Edward Burtynsky. Alberta Oil Sands #6 Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, 2007. Courtesy of the Artist.

It’s often impossible to fully understand the big picture of industrialized development from the limited perspective of the consumer. Each day, most of us in the western world go about our business, driving to and from work, using plastics made from petroleum, enjoying foods shipped in from thousands of miles away, without a thought of the very resource that makes this all possible—oil. The impact of oil has consistently reappeared in the work of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky for well over a decade. Burtynsky’s photographs often soar into the air, freeing us from our limited perspective, offering us the ability to better understand the scale and impact that this material has on contemporary life. It is only through this expansive perspective that we begin to understand the magnitude and consequence of our complicit actions. Recently, Daily Serving founder Seth Curcio was able to speak to Burtynsky by phone about his current exhibition, titled Oil, at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno. During this conversation, we learn how Burtynsky’s research has altered his own relationship to oil, how he uses scale and perspective to shape our understanding of the industrialized world, and what lies ahead of us with the future of oil.

Seth Curcio: In the introduction to your book Oil, you said, ” In 1997 I had what I refer to as my oil epiphany. It occurred to me that all the vast, man-altered landscapes I had pursued for over twenty years had been made possible by oil…” Since that time, you have spent a decade and a half documenting the impact of oil consumption globally. How has this ongoing project shaped the way that you interact with the world, especially in regard to oil consumption?

Edward Burtynsky: At that point, I had spent sixteen or seventeen years trying to find the largest events possible around mining and quarrying. I was interested in places that we had collectively engaged, and that illustrate scale. I realized that the scale that I’d been photographing could only have been achieved through the combustive engine and a readily available fuel, such as oil.

These ideas led me to consider the things that are around me, from the fuel in my car, to the road that I am driving on, to the plastic container that was in my hand. They are all produced with oil. As I started to look around, I asked myself, What’s not oil?—and that became the more interesting question. It was at that point that I began to close the chapter on mining and open the chapter on the oil landscape. That started my research representing the extraction and refinement of oil, the urban worlds and events produced as a result of oil, and the end of the line: the final entropy and physical result of oil consumption.

Edward Burtynsky. Oil Fields #22 Cold Lake, Alberta, Canada, 2001. Courtesy of the Artist.

Through this, I was fully aware that I was involved in the consumption of oil, too. You simply cannot live life in the modern world without the usage of oil. We are all, in some way, participating in the material and resource. But I’m always trying to find ways to mitigate my own consumption and impact. I planted a forest in 1985 and have since cared for it as a gesture to offset my carbon usage. I’ve always been careful to purchase fuel-efficient cars, and each time I fly, I purchase from offset companies. It is always my hope to be able to offset my usage through these means.

SC: As an individual, our limited perspective often prohibits us from seeing the larger picture of our impact on the planet. Literally, shifting our perspective to 1,000+ feet above the ground can drastically change how we see the world. For me, this was strikingly evident in the expansive aerial photograph Highway #5, Los Angeles, California, USA. Can you talk a little about perspective and access as it relates to your work?

Edward Burtynsky. Highway #5 Los Angeles, California, USA, 2009. Courtesy of the Artist.

EB: When you stand at ground level, a real hierarchy begins to form. Everything in the foreground of the picture becomes dominant and hides everything behind it. The middle just becomes irrelevant at eye or ground level. But then I realized that as you move up a bit, things begin to reveal themselves and you get a real sense of the relationships between the foreground, middle ground, and background. The descriptive power of the elevated point of view becomes so much more interesting than the view from the ground. From this point, you really get the chance to understand the scale of the landscape or how much of something is there, like how many cars are backed up behind you or how many planes are parked together. You get to see and really understand scale from the elevated viewpoint. And for me, that is a way that I can describe the system in which we organize certain things on such a large scale.

Edward Burtynsky. Highway #1 Los Angeles, California, USA, 2003. Courtesy of the Artist.

EB: I do believe that an image has to be visually compelling to address the kind of landscape that will challenge us and make us ask the important questions. I think that artists don’t really have the power to change the world, but we do have the power to raise questions about the world that we are creating. In my heart, I feel that as artists we can hold a mirror up to society and help reflect upon exactly what we are doing and what type of world we are creating. All types of artists have the ability to take on this task. We must take on society and examine the condition of the human experience, and make sense of it as an individual and as a collective society. You are simply not going to get this type of storytelling directly from science. It is the role of the artist to tell this type of story. It’s inherent in the creative arts to reflect where we are going in a way that perhaps has not been thought of before. And aesthetics is a portal though which people will enter to explore these notions. But if the work is not visually interesting enough for them to enter, then you won’t be able to communicate anything at all to the viewer.

Edward Burtynsky. SOCAR Oil Fields #6 Baku, Azerbaijan, 2006. Courtesy of the Artist.

SC: Your images are simultaneously seductive and aggressive, instantly placing the viewer in the question-asking role. This prompts one to consider their own place within the image, and how one’s own culture and daily activities contribute to a much larger problem. Paul Roth has said about your work, “The subject is not oil… These photographs are about man, and what he has made of this earth.” While the gravity of this resource is certainly evident throughout your pictures, I feel that the effects on humanity are most profound in the portraits found in the group The End of Oil.  Since you were on the ground engaging with people whose lives are directly impacted by man’s use of oil, I wonder if you connected with humanity in a way that was not possible in your more distant aerial photographs? Did making those portraits change the way you thought about man, and what he has made of this earth, as Roth suggests?

EB: When I went to Bangladesh, it was if I stepped back in time and was in the middle of the industrial revolution. Many of the people there were engaging in the most filthily hard, arduous work that can be conceived. I felt that I went back in time because I could never see this type of work in my culture, as that moment had long passed. These men were working barefoot in a scrapyard, cutting metal with a torch and no eye protection, and inhaling clouds of asbestos with no respirators. They are taking part in the collateral damage of western off-gassing. It’s a filthy job, cutting down massive ships that are technologically obsolete for our purposes. But to see these people barefoot and still holding a shred of dignity in these types of jobs, I felt that at some point it is important for humanity to enter this project and for viewers to see humans engaging with the end result of our impact, as opposed to those who participated in the beginning of the narrative. I thought it was important to show humanity in a very unfortunate situation, even as they are attempting to better themselves, so that the first world can really see exactly who is doing our dirty work. And that is why I wanted to have people appear and at that particular point in the narrative.

Edward Burtynsky. Shipbreaking #23 Chittagong, Bangladesh, 2000. Courtesy of the Artist.

Overtime, it has become more apparent to me that these aren’t as much landscapes as they are places that illustrate the systems, such as how we extract oil from the ground, how we ship it, and how we build infrastructure to move machines around. The work is about trying to find a way to represent all of the systems that we have created to enjoy the benefits that the internal combustion engine and oil have afforded us. The images are not really about the singular place; they are a stand-in for the ways that we have changed our landscape to accommodate all of these things—this new way of life.

SC: Absolutely. The impact is so invisible to the western world. There are such small moments where we can see the effects of our culture on the rest of the earth. This brings to mind the times that we do get to see our actions unfold—like with the Gulf oil crisis. Considering that you had been working on this project and related projects for well over a decade when the Gulf oil crisis happened two years ago, what went though your mind when viewing those images and video on TV? What is your reaction to the incident and all that has occurred in that region since?

Edward Burtynsky. Oil Tanker and Refineries Pasadena, Texas, USA, 2004. Courtesy of the Artist.

EB: I went and photographed that area right after the situation occurred.  I had been working on a project about water, and I thought that this is a perfect example of an immediate oil and water event that was loaded with implications that were real and happening right now. I thought this would give me a change to see these all-important liquids in our life in an unexpected and unwanted marriage. It was like the Frankenstein story, where we did something and really didn’t fully understand the risks; we drilled to 23,000–5,000 feet of water and another 17,000 feet of bedrock to get to the oil. And then to have it all go bad and lose control of the well. It’s like when doctor Frankenstein creates life and then it turns on him and becomes a menace. The same scientists are then trying to contain it and get back into the lab, but its not that easy. It really is the process of science overreaching and then losing control. It’s a lesson that we keep repeating —not fully understanding the risk and moving forward anyway. Imagine if this repeats itself in drilling conditions in the Arctic. If there were a spill in the winter, there would be no way of reaching it; it would just gush all winter long and could very well completely destroy the Arctic. Imagine the mess that we would all be in then. The idea of an error occurring in the Arctic is a real nightmare. The Gulf has 35,000 wells. They are not new at this, and they have every bit of technology, help, and resources available at their disposal to help solve the problem. Now the Arctic is a completely different situation. With all of the resources available, it still took three months to stop the oil in the Gulf! In the Arctic, who is there to help? Who is there to save the day? Nobody. So it is a scary thought that we would advance into this region in our pursuits of this material.

Edward Burtynsky. SOCAR Oil Fields #4 Baku, Azerbaijan, 2006. Courtesy of the Artist.

SC: There is so many issues with the inevitability of another spill at the magnitude of the Gulf oil crisis. But the western world is so detached from the actual production of oil that it can seem out of touch. We just know that we still need it, and therefore another site will be built. Another type of technology will be invented to reach another pocket of oil. This brings me to the landscape pictures that you made under the umbrella of The End of Oil. They are so striking and haunting. These images really get to the essence of  not only the impact of our consumption of oil, but also the waste we leave behind. However, we know that no matter how many of these sites are used and abandoned, inevitably another will open to satisfy out needs. So seeing these images actually makes me consider the future of oil. I’m curious about what your discoveries have led you to think about the future of the man-made world in regard to this material? What do you see on the horizon?

Edward Burtynsky. VW Lot #1 Houston, Texas, USA, 2004. Courtesy of the Artist.

EB: I see it in terms of peak oil. It is not a question of if, it is a question of when. It’s not like peak oil is going to stop. It’s just like the 1974 peak oil problem: It crests, and no matter how much you pump, it can’t keep up with the public demand. All of the sudden you see supply go in one direction and demand go in the other. Then you get market adjustment; the prices go up to help reduce demand. It’s like playing ping-pong on a moving train; the price goes up and down, but really it’s always moving up and going forward. When we average it out, it will move from $100 to $200, $300, $400 per barrel, and that is what it will look like at different price points. As the price goes higher, more people will be left behind. Less people will be able to drive, fly in an airplane, and oil consumption will be left for those with more capital, while the rest of us deal with massive inflation. And third-world countries could be completely out of oil, leaving them with huge amounts of social unrest. In countries like China, you can see them purchasing oil fields and natural resources from anyone that will sell, as they know that they don’t have many of their own natural resources. They are stockpiling from locations around the world in preparation of their expanded development.  And there is going to be a lot of tension globally as we begin to hit peak oil again.

Edward Burtynsky. Breezewood Pennsylvania, USA, 2008. Courtesy of the Artist

But there is something that we here in the West can do. It  is called losing our addiction to oil. I feel that we could reduce our consumption by 30% through conservation: raising the fuel average to 50 miles per gallon in cars, producing alternative energy, and reducing the huge tax cuts to oil companies and giving them to green energy developers. There just hasn’t been the right emphasis put in the right places yet. Historically, big infrastructure changes have to come, in part, from the government. Just like it did with when we needed to add telephone lines, highways, and hydro development—it all came from the government. And if we are going to make these changes in relationship to our oil consumption, if we really want sustainable alternative energy, the government has to be there. It has to create a level playing field. It’s got to put oil in the same place as alternatives, and quit giving benefits to oil over alternative energy. Tax people for carbon consumption and alternatives start looking really good. We all play a part in this.

The exhibition Oil, by Ed Burtynsky, will be on view at the Nevada Museum of Art from June 9, 2012 – September 23, 2012.

Alberta Oil Sands #6 Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, 2007 / Courtesy of the Artist

Seth Curcio: In the introduction to your book Oil, you said, ” In 1997 I had what I refer to as my oil epiphany. It occurred to me that all the vast man-altered landscapes I had pursued for over 20 years had been made possible by oil…” Since that time you have spent a decade and a half documenting the impact of oil consumption globally. How has this ongoing project shaped the way that you interact with the world, especially in regard to oil consumption?

Edward Burtynsky: At that point, I had spent 16 or 17 years trying to find the largest events possible around mining and quarrying. I was interested in places that we had collectively engaged, and that illustrate scale. I realized that the scale that I’d been photographing could only have been achieved through the combustive engine and a readily available fuel, such as oil.

These ideas led me to consider the things that are around me, from the fuel in my car to the road that I am driving on, to the plastic container that was in my hand. They are all produced with oil. As I started to look around, I asked myself what’s not oil? and that became the more interesting question. It was at that point that I began to close the chapter on mining and open the chapter on the oil landscape. That started my research representing the extraction and refinement of oil, the urban worlds and events produced as a result of oil, and the end of the line — the final entropy and physical result of oil consumption.

Oil Fields #22 Cold Lake, Alberta, Canada, 2001 / Courtesy of the Artist

Through this I was fully aware that I was involved in the consumption of oil too. You simply cannot live life in the modern world without the usage of oil. We are all, in some way, participating in the material and resource. But, I’m always trying to find ways to mitigate my own consumption and impact. I planted a forest in 1985 and have since cared for it as a gesture to offset my carbon usage. I’ve always been careful to purchase fuel-efficient cars, and each time I fly, I purchase from offset companies. It is always my hope to be able to offset my usage through these means.

SC: As an individual, our limited perspective often prohibits us from seeing the larger picture of our impact on the planet. Literally, shifting our perspective to 1000+ feet above the ground can drastically change how we see the world. For me, this was strikingly evident in the expansive aerial photograph Highway #5, Los Angeles, California, USA. Can you talk a little about perspective and access as it relates to your work?

Highway #5 Los Angeles, California, USA, 2009 / Courtesy of the Artist

EB: When you stand at ground level, a real hierarchy begins to form. Everything in the foreground of the picture becomes dominant and hides everything behind it. The middle just becomes irrelevant at eye or ground level. But, then I realized that as you move up a bit, things begin to reveal themselves and you get a real sense of the relationships between the foreground, middle ground, and background. The descriptive power of the elevated point of view becomes so much more interesting than the view from the ground. From this point, you really get the chance to understand the scale of the landscape or how much of something is there, like how many cars are backed up behind you or how many planes are parked together. You get to see and really understand scale from the elevated viewpoint. And for me, that is a way that I can describe the system in which we organize certain things on such a large scale.

Highway #1 Los Angeles, California, USA, 2003 / Courtesy of the Artist

EB: I do believe that an image has to be visually compelling to address the kind of landscape that will challenge us and make us ask the important questions. I think that artists don’t really have the power to change the world, but we do have the power to raise questions about the world that we are creating. In my heart, I feel that as artists we can hold a mirror up to society and help reflect upon exactly what we are doing and what type of world we are creating. All types of artists have the ability to take on this task. We must take on society and examine the condition of the human experience, and make sense of it as an individual and as a collective society. You are simply not going to get this type of storytelling directly from science. It is the role of the artist to tell this type of story. It’s inherent in the creative arts to reflect where we are going in a way that perhaps has not been thought of before. And, aesthetics is a portal though which people will enter to explore these notions. But, if the work is not visually interesting enough for them to enter, then you won’t be able to communicate anything at all to the viewer.

SOCAR Oil Fields #6 Baku, Azerbaijan, 2006 / Courtesy of the Artist

SC: Your images are simultaneously seductive and agressive, instantly placing the viewer in the question-asking role. This prompts one to consider their own place within the image, and how one’s own culture and daily activities contribute to a much larger problem. Paul Roth has said about your work “the subject is not oil…These photographs are about man, and what he as made of this earth.” While the gravity of this resource is certainly evident throughout your pictures, I feel that the effects on humanity are most profound in the portraits found in the group The End of Oil.  Since you were on the ground engaging with people whose lives are directly impacted by man’s use of oil, I wonder if you connected with humanity in a way that was not possible in your more distant aerial photographs? Did making those portraits change the way you thought about man, and what he has made of this earth, as Roth suggests?

EB: When I went to Bangladesh it was if I stepped back in time and was in the middle of the industrial revolution. Many of the people there were engaging in the most filthily, hard, arduous work that can be conceived. I felt that I went back in time because I could never see this type of work in my culture, as that moment had long passed. These men were working barefoot in a scrapyard, cutting metal with a torch and no eye protection, and inhaling clouds of asbestos with no respirators. They are taking part in the collateral damage of western off-gassing. It’s a fifthly job, cutting down massive ships that are technologically obsolete for our purposes. But, to see these people barefoot and still holding a shred of dignity in these types of jobs, I felt that at some point it is important for humanity to enter this project and for viewers to see humans engaging with the end result of our impact, as opposed to those who participated in the beginning of the narrative. I thought it was important to show humanity in a very unfortunate situation, even as they are attempting to better themselves, so that the first world can really see exactly who is doing our dirty work. And, that is why I wanted to have people appear and at that particular point in the narrative.

Shipbreaking #23 Chittagong, Bangladesh, 2000 / Courtesy of the Artist

Overtime, it has become more apparent to me that these aren’t as much landscapes, as they are places that illustrate the systems such as how we extract oil from the ground, how we ship it, and how we build infrastructure to move machines around. The work is about trying to find a way to represent all of the systems that we have created to enjoy the benefits that the internal combustion engine and oil have afforded us. The images are not really about the singular place; they are a stand in for the ways that we have changed our landscape to accommodate all of these things — this new way of life.

SC: Absolutely. The impact is so invisible to the western world. There are such small moments where we can see the effects of our culture on the rest of the earth. This brings to mind the times that we do get to see our actions unfold — like with the gulf oil crisis. Considering that you had been working on this project and related projects for well over a decade when the Gulf oil crisis happened two years ago, what went though your mind when viewing those images and video on TV? What is your reaction to the incident and all that has occurred in that region since?

Oil Tanker and Refineries Pasadena, Texas, USA, 2004 / Courtesy of the Artist

EB: I went and photographed that area right after the situation occurred.  I had been working on a project about water and I thought that this is a perfect example of an immediate oil and water event that was loaded with implications that were real and happening right now. I thought this would give me a change to see these all-important liquids in our life in an unexpected and unwanted marriage. It was like the Frankenstein story, where we did something and really didn’t fully understand the risks; we drilled to 23,000 ft – 5,000 ft of water and another 17,000 feet of bedrock to get to the oil. And, then to have it all go bad and lose control of the well. It’s like when doctor Frankenstein creates life and then it turns on him and becomes a menace. The same scientists are then trying to contain it and get back into the lab, but its not that easy. It really is the process of science over reaching and then losing control. It’s a lesson that we keep repeating — not fully understanding the risk and moving forward anyway. Imagine if this repeats itself in drilling conditions in the artic. If there were a spill in the winter, there would be no way of reaching it, it would just gush all winter long and could very well completely destroy the artic. Imagine the mess that we would all be in then. The idea of an error occurring in the artic is a real nightmare. The Gulf has 35,000 wells. They are not new at this, and they have every bit of technology, help, and resources available at their disposal to help solve the problem. Now the artic is a completely different situation. With all of the resources available, it still took 3 months to stop the oil in the Gulf! In the artic, who is there to help? Who is there to save the day? Nobody. So, it is a scary thought that we would advance into this region in our pursuits of this material.

SOCAR Oil Fields #4 Baku, Azerbaijan, 2006 / Courtesy of the Artist

SC: There is so many issues with the inevitability of another spill at the magnitude of the gulf oil crisis. But, the western world is so detached from the actual production of oil that it can seem out of touch.  We just know that we still need it, and therefore, another site will be built. Another type of technology will be invented to reach another pocket of oil. This brings me to the lanscape pictures that you made under the umbrella of the End of Oil. They are so striking and haunting. These images really get to the essence of  not only the impact of our consumption of oil, but also the waste we leave behind. However, we know that now matter how many of these sites are used and abandoned, inevitably another will open to satisfy out needs. So, seeing these images actually makes me consider the future of oil. I’m curious about what your discoveries have led you to think about the future of the man-made world in regard to this material? What do you see on the horizon?

VW Lot #1 Houston, Texas, USA, 2004 / Courtesy of the Artist

EB: I see it in terms of peak oil. It is not a question of if, it is a question of when. Its not like peak oil is going to stop. It’s just like the 1974 peak oil problem, it crests and no matter how much you pump it can’t keep up with the public demand. All of the sudden you see supply go in one direction and demand go in the other. Then, you get market adjustment; the prices go up to help reduce demand. Its like playing ping pong on a moving train, the price goes up and down, but really its always moving up and going forward. When we average it out, it will move from $100 to $200, $300, $400 per barrel, and that is what it will look like at different price points. As the price goes higher more people will be left behind. Less people will be able to drive, fly in an airplane, and oil consumption will be left for those with more capital, while the rest of us deal with massive inflation. And, third world countries could be completely out of oil, leaving them with huge amounts of social unrest. In countries like China, you can see them purchasing oil fields and natural resources from anyone that will sell, as they know that they don’t have many of their own natural resources. They are stock piling from locations around the world in preparation of their expanded development.  And, there is going to be a lot of tension globally as we begin to hit peak oil again.

Breezewood Pennsylvania, USA, 2008 / Courtesy of the Artist

But, there is something that we here in the west can do. It  is called losing our addiction to oil. I feel that we could reduce our consumption by 30% through conservation – raising the fuel average to 50 miles per gallon in cars, producing alternative energy, and reducing the huge tax cuts to oil companies and giving them to green energy developers. There just hasn’t been the right emphasis put in the right places yet. Historically, big infrastructure changes have to come, in part, from the government. Just like it did with when we needed to add telephone lines, highways, and hydro development – it all came from the government. And, if we are going to make these changes in relationship to our oil consumption, if we really want sustainable alternative energy, the government has to be there. It has to create a level playing field. It’s got to put oil in the same place as alternatives, and quit giving benefits to oil over alternative energy. Tax people for carbon consumption, and alternatives start looking really good. We all play a part in this.

The exhibition Oil, by Ed Burtynsky, will be on view at the Nevada Museum of Art from June 9, 2012 – September 23, 2012.

For over a decade now, Japanese artist Motoi Yamamoto has been engaging with his memories through the physical act of creation. Building large scale installations by hand and out of salt, Motoi brings form to the immaterial, actively wrestling with memories that are in a constant state of flux. Just as memories are unfixed and transient, Motoi’s installations are equally unstable and temporary. Motoi transforms salt into intricate and laborious installations, which are eventually swept up and returned to the sea. DailyServing’s founder, Seth Curcio, had the opportunity to speak with Motoi about the cultural implications of salt, the immaterial qualities of death, and the forms best suited to articulate loss.

The following interview was translated with the generous assistance of Miyako Fujiwara.

Image Courtesy of Motoi Yamamoto and the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art

Seth Curcio: For nearly two decades, you have made intricate, yet temporary, installations using salt as your primary medium. I know that salt is a very important substance in Japan–as it is in many cultures–used in funerals, to ward off evil, as an offering, and as basic support for life. However, I understand that there was a very personal experience that brought you to this material. Can you tell me what led you to use salt and how it initially took form within your practice?

Motoi Yamamoto: I use salt because in Japan salt is used at funerals. My sister passed away from brain cancer 17 years ago. In order to overcome her death, I made pieces by picking up each event one by one, related to the theme that a person is going to die. I started thinking that I would like to make an artwork based on funerals.  And, I realized that in Japan we use salt at funerals, and this is why I began using salt for my art. The history of salt in Japan, how we use it, and the meaning of it, were all very suitable to my concepts.  Also, I liked the color of salt very much. At the beginning, I baked it into the shape of bricks, and then piled them up to build a sculpture of a bed.  Later, I made a three dimensional piece which was based on the complicated shape of a brain.

SC: Coping with death can be very difficult for many people. It can be equally challenging to convey emotions caused by loss. Yet, you have developed an acute visual language that allows you to simultaneously address your personal dealings of loss, while also giving form to the universal sentiment of mourning. Has the process of creating these works changed your feelings of death? How it altered your thoughts on loss and the process of mourning?

Motoi Yamamoto: I can’t tell if my feelings of death have been changed by the passage of time or by the process of creating my work.  I don’t have any way to compare to the two alternatives because I’ve only experienced this through my work, not through a more conventional mourning process.  I would like to think that it altered my thoughts on loss gradually, but I don’t know.

Image Courtesy of Motoi Yamamoto and the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art

SC:I’m fascinated by the connection between the ephemeral nature of your work and the fleeting quality of memories. It seems that just as a memory can never be fully permanent, neither can your installations. They’re both present for mere moments in time before slipping away. In a quote you mentioned, “What I look for in the end of the act of drawing could be a feeling of touching a precious memory.” Do you feel that your work is an action to preserve a memory, even though the nature of the work is temporary?

MY: I would say my work is not an action to preserve a memory, but rather a way to try and recall all the memories as much as I can.

SC:  Memories are always in a state of flux, they change and become less vivid the further we get from the original moment. Yet, your process seems to allow you the unique opportunity of keep a particular person alive in your mind – or at least consistently engage with your memories. This gesture seems very humble and moving. How do you think your sister would feel about your work if she were able to see it today?

MY: I know it would never happen, but I believe that she would be happy to see my work, and by thinking this it pleases me.

Image Courtesy of Motoi Yamamoto and the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art

SC: Even though your work stems from a very personal experience, it address ideas, and employs metaphors and symbols that are universally understood. However, eastern and western cultures often interpret ideas of death and mourning very differently. Do you feel that your work is interpreted differently when exhibited to in the context of a western audience, as opposed to an eastern audience?

MY: I think the reactions of the audience to my work in both the West and East have more similarities than differences.  But, speaking of the interpretation of my work, to be honest,  I don’t know the differences, because I can’t communicate with the audiences deeply in other languages.

SC: Verbal communication is often less than effective when attempting to convey many concepts found in your work. Over the years you have found several metaphors to help communicate your ideas visually–labyrinths, gardens, forest patterns, cherry blossoms, corridors and stairways among others.  Have you found that some of these forms are more effective than others at conveying your ideas? How does the rigidity of the Labyrinth form activate your concepts over that of the organic forms of the Floating Garden? And, vice versa.

MY: I feel that the Labyrinth is the most direct shape that connects my creative process, through which I am making and trying to connect some big and precious memories with my sister. The piece becomes the final shape that emerges from this process. Also, the Labyrinth makes me think about the concept of my work quite clearly compared to the others, because the Labyrinth will be most affected by the surface of the floor or the humidity while I am drawing lines with salt, and these uncontrollable elements remind me of my experiences with the terminal care of my sister.

In Labyrinth, I put one or several goals in position, which represent big memorial places I have with my sister. From the entrance points of the work, I start drawing a maze-like pattern by wishing these places could be connected. The Labyrinth was born in Greece and Scotland, mainly Europe, and the pattern symbolizes birth, death and rebirth. But after more than a decade since my sister passed away, I feel I am losing the ability to recall all the memories. It seems that I began to wish for a fresh breeze to blow into myself, and I also wish to look into the corners of all the drawers that are filled with memories by turning over the closet, so to speak. I think that these wishes lead me to find a pattern that has a similar meaning of the Labyrinth, but from an Asian perspective, which is the “swirl or spiral pattern”. The swirl is circling in and circling out (going into a circle and coming out from a circle) and the moment when the spiral meets both in and out, is the time of rebirth.  A swirl is also assembled using many bubble type circles, like lace. I want to spin all of these smaller bubbles into one larger piece.  In this context, each circle resembles a small or trivial but important memory with my sister.

Image Courtesy of Motoi Yamamoto and the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art

SC: There is a certain cycle that is found in each of your projects, as your work takes form with salt, and is ultimately disassembled and returned to the sea. I understand that this is a very important and symbolic action, so much so that it was used as the source of your exhibition title at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, Return to the Sea: Saltworks. Tell me a little about the significance of this gesture? Since your projects take form through a laborious process of individual creation and stems from such a personal event in your life, I would only assume that you’d like to return the work to the sea yourself. Why have you decided to incorporate the community into this final stage?

MY: I suppose that the reason I started the Return to the Sea project is because a longer time has passed after her death. I can breathe more openly and think of other things, or can now afford to think of other things, that I believe I was not able to do shortly after she passed away.

I recall that it was the summer of 2005, 10 years passed after her death and my feeling had changed.  Before that time, my Labyrinth was composed of straight lines or even by curved lines, but the shape was very geometrical, and had only one entrance.  After the summer of 2005, I started drawing very winding lines and I added several entrances. The outline sometimes began to look like a sea shore, more natural than a pure geometrical shape. Also, around that period I started the public access to view my process while making the installations. I suppose that I was trying to get rid of the closed framework that included just my sister and me, by showing (disclosing) my very private process of making the work to others.

Another reason for allowing a public viewing of the Return to the Sea project, either or without me being present, is that I realized that viewing my work, or simply meeting me with my work, could heal some peoples’ wounds, especially those who had similar experiences to what I had with my sister.

Return to the Sea: Saltworks by Motoi Yamamoto from John Reynolds & Lee Donaldson on Vimeo.

In 2006, I had an exhibition as a part of Force of Nature at the main library of the College of Charleston. A locksmith of the College of Charleston who lost his father because of a brain tumor, asked if he could dismantle my work and bring the salt back to the ocean.

My work, when I finish making a piece, becomes not my own in a sense.  The salt itself that I use is a natural substance that is still in a big circulation of the Earth, in the same manner as the salt in the ocean or salt in our bodies.  I am happy to see if people imagine or think about these ideas when they touch the salt of my works.

Motoi Yamamoto Return to the Sea: Saltworks will be on view at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, SC through July 7th, 2012.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Standing), 2010 | 40" x 53" | Courtesy of the Artist

Seth Curcio: So Matt, currently you have an exhibition on view at Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco, titled HORIZON/S. The series pulls from cultural images that transcend time, location, and cultures. But, before we dive into these ideas, I’d like to learn some basics, like how these images are constructed. They seem so mysterious – can you walk me through the process of finding your source material and constructing the image?

Matt Lipps: Sure, this body of work, like the majority of my work since 2004, is an entirely analog process involving sculpture, collage, and theater staging on a small scale with a cast of paper dolls that I’ve cut out and propped up with supports so that they may stand on their own. For HORIZON/S I pulled from the first 10 years of Horizon Magazine, a bi-monthly hardback arts journal first published in September 1958. The magazine’s inaugural issue sets up a general invitation to the American people to join the editors of the magazine on a voyage towards an imagined “horizon” of high art and culture – examining art(ifacts), architecture, theater & film actors, and serving up what would be fine “taste” for those who weren’t in the know – a relatively antiquated way of thinking about art objects.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Form), 2010| C-print, 40" x 53" | Courtesy of the Artist

SC: Your work is ultimately exhibited as photography. Yet, your process starts with an appropriated image, moves into sculpture, draws heavily on painting, and employs the tools of theater. Ultimately it arrives back at an image. What do you feel happens in this transformation of material?

ML: I’m not sure that I know, but the transformation is evident, and heartfelt for me, too – which is what keeps me engaged in making the work. For me it has something to do with an embodied, phenomenological experience of encountering an image in a dislocated context at an unexpected size. Certainly, the scale of the image is key to this transformation, and photography allows me to play with scale and depth in ways that traditional collage doesn’t. I’ve done several works that exist as sculpture, but it’s generally a frontal presentation that fails to some degree when attempted to view “in the round,” and, the work feels diminished somewhat as mere paperdolls of an expected size.

Re-photographing those images back into a photograph brings a certain amount of seamlessness to the foreground and background that, I hope, holds the viewer’s attention for slightly longer. This is especially tricky in HORIZON/S when you’re confronted with photographic reproductions of varying quality and scale, that depict stone sculptures, painting fragments, illusionistic spaces, portraits, landscapes, etc., and it’s all tied back together and hermetically sealed under the photographic picture plane.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Reach), 2010| C-print, 40" x 53" | Courtesy of the Artist

SC: I like to consider how you categorize images and ideas in your practice and how this aligns and deviates from the basic cultural structuring – or lumping – that engages most museums. I know that HORIZON/S is also further divided in to two parts: Private and Public Collections. What are the main distinctions of these two collections?

ML: In assembling a cast of about 200 characters, obvious trends presented themselves – not only in my image selection process, but also in the kinds of images that were reproduced in the original magazine. This is highlighted when examining what size they were reproduced as, and whether or not they were printed in full color, black and white, or at times photogravure.

These decisions were made by the editors, thereby producing a secondary hierarchical structure. When all of the images are set to stand on their own, it’s clear to see what was deemed central to the idea of cultivating good taste, and what genres of art were seen as marginal or clearly dwarfed in comparison.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Women's Heads), 2010| C-print, 40" x 53" | Courtesy of the Artist

An example of Public Collections – the first photograph I made in the series – is Untitled (Women’s Heads). I pulled from the group every image I had cut out that was only of a female head and shoulders, to see what that image would look like. In the magazine, as in art history and by extension museums and archives, it’s necessary to organize objects by region, chronology, and/or genre so that they can be “knowable,” or classified into a system. My project aims to question the logic of that practice, and asks what else can be learned from a different system of objects if set free from the typical constraints of the archive and introduced to elements of chance, disorganization, and a personalized re-mixing of art and art historical objects.

But, there were other connections I was making with individual objects that had no logical connection, other than the fact I was compelled to make pictures incorporating them. From this started the parallel series I call Private Collections – the idea being, rather than making a photograph curated around a single homogeneous premise to communicate a single idea, I would make photographs of disparate objects culled together by an individual taste. This act allows for a more narrative story about the individual who may have collected them to emerge.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Marble), 2010| C-print, 40" x 33" | Courtesy of the Artist

SC: In this way, you are able to simultaneously mine images and objects that are collected and organized by institutions, and then by you as an artist. Obviously, the result speaks to your own taste, however someone else sets the parameters. This type of curating from existing structures references our remix culture. How do you feel the ubiquity of images and excelled sharing of cultural information affects our perception of the world? Especially since so much of this information is already organized or “curated” by others.

ML: Previously, I had always talked about my work in relationship to “desire,” rather than “taste.” But, with HORIZON/S – a broader examination of taste-refinement is brought to the fore.

To answer your question about the ubiquity of images and excelled sharing of information…I only feel safe answering how I feel it affects my perception of the world. It’s fantastic! It’s horrific! There are images I can never scrub out of my mind – that I wish I’d never laid eyes on…there are others I’ve had deep and meaningful relationships with/to (and, I mean this with much gravity). As an appropriation artist, I’m grateful to have these tools to employ, and I aim to do so with integrity and sincerity. If I were to offer a word of caution about the endless production and distribution of images, it’s that one might grow comfortably numb – that they’d lose their affect and ability to trigger outrage and mobilize change. Or, that people think they know the operation of any given image before taking the time to read it, because of some imaginary typological vault of pictures that contain finite and quantifiable data. That seems lazy to me, and, in part, with this project, I was trying in my own way to “re-mix” that.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (bar), 2008 | C-print on aluminum, 46" x 33" inches | Courtesy of the Artist

SC: That’s great insight on how you relate to imagery, both images selected by you and the endless barrage of images in the world. I’m also interested in how HORIZON/S remains so seemingly objective in nature, in contrast to the pictures in HOME SERIES. Was there a shift from your previous work that caused you to engage in a project that allows for your personal narrative to remain distant?

ML: There has been a shift, but for me, it’s been at a glacial pace starting from the first photograph I can remember cutting out when I was thirteen years old. The practice has always been about having a relationship with a person, place, or object – a photographic distance announced in the mediation of that object in its image-ness.

Early on in my work, this longing was explicit: my desire to be with a body pictured in a magazine to act as surrogate lover/boyfriend, resurrected from a late-1970’s pre-AIDS moment in time. It was a willful exertion of my desire for him to sit with me on our bed, and to take his portrait, thereby re-flattening him into a Barthesian photographic flat-death (again). For me, that work is about melancholia and loss in as much as it’s about a personalized, magical desire.

Coming to terms with my own sexuality and understanding the operation of these images in relationship to my desire, I was able to formalize a vocabulary around my work and turn it into a language that was legible across multiple genres of photography. This, in turn, allowed me to move past my immediate biography (though, never that far removed from it), and look at broader reaching themes in my work.

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Satin), 2004| C-print on aluminum, 40" x 30" | Courtesy of the Artist

Fast-forward to the HOME series, I still incorporated ideas of desire (or, taste, or, selection) and loss in relationship to a personalized history of photography literally housed and cultivated within my childhood home. There, I’m compiling a cataclysmic dichotomy of “high vs. low” that examines the accrual of objects and memories in an intimate, domestic space in relationship to an unpacking of heroic baggage.

And, now with HORIZON/S, where it might appear as though I’ve stripped back all of the personal narrative found in earlier modules, I still employ my vocabulary of image-making, and its deeply concerned with ideas about photographic representation and the desire to understand its operation with respect to art history and the cultivation of taste. It still feels very me, even if I’m less apparent than before.

SC: Do you feel that you have reached a state of completion with HORIZON/S? Is there often a clear stopping point in your series, or do you feel that you can continue it indefinitely?

Matt Lipps, Untitled (Sculpture) 2010| C-print, 33" x 80" | Courtesy of the Artist

The impulse to “re-mix” HORIZON/S was endless – so, yes, it could have gone on indefinitely! In fact, I shot at least 50 images that I thought worked well – but it was ultimately edited down to about 22 photographs. Being a photographer and carrying the burden of seriality is always a delicate balance of editing, and having good friends and mentors helping you see your blind spots.

But, I ended up working on HORIZON/S for almost two years, mostly pre-production and making decisions about the look of the final image. Now, I’m feeling pretty done. Though, I will say that it was fascinating to watch people look at these images, and their need to know who each person/object was – a desire to unlock a deeper logic, or to give name to something that seems familiar but forgotten. I would be curious to push that notion further, partnered with my own fascination with how images traditionally operate, and how I might continue to confound that.

Image Courtesy of Contemporary Art Daily

Navigating through Venice in the off season can be challenging, but trying to move through hot, narrow streets and massive crowds of people during the Venice Biennale is completely dizzying. Illuminations, the 54th Venice Biennale, was the largest and most comprehensive to date with 89 national participants alongside 37 collateral events arranged by international organizations and institutions.  As usual, the exhibition spread liberally over Venice’s Arsenale and Giardini as well as in satellite locations throughout the city.

Image Courtesy of the Artist

After spending my first morning fighting my way to the Giardini, I stumbled my way into my first international pavilion, Crystal of Resistance by Thomas Hirschhorn representing Switzerland. This initial occurrence seemed all to appropriate, considering like Venice itself, the work is dense with cultural information and fully engaged in a cycle of production and consumption. In true Hirschhorn fashion, the all-encompassing and transformative installation feels strangely distant from the outside world, yet remains fully composed of materials of the western culture just beyond the doors. Bonded by packing tape, the various selection of tvs, chairs, printed images and video, toy dolls, aluminum foil, cotton swabs, bottles, and buckets (among countless other objects) are transformed through a second stage of mass-production. Perhaps the only material that doesn’t directly reference globalism and commodity culture are the thousands of crystals that are scattered throughout the installation, providing the heavy social context with the transformative “powers” of healing and beauty. Scale dramatically shifts between the craft-like plastic crystals to the oversized shapes made of plastic sheeting, fluorescent lighting, and wood, taking one all-encompassing installation from macro to micro with each step.

Image Courtesy of the Artist

Here, Hirschhorn maintains his emphasis on the excesses of contemporary life found in physical materials and visuals information, yet creates his own biological universe, giving form and weight to largely invisible processes. Plastic chairs and tvs carry their own cultural history while simultaneously becoming soil for the crystallized flora and fauna dispersed through the environment. Packing tape grows up the side of aluminum foil structures, and vines of photos drape between fluorescent lighting branches. Hirschhorn has imbued his installation with a life system that carries his references to consumer culture and economic chaos, offering the viewer an accelerated experience fueled on notions of the absurd and proliferated by discarded items of commerce.

Ryan Travis Christian, “Optical Illusion #4 (Sad Sacks)”, 2011 / Image courtesy of Guerrero Gallery

Seth Curcio: So Ryan, It is good to finally chat with you! You know, I first came across your work about two years ago in Los Angles at the now closed Synchronicity art space – across the street from one of the best ice cream spots in the world, Scoops. I was there with a good friend of mine and he was raving about your drawings. Since then, I have kept my eye on your projects as they pop up in galleries all over the country. There has been a lot of development in your work over the past few years and your visual vocabulary is constantly expanding, evolving, co-opting and consuming. Walk me through the process of creating one of your drawings. Do you approach it purely through intuition or are they carefully planned from the start? I have read that you create an abstract problem for yourself and then solve the problem during creation…. this sounds really interesting, but exactly what does it mean?

Ryan Travis Christain: Likewise! Haha, for the record… Synchronicity (run by two near and dear friends of mine) is re-opening kitty corner from their old location in a freestanding building facing Scoops, & now that you mention it, i could really go for a scoop of pear ice cream, damn that place is good.

Anyhow, as far as approaching a drawing goes, I’ve been writing a lot of brief little notes to myself on scraps of paper, stories, memories, phrases I’m fond of. These scraps are everywhere! I like to sit on them for awhile and see what comes back to me a second or third time, figuring there’s some sort of extra weight to that.

Taking said idea, I then begin to build up a surface on the paper, there are a decent amount of layers beneath the finished product. The “abstract problem” is more or less a mess that I’m forcing myself to respond to. Expressive mark making, rubbings, or even something like a big fat x in the center of the picture plane, provide me with a loose structure that I can begin to plug my vocabulary into. It’s nice to be able to retain some of the gestural quality of the “problem” and have that interact with the concrete visual elements. It definitely gives the drawings some sort of energy.

New Bikini Jam #2″, Graphite on Paper, 2011 / Image courtesy of Guerrero Gallery

I’ve made it a point to stop pre-conceiving a specific image to achieve. I used to drive myself crazy that way, trying to meet my brain’s own high standards. I feel like that kind of sucks the fun out of it, as opposed to just seeing what happens. I think that’s a really great way to go about making something, you can stumble across all sorts of things that way and often surprise yourself. There is a lot of of freedom in this approach. I read recently that Cormac McCarthy tackles his writing in a similar fashion.

SC: So what are some examples of the phrases that you write down? There is a definite dark humor that permeates your work. Do the phrases contain humor too, or are they totally random? Also, I want to know more about your visual vocabulary. Where do you pull your sources? And, is anything up for grabs?

RTC: Oh man, the phrases are infinite, they are pulled form everywhere, I probably use about 1% of them overall. Sometimes they are humorous, sometimes totally random. Some examples are “juice loosener”,”walks in forrest, sleeps in the river”, “wooden mexican”, “dramamine”, “old dro”, “snake men”, “demon bag” (these are ones visible from where I’m typing). I guess they’re probably funnier to me since I know what they specifically reference, but I’m not trying to be funny, I just want to retain these fleeting thoughts and 2-3 word phrases do the trick quite nicely. It also happens that some of these “ideas” are just actually funny, humor trumps beauty in my mind as far as eliciting an emotional response from a viewer and I’ve always been most drawn toward humorous work.

Ryan Travis Christian, “Binocular View #2″, Graphite on Paper, 2010 / Image courtesy of Guerrero Gallery

Yeah, anything is up for grabs, I don’t see any point in limiting myself to a specific set of sources, but I do definitely tend to wind up gravitating toward certain things repeatedly. I find myself wanting to draw cars, sex, homes, lawn care based activities, and vague landscapes/shallow spaces the most. I guess these are the things I think about/recall most often and the landscapes/spaces are perfect stages to place the narrative. Narrative wise my source is mainly memory, object wise my source is also mainly memory, but from time to time I’ll steel someone’s story or print out a picture of a rose to draw from. Thought I’ve noticed as time goes by, other sources start to creep in slowly and become a staple part of the vocabulary. So it’s constantly evolving, at glacial speeds.

SC: That’s interesting. I usually link words like car, homes and lawn care to suburban culture. These are all mundane activities and objects that fill basic suburban life. Yet I feel that there is also an anxious feeling of being trapped in some sort of bad dream, where absurdity takes over seemingly innocent activities — maybe this too is a product of suburban culture! It’s evident in works like Creepers #1 where a typical backyard melts into a subversive landscape. Since you mentioned the source of your narratives being based mainly in memory, I have to ask, what happened to you in the past that led to these types of visual stories?

RTC: Spot on! The surburbs (where I grew up and still live) are like a bad dream or a weird one at least. You have rural and urban influence, lots of space, redundant store scapes and infinite neighborhoods. Suburban culture is fucking boring when you are young and angst-y, it forces you to make your own fun. You have to hang out in the forrest or sneak out and run around at night and be absurd. When your town or city or whatever isn’t brimming with garbage and filled with hobos and police sirens, happenings are much more noticeable.

But suburban lifestyle aside, I feel that story telling is the highest form of art, drinking beer with friend comes in a close second Marioni!. So that’s what I do, take the best ones and draw em’. I don’t usually broadcast what a drawing is specifically about, I like that people can make their own associations with the imagery, but since you asked nicely, I’ll tell you one.

Ryan Travis Christian, “Creepers #1″, Graphite on Paper, 2010 / Image courtesy of Guerrero Gallery

Creepers #1 happened on Halloween of 2001, at the time we had these neighbors who were total crabapples, a real miserable middle-aged couple, the entire block would agree with me on this statement. My parents and I were returning from an early dinner and kids were all over the place trick or treating. As we pulled into our driveway, I briefly glanced at my neighbors house. It took me a second to realize something was off about what I just saw. When I looked again, I noticed a face looming in these two large trees that are situated on the corner of their house. It wasn’t a familiar face either, it was this perverted crumby looking old man, just hiding in the bushes in broad daylight. I realized 2 things immediately, a) this guy was up to no good ( I know this, being someone who has hid in the bushes many times) and b) I had the opportunity to catch this weirdo and maybe whip his ass (taking the law into my own hands is kind of a fantasy of mine). So, i pointed at him and screamed “Hey you”. He jumped out of the bushes. My neighbor was handing candy out and screamed when she saw this. He sprinted between our houses into the backyard and toward a busy road that runs behind our street. I ran into the garage and grabbed a baseball bat, ran out the side door and chased him down the road, I got so close too! But I failed, he wanted it more than me I guess. The neighbor lady had called the police while this was all happening and they showed up pretty quickly, telling us that this was one of multiple calls they received about a guy creeping in the area.

Ryan Travis Christian, “X2Go2Work!”, Graphite on Paper / Image courtesy of Guerrero Gallery

SC: HA! What a priceless story. Thanks for sharing the background. The suburbs can definitely breed the most absurd happenings. I can see how these personal stories are rich with the content that can fuel your work. I’m also interested in your aesthetics. There is an amazing fragmentation in your work that allows for multiple references to appear simultaneously. It is evident that you absorb a lot from contemporary art and culture and subvert it for you own purpose. I’m curious about the artists that you are interested in right now, the art history that you keep coming back to and in general, things that have been captivating your attention as of late?

RTC: My pleasure, there’s lots more where that came from. I interviewed Ben Jones a long time ago and he said it better than I ever could… “It takes only the most ballin’ original tightest visual shit possible… I want to see fucking mint ass visual shit and then and only then will I approve/steal it”.

Doing the whole blog thing and curating and just looking at a lot of art in general, I’ve developed a very specific taste for elements I think work best, and like any artist, you can look at their work and probably develop a complex diagram of where everything they made came from. It’s constantly changing too. Current artists would include but isn’t limited to: Paper Rad, Marissa Textor, Mike Rea, Bjorn Copeland, Scott and Tyson Reeder, Jose Lerma, Geoffrey Todd Smith, Eddie Martinez, Eric Yahnker, Allison Schulnik, Ben Stone, Deb Sokolow, Cleon Peterson, Ben Stone, Xylor Jane, Andrew Schoultz, Joseph Hart, Chris Duncan, Samantha Bittman, Garth Weiser, Lightning Bolt, Hilary Pecis, Evan Gruzis, Glen Baldridge, Michael Krueger, Chris Johanson, Joe Roberts, Adam Scott, Cory Arcangel, Ann Toebbe, CF, Scott Wolniak, this list could seriously go on forever… Older inspiration comes from; Conlon Nancarrow, Guston, De Kooning, Archibald Motley, Ub Iwerks, Bruce Bickford, The Hairy Who, George Condo, Ray Yoshida, this could go on forever too. More than anything, I ideally want to be able to do for future generations what these people have done for me, which is make me believe that art isn’t totally stupid. If there’s a name you don’t recognize, please google it.

Ryan Travis Christian, “Jailbirds”, Graphite on Paper, 2010 / Image courtesy of Guerrero Gallery

SC: In your current exhibition Sad Sacks at Guerrero Gallery in San Francisco, you have produced an epic-scaled drawing as well as a collaborative work with Chris Duncan. It seems that you are certainly interested in expanding your practice. Beyond furthering your intricate drawings, do you have any projects or exhibitions plans that are outside of your current method of working?

RTC: I’ve been doing the smaller scale/ super tight drawings for a couple years now and I’m going to continue that. But there are a lot of other things that I want to pursue, probably too many. After knocking out that big one @ Guerrero in 2 days (the biggest thing I’ve done thus far), I’m definitely jazzed to be back home in the studio with an extra added energy. Next month I’ll be doing two more massive wall pieces, one with Western Exhibitions at the MDW Fair and the other at the Co-Prosperity Sphere, both here in Chicago. I’ve been dj’ing thematic sets recently with Club Nutz (the worlds smallest comedy club) and will continue to do that as much as possible. Also trying to acquire a full on drum kit to execute some music I’ve had in my head for a minute now. I’ve been juggling around some sculpture/video ideas and also have been attempting to make paintings of my drawings, ideally in 5 years from now I’d like to have the option of taking an idea I have and being able to execute it in any medium, while maintaining a certain caliber. Also developing a hand drawn animation a la’ 1930’s style, which won’t be finished for a long time! Trying to run the gauntlet…

Ryan Travis Christian “Freewheelers”, Graphite on paper / Image courtesy of Guerrero Gallery

Concerning the collaboration with Duncan, that was amazing, but that’s because he’s a force of nature! I’ve been doing collabs for a short amount of time, sometimes they ‘re lemons other times they blow your mind. I think it’s important for like minded artists to collaborate, it’s just another way to communicate/bond/learn from one another, plus it’s a lot of fun. I’ve done some with Eric Yahnker, Alexis Mackenzie, Dana Dart- Mclean and Chris, thus far. I have a nice list of about 15-20 folks that I’ll be working with over the next 6 months, which will culminate in a project space show at Western Exhibitions in October alongside my debut solo show with them. Got a big curatorial project in the mix and a book project based on what could be my gnarliest story ever! Plus a bunch of group shows between now and mid 2012 all over the country and abroad. Keep your eyes peeled for Ryan Wallace‘s upcoming curatorial project based on the idea of “home” that’s coming up in May, it will be a game changer. I signed up for a summer golf league. I feel like when I type all of this shit, I’m begging the cosmos to splatter my face with egg. It’s only a matter of time until you read about my head exploding.

Trevor Paglen They Watch the Moon, 2010 / Courtesy of Altman Siegel Gallery

Seth Curcio: Trevor, your practice is centered in both experimental geography and art-making. Often the two collapse into one. Did your interest in geography develop concurrent with your interest in art-making? Or, did one come before the other?

Trevor Paglen: I’ve been an artist my whole life – much longer than I’ve been a geographer. In the mid 1990s, I started doing projects that had a strong relationship to landscape and the politics of visibility. While earning a MFA in Chicago, I became frustrated by the limits of traditional art theory, which mostly comes out of literary criticism, and wanted to find a more expansive theoretical language that could account for things like economics, politics, materiality, and so forth, in addition to questions of representation. Geography theory, I found, was incredibly powerful and flexible: it provided me with a way to think about cultural production in a much more powerful way than what I’d found in art and representational theory. So, I ended up moving to Berkeley and doing a PhD in geography.

Trevor Paglen: Unhuman Installation View/ Courtesy of Altman Siegel Gallery

SC: It’s interesting to know that you began making art long before your interest in science. In much of your work, there are strong references to art history as well as the history of photography. Those histories are intermingled with political and scientific concerns, allowing much of the work to function on multiple levels simultaneously. There are obvious references to Abstract Expressionism in works such as The Fence (Lake Kickapoo, Texas) and Untitled (Reaper Drone), as well as specific references to the history of photography in the works Time study (Predator; Indian Springs, NV) and Artifacts (Anasazi Cliff Dwellings, Canyon de Chelly). How do you feel these art historical references operate in the work, and what insight do they provide the viewer?

TP: Absolutely. There are all sorts of reference and nods to various art-historical moments and works, and references to specific historical photographs and gestures. I constantly use those references in a number of ways. With those references I want to ask “150 years ago, for example, a photographer looked at a particular place and that act of looking and photographing, at that particular historical moment, said a number of things about that historical moment. What happens when we try to see the same place now, and what might that act of seeing or photographing tell us about our particular historical moment?” The same is true for the references to various representational modes: “What,” for example, “does abstraction mean now? What, if anything, from that particular way of representing a historical and cultural moment, is relevant to our own contemporary moment? Why? And how?” For me, these sorts of historical references act as guide-points that we can use to understand how to see the world now, which is ultimately what I’m interested in.

Trevor Paglen Untitled (Reaper Drone), 2010 / Courtesy of Altman Siegel Gallery

SC: The notion of seeing remains consistent in your work. As you mentioned before, this idea can be explored through the use of photography or by referencing specific moments of art history, when considering how other artists have seen the world and then represented that view in their work. Beyond these methods, much of your work is also investigating technology that is designed to see us, but not be seen. I find it interesting that the main way you shed light on these objects is to track and photograph them yourself, further reinforcing the idea of seeing. It seems that you are actively engaged in watching that which watches us. How do you feel about this cyclical processes?

TP: I think that there is a little bit of any irony in the act of “watching the people who are watching you” here for sure, and it’s certainly something that I’ve developed into a sub-theme quite explicitly in some works. But overall, I don’t think that particular dynamic is something I’m categorically interested in. That reading seems to emphasize the “surveillance” aspect of the work too much, and I’m actually not particularly interested in surveillance, per se. But it does point towards something that I am interested in, something I call “entangled photography” or “relational photography” – what I mean by this is thinking about photography beyond photographs. What happens if we start thinking about the practice of photography as embodying the critical moment in the work? In other words, what if the “fact” of photographing something is the essential critical point of a work? I started thinking about this a while ago when I was photographing secret military bases and CIA prisons – for me, a crucial part of those projects is not always what the images look like so much as the politics of producing them.

Trevor Paglen Time study (Predator; Indian Springs, NV), 2010 - Detail / Courtesy of Altman Siegel Gallery

I think I’m going to revise what I said about these relationships of seeing not being interesting to me. They are. But I think they’re part of what we might call the spatio-ethical dimension of the images’ conditions of production, rather than the aesthetic part of them. Sometimes the “entangledness” of the photograph can arise from these complex relations of seeing and counter-seeing in my work (i.e. photographing spy satellites or Predator drones photographing me), but not always. Sometimes the relational dimension can arise from the very fact of taking a photograph of something that, for political purposes, “isn’t there.”  Or any number of things. But, yes, the “relational” aspects of my work are absolutely crucial, even though they’re often not self-evident in the prints themselves.

Trevor Paglen Time study (Predator; Indian Springs, NV), 2010 / Courtesy of Altman Siegel Gallery

SC: It’s intriguing to consider the fact of photographing being the critical crux of the work. However, I think I am still unclear exactly what you mean by entangled or relational photography in this context.  Can you provide me with a little more insight? Are you saying that the fact that you are able to produce the photograph supersedes the photograph itself? If so, why show the photograph at all — does it then become about exhibiting proof of the action?

TP: With regard to your question about whether “that the fact that you are able to produce the photograph supersedes the photograph itself,” what I mean is a little more subtle. The “fact” of being able to produce the photograph is just one aspect of this. Let’s think about what photography is in two ways: we have one aspect of “photography” that happens prior to the photograph itself, and we have another aspect which is the photograph or image itself. In the former sense, I’m talking about all sorts of things – on one hand, you have a technological and social history of “seeing with machines” (my definition of photography). You also have specific sets of relations that  “set the stage,” as it were, before you open the shutter. In every instance, those relations are going to be different, but what I mean by “entangled” photography has to do with making those relations somehow part of the work – whether visible in the final photograph or not. And yes, the photograph in a sense does become “proof” of the action, or, more precisely, the photograph may point towards the action. But that doesn’t mean that the “relational” or “entangled” aspects of the photograph supersede the photograph itself. On the contrary, we also have the photograph itself. The image or photograph is an opportunity, related yet distinct from the “relational” aspects of the photography process, to convey other sorts of meaning, metaphor, allegory, or, if you’re so inclined (I tend not to be), documentation. So I’m not really talking about either part of the photography process superseding the other, I’m talking about the fact that there are all sorts of opportunities to develop the “relational” side of the work that can contribute to what the overall artwork is.

Trevor Paglen Untitled (Predators; Indian Springs, NV), 2010 - Detail / Courtesy of Altman Siegel Gallery

SC: As you often turn to the sky to track objects such as satellites, planes and drones, you seem to present these objects engulfed in a sea of space. Formally this presents a vastness that seems to echo the sublime. I feel like this gesture is also referential of moments in art history, but I also suspect that the idea of vastness itself operates as a metaphor for the unknown, or at least that which is present but rarely detected.  What are your thoughts on the concept of vastness and the sublime as it relates to some of the images on view now at Altman Siegel Gallery?

TP: This notion of the “sublime” is a really important part of what I do. I think about the sublime in relation to Jean Luc Nancy’s definition of it, which has to do with the sublime being the “sensibility of the fading of the sensible.” In other words, the sublime arises from those moments where we can sense that we cannot sense let alone understand something. This brings us to the “aesthetic” dimension of the work. In terms of contemporary critical theory, an investigation or discussion of the aesthetic is often thought of as a philosophical dead-end, a discussion that ended quite some time ago (except in reactionary ‘neo-art-for-art’s-sake’ conversations which usually function as little more than apologies for vapid art). But I’m not willing to cede aesthetics to the more reactionary corners of the art world. Historically, aesthetics has often been linked to notions of freedom: ambiguity and the sublime can be quite powerful and is something visual art can be quite good at dealing with. So it’s important to me that it’s a part of my work, but the underlying “relational” and ethical aspects of the work are crucially important. Without them, it’s just pretty pictures. And there’s no reason to care about pretty pictures.

Trevor Paglen PAN (Unknown; USA-207), 2010 / Courtesy of Altman Siegel Gallery

SC: Well, I appreciate that you are able to balance both political and aesthetic concerns without either seeming arbitrary. Taking a different turn, I’m also interested in the intersection of vision, geography and time in this new work as it applies to the 21st century. As an artist and scientist that produces artwork and research in this area, I am curious what you feel is happening right now? What are the implications of new technology and how do you feel it is changing the way we, as a collective society, view ourselves and the world around us?

TP: Ha! That question is too big for this interview, I think. This is really something I’m trying to think through. I’m not someone who thinks there’s something historically new about the fact that human perception is being radically reconfigured at the moment (I think that those in the 19th Century were probably greater, and this is a big hint to looking at some of my newer works), but at the same time, I’m interested in the ways that what “seeing” is, is historically specific. I’m extremely interested in what seeing is, and what seeing means in the contemporary moment. Of course, this has everything to do with machines, which in turn has everything to do with time (in several senses: 1) the ways in which machines rationalize time; 2) the ever-increasing “speed” of vision – think Predator drones in Pakistan flown by pilots in Nevada), which of course has everything to do with space (what Marx called the “annihilation of space with time” – again, think Predator drones flown from Nevada creating a relationally contiguous geography even though they’re obviously on opposite sides of the world). You can see the question gets really big really quickly.

Trevor Paglen: Unhuman Installation View / Courtesy of Altman Siegel Gallery

SC: Thanks for entertaining a question of that magnitude. I know that you currently have an exhibition on view, but I’d love to hear more about the research that you are currently engaged in. What are you working on now, and what projects or exhibitions do you have on the horizon?

TP: In the immediate future, I’m continuing my work on drones and continuing my work on “invisible” infrastructures that the piece The Fence (Lake Kickapoo, Texas) points to. I’ve also begun work on a longer-term project dealing with time and universality. I know that’s pretty vague, but it’s going to be a while before I begin to understand that project.

Unhuman will be on view at Altman Siegal Gallery in San Francisco through April 2, 2011.

Richard Baker Howl, 2010 Gouache on paper 12 x 10.5 in. Courtesy of Gregory Lind Gallery.

As contemporary life embraces digital formats as a means of convenience, analog devices have become more and more scarce in contemporary society. Record albums have all but disappeared for mp3’s, newspapers for blogs (such as DailyServing) and printed books for Kindles and iPads. While there is a growing demand for these analog items for the nostalgic, these physical objects are equally fetishizied as they diminish as part of our everyday life. I’m a sucker for a good artist monograph, and I have a several bulging bookshelves to prove it. I seem to constantly remind myself not to fall victim to attractive packaging and always to evaluate the contents of a given publication over how well made or designed it may be.

Currently on view at Gregory Lind Gallery in San Francisco are two artists that use the physicality of the book as a subject, both in image and as object. Tom Burckhardt has collected the front and back covers of various found books, intermingling the book covers existing markings with formally constructed painting. The coexistence of the books physicality along with Burckhardt’s own marking collapses our expectations of these objects as books, liberating the materials from their utilitarian function, and binding them to the world of formal abstraction.

Tom Burckhardt Rampart St., 2010 Colored pencil & acrylic on book cover 8 x 10.5 in. Courtesy of Gregory Lind Gallery.

Richard Baker, approaches the notion of the book through representation, painstakingly rendering all of his subject’s physical details. Literary masters from the 1950s through the 70s, many having worked in San Francisco where this exhibition takes place, such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, sit along side books that reference the art world, such as the book A, written by Andy Warhol. For Baker, the books rendered mark important moments of recent social history, blending the nostalgia for these books as items of historical markings with the art object.

While each of these artists turn their attention to books as objects and images in very different ways, the feeling of longing for the physical, analog quality of material is present. In many ways, the works on view transcend the subject referenced or the material sourced, binding the viewer to our wavering relationship to these physical objects.

Installation view. Courtesy of Gregory Lind Gallery.

Katy Grannan. Anonymous, LA, 2009. Courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery

Seth Curcio: The portraits in your new series Boulevard are striking in their simplicity. Yet, given the reductive context, each photograph speaks volumes about the subject. The physical qualities of the individual make evident their distance to the what most call the American dream. With the narrative possibilities being so strong, I wonder what are the guiding principles used to select your subjects?

Katy Grannan: It’s difficult to explain what makes someone especially interesting to me – it’s a combination of personality, spirit, and their actual, physical being.  These photographs, as you mentioned, are so reductive – photographic description and detail is virtually all there is – & hopefully physical description becomes illuminating on another, psychological level. It’s important that the photograph describes a particular subject, but it also has to speak to something much larger, so that the viewer has the sense of a shared history; they’re portraits of all of us.

SC: Its interesting that you mention photographic description and detail being all that is available to the viewer. Given the reduction of image context, light becomes an even more prominent component in this work than in earlier series and remains consistent, as each figure is illuminated on a stark white ground. This purity of light is something that is evocative of the west and California in particular. Do you view the light as a metaphor? Something that is simultaneously seductive and revealing?

KG: Yes, certainly.  It was the first thing I observed when I moved to California.  The light is so seductive and comforting, and at the same time it kills everything – nothing stays green very long – and the light can be relentless and indiscriminate.  It illuminates everything, everyone.

Boulevard installation image, Courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery

SC: Each of the portraits speaks to how the ideals of a particular city can physically wear on the subject. It seems that this is most evident in your portraits from LA, as the city has come to represent celebrity and wealth, while its reality is often much darker.  It seems like the vain pursuit of beauty has worn physically on many of the subjects, leaving little more than the residue of longing for an unobtainable dream. Yet, there is a persistent optimism that runs through the series.

KG: I’m glad you mentioned optimism.  I definitely did not want the series to be a parade of despair, nor am I interested in smiley happy people (family photo albums are already filled with those pictures – this has always irritated me). Each one of these photographs is like a short story and part of that narrative, of course, is the part where they’re working with me to make a photograph on the spot, right after we’ve met.  The dynamic is different every time, but it’s almost always a lot of fun.  People really get into it, and it requires a generosity and openness to be part of this process, to dance on the sidewalk in front of traffic, to wave at strangers honking.  And I love the spirit of someone like the eighty year old woman who still wears bright lipstick and eyeliner – she deserves to feel gorgeous, and she is.  Or the eighty year old man that handed me his business card that read “International Playboy.”  These are the people I want to know better.  But of course, all of our histories are complex – there is disappointment, shame, loneliness, and there’s also joy.  I want all of it to exist, messily and awkwardly, in the photographs.  Because that’s life.

SC: Have there been any personal stories shared with you by your subjects that you find particularly captivating?

KG: Yes, almost everyone shares a lot with me.  Each one is like a story from The Dubliners or Chekhov.  A few women spoke to me about having a nervous breakdown after they had kids and their husband didn’t help out, then rejected them after their breakdown.  Now they’re alone; they were never able to fully recover.  I see them as especially sensitive women – they’re not crazy or strange, they’re women who are vulnerable and sensitive and who live every day knowing their kids are out there somewhere, and these kids might never know that their moms did try, but it was just too much.

I’ve made several good friends – Nicole, Melissa, and Linda are three women that I spend a lot of time with, and whom I’ve also filmed for the past year.

Katy Grannan. Anonymous, SF, 2010. Courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery

SC: I understand that you have used that footage to create a video project titled The Believers, which premieres tomorrow night at 1453 Valencia St. in San Francisco. Tell me a little about the process of creating the video. How did this time-based medium effect the way that you approach the work, and how do you feel that it changes the viewer’s relationship to the subject?

KG: I’ve thought a lot about this – it was really important that the film not “explain” the photographs, or reveal the mystery or ambiguity of the photographs. The film has a relationship to the photographs but it is entirely it’s own thing.  It’s a little difficult to explain the premise of the film, but it deals with the nonlinear, disruptive nature of experience and memory.  It is all footage that I shot of several women, with existing, ambient sound and dialogue, but it is not a documentary film by any means.  I don’t like that term, anyway – “documentary” – but the film intentionally weaves different subjects together, creates relationships and confusion among all of them.  You don’t necessarily know anything biographical about the subjects – except that they’re all performing and masquerading – but it’s meant to be disjointed and to mimic the way that one person or moment reminds me of another, and experiences are recalled in entirely new ways – they’re almost reinvented, re-imagined memories.  The film also shows the way that subjects and I interact with each other – they’ll boss me around, tell me where to stand, etc – so it more directly deals with this aspect of collaboration and control.  The women in the film have big personalities and strong opinions, and I respect that.

SC: Looking back at your older bodies of work, such as The Westerns and Mystic Lake, it is apparent that your work is in dialogue with the history of portraiture, both classical and commercial.  It seems easy to place you in the lineage of Diane Arbus, given your choice of subjects, or Richard Avedon, given the reduction of context in the portraits. However, I think much of your work goes beyond this type of comparison, leaving me feeling as if it is too easy to just lump you with those photographers. Which photographers of the past do you feel best inform your practice and which contemporary artists do you look to for inspiration?

Boulevard installation image, Courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery

KG: I take no offense in comparisons.  I often think artists and people who write about art place way too much importance on the appearance of novelty and obtuse sound bites, but if they really did their homework they’d see relationships and historical precedents all over the place.  Arbus and Lisette Model, Robert Frank and Walker Evans, etc. are obvious examples.  No one works in a vacuum; there is precedent and dialogue in every medium and expression and those relationships can be really interesting.  (“Tradition and the Individual Talent” by T.S. Elliot should be required reading).  The uniqueness or particularity of serious work is often in more thoughtful, quieter differences – all of which have to do with our own biography, experiences, and the world that we’re faced with at any given time.

I could give you a very long list of artists whose work I admire, and an even longer list of writers and film makers that have influenced my work.  But I really like what Robert Gober said: “Whenever I give a talk about my work I am invariably asked who my influences are.  Not what my influences are, but who.. As if the gutter, misunderstandings, memories, sex, dreams, and books matter less than forebears do.  After all, in terms of influences, it is as much the guy who mugged me on Tenth Street, or my beloved dog who passed away much too early, as it was Giotto or Diane Arbus.”

Katy Grannan. Anonymous, SF, 2009. Courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery

SC: Boulevard is accompanied by a beautiful catalog that includes additional work not on view at Fraenkel Gallery. In the back of the book there is an amazing quote taken from the Kinks song Celluloid Heros written by Ray Davies. The lyrics contain the stanza…

“Everybody’s a dreamer and everybody’s a star
And everyone’s in show biz, it doesn’t matter who you are
And those who are successful
Be always on your guard
Success walks hand in hand with failure
Along Hollywood Boulevard”

This line really captures the feeling that your subjects could be anyone of us, at anytime. What we constitute as our reality is often much more fragile than we perceive. You made a statement that ” the viewer has the sense of a shared history; they’re portraits of all of us.” That statement, coupled with the Celluloid Heros lyrics, is really poignant. It seems that for many, the West is still synonymous with freedom and boundless opportunity. This is obviously an illusion, but has working on this project caused you to reflect on your personal relationship to California or the West in general?

KG: Sure it has.  But what’s impressed me more is that many of us still try;  we make the leap of faith; and sometimes we willfully create an alternate, perhaps even a delusional reality.  That isn”t limited to California – it’s only limited by our imagination and our circumstances.  My grandmother was the queen of alternate realities, and I think it’s what kept her alive and joyful for a very long time. She wasn’t crazy – she was imaginative and stubborn and, to paraphrase Tony Kuchner, sometimes living in the world can be unbearably ordinary.

The twentieth century has provided a plethora of methods to communicate quickly to the masses, and it is becoming increasingly rare to find anyone taking the time to write a handwritten letter, much less create a large-scale public mural to share ideas with the public. However, for almost all of human history, wall paintings have served as one of the most effective ways to chronicle the events and progress of our time. Artist Josef Kristofoletti has tapped back into this method of communication and it has led him to some amazing places. From the gymnasium of his former high-school to a year long road trip around North America with the Transit Antenna artist collective, Josef’s desire to paint in public spaces has kept him moving. Perhaps the most impressive of these large-scale murals took place at CERN, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, situated in the Northwest suburbs of Geneva on the Franco–Swiss border. There, Kristofoletti created a four story mural of the ATLAS particle accelerator, directly on the walls that contain the actual structure. Since the completion of the project just a few months ago, I’ve been dying to talk with the artist about his experience of seeing the world’s most ambitious laboratory, as well as the completion of his most impressive mural to date.

Seth Curcio: So Joe, you recently had the unique opportunity to do an artist residency of sorts at the famous CERN, the European Organization of Nuclear Research on the boarder of Switzerland and France. You had the honor of being the first artist invited to produce an original work of art for the organization. Tell me what projects led up to this invitation and how did the world’s largest and most advanced scientific laboratory learn about your work ?

Josef Kristofoletti: In 2008, I made a painting for a two person show with my friend Matt Phillips at Redux Contemporary Art Center. Matt and I had some conversations before the exhibit about what we wanted to show. We talked about the origin of the universe and dark matter, then I decided that I would do something related to CERN. I painted a mural of ATLAS, the largest of the CERN particle detectors. I tried to make the mural scientifically accurate, based on the schematics available on the CERN website. After the show opened it got a little bit of press and a month or so later I got a call from Claudia Marcelloni, the photographer and outreach coordinator for the ATLAS experiment. She told me that they had seen photos of my mural and asked if I might be interested in doing something on location. I couldn’t believe it at first, it just sounded really strange over the phone. We set up a time for a meeting with some of the physicists and I booked a flight to Geneva that same day.

SC: Once you arrived at CERN, the officials gave you a tour of the facility, allowing you, an artist, unprecedented access to such highly restricted laboratories. Tell me a little about what you saw and how it turned into inspiration for the gigantic painting that eventually came to be?

JK: From the airport the CERN shuttle picked me up and took me right inside the lab’s main building. I met with two incredible scientists who work there, senior physicist Michael Barnett who is the head of the Particle Data Group, from Lawrence Berkley National Labs, and Neal Hartman, who engineered the innermost part of ATLAS, the pixel detector. It was a great meeting because they were as excited to talk to me about art as I was in finding out more about super symmetry. We talked about Egyptian sculpture and cinema. Neil has since left his position at CERN to attend film school in London. Anyway, they gave me a tour of the ATLAS facilities and we looked at some of the walls that I could potentially work on. By that time the detector, which is over 90 meters underground, was completely closed off to visitors and gearing up for the cool down process. Before collisions can start the entire 27 km tunnel is chilled with liquid helium to a temperature than is cooler than outer space. As we were talking about the possibilities of the project, my guides realized that I had to see the actual detector in person. After they made a few phone calls, and I started going through the most high secure checkpoint I have ever seen. The workers go through a complex biometric security system that includes a retinal scan. They all wear a dosimeter that measures radiation levels and there are plenty of safety warning labels on everything. We took the elevator down, then stepped out to look at the beast. There were a few men inside the detector doing some last minute work, but they were reduced to ants by huge size of its metal parts . It was sublime.

SC: This sounds amazing! I bet you never imaged in a million years that your research and project about ATLAS would eventually bring you into the exact laboratory that you studied for the mural at Redux Contemporary Art Center. I’d love to hear about some of the technical obstacles that you faced when creating the work, such as the time line needed for creating such an ambitious work, how you selected your subject matter, and dealing with extreme weather on the Franco-Swiss border. I even heard that you became a dad over this whole process. It just seems larger than life, both literally and metaphorically.

JK: I couldn’t get everyone to agree on the location that I wanted for the mural. I really wanted it place directly over the detector itself, and that alone took months. By the time that process was accomplished I had to start right away even though there was no funding for the project yet. I had charged the ticket to a credit card and flew back to Geneva from the United States. My third day there I met a side show performer named Stephan who lived by the train station and offered to let me sleep in his squat. He has this act where he can eat and swallow lit cigarettes. Stephan helped me stay sane for much of the project. There were so many security and safety issues at CERN that every day new problems came up. I had to go through safety courses to get clearance to work on the site and to use the Nacelle lift, which is the machine that was used to assemble the detector itself. I could not afford any assistants because it would have taken many more months of paperwork and training. I worked through French and German interpreters on many of the logistical issues and some of the safety classes. By the time I was able to touch paint to the wall it was October and getting colder every day. One day I couldn’t feel my hand any more and I realized that I had to face reality and come back the following year. I was able to finish the smaller of the two walls by mid November and had to return in June to continue. Halfway through the painting the whole operation was stopped by one of the electrical engineers in charge of safety. I was working right over the transformers and he said that in case of an accident the power supply would be jeopardized to the whole experiment. That stopped me until further security measures were dreamed up.

Every once in a while one of the physicists would confront me, very seriously, about how some part of the detector was not drawn properly. But, I respect that because for many of them this is a life’s work. Some have been there for twenty years going over the smallest details thousands of times. The whole detector is exactly precise to within one millimeter. I tried to explain to them that I was just making a painting. From up it the air I could see Mont Blanc just to my right, and the Jura mountains to my left. When I started on the proposals I found out that my wife was pregnant. My son Daniel was seven months old when I finished the mural. A lot of what has happened I can’t put into words, its been both shocking and beautiful. While I was at CERN I saw a lecture by Stephen Hawking. He was one of my childhood heroes. The first slide he showed said: ‘Why are we here? Where did we come from?’

SC: That all seems like such a feat in itself, not to mention the fact that in the end you created an amazingly ambitious mural that lives up to all the magic that is happening inside the facility. So now that you are back in the US, what kind of projects are you working on, and what do you have coming up?

JK: Just before I came back to the US I went to Fame Festival in Italy and it was one of the most amazing art exhibitions that I have ever seen. It was so cool to see huge paintings by BLU and the other artists, I found that very inspiring. I’m really obsessed with large-scale paintings on walls and I love that the street art phenomenon keeps exploding all over the world.  My next big project, which I’m super excited about working on, will be doing something for the Olympics. Details on that project to come…

Images Courtesy of Ebersmoore Gallery

Seth Curcio: So Mike, its been almost a year and half since you participated in the DailyServing  1000 DAYS exhibition at the Scion Installation gallery space in LA. What have you been up to lately? Tell me a little about the projects that you have been working on?

Michael Rea: After LA, I was out in San Francisco for a solo show at a down town office building 101 California.  After that, I was a group show at Western Exhibitions where I showed the Tasvo Maneaters Part 1 which later went on to show at Next art fair in Chicago.  Last spring, my work was exhibited in a group show at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. The show was curated by Vallerie Cassel-Oliver and was titled Hand+Made The Performative Impluse in Art and Craft. For the show at CAMH, I rebuilt the instruments for my 2004-05 performance piece I Yell Because I Care. The Instruments were displayed along with a video of the performance. After returning for the show in Houston, I began work on a solo show at Ebersmoore Gallery. Around August I took a break and traveled to Darmstadt, Germany to build a site specific sculpture as part of a residency/exhibition called Forest Art. After returning in September I seem to have spent every waking moment in the studio preparing for the show at Ebersmoore Gallery.

Images Courtesy of Ebersmoore Gallery

SC: In addition to your exhibition at Ebersmoore, you are included in the exhibition Inside Out at the Northern Illinois University’s Art Museum. Tell me a little about what is on view at each show.

MR: Well the show at the NIU art museum is a group show curated by Karen Brown, a faculty member in NIU’s art department. All of the  work in the show has a connection in some way to clothing/garments. There is a real nice variety of work in the the show. The two pieces that I am showing are Olympia and a Prosthetic Suit for Stephen Hawking W/ Japanese Steel. While Olympia seems to fit into the show a little more traditionally due to the use fabric and latch-hooking, It was really nice to show the the Stephen Hawking suit in this context.

The exhibition at Ebersmoore Gallery consists of work I made over the last year. In the main gallery space there is a large cannon like structure titled Benita. The cannon begins in the gallery and penetrates through the gallery wall and the living space adjacent to the galley pointing towards an exterior window.  Surrounding the cannon are multiple kegs, a bong, and a collar and chain tethered to the gun. There is also a scope a top the cannon, which has a video loop of a shower scene taken from the film Stripes. Oddly enough the video’s composition is rather similar to that of Les demoiselles D’avion. Viewers are invited to climb up and sit in the cockpit of the cannon. In the living space along with the 20′ barrel I have a few works on paper, which I have worked on throughout the last year.

Images Courtesy of Ebersmoore Gallery

SC: Much of your work is derived from, or abstractly references specific films. Constructing these objects out of wood essentially renders them useless, and they become stand-ins for real and imagined forms. So, I’ve got to ask, if you could activate these sculptures who would you like to see tethered to a death star-like ray gun surrounded by multiple kegs and a bong, and what would he or she being doing?

MR: Well I was considering using a muscular young man at the opening, but did not have time to place and filter the Craig’s List ad.  I wanted my friend’s brother to do it, but he moved away from Chicago.  He would have been perfect. Stylish, bitchy, young, works out all the time, and parties when he is not at work or in the gym. I figure I would have had him wear an outfit he would have normally worn to work at Sidetracks, and just had him drink, flirt and pout.

Images Courtesy of Ebersmoore Gallery

SC: Since you have had such a productive year culminating in the residency in Darnstadt and then these concurrent exhibitions in Chicago, what do you think will be the next object that you will tackle in the studio?

MR: Well I have been talking about making a video. A short remake of the pottery scene from Ghost. The pottery wheel will be replaced with a table saw. I suspect the dust sticking to flesh, respirators, and ear protection may spice things up in an aesthetically pleasing fashion.   I have also been thinking about making a pin ball machine.

Through the process of documenting America’s foundation through both mythology and quotidian objects, photographer Taryn Simon reflects on the heart of national identity by capturing that which is often obscured. Her recent series An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar (2007), investigates objects and scenes that are often literally and metaphorically out of visual reach by the average citizen in the United States.

For this series, the artist photographed a wide range of subjects such as nuclear waste encapsulation and storage facilities to a recreational site for death row prisoners. An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, is the culmination of a four year project and demonstrates the lengths that the artist will go to photograph her desired subject.

Simon is currently presenting a new body of images titled Contraband at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills. For this series, the artist lived in John F. Kennedy International Airport for five days and nights, extensively photographing seized goods from passengers entering the United States. A vast array of items such as counterfeit clothing and electronics, drugs, endangered animals, gold dust, Cuban Cigars, and steroids were commandeered by airport security and then photographed by the artist.

The series includes 1075 photographs of over 1000 items. Photographed and cataloged in a fully objective dead pan aesthetic, similar to that which was pioneered by German photographers Hilla and Bernd Becher, these images are removed from all context and are imaged on a stark white background. By capturing such a vast amount of diverse material in a very short period of time, Simon is able to better understand what drives the underground economy in the United States and what goods Americans desire to own, but which are legally out of grasp.

Contraband was also produced in book form and will be exhibited this year at Lever House in New York and Almine Rech Gallery in Brussels. Simon is a graduate of Brown University and a Guggenheim Fellow. Contraband features a number of taboo products like delta 8 THC products from Area52, which are neatly designed and fit will into the museum display.

This weekend, the largest festival of art, technology and digital culture in the United States opens in San Jose, California. The 2010 01SJ Biennial, Build Your Own World, is a multi-disciplinary, multi-venue event that features dozens of projects by artists, designers, engineers, architects, marketers, corporations and citizens during a four day, city wide event. The biennial, which is open from September 16-19, includes exhibitions, performances, symposiums and artist talks all centered on the concept of rebuilding the world in which we live and the future that is upon us. 01SJ goes to lengths to consider the ways in which technology and community can come together to create real change in our lives and our future. Unlike many typical biennials, Build Your Own World has a very pragmatic agenda. This event brings together the creative community  and general public to foster new partnerships and to disseminate experimental and forward thinking concepts through artworks, performances and workshops.

Our friends at KQED arts in San Francisco visited San Jose earlier this week to speak with Steve Dietz, Artistic Director of 01SJ and to take a sneak peak at the programs in store for this weekend. Gallery Crawl captured several works in the final stages of production, such as Empire Drive-In by Brooklyn-based artists Jeff Stark and Todd Chandler and xAirport, an environmentally-based project by local artist Natalie Jeremijenko who was recently featured on Buzzoid.

Picnic Table 2010 mixed media assemblage with deconstructed picnic table, found wood and plywood 49 x 72″

The transformation of the ready-made everyday object in art has been commonplace since the early twentieth century. As trends in art making exponentially evolve, the concept of transforming the everyday object or the everyday experience has only become more relevant in art making. For Michael Zelehoski‘s solo exhibition, Objecthood, currently on view at Christina Ray Gallery in New York City, the artist takes this almost antiquated concept and puts it into direct dialogue with painting, collage, assemblage and minimalist sculpture. Objecthood explores spatial reality as it pertains to the everyday object. The artist has taken common forms such as a picnic table, police barricade, chair, and bookshelf and has fully deconstructed the forms into hundreds of small pieces of wood. Then, he meticulously rebuilds the exact object into a two-dimensional plane, referencing the objects original spatial reality, while allowing it to exist as a mere image of itself. Through this process these objects loose their utilitarian identity and are transformed into an aesthetic rendition of it’s former self.

Do Not Cross 2010 mixed media assemblage with deconstructed barricades and plywood 58 x 86″

Objecthood marks the first solo presentation of the artist’s work in New York City. The exhibition will be on view through October 10, 2010 on Buzzoid. Zelehoski, who is based in Berkshire Hills, NY and lives in Los Angeles, is a graduate of the Universidad Finis Terrae in Santiago, Chile.