Natalie Majaba Waldburger

Utilizing enhanced matte paper, my contemporary origami sculptures exhibit the intricate dynamics of curved fold tessellations, drawing attention to the inherent tension between paper's structural rigidity and its temporal ephemerality. The system of folding, born from paper's transience, metaphorically amplifies the resilience of form as it contends with external constraints. Interestingly, the very act of folding this untraditional medium for origami stands as a poignant allegory for the racialized body within colonial institutional contexts. The challenges and, often, the impossibilities faced underscore a narrative less about the resultant piece and more about the tumultuous process of creation itself. Thus, the sculptures serve as both an aesthetic exploration and a profound commentary on struggle, resistance, and the complexities of identity formation within restrictive paradigms.

The resilience of spores and their hidden proliferation in the ecologies of domestic spaces evoke the haunted presence of cultural longing and displacement caused by the diasporic experience. Residency and exhibition, School of the Visual Arts, NYC. Installation with Grow Bio mycelium. wheatgrass, English ivy, boxwood, fern, cotton packing twine, silk, frames, pink oyster mushrooms, shiitake mushrooms, oyster mushrooms

For Marking Schemes, The Drawing Board will use Red Head Gallery as a studio/laboratory over a 2 week duration, which will include invited artists* to collaborate with The Drawing Board. This process will be documented in time-lapse. Drawing is a primary form of expression and visual communication that uses line, mark-making and gesture. The medium of drawing is accessible, affordable, universal, and among environmentally sustainable forms of art making. Drawing crosses barriers in ways that support cohesion and communication and still speak critically, thoughtfully and playfully about the ways power is constructed, transferred and interrupted. Collaborative mark-making promotes empathy and shared experiences of making. Drawing as practice opens intuitive, creative, and lateral thinking processes that are necessary to offset the rigidity of institutional culture of policies and regulations, which faculty and artists engage as cultural workers within institutions. Institutional practices and administrative mindsets impact students' creativity and, in turn, their artwork. Institutional practices increasingly shape cultural dialogue and the wider cultural landscape. These cycles of formalized art-making recirculate among cultural institutions. Institutional commitments intended to implement diversity and inclusion risk becoming the very barriers to knowledge-creation and structural change they were designed to address. With an aim toward building more inclusive contexts in the colonized spaces of academia, the Drawing Board engages artistic methodology and institutional critique to promote systemic change. The Drawing Board would like to acknowledge the generous support from the Canada Council for the Arts. https://www.redheadgallery.org/marking-schemes

Aggressive Passive, Grow Op, Gladstone Hotel, 2019, organic wheatgrass, organic soil, biodegradable felt, grow lights, juicer, biodegradable cups This project responds to the theme of Grow Op this year by considering the term energy in relational terms, as experienced by diverse organisms and social systems. This biodegradable and consumable artwork simultaneously considers the energy required in the absorption of light for the production of chlorophyll, the nutrient energy of plants to humans and in their consumption, the social forces ascribing value to foods and fads, gentrification of communities, and the energy used in artificially controlling and maintaining plants. “Visitors feasted their eyes and mouths on Natalie Majaba Waldburger’s biodegradable and consumable piece, Passive Aggressive. The work considered the circle of life and energy that connects photosynthesis to human consumption, the social forces involved in food, and the gentrification of communities.” https://artthescience.com/magazine/2019/08/21/bits-grow-op-2019/

“The Drawing Board" members are professors JJ Lee, Amy Swartz, and Natalie Majaba Waldburger. Our first public exhibition, "Back to the Drawing Board" was at Loop gallery in August 2017. As individual artists with 20+ year career spans, we have exhibited extensively, have work in both public and private collections and have been recipients of multiple grants and awards. In the context post-secondary education, we have worked together in a variety of different contexts over the past fifteen years, from partnerships on creative projects and exhibitions, teaching in post-secondary institutions, and most recently working at OCAD University on establishing new specializations, curriculum, and teaching collaborations. We have a unique and common bond as artists, women, mothers, and educators and our creative dialogue seeks to investigate the complexities of work and working relationships in the context of an art university. The artwork examines the role of creativity and collaboration mediated by institutional structures. The Drawing Board collaborative exhibition and performance was originally developed at Loop Gallery in Toronto, in which the administrative procedural policies of the institution were used as a structure to shape creative activity through a fictitious group which we invented called the “Drawing Board”. As a collaborative group of artists-educators working at the intersection of process and labour. The Drawing Board is both the title for our collective as well as the title for our performance piece. The satirical Drawing Board is comprised of three faculty and administrators at OCAD University. The meeting is enacted as a performance in which administrative and procedural protocols, used in the formal meetings of the institution, are used to shape creative activity during the performance, specifically drawings and art ideas; an attempt to make artwork by "consensus".

Using local soil and hydroponic felt to grow wheatgrass in the form of the words "Passive-Aggressive" in a script font which was mounted onto the wall for the exhibition. The blinding grow lights and the sharp spikes of the wheatgrass leaf evoked the experience of passive aggressiveness. The plant, a popularn wellness elixir, peaks to the dichotomy between nutrition and toxicity. Wheat grass as a material embodies many contradictory associations as a nutrient source as well as a symbol of neighbourhood gentrification. The latter can also be described as passive aggressive in nature.

Cylinders constructed out of panoramic photographs house invasive plants collected from local public spaces: Central Park and Prospect Park. After a workshop on invasive species at GenSpace with artist Ellie Irons, I further researched these species revealed the origin of each plant, its ideal growing conditions and the adaptations it made upon arrival. These plants formulate a microclimate for themselves that emulates and mimics their place of origin once they have settled into their new surroundings finding root in cracks in sidewalks or under urban construction.

The magnifying and fish-eye lenses embedded in whole eggshells allow the viewer a peek into a small-scale exhibition of well-known conceptualist and minimalist work by artists, Bruce Nauman, Dan Flavin, and Richard Serra. Each of the eggs contain small scale, spherical panoramic views of the exhibition rooms at the DIA Beacon gallery. The monumental nature of these Modernist and Post-Modernist works are contrasted by their minute forms housed in egg shells.

Curated by Steven Holmes OCT 31 - DEC 17 JOSELOFF GALLERY, Hartford, CT Artists Marina Abramoviç Robert Beck Stanley Brouwn Thierry Delva Tracey Emin Spencer Finch Kelly Mark Magnus von Plessen Jennifer Reifsneider Natalie Majaba Waldburger Martin Wilner ARTIST RECEPTION Thursday, November 2, 2017, 5-7 pm with a performance by Natalie Majaba Waldburger What is a portrait? Is it a likeness, only? Can a portrait be a likeness, but not be ‘about’ the subject? Is a portrait about the artist, or the subject? Can a self-portrait not be about the self? Or is there a way in which all art is, in the end, about the artist – and therefore all art is self-portraiture? The self-portrait is in some senses the most fundamental of artworks. The first work of art, handprints on a cave left 50,000 years ago was – simply - a self-portrait. I am. I was. In this way, the self-portrait is a trace element in the history of consciousness. The human drive – expressed often as the drive to “leave a mark” – is the drive of a human subject to be seen, pictured, or remembered in some way. Much of human creativity arcs towards the monument. While the artists in “The Cave of Forgotten Dreams” each make their own subjectivity the subject of the work exhibited, in each case the self is depicted not through mimesis, but through surrogacy, allusion, redirection or the refraction of the notion of self from noun to verb, from subject to object, or from self to other.

Series of large scale painting installations

iodine on onion skin with lamp