OtherPeoplesPixels Interview T.C. Moore

Quagga Mare, 2014. horse hair. 56" x 60"

T.C. MOORE's poetic, sculptural eulogies for deceased and endangered animals shift us out of our human-centric mode into the quiet contemplation of the lives of other beings. She creates knotted, sewn and etched works with shed horse hair, hoof clippings, found bones and scraps from the fur industry, often mending or embellishing the found materials in the spirit of healing and honoring. After completing degrees in Interior Design (1980), Architecture (1984) and Landscape Architecture (1986), T.C. went on to earn her MFA in 2012 from JFK University, Berkeley. She has exhibited widely throughout California, with solo shows at Garage Gallery in Berkeley and Gallery Route One in Point Reyes Station. In 2016, her solo show Interconnected at the Compound Gallery in Oakland featured her horse hair sculptures. Two works were featured in the 2016 West Marin Review, which was awarded the “most visually stunning book” by the New York Book Industry Guild. T.C. lives in
Santa Rosa, California.

OtherPeoplesPixels: Horse hair is a dominate material in your sculptural, fiber-based practice. What is your personal history with horses?

T.C. Moore: I was one of those annoying little girls in class that was always daydreaming and doodling in the margins of her rulers, far more interested in living in the confines of my imagined world then being present in the one where everyone else seemed to exist. My earliest fantastical recollections included people replaced by animals; animals seemed safer, kinder and cuter. My parents’ marriage was difficult, and my mother often sent me off to her mother’s farm in order to relieve herself of parental duties. It was on this farm where I recall my first aesthetic experience.

My grandparents did not have horses, but I remember the day two young women rode up onto my grandparents’ property. The horses were enormous, frightening and the most beautiful animals I had ever seen. I became obsessed with horses from that day forward. When people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said a horse. It took me some time to understand that you do not grow up into another species. I painted, drew and pretended horsies until middle school, when it was no longer cool to do so. My bedroom however, remained my private horse cave, with walls plastered with horse posters, drawings and pictures of horses cut out of newspapers and magazines. I always wanted a pony for Christmas, but my parents could not afford one. The desire for anything and everything horse persisted into adulthood. When my mother died I inherited enough money to finally purchase the pony I never got for Christmas. I now own two ponies, a mare named Tinka and a gelding named Arlo.

...in a smooth and flowing manner #6, 2012. horse hair & canvas. 20" x 20"

OPP: When did horse hair first enter your art practice?

TCM: In grad school I was struggling with my paintings; I felt all I was doing was illustrating. One spring day in 2010, I was with my horse shedding out her winter coat. This is a yearly occurrence. Most horse owners throw this unwanted undercoat in the garbage. I was using a rubber curry-comb, and it became clogged with hair, so I dumped it upside down onto the stall floor. I had done this many times before, but somehow this time I saw the hair in a different light. A shock of excitement ran through me, and I started collecting my horses shed winter coat. Horse hair as a medium felt so authentic and true to my being. I loved the color, the smell and the feel of it. The idea to use it came about from this one simple, pure and intimate act of grooming. The hair has a spiritual quality, like the horse is always present with me, even when I am not actually with a horse. The hair becomes a surrogate, not just for horses, but all animal essences.

Feed Bags, 2012. horse hair, canvas, acrylic + horse teeth. 12' X 8" x 14'-0"

OPP: How do you have so much of it? Is it just from Tinka and Arlo?

TCM: Collecting, organizing and storing the hair has become another side of my artistic practice. I started by asking other horse owners if I could have their horse’s shed winter coats. I also advertise on a local community web-site for horse owners and ask people to save the hair—it doesn’t have to be clean. I pay for pick up or postage. It was easy from there to start also working with mane and tail hair. I also purchase this hair on-line, so I can get the lengths and quantities that I need.


OPP: What are your art historical inspirations? 49 Days of Mourning (2013) references both a quilt and the Modernist grid. The series of horse hair “drawings” on canvas …in a smooth and flowing manner (2012) make me think of a less rectilinear Agnes Martin, while the Feed Bags (2012), on the other hand, recalls the off loom woven structures of Claire Zeisler and Leonore Tawney.

TCM: Art Historical inspirations are many and if the work is minimal, abstract, primitive or has anything to do with line or natural materials you can almost guarantee I will love it. Artists, like Chris Drury, Ernst Haeckel, Ann Hamilton, Agnes Martin, Kate MccGwire, Wenda Gu, Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois, Joseph Cornell, Mark Bradford, Paul Klee, Leonardo Drew, Deborah Butterfield, Julie Mehretu, Darren Waterston……

COW, 2016. dyed horse hair, cow skull, acrylic + wood. 37" x 21" x 11"

OPP: Tell us about your newest body of work Sporting Life. For the first time, you’ve dyed the horse hair in vibrant colors. . . not unnatural colors, but certainly unnatural to the animals being eulogized.

TCM: The latest body of work came about after finding bones from animals on my hikes. The bones, like the horse hair, have spiritual essences. I became obsessed with collecting them. A colleague of mine found a deer skull that I coveted, and she was generous enough to give it to me. This is the red white-tailed deer skull. I wanted to bring the two mediums together, but I wasn’t sure why or how. In the process of making my work I discover its context.

It is a journey I start without a preconceived idea about its end. I started to drill 3/16” homes into the antlers and inserting the horse hair, but once I was finished it felt rather gratuitous. Somehow they just keep reminding me of something until it finally hit me. I was doing something familiar, I was doing my own version of my my deceased father’s taxidermy hobby.

When I was young I saw my father as all powerful, like Dick Tracy. His power and presence was expressed even when he wasn’t around in our home through his taxidermy displays on our walls, shelves and coffee tables. Growing up I had a strange ambivalence with his trophy mounts in that they displayed the beauty of animals which I love, but at the same time the horror that they were killed at my fathers hands. When I realized I was partaking in this reverse taxidermy, I started putting the skulls on traditional mount forms. I was initially hesitant, even a little frightened about using such vibrant colors because it didn’t seem natural. Then I realized it expressed the unnaturalness of trophy mounts. It is pretty strange that humans as species have developed a display system that prepares animals to lifelike effect, but only after we have taken their lives away.

Ivory Billed Woodpeckers - Extinct, 2015. mirror + metal. 13" x 9"

OPP: Reflections is a series of etched mirrors, featuring various endangered species. First off how, how the hell did you photograph those mirrors so well?

TCM: Photographing the mirrors, initially was a challenge. Fortunately, Don from Almac Camera in San Francisco figured this one out for me. I told him I needed the mirrors to be on a black background, this wasn’t a problem. However, the images obviously showed the camera in the shot and the animals, that I wanted to appear ghost like basically disappeared with studio lighting. So we experimented until Don came up with the idea of putting black velvet facing the mirrors and cutting a hole just large enough for his camera lens to peak through. He also shots the work off-centre, so even the lens isn’t visible in the final shot. What else can I say except I recommend Don at Almac Camera, great pricing as well.

Pangolin, 2016. etched mirror + wood. 11"x9"x1/2"

OPP: More importantly, do you identify as an animal activist/artist? How do you balance the practical concerns of animal activism and environmentalism with the aesthetic concerns of art-making? Are those concerns ever in conflict with one another?

TCM: Yes, I am an animal activist/ artist, a card carrying PETA member for years, not to mention a vegetarian. This is a tough question and one that I have given a lot of thought. Sometimes I ask myself, wouldn’t my time be better spent doing something directly beneficial, like working for the Sierra Club or Greenpeace or the National Resources Defense Council? I am not under any illusions that one person can change the world. But everyday I make small, informed choices and decisions based on the underlying ethical premise of animal/environmental concerns. I have also learned that you have to be true to yourself and have faith in the power of art. I believe we are all blessed or cursed with who we are intrinsically and with that comes a responsibility. I believe art-making allows me to evolve, share, explore, express and record in a way that traditional activism does not. My concerns, thoughts, dreams and fears are personified in an artifact that can be shared as a aesthetic experience which is different from other activist experiences.

Bunny Slippers, 2015. fur, feet, wool, snare, wood + plastic. 8" x 20" x 8"

OPP: You’ve written that your work “is inspired by the Biophilia hypothesis, a term coined by E.O. Wilson which states that humans as a species have a universal love for the natural world.” If that’s true, why do you think it is so easy for 21st century humans to trash the planet and ignore the effects of their behavior on the surrounding world?


TCM: As a species, we have a tendency to be chauvinistic, narcissistic and dogmatic. We also do whatever comes easiest. I am not saying all humans are like this, but we do have a tendency to see the world only through our eyes and only with our own personal gains at the forefront of our reality. However, humans as a species also possess the capacity to change their behavior in drastic ways, more so than any other species on the planet. So, there is always hope.

To see more work by T.C., please visit topazemoore.com.

Featured Artist Interviews are conducted by Chicago-based artist Stacia Yeapanis. When she’s not writing for OPP, Stacia explores the relationship between repetition, desire and impermanence in cross-stitch embroideries, remix video, collage and impermanent installations. She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where received her MFA in 2006, and was a 2011-2012 Artist-in-Residence at BOLT in Chicago. Her solo exhibitions include shows at Siena Heights University (2013), Heaven Gallery (2014) and the Annex Gallery at Lillstreet Art Center (2014) and Witness, an evolving, durational installation at The Stolbun Collection (Chicago 2017), that could only be viewed via a live broadcast through a Nestcam. Now that the installation is complete, you can watch it via time lapse. Her upcoming solo show Sacred Secular will open in August 2017 at Indianapolis Art Center.

OtherPeoplesPixels Interview Tom Pazderka

Heaven Abyss, 2016. Oil, ashes and charcoal on burned panel. 43"x 57"

Informed both by "Czech fatalism and American optimism," TOM PAZDERKA's interdisciplinary practice is loaded with symbols of conflicting ideologies: burned books, raw two-by-fours, buildings crashing down, remote rustic cabins and the famous, solitary individuals who retreated there. In Freedom Club, he highlights underlying connections between notorious (Ted Kaczynski) and beloved (Henry David Thoreau) cabin dwellers. In Twenty Years of Progress, he explores a never-ending cycle of creation and destruction in drawings on charred book pages. Tom earned his BFA at Western Carolina University in 2012 and his MFA from University of California, Santa Barbara in 2016. He just closed a solo exhibition called Into Nothing: New Paintings in Ash and Oil at the Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara, that was accompanied by a public discussion with artist Maiza Hixson titled Art(ists) of Survival. Since June 2016, Tom has been an Artist-in-Residence at Red Barn Project Space, UC Santa Barbara, where he curated the group show Somewhere or Nowhere At All. In June 2017, his solo exhibition American Gothic will bring the Residency to a close. Tom lives and works in Santa Barbara, California.

OtherPeoplesPixels: In your artist statement, you say “Often I combine a particular Czech fatalism with an American optimism to strange effect.” Can you say more about how you bring this fatalism and this optimism together in your choice of materials, images and subject matter?


Tom Pazderka: Yes, great question right from the start. Czech culture is by nature fatalistic and pessimistic about the future. It comes from centuries of struggle for its own voice and freedom from the rule of neighboring nations and empires. For the past one to two hundred years, there has been an unofficial national discussion about the ‘lot of the small nation’ and what this really means. History is offered as a solution and as an obstacle to national progress and interests. Throughout history, Czechs have struggled for freedom from oppressive forms of religion, then feudalism, the aristocracy and monarchy, the empire, then communism. Finally, with today’s freedom comes another kind of servitude in the form of consumerism and political and cultural deferral to the West. It’s only taken 25 years for pessimism and fatalism to rear its ugly head again.

America and Americans do not have this issue. The world to them is open and wide. Perhaps an entire century of victories and becoming one of the world’s superpowers is a way to achieve cultural hegemony and solidify positive feelings of optimism for the future, regardless of the true nature of these victories. Even the smallest of American grassroots movements—no matter how big or terrible the opposition is—always maintains optimism and hope for change. American nature seems to be one of persistent triumphalism that seems to go back centuries to the Protestant work ethic. This is unheard of in Central Europe. If I was to boil it down I would say that America seeks to constantly renew itself at the expense of the old, while Europe and Czech in particular, seek to solidify and reconcile its present with a chaotic and problematic past at the expense of its future.

Outpost, 2016. Burned image and woodcut on recycled pallets. 72" x 72"

OPP: So how does this affect you personally?

TP: I was born in the Czech Republic, while it was still Czechoslovakia, but moved to the U.S. when I was 12. I have been in the country long enough to be considered half Czech and half American. But I often feel like I am neither Czech nor American. The particularities of the two cultures at play here are sometimes in opposition. I, myself, have become infected by the optimist bug. This is why I am drawn to dark and beautiful imagery and the grit of raw materials. I am attracted by things that are terrifying but also aesthetic. And I use a lot of wood because it’s a humble material, readily available everywhere, but at the same time it is what the U.S. is built upon.

Falling Twilight, 2014. Charcoal on burned book paper. 120" x 48"


OPP: A recurring strategy in your work is burning images onto tiled two-by-fours and book pages. How do construction and destruction meet, physically and conceptually, in your series Twenty Years of Progress (2014).  


TP: In Twenty Years of Progress I chose several significant events that took place between the years 1994—the year I emigrated to the U.S—and 2014, when returned to the Czech Republic for an artist residency. All of the events have negotiated destruction in some way. Some were quite notorious, such as the burning of churches in Norway or the demolition of the Murrah building in Oklahoma City. But one of them went completely unnoticed and that was the demolition of the building of the former Czech Communist Party newspaper Rude Pravo (Red Law). It was as if the shame of those years had to be erased without fanfare and masked by a new type of ideology; what replaced the building were offices and a shopping center.

The physical destruction came through actually burning books in a pit—a symbolic act for the willful destruction of knowledge. The charred remains of the books were then used to make works like those in Twenty Years of Progress. Years earlier, I had used torches to ‘draw’ into wood. The resulting images were quite strong because they became part of the substrate instead of sitting on top of it. They were burned into the wood like memory is burned into one’s mind. Then there was the smell. During my grad years, the joke was that everyone knew when I was around because there was a strong smell of a burning fire inside the studios. Conceptually, destruction seems to always precede a new beginning.

Lost Wisdom: a Secular Book Burning, 2012. Burned books

OPP: That makes me think of the Phoenix, rising from the ashes. Fire, in particular, is important in your work.

TP: Yes, fire is this basic element that gives warmth and comfort but can hurt or kill if one gets too close. I also think of fire in metaphysical terms, as the fire inside that burns with anxious desire for knowledge. Gaston Bachelard wrote a great, short book on this subject called Psychoanalysis of Fire. He identifies certain archetypes—from the arsonist to the Promethean figure— who are drawn to fire.

Despite what we know about the world through science and religion, we know very little about fire itself. Fire is not a just a simple consequence of heat. There must always be an excess to heat to create fire and an excess of something to fuel the fire. . . otherwise it disappears. As such, fire is simply a manifestation of some inward potential that moves outward. Enough heat and a spark create fire, but the physical manifestation itself is as elusive as electricity. One cannot touch it or feel it or grab it, but one can definitely be burned by it. The movement of fire creates powerful meditative states in its observers, and I know this because I’ve stared into fires since I’ve been a young kid.

Drawing for Genius and Madness, the Thoreau Kaczynski Tableau, 2012. Recycled wood and charcoal. 36" x 17" x 2"


OPP: You’ve been exploring the cabin as a form and a symbol for several years. When did the cabin first show up in your work?

TP: I can pinpoint this pretty precisely. In 2012, I made a drawing on on some scrap two-by-fours of two cabins: one was Henry David Thoreau’s Walden Pond cabin and the other was Ted Kaczynski’s Montana cabin. The scrap wood was made to look like it might have come out of each cabin as a sample of a floor. I called the work Drawing for Genius and Madness, the Thoreau Kaczynski Tableaux because I intended it to become a larger work, an installation perhaps. When I came across the images of the Kaczynski cabin and compared it to the images and floor plans of Thoreau’s cabin, I was immediately struck by the similarities. There were differences, of course. But on the whole, the size and layout of both cabins were eerily alike. This is when I got really interested in the writings of and about Thoreau and Kaczynski.  What were the circumstances that made these two who they were/are and how might this be significant to the American experience? I was then introduced to the work of filmmaker James Benning, who built replicas of both cabins in the mountains of California for very similar reasons. Benning’s work culminated in a very provocative book called Two Cabins with critical essays by Julie Ault and Dick Hebdige (with whom I studied at UC Santa Barbara). The essays describe Thoreau and Kaczynski’s relationship to the strange tapestry that is the American experience of wilderness and to one another. 

Freedom Club: Martin, 2016

OPP: How has your thinking about what the cabin symbolizes changed over the years? When did your interest in the cabin shift to an interest in the cabin dwellers?

TP: From early on the cabin seemed to me to be the symbol of freedom, a particular kind of American freedom, tinged with a rustic patina of traditionalism. The more I dove into research about Thoreau and Kaczynski, other patterns started to emerge and now I tend to think of the cabin more as a place fantasy, similar to ‘the room’ in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, where one’s innermost and deepest desires are supposed to come true. This is of course a trap, because nobody truly knows what one desires. By going to a place where desires become reality, one’s confronted with the very knowledge that desire is nothing more than desire for desire itself.

My entire graduate thesis, Psychoanalysis of the Cabin, was based on a reading of the cabin as a place of refuge not just for individuals but also for the entire nation that used the symbol of the cabin as a nostalgic vehicle for a collective national unconscious. Scenes of rustic Arcadia show up in post-apocalyptic sci-fi films like Oblivion, and since the filming of Birth of a Nation, where the last showdown scenes take place inside a log cabin, Hollywood’s been unable to extricate itself from the Romantic fantasy of a rustic nationalism.

Once I’d exhausted the material on Thoreau and Kaczynski, the figure of Martin Heidegger and his hut in the Black Forest of Germany emerged. It was an opening into the cabin life of Europeans, which is entirely different from the American experience. I partly grew up in a cabin in the mountains of Czech Republic and all of a sudden here was a method by which to understand that experience. I began to read studies done on what’s called the ‘cottaging’ culture in Czech Republic and what little there is known about the tiny house movement in the U.S. This is where some of the cabin dwellers first appear, but mainly as a result of their relationship to one another, either directly or indirectly through similarities in outlook or politics.

Freedom Club Cabinet of Ted and Henry, 2016. Photo credit: Tony Mastres


OPP: What strikes me about all the cabin dwellers you’ve chosen is that they are all men, except Leni Riefenstahl—but in this case, the exception might prove the rule. I don’t want to imply that the qualities of nationalism, individualism, madness and desire for dominance are only present in men. But I do see them as conditioned by Patriarchy and cultivated by looking at History through a patriarchal lens. What are your thoughts on how Patriarchy affected these Cabin Dwellers?


TP: I think that historically, our culture has focused mostly on the men that managed to be seduced by escape and solitude and then occasionally turned their otherwise non-participatory, non-social behavior into anti-social behavior. Ted Kaczynski is a case in point. The most obvious example here is Henry Thoreau, a philosopher, metaphysician, radical, curmudgeon and anti-social in one person. Our conditioning as a society comes at us from many directions, the strongest of which seems to be media. When the story broke on Kaczynski, it was hard to make out what was actually true about the person who was being portrayed. Thoreau was shunned during his lifetime, and nobody read Walden until well after his death. Why or how Thoreau’s work was appropriated as symbolic Americana is anybody’s guess. Rebecca Solnit identifies several counter-intuitive issues at play in the figure of Thoreau in her short essay The Thoreau Problem. Thoreau writes of country life, the cabin and solitude, but nothing about the fact that he frequently went to town to purchase items he needed or that his aunt did his laundry. I believe that the Patriarchal lens you mention is used to clean up the image of a man from a vaguely ambiguous idealist to one of a resolved activist for strong values. This lens narrows and simplifies what would otherwise be a much more interesting portrait, and this is the case of all of the individuals in this series.

I’ve opted for inclusion of a couple women, Leni Riefenstahl, who more or less went into hiding after the second World War and Judi Bari, a fairly notorious anti-logging activist involved with Earth First!  A third woman was going to be Hannah Arendt, whose work on culture and totalitarianism is exceptional, but her main and only tie to cabins was through Martin Heidegger.

I believe that culture, and Western culture in particular, conditions men to be escapist. This is where we get the idea of the man cave, a place within one’s home to which a man can momentarily escape from the pressures of the outside, including the family. Women are conditioned differently, I suppose to be more oriented toward social groups. This is why it is difficult to find women among the above mentioned Cabin Dwellers. That is not to say that women do not go to cabins, they just do not tend to go on their own, or at the very least they do not tend to plan various acts of domestic terrorism from a place of solitude.

I also have to point out that the cabin as escapist refuge seems to be more an American phenomenon.  Again, this is not an absolute, but in Czech culture, cabins and cottages were used primarily as second homes for entire families (similar to Scandinavia), not just for the sole purpose of an escape for the male head of the family. There are of course exceptions. In the U.S. however there seems to be a line of a kind of Eden associated with the cabin stretching back to early American history with the Homesteading Act, Thoreau and Emerson at the beginning and Edward Abbey and Ted Kaczynski at the end. Each instance is a type of exercise in existential freedom and self-exile. The flip side to the Kaczynski scenario could perhaps be the case of the Lykov family in Russia. They escaped persecution for their religious beliefs by hiding in the far eastern portion of Syberia, living virtually isolated for more than four decades until Soviet scientists rediscovered them when they flew overhead in a helicopter sometime in the 1970s.  Agafia, the last remaining Lykov, is still living in the same hut, living off the land, and practicing religion as her ancestors have always done.

Bringers of the New Dawn, 2017. Oil on burned wood panel with charcoal and ashes. 50 x 33

OPP: You’ve described American history and culture as “a history of space and stuff (objects, property, etc) which contains its absolute inverse, the unspoken history of lack and loss (spirituality, individual rights, etc). This opposition is itself driven by the strictly American concept of power, and the myth of growth at the expense of everything else.” This statement resonates with me so strongly right now in the third month of the Trump Administration. Has this current political moment spawned any new directions in your work?

TP: I have to say yes. While I wasn’t a close follower of the presidential campaign because deep inside I knew that Bernie did not stand a chance of winning, I was nonetheless keenly aware of the situation. Trump represented everything that is currently wrong with Western culture: vulgarity, baseness, an absorbing self-interest bordering on pathology and above all an insatiable drive toward power that means nothing beyond itself. The Ego’s desire to announce itself endlessly plays itself out in the figure of Trump first as a real estate mogul, then as a celebrity and finally as president of the United States. But this desire for endless adoration and validation creates an abyss in its wake. What this abyss is, is currently unclear.  I tend to personalize a lot of my work so that the abysses that I paint now are directly related to personal loss. It is then a bit easier to point outward, toward our culture and say, this is our collective loss that we try to cover over with a seemingly endless supply of stuff and entertainment so that we may not deal with our own responsibility and grief. As a result, my work has become much darker and brooding. I’ve eliminated all color and left only black and white. The paintings I make now are sooty black from the ash and charcoal I use to smear over the burned surface. Sometimes I think they should be uglier, but the small amount of optimism I still have keeps the images rather beautiful to look at. I make no reference to cabins, except for the fact that I paint on wood and leave some of it exposed. I think that this move leaves the cabin symbolically in place. The latest turn back toward painting is a direction I started to call the American Gothic, after the famous painting by Grant Wood.  Wood’s painting is an enigmatic piece. The only reason that it’s called American Gothic is because of the Neo-Gothic window at the top of the house. Everything else about the painting, including the architecture of the house and style of clothing, is rural American. The painting is for that reason not about the couple in the foreground, but entirely about the house in the back. I find this kind of ambiguity fascinating because it seems to me to be the opposite of today’s climate in which everything has to be spelled out.

To see more of Tom's work, please visit tompazderka.com.

Featured Artist Interviews are conducted by Chicago-based artist Stacia Yeapanis. When she’s not writing for OPP, Stacia explores the relationship between repetition, desire and impermanence in cross-stitch embroideries, remix video, collage and impermanent installations. She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where received her MFA in 2006, and was a 2011-2012 Artist-in-Residence at BOLT in Chicago. Her solo exhibitions include
shows at Siena Heights University (2013), Heaven Gallery (2014) and the Annex Gallery at Lillstreet Art Center (2014). She created site-responsive installations for Form Unbound (2015) at Dominican University and SENTIENCE (2016) at The Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art. Resist the Urge to Press Forward, a two-person show with Brent Fogt, is on view at Riverside Art Center (Riverside, Illinois) until April 15th, when there will be a closing reception and artist talk. Stacia just completed Witness, an evolving, durational installation at The Stolbun Collection (Chicago), which could only be viewed via a live broadcast through a Nestcam. Now that the installation is complete, you can watch it via time lapse.

OtherPeoplesPixels Interviews Kevin Blake

Quaint Anticipation Of A Famous Phrase, 2017. Oil on Paper. 53" x 65."

KEVIN BLAKE’s chaotic surfaces contain abstract marks, figures, graphic line drawings and worked, textured accumulations of paint that might have been applied with a palette knife. Ultimately this multiplicity of rendering styles serves to underline the intertextuality of American cultural myths inherited from print, television and film. After earning a BFA in Painting and Drawing (2004) and an MA in Art Education (2011) from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Kevin went on to earn his MFA in Visual Arts (2014) from The Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University. What the Cool Pigeon Knows (2017), his first solo exhibition, is currently on view at Riverside Art Center's Flex Space until April 15th. Another solo, Post Celestial Intemperance, will open at The University of Indiana Northwest in Gary, Indiana in November 2017. Kevin is a contributing writer at Bad at Sports and New City. He lives and works in Chicago.

OtherPeoplesPixels: How do you use incomplete images—or voids—and spatial confusion of foreground and background in your work? I see it most in A Pretty Thing of Pure Diversion, but it certainly shows up elsewhere.

Kevin Blake: I remember seeing an engraving by William Hogarth called Satire On False Perspective, which changed the way I make images. With such simple visual devices, Hogarth is able to create a novel connection with the viewer by creating what would later be classified as an “impossible object”—an idea thoroughly explored by the surrealists, Marcel Duchamp, M.C. Escher and many others. When the viewer finds these perspectival errors, impossibilities, or nuances that defy the reality of the image, the idea becomes clearer. The author becomes present in that moment. Suddenly, everything becomes possible in the space, and the clue which sent you back into the image to review it as an object infused with an idea (rather than a picture about ideas), begins to betray its secrets.

Eventually, the image unfolds completely to reveal a dialogue that you've been engaged with in your own mind. When I found Hogarth’s etching, I could see myself following the sign posts in the image, just the way they are aesthetically set up to do. I could see myself standing back and watching it all happen. I remember this being the first image that somehow took me outside of myself to reveal myself, and it was done through language. Through visual pun. Through cuing a historical visual cannon that makes the definitions for things like the “impossible object,” possible. This image by Hogarth encouraged me to try to understand what it means to communicate with the audience by somehow occupying multiple roles in the making of the image. Storyteller. Painter. Writer. Viewer. Diplomat. Poet. Dreamer. The roles are infinite. The perspectives are infinite. The paintings are an attempt to communicate and highlight the co-presence of history through these various lenses.

Twig of The Hider That Tanned Him, 2016. Oil on Paper. 60" x 84."

OPP: And how does your combination of abstract, gestural marks with figurative representation feed into this multiplicity of perspectives?

KB: I think I’ve gone some distance in explaining the conceptual approach to the kind of fragmentation you suggest is happening in the paint itself, but I think it follows that the aesthetic is born in this mosh pit of ideas. And the paintings certainly are a mosh pit. A garbage heap. A junk closet. Paint slams against drawing. It obliterates the ground it rests on. And within its bounds, ideas rest, waiting for a viewer to bring them to life in their minds. Fragmented space, voids, and confusing perspectives not only support my conceptual framework, but also create and represent a break in the continuity of thought. My work is impulsive. It is reductive. It attempts to capture the viewer at a colloquial baseline in its imagery, and from there, the onion can be delayered—crying eyes and all.

The Desperado Concept, 2014. Mixed Media on Paper. 10" x 10."

OPP: What role does text and textuality play in your work?

KB: Language is the foundation of my work. Well, it’s the foundation of everyone’s work, of course, but I happen to make my bed in it. Whether the text remains simply as a title or it shows up on the canvas, it remains integral to the delivery of the message. Even if the viewer is not taken by the image, the text can make them look again. It is the ego that guarantees the double-take. The mind wants to figure “it” out. I see text as an opportunity to assure re-entry into the visual space. It both guides and deceives. This pause that text creates is very similar to the effect of the strategies I use to deploy paint. The words push the visual elements into different potentialities. They represent by both historical protocol and personal motivation; they are both designative and denotative,  representative and connotative. They take us outside of ourselves and back into ourselves. To me, text is a tool and an inseparable working component of my output.

Every Time He Wakes Up, There's Another Mouth to Feed, 2014. Mixed Media on Canvas. 96" x 78."

OPP: That leads me to think about the references to 1980s media texts—E.T., Iron Eagle, Rambo, He-Man and She-Ra—in Salvaged Mirages. Can you talk about this exploration of TV and movies as mirages?

KB: I named that series Salvaged Mirages for many reasons, but my favorite is that it is somehow hard to say mirages. Or it feels like that word should be singular only. Does a mirage so totally envelop immediate experience that only one mirage can exist at a time? Again, this simple device creates a break in the continuity of my thought, just as a mirage of an oasis might disrupt the mind of a thirsty traveler in the desert. Clever metaphors arise when you attempt to think about what your own thoughts may have been just a couple years after making a body of work.

Salvaged Mirages, from 2014, feels both foreign and necessarily my own. As a kid, I never thought about the ideas inherent in the things I consumed—visually or otherwise. No kid thinks about the implications of seeing Rambo obliterate an army, or how Night Rider sculpts the idea of the modern male hero, or how Married. . . With Children instilled the normalcy of disfunction in the familial unit. Though when you look in the mirror as an adult and want to know how this could be what you are seeing, you retrace your steps. All systems teach you to look behind you to understand what’s in front of you, and the inclination to mine that decade’s cultural residue, comes from the never-ending endeavor of trying to know oneself.

Defender of the Flag, 2013. Mixed Media on Panel. 48" x 48"

OPP: Have you gained any specific insights into how these media texts have affected you as an adult?

KB: I wonder if watching MacGyver religiously might have shaped the way that my paintings are made. MacGyver was a bricoleur—using whatever he had at his disposal to solve a problem. No object was without value. All things had multiplicity. Every object carried with it the ability to defy its quotidian value. So the mirage is something you think you see but, upon closer inspection, turns out to not be what you thought it was. However, what is salvaged from the mirage, I think, is whatever happens during the investigation of it. The mirage dissolves, but the picture becomes clear.

He Was On Like A Leech And Off Like A Dart, 2016. Oil on Paper. 18" x 24."

OPP: In The Fisherman’s Fables, I see representations of different kinds of “working”—from domestic and manual laborers to military officers, white-collar workers and pin-up girls—which seem to relate to the myth of the American Dream. How do these visual references to the 1940s, 50s and 60s operate in this work made in 2016-17? What’s the moral lesson in these fables?

KB: This newest series is a direct result of pursuing this trajectory—of tracking down threads of ideology and looking for the absolute edges of things. In casting such a wide net, I was forced to confront the spectrum of affects created by print. For centuries, print media was the intellectual marketplace in which all ideas were peddled and consumed. Its affects are responsible for the values that have, since its inception, become the chorus line of the archetypes I hone in on in my paintings. The home-grown country boy is one of these remote-controlled heroes. I collage him into time the way he feels collaged into my time—into my world of understanding, knowledge, and exploration. He exists as a kernel of the pastiche of the American Dream—just as his polarity rounds out the idea at the other end of the spectrum.

I am interested in these now smoldering images that remain the well from which print-based ideas continue to infiltrate an evolving digital world within the human psyche. The internet has transformed human records. We can now see the stuff in the cracks of our history, the deep fissures that for so long were left unchallenged and unexplored. We can see the thread of our past, like Ariadne following her way out of the labyrinth. Over here and over there, a different vision of the same idea is delivered in high definition and with all the confidence that a culturally sanctioned notion can offer. And every new day brings another perspective that evolves with the everyday task of being alive. The getting older. The work. The stress. The love. The everything. I try to let it all in, and let it all out. Inhaling and exhaling. When I step back from the work, the connected trees of association make their way back to each other, both in the individual paintings and on a macro scale when they hang together. This happens conceptually and aesthetically. At multiple levels. With multiple meanings. I craft them this way. I recognize these places I get to in the mind, in the imagination, and I am reminded once again, that we are living in the co-presence of our history. It doesn’t exist in the books. It cannot be contained by the words. It is scrambled. Always scrambled. And you must go into the imagination, into the mind, into that place with nutpick and toothbrush and work away at it. You have to try to unscramble the letters. That’s what these paintings do. They attempt to brush away a little dust by bringing other times and places into the forefront as a way of trying to understand how that imagery operates in the here and now. In my psyche, as well as the viewer’s.

Old Fruit Ripening Behind Famine Built Walls, 2016. Oil on Paper. 26" x 23."

OPP: I see a menacing, looming threat in a lot of the works, especially those in Last Gas Lamp on the Wagon Road (2013), where white men in dress shirts, military uniforms and cowboy gear wield guns. I see this as a representation of toxic masculinity. Does this relate to "the stuff in the cracks of our history, the deep fissures that for so long were left unchallenged and unexplored?"

KB: Last Gas Lamp on The Wagon Road was initially called Systems of Attrition For An American Patriarch. Your intuition serves you well. However, I don't think toxic masculinity is a social disease that I would qualify as a phenomena that has fallen into the cracks of our history. This idea has been, and continues to be, an intolerable symptom that people are more or less aware exists and rage against. That is not to say it isn't a clear and present danger to an evolving world. I do think a patriarchal society is one of many reasons that we have gaps in our history in the first place. We exist within a perpetually evolving tale that has been doggedly edited and refined. As human beings are born into this story, it is the circumstances of the present condition that shape the character. This reminds me of a Bruce Lee quote where he says something about pouring water into different containers. His point is that the water takes the shape of the container, as human beings take the shape of their surroundings. While I am interested in this idea and how patriarchy has shaped the world we live in, the thrust of my intention concerns complexity, in and of itself. I dive into this ocean knowing I’m not aiming for another coast. My intention is to stay at sea, floating in the collective debris of humanity. This doesn’t mean that I don't want to talk about about the issues inherent in the images I make, it means that I am presenting information in a way that is supposed to be about trying to parse culture. In this way, I try not to tie my hands to ideas. It is the mechanism that brings ideas into reality that I attempt to undermine, distort and project anew.

Breakneck Servility For The Relics of Our Time, 2016. Oil on Paper. 30" x 30."

OPP: You have a show up right now at Riverside Art Center (Riverside, IL) called What The Cool Pigeon Knows. Tell us about the work in the show. What is the underlying current drawing together works in the show?

KB: What The Cool Pigeon Knows, is an extension of the thesis I suggest in The Fisherman’s Fables—all of the paintings are a part of this series. Though, the work for this show was selected specifically for the Riverside Art Center. I’ve been going to shows there for the last couple of years, and I’ve noticed that a majority of the artists I meet there are women. So, I selected work that represented my investigations into female archetypes or their polarities, knowing that it would say more about me than it does about women. I began by thinking about the idea of the reporter which morphed into the informant or stool pigeon. I felt like I was putting my biases, conflicting ideas and ineptitudes on display—both conceptually and aesthetically. I felt like I was snitching on myself for the flaws inherent in the ideas present in the images. I felt like the images were telling myself why I think the way I think. There is a stool in the show with a box full of cut-up paintings sitting atop it, prompting show goers to take a sliver of failure with them. This is the trash heap of ideas from which these paintings are a natural extension. It is the pile of fleeting ideas that form the nexus of my conceptual framework. It is the elephant in the room. It is the stool pigeon.

To see more of Kevin's work, please visit kevinblakeart.net.

Featured Artist Interviews are conducted by Chicago-based artist Stacia Yeapanis. When she’s not writing for OPP, Stacia explores the relationship between repetition, desire and impermanence in cross-stitch embroideries, remix video, collage and impermanent installations. She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where received her MFA in 2006, and was a 2011-2012 Artist-in-Residence at BOLT in Chicago. Her solo exhibitions include shows at Siena Heights University (2013), Heaven Gallery (2014) and the Annex Gallery at Lillstreet Art Center (2014). She created site-responsive installations for Form Unbound (2015) at Dominican University and SENTIENCE (2016) at The Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art. Resist the Urge to Press Forward, a two-person show with Brent Fogt, is on view at Riverside Art Center (Riverside, Illinois) until April 15th, when there will be a closing reception and artist talk. Stacia just completed Witness, an evolving, durational installation at The Stolbun Collection (Chicago), which could only be viewed via a live broadcast through a Nestcam. Now that the installation is complete, you can watch it via time lapse.

OtherPeoplesPixels Interviews Garry Noland

The One Thing, 2016. polystyrene, corrugate with decollage. 21.250" x 19.250" x 3." Photo credit: E.G. Schempf.

Since beginning his career in 1978, GARRY NOLAND has explored so many materials: National Geographic magazines, corrugated cardboard, bubble wrap, wood, pvc pipes, marbles, duct tape, foam, just to name a handful. His studio practice is primarily driven by process and material. In sculptures and textile-like surfaces, he emphasizes pattern, surface and texture as the byproduct of actions like cutting, marking, taping and gluing. Garry earned his BA in Art History at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, but he’s always been a maker.  His long exhibition record began in 1980, with notable recent exhibitions at Haw Contemporary (2015), the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (2014), Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (2014) and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (2013). On April 16, 2017, his solo show Unorganized Territory will open at Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Chicago, and, in the Fall of 2017, he will open a two-person show with Leigh Suggs at Artspace in Raleigh, North Carolina and a two-person show at Los Angeles Valley College Art Gallery in Van Nuys, California. Garry lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

OtherPeoplesPixels: Is there an underlying thread that connects the materials you choose?

Garry Noland: One of the answers regarding materials relates to the non-human part of nature. We are part of the world around us, yet in a separate, contemplative position. Nature has many materials: gases, minerals, animals, plants and the breakdowns into smaller parts (water vapor, sand, insects and pine needles, for example). Nature's processes—evaporation/condensation, sedimentation, reproduction and seeding—are an incessantly-recycling pattern of life. They inform the "studio practice" that is Nature. Jackson Pollack's statement "I am Nature" gets at the artist's natural role in working with whatever material is at their hand. Nature teaches us to apply our energetic, creative impulse to solve problems that a set of materials poses to us. A new material simply presents new problems or challenges. A familiar material will present new challenges based on skills we've acquired in our subsequent actions. The underlying thread is what can I learn? and how gracefully can I solve the problem?

Close-Up USA, No. 7, 2016. Polystyrene, aluminum paint, sand, concrete mix. 22" x 41" x 8." Photo credit: E.G. Schempf.

OPP: You don’t seem to be drawn to Nature’s materials, but to human-made things: “found and reclaimed materials from alleys, side streets and urban dumps.”  What draws you to materials generally? Any new finds that you are excited about in your studio right now?

GN: Right now I am using corrugate, polystyrene, paper, wood and some mild adhesives. I am using simple verbs: Cut, tear, place, adjust, glue. Nearly all of the materials are found, free or very inexpensive. Part of the attraction is that these materials have been through another use. This other use, not to mention the process in which they were originally created imparts spirit to the material. . . it is the farthest thing from inert. The found marks in dock foam or the folds, scraps and abrasions add a layer of experience to cardboard. It is part of my job to augment it by leaving it alone or adding to it. I know that new materials will come along or that I will find new use for something I already thought I knew something about.

Ticket, 2012. Tape, Floor Debris on tape. 103" x 98." Photo credit: E.G. Schempf.

OPP: In your statement, you say “Sometimes I am the boss of the material but just as often the material, by virtue of a chance arrangement, for example, will tell me what needs to be done.” Could you say more about making in this way? What’s the process feel like for you? Will you tell us a story about a piece in which the material led you more than you led it?

GN: One might infer that I have a collaborative relationship with the material. Material is inseparable from the "artist". It is possible to see potential in every single thing. Metaphorically then, as well, there is potential in every single person. In general this brings me great joy. I am solving problems I could not have foreseen minutes or years before. Simultaneously new work explains often what was going on in an older piece....a kind of studio deja vu. I keep a lot of material in the studio precisely because I know that chance arrangements or views askance will reveal combinations I could not have rationally thought of. An example is the piece tilted Failed Axle. There was a spool of bubble wrap in the studio to use a packing for an outgoing work. Several feet beyond the spool lay a curved piece of orange PVC pipe. Out of the corner of my eye, it looked like that the pipe was coming out of the spool, like an axle. The piece made itself essentially. I am a grateful intermediary.

Pumpjack (Sergeant), 2015. polystyrene, tape, pvc pipe, marbles. 63" x 58" x 7." Photo credit: E.G. Schempf.

OPP: Your application of marks—as cuts, tape, paint or marbles—to the surface a variety of substrates, functions differently across your body of work. I’m thinking about the difference between works like Pumpjack (Sergeant) (2015), which have complete surface coverage and the wall-hung sculptures from the Handheld series (2014). When is it about hiding the underlying surface and when is it about highlighting it?

GN: Pumpjack (Sergeant) is a good piece but I know that, like every other piece, it is on the way to something else. Part of the impulse behind the complete coverage was to produce a design to supplement the object. . . to cover an object with images of objects. I love pattern and surface design. One of our jobs as artists is to find out "what goes with what.” Relationships between materials may be abrasive, copacetic or somewhere in between. In Pumpjack the tape presents a way for the eye to move around the object as does the application of marbles on the PVC armature. How do the marbles act with the tape pattern? How does the tape pattern work with the slabby foam block? How does the eye move around the whole thing? How does the slab act with the wall and floor. How does the painting/sculpture work with the viewer.

I hope, in the end, we ask how we relate to each other. The Handheld series (which were pieces cut off from the corners of Failed Monuments) used the gold tape (implying luxury) next to the "low-brow" foam and found marks. The exchange between tape and foam, gold and found marks was more direct and I think more honest.

Handheld 03, 2014. Foam, tape. 10" x 10" x 5." Photo credit: E.G. Schempf.

OPP: I think of your taped wall-hung works more as textiles than paintings. They have a textile logic to them, in the sense that the image appears to be part of the structure, as opposed to applied to the surface of another substrate. Thoughts?

GN:
I like and appreciate that reading! The image (if we agree to call "it" that) not only is part of the structure, but is/or represents the structure in full. That is, they are one in the same. The question becomes how can we merge image/object; form/content; female/male; figure/ground, among others, for example. This was written about by Lucy Lippard in OVERLAY and was at least a sub-topic in Cubism.

OPP: What role does balance—compositionally, physically and metaphorically—play in your work?

GN: The best question. Balance is a fluid, contextual situation. Balance is a how as much as it is a what. It's an easy tendency to find balance in a comfort zone. It’s imperative that any artist finds a way out of their comfort zone and into emerging, fighting off laziness and complacency. Balance comes from in-balance. Content comes from form. Form comes from content. Positive space comes from negative space.

To see more of Garry's work, please visit garrynolandart.com.

Featured Artist Interviews are conducted by Chicago-based artist Stacia Yeapanis. When she’s not writing for OPP, Stacia explores the relationship between repetition, desire and impermanence in cross-stitch embroideries, remix video, collage and impermanent installations. She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where received her MFA in 2006, and was a 2011-2012 Artist-in-Residence at BOLT in Chicago. Her solo exhibitions include shows at Siena Heights University (2013), Heaven Gallery (2014) and the Annex Gallery at Lillstreet Art Center (2014). She created site-responsive installations for Form Unbound (2015) at Dominican University and SENTIENCE (2016) at The Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art. Resist the Urge to Press Forward, a two-person show with Brent Fogt, is on view at Riverside Art Center (Riverside, Illinois) until April 15th, when there will be a closing reception and artist talk. Throughout March 2017, Stacia is working on an evolving, duration installation at The Stolbun Collection (Chicago). You can watch Witness change via live feed.


OtherPeoplesPixels Interviews Gina Hunt

It's Curtains for You (close-up view of inside), 2016. Hand dyed transnet, steel, aluminum. 96" x 96" x 48."

GINA HUNT explores the permeable and reflective qualities of screens in her paintings, sculptures and site-specific installations. She draws attention to the subjectivity of visual perception in painted surfaces, including the plain weave of canvas, window screens, scenery netting and scrim. Most recently, she has moved her work out of the gallery and into the outdoors, where her multicolored screens are both discrete objects within the landscape and mediators for viewing it. Gina earned a BFA in Painting, Printmaking, and Art History (2009) and an MA in Painting (2012) from Minnesota State University. In 2015, she completed her MFA in Painting at Illinois State University. Gina completed a  2015-2016 fellowship with Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar. In 2016, she was Artist-in-Residence at Badlands National Park and at Hinge Arts in Fergus Falls, Minnesota. Beginning February 1, 2017, you can view her work in a two-person, online exhibition titled In This Place at Pleat Gallery. Weight of Light, a group exhibition curated by Melissa Oresky, will open at DEMO Project in Springfield, Illinois on March 10, 2017. There will be a gallery talk on April 6, 2017. Gina currently lives in Bloomington, Illinois and teaches Drawing at Illinois State University.

OtherPeoplesPixels: Screens are prominent in your work, both as a material and as a metaphor. Could you talk about the difference between looking through screens and looking at screens?

Gina Hunt: Fascinating question! I immediately think of how vision works and the similarities between our eyes and cameras when it comes to depth of field and the ability to focus. I am always getting pleasurably distracted by looking through window screens, fencing, and mesh barriers because of the ‘flit’ that happens between focusing on the screen and then focusing on what is beyond and behind the screen. I’ve been doing this since I was a kid, and I think this experience is really common. Looking at the same physical objects with and without a screen is a completely different visual experience. That difference, or subjectivity, between these two visual experiences blows my mind.

Chromascope (RO), 2016. Acrylic on hand-dyed cut canvas. 24" x 24."

OPP: Please talk about your repeated strategy of slashing and twisting canvas in Feedback (2015), Colorblinds (2014) and Chromoscopes (2015).

GH: I can credit the development of that specific process to two people: my grandmother and Lucio Fontana! Fontana helped me realize that a painting is a very physical object. No aspect or component of a painting is a given; every physical bit of a painting is a material choice. Fontana cut his canvases in the most elegant of ways and showed us that paintings can depict space with actual space, not just implied illusive space.

A few years ago, I was suddenly having a battle with my paintings. It was a complicated mess that dealt with illusion—but instead of going into that whole story, I will explain how I got out of it, which lead to several subsequent bodies of work. I took a few weeks away from the studio and spent full days making a quilt with my grandmother. It was a highly complicated one that we designed. While working on this, we talked about history, politics, gender, modernist painting, and physical labor. This physical engagement with the materials—the measuring, pressing, folding, cutting, stitching, and piecing was so satisfying.

When I returned to the studio, I began cutting up piles of un-stretched, painted canvas. I developed a process of making pattern-based paintings that are incredibly physical and sculptural while also presenting optical experiences based in color. Around that point, it seemed to me that Fontana was taking apart paintings. I felt like I was putting paintings back together.

Flit, 2015. Acrylic on cut canvas over canvas. 47" x 61."

OPP: Any chance the quilt as a unique form will ever enter your practice?

GH: Yes, I am certain that it will.

OPP: Are all paintings screens? Why or why not?

GH: I love this question! Screen is such a complex word with multiple definitions. As a verb, a screen can divide, separate, and conceal.  A screening is an assessment or filtering of information. As a noun, a screen can be a flat panel displaying images and data, a thin object or material which separates spaces, and a surface which allows images and ideas to be projected onto it. Thinking through all of this—Yes. I am rather certain that all paintings are screens.

Window Screen (GR), 2016. Acrylic on cut window screen mesh over painted wooden frame. 16 inches x 20 inches.

OPP: What does site-specificity mean to you?

GH: My work is dependent on where I am in the world. It is site-specific in every sense of the term.

In 2015-2016, I lived in the Middle East as a Practicing Artist Fellow. I believe that the decisions we make are dependent on context and circumstance, and this opportunity made it so clear to me. The research and work I was producing quickly became reactive to the specific place I was a part of. Unfamiliarity can be a great asset—one is able to notice details and characteristics of situations which can become worn and unnoticeable with time and exposure. 

Through that experience, in addition to following residencies I’ve been to, I have prioritized an engagement with locality and hope for my work to be responsive to where I am. My work is site-specific because I am cultivating knowledge of place (local culture, history, visual culture, aesthetics, and identity) through context-based research. I don’t want to just insert myself and my ideas; I want to collaborate with the place where I am making work. 

It's Curtains for You v2, 2016. Hand dyed transient installed in the windows of an abandoned gazebo outside of the Kirkbride buildings (formerly the Fergus Falls State Hospital) in Fergus Falls, Minnesota. Approximately 60 inches x 144 inches

OPP: You were the 2016 Artist-in-Residence at Badlands National Park in South Dakota. Please tell us about this unique residency.

GH: Yes, I just finished that residency and am still reflecting on it. I was completely surprised and thrilled to get it, as I have not seen artists physically place work within the landscape of the Badlands like I wanted to.

The Artist in Residence program at the Badlands National Park supports two artists each year, one in the spring and one in the fall. And so, I wasn't working alongside other creative practitioners, I was working alongside paleontologists, archivists, park rangers, etc. I learned a lot about the landscape and its history from each person I met. The park staff was wonderful support when I needed them but also didn't encroach on me in any way or question my concepts. Their support really impressed me. Since the projects were going to live outdoors, I decided to set up a simple shop outside of my apartment, in the park, and that is where I built most of the work.

I spent a lot of my time exploring the landscape and problem-solving how to install projects without physically interrupting the landscape in any way. Everything was paired down in terms of process, materials, and installation. I worked within limited means. I thrive when thrown into a challenge like that. The weather is entirely unpredictable there, too, which had to be factored into my material and installation decisions. I asked myself, With the materials I have available, how do I make a large-scale installation outdoors that could withstand high winds, rain, and snow, but cannot be staked into the ground or attached with most things one would typically use?

Suncatcher for the Badlands, 2016. Nylon, window screen mesh, and theater scrim stretched on four painted wooden frames, attached with metal hinges. Installed at Badlands National Park. 48” (h) x 36” (w) x 36” (d).

OPP: Aside from having to navigate the physical conditions of the landscape, how was your work there informed by your research into the region?

GH: I spent time researching the visual aesthetic traditions of Lakota culture. The challenge was then creating a bridge between this “field study” research and the physical work I created. Color and geometry were the major aspects of my research. Specifically, I was reading about Lakota star knowledge/astronomy/stellar theology and its interdependence with the landscape. There is a beautifully poetic yet literal concept called mirroring. The earth and the stars “are the same, because what is on the earth is in the stars, and what is in the stars is on the earth” (quoted from Mr. Stanley Looking Horse, father of the Keeper of the original Sacred Pipe, in Lakota Star Knowledge). One example of this is how the earth map and star map are interdependent on one another; this is described in an abstract, geometric drawing. The visual description, which has been recorded in star maps, has an inverted triangle above a reflected triangle, and these triangles meet at their apexes. They are mirrored. The inverted triangle on top symbolizes the sky, or a star, and the drawings of it look like a pointed cone that channels light.  The mirrored triangular cone on the bottom is the same but inverted. This component symbolizes the tipi (which is loaded with geometric symbolism) and earth sites. Thus, the combination of the two triangle cones is called Kapemni in Lakota, or twisting

One of the sculptural works I created drew from this knowledge and employment of geometry to channel light from the sky.  I created a triangular, three-sided form as a conduit for the sunlight and a place for the light from the sky to integrate with the ground and rocks and landscape.

Mirroring, 2016. Theater scrim, PVC mesh, and window screen mesh over (3) wooden frames, attached with metal hinges. Installed at Badlands National Park. 48 inches x 36 inches x 36 inches.

OPP: And your piece Suncatcher for the Badlands was based on research into the Medicine Wheel?

GH: Abstraction is everywhere in Lakota visual culture and is very symbolic. Another important symbol is the Medicine Wheel, which is a complete circle divided into four quadrants. Each quadrant is assigned a color (white, yellow, red, and black). All knowledge is embedded within the Medicine Wheel and the four colors are the symbolic primaries. I used the colors of the medicine wheel in the Suncatcher for the Badlands because they are the primary colors of Lakota knowledge of the universe. Color is always embedded as a conceptual component in my work. I have been working with various systems of primary colors for several years and working in the Badlands allowed me to learn more about color through a very specific cultural and regional context.

OPP: How did being immersed in this natural environment for an extended period of time affect your work?

GH: The work I created was a documentation of a sensitive awareness of and engagement with locality and landscape. I created site-specific installations during the residency, which I photographed throughout the day and in varying weather conditions. During the five week residency, I experienced nearly every possible weather scenario! The installations lived in the bright sun, dense fog, two snowfalls, and a blizzard. The projects were akin to a scientific experiment—the installations were the stable “control variable” and the weather was the “independent variable.”The prehistoric landscape was an ideal setting for light and color experiments. The landscape served as a laboratory. I was able to spend time exploring and hiking nearly every day. This led to a familiarity with the land and the light and allowed me to develop a sensitivity to the elements. I was truly collaborating with the sky, the rocks, and the sun.

To see more of Gina's work, please visit gina-hunt.com.

Featured Artist Interviews are conducted by Chicago-based artist Stacia Yeapanis. When she’s not writing for OPP, Stacia explores the relationship between repetition, desire and impermanence in cross-stitch embroideries, remix video, collage and impermanent installations. She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where received her MFA in 2006, and was a 2011-2012 Artist-in-Residence at BOLT in Chicago. Her solo exhibitions include shows at Siena Heights University (2013), Heaven Gallery (2014) and the Annex Gallery at Lillstreet Art Center (2014). She created site-responsive installations for Form Unbound (2015) at Dominican University and SENTIENCE (2016) at The Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art. Resist the Urge to Press Forward, a two-person show with Brent Fogt, is on view at Riverside Art Center (Riverside, Illinois) until April 15th, when there will be a closing reception and artist talk. Throughout March 2017, Stacia is working on an evolving, duration installation at The Stolbun Collection (Chicago). You can watch Witness change via live feed.

OtherPeoplesPixels Interviews Jen Graham

Health Care, 2012. Embroidery and acrylic on fabric. 36 1/2" x 35"

JEN GRAHAM's hand-embroidered portraits of American presidents and divisive, media "loudmouths" ask us to slow down and consider the information we receive and how we receive it. In Trajectory Patterns, Jen offers us an embodied way to comprehend gun violence by quantifying the numbers of victims of mass shootings during 2016 in a tangible fabric timeline. And her mash-ups of Civil War imagery culled from the Library of Congress Archive with contemporary text remind us to bring knowledge of American History to our understanding of current events. Jen earned her BA in Art at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her solo exhibitions include shows at Truckee Meadows Community College (2015) and McNamara Gallery (2012), both in Reno, Nevada. Her work was recently included in the group exhibition Tilting the Basin: Contemporary Art of Nevada at the Nevada Museum of Art in 2016. The show will travel to Las Vegas and be on view from March 17-May 14, 2017 at 920 Commerce Street. Jen’s project At War With Ourselves will be on view at the Carson City Legislative Building in Nevada from March 20- April 7, 2017. Jen currently resides in Reno, Nevada.

OtherPeoplesPixels: Your most recent work Trajectory Patterns is a textile timeline of mass shootings in the U.S. in 2016. Can you talk about the value of visualizing the data that represents violence in this way?

Jen Graham: Gun violence has become something that we mostly overlook or accept as a part of American life. When confronted with a visual depiction of the sheer volume of mass shootings that have taken place, the scale and atrocity of the statistics are undeniable and have more of a lasting impact than reading a number or a headline.

I chose to represent each mass shooting individually, while still focusing on depicting the immense quantity of the shootings as they accumulated. Each panel represents one mass shooting. One inch of length in the panel represents one person who was shot in that incident (not including the shooter). For each panel, I hand embroidered a label with the street address of the location of the mass shooting the panel represented, intentionally omitting the city and state from the address. The street address alone feels more personal and familiar, and it leaves the viewer with a sense of ambiguity as to where exactly each shooting took place. They could have happened anywhere, and they do happen everywhere.

As mass shootings occurred and I added them to the piece, the previous panels would need to be pushed back to make room for the new ones, just as these tragedies get pushed back in our minds or in the news to make room for new tragedies. The pile that amassed at the back of the piece was particularly haunting to me.  I felt it quietly mirrored the number of human bodies that were piling up as the year went on. 

Trajectory Patterns, 2016. Embroidery and fabric. 24"w x 167"h.

OPP: How has making this piece affected you?

JG: Creating this piece has been emotionally draining for me. I struggled to keep up with the amount of work that was needed to represent each shooting as they occurred, and I was overwhelmed with the sadness of it all. I only just completed the piece last week, which now measures 167 feet in length, representing 385 mass shootings that took place last year in the United States. 

Because Tilting the Basin was on view for three months last August through October, I had decided to continue to add panels to Trajectory Patterns as mass shootings took place while it was on display. I added to the piece outside of visitor hours, but if someone visited the exhibit multiple times, they would have noticed the growth of the piece.

OPP: When did you first start working with embroidery, the dominant medium in your practice?

JG: I began to experiment with embroidery around 2009, and at the time I wasn’t aware of much contemporary work being created in the medium, which freed me to develop my own style outside of influence from other contemporary artists. At the time I wasn’t interested in learning the formal techniques of the medium. I just jumped right in and tried to figure out what I wanted this new hand-sewn work to look like.

Margaret Sanger (detail), 2013. Embroidery and fabric. 29" x 22"

OPP: Your embroidered drawings are visually simple, made primarily of outline stitches. Nothing is filled in. Can you speak about this formal choice as it relates to your content?

JG: Embroidery is incredibly time-consuming, and the end result is usually quite ornate. My intention was to find a way to embrace this medium while abandoning the ‘precious’ quality it often exudes. This led me to the more straightforward style that I began using in my initial embroidery series My Presidents. I created portraits of every past president of the United States that are less formal than we are used to seeing. Using only straight stitches and chain stitches helped steer the portraits away from the tradition of regal oil paintings and marble sculptures. 

With the series At War With Ourselves, I was primarily using imagery from the Civil War, many of which were photographs of Union and Confederate soldiers I found in the Library of Congress Archives. Some of these photographs were hand-tinted, a technique that has always intrigued me. Hand-tinted photographs represent the photographic medium’s early struggle to be accepted as an art form or even as realistic depictions of the world. The addition of color was intended to bring the image to life, though it often arguably had the opposite effect. With this series I began incorporating a similar hand-tint to some of the embroidered elements in my work.

I have recently begun to utilize more decorative, complex stitches into my work, but I will likely continue working with primarily straight stitches and chain stitches.  I like the humble quality this type of stitching brings to my work.  Everything is little un-refined, not quite perfect, a little frayed. There is never a question that this work may have been produced by machine.  My hand is always evident.

Wealth and Privilege (Jay Gould), 2011. Embroidery and acrylic on fabric. 22" x 14."

OPP: You mentioned At War with Ourselves, which draws together images and text from the Civil War Era. But this work isn’t about the Civil War. It’s about American politics now. Why is this imagery from the 1800s relevant today?

JG: As I was doing research for the My Presidents series, I became fascinated with the years leading up to the American Civil War. I began to see so many parallels with the disputes that led to the Civil War and the arguments within contemporary politics at the time (in 2011), and I think these conflicts are even more prevalent today. I also feel that imagery from the Civil War is still very impactful and emotional in American memory. 

The most prominent example of this is the continuing discussion about the offensive nature of the Confederate battle flag and what place it should serve in the American public and in history. In many ways our society has progressed, yet these same arguments and tensions are still threaded within American society today, they have just transformed and evolved. 

I initially exclusively paired up contemporary text with imagery from the Civil War to draw a comparison to the two, but I quickly expanded to sometimes using 19th century text with contemporary imagery instead. By framing contemporary ideas in the context of the Civil War, I am challenging the meaning and motives of the concepts and questioning how far we have really come as a society since the Civil War.

Loudmouth (Donald Trump), 2013. Embroidery and acrylic on canvas. 27" x 20."

OPP: My Presidents (2011) has new resonance in light of the protest rally cry “Not My President.” Can you talk about the research that went into this series, how you settled on the banner titles for each former president?

JG: I knew very little about the U.S. presidents before beginning the My Presidents series. The goal of this series was to change that, to indulge in the biographies and presidencies of all 43 of the past presidents of the United States, and to embrace their history as a part of my own history, whether I agree with their policies and decisions or not. I individually researched every past president, and I then re-framed their legacy with my own personal interpretation of who they were as men and as presidents by giving each a nickname.

#12 Zachary Taylor, 2010. Embroidery on canvas. 11" x 8 1/2."

OPP: Can you highlight a few of your favorites?

JG: Zachary Taylor was one president I knew nothing about before I began this project, but his portrait is one of my favorites. Taylor spent his career in the military, and he was admired nationally as a war hero. But he admittedly knew nothing about politics, and he had never even voted. He also had no regard for formal attire, military or otherwise, and was known to dress in tattered clothes with a big floppy hat, even as president. He was often mistaken as a farmer.

His presidency was largely absorbed by the arguments over whether California should be admitted to the union as a free state, thus he accomplished very little before dying in office. At the time he was known as “Old Rough and Ready,” but I nicknamed him “The Slovenly Celebrity” as I felt this better summed up what kind of man he was as president.

Another president known for his unsophisticated persona was Lyndon Johnson. I think he is one of the most interesting men to have served as our president. He was a career politician who was first elected to congress in 1937 when he was just 29. By the time he was sworn in as president in 1963, he was a master legislator and manipulator of Congress, which is how he succeeded to pass a heap of legislation aimed at lifting up the disenfranchised, including the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Though ideologically he was closely aligned with his predecessor, Kennedy, their personalities were polar opposites. Johnson was unapologetically foul-mouthed, obscene, and unrefined. I gave him the nickname “The Foul-mouthed Schmoozer.”

#36 Lyndon B. Johnson, 2010. Embroidery on canvas. 11" x 8 1/2."

OPP: Why no Barack Obama?

JG: This series does not currently include a portrait of Barack Obama, because I only included every past president, and I completed the series in 2011 while Obama was still in office. I could not accurately give him a nickname until his presidency was over. Just imagine the difference in perspective you would have of the presidency of Richard Nixon if you only looked at his first two years in office.

I considered this series to have been completed in 2011, and I did not plan to continue it. But Barack Obama was the first President who I truly felt was my president, so I am now considering adding his portrait to the series.

OPP: Any ideas for his nickname?

JG: I have put a lot of thought into this, and I am currently leaning towards the nickname "My President." My mom has always had great love and admiration for John F. Kennedy. He seemed to inspire and define her generation. He will always be her president. I think Obama is that president for me and my generation, and it would be fitting for me to end this series with Obama as "My President."

OPP: How has the recent presidential election and the first few weeks of the Trump administration affected your practice, both in terms of potential new projects and your ability to work?

JG: I have been deeply saddened, ashamed, and distressed by every action taken and word spoken by Donald Trump and his administration. To see our society slide so far backwards is disheartening, and it does make it difficult for me to feel motivated to make work. It’s hard not to feel completely defeated. But I just need to move past this sense of defeat, and when I do, I find a greater sense of urgency, a greater need to be making artwork right now.

I do think that the kind of work I make will need to change. The majority of my work has been focused on confronting and combating underlying issues in American society and politics, but now all of these issues are shamelessly out in the open. This is an entirely new political landscape. As I move forward, my work will likely need to be more pointed and confrontational than it has been in the past. We now have to speak louder to be heard over the incessant roar of this disgraceful administration.

To see more of Jen's work, please visit jengrahamart.com.

Featured Artist Interviews are conducted by Chicago-based artist Stacia Yeapanis. When she’s not writing for OPP, Stacia explores the relationship between repetition, desire and impermanence in cross-stitch embroideries, remix video, collage and impermanent installations. She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where received her MFA in 2006, and was a 2011-2012 Artist-in-Residence at BOLT in Chicago. Her solo exhibitions include shows at Siena Heights University (2013), Heaven Gallery (2014) and the Annex Gallery at Lillstreet Art Center (2014). She created site-responsive installations for Form Unbound (2015) at Dominican University and SENTIENCE (2016) at The Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art. Resist the Urge to Press Forward, a two-person show with Brent Fogt, is on view at Riverside Art Center (Riverside, Illinois) until April 15th, when there will be a closing reception and artist talk. Throughout March 2017, Stacia is working on an evolving, duration installation at The Stolbun Collection (Chicago). You can watch Witness change via live feed.

OtherPeoplesPixels Interviews Bobby English Jr.

I Am Mountain, 2015. Performance Still.

In performance, installation, drawing and welded steel sculpture, BOBBY ENGLISH, JR. explores the immediate and inherited trauma of racism, as well as the capacity for catharsis and forgiveness. His numerous performances include elements that are also part of religious services—symbolic objects and garments; music; language in the form of chanting, singing and the rhetoric of preachers and an audience/congregation. Using his own body, handmade artifacts and repetitive, ritual gestures, Bobby offers viewers a spiritual lens through which to look at the personal experience of social and political injustice. Bobby holds a BFA in Drawing with a concentration in Sculpture from The Maryland Institute College of Art. His solo exhibitions include I AM YOU ARE (2016) at Gallery CA in Baltimore, Presence, Soul, Existence (2016) at the Ward Center for Contemporary Art in Petersburg, Virginia and History, Experience, Revelation (2015) at Terrault Contemporary in Baltimore. He has performed at School 33 (Baltimore, 2016) and the Queens Museum (New York, 2015 and 2016), as well as at numerous performance festivals. Bobby is based in Oakland, California.

OtherPeoplesPixels:  When and why did performance first enter your art practice?

Bobby English Jr: My father was also a Broadway performer and Italian Opera singer, so it had to come out eventually. Not to mention I have performed for my mother hundreds, maybe thousands of times to this day. Performing has always been natural for me, but it entered my art practice as soon as I began creating metal sculpture. It was an instant marriage; not really inspired by anything except my desire to push the idea of sculpture and installation into theatre and film. I’m striving for the truth and emotion that can’t simply come from object; the kind of connection that comes from human to human energetic dialogue.

Entropy II, 2015. Fabricated Steel. Variable Dimensions

OPP: Do you conceive of the welded steel works as sculptures first that are then activated by performance? Or are they props created specifically for use in the performances? Does the distinction matter?

BEJ: The distinction doesn’t matter at all, actually. Sometimes I am simply intrigued by a geometric shape or symbol; sometimes even an idea that I then transcribe into shape. Often times I create the sculptures and simply live with them in my everyday space until their meaning becomes clear. Other times I add the sculptures to my performances without knowing what they mean at all; but then their relationships to the many other sculptures I’ve created within the space informs the piece in question. It’s a very organic process, almost like a constant improv dialogue between myself and my creations; sometimes risky in some aspects.

The Eye and I, 2016. Performance still.

OPP: Please tell us about how you employ costume and ritual in your performance series Blossoming Black Power, which includes individual works titled Message I and Message II, Madness, , Property, and Fear and Control (Brothers! Sisters! Where are you?).

BEJ: Costume allows me to step fully into different “beings,” roles or characters, and the costumes themselves sometimes represent time. For example, in Message I, a performance centered in ritual and history; I felt more like a shaman while in that costume. Then in Becoming, the costumes are both representations of time, feeling, passage and signal my stepping into different archetypes; the hero, the stranger, the villain, the leader, the meek, the wise one, etc. So much of my performance is acting, and the costumes certainly allow me to step deeper into feeling a role. My nudity allows me to both feel more meek and more powerful. My staff makes me feel more wise; the spears and shields make me feel more aggressive, like a warrior. I draw whichever energy I need from the costumes and props.

OPP: And sometimes those change over the course of a single performance...

BEJ: I just recently became comfortable with more than one costume change in my performances. In doing so, I realized how much deeper narratives become when I both step into a character psychologically AND physically. In Becoming, I knew that each cage represented a different point in time in my life, and in planning the performance I knew that I would enter and/or use certain sculptures to enable myself to dive deeper into emotion and break more psychological and physical barriers.


Becoming, 2016. Performance, Installation.

OPP: You mentioned Becoming, which is simultaneously performance, installation and healing ritual. Your relationship to the “cage” changes over the course of the performance. How does that particular prop/costume speak to catharsis?

BEJ: I’m happy you picked up on all three of those! The healing aspect of my art is very important to me right now. One can almost see the trauma healing through the sequence of performances. As I’ve stepped into new healing on my journey, I want others to come along as well, welcoming them into my world as I always have.

The cage has been a piece I’ve been growing with since the very first performance with it a year and a half ago. In Becoming, the cage begins as a safe place; a womb; a place of birth, rest, comfort, the mother in its highest form. Mid-way through the performance, the cage becomes the enemy, representing a body, the oppressor. I both harm and then come to love the “body.” At the end of the performance I re-enter the cage; as it becomes my place of death, eternal rest, transformation, and total healing after a life journey that is performed throughout Becoming.

Blossoming Black Power: Message I (Video), September 05, 2015. 2 Hour Performance.

OPP: I have to ask about the little girl in the red dress, who followed you for a while during your outdoor performance Blossoming Black Power: Message I, which had a background audio track composed of numerous speeches from Civil Rights activists through the years. She was both just herself, a human audience member of live performance, experiencing it in an idiosyncratic way. But in watching her follow you, I thought about the uncontrollable parts of live performance, the introduction of joy and levity into a narrative of struggle and how one generation communicates with the next about the racist history of America. Did you know she was following you and did it change your performance in the moment? What do you think of how she reacted to and interacted with your performance?

BEJ: I did know that she was following, and I didn’t let it change anything about my performance in that. I often do react to the happenings around me while performing; comments from the audience, a sculpture being knocked over, my invading the space of the audience and vice-versa, etc etc. I enjoy these moments of complete improvisation because I feel they are the most real. Honestly, I haven’t really felt any way about it until this moment. Right now I feel a great sense of disappointment that she was oblivious to the weight of what was happening around her. On the other hand, part of me wonders that maybe ignorance truly is bliss and the way forward.

Contemplation #39, 2016

OPP: What does it mean to conflate spiritual or religious practice with performance art? Can artists be spiritual leaders?

BEJ: For me, conflating spiritual and/or religious practice with performance art is simply creating my own personal mythology that steps away from the patriarchal interpretation of spiritual texts that has and is still occurring worldwide. It’s simply another way of me reclaiming myself from internal and external colonization. It’s also a way to show worldwide similarities in myth and culture. My hope is that audience members make connections between their ancestry and the ancestry of others around them. Ultimately creating solidarity, respect, and love. I believe anyone has the capacity to become a spiritual leader. However, artists certainly have an edge on interpreting and being drawn to symbols and turning them into forms that can be more easily understood.

To see more of Bobby's work, please visit subverse-vision.com.

Featured Artist Interviews are conducted by Chicago-based artist Stacia Yeapanis. When she’s not writing for OPP, Stacia explores the relationship between repetition, desire and impermanence in cross-stitch embroideries, remix video, collage and impermanent installations. She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where received her MFA in 2006, and was a 2011-2012 Artist-in-Residence at BOLT in Chicago. Her solo exhibitions include shows at Siena Heights University (2013), Heaven Gallery (2014) and the Annex Gallery at Lillstreet Art Center (2014). She created site-responsive installations for Form Unbound (2015) at Dominican University and SENTIENCE (2016) at The Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art. Stacia is currently preparing for a two-person show titled Resist the Urge to Press Forward with Brent Fogt at Riverside Art Center (Riverside, Illinois) and Sacred Secular, a solo show at Indianapolis Arts Center in Indiana.

Artists Answer: Are you struggling with your practice in light of recent political events?

I've been hearing from every artist around me, and am also feeling myself, that the recent election and all the following actions by the current administration are majorly impacting how they view their art practices. Some of us are floundering, asking whether what we do is really important and others are finding renewed value in the creative process and creative communities.


Whatever your practice is and whatever your political beliefs are, I'd like to hear how this political moment is affecting your practice. Are you changing the way you work? Are you taking refuge in your studio? Are you using your creative skills to make protest banners and/or support activist work? Are you totally stymied ad stuck? Are you reevaluating everything you do as an artist?

Geoffry Smalley | Read the Interview

"Yes!!! I have had many discussions around this topic as well, and the range of ways artists are coping and processing is myriad. Personally, I have dipped into my deep past, to my early illustration training and have been making political cartoons. I find art making to be the only real outlet for me to process the torrent of madness in the news these days. To slow it, focus energies and establish opinion. And when I can, I support fellow artists who are fundraising through sales of art or t-shirts, etc. Individuals are taking on the task of fundraising for great organizations who fight the good fight, but I have been thinking about centralizing that idea, maybe into an online rolling exhibition of sorts that would be very accessible. I haven't formed the idea yet but our community is filled with great thinkers and entrepreneurs and brilliant makers who could be a loud voice together."

Michael Pajon | Read the Interview

Sisters of Fate, Daughters of Night, 2016. Mixed Media Collage on Antique Book Cover. 10 x 13in

I have a renewed interest in printmaking as a way to make flyers and handbills to distribute during protests and for writing postcards to congress, senate and our local elected officials.  Not yet sure how it will effect my main practice, but I have no doubt it will creep in at some point. I am asking my local arts organizations to divest from any relationships they have with organizations that have ties to NDAPL and the BBPL (bayou bridge pipeline, the tail of the serpent). In New Orleans, that organization is the Helis Foundation. I'm looking forward to using digital print as a way to fundraise for vulnerable organizations by making small editions at an accessible low cost. As artists we have to keep in mind that this has been done in the past, the National Endowment for the Arts was gutted a long time ago. Other organizations stepped up to fill the void left behind. I'm hoping the same will occur over the next four years, that the Cheeto in Chief will bring us all closer together in his attempts to drive us apart. Best of luck to all of my fellow artists and humans out there fighting the good fight. Your work is needed now more than ever, get in our out there and make beautiful, thoughtful things!!

(Note: Michael is selling 14" x 18" archival inkjet prints of the above collage to raise money for NODAPL. $50 + 12 for shipping. 20 left. $1500 raised so far.)

Tory Wright Lee | Read the Interview

"Motherhood was the first big change in how I work, but in a way that was less disruptive than this election. There is now a weight pushing down on my mind that was not there before. Especially with the regressive agenda against women's reproductive rights and so much more. My work has always been about the woman's body and editing fashion photography down into a more powerful image by cutting away as much if the surface as possible. Now, after a period of mourning and work reflecting that emotion, I find myself looking at finished work and asking myself if I made the image about strength. Does this woman look strong?"

Michael Salter | Read the Interview

"I stand firmly in resistance to the current administration and keep a steady stream of anti-trump images flowing out into the world. I always share the work in hopes it will help the resistance, for use as signs or posts. Otherwise, yes, I am struggling to maintain a regular creative output. For the moment I keep my resistance work and my personal work separate but have no inhibitions about them, or my, connections to them. My work is already subversive so if I can just get to a functional level of anger, despair and disillusionment, I can channel my energies back into my work. One thing I do know is that the underground can thrive in a dictatorship. I cling to that idea, that my career is rooted in collectives and alternative spaces and I know the energy and power and effect that a group of like minded people can project. We will all keep making work, and it will matter. And people will see it and experience it, and it will make a difference. I personally just have to get my lean returned to forward and not just flat out on my heels in shock."

Yikui Gu | Read the Interview

Golden Shower/ Holdin' Power, 2017. Acrylic, marker, silicone, yarn, & pen on panel.

"Like many artists, my head has been swimming since the election, and each passing day brings another turn of events. It seems like the first month of this administration has been more eventful than the entirety of many past administrations. Below are some general thoughts, in no particular order of importance.

  •  As a Bernie supporter, I'd actually been resigned to a Trump presidency since Hillary's coronation here in Philly back in July. During the final night of the DNC convention, I turned to my wife and stated that I felt Trump would beat Hillary in the general election. She rolled her eyes as most people did, but a failure of imagination doesn't mean something can't happen. Progressives had warned corporate Democrats of this since the beginning, and the very fact that the DNC had to rig the primaries for the "stronger" candidate spoke volumes. 
  • When I do flounder in my practice, it is almost never due to worldly events. Whatever artistic crisis I may be having is usually internal, almost never external. The self doubt is ever present, and I've seriously considered giving up being an artist on a number of occasions. But doubt is a good thing; it causes you to be introspective and honest with yourself, which usually leads to better art. Shitty artists are always confident, the good ones usually don't have so much certainty.
  • The general turn of events has actually provided a lot of food for thought as an artist, so that there is much more material to work with. An analogous situation can be seen on Saturday Night Live, where the sketches are better precisely because there's more inspiration and source material to work with.
  • As most reasonable people are, I'm fairly disgusted by recent events, and it has made me even more of a nihilist than I used to be. This is by no means a negative; it is actually quite liberating. I often find that when I have no fucks left to give is when I produce the best work, since there is nothing to lose.
  • I've refrained from making any artwork that directly references current events, with one exception. I did produce the small piece above as a donation to a local Philly gallery for their auction to benefit free youth art classes."

Erin M. Riley | Read the Interview

Head On, 2016. Wool and cotton.100" x 50."

"I have been working on a very personal and emotional exhibition for the last five months. It opens in March, but as the time approaches, it feels like advertising an art show is just silly. I support myself with my art and am struggling with how to continue on this path as arts funding seems to be getting cut everywhere and collectors aren't as adventurous. It feels ridiculous pushing art when so many other causes are matters of life and death. I know art is important, and I will not stop making it. But it's going to be much harder to survive with 45; that seems like a truth for the majority of folks in and out of the art world. I am looking for work outside of my studio practice so that I can have income to donate and support causes that I can't currently on my non-existent budget. I am also doing more research into artists who are women of color, trans, immigrant, Muslim, Mexican— those who are what 45 is explicitly against—and supporting their work when I can. I am also going to way more art openings, it seems like an obvious thing but especially artists who are opening shows lately I know how much work goes into them and no one expected the climate to be so toxic. We have to support each other physically, hugs are great."

Katie Vota | Read the Interview

"Recent events have caused a crisis in my mind in relation to my practice. I feel derailed, like the work I was making isn’t important enough to deserve my time when there are so many things to be done. The outwardly activist portions of my practice have stolen all my focus and attention as a way of coping. However, this feels disingenuous. All that work about queer opulence and visibility and our body politic is more relevant than ever. However it’s also dangerous (maybe it was always dangerous). We are under attack. It’s an attack against beauty, queerness, opulence, and everything my work stands for. What is beautiful is that we will continue to resist the toxic, fragile masculinity that is currently destroying the earth. As a bi queer femme, I shine bright, constantly proclaiming myself as “out” and counted amongst the many who cannot blend into the crowd. I am ready for this fight, even though I’m frightened. And yet, convincing myself to make the work I want to make is hard when I keep spiraling back to the idea that it’s not enough.

In light of recent political events, I am rethinking the context of my art practice. It’s taken months coming to this realization, that instead of having a collection of disparate bits that are the ruins of my practice strewn around my feet, that these things I want to be doing—making protest banners and punk patches for resistance—are not so unrelated to the sculpture and installation work. My work is still about touch, interactivity, play, the creation of experience through the occupation of space via the multiple, queer experience (the femme perspective), and the creation of community through skill sharing….. However, instead of trying to talk about these things individually, I think I want to talk about activism and the roll it has in shaping the way these congruent narratives are interrelated. I’m hoping by reframing the discussion in my mind, I’ll be able to get back to making the work."

Ian Davis | Read the Interview

Broadcast, 2014. Acrylic and spray paint on linen. 75 x 80"

"I feel particularly well equipped to answer this, considering the fact that my work has dealt with politics and power for a long time. However, I don't claim that my work is topical, and I've always made an attempt to be vague about what's really going on in the narrative situations I describe. The day after the election I found suddenly that reality had crept much closer to the somewhat surreal situations I paint. In the last week and a half, it almost feels as if the strangeness of the political climate has surpassed anything I've described in my paintings. Now my concern is that these look like political cartoons. I'm trying to figure out how to respond and let what's happening permeate the imagery, but at the same time I'm trying to retain a poetic quality in which everything isn't all explained and spelled out. Its a weird balance and I feel that it will take some time to really let everything marinate. Everything has flipped so quickly. It's too early to tell what's going on. I think it was George Orwell who said that scared people don't write good books. At the moment, I'm trying to determine whether scared people can make good paintings. Its been tricky so far. I've made signs for protests, but I have given them to people who don't have signs of their own. when you leave, leave your sign for somebody else to use!"

OtherPeoplesPixels Interviews Matthew Hilshorst

Pretty Average Blowout, 2015. Acrylic paint on canvas. 18" x 25" x 4."

MATTHEW HILSHORST's "sincerely pessimistic" work includes painting, sculpture and a plethora of hobby craft techniques—latch-hook rugs, bottle cap murals, and electrical wire "paintings"—that sit right on the boundary between painting and sculpture. He conflates the grid of gingham tablecloths and latch-hook rug canvases with the grid of Modernist Abstract painting. His sculptural shrouds, towels and cakes made entirely of paint explore themes of gravity, decay and longevity. Matt earned his BFA in Painting from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis/St. Paul. He went on to earn both a Post Baccalaureate Certificate and an MFA in Painting from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been including in exhibitions at Sidecar Gallery (Hammond, Indiana, 2016), Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art (2015) and Peregrine Program (Chicago, 2013). Matt lives and works in Chicago.

OtherPeoplesPixels: What role does mimicry play in your work?

Matthew Hilshorst: I don't know if mimicry would be the right word. I am definitely trying to copy something or copy a technique in the way I make a thing though. It is more a form of flattery or reverence for the object and the way in which it is made. Real admiration led me to carve two egg beaters out of wood and then spray painted them chrome. I made them as realistic as possible so that they really represent nothing more than egg beaters. I love banal objects that someone painstakingly designed. I had Egg Beaters up on display at an office building downtown for almost a year. When I finally removed them people told me they had been trying to wrap their heads around why I simply put egg beaters up on a shelf. When I told them they were super delicate wood carvings, they were shocked. It immediately and completely changed their view of what they had been trying to understand.

Egg Beaters, 2003. Carved wood and spray paint. 7" x 1.5" x 1.5."

OPP: Are these works ironic or sincere? Is that question even relevant anymore in the way it was at the time they were made?

MH: It is still a relevant question. Those past works are completely sincere, although it may be read as ironic when the sarcasm or pessimism represented is misunderstood. I spend months and sometimes years creating individual pieces, so putting all that time and effort into creating something, it can't help but be sincere. I love making work that is task-oriented. Making a work that's too simplistic can feel unrewarding, while making a work without a preconceived notion leaves me overwhelmed and unable to begin. I try to give myself a new challenge with every piece, but I always know there is an end point before I start. I recently completed an 8'11" long stained and worn red carpet made of latch-hooked paint. It took me nearly two years to complete.  8'11" is an odd length, but it is as long as the tallest man to have lived was tall. The other measurements of the carpet are in relation to my own body. How it hangs partially on a wall and partially on the floor is also important. I consider every aspect of a work before I make it; little to nothing is arbitrary. But that doesn't always mean I get exactly what I intended. There are always challenges, set backs, and aspects I could have never anticipated.

Much of my work will have a craft look to it because the methods I use to create it are a main component of it. In other words, the process I use to make something is definitely part of the content. The carpets, rugs, towels, and welcome mats are my way of painting a thing where each latch-hooked piece is also a brush stroke, and each brush stroke represents a thread. I do paint very realistically with oil paint too, but I rarely get excited about doing it. I prefer to not represent something in two dimensions. The physical object is so much more satisfying than a representation of it. As I say that though, I'm working on a new group of oil paintings. Ha. 

The Red Carpet, 2016. acrylic paint and flocking fibers. 8'11."

OPP: What’s the new work about?

MH: The oil paintings? Bingo. Seriously. The new acrylic work is more about hostile hospitality. Lots of different takes on welcome mats and entry rugs. In the same way that throw-away gingham tablecloths physically display "Americana," so do welcome mats.  Thinking about the United States being so unwelcoming to refugees and immigrants has really permeated my new work, it would seem.

Worn Out Hand Towel, 2014. Acrylic paint on towel bar. 16" x 20" as displayed.

OPP: Captured Unicorn (2013) and Snake in the Grass (2013) are latch hook rugs in the conventional sense of the word. They are cut yarn attached to a gridded canvas, creating a shaggy surface. What’s different about Welcome Mat (2014) and Worn Out Hand Towel (2014)?

MH: I originally created Captured Unicorn for a medieval themed show at Bureau in New York and Snake in the Grass was made for a show here in Chicago at Peregrine Program. Both rugs were a new direction for me that ultimately greatly influenced most of my future work and methods of production. My work has been described to me as "basement art,” and I think that gets back to sincerity and irony so I decided to go full-on basement craft for my first latch hooked rugs. Both shows had a dedicated theme, so I was able to get away from traditional painting or sculpture and have some fun with fibers for those two shows.

I switched to latch hooking paint because I wanted to work with a larger color palette. I was going to start hand-dyeing and spinning my own yarn, but that started to seem like more of a drag as far as tasks go and made something simple like a latch hook rug way too complicated. Figuring out what ratio of paint to medium I needed, making endless tests, and learning that acrylic paint does not like getting colder than 50 degrees Fahrenheit presented challenges, but I knew I could easily manipulate color using paint which was my ultimate concern. I like making objects out of 100% paint because of its plastic perfection. It's also a great way to represent a functional object that only functions as art. Using only paint makes me contemplate gravity, time, and longevity, which have been underlying themes in all of my work. I make my own grid out of paint that I latch-hook into, removing a canvas or a separate support system for my paintings. Many of my paintings have to be viewed from above and can be displayed in many different, irreverent ways; they don't just hang on a wall.

Red Gradation, 2011. Acrylic paint on vinyl tablecloth on stretched canvas. 40" diameter.

OPP: What does the grid mean to you in works like Sagging Tablecloth (2010), Red Gradation and Green Gradation (2011) and Access (2013)? How do the shrouds and Thrown Paint, all from 2014, and Smear (2015) add to this conversation?

MH: I was shopping at an Ace Hardware store that was going out of business (probably late 2003) when I first started at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. There was a bin full of gingham patterned vinyl tablecloths, and I bought the whole pile of them. I hung them up in my studio and was mesmerized by the colors and the pattern. I sat staring and contemplating them off and on for a solid semester. They seemed to incorporate all the ideas that were in my head. They were mathematical and perfectly measured. Time and space were involved in their flatness and their infinite pattern. And they contained patterns within patterns. The tablecloths were bright and in basic colors, equally straddling ideas associated with Op Art, Pop Art, and Minimalism. The gingham pattern also has embedded cultural associations like American idealism, gatherings, mass production, eating, our throw-away culture, and classic picnics.

Originally, I painted pointillist landscapes on them by only using the squares in between the red checks and white checks. I wanted to create imagery that was ghostly and barely visible by hiding it within the pattern of the tablecloth, but in no way disrupting the grid. Those works aren't up on my website because I did the ghostly thing too well—they don't photograph well, or really at all, ha. I then started to create more pattern-based work like the two circular gradations, because it was more visually impactful than the landscapes. The grid continues to play a major role in all my other work including the bottle cap murals, the gridded structure of a latch-hook work, the layers to my graph paper cut outs, smear, the shrouds. I wish I could wrap my head around the fascination with grids, but it seems like some sort of micro/macro truth in organization that verges on spiritual. Basically, it seems to hold some sort very deep secret that I can't understand, so I’m constantly coming back to it and exploring it.

Checkered Drawing 1, 2008. Color pencil on paper. 18" x 24."

OPP: Talk to us about cake and about your cake sculptures and paintings.

MH: The cake paintings bring me back to craft and the method of making things. They came about while I was making my first all paint works. I use a piping bag to create my paint latch hook rugs and towels as well as Caught, Smear, and the Shrouds. I decided that since I was using a technique used for decorating cakes, a cake with a phrase or appropriate decoration could be powerful as a painting.

The cakes have messages about time, aging, gender, and gender roles in their construction. I grew up always being encouraged to be creative, but I was discouraged from being in the kitchen. I would have much preferred to watch and help my mom cook, but my place was in my dad’s wood shop. I made Con to bring up questions of gender roles, gender assignment and gender restrictions. Much like the tablecloth paintings straddle different art movements, I also wanted Con to be a yin and yang of Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism. The Pieces of cake that seem to have been cut from Con are all in some way ruined. Maybe someone has run their finger through the frosting, a fly has landed on it, or a cigarette has been put out in it. Gender is brought up again in Pretty Average Blowout where 80 flaccid candles have been extinguished. This cake refers to the 80 years an average adult male in the United States can look forward to living. Once time and gravity take their toll, your celebrations are over.

I'm generally an optimistic person but my work has become sentimental and sometimes literally drips sarcasm. I guess it is sincerely pessimistic! That seems to be even more prevalent in recent work, especially since the election.

Con, 2015. Acrylic paint on canvas mounted on cardboard. 20" x 25" x 5."

OPP: What’s happening in your studio right now? How are current political events affecting your practice?

MH: These current and pressing concerns have affected my newest work for sure. Overall, it’s becoming darker and almost nasty. . .  but in a good way. These last few months, it has been really hard to concentrate and get to work in my studio. For at least a month after the election, every time I set foot in there, I struggled with the question, why is this important? Then I went to D.C. to protest the Trump inauguration and to walk with my sister and many friends in the Women's March. It sounds cheesy, but it was such a powerful and positive experience that when I came back to Chicago, I felt I needed to try to do something more.

It's only been a week since I've returned, but I contacted two other artist friends who had also been in D.C. and asked if they were in a resistance group. If they were, I wanted to join, and if they weren't, I wanted us to start one. There are now five of us dedicated to inviting people to create a group that will encourage and promote creativity, accountability, information sharing, and a way to make more of a visual impact around the city and at protests. As much as we kind of cringed at the look of the pussy hats, we all loved that people came together and each created a handmade pink hat which was worn as a unified front. We hope to invite many and become a group that channels the creativity of the Chicago artist community for good against evil.

To see more of Matthew's work, please visit matthewhilshorst.com.

Featured Artist Interviews are conducted by Chicago-based artist Stacia Yeapanis. When she’s not writing for OPP, Stacia explores the relationship between repetition, desire and impermanence in cross-stitch embroideries, remix video, collage and impermanent installations. She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where received her MFA in 2006, and was a 2011-2012 Artist-in-Residence at BOLT in Chicago. Her solo exhibitions include shows at Siena Heights University (2013), Heaven Gallery (2014) and the Annex Gallery at Lillstreet Art Center (2014). She created site-responsive installations for Form Unbound (2015) at Dominican University and SENTIENCE (2016) at The Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art. Stacia is currently preparing for a two-person show titled Resist the Urge to Press Forward with Brent Fogt at Riverside Art Center (Riverside, Illinois) and Sacred Secular, a solo show at Indianapolis Arts Center in Indiana.

OtherPeoplesPixels Interviews Erika Roth

Carb face (detail), 2016. Mixed media; Food diaries, asorted ribbon. yarn, pipe cleaners, Christmas tinsel, silk cord, sequins, various hair accessories. brownie pan on plywood. 41'' x 36'' x 41'' dimensions variable

ERIKA ROTH's intimately personal work speaks to several interconnected and widespread experiences—food addiction, body image and celebrity worship. In collages and assemblage sculpture, she combines her daily food diaries and images from celebrity gossip magazines with “female vernacular” materials like hair accessories, braids and ribbons. Following in the lineage of the feminist artists of the 1970s, she calls attention to pervasive cultural attitudes, reminding us that "the personal is political." Erika received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. In 2016 she completed a year and a half long residency at Brooklyn Art Space. Her many group shows in New York include Trestle Project's recent A Symptom of the Universe, which highlighted artists as seers whose artworks "reflect shifts and departures in the collective unconscious." In December 2016, she was included in Project Gallery's exhibition at Aqua Art Miami, part of Art Basel Miami. In October 2016, Hyperallergic commented on “the popping textile assemblages of Erika Roth," shown at Gowanus Open Studios 2016. Erika lives and works in Brooklyn.

OtherPeoplesPixels: How do you think about excess, in your life, in contemporary culture and in your art practice?

Erika Roth: I am always interested in exploration, process, investigation, and discovery when making my work. I always make sure I have plenty of my supplies around me to make my work. I love to get my materials from the 99 cent store, where I can buy as much as I need. It takes a lot of material to make my work. I love craft materials because there is no scarcity—I can have as much as I want. The accumulation of materials gives my work a richness, a feeling that the work is alive, that it has vitality.

In my life there is no such thing as excess! I stockpile food, toiletries, gym clothes, even studio space and counter space in my kitchen. I always make sure I have enough of these things or spaces in my day to day life, which offers a kind of safety and security.

Anxiety, 2014. Mixed media; Food diaries, crimped curling ribbon, organza ribbon, sequins, small jewels, picture from magazine, gloss medium, pen, on canvas. 36" x 36"

OPP: What led you to shift away from rectangular, (more or less) two-dimensional work towards sculpture? It seems like Devoted to Suffering might have been the turning point.

ER: Yes, Devoted to Suffering was a kind of transition in my work. With most of my 2D work, I was trying to depict remnants or fragments that make up a landscape of thoughts from a woman who is obsessed with body image and food. The rectangle was a kind of snapshot into this world, for just a moment.

Then the 3D works became more of an evoking of an experience, really dramatizing the story of a woman who is obsessed with food and body image. The sculptural works let me invite the viewer in to experience her world.

There was also a practical part of my evolution from 2D to 3D work.  Before I got a studio I had very limited space to work in. When I found studio space I started thinking differently about the work, imagining it in a gallery setting. So I started to have the mental and physical space for the work to grow.

Sheet Cake, 2010. Mixed media; Food diaries, crimped curling ribbon, holographic curling ribbon, cut out picture from magazine, gloss medium, pen on canvas. 30" x 30"

OPP: Can you talk about the legibility (or illegibility) of the text in pieces like Skinny (2011), Creamsicle (2010) and Pink Frosting (2009) from the series food diaries? How important is it that viewers read this early work?

ER: When making my early work it was not that important to me that the text was legible. I was satisfied if a viewer could read or recognize a few words here and there. I was mainly interested in using and making my own materials at that time to depict some feelings and thoughts I had about food addiction. My own food diaries, where I write down what I eat each day, became the ground color for these works. I incorporated into my art a very personal part of my own story.

bonesunderneath, 2015. Mixed media; Magazine pictures, notebook paper, sticker, fake nails, googly eyes on baking sheet. 18.5" x 15"

OPP: Tell us about your recurring materials: curling ribbon, pipe cleaners, beads, hair accessories. What attracts you?

ER: I love my spools of ribbon for their colors and surfaces, and I use them as paint. I can do volumes of exploration with ribbon, as opposed to paint, which is more precious and costly. These materials are readily available and inexpensive, so that I can transform them into my own art materials without even going to an art supply store. Like the pages from one of my spiral bound food diaries, these are ordinary things that I mold into something more precious.

My materials are domestic. I use them to create the fabric of an ordinary woman's life. I use hair accessories partly because they hold things together. But these items also evoke gender and are very recognizable. I juxtapose the hand-made braids and the drugstore bought hair accessories to create a context where people can connect to my work, and they can find their own meaning.

Never ending Narrative, 2016. Mixed media; Food diaries, polyppylene film, ribbon, pipe cleaners, beads, glitter, rhinestones, pony tail holders scrunchy, barrettes, silk cord, sequins, journal, on canvas. 36'' x 84'' dimensions variable.

OPP: How do these materials relate to “the psychological landscape of food addiction, that gorgeous nightmare of attraction and resistance?”

ER: My work is autobiographical. It is my own story in my own voice regarding my relationship with food. In some of my work I have created cakes and brownies that I cannot eat. I make them beautiful and appealing but at the same time they are inedible. They evoke the nightmare of attraction and resistance.

OPP: Do you ever receive the critique that your work is “art therapy” because of its psychological and emotional content? How do you respond?

ER: I have never received that critique, but trust me. . . I am working out something, consciously or unconsciously, in my studio.

I cherish all my misery, 2016. From A Symptom of The Universe, Trestle Projects, Brooklyn, NY.

OPP: You employ chains, braids, twisted cord and yarn in your recent sculptures and installations. How does this visual motif—the form as opposed to the material—underscore the content of your work?

ER: The visual motifs in my work come from my love of glamorous fashion accessories, female memories, and domestic rituals. The chains are inspired by my love for Chanel handbags and accessories from the 80s and 90s. They also speak about being held down, in bondage to something that is outside of you. Braids are one of the first hairstyles we may learn for ourselves in early adolescence. We may have memories of a mother braiding our hair. The hair accessories are nostalgic to me and are part of a female vernacular. The twisted cords and yarns remind me of childhood art projects in school or at summer camp.

People have told me that my work looks alive, that my sculptures come across as creatures, that they have a kind of vitality. I think the visual motifs contribute to this feeling.

Surrendered, 2016. Mixed Media. 7' x 5.5' x 3.5' variable

OPP: Since food addiction is a common and often misunderstood issue, what do you want your viewers to understand about it? Do you feel a sense of responsibility that viewers learn something?

ER: For viewers who can identify personally, I want them to realize that they are not alone, that their struggles with food addiction are real, and that there is help and support out there, that they need to reach out and ask for it. 

But my work also appeals to people who don't have a personal connection to this theme.  They respond to my aesthetic, or love the materials I use, or just think the works are beautiful or interesting. I welcome these viewers too. 

To see more of Erika's work, please visit erikajroth.com.

Featured Artist Interviews are conducted by Chicago-based artist Stacia Yeapanis. When she’s not writing for OPP, Stacia explores the relationship between repetition, desire and impermanence in cross-stitch embroideries, remix video, collage and impermanent installations. She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where received her MFA in 2006, and was a 2011-2012 Artist-in-Residence at BOLT in Chicago. Her solo exhibitions include I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For (2013) at Klemm Gallery, Siena Heights University (Adrian, Michigan), Everything You Need is Already Here (2014) at Heaven Gallery (Chicago) and When Things Fall Apart, in the Annex Gallery at Lillstreet Art Center (Chicago). Stacia created site-responsive installations for two-person show Form Unbound (2015) at Dominican University's O’Connor Art Gallery (River Forest, IL) and SENTIENCE (2016) at The Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art. Her work was recently included in SHOWROOM, curated by Edra Soto, at the Chicago Artists’ Coalition. Stacia is currently preparing for a two-person show titled Resist the Urge to Press Forward with Brent Fogt at Riverside Art Center (Riverside, Illinois) and Sacred Secular, a solo show at Indianapolis Arts Center in Indiana.