Phone Tag: Interview with Athena Thebus

Dreaming About You Woke Me Up, 2018. Presented at ACE Open, ADL. Photo: Sam Roberts

Previous Phone Tag participant Eugene Choi connected me with Athena Thebus for this Phone Tag interview. Athena is an artist based in Sidney who works at the intersection of sculpture and installation. Writing is both a driver and presence in work that navigates ideas of self and emotionally laden concepts such as shame. In this Phone Tag interview, we discuss how obsessions with words informs her practice, the importance of finding a queer community, and how she came to define herself as an artist.

 

Phone Tag is a generative interview format, where I ask each participating artist five questions (plus others as the discussion meanders). At the end, I ask him or her to introduce me to an artist whose attitude and work they find interesting and/or inspiring, who I then interview with the same five questions.

*****

 

Linnea West:  “If you were to briefly describe your practice, to someone who doesn’t know you, what do you say you make?”

Athena Thebus:  “I make sculpture and installations. I used to write a little. Well, recently it’s been a real combination of the two. I’ve been writing, and then wanting to make atmospheres or objects or installations that almost create a room for the writing, so they go hand in hand.”

LW:  “So, the text is very much in the gallery and an essential part of it?”

AT:  “Sometimes it’s not in the gallery. I’m like, ‘What part of this text do I want to make into a room or a mood?’ That’s where it begins. It might meander someplace else, but that’s the starting point.”

LW:  “Do the texts ever live by themselves as well? Do you ever publish them?”

AT:  “I do, but not many.”

[laughter]

“In my practice I do have a lot of text, in words or phrases that appear in my installations…I guess it is pretty text heavy. It just needs to breakdown and fragment as it goes along.”

Dreaming About You Woke Me Up [Detail: Power Fuck], 2018. Presented at ACE Open, ADL. Photo: Sam Roberts

LW:  “For me, as a writer, one of the things I love about writing about art is that writing pushes my thinking forward. How does the writing practice affect your thinking or your visual practice?”

AT:  “It feels like it becomes clearer. Also, I get stuck on words. Not stuck, but obsessed by words or certain phrases. Especially phrases that come from my mom that I thought that I had forgotten. For example, the other day I was thinking about desire and how much it’s a driving force in a lot of the things that I do. I remember when I was eight, I had one of those things that you have in your room that’s half a whiteboard, half a corkboard. She had written in permanent marker on the whiteboard side: ‘Desire + Determination = Success.’ It’s so full on. You know what I mean…I covered it up with pictures of my friend from school.”

LW:  “Yes.” [laughs]

AT:  “We have different ideas of what it means to be successful, but what is distilled in me from that quote of hers is definitely the desire.”

LW:  “That’s fantastic. I think that is so intense though.”

AT:  “Yeah. Permanent marker as well. I could never wipe it off.”

LW:  “What are you working on now?”

AT:  “I just had a really busy month. So I’m taking some time to rest, but I do have projects coming up. [Previous Phone Tag participant] Eugene [Choi] actually did this Real Real streaming thing with Campelltown Arts Center. I’m about to do that next.

It’s coming up in six weeks. It’s a live stream event. Before the stream you get a two‑week residency in the space. I’m doing it with Akil Ahamat and Ainslie Templeton. It should be good.

After that, a few other things. I’m not sure yet….I’ve got to move studios and all this kind of stuff. Some projects that I’ve been thinking about, and something to do with that quote, because it’s really been bugging me now.”

LW:  “Do you often work with other people?”

AT:  “It’s pretty fresh actually. One of my first real collaborations was with Marcus Whale. He’s a musician. For our first collaboration, I made the set and did his costume for a performance at a festival. It’s still fresh, but I like it. Usually I’m solo.”

LW:  “Do you have more performative aspects to your own practice?”

AT:  “I don’t like performing that much, but I love watching dance and I love watching performances. It’s just so energizing. Sometimes I feel that parts of my work lack this kind of performative aspect, like the rooms really need to have bodies moving in them. So I’m taking a little detour and just making rooms and costumes for performers that already exist in the world. Instead of bringing them into my space, I’m going to their space.”

LW:  “That’s interesting. And who knows, maybe in the end, it somehow does work back into your space.”

AT:  “Yeah. It’s exciting. I just love being able to do something and then hang back and not be involved.”

[laughs]

Deep Water Dream Girl [Still], 2018. Presented at Next Wave Festival. Image courtesy Athena Thebus

LW:   “So you mentioned that you’re moving studios. What’s an ideal day like in a studio?”

AT:  “Oooh an ideal day. The ideal day is that I wake up early and I go to yoga and that’s very rare. And then, I’ll ideally ride my bike to the studio, and when I get there, I read a bit. Then I make something and it makes me feel powerful and strong. That gets wrapped up within 6 hours because I think 6 hours is the most productive amount of time and then I ride home, and then I make dinner.”

LW:  “Does this have to be making something physical to get that feeling?”

AT:  “No, not necessarily. It could be some good words or it could just…yeah, it doesn’t have to be something physical. It’s a productive thinking time.”

LW:  “That makes sense. But you are also making objects, right?”

AT:  “Yeah…there’s never been the most ideal studio space. A lot of my installations are components that come together only in the week of install. I would so love to have a practice where that’s not the case, where everything’s figured out before install. It’s just hard to have all that time and all that space. Maybe that’s just how I work as well—everything’s fragmented. I can only think in fragments and then it comes together later.”

LW:  “If you work with fragments and assembling them in space, does that mean that the set up is provisional and that it could be reinstalled in a different way, or that different parts that could be reused?”

AT:  “Absolutely. I recently reinstalled this exhibition called Dreaming About You Woke Me Up. I’m so much more into the second iteration than the first, which is to be expected. I’m honestly interested in that kind of restructuring, re‑presenting something that’s essentially the same idea but different. I’m also trying to resist making something new all the time.”

LW:  “You don’t want to make something new all the time because the ideas are rich enough that you want to keep going back to them?”

AT:  “Yeah. Also, I feel like there’s this pressure to continually make something new. I don’t think it gives that idea enough length to be felt fully.”

First Thursday’s Filipinx Edition, in collaboration with Caroline Garcia, 2017. Presented at the Institute of Modern Art, QLD. Photo: Savannah van der Niet

LW:  “When did you first think of yourself as an artist?”

AT:  “It would have to be when I moved to L.A. in 2014. I had dreamt of the place before ever setting foot in America. I remember I was just like, ‘Whoa, I have to introduce myself to all these new people that don’t know who I am.’ I kept introducing myself as someone who was trying to be an artist. I realized that’s a fucked thing to say.”

LW:  “Yup.”

AT:  “Drop the trying to be and conceptualize myself as an artist. That’s when it first started.”

LW:  “That makes sense. How’d you like L.A.?”

AT:  “I loved it. It’s so sunny and warm there. It’s also the first place that I ever imagined a future for myself in a queer community. It’s a really critical moment in my life. Maybe that’s why I hold on to it as the best place ever.”

LW:  “Do you think that moving away had a lot to do with having that moment in your life?”

AT:   “Sure. I grew up in Brisbane, which is a much smaller city than Sydney.”

LW:  “You’ve been living in Sydney since L.A.?”

AT:  “Yeah, since 2015. I only got to be in L.A. for a year. I’ve been trying to come back. Every year I enter the Green Card Lottery.”

DOGGY (performance reading), 2017, performed at First Thursday’s Filipinx Edition, Institute of Modern Art, QLD. Photo: Savannah van der Niet

LW:  “One of the questions that I like to ask artists is: Do you think it’s more important to be in a big city or a quieter place? A big city is often great for a career, and you can see a lot of art. It’s also usually tough financially. From what I hear, Sydney is an expensive place to live. Or is it better to be somewhere smaller, where you can focus on making?”

AT:  “That is such a tough question, but I will say it’s better to be in a big city. I would never move back to Brisbane, for example. I never could go back to a small city. Definitely big city. Bigger ideas, more people. It’s just so much more exciting. It feels dense.”

LW:  “Everyone I talk to has either been in a big city or, maybe in an MFA program that was in a small town, so they were away but usually in a city. Nobody says, ‘Oh, you should be in a big city.’ Everyone says, ‘Oh, it’s a tough question. I want both,’ etc. You’re my first person who was just like, ‘No, you should just be in a city.’

AT:  “Yes, absolutely. That’s funny.”

DOGGY (performance reading), 2017, performed at First Thursday’s Filipinx Edition, Institute of Modern Art, QLD. Photo: Savannah van der Niet

LW:  “Who has influenced your practice?”

AT:  “So many people. Definitely AL Steiner. Who else? José Esteban Muñoz, definitely. I think also Bhenji Ra and Justin Shoulder, even though they’re very much more performance artists, because of their approach to culture, the Filipino culture, from an Australian point of view. Not even an Australian point of view. That’s an incorrect thing to say. Having a mixed heritage and living in Australia, and trying to negotiate all of that, has been a huge influence in my career.”

LW:  “How did you find your people? Was it in art school, or just going to see things?”

AT:  “Not art school. It was just going to things. Justin and Bhenji are very key…I see them as parents in the creative community here. Wait, what was the question?”

LW:  “It was about how you found these people. How they came to you.”

AT:  “Sydney has this great community of Filipino artists that I don’t think I’ve seen in other cities. Definitely not in Brisbane. Unfortunately, I only had one year in L.A. so I didn’t find that community in that time. I’m sure it exists. It feels very unique to see this group of people.”

LW:  “I have become more aware through these interviews that it exists—that there are these connections between the Philippines and Australia. Is this a historical relationship, or a more current immigration? Where does this come from?”

AT:  “There are Filipinos everywhere. It’s really great. It seems to be a current generation—actually, no, wait, I think we celebrated 50 years of diplomatic ties with the Philippines and Australia last year. There were a lot of events at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and all around Sydney City, with other regional galleries, as well. I guess it’s rising up in our consciousness.”

LW:  “Was your generation the first to be raised in Australia as Australians?”

AT:  “Yes, definitely. That’s correct.”

LW:  “Do you have family in the Philippines?”

AT:  “I do. My parents actually just retired there. My dad’s German and my mom’s Filipino, and they both moved to the Philippines. It’s strange. I didn’t think I’d miss them, but I really do. It’s weird. When they’re far away, you’re like, ‘Oh wait, come back.’”

[laughs]

LW:  “Those are actually all of my questions.”

AT:  “Really?”

LW:  “Yeah, it’s a simple interview process—five questions and they’re always the same. ‘When did you first think of yourself as an artist?’ is always super interesting. People sometimes really struggle with it.”

AT:  “That’s true. I guess pivotal to that answer is that when I was 25, I decided not to doubt it for five years.”

LW:  “Oh, that’s good.”

AT:  “Not have a plan B. Not working towards a plan B. Just to reassess it in five years time, so when I’m 30 years old.”

LW:  “This reminds me, though, of what your mom wrote on the board about determination and success, and desire.”

[laughter]

AT:  “Oh my God. It’s exhausting! In a good way.”

AT:  “Thanks for making the time to Skype, and for interviewing me.”

LW:  “Thank you. This has been great.”

Angel, 2015. Presented at Bus Projects. Photo: Athena Thebus

 

*On Friday July 27, Campbelltown Arts Center will stream Real Real 3, a performance featuring Athena in collaboration with Akil Ahamat and Ainslie Templeton, live on Facebook, at 1:30pm local time. Learn more here.*

Phone Tag: Interview with Rachelle Sawatsky

Installation view, "Reincarnation Clash", China Art Objects, 2016

Installation view of “Reincarnation Clash,” China Art Objects, 2016

For this iteration of Phone Tag, I Skyped with the L.A.-based painter Rachelle Sawatsky from her home one morning, with the bright sun, chirping birds, and sound of traffic creeping in. Previous Phone Tag participant Monique Mouton knows Rachelle from their time studying at Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver, B.C., and connected us. Rachelle plays ideas about abstraction and figuration off each other in painted ceramic objects and writing in addition to paintings. Her recently closed exhibition at China Art Objects Galleries in L.A., depicted animals on fantastical journey described in poetic titles such as “The Animal Lover’s Guide to Tragedy/The Emotional Person’s Guide to Plot” and punctuated by high-hung shaped ceramic tiles dipped in watercolor. In this interview, the artist describes the fluid and generative way she moves between word and image, trusting an image, and her interest in the writings of Agnes Martin.

 

Phone Tag is a generative interview format, where I ask each participating artist five questions (plus others as the discussion meanders). At the end, I ask him or her to introduce me to a working artist whose attitude and work they find interesting and inspiring, who I then interview with the same five questions.

***

LW: “So I know you have an exhibition at China Art Objects that went up recently. What have you got going on now?”

RS: “I’m in a show this fall, in Vancouver, at a museum, so I’m working on figuring out what pieces are going to go in that. I’ve been working on a series of new drawings that stem from Agnes Martin’s writings. I’ve been thinking about her work a lot, for several years, and how there seems to be a point of view, a perspective, but no body in her work. So I went on this internet trail and I found some early work she did. She destroyed most of her early work, but there’s some… a lot of it is figurative… some Greek and Biblical myths…but it still seems to obfuscate the body, the queer body in particular…. So, that is an interest of mine, but in these drawings I’m not using her paintings as a starting point, but her writings, and thinking about metaphysical language as a way to generate new ideas for imagery.”

LW: “I didn’t realize. Did she do a lot of writing?”

RS: “Yeah. There’s a volume of collected writings that are published. They’re feel super inspired by New Age and Eastern Philosophy, but she said that it isn’t specific to any religion. I’m going to go on a trip this winter, once it gets colder in the desert. Spend some time in the landscape where she lived and draw and write.”

LW: “Is this something that has been percolating for a while?”

RS: “I’ve been talking about it for years. And then I was like, I should just do it now.”

"Roulette" 2016 oil and flashe on canvas, 58 x 104 inches

Roulette, 2016, oil and flashe on canvas, 58 x 104 inches

LW: “Totally. Is she someone you think of as an influence? And, more generally, who has influenced your practice?”

RS: “Probably the painters that have influenced me the most would be Joan Brown, Agnes Peltin, and Maria Lassnig. I think all of them are interested in developing bodies of work or systems of articulation, systems of thought, around the emotional life… and thinking of metaphysical states and your personal life in the same sentence. Those have been some keystones for me. Also, I look at a lot of drawings by Rosemarie Trockel and Louise Bourgeois and Marisol.

For the most recent show I did—that’s still up at China Art Objects—I wrote a poem about being on a plane and imagining all the different people on it and what would it be like to suddenly become them and live their lives. This poem expanded into a narrative poem I wrote for the show that also had a plane crash where all the bodies reincarnated as animals. Then I made all these narrative paintings telling this far-fetched story. I had this celestial body of ceramic stars all dipped in watercolor that were hung all over the walls at different heights. I was kind of imagining a metonymic relationship between the two bodies of work, in that the watercolor ceramics are dipped so they have these horizon lines, this sense of the registration of the earth through the watercolor. And these paintings are kind of like interior space or exterior spaces, kind of ambiguous, and the whole feeling is like being on a plane, lightness and airiness….At the same time I was reading Patricia Highsmith’s The Animal-Lovers Book of Beastly Murder, about short stories from the perspective of animals who are kind of mistreated and have revenge killings on their owners…. So there is darkness in it too.”

LW: “Nice.”

RS: “Yeah. So, fiction is a big interest of mine, and artist’s writings. In this show, Patricia Highsmith is someone I was really thinking about and Joan Brown, too.”

"Reincarnation Clash" 2016 oil and flashe on canvas, 52 x 58 inches

Reincarnation Clash, 2016, oil and flashe on canvas, 52 x 58 inches

LW: “Have you always thought of yourself as an artist? As a visual artist versus a writer…do you distinguish?”

RS: “I was always into both. The first time I ever did art, the first memory I have about art, is when I was in a preschool program, when I was like 4 or something, and we had different activities but I never knew the names for them, and one of them was Cooking, and we made peanut butter and jam sandwiches, and the other one was Art, so we would paint. I always thought they were the same activity…doing messy things with liquid… I’ve always really gravitated toward making as a process of experimentation with materials.

I also wrote a lot of stories and poetry since I was a kid. I used to think of them as separate from my artwork. More recently, over the past few years, I’ve been using my writing as a generative process for working with imagery. Imagery is something that feels somewhat new to me. I think that it’s really through my writing that that has happened.”

LW: “Do you ever use text in your paintings?”

RS: “No. I think part of the reason I neglected to use my writing in shows before is that text sometimes has a very authoritative function. In relation to something visual, it’s comfortable for someone to read a text in a gallery and feel a sense of something explaining something. And I enjoy making things that might have an uncomfortable relationship to language, or more of a relationship to materials or physicality or another kind of poetics or objectness. For this reason I never used text alongside my work as I thought that it would interfere with this, but I’ve found through poetry I’ve been able to find different affinities.”

LW: “Yeah, I feel like you seen them differently, images and text, and it changes the dynamic to put them together, for sure.”

RS: “I’m interested in the strange compositional possibilities of it too, in editing…looking at different bodies of work, whether its drawing or ceramics or paintings, and kind of like working with the show in mind and writing to kind of compose the exhibition. For another show [at Harmony Murphy Gallery], I made a body of work called Stone Gloves, a series of drawings that were exploring emotional and psychological boundaries within the body. A lot of them also had animal and, like, ET imagery in them too, this kind of non-gendered bodiliness that I was interested in. Those drawings all had titles that made up the line of a poem. I’ve recomposed the poem and worked with it in subsequent exhibitions reinstalling the drawings in different ways. I think that it’s interesting to work with text  compositionally.”

Untitled, 2015, watercolor and glaze on ceramic, 20 x 21 x 2.25 inches

Untitled, 2015, watercolor and glaze on ceramic, 20 x 21 x 2.25 inches

LW: “That makes sense to me. Where are you now—are you in your studio?”

RS: “No, at home.”

LW: “I can hear the birds outside; it sounds very pleasant. Do you have a studio? What’s an ideal day like in the studio?”

RS: “Getting up really early. For the past show I meditated every day. That was a way to bring less intention to everything I made and to be open to whatever kind of free associative thing happened. So, that’s become a part of my practice. Just have no plans. To make things all day. Probably meet someone for a late lunch or a beer at a Mexican restaurant near my studio.”

LW: “Have you been in the same studio in LA since you’ve been there?”

RS: “This is the second or third studio I’ve had. It’s really great. One thing I really enjoy about being in L.A.—it’s quickly changing—it’s getting more expensive—but still at this point it’s manageable. I feel a lot of freedom here to have a large studio to myself and be able to make large work and to be able to also work outside because the weather is nice year-round.”

LW: “What about the ceramic pieces—are you able to make those…?”

RS: “I make some of those in my studio but I also work in another ceramic studio as well.”

"Heartbreak Confusion Disaster" 2014, chalk paster on newsprint, 20 x 24 inches

Heartbreak Confusion Disaster, 2014, chalk paster on newsprint, 20 x 24 inches

LW: “Do you think it’s better for an artist to be in a big city like L.A., where is getting more expensive, or to be in a smaller, quieter place where maybe the focus could be more on making?”

RS: “That’s a question I ask myself a lot. Personally right now I enjoy living in L.A. because I feel like there’s a lot of really great people here, who I have a lot of energy with. It’s nice to be in a place where you feel like you’re rocks rubbing against each other making sparks. I enjoy those stimulating interactions. There’s a lot of that going on in L.A. and I’m interested in a lot of artists working here. In that regard, L.A. works for me at this point. I imagine at some point in the future I’ll move somewhere quieter to work but for now, it’s really great.”

LW: “How was Vancouver?”

RS: “I visit there quite often and I have a lot of friends there. I feel like there’s a lot of creative exchanges that I still have there. The rents are super expensive, especially studio rent. I think it would really change the work I made if I were to live there.”

There’s also a lot of nature around there, which is really different and great. Here we have more desert, and there it’s a forest space. I used to spend a lot of time in the woods there – there are all these little islands off the coast and my parents have a cabin there –so I used to work a lot in the cabin.”

Untitled, 2015, watercolor and glaze on ceramic, 12 x 11 x 2.25 inches

Untitled, 2015, watercolor and glaze on ceramic, 12 x 11 x 2.25 inches

LW: “That sounds fantastic. Is that where you think you pull so many animals in your work from—from nature? Or is it more metaphorical?”

RS: “Well… I am influenced by the animals around me. Like, my cat passed away a year ago, and I think somehow I wasn’t intending to reimagine his reincarnation. But I just kept painting cat bodies. I didn’t realize it until I hung the show. But I also think there’s this other level of the imaginary, or, imagined beings. The imagery of metaphysical realms is something that’s kind of an intriguing challenge for me right now. Also, imagery that is  somewhat irreverent to abstract transcendental painting, which has a lot of formalism to it…”

LW: “Yeah, and heavy spiritual overtones…”

"Romance" 2016 oil and flashe on canvas, 52 x 58 inches

Romance, 2016, oil and flashe on canvas, 52 x 58 inches

RS: “Yeah, I’m imagining replacing those with dark humor instead. I think about giving a painting permission a lot. Allowing each painting to come into its own in its own way and not necessarily thinking about a style or a finish. To stay with the image, whether that’s this plane crash or something like that.. is more of a challenge than to imagine the painting expressing a continuity of an aesthetic style.”

LW: “Well if you’re trying to let go of control, do you do a lot of paintings and sketches, or do you kind of just paint on canvas and keep going?”

RS: “I use both drawing and writing in preparatory ways. Sometimes I’ll write a line and think ‘What if I painted this?’ And then I’ll draw maybe a little bit. I don’t think of it as losing control… it is more about trusting whatever poetic confusion the image holds. I work slowly and sometimes repaint a painting several times. The paintings in the show at China Art are very pictorial, and I was really into the idea of a kind of blind sincerity of illustrating a line. Sometimes my drawings come from a very different place, like, the aggressivity of something internal or anti-kind-of-formalness. So it’s sort of a fluctuation of a lot of different energies and forces.”

LW: “It’ll be interesting to see how this translates into Agnes Martin, who I only know through her paintings, but just seems so different in my mind…”

RS: “Yeah, I imagine it being really different. I’m thinking I’m just going to pretend I’ve never seen anything she made.”

LW: “But for this upcoming show in the fall, you’re working more with existing work?”

RS: “Yeah, I am. I’m making an installation, drawings, and the ceramic wall paintings I’ve been doing. And then I’ve also recently been experimenting with screenprinting my chalk pastel drawings onto ceramics, so then there’s another element where some of the ceramics start to feel photographic –some of them are made with paper clay and with watercolor–they feel like paper. Or, slightly sculptural as the edges are all painted, as if they are canvases that has messed-up painting on the sides.”

LW: “Great, thank you for participating in Phone Tag.”

RS: “It was a pleasure to meet you.”

LW: “Yes, likewise!”