Born and raised in Hattiesburg, artist Andrew Ondrejcak now lives in New York and spends most of his time working in Europe. For a three-night run, Ondrejcak is bringing his latest creation, Landscape with Figures, to the Contemporary Arts Center stage in New Orleans.
A graduate of Oak Grove High School, Ondrejcak developed a love for the arts while a student there. He took part in theater and enjoyed the art class he took.
“We had a teacher, Shelby Hatten, who was the most inspiring woman you’ll ever meet,” he said. “I think she really helped form a lot of my early creative maturation, but don’t think she realized it.”
Ondrejcak ran for class office and took part in more leadership-type activities and the arts while his older brother was participating in sports.
“I never really had a vision for myself to be an artist because it really doesn’t exist here,” he said. His first job was working as an apprentice for Susan Carruth of Hattiesburg, who makes jewelry. He also worked with local artist Kym Garraway.
“It never really made practical sense for me to become an artist, so I ended up studying architecture in school thinking that was sort of a fusion of what I would be doing creatively, but along with some practical application,” he said. “I knew I didn’t want to be an architect and then I just sort of found my way as an artist.”
He studied architecture and painting at Savannah College of Art and Design and later, playwriting at Brooklyn College.
His work with experimental theater led him to a career in art direction and production design in the fashion industry, where he has become one of New York’s most sought-after creative directors, known for large-scale environmental installations.
His original works have been presented at the Guggenheim Works & Process; Holland Festival, Amsterdam; Palais des Beaui-Arts, Brussels; BAM Harvey, Brooklyn; The Public theater, New York and Kampnagel, Hamburg. He works with Vogue, Bazaar, Italian Vogue, Wallpaper*, W, V, among others.
A New Yorker, he lives in Brooklyn and has a studio in Chinatown, but has been in the Crescent City since Jan 7, where he met collaborators from Los Angeles and New York, who flew in to work on this latest project.
From Jan. 31 through Feb. 2, CAC in New Orleans will host his show at 7:30 p.m. nightly.
The show came about after Neil Barclay, art director the center viewed Ondrejcak’s “Elijah Green.”
Ondrejcak said the production took quite a bit of money to make and was featured at The Kitchen in New York. Landscape with Figures is a re-conception of Elijah Green.
The play was supported through grants from the MAP Fund and the New England Foundation for the arts, which are both highly competitive grants.
The MAP supports original live performance projects that embody a spirit of deep inquiry, particularly works created by artists who question, disrupt, complicate, and challenge inherited notions of social and cultural hierarchy across the United States. MAP awards $1 million to up to 40 projects in the range of $10,000 – $45,000 per grant.
“They give you a lot of money, so, it was sort of a big deal, and Ondrejcak said. “There was a lot of energy around my work at the time and pressure. I had a complete meltdown afterward.”
Part of the grant Ondrejcak received was to tour the work nationally. A chunk of money to create the production and then the same amount of money to tour it, he explained. But he informed them they could do something else with the money, because he wasn’t going to tour the production.
He later met Barclay and they had a very candid conversation about what worked and what didn’t and what could be interesting to work on further and what ideas there were to work beyond.
“He offered for me to rebuild the work in New Orleans,” said Ondrejcak. “I had a little nugget of touring money, so I told him I was touring it, but only to New Orleans. So, I’m basically using the tour money and building the piece with some additional money that came in as well.
In America, a lot of work that Ondrejcak does is through grants, explaining that money he receives in the United States is miniscule compared to the grant money he’s able to obtain and work with in Europe. Thus, why he spends much of his time there.
“It’s much more state supported,” he said.
And it’s more state supported and the structure is quite different there,” he said. “You could apply for a grant of much greater quantity and spend much less doing it. And have a much likelihood of getting the money in Europe. But in America, you can work for weeks and weeks and weeks and write pages and pages and get $4,000. It’s untenable and a problem and why the art doesn’t grow.
Ondrejcak works on six to eight projects a year, with one bigger production, but there’s always others in development at all points.
“It takes maybe two years to make a performance and then they are kind of overlapping and one builds upon the other like “Elijah Green.”
Ondrejcak was building something for a museum in Brussels, Belgium, while working on “Elijah Green,” so those kind of ideas kind of seeped into this other piece when I was thinking about New Orleans.
The idea he is working on now has been in the works for about five years. “And I think it’s going to be at its completion in New Orleans,” he said, noting that he thinks it will tour internationally during the next few years.
“It will find its shape in New Orleans, whereas in New York I didn’t understand it yet, but now I have enough perspective.”
The show was inspired by the paintings of Pietier Bruegel the Elder and blurs the lines between theater, dance, installation art, painting and literature.
“Landscape with Figures” isn’t your traditional stage show with witty dialogue, scenery and costume changes.
Ondrejcak describes it as really interesting and something for the audience to talk about afterwards.
“It’s a performance work and really doesn’t adhere to the rules of play,” Ondrejcak said. “There’s very little spoken text and no dialogue between characters. There’s basically just introductory spoken text. There’s not really a plot and then there’s not really any characters. It’s an amorphic organism.”
He described “Landscape with Figures” as being about looking at a community and the diversity of bodies and ages, and types of experiences that exist within a community and how the lives of these unrelated people are bound together through community and life.
The production stage is really quite big at 110 feet long by 60 feet wide with the audience on two sides, up high, looking down.
“So, it’s kind of like God looking down on mortal man, scientists looking down at rat experiments at 20 performers on stage the entire time,” he said. “They all are doing long-time durational performance acts. Some of those actions are more tasked based – someone is ironing, and then may be ironing and lift into a more poetic or unreal physical existence. It really plays a lot with the relationship from the real to the unreal.”
Of the 20 people who will be on stage, he knows only one, his mother, Denise. “It’s quite a diverse cast of characters in terms of culture, but also in terms of life experience.
“My mom, who has never been in one of my plays before, is going to be in it. It’s been years since she was in “Carousel” at Hattiesburg High in 1960-whatever.”
There’s also a young amazing dancer, Shaniece, who is 22.
“She has no business being on stage with my mom or me; none of us has business being on stage with each other at all.”
Ondrejcak said he’s interested in this casting concept where these people have no other opportunity for these people to even meet, much less be on the same stage and work together.
“Because they are all doing individual, autonomous actions that are more or less silent, there is a live pianist, who will play during the 69-minute performance.”
Audience members will be given binoculars, so they will be able to look myopically at these different figures, or put the binoculars down and watch the landscape unfold over time.
“They could watch the ironing woman who really does some beautiful and amazing subtle work the entire time or you could watch her through binoculars and be entertained by seeing how her works embed within the community and also in forms of other peoples’ work.
The time frame for the production is the here and now. Ondrejcak says he doesn’t like to pretend very much, but prefers practical, accessible things.
“There’s not a time and place like you would see in a traditional play,” he said..
He described this piece of work as “a quiet and intimate performance,” which contains a six-minute introductory monologue and a six-minute song at the end with eight scenes of six minutes each and a three-minute interval in the center of the play. Original music was composed and is performed by Nathan Parker Smith.
“Even though it’s silent, some characters are very overt, while others are very slight, subtle dramas, as in our lives,” he said. “You could watch one performer over time and they do change and grow through obstacles and things.”
Ondrejcak said his mom, Denise Dews Ondrejcak, as a participant is always up for whatever “She has all this love and she just tries to find places for it so I put her in the play,” he said. His other has been in several of his workshop plays in New York.
“I’m really interested in this idea of the real, practical things,” he said. “I’m really interested in putting people on stage that aren’t performers, but real people.
Denise, grew up in the Dews family home on Arlington Loop, where his uncle Andrew Dews still lives.
In addition to his mom, Pine Belt residents making their way to the Crescent City for the show may recognize other Hattiesburg treasures. Ondrejcak said he raided the closets in the Dews’ home and took old cotillion and Zeus dresses along with Hamasa memorabilia to use as props for the show.
During his short stay in town, before heading south, he also had the opportunity to visit the Lucky Rabbit, where he also made some prop finds.
All costumes used in the performance are made by artists from New Orleans in combination with hand-crafted textiles and artisanal work from Haiti, Burkina Faso, Afghanistan, Kenya, and Mali though the United Nations’ Ethical Fashion Initiative.
Ethical Fashion Initiative
Ondrejcak’s most recent work was during June of last year in Brussels, Belgium.
“It was in a museum – one of those big marble European institutions, columns and stairs,” he said of the Bozar Museum.
The piece was called Figure Studies, a character study of the10 performers that he found in Paris, Brussels and Flanders. The characters were placed on museum pedestals, much like sculptures, therefore working with very physical restrictions.
The show was based on Baroque and medieval allegories, which is something Ondrejcak has played around with quite often.
Figure Studies was part of special work and the culmination Ondrejcak has been doing with the United Nations for a few years.
Ondrejcak worked with the U.N. through the Ethical Fashion Initiative, part of the U.N. Alliance for Sustainable Fashion.
He explained its job is to pair artisans in developing countries with mass-market fashion production. For example, they will have a collective of women in Haiti who do hand embroidery.
“They create an infrastructure around these women to do their work to make sure they are paid a fair wage, there are no children working and they have safe working conditions.” Ondrejcak said. “The U.N. is there to make sure they are provided infrastructure. They are also there to give them professional development, putting them in front of people like me, that’s helping them to nourish their craft.”
Ondrejcak said he was invited by the U.N. and EFI to work with these artisans, which sent him to a myriad of countries, mostly West Africa and Haiti. And where he couldn’t travel, his assistants went for him.
The artist said he worked with these women hand-in-hand to see what their skills were, to develop a design with them, which they would execute on their own terms, sending the final completed product to him in New York.
“I would go into a woman’s studio in Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Haiti and Mali, and see some patterns she is working on and offer suggestions for say, a different color palette. They would loom it, which is an incredible laborious process and in New York I would receive yardage of this amazing fabric and that’s what the costumes for Figure Studies were made from.”
These figure studies at Bozar’s Horta Hall explored the themes of Hope, Fame, Courage, Chastity, War, Love, Folly, and examines how these archetypes manifest themselves in the interconnected, global economy.
Tickets for the performances are available at https://bit.ly/2RTPH3C. Tickets are $25 for CAC members and $30 general admission. The center is located 900 Camp Street, between Andrew Higgins Drive and St. Joseph Street in the New Orleans Warehouse Arts District, one block from Lee Circle and the Saint Charles streetcar line.
