INTERVIEW

INTERVIEW // Matthew King and Heather Leigh Mcpherson

in

A CONVERSATION BETWEEN
MATTHEW KING AND HEATHER LEIGH MCPHERSON

ON THE OCCASION OF PAINTINGS FROM THE 1970'S AT GRIN

Heather Leigh Mcpherson- The title of this exhibition, Paintings from the 1970s, suggests that your work is visiting us from the past. Is art a form of time travel? Why the 1970s?

Matthew King- It’s safe to say that most aspects of contemporary culture, especially consumer culture, are heavily wrapped up in a fetishization of the past. At times it becomes almost apocalyptic- like there’s no present, and no future. The current state of painting is no different, although it's not such a bad thing. I think painting is actually in a good place right now. It seems like people are starting to think about it again- especially abstract painting. The best painters right now are the ones who have an awareness of painting as a tradition, and a philosophy. They don’t get wrapped up in trying to find the “next big thing”, or some brand new way to make a painting that they think is going to save the world. It seems like formally considered painting hit a pinnacle in the 70s, and then started the race to the bottom.

HLM- Your paintings instantly conjure Frank Stella’s stripes, John McCracken’s leaning slabs, and Al Held’s alphabet paintings, among many other art historical referents. Do you invoke these artists in homage? In commentary? How do you position yourself vis-à-vis art history?

MK- Painting in particular has always referenced itself. The current dialogue of painting and art making in general is so fractured that it really boils down to what ideas you are interested in. Is it a homage or commentary? I suppose on some level it is. But I liken it to the Rolling Stones playing the blues, or to Dylan playing traditional folk songs.

Santa Fe II and Santa Fe III, 2015, Acrylic and Lacquer on Plywood, 48 × 36 × 3 in

HLM- You tend to work in series. In each one, you seem to perform an exhaustive exploration of one visual idea, like you’re setting two or three rules and then seeing all the different things you can make while following those rules. What about iteration compels you? What are the other defining elements of your working process?

MK- The repetition is important- especially in the smaller aluminum works. It’s like Cezanne painting Mont Sainte Victoire over and over. You develop an attachment to one idea, or one equation, and making multiples is a way of figuring it out. You have to make 100 drawings before you make your first one.

In the larger works, the building and the labor are important. If these things aren’t made by my own two hands then what’s the point? I take pride in craftsmanship- the entire process from start to finish is part of the act of painting whether or not actual paint is involved.

Nowadays you can go to the store and buy a pre-made canvas, or you can pay someone else to make the arbitrary rectangle for you. That’s not enough. There’s no consideration.

HLM- I’m interested in the physical materials you use and appropriate, from found photographs and advertisements to industrial oriented strand board. Many of your paintings strategically reveal the product information printed on the OSB, acknowledging the painting support as an active compositional participant. Your collages seem to begin with the found image, which becomes a given for the ensuing painting. Do you always take up an existing image or material as the seed for an artwork? Is appropriation a conceptual approach for you or more of a procedural stimulant?

MK- I pay close attention to the content in the materials I work with, but I’m weary of having a strictly “conceptual” approach to making anything. I’m involved in the concept of making abstract paintings- which at times seems ridiculous in its own right.

I appropriate images and materials that have overarching themes and connections. Obviously there are certain aesthetics and subjects that I’m drawn to more than others. I think there's a power to that- and a personality to it as well. There’s no intended message in these things. I’m not interested in working in some kind of preordained conceptual path- like the type of work that needs an artist statement tacked up on the wall next to it.

HLM- These paintings are pictures and objects at once, and they seem to ping-pong between speaking to the eye and speaking to the body. Their saturated color, high contrast, and disrupted patterning offer up a buffet of delicious optical action, but their compositional tricks often register in the body-- the calculated pairing of a parallelogram-shaped panel with a 20-degree stripe pattern, for example, can make a viewer feel as though her body’s listing left or right, or that the floor she stands on is out of true. That the panels lean against the wall, entering the space of the viewer, intensifies their bodily quality. Is that eye/body or picture/object dynamic a source of tension? Of energy? Is there a specific experience you’d like for viewers to have as they stand among these things?

MK- I think of paintings as physical things that occupy and take up space- objects with true spatial presence. The wall becomes the crucial element though- the defining element to painting. Whether they lean on the wall, hang on the wall or sit in front of the wall- they are all paintings. The wall creates a kind of demilitarized zone between the thing and the viewer. It’s interesting. You could nail a chair to the wall and it will demand the consideration that only a painting can.  I’m interested in that space- placing an object in the room, like a chair or a piece of furniture, but maintaining a dictative control on perspective.

Santa Fe I, 2015, Acrylic and Lacquer on Birch, 52 × 50 × 2 in

Santa Fe I, 2015, Acrylic and Lacquer on Birch, 52 × 50 × 2 in

HEATHER LEIGH MCPHERSON

Heather Leigh McPherson is a Providence-based artist whose work deals with painting, digital expression, and contemporary models of identity. Recent solo exhibitions include A Platform for Traits at Providence College and Anytime Concept at Vox Populi in Philadelphia; in the coming months she will exhibit at Rockhurst University in Kansas City and Actual Size in Los Angeles. She has been on the full-time faculty of Providence College since 2009, where she teaches courses addressing painting, studio research, and contemporary art history. Winner of the 2015 Rhode Island State Council on the Arts Merit Fellowship in Painting, McPherson holds a bachelor's degree from Washington University in St. Louis and a master's from Rhode Island School of Design.

hmcpherson.com

 

 

 

 

INTERVIEW // ANDREA WOLF AND GRIN

in

A CONVERSATION WITH ANDREA WOLF ON THE OCCASION OF WOANDER
CURATED BY COREY OBERLANDER AND LINDSEY STAPLETON

GRIN- How would you describe your relationship with nature? Is this something you often consider? Does living in a city affect this relationship?

ANDREA WOLF- I don't think about this often. I like being in nature, but I also find it interesting that that has become something you have to make happen, like you have to travel to get there (even if it's a short trip). I have to say though, I'm very much a city person. I guess I think more about our mediation of nature and the images of it; the link between the space we observe and the one we find ourselves in. Then, I think more about landscape, or the concept of it.  A landscape is not merely a place, but also its image. It does not only reside in nature but also in culture.

G- Would you mind providing some background information about the works in Woander? Where do these ideas germinate, and why have they held your attention?

AW- Last December when I was in Chile, I came across a beautiful album that contained a collection of high resolution photographs of the moon, part of a research developed by a Chilean astronomer presumptively in an observatory in Chile or Brazil between 1961 and 1962. Most pages have two photos overlaid by a velum paper with very specific technical information about the conditions and lenses in which the images where taken. Inside the album, I found two essays written by the same scientist "Observaciones del Desvanecimiento del Brillo de Algunas Estrellas en Sus Ocultaciones Por La Luna" and "Destellos Luminosos en La Luna".

I was completely mesmerized by this discovery. The images of the moon are breathtaking, the detailed information of how they were taken makes it even more compelling, regardless of the technicality of it. This album, with all its research and science, seemed so personal and reflected so much caring. It just made me think about my memories of the moon, just to realize a few minutes later that I don't actually have any. Yet again, they felt like mine. These photos, glued to the thick paper like a family album are how I remember  space and probably how you do too. 

And then I remembered this super 8 film I found in New York a couple of years ago. It was about space travel and progress and dreams. So I looked it up in my found footage archive. It's a media production kind of film about the space flight of astronaut Gordon Cooper in 1963 and his public reception after landing. The film is called "Mission: 22 Orbits! Flight of Astronaut Gordon Cooper". I think it is the quality of film (actual analog film) that makes you feel that everything you are watching must be part of your memories. It has the texture of remembrance. and then there are some concepts and events in history that are imprinted with certain aesthetic. When I think about the moon and the stars and outer space I think in black and white. How do you imagine progress?

G- Do you find that materials inform your work? Is it the other way around? Or is it in constant motion?

AW- I work mostly with found footage home movies, found photos and vintage postcards that were once written and mailed. I am interested in these memory objects we produce and the relation between personal memory and cultural practices of remembering. 

For years now, I have been collecting super8 and 8mm films, creating my own archive of home movies and found footage. I buy these films in flea markets in different countries and have collected some from friends or in random circumstances. One could say, I work with other peoples memories. The archive appears then as a potentially successful means of accessing what has been lost, reconstructing the past. But what is interesting to me about the archive is the possibility to re-appropriate and re-interpret that material, to create new narratives through montage, juxtaposition, and collage.

So I think it is a dialogue between the materials and the work, in which both inform each other.  Technology, media and memory affect and transform each other, creating models of remembrance that are culturally shaped. In some ways, my work is about making that evident and, in the process, the memories that I collect are transformed, but they also influence the way I think about my work.

GRIN- How would you describe your relationship with nature? Is this something you often consider? Does living in a city affect this relationship?

ANDREA WOLF- I don't think about this often. I like being in nature, but I also find it interesting that that has become something you have to make happen, like you have to travel to get there (even if it's a short trip). I have to say though, I'm very much a city person. I guess I think more about our mediation of nature and the images of it; the link between the space we observe and the one we find ourselves in. Then, I think more about landscape, or the concept of it.  A landscape is not merely a place, but also its image. It does not only reside in nature but also in culture.

G- Do you find that materials inform your work? Is it the other way around? Or is it in constant motion?

AW- I work mostly with found footage home movies, found photos and vintage postcards that were once written and mailed. I am interested in these memory objects we produce and the relation between personal memory and cultural practices of remembering. 

For years now, I have been collecting super8 and 8mm films, creating my own archive of home movies and found footage. I buy these films in flea markets in different countries and have collected some from friends or in random circumstances. One could say, I work with other peoples memories. The archive appears then as a potentially successful means of accessing what has been lost, reconstructing the past. But what is interesting to me about the archive is the possibility to re-appropriate and re-interpret that material, to create new narratives through montage, juxtaposition, and collage.

So I think it is a dialogue between the materials and the work, in which both inform each other.  Technology, media and memory affect and transform each other, creating models of remembrance that are culturally shaped. In some ways, my work is about making that evident and, in the process, the memories that I collect are transformed, but they also influence the way I think about my work.

G- With so many works confronting memory, do you ever insert your personal ephemera or memoirs, or are they only intended for the collective?

AW- I do have some of my own home movies as part of my archive, but when I use this material, I tend to remove myself and not think of them so much as mine. Continuing with the idea that memory is a narrative construction, we can find similar elements in the stories that we create when we say who we are and in the memory objects that we produce. We tend to record some specific events and rituals that mark the passage of time and the unfolding of our lives: birthdays, vacations, graduations, weddings: mostly happy moments indeed. Therefore, we can think of the idea of our memories becoming interchangeable; the photograph of one’s birthday could be the memory of any other, the person changes, but the ritual and the story being told remains the same. Home movies become cultural products and cultural practices set the tone of the ideal memories. But, home movies are never simply found footage of the past: each time they are reviewed, their meaning changes.

ANDREA WOLF

Andrea Wolf is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist from Chile. Her work consists of ongoing research on time, memory, and image. Wolf’s practice focuses in memory objects we produce (photos, home movies, postcards) and the relation between personal memory and cultural practices of remembering. Wolf creates video installations and video sculptures to tackle these matters, representing the tension between remembering and forgetting. Working with found footage - with anonymous stories - she leaves an open space to be filled by the
meaning that each of us brings through our personal experiences.

Wolf holds MFAs in Documentary Filmmaking (Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona) and Digital Arts (Universidad Pompeu Fabra), and a MPA in Interactive Telecommunications (NYU). She was a resident of the AIM Program at the Bronx Museum in 2013 and is currently an artist in residency at the New York Media Center. Wolf has shown her work and given lectures and workshops internationally in venues like the Museum of Memory and Human Rights and the Contemporary Art Museum in Santiago Chile, Dumbo Arts Festival, White Box, The Paley Center for Media and Wave Hill in New York, MIT Media Lab in Boston, Digital Culture Center in Mexico City, VIZZI Festival in Kiev and Media Lab Madrid. Andrea is founder and director of REVERSE, a non-profit workspace and art gallery in Brooklyn.

andreawolf.org

 

INTERVIEW // MARIA MOLTENI and GRIN

in

A CONVERSATION WITH MARIA MOLTENI ON THE OCCASION OF WOANDER,
CURATED BY COREY OBERLANDER AND LINDSEY STAPLETON

GRIN- How would you describe your relationship with nature? Is this something you often consider? Does living in a city affect this relationship?

MARIA MOLTENI- This is something I often consider. I feel I have a strong relationship with nature, though I've mostly lived in cities. I grew up in Nashville and moved to Boston as a young adult, but both cities are quite lush and close to mountains, fields, forests, etc. As a child I spent a lot of time digging around in creeks, climbing trees, and visiting my grandparents who were strawberry farmers. There were a lot of those influences that I've always wanted more of in my life. 

 I have other thoughts about the relationship that artists have to nature... whether they're situated rurally or in one of Jane Jacob's described “diverse urban ecosystems” that adhere to similar rules of coexistence. Because many contemporary artists are economically undernourished, they tend to reshape their habits for survival. Many people describe art-making in terms of novelty or profession, but I believe the artistic necessity can be likened to certain primal instincts. They can't easily be explained or shed. It's just something you do, or have to do, or know how to do. 

 Some of the gaps that 'civilized' or socialized humans try to forge between themselves and other animals may be closed by an artist who designs her life around these necessities and available resources. Many artists live less conventionally and their lifestyles reflect those of animals for whom productivity and play haven't been standardized. I've shared studios with all sorts of organisms who share some of my tendencies. I worked among spiders in an Allston basement and much enjoyed watching them weave between my sculptures as I crocheted. I worked out of a honey warehouse in Leominster where bees often snuck in. It's great to be around such productive, matriarchal communities like honeybees as you're hustling and working your butt off. I did a residency in Pennsylvania that was overrun with bats (one of my spirit animals). We had regular interactions because our sleeping patterns were similar. And now I live in a fancier live/work building in downtown Boston. Midway Studios used to be a wool factory and there are still what I like to call "heirloom" clothing moths that make messes of my fiber pieces! People living in denser cities aren't as removed from "nature" as they may think. But what I miss most about Tennessee, besides being able to see more stars, are the powerful night calls of cicadas and other insects. Those sounds really massage the soul.

GRIN- Would you mind providing some background information about the works in Woander? Where do these ideas germinate, and why have they held your attention?

 MM- I’m interested aesthetically and philosophically in how the artificial interacts with the organic and how they become separated as “natural” and “unnatural”. I’m as heavily influenced by pop-culture as ecology, particularly when queer culture appropriates it. I’m drawn to this tanning bed image, like a moth to a flame, because it appears both toxic and alluring, threatening and nourishing. It’s placed in the front window of a salon as an advertisement, but the rhythmic rise and fall of color shifts remind me of droning insect calls or animals that change color with their moods/surroundings. I paired it with a cicada call because it juxtaposes varying natural cycles- the electromagnetic (visible) spectrum, sunrise/setting, seasonal recreation, insect mating patterns, etc.  People work these tidy 9-5 jobs so they can go and “work” on their tans every 5 days. Some cicadas stay in the earth for 13 years and only see the sun to have babies before going back under. Circadian rhythms manifest in many different ways, but we often think there is this one “natural” way to exist.

The Cicada drone you hear in my installation is a field recording from a trip I took to Texas. The Cacama valvata, or “Cactus Dodger” was named after the lord of the Aztec kingdom Tezcuco. Cacama was killed by Spanish conquistadors and is supposed to live on in these creatures.  

GRIN- Do you find that materials inform your work? Is it the other way around? Or is it in constant motion?

MM- It is in constant motion, but I’m a very tactile, material-oriented person. In this way I'm like a Magpie, collecting shiny objects and hoarding them into my space. Half of my practice is playing Tetris and finding ways to build them into my apartment layout. Sometimes I wish I were less of a "pack rat" but I also believe that my materials find me and that this whole process ties daily life to a finally arranged piece. The objects, then, are also kind of charged with a previous history or energy that I think makes its way in psychically.

GRIN- From paintings, to video installations, to interactive performance, your work has its own sort of spectrum. How do these projects inform each other and how do you transition between them?

MM- I’m not sure I’ve found the most graceful way to work between them, but I’m very much following my instincts/intuition and responding with tactile and tactical solutions to various irresistible stimuli. I like to move between media that seem more and less concrete or ephemeral. Much of that is about experimentation and experiential research. I believe that life, art, and nature are tangled up and I’m trying to tease this all apart. I’ll basically try anything.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Maria Molteni is a Nashville-to-Boston-based multimedia artist, beekeeper, and educator. Having completed rigorous studies in drawing, painting and printmaking at Boston University her practice sprang from roots in observation and formalism.

Over time, it expanded to incorporate performance, research, and participation. In the spirit of early puppeteers, with roots in religion and radical politics, she attempts to extract or embellish psychic energy in urban and natural environments. Exploring iterations of sport, craft, feminism, spiritualism, animism, utopia, pop-culture, cryptozoology, and queerness, her work seeks to embody or expose unseen presences or predicaments, whether cosmic or practical. She enjoys problem solving via traditional methods of craft, employing original or absurdist tactics as applied aesthetic solutions.

maria-molteni.squarespace.com