OtherPeoplesPixels Blog

The One Thing, 2016. polystyrene, corrugate with decollage. 21.250" x 19.250" x 3." Photo credit: E.G. Schempf.

Since beginning his career in 1978, GARRY NOLAND has explored so many materials: National Geographic magazines, corrugated cardboard, bubble wrap, wood, pvc pipes, marbles, duct tape, foam, just to name a handful. His studio practice is primarily driven by process and material. In sculptures and textile-like surfaces, he emphasizes pattern, surface and texture as the byproduct of actions like cutting, marking, taping and gluing. Garry earned his BA in Art History at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, but he’s always been a maker.  His long exhibition record began in 1980, with notable recent exhibitions at Haw Contemporary (2015), the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (2014), Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (2014) and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (2013). On April 16, 2017, his solo show Unorganized Territory will open at Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Chicago, and, in the Fall of 2017, he will open a two-person show with Leigh Suggs at Artspace in Raleigh, North Carolina and a two-person show at Los Angeles Valley College Art Gallery in Van Nuys, California. Garry lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

OtherPeoplesPixels: Is there an underlying thread that connects the materials you choose?

Garry Noland: One of the answers regarding materials relates to the non-human part of nature. We are part of the world around us, yet in a separate, contemplative position. Nature has many materials: gases, minerals, animals, plants and the breakdowns into smaller parts (water vapor, sand, insects and pine needles, for example). Nature's processes—evaporation/condensation, sedimentation, reproduction and seeding—are an incessantly-recycling pattern of life. They inform the "studio practice" that is Nature. Jackson Pollack's statement "I am Nature" gets at the artist's natural role in working with whatever material is at their hand. Nature teaches us to apply our energetic, creative impulse to solve problems that a set of materials poses to us. A new material simply presents new problems or challenges. A familiar material will present new challenges based on skills we've acquired in our subsequent actions. The underlying thread is what can I learn? and how gracefully can I solve the problem?

Close-Up USA, No. 7, 2016. Polystyrene, aluminum paint, sand, concrete mix. 22" x 41" x 8." Photo credit: E.G. Schempf.

OPP: You don’t seem to be drawn to Nature’s materials, but to human-made things: “found and reclaimed materials from alleys, side streets and urban dumps.”  What draws you to materials generally? Any new finds that you are excited about in your studio right now?

GN: Right now I am using corrugate, polystyrene, paper, wood and some mild adhesives. I am using simple verbs: Cut, tear, place, adjust, glue. Nearly all of the materials are found, free or very inexpensive. Part of the attraction is that these materials have been through another use. This other use, not to mention the process in which they were originally created imparts spirit to the material. . . it is the farthest thing from inert. The found marks in dock foam or the folds, scraps and abrasions add a layer of experience to cardboard. It is part of my job to augment it by leaving it alone or adding to it. I know that new materials will come along or that I will find new use for something I already thought I knew something about.

Ticket, 2012. Tape, Floor Debris on tape. 103" x 98." Photo credit: E.G. Schempf.

OPP: In your statement, you say “Sometimes I am the boss of the material but just as often the material, by virtue of a chance arrangement, for example, will tell me what needs to be done.” Could you say more about making in this way? What’s the process feel like for you? Will you tell us a story about a piece in which the material led you more than you led it?

GN: One might infer that I have a collaborative relationship with the material. Material is inseparable from the "artist". It is possible to see potential in every single thing. Metaphorically then, as well, there is potential in every single person. In general this brings me great joy. I am solving problems I could not have foreseen minutes or years before. Simultaneously new work explains often what was going on in an older piece....a kind of studio deja vu. I keep a lot of material in the studio precisely because I know that chance arrangements or views askance will reveal combinations I could not have rationally thought of. An example is the piece tilted Failed Axle. There was a spool of bubble wrap in the studio to use a packing for an outgoing work. Several feet beyond the spool lay a curved piece of orange PVC pipe. Out of the corner of my eye, it looked like that the pipe was coming out of the spool, like an axle. The piece made itself essentially. I am a grateful intermediary.

Pumpjack (Sergeant), 2015. polystyrene, tape, pvc pipe, marbles. 63" x 58" x 7." Photo credit: E.G. Schempf.

OPP: Your application of marks—as cuts, tape, paint or marbles—to the surface a variety of substrates, functions differently across your body of work. I’m thinking about the difference between works like Pumpjack (Sergeant) (2015), which have complete surface coverage and the wall-hung sculptures from the Handheld series (2014). When is it about hiding the underlying surface and when is it about highlighting it?

GN: Pumpjack (Sergeant) is a good piece but I know that, like every other piece, it is on the way to something else. Part of the impulse behind the complete coverage was to produce a design to supplement the object. . . to cover an object with images of objects. I love pattern and surface design. One of our jobs as artists is to find out "what goes with what.” Relationships between materials may be abrasive, copacetic or somewhere in between. In Pumpjack the tape presents a way for the eye to move around the object as does the application of marbles on the PVC armature. How do the marbles act with the tape pattern? How does the tape pattern work with the slabby foam block? How does the eye move around the whole thing? How does the slab act with the wall and floor. How does the painting/sculpture work with the viewer.

I hope, in the end, we ask how we relate to each other. The Handheld series (which were pieces cut off from the corners of Failed Monuments) used the gold tape (implying luxury) next to the "low-brow" foam and found marks. The exchange between tape and foam, gold and found marks was more direct and I think more honest.

Handheld 03, 2014. Foam, tape. 10" x 10" x 5." Photo credit: E.G. Schempf.

OPP: I think of your taped wall-hung works more as textiles than paintings. They have a textile logic to them, in the sense that the image appears to be part of the structure, as opposed to applied to the surface of another substrate. Thoughts?

GN: I like and appreciate that reading! The image (if we agree to call "it" that) not only is part of the structure, but is/or represents the structure in full. That is, they are one in the same. The question becomes how can we merge image/object; form/content; female/male; figure/ground, among others, for example. This was written about by Lucy Lippard in OVERLAY and was at least a sub-topic in Cubism.

OPP: What role does balance—compositionally, physically and metaphorically—play in your work?

GN: The best question. Balance is a fluid, contextual situation. Balance is a how as much as it is a what. It's an easy tendency to find balance in a comfort zone. It’s imperative that any artist finds a way out of their comfort zone and into emerging, fighting off laziness and complacency. Balance comes from in-balance. Content comes from form. Form comes from content. Positive space comes from negative space.

To see more of Garry's work, please visit garrynolandart.com.

Featured Artist Interviews are conducted by Chicago-based artist Stacia Yeapanis. When she’s not writing for OPP, Stacia explores the relationship between repetition, desire and impermanence in cross-stitch embroideries, remix video, collage and impermanent installations. She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where received her MFA in 2006, and was a 2011-2012 Artist-in-Residence at BOLT in Chicago. Her solo exhibitions include shows at Siena Heights University (2013), Heaven Gallery (2014) and the Annex Gallery at Lillstreet Art Center (2014). She created site-responsive installations for Form Unbound (2015) at Dominican University and SENTIENCE (2016) at The Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art. Resist the Urge to Press Forward, a two-person show with Brent Fogt, is on view at Riverside Art Center (Riverside, Illinois) until April 15th, when there will be a closing reception and artist talk. Throughout March 2017, Stacia is working on an evolving, duration installation at The Stolbun Collection (Chicago). You can watch Witness change via live feed.

KALENA PATTON's carefully balances bowling balls on columns of crystal goblets, hammer heads inside porcelain teacups and workout weights on tiny, decorative vases. Her precarious arrangements of found objects hint at the profound strength of the delicate support objects, poetically drawing together physics and Feminist theory. Kalena earned her BFA (2007) from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and her MFA (2012) from Parsons, The New School for Design in New York. In the Fall and Winter of 2015, she was an Artist-in-Residence at Oxbow School of Art (Saugatuck, Michigan). In August 2015 she co-facilitated a workshop with Historian Athena Eliades at the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association’s Annual Conference in Sacramento. Titled Unsilencing Femicide in Ciudad Juárez: History and Art Making, the workshop explored art-making as a medium for understanding social injustices and gender perspectives. Kalena lives in Brooklyn, where she also works as a floral designer.

OtherPeoplesPixels: From your statement: “Loosely informed by physics, feminism, and my experience living in Las Vegas as a young woman, my practice is an ongoing exploration of the process of becoming by creating systems of objects “on the verge” while simultaneously referencing their past and anticipating the present.” Will you expand on the relationship between physics and feminism in your work?

Kalena Patton: The major link between feminism and physics is essentially the relationship between discourse and matter. I admire the writing of the physicist and philosopher Karen Barad, who suggests that discourse and matter are both part of the phenomena of becoming, setting boundaries and limitations, and, conversely, creating possibilities.

From beginning to end, I want my entire process of making and its components—objects, space, discourse, myself and audience—to embody a state of possibilities, the limitless idea of becoming, which I also relate to a feminist and agential realist perspective of understanding the world.  The intra-active relationships I develop in my sculptures are a way to question and challenge boundaries, established knowledge, and notions of the world that are helplessly mediated and hierarchical—allowing for a way to move forward from imbalanced power and value systems.

OPP: Do you think of your work as emotional metaphors?

KP: My work is coming from the culmination of my conceptual interests, emotional experiences, and unexpected variables in the process of making. I see the emotional layer as a point of access to lead to greater contextual inquisitiveness and consideration.

OPP: Frozen in photographs (as I experience them online), your sculptural arrangements are always “on the verge” of falling over or breaking, but they never do. The potential is forever there, and there is a certainty that they will never fall. They are forever in balance. Are balance and precariousness in essence the same thing?

KP: My experience of making is as much the art as the objects or photographs, even if I am the only person that experiences it, and in this process, I see the precariousness as a shed layer of the balance I seek in the process of making.

The precariousness in my work is what also brings awareness to the balance. I view them as different ways to understand time within the same system. Anything that is in equilibrium is not going to stay that way forever, which makes it vulnerable to imbalance and brings about a concern for when and how that shift will occur. Yet, for every shift in what may seem like an ideal balance comes the opportunity for a new state and new possibilities.

OPP: Do you exhibit photographs of the work in the section On Site? Or are these only available to those that encountered them in the world and on your website?

KP: I exhibit photographs of my site specific works, as well as exhibit site specific pieces themselves for people to encounter (if it is safe). When viewing the sculptures in person, there is a visceral response and a tension between the viewer and the sculpture. The viewer becomes part of the work and his/her agency can affect the entire system and vice versa. In viewing photographs of the work, this anxiety and excitement is suggested, but the actual danger or fear is removed. Yet, the photographs allow access to this particular time and space that would otherwise not be accessible. The sculpture arrives in a state of stasis,  never falling, held in a quiet moment filled with its own paradox.

OPP: How do you pick your materials? How do you conceive of a piece?

KP: Most of my works begin with a curiosity and awe of a specific object or space. Once I have a place or object in mind, I will go on walks with the intention of just observing the relationships of everything I see. From this I usually find something that inspires my experimentation.

With a tendency to over-analyze and fall into the tediousness of making art, I have found that my most successful works have been made with a sense of humor and self-imposed urgency. When I approach my making as a mischievous and playful act, there is a sincerity, ease and conciseness that emerges in the work—one that is often more diluted in my more premeditated pieces.

2015

OPP: You must have had some failures in terms of physics. Will you share an anecdote or two about sculptures that failed or sculptures that were extremely frustrating to execute?

KP: Absolutely! I balanced a large sheet of glass on the pointed tip of a small boulder, which in itself was impressive, I must say. I really wanted to balance a bowling ball on top of that balanced sheet of glass. I spent many hours squatting next to it, with one hand on the ball and one hand on the glass. I worked on this for days. It was extremely frustrating at first, but became very meditative and more about my experience rather than an end goal. I never did get it to balance. And I broke the glass when I was cleaning up the materials at the end of a long day.

For another piece, I was collecting large glass vases of various shapes and stacking them on top of each other to create columns.  I managed to balance them to about my own height quite a few times, as I could not leave them stacked in the studio in case footsteps nearby shook the floor. I finally stacked them to about 8 feet, which took a long time and was so quietly stressful. When I left to get my camera, I heard a massive shatter. All of the vases were broken.

Sometimes I experience relief when everything falls apart. At times I feel like I am wrestling with their desires. It can be satisfying to let them go.

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, closed in December 2015 at Dominican University's O’Connor Art Gallery (River Forest, IL). Most recently, Stacia created a brand new site-responsive installation for SENTIENCE, a group show on view at The Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art until March 27, 2016.