Meet the Artist

Woman with short brown hair, cat eyeglasses, in a relaxed pose. Photo credit: Ilme Vysniauskaite.

Biography

Felix Obelix, aka Wendy Spitzer (pronouns: she/her), is an interdisciplinary artist with a diverse output that spans music composition and performance, visual and community artmaking, writing, research, and modes of participatory inquiry. Driven by an expansive curiosity, her projects often explore themes of time and memory and are executed collaboratively. She has received support from Raleigh Arts; Downtown Durham, Inc.; the Durham Arts Council; the Orange County Arts Commission; Chapel Hill Community Arts & Culture; and the Strowd Roses Foundation, among others. Under the moniker Felix Obelix, she has released two albums of original compositions: The Tick of the Clock, the Beat in the Chest on the Pox World Empire label (2010) and The Ringtone Album on the Potluck Foundation label (2013). Other experiences have included audio installations on grief and mental health, a time capsule project, original scores composed and performed live to silent films, theatre and film scoring, as well as solo and group visual art shows. She has a BMus in Performance from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA) and a MMus in Creative Practice from Goldsmiths College, University of London (UK), which culminated in a final thesis entitled, Trust Them With Your Weird and Strange Notes: An Arts-Based Research Perspective on Vulnerability and the Social Dynamic in Creative Collaboration. After time spent in Prague and London, she now lives and makes art in central North Carolina.

Artist Statement

As an inquiry-based interdisciplinary artist, I ask questions and use responses to create projects involving audio/music, community participation, visual art, and research. Curiosity drives my initial process: once the questions have been asked, I find patterns in the answers, and juxtapose and aggregate elements to find the connections among them. Thematically, I am often interested in the relationship of time to memory and the co-mingling of past and present in our personal and cultural histories. Collaboration is also a hallmark of my practice, and co-creation may occur with acquaintances, friends, community members, or other artists. The multiplicity of perspectives helps me explore a topic from multiple angles, some I may be blind to, and it lends a collective depth to the final piece beyond what I am capable of as an individual artist. In all of my work, I seek to find relationships—between disparate pieces of information, between past and present, and between myself and others.

Meet the Artist

Biography

Artist Statement

Curriculum Vitae