Miloš Šejn | Českých Bratří 312 | CZ-50601 Jičín | T +420 723 701 658 | milos [at-sign] sejn.cz
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29.05. – 28.08.2023 | CUBE X CUBE GALLERY, Novina - Kryštofovo údolí
29.05. – 28.08.2023 | CUBE X CUBE GALLERY, Novina - Kryštofovo údolí
SEMI–OPEN
curator: Veronika Čechová
30.9. – 28.11.2021 | ENTRANCE Gallery, Prague
Entrance Gallery is the first artistic space in Prague that focuses systematically in its long-term program on the issues of ecological sustainability and care for the environment. We view this problem as socially urgent and very complex because it includes a wide spectrum of constituent topics and questions. This allows us to structure the gallery program to include the introduction of various artistic, theoretical, or practical attitudes and views.
As far as the actual gallery operation is concerned, we try to implement such practices that correspond with our environmentally and ecologically conscious content. The key values for us are those striving for sustainability and aiming to reduce consumption, those that support horizontal cooperation, discussion and (self)education and those that also stress the importance of slow curating, preferring quality over quantity. In this sense, we try to focus on long-term cooperation and activities that don’t necessarily lead towards immediate public presentation, but are an essential part of developing the gallery’s mission and applying our vision (for instance, the reading group, international networking, and cooperation on artistic projects that take place during the whole year etc.).
The dramaturgy of the gallery is now based on three main program ‘pillars’ and we would like to add a fourth one:
Exhibitions and artistic events
Research and community-based program focused towards the artistic scene
Educational program aimed at the neighbourhood, education and popularization of the general public
Long-term artistic projects connected to gallery’s place and/or residencies
The exhibition by Milos Šejn “SEMI-OPEN” aims to explore the multi-layered history of the site both of the Orangeria and of the entire complex of gardens of the Břevnov monastery, but also the existence of the monastery itself and adjacent spaces, directly charged with questions such as White Mountain, the former deer-park Hvězda and, after all, the likeness of the life of contemporary man and the landscape in this area of the city of Prague in the middle of today's world. The author will be true to his previous artistic direction and will work consistently with both the given spaces and the position of himself, as a living being in the midst of beings other than only human society, but also a living verity within the organism of the place, its geological memory, the life of vegetation, the life of so-called higher organisms and all their manifestations as they are present in the forms of language, communication, being, co-existence and every conceivable form of architecture. Architecture in the literal sense as well as architecture in the sense of dreaming, wishing, co-caring, co-being.
The author's presentation includes not only the "gallery" exhibit itself, but also related community types of meetings like SITE, WORD and TIME.
As far as the actual gallery operation is concerned, we try to implement such practices that correspond with our environmentally and ecologically conscious content. The key values for us are those striving for sustainability and aiming to reduce consumption, those that support horizontal cooperation, discussion and (self)education and those that also stress the importance of slow curating, preferring quality over quantity. In this sense, we try to focus on long-term cooperation and activities that don’t necessarily lead towards immediate public presentation, but are an essential part of developing the gallery’s mission and applying our vision (for instance, the reading group, international networking, and cooperation on artistic projects that take place during the whole year etc.).
The dramaturgy of the gallery is now based on three main program ‘pillars’ and we would like to add a fourth one:
Exhibitions and artistic events
Research and community-based program focused towards the artistic scene
Educational program aimed at the neighbourhood, education and popularization of the general public
Long-term artistic projects connected to gallery’s place and/or residencies
The exhibition by Milos Šejn “SEMI-OPEN” aims to explore the multi-layered history of the site both of the Orangeria and of the entire complex of gardens of the Břevnov monastery, but also the existence of the monastery itself and adjacent spaces, directly charged with questions such as White Mountain, the former deer-park Hvězda and, after all, the likeness of the life of contemporary man and the landscape in this area of the city of Prague in the middle of today's world. The author will be true to his previous artistic direction and will work consistently with both the given spaces and the position of himself, as a living being in the midst of beings other than only human society, but also a living verity within the organism of the place, its geological memory, the life of vegetation, the life of so-called higher organisms and all their manifestations as they are present in the forms of language, communication, being, co-existence and every conceivable form of architecture. Architecture in the literal sense as well as architecture in the sense of dreaming, wishing, co-caring, co-being.
The author's presentation includes not only the "gallery" exhibit itself, but also related community types of meetings like SITE, WORD and TIME.
Accompanying program (details to be specified):
SITE
SITE
Thursday, October 14, on the terraces of the gardens of the Břevnov Monastery - & Katarina Kadijević, Tereza Kerle, Rena Milgrom, David Helán, Tomáš Ruller
WORD
WORD
Wednesday, November 3 - & Ivo Hucl
TIME
TIME
Sunday, November 28 - & Bohemiae Rosa
ÍHMNÍ
30. 9. – 28. 11. 2021 | SmetanaQ Gallery, Prague
curator: Martina Vítková
Peaceful Relaxing, © Miro Švolík
INSTAGRAM
30. 9. – 28. 11. 2021 | SmetanaQ Gallery, Prague
curator: Martina Vítková
Peaceful Relaxing, © Miro ŠvolíkIf you think of a painter as someone who is moved by the picturesque landscape and experiences his horrors and furies in front of a stand in nature or a studio, a palette in one hand, a paintbrush in the other, a beret on his head, and an amusing pipe in the corner of his lips, then Miloš Šejn is not a painter. He is not an observer of the world around him, he is intrinsically his body and intellect both a part and a tool of events.
Miloš Šejn’s intermediate approach includes painting, drawing, performance, conceptual procedures, land art, work with an archive of found naturals, handling of word, photography, sound recording, and new media. He does not paint in a studio; his studio is nature, a garden, a landscape without walls or roofs. Šejn's activity is open to the natural processes to which he tunes himself, listens to them, influences them by his presence, intensity, and the words that come to him. He works on the ground, the frame some paintings get later, and for others it's not at all relevant. He uses his hands directly rather than a set of brushes. Through them he guides the strokes of wood, lodes, fingers, sizzle and drip, the friction of natural and pigments against each other ... The whole body of the artist becomes the instrument of the creation of the work. Words and sounds arise during the creative process, are part of it, as are colors or gestures. The author stores these kind of poems in typewritten notation, some fragments manifested in calligraphic form. Calligraphy is not only beautiful, but gestural, with immediacy, action, movement, and dance. For Miloš Šejn, there is no difference between a record of nature, a painting and a poem.
He, in a creative act, reconciles the visual with the acoustic; the painting is made with the co-operation of multiple senses. Everything we perceive and hear in the landscape, the cauliflowers, the noise, the wind, the gurgle of water, the croon of frogs, imprints on us. The artist also works with his own recordings. The genesis of a work of art and the process of knowing a particular place can be an identical process. Globally, Šejn’s approach could be described as communicating with the landscape.
The paintings bear GPS coordinates specifying the territory of origin of the work. They tend to be popular places in the Bohemian Paradise landscape and elsewhere. Agara is the Celtic name of the Ohře River, Javoří brook can be located in the Giant Mountains, gardens in the Baroque landscape at Jičín. The effect on the landscape, and thus on its articulate record, must necessarily have a time of cyclic as well as fragmentary, natural calendar, pagan and Catholic holidays, Walpurgis Night or St James's Night, farm time of sowing, ripening and harvesting. The artist taps into the primordial, the nature of man-made nature that we suspect beyond the wilderness, farmed and cared for by man. He comes into direct contact with the natural order, with grass, leaves, shrubs, streams, water, stones, hills, furrows, light, dirt, marshes, and forests.
Miloš Šejn belongs to a family of wizards of the Earth, to whom the landmark Magicians de la Terre exhibition in Paris in 1988 was dedicated. For more than half a century, he has been collecting wildlife, making it into an archive, understood as a base, a gateway, a way for imagery – a mental activity in which the clichés of the everyday can be transcended, tapping into the resources inside and outside us that expand the world’s perception and understanding. The process of creation is what it is, and at the same time ritual, play, myth-making, purification, connection, harmony. Physicality plays an important role, knowledge by all senses, skin responsiveness and, through walking, performativity. Perceptions, experiences and visions recorded through painting, drawing, sound recording, photography, video or language form a whole, a single world.
The idea of the whole is influenced by the limits of the human body; Šejn's work is also about finding a line between the body and nature. We are the creation of the earth. She's our Mother. Performance can be understood as a body poem. The body we watch during the event is not an autobiography, rather a gestural and physical mapping. The artist becomes the landscape himself, there is complete identification, empathy, absolute experience. Art theory has the German term einfühlung for this.
The exhibition includes a table, chair and depository. The table does not define where we meet to eat; rather, it is the desk of a scholar, a researcher, something between laboratory and philosophy, pure but experience, and the use of a marked space for observation and thought. René Descartes or Immanuel Kant could have sat at a similar table. On the table, instead of a globe, are a pair of stones, transparent crystal, an enchanted water element, essences of spirituality and pyrites, a mineral as dense and dark as the weight of gravity, the essence of the earth, a symbol of human tools both constructive and destructive. The exposed dead trunk of a lemon tree is not just a found object and a drawing in space, it is tied to the earthly being of the author by time and place of birth.
Moving points of color and surfaces brings video projections of Gardening. The record of the desolate garden seen by Milos Šejn is like a glimpse into the sun, reflections and lights clinging to the algae as loved it by Karel Malich, but also the cycle of nature, the Gardener's Year, portrayed by Karel Čapek. The projection rewrites the installation from the old garden convoys with which we used to irrigate the needed places. The end has years of proven shape and material, a symbol of caring for a land whose moisture we use for ourselves.
We see the landscape and art in a largely contradictory way, art is man-made, nature is not man-made, man is a part of it, his existence rewrites and influences it as much as any other inhabitant of the planet. Nature and art are a common creativity, a movement. Art also functions as a new possibility of man-to-man spiritual touch, maker-to-viewer, for example, through the landscape. The painting is a record, a map, and an aesthetically fascinating new shape. As part of the exhibition, a painting depository is ready for the visitor to leaf through. Through the entrance to the exhibition, we seem to be invited into the artist's personal space. The whole is a visual event brought to life by performance, with Miloš Šejn sitting in a chair at the table.
Martina Vítková
Miloš Šejn’s intermediate approach includes painting, drawing, performance, conceptual procedures, land art, work with an archive of found naturals, handling of word, photography, sound recording, and new media. He does not paint in a studio; his studio is nature, a garden, a landscape without walls or roofs. Šejn's activity is open to the natural processes to which he tunes himself, listens to them, influences them by his presence, intensity, and the words that come to him. He works on the ground, the frame some paintings get later, and for others it's not at all relevant. He uses his hands directly rather than a set of brushes. Through them he guides the strokes of wood, lodes, fingers, sizzle and drip, the friction of natural and pigments against each other ... The whole body of the artist becomes the instrument of the creation of the work. Words and sounds arise during the creative process, are part of it, as are colors or gestures. The author stores these kind of poems in typewritten notation, some fragments manifested in calligraphic form. Calligraphy is not only beautiful, but gestural, with immediacy, action, movement, and dance. For Miloš Šejn, there is no difference between a record of nature, a painting and a poem.
He, in a creative act, reconciles the visual with the acoustic; the painting is made with the co-operation of multiple senses. Everything we perceive and hear in the landscape, the cauliflowers, the noise, the wind, the gurgle of water, the croon of frogs, imprints on us. The artist also works with his own recordings. The genesis of a work of art and the process of knowing a particular place can be an identical process. Globally, Šejn’s approach could be described as communicating with the landscape.
The paintings bear GPS coordinates specifying the territory of origin of the work. They tend to be popular places in the Bohemian Paradise landscape and elsewhere. Agara is the Celtic name of the Ohře River, Javoří brook can be located in the Giant Mountains, gardens in the Baroque landscape at Jičín. The effect on the landscape, and thus on its articulate record, must necessarily have a time of cyclic as well as fragmentary, natural calendar, pagan and Catholic holidays, Walpurgis Night or St James's Night, farm time of sowing, ripening and harvesting. The artist taps into the primordial, the nature of man-made nature that we suspect beyond the wilderness, farmed and cared for by man. He comes into direct contact with the natural order, with grass, leaves, shrubs, streams, water, stones, hills, furrows, light, dirt, marshes, and forests.
Miloš Šejn belongs to a family of wizards of the Earth, to whom the landmark Magicians de la Terre exhibition in Paris in 1988 was dedicated. For more than half a century, he has been collecting wildlife, making it into an archive, understood as a base, a gateway, a way for imagery – a mental activity in which the clichés of the everyday can be transcended, tapping into the resources inside and outside us that expand the world’s perception and understanding. The process of creation is what it is, and at the same time ritual, play, myth-making, purification, connection, harmony. Physicality plays an important role, knowledge by all senses, skin responsiveness and, through walking, performativity. Perceptions, experiences and visions recorded through painting, drawing, sound recording, photography, video or language form a whole, a single world.
The idea of the whole is influenced by the limits of the human body; Šejn's work is also about finding a line between the body and nature. We are the creation of the earth. She's our Mother. Performance can be understood as a body poem. The body we watch during the event is not an autobiography, rather a gestural and physical mapping. The artist becomes the landscape himself, there is complete identification, empathy, absolute experience. Art theory has the German term einfühlung for this.
The exhibition includes a table, chair and depository. The table does not define where we meet to eat; rather, it is the desk of a scholar, a researcher, something between laboratory and philosophy, pure but experience, and the use of a marked space for observation and thought. René Descartes or Immanuel Kant could have sat at a similar table. On the table, instead of a globe, are a pair of stones, transparent crystal, an enchanted water element, essences of spirituality and pyrites, a mineral as dense and dark as the weight of gravity, the essence of the earth, a symbol of human tools both constructive and destructive. The exposed dead trunk of a lemon tree is not just a found object and a drawing in space, it is tied to the earthly being of the author by time and place of birth.
Moving points of color and surfaces brings video projections of Gardening. The record of the desolate garden seen by Milos Šejn is like a glimpse into the sun, reflections and lights clinging to the algae as loved it by Karel Malich, but also the cycle of nature, the Gardener's Year, portrayed by Karel Čapek. The projection rewrites the installation from the old garden convoys with which we used to irrigate the needed places. The end has years of proven shape and material, a symbol of caring for a land whose moisture we use for ourselves.
We see the landscape and art in a largely contradictory way, art is man-made, nature is not man-made, man is a part of it, his existence rewrites and influences it as much as any other inhabitant of the planet. Nature and art are a common creativity, a movement. Art also functions as a new possibility of man-to-man spiritual touch, maker-to-viewer, for example, through the landscape. The painting is a record, a map, and an aesthetically fascinating new shape. As part of the exhibition, a painting depository is ready for the visitor to leaf through. Through the entrance to the exhibition, we seem to be invited into the artist's personal space. The whole is a visual event brought to life by performance, with Miloš Šejn sitting in a chair at the table.
Martina Vítková
Maple Hill / Giant Mountains 2020, Interaction with landscape performance relict
Rivers, Streams, Puddles
03.06. – 07.07.2019 | Galerie AMB, Sbor kněze Ambrože, Ambrožova 729, Hradec Králové
Miloš Šejn & Lada Semecká
Curator: Martina Vítková
Organizer: Klub konkretistů
It was a moment so full of elusive image of beauty and bewitching words.
Thus, images are born, which are not only a message, which anyone should be excited about. They are fragments of a living presence.
03.06. – 07.07.2019 | Galerie AMB, Sbor kněze Ambrože, Ambrožova 729, Hradec Králové
Miloš Šejn & Lada Semecká
Curator: Martina Vítková
Organizer: Klub konkretistů
I fell through the waterfall by flash and cut the surface with living flow line.
So Dipper bird, which appeared for a moment to the end of the walking through the Javoří creek in the Giant mountains, told me.
So Dipper bird, which appeared for a moment to the end of the walking through the Javoří creek in the Giant mountains, told me.
It was a moment so full of elusive image of beauty and bewitching words.
Thus, images are born, which are not only a message, which anyone should be excited about. They are fragments of a living presence.
Miloš Šejn:
From the Diary / July 28, 2018
From the Diary / July 28, 2018
Group
Krajinou Zdeňka Sýkory
13.07.2023 | Galerie Benedikta Rejta v Lounech
13.07.2023 | Galerie Benedikta Rejta v Lounech
ACTION ART
23.06. – 10.09.2023 | Galerie moderního umění v Hradci Králové – GMU
23.06. – 10.09.2023 | Galerie moderního umění v Hradci Králové – GMU
Symbiosis
06.06. – 25.06.2023 | Galerie kritiků, Praha
06.06. – 25.06.2023 | Galerie kritiků, Praha
NORTH BOHEMIAN COLLECTION
10.05. – 02.06.2023 | Galerie N, Jablonec nad Nisou
https://www.ft.tul.cz/katedry/galerie-n/galerie-n
10.05. – 02.06.2023 | Galerie N, Jablonec nad Nisou
https://www.ft.tul.cz/katedry/galerie-n/galerie-n
Performance
Hermit
20.06.2023 | knihkupectví ArtMap, Vojtěšská 196/18, Praha
20.06.2023 | knihkupectví ArtMap, Vojtěšská 196/18, Praha
Prague Biennale 2021 / Re-connect Art
03.09. 2021 – 07.09.2021 | Prague
curator: Helena Kontová, Jana Orlová, Elis Unique
The Prague Biennale Project 2021, a five-day festival of performance and video art, will take place from the 3rd to 7th of September in thirty locations across Prague. The fourth edition of the festival, subtitled Re-connect Art, will offer reflections on current topics including depersonalised communication, isolation, media ecology, and the relationship between humans and technology. Over fifty artists from around the world will present eleven live performances, five live streams, and over thirty videos. Mariánské náměstí will be the location for a gate that allows for two-way live streaming, connecting the artists and festival visitors directly. Entry to the festival is free of charge.
03.09. 2021 – 07.09.2021 | Prague
curator: Helena Kontová, Jana Orlová, Elis Unique
The Prague Biennale Project 2021, a five-day festival of performance and video art, will take place from the 3rd to 7th of September in thirty locations across Prague. The fourth edition of the festival, subtitled Re-connect Art, will offer reflections on current topics including depersonalised communication, isolation, media ecology, and the relationship between humans and technology. Over fifty artists from around the world will present eleven live performances, five live streams, and over thirty videos. Mariánské náměstí will be the location for a gate that allows for two-way live streaming, connecting the artists and festival visitors directly. Entry to the festival is free of charge.
Art Safari 36: TOGETHER
Curated by Daniela Kramerová
Miloš Šejn & Vladimír Javorský: CO–OPERATION
05.06. – 11.06.2021 | Studio Bubec
Prague, CZ
Prague, CZ
Art Safari 36 will be designed on the principle of artistic cooperation as well as activating visitors to participate artistically and experience the event. Selected artists who belong to the studio's tribal authors and have been instrumental in its existence will be approached with an offer to participate in this Art Safari. And - at the same time, they will be asked to choose the collaborator(s) with whom they will jointly create the work or installation for the show. The condition is artistic interaction (not just cooperation on the ground of realisation, for example), or the choice of an inspirational counterpart who is not necessarily from the art world, but who will support the search for more challenging avenues of cooperation.
Miloš Šejn & Vladimír Javorský: CO–OPERATION
Theatrum Mundi III
27.04.2019 | Národní galerie, Veletržní palác, Prague
“Theatrum Mundi” is a multimedia project that displays a model of the universe metaphorically as an endless circle of life where everyone is a co-creator and introduces art as a process that makes us what we are.
Theatrum Mundi III
27.04.2019 | Národní galerie, Veletržní palác, Prague
“Theatrum Mundi” is a multimedia project that displays a model of the universe metaphorically as an endless circle of life where everyone is a co-creator and introduces art as a process that makes us what we are.
Theatrum Mundi III
Special
Bohemiae Rosa
25.08. - 30.08.2023 | Landscape & Memory - Bohemian Paradise & Isara River
http://www.bohemiaerosa.org
25.08. - 30.08.2023 | Landscape & Memory - Bohemian Paradise & Isara River
http://www.bohemiaerosa.org
Rivers, Streams, Puddles
03.06.2019 | Muzeum východních Čech v Hradci Králové, Eliščino nábřeží 465, Hradec Králové
Lecture and discussion with Václav Cílek & Miloš Šejn
on Monday, June 3, 2019, at about 10 o'clock in the morning
Organizer: Klub konkretistů
03.06.2019 | Muzeum východních Čech v Hradci Králové, Eliščino nábřeží 465, Hradec Králové
Lecture and discussion with Václav Cílek & Miloš Šejn
on Monday, June 3, 2019, at about 10 o'clock in the morning
Organizer: Klub konkretistů
ART SPACE ECOLOGY
15.10.2018 | BLACK ROSE BOOKS, Montreal, Canada
Art Space Ecology: Two Views--Twenty Interviews embraces the international context of today’s art making and, through the medium of interviews, encourages readers to engage directly with nature-focused creators and their artistic processes. The twenty artists, though diverse in backgrounds and methods, all produce works that are either embedded in the environment or that document our ever-changing landscapes. In these interviews, Grande explores the motivations that inspire artists to use the natural world as their canvas and how their works explore the intersections of art, space, and the environment, raising questions about our relationship with the landscapes themselves. An engaging introduction by Edward Lucie-Smith, English writer, poet, art critic, curator and broadcaster, sets the stage for these artists to share about the artistic processes of their works.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Edward Lucie-Smith;
Introduction by John K. Grande;
Paul Walde - Requiem for a Glacier
Jason deCaires Taylor - Rising Waters
Jan-Erik Andersson - Form Follows Fun
Milos Sejn - Walking Past Babylon
Buster Simpson - It’s About Habitat
Peter Hutchinson - With Nature in Mind
Joshua Portway & Lise Autogena - Environments in Conflict
Chris Booth - Sculpture in Ecolution
The Harrisons - How Big is Here?
Pilar Ovalle - Nature In Place
Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas – Best to Love Bugs
David Maisel - Tapping Topography
Alan Sonfist - Culture Nature
David Mach - DISRUPTOR
Haesim Kim - Contemplating Nature
NILS-UDO - Towards Nature
Gyenis Tibor - Photo Actionism
Dennis Oppenheim - Putting the Public Back into Public Art
Robert Polidori - Ars Memoria
Henrique Oliveira - Being and Form
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-55164-696-1
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-55164-698-5
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-55164-700-5
BLACK ROSE BOOKS
Amazon
"Grande offers an eclectic global perspective in the book, whether it's Jason deCaires Taylor's underwater sculptures in the Canary Islands or Milos Sejn's Solar Mountain, a site for contemplation and renewal in the Czech Republic. . . . Timely, and the conversations engaging."
– Galleries West
"No significant movement in art remains independent of social and historical forces. Nor can it remain independent of surrounding related artistic impulses, which may not be pursuing the same ends. These are things that emerge clearly from John K. Grande’s fascinating series of interviews with artists working in this field. Ecological art and Land Art have a much longer history than most experts on contemporary culture are willing to suppose.... Other parallels can be found in the historical record of non-European cultures, especially in China and Japan, where landscape occupies the central position in art that Europe, since the Greeks, has accorded to the human figure."
– Art & Museum
"Whatever the medium under consideration, whether sculpture, organic interventions, performance art, body art, or technically complex installations, the discussions he choreographs in his new books explore and reveal the often mysterious motivations behind the maker’s making and unearths their intentions in a gentle yet dramatic manner. This book demonstrates clearly that in the end, or even more so, in the beginning, the natural world is our original and implicit canvas.
By examining the powerful intersections between art, technology and biology itself, he manages to reveal the deep questions that drive each artist forward. Perhaps the biggest question, and the most commonly recurring one: what is the most appropriate relationship we have or should have to the landscape? Not as something we live on, but as a place we should live with."
– CRITICSATLARGE.CA
This book is a field guide for artists working with nature, or addressing issues of the natural world in performance, video, painting, sculpture, installation or body art. The natural world becomes a canvas for exploring the intersections of art, space, and the environment. Questions about our relationship with land are raised by the dynamic interactivity and dialogues between John K. Grande and the artists: object and environment, artist and audience, society and nature.
– Arte.Es Magazine, Spain
"John Grande's international renown as a critic, curator and cultural commentator is hard earned and well deserved. His own observations, as well as the important artists he shares with us in this collection of twenty inter-views, is all about our active engagement in the natural environment. The delicate balance and proportional harmony so clearly in evidence in his questions and the artist's answers often feels like a carefully crafted dance between the heart and the head."
– Critics at Large
15.10.2018 | BLACK ROSE BOOKS, Montreal, Canada
Art Space Ecology: Two Views--Twenty Interviews embraces the international context of today’s art making and, through the medium of interviews, encourages readers to engage directly with nature-focused creators and their artistic processes. The twenty artists, though diverse in backgrounds and methods, all produce works that are either embedded in the environment or that document our ever-changing landscapes. In these interviews, Grande explores the motivations that inspire artists to use the natural world as their canvas and how their works explore the intersections of art, space, and the environment, raising questions about our relationship with the landscapes themselves. An engaging introduction by Edward Lucie-Smith, English writer, poet, art critic, curator and broadcaster, sets the stage for these artists to share about the artistic processes of their works.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Edward Lucie-Smith;
Introduction by John K. Grande;
Paul Walde - Requiem for a Glacier
Jason deCaires Taylor - Rising Waters
Jan-Erik Andersson - Form Follows Fun
Milos Sejn - Walking Past Babylon
Buster Simpson - It’s About Habitat
Peter Hutchinson - With Nature in Mind
Joshua Portway & Lise Autogena - Environments in Conflict
Chris Booth - Sculpture in Ecolution
The Harrisons - How Big is Here?
Pilar Ovalle - Nature In Place
Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas – Best to Love Bugs
David Maisel - Tapping Topography
Alan Sonfist - Culture Nature
David Mach - DISRUPTOR
Haesim Kim - Contemplating Nature
NILS-UDO - Towards Nature
Gyenis Tibor - Photo Actionism
Dennis Oppenheim - Putting the Public Back into Public Art
Robert Polidori - Ars Memoria
Henrique Oliveira - Being and Form
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-55164-696-1
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-55164-698-5
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-55164-700-5
BLACK ROSE BOOKS
Amazon
"Grande offers an eclectic global perspective in the book, whether it's Jason deCaires Taylor's underwater sculptures in the Canary Islands or Milos Sejn's Solar Mountain, a site for contemplation and renewal in the Czech Republic. . . . Timely, and the conversations engaging."
– Galleries West
"No significant movement in art remains independent of social and historical forces. Nor can it remain independent of surrounding related artistic impulses, which may not be pursuing the same ends. These are things that emerge clearly from John K. Grande’s fascinating series of interviews with artists working in this field. Ecological art and Land Art have a much longer history than most experts on contemporary culture are willing to suppose.... Other parallels can be found in the historical record of non-European cultures, especially in China and Japan, where landscape occupies the central position in art that Europe, since the Greeks, has accorded to the human figure."
– Art & Museum
"Whatever the medium under consideration, whether sculpture, organic interventions, performance art, body art, or technically complex installations, the discussions he choreographs in his new books explore and reveal the often mysterious motivations behind the maker’s making and unearths their intentions in a gentle yet dramatic manner. This book demonstrates clearly that in the end, or even more so, in the beginning, the natural world is our original and implicit canvas.
By examining the powerful intersections between art, technology and biology itself, he manages to reveal the deep questions that drive each artist forward. Perhaps the biggest question, and the most commonly recurring one: what is the most appropriate relationship we have or should have to the landscape? Not as something we live on, but as a place we should live with."
– CRITICSATLARGE.CA
This book is a field guide for artists working with nature, or addressing issues of the natural world in performance, video, painting, sculpture, installation or body art. The natural world becomes a canvas for exploring the intersections of art, space, and the environment. Questions about our relationship with land are raised by the dynamic interactivity and dialogues between John K. Grande and the artists: object and environment, artist and audience, society and nature.
– Arte.Es Magazine, Spain
"John Grande's international renown as a critic, curator and cultural commentator is hard earned and well deserved. His own observations, as well as the important artists he shares with us in this collection of twenty inter-views, is all about our active engagement in the natural environment. The delicate balance and proportional harmony so clearly in evidence in his questions and the artist's answers often feels like a carefully crafted dance between the heart and the head."
– Critics at Large
Architecture and the Senses
12.–14.10.2018 | Plasy Monastery, CZ
Seminar, Workshops, Discussion
Agosto Foundation
Miloš Šejn: A Nightingale with a Flat Flight, Path in Translation
I record a moment of the nightingale’s living space. I have entered his house, his home. Reflections of vegetation, overhanging willows, and viburnums on the surface of the water say something of our, yes, perhaps our dialogue. I don’t know what the avian beings truly see and feel, but I am enraptured by the visual impression of this moment. When I wake up early in the morning, I lie on my bed and the branches from the garden stretch in from the window, clouds, the first rays of sun, and birdsong, it’s a perfect situation. Half asleep, loved ones and acquaintances approach, my consciousness is just as much between corporeality as between a dream and the consciousness of the house. I don’t know how the singing birds perceive this moment, and I know even less how long it has been since people have tried to capture this musical stream of speech in their own language – probably since time immemorial. Various languages and dialects hear something different each time. What follows are examples of translations of nightingales from the history of ornithology. And do we hear today at least some of a fragment of the nightingale’s building of a house?
12.–14.10.2018 | Plasy Monastery, CZ
Seminar, Workshops, Discussion
Agosto FoundationMiloš Šejn: A Nightingale with a Flat Flight, Path in Translation
I record a moment of the nightingale’s living space. I have entered his house, his home. Reflections of vegetation, overhanging willows, and viburnums on the surface of the water say something of our, yes, perhaps our dialogue. I don’t know what the avian beings truly see and feel, but I am enraptured by the visual impression of this moment. When I wake up early in the morning, I lie on my bed and the branches from the garden stretch in from the window, clouds, the first rays of sun, and birdsong, it’s a perfect situation. Half asleep, loved ones and acquaintances approach, my consciousness is just as much between corporeality as between a dream and the consciousness of the house. I don’t know how the singing birds perceive this moment, and I know even less how long it has been since people have tried to capture this musical stream of speech in their own language – probably since time immemorial. Various languages and dialects hear something different each time. What follows are examples of translations of nightingales from the history of ornithology. And do we hear today at least some of a fragment of the nightingale’s building of a house?