OtherPeoplesPixels Blog

TRACEY SNELLING creates hybrid spaces—between cultures, between locations, between media—in her multimedia installations and sculptures. Often referencing fictional representations of space in film and literature, she asks the viewer to step into the role of voyeur. Her miniature sculptures of motels, store fronts, and urban environments incite curiosity about what exists behind the facades, while her lifesize recreations of interiors allow the viewer to consider the facades of our cultural identities, which are even more difficult to penetrate. Tracey exhibits internationally and her work is on view this fall in Virginia, California, Utah, France, Denmark, Belgium and Norway. Tracey lives in Oakland, CA.

OtherPeoplesPixels: Your installations usually involve miniature versions of buildings like gas stations, motels, and gift shops. Did you grow up with an interest in dollhouses or train sets, before you started making miniatures in the context of art?

ALISHA WESSLER's work revolves around a "propensity for detail." This propensity emerges in the accumulation of marks in her intricate pen and ink drawings and in the repetition of gestures in her sculptural installations. In 2012 she received a Rackham International Research Award to travel to Serbia and Croatia, where she researched and made art as a response to the collections she found in museums and other sites of memory pertaining to former Yugoslavia and its socialist past. Alisha is currently an MFA candidate at University of Michigan, School of Art and Design, and in 2013, her MFA exhibition will take place at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, where she will display her work amongst the existing collection.

OtherPeoplesPixels: Most of your drawings have an intense accumulation of detail. How does this formal quality relate to your conceptual concerns?

Alisha Wessler: It’s true, the things I make are the result of many collected and accumulated parts coming together. They feel like they have minds of their own—through countless layers and additions, they are often unrecognizable from the form they began with. I feel that this desire to make many small marks is linked to the act of collecting—both figuratively and conceptually. I think a lot about collecting and the compulsion many of us have to possess small parts of the entire universe.

OPP: Yes, I know what you mean. Whenever I see an accumulation of detail, I always think about the process of creating it and about the experience of the maker. For me, those are tied to the meaning of the piece. But not everyone looks at art with these things in mind. In your experience, how have viewers responded to the accumulation of detail in your work?

AW: I've received a wide array of responses, ranging from those who feel that the detail pulls them in—making them stop, look, and wonder—to those who feel wholly overwhelmed by it. Some viewers, trying to make sense of the work, see (unintentional) forms emerge in the detail—and that's when things get interesting. And, of course, there are also the comments referring to my patient (or obsessive) nature or about the eye strain the work must cause me!

OPP: I see a similar kind of obsessive accumulation in the fabric stalagmites and stalactites of Back Channels, which was part of a two-person show at Johansson Projects in Oakland, CA. Could you describe this installation and talk about your intentions?

AW: I would describe it as a two-part installation: the interior was a cave environment that visitors were invited to walk into, while the exterior was an amorphous sculptural form that crawled into the gallery space with a tail-like end. The cave entrance was built into a pre-existing archway, utilizing the unique architecture of the gallery space. I wanted to create an experience that would make the audience forget where they were while they were inside, yet would also make them aware of its artifice on the outside.

OPP: In 2010, you illustrated Heinrich Hoffman’s cautionary verses to children in Der Struwwelpeter, published by Container Corps.  I’d love to hear more about this project.  Were you hired as an illustrator by the publisher? Or did you conceive of the project and approach them?

OPP: What's your favorite drawing from the collection? Does it coincide with your favorite story?

OPP: In 2011, you were in Prague as an artist-in-residence at Meet Factory. What did you work on while you were there? 

It was during the construction of this project that I realized my propensity for detail, leading me to my most recent body of work. This project is an ongoing series of small artifacts, representing the intangible nature of dream imagery and exploring questions of intimacy and scale.

OPP: Are these drawings of artifacts? Or are you now making small sculptures? I'd love to hear a little more about this in-progress work.

AW: The current project is a series of small sculptures and drawings revolving around "artifacts" from dreams. In my dreams, I have always encountered uncanny three-dimensional forms and their fleeting quality has made me want to collect and record them in some tangible way. I find it fascinating that inside the dream, the objects appear logical and familiar, but upon waking, it is often impossible to locate language precise enough to describe them. They cannot be embellished, nor can they be communicated with any accuracy. Instead, they exist in a realm entirely their own, rarely remembered with true clarity and yet difficult to forget entirely.

The objects I make mirror this indeterminate place—both in process and outcome. I use a wide range of materials, both natural and synthetic, including found elements such as: milkweed, horsehair, wax, wood, mud, sea-reed, and salt crystals. In a nearly alchemical process, these materials come together and then are carved away at until they reach their desired form.

MATTHEW DALE JANSON's colorful, textured sculptures combine traditional art materials with found objects and industrial materials to create delicately-balanced abstractions of the body, both human and animal. In 2010 and 2012, he was a finalist for the Sondheim Prize and is currently a nominee for the 2012 Baker Artist Awards. Matthew lives in Baltimore, MD.

OtherPeoplesPixels: Your material lists are always very detailed, almost like you are making sure all the materials get credit for their role in your sculptures. Can you talk about materiality in general and why you choose the materials you choose?

OPP: Do you generally have a vision of what the sculptures will look like before you start? Or do they shift and change as you are working?

Time is so present in a painting, and that makes it immensely difficult to ‘do.’ I think life can be boiled down to one question: “what I am I going to do next?” Painting takes the question on like a bull. I try to paint in three dimensions.  

MDJ: I never really switched. I just stopped showing my paintings about four years ago. I felt my sculptures were much stronger and my voice much clearer. Right now I’m working on some new paintings which look like they may take shape as a full body of work. Some are on canvas but most are ‘non-traditional’ paintings using foam, a variety of supports and paints.

OPP: Many works are abstractions of the figure, and those that aren't still have a visceral quality. The sinews of the polystyrene evoke the body, but the colors and textures of the materials destabilize that. I'd love to hear your take on this pairing of the plastic and the man-made with the visceral.

OPP: In your online public application for the 2012 Baker Artist Awards, a fund which supports Baltimore's artists, you say you think of your project as "shopping at Walmart to make religious statuary." Could you expand on this?

OPP: Was there ever a time when you made a drastically different type of work than the work that's currently on your website?

OtherPeoplesPixels: Tell us a bit about your history and development as an artist.

Judith G. Levy: First I’d like to thank you and say how pleased I am that you invited me to be one of your featured artists. Thank you for this opportunity to speak about my work and my artistic evolution. During my high school years, I was fortunate to have had excellent art, creative-writing and history teachers who really encouraged me and taught me my first lessons in taking intellectual and creative risks. While at Hunter College in New York City, I really began to learn about conceptual art, performance and film-making, and I was exposed to so much exciting work by other students and by the professional artists in the city. I made drawings, paintings and photographs, and I shot film. I shared everything, except the film footage, with my friends, keeping it private until I was ready to figure out how film was going to fit into my work. This did not happen until many years later.

During my college years, I understood little about the possibilities of thinking conceptually in an interdisciplinary way and nothing about the use of humor in a legitimate art practice. Nor did I know how to let the concepts drive my work. I did, however, create what I now know were mixed media installations on the walls in my house. For many years, family obligations and earning a living took up much of my time, but I always voraciously read newspapers and novels, watched narrative and documentary films, wrote stories, and made my wall projects and drawings late at night.

When I was in the seventh grade, I did research in my school’s library and wrote a glowing report on all the good that President Andrew Jackson did for our country. It was only later that I learned, on my own, that he was responsible for Indian removal, ethnic cleansing, and The Trail of Tears. I had not read about these events and actions in the books in my school’s library. Around the same time that I wrote the Jackson report, I was reading a lot of fiction that didn’t hold back a thing. Books, like Strange Fruit by Lillian Smith, which I’d found hidden in my father’s tool shed. Smith’s book, published in 1944, is a story about racial strife in a small, Southern town. It, along with Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, Roth’s Call It Sleep, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Agee’s A Death in the Family, began to articulate for me what I knew intuitively and experientially—that events have considerable context and that people have complicated feelings and motives for both their actions and inactions. I began to realize, as author David McCollough wrote, “History is who we are and why we are the way we are.”

DAN SOLBERG's interdisciplinary practice "often documents or extracts portions of a natural occurrence, and through careful selection and alteration, leaves the viewer unsure of where the pure artifact ends and where [he has] intervened" (Dan Solberg, Artist Statement 2012). Most recently, his work has been exhibited at ROYGBIV in Columbus, OH. Dan has recently relocated from Washington, DC to Brooklyn, NY and is in the process of setting up a new studio.

OtherPeoplesPixels: In most of your work, you use found objects, images and footage. Tell us about your collecting process.

Dan Solberg: About half the time, the objects I use are ones that find me. In those cases, the object is something that I stumble across or come in contact with as part of an ordinary day. Those kinds of objects usually spark new ideas instead of completing existing ones. The other half of the objects I use are those "completion" ones, where I'm working on an idea already and know the sort of piece I'm looking for, but it needs something that's not quite there yet. To be honest, my process is not glamorous or thrilling. I usually search for things online or hunt around at standard retail outlets. I generally prefer to use consumer-grade materials.

OPP: Videos like 9th Floor Sonata (2010), Contra Reset (2009), Glowers (2008), and Side Scroller (2008) all involve still shots with a very slight amount of motion and change over a long period of time. I see this same quality in installation pieces like Out the Window, Above the Trees (2006). For me, they are about patience, the need for stillness, the difficulty of endurance, and how anything can be an opportunity for meditation. Does that resonate with your interests? 

DS: Yes, definitely. A word I often come back to is "mesmerization." I make pieces that acknowledge the act of looking or watching needed to take them in. We're still at a point where using a sense other than sight to take in an artwork is pretty novel. Sure, there's sound that accompanies video, but I think film has pushed that forward more than art itself. As such, I make pieces that reward the act of looking (and sometimes listening) as opposed to using that action solely to push the viewer to think about a particular idea. I provide a space for that deeper consideration by the viewer, but I think it's necessary to lay ideas out on a reflective surface.

OPP: Sandstorm (2009) is a sculptural sound installation that, of course, requires listening, but it's intensely aggressive because the volume is at maximum. That's part of the piece. So, I'm not sure if listening is "rewarded." Will you talk about this piece and how viewers respond to it?

DS: If Sandstorm were a purely audio piece, I'd agree that it would come off as aggressive, but since the audio is coming out a tiny speaker, played from an even smaller mp3 player, and part of this whole sculptural space, it has other context to balance out the aggressiveness of the volume and repetition. That said, Sandstorm does reward an astute listener with its unique audio distortions (a result only achieved at maximum volume), and subtle differences, depending on where the viewer stands in proximity to its front. Many viewers name the song right away when they hear it, while others recognize it but don't know from where; this was the level of mainstreamness I was hoping for. The suspended mp3 player also gets a lot of attention since it's being held up by taut tension and I think people anthropomorphize it since it sort of looks like the cords coming out of each side could be outstretched arms.

OPP: Ah! This is definitely an example of a piece that is a lot harder to understand online. I haven't seen it in person, so I made assumptions as to what the experience of encountering it would be like. Even with your video documentation, I imagined the sound to be louder and more aggressive than it probably is in a gallery space.

DS: Yeah, I've never been totally satisfied with the documentation of that piece. Maybe a walk-around video would serve it better.

OPP: Many works make use of digital noise to create abstractions, as in Night Sky: Santa Barbara 2008-01-31 04:06:50 AM – 04:22:39 AM (2008), 25% of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit 2007 720p HDTV by Cybermaxx.avi (2009) and of_other_spaces.pdf (2010). Are these works representations of the literal breakdown of information or metaphors for something else? 

DS: Even more so than representations, all of the pieces you mentioned are physical evidence of actual glitches and distortions that occurred without prompt. I know there is a way to alter the compression of a video file to make it look like my Sports Illustrated video, and other artists like Takeshi Murata have done fantastic work using those tools, but I was more interested in the way the systems broke themselves down. They are artworks almost entirely born out of the machine, making them the most found-object-like of all my artworks. I think this is a palette rich with metaphor, especially considering the lack of artist's hand at play.

OPP: Will you draw the metaphor or metaphors out for the readers?

DS: I'd prefer to leave concrete metaphors for viewers to determine for themselves; that's why I picked loaded topics for the subject matter of the videos. At least as far as the pieces featuring glitch aesthetics go, I'm most interested in viewers interpreting metaphor and then assigning that viewpoint to who or what made the artistic decisions that lead to that interpretation. The majority of the "artistic" process in those pieces was conducted by a machine with minimal to no human instruction. Perhaps that's a metaphor for the futility of art interpretation though.

OPP: In 2010, you opened an art space called Craig Elmer Modern in St. Louis, MI, and had a 2-person exhibition there with Jake Cruzan. Does the gallery still exist?  

DS:  Sadly, the gallery only ended up existing for our show. We did originally have plans to host more exhibitions in the space, but I ended up moving out of town, and we were just borrowing it for free until someone came around who actually wanted to pay money to rent the space.

OPP: What did you learn about being an artist by running the space?

DS: Running the gallery was a lot of additional work, but it was great to have total control over the space and how we wanted the show to look. Before the opportunity for the gallery space came up, we were considering building walls in a storage unit we rented so we could at least get some nice install shots, but the gallery forced us out into the public a bit more, and made me step a little outside of my comfort zone.

OPP: Any plans to try your hand at being a gallerist again in the future?

DS: It's not something I'm seeking out. I'd love to do more curation, but I don't think gallery ownership is in the cards.

OPP: In 2012, you've been doing more installation with found objects, like Remember, Clubs and Megaplates. What has led to this shift? 

 DS: I'd say I've been working with more "fabricated" objects than "found" ones. In contrast to my digital work, I've been intentionally buying things and manipulating them by hand. The simple answer is that I like to cycle through a variety of processes to keep any one from feeling too rote or typecasting me in a particular medium. The materials selected for an artwork are extremely important, but I don't have loyalties or allegiances to one medium over another.

OPP: Are you working on anything brand new in your studio right now?

DS: I'm working on iterating Remember and modifying Clubs, but I'd also like to put myself in another video (probably shoot it with my non-HD Handycam), and do another piece with music. I've got some awesome-looking old, blocky computer speakers that I'd like to use, but to what end, I've yet to figure out.

JENNIFER MILLS is an interdisciplinary artist who conflates art-making and art-selling in an ongoing exploration of the value of art. She uses her interactive performances and installations as a way to disseminate thousands of artworks for free or for prices as low as a penny. Jennifer is currently in residence at BOLT, a year-long studio residency in Chicago, and her solo show LOW MIDDLE HIGH will open September 5, 2012 at CULTUREfix in New York City. Jennifer lives in Chicago, IL.

OtherPeoplesPixels: I've read that you studied classical voice and performance when you were young, and you are well-versed in drawing, painting, video, and performance. Tell us a bit about your trajectory as an artist, and how you got to making the work you are making right now.

CHRISTINA PETTERSSON explores decay, memorialization, and resurrection in large-scale graphite drawings that reference classic literature from the English Canon. Her romantic landscapes, populated by a recurring female figure surrounded by animals, reveal the wildness of the experience of a world in decline. Most recently, her work has been exhibited at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood in Florida and at Launch F18, curated by Site95, in New York. Christina lives in Miami, Florida.

OtherPeoplesPixels: You draw exclusively in graphite. What are the challenges of this medium and what are the benefits?

Christina Pettersson: I am able to achieve a tremendous amount of detail working with graphite, but it's a very silvery medium. I sometimes miss the true darkness of charcoal or oil. It's also very difficult to photograph well. If I try to capture the authentic grey of my drawings, it looks dull, and I find I have to cheat the contrast for reproduction purposes. It's a shame. On the other hand, it's cheap, non-toxic, and absolutely the most comfortable medium I've ever used. And I've tried plenty. It reminds me of writing too: the singular aesthetic of words on white. It's strange to think that in all my years of schooling no one ever told me I could just draw if I wanted. I had to be a painting major... then fiber, then sculpture. When I finally started just drawing again in my late twenties, I knew immediately that this was it for me.

OPP:  Most of your drawings are quite large, bigger than the body of the viewer to be sure. Have you always drawn on this scale? Why is the scale important to the work?

CP: The body is almost always to scale with life, and has been for a long time. I find it very difficult to relate to a figure otherwise. I want the viewer to be able to step right up and feel as if s/he could step into the page, as my figures are stand-ins for the viewers themselves. I want the viewer to imagine being in the various scenarios I put them in. The fact is they are not much about my personality. I want to be a storyteller. Rauschenberg said that narrative is the sex of art, and I think I understand what he meant. I am drawn to the pleasure and pain of beautiful tales, and it is not about fulfilling logic.

OPP: I'm interested in the fact that you say they aren't much about your personality, because the figures are in your own image, correct? Can you talk about the desire to insert yourself into  "the pleasure and pain of beautiful tales?" 

CP:  The figures are almost always of me, but I don't consider them "self portraits." Admittedly, something about that term gives me the heebie jeebies...as if I'm trying to bare my soul, I guess.  Let's face it though: there's no avoiding yourself, no matter what you do. Yet when we write the stories about ourselves, we inevitably change them. So why not steal from the better narratives of the Bible, literature, mythology? In art, the whole of history becomes a record of my own life. The act of drawing is so bizarre and primal. It is the demon's whisper that no book is closed forever, so keep digging. So, I would rather resurrect Ophelia from Shakespeare's murdered chambers, without any idea of what will happen, than to tell you what I already know.

OPP: There's is a pervading sense of Romanticism in both your drawings and in your video work. I mean that in terms of the mid-late 18th century ideals in European literature and art that were a response to the Enlightenment. There was a call back to nature and an attention to the wildness of the emotional life that is seen historically as a reaction to the hyper-rationalism of the Age of Enlightenment. Can you talk about these values in the context of our contemporary world?

CP: Absolutely. Most of my stories are resurrected from the best literary tales throughout history, spawned by murder or undying love. These are the primal fires that fuel my desire to be alive in the world. The figures were previously in large expanses of empty space, but lately the background has been playing a larger role. The sense of distance that it evokes echoes the romantic landscape tradition, from Claude Lorraine to the Hudson River School. The “sfumato” of the landscape—to use one of the four canonical painting modes of the Renaissance—literally means "gone up in smoke." I love those weird Pagan landscapes, too, especially Giorgione's Sleeping Venus, which shows a woman inexplicably reclining on flowing fabric in the romantic outdoors. There is this sense of an empire on the brink of collapse from it's own decadence. The old world is receding, and this reclining woman is both protector and destroyer. I want to restore that epic and mythological dimension, a sense of awe and reverence for the world.

OPP: From 2004-2008, you made a series of drawings of bricks taken from the houses of famous writers, including William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, and William Butler Yeats. Then, in 2009, you made drawings of the overgrown graves of Zora Neale Hurston and Eudora Welty. The first thing that strikes me is the difference in how History treats male and female writers. Was this part of your intention when you made the later drawings?

CP: It was, though I'm not sure how deliberate it was at the time. Now that seems obvious to me, too, but in the beginning I worked on instinct and trust. I did initially visit the last surviving house of Zora, down the street from where she was buried in Fort Pierce, Florida. But it was a mean and lonely place of poverty and obscurity she died in. It was the opposite of the brick and magnolia grandeur of Faulkner's estate. Her grave itself was unmarked for over a decade, a mere empty lot beside the train tracks, until Alice Walker bought her a tombstone. The tree I drew is a Brazilian Pepper. It's not a tree so much as a shrub, an invasive species no one plants intentionally. It grows in the ditches among the weeds. Welty, on the other hand, was a white woman who was born and died comfortably, and was buried in a beautiful Civil War-era cemetery in Jackson, Mississippi. At her grave is a proud Juniper tree. So even between the two there is a great psychological distance.

OPP: The second thing that struck me about these drawings is more about you than the drawings themselves, and I see it in all your work that references literary texts. In your statement about the brick series, you say: "A lone graphite drawing of a brick, surrounded by a great expanse of white paper, can tell the story of how spirit actually finds its way inside of matter and how humans tend to it." This is a beautiful idea that gets at one of my personal interests: fandom. Although fandom is usually associated with media, like TV shows and movies, or sports, I love the idea of literary fandom. It's really the same thing: an intense engagement with a "text" (in the flexible, postmodern sense of the word), in which the text is a portal to other ideas or to other people. Did the houses and the graves you chose have personal significance for you?

CP: Yes! All great love affairs. Fandom is a perfect way to describe it. After all, stealing bricks from houses is certainly as weird as tearing off a scrap of cloth from a singer and keeping it at your bedside table. We each choose our own holy relics. Text, in particular, is a portal for me, because I can lift certain phrases and sentences off the page and carry them around in my head. They hang about for months and years, haunting me, repeating and repeating. I could stare at a painting by Caravaggio forever, but I could never carry it around afterwards. Not even a hand or a foot. My mind won't hold on to it. Drawing the bricks was partly about that—an attempt to make as close a copy as possible. In the end though, a drawing of a brick is not really a brick at all. But with writing you can make an exact copy. I suppose this is the real source of my romantic relationship with the world. When I walk down the street on a fall day, Shakespeare is incanting:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

And so on. I just looked up the word incantation, by the way. "Ritual recitation of verbal charms or spells to produce a magic effect." Isn't that wonderful?

It's a shame most people only read stuff like Shakespeare in high school. Writers were great prophets in the past, like oracles or augurs. Tennyson was one of the last poets famous enough to have crowds of people follow him down the street to his home on the Isle of Wight. That was long ago. That was fandom of a different color.

OPP: Before, you mentioned you want to tell stories and that the graphite reminds you of writing. Did you ever want to be a writer instead of a visual artist?

CP: Always! More than I wanted to be an artist probably. But getting your second choice in life isn't at all bad. I just want more time to read: weeks, months, years. It's the only thing that makes me wish I believed in an afterlife, because like Borges, "I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” So, third career choice: librarian? 

To view more of Christina's work, please visit christinapettersson.com.

JOHN STARK's paintings are hauntingly ambiguous. The hooded figures, whose faces we never see, peform rituals which evoke the mystical and the mundane, asking the viewer to decide if what is being portrayed is sinister or soothing. John is a finalist for The 2012 Threadneedle Prize, and his work will be on view this September as part of 20/12 London Art Now. He lives and works in London, England.

OtherPeoplesPixels: In an illuminating interview last year on dazeddigital.com, you mention quite a few art historical influences. But I also see elements in the paintings that make me think of contemporary horror movies, heavy metal album covers, and fantasy posters? Are these also an influence for you?

OPP: What is the structure built from branches and supporting a body hidden under a blanket? I've seen it in several of your paintings and others have similar structures, but it looks like there's no body. Is this an invented structure or something with a real world referent that I'm not familiar with?

OPP: Why is it a recurring motif in your work?

JS: I'm interested in the way these motifs operate as memento mori and function as poignant symbols for Nietzsche's idea of the eternally recurring cycle and also call in to question Jung's belief in the immortality of the soul. I'm also attempting to comment on contemporary ways of viewing images of death and how they’re digested in the modern western world. We are becoming more desensitized by way of simulated deaths through media and film which enables us to suppress the reality of it behind a vale or bury it in the grave of our cultural memory, as if we have no innate notion of our own death. It is only the shock of a loved one’s death that persuades us that we can or even will die one day. So the intention with these particular works is for them to hover somewhere between the two oppositions. On one hand, they appear quite synthesized like fantasy art, and on the other, they depict something very real and poignant. It's a reminder that you will die and of the question of what happens at that point.

OPP: The figure in your paintings is always hooded or turned away from the viewer of the painting. Or the face is shrouded in hair or covered by fabric. Why is that?

OPP: Could you talk about the ideas of ritual and alchemy that tie apiculture and painting together?

JS: I like to think the physical process of the bees at work mirrors the process of creating a painting. Pollen becomes honey through an act of alchemy: the worker bee uses its body as the space for transformation and then regurgitates the liquid gold. Similarly, the dead stuff of paint— essentially inert matter—becomes charged through the practice of painting. Also the process is analogous with an alchemical pursuit towards a kind of philosophical gold where the metaphysical becomes physical, or the process of painting becomes a means towards self individuation. More specifically, the Black Sun is the starting point; you must travel into the darkness to find the light. So, regarding the alchemical symbolism inherent in the imagery, it refers directly to the mystical pursuit of painting.

OPP: Metaphysics is obviously a major theme in your work. Would you say your role as an artist similar to that of a metaphysician, interpretting the world for others? Or are the paintings themselves just the result, the evidence, of your private metaphysical inquiries?

JS: Metaphysics is naturally a part of painting. It's wrapped up in the strange intangible process where mind becomes matter and physical labour is transformed in the paint through time and space. Painting, for me, is a way of being that forces out questions about the nature of existence, so that is what I do. Through painting, I investigate the world from a personal perspective, where thoughts and feelings become manifest, which in turn are further interpreted by the viewer. My investigation tends to centre on universal (or Jungian) archetypes and their manipulation, so the paintings are dependent on this exchange between the artist and the beholder. To function, the paintings must be felt or understood.

from series Black Mirror

OPP: Your newest body of work, Black Mirror, seems to expand what you started with Apiculture into new and more mundane (i.e. less seemingly mystical) rituals like shaving and book binding, but they still maintain the aura of something secret and solemn happening. These are NOT funny paintings. I see in them the mystical experience/transcendence of self through ritual, labor, and magic. Older bodies of work reference magic and possible dark arts as easily as they reference Christian or Tibetan symbols. These same religious/mystical/ spiritual rituals are still visible in the new work, but now the trappings are of labor and nature and science. Are you making a point about mysticism and the everyday? Or am I just seeing what I want to see in your mirror?

To view more of John's work, please visit johnstarkgallery.co.uk.

STEVEN PEARSON combines numerous painting techniques and media to create dynamic,  colorful abstractions of digital information and everyday experiences. His compositions are orchestrations of chaos and balance that reveal a myriad of influences from fine art and pop culture. Steven has been an Associate Professor in the Art & Art History Department at McDaniel College since 2004. He is also the Director of the college’s Rice Gallery and lives in Westminster, MD.

OtherPeoplesPixels: I see a lot of different aesthetics and references in your work: graffiti, graphic design, comic books, and the history of abstraction in painting. Tell us about some of your influences.

Steven Pearson: My influences are extremely varied, from Baroque painters like Rubens and Rembrandt, to comic books and graphic novels. I started out as a narrative figurative painter and was influenced by the Baroque. I love the use of composition and movement in many of Rubens’ paintings and the way he carries the eye through every inch of a painting. I’ve tried to bring that kind of movement and use of space into my own work. In comic books, I’m interested in the use of the page and the panels. The panels are used to control the information, organize the story, and convey a sense of time, but within the panels themselves, there can be these moments of intense drama. It’s amazing how much can actually be conveyed in one page without overwhelming the viewer. There is a definite connection between those dynamic compositions of Rubens and the compositions found in a comic book. Good graffiti contains that dynamic movement and drama as well, but what interests me more in looking at graffiti is the layering of different murals and tags upon each other. It conveys a sense of history and time.

As for influences from the history of abstraction I’d have to say I am interested in the space and design of Al Held, Frank Stella, Franz Ackerman and Julie Mehretu; the rawness and brushwork of DeKooning and Terrence La Noue; the push/pull of Hans Hoffman; the openness to gain information and ideas from varied visual resources of Grace Hartigan; the use of color of the members of the Washington color school; and the potpourri of marks, images, information, and politics found in Basquiat. I’ve probably taken a little from each of them, plus many more over the years, and found ways to blend it together with my own sensibilities to create my own voice, which we all do. At least I hope I have, but it’s always a work in progress.

 OPP: You use a lot of different types of paint, including acrylic, oil, spray paint and paint pens, and this leads to a lot of very different kinds of brush strokes within the same painting. How did you develop this way of painting? Can you talk about the conceptual underpinning of this convergence of styles developing out of the medium itself?

SP: I enjoy contrasts. They add balance. Balance is an important part of life. We are constantly looking for it, and sometimes we even find it. Spray paint gives me a misty, speckled treatment of an area to balance the flat, opaqueness of acrylic. Loose, active brushstrokes balance the hard, taped edge. The paint pen gives me a clean outline that makes drips and splashes appear very controlled, balancing the chaos of chance that actually created them. Both as a figurative painter and an abstract painter, I was more conscious about trying to achieve variety of paint applications when I painted in oils. But when I switched to acrylics, I was doing the Heroes and Villains series and needed the paint to just sit flat, opaque, and have mostly a hard edge, so it wasn’t as important.

At the end of that series, I wanted to explore the nuances of painting a little more. But I also felt like I needed to be willing to bring in any medium necessary— and that made sense to the paintings—to add contrast and variation to the surface. As an undergraduate student in the early 1990s, I had silk screened into paintings, sewed collaged paintings together, and worked on various surfaces. Not all of these experiments were successful, or even good, but it’s that process of experimentation and discovery that is fresh and invigorating and keeps me coming back to the studio. I also believe that those areas of contrasting brushstrokes, or little introductions of a different medium draw a viewer in and keep them engaged.

OPP: I love that you acknowledge that not all experiments are successful. And I often find that I learn as much from my failures as from my successes. Will you tell me about a failure that taught you a lot about your own work?

SP: I will try to answer that with a general lesson I have learned, which is that all of the failures have taught me not to approach each painting like it will be a masterpiece and to not be too set on an initial idea, but be open to change and revision and let the work tell me where it needs to go. A specific example is the painting Gaining Momentum. I did that painting at the Vermont Studio Center, and I had a set idea and a small sketch I was working from in the first week or so of the painting. I wanted these two opposing forces (in my head, I was thinking of two Hokusai waves) coming at each other. After a week, I stepped back and looked at the painting and realized I had two colorful phallic-looking shapes opposing each other instead of two wave-like forces. Not the result I was looking for. After some commiseration, I took the the 16 panels off of the left wall, laid them on the floor and just loosened up. I poured paint, spray painted, and drew in charcoal until I had a ground that I could build on that wasn't overly planned out. Another interesting thing about that painting is I had intended it to be a 16' wide flat painting, but when I got into the studio provided for me at the residency, I found that there wasn't a 16' wide wall. So I mounted the panels in the corner, just to start working. After working on it for 2-3 weeks, I realized that the corner installation allowed you to get more physically immersed in the painting and be enveloped by the color.

Don Quixote's Folly was very similar. It took four months, several very ugly stages, and multiple configurations of the panels and overall shape to finally resolve it. If I wasn't prepared to push through several revisions and to be self critical, I would have either abandoned it in one of its incredibly ugly stages or tried to convince myself that it wasn't a bad painting. There are several paintings—that fortunately have never seen the light of day—that didn't get re-worked and resolved. I was convinced at the time that they worked. Luckily for me, I didn't have shows they were destined for, so I had time to think about them and either scrap them or paint over them. So to sum it up, I've learned from my failures to be open, count on revision, and to always know the location of a big dumpster.

OPP: The paintings from Dualities and Amalgamations (2009-2010) are a reflection of "our ability to receive and assimilate" the "flood of information on a daily, if not hourly, basis via a variety of technological means: emails, text messages, Facebook, Twitter, online newspapers, countless websites, as well as television and radio. In this sense, they are not pure abstractions. They are actually representations of information. But the viewer doesn't have access to what is being represented, because all the information is coded. In terms of contemporary painting, is pure abstraction even possible anymore? Is it interesting or relevant to your work?

SP: That’s a good question. Bob Nickas touches on that slightly in "Painting Abstraction: New Elements in Abstract Painting." He questions why artists who paint non-representationally reject the notion that their work is abstract. He suggests that the term abstraction should be used to cover artists who create representational abstractions, as well as artists who work from more formal, non-objective modes. Using abstraction as an umbrella word that covers a wide variety of abstract or non-objective painting makes complete sense to me as a painter in the 21^st century. It is difficult and probably nearly impossible to remove yourself from the visual bombardment that we undergo daily, so how can someone paint pure abstraction? The questions will always be there: Where did you get that color? Why that shape?... and so on. I do think about it when I am creating painting, and I do like it when the sources of my visuals become so obscure that they are indecipherable, but I think my paintings would lose interest to me if I tried to actually divorce them from outside resources.

OPP: I'd love to hear more about your series Heroes and Villains (2007-2008), which uses 1980s comic book covers as the source for your color palette and responds to the wood grain of your birch wood substrate as the source for the patterning. Why did you decide to put these 2 disparate sources together?

SP: I fell into that series on accident. I was about to build a new stretcher for a painting when I noticed a shape in the wood-grain of the birch plywood I was going to cut up for corner braces. The shape looked very similar to shapes that I would make when painting quick abstract studies on paper. I decided to do a couple of small paintings that just used the grain of the wood for the composition, with no additions brought in. After painting two of them I saw that I was using a contrasting combination of Liquitex Brilliant Blue and Cadmium Red Light. I like that combination together because of its intensity, but at the time I was painting them, I was watching Superman Returns. It made me think about the colors always used to depict heroes in comics, and conversely, the colors often used to portray villains. I decided to use the colors of heroes and of their arch nemeses as the palettes for my paintings, but I was afraid that if I tried to draw my own compositions, I would be too heavy handed in creating "hero shapes" and their villainous counterparts. I thought I could avoid that by using the wood grain as the "drawing" and letting the color represent those opposites. I also felt the use of the wood grain and the use of color as an addition was another way of introducing opposites. The wood grain was "truth." It was the natural pattern of the readymade substrate. The color was a fallacy added to that surface. It was another way for me to continue my focus on opposites and balance.

OPP: You have 2 upcoming solo shows in the fall/winter of 2012: Information Breakdown at Exhibit A Gallery at the Hamilton Street Club in Baltimore and Information Overload at the Visual Arts Gallery in Queensbury, NY. Was the work in these shows developed simultaneously? I'm assuming some connection based on the titles of the shows, but what will be distinctly different about the exhibitions?

SP: The work in Information Overload was developed first. In that series, I was focusing on a more intuitive process. These paintings are composed of shapes, forms, and colors of things I may have seen driving, or surfing the web, or walking, or driving. The paintings are built up and layered with these memories. In the process some get buried or fragmented, and some remain prominent and sit on the surface, much like the way we store and process information.

In this series, I also started tracing parts of the composition, or even parts of previous paintings, and would then repeat them and reconfigure them within a composition, cannibalizing one part to activate another. The painting Amalgamation is created from three previous paintings traced and recombined to create a new composition. This altered the memory and changed the story of those things. Some parts get enhanced and become more of a focus, and others become background. I think it is interesting composing a painting this way. It makes me think roughly of Jean Piaget’s adaptation process: assimilation and accommodation. We take in new information and incorporate it into our existing ideas (assimilation), or our ideas are changed based on new information (accommodation).

The paintings that will be in Information Breakdown are derived directly from the paintings in Information Overload, and from the process used to create Amalgamation. I started the first painting in the group that will be in the show, Over/Under, from traced portions of Amalgamation and Don Quixote's Folly. When I finished Over/Under, I traced it in 10" squares placed randomly over the composition and then transferred them to a new panel in random order to create a new composition. When that painting [Mesmer] was completed, I traced it in 10” squares and reconfigured it into a new composition [Intermittent Lucidity]. I am currently working on the fourth in that series that was traced from Intermittent Lucidity. All the information in the paintings can be traced back to Amalgamation and Don Quixote’s Folly, but it gets so broken down and re-ordered that it becomes nearly unrecognizable, altered, and new. I plan on repeating this process for 7 to 10 paintings, by which time I think the information will be so broken down, it will be like painting white noise.

SARA HOLWERDA is a performance and video artist who uses movement and dance to explore the limitations of the represenations of the female body in western culture. Her references are varied and include painting, burlesque, vaudeville, movies, contemporary pop music videos, and YouTube tutorials to name a few. Sara recently received her MFA from Cranbrook and now lives and works in Chicago, IL.

OtherPeoplesPixels: Your performances and videos involve movement and dance. Do you have a formal background in these fields?

Sara Holwerda: Yes. I figure skated competitively for over ten years, and, as part of my training, I did ballet and yoga. In college I took modern dance at the YMCA and fell into some barefoot dance performances with middle aged hippies in the woods. (I went to college in Ann Arbor!)

OPP: In many performances such as One and Three Women (2012) or The Fall (2012), you perform with others. Are you always the choreographer of these performances or are they collaborators in creating the work?

For The Fall, I had a much larger cast—five dancers, a singer, a Tree of Knowledge, and three paparazzi—so I had to be more prepared with my choreography. I drew diagrams and sent PDFs to everyone to make rehearsals go faster. The scale of the project made it difficult for me to both direct and perform effectively. I performed as a Marilyn Monroe imitator, because I felt I needed to return to that role—when I was seventeen, I performed Marilyn Monroe's "Diamonds" solo in an ice show. That solo became an unintentional drag performance failure! My wig came off during a layback spin, and my middle-aged male partners were so nervous that they could barely velcro the "Cartier" on my wrists or lift me up. My inability to fit into this hyper-feminine role, which has been so iconic for so long, was part of my inspiration for the piece. Before I did this performance, I created the Marilyn fuchsia dress from that number as a burlesque costume, and I worked tearing off the costume bit by bit in The Fall. In retrospect, after going through the whole process of staging that work, I realized that I didn't need to perform this role. I learned an important lesson: with a large cast, I can direct more freely if I remove myself as a performer. I'm planning a re-staging of this performance, and I will not perform in it.