| CATARINA LEITÃO Frantiska and Tim Gilman-Sevcik in W ART, Mimesis, Porto, Portugal, November 2005 Catarina Leitão’s (Stuttgart, 1070) drawings imagine products that mediate our interactions with Nature. They highlight our level of discomfort with the Real and show a cultural desire for distance and safety that avoids direct contact with our fear at any cost. We began a conversation with her by asking if she felt that her drawings, which cross military design with outdoor gear, could be perceived as highlighting the notion of nature as something to be feared. She told us that she initially came to the idea of these survival objects from simple questions of how the urban resident interacts with nature. The military aspect came from research into camping gear. She found a strong element of fear in their advertisements, a long-term aspect of America’s culture – fear of communism, fear of the nuclear bomb, fear of AIDS, etc… Now terrorism. When we asked if she imagined the use of the gear envisioned all interaction with nature as a kind of extreme sport, she insisted that she is also interested in less extreme kinds of interaction with nature. She used the example of the amount of stuff people carry with them for a pleasant day at the beach. The chairs, umbrellas, insect repellents, coolers, towels, etc… the opposite of an extreme sport. She humorously pointed out that it’s more about sampling your living room in an outdoor setting. She describes our dependence on nature (with houseplants and parks as substitutes) and our simultaneous distance from it. We wanted to know if she thinks of this as positive or negative. She doesn’t see it as positive or negative, but more of confronting perceptions with insights into reality. We must be aware that things we think of as nature are actually man made, though even she admits to being blind to that, and going to a park looking for some kind of untamed original nature. Camouflage has been a prevalent element in her work for years, so we wondered if she always had a military reference in mind, or if using camouflage had led her to her current work with militaristic imagery. She explained that she sees it as an attempt to flatten, abstract, and homogenize forms, shapes and colors in nature. When she started using it around 2000-2001, she saw it being used in all kinds of city clothing, completely detached from its meaning. Earlier, she created sculptural pieces that arose from attempts to un-flatten those shapes. The military influence appeared later in her series “One with Nature”. Her earlier work combined drawing and sculpture, and we wondered why she had seemingly abandoned the three-dimensional work. When making drawings in conjunction with sculpture they had seemed to her merely like sketches, and she was bothered by the limitations that imposed. Conversely, she found that the sculptures were falling into the trap of being illustrations of the drawings. Having changed her focus to drawing, she now feels that working on paper allows her to imagine objects without the limitations of fabrication. She finds that if she can achieve her work with the economy of means offered by a sheet of paper, she can not only free her ideas, but she can simultaneously comment on the alarming acceleration of production and consumption in capitalist society. |
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