Natalia Stuyk

0:05[Applause]

0:11hello my name is Natalia stoic and I'm a video artist I predominantly do work for brands making promotional videos on the internet just to summarize what I do some of them are music videos some of them are fashion films I do a lot of stuff on social media lots of video loops and stuff like that but a lot of my own personal work is more sort of experimental abstract working with shapes and textures and colors and yeah.

0:46So that's my show real but the project that I want to talk to you today is a new project which is completely different to the work that I've done up until now I don't know if you're familiar with a company called Melissa shoes but they are a Brazilian company who makes sustainable amazing shoes are very colorful and fun and very good for the environment and they're just a wonderful company we're collaborating on an installation to take over their gallery in and their Galleria in New York City in the summer I'd wanted to show you the final product but the deadline got pushed back.

1:30So it's still a work in progress but I'm really excited about it. And it's a completely new direction for me.

1:38So I really want to just share the design process and how it's all coming together. And some of the hurdles along the way.

1:45This is the Galleria in New York it's got these are actually 3d renders but I mean you'll still get the idea they're pretty forward-thinking brand really open to collaborating with artists and taking chances and creating new experiences for their customers and rather than creating just branded content I feel like they try and do something that it's more engaging and different and I think ultimately this creates such a strong bond between like getting to the store and the customer and the brand everything sort of comes together and they're quiet like they're just pretty dreamy group of people to work with as you walk in there's like two massive screens and there's like a walkway and you can see the product on either side and mirrors on the floors and then.

2:34This is kind of like the space so the brief was to somehow materialize my videos into real-life structures and I've always thought about this.

2:49But I've had no I just have no idea how to do it Melissa had identified work of mine that they felt would work well within the space but otherwise it's completely open brief and among the creatives in the room having an open brief is not always the best idea I use a lot of reflective materials in my videos and a lot of digital imagery that hints at something. That's like super real something tangible but it feels much more heightened and saturated none of it really does exists in a definable space either it's just kind of like floating in the middle of nowhere.

3:25So the brief was somehow to translate this aesthetic into a series of real structures that could inhabit the Galleria thankfully there's someone to help me do that which is this company called soft lab which is run by an architect called Michael civis and a lot of work that they do is already using a lot of the similar forms that I try to express digitally but I'm not used to the constraints of real-life objects and I'm not used to actual tangible material and purely digital artists so in videos the limit are the limit is my own technical ability I generally always find a way to get my point across but I feel like this is a whole different approach I also wanted to tell a story with the installation I needed a concept to ground it and bring it all together a lot of my work explores themes of escapism I travel a lot.

4:22And I feel like travel and new places new colors new textures influence my work a whole lot.

4:29So this the title that I've landed on has been but I saw which means paradise in Spanish and my family are from Spain so a lot of my work draws inspiration from the places that I I frequent a lot Spain in particular comes up again and again I try and echo like the slowness of it in like the loft my work is just really sort of tropical and fluid motions and stuff like that.

4:56So the concept so I settled on chard light structures that I'm generally quite fascinated by in nature so the image on the right hand side is a photo that I took in my garden of birds-of-paradise flowers and this sort of chard like structure has a versatility to look organic and digital at the same time just if you cover it in a different color or add a different texture or change the context of it it fuses the real world with computer-generated imagery so I thought this would be perfect to tie in the video element to the sculptural one this is just a clip of another video that I made called wish you were here I used these sort of chard like sort of folded things throughout my work a lot.

5:50And well I guess they're sort of more like birds in this clip but I you know it's a it's a shape that I revisit a lot I continued exploring this I know full well that the real life version won't move but I find it very very difficult to design anything without making it move which makes it probably quite hard to create in real life but you know it's fine the installations gonna be based on these shapes so I can easily emulate digitally I can it allows me to play with scale it's very versatile I use it over and over I could create huge versions of these in the initial sort of walkway that you saw at the beginning you're so that you'd be totally immersed in them and and it should feel like you're inside the video and then sort of like as you're walking through into the rest of the space it should feel like there's hundreds of similar shapes populating the whole store hanging at different levels with interactive lights that vary in brightness depending on whether visitors are in the store what's really really frustrating is the soft lab actually just sent me renders of what its gonna look like in the space but that's on my phone not in the presentation.

7:10So I can't show you just imagine it.

7:13So we're gonna make this out of dichroic film which is generally just used as the covering for a flat surface it's not usually used as a material on its own which gives it sort of like strange limitations but we chose it because the way in which it reflects light is is super interesting it reflects light but allows you to see through it at the same time it's incredibly lightweight so we can hang them all over the shop if someone bumps into one they're not going to sue the store stuff like that and the right circumstances it can look like super like iridescent they're just infinitely fascinating to look at also you can see video through it which is which is good for the the initial walkway I use a lot of textures in my work as well.

8:03So I'll be able to use this same texture in the video that will be right at the entrance something that I've been thinking about a lot recently is that to give the video a bit more depth in context instead of just being abstract evolving patterns I can experiment with movement that responds to the laws of physics the sculptures in the Galleria will exist in real life they'll be actual physical things that you can touch so I want the video to also be true to this I want to have sort of a hint of realism which I've not actually ever done before ayuh studied animation.

8:40But I've not ever adhered to any of those rules for some reason but so I'm gonna give that a go so the aesthetic overall is going to end up being a slight nod to JG Ballard book of shorts called Vermillion sans which I read a few years ago.

9:01But I'm rereading it again and it's it sort of started to creep into all of my work again so I want s of animate clouds of dust and that sift through the negative space and sand and heat that rises off every surface I want to convey this sort of sense of paradise without resorting to the stereotypical image of like a palm tree on a beach I want to create something otherworldly and ethereal so I want to transmit that feeling of I want to be in it or I want to touch it.

9:30But then at the same time you're you're going to be in a physical space where in which there are these elements that feel like they're spilling out of the video so yeah if anyone's in New York over summer preferably as of the 24th of May pop into galleria melissa and hopefully the installation will be really good to finish I want to leave you with a video that's actually finished to prove that I can finish things a couple of years ago I spent three weeks in Tokyo and it was the first time that I properly started thinking about how forms move in 3d space and I came back to London with an image in my head of this never-ending structure that had no end and it was just constantly rotating covered in neon lights because that's what really stuck out to me in Tokyo and I'd never made anything like it before.

10:29So I had to figure out that process through a lot of trial and error and it's basically informed the way I kind of approached a lot of my projects now even though it was three years ago.

10:40So I thought I'd finish on showing you this video and I hope you like it ♪

12:52thank you [Applause]