, Migros Kulturprozent, Mondrian Foundation, Japan Foundation, Arts Council England, Canada Council for the Arts, Procedural, Hewlett Packard, LG Electronics, and many others. As an educator, he has taught over the years at various art schools and universities in Europe and Asia including Zurich Hochschule der Kuenste, Luzerne University of Arts & Science, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland, Sogang University, and NCCU Taipei. 

More infos: https://artclayportfolioonline.blogspot.com