Headlands Center for the Arts

Artist Statement

The center of work is the essence and creation of connections: the grandmother spider spirit. My practice is multivalent, engaging performance, social practices, drawing, as well as video-augmented and virtual reality.

The relationship between the real and virtual is personally significant to me. I have moved between several different countries and cultures in my lifetime, and as an immigrant, I’ve relied on digital means to connect to people and places in an attempt to construct “home,” long before the pandemic. My projects are affective mappings of what it means to continuously oscillate between analog and digital, past and future, and being present. I develop #memoryconnectors by observing topophilia and translating these energies to cyberspace.

I use my body-device to keep balance through my compass-meditation: the Long Distance Somersault career. Rolling as far as I can helps me to connect with place, gaze in the Eye of the Hurricane and seek higher alternatives.

While at Headlands

I’ve been developing a multi-layered, virtual reality Social Housing Neighborhood since 2018. Its latest area is the Art Camp: a homesome virtual residency and a bi-monthly art gathering—an alternative to our many missing social art events. I invite womxn and underrepresented artists to investigate the possibilities of creating and inhabiting a communal place with care, to cultivate this layer of our social fabric based on radical inclusion and cyber-intentionality, and to elevate the shift of our up-scaling digital existence together. The residencies accumulate in Show & Tell events, as artists guide visitors through their VR studios. Art Camp can be a bridge for those whose practice is not rooted in digital media, and for a diverse community with different voices as it is accessible both on a browser and in virtual reality. This project is seeded in my Headlands experience, and grounds my transition to Salt Spring Island in Canada.

Selected Video Works

ART CAMP Commons, 2020; Tour Guide Video in TiltBrush; 5 min. 37 sec.; © Judit Navratil

LDS (Long Distance Somersault) Protected Group Rolling at Headlands, 2019; 1 min. 12 sec.; © Judit Navratil, Documentation by Christoph Steger

‘LDS in Virtual Reality Social Housing Neighborhood’, 2019; Projection on Salesforce Tower (Boston Properties) with Ava Morton, Efe Ozmen and Maxine Schoefer-Wulf; May 18–20, 2019; © Judit Navratil