Phone Tag: Interview with Rachelle Sawatsky

Posted on July 28, 2016 by Linnea

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.

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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

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

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

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

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

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

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!”

Phone Tag: Interview with Ezra Tessler

Posted on April 22, 2016 by Linnea

This Furtive Burg, Ezra Tessler

For the this iteration of Phone Tag, Chase Westfall connected me with the Brooklyn-based painter Ezra Tessler. Ezra is a painter who received his MFA from Bard College in 2015. He recently showed his work at ZsONA MACO contemporary art fair in Mexico City with Páramo Gallery. His work often deals with the nature of painting and image-making itself, and how it might expand the sphere of what painting can do in the world. Not realizing how close we live to one another in Brooklyn, we Skyped one recent morning, discussing Ezra’s recent paintings, navigating teaching and making work in New York, and somehow balancing life concerns at the same time.

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This Furtive Burg (alternate view), Ezra Tessler

LW: What are you working on now?

ET: I just came back from Mexico where I was in a two-person booth at MACO with Barb Smith, a sculptor who did her MFA at Bard with me. I worked on two bodies of work for that show. One group was a kind of three-dimensional painting, something I’ve been working through for a number of years. I wanted to do more than just makes “pictures.” I didn’t want to make paintings as images just to be consumed on the Internet. So I’ve been thinking about a kind of parity between the surface of the painting and the structure of the painting, a possible non-hierarchy between those two things. I’ve been making paintings where the structure is sort of equal to the surface. For example, there are the paintings I make that use clay and oil, these sort of pictorial landscapes. So there’s a pictorial space to them but they come off the wall at angles. Between the pictorial space and the physical space of the painting is this idea that they would create a sort of third experience of space for the viewer. If the cheesiest way to think about a painter’s aspirations is that he or she would like to move the viewer, these paintings try do that in the simplest possible way, they do it by literally making you move around the painting.

I had been thinking a lot about Cézanne, and the ways in which an apple looks like it’s about to jump off the canvas but also looks like its flat and dead. I like that idea of two distinct things—still and in movement, coming and going, falling apart and forming at the same time. Ideally these paintings feel like they’re coming and going at the same time.

Installation, Bard MFA Thesis Exhibition

LW: But you’re often working with more abstract imagery. So not like an apple…

ET: Exactly. I just finished grad school, during which I constantly battled a perceived struggle between figure and ground. I think a lot of my mentors came from a generation of painters still thinking in immediate ways about Abstract Expressionism and this idea that a painting should be an artifact of a series of battles the artist plays out on canvas. For me the culmination of grad school involved getting rid of the figure and making the painting the figure, oftentimes resorting to abstraction or pattern or stripe, things that in some way offered a field. The embodied field allowed – temporarily – to get past this idea of a figure-ground dichotomy. Those paintings present a clear pictorial landscape but ideally they could also subvert a presumed way of looking at a painting. The idea that you could hold two subject positions of being still and in movement…of coming and going…has some political possibilities. An identity position in which you were able to be both still and moving. I’ve been thinking about what the implications might be, however slight.

The second body of work paired the 3D work with these Delacroix sketches I’ve been thinking about for a long time. Delacroix’s sketches show Christ on the Sea of Galilee. He’s asleep and the disciples are crowded on the raft and reeling in terror at the storm. Christ wakes up and scolds them. Van Gogh and others seemed particularly struck by these sketches. There’s one at the Met that’s quite striking. I’ve been looking at this painting for a long time and thinking about this idea that a painting could be both a source of comfort and but also a source of exposure or risk. I was thinking about the analogy of raft, as an analogy for painting, for the studio, for larger political positions. The paintings that came out of this long process alternate between stains and images so that they move between abstraction and figuration.

Now that those are done, I’m excited to try to push further. I’m curious to see what’s next.

Still in the Tempest II, Ezra Tessler

LW: You mention Delacroix and Cézanne. Are those influences? Are your influences mostly painterly?

ET: They’re artists whose work I’ve spent a lot of time looking at and thinking about. They come up a lot in my own teaching with students as well.

But I would answer your question in two ways. One influence is the teachers and mentors whose work and lives I respect. A lot of the teachers I most respect offer examples for how to live a good life that engages a community–people like Nancy Shaver, Amy Sillman, Monika Baer, A.L. Steiner. People who offer models for life as an artist.

But also a lot of the work I think about and look at now is work that is very different from the work I do. For example, Sondra Perry, who you’ve interviewed. Or, I just saw a talk at MACO by Jenn Rosenblit, who gave an amazing panel talk. So much of my own work comes out of questions of social justice. Why make art of a particular kind and for whom? What is ethical work, what do qualities of generosity and empathy mean? The artists I respect most are artists who think about that and who force me to think about that further. Painting is a medium that perhaps doesn’t allow for such an opening up. I’m definitely a studio rat, but I find that challenges brought by non-painters to be ones that I want to engage in, the ones I think about most. People like Adrian Piper and Andrea Fraser, for example—even though a connection to a painting practice is tenuous, largely because painting so starkly embodies the problems or contradictions they challenge. I’ve also been thinking a lot lately about painters who work in three dimensions like Moira Dryer and Ralph Humphrey, for example, who really pushed parity between structure and surface.

LW: You mentioned being a studio rat, and maybe that is typical of a painter. So what’s an ideal day in this studio?

ET: A typical day involves getting to the studio early with my dog, Zalea, and spending all day there. I spend as much time as possible in the studio. I usually get right to work. My studio has always been very chaotic but it’s important to me to have a lot of work going at one time. I wake up excited to get to the studio and when I get there I’m equally excited to work, whether that means putting down a new layer of paint, sanding away an old layer, or riffling through books and images.

LW: If you have that many projects going, is it helpful for you to be able to jump from one to another?

ET: This has been the challenge. Deadlines often bring about an editing process. For example, there were two bodies of work that went to this show in Mexico but I had been working on a number of bodies of work leading up to it. As the deadline got closer, work got winnowed out. In the end, I make a lot of decisions in the editing process outside of the studio. Especially because paintings get dealt with in the studio in such dumb and absurd material ways.

Installation, Zona Maco

LW: When did you first start thinking of yourself as an artist?

ET: This is a challenging question. After college, I worked in human rights for several years, I did doctoral work, and only after that did I do an MFA. But the entire time I was doing that other stuff, I was painting and seeing work and reading about work. But it was always a balancing act. There came a certain point when I thought: “When am I going to make the jump?”—as if it required a large decision to change my life to enable it. But I looked up one day and was spending all my free time in the studio making work, so it sort of happened naturally that I started to think of myself as an artist. Simply because I was making work.

I had been working in these other worlds that in my mind were connected to the studio but for other people weren’t connected. For me, it was very clear why I was involved in human rights but also keeping up a studio practice, or doing a doctoral program and painting, but for other people it wasn’t so clear. I had probably been worrying too much about that category of an official artist.

LW: I ask the question because for me it took a long time to call myself a writer. When did you start painting? As a child? Always?

ET: Always, always. When I was in the womb, my mother—who was not a professional artist—was going to the Barnes museum on the weekends and taking classes with Violette de Mazia. My earliest memories are of going to the Barnes Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, or looking at books of the Ashcan school with my grandfather.

Heather and Lore, Ezra Tessler

LW: You live in Brooklyn now, and I take it you’ve been in the New York City area for a while. My final question is whether it’s better to be in a big city like New York where it’s tough and expensive but there’s a major art scene, or to be in a smaller, quieter place where you can maybe focus on making?

ET: Several friends have brought their graduate student classes from outside of New York for studio visits and I always get the question ‘Should I move to New York City?’ It’s such a personal question though. A number of friends have moved upstate or out of NYC so they can live cheaply and have a bigger studio, and that makes a lot of sense. But the answer seems clear to me right now–it’s where I have a community of people. For me, that’s most important—to be talking about and looking at art and fighting things out in the studio with friends and studio visits. Right now almost everyone I know is in New York… people who offer a source of comfort and challenge in the larger project of making work. For me, the most important thing is to have the ability to make the work as much as possible and to have a community.

It’s also such a personal decision how one participates in the art world and which art world you participate in, because obviously there are many art worlds inside and outside of New York City. Sometimes when NYC gets to be a bit much I think about people like Nancy Shaver, Martin Puryear, Dana Hoey, and other artists who I respect a lot and who have moved upstate and built a life that seems conducive to making work and community. But I’m still building my life here and it’s hard to want to give that up.

LW: Yeah, absolutely. This has been great. Thank you for participating.

ET: Thank you.

Phone Tag: Interview with Chase Westfall

Posted on February 3, 2016 by Linnea

Small Offering, Chase Westfall

For the third interview of Phone Tag, I spoke with Chase Westfall from his office at Gallery Protocol in Gainesville, Florida, where he is the director. As an artist, Chase draws on a broad range of philosophical, theological, and artistic influences to consider the cultural meaning and societal function of violence. His practice encompasses a broad range of media including sculpture, installation, video, and performance in addition to painting. I worked with Chase on a text for a solo exhibition, Terror Function, that he had this past winter at 101/exhibit gallery in Los Angeles. In addition to his artistic practice and Gallery Protocol, Chase is a part of Imperfect Articles, a Chicago-based t-shirt company that seeks to challenge the relationship between image, audience, and “exhibition” space by working with artists to create t-shirts. I caught up with Chase after he was recovering from a busy period of teaching, preparing for his most recent exhibition, gallery projects, travel, and the holidays.

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LW: “What are you working on now?”

CW: “Right now I’m pursuing something I haven’t done in a number of years: a couple of local exhibition opportunities. I grew up in this area, but then moved away when I was about 19. Since then, for the past 15 years, I’ve had that stereotypical nomadic lifestyle–two years here, two years there. And there was actually a brief period when I was back here finishing my BFA (I graduated in 2008), but then it was off again to the next thing. About two and a half years ago we–my wife and kids and I–moved back here when I accepted the position as the director of Gallery Protocol. With all of that coming and going, it had been almost 9 years since I had exhibited any work in Gainesville. Then a friend of mine approached me about doing a show in a space here in town. It shifts my set of personal criteria for the exhibition. Not in the sense that I don’t take it seriously, but for whatever reason doing a show in my hometown after so long is a way of like, snuggling in. All the people and reasons integral to my start are here, so it becomes a chance to celebrate them. I’m going to focus on making a set of paintings. The 101/exhibit show was very interdisciplinary, more so than I’ve worked historically. I had a lot of fun with that, but it also felt raw and vulnerable. All my current efforts are about rediscovering my comfort zone. I’m just going to make some paintings, which is my metaphorical artistic home.”

LW: “After nine years, there’s a lot of room to reflect on what has happened.”

CW: “Yeah, and it’s actually in the same space that I did my BFA exhibition. As I was getting ready to graduate, I wanted to do something off campus and this space was available for rent back then–it was something like $75 a night? They were just trying to cover their costs. At the time it was called Downhome Gallery, but it closed after we moved away. One of the guys I was in school with when I was here, Micah Daw, also recently moved back to Gainesville and reached out to the owners of the building and got permission to start doing shows there again. This upcoming exhibition feels like it completes the circle since it’s in the same space where I did my first real exhibition–the first time I did a show on my terms and, more importantly than that, was able to pursue my own vision.”

Installation view, Terror Function exhibition at 101exhibit gallery

Installation view, Chase Westfall: Terror Function exhibition at 101/exhibit

LW: “You live in Gainesville, but you just had an exhibition in L.A.. Do you think it’s better for an artist to be in big city like L.A.—with a strong cultural scene but higher cost of living—or to be in a smaller place like Gainesville, where maybe the focus can be more on making?”

CW: “Honestly, because of a number of personal life choices and circumstances, being here in Gainesville is the right thing for me. But I tell any young, genuinely ambitious artists I talk to: go to New York, go to Chicago, go to L.A. You’ll face real challenges but those challenges, over the long term, will help you develop the qualities that you need to have as an artist. Even if you can only take it for a couple of years, have that experience and it will give you a lot of perspective for moving forward.

The nature of access is changing because of the internet. But there is still a visceral energy and phenomenological pressure that you get in the city. For me, there is something about these big cities as places where the talent collects and pools and, in a healthy way, you realize you can’t sit around and wait. You gotta’ hustle and get after it. There is a larger mythology about what it means to be an artist that centers around a fantasy of self-fulfillment and self-expression. While those are really wonderful privileges of being an artist, they aren’t sustainable over the long term unless there’s a real blue-collar work ethic to lay a foundation for that self-indulgence to happen.

So, I still say get to the big cities. You can stay informed and educated in smaller places in a way you couldn’t in the past, but even so, you want to be around the best people. You want to be around the freshest, rawest, toughest, and grittiest ideas, and the areas of critical mass are still the big cities.”

Blue Barricade, Chase Westfall

LW: “Speaking about being an artist, when did you first consider yourself an artist?”

CW: “That’s a great question. Well, like a lot of artists, I was the kid who could draw really well. I developed a sense of self-worth around that skill. But that sort of lost its importance for me as I got older –by the time I got to high school I didn’t want to be the kid who could draw really well–I wanted to be the kid who played soccer really well. So I spent four years of high school, despite my lack of natural athletic ability, focusing on that. After high school, I started messing around with BMX but then broke my ankle really badly. I was in a walking boot for 8 months. I was stuck in my house. We lived out in the country and I couldn’t drive, so I stayed at home all day. And my parents are kooky enough people that, one day, when I got the urge to start painting murals on the wall, they said ‘go for it.’ So I started painting murals and had a lot of fun with that. At that time I was also getting ready to serve a religious mission for my church. The timing of the injury was such that just as I was getting out of the boot I left the country for two years to serve as a missionary in Costa Rica. All I had been doing before I left was painting, so I left in that mindset–thinking about art. Maybe not art with a capital “A” but certainly drawing, the rendering of images, etc., had had this sort of stunning rebirth for me. The whole time I was serving my mission, I felt like that was what I wanted to do when I got back. I couldn’t really rationalize it—perhaps it just was a coincidence that that was the flavor I left home with. I would tell people there that when I got back, I was going to be an artist. That was it. I never really questioned it after that.”

LW: “Who has influenced your practice?”

CW: “That’s a question I really struggle with. It must be like a mental block that I have because I look at a lot of art and I know it influences me, but the influences that I’m the most conscious of, or self-aware about, are more the conceptual or philosophical ones. A lot of it comes from things I read, so a lot of authors have been very influential.

You always take material cues from other artists. But I think the biggest thing I learn from other visual artists–speaking in the broadest terms–is about what is and isn’t effective–what kinds of things can and can’t be reached through the language of visual art. Looking at where their works succeeds, where it fails, developing a sense of what kinds of information it can most effectively communicate. That was something I personally struggled with early on, confusing the communicative potential I wanted my artwork to have with the kind of communication that was better left to other forms of expression. I was very fixated on being able to express specific ideas and being able to communicate in very concrete ways. I’ve learned through engaging with visual art that you have to let go of that to a certain extent.”

Jihadi, Chase Westfall

LW: “Speaking of the difficulty of representing certain things visually, and being inspired by a lot of writers, do you ever write?”

CW: “I have. I’ve written criticism and what I might call art theory, but I’ve never really undertaken writing as a creative practice. I’ve thought a lot about doing it. The first baby step I took in that direction was the poem I included in the Terror Function show. My brother and I composed a poem—my brother’s a writer—and had it displayed in the space as part of the exhibition.

There’s this mythology around artists, which could very well be true, that real makers can’t live without making. And that’s never been me. I like being in the studio and I have certain skills for art making, but I also acknowledge, as we all know, that making a good drawing, for example, is not the same thing as making art. And I don’t have that emotional dependence on art making that I hear other artists talk about. The satisfaction that I derive from writing, even when it’s something as simple as the press releases here at the gallery, is often equivalent to making paintings. So, I have thought about transitioning parts of my practice into writing.”

Installation view, Chase Westfall: Terror Function exhibition at 101/exhibit

LW: “Regarding making and how you approach making, what does an ideal day look like in the studio for you?”

CW: “An ideal day?…is something I’ve probably never had. I don’t really believe in the value of the ideal or perfect world—the challenges we face are the vital spark that keep things moving forward. That sounds pretty corny really, but I’m embracing it more and more as I get older: it’s the little thorns in your side that keep you moving, progressing. For me, that’s the best way to ensure that what you do has a vitality and edge.

But an ideal day would involve getting up early, so getting into the studio by 5 or 6 am. Read for an hour or two. Then, a combination of prep work and actual execution. The prep work can be as enjoyable as the making itself. Of course, you can’t really separate it out from the making. But if there is a kind of zen state to be achieved in the studio, for me it happens when I’m assembling and stretching canvases. You’re not making complicated value judgements. There is a cleanness that process has that other aspects of your studio practice don’t have. Then you really settle in to work and get some painting knocked out for the rest of the day. When you’re ready to go home you make a few calls to check up on the progress of your other projects–because if this is an ideal day I am farming out my sculptural stuff!”

Untitled (Veronica), Chase Westfall

LW: “How often do you try to get in the studio?”

CW: “It’s streaky; I’m definitely a studio sprinter. I don’t have—just because of life circumstances—consistent studio time. For instance, I’ve only spent a couple of days in the studio since the Terror Function exhibition, and that work was delivered in late October. There has been a ton going on since then with the Gallery and Imperfect Articles so that’s how it goes sometimes–I’ve only been in there like one day a month. What will happen is that as a deadline gets closer I will switch gears and then I’ll be in there every day for as long as it takes to get the work knocked out. That’s not ideal—I wish it wasn’t that way. But, the frequency of the studio time is really dependent on the immediacy of the deadline.”

LW: “Yeah, but I can only imagine. You do have a full-time job and you do have a family. You fit it in where you can.”

CW: “That’s true, but it still puts you through the emotional wringer. Every few months it’s like: ‘OK, I’ve allowed other things to displace my studio practice as priority. You think, maybe I’m not a real artist, maybe I don’t have the dedication or passion that it takes. Would a real artist go two months without being in the studio?’ You start to ask yourself, should I try to transition into something else, do more writing for example? And then, as soon as you have those doubts, you have a good studio day, and you’re stoked again. It’s a constant back and forth.”

LW: “Certainly for me, the way I approach the writing I do, it’s a balancing act. Those are all my questions. Thank you for participating!”

CW: “Thank you so much.”

Linnea West

Category Archives: life

Phone Tag: Interview with Rachelle Sawatsky

Phone Tag: Interview with Ezra Tessler

Phone Tag: Interview with Chase Westfall