OtherPeoplesPixels Blog

Drawing on personal experiences of alienation, assimilation and identity construction, artist and educator ERIN MINCKLEY CHLAGHMO explores the shifting line between experiences of belonging and not belonging in her textile-based work. Her large-scale sculptures are amalgamations of found and printed fabrics, combining patterns which carry seemingly disparate cultural, racial and religious associations. Her use of textiles highlights the similarity between animal (scales and plumage) and human (armor and clothing) means of camouflage and protection. Erin received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012. Recent exhibitions include the first Interfaith Biennial at Dominican University (River Forest, Illinois), Fiber Options: Material Explorations at the Maryland Federation of Art (Annapolis, Maryland and Chroma at the Urban Institute of Contemporary Arts (Grand Rapids, Michigan). Flags Mistaken for Stars, Erin's collaborative project with artist Eric Wall, is on view on the roof of Lillstreet Art Center throughout October 2013, and there is a closing reception for the group show Fiber Optics on October 11, 2013 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Erin spends half the year in Chicago and the other half in Morocco, where she and her husband run an educational tourism company.

OtherPeoplesPixels: Could you talk generally about the interaction between the decorative and the protective in nature and in culture?

Erin M. Chlaghmo: I began to research camouflage a few years ago. I was interested in armor structures found in nature, such as fish scales, feathers, etc. There was this interesting moment where I realized that manmade armors are replicating those found on animals, and patterns that hide military vehicles, aircraft and soldiers are mimicking the landscape of a given region. Decoration is actually a survival technique. Without it, the form would be revealed as it moves or in contrast to the scenery. So, this is an integral part of how I build a motif or pattern structure. The individual unit or figure is disguised by the background or final form through the use of repetition and accumulation. The correlation to culture is that an individual can attempt to stand out or blend in depending on who they surround themselves with. Notions of belonging and un-belonging are themes that drive the work I make.

OPP: Why are textiles the perfect vehicle to explore belonging and barriers to belonging?

EMC: Fabric has a historical relationship to the body through garments, adornment, rights of passage and nomadic dwellings. Fabrics shape our lives. We feel at once welcome and familiar with certain cloths. We make associations to our personal experiences when we see materials like acrylic felt or wool or any material. Much of the work I make aims to start a conversation. An enormous textile like Phobia creates a relationship to the viewer's body and the architectural space, alluding to the infinite. It is bigger than me and you, and it is out of control. It is both scary and seductive.

OPP: You use both found textiles and print your own fabrics for use in your sculptures. Do you tend to print in response to what you find? Or do you seek out the textiles you need in order to execute your vision?

EMC: Pattern has the ability to signify culture. A textile's motif is a signifier of origin or utility: like a cross, an American flag or a Southwestern diamond shape. People have an immediate reaction to imagery on fabric and make assumptions about the content when it is recognizable. This is a complicated language to speak because I'm working with a plethora of borrowed and imagined patterns. It's sometimes very difficult to speak about personal experience through images that are collectively already familiar. I'm trying to mine imagery that is not familiar so that a viewer has to make a choice about their own relationship to the meaning of the work. I'm trying to ask the question: Can images belong to a certain culture? Can I borrow and alter them? What does it mean if I do this?

Many years ago, I went to JoAnn's Fabric looking for recognizable patterns. I found so many prints that shocked me: Confederate flags, cowboys and Indians, Kwanza, Virgin Mary, etc. I was disappointed that the only imagery of people was so cliché and politically incorrect. I wondered, "What in the world would you make out of this fabric? Why do people buy this? Do they buy this?" I couldn't imagine a pair of curtains or a quilt or a child's dress made from these prints! I couldn't see any imagery that I related to, even though it was familiar. I had hoped to make cloth that told a story about my life. I bought them all and decided to make an artwork that expressed my frustration. I wanted to comment on the images by painting and inserting imagery into the pre-existing patterns. I painted the Mormon temple into one fabric with an idyllic scene of churches because I felt right at home in a sea of steeples. I painted a small silhouetted teepee into the distant background of a pattern with silhouettes of cowboys on horses to represent the lack of historical accuracy when depicting the Wild West. I more or less left my paintbrush behind when I finished that body of work. I began to manipulate the fabric itself instead of adding pictures on top.

OPP: In particular, you use a lot of Moroccan textiles. Could you tell us about your personal relationship to Morocco? Did your interest in Morocco stem from your work or did the work grow out of personal experience there?

EMC: I lead a sort of double life. My husband is a Moroccan immigrant, whose family members all still live in Morocco. We travel back and forth to visit them, and we also run a summer tourism company there. I am a cultural translator of sorts. When I'm in Morocco, my family there calls me Hayat. I don't even go by my own name. My habits are extremely different, and I speak Arabic fluently. So, I have assimilated, I guess, into this other society, but only for part of the year. This truly has deepened my art practice because it is the research I need to enrich the work I make. Living somewhere where I am between belonging and being foreign, understanding and rejecting cultural norms, being understood and feeling helpless. . . these experiences repeat themselves in other facets of my life—and likely most people have felt this way at some juncture. Adapting and assimilating takes us back to the beginning of this conversation, where I talked about camouflage. I can't change my race, but everything else can change. I feel like a chameleon, aiming to adapt to every new experience in life as if I was meant to be there. As if I belong.

The textiles brought home from Morocco are an incontrovertible match to ideas already present in my work. Repetition, infinity, accumulation and ascending shapes are present in zillij, Moroccan tile patterns, and other architectural designs. The fabric there is rich with color and texture and is inexpensive. So, I line plain fabrics with it to give them added detail.

OPP: Assimilation is often used as a bad word here in the United States where our nation was built by immigrants and where we value personal identity so strongly. There are negative associations when immigrants feel compelled or are forced to assimilate to a dominant culture, and there’s a sense that we all lose something if they lose their culture. Besides we are all immigrants, too. . . except for the indigenous Native Americans. But choosing to be a chameleon is different; there’s less fear that something important will be lost forever. Thinking about adaptability through a biological lens makes it seems less urgent that we hold so tightly to our identities. Is identity itself just a protective armor, a temporary condition? Would it be as easy to assimilate if you moved to Morocco forever and never came back to the United States?

EMC: Identity is so much more malleable than one thinks. There are grandmas who used to be punk rockers. There are Muslims who used to be Mormons. The assumption that once you change significant identifier that you can't go back is not true. You may never practice the old religion, just like grandma is no longer going to see the Ramones in concert. But, she still retains that part of her (even if in secret). Identity is like collage. You keep adding and adding; layers are covered up and perhaps "lost forever." But they're still there underneath.

Also, people don't chose their family of origin or their race, but everything else can be changed. I grew up in a semi-Catholic, middle-class American family in Utah, and I converted to Islam and speak Arabic. Does the changed identity imply that I am less authentic? I propose that I am my best self, the person I was meant to be, when speaking in Arabic and fasting during Ramadan. I am a very flexible and adaptable person at my core. I like to accommodate others and see from their point of view. I am empathetic. I can blend in and communicate better in a foreign environment if I "do as the Romans do." That applies to every situation in life, not just living abroad. There's a fine line here between impostor and chameleon. I'm not pretending I'm Moroccan. I am fully aware of my whiteness and my origin, and so is everyone else. But, I am just trying to survive. The real me is inside. She is constantly donning different "armor,” not readying for battle, but adapting to my environment.

Many people live their life refusing to adapt. They never enter situations or environments that make them uncomfortable. They never associate with people that are not like them. This is the scary dilemma because, the longer you live your life afraid to adapt or refusing to relate to another who is physically or culturally unlike you, the more likely you are to build fear or hatred for the other. The "other" becomes a mystified person, assumptions are made, stereotypes are cast and barriers are built between you, but this border line is not real or tangible. This is the purpose of my life's work, both as an artist and as an educator. How do we break down these borders?

I also want to respond to the point you made about the word assimilation having a negative connotation. In the late 1800s, the first "Indian" boarding schools in America forced Native students to shave their heads, change their names, speak English and practice Catholicism. There is a heavy feeling when considering that assimilation could be forced upon a set of people towards a second group's aims. And although terribly atrocities were suffered by these children, they surely retained their identities. Their children are the ones who suffered loss of "authentic culture" and tradition. By the 1970s, 60,000 students attended these schools. The societies were considered "civilized," and the government abandoned the effort to educate Native Americans separately. Generations later, there is a huge push to educate youth about the Native languages and art forms. Now, many are uninterested and would rather play video games or get lunch with their friends at McDonald's. So. . . I'll need to ponder for a while about assimilation's reverse effects along a timeline of a few generations. I doubt that my children's children will regret not growing up the way I did. I'm hoping they appreciate living a life straddling two extremely different cultures.

OPP: You mentioned scales, which are are evoked in abstract pieces like Phobia (2013) and Exterior Perceptions (2013). They are used as armor in pieces like Choose the Right (CTR) (2012). They are decorative in your painted scale studies and mesmerizing in your latex wall painting Infinite Repetition (2012). Could you talk about this recurring visual motif in your work?

EMC: From small to large, overlapping and infinite, the scale or shingle pattern first appeared in a painting I made of a peacock. It was a labored process to create that artwork, and ultimately it didn't work to have spent so much time on the details of each feather. The thing I found that I liked the most about the bird was the layer pattern in her feather structure. This has been present in almost every work I've made since. The felt layers overlap (which hides the origin of each loop from sight) and get larger towards the bottom, and my paintings start at a central flower shape or tear drop and emanate outwards. The suits of armor all have this structure, too. Scales have for some reason kept my interest and flawlessly connect many bodies of work that are disparate in medium. Ultimately, it is a form that is abstract enough to be many things and nothing at once.

It is also a perfect way to illustrate the unit—the individual or unique original—repeated into an implied infinity. It becomes less about the singular and more about the plural or the gestalt. The human mind has the tendency to see the forest and not the tree. Another reference to camouflage and assimilation, the theories of gestalt name our brain's need to group things together by likeness, proximity, continuity and common fate and perhaps the human desire to belong. I guess, it's another metaphor for society. One worshipper is lost amongst a church full or worshippers; one prayer is lost amongst a lifetime of prayers. The scale is a physical representation of homogeneity and diversity amongst the whole.

Featured Artist Interviews are conducted by Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist Stacia Yeapanis. When she’s not writing for OPP, Stacia explores the emotional and spiritual significance of repetition in her cross-stitch embroideries, remix video and collage installations. She is an instructor 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 2012-2013 Mentor-in-Residence at BOLT in Chicago. Her work is on view through September 2013 in Abstracting the Seam (Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago), and she has two upcoming solo exhibitions: I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For (Klemm Gallery, Adrian, Michigan) in November 2013 and Everything You Need Is Already Here (Heaven Gallery, Chicago) in January 2014.

JUAN BOLIVAR's paintings hover between abstraction and representation. Influenced by abstract painters before him, he's enchanted by the possibility of pure, unencumbered form: simple geometric shapes, flatness, expanses of color. But his carefully chosen titles make it impossible for a circle to just be a circle. Juan graduated with an MA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College in 2003 and has had solo shows at Jacobs Island Gallery in London (2011), John Hansard Gallery in Southhampton (2008) and Lucy Mackintosh Gallery in Switzerland (2008). He has work in several upcoming group exhibitions in London: This-Here-Now at no format Gallery (November 2013), I'm Wanted Dead or Alive at Koleksiyon (December 2013) and Zero Tolerance at Lion & Lamb Gallery (January 2014). In February 2014, his solo show Boogie-Woogie will open at Tim Sheward Projects in London, where Juan lives and works.

OtherPeoplesPixels: The press release for your 2008 exhibition Geometry Wars states: "The phrase Geometry Wars describes Bolivar's 'struggle with abstraction'—whether to subjugate 'the square', and present it as pure form or whether to animate it into the world of figuration." Could you talk about your personal struggle with abstraction? Have you resolved anything since 2008?

Juan Bolivar: Yes and no. Many years ago I made what I thought were 'serious' abstract paintings. My aim was for the viewer to see nothing but sublime voids and experience a non-referential, plastic reality. Whenever I exhibited these paintings, the viewer's immediate impulse was to try and make sense of what s/he saw, and often viewers offered their interpretations, ranging from being able to see a room or a face. But it always caused me frustration, as I insisted nothing was there to be seen.

I once read that Georges Braque had a similar experience when he unexpectedly saw the vision of a small squirrel in one of his paintings, and, try as he did, he could not prevent this small creature from coming back to his cubist work. Likewise, I yearn for the idea of 'pure' abstraction—recently I found myself mesmerized by Gerhard Richter's Grey (1974) and Ellsworth Kelly's Orange Relief with Green (1991) at Tate Modern—but, at the same time, I can't help mentally drawing a wall socket or a silly mustache onto works such as these.

In February 2014, I will have my second solo exhibition at Tim Sheward Projects in Bankside, London. I plan to accentuate these conflicting polarities by appropriating and subtly altering some famous abstract paintings I saw earlier this year in the show Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925 at MoMA, not quite making fun of these works, but teasing them the way we only can with those people closest to us or whom we love the most.

OPP: From a viewer's perspective, what I see in the abstraction is affected by what I know and whether I've read the titles. Hoodie, for example, struck me as so funny—and strangely poignant—that I'm still laughing a little. Clearly, it's Kenny from South Park. But if you've never seen South Park, perhaps it's a black circle on top of a grey circle and two white half circles on top of a pointed oval. Other pieces have a Rohrshach effect, like Hero. At first, I saw this piece as way more abstract than some of the others. Then when I read the title, the person jumped out at me, which of course changed what I saw in The Great Suprematist. What's the funniest (or weirdest or most offensive) interpretation you've heard from a viewer about one of your pieces?

JB: Art is a contextualized activity. Its meaning is dependent on the viewer and the context in which it is seen. So, yes, everything you say is true and very pertinent to the interpretation of my work. In linguistic terms, the optimum reader of a text is the theoretical reader, who most understands the embedded references and context of a text. Paintings are the same, and, to some degree, my work investigates how interpretation is a contested territory with its own sliding scale of hierarchies from South Park to high modernism.

One of the strangest and most challenging comments I have had about my work was simply: "What is it?" I think it was from an electrician carrying some work in my studio. He didn't mean to ask, "what was this image of?" or "what did it represent?" but literally “what was the object before us in my studio?” After I explained that the large, grey mass in the corner of the room was a painting, he then asked, "what is it about?" I had to quickly compress all the information flashing inside my head as I had a small short-circuit of my own, and I simply replied that my paintings were about other paintings. He didn't seem satisfied with this answer, but I realized that, for better or worse, this idea of contextualized references was central to my practice.

OPP: Could you talk generally about how you use and respond to space in your work? As you are painting, do you think of space in a purely compositional way? When, if ever, does it take on metaphorical meaning?

JB: Some believe that time doesn't exist, so by default neither might space. The space, however, that painters deal with transcends this argument, and the reason is because they deal with pictorial space. Pictorial space isn't space at all really but more of a game. It is like the boundary of an American football field; one can only play this game within these lines. Outside these lines, the game disappears and does not exist. In the same way, pictorial space is a boundary governed by rules where artists play visual games.

The pictorial space most of us are familiar with in Western painting has been developed for many many years, first through religious iconography, then in the Quattrocento and finally during the High Renaissance. There is a wonderful book by the art historian John White titled The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space, which charts its journey. As result of the pictorial space that we now take for granted, we are able to accept things such as perspective and view the edge of the canvas as if framed by an invisible window to the world. Both of these are very sophisticated notions and actually took many centuries to develop.

This type of pictorial space was shattered by Malevich's Black Square (1914) and turned upside down by Mondrian, Picasso, Joseph Albers, Pollock and many other artists including Hans Hofmann, who addressed the flatness of a painting and the painterly materiality of this reality. Our visual language now is highly complex and layered, to the point that Mickey Mouse's ears owe as much to Cubism as they do to geometric abstraction. These are the complex layers that underpin the pictorial space I am exploring.

OPP: The paintings in Law & Order, your 2013 exhibition at Tim Sheward Projects in London, are titled after classic rock and heavy metal bands from the late 1970s to the early 90s—Rush and Deep Purple are two examples—and songs, such as The Final Countdown, Highway to Hell and Winds of Change. Each painting also includes some visual reference to recognizable abstract painters including Piet Mondrian and Josef Albers. Could you talk about your intention behind the juxtaposition of these popular music and fine art references?

JB: The paintings in Law & Order comprised of two groups: one group was of small works based on postcards purchased from MoMA and Tate Modern of seminal abstract works, and the second group—landscape in format—incorporated these seminal works, appropriating and twisting their meaning. The postcard series' works were titled after rock bands, and the color field landscapes after rock songs, highlighting the source relationship connection between the two.

Besides loved ones, friends and family and my quasi-spiritual beliefs, there have been two constant, guiding forces in my life: geometric abstraction and rock music. Hard as it may be to imagine, bands such as as AC/DC, Saxon, Journey and Rush have gotten me through tough times as much as Mondrian, Albers, Ellsworth Kelly and Peter Halley have. I have always wanted to somehow incorporate these two forces. At first, this seemed idiotic and juvenile. But I later realized that by combining these two aspects in a painting through titling and imagery, I am creating a symbiotic situation that qualifies my relationship to both, whilst at the same time challenging our expectations of these cultural hierarchies.

Bands like Deep Purple are quite well known, but Saxon, Tygers of Pangtang or Budgie, who are all from a similar period in British rock, are far less known. In the same way, Wyndham Lewis, Vanessa Bell or David Bomberg are less well known in the Western cannon, but are equally important to British abstraction. Whilst in New York earlier this year I saw an early Vorticist work by David Bomberg at MoMA, and I got goose pimples as if watching some rare early footage of Led Zeppelin's rendition of Dazed and Confused. I have come to accept that my relationship to abstraction is very nostalgic, just like my relationship to music.

OPP: Do you have a favorite piece of your own work? Will you pick one and give us the inside scoop on what it means to you and why you were thinking about when painting it?

JB: I am a firm believer that the really good paintings have little quirks and are never perfect-perfect. The actress Jennifer Grey describes how following rhinoplasty surgery "she went in the operating room a celebrity and came out anonymous." It's hard to say why her acting career didn't flourish. What many people don't know is that in 1987, just a few weeks before the release of Dirty Dancing, she was involved in a very serious car accident. One can't help thinking this accident may have had an effect on her, but people often cite her post-rhinoplasty visage—her natural nose represented her individuality to the public—as the reason.

I have very few favorite works. I often feel a sense of dissatisfaction when I finish a piece. It is a paradox. If one is too pleased or enamored with a work, it usually means that it isn't very good, but it doesn't stop us from searching for that perfect moment the way a tennis player aims to hit the ball at the sweet spot of a tennis racket.  

Two weeks before my Goldsmiths College show in 2003, I had finished a set of paintings that I had planned to exhibit. I was due to have one final tutorial, and I thought it would be a formality. Two hours later, after a lengthy discussion, the visiting tutor threw me a curve ball and announced that he thought this body of work wasn't at all finished and that there were some works that could also be taken out. I went into panic mode, but now I understand what he meant and I am immensely grateful for his intervention. With hindsight, I see that the group was too flat, too neat and trying to be too tasteful. Basically too boring. There was no tension.

He went away, and I looked at work I had made a year earlier too see where things had changed and gone flat. Out of nowhere came Bushman, one of my favorite works of all time. It's a silly and ridiculous painting, and at the same time it employs a very sophisticated language. But most of all, I am not really sure how it happened, and I don’t fully understand what makes it work. The painting was born out of adversity and a desire to surpass my expectations and—oddly enough—because I didn't really fully understanding my own work. It's difficult to recreate all of these circumstances and conditions, and I don't think that one can or should. But as I mentioned earlier, I have a solo show at Tim Sheward Projects in February 2014. So, as they say: Watch this space.

Featured Artist Interviews are conducted by Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist Stacia Yeapanis. When she’s not writing for OPP, Stacia explores the emotional and spiritual significance of repetition in her cross-stitch embroideries, remix video and collage installations. She is an instructor 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 2012-2013 Mentor-in-Residence at BOLT in Chicago. Her work is on view through September 2013 in Abstracting the Seam (Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago), and she has two upcoming solo exhibitions: I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For (Klemm Gallery, Adrian, Michigan) in November 2013 and Everything You Need Is Already Here (Heaven Gallery, Chicago) in January 2014.

American artist MADELINE STILLWELL improvises with intention in her site-specific performances. She uses her body as a drawing tool, alternately struggling against and collaborating with found construction materials and trash that she collects onsite. Her physical actions become metaphors for human experiences—breaking through barriers, climbing the walls, emerging from the rubble, rolling around in the muck, untangling oneself—making marks as she literally and figuratively works through each space. Madeline received her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2008. She has performed and exhibited widely throughout the United States, Canada and Western Europe, most recently in the group exhibitions Re-Made // Re-Used at REH Kunst Berlin and A Night in the Park at das Moosdorf in Berlin. Madeline lives and works in Berlin, where she is an Adjunct Professor in Performance at the Evangelische Hochschule Berlin.

OtherPeoplesPixels: Talk about the repeated motif of emerging from or breaking through a barrier in your performances. I think of birthing and butterflies emerging from cocoons while watching the video documentation of the performances.

Madeline Stillwell: On a visual level, I've always enjoyed the sensations that occur from seeing something pushing itself through another thing. The meeting place between opposing materials engaging in a temporary dance of overlap has always stirred something powerful in me. Ocean waves lapping against a gridded surface, for example, or wet cement swirling gently through the blades of its mixer. Ultimately, I believe we humans are never alone; we are always acting in response to nature, to culture, to circumstance, to each other. We are constantly confronted with life's given situations, and often times find ourselves struggling against the limitations of our own minds. I am fascinated by such barriers because so many unexpected possibilities can open up from finding our way through something that appears at first to be a roadblock. It is about the will to grow. Coming out on the other side of a personal, social or physical barrier can be one of the most satisfying of all human experiences.  

Featured Artist Interviews are conducted by Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist Stacia Yeapanis. When she’s not writing for OPP, Stacia explores the emotional and spiritual significance of repetition in her cross-stitch embroideries, remix video and collage installations. She is an instructor 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 2012-2013 Mentor-in-Residence at BOLT in Chicago. Her work is on view through September 2013 in Abstracting the Seam (Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago), and she has two upcoming solo exhibitions: I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For (Klemm Gallery, Adrian, Michigan) in November 2013 and Right Here, Right Now (Heaven Gallery, Chicago) in January 2014.

KATHRYN REFI Googles herself. She repeatedly counts and marks the number of days she's been alive. She searches microfilm for events that occurred on the date of her birth and uses objective methods of compiling data from her daily life, including recording sound and light and tracking her own movement on maps. This data is the source of her drawings and paintings. However, the real subject of her work is not "Kathryn Refi," but rather the mystery of existence and the noble futility of attempting to comprehend it through limited means. Kathryn graduated Magna Cum Laude from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1997 and received her MFA from the University of Georgia in 2002. She has had solo exhibitions at Solomon Projects (Atlanta), the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art and Fugitive Art Center (Nashville). Kathryn lives and works in Athens, Georgia.

OtherPeoplesPixels: Talk about the presence of futility in your work.

Kathryn Refi: In my work, I am grasping at something I can never get a hold of. It seems like this grasping and searching is part of the human condition. Hopefully we are always struggling to better understand ourselves and the world around us, looking for meaning while simultaneously accepting the possibility that there is none to be found. I'm in a constant state of searching that has no end goal. Sometimes it feels futile but is none the less crucial. The faith in the process, maybe even in the futility, becomes a goal in itself. It is a way to combat nihilism. My work is a search for meaning in my life through quantification and visualization of certain aspects of my experience. I approach this subject from different angles and through different means to see what bits of insight I might glean.



OPP: I think of your work as a series of existential gestures. To be aware of futility and act anyway is a way of asserting that we exist, whether or not it yields results. Are you influenced by Existentialism or any other philosophical or spiritual modes of thinking about existence?

KR: Only in a very broad sense. I read a lot of Sartre and Camus in high school, but I haven't read any explicitly philosophical or spiritual works since then. Seriously. I'm not very interested in reading about thinking. I'd rather just be open to the world around me and do the thinking internally. I actually just looked up "existentialism" to make sure I knew what it meant. Part of me really fights any philosophical associations or terms because it starts to feel too academic, intellectual and potentially alienating for myself and my audience. I'm very wary of exclusionary references to philosophers, authors or schools of thought.

OPP: What or who has influenced your work?

KR: The single greatest influence on my work is a teacher I had during undergrad at Maryland Institute College of Art named Sherman Merrill. He was not a visual artist. The class I took with him was a liberal arts class called "History of Ideas." We studied the Protestant Reformation, U.S. expansion across the Western frontier and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He was a tyrant of a teacher, very serious, and he worked us hard. If he saw that your hand wasn't moving to take notes he would yell at you. On the first day of class he told us that when we entered his classroom we were entering the world according to him, and that everything we would be and had ever been taught was subjective. We weren't supposed to question what he was saying to his face but rather know in our minds that what he was teaching us was colored by his own life, even though we were studying historical events. On the short answer and essay exams he gave, we had to begin each answer with "According to Sherman Merrill. . ." We had points deducted if we failed to start our answers this way, even if what followed might be mostly uncontested historical information. It made such a lasting impression on me. It has affected the way I view the world ever since, strengthening my skeptic leanings. Now I move through life with the knowledge that everyone is seeing the same thing slightly differently. I am fascinated by this multiplicity of perspectives.

OPP: In your project Searching for Kathryn Refi (2011-2012), you drew the first image that appeared as you typed your name in a Google image search bar, one image every time you added a letter. Here we see that futility of looking for oneself outside of oneself—a trap that many people are caught in in the age of social networks, selfies and Google. Who hasn't Googled themselves? I know I tend to do it when I'm at a loss or lonely. But the project also brings up a more profound truth about the nature of self: the images in that first slot change. Some of them are already different from when you drew them. Was this an intentional part of the project?

KR: Yes, I was aware of the changing aspect of the search results and how the resulting drawings are a record of a definition from a certain place and time. This feels appropriate on a historical and personal level. Yesterday's heretics might be today's sages. What was once a prescribed medicine is now a known poison. As we gain more information, our definitions of people and events change. This includes information gathered objectively through a scientific method or subjectively through personal experience. So many of our definitions are cultural. A culinary delicacy in one region may be considered inedible in another. Our definitions are always changing, which is a positive. It relates to the question of whether or not there are any absolute truths.

OPP: Are there any absolute truths. . . "according to Kathryn Refi"?

KR: I don't know at this point. I think I used to have more of a belief in/need for absolutes than I do now. I would like to say that an absolute truth would be something like "causing someone non-consensual physical harm is wrong." That's fairly certain, right? But what about in self-defense? War? There are always caveats and exceptions and very quickly the waters get murky.

OPP: November 2nd, 1975 is your birthday and the title of a series of drawings based on images sourced from microfilm of newspapers, the internet, and family photos of events that occurred on that date. Again, you take a common musing that most of us have had and turn it into series. As with Searching for Kathryn Refi, you use yourself as a starting point, but the project really isn't about you as an individual. What's it about?

KR: It's about getting outside of oneself and assuming a more global perspective. The date I have always defined as the date of my birth is known to others very differently, if they think about it at all. I use myself and my personal experience as starting points to explore the greater idea of the experience of life. Sometimes I worry the work could be seen as navel-gazing, so I make sure that it has an entry point for viewers that will lead them to think about their own lives.

OPP: In projects like My Address Book (2003), Color Recordings (2006), and Driving Routes (2004) you used your personal experience as a filter for compiling objective data that is translated into visual output, but these projects are less about a personal sense of identity than your recent projects. Do you see these earlier projects as fundamentally different or the same?

KR: That's an interesting question and something I'm circling around the edges of, metaphorically. I don't see the earlier work as fundamentally different, but I've recently become aware that something is changing. A shift is occurring, and my artist statement isn't quite accurate anymore. But I can't yet pinpoint what is happening or why, and I honestly don't want to right now. I'd rather just let the process unfold on its own. Even though all of my work is made within a specific framework that guides the visual imagery, I am always thinking "I have no idea what I'm doing and whether or not this is stupid." So some degree of intuition occurs before I set up the parameters of each body of work. In the midst of it, I can't make sense of it, but maybe in the future I will look back and see the greater context of how the work is developing now.

OPP: I’m really glad you mentioned that sense that your artist statement is no longer quite accurate. I’ve had that experience many times, and I’m sure we aren’t alone. It’s so exciting to feel the deep pleasure of discovery and surrender. But it is so frustrating to have to put it into words before I’m ready, which mostly occurs because of a deadline for an exhibition proposal or a grant application. During those moments, I experience a separation between my art practice and my art career. Do you see these as distinct from one another?

KR: I would be happy if I never had to talk about my art again. (But your questions have been very considered and thought-provoking, so I haven't minded responding to them!) I get frustrated when I am expected to concisely verbally explain what my work is about. It is something that I can't put correctly into words. That is why I am a visual artist, not a writer. Sometimes even I don't know what my work is about. If I always did, I don't think making it would be as interesting for me. I understand that sometimes the viewers wants to make sure that they "get" a piece of art, but I also feel like it's not that simple. It's not a one-liner. And if the work isn't engaging for someone, that's fine, they can walk away. I think we all need to be more comfortable with not knowing.

Somewhat unfortunately, this results in me being a poor advocate for my work. As I am generally not interested in convincing people of anything, I am definitely not compelled to convince someone that my work is awesome and they should buy it or exhibit it. Because, you know, maybe they shouldn't.

Featured Artist Interviews are conducted by Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist Stacia Yeapanis. When she’s not writing for OPP, Stacia explores the emotional and spiritual significance of repetition in her cross-stitch embroideries, remix video and collage installations. She is an instructor 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 2012-2013 Mentor-in-Residence at BOLT in Chicago. Her work is on view through September 2013 in Abstracting the Seam (Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago), and she has two upcoming solo exhibitions: I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For (Klemm Gallery, Adrian, Michigan) in November 2013 and Right Here, Right Now (Heaven Gallery, Chicago) in January 2014.

WILL HOLUB’s figurative paintings based on publicity stills of actresses and vintage photographs of prizefighters and Army Air Force Navigators emphasize the act of looking and being looked at. His work focuses on American cultural archetypes of glamour and masculinity. His abstract accumulations of the meditative repetition of ripped paper offer a haptic antidote to the scrutiny of only looking at the surface. Will studied painting and film-making at the University of Toronto, and completed coursework in illustration at the School of Visual Arts. His numerous solo exhibitions include shows at the Santa Fe Center for Contemporary Art, Chiaroscuro Gallery in Santa Fe, Braunstein Quay Gallery in San Francisco and the Gail Harvey Gallery in Santa Monica. You can view his work in-person at the group show Metro Montage XIII at the Marietta/Cobb Museum of Art (Marietta, Georgia) until mid-September 2013. Will lives and works in the Mystic region of southeastern Connecticut.
 
OtherPeoplesPixels: You have two ongoing modes of work that are visually very distinct from each other. On the one hand, your figurative paintings are based on movie and publicity stills of actresses and vintage photographs of prizefighters and Army Air Force Navigators. Your other body of work is comprised of textured, abstract paintings and collages. How is the process of recreating a photograph in paint different from creating an abstraction by tearing up paper and applying it to the surface? Are these different ways of making a painting more alike than one might expect?
 
Will Holub: Making a painting based on a photograph is fundamentally a labor-intensive exercise in hand-eye coordination. It is also a constant reminder that a photograph is not the thing it depicts. Such basic and helpful awareness is also a primary link with my textural abstractions, since the irregular shapes of the hand-torn fragments I use in building up textural surfaces demand decisions instantaneously as each one is glued into place. As a result, both kinds of work also impart the calming benefit arising from attentiveness.

OPP: From a process point of view, do you prefer working one way to the other?

WH: The figurative paintings require the use of my dominant right hand alone for most of the work, while the abstractions allow me to work with both hands, which balances muscle use more and allows me to work for longer periods without taking a break. That also may have something to do with the stimulation of the right and left sides of the brain that ambidextrous work provides. After nearly 30 years of art-making, I can honestly say that I love making both kinds of work, and my appreciation for the differences and similarities in their processes continues to grow even as they evolve.

OPP: My favorite series is There Is Nothing Like a Dame, which is based on screencaptures from the musical South Pacific. You've painted only the male characters, singing while shirtless or bare-chested. What strikes me is that even though I know they are singing, they look like they are screaming or yelling. Some look aggressive and others look like they are wailing in pain. What do you think these men are so upset about? Or do you see them that way?
 
WH: My intention had been to find something tender and vulnerable amidst all the hypermasculine, military posturing of the period. I had not considered that the singing sailors in South Pacific might look like they were in pain, but given that Joshua Logan, the director of the film, was a bisexual man working in the fiercely homophobic America of the 1950s, it very well might have been his own "hidden-in-plain-sight" message.

OPP: I think there is vulnerability in the aggression I see, especially because you’ve frozen them in time. It’s like they can never escape the longing embodied in the song. I was reading it as about the precarity of the heterosexual masculine experience of that time: that the straight men are also victims of a cultural climate that limits their expression of longing and desire. Longing is universal, but the expression of it is often culturally dictated. I didn’t know that the director was bisexual, and now that I’ve just gone and re-watched that scene on Youtube, it adds a whole new dimension to the movie and to your paintings. Do you think viewers who haven’t seen South Pacific or other musicals from this era understand this work differently?

WH: Familiarity with American movie musicals of the 1950s is not required to appreciate the paintings on their own terms, but perhaps the paintings might arouse some curiosity among the uninitiated. That said, your interpretation and the responses I've received from several curators indicate that the paintings may be functioning as a kind of psychosexual litmus test for viewers.

PRISCILLA BRIGGS investigates representations of capitalism, consumerism and the global market in her photographs of malls, tourist markets and manufacturing districts throughout the world. She emphasizes the role of advertising imagery as an influential backdrop in the creation and reflection of personal and collective cultural identities. Priscilla’s photographs were most recently seen in the group exhibition Art in the Age of Globalization at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and she has had solo exhibitions at The Phipps Center for the Arts (2010), the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, (2009) and Minnesota Center for Photography (2008). Her work is included in the rotating Midwest Photographer's Project at the Museum of Contemporary Photography and the permanent collections of the Cleveland Institute of Art and the Hillstrom Museum. Priscilla is currently at artist-in-residence at the Chinese European Art Center  in Xiamen, China, but her home base is Saint Paul, Minnesota.

OtherPeoplesPixels: You've spent a lot of time photographing malls and other market spaces throughout the world. I'm curious about your personal experience being in spaces that revolve around consumerism. Can you tell us about an early shopping memory?
 
Priscilla Briggs: I grew up by the seashore in Maryland where I spent a lot of time on the boardwalk—a carnivalesque tourist haven. There were a few shops that I visited over and over. My absolute favorite store sold a menagerie of horribly kitschy blown-glass tchotchkes, such as a pair of translucent pink swans made doubly fabulous by a spray of optic fibers. I spent many magical hours in that store, but I never actually bought anything. I wasn’t interested in owning a single glass figurine. It was more the experience of being surrounded by a room full of beautifully reflective and colorful glass objects that I enjoyed. In retrospect, I equate that experience to my adult enjoyment of art installations by artists like James Turrell or Sarah Sze. 

PB: Malls are akin to museums. They are designed spaces full of objects for sale that are really artifacts of our culture, reflecting what we value, what we find desirable, how we live. The accompanying advertising inserts these objects into our lives, and embeds them within mythological narratives that most of us can’t help but internalize in some way. These affect and reflect our sense of individual identities and our collective identity as a culture.
 
Most malls feel like safe, contained spaces. They are primarily occupied by chain stores that you can find nationally, if not all over the world. Many people like the reliability of that kind of consistency; they find it comforting and efficient. My work is fairly critical of these spaces and the unbridled consumerism they are designed to encourage. Although I do shop at malls occasionally, I try to frequent and support stand-alone locally based businesses that are less corporate as much as I can. I rarely went to malls before I started photographing them and now, after spending so much time there for work, I have no desire to linger.

OPP: What drew you to malls as sites to photograph?

PB: My work has evolved from a foundation in environmental portraiture, with a shift in focus from the unique individual to consumer culture identity. Because the market drives a capitalist society, I was drawn to that as a subject, initially looking at how advertising narratives influence one's personal sense of identity. When I moved to Minnesota 10 years ago, I couldn’t resist the call of the Mall of America, such an obvious icon of capitalist consumerism. Then I read an article about a mall craze in China: over 500 malls were built in a five-year period, some five to seven times the size of the Mall of America. I was intrigued by what this would look like in a country with a history of communism, and that’s how my work segued to China.

OPP: Your 2010 series The Road to Shantou juxtaposes interiors and exteriors from "a manufacturing district in Shantou where most of the brassieres in the world are made within the 50 square mile area between Chendian Town, Chaonan and Gurao Town." The fact that all the billboards feature white women and all the garment workers are Chinese makes the discrepancy between worker and customer so evident. You mention the Chinese history of valuing female modesty in your statement. In photographing in the factories, did you get any sense of how the people there experienced the advertising that surrounds them in their daily lives? What did you learn that isn't in the photographs?
 
PB: The Chinese are very matter-of-fact people. I think they take the advertising at face value and probably tune it out. What’s striking about this area is not so much that the billboards show scantily-clad women—this has recently become common in cities all over China—but that the sheer amount of this imagery makes walking through the streets like living in a Victoria’s Secret catalog. One thing that is perhaps not evident in the photographs is that the advertisements are directed at the Chinese distributor rather than the end-customer. Most foreign wholesalers will place their orders at big wholesale export fairs like the Canton Market in Guangzhou, so there are very few foreigners who come to this area. The use of primarily Caucasian and Arabic models is partly due to the belief by many Chinese that these women are sexier and more curvaceous than Chinese women. In the same way that many American women wish they were as skinny as the models in magazines, many Chinese women often wish they were curvier like the Western models in their advertising.

OPP: Global Market pairs images from the Mall of America in Minnesota with images taken in various outdoor markets and shopping centers in Cuba and Thailand. Talk about the overlap of consumerism and tourism in this body of work and your use of postcards in the 2008 installation at Minnesota Center for Photography.

PB: I first used the postcards in the Market exhibit, which was comprised of photos from the Mall of America only. The postcards referenced the MoA as a tourist destination—people actually fly from other parts of the country to spend a week at the Mall of America. I included text on the back of the postcards, providing statistics about American consumer habits, and used titles to connect the image and text conceptually. The postcards made the exhibit more interactive. Visitors could take a postcard right off the shelf and purchase it.
 
Global Market expanded on the idea of the tourist market and included images from Thailand and Cuba because I had the opportunity to travel to those countries through my job as a professor.   
 
Tourist markets are fascinating in that the souvenirs sold there are often objects that are designed to represent the culture being visited, specifically in a way that distinguishes it from other cultures. I have often found these representations to be more a reflection of what the tourist hopes to find rather than what exists in reality—the toured have a stake in maintaining that façade in order to keep the tourists coming and spending. Gary Larson summed up this kind of performing of culture very well in his Far Side cartoon of Polynesians scrambling to hide their TV, VCR and lamp as a Caucasian man in a safari outfit walks toward their hut, with the caption “Anthropologists! Anthropologists!”

For example, Copy an image of a Long-Neck Karen woman holding up a postcard with a picture of herself on it, was shot in a refugee village in Thailand. After tour companies started dropping off busloads of tourists in their village everyday, the villagers started charging admission to the village, gave up their farming practices and each opened a stall in front of their house to sell souvenirs. They also started wearing traditional dress everyday rather than just on special occasions. When I invited a representative from the Thai tourist commission to speak with our students, he referred to the villagers as “the product.” Two of the postcard images in the show were of Hill Tribe children on the side of the road with a sign that says “Take the Photo 20 Baht.” I included information on how to practice community-based tourism in Thailand and ways to help the Hill Tribe Villagers on the back of the postcards and titled them Take the Photo I & II.  All the other postcards could be purchased for a dollar, but these two were free.

OPP: Wushipu (2010) investigates the workspaces of Chinese production painters through portraiture and still life photography. This body of work is very connected to your other work in that it investigates a market where the East and the West collide, where Chinese workers are satisfying Western demands for luxury goods. But it also brings up the issue of value as it pertains to painting and photography, copying and originality, art and craft. What's your take on the labor these painters do? Are they artists? Is the labor the same as what the garment workers do?
 
PB: Your question sums up what this work is asking the viewer to think about. The work the painters do is distinguished by the Chinese oil painting community as either “commercial”—work that is a direct copy of a photograph or masters’ painting and used for decorative purposes—or “creative” work that is an original fine art composition. The painters I photographed for the Wushipu series are making “commercial” paintings, which comprise 80% of the multi-billion dollar oil painting industry.

In my opinion, this labor is definitely not fine art, but while one painter told me he hated painting and just did it for money, many of the painters aspire to a more high-profile career in which they are respected as fine artists. They see their commercial work as a way to build their skills and pay the rent. 

It’s difficult for artists in China to gain recognition as fine artists if they haven’t gone to one of the top universities. Some painters who did not go to university complained that it is elitist because those universities require that you speak English to get in. I’m guessing that the English requirement is there because texts about contemporary art and theory are generally not written in or translated into Chinese. Because the commercial painters don’t have the access to such texts, it is difficult for them to work or think within the contemporary art context or to understand how value is assigned to art work. I believe many of these painters could do more interesting work under different circumstances and with a better art education, but they are trained to copy masters rather than to experiment or think of an idea of their own. Many think a painting is good if it looks exactly like what they’re copying. In spending time with this community, I have met some highly skilled painters who are incredibly inventive people living the life of an artist, but making carbon copy paintings so they can feed their families.
 
What entertains me about this industry is that many of these paintings are sold in galleries in the U.S. and Europe with a fake name signed to them. For instance, a gallery in Venice may want tourists to believe they are buying a painting of the Venice canals by a Venetian artist so they sign an Italian name to the painting. No one would buy it if they knew it was painted in China.

To see more work by Priscilla, please visit priscillabriggs.com.

JOSEPH G. CRUZ investigates the methods by which culturally and historically significant sites and events accumulate meaning through their varied representations. These subjects, such as the Matterhorn and the first walk on the moon, are starting points in his research-based art practice. The resulting installations include found objects, sound, text and sculpture and exploit the vernaculars of set design and museum display. In Fall 2013, Joseph will be an MFA candidate in Sculpture with a minor in the History and Philosophy of Science at Notre Dame. He recently completed the year-long BOLT Residency at the Chicago Artists' Coalition; his solo show in the BOLT Project Space opens on September 6, 2013. He will also be representing BOLT at EXPO Chicago in a booth that was juried and curated by Dieter Roelstraete. Joseph currently lives in Michigan City with his wife and their dog; at the time of this interview, they have a daughter on the way.

OtherPeoplesPixels: Research plays a big role in your art practice. To what degree are your research and the creation of objects intertwined or separate and distinct modes of thinking?

Joseph G. Cruz: My work is fueled by a love for the research, but I don’t make a distinction between research and creation in my practice. I see both as modes of exploration. There is a phase of research that is exclusively reading and field research. Then there is a phase of object-making that is like thinking with my hands. Sometimes I create a system by which the physical objects do the research by transcribing subjective, historical texts into “objective” data and translating them back into other subjective formats like sound. 12 transcribed notions (2012) and my Alfred Hitchcock’s "The Birds" piece (2010) are specific examples of how the work translates historical texts into subjective formats.

My enchantment with research isn’t just a love of discovery. It's also a love of the inventiveness of creating seemingly random contextual connections: historical, technological, cultural, scientific, pop, whatever. I tend to limit the object making to processes and materials defined through the research. Then I mix and match methodologies from the connecting topics I discover to create conceptually driven work.

Each body of work examines a particular cultural, historical or scientific subject, as if it were a leitmotif in a larger story. I work on different pieces within a body of work simultaneously and always think of them in relation to each other. The individual pieces can exist as autonomous objects, but they can’t come to full fruition unless they are viewed in context with one another.

OPP: What kinds of creative endeavors were you engaged in when you were younger?

JGC: My junior high and high school years were all about skateboarding, surfing and DIY music culture. I started off playing bass and drums in a number of different bands, playing everything from hardcore to instrumental scores. The board sports are all about original interventions. Skateboarding revolves around how you use the skateboard in relation to architecture. And surfing is much more creative and expressive than most people realize. It's all about creative adaptation. You have to anticipate the way the wave bends and flows and find a way to perpetually keep sliding down the face.

Those years were about creating new forms of agency and identity, although how successful or aware of that fact we were is another story. Now that I think about it, that time was probably the most important formative aspect of my artistic personality. The practice just evolved into a more abstract, social architecture.

OPP: In 2012, your solo show not a fact, still extremely real at Comfort Station in Chicago revolved around various representations of the Matterhorn, employing and commenting on romantic, historical and scientific narratives. The Matterhorn is the subject of all the work, and yet it isn't. What's the real subject?

JGC: First off, thank you for asking that question. It’s true that my interest is not in the Matterhorn, per se, but rather in its agency and how it presents itself to us over time and how that has changed. I’m not pretending we live in some sort of Tom Robbins-style existence in which objects think and feel like humans. I’m thinking more of observing an object—in this case, the Matterhorn— over a larger span of time, to the degree that we, as individuals, have less control over it. The historical object gains its own agency. To paraphrase Werner Heisenberg, it's important to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

The subject of this body of work is more of a verb than a noun for me. I’m trying to understand it through a trans-contextual investigation. That's the reason all of the works in that show reference different modes of knowledge production.

It starts with Edward Whymper, who triggered the golden age of alpinism with his worldwide tour of lantern lecturers about his first ascent of the Matterhorn. Four people died on that climb, and that’s where the proclivity toward spectacle emerges. I made a few pieces that mapped the romantic language from these lectures and translated it into a player piano piece. Kant’s writings about the sublime point outward via the Swiss Alps, and we see the techno-contemporary sublime via the Large Hadron Collider, which sits under the same ranges. Many years later, Disney created a famous roller coaster, and the Matterhorn now exists in many of our computers as a generic default screen saver. How do we understand the Matterhorn today? Why do we understand it that way? What are the implications or symptoms involved with that understanding? I guess it is more about mediation in scale. The Matterhorn is basically a soap box, and its repetition in the show hopes to dissolve itself. Think Marcel Broodthaer’s Department of Eagles.


OPP: I like the idea of the Matterhorn having agency and asserting itself over time through these various representations. But each of the instances you mention can also be viewed as a kind of violence to the mountain or toward nature in general. They are attempts to dominate the site of the sublime experience, to beat it into submission, to tame the shrew, if you will. So, does the Matterhorn gain its agency through the accretion of representations, in spite of them or through your side-by-side presentation of these representations?

JGC: Well, we’re not talking about actual mass, but the more abstract materiality that both stems from and is the representations of it. According to material culture studies, an object gains agency when used by humans for specific means. Things do far more than simply effect what humans do; things transform and impact the specific way in which human beings perceive and understand our situatedness. Mediating representations act as surrogates in that they not only stand in for the thing, but also create a new psychological space for the thing. The simulacrum doesn't give us the real thing, but what it gives us is still real. Not many of us have been to the moon, but we have a general agreement on what the moon is. This is more real than the physical experience of the moon. So there are shifts in the historical understanding of the Matterhorn as these representations accumulate, although I wouldn't say those shifts are necessarily linear.

OPP: Several earlier pieces—10 milliseconds of Utopia (political illustration?) (2009), re-entry shock (2008) and everafter (2010)—employ the visual motif of suspended taxidermy animals. They are suspended literally and transparently on strings in the air, indicating a suspended moment in time. The fact that we can see the strings relates to something you say in your statement: "The work seems to be telling a story while talking about how the story is being told." In what other ways do you talk about the story being told while telling a story?

JGC: I try to operate in a similar way to The Colbert Report or The Daily Show. The humor and umph in these shows doesn’t lie in the specific news story. It is in how they float around the periphery of the implied rhetoric and in the semantics of the stories being told. It’s that periphery which most interests me. I try to create an “and/or” situation when deciphering information.

Most of the pieces you cite were made during undergrad and were seeds for my current practice. I worked at the Field Museum, doing soft-sample taxidermy in the Ornithology Department. I was thinking about how visual rhetoric functions in dioramas, both from the audience’s point of view and from backstage.

My installations are like dioramas or movie sets that the viewer can walk around. I present a well-crafted front view, and then I exaggerate physical set-building methods “backstage.” I place spotlights on the extension cords and unpainted stage supports, exposing the hardware which supports the façade. All this is only available once you walk around the “set.” 

The installation If one looks down at the earth from the moon, there is no virtual distance between the Louvre and the Zoo includes a sculpture that references a landscape or a meteorite of sorts and looks like a scale model. From one side, it looks like a big rock on a pedestal. But when you walk around it, the pink insulation foam out of which it is carved is exposed. The illusion is revealed. A piece of glass cuts through the two sides, so that you can see a reflection (the façade) while simultaneously peering through the transparent glass to see the foam.

With those taxidermy birds in mid-flight, I aestheticized the strings that support the frozen moment in order to shift the viewers’ attention from the spectacle to the geometric structures and shadows of the strings which metaphorically and literally hold them up.  

OPP: You were a 2012-2013 BOLT resident at the Chicago Artists' Coalition in Chicago. You have a solo show coming up in the BOLT Project Space and you'll be representing the residency with a project at EXPO Chicago in September. Will you give us a sneak peak of the work you'll be debuting at one or both of these venues?
 
JGC: I am really excited and honored to be doing these shows and a little intimidated about representing BOLT at EXPO. It’s a young program that is really special and has some wonderful people behind it. It’s amazing how much momentum it has gained in only two years, but it still needs to be recognized and understood for how amazing it is outside of Chicago.

Assembling Vestiges, my solo show in the BOLT Project Space, loosely borrows its name and strategies from Deleuze’s assemblage theory. The jumping off points for this show are representations of late 19th century polar expeditions, space exploration and satellite imagery. It takes on a lot of curatorial strategies influenced by Thomas Demand’s La Carte D’Apres Nature at Matthew Marks Gallery and Mark Dion’s OCEANOMANIA at the Oceanographic Museum in Monaco, in that it involves time travel, actual artifacts like crystals from Antarctica and lunar meteorites, a couple of works from other artists (like a commissioned Turner reproduction). All of the pieces are vestiges of the research and some are vestiges of actual sculptures. For example, there is a series of broken silica molds and bronze slag. These are byproducts of sculpture, but the sculpture isn’t present. In this new work, I’m employing a more complicated notion of how the story is being told by presenting the agency of the environment (i.e. polar weather) via the color shifts that result from the extreme cold in Herbert Ponting’s first film of the Antarctic. It’s a very different show for me and a big experiment in moving my practice forward.

The EXPO booth is a satellite installation (forgive the pun) called Assembling the Lunar. It includes a sound installation which translates a recent topographical mapping of the far side of the moon into sound frequencies, a microscopic illustration of the night sky on the night of the first moon walk, a generic collectors’ edition lunar meteorite, and miscellaneous formal moves that reference horizon lines.

Featured Artist Interviews are conducted by Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist Stacia Yeapanis. When she’s not writing for OPP, Stacia explores the emotional and spiritual significance of repetition in her cross-stitch embroideries, remix video and collage installations. She is an instructor 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 2012-2013 Mentor-in-Residence at BOLT in Chicago. Her work is on view through September 2013 in Abstracting the Seam (Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago), and she has two upcoming solo exhibitions: I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For (Klemm Gallery, Adrian, Michigan) in November 2013 and Right Here, Right Now (Heaven Gallery, Chicago) in January 2014.

VALERIE HEGARTY’s painting, sculpture and installation simulate a collision between nature and culture. Crows attack three-dimensional recreations of still life paintings, and grasses take root and flourish in an Aubusson rug. Rosebushes grow through gallery walls. The damage sustained by these cultural objects and spaces is an incidental, insistent reminder of the ongoing cycle of death and rebirth that exists at every moment, even when we try to hide from it in the notion of the supremacy of civilization and culture. Valerie’s work is included in the permanent collections of The Brooklyn Museum, New Britain Museum of American Art and the 21c Museums. Valerie Hegarty: Alternative Histories, a site-specific installation that activates the Brooklyn Museum’s Period Rooms, is currently on view until December 1, 2013. Her numerous solo shows include exhibitions at Marlborough (2012), Guild & Greyshkul, (2005 and 2006), the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (2008), and most recently Nichelle Beauchene Gallery (2010 and 2013). Valerie lives and works in New York City.

OtherPeoplesPixels: Throughout your practice as an artist, you've explored decay, damage and impermanence. You make regular reference to vanitas painting, scavenger birds and shipwrecks, all implying a bittersweet reckoning with mortality. Were you initially more attracted to the aesthetics of decay, or the concept of it?

Valerie Hegarty: I was initially interested in the idea of deconstruction with decay and damage as a means to an end. It’s a representational device to deconstruct a painting, and the aesthetics of decay become a formal way to abstract a representational painting. I like the layering of meaning and the multiple narratives that occur. I’m not really interested in the fetishization of decay. Decay in my work is a way to talk about the breakdown of ideas that are no longer working.

OPP: In your 2012 solo Figure, Flowers, Fruit at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery in New York, you referenced the history of portraiture and still life painting. But the works featured were more sculptures than paintings. The peaches in one still life explode out of the frame onto the wall. In a portrait titled Woman in White, flowers appear to be growing from the sitter's face and the bottom edge of the frame dissolves into a system of roots. Could you talk about the idea of nature overtaking culture?

VH: I think of my work as painting more than sculpture, but there is a transition in most pieces where a painting on the wall appears to explode or grow into three dimensions. I often cite Thomas Cole’s series of five paintings The Course of Empire as a reference for my work. In Cole’s series, civilization and the landscape are depicted in five stages with the pastoral being the most harmonious. As the series continues, civilization grows, leading to greed, decadence and war. Civilization destroys itself and collapses into ruin. The final stage of the series is Desolation: all evidence of man is erased, and buildings are eroded and reclaimed by nature. There is the implication that the cycle will start all over again with rebuilding and repopulation. I see my work as the desolation phase, where culture has broken down. Nature is taking over, laying a fertile ground for something new to grow.

OPP: In 2011, you repeatedly "melted" George Washington's face in watercolor and acrylic paint. Although this decay or destruction of the human face and of the painting evokes all the same ideas as other vanitas work you've done, these read differently to me. Because the figure of George Washington is so loaded, I read this work as about the erosion of faith and pride in our historical American icons, and possibly about the erosion of their actual value as heroes. Yes, George Washington was the idealized father of the United States, but he was also a human being and a slave owner. When did you first decide to melt his face and what does this action mean to you?

VH: I first started to recreate paintings of George Washington in 2007 and have done a number of works over the years where his face and/or body are altered. On one level, I’m interested in a comic reference to the death of painting by creating a painting that appears to be self-destructing or vandalized. In the series of melted faces, I am also interested in the transition from what appears believable to the impossible, much like magical realism in fiction. There is a surrealist transition; the face is melting in a way that would not actually happen in reality. I also like the reference to the Gothic fiction story The Picture of Dorian Gray. The main character realizes that one day his beauty will fade, so he expresses a desire to sell his soul to ensure a painted portrait of himself would age rather than he. His wish is granted, and when he subsequently pursues a life of debauchery, the portrait serves as a reminder of the effect each act has upon his soul. With each sin, the painting becomes more grotesque. Using the iconic portrait of George Washington creates a commentary on the formation of American identity with the disfigured portrait revealing the return of repressed and darker elements of American history.

OPP: George Washington's portrait is not the only famous painting you've "destroyed" in your work. Niagara Falls, Fallen Bierstadt and Among the Sierras with Woodpecker all reference so-called masterworks by Albert Bierstadt, who was part of the Hudson River School. Why so many Bierstadts?
 
VH: I choose paintings that are considered “masterpieces” of American art and that I consider to be iconic images of the American landscape. For whatever reason, many of Bierstadt’s images of the American West rang familiar to me even though I wouldn’t necessarily have been able to identify the artist prior to doing research for my work.  It’s not important to me that there are a number of Bierstadts referenced in my work. I’m not really concerned with the artist, but the image.

OPP: Are these reproductions or recreations of Bierstadt's landscapes that you are "destroying"? 

VH: They are created reproductions that appear to be destroyed. As the decay is very carefully crafted and sculpted, the worked is actually constructed rather than deconstructed, although the illusion is the opposite.

There are definitely social and political messages in the decay that address American identity and the damage created through its formation—war damage, the oppression of peoples, damage to the environment through global warming and deforestation. 

My altering of these iconic images can also be a metaphor for how memory processes imagery. It’s a collage-like process: we have familiar images in our heads that we are constantly altering, editing and updating to reflect our current reality.

OPP: In your 2010 installation at Locust Projects in Miami, you combined anamorphic painting techniques, paper-mache and photography to create  "the impression that the gallery walls have been stripped back to reveal an old Miami building interior." But you've been creating architectural illusions in your installations since grad school. Some early examples in include Renovation (2002) in your grad school studio, Green Bathroom (2003) at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and Childhood Bedroom (2004) at the Drawing Center in New York. Why does creating three-dimensional illusions continue to captivate you? Could you also talk generally about illusion and its value?

VH: I think of the projects you mentioned as drawings, collages or paintings. In essence I was creating the illusion that a section of the gallery wall was peeling away to reveal an older interior. To create this effect I glued painted layers of paper to the gallery walls and floors. These layers were often cut to the exact size of different architectural materials like floorboards, wallpaper and tile. Afterwards, I would peel and scrape the paper. Although the piece looked subtractive, it was actually additive. I called this work “reverse archeology,” and for me it was an investigation of memory. It was similar to making a drawing on paper, and then erasing it partially.

I think of the space created in this work as similar to the illusionistic space that is created in a painting. Except, in my work, the painting is extended out to the walls and the floor. I consider it a three-dimensional painting and that is how I consider most of my other work as well. The illusionism is a means to an end and not an end in itself. I’m interested in drawing the viewer in by creating uncanny scenarios that create surprise and curiosity in the viewer. Only when drawn in closer, can the viewer begin to ponder the line between fact and fiction and, I hope, delight in the discoveries.   

OPP: You have a very impressive exhibition record, including 13 solo exhibitions since you got your MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002. That’s almost one a year and sometimes two in a single year! Did you approach any of the curators or exhibition directors of the galleries and museums where you’ve had solo shows, or did they approach you? Can you offer any advice to emerging artists about lining up solo exhibitions and studio visits?

VH: Yes, I have been extremely busy the past 10 years! I landed my first solo at Gallery 400 in Chicago by responding to an open call for proposals. Someone at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago saw that show and invited me to make a proposal for their emerging artist space. In NYC, I was approached by Guild & Greyshkul, my first gallery, after they had seen my work in a group show at The Drawing Center and had heard that I had been selected for a Rema Hort Foundation grant. I was approached by Museum52 in London to do a solo show after they saw a large piece of mine in the NADA art fair in Miami. So yes, every time I was approached by the gallery directly, but only because they had seen my work elsewhere in a group show.

My advice for emerging artists is to apply to all open calls at legitimate spaces because even if you are not selected, it still means a group of curators will see your work when when the proposals were reviewed. Keep close to your artist peers and be generous with sharing information. Often I am selected to be in group shows because a curator is familiar with my work or an artist friend recommended me. In NYC, it's very hard to approach galleries directly, or get an "in" simply because you know someone at the gallery. Gallerists generally want to discover their own artists. They are bombarded with people trying to get them to look at their work. Apply for anything that involves an application: grants, slide files, group shows, residencies, studio space programs. Do studio visits with your friends so they are familiar with your work and will think of you if they are asked to recommend other artists for shows. I applied for every single emerging artist opportunity in NYC and started getting chosen for things. That lead to group shows and then eventually being noticed. Most likely you will need another job to pay your bills. That is the norm for most artists, so prepare for that reality. It's not easy. But if it's what you want to do, don't give up.

John Espinosa: The base element or condition in my work is a type of turbulence that occurs in the natural flow of human knowledge. That flow could be related to time or matter. It could be a chronological, vertical circulation through human generations or a horizontal seepage that filters and spreads through the beings and artifacts at a single point in time. The distortion of the flow is often related to human interpretation or misinterpretation, and the turbulence becomes heightened around the abstract or the incomplete.

My projects often harvest and diagram these naturally occurring abstractions. In other instances, they function like a vector or a by-product of cross-contaminated reference points that I find or create myself. Multiple narratives or concepts often overlap or bleed into each other and mutate into something else altogether.