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NINA KATCHADOURIAN LIKES TO BE A BIT BAFFLED
By Leah Ollman
Los Angeles Times, CA
May 22 2008
She has a solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.
SAN DIEGO -- Over the last decade, Nina Katchadourian has mended broken
spider webs with colored thread and glue. She has programmed a computer
to translate the pulses of a popcorn popper into Morse code. She has
diagramed a family tree of supermarket icons -- Uncle Ben, Mr. Clean,
the Gerber baby -- and staged an endurance test for herself, attempting
to smile for as long as possible while archival footage of explorer
Ernest Shackleton was projected onto her front tooth.
Endearing, goofy, earnest, witty, subversive, penetrating --
Katchadourian's work leapfrogs across an array of emotional
touchstones, finding a briefly comfortable fit, then moving on. Many
of her projects center on thwarted efforts to categorize and simplify,
to define and know. They suggest that the impulse toward order may be
fundamentally human but that the complexity of nature and experience
is just as absolute. Yet according to Katchadourian, misalignment
brings satisfactions of its own.
"A lot of things I'm attracted to are like that: close, but not
quite. The way they mismatch is often a starting point for work for
me," she explained recently. "Misunderstanding is a very fertile point
for making art. When things aren't quite right, that often makes them
funny, or awkward, or poignant."
The Brooklyn-based Katchadourian, 40, was speaking as finishing touches
were being put on her new solo show at the Museum of Contemporary
Art San Diego. A part of the museum's so-called Cerca Series, it has
brought her back to the city where she began to mature as an artist
in the 1990s.
Consider one of the exhibition's two video installations, "Accent
Elimination" (2005), which begins with the simplest of interviews and,
within its short (less than 15-minute) loop, evolves into a meditation
on voice, identity and origin.
The artist and her parents appear, head and shoulders, separately
on three side-by-side monitors. Katchadourian asks them their names,
which leads to questions about their nationalities and accents. Basic
enough, except that her mother is Swedish and grew up in Finland,
and her father is Armenian but was raised in Turkey and Lebanon.
After eliciting the mildly perplexing facts from each, Katchadourian
repeats the interviews -- only this time she addresses her mother in
her mother's accent and her father in his. They both answer in their
best imitations of their daughter's uninflected American. Three other
monitors, back to back with the first set, show the family training
with a vocal coach to perfect the transformations.
"It's not a project about watching our stunning success with the task
at hand," Katchadourian said. "It's much more about the brow-sweating
effort to get there, and the awkwardness in all of that, and how that
awkwardness is linked to a kind of goodwill, to be inside the other
person's voice."
She said she was working on the piece at the same time the home she
grew up in was being sold. There was a lot of discussion, she recalled,
about what to keep and what to get rid of.
"That's when I started to think about the accent as something
that could be handed down. What if it was a physical thing, like
an heirloom?"
Assistant curator Lucía Sanroman, the organizer of the show,
encountered the video piece shortly after she began work at the museum
a few years ago. Its themes of translation and mistranslation seemed
relevant to the San Diego-Tijuana region, she says, and to her own
experience.
"It resonated with me personally, because I also have a strong accent,"
says the Mexican-born Sanroman. "For Nina, it was a very personal and
keen observation of being from so many parts, of having an identity
that is beyond hybrid, and how to negotiate that."
Katchadourian, boyishly slim and angular, with wavy dark hair, soft
brown eyes and a deep, mellifluous voice, was born and raised in
Palo Alto, where her mother worked as a literary translator and her
father was a professor of psychiatry at Stanford. After receiving her
undergraduate degree from Brown, she enrolled in the master of fine
arts program at UC San Diego, studying with the late Allan Kaprow --
the father of happenings and currently the subject of a retrospective
at the Geffen Contemporary in L.A. -- as well as performance poet
David Antin and "Eco-Artists" Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison.
"UCSD was a great fit for me, because no one ever told me I had
to work in any particular medium," Katchadourian said. "We were
required to have people from outside the art department on our thesis
committee. They didn't want us just talking to artists."
In the subsequent years, Katchadourian has taught at Brown, the Rhode
Island School of Design and Parsons and been the subject of exhibitions
around the world, including a 10-year survey recently organized
by the Tang Museum at Skidmore College in upstate New York. She
also has a thriving career in music, writing and recording songs
independently and with a folky Brooklyn-based group, the Wingdale
Community Singers. And she works part time at the Drawing Center
in Manhattan's SoHo district, managing and curating shows from its
registry of 1,200 contemporary artists.
With her attention honed by so many different endeavors, she doesn't
necessarily look to art for her ideas or inspiration.
"Art has become the best alibi I've found for exploring different
things in the world," she said. "It's the perfect excuse. You get
to talk to people who are interesting to you. You get to travel to
places you want to see, investigate subjects that have you enthralled
and obsessed. It's just a fantastic vehicle for all these things."
In her newest installation, "Zoo" (2007), also at the San Diego
museum, she portrays a familiar environment as something fragmentary
and disjunctive, using footage shot at zoos around the world over
the last seven years. Images of animals, enclosures and signage are
projected on four walls and dispersed among 15 monitors splayed at
different angles and heights around the exhibition space. Several tight
close-ups of animal parts are tricky to identify, and sometimes the
sounds don't match the accompanying images. Jellyfish pulse against a
glass enclosure to the rhythm of chittering birds. Soothing classical
music accompanies footage of a bird maniacally pacing its space.
"In some ways," the artist said, "this is the least funny piece I've
made in a while. There are funny moments, and there are moments
that are odd and awkward and quirky. What happens for me overall,
largely as a result of the sound, is that it becomes a place you don't
feel that good in after a while. It's an unsettling and unsettled
environment. The animals don't seem entirely comfortable, and neither
does the viewer.
"I haven't set out to make a piece that's anti-zoo. What I'm really
interested in is this complicated relationship that is contained in
zoos and that I certainly have to them. On one hand, I love going to
zoos and I love seeing animals up close. But there are also always
moments when I feel saddened and guilty.
"Sometimes I make projects as a way of thinking through the
questions. I'm making this piece about zoos to figure out what I
think about them."
--Boundary_(ID_tw6gq4dPdF6ablGhXZPywQ )--
By Leah Ollman
Los Angeles Times, CA
May 22 2008
She has a solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.
SAN DIEGO -- Over the last decade, Nina Katchadourian has mended broken
spider webs with colored thread and glue. She has programmed a computer
to translate the pulses of a popcorn popper into Morse code. She has
diagramed a family tree of supermarket icons -- Uncle Ben, Mr. Clean,
the Gerber baby -- and staged an endurance test for herself, attempting
to smile for as long as possible while archival footage of explorer
Ernest Shackleton was projected onto her front tooth.
Endearing, goofy, earnest, witty, subversive, penetrating --
Katchadourian's work leapfrogs across an array of emotional
touchstones, finding a briefly comfortable fit, then moving on. Many
of her projects center on thwarted efforts to categorize and simplify,
to define and know. They suggest that the impulse toward order may be
fundamentally human but that the complexity of nature and experience
is just as absolute. Yet according to Katchadourian, misalignment
brings satisfactions of its own.
"A lot of things I'm attracted to are like that: close, but not
quite. The way they mismatch is often a starting point for work for
me," she explained recently. "Misunderstanding is a very fertile point
for making art. When things aren't quite right, that often makes them
funny, or awkward, or poignant."
The Brooklyn-based Katchadourian, 40, was speaking as finishing touches
were being put on her new solo show at the Museum of Contemporary
Art San Diego. A part of the museum's so-called Cerca Series, it has
brought her back to the city where she began to mature as an artist
in the 1990s.
Consider one of the exhibition's two video installations, "Accent
Elimination" (2005), which begins with the simplest of interviews and,
within its short (less than 15-minute) loop, evolves into a meditation
on voice, identity and origin.
The artist and her parents appear, head and shoulders, separately
on three side-by-side monitors. Katchadourian asks them their names,
which leads to questions about their nationalities and accents. Basic
enough, except that her mother is Swedish and grew up in Finland,
and her father is Armenian but was raised in Turkey and Lebanon.
After eliciting the mildly perplexing facts from each, Katchadourian
repeats the interviews -- only this time she addresses her mother in
her mother's accent and her father in his. They both answer in their
best imitations of their daughter's uninflected American. Three other
monitors, back to back with the first set, show the family training
with a vocal coach to perfect the transformations.
"It's not a project about watching our stunning success with the task
at hand," Katchadourian said. "It's much more about the brow-sweating
effort to get there, and the awkwardness in all of that, and how that
awkwardness is linked to a kind of goodwill, to be inside the other
person's voice."
She said she was working on the piece at the same time the home she
grew up in was being sold. There was a lot of discussion, she recalled,
about what to keep and what to get rid of.
"That's when I started to think about the accent as something
that could be handed down. What if it was a physical thing, like
an heirloom?"
Assistant curator Lucía Sanroman, the organizer of the show,
encountered the video piece shortly after she began work at the museum
a few years ago. Its themes of translation and mistranslation seemed
relevant to the San Diego-Tijuana region, she says, and to her own
experience.
"It resonated with me personally, because I also have a strong accent,"
says the Mexican-born Sanroman. "For Nina, it was a very personal and
keen observation of being from so many parts, of having an identity
that is beyond hybrid, and how to negotiate that."
Katchadourian, boyishly slim and angular, with wavy dark hair, soft
brown eyes and a deep, mellifluous voice, was born and raised in
Palo Alto, where her mother worked as a literary translator and her
father was a professor of psychiatry at Stanford. After receiving her
undergraduate degree from Brown, she enrolled in the master of fine
arts program at UC San Diego, studying with the late Allan Kaprow --
the father of happenings and currently the subject of a retrospective
at the Geffen Contemporary in L.A. -- as well as performance poet
David Antin and "Eco-Artists" Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison.
"UCSD was a great fit for me, because no one ever told me I had
to work in any particular medium," Katchadourian said. "We were
required to have people from outside the art department on our thesis
committee. They didn't want us just talking to artists."
In the subsequent years, Katchadourian has taught at Brown, the Rhode
Island School of Design and Parsons and been the subject of exhibitions
around the world, including a 10-year survey recently organized
by the Tang Museum at Skidmore College in upstate New York. She
also has a thriving career in music, writing and recording songs
independently and with a folky Brooklyn-based group, the Wingdale
Community Singers. And she works part time at the Drawing Center
in Manhattan's SoHo district, managing and curating shows from its
registry of 1,200 contemporary artists.
With her attention honed by so many different endeavors, she doesn't
necessarily look to art for her ideas or inspiration.
"Art has become the best alibi I've found for exploring different
things in the world," she said. "It's the perfect excuse. You get
to talk to people who are interesting to you. You get to travel to
places you want to see, investigate subjects that have you enthralled
and obsessed. It's just a fantastic vehicle for all these things."
In her newest installation, "Zoo" (2007), also at the San Diego
museum, she portrays a familiar environment as something fragmentary
and disjunctive, using footage shot at zoos around the world over
the last seven years. Images of animals, enclosures and signage are
projected on four walls and dispersed among 15 monitors splayed at
different angles and heights around the exhibition space. Several tight
close-ups of animal parts are tricky to identify, and sometimes the
sounds don't match the accompanying images. Jellyfish pulse against a
glass enclosure to the rhythm of chittering birds. Soothing classical
music accompanies footage of a bird maniacally pacing its space.
"In some ways," the artist said, "this is the least funny piece I've
made in a while. There are funny moments, and there are moments
that are odd and awkward and quirky. What happens for me overall,
largely as a result of the sound, is that it becomes a place you don't
feel that good in after a while. It's an unsettling and unsettled
environment. The animals don't seem entirely comfortable, and neither
does the viewer.
"I haven't set out to make a piece that's anti-zoo. What I'm really
interested in is this complicated relationship that is contained in
zoos and that I certainly have to them. On one hand, I love going to
zoos and I love seeing animals up close. But there are also always
moments when I feel saddened and guilty.
"Sometimes I make projects as a way of thinking through the
questions. I'm making this piece about zoos to figure out what I
think about them."
--Boundary_(ID_tw6gq4dPdF6ablGhXZPywQ )--