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Making Waves with Melissa McGill and Red Regatta

fullsizeoutput_1651 — Preview performance of Melissa McGill’s *Red Regatta* on May 11, 2019, in front of the Associazone Vela al Terzo on the North Lagoon at Fondamente Nove. Photo by Matteo De Fina.

By Chiara Mannarino

A week after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1991, artist Melissa McGill travelled to Europe for the very first time. This independent voyage, beginning in Venice, Italy, would unexpectedly lead her to an abundance of friendship, love, and creative inspiration, all of which have coalesced to inform her most recent project, Red Regatta.

Red Regatta is an independent public art project presented in collaboration with Associazione Vela al Terzo and Magazzino Italian Art Foundation. It activates Venice’s lagoon and canals with large-scale regattas of traditional vela al terzo sailboats hoisted with hand-painted red sails. The visual combination of fifty-two carefully crafted and applied red hues swimming and swirling together through Venice’s unmistakably distinct greenish-blue water is an unforgettable sight, leaving its imprint on the “Floating City” forever.

Such ambitious, grand, and site-specific public art projects are central to McGill’s artistic practice, which redefines each landscape it touches through physical interventions seeking to illuminate rich histories and traditions and to foster a greater understanding of our surroundings as well as our relationship to them.

GN7A9252 — Melissa McGill with the first sail at Atlas Studios in Newburgh, NY. Courtesy of the artist.

CM: Can you speak a bit about your connection to Venice?

MM: I lived in Venice for two years from 1991-1993. Right after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in the sculpture department, I went to Europe for the first time. Venice was the first place that I landed. I went by myself and that helped me learn to speak Italian. I made many friends, who are now like family, and became part of a community of Venetians. I have been going back and forth for 30 years for inspiration, for friendship, and for work.

CM: How did you become so invested in the longstanding Venetian sailing tradition and how did the project come to light?

MM: Two years ago, I did an exhibition based on the Campi in Venice. Through doing this project, I was lucky enough to meet Giorgio Righetti, the president of the Associazione Vela al Terzo Venezia, and Silvio Testa, who wrote a wonderful book about vela al terzo and to spend a day in their boats exploring the small canals in the city. On the plane back to New York, I just completely fell into Silvio’s book and was so inspired by the tradition and these boats. These two became my core collaborators in the Red Regatta project, and it was really from that moment that the project started to unfold.

CM: Can you speak a bit about how the project has developed since then?

MM: Last month, we did sail painting workshops with art students from IUAV (University IUAV di Venezia) and my collaborating sailors from the Associazione Vela al Terzo Venezia in Spazio Thetis in the Arsenale, which was very generously donated for the project. We painted 104 sails in 8 or 9 days, and the reason it was done in such a timely way is that we had such incredible enthusiasm from the students and the sailors. To see and be working with the actual sails in space and to have this community form together between the students and the sailors painting together created this wonderful feeling of collaboration.

CM: It must have been quite a feat to complete all of that work in just 8 or 9 days! What did the actual painting of the sails look like in terms of technique?

MM: While testing a prototype sail in my studio in New York, I realized that I wanted to have the hand evident in the painting rather than it just being a flat color field, so we used brooms and brushes to create these big, beautiful, expressive brushstrokes. Each sail became a painting on its own. The idea to use brooms to paint the sails was something that came to me at 5:00 in the morning on the second day with jetlag. After testing a few types of brooms, we bought all the brooms of this one type from the Ferramenta on Via Garibaldi. The guy was like, “What on earth are you doing with all these brooms?”

Melissa McGill painting the first sail at Atlas Studios in Newburgh, NY. Courtesy of the artist.

CM: Was he excited when you explained what they were being used for?

MM: Oh yes, he was very excited. He even asked, “Can I come and see? I’m really interested!”

CM: It seems like so many are drawn to this project. The workshop collaboration itself involved people from all different walks of life. Can you speak about the significance of this unification of young and old through painting the sails?

MM: We had sailors of all ages, including those who are in their 70s, participate, and between the university students and these people there was a huge age range. Some even brought their kids to see the sails being painted. It was just this incredible community that formed. They were all getting to know each other, the students were asking the sailors questions about the maritime traditions, and there was this exchange, collaboration, and connection created between all involved.

CM: Why did you choose to involve young Italian art students specifically?

MM: Involving students in a public art project provides a unique opportunity to invite young people to participate and engage with the work in an intimate way. That opportunity, I think, is community-building, which is really important to me and my public art project. The sailors were so moved by the students’ interest and their involvement and passion for the project that they invited the students to be crew members in Red Regatta!

CM: That must be so exciting for them! The students’ enthusiasm alone demonstrates just how significant this tradition remains today, and your project and process really honor it and bring it into our current moment in a new and exciting way. What does the Venetian sailing tradition mean to you and what about it excites you?

MM: This is a tradition is about the lagoon and its history. Many of the boats have been passed down through generations and restored, and they’re so beloved. These boats are very specific to Venice in that they are very low draw, so they have flat bottoms and can go in very shallow water, and the mast can be removed and laid down so that they can go down under bridges or be rowed. It’s a tradition that really involves the rowing or sailing and the wind and the water. It’s important to keep this tradition alive.

GN7A9199 — Melissa McGill painting the first sail at Atlas Studios in Newburgh, NY. Courtesy of the artist.

CM: I feel that this project is crucial to have in Venice at this time. How do you see Red Regatta fitting into the unfortunate realities of the city today?

MM: The timing for this project is now. There are issues with rising water, climate change, mass tourism. There are many things that are having a huge impact on Venice. There’s also a shrinking native population and a rising tourist population. This is a public artwork, and this work is not meant to presume to solve the many problems Venice is dealing with. However, it is meant to raise awareness about a lot of these things.

McGill_Red Regatta Preview_5.11.19_5 — Preview performance of Melissa McGill’s *Red Regatta* on May 11, 2019, in front of the Associazone Vela al Terzo on the North Lagoon at Fondamente Nove. Photo by Matteo De Fina.

CM: The project celebrates Venice and the qualities that make it unique in so many ways—one that really stands out is your consideration of Venetian colors. Can you speak a bit about your selection of red as an emblematic color of the city?

MM: Red is a color that I associate with Venice, and reds refer to an enormous range of things in the city. From Rosso Veneziano, Venetian red, to traditions like the Festa del Bòcolo with the roses, the terracotta rooftops, Tiziano and Tintoretto paintings with that rich red, and the pigment trade, there are all types of things that we can talk about in terms of the color’s direct physical associations with the city. But then there’s also the emotional. Red is a color of energy, of life force, passion, alarm, warning, love. It represents a huge range emotionally, so for me, a core decision in the project is that it’s not one thing, it’s many things, and all of those colors and all of those possible references are sailing together in this work.

VENEZIA 11/05/19 - red regatta - performance dell'artista Melissa McGill - barche con vela al terzo in competizione con le vele rosse ©Marco Sabadin/Vision — Preview performance of Melissa McGill’s *Red Regatta* on May 11, 2019, in front of the Associazone Vela al Terzo on the North Lagoon at Fondamente Nove. Photo by Matteo De Fina.

CM: How have you chosen and procured the shades of red that you use in the project?

MM: I’ve walked around taking photographs of all of the different reds as reference material, I developed about 100 shades of red, and finally chose one for each of the 52 boats we have participating. The range of the reds goes from orangish to brownish to purplish.

CM: What were you most excited about as you sailed closer to the project’s official launch?

MM: The moment we see the sails on the boats reflected in the water, against the city, against the sky, against the lagoon, that is it for me! I’m excited about seeing it in its context because I’ve seen the sails hanging in the Arsenale in Spazio Thetis, I’ve done all these experiments in my studio, but when the sails are actually on the boats and when we’re there with the boats sailing together, that’s when the project will come to life. Doing a project like this is a long and challenging road, but when the sun illuminates these red sails, mixing and blending together in Red Regatta…that makes it all worth it!

Red Regatta officially commenced on May 8 with an artist talk and community open house at Ocean Space and a preview regatta on May 11 on the northern lagoon at Fondamente Nove. Additional regattas will sail at various points throughout the duration of the Venice Biennale until November, including during the annual Regata Storica in the Bacino di San Marco and the Regata di Burano in September.

To follow the Red Regatta project, please visit the artist’s website where you can find an interactive map, additional details, and updates.

Re-imagining the South Asian Curator

1 (1) — Natasha Ginwala and Defne Ayas were selected to curate the Gwangju Biennale in September 2020.

By Devana Senanayake

“I am not entirely comfortable being bracketed as “a South Asian Curator,” says curator and writer, Natasha Ginwala. “Maybe this fluidity which I have structured my life around is one way to break out of these codes which are opportunities, but they are also ways of defining you.”

There are limited curators of colour working in the cultural field. Natasha feels these specialized positions are a welcome development, yet at times situate curators in prefixed categories rather than provide them an opportunity to reshape and push the boundaries of their occupation. In 2015, the Mellon Foundation released the first comprehensive survey of diversity in American Art Museums. It cited only 16% of leadership positions held by people of colour. Of these positions: 38% of Americans identified as Asian, Black, Hispanic or multiracial. There are limited curators of colour, much less South Asian curators, in Europe and America.

TASTE KARATHTHE 3 — Firi Rahman, *Taste Karanthethé* (2019). Performance. Colomboscope 2019: *Sea Change*, Colombo (25–31 January 2019). Photography by Ruvin de Silva.

“The whitest job in the entire cultural community in New York is curator,” Tom Finkelpearl, the city’s commissioner of cultural affairs told the New York Times last year. “That’s changing.”

In response to criticisms of limited diversity, large scale museums have created full-time positions to bring in more diverse curators. In 2015, the MET created a position for an “Assistant Curator of South Asia” and appointed Shanay Jhaveri to it. The TATE appointed Priyesh Mistry to the “Assistant Curator of Research for South Asia” position. Last year, the Peabody Essex Museum appointed Siddhartha V. Shah as “Curator of Indian and South Asian Art.”

Photography by Ruvin de Silva

“I see these positions from a distance, and I wonder what it does to you because you are still slotted as “The” South Asian Curator. I am feeling more at ease because it’s my relationship with the artists I work with, my thinking, and my writing which defines how I am seen in my field,” she says of her journey as an independent curator, an alternative to the traditional role as a full-time curator in a museum.

Curatorial roles based solely on location oversee the cultural richness, diversity, and complexity of the region. Generalized names such as “South Asia” fail to capture the multiracial, multiethnic and multilingual identities that inhabit those regions. As an area, South Asia is large. It includes India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives just to cite a limited number of countries. None of these elements are taken into consideration by the generalized South Asian Curator labels.

Henry Tan & Partners, Merchants of Merchants (2019). Performance. Colomboscope 2019: Sea Change, Colombo (25–31 January 2019). Photography by Ruvin de Silva

Henry Tan & Partners, Merchants of Merchants (2019). Performance. Colomboscope 2019: Sea Change, Colombo (25–31 January 2019).Colomboscope. Photography by Ruvin de Silva

Natasha studied at Jharwala Nehru University’s School of Art and Aesthetics in Delhi. She then pursued a specialized curatorial course in De Appel Arts Center in 2010. At that time, she had been the only South Asian participant in the course. As a student in India, she found a lot of “hierarchies” in local art circles, so she found her experience in the Netherlands, despite being an inexperienced curator, to be a liberating and educational one.

After the conclusion of her studies, Natasha stayed in Europe to pursue the role of an independent curator a decision that ultimately helped her host several biennales such as the Contour Biennale 8 Polyphonic Worlds: Justice as Medium and Documenta 14 (2017). Her projects have also been featured at the 56^th Venice Biennale and KW Institute for Contemporary Art.

SISSEL TOLAAS 2 — Smellarchive children’s workshop by Sissel Tolaas. Colomboscope 2019. Photography by Ruvin De Silva.

As India’s economy has risen, Indian art has enjoyed greater levels of local and international popularity. Iftikhar Dadi, Associate Professor of the History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University, commented on this phenomenon on the Guggenheim blog:

“A new generation of curators has emerged in India, and curating is now considered a serious and competitive profession. India also overshadows other South Asian countries in its international exposure, its artists and curators having recently enjoyed more opportunities to exhibit both domestically and internationally….

Other countries [in the region] are also developing analogous infrastructures including museums, galleries, journals, training programs, and periodic exhibition platforms such as biennials.”

FORT TRAILS 1 — *Colomboscope 2019: Sea Change, Colombo (25–31 January 2019).* Photography by Ruvin Da Silva.

It is only natural that Natasha stayed connected to her South Asian roots as it is an area hungry for exposure, strong management, and reinterpretation. She is currently based, simultaneously, in Berlin and Colombo.

“I think it’s great that it’s so self-organized. I think there’s much more room to experiment, and there’s an opportunity which we need to harness and not see as [lacking]” she says of the potential held by the art scene in Sri Lanka.

She also singled out friendly people full of interesting memories and personal anecdotes in the Sri Lankan art community. Natasha first came to Sri Lanka, the home of her partner, in 2014 and co-curated Colomboscope a year later. She is currently Artistic Director of the festival that exhibits contemporary arts and encourages an interdisciplinary dialogue. In 2018, the festival ran over seven days in January in several Colombo locations such as the Rio Complex, Barefoot Gallery, Grand Oriental Hotel and Galle Face Green Hotel.

WALKING ISLAND 2 — Colomboscope 2019: *Sea Change*, Colombo (25–31 January 2019). Photography by Ruvin De Silva.

As a curator responsible for a l ocal festival, Natasha understands that the festival needs to be a “sustainable and context-responsive environment for cultural producers to continue generating path-breaking and genre-defying approaches in the field.”

“A lot of the work happens through writing, studio visits with artists or workshops with younger artists. We want to think about how we can equip the community,” she says of the larger role the festival plays in nurturing the local art scene through its focus on intimate gatherings and relationship building.

The festival featured several local artists such as Anoli Perera, Isuru Kumarasinghe and Jasmine Nilani Joseph; and international artists such as Hira Nabi, Armine Linke, and Henry Tan and partners.

“We think of [the festival] as a platform to try new vocabularies; and where new kinds of approaches can be laid out and explored.”

CLIMAVORE 2 — Cooking Sections, *CLIMAVORE: On Mangroves and Mudflats* (2019). Performance. Colomboscope 2019: *Sea Change*, Colombo (25–31 January 2019). Photography by Ruvin de Silva.

Iftikhar Dadi encourages curators to take the South Asian diaspora into consideration in their exhibitions: “The South Asian diaspora is enormous in cities such as Dubai, London, and New York. Curatorial initiatives in these places have also been instrumental in reconceiving South Asia beyond the restrictions of national borders.”

The Sri Lankan diaspora exists in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Europe, Australia, and the USA. The festival has provided a foundation for artists such as Sri Lankan-Swiss performer, Robin Myer; and Sri Lankan-Australians, Amara Raheem and Cresside Collette to exhibit their practices.

TASTE KARATHTHE 1 — Colomboscope 2019: *Sea Change*, Colombo (25–31 January 2019). Photography by Ruvin De Silva.

“These are artists who have lived away from the island and are finding their way back through the arts,” Natasha says.

For upcoming festivals, Natasha hopes to explore the rising interest in set forms of publishing (like zines and artist books), multimedia (like film and video), and identity politics that happen in the local art scene.

“There is more consciousness with gender, race and class-based questions in the way artists are producing work. In terms of a post-war society, how do you tackle these questions?” she says about the festival’s evolution and her responsibility as a curator in a country undergoing reconstruction and focused on reinterpretation for progress.

Sarah Davidson and Aimée Henny Brown on Fragments

By Adi Berardini

2edit — Sarah Davidson *ground figure,* ink, watercolour, flashe, graphite, pencil crayon on paper, 36 x 70 in, 2018

fragment4 — Sarah Davidson *fade away,* ink, watercolour and pencil crayon on paper 27.5 x 33.5 in, 2017

secret_life_of_plants — Sarah Davidson *the secret life of plants* ink, watercolour, flashe, graphite, pencil crayon on paper 37.5 x 69 in, 2017

The sun radiates through a mobile of broken sea glass that hangs from the porch. Scratched but bright, the light creates jewel tone colours of emerald green and cerulean blues meeting pale pink. In Sarah Davidson’s work, floating shapes dance with negative space between. They’re close in proximity, but often times they don’t touch— they connect through a dialogue. They are suspended, floating in mid-air amongst the other fragments.

Fragments can shatter but they can also bring together new worlds from disparate parts. In Aimée Henny Brown’s work, fragments from archival material transform into other-worldly escape shelters and settings. Beyond the desert sand, there are mountains in the background colliding with a steel dome. Subtle lilac clouds are suspended through space and time and a new world is built up through fragments. There’s a surreal, dream-like aspect to her mixed media work.

While talking in her Vancouver studio one day, I remember Davidson saying how liberating it is to be able to cut up work especially if you’ve made something that you’re not fond of. She advised to “just cut it up”—There’s a certain freedom attached to the act. If it’s not working as a whole perhaps there are aspects of it that do work. There has to be a moment within that flick of the brush that glows among the distasteful parts. Cut it up, use it. Learn from it.

Within the suspension of the shapes in Davidson’s work, there are parts that are intentionally missing. Viewers are left to create the rest of the scene in their mind, or connect the fragments as they’re presented. We only remember mere moments from memories. Maybe I’ll only remember the expression on your face or parts of our conversation. Memories never seem to be complete, we only remember certain parts to the whole that are highlighted in our mind. The reel replays in disparate fragments. Some memories re-occur and some are forgotten like sand sifting through our fingers. Ask a friend to describe a memory and it will likely vary from your description, often drastically.

In Davidson’s latest work, there are sinewy spiderwebs filling up the negative space bringing unity to the suspended shapes. Bridging drawing and painting, there’s a new sense of depth and mystery created within the work. These works are reminiscent of memories jumbled in the mind, flashing back to a summer’s day and remembering parts of the landscape. Although the shapes are still in dialogue, they seem more interconnected through flowing lines representing flora. They have another dimension to them, through higher contrast, multi-layering, and the ghostly lines like neurotransmitters connecting the shapes together.

Fragments can tear worlds apart but they can also rebuild them. Aimée Henny Brown creates post-apocalyptic, futuristic worlds that are built from the fragments. Brown is attracted to exploring modes of survival. Her work brings up the question of escapism—when we run out of options where do we go? The post-apocalyptic collages have a sublime quality to them, although they suggest an inevitable demise, they are dreamy and mesmerizing. Brown’s work seems to evoke a past romanticism of consumerism and technology that plays its own part towards global warming, extreme weather, and the new age of environmentalism we face.

Aimée Henny Brown Futur Infinitif VII, hand-cut collage on cotton rag paper, 46 x 46 cm, 2016
Aimée Henny Brown Futur Infinitif V, hand-cut collage on cotton rag paper, 46 x 46 cm 2016
Aimée Henny Brown Futur Infinitif IV hand-cut collage on cotton rag paper, 46 x 46 cm, 2016

In her ‘Futur Infinitif’ series Brown juxtaposes classic architecture with organic forms, such as gemstones and rough minerals. Smooth, bold architectural lines converge to rough, organic textures of gemstones. Not only are contrasting forms evoked but the materiality of the buildings are paralleled with mineral extraction. They elude to the spectacle of architecture; often times architecture creates a sense of awe and amazement without the question of where the building materials are sourced and extracted from. The large-scale spectacle of buildings is compared to the micro-scale of gems, brought into a macro-scale through these mixed media collages.

Where in Davidson’s work memory functions in a unique way, Brown’s work evokes what the future may look like through analyzing the past. Through addressing notions of survivalism, futurism, and architectural dwellings, fragments are pieced together in a way to creatively imagine what the future could look like. How do we learn to build the future in an interconnected way that considers natural systems instead of building invasive structures? Influenced by both space and time, her work brings aspects of past memories and the gleams of the possibilities the future holds.