For this show, the artist went overboard
The First Art Newspaper on the Net    Established in 1996 Monday, October 7, 2024


For this show, the artist went overboard
A photo by John Janca of work by Nina Katchadourian at the Catharine Clark Gallery that is part of her show “To Feel Something That Was Not of Our World.” With sculptures, drawings, videos and ingenuity, Katchadourian revisits the true-life, lost-at-sea story told in the book “Survive the Savage Sea,” that her mother read to her as a child and she re-read herself many times. Nina Katchadourian and Catharine Clark Gallery; John Janca via The New York Times.

by Jori Finkel



SAN FRANCISCO (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- When artist Nina Katchadourian was seven, in 1975, her mother read her the true-life shipwreck story of a family that survived 38 days adrift in the Pacific, near the Galapagos. The tale, Dougal Robertson’s bestseller “Survive the Savage Sea,” was full of suspense, starting when a pod of orcas destroys the hull of their sailboat and forces them onto an inflatable boat. It also held lessons in resourcefulness for a would-be artist as the Robertsons learned to survive on a tiny boat with minimal supplies — crafting a sail, spearing turtles and hooking fish — while inventing ways to stay alert during their ordeal.

Katchadourian, who grew up in Stanford, California, and spent summers with her mother’s family on a tiny “speck of an island” off Finland, said she is not much of a sailor. Still, she reread the book nearly every year and later read the expanded, more colorful version by Dougal’s son Douglas. She visited a maritime museum in Cornwall to see the family’s 9 1/2-foot dinghy. She watched a maudlin movie about the events starring Robert Urich and Ali MacGraw. And this past summer, the pandemic gave her the impetus and time to create her own version of the story: an art project made over a 38-day stretch to mirror the Robertsons’ journey — over the same period — in 1972. The show, “To Feel Something That Was Not of Our World,” fills the Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco, through Feb. 20.

During that time, she created sculptures, paintings, videos, audio tracks and a series of rhythmic sketches of ocean waves “trying to understand the sea and how it changes,” the artist said by phone. “It was a bit like a daily journal; a repetitive drawing of the sea surface starts to feel a lot like writing on the page.”

She was speaking from San Francisco, her first trip from her current home in Berlin since the pandemic started. “The Robertson story bears some resemblance to how we’ve all been living this year, isolated from each other in our own little shipwrecks,” she said. “But it’s also about the incredible invention, resourcefulness and creativity they bring to their predicament. They have an optimism I find striking; they just keep at it. That for me has had a lot of traction artistically. What can I do with almost nothing? What can I do when art seems almost impossible?”

Katchadourian is known for quirky ingenuity. In her popular series “Seat Assignment,” she created art on airplanes out of objects at hand, including bathroom selfies in which she dressed like a Flemish portrait sitter, fashioning toilet seat covers into austere dress collars.

Her new exhibition includes mementos like the bottle of turtle oil (here, sunflower oil) that Lyn Robertson, Dougal’s wife, put to great use on board, as well as an array of sea creatures. A 22-foot-long, to-scale paper orca covers one wall, while wire sculptures of the dorados that provided the family with some food and water (horribly dehydrated, they sucked the eyeballs) hang from the ceiling. A painted outline of the dinghy on the gallery floor underscores how painfully cramped it would have been.

Early on, she reached out to Douglas Robertson, who was 18 at the time of the shipwreck, to see if he’d be willing to speak with her a few times about his experience. (There were six on board, including his younger twin brothers and a college graduate accompanying the family; all survived.)




Now 66 and an accountant in London after a career in the Merchant Navy, Robertson offered to speak with her each of the 38 days. “I nearly fell out of my chair with happiness,” she said, recalling it as her dream structure for the project.

Reached in London by phone, Robertson explained that his motivation was actually practical; short calls would fit his schedule better than a few marathoners. “But we ended up with 38 very long conversations,” he said, laughing. “She asked very good questions I haven’t been asked before.”

In the audio clips, now online, the artist asks where they got the wood for their spear (a boat seat) or who drank the turtle blood first (Dougal). Later, she wonders how they resisted drinking seawater. (Calling it “brine” helped, he said.) But by the end they sound more like old friends, laughing and crying together while Robertson read passages from his own book.

“The challenge of this show was that I was an odd combination of journalist, archivist, anthropologist, historian, museum curator, biographer and fact-checker — with 'artist' being the umbrella term that allows you to do all of these things,” she said. “I’m not bound to the same final destination as a journalist or historian would be, but there is a sort of ethics to this project for me.”

Veronica Roberts, a curator at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, who organized Katchadourian’s 2017 show “Curiouser,” pointed out that “being curious is her job as an artist. I love the way she follows these irrational ideas rather rationally, all the way to the end.”

One result is that Katchadourian went overboard researching details. After she made the paper orca, she mailed it to Robertson for his input. “It made me shiver when I opened it — that exact color gray, just forward of the dorsal fin, is what hit our boat,” he said. She consulted biologists to deduce the species of turtle the family ate (olive ridleys or hawksbills). He said she was the first person to figure out they were rescued July 22 and not July 23.

Some of Katchadourian’s other projects, like “Seat Assignment,” are ongoing, and she doesn’t think this one is finished, either. She’s still trying to track down the high school students in Miramar, Florida, who made the dinghy as a school project before it was sold to the Robertsons. And she’s also trying to locate photographs of the Toka Maru, the Japanese fishing boat that rescued the family. She is determined to show the project again in London in 2022, the 50th anniversary of the shipwreck, “so the Robertsons can come and see it.”

© 2021 The New York Times Company










Today's News

February 7, 2021

Facing deficit, Met considers selling art to help pay the bills

Photography in the raw

A natural work of art may be hiding among Indian cave masterpieces

It's not every day we get a new blue

Exhibition of four monumental new paintings by Anselm Kiefer opens at Gagosian

Rarely seen artworks reveal untold stories in new exhibition

Works from the collection of Allen & Beryl Freer to be offered at auction

For this show, the artist went overboard

Fashion mogul Peter Nygard denied bail by Canadian judge

HBO's Black Art: In The Absence of Light debuts February 9

David Nolan Gallery presents a selection of new paintings, sculptures and works on paper by Jonathan Meese

The Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU presents exhibition on the work of Will Eisner

The Drawing Center opens the first museum exhibition dedicated to David Hammons's pivotal early works on paper

'Joseph Rodríguez: LAPD 1994': New book and online exhibition by the Bronx Documentary Center

Simon Patterson's exhibition 'Head to Toe' opens at Serlachius Museums in Finland

'Picasso. Figures' from Musée Picasso-Paris makes sole U.S. appearance in 2021 at Frist Art Museum

Christopher Plummer's robust final act crowned a noble career

Stevens Auction Company to offer items from three major southeastern estates

First solo museum exhibition for Chris Schanck, Detroit-based designer & Dallas native

Curated kitsch collection to be offered at Benefit Shop Foundation

"Lewis Hine, Child Labor Investigator" opens at The Dorsky Museum

World's first million-dollar Michael Jordan card drives Heritage Auctions' Modern Sports Cards event

'Mastery and transgression' in music that bridges genres

Pierre Guyotat's visual oeuvre to be donated to the Centre Pompidou

5 Tips for cleaning RV with vacuum




Museums, Exhibits, Artists, Milestones, Digital Art, Architecture, Photography,
Photographers, Special Photos, Special Reports, Featured Stories, Auctions, Art Fairs,
Anecdotes, Art Quiz, Education, Mythology, 3D Images, Last Week, .

 



Founder:
Ignacio Villarreal
(1941 - 2019)
Editor & Publisher: Jose Villarreal
Art Director: Juan José Sepúlveda Ramírez
Writer: Ofelia Zurbia Betancourt

Attorneys
Truck Accident Attorneys
Accident Attorneys
Holistic Dentist
Abogado de accidentes

Royalville Communications, Inc
produces:

ignaciovillarreal.org juncodelavega.com facundocabral-elfinal.org
Founder's Site. Hommage
to a Mexican poet.
Hommage
       

The First Art Newspaper on the Net. The Best Versions Of Ave Maria Song Junco de la Vega Site Ignacio Villarreal Site Parroquia Natividad del Señor
Tell a Friend
Dear User, please complete the form below in order to recommend the Artdaily newsletter to someone you know.
Please complete all fields marked *.
Sending Mail
Sending Successful