A Long Distance Relationship

Karima Baadilla and Yeon Jae Choi

Andrew Sullivan wrote “If love is sudden, friendship is steady.” At the moment of meeting a friend for the first time, we might be aware of an immediate “click” or a sudden mutual interest. But we don’t “fall in friendship.” For friendship is based on knowledge, and love can be based on mere hope…. But the more you know a friend, the more a friend she is.

Choi and Baadilla met almost 4 years ago in RMIT Ceramics, and have since continued to be friends while not seeing physically very much of each other at all. Painting more than ceramics is often a medium associated with art historical and institutional reification, a medium linked to notions of mastery, icons, and often, the myth of the solitary, tortured, male genius. This master narrative of painting has been made and unmade across centuries, and critiqued for the exclusionary narrative of the white, male master of the canvas.

By transforming the site of the canvas into vessels of collaboration, particularly a gestural, bodily language of collaboration, call, response and remaking, Baadilla and Choi challenge the historical foundations of the medium.

Rejecting the sterile, solitary sphere of painterliness and the studio, these two artists come together in a collaborative sphere often reserved for the performer, the story teller or the community. Much of the work relies on trust between Choi and Baadilla, trust that each will do what is right with the form, and the other to do what is right with the treatments of multiple firings and glazing, and finally a huge helping of the age old advice of not sweating the small stuff.