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.

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.

*****

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.

******

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.”

Phone Tag: Interview with Sondra Perry

Posted on September 7, 2015 by Linnea

Cyborgs in Generic Windows (one of four), 2015

For the second interview of Phone Tag, I Skyped with Sondra Perry in her studio at Columbia University this past February. Since the interview, Sondra graduated with an MFA from Columbia this past May and is participating in the Core Residency Program at the Glassell School of Art in Houston, Texas. Her work often focuses on identity, its fluidity, and power structures whether through performance or new media. I was introduced to Sondra by the first artist I interviewed, Trevor Amery.

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/or inspiring, who I will then interview with the same five questions.

************

Linnea West: “How do you know Trevor?”

Sondra Perry: “Trevor and I went to Skowhegan together last summer. We talked a lot about whether to go to grad school or not. We were in a similar situation where we got into programs that started in the Fall. He waited a year to go back to school, and I decided I would just go to Columbia. So we had a lot of bonding moments over the anxiety of school and finances, and also really deciding how we wanted to situate ourselves in the art world through one’s program.”

LW: “Are you happy with your decision to go to grad school?”

SP: “I decided to come to Columbia, primarily because of Kara Walker, who is actually no longer here. All of my classmates are really amazing, and I think that’s a huge part of any type of program. Those are the people you are going to be in communication with for the rest of your professional life.

I do question, sometimes, my decision-making to come to a program that’s not paying for me to be there. I come from a background where I haven’t been given anything. Life has been really tough for most of it. So when I was talking to my family about it, they were concerned about the fact that I would come here and put myself in debt when I didn’t have to. Being here has really forced me to acknowledge that I am complicit in the power of this institution as well. It comes with me, and because of that I am privileged, all things that I think I knew unconsciously when I was deciding to come to this school. At the same time it’s really difficult because you have to work so much to live in New York City. So yeah, it’s like these two sides. It’s complicated my identity in a lot of ways, which is—was—already complex. I’ve been talking with a lot of people who have been in similar situations. It’s a lot of soul-searching, about power and being close to power and all of that art world market stuff.”

42 Black Panther Balloons on 125th Street, 2014 performance on December 5th, 2014 walking black panther mylar balloons between Riverside Drive and Sixth Avenue on 125th Street in Harlem, New York

42 Black Panther Balloons on 125th Street (performance walking black panther mylar balloons between Riverside Drive and Sixth Avenue on 125th Street in Harlem, New York), 2014

LW: “Well, you’re in the center of it.”

SP: “Yeah, it’s here. It’s all right here. So you can’t ignore it…and I don’t think you should. I don’t think that would have happened if I had gone to any of the other schools I was accepted to, not with the same ferociousness.”

LW: “A lot of these concerns come up in your artwork, right? Just from looking at your website, it seems very connected. Could you describe your work?”

SP: “I make a couple of specific things: I do performance and I make videos, and there is a merger between those things, and then I make digital images. I’ve always been really interested in dimensionality in relationship to identity, so thinking about fluidity in that way. Recently I like the language of dimensionality and thinking of people as existing in-between spaces as ghosts or apparitions, or existing in a paraspace or a space that is kind of undefined—or at least trying to access an undefined space.”

LW: “Is the internet one of those?”

SP: “Absolutely. I have a whole internet project I’m doing right now. Those are spaces where there is autonomy or, if it’s not autonomy, then the illusion of autonomy that I think can be very helpful to creating the self. I’m thinking in capitalist, individualistic ways, but really using self-creation as a tool for political action and personal freedom, in a sense.”

LW: “I have a friend who was telling me this weekend that she sees Ryan Trecartin’s work as working in a very positivist way in the internet, to explore how identity can be created.”

SP: “So many people in this program hate Ryan Trecartin. I don’t understand it. When I first discovered his work, it was cyber-ish, like how his setwork functions is similar to the internet overload. I thought it was really powerful and it worked. What I really love about it is that there nothing real. There’s no realness anywhere. That’s really important. He’s creating construct after construct after construct.

I’m interested in having an understanding of the constructs that you’re working within. It’s funny because the general language about the net doesn’t necessarily reflect what that space is. The things that separate spaces are all interfaces that have been created, lots of them by corporations. When we think that we are trying to express ourselves and we’re being individuals, we’re being individuals within a frame that is primarily to collect our data and sell us stuff. There is a space where that becomes really scary. I’m really interested in coding now, so I’m trying to figure out how to code, because the interfaces that we use are absolutely how our experience is formed.”

Cyborgs in Generic Windows (one of four), 2015

LW: “How would all of that relate to Mother, this project where you created cyborg versions of you? And, I don’t even fully understand what you mean. What is a cyborg?”

SP: “I use the term cyborg really loosely, as things that are an extension of biological matter. There is this program that is on the internet, a paid service called SitePal, and it is geared toward small businesses that want to have a humanist touch on their website. You can build these little boxes that pop up. You can program language in and it will greet your customer when the page loads. I wound up using that service to make these little gif images that do things, but they don’t speak. I was trying to subvert that “I’m here for you to use in some way” idea. Their function no longer works. They’re just looking at you, as things in another space looking in.

I’m really into the Mother project. I’m learning a lot through it. I was trying to find a good website name, something catchy, and mother.com and mother.org were taken, and mothermother was taken, and I decided on Mothermothermother.org. I was reluctant to do it because, as a fatbodied black woman, there’s a mammie archetype that is placed upon bodies that look like mine. That are supposed to be asexual, nourishing, mother figures. My entire life, the work that I created, I tried to stay pretty damn clear of that. And then the website happened, and I just decided I was going to jump head in. I was already peeking in that area, because of the performance work I started doing –and I thought you know, why not? It’s a great metaphor: Mothermothermother. I call it a space to explore how identity can be created, using the feminine to talk about technology, which doesn’t happen much. It seemed like it made a lot of sense.”

LW: “Who has influenced your practice?”

SP: “I have to say Kara [Walker]. I went to undergrad for ceramic sculpture and I was so gung-ho about being a ceramic sculptor. The first week of class, on a Wednesday, they showed the Art:21 episode that Kara did. I didn’t know about her work before. I had been to a museum once in primary school or something, but I wasn’t well-versed in contemporary art. I was just doing my own thing. I hadn’t realized that you could make art that impacted people. It really did blow me away. I’ll never forget that moment. I thought ‘I’m going to learn everything I can about this work and the woman who makes it,’ and a couple weeks later I learned that she worked at Columbia, and that’s the only reason that Columbia was on my radar at all, because she was there.

Who else? There’s a really great German video artist named Bjorn Melhus. I came across his work in sophomore year of college. He’s a German artist who watched American television growing up. He reenacts all of these American films. It’s totally different narratives; he plays all the parts. He’s an amazing technician.

Nam June Paik is one of my people. I went to school with a bunch of old school video artists, and I thought he was kind of a visionary in how most off his work is him speaking as an Asian man in relation to the West. There’s a piece with a violin. He’s lifting it for like 10 minutes, and at the end of the 10 minutes he crashes it on the ground and smashes it. I just thought that was so revolutionary.”

LW: “You mentioned that you used to work with ceramics, but did you always make stuff? Did you always know you were going to be an artist?

SP: “No, I didn’t. It was a weird situation. We were in Texas, and our family became homeless. I’d had a lot of anxiety throughout my entire life, and I didn’t like going to school. But when we became homeless and moved into the shelter, I had to go to school. The only thing that saved me from dropping out was art class. Halfway through that year, we started on ceramics, and I was just like, ‘Oh, I know how to work with this thing.’ The discovery was something about learning…like when you know what you want to do the learning isn’t hard. It’s still difficult, but it’s ok. We moved back to New Jersey after that stint, and everything became normalized again. Ceramics was the one thing that I wanted to do. I figured it out at 14, but I didn’t know I wanted to be an artist. I just felt like ceramics was the only thing I was good at. I don’t think I really identified as an artist until sometime when I got to school to study art. ‘Ok, well I guess I’m an artist now. All these other people are calling themselves artists.’ It all came really quick.”

LW: “That’s really interesting because ceramics is such a physical thing, with your hands and if you’re throwing on the wheel you’re whole body is into it, but now your practice has transitioned so much into this immaterial, or virtual, realm.”

Photograph of Sondra Perry & Associate™ Make Pancakes and Shame the Devil, 2015

SP: “It’s super weird, yeah. Everyone says it all comes back. It’s funny because I’m still really engaged in the body, but in such a different way. I’m curious to see what happens with it. Last year I took a wood sculpture class, and it was such a pleasure making stuff. Just nailing stuff. I forgot for so long. So back here, this a – a ‘sculpture’—”

LW: “So yeah, this is your studio. Can you tell me about it? What’s an ideal day like?”

SP: “Sure. It’s here at Columbia. We’re on the third floor. I have a pretty big studio.

So what happens here is on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays we have our MFA core classes, and then the rest of the time is for work or to make studio work. This semester I have a teaching assistantship on Tuesdays morning, and I work as a lab monitor for 6 hours and then I’m also on the team for the visiting artist committee.

But last semester it would have been totally different. I had a fellowship position where I had to work 20 hours a week for the Digital Media department. I decided–I’m not sure if this is stupid or not because this is Columbia—not to take any classes, because the last year, I hadn’t had any time to make work. Although I’m still working for the department, it’s not as many hours, and now I have so much more time to make my own work. It’s the most amazing thing. It’s the thing I thought all of grad school was going to be, and it’s just this semester, and that’s fine.

I’ll wake up, I’ll get here, I’ll answer emails, social media, read a bunch of stuff. Then I have a list of projects that I’m working on, and I’ll rotate each day. So I have a video project that I’m working on, I’ll do that for a whole day before I’ll switch over. My days are awesome. I’m so lucky.”

LW: “Do you have another year of the program left?”

SP: “This is it.”

LW: “Oh, wow. Have you been thinking ahead at all yet? Or, are you trying to not think about it?”

SP: “It’s really hard not to. Because all the applications for things are due now, so I’m working on applications, doing all of that, but trying to stay focused on this moment. But I’m not thinking about thesis yet. I have the projects I’m working on. My plan is to work on all of them until about two weeks before the thesis show. Then, figure out what’s going to happen.”

Cyborgs in Generic Windows (one of four), 2015

LW: “Do you think it is more important for an artist to be in a big city, like New York, or to be somewhere where it is affordable and you can make a living and still make work? You seem to be in a great position to speak to this.”

SP: “My plan for after grad school is to make as much work as I can. I’m giving myself a five-year window, like non-settling down, just making things, and I will go anywhere I can that will allow me to do that. That’s not New York City. There’s this thing that happens in the city: it’s connected to the money, it’s the thing that makes its really horrible for people who need to live here, or who feel like they need to live here. It is what I was talking about at the beginning: about this relationship to power. I think that’s what New York is. We can talk about the relationship to culture, but when it comes down to it the reason why the cultural centers are here is because of the long history of being a port city but also people like the Coke brothers funding Lincoln Center. I really wish that when people made a decision to stay here that they are thinking about all of that stuff too. Everyone hates Time Square, but the reason why you have all the amazing museums and stuff is because of the capital here. At this point in New York’s history, there is no Time Square without MoMA. It’s all the same money mixing into one another.

That being said, I know there’s still something to being around gallerist, and blah blah blah…but that is a specific endgame, that’s a very specific artworld, and there are many types of art worlds. I don’t think that is something that I am interested in pursuing directly. So, I want to make the work. That’s what I want to do. I think you can go anywhere, and you can make the work, and you can find communities.”