2016-04-19


I have a studio visit on Monday with a curator!

Studio visits are awkward, but at least it is with a curator. Nothing is worse than artist to artist studio visits.

Wondering how it will pan out. So I thought I would prepare myself with some writing via dairyland, as if dairyland is the person visiting my studio.

Tell me a bit about your art:

I make collages and zines, and recently I experimented with video. But at the end of the day I would label myself a collage artist. The work has always been personal, narrative, and figurative, in the vein of exploring identity. Typically through the format of the self-portrait. I went to school to study painting and I continued for a few years. Then I started making black and white photo-based zines until I got to the point I realized I didn't like painting. I decided to completely stop painting about two years ago and it's been great. I really love the format of collage. I should note I source my collage materials myself, that is, and photo I use I took.

What have you been working on?

I've been making a series of new collages about questions I've been asking myself about my privilege. It's the newest iteration of exploring my identity, but in historic, institutional, and social terms. Previously I was interested in the immediate happenings of my life and I would detail those stories. This time around, I've been thinking a lot about who I am within a larger apparatus. That is, how is my life informed by being white and male. Specifically, I'm zooming in on the anxieties these tap into, that being, this anxiety that I'm stupid and undeserving. I'm working through difficult questions about how I got here and using the art as therapy in a way, to better understand my position in in these various spaces. I've always been told I am too hard on myself. So I'm digging around with a lot of self-scrutiny. I'm hoping, by thinking about this work after looking at it, maybe it can prompt the same questions in the white men, since I feel like their life goes unquestioned too much. After reading enough postcolonial theory and race and gender and class theory, I had to ask myself a lot of painful questions about the concept of white male privilege and how it manifests in my daily life. It's elusive, so I try to keep the work flexible as I process these ideas.

Why are the collages so dirty? Can you explain why they are punctured?
With this body of work I am rigorously resisting the precious. I wanted objects I could easily handle and work with without worrying about sleekness or reverie. I wanted a hands-on, destructive, malleable quality to the work. These questions I am asking are not easy, "clean", safe questions. They're destabilizing questions because they challenge my idea of what's normal. I wanted these pieces to look as if they were applying that these ideas can be approached. I've been drawing a lot of inspiration from power movement posters. The point about revolutionary posters is to attract and offer something easy to tear off and take home. These posters are usually stapled or tacked to a post. They are sheets of cheap paper put outside. They're dirty. They don't last. But they're aggressive and attractive and loud. I like this gravity, even though it's usually a cheap xerox. Also, this might be a bit of a reach in explaining the punctures but I wanted this work to have holes to the other side as a symbol that these constructs are easy to destruct. Also, I think a lot about history as this formless infinitesimal thing that exists in our lives and informs our lives and I pictured it looking like dots. When I started these collages I started by puncturing the wall a lot to get this look of all these holes. But no one would ever make those connections.

Why pink? Since I was asking questions that have to do with skin color, I wanted to avoid white paper completely, just in the off chance someone thought I was doing that on purpose. Someone read Pierre Huyghe about his use of a white dog so I really wanted to avoid that. Plus, pink seemed like a universal color that can't be attributed to one person. There's this joke my ex's mom would say: "We are all pink inside". It's gendered to some people but I thought it was a very warm and loving color.



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