Studio visits are a vital part of our artist-driven curatorial approach. It's a chance for us to hear directly from artists about how they are thinking, feeling, and making, and to see what they are working on. We meet artists at every stage of their career, and in any stage of aproject, and in any space that's workable for them (yes, that includes living rooms!). Though every studio visit is different, these meetings are always a chance for us to get inside the artist's mind and show that we care about their work. Though COVID-19 has halted in-person visits of any kind, we are jumping into virtual visits with artists from Boston and beyond whose work has an important message for the public. For our first edition, we meet with artist Zsuzsanna Varga-Szegedi.
One of the last gatherings I attended before the quarantine was a little get-together hosted by Boston Art Review at Emerson Contemporary. Spacetime was on view there, and one of the artists in the show, Zsuzsanna Varga-Szegedi, and I had been texting back and forth to see it together. But most conversations that evening, March 10, were speculations on an impending shutdown and what it might mean (Charlie Baker announced a state emergency that afternoon). A mere 48 hours later, from my couch during my first day of #WFH, I remembered Zsuzi’s parting words that night: “we’re entering a digital stone age.”
An interdisciplinary artist, Zsuzi works deftly with technology, digital space, and translation. She works at the nexus of virtual and physical, blending media to “analyze” absence, distortion, and distance in order to see the possibility within each. As such, she’s especially poised to guide us through such a stone age, and so hers was one of my first virtual studio visits.
L: Now + There Assistant Curator, Leah Triplett Harrington; R: artist, Zsuzsanna Varga-Szegedi
There is no formula for studio visits! Every artist is different. I typically don’t prepare too much for a first studio visit outside of looking at a few previous examples of the artist’s work and coming with a few starter questions. If I agree or ask for a visit, it’s usually because there’s something about the work that I can’t quite figure out, aesthetically or conceptually. There are questions that the work leaves unanswered (in a good way!) that makes me want to talk it out with the artist. We might jump right into those questions, or meander our way through them by chatting about their background and practice. I see the studio visit as a hugely important part of building not just a working relationship with an artist, but trust.
I’m always interested in place, and Zsuzi considers how national or local identities shift with time through digital distillations. I wondered how physical distance might inform her meditations on place.
Lukács in Boston on July 18, 2019, as part of In the Words, In the Bones at the Boston Center for the Arts. Photo by Leah Triplett Harrington.
We met via Zoom on April 9 (but not before the requisite texts checking on who was setting up the meeting, and on what platform) amidst a particularly heavy thunderstorm, with rain so loud that it was hard for us to hear each other. It was a welcome reminder of the physical, however, and our geographic proximity (she in Somerville and me in Fort Point). It also recalled for me the hot summer last July when I first met Zsuzi during a public projection of her piece contemplating collective memory, cultural myth, and place, Lukács in Boston. In this nomadic work, Zsuzi recreated the well-known statue from a public park in Budapest, Hungary (where Zsuzi is originally from) on the facade of the BCA.
The work was part of In Words, In Bones, a group show considering how histories are inherited. Like Lukács in Boston, much of Zsuzi’s work takes a thematic starting point “absence and erasure in relation to the Communist history in Hungary and its post-communist, often nationalistic present.”
This is a concept she mediates on, more personally, in her remote collaboration with Hungarian poet Áfra János. The two created a book together, Productive Misreadings, with and about digital mistranslations while János was in Hungary and Zsuzi traveled. She’s interested in the expansive, yet contained, qualities of a book. The first part is in Hungarian and the latter in English, the two meeting together in the middle. Her book tour was canceled due to COVID-19, and she needs help getting copies to the US.
Screenshot from the virtual studio-visit, captured April 9, 2020. Shared with permission of the artist.
We talked through the book, with Zsuzi elaborating on her images and translations of János’s poems, which she did herself. The imagery is comprised of distorted, mediated, and abstracted iPhone images, drawings, and paintings. A painting from her home studio in Boston was filtered into the book’s pages (and I got to see the real thing virtually) while its cover comes from the ongoing series Fracture Analysis.
Screenshot from the virtual studio-visit, captured April 9, 2020. Shared with permission of the artist.
I see analysis as the thread that binds Zsuzi’s interdisciplinary--or transdisciplinary--work. Aesthetically, she is synthesizing images, and conceptually, compressing impressions and perception. All to understand how we got to the present moment.
In response to COVID-19, Zsuzi is virtually teaching her drawing class at Wellesley. She’s also working on some workshops with colleagues to help adjust their teaching and practices to the virtual world, based on her remote collaboration on Productive Misreadings. It’s opportunities like this, to embrace limitations, that excite Zsuzi, and makes her think that we can come out of COVID-19 and our digital stone age more equipped to expand possibilities for collaboration.
Screenshot captured from Varga-Szegedi’s new collaborative online workshops.
“I've been feeling very grateful for feeling closer to the earth,” says Zsuzi. “As the fear and hype settles down, our senses get more attuned to able to see a larger picture and interrelated connections between ourselves. I'm hopeful for these new meaningful connections even in collaboration with technology when needed.”
Learn more and help Zsuzi during COVID-19! Check out her website and quarantine workshops (including artists that are inspiring this work!). Productive Misreadings can be purchased here. And finally, see “Eastern European Art & the Age of Extremity,” a recent panel that Zsuzi took part in to learn more about the themes in her work.