Saturday, May 12, 2012

ARTICLE: Artistication at Baraka (glasschord.com)

(glasschord.com) The Artistication Project is the brainchild of artist Charles Hachadourian. Through his dialogue with artist Kardash Onnig they aspired toward creating an event that would provide artists with the time and space to create and discuss their work. Hachadourian believes that the “tactile conversation between artists” and the accessibility of the conversation to a larger public is crucial to social-intellectual and communal-spiritual growth.

The overall objective of the Artistication project is to create place-responsive compelling artworks that incorporate site, its role in community, and the use of dialogue between the artists as a critical link to better understanding both process and intent.

The Artistication residency is designed to provide two artists with room, board, and a material stipend for the period of one month to realize their respective work. We ask that the artists maintain a compelling connection to the worksite and be willing to participate in a recorded, transcribed document designed to support each other’s individual approach to process, problem solving and intent. Once realized, excerpts of this document and the events that took place in Baraka will be published in Glasschord Magazine, as well as a full transcription in print and digital form. There will be four residency periods that the applicants can choose from:

1. The first is May 15th through June 15th.
2. The second is July 1st through August 1st.
3. The third is August 15th through September 15th.
4. The fourth is October 1st through November 1st.

The Baraka site, donated by Onnig, is located on eleven acres of beautiful landscape in Stanfordville, NY all of which will be made available to participating artists. Baraka staff will be on site to help facilitate the fabrication and installation of the works.

To Apply for the Artistication residency click below: Artistication at Baraka Application

Interview with Kardash Onnig, whose Baraka complex will facilitate the Artistication residency, by artist Katherine Mann.

Katherine Mann: I’ve attended several residencies, and there is certainly a traditional framework that, I would say, the vast majority of residencies share. That would be the formula of space+time+solitude=residency. Does your residency provide an experience that would be different from others?

Kardash Onnig: Artistication began with a dialogue with Charly Hachadourian, he is the activator of this project. I will be the caretaker. I will feed the artists, house them, help them with material needs, and share with them the BARAKA of the land. The artists will receive solitude from the business of modern life, though unlike traditional residencies, they will have to agree to partake in dialogue with each other about each other’s work, work habits and intent.

Personally I believe we need to be liberated from “freedom of the individual” and for that to happen it begins with a dialogue between two. It is a priority for both parties to accepted change and growth through the experience and the conversation. This back and forth interests me. The artists cross borders, become “others”, becoming the earth, the work and the process.

This project began with dialogue between Charly and I, and then the Glasschord community, and now you are entering the process.

Charly’s idea to record and publish a book of the conversations between the two participants discussing their work, their intent, their responsibility to the community, their work ethics, their aesthetics, is powerful and I will do all that I can to facilitate this exchange right here on the land. It is also another step in fulfilling my studies towards Universality.

KM: How did you build this residency – how did it grow from a theoretical idea to an actual endeavor?

KO: In a way, this project started over thirty years ago. This “project” has two godfathers: my adopted father Sam Shaw’s gift of the land “BARAKA”, and my late father’s recent gift of an inheritance from a land sale in Lebanon.

KM: I assume that you live on or near the property in Stanfordville, and from looking at your work on your website you seem to be interested in really exploring your own persona (“being” as the quote in your Glasschord bio says) in the world, and in that community. Would you say your work is influenced by your environment, and how do you envision that same environment/community will affect the new-coming residents?

KO: I am in dialogue with this land: its trees, its spring, the birds, the wind, visiting friends – they all have helped me evolve my own being, to help me facilitate dialogue into a spiritual transference. My hope is that the residents will come to this land and use it for their own creative “transference”.

KM: You mentioned a “liberation” from the “freedom of the individual”, but why do we as artists need to be liberated from solo working? You talk about art making in a very fluid language – like you are interested in the studio process, but also in that process seeping into life. What is it about the location or experience that will allow artists to transform themselves or their art (the Voki that you mentioned, for example)?

KO: I do not object to solitary work. For me, the caretaker of Baraka, the intention of the work is to evolve the self to a three-dimensional consciousness so that when Be-ing with another being the transferences manifest the fourth dimension, or what I call Voki. To BE: one needs to have the mind beyond duality, the third dimension of the five senses, and the four elements of the torso. Liberation is when the individual realizes that the creative process begins with a priority that the work being done is for an “other”, as the original spark had come from an “other”. Liberation is accepting that one does not exist without the “other”. To find that other, “Dialogue” is necessary. In the Artistication project it started with Charly, who began the dialogue with me.

KM: What does Universality mean to you and what will that interest mean for the artists who come to the residency?

KO: One day a Muslim Afghan from the village of Balkh, whose father was a mullah, escapes to the west and settles in Konya. One day he meets a man from Tabriz named Shams, they spend some time together in dialogue, and after that, Rumi, the most published poet in America becomes a Sufi, a universalist.

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