life, the universe and art

Judith Baumann

2010-03-15T04:42:00.000-07:00

Judith Baumann is the latest artist here on Life, the Universe and Art. Hailing from Buffalo, NY and currently residing in Olympia Washington, where she teaches Print Media at Evergreen State College. She is also the Gallery director at Northern: An Olympia All Ages Project, Olympia, Washington a non profit gallery that she helped open in May 2009. Judith's work uses digital and Serigraphy printmaking techniques to draw attention to pop and consumer culture through a lens of humor that juxtaposes a critical cultural critique with mass media. She has been the recipient of a grant for the Vermont Studio Center as well as Virginia Museum of Fine Art Professional Fellowship Grant Recipient. Her exhibitions include Washington Project for the Arts/ Corcoran, Washington, D.C., Stefan Stux Gallery,New York, Boston Museum School, Massachusetts, Delaware Center For the Contemporary Art as well as The Basement Gallery in Knoxville, TN.

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1. Your work, and in particular your body of work “When Appliances Attack” uses an overt and an almost slapstick humor. How do you see this functioning for your viewer? Is there a purpose for the humor for you? What tradition does this come from?

“When Appliances Attack” was the body of work I created for my graduate thesis show at Virginia Commonwealth University, so I think of it more now as a kind of reference point for my current work. Everyone loves humor and wielded well, humor and sarcasm are powerful weapons. The saturated colors in the majority of the work, with the exception of the more subtle washing and drying machine triptych, are inviting and fun. I can’t take credit for that – it’s contemporary industrial design… bright, shiny, plastic stuff. For me, humor makes work approachable. The series is critiquing the settling and taming of inhospitable tracts of land in the American Southwest. The environmental and ecological impact of essentially colonizing these arid areas, depleting water sources and solely relying on the transportation of all goods and services to the region is astounding and unsustainable. Using humor is the only way to address such a statement in a visual way without using a crowbar on your viewer’s head. Humor and satire have been a tradition of subversive artistic expression since before the printing press, although in more clandestine ways. I think satirical, funny art is inherently the people’s art.

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2. In “When Appliances Attack” you have massing of the objects that creates a unique aesthetic within the body of work. What was your methodology? And what was the ideology behind the massing?

The massing was meant to underscore the amount of variations in the same basic appliance for a given year. All of the images of vacuum cleaners, lawn mowers and washing and drying machines were collected from online retail websites between October 2004 and March 2005. How many options does an average vacuum cleaner really need to have? The formations of the appliances were influenced by vintage science fiction posters, The Lord of the Rings trilogy and my fascination with the act of collection and hoarding. The ubiquitous nature of the appliances – the exact same model can be purchased throughout the country – highlights the homogenization of America, the growing dichotomy between the nation’s upper and lower middle classes (not to mention between the truly rich and truly poor), and our fascination with stuff that may or may not have any value in our particular geological region (lawnmowers in the Southwest).

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3. In your “Travels with John” body of work, you again employ humor to engage the viewer. However, the way the humor functions is very different than that in “When Appliances Attack”. What is this difference and how did this develop?

The “Travels with John” body of work, which is in perpetual development it seems, came out of a lonely, isolated stretch of time for me. During this time, I re-read John Steinbeck’s seminal “Travels with Charley,” in which the author travels the country with his standard poodle, Charley, in search of ‘real America’ and the people living there. Almost 50 years since the original publication date, the novel mirrored my growing concerns with the problems facing our country: the rapid development of land, depletion of natural resources, mass media’s influence over culture, the control of big government over the nation’s decision making bodies, and deforestation and its environmental impact, among many other political and social observations relevant still to the 21st century. Like Steinbeck, I have perpetual wanderlust and a great love of this country. I decided that I needed to start some sort of documentation on all my travels, weekend or otherwise. First, though, I needed a traveling partner. Since I don’t have a dog and I’m more of a solitary adventure seeker, I decided an imaginary roadside companion would be best. I thought of artists I admired and wanted to learn from, who I would want to imagine having long conversations in the car with, and who I could start to imagine seeing our travels through their eyes. John Baldessari was my first choice, his name also played nicely into the John Steinbeck reference. We did a test drive of course, to see how we would get along in my tiny hatchback Hyundai accent. We had a few quibbles but mostly it just felt… right. Therefore, the documents of my travels don’t simply reflect my humor, but the imaginary combination of my humor with John Baldessari’s.

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4. “Travels with John” plays with the idea of absence and presence in its aesthetic appearance. What was your methodology? Is the aesthetic informed by your content? And how do you think John Baldessari would respond to the work?

The whole series really delves into my over-active imagination, which of course is based on absence. “Travels with John” is the second in my “art fan art” series, the first of which was a copulation between Dave Hickey, Google and his theories surrounding art criticism. The images in “Travels with John” reference Baldessari’s graphic portraits and film stills in which he replaces recognizable characteristics and visual content with flats of varying bold colors. I apply John’s perceived aesthetic to the landscape in reference to time and physical space. In the deserts of New Mexico, horizon lines are obliterated by swaths of green, almost making sky and sand indistinguishable. On the wild coasts of Washington, haystack formations are blocked out of the landscape by reds and yellows, hinting at the eroded horizon line thousands of years from now. In Northern California, Redwoods are obliterated, wildlife is extinct and the tides deposit candy colored pollutants on the shores. All original images are taken in true snapshot fashion, altered later through digital imaging and screen-printing. Again, the tongue in cheek nature of this series (and its art-world reference) makes the political and environmental content digestible, if not immediately apparent.

I would hope that John would chuckle.

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5. You are trained as a printmaker and teach printmaking, but your work encompasses an extension into other media, specifically I am referring to your work “Blog-Thing Self Portrait”. What are the differences in how you approach printmaking and digital media in your work? Is there a place where prints and digital media meet ideologically, and methodologically? What are the differences for you as a maker, which is more fulfilling as an artist and why?

When printmaking and digital media collide, the term printmedia is conveniently conceived. That’s the realm I work in. I do not consider myself a ‘printmaker’ nor do I actively use traditional printmaking in my work. All methods of printmaking were created to disseminate information, from the earliest relief printing to typesetting, intaglio and lithography. As each of these commercial mediums were surpassed by another, artisans and artists adapted the techniques to create new, unique editions of art on paper, for the purpose of fine art alone. Digital printing and the advent of the Internet have now usurped traditional printmaking’s ideological role, questioning even the relevance of the term ‘edition.’ Traditional printmaking is extremely process oriented and technical in nature, which for me often hinders conceptual development in image making, unless that image directly relates to the process itself. When teaching, I often talk about ‘image appropriateness’ for the technique I’m giving instruction in. Intaglio has its own aesthetic, as does crayon drawn images on litho stones, and halftone images in serigraphy. That’s not to say that one cannot push the boundaries of those mediums, or even combine them but in general, highly detailed stencils just don’t look good as aquatints. In my work, I combine digital photographs, internet based imagery and graphic design standards. I compose on the computer (my ‘matrix’) and digitally output through high quality ink jet printers (my ‘press’) on traditional fine art rag papers (my ‘substrate’). Just as much technical skill and preparation go into my image-making as traditional printmaking, and I will argue with any die hard printmaker who questions the attention to detail, patience and problem solving ability that using digital inkjet printers entails. Currently, working in the digital realm just makes sense with the visual components and concepts I’m using as an artist.

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Top Ten list of Influences

1. Friends finding and fearlessly following their own life’s trip.
2. The DIY ethos
3. “Walden” by Henry David Thoreau
4. My students, when they work hard, make mistakes and learn from them.
5. All the radical, feminist women in Olympia, Washington
6. Andy Warhol
7. Summer in the Pacific Northwest
8. “The Americans” by Robert Frank
9. Growing up in Buffalo, NY
10. Joel Sternfeld’s “American Prospects,” Alec Soth’s “Sleeping By The Mississippi” and Bill Owen’s “Suburbia.”

What are your current projects?

My current project includes abstract CMYK serigraphs of famous explosions on film post 9-11 and hand drawn halftone-pattern landscapes. John and I will also be traveling to The Spiral Jetty over spring break. John read a post on Craigslist’s rideshare that Robert Smithson needs a lift to Olympia.

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List of works
1. Descent of the Lawnmowers! No. 3, Giclee Print, 30" x 44", 2005
2. Invasion of the Washing and Drying Machines! No.1, Giclee Print, 30" x 44", 2005
3. Baldessari Staring at the Shore, No.1, Digital Print and Serigraph, 19" x 13", 2007-09
4. Baldessari Lost in the desert, No.1, Digital Print and Serigraph, 19" x 13", 2007-09
5. Blog Things Self Portrait No. 2, Digital Print, 13" x 19", 2006
6. Blog Things Self Portrait No. 1, Digital Print, 13" x 19", 2009
7. Baldessari Camping at the Coast, No.1, Digital Print and Serigraph, 19" x 13", 2007-09

Will Luers

2009-03-04T05:55:00.000-08:00

Will Luers is the latest artist here on Life, the Universe and Art. Currently residing with his wife and kids in Portland, Oregon, Will is a native of Washington DC. He received his MFA in Film from Columbia University, and his undergrad from the university of Pennyslvania. He recently finished an artist-in-residency at the Digital, Technology and Culture program at Washington State University Vancouver. Will's exhibitions include the Media Arts show at the Electronic Literature Organization as well as Pixelodeon. His extensive teaching record includes Parson's School of Design, Hunter College, Portland State University, Pacific University. Will's work explores the materiality of cinema as it intersects with the internet through spatial montage, asynchronous loops, seriality, hyperlinking and locative media.

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1. You situate your work as net cinema poetics. What does this definition involve? How does this concept inform the way you create work? What constitutes the ideology behind net cinema poetics?

“Net cinema”, rather than just “online video”, is net art that draws on the basic elements of cinematic language: duration, montage and framed space. The network opens up all these other possibilities: spatial montage, the non-linearity of the database, generative montage, loops and short durations (5-10 seconds).

The poetics of net cinema is what I have decided to explore with my writing and video work on solublefish.tv. I think of this blog as a brain gym, to keep alive my cinematic thinking muscles. Just like the real gym, I have to constantly argue with myself to go workout, but I always feel much better when I do. I think my “ideology” is that cinema history has given us - all of us - a powerful and universal tool to express, think, play and share on a global stage. Before we rush to find the new show business models on the internet, lets see what else can be done. There may be many new forms of cinema art waiting to be invented. And even new ways to monetize those forms.

2. Alot of your work, in particular Foliage and Steam, Light, Grid has a finely developed aesthetic that exposes the materiality of the digital. What does the material manifestation, the form and function of the digital, conceptually construct within your work? How does this affect your process of creating works?

I should say that what gets me working productively is when my intentions get out of the way. With Foliage, I was walking in a forest with my kids on an exceptionally clear Fall day. I started collecting video of the light playing on the leaves. It was many weeks later that I brought everything into Final Cut and started playing around with the materiality of the images. It struck me that the pixelate effect did three things to the image of the autumn leaves. It separated the colors into very clean abstract panels that pulsated with light. It created a natural grid with which to layer images. And it gave me an easy digital metaphor for what happens to a leaf’s color when it breaks down on a cellular level. So all of this was a discovery. With Steam, Light Grid, it was a similar process of discovery. It is only in the final post-production stages that I really know what I am doing. The surprise is what keeps me interested all the way through.

3. Steam, Light, Grid and The Walking Man, both employ scenes of the everyday, juxtaposed and interspersed in fragments. How do the everyday fragments conceptually operate within your work? How do these visual fragments function for your viewer? And how doe they relate to the digital materiality of your work?

A feature production will spend a lot of money on creating an illusion of everyday. When there is no budget, as is the case with most videobloggers, one’s microcosm becomes the subject of the work. And what a rich subject. I have spent over fifteen years as a struggling screenwriter. I enjoy writing dramatic stories for the “big” screen, but you have to rely on your own mind for source material. Inside the everyday there is an endless field of potential images. It is still a struggle to get outside of abstractions and really see what is in front of you, but as a way to collect material for post-production, the everyday is extremely generous.

I feel the need to run the material through a digital grinder and see what forms come out the other end. One of those grinders is spatial montage, juxtaposing multiple frames within a single larger frame. I guess fragmenting the images in this way keeps me from identifying to easily with their everydayness. Art wants to make the familiar, unfamiliar.

4. Rhythmic sound drives the structure of your works, especially in West Loop and Strange loop. How did you develop the sound for these pieces and how does the sound create and affect the form of the piece?

I want to work at integrating sound earlier in the process. Right now, sound is an afterthought. In the loops you mentioned, I simply searched my iTunes library for fragments that might fit. I then threw these into the timeline, slowed things down, sped things up, etc. A very similar process to how I work with the images. These loops were also remixed fragments of old movies, so I was thinking of appropriate sounds for particularly movie genres.

5. In The Walking Man, you collaborated with Joel Sugerman. This piece is strucured in nine phases, how does each phase function? The sound of the piece utilizes a distinct digital material voice contrasted with human fragments, how does the sound function in relation to the image for you? Also, how has this collaboration informed your practice? How was this different from your solo work? What were the benefits of this artistic collaboration? What were the difficulties of this collaboration?

Joel Sugerman is a very talented (and funny) actor who was staying with me for a month. I always wanted to do a project with him, but I didn’t have any clear idea. So he and I created a character who was a wide-eyed tourist visiting Portland. We would go out into the city and I would take video with my pocket camera of him interacting with the locations. Sometimes I had him do things, but mostly it was me documenting his improvisations.

I had recently read quite a lot about psychogeography and surrealist urban walks for a workshop on locative art, so I was headed in that direction. I think our ambition was to reinvent 1920’s slapstck as a net art form. That naturally led to playing with speed and changing the video to high contrast black and white. Then the multiple panels produced some interesting effects. That is when I started to write the digital voice as a commentary on walking in the city – a smooth textbook voice trying to explain and control how we experience the world. I was trying to provide some narrative unity to something quite random. In contrast to the voice, the multiple images stutter and jolt in a way that is more like life, even though as representation it is very artificial. In a way, the series became about the process of making it: the futile attempt to manage experience with technology. I am mostly pleased with it, because it gives me a path for creating stories that don’t rely on the traditional narrative shooting/cutting methods. I am very much looking forward to working with actors (especially with Joel) again.

6. How has the employment of locative technologies in your work informed your practice? Has it changed the way you create and think about the work of art? Because your work, tends to talk not only about poetics but also about the materiality of the digital, how how the use of locational technologies manifested with these two conceptual veins in your work? How does the definition of a narrative walk affect the process of making, as opposed to the poetics of your work?

Mobile applications will make it very easy to plant video in space, like you would a geocache. I am intrigued by the idea of having to walk to get to a new chapter or episode in a series. The problem is the story (or game) has to be pretty compelling. I think we might see geotagged video be a part of larger cross-platform works, like Alternate Reality Games. But then again, for anyone who has ever geocached, it is not the treasure so much as the hunt that is so gratifying. One of the challenges of net cinema in a world of sensory overload is how to reinvent the visible. One way is through fragmentation, collage, and remixing. Locative cinema offers another way by integrating screen space with movement in real space.

Top Ten List
In no particular order:

1. The community of video-art bloggers (too many to name) – we encourage each other to make things and share them
2. Raul Ruiz (esp. Poetics of Cinema 1 & 2) – combinatory cinema, pluralizing narrative sequences
3. Jacques Rivette (everything) – a cinema of being
4. Laura Riding Jackson (Progress of Stories) – stories about the stories about being
5. Samuel Beckett (short works for television) – condensed messy dramas, repetition, clarity of image
6. Eija-Liisa Ahtila – condensed dramas with spatial montage
7. Roy Ascott (Telematic Embrace) – generative art, “fields of meaning”
8. Bill Viola (esp. I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like) – video as a tool of perception
9. Adrian Miles (vog manifesto) – pioneer thinker about networked video
10. Mark Amerika (Professor VJ, Meta/Data) - net art as life practice, remixology

7. What are your current projects?

I have five or six projects I am working on. One or two will arrive someplace interesting. I am designing some small walk projects. A series made of 12 second episodes. The same old “new media” question keeps nagging me: how are we going to tell stories/create experiences that combine text, images, video, audio and now spatial co-ordinates? I am working on more narrative ideas, but that still explore the non-linearity of database structure. It’s very hard because storytelling is about control, and the database is about giving up control. It is the tension that I wake with every morning – how much to plan, how much to leave to chance.

List of Works
1. Still from Foliage, 2008
2. Still from Steam, Light, Grid,2008
3. Still from Westward,2008
4. Still from Walking Man, 2009
5. Picture from Narrative Walks, 2008
6. Picture from The Father Divine Project, 2008

Blake Carrington

2008-10-09T06:47:00.000-07:00

Blake Carrington is the latest artist here on Life, the Universe and Art. A native of Indiana, Blake is currently finishing up an MFA at Syracuse University in Transmedia. Blake's work explores the intersections between cultural/physical geography, and human/digital perceptual systems. His extensive exhibition record includes Solvent Space, Richmond VA, Canal Autor, Madrid Spain, Rochester Contemporary Art Center, Rochester NY, The Lab, San Francisco CA, Atlantic Center for the Arts, New Smyrna Beach FL, NeMe Independent Museum of Contemporary Art, Cyprus, and University of Toronto Blackwood Gallery amongst many others. Blake is also one third of the artist collective Avalanche Collective, whose most recent exhibition was at the University of Georgia. Here, Blake talks about some of his recent work, it's performative aspect and his influences in this latest interview.

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1. Within your work, and I am thinking of particularly of Sky and Wires (At Home and Homeless) it seems as though you are taking the language of audio, that of composition, and allowing that to establish your visuals. How has this developed within your work? How do the visual and audio interplay with each other in your process?

I often think about a statement made by R. Murray Schafer in his 1977 book “The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World”. He encouraged awareness of the fact that all visual projections of sound are arbitrary and fictitious. This fact is even truer today, as transcoding from audio to video and vice versa is accomplished quite easily with programs such as Max/MSP/Jitter. Extrapolating from a conversation strictly about data-conversion, I believe this element of the arbitrary is echoed in our own perceptual faculties. Though our visual and aural faculties process sensory input in very different ways, they both lead to a heavily filtered image or sound in consciousness that may have very little in common with the external terrain. Because that external terrain is neither visual nor aural, our consciousness of it as such is a fiction.

Specifically concerning the relationship between sound and image in my work, I draw an analogy of two opposing riverbanks, existing independently but in parallel. These parallel trajectories connect at intervals via some kind of bridge. In general the sound and image have rhythms and flows of their own, which relate to the other in a way not unlike classical counterpoint.

2. Performances of electronic media techniques is prevalent in your work. How does working with digital technologies inform the performative aspect of your work? Is the performance composed prior, or do you let it develop in the moment?

I generally work within a pre-composed structure that allows for some amount of improvisation. Working with electronic technologies and performance one must consider two issues. The first concerns the performer’s interface with the instrument. The second concerns the performer’s interface with the audience. These points are only problematic in that they require a different approach and reception than one used by acoustic performers and audiences. In the first case, where a cellist has a sensual connection with the sounds emanating from the cello, a laptop musician is sensually detached from the synthesis of sound. In the second case, where a guitarist can energize a stadium with extravagant windmills and banging-of-the-head, a laptop musician may appear to be checking his email.

As a remedy for this lack of an intuitive interface between instrument, performer and audience some artists have focused on creating systems with custom hardware and software Taeji Sawai’s spotlight interface and Jean Michel Jarre’s “Laser Harp” are two examples that come to mind. These tools allow a greater amount of improvisation, and give the audience a more visceral connection between the performer’s body and the sound generated. I experimented with this approach with “ATS01: Wisp”, where I used light sensor input from a desk lamp to control a projected visual synthesis, while placing myself in front and center of the audience. However, with “You Would Do As Well Never Moving From Here” I felt the amount of information being transmitted by audio and video would already be reaching the audience’s bandwidth capacity. To also draw attention to my body would cause an overload of information. In general I try to find an optimum balance of information density between sound, image and body.

3. You have a very developed aesthetics in your work that causes the viewer to question perceptibility; this is especially prevalent in your piece ATS01:WISP. How has your aesthetic practice developed?

Ideas relating to cultural and physical geography, human and digital perceptual systems, and noise and signal combine to form the basis of my aesthetic and conceptual decisions. As I mentioned above, this questioning of perception can be correlated to a questioning of the geographic spaces we inhabit. Along this line, one can draw an analogy between the information processing that takes place in perceptual and geographic systems. A human being takes in sensory data from the environment, the ultimate HD system. From the start this data is filtered by our sensory faculties. We can see only a narrow band of electromagnetic radiation, and we can only hear frequencies in the range of 20Hz to 20kHz. Our brain then processes this manifold of sensory data, and filters it down to an even smaller trickle that it deems important to present to our consciousness. Comparing this journey to that of creating a topographic map, one sees similarities. Again we start with the environment, the ultimate HD system. From the outset certain factors are selected to be included in the map. Is this map meant to convey physical, social, economic or political information? Let’s say it is meant to be a road map. Therefore, the cartographer may discard any data relating to the people living in the area. Furthermore, a map may not represent perfectly all elements within a given area. Even if one were to make a map on a 1:1 scale, as Lewis Carroll and Jorge Luis Borges have written about, one is still discarding information by converting a three-dimensional terrain to a two-dimensional representation. At any given scale the cartographer must decide what elements will be represented and what elements will be condemned to empty white space. In both human perception and in the construction of topographic maps, the fundamental process at play is the discarding of information.

Noise and signal are present at all stages of this analogy. The noise of the external environment is systematically filtered down to a signal of consciousness, or a signal of meaning. These processes inform my aesthetic practice, and provide a wealth of potential to draw metaphors from one field to the other.

4. Within your piece Progress Filter Decay, there is a tension between chance operations and a constructed environment, which also reflects back to the performative in your work. How important is the tension between chance and the constructed? What does that tension enable with your process?

In Progress Filter Decay that tension acts as a stand-in for ideas about order/entropy and progress/no-progress. The six audio tracks feature more or less intelligent human beings speaking about different kinds of progress, while an organism that hasn’t evolved significantly in 400 million years, the hissing cockroach, controls volume levels with seemingly arbitrary movement. The work was an experiment for me in setting up a system independent of myself and letting it run.

5. In You Would Do, the viewer is confronted with performance of four men, singing in barbershop style, and then with a video and audio performative piece that creates an intriguing dichotomy. This dichotomy seems very important to the conceptual base of your work. Where is this piece and its presentation situated conceptually? How has your work evolved conceptually? Is the conceptual in your influenced by the media in which it is created?

A phrase from Italo Calvino’s novel “Invisible Cities” provided the foundation for this work. In the novel, Marco Polo speaks with the aging Mongol emperor Kublai Khan, describing each of the cities of the Khan’s kingdom. Kublai, vexed by Marco’s fantastic descriptions of impossible spaces, responds, “My gaze is that of a man meditating, lost in thought --- I admit it. But yours? You cross archipelagos, tundras, mountain ranges. You would do as well never moving from here.”

I am intrigued by Calvino’s treatment of these impossible spaces, and with this work I attempted to create a synthetic topology of my own, using sound as a raw material. The raw material is localized in the first 20 seconds, as the vocal quartet sings the line. The rest of the performance then is a stretching out of this single phrase. With the extreme amount of stretching I performed on the recording, small pauses seem like wide valleys, and intricate harmonics shift gradually. Over the course of 20 minutes, a listener may oscillate back and forth between recognition of the source recording and immersion in the soundscape.

Regarding the influence that media have on my conceptual decisions, I feel that there is a constantly cycling feedback loop between the two. I work with audiovisual signals because that medium naturally suits my aesthetic and conceptual worldview, yet that worldview is shaped in large part by my interactions with technology.

6. You also work with the collaborative group Avalanche. How has working collaboratively informed your own practice?

Working with Christopher Gianunzio and Colin Todd as Avalanche Collective has forced me to think more socially about all of these issues। Where my own work exists in a realm of perception, our collaborative work exists in the cultural landscape. Our best ideas tend to come out of play, which is quite refreshing.

Top Ten List of Influences

In no particular order…

1. Italo Calvino, esp. “Invisible Cities”
2. Jorge Luis Borges, esp. “Library of Babel” and “On Exactitude in Science”
3. Tor Norretranders, “The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size”
4. Francis Alÿs
5. Carsten Nicolai a.k.a. Alva Noto
6. Curatorial work of Nato Thompson
7. Steve Reich
8. LaMonte Young
9. Topographic maps
10. Cultural geographers: Denis Cosgrove, Don Mitchell, James Duncan, Nancy Fraser

What are your current projects?

I’m currently working on a few things…a permanent outdoor sound installation for The Redhouse Art Center in Syracuse titled “Topoextension”, an audiovisual performance deriving sound from the architectural plans of medieval cathedrals titled “Cathedral Scan”, and a descendent of “ATS01: Wisp” that will produce real-time synthetic topologies derived from a feedback between sound and image.

For higher quality videos and more information on Blake visit his website.

List of Works
1. Still of performance You Would Do
2. Sky and Wires (At Home and Homeless), Video. 9m31s
3. Still from Sky and Wires (At Home and Homeless), Video. 9m31s
3. Still from AST01Wisp
4. AST01Wisp, Video documentation of performance, 6m08s
5. Video Documentation from Installation, Progress Filter Decay 2m39s
6. Still documentation from Installation, Progress Filter Decay
7. Still documentation from Installation, Progress Filter Decay
8. Video documentation from Performance, You Would Do, 3m33s
9. Still documentation from Performance, You Would Do
10.Still documentation from Performance, You Would Do
11. Video documentation, Avalanche Collective. Broad St. Gallery, University of Georgia, 1m59s
12. Still documentation, Avalanche Collective. Broad St. Gallery, University of Georgia
13. Still documentation from Performance, You Would
14. Still from performance AST01Wisp

Deb Whistler

2008-07-12T06:41:00.000-07:00

Deb Whistler is the latest artist here on life. Deb is currently Associate Professor and Chair of Art and Art History at Hanover College in Indiana. A Midwest native, Deb graduate from the University of Cincinnati with her MFA. Her work explores notions of existence and self-reflection through materiality and the artist mark. Her exhibitions include Coker College,B erea College, The Carnegie Visual and Performing Arts Center, South Bend Regional Museum of Art, as well as Suzanna Terrill Gallery , the Vizivarosi Gallery, Budapest, Hungary and the Vincent Price Museum in LA. Recently Deb was named artist of the year by the Southern Arts Council for 2007/08. Deb talks about her process and the meanings within her art here on Life, the Universe and Art..

1.Your work seems to talk about the transformation of materials; thin paper becomes something beyond a flat surface, has a mass and texture that is other than paper. How does the transformation of your materials inform the aesthetics of your work?

Transformation is a good word to describe my work and my use of paper. Many of my pieces contain a quiet history of a past life. The overall image is captured in a state of becoming something beyond what is expected. It peels back from the wall, it explodes from the light source or it spills out from above.

I have always been interested in what lies behind the façade. The mask that hides the truth, the potential of something to become or pretend to be something that it is not, and the length that we will go to fool, deceive and hide our true selves and our objectives.
The overall images and the way I use paper in my work, support this idea of camouflage. Paper masquerades as steel, rubber, smoke, thread, water, or cobwebs. I like that it is the material itself and not the image drawn on the paper that creates this illusion. My favorite response from the viewer is the surprise when discovering that it is only paper pretending to be something grand.

2.Within this body of work, the subtly with which you infer your imagery is intriguing. It is as though you are creating your own mythology. How have you developed this intricate mythology And what are your influences for that mythology?

Wow…that’s a great question… it hits right to the core.

As a child I struggled to make sense out of the world I lived in. I remember my childhood as silence; no one explained anything to me. This freed me to investigate my own explanations. There were two events during my early childhood that have affected my work and my search for what lies behind the curtain. The death of JFK, and the film The Wizard of OZ were experiences that lead me to question my own trust in what I perceived as truth and threatened my sense of security. I had no idea what a president was, but I assumed he was a GOD or the great and powerful OZ, someone who was an invincible ultimate power. I began to search for answers in order to regain my sense of security by combining pieces of information I had gathered from Sunday school lessons, fairy tales, observations from nature, Native American stories and Greek mythology that my grandmother had read to me. I found similarities in all of these stories and began to combine this information to create my own understanding of the structure of the world I lived in. These similarities included the notion that everything is not as it seems, you must take responsibility for your actions, evil is often disguised as goodness, goodness is often hidden or silent, beware of the shortcut, and the man behind the curtain is only a fictional safety net.

My current work continues to combine images taken from a variety of belief systems in hopes that the viewer will begin to find global connections. Most recently I have combined images from last judgment paintings, Chinese scrolls, Greek mythology, and nature to create my works.

3. You have a very distinct aesthetic that is almost meditative, that is the viewer must really look intently at it in order to fully see the delicate details of the work. How have you developed this? And what do you want the viewer to take from the experience of your work?

My usual flippant response to this question is my inability to commit to anything, but in reality I work very intentionally to entice the viewer to search and discover. This activity of searching in order to discover the truth supports the notion of creating an opinion based on a collection of information. I want my work to encompass the mysteries, the every changing, the complex and the overlooked. I use visual seduction as a way to mask the truth and also to encourage an intimate visual experience. The seduction of the work is intended to draw the viewer in close as they become lost in the details and seemingly random patterns. It is within these patterns that images are revealed and with each viewing, new interpretations or discoveries are made.

4. This body of work interacts with the environment around it, creating shadows, and reflections. In a sense the work is extended and becomes part of the environment. How have you developed this, and what does it create for you conceptually?

Peter Pan’s shadow had an independence that helped reveal his true character. I love the idea of a cast shadow and object being dependent on each other. There is a playful engagement between the two, as the cast shadow changes and distorts the original form. The cast shadow often becomes more interesting than its origin and causes you to compare the object to its counter part. The passive and the active roles wrestle for visual attention an ultimately define the object.
I also use reflection in a similar way. The mirror is used to reveal an inverted image of the object, offering the viewer a new perspective. This new perspective reveals visual information that would normally be hidden.

The object, shadow, reflection and placement become visually fused together and it is only when the viewer considers form in space that the whole is understood. I enjoy that the exterior forces of our surroundings can bring our attention to an otherwise invisible object and the objects existence is dependent on the space it occupies.

5. Your work has an adherence to the craft as well as the concept. How does the process of creating the work, the craftsmanship affect the aesthetics of the work? How have you developed your craftsmanship?

The craft and concept are dependent on each other. My process of making visually refers to purely decorative crafts such as crochet or lace. It is the complexity of my process that visually seduces the viewer to move in closer. The craft of my work is the visual hook, it is the familiar, something the viewer recognizes. I feel I am successful when the viewer moves from questioning how it was made, to questioning what it is. When the viewer begins to question, the complexity of the meaning is revealed.

The paper cutting process I use came directly from my wood cut process. I use the same mark in both mediums and I refer to my process as paper carving. Even though I dislike labels, I do consider myself a printmaker.

The manner in which I work has been described as obsessive, although I prefer the term focused. My works were once described as being Rococo with a purpose. This comment made me laugh, since the Rococo style is my least favorite. Although I cringe at the thought of linking my work to the Rococo style, it was however, an insightful observation.

Top Ten Influences
What is not there: negative space, silence
-Fictional characters: the bogie man, Peter Pan, OZ, Mr. Darcy
-Nature: spider webs, cocoons, the solar eclipse, shadows from trees, fog, wood-grain, onions, the changing seasons
-Authors: Virginia Wolf, Ian McEwan, Kafka, Orhan Pamuk
-Craft: Islamic rugs, lace, stain glass windows, shadow puppets
-Artists: Marco Maggi (transforming material), Eva Hesse& Kiki Smith (the combination of fragility and strength), Rembrandt (for what is revealed in the darkness),
-Simultaneous contrast
-The stain glass in San Chapel on a partially sunny day.
-Chinese scrolls

6. What are you currently working on?
I am currently working on an installation that revolves around the idea of search and destroy, and the impact of winning at all cost.

List of Works
1. Falling Angels, paper, steel, glass
2. Detail of Falling Angels, paper, steel, glass
3. Detail of cast shadow, The Dumping of Pandora's Box
4. The Dumping of Pandora's Box
5. Detail of Abyss, paper, graphite
6. Detail of Abyss side view, paper, graphite
7. The Reflection of Medusa
8. Detail of mirror view, The Reflection of Medusa
9. Last Breathe
10. Detail, Last Breathe
11. The Voila Machine
12. Detail of the Voila Machine

AmzeEmmons

2008-03-24T16:46:00.000-07:00

Amze Emmons is the latest artist here in Life, the Universe and Art. A University of Iowa grad, Amze is Assistant Professor Print and Drawing at Muhlenberg College, outside Philadelphia. Amze has an extensive exhibition history including, Painted Bride, Philadelphia, PA, Transmission Gallery, Richmond, VA, Works on Paper Gallery, Philadelphia, PA and Scuola Internationale Di Graphica, Venice, Italy. Awards include Individual Creative Artist Fellowship, Pennsylvania Arts Council Grant, The MacDowell Colony, and a Key Holder Residency, Lower Eastside Printshop, New York, NY. Amze talks about his latest body of work, Refugee Architecture, which deals with the architecture of displacement, here on Life.

1. This body of work seems very much about alienation and the urban environment. It almost feels post- apocalyptic, but with a wry wit to it. How did this recent series come to in being? What was your conceptual base for it?

Your description touches on most of my main conceits; it’s great to hear that it comes through to the audience.

Only in retrospect does this work really appear to emerge from a fairly logical trajectory. I had finished a large body of work investigating modernist architecture, mostly vague office spaces and bleak waiting rooms; that work was intended as a kind of critique of institutional space. It was beginning to feel played out and I wanted to head in a new direction. The civil war in Iraq was just beginning to explode, and imagery of the people being displaced and all the car bombings was overtaking my attention; these events seemed too important to not speak about but I had no interest in making polemic imagery. So I just started working and asymmetrically I found subject matter that suited my vocabulary: refugee architecture, abandoned inhabited spaces, and decimated urban landscapes. Initially I set the constraint that I would only harvest source material from the New York Times. There was something odd and quiet about the grey black and white halftones when compared with the streaming video TV or the cheap digital images of carnage found on the web. Eventually I settled on a process of only working from documentary sources: newspaper clippings, news media imagery, documents and images from the UNHCR, Doctors without Borders… This led me to a broader investigation into global displacement. In a sense this body of work is really about this moment in time as seen through my various filters and procedures. It’s interesting to me that people often refer to it as post-apocalyptic. It’s just a collage of all the information we are fed on a daily basis but we’ve become numb to it.

2. You have a very distinct aesthetic, where your environs have a sense of accumulation, almost an all-overness, if you will, and yet there is a distinct visual quietness. How did you develop that?

I think the aesthetic sensibility in the work comes out of the process of making it and has been developing since I started this project three years ago. From the start I knew that this work needed to be pared-down in broad visual terms. The content and source material are overwhelming to me and needed to be filtered. Also I wanted to bring more of what I was really enjoying in my print work into this drawing/painting space. In my prints I was trying to exploit the anonymity that one finds in architectural drawings, printed matter and vintage comics. They clearly speak about the artist’s hand but also have a removed ‘age of mechanical reproduction’ quality to them. It seemed somehow important at an intuitive level to combine this pared-down, minimal realism with this interest in print language. I’m glad it reads as visual quietness--I would see that as a kind of success.

3. Your sense of balance between what is depicted in your imagery and what is not is really sophisticated. It seems to give just enough to allude to a particular narrative, but not enough to spoon-feed your audience. How have you developed that tension? And how do you see your audience relating to this narrative device?

This work starts out with all of these layers of source material--articles and newspaper clippings, found text, etc.--all of it seems important. I spend a lot of time drawing and erasing, but mostly erasing. I’m trying to find the essential elements that resonate inside of all the noise, intuitively editing and paring the image down to what seems most true. I’m interested in how the voids that are left can occupy space, both formally and conceptually.

The question of narrative is an interesting one. I don’t really intend these images as narrative works. From my point of view these images exists as artifacts of my process, fragmentary like a film still. I think the reason the images allude to narrative are because of what the audience brings to them. The shelters, blast walls and discarded water bottles are embedded in our visual culture; we remember them from images of Katrina’s aftermath or of sectarian conflicts in Baghdad. I’m very interested in how these assemblages, made up of architecture and evidence of displacement, can pose questions of narrative to the audience. It’s like a piece of isolated footage, composed of these discrete symbols that can be decoded in many different ways. I like the idea that an image can be a place of discovery for everyone involved.

4. Within your environs, you use these really rich moments of color, which act as a sort of punctum. How do you balance the color with your forms? How has this aesthetic device come into your work?

The short answer is that a lot of what happens in the studio is an intuitive process; the longer answer is that I have always had a keen interest in color and shape as formal elements to be manipulated. I spent a good deal of my time as a student looking really closely at Renaissance heavy-hitters like Giotto; I was always taken with his use of color. Later in my education I really tried to focus on learning formally how to manipulate composition, I guess coming out of an interest in the Bauhaus artists. I suppose it’s probably not really cool to suggest that I am a formalist inspired by Renaissance painters but that time spent studying their work is essential to how I construct these images today. But I should add that my pallet is strongly informed by my everyday activities. I carry a camera with me almost all the time; you never know what you might see in Chinatown or Target that will inspire you. I went to graduate school with some really great color theorists/practitioners; Gianna Commito and Nate Haenlein both taught me a lot about ways to deploy color.

5. There is an absolute adherence to craft and a sense of detail in your work. What is your drawing methodology and how do you think that methodology affect the aesthetics?

I think my over-arching method comes out of an interest in finding the image through the activity of drawing. I try to lay down a lot of information, rapidly, proceeding without expectations or emphasis. The forms are conjured out of this mess. Then I spend a lot of time erasing/editing until I find what is essential to the image. This willingness to really rework the image as if nothing is sacred comes out of my time spent making etchings and scraping plates. I think the surface becomes a kind of palimpsest. The images are very sharp but if you look closely all the history of erasing and re-drawing is there in the surface. I really like the way the drawn marks and painted shapes serve to act as foils to each other.

Top Ten list of Influences

After re-reading this list, It seems to have turned into more a list of things that entertain me right now. And I only came up with seven items. What does that say about how I’m influenced or my long term memory? I don’t know.

Podcasts- It’s hard to remember what I did in the studio before I started listening to these. I have a full list of my current favorites on my website.

Books- I read a lot and at times with haphazard taste. I’ve realized only lately how generative text is to my work. Recent titles worth mentioning- City of Glass by Paul Auster, Spook Country by William Gibson, Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, The Places In Between by Rory Stewart.

The Wire- It’s almost cliché at this point but this is really good TV. Up with complexity!

Comic Books- It seems to me that my aesthetic decisions are very informed by all the years of my youth spent looking at kinetic, brightly colored bursts of energy trapped in fading newsprint. I recently ‘discovered’ this indie, artist-writer, Anders Nilsen. He’s really, really great. I feel like our work is somehow in conversation. I have a total comic crush on him.

Food that comes in it’s own container- Bananas, hard boiled eggs, burritos.. the list goes on. It’s natures’ own mysterious symmetry at work.

Kiosk- is a store in NYC whose owners comb the world over looking for small odd items that are in themselves beautifully designed or packaged everyday objects. I’m sure I’m not doing justice to the items in their collection. www.kioskkiosk.com/

Portable Architecture- The future is coming at it’s on wheels! Check out the archive of images of portable architecture at Temporary Services, www.temporaryservices.org/ --If you aren’t familiar they are a very cool art collective out of Chicago.

What are your current projects?

Besides just continuing this body of work and few upcoming shows, I have several other more collaborative projects in the works.

HUSH, a Dance Theater X production
HUSH is a multi-layered Dance collaboration under the direction of the choreographer Charles Anderson. I will be working as a visual designer on the piece.

Refuge/Refugee
I am contributing a section of text and imagery to Refuge/Refugee, a Chain Links series
Book. This interdisciplinary text will explore the plight and nature of refugees and refuge
from several distinct vantage points।

List of Works
Portrait of the Artist
Technical Oversightt, Paper, 18.5x24” 2007
Secret Writing, Paper, 18.5x24” 2007
How to Run, Paper, 18.5x24” 2007
Disruptive Technology, Panel, 20x24” 2007
Being Cheerful Starts Now, Panel, 20x24” 2008
Pidgin Satellite, Paper, 18.5x24” 2007
Protective Clothing, Paper, 18.5x24” 2007

Jenn Figg

2008-02-16T15:36:00.000-08:00

Jenn Figg is the latest artist here on Life. A California native whose sculptures investigate boundaries and the space in between, Jenn currently resides in Richmond Va, where she is a PhD student at Virginia Commonwealth Universities Media Art and Text Program. Jenn's work had been in numerous exhibitions including Santa Barbara Contemporary Art Forum, Santa Barbara,The Arts Center, Carpinteria, CA, Gallery 25, Fresno, Silah Gallery, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara among numerous other venues. Jenn talks about her sculptures as well as her investigations into new media and boundary spaces in the latest interview.

1. Your work transforms the materials, which include jellybeans, salt, and a lot of other unexpected things. Why have you chosen to utilize these seemingly mundane things in your sculpture and what do they impart to the viewer for you?

My work stems from an intuitive process, so when I have an idea of what the whole might look like, I need to find its constitutive parts. A lot of time is spent photographing objects or prowling in hardware, secondhand, or candy stores. There is an element of surprise in the transformed material, the vacillations between the subject / object function to bring new associations. Weed whacker cord is seen as sour candy rope, yarn becomes a trifle, and tarred monofilament translates as grass. The physicality of the object goes beyond surface and form.
The material always already has symbolic and metaphoric allusions (associated narrative) that are both inherent and imposed. Through juxtaposing and configuring various of these known objects, I have the means to explore some of the boundaries of these common understandings. Not only am I interested in the boundaries of our common understanding; I am enchanted by the conceptual place between the boundaries.
This space I call the purlieu. The word was originally used in old English Forest Law and coined by John Manwood in 1665. It is the place between the forest and the city, which is neither forest nor city – a place without a designator. The purlieu was thus a borderland, a social space of overlapping and conflicting jurisdiction. The purlieu, which came to derogatorily denote any of a place’s outlying parts, is the hidden—existing at the point of overlap, being neither one thing nor another—nor not one thing nor another। Until the purlieu becomes a center of designation, it remains hidden. And that’s the place I’m hooked on – I keep seeing it. My latest work aims to draw attention to these conceptual boundaries, crossings, demilitarized zones, even an area of zombies…

2. There is a meticulous attention to detail in your work. How does the process and methods in your work relate to the final piece?

Surface detail totally fascinates me, informed by my past textile design experience. I did and still wish to knit! Anyway, the ‘depth of surface’ – it is more than skin deep. That is where I want to go, so the materials I choose feed into that mode of thinking.
I consider surface as constituted of layers of texture, color, form, and object that make meaning. One of the questions I ask is, ‘Wherein the veneer resides the unexplored or unknown?’ In pulling attention to surface it is a recognition that the things that are hidden are not in the back of a closet or even in the darkest recesses of the mind…the things that are the most difficult to see are sitting right on the surface. I relate this to Poe’s classic, The Purloined Letter. People often look to others to tell them about themselves. One of the aims of my work is to draw attention to and highlight the surfaces of the ordinary, drawing out the mysteries there. A certain mystery for me is the perfection of a craft, and as I am inherently imperfect, well…how are things made?
There was a point when both the labor and the time involved to create the work became part of the overriding narrative informing the final piece – I am thinking specifically of Fashioning Eden (Sowing Machine)। Every individual strand was cut, rolled in tar and silicon carbide grit, and adhered to make the grass bed। That seemed important at the time. Currently I am deemphasizing fabrication. I used to think that I was process oriented…again relating to weaving (winding a warp and threading a loom, etc.) As my work has progressed and I have needed outside help to complete it, my hand is not the only one involved and the physicality of making seems processually less connected. So now, the layers of process and method within the piece relate only laterally.

3. There is this feeling to your work of play, and of whimsy. How did you develop that?

Whimsy is something that I do not purposefully try to achieve. With Fabulous Fibonacci I was aiming toward a craft aesthetic, blending bright yarn with candy and an obsessive counting, something that could go on and on infinitely. The counting, sorting, and stacking of the yarn balls was completely absorbing; they became little delicacies, needing lacy doilies. Relating back to your previous question of process and methods, the yarn mounds were a labor of love, and the time played an operative role in this work. The counting of hundreds of yarn balls and silver dragees reminded me of measuring ingredients when cooking, and the seeming endlessness of that endeavor. So I serve them up for visual consumption…
For some of the topographies, like those in the shelf series, the camera lens defines the point of entry, creating the geographic margins and forcing scale। A small shelf, seen through the mechanical eye, is established as a candy forest – where we meet the growths at eye level, and the whole becomes quite playful। Initially, my interest in seeing the details drove me, photographing purely as documentation – since so much of my work is made of ephemeral materials. Then it became something else altogether, more of an interest in the composition and object, a change from the mass to the singular. It needed a different take.

4. Your piece, Foundation, is changed by the viewer as they enter the space of the sculpture. How important to the piece is that interaction and what does it mean to you and for the viewer?

I assume that we are talking about people who are actually interested in experiencing the work in the first place? The viewer cannot be forced to do / see anything, but they can be guided.
Let me explain a bit. Within Foundation was a corridor, delineated by the mass of objects on either side. For a short time, people walked around the outside of the work, but a few walked through. Suddenly it became crowded, and then people began to slide underneath it. There was no way to control the viewpoint – people were walking through, lying underneath, and sitting inside it. After the opening it needed many repairs! I hadn’t expected that level of interaction.
When the viewer entered the work, Foundation ceased to be a discreet object – albeit a large object – situated in the center of the space. Instead it became a dynamic landscape, subtly altering the center of gravity, as the ‘ground’ had risen from the feet to the thigh. Also, the individual objects were barbed, and they caught on clothing, so when they released and swung back they would bump other pieces and set off a chain reaction. This brought to the viewer a body awareness, a sense of their own physicality in relationship to their surroundings. That mindfulness brings another level of meaning to the work. Foundation was never still because of air currents, but with people shifting within it the triggered kinetic motion was more exaggerated.
That sense of the self and the body moving through a space either physically or psychologically is important to me, but for this particular installation, it was not crucial। Fashioning Eden (Sowing Machine) was a work that is user-activated, with a hand crank, an absurdist piece of machinery. But there are enough clues, such as a kneeling pad and protective (if fanciful) gloves to imply that the handle could be turned and that the grass would move. If the viewer physically engages the work then they, in turn, become a performance for others, and this crosses some sort of passive audience boundary.

5. You have this very distinct aesthetic, which seems to employ chaos and control to create an environment. How did you develop that?

Much of my earlier work developed from a place of repetition of action and form। The making of the work was actually meditative for me, and I was told that others experienced a calm state of mind when watching the kinetic work from that time. Seed grew out of that space. It was placed in rows and spaced exactly, but since each strand bent differently, the sculpture rose up into a chaotic jumble, a total texture. Nature has an intrinsic order, and I was using plants as a departure point. I continue to depict nature, but with different sensibilities.

6. What are you working on now?

I am investigating garden spaces through substituted and pantomimed nature. These landscapes are in the form of digital collages at this point, a mixture of photographs of real life object and my sculptural work, which then is manipulated. I look at them as particular fictionlands – depicting a boundaried hovering between our first- and second- life, and hinting at those darker places that are quite ordinary.
This new work is exciting – I am venturing into a different type of dimensional representation, using digital effects for imaging and printing, and also using a paper-doll concept for the forms. My next project is to build small tableaux, using some projection and possibly peepholes to further guide the viewpoint within the composition. Much of my inspiration comes from contemporary gamescapes, and their theatricality. There is more of the hidden in there – what is offstage? I keep asking…

Top Ten Influences
My parents
My artist and philosopher friends. they always inspire me.
All those movies I saw when I was a kid, like the original Star Wars trilogy, Poltergeist (plus other scary ones like Hellraiser, the Freddie Series, and Aliens) Bladerunner, Labyrinth, The Dark Crystal, The Neverending Story, more recently, Werner Herzog's films, Pedro Almodovar's films, The Matrix...
The poets Pablo Neruda and Mary Oliver and Rainer Maria Rilke and Emily Dickinson
Eva Hesse, Roxy Paine, Tara Donovan, Judy Pfaff, Kiki Smith, Marnie Weber, Felix Gonzales-Torres
The authors Ian McEwan and Paul Auster and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Margaret Atwood and Umberto Eco
The photographers Diane Arbus, Ansel Adams, Jeff Wall, Cindy Sherman
The designers Eero Saarinen and Charles and Ray Eames and Junichi Arai

List of Works
1. Candy Grass 2007, wood, monofilament, paint, adhesive, candy
2. Fashioning Eden, detail 2006, wood, monofilament, tar, silicon carbide grit, various metal parts
3. Fabulous Fibonacci, wood, yarn, candy, adhesive, paint, doilies, 2006
4. Foundation 2005, screening, silicon carbide grit, thread, adhesive, sand, salt
5. Foundation, detail 2005
6. Seed, monofilament, wax, wood, 2005
7. it's always winter outside Never-Never land, composite digital image, light box, 2008
8. Mold / Moulding, 2007, 'oops' paint

Althea Georgelas

2007-12-28T12:46:00.000-08:00

Althea Georgelas is the latest artist here on Life, the Universe and Art. Althea is a multimedia artist who utilizes new technologies in her work including video and digital prints. Currently, she resides in Richmond Virginia. Her work has been on view at the Kunst Museum, Kristiansand, Norway, The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond Virginia, the Collaborative Public Arts Festival in Richmond, Va, as well as numerous other venues.

१. Your work frequently, deals with the current events, such as the war, feminist issues, or the use of media communication. How do you position your ideas about current events in your work, and how important is that for you as an artist?

Artists, like all people (whether they are aware of it or not), are just responding the world from their vantage point.

Artists learn how to communicate their views to others effectively and this makes them sensitive to the editing and manipulations of mass media. Who better to step into the same arena as big business advertising and be heard among the flooding but those who understand its jargon? The key is making your reply decipherable to the rest of the world and not just elite academia. I am not saying that any one act or piece of artwork should start its process with then intent of fixing the world… but if something pisses you off or stirs a great tornado in your gut… RESPOND in earnest. When people stop responding to their lives… the music stops.

Every person has the right to speak. All points of view are valid and maybe artists (who mostly call themselves so) are just people driven to make artifacts, objects, ideas or situations to archive their views of the world, their street … their minds. Like moving, breathing time capsules… we are all astronauts for the future. My own history calls for attention to the things overlooked… to respond to the onslaught of information and emotional movement whirling about in the ether.

It is hard not to look into the fire, my friends. So, as I tell my students as I have been told myself… speak damn it. Holding all that smoke in makes for more bullshit later on in the world and shit, we ain’t got time for that.

2. Your work has a distinct collage aesthetic, how did you develop this sensibility?

Using collage is a way to replicate the overwhelming nature of emotion and information I feel buzzing around. Life and memory are layered… so too are the things representative of it.

When I was a kid I use to spend hours collaging images on the walls of my room and sewn to table clothes. I was a pain in the ass to my poor mother who bought gallon after gallon of Killz paint to one day, hopefully someday, paint that room dubbed the cage back into some form of farmhouse normalcy. Assembling those images made a lot of sense to me and I guess that evolution is still with me in all forms of artmaking and thinking.

There was and still is something about sitting alone, possibly looking very lazy while clipping away at an idea. Later on I was introduced to the darkroom and damn, I really loved all that black and quiet while bringing images together. Better than therapy. Truth.

3. A lot of your current pieces use the imagery of power lines. What do they represent for you and do they communicate?

My Mother, a gardener of color and Father, an architect, taught me how to design and look at buildings when I was very young. Watching the tall spindly trees of Virginia… I spent hours looking up in to those skies imaging towering structures being built into the clouds. We use to take road trips to Pennsylvania where I spent summers chasing dairy cows and climbing haystacks with kittens in my pockets to the hit the zip line out the silos at my grandparent’s farm. During the long truck ride north, I was usually bored and bellyaching. To combat this my Mother told me to watch the power lines “jump” in the sky as they whipped by… something she used to love to do. After a while I started seeing shapes and architecture grow out of their movement and I felt an affinity towards them.

When I moved to Richmond, Virginia the clean rhythmic construction of power lines fed over the countryside was nonexistent. Richmond’s hovering sculptures were and still are in chaos. They seem organic, like the spines of ivy crawling over brick, grown out of the city’s residents shear desire and need for that powerful juice to fill their homes and industry.

In my recent video/sound piece, Powerlines (2007) this need for power is addressed. These cables and towering poles are the physical extruder of our energy desire. They are the physical representation of our movement in to the virtual. They are the necessary link to feeding into our lives, our homes and our heads the unphysical media spaces (the electricity to fuel television, the internet etc) that we are increasingly living our lives out in. We view and interact with the physical world through a window, maybe many panes removed from the actual action or touch. How is this creating tension between the physical and the unphysical? The piece was experienced as about a 15 foot across projection and two channel speaker system. You can check out a very small, very compressed version of the video here: www.meltmixpair.com/powerlines.html (or scroll down and click play on the small compressed version.). Please use headphones… and maybe a magnifying glass. Enjoy.

4. The digital print series also is very much about appropriation and issues of authorship. How do you approach the idea of artistic authority, and how does that process affect the work?

Appropriating images or materials from other sources is just another to way to examine the world around us through the points of view of other people. Collecting and arranging these elements then creates a new story out of the thoughts and ideas of others that I feel an immediate affinity towards. It is a way to examine myself and what ideas, object and situations etc that I am currently attracted to. The new arrangement comes to be after I have gnawed, chewed and swallowed the original… it comes forth as it’s own entity. I do cite my sources (when available) much like writing a research paper to pay tribute to their origination. Hopefully this will inspire others to seek out the sources creating a network of thought and discourse among people. I am a fan of sharing ideas… not hording them so that only the few may partake in their existence. Art should not succumb to dusty gallery walls as pillars of untouchable magic. To the street! If you want to dance you are going to through some sweat on the people around you. Get used to it.

५. Your video piece uses a very sophisticated use of sound as rhythm for the image, how has this developed?

Video, like paintings or piano playing, has a rhythm unique to itself that is created by the triggering idea. There is no blank canvas and no real silence as the (illustrious!) creator of this blog and John Cage might grinningly say. When I come to the point where the idea is ready to take a shape it has long since been thumping a rhythm into my head and that cadence demands representation. Whatever it calls for. The idea chooses its mode of transportation… its medium and tempo.

6. Top Ten List of Influences

This is a hard one…wonderfully High Fidelity. How about seven loose categories? Give me an inch and I’ll demand, well, you know…

Groups/ideas:
The GRL (www.graffitiresearchlab.com)
IAA (www.appliedautonomy.com)
Instructables (www.instructables.com)
The Storker (www.xmarkjenkinsx.com)
www.surfingthespectacle.com
TXTual Healing (www.txtualhealing.com)

Media:
The good, the bad and the ugly of: art, television, advertising, and gov. conferences
Robot Chicken
Slowpoke comics by Jen Sorenson
Columbia Journalism Review
Oh golly, the news!

People:
Not the Nihilists… and yet the nihilists
The good stories told in bars, cars and while dancing
Drawing on napkins with comrades
Astronauts
The big tree over the river of my childhood

Places:
My porous memory
Traveling (not so much the destination)
Running to exhaustion and dreaming
Drifting 100 feet below the surface with the sharks
Walking through Bangkok
Walking through America
Random acts of art in public space

Music:
Epic battle songs and the quiet ones too… Pink Floyd, Sole, Dj Spooky, God Speed You Black Emperor etc. etc.

Films:
Blade Runner
Punishment Park
Apocalypse Now
Mishima
Dark City
Pi
Mad Max

Some more people:
J. Conrad
W. Gibson
W. Faulkner
C. McCarthy
G. Orwell
K. Vonnegut

7. Current ventures?

There are two ideas on the horizon and one involves portraits of those energy extruders and a dive into the growth of the Richmond landscape by tracking its power needs. The other, more dominant idea, involves my working through reactions and feelings surrounding violence and women. During the spring/summer of 2007 I worked with Bob Paris (a comrade, VCU prof. and creator of www.surfingthespectacle.com) to create a web image essay about women. Dubbed “The Measure of Women” it speaks, through appropriated images, about the past, present and possible futures of violence towards women being attributed to physical limitations and psychological reaction. Violence towards women is the only epidemic that has span the length of human history within all regions, ethnicities and creeds.

I feel it is time to give it full attention as painful as that may be and give it the focus it regularly demands. It is fair to call it an epidemic simply because it is. It is one that remains silent for a multitude of reasons… lack of support, acknowledgement and/or discrimination etc. Many people just think it’s “old news” and that it really isn’t a problem anymore. How about this: EVERY woman I know (friends, mothers, grandmothers… young and old) have their own story to tell about a violent situation they themselves have experienced. It has been a shocking realization, over the past few months, while conversing about the subject of domestic violence and assault, with the women I am surrounded by.

Part of me believes that the increase in aggression towards women is caught in a cyclic reaction and creation of media involving violence toward women as background fodder (rape, beatings, submission as background textures in films and television etc is more disturbing than giving it the forefront focus it deserves)… which is representative to the way our culture and all cultures seem to deem the subject… as a background hiss.

At this point I am in the process of planning the collection of stories. It is possible that these stories may become sound pieces but I won’t know until I have begun interviewing. This is a journey to understand myself as well possibly being cathartic to others. We will see where this takes us.

Martin Bromirski

2007-11-30T06:20:00.000-08:00

Martin Bromirski is the latest artist here on Life, the Universe and Art. Based in upstate New York, he received his BFA from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Martin is a multi disciplinary artist who work includes paintings, and photos, he also authors the art blog Anaba. His work has been included in numerous exhibitions, including The Painting Center, NY, D.U.M.B.O Art Center in NY, Digging PiTT Gallery, Pittsburg, Art Base; Stuffy's in Richmond, VA and most recently at Richard Prince's Second House in Renesselaervialle, NY. Martin talks about his work and its influences here on Life.

1. Your latest body of work “at Second House” deals with the remnants of a fire at Richard Prince’s Second House. It seems to explore not only the physical remnants of a fire, but also speaks about your relationship to the mythology of the artist. What led you to this development?

Oh, so complicated… how do I answer? The interest in the mythology of the artist, the idea/creation of identity, goes way back… at least to my last year of college (1989/1990). One of the big things for me back then was the discovery in the hall of a blackboard, full of mysterious diagrams and the name “Humberto Maturana”. The diagrams related to the charcoal drawings I had been making (maybe under the influence of Beuys?), and the lyrical name led to the birth of a character and a whole body of work exploring those identity themes. This was before google, and I was already way inspired, so it was more than a year before I did any research on that name and discovered that Humberto Maturana was a real person, a Chilean expert on the nature of time, metadesign, the ontology of observing. I ordered one of his books, called Tree of Knowledge.. which blew my mind (the parts I could even understand) because it tied in so much with the Humberto stuff I’d been making. The ephemerality of certainty, “living as a process is a process of cognition”, the reciprocality of perception.

The interest in the house comes from a lot of other stuff too, of course. Two of my favorite buildings in Kyoto are Ginkakuji and Kinkakuji… the Silver Pavilion and the Gold Pavilion. Prince’s Second House was silver, Kinkakuji was destroyed in fire. The fire was arson, fictionalized in an account by Mishima Yukio, set by a young monk obsessed with it’s beauty and perfection.

2. The two series of Jerry Saltz, both at Stuffy’s Basel and the Studio visit, are such an interesting
and exciting play on the relationship of artist and critic. How did you develop this idea and how has it been received by Jerry Saltz (especially the kiss!)?

Jerry Saltz came to Richmond , to give a lecture at VCU in conjuction with the John Ravenal-curated exhibition Artificial Light. They had made small posters featuring a life-size profile photo of Jerry Saltz, so I took a few and cut out his head, to kind have a conversation with. I was holding his head, forcing him to look at my paintings on the wall, nodding his head… it was like he was my dummy. Then I took my cell-phone and with one hand tried to hold the paper head in a realistic way and keep it from curling, while with the other I took pictures. One thing led to another and the paintings were pretty much forgotten, and we ended up in bed.

That first set of photos taken at my apt/studio was a result of total play, but they were so hilarious I wanted to show them, so I decided to construct an almost-possible narrative of actually meeting him. I took the head to the Stuffy’s show and climbed all over the booths trying to take good photos of him with all of the work… that second set of photos of Jerry at Stuffy’s was posted before the original set, so I could make up the story of meeting him at Stuffy’s and inviting him to my studio.

It felt GREAT to make that fake art fair, with the sign out front, have the paper head critic come, and put it all on my blog. So many more people have seen, and continue to see, those pieces than if I had actually had a painting included in the corner of someone’s booth in Miami . The self-empowered DIY delusion truly superior to reality.

I have no idea what Jerry thinks of that piece, but I’d be surprised if he has not seen it. It has definitely been e-mailed around, and people click on that link every single day; it’s always on the first or second page when people google his name. He probably thought it was funny, but doesn’t consider it any more seriously, because it is not represented by a gallery and not in NYC.

3. Your work has a definitively playful side to it even when it deals with very serious subject matter.
How and why have you developed this sensibility (which I really love, by the way)?

Thanks. Wow, these questions are hard… that sensibility (any sensibility?) isn’t something that has been consciously developed. But, I guess yeah, a person can recognize his sensibility and embrace/repress to whatever degree. I suppose that I am an embracer of the goofballness.

4. There is a distinct aesthetic that you use in your photographic work, a feeling of presentness. How have you developed this?

If I have the same understanding of this feeling which you describe, it may be because with my photos I am not like trying to be a third-party neutral observer, or a recorder, but am actively in the space and/or engaging with the subject of the photograph. There is no distancing. It probably goes back to that immersion in Maturana and his ideas.

It might also be partly due to the crappy quality of my photos? I don’t have a real camera, they have almost all been taken with disposable cameras and my cell-phone. Does the lack of polish possibly contribute to that feeling of presentness?

I think a similar thing is happening with the paintings.

Actually, I’d really like to get a real camera. I’m kind of bummed that there are so many good cell-phone photos that I don’t think I can make prints of, the resolution and color would be so bad. They will probably always just be digital.

5. Your work, the “at Second House” series, the Jerry Saltz bodies, the Ana Project all seem to merge life and art together. How has this process affected your life and your work? And how has blogging affected them both?

When I started doing all the small paintings with circles it was while I was always eating at Stuffy’s… it got cold and Stuffy’s started having a Sub of the Season, it was a meatball sub. Every single day, sometimes more than once, I was eating the meatball Sub of the Season because it was the cheapest, and warm. Then I started to look at these meatballs every day and think about my circle paintings, started to think of the paintings as meatballs… not literally, but the physicality, oddness, awkardwardness, sloppiness, etc… and to think about the Stuffy’s space. So I asked if I could make a show at Stuffy’s… it was called Meatballs at Stuffy’s. The following year I organized a show of a bunch of awesome Richmond artists at Stuffy’s, concurrent with a show I had at Haigh Jamgochian’s fantastic Markel Building . Now I want to have a show at this gym I am going to every day… getting really into that space.

Blogging is having a huge affect on my art, process, and life… forging real and imagined relationships, leading to the creation of a lot of photo/narrative work, stimulating an interest in provocation, how much to share, wondering what the line is, what happens if you cross the line, lots more writing, lots more photography, awareness of an audience, doing internet art, thinking about entertainment, how to pace, just a ton of stuff. It is all still relatively new to me, so it’s hard to grasp exactly what things are happening. I have absolutely no “blog guilt”, like I think a number of artist bloggers develop… that they’re wasting time not making their “real” art, whatever medium it is. I just think of the blog as a medium that I’m enjoying experimenting and participating in, even if I don’t always know what I’m doing or why.

Ten Influences (can be anything)

I’m changing “Top Ten” to “Ten”…

Mildred Elfman Greenberg
Paris (an artist, not the city)
Humberto Maturana
Roberta Fallon and Libby Rosof
Joe Fyfe
Grandma Moses
Comics - Jack Kirby, et al
Daniel Buren
Japan – so much from 8+ years there, an unbelievable amount, too much to identify here.
Richmond - the atmosphere/life-style/vibe/aesthetic, plus artists like Haigh Jamgochian, Paul DiPasquale, Don Crow, Travis Conner, Jeannine Harkleroad, Ron Johnson.

Mary Kate Maher

2007-10-27T10:53:00.000-07:00

Mary Kate Maher is the latest artist on Life the Universe and Art. A Philadelphia native who earned her MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Mary Kate now lives and works in Brooklyn. Her work includes drawings, sculptures, installations and video. She has been exhibited at the D.u.m.b.o. Arts Center, NY, and the Stuhltrager Gallery, NY, Vox Populi, Philly, the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania and the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia. Mary Kate talks about her latest project in process here on Life, the Universe and Art.

1. Your latest body of work deals with cryptozoology, whaling and underwater debris. How did you develop your interest in these subjects and how has researching these subjects engaged your practice?

I tend to work from a stream of consciousness, pulling from books, essays, news, movies, etc. I make a lot of notes and drawings in various sketchbooks. While working on one project, I am also figuring out ideas and solutions, which sometimes lead somewhere else entirely. I am constantly building a vocabulary of symbols, which I resort to when needed. I begin with a broad concept and sketch until I have what I think it should look like visually. Once I have more detailed thoughts I begin research.
I have been finding books in the trash mostly from the 1970’s in that Time Life style of pictures mixed with random information on esoteric subjects like the whaling industry, and sea creatures. The books with hazy photographs and oversaturated color meant to educate but always seem a little too fantastical. I began putting thoughts together working off ideas from the previous sculptures I had completed. That work focused a lot on the fragility of life depicted through figures covered in bio-protective clothing and masks. I had been thinking about environmental elements, trapping and hunting for both science and sport. How does anyone become interested in something? You latch on to one small part that makes you curious and you go from there.

2. Your work deals with a tension of representation and abstraction, where do you see that line aesthetically? And how has that tension affected your practice?

This has been my biggest challenge. I am always asking myself how much information do I want to communicate to the viewer and the answer changes from work to work. Maybe “Realism” and “Abstraction” are the terms I should use. It is difficult to pin point. My last few sculptures were, for me, very realistic and figurative. I felt I needed to go in that direction but I can’t work that way all the time. With mold making materials available today for sculpture, special effects, and restoration, it becomes very easy to reproduce and remove the hand from art. Automotive paints become the new finish, cast aluminum becomes the new bronze. They are all very sexy and alluring and can make for interesting surfaces. Hyper-realism amazes me since I know what goes into that process. If it doesn’t reach that goal it falls flat and feels fake. There is a fine line. Lately I find myself drawn to artists like David Altmejd and Urs Fischer whose work is a conglomeration of realism, abstraction, chaos, symbols, everything mixed together. I think we are taught to find order and when presented with a lot of information all at once we tend to shut off. Especially if it’s art we don’t understand at first glance.
I work out of mess because I need to lay everything out where I can see it. It may be on the floor for months until one day it makes sense. I create in chaos, I have tried to change and it just doesn’t work. Just ask my ex-studio mate.

3. You are currently developing a video component for your Cryptozoology body. How has working in video affected your artistic practice?

The video component isn’t so much about Cryptozoology as it is about the idea of the hunt. It’s another aspect of the overall story possibility. I would use the term ‘video’ quite loosely since it was created to be seen with the rest of the body of work and not as a solo project. This is also the only piece that involves a figure in action. The sculptural elements depict what has been left behind, dismantled, or discarded. In the video, one man is preparing himself with ridiculous objects and gear in advance of an expedition. It was shot in low quality, black and white digital video, meant to be reminiscent in aesthetics of 19th century British explorers.
I leave my creative practice open to using different media. I am most comfortable working with certain materials but I am always eager to experiment. I felt in this case video lent itself to what I wanted to portray. To create this in the round would have been too realistic and would have forced the viewer to be in the present moment. Presenting it as a video suggests that this has taken place in the past.

4. Your work has a very distinct aesthetic, both creepy and sublime (which by the way ~ I love!). How have you developed that aesthetic sensibility?

I hold on to every sketchbook. I have some dating back ten years or more. Many are quite embarrassing to me now, but to my surprise, there are similar marks, shapes and ideas in my current ones. Thoughts passed over, familiar quotations, themes, movies scribbled in the margins. I have a love/hate relationship with my personal aesthetic but I feel that it helps me to make personal work. When I experiment with changing how I make a mark or smooth out edges, it may feel new and updated at the moment, however over time it feels ingenuine and I can’t respond to it with a familiar dialog. This keeps me on a constant evaluation. I can’t allow myself to become too comfortable. I keep asking questions.
Creepy is a term that I hear quite often. I don’t set out for ‘creepiness’ but I usually end up there. I am drawn to odd ideas. The body has always been an influence, its peculiarities and abilities. Things are always going wrong naturally in nature and that always opens a path to something interesting and perverse.

5. In a real sense, you make work as a body, not as singular pieces. How does this practice affect your work? And do you conceptualize your work as installations or sculpture? And how does that affect your working process?

I have made work that is singular, but it feels too naked and lonely. Then it becomes orphaned and I hide it away. There is something innate that forces me to work in groupings. The pieces dialog, when together, this doesn’t mean they can’t be separated. Working this way doesn’t limit me. I keep making work around a concept, working and not editing. Once I feel I can step back and analyze that production, then I edit. This leads to reconfiguring and dismantling, maybe even reintroducing the orphan that now belongs. This process does take a lot of time. I have been working with some objects for nearly two years and they are still out on the floor where I can see them.

Top Ten Influences

Joseph Beuys- for his intellect and work
The American Astronaut-for proving a movie can be amazing on no budget
Oliver Jones- for his ability to put my thoughts into words
This American Life- for sharing the fortunes and misfortunes of others
Independent Film Theaters-for keeping it real
Crossword puzzles-for thinking inside the box
Cormac McCarthy-for his books, especially The Road
Road Trips and travel-for adventure and grounding
Valerie Hegarty-for her amazing work
Sunday morning French films in feather beds-for perfect endings to
the weekend

Caitlin Perkins

2007-09-30T08:27:00.000-07:00

Caitlin Perkins is the third artist here on Life, the Universe and Art. She is a self-described thrifty Yankee girl from northern New Hampshire where she attended a three-room schoolhouse in the village of Jackson. Her work includes prints, artist books and installations and draws heavily on the visual vernacular of urban streets and historical collections. She is particularly obsessed with 19th Century sea exploration, 18th Century literature, natural science museums and menageries.

Perkins has an MFA in Printmaking/Book Arts from The University of the Arts and a BFA from the University of New Mexico. By day she works for Philagrafika, a non profit arts organization supporting fine art printmaking and is a founding member of the Philadelphia Center for the Book. She is a practicing artist working out of Space 1026 in Philadelphia, a collective which has exhibited at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco, in Milan, Italy, London and most recently at BravinLee Programs in New York City. Perkins received an Independence Foundation Fellowship in July 2007.

Caitlin sets the scene for us:
First, let me set the scene for you. So I‚ am sitting in a cafe in Philadelphia, the smell of roasted beans wafting around, and, to my left is a pumpkin. It‚ is amazing how many strangers have walked up to me to talk about my silent companion. Large squash seem to command a lot of respect in this tiny cafe. Yup, it is me, my large orange pumpkin, and a faintly sweet iced soychai latte, in a 24 oz cup.

I’m typing away in a sea of cluttered cafe tables, each one floating a computer. All of the faces illuminated by the screens‚ clicking away, on our little silver boxes, Little ticky-tacky boxes. My, my, it is totally ridiculous in here.

I just caught up with a friend who is now working for a Philadelphia School teaching history and social science. We talked about my latest Curatorial project here in Philadelphia, curriculum development for her spring African American History class, and well, my pumpkin.

I love philly.

And, I love the 21st century.

And, I digress‚ on to your questions.

1. In your pieces Secret Cafe and Photobooth, there is a rich historiography to the work. How does historical research, and documentation practices engage your thought and work process?

I’ve always been a research junky‚ I got it from my mom, and my jealousy for her photographic memory. We used to have long conversations about literature, folklore, education, and religion in our weekly commute to Maine for my piano lesson. We made that commute for 9 years. I admit I’m curious, sometimes a revisionist, and most definitely a generalist. My love for irony, random facts and minutia allows me to find relevance in most conversational topics. I suppose that is what I like to do, create synergistic experiences, bridging gaps between fields of study, occupations or avocations. One can find oneself in strange situations, and it is useful to be able to converse with a scientist, drug dealer or a firefighter.

Then, I am totally amused by annotation and cross-referencing. Perhaps also this goes back to my love of libraries and my adoration for the interweb‚ the hunt and the random places it can take you.

Also, since I grew up in rural New Hampshire, my family would spend huge amounts of time at our local library, at least a weekly trip. When we moved from one town to another one about 25 miles north, the librarians joked that their circulation dropped by 50%. There is something so gluttonous about going to the library and walking out with 10, 12 or 15 books. Sort of like window shopping, or trying clothes on in a dressing room, if only briefly, a dazzling sequin evening gown, the dress is yours for those brief few moments while you twirl with your reflection. Books filled with beautiful pictures and stories; mine to look at over and over, until the next week.

And then, of course there is my city, Philadelphia. History is such a part of my daily life. I get to run on well-weathered bricks, not to mention the cobblestones that have been here for centuries! And almost monthly, when I first moved here for graduate school, I would see a re-enactor come out of their door in leather knickers or a hoop skirt and bonnet, as if everything was totally normal. And, well really it is.

History and research is important for all those reasons, and‚ then there was Indiana Jones. OH, how I wanted to be an archaeologist when I was a kid. That movie inspired me, and I had such a crush on Harrison Ford crashing through the jungle with sweaty bravado, uncovering treasures.

The summer my grandfather gave me a metal detector, that was it‚ I spent hours underneath our family barn digging for agricultural treasure. (My mother said she couldn't get the dirt out of the knees of my pants) The spoils of my digs were carefully cataloged and installed in my farm museum, an empty stall. The admission was on a sliding scale, but the suggested entrance donation, was I think 25 cents.

So, really, my research and historical projects that I’ve been doing are all recreations or adaptations of projects that I had going before first grade.

2. Your aesthetic practice has a distinct look that seems married to the historical and the philosophical underpinning in your work. How did you develop your aesthetic sensibility?

My practice, was codified when I spent a summer interning at the American Philosophical Society in 2003. While there I was able to touch, admire and conserve some amazing documents. I also tapped into a collection of scientific documents about sea serpents from the 19th Century‚ and well that led to my graduate school thesis, all about sea serpents. The final show was a fake museum installation about hunting sea serpents, playing off the implied truth to a museum crossed with a cheesy roadside attraction aesthetic that I love so much.

I realized that I do have an aesthetic, and that comes with the need to make things real. It is all staging, creating an experience that is believable, allowing the viewer to suspend belief for a few moments, I can hook them.

There are a lot of artists who use this pseudo/real research artwork. Sue Johnson and her encyclopedia, Mark Dion and his partner J. Morgan Puett, and Beauvais Lyons and his Hoke’s Collection. Even museums dedicated to this like the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, California.

What I’ve learned is there must be a certain degree of polish‚ even if I’m using humble cardboard or newsprint, there has to be a finish to them. Cardboard is amazing stuff, you can make it look like rocks, or wood.

3. A lot of your work, such as the Secret Cafe and Phototbooth deals with the audience becoming part of the piece through participation. Did you conceive of this with the participants as part of the piece or is the interaction itself the piece? And how does the act of audience participation affect the relationship of artist/ viewer for you?

I’ve always spoke of audience participation as a token of my work, the touchstone. I think with the Photobooth piece, it really nailed it. I created that piece, solely for the joke. It took me a week to build it because I was stubborn and I wanted to make it out of all recycled materials, so of course it took me like 50 times longer. Anyway, I was finishing it right up until the opening, hadn’t thought of the exchange except for preparing the drawing sheets, putting out the drawing implements. But the human contact was not anywhere in my thinking. I had thought about the exchange, I wanted it to be free, and‚ anonymous‚ only the person sitting could see the artist. I was running around until the opening. Plopped myself in the box and the first person walked in, and it almost took my breath away. I had created this totally intimate space. Two people only inches from each other, doing this very intense exercise of drawing this person with the intention of giving them the drawing through the slot when it was done. And it hit me during the first conversation. Here was a complete stranger, facing me, and we talked and I drew. Then the next, and the next.

4. For the Photobooth piece, you have artists drawing the photo for the participants. The sense of play and subversion of media is very engaging. What is your thinking behind this act?

Subversion is so important. Making these things‚ my friend recently, who always make fun of me doing stuff that won’t make money‚ branded me an event artist as a joke. But I decided I like that. Events or situations are my medium.

And going back to my earlier thought, that I’ve been doing these kinds of projects for thirty years now. Hell, even the photo booth is similar to an experiment for a while at my hippy kindergarten, Little Earth. A little side business I had going, using a camera‚ I made out of foam blocks. I would take a picture‚ then draw the person, to give them a photo. This memory only surfaced after I made the photo booth in the March exhibition.

5. How did the audience/ participants react to the Photobooth?

It was strange, because people got sassy! Two teenage girls came in, and totally brashly asked if they could make out. I didn’t skip a beat, even though it totally took me by surprise sure if you can hold the pose for that long. Other artists sat, cause it is hard to draw for that long and they had similar experiences, intimate exchanges. And sass. There was more sass.
And then there were people came to have their portraits done including a new family, with a brand, brand new baby. It was their first walk out of the house with that little human. And they were so sweet, all three of them.

Top Ten Influences

1. My mom of course, eh?
2. My grandfather and father for both sort of surreptitiously working in the printing industry. My grandfather worked in the newspaper printing industry and my dad had a small offset press when I was a small baby. Ink in my blood I guess.
3. Yankee thrift and ingenuity
4. Benjamin Franklin and all his societal experiments-like all the libraries here in Philly
5. 18th century history and 19th century science
6. Definitely Lawrence Stern who wrote A Sentimental Journey and Tristam Shandy, that dead white guy from the 18th century can make me laugh at his escapades so hard. His sentimental journey is about a guy eating dinner in England, deciding that he would like to dine in France and leaves the next day to do so,he eats and screws his way through Europe and carefully comments on and documents the most commonplace things. Hilarious and very bawdy.
7. Francisco Goya
8. Duchamp
9. The Yankee Remix, an exhibition at MassMoca. The artists included:
Rina Banerjee, Ann Hamilton, Martin Kersels, Zoe Leonard, Annette Messager, Manfred
Pernice, Huang Yong Ping, Lorna Simpson, and Frano Violich.
10. Betsy Johnson
11. Jay Shafer and his Tumbleweed Tiny House Company.

So, here I thought I would also include movies, since they were taking up all my top 10, and they are such their own thing.

Arsenic and Old Lace
Lady for a Day ‚ one of the most crisp, sassy screen dialogs, ever!
Jan Svenkmeier
Brothers Quay short films, (I saw them together pushing an empty baby carriage down the street in Philadelphia on pine street one day)
Blade Runner
Errol Morris‚ Vernon Florida
Maysles Brothers‚ Grey Gardens
Science of Sleep
16 Candles
Timebandits

Lane Cooper

2007-08-23T09:16:00.001-07:00

Lane Cooper is the second artist here on Life the Universe and Art. Lane is currently an Assistant Professor at the Cleveland Institute of Art in Ohio. She received her B.S. in Studio Art from the University of North Alabama, her M.A. in Art History from The University of Alabama at Birmingham and her M.F.A. in Painting from the University of Alabama. Lane is a visual and textual artist, working in drawing, painting, video and installation. She has shown widely most recently participating in “Visual Connections: A History of the Moving Image,” a group exhibition dealing with TIME-based work with featured artist Bill Viola

1. Your current project deals with the idea of a life debt, what exactly is that and how did you come to work with this idea?

There are moments in your life that stand out – pivotal moments that decide the course of things. A life-debt has to do with these moments in a positive way – people that give something, a word, an action – for the better. It can be something that’s small, but whose value can’t easily be measured.

To give an example, in 1996 I was diagnosed with cancer and I went through a really tough time for a couple of years. I remember sitting with my friend Chris waiting to have my first biopsy. She kept making jokes about how maybe my lump had teeth and hair. She kept cracking me up and then afterward we went and got pizza and watched a movie. That’s a life-debt… something beyond ordinary understandings of value.

So I was thinking about these people, like Chris, that I owe so much to and I was also thinking of this idea of a debt and payment and value. The idea of value is one that I’ve worked with in the past and I’m still very interested in – part of it is this idea of art as a precious commodity – even a priceless commodity.

Images… text… these are currency…

2. This project seems to be very much about the act of creating and the act of giving, how does this idea impact your process and the work?

When you talk about art with people who aren’t artists, this idea often comes up that how much work, how much effort, how much time is put into a thing determines, at least to some extent, its value, its goodness. I’m interested in this idea of exchange value versus its more intangible value. It’s a juxtaposing in my work always of metaphysical concerns with the perceived reality of value; of commodity.

In terms of the process, the actual act of making and giving - when I was a kid, my grandmother made quilts – they were piece-worked, built moment on moment, very methodical and with very consistent aesthetic decisions guiding the process. In the end one might look very much like another, or not, yet they were usually made for someone specific and as objects they have this personal value that is impossible to quantify. These quilts were what she had to give. This is one of the models for this process.

3. Throughout your video work, and with this project there seems to be a thread of biography, not only of yourself but of the culture you have grown up in, the Appalachian foothills. How has that informed your aesthetic choices?

4. The philosophical and cultural implications of your work, and the choices you make seem very much to understand art as not necessarily “ART”, but rather as something that lives and breathes with the artist and the community in which it interacts. How did you arrive at this idea?

(3 & 4 together) –

We’re all informed by our biographies. We’re either reacting to or acting on the content of that biography.
I always wanted to be an artist – since I was three… and when I went to undergraduate school I left with a certain understanding of what that meant. Primarily it meant being something “other than” – when I left my tiny town I did not value my identity or the generosity of those who made me. I didn’t understand that my passions were a product of that culture. Those passions: language, the tactility of sound, of voices, an understanding of image as text, the value of making, and a dwelling upon the nature of being – were given to me by those people.

It’s been a long time coming, this process of letting go of that original understanding and, as evidence of it, there’s an awful lot of bad work out there with my name on it. Letting go of that idea of artist also meant letting go of my idea of art. Where I once saw art as this object that was there – whole and self-contained – self-possessed with intrinsic value, I now understand it as a text, a narrative that depends on the reader. The work is an actor in a dialogue. It’s really rather boring if it’s just for me.
Now I’m open to how my life, the people and places I come from has informed my work. That history comes out in my approach to making; how I think about that making and in the things I’m interested in. Conversation, debate, storytelling and even old school Populism were so much a part of my youth and now that’s been reconfigured into my work.

5. Your aesthetics have this amazing sense of formal beauty? How did you develop that aesthetic sensibility?

Some of it is like chocolate ice cream, you choose what you like.

-- I want my work to have a certain appeal, so I tend to pick out the things that appeal to me and seem appropriate to the ideas being expressed. But it’s not as simple as that is it? It would be easy enough to write a book on aesthetics but the short of it is that my sensibility has shifted significantly since ’96. I find I use color more deliberately, more sparingly – I don’t feel the need to be as direct in my imagery either. When I stopped making my work to satisfy this imagined external art consumer, I started liking it a lot more. Also knowing and working with the artist Charles Tucker and becoming more familiar with the working process of Mel Chin has had a huge influence on the look of my work. It’s due in large part to their influence that I have arrived at a process that’s about questioning and strategizing within the work while trying to balance that with not second guessing my decisions too much. This conscious thinking has had, I think, a stabilizing effect on my work. For the most part I think it’s more sophisticated now

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Top Ten List
It’s very difficult to limit this to ten…
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Uncle Lee
Charles Tucker
Mel Chin
Drive-By Truckers (& Johnny Cash & Doc Watson, etc.)
Hamilton, Alabama
Sylva, North Carolina
Richard Giles
Tom Mims & Kay Canipe
White Lightening (the movie with Burt Reynolds)

Text for Sound House Video

Slow It has passed
until almost gone
a residue only remains
and memories
grayer than dreams
image you to me

I breathe in
your smell
your thought
my grief

I breathe out
everything

copyright 2003
lane cooper

Joe Hu

2007-07-15T07:35:00.000-07:00

Joe Hu has graciously agreed to be the first interviewee for this blog. He lives and works in Philadelphia. Recently, Joe had a thought provoking and finely crafted exhibition up at Pentimenti Gallery in Philadelphia. He currently has work up at the Pennsylvania Academy and is featured in Mid-Atlantic edition New American paintings. For more information, and to see more of his work visit his website at www.josephhu.net.

1. Your current body of work deals with recreating objects that have been given to you। I was wondering where did that come from, how did that develop?

Making art for me is a very carefully considered decision। As all of us artists know, it's an extremely difficult option to take and comes with a certain amount of derision from family and peers. In my case, I've decided that if I'm going to make the sacrifices necessary to follow this path, it's going to be in the service of the most honest, sincere and rigorous work that I can produce. I know that sounds hopelessly cliched, but it's the truth. After going through a particularly depressed period, where I questioned my vocation, my motives, my career options, how I would survive in the world and how I could live with myself, I decided to only do this if the work I made was what I really wanted to make, whatever I wanted to make, and that it had nothing to do with what other people wanted me to make if that's not what I wanted. I decided not to be influenced by what was more saleable, marketable or critically popular, and only focus on what I though was the best work I could make and what I could be proud of. At this vulnerable moment at which I was either going to quit making art or doing something real, I spent some time examining myself and my habits, my interests, etc. All my art has been about trying to understand the basic questions: who am I, where do I come from, how do I relate to the world,etc. Ever since I was a child, I always had a very acute awareness of my relationships to family, friends, etc. Not particularly a cognitive understanding of what those relationships meant or how they operated, but aware none the less of the base feelings that were present in them.

This current body of work is a bit of an indulgence. I'm using these objects that people have given me, and I'm projecting all the feelings I have about the givers and the situations in which I was given them, and all the emotions and love, longing, regret, etc, onto these objects, really pouring my pent up energies into the meticulous construction of these facsimiles in the most extreme way that I know how. This process has allowed me to both embrace and release the strong and meaningful feelings I have with each of the givers and their objects.

2. Your aesthetic is very defined. How has your aesthetic come to where it is today?

This one is easy and pretty short. I'm a virgo. My father is a virgo. He is also an architect, and his work has always permeated our living space whether it be his actual office in the basement or his collection of modernist furniture in the house. My mother is also extremely particular in her running of the house and this has spread to all of my siblings. To this day, I can walk into the kitchens of any of my family and instinctively know where items are kept purely on what is the most logical and how Mom would have done it.

3. There is a quiet and yet very emotional component to your work। How does your emotional life affect,or does it even affect your work?

My emotions are everything in my work conceptually। That is WHY I make art - to understand, express, and release the emotions that I have towards the people in my life or the situations that I find myself in. I feel that our relationships with the people in our lives constitute the real meaning in our lives. Without people to care for and be cared by and share highs and lows with, my existence would be fairly meaningless.

4.Your work has been described as an existential crisis, however, I don't necessarily agree with it being a crisis, more of a acceptance. How do philosophical examinations of life come into your work?

Philosophical, psychological, emotional - my work is really made from these things. Philosophically, I do take seeds of ideas from critical writing and philosophy that I find that is related to and helps me to better understand and define my feelings. For example, Lewis Hyde's "The Gift" was consulted while I was working on this current body of work. Other works that I've looked to in the past include Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, Beaudrillard, Barthes, Benjamin - the big obvious ones really,but enlightening none the less.

5. Craft is explicitly important to you as discerned by the craftsmanship in your work. Where has that evolved from?

My craft has always been with me. Like I mentioned before, I am a Virgo and come from neat and particular parents. As far as I can remember, I have always been a little bit anal retentive about certain things, the presentation of my work in particular. I've always tried to do things the "proper" way, learning all the techniques that I could and applying them to the best of my ability. With the sculptures, I've tried to turn it up a notch because the craft and their believability is really important conceptually। If they couldn't pass for the objects they represent,then they wouldn't mean anything। Transforming cheap everyday materials into carefully crafted works of art and presenting that to the viewer is part of the "gift".

TOP TEN INFLUENCES

Mom and Dad
Sophie Calle
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Sarah McEneaney
Vija Celmins
Kiki Smith (I'm a new fan of her work!)
Byron Kim
Cornelia Parker
A mix of all the advice I've received from past professors