Tissue toilet cover and Flemish headdresses

This Saturday was not the first time I laid eyes on Nina Katchadourian. I met her once before during a one-month intensive summer class in New York. While the rest of our visits were to the studios of a variety of artists, Nina Katchadourian generously invited us to her Brooklyn apartment. Sitting in her sofa we watched a slide show and listened to her as she spoke freely about her art practice. It didn’t take me long to realize that she is an artist motivated by her curiosity and perhaps even her restlessness. Her art has a certain fresh flair of spontaneity. The work presently exhibited at Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco, titled “Seat Assignment,” most definitely could be described as such.

I personally have a very hard time being productive when I’m flying. I always plan to get a lot of work done, but I eventually end up just staring out the window, dozing off. To the outmost I might actually open up a book and read a couple of pages before I doze off again. Nina Katchadourian has managed to do what I would only dream of. She has created, and is still creating, a body of work that uses the time spent on airplane as an opportunity for productivity. “Seat Assignment: Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style” started as an unintentional lavatory art project during a domestic flight. Today it is part of a more extensive project including over 2 500 photographs and video, made on more that 70 flights.

On her website she writes, “while in the lavatory on a domestic flight in March 2010, I spontaneously put a tissue paper toilet cover seat cover over my head and took a picture in the mirror using my cellphone.” Looking at the image she realized that it resembled 15th-century Flemish portraiture paintings and the discovery motivated her to continue explore what the plain had to offer in terms of different kinds of headdresses. When she landed 14 hours later she had a whole new set of photographs that partly can be seen hanging on the appropriate red-painted walls at Catharine Clark. The whole setup recalls Western traditional painting galleries where even the frames have a historical dignity to them.

In the Flemish paintings they typically set their models in front of a dark background. It is uniform and nondescript. Nina Katchadourian, who was wearing a thin black scarf on that flight, decided to hang it up behind her, and in that way recreate its neutral but dramatic backdrop. Even though it was a project that came on a whim, it is quite clear that the paintings of the old masters must have made a strong imprint on her. She did after all manage to replicate a dozen of its more typical headdresses and postures.

The exhibition at Catharine Clark will be up until May 26, 2012.