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Suara Welitoff

5.1.12.1_fellow_art_welitoff_profile

Suara Welitoff

Organization

deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park

Program

Rappaport Art Prize

Year

2012

Press

Suara Welitoff ’s The Feeling of a Feeling at Anthony Greaney

Suara Welitoff’s Failed Narratives Reimagine the Present

ArtForum: Suara Welitoff

Website

http://suarawelitoff.com/

What an honor to have received the Rappaport Prize from the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum! And to be included in the list of artists I so admire.

Suara Welitoff uses existing film and video footage to create what many have called “mechanical watercolors” or video poems.

They are purposefully concise, slow, and feature pared down visual information through minimal tones and high contrast levels. The results are brief, looped scenes located in a world devoid of time and space. Welitoff uses sources ranging from her own 8mm films to found made-for-television nature specials and documentary material to French New Wave cinema from the 1960s. In each case, the original footage carries with it specific implications that she reconsiders and recontextualizes through her signature editing process. Suara’s work was featured in numerous exhibitions at key galleries and museums, including the Krakow Witkin Gallery and the Boston University Art Gallery. Suara Welitoff has been featured in articles for the Art in America, the ArtDaily and The Boston Phoenix. Suara Welitoff’s work has been featured in articles from ARTFORUM, Flash Art, Boston Art Review. If possible, please change the last sentence of my bio to: Suara Welitoff’s work has been featured in articles from ARTFORUM, Flash Art, Boston Art Review. Her survey exhibition at Tufts University Art Galleries was reviewed in Berlin Art Link, Boston Art Revew, and Delicious Line.

Gallery

Tilted Heritage 2015. 25'x10'x10'. Ash on canvas, stretcher bars, rope, C clamps. Installed in Labored Landscapes (where hand meets ground), a solo exhibition at the Fitchburg Art Museum, September 21, 2019—January 12, 2020. Photograph: Charles Sternaimolo. This piece was triggered by an event, a fire that destroyed a vast area of one of the most iconic coastal cities in Chile. Tilted Heritage is an attempt to link contemporary politics to the history of colonization and its repercussions in identity, the cannibalization of culture, and the subversion of meaning.
Donde el Cielo toca La Tierra, 2019. Three oil on canvas paintings, approx. 12’ x 30’ each. Installed in Labored Landscapes (where hand meets ground), a solo exhibition at the Fitchburg Art Museum, September 21, 2019—January 12, 2020. Photograph: Charles Sternaimolo. Large-scale paintings, accompanied by photos etched with the text of interviews conducted with former workers which explore the physical and emotional connections made with the earth through the labor of the miner. My labor was an act of resistance to the industry while attempting to provide reciprocity and critical homage to its workers.
Grey Copper. 35’ x 36’ x 6’. Drawing and sound installation. Installed in Daniela Rivera: The Andes Inverted, a solo exhibition at The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, March 4, 2017–February 25, 2018. Grey Copper is a massive copper point drawing on one of the museum walls, that was cut and tilted six feet into the exhibition space. The abstract drawing was generated with traces of rocks brought from the mine itself and drawn with copper. I invited music composer, Jenny Olivia Johnson, to collaborate with me in the design of a sound interface that would allow for the use of more than 150 sound files collected from the site. The tilted wall acted as a massive resonance box and activated the emanating sounds, which included interviews with niners, sound samples taken from the mine and the Atacama region, as well as the sounds of making the drawing.
Sin Evidencia/ Without A Trace, 2019-2020. Approx. 14’ x 10’. A wall made out of 2,222 soap bars. Installed at Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis University (2019) and Davis Museum, Wellesley College (2020). Without A Trace establishes a dialogue between the political history of my home country, Chile, with a personal history of trauma, and the formal strategies of male dominated Western art movements. The wall is constructed with bars of Zote soap. Zote is a Mexican brand of soap used for hand washing delicate laundry. This soap wall covers the extent of a gallery wall, camouflaging at first as part of the architecture, but little by little revealing itself due to its scent and materiality. My hope is that the experience of this piece immediately recalls spaces of intimacy and vulnerability centering the understanding of the work in memory and the body. The soap wall was my way to link institutional abuses of power to abuses and violence occurring in the domestic space. I also linked this wall soap to the cleansing act perpetrated by victimizers and the erasure of the traces of violence. The soap referred to moments of complete vulnerability and intimacy, and the act of washing off dirt and traces of previous events. Today, the figure of the wall indicates much more and each bar of soap points not only to the victims and victimizers but also to our collective blindness, complicity, and silence.
Sobremesa (Karaoke Politics). Public Platform made on repurposed dinning tables and activation via public performances and events. Sobremesa (Karaoke Politics) creates an open space for public vulnerability, expression and equity, while standing in recognition of the great value that lies in difference. Envisioned for the Boston neighborhood of Grove Hall, artist Daniela Rivera has created a platform for community discourse that invites community members and the public to step onto a stage of connected tables in order to challenge and traverse the symbolic boundaries of social expectations. Amidst our uncertain political climate, this project aims to open a playful space for gathering where the sharing of individual and cultural expressions is celebrated. The word and concept of sobremesa refers to a Pan-Hispanic cultural practice that was brought to the Americas by Spanish colonizers. During sobremesa, plates and leftovers as well as conversations and memories begin to literally and figuratively accumulate on top (sobre) of the dinner table (mesa). This outdoor installation features twenty repurposed dining room tables that have been altered to create a joined and singular platform. The table-tops have been stained in different colors to emphasize their place as territories that exist within a larger map.