April
Reckoning with a Changing Climate
by Monica Uszerowicz
This month’s residency was generously sponsored by Jane Wesman.
In April of 2022, Cathy Hsiao, Gabrielle Vitollo, and Scott Bluedorn spent a month in partial communion with the sea. Here in Miami for Fountainhead’s Climate & Environmental Sustainability residency, they snorkeled, swam, and together added details to Bluedorn’s Fountainhead Island House (Temple of Change), 2022, a sculpture on Legion Picnic Island resembling a children’s clubhouse. The imagined hideaway foretells sea-level rise—the titular “change” describing the necessary shift toward protecting our planet and each other. Miami itself, where the effects of climate change are felt with every thunderstorm and subsequent flood, rendered the residency’s themes tangibly close.
Vitollo was moved by the city’s environmental vulnerability: “You’re seeing beautiful marine life—and, at the same time, plastic and trash dumped into the local ecosystem.” Her mother, an artist, teacher, and avid gardener, can identify local birds by sight; her father “works in the industry of environmental protection.” Learning about the environment from “emotional and big-data standpoints,” young Vitollo loved Leonardo da Vinci for his own interest in both scientific investigation and observational drawing. Vitollo, like da Vinci, is fascinated by the relationship between humans, animals, and machines; for her maximalist Satellite-scape paintings, she depicts abstracted renderings of Google Earth maps—including the application’s glitches, displayed as sudden bursts or overlays.
These painted glitches might refer to “a disruption of the technology, though they can also be interpreted as the violence being committed to the landscape.” She paints quickly, to reflect the urgency of the dwindling coastlines she’s reimagining. Before her arrival, Vitollo printed out images of Miami’s coast from Google Earth, playing with their scale. Considering our exploitation of the landscape, she resists the term “Anthropocene,” preferring to subvert our outsize dominance. “I’m more interested in symbiosis. I think we’re on a path to a more compatible relationship with nature.”
Hsiao, swimming for the first time in her life, was recharged by the Atlantic Ocean; she felt “like we recentered notions of our body and its connection to the earth.” Her multifaceted work incorporates sculpture, painting, and sound. While adapting architectural materials like concrete, she has a profound, more intimate relationship with plant-based dyes, particularly indigo, describing their traditional use as a sustainable technology utilized primarily by Indigenous people and people of color. (Indigo initially arrived in Hsiao’s life as a healing tool for a chronic skin condition.) In Miami, she was shocked by the city’s interpretation of what constitutes private and public land—often along the same stretch of sand.
“Conversations about climate change are informed by a canon of discourses on what we think nature is, how it’s regulated,” she explains. “Without the traditions of people of color being part of that discourse—what do we come up with?”
She left behind a cement-cast, indigo-dyed cat face, recognizable as the logo for Botan Rice Candy, a Japanese sweet popular across East Asia (Hsiao grew up between the US, Hong Kong, and Taiwan). The cat, she says, is something of an “emoji”—an easy, meaningful lexicon in which she finds inspiration. If there was an emoji for climate change in the US, “it could possibly be Florida’s shoreline,” she adds.
Bluedorn, too, hopes to reimagine these conversations, creating a “maritime cosmology”—a mythos inspired by the space between land and sea—with his nautical illustrations and assemblages. “I think we need new myths and ideas in order to change consciousness, to affect change,” he explains. “Otherwise, there’s no compelling vision for society. We just have these distracting ideas of progress—the myth of progress.”
In 2020, he built The Bonac Blind, a floating home inspired by the Bonackers, the locals of East Hampton Town; the structure was a response to his hometown’s dual crises of displacement and climate change—both clearly mirrored in Miami. During his travels, Bluedorn, like an archaeologist, scours coastlines for debris, which “can tell you a lot about currents, and about the place where you are.” He presses the items into clay, in the style of Babylonian tablets. As he explores, the materials start to resemble each other; in Miami, he arranged them into hieroglyphic-like sculptures (Talismans, 2022). The organic and inorganic coalesced with alarming ease—spiraled plastics and whorled mollusk shells, iguana skin, and stretchy tarp–and became a genus of hybrid species, endemic to the same ecosystem.
In May, the artists tenderly shared their gratitude and memories on social media: Hsiao thanked “the water and soul shepherds I met on this journey,”; Bluedorn’s graphite-and-acrylic drawing, Better Reception, features a satellite affixed to a palm tree too regal for such an appendage—a familiar sight in Florida. Vitollo posted a photograph of a sunset, ice-cream-colored and warm. A thread woven through their robust practices—poetic considerations of our mercurial relationship with the planet—became visible in Miami, as if it needed the water to set it aglow: flora and fauna merging with our waste, plants with our skin, our shrinking coastlines with our bodies—still diving in and finding solace in the water. They offer warnings, to be sure, but these are omens full of hope.
Scott
Bluedorn
Working in painting, printmaking, drawing, installation, and collage, Scott Bluedorn illustrates how the natural world collides with contemporary human society in both detrimental and beautiful ways. His work considers how technological advancements like industrial manufacturing or mass commercialization contribute to the destruction of our ecosystems and biodiversity. Part of his process involves observing ruins and/or collecting found waste objects from shorelines and researching how these things wound up abandoned in our natural environment. Intertwining both history and commerce—and finding connections between the two–makes up the basis of his research and ultimate works. Inspired by science, cultural anthropology, and nautical tradition, Bluedorn’s work takes shape around visual elements like diagrams, objects, and drawings, and references naturalist art by artists like Audubon, Durer, or Haeckel in its approach.
Whether drawing materials directly from nature for site-specific installations or creating surrealist-inspired drawings and collages, Bluedorn centers both the simple beauty of nature and the destructive forces altering our world. His work has been acquired by the Edward Albee Foundation and the Parrish Art Museum, and he previously completed residencies with Shoals Marine Lab and the Nature Conservancy as part of the Andy Warhol Preserve Visual Arts Program. Bluedorn was born in Southampton, NY. He currently lives and works in East Hampton, NY.
From left: Bluedorn with a sculpture he created for a site-specific work in Miami, photographed by Jayme Gershen; an overhead look at Bluedorn’s work-in- progress in the studio at Fountainhead Residency; new works by Bluedorn displayed during the Fountainhead Residency Open House, photographed by Rodrigo Gaya; a portrait of Bluedorn by Gershen.
Cathy
Hsiao
Cathy Hsiao distills the abstract idea of climate change into small, accessible actions that can be applied to an expanded field of ecology that includes connecting the local environments of her kitchen and studio with other, wider geographies. An amalgamation of craft, ancient tradition, and science, her sculpture practice repositions color, ornamentation, and the highly decorative languages of her own and other diasporic cultures as sources of ecological knowledge. In this way, she considers how those most impacted by climate change are those whose visual languages are most lacking in representations of ecology.
Creating low-relief sculptures utilizing plant dyes and mass-produced architectural products like cement and hydrostone, Hsiao’s process involves casting the materials in shallow clay and plexiglass molds and using recycled food waste and plants from which she extracts color as dyes. These dyes color the gypsum and cement sculptures she creates, in an iconography culled from her East Asian heritage while referencing forms of pre-modernist architecture. Designed to evoke joy, memory, and empowerment, Hsiao’s sculptures embed complex questions regarding what a sustainable environment looks like and whose aesthetics determine how we see and imagine a shared future ecology. She has exhibited work at the Chicago Cultural Center, the DePaul Art Museum, and Goldfinch Gallery, amongst others. Hsiao teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and taught “Material Ecologies Lab: 드藍 Indigo on the Meadow” at Ox-Bow School of Art. She was born in NYC, and currently lives and works in Chicago, IL.
Clockwise from left: Hsiao in her studio at Fountainhead Residency; posing with her work, Le Tigre, 2022, in her Fountainhead studio; a snapshot of the organic materials that Hsiao turns into dyes for her relief sculptures; all images by Jayme Gershen. Bottom right: Flower for 2046 | 花樣年華, 2022. Hydrostone, cement, indigo dye, quebracho wood dye, lac insect dye, sumi ink, and UV ecopoxy.
Gabrielle Vitollo
Gabrielle Vitollo’s painting practice utilizes geological data and Google Earth technology to create abstract works that hypothesize how human intervention might alter some of the most beautiful landscapes in the world. Her latest works—born out of an inability to travel during the pandemic—find Vitollo traversing the globe from her laptop, studiously scrolling from glacial planes to alpine valleys to find images that stand out to her as either peculiar or particularly unique. Building on a legacy of Romanticist landscape paintings, Vitollo’s take is a modern-day excavation of human activities that ultimately pose an existential threat: How will these landscapes be altered 50, 100, or 1,000 years from now?
Vitollo’s process involves selecting and screenshotting a satellite image from Google Maps, which she then displays before her while she paints. In the tradition of abstraction, Vitollo’s brushstrokes are fluid and intuitive, allowing her gut to determine when a painting is finished. With a research-based practice that includes a Fulbright scholarship and DAAD fellowship, Vitollo is a YoungArts alumna and her work has been exhibited at Kunstpunkt, GlogauAIR, and the Friedhofsmuseum in Berlin as well as The Knockdown Center, The Hole, and Brooklyn Expo in New York, among others. She was born in West Chester, PA, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Clockwise from left: Installation view of works in progress at Fountainhead Residency, 2022; Acrylic and sand on canvas; a portrait of Vitollo at Fountainhead; Transformer, 2022. Photocopy collage with protection UV spray on aluminum and steel, courtesy of the artist; Vitollo in her studio at Fountainhead Residency; all images by Jayme Gershen.
Bluedorn, Temple of Change, 2022. Found object installation on Legion Picnic Island, Biscayne Bay, Miami, Florida.
Bluedorn, Hyperfungi, 2022. Watercolor on paper.
Bluedorn, Metamanatee, 2022. Watercolor on paper.
Hsiao, Blue 藍, 2022. Hydrostone, indigo, C-prints, and clay. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Hsiao, Solstice Fragments 花石廢墟, 2022. Hydrostone, quebracho, indigo, sumi ink, graphite, and UV ecopoxy. Photo credit Robert Chase Heishman and Cathy Hsiao.
Hsiao, Am I Chinese too 我也是中國人嗎, 2022. Hydrostone, indigo, UV ecopoxy, single channel speaker, electronics, and sound. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Vitollo, 76°55’21”S 166°49’33”E (Pine Island), 2021. Oil on canvas.
Vitollo, 25°11’30”N 80°38’26”W (Miami Coastline), 2022. Oil on canvas.
Vitollo, 63°44’22”S 59°19’38”W ArcticZigZag, 2022. Oil on wood panel.
April: Special Projects
Nestor Siré
Nestor Siré is interested in hacking the extraordinary social phenomena that make up contemporary Cuban life. A multimedia artist whose primary mediums revolve around technology, Siré’s work is grounded in relational aesthetics and distinctly points its gaze at life in Cuba—an unparalleled experience where ingenuity and invention are necessary to survive. Working across video, photography, hardware and software development, video games, and video art, Siré’s work often aims to intervene in how a system operates to uncover more profound questions about how societies form and ultimately operate. In particular, Siré is interested in the unofficial methods that facilitate the circulation of information in the digital realm and often creates works that uncover how these underground networks of information have always existed in some form or another.
His practice is based heavily on research and conversations with artists and everyday people, and he works toward identifying academic and aesthetic modes from which to display his findings. Recent projects like a video game challenging players to circumvent the everyday obstacles a burgeoning entrepreneur might face in Cuba or a wi-fi device made from everyday objects that embed the network’s name with a poem and can be placed anywhere and accessed by anyone, are just some of the ways his work achieves its ends. Siré’s work has been exhibited at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Queens Museum, New Museum, Hong-Gah Museum, The Photographers’ Gallery, the Havana Biennial, Manifesta 13 Biennial, Gwangju Biennale, and Curitiba Biennial, among others. He was born in Nuevitas, Cuba, and currently lives and works in Havana, Cuba.
Clockwise from left: CubaCreativa [PC GAMER], 2022. 3D models, NFTs, graphic design, video, and stock photography, courtesy of the artist; a portrait of Siré in his studio; Siré photographed with the wifi networks he intervened with poems as part of a collaboration with O, Miami during his residence; and the device Siré created to carry out this intervention; all photographed by Jayme Gershen. Right, from top to bottom: CubaCreativa [PC GAMER], 2022. 3D models, NFTs, graphic design, video, and stock photography, courtesy of the artist; Fragile Connections, 2022. Interactive multimedia installation, process art, offline node, videos, graphics, stickers, metal structures and biquad wifi antenna, courtesy of the artist.
Pavlo Kerestey
Pavlo Kerestey’s work typically begins with an intervention with his collaborator Susanne Clausen; he might project a film on the side of an abandoned building or stage a performance in a busy town square. The people who happen upon his works become unwitting participants, in a manner that allows Kerestey to consider their particular social roles. Reiterating these everyday interruptions until he feels he’s captured the essence of how we interact and connect with one another in his own contrived social experiment, Kerestey’s work then moves into its second phase. Back at the studio, he creates vivid, fluidly abstract paintings from memory that reflect on the experience. Those paintings are later repurposed for new works—appearing in his films or performances—creating a regenerative dialogue and record of how our reactions and receptions change over time.
Kerestey’s work reflects on the tense expectation of disaster—a fitting subject matter given the current circumstances of his native country, Ukraine. He briefly joined Fountainhead Residency in April, while he prepared for an exhibition with the Voloshyn Gallery. Owners Max and Julia Voloshyn have mounted a socially charged show that was supposed to make its way back to Kyiv when Russian airstrikes impeded air travel (the gallery is now being used as a bomb shelter). Kerestey is a featured artist in the exhibition, titled “The Memory on Her Face;” his work has been exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, and is part of the collections of the National Museum of Ukraine and the Zenko Foundation. He was born in Uzhhorod, Ukraine, and currently lives and works in Reading, England, and Munich, Germany.
Left (clockwise from left): Kino Cinema, 2021. Diptych oil on canvas; Kino, 2021. Oil on canvas; Kerestey in his studio at Fountainhead Residency, photographed by Jayme Gershen; _this doesn’t fit into the space..., 2022. Acrylic on canvas. Right (clockwise from left): A portrait of Kerestey by Gershen; Could you leave it like that, 2022. Acrylic and oil on banner; Worker’s Cinema, 2021. Oil on canvas.