Aneta Grzeszykowska & Catalina Ouyang in Conversation

On the occasion of Art Basel Miami Beach 2023, Lyles & King is pleased to exhibit a two-artist presentation with Aneta Grzeszykowska and Catalina Ouyang.

In their conversation, Grzeszykowska and Ouyang discuss conceptual and material overlaps within their practices. Their rich, intellectual dialogue touches upon ideas of tenderness, eroticism, control/agency, and destruction as generative forces in their art-making.

Aneta Grzeszykowska: The multiformity, fluidity, and specific polymorphism of your sculptures evoke the figure of the cyborg woman described by Donna Haraway. Do you identify with this interpretation of your work? Are the hybrids you create a vision of loss or rather of freedom?

Catalina Ouyang: I arrived at the hybrid out of my love for the liminal beings of myth and the transformations that occur within those stories. These stories of mutability seemed to be instigated by crisis and alterity, which have been two ever-present conditions in my formative experiences.

In terms of fluidity and a non-hierarchical handling of material, I am interested in how Haraway’s contemporaries working in New Materialism think about time, multiplicity, and simultaneity. I seek out different ways of refusing the index and rational or "universal" truth, but I am not a posthumanist. If anything, my work is very anthropocentric. I have unfinished business with humanity. I pursue contradiction because artmaking is the primary outlet for my death drive. In occupying my body and mind in the space where, in Karen Barad’s words, “time is out of joint,” I exhaust myself before I can implode.

CO: To turn that question back to you, Aneta, are you thinking about Haraway? Your use of avatars, while more primordial in sensibility, formally reminds me of Lynn Hershmann Leeson's Breathing Machines from the 1960s. Is this something to you? What kind of agency is generated by, or conferred upon, the proxy of yourself?

AG: The representation of the body as an object/avatar has been analyzed in my work, for example in the Mama series, shown at the main exhibition of the 59th Venice Biennale. In this series, my daughter interacted with a silicone object that was actually her mother's double, i.e. mine. In Mama, the doll becomes a mirror reflecting the viewer's emotions.

Using a double allowed me to observe my relationship with my daughter from the outside. Through my work, I often break the perception of my own existence from the formal limitations of the body. I look at my identity through a prism of other people’s experiences, as I try to break away from subjective perception.

AG: I would like to mention the works of Alina Szapocznikow, titled Photosculptures (1971), which are chewing gum sculptures formed by the artist's teeth. Teeth are the physiological and conceptual tools that shaped her objects, like in my series Selfie with a Dog. Do you also have an artist with whose concepts you identify with or relate to? Who are they?

CO: Lately, the writing and films of Marguerite Duras: she muddles first- and third-person, present and past tense in ways that embody the unruliness of memory and subjectivity. In my recent sculptural works, I materialize misremembered forms: a stuffed animal, a gesture, a posture, a lost garment, a lover's freckled skin, a sensation from a dream that escapes you but leaves you unsettled. I am chasing what is tactile and sensory in the region between impossibility and the doomed attempt at recall. Abstracted volumes are constituted of the sheetrock and wire mesh used to build the suburban homes I grew up in. Acrylic gel captures the phantom of a digital image and adheres it onto an unstable surface. Duras starts from the "I" and flings the pronoun into a void; she fixates on a single moment and writes in concentric circles around it until the subject disintegrates completely. In both our work, revisitation both creates and destroys.

CO: Selfie with a Dog is a departure from the conditions of control in your earlier work. This series  has a markedly different approach in terms of what is seen, what is concealed, and who has agency. There is great generosity and, daresay, gentleness in inviting risk and accident, as in the process of making Selfie with a Dog. What for you is at risk? And what is protected?  

AG: In 2014, in a series of photos titled Selfie, I photographed naturalistic sculptures I made, depicting fragments of the human body prepared from animal remains. Exhibiting photographs of sculptures instead of their physical forms comes from my desire to take control over their representation. In 2022, I returned to the subject in my series Domestic Animals which recycles the masks. These images show my two dogs wearing the now dried masks. While working, I noticed that my dogs started biting and licking the objects. At first I was concerned about this, but then I realized the enormous interpretative potential. So in 2023, I made “fresh” copies of these objects and fed them to the dogs.

In Selfie with Dog, the dogs are the performers and took complete control. The gradual disappearance of objects emphasizes their fragility and impermanence, evoking a certain existential anxiety. Paradoxically, I have the impression that by giving up control, I am entering another level of control. At the same time, the dogs’ innate desire to eat objects becomes a proposition that, when controlled and conceptualized, turns into an artistic creation. 

AG: In Selfie with a Dog, a body is simply a dead body and can be literally, not figuratively, eaten. Animal remains cease to resemble a human body and begin to be simply meat. Meat, being dehumanized, no longer arouses empathy. What is the function of using real remains (in the form of hair, bones, skulls) in your works?

CO: The consumption of the dead, decorated body makes me think about funerary practices involving consumption of the corpse. These are honorable rituals. I don't find a dead or discarded thing to be dehumanized. I engage with morbidity and the so-called abject, in fact, out of inexhaustible optimism: because I have faith that it amounts to something, be it renewal, retrieval, or transcendence. When I feel blocked, I return to the sculptures and ex-votos of houses of worship, for the profound love they evince in their transformation of humble materials such as softwood, wax, papier mache, and animal parts.

My work is invested in social space, and there is plenty to be cynical about in considering the built environment and attendant historical discourse. I am not free of cynicism or anger, but more and more I find grace in equivocation itself. Bones are the architecture of the body; hair, skin, and clothing form the planes along which the body interfaces with its environment. How do I metabolize or represent these materials in a way that goes beyond offering a mirror to grievance? I have been paring back formal and material elements of my work and trying to ascertain something essential. I do not have identifying language for this “something” yet, but I know how it feels: tended, textured, unbearably light, open-ended, alternately shrinking and billowing.

CO: I love the image of the series where it looks like the dog and Selfie sculpture are kissing. I am interested in spaces where tenderness, eroticism, and destruction coincide. As a mother who lives with dogs, your daily reality involves caretaking. How has this informed the stakes of your practice?  

AG: In my opinion, the private territory is sufficient to analyze the complex psychological processes taking place across nearly all kinds of relationship dynamics. The process of care often creates a zone in which tenderness intertwines with violence.  In an earlier series, Mama, I reversed the traditional roles between child and mother, deconstructing the established pattern of parental domination.

In Selfie with Dog, eating becomes violent and surprising and begins to intertwine brutality with  tenderness - the sight of a dog leaning over a person's face was suspended somewhere between these extremely opposite emotions. Also the figure of a feeder artist created here, allowing herself to be devoured by her own dogs, metaphorically cannibalizing her own art, brings to mind the aforementioned caring activities.