Weathering - Freya Copeland and Youvalle Levy
Weathering is the second in a series of publications by Freya Copeland and Youvalle Levy exploring the existential dread, boredom and isolation experienced in many large cities.
Weathering is a creative endeavour to bridge physical distance, It is a visual conversation over the great distance forced upon Copeland and Levy during international lockdowns and border closures as a result of the 2020 pandemic.
Even Though they were at complete antipodes from each other, Copeland and Levy made many analogous observations: Views confined by window frames and through chain link fences, feral cats staring at the camera with piercing eyes.
In this Edition, the correspondence is abstracted further than in Kalt, represented by punched holes and reference to archival stickers which the artists frequently use in the editing of their work.
Being at great geographical distance during the production of weathering meant that the visual editing markers came to have an even stronger influence on the process and eventually became involved in the work itself. The yellow is borrowed from the interrupted construction sites present throughout the publication.
As with Kalt, The publication is printed on extremely light Newsprint, to create something that felt ephemeral and of the everyday.
“We are almost always drawn to photograph piles of rubble, rubbish, and the scars of urban infrastructure. But with this project, these views were confined by window frames or obscured by fences. as though us being physically bound to one place became visible in our work.”
Weathering is not to distinguish between one artist or the other, but rather a way to remove a small element of ownership over images as single photographs. The amalgamation of the works serve to bridge location and the concept of “the artist”, putting emphasis on methods and processes of artistic collaboration.
“We began both of these works at moments of creative stagnance, we were interested in lowering the stakes of artistic output. To put less pressure on grand external narratives and more value on our natural, introspective and subjective visual language.”
Weathering began as an attempt to reconnect with creative practices after months of confinement and has become an agitated memorial to the early days of the world in its new state.
The first in the series, Kalt, was released in 2019.
Kalt is a visual conversation, as if in written correspondence, of the longing for the artists’ native lands warmth and light, while at the same time, their fight against their native lands in order to find comfort in their adopted city.
Kalt includes 4 colour postcards featuring collections of bureaucratic detritus, typical of life in any major european city, and actual messages and emails, rewritten in the artists’ own hand.