Gallery Hours: 12:30-5:00 Tuesday through Friday
1:30-5:00 Saturday, 2:00-4:00 Sunday
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Gallery Hours: 12:30-5:00 Tuesday through Friday 1:30-5:00 Saturday, 2:00-4:00 Sunday |
In Between: (re)Negotiating Ethnicity, Gender and Sexuality Curated by Emily Yochim, Vika Gardner and Darren Miller Artist's Talk by Zanele Muholi and Opening Reception, Tuesday, January 26, 7 – 9 PM Exhibition Dates, 1/26 – 2/16/2010 |
Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside. - Dorothy Allison
In early 2010, we find ourselves in a culture characterized by both profound changes and intense fears. Just a year after President Obama’s inauguration signaled hope and change, new terrorist activity on the United States’ home front has reignited persistent and entrenched fears of “the other” - those whose identities lie somehow outside conventional norms of race, gender, sexuality, class, and nationality. Such fears are frequently soothed by social, cultural, and political practices that seek to define subjectivities as concrete and fixed – as black or white, gay or straight, male or female, good or evil. Still, continued debates about gay marriage, changing demographics signaling the impending “minoritization” of white Americans, globalized media, and the election of our first biracial President each gesture toward a culture in which traditional definitions of identity will simply not work. What’s more, our responsibility as informed and concerned citizens interested in social justice impels us to see the spaces “in between,” to resist the urge to force our fellows into preexisting categories, and to welcome new visions of self and subjectivity. - Emily Chivers Yochim, PhD, Assistant Professor of Communication Arts |
Zanele Muholi |
Interview with ZANELE MUHOLI COMING SOON
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The image of Mary Ellen Strom |
Interview with MARY ELLEN STROM DLM: I noticed your area code at the moment is 718. Are you in Brooklyn? MES: Yes. I’m so happy to be back in New York. I’m still teaching at the Museum School in Boston, and I’m up there 3 or 4 days a week and then here for the rest of the time. I love the energy of New York. DLM: That sounds like a hectic schedule. MES: I guess I can handle hectic. You know, having three children kind of takes a leave of absence off the table for me, financially. I’m between Boston and New York. My family was just down here to visit, so we’ve been going back and forth. I’m doing a residency sponsored by Artadia at the International Studio and Curatorial Program here in New York. I was awarded an Artadia grant in 2007, and any Artadia awardee can apply for the residency. Josh Greene and I are only American participants right now and it’s been great for me to meet so many artists from overseas and to see work I don’t necessarily have a context for. DLM: A few months ago I read a reviews in the Boston Globe and Big, Red & Shiny of your recent collaborative work, Four Parallel Lines, with your partner, Ann Carlson. Do you always work collaboratively? MES: My practice is not strictly collaborative. I work with other people when it’s fruitful and fulfilling for both of us. On some level, working together with Ann infuses our work with things we’re both interested in. Lately it’s been intensive investigations into movement-based performances along with material that’s critical and involves different groups of people. We’re working with lawyers, day laborers, a cow, firefighters, and ranchers. We make portraits that refute conventional boundaries of portraiture. The sitters have a lot of agency in what is produced and that makes the work truly collaborative. DLM: You mean, you’re collaborating not just with Ann and other artists but also with the subjects in your work? MES: It’s a different methodology than we’ve used before. It is fulfilling in terms of process and the people we work with are finding this to be a potent experience. In Four Parallel Lines, you see 2x4’s being dragged across the ground. We did that work during a one-month residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts, just north of San Francisco. We hired four Guatemalan construction workers and, as part of their contracted work for us, we showed them lots of artwork and talked with them to hear their responses to the various images and ideas. They all responded strongly to Walter DeMaria’s 1968 piece, Mile Long Drawing in the Mohave Desert. They described DeMaria’s ephemeral, unfinished piece as a metaphor for the border, imaginary lines, for walls that were never built. We staged Four Parallel Lines on the beach, early in the morning so the water looks milky, like whitewash: another metaphor. The piece is shown as a large projection and uses the video convention of the loop. The four men drag 2x4’s through the wet sand to make four parallel lines and then the lines are washed away. The action begins again so there is no real beginning or end. Some people read it as commentary on labor, others are interested in the mark making, and some have read it as a piece about mortality. DLM: You use the loop in Eleanor Dubinsky and Melanie Marr. It’s a re-enactment of Courbet’s painting, Sleep, which was originally commissioned by a 19th century Ottoman diplomat who apparently collected paintings of lesbian erotica. MES: Yes, Khalil Bey, the Turkish ambassador to France during the Second Empire. I think he also commissioned Courbet to paint Origin of the World, (a close-up view of a woman’s spread-eagle crotch). Some say the work is objectifying but it is also ahead of its time. Lesbian erotica was fairly prevalent in the Second Empire but the normative view of sexuality was that women were not sexual beings. Men generally didn’t believe women wanted to have sex. There was an acceptance of affection between women but culturally there was not a real belief in erotic relationships between women. It wasn’t illegal for women to be together but… DLM: But, there’s no need to name lesbianism is if doesn’t exist; and the cultural belief was that women had sex with men out of a sense of duty or obligation? MES: In the second empire lesbianism is pictured only as a male fantasy, not as a real option. Homoerotic images of women were a bit of a fashion. Look at the work of Flaubert, Balzac, and Gauthier. Courbet stood apart and I adore him for it. He was a provocateur. He would make inflammatory statements to get people’s attention and go against social norms. One of the things he did was paint poor people, not just the bourgeoisie. He depicted the working class in silk drapery and pearls. Sleep is magnificently beautiful and it’s a sensational, sensual, huge narrative oil painting. DLM: Traditional materials and methodology allowed him to enter the cannon in spite of what some might have considered profane content? One possible reading of Sleep is that the women are high-class prostitutes, resting in between clients. MES: He figured out how to push the boundaries yet have it fly under the radar. And people are always coming to works with their own ideas. I read an analysis of Sleep by an art historian who claimed the darker figure in the front represented the new world, the Americas, while the blonde figure is the old world, Europe. DLM: A colonial lens, I guess. In your work, the title is the names of the models. Do you want us to know something about Eleanor Dubinsky and Melanie Marr? MES: I want you to know it’s them. My humble attempt at recreating this piece is to give the models their subjectivity. They are not objects for your gaze but they are women with names. They are artists with names. And yet, they are very much aware they are being looked at. Unlike the subjects in Courbet’s painting, Eleanor and Melanie know you are watching. Melanie makes direct eye contact with the viewer.
DLM: Yet the video moves so slowly, I could easily miss that. When I first saw this piece, I had the feeling of being underwater, or a kind of waking sleep. You’re using video to essentially create a still image. MES: It is not slow motion. The whole thing is shown in real time. We meditate before shooting and we slow our minds and bodies down to consider each small movement. The models project fully, not just from the face, and they own their own sexuality. DLM: You’re behind the camera. What about your sexuality? MES: I love art historical nudes and I think they’re extremely erotic, and even if people mistake that as complicity with the male gaze, I work to take it back and say, “Look, this is really erotic. Really sexy. And it’s not just men who get to do the looking.” And, in fact, the models can look back at you and feel good about it and it doesn’t have to be scary. Eleanor and Melanie are in full control of this image. They are making it. They are in full participation with the production of it. It’s not just my fantasy anymore, but also theirs. DLM: We’ve come back to collaboration. MES: I love collaboration. I find it fascinating and I don’t have any need to own authorship. I like sharing authorship. I find it really interesting. DLM: You grew up in Butte, Montana. Does the girl from the Rocky Mountains come out in the work? MES: It’s always about what it’s like to be an urban subject, and what it means to be from the rocky mountain west without propagating the mythology of the west. I talk about what’s going on there ecologically, socially... DLM: By making videos that kind of look like paintings? MES: I am really interested in movement inside the frame. Sometimes it’s camera movement and sometimes it’s a challenge to instead create a fully articulate visual language without moving the camera. I think of it as a personal challenge, as in, is this possible to do? When I’m successful, I’m very satisfied. It is subtle and powerful. If I were using more cinematic language I think it would be distracting. It wouldn’t be getting at the meaning that can come from slowed-down, deep looking. DLM: Who else is using this kind of visual articulation? Who are some of your influences? MES: Chantal Akerman. Ulrike Ottinger. Art historians Ann Reynolds, Catherine Lord and Maura Reilly have heavily influenced me. They are the people who helped me understand the potential of this project. DLM: Do you think they would be comfortable if I described them as Feminist Art Historians or Revisionists intent on reconsidering canonical works? MES: Sure. And I think all my works are social critique. They are attempts to unearth history, art history and different aspects of culture. My work is research-based and looks at the past to help me further understand where we’re at now. I’m not attempting to quote art history; it is more fanciful than that. I have a great idea for fantasy collaboration: a yearlong residency with Courbet in his studio! DLM: He might disappoint you. Maybe he’s a product of his time, but I’ve gotten the impression he was a misogynist. MES: I don’t know that. We can’t know that. I think -- by the way he painted women -- he really liked them. He gave the figures a lot of freedom. One can say his was a typical, voyeuristic, male heterosexual approach to female sexuality but we should be careful about looking back with a 21st century lens. |
THINK AGAIN (David John Attyah + S.A. Bachman) |
Interview with S.A. BACHMAN, co-founder, THINK AGAIN DLM: Considering the goals of this show – to complicate oversimplified notions of gender, ethnicity and sexuality -- can you describe a few of THINK AGAIN’s projects? SAB: I want to talk a little bit about who we are. THINK AGAIN are two people interested in reproduced, mass produced images, visual analysis, and the cultural underpinnings of power structures. In Popping The Question – a mobile billboard that criticized the privileged and problematic institution of marriage (gay or straight) during a time when marriage has hijacked queer politics – we asked people to connect their personal desire to be married to the wedding-industrial complex (i.e. sweatshop labor, conflict diamonds, other extractive industries). Why do radical queers and feminists want to keep police out of the bedroom and laws off their bodies while also seeking state sanctioning and licensing of their relationships? This kind of project is when THINK AGAIN is at its best, when we’re synthetic. We pull together unexpected structures, commingling ideas that people may not otherwise connect. Actions Speak – a 17’x67’ photographic image in the Worcester Art Museum that was accompanied by images projected on the exterior of the building – connects private acts of violence, domestic violence, public violence, state sanctioned violence, media violence, and HIV/AIDS. We believe that a citizenry that is not incensed operates by being disconnected from brutal acts, and it is our concern that apathy to and disconnection from brutality is not a natural feature of human nature or the logical result of over-saturated media culture, but is deliberately produced by various aspects of public life, media, political maneuvering and lived experience. We offer visual analysis to figure things out, questioning assumptions and prompting the viewer’s imagination. DLM: Is there a risk that your work might seem like a series of progressive PSAs? SAB: Sometimes people ask if we’re being too didactic, too prescriptive. We are super-aware of this question while we’re working. For example, the mobile billboard was in motion, moving quickly, so maybe a viewer only saw one line of one part of the image until we stopped at specific sites. There are multiple aspects, it is multivalent and even the most cursory view allows some level of cognition. It depends on how much time the viewer is willing to spend with the work. We want to make sure there is always something that is accessible. Also, there are personal implications. We are not finger pointing, but investigating our own relationships to these issues. In Economic Boom for Whom?, we were responding to the problem of gentrification in very specific situations (we did a poster titled, White Blight). I had recently become a homeowner in Jamaica Plain, MA, and David was living in San Francisco, a bike ride from the Mission, among other areas. While we were criticizing specific sites of gentrification (we understand that not all gentrification is a problem) we also recognized that we were not outside of the problem and in fact, I have dear relatives in real estate who helped me purchase my home. In both locations people were dealing with serious issues of displacement. We weren’t suggesting we had all the answers. The goal of those posters was is to get people thinking, talking, and again, provide visual analysis while the billboards were up -- and long after they came down they were used in many ways by many groups. We seek to dissolve the boundary between critique and action while prompting the political imagination. As far as where we fit within the traditional art sphere: we hope we are broadening ideas of socially conscious work in the realm of contemporary art, while simultaneously expanding notions of art used for social justice. We show links between structures of power and individual bodies/daily life. We have a long conceptual interest in linking political discourse to the body. In the case of Actions Speak, we refracted those linkages through a lens that focused on violence against women, hate crimes, war crimes, poverty and global HIV. DLM: I think your work does those things effectively, yet very little has really changed in our culture regarding violence, poverty, and sexism. How do you remain optimistic? SAB: I’m a short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist. No one is more skeptical than we are that a billboard or a postcard can change anything. Most of the time I don’t know if the work is having an impact because, in larger terms, it’s barely a blip on the pop-cultural screen. It’s just the work David and I needed to make these past 12 years. I believe there is something about utterance: that is said is always out there in many ways both concrete and more metaphysical -- our work is also a way to talk back and put something on the record. I operate on the belief that it is important to speak. There are moments that make all the difference in the world to us -- like the young queer woman who knew our work, she’d been thrown out of her home because she came out, and she sent an email out of the blue to ask for THINKAGAIN postcards to decorate her new room. DLM: Posters, postcards, and billboards, public projections, video and web resources are modes of dissemination that connote consumerism. To what extent are you influenced by media culture? SAB: Tremendously for both of us. In my early work – before David and I began collaborating – I was using appropriated images. I dealt with the veracity of the photograph, critiquing media representations of “The American Dream.” Early on I limited myself to work with the size of the original materials and that turned out to be a good thing as it offered an external constraint; otherwise, I would have spent months just working on collaging or enlarging or whatever. David also has a very longstanding interest in mediated culture, mediated images and appropriation. For us, deciding when a work is done is one of the hardest things. David and I are both really meticulous and sometimes deciding a piece is finished is the result of a deadline. I have long been interested in how meaning is changed depending upon how the intertwined relationships between public/cultural and private/personal are viewed. I tend to think personal OR political is a false dichotomy; after all, societal law and convention bind our most intimate personal decisions. Our best projects juxtapose daily, lived experiences with underlying power structures that are often ignored. DLM: How does text function in your work? SAB: At different times and in different works it functions in different ways: to elucidate, to contradict, to provide visual analysis and as poetry. Sometimes it offers a direct way of talking back, to send a postcard to a TV executive, for example. In our last two projects (Salt in the Wound/NAFTA Effect and Actions Speak), there is also what we refer to as ee cummings meets concrete poetry. DLM: Concrete poetry? SAB: In concrete poetry the design and arrangement of type, literally the shapes of words and how each word is laid on the page, is as important for conveying meaning as the words themselves. It’s sometimes referred to as visual poetry. We play with the meanings and tempo of words, using them in different ways to contradict or support image content. David and I spend lots of time working to choose precise words that have the right meanings, the right aesthetic dimension, the right kind of articulation and the right kind of sound. I often refer to Henry Giroux’s “language of critique” and “language of possibility.” We recruit art making in the service of public address, collective dialogue and social action. We work to prompt the political imagination. DLM: This makes me think of Barbara Kruger. She came from the advertising industry and offered critique from the inside out. Is she an important influence? Do you and David come from commercial design backgrounds? SAB: David has worked as a designer although that is not his primary “background” -- but I have not. We’re both largely self-taught. DLM: I think I see a postmodern influence in the ways you use text, especially in Mind Control and Queer Youth Manifesto. We see funky, grungy, disintegrating typewriter fonts (like Trixie), cramped, disjunctive letter spacing, and overlapping leading. The look of the design is early ’90’s. SAB: I don’t think the pieces in this exhibition are dated. Typography changes over time because of technology and the thinking of the time. David and I are always a little behind the curve in terms of owning the latest versions of software. In Mind Control and Queer Youth Manifesto, we wanted to make work that was transparent, in that it’s not about the computer and not about design but that those things allow the content to come through. It’s not so much about theory as content. We’re using the pop cultural visual tools of the time and allowing them to undermine themselves. I think we all come to understand injustice at an early age, even if we can’t articulate it that way. In Mind Control we’re talking about conformity, where it comes from and how it operates. DLM: Do you think the projected image is a visual confrontation?
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Andrea Chung |
Interview With ANDREA CHUNG Emily Chivers Yochim: Can you tell me how you got started as an artist? Andrea Chung: Well, I always wanted to be an artist as a kid and I had to sort of fight my way into art school. My very Caribbean parents weren't thrilled with my decision, but were supportive enough to send me to Parsons School of Art and Design in New York City. I was 17 years old. I was an illustration major but really felt unsatisfied with it. I stayed in New York until summer 2002. Then I moved to San Diego with the man who is now my husband. We lived there for a few years and then applied to Maryland Institute College of Art for my MFA. This tremendously changed my life. My Director, Frances Barth, was an amazing mentor and really taught me the importance of studio practice. Being surrounded by my peers also opened my eyes to new ways of making and understanding work. I think the other artists in my program definitely influenced the ways I make work. For example, when I began the program I was a painter. By the end of my first semester I was making sculptures, something I'd never done. ECY: This is really fabulous. I've also found that working closely with my peers has been profoundly motivating and exciting for me. What is the catalyst for making your work? AC: My work initially began with me investigating my family. I wanted know more about my father's parents. It's always been very hard getting information about them particularly because they were in Jamaica and I grew in Houston, TX. They are of a generation that doesn't really speak much about their lives, especially to their own children, and unfortunately I never really got to know them. I don’t remember my grandmother. She died when I was very young. I did, however, meet my grandfather who was born in China. He died when I was around 10. As I've gotten older, I've grown more interested my family, particularly the circumstances that brought them to the Caribbean. I began collecting stories and images and this turned into some of my earlier paintings and sugar works. Sugar in particular is a very significant material. My grandmother's leg was amputated due to gangrene caused by diabetes. She eventually died during the surgery to amputate the second leg. Sugar was the largest Caribbean export during British colonial rule. From there, I began to look at the relationships materials, specifically foodstuffs, have with migration patterns (both voluntary and involuntary) into the Caribbean. I researched archival images and found photographs of itinerant cane laborers and discovered they were used to promote tourism. I thought about my grandparents and these laborers and tried to figure out a way to honor them. I decided the best way to do so would be to give them a day off, and so I began removing them from the images. I see a parallel between colonialism and the tourism industry and I suppose I'm trying to exploit that. ECY: find your work extremely compelling - and the removal of the individuals from the images speaks volumes. You've really already answered the next question, I think, but I'm going to throw it out there anyways. You said that you grew up in Houston with Caribbean parents. Can you elaborate a bit on how this affects your reading of identity? And I think your work speaks to ethnicity specifically - and maybe gender in a less direct way. AC: It’s funny because the collages and the cut outs were really just a joke for me. I found them extremely hilarious to make. I was being an asshole when I first started playing around with the idea. I am still shocked at the response to the work. ECY: Sometimes I think it's when we're most open - and not trying to be "serious" that our best work can happen! How do you balance humor with cynicism in your work? AC: I am a researcher and my husband was a history major: that’s really had an impact on me. I realize that nobody wants to think about the side effects of colonialism, especially when you are either the former colonizer or still benefiting from the results of colonialism. When I was in school, I was one of two black students, and nobody wanted to talk about issues of race. Things tend to be more accessible when they're funny but I honestly don't know if these are funny to anyone that isn't familiar with the history. When I started making the sculpture out of spices, I wanted to specifically communicate with other West Indians or anyone that was familiar with the culture. Your sense of smell has a powerful way of bringing back memories. I suppose I'm attempting to do the same thing with the cut outs, tears and collages. Most of the images I've used are familiar and iconic. Memory is a big part of the work, and the difference with the cut outs and collages and animations is that I'm asking the viewer to question his memory. My work doesn’t just speak just to ethnicity, but larger issues of globalization, history and economics that resulted from colonialism. ECY: Can you discuss your influences? AC: The documentary Life and Debt by Stephanie Black really got the ball rolling for me. It's based on the essay, A Small Place, by Jamaica Kincaid. I love Fred Wilson and Andrea Fraser. I had the opportunity to have both of them critique my work and it's interesting that they are both critical of the art world and academe. I also really like Martha Rosler's work. Her images are so powerful and intelligent. I love Kara Walker's boldness. Hung Liu influenced my earlier paintings, but the artists who most influence me are my peers. I met an amazing performance artist during my residency at Skowhegan named Amanda Alfieri. She's 24 and too powerful for her own good. Janine Antoni and Vik Muñiz. If I could be like any artist it would be Janine Antoni. We both share an affinity for materials. There are artists near my age that I look to who have been supportive. Hank Willis Thomas has definitely been someone who has looked out for me. Fahamu Pecou, Rene Trevino, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum are all amazing artists and good friends. I believe we share similar interests and we are supportive of one another. Oh, I almost left out one really important influence, Yinka Shonibare. |
Cobi Moules |
Interview with COBI MOULES Emily Chivers Yochim: Can you tell me how you got started as an artist? Tell me a bit about how you’ve gotten to where you are today. ECY: What is the catalyst for making your work? ECY: Where did you grow up? How does this affect your reading of gender/sexuality? CM: I grew up in Oakdale California, which is in the central valley of California. My experience there was very conservative and religious. Gender and sexuality outside the masculine-male and feminine-female paradigm were not talked about, except to express disapproval. My only window into other gender and sex possibilities was the Jerry Springer Show, which thrives on outrageous spectacle. It took me a long time to come into my own and begin to understand the complexities of identity and individual experience. ECY: Are you more interested in presenting problems or solutions? CM: I am more interested in presenting my own personal experiences rather than either a problem or a solution. Problems do present themselves, but most of my work does not have that goal. One painting that presents a particular problem is the double full-length self-portrait. ECY: Who are your influences? Do you see yourself as part of a particular lineage? ECY: Can you describe your methodology? ECY: Can you describe a typical day in the studio? CM: There is nothing too exciting about my studio practice. I keep a pretty regular schedule and I’m fairy clean and orderly. I usually get into my studio around noon, have some lunch in my comfy orange chair, while I look around and figure out where I want to begin. Then I get started, which means I sit down in front of my painting for hours. I take a few snack breaks but other than that I stay pretty focused for long periods of time. I usually leave around midnight, give or take a couple of hours. ECY: To what extent are you influenced by mediated pop-cultural images? CM: I am influenced quite a bit by pop-culture, particularly in regard to clothing and hair and their relationship to identity. I am working even more directly with pop-culture imagery in a current project (fulfilling a childhood fantasy) by portraying myself as 4 of the 5 members of New Kids On The Block. With this project I am taking on different identities by recreating some of their magazine posters and inserting myself in their place. ECY: How do you balance humor with cynicism in your work? |
Colleen Toledano |
Interview with COLLEEN TOLEDANO
Colleen Toledano: The two pieces in the show are part of a body of work where I developed feminine weaponry of my own fantasy use. The piece that is inspired by a rifle and a pump blush applicator is called Smother Blush. I imagined the piece would kill my attacker by suffocating him with blush. Not only would I kill the person with this "blush gun" I would also leave him a rosy shade of pink. I thought by doing this I would be seen as a compassionate killer. The second piece is a cross between a baton and a mascara wand, Tangle Wand. I was thinking about how women tend to fight. We almost always go for the hair of the other person. This baton is used to hit the person in the head, twist and entangle a large quantity of hair, and then pull. All the pieces allude to function but they are heavily based on fantasy. Darren Lee Miller: Kind of macabre fantasies! CT: Kind of, yeah. DLM: Are you responding to a kind of structural violence against women while simultaneously working to psychologically castrate (or at least feminize) the men? For example, women are statistically more likely to be assaulted than men? The assailants are usually men. You’re proposing to kill the guy and them doll him up. CT: Initially, when you look at the pieces the beauty and the intricacy of the sculptures are what you notice. It isn't until you really look and notice the sharpness of the metal or filed points that you understand these are weapons DLM: Well, they are for self-defense. CT: I approached this body of work by trying to make an uncomfortable situation such as defending myself more comfortable, to give myself more confidence. I knew psychologically it would be difficult unless I had control over the physical part of it. I don't think most people carry around guns or batons, and most people I know have never handled a weapon. DLM: You're taking signifiers of femininity and turning them into deadly weapons? There's something really funny and campy and kitschy about that. CT: I see them as totally ridiculous but at the same time they’re coming from a real place of fear. I'm terrified about being jumped while walking to my car, or being raped. DLM: Is humor usually a part of your work? CT: I think some sort of dark humor is always involved, allowing the piece to be less confrontational, more inviting. DLM: It does that without losing a sense of anxiety. CT: Thank you. I think so. DLM: How do you balance the sobering catalyst for this work with the ridiculous/fantastic finished piece? CT: My approach to content is humor plus subtlety. The materials are very much about hard and soft. When those two materials are next to each other they emphasize the complementary qualities. DLM: It's interesting to think about form and materials, the way they have imbedded meaning, syntax. Are there other artists working this way? People you look at? CT: I do choose my materials very carefully. I just saw a Damien Ortega show that I was really excited about. I saw a strong consideration for materials and their meanings in his work. DLM: Can you talk a little about materials and what they are about? CT: I am a ceramics artist who uses clay, but I’m not always seen as a “ceramic artist.” When I use porcelain I am interested in the fact that at some point it was incredibly soft and then became incredibly hard. There are allusions to fragility, delicacy and also a level of elegance and formality. DLM: Like fine china vs. flowerpots. Porcelain means something and terra cotta means something else? CT: Yes. DLM: Do these meanings shift? CT: Historically, in ceramics they have not. DLM: I don't think of you as being very traditional. It looks like you mix lots of other materials with ceramics and I remember how you joked about striving for the 30% minimum (or whatever) so you could show a new piece at the NCECA (National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts) conference last year. CT: I don't think I am traditional, but I consider tradition and I play with it. If I include clay, I include it for a reason. DLM: Do you feel there is tension in the field about defining oneself as a "ceramic artist" as opposed to saying you're an artist who uses ceramic materials? CT: Yes, this is something I struggle with a lot. True ceramic artists might not consider me a ceramic person but when people look at my work they always notice the craft. DLM: Is craft as important as the other content? CT: Always. Historically, the content was seen in the functionality of the object. DLM: While, in reality, your pieces in this show have no real function. They just suggest a function -- a comical and violent one. CT: The show pieces allude to function: false function. DLM: This is where the theory comes in. Who are you reading? Or, whom were you reading when you made these? CT: I was reading a lot about feminism and post feminism. DLM: What is post-feminism? CT: Third-wave feminism would be considered post. Feminism now is very different from what it was in the late 70’s and early 80’s. DLM: S.A. Bachman, (co-founder of the artist collaborative, THINK AGAIN) also identifies as third wave, so I will need to do some reading. Any suggestions? CT: If you look up girl culture you will find tons of information. It’s really about embracing what makes you feminine. DLM: So is there empowerment in the embracing high heels and blush and mascara? CT: YES! DLM: I've always thought those tropes were culturally manufactured to encourage consumerism and conformity, like that old Robert Palmer video, Simply Irresistible, the clone-like super models in tight miniskirts and red lipstick swaying to the beat. But you're saying there's a kind of empowerment in being girly? CT: That video was really just about sex. One of the things third wave plays with is that idea that makeup and shoes and clothes are not necessarily about attracting a mate but instead are fun rewards and modes of self-fulfillment. We’re doing our hair because we like it and it makes us feel good. It’s moving against some of the asceticism that dominated earlier waves of feminism. I own and control my girliness. DLM: Do you think any of that content has carried forward into your current work? CT: I’m still talking about control, how to get it and how to keep it. My newest work is not as narrative and not so much about femininity, but is about function and empowerment. I’m deconstructing everyday objects (like a wheelbarrow) and aggressively simplifying, stripping down to the minimum required for the object to function. The work is about bodies, idealizing bodies on the one hand and building confidence and acceptance on the other hand. It relates to people getting rid of some part of themselves, like excess body fat that is surgically removed or corseted, and I'm using common banal materials, like 2x4’s and spackle, to make those connections. The size and scale are personal, sized to my body. The work comes from a personal place but I think the materials and application allow a universal reading. |
Jacinta Bunnell |
Interview with JACINTA BUNNELL Emily Chivers Yochim: Can you tell me how you got started as an artist? Tell me a bit about how you’ve gotten to where you are today. Jacinta Bunnell: When I was very young, I knew only a few artists, and they didn't even identify as artists. These were working class people who did not feel they had the luxury to be full-time artists. My father and my aunt were two of them. They would sit and draw with me, or we would study ideas from craft books together. Approaching all work with an artistic eye was woven into every aspect of their lives, from addressing an envelope to constructing gardens. I watched them carefully, as any young person studies her environment. I realized that being an artist first meant having a steady hand, which simply comes from practice. Throughout my life, I have always been artistic, just never took it or myself as an artist seriously. It was about eight years ago that I began to make art central to my life. I had done the get-a-fulfilling-job-right-out-of-college-thing but noticed after several years that some big part of myself was not being expressed. It was then that I left my job and slowly started working on my creativity: writing, drawing and painting. I have not looked back or regretted taking the bold step to leave the "stability" of that job since. ECY: What is the catalyst for making your work? JB: I want to make a difference in the lives of young people. Sometimes it is as big as giving a young LGBTQ person a reason to not kill themselves that day. I want to provide media examples of real life: something other than the hyper-masculinity, hyper-femininity and compulsory heterosexuality that the mainstream media bombards us with. I want people to be proud of themselves. If you do not see yourself in print anywhere, how do you know you are not the only one that thinks, acts and feels as you do? ECY: Where did you grow up? How does this affect your reading of gender/sexuality/ethnicity? JB: I grew up in a small town in Northeastern Pennsylvania. No one spoke of feminism, gender variance, racism or sexual orientation in my town, unless it was in a crude, mean-spirited way. Boys that did not present themselves as typically male were tied to trees by football players. Awful stuff. I had to wait until I moved away from there to learn about so many things. ECY: Are you more interested in presenting problems or solutions? JB: Solutions! ECY: Who are your influences? Do you see yourself as part of a particular lineage? JB: Of anyone, Kate Bornstein's work was the most influential to us when we were creating these coloring books. ECY: Can you describe a typical day in the studio? JB: When working on a coloring book, I just keep a notebook on hand to jot down all the ideas that bubble up over the course of a day: I might be inspired by something I witness on the playground or in a conversation with a stranger, maybe something I see on a billboard. When I am fine-tuning the pages for the coloring books, it is just me quietly sitting at a desk, sometimes laughing to myself, or batting ideas around with my collaborators. Aside from making coloring books, I am a painter. I surround myself with scraps of found paper that I weave into a canvas, put on NPR or some music, and lose myself in the act of creating. ECY: To what extent are you influenced by mediated pop-cultural images? JB: I am not tuned into pop culture very closely. But I make myself aware of children's books and observe the way gender, sexual orientation and family structures are handled therein...and try to fill in the gaps with my work. ECY: How do you balance humor with cynicism in your work? JB: I try to infuse all of my books with humor. Humor is a useful tool in bringing people together, despite divergent worldviews. We can help people absorb the vastness of a problem if they are not on the defensive from an attack. Once you have opened someone's heart with a joke, a shared smile or a good laugh, you are better able to do the hard work of liberation together. |
Jacob Kincheloe |
Interview with JACOB KINCHELOE Darren Lee Miller: Some of your earlier work seemed to be simultaneously erotic and religious. One image I remember in particular showed a handsome young man, smiling in spite of the fact that he has just been flayed alive and is holding his skin like an overcoat. I took this as a nod to the story of St. Bartholomew, through he wasn't the only one killed this way. It also brought to mind the Titian painting, "Flaying of Marsias," though, perhaps, the scene you drew shows what happened after the Titian narrative. How do such allegories inform your work? How do you negotiate eroticism within the realm of the religious stories? Jacob Kincheloe: My work in the past was heavily informed by mythological and religious stories, as well as the artworks that historically grew out of them. The piece you have mentioned was in many ways a response to the picturing of penitent saints whose rags are representations of their rejection of the physical, material world. I wanted the figure in my drawing to hold his skin in a similar way. The piece is meant to pose questions about our notions of our own physicality. It is an examination of our current cultural relationship to a historical approach that problematizes the bodily juncture between sacred and profane. A few years ago, I began to center my work on the challenges of the space of the body. The work is an interrogation of the boundaries and limitations of the figure, as well as an exploration of its potential as a performative, experimental vehicle. Sometimes the work is about the pleasure of the body's insularity, and at other times it is about the terror of being unable to escape it. These impulses are both intensely spiritual and utterly sexual in the same moment. At their heart, the drawings are aimed at honesty and delicacy, and I like that eroticism is an intrinsic part of that. DLM: I feel you're alluding to a traditional western bias that places sexuality and spirituality at odds with each other -- you know, the idea that sex, our bodies, and our desires are dirty, sinful. I've recently learned that some mystical religions viewed the body and it's capacity for erotic joy as a path toward spiritual enlightenment. In your "Butthole" drawing I feel this tension of sacred and profane as I simultaneously yearn for and relate to the anus as a locus of pleasure, pain, love, self-loathing, affirmation and defilement. The image is both inviting and repulsive: the grotesque sublime. The mark making is so sensitive, so soft. It's like a whisper, except, there it is, a guy's asshole and nut sack in our faces. They are the objects of my queer desire. How do you feel about my observations here? Do you see the piece as a self-portrait? JK: This piece began with an interest in focusing on conventionally unregarded areas of the body. I aimed at exploring the parts that are often left out when we aestheticize the figure. I started working with my camera, taking pictures, looking, and trying to find ways to examine the unexamined. The figure appears susceptible and vulnerable, but it also creates tension in its potential for sexual agency. I wanted grace, beauty and meticulous craft to describe an orifice of excretion and a positioning of the male body that is usually relegated to the grotesque. We’re referring to the piece as the “Butthole” drawing, but it’s really untitled specifically because I’d like for the viewer to be allowed a multivalent engagement with the image and the pose. The picturing of the anus is provocative and becomes the focal point of the piece, but there are a number of different points of entry (no pun intended) into the drawing. I like that the pose of the figure suggests different things to different people. A lot depends upon where the viewer is coming from in relation to their own body and their own desire. The performative aspect is my starting point—I’m testing my body, experimenting, paying attention to the ways things feel alongside how they look. Then, the process of drawing is a way for me to slowly understand the content. This question of self-portraiture is a difficult one. The work is undoubtedly personal in part, but it’s more about an investigation of the complexity of the corporeal condition as it belongs to humans generally. I’m using my body as an instrument for experimentation, examining how it behaves, how it looks, what it can do, what it makes me do. DLM: Do you think of your work as performance art? JK: I’m invested in interdisciplinarity, and a number of different mediums are involved in generating the work. Performance is a big part of it, but I’m really happy calling it drawing. I think the kind of image I’m building invites a viewer into a different sort of visual experience than they would have seeing the performative material in action. Whether or not the viewer has any personal experience with drawing, it is apparent that the making of these images was a slow labor of care. Within the space of the drawing, I’m able to invest myself in this delicate, layered rendering that speaks to time and effort in a certain way—hopefully in a way that one can relate to the time and effort involved in being in the world in one’s own body. DLM: Can you trace a conceptual trajectory between the sensual figure we see in the "Butthole" drawing and the tormented figure in the 5-panel piece? JK: The "Butthole" drawing was all about taking pleasure in the body. It is looking at the joy of the body’s insularity and the individuality of its structure. The 5-panel piece is looking, on the other hand, at the horror of being trapped within such a space. I think it’s a universally familiar impulse to want to escape the confines of this cage. Certain elements of our identities—race, sex, physique, to name a few—are not of our own choosing, but are physically thrust upon us, and we are made to grapple with playing out the roles they prescribe. We also are confronted with desires that do not seem to fit within the space of our own figure. So we end up hungering for ways to break these lines of limitation. I saw that in using the blurred motion captured by my camera, I could render such a rupturing of the boundaries of the body, and picture this desire to lose the edges that confine us to our physicality. DLM: Is there an underlying anxiety about mortality in all the work? JK: The notion of mortality plays a part in the work. We’re bounded by time in the same way that we are strangely bound in corporeality. But the anxiety I’m trying to picture is less about the terror of what may come, and more about the peculiarity of the body’s machinery in the moment. |
Jeannie Simms |
Interview with JEANNIE SIMMS Vika Gardner: Can you tell me about the photographs in the show? Where were they done? Jeannie Simms: I went to Hong Kong first, and saw the women gathered there years before going and photographing them. I was in Hong Kong visiting an ex-girlfriend. The Indonesia women were more out than the Hong Kong women. The Indonesia women were there as migrant workers. Interestingly, there were many levels of migrant workers; the photographer booths were staffed by migrants from mainland China who went back and forth, and the Indonesians were working for local families. I wanted to photograph women being photographed; the intersections of the backgrounds were interesting. Some of the photographs in that series include the photographers as well. It’s very rich: the backdrops are emblems of mobility with economic liberation. VG: Do you see this work as “liberation”? JS: Luxury is something they don’t have, but something liberating happens when they leave Indonesia. They support their families and therefore are held in very high esteem. The money they send home helps to build houses and can start off a newly married couple with an independent household. Back home they’re basically very poor, farming to feed themselves. In Hong Kong they achieve a certain status. Hong Kong itself is very consumerist, so they get a consumerist feel under their belt. Not materialist. They dress up on Sunday [and go to the park], but they send almost all of their money back home. The consumerism comes from the scale of the advertising in Hong Kong, and from the enormous number of malls there. VG: Was your first trip as a tourist? VG: You might be accused of objectifying pretty “Oriental” girls. JS: I make sure there are titles and text with the images; it’s important to understand them. The context is important. One of the things that motivated me was the US dialogue about queer lifestyle and marriage. I’m not that interested in that dialogue, and wanted to look for a new kind of sexuality connected with migrant labor. Marriage here is such a limited conversation, and it seems unaware of the world. We have so much, and have moved away from the world’s concerns. We have a profound phenomenon of being disconnected from the goods we consume -- we don’t have a picture of it. The picture of the two women lying on the grass was taken behind the agency in Indonesia, where the women were waiting to go to Hong Kong. They waited for as long as a year. After my work in Hong Kong, I talked the owner of the agency into letting me talk to the women, and I spent a month getting to know them. I taught them charades, and asked about their dreams and fantasies. We produced the works together. I’d show them stills of Jean Genet’s “The Maids” and Mary Cassatt, images of homosocial domestic labor so that they [the women she’s photographing] would have a connection to it. The TV in Indonesia has very melodramatic dramas, so they wanted to play with dramatic visuals. They would be inspired by something they were looking at. I felt like I was showing them something that I had some familiarity with and they infused it with their home. Some of the women had their own ideas of how they wanted to be photographed. VG: So it was staged, but not necessarily staged by you. JS: We also made videos. The women were waiting to be placed in Taiwan; participation in the photographs was totally voluntary. I was working with a local artist. The women were living in that compound for a year, bored out of their minds. They weren’t allowed to go home and visit their families; the families could come once a week, but those who lived further away didn’t see their families. Some of those who were busy learning Mandarin didn’t participate. VG: Why is one woman looking into the camera and the other looking away? JS: It just happened that she looked away. It’s based on a still from “The Maids”. The woman on the left did a lot of work with me. She had her own ideas about how to pose. There’s a physical affection the women develop with each other, a coziness I wanted to capture. Both the women in this image have short hair. They have to have their hair cut when they become maids. They’re told it’s because they prepare food, but there’s a worry that if they’re too beautiful they’ll seduce the husband, and short hair is not considered seductive. It’s important to say that I’m showing them Mary Cassatt; the “orientalization” of the women is part of the conversation here. Part of the process included giving them prints. I want them to see their lives in an elevated fashion, to see their lives as epics. Going abroad was like a novel, an idea they they agreed with. I felt like it was something happening for them to get outside of themselves and see their contributions. VG: Do you want to get your viewers -- those looking at the pictures -- out of their own context? JS: Yes. When you see images of migrant workers, we see them at work. So these are about something else. It’s a different type of photography. When you’re seen as your labor, you’re seen as less than a complete personality. We wouldn’t show white collar workers in the White House or something as only their work. VG: Do you see this as a way to educate the viewer? JS: It’s not education, it’s another possible way of looking that people might not be aware of, another possibility of thinking about workers that are relied on as a part of the economy. In Hong Kong, most middle class families have a maid. They are an integral part of the health care economy, which would crumble without them. They take care of the elderly, and pregnant women, and children. I’m not out to tell their story per se, but to let them re-imagine themselves. What we did [by taking the photographs] was playing into this tedious moment. I like that it was helping them play. VG: In what ways are your work and life integrated? JS: M work has been about how biographies are structured, how we think about who we are. I’m adopted, I could have had another narrative completely. I’m politicized, since I’m a child from before Roe vs. Wade, I feel especially contingent. There are conditions that produce subjects, who individuals are, and how they construct identity; this is a conversation that produces subjects. I have a film background and studied film in high school and college, although it was often self-taught. I’m influenced by international film. In some ways I’m post-media; I also do sculpture. I teach full time at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. A lot of my production is over the summer, although I do get into the studio during the year. VG: What is a day in the studio like? JS: I’m a laptop-based artist, so I can edit anywhere. At work I can plug in and use an extra screen. I use video and sound in strategic ways. I record sound effects and add them to videos. I have large photographs up in the studio. I also just finished a sculpture there, so I’ve been sanding and getting it ready to go. You might say I’m digital and haptic. VG: Do you think doing art on computers is changing it? JS: The computer breaks down disciplines. It’s hard to tell printmaking from other disciplines. But I still tend to think of work as objects in space and time. Even the things that are projected are still in the physical world. VG: But don’t the projected images help the viewer to step into another world? JS: Yes, I agree. With the projection of film, you have a difference between film and video. But my students these days often don’t go to the movies [to experience the immersion in a film]. They don’t envelop themselves. They’re more used to the interior effect. That’s a social and scale difference. The large scale is more enveloping. VG: How large are your prints? JS: These photographs are about 24x30, small compared to gallery size. They’re meant to be human scale, not larger than life. VG: How does your life affect your work? JS: I don’t know how to answer that. The way I work has tended to be imaginary things. The sculpture I did was made up: a butt with video inside it. But my work tends to be based in observation. I see what I’m looking at rather than at myself. It’s not a rich imaginative world. I’m interested in observing where art is going. I want to see it move across the international boundaries, more dialogue across the international stage. I’d like to see more contemporary art from places we haven’t seen before. I’d like more opportunities to work and collaborate internationally. Work with local communities. Look at migration. In a way, in contemporary life everyone is in migration. VG: Do you see that as different than before? JS: Yes. It doesn’t feel like I can just look around myself to see what’s around anymore -- it feels naïve. There’s lots of connections and influences in contemporary consumer capitalism. VG: Is your art optimistic? JS: I don’t know if my art is, but I am. There are values I care about: intelligence, compassion, generosity, listening, observation. I have faith in concrete things. VG: Do you have humor in your work? JS: Some of the time. VG: How? JS: The works themselves. The videos from this project are much funnier than the photographs. You can feel in the videos the relationships between the women and their relationships with me. The ass sculpture: you look up the asshole, and it’s a funny moment. The figurative turn into a person rather than an objectified thing. VG: What’s in the video in the asshole? JS: It’s old movie curtains opening, and aspect ratio curtains -- the black curtains that close off parts of the screen when a projection changes aspect ratios -- opening and closing like a sphincter. It generate laughter from people who look at it. VG: Are you influenced by pop culture? JS: I can’t not be influenced by it. The women [in the photographs] are not really pop culture. I don’t feel like [pop culture] is very relevant. Other things feel like stronger influences: international and European contemporary art, American contemporary art, international film, queer theory and criticism. VG: What impact do you feel where you grew up had? JS: I don’t feel that it had an impact, and that thinking that way is antihistorical. Art is not just seen through one’s self. The social and political are important. When you go overseas, you see the American breed of individualism as just so obvious. |
Jess Dugan |
Interview with JESS DUGAN Vika Gardner: What happened in 2005 that made you start wanting to photograph trans people? Jess Dugan: The trans project began after I had chest surgery; the first picture I took with my new camera was one of my mother and I without our shirts. I’d only had the camera for two weeks and so I was experimenting with both my new body and the new camera. I feel very similar and different at the same time with my mother. I was trying to understand more fully the different choices we made/make. VG: Do you use text to direct a viewer's experience? JD: I’m not trying to represent narratives, or even identities. I know some people include more information on the subjects of the photographs, but I use only their names, and let the context of the images tell more about the gender. Because I’m using a 4-by-4 camera, I have to have a lot of participation with my subjects. The large format camera means the subjects need to be still for longer than a snapshot would typically require. The classical format and the shallow depth of field don’t immediately mark anything as trans, but leave it open. VG: Do you see yourself as part of a lineage? JD: When I began, I looked at the radical photographers -- Mapplethorpe, Opie -- I liked that they were in your face, I was interested in that. Then I started working with the photographs of a more classical style, like Walker Evans and Dorothea Lang, and started fusing the two. But I also still have a desire for queer photography. VG: Is your work grounded in a location? JD: I think my work is specifically American. It can be very Boston; I have access to people there, to different kinds of people. I’m not sure how my experience as a photographer would change in a different place; I’ve only been to Vietnam. VG: Tell me about the picture with the shirts hanging out to dry? JD: I have done a lot of portraits, and I wanted to expand into more still lifes when I did that. I had just done laundry and hung it there, and I liked it. The t-shirts -- white t-shirts -- are symbolic of masculinity for me; I wanted to wear white t-shirts. Gender sometimes seems to me as a uniform, something malleable. The pictures of drag kings also sometimes seem that way: a hyper-charicaturized masculinity that individuals put on and take off. It’s common for people to like that photograph but not understand why they’re drawn to it. VG: Are the images staged? Do you collaborate with your subjects? JD: I like to not stage my photographs. I don’t bring lighting with me, I just come and work with what’s there, work with the environment that I have. The coffee photograph in particular was of my roommate; I saw them and told them to just stay there while I brought the camera to capture the moment. So on some level, yes, I knew how the light struck in that time in the morning, but it also was capturing a natural moment in a natural setting. VG: Why do you work in black and white? JD: All my personal work is in BW; color isn’t my favorite. I worked with it in college when I had to, but BW is more comfortable. VG: Why photography? JD: I was always drawn to it, even as a child. I would take pictures of my teddy bear [laughs]. I moved to Boston [from Arkansas] with my mother when I was 13. In high school I wanted to take photography, but I was only able to when I was a senior. In college we weren’t supposed to declare a major until sophomore year, but I started on photography right away and have always felt an affinity to it. VG: You grew up in Arkansas? JD: Yes. I’ve always had an attraction and repulsion to the South. I romanticize it and then when I’m confronted with the reality of it again, I reject it. I’m so impressed with people I meet who live here. Ely works in a restaurant with some good ole boys, and I am so amazed with the amount of energy that he spends just getting through the day. VG: The images in the prints seem to be framed by dark corners. JD: The vignetting was planned, although in the triptich it’s a little distracting. I almost always print full frame. I compose in camera normally, and print 16x20 at home. It’s my pattern. VG: What kinds of emotional qualities to you want to convey? JD: I go for a subtlety. The look in the eyes doesn’t translate well over the internet; a print is much better. I want a quiet emotion. My subjects are not usually smiling or laughing. It’s understated. VG: Do you see yourself doing this -- the trans series -- until you’re old and grey? JD: As time goes on the trans work is harder to separate from the rest of what I do. I’ve started to blur the boundaries. I see myself as trans -- but a bigger part of my identity right now is “photographer”. Trans is a big part but not necessarily the major part. VG: How do you see gender? JD: It’s complicated. I’m trying to see who people actually are versus the cultural signifiers within which they find themselves. Even when the cultural signifiers are questioned, it’s hard not to use them. We have to navigate within the system. Personally, it’s not about the male-female differentiation. It sometimes seems simple and basic, but we have to make choices. My project is about blurring how these are seen. I photographed a butch woman who’s a mechanic in front of a car -- it’s about the crossing of gender, not meeting the expectations, not necessarily about being trans specifically. I’m examining the markers of gender, those that people are choosing to fit into, and those that are inherent in the culture. VG: I’m married to a man who often sees himself as being both feminine and masculine while having to act only masculine, and who sees me as being both masculine and feminine, and he wants me to act feminine, even though he sees us as fitting together well because we’re neither one nor the other. The boxes of gender don’t always fit us well even when on the surface we’re “conforming” to expectations. JD: The boxes are exhuasting! The trans projects helped when I first has the surgery and was talking about trans idea all the time, but after a year, I was bored and wanted to talk about something else. Everyone wants to put you into boxes. Even when they themselves don’t conform to expectations, they want you to not conform in their way. It gets awkward. Everyone has so much pressure. I wouldn’t say straight men are oppressed, but they have to conform to these pressures as well, fit into roles. |
Jesse Finley Reed |
Interview with JESSE FINLEY REED Emily Chivers Yochim: Can you tell me how you got started as an artist? Jesse Finley Reed: Early childhood is very memorable for me in terms of learning about creativity and self-expression. I have the mixed fortune of having former hippy parents. My father was an artist, carpenter and later, designer. He always encouraged us to make things. On weekend mornings he and I, and later my sister, would sit and draw in the living room together. He always made it fun, trying to weave in some technical skills as much as one can with a 4 year old. Art was always something I made, but like most children, I didn't think much of it. I found a sense of freedom in art class and I was able to express myself without being too self-conscious. By my senior year in high school, I was taking three art classes a day and I focused on how to become an artist. This led me to art school. In high school the verbal attacks began. I was bullied for being different, for being gay, and art provided a sanctuary. I often wonder how things would have played out had I not felt so driven to the margins of small town society, not that I have any desire to relive the past. ECY: What is the catalyst for making your work? JFR: I have been thinking about this, and how it relates to the work I do in Berlin. In many ways it relates to the outsider role I inhabited growing up as a queer boy. Feeling shut out by my peers led me to find ways to express myself. Art classes provided me with freedom and confidence, an affirmation of the value of my outsider status. I think one of the main reasons I love working and living in Berlin is because I am an Ausländer. My inspiration comes from what I see, my experiences, what I read/have read -- really everything around me. I spend a lot of time researching my ideas, thinking about what I want to make. My artwork, despite being reductive and cold at times, it comes from a very personal place, and is concerned with exploring, defining and appropriating the idea of the queer. I am fascinated in how ephemeral materials, including lighting, makeup, and decoration can transform bodies, hallways and nightclubs into uncanny spaces. I create a visual image or object in disjunction with quotidian representations of my subject: nightclubs are brightly lit, rather than dark and sexy; soap is wet and dirty, rather than fresh and clean; unremarkable male bodies are superficially transformed into hyper-masculine models. The implication of queerness plays an important role in the reading of my work, not only as a suggestion of strangeness or difference, but also in the work's relationship to sexual orientation. I feel ambivalent about ghettoizing myself as a gay artist, although it’s not a category I shy away from. Sexuality is the last bastion of discrimination in our society. To call someone a black artist or to say that that an artist makes black art or Asian art would be offensive, and politically incorrect; however, this is not the case with gay art. I always find it amusing when, during a studio visit, someone says to me, "well, we like the work, but it’s just a little bit too gay." My experience living as a gay/queer man is the perspective from which I produce work, and I don't see any need to apologize or heterosexualize my work in order to please different audiences. There is something in my work for everyone, whether it’s blatantly about homosexuality or not. I am very conscious of this in fact, and I work to leave things open ended. ECY: Where did you grow up? How does this affect your reading of gender/sexuality/ethnicity? JFR: I grew up in the Boston suburb of Duxbury, MA. During my developmental years I was desperately trying to fit into a mould amid all the verbal attacks of my adolescent peers. Despite not being out, I was assigned the role of town faggot. I rebelled, and in this rebellion I saw a spark of power in playing with otherness. During this time I started to question gender expression through fashion, theatre and the fine arts. In 9th grade (1990) I made a sculpture that ended up being displayed in the principal’s office, called Three American Families. I organized Barbie and Ken dolls into a diorama with three couples: gay, lesbian and heterosexual. I glued a Jesus night-light to the top. I think there was a painting of an American flag with pink triangles as well. ECY: Are you more interested in presenting problems or solutions? JFR: Neither, I am interested in the in-between. Problems are of course inspiring in some capacity to me, but I am more interested in creating polemics. I seek to shift and question meaning. This leaves an opportunity for the viewer to reach her own conclusion about what she is seeing. I inspire conversations and hope the dialogue will lead to solutions. ECY: Who are your influences? Do you see yourself as part of a particular lineage? JFR: My influences are varied and vast, however two visual artists that have played significant roles in my development as an artist are Robert Gober and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. I am not particularly interested in fitting myself in the history of art, or locating myself in the cannon. This is the role of art historians and cultural studies experts. I see myself as a conceptual artist using photography, and I have come to understand my practice through reading post-modernist rhetoric. ECY: Can you describe your methodology? JFR: My projects start as ideas and percolate in my head anywhere from six months to five years before I make them. There is a lot of quite thinking, sporadic sketching, image collecting, looking at what is out there. There is a lot of free association and learning about unrelated things. For instance, I am listening to a lot of anthems lately: national ones, collegiate ones, and former soviet ones. There is grandiosity to them that I both appreciate and find tacky.
ECY: Can you describe a typical day in the studio? JFR: My studio is always in various states of conceptual existence. Despite having had studios in New York, Berlin and Boston, I am without a physical art-making space for the next few months. Ultimately, my studio always exists in the space shared between my laptop and myself. This, most often, includes a desk or table and chair, but the bed also serves as a fantastic studio for me. Some of the biggest pushes I have made in my visual work and writing occurred in my bedroom. ECY: To what extent are you influenced by pop culture? JFR: With the explosion of visual information in the world (digital snap shot cameras, the internet, the 24 hour news cycle), it’s the job of artists to create visual work that contributes to this already image-saturated world in thought provoking and meaningful ways. I always tell people that the world does not need another work of art/photograph/film/dance that is not somehow inventive, or creating a new conversation. Paintings should not be made just because their creator is a painter. Photographers should not just take pictures just because that is what they do. There needs to be a reason; otherwise it’s just a hobby, which is wonderful, don't get me wrong. But visual artists need to be acutely aware of the content in their work. Interpretation depends upon each viewer, but if we are going to add more to the world of images and stuff, then we should understand why we’re doing it. ECY: How does humor play in your work? JFR: Humor is a point of entry for someone in my work, but I’m not thinking: wow, they will find this so funny. At times I see it as more of pathetic and over-the-top, for example, with Boy's Showing Off series, the body of work that followed The Merchandise. In this series I really sought to exploit the body make up I had been using in the Merchandise, and do the exact opposite of what I had tried to do in the earlier series. The body make up is sloppy, there are ridiculously well defined tan lines in some cases, the interiors are strange pornographic sets, and, in the end, it’s printed like a Teen Beat magazine poster. All of this is funny, and queer, and ultimately meaning is located in all of it for me. Meaning is located in every material and choice we make. |
Jesse Jagtiani |
Interview with JESSE JAGTIANI Darren Lee Miller: Could you describe the piece in the show? Jesse Jagtiani: Paradise was created while I was in a class called Art & Biology at Carnegie Mellon. I wanted to create a humorous video that depicts mutants living peacefully together. I merged male and female body parts to create little animals. I filmed my body parts and those of my partner. Everything else was collaged from images I found on the Internet. The children singing about what they love in the world was also found online. DLM: What struck me was your decision to concentrate on creating fanciful creatures out of male and female sexual organs. We see flying breasts and monkey-like buttocks swinging from the trees, eating fruit. There's a peacock-like penis grazing near a stream. JJ: My intention was to make them cute. I love to play with eye candy, to have it look cute at first glance but, upon close inspection, it is anything but saccharine. My work is concerned with recent developments in technology, embracing both expected and unexpected cultural contributions of science. In this case, gene technology and the way we use natural resources were on my mind. I want the work to be fun, but to leave viewer feeling uneasy. DLM: Inclusion of the children singing connotes ideas of lost innocence. Does that play into your the bio-tech and environmental themes as well? JJ: There is juxtaposition between cute image – supported by children singing – that triggers a nice and sweet feeling; and then there’s the deeper meaning and intention, the fear of the future, the unknown, the unforeseeable. DLM: When I first saw the piece I thought of Hieronymus Bosch's famous triptych. JJ: I was more influenced by Paul Chan. He had just given a lecture at CMU, but I can see how you thought of Bosch. I was looking at Chan’s 17-minute digital animation, My Birds, Trash, The Future. He currently has a piece at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston, incidentally. DM: Another thing that stuck me about "Paradise" is that, although we see mutant creatures constructed from human sexual organs flying and climbing about the scene, there is nothing to connote gender. In fact, your work seems to create a space outside of traditional binary gender designations. Are you concerned with gender roles in your work? JJ: Yes that is something I examine in several pieces of my work. I have a problem with the need to categorize gender and sexual identities in contemporary culture. I feel there are in-between spaces that are not definable, and in my opinion the ways we currently define gender create unnecessary social issues. DLM: Do you think of yourself as an activist? JJ: No. I think I’m a selfish person, an artist who has the urge to express her opinion. If it helps open other minds and creates new spaces for dialogue, all the better. DLM: You talked already about Chan. Who are your other influences? JJ: Bjoern Melhus, Pippilotti Rist, Garry Hill. And since forever, Max Ernst. DLM: Yay, Max Ernst. DLM: In all your work it seems you work closely with the other people whose images appear in the videos. Do you think of it as collaborative work? JJ: Maybe yes, but not consciously. I create work about things that effect me, concern me, and I'm sure generations before have had the similar issues. My work is collaborative but not democratic in the execution. I tell my models what to do and they can give their input, but the ideas and the actual directing, composing, editing, collaging, compositing, animation, and finding media images is all up to me. DLM: As someone who uses Adobe Photoshop, I can see and appreciate the sophistication of your post-production work. Can you describe your methodology (if you have one)? JJ: Well I normally have an idea and my ideas often have digital imaging to them, so the execution to has to be figured out before the shoot. In the case of Paradise I shot our bodies in front of a green screen. Then I separated the body parts, reconnected them in different ways and started animating. When I had the animated creatures done, I created the background from found images. Everything was separate and collaged together. My last step was laying in the sound track. DLM: In the case of "Paradise" the sound track simultaneously supports and undercuts the image. JJ: Yes, I was happy when I found it! DLM: So, in closing, what are you reading now? JJ: Are you kidding me? DLM: I know! My interviewing style is awkward. I forgot to segue. JJ: I was reading Loving Big Brother, by John E. McGrath for a class I taught: Live Video Performance, Power Dynamics in the Contemporary. It’s a class I designed this past year where we explored voluntary acting vs. involuntary acting. The book is about surveillance, mainly. DLM: Before we end the interview, is the anything you wanted to add? Maybe things we didn't cover during the course of the conversation? JJ: I'm terrified by interviews. DLM: Ha ha! Please come to Meadville for the show. |
Melissa Boyajian |
Interview with MELISSA BOYAJIAN Vika Gardner: Can you describe what you do? Melissa Boyajian: In many cases I’m a performer, using irony and humor. My projects are designed to question gender, homophobia, and sexism. I also question established, academic discourses. In my photographs, I am both the subject and the artist, poking fun at the male artist’s gaze. I problematize the trope with gender ambiguity, masculine women and feminine men. I created the Odalisque for Said during my first year of graduate school. It is among the works I abandoned. VG: Why? MB: I was confused about what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to work on the things that I had been working on with photography. I wanted to use other mediums and subject matter. I was trying to decide on something so daunting, and I was feeling inexperienced. I didn’t know enough of the cannon of art history, theory, etc. I created subjects that were meaningful for further work, although I didn’t know it at the time; they turned out to be powerful. VG: What are your influences? MB: Said’s Orientalism was a major influence. My grandmother, Mary, had recently passed away. My family is Armenian; my grandparents emigrated from Anatolia, modern day Turkey. I became interested in representation of the Middle East, such as the Odalisque from 1814. Said borrows from Foucault’s contrast between the Occident and the Orient. It creates a misconception about “The East or the Near East being feminine, docile, etc. I followed Ingres' Odalisque because of the idea of fantasy. The original was based on letters from the wife of the British ambassador to the Ottoman empire, Lady Whortley Montague. Ingres projects his own ideals based on his imagination from Lady Montague’s letters. This depicts people -- a fetishization -- based on her writing, even though the closest he ever came to the Middle East was Italy. VG: Do you see the work as revealing problems or solutions? MB: More problems than solutions. I think that’s all art can really do, critique or reveal problems. It’s not good to forcefully change anything; it’s more democratic to present a problem. VG: Why did you use a beard in this image and not a mustache? MB: I don't know if I am being too simple saying that I was working with the idea of the 'bearded lady.' The beard did not signify anything religious or anything from Bear culture. The bearded lady, however, aside from being a subject of laughter, ridicule or "schizonphrenic" subject with "gender confusion" problems, is also an individual pushing the boundaries of gender and normality that is appreciated in the queer community. Such as circus entertainer, writer and bearded lady Jennifer Miller. VG: Describe your day. MB: I teach photography one day a week, and I have a job as a pastry chef since 2003. I don’t work in a way where I’m constantly producing. I might have a few months where I’m reading a lot. I read a ton and I’m really really super organized and anal. I have a million preliminary plans and go through a series of tests of the project before a final result. So it can be a year to a year and a half before a project is installed. For me the research component is important to the studio work. VG: Do you see gender as binary? MB: I see gender as performative and fluid, no binary at all. VG: How does art enrich your life? MB: I can’t imagine not doing art; life would be boring without being a kind of cultural producer. It’s fun -- it brings a lot of riches. Creative people in my life influence me in general. VG: Do you think orientalism as a theory is over? MB: It’s still really relevant, especially in wartime. People’s attitudes toward Arabs and Muslims are ridiculous. It’s about war and domination. There’s still work to be done. VG: What’s your intellectual lineage? MB: I have masters -- I studied art and theory. I see myself in the Western tradition of art and theory. I am also in dialogue with a sort of intellectual circle of international Armenian writers/activists/artists. Shushan Avagyan (writer and activist), Chris Atamian (writer and director), Mamikon Hovsepyan (gay right's activist), Arpi Adamian (artist and activist), and Nancy Agabian (writer/professor), Arlene Avakian (activist/writer/professor), Adrineh Der-Boghossian (artist). My interest in social/political theory (Said, Foucault, bell hooks, Judith Butler and Benedict Anderson). 2. I am also shaped by Armenian history, both history books and stories from some of my family members that have passed on. 3. Other artists. To name a few: Anri Sala, Harun Farocki, Michael Rackowitz, The Museum of Jurassic Technology, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Joan Fontcuberta, Sharon Hayes, Walid Raad, Carrie Mae Weems, Adrian Piper, Cindy Sherman, Sergei Parajanov, Atom Egoyan, Shirin Neshat. 4. I am also influenced by Armenian music, food and dance. VG: Do you work collaboratively? MB: Yes, I’ve been working collaboratively since my second year of graduate school. I’m just drafting a solo project now, but everything else was collaborative. I enjoy how to have 2 minds meet and create something -- it’s challenging and democratic. One of my collaborators is Jesse Jagtiani; another is Valeria Lopez. VG: Pop culture? MB: I have other work that references TV and pop culture more. I have a piece critiquing tourism. I and a collaborator fabricated a town in Oklahoma, created a history with pamphlets, maps and a parody video, like Travel Channel stuff. VG: Do you have a specific goal for your viewer? MB: No, I don’t really from a simple picture. I hope it would raise questions about authoritative structures, questioning what’s true, what’s factual or fictitious. VG: Why is the body art in this image here? MB: It’s just queer. There was no reason to take it out. It’s more of an emphasis that it counters the expected gaze. If I were to make this image again, I would not change it, but I think that I would go about the way I made other images in the series differently and I would read more on the discourse and criticism of Orientalism and homosexuality and colonialism in the Middle East. I later realized that the photo has a certain likeness with other artists such as Yasumasa Morimura and Yinka Shonibare. How might I make my series a bit different? VG: Given that this image is on some level based on a woman’s view of the Ottoman harem, did you consider a woman’s gaze in this image? MB: I’ve read Lady Montague’s letters from Turkey; she was extremely impressed with the role of women. She thought they were freer than the women in England. There’s some speculation: she might not draw out problematic issues on gender, but there’s still lots of class distinction. VG: Do you have a cultural/political lens? MB: With my family history and her upbringing, I’m aware of and sensitive to oppression. I think I’m more open-minded because of that. I also volunteer and participate in activism. So I’m fairly political inside and outside of art. There are other issues I try to address in some of my other work, which stem from some of my family members who escaped the massacres in Turkey from 1895-1915 and my own personal relationship to the Armenian community being only a halfsie, such as collective memory, cultural erasure and cultural belonging. My dad and his brothers were raised in Watertown, MA (the former little Armenia before Glendale CA) and they were initially forced to go to Armenian school when they were children (my brother and I also went for a time). They hated it and wanted to be as American as possible so they would crawl out the bathroom window at school until their parents eventually gave up on making them go. My father being the youngest of the boys retained the least amount of the Armenian language and therefore it was not passed down to me. The passing of customs and language in Armenian is usually done by the mother. My grandmother and uncle taught me a small amount of the language and I have learned quite a bit on my own from language tapes and visiting Armenia with my uncle. Part of my other work ("Basic Conversational Armenian", video) addresses the irony of trying to learn the Western Armenian language (spoken by Armenians of the Diaspora) and negotiate with gender codes and sexism in the lessons. There are also issues of collective and personal memory present in my work. How does a group of people remember a traumatic event and how does it change over time? How do I remember it and is part of the memory pieces that I have improvised? I am interested in how cultures retain and hybridize traditions as well. VG: Would you do the same kind of gender boundary crossing today? MB: I’m not sure if I would do it differently. Since then I have been reading about post-colonial feminism. It’s another layer that’s not quite a critique. Perhaps some of the orientalists were visiting the East to explore homosexual desires, a fetishization in a way Said did not explore. I now see this as something adding another layer; I didn’t know this when I made this picture. VG: Who are you reading? MB: it’s an article in a book by Reina Lewis and Mills [Worldcat says: Feminism and post-colonial theory : a reader / Reina Lewis, 2001]. The position of the artist in the past has been linked to ethnographers and anthropologists, and I want to look more at the possibility of homoerotic vacations. VG: Is there anything more that you want to tell me? MB: There’s a different for me between being openly queer with friends and family versus those in the Armenia culture. It’s quite different. I came out to my close family when I was 22, but not to others in the Armenian community. I came out to my Armenian family only 2 weeks ago. My grandmother who died in 2003, and I never had that conversation with her, although we were close. When I told my Armenian family, they were okay, but visiting other family, there were strict rules. I could not be visibly gay in any way there. But I have a group of gay friends in Armenia anyway. So I have different identities for different cultures. I go to Armenia every few years. My work also deals with this -- with the sexism and homophobia in Armenian culture. VG: Do you speak Armenian? MB: Just at a very very basic level. My grandmother taught me a little; my father and his brothers speak a little. |
Nahna Kim |
Interview with NAHNA KIM
Nahna Kim: I have a foot in two different worlds, so I take part in them both instead of just one. VG: I see you keep a cell phone with a Georgia area code, but you live in New York. NK: Yes, I’m a southern girl through and through. In Boston I capped out on the South. VG: Kim is a Korean name, isn’t it? NK: Yes. When I stabilized in one world, I was pulled into others. Sometimes it was intentional, sometimes accidental. I have come up with my own coping mechanisms. Growing up in the South where there were hardly any Koreans, I had to develop many tools to deal with race issues. Boston was eye-opening; as naive as it may sound, I didn’t expect a big city above the Mason Dixon line to be so racist. VG: Was the racism overt or covert? NK: In the South, I believe that ignorance is worn like a badge of honor, and people are able to embrace it. In New England, people mask it because they’re more PC. It’s more uncomfortable because issues aren’t addressed. VG: Tell me more about the snow globes. NK: I want people to pick them up and play with them – snow globes aren’t precious objects, they’re more sentimental. I enjoy art you can touch. Museums are maddening to me because you can’t touch the art. I always want to get close to things. VG: Why Mount Rushmore? NK: It comes out of an interest in American tourist monuments. In Georgia we have Stone Mountain, it is the largest granite formation in North America. The front of the mountain has the Sons of the Confederate, commissioned by the Daughters of the Confederate. There is a laser show played to the tune of Dixie. I never understood it as a child, but when I later understood the symbolism and historical context, I realized that it was kind of a fucked up place. I watched all this red-neck stuff, and thought about the original intentions versus the actual lived experience of the South. Afterwards, it seemed to answer a different message. The same person who carved Stone Mountain (Gutzon Borglum) , also carved Mt Rushmore. I thought about what Stone Mountain meant and then wondered, who goes to see Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota? And the difference between the Founding Fathers of America versus the Sons of the Confederate? I couldn’t go to South Dakota to see the real thing, so I decided to make it for myself. It symbolizes a kitchy America. I wanted to look at old school America. I got in my car, and set off to look at monuments and explore. We often don’t explore America because we’ve become exposed to the landscape through photographs. We don’t think of the monuments as destinations, and we also fail to see the American landscape as a destination. At the same time, when visiting, there’s a fine line between being a tourist and an alien. What’s made for America and what’s made for tourists? VG: Where did you go? NK: I went to state parks, Graceland, the Statue of Liberty, the Washington Monument, World War II Japanese internment camps, the Martin Luther King monument, the JFK library. I choose these places because they were accessible to where I lived-- they pulled me closer to the founding things of America, the things that helped build the America that we know. I wanted to go to see “other kinds of places”, like the ones on the side of the highways that no one tears down. VG: What’s the connection? NK: They’re all kind of terrible disappointments, beautiful but unfulfilling. I felt naive: if I visit a place, can I own a piece of it? With a photograph, you own and connect with it. But somehow it also divides and conquers by the act of photography. The photographs all ended up being unfulfilling. It stems from the idea that I don’t identify with Korea. It is who I am by ancestry, but I’m never fully accepted when I’m there, I’m only accepted as an American. I went to Korea before graduate school. When I was there, everyone looked like me, and spoke a language I understood, but I wasn’t Korean enough: I looked American to them, and my Korean sounded different. It felt like I was a rejected by my Motherland, after this realization, I shortened my trip and I came back 3 months early. It was heartbreaking in some ways. So I wanted to go out and connect with America. Living in Brooklyn, it’s really diverse. People don’t ask who you are, they ask what do you do and where are you from. It’s my own stubbornness: why can I not be American, Why can’t I be from Georgia? Why is it so impossible? VG: What were the internment camps like? NK: There wasn’t much -- they were turned back into farms, and there is plaque that indicates something else had existed there. The buildings were all temporary, so they’re long gone. There are no traces of what was there. At one, there’s a monument in the middle of a farm: that’s how history is treated. Some events are glorified and made into history, while other events are plowed down and replaced with a plaque. The photographs from the internment camps have nothing to show. The Confederacy gets a mountain, thousands of interned Japanese, and all you get is a plaque. I was just as disappointed in the Interment camps as I was with Plymouth Rock. VG: How are hyphenated Americans left out of “monumental culture”? NK: When you’re a hyphenated American, you are automatically labeled as being different, a kind of half-assed American. Race is a construct, and hyphenating seems like another construct, a way to make you less than the sum of your parts. Not knowing a person’s ethnicity makes people uncomfortable, but my larger question is what difference does it make? Are people simply looking for commonalities? VG: How were the snow globes manufactured? NK: I worked with a factory in China. I sent a composited photograph and it was then made into 3-D model. I left the details of the figures up to the artists at the factory. I thought of the project as a collaboration with the factory. A friend had mentioned a MLK monument somewhere on the East coast that was being made by a Chinese artist, and the sculpture ended up having Asian-like features. So I thought of it as a crossing of globalization and imperialism. The globes were all hand painted; some were excellent, some were awful, the same but not the same. VG: Have you sold any of them? NK: I’ve sold some of them. VG: That’s a lot of images -- how does it make you feel to have so many representations of yourself? NK: I don’t know -- I’d like to see how they exist in someone else’s home. They’re like you’re children, you want to see them living in their own environment. VG: Why snow globes? NK: There’s something magical about snow globes. They’re simple in substancebut you can be entertained by them for hours. They’re one of the things that you bring home from tourist places. It felt like the best way to combine a trinket, a monument, and a possession. VG: The College gave us snow globes of one of the buildings on campus last year -- when you get here, I’ll give you mine! VG: Are you pushing back against the dominant American racism? NK: I’ve been the good American Asian kid. It is what it is. How I deal with the art is more positive than negative. I also did portraits of myself as beauty pageants. Being from everywhere -- Alaska, Vermont, etc -- is more embracing what I’ve been handed in life. You may interpret it as negative, but I think of it as funny. It’s kind of funny not to be “really American” while “pushing back with a smile”. It’s people’s own insecurities and fears that feed the hate, so just smile and it goes along. VG: What’s you’re work life like? NK: It’s kind of embarrassing. I got busy living and making my own work has taken a back burner. I’m an artist’s assistant at the moment. I was very uninspired for a while, but working for an artist has had inspiring moments. VG: To what extent are you influenced by highbrow or lowbrow culture? NK: I just wanted my work to be accessible. All artists make work for themselves. I want to make images for the child that was myself, so she can see someone of her own likeness. Even as women, we don’t see women monuments, so it’s not just an Asian factor, women are also not available. |
Ria Brodell |
Interview with RIA BRODELL Darren Lee Miller: In your statement you say the work "intermixes how the different figures I’ve identified with or admired, co-exist in my mind, and how I see myself in them." Most of the characters you've drawn are completely fictitious, or in the case of Sinatra, it is the mediated, film image of the man, not the "real" Sinatra. To what extent are you influenced by images of film and TV stars? Ria Brodell: So far in this body of work the "figures" have been specific individuals that I related to in some way, sometimes they were pop culture icons like Cary Grant or Freddie Mercury. Mostly it was the image of them, their "idealness." The way they carried themselves, the way they looked or dressed: their pop culture personae. Other times it was more general, like mountain man DLM: They are archetypes: the leading man, the super star, and the saint. Do you wish you were an ideal type? RB: Not necessarily. DLM: I guess what I mean is this: while they are held up as ideal and authentic, movie stars are not real. We can lose ourselves in the alternate reality, like when we go to see a movie and “suspend our disbelief.” RB: I think they functioned – when I was a kid, and for this series – as a jumping off point. They’re people I remember being really infatuated with and somehow knowing that yes, they aren't real, and there is no way that when I "grow up" I can become them...but they were symbols I guess. Like a movie, I suppose, an escape. DLM: When I first saw the drawings I thought you were drawing yourself as men to redefine your gender against a masculine ideal but I now think it's more complicated than that. The gender you cast for yourself isn't exactly neutral but it's also not easily defined. I'm not sure how to make this into a question... RB: Ha Ha. Yeah, they are definitely me as them, me if I could be Cary Grant or even if I could be another man in the image of Cary Grant DLM: Or, in the case of St. Philomena? RB: With the religious pieces it's not necessary me identifying with them but more of what would they think of this. DLM: Oh, that's interesting. My own unfortunate experiences with religion left me feeling demonized and marginalized. How have the religious icons functioned for you in this body of work? RB: My middle name is Philomena and I've always had issues with it and with my first name too, Maria. I think I did have a close and fairly good relationship with religion as a kid; the saints were very real to me. I just feel bad that I never liked the names my mom chose for me because it was such an important and faith based choice for her DLM: I feel like the work gives me a window into the innocent mind, the child's mind. I think there is earnestness about the work that I usually associate with childhood. RB: Yes it did start with childhood, young adulthood etc. I think the work is just now starting to veer towards adulthood and how I feel about my gender now. DLM: Do you name or define your gender? RB: Not unless I have to check a box. DLM: I'm going to steal that answer next time someone asks me the question! Yet we are expected to put ourselves into neatly defined categories repeatedly, everyday. Trying to step outside of the box becomes a politically subversive act and requires courage. To what extent does the political content of your work inform the viewer’s reading? RB: Without knowing my gender the work runs the risk of being straight up portraiture, so even there I'm forced to sort of choose a box. I hope to move in a direction with the work that starts to talk about undefined areas. DLM: That's what we're hoping to do with this show... RB: It's hard. So far the work has been images of me portrayed as these masculine types, and I definitely relate more to the masculine side of things, so I guess I've always wondered, where does that put me? I’m trying to address that in the work. DLM: And the religious part of yourself? It sounds like faith is still very important to you. Do you feel you're taking ownership of your spiritual self in equally undefined ways? RB: I think the faith aspect may go by the wayside for a bit. I think it was part of my childhood self and young adult self and now, as an adult, I have major problems with it. DLM: But you come to an understanding with Philomena. Maybe it's slowly starting? RB: Maybe. If you leave the "religion" out of it and just think of the saints, or least some of them, as the humans that they were, they were pretty interesting people. DLM: I saw a bumper sticker that said, "saints are people with checkered pasts and sinners are people with checkered futures" DLM: I'm going to shift a little. Where did you grow up? RB: Idaho. DLM: Do you think Idaho is an important formative aspect that is reflected at all in the work? RB: It definitely played a part in my past work. I think family, more than Idaho, is coming through in the work but I suppose my ideas about that place are tied up in my family. It's VERY similar to the religious aspect. With the religious pieces, I was showing my relationship to these saints, how much they meant to me. Putting them with these "self-portraits" may have been my way of asking for approval or hoping not to be judged. The same could be said for my relationships with my family, because they are so tight knit, though I haven’t yet addressed family directly in my work DLM: We’ve been talking very seriously and I want to acknowledge the gentle sense of humor that lives in the work. The drawings are earnest and self-effacing at the same time. RB: Good. I never want it to be too heavy handed or sad. |
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This exhibition is part of the Year of Social Change at Allegheny College. |
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