Paintings - mixed media at Hotel fox, copenhagen.......................................

                                                             

                                                        

                                                                 

Pershing Square - Los Angeles. 'Art Squared'. Contemporary Art in the  Public Space                              

   

    'Art Squared' in  
(CLICK HERE   to watch VIDEO 'A Public Spaceart Squared' at Pershing Square)
   Pershing  
   Square - Downtown LA

Bisquit Factory Exhibition -       LA Magazine interview

Making the F-word fashion

We are four female painters, Sabina Mlejnek (Austria), Birgitte Moos (Denmark/USA), Vibeke Knudsen (Denmark) and Suzanne Russell (USA/Denmark), with diverse national, cultural and educational backgrounds. 

  

We are working on a collaborative art project, and this is a project description and examples on sketches for common paintings. 

Our project is an experiment  in collaboration aimed at producing a series of large paintings, planned to be aproximately 13,1X6,5 ft, on the subject of notions female beauty and cultural identity. We plan to investigate our individual interpretations of the female body over time, as we collaborate to produce paintings in which the only rule is, that we may not stop each other via verbal responses to each other’s painting during the work period. Painting over each other’s work and adding to each other’s work is allowed.

The project is about the group’s working methods and dynamics. For this reason, the dynamics of the group will be documented each day through a variety of media, including video recordings and questionaires. We concider creating a website for the project, with blogs and photographs, documenting the paintings’ stages and development. The working process will be reflected in the dynamics of the paintings.

A flirtation with culturally defined ideas like ego and self, is implicit in our proposed working method and 

subject matter. These ideas will be investigated and, hopefully, 

illuminated by the content of the paintings themselves. Grabbing the 

spotlight and worshipping beauty. 

Can we let go of our egos? Can we produce paintings, that contain 

references to a wide-range of styles, because we have different talents, tools and references? 

Will the paintings function as symbols and aesthetically as paintings when the content is made up of a sort of cultural hacking?

Part of our project is to exhibit our collaborative paintings in each 

of the countries where we are from.

We expect the essence of our collaborative paintings to be a 

culmination of our observations about female beauty, especially as 

it is portrayed in mass media throughout the world. 

Ideals of female beauty have been articulated in Egypt, in Dante’s Italy, in art and theater, in film and television, and in advertisements. The glamour system. Especially in the West, women are given the leading role of “Figure Magnifique,”  a mythical role that tries to convince the viewer, that these women are real and represent female beauty.

As a possible consequence of society’s rejection of natural look as beautiful, our paintings will comment on the scientific methods that are available to achieve beauty at any cost. 

Female beauty is an indicator of success and a staus symbol. Stategies for seduction are defined in the media and the myths they create. The relationship between the sexes are affected.

Through media images we become aware of our obsessive attantion to 

appearances. The perfect body. Our body becomes our identity. Our identity becomes a projection of our body as a social construction, 

in which the conventional meaning of the word ”object” describes the female body, and its status in terms of time and place.

Many international female artists work with hybrid artistic expression 

in which they combine, for example, photography, video, installation and 

performance art. This can be interpreted as a rejection of painting 

as a traditionally patriarchal medium, with the masterpiece as its result.

Painting is not related to gender in Denmark in the 21s century. In our 

project , we wish to use painting as a genderless media through which we, 

as female artists with different nationalities, show the world that 

we use the oldest and most traditional art medium as part of 

our contemporary investigation.

 Gallery Westphall - Copenhagen.          

          "Memory Palace Series"

Being born into the time of ‘the no future generation” and punk anarchy, I was confronted by the idea of visually manifesting the influence of that era, by using the concept of a fascinating system: The Memory Palace. An ancient technique used for almost total recall, the method of loci, or “ars memoriae” (art of memory in Latin).
I then transcribed this system into a product for the imagination, with a fount to store abstract memories, where image represents thoughts and memory.
Symbolically, a brain scattered full of information: A perverse peep, into the creative and complex atmosphere inside the memory of a mind palace.
The paintings represent the stored repertoire of an inner biography. Where the woven layers of each individual painting is a narrative into a separate vision of remembrance.

Phantom Galleries - Los Angeles

The Memory Palace Series. Installation and paintings  

Photos by Jessica Shokrian

Painting: 'Element of                       

Crime'/'Forbrydelsens Element    136X152 cm, acrylic on paper, 2007. 

Visualisation on the Lars von Trier movie

Are written from left to the right as a result of the Artists thoughts projected directly onto a surface, which later will be located in front of the observer. The content is now manifest and placed within the image. It will hereby reflect itself mirrored back to the receiver.

Bedlam Gallery - Los Angeles, Solo Exhibition
Photos by Tina Jøhnk Christensen   

ARTIST STATEMENT"WHITE COWS"

Dimensions 30X80". Acrylic and mixed media on woodpanel
Photo by Rick Mendoza  

THE REASON

This painting is a subtract derived from an idea of a series of 5 empty storefront concept installations that I created as a commentary and anticommercial, based on the fact that the fashion week of Copenhagen in 1997, was located in a former slaughterhouse, where the particular location was called ’The Hall of the Axes’ in the Meatpacking District of Copenhagen. How ironic is that!

THE THEME:

One of the cultural differences between Copenhagen 

and Los Angeles: 

The self aggrandizement of women in LA.

It is not a new phenomenon, that women demand attention. Attention often gives an economic advantage. LA most of all, is a city controlled by the brutal force of financial gain, and a social and financial security network is virtually non existent, unless one is wealthy! Female beauty is a wealth magnet, as well as a status symbol. Women in LA ( all kinds of nationalities ) emulate media stars as the 'Figure Magnifique' of mythology.           

THE FALLACY:

The fashion and film industry induces the belief, that thin girls are the real representatives of beauty. A rather narrow minded ideal. The degeneration of natural beauty is far more obvious in LA, the city of celebrities and wannabes, as girls here are typically smaller in their body measurements, than their counterparts in Europe: A new Danish trend is to expose mannequin dolls in storefronts, with sizes in European sizes, has grown from a 34 to 38 and the EU parliament is currently discussing whether to provide rules for lowest BMI numbers allowed for catwalk models.                   

THE MANIA:

The essence of the painting ‘White Cows’, is a culmination of an observation and research into the thematic of female beauty in modern media and fashion in Los Angeles, Copenhagen and Europe in general.           

The content of the painting consists of images inserted into a conceptually designed space; the painted area. In the digitally designed, and in the hand drawn images within the painting, the intention is to evoke/visualise flickering images, backgrounds and or particular locations! These flickering images or films, are of nanotech equipment for life extending and body-beautiful surgery, future dna manipulation, and even axes of a slaughterhouse.           

A comment on female beauty and the methods and extent used, to which people will go to in order to achieve this: Beauty conquers everything - and beauty equivocates with success.           

THE THIRST:

Across the painting, there are rows of identical catwalk mannequins, posing in continuous repetitive movements, reminding of the march of a fascist parade. The mannequins stand still, a Bertolt Brechtian tableaux vivant. A black conveyor belt propels the girls, all dressed in cow skin, through the room. The floor beneath the conveyor belt is drenched in blood: The slaughterhouse!The theme of twins represents here the idea, that women also mirror themselves in each others narcississtic adoration/competition. The color scheme of the painting has conscious movement from light to dark, and from the left to the right: The concept of political progression in western society. The color palette is very feminine and deliberately misty; the location of a polluted place, where it constantly rains blood and milk...          

THE RESULT:

... A parallel on the subject of being a woman in LA, and a meat market. Therefore the title, "WHITE COWS".

THE REASON:

The painting was painted as an anticommercial for a fashion week in Copenhagen, which was located in a former slaughterhouse, where the particular location was called The Hall of the Axe. How ironic is that!

           'Repulsive Repetition Series

SEE ALL 16 PAINTINGS AT 

http://birgittemoos.com/Repulsive%20Repetion%20Series.htm

ART STATEMENT
There is a kind of cultural deep freeze in our bodies, where society paralyses our brains...
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Friedrich Nietzsche quote

“Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence”

M.J. Higgins Gallery - Los Angeles

Far and Wide. Med Richard Godfrey, Chati Colonel and Moris Tepper









                                                            


                                                            Photo by Tina Jøhnk Christensen

                                                                                                       

San ta M onica  Airp ort    Los Ange les

Wallinstallation

March  2006. The Arts District   Citizen, Los     Angeles by       Birgitte Moos.   Review of        Parsifal,         directed and designed by Robert Wilson at The Los Angeles Opera                            

Robert Wilson is an American theatre director and scenic designer, known for being experimental in the cutting edge theatre scene, using a theatrical language where theatre becomes performance, while still being rooted in classical theatre and opera.

Wilson, born in Texas in 1941, educated at the Pratt Institute in New York where he studied architecture. He is the founder of The Watermill Center at Long Island. A cross disciplinary art school, where artists comes from all over the world, to become inspired in the spirit of this leading avant-garde theatre novice.

He has staged numerous productions over the last three decades throughout the world, including works as Salome, Madame Butterfly, Parsifal, Deaf Man Glance, The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, The CIVIL wars and Einstein on the Beach.

Wilson has been working with outstanding artists such as Philip Glass, the German director Heiner Muller, the legendary David Burne, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, William Burroughs,, Jessie Norman, Susan Sontag, and Tom Waits.

His theatrical interpretations consists of almost empty stages and stunningly beautiful lighting designs. Nonlinearity defined through combining different art forms into total art works, where movement, music, visual art and design are fused together into a new formula for stage work. Movements and visual effects become more descriptive rather than words being central in shaping meaning.

Wilson is directing actors into mechanistic movement patterns that usually not represent their engagement in emotional content. It seems as if the mere fact is, that the actors have to move from point to point as if counting numbers internally, while exercising the movements as practical transportation in order to create or deconstruct the story. This could be a comment on that deconstruction could be applied as an analytical method of seeing literature, architecture and so forth as that language and trends are unstable.

The works of Robert Wilson stands solely out, in this time with tendency of confusion. He masters the walk of the double-edged sword, being able to assemble the blade so that it cuts clear through centuries of scenic art forms. His imaginary visual compositions leads reason towards consciousness about philosophical, defragmented cultural expressions and connects them in soul full footprints, sliding through time and space so clearly as any intuitive and abstract intuitions about life content and communication. Communication, collaborating through music, song and body language.

Wilson’s directing is atypical in the sense of that nothing typical appears. He connects so named traditional dramatic expressions in new images, that moves slow-motoric through almost clinical yet painterly spaces, converting instructions in a written play into bodily language and executing these, one instruction at a time.

Wilson is popular in Europe. This is possibly a reaction to his nonverbal visual communication. Speakers of different languages can understand the content. Hereby not said that the audience subtracts the same content. The content is though of universal questions and ethical interactions, with outstanding ability of transferring settings and emotional content into abstract, suggestive landscapes and motions.                                                                  
Wagner’s opera Parsifal, performed at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, is transformed into a zen-buddhistic, meditational stage version. Parsifal is a 41⁄2-hour joyous meditation on physical focus and presence. Dreamlike stunning scenic settings created through set and lighting design and geometric black and white costumes.

Wilson’s rendering of Wagner’s religious opera Parsifal is a contemporary and yet timeless sensuous illustrated work. Theatre traditions such as Japanese Noh theatre intertwined with Bertolt Brecht’s human tableau vivants: People posing silently. The figures are moving incredibly silent, now and then just about, and sometimes, jerks a posed hand mechanically back and forth as attempts made to comment on something. Or as nervous tics coming out of powerlessness against seemingly insoluble dramas, with the awareness of how hard it is to communicate verbally.

Intrinsic a slow operatic work, projecting religious systems into stylized patterns, where bodily collages slides across the stage. Illuminating occurred crisis, where seemingly minimalist movements captures gestures before they occurs, as results on uncontrolled subconscious mania. Downtempo, either as a result of emotional deep freeze, or existentialistic cultural confusion. Automatic reactions and forms repeated, hypnotically looped in complex cycles, like a mantra looking for universal harmony. 

   "Company Slaughter", 2001

      Visuel concept and design for 
interactive television show

Frozen at The Ark Theatre, Los Angeles. Set design by Birgitte Moos

Paul Wagar directed the critically-acclaimed Ark Theatre presentation of Bryony Lavery’s Frozen, recommended by the LA Times, LA Weekly and Backstage West. 

AN ICY JOURNEY INSIDE A TRAGEDY by Daryl H. Miller, LA Times. October 28, 2005 

http://articles.latimes.com/2005/oct/28/entertainment/et-stage28

FROZEN, Back Stage West, November 10, 2005 http://www.allbusiness.com/services/amusement-recreation-services/4393108-1.html

'The Fox' 
  at 
 The Ark        
 Theatre              
 Los Angeles       
 Set design  
 by 
 Birgitte Moos



Photos by Tina Jøhnk Christensen