Posts filed under 'multimedia art'

Blurring the Lines of Time: A Conversation with Ruoyi Shi

This sense of displacement, which many might perceive as humor, mirrors my relationship with language.

From a glass casket for sculptures, to a piece of a burial figurine cast into edible gummy bears, and gelatin-based fish placed on silver platters, Ruoyi Shi’s whimsical oeuvre spans the realms of the organic and the inorganic, the imaginary and the real to interrogate the nature of truth, storytelling, and language. An interdisciplinary artist working across the domains of sculpture, video art, and writing, inspired by the oral histories and mythologies she grew up with, Ruoyi invents a singular kind of artistic practice that transforms not only personal memory but also collective history. “I am interested in how people are encouraged to appropriate any image they encounter, and how our vocabulary was chosen and formed in today’s society. I consider my work as fragments I collected for creating an alternative reality,” she says in a talk with Shoutout LA. In the following interview, I spoke with Ruoyi about the role that humor plays in her projects, reinventing historical objects, and the everyday precarity of living with language and mass media.

Junyi Zhou (JZ): I’d like to begin with your work Tomorrow’s Comforts are Here Today, in which you built a casket for your glass skeleton sculpture, as if it were a living entity. I always call my art creations creature,” you wrote in your artist statement for this piece. It seems that the relationship between the organic and inorganic, or the dissolving boundaries between the two, are central to your body of work. Could you speak more about this?

Ruoyi Shi (RS): Exploring the boundaries between nature and artificial existence, as well as the notion of truth and its fabrication, has been a central theme of my practice. I see my art-making as a process of building an alternative reality—one that can be fragmented, chaotic, and full of coincidences. This reality of mine lies in the area where the organic and the inorganic slowly merge into one another. My goal is to mimic nature and capture the moments when nature exposes its unnatural side.

Many decisions I had to make in my art were neither preplanned nor expected. My immediate environment, materials, and time worked together to provide me with options, and my choices were directed by instinct rather than logic. It’s a form of collective creation. In this era we live in, the term “organic” has been deliberately shaped into a manmade concept. By placing our collective creations on a more equal footing, I aim to express greater honesty and respect for the elements beyond my control.

Tomorrow's Comforts

Tomorrow’s Comforts are Here Today (2021). Performance, writing.
Courtesy of the artist.

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The Delimitation of Self: Kevin Claiborne on Mixed-Media Art, Blackness, and Material

I’m interested in how the layering of text and image can create or disrupt tension, structure, rhythm, perception, and interpretation.

In Kevin Claiborne’s multimedia work, he sources from personal archives, landscape, and anthropological studies to coalesce a vision of Black American history into its contemporary variations, spanning the realms of collective and private histories. “Starting with the gaps in my own family history, and the space between ‘what I know vs. what I should know,’ the missing information between where my ancestors come from and where I am today, I am digging and mining the sediment of histories, passed down, erased, and avoided,” he writes. In “BLACK ENOUGH,” his 2020 exhibition at Thierry Goldberg, he poses a series of questions against the landscapes of Joshua Tree. Some of his questions, such as “Is Black enough?” and “When is Black enough?,” are clipped in the frame, leaving the sentences unfinished, like the Black lives that are prematurely cut short. Extending his reflections on Black identity and memory, Claiborne’s 2023 exhibition, “Family Business,” took a slightly different turn. Drawing from a box of family photographs, he applied green and blue pigments to the images, condensed moments in which his mother, beaming with a radiant smile, once gazes affectionately at his father. The result is a heightened revision of his family archive, a rediscovery of the ties that bind him to his kinsfolk: their shared passions, dreams, and tears. In this following interview, he speaks on materiality, capturing Black lives in Black contexts, and embedded dialogues within his visuality.

Junyi Zhou (JZ): From the beginning of your career, you’ve combined written texts with visual materials. How did this idea come to you initially?

Kevin Claiborne (KC): For as long as I can remember, I’ve had an interest in the power of words—their potential, their malleability, their limitations, and their ability to shape meaning. I’ve always been impressed with people who have mastered their expression of the written word, and who understand how to literally and metaphorically paint with text. My earliest inspirations were graffiti artists, poets, and rappers, all of whom understood the nuances of language, how the weight of words changes with scale, and how to use text as a material.

When I first started using photography and archival images in a conceptual manner, incorporating text seemed like a logical next step. Words change meaning depending on present context, and context can change depending on the words that are present.

JZ: I know that you started out as a photographer. How do you see your multimedia/cross-media approach? Does it impose certain limitations on your objective (if there is one) as an artist, or is it the ultimate means for you to channel your message?

KC: Sometimes my mixed-media or multimedia approach offers the ability to enhance and increase the complexity of my work, and other times, it shifts the focus from the material composition of the work to the ideas embedded within. Every material has a story, a purpose, a history, and a language or logic to its usage. Sometimes, the material becomes the focus, and sometimes certain material combinations allow the viewer to have more entry points into appreciating, understanding, or engaging with the work. It depends on the context. READ MORE…