OtherPeoplesPixels Blog

He Was a Friend of Mine, 2016. Oil on canvas. 36" x 48"

ISAK APPLIN's painted vignettes often depict quiet moments that point to the internal experiences of their subjects. A man chops wood while remembering a betrayal. Solitary figures stroll through the forest in contemplation. Although there is occasional drama—sometimes a man is knifed outside a bar. Regardless, these works balance site with story. His attention to color and texture demands that viewrs take the environments as seriously as the action. Isak earned his BFA in Painting at Maine College of Art and his MFA in Painting and Drawing at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His numerous solo shows include: Dark Holler (Chicago, 2006) at Contemporary Art Workshop, Six More Miles (Chicago, 2008) at Roots and Culture, Chocorua(Ontario, 2013) at Evans Contemporary, and Now Chicago (Sydney, Australia, 2014) at The Hughes Gallery. Around the Mountain Again, a two-person show also featuring the work of Featured Artist Carl Baratta opened at The New Standard Gallery (Sydney, Australia) in early 2018. He is currently at the Stephen Pace House Residency in Stonington Maine. Isak also runs Titan and Weald, a private press specializing in chapbooks, fine press books and relief prints. Isak lives in Queens, New York.

OtherPeoplesPixels: What’s your relationship to the woods?

Isak Applin: I see the forest as a place of mystery and change.

I grew up in the woods of the Taconic Mountains on border of Massachusetts and New York State. In the 19th century, lumber mills, small factories and sheep farms deforested much of the region. As these industries waned during the mid 20th century a rich forest quickly grew back. And yet traces of the old way of life remained: logging roads, building foundations, stonewalls, mysterious piles of rocks and weathered fence posts were scattered throughout the woods. I witnessed the tail end of this transformation as a child; even then I found it awe-inspiring, disconcerting and sublime.

As a child and teenager, the forest was also a stage for adventure—it was my African jungle, Sherwood Forest and Siberian taiga. Later it was the place for one’s first kiss and precious hours of freedom from school and parents. 

The inhabitants of this forested area were also equally fascinating. During the 1970s, the area was settled by Whole Earth Catalog inspired hippies, Vietnam Vets seeking solace and New Yorkers who had always dreamed of owning a horse. It was also a place of big dreams and spectacular and frightening failures. Within a few miles of my house there was a thriving Sufi commune, a huge Indian style Peace Pagoda built entirely by volunteers and a failed nudist colony—it had descended into violent, drug-ridden chaos. I’ve always been extremely fascinated and moved by my neighbors’ eccentric and epic lives. 

The Letter II, 2014. Oil on canvas. 30" x 30"

OPP: How you think about the woods when painting?

IA: Many of the paintings attempt to capture the sentiments I described above. They are simply an edited depiction of that landscape or the story set in that landscape. I have always been a collector of stories and situations I find moving, strange and unique. Sometimes, often years after the event, I feel the need to make a painting of one of these stories in an attempt to record and share it. And this is how much of my work is generated: I hear a story or experience something, find myself reflecting on it, and at some point decide that this event needs to be shared with the rest of the world. 

Forked Lake, 2017. Watercolor and gouache on paper. 12" x 9"

OPP: What’s your relationship to landscape painting?

IA: My relationship to landscape paintings is that of a magpie to its nest; I’ll steal from any tradition if it helps me convey the spirit of the story or place I’m depicting! In general, the compositions are largely influenced by Medieval Sienese paintings, Persian and Indian miniatures and various Chinese paintings. Early and mid 20th century European and American modernists often inform my color choices and paint handling. Lately I’ve been under the spell of Monica Poole and Gwenda Morgan, wood engravers from Britain that created marvelously inventive landscape prints.

His Last Night in Randazzo, 2017. Watercolor and gouache on paper. 19" x 14"

OPP: His Last Night in Randazzo (2018) and Goodbye Jay (2017) have a cinematic quality, in the sense that the scenes floating around the central figure indicate something other than what’s happening in the present moment. I keep flipping back and forth between thinking they are the near future, the distant past or a complete fantasy in the heads of the figures in the bottom of the the paintings. Thoughts?

IA: Both paintings are inspired by true events, and both depict several different points of time within one composition. The events are fragments, and they do not necessarily come together to form a coherent narrative. In these paintings I hope to capture what it feels like to hear the stories (or the storyteller) that I’m working with, rather than transcribe these events into a linear narrative.  

Goodbye Jay is a memorial painting, albeit a light-hearted one, depicting events from the life of a friend who was a sailor on research vessels in the Arctic and the South Seas. He lived in a comic book world of maritime violence and South Seas romance. His Last Night in Randazzo is a little less straightforward. I used the space to the left of the tree in the center as a container for vignettes depicting an acquaintance’s escape from Sicily and his flight to Detroit. To the right of this tree is a couple walking down a path in the present day--they are the ones that have to live under the weight of the events on the left.

Fantasy is sparingly added to these compositions, I only include fictional events in the paintings if I feel that it will enhance or clarify the feeling that I’m trying to convey.

Spring '96, 2013. Oil on canvas. 30" x 30"

OPP: Can you talk about the recurring themes of being chased, watched or stalked?

IA: The chase themed paintings began in 2012. A friend and I were cycling along a wooded path on a drizzling November afternoon, and we were suddenly chased by an incredibly fast deranged man wearing a cape of burlap sacks. Around this same time everyone in my apartment building was unexpectedly evicted. I started making some drawings of being chased while cycling, and the chase theme became an allegory for forced flight.

The “watching” paintings are about longing, loss and the quixotic behavior of scorned lovers. Like the other paintings, these are based on true events from the distant past that have haunted and moved me. I never really set out to make a painting about being stalked, but I can see how some of the compositions could inspire that interpretation.

Dennis and Marilyn, 2016. Oil on canvas. 30" x 30"

OPP: Tell us about the process of making collaborative prints with Carl Baratta and Oli Watt?

IA: This series started in 2007. One of our primary goals is to create a collaborative piece where the viewer can’t see each artist’s hand. Put another way, we hope that no one will be able to look at a piece and suspect that I drew the bottom, Carl drew the top and the middle looks like something from one of Oli’s prints. To achieve this, we try to draw in each other’s style, we often take turns carving different parts of the wood block, and we generally make all decisions collectively.

Old Woman Spring Road I, 2016. Collaboration with Carl Baratta, woodcut on paper. 9" x 12"

OPP: Did this collaboration teach you anything about your solo practice?

IA: For a long time, the collaborative work was a place where I (we) explored fantastic and mythological themes that were absent from, or didn’t seem to fit into, my personal work. The collaborative prints were a vessel for passages from the epic of Gilgamesh, invented deities and the depiction of other worlds—content that seemed at odds with my paintings set in the contemporary world. To my surprise, in 2014 the apparitions, ghosts and angels from the collaborative prints started creeping into the personal work, enriching it in a way that I could never have anticipated.

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.

JAVIER CARMONA’s photographs read like stills from motion pictures, hinting at the process of their own production. He directs and performs with actors in scripted scenes in rented apartments in far-away countries. In recent projects, he performs the character of Xavier, whose navigation of romantic relationships is an exploration of language, gesture and intimacy, both between humans and in relation to the cultural specificity of geographic locations. Javier earned his BFA from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago in 1994 and his MFA in Photography from The University of New Mexico in 1997. He has exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Mexico and Italy, and his work was most recently seen in Front and Center, the culminating show for the Center Program Residency at Hyde Park Art Center. In 2016, Javier will have solo exhibitions at Galería de Arte Contemporáneo, Secretaría de la Economía in Mexico City and The Photo-Four Gallery at South Suburban College in South Holland, Illinois. In March 2016, he will present Making a Scene: Towards an Actor’s Method for Still Photography at the National Conference of the Society for Photographic Education. Javier teaches at Dominican University in River Forest, Illinois and lives in Chicago.

OtherPeoplesPixels: Could you expand on your notion of an "epic picture?"

Javier Carmona: It’s my reaction to the limitations placed on photographs by defining them as categories. There’s a part of me that loathes talking about pictures in terms of portrait, still life, landscape. Curators seem insistent on cataloging an image as a way of assigning its meaning. I don’t know how to answer the question, “Are these portraits?” I can’t bring myself to teach that way. I don’t get it.

I’d rather address the picture as a temporal phenomenon; an epic picture negotiates a narrative not bound by time. The still photograph is decontextualized time, even though we think of it as originating from a linear sensation of it. I anchor the still picture in a dialogue with the moving image. In cinema, the methodology of fusing the external world with the rehearsed intentions of a performed action is so much more of an accepted circumstance. My work brings that audience expectation of cinema to the still photograph.

Years ago, in my dissertation, I paraphrased Brecht’s idea of the Epic Theatre and began using the phrase Epic Photography; the epic picture is one which looks for a renewed, human expression of the actual and resistant world. In this sense, our phones take pictures, but they’re often obstacles to our tangible surroundings. I’ll take the sensual and the social over the virtual.

But let me be clear: it is possible to make an epic picture with a cell phone. Epic is not about scale or file size. I'm for any device that engenders contact with the external place. I'm more critical of our self-hypnosis with gadgets; our debilitated social behavior because of them. My principle camera these days is my Samsung Galaxy Note. It's the biggest cell phone they make, but still discreet. It makes the initial mark, like location scouting."

OPP: Are your characters archetypes or individuals?

JC: The key word is character. Even when I perform in front of the camera, I play someone named Xavier. That simple letter change—from Xavier to Javier—allows me a conceptual distance. I can embrace an affectation other than my own.

So many of the recent projects, like In the Arena, have started with scripts in which the actors play characters. I’ve noticed my impulse to give them X names: Xoraida, Xenobia, Ximena, Xan, Xochitl. The X finds variable pronunciation; perhaps an extension of a mutable identity. It’s the mathematical unknown. It serves to exoticize these characters for an audience. Perhaps the characters approach the archetypes of audience expectation—an ethnically ambiguous visage we could call Latin.

OPP: As the viewer, I feel a sense of longing that I also read in the characters. I'm longing for the rest of the story—all the parts between the captured moments. . . the moments I don't get to see—and they seem to be longing for connection or belonging. I am drawn in by the intimacy and vulnerability in the images themselves. What roles do intimacy and vulnerability play in the process of making the images?

JC: I tell myself to make straight forward pictures about what I don’t understand. That requires risk and yes, I hope, emotional vulnerability. I want the characters to examine what they don’t know about each other and the circumstances of their surroundings. The scenarios are largely written that way. It’s important the characters suddenly realize they are not where they once were, that they’re on an indifferent street in Mexico City or an arresting intersection in Rome.

I had a long habit of going to Mexico to photograph, but a handful of years ago, I began renting furnished apartments to extend my stay there as long as it was sustainable. I wanted to have a resident’s intimate knowledge of the place I had been born, but only knew in brief, albeit regular intervals throughout my life. Even before I knew to articulate it, I longed to create a cinematic illusion of what that other reality might be. So the Xavier character emerged as one negotiating a romantic relationship. The series, Mexican Cinema evolved into something I called The Enamorates / Los Enamorados. I thought of Xavier’s female foils as extensions of this intimate knowledge. To know Ximena, was to broach the immediate circumstance. Do the female characters become embodiments of ideals? Maybe initially, but only as a starting point.

Love Streams-an Italian Play, my ongoing work in Italy, initially came from an opportunity to teach in Florence during the summer. There emerged a parallel search for this intimacy you’re perceiving. In this case, it was a culture that resembled my own, but different enough to pose the obstacle of language toward understanding. I liked the prospect of being a chameleon there, of being mistaken for an Italian. On the streets, I would be asked for directions as if I were a resident; inevitably this informed the Xavier character. In Italian there is no letter J. So it was easier to be Xavier.

In Italy, I really began to think mostly in gestures and physical actions. I am still hoping to get that idea right: how two people might learn to negotiate emotion, despite communication.

The in-between moments you describe are the ones in which I think photography works best—when it resists explanation and revels in ambiguity. There’s more to be learned by ambiguity than a straightforward recitation. While I have been shooting these scripted scenarios to eventually also be a proper short film, I fear the ambiguity of the still may be lost once the image begins to move and explain itself.

OPP: I'd like to see the film because I’m ultimately curious about these characters for whom I've created my own stories. I’ve filled in the blanks, and a part of me wants to know if I’m right. On the other hand, my own longing to know and the way your still photographs resist my REALLY knowing seems to be the point. Is this related to what you meant by the “resistant world?”

JC: I'm often told, "These photographs should be films," implying this narrative speculation is not the purview of the still. I disagree. That longing you're describing, is much more indelible in a still that isn't replaced by the next moving frame. Photographs resist explanation as much as the external world resists providing the answers.

But ultimately the "resistant world" deposits the rehearsed gesture "on location," inviting an interaction with elements out of one's control, making credible what is enacted in the process. It's what I see in Cassavetes or French New Wave films made on streets, without permission and probably why they were my central influences.

OPP:  You occasionally use subtitles, sometimes in English and sometimes in Spanish. Where does the text come from? Do you think about audience when deciding which language to use?

JC: The text is pulled directly from the scripted scenes. The sequence of stills which make up In the Arena, highlights the physical gestures being performed. In the film version I’m editing, I’ll likely have the entire narrative subtitled regardless. Very likely the text will fluctuate in language and waiver in the accuracy of its translation. It would become a second dialogue over the spoken one.

I don’t mind that the subtitles or even the titles for the images go untranslated for what is initially an English-speaking audience. If they’re interested, they’ll use the universal translator on their phones. Otherwise, it’s another layer of ambiguity. Is it mischievous to give untranslated Spanish or Italian titles to works seen mostly by an American audience? Hopefully it makes them self-conscious of their role as an audience. To me it broadens the definition of what should be a mainstream experience of art viewing. It’s asking the audience to consider more information as part of who they are.

OPP: Language and translation is just one part of comprehending work that bridges multiple cultures. You've exhibited throughout the United States and extensively in Mexico City. Is your work understood differently in Mexico versus the U.S.?

JC: Is the work understood differently in Mexico? Oh gods, yes! And that’s so refreshing. Having those actual conversations with different audiences is the heart of the dialogue the work is looking to engage. As if the work itself provides the pretext to interact socially with people I’d like to know further. Despite my Mexican birth or fluency in Spanish, Mexicans regard me as an American artist, with the accompanying exoticism. I’m intrigued by how I’m perceived in these different places. It feeds the character. When I started going there as a young artist, gaining social acceptance in my country of origin was an unspoken motivation; exhibiting work was a way to do that. Now I go find a community I miss enormously.

In the States, many art people go straight to gender in this work and are often unwilling to allow me the conceit of playing a fictional character. I showed Mexican Cinema to a book publisher, who felt the work was mostly about surrounding myself with beautiful women and dismissed it outright. I’m still baffled by that. I couldn’t get her to engage with the importance of location in the evolving narrative. Was she culturally intolerant or offended by a perceived sexism?

I tend to not have the work explain all these references, for fear of becoming didactic. Ambiguity is king. But it comes at a cost when the audience isn’t aware of the cultural baggage you’ve arrived with.

I exhibited a few stills from In the Arena in Mexico City recently. They got it. They were eager to have a conversation about the telenovela and how it affects the Mexican expression of emotion. There’s an acting school in Mexico City that teaches a melodrama class called Bofetada y Lagrima, which focuses on the slap and crying for the camera. I think a discussion of that in an American context would be extraordinary. 

OPP: What about specific geographical references that American audiences might not get, such as the Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City? How does this location add another layer of meaning in The Reforma Rehearsals, Part I and II (2013)?

JC: The Paseo de la Reforma is Mexico City’s principle artery. It’s one of the busiest—maybe ten lanes in some stretches—stitching together the many monuments of the city’s identity. To have a film, where an actor, walks as slowly as possible in real time against the current of the fastest traffic, is akin to reclaiming an individual presence in this vast city. It takes her nearly 15 minutes to cross 50 feet in the volatile context of chance occurrence. That’s epic, as I’d like to think of it; the gesture is not bound by time.

OPP: I initially read your work more literally as about intimacy and vulnerability, gender roles and possibly archetypes from the telenovela, which I had an inkling about, but didn’t feel well-versed enough to comment on. I was particularly curious about the vulnerability of the Masculine. But now, I see the romance as an allegory for cultural and geographic belonging. What I initially thought of as a longing for human connection, I now see as a more general longing for belonging. Thoughts?

JC: Belonging? That works. . . You know, you're reminding me that I've rarely felt comfortable in a room full of people where everybody looks and sounds the same. I've always felt more at ease in heterogeneous surroundings. And that alien feeling happens in Mexico, too.

At the same time, I've had an instinct to understand by infiltration. My interest in language and gesture allows me to be a chameleon. Making pictures and now studying acting exists in this context. I loved that I've been confused for an Italian or someone of Middle Eastern descent. It sets up the challenge to find a way to belong. To learn how they greet or love.

Featured Artist Interviews are conducted by Chicago-based, interdisciplinary 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 instructor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where received her MFA in 2006, and was a 2012-2013 Mentor-in-Residence at BOLT in Chicago. Her solo exhibitions include I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For (2013) at Klemm Gallery, Siena Heights University (Adrian, Michigan), Everything You Need is Already Here (2014) at Heaven Gallery (Chicago) and When Things Fall Apart, a durational, collage installation in the Annex Gallery at Lillstreet Art Center (Chicago). Form Unbound, a two-person show, also featuring the work of Aimée Beaubien, runs through December 19, 2015 at Dominican University's O’Connor Art Gallery (River Forest, IL).

Illusions of material, weight and balance are precariously at play in DICKSON BOU's angular, faceted sculptures, which  obliquely reference architecture, airplane wreckage and paper airplanes. Working intuitively, he first familiarizes himself with the inherent qualities of his chosen materials—white foam core, wood grain contact paper and textured floor underlay, to name a few— then allows the outcome of each conscious decision in his process to lead to the next. Dickson earned his BFA at the University of Western Ontario in 2009) and his MFA at the University of Victoria, British Columbia in 2011. He has exhibited in The Windsor Biennial (2011) at the Art Gallery of Windsor, Firstness (2012) at the defunct Tumble Contemporary Art in Winnipeg, Manitoba and Bracket(ed) (2013), a two person show also featuring the work of Thomas Chisholm. Dickson recently opened N+1 Cycle, a vintage bicycle shop, with Jason Hallows in London, Ontario, where he lives and works.

OtherPeoplesPixels: What role does materiality play in your work? What are your favorite materials? Have you ever worked with a once-loved material that you ended up hating after creating art with it?


Dickson Bou: I've always described my work as “materially driven.” Every piece starts with a material that I've been obsessing over in the studio. I experiment with it, figure out what I can and can't do with the material and go from there. My favorite materials are the types that allows me to make work that seems more substantial than it actually is. The more recent white, angular sculptures are good examples. They are foam core made to look like welded steel. It was important for that work to be able to shift back and forth between substantial and fragile. I would never hate a material I once loved, but I usually exhaust materials like you would exhaust a song or record by playing it one too many times.

OPP: Early works Parkhead (2008) and From Faraway (2009), a series of small-scale sculptures, are reminiscent of architectural models for city planning. They are like plans for public parks that couldn't exist in reality: imagined, self-contained environments holding self-contained, ambiguous narratives. There appears to be a shift away from narrative and towards material and spatial exploration around 2010. Is this true? Do you imagine a narrative in any more recent works?


DB: There was a swift away from small-scale models but not away from narratives. I noticed that people really latched onto the models, maybe more so to narratives presented by the models. I was more interested in the shift between scales than the actual narratives the scale models presented. With Parkhead, the safety pin is the one thing that occupied both scales. If you look at the piece in 1:1 scale, it's a head with a safety pin on top of it. But in 1:148 scale (or N scale in the model train world), it's a Claes Oldenburg sculpture in a park. I was interested in how Parkhead can bring you in and out of worlds (or scales) depending on your perception. The models became too literal and too easy for people to get hung up on. They became distracting, and I wanted to explore new territory.

With Wood & White, my 2011 MFA Thesis show, I wanted the viewer to experience the narrative more directly. I wanted viewers to feel like they were walking through a plane crash or navigating around icebergs or sinking ships. Each piece in Wood & White keeps the narrative moving. I'm more interested in putting viewers inside the story than giving them one to look at.

OPP: Could you talk about Cherry Blossom Shipwreck (2013), in which you hung four sculptures in the atrium at the University Community Center (UCC) on University of Western Ontario's campus? The pieces could be viewed from all three floors of the UCC. Many of the pieces resemble the work from Wood & White. The forms are very similar, but the installation completely alters their nature. On the ground, the sculptures remind me of airplane wreckage. In the air, they evoke paper airplanes and origami cranes.

DB: I made Wood & White knowing that viewers would walk around each piece and work their way through the exhibit. It's different with Cherry Blossom Shipwreck; you can't go through and around each piece, but you can view them from under and above. I related this way of viewing to outer space. Since Wood & White resembled airplane wreckage so much, I decided to look into spaceship wreckage. One of the pieces is inspired by the nose of the Millennium Falcon. At that time, I had also just moved back to London, Ontario from Victoria, British Columbia and was thinking about the cherry blossoms there and how pretty it was when the flowers floated through the wind.

OPP: What are you working on right now?

DB: I'm kind of on hiatus right now. I recently opened up a vintage bicycle shop with my friend Jason Hallows called N+1 Cycle here in London, Ontario. The summer was busy—which is great—but I'm looking forward to the down time over the winter to focus on my artwork. I've been playing around with metal, which I use to think it was too heavy and cold. But I met Dan Bernyk in my MFA program at the University of Victoria. I was blown away by how he was able to bring out metal’s light and warm side. I also started fixing old steel bicycles and really got into custom Randonneur bicycles hand-built by the French in the 1940s-70s.Their craftsmanship and innovation is very inspiring. Beauty and form through function have been on my mind a lot lately, so we'll see if it will work it's way into my future projects.

To see more of Dickson's work, please visit dicksonbou.com.

Featured Artist Interviews are conducted by Chicago-based, interdisciplinary 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 instructor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where received her MFA in 2006, and was a 2012-2013 Mentor-in-Residence at BOLT in Chicago. Recent solo exhibitions include I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For (2013) at Klemm Gallery, Siena Heights University (Adrian, Michigan) and Everything You Need is Already Here (2014) at Heaven Gallery in Chicago. Here|Now, a two-person exhibition curated by MK Meador and also featuring the work of Jason Uriah White, is on view at Design Cloud in Chicago from July 25 - October, 24, 2014. Beginning on November 7, 2014, Stacia will improvise When Things Fall Apart, an ongoing, collage installation in the Lillstreet Annex Gallery. Closing reception guests will be invited to help break down the piece by pulling pins out of the wall on December 5, 2014.

ADRIENNE GINTER relishes the details of nature: the gnarled web of tree branches, the modulating texture of a flower's surface, every individual blade of grass. Her cut-paper works, etchings and paintings of nature scenes draw on ancient myths, history and personal experiences. Each meticulous detail reveals a unique narrative, adding depth and nuance to the larger whole. Adrienne received her MFA in Painting from Boston University in 2008 and recently completed a residency at Vermont Studio Center. Since 2013, she has served as a trustee on the Vermont Arts Council of Windham County as well as the Vermont Crafts Council. In July 2014, she will have a solo exhibition [title?] at Outerlands Gallery in Vergennes, Vermont and will be featured in the Spring 2014 issue of Studio Visit Magazine. Adrienne lives in Wilmington, Vermont.

OtherPeoplesPixels: In your artist statement you say, "My approach to a painting is that of an exploration into the reoccurring oddities and subtle fascinations of the natural world." Can you give us some examples of the oddities? What fascinates you about nature?

Adrienne Ginter: The largest flower in the world is the Rafflesia arnoldii, which I reference in my paper-cut work Red Crane and my mini gouache painting Craneflower. The Rafflesia arnoldii grows up to three feet and only blooms for a couple of days. It is nicknamed the "corpse flower" because when it flowers it emits a horrible odor of decaying flesh. It does so to attract flies and beetles which pollinate the flower. The pollinators must visit the male then female flower in that order. Red-crowned cranes will attack larger predators like wolves and foxes when protecting their nests. Other smaller birds such as mockingbirds will attack snakes and even humans to protect their nest as seen in my paper-cut Snake in the Garden. In Whale Hunters, I portray a whale shark, a species which originated 60 million years ago. It is the largest fish in the world and times its arrival to coincide with spawning fish shoals and feeds on clouds of egg and sperm. So much in nature is left up to luck and chance, yet every plant and animal has evolved to better its own chances of survival.

It’s crazy that I can spend three consecutive days painting outside on the same watercolor, and everything changes day to day because plants and animals are continuously growing and dying. I often think about how many different processes are happening in the natural world at any given moment and how we as humans fit into this, copy it and ignore it. We are animals, after all.

OPP: You have experience with many different painting and print media: oil, watercolor, gouache, monoprints, etching. More recently you've been making work in hand-cut paper and collage. When did you make this shift? Do you consider it a break from or an extension of painting?

AG: I work in different media because I enjoy learning/teaching myself something new. The first hand-cut paper piece I made was Jungle (2008) during graduate school. I was struggling with a 6' x 7' all-green oil painting of the same title and created the paper-cut in order to inform my painting. After I made that first paper-cut, I was hooked. Working with paper allows me to open up and be more creative in experimenting with imagery and ideas. Paper allows me to be more fantastical for some reason. It doesn't have to make as much sense as I think a painting should. Paper also simplifies my palette since I use archival papers, usually Canson Mi-Teintes, and they only make 42 colors. Also, since I am working reductively and with a border on every piece of paper there is a built-in stopping point. There’s a natural limit to how much paper I can cut out.

I do not consider cut-paper a break from painting; each medium informs the other. I created a book from etchings I made during my first year in graduate school. That book of etchings was a huge turning point for me. I felt much more free with my imagery with the small scale of the etching plates, and those etchings led to the large oil paintings that ended up being my thesis show. I never would have made those large paintings without creating that book first.

OPP: How important is planning and precision in your hand-cut paper works? Could you explain a little about the process?

AG: I do not plan out the paper-cuts. The only thing I plan is to have a connecting border on every layer. I typically use a X-Acto swivel blade. It’s an extremely small blade on a pivot, so I can cut curved lines. I begin with a color palette in mind, but this usually changes as the work progresses. I start with an idea (which often changes as the work progresses), and work on everything backwards, as I loosely draw the image on the reverse side of the paper, always leaving a border. I cut the smallest details first. That way, if I have a slip with the X-Acto knife, it happens towards the beginning of the process. After the first sheet of paper is cut to my liking, I register it on the next piece of paper, upside down, so I can again draw on the back and always leaving a border. I work this way, from the top sheet towards the back sheet, which is left blank. When I glue-tack everything down, I work in reverse from back to front. I am limited in what I can achieve with the paper, a fact I like. Paper is more graphic than painting. Images like clouds that require a lot of variation do not register well, so I just omit them.

OPP: There's little sense of the modern world in your oil paintings from 2008, around the time of your MFA thesis exhibition. The human figures often look like statues or figures from paintings of a different era because of their clothing and hairstyles. Some rare exceptions include the bikini in Me and My Mama (2008) and the making-out couple in Where Babies Really Come From (2008). The landscapes themselves seem idyllic and make me think of the romantic poets of English literature. Were you romanticizing nature in your work at this time? Has that changed in recent work?

AG: I still like using people of different eras in my work, as in my paper-cut Spring. I wanted my paintings from my thesis exhibition to feel like you were stepping into a different world. I often referenced french porcelain, anatomical statues, etc. Humans have emotional connections to items in history, and I wanted to represent that. For example, in the painting Altair and Vega, the touch that occurs between the two women feels so more emotional to me than if I had used representational figures in the same pose. I think it is just easier for humans to feel that emotion and connection if it is step removed from reality.

I am romanticizing nature. I want to make my own world. Many of the animals, people and flora in my work are combinations of the real, the extinct and the imaginary. Birds in The Forgotten Forest, for example, are sourced from emus, ostriches and my imagination. My current work is more about creating my own history/nature. In Red Crane, the corpse flower is birthing the red crane. This scene is from my imagination; it couldn't be possible.

OPP: Could you talk about the importance of detail in your paintings and cut paper work as it relates to macro and micro narratives?

AG: I always have multiple narratives going on in each piece: a more universal narrative and a more personal one. I have to include my personal narrative in order to keep myself engaged, but I also offer viewers an opportunity to create their own narratives through the presence of detail. Mayday, for example, is about that moment of falling in love and how fantastic and vulnerable it is at the same time. A heaven/hell or light/dark theme emerges through the painted details in the scene, i.e. the juxtaposition of scary roots and tree branches with whimsical flowers. Regardless of what medium I’m working in, I strive to create work that is legible from a distance and becomes more engaging as the viewer moves closer. I want my work to be compelling whether you are across the room or just an inch away.

I have always noticed the details in a room or in a painting or the accessories people are wearing. As I progress in my work, I have become more and more intrigued by learning which components make up a whole. If I am representing a bird, I pay attention to each feather, to how wing feathers are very different than body feathers and to how the texture of the body differs vastly from the texture of the eye, beak or legs. I consider how each element in a scene has distinct qualities and requires precise visual language to describe it. This is something that is easier done in oil paint than cut-paper: leaf and rock textures can be built up with paint, and the sky can be a thin wash. Detail is so easily overlooked in everyday life, and I want to make people notice it. It heightens the narrative. Maybe because that's all there really is: millions of details making up the whole.

To see more of Adrienne's work, please visit adrienneginter.com.

Featured Artist Interviews are conducted by Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist Stacia Yeapanis. When she’s not writing for OPP, Stacia explores the relationship between repetition, desire and impermanence in her cross-stitch embroideries, remix video and collage installations. She is an instructor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where received her MFA in 2006, and was a 2012-2013 Mentor-in-Residence at BOLT in Chicago. Her solo exhibition I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For at Klemm Gallery, Siena Heights University (Adrian, Michigan) recently closed, and her solo exhibition Everything You Need is Already Here is on view at Heaven Gallery in Chicago until February 17, 2014.

ALEX GINGROW's satirical text paintings reference art gallery provenance stickers and quote gallery gossip and snippets of conversations she has overheard while working full-time as a mat cutter at a framing shop in midtown Manhattan. Individually, each painting evokes a scathing drama of indiscretion and vanity. But, as a group, the paintings reveal a persistent metanarrative of class, value and labor as they relate to art production. Alex received her MFA in painting from Savannah College of Art and Design in 2007. She mounted her first solo show, All the Money IS in the Label in 1012 at Mike Weiss Gallery. In 2014 she will participate in The Fountainhead Residency in Miami. Alex lives in Brooklyn, New York.

OtherPeoplesPixels: The quotes in your recent series All the Money IS in the Label range from obnoxiously pretentious to surprisingly ignorant to potentially profound. There are even moments of poetry. I easily imagine the snobby, entitled person who said "Restoration Hardware? I mean, why? My cleaning lady has that stuff" and the ignorant person who said, "So, what, what's the deal with that gallery? Do they, like, only show black artists?" But other quotes are more ambiguous because we don't have context or tone of voice to help us understand the meaning of the words. I end up really musing about who the people are and what their lives are like. Do you remember who they are once you write down the text?

Alex Gingrow: So far, yes, I can remember the context and speaker of each quote. Every piece has a story behind it. Some are long and detailed and others are as simple as an overheard conversation. As the series continues, this could change. But when I look back at my source material, I am less interested in the quotes from conversations I can’t remember. The details validate the narrative for me even if I don’t share them publicly or if they don’t come through in the finished piece.

I do sometimes take quotes out of context but only when they speak to a higher truth or injustice. And yes, there are certainly moments of poetry. Years ago, a friend told me a tale over several adult beverages. He had a studio across the way from Mary Boone’s apartment back in the SoHo days and watched her light tampons on fire and throw them from her balcony. The story was old. The event was older. But it stuck with me, and I loved it. So, Balcony Burning Tampon Tosser is an homage both to the story, to the storyteller, to Mary Boone and, most of all, to the joy that is slumming around a cozy dark bar with art friends telling wild stories, even if they are a little taller than the truth.

I love storytelling, and I come from a long line of animated storytellers. I find great joy in retelling a story for an interested viewer. There’s a moment of magic when I share a story behind one of the quotes, and the person to whom I’m speaking has a parallel story. Then we launch into a whole conversation based on a simple one-line narrative.

OPP: What’s the difference between storytelling and gossip? Is it an important distinction?

AG: It is an important distinction. My intent is to generate a narrative, not to spread dirty or juicy secrets. Gossip has an identifiable face, place and plot. Those are the details that hold the recipient’s attention, and I choose the word "recipient" carefully because I think gossip, by nature, is delivered. My goal is to set up the rough sketch, an outline of sorts. Then it becomes the viewer’s job to fill in the blanks according to his or her own experiences, ideas and assumptions about tone of voice. Completion of the narrative becomes a participatory event. Every title is somehow related to the correlating gallery, but the speaker is never identified. It could be the gallery owner, a collector, an artist, a passerby or even someone randomly talking about one of the artists shown by the gallery. The tone is set when the viewer decides who the speaker is. Thus, the story is completed by the viewers’ own ideas. This is why I generally don’t publicly share the genesis of the titles.

OPP: You admit in your statement that this body of work is a "sharp critique of the world in which [you] choose to maneuver." I like that you emphasize the fact that we can be both willing participants and critics of our chosen communities. Has the gallery gossip that you witness on a daily basis at your day job ever made you question your own desire to be part of the New York art scene?

AG: Oh lord, yes. Everyday. Hardly a day goes by when I don’t want to turn to some of the people I encounter at work and in the art world and ask, “Do you HEAR yourself? Do you seriously think it’s okay to BEHAVE like that?!?” I’ve realized that some people truly and absolutely do not care one iota if they come across as assholes. It amazes me. 

But! I can’t be too bitter because they are my source material. I’ve made artistic strides out of a coping mechanism. I think a lot of really good art comes from anger and spite. If the rest of the world could figure out how to channel those very natural human emotions in more creative ways, we’d probably have a more peaceful world and better art to experience.

New York does have its own special breed of viciousness. But I’m not sure that I could operate anywhere else right now. Sure, I have my moments when I need escape more than I need to breathe, but there’s an electricity to the raw brazenness of the New York art world that feeds my practice. I worry that anywhere else would seem too quaint at this point. So I take the good with the bad. The upside to the New York art world is the closeness of the community. I’ve only been here for six years and have met so many smart, talented, kind and supportive artists. I don’t ever want to take that for granted.

OPP: The fact that the people coming to pick up the artwork from the framing shop don't consider you, as a service worker, important enough to be discrete in front of reveals an implicit class discrimination and a critique of beliefs about the value of different types of labor. They likely have no idea that you are an artist who also performs a kind of labor that they do value—or at least purport to. Is there a relationship between the labor you do at your day job and the meticulous, creative labor you do when painting?

AG: I’d give anything to be able to support myself solely from my art and to be able to spend long, uninterrupted periods of time in the studio everyday. But that’s not the case right now. I will continue to punch the time clock twice a day and take my lunch at the cold metal-topped table in the drafty back corner of the shop.

I think there is a correlation between service industry workers and the emerging-whatever-you-want-to-call-the-non-Koons/Hirst/Murakami artists in today’s art world. Art has become such a commodity, such a luxury item. Maybe it’s been this way since the advent of the gallery system—and perhaps it’s better to keep fragile egos in check anyway—but the artist as an individual seems to be valued less than the monetary value of the art in the market. Here, gallerists seem way more concerned with how they’re going to sell a work, whether the materials are all archival and how quickly we can pump out new works. Artists sometimes seem like the service workers in the gallerists’ industry. But I’ve witnessed artists being treated differently in other cities and countries, where gallerists take on artists because they like the art and trust the thought processes of the artists. It’s a relationship, not a business arrangement

OPP: I have to ask about Victim Series (2006-2007), a series of drawings of victims of various violent crimes or disasters. The subjects appear to all be people of color and many are children. This work is so distinctly different—both in subject matter and tone—from your deadpan, text-based work. It's so visceral and emotional and feels even more so after reading the comments of players in the New York art world. Is the satire in your new work a total break from this series or is there an underlying conceptual connection between these older drawings and the work you are doing now? 

AG: Victim Series is the body of work that I presented for my master’s thesis at the Savannah College of Art and Design. The impetus of the series was oddly similar to that of the provenance sticker series in a few ways. I was angry about the disregard many of my fellow students had for the U.S. war in Iraq. In response to an assignment to create an image that was mediated several times over, I chose to draw an image I lifted from a Canadian website of an Iraqi man recovering from wounds sustained in the war. 

Around the same time, I listened to George W. Bush give a speech on our “progress” in Iraq. During the reporters’ questions at the conclusion of the speech, someone asked the President how many Iraqis had been killed to date. His response was, “30,000, more or less.” After I listened to this speech, I got online to find a transcript because I couldn't believe what I had heard him say.  Mind you, this was 2005—before the overwhelming prevalence of YouTube and instantaneous video on the Internet. The only transcript I could find was the official White House transcript which EDITED OUT Bush's flippant "more or less." The transcript read: "30,000 Iraqis. . . and 2,140 of our own troops in Iraq."

I decided to draw his idea of more or less. Babies, children, young men and women. Bombed, killed, maimed, terrified. More or less. The works in the series are large, charcoal drawings. I wanted the images to have an engulfing presence. I used charcoal to both add to the sense of burning and soot and so that I could physically rub and blend the medium as I worked, so as to have a sense of touch and tenderness with the images. I worked on this series for a little over a year and eventually incorporated text from Bush’s speeches into the images. I had to resort to reading his speeches because I got too distractingly angry when I heard his voice. After working on these drawings for a while, I couldn’t get out from under the dark cloud of death and corruption and sadness that was my studio practice. Between that time in graduate school and my move to New York, where I no longer had a studio space that could accommodate the massive amounts of charcoal dust I was creating, I laid the series to rest. The drawings are rolled up in my studio and I look forward to showing them someday. With every political season, the context changes, but they still carry the same potency as they did when they were created. 

OPP: What have you been working on since the exhibition at Mike Weiss Gallery? Are continuing on with the appropriated text or shifting gears into something new?

AG: I am still working on the sticker series. There are about 40+ pieces in the series so far and a good many more waiting to be made. I still make myself laugh when I’m working on them, which is how I know I should keep going. That said, as evidenced by the Victim Series drawings, I tend to make major shifts every now and again. Some artists get to be known for one certain body of work, and they never really stray from it. That works for them, and it certainly works for their gallerists and collectors.

My practice depends on fresh experiments, new ideas and pushing myself outside of my comfort zone. I am working on some ideas and sketches for an interdisciplinary project that deals with personal narrative, family history and ice skating. I grew up skating and loving it, and I've recently been reexamining the sport in terms of its parallels with the art world and my own studio practice. The project—a long time in the making—will include durational video, a script and sound piece, text-based paintings, model-building and costume design. I am trying to find that sweet spot between so-personal-it’s-universal and awful, sappy, here-are-my-first-world-problems. It’s a fine, fine line. Thankfully, I have plenty of asinine and vitriolic art world quotes to commemorate in the meantime.

To see more of Alex's work, please visit alexgingrow.com.

Featured Artist Interviews are conducted by Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist Stacia Yeapanis. When she’s not writing for OPP, Stacia explores the emotional and existential significance of participating in mass media culture in her cross-stitch embroideries, remix video and collage installations. She is an instructor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where received her MFA in 2006, and is currently a 2012-2013 Mentor-in-Residence at BOLT Residency in Chicago. Notable exhibitions include Losing Yourself in the 21st Century (Maryland Art Place, Baltimore), MP3 (The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago), Please Stand By: Stacia Yeapanis + Readymade (Baang & Burne Contemporary, New York), Over and Over Again (BOLT Project Space, Chicago). Her work is on view through September 2013 in Abstracting the Seam (Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago) and she will mount a solo show titled I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For (Heaven Gallery, Chicago) in January 2014.