Claire Sammut: On Beginning Wherever That May Be

Except from the essay On Beginning Wherever That May Be by Claire Sammut (see full text below)

Leonie Weber's multidimensional practice centers on the politics of labor, specifically reproductive, emotional, and domestic labor. Weber approaches poignant ideas through video, installation, and printmaking to process modes of production, fruition, and the omnipresent facts of ecological fallout caused by mass consumption. Using assemblage and signification, Weber employs quotidian subject matter through materials that signify affective qualities of lived experience specific to caretaking. She is equally committed to the longstanding performative and procedural idea of exhausting the subject, any subject, to the point of amnesty or eradication. The artist employs tropes involving the manipulation of the body, traces of performance, photographic documentation, and take-away material in the form of a zine titled "Omissions." Weber's images arrive as a labor of iterative production made within the bounds of her psyche, life experience, cultural connotation, material, and archival affinity. Like a palimpsest, the trope of iconic faces glimpses through the exposures, revealing traces from earlier moments of composition and light.

Weber's most recent body of work explores reproductive, domestic, emotional, and creative labor. It is no secret that receiving proper compensation and recognition while grappling with more significant power dynamics in art is a longstanding plight. Much like the role of a radical caretaker, an "artist's" labor represents a commitment to pushing boundaries and challenging norms by continuing to create and innovate against all odds. The works displayed involve a range of mediums; sculpture, drawing, prints, and a video piece, all assembled as a cogent and visceral body of work. VESSEL (MAINTENANCE AND FREEDOM) (2022), perhaps a nod to those feminist service-oriented works by Mierle Laderman Ukeles, invited viewers to consider the precarious and precious nature of domestic and artistic labor, citing its fragile interconnectedness. In her short video BE THE ONE (2022), Weber employs blood and bloodiness as central points of entry into understanding the conceptual foundations that inform her practice, a hue that insinuates the beginning and end of life, a convivial fluid that keeps a heart beating. Another essential element of the wall installation, THE HEART IS A MUSCLE THAT WORKS FOR YOU (2022), is the chosen arrangement of prints, drawings, and small objects on shelves. Together they create a network that spans the gallery's lower level with varying approaches to depth and perspective.

The black and white screenprints of domestic scenes, arranged in clusters, create new objects and highlight the interconnectedness of labor as something beyond the assembly line. Together, these items serve as indexical material history honoring ideas of domesticity and child-rearing. The found objects and remnants from performances denote the centrality of personal history and lived experience.

With subtle theatrical humor and moments of reprise, Weber's multifaceted practice raises questions of what counts when it comes to different definitions of "work" physical, mental, consumptive, and creative.

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On Beginning Wherever That May Be

In work, love, life, and death, beginnings are bound to raise emotions; anxiety, excitement, nostalgia, terror, longing, fear, and more. And while this cycle needs little explanation, most beginnings are not without an end. A start constitutes something coming into existence; launch, embark, etc. The exhibition It Begins With What's Already There presents new works considering everything between the proverbial start and finish line. Together Leonie Weber, Renée Estée, Dahlia Bloomstone, Maya Baran, and Luis Emilio Romero explore notions of hope, ritual, transience, modernity, elegy, cynicism, and more through a range of mediums and subject matter.

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Renée Estée's large-scale paintings emerge as epitaphs of intimacy and pending loss. Born and raised in Melbourne, Australia, Estée plays with the medium's capacity to narrate, recall, mythologize, haunt, and memorialize, all rendered in dark velvet tones that evoke the earthly Australian landscape that echoes across the series. Here, painting elides with acts of ritual and contemplation, colored by adorned apparitional figures and composed with textual offerings that urge touch and kinship beyond life and through death. Her practice is driven by poems woven throughout the work, appearing as textual addendums. In You Were Born On A Pineapple Farm (lights flash blue and red, the sky is always gray, it never goes away) (2022), words fill the leftmost margin of a large canvas like notes scrolled in a journal, while the outline of two ghostly figures orbits around a pool of cobalt violet ox blood and beyond.

In reckoning with a profoundly personal voyage towards and through grief, Estée's large-scale paintings engage the body as a spectral force, linking sites of memory, celebration, commemoration, and circular narratives with the pending promise of loss. Each work combines materials and methods, including lace, imitation gold leaf, ceramic, charcoal, fabric dye, and collaged mementos, to produce vast scenes, saturation, and abstract figuration. While the paintings are formally hung in the gallery, some bleed onto walls, such as sequins, goldenrod paint, and heart shapes. With titles such as Turns Away, Still There (2022), and Sometimes we talk about where the soul goes (heatwaves dance forever) (2022), there are visceral moments of pleasure in the adornment and moments of longing that cycle throughout the canvas.Estée's rich use of symbolism produces a haunting quality throughout each work. The heavily layered nature of the paintings becomes even more apparent through her sanding of the back to reveal initial marks. The history of the mark evokes memory like a lasting footstep in the sand. The paintings present objects with pure sentiment and the capacity to tell a story. Her paintings incorporate symbolic figures, including horses. Here, the horse represents a kind of journey and protection, the one who carries the message. Her use of narrative is embedded in both the material and unique expressionist gestures that fill the canvas to create a cosmological dance. Through these lush and palimpsest images, Estée asks what it might mean to face the present if it were the past, using paint as a hauntological medium to omit and transfigure. 2

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Dahlia Bloomstone builds a world of playful dystopian pop fairy tales that address the immediacy of life under capitalism with humor and nuance. Her practice centers on time-based mediums that join themes of apocalypse, virtue, and opulence, where sex work platforms collide with questions of self-fashioning and subjecthood. Sex work (SW) is portrayed in limbo as an endemic, philanthropic role-play cloaked in vernacular parody. It is an industry and form of consumption wherein individuals pay for sexual services. SW can also be viewed as a product of consumer culture, which promotes the commodification and objectification of bodies. The idea of purchasing and consuming sexual experiences fits into a larger cultural narrative of buying and selling pleasure. The stigma surrounding this industry often leads to the marginalization and exclusion of sex workers from mainstream society, further perpetuating the idea that their bodies and labor are objects to be consumed rather than valued and respected. Examining the intersection of sex work and consumerism can shed light on how capitalism and power dynamics shape our understanding and treatment of individuals in various industries. Bloomstone's film draws attention to the fickle nature of such interactions while paying homage to post-internet art optics, total installation, and interactive gameplay.

Through various mediums, the artist highlights the violence inherent in producing SW content and knockoff goods, where bodies are molded into objects for end use. Drawing on personal and professional experience, the artist highlights the slight disconnect between the consumer and the consumed, particularly for a class population with access beyond the means of others who are siloed from the labor and bodies that produce their goods. By creating parallels between the treatment of fish and sex workers, the artist highlights how humans exploit other living beings for their ends. In the video game Money Driven Fish Tanks, the user objective is to "Collect ten greens and ten cash, then find home." Gamers trod along inside a room decorated to feel like a lounge at a strip club, where specific wallpaper designs are synonymous with the locale. The proverbial fish tank is a literal entrance to other fables or dystopian fairytales, inviting viewers to consider these issues more significant social and cultural implications. In this built world, fish are a form of currency.

The work suggests a reckoning with one's habits of consumption. The fish tank is employed throughout the content as a metaphor for feeling trapped, objectified, and on display. Bloomstone encourages us to reflect on our relationship to consumerism and the ethical consequences of our actions. On the wall, her radically personal film SW-er-NPC-Fable (2022) plays on a loop, its images grainy and the artist present in shots taken by herself and, at times, others. The piece rambles with a hypotonic score that evokes a certain kind of sadness set by the scene of Bloomstone's everyday life and career. In this way, artifice functions as a conceptual device. With a room clad in wallpaper and reddish pink lighting, Bloomstone's multifaceted installations read as a dark and effervescent nod toward collectivism in the wake of collapse.

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Maya Baran is an artist whose cross-disciplinary practice is anchored by her interest in itinerancy, temporality, societal and personal journeys, and metaphysical forces correlating with states of mind and body. Baran uses her camera as an "all-seeing" apparatus; her images hone in on the peculiarities of a person and pay homage to one's interiority. She does so by engaging storytelling and talismans to unfurl narratives and glean more about humanity against the grain of everyday life.

Each work, on paper and in the center of the space, conveys the nuance of Baran's narrativized and conceptual photographic talent alongside the history of her lived experience. What is described as a "cosmic orb" made with a hardened weather balloon hangs heavy in the center of the room, it is brilliant shifting color, and enticing mystical presence create a magnetic pull in the space, drawing viewers in and around what feels like the gravitational pull of the sun. The recurrent motif of figures alongside recognizable printed material like newspaper headlines and magazine covers conveys undertones of the distinctive nature of the individual as portrayed through a rendering made by a camera or by hand. A central piece hangs in the center of the room to explore the color of the universe, a scientifically measured bright shade of faded yellow deemed "Cosmic Latte." The color results from the light emitted by young stars, which change with age, as do sentient beings. Absolute Red meets Absolute White to Baran's project poses the color to ask how cosmic time and human time intersect, how human and star matter elide. What we cannot see takes precedent.

The artist's luminous and hyper-detailed installation focuses on individuals from various backgrounds and ages who find themselves on a journey characterized by photographs of clothing and objects from different eras. The portraits present as intimate windows into one's life at a moment in time, on the long arc of a journey illuminated by the uniting force of a single color to identify earthly life. Baran's individual photographs and unique arrangement rouse a sentiment of accumulation over time presented through archetypes that cling to talismans that indicate the depth of character beyond a snapshot or portrait. In this way, viewers are confronted by their finite existence, the means of their journey, and points toward how one is futile and limited understanding of the universe and all of its illusive idiosyncracies. We are asked to consider the camera's relationship to time concerning our self-understanding. Her breadth of work, from film to photo and installation, accounts for the raw edges of personal and non-linear time through figuration that hints beyond the topical and points towards the warm orb of daily cadence and cleansing.

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Luis Emilio Romero's precise paintings draw on themes of lineage, trance, meditation, and color energy. A technique inspired by traditional craft, Romero's work spins artifacts into spirited rituals of attentive contemplation. His paintings employ complex weaving patterns that coalesced color with textures created by directional linework, producing a brilliant visual structure. In this way, painting is imbued with quiet spiritualism that comes together through waves of saturated and melodic cohesion.

Essential to Romero's practice is an understanding of Color theory, the study of how colors interact and how they can be combined to create different visual effects. There are three primary colors: red, blue, and yellow. These colors cannot be made by mixing other colors. Secondary colors are created by mixing two primary colors: orange (red and yellow), purple (blue and red), and green (blue and yellow). Tertiary colors are created by mixing a primary color with a secondary color. Color theory is essential when choosing yarns and planning a project in weaving. Weavers can use different colors to create various effects, such as stripes, plaids, or gradations. Complementary colors, opposite each other on the color wheel, produce a striking contrast when used together. Analogous colors, which are adjacent to each other on the color wheel, can make a harmonious effect, serving its purpose in a long lineage of geometric abstraction.

In Ritmo Armonico (2022), translating to Harmonic Rhythm, warm oranges, and muted yellows mingle with ominous purples and hints of blue to produce what feels like watching the horizon peer out after a storm, a visual representation of longing through a suspended dissonant chord. Romero applies colors to create depth and dimensionality, almost bringing the oil-painted woven elements off the canvas and into the room like hanging textiles; one can drape over their body. Romero draws on what he has gleaned from Guatemalan family and ancestry to forge a practice combining symmetrical paintings with intentional palettes meant to re-energize the ritual of woven craft through painting. The method is of intense mindfulness, a labor of patient rendering grounded by individual artistry and cultural precedent. In Triumfo Melancolia (2022), translating to Triumph and Melancholy, a range of dense purples and luxuriant reds collide to form a morose yet elegant unison. His colorfully profound paintings are produced by a rigorous commitment to amending and subverting traditional craft for reverence contemporaneity.

Romero's rigorous and intimate paintings serve as containers for understanding the significance of language as a means of expression. That language translates onto the canvas with reverent tact and ease. Romero's interplay of technical painting and color strategy produces a conversation of homage to tradition brought into the present moment. The work is more than a technique but, better yet, a new language of identification and traditional familial knowledge couched in the artist's lived experience.

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An expansive exercise in mediums and methods, the 2022 Hunter MFA exhibition It Begins With What's Already There presents works that demonstrate dynamic self-reflexivity by investigating questions of history, virtue, circumstance, and futurity, together making space for what occurs when one utilizes what already exists to make do, move through, and move forward. Together, their works represent a form of collective processing, dealing with the intricacies of life in ways that evade explanation.

- Claire Sammut