Notes on a Scattered Subject in Montmartre, by Deborah Kapchan
Invitation: Experimental Encounters in Pandemic Times, by Susan Ossman
This project was a pandemic-era reflection on the "subject" both in the sense of a topic and the particular forms of consciousness associated with a person or social condition. I devising three programs of art/experiment that asked "What is the subject?" I drew on and bundled together strands of contemporary art, anthropology anthropologists and cultural theory to probe what might be learned about subjects in lock-down times of heightened digital promiscuity.
Three artwork/experiments got at different aspects of subjectivity and subjectness. "Invitation" focused on one on one exchanges. "Self Portrait in Monmartre" was a walking-tour of me, then a gallery exhiibition that reflected on divides of inside and out. "One and Many" probed issues of self to community, individual to social body, by transforming an individually composed artwork into a collective artwork as a way to celebrate the end of pandemic-era restrictions.
This site was concieved a space to exhibit, publish, reflect on and perform the art/experiments as they unfolded. I worked with a ready-made digital platform, much as one might paint on a pre-stretched canvas. Other iterations of the individual works and the project as a whole took shape in a gallery and in the articles vaiable above. Reflecting on how "the subject" changes as it shifts among media and genres of publication and diverse audiences becomes part of the experiment.
Scroll down to read summaries of each project with links to further information.
Heading 2
This work explores communication, touch and truth. The piece is composed of 33 pieces that I made over several months, then mailed to people around the world. These individual pieces of the single artwork will never meet except on this site, where I diversely configure and reflect on the subject of the art by way of the photographs and texts recipients send to me.
The process of making, sending, receiving the photographs and assembling them has sparked reflections on conceptions of the "full picture" that I did not imagine when I first devised "Invitation." In a post-pandemic article I study "Invitation" to probe the generative capacities of the project design and the questions of subjectivity, be it individual, collective or dispersed
Self-Portrait
This project began with an outdoor portrait/parcours
scattered around the Montmartre quarter of Paris.
(Self-Portrait in Montmartre)
From December 10- January 30,
a second rendition of the Self-Portrait was exhibited at
the Gallery of the American University of Paris
(Self Portrait in Place)
Self Portrait in Montmartre
May 16, 2021
.jpg)
.jpg)
This project makes the Montmartre quarter of Paris a canvas and a frame for an interactive, dynamic self-portrait/landscape. The work was scattered within a kilometer of the apartment where I lived from June 2020 to June 2021 during the COVID pandemic. I was undergoing treatment for breast cancer.
I exhibited the portrait as parcours on May 16, 2021. The public received a map with twelve sites they could chose to visit in any order. Viewable, palpable, on-site art and places were each associated with online slides shows, videos and audio recordings accessible on phones. Participants were invited to make their own recordings and notes about the bits and pieces that made up the scattered portrait.
This self portrait literally mingled its subject (me) with the landscape. frame/calendar of the quarter. Working within the confines of a year, a place and my biography the artwork led me to contemplating questions of time and visibility, surveillance, and the body-self in motion.
Habituellement, les autoportraits sont réalisés seuls, en studio, puis accrochés pour être visionnés dans une exposition ou un musée. J'adopte une approche différente pour ce portrait dans le cadre de mon programme de travail en cours sur les « sujets éparpillés ».
Pour mon portrait, j’inclus l'environnement et le spectateur dans le cadre du processus de composition, qui n'est jamais tout à fait complet, jamais entièrement présent, comme n'importe quel sujet dans une œuvre d'art, ou dans la vie.
Ce travail intègre naturellement les conditions particulières de mouvement restreint et de distanciation sociale au cours des derniers mois pour tout le monde. Il comprend aussi ma découverte et traitement pour un cancer du sein qui a chevauché les mois de pandémie et qui a transformé une visite à Paris en une migration de retour provisoire.
Self Portrait in Place
9 December 2021/ 30 January 2022
American University of Paris
The second exhibition of the self-portrait brought what was outdoors inside. In the gallery the body of the viewer was no longer immersed in the city. Instead, people were immersed in large paintings that appeared tiny when they were viewed on phone screens. Brushstrokes, words and scratches on canvas become palpable, while the city became image and imagined. The visitor no longer heard their own heart neat quicken as they climbed the Montmartre hill. Inside, the voices in the digital recordings became more distinct.
The gallery stretched from a large entryway beside a cafe through the university library and into an atrium with a view on the Seine. Although the rush of students and faculty between classes might intimate the bustle of the street, the space included resting places with chairs and coffee tables. In the warm gallery, people could pause in front of a work or sit together to discuss it. They could linger as they associated what they saw first-hand with digital elements. They could make a digital visit of the original self-portrait and compare it to this second version.
Exhibition curated by Blanca Casas Brullet
With special thanks to Antonella Casellato, Waddick Doyle, Caroline Pierce and Jonathan Shimony.
Time Lapse: LA Arts Documentary
The final project in this series explored collective and composite subjects. In March 2022 people were just beginning to meet in public places. "One and Many" used a large public artwork to instigate an active, collective reflection on the body and the body politic, self and community and the the part to the whole.
On March 3, 2022 I stretched a 25 foot long painting inspired by poppy fields across the front of the Riverside Museum. The work was composed of over 100 individual artworks. Viewers who attended the "opening" of the one-work exhibition during the city's monthly art walk were invited to dismantle and remake it. Each person selected one of the 100 individual works to bring home with them. In return, they filled in the empty space on the canvas revealed by removing their artwork.
Why poppies? Poppies are among the first flowers to burst into bloom in spring. They are the stte flower of California where there are entire parks dedicated to the huge hillside tapestries the flowers weave each spring.
In this work, I celebrated this beautiful if fleeting bloom, along with other properties and symbolic meanings of the fragile flower. Poppies have been associated with spring fields and life since antiquity, so too their narcotic properties. They symbolize fertility and life, dream states and death. Since WWI red poppies have been worn in English speaking countries to honor veterans. Trade in the products of the poppy were at the center of the colonial Opium wars in China. Today, in Afghanistan, and around the world, farmers uproot food crops to plant opium poppies to survive. ( for more click here)
