“I make sculptures out of objects I collect from the streets,” Amra Causevic told “Art in America” during a recent studio visit.
“Hauling materials in the city has always been a challenge,” she continued. “I just walk around the neighborhood and find things spontaneously: maybe stacks of egg cartons, or some little yellow plastic thing that clearly belonged to someone. I find myself wondering where these things came from, what their history is.”
Causevic is one of five emerging New York-based artists we visited for our Summer 2023 New Talent issue.
Read an edited version of their conversation here: tinyurl.com/5de37ja5
Art in America: https://www.artnews.com/c/art-in-america/
Credits:
Featuring Amra Causevic
Director/Producer/Editor: Christopher Garcia Valle
DP: Jasdeep Kang
Interviewer: Emily Watlington
Video Transcript
Foreign I’m in Manhattan New York and I’m a multi-disciplinary artist me being in my studio I’d like to think of it as like a wet kitchen I like a space of collaboration and getting messy and like really working with the feelings I have inside and just kind of healing myself through
The process of making it’s like I almost have to look to the dark side to get the light side and I don’t intend this to ever happen but like humor somehow comes out like I think about this idea of this is like material baggage or like historic
Baggage that we carry from place to place and like the importance of keeping certain things and this is how materiality comes into play with my work because I mainly collect um objects from the streets and materials from the streets to minimize things for myself like for my body and labor
And just everything I would just walk around the neighborhood and there was always Stacks and stacks of like egg cartons that I would find and I found ways to use it to turn into paper pulp and then just what by walking in the neighborhood I would find hot objects
Like yellow little things weird classic things that feel like belong to something but uh you know you don’t know where they came from or what their history is All of these objects on this wall have text written next to them they’re either my own personal associations to that to them or they’re like what I think they are or where I found them so I tried to be like actual and Fantastical and then if I have friends or people
Come to the studio and they’re like oh this reminds me of this I like write it down um so I like the objects themselves to become a story and I like them to become like as a collective a form of Storytelling you know using objects or things from the past to sort of
Reimagine a future that’s possible and my muscles uh so there’s there’s like all kinds of materials embedded the material list is it’s really a huge there’s salt there’s paper there’s glass there’s hair there’s like all of these things and I imagine like thousand years from now this is
Like a Sci-Fi story where you know people are digging in sand dunes of what was once the ocean and they come across these vessels and uh and they’re like embedded with objects from the past as like a form of recollecting the moment so um yeah they’re a form of a marker my
Work was very very interactive for a long time and I think it still is and I need that interaction because I think for me that’s the only way to get excited about anything is through touch and like being within a space um I really like just to put my hands on
Things and touch and um yeah like a kid in the playground basically without any like doubt I just go into it
Video Amra Causevic’s Found-Object Sculptures Address the Baggage of Forced Migration was uploaded on 07/18/2023 by Art in America Youtube channel.