Conny Purtill. The Ground, 2014; installation view, Adams and Ollman Gallery, Portland, OR. Courtesy of the Artists and Adams and Ollman.

Mack McFarland: Conny, I am wondering about language and how it operates in your process and work. The press release has some phrases in quotes such as, “…until the ground is exhausted, at which time it is ‘neutralized’ with pencil marks…” And later, “available spaces,” and even the title of the show, “ground.”

Conny Purtill: A phrase like “the ground” generates a specific force that pulls me toward things and ideas and people. It is a force that I’ve come to accept as natural and profound (and I would say it has no less an impact on me than a force like gravity). Words naturally push and pull against a thing or a person or an idea—these forces are attractive to me probably because they take such little energy to generate, and once they are generated, give so much energy back. That might be how language operates in the process and work.

(from left to right) Conny Purtill. Handheld Ground, 2012-2014; gesso, India ink and pencil on wood; 14 x 31 1/2 x 1/4 in. Conny Purtill. The Ground: Smoking Quagmire, 2009; graphite and ink on paper; 9 1/2 x 8 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Adams and Ollman Gallery.

MM: Do you share this language with your collaborators? Do you think of Culpa, Heikes, Jackson Hutchins, McGee, and Norsten as collaborators?

CP: Yes, I do share these phrases with the people I choose to have relationships with. But that said, I do not expect my found phrases will generate useful forces for other people the way they do for me. I share them only because it is what I have to share.

And no, I don’t find the word “collaborator” represents the relationship I’m having with any one of these people. I gift people neutralized grounds as a way of generating a force that pulls us together. The object itself (and what ultimately happens to or with it) is not something I care too much about. I’d rather find a word that represents the relationship—maybe “love”—or a word that represents that specific force…um, I might go with “love” again.

Conny Purtill. The Ground, 2014; installation view, Adams and Ollman Gallery, Portland, OR. Courtesy of the Artists and Adams and Ollman.

Jay Heikes: I love you too, Conny! For me, a white ground has always seemed suspect. I work so hard to produce the patina of an aged authenticity in my work, which can feel satisfying aesthetically but also ironic in the faux tribal sense. When Conny first approached me with the idea of gifting one of the “grounds,” I was relieved that I didn’t have to start from a bleached space. Instead I was challenged with the thought of whether I should touch the ground at all. But after some contemplation, I realized that a certain kind of all-over painting had been beaten to death for me, rendered as powerful as a swatch of fabric. If I was given this incredible ground, my job was to provide an incredible figure for that ground so they could harmonize like a band, like Wings. So in that way I see it as a collaboration, but I would assign to Conny the role of an inspirer, a McCartney.

Todd Norsten: I think that Conny had told me about the process of making the grounds, but I never thought about them as regimented to the degree articulated in your question, Mack—they just looked really cool. So Conny’s description of the collaboration as more like love is appropriate for me. Plus, Conny is like Yoda without the gimmicky talk and green, wrinkly skin.

I was more interested in another idea that Conny and Jay were talking about, that was mostly a joke but discussed somewhat seriously—the idea of making a one-stroke painting. Sort of the Holy Grail of painting that exists somewhere between children’s books and sophomore painting class, but only achieved through years of training and Bill Murray’s enlightenment in Caddyshack. The paint that I put on the ground was informed by conversations with Conny and the one-stroke painting idea, so the force that he explains as love seems like an apt description of the interaction.

Todd Norsten and Conny Purtill. Your Ass Is Grass, 2013; oil, gesso, India ink, and pencil on canvas; 22 x 17 in. Courtesy of the Artists and Adams and Ollman Gallery.

Jessica Jackson Hutchins: Force, the ground, gravity, love—such beautiful language, Conny: simple, profound, and totally apparent in those works. I thought of Conny the whole time I lived with his ground. It felt like something between us, and that was an inspiration. It was always a conversation with him. The size is such a factor in this, too. It’s intimate and every inch of it has been combed over—that kind of attention is felt. I think it contributes a lot to this force he speaks of.

Jessica Jackson Hutchins and Conny Purtill. Table of Contents, 2014; gesso, India ink, pencil, acrylic, oil, paper, glazed ceramic, and found plate on canvas;
17 x 22 in. Courtesy of the Artists and Adams and Ollman Gallery.

MM: Conny, your Purtill Family Business is well known, perhaps even infamous for the design of artist and exhibition catalogs. The structure of your exhibition included a built-in, X-shaped partition in the middle of the space, which seems to echo the pages of an open book or even the fold-out pages of the 2006 Whitney Biennial catalog that Purtill Family Business designed. Do you approach an exhibition layout in the same way you do book design?

CP: Regardless of whether you are thinking about a book space or a room space, they are both, in my situation, about servicing the art. Design that does not function as a service to something is not design—they are the same in that way. For the space of the exhibition, I set up a group of isolated triangular spaces that one would circle through. The fundamental element—the space that most interested me—was the individual triangular space. In each triangle, one single work appeared on each plane of the triangle, with just enough room for one person to stand in the middle of the triangle. This was the only space I was interested in building. This simple construction was the best way I could imagine to build a space that illuminated the specific forces we were speaking about earlier and offer the opportunity for a single person to be immersed in the dynamic in an intimate way, hopefully compounding the energy. Keeping the architectural form simple was really important because I wanted the space to be as much about the forces generated as it was about each individual work. I wanted to build a space in which one could see and feel complexly.

Mack McFarland is the curator of the Philip Feldman Gallery + Project Space at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. Since 2006, he has organized or curated over 30 exhibitions, with a focus on artists whose practices involve social or politically engaged themes.

John Smith, The Girl Chewing Gum. Still from film.

John Smith‘s 1976 The Girl Chewing Gum is a black and white film depicting the everyday life of a London street.  At first, the authority of the voiceover narration seems like instructions given by a film director, but over the video’s twelve minutes the narration devolves into mere description and then confusion.  What begins as a commanding presence—masterful instructions given by the voice just as each action is about to unfold—breaks down into a struggle to keep up with the crowded scene.  Finally, the view switches completely to a slow pan over English countryside, even as the traffic noise from the original scene continues.  This is an incredibly simple gesture that creates poignancy and depth.  As understanding dawns that the narrator is not, in fact, directing the actions on screen, the viewer’s recognition shifts.  What starts as the audio of a man who directs his world turns into a man desperate to control his environment (or at least maintain the illusion of doing so), until finally there is a psychic (and literal) break with the scene altogether.

Yemenwed, Episode 3. Still from video.

Smith’s thirty-year-old work still holds up conceptually, but it’s anyone’s guess how the other videos in the exhibition will fare over time.  Charles Atlas‘s Tornado Warning (2008) is a five-channel installation of strong technical proficiency.  It is the only video-based work in the building that addresses its physical space by means of a built environment and moving lights; unfortunately the projections look an awful lot like a cross between Op art and the code-drenched computer screens from The Matrix.  In another room is artist group Yemenwed‘s Episode 3, a combination of animation, painting, sculpture, and live-action video.  The visuals are cleverly done, but if there is a narrative to the meanderings of the main character, who ambles through a constructed and animated space with some kind of hobbles/casts on her legs, it is not apparent.

Christopher Miner, The Safest Place. Still from video.

Christopher Miner‘s The Safest Place features a man revolving slowly in the zero-gravity atmosphere of a space capsule.  His knees are drawn up to his chest and his arms are wrapped around his knees.  The soundtrack of a man’s voice singing is unaccompanied, but there is a heavy reverb/echo on the voice and it’s impossible to make out the words.  That’s too bad, as upon reading the exhibition booklet one learns that they comprise the lines of a modest hymn.  Part of the artistry behind The Girl Chewing Gum is that Smith sets up a very simple system and then disrupts it; Miner’s video has the same kind of confident simplicity overall, but in its present state allows no room for a secondary layer of meaning to come into play.  Clearer audio might have provided that.

Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Piano Print (2010). Wood cut print, approximately 70 x 60 inches.

Two of the rooms on the second floor contain videos as part of larger installations of more traditional visual art.  Jessica Jackson Hutchins‘s Children of the Sunshine is visually spare and elegant.  Four prints, two of which are taken from her family piano, hang on the walls.  In the center of the room is the actual baby grand: carved, scarred and careworn.  These evocative objects would be enough: the prints are beautiful, with deep black ink providing a backdrop for smeary colors and bulbous papier-mâché protrusions or large burn holes.  The piano—small, dirty, pitted with childish carvings—stands as emblem of home, family, and a middle-class childhood.  Unfortunately, the poetry of the room is completely upset by the cacophonous video on the flatscreen monitor in one corner.  In it, Hutchins’s family of singer-musicians chants a nearly atonal chorus of “we are children of the sunshine, we are children of the sunshine” over and over while banging, blowing, or plonking on various instruments.  I regret that this teeth-gritting and superfluous aural torture not only drove me out of the room, but also continues to haunt me as I write this.

The next room—blissfully quiet, but still prickly—is Storm Tharp‘s High House, an assemblage of objects that toes an uneasy line between studio and gallery. There are hand-labeled jars of paint and plants lining the windowsill; there are color-field canvases hung in a grid, and a fan that blows two silk scarves appliquéd with NOT THE LAST TIME.  A video displays a curtain billowing in the frame of a sliding-glass door.  In the middle of the room, a pristine white staircase rises above head height and leads nowhere.  Tharp has seen many successes in the last few years, including the Whitney Biennial, and this room feels like a web of clues that provide a glimpse into the mental state of an artist on the edge of something really big.  The vibe here is uncertainty; the ambiguity of being poised in a position of near-flight (up the white stairs, out the breezy video doorway), choosing between public glory and private life.