WhyWhyArt

To be like Water?   Exhibiting Artist & Artwork

Island6 Arts Collective   //   Rock It Port to Starboard

Rock It Port to Starboard, 2017

RGB LED Display, acrylic painting, paper collage, teakwood frame

66.5x47cm
To check if spray is getting in the engine, she climbs inside the hull on a sunny day. If she sees light at the edges, she replaces the gaskets and latch. She keeps an eye on mating surfaces for drips, salt stains, weepage and ridges of crud. If she does absolutely nothing else, she looks at the exhaust risers and head gaskets. Vibration and settling can cause misalignment. She eschews strap hold-downs in favor of threaded rods and locknuts. She wraps her hair every night in a silk scarf. She squeezes hoses. Soft, mushy, checked, discolored or shedding hoses can collapse under suction. It starves the engine. She knows that even stainless fasteners corrode. Crevice corrosion looks like streaks of rust spewing from fastenesrs. She removes, replaces, and rebeds them. She finds the cause of the wet core. She examines gelcoat for imperfections, particularly on leading edges: stem, keel, and chines. She repairs with epoxy. She ensures shafts are centered on their bearings. A minor misalignment is multiplied by the length of the shaft. She checks the stuffing box and even the struts. Once sacrificial anodes lose half their weight (not size), she replaces them. If an anode is full-sized but looks like swiss cheese, it’s no good. She doesn’t paint them, ever.
The island6 Art Collective is an artist-run studio, gallery space and creative platform established in Shanghai’s M50 art district on Moganshan Lu. Headed by French artist Thomas Charvériat, the mixed-media productions of island6 incorporate painting, LED, performance, video, and text into a comprehensive and ecstatic body of work that is markedly collaborative and loud. The island6 Art Collective has previously exhibited with WhyWhyArt at the Babel Me exhibition.

The medium-blending style of island6 presents the interaction of character and environment in a incongruent world. An expertly created landscape, delicately amassed through painting and photography, cages graphic cartoonish minstrel who pursue their programming. The aping-around of island6’s little darlings, some of which are actual apes, in fine settings takes a seat at the table for a dialogue about urban renewal. The individual interacts in a space they themselves never made, but in which they are doomed to forever fulfill their programming.

island6’s work feeds off collaboration. That goes for the production team as well as the viewer who moves at the core of their efforts, as a step inside their gallery mined with motion-activated sensors will reveal. The artistic director, Charvériat, received a Bachelor’s of Fine Art and photography from the New York School of Visual Arts and a Masters of Fine Arts and Sculpture from Columbia University. He chiefs a marauding band of artisans, techies, curators, researchers, writers, and one toddler who, at this point, has virtually no say. He is particularly known for his work in LED and video and incursions into the use of SMS messaging in interactive works. Running off the whims of a vanguard of merry pranksters, works are either replications in winding series or utterly apart from anything previously seen from the studio. One thing you can trust: artworks produced by island6 are consistently a spectacle.