In the 2nd edition of the Friend of a Friend project, Raster invites you to an encounter of three artists from three continents: Flo Kasearu from Estonia, Sachiko Kazama from Japan, and Michelle Rawlings from the United States. Each of them works in a different medium and cultural context, employing an individual, expressive language. In varying ways, all of them negotiate the social and political dimensions of artistic work.
Flo Kasearu (born in 1985) is the founder of a private house museum, which together with the adjoining garden constitutes the site and subject of her artistic activities. Kasearu addresses art institutions—museums and schools—in her own contrary fashion, inviting their staff to work on her Tallinn estate. Her installations, performances and actions also concern problems of nationalist rhetoric and the presence of women in culture. At the exhibition we present a specially created installation by the artist as well as works from her series Startup (2018), made from stones left over from the construction of the Korean Garden project in the yard of the Flo Kasearu House Museum in an exchange with the Gwangju Biennale (2016).
Sachiko Kazama (born in 1972) is an expressive artist of black-and-white woodcuts on political and social themes. The point of departure for her works may be both contemporary and historical events, which the artist transforms into a tale of her own, full of subtle humour and fantasy. Using traditional graphic techniques, Kazama alludes to the history of this genre and its modern incarnations, from political satire to contemporary comics and manga. Her works are found in the collections of the most important art museums in Japan but so far have not been shown widely in Europe.
Michelle Rawlings (born in 1980) is primarily a painter. Her intimate-scaled works are a study of contemporary visual culture from a woman’s or girl’s perspective. Rawlings is interested in the collision of the traditional painterly medium and the modernist language of abstraction with digital reality: the structure of pixels and the dynamic of social media. Her works combine the lightness of virtual paintings with festishistic quality of materials, the canon of art history with the spontaneous and random nature of the Instagram profiles of teenage girls. The exhibition will present the artist’s latest paintings, created in the last few months.
