Q + A with Chiaozza

What can you tell us about your morning still life drawing practice?
We warmed up this past winter with a short still life/slow life session in the mornings. We’ll come into the studio early in the morning, make coffee, and assemble fun little compositions of our collected studio ephemera. It has been a great chance to exercise our looking/seeing/drawing skills.

What is Chiaozza?
CHIAOZZA is our collaborative practice exploring play and craft across a variety of mediums. We make paintings, sculptures, installations, public art, design and more. Our work has at the root of it a foundation of play and experimentation. We like to try new things in many different ways. Oftentimes one concept, such as bulbous bouquets, will manifest in sculpture, painting, drawing, and works on paper.

How do you each approach your creative process and practice differently?
We each bring a wholly unique perspective and life experience to everything we do. We each have aesthetics that generally align and continue to evolve as we grow our practice as a collaboration. There is a certain balance of tidiness and craft that holds some of our varied and dynamic ideas together.

What are you most inspired by now?
We recently saw a performance called “The Obligation to Live” by Bread & Puppet Theater in New York. During this performance, they held up four “Papier-mâché Gods.” One of them was the papier-mâché god of “The Obligation to Plant a Garden in the Rubble.” We both identify with this sentiment – that one of our biggest responsibilities and inspirations right now is to keep sharing light; to plant seeds, some of which we hope will grow towards positive change.

You have been organizing small outdoor art workshops here in Brooklyn. What do you like about working outdoors rather than in a studio for these workshops?
Being outside feels good. We love being connected to the air, the plants, the earth, the environment, and natural materials. We don’t live immediately next to a park or a backyard, so we often have to set aside time to explore parks, gardens, and outdoor spaces. Outdoor Art Club creates a little space every other week or so to spend time outdoors with friends working on creative exercises. Each session we have a different theme, such as puppets, watercolor, printmaking, etc., paired with specific materials. Often we use natural, found, donated and recycled materials for our projects, and the emphasis is on play and exploration of the creative process rather than on the actual “finished” product. We believe it’s an essential part of childhood to play outdoors and to experiment with materials. There is a freedom that emerges in an outdoor space; it expands the feeling of possibility and activates the imagination.

Our brains work differently outdoors. There is another level of stimulation in nature that allows us to settle down a bit and get lost in little projects without a lot of pressure. It is fun to connect with other people of all ages and create something over the course of a few hours together. It honestly feels therapeutic and healing. So much of what happens in the world seems well beyond our control and that can feel heavy and sad. Coming together and working on achievable projects that bring joy and smiles feels important and empowering. Empowerment and agency within our environment is something we want to encourage in ourselves and share with others.

Some of your work comes to life as public art, do you find that public art has different demands or parameters than work that would be shown in a gallery?
In the studio we are generally drawn to friendly materials that are fairly easy to access and work with; paper, wood, glue, paint, ready-made objects are all examples of materials we tend to work with. The things we get our hands on have a low to moderate level of toxicity. We are not properly set up to do fiberglass or major milling jobs. As our work in public spaces evolves, we recognize more and more that we need help taking something we made in one material into a material that can withstand weather and interactivity. We love growing relationships with fabrication studios who specialize in helping to bring art dreams to life in materials and finishes that can live confidently in public spaces. Along with helping to create a more successful installation, working with industry professionals also helps forge time for more experimentation and discovery in our daily practice.

How does the notion of play and being playful fit into your work?
As collaborators, play is a way of working together in a fun and constructive way. Most of our projects emerge from dialogue, shared experiences, and experimenting with ideas. Play, when paired with rigor and a serious pursuit of curiosity, coalesces into the work.

Play is power. It is not easy to play sometimes. There needs to be some kind of agreement or negotiation and acceptance to enter into a realm of play. Play means giving into the unknown and following creative impulses and responses in service of discovery. Play is practice. With the repetition of playfulness, one can accumulate a muscle memory that helps keep the imagination elastic and ready for new problems & solutions. Play is work. ❤️

How do you choose color and pattern for different pieces?
For us, usually form comes before color, and color is a response to the form. We often seek color relationships that are harmonious and familiar, yet unexpected and fresh. Sometimes pattern emerges as a way to enhance or respond to the form, and it brings in another point of visual play. Pattern may have first emerged in our work as a way to suggest surface details like the ones you see when you look closely at a plant or a rock.

Color is an impulsive and sentient response to the particular form, material, scale and potential environment that is unique to each piece and project. Sometimes color is conceived as a grouping across a collection of shapes or images. We want color to work on a variety of levels: independently within one piece, collectively across a series of shapes, holistically within our body of work, naturalistically in relationship/contrast with different environments, and even spiritually in a healing and affective way.

Some of your larger work commissions have been abroad, and have involved the use of different materials and manufacturing processes. What do you find most interesting about working in different countries and how the work takes place?
Just as one may need to translate language in order to communicate with a diverse audience, we also need to translate visual information. Making drawings, diagrams, forms, colors, and details legible to a diverse audience of curators, fabricators, clients, and project managers is an important part of producing our work, whether abroad or locally.

Collaboration can be challenging but you two seem to be a great team! Do you have any collaboration tips?
Collaboration is built on a foundation of mutual respect. We have a deep respect for each other’s ideas and talents, and this is what enables us to feel balanced, have fun, and trust each other to contribute to the collective goals of the studio. We find this to be true when working with collaborators outside of CHIAOZZA as well – when the mutual respect is there, the collaboration feels balanced, healthy, and fruitful.

What are you working on now?
This summer we will be participating in the East Rift Valley Land Art Festival in Taitung, Taiwan. This is especially exciting because it will be our first public sculpture in Taiwan, which is where my parents emigrated from, and I have a strong cultural connection and family ties to Taiwan. We’re also working on several commissions, cover art for a magazine, and a late-summer show in Manhattan. We’ll share more about these projects soon :)