January 2020
Pictured left to right: Zsofia Schweger, Nikita Gale and Olga Migliaressi-Phoca
One of the most exciting benefits of residency at The Fountainhead is the effect of putting wildly different artists together in an intimate setting. Co-founder and director Kathryn Mikesell, through the residency and now through her ongoing local artists program, MEET, truly believes that artists spending time with one another almost always sparks a new curiosity or direction. The artists living and working in the residency this January - hailing from all over the world, their practices and processes remarkably distinct - proved that working so intimately among other artists can inspire both practical and esoteric ideas.
Nikita Gale, Olga Migliaressi-Phoca, and Zsofia Schweger learned quickly that the furious pace of immersion into Miami’s cultural landscape created opportunities to view and present their work in a new light. “I was inspired by the way my fellow artists spoke about their work, which got me thinking about how I might open up the way I present my own,” says Phoca.
“We work in different mediums in different ways” adds Schweger, and its been engaging and inspirational to be so close to them. It’s been a long time since I’ve been exposed to that.”
Settling into Miami during a busy holiday season, Gale, Phoca, and Schweger reflect on their practices and their month-long stay at the Fountainhead.
Nikita Gale
With a background in archaeology, Los Angeles-based artist is interested in how humans have manipulated and altered objects and materials in pursuit of understanding their own anxieties and desires. Grounded primarily in research that includes reading sci-fi, black feminist authors and architectural theory, her work is constantly evolving from a set of themes that invariably lead Gale to examine the relationship between infrastructure and authority. Her work isn’t necessarily aimed at rupturing that relationship, but rather, serves to question what humanity at large considers as something foundational.
“I’m interested not in breaking the infrastructure but rather critiquing while avoiding a refusal to recognize my own implication in that system,” Gale says. “I’m interested in the mechanisms.”
Working conceptually with a variety of materials, Gale’s practice often incorporates sound, sculpture, and performance to re-frame how we enjoy a universal pleasure: Music. “Music is at the foreground because my mom was a music teacher, which has left me feeling like it’s a primary mode of learning and communication,” she says. “I also think music operates really nicely as a framework because it’s kind of like a universal entry point in the way that it occupies our consciousness.” Her pieces often include fragments of objects we associate with music-making: strings, guitars, and microphones are among some of her recurring materials.
At the Fountainhead, Gale was focused on an upcoming project at MoMA PS1 that will re-contextualize the experience of attending a concert. Visitors will walk into a space where a stage has been set up with instruments and lighting, yet file into a space under the stage to experience the show - which won’t, in fact, have any live performers. How the audience might react to this temporal experience - the ‘show’ is ticketed and runs for about 45 minutes - is precisely what Gale hopes to unpack.
“I’m setting up the scenario to see how it plays out,” she says.
Olga Migliaressi-Phoca
In Miami, Olga Migliaressi-Phoca’s work revolved around a series of split-second snapshots assembled into collages and diptychs, each image carefully selected to highlight a contradiction. She sought to capture the city’s somewhat contradictory essence, as viewed through her lens: Trash cans overflowing with litter are captured against their lush green backdrop. Art deco signage brings life to an otherwise dull and decaying building. Icons like the Coppertone Girl and the Tropical Life logo of the Sunday Herald are splashed against concrete and billboards. Humorous, sarcastic, and notably kitsch, Phoca says the exercise allowed her to understand Miami from a local’s perspective.
“I wanted to get to know the city as though I lived here,” she says, “and what that came down to was making an artist book of images that reflect a visual vocabulary of juxtapositions and ironies I came across while photographing in Miami.”
Typically, Phoca’s work is a little more carefully planned, but the artist tends to lean deeply into images that portray how important social movements are co-opted and commercialized. She references a specific place and time in each series, incorporating - and then bastardizing - logos, icons, and images that illuminate how a specific topic, like female empowerment, has been branded by the media.
“I use photography as my medium in the collages and I use photography to paint on the computer and create the narratives and environments that I want to bring to life,” she says, reflecting that her time at the Fountainhead “gave her the opportunity to experiment a bit.”
Zsofia Schweger
“I like for all the indecisiveness to be left out of the work,” says Schweger, a Hungarian-born, London-based painter exploring the concept of home through a series of perfectly symmetrical canvases. She gestures to a row of neatly stacked plastic jars, each containing a different pastel-hued spot of paint. Schweger painstakingly mixes each color she works with, studying its aesthetically seductive qualities before settling on just the right tone. Once it’s just right, Scweger applies the paint to her previously line-drawn canvas, where she has conjured a room - sometimes real, others imagined - into the frame.
These paintings have a marked coldness to them. Often a picture of a well-appointed room - where every piece of furniture has meticulously sharp edges, and every surface is wiped clean of any objects revealing the imagined inhabitant’s personal style - Schweger’s paintings feel empty. That emotion, she says, is what interests her about painting the idea of home.
Having lived away from hers for most of her adult life, Scweger aims to capture whether one’s sense of belonging is driven by a place or the people within it. “Throughout the years I’ve had to deal with the fact that returning home feels different - in your absence, it has changed, and so have you,” she says. By drawing rooms from her childhood, others she’s encountered on her travels, and lately, rooms she imagines exist, Schweger questions our sense of belonging.
At the Fountainhead, Schweger continued to evolve her painting practice - recently, her sharply drawn, geometric forms have been applied to wood blocks, so that each piece can be separated and affixed at the viewer’s will - and spent much of the time soul-searching. “I was looking forward to getting away from London and its rat race” she says. “There were gut level things I was looking for and that’s what I got.”
