Aly‍ Ogasian

Aly Ogasian is spotlighted in the New Voices series, which highlights emerging artists who showcase their art on ArtConnect.

Aly Ogasian is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Her practice is research driven and typically site responsive, sparking conversations about everyday life and survival in a rapidly changing environment.

Recent projects critique notions of expedition in the 21st century and play with the idea of an island as a metaphor, exploring notions of adaptation and survival, community and individualism, terrestrial and extraterrestrial, nature and technology. She has two separate longstanding collaborative practices with artist, designer and educator Shona Kitchen and artist and educator Claudia O'Steen.

Curious to gain more insight into her artistic approach, we asked Aly a few questions about her practice.

Observation, whether conducted by yourself or through something you’ve made, is a throughline in much of your recent work. Does observation serve as a starting point, or is it something that remains essential throughout the entire artistic process?

Observation usually serves as both the starting point and is an essential part of my process. Typically my projects have a long arc, and begin in a specific location where I spend time trying to deeply observe that place or a particular condition of that place. Oftentimes, I don’t know where the process of observing will lead me artistically. In a lot of my work with O’Steen we develop instruments or devices to observe through as well, as a complimentary mode of understanding. These devices are often based upon scientific instrumentation.

Your work Limnologies, created in collaboration with Claudia O’Steen, is a large-scale installation and the culmination of two years of fieldwork on an island in Lake Superior, where you lived and worked off grid for two subsequent summers. Can you tell us about those summers? How did your approach or relationship to the island change over that time?

Claudia and I were awarded the Rabbit Island Residency, which is an off-grid residency where you live and work on a 94-acre island in Lake Superior. We knew that we were most interested in making a project that engaged with the ecological or environmental conditions of this place, but we weren’t entirely sure what that might consist of.

While in residence, you live in a three-sided structure, which means you’re never fully sheltered from the weather. And because the island is in the middle of a huge lake, the weather conditions vary significantly, and this really dictates how you’re able to function each day. We noticed that when it was really windy, for example, the sound of the waves was so loud that it was difficult to concentrate. I think we’re so used to moving through the world via architecture or cars that we often don’t notice the weather systems around us.

While in residence, we became obsessed with trying to understand the weather patterns on the island, both by listening to the nearshore marine weather forecast on a walkie-radio and by developing our own systems for observing changes and patterns in the wind, waves, water temperature, water depth, and atmospheric color.

“We were interested in what happens when an attempt to measure or describe an environment becomes a translation rather than a direct record.”

The artwork was developed using documentation created by portable sculptures that you’ve described as “observational mechanisms”. How do these work, and what do they allow you to observe or document?

The instruments worked in a variety of ways. Some used waves or wind to generate drawings on waterproof paper, while others were submerged underwater, using small flags tied to ropes to register current direction and water depth. Alongside these instruments, we developed systems for translating our observations into other forms: mixing paint to match the horizon, water, and sky; writing descriptions to accompany these colors; and drawing our instruments in relation to the direction of the water.

These processes were deliberately imperfect. We were interested in what happens when an attempt to measure or describe an environment becomes a translation rather than a direct record. Each system could capture something, but none could adequately contain the complexity of what we were observing. In this sense, the instruments also became records of our attempts—and failures—to understand the place.

The work is presented as a series of very intricate sculptures, involving various mediums, including projections, objects, text, and much more. How did you approach translating all of this research into an artwork?

We were interested in thinking about everything we collected not as discrete forms of data, but in relation to a larger, interconnected system. We interviewed researchers working throughout the region who were studying Lake Superior climatologically and geologically, and these conversations reinforced the complexity of what we were observing. Rather than finding straightforward relationships—for example, between rising water levels and erosion—we encountered systems in which multiple factors were continually interacting and influencing one another. Our attempts to understand these relationships repeatedly revealed the limits of our own ability to understand them.

We wanted to present our observations as a grid, evoking the structures through which scientific data is often organized and compared, while also thinking about the grid as a three-dimensional space. As the viewer moves around the work, relationships that might initially appear legible become increasingly difficult to isolate or untangle. The installation therefore becomes both an attempt to organize information and an acknowledgment of our failure to fully comprehend the systems we were observing.

We were also thinking about the relationship between local weather systems and larger global processes. During our time in the region, major wildfires in British Columbia dramatically altered the color and quality of the sky around Lake Superior. This became an important reminder that what appeared to be a local observation could be shaped by events occurring hundreds or thousands of miles away. We became increasingly interested in these constantly shifting baselines: how the environmental conditions against which we measure change are themselves continually changing, and how our attempts to understand those changes are necessarily partial.

“The installation therefore becomes both an attempt to organize information and an acknowledgment of our failure to fully comprehend the systems we were observing.”