Louise Despont. Garden, 2014. Installation view at Pioneer Works, Red Hook, Brooklyn, 2014. Production still from the ART21 New York Close Up film, Louise Despont According to the Universe. © ART21, Inc. 2015.
What is the source of inspiration? In a new film from the ART21 New York Close Up series, artist Louise Despont, from her Tribeca studio, peruses a vast reference library of images she began collecting in high school and maintains to this day. Drawn to geometry, energy waves, and universal symbols, Despont’s interests reveal a fascination with underlying patterns and cosmological draughtsmen: Rudolf Steiner, Carl Jung, Agnes Martin, Charles Burchfield, Martin Ramirez, Achilles G. Rizzoli, Adolf Wölfli, Hilma af Klint, Theosophy, Buddhist medical charts, Shaker gift drawings, seismographs, echolocation, mandalas, yantras, Tantric drawings, maps, gardens, fasciation in plants, beehives, kilim, ikat, Jantar Mantar, and masks. “What’s so interesting about the creative act is that you can access something completely outside yourself,” says Despont, who makes a distinction between consciously referencing subject matter in her artwork versus communing with a sense of unconscious awareness. “If you offer yourself up as the hands to make the work the relationship you form with what you communicate with has its own voice.” Featuring Despont’s drawings included in the exhibitions Harmonic Tremor (2015) at Nicelle Beauchene and The Six-Sided Force (2014) at Pioneer Works, as well as scenes from her stop-motion animation Experiments in Moving Drawings, Parts I & II (2007).
Louise Despont (b. 1983, New York, New York, USA) lives and works between New York and Bali, Indonesia.
CREDITS | ART21 New York Close Up Created & Produced by: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Director: Wesley Miller. Editor: Brad Kimbrough. Cinematography: John Marton, Wesley Miller & Andrew Whitlatch. Sound: Wesley Miller. Design & Graphics: Open. Music: Jared C. Balogh. Thanks: Nicelle Beauchene, Catherine Despont, Thierry Despont, Gabriel Florenz, Pioneer Works, Inae Rurup & Dustin Yellen. An ART21 Workshop Production. © ART21, Inc. 2015. All rights reserved.
ART21 New York Close Up is supported, in part, by The Lambent Foundation; the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; and by individual contributors.