rebel rebel

laura oldfield ford

Cheap & Plastique interviews London-based artist Laura Oldfield Ford for Issue 10.
See more of Laura’s work here.

C & P: In your artistic practice do you focus mainly on drawing and collage? What other materials find their way into your work?
Laura: I trained as a painter, I am currently working on series of large scale canvases about abandoned housing estates and militant cells operating from them. I am also collaborating with other artists on film and writing projects.
I don’t really compartmentalize my practice, it doesn’t make any sense for me to do that. The paintings, the billboards, the blog posts, they are all manifestations of the same force. They have different intensities and speeds and that’s why I move between different processes but I don’t privilege one over another.

C & P: Sometimes there is a wash of color overlaying your drawings (often a bright pink or fluorescent green mainly used for overwritten text or graffiti). What effect to you hope to achieve by adding these day-glo colors and text over your stark grey subject matter (depictions of a post-industrial landscape; crumbling tower blocks, deserted trash strewn streets, overgrown non-places)?
Laura: I use flashes of fluorescent colour in an attempt to articulate those fleeting moments of epiphany, those little rushes of euphoria that you encounter when you’re drifting in the city. I suppose it is the city filtered through a narcotic lens, those heightened moments, flashbacks from raves and punk gigs, all day drinking sessions in squatted pubs.
The translucent layers of paint also allude to the textures and surfaces of the architecture I’m walking through, the way concrete is weathered, marked by its inhabitants, the patina of decay and the possibility of rupture.
By building up layers with the paint I am also attempting to describe the city as palimpsest, of layers of writing, erasure, and overwriting.

C & P: Your work is very much about the state of affairs in London at the present time. Can you imagine making work about another place? Have you lived outside of London/the U.K.?
Laura: I am indelibly marked by London as it the city I have spent most time in but I also feel how it relates to other cities and explore these paths. I am about to embark on a six week residency in China and also Korea later in the year. I am interested in exile, in landscape as a mythologized, intense mental space. I lived in New York for a while, I had a studio in Hell’s Kitchen, which was a massively contested site at the time.

C & P: Do you feel that the London/Tottenham riots of August 2011 are just the beginning of a time of unrest in the city? Did the riots bring about any policy change? Or are things pretty much the same as they were before these events occurred?
Laura: I think those moments of incandescent rage were the signal of better times. Those currents of anger have always been there pulsating beneath the surface of the city, oscillating above it and through it like mobile phone signals. I was impatient for those channels to be activated and in August they were. I think this year we will see more intensive periods of fighting. I can visualize the flashpoints now, all we need is a couple of prolonged heat waves in June and July.

C & P: You relate your walks/drifts to Guy Debord and the S.I.’s idea of the dérive. Do you feel that people have become so pacified by the predictable and monotonous experiences of everyday life that they are not really living anymore?
Laura: I think less pacified, more exhausted. I genuinely believe the social terrain can shift very quickly. A few years ago when I started my zine, in 2005, my work was considered by some to be exotic, to be an amusing anomaly, massive social upheaval, strikes and economic crisis were deemed to belong to another era. I knew it would all happen again, I was willing it to happen, I knew people weren’t pacified to that extent, I knew it was all close to breaking. Now a lot of those same people find my work a lot less amusing since it has shifted into the terrain of documentary and reportage of the contemporary moment. A lot can happen when you’ve got so many people on the dole in a city seething with viciousness.
In the introduction to my book Savage Messiah, Mark Fisher talks about this, that if all our time is taken up trying to pay rent and mortgages it leaves us too wrecked to wander and drift and think, As Jon Savage points out in England’s Dreaming, ‘the London of punk was still a bombed-out city, full of chasms, caverns, spaces that could be temporarily occupied and squatted. Once those spaces are enclosed, practically all of the city’s energy is put into paying the mortgage or the rent. There’s no time to experiment, to journey without already knowing where you will end up. Your aims and objectives have to be stated up front. “Free time” becomes convalescence. You turn to what reassures you, what will most refresh you for the working day: the old familiar tunes (or what sound like them) on ITunes. London becomes a city of pinched-face drones plugged into iPods.’

C & P: When I moved to Bethnal Green (from Boston, Massachusetts) in 1999 my interest was immediately piqued by the council estates sprinkled throughout the East End / Tower Hamlets area. I had never seen such architecture in Boston, or in the US, for that matter. I was drawn to these massive housing projects, intrigued by their coldness and also slightly frightened by the sprawling nature of the structures and the strange, empty areas surrounding them. I would wander around the back streets of the East End daily, photographing and exploring all of the dilapidated sites. You also photograph while walking/drifting around certain parts of London and base your drawings on the images you collect from your wanders. What draws you to these neglected (and now changing) parts of the city? Do you aim to document the disappearance of these types of areas in the city?
Laura: Brutalist architecture has always fascinated me. I have always been enthralled by the dark theatricality of it, the levels and walkways, the networks of courtyards. I am enraptured by the moment when the modernist grid starts to unravel and succumbs to the labyrinth, those moments when planned uses of spaces are subverted, like when it kicked off on Broadwater Farm (in Tottenham) in 1985 where the aerial walkways were used for observation and aerial bombardment, and also the Crescents in Hulme in Manchester that were squatted and surrounded by the nomadic architectures of traveler sites.

C & P: When I was in the East End last summer I was shocked at how different Bethnal Green looked, one of the council estates that I walked by every day seemed like it was slated for demolition. My friend told me this was because of the Olympics coming to London in 2012. You address this redevelopment in your work. How do you see the East End changing in the future? Will the East End just be another area for the yuppies to sip fancy cocktails in their new luxury condos, displacing the artists and the middle class/poor people that have called that area their home for so long?
Laura: When I started the zine this was one of the biggest concerns to me, the class cleansing that was happening around the East End. I was directly affected by it when my own estate was evicted. Certain areas have had whole sections of the population forcibly ousted, parts of Dalston, Hackney and Bethnal Green have become massively gentrified and a lot of people have been forcibly ‘decanted’ to sink estates in places like Poplar and Edmonton. The scene you describe has already materialized. I am interested to see what the East End will look like in 2013 when we’re steeped in the second wave of a double dip recession, the collapse of the Eurozone, the backlash against the failed Olympics. A lot of people who bought into the idea of property investment and aspirational lifestyles are going to be defaulting on mortgages in hugely contested areas, these boroughs are riven by strife along multiple lines.

C & P: I read online that you once lived in Aylesbury Estate in Elephant and Castle, which is also under redevelopment at the current time, what was the experience of living there like? Were you squatting there or living in a legitimate space?
Laura: I was staying there for a year or so in someone else’s council flat. It was pretty grim then, (ten years ago) there wasn’t much happening around there unless you were into BNP pubs and African churches. Now it’s better because there has been a massive influx of Equadorians and Colombians and they have better bars and cafes.
I used to spend a lot of time walking from there to the bawdy drinking dens of Peckham and New Cross, that route across Burgess Park, along the ghost of the Surrey canal became suffused with a sense of excitement, the euphoria of escape from stifling misery, when I walk it now I still feel it.

C & P: In addition to making drawings you also produce a zine, Savage Messiah, and artwork for outdoor billboards (both which showcase your drawings). When you hang the billboard pieces throughout the city are you doing this illegally? Do you hang your work over paid adverts or do you choose disused billboards? Do you include any sort of tag on the work or is it anonymous (except to those that recognize your artwork)? Have you ever
been in trouble for vandalizing?
Laura: I like the immediacy of going out flyposting, it’s the best way of responding to shifting situations. With the more organized commissioned posters you have a certain luxury in the sense that the work is durational, it exists in the street for a certain amount of time. This means you can burrow into a place over time, be more subversive in the content, with the flyposters I like to be quite brutal and direct.

C & P: Could you tell me a bit about the WE ARE BAD collective? What role do you play in the organization of this group’s activities?
Laura: We are Bad doesn’t exist in that exact incarnation although the other members of the cell are still active and we do work together occasionally for certain projects. I do a radio show called Abject Bloc with them. I like working as a collective. I am currently collaborating with other people now on projects around the Diamond Jubilee, Olympics, and 2012 riots.

C & P: Tell me about your zine, Savage Messiah. How long have you been producing the zine and how many issues have you made? Do you produce and finance the zine yourself or do you receive artist grants to help you with production costs, etc…? How long have you had the Savage Messiah blog online? Is it a direct translation of what appears in the zine?
Laura: Savage Messiah started in 2005, I have made 13 issues so far. I have always made it on a very ad hoc basis, just photocopying them and distributing to whoever is close at hand. I like the fluidity and dynamism of zines, I thought of it as a current, operating outside the designated white cube zones. I thought of it as sending out a message in a bottle, that it would drift out on its own and who knows who might find it and how they might relate to it. I always trusted it would be an effective way of contributing to a critical milieu and allowing the right people to gravitate towards me. Now it is a book it has become something else, it operates on a totally different level. The blog has been going for a year, when it started I was posting fragments from the zine, writing, photos and drawings, now I post new writing, reports from recent dérives.

C & P: Have you always kept a written record of your thoughts about the situations you experience in daily life while living in London? Are the texts in the zine culled from personal experience, other people’s experiences, or a mix of both?
Laura: I write a journal, I usually spend an hour a day on it, sometimes more. This is important, it becomes the genesis of other trajectories, I always draw on memories of walks around the city. It’s not so much about a quest for authenticity in the work, that doesn’t really interest me, it’s more about having lacerating detail in the writing and a connection to those desires and anxieties that end up being hidden.
I also write up my dérives, these become fractured narratives, a conflation of detailed recollections and conjecture, the walk becomes a structure to weave desires and fictions.

C & P: What projects are you working on currently?
Laura: In April 2012 I have a residency in Shenzhen in China where I am making work for a sculpture Biennial. When I return to London I am doing a residency in Deptford, South London where I will be using a disused police station as a HQ for various activities. In September I am making work in Korea for the Gwangju Biennial, then in November I am in a show at Caja Madrid in Barcelona called Desire Paths with Francis Alys, Mark Ariel Waller, and Cyprien Galliard. I am making an intervention at Tate Britain in August, this will involve walking around Vauxhall and Pimlico and photocopying drift reports and flyposters.

Doktor Kosmos

Friday Music

More Doktor Kosmos musics here.

Thanks dears for the enlightenment!

Bushwick galleries

Map larger here.

Since I will be “vacationing*” in Bushwick next week I have made a handy list of galleries to explore. All of this information is gathered from Bushwick Daily’s map, which can be found here. I altered their map (scrawling in gallery names, above) and also made a list of all of the spaces. Links are included below (so you can check if the gallery is open & what exhibition is up). I figured since I made the effort to prepare this for myself I may as well share with others interested in checking out the spaces that are so quickly popping up in Bushwick.
Yes, I am pretty damn nice!

Bushwick Galleries:

Centotto
250 Moore St., #108, Brooklyn, NY

KestingRay
257 Boerum Street, Brooklyn, NY

319 Scholes (by appt.)
319 Scholes St, Brooklyn, NY

Youth Group Gallery (by appt.)
407 Johnson Ave, Brooklyn, NY

Luhring Augustine Bushwick
25 Knickerbocker Ave., Brooklyn, NY

Bogart St. Area

Interstate Projects
56 Bogart St Brooklyn, NY 11237

CCCP
56 Bogart St Brooklyn, NY 11237

Nurture Art
56 Bogart Street

THEODORE:Art
56 Bogart St Brooklyn, NY 11237

Momenta
56 Bogart St Brooklyn, NY 11237

Bogart Salon
56 Bogart St Brooklyn, NY 11237

Studio 10
56 Bogart St Brooklyn, NY 11237

Agape Enterprise
56 Bogart St Brooklyn, NY 11237

More Bushwick Galleries:

English Kills Gallery
114 Forrest Street, Brooklyn, NY

Storefront Bushwick
16 Wilson Ave., Brooklyn, NY

Factory Fresh
1053 Flushing Ave., Brooklyn, NY

The Living Gallery
1087 Flushing Ave #120 Brooklyn,

Secret Project Robot
389 Melrose St., Brooklyn, NY

Clearing
505 Johnson Ave., #10, Brooklyn, NY 11237

The Active Space
566 Johnson Ave Brooklyn, NY 11237

Norte Maar
83 Wyckoff Ave., #1B, Brooklyn, NY

Sugar
449 Troutman St. #3-5, Bell#21

950 Hart Gallery (by appointment)
950 Hart St Brooklyn, NY 11237

Sardine
286 Stanhope Street, Brooklyn, NY

Botanic
150 Wyckoff Ave Brooklyn, NY 11237

Ridgewood Galleries:

Parallel Art Space
17-17 Troutman Street, # 220

Regina Rex
17-17 Troutman St. #329, Queens

Valentine
464 Seneca Ave., Queens, NY 11385

Small Black Door
19-20 Palmetto St., Ridgewood, NY

Pdf of full gallery list here.

*aka staying away from my Greenpoint home base for 7 fun-filled days

Geert Goiris

E-313, 1999

From Whiteout, looped slide projection with 49 slides, 2009-2011, dimensions vary according to space

Cheap & Plastique interviews Antwerp-based artist Geert Goiris for Issue 10.
See more of Geert’s work here.

C & P: Where do you currently live? Is this where you grew up?
Geert: I live in Antwerpen, Belgium. But I grew up in Bornem which is a small town about 35 Km. west of Antwerp.

C & P: What do you like most about living in Antwerp? Is there a large contemporary art/photography scene there?
Geert: My girlfriend and I came to Antwerpen after living for two years in Prague and two years in Copenhagen. We moved to Antwerpen when I was accepted at the HISK (Higher Institute for Fine arts). HISK is a studio-program for artists, with technical facilities and an international team of visiting tutors. The residency lasted for three years and was set in a fantastic place: an abandoned army base in the city. After HISK we stayed on and settled in Antwerpen.
Antwerpen is a quite lively city for its size. The fashion-academy is respected and draws talented young designers to Antwerpen. Also the music and visual arts scenes are quite vibrant, with a good infrastructure of institutions, some artist collectives and independent spaces as well. There is a photography museum in Antwerpen, which has a good library on the pioneering years of the medium, up to the 1980s–1990s. Recent and contemporary photography is not very well represented. Unfortunately, the program of the museum is a bit too populist and arbitrary for my taste, luckily a few individual photographers are trying to revitalize the institute.
Belgium is so small that it is easy to get around to see exhibitions or performances. Brussels is more prominent and cosmopolitan, with a strong contemporary dance scene, the Wiels Centre for Contemporary Art, and concerts and lectures all the time. Also Gent is an interesting place where things happen, and cities like Liege and Oostende have a lot of character and personality.
So I don’t want to be too chauvinistic about Antwerpen. What I like about the city is that the rents are relatively cheap, so it is manageable to find a good space to work and live, and geographically it lies well situated between Amsterdam, Paris and London. The living quality here is fine, just a pity that the traffic is so mad, and the air pollution it brings is heavy. The small size and layout of the centre would make it ideal for biking, but in the postwar period the whole infrastructure was directed to cars. The mentality is changing slowly, but we still have a long way to go.

Suspension, 2006

C & P: Do you mostly travel outside of Belgium to find subject matter for your photographs? How many trips (for the purpose of your photography practice) do you go on in a year, generally?
Geert: It depends, about 5 times in a year. I try to combine trips: when I have an exhibition or a workshop abroad, I often stay a little longer to make new work.
After a long or faraway journey, it may take a while before I embark on a new project, collecting money and finding free time can be a slow process. I teach at the Art Academy in Brussels, so I travel during the academic breaks or in the summer holiday. Most of my work is shot outside of Belgium.

Ecologist’s Place, 2006

C & P: You often shoot desolate, ethereal, sometimes sublime, landscapes in remote areas. Do you consider your experience of traveling to and photographing these remote places similar to an expedition?
Geert: Not really, I would say that my travels are more an exercise in wandering and improvising. Most expeditions have a defined objective.
I don’t always have a clear idea before I set out. Often the context (the characteristics of a landscape, the quality of the light on a specific moment, the spatial impact of architecture, etc…) directs my gaze, and I am responding to it. This method of working is exemplified in the Resonance series.
When I made Whiteout, (a projection piece for two analogue middle format projectors and a dissolve controller), I had the privilege to join the Belare (Belgian Antarctic Research Expedition) for two successive seasons. This mission was carried out by a large group composed of engineers, biologists, military mechanics and logistics specialists, a doctor, carpenters, electricians, a few mountain guides, and a bunch of adventurers. Heterogeneous as it was, we all had clear tasks and responsibilities, not in the least because the environment is so hostile. So we were structured as a genuine expedition, a group of individuals with an articulated sense of interdependency. When the nearest neighbor is so far away, survival strategies and safety regulations become tangible.
And for Adieu, the project I am currently working on, the method lies somewhere in between: I carry out a lot of research before I set out to photograph a specific subject.
I travel alone to make the Adieu photographs, but a lot of people are involved because I need to get authorization for photographing particular places or interiors. The preparation has some resemblance to a small expedition.
On the field I often meet people who show me around or open up the building they care for.
It is a privilege to have such local “guides.”

Melting Snow, 2005

C & P: Is the idea of an expedition important to your photographic practice?
Geert: To me it represents the romantic embodiment of discovery, self-realization and curiosity, and I am quite sensitive to this kind of mythical fictions. The classical rites of passage during a long journey are separation, initiation, and return. And usually the person that returns has “changed.” Travel is often defined as a freeing and transformative experience. And I can relate to this concept of “inward” travel at the same time it is obvious that many historical expeditions had imperialist or colonial agendas, and the heroic rendering of expeditions in popular culture can be a misleading façade covering the violent realities of these intrusions. Expeditions were always symbols of restlessness and ambition, this applies to an expedition into the heart of darkness, as well as to a journey to the moon.

C & P: How long do you stay when you travel for a photographic adventure? When you are shooting are you usually alone or do you have a guide with you? How do you get around in these empty places? Is there ever a fear of being threatened by wild animals when you are in extremely remote regions?
Geert: Usually, I don’t stay very long, and when it is practically possible, I prefer to be alone or with just one friend.
I walk, but not very far. My equipment (large format camera, tripod, film and lenses) is a bit too heavy to take long hikes. So I always end up driving a lot.
I like to move around in open spaces such as the tundra, the desert, salt plains, or ice fields. Not many animals live in these unsheltered environments. In Norwegian Lapland I was once attacked by a bird. I must have come too close to its nest, so it was diving straight down towards my head to scare me away (and the bird succeeded).
So injury is more likely to come from the land or climate than from animals: dangers like flash floods, rivers becoming unpassable, pitch black moonless nights where one might stumble and fall, or the freezing cold that numbs face and fingers.
Respect is important, so I always pay attention to the advice of local people—they know.

C & P: Many people are afraid of the “big city” and the dangers associated with city living (crime, etc…) I feel the opposite of this, nature (and its disorder) is what terrifies me. Are you ever fearful when you find yourself so far removed from other humans and urban “civilization” and immersed in nature?
Geert: I haven’t been totally on my own in very remote areas, so I can’t tell. During the Antarctic expedition, we sailed with a Russian icebreaker from South Africa to Antarctica. From the second day on we were so far away of all usual shipping routes, that it made us very exposed. Sharing this vulnerability with everyone on board made it more bearable.

From Whiteout, looped slide projection with 49 slides, 2009-2011, dimensions vary according to space

C & P: You state, “The romantic notion of exploration, the sensation of seeing something for the first time, not only as an individual, but also as a society, is a big part of my work.” Could you discuss this further…
Geert: An explorer is always an individual, being confronted with something for the first time.
But when returning to civilization and sharing his or her witness account, the new discoveries enter into collective consciousness. Discoveries are made by a small group of people, but eventually they make their way into a larger society. A new discovery can cause a paradigm shift.
An example is Pale Blue Dot, the name that was given to the photograph taken by the spacecraft Voyager 1 at its most remote location where commands from earth were still possible to be received. Capturing the earth from this distance placed humanity on a scale that was never seen before. This image isn’t really about a discovery, but was more a realization that came about through visual proof: society seeing something for the first time.

From Whiteout, looped slide projection with 49 slides, 2009-2011, dimensions vary according to space

From Whiteout, looped slide projection with 49 slides, 2009-2011, dimensions vary according to space

C & P: How did you first go to Spitsbergen, Norway, in the Arctic? What made you want to shoot a series there specifically?
Geert: My girlfriend is Norwegian and her sister is a geologist who has lived and researched many years in Spitsbergen, together with her husband. This gave us the chance to go visit them and see this miraculous place. The landscape type on Svalbard is Arctic desert: dry and cold. There is a continuous permafrost, along the coast this frozen layer is 10 – 40 m. deep, but in the highlands it can reach up until 450 metres. An effect of this permafrost is that any trace imprinted in the landscape will remain for a long time. I saw a photograph that was taken in the 1980s of the tire tracks made by a German Luftwaffe plane when it landed on one of the islands during World War II. The tracks were still clearly visible after 40 years. The enduring cold acts as an archiving agent, and every imprint made on the land remains like a scar or scratch. Such metaphors are often used, defining the place as a kind of virgin territory where visitors are interrupting the sovereign wilderness. Confronted with a place that is so foreign and hostile to human settlement, feels almost like trespassing.
On top of that, there are few bacteria, so the decomposing process of organic matter is slow. Leaving a simple item behind, such as a cigarette butt, will have a profound effect, as it will remain for a very long time. Every single object added to the landscape becomes pertinent and stands out as an anomaly. The cold also extracts moisture from the air, so the atmospheric perspective drops. This makes it possible to see clear for about 80 Km. or more. Distances are hard to judge, and the outline of mountains and the horizon seem unusually sharp.
All these spectacular features make the place feel like a prehistoric, ancient land that has come to a slow standstill. I felt totally overwhelmed by the landscape, and the anachronistic qualities it possesses has been a returning theme in my artistic work since.

From Whiteout, looped slide projection with 49 slides, 2009-2011, dimensions vary according to space

C & P: Many of your images convey a sense of loneliness and the idea of man lost in a void, your images from the Whiteout series especially come to mind. Could you talk a bit about the experience of photographing the Antarctic locations in this series? How did it feel to be immersed in these vast landscapes, experiencing the void? Did the fact that whiteout conditions are very dangerous and could have led to your demise effect your mental state?
Geert: Safety regulations on such an expedition are strict; it is not permitted to wander alone or lose contact with the camp or the team members. During the two “whiteouts” I’ve experienced, I was driving in a convoy of three Caterpillars traversing the ice to pick up supplies at the coast. The only time I could photograph the phenomenon, was when we stopped the vehicles to refuel.
So I was only able to make a few photos of the actual phenomenon. In these cases, the photographic film recorded something my eyes could not perceive at the moment. All I could do was position the camera and press the shutter release without looking through the viewfinder as there was nothing specific to see. When I would point it towards a person or vehicle, these artifacts stood out clearly, the rest was a void of bright white light.
I had been reading about the whiteout optical effect and the desire grew to join an expedition to photograph this elusive phenomenon. Once I got there, I was very lucky to be exposed to a full whiteout, but found myself in great difficulty capturing this alienating sensation in a photograph. As Hamish Fulton said: “an image can never compete with an experience.” But I wanted to communicate this experience, and ended up presenting a seemingly empty frame which still carries the suggestion or trace of that sensation. In the images taken during the “peak” of the whiteout, there is really nothing to see, I might as well have photographed a white sheet of paper. But it is a reproduction of a lived event. This is part of the magic of taking pictures, no?

Near Hekla, 2000

C & P: I was just reading about an installation in Chelsea, NYC, by the artist Doug Wheeler and it made me think about your work. Are you familiar with his work?
Geert: No, unfortunately I have never seen his work in reality.

C & P: Wheeler creates disorienting environments where the viewer is immersed in pure white light upon entering an installation, the walls are curved and there is no “edge” in the space. Wheeler wants people to experience light and space in a more direct way than is normally possible in the day to day. It would be interesting to compare one’s experience of Wheeler’s constructed “whiteout” phenomena, in a gallery, to the experience of an actual whiteout, whilst alone, amongst nature, in a freezing cold and snow-covered Antarctica. Would the person’s experience of each instance be completely different or somewhat similar? Also do you think that the experience of gazing upon one of your photographs of a whiteout in a gallery setting might elicit a similar response/feeling within the viewer as with these other two scenarios? Would you like the viewer to get “lost” in your photograph?
Geert: Whiteout consists of analogue photographs made on the location by myself. When presenting them as a continuous slideshow in the gallery, this follows a familiar logic of display and presentation, and there is no disturbing or novel aspect in the presentation of the work: a slide projection in itself is a well-known medium or interface.
I am interested by the work of Doug Wheeler, and judging from installation view of his work Infinity Environment, the effect must be stunning. Also Belgian artist Ann Veronica Janssen, has built spaces—on a smaller scale—where viewers lose all visual anchor points (L’Espace Infini, 2002).
But in the end I present an image, rather than a physical experience. When exhibiting a photograph, I offer a visual experience which opens up a space for the viewer to negotiate, rather than manipulating the apprehension of that space. The artifact and document value (the fact that I was there, that I recorded the phenomenon on a piece of film, which is then projected again in a gallery space) is also important. Looking at photographs in an exhibition is a conventional ritual, and the viewer is not destabilized by it. But the abstraction lies more in the fact that these images depict a real event, which doesn’t seem to have a clear visual referent (in fact some images seem to be “empty”) and in the transformation of matter into light (the optical phenomenon of whiteout) and light into matter (the projection of the slide film: light passes through the film material and casts a ephemeral image unto the screen).

C & P: Has the work of any of the Light and Space artists from the 1960s/70s, such as James Turrell or Robert Irwin, influenced your artistic practice?
Geert: I admire the precision, poetry and singularity in Turell’s work very much.Through his work and interviews I was introduced to the concept of Ganzfeld. So, I can say I was influenced by James Turrell in an indirect way. But I would never dare to present a work in relation to his.

Sphinx, 2004

C & P: Your images are not a document of a specific place and time but instead they capture a feeling. You say, “I like to create works that are otherworldly and strange, I don’t see any point in presenting an exact reproduction of the facts as they occur.” What draws you to make an image of a certain place/object? What makes a place special and worthy of being photographed? Could you speak about the term “traumatic realism” which you use when referring to your own work.
Geert: I think I photograph the way I approach a place or what I project into it more than the actual place itself. The approach is conditioned by the history of that place, my personal affects or attachments, the nature of the light on that particular moment, etc. Even sensory qualities that never make it into the image, such as cold or silence, can play an important role.
I use traumatic realism not in a psychological way (unresolved and painful past), but rather in the medical sense of it: a fracture or breaking point. It’s the moment where fact (the place) and fiction (my projection) meet.

C & P: How do you scout out locations for future photo series? Do you research places on the internet? Do you ever randomly travel somewhere hoping to find something interesting to shoot?
Geert: I used to think of it in terms of serendipity only, to be on the road with a camera encountering people, places, and phenomena. In recent years, however, I have come to enjoy research and started planning my trips more efficiently. By getting older, it feels like time becomes more precious.

C & P: Many of your pictures are people-free, do you prefer to photograph places that are void of people?
Geert: There isn’t a deliberate plan or agenda behind this, but maybe by not depicting people in the image, this leaves the viewer more free to create a narrative for him or herself? Often when people are depicted in a landscape photograph, the figures become principal characters, and the reading of the image gets narrowed down to a few plausible story lines. When the space before you is blank and devoid of people, the viewer himself becomes the one that is “in” that place, and the photograph can function more as a self-reflexive tool. Like a mirror? I don’t know, this is speculation, but showing the space empty might invite the viewer to consider what she would do in such a place, when she is there alone.

Abyss, 2000

C & P: Your images are very painterly (partially because of the long exposure times you use when capturing the image to film) and the landscapes in many of your images bring to mind Caspar David Freidrich’s paintings. Is he an influence on you?
Geert: Long exposure is something inherent to photography and therefore hard to perceive by the human eye. Caspar David Friedrich could see different things in different moments and bring them together in his atelier whenever he liked. His work appears realistic but is in fact pure fiction, drawing on memory and imagination. As a photographer I have to deal with the actuality and singularity of the location, to which I add fiction. The painterly strategies I use are duration, hierarchical compositions, overall sharpness, and I ignore legible time references such as clouds or heavy shadows. By avoiding those, I get into a timeless time, which one could experience as a painterly quality.
Caspar David Friedrich continues to have a strong impact. His paintings have the quality of ideograms: they communicate very strongly, and are remembered instantly. The atmosphere in his paintings, his treatment of light and the dramatic compositions are exceptional, and I think they still have a huge influence on image makers today.

Futuro, 2002

Eugene’s Neighborhood, 2002

C & P: You have photographed forgotten structures that are (now) emblematic of the death of the utopian dream (of the 60s), such as Futuro—the prefabricated, transportable UFO ski cabin, now deserted in the forests of Finland. What attracts you to these structures? Are you interested in these objects as architectural oddities or are you more interested in what is left behind after the failure of an idea? Are you disappointed that the present time does not look as many imagined what “the future” would look like in the 1950s and 60s?
Geert: These structures were once vessels for the imagination, symbolic objects, and I believe they still carry that function. Even though the positivist belief in the future as a time where technology would solve most problems and bring comfort to all, has proved too optimistic, the gesture these objects present is something that I would like to honor.
Without wanting to be nostalgic, there seemed to be a window that enabled for big and generous thinking, this I value. There was a belief in transcending the limitations of the epoch, and a positive projection into the future. Many people now see this as hopelessly naive, but my feeling is that a skeptic or cynical outlook isn’t very constructive either. My intention is not to present them as failures of ideas, but as modern ruins, the embodiment of a past way of looking into the future. Even as they might be chronological remote, I think we can still connect to the bold spirit of progress.
The photograph of the Futuro has different layers for me. About ten years ago, Phaidon published a book called The Sixties, which focused on the design, architecture and fashion of that era. I looked through it and came upon a photo of the Futuro. Immediately when I saw this image, I remembered that I have seen that exact same photograph in a magazine when I was about 10-11 years old. My spontaneous reaction was: I wonder if it is still there? After some time I visited a friend in Finland, so I asked around and located the Futuro. We went on a search together and managed to find the plastic pavilion just before it got dark. The whole trip was like an adventure little boys have. On the other hand, when I show this photograph, everybody goes: “oh yes, a UFO”. Even though very few people would claim they ever saw a flying saucer, it has entered our language and consciousness through popular media. I am interested in how knowledge and awareness is shaped and mediated through fiction in cinema, TV, graphic novels and other sources. When I was young, television was a major input. Literature and music came later. So in a way this photograph is also a retracing and revisiting of images that were important for me then.
It is an endless loop: set designers develop models being used in cinema, SciFi authors have draftsmen compose space ships for their stories, a Finnish architect takes this archetypical shape as the basis for his real 3D design for a transportable cabin. Then forty years later a photographer passes by and renders this object flat again.

Liepaja, 2004

C & P: Could you tell me about the Liepaja image (from the Resonance series)? How did you come across this building? Do you know the history of the building? Is this a subject that you sought out or did you come to find this randomly?
I stumbled upon it accidentally when I was traveling through Lithuania with a friend.
Geert: The history was told to us by someone, but I haven’t verified it. It seems that this building was a bunker of the Red Army defending the port of Liepaja. When the Soviet Union collapsed, and Lithuania reclaimed its independence, it took a long time for all the troops to return to Russia. It was a painful episode: many Russians were assimilated and had build up close relations with Lithuanians over the years. A lot of families suddenly had to be relocated. When the Russian troops finally left the defense line to the Lithuanian army, the foundations of this bunker were dynamited, so it was severed from the land and it is slowly sinking into the sea.

C & P: What is your preferred way to show your work? When your work is shown in a gallery how important is size, scale, and sequencing?
Geert: The exhibition of my work is a specific situation where the parameters you describe are of utmost importance. I like very much to present the photographs in a dynamic tension with each other. The notion of images resonating, or different visual “force-fields” interfering with one another, is important in my approach to exhibition of my work.
In every exhibition I try to include at least one new work that hasn’t been presented before. And I deal quite specific with the architectural space and the flow of the spectator through this space. When it is a solo show, I always build a scale model and play with different selections and set-ups for some weeks. It is equally important as the editing process of a book I guess, and I like it a lot. Thinking out an exhibition gives me a lot of pleasure. After that, the practical and logistic side of organizing the works to be packed, shipped and installed is less stimulating.
I don’t have a preferred way of showing. Some pieces have their own form (like Whiteout, which is an analogue two-projector loop), some images exist only as a large format wallpaper, claiming a more monumental presence within space. And still other photographs are presented in a more traditional way: framed Lambda prints of about 100 x 125 cm.

C & P: Where can we find your portfolio website?
Geert: Here.

Palanga, 2000

modern witch

Sunday Night Music

modern witch website here.

My Barbarian

Tourists from the Future

An Evening with My Barbarian
Monday, April 16 (that’s tonight!), 7 PM, Theater 2, MoMA

Science-fiction new wave musicals, the selling of souls to witches, the culture of excess, alter-egos, Los Angeles cultural production, the middle class collapse—these all seem like topics worthy of discussion on a Monday night.

From MoMA’s website:
The Los Angeles–based performance collective My Barbarian—Malik Gaines (b. Visalia, California, 1973), Jade Gordon (b. Santa Rosa, California, 1975), and Alexandro Segade (b. San Diego, California, 1973)—combine their eclectic background in theater, theory, and contemporary art to create incisive, campy, site-specific plays, concerts, theatrical situations, and video installations. All three group members will be present to discuss their most recent works.More info here.

Silver Minds

Broke People’s Baroque Peoples’ Theater

Dance Witches Dance

Short interview with My Barbarian below.

Chelsea wanders

My favorites during my last Chelsea wander:

Yorgo Alexopoulus: Transmigrations at Cristin Tierney Galley

Stan Douglas: Disco Angola at David Zwirner

Michelangelo Pistoletto: Lavoro at Luhring Augustine

Jim Shaw at Metro Pictures

Afro Burri Fontana at Haunch of Venison

Ryan McNamara at Elizabeth Dee Gallery

Alan Shields, The Spirit Level at Gladstone Gallery

Sarah Lucas, The Spirit Level at Gladstone Gallery

Dianna Frid

Studio view of The Vertical Shadows in progress, Variable dimensions, Various mediums including paint, cloth, wood, cardboard, plaster and wax, 2008.

Cheap & Plastique interviews Chicago-based artist Dianna Frid for Issue 10.
See more of Ms. Frid’s work here.

C & P: You grew up in Mexico City and Vancouver, Canada, then went to undergrad and graduate school at the Art Institute of Chicago. Do you feel that being in Chicago influences your work at all? If so, how? Does it matter where you are for you to maintain an art practice?
Dianna: I was born in Mexico City and when I was a teenager my entire family moved to Vancouver, British Columbia. In a nutshell, the eventfulness of that move at that particular point in my development—from one culture to another, from one language to another, and from one perceptual space to another—is more significantly generative of my thinking as an artist than the city of Chicago has been up to now.
This may be a small thing, but important nonetheless: I remember that when I first moved to Chicago I could not relate to the flatness of the land. Many friends who grew up in the Midwest crave the openness of the prairies, but I have not had such craving; at least not yet. When I first arrived in Chicago, I could not understand how I was going to survive without mountains nearby: mountains as points of orientation but also as markers of comparative proportion, of geographical heterogeneity. But Lake Michigan and the big Midwestern sky became points of phenomenological reference. I think that wherever I may live, I would look for these types of points of reference. Like so many people with whom I went to school, I used to see myself as someone with one foot out of the Chicago door. It took a while, but now I can fathom life in Chicago as creatively challenging in the long term. In some ways Chicago can be very cosmopolitan: think of all the architectural landmarks in the city that are of both homegrown and international significance. At the same time Chicago can feel very regional; this can cut both ways, as insular or locally fulfilling and expansive.
As far as what I need in order to maintain an art practice, I need the confluence of a few things, all of which point to stability, stimulation and space. I have stepchildren (they are teenagers) and my husband is a professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago. The stability and stimulation that come from my family life help me maintain a discipline. They provide the foundation for the mental and physical space in which imaginative and critical work unfolds. Several years ago I began to teach at a public university, the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). I had gone to private schools, Hampshire College and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. My students at UIC are mostly commuters, unlike the students at the schools that I attended, who came from all parts of the North American hemisphere and beyond. I have learned the most about Chicago’s multiple identities from my students. Chicago is not just one definitive place or one cultural environment. The art scene here can be small, but it seems to be ever changing. And I have a great studio. I am very much a studio artist, so, wherever I go, I need a studio space to continue working.

Template #2 for The Forces that Shape Them, 9 x 15 inches, Cloth, adhesives, metal, graphite, 2009.

C & P: Tell me a little about the process of creating a new work. What inspires you to begin an artwork? Do you sketch out your ideas with a drawing first? Do you ever work a composition out on a computer before you begin to create your piece?
Dianna: I see much of what I do as drawing—in my use of thread and other kinds of linear elements, but also in my activation of materials in a combinatory way. That is, I see my works, the so-called end results, as splintering off from acts of drawing, even when there are no preliminary drawings to speak of. Having said that, sometimes I have an idea for years and it takes me that long to figure out how I want to execute it. This applies mainly to how I make my sewn artist’s books. For example, in the book The Waves, I remember reading years ago that in her novel of that name, Virginia Woolf wanted to explore rhythm rather than plot. That search for rhythm without plot in the foreground fully resonates with my thoughts on the structure of the book form itself.
I see the structure of the book as a site where movement yields to movement from one pair of pages to another. This produces a rhythm that may be altered according to the placement of elements—textual or otherwise—in the pages. What interests me is the conceivable emergence of movement through structure. It is like moving through architecture, but at another scale.
To answer your question in a more general sense, at the inception of a project, I engage directly with manual processes to generate structures and images. I begin by attending to concrete material properties and potentials; like I said, the filaments of thread, but also the strangely brittle robustness of plaster, or the lustrous shimmer of graphite. These properties are amplified in the dynamic tension of the results: I reconfigure and combine materials, and arrive at resolutions for which there is no prior blueprint or drawing. My process relies on both gained proficiency and spontaneous exploration, and it unfolds within the context of the studio. Like I said, for me the studio is a laboratory where I experiment and discover the multivalent possibilities of making art. Over time, I have come to realize that one of the reasons I make things by hand is to participate formally and critically in the voluptuousness of the materially proximate world. I use the word “voluptuousness” here in the sprit of Mario Rossi’s philosophical proposal: the great interests of man: air and light, the joy of having a body, the voluptuousness of looking.

C & P: Have you always explored time, death, space, clouds and weather, and ontology as subjects in your work? Does incorporating and working through such heavy themes and questions about the universe in your work help you to feel more at ease in daily life?
Dianna: Philosophical questions concerning the nature of reality and how we attempt to make sense of it are at the thematic core of my research. I believe that I am in good company, for these themes have concerned poets, theologians, skeptics, scientists, and artists for millennia. I do not categorize these themes as heavy or, for that matter, optimistic. Ontological questions are as perennial as questions about the origin of the universe and the relative brevity of human life in relation to geological time. I see these themes as factual and at the same time mysterious. My works are not illustrations of these themes. Instead, they are explorations into the nature of how these themes are given form. For example, on the one hand, there are the clouds in the sky. On the other hand, the clouds are part of a classification system created by human beings: the clouds are named and subsequently understood by these names. The themes of inscription (naming) and description of phenomena are part of what I explore. But I do not perceive them emotionally as heavy or light, scary or consoling. Having said that, all this might look emotionally different if, like in Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia, a planet was about to crash into the Earth and annihilate us.

Dislocation of Snow, 12 x 9 inches, Mixed media on paper, From the series Engines of Weather, 2008.

C & P: What factors into the process of selecting materials, size, and subject matter for a specific piece, since you work in so many mediums—sculpture, site-specific installation, collage, works on paper, painting, drawing, book arts, sewing?
Dianna: So much of my work amounts to the acknowledgement of materiality. Given that our humanity is manifested within a tangibly physical world, my research starts from the perspective of the material properties of this world. In my work, not only materials but also spaces are catalysts that, when activated, alert us to their physical presence and properties, to their—and our—phenomenological potentials. I suppose that I want to remain alert to such potentials, and thus to provoke self-reflectivity in relation to the sensuous, material world. As you point out, scales shift dramatically in my work, from the intimate scale of the hand-held book to site-specific architectural installations that can be entered. Each of these scales—and everything in between—does something different perceptually, materially, in relation to our subjectivity and our bodies.

C & P: You frequently work with materials which are associated with craft making and children’s art, such as colored construction paper, papier-mache, and cardboard. These materials are mostly thought of as ephemeral and flimsy but they can also be fragile and quite beautiful. Is there a particular reason why you began incorporating these materials into your work, what draws you to them? Do you like to use “throw-away” materials to contrast/counterbalance the very large themes which you are addressing in the work you are creating?
Dianna: I do not think of materials hierarchically and this is how I want my work to be positioned: sensuously but also politically. There is an assumption that we all see materials on a shared or unquestioned hierarchical scale. What is throw-away for someone may be generative in a very sophisticated way for me, or vice versa. There are many historical precedents for this. One important example can be found in the work of the artists who constituted the Arte Povera movement (not to mention the artists who influenced that movement such as Lucio Fontana and Antoni Tapies). Each of the Arte Povera artists is very different from the next, but they shared a clarity about eliminating material hierarchies. This was radical in the 1960’s, but it is curious that the question of hierarchy still pops up—I infer from this that the question is unresolved. There is so much noisy bling in art today that gets championed. Think of Damien Hirst’s diamond skull and there you have it: spectacle.
In addition to Arte Povera, I am drawn to off-center lineages of textile design and cloth. The question of craft is tangled up with questions of hierarchy, but also of categorization, of value, of labor, of functionality, of gender, and of tradition. This is why I find the general question irrelevant to my work: I make sculptures and drawings and books that do not, for instance, deal thematically with questions of gender or tradition. I do not make craft wares, even though much of what I make is the result of honing and un-honing what I know technically and manually vis-à-vis what I find intellectually stimulating. My work challenges any position that addresses the aesthetic dimension of art as superfluous. It is odd to me that intelligent people would think that the intellectual and the sensual are extricable from each other, as if work that gives pleasure and joy cannot also be smart and analytical.

Let Us First Deal With Air, 12 x 9 inches, Mixed media on paper, From the series Engines of Weather, 2008

C & P: Do you feel that by using the materials associated with children’s artmaking that you are creating a ‘world of wonder’ as you may have when younger, while playing with art materials —during a time when you were more innocent and less knowledgeable about the ways of the world? 
Dianna: I do not see my work as naïve or childlike. I do not think that any given materials belong to children or adults in general. Thought, analysis, the honing of skills, the deployment of materials to tackle complex ideas—these are all part of my long-term project and they did not emerge spontaneously out of thin air. The spontaneity you see in my work is honed. Besides, I do not think children are necessarily “innocent.” My work arrives at resolutions in very particular ways from project to project. I may not always know what I am doing, but this does not mean that I am “child-like” or an ingénue.

Untitled #4 (Refraction of Bolts), detail, 7 feet x 24 inches x 30 inches, Cardboard, wood, cloth, plaster, plastic paint and ink, paper, acrylic, wax, rubber and, papier-mache, From the series The Vertical Shadows, 2008.

C & P: Could you tell us a bit about the Vertical Shadows and Engines of Weather installation? What are these sculptural objects that populate the installation? Are they meant to represent architecture and/or phenomena related to the weather or both? Could you tell us a bit about the pieces Untitled #4 (Refraction of Bolts) and Untitled #2 (Cumulonimbus) specifically?
Dianna: The Vertical Shadows sculptures and The Engines of Weather 2-D collages are two related bodies of work that I first exhibited in 2008. I started to make the sculptures in 2006 after I got my current job teaching sculpture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I started to make the Vertical Shadows for many reasons but I confess that an important one had to do with the fact that if I was going to teach sculpture, I wanted to use my studio practice to revisit making sculpture in the most physical and in-the-round sense. For a while I had been looking at Brancusi’s use of the base. I was intrigued by the fact that sometimes it took him many years to pair up a constructed pediment with a particular cast or carving. He did this formally but also strategically as a separate but related way to control—to whatever extent—the framing of his smaller, materially finer, abstract figurations. One might think that my looking at Brancusi was a retro move, not only after the prevalence of the Duchampian ready-made that has become so ubiquitous, but also after all the critically challenging work from the 60s and 70s that broke away from earlier conventions of sculpture and situated art in the expanded field. I intuited that I needed to move non-linearly and interpretively towards Brancusi’s base. In retrospect I recognize that I wanted to think about the intersection of sculpture, pattern, architecture (think of mosaics and tiles), the miniature model, abstraction and representation. The Vertical Shadows became my vehicles for these multiple explorations. But before I had articulated all these things out loud, I simply started to make the bases with no sense of what they would, so to speak, support. I started to make shapes from geometrical solids (such as cubes and octahedrons), and these became the foundation for the stacked shapes that were to become the Vertical Shadows.
While I worked on these in a thematically open way, I was reading a book about the history of how clouds got their names. I have been interested in nomenclature and onomastics (the field of linguistics that looks at how places get their names) and I had already explored the subject of naming in earlier works (The Field from 2003; and the artist’s book The Ascents from 2001). Reading about how the clouds got their current names influenced the way the content of the pieces took form. Before 1803 it was commonly believed that there were hundreds of types of clouds. That year, the English amateur meteorologist Luke Howard published On the Modification of Clouds, which used a Latin taxonomy to establish three principal categories of clouds: cumulus, stratus and cirrus; and two subcategories: cirrostratus and stratocumulus. Nimbus was added later, to describe the potential of precipitation.
In any case, I started to make the bases first and the subject matter for the sculptures came later. I made a lot of horrible pieces that I threw away until I began to arrive at the overarching structure for the project. By the time I got to work on #4, The Refraction of Bolts, the cloud-like forms had moved downward into the edges of the base, and the bolts occupied the top. It is a sign that the subject of the work was decentralized, that the “what is the work about” question became less important and hopefully less over-determined.
For the Vertical Shadows I used materials, colors and patterns as a way to connect or relate the stacked volumes to each other, while still maintaining their modularity. It is not as if I was trying to use every color I could. I was trying to establish connections at the edges of each pattern and shape. I understood this from looking at how textiles and tiles are used in costuming and in architecture. Patterns complement each other, sometimes acting to create the illusion of volume, sometimes to generate sensual pleasure through a reiteration of form, sometimes by creating provocative clashes and disjunctions.
Building sculptures can take me a long time. I often have to plan aspects of a given work, for example its proportions, quite methodically. Or I must wait for plaster to dry. Or build something slowly only to find out that it fails and has to be re-built. The Engines of Weather are small works on paper that were rapid antidotes to the slowness of the sculptures. I had materials around the studio (like pieces of painted paper and sheets of metal with adhesives) and I began to make small two-dimensional diagrammatic abstractions with them. At times I would paint over an intricate pattern completely and start again, but I would leave a trace of the buried layer underneath. At other times the pieces seemed to happen spontaneously. I was fully submerged in making the two bodies of work simultaneously, so they clearly inflected each other. However, I approached the titling of the works quite differently. The titles of the sculptures are more or less descriptive of what you see. The titles of the Engines of Weather are evocations of the phenomena of weather and how it is described meteorologically. As someone who has studied how things and places get their names, I am definitely invested and implicated in the naming process through the titling of my works.

Sometimes Gather, Sometimes Disperse, and Sometimes Remain Motionless, 12 x 9 inches, Mixed media on paper, From the series Engines of Weather, 2008.

C & P: Are you attempting to make sense of the repetition of forms in the physical world with the patterns you create in your artwork? Do the patterns correlate to any theories or ideas about what makes up the universe (molecules, elementary particles, etc…)?
Dianna: We can address pattern from so many perspectives. There is the optical perspective, of course. Others have interpreted my work as a reflection of the patterns that occur in natural phenomena. But there is another way of addressing pattern. Pattern can be an index of a thought as well as of a manual process. Lately I have been reassessing the series of actions that I repeat again and again in the making of my work. These actions can be quite monotonous and boring. But after crossing a certain threshold of boredom I find that on the other side repetitive actions become trance-inducing. Embroidering, cutting, stacking, sanding, all of these repeated types of action can, at the best of moments, make time disappear or stretch. While making the work I have become interested in the possibility of getting to a place through the process where the “self” can get lost. It doesn’t happen all the time, but when it happens sometimes I can look at the work with some detachment and see with a clarity that I could not have anticipated or planned.

C & P: Text shows up frequently in your work, especially in your artist’s books. Have you had any graphic design or typography training? How do stories, or fragments of text, from popular media (such as a line from an obituary, a line from a classic work of literature or poem, a word from a dictionary, a touching newspaper story) make its way into one of your works?
Dianna: I did not have any formal graphic design training but early on I looked closely at how books are designed. The book is the perfect technology. I don’t think anything can be done to improve it, but much can be done within the parameters of its structure. Text and language unfold visually and/or temporally in a sequential way. In a book you can move backwards and in non-linear ways to disrupt or evade a sequence, while acknowledging that it is there at all times, in a physically tangible sense. I am drawn to how books make me self-aware of language’s materiality. The materiality of language is part of what I try to address in several of my artist’s books. The translation from one type of materiality to another is also part of what I think about when I use words taken from a page and then give them visual and conceptual import in a newly translated form. In the instances where I use words from, say, the Odyssey, my work merges appropriation and ekphrasis.

Page views from The Comets, Canvas, cloth, embroidery floss, aluminum, adhesives, paper, acrylic paint, Unique Book, 2011, Closed 11.25 x 6 inches; Open 11.25 x 11.75 inches.

C & P: You have been producing books since 1999. How many have you made? What are a couple of your favorites and what do you like about these books in particular? Could you discuss what The Artery Archives entail? 
Dianna: I began to make books circa 1992, as a way to give enduring form to ephemeral works that had been documented photographically. These included interviews and performance works that I did collaboratively when, for a very short spell of time, I lived in Oaxaca, Mexico in the early 1990s. I came up with the name Artery Archives at around that time. I cannot remember why I chose that name…something about the alliteration perhaps, in addition to the expansive meaning of the concept of an archive: where one book is only a part of a collective organism. To this date I think of my books as one larger work. When I moved to New York in 1995 (I lived in NY for little over four years) I did not have a studio space at first and making sewn sculptures—this is how I thought of the books—was a way of addressing topics of whatever magnitude at a small and intimate scale. I continue to make the books today, sometimes in bouts, sometimes with large pauses between one book and the next.

C & P: What artists would you cite as influences? Are there any modern abstract painters that you admire? What type of visual art are you most drawn to?
Dianna: I gravitate to the work of various artists, and am, if anything, drawn with even greater intensity to the work of writers. My experience reading and re-reading the books of Clarice Lispector remains an important point of reference and orientation. I am self-conscious that I am reading Lispector in translation (from Portuguese to English or Spanish) and such “reading-in-translation” is in itself also a valuable point of reference. As I said earlier, some of the Arte Povera artists remain important to me: Alighiero Boetti and Giuseppe Penone in particular. I was really interested in what Catherine de Zegher was doing curatorially at the Drawing Center, and her show “3 x Abstraction: New Methods of Drawing, Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz, Agnes Martin” was a revelation. So was her co-curated show “On Line” at MOMA from 2009. As far as contemporary artists, lately I have been looking at Serjei Jensen’s fabric paintings, at Phyllida Barlow’s and Karla Black’s sculptures and at Sheila Hicks’ tiny weavings.

The Wall House

C & P: Tell us a bit about your residency at The Wall House Foundation in Groningen, Netherlands?
Dianna: I spent a few weeks at the Wall House this summer to begin to imagine a project for the summer of 2013. The Wall House Foundation project, which is titled The Inside from the Inside, is a response to the architecture of the late John Hejduk, who designed the Wall House # 2 in 1972. Of the many theoretical houses that Hejduk designed, the Wall House # 2 is one of the few ever built (it was completed posthumously in 2001). Hejduk, who was also a poet and a draftsman, was deeply engaged with language and drawing as foundations for envisioning buildings. The Wall House generates questions about the relationship between drawing, poetic symbolism and what a dwelling can be; it also prompts me to address the connections between Hejduk’s imaginative conception of the house and the signals he left in it to encourage us to perceive space in mysterious ways.
At the center of my project is a large graphite wall installation. This three-floor drawing will act as an interior connective tissue between vertically stacked rooms. The rooms are only accessible by crossing a threshold marked by the wall that gives the building its name, and
by ascending or descending a staircase. My exhibition will be an intervention that models a different kind of link between “insides.” The artist’s books play an important role in conveying this interiority. Artist’s books, in their modest scale, can temporally “ingest” a person (I am borrowing the figurative use of ingestion from Hejduk). The traversal of an artist’s book is a sequential traversal of spaces. Like rooms in a building, the traversal of the book’s space is given meaning by the manner in which a sequence generates content.
Although I have made projects for architecture before—notably skylight and spectra for the 400 square meter atrium of the Neues Kunstforum in Cologne—The Inside from the Inside marks the first time that I will respond to a considerable architectural landmark. On the one hand, this is a rare opportunity to showcase a firmly researched and materially poetic dialogue with John Hejduk’s legacy. On the other hand, it will be a pivotal work that will allow me to join together facets of my practice—artist’s books, drawing, poetry and installation—within one unified site.

Untitled #3 (Fair Weather Cumulus, Fort), detail, Cardboard, wood, cloth, plaster, plastic paint and ink, paper, acrylic, wax, rubber and, papier-mache, From the series The Vertical Shadows, 2008.

C & P: What are your future plans. Do you have any shows coming up in Chicago, New York or beyond?
Dianna: Depending on funding the project at the Wall House may become large and involve other artists in an inter-disciplinary sense, so this is where most of my outward energies have been focused. However, I have started new work in the studio (some large drawings and smaller sculptures). While nothing is scheduled, I have been lucky that there is ongoing interest in showing my work both here and in New York in the near future. I do not like to repeat myself again and again, and this is why having a lot of time between exhibitions can be not only convenient but, above all, creatively important. This summer I will be making some new lithographs with Bud Shark, a master printer who has a studio outside of Lyons in Colorado. I have worked with Bud Shark before and have had one of my most satisfying collaborative experiences as an artist doing that. Before I worked with him I told him that I knew nothing about printmaking in general and lithography in particular; he told me that this is why he was interested in working with me.

C & P: What could you imagine doing if you did not create art?
Dianna: Horticulture. Or being a social worker. I suppose that being an art educator at a public university like UIC already in a sense involves aspects of both.

Untitled #5 (Strata and Halo), detail, Cardboard, wood, cloth, plaster, plastic paint and ink, paper, acrylic, wax, rubber and, papier-mache, From the series The Vertical Shadows, 2008.

Deedee Cheriel

Cheap & Plastique interviews Los Angeles-based artist Deedee Cheriel for Issue 10.
See more of Ms. Cheriel’s work here.

C & P: You live in L.A. How long have you lived there? What do you like most about living there?
Deedee: I do live in L.A., I moved from rainy Oregon. I love it here. There is so much amazing art coming out of L.A. right now, and there is a lot to do: hiking, biking, surfing, museums, different kinds of food…

C & P: Have you spent any time in NYC or on the East Coast? Does being on the West Coast inspire your work?
Deedee: I love New York! for some of the same reasons as L.A.— galleries, food, endless cool stuff to do, great public art, but I love the lightness and sunshine in L.A.. I definitely think my work has a lot of influence from Southern California, My work is really inspired by natural environments.

C & P: Do you feel that there is a lot of interesting artwork being created in L.A. right now?
Deedee: Yes, there are really great artists living and working here: Mel Kadel, Shepard Fairey, Retna. I love seeing new murals and how art is becoming more of a public thing once again, like it was in the 1940s when the populist culture of the Mexican mural spread to Los Angeles and the greater U.S..

C & P: Where did you grow up? Were you a creative youth?
Deedee: I grew up in Oregon, my mom was a school teacher, and my earliest memories are of sitting at a little desk and making stuff—drawing and gluing while my mom was cooking in the kitchen. My mom was also in school when I was little and I remember going to her classes and drawing during the lectures.

C & P: You started out designing record covers and t-shirts for Oregon’s music scene in the early 90s and you were also in a band. How did your past creative endeavors lead you to the artwork that you are creating now?
Deedee: The punk art of the 70s was really inspiring to me. I liked the iconic and simplistic imagery. I liked the messy silk screened look, so when I got into my first band I was so excited to start making shirts and record covers. We were very DIY, even carrying our silkscreen on the road to screen shirts for people at our shows to make gas money to get to the next gig. I think the DIY ethic of the times definitely made me the artist I am. I mean, there weren’t many other girls making weird art and hanging it in their local punk clubs and having art shows back then. There certainly weren’t cool galleries in Portland then, so I just was propelled by my own desire to create, and by the music I was listening to that inspired me to rebel against the norm.

C & P: What were some of the bands that you created artwork for in the 90s? Do you still create artwork for bands?
Deedee: I mostly made stuff for the bands that I was in Adickdid, The TeenAngels, Juned, The Hindi Guns and a few other local bands.

C & P: Does music influence your work?
Deedee: I like listening to music when I paint. I love listening to Jarvis Cocker’s Sunday Service on BBC radio on the internet, it is the highlight of my week when I am in the studio painting.

C & P: Could you talk about the repeated use of the bear image in your work? Who is this mysterious bear and why does he so often appear to be plagued with some sort of existential malaise, a la Munch’s The Scream? Is the bear pissed off at the world?
Deedee: Yes, and no… The bears have always symbolized the Buddhist idea that to desire is to suffer. I think I first started painting bears when I quit smoking, and I was constantly looking for something outside myself to fill up the emptiness left by overcoming that addiction. I quit drinking, smoking, drugs, all that stuff awhile ago. It was so dark, but the desire for things outside of myself— whether it is a piece of art, or a piece of cake, or to gossip—whatever the need is that is taking me out of the moment, that is making me suffer, is the thing that the bear symbolizes, so the bear is the perfect metaphor, the ceaseless unending desire that compels most people to consume, to over consume, to feed their addictions to stuff or drink or drugs. I think we can all relate.

C & P: Are the characters in your pictures purely fictional or are they based upon people you know?
Deedee: That is funny. I am largely driven to create out of pain, or maybe I use my work to solve problems. Recently I had a crush on this guy, who is now my boyfriend. I had told a couple of my close friends, who decided it was a competition of sorts. With no loyalty to the friendship I would watch from afar as they followed him around. It was so painful to watch the long term friendships disintegrate before my eyes, and walk away from this guy I liked, but I didn’t want to compete so I just decided to hang out elsewhere with other people. My sadness over losing the friendship and feelings of being betrayed and burned came out in this really petty way. I mean I couldn’t help feeling that the whole situation was very high schoolish and in high school I obsessively drew horses, and one of the girls had some horse like qualities (according to one of my friends) so I just started drawing all of these culty brainwashed girls as horses, following around and worshiping these masculine bear creatures. It was amazing how satisfying (albeit juvenile) to transform my crappy feelings into a whole body of work for a show.

C & P: Your illustrations are populated by creatures found primarily in the Pacific Northwest, have you always drawn these particular animals (the bear, the owl, large wild cats)? Are you a fan of exploring the woods and camping out in the wilderness? Have you ever come into contact with any of these animals in the wild?
Deedee: As a kid, my mom took us camping for weeks at a time. Some of my most fun memories are of hiking in the woods in Oregon, sitting naked in hot springs in the woods while it was raining. One time my brother and I found a headless cow upside down in a stream that had bear claw marks all over it, and we still stayed in the campground near where it happened that night. We used to live in a log cabin in Wyoming that bears would come near all the time, and I still hear owls up by my parents house when I go visit, so yeah, animals from the Pacific Northwest are a huge inspiration to me.

C & P: How did the tree creatures and animal human hybrids that are repeated in your work come to be?
Deedee: The first girl with a bird head was a caricature of this girl in Santiago, Chile. I was living there, painting and playing in bands. My bandmate lived on the 21st floor of this building, and we would sit around and drink wine and do lots of drugs and his skinny model girlfriend would wander around the apartment talking in a little high-pitched voice, she was like this little beautiful bird in a cage, living up above the dirty city!

C & P: Many of the characters in your work are involved in blatantly sexual acts, which bring to mind images you might see in the Kama Sutra or in a relief in a Hindu temple in India. Are these works an influence on your illustrations?
Deedee: I am half Indian, and have spent time in India visiting family, and was initially inspired by one of my trips to a temple in Southern India where there was some hardcore monkey on giraffe, on tiger on bear action. The relief carvings were painted some really vibrant colors. They lined the outer parameter of the inner sanctum of the temple. I studied Indian temple imagery in college, and those things tend to symbolize spiritual inter-connectedness, and fertility for the earth and the crops—plentitude, abundance, etc. I guess my thoughts on it, beside the fact each human desires that connectedness—both emotionally and spiritually—are that the sexual imagery is my response to the disconnectedness, anger, and violence that we are bombarded with on a daily basis in our culture.

C & P: Your work also seems to reference the patterns and colors found in Indian textiles. Does Indian culture influence your work? Have you spent time in India?
Deedee: I do spend time with my family in India when I can. I was really inspired by the feminist art of the 60s that used textile patterns as a way of bringing “women’s work” into high art. I like textile patterns, and think it is interesting that every culture has their own unique patterns.

C & P: Some of the characters in your portraits are dressed in traditional Indian clothing while in other works they are wearing high society gowns and look like they may have just walked off the lawn of a George Seurat painting. Are you interested in fashion? Why do these two styles appeal to you in particular?
Deedee: I like to play with the issues of class.

C & P: What is your process like when creating your work? Do you draw by hand? Do you use a computer when creating your pictures? Do you ever make silkscreen prints?
Deedee: I draw, no computer rendering. Yes, I have been doing a lot more printmaking because I feel it makes my work more accessible to people who can’t afford a painting.

C & P: You told me that you just finished a body of work for a show. Is it in L.A.?
Deedee: I have a show up at Merry Karnowsky Gallery in Los Angeles right now. I also have upcoming shows in Melbourne and in the UK.

C & P: Where can we find you on the world wide web?
Deedee: Here.