Engaging People: Eric and Heather ChanSchatz
Last Thursday at the MCA Denver, visual artists Eric and Heather ChanSchatz delivered a talk about their process. The talk was mediated by former Whitney museum curator David A. Ross, who during the audience question-and-answer session, determined that “Visual art in the 21st century is about how to engage people.”
Engaging people is what Eric and Heather ChanSchatz are all about. Their collaborative art transcends the boundaries that often develop between the art world and, well, the rest of the world. In creating one of their ultra-lightfast silkscreen paintings, ChanSchatz will meet at length with different communities of people: their collaborators have included Pennsylvania Coal Miners, dancers from Merce Cunningham, and US Soldiers. While collaborating with their communities of choice, ChanSchatz will produce sets of shapes and colors and ask individuals to select their favorite swatches. From these selections, Eric and Heather assemble “Universals,” or clustered geometries and hues. They then arrange the Universals across a canvas, or into an installation, or into a sculpture. Art that has emerged from layerings of these Universals are now on exhibit at the MCA Denver, as part of the show “The Face I had Before the World Was Made”. Paintings, an installation, and a small sculpture are available for view.
ChanSchatz (a combination of Eric and Heather’s last names) have been producing work since they first met in undergrad at Berkeley. They were the first artists in America to apply to MFA programs in visual art as a singular entity. Their insistence on staying together as an art team has been received with much support, and thankfully so. Their work has served their communities wonderfully, and their collaborative, people-based process might be considered the best example of social art practice since the works of Christo and Jeanne-Claude.
When asked how many characters there were in their image vocabulary of Universals, Heather answered “I think there’s about 10,000 now.”
.jpg "Ryan Riss | November 4 - October 28, 2011")
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