![\"Olympia](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/OS1.jpg\")
(left) Coat: Prada, Top and jeans: Olympia’s own (right) Shirt: Calvin Klein, Trousers: Louis Vuitton<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
(left) Coat: Prada, Top and jeans: Olympia’s own (right) Shirt: Calvin Klein, Trousers: Louis Vuitton<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cIt seems like our society in general is constantly travelling. It\u2019s a life lived in transit.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n SLEEK travelled to Dallas to watch Olympia Scarry hit the tracks with four-time Olympic gold medallist Michael Johnson<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":34247,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[11856,139,3980],"tags":[38,4268,5063,5064,5065,5066,680,5067,5068,5069,5019],"class_list":["post-34256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sleek-art","category-art","category-tech","tag-art","tag-benedict-brink","tag-dallas","tag-frank-seidlitz","tag-harlems","tag-michael-johnson","tag-nike","tag-olympia-scarry","tag-olympic-gold-medallist","tag-olympics","tag-sleek-50"],"acf":{"main_category":null,"legacy":"1","exclude_from_ads":null,"hero_title":null,"subtitle":null,"hero":null,"teasers":null,"facebook_image":null,"related_articles":null,"next_article":null,"sleek_card_focus":null,"content":null},"yoast_head":"\n
\nEver eager to take up a challenge, SLEEK travelled to Dallas to watch Olympia Scarry hit the tracks with four-time Olympic gold medallist Michael Johnson.
\nA few days later, the Swiss-American artist welcomed us to her Harlem studio. There we met an ambitious creative who doesn’t let anything get in the way of her work. What follows is a conversation about the merits of keeping fit and retaining focus while being constantly on the run.
\n
\nSLEEK: We just followed you to Dallas, where you trained with Michael Johnson, the four-time gold medallist. How did this happen?
\n<\/strong>OLYMPIA SCARRY: I recently took up running. I started September 1st and I haven\u2019t stopped since: every day, once a day, I run a short distance. Then Nike reached out and asked if I\u2019d be interested in training with Michael Johnson in Texas as if I was preparing for the Rio Olympics. So I accepted, and here I am testing my potential.
\nAnd has running influenced your practice, too?
\n<\/strong>My practice is cerebral, so shifting my attention to something physical is necessary. It helps my practice in that it releases chemicals that apparently make your brain focus. Therefore it\u2019s beneficial to both my sanity and my creativity.
\nSo would you agree that art and sport have a special relationship?
\n<\/strong>I\u2019m definitely interested in the history of aesthetic depictions of sport. One such work is German director Leni Riefenstahl\u2019s film about the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics, \u2018Olympia\u2019. Riefenstahl was commissioned to realize it by Hitler, and after the war she was condemned as a fellow traveller of the Nazi government. Nevertheless, \u2018Olympia\u2019, remains critically acclaimed for its technical brilliance, not least its depiction of the African-American athlete Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals at the event. Despite its provenance, what I find fascinating about this film is its portrayal of the body and the diversity of its forms. Having seen it I created works whereby I selected a collection of stills featuring athletes\u2019 hands from the film, and produced a series of ultra-violet studies that were printed on prosthetic plastic. So yes, there seems to be this connection between the two disciplines.
\nAnd in terms of art, what else are you working on?
\n<\/strong>I work on a number of different projects simultaneously. For instance, right now I\u2019m creating video pieces using recordings of extreme elemental conditions out at sea. At the same time I\u2019m making large scale, abstract landscapes, which I\u2019m then printing on paper. The source material for this work is found footage from surveillance cameras in nature.<\/p>\n
\n\u201cI want to explore how technology is replacing the notion of the natural sublime.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n![\"Olympia](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/OS2.jpg\")
Shirt: Calvin Klein, Trousers: C\u00e9line<\/p>\n
\nThese are the works that we can see hanging on your studio wall. From afar they are quite difficult to make out, but when you get up close you can see minute details.
\n<\/strong>Yes, there are different hues and saturations, and there\u2019s also pixilation. But the pixels are quite large, almost like brushstrokes, in a way. It\u2019s as visually abstract as it is specific in the title, which marks: meters above sea level, wind speed, temperature, time and the date.
\nWhat\u2019s the idea behind this technique?
\n<\/strong>I wanted to explore how technology is replacing the notion of the natural sublime. When you look at how the Romantics worked, it\u2019s very different from how the concept of nature is currently mediated. Caspar David really got into<\/em> nature, whereas today, there seems to be some distance in our experience of it. Despite this, digital images of nature still proliferate via the internet, and this distancing has created what I refer to as a technological sublime.
\nSo it\u2019s both mediation and distance?
\n<\/strong>Yes. It might seem unfathomable, but a good parallel is watching the news: because there\u2019s this physical gap between you and the event you\u2019re watching or being told about, it can be hard to connect. Nonetheless, you still have a<\/em> connection to it because of television; it\u2019s just not the same as being a participant or a witness \u2013 you\u2019re not directly involved. And that\u2019s how I think about the technological sublime. It\u2019s a force that at once reinforces and displaces our sense of being in the world.
\nNature and technology are dominant themes in your work. Yet they appear to be absent in your recent project, \u201cThe End is The Beginning is the End the Beginning\u201d, a series of crying Madonnas.
\n<\/strong>It\u2019s funny you say that, because these are also found images. And actually, distance, here, is important, because the sculptures are by anonymous individuals, as are the photos. They all elicit a very human action \u2013 crying. Therefore, you can feel the emotion despite being removed from the event. \u2018The End\u2026\u2019 is about history repeating itself, infinite cycles. I guess the access points are the tears, which are relevant and a reaction to what\u2019s going on in the world today.
\nSome other curious objects in your oeuvre are the neck pillows cast from rubber. They\u2019re such weird objects. What\u2019s their significance?
\n<\/strong>For me, neck pillows adhere to the market of endless and mindless travel. They\u2019re an emblem of survival, a modern day prosthetic, like a sculpture for our time. I\u2019ve never used one though.
\n <\/p>\n![\"Olympia](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/OS4.jpg\")
Shirt: Sunspel, Trousers: C\u00e9line<\/p>\n
\nIs it also a nod to the artist\u2019s lifestyle these days?
\n<\/strong>No, it seems like it\u2019s our society in general that is constantly travelling \u2013 a life lived in transit.
\nYou seem to still travel a lot. How important is it to get out and about?
\n<\/strong>There\u2019s a lot to be said for an occasional geographical; it changes your ideas. When I\u2019m at the studio I\u2019m on my own. So it\u2019s good for me to get out and be with other people. It helps me get different perspectives. That includes artists, naturally. But through my work I also have conversations with people from different fields, such as marine biologists, nature conservationists, police officers and writers. When you\u2019re working with varying subjects and materials, you interact with interesting characters.
\nLet\u2019s talk about \u2018Elevation1049\u2019, the curatorial project that you started three years ago in Gstaad that\u2019s happening again in 2017. When it began, it was your first time working as a curator. How\u2019s it different to being an artist?
\n<\/strong>In a way it\u2019s a continuation of both. The lines are blurred. They feed each other. It\u2019s inspiring and humbling at the same time. I guess it\u2019s the best of both worlds.
\nThe debut show featured 33 artists, including Pamela Rosenkranz, Christian Marclay and Olaf Breuning among others, who are all Swiss. In a time of supranational biennales and this seems a little odd. Why this approach? And what does it mean to be Swiss in the 21st<\/sup> century?<\/strong>
\n<\/strong>Actually, one important principle that guided the first iteration was the idea that the landscape directed our curatorial focus. We wanted to question what it meant to be from a certain place, and whether that still means something today. I was born in Switzerland but I didn\u2019t grow up there, so for me, \u2018Elevation1049<\/a>\u2019 was also about trying to find an identity while discovering whether nationality is even important anymore. As such, using Switzerland as a concept to ground this exploration seemed useful, as it\u2019s always had this reputation of being neutral. At the time I was also immersed in the work of Emma Kunz. She was a Swiss healer and artist who believed that one must nourish and treat oneself medically with elements taken from where you were born. This was in the 1950s, and I was interested to see whether her ideas were still relevant today. With \u2018Elevation\u2026\u2019 we are trying to bring back this notion of site-specificity by engaging with the landscape and by taking our time
\nThe artists at the first \u2018Elevation\u2026\u2019 were invited to create such unique works in the <\/strong>Gstaad landscape. Are you approaching the 2017 iteration in the same way?
\n<\/strong>The first exhibition was comprised mainly of site-specific installations. But this next one will focus on durational works, sound installations, and performances, as the mountains lend themselves so much to sound, through echoes, refractions with the ice and also absorptions with snow.
\n\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n
\n![\"Olympia](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/OS3.jpg\")
\n
\nThe second part of our photo shoot <\/strong>takes place in and around your studio in Harlem. What\u2019s it like to be working here as an artist?
\n<\/strong>Harlem is inspiring. I actually made a series of sculptures out of discarded chicken bones that I collected there. I cast them in bronze and gold, and named them after the streets they were found on, some which of are named after Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, and Martin Luther King. I used to live in Harlem, but now I just have a studio there. In a strange way it feels like it\u2019s still an untouched part of New York, even though it\u2019s in Manhattan and it\u2019s so close to it all. There are still social issues that need to be addressed, so it\u2019s still rough but great at the same time.
\nI thought former New York mayor Rudi Giuliani helped rebuild the area in the late Nineties?
\n<\/strong>Ha! He only got as far as 125th Street, and I actually told him that when I met him! Of course, it\u2019s better than it used to be. Marcus Garvey Park used to be extremely dangerous, apparently the most dangerous park in the city. Today it\u2019s safer, but there is still a lot of poverty in the area.
\nLastly, you seem like a natural in front of the camera. But how would you describe your everyday style?
\n<\/strong>Functional. Most days I\u2019m in the the studio, so I wear corduroy pants, a T-shirt, sneakers and my glasses, if you must know!
\n
\nPhotography: Benedict Brink
\nProduction: Frank Seidlitz
\n
\nThis print feature is taken from Sleek issue #50, available for purchase\u00a0on our\u00a0online shop<\/a>\u00a0jetzt.<\/strong> \n <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"