Anthropologist and artist, curator and author, Susan Ossman offers a vibrant global perspective in art that celebrates the collaborative process. From an ongoing, fascinating, continually growing construct: The Moving Matters Traveling Workshop to light-filled oil paintings, silk sculptures, installations, and the written word, Ossman inspires the explorer in all of us.
Perhaps her most passionate work, her on-going project Moving Matters began as a seminar that explored the creative responses artists and anthropologists shaped, as inspired by Ossman’s own book, Moving Matters, Paths of Serial Migration. It has evolved into a collective, where art is developed based on the experience of living in different countries. They include the U.S. – specifically, California, the Netherlands, France, Romania, and Germany. The travels, and the art created from them are based on her concept of serial migration, which refers to those who have “migrated” and lived in different countries repeatedly, resulting in shifts in terms of lifestyle, work, and position.
Belonging, community, and identity are amont the ideas she explores through the workshop, as participants uncover a wide range of visual and emotional language and express it to viewers through performances and experiential presentations such as film. Focusing on both the individual and collaborative experience of mobile migration, the project seamlessly weaves Ossman’s studies of anthropology with her work as an artist and curator.
The project, which Ossman founded in 2013, has included workshops, live performances in museums and in public spaces from the site of the Berlin Wall to Amsterdam to Melbourne to the a recent iteration depicted above, Mapquest, in Riverside, Calif. While each workshop or performance is unique, a minimum of four artists involved in the MMTW’s previous work continues to collaborate as locations are changed.
Ossman’s own art is as fascinating and multi-layered as this concept and study, and viewers who take in her thought-provoking work can see how each aspect of her work reflects the other. Ossman paints, draws, and shapes installatons using a mix of materials; she creates collaborative projects and performances.
Her paintings are rich in abstract expression, as in the powerful surge of golden light that infuses and illuminates “Strung Out,” a large scale oil work that evokes brilliantly colored sheets on a line, as well as an amorphous human figure.
Her “Poppy Experiments” are equally aglow – or perhas abloom is a better word – with large scale, delicate floral images in a variety of mediums taking viewers within the fragile embrace of petals. Time, space, and light all dance through her work, and one is struck by the emotional vastness of the images.
The lush abstract oils in “Conversations” pairs large and smaller canvases in a kind of visual dialog; the twinned pieces reference and reflect each other’s palette. Ossman describes the images as representing two people meeting and talking in the alrger piece, with the smaller work representing the result of this encounter. The pairing conveys emotion and meaning not easily expressed in the original verbal and personal conversation.
Whether she is working on canvas or on silk, forming sculptural works or installations, her work is above all else alive, exploratory, and powerful in both palette and form.
In her installation “”Wood/Words, What goes up in Smoke,” Ossman illuminates the fruit of women’s labors. She describes the work as using pieces of “wood” in the form of the fascia, similar to gathered sheefs of wheat and also symbolic of Roman power and justice. Written upon these branches in regional languages are the words “gather wood, gather words;” below them are texts that describe each objects referencing never-ending labor in the fields.
From her exhibition Femine Abstractions last summer to her installation “Mediterranean Sea Scroll,” there is both an exuberance and a transitory feeling to Ossman’s work – the spirit of the traveler, both the physical and the emotional aspects – infuses it. And, these works are also powerfully enriched through Ossman’s vibrant cultural and societal exploration in anthropology.
As a writer, Ossman explores both art and anthropology through texts that seek to illuminate her own relationship with both; for example Wissen/Schaffen serves as a catalog for and exploration of a 2017 exhibition by Ossman and Claire Lambe that presented a process of knowledge creation through an advanced study group of scholars and artists. Moving Matters paints a written portrait of serial migrants through stories of a variety of subjects who travel freely between borders; it may be the emotional borders that they cross, their ability to sustain ties to past homelands, and their own self-reliance that fascinates Ossman the most; the work is also politically resonant in its exploration of nations, boundaries, borders, and the fluidity among this mobile population, and ultimately within all of us.
Ossman’s juxtaposition of art, the written word, and her passionate exploration of anthropology is evident in all aspects of her work, and within each element: she casts a wide and inclusive net that crosses all borders, intellectual, geographic, and metaphysical. We travel with Ossman to exotic places and even through time, and are the richer for the experience. In the words of Marcel Proust, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” Ossman opens ours to her own vision.
- Genie Davis; photos, Susan Ossman
