Artist Statement
ERKANU: The Girl Cut In Two is a sistersister multi-disciplinary art collective consisting of Mongolian American artists, youngest sister Jennifer Tsogo and oldest sister Eriko Tsogo. We are fascinated by the concept of gender and cultural identity. We are interested in expressing the embattled emotional middle space of the marginal woman; one who lives in two worlds, a person of no origin - at once related to all, and at once devoid of identity.
Since our childhood, we lead a nomadic way of life following the immigrant footsteps of our parents. We are first generation Mongolian Americans; one born in Mongolia and the other in America. In living within the occupation of two contrasting cultures, we understand the world through the periphery of a marginal paradox - naturally growing to form an adaptive yet spilt sense of identity.
Our identities as a first generation Mongolian American allows a life of duality where opposing traditions, values and norms of the East and West constantly clash and fuse; creating a marginal periphery of absent origin. Our art is an extension of us and our perpetual search to identify, empower and inspire by way of exploring the conflicting marginal meeting periphery of the East and West.
We utilize mediums of drawing, painting, sculpture, writing, performance, photography and multimedia as confessional means to shed light on our experiences of insight recollected from living on the margins. We like to fuse binary concepts and techniques of representation; from contrasting languages of wet and dry textures, precision and chaos into stimulatory juxtaposing layers as to create conceptual proximity between disparate things.
About
Translating the Clyfford Still IN STILL drawing and or painting into sounds then movement.
ERKANU: The Girl Cut In Two is a sistersister multi-disciplinary art collective consisting of Mongolian American artists, youngest sister Jennifer Tsogo and oldest sister Eriko Tsogo. For the 2019 Archives As Muse program, ERKANU proposes to create unique multimedia art piece combining data, sound, dance composition using the Clyfford Still Museum Archives – choosing one Clyfford Still painting or drawing to examine/explore how the visual (art) / In Still images transform into sound? Extracting melodies from image. How does the visual translate into sound and movement?
Using combination of data, mapping and Musicalgorithms (pronounced music algorithms) program, ERKANU will compose one fully rendered musical song piece from a chosen Clyfford Still archive painting/drawing by transforming the visual data into sequences of proportional musical notes; creating a musicalgorithms system that will help decode/translate the two dimensional abstraction into notes.
Once a complete sheet music is produced, the composition will be reiterated and played by a traditional Mongolian musical instrument, connecting and demystifying the abstract through/with the ethnic, translating the abstract though the ancient and current. Composing unique melody for one piece of art, the proposed song composition will be professionally recorded.
ERKANU sisters will compose a 15-minute silent body performance routine in response to the completed song composition. Ending dance number will be performed live at the November 23rd Archives As Muse event on the provided stage.
