2020-04-12
153
The one constant material in Hayv Kahraman’s practice has been linen, the substrate she uses for her elegant paintings of women that are informed by research and her experiences as an Iraqi refugee. It’s not just any linen, though—since 2009, she’s been sourcing it directly from the Belgian linen wholesaler Libeco. “This linen has a tight weave with very little knots, and that’s hard to find,” she explained.
She currently uses the textile from batch 17, which corresponds to the year the flax was harvested and manufactured. “The amount of sun and rain the crops get that specific year will determine the hue of the linen,” Kahraman explained (for example, more rain causes a bluish tint; more sun, a yellow tint). For many years, she preferred linen with the warmer hue (made of crops from 2004), but as it became more difficult to source, she’s had to use a more recent batch.
True to the artist’s smart, research-intensive practice, the linen holds conceptual significance, as well. Linen was introduced in 16th-century Venice as an alternative to canvas that was better suited to the climate and easier to roll up and transport. Given its close ties to Western art, Kahraman sees it as “a surface in which I can dispute European concepts of power,” she explained. “So it becomes a material to decolonize. It’s also a common and familiar material for our Western eyes to digest that then serves as the perfect decoy for me to speak about brown bodies and subjectivities.” Additionally, she chooses to keep much of the linen bare (not gessoed or painted) because it reminds her of “the color of Iraqi sand.”
Max Hooper Schneider
Invertebrates
Max Hooper Schneider first encountered invertebrates—the living creatures that would later inspire and occupy his art—while growing up, peering into tide pools along California’s Pacific Coast. The backboneless animals, which range from crabs and jellyfish to spiders, continued to be a passion as he grew up, surrounding himself with aquariums. “As an artist, I quickly began to understand invertebrates as an essential medium for storytelling and systemic sculpture,” he offered. (He’s particularly fond of arthropods and cnidarians.)
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Indeed, in creating his works, the artist, who studied biology and landscape architecture, weaves philosophical, often dystopian narratives through complex ecosystems—like Utopia Banished (2015), where live leeches slither in a tank with a white porcelain cake, or The Last Caucasian War (2014), where Ocypodidae crabs share a vitrine with a mud-covered Toshiba laptop. While Hooper Schneider is drawn to the “lure of their symmetrical body plans, spiny skins, and eusocial behavior” of invertebrates, more important is their “extremophilic potential”—their ability to thrive in harsh environments, he explained. “They will continue to colonize the planet long after humankind has exited.”
Nikki Maloof
