Headlands Center for the Arts

In Project Space: July 5–August 24

Artist Statement

Life After Life practices new forms of being together. Through film, video, ceramics, drawing, and painting, they couple the intimacy of their relationship with the publicity of the market. Exercises in symbol and thing, abstraction and skin, technology and nudity pulse through their work. Life After Life is Paige K. Johnston and Karthik Pandian.

While at Headlands

While at Headlands, we will be editing and working on sound for a film that we shot in the Vermont home of Rudyard Kipling last autumn. We will also be shooting material for an autobiographical two-channel video that draws on the visual rhetoric of fragrance advertising. We plan on shooting this new work in a range of formats from hand-processed 16mm black and white film to cellphone video.

We also plan on realizing a new series of oil paintings executed on heart-shaped panels. Titled “Like After Like”, we have conceived the paintings as self-portraits disguised as monochromes—explorations of our own skin tones mapped onto an exhausted yet ubiquitous symbol.

Finally, we will do studio visits with Bay Area ceramicists, borrowing objects to display alongside our own works in clay and assorted flora. We will arrange this collection on a purpose-built shelf running the perimeter of our workspace.

Selected Video

Life After Life 1, 2014.