Maggie Wong School of the Art Institute of Chicago
An Interview with Artist Maggie Wong
Maggie Wong is a visual artist, author, and educator based in Chicago. Her work has been exhibited in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and Berlin. Most recently, Maggie'due south work was exhibited at Pitchfork'due south MidWinter Festival at the Art Institute of Chicago. I reached out to Maggie to hash out her various creative mediums and inspirations. You tin can discover her piece of work on Instagram @ikeanokia.
Don: What most interests me the most about your work is its wide range of mediums: from writing to sculpture to sound. How do yous cull a medium? How does the medium alter or enable the bulletin yous want to convey with your fine art?
Maggie: A medium doesn't simply alter or enable the message I want to convey, it is a message itself, one that I want my work to facilitate further. Playing with materials is at ultimate pleasance and tin can be a rigorous practice. Through play, I get to learn how something behaves and how I relate to that textile. The material then becomes a tool or language that allows me to pair an idea to a medium, which is a decision based on how I want to piece of work out an idea. Medium specificity is the term that artist use to describe the particular connotations, histories, and relationships embedded in material and its use or effect. For me, medium specificity is a thing of its mattering, a playful pun. I consider material by its composition of matter, its elements, i.e., wood, silicone, mucilage, copper, steel, cotton, acrylic. Matter, the discussion also connotes something having meaning. Certain materials such as plywood accept a cultural significance, as well every bit functional pregnant or purpose. There is also the matter of the personal and sentiment. A ceramic loving cup not only holds your forenoon coffee, merely it can proceed memories of having breakfast with a loved one, all the while the handle of the cup holds yous. I think what changes about in using different mediums is the form of relationships highlighted between one some other and stuff.
Close to Yous
Shut to You
Arranging Dears
Don: Your installation "Close To You" explored sentimentality. What does sentimentality mean to yous?
Maggie: "Shut to You" was an installation inspired by my sis's echolalia. Sara, who is on the autism spectrum, loves to repeat lines of pop songs. She volition say lines from a song that she has heard when she does not know how to communicate with her own words. For the installation, I made and adapt a series of self-soothing objects and above them from celling mounted speakers played various covers of the pop vocal "They Long To Be Close to you", fabricated famous by the Carpenters in 1970. The recording had many skips, loops, and crackling sounds because it was created from making silicon molds of parts of vinyl records. In many ways the whole fine art slice was sentimental, starting with it being an attempt at understanding and connexion to my sister.
The reproduction of pop music, provides a tangible experience of a shared a desire to be in and of the globe. Empathy and ethics can build from witnessing others sentimentality. Sentimental songs and the $.25 of scratches and static on a record go notions of sentimental compulsions of wanting to belong. Highly affective songs such as "The Long To Exist Close To You" tunes us to a human chapters for begetting the weight of honey, loss, and all that might seem trite just is oh and then existent. And so a part of my work on sentimentality relates to emotional resilience, and how that reliance could flourish within constraints, such as when someone has a express capacity for a speech like my sister. In the installation a constraint is felt in the repeating of a unmarried vocal and its lo-fi noisy cached audio. What I am interested in exploring is how we experience human and alive even when we are sequestered by mitigated forms of communication; such as limits of our own cognition, recording devices, or even social norms.
Don: You lot named "Shut To Y'all" subsequently the song "(They Long To Be) Close to You" (most famously recorded by the Carpenters, just plainly, likewise recorded by the Circumvolve Jerks). You mention that the convertibility of the vocal makes it a "low brow node of civilization that is highly shareable and fluid, which is at the heart of why it is and so beautiful." What are your favorite musical artists? How accept music and sound inspired your art?
Maggie: I have too many favorites! Which I don't find to be a problem. Currently, I have been diving into house music and listening to artist such every bit Yeji, and into old recordings of legendary clubs like Paradise Garage. I grew up in a punk scene which is also centered around clubs/DIY spaces, and dancing, through the moves in a mosh pit are entirely different than at an one-time school disco. The offset art form that captivated my teenage attention was black and white film photography. I would often shoot my friends and use images to college and also make flyers for friends' bands. The punk ethos of collective space making and being critical of social norms and conservative politics unabashedly shaped my thinking as an creative person, which I was becoming every afternoon I would accept pictures and every night at 924 Gilman St in Berkeley, CA.
That quote you pulled is heavily inspired by the contemporary artists Penelope Umbrico and writings of the artist Hito Steyerl. In in her essay "In Defense of the Poor Prototype" she puts forth notions on share-ability of a pieces of civilization that are depression quality, like jepgs and pixelated smartphone videos. You tin can find read it for gratuitous by searching the website due east-flux.com. I highly recommended information technology.
Don: Your latest project involves painting on vinyl records and recording the sounds. Can you describe your process for this projection?
Maggie: The project entails a participatory element, which is an example of how my work as an art educator folds into my artistic practice. The project invites people to engage in long looking and deep listening. The process is to take a used vinyl record and brand a drawing from ascertainment on it through etching into the disc. The sketch can be annihilation, merely the requirement is that information technology is a sketch from life. This can include working from artwork in forepart of you, say if the workshop takes place in a museum gallery. Once the cartoon is completed, I facilitate a listening session where we play that record/drawing with a turntable and put through filibuster and other effects. The effects only highlight the scratches of the drawing such that a scratch becomes a remarkable part of the sonic limerick. The idea of the whole project is based on a question, "what is it like to listen to a cartoon?" From there a larger question emerges for me, "What informs our attachment to people, places, or things around us?"
This project is a chip of an experiment and a piece of work in progress and I am working in collaboration with another artist James Hapke to brand an initial iteration. The start version of the piece was showcased at Midwinter Festival at the Fine art Constitute of Chicago.
Electric current work in progress in the studio
Blues Compilation
Don: Yous teach courses at the Art Establish of Chicago. Has your piece of work as an educator informed your work as an artist?
Maggie: Art has always been a manner for me to play with my curiosities and be a perpetual student. With projects, such every bit the listening drawing project, I seek to acquire something. What being an educator has taught me is that students can evidence me new ways to sense, discuss, and make art. The practice of cartoon, sculpting, writing, talking, listening can be a collective procedure of significant-making – similar making a new language. In that location are so many possibilities in forms of knowing and as an educator and artist I have the responsibility of being a role of a collective. My function is too reciprocal. The idea that yous can be mentored and be a mentee simultaneously is inspiring and continuously allowing me to acquire new means to appoint with artwork.
Don: Yous grew up in Oakland, and your work has been exhibited across the United States and in Europe. How does the art scene in Chicago compared to other places you've lived and exhibited work?
Maggie: My experience in the Chicago art world has been very academic and rich with emerging artists. I came to Chicago to work and study at the Art Plant as a Museum Educator Graduate Scholar. During that time, I was also studying at SAIC in the Low Residency MFA program which I graduated from this by summer. All that is to say that I have been in a chimera. From where I stand I see that there is a strong academic and political influence in the art that is being fabricated and shown in Chicago. I notice that many artist and institutions have a radical attending to art that speaks from the margins of club. This might not be unique itself, but what is distinct about Chicago is how students and young emerging artists take up these complex conversations anywhere between their ain flat galleries to art institutions.
Maggie Wong Official | Instagram
Source: https://midwestaxn.com/art/an-interview-with-artist-maggie-wong/
0 Response to "Maggie Wong School of the Art Institute of Chicago"
Post a Comment