Quintan Ana Wikswo’s
artistic and intellectual practice is located at the intersections of
literature, film, photography, queer and feminist theory, new media, human
rights, and performance collaboration with composers and choreographers. Her
cross-disciplinary projects integrate her original texts in fiction,
nonfiction, poetry, and libretto, as well as her original alternative process
photography, 35mm films, and live performance works.
Recognized
for her exploration of new forms, hybrids, and collaborative discovery, Wikswo’s
singular vision and process crosses disciplines and defies distances between
past and present, analog and digital, the anachronistic and the avant-garde.
Her works – typically created using salvaged antique military communications
equipment - explore sites of obscured, contested, and hidden histories that
often include under-documented crimes against humanity.
Wikswo has
received major fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts,
the National Endowment for the Humanities, Yaddo, the Pollock Krasner
Foundation, the Center for Cultural Innovation, ARC/Durfee, Djerassi, the
Puffin Foundation, Ucross, the Millay Colony, the Anderson Ranch Arts Center,
the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Oberpfalzer Kunstlerhaus, and more.
Her projects
are published, exhibited, and performed widely in the Americas, Europe and
Asia:
The first
solo museum survey of her work, PROPHECY OF PLACE: QUINTAN ANA WIKSWO was
presented in New York City from August 2011 – March 2012 by the Yeshiva
University Museum at the Smithsonian-affiliated Center for Jewish History. The
nine-month exhibition featured her poems and stories, multi-panel photography,
assemblage, live performance works, and films surrounding a thousand years of
crimes against women in Europe from the Crusades to the Holocaust, and
questioning the marginalization of female, queer, and disabled experience
within human rights and Holocaust narrative. Major works from the exhibition
continue to museums in the United States and Europe in 2012-14, including the
Munich Jewish Museum and the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.
A prolific
writer across forms, her texts appear regularly in magazines and journals
including Tin House, Kenyon Review, Conjunctions, Gulf Coast, WITNESS, New
American Writing, Alaska Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly, Drunken Boat,
Sidebrow, and more. Her works are also published in artist’s books, exhibition
catalogues, and anthologies such as One Blood: The Narrative Influence
(University of Alaska Press). Multimedia DVDs include The Anguilladae Eaters
(Catalysis Projects), Prophecy of Place (Yeshiva University Museum), Waterland
(Vera Icon), and Apostrophe Catastrophe (Catalysis Projects).
Seventeen
major collaborative performance works are based upon her own original multi-genre
texts, poetry, and other writings, and engage her own original photography,
film projections, multichannel video, field recordings, and performance
electronics. Through an adventurous collaborative process, the projects expand
across music, movement, dance, opera, and theater via a creative team that
includes composers Andrea Clearfield, Veronika Krausas, Pamela Madsen, Anne La
Berge, David Rosenboom, Tom Flaherty, and Isaac Schankler, choreographers
Manfred Fischbeck, Alexx Shilling, GroupMotion Dance Theater, and a spectrum of
actors, musicians, and performers.
Wikswo’s
works have premiered internationally at prominent institutions including the
University of Southern California, the Museum of Jurassic Technology, the Lyon
Musée des Moulages, the Jewish Museum of Munich, Schloss Plüschow, the Los
Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, Beyond Baroque, MicroFest, Boston Court
Performing Arts Center, California State University at Fullerton, the
University of Maryland, Yeshiva University Museum, Kebbel Villa, The Composer’s
Project, the International Alliance of Women in Music (IAWM), the National
Center for Music Creation (GRAME), and in multiple galleries in Los Angeles and
around the world.
A dedicated
interdisciplinary teacher, Wikswo maintains a lively reading and artist lecture
tour throughout Europe and the United States, and presents master classes and
workshops for programs in Creative Writing, Music Composition, Theater,
Performance, Film, Visual Art, English, History, Gender Studies, Queer Studies,
and Human Rights.
She earned an
interdisciplinary BA with Honors from the University of Texas at Austin, with
triple majors in Philosophy/Critical Theory, Gender Studies, and History, and
minors in African-American Studies and French. She was awarded an international
fellowship in Gender Studies to the University of Sydney, Australia, and an MFA
in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, where she was honored
with the President’s Award and the University Distinguished Service Award.
Her studios
are located in Brooklyn and Los Angeles.
Quintan Ana
Wikswo is an interdisciplinary artist whose projects integrate a constellation
of works in photography, original text, video and installation, as well as
performance collaborations with composers and choreographers. Catalysis
Projects interviews her about synesthesia, washing dishes with kitty litter,
and microtonal fantasies.
MicroTextual will
premiere Quintan’s Floriography I/Coimbra 1452 (with Rafael Liebich) and
Floriography II/Bavaria 1543 (with Philip Shakhnis), a diptych of video-integrated
text performance works about medieval botanical and ecological life at
Inquisition convents and Crusade villages.
CP-Language
can be defined as a system of symbols that convey meaning. In your artistic
practice, how do you convey meaning? In what way do you use your medium to
create your own language?
QAW-This
summer in Czech Republic – where the character system and language are
completely different from English – I spent a long time in a shop trying to
distinguish a box of dishwasher crystals from a box of cake mix. Both were
cardboard containers of white powder with images of a kitchen and a cat and a
half-eaten slice of cake on a plate. I stood there giggling happily while the
workers glared at the demented Gypsy lady who might steal the box of cat
litter.
A few years
ago I was told I have synesthesia, which tends to tangle up meaning through
some aberrant neurological and cognitive wiring. As a visual artist and writer,
this is a big tangle. For instance, the color yellow makes a sound, and thus
has stronger auditory than visual meaning
– yellow is not a “color.” Likewise, letters are very visually and
emotionally evocative – much as human faces convey very distinctive
personalities. When I make words, I make
little villages. Sentences are civilizations. The integrated
text-video-performance pieces for MicroTextual (Floriography I and II) explore
mass slaughter and genocide, but I built the texts using letters whose
personalities are extremely gentle and pretty and demure. A bit shy, with the
tendency to daintily cringe away from any unpleasantness.
Clearly,
there’s no way an outside audience could share in that kind of personal
language. Yet every creature is fairly clueless about what its fellows are
trying to say, and at some point it’s the process of conveying meaning that can
be most mesmerizing – watching someone try to wash dishes with kitty litter, or
bake a cake using dishwashing powder is more intriguing than doing it just like
everyone else. This struggle about attaching symbols and meanings have resulted
in psychiatric asylums, Carnegie Hall, and the Crusades. It’s nice to imagine
that as artists we finally have the right to draw our own conclusions.
CP-Text can
be understood as a code – a symbolic mark-making that some others can “read,”
but yet completely unintelligible to people not fluent in that language. How important is it to you whether your
“text” conveys a comprehensible meaning or communication to your audiences?
QAW-My most
fertile conversations begin with misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and
errors of interpretation. Otherwise, there’s no friction. No rough edges to
catch against. I find a perverse pleasure in being artistically uncomfortable
and confused and disoriented. Over time, this sensation has become a barometer
that monitors my stagnation and aeration. I never create a work from a tidy
place of comprehension – my own works are documents of an awkward struggle to
understand something I find unwieldy.
As artists
and audiences, I think it’s very important that we get excited by – rather than
intimidated by – disorienting, perplexing, unfamiliar communication. I rarely
want anyone to pre-digest anything for me, and I try to carry that philosophy
forward to audiences, whether they like it or not.
Overall, I
think it’s fruitful to resist the marketplace-driven phobia about being
misunderstood – the whole idea that everything must be distilled to a tits-out
elevator speech where god forbid something isn’t quick and easy and sexy. It’s
repellant, but not in the fun way.
Likewise, the attempt to control the outcome for an audience is very
dull and stultifying – when artworks are presented with a hegemonic
surveillance around “the right meaning” it completely kills the chemical
reactions between artist and audience.
It makes artworks that smother rather than kindle.
A lot of my
work is politically engaged, and so for me to try and control or police meaning
would get really ugly. The pieces being performed at MicroTextual explore epic
historic genocides, and of course I have various points to make. But it would
be splendid if someone just gets that there are green butterflies in a field.
When someone attaches a new meaning to my work, it means the piece sprouts renegade
tendrils and grows weird vegetables in someone else’s brain. Birth is meant to
be a struggle for everyone involved.
CP-The term
microtonality is generally applied only to music that uses a tuning system
other than twelve-tone equal-temperament.
However, we believe that, because microtonality breaks down one of the
fundamental building blocks of western music (the tyranny of the twelve), it is
a term that can be applied to other disciplines of artmaking. Do you see microtonality in your, or other,
fields? How does your work on the April 16 concert find the small spaces
between the keys or between the words.
QAW-I
realized recently that I have developed an little fantasy about microtonal
music being an arcane, Kabbalistic, alchemical treasure hunt where secret notes
are hidden between the visible notes.
Rather like an auditory wormhole through which one can vanish out of
mundane do-re-me territory and emerge someplace altogether fantastic. Like
sailing to the edge of a flat earth and expecting to fall off, only to discover
a sphere…or vice versa. How lovely!
Microtonal
music is also such a wonderful imposition on musicians and audiences who might
otherwise fall into a rut of twelve – let’s make it fast! Let’s take the
interstate, instead of Route 66. I love
how microtonality forces participants to navigate unfamiliar, disorienting
situations, and requires people to grow new perceptual antennae to sleuth out
what’s going down. The risk is feeling foolish, vulnerable, overwhelmed,
annoyed and exhausted, but the reward is gaining a new auditory knowledge
that’s a bit secret and arcane.
When you
approached me about contributing works to this event, the challenge was to find
a analogous “microtonal” tuning in literature – a way of composing and performing
text that involves that sense of striding off the map, sailing over the edge,
spending time in uncharted waters. I thought about how much I love spending
time in countries where I’m illiterate in the written and spoken language
because I’m forced to embark upon that treasure hunt for other clues of
meaning, like gesture and expression and context.
So I created
two works for the April 16th concert that involve finding the small spaces
between languages – each text piece is visually projected in English, while
being overspoken in other languages such as Russian, Hebrew, and Portuguese. In
a sense, the audience is the performance, occupying that space between the two
languages where a third meaning emerges.
I’m very
excited to hear everyone’s pieces at the April concert, especially so many
premieres. It’s impossible for artists to really play it safe within these
creative parameters, and that’s tremendously inspiring. Besides – if the world doesn’t turn out to be
spherical, the ship will make a lovely crash as it falls off the edge of the
world.
www.catalysisprojects.com/microtextual.html
http://www.quintanwikswo.com/
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