IRENA KECKES

 

ARTIST STATEMENT | IRENA KECKES

 

 

Living and working in diverse artistic and scholarly environments in Europe, Japan, USA, New Zealand and, more recently, Guam has shaped my approach to art making and thinking. My main artistic practice is printmaking. I employ both Eastern and Western print methods, placing an equal importance on concepts and technologies. My art research has been informed by ecologically-responsive and expanded forms of contemporary print, and as well aspects of phenomenology, deep ecology, and Buddhist practice and philosophy. While using one of the oldest printmaking methods my practice has moved towards what may be called an extended field of print; my large-scale woodcuts are often placed alongside the three-dimensional objects – carved wooden plates. Merging intellectual and physical acts of making, exploring embodied ways of knowing, and mind-body interrelations have been key components of my artistic query.

 

My PhD study, completed in 2015, investigated forms of contemporary printmaking, its relationships with aspects of Buddhism, and more. It explored if and how a Buddhist notion of interconnectedness may inform ecologically mindful printmaking. Likewise, the cycle of my latest works titled “Black Prints” have been exploring the process of carving as a meditative practice, while using one of the oldest printmaking methods. In creating these prints, an equal importance has been placed on concepts, on technologies and on blending art with craft, and body with mind.

 

 

Irena Keckes, Auckland, February 2015

 

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INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION OF CONTEMPORARY PRINT UOG 2016

ISLA CENTER FOR THE ARTS, AUGUST 25 - OCTOBER 14, 2016

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How to make visible the various forms of print that are at the core of contemporary artistic practice?[1], a question that undeniably fascinates many print media artists today, has also inspired the realization of the International Exhibition Of Contemporary Printmaking UOG 2016. The tendency of this Isla Center for the Arts’ first, by-invitation only, international graphic arts project is to promote an interchange of multiple print practices and create a discourse around contemporary printmaking.

 

The international survey of contemporary printmaking in Isla has gathered outstanding artworks, demonstrating that there are incessantly other and different ways of creating and seeing art. Twenty-four artists in this exhibition actively present their work worldwide, through which best of printmaking becomes visible to the wider audiences. Engaging and challenging, their artwork voices ever-traversing dialogues of printmaking and its processes of delivery that are often subject to endless transformations. Such holistic approach to the practice materializes print through experimenting, taking risks, making mistakes, and discovering.

Reconciling traditions with advanced techniques developed through processes of image making, this exhibition invites audiences to explore if and how print practices have been revolutionized through research, technologies, diverse communities and more. The aim is to perceive printmaking praxis beyond its traditional meanings, and ponder it as a field of visual and conceptual inquiry, as a pervasive and transformative force in art today.

 

Artworks in this show encompass a range of themes and techniques including relief, intaglio, screen-print, lithography, monotype, digital and experimental print methods. Its out of the frame display reveal surfaces, textures and tangible qualities of art on paper, often valuable to printmakers.

 

[1] Sabine Trieloff, “Interview with conceptual artist Luis Camnitzer,” Daros Exhibitions, 2010, Zürich, Switzerland, accessed June 5, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOp9CcuQXo8. Luis Camnitzer (b.1937) is a German-born Uruguayan artist and writer who moved to New York in 1964. He was at the vanguard of 1960s Conceptualism, working primarily in printmaking, sculpture, and installations. Camnitzer’s artwork explores subjects such as social injustice, repression, and institutional critique. His humorous, biting, and often politically charged use of language as art medium has distinguished his practice for over four decades. Accessed, August 11, 2016, http://www.alexandergray.com/artists/luis-camnitzer

 

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Irena Keckes

Assistant Professor of Art, University of Guam

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Dialogues & Evocations: Irena Keckes / Nim Flora Chan

Foreword by Amy Weng

 

Wood pulp, pigment, carbon, wax, oil, resin, water, soot... At a material level these components tell us much about the nature of ink painting and print making. They provide an alchemical formula for a work of art, but like more scientific principles of atoms and nuclei fail to account for an increase in mass.

 

Dialogues and Evocations is a collaborative exhibition between Irena Keckes and Nim Flora Chan, exploring the potential of the monochrome to negotiate divergent states of being.  A printmaker and painter respectively, neither is bound by any single doctrine, Eastern or Western, nor do they emphatically state a material position over a metaphysical one. Instead both artists tease out questions about the nature of art making and the role of art in global exchange. Positioned within the grounds of Fo Guang Shan Temple, the reductive qualities of both artists’ works recall a Buddhist mantra – its enunciation has the acoustics of a descending register:  soot, water, carbon, pigment, pulp...

 

In Keckes’ practice we see the synthesis of Buddhist thought with phenomenological and ecological concerns: mind with body with nature with universe. Yet the gesture of cutting is vigorous, reinforcing a sense of purpose through repeated action. The body of the artist is made implicit in every mark, so the work becomes an impression, a trace of the physical act of making. Her interest in ecological methods is not just a means of self-preservation but of stating a commitment to consequential practice. Keckes’ work suggests both the microcosm and macrocosm, a sense of ordering through repeated action. Grooves play across the surface of her works, condensing in continents, reefs and floes.

 

This tectonic quality is amplified in relation to Chan’s work. The logic of the scroll conceals an internal secret, yet its deployment in space reveals a lineage drawn through the history of traditional Chinese ink painting. Chan’s paintings seek to evoke the landscape through their unfolding in space. Exploring the expanded field of painting, Chan sets up spatial markers, composing through swoops, pauses and crescendos. The static quality of painting becomes charged with movement. Chan’s paintings evoke a dynamic sense of the world that is also deeply embedded within Zen practices. In both Keckes and Chan a strong performative and embodied notion emerges, an acting out and an absence. If both artists’ works can be seen as a kind of journey through a landscape, this exhibition yet conceives of a different politics of vision.

 

In 2009 Nicholas Bourriard proposed an idea of the altermodern as giving a radical position for artists and (non-Western) cultures who agitate for more equitable modes of global exchange.[1] What was also significant was the supposed fluidity with which artists could move between cultures, borrowing and re-contextualizing practices. Rather than reducing their works to isolated points on a rhetorical map, both artists in this exhibition recognize the overlaps in various discourses and philosophies. These moments of overlap produce a build up of live connections, adding to the substance of accrued meaning.

 

Georges Didi-Huberman identified the imprint as a “dialectic image” indicative of both touch and loss.[2]  Negotiating the tension between its material and symbolic efficacy, Keckes and Chan occupy a liminal space – between gesture and stillness, history and present, body and mind. Dialogues and Evocations extends the possibility that the monochrome is never just black and white.

 

[1] Marcus Verhagen, “The Nomad and the Altermodern,” Third Text 26, no. 6 (2009): 804.

[2] Mary Ann Doane, “Indexicality: Trace and Sign: Introduction,” Difference 18, no. 1 (2007): 5.

 

Amy Weng, Auckland New Zealand, 2015

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Professor Manying Ip speech in occasion of the Dialogues & Evocations: Irena Keckes/Nim Flora Chan exhibition opening in Fo Guang Shan Buddhist Temple, Auckand, New Zealand

 

Abbess Man Shin, Venerable Jue Hou, ladies and gentlemen, honoured guests of Irena and Flora,

We are gathered here this afternoon to celebrate the opening of the collaborative exhibition "Dialogues & Evocations" by two artists: Irena Keckes and Nim Flora Chan. How delightful it is that we can do this in such an idyllic venue - the Fo Guang Shan Temple art gallery.

 

Both Irena and Flora have been trained at the Elam School of Fine Arts. There's a saying that artists are born, not made. However, I'd suggest that the artists' development in a nurturing environment is important, an environment which gives them ‘room to play’. The artists are the product of a happy mix of East and West. Both Irena and Flora have their roots from beyond New Zealand, and they have been encouraged/challenged to express their innermost musings in an artistic way, using very different medium and different tools (carving knife, woodblock, brushes, pulp and paper).

You would see that Irena's woodcut prints, and Flora's monochrome paintings share a common feature. To me, their art work could be labelled ‘minimalist’ in the Western tradition. In Chinese painting, we talk about Liu Bai - leaving it white. What is left white instead of what is painted/depicted is considered the most potent part of the painting. In Zen Buddhism, their works evoke Xu (虛) and Wu (無). Variously, and inadequately translated as 'emptiness' and ‘nothingness’, the terms might suggest that their art is so abstract that they might as well be blank. More accurately, Xu and Wu mean abstractness and simplicity. The uncluttered art work gives rise to the potent power of suggestion, leaving many possibilities to unfold. How does the art work speak to the viewer?...all messages should be personal, depending on the experience of the viewer...and all different.

 

Art is solo work. I was struck by how meditative it has been for Irena and Flora. Art work is the solid expression of the dynamic and fluid psych of the artists. Genuine art work captures the significant moment when the artist is moved/inspired to express in her chosen medium a powerful message, whatever it is. Yet art work is never static, it expresses alternative conceptions of changing rhythms and suggests shifting nuances.

 

Flora asked me to speak about the merging power of community and art. Both artists have moved between cultures. I would like to think of Irena and Flora as trailblazers in the New Zealand multicultural art scene, their works recognized as expressions of artists who have enriched New Zealand’s cultural landscape with elements of their own heritage and culture. So called 'Asian identity' should not be seen just in the form of gilded flying dragons or ashen-white geisha girl masks, but in genuine, personal and truly self-expressive works which all of us will soon see. In Zen, one famous koan asks: ‘What is the sound of one hand clapping?’ The Master's answer is: 'a thunderous silence’. Later on, when we go through the artworks of Irena and Flora in the gallery, we shall hear, with our minds, much of this thunderous silence.

 

Manying Ip,  Professor Emeritus, University of Auckland 2015

 

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IMPRINT

Winter 2012, Volume 47, Number 2 (Page 51)

 

Negotiating the rapture of process and materials: Irena Keckes In Auckland

by Steve Lovett

 

An interesting PhD show here in Auckland features prints created using the Japanese method of water-based woodcut printing. These large-format prints take the form of a three-dimensional installation. This installation, at the University of Auckland Elam School of Fine Arts Project Space, invites the viewer to become immersed in a meditative contemplation of surface, evoked by the interplay of materials and process. As the artist Irena Keckes notes, the repetition – ‘not as a stereotyped or an automatic within processes of making prints’. Think of the performance of print (and other art-making processes) as a method of accessing and almost spiritual state as the artist works in the studio.

 

The scale of the prints equals that of our own body. We are invited to move through the exhibition space to become embodied, that is, a part of the work. Keckes’ work invokes Professor Paul Coldwell’s notion of the print installation as a contemporary print folio. Coldwell suggests this operates as a conceptual proposition of variation, sequencing and seriality. We have the opportunity to understand Keckes’ work as a sequence of related ideas that operate physically and optically as the space of the folio is negotiated. The work is rendered in a rich sequence of blacks transferred from woodblock onto papers suspended in space. The pigment shifts, sometimes tonally anchored in the architecture of the space, sometimes, more smoke-like and appearing to float in the atmosphere. Seemingly impenetrable black gradually yields more and more to the viewer.

 

Before mastering the Japanese method during an MFA course at Tokyo University of the Arts, Keckes studies and extensively practiced Western printmaking methods, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. For the future, she is interested in exploring the concept of print as an expanded field, as well as its arts-crafts connection, through creating large-scale woodblocks and experimenting with materials and modified processes.

 

References

Quotations: I Keckes in conversation with S Lovett, Auckland, NZ 08/04/2012

See the graphic Unconscious, Philographica 2010

Negotiating rapture MCA Chicago 1996, thinking Print MoMA 1995

Prof P Coldwell, ‘Just what is it that makes and artist’s folio so special, so appealing, so important?’ Keynote address, IMPACT 7, Melbourne, Australia, 28 September 2011.

 

Steve Lovett, artist and art educator, Auckland NZ, 2012

 

 

 

 

 

 

Energetic, intuitive and emotional!

Woodcut prints exhibiton in Vjekoslav Karas Gallery, Karlovac 7-28th November 2007, Croatia, 2007

 

The third independent presentation in Gallery Karas, of the artistic creation of Irena Keckes is a selection from five woodcut cycles created between 2002 and 2006. These conceptual-visual entities are strongly linked by the artist's personality which is characterised by spontaneous feeling and intuition. As an artist, Irena creates her carvings by transforming the outer-visual or inner-emotional experiences into a free, abstract, suggestive form.

 

The works in this exhibition, incorporated under the title Mental landscapes and Human nature (2002/2003) are abstract compositions in which the artist visualises her personal thoughts by following her intuition in combining art elements and using the expressive potential of colour. Creative work for Irena is not a flight from reality; on the contrary, it gives her an opportunity to understand the potential of human communication and the pregnancy of human relationships. Introverted, tranquil and subtle are the works collected under the title Life cycle (2004.) and made by the use of press. These works represent gradation, variation and change of tone, as well as symbolic of diverse shallow and deep cutting into the wood. The works display an accentuated, velvety softness and pearl shine that creates a total impression of deliberateness.

 

A similar atmosphere is present in the cycle titled Time (2004.) that consists of two parts: Time 1 – represented by twelve monochrome geometric forms in which Irena deals with texture and brightness gradation, and Time 2 - represented by twelve polychromous works of free abstract form that originated from the photographs taken by the artist during her stay in Japan. The abstract compositions of the cycle titled Life forms (2005/6.) are free forms on large paper. Officially, these works are part of an introduction into the latest cycle titled Inner space (2006.). The atmosphere of the cycle is pronouncedly classical due to very deliberate and harmonious composition and colour relationships. It seems that Irena's almost spasmodic bursts of energy apparent in the above mentioned creative cycles have been subdued into an overwhelming impression of creative ease and tranquillity.We believe that the works of this Tokyo educated artist from Karlovac will continue to thrill audiences with their energy, intuitiveness and feeling. 

 

Antonija Družak-Škrtić, curator at the City Museum and Gallery V. Karas, Karlovac 2007

 

 

 

 

Red Threads

Paper threads exhibition in Galerija Nova, Zagreb,Croatia, 2002

 

Irena Kečkeš returned from Japan a year ago. Besides an inspiring life experience, she brought plenty sheets of paper... Delighted by vast quantity of stunning thinner, thicker and the thickest variation of paper, as well as their firmness and quality, Irena, a graduate in graphic arts, set herself to printing. She carved some wooden plates in Japan, others were produced by an invocation of her Japanese experience. However, Irena's most valuable acquisitions from a long journey, beside a wish to return back to Japan, were magnificent red threads. Subconsciously connected to Their Majesty she let them wait. Searching for a form worthy of the cultivated nature of Japanese gardens, were in autumn red accents become philosophy, she contemplated the Beauty, which gives the Threads a meaning.

 

By interplay of imagining, hesitation, musing, doubting, dreaming and living, an invisible world of intuition grew huge and the intensity of its experience became binding. Irena fashioned the regular shape of the gallery at her disposition. Hanging threads are at some places coalescing, at other places scattering. The inner rhythm becomes visibly red. Although hanging, they are not ruled by gravity alone. Their intertwining formation is doubled by the shadows cast on the walls of the box, that is, the gallery, and also on the threads themselves. The graphite thus produced touches the space. It became dense, intimate and protective. To pass through it is like walking down a shrine. We identify ourselves whit it. We trust in it without reservation. We feel it to be true, eternal, made explicitly for us. Linear flux of time is gone without trace. By observing the ambience from a realistic space, we observe Irena’s letter to herself.Somewhat cocooned readability of the big red drawing is incredibly attractive. It invites intothe space of spirit. Into a fascinating space of meaning. By the ambience thus created, Irena exposes and lives her own imperative premonition about red as Beautiful and Magnificent. And red. She gives an insight into herself with the sense of destiny, through a permanent act of creation. Striving to reach The Ultimate Cognizance she forebodes the bounds and the boundlessness. Like an arcane red labyrinth... 

 

Antonija Družak-Škrtić, curator at the City Museum and Gallery V. Karas, Karlovac 2002

 

 

 

 

The prints of joy

The prints of Joy, exhibition of prints in Vjekoslav Karas Gallery, Croatia, 2002

 

Besides an inspiring life-experience, Irena, overflowing with impressions and an unbelievable positive energy, brought back from Japan plenty sheets of paper. Even before her work “turned Japanese” it was considered daring, but the courage by which she, during the past year, went into the depths of her intuition brought out some totally unexpected vibrations.

How else, but vibrations, are we to call Irena’s Mino Washi that “flew over the staircase” of the gallery, within the exhibition named “The generation of nineties”, or her ambient installation- a spatial drawing, up to recently exhibited in Galerija Nova, Zagreb.

 

In both cases Irena demonstrated that she wasn’t in any way limited by her printmaking thinking, just the opposite, in Japan this sensibility to the materials led her to discover Their Majesties Mino Washi and red Red Threads. A need to form came by itself, just as the awareness of possible realizations of her conceptions came by breathing Japanese air. The conception of this exhibition follows the same spirit. The prints obtained from wooden plates are placed into a free space, without walls to support the paper. They become flags of joy, kites of happiness, whirlwind of inspiration. Each print is a clear statement that the artist leaves, without holding back, to a spectator-wanderer’s experience and understanding. Irena’s main occupation is colour; a colour that is Irena’ s own, completely defined, open, uncompromisingly red. Variable and unconventional formats (two long “snakes”) and the variety of the printed paper’s characteristics (they were hand made by Irena, out of Japanese “kozo” plant fibers) are placed on one side of Irena’s playground; on the other side are the prints cut out of pear wood. Printed shapes are divided into two major groups, according to their plate-sources. The first one is connected to Irena’s linoleum prints, a technique by which she accomplished high level of expressive form even before her journey to Japan. There is a tension between the material world and the energy, which pervades its foundations; the energy surmised by the artist and put into action in the woodcuts. The tension is additionally emphasized by her deliberate intervention in the “framing” of the prints. Thus she, on some sheets, prints only a part of the intended woodcut. By segmenting a larger whole, “framing” the chosen segments and assembling them on the print- the artist manages to surprise herself. By testing the red print as a foundation the artist engages in a subtle polychromy: red on red, bluish, greenish, yellow.

 

Complexity produces a chaotic flourish, transforming the original red print, although still recognizable, into something that contradicts it. In some of the prints belonging to the first group of woodcuts there is detectable central lines of force. The lines of force very clearly provide a rectangular frame of composition. This phenomenon makes a bridge to the second group of prints in which Irena accepts the shape of square, as an element of the overall composition whose parts are in turn wholesome compositions themselves. The spectator’s schematic perception is brought to tension with what is actually submitted. The planes and lines are independent, separated from objective. The squares and what is taking place within them are put into columns and lines and thus ordered they bear witness of the secret world of which they partake.

In Japan streets have no names, when you want visit someone for the first time he or she will draw a sketch referring to some prominent local elements; space will be measured by time, a reference point will be a red window, green fence, a traffic light...By exposing her prints Irena sets remarkable and clear signpost lading to herself. She rejoices in creating. 

 

Antonija Družak-Škrtić, curator at the City Museum and Gallery V. Karas, Karlovac 2002