Interview With Nona Faustine

Tell me about the title of your show.

The title Reconstructions comes from the Reconstruction Era a period in our country after the civil war that focused on the transformation of the Southern States. It was a significant chapter in the history of civil rights in the US, so the title lends itself to that term, and ideas that are reflected in the work. In many ways it is a snapshot of my life. On one level I am doing my own reconstructing by interpreting if you will events and ideas around slavery, and history. I’m putting myself in places of New York City’s colonial past. Events that we still have to contend with, so there are many reconstructions going on. On the other side I am playing with the family album recreating what that means for my daughter and I.

Don’t Air Out Your Dirty Underwear in Public

photo by Jamie Liles   (Nina inside a water bucket – vintage photographs printed on underwear)

“Los Trapos Sucios Se Lavan en la Casa” is a very popular saying in my Puerto Rican Culture, and for my family a very present one. My mother has always said this phrase to me and my sisters, and still does.

Preparing for SlideFest and my actual performance during SlideFest was all very cathartic. It was a place within and a space around me that I finally felt comfortable rebelling against this phrase that I have always found annoying. I understand that secrets within the family should stay inside the home; but sometimes secrets need to be let out for them to be able to be resolved.

In this process I took some old photographs from my mothers closet at home. I wanted to find all the pictures of my family before I was born. When they were five. My mother had a complicated birth with my twin sisters, where she almost died. They told her she could never have anymore children. And then there were six.

I made six dirty underwear, representing my core family. Then transfered the vintage pictures onto underwear (front and back) and wrote all my family’s secrets on them by hand. It was very hard for me to do this, but with a big sense of relief with a great weight off my shoulders. My Mom would punish me if she knew what I did. I am almost 30 years old and still dealing with this childhood rebellion. Why? I don’t know maybe it is because I am the youngest in my family and the secrets were always kept from me, as if i wouldn’t be able to deal… slowly but surely I found out every dirty little secret…and now is when I am dealing with them. Art, Photography, Writing and Performance is my way of coping – hence my performance for SlideFest.

I started out inside a bucket of water – I had to clean myself first. I have been a dirty girl. Then I get on to angrily and fearfully clean each underwear one by one. Rubbing the underwear hard against the washer, i would stand up to be able to be more rough, I even cleaned them with my feet, because they are so dirty.

Exposing myself and my family like that was a real challenge, especially when the audience came up to get a closer look. I got embarrassed and didn’t know what to do. Finally, I decided, “enough of this! No, never mind!” Maybe I don’t want be that vulnerable in public. So, I decided to take back my dirty underwear, my washer and my water bin and go home.

Photo by Jamie Liles        (translation: Apartment Garden Street – no chairs, no plates, no silverware – Rug covering stains – written by my Mother in the late 70s)

Amazing, AWESOME, love it!!

I would like to thank you Marvin Heiferman for his patience with working with us as a group. I want to congratulate him not dying of a heart attack. I admire his responses, great sense of humor and respect for all of us. I surely have to admit that we did great job! Laura working on the publication, Aline on the production, Juana and Nina on the videos promoting the event, Kory and Kathy on the social platform tumblr etc.,Xavi on installation, Emilie on fighting for the title of the show related to straightforward interpretation of the shoe. Wait, I am supposed to write about SlideFest experience, not Group Show.

I am not a fan of formal talking in front of people next to the microphone with all public speeches saying basically one thing just in other words – thank you for all your support you put in our education that actually costs me a lot. I would rather say it was nice experience to step out and respond from the other point of view thinking about our working process. The format of SlideFest pushes us to explore other boundaries of our work and collaborate with others. I explore the possibilities working with my partner in crime, Marina vs Bonnie. Being sarcastic and yet funny (which I always believe is a success), we design the set related to our countries and background, exploring American language of expression that questions the absence of meaning.

Do we really think how are we responding to others or we just talk to talk and say something which actually doesn’t change anything but to be accepted in the social norms of behavior? Yes, I question it, like many other things at this time of my life. At some point, maybe I will come back and be politically correct but at this point I wander and wonder. Coming from the European society we obey rules we don’t talk just to say something, we usually say what we mean and we rather make it happens than just create illusion for other people to make them feel comfortable.

Amazing, AWESOME, love it!! ENJOY

The Yellow Brick Road to Slide Fest.

3 o’clock
Photograph by Kim Weston

Marvin Heiferman is, without any doubt, an excellent instructor but more than that, he is a man full of grace. He has a disposition that’s just cool and copasetic. I’d say he’s a “brotha from another planet”. He posses the perfect temperament to deal with the demands of artists and help us navigate into looking and understanding the photographic image. Marvin’s  clearly understands photography’s traditional form, and knows it’s changing. He brought this concept to the critical practice course. His appreciation for various art techniques and art management made me look at photography from another prospective. I learned to apply those accounts into my own photographic practice and appreciate the my work, and that of my fellow peers with new eyes.

Marvin guided our class of eleven artists onto the yellow brick road to ICP’s  annual event, SLIDE FEST. This collaborative presentation with my peers brought out emotions in my spirit I’ve never felt before. My experience with other collaborative projects never felt as challenging. Excited at the idea of working with Marvin Heiferman gave me an overwhelming sense of joy to work with yet another great mind at ICP. I was equally excited with working with my peers. Then things turned, my excitement turned into anxiety and I wanted out at almost every turn. All the personalities talking all at once just became to much for me to handle. Focusing on creating my work for Slide Fest and the group show at our studios, increasingly became blocked by my approach and reaction to the class dynamic. My eyes were closed to the theme for the event, “Shoes”. Stubborn and set in my ways, I blame this way of approaching the project on being a Taurus. All I could think of was, who wants to photograph shoes and feet? Why? I just did not want to waste my time on this project that had not relationship to my personal. But of course Marvin saw my excitement and then my resistance. At every turn in my frustration he seemed to stick with me and quietly challenge my belief system. No matter how frustrated I got, he had this smooth approach that calmed me down. I began to question my stubborn position, and I was able to pull off a five minute presentation at the last minute with the help of my peers, and complete a project for the group show about feet.

As a group, my class is exciting and energetic. The idea of adding an exhibition in conjunction with slide fest was born out of that energy, potentially a new tradition. No matter how hard it seemed, the journey was painful until we reached OZ. Last minuted changes and letting go freed me. It’s always that moment just before the eleventh hour, things come to life. My peers had my back and  Marvin got us SLIDE FEST and the Group show. A big thank you to my ICP family.

DESIST, Elf!

When we started working with Marvin Heiferman about the concepts for this year’s SlideFest presentation, I knew two things: a) it was a presentation of everyone’s work within a timed frame, i.e it lasts for about an hour and everyone gets approximately 5 minutes; and b) the work was gonna be put together based on what worked well with each other in a sequential manner, this first-then that-then this in the middle-then this closes. I also knew a third thing, I was solidly certain very soon after we were introduced to this about what I wanted to do. That is, at large. The details I worked out -and many changed- through the semester, but the main bit was: use the 5 minutes to provide an intermission, to give people that moment of respite, even though they actually didn’t get any because it wasn’t an intermission (they didn’t get up to go to the bathroom, and the lights were not turned on to give such indication, and refreshments did not include hot dogs. And my name popped on the screen before the “intermission” started.)

To stay firm in the idea that I wanted my intermission, in hindsight, is revealing of how that clarity of mind moment sustained, it actually seems right now even weird (in a good way) because moments of clarity did not come to me too often during this Spring semester.

(Dear classmates and Marvin: if I actually did bring up 3.5 other ideas to the table during the first class we talked about this, I can’t even remember them! It is remarkable I didn’t change my mind about it either. WAIT except that I almost did during dress rehearsal the day off, but I think I was gonna get slapped if I did.)

SO, once the framework I was gonna work with was decided upon, then came details, details, details. And they sprung (the ideas that formalized them) rather fluidly. And they came to be in approximately the following order:

Intermission time is associated with drive-in movies, the atomic 50s, wieners and popcorn and it has that ubiquitous 50s atomic/Jetsons/Bewitched star design all over the place; the messages flashed on the screen are generally homogenous: intermission, we hope you are enjoying the show, have some refreshments, the show will be back in 4, 3, etc. minutes, sometimes the wiener hops into the bun; I don’t have the animation skills -YET- to make my own moving refreshments, and I did not want to appropriate an existing intermission clip, because I wanted to be able to personalize my own message. Ok, so I am going to make my own video. Design: font (I downloaded one actually called Bewitched), atomic star, colour palette (I gathered a selection of 1950s diners and eye dropped the pastel blues of the diner barstools, and the soft pink of the neon lights). Now, music. 294381234924 options. That’s where Monty Python and the Holy Grail came to save me. It was their blatant intermission organ tune included in the movie that I had forgotten about but once I heard it again I realized: this.tune.will.never.leave.me (and my classmates had the same feeling as I saw them leave class humming it every time I showed it. It was like I was harassing them with this tune. Somehow, it is clear to me now, after I made the piece, there was also a level of harassment at passing a church basket along the audience and force them to take something. This last iteration of the piece came in conjunction with thinking and thinking and re-thinking about what intermission meant, how it’s represented in other time-based presentations/events/situations, I think this came with the ability and PEACE OF MIND of knowing I am working with this one piece, and I am on it, and I have the luxury -in my head- of TIME (even thought it never felt like that, now I realize even though I felt “rushed” all the time, it was my own invented “rush”). This is how I got to feel alright thinking about the 2, 3, 4 sides of certain words, and certain meanings, and certain scenarios and push them forward. So thus, I thought of Catholic mass. I thought that the moment in mass when they collect money from the congregation was mass’ own version of intermission: except that I am prompted to a suggested donation. I wanted the opposite of that because David Deitcher had said that week in Critique something along the lines of “gifts are problematic; they put you in this position of having to give back.” From there I worked out the idea of producing my own scratch-off lottery tickets, and the message within would have been along the lines of “CONGRATULATIONS YOU’RE A WIENER. You may pick up my resumé at the end of the show” but after an entire weekend of arguing the pros and cons of that idea, as a concept within the piece, I realized two things: it has potential, it could create an infinite regress of giving, and taking, but it was also yet another layer of snark. I am still thinking about this and feel unresolved about it. Something to keep looking into.

Because I felt unresolved, I let it sit and did not use it for the piece, but instead -and serendipitously- came across with miniature fuzzy bear toys that were 0.29 cents each, and a 5 dollar tiny notebook of text slang, with a gazillion iterations of words, in slang, organized alphabetically (and it included a special section for seniors). All this stuff had monetary value, it could be taken away, it was a souvenir, it rewarded you for sitting through this not-so-intermission. From there it was easy to think about also giving candy as a way of having people actually eat something (hot dogs in a basket, no go). From all the memorabilia, the text slang lose sheets are still to me the most successful, they somehow mirror the process we used as a class to come to the cover design of the SlideFest publication, which was the use of anagrams, and processing “SlideFest” through an anagram generator online (DESIST! ELF). Stamping it with a stallion dipped in ochre ink was delightfully pleasant: I was a sign off, a giving it away, and a giving up of that pesky horse rummaging around the room aimless. The Elf, desist.

Laura G

http://www.lagonzalez.com

Focusing on the action, not the result

Thursday, 11:09 AM. I’ve basically had nothing to eat since dinner on Tuesday, and slept four hours a night for the past week. I was talking to someone after the crit of the show yesterday, and was telling him that while painting the studio the night before I realized I had never painted the walls for my own show. The thought startled me, I’ve been so busy and immersed in trying to get all prints made, papers written, walls painted and mid board books sent to print (all while trying to keep my personal life from falling apart), that I didn’t realize that the materialization of everything I’ve been working on for the last year was happening right in front of my eyes, and I was an integral part of making it happen, we all were.

Delis Fest

I wanted to make something that involved a presentation without turning into a performance.

I’ve always been told that my sense of humor is my best weapon. To stand in front of a 100 people (number of people that is expected to attend) feels, to me, like a menace. I can hardly speak to my 11 classmates without making 3 jokes in a row so I needed something better.

I could stand there and dance “El Meneito” or I could make a statement about mass media. I decided to do what I should do: show my work. But how? Just play my videos one after another seemed ridiculous. After some rides in the train (the second best place to come up with ideas. The first is the shower), I remembered that thing that Nayland tells us: “Things are already connected because you made them”. Ta-Da! I was the link. I had to speak and link the videos together by a narrative that will be, as everything I do, a joke about my self.

I hope it will work. My classmates laughed. Some of them, anyway.