Celebrating Potential of Beauty and Calm in Imperfection
A collection of visual work, In Honor of Imperfection, by Zoey Hart will be exhibited at Artificial Retirement. Inspired by the Japanese Zen Buddhism wabi-sabi and her own chronic illness, the work celebrates the potential to find beauty and calm in the incongruities and imperfections of our bodies, spaces, and lives.
Hart is a Brooklyn-based artist living with chronic autoimmunity. Her interest in imperfection and malfunction is rooted in both her body and her physical environment. The intervention of technology in her life is constant scanning process such as sonograms and CT scans, and yet this illness still remains as mysterious. She uses those scanned images to create mixed media collage and textile-based work incorporating artifacts of urban decay such as rust, chipping paint, and broken bricks. I interviewed Hart to let the readers know more about her background and her work process.
** Hart will run her workshop In Honor of Imperfection: Cultivating mindfulness through creative practice on August 28th as a part of Artificial Retirement. If you would like to create artworks together with Hart, please RSVP here. **
When and how did you start making art? Was ‘imperfection’ always your inspiration to create art?
I was always fortunate to have art in my family. My grandfather was a working artist into his late eighties, and was a particular source of inspiration as his own health was compromised. I vaguely remember him using his own gallstones once in a painting when I was a kid. Not surprisingly, I found the situation to be more fascinating than morbid.
After a swift departure from undergraduate large-scale oil-painting classes, I traveled back and forth to Northern Thailand for several years to study cross-cultural emotional expression in art for my MA. Through these travels my own creative practice settled into its current strange and morbid shape. I believe that one’s art transcends far beyond what she shows on a page or screen, crossing over into how she lives, breathes and experiences life day to day. Aside from my own medical imperfections, the chronic imperfections built into the norms of daily life can be just as creatively fruitful given the right circumstances.
Would you like to share your personal experience of autoimmunity with the readers?
The past few years have been a diagnostic circus which has limited my traveling. I wish there were a simple answer to the diagnostic question. What the medical community have settled on is that I am one of those autoimmune anomalies that has symptoms of many conditions, cousin to Lupus and a next door neighbor to Lyme Disease. Mysterious inflammation throughout different systems has made imaging tests necessary. Day to day I have to contend with severe muscle pain throughout my body challenging my movement, and serious allergic reactions to random nonsense like heat.
A huge part of my creative practice has always been centered around collecting. Through my travels, I’ve been known to take large suitcases full of medication away with me, and to return with the same cases full of rocks, moss and other tangible and intangible artifacts to use in my work.
Can you tell me more about your future residency in Japan?
Last year I was invited to Studio Kura, outside the quiet city of Fukuoka, Japan for a studio residency to research and design an art workshop series for cross-cultural youth around the concept of wabi sabi (an aesthetic and philosophical element of Japanese Buddhism which highlights the beauty of nature’s imperfections). My larger plan is to continue to develop a wabi sabi art workshop for communities adults and youth in NYC, which will address mindful creativity plus meditative art making as vehicles to deescalate obsessive perfectionism and premature stress.
Through the series of work I’m creating for this exhibition, and my preparation for mindful creativity workshop coming up in a few weeks, wabi sabi is back on my radar. To be able to learn more about this art and philosophy from its own geographic and cultural roots seems like an essential next step for my work as an artist, educator and evolving human being. If you would like to learn more about this and/or make a small kind donation to the project, please visit: www.gofundme.com/sfcwabisabi
** Hart will run her workshop In Honor of Imperfection: Cultivating mindfulness through creative practice on August 28th as a part of Artificial Retirement. If you would like to create artworks together with Hart, please RSVP here. **
Artificial Retirement opens August 19th at Flux Factory with an opening reception at 6pm. Performances by Byron Rich and Heather Brand, Niki Passath, and Fan Letters start at 7pm. AR is a Flux Factory major exhibition.
