What excites you most about your most recent work?
The goal of constantly reinventing one's practice is one
I aspire to - the change can be slight and the results nuanced,
but I believe there should be ongoing productive mutation in both
process and product. My current studio work uses an established
formal vocabulary of organic forms rendered in black and white,
but I'm placing the forms into a new set of relationships, both
with each other and with a viewer. The new format evokes the
experience of kneeling down to examine a tide pool, a moment in
which focus shifts and sharpens to reveal different levels of
activity. I'm very interested in how this physical change in
focus will translate into new choices I make about the content of the work.
What do you find most appealing about the arts community at Carolina?
Having conversations about the arts with people from different
disciplines and areas of interest - there is a genuine sense of curiosity
and interest shown by people I've encountered here at Carolina about the
arts, how and why work is made, and what impact the arts can have in a
broader cultural sense. The community here doesn't seem jaded, but rather
engaged and awake, and I'm truly excited to be a part of it.
How do you see your work relating to other arts disciplines besides your own?
My work has often been framed within the visual culture of science.
I reference notions of internal biological systems, the body as a site of
experimentation and discovery, the movement of cells, fluids and organs. I
have a keen interest as well in performance and movement studies - how the
body manifests psychologically-driven experience in the physical form of a
mark or a gesture.
What artist in your field, living or dead, do you admire most, and why?
I believe the South African artist William Kentridge loves charcoal
as much as I do. I recognize in his work the best part of what it means to
be able to draw – to be able to translate an observation or an idea into a
physical reaction and to have the image carry a sense of both the hand and
the subject. Kentridge also taught me that it's possible to make drawings
about despicable human behavior in a way that carries the despair of the
subject and the beauty of the drawing at the same time.
If you had a million dollars to give away, what would you do with it?
Artist residency programs can function as tiny utopias, places
where prevailing rules and economies are suspended in favor of concentrated
creative production. I would like to enable as many 'borderline artists',
people who have the urge to make art but not the time or place or structure
to give themselves over to the practice, the opportunity to spend a month
or two immersed in a sense of possibility that a residency can afford.
If my math is right, I could sponsor a few hundred artists to go to
established residencies, or I could create a center of my own.
Might there be another million to work with?
What kind of place do you think art has—or should have—in the larger global community? And how does what you do in the classroom connect to the larger world?
There are several answers to that question, but I'd like to focus on what
I see to be the inherent value of the act of making. When a student sits down in
front of a blank piece of paper, an empty canvas, a raw slab of clay, they are
faced with choices, risks, and potential. Art making teaches the caring student
how to make creative choices, how to impact the material in front of her or him
in such a way that their idea becomes tangible. I frequently say in regard to a
drawing, quite bluntly, ‘if you don't like it, change it.' I hope this carries
over, if only metaphorically, into other aspects of social and political life;
that students realize that all their choices, their ideas, carry the potential
to affect change in their communities.
What's the last book you read, and what did you think of it?
I'm in the middle of “The Plague” by Albert Camus. The question of
‘emergency' is raised repeatedly - who has the power to declare one, and how
do we individually respond, or not. Who asks questions and who has the power
to give answers? His words are stirring, heavy and of the present.
Tell us about your work in progress—what can we expect from you next?
The scrutiny question looms large in the studio - how many different ways can
a piece be seen and to what end? The tide pool project I refer to above is fueled
by a sense of wonder but also ambiguity - it's not entirely clear what one is
looking at, whether the forms are benign or hostile, if it's a system in balance or
chaos. I am currently drawing forms to be mechanically reproduced and nested into
each other, creating a sense of visual overwhelm, growth gone awry. My studio is a
jumble of drawn forms at present, imagined figures alluding to worms, crustaceans,
barnacles, things that thrive in the cracks and crevices. I see the tide pool work
as a series of puzzles, and I'm keen to begin piecing them together. |
