Steve Locke:  It’s weird because I knew you before I knew your work.  I think it was the Yvonne Rainer/Rob Storr talk at BU.  Afterwards, we had a bit of a chat and you told me about PAPER MONUMENT and were sweet enough to send me a few copies.  Because of that, I thought of you as a critical theory/curatorial sort of voice and this got reinforced when we (with Colleen Asper, Anoka Faruqee, and William Villalongo) worked together to create a response to the writings of Ken Johnson in the NYTimes.  I didn’t really know you as a painter until your project at the deCordova Biennial with Roger White.  It was the first time I had seen one of the Plaid Paintings, and I really responded to the way it troubled some of the ideas I had been fed about abstract painting.  I spent a lot of time looking at them and I could not figure out why they were so potent and so humble at the same time.  They so clearly have these references to domestic things like tablecloths (that I think you enhance by not stretching them).  They made me think of Mary Heilman where she presents something that looks mundane and upon closer inspection reveals a complex series of decisions that belie the simplicity of the image.  Like her paintings, the Plaids are really matter-of-fact and directly painted.  They don’t have pretensions of heroism and they completely deflate the notion of the “gestalt” that is promised by Modernist Painting and in this way, they start to tackle some of the same territory as Daniel Buren and some of the other artists in the Supports-Surfaces movement in France.  But beyond that moment, your paintings seem to be engaged in something much deeper that the limits of what painting can (and should) do.   I see tensions through out the work (between public/private; modest/heroic; institutional/domestic).  Which leads me to my question:

How does conflict play a role in what appears to be a deeply structured practice in the Plaid Paintings and how does it inform decisions about the separate but conjoined acts of painting and presentation?

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Dear Steve,

Plaid , 2013, acrylic on acrylic, 18×42″

I’m so glad you asked me about conflict in the plaids! At first I thought that was too strong a word, but you’re right—the various conflicts are always there.

Of course, on a material level, plaid emphasizes the interweaving of warp and weft, so in this sense it renders the conflict/confluence of fabric visible. This is what I like when I’m looking at plaid. Each area of color emerges from the two sets of threads, so any adjacent hues are of necessity half the same, half different. For me these ramifications are interesting precisely because the rule is always explicit, inherent in how the thing is made. The pattern is surprising because it’s programmatic. I read every plaid I see like a vernacular Sol Lewitt.

And then with plaid there are also the interwoven, so to speak, questions of location and origin, issues that occur in a different register of intersections and coordinates but are nevertheless part of the pattern. Many fabrics reference or evoke a place, but plaid is a special case because it is both so ubiquitous and so commonly associated with “clans”—Scottish and otherwise. Actually, the earliest known examples of plaid are from 3500 BC China, but most people think plaid comes from Scotland, so that is itself notable. And the Scottish part of the story is complex because the famous tartans came to prominence as part of a (ongoing) conflict with England. At the same time, plaid became such a dispersed pattern because the Scots helped colonize India, where cotton “madras” plaids were produced for distribution throughout the British Empire. And of course now we live in a global age where plaids are made all over the world and depending on the context and their particular qualities can reference a range of places from honky-tonks, country clubs, grunge shows, the board room—all the while signaling membership in various groups. So the conflicts present at that level interest me, too.

I came to Ohio from Ecuador at the age of six, so for me the encounter with plaids is bound up with realizing that it was a prep-school pattern. My mom taught second grade at a private school, and I got a lot of my clothes from the thrift store there, and I think it was a way for me to fit in with kids that had a lot more money than we did. Wearing the right plaids was a way to disguise both my foreignness and my relative poverty, so I experience plaid as a kind of camouflage as well, a way of fitting in. So the pattern carries all those conflicts for me—of class, of origin, of group membership and assimilation—in a personal way. Over the years, I amassed a large collection of plaid shirts, not all of them preppy, and came to wear the pattern almost exclusively, but for decades I was merely a collector, a self-taught connoisseur.

Plaid, 2015, acrylic on acrylic, 18×24″

So I had developed a certain expertise, but deciding to paint plaids didn’t come from that so much as from sensing that there was a kind of joke in it, something funny about a painting that was plainly abstract but also utterly recognizable. I enjoy the category conflict. Somehow if you go from monochrome to stripe to plaid, even though the progression makes perfect sense, plaid ends up being the punch line. If you picture it with Buren, and he is repeatedly calling “scene!” with the stripes, I just keep going, adding stripes in the other direction.

And I like how the representation doesn’t function in a straightforward way either: Is this plaid a painting of something? An artist I admire—someone who doesn’t associate his name with his work—was making copies of Mondrian paintings, after Mondrian had died, arguing that paintings of abstractions could not be abstractions themselves. As I did with Buren’s stripes, I wanted to take that question to a different place, to where it involved patterns from everyday life.

In terms of re-presentation, which was how my teacher Robert Reed insisted on pronouncing it, the painted plaid is a peculiar thing. You can’t actually interweave the paint, so the illusion of plaid involves layering, transparency, and a lot of guile in the way you choose and organize the colors. Eliminating the canvas was essential to this, as it allowed the paint itself to serve as its own ground. All my plaids are acrylic on acrylic, and I paint them front to back, so the first things I put down are the first things you see, and the gesso goes on last, to seal the back. (The reverse of conventional painting, where you cover things up as you go and the last thing you put down sits on top.) There is a tricky illusionistic system at play, but it’s also just overlapping paint presented directly, where everything I do is evident in the final result. So here too, in the process, I think the conflict between illusion and material reality is the generative force.

Works in the studio of Dushko Petrovich

Born in Quito, Ecuador, Dushko Petrovich is a New York-based artist, writer, editor, and teacher. He received his B.A. from Yale University and his M.F.A. from Boston University before going on to serve as the Starr Scholar (Artist-in-Residence) at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. He has exhibited his work at venues including the deCordova Museum, in Boston; Rachel Uffner Gallery, in New York; the Suburban, in Chicago; and the Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen.

His writing has appeared in periodicals such as Bookforum, Slate, Modern Painters, and the Boston Globe, among others. Petrovich is a co-founder of Paper Monument, where he has co-edited many publications, including I Like Your Work: Art and Etiquette and Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment. He also chaired the n+1 Foundation’s board of directors from 2013 to 2015. Petrovich currently teaches at Boston University, RISD, NYU, and Yale. His newest project, Adjunct Commuter Weekly, made its debut at ICA Boston in July.

Still from The Fullness of Time, 2008, MiniDV, 58 minutes. Pictured: Troi Bechet (Gigi)

SL: I rewatched The Fullness of Time (a Vimeo link to the film is here) the other night and I didn’t realize how much I needed to see it in light of contemporary events. Technologies have brought the state sponsored violence meted out to black people to a larger consciousness but seeing these images of black people killed over and over again has really started to wear at my psyche. It was a balm to see the heroine of Fullness because she is a model of how to survive trauma. Her response to the community and the music is the moment in the film that (still) brings me to tears. It’s not because it is a sign of an easy resolution, but it’s more like watching Orpheus leading Eurydice out of Hell. The camera is a witness to someone returning to the world of the living. For me, that moment is an indication of how art can touch the most wounded of places and, while it may not heal them, can allow us to find our way back to ourselves. It remains one of the few films about a trauma that doesn’t present the spectacle of black suffering. Which brings me to my question:

In a culture that denies or debases subjects and narratives outside of the dominant society, how do you create and sustain a practice of filmmaking informed by the idea of culture as a site of possibility and resistance?

Cauleen Smith: I hope this is ok. This film is hard for me to talk about.

The images in our heads that populate our imaginations and inform the way we experience the world come from some-where. Therefore, to my way of thinking, making images is a way to combat and revise the debased narrative subjectivity that you describe. So what that means is that my work is made with the understanding that it is rooted outside of the narratives of dominant society. In the margins of cultural production sustainability is a luxurious concern. Survival is the thing at stake. Now, I’m not crying, “Poor me. I’m on the margins.” I’m saying that the ground of the ideas in my films rest on the power and agency from that which is underneath and along the edges.

Cauleen Smith, Drawing for The Fullness of Time, ink on paper, 2007

I may have never told you about how I wrote the script for The Fullness of Time. Basically, I just listened. Eighty percent of the dialog you hear in that video is out of the mouths of friends and strangers. People just attempting to describe the experience of the cognitive estrangement one feels when you return to a place to find it there-but-not-there, familiar and yet totally alien. The disorientation is itself a wound. I felt that woundedness while I was there— in the people, in myself, in the land still recovering from “the waters.” Orpheus and Eurydice is such an apt metaphor, Steve. For one thing, it’s my favorite myth. And until now, I failed to recognize that I’d finally done my own adaptation! So thank you for that. Gigi finds herself at the bottom of the waters, sheltering herself in a hurricane-shattered swimming atrium. But she wanders and walks and constantly returns to the site of her loss until she is found, until she finds herself again.

Thomas Hirschhorn wisely eschews anecdotes relating to the production of his site-specific installations, but I offer this as an exhibit of the ways in which the margins are my main artery of material content and form. You know that scene in the church? We shot that completely off the cuff. I had not even met with my crew. I landed on a Saturday night, Paul (Chan) called me to share the news that a pastor that he’d been working with was planning to do a Sunday morning sermon on (Samuel) Beckett’s Waiting For Godot. So I called my crew, called Troi Bechet, the actor, and we all met for the first time in front of the church. My direction to Troi was something around the lines of, “Ok, this is the scene where you finally come home. You’ve been adrift, you’ve literally lost your mind, but now your mind is returning to you. Troi said, “Got it.”

My camerawomen claimed their respective corners of the church (competing for real estate with a French film crew!) and the Pastor began. You can see that he is an accomplished orator. He slowly and carefully escalates the passion and urgency of his compassionate message. And the message, remarkably intersects abiding faith with speculative predictions. The Pastor and his choir sing: “I change for you, you change for me, watch God change things…I see you in the future..and you look better…Be blessed!” I’m not a practicing Christian (in fact I’m always shocked, at upon entering a church, that I don’t burst into flames) but this moment, then and now, moves me has me in communion with the people in that church. The Pastor’s message projects us forward in time, past our contemporary suffering, into a future where we look better. I love that: You look better. Assigning dignity and love to the process of healing wounds is no small thing. This is what I learned from Pastor that day.

On a formal level, the music in the video is fused with three different spiritual/secular/social practices. The first sonic-psychic healing encounter is with the Uptown Mardi Gras Indians. The are terrestrial phantoms, grounded and real while accessing sounds and rhythms so old as to now only be known though our bodies. They gently rock her, console her, and then leave her with her grief, reshaped into something that she can now carry. Music does this for us all the time, right? This is the reason that my films are moving more closely towards imitating the procedures applied by improvisational musicians and away from those of filmmakers. In music are powerful structures and procedures that require no translation for the one who listens. I’m operating on faith and deed that the same can be true of images. Next, Gigi pulls herself together, and goes home; to church, where she is welcomed and comforted. The choir is full of joy, the Pastor embodies an earthbound kind of ecstasy. “Be Blessed!” Gigi raises her hand to the heavens and receives herself. Finally she can mourn and her final guides, The legendary Hot 8 Brass Band lead her from the world of the dead to the world of the living.

I’m trying to make images that communicate a generative power inside of the very thing we are trained to despise: blackness. Blackness as a western concept is so very remote and low that inhabiting it boomerangs us to the other side of white supremacy – the other side of death. So thanks Steve, for finding solace in watching a woman survive the worst things that can happen to a person even while we are forced, over and over again to watch black families do that very thing at the hands of state sanctioned violence. I still believe that if the images in our heads come from some-where, then why not have some of them come from a place that makes us lose our fear, find our love.

NOTE:  Cauleen will be in conversation with Rebecca Zorach and Pemon Rami on 17 November at MCA in Chicago, 6-7 pm.

Cauleen Smith is a an interdisciplinary artist whose work reflects upon the everyday possibilities of the imagination. Though operating in multiple materials and arenas, Smith roots her work firmly within the discourse of mid-twentieth century experimental film. Drawing from structuralism, third world cinema, and science fiction, Smith makes things that deploy the tactics of these disciplines while offering a phenomenological experience for spectators and participants. Smith’s films, objects, and installations have been featured in group exhibitions. Smith is based in Chicago and serves as faculty for the Vermont College of Fine Art low-residency MFA program.

i wash my feet for you, gouache and gum arabic on panel, 15×15″

Steve Locke:  When we were in grad school together you turned me on to the writings of Mira Schor.  In those writings,  I discovered a way of working that allowed me to investigate figuration at a time when that was actively discouraged. Also, because our interests in gender, depiction, and subjectivity have dovetailed over the years, it’s always exciting for me to see the ways you address these in your work.

I’ve always had a sense of seeing something from the inside out when I look at your work.  It’s not just the way things are, it’s more like a combination of all different streams of time that come together for a moment to make an image.  

What has been evident to me in your work is a tremendous amount of power and weight in objects and images.  Things float and fall, or they balance with formal elegance and a sense of danger.  Sometimes, like in Back in the Saddle they actually seem to destroy the subject with the elements of modernist design. There is a sense of tremendous violence in your work.  Not just in the imagery, but in the methods and materials.  Toxic pigments, handmade inks, sewing (or suturing), cutting, and reforming the work and the body (sometimes your own, as in Most Improved) in the work are the hallmarks of your practice.  At first I thought it was at odds with the sort of gendered traditions of home and then I realized how sexist my thinking was.  I also think, in this time of tremendous backlash against women, that the urgency of these actions are clearer to me.

How do you understand the use of power in your work, and how do you use materials and methods to convey its presence or absence?

Disquietude

my dear, gouache, oak gall ink and gold leaf on deer parchment, 18″x24″

The idea of power can have several meanings. It means there is an ability to do or act and that there is the capability of doing. It is also possible to understand the implication that one may have power over another’s ability to do or act. I have thought about these conditions for a very long time- much longer before realizing that I was someone who would make images and that an image could have consequence.

As a young girl I realized that power came with the ability to be heard.  And not only to be heard, but to be listened to and to be allowed to speak.  Within my family, I found it difficult to find space to have my voice heard; often being spoken over, ignored, or simply not finding a gap to enter into conversations.  It was clear to me that male words were valued more for some reason and it was maddening.  Rather than staying angry and fighting out loud, I retreated and realized there was a quiet power in being invisible.  There was something to being able to slip in and out of a situation and this realization has directly influenced how my images coalesce. Navigating a conversation has always been pivotal for me.  How much to add, how much to divulge, is it worth the energy, and more importantly when is the right time to interject are questions that still run tandem with my daily interactions.

The internal and external coexist through the tension of juxtaposed images in the same way a cool smile can belie the heat of anger in one’s gut. I don’t think I would have used the word ‘violent’ to describe my work but can see it now as you have described it. I think honesty can be violent and there is truth in humor.  This is where the poetry is found and a cliché can be revived through a visual image.

In depicting something specific, I have often wanted there to be an effortlessness in the final representation; a gloss of the process. I understand that the delicacy of watercolor washes and the exactness of details with gouache give credence to an image that may seem confrontational or aid its “tongue-in-cheekness.”

This quiet command of materials is akin to a woman’s wile- her smile and nod, a silent acquiescence. Painting on old stained vintage linens that were once napkins or placemats provides a context to confront my fears of motherhood, my doubts of wifehood, my femaleness.

More recently, my investigation and research into the origin of materials has allowed me to make work in which the ingredients have a direct bearing on the inherent meaning. Rather than only being a picture of something, these explorations hover between image and object. Now, when I choose a material, I think about its greater significance. This has given me the freedom to unapologetically embrace a variety of subjects. When I use oak gall ink that I have made, I know that it is permanent; but caustic, and will eventually ‘bite’ through the surface I’ve used it on. There are other inks that I use that I know will fade and disappear.

How language, words, and images are interwoven have always been important.  I love old paintings that have banners swirling through the composition declaring what is true or have a small note lovingly painted with the artist’s name. So beyond titles, I am using text in a much more direct way.  Right now I am working on a fresco panel with historic blue colors and the sole words, Forever is a long time, painted as the subject.

So, for me, power comes down to the idea of voice, of being heard, and choosing whether to scream or whisper.

Candice Smith Corby received her BFA in painting from Tyler School of Art and her MFA in painting from MassArt.  She is the gallery director at Stonehill College where she also teaches in the Visual and Performing Art Department.  She also combines her studio research with traditional material workshops offered, through the arts collective The Bottega (www.thebottega.it).  She is represented by the Miller Yezerski Gallery where she will have a solo exhibition in November 2015.  Her work is included in the collections of Fidelity Bank, Framingham State University, Wellington Investments, and Cosmit.  She has been the recipient of the MCC Fellowship in painting in 2008 and 2014, and an Awesome Grant in 2013.  She is included in 34 an exhibition on the Boston Harbor Islands as part of the Isles Arts Initiative.  The exhibition opens 26 July and Smith Corby’s work can be seen on Great Brewster Island. 

Nat Meade, Study (Plaid Pantry)

Steve Locke: I have been following your work since we met at Skowhegan 2009 (and I’m lucky enough to have one of your works on paper). I have always felt an affinity for your work not just because of the subject, but because of the qualities of the paintings themselves. You have a way of making images that appear to be simple but upon deeper investigation reveal themselves to be complex and layered in their realization and, by extension, their possible meanings. In an era when so much of painting is directly informed by the digital and the photographic, your paintings don’t just require a slow looking, they demand it. Because of this, your work rewards the viewer not just with an image but with a sensation. I mean this in the way that someone like Bridget Riley is interested in the effect of the painting on your eyes and your body. I get a sense of air, light, energy, heat, and physicality of space from these pictures. That does not happen a lot in contemporary painting the fact that it does in your work is a testament to your practice. In the current moment, you are making paintings that reveal and foreground their process without losing their integrity or importance as pictures. Pictures that illuminate the body as a site of contemplation, disappointment, extremity, or disbelief. Which lead me to my question:

In your painting practice, how do time and light (in both a real way and in a poetic way) influence the choices you make in depicting the body, its movements, and its locations?

Nat Meade: Light is another player or character in my work. I want it to be as tangible and, in a way, as physical as the figures and forms.

Around the time that we met I set out to change my approach to painting. I no longer wanted to make paintings that were referential and dependent on an external source. Instead I wanted to invent a painted moment- performative in its small and inward way. It was important that the images were discovered through their execution. The transition was difficult and for a long time I struggled to make anything satisfying. I needed parameters to make what I was doing challenging and tangible. I came up with a set of self-imposed rules and light became the constant player, a means of focus that also allows for playful discovery. Along these lines forms and figures have been reduced to simplified shapes in a shallow space. I can (hopefully) (more or less) predict how light might rake across the things I paint. I treat everything- light, color and form as a thing-just a stupid thing.

(Photos from Nat Meade’s studio by Jean Paul Gomez)

James Ensor has been described as employing an allegorical use of light. I only know what this means intuitively. It has to do with light asserting itself as a persistent actor. I see it in his work and want it in my own. There is directional lighting in all of my paintings-overly defined beams cutting through the composition, splitting figures, casting shadows, indifferently raking over faces. Color and light are closely linked. I like to assign the light areas a color and dark areas another: make the light areas yellowish and the dark areas green. My friend and artist Michael Brennan has said that “…[t]ime and light are made manifest in [my] work as color. Color as crumpled light.” I think I understand this intuitively as well. I like to build up opaque areas of light and emphasize the literal ridges of light and shadow. It is like repeatedly saying, “Here is the light AND here is the dark.”

Light can add drama and brevity. It can also conceal and ridicule. There is something inane about the cast shadow from a nose or a pair of eyeglasses. I like to zoom in on these moments. My subjects are meant be contradictory: elevated or beatific and buffoonish or absurd. I have been painting these bearded figures at three quarters view, a wedge for a nose, sometimes with gaping mouths like a hollowed out tree. They are these male stand-ins. I have recently realized that this goes back to an Antonio Frasconi print that was in my childhood home, a minimal woodcut of a bearded Walt Whitman with a triangle nose and series of dashes for a beard. It looked just like my dad. In my head the image was both God and Father, which were probably the same thing. On some level my work deals with this kind of elevated personage and its frailty.

I feel like this doesn’t exactly answer your question. Light is the constant character. Time and setting are frozen. And the body is reduced to its dumb, tangible parts so I can play with it like a Mr. Potato Head toy.

Thanks again for asking,
Nat

Find more of Nat Meade’s work at www.natmeade.com.

Anthony Palocci, Jr. Looking Up, 2015, oil on canvas, 60×96 inches. Studio view.

Steve Locke:  I think you are making some very challenging and gorgeous paintings, they were a high point of the last DeCordova Biennial. The ones that Lexi Lee Sullivan chose for that show married a haptic and almost brutal paint handling to elegant and bravura drawing. The result was spell binding. Like Vija Celmins, you managed to imbue everyday objects with an interior life. And at the same time, there was an assertion of modernist flatness and vivid surface that referenced Jasper Johns. Even the picture that Robert Moeller included in his pop up show, Yeah You Missed It, contained this dichotomy between the depicted and the felt.

My question is how does the idea of restraint inform your selection of imagery, your approach to color, and practice as a painter?

Anthony Palocci, Jr.:  It’s kind of funny for me to think about restraint. I haven’t thought about that in such depth until this question…

The first restraint I may have set up for myself was that whatever I painted must be manufactured. Whatever I paint cannot be organic or naturally occurring, it has to have been manipulated somehow. Whether it was built in a factory, sent through a meat grinder, or put through a mill, it’s got to be assembled by some form of fabrication. I think this focus stems from wanting to talk about people. I decided that I could say a lot more about people by painting images of the objects they created rather than depicting the people as themselves…

I used to paint a lot of people as people but there was a conflict of interest there because I didn’t want to talk about the individual. The individual was a very messy idea for me, something too complicated as one gets wrapped up in their story…Seeing someone in a painting, one identifies with that person as being of the same form and therefore empathizes with them; whoever they are, as they are depicted. At that point you’re too far into the painting for me…I needed to keep more of a distance between the painting and myself/the viewer/my audience…

By this “restraint” as you call it, I have boiled down my big ideas to the essential stuff I want to get at. By making a selection of a larger picture I eliminate everything else I don’t want to paint. I get distracted easily a
nd the world is such a vast place I need to discipline myself to hone in on one thing at a time. It’s really what keeps me grounded, to take one thing out of life and spend time with it. Even these objects have a story though, but it’s less literal than a person’s story because these objects are inanimate. They don’t have brains or blood. They have electricity, oil and motors. For now in my selection of imagery I have solved the first major problem I had as a painter, “What do I paint?”, and now I can get on with it…

Color is a whole other box of rocks. Color is so overwhelming to me now more so than ever because I am teaching color to students. Not only does one have to decide, “What do I paint?” but one must decide, “What Color do I use?” you could also ask, “How do I describe this?” or “Is it invented or observed?” and then there is the “Why then? How come?” to every answer you end up with…

I used to just grab any tube of paint that looked good at the time. Then that became problematic. Color is delicious and it is very easy to overindulge. Color is distracting because it is emotional. I can’t have color break my composure. For me it has always been a balance between the Venetians and the Florentines, Romanticism / Classicism, color / form, and painting / drawing. One can’t look at a form divorced from color. It’s a complicated issue for me.
My solution to this problem right now has been to work within the restraint of chromatic grays. And recently I have been drawn to objects composed of grays with parts made of plastics, metals and wires, so the shoe fits. I mostly work with either a warm or cool mixture of red and green with white added in for the shifts in value. That’s what goes on top. The under-painting is a whole other animal. I started using washy glazes of saturated colors as a ground so that the grays on top didn’t feel so dead (Nat Meade used to pick on my paintings in grad school because the grounds were left white, like the Impressionists). My under-paintings are color coordinated, differentiating the layers of spatial depth. Each painting is different but the most common use of the color is as follows:

Yellow = ground
Green = shadow
Red = light

Sometimes I mess with that, with blue, orange, and sometimes purple, just to see how the gray will behave on top. The same color gray will look different on top of a red than it does to a yellow or green, and in that, the same gray becomes a different gray. There are so many variations within these limits I feel like this is merely the starting point for me in my exploration of color. But for now, this is how I am making sense of things.

As far as my practice is concerned…it comes down to discipline again. I know I have to do certain things before I get down to business and waste a lot of material, so I have to come up with plans before I begin a painting. Every big painting starts off as a series of sketches. They can be formal or informal; on bar napkins or paper, whatever is available when I get an idea for a painting. From that point if I want more from that idea I make a small sized gouache painting and start thinking about how to conceive of the image and what to do with the paint. One thing leads to the next and I decide a size appropriate for the scale of the image and go. A lot of the time the larger paintings lead to smaller works as well. One part might strike me as worthy of more time or a separate canvas, so that spills out onto other surfaces. Keeping this part open for exploration helps me maintain an interest in any given subject. The deeper I can go into one thing, the more I can get out of it, the more I figure out, and all the while I am generating more paintings so I don’t feel like I’m wasting time on a big blow out.

Lately I’ve been returning to the image of the window fan I had hung in DeCordova. I wasn’t satisfied with my depiction of it. For a long time I would try and see how something was made, and then sort of internalize that form and make a painting of it. Now I am trying to keep it more true to what I am looking at, more observation and study of the thing itself. I’ve come to be more invested in the work as a result. Now I feel as though I am manufacturing these things. I observe, disassemble, and reassemble the objects. I’m also becoming interested in the situations one might find these objects in. The painting you cited in Yeah You Missed It is that same fan from the DeCordova but in one point perspective and with a window screen on top of it… The painting fools with perception. When you look at this painting you are looking at a small selection of a scene. Looking up from the ground outside an apartment to the second floor window where the fan is. I’ve cropped out everything but the space with the fan in it. Due to the perspective a lot of the object is obscured by the screen in front of it and the painting starts to take on different roles. It’s an illusion of space and it’s flat, like that Modernist thing you described. The tactility of the paint also helps with that. The painting asks a lot of questions at the same time and contradicts itself.

Installation view of Yeah, You Missed It, curated by Robert Moeller, at the Mills Gallery, Boston Center for the arts.
On wall: Palocci’s Looking Up. (Sculpture by Antoniadis and Stone.)

The restraints of this one object lead me to this strange selection of that scene and it is leading to even more. Restraints aren’t really restricting. I feel that restriction can be liberating, as it forces one into focus. It just takes a while to find that focus.

Talk soon,

Tony

Matthew Gamber, Blue Birds Exhibit, Gelatin silver print, 2010 from the series Any Color You Like

SL: I was a big fan of the work you had at the previous deCordova Biennial.  That work, titled Any Color You Like, did something so immediate and captivating that I am still thinking about it. You hear a lot of talk about audience engagement and interactivity in contemporary art but in all honestly, I am always wary of an artist that tries to involve me in their work.  The current vein of participatory/relational art seems oddly about spectacle and distraction (I think of Carsten Holler’s Experience at the New Museum).  But your work involved me in a visceral way.  I found myself really engaging and imagining what the situation posited in the photographs would be in “reality.”  I was determined to understand what had been lost in these images, namely, their color.  I got tremendously invested in what I thought I was seeing and what I was claiming and naming, so much so that I was completely dumbstruck that someone else had a completely different understanding of what was being imaged.  I could not recall the last time an artwork sparked this kind of internal and external disagreement about what it clearly pictured.  I remember thinking that I was more involved with what I was looking at than I had been in a long time.  It was really satisfying.

The current work requires that same attention from me.  Presented with all of photography’s indexical power, the photos seem to be empirical, almost like data.  But in the looking they unravel and unfold into a larger, less stable proposition.  They use presence AND absence to do this and that leads me to my question:

How do the poetics of loss, the nature of objects, and implications of nostalgia inform your photographic practice?

MG:  When someone asks me what my photography is, my best (and most unsure) answer is academic photography. My interest lies in trying to understand how camera technology led to certain conventions in seeing—a history of photographic methodologies. The best way for me to participate in this discussion is to make artwork that probes these conventions through a series of orthodox methods (utilizing processes faithfully, but in way that would be incorrect).

A black-and-white photograph is a signifier of data, information, and history (including mystery and drama). It is also a signifier of the past, and more potently, a site for nostalgia. Marshall McLuhan described nostalgia as a loss of identity—defining the present as reenactment of past forms. Are notions of photographic truth fueled by uncertainty within the present tense? Is it possible to create a black-and-white photograph today whose value is not based in latent nostalgia?

The photographs of Any Color You Like require interaction with a viewer’s own expectations. Is it possible to describe color verbally? Does it require prior knowledge of color to be able to describe it? These images involve language to reconcile the missing content within the pictures. The desire for color creates vacuum in which one seeks to restore any of the possible colors missing in the photographs. Historical color is imaginary.

Matthew Gamber’s work is on view in a two-person exhibition at the Hagedorn Foundation Gallery, in Atlanta, Georgia.  The show, also featuring Peter Bahouth, is called New Takes and is on view from November 13, 2014–January 10, 2015.  

Installation view of Another Utopia, at LaMontagne Gallery, Boston

SL: First off, congratulations again on Another Utopia at LaMontagne. I was looking forward to seeing new work from you. When I was at the gallery, I said to someone, “I knew this was going to be good, but I really didn’t expect it to be this good!” It’s always a treat to see your work but to see you change up so many things and present sculpture that had so much going on was refreshing. The work breathed into the existing modernist gestalt a sense of urgency. It felt like the perfect work to address current ecological concerns and it does this with a precision and a focus that belies a lot of the current “environmental art.”

The work is not an emotional cry or an accusation. It feels more like a desperate but reasoned attempt to make sense of something. In this way, it reminds me of your practice where I feel you making the work of a persona. Whether it is Huck Stoddard or the exquisite Bathyscape sculptures and performances, I had always had a sense of an organizing intelligence in your work that was, if not directing the action, providing the aesthetic sensibility that oversaw production. But the shifts in your work (embracing characteristics from science, fly fishing, deep sea exploration, farming) have never felt calculated. In fact, they have felt like an emotional positioning expressed via your broad and deep investigation of materials. For an artist whose work so clearly talks about risk, danger, and vulnerability, especially of the male subject, there is often little discussion of how your work is about the roles of men and how they change over time and in relationships.

What influences your choices in methods and materials and how are these choices linked to theoretical concerns (i.e. feminism, ecology, psychology) and/or personal discoveries as an artist and as a man?

Andrew Mowbray: Dear Steve, Your articulate and well-crafted question has been a struggle for me. It is the one subject in my work that I have chosen not to focus on in recent years. Your kind words and intelligent observations of Another Utopia are sweet and I would expect no less from you. Thank You! Please excuse the delayed response. If I could easily write about this stuff I wouldn’t bother making it.

In the recent past I was always hyper aware of the materials and construction methods I used, from their history to their popular use and also acknowledging the people who worked with the materials and their physical and emotional relationship to them both historically and in the present. Inherently I began subverting these traditional notions and paradigms of material specification in relationship to history, class and gender. This led me to plastic as a material for creation. It has less baggage, it is “new” and “synthetic” It is everywhere around us all the time, yet we don’t want to acknowledge it, so we design it and color it to represent and imitate so many other materials. Plastic doesn’t have a rich history, it didn’t grow in an ancient forest and it wasn’t forged from rare minerals. It is trash and it is often ugly and tough to work with. Plastic is neither warm nor cold and both neutral and sterile. Plastic is brilliant and dumb. It has no class.

Beyond materials my motivation with creating has never been to make something clever or a statement that pushes buttons. For instance, when I did the performance, Just for Men, in 2005 at the Boston Center for the Arts I wanted it to have an understanding, a contemporary conversation, or new male counterbalance to Janine Antoni’s Loving Care 1992, a work I strongly admired. After this and my work Bathyscape from the same year, I started to feel like the guy who deals with “white straight contemporary masculinity”, a group and history that in the past I had felt guilty about being unwillingly linked to. At the time I was interested in the potential for a new paradigm shift, no more 1950’s social gender roles. Some thought it was an entertaining issue, like “stay at home dads” “that’s cute”, so I backed off and choose to place these elements and ideas in the background of my work.

Moving on: The methods I employ have always been rooted in a genuine interest in craft or experience (I like to sew and make quilts, garden and cook). Sometimes people associate these aspects with a particular gender, and I often did too. I still think about these issues, a lot because they are important. Feminism, race, class and gender issues still have a long way to go but overall everybody just needs to try and understand, have some empathy, and think. Yes, I am a man but more than that I am an individual. This being said depending where we are as individuals, we may serve as both representatives and representations of the characteristics that people feel describe us, especially when we are minorities in a crowd. (I could go into personal experience stories now but I won’t, that’s it.) With these thoughts, Another Utopia was partially about all of the forms getting along, no material or construction hierarchy and physically all growing and fitting together with their neighboring forms.

Another Utopia started with a cucumber that grew into our garden fence and with some frustration from the overuse of the words “sustainable” and “green”, this led to growing birdhouse gourds in modular forms. From that point on it has been four years into an incredibly organic process that is just at the beginning. I started this very rudimentary process with simple forms and mostly grown or found and reclaimed materials, and no expectations, just asking: Can it do this? What else can it do? What can it be? What else? What will it be next?

To sum it up, I mentioned earlier that I am a man and recently now I am also a father. Lots of people have babies and children and some choose to create work about this experience. I have not felt an urge to collaborate with my child in a formal “art” way. The one thing having a child has changed is my thinking about making. It is no longer about me just navel gazing my issues. I am now an official tour guide and ambassador for this person. I choose to create and show her a world with the potential for good.

Best, Andy

Andrew Mowbray is a Boston-based artist who holds an BFA in Sculpture from Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from Cranbrook.  Another Utopia was on view at LaMontagne Gallery 9 November-21 December 2013 and is reviewed in ART IN AMERICA by Francine Koslow Miller. He has received grants from the LEF Foundation, Massachusetts Cultural Council, and from Wellesley College, where he is currently a Visiting Lecturer in the Art Department. 

Bull in the Ring, 2008
Performance video – banned drill, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Produced by Brad L Cooper
WITH the players of LCFL semi-pro football
Photo by Marshall Astor

Steve Locke: The first works I had seen of yours were the Invisible Man series and I’ve seen a few of the fighting performances. They are quite brutal (I’m thinking especially of Bull in the Ring.) The sheer athleticism of those performances meshes uncomfortably with the raw physical fact of them. In watching your work, I am always amazed at the effect it has on the spectators. I have seen you turn a room of well-heeled art world types into a mass of people screaming for blood despite themselves. The work, sited as it is in (sometimes literal) arenas of masculine performance permits a certain level of spectatorial pleasure in watching the violence meted out at you, or rather at your “El C” persona. It was fascinating to see people forced to deal with how much they wanted to see you hurt, especially in the performance where the act of failure or loss is involved. The work goes on a journey of display and bravado to times of bone crushing defeat and impotence. Unlike Matthew Barney, whose masculine performances seem theatrical (and thus, unreal) to me, and unlike Bob Flanagan, whose masochism seemed rooted in exercising some control over his body, your work seems to inhabit and utilize masculinity as a site of investigation of personal and public limits and social desires. Sports are one of the few social spaces with a prevalence of black and brown male bodies. These are examined and exchanged, and are cheered for their for power and discarded when they are no longer able to perform. Which brings me to my question:

How does your work affirm and critique the social desire for the evaluation, elevation, and destruction of the black/brown male body?

Shaun Leonardo:  Most interviewers do not have the balls, so to speak, to ask me such a poignant question, so I promise to give you an equally real answer.

A journalist once attempted to compare my work to that of Matthew Barney’s. At which point I felt I could not submit to her line of questioning. “Fundamentally, my work cannot be compared to Mathew Barney’s.” “Why not?” she asked. “Because I am not white…”

That is to say that I acknowledge that the exhibition of my body, in sport or otherwise, plays within a system and cycle of (mis)representation that has and continues to use, ridicule, and distort the image of the black body. My body, or at least the perception of my body, is not always my own.

It is not a coincidence that I’ve chosen the spectacle of fighting as one of my primary vehicles of expression – the sweat of the dark-skinned, male body cloaked under the suggestion of “athleticism;” this body beaten and battered under the suggestion of “aggression;” and the animal behavior of this body (I’ve wrestled in a cage haven’t I?) under the suggestion of “intensity.”

El C vs…., 2008
Photo by Gabriel Fowler

As you stated so well, I take on the uncomfortable reality that within the span of 10 min., 1 hr, 3hrs…. I can provide people a hero, only to experience them wish for that hero to be torn down. We are ingrained with the desire to see the black athlete achieve champion-hood, but are equally thrilled to see that same person self-destruct. What we do not honestly accept is that we all have a role in creating that narrative – he can’t win, win… keep this spic/nigga boy running. Sometimes, a portion of the audience wishes for the hero to be upheld or reborn, because, I suspect, many of us are exhausted of witnessing (societally-induced) failure.

I am most successful when I am able to have the audience note their own place within the performance – the how and why they’ve handed themselves over to such a spectacle. We all know how to participate, whether consciously or not, in the metaphorical and literal arena of violence. This is precisely why it is so necessary for me to disrupt the performance at its very end – to remove the mask and reveal my humanity. It is only then that I may reclaim my identity, and also only then when I may, in utmost hope, reach my objective of having the viewer observe him/herself.

The ‘evaluation’ aspect of your question excites me most but in an indirect sense. It is no accident that following much of my performance work, members of the audience (if he/she does not have the intention of trying to sleep with me) have a difficult time approaching me. Is it that they are embarrassed of what they have subjected themselves to or the manner in which they behaved? Or maybe, immediately following a performance, the veil is not yet pulled from their eyes—I continue to be a mirror to their desires and prejudices and, in that, they are too frightened to confront themselves.

Shaun Leonardo is a Brooklyn-based artist from Queens, New York City. He received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and has received awards from Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; The New York Studio School; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council; Art Matters; New York Foundation for the Arts; McColl Center for Visual Art; Franklin Furnace; and The Jerome Foundation. His work has been presented internationally with recent solo exhibitions in New York City. He was included in Radical Presence NY: Black Performance in Contemporary Art at the Studio Museum in Harlem.  In Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 28 February 2014, he will perform One-on-Ones with two members of the Harvard Crimson Football Team.  Images and videos of his work can be found online at elcleonardo.com.

Double Painter 3
graphite, acrylic, oil, alkyd, spray paint on paper, 50” x 100”, 2013

SL: As I have watched your work over the years, I am truly stunned by your painterly invention and your use of material. With a complete embrace of differing and often competing painterly and artistic styles-from still life, to appropriation, to expressionist mark making-you consistently and surprisingly create complex painterly fictions based on what you refer to as “discredited” texts. In the current work, based on (William Shakespeare’s) Timon Of Athens, you have moved into performance and music as well, but I see these as extensions of a painterly practice and this leads me to my question. This commitment to using paint and eschewing other methods that would make the work easier to produce does not seem to be strategic in your work. It reveals itself as a deep commitment to the practice of painting; I would even go as far to say that you have an “ethics of painting.”

I am wondering how what I sense to be an ethical commitment to painting informs the development of the kinds of imagery that appears in Timon of Athens.

CD: Steve, Thank you for such a plump and thoughtful question.

I made a previous wobbly attempt to respond to the part regarding an ethics of painting. I’m now sitting in a coffee shop in Atlanta with a pencil and a sketchbook, formulating a new answer. I’m flanked at the counter by a pale woman quietly playing Hey Ya! on a ukulele, in a way Andre 3000 might not recognize. There’s a painted mural on one wall depicting a sea monster drinking coffee through its tentacle-trunk. Three young men have laptops connected to outlets by power cords that in this context look like feeding tubes. And the young woman who poured my coffee has a tattoo of a radio tower on her thin left arm. I ask her if it’s a specific radio tower and she says, “No I drew it. It doesn’t exist.” Somehow this all seems relevant.

So as I prepare to answer your question properly this time, I have to admit that it never occurred to me to consider my attitude toward painting as an “ethics.” But I realize that it is, though perhaps not in an obvious way. The unexpected mutability and mobility that painting provides are both core qualities to me. Painting always has one foot in the 15th-century and one foot in the current moment, and its tools are mostly slow, inefficient, and difficult to learn. These generally discredited qualities are the ones I like the most. This is probably why one of my favorite paintings is Picabia’s The Handsome Porkbutcher.

Thomas Lawson wrote an essay in 1981 called “Last Exit: Painting” where he suggests that conceptually savvy artists transplant their artistic agendas into the discourse of painting. His logic was that the entrenched audience and a marketplace for painting made it a perfect location for transgression. However, as time has passed it’s increasingly doubtful that conceptually based transgression is going to make anyone’s day. But the important subtext of Lawson’s essay is that painting is infinitely adaptable with an inherent ability to purloin from other media. Then in 2000 Douglas Fogle curated an exhibition called Painting at the Edge of the World, whose catalog essay compares painting to a virus due to its capacity to continually mutate in response to new challenges, returning more resilient each time. I am convinced that the anachronistic materiality of painting allows it—like the simplicity of a virus—to acquire data from other disciplines and constantly recalibrate its own status. Mutability equals survival, and painting’s dogged shape-shifting capacity provides a durable artistic vehicle for me, and one seemingly without limit.

Mobility is another issue, and painting provides it in multiple ways. First, painting can be a portable, mobile orphan tumbling though time into a sequence of unpredictable environments, the eternal outsider. But there’s another type of mobility that’s even more important to me. Painting remains buoyantly resistant to the seduction of new technologies that only promise additional new technologies. As you say in your question, I could make work that’s “easier to produce.” But to do so would diminish my own self-reliance and hook me into a system of technological life support that reduces my mobility, just like the men here whose laptop cords prevent them from roaming the room as freely as I can with my paper.

It’s even worse when artists mechanize their artistic thought processes. The machine aesthetic values speed, efficiency, and predictability. It produces urges where there were none, such as the urge to partition the past and make it as orderly as cutlets. It can soothe artists into believing they can anticipate the future to make it less indeterminate and frightening. I might love Sol LeWitt, but I hate the way the working method for his wall drawings turned art into computer programming: the successful completion of instructional sequences producing identical outputs. This creates the illusion that the future should be knowable, that one should only produce artwork according to prior plans within predictable time frames. This always strikes me as a poisonous mindset and one that would never allow for the creation of a piece like Picabia’s The Handsome Porkbutcher.

In 1981 Rene Ricard wrote an essay called “Radiant Child” that correctly describes graffiti as a form of painting suited to the (then) contemporary moment because it transformed artists’ names into recognizable brands. It’s a grim trajectory to watch the modernist quest for a subjective signature style morph into an ‘80’s desire for artist branding. Any artist who avoids experimentation because it might disrupt their brand identity has agreed to willful immobilization. I gravitate toward artists whose unpredictable movements make them difficult to brand, as with Picabia’s The Handsome Porkbutcher.

When I started the Timon of Athens project, I did so because wanted the continual discomfort of making paint do new things. And I wanted to treat a 400-year old play like it was current, relevant, and obvious. When deciding to make different types of painting for each character in the play, I purposefully avoided a full plan of action. The heterogenous practice I initially wanted unfolds itself intuitively as I continually fatten it with new work. The constant change from character to character also removes the expectation of stylistic consistency, and deposits me outside the corral of a solidly recognizable brand. (If anything, I constitute a corruption of the Shakespeare brand.) I move though the characters in no order and with no narrative goal. I make a different number of works for each character. Some characters might produce fifty pieces. Others might produce one. I’m careful to advance without strategy, instead creating a mental environment where thinking, as (Jean-François) Lyotard says, “…Is almost no more than letting a givable come towards you.”¹ This way of thinking through paint provides me the combination of discipline and freedom that I find necessary as an artist. The continual drive toward skill acquisition can be demanding, but so was smearing out a bison on a cave wall. And so is butchering pork.

Painting is both fast and slow, one of the oldest art techniques and one that’s continually renewed. It has a creative template that accepts that if something can be imagined, it can be made visible—which is now the standard operating system for photography, video, and film as well. Painting permits its users to hold disparate thoughts at the same time, the way theatergoers can recognize Meryl Streep onstage while also completely believing the character she portrays. The strip of wood depicted at the bottom of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna is both simple paint on canvas, and also the coffin of Pope Sixtus. It is both. The pantied crotches in a Balthus painting or in Alice Neel’s Wellesley Girls are both incidental slippages, and not. A scrap of paper really can be a portrait of Iris Clert. And not.

The marks I’ve made on this paper may outlast this coffee shop, its mural, its ukulele player, its underfed barista, and me. It may outlast the laptops in the room and the computer screens on which readers will eventually see my notes transcribed. This is the mutability and mobility that painting provides me, a nourishing code of ethics fed by the likes of Picabia’s The Handsome Porkbutcher.

Craig Drennen

¹Lyotard, Jean-Francois (trans. G. Bennington & R. Bowlby). “The Inhuman: Reflections on Time.” Stanford University Press. 1991. p. 18.

Craig Drennen is an artist based in Atlanta, GA. He is represented by Samsøn in Boston and Saltworks in Atlanta. His most recent solo exhibition was at Ellen de Bruijne Projects in Amsterdam, and he is currently featured in the “SCORE” exhibition at MOCA GA in Atlanta. His work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, and The New York Times. He teaches drawing and painting at Georgia State University, served as dean of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and is on the board of Art Papers magazine. He has worked in the exhibition departments of the Guggenheim Museum, the Jewish Museum, and the International Center of Photography, and others. Since 2008 he has organized his studio practice around Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens.

HUSH
2011
Performance (still)

SL: I was introduced to your work when we were participants together at Skowhegan in 2002. You did a pair of performances that were very difficult on the viewers and very hard, physically and emotionally on you. I had never really experienced that level of commitment in a performance and I was quite terrified and thrilled at the same time. It’s stays with me to this day and it really was a profound part of my education as an artist to see that level of commitment and fearlessness, especially knowing afterward how terrified you were to do the performances.

I also love on your website that you talk about the audience (“The work I make isn’t exactly for everyone. Or maybe it is. Maybe it’s just the idea that the “everyone” that I’m talking about is not the “everyone” that is counted as important. Maybe its because I’ve made work about the folks we don’t see… “)

HUSH is a work that resonates with me for the same reasons your Skowhegan performances did. There is a radical vulnerability in the work, even by what I like to call “post-Marina” and “post-Andrea Fraser” standards. I struggle with seeing a Latina in a bed, there for other people’s “use” and yet, it can be a very tender and amazing interaction. There is also this internal journey that you go on that produces this kind of automatic writing that is unfiltered and becomes almost ornamental. I have to say, watching you do the writing is powerful. You talk to yourself, yell, scream, laugh as you are doing it. The authenticity of your immersion in those moments removes any theatrical distance and complicates the role of the viewer. I am a witness to this external manifestation of your internal experience. Which leads me to my question:

Do you see radical vulnerability and the internal journeys it can produce as a model for understanding how we exist in contested space(s)?

WRO: Could you just clarify the phrase Contested spaces?

SL: I think of contested spaces as areas we have to work together to navigate. As a black man, that can be Barneys.

WRO: In the spirit of Radical vulnerability, I open my response with admitting that I have been terrified to answer this question. Sat and read it ten times. Twenty times. Labored over each consonant and vowel. Gasped in awe over the brilliance in your writing, and wondered: could I even begin to posture my actions as something radically vulnerable? Do I have the authority to talk about my crazy ass processes for expressing that which a painting or drawing, from my hands, cannot harness, and claim that it can be considered a model for understanding our existence in contested spaces? Commence Panic Attack in 5- 4- 3- 2- 1….

The answer, to me, lies in understanding that vulnerability is the greatest test of strength. Anyone is brave when armed with heavy artillery and a healthy knowledge of their opposition. Its what makes the David vs Goliath formula so fascinating to us. Armed with only a slingshot and strong convictions, David takes down Goliath. Martin Luther King, Jr. mobilized a nation with little more than his words and his faith.

Just before I took my place in bed for the HUSH performances, I spent some time praying for clarity and wisdom. Reminded myself of why I was doing what I was doing. That I was placing myself in the bed because I wanted to heal. I wanted to heal myself from a deep loneliness that was consuming me. I knew that if I was feeling this, surely others were as well. I wanted to heal. I wanted to stop hurting. I remembered hearing somewhere that Love is the one thing that keeps growing the more of it you give away. I prayed to be clear in my heart, and wise in my approach. That my time with folks be sincere and pure. That I not stray from my directive to serve openly and lovingly. The thought of me being viewed as a Latina in bed, sexualized and utilized briefly concerned me, but, as i tell my students (and remind myself) Intention is Everything, I knew that my intention was not to be a Latina in Bed to be Utilized and Sexualized, this would simply not be where I focused my energies. I readied myself for whatever was to come and slipped into the bed carefully, extending a gentle, silent invitation to lay with me. What happened over the next 4 hours was beautiful in so many ways. I left the bed covered in hives and utterly exhausted, but I felt sated and healed.

I went on to do it again in Korea at the Gyeongnam Art Museum. Tremendous experience, since I didn’t even speak the language. Trust was everything.

So what does this have to do with your question? Nothing. everything. I recommend that everyone practice being vulnerable. speaking their minds clearly. serving lovingly. especially in contested spaces. I think it is a great equalizer.

Do I think radical vulnerability and the internal journeys it can produce [can be viewed as] a model for understanding how we exist in contested space(s)?

I hope so! If for nothing else, it serves as a big ol’ bra snappin’, back o’ ya neck slappin’ reality check for those that need one and are willing to recognize it.

(and…. release breath… I’ve been holding my breath the whole time I was writing, Steve. things frighten me. there are so many things that I don’t know…and i’m okay with that).

-Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz
January 22nd 2014
2:47pm
written at my desk at home in Orlando, Fl.

HUSH: wall drawing (site specific)
2011
India ink on wall

Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz holds an MFA from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.  Her awards include Awards include: 2009 Bronx River Alliance Cultural Preservation awardee, 2008 El Diario/La Prensa Mujeres Destacada Honoree, Ralph Bunche Fellow (2008), BRIO Award (2002, 2006), Artist In the Marketplace fellow (2004), Longwood Cyber resident (2004), FIT Outstanding Alumni (2001).  Her performances are included in I See You: The Politics of Being, which opens 26 January at the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts+Culture in Charlotte, NC.  On 6 February, she will participate in the panel discussion (with Freddy Rodriguez and Maria Magdalena Compos-Pons ) at the Smithsonian that is part of the exhibition, Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art.  She is Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Arts and Design at the University of Central Florida and will be a visiting artist at the University of Utah in 2014.