Magic Hour
Photo: Tom Little | Exhibition: Miller Institute of Contemporary Art, Pittsburgh, USA, 2024
Magic Hour is made up of a series of glass sculptures and video projections that together produce liquid, unstable, spellbinding images as light forms. Playing with glass’s transparency and optical distortions, the sculptures act simultaneously as image, lens, and frame, becoming portal-like devices dispersing refractory and projected images that elude rational, perspectival ways of looking. The shimmering colors that result recall the dazzling, dizzying, saturated light of the artist’s childhood where edges blurred under the intensity of the Australian sun. They also recall the technicolor palette of another kind of Oz that Saxelby grew up with, a filmic reference throughout the development of this work, with its destabilization of the veils between magic and illusion, reality and dreams.
Magic Hour was born from the artist’s recurring daydream of visiting a witch's house in the woods. Saxelby views this house as a sheltering structure for all kinds of resistances, like powerful, shape-shifting, monstrous, autonomous modes of femininity. She looks to the witch as a feminist haunting of patriarchal capitalist forms of knowledge that give legitimacy only to what can be measured, rationalized, categorized, and controlled. The witch’s house in magical fictions offers a different kind of reality: one in which magic subverts power, the uncanny unsettles reason, hybridity evades division, and the strange and taboo flirt with the unknowable and the repressed. Inside, the crystal ball and magic mirror are among the witch’s tools for seeing with “second sight,” glass objects that offer pathways to different perceptual faculties and intuitive responses that are not available through scientific objectivity and rational thought. The installation is a reconciliation of differing forces in tension: image and space, interior and material worlds, light and matter, daydreams and the political imaginary.
Propositions for Architectural Ornaments
Photo: Shan Turner-Carroll, Kate Warren, Gregory Stanley | Exhibition: Katzen Art Center at the American University Museum, Washington, D.C., USA, 2023
In the series Propositions for Architectural Ornaments, the artist invents a speculative language of sumptuous architectural adornment in ceramic and glass drawn from the play and artifice of costume jewelry. Her work treats architecture as a body whose adornments should change over time, as a building’s symbolic functions evolve with shifting values. Here, decoration is put forward as a strategy of subversion and reclamation, and the activities of dress up and play-pretend are seen as crucial forms of calling new worlds into being. Saxelby’s glittering ornaments resist Western architecture’s problematic ideals of naturalness, purity and authenticity. Instead, the artist combines color-shifting iridescent pigments, ceramic lustres, glass powders, and larger-than-life rhinestones and pearls to create her own dazzling technicolor architectural fantasy.
The series was exhibited at the Katzen Art Center at the American University Museum in a two-person exhibition titled Make-Believe with Devan Shimoyama. Make-Believe presented the fantastical world-building of the artists side-by-side. The exhibition considered the artists’ shared use of decoration and artifice as tools to mediate between the real and the imaginary in a post-pandemic world where fantasies play increasingly vital roles.
Photo: Kate Warren, Joe Gibson
To Future Women (2018, 2037) is a 20 year time capsule of letters written to the next generation of women to memorialize the 2017 Women's March and ongoing #MeToo movement. It is a networked interactive artwork that invites participants - women, men and all gendered identities - around the world to write a letter to women in twenty years time. Part art and part history, this collection of letters will be archived for twenty years in Washington, DC by national museums and re-exhibited in 2037 on the 20th anniversary of the Women’s March. To Future Women uses the platform of art to historicize one of the largest single protests in global history.
To date, To Future Women has received over 3000 letters in 10 different languages, including from Hillary Clinton and Dr Jill Biden, and been covered by press all over the world. The project launched at The Phillips Collection on 21st January, 2018, the one year anniversary of the Women's March, and traveled to different cultural institutions in Washington, DC over the following six months, including the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, the Anacostia Art Center, the Smithsonian Arts & Industries Building and IA&A at Hillyer.
Lullaby
Performance/Choreography: Vanessa Soudan | CINEMATOGRAPHY: Katie Schuler | Photography: KristIn Adair | sound: great waitress (Laura Altman, MoniCa Brooks and Magda Mayas)
Lullaby (2017-2019) is a 2-channel video installation that explores the relationship between architecture, gender and ritual within the monumental landscape of Washington, DC. Lullaby documents a series of performances staged at five of the monuments on Washington’s National Mall. Collaborating with performers Viva Soudan and Bailey Nolan, the artist developed a series of imagined ritual gestures that repurpose the heroic forms and masculine iconography ubiquitous in the nation’s capital. In doing so, Saxelby questions the symbolic spaces in which we perform our identities and value systems today.
Leveraging the classical propositions of the Greco-Roman derived monuments, the performers mold their bodies into the architectural forms, in turn inviting the forms to fit them. Through mirroring and contorting the architecture in the editing process, Saxelby manipulates the existing structures to create her own imagined virtual architectures. These espouse a new symbolic order that emphasizes the spaces in between. Entitled Lullaby, this work reflects Saxelby’s interest in ephemeral and performative systems of transmitting cultural knowledge and value systems in contrast to architecture’s permanence and rigidity. Lullaby seeks to collide the timely and the anachronistic, the poetic and the political, the imagined and the real.
The Architecture of a Witch's Hut
Photo: Subodh Samudre
The Architecture of a Witch’s Hut (2017) is an interactive installation stemming from the idea that a witch’s home is one of the few typologies of architecture built by a woman for herself. The artist undertook the process of independently building her own structure in seven days - its height determined by how high she could reach on a ladder and its joinery determined by the tools and materials on hand. Created during an artist residency in upstate New York, its form references the site’s surrounding New England architecture and, with it, the real history of witch burning in the area 300 years prior. The project culminated in a collective burning of the structure with fellow artists in residence and the small town’s local community, reclaiming fire from a destructive and violent force to one of memorialisation.
BREAK
With guest performances by Machiko Motoi, Elizabeth Hogan and Adam Gottlieb. Photo: Kai Wasikowski
Finalist | 64th Blake Prize
Part installation, part audience-driven performance, BREAK (2016) examines ceremonial acts of catharsis involving the creation and destruction of totemic or sacred objects. The artist created a subversive space that facilitated a ritual performance which allowed for a temporary suspension of normal social behavior – particularly that within an art gallery. BREAK consists of a white wall-mounted grid, a new kind of shrine, housing ceramic figures developed from the artist’s research into the ubiquitous and ancient ceremonial use of dolls. In front sits a plinth that has been transformed into an altar.
With no formal instructions, members of the audience are intuitively invited to select a ritual doll and - standing on a pedestal facing the collective audience - smash it. Raising questions about the way museum objects are thought of as being able to transform the viewer morally or spiritually, BREAK collides the objective, rational, contemporary art spectacle with an audience driven, sacrificial destruction of artworks. A collaboration with a group of three performance artists lead to a series of evocative and emotive performances that played the role of opening ceremony and audience instruction.
Ritual Gathering
Edible sculpture in collaboration with renowned australian patissier Adriano Zumbo. Photo: Kai Wasikowski
Finalist | 64th Blake Prize
Ritual Gathering (2016) transforms a modern birthday celebration into a powerful symbolic event. The participatory installation disrupts the spatial hierarchies and viewing protocol of an art museum context to antagonize and reimagine the conventional language of art. The work sought to highlight the audience’s intuitive, triggered response to a deeply ingrained ritual process by presenting them with specifically arranged motifs to which they had to respond with no instruction.
The installation’s focus is a large painted cake - a living artwork that is consumed on the exhibition’s Opening Night - created in collaboration with Australia’s most celebrated patissier Adriano Zumbo. Twelve hand-painted birthday hats appear to float at head height under which twelve cushions act as place settings, inviting audience members to sit together and participate. It intended to question the contemporary Western dislocation between art and ritual by challenging the audience’s role within the gallery space.