Steven Chodoriwsky

Artist Statement

ARTIST STATEMENT

My interdisciplinary work is grounded in issues of contemporary territory, collective practices of study, and documentary acts of self-reflection. In collaboration with individuals, collectives, and institutions, my activities pivot around the material entanglements of performance, landscape, and document to produce complex acts and artifacts. Through space-, image- and text-making, I shift between creative genres in ways that demonstrate an ethical attitude toward constructions of place and experience, and the critical positioning of the personal and collective body therein.

In my research, I am invested in creating experimental models of practice, acts of engagement, and structures of kinship that affect and reconfigure our perceptions of constructed and natural environments. Through close readings of sites and contexts, I consider my activities as forms of critical spatial portraiture: interventions assembled in-situ, and often enacted in real-time. From these concerns, my work takes shape in a range of media formats, including physical installations, printed matter, film/audio, or collective theatre pieces—each entailing extended periods of construction, planning, collaboration, and documentary capture.

Performance—as both a medium and a methodology of full-scale making—is central to my practice, and engenders unique acts of collaboration, presentation, and publication. I advocate for the performance act as an embodied platform and convivial tool, a design object and a material culture. Whether theatre work, speech act, or guided tour—my works comprise a range of processes that can be emphatically constructed, reproduced, and felt.

The production of experimental forms of publication also plays a key role in my practice, alongside spatial and performed works. Working as editor, organizer, translator, book designer, and self-publisher, these activities under the imprint EDITS—in parallel with my ongoing intensive engagement with the working groups Collective Question (Chris Lee, Julie Niemi, SC) and Construction Company (Chaz Prymek, Joshua Graham, SC)—reflect my interest in distributive models of media practice and event production across multiple cultural spheres.


BIO

Steven Chodoriwsky (Englehart, Canada, 1980) is an artist, designer, writer, and educator. His research-centered practice engages with performance and interdisciplinary platforms, pedagogical models, and speculative acts of reading and writing with the built environment. His projects employ a diverse range of media including site-specific installation, workshops, publishing actions, theatre pieces, and audio-visual artifacts.

Based in Salt Lake City, he is Assistant Professor in the Division of Multi-Disciplinary Design at the University of Utah. Prior to this, he taught at Cal Poly Pomona, Cornell, and at the University at Buffalo School of Architecture, where he held the Peter Reyner Banham Fellowship. He was educated in architecture, environmental studies, and urbanism at the University of Waterloo and the Tokyo Institute of Technology. He has also held extended art/design research positions at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, and the Center for Contemporary Art, Kitakyushu. Currently, he holds the Artist-in-Residency at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Arts, and is the Digital Matters Fellow at the Marriott Library, University of Utah.

Chodoriwsky has exhibited and performed work at a variety of venues from the grassroots to the international, such as the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, de Appel Arts Centre, UB Art Galleries, Wendy’s Subway, Blaffer Art Museum, Wexner Center for the Arts, Ogura Gallery Kitakyushu, Suzuki Company of Toga International Theatre Festival, among others.