2020 Residency Artist : Natalie Ball
I make art as proposals of refusal to complicate an easily affirmed and a consumed narrative without absolutes. - Natalie Ball
The Verbier 3-D Foundation is pleased to announce Native American artist Natalie Ball as our 2020 artist-in-residence. Continuing in the 5th year of the Verbier 3-D Foundation’s climate and glacial project, the artist will be invited to live in the deep Swiss Alps to consider current debates around climate change and the topic of WATER.
Natalie Ball was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. She has a Bachelor’s degree with a double major in Ethnic Studies and Art from the University of Oregon. She furthered her education in New Zealand at Massey University where she attained her Master’s degree, focusing on Indigenous contemporary art. Ball then relocated to her ancestral homelands to raise her three children.
Her work has been shown nationally and internationally: Vancouver Art Gallery, BC; Te Manawa Museum, NZ; Half Gallery, NY; Portland Art Museum, OR; Museum of Contemporary Native Art (MoCNA), NM; Seattle Art Museum, WA; and SculptureCenter, NY. Natalie attained her M.F.A. degree in Painting & Printmaking at Yale School of Art in 2018.
Currently, I am exploring gesture and materiality to create sculptures as Power Objects. I offer my objects as proposals of refusal to complicate an easily affirmed and consumed narrative and identity, without absolutes. I believe historical discourses of Native Americans have constructed a limited and inconsistent visual archive that currently misrepresents our past experiences and misinforms current expectations.
I excavate hidden histories, and dominant narratives to deconstruct them through a theoretical framework of auto-ethnography to move “Indian” outside of governing discourses in order to build a visual genealogy that refuses to line-up with the many constructed existences of Native Americans.
My goal is, for my art to lend itself as new texts, with new histories, and new manifestations, to add to the discussion of complex racial narratives that are critical to further realizing the self, the nation, and necessarily, our shared experiences and histories.
www.nataliemball.com
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Natalie Ball, Purse First, 2019
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Natalie Ball, To Be Continued, 2015
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Natalie Ball, In The Business of Reclaiming Space (video), 2018
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Natalie Ball, I bind you Nancy (detail), 2018.
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NEW WEBSITE ☼
The Verbier 3-D Foundation has launched our new wesbite!
Designed by Zurich based designer Nicolas Combes, the new site provides a clean platform for those to explore and get to know us better.
Check it out here.
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Karsten Födinger's ERRATIC EXPEDITION
at the Verbier Art Summit
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As part of our continued cultural partnership in 2020 with the Verbier Art Summit, we would like to invite you to experience two ERRATIC afternoons during the Summit with 2019 residency artist Karsten Födinger.
On 31 Jan, we invite you to join us at Medran lift station in Verbier to participate in Födinger's cultural intervention for the Summit weekend. Utilising the Swiss alpine infrastructure, Födinger will create an absurd moment by placing foreign tree species such as palm trees — as you find at the 'Riviera' down at Lake Geneva around Montreux — in the cargo baskets of the Televerbier cable cars that will constantly circulate, passing the tree line in both directions, greeting and waving to new arrivers and skiers.
The intervention refers to the local climate research which the artist began during his 2019 residency, in combination with his irritation by the 'Nizza Flair' of foreign trees together with French influenced architecture that is evoked in the town of Montreux.
Visitors are also invited on 1 Feb for a walk through the Verbier 3-D Sculpture Park with artist Karsten Födinger, curator Alexa Jeanne Kusber and Foundation Founders Kiki Thompson and Madeleine Paternot.
The walk will feature, PILIER ERRATIQUE, the new sculptural work by Födinger developed during his residency which is currently on exhibit at an altitude of 2,300 meters in the Verbier 3-D Sculpture Park.
More details can be found here:
www.3-dfoundation.com
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Karsten Födinger, Pilier Erratique, 2019 (in the Verbier 3-D Foundation Sculpture Park).
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Karsten Födinger preparatory research during residency.
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Födinger with his maquette for Pilier Erratique.
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2020 Verbier Art Summit
Resource Hungry: Our Cultured Landscape and its Ecological Impact
January 31–February 1, 2020
From January 31 to February 1, 2020, the Verbier Art Summit presents its fourth edition of free talks, in partnership with Jessica Morgan, Nathalie de Gunzburg Director of Dia Art Foundation in New York, who states, “This is a moment to reflect on doing less, better and for longer.” In the face of a rapidly expanding cultural world, the 2020 Summit asks how to envision a way forward in finding harmony between art, ecology and resources.
The 2020 Summit speakers include artists Jennifer Allora, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Joan Jonas, Lucy Raven and Stefan Kaegi; architects Adrian Lahoud and Philippe Rahm; curator Elvira Dyangani Ose; philosopher Djamila Ribeiro; art historian Dorothea von Hantelmann and El Último Grito (academic designer duo Professor Roberto Feo & Rosario Hurtado).
The interdisciplinary Summit programme offers perspectives on a resource hungry epoch, focusing on the impact of humans on the landscape across art, design, architecture and engineering. It tackles a variety of subjects ranging from the history of land art; the resources consumed by art and institutions; engineering and repercussions of other man-made forms on the environment; real and imagined landscapes as well as the future of art in the context of ecological crisis.
Join us at the Summit and let yourself be inspired by artists, writers, curators, museum directors, technology experts and the public discussing together topics for the future.
More information can be found here:
www.verbierartsummit.org
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Chloe Dewe Mathews during her 2016 residency.
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About the Verbier 3-D Foundation
The Verbier 3-D Foundation is a non-profit cultural organization dedicated to promoting contemporary art, environmentalism and education through its Artist Residency and Sculpture Park.
Founded in 2010 by New York-based artist Madeleine Paternot and Verbier-based artist Kiki Thompson, the Foundation creates an educational and cultural Artist Residency and Sculpture Park at an altitude of 2,300 meters, inspired by the stunning Alpine environment of Verbier, Switzerland.
Our mission is to support emerging and established talent by pushing artists out of their comfort zones, fostering development that might not be possible in the studio space.
In 2016, the Verbier 3-D Foundation launched a 5-year initiative that links art, education and glacier conservation curated by Alexa Jeanne Kusber and Paul Goodwin. The project supports artists joining the climate change debate.
Participating artists include: Chloe Dewe Mathews (UK), Olaf Breuning (CH) and James Capper (UK), Karsten Födinger (DE) and Natalie Ball (US).
This initiative acts as an integrated creative hub and a vital part of the cultural resurgence of Verbier, Switzerland.
For press inquiries, please contact Kiki Thompson.
For general and programming inquiries, please contact Alexa Jeanne Kusber.
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