March 2021
Finding community is an important rite of passage in an artist’s career. Though daily practice is often solitary, tremendous innovation occurs when artists come together in discussion and camaraderie. Their collective work often helps elevate and propel new genres or ways of making; relationships often lead to new opportunities or directions in their work; and at the very least, their kinship helps them feel less alone on the journey.
In March, artists May Maylisa Cat, Camille Hoffman and Vincent Miranda were brought together in community by Bass Museum of Art curator Leilani Lynch. Lynch noted that “though [the artists] were varying in their areas of conceptual and material research, these artists share an interest in artmaking as it relates to identity and diaspora, the body, and how these complex notions unfold in our contemporary environment.”
United by common conceptual threads, each artist discovered that their pairing allowed them to explore new directions in their work while grounding it in its purpose. “With our first studio visit and the conversations that came up afterwards, May and Camille really brought up aspects of how I work that I hadn’t thought about,” says Vincent.
The experience also enriched the way they approach the arts community, whether by showcasing the importance of offering a platform for diverse artists, as in May’s case; or simply building on their experiences with one another to instruct future generations of artists, as Camille did with her students.
“It's just a very supportive space that I feel allows for new experiences and new insights to emerge,” says Camille. “I've certainly thought about my practice in a new way here. I'd also say that it has been an incredible privilege to teach my virtual art classes from here and hold space for these artists to be in conversation with the young artists i'm instructing. It's been a very rewarding experience.”
“There are people who walk the walk and those that don’t,” says May. I’m happy to connect with artists who get it.”
May Maylisa Cat
May Maylisa Cat is tired of the performative tropes associated with her identity. From the monolithic erasure of Asia’s nuanced cultural differences, to the sexualization of Asian women (White Sexual Imperialism), the tokenism, or the cultural commodification of non-white culture for American commerce, May’s work dismantles these stereotypes with humor and wit. Encompassing performance, installation, new media, video, and sculpture, May engages in world-building that places you in the center of her own internal conflict over how her racialized body and personhood are carelessly portrayed in American vernacular, then subverts the mundane tropes into absurdist commentaries.
May’s process queers archival material by reimagining it as parody. With Thai horror films, food and hospitality culture in media making up her prime material, she will often carefully construct a character or storyline that’s oblivious in their overt discrimination. As Asian artists are tokenized in the realms of food, hospitality, and/or trauma for institutional visibility, her work aims to undermine this staged veneer. With many of her characters often played by May herself, the artist refers to this practice as a ‘trojan horse’ to examine problematic Asian stereotypes - by interrogating neocolonial issues of exploitation and orientalism through the guise of humor, May leaves her viewers’ own biases starkly in evidence.
Her works tend to center around cultural commodification and the reappropriation of appropriation - like Fok Fok Industries, a multimedia surrealist series that riffs on a popular award-winning Los Angeles Thai restaurant, Pok Pok, which has a white owner. With an imaginative approach, she began to steal it back to use it as a site of transnational resistance, engaging with the current anti-coup protest in Thailand and Myanmar. At the core of her work is the determination of power behind the commodification and appropriation of non-white cultures from a transnational perspective - in other words, is someone telling a story that simply doesn’t belong to them?
"Archiving is not neutral. You have to think about what's shown and the order of it,” says May. “Who carries those archives? Who has the means and resources?"
Tragically, the Atlanta mass shooting that left six Asian women dead after they were specifically targeted as the object of the shooter’s rage occurred while May was in residence. Deeply moved by the experience, May wrote a poem to honor her community’s grief. She additionally continued to develop work around her Fok Fok Industries series.
Camille Hoffman
Where others see a picturesque tropical landscape, Camille Hoffman sees a narrative that erases the identity of a place. Dissecting how stock photography in advertising is used to attract people to certain places as vacation destination, Camille helps us remember that the essence of a place is rarely captured in these types of images. Using manifest destiny as a framework from which she can critique these images, Camille paints and collages over this primary material in an effort to present a more layered view.
Camille subverts language of manifest destiny - one that laid the groundwork for the decimation of indigenous peoples - by infusing her work with autobiographical materials. Refuse like holiday themed plastic tablecloths, old medical records, and reproductions of nature are embedded within her consciousness and as such, in her work. She utilizes stock photography for its anonymity; she’s intrigued by how an image of a beach can represent any beach in the world and yet does little to tell you anything about the destination it portrays.
“My personal process involves taking these things and infusing it with my own sense of place, while recognizing that even that is completely subjective” she says. “I like to take the artificial and make it real.”
As a lifelong educator who makes accessibility central to her work, Camille purposely selects materials that are easily understood while further complicating them through her mixing and layering. This reconfiguring process points to the complexity of the intercultural histories layered within her original images as well as in her embodied experience. At Fountainhead, Camille’s studio was a beautiful mess: Flashes of turquoise and teal images littered the floor, as Camille carefully selected which images she would work off. She spent her time making new work while teaching her students over Zoom, infusing each of her lectures with the perspectives of her fellow residency artists.
“Each material I use comes with its own cultural economic context that I know people will be able to relate to,” she says.
Vincent Miranda
At Fountainhead Residency, Vincent Miranda reflected on homecoming. Though he was born and raised in South Florida, he had spent the past several years living in the Bay Area in California, and the things he once took for granted about his hometown now invaded his senses and informed his work.
“Whenever I come back to visit, I appreciate different things about what makes Florida, Florida,” he says.
While Vincent’s work has long drawn from the South - and the region’s hip hop culture, in particular - his time in residence brought new elements to the fore. Interested in how landscape and masculinity intertwine and invariably, instruct, Vincent explores how young men often warp their identities in pursuit of a certain status or standing. Using southern hip hop as a point of reference, Vincent creates sculptural works and installations that riff on its vernacular while exposing how that parlance ultimately shapes aesthetic culture among young men of color.
Vincent notes that gestures play a huge role in how this community expresses their status or wealth. He’s especially interested in ‘the flex’ - any gesture that signals masculinity and power with a wide chest or a curled bicep. His new work builds a bridge between this flex and nature, which finds parallels but also attempts to encompass femininity and fragility to build a more whole self. At Fountainhead, Vincent created molds of flowers and other flora he encountered, casting them in a pliable material and shaping them to complement a flexed gesture. Malleable, delicate, and pretty, these sculptures nonetheless reference a motion that’s meant to draw attention.
“Nature’s always flexin’,” he says, “and I’m looking at the nature that’s around the residency and really getting inspired about how I can draw these parallels.”