Thoughts become words, words become images.
Opening Thursday Sept 12th, 6 – 9pm. RSVP at rsvp@hvw8.com
A group show curated by Anaïs Ngbanzo at HVW8 gallery, Los Angeles. Literature in itself is an art form; carefully chosen words paint visuals upon a page for the theater of the mind. This has often inspired other, more visually oriented artists to create works based upon these mental images.
Thoughts become words, words become images is an exhibition which illuminates the interplay between literature and visual art.
Held at HVW8 gallery, this group show is bringing together established artists Dev Hynes and Gia Coppola, as well as up-and-coming talents: musician Kelsey Lu, photographers Amanda Charchian and Lily Gavin, and the painter Cassi Namoda.
The show will feature photographs, paintings and short films. All of the pieces revolve around books. The works, some commissioned especially for the project, plunge into the themes of identity, desire and self-love issues explored in Joseph Conrad’s 1915 novel Victory, Patrick Süskind’s 1985 masterpiece Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, and Essex Hemphill’s poetry. The artist Kelsey Lu will pay homage to modern poetry by using a particular kind of prose employing discontinuous and broken forms.
Stressing the freedom of a multiplicity of voices and viewpoints, each artist had carte blanche to choose a book to develop a story. The selected writers might be from Germany, Poland, or America, but they all have something in common: they evoke our common humanity in narratives with which we can identify, even though their lives may be remote from our own. They negotiate the freedom of interpretation which lead us today to these pieces of art.
ARTISTS
DEV HYNES, musician
Multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and director Dev Hynes is in countless ways what could be called “a true artist.” Far from the false reality we seem to live in right now in which everything is manufactured, Hynes’ work is honest and captivating. Critical or loving, up or down, Hynes is concerned with staying true to himself.
Often vulnerable, there is a streak of sorrow in almost everything he writes. In the past years the musician has shared his intimate exploration of life as a black man in America, bringing up the ambiguity and complexity of the modern man and the “unspoken sadness” of black depression. In his mid-twenties Hynes discovered the late poet Essex Hemphill, something he cites as a turning point for him and whose poetry he considers a continued inspiration. It was during the time that Hynes was reading Hemphill’s book “Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry” that he started working on the “Hope“ video. Hynes will be screening
four distinct video channels, all of which make up a new and special editing of his self-
directed “Hope” video.
Inspired by Essex Hemphill’s Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry, directed by Dev Hynes
Special video installation of Dev Hynes “Hope” video (self-directed).
New editing of four distinct video channels played simultaneously
GIA COPPOLA, director and photographer
Inspired by Joseph Conrad’s Victory, photographed by Gia Coppola
Portrait of Maya Hawke, The Hamptons, 2018
31,4 x 31,4 in
AMANDA CHARCHIAN, photographer
The photographer Amanda Charchian creates work with a feminine sensuality that celebrates the erotically charged. Disrobing her subjects, she captures the intimacy and the connection between herself and the women she photographs, translating the rush, the adrenaline and the subtlety of the moment. In 2016, only few years after graduating from Otis College of Art and Design, Charchian released her first monograph, Pheromone Hotbox. Captured all around the world, the photographs explore the woman’s body.
Charchian explained “I have been preoccupied by the idea of pheromones and the emissions of our bodies as extrasensory devices of communication: clothes distract from that. I am interested in photographing the part of a person that cannot be expressed solely with speech or a look from the eye.” The prints presented during the show explore Süskind’s languorous catalogue of scents. “Reading Patrick Suskind’s words brought so much revelatory description to an otherwise unseen world of desire. The intangibility of scent and the carnal feelings it arouses in us as humans inspires me immensely. Painting shapes on photographs alludes to the lingering forms in the ether.”
Inspired by Patrick Süskind’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, photographed By Amanda Charchian
KELSEY LU, musician
Kelsey Lu was born in Charlotte, North Carolina; a white dove flying over troubled waters. Her earliest memories consisted of a combination of art, nature, music, the computer graphics art dark room of the local news channel. Lu’s mother would bring her in to work because she didn’t trust babysitters, and the family was part of a religious practice that kept kids sheltered from most things they might usually be influenced by while growing up in America. Lu found comfort in nature. Later, when forging her own path outside of the cult of her childhood, she found healing within the language of poetry and turning poetry to songs. She performs worldwide in a mostly musical format.
At times when she’s alone at her home studio in Los Angeles she feels like a world famous pianist performing to an audience, although cello is her main squeeze. Lu feels in tune with the complexities of her many past lives. She strives to unite individuals in a much tighter expression of group consciousness by way of Empathy and Love.
Man’s Best Friend, Poetry-film written and directed by Kelsey Lu
Stills from Kelsey Lu’s ‘Man Best Friend’ poetry-film, 2019
CASSI NAMODA, painter
Born in Maputo to a Mozambican mother and American father, Cassi Namoda’s painting practice has deep roots in literature. Most of her figures come from pieces that she has read. Namoda paintings pay homage to Mozambique, through representation of characters confronted with the daily nuances of postcolonial life. She recently read Transforming Mozambique: The Politics of Privatization, 1975–2000 by M. Anne Pitcher while she was doing research about tea plantations in Gurue where her grandfather once worked. After this recent literary exploration, Namoda reimagined two characters: Borges and Jalan.
A recurring figure that Namoda names Maria appears repeatedly across the works. Maria is gentle, saintly, yet simultaneously melancholic and maligned. Her many scenes of triumph, peril, compromise and heartbreak show the wide range of emotion Namoda brings to her work. She states “The painting Maria pends by the bar is a more a solemn painting that has a gesture of absurdity and surrealism. The atmosphere of the bar is familiar and Maria is a metaphor that I’ve continued to explore.”
Inspired by M.Anne Pitcher’s Transforming Mozambique: The Politics of Privatization, 1975-2000
painted by Cassi Namoda
Maria Borges of Goa, 2019 Jalan, a tea estate, 2019
Acrylic on canvas, 12×16 in. Acrylic on canvas,12×16 in.
Inspired by Russell G. Hamilton’s Voices From an Empire: A History of Afro-Portuguese Literature,
painted by Cassi Namoda
Maria emotionally listens to Cesaria Evora « Saudades » as she pends by the bar, 2019
Acrylic on canvas, 40×30 in.
LILY GAVIN, photographer
Photographer, director, writer and now actress, Lily Gavin is a multidisciplinary artist, born and raised in New York. She recently starred in Grear Patterson’s U.S. coming-of-age movie Giants Being Lonely, which had its world premiere in the Horizons strand of the Venice Film Festival this summer. Right after graduating from Bard College, Gavin was invited as a still photographer on the set of At Eternity’s Gate, Julian Schnabel’s biographical drama about Vincent Van Gogh. Following this experience, Gavin put on a solo exhibition “Lily Gavin: A Story with Vincent” at the LUMA Foundation in Arles as part of the Rencontres d’Arles, the international summer photo festival. While in Mexico this year, Gavin took the time to work on a personal project. She explains: “This is a series of paintings I have been making and I have been documenting the process of making them— almost thinking that I will never show the actual paintings because they are more about who I was at the time of making them”. This idea of photographing paintings and experiencing photographs as truths reminds Gavin what the late John Berger shared in Ways of Seeing: “Because of the camera, the painting now travels to the spectator rather than the spectator to the painting. In its travels, its meaning is diversified” The artist states : “In losing the uniqueness of the object, we gain the mystery of the image.”
Inspired by John berger’s ways of seeing, photographed by Lily Gavin
Portrait, Troncones, 2019 Landscape, Troncones, 2019
Silver Gelatin Print, Ed. 1/5 Silver Gelatin Print, Ed. 1/5
68 x 54 in. 68 x 54 in.
The Curator
Born in 1989 in Paris, Anaïs Ngbanzo recalls developing interest in literature at a very early age and later on, in photography. After graduating from the European Communication School in Paris, she started a career as an Image director in fashion.
Ngbanzo soon noticed that instead of doing visual research for a photo series, she would translate the intricacies of literary characters into photography and films. The idea for this art show began as a way to celebrate literature within a different format than the old fashioned book club, and furthermore to fight the long, steady decline of reading. This show examines how writers move artists. Some books seem like a key to unfamiliar rooms in one’s own castle. Born out of concern for the future of reading while we stand at the breaking point of social media, she wanted to find a way to keep literature a vital part of the culture. Making the connection in this show between a new generation of artists and masters of literature highlights how great writers can still be relevant after many decades. Yet, they need different mediums to keep them alive as well as new ways of interacting to seek mass appeal.
Invite artwork by Olga Prader
