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The W.A.V.E.S. Project: Getting creative with waves
Two artists from the US are collaborating to reflect nature through their artwork
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Two artists from the US are collaborating to reflect nature through their artwork.Starting from Jakarta, photographer James Wilkins and artist Michael Daube will spread their fascination of nature's elusiveness
around the globe through The W.A.V.E.S. Project.
Boston-born Wilkins, a fine arts photographer, and New Yorker Daube, a sculpture, painter and passionate philanthropist, have known each other since they both attended the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, 25 years ago.
After years developing their own careers, Wilkins and Daube teamed up again, displaying 39 thoughtful pieces to show their recent exploration of aspects of the natural world, such as sound waves and wave lengths.
The W.A.V.E.S Project is an abbreviation of the values they instill in their work: World ' inclusive of all people and places; Access ' the right to an experience; Visceral ' a deep anatomical connection; Empirical ' observed, felt, experienced with no requirement of scientific method; and Symbiotic ' which is greater in combination that the separate entities alone.
'The whole concept of communication in the W.A.V.E.S Project is to move like a wave. We worked with wave patterns,' Daube told The Jakarta Post at an exhibition at Tugu Kunstkring Paleis in Jakarta, which is running until May 3.
The exhibition is part of the Singapore-based Gallery R's mission, which is to foster a consciousness and creative response to global environmental issues and other benevolent causes through fine arts inspired by nature.
'We'd love to give back to where we are, and communicate with the local community. It's interesting that it came from a thought of a boy, without any assumption, art has a healing quality,' said Daube, referring to 8-year-old Rohinish Gupta, who found a connection between portrayed nature and global warming concerns after seeing Wilkins' work on an exhibit in New York.
Wilkins created 22 pieces for the exhibition. He formed the foundation for his new works by imposing wave lengths onto an image, rendering a surrealist landscape.
These are combined with numerous other photographs, resulting in large-scale photographic artwork that makes reference to Renaissance painting.
Wilkins focused on creating a very personal style to communicate the content of identity and psychology. The pursuit led Wilkins to a solitary existence under the dark cloth, shooting large format negatives, and into the darkroom, developing film and printing under the classic red glow of the darkroom safelight.
All of these elements contributed to his signature style of a silvery moonlight illumination emerging from the sensual darkness of a photographic night.
In a photograph piece entitled Leda and the Swan, for example, the photographer displays the alluring sight of a Greek myth.
For the piece, Wilkins began a series of individual works depicting the story. In a landscape of beauty and opulence, Zeus, as the swan, is seen just having flown down from Olympus in pursuit of Leda. The sensual night scene is characterized by a signature moonlight illumination that has been developed and explored for more than 20 years.
The numerous components in the piece were individually created by painting as well as photography in preparation for inclusion of the piece onto a 183 cm x 121 cm platform.
'There are maybe 50 photos in this piece. I took each photograph individually and then I behaved like a painter,' said Wilkins.
Besides the intricate Leda, he also produced a simple photograph of a sole white tulip, which carries a moonlight effect.
The intimacy of the straight photograph of a tulip reveals the unseen nature of such a specific anatomy.
'It's a tulip in Brooklyn Botanical Garden. It's simply a straight photograph and has a strange beauty,' he said.
'I have a specific setting of exposure. I tried to get the exquisite glowing highlight of that moonlight glow, so I underexposed it and the universe around the object goes dark. The green leaves, the dark soil goes black because I've underexposed on the exquisite sublime white,' Wilkins went on.
Daube displays various forms of art that take inspiration from sound waves.
He recorded sound waves as traditional two dimensional line patterns and then converted the drawn lines of the sound waves into three dimensional sculptures.
The sculptures are abstract and yet representational, elemental and exquisite. The artists used actual sounds, like the crashing of thunder, or in other cases, the sounds of a voice speaking selected words, such as 'subject object'.
In the Myth of Er pieces ' collections of linked mouth blown glasses in blue, pink and gold ' Daube thinks of the need for the words 'subject' and 'object' as a long-standing philosophical issue.
'[The title of the piece] is the last story in a book by Plato. Him and Aristotle have been the big influences in my work. It was made by using sound waves by two words: subject and object. I took those words from the profile of the wave, and rotated it in an animation program. I made a 3D object out of the word and then I twisted it to make a hook out of it. So, subject and object become united, that's just like in philosophy, where all things are one,' said Daube, adding that he was also inspired by a classic toy, Barrel of Monkeys, in applying the linkage between glasses.
A straightforward yet epic sculpture called Luminarium by Daube brings an ancient and modern atmosphere at the same time.
From the Latin word for light or lamp, Luminarium refers to an object that generates light in a space. The sculpture manifestation of the sound wave leads to the contemplation that all masses made of molecules have both frequency and vibration.
Luminarium is not static, but appears to be in motion. Moving in a direction in time, away from the unseen central axis from where it was created and has now left behind.
After choosing Jakarta as the launch pad of the traveling exhibition, Wilkins and Daube are eying Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia and Dubai as their next stops.
Kunstkring Paleis is a newly reopened gallery and restaurant, which is a restoration project by Grup Tugu. The grand historical building was first opened 99 years ago as Bataviasche Kunstkring during Dutch colonial times, and was built to house the Fine Arts Circle of the Dutch East Indies in promoting enthusiasm for the fine and decorative arts of the Indies.
' Photos by Nurhayati
