OtherPeoplesPixels Blog

OtherPeoplesPixels: Paintings like Reflecting Pool and Lemons (both 2011) represent nonwhite people, but these pieces are exceptions that prove the rule. The majority of the paintings are populated with droves of white men in business suits and dress shirts. I read this as a very intentional and highly allegorical choice. Can you talk about the conceptual reasoning behind the homogeneity of figures that congregate in your paintings?

Ian Davis: The paintings are highly critical of humanity. I'm displaying humanity in its most vile form. I feel pretty comfortable with portraying these people as white men, since I think they deserve the lion's share of the blame given the subject matter of the work—greed, hubris, willful ignorance—and,  since I'm a white man, perhaps I'm most comfortable criticizing myself. Recently I've been thinking a bit more about the identities of the figures. It has occurred to me that the figures could in some cases just as easily be Asian men. They do all have black hair.

The homogeneity is both a formal and narrative element. I'm not interested in portraying individuals in these paintings. These are about the mass, the herd. This is about the messed up stuff that happens when a bunch of people get together and stop thinking. But I'm also attracted to pattern, and something formally magical happens when you cluster a bunch of people together all dressed alike. The way the figures interlock and interact becomes something else entirely. I keep coming back to painting rooms full of people sitting. There's something mechanical about it. It's dark in an Orwellian way.

You know, I'm a firm believer in mystery. So I hesitate to look too closely at why I'm doing something. I'm content to just find something compelling without examining it too much. When I'm doing a crowd of people and this weird line between figuration and abstraction is being blurred, it just feels appropriate. In 2005 I was at Skowhegan in Maine, and the sculptor Charles Long came by my studio. He talked about doing something and not knowing why. I think he gave me permission, or allowed me to give myself permission to not know what something means. It's not a cop out, but rather a method for getting out of your own way.

OPP: Are the figures in your paintings victims or perpetrators?

ID: Generally, the people aren't really doing anything. Even when they are supposedly playing a participatory role, their main function is to act as a passive mass. Of course there are exceptions to this, but when the figures are active, they are mostly just noticing things or pointing at things. They are reactive, not active. Really they are both perpetrators AND victims, without realizing it. They ARE the problem. They have caused it, and they will be affected by it.

OPP: Pieces like Auditorium (2006), Climate (2009) and Monument (2013) remind me of the countless Nazi Nuremberg Rallies images I have seen. Are you consciously referencing these historical images? What are some points of reference in your work?

ID: I've seen Triumph of the Will, if that’s what you mean. The images in that movie are powerfully scary, but the geometry is incredible. You can see the same geometry in images of soldiers from North Korea and of two thousand Chinese people dancing in synchronicity. It’s in Edward Burtynky's photographs of factory interiors and Busby Berkeley movies.

I'm drawn to images of large groups of people. I like the feeling of endless pattern: this vibrating, radiating thing you get when you really extend something. It happens in Bridget Riley's paintings, too . . . and also in old panoramic photographs. I think it relates to music somehow—this rhythmic, droning, trance-like pattern you get with Jimmy Reed or Booker T & the MG's.

But you know what I kept noticing in Triumph of the Will? In every long shot of an endless row of soldiers, there's always one guy who is a bit too tall. At the moment you notice that, you remember that these are actually people. It changes everything.

ID: It's not really a moral message. Generally speaking, I depict all the elements of a narrative—i.e. a bunch of scientists in lab coats sitting in an auditorium watching a reel-to-reel tape recorder on a stage—but what is actually happening is a mystery. Like De Chirico or Magritte. There's no question about what you're seeing, but why you're seeing it remains unexplained. So when I'm making a painting and there are 500 figures in the same pose with the same clothes on, each one looks different simply because I physically can't do it exactly the same way twice. You start to notice imperfections or variations, and that becomes a way to access the mystery.

OPP: I've read several reviews—one by Roberta Smith for The New York Times and one by Chris Packham for Pitch.com—in which they refer to the "cuteness" of your paintings. These were in no way negative reviews, but I found that word utterly imprecise. The word cute implies a lack of content, which is so obviously not the case. Calling your paintings cute is an imprecise way of commenting on the style. Is your painting style, which is more illustrative than realistic or expressionistic, intentional or intuitive? How does that style support your conceptual concerns?

ID: It bothers me when words like "cute" or "whimsical" or "playful" are used in relation to my work, but what can I do if people misread them? I just figure they haven't looked at them closely. I don't think about it. I just don't care! That probably sounds nasty or something, but I just can't do anything about it. I'm not going to change what I'm doing because somebody called my work "cute."

There's probably something inherent in the way I paint that leads people down that path. Maybe they see a relationship to folk art because of the flatness and patterning. Maybe it's the scale. When I think about how I want my work to look, I think of Bruegel's epic scale, Magritte's deadpan, utilitarian paint handling and LS Lowry's sense of color. It's not a formula, but those are examples of learning from other artists by looking.

The way I paint is descriptive. I'm trying to remove gesture, to paint the way a guy who isn't trying to make art would paint—which is probably impossible. It's both intentional and intuitive. I went to art school but not graduate school. I'm not self-taught, but I wasn't given any instruction at all that led me to paint this way. I arrived at my style by making hundreds of paintings that were derivative of the things I liked looking at, including Orson Welles' films, JG Ballard's novels, Plains Indian Ledger drawings and Baker Overstreet's work. I had to figure out how to make my paintings. I think you have to invent your personal way of making a painting. That seems, to me, to be the point. It has to be your invention.

OPP: One of the most enigmatic and evocative images is Rooftops (2012), in which a series of nearly identical rooftops are filled with hundreds of indistinguishable figures. I can't tell if they are waving for help from an overhead plane, pointing at something in the sky or trying to communicate with each other. The way the image is cropped implies that these rooftops with people on them could go on for miles . . . or forever.  It makes me think of the trope in zombie movies when the humans escape to the roof only to get stuck there with no way out. In your painting, it's like ALL the people are stuck on the rooftops. So, no one's coming to help. What's happening in this image, and what are the pink parts on the surface of the rooftops? Did you have a specific narrative in mind? 

ID: I don’t know if I should say this, but I don't consider Rooftops a very successful painting. The idea initially was to make a painting in which all the figures were reacting to something off in the distance, something outside the picture plane. I was thinking about a personal experience I had being on a rooftop in New York on September 11th. The pink shapes are supposed to be puddles of water, reflecting an acid pink-colored sky, which could indicate either something apocalyptic or a really epic sunset. I know that this painting was unsuccessful because you had to ask me what the pink parts were. I tried to convince myself that I could pull off painting the reflections in the puddles pink. And you're not the first person to ask me about this. If somebody had come into my studio while I was making this and thrown a drink into my face, I might have reconsidered. I might have painted the puddles blue instead.

OPP: Well, I respectfully disagree that it is unsuccessful. It’s one of my favorites because not knowing what the pink was kept me musing about the narrative. It evoked that mystery you've referred to. Do you have a favorite painting of your own?

ID: Skeptics is one I really like, because I just made it. I didn't sweat and worry over it. I like the ones that happen easily, but some are a lot more pleasant to make than others. Wee Small Hours has nice light in it. I wanted to make an all blue painting. The color palette is based on a Frank Sinatra album cover. I’m pleased with the end result, but it wasn't very fun to make. It took about seven months, and that is just so long to look at one painting. Nothing should take that long. By the end, I never wanted to see the thing again. If I feel that I'm steadily making progress on a painting, then I'm enjoying it. If I'm dealing with endless weeks of doing and redoing and not really seeing any development, then work doesn't feel like it has anything to do with making art.

OPP: You’re in the middle of preparing for your next solo show at Leslie Tonkonow (New York) in March 2014, correct? Will this show have any surprises in it? Any changes in direction or content?

ID: Right now I'm trying to figure out how to make my next show. I've been getting in my own way a lot lately, just being a bit too aware of whether things are enough of a progression to justify their existence . . . self-defeating things like that. I'm just finishing up a big painting of Bohemian Grove that depicts a bunch of industrialists looking at themselves in vanity mirrors. I'm trying to figure out how to paint things that aren't solid—things that move—like plumes of smoke, lava and fire. I hope I figure something out soon. It happens really slowly. There's always a long pause between thinking about what I want to try and getting up the nerve to actually try it.

To view more of Ian's work, please visit iandavisart.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 mediated culture in her embroidery, video, sculpture and collage works. She received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2006), where she will begin teaching in Spring 2013, 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).

DENA SCHUCKIT’s colorful, dynamic paintings act as poetic abstractions of explosions, car accidents, house fires, war and other disasters as seen in Internet news site slideshows. She explores the age-old conflict of man versus nature through a lens of optimism by revealing the beauty in the moment before the reality of the chaos crystalizes. Dena received her BFA from the University of California at Santa Cruz and her MA from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. She was a master printer with Crown Point Press for 12 years. Her work is featured in collections at the University of the Arts, London, and the Parsons School of Design, New York. Dena lives in London, England.

OtherPeoplesPixels: On first glance, most of your paintings appear to be abstractions. But very quickly, I begin to see the referents to explosions, car accidents, house fires, war and other disasters. Could you talk about the interplay between abstraction and representation in your work? Was your work ever more abstract or more representational than it is now?

Dena Schuckit: I work from the photo slideshows that run online next to stories of events like earthquakes, wild fires and other natural or manmade disasters that are usually a world away. The slideshows change the way we experience the news. We’re all accidental photojournalists now, on hand to document and immediately transmit every event around the globe as it happens. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that everyone, everywhere, has a cell phone that can take a picture shoved into a back pocket. Digital media bring this barrage of images from far-away places into our homes without any real context to help viewers wrap their brains around the actual impact of these events. They’re abstract both in a formal and conceptual way.The photos are vivid, accidental landscapes from the world I know, but that world is completely out of context. They are gorgeous rearrangements—fragments of things I recognize—but they are presented in puzzling, perplexing compositions. I’m drawn to their abstract quality, and I don’t want to mess with that in the way I interpret them. My work has always been semi-abstract. It’s easy to remain abstract with this source material because the paintings aren’t based on any one specific headline event or incident, and the news photos that I’m working from are already somewhat visually abstract. That said, I do try to paint little people into the panels somewhere so that there’s a suggestion of scale and perspective. Otherwise the paintings appear completely nonrepresentational. Even as abstractions, they’re still landscapes, and I like that viewers can sense some space or depth.
Blast Boom Bust

OPP: I'm instantly attracted to the color and composition of your paintings. Personally, I find them very beautiful. Are you making horrible events more beautiful than they are or are you revealing some terrible beauty that already exists in tragic events?

DS: The paintings I make are abstract. I don’t think they’re either horrible OR just beautiful. But I do think they’re beautiful. I reinterpret the elements of the collected images that drew me to them in the first place: color, composition and, most importantly, a mysterious sense of place.  The photos that I work from are engaging primarily because they’re NOT horrible or terrible in and of themselves. That’s the irony of them. They’re unique, abstract compositions created by chance events in nature and captured immediately; the dust has literally not yet settled there. We know that the events from which these photos are isolated have serious effects on the people involved, but that’s something we infer. As snippets and fragments contained by the four sides of my computer screen, these landscapes are far, far removed from the environment they’re representing. They’re a surreal "calm after a storm" or an unfamiliar and intriguing terrain. They’re familiar elements shaken up and rearranged, heaped and piled into some pretty interesting architecture. I’d say they’re even inviting. They’re the world we all live in, completely different from the one we inhabited a moment ago.
Bumper

OPP: Tell me about your process of collecting and organizing the source imagery for your paintings.

DS: I was pulling these abstract frames from events around the world down to my desktop for months before I started painting from them. I just wanted to think about them, to not forget. I began collecting images to remind myself about color and mood, and then I slowly started organizing images into vague categories by type or subject: crowds, building collapse, under sea, above sea.

When I start a painting, I sift through these slideshow images and shuffle them around to make connections, like an imaginary collage. A composition materializes in my mind, and that’s where I start. Then the painting evolves as it does. Source imagery is shuffled in; source imagery is shuffled out. Each piece takes on a life of its own until all the rubble has settled into something I couldn’t have planned.

OPP: It’s interesting to think about the translation of information and imagery back and forth between the physical world and the digital world. First, by-standers and photojournalists capture real world events digitally and upload them to the Internet. Then you download them and re-interpret them back into a concrete physical form: a painting. Is the act of painting connected to the not-forgetting you mentioned before?

DS: I think the collecting is just feeding my hoarder monster. It’s satisfying the same urge as finding raw material like pieces of wood or metal on the street and dragging it home for some future project. I think most artists have piles like this—stashes of material saved and organized in some way for later use. The digital stash takes up far less physical space than the wood and metal, which is a bonus.  There’s so much surreal raw material and information to work from in these photos. As a group, they map our ever-changing environment. Then the painting is a sort of figurative exploration, a delving into new realms. To begin a new panel, I collage bits and pieces in my head, but I still need to see the source to remember details and elements. Each photo is unique and contains something special I don’t want to forget: colors, angles, textures.
Green Smoulder

OPP: Talk about your instinct to create order out of chaos. You've mentioned it as part of your process. Do you see this as an aesthetic instinct specific to artists or as human one?

DS: As an artist, my source material is based in chaos, my working space is an absolute catastrophe, and my paintings, I think, are a riot of color and texture. Maybe it’s different for minimal artists, but then again a minimal artist is still tasked with finding some order in the chaos outside his or her studio.The world is a chaotic place. On a huge scale and on a tiny scale, in big groups and individually, we attempt to rein in the bits and pieces. We shuffle and reorganize and categorize to gain some control over our environment. But that’s never going to happen. It’s an impossible endeavor.

OPP:  A line from your artist statement really struck me: “Like confetti from a popper, expanding energy sends colorful riots of material into momentarily suspended chaos where the abstract arrangements that result hang in poses new and unfamiliar.” It’s a completely accurate description of what your paintings look like, but the poetry is very disconnected from the horror we know will be experienced by the people who are affected by these various disasters. Is it fair to say that your paintings are not about the explosions and fires and disasters themselves, but about the poetry of that captured moment just before anyone has to deal with the consequences of the events represented?

DS: My work is definitely not about disaster. I don’t think there’s any horror in my landscapes either. The opposite is true, actually. They’re about navigating a new and constantly evolving terrain in the man versus his environment conflict and doing it with optimism, a sense of calm and hope for regeneration and safe passage. And some whimsy as well.When I started collecting the headline photos, which are random images I found mesmerizing for all their mystifying and awesome and somewhat scary qualities, I became interested in 18th century notions of the sublime—Kant’s dynamic sublime and also Edmund Burke's ideas—and the relationship between beauty and fear. But the act of painting from these photos is a personal resolution to look on the bright side, to find the beauty in all the uncertainty.

To view more of Dena's work, please visit denaschuckit.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 mediated culture in her embroidery, video, sculpture and collage works. She received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2006), where she will begin teaching in Spring 2013, 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)

YOSKAY YAMAMOTO was born in Toba, Japan and moved to the United States when he was fifteen. His sculptures and paintings playfully mix American and Japanese cultural references, emphasizing a personal experience of cultural hybridity. His sculptures of iconic characters from cartoons, video games, books and movies are simultaneously familiar and foreign. In December 2012, Yoskay was commissioned by Perrier to create a large scale sculptural installation at Pulse Miami. He is represented by LeBasse Projects in Culver City, California and lives nearby in Los Angeles.

OtherPeoplesPixels: Your work is a fusion of these two distinct cultural backgrounds. Currently you exhibit primarily in the United States. Are the references to Japanese culture in your work ever lost on American audiences?

Yoskay Yamamoto: It really depends on each viewer to connect with the Japanese references in my work. Sometimes they get lost, and sometimes people point out the subtle references that I didn't even recognize before. Either way I’m not really concerned if the references get lost. Some people seem to be fixated on finding meaning with everything, but I'd rather have the audience find their own story. When I make art, my primary focus is to create work that excites me or makes me smile.

OPP: Dragons and koi are both recurring creatures in your paintings and in the history of Japanese painting. Some examples from your work include screaming for the sunrise (2009) and koibito in pale blue (2007), which features a man with a fish head. Both of these paintings have also spawned limited edition vinyl figurines produced by Munky King, a Los Angeles-based designer toy company, which seeks to blur the line between toy and fine art. Could you talk about the symbolism of these creatures in Japanese culture and your interest in them?

YY: From what I understand, both the koi and the dragon represent good luck or good fortune in Japanese culture, but this isn't the reason I created these characters. I was really into mythological creatures at the time. I love how the creatures in mythology are combinations of many different living things. I also think it's romantic. The stories are explanations of things that people didn't understand at the time.

OPP: Koibito is part fish, part boy, right? Is he a mythological creature? What does he express about you?

YY: Koibito was originally created to commemorate my pet fish, Tuna. He died because of my carelessness and laziness. But at same time, Koibito symbolizes the sense of alienation that I felt growing up in California. It's kind of like the phrase "fish out of water.” I felt and still feel like I don't completely fit in anywhere. . .  either in Japan or in the United States.

OPP: Why did you decide to recreate koibito and screaming dragon as designer toys?

YY: I thought it would be a good way to expose my art to a broader audience. And a vinyl toy is a great way to make a more affordable work of art.

OPP: In March 2012, you had your first all-sculpture solo exhibition, Joke's On Me. . .  at LeBasse Projects. The exhibition featured many recognizable childhood icons from cartoons, video games, books and movies such as Bart Simpson, Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man and Hello Kitty. What struck me are the facial expressions of these characters as you've recreated them. Many are neutral, but they read as desperately sad because we are so used to seeing these characters smiling. Do you think of them as sad?

YY: I like referencing the iconic childhood characters in my work because everyone has certain personal attachments to them. They are not necessary about my childhood. I enjoy altering the appearance of these iconic characters and giving them a slightly different look. I really don't think of them as having sad expressions. To me, they are neutral. It’s the oddness of them that excites me.

OPP: You use a lot of different fabrication methods for those sculptures, including plastic, cast resin and vinyl, but I'm most interested in the hand-sculpted basswood. When did you learn wood-carving?

YY: Woodcarving is the newest skill that I picked up for my sculptural work. Wood is more challenging than other materials that I use, but I love the organic look of the final product. When working with clay, you can always add more mass and volume as you need it. But when you are carving, once you take a piece off, that's it. You can't undo it.
I learned by trial and error, gaining a few scars on my left hand along the way. Now I wear cut-resistant gloves to protect my hands. :)

OPP: You are about to participate in a unique event in Hawaii. Tell us about it.

YY: Yes. In February I'm participating in Pow Wow Hawaii, in which a group of artists work together to paint murals in Hawaii for two weeks. Collaboration on the murals is really up to each individual artist. Since painting a mural is a territory I'm not too familiar, I think I'm gonna approach it with a basic idea in my mind.

OPP: What’s your favorite piece of yours? Why?

YY: My recent favorites are carry me away and I hope it will reach you eventually. These pieces helped me head in a different and new direction that I'm excited about. When I completed carry me away, I really felt more closely connected to my work than before. It's rare to have this sensation with my work so it felt pretty special.

To see more of Yoskay's work, please visit yoskay.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 mediated culture in her embroidery, video, sculpture and collage works. She received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2006), where she will begin teaching in Spring 2013, 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).

CHLOE S. WATSON's enigmatic renderings of nondescript landscapes and architecture are based on places she has lived. Her work investigates the abstraction of fact through memory. She deals with experiences, objects and people that should evoke emotion, but instead all the emotion is stripped away. The viewer is left with only a graphic rendering of a human experience. What's left out is as important as what remains. Her work is currently included in Binderful, an online exhibition at Baker Fine Art, which is housed in an actual binder and will begin traveling to art spaces around the country in late January 2013. Her upcoming solo show at Delaplaine Visual Arts Center (Frederick, MD) opens in August 2013. Chloe lives in Farmington, Maine, where she and husband, the artist Jason Irla, run the space Points North out of a retired horse barn.

OtherPeoplesPixels: The most consistent formal quality in your landscape paintings is an exploration of architectural space through color and line. Objects are flattened into mere shapes: mountains become triangles, a sand dune becomes a pink blob, a doorway becomes a blue rectangle. How does this abstracting of architecture and landscape reveal your conceptual concerns?

Chloe S. Watson: I’ll give a little background about the origin of this work first: I didn’t start taking my paintings and drawings seriously until my second year of graduate school at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Before graduate school, I was primarily working three-dimensionally and thought of my drawings as preliminary studies for future sculptures or installations. I was struggling with my sculptural work, and I was encouraged in graduate school to examine my drawings. They were more interesting formally and accomplished things that the sculptures couldn't. Through drawing and painting, I could reference architectural spaces that would be impossible to physically bring into the studio.

The early spatial paintings came out of the formal drawing exercises I was doing in my studio—cutting out and arranging flat paper sculptures, lighting them, and drawing them from life. At the time, I was thinking a lot about my personal experiences and memories of spaces. I had just read The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard. Reading about architecture as a container for memories struck a chord with me and is something I think about constantly. My family moved around many times while I was younger, and readjusting to a new place became the norm; it had a profound effect on me as a person and an artist.

I began translating my memories of architectural spaces—my childhood bedroom, for example—into the backgrounds for those strange forms, and I would insert other objects into the paintings as well.The paintings are mostly about absence verses presence and substitution; substituting nondescript forms for furniture that lived in a particular space kept the viewer from accessing the “true” memory of that place. I was also interested in creating a visual vocabulary of nondescript objects that could be read as windows, doors, holes or even streams or puddles of liquid. These forms suggest but never dictate what roles they play in the paintings. This is still important to me, because it allows room for any interpretation from the viewer.

OPP: I see what you mean about what the drawings can do that the sculptures can't. In a painting like Wall with Columns, I can see that there are two columns in this space and a drawing of two columns on a wall in the background. When I first glance at the piece, I see the representation of a three-dimensional space, but the more I stare, the more that space disappears into pure color and line. It goes totally flat. Then I have this Magic Eye experience: the image keeps moving back and forth between the second and third dimension. Your drawing of the columns becomes equivalent to your drawing of a drawing of a column. How is this connected to your ideas about memory?

CSW: I’m glad that you had that experience, because I attempt to confuse the viewer’s perception of space in most of these paintings. That confusion is connected to what I find fascinating about remembering: everyone’s memory malfunctions. I read Daniel Schacter’s book The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers, which categorizes the essential malfunctions of memory and articulates many of the ideas I reference in my paintings and drawings. Memories are never set in stone; one “chooses” to recall certain details or events if the recollection is essential and powerful enough. Individual memories are weak or strong because of their purpose and how often those particular memories are accessed.

In the paintings of previous spaces I’ve inhabited, I am interested in creating these warped perceptions of space, because my memories of those spaces are certainly already distorted. Wall with Columns is based on my old studio in Baltimore that had two very prominent but annoying columns directly in the center of the space. When I begin a piece, I often ask myself, "What are the main players in this piece and why?" In this particular painting, it was the columns. I wanted the columns to seem more monumental and intrusive than they actually were. I highlighted that importance by repeating their forms through a line drawing in the background. The green outline is not definitive; the viewer could be looking at a door or window, a hole in the wall specifically cut for these two columns to slide through, or an object resting against the wall. There is a significant connection between art and remembering for me; both rely on individual interpretation to perceive what is or is not authentic.

OPP: In 2011, you drew 73 jerks from your personal history, documenting them only by their hairstyles. The cataloging of personal data and memories transformed into a stripped-down graphic rendering is a strategy you use repeatedly, as in 17 Bedrooms and Paintings on a Map. 73 Jerks stands out in its representation of the human form. What made you shift gears from the spatial paintings you were doing before?

CSW: I need to feel challenged in the studio, and the paintings had become too easy for me to figure out. It was like my hand and brush were so trained they knew exactly where to start and what to do. I was restless. In June 2011, I did a residency at The Wassaic Project in Wassaic, New York. I went there intending to work on those paintings, but for several months before that I had been considering a project about all of the jerks I’d ever known. I felt timid about actually following through. The jerk project would be so different visually, but conceptually it was connected to the spatial paintings; visually, it translated as an examination of my personal narrative and memories. By the time I arrived at the residency, the jerks were stuck in my head.

I had brought several yearbooks from my schools with me as well as numerous photographs that my mom had just given me. I meticulously went through all of my sources and took notes about who I was considering including and why. After only four days at the residency, I had already finished all 73 of the drawings. I decided to work chronologically so that the drawings would create a sort of timeline. In order to keep the figures nonspecific and thus universal to viewers, I drew only the hair of each jerk. 

OPP: Did you enjoy making the drawings?

CSW: It was interesting to spend the 20-45 minutes drawing each hairstyle and thinking about why I was including that particular person in the series. I’m not sure what made me decide to quantify the jerks and think of them like data in a science experiment, but I had a blast making the graphs and attempting to write very analytically about the correlations between age, gender, hair and one’s likelihood of being a jerk to me. I highly enjoyed making 73 Jerks, but it is a project that I am only going to explore once. I have no intention of creating another volume of jerks and honestly hope that I don’t have to.

OPP: Quoting from your statement for your project Paintings on the Map: "This project is a continuation of my exploration into architectural spaces as containers for memories. I began by completing a series of paintings based on eleven residences significant to my personal narrative. Combing through photographic sources, I attempted to capture what I felt was the most memorable aspect of the space when I occupied the residence." Could you talk about the interactive aspect of the project that followed the creation of the paintings? How did this project get at your interests in a way the paintings alone could not?

CSW: Paintings on the Map grew out of the 4" x 6" studies I was doing earlier this summer. My husband and I recently moved from Baltimore to Maine. Before we left, we met the couple that was moving into our Baltimore apartment, which was a space I absolutely loved. I had this urge—and felt it my duty—to communicate to the new occupants why and how much I loved this apartment, in the hopes that they would value the space as much as I did. I recognized that the painted studies were postcard-sized and wondered what would happen if I sent a small painting through the mail as a postcard to the new tenants. And what if I sent a piece of art to other strangers who currently live in my past dwellings? They have no idea that we are connected to each other through the history of a place. Would the admission of "I used to live in your house" make the current residents feel uncomfortable?

I decided to write a QR code and web address on the backside of each card, which offers an explanation as to what they were looking at. I was aware that my handling of the imagery on the card might be difficult for the resident to understand or access. I also loved the idea that the card could serve as a gateway to more information that exists on a Google Map, and it was up to the recipient whether or not they access that information. In my introduction to the online map, I provided my contact information and asked recipients to please send me a photo of the painting in their home. I also asked them to share any memorable experiences they’ve had in their space. I was a little pessimistic about getting any replies, but two recipients sent me photographs and shared stories about their current homes. I was ecstatic to see my painting hanging in the place it was based on. It was as if an extension of myself was living in that space again. There was also something wonderful about sending a gift—especially one that could be mistaken as junk mail—to a complete stranger and imagining the recipient’s reaction to getting a weird piece of art one day in their mailbox.

OPP: You recently curated Methods of Exchange, which also involved the mail. It was the inaugural exhibition at Points North, the new art space you run with your husband Jason Irla in a retired horse barn in Farmington, Maine. This particular curation involved your sending all the invited participating artists painted postcards in exchange for the pieces they sent you to show in the exhibition. Do you see this exchange of work as part of your artistic practice?

CSW: I don’t know if this sort of exchange will continue in my artistic practice, but I certainly want it to continue outside of that in my daily life. I sent handwritten letters and care packages to friends all the time when I was younger, but as I got older and took on more commitments, it became difficult to continue that kind of giving. I couldn't justify it in the age of convenient, online communication. But I was determined to not let moving to rural Maine become a death sentence to my social life and art career. I still feel that there is no excuse for giving in to the isolation here when there are so many ways to keep up with the rest of the world. Method of Exchange was my way of introducing the Farmington community to a group of artists that my husband and I are excited about and want to share. The show was also about forming broader conversations about home and distance. I might not be able to travel to your home in San Francisco, but for only 45 cents my small painting can get there in less than a week.

OPP: Recently you've been working in three-dimensional soft sculpture? Is this the first time? What led to the shift away from painting?

CSW: A very important aspect of my studio practice is that it isn't defined by medium or material. The direction of my work is dictated by the ideas. The methods necessary to complete projects are secondary to the concepts. I have a varied skill set and backgrounds in sculpture, fiber and material studies, painting and drawing. I’m confident that I can learn any other approach or technique in order to complete a project. I still consider these three-dimensional soft sculptures—specifically those in Idyllic Landscape Unit— to be paintings, because they are created with acrylic on canvas. They are simply paintings that exist in three-dimensions. More recently I've become interested in creating work that is about my current place. I could easily live in any other place and communicate visually, but there is something particular about my experiences in rural Maine. The idea of packing up a scaled-down version of my surroundings, sending them off to a completely different area of the world and allowing the viewer to imagine themselves living in this setting really intrigues me. This new work is partly about the convenience of shipping, storing and installing the landscape elsewhere, but it’s also about the effect materiality has on the reading of these models. There is something comical about using AstroTurf as a footprint for this picturesque scene of rural life or using sheep’s wool to depict the mythology of the moose up here in Maine. I’m still painting—mostly small landscape-based studies—but my focus right now is primarily on creating these three-dimensional models. I am so enamored with my new surroundings and want aspects of this setting to simultaneously exist elsewhere.

To view more of Chloe's work, please visit chloeswatson.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 mediated culture in her embroidery, video, sculpture and collage works. She received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2006), where she will begin teaching in Spring 2013, 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).

LIBBY BARBEE's colorful collages and interactive sculptures address the construction of landscape and the frontier myth of the American West with a nuanced attention to the psychological and cultural implications of place. She received her MFA from the Maryland Institute Collage of Art in 2011, and was recently an artist-in-residence at Platte Forum (Denver, Colorado). In September 2013, Barbee will present a site-specific installation at Howard County Center for the Arts in Ellicott City, Maryland. Libby lives and works in La Veta, Colorado. 

OtherPeoplesPixels: What do you find compelling about Colorado? How has this place affected your work?



Libby Barbee: You know, it is really kind of strange. I grew up in a very small rural town on the southeastern plains of Colorado, but it was not one of the beautiful, mountainous areas that people often think of when they imagine this state. I always spent a lot of time outdoors. From the time I was a kid, I loved science and everything creepy or crawly. But as an adult, I never really thought of myself as an “outdoors” person and never felt particularly tied to the landscape of the American West. Before relocating to Baltimore for graduate school, I had been working for a couple of years on a series of paintings about gender and domestic spaces. My work at that time was still concerned with place, but it was more figurative and all about culture. Having grown up in the land of horrible landscape art, landscapes were pretty much the last thing in the world that I was interested in painting.

When I started graduate school, I fell into a serious creative slump. I no longer felt connected to what I was exploring in my studio practice. Even worse, I felt completely disoriented and claustrophobic on the East Coast. I had spent all of my life in a place where you could just look out and see for hundreds of miles in any direction. Suddenly I was in a landscape where I was totally dwarfed amongst all of the people, buildings and trees. It was just suffocating; I was dying to escape the place. On top of it all, I was experiencing some serious culture shock. I still maintain that people are people no matter where you are, but there are some very real differences between the attitudes and perspectives of East Coasters and West Coasters. It took some adjusting to.

Untitled
2009
Collage and charcoal on paper

OPP: How did your work change then?

LB: I somehow started making these charcoal drawings of this nude figure wearing a coyote hood. There wasn’t really any indication of the landscape in the drawings, but they had everything to do with this figure interacting with an imagined space. The figure’s placement and posture was very performative, almost as if it were performing a ritual or dance. Eventually these small drawings led to a large artwork that developed along one wall of my studio. It started as another of these charcoal drawings—the coyote-hooded figure carrying a grain mill on its back. I was at a point where this whole endeavor needed a push, and I began to add a rocky mountain ridge to the composition. I just kept adding page after page of paper until the drawing filled the whole wall. It was from this drawing that the idea of collage emerged. I had printed off some images of rock faces as a reference, but I got impatient. To speed up the process, I started cutting them up and taping them to the paper surface.

By the time I was finished with this giant drawing/collage, everything that I had been thinking about, experimenting with and biting my nails over just began to gel. I started to become consciously aware of the importance of the Western landscape and all of its cultural baggage in the fabric of my reality. I was able to contextualize my connection to the West and began to understand the activity of drawing these charcoal figures—which before had seemed unconnected and inconsequential—as a performative act of re-establishing my place in and perspective on the world. The figures quickly fell away in my work, and the landscape became the central actor. I also became more and more cognizant of and interested in the role of the mythic West in the larger American cultural consciousness. Before going to the East Coast, I don’t think that I had really ever completely understood the enormity of the importance of that particular landscape and the symbolism that it holds as the essence of American-ness. It has been interesting for me to see how my explorations have grown organically from something very personal to encompass these larger spheres that are progressively more universal.

I have been back in Colorado for about a year and half. Now I do live in one of those beautiful mountainous spots—a cute little town nestled below the Spanish Peaks of southern Colorado. We have small herds of deer that live in town and sleep in our front yard, and on cold mornings after a light snow, the sun sets the mountain aglow in a manner so brilliant you really begin to wonder if it isn’t nature’s attempt to imitate Thomas Kinkade. It has all of the makings for horrible landscape paintings.

The ranchers and old hippies here are left over from the communes that brought in artists from New York in the 1970s with the possibility of “dropping out.”  It's the same desire, of course, that attracted the ranchers and the cowboys before them, and the miners and the trappers, and—going all the way back to the beginning of the American Frontier—the pilgrims. All of them had the hope of trying it all anew, wiping the slate clean in a place unencumbered by culture, undirtied by human rules, hierarchies and restraints. It’s all a farce, of course. There is not much free or natural or unconstrained left about this place. It is all broken up, parceled out and divided by property lines, fences and water rights. The forests are managed by logging and fire, and the parks get new trails every year. But it really is a beautiful illusion.

OPP: How is the Colorado art scene different from the Baltimore art scene?



LB: Baltimore is so full of energy. There is a really strong DIY attitude in Baltimore, and people just make things happen. You might go to see an ad hoc exhibition in someone’s living room one night, and the next night, you can see the same artists’ work in an exhibition at the Maryland Art Place or another well-established art venue. There are so many unoccupied buildings in the city that it is really easy for artists to find communal living spaces, studio spaces and spaces for all sorts of exciting exhibitions, performances and other forms of exchange. The whole scene is more about experimentation and the exchange of ideas than about sales or status. There is a lot of support for emerging artists.

The Colorado art scene is, of course, much smaller and more diffuse. I live in a very rural spot about three hours from Denver, so I am pretty isolated from any contemporary art scene. Usually when I tell people that I am an artist, I get some answer like: “Oh, you are?!!! Well, you should meet my neighbor Larry. He makes just the neatest sculptures of sunflowers and animals out of old tractor parts. You would just love them!” And, in all honesty, I really kind of do love them.

I spent two months in Denver last spring doing a residency at a wonderful arts organization called Platte Forum. I had lived in northern Colorado for about eight years during and immediately following my undergraduate studies at Colorado State University, and this was the first time that I had spent much time in the Denver area since leaving Fort Collins in 2008. I had the opportunity to get a better feel for everything that is going on there, and I honestly was quite shocked. I met so many artists who are doing really interesting things, and there are a growing number of organizations, residencies and venues that support contemporary art and emerging artists. I have always believed that you can tell the health of an art ecosystem by the amount of support that is shown for emerging artists. If all of the artwork is being shipped in from other places or you just see the same artists over and over again, you know that the system is unhealthy. I think that Denver is on the move and heading in a great direction. As soon as I am finished being a hermit in the mountains, I think that I will head there. 

OPP: I'd love to hear more about the creation of colorful landscape collages like Reimagining Bierstadt: Rocky Mountains (2012) and The Harvest of Particles (2011), which involve both collage and painting. Could you explain your collage process? Do you plan your compositions in advance?



LB: A lot of my work begins with reading. I love to read about science and natural history; certain ideas just catch my attention. I’ll start out with a general concept or even a catch phrase and get to Googling. My husband swears that I am a research addict. Honestly, I don’t know what I would do without books and the Internet. I allow myself to be pulled along by the research, often discovering connections between ideas I never would have imagined fitting together. The collages are about synthesizing all this disparate information. 

Sometimes I do plan my compositions in advance (it is the smart thing to do, after all), but I am impatient. More often, I find a few images that fit the idea that I am after and that somehow have a life of their own. They become sort of like actors on a stage, and they often dictate the direction of the composition. It is weird, because sometimes I will completely eliminate them in the end, but the resulting composition could never have been created without them.

As I start constructing the collage, I go through this whole back and forth process of finding images and creating paint swatches. The painting is great, because it is mindless and cathartic, and I can really concentrate on the audiobook that I am listening to. I drip and swirl and puddle it until I have a nice big stack of painted paper that I can cut from. Then, I try to match the printed images with the painted swatches, and when I can’t do that, I fiddle with Photoshop (which I hate) until something works. Once I am fed up with Photoshop, I go back to puddling and swirling. Amidst all this back-and-forth, are long hours of cutting stuff out with Exacto knives and gluing. Eventually it all just works itself out. It is a stupid process really, and sometimes I hope that I figure out something better.

OPP: What are your sources for your collages? What is your collection process like?



LB: My collection process is really a hodgepodge of approaches, and I am sure it would seem like complete lunacy to anyone who walked into my studio and tried to make sense of it. Nevertheless, there is some twisted and confusing logic behind it all.

The process is constantly changing, and the rules of the game are different from piece to piece. Sometimes the process emerges out of necessity. I know that I need a certain color, texture, value, and I go out looking for that. More often, however, I set up parameters for myself: I only use images found by Googling a certain word, by searching a particular data base or by using images of only one particular place. I am obsessed with the US Geological Survey, and I can spend hours looking through images on the organization’s website. I am constantly looking for new ways of picturing the world, and I keep hundreds of photos saved on my computer in folders with names like piebald deer and icebergs.

OPP: How is the process of collage itself connected to your ideas about the American wilderness?

LB: We imagine nature to be pure, unchanging, timeless. Most importantly, we often define nature as an absence of human intervention. We see the human and natural worlds as distinctly separate. This has been historically important in a nation whose identity depends on the idea of the untouched/uncivilized landscape as the mechanism for political and spiritual purification and the creation of a stronger, better, freer nation.

But, in reality, “nature” and “wilderness” are cultural fabrications. Yellowstone National Park, for instance, is a beacon of American wilderness. And yet, its plants, animals and geology have been utilized and manipulated by humans for thousands of years. We identify national parks as “natural” spaces, but a lot of effort goes into maintaining them. They are an attempt to reconstruct a pure and unchanging state that never really existed.  

Collage is essentially the construction of cohesive images out of very incoherent parts. I set out to deconstruct images of landscape in order to reconstruct them in a new light. In one of the first works, I used photos of landfills, feed lots and parking lots to create rock faces. In another painting, I used one aerial photograph repeated over and over again to create a panoramic view of rolling hills and plains. I hope that viewers will move from the cohesive image to the incoherent parts and begin to think about the facts that are overlooked in their perceptions of the idealized American landscape.

 To see more of Libby's work, please visit libbybarbee.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 mediated culture in her embroidery, video, sculpture and collage works. She received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2006), where she will begin teaching in Spring 2013, 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).

ABDUL ABDULLAH explores themes of belonging and alienation in the context of a Muslim-Australian identity, using his own background as a touch point. His paintings, photographs, video and performative public collaborations operate from a spirit of generosity, while they simultaneously reveal cultural misperceptions about the Muslim-Australian experience. In 2009, he received the Highly Commended in the NYSPP at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra and was named a Perth Rising Star by Insite Magazine. In 2010, he was included in the inaugural Triple J list of 25 Under 25 + Smashin' It. Abdul lives in Perth, Australia.

OtherPeoplesPixels: Your background is in painting, but lately you're taking more of an interdisciplinary approach. Tell me about your interest in portraiture. How did it begin?

Abdul Abdullah: Before I studied art, I studied journalism. I am a curious person, and I am particularly curious about people. Art school for me better satisfied my curiosities and was a more immediate way to address the questions I had. I like people, and I want to understand them. Portraiture seemed like a rational method to pursue. To the chagrin of my lecturers, I painted throughout art school and resisted other mediums. At the time, I wanted to graduate from art school with a practical skill. While painting is still the backbone of my practice, I now see the medium as second to the idea and look to find what processes best suit what I am trying to communicate visually.

OPP: One thing that really stands out for me about your portraits is the consistency with which the context is stripped away from the figures you paint. Mostly they float in blank fields of color, as in King Keanu (2011), although sometimes the light from some unknown source remains on their faces, as in Serani (2012). How does this formal choice reveal your conceptual concerns?

AA: What I am looking to do is find an efficient mode for the consumption of an idea. It is a reductive method that seeks to put across a simple idea quickly. Often the canvas serves the purpose a plinth can serve in a sculpture. I want to direct the audience to what I find important in an idea.

OPP: I find your body of work Celebrations and Gold refreshing in its emphasis on joy and the notion of honoring the individual. Can you talk about this work and how it developed? Is it a reaction to something in the art world?

AA: Celebrations and Gold was my return show to my hometown Perth after almost two years away in Melbourne and Europe. Melbourne was an amazing city with a lot going on, and I found myself only trying to replace the friends I already had in Perth. I began to feel that cities were much more the same than different, and what really matters is the people you love who live in them. This particular body of work was a way of celebrating the friendships I had in my hometown. I painted the people around me who I loved and in the way that I liked to think of them. I put them in crowns and showered them in confetti. In essence, I celebrated what they meant to me. It wasn't consciously a reaction to anything in the art world, but in hindsight, I can see how this was a way of differentiating myself from a lot of the clinical, academic art I was surrounded by in Melbourne and positioning myself unapologetically as the emotional and reactionary artist I am.

OPP:  Your most recent photographs were shown at the Melbourne Art Fair in August. They feature you and an older man, and the titles refer to your paternal lineage. Could you talk about this theme in your work?

AA: The photographs featured my father, or likenesses of my father. Lineage is a subject that has become very important to me. I am a seventh generation Australian with a direct paternal link to a convict who arrived here in 1815, after stealing two stamps and a watch chain in London. My paternal line is exclusively of British origin. On my mother’s side, it is Malay. My father converted to Islam in 1972 and took the Arabic name Ibrahim Abdullah. He married my already Muslim mother, and they raised their children as Muslims.

While my roots run deep in this country, I have found myself continuously having to justify my position as both an Australian and as a Muslim. My skin is brown, and I have an Arabic name so people think I must be from somewhere else with values that don’t correspond with Australian values, or they say that I have assimilated well. Both statements are incorrect. My family has been in Australia for 200 years. I haven’t changed to assimilate into Australian society; I have always been the way I am. Even the cable guy that came to fix my internet the other day said, “I saw your name and thought I’d have trouble with you, but you speak English well." This is symptomatic of the broader Australian attitude. We might have opened our borders, but the White Australia Policy, which restricted non-white immigration to Australia, was only abolished 40 years ago. The personal revolution my father underwent when he became a Muslim that same year defined who I am and how I identify myself today. I am an Australian, I love my country, and I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else, but I certainly don’t fit the Aussie stereotype.

OPP: As an American, I'm not sure I know exactly what the Aussie stereotype is. Could you explain what you mean?

AA: The Aussie stereotype, as I understand it, is the white, sun-bleached by-product of British colonization. At best it's the laid-back, rough-around-the-edges Crocodile Dundee type. At worst, it's nationalist, xenophobic and white-supremacist. Australia did not suffer apartheid, but our historical experience is not dissimilar. Indigenous people were not classed as human beings until the 1970s, and the term asylum-seeker has somehow become synonymous with illegal immigrant. The Cronulla riots in 2005 were perpetrated by flag-bearing people fitting this stereotype who claimed ownership of the term Aussie. Placards on the day denounced Wogs, referring intially to Lebanese-Australians. But as the day went on, the term seemed to refer to anyone who wasn't white. Broadly speaking, I wouldn't call those who fit the young Aussie stereotype consciously racist, but rather they are South Park Conservatives, and by that I mean, well-meaning idealists with oversimplified, right-leaning politics. They have an egocentric view of the world that reveals a limited understanding of domestic and international history. They wear Rusty brand shorts and flipflops no what the weather is, and they look like Chris Hemsworth or Kylie Minogue.

OPP: You did a collaborative project with two other emerging Australian artists, Nathan Beard and Casey Ayres, called The Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The project deals with cultural stereotypes and the experience of living in a multicultural society. Explain the historical reference of the project's title and describe the public performance project.

AA: The Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was a collaboration with fellow Eurasian artists Casey Ayres and Nathan Beard for the 2012 Next Wave festival in Melbourne. The title refers to Japan’s geo-political ambition in World War II, called the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere." We dropped "East" from the title and made it more inclusive. The project consisted of an embassy for the fictional empire where we the artists acted as hosts or ambassadors. We transformed a space at the National Gallery of Victoria into an orientalized kitsch set that acted as the backdrop for a series of performances and workshops. These included dancers, musicians and performers, as well as experts in different Asian arts and cultures. We wanted to turn a mirror on the exotic and hold it up to the way Asia is consumed by the Australian public. The whole project was tongue-in-cheek, but we were able to reveal some uncomfortable stereotypes.

OPP: There seems to be a precarious balance between irony and a sincerity in the act of performing as ambassadors. This irony-sincerity hybridity underscores what you've said about your experience as a Muslim-Australian, in the sense that it is a synthesis of two things which people often think of as opposing. I'm wondering about the tone of the performances and workshops. Was it in contrast to the "orientalized kitsch set" or in line with it?

AA: It's important that The Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was a humorous engagement with these topics, it was also an earnest investigation that carefully handled different cultural discourses. Our workshops were authentic collaborations with Asian-Australian performers, artists and experts. The set and our costumes were exaggerated facsimiles of the real thing, but our engagement with the people we hosted was sincere and not supposed to be ironic.

OPP: Those gold suits are amazing! Could you talk about the role of costuming and accessorizing in the project?

AA: The costumes we wore for the duration of festival were based on a Prada design and were made while on a research trip to Thailand in 2011. As the ambassadors we decided we were each going to identify with one of the three imagined pillars of our empire: passion, beauty and wisdom. The crowns we chose and our demeanors were designed to reflect these traits. The gold fabric was chosen, because we felt it reflected the kitsch themes of the space and idea.

OPP: What effect did your collaboration in The Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere have on your own individual practice?

AA: While I have been consciously expanding my practice over the last three years, this collaboration took it to places I hadn’t ever imagined. It involved theatre, dance, performance and audience interactivity. We existed in the space as part of the artwork and interacted with our audience as performers. It really revealed to me what is possible when you are trying to communicate an idea and how, when making art, the idea absolutely must be privileged over the medium. At the same time this does not undermine the value of painting, but rather reinforces the reasons I paint when I do and when I use other means of communications as opposed to painting. 

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

AA:  In 2013 I will be exhibiting and working on a body of work that explores the notion of "home." Australia, being a relatively new nation with colonial beginnings has an uncomfortable relationship with this idea. What does "home" mean in the contemporary multicultural Australian context? As a seventh generation Australian, who is also a Muslim and who isn't white, I have mixed feelings about identifying with my nationality. I am an Australian and I love my country, but there is a segment of society in which people claim the same thing but deny my right to do so. I don't have a "mother-country," and if this isn't my home, then where is? I think this question is relevant to an entire generation of Australians who don't identify with bushrangers.

To see more of Abdul's work, please visit abdulabdullah.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 mediated culture in her embroidery, video, sculpture and collage works. She received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2006), where she will be teaching in Spring 2013, 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).

ERIC ASHCRAFT juxtaposes nature and technology, painting and sculpture and the found and the original in his mixed media work emphasizing the blurry, rich spaces between the binaries we often use to define things. His work has been shown most recently at The Missoula Art Museum (Missoula), Mt. Comfort (Indianapolis) and as a part of a two-person exhibition Poseur at Grizzly Grizzly (Philadelphia). Upcoming exhibitions include Taste at Small Black Door (New York). Eric lives in Yakima, WA.

OtherPeoplesPixels: Many of your pieces are paintings on modified found objects, so they are part painting-part sculpture. But juxtaposition seems to be an even stronger defining strategy driving all the work.

Eric Ashcraft: Lao Tzu once proposed that truth is apprehended through the understanding of fundamental binaries. Often, when one considers how best to describe the interactions of things around us, “discontinuity” proves to be a valuable signifier. A thing or event becomes best described by what it is not. The mind works to separate things, to classify, in order that it may abstract experiences into symbols, and orchestrate symbols into concepts. This is what we see in language, i.e. not dark but …, not soft but …, etc. It is no coincidence that a recurring theme in mythological constructions is that the fabric of nature itself is comprised of the interaction between opposites. It is also fascinating to me that nature—as described by quantum field theory—works in much the same vein as many of our mythologies would suggest. The laws of nature are very nearly symmetrical with respect to particles and antiparticles, which provide—for lack of better terms—a balance between the fundamental components (interactions) of reality.

When it comes to drawing lines between sculpture and painting, I often think, loosely and imperfectly, in terms of the classical binary opposition between mind and matter. In a limiting way, I relate properties of painting (surface-illusion) with mind, and properties of sculpture (form-space) with matter. In this context, I then enjoy attempting to erase the lines of separation, suspending knowledge of their respective attributes, which brings me closer in affinity with the traditions of mysticism. In moments of illumination, these systems of opposites are transcended and dissolved into a homogeneous continuity. And there, interconnectedness is laid bare and inarticulate. 

On a basic level, I don’t see much of a difference between the two; one easily becomes a surface for the other. Both are composites of thought and action. Both manifest as objects, limited by the material of which they are comprised. Both inevitably decay in time and are defined in accordance with the limiting symbols of language and difference. And importantly, both are constantly being redefined as the parameters in which they exist, evolve, expand and reconstitute under new paradigms. And so these half-painting, half-sculpture “hybrids” are a kind of articulation of this malleability of form and classification. In general, this perpetual fluctuation of category is a continuing drive for me.

OPP: So, do you identify as a painter, sculptor or as a conceptual artist?

 EA: If I had to choose between being identified as a painter, a sculptor or a conceptual artist, I would choose to be a banana. When it comes down to it, I’ll use whatever method necessary to allow an idea or experience to come to fruition, and usually concept takes priority. It is also probably obvious that I have a debilitating fear of being categorized, but it is important for me to allow myself to creatively wander and be a bit delusional. Truly, I think it would be best to not consider myself an artist at all and circumnavigate the issue.

OPP: Touché. A specific juxtaposition I see over and over again is the combination of the untouched, romantic landscape with various forms of technology: in My Kind of Romance (2008) you added a neon dress shirt, and, in Entertainment Tonight (2008), you put the painting on a TV set, and in Tell Me if I am not Happy (2011), the landscape covered the jacket of an undisclosed VHS tape. Could you talk about the recurring combination of the romantic landscape with technology?

EA: It really comes from numerous places. Some of the most visible to me are a consideration of the history of beauty and the seduction of the observer, the manifestation of both as signs, and conflict between immersive space and the obstructive tactility of our urban detritus. I remember, in the case of My Kind of Romance, being really interested in different materials and images employed in order to seduce. The image of the untouched landscape, which in this case, was a kind of compendium of historical influences varying from Corot, to the tyrant of our grandparents’ walls, Mr. Thomas Kinkade, and the physical presence of neon. Both have qualities that entice. One, an image that satisfies a kind of escapist yearning, relates to desires for purity, and the other, neon, is a more urban material. It's eye-candy, employed to catch one’s attention, reeling one in to consume. The shirt also stands in as an abstracted modern presence within a nostalgic and fictitious ideal. 

Perhaps a general interest in the sublime is a more apparent source of the combination. Technology, in a way, embodies a new experience of the sublime, one that provides awe through a shear overabundance of information. Where we once could stand on a precipice and feel the awesomeness of a great expanse, belittled and terrified by the vastness of space and unharnessed nature (in some places this still happens, especially in relation to outer space), we can now feel a similar phenomenon via the great expanse of information that confronts us through our exponentially generative technologies.

OPP: Talk about the theme of erasure in works like BEST IF USED BY JAN 01 12 (2011), The Hard Bones Under the Flesh (2011) and Were It to Begin and Were It to Cease (2011).

EA: I was interested in revealing the form or material under the advertising or image. I was sort of trying to reveal the essence of the object by taking away its skin. In doing so, the material and form became both reduced and more coherent in the modern sense. By cutting away at a structure, you can begin to understand how it works. You can break it down and simplify it. These works were kind of dissections in a very superficial sense.

OPP: So, is the tendency towards deconstruction as a way to comprehend related to the experience of vastness and awesomeness of the sublime in whatever form?

EA: You know, I have never seen a connection between them; perhaps you are picking up on something. I sort of think of the sublime as this moment where things can’t be reduced or taken apart, as being in affinity with rapture. It can only be talked about and deemed a sublime experience after the fact. So there is a rift between experience and understanding. First, one experiences, then knowledge is extracted from that experience once it is decoded into a language of logical understanding. Deconstruction is a utility for obtaining knowledge. The experience of the sublime is a state of dissolution into the unknown. So, perhaps they are connected in the sense of being complements.

OPP: There are some fascinating anomalies in your oeuvre: The Cracked Picket (2009) and Summertime (2010), for example, represent extremely different styles of painting. They are so distinct that it seems to be a conscious choice. I'd love to hear more about these pieces, and why you chose to paint the way you did? 

EA: Painting has an immense history that is nearly impossible to ignore, to the point that virtually any mark you make on a surface can carry a cultural and political significance. I like to visualize aesthetic approaches as varying tools in the toolbox; you can build content through renegotiating the terms of a thing’s representation and by questioning the validity of a thing’s historical definition or stature.

I think of style as really organic in this way. Different styles can be used to express different ideas. Some things are simply more effective rendered in a particular way. In The Cracked Picket, I remember trying to navigate between styles in such a way that the overall aesthetic wouldn’t fall into one category or the other, sort of walking the fence between cartoon and realism, humor and seriousness, abstraction and representation. Even the paint application was stuck somewhere between thick and thin. The combination of the perspective and the abundant thickness of the painting’s layers made the house feel like a real object in person, as if it were poised to fall off the surface. The fabricated quality of the house was magnified by rendering it in a synthetic medium: acrylic. Also relevant was its scale; it was much too big to be an illustration and too small to be a completely immersive illusion. It almost felt as if it should have been inhabited by hobbit-sized dolls.

I painted Summertime through a childhood memory of a confrontation with the decaying corpse of an entangled and unfortunate cow. There are a lot of contradictions at play, conceptually, physically and in regard to taste. I was trying to achieve a balance between an evasive apparition-like quality and a solid mass. The paint needed to be more of a mutating agent, accented by moments of heaviness shifting into transparency. The method of paint application was influenced greatly by the subject. I was revolving around death as a subject and a metaphor for painting as a whole. I was considering ambiguities in form through the use of an extremely plastic and fleshy material, mainly oil. I wanted to represent Death, unveiled as an elapse of time rather than as something instantaneous and foreign. I saw this concept as being in conjunction with the character of painting itself. A painting is built in time and ultimately decays in time, much the same way we do. A painting represents an expanded period of time. The time of its making is inherent in the “finished” work, in the layers of its construction. But it is never truly finished until it ceases to exist.

OPP: What you are saying leads me to think of your work through the lens of contemporary remix culture, which is something close to my own heart. Throughout art history, new work has always drawn on old work, but your work makes this creation of meaning through juxtaposition more apparent because it is less concerned with having a definitive, "original" style. I'm enjoying thinking of your work as painting remix, similar to sampling in Hip Hop or the creation of new narratives in fanvids, mash-ups and supercuts. Is there any connection between your work and these non-art-world forms?

EA: Definitely. I enjoy that connection. All of these methods mix and clash material from a nearly inexhaustible and ever-growing media archive. Everything is up for grabs. The exchange of information has become so fast that classified channels of expression don’t have much of a shelf-life. There is always something new being born from the old, and I see no sign of it slowing down. So many turning points in history really come from separate languages combining into new forms. In a way, these “non-art-world” (non-art-world-yet?) methods pay homage to older methodologies of creativity, particularly appropriation in Cubist and Dadaist collage.

I think material that has a real physical history can be “remixed” as well. As our experience of media and technology becomes more integrated with the physical, the barriers between real and virtual begin to seem less distinct; it is truly hard to distinguish what is original from what is synthetic. I’ve begun to think of the two as unified harbingers of information.

As the exchange of information becomes increasingly more rapid, I see a possibility for material and image manipulation to expand to encompass increasingly more collisions of aesthetics. I envision the future of communication as a vast array of interweaving symbols that no longer function on a two-dimensional level—as current language does—but instead a multi-dimensional ocean of layered meaning and non-meaning, abstraction and image, symbol and space.

On another note, if you choose to sample something, you can sample and still put your twist on it -- in fact it’s hard not to, the way you can still hear a characterizing finesse behind a great DJ’s flavor of blending chosen source material. Originality can be found in the idiosyncrasies. When you are taking influence, or even straight up stealing, the result doesn’t have to be derivative, and even that isn’t always a bad thing. I still entertain the idea of uniqueness, but one doesn’t need to be original in one way. You can be creative through multiple mediums and even multiple identities. You don’t need to wave a banner around with a singular product to be successful.

OPP: What new development in your art practice are you most excited about right now?

EA: There are a lot of avenues I’ve been exploring that are particularly rewarding. I feel as if right now I’m in a state of transition between multiple platforms, and new methods of expression have begun to unveil themselves. I’m beginning to try to fuse disparate platforms of expression that I’ve used in the past with new visual languages I’m trying to develop. In this respect, digital methods of production and explorations into new fields are especially enticing. In this approach, I have been making these twisted erotic drawings and digital works I haven’t shown anyone yet. I really don’t know how to describe them, which is exciting. 

To view more of Eric's work, please visit ericashcraft.com.

RICK LEONG paints dense, psychologically-charged landscapes influenced by both the traditions of Chinese, Japanese and Canadian landscape painting. He explores our human experience of the landscape, often using the metaphor of twilight to reveal the intangible border between the internal and external, the subjective and the objective. He is currently an artist-in-residence at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, where he will have an exhibition opening at the Anna Leonowens Gallery on November 13, 2012. Rick lives in Victoria, British Columbia.

OtherPeoplesPixels: What is the origin of your interest in landscape?

 Rick Leong: When I was an undergraduate, I was working with themes of political identity and what it means to be a Chinese-Canadian. I worked with imagery derived from Chinatown kitsch, manga and anime, basically developing a warped sense of Asian history and culture through visual language. There are a lot of senior artists working within those themes of identity and displacement, particularly in Vancouver, where I am from. I felt that I was essentially walking in their footsteps and really wanted to forge my own path. By the time I was headed to graduate school, I felt that the work that resonated with me the most were classical Chinese and Japanese paintings and prints. I didn't simply want to emulate those artists and their works so much as I wanted to join in this beautiful conversation they were having about the landscape and our relationship to it. I wanted to try to recreate the feelings they inspired in me rather than recreate their techniques or methodologies. I think this became a fundamental influence on how my practice would develop over the next several years.  

OPP: Is there a specific artist or piece from either of those landscape traditions, or from Vancouver that is particularly influential for you?

RL: The paintings of Kano Motonobu have had a tremendous influence on me, particularly his painting Birds and Flowers in Four Seasons. He is known for creating wa-kan, a technique that combines classical Chinese and Japanese styles.

OPP: In the spirit of full disclosure, I'm going to reveal a personal bias: I've never been partial to landscapes in general. I love being in nature, but what I love about it is my emotional experience of feeling connected to the world. Often straight landscapes don't do much for me, even when I can recognize their beauty, because they don't elicit my emotions. But I feel very different about your work. In paintings like Hush (2010), A Still Melody (2009) and Dancing Serpent in Dawn's Quiet (2006), the vines, branches and trees look like creatures. Plants are, of course, alive, but in your work, they appear to have personalities, to be animated emotionally. It's this quality that gets me really interested in investigating the paintings further. Are you intentionally imbuing nature with personality? If so, are your intentions in doing so different from my experience viewing the work?

RL: When I create a body of work for an exhibition, I typically try to recreate the experience of venturing into a particular kind of landscape. I start with the dawn. As the viewer moves through the exhibition, encountering the different elements of the landscape from different perspectives, it transforms into night. I often build my landscapes around animal forms or text, mainly as a compositional device but also as a way to imbue the work with a hidden layer that gives me the opportunity to develop a more profound viewing experience. The inspiration for Hush came from the experience of walking alone in the woods in the Rocky Mountains, and the silence was like a blanket. The only noises were my footsteps and my breathing, and I became lost in thought. The text written in the branches of the tree in Hush is "the sound of silence is the sound of self."

I work predominantly from memory in these works, and what I don't recall exactly I invent or imagine. In this way, I am not creating a document of a particular place but rather the experience of places that seem familiar in a tacit way. This process allows for the unexpected that arises in the creation of a work to exist and develop into something tangible. When laying down textures for grounds to build upon, I'll often pick up on forms that I see developing and flesh them out. This has led to an interest in the gestalt, or the process that helps us define or order the chaos around us. It is how we make sense of letters from typographic shapes, for example. In this way, I have started to think of the landscape as a visual language that I can use to talk about other things that may interest me. So the work is in part about the landscape and how we experience it and what we take away from it and carry around within us, but it is also a form of language and communication. The phenomena of the gestalt extends to the way that we anthropomorphize the landscape as well. When we walk by a tree and we see a face in it, it is part of this process. There is something fundamentally compelling about this process that persists throughout our history, such as in Taoism and Shintoism all the way to Disney. Part of my process in creating a work is to allow those elements that arise to take on a personality of their own. I like to think of this as allowing the painting to have some say in its own creation, to dialogue with the work as I am making it.

RL: As I was building these landscapes that always began with the dawn and ended in darkness, I became more aware that the paintings were focused on the day. I realized that this is only a part of the way that we experience the landscape. I began to break down the landscape into three distinct ways of experience—day, night and twilight. The Roaming Gloam was my first deliberate project that dealt with the in-between aspect of twilight. I approached the work as an experience of a place situated within time. Time as place. As I began to venture into the realm of phenomenology and ontology, I began to think of the in-between time of twilight as a metaphor for the threshold between the subjective interior realm and the objective external realm. I am interested in how each informs our experience of the other. It goes back to the gestalt in the way that we project aspects of ourselves onto the landscape when we see a face or form within the landscape and, alternatively, how we situate ourselves within constructs of space and place within our own thoughts and dreams. 

RL:The impetus for The Wilderness was the desire to create the experience of the landscape at night. When the woods, rivers and lakes become obscured by darkness, the eyes drift to that which is illuminated. I wanted to approach it in my typical way, to create this experience of a place as one moves through it, experiencing it from different perspectives. Again, there are the familiar aspects which manifest as shooting stars and constellations, yet we have to project more of our imaginations into the work as it is the great unknown wilderness of our time. The work was a challenge for me to create, as there is less critical mass to manipulate. I began working from the material itself, staining the linen with inks, pouring and pooling the watercolours, and finally fleshing out the forms with oils. In relation to The Phenomenology of Dusk the processes were at radically different ends of the spectrum between control and chaos. Both have their pros and cons, so I don't necessarily prefer one over the other so much as I strive for the ability to shift my methodology as the work demands.

OPP: What new piece, idea or upcoming opportunity are you most excited about?

RL: I am currently the artist in residence at NSCAD, and I am working with lithographs and screenprinting for the first time, as well as making paintings. It is an exciting cross discipline experience for me, and I am learning a lot. The work I am doing here culminates in an exhibition at the Anna Leonowens Gallery, and will be part of a larger body of work that will be shown at Two Rivers Gallery in Prince George in January, 2013.  

To see more of Rick's work, please visit rickleong.com.

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.

from series Black Mirror

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?

John Stark: Yes they have been, but influences come from all experience, and the paintings tend to be born out of ideas as old as the world itself. I don't try to create original ideas. For me, originality is novelty. In the spirit of modernism, I try to find new ways of expressing the old. By presenting this subject matter now, the meaning shifts when consumed in the contemporary context and the tendency is to draw comparisons within the specific social or cultural realm. I was influenced by elements of popular culture earlier when the language was forming, but now the work tends to have a life of its own and perpetuates itself within the structure of its own narrative drive. 

from series Meliora Silentio

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?

JS: A funeral pyre. Similar structures can be found around the world and were used by different cultures at different times. The first painting I made like this depicted a Native American funeral pyre. In this custom, they believe the soul is carried up to the sky by birds of prey when the cadaver is consumed. Also in Zoroastrianism, they build a concrete turret called a 'Tower of Silence' to elevate the body of the floor so as not to infect the ground as the earth is considered pure. The architecture of these structures or houses for the dead is something I found fascinating, and I went on to create more versions of ‘stick architecture’ that became more like gateways or portals used in various tribal rituals of initiation, alluding to the painting itself as a gateway to pass through (in the metaphysical sense).

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.

from series Apiculture

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?

JS: It keeps them guessing ; )

OPP: One series Apiculture (2008-2012) has spanned years. What is it that drew you to the subject of beekeeping?

JS: It was an intuitive decision that happened gradually, and it's now six years since the idea first formed. I felt the beekeepers provided an adequate metaphor that could be read from many different vantage points, and a painted world for the keepers to inhabit with potential narrative possibilities was born. It felt a bit like Phillip Guston when he discovered his world of clansmen: in a documentary he states he felt like a movie director with a new cast when making those works. As I fell deeper into the subject, I found interesting parallels between beekeeping and the fact that it has frequently been a monastic practice like mead, liquor, and beer production. I became focused on these kinds of rituals for their allegorical potential and their inherent mystical nature. Today there are shamanistic bee cults in practice that worship the bee and the symbol of the hive, which has been used to represent utopian society to varying degrees by many diverse communities, corporations, and religious groups throughout history.   

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?

JS: I think you understood the paintings very well from your question, and the paintings are supposed to be very much a question. In the new work for Black Mirror, there was a definite intention to focus on more banal imagery which I tried to compliment with a more photo-real, Vermeer-esque painting language, allowing a new kind of tension to occur. Because of this, the works appear more removed than previous works, but the subject is more loaded and charged due to the heavy religious and scientific connotations and the paradoxical nature of the imagery. The depiction of labour is consistent in this series, as in Apiculture, and refers to the process out of which the work is born. The intention is to question the inherent value attached. My work is not conceptual; it relies on the physicality of the paint and its technical manipulation, so what you see is what you get. Although I’ve found, depending on what the viewer brings to these paintings, the readings will vary dramatically. Some see depictions of prisons or concentration camps, and others see a modest but tough existence driven by love, compassion and devotion. I prefer the latter.

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