OtherPeoplesPixels Blog

OPP: One metaphoric theme I see in a lot of your work was highlighted in your exhibition at Art Gallery of Greater Victoria called The Phenomenology of Dusk (2012): thresholds, in-between-ness, hybridity. Could you talk a bit about this body of work and how metaphor plays out in your landscapes?

2009

Ink jet

40 x 26"

HELEN MAURENE COOPER is concerned with the traditions of storytelling mutated by pop culture. Her work engages various photographic traditions from her recreations referencing portraiture and pop culture to her large-scale macro photographs bordering on abstraction to her recent documentary photography. She is one half of the collaborative duo Baccara, a 2012-13 BOLT Artst-in-Residence at Chicago Artists' Coalition. She is also a  co-founder and co-director of Azimuth Projects which aims to expose new audiences to Chicago's bountiful art community. Helen Maurene lives and teaches in Chicago, IL.

OtherPeoplesPixels: In your statement, you mention that your works are influenced by "[your] preoccupation with longing, desire, and the containment of wildness." Could you say more about "the containment of wildness?"

Helen Maurene Cooper: I think my preoccupation with "the containment of wildness" has a lot to do with the cultural climate and the media imagery present in my growing up… Maybe, it’s about the disconnect between the representations of women—luscious flamboyant and proud—on the covers to all of Mom’s country music albums and their sad, whiny songs. Maybe it’s about music videos from the 1980’s and the subtle racism that masquerades as cultural fetish: numerous visions of Africa, wild life, woman on safari… long, curly, wind-blown hair; bi-racial relationships; the desert; the jungle. Maybe it’s about coming of age in the AIDS crisis, protection foregrounded in desire. These are some thoughts. I have more, but really as long as I can remember I have looked for visual representations of that which is uncontained, which is then naturally reflected in my art.

OPP: That makes a lot of sense to me. You bring up the representations of women that you were seeing as you grew up... there is something particularly feminine about your work. But I say that with hesitancy, because I want to avoid essentializing the female experience or defining the feminine only in relation to the media... but would you agree that the wildness your are talking about is specifically feminine?

HMC: Completely, but it has to do with the performance of femininity: the complexities, the artifice and the authentic (if that even exists). In the time between my undergraduate and graduate schooling, I did a photography project in Philly about trans people living as women. When I was shooting Birds of Appetite, the process of adorning myself—my nails, fake eye lashes, makeup and clothing—was much like what I witnessed the women I photographed in Philly do… it was drag in its own way.  

Cat tails

OPP: When constructing photographs, do you tend to have an idea for an image and then seek out the appropriate costumes, props and backdrops? Or does it happen the other way around?

 MHC: The way I construct a photograph really varies from piece to piece. My graduate school work, Birds of Appetite, began with general image-based research. I took hundreds of stills from Veronica Hart films, and I plastered my studio with variations of gestures and scenes that were used as the basis for creating my own narratives. I then produced and directed images with myself as the actress, sometimes with a male counterpart. The positioning of bodies was the primary principle. I then chose the location and added costuming where it was appropriate. As the work evolved, the components shifted. Sometimes, I would find a wig or a garment and build a scene around that. At one point, I was really interested in the zoo as a backdrop, so I scouted locations from the camel house to the primate house and then picked costumes and color palettes based on those chosen locations. When I begin staged photography projects, I usually give myself some kind of starting point that helps me organize my brainstorming, such as pulling film stills and building from there. Once I am pleased with the images I am producing, I allow myself to deviate from the process and pick another element as the leading criteria. 

OPP: Your later series Hoodwink also uses custuming and props as it "juxtapose[s] the self-conscious language of portraiture with exaggerated bodily details and urban niche cultural signifiers?" What are the origins of this body of work?

MHC: It’s hard to talk about Hoodwink with out talking about Hard Candy. Both projects happened simultaneously and, to a certain extent, are still in progress. They come out of the very strange racially/ culturally segregated organism that is Chicago. Since finishing graduate school, I have taught photography in the Community College system primarly to nonwhite and economically disadvantaged students. Both bodies of work are very much a product of conversations with my students regarding financial and cultural barriers in the city.

The first iteration of this work, which never made it to a website, was a much more literal collaboration. I asked my male students to generate lists for me of slang they thought would be funny to hear white men say. I then took those lists to an airbrush artist and had him make t-shirts for me with these sayings.Then I went to bars in Wrigleyville and asked white men to pose for me wearing the shirts. The images I made in that four-month period leave me cold; there is something about them that is so stupid, it misses the point of cultural appropriation. The men I photographed were so not in on the joke. I then tried the same idea out at a few lesbian bars, but much to the same end, visually uncoupling and just embarrassing.

Untitled with Cupcake

OPP: How do the signifiers of race, class and gender play out in relation to the portraiture you reference?

HMC: I was watching a lot of hip hop videos at the gym and was so attracted to the aesthetic of the women in them that it made me want to return to female subjects and to play with their tropes of femininity. I wanted to make portraits, I wanted the control of working in a studio, and I liked the scripting of clothing. For me, this is a more natural method of playing with cultural appropriation. Much like with Birds of Appetite, I picked a visual starting place: Mannerist painting, which is seductive, formal and gestural as hell, much like the hip hop videos. I chose to have my models wear accessories similar to women in the videos—acrylic nails, acrylic hair and plastic jewelry—all things that are put on the body that do not represent identity, but point to race and class within an American context. Most clothing came from Rainbow at Chicago and Kedzi, the wigs from a wig store in the same shopping center, weave and graphics by Kara Wabbel of Barbara and Barbara and backdrops from China via Ebay.   

OPP: Is the process of shopping for the shoots as important to you as the photo shoots themselves?

HMC: The process of shopping is one of the necessary details; there is pleasure in the hunt and making the puzzle pieces work. But it is not as important as shooting the picture. 

 

 
OPP: So let's talk about Hard Candy specifically, because that series does something slightly different, but related to what Hoodwink does by focusing in so close to the details of the accessories you mention. It's a series of large-scale macro photographs exploring the aesthetics of nail art in relation to decadent materials like icing, glitter, and candy. The compositions are formal and have an intense lushness and sensuality. They definitely evoke a sense of longing in me. They make me want… abstractly. What I mean is, they awake a desire for things I didn't want before I saw the photographs. Do you have a personal connection to nail art?

MHC: I got my first set of acrylic nails when I was in graduate school shooting Birds of Appetite. I was scripting myself as characters based on ultra-feminine personas from B-movies, porn and country music of the early 1980s, and all those characters had long, oval, sculpted nails. I would sit in the nail salon and wait for my polish to dry, all the while longingly looking at the designs on the hands of women around me. In my first year of teaching college, I began to notice the nuances in nail design on the hands of students and clerks at various stores. I began asking questions about these shops and, with vague intersection coordinates, began to venture into various neighborhoods on the far west side. As Americans, we know the cultural norm. The stereotype is that all nail shops are Asian-run, but what exists in pockets of Chicago is a very different model. Hispanic and African-American women run the shops, operating as independent contractors. I could go on all day about the financial model, but the pertinent part is that Chicago has a very specific nail culture, and shops run by Hispanic and African-American women often use very different styles and techniques than those seen at Asian shops. The style and model comes out of Detroit.

There is a name for every type of design and acrylic add-on, subtraction and cultural element. The titling in each of my photographs is significant. If the women I photographed had had her nails done at an Asian shop, the photograph is titled “Design with…" If the nails come from an African-American shop, then the photograph is titled with the language assigned to the design: money, junk, 3d, inlay, stripes, lines, drag, etc... It’s somewhat annoying to me that nail art has become so popular and really co-opted in the past year, but, again, it isn’t the nail art of or produced by working class women that has become popular. It is nail art for privileged women, done in high-end salons. Nail art in Chicago and the Midwest is its own thing; it’s very insider. I get my nails done in other cities, but you can’t find a tech in New York or Philly who knows how to lay acrylic, inlay or do detail brush work the way you can in Chicago. It’s very specific to the cultural flavor of urban Midwest living.

I tried to photograph nails for a year and a half before I finally broke down and just got my own acrylics. Wearing large acrylic nails changed my ability to make photographs; any women in the know could look at my nails and tell what shop I had been to. The quality of the work is something that really identified me as an insider. I photographed my students and clerical workers at Harold Washington College for a solid two years. Currently, I am still shooting but making more abstract images, with larger color and sparkle fields.   Untitled

2012

14 x 11"

OPP:  Recently, you've been taking portraits on site at the nail salon in Chicago where you have been getting your nails done for years. Could you talk about the shift from the photographs of the nail art itself to photographs of the nail artists and clients who have their nails done?

MHC: I actually started going to a new salon in March, and my tech and I are the same age—most of the techs are in their early 30s. The shop is known for its raucous techs and clientele. Collectively there is good amount of gossiping about men, and there’s a lot of watching of reality TV and commentary on everything. Because the shop is such a social place, asking to photograph in the salon didn’t feel like a major invasion (even though I am white and they are not, we are of very similar economic demographics), and I thought they might be receptive to the idea.

I was looking at Sammy’s, New York, 1940-44 by Lisette Model a good deal this summer. It’s a bar portrait of a women and a solider. These two figures take up the majority of the frame, with small headspace for two male characters in the background. The flash falls on the woman. Her make-up, clothing and hair are highlighted, and there is sweetness to the moment she shares with the sailor. I loved the details of the female character's face and the intimacy shared between two people in this image. I spent a good deal of time thinking of how I could play with this strategy of intimacy and isolation in space. And I spent even more time gazing across the nail table at Mz. Carla, my nail tech. The desire to photograph her and, specifically, to photograph her from that distance of the table became really strong. I liked the space between us and the idea of isolating a figure so that you really didn’t have too much contextual information. It took several weeks of negotiation with Mz. Carla and other women in the shop, but I have now steadily been photographing every to  every other week. I always get my nails done, and then I hang out for another hour or two and photograph. I take 4x6 prints of the shoot from the week before and give them to the techs and to their clients.

OPP: It's interesting to me that you flip back and forth between staged studio photography, where you are in control of everything, and this on-site shooting that requires you to just respond to whatever is happening in front of you. It seems like most photographers do one of the other.

HMC: It’s a very different type of photography than I’ve done in years. The strategy is more in the documentary tradition, but the work is still evolving. In many ways, it’s much harder than making staged photographs. I have to move quickly and recall strategies of street photography as I frame and shoot.  Also, this new work requires a vulnerability and an openness that can, at times, feel awkward. I’m feeling very challenged and rewarded. 

  Baccara at the Starving Artist benefit

Promotional image

2012

OPP: You also have a collaborative practice with Madeleine Bailey known as Baccara. How did this collaboration start? How has it been fruitful?

MHC: Baccara began as a case of mistaken identity with artist Madeleine Bailey. We were both MFA candidates at SAIC and overlapped briefly. A few years later, we were introduced at a party and immediately began to talk about the possibility of collaboration. When we look back on that night, we are still surprised that we proposed such closeness without knowing one another. In the past two years, we have created several bodies of work, done our own homemade residencies in Indiana and created a shared studio practice. This summer we were in a two-person show at Electricity is Magic in Toronto called White Noise Syndrome and are currently 2012-13 BOLT residents at the Chicago Artists’ Coalition with a shared studio space.

To give you something more formal, our artists’ statement reads: “Drawing on mythologies of romance and stories of mistaken identity, our name channels the image of the Black Rose as depicted through the Harlequin romance novel ‘Knights of the Black Rose.’ While the Black Rose is not found in nature, botanists have manipulated the genetics of several varieties of roses, creating a hybrid black rose that actually appears to be a deep red or purple. Appealingly, Baccara is also the name of a successful female Spanish musical duo, whose hits melded disco, pop, and elements of Spanish folk music in the 1970s. With particular affection for ’Yes Sir, I can Boogie’ and ‘Sorry, I'm a Lady,’ we took the name of the genetically modified flower and the campy folk disco band and made it our own: as Baccarra, we are a Chicago-based female duo that produces photographs and works on paper as well as performance and narrative based videos, embracing artifice and the absurd through childhood games and sexual parody.”

Baccara, is a two-headed, red-headed monster, a powerful friendship, a creative union and a business partnership.

OPP: Can you tell us about the collaborative performance Baccara did at the Starving Artist benefit for Chicago Artists' Coalition a few weeks ago?

MHC: Baccara created a sensorial experience in which guests at the Starving Artist benefit selected one of two chocolates provided by Vosges Haut-Chocolat. Guests were then blindfolded and guided to select their preference between each of two scents, sounds and tactile experiences. Three masked assistants (Jackie Rivas, Alysia Alex, and Kaylee Wyant) assisted in this procedure and photographed every aspect of the event. Props used were two scent vials, one ipod with headphones, one brass object and one pheasant pelt. Madeleine and I were dressed to embody each of the two choices, one being baroque the other being “gypsy passion." Approximately 400 chocolates provided by Vosges were hung from the ceiling using a series of empty frames stretched with screen and strung with thread. Given the guests sensorial choices, they were photographed in front of one of two backdrops. The background represented their taste, and they were given a corresponding chocolate: the absinthe truffle was wrapped in burlap and corresponded to the “gypsy passion,” and the lulu truffle (created for this event) was in purple silk and was paired with the baroque background.

 To see more of Helen Maurene's work, please visit hmcooper.com.  

OtherPeoplesPixels: In one sense, you are a documentarian of identity and how our identities are connected to the communities and sub-cultures to which we belong, whether those are subcultures of affinity, as with Gatling (America) and Lady Like, or communities that evolve out of geography, as you examine in West Baltimore Lives. But I wouldn't call you a documentary photographer. How do you identify as an artist?

Bayeté Ross Smith: I would describe myself as a photo-based multimedia and mixed media artist. It is important to me that my work be relevant to everyday life and resonate with people from a broad range of backgrounds, from those in the arts, to those in athletics, business, and politics, to kids in elementary school. I like for my work to build off of every day themes and issues we all face. It is also important that my work be relevant internationally. So I do my best to create work that is activated by the audience in some way, either directly or indirectly. I want the viewers' imaginations to activate the work. Beyond the basic story line I create for them, I want the viewers to have an experience that expands their thinking about specific groups of people, social issues or social interactions. But I don’t just want to be didactic. Ha! Art school word. Seriously though, being didactic is not necessarily wrong, but I want to go beyond that. I want their imaginations to complete the story and complete the experience. That also makes it important for me to base my work in some form of fact or reality. I like to think my work contains elements of truth. I think that gives it a solid foundation that is relevant to people other than just myself.

OPP: What is your relationship to documentary photography?

BRS: I began my career as a photojournalist working for the Knight Ridder Newspaper Corporation. So journalism and documentary photography are at the foundation of how I work artistically. I began my approach to art making by telling stories. These stories always had factual elements to them. I use that perspective as an entry point for most of my work. If I am telling relevant stories, I must think like a journalist. It’s not all about my vision or perspective, though that is definitely part of it. Any journalist that tells you otherwise isn’t being honest. But as journalists, we do try to remove our perspective as much as possible. I am no longer a photojournalist, so I incorporate more of my perspective into my work. I still leave the narrative open, so that the viewers can apply their own personal experience to the experience of the artwork. I also want to make my work an easy “read," but allow for there to be several layers to it as well. So while there are elements on the surface that people can easily recognize and relate to, there are also a variety of issues and questions raised upon further reflection. As I mentioned, I like for there to be significant factual elements in my artwork. I think that makes the work more relevant and more engaging. However, I believe it is important use one's imagination to build on the elements of life we experience on a daily basis.

 

OPP: Your ongoing photographic series Pomp and Circumstance: First Time To Be Adults began in 2005. This is series of portraits taken at proms, which you say are one of the last American rites of passage. When you make these photographs, are you the official prom photographer?

BRS: In most cases I am not the official prom photographer. Generally, I am there to shoot 50-100 fine art portraits as an extra feature for the individual school’s senior prom. I don’t want the hassle of managing photo orders. Each participant gets a free 5”x 7” photograph though.

OPP: How many proms have you been to over the years?

BRS: I have photographed proms in New York, New Jersey and California. It has been a challenging project to continue because I can only shoot it during a few weeks in the spring. It can also be challenging to develop connections with people at the various schools. A lot of times the faculty and administrators don’t take the time to understand what I am doing and how it is a benefit to their students, but also that it doesn’t require any real extra work on their part. Over the years I have shot over a dozen proms, and I am planning to do some shooting in the south and midwest over the next several years to finish up the project. I think it becomes more interesting when you look at images from proms over a period of 10 years.

BRS: I create all the backgrounds based on conversations with each school’s student government. So the background represents that school and their students. The students are encouraged to express themselves in a commemorative fashion. These are not typical prom photos in the sense that the youngsters are allowed to pose however they would like. I encourage them to be creative, but also to be thoughtful because these pictures will represent them for years to come. I am very interested in how identity is formulated, expressed and perceived at the start of adulthood. The prom is still the first official adult night out for many young people in America.

OPP: What I love about this series is the way it reveals that a large part of identity is performance. These teenagers may or may not understand that, and I may or may not have understood it when I was that age. But we've all been teenagers, and as a viewer of the work, I can recall that how I presented myself to the world was immensely important to me. But these pictures don't seem critical of the subjects. Instead, they reveal the pleasure of the performance, and that's what makes them so compelling. Could you talk about the idea of performing identity in your work?

BRS: Performance is a very interesting aspect of identity. We all have a way of wanting to be perceived by others. We perform these aspects of identity on a daily basis. We perform a different identity for our parents, than for our children, than for our business associates, than for our significant others. This becomes more clear when you think of celebrities who have a “public” persona versus a “private” persona, but we all perform identity for the different communities we are a part of and in different situations. This aspect of identity is amazing to me. I think you can see it very clearly when you examine young people performing their adult identity for the first official time and in a commemorative fashion.

However, the performance of identity can also be very subtle. I like examining identity and how it is performed by looking at explicit and implicit forms of this performance. Someone recounting their personal history for example, like in West Baltimore Lives, is more explicit. Recording someone’s favorite song and a memory they want to share, like in my boombox project Got The Power, is a bit more implicit. The way identity is performed is also interesting when you examine people’s preconceived notions about specific performances. A classic example would be racial profiling like in the Trayvon Martin case. You not only have George Zimmerman racially profiling Trayvon and it resulting in Trayvon’s death, but the police department participating in a similar form of profiling, where they didn’t think it was important to conduct a proper investigation, because Zimmerman’s “story checked out." Both the performance of identity and the perception of that performance can be extraordinarily informative. 

OPP: You make a good point about the continuum of the perceptions of identity: on the one end, are the ways we perceive ourselves and choose to participate in performing our racial, cultural and gender identities and, on the other end, is the space of stereotype and prejudice, in which others are perceiving us and making judgements about our performances. In general, I would say your work focuses on the first end of the spectrum. Do you agree? Is that a conscious choice on your part?

BRS: To some degree, yes. I believe it fosters more critical thought and self reflection to allow people to realize their preconceptions on their own. It tends to resonate more when they discover it themselves as opposed to being told by an exterior force. That is why a lot of my work is designed so that it is activated by the viewers' personal experiences. When someone looks at an image from Our Kind of People and realizes they feel similarly about the white guy in the suit as they do about the black guy in the hoody, that means something to them. That is not something I can tell them, or even show them; it's something that they must come to on their own. Similarly, if someone hears a story in one of the Got The Power mix tapes that is similar to a memory they have, or they hear a song in the mix tape that is meaningful to them, they feel a certain connection or kinship with the community that created that mixtape. Somewhere in their mind they feel as if "they are like me." This feeling can't be evoked by showing them facts or statistics.

My work focuses more on the 1st part of the spectrum you describe than on the 2nd for this reason. But I also feel this is the more interesting aspect of the spectrum. It's at the core of individual identity, and, as Americans, we emphasize the individual so much. The other end of the spectrum is interesting as well, because it does not always manifest itself in overtly negative ways. Preconceptions aren't as simple as being good or bad. We need to understand them, why they exist and where they come from. We perform identity based on our roles in various communities. At the core of my work,  I am fascinated by how people interact, both in the socializing we do on a personal level and in the social systems we create. Ultimately the way we envision ourselves dictates how we create and participate in these social systems and personal interactions. I think it is something that is at the core of how we evolve as humans.

 

 OPP: You mentioned Got the Power, which is a public installation, sculpture, oral history, mix tape and a tumblir blog, all rolled into one. It's my favorite piece, by the way. There have been several incarnations of the piece in different locations, each one documenting the people of that community through their stories and the songs they contribute to the mix tape. Could you talk about why you chose the form of the boombox tower?

BRS: The boombox is an iconic object. So even younger people who never actually used cassette tapes recognize the boombox as an icon of traveling music. Personally, I believe there is also recognition of the boombox as an icon of community music. Remember, the proverbial B-Boy or B-Girl with the boombox was not only playing music for himself or herself. They were really playing music for everyone else in the vicinity, even though that wasn’t always by request. So taking this iconic item and using it as a vehicle for creating portraits of different communities through audio just seemed perfect to me.

The process of collecting the boomboxes was just as interesting as collecting the songs and stories. Next time I do this project I will document that process, too. Collecting the boomboxes can be rather expensive, so I always had to be very creative in order to stay on budget. The cost of boomboxes is actually the most significant obstacle to doing this project in more locations. However, I do have plans to expand this project to more locations in the coming year. Anyway, when collecting boomboxes, I find myself researching online and traveling to a bunch of different thrift stores, places that have old electronics, meeting boombox collectors, etc. I come across all types of people in search of them. The aesthetic works the best when the boomboxes are the classic ‘80s-looking boomboxes, but it also interesting to include a wide variety of them. I have seen people stare at the sculptures and count how many different models of boombox in the sculpture they actually owned.

OPP: I particularly love the idea of defining the diversity of a community through the musical tastes of its members. It's really interesting to think about the idea of how race, class, and gender affect our musical tastes, but because there are no images of the people, we have to wonder about our assumptions. I'd love to hear more about the process of collecting the contributions from the members of the communities. What are some of the challenges of making community-based work like this?

BRS: The biggest challenge is getting people to take the time to talk to me about their favorite song(s) and to take the time to share a memory with me. The average person doesn’t always understand that contemporary art can exist within their daily life, so explaining that you are doing an art project doesn’t always register, especially when it's a community-based, public art project. People tend to think art exists in a museum or a gallery, and often they don’t feel like they understand contemporary art. 

The first time I did this project is was a commission for the Laundromat Project in Washington Heights. The sculpture was in a laundromat, so I would talk to people while they did their laundry. Even with that type of “captive" audience, it was challenging. I actually didn’t get anyone to share memories with me. I did get songs though. Interestingly enough, I originally had planned on this project being directly interactive, where people could actually walk up to the sculpture and play whatever they wanted. I soon realized that, even with the proper signage, people weren’t likely to do it. So I decided to take a more archival approach where I had people write their favorite songs on a list, and then I went out and got those songs for the “mixtape."

OPP: Was it easier to get people to participate in any of the other locations?

BRS: In Baltimore, collecting the stories was much easier. I worked with a colleague of mine, Raquel DeAnda, and we combined Got The Power with the West Baltimore Lives project. We used the music part of this one a little differently and had local musicians score the people’s stories about their memories. Collecting boomboxes in Baltimore was much easier than in New York. In Minnesota, it was the first time I created the boombox sculpture outside. So there were significantly different issues related to construction and weatherproofing. However it was great to be able to build on such a large scale! The Minnesota version was created for Franconia Sculpture Park and is still currently installed. So yay! It made it through a Minnesota winter. Since this version was in a sculpture park, I simply would talk to a variety of visitors and collect their favorite songs. This was probably the easiest place to collect songs. You know Minnesota people have that “Minnesota Nice” thing going. Collecting the stories was a little more difficult but not as challenging as in Washington Heights. I used an iPhone app to record all the stories and made sure I mixed them creatively and tried to make there be a correlation between the music and what specific memory was being shared. The other thing about Minnesota that worked to my advantage was that I was in a place, Franconia Sculpture Park, where people came to in order to experience art outside of a gallery. The park has a pretty good reputation in the Twin cities area, so most people I approached were pretty receptive. Therefore, the Minnesota Mixtape was the longest and most extensive. When I did the installation at the New Museum at the Festival of New Ideas, we basically moved the installation from the Laundromat Uptown to the New Museum. This was another case—maybe it’s New York—when I couldn’t get people to record memories. But people were very willing to share songs. Another aspect of this project that is very time consuming is tracking down the different songs people request. Though it is also kind of fun. The mixing is somewhat time consuming, too.

All in all, Got the Power is a very fun project to work on. I think people will find it interesting to listen to the various mixtapes and compare and contrast the musical tastes of people from different regions. Some of what people hear may be surprising.

OPP: What new idea or project are you excited about right now?

BRS: I am very excited about I project I am working on with my cousin Will Sylvester. I can’t go into all the details just yet, but it involves Hip Hop album skits. I think it will be really interesting. And of course I am very excited about my current collaborative project, Question Bridge: Black Males. I am very pleased with how this project has been received at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, as well as at the Brooklyn Museum, Oakland Museum, the Utah MOCA and in Atlanta. We are currently making plans to tour the installation and film version of this project this fall through 2014. So far, it's scheduled to exhibit at the Schomburg Library for research in Black Culture in Harlem, the Contemporary Art Musem of St. Louis, the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Harvey B. Gantt Center in Charlotte, NC, as well as a variety of other locations in 2013. 

Tracey Snelling: When I was young, both my sister and I each had German manufactured Lundby Dollhouses: modern 1970's multi-storied ranch houses with orange carpets, lights and a fish tank that lit up. We played with those nonstop, acting out all sorts of crazy scenarios, such as the house burglar who breaks in and kidnaps the whole family. I also had little adventure figures and a speedboat, and I constructed an island setting in our garden, complete with a lake made by digging a hole, lining it with a black plastic trash bag, and filling it with water. 

OPP: Tell me about the first miniature you made as part of your art practice?

TS: The first small scale sculpture that I made as an artist was a craggy mountain that turned into a lit castle at the top of the rocks, based on a Dorothy Parker poem. I made it during a sculpture class at the University of New Mexico, but destroyed it when I left school. The first surviving small scale sculpture is called Untiltled 1. Inspired by a two dimensional collage I made of a brownstone apartment building missing its front wall, with all the rooms exposed, I constructed a small scale house. Both the inside and outside walls were covered with black and white collage from 1940's Life magazines, and small lights iilluminated each room. I went on to make ten untitled sculptures. These led to my more realistic sculptures--the first one being Motel (2002).

OPP: The buildings in your miniatures are so detailed and also feature LCD screens playing appropriated clips from movies and found videos in the windows. The process of designing, building and detailing must be complex and intricate. Tell us about what goes into the process of creating sculptures like LA Swimming Pool (2011), Stripmall (Los Angeles) (2007) or Mexicalichina (2011). Do you have assistants?

TS: Often, I start with an idea either from my travels, photos I have taken or images I have gathered from the internet. I will make a very rough sketch, then start building. When I build, it's very intuitive, so it's difficult to use assistants until I have the main structures cut out and at least initially staged, waiting for assembly. Once the structures are somewhat determined, I sometimes work with assistants to get the work close to the finishing stages. Still, the works constantly change and evolve as I build them. It often feels like a puzzle that I need to solve, and once it's solved, the work is finished. Working on the small scale sculptures is quite a contrast to constructing or installing my installation work, where I often manage a dozen assemblers, professional builders and/or artists.

OPP: How has the process changed the longer you do it?

TS: Now I know certain building issues to avoid, ways to build the sculptures better and how to make the electronics more easily accessible. Recently, in LA Swimming Pool and Mexicalichina, the sculptures are starting to either grow vertically or break through the structure of the base. I'm excited about this development and look forward to more experimentation with this.

OPP: A piece like Pass Off a Fisheye For a Pearl Trading Post (2010) features the juxtaposition of the commodified versions—the souvenirs and the signage—of Native American and Chinese cultures. It not only reveals a space where the commercial versions of these cultures meet, but hints at the border between the surface and the depth of any culture. There's also an exploration of the border between literal facades and interiors. The miniature sculptures only show the outsides of buildings and give the viewer a hint of what is going on inside, but the life-sized room installations allow the viewer to step inside. Why is it important to explore borders and liminal spaces?

TS: After traveling through China and visiting Chinatowns in different cities in the West, I had been wanting to make a life-size Chinese gift shop (with motion censored lights, sounds, and moving toys). When Rena Bransten Gallery  offered to give me a ten year survey exhibition, I decided it was time to construct it. One of the challenges of a ten year survey was how to lay out the show so that it acted as an encompassing, overall environment, rather than as a show of individual works. I decided to have the exhibit flow from different locations and cultures, which then altered my plans for the gift shop. Instead of being a store with one entrance and solely Chinese gifts, it became a Native American trading post/Chinese gift shop with two entrances. It also acts as a passageway to the last area of the exhibition—China. The combination of these two very different cultures was fascinating to me. When combined in a gift shop, one gets the sense of how these inexpensive gifts and souvenirs from different countries are all probably made in the same factory. It also looks at how we travel as tourists and try to capture the layered, wonderful experiences by buying cheap, little trinkets and how these objects carry much more value than they would initially seem to.

For a while now, I have explored combining larger or life-size scale structures with smaller ones. The first instance of this was in my exhibition Dulces at Wedel Fine Art in London. Big El Mirador (2007) was a seven-foot tall hotel with six synced videos in the hotel windows. At times, the action would move from one window to the other. There were two sets of videos--one set from black and white Spanish Buñuel films, and the other looking at love and drama in present-day American West. I also had a life-size rundown motel room called Room at El Mirador (2007) in the exhibit, which is now part of the David Roberts Art Foundation collection. Since then, I have worked with larger and life-size scale quite a bit. I find that, by having both the small scale and a version of the life-size scale together in one space, the experience of interacting with the subject expands exponentially.

Pass Off a Fisheye For a Pearl Trading Post, as well as many of my other works, are good examples of my exploration and interpretation of culture. I translate culture into visuals that other cultures can understand. In my sculpture Mexicalichina, I have combined Hispanic, Chinese and Californian culture into one work that speaks to people from these cultures as well as from others. Though I enjoy traveling and looking at many different locations and cultures, the intersection of these cultures is even more fascinating to me. At the borders, unusual and interesting mixes start to happen. Unfortunately, clashes between different cultures happen here too. But that's also an important issue to observe.

OPP: What is the role of cacophony in your installations?

TS: When placing my sculptures and works in an installation, I am aware of the soundtracks of the different works and how they will combine. I spend quite a bit of time adjusting each sculpture's volume after placement. When the sounds mix, the feeling of the place that the works represent is captured further. For my exhibit Where Mr. Wong Sent Me at Galerie Urs Meile in Beijing, the theme of my work was my exploration of the places I visited in China. The sounds of local markets, busy streets, a traditional singer and a more modern song, firecrackers and kids yelling and playing combine to capture the feeling of walking down a bustling street in Chongqing or Beijing. At other times, it's necessary for the sounds to be quiet and distinct. I recently installed five new sculptures at an exhibition The Storytellers at the Stenersen Museum in Oslo. Each of my sculptures was based on a different literary work of Latin authors. The works were very individual and the sounds were more important as individual pieces than as a group, so it was necessary to adjust the balance so that one did not affect the others.

OPP: My favorite part of an installation like Woman on the Run (2008) is the layering that creates a sense of seeing a single idea from multiple angels, all at once. What I mean is that it's hard to figure out what came first, because everything feeds into everything else. The video footage acts as backdrop for the life-sized motel rooms and miniature sculptures. The comic book features stills from the video. The miniature sculptures feature portions of the videos in their windows. The sculptures also act as backdrops for images in the comic. Could you talk about this layering?

TS: This layering is an extension of all of my artwork, in one way or another. A photo I take of a motel might evolve into a small sculpture, which I then film and incorporate into an installation that might have several other aspects of that theme or even that particular motel. This layering in my work speaks to the idea of reality and how everything is subjective. There are so many nuances to each and every thing and experience in life. By adding layer upon layer to my works, I'm able to add different meanings and create a fuller, more engaging experience.

OPP: How does the installation of Woman on the Run change every time you install it?

TS: The idea initially came when I was making a series of photographs to accompany my installation Another Shocking Psychological Thriller to be shown at Lokaal 01 in the Netherlands. I titled the photo series Woman on the Run and these fed my ideas when I was invited to write a proposal for Selfridges in London.

After the Selfridges exhibition, a friend and collaborator Idan Levin stepped in to act as producer and help me travel the installation in the U.S. We decided that it would be much more  interesting if the installation kept changing and evolving as we showed it. Since it's made of many components, we've been able to set the installation up differently in each location. Woman on the Run has traveled to Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, 21c Museum in Louisville, the Frist in Nashville, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, and is now showing at the Virginia MOCA. We have added the comic book in Louisville, a 16 foot billboard with projection in Nashville, a new projection and video in Winston-Salem, and our newest creation is a life-size fortune teller's storefront added in Virginia Beach. The Mystic Eye, as it is called, has a crystal ball that plays video related to the character's past or future. Old gypsy music plays in the background. If one calls the phone number on the front of the building, they are met with a special message.

We also added a performance element during the opening. A young woman playing the character "Veronica" sat forlornly on the bed in the motel room, occasionally taking a swig of whiskey from the bottle in her hand. She also roamed over to the Mystic Eye, sitting and gazing into the crystal ball. In addition, we had a "detective" character who lurked behind the buildings and flipped a coin. Considered more as live sculptures than actors, the performers added a whole new dimension to the experience of the installation. We are now in the final stages of completing a new extension of Woman on the Run called Woman on the Run Redux. It's a site-conforming mystery treasure hunt that can be installed in various places, such as hotels and museums, with props as clues and tags that one can scan with their iPhone to see related videos. It can be shown independently of the original installation, or in conjunction with it.

 

OPP: Your most recent film, Nothing, premiered at the San Francisco International Film Festival this year. Was this your first foray into making a film which screens in a more traditional way, as opposed to a film or video for part of an installation?

TS: This was my first endeavor into more traditional film, although Nothing would still be considered an art film or somewhat avant-gard by the general film viewer. While I writing it, I wanted to capture the quiet, long, slow, burning hot days in the desert combined with the drudgery of being stuck in one's life. There is no dialogue, and most of the sounds are ambient. The pacing of the film is deliberately slow, with the exception of one small part.

OPP: What was different about working that way?

TS: It was quite a different experience making this film, as opposed to building sculptures or an installation. Working as the director with a crew of seven is much more of a collaborative effort, even though we were all working to achieve my vision. By having professionals do what they do best, I was very happy with how the film turned out and how quickly we were able to achieve this. I definitely look forward to making more films, though the next one will most likely be feature length.

When I initially came up with the idea for Nothing I envisioned it showing in a museum space, along with sculptures, installation, and a photo series that relates to the movie. The film festivals have been a good experience. Besides the San Francisco International Film Festival, it has also shown at several other festivals, and will be included in the Thessaloniki International Film Festival in November. I plan to develop the exhibition and its components, and to travel the show to museums in the next few years.

To view more of Tracey's work, please visit traceysnelling.com.

Untitled

2012

Pen and ink on paper

Plastic viewers, 35mm slide transparencies, metal armature

Photo by Tad Fruits, IMA

OPP: Have you always been an interdisciplinary artist?

JGL: Throughout my life, I was evolving into an interdisciplinary artist, but I didn’t really know it until about 2008. I was fulfilling my exhibition obligations for a Lilly Endowment Creative Renewal Arts Fellowship that I’d been awarded the year before. This fellowship grant encouraged travel, and I went to Germany and Poland to explore my family’s origins. In Poland I made a short video for my upcoming exhibition, and it really wasn’t a very good film. However, I also made a successful, interactive installation about memory, an animation, some paintings, a comic strip and some collages. It was around this time that I really began to think, focus and create in a new way. I fully embraced an interdisciplinary approach to conceiving and making work, and it seemed like the most perfect, complete and natural thing in the world to do, like breathing. And like breathing, it didn’t feel like a voluntary choice, but rather that the most intrinsic and essential element of my artistic existence had come home to roost. An interdisciplinary practice was going to allow me to create layered, complex, yet accessible work that would rely upon all of my skills as a visual artist. At the same time, it would permit me to integrate my interest in writing, filmmaking and performing, as well as tap into my longtime passion for fiction, history, politics and culture. Kansas City has been an excellent fit for me, and I’ve lived here for a little over four years. I have found the arts community to be very supportive of my interdisciplinary practice and full of opportunity.

OPP: Personal and collective memory, history, revisionism and historical bias are recurring themes in your work. Did you ever consider being an historian? How much is historical research part of your art practice?

JGL: Recently writer/filmmaker Errol Morris was quoted as saying, “I despise versions of postmodernism that suggest that there is no such thing as truth, that the truth is up for grabs, relative and subjective… Narrative does not trump all; it does not trump the facts. The facts are immutable. You may not be able to apprehend them or they may be elusive, but they are there.”

I create narrative inventions to attempt to undo omissions, falsehoods and revisions that occur all the time. I’m seeking the truth, with the emphasis on seeking. Of course, I realize that because I use invention, it may seem as though I’m doing the very same thing that I criticize and question in others. However, my intention is not to reconfigure or rewrite the truth, but to make work that gets closer to it.

Although public and private narratives, history, revisionism and historical bias are definitely recurring themes in my work, I have never considered being an historian in spite of the extensive amount of historical research that goes into my work. I think of myself as an interdisciplinary artist whose work is conceptual. Historic and cultural research is a crucial part of my artistic practice. It can be very time-consuming, because my work depends on getting the facts and the details right. This means that when I’m creating a family tree for Hansel and Gretel, I am reading about such things as fraternal orders in Germany prior to World War I, 18th century spellings of German names, German emigration to the United States, the formation of the Progressive Party in Kansas and the flu pandemic of 1917. In Huckleberry Finn, both for the video and the family tree, I researched the early Black Press in the Midwest, lynching in the United States, abolitionists in Missouri, Mark Twain’s childhood friends, the history of slave names, the growth of African American churches and indentured servants. For The Lone Ranger’s video, family tree, postcard album and family artifacts, some of the subjects I studied are: the Texas Rangers, 19th century horse and cattle ranches, volcanoes in Turkey in the 1700s, John Muir and Sarah Bernhardt’s performance in Kansas City in 1906.

I spent many months on The Last Descendants project, because every invention must ring true in order to successfully create suspension of disbelief. This is crucial. If I don’t succeed in making you believe that I am interviewing the last living relative of The Lone Ranger, the whole thing will fall apart. I also must find all of the historical and factual information I need, so that when I reference a Civil War battle, the sinking of the Titanic or the Spanish Flu Pandemic, everything is correct.

Memory Cloud, detail

OPP: Many of your works reference the ways we glorify moments and places from history, by using materials associated with tourism like souvenir plastic photo viewers, as in Memory Cloud (2009). I'd like to hear more about these installations.

JGL: Memory Cloud is an interactive installation that I created for the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 2009. It was based on a small prototype I’d created for my Lilly Endowment Creative Renewal show in 2008. I was thinking about what Susan Steward describes in On Longing, as “the conventional view of time in the everyday lifeworld” and how she contrasts traditional, linear notions with a model “offered by fiction” in which “the time of everyday life is itself organized according to differing modes of temporality, modes articulated through measurements of context and intensification." My attachment to little, plastic, souvenir viewers goes back to my having received one that included an image of me sitting on a horse during a childhood visit to a dude ranch. Every time I looked into the viewer, I felt as though I’d instantly entered into a private, miniature world and that I was miniature, too. It occurred to me that I could create something that captured the vast, shifting, non-verbal aspects of memory by creating a large, amorphous cloud comprised of hundreds of these plastic viewers while using them as sculptural elements. At the same time, I thought I could articulate memory’s visual and narrative specifics in the images within each one. I figured that this interactive installation would inevitably provoke memories and prompt conversation, as participants verbally shared their remembrances with one another. I also thought that many of the people who looked into the little viewers would engage in silent, private recollections as they, too, entered into tiny worlds of remembrance.

In creating Memory Cloud, I was also thinking about the Midwest, where I’d felt welcomed and where I've made my home for over 15 years. I was interested in what I was observing about how Midwesterners tried to describe themselves. It seemed to me that people in the middle of the country had a harder time defining their regional identity than people living on either coast. I wondered if the coastal oceans had buffeted definitions in place for those living closer to the edge.

During my Creative Renewal Arts Grant trip to Poland and Germany, I got closer to my own identity and family history, as well as to the duality of my Jewish and non-Jewish heritage. I visited Tarnow, where my Polish Jewish relatives had been murdered and Leipzig, where some of my German Lutheran family members had supported the Nazi regime. In Memory Cloud, I became very interested in creating a visual, interactive installation that would be simultaneously poignant and provocative. I also wanted to create something that people could touch, so that as they held one of the plastic viewers, each holding a unique, found image of Midwesterners from the 1940s to the 1970s, it would fold them into the enormity of their own histories and associations. I believed that every time someone picked up a plastic viewer and viewed an image, his or her own set of memories would be aroused and appear intact, or in fragments, or hardly at all.

I also care deeply about how photography captures the “everydayness” that Harry Harootunian writes about in his essay “Shadowing History." The taking of a photograph is so often an effort to create memories, and Harootunian acknowledges that in order to remember, we must transform an experience into something that can be retrieved at a later date. I also think that my use of found photographs in this and in other work is using signification and re-signification to acknowledge the overwhelming presence of beauty, sadness and death in all experience.

OPP: And what about the postcards in Panoramic Postcard Installation (2010)?

JGL: I used many pieces of vintage postcards to create new images that looked like old ones. I’ve always seen postcards as tidbits of public history and culture. I've always liked them, not just as souvenir items, but also because of the incongruity of personal messages being sent in a very public manner. So I embarked on using portions of found postcards to augment their seemingly innocuous purpose and transform them into provocative statements about our American past. I believe that souvenirs are historical and cultural representations and that a picture postcard of the Old South or a miniature Berlin Wall inevitably shrinks any struggle with meaning. I was determined to use the same form and appearance to counter this, and I wanted to make pleasant-looking postcards as a way to seduce the viewer into a challenging conversation.

I question what role tourism plays in our understanding of public history, and I am suspicious of glorification. Perhaps this stems from what I understand about the relationship between glory and power and how aggrandizement of position, policy or purpose can wreak tragic havoc upon people, places and things. Remember my discovery about The Trail of Tears. In my Panoramic Postcard, Frederick Douglass Park, Valor, Virginia, I created a tribute to Frederick Douglass that includes depictions of a statue of George Washington from a Kansas City, Missouri park; a refurbished slave auction house from South Carolina; images of Newport mansions; and many other pieces of postcards from all over the United States. By putting them together into a fictional depiction of a tourist site, I explore how public history is described and how commercialism contributes to a limited understanding of what actually happened. This postcard addresses the North’s role in the slave economy of the South, Washington’s flawed and limited definition of democracy, and commercial tourism’s efforts to turn a slave auction site into a spruced up tourist attraction. Here I investigate our inclinations to redefine what actually happened in order to forget what actually happened.

The back portions of these postcards contain image descriptions that mimic typical postcard language. It seems to me that the traditional language on postcards has often upheld prevailing notions that circumvent the truth. For example, Splendid Country Roads, Refuge Co., South Dakota, is a postcard that depicts Indians sitting by the side of the road near their teepees and also shows two touring cars with sightseers taking in the beautiful, pristine views. On the far right side of the postcard is the Statue of Liberty. The postcard also shows two roads, split in the middle by trees. The description reads: "Touring by automobile is a fine way to explore America’s natural beauty and also visit with Indians who sell their handmade crafts."

I certainly think it is important to acknowledge the role of irony in my work, for the implication is that the land in the postcard was stolen from the Indians who are living on the side of the road, the cars are intruding upon nature, the statue of liberty is replicated in a cornfield, and the split road is a metaphor for two avenues of justice: one for those who have power and the other for those who don’t.

OPP: You've had work on billboards and flags and in the Indiana State Park. And you did a collaborative performance called Everybody Loves a Parade (2008) as part of On Procession, an art parade sponsored by the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Could you talk about your experiences making public art and why you chose some of the forms and venues you chose?

JGL: Most of the public art I have created has been in response to a call for work. The exceptions were two Girls Brigade (2007) solo exhibitions, one in Chicago and one in Minneapolis. The Girls Brigade project explores child warriors, Celtic history and the use of signage to create group affiliation. In Chicago, near the former NavtaSchultz Gallery, Girls Brigade figures, flags and a banner were exhibited on Lake Street. I was really happy about showing this work in Chicago, where I was able to create an alley filled with Heraldic flags and place figures of the Girls along a very busy street. In Minneapolis, several Girls Brigade figures hung on the exterior wall of Soo Visual Art Center’s building. In both of these cities, I think many people saw the work, because they happened to be walking or driving by it. I like the serendipity in this. I also like that public work becomes part of the environment. In making outdoor work, I have explored commercial products such as polyester banner and sign material, Sintra, and marine-grade plywood.

In 2008 I’d been reading Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion, and I was thinking about Lippmann’s writing about democracy, partial truths, stereotypes and the public’s lack of information. I was paying particular attention to the chapter, "The World Outside and the Picture in Our Heads," which explores how we form world-views and beliefs through erroneous and partial information as well as through limited direct experience. I had also been investigating the possibility of being able to wear a video on my body as an emphatic way to express personal opinions in public settings. In 2008, when the Indianapolis Museum put out a call for work for On Procession, I collaborated with another artist, and we created a two-person performance piece for the parade called Everybody Loves A Parade. This work consists of matching military, camouflage outfits and DVD chest packs that display identical video compilations of historic, military parade footage and youth parades set to the music of "The Washington Post March" by John Philip Sousa. The two of us marched in the parade, while wearing the outfits and DVD players. Everybody Loves A Parade explores the glorification of war through military parades and suggests that most of us understand little about the past, because we did not experience it. Because we are tempted to emphasize the most appealing aspects of history, we often compartmentalize events and shape them to fit preconceived ideas.

Creating work for a specific site or show can catapult something I’ve been thinking about into becoming reality and prompt me to think about my materials. For example, in responding to a call for work, such as The Dining Room Project in Kansas City at The Paragraph Gallery and The Epsten Gallery, I was able to create You Never Dine Alone, a video installation about the mundane, conflicted and poignant interactions we have with others when we dine and about memories of food. I created an interactive installation consisting of a table, two chairs and two place settings, one for a gallery guest and the other for the monitor that displayed a looped video. The video contained 18 brief segments of individuals eating and speaking about subjects that range from the death of a grandfather to a school cafeteria food fight.

OPP: The Last Descendants (2011) is a video series and installation, in which you interview the living descendants of the fictional characters Huck Finn, Hansel and Gretel, and The Lone Ranger. The interviews use fiction and humor to talk about how the personal biases of individuals affect the way we remember the past. To me, the implication is that history is always a kind of fiction, because there is always some perspective left out. What were your intentions with this series?

JGL: In The Last Descendants, I do use public history, fictional narrative and humor to explore how we understand, describe and remember personal and public events. I am interested in how these personal and public narratives get constructed. I use historical facts, fiction, invention and the suspension of disbelief to question what we know and how we know it. For example, in the Hansel and Gretel video, the male character John talks about a relative in glowing terms, until his sister Diane corrects him by stating that the man was a “deserter” during the Revolutionary War. In another reference to a relative, he skirts the issue of a Nazi affiliation. John also brags about belonging to a fraternal order in Germany, and he fails to say that it doesn’t include women until asked by the interviewer. In Huckleberry Finn, the surprise is that Huck’s living relatives are African-American and that Huck and Jim were half-brothers, because Huck’s father raped a slave. This information counters the vague background that Mark Twain gave Huck and emphasizes the horrors of slavery. In addition to having the characters in these videos invent, color or obscure their familial history, I want to place personal stories in the context of larger fields of time and place. I do this somewhat in the video interviews, but I especially focus on it in the large, family trees that include many decades of war, epidemics, immigration, persecution, as well as indications of triumph, love, faith and courage. Both the videos and family trees are provocative and underscore my feeling that personal and public history is largely interpreted. It depends on who is telling the story, how the story is being told and why. Although I invent things, my intention is quite a different one from those who deny the Holocaust or question President Obama’s birth certificate.

It is important that I also include information on the family trees that isn’t usually included, such as murder, rape and robbery. I use the suspension of disbelief to create a hybrid of fact and fiction and to show that what we think we know about people, events, personal friends or public figures may not be the truth. The display case containing The Lone Ranger’s personal possessions and family heirlooms addresses the use of objects to create personal and public narratives about the past. These objects arouse our nostalgia in a way that can interfere with getting closer to the truth, but they also provide a great deal of joy and solace, as they let us touch and hold bits of history in our hands. It felt critical to me to use familiar fictional characters as a point of departure, because this provided rich, familiar ground for exploration and development. I believe that by using these characters, I made it easy to engage the audience in work that addresses challenging subject matter.

OPP: Your work is funny, but not stand-up-comedian funny. It's more wry-smile funny. I was totally amused with the defensive reaction of the Lone Ranger's great-great-great niece when she is asked what she knows about his relationship with Tonto. She says, "Look, I've heard this homosexual thing before, and don't get me wrong. I have nothing against gays. I saw Brokeback Mountain and I liked it… but I would like to set the record straight." How is comedy perfect for talking about important social issues like racism and homophobia? What are the potential pitfalls?

JGL: I’m really glad you like the humor in my work. It is important to me to use humor and irony, when I can, to address difficult subjects. I think it is easier to see things about ourselves, if we see them in others first, and laughter just helps that along. I don’t usually use the words “funny” or “comedic” to describe my work, although some may say the work is funny or comedic at times. The premises are serious, but I like to use humor to create believable characters. I couldn’t resist setting the Lone Ranger’s great-great-great-niece up the way I did to reveal her feelings about LGBT issues, because we are still dealing with these civil rights and and humanitarian concerns in the United States. I also like to debunk heroes like The Lone Ranger, not because I don’t like them, but because I’m cautioning us to examine how much power and adulation we give to any one person. In Huckleberry Finn, we chuckle when one of the sons exclaims that he isn’t going to receive a “Finn Family Fun” t-shirt anytime soon, because the white side of the family isn’t interested in having a family reunion with the black side of the Finn family. I am clearly fabricating this narrative. However, we know that this kind of prejudice continues to exist.

The risk I take in using humor and irony to address political and social issues is that I might not be effectively humorous or ironic. If I miss my mark, then nothing will work. I think humor and irony can be respectful and still potent. Here again, I don’t think I’m writing comedic scripts. I think I use humor and irony to illuminate important questions and issues, and the issues are paramount.

OPP: What new projects are you excited about?
 
JGL: The first project I’d like to describe is the one I’m very excited about and currently working on. Last year I received an Andy Warhol Foundation Rocket Grant through the auspices of The Charlotte Street Foundation and The Spencer Art Museum. I am creating a video called NV in KC (Envy in Kansas City). I created a fictional narrative and use documentary-like interviews to explore envy among artists and institutions in Kansas City. My intention is to explore a subject that is rarely discussed among artists and to help define some of the creative challenges that artists face. In this project, I use humor to deal with some of the difficult aspects of envy. Local artists, musicians and performers are participating in this project, as well videographers and lighting and sound crews. We are completing the first edit now, and we hope to have the project finished by late fall.

After I complete NV in KC, I’ll be working on an installation, thinking about a short video and exploring some 2-D work that has been on the back burner.

To view more of Judith's work, please visit judithglevy.com.