Visual Art at Centrum

The Via Media...in Vegas, baby!

This summer, the Episcopal/Anglican church is holding its every-10-years-lets-review-ourselves Lambeth Conference in Canterbury, while a separate conservative group of mostly African and South American Anglicans are meeting on their own in Jerusalem as a protest against the western church's acceptance of homosexual pastors. These separatists feel the need to fight against the serious problem (as they see it) of homosexuality before it takes their church over.

Because, really, what is faith without sex?

And what is Vegas without faith?

As I wander in boiling Sodom (a lovely 107 degrees outside, but who goes outside?) looking at the overweight casino men praying on a good hand, and at the sparkly hookers adorning those men, I find myself wondering yet again about why people need what they do, and about what awful things can spring from expressing those needs.

On a scale of visual awfulness, the local art in Vegas is fairly high up there. There are on display showgirl fantasies in soft oils, bright digitally enhanced blobs of color printed on canvas, over-bright photographs of Strip kitsch, and shiny copper paint on boards that express the artist's "abstract meanings". The hotel art is mostly color blobs or forms generated in what I imagine is the Vegas Discount Abstract Hotel Art Factory (Free Gold Leaf with Bulk Framing Orders!) The restaurant art can be sensuous (cleavage, ass, ripe red peppers that look like cleavage...or ass), making dinner a mental cacophony of Freudian half-theories. One attempt to enhance the accessibility of "real" art here, the Guggenheim extension at the Venetian, closed due to lack of interest more than a month ago.

So, one is left to people watch and to wonder about needs and what they get you into. The need to express oneself as an artist in such a completely imaginary place seems to result in rather cheesy, rather conservative artwork. The expression of other needs - - to gamble, smoke, screw, drink, what have you - - all take place in a city that is cleaned, pressed, repaired and repainted each day in readiness for the next night's happenings, so one can never actually see the results very clearly.

And that is the power of conserving the norm, of maintaining a public "middle way" in Vegas. Seeing it in action it is truly remarkable. It is Westworld, it is Victorian England, and there are no consequences. You just go on and do what you do, whatever that need may be, and we will work to maintain the slot-machined-filled communal order that allows each to his own. The placid subject matter of the art will not offend, either.

In Canterbury, they will be wringing through what they believe regarding homosexuality, and in Jerusalem the offended Anglican separatists will be shouting out against it - - but participating in both meetings will be gay pastors, and polygamous pastors, and adulterous pastors. Silent pastors.

It seems the separatists are forcing the church to act in alignment with specific thoughts about sexuality, and the sacred. Yet Anglicans have built the modern church on the idea of the via media, the idea that public lives and actions should conform to the church standards, but that conformity of thought is not required.

Over time, of course, one infects and informs the other...resulting now in a stated need that the church narrow itself to align with historically/socially accepted norms, that participants in the church all think the "right" way. And so it is in Vegas - - with all the shiny and color and hypnotic casino bells (and belles), everyone winds up thinking Vegas, and praying in the same way everyone else does, sooner or later.

Printmaker Elizabeth Dove at Fort Worden June 20-21

Printmaker Elizabeth Dove will speak June 20th at Building 204 at 7 pm as a guest of Corvidae Press, the Port Townsend printmaking guild. The talk is free and open to the public. The next day, June 21st, Dove will give an in-studio demo-workshop at the Press in Building 205, beginning at 8:30 am. The cost of the demo-workshop is $45 per person.

Ms. Dove is a printmaker and photographer currently residing in Missoula, Montana. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art, University of Montana. Professor Dove is responsible for undergraduate and graduate students, teaching all printmaking disciplines, photography, and special courses integrating printmaking, photography and digital media.

She has conducted extensive research into non–toxic printmaking processes, taught dozens of workshops at colleges and universities, received funding to study the integration of digital technology and traditional printmaking practices, and has published her research in the books The Contemporary Printmaker and Non–toxic Intaglio Printmaking, and the British journal “Printmaking Today". Elizabeth received her BFA from the Maryland Institute, College of Art in Baltimore, and her MFA from Vermont College.

Ms. Dove’s own work is based on traditional printmaking practices (concerns with repetition, imprinting, and the matrix) but has expanded in media to include earthworks, site specific sculpture and installation. Her main interests are investigating the passage of time, subjective scientific methods, and how one's body can register and can communicate history and memories.

Corvidae Press, in residence with Centrum, is a guild of some 35 members working on various printmaking techniques in their newly renovated studio in Building 205, Fort Worden. Contact: Bill Curtsinger 360-774-0750

http://www.corvidaepress.com/CorvidaePressNews.html

Necking in San Francisco

Aberdeen, Washington's other artistic native son, the photographer Lee Friedlander, has spent his long career capturing people doing what they do, especially when they are unaware of their doings. He shoots the moments after events, the reflections, side angles, shadows. He shoots the rhinos humping at the zoo while onlookers stand anxiously waiting for something more zoo-like (and please, less animal-like) to occur. He shoots the last hour of the cross-country road trip, the last act in the street parade.

His recent retrospective, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, showcases Friedlander's almost pathologocal social voyeurism. And it showcases his fascination with that most awkward and vulnerable of our human parts, the neck. The vantage point in many of his photographs is that of a dog or a child; he shoots from what seems like the subject's knee level, and shot some of his self-portraits from this up-body stance as well. Its a funny angle. But Friedlander is a funny guy. His shot of 1980's cubicle workers in a Boston office is hilarious, revealing coiffed professionals in nice office clothes sitting and staring blankly at the computers in front of them, as if these strange new machines are holding them in a force field while slowly sucking every thought from their brains.

Friedlander gets close enough to touch, in his engaging images, and stays just far enough away to let us see the strange and the goofy. Which meant that for this viewer, seeing his show at SFMOMA was disconcerting. That angular, segmented museum space is filled with offputting dark corners and sharp edges. It felt cool, pretentious, unwelcoming.

I recently bought The Architecture of Authority, by photographer Richard Ross, and found myself (to my own dismay) mentally noting, as I wandered SFMOMA, all the integrated control systems in this supposed center for artistic and intellectual exploration. I would expect that of, say, a jail or courthouse, or even an airport, but not a civic museum space.

And then I went to see the artwork at the San Francisco International Airport, and my head got turned completely around. First off, I saw work on display in the small and quiet SFO airport museum and library by Herb Lingl, the aerial photographer (who prefers a far loftier vantage point than Friedlander.) Lingl's crisp, highly saturated photographs of the Baylands restoration in Sonoma and of SF Bay salt ponds were creepy and offputting, but where they were displayed was anything but. I completely lost time in the contemplative museum space.

I also saw an installation at SFO of sculptures of the Buddha, about one dozen sculptures created in various centuries and from various Asian countries. The installation was just feet from the security lines in the International Terminal, yet it was quietly mesmerizing. The airport people-watching was also delicious.

But, back to necks - - I ended the day watching John Edwards not really stick his neck out for Barack Obama (as it seems the nomination fight has been called) on a big screen television in a hotel lobby while chatting with Milton, who was on his way from Yosemite to an elderhostel up on Orcas Island. And after talking politics for about 20 seconds, Milton volunteered to me that life is about protecting yourself from vulnerability, about covering your neck, and that was why he usually carried a gun while at home in Arizona.

Milton said there were three kinds of people in the world: sheep, sheepdogs, and wolves. I was (obviously, since I am female) a sheep, and he considered himself a sheepdog/protector of the flock (see above: gun carrying). He was on the fence about Obama, because he was not sure how Obama would be on torture. Then Milton asked me very directly if I would waterboard someone if my husband's life was at risk. I kid you not. I tend to have these kinds of conversations with people, where they reveal and revel in the philosophies they have hard-baked for themselves.

Needless to say, when I stuck my neck out and told him that I was an artist and painted abstract oils, he quickly defined me for me: "Oh, ya mean those paintings where you can't tell what they are about just by lookin' at them? I just don't get that."

Right back at ya, Milton.

Consolation Prize

Agatha Christie wrote a a funny piece of dialogue in one of her very early books, a quote I like to re-read often: "A man who has shot lions in large quantities has an unfair advantage over other men." Just so. Another favorite quote is from a play by Christopher Fry, The Lady's Not for Burning, where a character pleads "When I think of myself, I can scarcely believe my senses! But there it is - - all my friends tell me I exist." This can be a doubtful proposition, as personas shift in differing contexts, and who you are (or what your work is) to others is morphed by those very others. This kind of thinking smells metaphysical after a while, and that is not my intent; I just am engaged by the way a mind attaches itself to an idea, or vice versa, and like so many other creative types, I dig painting about that.

Christie wrote her characters as absolutes, which is precisely the comfort and the appeal of her mysteries. It is a relief to read about known and unchangeable qualities in (fictional) others, a true mental relief. Because engagement in our here-and-now belies that. Sound bites change perception, and character is splayed out on cable shows, one relentlessly morphing interview at a time.

The pleasure of painting, by contrast, is the pleasure of a completed internal conversation, at least for the artist. I loved seeing the RBC Canadian Painting Exhibition at the Emily Carr University in Vancouver last fall for that reason; it was a room of finished thoughts expressed by young, emerging Canadian artists. The thoughts varied, of course, and some were more challenging. Some were pristine. The acrylics by Elizabeth Grant I found particularly compelling. But funnily enough, Arabella Campbell, the winner of the competition, had a lot of nothing to say about the nothing that inhabits a lot of art. Her winning composition presented the structure beneath a painting. It was also seemingly about the inner state of nothing that often precedes the work (because honestly some of the best stuff comes from a blank mind) and the blankness you are left with after you get a composition out of you and onto canvas.

What struck me as funny is that compared to the other work in the show, Campbell's did not take me anywhere other than where I was - - namely, in a big white room at Emily Carr looking at (or in this case for) paintings. I thought her work was silly and pleasing, as if the painter herself was somehow like the Fry character, being assured of her existence through others telling her there is something to her, since her senses are unreliable. The idea she seemed to want the viewer to attach oneself to was not self-awareness, or the wonder of creativity, or even the basic comprehension of the structure of a painter's canvas. The idea my mind attached to, upon seeing Campbell's work, was that she is an artist who thinks very easy, knowable, concrete things.

And no, I am not going to follow that with a Seinfeld-esque "not that there's anything wrong with that" sentiment. There is something wrong with that, especially if your compatriots in the same show are grappling with ideas like the fear of overloading oneself with sensory experiences, or the eeriness of nocturnal suburbia, while also displaying dexterity with paint and color and some intellectual discernment. I don't perceive that a work of art does anything much in and of itself, but it is good when you as the viewer can find in the work evidence of that artist's internal conversation - - or an idea or image to attach oneself to, an attachment that lingers after the viewing, and changes one's own mental lineup.
 

Believing and Seeing

On those days where words matter so, like the days leading up to an important primary election, for example, art takes a back seat. Or so it seems.

And then...the Latrobe, PA flag-pin questioner at the democratic debate last week appears, an archetype, a woman-as-art-piece...and the artfulness of the public theater of politics is front-and-center once again.

For me, watching Nash McCabe ask her question of Obama was much like my visit to the art exhibition called "The Believers". I saw this exhibition last summer at Mass MOCA, and found it both repulsive and oddly familiar. For so many artists, deducing the workings of a mind is an agony. And the pain expressed in "The Believers" was palpable, not just in the subject matter (screeds on body mutilation and religion, schizophrenic musings, the essence of witch-ness, glorious imagined machines, the strange connections between all happenings) but in the artists' raw and compulsive need to categorize their own feelings, sexuality, thoughts - - and to in turn be categorized and comprehended by unseen audiences.

They strove to express and be known through symbols that formed a framed, articulated stance on Life's Important Question (whatever the artist determined that was.) Overall, the work in the exhibition seemed to me to be about the need to be identifiable, to self-describe in order to be known by the stangers who encounter these expressions of belief. To have their belief solidly seen.

On the other side of Mass MOCA, running at the same time, was an exhibition by Spencer Finch ("What Time is it on the Sun?") which conveyed the opposite. His installations explore other truths - - that light is tricky, that comprehension is subjective, and that memory (as in the hilarious and sad multi-piece "Trying to Remember the Color of Jackie Kennedy's Pillbox Hat") is specious. What you can and think you know, what you recall, even how you see color, Finch seems to say, is ever-changing.

Questioner Nash McCabe, belongs squarely in the camp of "The Believers". She knows what she knows, and it is constant. She feigned a vetted question about patriotism (and what is today's definition of that exactly?) when what was churning underneath was something else. Something about an unspoken shared comprehension she desired. Something like: "I don't want to challenge your humanity, Senator Obama, but how can you expect me to vote for...a black man? I mean you look nothing like anyone I would ever want to know, and in the privacy of my own home I say terrible things about you because you are not white like me, so how can I comprehend your mind - - but I will frame all that as a question about a symbol, since we all see a symbol in the same way, don't we?"

Staying Sweet

The crazy-long 10,000 page ‘enormous theorem’ (a massive algebraic proof categorizing simple groups) is a mathematical method for analyzing abstract and physical systems that have symmetry.

In mathematics and physics, symmetry is “a transformation or rearrangement of something that leaves it unchanged…The theory of relativity says that the transformation from one observer's point of view to another's may alter the values of some observations but will leave the laws relating those observations unchanged.” Perspectives change, but the song remains the same.

The enormous theorem identified all the mathematical building blocks from which all groups can be constructed, with the exception of 26 simple groups that did not fit into the theorem’s identifiable patterns. Thanks to this intellectual feat, “the principle that any fundamental physical theory must possess certain kinds of symmetry has become a scientific axiom.” 

When Daniel Gorenstein, the father of the enormous theorem, published his work in 1982, mathematicians and academics around the world were immediately enthralled. And some immediately connected Gorenstein’s work with…God. One of the quotes I saw at the time was from a professor who said that to him, the enormous theorem was like the first proof, a balanced and beautiful geometric proof that God may have written as he was test-planning the creation of the universe.

About 1300 years before Gorenstein and his collaborators published their theorem, this symmetrical image was created to honor both St. Matthew and God (who apparently was the universe’s first geometer.)

The image is from the Lindisfarne Gospels, an illustrated manuscript created by an early Christian bishop at the Lindisfarne monastery (the creepy ruins of which, located just off the Northumberland coast in northeast England, I have had the pleasure of wandering around.) The manuscript served to honor and preserve the ideal Christian church in a hostile world full of crazy Celtic pagans and invading Vikings.

As with any religious text, the author of the Lindisfarne Gospels followed church-sanctioned rules in his choices of script and illumination, symbol and illustration, many of which were also evident in Roman codexes written 100 years earlier. These rules of presentation placed an incredible value on visual symmetry and balance.

Taken as a whole, the illustrations in the Lindisfarne Gospels offer up their own visual ‘enormous theorem’ on how one should systematically convey (early Christian) religious experience, which is guided by unchanging laws and…symmetry.

Francis Collins is a scientist (now author of a book on God) who recently claimed to have found proof of God through Collins’ research on the ‘beautiful system’ of the human genome. This solid proof finally came to Collins many years after having a revelatory moment when he was hiking in the Cascades here in Washington. On that hike, he saw the natural ‘beauty of creation’ all around him and realized that denying a supernatural force was at work was, for him, now impossible.

Of course, much of the beauty (systemic, symmetrical or otherwise) that Collins saw around him in the forests of the Cascades was likely second-growth trees planted and regulated by Weyerhaeuser’s minions, but I digress.

This week law enforcement officers raided the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints compound in Texas, and the released 400 women and children living/held captive there. Daily life on the Texas compound (we now know from the victims) was as controlled and regimented an experience as prison life. Or monastic life. The women in particular in this FLDS church had to follow very specific rules, like not cutting their hair and marrying at puberty. The women were also admonished to not think, to not contradict or disagree with their religious leader/husband, or with any man, or any belief of the church -- they were to “stay sweet” in their minds and hearts at all times.

Francis Collins sees proof in patterns that God created the symmetry and beauty of the natural world and the beautiful symmetry of the human genome. The Lindisfarne Gospels offers us an instruction book for religious experience that claims to celebrate, through human artistic effort, the symmetry and balance of God’s ideal world. And a mathematics professor, reacting to the publication of a theorem that explicates the symmetry of most physical systems, claims it is an example of God’s prowess in geometry.

How these responses are any different than “staying sweet” is beyond me.

Scientists and those of faith who hit against something complex yet orderly claim that this symmetry is just more obvious proof of God. The enormous theorem, in actuality, conveys just the opposite: natural, physical, and abstract systems contain symmetry as a basic attribute and finding the random outliers (or 26 simple groups) beyond that pattern is what really should give us pause, or make us dig deeper, or spark creative exploration.

But of course forcing order in the face of complexity has always been a form of refuge, especially in art. And I find that however much I am a contrarian, I’m a little mesmerized by this kind of thinking, especially as expressed in the work of painter Rudolph Bauer (who composed a number of his orderly geometric drawings while captive in a Nazi prison.) 

Bauer and other non-objectivist painters seem to have used art to ruthlessly and consciously redirect their attention away from the chaotic reality of a world at war. And I see in their artwork something very like the Lindisfarne illuminations (and in the psychotic control in the FLDS church and in God-is-the-explanation scientists like Francis Collins) -- evidence of that act of human will it takes to contain all curiosity and critical thought.

To think sweet, to say God is the answer, to paint the geometry of a mind strictly contained and rigidly conforming to aesthetic rules...I can imagine these all serve a purpose, are perhaps part of assuring your identity’s survival. One can imagine finding refuge in drawing geometric shapes if one were held in a Nazi prison, or in drawing endlessly repeated knot patterns in a manuscript while utterly alone in a cold and dark monastery. But using the ceremonial majuscule script in the illuminated Gospels is akin to (and just as practical as) requiring all women in your sect to wear dresses. Seeing symmetry and geometry in science as mystical and proceeding from a creator being is akin to claiming that the regulated forms used in a non-objectivist painting actually give access to some spiritual power.

What makes my head twist on all this is the question of what is accomplished by these limits, by mentally or creatively “staying sweet’?

What is left when you get there? Entry to heaven for the select few? The promise of knowing something other minds do not? Seeing the hand of God in your very own scientific research? Claiming the supernatural in your own geometric patterns on paper or canvas?

How frighteningly, mind-numbingly narcissistic.

tiny + rage = love

tiny + rage = love

From Ten Tiny Dances, performed in Seattle, September 2007.  Choreographed and performed by Amy O'Neal, Music by Zeke Keeble.

On a tiny stage in the round Amy O'Neal is my current favorite time-based kinetic sculpture.   A stretch perhaps, but it won't be the last time you catch me showing disregard for the boundaries which are rumored to separate performing and visual art. As part of One Tiny Dance, this piece was originally performed in the lobby of Pacific Northwest Ballet during their Celebrate Seattle Festival.  Amy says, "At that time it was untitled with a slightly more playful energy. There were a lot of kids around me dancing with me while I was performing--it was so great!"  The piece took on a new vibe and gained a title at Ten Tiny Dances, "It became about owning my anger and channeling it positively, to move forward . . . . embracing my history as a woman and as a dancer."

Amy O'Neal, photo by Gabriel Bienczycki

From Locust website:

Amy O'Neal is a performer, choreographer, teacher and the co-director (along with Zeke Keeble) of locust (music/dance/video company) based in Seattle. Amy teaches contemporary dance technique and funk regularly at Velocity Dance Center and has taught and/or conducted residencies at the University of Washington, University of Idaho, University of Oregon, Lane Community College (Eugene, OR), Northwest Vista College (San Antonio, TX), and Cornish College of the Arts (Seattle, WA).  Her work has been commissioned by Spectrum Dance Theater, Moving Current in Tampa, FL, and Seattle Theatre Group's Dance This . . . where she collaborated with Sonia Dawkins and Savion Glover.  As a performer, she worked with the Pat Graney Co. for 3 years, was a 6-year member of Scott/Powell Performance, was the lead singer of the Seattle band Marrow for 3 years, and performed in Mark Haim's acclaimed Goldberg Variations. Amy also frequently collaborates with musician/comedian, Reggie Watts.   For locust, Amy has received funding from the Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs, the international DanceWEB scholarship, the Mary Levine Fund, Artist Trust (Fellowship '05, GAP '04,'06), 4 Culture, the Bossak/Heilbron Charitable Foundation, the National Dance Project of the New England Foundation of the Arts, the National Performance Network, and the Creative Capital Foundation.  Amy holds a BFA in dance from Cornish College of the Arts and will choreographed for Cornish Dance Theater in Spring 07.  In 2007, she was also a guest lecturer at the University of Washington and will conducted a residency at Texas Women's University.

Locust is the dance/music/video performance brainchild of musician/composer Zeke Keeble and performer/choreographer Amy O'Neal. Since 2000, locust has created 5 evening-length works Leave me Inside (2001), Left-out (2002), DEFACE (2003), convenience (2005), and mockumentary (2006). They have toured to Jacob's Pillow (Becket, MA), The Myrna Loy (Helena, MT), PICA's TBA Festival (Portland, OR), and Joyce Soho (New York, NY). locust invites performers on a project to project basis and has worked with some of the most distinctive and talented performers in Seattle. locust has been described as the avante guard garage band of the Seattle dance scene.

Considering Emma Peel’s Hairdo

In a scene in a recent chick flick, Hugh Grant’s character says salaciously that he enjoys painter John Currin’s work because it has “the perv thing.”  It’s a memorable moment in the otherwise forgettable film -- bad boy narcissist swaggers through a gallery filled with Currin’s overtly sexualized portraits of huge-breasted, wide-eyed women and sings the praises of his perceived brother in arms. It’s also an ironic scene, for those art critics who see Currin’s work as his indictment of our culture’s continual objectification of women. Grant’s character, apparently, just sees the breasts. 

People often try to identify, or identify with, an artist’s ‘thing’ - - their method or subject or mindset, and critics often ascribe motivation to artists, where there really is little evidence of its existence. Why Currin would choose to spend his working life trying to make the point that we objectify women by painting grotesquely exaggerated females that look just like all the women we see objectified in the media every day is a question only a critic can answer. As an artist, I think this critical assessment is a little off.

Currin has gained renown for his method as well as his subject matter. He mixes his own paints and preparations, using the processes of an artist from a previous century, and this ‘method thing’ adds to his appeal for collectors. He is a very successful painter. He also quite obviously is a bit of an obsessive and has some serious issues about sex and women that likely need working out. But I for one do not think he is presenting his images for a larger political or sociological purpose (and he himself does not claim to). Currin just seems to like to abstract and morph the female form and capture this in paint. Which is what painters do, after all; we use what we see, and we paint because it is what we enjoy. One could also say Currin visually prefers the abstracted and morphed female form and, much like Hugh Hefner, has made a living expressing this preference.

The need to know about an artist’s ‘thing’ seems to cloud the viewer’s perception of what they are actually seeing, and often clouds the context in which they are seeing it. I am still surprised at how often viewers of an artist’s work, including mine, get things wrong. I once had a studio showing where a visitor asked me, in all seriousness, to give him the nickel tour of the art history of my work - - who my influences were, whom I was most imitative of, what phases I had gone through, what phase I was in now. It was as if he had a standard artist questionnaire at the ready. A few years back at a solo show, a visitor asked her friend if she had seen my work before, and she rolled her eyes, sighed dramatically and said “yes, I know her, she's the queen of the palette knife”.  She thought she had identified my ‘method thing’.

Artists certainly comply with these requests and respond to these needs, because we tend to be sensitive types, or because for some, comprehensibility is a pathway to recognition. Regardless of how (or if) the artist responds, it is always the viewer who ascribes the ‘artist thing’-- usually for their own viewing comfort. And thinking about viewers ascribing and artists complying, and Currin’s objectifying of objectified subjects is what brings me to Emma Peel.  

Diana Rigg gained fame by playing this catsuit-wearing main character in the mod 60’s television series “The Avengers” and set a certain standard as the ever unattainable femme object (who was so very good with karate and car engines). As a female viewer, I tend to ascribe ‘things’ like vivid intelligence and savvy to the character, but know in truth Mrs. Peel’s purpose is simply to present a female as object, as is the case with many of Currin’s subjects. She too is an abstracted and morphed female form, exaggerated by her clothing and her preternatural ability to leap over high walls with the grace of a ballerina. Mrs. Peel also functions as lovely visual contrast for her partner, the utterly unsexy but very well dressed Mr. Steed.

As regards my own artist ‘thing’ and interpretations thereof, it turns out that I never actually use palette knives in my work. I use almost every other kind of object though, including my fingers, brushes, wallboard scrapers, spackle knives, and a ruler on occasion. And when I really see the female object Emma Peel, I think many things, but mostly I think about the object that matters in my world - - I see her teased and sprayed 60’s hairdo (such stiff hair!) and think “I could make a brush out of that.”

Port Townsend—Just Down the Road from Illinois: A Conversation with Kim Kopp

"'Everything is biographical', Lucian Freud says.  What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget.  Everything is collage, even genetics.  Here is a hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly.  We contain them for the rest of our lives at every border that we cross."  – From Divisadero, novel by Michael Ondaatje

Counsel Langley:  You state a “desire for simplicity,” yet you use a long list of materials.  How does this reconcile?  What sort of simplicity—mental, visual—are you seeking? 
Kim Kopp:  That’s a very good question.  A number of years ago I was meeting with a group of artists in Port Townsend every week—we just discussed, talked, whatever.  And, it occurred to me one day that simplicity is so incredibly complex.  Something about the complex nature of simplicity made being simple one of the most difficult things for me because I come from a long line of pack rats.  I love materials.  I pull in from all kinds of places.  Life is complex.  Our daily existence is complex and requires a lot.  And to simplify is a desire, it’s a goal, it’s the unattainable.  So, I pursue it, I’m constantly unsuccessful, but oh well.  It keeps me going it keeps me working.

CL:  With the Calender Project you convey a sense of time and our relationship to it.  Where does your need/desire to address and track time come from?
KK:  Time has always been very interesting to me because I observe all the time—shadows coming and going, the sun moving across the sky, how the light changes over days.  Particularly in 1995, here in Port Townsend, I’d been here a couple of years.  I lived by the Chinese Gardens and every day I would go away and come back and I was struck with the water in the pond, the water in the strait, and the sky.  And, then that is interspersed with the land in between the pond and the strait.  Some days you get to see the islands, some day you don’t.   So I did a study of that.  Just every morning I would go and stand there and look at it and look at it and look at it from one point of view.  I’d notice the texture of the water, the color of the water.  Then I would run to my studio and do a three inch by three inch painting of what I remembered of what I saw.   I think that was the first real manifestation of time in the way I’ve come to do it now.

CL:  I did a similar observation of early mornings in the months after my first child was born.  Every morning I’d walk with her to the end of the same pier and I’d stand in the same spot and snap a shot with my camera.  There was something comforting in collecting these, it makes visible the effect small changes in circumstance have on appearance.  You find out that you could spend the rest of your life just studying that.
KK:  Exactly.  So much is in it, yet it is a very simple thing.  It goes back to the complex nature of simplicity.  It is not an easy thing to understand.  I think Chinese philosophers spend entire lives trying to figure out the same thing.  What I am trying to figure out is nothing new.
CL:  Sure, it is a fundamental curiosity, feels like looking in a mirror, like you are going to learn something about your nature by understanding the nature of that scene over time.
KK:  Right, let me show you what I did do [pulls out a leather bound volume of thick artist’s paper].  That pond, it really sticks with me.  I did study it for a year, not every day, but once a week.  I bought this very cool sketchbook from David Burroughs.  The sketchbook was expensive, bound in a 16th century way, an absolutely lovely book with really good paper and it turned out that it had fifty-two leaves.  So after having the book for, I don’t know, months, I finally counted the pages and I thought ‘Oh, it has fifty-two to leaves, it’s supposed to be a year long project!’
    I didn’t invent the idea of time, but humans invented how we keep track of it.  I just plugged in to what was already there.  So, I did this same view once a week for a year inside this book.  I started on the Fall equinox and went round the year that way.  It comes out once in a while, Libby Palmer borrows it for her Marine Science Center workshops.

CL:  You’ve designed books and done bookbinding.  Does that influence the way you present your work?
KK:  It does.  I’ve always loved books and paper.  Books in their nature create layers, create a sense of time.  It can be experience in a linear way or flipped through at random, moving from back to front.

CL:  Something we share is a relationship to boats.  My dad is a shipwright—I grew up using his draftsman’s tools and being on the water.  You studied at the boats and boatbuilding, can you speak to how that impacts your work?
KK:  When I came to the Northwest it was to go to the Northwest School of Boat Building.  The reason I did that, to back up a little, is that in 1992 I had just finished my Master’s degree at the University of Chicago.  Part of the requirement, in addition to doing a thesis exhibition, you have to do a written thesis and you need to take at least three courses out in the general curriculum, away from the Art department.  They can be anything, any professor who would let you into their class, whatever interest you have, go for it.  Well, I went to the Anthropology department.  I had some connections to a Native American culture on the west coast and that sparked an interest in how cultures around the globe relate to boats.  I learned that parts of boats, especially in primitive cultures, are named for parts of the human body.  My work, when I began art school was very figurative.  I started making connections between primitive cultures, their boats and our bodies. 
     At the time I was making a nine-foot tall sculpture of a woman and in order to work on I had it lying down.  So, I left, to get my coffee, and walked back in and saw a canoe.  It was just like ‘Oh!  I see where this is going.’  From that moment forward my work has moved into abstraction.
CL:  And you haven’t turned back.
KK:  No, but I have wavered, because I have a love of the figure.  I studied the figure with some really great people and there is just nothing that is so wonderful as well done figure.  I still have a love of that.  What tipped the scale for me was the intellectual connection—this whole idea of boat/body metaphor—I could trot around the globe and find references to this. So, I did through the Anthropology department. 
    So, I get all done with graduate school and, you know, it’s that big swan dive into the abyss—what do you do after you life has changed in this really dramatic way?  You no longer fit in the mold you were in.   I saw a little ad in the back of a magazine for the boat school.  I was at home and I was idle that day and thought ‘Well, I’m just going to call them as ask about this,’ they said, ‘Gee, pop in if you’re in the neighborhood.’  I got off the phone and looked at a map and here’s the boat school in Port Townsend, Seattle closest big city and I’m looking at Interstate 90 which I could’ve thrown a rock from my house and hit.  I thought ‘Well, it is just down the road,’ and I needed a road trip.  I threw my dog in the car and had a cousin of mine meet me in Port Townsend for the Wooden Boat Festival. 
    I went the boat school and was given a tour by Dan Packard, he’s not teaching there now, but he was teaching there then while on sabbatical from his position as Chair of the Sculpture department at the University of South Dakota.  He and I went off for two hours talking about boats and figure and the relationship and art.  Boats are beautiful, my god, in the water they’re something, out of the water there’s so much potential, there’s so much going on with a boat.  I got bit at that moment.  Living outside of Chicago, flatlands of the world, in a big urban area, wondering how could I work on my work and live, support myself, all that.  I decided to go to boat school.  It seemed perfectly logical
     I went with the intention not of working on boats.  I wanted to enhance my sculpture skills, my wood working skills and knowledge and really make a transformation in my work.  That brought me to boats, which again influences my imagery.

CL: How has your education served you?
KK:  Oh, I wrestle with that all the time. There’s no going back again.  Once you have grown out of a form or a mold or a shape, as elastic as we like to think we are, there really isn’t any going back—you can’t unknow what you know.  For me education was the way I could put value on being an artist.  Growing up in a large urban area where in a town of 50,000 I didn’t know any other artists.  My first adventure into college right out of high school was a real reality check.  I went to a huge university.  I felt like a number.  In the Art department one of the teachers was telling us about how he was turning forty that year, you know I was 19, and he was just starting to get his work out in the world.  And, so he had a job as a professor in order to do that.  I realized very quickly that I have a practical side.  That I’m going to have to work, how am I going to eat until I’m forty?  And then of course what I’ve learned since that being out in the world as an artist is not a guarantee of a living.
    I think for me going to school, when I went back, I quit school after that year—got a lovely waitress job, eventually wandered back into school through interior architecture.  Which impacts my work also.  I love drafting tools, like you.  Went into the Art Institute of Chicago through that door and then I took a painting class to enhance my rendering skills.  They lost me.
     So that was kind of a convoluted path, but for me going to school became a way to do artwork, to find myself in that world.  If I had been left outside of that I don’t know that I would have pursued being an artist.
    It also helped me to me to communicate about my work.  I’m a not a writer, I struggle with that.  It gave me a sense of being in a community where I could talk about my ideas.  It was good soil to use a gardening analogy.  It was good soil for me to grow in.

CL:  What would you say to someone considering an arts education?
KK:  Well, I’d have to give that a lot of thought.  Or, maybe none at all.  I think of the professor that said “Gee, I’m just turning forty and am just starting to get recognized for my work.” I was ripe at that moment to hear that.  I regret at times, if I have regrets, having quit after that year.  I think it might have been good had I stayed, found a way to stay or I had not been so shy as to go up to someone and say ‘ya know I’m a little scared.  I don’t know how to move it this world.’ And found someone who’d mentor me.  So maybe that’s what I’d say.  Look inside yourself and see what it is you need and want from it and know they are not necessarily the same thing.
    I think it might be to look inside and find out what you need.  Then look back inside and find out what you want.  Then go to the right place and speak up.  Leave you ego a little bit outside—being an artist humbling and school is very safe ground.  But, even in school it is humbling.  You are in competition with you teachers.  You are unzipping yourself.  Always try to speak truth.  And if you don’t know say so, someone will help. 
    I needed a mentor.  I needed someone who could just every once in a while tap me on the shoulder and said, “Keep goin’, keep goin’.”  And I did find that later. I actually didn’t voluntarily go back into the arts.  I had someone who saw it me and tricked me into it.  I am grateful to that person!
    I think that the thing with art is that you don’t need the degrees and you can patchwork together the experience, but you have to be really self-motivated in order to do that.  I know a lot of self-taught artists that are just fabulous that have hard attitudes about people who’ve had education.  But once again it comes down to the individual.  I needed because I worked full-time and it was a way for me to find the time.

CL:  So I’d love to know, you’ve got Pathways and Echoes running at Fetherston Gallery in Seattle right now, what’s up next for you?
KK:  Next! Gosh.  I have been invited by Barbara Shaiman to be part of the SAM Gallery.  I’m going to be a part of their summer introduction.  So that’s my next thing.  It is going to be paintings.  She loves the calender project but in her context it doesn’t work.  So she has been waiting to see what I do working bigger.  In graduate school and shortly after I was working six by eight feet, so bigger is not a problem.  But like a fish I grow to the size of the tank—calendar project I had an attic studio, that’s how that started.  Now I have space, I’ll work bigger.  I’m really excited!
CL:  Congratulations!
KK:  Beyond that that’s where my little art administrator needs to get her butt in gear to find the next thing.  I’d like to get representation outside of this region.  I have to start looking for that.  That is the hardest part of being an artist for me, getting my art out into the world.  Fetherston is being helpful with that.   They have some ideas, but it is a hard time for art.
CL:  Why do you think so?
KK:  Economics.  I think it is a great time for art making, very rich for the making, but being in the world in any sort of economic way it is rough.  I think that is something that is not taught well in school, that it is a business.  There is little in the way of support.  Artist Trust!  Put a plug in for them!  Fabulous organization. There’s another great reason for being in Washington State.

CL:  What about themes, what will we be seeing coming up in your imagery?
KK:  I’m not really sure.  I’ve been thinking about holding, the word holding and I have been considering moving into oils again.  I took a diversion, when I had a Centrum residency, into printmaking.  This influenced the work that is at Fetherston.  And, I moved away from oils, in part because the studio was in my house and there were toxic issues.  Now I am working in my mind with oils and collecting. In addition, to the word holding I have been dealing a lot with the idea of ‘falling.’  So oils, holding and falling.

KIM KOPP'S STUDIO:

 

 

 

 

[PICTURED, from top: starcircle, graphite, dry pigments, wax on japanese papers over panel, 10 x 10"
the calendar project: march (from year 2005), graphite, dry pigment, acrylic, ink, found objects, correction tape, wax on japanese papers over 31 panels, 55 x 55"
march view from 52 week pond observation, photo by Counsel Langley
window to night sky, graphite, dry pigment, acrylic, ink and was on japanese papers over panel, 25 x 25"
five views of Kim Kopp's studio, Port Townsend, WA, photos by Counsel Langley]

Welcome Counsel Langely to the Visual Arts Blog

Please welcome Counsel Langley to the scene!

Originally from the Port Townsend, Washington, Counsel Langley received her BFA in Metals from Massachusetts College of Art.  Since her return to the Northwest, her work has been exhibited regionally in numerous solo and juried shows.  In 2007, her work was selected for publication in Visual Codec’s One Shot and garnered Best in Show in the 8th annual Art Port Townsend regional juried art exhibition.

Using acrylics, inks and immodest amounts of glitter, her recent paintings explore her memories of urban spaces and are influenced by the look of circuitry, fluid turbulence, weather, outer space, engineering schematics, and architectural drawings. 

Currently she resides in Port Townsend with her husband and two daughters and is involved in several cross-discipline collaborations, including fashion design, music performance, and film making. 

[Pictured: Cityscape 17 (Start Over), acrylic, ink, glitter, 36in x 36in, (c) 2007]