Kinetic Body is a mixed media installation up at Wrafterbuilt:
119 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, NY
The first Friday event is 11/6/15, from 6-9 pm.
119 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, NY
The first Friday event is 11/6/15, from 6-9 pm.
An artist used to daily studio time is adrift without that space of making. Jaime Schmidt was without a physical studio for months, and poured herself into daily sketches and photography sessions in order to "make something happen." Faithfully in response to this daily practice: Kinetic Body has happened.
Immediately the woven enclosure recalls the web-like installation by Chiharu Shiota: Trace of Memory, at the Barrel Factory in Pittsburgh. While Shiota's work looks to the echoes of past residencies in a space, Schmidt's is a living system.
Immediately the woven enclosure recalls the web-like installation by Chiharu Shiota: Trace of Memory, at the Barrel Factory in Pittsburgh. While Shiota's work looks to the echoes of past residencies in a space, Schmidt's is a living system.
Lines etch across the air in enfleshed color, building connections and an overall sense of identity forming itself. The lines both stretched and drawn recall topography, fingerprint whorls, and cells in expansive division.
Bodies incubate in amniotic sacs, flesh metamorphosing or healing wounds (again with the growth of cells and tiny reflected details., each drawing like a gylph.)
What was this critical wound? The artist references past traumas of childhood being addressed by a meditative process: healing began with visual mindfulness, where repeated sketching helps Schmidt reach a subconscious state.
Bodies incubate in amniotic sacs, flesh metamorphosing or healing wounds (again with the growth of cells and tiny reflected details., each drawing like a gylph.)
What was this critical wound? The artist references past traumas of childhood being addressed by a meditative process: healing began with visual mindfulness, where repeated sketching helps Schmidt reach a subconscious state.
In this state, ideas connect with each other. Travel photos splay out in linked threads, linking like neurons in the brain. The physical photos ( as opposed to Instagram shots with hashtags) convey that the identity being constructed here is explicitly present and handmade, not digital.
Schmidt describes the evolution of her work: previously it was more emotive and visceral, a coping mechanism for surviving her father's long-term illnesses. This new body of work is emerging from that past catharsis and beginning the foundational stages of a new cosmology.
This world-building is grounded in Phenomenology: the study of consciousness. She (and I) wholly recommend John Dewey's Art as Experience, as an exploration of how art takes experiences and distills them into Experiences: more concentrated and purposeful than the whirl of life passing by.
My main point of concern with Kinetic Body is that it requires solitude to be experienced to the fullest. This limiting factor of installation work continues to come up: how to we frame and invite in the public to installation and performative works? How do you have an "Experience" while milling around at an art opening?
This world-building is grounded in Phenomenology: the study of consciousness. She (and I) wholly recommend John Dewey's Art as Experience, as an exploration of how art takes experiences and distills them into Experiences: more concentrated and purposeful than the whirl of life passing by.
My main point of concern with Kinetic Body is that it requires solitude to be experienced to the fullest. This limiting factor of installation work continues to come up: how to we frame and invite in the public to installation and performative works? How do you have an "Experience" while milling around at an art opening?
Schmidt's cosmology has the fingerprint at its heart. Her research revealed a guiding biological curiosity: your fingerprints remain the same from cradle to grave. For her this connects many forms of identity in a fascinating symbol of the physical, mental, and spiritual. This became an obsessive and meditative drawing practice which led to the current body of work seen here.
Traveling for the first time, Schmidt recalls flying over California and looking down: "The lines of the land were the lines on my hand." These geological fingerprints became a visual home for the process unfolding in Kinetic Body.
Unspooled thread sits altar-like before more glyph-paintings of fingerprints and the adjoining room, and nearby a fleshy sac sits patiently inside a cocoon of printed lines. Schmidt says that the work will take on another form: she has eschewed the traditional aversion of cutting or re-purposing work in favor of consistently tearing up and remixing her paintings and installations.
Unspooled thread sits altar-like before more glyph-paintings of fingerprints and the adjoining room, and nearby a fleshy sac sits patiently inside a cocoon of printed lines. Schmidt says that the work will take on another form: she has eschewed the traditional aversion of cutting or re-purposing work in favor of consistently tearing up and remixing her paintings and installations.
Anselm Kiefer said during his visit to Buffalo last year at the Albright Knox: "Archival is an idea in service to the museums. I don't worry about it at all." Schmidt echoes this focus on the changing work: "As an artist, spaces come to you. Creativity is the one solid thing in my life that I have."
Essentially, other than this constant making, everything else will change. In opening up your identity to the unknown, through wear and tear and the dangerous tools of the maker, your fingerprints change. This power is enticing and dangerous, and it is an irresistible combination which keeps the artist moving.
Essentially, other than this constant making, everything else will change. In opening up your identity to the unknown, through wear and tear and the dangerous tools of the maker, your fingerprints change. This power is enticing and dangerous, and it is an irresistible combination which keeps the artist moving.
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