This is Granny Smith, 2018. Acrylic on poplar. 52" x 52" x 13." Photo credit: Margot Geist

EMI OZAWA's skillfully crafted sculptures show thoughtful attention to line, form and color. The simplicity of her geometry—repeating circles, lines and squares—belies the complexity of her thematic concerns. In kinetic sculptures and wall-hung sculptures that change dramatically as the viewer walks past, she explores of the relationship between looking, touching and moving. Emi studied at Joshibi University of Art and Design and Tokyo School of Art. She earned her BFA in Craft/Wood at The University of the Arts (Philadelphia) and her MFA in Furniture Design at Rhode Island School of Design. She has exhibited widely throughout the U.S, in London and in Tokyo. In January 2018, Emi's solo show Follow The Line opened at Richard Levy Gallery. The gallery will also take her work to Art Miami in December 2018. Her work was included in the group show Parallax : A RAiR Connection Exhibition (2018) at the Roswell Museum and Art Center, alongside Featured Artist Justin Richel. In 2019, Emi will be an artist-in-residence at Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she lives and works.

OtherPeoplesPixels: You studied graphic design and furniture design. How did that inform the work you make now? 

Emi Ozawa: while I was working as a graphic designer, the feeling of wanting to create 3D objects by my hand grew. I had the idea that objects could be kinetic and interactive. The reason why I started learning woodworking was to make my sculpture steady for touching and moving. I was interested in furniture as objects that have a built-in invitation to touch and move. I also wanted to learn about wood. I love the feel and the texture of this material.

Square on Square, 2010. Acrylic on apple plywood with brass. 19.75" x 20" x 3". Photo credit : Margot Geist.

OPP: What led you away from functional objects toward visual art?

EO: From the start, I was combining my sculptural ideas into furniture. I wanted my work to be inviting. You can sit, you can open a door. Its function was secondary for me. For instance, Bird table’s surface is very limited. My ‘box form’ sculptures—like Wound Up(2001) and bOX (2001)—have very small inside spaces. Each piece has very unique way of opening and closing. They needed to be explained by someone present, sometimes a piece would be displayed in a case, all of this intruded on the viewer’s full experience. Gradually I felt that I wanted my work to be independent like a painting on a wall. Viewers are invited to look and have an experience of interaction without touching. Further more, I wanted to focus on surface painting more than spending too much energy with building mechanical parts and joints.

Red Bridge, 2004. Acrylic on apple plywood with brass. 15" x 15" x 2.5". Photo credit : Mark Johnston.

OPP: In your statement, you mentioned that play is a central concern of your work. Early kinetic works like Triangle Train (2009) or See Saw 2 (2002) could be touched. What makes an interactive work a sculpture versus a toy? Does that distinction matter to you at all?

EO: Yes. This distinction matters to me, but I can’t help it if others blur the line between the two experiences. Making art which applies itself to our instinct to play is the connection I am seeking. I think a toy is for the users—user-centered. That’s why a lot of toys are made safe for certain ages, for certain development, or there is a room for how to approach the toy.

Speaking about my interactive sculpture, there is a very specific way that a viewer can interact with the piece. When it’s activated, it shows a movement or a surprise which I created to share. So it is artist-centered.

Rain on Rain, 2016. (front, left and right side views). Acrylic on poplar. 48" x 28.5" x 2." Photo credit: Margot Geist.

OPP: Your wall sculptures are very much about visual perspective. They change if you look at them from different points of view. Is this pure abstraction? Or do you think of these abstractions as metaphors?

EO: I think a lot of them are pure abstraction using color and geometry, but some are developed from my response to nature. For example, I considered rain drops falling in Rain on Rain (2016), the moon in a night sky in Once in A Blue Moon (2014) and the vivid colors I see during Summer season in One Summer Day Takes a Walk (2013). I like working with squares and circles because they are my favorite language. They tend to relate, and I use them towards what you are talking about in terms of visual perspective. 

Drifting Mist (two views), 2015. Acrylic on poplar. 15" x 15' x 1.875". Photo credit : Margot Geist.

OPP: When I first looked at works like Kaki to Yuzu (2018) and Blue Line (2017), I thought of variations on the Modernist grid and the textile grid of weaving, as well as an accumulations of ladders against the wall. Then I googled Amidakuji (2016) and had a whole new perspective. Can you explain for non-Japanese speakers? 

EO: Amidakuji is a common game of chance in Japan. You just need a pen and a paper. You draw vertical lines of participants number which could be two to however many. Then add horizontal lines in between the vertical lines, write prizes or numbers at the bottom end of the line and hide that detail. Each player can add more horizontal lines. Now the game begins. Each participant picks a line. You track the path downwards from the top. Following the line, it crosses sometime with other path but never overlap. When you reach the bottom, you find the prize. When I started drawing this idea, I thought everybody knew about it. Then soon I found out it is not common in USA. As far as the purpose of the game goes, picking the shortest straw might do something similar.

Amidakuji, 2016. Acrylic on mahogany. 54" x 46.5" x 1.25." Photo credit : Jeff Krueger

OPP: How important is it that viewers understand this reference when looking at the work?

EO: I structured these three pieces based on this game and applied this rule to color these lines. I wouldn’t be making these works without knowing Amidakuji. But it can be looked at as a sculpture without its references. Though it is not a must, I mention its inspiration because it is part of it for me, as is this work’s relation to the Modernist grid you mention. It is interesting to see similarities in Mondrian’s structure and this game.    

Five Blue Circles, 2018. Paper on board. 10" x 15" x 2.5" frame.

OPP: Many recent wall sculptures are made of paper instead of wood. Is this a new material in your practice? 

EO: I have been making paper models for 30 years. It was for my furniture, as it is now for my sculpture. From drawing to paper model to wood sculpture. . . this has been my process. Paper model-making is an important step for me to see and understand three dimensional aspects before working on a piece in actual size and material. I always enjoy working with paper just like I do with wood.

I have an upcoming residency  in 2019 at Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where there will be an opportunity for me to do some 3D lithography. Because this work will be on paper, I was looking at my paper models and drawings and started experimenting with paper towards the work as a finished art object. 

Sugar Plum, 2018. Paper, tape on board. 13" x 13" x 1.5" framed.

OPP: Can you talk about the material differences between wood and paper?

EO: Paper doesn’t have thickness like wood. Paper is foldable and flexible unlike wood. Paper is more fragile than wood. There are many differences between the two, with what you can and cannot do, yet my paper and wood pieces are alike though in different scales.

Some ideas echo in-between wood pieces and paper pieces. My newest paper pieces are inspired by my wall wood sculpture that changes its look from the different perspectives. I found it is interesting that the reverse process is happening. Adding paper to my materials, my play ground of ideas is expanding. 

To see more of Emi's work, please visit emiozawa.com.

Featured Artist Interviews are conducted by Chicago-based artist  Stacia Yeapanis.  When she’s not writing for OPP, Stacia explores the relationship between repetition, desire and impermanence in cross-stitch embroideries, remix video, collage and impermanent installations.  She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where received her MFA in 2006 Stacia was a 2011-2012 Artist-in-Residence at  BOLT in Chicago.  Her solo exhibitions include shows at Siena Heights University (Michigan 2013), Heaven Gallery (Chicago 2014), the Annex Gallery at Lillstreet Art Center (Chicago 2014), The Stolbun Collection (Chicago 2017) and Indianapolis Art Center (Indianapolis 2017) and Robert F. DeCaprio Art Gallery (Palos Hills, Illinois 2018). During summer 2018, Stacia created  Renunciation Reliquary as a one-night installation for Chicago Artist Coalition's annual benefit Work in Progress and was an Artist-in-Residence at Facebook. She is currently preparing for a solo show titled Practice, which will open in April 2019 at Kent State Stark.

Machinations, 2018. Neon (mercury), graphite on paper. 122cm x 111cm.

Interdisciplinary artist ALICIA KING explores the relationship between the human body, technology and the always-imminent Future. Some sculptural works combine the visual language of the religious reliquary with living human cells. Other text-based works, rendered both in neon and in balsa wood that mimics the form of neon, highlights the false dichotomy of nature and technology. Alicia earned her BFA in 2005, followed by her PhD in Fine Arts in 2009 at the University of Tasmania, Hobart Art School. She exhibits internationally and has been included in group shows in Germany, the United States, Japan, Vietnam and Australia. Her work is included in the Fehily Contemporary Collection and the permanent collection at The Museum of Old and New Art (Hobart, Tasmania). Alicia is preparing for two solo exhibitions in 2019 in Melbourne: Our Long Conversation with the Sun at Linden New Art and Alien Nature at C3 Contemporary Art Space. Alicia lives and works in Melbourne, Australia.

OtherPeoplesPixels: What’s the relationship between biology, technology and spirituality, as you see it?

Alicia King: The spiritual link is interesting, and it can be culturally specific. For example, Japanese culture has a history of animism that influences their approach to robotics, but I’m not sure Western culture really makes that connection. I think the technological can seem in opposition to the spiritual because we generally equate the spiritual with nature, and tech is often seen as the opposite of nature. I wouldn’t say I’m overtly interested in spirituality, but I guess I allude to those ideas through exploring subjectivity and embodiment in biological materials, the sublime and phenomenological in nature and technology. 

In a way, the reliquary pieces play upon fake miracles of technology and the idea of science as fulfilling the mythology of the future.

Slip me some skin, 2012. Glass, human tissue (donated by anonymous donor), fibroblast cells (HaCaT cell line) agar, resin, flock. Detail.

OPP: Yes, I was specifically thinking about the reliquaries like Slip Me Some Skin (2009) and Delicacies of the Dead (2009). Works like these refer to the Medieval Christian practice of memorializing dead saints by their body parts, which were intended as devotional objects that link human and God. What does it mean to create reliquaries for human cells from anonymous donors? 

AK: How we deal with bodily materials once they are outside of their host body is really varied and fascinating. When used by industry, tissue is generally anonymous, objectified and considered to be a waste product, though it has incredible financial value. The individual origins of the tissue are removed and it is used like any other raw material commodity. 

In the case of cells from anonymous sources, the use of the relic applies a sense of subjectivity to bodily material, and places focus upon the identity of the tissue through the limited information available about its origins. It’s also used to make viewers aware of how tissue is used and the ethical issues involved. There are online tissue banks where researchers purchase cells and tissue, and that tissue is sourced from individuals—it’s a pretty wild concept.

The Absence of the Void. 2009. Human tissue (the artist's cultured skin cells from tissue taken via biopsy), polyurethane, flock, acrylic. Detail.

OPP: Is it a different experience when you use tissue from your own biopsies?

AK: With my own tissue, I was exploring an experience of self and whether working with my own tissue would effect my sense of embodiment. When was a teenager I had facial surgery that changed my face significantly and ruptured my sense of feeling in sync with my body. It also got me thinking about the psychological effects of adding and subtracting from the body with the living materials of other humans and animals, and really started me on this body of research. 

The Vision Splendid, 2010. Portable bioreactor housing living human tissue (the artist's own skin cells and tissue, taken via biopsy). Installation view. 3m x 2m x 2m.

OPP: In works like The Ephemeral Flesh Project (2010) or The Vision Splendid (2010), what are the practical logistics of working with bio matter as an art material?

AK: Working with living systems (human cells and tissue) is challenging and hard to describe. It’s a really layered and subjective experience—you can’t help being aware that the material you’re working with is alive, and that it comes from a human/s body. It’s also really temperamental, you can’t control the physical or aesthetic outcome like you can with non-living materials, you have to let the material guide you, and it’s prone to illness, infection and death. It’s a very strange process. 

Psychic Nature. 2017. Cast pigmented polyurethane, airbrushed metal sheet, magnetic material. 40cm x 40cm x 30cm.

OPP: In 2009 you earned a PhD for “Transformations of the Flesh; Rupturing Embodiment through Biotechnology, an artistic exploration of relationships between biotech practices and the physical, ethical and ritual body.” Tell us about this thesis project. Was it written? What do you mean by “the physical, ethical and ritual body?”

AK: My PhD explored how artists contribute to dialogue around the influence of biotech developments on our sense of humanness. The thesis comprised a body of artwork and a 40,000 word exegesis. 

I was looking at different relationships that we have with the body in society.  Firstly, the way that bodily material is physically used in science and medicine, i.e. how it is physically processed and/or manipulated; how it’s regulated in an ethical and legal context, in relation to commodification of bodily materials, i.e. who has rights over our bodily materials, and what can be done with them. And lastly the history of ritual attitudes to the body, in the sense of the emotive and subjective relationship we have to our bodies, living and dead, through reference to the historic bodily relics. We conceptualize and deal with the body with such conflicting and irrational perspectives. And I’m continually surprised by how disinterested people seem to be about what is happening to our bodies in science and legislation. 

Natural Phenomena. 2015. Detail. Biological amulet levitating above a cast of the artist's bust. The amulet rotates as it levitates, seemingly propelled by telekinesis.

OPP: Tell us why you chose to get a PhD and how it’s affected the visual art you now make?

AK: It’s more common in Australia for artists to have PhDs. Depending on your arts practice, it can help your work to be taken more seriously. My work has always been a fairly even mix of practice and research, but it helped me access University facilities and personnel in other faculty areas for research projects that I’m not sure would’ve happened if I’d been a random artist. Australia is pretty antiquated in its attitude towards artists, so it helps to level the playing field between artists and researchers/academics.

Clone the Future. 2015. Hand-carved balsa wood. Detail.

OPP: You’ve recently been making text-based works in balsa wood —Why Die and Clone the Future, both from 2015—and neon? What’s the relationship between the two materials and the text? Does one address your conceptual interests more effectively?

AK: I find neon really interesting as a pop-cultural signifier of hi-tech and the ‘future.’ Neon is also biological, made from glass and natural gases. It can be seen as an atmospheric microcosm, much like the Aurora Borealis gases in the atmosphere, condensed in a glass tube and activated by electricity. So for me, it really embodies the relationship between nature and tech.

Hand-carving neon text in a natural material like balsa wood adds a layer of ambiguity to it, yet at the same same time directly relates the natural with the technological. 

Language also plays an important role in cultural hierarchies. The text alludes to pop culture and biotech in order to play with some of the iconic mythologies about science and the future.

Featured Artist Interviews are conducted by Chicago-based artist  Stacia Yeapanis.  When she’s not writing for OPP, Stacia explores the relationship between repetition, desire and impermanence in cross-stitch embroideries, remix video, collage and impermanent installations.  She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where received her MFA in 2006 Stacia was a 2011-2012 Artist-in-Residence at  BOLT in Chicago.  Her solo exhibitions include shows at Siena Heights University (Michigan 2013), Heaven Gallery (Chicago 2014), the Annex Gallery at Lillstreet Art Center (Chicago 2014), The Stolbun Collection (Chicago 2017) and Indianapolis Art Center (Indianapolis 2017) and Robert F. DeCaprio Art Gallery (Palos Hills, Illinois 2018). During summer 2018, Stacia created  Renunciation Reliquary as a one-night installation for Chicago Artist Coalition's annual benefit Work in Progress and was an Artist-in-Residence at Facebook. She is currently preparing for a solo show titled Practice, which will open in April 2019 at Kent State Stark.

Hot Pants (from The Things We'll Carry), 2018. Cast aluminum. 21” x 2” x 18”

EMILY BUDD's cast sculptures explore the relationship between objects, humans and geologic time. Whether working in bronze, aluminum or conglomerations of concrete, plaster, paint, resin and found garbage, she reminds us that we are—right at this moment—in the process of becoming the fossils of the future. Emily earned her BFA in Sculpture at Miami University in Oxford, OH and her MFA at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. In 2018, she was an Artist-in-Residence at Recology (San Francisco), Salem Art Works (Salem, NY) and will be rounding out the year at Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts (Saratoga, WY). In September, she created a one-night installation at the Abandoned Railroad Station in Salem, New York titled The Exorcism of Emily Budd. Emily is currently based in the Bay Area.

OtherPeoplesPixels: What do you love about bronze as a medium and/or casting as a process? 

Emily Budd: Foundry casting techniques interest me by embodying both a traditional craft but also an evocative potential to address themes of time, loss, mimicry and fossilization in a contemporary context. I like this harmony of temporalities, and I regard the extensive process involved in getting there as a metaphor for a journey of transformation.

Water Bottles, 2017.

OPP: What role does stratification play in your work. I see it in the Water Bottles and the Artifictions. 

EB: I use layering to evoke geologic strata that to me, is also a creative record of time that is additive, liquid and dirty. That is how the earth and time tell their story, a diary using stratification as a language. In Artifictions and Water Bottles, I transformed garbage into imagined geologic matter, altering and stratifying it into molds made from discarded objects, as if formed eons beyond their use. 

Vulcan's Stockpile, 2018. Rebar, joint compound, graphite, plaster, concrete, paint, broken glass, caulk, epoxy, plastic, sand, grout, garbage. 42” x 18” x 34”

OPP: For the mold-making-challenged among us, can you explain lost-wax casting?

EB: Lost-wax casting is ancient but it stayed sexy. I love the exchange of liquid to solid, solid to liquid, heat and alchemy. You build a form in solid wax, and put a sturdy material around it such as a plaster or clay. Applied to heat, the plaster or clay hardens and yet the wax, like a candle, melts out in a designed escape plan. This is my favorite part of the process, and also the most anxiety-inducing because after the wax melts out, there is no sculpture. There is only a void left that the molten material can be poured into, recreating an exact copy of the original in durable metal.

OPP: What happens to the original sculptures after the metal version is made in works that use a different casting method? 

EB: That depends on the type of mold you make. In lost-wax, the wax melts out so you lose the wax form. There are variations on this process and strategies of using it in more experimental and modern ways. I have explored many different materials other than wax using the lost-wax process. I have burned out fruits and vegetables, seeds, wood, plant matter, garbage and textiles as a means to immortalize them, documenting their otherwise impermanent existence into long-lasting metal to ask deeper questions about the perception of time scales.

Cast Forward (Archway), 2018. Styrofoam, plastics, textiles and garbage cast in solid aluminum, steel rebar, plaster, iron oxide, ink. 59" x 96" x 22"

OPP: You were an Artist-in-Residence at Recology in 2018. Will you tell us about your experience at this unique residency? How did it affect your practice? 

EB: The Recology residency was really cool because you get access to the public dump and therefore anything discarded there. It makes you start looking at literally everything as a potential art material, even beyond the residency experience. I approached my trash-digging there thinking in terms of archaeology, imagining how our discarded materials will inform a future about our derived present.

Stalagmites, 2017. Aluminum. 22"-74" h, 5" -19" w/d

OPP: In Cast Forward, you shifted from bronze to cast aluminum. . . was this a practical, aesthetic or conceptual shift?

EB: Both bronze and aluminum have conceptual interest for me. Bronze is used in death memorials, grave markers, cremation urns and monuments, so it has this capability of retaining memory that is interesting to me when that is shifted. In my piece Lost Wax, I did a lost-wax burnout using a raw beehive honeycomb original to memorialize a potential future loss of bees. In Cast Forward, the aluminum, being lighter and cheaper, allowed me to realistically explore larger forms which I wouldn’t have been able to do in bronze. I also like how aluminum is newer and in a way tackier with its chrome-like reflection, like the more contemporary attitude of quick and cheap built environments. 

The Exorcism of Emily Budd, 2018. Cast iron, cast beeswax, found furniture pieces.

OPP: So what’s next? Any new directions in your studio?

EB: I’m developing a new body of work that I think will open up a lot more over the next year. I am collecting fossils and found objects and experimenting with various casting materials such as beeswax, iron and glass. I am reimagining post-apocalyptic tropes by designing artifacts that display a dissonance within our current world. Thinking out of context of time and place, I want to make objects that memorialize change and unknowability.

To see more of Emily's work, please visit emilybudd.com.

Featured Artist Interviews are conducted by Chicago-based artist  Stacia Yeapanis.  When she’s not writing for OPP, Stacia explores the relationship between repetition, desire and impermanence in cross-stitch embroideries, remix video, collage and impermanent installations.  She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where received her MFA in 2006 Stacia was a 2011-2012 Artist-in-Residence at  BOLT in Chicago.  Her solo exhibitions include shows at Siena Heights University (Michigan 2013), Heaven Gallery (Chicago 2014), the Annex Gallery at Lillstreet Art Center (Chicago 2014), The Stolbun Collection (Chicago 2017) and Indianapolis Art Center (Indianapolis 2017) and Robert F. DeCaprio Art Gallery (Palos Hills, Illinois 2018). During summer 2018, Stacia created  Renunciation Reliquary as a one-night installation for Chicago Artist Coalition's annual benefit Work in Progress and was an Artist-in-Residence at Facebook. She is currently preparing for a solo show titled Practice, which will open in April 2019 at Kent State Stark.

Did you know the OPP blog just turned seven-years-old at the end of August 2018? In honor of our birthday and the artists we feature, we'll be sharing some blasts from the past throughout the year. In this post and over the next few weeks, we'll share new work from Featured Artists interviewed in the first year of the blog. Today's artist is Lilly McElroy.

What's new in your practice, Lilly McElroy?

A Woman Runs Through A Pastoral Setting, 2014. Video.

Lilly McElroy: This was a surprisingly difficult question to answer. While the work has evolved and looks very different, I’m still dealing with some of the same issues that I was addressing when you first interviewed me in 2010.  My projects are still about the desire for connection and control, or perhaps, more accurately, those two things are still part of the work that I’m currently making. Humor and absurdity are also still big parts of my practice. I’m most comfortable when I can get the viewer to laugh, but my projects have become more wistful and darker. Now the laugh I’m hoping to elicit is one that is tinged with sadness. For example, I just filmed The Big Game, a video of a man chasing me through the woods while he plays Gary Glitter’s Rock and Roll Part II on the trombone. The video is funny, but it is also violent.  

Hopeful Romantic, 2011. Video. Duration: 3min 59 sec.

Nature or images of nature are present in my current work. Even though I’m still interested in making work about connection and the desire for connection, I’ve stopped making social work. I’m no longer approaching strangers and asking them to participate in my projects. Instead I’m using the landscape. In 2011, I made a video called Hopeful Romantic for which I drove across the country and played Bruce Springsteen’s Dancing in the Dark to the American landscape. This was the first project that didn’t involve any social interaction. I was alone for the drive and I was alone in the video. This video lead to other non-interactive works that involve the landscape. 

I Control The Sun #18, 2016. Archival Pigment Print 40" x 40."

My ongoing photo project, I Control The Sun is a series of photos of my arm jutting out into the landscape as I attempt to grasp the sun. I make a photograph every time I enter a new geographic location and have been working on the project since 2013. On their own, the photographs are beautiful and allow me to indulge in making pretty pictures. However, when you view them as a grid of images the repetition becomes obvious and that creates a sense of desperation. I’ve also spent the last year working on a project called Sanding Away A Year’s worth of Sunsets for which I printed out 365 8" x10” photographs of the same sunset, stacked them together, and have been laboriously sanding away the image of the sun by hand. I sand for an hour a day and the stack is 4” thick. The longer I work on the project, the harder it becomes to sand and the less I am able to accomplish in that hour. The project is also changing my body.  I keep having to reset the finger print id on my phone because the sand paper I’m using is scratching up my skin. The process feels ridiculous, but is producing an object that records the effects of my labor. At the end, the viewer will see a stack of photographs whose main subject has been scratched out.  

Hour 1 & Hour 100 fromSanding Away a Year's Worth of Sunsets, 2018.

So, duration, repetition and process have become components in my practice. Another change is the fact that I’ve started using objects and images both as stand-ins for my body and as characters in my work. I think I’ve missed being behind the camera. I also like the way objects bring additional meaning into work and are so easy to anthropomorphize. In Let’s Dance, a cactus riding a Roomba moves around a balloon that is tied to a rock and is being blown around by two fans. The two characters, the cactus and the balloon, dance around one another until they are both destroyed. It is both funny and heartbreaking.  

Let's Dance, 2018. Video. Duration: 4min 34sec.

The biggest shift in my practice, however, is the collaborative project that I’m currently working on with the artist Christopher Carroll. After years of helping each other film videos and make photographs, Christopher suggested that we make work together. Our project, I’m here. Now What? focuses on our relationship with and feelings of alienation from the natural world. It began with the construction of a simple stage in the woods in Maine. On the stage, we performed actions and filmed them. In a segment of the video, I treated an image of the landscape as a romantic hero and posed with it as though we were on the cover of a romance novel. In another segment, Christopher utilized a drone to explore the surrounding woods while he remained seated on the stage. The project keeps expanding. In the summer of 2017, we held a performative screening on the stage during which Christopher used a hunting tree stand to scale up a tree and play the cello. This summer, we decided to move away from the stage and explore the surrounding woods. The exploration began when we destroyed the stage with axes as seen in our video, Chop. This collaboration has helped expand my practice and opened me up to new ways of working. It allows for experimentation. I’ve never utilized drawing or mark making in my practice, but after chopping up the stage we made a gravestone rubbing of the wreckage. That act and the resulting drawing were exciting for me.

CHOP. 2018.

Read Lilly's 2010 interview.

Failure is an Option, 2017. Installation view.

In a nod to the legacy of Modernism, JEFF KRUEGER (@kruegerstudio) uses recurring, abstract forms. But his ceramic works and drawings do not maintain the primacy of the non-contingent art object. Whether in sculptures glazed with his own blood or objects that evoke both physics and philosophy—his works refer to real objects and issues in our very messy lives. Jeff earned his BFA, in Ceramics at the California College of Arts and Crafts, followed by his MFA in Sculpture at the University of New Mexico. His residency at Roswell Artist-in-Residence in New Mexico culminated in the solo exhibition Failure is an Option: My life with Abstractions at the Roswell Museum and Art Center. Jeff's work is represented by Gallery Fritz (Santa Fe, NM), where he will have a two-person show in April 2019. In the meantime, his work is included in the group show The Audacity of Art, opening on October 26, 2018 at Gallery Fritz. Jeff lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. 

OtherPeoplesPixels: You identify yourself as an “abstract social realist.” What does that mean to you?

Jeff Krueger: This is a catch all terms I use. In many instances, the work is a form of cultural study, which re-renders forms in the world, be it items designed for the body, the home, small public arenas or corporate identification. They are things as diverse as cervical caps, water pitchers, oddly curious parking lot dividers. There can be a flat footedness to the enterprise, like reading the My McDonalds ad campaign and deciding to make my own arch. The Social Realism aspect of this is the turning of the arch upside down with bottles of bleach holding up the sign, which is a reference to the city of Chicago pouring bleach into street food vendors food as a means of discouraging the practice.

Ghosts, 2017.

OPP: Talk about the abstract visual language you work with.

JK: I generate a constant stream of abstract forms, be it works which evolved out of Dadaist, Surrealist, non-objective art and other 20th Century traditions. This language is our artistic inheritance. My work involves infusing these forms with direct contact with the real, whether that is coating the objects with red blood cells, using them to present things like my DNA, store used condoms, or simply juxtaposing the forms with materials that have generally understood cultural meaning. In the newer works, it can be as simple as glazing them in such a way that the color gives the work meanings. I hope the works achieve some quality that there is an active social realist consciousness to the object. Group identity or cultural identity is for me a form of abstraction, and I am looking to render these abstractions as a vehicle for understanding the world. 

My Brother Michael Drinks from the Evangelical Water Bottle, 2017. Ink on Paper. 19"x 13"

OPP: Can you give us a specific example of that?

JK: I made a drawing of a my brother being waterboarded by what I called the Evangelical Water Bottle. It was a thought about how he had become such a devout Evangelical Christian and how our country has used waterboarding as a method of torture. I decided to make the water bottle into an object. I wanted to use the work to reconsider imagery which might reflect upon the central Christian rite of Baptism, one of these major cultural abstractions. Once you are washed, you are forever washed. Water is present, even though it is gone. The photograph with the bottle in front of a handicap parking space was a way of taking the object back to my brother, as he was one of the people that spoke before Congress in advance of the Americans with Disabilities Act. This parking spot at Bitter Lake was a direct result of Michael’s work. 

It is a poetic loop I suppose, but one I hope considers a wide scope of related subjects.  

Untitled Body with Red Interior, 2017. Ceramic with Poplar and Brass. 16" x 44" x 14"

OPP: Have you always worked with ceramics? Tell us a little about your artistic trajectory.

JK: I started working with clay in high school. I studied at 3-4 different schools as an undergraduate, and at each step I was given the direction to aim high. Viola Frey, at the California College of Arts and Crafts, was among those voices. She was pretty amazing and directly introduced the idea that art could be a form of cultural study. I have been a restless artist since then, exploring a number of media and forms, but often return to ceramic work due to its unique properties and my interest in design. I was schooled in the 80s, which can be seen as both the peek and collapse of Modernism. Minimalism and all that gospel still has meaning to me, as I think a ‘thing’ unto itself can be far more commanding than something which is primarily referencing something outside itself. Ceramics does the former very well. 

Infinity is King, 2017.

OPP: You use a lot of repeated ceramic forms that are recontextualized by color and titles. An example is Infinity is King, in which the form is a figure wearing a crown, and Infinity Tastes Like Candy, where the same form evokes cotton candy. Talk about this recontextualization.

JK: It is an outcome of thinking about the same thing in different ways. I would not say I work in series, but I do think about the same topic from different perspectives, variations on a given form allow for distinctly different ways to frame the ideas in the work. 

One of the concepts that has played out in the work through the years is that of fecundity. What is human fecundity? It is sort of a pompous question, but not really. . . and I think it is an important one to ask these days. Somehow I think our faith and inquiries about the infinite are linked to our fecundity. These works came out of an interest in defining the infinite within a single object. What would that look like? I don’t know if this form is satisfying enough, but I like it. Infinity is King juxtaposes that form with a crown dotted with flesh tone blobs. I guess that is a thought about the human obsession with race which seems a rather petty obsession in the context of the genuinely infinite. Infinity Tastes like Candy is an ode to my childhood. When I was kid I was told everything that I would not eat tasted like candy. It was somewhat funny because, with exception of chocolate, I don’t recall ever liking candy.

She Will Gives Waves of Warning, 2004. Ceramic and Epoxy. 6 1/2" x 32" x 12 1/2"

OPP: And what about the repeated form used in Untitled in Grape, She Will Give Waves of Warning (2004) and The Settlement (2000)?Does it have a real world reference?

JK: These sculptures are part of the long line of abstract forms I mentioned. I make a lot of work in both drawing and sculptural form, which does not start from knowing what or why I am making it. Generally there is no thesis I am trying to defend. Rather, I make work intuitively and then try to see what is generated in terms of emotion or language. Then I see if I can say something or ask a question via that generated language. 

After I made these, I saw the form as an abstract uterus. I wonder what this projection of a uterine form means. There is a quality to it of deriving language out of a human body part. I don’t have one of those parts but I came from one. Is that even valid to say any longer? I am not entirely sure why I feel invested, but they are beautiful. I’m aware of the pathologically patriarchal in our culture—I saw that in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings which pitted all those male characters against a flaming vulva—and I wonder if I am not doing something similar. But I don’t know if it is patriarchal to wonder about where you came from or consider the world outside oneself. There is an aspect of it which is clearly an unconscious activity, as it is most of the time when I render parts of male body in works like Doubles or Fattening Frogs for Snakes.

Juggling Our Inequity, 2017. Ceramic and Water Color. 60" x 146" x 3"

OPP: Can you talk about the relationship between ceramics and drawing in your recent show, Failure is An Option (2017)?

JK: Back in the 1980s, I worked in a preverbal, rather awkward manner. One of the more influential drawing projects that I saw back then was a collaborative book of the poet Micheal McClure, with whom I studied, and his friend Bruce Connor. At the time I was essential making blobs in both ceramics and ink drawings. In the Connor pen drawings, I saw this road to radically slowing my mark making down. There was a union of the subject and the field, meaning and content. I’ve done similar work since. I make the drawings as a matter of daily practice. Sometimes it is the bulk of my production; other times it falls to the side. Often I see forms within the drawings that I feel would be interesting objects, and so I try to render them as such. The drawing It and  ceramic wall sculpture Its Black Facsimile would be one of those attempts. Each of these an attempt to render some notion of the fecund.  

The exhibition also includes watercolors, renderings of photographs and plein air paintings I’ve done over the last few years. I take a lot of photographs as a manner of looking at the world. Many seem like they would be interesting paintings. I also am confounded by Facebook and the news, so I use these sources for imagery which make it into the watercolors. A suite such as Juggling Our Inequity combines all of this work. In that group, there is a small painting of a river in Russia that was reported to be poisoned. It was bright red due to copper, chrome and other contaminates. Then I did a small watercolor of the field behind my house in Roswell, which edges fields devoted to alfalfa production. The pairing of this bucolic scene with one of an industrial disaster seems honest, as both happened simultaneously. I surrounded the pair with a field of ceramic dollops. The chemicals in these glazes are about the same as those in the poisoned river and probably some of those in the alkaline water used to irrigate Roswell. All of it seems tied together, mutually dependent, the inequity that between the earth and how we use it.    

Baptismal for the Death Star, 2017. Ceramic. 40" x 30" x 25." Photo credit: Margot Geist

OPP: What are you working on right now? Any new directions in the studio?

JK: At the end of my Roswell residency, I finished some pieces I call sequences. These are works which again relate to the ink drawings. They are ceramic forms thrown and then assembled and hand built.  I am doing these at the same time as making more watercolors. Some of these will possibly go into a long term project that I am working on which relates to living on the Death Star. 

Featured Artist Interviews are conducted by Chicago-based artist  Stacia Yeapanis.  When she’s not writing for OPP, Stacia explores the relationship between repetition, desire and impermanence in cross-stitch embroideries, remix video, collage and impermanent installations.  She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where received her MFA in 2006 Stacia was a 2011-2012 Artist-in-Residence at  BOLT in Chicago.  Her solo exhibitions include shows at Siena Heights University (Michigan 2013), Heaven Gallery (Chicago 2014), the Annex Gallery at Lillstreet Art Center (Chicago 2014), The Stolbun Collection (Chicago 2017) and Indianapolis Art Center (Indianapolis 2017) and Robert F. DeCaprio Art Gallery (Palos Hills, Illinois 2018). During summer 2018, Stacia created  Renunciation Reliquary as a one-night installation for Chicago Artist Coalition's annual benefit Work in Progress and was an Artist-in-Residence at Facebook. She is currently preparing for a solo show titled Practice, which will open in April 2019 at Kent State Stark.

tiny sculpture series 1, 2017. wood, fabric, rope, felt, polyfil, acrylic paint,. 5.75"h x 4"w x 4"d

TAMARA BAGNELL's soft sculptures are playful systems made of fabric, felt, wood, rope and polyfil. They teeter between abstraction and representation, and the meaning of her recurring forms—drops, vines, concentric arches, stuffed tubes—shifts as her palette does. Tamara earned her BFA in Interrelated Media from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2001. She ran a textile design and screenprinting business until 2016, when she turned to art-making full time. Her artwork has most recently been exhibited at the Durham Arts Council, in soft goods (2018) at VAE Raleigh, and The Art of a Scientist (2018) at The Rubenstein Art Center at Duke University. Tamara lives and works in Durham, North Carolina.

Custody of the Tongue (veiling), 2013. 2:28 minutes

APRIL DAUSCHA's work is distinctly feminine—in the Victorian sense of the word. In photographs, videos and sculptures, she combines the visual language of the Victorian era with intimate acts of the body to explore her personal experiences of mourning, contrition and motherhood. April earned her BFA in Fashion Design at the International Academy of Design & Technology in Chicago, followed by her MFA in Fiber at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. Her work is represented by Page Bond Gallery (Richmond, Virginia). In 2018, she has exhibited at Museum on the Seam (Jerusalem, Israel), the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles (San Jose, California), the Walton Arts Center (Fayetteville, Arkansas) and her work will be included in the upcoming Uneasy Beauty: Discomfort in Contemporary Adornment, which opens on October 6, 2018 at the Fuller Craft Museum (Brockton, Massachusetts). In November 2019, her show Clothed in a Mantle of Virginity will open at Furman University Gallery in Greenville, South Carolina, where she also lives.

OtherPeoplesPixels: Lace, hair, bustles—the materials in your work have a Victorian sensibility. How is this bygone era relevant today?

April Dauscha: I actually came to love the Victorian era by way of fashion; my background is in fashion design. This period originally peaked my interest because of the fashion rituals that were associated with mourning and loss: black veils and the story of Queen Victoria. The visual language of the Victorian era has allowed me to explore my personal experiences of mourning, loss, religion, femininity, sentimentality and motherhood. Materials like lace help create a visual vocabulary and symbols that give meaning to the work. 

Examination of Conscience, 2011. Photograph.

OPP: Why are you drawn to lace in particular?

AD: Lace is a total dichotomy. It speaks of purity and sexuality. It reveals while it also conceals.  It is humble, yet ornamentally overindulgent. In my work, I use lace as a symbol to represent the duality of body and soul, right and wrong, good and evil. The lace is always handmade and often uses a variety of needle lace techniques. The process of making lace is significant because I have always viewed the act of making as a representation of penance.

Perpetual Adoration, 2012.

OPP: I see a connection between 1970s endurance video and performance and religious ritual in your video works. How do you think about these videos as a body of work?

AD: I often use my body and handmade objects as props for fictional rituals captured through intimate, voyeuristic and documentary-style videos and photographs. The tension of using handcrafted objects often associated with women’s work and subjecting them to digital manipulation is mirrored by the duality of these beautiful and virginal objects, misappropriated in unexpected ways—ways that often lack a sense of decorum. I swing between the delicacy of handcrafting a miniature piece of needle lace to the vulgarity of  wrapping a lacemaking thread, tightly, around my own tongue; this is a symbolic gesture of confession and atonement.

Bound: Reflections of the Self, 2011. Photograph.

OPP: Tell us about Bound: Reflections of Self (2011). The title frames the figures as two parts of one person, as opposed to two figures bound together. Why is hair the binding agent?

AD: Bound: Reflections of the Self is a photographic series that investigates the idea of an alter ego. These photographs explore themes of good and evil and our inseparable relationship with the dichotomy of these conditions. In this series, my hair has come to represent an uncomfortable binding of one's self to one's alter ego, while also serving as an act of penance and self-mortification.

Engorged, 2017. Glue, milk, glass bottles.

OPP: Most recently, you’ve been making work about motherhood. The body is now present in the form of its byproducts—breast milk, a baby toenail, a dried umbilical cord. Can you talk about this shift of representing the body in photography and video to representing the byproducts of the body?

AD: My work on motherhood is very much about separation, especially the separation of two bodies. My piece, Bond, is a traveling case filled with breast pumps, rubber nipples and glass baby bottles containing glue. The work signifies a connection between breastfeeding, bottle feeding, bonding and a struggle of separation between the mother’s body and that of her child.

There is a blatant absence of child and mother in this piece. The meeting of cold, hard, man-made surfaces highlights the separation of mother and child and the necessary dilemma of substituting their bodies. The vessel is a stand-in for the mother,  the bottles for her breasts and the pump acts as child. The body of the infant struggles to function without its mother. The body of the mother struggles to function without its offspring. 

However, I am definitely still working through performance and photography as a way of documenting the body in ways that deal with my experience as mother. My piece, Weaned (a year later), is photographic evidence of the phenomenon of perpetually-lactating breasts. This photograph was taken exactly one year after I had weaned my youngest daughter off my breast, yet my body was still attempting to nourish her body despite our bodily separation. The image becomes a symbol of yearning and the slow process of weaning, both physically and mentally, that happens between mother and child—an unwelcomed separation of bodies, one still yearning to nurture the other. 

To see more of April's work, please visit aprildauscha.com.

Featured Artist Interviews are conducted by Chicago-based artist  Stacia Yeapanis.  When she’s not writing for OPP, Stacia explores the relationship between repetition, desire and impermanence in cross-stitch embroideries, remix video, collage and impermanent installations.  She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where received her MFA in 2006 Stacia was a 2011-2012 Artist-in-Residence at  BOLT in Chicago.  Her solo exhibitions include shows at Siena Heights University (Michigan 2013), Heaven Gallery (Chicago 2014), the Annex Gallery at Lillstreet Art Center (Chicago 2014), The Stolbun Collection (Chicago 2017) and Indianapolis Art Center (Indianapolis 2017) and Robert F. DeCaprio Art Gallery (Palos Hills, Illinois 2018). During summer 2018, Stacia created  Renunciation Reliquary as a one-night installation for Chicago Artist Coalition's annual benefit Work in Progress and was an Artist-in-Residence at Facebook. She is currently preparing for a solo show titled Practice, which will open in April 2019 at Kent State Stark.

BackwardFuture, 2017. Installation shot, Black Crown Gallery. Photo credit: Phillip Maisel.

RACHELLE REICHERT's sculptural forms are minimal and her palette is monochromatic—almost exclusively black, white and grey. These formal decisions grow directly from her material choices—graphite and salt. Underlying the seemingly-simple, formal elegance is a committed interest in the social and ecological impact of technology. Rachelle earned her BFA at Boston University, following by her MFA at Mills College (Oakland, CA). In addition to numerous solo exhibitions, she has presented her work at the California Climate Change Symposium, the State of the San Francisco Estuary Conference, the American Geophysical Union Meeting. Her work will be on view from September 9 - October 21, 2018 in the group show Unwalking the West at the Center for Contemporary Art & Culture at Pacific Northwest College (Portland, Oregon). Rachelle is curatingTrace Evidence: A Cross-Cultural Dialogue on Climate Change in affiliation with Global Climate Action Summit in September 2018. The show opens at Minnesota Street Project (San Francisco) on September 5, 2018 and will be accompanied by a panel discussion sponsored by SFMOMA on September 11, 2018. Rachelle lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area, California.

OtherPeoplesPixels: Why are salt and graphite the dominant materials in your work? How do they drive your work?

Rachelle Reichert: I am interested in the familiar becoming unknown and in the complexity of seemingly ordinary things. My practice explores the connection between basic natural materials, their use by industry and technology and the resulting impact on the environment and culture. I have created work with metal, clay, natural pigments, charcoal and more. But graphite and salt have held my attention for over five years.

Graphite is a primary tool for drawing— a practice that helped develop human consciousness. Graphite was originally used by sheepherders to mark sheep. Since then, it has a history in industrialization as a lubricant to machinery and now in the lithium-ion battery found in cars and  smartphones. Graphene—graphite’s 2-D form—is enabling leaps in nanotechnology and biotech because it is an excellent superconductor. I research the life cycle of the material, from extraction to implementation and create artwork based on this research.

First Rains, 2016. Salt. 15 x 12 x 9 in each.

OPP: And salt?

RR: I started thinking about salt in 2013 in my first semester of grad school. I had an incredible professor, the late Anna Valentina Murch, who encouraged material experimentation in sculpture when I was making large graphite paintings. She helped to transform my thinking. Salt has been extracted industrially from the San Francisco Bay since the 1850s. It is an incredibly unstable mineral that is essential for human life. Like graphite, I’ve researched salt’s use in industry, such as local extraction and the repercussions shaping the San Francisco estuary. In addition I have studied salt’s role in culture, such as its use in woman-led pagan practices that were later adopted by Catholicism. My salt circles come directly from that.

Both graphite and salt are extracted all over the world. Presently, I am looking at graphite extraction in China and I recently returned from the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia, the largest salt flat in the world with the largest reserves of lithium.

Exhibition at Monterey Peninsula College, 2017

OPP: How do you make formal choices to support your conceptual concerns?

RR: My forms and palettes are determined by the materials themselves. I am sensitive to the textures and forms of the materials. That is where the complexity lies. These works are demanding and require close looking. Unfortunately, photographs of the works don’t communicate this well. 

OPP: How do the forms grow out of the material? It’s clear in the saltworks, but what about the hexagons, for example?

RR: The hexagons reference the crystalline structure of graphite, an allotrope of carbon. It’s the hexagonal form that allows for the superconductivity of the material. A beautiful example of form follows function.

Untitled (Hexagons 3), 2018. Graphite on panel. 50 x 24 inches (variable).

OPP: Is the sourcing of your materials important?

RR: Yes, very important. It creates the content for some works. I often harvest my own materials or when I can’t do it myself, I work with companies who do and build relationships with these companies. I often watch sights for a very long time, years usually, before I start making work. Watching includes tracking locations via satelite images and reading news, geological reports, surveys or any information I can find and visiting the locations—if I can. 

Currently, I am working on a project where I’ve been visiting locations in California impacted by forest fires and making oil paint from the charred trees. I started this in 2014 but it is just now that I am making paintings. The fires have accelerated rapidly in the time I’ve been researching. I coincidentally started making this work during the largest recorded fire in California history, the Thomas Fire in December 2017. Since then, the Mendocino Complex Fire, burning as I write this, now holds the record as the largest fire. I am creating this work as it rains ash from the sky in San Francisco and grieving, like so many others, for a California past and for those who have suffered from these fires.

Blackdragon Mine #15, 2017.

OPP: What role does satellite imagery play in your drawing practice?

RR: I use private-sourced earth imaging satellites to track locations affected by global warming. I have access to these images from a research ambassadorship. I track graphite mines with these images and salt evaporation ponds, wildfires and new sites of extraction in the American West. These images come from technology that could not exist without the raw materials that are being photographed and so I want to highlight that connection with my drawings.

OPP: Are the Black Dragon drawings examples of this? Do viewers/critics ever miss the connection and want to talk abut these as pure abstraction?

RR: Yes. The name comes from the mining group that I have been following in China. These works can function as pure abstraction or as an investigation of the images I am exploring and creating the works from. The connection is often missed, but I think that adds an interesting layer, potentially revealing the reference images in unexpected ways. Most people don’t realize that satellite images are highly edited—color corrected, cropped, composited—to look like what one would expect from a satellite image: a clear view of the land below with no clouds or blurs or camera malfunctions (remember, these images are coming from space!). The drawings are layered and space is negotiated in strange ways intentionally to reveal this. 

Blackdragon Mine #16, 2017. Graphite on prepared paper. 12 x 16 inches.

OPP: You’ve presented your artwork at the California Climate Change Symposium, the San Francisco State of the Estuary Conference, and the American Geophysical Union Meeting. Can you talk about presenting art in a scientific context?

RR: My research requires a lot of understanding into the chemical composition of my materials and how their uses impact the planet. I track pollution from extraction and man-made marks on our planet. I feel that art is an essential tool to help understand science, especially climate science. There is an urgency there and I am always seeking opportunities to intersect ideas and collaborate. 

Featured Artist Interviews are conducted by Chicago-based artist  Stacia Yeapanis.  When she’s not writing for OPP, Stacia explores the relationship between repetition, desire and impermanence in cross-stitch embroideries, remix video, collage and impermanent installations.  She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where received her MFA in 2006 Stacia was a 2011-2012 Artist-in-Residence at  BOLT in Chicago.  Her solo exhibitions include shows at Siena Heights University (Michigan 2013), Heaven Gallery (Chicago 2014), the Annex Gallery at Lillstreet Art Center (Chicago 2014), The Stolbun Collection (Chicago 2017) and Indianapolis Art Center (Indianapolis 2017) and Robert F. DeCaprio Art Gallery (Palos Hills, Illinois 2018).  Most recently, Stacia created  Renunciation Reliquary as a one-night installation for Chicago Artist Coalition's annual benefit  Work in Progress and was an Artist-in-Residence at Facebook. 

SMILE, 2017. Bindis, jewels, thread on silk. 56" x 80."

Interdisciplinary artist PREETIKA RAJGARIAH uses personal biography as a jumping off point in works that "challenge perceptions of exoticism and the sociopolitical standards in Indian and American cultures." Her performative photographs and videos investigate the nature of body adornment—which can paradoxically make us blend in or stand out, depending on the crowd. She gives decorative materials—ruffles, saris, bindis, henna, glitter, hair extensions—their own embodiment in sculptures and wall works, allowing the viewer to contemplate ornamentation without the body as a substrate. Preetika earned her BA in Studio Art at Trinity University in San Antonio,Texas. She completed her MFA in Painting and Sculpture in 2018 at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She was recently an artist-in-residence at ACRE and is headed to Oxbow in the fall. Her work will be included in a two-person show, opening at Roots and Culture (Chicago) in October. Preetika is currently preparing for three solo exhibitions in Texas in 2019: Tangled at Art League Houston, Sari Not Sorry at Lawndale Art Center (Houston), and a currently-untitled show at Women and their Work (Austin). Preetika lives and works in Houston, Texas.

OtherPeoplesPixels: What does adornment mean to you?

Preetika Rajgariah: Adornment represents choice—the choice to adorn or not—and pushing those boundaries. 

In my culture, adornment is expected for women to elevate one's beauty or status. . . growing up with the pressure to decorate oneself or present in certain ways is something I’m interested in challenging in my life and work. 

Beauty Mask, 2018. Digital Photo.

OPP: What’s the role of exaggeration in your photographic and video works from Self? 

PR: I’ve often gravitated towards accumulation and repetition in my practice. More recently, I like to use my body as material to showcase this exaggeration. I’ve always been a bit of an athlete or a competitive person, so in the videos or photos, I am often in competition with myself. I am very interested in exploring my limits and defying my own expectations. So, these works explore limits and standards that are set by societies. 

How About Now?, 2017. Video performance with sindoor powder. 4:10 Excerpt from 20 minutes.

OPP: Can you talk about additive versus subtractive processes in your series of modified Saris? Is the sari a symbol—if so, of what?—or simply a familiar surface in this work?

PR: The sari represents familiarity and nostalgia while simultaneously embodying the exotic. It is a material that evokes memories of the place I was born, but it also signifies a culture that I sometimes feel extremely removed from.

Typically, impulse and intuition lead the decisions I make in my practice. I MAKE first and foremost, no matter the medium I am using. In the two dimensional sari pieces, I make formal decisions of addition or subtraction depending on each particular sari and the story that inspires the piece (yes, there’s usually a autobiographical narrative that informs each of my works). 

What we keep, what we leave, 2017. Sari with pyrography. 55" x 90."

OPP: Both material and process play a big role in your work. Are you more driven by one or the other? 

PR: Both material and process are crucial to the content of the work. More often, I am drawn to material first, as it is extremely narrative driven, and then process comes in as my way of problem-solving. Coming from a painting background, I treat material similarly to paint. Formally, it is a large part of the beauty in my work. The materials I use in my work now—textiles, powders, henna—go way back for me. They are all materials that surrounded me daily while growing up. In this sense, I feel much more connected to my art and my work now than when it existed as just paintings. My processes—stitching, tearing, pouring, bleaching—are ways of handling of these materials that complicate, dismantle and re-purpose.

Climax, Migrating Identities, 2015. Watercolor on paper. 51" x 1.2'

OPP: I love the migration paintings. They teeter between abstraction and representation, and the marks remind me of thumbprints. Can you talk about the shift from these representations of the movement of groups of people to focusing in on the individual in recent work?

PR: In recent years, as I have unpacked my own upbringing and personal life, the work has honed in on the individual as well. The migration paintings are directly related to my three dimensional sculptures—the aunties. I had wanted to make three dimensional versions of the paintings for quite sometime, and as I became interested in fabric and textile, experimenting with the new material lead me to create free standing, hollow sculptures made entirely from scraps of traditional silks - often saris that belonged to the women in my family. 

Hairy auntie, 2017. 25" x 60."

OPP: Who are the aunties in Soft Bodies? Are these soft sculptures memorials to your real aunties?

PR: No, the aunties are not specific to any real people, but they do embody a certain spirit so to speak. They are mash-ups of many dualities I experience: Indian/American, traditional/modern, masculine/feminine, past/present, hard/soft, etc. As I created these amorphous bodies, the narrative around their being came into existence. They are bold, resistant and a bit othered. They represent facets of my own personality as a bit of an othered woman in the American and Indian societies that I navigate, while also being stand ins for a tribe of aunties I wish I had had in my life growing up.

To see more of Preetika's work, please visit prajgariah.com.

Featured Artist Interviews are conducted by Chicago-based artist  Stacia Yeapanis.  When she’s not writing for OPP, Stacia explores the relationship between repetition, desire and impermanence in cross-stitch embroideries, remix video, collage and impermanent installations.  She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where received her MFA in 2006 Stacia was a 2011-2012 Artist-in-Residence at  BOLT in Chicago.  Her solo exhibitions include shows at Siena Heights University (Michigan 2013), Heaven Gallery (Chicago 2014), the Annex Gallery at Lillstreet Art Center (Chicago 2014), The Stolbun Collection (Chicago 2017) and Indianapolis Art Center (Indianapolis 2017) and Robert F. DeCaprio Art Gallery (Palos Hills, Illinois 2018).  Most recently, Stacia created  Renunciation Reliquary as a one-night installation for Chicago Artist Coalition's annual benefit  Work in Progress and was an Artist-in-Residence at Facebook.