Rococo Remastered: Q&A with Noel Kassewitz

Noel Kassewitz is a contemporary artist and third-generation Floridian currently based in Washington, DC. After receiving her BFA in Studio Painting from the University of Florida and working with the prestigious Rubell Museum, she later completed an artist residency in Carrara, Italy with marble master sculptor Boutros Romhein.

Kassewitz has guest written for Union of Concerned Scientists and her work has been featured in the Washington Post, Huffington Post, Financial Times, and PBS WETA. Kassewitz has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally, with recent solo exhibitions at Arlington Arts Center (Arlington, VA) and IA&A at Hillyer (Washington, DC), along with exhibitions in Miami, FL; Chicago, Il; and State College, PA; as well as in Milan and Bologna, Italy. Her work was recently acquired by the University of Maryland’s CAPP program for their permanent public art collection.

Rococo Remastered was on view at Hillyer on January 3 – February 2, 2020.

Your work examines your own relationship as an artist with a rapidly changing cultural and environmental landscape, often creating work that simultaneously serves as “artwork and a survival tool.” Tell us about what this means to you.

I think there is a lot of incredible artwork being made that explores and exploits new advances in technology, but I chose to go in the other direction for a specific reason. We live in a world where constant adaptation at breathtaking speeds has become the norm. I find it interesting trying to navigate this digital moment in a much slower paced physical body and find a lot of correlations to that within traditional forms of artwork like painting and sculpture. Simultaneously, the majority of the world’s population does not have the luxury of simply “moving somewhere else” or using technology to save themselves in climate crisis situations and will instead be forced to jury-rig solutions to survive and adapt to newly inhospitable environments.

Finding ways to adapt, or maladapt, my works to a world rapidly leaving them behind has become an interesting metaphorical concept for me. In weaving, sewing, painting, dying, and salvaging materials, the studio becomes part wistful shrine, part research and development lab for continuous adaptations and augmentations needed for painting to survive. About three years ago, I started exploring various ways to make paintings climate change ready, particularly in regards to rising sea levels. I have spent time extensively researching materials and consulted with an expert art conservator. I learned to weave my own canvas and embed buoys and other found flotation devices into the fabric of my paintings, as exemplified in the series They say hope floats, but I’d rather be sure. I have tried approaches as simple and playful as wrapping existing paintings in common pool noodles and as complex as creating new waterproof paintings using synthetic sailcloth & marine foam, as in the piece Rococo Remastered: Sunset on the Empire, which I used to float down the Potomac River in August of 2018.

Your exhibition at Hillyer, Rococo Remastered drew connections between climate change, art historical references, and Miami pool culture. Those seem like three very different concepts, can you tell us about how these intersect for you and how you brought them together for a cohesive exhibition and body of work?

I know they can seem so different initially, but theres an important common thread that ties them all together: namely the complacency and absurdities that accompany a late capitalist society. As a big believer in the cyclical nature of things, I often find myself looking to the past in an attempt to understand our current times and it was diving deeper into art history that I discovered our current moment’s historic parallel. This discovery is what launched my color palette in a new direction and began this body of works.

Rococo, is the term used for a particular artistic style that was very popular in the few decades leading up to the the French Revolution. It was characterized by a pastel palette and a focus on the playful, decadent, and frivolous by a governing aristocracy who were intently ignoring the warning signs of a system out of balance. Then the French Revolution happened… which rebalanced the system, but at a very bloody cost. I can’t help but relate this chapter of history to the current one we are in. There is growing inequality between the classes in society and an increasingly unstable climate, both politically and environmentally. What caught my eye artistically was that pastel colors were suddenly in vogue again. It even had a name, “Millennial Pink,” and unlike typical color trends it was popular year after year after year. Is it a pattern that we seek these colors to soothe or fool ourselves as outside pressures builds?

My hometown of Miami is the natural stage for this story to play out upon. Sea levels are rising, without a doubt, and as one of the “canary in the coal mine” cities Miami is now regularly flooding. Yet, decked out in the pastels of Art Deco (which, in and of itself was a re-examination of the Rococo time period), I still see realtors attempting to sell properties as if the city isn’t in critical danger. Miami, with it’s over-the-top, celebrity-studded pool parties proudly flaunts its excessive and conspicuous consumption, which means the stage is being set for a clash between this late capitalist “the party must go on!” refusal to capitulate and the climate crisis. I believe people will still be in these pools, continuing to party even as the seas rise and pour in.

Which brings us back to this body of work. The Rococo Remastered series is a body of my climate-adapted works that draws its aesthetics from the Rococo. Frivolous, tongue-in-cheek, and hosting an abundance of pastel tones they nod towards to the absurdities of our contemporary late capitalist culture, while simultaneously being disaster-ready through their buoyant capabilities. It focuses on that moment when the boundary between pool and sea is erased and I use pool floats injected with expanding marine foam to recast some of the classical characters from famous Rococo paintings. For instance, Apollo the Sun God becomes a “bro” in sunglasses unaware that the party is ending. The nymph Europa, who is abducted into the sea by Poseidon disguised as a bull, warns of the dangers in allowing the temporary allure of a bull market economy to drag us all under with it. Putti, the cherubic figures often populating historic paintings, function as personifications of our naivety and the baser activities we engage in to distract ourselves.

Whether the coded warnings in these works are enough to get people to change in time remains to be seen. Yet, with the built-in survival capabilities of these paintings, one this is assured: regardless of what their collectors do, as sea levels rise and inundate cities, my paintings will float up and off the walls of their homes, bearing witness to this important time in history and surviving to be found at a later date.

Do you have any predictions as to how your work might evolve alongside climate change?

Our climate crisis is manifesting in many forms. Rising sea levels are one, but there are also stronger storms, longer droughts, torrential flash flooding, and severe wildfires. These all can then ripple into food shortages, destabilization of governing systems, and widespread immigration crisis. There’s a lot to unpack in a situation of this magnitude and I can see a lifetime devoted to the attempt. I’ve already begun exploring other modes of preservation, such as encasing drawings in sheets of resin – like prehistoric insects caught in amber. I hope that my works continue to evolve alongside the situation and through their cultural push-back and irony help highlight the fallacies we are unwilling to face while we still have time to understand, change course, and adapt.

You recently took a trip and were “off the grid”. Can you tell us about where you were and what that was like? Did it inspire or recharge you artistically?

The trip was quite the adventure — let tell you about the miracle that is the gray whales of San Ignacio Lagoon and how I lived at an eco-camp in the desert for a week all so I could experience it firsthand!

We arrived at Kuyima Eco Camp on March 10th after driving for 5 hours through the sparsely populated Baja peninsula of Mexico to the small mission town of San Ignacio, and then one further hour through truly remote desert terrain. Once at the eco-camp, you get assigned to a small cabin or tent. Since my mom, grandmother, and I were traveling together, we were assigned one of the cabins capable of sleeping three. The camp facilities are run by solar power and they had a composting toilet in addition to two “boat” toilets. You shower by filling a bucket with solar heated water and then take it to your shower stall. Needless to say, I was living out my environmentalist best life.

What’s so unbelievable about the experience is what happens once you go out in tiny boats into the waters of San Ignacio Lagoon. It is one of the only places in the world where whales choose to engage with people and come up to your boat! There’s no food involved, which makes the encounter so additionally surprising. But most surprising of all is that Gray whales were once hunted to the BRINK of extinction. Whalers dubbed Gray whales in particular the “Devil Fish” because they wouldn’t passively give up when harpooned but instead would capsize boats and do everything in their power to fight back. Gray whales are long lived enough that some of the whales from then would still be alive today… which makes their choice of peaceful interaction so unbelievable! Here we were horrifically killing them mere decades ago and, through an incredible act of forgiveness, they now interact with us and even bring their babies over to the boats. So you better believe that over the course of the next two and a half days I reached out to touch and kiss those whales every time they chose to interact with us. It gave me such hope. We might have just enough time left to learn to co-exist with nature and be forgiven for the path we’ve previously taken.

When you returned home, a lot had changed quickly due to the COVID-19. What was it like to return home and to your studio in the midst of this?

It was a whirlwind! Again, being off the grid meant none of us knew how much things were escalating. When I finally got cell service again, my fiancé was adamant that I needed to get back into the country ASAP since the borders with Mexico could close at any moment. Luckily we made it back into the country with no issue, but of course we all then had to quarantine ourselves since we’d been passing through major international airports. I’m a believer in quantum physics and the possibility of multiple timelines, and that is exactly what this felt like. We had left the country on one timeline and come back in another. It was pretty surreal. Since then I would guess that I’ve been experiencing things with much the same mixture of emotions as everyone else. I am the type of artist that needs time to synthesize and process, so the pandemic has been pretty disruptive to my creative practice. Not to mention it delayed or canceled a lot of projects that were important to financially supporting my endeavors, which has resulted in mountains of paperwork on my end.

I’m happy to report though that the creative juices are flowing again. Last week, I noticed an appreciable mental shift that pushed me back into the studio to create. I’m curious to see how the effects of this global event ripple into the works of artists over the coming months and years.