OtherPeoplesPixels Blog

Hyperbeast Lives

HECTOR HERNANDEZ's photographs of bodies in motion, swathed in brightly colored fabric, examine the figure's relationship to space. Face and gender obscured, the human bodies are stripped of all markers of human identity, allowing them to become otherwordly hyperbeasts. In 2012 he was nominated for "Austin Artist of the Year Award" in the 2D category by the Austin Visual Arts Association. His work was recently shown at SXSW 2013 and in Cantanker: The End at Big Medium Gallery in Austin, Texas, where Hector lives.

OtherPeoplesPixels: Your work strongly references fashion photography with its emphasis on the female body as an object, but it resists that designation because the accumulation of repeated poses and visual motifs asks me to muse about the intent of the images in a way I never would with fashion photography. Are you influenced by fashion photography?

Hector Hernandez: Interesting that you bring up fashion photography. To be honest, fashion photography has never been a source of inspiration for me. I can see why people might think that it is, but no. I can say that my recent work has been somewhat inspired by Christo and Jeanne Claude’s The Gates and a desire to experiment with movement. What I am trying to do with my new work is to capture that one second in time when everything is perfect: the power of the body, the energy going through the fabric and the balance of light.

OPP: You (almost) always obscure the identity of your models by hiding their faces, either with masks, sheets or pompoms. In early work, your models seem to be predominantly female, which brings to mind the discourse surrounding the male gaze and the objectification of the female body in art history. But some of the images also reference superheroes, who are masked for a very different reason. Could you talk about this recurrence of the masked female in your work? What does it mean to you?

HH: I have always been interested in the idea of identity in art. Some of my work is an attempt to explore this concept, but also to have the viewer feel that they can relate to my subjects. 

My exploration began with the Astro Girl series. Astro Boy, a Manga character from the 1950s, is this little, shiny, cool-looking, powerful boy-robot that seems to be perfect. Created to replace a scientist’s dead son, he is summarily rejected for the very fact that he is not human. So, while we may see the face of a shiny perfect little boy, behind that mask there is another story. The same is true for all of us. Behind our masks there are other stories, other perceived imperfections.

In my Astro Girl series, I created a character that is supposed to represent physical beauty and perfection. But despite the model’s perfection, she wears a smiling mask. By photographing her at awkward angles and poses, and in odd situations, I am attempting to expose what lies behind the mask: the vulnerabilities we hide and our fear of showing people who we really are.

The superhero series was really about indulging myself. I’ve always loved superheroes like Batman, Superman, Spiderman and their associated imagery and stories. I decided to create my own character, Mrs. Nitroglycerin. Since there are plenty of male superheroes out there, I created a female character with her own look and weaponry. The look I came up with draws on some recognizable superhero imagery, but I also tried to make her stand apart and to make it clear that she is nobody’s sidekick. 

Mrs. Nitroglycerin

OPP: Does Mrs. Nitroglycerin—interesting that she’s a Mrs., not a Ms.—have an origin story? Tell us about the design of her mask and her axe.

HH: The idea was to make a female supervillain, the anti-Capitan Planet. Mrs. Nitroglycerin isn’t planting trees; she’s cutting them down. I wanted her character to have a colorful weapon, and I thought that an axe would be the perfect accessory.

At the time, I was experimenting with different materials and started working with foam sheets. I love the possibilities that are open to me when working with foam. There are lots of color choices, and the material is easy to manipulate. When it came to designing Mrs. Nitroglycerin’s look, I decided to use a Batman mask as a foundation. The iconic shape of the mask would give the viewer something that was instantly recognizable, but by adding the layers of color and texture, I hoped to create a unique look and character.
 
When I was done, all she needed was a name. I wanted something that sounded dangerous . . . explosive. And, what’s more explosive then nitroglycerin? I decided to make her a Mrs. to give her a bit of a backstory. There is clearly a husband out there, maybe estranged, maybe missing . . . Is he her better half or her worse half? Who knows?

Hyperbeast

OPP: Hyperbeast and Hyperbeast Lives, your most recent bodies of work, are very different. It's clear how they grew out of the older work, but some of these models could be either male or female. And the bodies are less sexualized than in earlier work. Was this intentional? What is a hyperbeast?

HH: I agree that the Hyperbeast series is very different from my older work, but still heavily influenced by the same inspirations. This new series is still about form, life, light and movement. When I first began the series, I was interested in creating new characters, but I also wanted to add an element that I felt had been missing from my previous work. Color. The explosion of color is the “hyper” in hyperbeast. Bold, untamed and vibrant.

The move towards gender ambiguity in these pieces is deliberate. No flesh is exposed, and I do in fact use both female and male models in the series. The creatures are not human at all, and because of this I feel that their genders should be left unrecognizable.

I began the series by experimenting with fabrics and how light reflected on them. When I added movement, the fabric changed from something I recognized as a piece of cloth, thin and fragile, to a mass of shapes and light. The hyperbeast was born. 

I imagined that these creatures exist in some other universe, that they roam wild somewhere, like lions or giraffes in Africa. I am simply capturing them in their natural habitats. Then again, I sometimes imagine that these hyperbeasts exist in our own world at some hidden level. They could exist, hidden to us in the same way that atomic and subatomic particles used to be hidden. These creatures could be a part of our world, dancing and living in the same spaces where we exist.

OPP: The shift out of the white cube and into the world helps me see the figures as creatures. In the studio shots, I read them more like sculptures, but in Hyperbeast Lives, they do become more alive. Are abandoned buildings the natural habitat for Hyperbeasts? Or will you eventually photograph them in other environments?

HH: When I started on this series, I did want the Hyperbeasts to look like sculptures. The idea was that the creatures were sort of like hunting trophies. I was the taxidermist mounting the beasts and making them look alive.
 
But after experimenting in the studio, I wanted to see the beasts completely free in the wild. I’ve always loved the way old abandon buildings look, so that’s where I went to find them. But, I do think that they live other places, too . . . I’ve caught glimpses of them here and there.

Dogs of War

OPP: I'd like to hear more about your mixed media work, which combines your photographs with appropriated imagery from comics and advertisements. Would you pick your favorite mixed media piece and talk about the juxtaposition of the imagery you chose?

HH: I started working with mixed media four years ago and had very clear ideas about what I wanted to do. The intention was for every mixed media piece to represent a distinct moment in my life that had some kind of impact or that shaped who I am today. The piece that I feel illustrates this idea most strongly is Dogs of War. In this piece I juxtapose images of an Imperial Walker with advertisements and images of crying women.

As a child, I loved Star Wars (and still do). I loved every aspect of it: the toys, the movies, the characters and especially the story. But, it is fundamentally a story about war. As a child, I didn’t understand what that really meant. That changed somewhat when I was seven with the bombing of Libya. I remember very clearly the day that I sat down with my grandmother to watch the evening news that was flooded with images of the bombing. The destruction, the talk of war, and Tom Brokaw’s repeated assertion that “we were a nation at war” convinced me that the fighting and the bombings would arrive at my doorstep any minute.

Yet, at the same time that these frightening realities were being reported, there were still commercial breaks. Along with the footage of bombings and interviews with soldiers’ crying mothers and wives there were commercials for cleaning products, cars, sodas, chips, and Star Wars toys. Dogs of War is my attempt to collect those disparate images and ideas from that one moment.

OPP: What was on the last role of film you shot?

HH: The last time I used film was back in 2008. I shot two roles but only developed one. The shots in that one developed role included some that would later lead me to the Astro Girl series. The undeveloped role actually contained some pictures of my mom’s dogs. My mom actually asked after those photos for about a year, but I never got around to developing them. I should probably do that at some point . . . 

To see more of Hector's work, please visit hectorhernandezart.com.

Featured Artist Interviews are conducted by Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist Stacia Yeapanis. When she’s not writing for OPP, Stacia explores the emotional and existential significance of participating in mediated culture in her embroidery, video, sculpture and collage works. She received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2006), where she will begin teaching in Spring 2013, and is currently a 2012-2013 Mentor-in-Residence at BOLT Residency in Chicago. Notable exhibitions include Losing Yourself in the 21st Century (Maryland Art Place, Baltimore), MP3 (The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago), Please Stand By: Stacia Yeapanis + Readymade (Baang & Burne Contemporary, New York), Over and Over Again (BOLT Project Space, Chicago).

DENA SCHUCKIT’s colorful, dynamic paintings act as poetic abstractions of explosions, car accidents, house fires, war and other disasters as seen in Internet news site slideshows. She explores the age-old conflict of man versus nature through a lens of optimism by revealing the beauty in the moment before the reality of the chaos crystalizes. Dena received her BFA from the University of California at Santa Cruz and her MA from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. She was a master printer with Crown Point Press for 12 years. Her work is featured in collections at the University of the Arts, London, and the Parsons School of Design, New York. Dena lives in London, England.

OtherPeoplesPixels: On first glance, most of your paintings appear to be abstractions. But very quickly, I begin to see the referents to explosions, car accidents, house fires, war and other disasters. Could you talk about the interplay between abstraction and representation in your work? Was your work ever more abstract or more representational than it is now?

Dena Schuckit: I work from the photo slideshows that run online next to stories of events like earthquakes, wild fires and other natural or manmade disasters that are usually a world away. The slideshows change the way we experience the news. We’re all accidental photojournalists now, on hand to document and immediately transmit every event around the globe as it happens. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that everyone, everywhere, has a cell phone that can take a picture shoved into a back pocket. Digital media bring this barrage of images from far-away places into our homes without any real context to help viewers wrap their brains around the actual impact of these events. They’re abstract both in a formal and conceptual way.The photos are vivid, accidental landscapes from the world I know, but that world is completely out of context. They are gorgeous rearrangements—fragments of things I recognize—but they are presented in puzzling, perplexing compositions. I’m drawn to their abstract quality, and I don’t want to mess with that in the way I interpret them. My work has always been semi-abstract. It’s easy to remain abstract with this source material because the paintings aren’t based on any one specific headline event or incident, and the news photos that I’m working from are already somewhat visually abstract. That said, I do try to paint little people into the panels somewhere so that there’s a suggestion of scale and perspective. Otherwise the paintings appear completely nonrepresentational. Even as abstractions, they’re still landscapes, and I like that viewers can sense some space or depth.
Blast Boom Bust

OPP: I'm instantly attracted to the color and composition of your paintings. Personally, I find them very beautiful. Are you making horrible events more beautiful than they are or are you revealing some terrible beauty that already exists in tragic events?

DS: The paintings I make are abstract. I don’t think they’re either horrible OR just beautiful. But I do think they’re beautiful. I reinterpret the elements of the collected images that drew me to them in the first place: color, composition and, most importantly, a mysterious sense of place.  The photos that I work from are engaging primarily because they’re NOT horrible or terrible in and of themselves. That’s the irony of them. They’re unique, abstract compositions created by chance events in nature and captured immediately; the dust has literally not yet settled there. We know that the events from which these photos are isolated have serious effects on the people involved, but that’s something we infer. As snippets and fragments contained by the four sides of my computer screen, these landscapes are far, far removed from the environment they’re representing. They’re a surreal "calm after a storm" or an unfamiliar and intriguing terrain. They’re familiar elements shaken up and rearranged, heaped and piled into some pretty interesting architecture. I’d say they’re even inviting. They’re the world we all live in, completely different from the one we inhabited a moment ago.
Bumper

OPP: Tell me about your process of collecting and organizing the source imagery for your paintings.

DS: I was pulling these abstract frames from events around the world down to my desktop for months before I started painting from them. I just wanted to think about them, to not forget. I began collecting images to remind myself about color and mood, and then I slowly started organizing images into vague categories by type or subject: crowds, building collapse, under sea, above sea.

When I start a painting, I sift through these slideshow images and shuffle them around to make connections, like an imaginary collage. A composition materializes in my mind, and that’s where I start. Then the painting evolves as it does. Source imagery is shuffled in; source imagery is shuffled out. Each piece takes on a life of its own until all the rubble has settled into something I couldn’t have planned.

OPP: It’s interesting to think about the translation of information and imagery back and forth between the physical world and the digital world. First, by-standers and photojournalists capture real world events digitally and upload them to the Internet. Then you download them and re-interpret them back into a concrete physical form: a painting. Is the act of painting connected to the not-forgetting you mentioned before?

DS: I think the collecting is just feeding my hoarder monster. It’s satisfying the same urge as finding raw material like pieces of wood or metal on the street and dragging it home for some future project. I think most artists have piles like this—stashes of material saved and organized in some way for later use. The digital stash takes up far less physical space than the wood and metal, which is a bonus.  There’s so much surreal raw material and information to work from in these photos. As a group, they map our ever-changing environment. Then the painting is a sort of figurative exploration, a delving into new realms. To begin a new panel, I collage bits and pieces in my head, but I still need to see the source to remember details and elements. Each photo is unique and contains something special I don’t want to forget: colors, angles, textures.
Green Smoulder

OPP: Talk about your instinct to create order out of chaos. You've mentioned it as part of your process. Do you see this as an aesthetic instinct specific to artists or as human one?

DS: As an artist, my source material is based in chaos, my working space is an absolute catastrophe, and my paintings, I think, are a riot of color and texture. Maybe it’s different for minimal artists, but then again a minimal artist is still tasked with finding some order in the chaos outside his or her studio.The world is a chaotic place. On a huge scale and on a tiny scale, in big groups and individually, we attempt to rein in the bits and pieces. We shuffle and reorganize and categorize to gain some control over our environment. But that’s never going to happen. It’s an impossible endeavor.

OPP:  A line from your artist statement really struck me: “Like confetti from a popper, expanding energy sends colorful riots of material into momentarily suspended chaos where the abstract arrangements that result hang in poses new and unfamiliar.” It’s a completely accurate description of what your paintings look like, but the poetry is very disconnected from the horror we know will be experienced by the people who are affected by these various disasters. Is it fair to say that your paintings are not about the explosions and fires and disasters themselves, but about the poetry of that captured moment just before anyone has to deal with the consequences of the events represented?

DS: My work is definitely not about disaster. I don’t think there’s any horror in my landscapes either. The opposite is true, actually. They’re about navigating a new and constantly evolving terrain in the man versus his environment conflict and doing it with optimism, a sense of calm and hope for regeneration and safe passage. And some whimsy as well.When I started collecting the headline photos, which are random images I found mesmerizing for all their mystifying and awesome and somewhat scary qualities, I became interested in 18th century notions of the sublime—Kant’s dynamic sublime and also Edmund Burke's ideas—and the relationship between beauty and fear. But the act of painting from these photos is a personal resolution to look on the bright side, to find the beauty in all the uncertainty.

To view more of Dena's work, please visit denaschuckit.com.

Featured Artist Interviews are conducted by Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist Stacia Yeapanis. When she’s not writing for OPP, Stacia explores the emotional and existential significance of participating in mediated culture in her embroidery, video, sculpture and collage works. She received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2006), where she will begin teaching in Spring 2013, and is currently a 2012-2013 Mentor-in-Residence at BOLT Residency in Chicago. Notable exhibitions include Losing Yourself in the 21st Century (Maryland Art Place, Baltimore), MP3 (The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago), Please Stand By: Stacia Yeapanis + Readymade (Baang & Burne Contemporary, New York), Over and Over Again (BOLT Project Space, Chicago)

CAROLINE WELLS CHANDLER queers craft and consumer culture materials such as pipe cleaners, pompoms, stickers, breakfast cereal and candy in his densely constructed surfaces. He reveals an idiosyncratic experience of a normative culture that can be both “a comforter and a discomforter." His detailed material lists imply that every single thing we encounter—both material and text—is part of the complex web of personal and cultural myths that feed into the construction of our identities. Caroline received an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale in 2011 where he was awarded the Ralph Mayer Prize for proficiency in materials and techniques. Notable exhibitions include Myth Maker (2012), a solo show at Vox Populi in Philadelphia, Deep Cuts (2013) at Anna Kustera in New York City and Interwoven at Arlington Arts Center in Virginia. Synchronicities, a solo show, will open in May 2013 at Open Gallery in Nashville, Tennessee. Caroline lives in Long Island City, New York.

OtherPeoplesPixels: In your most recent work, found blankets, which feature manufactured and glorified representations of animals in the wild, are stretched inside excessively embellished frames featuring pompoms, cheerios, gummy bears, stickers, plastic toys and other colorful materials from craft stores and grocery stores. I read these pieces as a meditation on the similarities and differences between our culturally constructed, collective fantasies about wilderness and our personal, idiosyncratic experiences of kitschy, manufactured goods that are evocative of childhood in the 80s and 90s. Can you tell us about your intentions with this body of work?

Caroline Wells Chandler: The series you speak of is titled Tranny Chaser. The title references Ru Paul's ballad of the same name. The work bridges a variety of culturally constructed dualities including the hunter and the hunted, the hunter and the gatherer, the embodied and the superficial and the real and fabricated. My intent is to dissolve perceptual binaries through the process of queering form. This body of work explores my personal mythology that inevitably spills over into a mythology about culture through the deployment of images associated with Americana naturalism coupled with Surrealistic tendencies. Overall I am interested in the mythologies that humans live by and how these personal and collective stories are internalized via text and images. The idiosyncratic is a tool to empower the individual. The idiosyncratic proposes that we all posses the ability to become our own cartographers and to discover terrains on our own terms with our own maps. I couple this process of navigating the work and world with pre-existing texts, theories and materials to avoid pure fantasy.    

OPP: Could you expand on the idea of queering form?

CWC: Queering form is a mode of making that involves the appropriation of the everyday in order to expand or augment its use, function or meaning. This is achieved in a variety of ways including changing the scale, the material or the relationship/s to other object/s and/or context. As a result, the use, function or meaning is subverted, critically engaged and expanded.

OPP: It seems like your titles play into that mode of queering form, too. I'm not always sure I'm getting every reference, but I have the sense that the titles are helping to subvert and expand on the original context.

CWC: The titles are very important and they contextualize the pieces. For example, I Singing to Nelson is a reference to the masculine softball player Marla Hooch from A League of Their Own. Her power is actualized when she performs on stage in drag—for her, this means wearing a dress. In an inebriated state, she sloppily sings her heart out to Nelson, the man of her dreams. The title is the slurry speech she retorts to her teammate who is trying to subdue her and get her off stage. Marla asserts herself, "I Singing to Nelson. Ain't I Baby!?!” Totally entranced geeky Nelson affirms, “You sure are!” This scene is a celebration of queer form. An analogous action is echoed in the structure of the pieces from the Tranny Chaser series, in which I take the familiar and everyday and place it in an unusual context.  

So you're probably noticing that things look a bit different here. Our old blogging platform, Posterous, shuts its virtual doors later in April due to acquisition by Twitter, but Posthaven has been created by Posterous's original founders as a way to continue their mission of offering simple, classy blogging. Posthaven is in public beta and doesn't currently support visual customization -- so we're in aesthetic 'basic mode' for a while here while the Posthaven gurus ramp up their platform to full speed. You might also see a few typos in the tags that Posthaven is working to fix. Bear with us! For now, we are loving the new, larger format and lovely high-res images! 

And not to worry, you can still browse through our full archive of articles and continue to expect all your favorite content to keep rolling in: OPP Artist Interviews, Tips & Tricks for your OPP site...and keep your eyes peeled for an exciting new series where we ask art critics to write about OPP artists through the lens of their websites, and discuss the issues involved with viewing art on the Internet.

Tune in tomorrow for our regularly scheduled Artist Interview!

(If you're interested int he whole blog drama, more info can be found at the links below.)

Artist, sports fan and educator NORM PARIS explores the allegories of decline present in western narratives of heroism. His sculptures and drawings frame the bodies of professional athletes like Michael Jordon and historical figures like George Washington as architectural ruins and fossils thus rethinking the myths surrounding monumentality. Norm received his BFA from The Rhode Island School of Design, where he is currently an Assistant Professor in Drawing, and his MFA from the Yale School of Art, where he was core faculty from 2003-2008. He is represented by The Proposition Gallery (New York) and his work is included in the West Collection. Norm lives in Brooklyn, New York.

OtherPeoplesPixels: What exactly is Forton MG? It seems to be your favorite material, and you stretch its capabilities in a lot of directions. What does it offer that other sculpture materials can't?

Norm Paris: Forton MG is a casting mixture made of resin and gypsum, so it's part plastic, part plaster. There is something modern about the material’s synthetic nature; its plastic underbelly is “pop,” while its plaster-like appearance is classical. Forton is a shape-shifter, a chameleon. It is an aqueous solution that can be poured into any kind of mold, but it can also take on the properties of various metals and pigments. Lately I have been adding brass, iron and bronze powders to the mixture, which allows the cast to mimic metal. It can receive a patina just like metal can. The cast does contain metal, but the majority of the material, the binder, is something else. In that sense, it is both real and fake. Increasingly, I am using Forton in conjunction with other found materials and moving between different modes of sculpture and drawing. I want to avoid that point where material exploration becomes habit and expand the formal purview of the work.

OPP: The figure of Michael Jordan is a repeated motif in your work, appearing first in your 2005 sculpture installation Michael Jordan, Save The World.  I'm not sure if you are a Michael Jordan fan, but I suspect your interest in basketball—or baseball or football—isn't purely artistic, aesthetic or critical. Do you identify as a sports fan?

NP: I loathed Michael Jordan when I was growing up in Cleveland, but he was unavoidable. He was the first sports figure to become a global brand. Just watch some highlights, maybe the 1988 Slam Dunk Contest, and you will find that Jordan is a Hellenistic sculptor and a performance artist. He uses the aesthetics of Michelangelo to sell himself as a god within the Arena. But at the time I was just angry that Ron Harper (guard, Cleveland Cavaliers) was nixed from the Dunk contest because of some stupid injury.

MJ’s sudden fragility by the 2002-2003 season opened the door for a lot of that work from 2005-2009. He had physically declined in a way that made sports fans uncomfortable. Jordan couldn’t follow his own script. What caught my attention at the time—besides an unexpected fit of intense nostalgia—was how the discrepancy between the ideal and the real highlighted the faulty nature of the myth surrounding MJ. While I was working on the MJ installation in my Philadelphia basement studio in 2004, it struck me that I was making these sculptures of an athlete-as-hero while the country was at war, while the Weapons of Mass Destruction crisis was in full swing. My engagement seemed out of step with what was happening. I think Michael Jordan, Save The World was an awkward attempt to come to terms with an array of public, private and political concerns. My work has changed a lot since that piece, but ultimately I am still interested in the strange fragility of these monumental figures.

So yes, I am a sports fan. But while I’m personally invested in pro sports, I’ve also become fascinated by the unstable allegories that underscore a game or a season, looking at the phenomenon the way that Roland Barthes looked at wrestling. Since the action in a game is in real time, stories are constantly created and then torn apart. Spectators—myself included—imbue players with heroic meanings only to find that this affect is obsolete a moment later. Someone dropped a ball, or missed a shot, or tore an ACL, or retired. Athletic allegories are inevitably temporary because of bodily limitations, changing circumstances and shifting opinion over time. Gravity brings us all down. Robert Smithson’s ideas about entropy don’t only apply to the earth and the ground, but also to the figure.

OPP: Michael Jordan: Disasters of War (2006-2009), your drawings and etchings which reference Goya's famed series of the same name, feature Michael Jordan as ALL the figures. Could you talk about this choice?

NP: I am interested in the foggy and spastic relationships in the Disasters etchings because there is no chance to settle the dilemma. The lack of closure becomes the point. I wanted to construct narratives that were not necessarily linear. And so I substituted every figure from Goya’s original compositions with Jordan; this basic rule sets the stage for a Freudian sense of conflict—he saves and maims and kills himself. I thought a lot about dark humor when I was making these prints. The gratuitous nature of them and the ridiculousness of the situation was alternately funny, inappropriate and sad. Like in Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards, overwhelming and ironic violence is the embodiment of a complex and uncomfortable emotional space. In that film, like in these etchings, instincts of victimhood and aggression are in flux.

I tend to find icons and to replace them whenever necessary. This happens in sports but is even more pronounced in the combustible narratives of politics. Goya’s original prints were protest etchings against the Peninsular War, and the inappropriate superimposition of Jordan calls a lot into question. I was looking at a fracture or conflation between this deflated leisure myth and a larger sense of real violence. 

OPP: There is a shift away from the figure. It's not absolute, but it is noticeable. Afterwards there are more sculptures of precarious structures, which may or may not be ruins of buildings that once functioned, but definitely don't now. Can you talk about this intersection of architecture and mythic heroes, which was drawn out in your solo show The Wall Still Stands (2011) at The Proposition in New York?

NP: As I finished the Disasters etchings I became more interested in the space around the action rather than the figure itself. I made the sculpture Rubble Fragment I (Mezuzah), and I realized that a piece of concrete could become the heroic figure instead of a literal classical body. I used the same substitution rule that guided the Jordan prints in the Reconstruction drawings, but architectural structures like two-by-fours and cinder blocks were the stand-in for human presence. Some of the drawings become defunct altars or shrines; others are failed utopian building projects.

I wanted to allow for a wider array of subject matter rather than harping on one obvious signifier. The architectural structures from the drawings are based on figures from sports clippings I've received from my father over the years and screen shots from old footage of baseball games, but they are heavily camouflaged. Bridge/Fortress/Hillis  began as a sculpture of the former Cleveland Browns running back Payton Hillis. Holding It Together (Pistol Pete) is based on Zurbaran's Saint Serapion. I was interested in the fragility of the structure, and its simultaneous sense of building and decay. This work explores some of the same terrain as the more overt sculptures and prints; but now I am encoding, encasing and cutting apart the source. Human form is roughly translated to architecture or rock formation. I’ve been looking at old sports writers like Henry Grantland Rice, who had a tendency to rename the heroes of the day as immovable rocks or some other monumental vision; the 1936 Fordham Rams for example, were coined the “Fordham Wall” and their offensive line was “The Seven Blocks of Granite.” This type of metaphor can be found in all sorts of places, from Percy Bysshe Shelley's Ozymandias to Pink Floyd's The Wall.

OPP: What do George Washington and Caesar have in common with Pistol Pete, Michael Jordan, Vince Lombardi, Jim Brown and Arnold Schwarzenegger?

NP: I witnessed all these figures through the lens of reproduction as a primary source of aura. Growing up, the distance of the photograph, print or video, and now the internet, allowed me to fill these vessels with my own meanings. There are countless posters of Michael Jordan stuck in mid-air as if he could levitate forever. Even the painting George Washington Crossing The Delaware is a fabrication which is only loosely based on historical fact, and yet this vision is as real as it gets. These people have been worshipped, albeit in vastly different times and places. While there are qualitative differences that separate them—George Washington actually did effect the world more than Pistol Pete—I am more interested in these icons as the embodiment of an internal response to popular American mythologies. They are mostly boyhood visions of manhood, all of which are more complicated than they initially appeared.

OPP: If you absolutely had to pick—pretend the world will end if you don't—would you rather go to an art opening or a sporting event?

NP: That’s like picking a favorite child. The question presents a false choice. I can have my cake and eat it too. I was drawing on my apartment floor as I watched game 7 of the 1997 World Series. 

And besides, sporting events can be art. Robert Smithson always talked about how the movies that were the most important to him and his peers were the B-movies, the sci-fi movies rather than the art flicks. These cultural artifacts were the platform on which he built his work. He was also immensely well-read and informed about art history, and he was certainly a part of the art world. He was intimately invested in all of his obsessions, and he reveled in the fact that he did not have to choose. I feel the same way.

A live basketball game is a singularity. It happens in real time and only exists in that moment. I suppose the artwork is at face value more static (unless it is performative or interactive), but certainly the experience of the work is also singular since it is specific to that time and place.

While I love the community aspect of the art opening, the support for the work of friends and peers, the reality is that there is more flexibility in seeing an art show—and art openings are often the absolute worst time to view the work. The sporting event is often the ideal venue to view the spectacle. And so, from a situational and phenomenological point of view, I choose the game.

To see more of Norm's work, please visit normparis.com.

Featured Artist Interviews are conducted by Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist Stacia Yeapanis. When she’s not writing for OPP, Stacia explores the emotional and existential significance of participating in mediated culture in her embroidery, video, sculpture and collage works. She received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2006), where she will begin teaching in Spring 2013, and is currently a 2012-2013 Mentor-in-Residence at BOLT Residency in Chicago. Notable exhibitions include Losing Yourself in the 21st Century (Maryland Art Place, Baltimore), MP3 (The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago), Please Stand By: Stacia Yeapanis + Readymade (Baang & Burne Contemporary, New York), Over and Over Again (BOLT Project Space, Chicago).

BRIAN R. JOBE's sculptures and site-specific installations explore the abstract concept of endlessness through a repetition of concrete forms. He uses common building materials such as cinder blocks, wood, roofing felt and plastic zip ties to draw in space, often creating an interactive pathway for the viewer. Brian's work is currently on view in two exhibitions: a two-person show titled Alignment 2x at the Center For Emerging Media at the University of Central Florida in Orlando (closing on February 22) and a solo installation titled Channel Modules at the Covenant College Art Gallery in Lookout Mountain, Georgia (closing on March 10). His upcoming solo show Land Overlap Wyoming opens in April 2013 at the University of Wyoming (Laramie), where he will simultaneously be a Visiting Artist. Brian lives in Knoxville, Tennessee. 

OtherPeoplesPixels: For years your most prominent recurring material has been the plastic zip tie. When did you first use this material in your work? What is it about this material that continues to be so compelling to you?

Brian R. Jobe: I first introduced plastic zip ties and loop locks into my work in 2004 during grad school and worked to utilize their material possibilities in a comprehensive way over the next seven years. My last piece that used zip ties was Turfside Passage: it served as a capstone for the material, stretching it to what I felt was its most visually resolved and public end.

I grew up drawing and always loved lines. When I started using plastic zip ties, they replaced the thread and mason’s line I was using before that time. At present, I’m interested in marking space and time by creating structural contexts. Today, linear or modular materials like wood, concrete blocks or bricks extend how zip ties have functioned in the work before. These materials provide structure and mark linear paths through repetition of form. I’m interested in pathways, corridors, highways, hallways and architectural forms that are often seen as a means to an end. But I construct them to be an end in and of themselves.

OPP: Your ongoing series Tuft vs.Turf includes outdoor, site-specific installations and found object sculptures. Between 2007 and 2011, you've wrapped plastic zip ties around road markers, cattle guards, railings, fire escapes, as well as found objects like a watering can, a hand saw, a meat tenderizer, and a utility lamp. Could you explain the title of the series? What does the gesture of wrapping these objects and sites mean to you?

BRJ: Tuft vs.Turf concluded in 2011 when I wrapped a forklift with zip ties which sat in front of the Blue Star Contemporary Art Center in San Antonio, Texas in conjunction with my solo show Blank Tides. The name Tuft vs.Turf highlights the tension between a spatial, geographic or static context and additive, physical markings. My aim with the ties is to re-contextualize a site or object so that the viewer might see it in a fresh way, in a reclaimed and also less functional way.

OPP: I read a more pointed ecological (or maybe philosophical) message in the early site-specific installations like Tuft vs.Turf (Cattle Guard) (2007) and Tuft vs.Turf (Gate) (2008). The fact that the zip ties are manufactured, made from plastic and often neon colors highlights the intrusion of the human hand into the natural environment. It seems significant that the plastic zip tie is a particular kind of strong, but temporary binding, and that it highlights these other means (the gate and the cattle guard) of the human attempt to dominate, or bind, nature. The meaning of the human intrusion shifts when you start to bring these outdoor installations into the city, as with Tuft vs. Turf (Fire Escape) (2009) and Tuft vs.Turf (Governors Island) (2009). When I looked at these, I began to think about the permanence or impermanence of graffiti and the way it is perceived of by some people as art and others as a public nuisance. What are your thoughts on this?

BRJ: Thanks for your highly considered reading of the work. While those interpretations weren’t my original intent, I’m glad to hear your observations and how you specifically relate to the series. It is always my aim for each piece to resonate on a universal level.

The immediate, secure, auditory gratification of each zip tie’s attachment paired with the temporal flexibility of the installations informed my selection of zip ties as the primary medium for that series. My goal throughout all of the Tuft vs. Turf projects was to create fluid, repetitive marks in space in order to highlight the architectural elements being wrapped and to alter viewers’ pre-conceived expectations about the element’s functionality. The pre-fabricated quality of the zip ties echoed the fabricated quality of the gate, cattle guard and fire escape.

For the rural interventions, I saw my action primarily as a way to respond to and spotlight the structural elements of a ranch environment. Similarly, it was my intent for the urban interventions to be seen in context (i.e. at a Chelsea gallery and at an art fair) and thus eliminate any question of its legality or any potentially subversive statement it may be making.

OPP: It looks like there was a shift in your practice around 2011, when you started to explore what you refer to as "the [innate] desire to move through corridors" in interactive sculptures like Turfside Passage (Knoxville) and in Land Overlap Tennessee #1 and #2 (2012). Is this desire a metaphor or some kind of biological imperative? Is that idea based in research or observation? Has audience interaction with Turfside Passage proven your hypothesis?

BRJ: Audience interaction with Turfside Passage has been the most dynamic I’ve witnessed. The participation ranges from the more private, personal experiences viewers have when walking through it to the delight of children running and screaming through it.

In my most recent work, I’ve reflected upon a motif that’s been recurring over the past ten years. When addressing large interior spaces, my inclination has been to create installations that require people to walk a circuit. That recurring pathway form, paired with a growing interest in architecture and public art, led me to create interactive corridors. Having an architect for a father, I’ve grown up thinking about space and material from an architectural point of view. I’ve recently decided that it’s a natural step for me to act on this tendency by building public structures. In fact, as my work shifts, I feel that I’ve only just begun my studio practice. I can finally can pair the material sensibility I’ve acquired with a clear vision towards representative and actual pathways. So, the desire to move through corridors is both metaphorical and actual. 

My research into the form of pathway has often been visual and first-hand, specifically in experiencing James Turrell’s The Light Inside at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the work of Richard Serra. Images of Richard Long’s walking pieces and by the scope of Robert Smithson’s oeuvre had a profound impact on me. I saw a terrific show last summer at Casey Kaplan in New York City of Liam Gillick’s recent projects that fired up my imagination. I also love the art of Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and Agnes Martin.

OPP: Your artist statement begins, "repetition signals endlessness." This statement combined with your corridors leads me to think about the postulation of the tunnel to heaven that people who have had near-death experiences talk about. And I think about the repetitive process of wrapping the zip ties as potentially meditative and maybe even evocative of the rosary. Is there a spiritual component to your work?

BRJ: As a child, I used to lie awake at night contemplating what it means to live forever after death, and I used to wish that forever were a fixed, quantifiable number like 10,000 years. The thought of endlessness has always been a startling notion, and my use of repetition in the work is a way for me to process the concept of forever.

Repetitive work can certainly be and has been meditative. The view of my corridors as “tunnels to heaven” is one of many associations that viewers may bring to the work. Personally, I’m coming from a place of wrestling with my smallness before God, and I’m exploring how the organization of material in sculpture can signal the wave of time yet to come.

OPP: Tell us about the work in the two exhibitions your work is in right now.

BRJ: Both shows have different goals. My work in Alignment 2x at the Center For Emerging Media at the University of Central Florida is paired with the work of sculptor Jason S. Brown, and the two of us created a new collaborative piece for the occasion. That work, Lifted Jacked, is composed of stacked troughs of gravel situated on steel posts, cinderblocks and packing foam. The piece started by considering gravel as an alternative future currency—something we may return to later on—but it became a formal, intuitive installation that suggests interstate overpasses more than bank vaults.

The work in my solo show Channel Modules at the Covenant College Art Gallery is largely new, experimental and site-specific. I created a room-sized work titled Meridian Angle. I lined the floor with roofing felt and organized a block pathway to create an interactive corridor. I addressed the non-traditional, architectural elements of the gallery and also subdivided the space in a way that challenges the viewer's expectations. In addition, there’s a repeating, stenciled form on the wall made with spray chalk over a template. On another wall is a six-foot-wide piece, titled Gravel Modules, which suggests many of the same concepts that the room-sized installation does, except in a more condensed, straightforward way. It’s probably my favorite of the new works since it is an archetype for many future concepts.

To see more of Brian's work, please visit brianjobe.com.

Featured Artist Interviews are conducted by Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist Stacia Yeapanis. When she’s not writing for OPP, Stacia explores the emotional and existential significance of participating in mediated culture in her embroidery, video, sculpture and collage works. She received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2006), where she will begin teaching in Spring 2013, and is currently a 2012-2013 Mentor-in-Residence at BOLT Residency in Chicago. Notable exhibitions include Losing Yourself in the 21st Century (Maryland Art Place, Baltimore), MP3 (The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago), Please Stand By: Stacia Yeapanis + Readymade (Baang & Burne Contemporary, New York), Over and Over Again (BOLT Project Space, Chicago).

RAIN HARRIS examines our assumptions around "good" and "bad" taste in relation to class, geography and time period. Her ornate, decadent porcelain sculptures and her expansive installations, all of which teeter precariously on the imagined boundary between “high” and “low” art, reference Victorian, Americana and Baroque aesthetics. Rain received her BFA in Ceramics from Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from Ohio State University. In 2012, she was an artist-in-residence at The Pottery Workshop in Jingdezhen, China, and will exhibit work made there in a two-person show with her husband, fellow ceramicist Paul Donnelly in October 2013. Rain lives in Kansas City, Missouri.

OtherPeoplesPixels: You have worked in a variety of media, including wood, fabric and Plexiglass, but your most common medium is porcelain. When did you first start working with this material?

Rain Harris: I made my first major body of work in ceramics at camp when I was seven. It was a series of bowls that could double as paperweights—or quite possibly lethal weapons. But in all seriousness, I started art school with the intention of becoming a jeweler, not a ceramicist. I needed to take an elective course. At the time, ceramics was one of the only things available. Truthfully, I did not see clay as a long-term option as it seemed too “crafty” and “messy.” My initial interest in jewelry and fine metals still seeps into my work, but clay immediately made sense to my practice. I often approach it with an eye toward diminutive grandeur and extreme preciousness, regardless of the scale I am working at.

Initially I worked in stoneware, but as my conceptual ideas evolved, my material choices needed to change. When I started to develop work that was influenced by court dinnerware and the decorative arts, porcelain was the obvious choice because of its smooth surface, white color and historical associations.

OPP: What do you love about working in clay? 

RH: I love the malleability of ceramics, and I frequently call clay "the chameleon of art materials." Because it can be manipulated by hand or cast into molds, its appearance can change everytime. It can mimic gold or silver. It can be shiny, matte or almost plastic-like. Visually, it can appear either hard and rigid or soft and fluid. The results can be amazingly varied.

OPP: Is there anything you hate about clay?

RH: I have a love-hate relationship with ceramics in general. I currently work with molds so I have the ability to easily make multiples. This allows me to make larger, more complex structures, and it also gives me the freedom to be less precious with my work. But the big problem with ceramics is its fragility during firings. Shipping and transporting are also an issue. My loss rate can be really frustrating at times.   

OPP: In your statement, you say: "I ask if an ugly object can be in ‘good taste?’ Also, can a beautiful object also be a tasteless object?" I see this in the gaudiness of your sculptures. That they are gaudy is undeniable, and gaudiness is culturally associated with bad taste. And yet, I find the sculptures, without a doubt, beautiful. But part of the beauty lies in how smart they are. Do you see the objects you make as beautiful or ugly?

RH: Arguably, beauty is not a quality inherent in objects. It only exists in the mind and eye of the beholder. Taste is also a learned behavior. That aside, I would categorize almost everything I have made as simultaneously beautiful and ugly. Each attribute is reinforced and amplified by its polar opposite. In my poison bottle series, the inherent gaudiness of the bottles is more pronounced than in other bodies of work. Normally my work has a restrained gaudiness. I use vintage floral decals to decorate the surface of the sculptures. Unlike most people in the contemporary art world, I do not consider decorative or pretty to be bad words. How those qualities are used determines their validity. 

OPP: I’m glad you brought up the idea that decorative is sometimes considered a bad word. It should NOT be a disparaging term, but is often used to dismiss work. I actually think decorativeness as a concept is much more complex than most people believe. It is often associated with superficiality, but I'd like to emphasize that superficiality is about the surface, and the surface is the first point of impact. I think it is often the viewer who doesn't penetrate the surface when work has a decorative quality. It's not the decorativeness of a piece that keeps viewers from going deeper; it's the viewer's assumptions about what decorativeness means that halts appreciation for the work. What's your take on the concept of decorativeness?

RH: I have always believed that decoration can be used as a narrative device. Repetitive symbols, archetypes and color choices can tell a visual story rather than being simply picturesque. Layout and composition, scale, color and process can be something visceral and emotional, something that has a greater meaning. Ultimately, pattern is larger than life; even when it is small, it has the ability to expand infinitely.

My work is heavily layered with visual information. I stack and arrange patterns and forms so it becomes difficult to determine where the pattern begins and ends. Is the design the form or the space behind it? This process is a balancing act. I push the decoration to the point where it is just about to collapse under the visual weight of its own embellishment. By doing this I am able to keep a sense of order, largely because I am responding to the patterns inherent in the structure of the work. I practice restraint in excess: In each piece, I challenge myself to stop just short of “too much.”

OPP: Artificial Phylum is an ongoing series of porcelain sculptures inspired by images of weeds and wild flowers. The sculptures themselves, however, are hard, shiny and decorated in kitschy decals and colors—specifically, Tangerine makes me think of two chairs I grew up with. Can you talk about this tension between the organic and the manufactured?

RH: The forms in Artificial Phylum are largely developed by the loss of information. I start by photographing plants and rendering them as computer-aided drawings. Instead of making these forms precise like the original plant forms, I simplify and let the visual information dissolve around the edges. Technology aids the abstraction. I cut my originals out of pink foam on a CNC router with a chunky drill bit, further reducing the visual information.

In earlier projects, I created designs that were visually dense. But in Artificial Phylum, flatness became incredibly important because it allowed the colors and patterns to become more aggressive. It allowed me to create work that was minimally excessive. Reduction allowed me to create stylistic cadences that suggested familiarity without resorting to mimicry. By distancing myself from the original object, I was able to create hybrids that were an amalgamation of organic qualities and manmade design.  

I have always had an odd relationship with color. I am fascinated with color combinations that are inherently ugly—not the kind of ugly found in a lavender Wal-Mart polyester teddy bear sweater. That is revolting. I am more drawn to the unpleasant hues of a dirty, 1970s harvest gold kitchen. I use colors that are almost nice but just aren’t pretty. These shades could masquerade as designer colors, but they are just too something—too dirty, too sallow, too jarring, too wrong, but almost right. I don’t necessarily gravitate to specific colors, but I am simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by certain combinations. I like red, but it is much better when paired with a shocking orange. I am fine with pale mossy dirty green, but it is so much “nicer” when paired with a sickly yellow-brown and maybe a splash of metallic gold.

OPP: In the summer of 2011, you did an artist residency at The Pottery Workshop in  Jingdezhen, China, known as the Porcelain Capital. Tell us about your time there.

RH: My husband Paul Donnelly and I worked there for a month. There was a huge learning curve because the porcelain in Jingdezhen handles itself much differently than what we were used to. It’s a beautiful, crazy-super-white porcelain that is fired at a very, very high temperature. I currently fire to cone 6 at around 2200℉, and most people in the United States only fire as high as cone 10. In Jingdezhen they fire to about cone 13, so it is substantially higher.

The forms I designed were variously sized flat wall pieces that ended up slumping in the kiln because the prototypes should have been designed differently to compensate for the heat and the way the clay moves in the kiln. Unfortunately, I did not realize this until almost the end of the residency when everything was fired. I was playing around with these flat wall forms that had inlays of a glow in the dark glaze. When viewed in normal light, they are very subtle as the white surface has darker white inlaid patterns. When the lights are off, the patterns in the surface of the pieces glow in the dark.

Paul and I are going back this summer if we get funding. Now that we understand how to compensate for the material differences, we can accomplish more. We have a two-person show scheduled for October 2013 with Red Star Studios, a ceramics collective in Kansas City. The exhibition will either be at the current space they share with Belger Arts Center or in their immanent new location. It will revolve around the work we made in Jingdezhen, and Paul and I will both be showing our individual work as well as some collaborative pieces. Right now I am working on a gridded piece that will be similar to a piece Paul made in 2008. He is making the cups, and I am decorating them with transfers I made in Jingdezhen. The piece will be large and will blur the line between art, furniture, design and display. 

To see more of Rain's work, please visit rainharris.com.

Featured Artist Interviews are conducted by Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist Stacia Yeapanis. When she’s not writing for OPP, Stacia explores the emotional and existential significance of participating in mediated culture in her embroidery, video, sculpture and collage works. She received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2006), where she will begin teaching in Spring 2013, and is currently a 2012-2013 Mentor-in-Residence at BOLT Residency in Chicago. Notable exhibitions include Losing Yourself in the 21st Century (Maryland Art Place, Baltimore), MP3 (The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago), Please Stand By: Stacia Yeapanis + Readymade (Baang & Burne Contemporary, New York), Over and Over Again (BOLT Project Space, Chicago).

Yet another way that OtherPeoplesPixels is showing it's love to artists, OPP is co-sponsoring the brand-new Maker Grant with our friends at CAC to assist one amazing Chicago-based artist with an unrestricted $3000 grant. We know how hard it can be to pay the studio rent or purchase the weird supplies you need for your ambitious new project -- so we're stepping up to help you take your art practice to the next level. What could you do with $3000? We want to see it happen!

The Maker Grant is funded by a portion of proceeds from the Chicago Artists Coalition's annual Starving Artist fundraiser and a matching contribution from OtherPeoplesPixels. The Maker Grant recognizes both CAC's and OPP's mutual commitments to supporting local artists' practices and professional development.

The deadline to apply is March 31, so get cracking!
 
The Maker Grant is open to visual artists based in the Chicagoland area who are:

• Artists who can show that they are at a defining moment to achieve growth in their creative and professional careers.
• Artists who demonstrate a strong and active engagement with, and professional commitment to, their artistic practice.
• Artists whose work as cultural makers impacts the development of art and culture in a meaningful way.

Read more detailed criteria & apply here. Good luck!

The mission of the Chicago Artists Coalition is to build a sustainable marketplace for entrepreneurial artists and creatives. As pioneers in advocacy and professional development, we capitalize on the intersection of art and enterprise by activating collaborative partnerships and developing innovative resources. The Chicago Artists Coalition is committed to cultivating groundbreaking exhibitions and educational opportunities, and to building a diverse community of artistic leaders that defines the place of art and artists in our culture and economy.
 
OtherPeoplesPixels is a portfolio website service designed by artists for artists, dedicated to helping artists and other cultural makers share their creative work with the world. Founded in 2005, OPP has remained an independently run, triple bottom line company and continues to support many arts, environmental & social justice initiatives through The OtherPeoplesPixels Fund.

NATHAN PROUTY's small-scale, abstract, ceramic sculptures ellicit a wide range of associations. They read as toys, trophies, fetish objects, consumer products and isolated body parts. Each whimsical and colorful piece maintains an uncanniness and sense of humor that makes it impossible to dismiss as eye candy, while simultaneously engaging the viewer in the pleasure of looking. Recurring formal motifs like piles, shafts and nubs offer the viewer the opportunity to contemplate the attractiveness of the sculptures, as well their ambiguous referents. Nathan's work has been exhibited at Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts (Newcastle, ME), The Clay Studio (Philadelphia), The Fuller Craft Museum (Brockton, MA) and Lacoste Gallery (Concord, MA) and is featured in The Best of 500 Ceramics: Celebrating a Decade in Clay (2012), published by Lark Crafts. Nathan is currently an MFA candidate in Ceramics at Ohio University.

OtherPeoplesPixels: In your artist statement, you say, "I have a problem. I am an image junkie" and later "My sculptures are the consequences of my addiction." This, of course, has the same humor in it that I also see in the work itself. But do you really think your image collecting and hunting is more excessive than other artists?

Nathan Prouty: I wouldn’t say that my attraction to images is more or less obsessive than other artists. If there is one truth about art weirdos like us, it is that we spend a large chunk of our lives in our own headspace. But looking outward is a huge part of—if not the reason for—what we do. As artists, we have a stronger drive to look and to ask questions about what we are seeing. The seeing and the asking become so intertwined that they fuse together into one process. But understanding the world through looking is just one method of processing and filtering and understanding the crazy thing that is the human condition.

 When people write or talk about my work, they tend to glom onto the Internet imagery idea, maybe because of my blog or because of my statement. The work responds to Internet culture and Tumblr-style image de-contextualizing, but that is not the main subject or inspiration of the work. I’ve just noticed that this is a relatively recent read, and it’s interesting. But it’s too simple of an explanation. It is an easy way for people to feel they’ve figured the work out. They'll say, “Oh, he's mashed together a bunch of images he found online. Now I get it!”

I position myself with self-depreciation and humor in my work, statements and writing because I genuinely believe that we shouldn’t take everything so seriously. But the humor also disarms people who have convinced themselves that they hate "capital 'A' art." Suddenly they can’t stop looking at the giant pile of sparkling unicorn crap in the middle of a pedestal. I love seeing the work manipulate the entrenched prejudices of viewers.

The universal language of humor is one of the most powerful things we have in our toolkit as humans. It primes us to relate to each other and to make our way though the slog that is life on this blue dot. I have to live in that space of goofiness and chuckles to stay sane. If there is a negative in my way of seeing, it is that I have a tendency to go dark and cynical really quickly. But the work itself is so happy and goofy that it compensates for all the darker stuff and enables me to keep my head above those murky waters. I’m not really a quote guy, but Joseph Campbell said we should “participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world…” I try to live by that as much as I can.

OPP: Most of your sculptures are painted earthenware. Can you tell us a bit about this material?

NP: Clay is the axis around which things revolve in my studio. But I ditch it in heartbeat if it gets in the way for any reason. It’s not really a point of pride or something to champion from the rooftops. It’s a matter of pragmatism and efficiency. I use whatever it takes to get the job done: paint, glaze, underglaze, china paint, embossing powder, flocking, glitter and resin. One of the quirks of clay—and here I'm generalizing a bit—is a pretty major trade off between strength and color. You can either have bright, awesome, saturated color on lower temperature clay that is more fragile or you can have so-so colors—browns and grays and all that crunchy, hippy, macramé stuff—on really high-temperature, robust ceramics. That’s the mug you want in your hand at the  Renaissance Fair, when the guy dressed in the crappy jester costume says something about your mother. High fire stuff is strong and dense and can really cause some Ren Fair damage! That’s why a lot of the functional stuff you see is brown; at those higher temperatures, the color just burns out. There are some absolutely stunning effects you can get at that higher temperature range, but I’m really in love with the versatility of the color and surface of the lower range material. A majority of my surfaces are glazed. The commercial glaze you can get off the shelf these days is pretty amazing in terms of its color range. I do use paint for texture on the plexiglass bases, but that’s about it these days. Within the old-school ceramics crowd, there is this unspoken rule that unless you mix the glazes yourself, you are not a "real" ceramicist, which is just a bunch of dogmatic jock-potter junk. I do and use whatever it takes to get the result I want.

OPP: What's it like to work with clay?

NP: Clay is a royal pain in the ass to work with. It’s fussy and fragile and dirty. It is probably one of the most inconvenient media to work in, but it is also awesomely versatile if you know how to tease what you want out of it. Clay has this insane ability to mimic. Ceramics can look like plastic, steel, grass or Formica.

The labor is crazy with clay, but the clay I use is the dumbest stuff that’s available. It's low-fire white stuff meant for summer camp ashtrays and kindergarten blobs. But it is plastic and flexible as hell and takes colors really well. Secretly, I love the fact that I am using clay that was meant for children’s projects to make my work.

OPP: What do you hate about clay?

NP: One of the things that drives me crazy about clay is “the community.” I say that with a big eye-roll and sweeping air quotes. I think it’s awesome that the medium has this robust base of people that get together to "talk clay," and there is such a widely distributed academic community revolving around ceramics. But at the same time, I am skeptical. It can result in some pretty lazy thinking. There is very little criticality in our corner. While it’s nice that everyone gets a trophy for showing up, it creates some steep, uphill battles for ceramic artists, who are not interested in spending a week obsessing over kiln design or who went to which MFA program. And because there is such a culture of subpar criticality, it’s easy to overcompensate and try to shove tons of concept and meaning and academic language into work that should just exist on its own. This is where the academic MFA factory really becomes the default way of surviving and thinking, which is a bit troubling to me. I am too much of a skeptic to trust any "default" just because it is "the way things are done." I might be contradicting myself. I don’t really have a thesis there; I’m just making observations based on my own experiences. Ok, now I'm hopping off my soap box.

A lot of the clay work that is "making it" out there in the larger art world right now is this stuff that is clunky and poopy and super-summer-campy—I don’t know how else to describe it. Like, chunky ashtrays with drippy glazes. Sterling Ruby and Arlene Shechet, are two that come to mind. Let me be clear though that they all make really beautiful work—I would kill for a Sterling Ruby piece. But the fact that curators and museums, suddenly willing to consider ceramics and rushing to jump on the bandwagon, are gravitating towards that genre specifically and somewhat exclusively is a bit odd. For those people who really know the material, the clunky ham-fisted look is water way under the bridge, and I question why there is not more innovative, diverse work getting picked up. It’s out there, but we never see it "cross over." The net needs to be cast WAY wider, and the ceramic folks bear most of the responsibility in making that happen although no one wants to cop to it. I think this is somehow tied into the same reasons we still see Peter Volkous being included in "cutting edge" contemporary ceramics exhibitions. Again, he makes great, powerful work, and I'm not suggesting that it should be shoved aside. But it is time to bring some additional voices and ideas to a wider audience.

OPP: Your sculptures are abstract, but I see a lot of recurring forms in them, including shoes, both male and female sex organs. Sometimes they look like unusable, complicated wireless mice. I get the sense that it doesn't matter to you if what I see is where you started from, but would you pick your favorite piece and give us the insider info on what you were thinking about when you made it?

NP: Oh man. Yeah, I really love that viewers can bring their own associations to the work. But I feel guilty sometimes because it’s too easy for me to just shrug and play innocent with the content—“you see whatever you wanna see, man!” At the same time, it is hard to delve into and thoroughly unpack the meaning because the work is kind of about everything, and therefore it's kind of about nothing. It's about the everyday, in all the many ways that word has meaning.  

It's sex, death, love and angst all wrapped up in a poop joke. And I am ok with the poop joke being front and center. It's the punch line that is delivered first, and you as the viewer need to work backwards towards the actual set-up of the joke, which may or may not have some more serious undercurrents bubbling up. But if all you see is the poop, I can't get uppity about it. All that said, what I say in my statement is also true: the pieces are a consequence of crazy amounts of input from all corners, not all of it necessarily visual. It’s not just about the imagery but also the implications behind that imagery. Any given piece is actually some neurotic algorithm of history, advertising, emotion, design, desire, frustration and nerdiness.

Right now, my favorite piece is Hercule. It came out of my Masterpiece Theater phase, when I was watching a bunch of PBS murder mysteries and period pieces. Hercule Poirot, created by Agatha Christie, is the main character in this great, campy PBS show that has been running forever. That piece is the only one I still have in my possession, and I think I’m going to keep it for myself. It’s this dainty, small pink thing that lies low and flat. It has a certain formal command of its own space, similar to the character in the TV show—dainty, meek, but razor sharp and easily underestimated. It holds this blob covered by these little strips of bandages or toilet paper, almost like a hat. I was thinking about old-school Universal Studio monsters like the Mummy and about toilet paper and its uses and connotations—what an odd thing! The base of Hercule—in fact, the bases of most the pieces—references countertops and laminate surfaces of the post-war American material boom. Thanks to new chemical technology, anything could be made to look like anything else. The little slice of 1950s kitchen countertop that Hercule sits atop represents the insane abundance of products and material wealth that was part of the new, post-WWII American reality.

OPP: You are in your second year of graduate school at Ohio University. How has your work changed since you've been there?

NP: Oh boy. When I decided to go back to school, I made the conscious decision to seriously reevaluate what had become habitual in my studio practice. One thing that has really cracked wide open for me is the idea of placement. I have started to think about the hierarchy and taxonomies of display within the home. If I hear one more grad student talk about the "realm of the domestic," I think I might barf. Yet I find myself right there too, somewhat begrudgingly.

I make these precious, fetishized objects, and they go out into the world. But what happens next? Lately, I’m thinking about the display of cherished, sentimental objects. Why does grandma’s clock go on the mantle, but that weird mason jar full of seashells that you brought back from Myrtle Beach goes on the back of the toilet tank? I’m thinking about the emotion and memory that objects absorb and about the beauty and wondrousness of us as a species, as viewed through our junk. The little, old lady down the street cherishes that crappy, dollar-store resin angel with all her heart. It’s enough to make you tear up. It’s crazy and beautiful at the same time.

To see more of Nathan's work, please visit nathanprouty.com.

Featured Artist Interviews are conducted by Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist Stacia Yeapanis. When she’s not writing for OPP, Stacia explores the emotional and existential significance of participating in mediated culture in her embroidery, video, sculpture and collage works. She received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2006), where she will begin teaching in Spring 2013, and is currently a 2012-2013 Mentor-in-Residence at BOLT Residency in Chicago. Notable exhibitions include Losing Yourself in the 21st Century (Maryland Art Place, Baltimore), MP3 (The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago), Please Stand By: Stacia Yeapanis + Readymade (Baang & Burne Contemporary, New York), Over and Over Again (BOLT Project Space, Chicago).

Hi OPP-ers!

With the New Year, comes new...Copyright Dates! Please check out our post last year if you’re having trouble updating your Copyright.

Remember that the system will automatically update your Copyright to include 2013 if you add new work to your site in 2013! So get crackin’!

That’s the old news -- let’s move on to new news.

Notice anything New about your Control Panel lately?

We’ve redesigned the ‘Nav Section Labels’ and ‘Nav Section Links’ areas and merged them into one big, awesome section entitled ‘Create and Reorder Labels & Links’. That’s right, you now have the ability to control the order of your website Sections!

Let’s start with some background information. You continue to have five default sections:

• Artwork
• News
• Links
• Contact Page
• PDF Page

You also continue to have the option of having up to six Nav Section Links. These Nav Section Links can be links to anything you’d like -- to an announcement about a new show, press about your work, to your blog, or even to an image or folder in your Artwork section.

You can view all of your website Sections and Nav Section Links in the ‘Create and Reorder Labels & Links’ area of your Control Panel.

Moving the sections around is really easy -- just drag & drop each section to the order you want them to be in, and then click Update at the bottom of the screen.

You can also take advantage of the Nav Section Links. Please note that using the Nav Section Links does not create a new section on your site. It simply allows you to link to something else -- including parts of your own site.

Let’s say you want to link directly to a folder in your Artwork section or to an image in your Artwork section, from your Home Page. Simply view your folder or image as a visitor would, and copy the URL that is displaying in your browser window when you are viewing that page.

Then, paste that URL in the ‘URL/Link’ area of your choice. You can also name the link by placing a label in the ‘Nav Link Name’ section.

The image or folder you are linking to in your Artwork section must continue to exist in your Artwork section, and cannot be removed from that area or hidden.

Till next time OPP-ers!