My work is multidisciplinary, installation-based, and performative, exploring notions of the domestic and the urban through the intimate (or public) matters of living together; personal care and household maintenance; wellness and well-being; and the effects of globalization and technological development upon living space. Propelled by narrative, installations probe issues of social discomfort and our cultural obsession with cleanliness; the methods through which society sanitizes women; our desire for quick-fix methods of self-help and self-care; and the increasing invisibility of technological infrastructure in the urban and domestic landscape.
I have recently been the societal tendency to position the figure of the Child as representative of “the future” – a reliance on reproductive futurism - and the problems of this representation for those who choose not to reproduce or cannot reproduce. I’m interested in positioning issues of social reproduction alongside those of biological reproduction and exploring the notion of reproductive futurity alongside the neoliberal characteristic of cleanliness as generating a forward-facing pathway. I’m interested in deconstructing notions of “the future” and asking questions about ideas of care in relation to reproductive futurity and the drive for technological “innovation”.
Taking the bodily, medical and performative contents that make up my artistic practice, I use my own orchestrated experiences of medical tourism procedures as a public platform to encourage discussion about the cultural, political and social meanings assigned to the female body and its capabilities. The bodily interventions include tubal ligation in Thailand, hymenoplasty in Poland, IVF consultations in Bulgaria and full breast tattoos in Latvia. I believe that upholding the high status of motherhood and treating childfree people as deviations from the standard of motherhood is clearly limiting to childfree women in terms of their acceptance as valuable contributors to the society and as people free of biological determinism. The aim of my artistic research is to contribute to the growing field of investigation in the childfree lifestyle and to question the standard of the normativity of motherhood for women in the Western society and to link the social stigmatization of childfree people with investigations in sociology, performativity, bioethics, body art, feminism and queer theory.
The Next Thing, Bury Art Museum and Sculpture Centre, Moving Image Gallery, Bury, UK
My ongoing practise researches and investigates parenthood, including; pregnancy, child birth, the relationships we have with our children, and considers that parenthood may not always be that of gaining a child but may be about losing them too.
I create installations as a visual interpretation of sensitive and personal experiences. I work across a variety mediums and disciplines using photography and film, painting, drawing and sculpture and the components can also be viewed as individual pieces.
Myrel Chernick grew up in Metuchen, New Jersey, traveling to Paris for a year with her family at age nine. There she discovered culture, history, literature, art, food, beauty. This formative experience fueled her determination to leave the suburbs and live a different life.
Chernick’s fascination with language began with her experience of learning French with the facility of childhood, understanding that it was very different from the language she knew, and that language was connected to culture. She studied art, receiving her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago after having moved to New York to participate in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Influenced by the conceptual art she saw around her, she sought to combine her love of literature and writing with light-filled installations. She began adding short phrases to her installations in 1977, influenced by Marguerite Duras, her austere but sensuous language, and her focus on the spaces between the words.
Living in New York, Chernick has continued to work with projections and multimedia installations, single channel video and photography, while taking a detour to raise twins, curate two exhibitions on motherhood, edit The M Word: Real Mothers in Contemporary Art, and to expand her writing to include longer text/image works. She spends as much time in Paris as she possibly can, and is currently writing and illustrating a hybrid novel that takes place in her favorite city.
I am fascinated by transformation processes.
I observe transforming spaces, economy, environment, cities, work, cells, bodies, knowledge, history, countries, roles, education, technology, relationships, selves, languages.
Becoming and being a mother is for me all about transformation. My first solo exhibition in the Zepter Gallery in Belgrade, Serbia was called Metamorphosis . The objects I made used banal everyday objects (plastic bags) and transformed them into an immense vagina or into umbilical cords falling from the ceiling. This story from 1999 was a intimate story of separating oneself from the primary family and a story about the everyday and the environment.
From 2006 to 2012 my partner and I went through a series of unsuccessful IVFs and several miscarriages. I did several sculptural works that documented this part of our lives - like the Womb exhibited in 2010 in Museum de Ceramica de l’Alcora, Spain. It was just about the pain, I guess.
In 2012, I was invited to make an urban intervention inside the Vesel Garden in Ljubljana, Slovenia. I was three months pregnant with my son and did not know what to expect about the occurring pregnancy. So I did an urban intervention with a participative performance and called this work Embryo garden. It was all about the thin line between life and death of the child to be, but also of the artistic child within myself.
My experience as a parent has been both challenging and inspiring for me as an artist. I explored the relationship between the roles of artist and parent in my 2016 exhibition in the Glass Atrium of the City Hall of Ljubljana, called A Thank You Note To the Cleaning Lady. The work that lent its name to the exhibition questions the relation between reproductive, maintenance work and having greater purpose in life. As a whole, the exhibition was born as a product of broken antagonism between being a parent and an artist and of cooperation between the two roles. The installation To Include Everything, Everything, Everything, Absolutely, Absolutely, Everything especially focused on that. And the work The Map is about the child experiencing and learning by himself, and the artist-mother just observing and taking notes. In this process, I sometimes feel as if steeling from him.
My media based art practice explores the realm of the moving image as a place of re-examination and possibility. It is a way for me to pull apart and reconstruct the threads of my life. Working in video, installation, performance and photography, I investigate my body and my South Asian Muslim Canadian female identity as a social construction.
The impetus for my art-making has always been curiosity, questioning and investigating. I want to uncover the place of agency within the structures that are imposed upon me. Fabric is a recurring metaphor to represent the many layers of codes wrapped around women’s bodies. It is a structure for me to hang meaning on – fabric can flow, constrain, codify and signify. It represents culture.
Through observing the formal and aesthetic properties of cultural gestures such as prayer, wearing a hijab, dressing/undressing, I deconstruct and reimagine how social codes and rituals can occupy the body. I experiment by pushing gestures beyond where they normally rest.
My works begin from the personal place of my Islamic South Asian Canadian heritage and end as images that can be read by a wider audience. The 6 meter long sari is abstracted into a long swath of red silk. A hooded sweatshirt stands in for a hijab. I deliberately use the conventions of mass media such as cinematic projections and seductive imagery to invite viewers to enter my work and settle in. I slow down and repeat images to facilitate reflection and reconsideration. I magnify texture and body parts so as to connect the viewer to a physical sensation.
In the process of image-making I see myself and unveil meaning in my life. I invite viewers to inhabit this imaginative space and reconsider their own experience.
In my artwork and creative projects, I use textile based media as a tool for communication; to record and speak about the individual, society, and the hand of the maker. I work with concepts of time, labor, and cloth as a tool for personal expression. My current body of work explores the value of cloth on both a personal and societal level.
I create visual recordings through the use of detritus from my life and studio. These elements and works from the past are employed into new forms that serve to document and comment on the material objects that tangibly define the work of my hands. These are woven pieces, broken forms, and cut offs of previous works. They track time and place, creating a sequence of objects that allude to written text and recording through the use of fiber, concrete, and metal. Through community based interactive weavings, I am able to create works in collaboration with diverse individuals, providing each person a platform to express their ideas. I value textile objects and processes and by bringing them out of my studio, and recreating the way they are being perceived, I work to give the viewer a new perspective on their value.
My work marries a functional, aesthetic, and conceptual approach to metal. She works with concepts of adornment to create works that use the body to engage in conversations that draw directly from her personal life.
“I was trained as a jeweler years ago, which brought me to understand the intricacies of creating work that is personal to each person wearing it and expresses parts of their life. The choice to work with precious metals has been because of their inherent strengths and weaknesses. I value silver, both for its culturally relevant quality and for its beauty. I employ copper for its strength and abundance. I am, after all, interested in creating something beautiful and desirable. As I continue to explore these personal narratives through these metals, themes that relate to my life as a mother begin to come through. My initial interest in small, intimate works, is finding a new source of expression that allows me to create intimate pieces that explore the relationships I have to my children.”
My practice based research uses autoethnographic and feminist methodologies to examine maternal subjectivities with a particular focus on the mother as a classed and gendered subject.
I am also interested in the performativity of motherhood and in examining narratives of the good and bad mother and how these narratives are perpetuated in everyday encounters and experiences.
I am a mixed media artist, exploring themes of the Maternal, Relationships, Sexual Politics and the Cycle of Life.
I am particularly attracted to Flora's life cycle; I link these to human experience using Anthropomorphism and Pareidolia, these are documented via Photographs & Sculptures, where inspiration from the natural world has become fundamental to my practice.
My sculptures are made from non-traditional materials, based on seeds, their shape & form are often reminiscent of human body parts
Currently my work focuses on pregnancy, motherhood and in particular the dynamics of Mother-Daughter Relationships, Since becoming a Mother myself, I have become obsessed with trying to document 'Moments' & 'Memories', and the 'Essence of my mother', in an attempt to understand the complex relationship that I have with my own mother.
Domestic Landscapes are oneiric installations made with light, kitchen utensils and shadows.
The complexities of how we inhabit and engage with our surroundings and the entities we share them with are at the core of my work. Informed by the photographic process, larger works and installations tend to incorporate light and projection as well as sound or video while smaller scale works often consist of everyday objects and multiples. Simulating nature with man-made items and transforming life’s daily chaos into delicacy, my work edges between childlike playfulness and a longing for the seemingly out of reach. Grounded in the home and activated by life with young children, necessary and repetitive daily tasks are absorbed into my work and reappear to expose beauty through reflections on domestic life.
Homage to Heqet
2012
Mott Community College Art Gallery, Flint, MI
The complexities of how we inhabit and engage with the earth and the entities we share it with are at the core of my work – systems within systems.
Over the past two years, frogs and toads have been a vessel for my perpetual interest in the simulation of nature. This exploration has manifested through drawing, installation, video and sound. My materials and habits tend toward everyday objects, multiples, and layers. Homage to Heqet is an extension of this work; An offering to frog-headed Heqet: Goddess of fertility, midwives, and newborns.
In the spring, amidst frog calls and blooming earth and henna on my belly.13 days later, a daughter was born into water, a force of nature.
Ritual is intention & process. I’m focused on honoring repetitive, menial daily tasks in mothering an infant, while embedding and reflecting on elements of our wetland counterparts.
Italian born, Amy moved to London in 1998 and graduated from Central Saint Martins College in 2005. Her work is mainly autobiographical but also holds a socio-political dynamic. Making the personal public her work originates from the female body, concepts of everyday life, loss of identity, the importance of memories and the abstraction of longing are central to her practice. Domesticity as a ‘visual language’ where maternal subjectivity is explored via different media such us drawings, photography, video installation and performance.
I’ve spent the last decade exploring the world of domestic life and family systems. Although I started as a painter, describing the chaotic and contradictory world of parenting seemed to require a multi-layered, eclectic approach, and I have expanded my practice to include collage, installation and photography. Recently, I’ve been drawn into the digital worlds my children inhabit so readily (in part because the subject of ‘screen’ causes so much debate and anxiety in the cultural discourse) and the imagery I’ve found there has been surprisingly inspiring and oddly familiar. One game had a pixelated, modular landscape—touched with moments of surprising, naturalistic beauty—that became an excellent metaphor for my domestic world. I use this imagery layered with realism, as well as a layering of techniques, to develop the idea of parenting and domestic life as a many-layered experience: funny, moving, and labor-intensive.