Agustina Woodgate isn't afraid to dig through other people's castoffs. Her work often involves overlooked or discarded items, repurposed into something meaningful. At Art Basel last year, she displayed a series of atlas, maps, and globes she painstakingly hand-rubbed raw. She's sewn poetry into thrift shop clothes, created colorful murals of stuffed animal skins, and outlined her body with human hair.
A finalist for both last year and this year's Mastermind award, buzz about Woodgate has been steadily growing. Last year, she repped Miami at Art Basel with Anthony Spinello's gallery Spinello Projects. The partnership stems from Woodgate's earliest days as an exhibiting artist."Immediately I knew we needed to work together and booked her debut exhibition, 'Organic,'" Spinello told Cultist about Woodgate. "However, trying to convince [the gallery owner] that an artist working with hair was a great idea... was not an easy endeavor."
Her works have been displayed globally, too, with pieces exhibited at the Montreal Biennial, the KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin, and El Museo Nacional del Grabado.
And while she leans toward the re-imagining of old objects, her overall style is context-based. She utilizes found items and on-site assets to create something new while simultaneously rife with historical context, focusing on the relationship between individuals and their surroundings.
Last year, she, Spinello, and several other artists transformed an abandoned East Berlin amusement park into a cultural program designed to allow disparate groups to utilize its space for creative endeavors.
"The park was built by the GDR in 1969, and when the wall fell down it was in East Berlin. Then it was bought privately and later abandoned in 2001, which created a totally different landscape. We went to research it historically, socially, on the politics of leisure, how entertainment changed depending on political systems," Woodgate told Cultist in 2012.
If her eclectic mix of previous projects is any indication, who knows what wonders Woodgate's future will hold.
2013 Mastermind Award Honorable Mentions:
Kevin Arrow
Pioneer Winter
The Overthrow
The Gutter Film Series
Daniel Reskin
Manny Prieres
Nate Delinois
Reed van Brunschot
Bookleggers Public Library
Ruben Ubiera
I'm Not Gonna Move To LA
Magnus Sigurdarson
Autumn Casey
Andrew "Zig" Leipzig
Brookhart Jonquil
JeanPaul Mallozzi
Kyle Trowbridge
Farley Aguilar
Aholsniffsglue
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