Artist Interview at MoMA - PS1: Debo Eilers

Debo Eilers Live at PS1

It's amazing how much you learn from talking to an artist. At PS1 I spoke with Debo Eilers about his sculpture work, which he recasts as recycled prop until someone decides to purchase it. From rebuilding Kanye West's sunglasses after a performance in which they were being handed out to children in Union Square in Manhattan, to hiring a 13-year-old to go shopping on Canal St. and then perform alongside him at a PS1 performance involving his work, Debo creatively reuses his pieces and reanimates them in various contexts. The canvas-size palette, on which he mixes his oils and resins, doubles as a wall hanging and a picture frame showcasing a photograph from the performance Secret Faggot, which was performed by a band of his friends.

In speaking to Debo, it is easy to see how malleable the vision of the artist can be. He nods and listens carefully and responds with new details related to the migratory nature of his work. On August 8th, during the well-attended PS1 performance, all the pieces he had set up in the space he shared with Tamar Halpern were moved or altered. The stage he had built for Secret Faggot was split into its constituent pieces and turned upside down. The broken mirror floor covering from his studio, which he had transposed onto the floor of the exhibit space, was stacked against a wall in pieces, and three of his mixed-media paintings had new plastic figurines of animals and fish stuck to them. The 13-year-old had made all the changes: she was empowered to alter the artist's vision as part of the performance.

Debo's work bears references to the aesthetic of Richard Hamilton, Cy Twombly and Gerhard Richter. He questions power dynamics in constructed interior environments, works with sculptural cutouts that are relatively two-dimensional and superimposes photography on painted cast plastic.

Artist Interview at MoMA - PS1: Franklin Evans

After reveling in watching a few others being playful, including a young girl and a group of 20-somethings running around in a frenzy, bouncing yoga balls, I clambered up the PS1 front steps and into the museum entrance. Feeling inspired, I asked the desk attendant if PS1 accepts proposals - still continuing to hope that she did not smile and shake her head no - as I bought a ticket and disappeared into the hallways of the former public school building. The first room I stumbled into absolutely floored me. Trust me, this is not a bad pun. The artist, Franklin Evans had covered floor, ceiling and walls in a labyrinthine pattern of tape, notebook paper and thread.

Franklin Evans     

I could not help but take my shoes off when I walked into Franklin Evans's painting. It was like walking into someone's memory unraveling itself in still time. A chromatic masterpiece of tape, printouts and notebook paper, Evans's walk-in painting evokes a deconstructionist palimpsest space with the celebratory pomp of Constructivism. While easily conducive to hours of scrutinizing his writing, his small, pixel-based watercolors, which read like mini-landscapes on ruled notebook paper, and old printouts of critical reviews of his work, the work as a whole presents a formidable trompe l'oeil. Strips of color dance around the PS1 room his 3D painting inhabits: they take over the parquet floors, the white walls and even the ceiling, slicing their way through recursively. Some hang precariously, ready to snap off their axis and curl up on the floor. I wanted to use it as meditation space, but I am not sure if that is what the artist had in mind.

Arttists Speak interviewed Evans about his work:

AS: You are primarily a painter. What made you create an environment you can walk into?

FE: Paint is one of the primary materials I am working with and with Painting historically.  The walk-in aspect is linked both to an installation space composed of a traditionally flat medium and to the interior painting space that exists in what I perceive as a multi-dimensional brain.  I hope the installation reads as thinking painting that exists as object, dissolution of object and peripheral information (history, criticality, process, failures) that are part of making things.

AS: Work/Play/Space - where did this exhibition name come from and how does it relate to your work? I know that space is an important concept for you.

FE: Workplayspace is akin to timecompressionmachine whereby dissimilar elements are contextualized by one another, equal and unequal parts the seriousness of work, the free-for-all of play and the multidimensional of space (implying a non-linear time), space that is both literally and informed by past and future space.

AS: Are Marc Chagall and Frank Stella two of your influences? How have they influenced your work?

FE: Chagall not at all.  Although I recently saw an amazing Chagall in Prague.  Stella, quite a lot.  In particular, Stella predetermined way of working in the Black Paintings and in his cosmologic spiraling forms of recent wall reliefs.

AS: In reference to freakout, the Jeff Bailey gallery press release describes your paintings as both "celebratory and psychedelic." What kind of planning goes into achieving these effects? What struck me about your PS1 walk-in environment was the simultaneous unity and chaos of the piece. It seemed to be in process. I almost wanted to pick up the threads on the ground and start adding to it myself. At the same time, there was a logic I did not want to disrupt.

FE: I appreciate that you did not physically disrupt the allusion to my working process.  It is almost enough that you wanted to think about it and possibly take away from it to your own practice.  The planning in my current work is quite active now.  In “freakout” days, I was process oriented but only in the allowance for chance elements to watercolor on paper.  Now I have many processes that I juxtapose in the hope that cross-contamination will lead to new processes (painted tape on wall grounds infecting the reframing of foundational viewing of art exhibitions, etc.)  It is definitely not a free-for-all.  For example, my floor piece composed of all the press releases from exhibitions I saw last year (extracted of the image) wore during the summer at PS1, particularly during the busy Saturday WarmUp Sessions.  I was away all of August and upon my return, much of the paper had torn and scattered through the installation.  It was exciting initially to see the change, but after a few minutes I read a chaos that didn’t connect to my intent.  Thus I decided to reorder the torn piece back into the initial path but under a protective layer of bubblewrap.  The path return to its initial form and the entropic process was highlighted.

AS: What kinds of collaborations have you participated in the past and what kinds of collaborations do you seek?

FE: I have collaborated performatively with writers and choreographers, both in visual design and in content of the performance.  I have also collaborated as a curator with others.  I look for collaborations that involve ideas that I cannot develop in my isolated practice.  And I hope to stretch the boundaries of my practice through these collaborations.

AS: Tell me more about how you collected material for the PS1 exhibit.

FE: “Timecompressionmachine” came out of the work I started to develop in fall 2008 at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation Space Program in DUMBO.  I wanted to use the entire studio as a working laboratory of space, idea, material, architecture.  It was a place as much for isolated reading as it was for exploring materials.  I documented this activity daily with still images for 12 discrete points in which the life of the studio would begin and end because of the know duration of the program (1 year).  Much was open in what I could explore, but it was clear that the studio would only have a 1 year life.  I described the year that in reference to Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking” a coming to terms with the end of a life.  I called it “Component System Sub-System: A Year of Magical Thinking.”  Component was objects like watercolors, wall marks, brushstrokes, books, diaristic notes.  They were arranged into sub-systems, usually wall or extensions from the wall – “turningtime” “treetarget” “friedrichspastfromthefuture”.  And these became the overall system.  This passed onto my solo show in Sep 2009 titled “2008/2009 < 2009/2010” the past always being less than the present (given the assumption of the lens of subjectivity as filter to anything that has occurred in linear measurement of time).  I re-presented some of the elements from “CSSS: A Year of Magical Thinking” but had new architectural consideration in the gallery space and I was addressing more directly ideas of time and duration rather than time and closure.  All this was brought forward to MoMA PS1 where I literally had to compress my working process of nearly 1 year into something that would be built in 3 or 4 weeks.  Moreover, I was compressing one and half years into something that would be show for 5 months.  My hope is that the piece is transporting on multiple levels (literal, fantastical, historic).

Industrial Cathedral of Arts: The Wassaic Project

Climb up the narrow stairwell at Maxon Mills in Wassaic, NY and peek into the dark openings overlooking a seven-story shaft that murmurs and hums with a deep, damp hollowness and the sound of various recordings by Leah Rico at each landing. The space is sublime. So is the artwork that sits within its cathedral-like exterior.

Artists from all over the United States exhibited their work at the Wassaic Project on August 13-15, enliving the small hamlet, which is part of the town of Amenia about two hours north of New York City along the Harlem Line of the Metro-North commuter rail train. Visitors poured in from all directions and populated a designated camp ground with their tents and then rushed toward the Maxon Mill, once used as a grain elevator, to see the art and enjoy the live music on the front porch of the hotel that adjoins the seven-story industrial structure. The hotel is also no longer a hotel. Small rooms with slanted floors and half-height walls that allow natural light into the spaces through heavy-timber columns and beams housed a photography exhibit consisting of medium-size pigment and inkjet prints. It would have been a squeeze to have more than two people in each room perusing the exhibit. On a chiaro-scuro mezannine, a lone piano basked in the sunlight streaming through the windows, its keys rising and falling and clicking. No sound was produced. It was an exercise in silence and automation. Back on the main level of the hotel a tilted wooden model of a city block with photos pasted to the rooftops invited visitors to look through a magnifying monocular, which deciphered the contents of the photographs, otherwise too small for the naked eye to see. The piece referenced an ongoing participatory public/private urban spaces activity accessible by emailing the artist, Jo. Q. Nelson.

By no means was this the end of it. The exhibit wound up another section of the building with jubilant momentum. But safety first. As a volunteer at the festival, my job was to monitor the number of visitors climbing up the narrow fire stairs so that they did not exceed allowable capacity. I also had to make sure that nothing caught fire. Also acting as gatekeeper to the exhibits accessible through the back staircase, Gwen Charles's Safety Project provided orange life vests to visitors who wanted to wear them free of charge. "If you are not wearing a life jacket, it's not going to save your life," was written on the booth showcasing the vests. On departure, visitors could opt to buy these psychological failsafes for $45. Many who were wearing them commented on how comfortable and safe they actually felt with some degree of due irony.

With over one hundred artists showing their work, the festival could have easily become a maelstrom, but the narrow stairs controlled the flow of people very efficiently through the vertical stacks of the industrial space. When I took a break from my volunteer job, I had a chance to glance through the 2nd and 3rd floor exhibits. I stumbled upon a dark room with a wall-width projection of names. Stephen Eakin's In Memory Of, a compilation of names of deceased individuals allowed visitors to enter the name of someone they wanted to commemorate through a user-friendly, touch-based interface. Dim lighting gave the space the somberness of a mausoleum and the visitors the privacy of remembrance. I entered my grandfather's name in the dense pattern of names and returned to my post at the base of the stairs where I had an excellent view of Brinton Jaecks's Unconscious Collective - a vortex of carved wooden beds attached to the ceiling and to each other with smoothly carved wooden chains and spanning across most of the ground floor. The piece references institutions and has a musical quality expressed through compositional tension and axial rotations of the individual beds. It is also a fine work of carpentry.

The festival accomodated both digitally produced work and manual processes. Clement Valla engaged 1600 individuals in the creation of two composite paintings on mylar through online software. Mary Lydecker created imaginary cities with traditional collage techniques, but the intersections were so seamless that the places became believable in their own right. She combined imagery from Stockholm and Hong Kong or Cocoa Beach and Stockholm, establishing a picturesque ambiguity about the sense of place. Her collages bridge geographic distances yet seem perfectly familiar at first glance because the patterns of development over the last century have produced odd stylistic and scalar juxtapositions.

Although there were other noteworthy pieces participating in innovative and polemical trends in the arts at Wassaic, for the sake of brevity, the remainder of the article focuses on the work of four artists who made a particular effort to engage their audience.

Jesse Kauppila
Printmaker Jesse Kauppila performed live demonstrations of his Bitmap Machine project for his audience. Collaborating with a mathematician, Jesse is generating combinations of "bitmap" prints, which will function as 2D, scannable barcodes. At the festival, he could be found shaking a box he had constructed to print the custom barcodes and explaining the process outloud. A ball-bearing grid underlay a metal, pixellated grid. Each time he shook the box, the ball bearings would land into random quadrants of their underlying grid and push up on the individual pixels of the grid above them. Jesse would then ink the end result and print the bitmap impression on Japanese rice paper. He was able to carry out this process without a press because the box he had built for himself performed all of the functions of a printing press. His individual prints became part of a larger twine-stretched grid, which he used to hang his pieces and keep track of the random combinations generated by the way the ball-bearings fell into place. His project aims to marry traditional print-making techniques with digital barcode technology. Throughout the duration of the exhibit, Jesse never tired of elucidating his process and answering questions.
He is based in San Francisco, where he practices printmaking and seeks collaborations with other artists.

Ben Cuevas
Installation artist and avid knitter, Ben Cuevas is inspired by British artist Damien Hirst and French social thinker Michel Foucault. When his frind taught him how to knit, Ben focused on how surgical the process seemed. His knitted hearts, skeletons, colons and scrotums among others, appear soft and plush and evoke the sense of comfort that any knitted apparel might. Structurally they are familiar because they are based on medical illustrations rather than photographic images of human anatomy. It is difficult to remember that they represent a disembodied grotesque. However, Ben insists that his work is not about representation. The installation piece he chose to showcase at Wassaic Project features a knitted skeleton seated atop a pyramid of Borden's condensed milk cans and a cloud of screen prints on Plexi glass suspended above it. The prints are of disembodied anatomical parts photographed in high resolution with diagrammatic illustrative overlays. Ben conceives of the piece as a reference to material culture and Wassaic's local history (The Borden Company had a condensed milk factory in Wassaic.) and a meditation on transcendence. The knitted skeleton is seated in the lotus position. His piece, like many of the other installation pieces in the exhibit drew the attention of the improvisational dance troupe comprised of dancers Charmaine Warren and Ashe Turner and musician John Ellis. Ben is based in Los Angeles and attended Hampshire College in Mass.

 
Josh Atlas
Josh Atlas wants to make you laugh. His doughnut-covered disco ball, frosting-laden beach gear and picture frames jammed in buckets with foam cushioning evoke Wayne Thiebaud's pastry paintings. Josh's work is 3D, however. It responds to lighting conditions, and both kids and adults love it. In order to prepare the doughnuts for his disco ball, Josh had to coopt another artist's studio and set up a drying abacus. To preserve the piece, he coated all his doughnuts in urethane and the frosting in epoxy. In order to provide a stable substructure for his disco ball of doughnuts, Josh used a beach ball as the core. His meticulous and finely-crafted drawings demonstrate the care and effort that went into creating his wondrous glazed amalgamations. Their precarious balance is due to a finely-tuned process.

A visit to Josh's studio affords a glance at a large photoprint of Josh submerged in a bath of doughnuts. He invites all to take a dip or watch him bask in the pleasure. One question we can all ask ourselves is whether such quantities of doughnuts express a love of them or an uncomfortable overabundance. Josh says he is just obsessed, and that this is an object-oriented turn in his work. He is also based in Los Angeles.

James Weingrod
The cosmos in a petridish comes to mind when James Weingrod starts painting with his custom-created water-soluble pigments and resins. He uses a clay-surfaced wooden base and films the process. A drop of silver fizzles and bleeds outward melting into the black, phalo blue and veridian green sea that Weingrod calls the universe. He invites participants to create the universe with him and explains doppler effects and supernovas as he reconstitutes the painting laying flat. It took him three years to master his materials and learn to control and predict their behavior. Weingrod's materials come from a small independent store called Guerra in New York City. Although he does not claim to be a chemist, Weingrod mixes all of his own paints. Dressed in a Tyvek suit and a Fedora hat, he has a knack for his participatory act and is not shy about engaging an audience and opening up his simple yet mesmerizing and infinitely engrossing process to all willing participants.

The Wassaic Project is an annual event, and it is organized by artists for artists. All the co-directors - Eve Biddle, Bowie Zunino, Elan Bogarin and Jeff Barnett-Winsby - had pieces in the exhibit and spent all year planning the well-attended, three-day event.