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. 

Hammer and Anvil, 2013
Porcelain, glaze and underglaze.
18″ x 13″ x 32″

SL:  I got a real hands-on education from you when I was a participant and Skowhegan and you were the shop technician. I learned so much from you but I didn’t really have an understanding of your practice until I watched you work on Possible Odyssey in 2005. I got a real education in materials and processes watching you build, fabricate, wire, and install what proved to be one of the strangest and most compelling moments of my experience that summer. I saw that the power of a simple metaphor created through intense and complex activity loses none of its power when the materials of it are laid bare for investigation. I’ve never forgotten that lesson.

Since that time I’ve seen your work in sculpture, performance, and drawing (and also in teaching) and I am struck about the way issues of power play out in your work. Your ways of creating power for your kinetic works and the metaphors they conjure have long been of interest to me. And this is beyond a facile wondering of why you chose to make something the way you made it. It becomes very clear after looking at your work that power, its presence, its absence, its potential, its ability to make or destroy seem to be central to your work. Which leads me to my question:

How did you come to use power as a material in your work and how does your understanding of the metaphors of power inform the ways you employ this material in your practice?

Possible Odyssey, 2005
8’ x 20’ x 6’
Wood, solar panel and charging battery, fans, polypropylene trash bags, rope and hardware

BA: Steve, that was such a transformative summer. I began that season at Skowhegan researching solar panels for experimentation. The impulse came from a desire to incorporate unseen or intangible materials such as sunlight into my work. I had also been looking at Arte Povera and became interested in the potential for meaning to be drawn from latent sources. Solar power, I thought, was a way for my work to reach beyond itself in material and metaphor. More than if it were plugged into a wall outlet, the work could be at once autonomous and fiercely placed in the present moment. I wanted the transformation of materials to happen in front of the viewer. The physical installation of Possible Odyssey – consisting of the bare-bones and recognizable materials of a solar panel, two by fours, fans and translucent trash bags – functioned as a “ground” between the ethereal input on one side and the live physical performance on the other. This formed an unexpected, eerie connection that really excited me, one where the literal transformation of solar power and performance became a metaphor for the activation of the imagination, to make something possible, and to nurture the continuation of that possibility in the mind of the viewer. It was, as you noted, the most complex work – the riskiest work – I had done to that point and the role of power launched new possibilities regarding the object, performance, and especially the role of the viewer in the meaning of the work.

After that summer, transformation of energy remained a central theme, but it became less important that the energy source be quantifiable in that transformation. In Constellation and Opus, canned peaches and planted potatoes were conduits not only for energy (a natural occurrence made manifest in wires and outputs) but also for more complex material relationships resulting in more complex metaphors. In using objects of the everyday to literally and figuratively energize the metaphor, they became stand-ins for the power of the unremarkable to have influence. Opus, for instance, was inspired by the story of a Mozart aria written purposely to be too difficult to sing so that he might ruin a hated diva’s career. I was fascinated by this story of negative influences resulting in positive outcomes. The difficulty of the aria, now considered one of the most beautiful, only served to inspire the diva to overcome it. Opus was completely still with the forces of influence happening under the surface or around you in the air. Unlike Possible Odyssey, performance took an almost invisible form but was still central to the meaning. Composed entirely from domestic objects, Opus brought familiarity and intimacy to the viewer, pulling them closer and pulling this experience into the meaning of the work.

The experience of the viewer has always been important to me, but I had always funneled it entirely through my own experience. After all, that’s really what artists do. The most interesting and compelling works of art for me though, are those that do not take the viewer for granted, that somehow involve our imaginations in the outcome of the work. I’m not necessarily talking about physical interaction, but affect. I’m talking about works from artists such as Beuys, whose simple sleds of fat and felt take us to visceral places that are at once unique and shared. I think that my interest in natural power sources, however large or small, exemplifies this shared source and continues to evolve into more and more inputs from the viewer. Imagination itself becomes content.

You might say that this has resulted in a deferring of power to the viewer. Occasionally this has had disastrous results, such in the case of a sculpture that was destroyed by a museumgoer because they literally sat on it! This experience affected me deeply. For a long time I wondered if I had made a mistake, if I really could effectively replace my own performance with the viewer’s imagination. What does it mean to blur this boundary so completely?

I have been working through this problem for some time and this work has resulted in a new series of ceramic objects and installations. Sturdy objects such as hammers and anvils rendered in porcelain lace are a happy return to craft and process that have been a way for me to reexamine how a material – specifically a traditional material – can be transformed into an art object that ignites imaginative impulses. In this particular case, the delicate and fragile nature of porcelain induces one to imagine what it might be like to smash it. My delight in all this is that the impulse, carried out through the imagination, flits back and forth from an appreciation for the objects and a secret desire to desecrate them. The performance of these objects strikes a balance between the power to create and destroy -one where the outcome is always becoming, where the potential is always there.

Betsy Alwin received a BFA in Sculpture along with a BA in Spanish Language from Minnesota State University in 1997.  She received an MFA from Illinois State University in 2001 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture that same year.  She has been awarded residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and Sculpture Space in Utica, NY.  In 2005 she completed a permanent public commission in Tokyo, Japan.  She has exhibited her work both regionally and nationally and has participated in several public art venues such as Figment on Governor’s Island and the Art Under the Bridge Festival, in Dumbo, Brooklyn.  Solo shows include Figments of the Ordinary Life at A.I.R. Gallery in New York City and Inner Limits at The University of Tacoma Gallery, Tacoma, Washington.  Her work has been included in several group and two person shows at the Islip Art Museum, the Berkshire Botanical Garden (Mass MoCA), the U.S. Botanical Garden, the Peter Fingenstein Gallery at Pace University.  She was nominated for the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant and has been a visiting artist at Williams College, Penn State University, Virginia Commonwealth University Craft Department and Johnson State College.  She has a forthcoming solo show in 2014 at No Globe Exhibition Space in Brooklyn. 

You can see images of Betsy’s work at her website.

William Cordova at the Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts by Steve Locke.

artcore journal is an edited online contemporary art journal published biannually. The journal seeks to establish a broad range of responses to contemporary art and curatorial practice from varied spatial perspectives. artcore journal presents a broad range of informed written texts, art works and curatorial initiatives. Each issue welcomes creative and critical responses to a theme as a way of establishing an intertextual network postulating on ideas concerning space in contemporary art discourse.