Tongues Love

This pair consists of a musician, and an artist working in digital collage.

Instead of creating one piece that combines the two art forms, Bartels and Kane decided to send each other an original piece in their preferred medium. The resulting pieces are responses to the work they received, developed in their own artistic language. Kane sent Bartels the collage below, and the musician responded with Heart On A Tray.

Here’s what Kane had to say about the composition that inspired her collage:

“I think the first thing that surprised me was that she had managed to find some inkling of sentimentality in a piece which I had created with the belief that it was [static], and above all, clinical.

I think she pulls that off by suggesting through her piece that the objects on the tray react to observation.

In my conception of the collage, they’re dead. What she described as a heart is a cow’s tongue digitally pinned to somewhat low-res image of a dissection tray, and she refutes this by taking on the voice of the tongue/heart and imbuing it with agency through that act.

In her song: ‘There’s you, there’s me, and here’s my heart. We’re looking at it and we’re talking about it because we both act upon it and there’s something we need to work out.’ Whereas in my idea of the collage as I made it ‘There is an object. It was once alive and we probably killed it and we believe there is something to be learned from it, but this curiosity’s purpose is ill-defined and often masturbatory. This observation requires control over the object, so we pinned it to be extra sure’

While Kane sent Bartels the collage to respond to in their first correspondence, Bartels sent a song for Kane to respond to. Below is the resulting collage and composition.

Tzara Kane

Kane is currently a student SUNY Purchase.

Léna Bartels

Bartels is musician and visual artist based in Brooklyn, NY.