Naomi Even-Aberle

Naomi Even-Aberle is a multidisciplinary artist who works with photo, sound, words and the body. She co-curates her own gallery at her home in South Dakota USA where she is also a martial artist and teacher. We shared our questions and answers in the summer of 2020 over email.

You are a martial artist and an artist. Which one were you first? And how did the two come together?

Art was very much a part of my life growing up. I used to draw, color, dance, and sing all the time as a child – exploring different mediums, and even "auditing" college art courses with my mother. I didn't find martial arts until I was in college and a friend wanted to try a free Taekwondo class and was too shy to go by herself. Three years later I was still attending classes, teaching classes and workshops, and working through the ranks. I’d found my martial arts family and I loved the training and camaraderie. 

I spent a lot of time keeping my martial arts and my visual art practices separate. In part because they filled different passions for me and because I didn't see any other role models integrating the two. When I went to graduate school three years ago I was challenged to find contexts that had meaning to me. Up until this point I worked in encaustic collage (which I still love to work with), but the work was flat and ultimately gave no depth to my own artistic reflection. A friend asked why I didn't talk about the complex relationship that I had to martial arts, gender identity, visuals arts, and sports psychology. 

It never occurred to me to look at these areas as overlapping. Since then I have stopped trying to separate the martial arts from other aspects of my life and worked really hard to engage my artistic process with  every aspect of my life instead, including my martial arts world. In some ways, it has been extremely challenging because in the martial arts world I work with other students. Are they collaborators? What rights do they have as artists present in my work? In other ways, it has been liberating to unapologetically accept who I am and the areas and philosophies that play such an important role in my artistic process. 

What are you working on at the moment?

I am working on two bodies of work simultaneously.

The first are body poetry/sound pieces that started during the Cel del Nord virtual residency. During the COVID-19 pandemic quarantine I find that I am spending more time in online "meetings" than I ever was before. It’s creating a new sense of connection, community, and conversation, but no matter how many meetings I attend at different times, places, or with different people all meetings are in some way revolving around the pandemic. The poems document real meetings and synthesize the group understanding and emotional responses to the pandemic. The words used come directly from the meeting, but are arranged to create a more creative and poetic understanding of the conversation.

As a companion piece to the Quarantine Poems I’m working on  The Cacophony of Isolation. The virtual meetings that are referenced for the Quarantine Poems are also sound clips that will be reused to create a sound piece. This sound piece is trying to capture the amount of sound, conversation, and the sometimes overwhelming sense of connections that are happening in all corners of the world and our lives. The individual meeting recordings will be layered to create a background noise from which certain phrases and voices can rise from. 

The second body of work is Choreographing Energies. It’s a series of video stills or photography that work to capture the artists' hands during different moments of creating or engaging in joyful acts. Some of the acts captured are washing dishes, performing yard work, boxing, martial arts hand training, holding a sword, self-pleasure, and feeding myself. The series works to present the various ways that we use our hands and bodies to engage in different acts; small, mundane, intimate, or communal, that bring and engage in joy. 

What does it mean to you to engage in Joy?

What a great question! It's actually the question that I am asking myself during my current residency. Up to this point, my ability to understand and engage in joy was linked to being able to bring joy to others, in my gym, and in my community. But I didn't know what joy looked like to me, at least not in a selfish sort of way. My research consists of taking pictures, reading and writing about small moments of joy, and the practice of building joy into daily life. I think some people see joy as a natural process that hits you in a perfect moment. In reality, joy is a habit that is built through repetition and practice. I am focusing on my hands - the way in which I make and create the most often in my everyday life and in the martial arts. Images of washing dishes with my hands paired next to an image of my striking a punching bag. Both bring me pain – hey, who really wants to wash the dishes? – but they also lead to joy in different ways. 

You lead me neatly onto the topic of dishes, and The Kitchen Sink Project – you and your partner use your home as a rotating art gallery – what has your experience of that been like?

The Kitchen Sink Project is so far one of my favorite art adventures, and I am lucky enough to be able to work on it with my partner. It was dreamed up in graduate school during an exit interview with faculty. They asked us soon-to-be graduating MFA candidates about our goals. At the time one of my goals was to be a guest curator and be invited all over the world to curate shows. Lofty goals at the time – I had very little curatorial experience and I was worried that no one would invite a martial arts-focused artist to curate any exhibition. One of my professors told me a story about how he gained his curatorial experience by curating a 10" x 10" x 6" box. He gave it a gallery title and worked with artists from all over the world to curate tiny travel shows in this box. He basically gave me permission to create my own opportunity and unapologetically build my own experience to achieve my goals. Thus, The Kitchen Sink Project was born. 

It’s now an exhibition project between myself and my husband Nik Aberle in Rapid City, South Dakota USA. We are taking inspiration from the phrase, "everything but the kitchen sink". The phrase became popular during World War II, where it was said that everything but the kitchen sink was thrown at the enemy. As artists, we believe that creating space to nurture, grow, and share the process and work of other artists is important, so we curate an exhibition space in our kitchen. Unlike the idiom, we strives to leave nothing out – even saying yes to the kitchen sink.

The experience has been amazing. We have a full year scheduled with artists from all over the world and a large, diverse exploration of medium and content. We have worked with a painter from Pakistan, a video collage artist from Macedonia, a performance video artist from Detroit, and we have so many more artists scheduled. The learning curve has been pretty steep in determining how to give space and agency to artists and still maintain a project identity. My role is the connector and planner, while Nik is behind the scenes, tech set up, and idea generator. It works well for us, and it has brought us closer together and provided amazing energy to our relationship. Since both of us are artists our selection process is quite diverse - because we ourselves make very different art. Personally, my favorite part is being able to meet and engage with other artists and artistic practices. My personal artistic exploration has exploded since working and meeting other artists. I now have more ideas than I know what to do with. 

You learn more about Naomi by visiting www.evenaberle.studio . All featured images by Naomi Even-Aberle.