Resident Spotlight: Carrie Fonder

Carrie Fonder is a sculptor, installation, and video artist whose work uses humor to play with issues of power. Fonder earned her MFA in sculpture at Cranbrook Academy of Art and her BFA in sculpture at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. She is a Fulbright Nehru Award recipient and is currently a member of Good Children Gallery in New Orleans, Louisiana. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally from Detroit to New Delhi. Fonder is an Associate Professor of Art at the University of West Florida.

https://www.carriefonder.com/

Interviewed by Cass Dickenson

C: Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself?

CF: My name is Carrie Fonder, and I'm an Associate Professor of Art at the University of West Florida. I’m a sculptor, video and installation person.

Jerry/Carrie is Up to the Task or How to Be an Art Critic, video still, video runtime: 4:44, 2020

C: So what kinds of ideas are you working with? What are you interested in?

CF: Largely, I'm interested in using humor as a strategy within art to investigate an array of topics, but art and power are things that I've come back to rather frequently. Formally, within my work, I've moved between two-dimensional and three-dimensional work, not just in terms of broad mediums like video and sculpture, but also within singular works,  I'll experiment with the relationships between 2D and 3D. So, for example, I might make an object that then reappears within a video, or then parts of the video that reappear within a two dimensional word that I then collage onto, and so on, and so forth.

C: So what is humor for you? Why humor? What does it do for you?

CF: Well, let me back up. When I was in my early 20s, I was told to go check out a Tim Hawkinson show. And it was so quirky and hilarious, and diverse. And it kind of worked against the seriousness of art school, which I was in at the time. I went to a lovely school, but at the time, it was fairly traditional. He had such an interesting practice that moved in so many different directions and felt like the humor, the experimentation, and–dare I say–joy seemed apparent within it. And that really calls me and through my own work. I mean, it took me years to come to a point where I started to think about humor in the context of my own work. It definitely did not happen at that moment. But within my own work, I started to think about humor as a tool to examine things in a way with some levity where I feel like it can become a lens through which we view things that are actually pretty serious. So humor allows me to look at things through a different lens, which makes them easier to view through a shift in perspective.

C: So what are some funny things to you right now? Politics? A good joke you heard recently? Is anything funny right now?

CF: Funny to me right now? I think I'm kind of forced to admit that I love things that aren’t funny. It's not that I find something funny, and then from there choose to make work about those things. It’s more that I find something terribly unfunny and choose to make work about it. A recent example within my work would be the art critic Jerry Saltz who wrote a book called How to Be an Artist, which I think is really ironic since he always talks about how he's a failed artist. And of course, he's an art critic. So I think it's very funny that he is writing this book. And so for me, that’s an opening to poke a little fun at that idea someone who positions themselves as an authority.

Little Laborers, Installation view, Good Children Gallery, 2020.

C: I feel like it’s a calculated rhetorical device.

CF: Calculated and Jerry are good words to put in the same sentence. Yeah, there’s definitely a schtick that he's very aware of. He's aware of the cards that he's playing for sure.

C: So it’s not Jerry Saltz, then? You’re poking fun at this authority he embodies?

CF: In a way, but then ultimately what I do is I dress up in drag as him. And it's not good drag.

He likes to talk about how writing is like getting naked in front of someone for the first time. So within my Jerry drag, you can hear that I'm typing on a computer, but you can see me just from the shoulders up. I'm not clothed other than a baseball cap that says PACE. And then when it cuts to a different view, I've gotten a still of a man's chest, off of the internet. And then I put my hands in front of that still image pretending to type through a really bad green screen. And the proportions are all off. I allow those kinds of wonky things to come into play with the work to point to that I'm approaching it with some levity.

C: So essentially, you're treating Jerry as a costume. Has he ever seen it? Has he ever acknowledged you dressing up as him?

CF: Well, I don't know if he’s seen that particular piece, but I know that I was in a show recently with a pair of panties I’d embroidered his face onto, where someone at the exhibition took a photograph of those. She sent them to him and his response to her was something like “bam, that'll stop anyone!”. And he wanted to see more of the work. So she forwarded that to me, he wanted to see more of the work and left his email. So she forwarded that to me so that I can then forward some of my work, which was very nice to not just send him random phone pictures. I sent him the work, but he never acknowledged that he had received it. Now, if his inbox was full at that moment, he never got around to it, if he found it offensive or just not worth commenting on, I’ll never know!

C: What a missed opportunity.

CF: I know, right? I had other people suggest that I should send him the panties. But frankly, there's so many labor hours that went into those pants.

Work in progress while in residence at Stove Works

C: So what work are you making during your residency at Stove Works? I don't see any Jerry Saltz in here.

CF: Right now there's no figures. I mean, I have a collage with tube socks here, which is a figure reference. The piece that I'm working on now is a geodesic dome structure. I’m still figuring out where that’s headed. I'm playing around with an Elvis song, “Summer kisses, Winter Tears”, which to me feels like the end of the world. And there will be a variety of things happening within it that are hopefully humorous, and will do the same things that my previous work has done without the cast of characters being quite so specific.

But then in a bigger way, my time at Stove Works has allowed me I've definitely been pushing ahead on that on the geodesic dome piece or what may become the geodesic dome piece. But I've also been really just affording myself an opportunity to play a bit and to experiment with more collage type work and photographing sculptures and then recontextualizing them in collages and doing some work with some flash and just playing with some different things that if I were at home, I would feel like I needed to, you know, do work in a, in a more linear way and focus on the next project and the next show where I'm allowed, like this month to kind of allow, I've allowed this month to be a time in which I can focus on the next show, but also a time in which I can play and experiment and that sort of thing.

C: You said you’re thinking about the end of the world. What’s causing the end of the world? Are you thinking about it as a narrative background for you or something really happening? Or is it the idea of The End of the World that you're just joking about?

CF: So, it's not actually the end of the world. I’m still making the work, so anything could happen at this point. But I'm really thinking about that song as a point of departure, because it's a song about love gone south. For me, I see a lot of people nostalgic about the status quo, at this point when things feel like they’re going south. So what potential  is there for change beyond that?  So the exhibition that the show will be in will have multiple rooms. So my hope is that within the first room would have the dome or whatever form that structure ends up taking, and then you will move beyond it. And in the back room. One of my influences is I have this bin, I started a worm bin during the pandemic, and then we feed them our compost.

C: Sounds like a weird sourdough project.

CF: Yeah, I dodged the sourdough for the worms. Maybe this is humorous or ridiculous, but I'm thinking about my worms and the cycle of decomposition and material cycles. I feel like some of that happens within my work, where one thing becomes another thing becomes another thing and… And the output becomes unintelligible as it goes through the cycle. So my worms are probably going to be making some cameo appearances, not physically, but in terms of video in the secondary room of the exhibition. So thinking through change. So rather than the end of the world being final, there's just an ending that then allows for change.

C: Is there anything we can look forward to in the coming months?

CF: Yeah, I have a show coming up in July at Good Children Gallery in New Orleans, so that’s where this work will find its momentum!

C: Great to hear. Thanks Carrie!

Resident Spotlight: Ryder Richards

Photo credit Joshua Simpson

Ryder Richards was born in 1977 and raised in Roswell, New Mexico. He currently lives and works in the Dallas area as an artist, writer, and occasional curator. He earned a BFA in Painting with a minor in Architecture from Texas Tech University and a MFA from Texas Christian University. He is the co-founder of the RJP Nomadic Gallery, The Art Foundation, and Culture Laboratory Collective. He is also the founder of EUTOPIA: Contemporary Art Review (2014-2020), wrote a series of essays titled “The Will to DIY,” and in 2020 launched “let’s THiNK about it” podcast. Ryder has participated in many national and international exhibitions and art residencies and continues to examine power structures and social/political interactions to consider bias.

Interviewed by Cass Dickenson

Cass: Why don't you introduce yourself?

Ryder: I grew up in New Mexico and have spent most of my life in Texas, and have been up until recently living in the Dallas area. I’ve taught college before but lately I have been working a corporate job, which has really changed my outlook on a lot of things regarding art and culture.

Graft, pine, baseballs and maple, 16x30x30, 2022

C: What are you interested in with your work?

R: Earlier, in my career, I was really interested in romance and violence and how those two become inseparable. And that has later led into things about concerns with power, concerns with institutional critique. So how architecture has embedded violence within it. So in that range, there's also the civilian rebuttal to both responses, which I'm quite interested in. Recently, I’ve started leaning into a Home Depot aesthetic–embracing the materials I can access, what I can easily buy. It’s a little bit DIY, though I’m still reliant on a system because I have to drive on the roads to get to that Home Depot. Through that there’s this strange sense of empowerment through spending money. What I can build on my own is a form of empowerment. So it's these kinds of small victories. But I think it sets up a paradigm that can allow people to experience something themself instead of being completely reliant on a system.

C: So you see yourself as a small winner.

R: The small wins, yeah. I'm a big fan of the small wins and these processes refer to the small wins. When you're looking at the big ideas of success and winning, you have to wonder how those broad goals get put in your mind. Like, why do you want the things that you want? So all of these things are shown to us, and they're easily commodified for us to consume. And so we tend to get competitive around these ideas and notions that are floating around. And yet, there's a whole other series of ideas and notions that are out there that we could be chasing, or pursuing that might actually have better odds of success. And a lot of this is because we sort of get trapped into where our attention goes and what is fed to us. So I'm really interested in sort of finding ways to break this cycle of how we attend to our own attention.

And that's where a lot of my work goes is trying to question these things and tease those boundaries. Those deformations that happen to individuals within a system.

Shield 6, found ball, wood, plexi, nylon, acrylic, pen and pencil, 72”x72”x8”, 2022

Shield 6 (detail)

C: You work with these drawings of sport objects, but it's really a reflection of us. There’s a very personal focus, and the bird’s eye view of society is put in the background of that.

R: It’s how an individual navigates within these systems and within these spaces. There's an idea called artificial negativity, where every form of resistance people can make is commodified by capitalism so that it can better control us in the future. I started realizing that all my efforts would be futile if I was in this cybernetic control system that's self-balancing. Well, then, if that’s the case, then the individual is all that's left as a malleable component. And if we're all programmed at some point, how do you deprogram yourself so that you can actually desire and value different things?

The art features all these sorts of beat-up objects that I've been drawing lately–these sports balls or found objects that I collected during the pandemic. I have these discarded sports objects that, usually, kids had thrown out into a creek bed or a drainage ditch. I’d bring them back home, and start trying to build works to sort of protect them and shield them and give them a different type of life.  It's a little bit romantic, but it also sort of deals with childhood in general, a throwing away of dreams.

C: I imagine a reliquary for these objects, you’re giving them the gravity of the fingernail of Christ.

R: Yeah, exactly. It’s like I’m saying “this is the pinky bone and you touch it”. There was an energy given to them at some point. And even after their obvious life is gone, you still have this object, and there’s the embedded energies and hopes and dreams that we put into it. Are they still there? In some sense, right? Like if you touch the bone of John the Baptist, it doesn't actually heal your wounds or your illness, but treating these objects as relics hides that an object becomes sacred once you create that space around it. But then doesn’t that sacredness bleed back into you? And can that be healing?

C: So this work is new, right? What kinds of artistic turns are you coming into right now?

R: This work started in January, so it’s very new. I started collecting the sports balls over the past year, but didn't know what to do with them. I'm still feeling my way through what I'm trying to do with it. I’m not trying to intellectually map out the process, but letting it come to me almost as if I’m sticking out an antenna or a conduit, looking for something else. Letting those movements come into me and actually heeding them and paying attention to them, rather than mapping out what would be successful according to sort of market forces or intellectual academic circles.

[left] Found Dream (soccer), Graphite and lamp black pigment on paper, 22x30”, 2023.   

[right] Found Dream (volleyball), Graphite and lamp black pigment on paper, 22x30” 2023.

C: How are you using this residency to take advantage of this new artistic trajectory you’re making for yourself?

R: This is my second time coming to Stove Works. The first time was during the pandemic and pulled me out of a very dark space that I was in during that time, from isolating and then being able to have community. This second residency stay is like a resurgence of that feeling. I'm in the midst of moving. I'm in the midst of figuring out a lot of things, and the time and space to create work and yet also be around a group of compassionate and empathetic individuals is this really insane gift. I’m able to come in and out of solitude repeatedly, which wasn’t something that I was usually able to have, at least during lockdowns. Coming to a space like this, and having the ability to practice a process, and yet also getting the social aspect is just sort of a rare and fabulous thing. It’s nourished me as an artist and individual.

C: Is there anything with you looking forward to that we can expect from you in the foreseeable future?

R: I'm going to be traveling a lot. So I think maybe I'm going to spend some time in Mexico–brush up on the old Spanish, you know, little things like that. I have a couple of shows coming up. One out in Roswell, New Mexico, we've got another one in Missouri State, and another one in Fort Worth, Texas. Thanks to this space, I’ve been able to plan work for those.

Resident Spotlight: Rainn Jackson, Residency Fellow

Rainn Jackson is an interdisciplinary artist and political organizer based in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Their work has been shown in various galleries and publications including Amos Eno gallery in Brooklyn, Gallery Sabine in Chicago, IL, the Contemporary Cress gallery in Chattanooga, the Apothecary gallery in Chattanooga, the Activist magazine, and Chattanooga Zine Fest. They are concerned with class and LGBTQ issues. Their political and art practices inform each other and merge into one integrated practice; they reference sexuality, gender identity, kink, protests, and theory within their creative projects. This can be most clearly seen in their zine work, which aims to educate in creative ways about issues surrounding sex work, trans identity, southern culture, and similar topics.

Rainn is Stove Works’ Resident Fellow for the first half of 2023.

Cass: Why don’t you tell me about yourself?
Rainn: I’m the resident fellow here at stoveworks, I live on-site to work with the residents. My practice mostly involves video and photography, but lately I’ve also been exploring collage. My work is centered around experiences as a queer person in the South, which can kind of be a hostile experience.

C: You mentioned getting into collage recently. Have you been having any new artistic turns as you’re coming into your fellowship?
R: For a few months, I’ve been feeling stuck with the work I’m doing. I’ve been maintaining a daily project where I record monthly pictures of my body changing since I started taking testosterone. I want to explore new projects while I’m here, since that’s a side project. I’ve been thinking about the hostility towards trans people–like the recent wave of anti-trans laws. That’s something I’m starting to focus on in my practice, because it feels like basically only trans people are talking about this.

C: How is the current hostility towards trans people affecting your practice?
R: I think my art’s gotten a little more depressing recently, and maybe angry as I respond to the sociopolitical climate around me. I have some photos around here where I’ve been cutting myself out of photos and photo manipulating the empty space I left. Or others where I harshly oversaturate my body versus the rest of my surroundings. Recently, I’ve felt both invisible and overly visible as a trans person, because a lot of people don’t know about the legislation being passed against us. It’s made me more vigilant of my surroundings, too.

I’ve been watching the films of Henry Hanson, a Chicago-based transmasc filmmaker. He makes work explicitly for transmasculine audiences, which has me feeling really inspired to make work. I found this archive of queer and trans masculine filmmakers called the Otherness Archive, which is where I found Hanson’s work. I’ve been meaning to dive more into it, because unfortunately it’s really hard to find queer movies that are actually good. 

C: Between your monthly self-portrait series, films and collaging, I’m picking up on archiving as a theme. Do you consider that an important part of your practice?
R: You could think of it like that. I tend to be more documentarian in my life and work, where I want to document queerness and keep queer life around me. I’ve been recording my friends’ lives since my last year of undergrad, so that’s been, what, four or five years?

C: You’ve been moving into collage, which is a more active–perhaps destructive–process than your photography. What does that do for you?
R: I’m still figuring out what collage is doing for me. I wanted to try something different when I got here, and I had a bunch of collage materials. I ended up liking what I was making.

I still plan on doing my self-portrait work every month. I also have a larger video project I’m starting where I want to get a bunch of friends together to film them asking questions directed at cis people, flipping awkward questions that they ask us back onto them. Things like, “are you on viagra?”. 

I used to live farther out of the city, which would make a large collaborative project like that impossible. Now that I have this residency right in the middle of everything, I’ll be able to get people for that video project. Other than that, I’m just enjoying collaborating with the people around me. I worked on some projects with one of the January residents, Abby Banks, which I’ll be showing up in Chicago later this year.

C: Do you have anything for people to expect from you?
R: I’ve been submitting a recent series of photos about social media censorship to shows, but nothing yet! Other than that, I’m excited to be here at Stove Works.

Resident Spotlight: Jodi Hays

Photo: Benjy Russell Photography

Why don’t you tell me about yourself?

I’m Jodi Hays. Large-scale collage-based paintings using reclaimed materials like cardboard, which I usually dye to expose those parallel rivulets you get from the cupboard corrugation. They’re not always large-scale. I’m based in Nashville and am so excited to be here because my studio at home is a garage. The ceilings in my garage are 8 feet tall and I have a lot of large projects coming up that I need to be able to see.

Jacob’s Ladder, 100x91 inches, dye, cardboard, tape, fabric and paper collage, 2022

What kind of work have you been getting done during your residency?

I’ve been getting a lot of large-scale work done–which you can see in this studio–as well as some smaller works. With this space, I can see 4 or 5 large-scale works in here at the same time. It’s amazing to work in a space that doesn’t have any history, compared to my garage. When I first applied [to Stove Works] I had a group show coming up at a Museum, but since I was accepted to this residency, it’s gotten pushed back, so the urgency of the work I’m making for that isn’t there anymore. It’s great because I can experiment more here.

A work-in-progress shot from Stove Works’ workshop space.

You mention this studio’s lack of history. What does that mean, and what is that doing for your work?

Practically and spatially speaking, my garage is my studio. It’s very private. When I'm driving my kids around the neighborhood and I’m collecting trash, my kids will see apartments being built and they’ll say, “Mom look, that house has a studio,” and I have to remind them that, no, that part of our house is actually a garage for the rest of the world [laughs]. But for me it’s a two-car garage that I share with the bikes and the lawn mower. Living in the city, it’s what I give up by having a private space in my home but it’s also about what I gain. I can clock in more hours because walking 20 feet from my house to my studio suits my lifestyle, but what I lose is the separation, the deep, deep 12 hour days where no one can find me. A three day block here is probably equal to like a month in my 20s. That's why I have so much work already here at this studio.

I can feel that development in the work around me.

Well yeah, there’s that. There’s the material labor and the invisible labor that goes into it. That’s kind of a nod to domestic labor; it can be dying, folding, organizing, cleaning.

A detail from Jodi’s studio

Is there anything else you’ve been able to do because you’re working here in Chattanooga?

I’ve had a good lineup of studio visits here, because I’m 2 hours from Nashville and about as far from Atlanta. And that was my aim: to take advantage of this luxurious amount of space. Also, the hands-off nature of this residency is brilliant. The way Charlotte and everyone have orchestrated time and space with this program has been great.

It has been a great opportunity to just get some deep work done with a clear head. I’ve got a pretty hefty showing schedule in 2023.

That’ll be all. Thanks, Jodi!

The following was written by Jodi after the completion of her residency with Stove Works.

I loved the short time I had with other residents, coffee and meals in between working in the studio were so nice!  I hosted a few studio visits with curators and art dealers. I was also able to give a talk at UTC. My home studio is a garage with low ceilings, so I was able to stretch out and work large without interruption, spilling out into the workshop areas. I cannot overestimate the impactful timing of this gift. THANK YOU.

Resident Spotlight: Jen Shin

Bio

Jen is a Korean American writer and mental health advocate based in Portland, Oregon, entering into her eleventh year in recovery from alcoholism and bulimia. Her writing focuses on her addiction, exploring the impacts of identity, race, and intergenerational trauma. Through her work, Jen hopes to reach communities of color to destigmatize the stigmatized, decolonize shame, and encourage healing. She is the recipient of HrStry’s 2022 Eunice Williams Nonfiction Prize and has received fellowships from Anaphora Arts and Fishtrap. In 2021, she published a zine through zines + things and her essays can be found, or are forthcoming, in Oregon Humanities, aaduna, and The Rumpus.   https://www.jen-shin.com/about

Jen was in Residence at Stove Works during October and November of 2022.
Interviewed by Cass Dickenson

Cass: Why don’t you tell me about yourself?

Jen: I am a writer, and the identities that I write to are being in recovery from addiction and being a woman of color. The memoir I’m working on during my residency is about my experience with addiction and understanding the roots of addiction. That’s really how I see the world, and those are the lenses I use in my work. Those are the things that have impacted me and led me to this journey.

What else? I live in Portland, Oregon, but was born in Chattanooga. I’m also a baker. I’ve been recently baking bread and selling it at farmer’s markets. The baking is sort of a healing process for me since part of my addiction journey has been having an eating disorder, and being able to make food for people and eat food with people has become healing. It’s sort of a full-circle moment for me. I also lead camping trips for people of color and queer people. To see our own representation in nature is really powerful for me.

C: So, how’s that going during your residency in Chattanooga? Are you getting in touch with Chattanooga’s landscape outside of your studio? How are you spending your time outside of your studio?

J: It’s been great to have my residency during the fall because I always hated the summers. You know, when I was growing up I didn’t like being outside. When I was younger I loved it, but as I got older, there was no interest. It was too humid to do anything in the summer. After moving to the PNW, though, I’ve found my own relationship with nature in such a new way. My own spiritual practice involves being really grateful to the earth. In terms of my time with Stove Works, I’ve been walking a lot: to the sculpture fields, for instance. Part of my writing practice is–y’know–30% of it is writing, and the rest is thinking. I can sit and think but being out in nature and observing and feeling present is something that helps me process things. I’ve gone to the sculpture fields, I’ve gone to the river walk, and I saw like 5 great blue herons. 

When I was younger, I’d laugh at tree huggers, but now, 20 years later, I’m literally doing that [laughs]. Being outside has been really grounding, and obviously, fall in Chattanooga is the best time to be here. It’s been helpful to have nice weather and be able to take a walk just to clear my head.

C: You’re writing about very personal history in relation to nature. I take it it helps to be grounded in the place you grew up?

J: Yeah! For the past year, I’ve been struggling to write the story of high school. And I’ve been chewing on this for a long time. It’s only a facet of the broader story, but I’ve been needing to crystallize that specific moment of time. It wasn’t until I got here, started walking in the places I used to hang out with friends, or park my car or go to the Aquarium – All of these places have so much memory for me. It’s what I really needed to put myself back into perspective: what were the good things? What were the bad things? 

I was really nervous coming back to Chattanooga because of racism because of being Asian in a predominantly white area. It was easy to say, “oh y’know the racist south” and all that, but I can view it more holistically now, with the right vocabulary and perspective. I’ve been in recovery for a decade so being able to have the time and space to process this has let me write new material that I needed to get out. That can be kind of difficult, and I don’t like to force things, so being able to process and listen to myself back here has been very, very helpful to bring myself back.

C: I can tell from your studio knowing these photos or these notes happened where we are now feels really familiar.

J: Yea, totally.

C: Anything else you want to tell us? Things we can look forward to after your residency?

J: So, like, 75% of the memoir is just setting up the experiences that led to my addiction, and 25% of it is devoted to having the addiction. I feel like a lot of literature is about the neverending suffering of addiction, so that’s not something I feel like I need to do. I want to explore the experiences that shape addiction. I kind of wanted to be seen, but I also wanted to be invisible. I wanted to be Asian, but I also wanted to be accepted by White people.

C: So, like sidestepping putting yourself on a pedestal?

J: Yea, my addiction sort of gave me that experience. Getting, you know, blackout drunk was like a form of disappearing. Those are the two poles that I’m speaking to. What are the ways that I was trying to assimilate, and what are the ways I was trying to cope? I just finished my first draft, so I’m going through high school right now. I’m using my second month to start cleaning up those parts of the book that need cleaning up.

Resident Spotlight: Muse Dodd

Muse Dodd (They/Them) is an  Anti-disciplinary Artist, Curator, and DJ from Severn, MD based between New York and New Orleans. Their work centers on the questions, How do you remember and what do you choose to forget? Through the act of remembering, Muse uses their body to map the lived experience of Africans in America. Muse channels trauma to connect with, process, and alchemize pain; both personal and collective through movement, ritual, and collective dreaming.

Cass: Why don’t you tell me a little about yourself?

Muse: My name is Muse Dodd. I’m an anti-disciplinary artist. I work in the mediums of film, photography, and performance. I also DJ and curate. Outside of that, I enjoy spending time with my family, nature and history.

Cass: What have you been using this studio space for?

Muse: This is month three for me, I’ve been using this time to expand how I use space in my practice. This is the first time in my practice I’ve worked outside of my bedroom. I’m seeing how it feels to have things on my wall for weeks at a time and see how it speaks to me. I’ve been working on a project with my ancestors thinking about how I fit into this large context of my family. A lot of the time I think about belonging and legacy. Contextualizing myself, my family history, and my family in terms of nature, situating ourselves in that space, and grounding ourselves in those roots, literally and figuratively. That’s been the guiding principle for me.

Muse’s studio in Stove Works.

Cass: I’d love to hear how you’re exploring personal history in terms of nature. Both in the studio and around the city. Is space helping you process these feelings?

Muse: I don’t have any family around here. I enjoy being situated right by the mountains. I grew up in the suburbs, and I wasn’t that close to nature, but I’ve been living in the South for the past two years. That’s shifted my context, and I’ve been thinking a lot about history, and how we reconcile with history. Thinking about the trail of tears, slavery, and how that influences architecture and monuments.

Cass: So many monuments.

Muse: What do you do with those, right? A lot of people like to glaze over those things. Even if you don’t acknowledge it, it influences what you do. Being here, building some stability in my practice, I’ve enjoyed getting integrated into Chattanooga and its art scene, but then I’ll also be leaving here very soon [laughs]

Cass: Yes, that's unavoidable. How has your work progressed over the past two months, and how are you continuing that during your final month?

Muse: It’s caused huge shifts. There’s so much work that’s been happening internally, and it doesn’t show a lot. I feel like I have these pulls between wanting to make work with all this space, but also being pulled to be more internal. I’ve been returning to writing during this time. There’s also the social aspect, I’ve been pulled to be with the other artists as well. I want to use this month to take the pressure off and ease more into my practice.

Resident Spotlight: Catherine Rush

Catherine in her studio at Stove Works. Photo: Wolf Francis @wolfrancis

Catherine Rush is a performer and poet at heart. She hails from Atlanta and considers herself a non-career artist. Her art can be considered multidisciplinary as it involves many themes explored through many mediums. Catherine often explores the world through performance art often incorporating video, costume and poetry into her communicative creations. She has written art reviews and interviews for publications such as Burnaway, Arts ATL, Jump Philly and many others. If you were to meet her you would likely see that she has a unique position as someone who is free to explore the strange, fun, slow, and enticing moments in life all in her own time and also use her skills to create platforms for other artists. It was a pleasure as always to sit down and talk with such a thoughtful artist.

Saria: How would you describe your artistic style?

Catherine: I do poetry and performance art and I tend to do it in an intuitive way. It also

responds to the audience. It's interactive and aims to open people up for thinking about things in a different way. So I guess the way that the sequences of images or words are organized, it's disorienting but it's reorienting too. When you're changing and things are changing. It's disorienting, it's uncomfortable. But I think there's a future logic to my work.

Saria: What attracted you to performance art?

Catherine: I started reading poems and I found that I would get really nervous reading poetry. I wanted ways to help people engage with it and be more open to listening to poetry. Poetry, by itself, can be really boring; of course I love watching people read their poems, especially for the first time, especially in a shared space, where you feel the electricity between people and the tension and excitement and nervousness, I love that. I started finding connections with my actual body beyond just kind of clowning or bringing in task based movements and things. When I started working on performances with my friend, Aida Curtis, she brought me in to help with a tribute she did to the film Wicker Man where she choreographed these song and dance numbers in a way that was very accessible for even someone like me, who didn't have a dance background. It was so painful and uncomfortable but I ended up helping her with a few more group performance pieces. Then she and I started making pieces together as The Clutching Dream. That was more performance art than poetry although she's also a poet. Now we've come full circle and are making a poem together.

Dehiscence, 2020. Installed in Hot Doughnuts Now at Stove Works.

Saria: Where do your ideas come from?

Catherine:  Ideas come from all their places. While you're walking, hearing people talk about seeing something funny or out of place, being hit by memories and how they sort of dovetail or don't connect with what's happening right now. I think a lot of my poetry comes from looking at uncomfortable things, be it finding ways to express or understand trauma, personal trauma, collected trauma, or just witnessing being close to someone having trauma. I think that is where a lot of my earlier poetry was coming from. And now, there is a sort of folding into grief and being in a country where there's not like, any scaffolding for grief collectively. That's been something my work has focused on for a long time. But I do it, I guess, in a really playful way to try and get people into a comfortable place where they can open up. My ideas come from everything, from life, I’m a big believer in things like ordinary poetry and ordinary art.

Saria: What is the difference between doing performance art and just being some weird girl at a party?

Catherine: Right, like that sort of ties into questions of identity and intention. If you are aware as a person at the party, and in your head, you're doing performance art, then you're doing performance art. I've known people who have had really sort of rampant unchecked mental health issues that also believed that they were just doing weird performances and nobody understood. Who's to say they're wrong, they're not wrong, both things are true. For me when I do a performance, it's a different space than when I'm just walking on the street and dancing by myself. I have some characters that sometimes appear, but a lot of the time, even if these characters appear, it's sort of a mishmash, weaving, I guess, between different identities and personalities.

Dehiscence, 2020, performance.

Saria: How do you feel when you participate in a performance? What's it like to subject yourself to a certain role for an extended period of time?

Catherine: Usually it's very calming. I kind of got into a different state. I feel like it's almost meditative. Obviously, there are times when something goes wrong, or there's something else outside of it in my life that's keeping me from wanting to access that space. But once I am committed, the performance has started. I am in a really restful space, even if I'm doing something more endurance-oriented. It's something that is less comfortable. It feels like I'm sort of sinking into a more meditative space. I also love the idea that how someone is viewing something changes it, and so I feel like people viewing my performances, or hearing my poetry, changes it. When you have an audience, it undoes illusions of control, but you also are acting on them; you're on the level where there's nothing being taken. I think you get a lot out of just seeing something surprising and different and absurd and funny and sweet.

Saria: How does your personal identity Inform your work?

Catherine: I think that for a long time, I didn't realize it till I was in therapy, but I was very afraid of being thought of as crazy. I think that's something that I looked at a lot in my writing and sort of something I wrestled with a lot in my early writing was what is it to be crazy, especially like the crazy woman, right? I've found a lot of meaning in my work personally, which has come back directly to my sense of self. I feel like performance and poetry are both ways to sort of find your center again and to affirm your own reality. In James Baldwin's Uses of The Blues, he talks about these three different musical impulses and all of them are sort of ways to deal with suffering and how so much art-making, in general, is our way of dealing with suffering. Sort of what he strips down to is that one of the more, isolated ways of meaning-making is self-affirmation as a route to joy. So by transmuting your experience into something lyrical, it gives you self-authority. You can apply that to any art form, or you can apply that to other things that we don't traditionally identify as art. What makes it really powerful in the realm of language is that you are actively changing language. Another Baldwin quote says that “Every writer is born into a language that you have to help change,” and I think when you bring in the physical element, I think it's even more alchemical.

Dehiscence, detail.

Saria: What do you hope to accomplish in your art?

Catherine: On one level, it's always about survival. It's always about yourself. I think that sort of ripples out to other people. Because writing even though you do it in isolation, usually, almost exclusively, it's deeply social. You are communicating, even if you're writing the most coded, secretive, redacted kind of thing. You're still communicating. Performance also is deeply social, even when I'm not interacting with people, and even when I'm completely ignoring everybody around me. In that sense, it's also about fluency, harmony, and connection. All of those things are healing. And for me, especially to someone who's not a career artist, it's all bound together. Like there's definitely like a lifeblood of community and survival running through all of it; even the things I do in isolation. The more people come together especially through art expression, the more we find that we're talking about and wanting similar things. Writing in terms of transformation is just changing the language. Changing the story, changing the myth, changing the metaphor.

Saria: What have you been reading/thinking about recently?

Catherine: Well, I couldn't sleep. So I read in one night the gifts of imperfection Brené Brown. She's amazing, she does research in shame and vulnerability and fear studies. It’s really good. I've been thinking about it and I'm really interested in PTSD. I think, coming from army families, I definitely have complex PTSD. I feel like almost everyone I know has some variety of PTSD. I feel like we are such a traumatized world. I think I'm really interested in how we can heal through community, even on an individual to individual basis.

Saria: What was the best part about your Stove Works residency experience?

Catherine: Definitely meeting the other residents, and in Covid times, learning to have a bunch of roommates again was a really special experience and to be brought together with so many dynamic inspiring personalities has been really nourishing and encouraging and I've learned so much from everyone I've met here, including you. Seeing people's practices and how people work has been super cool. I've lived with many artists always but never in this more professional setting.

Resident Spotlight: Allison Spence

Allison

Allison Spence is a multi-disciplinary artist seeking to subvert our expectations of form and representation  She is currently a professor at Florida State University. In her art, she deals within a level of abstraction and figuration and creates a fragmentary existence based on the themes of bodies and how they take up space. She embraces the potential new meanings that abstraction allows for. She uses the masterful blending of boundaries to create work that is not easily categorized or defined. Recently, she's been making work that relates to the pandemic and her experiences.

Saria: How would you describe your artistic style?

Allison: My style, I don't think anyone has ever asked me about my style before. I usually tell people that I'm interested in doing non-paintings. I came from a background where I was trained to be a narrative figurative painter, which I completely abandoned after graduate school, and started to abandon that kind of body of painting altogether. It wasn't until the pandemic that I started to go back to more representational stuff. Actually, I don't know what it was, maybe it was the kind of sitting with myself too long and working on a small scale and touching things that made me sort of want to represent things a little bit more, at least this time. I generally like things that are beautiful but in a fundamentally upsetting or uncomfortable way. So, I do a lot of stuff about body horror, and I'm really interested in these indeterminate, determinant bodies that can kind of exist outside of our desire to categorize and label.

Saria: What do you think of abstraction as a form of expression, why do you use it?

Allison: There is a term that’s become a kind of like a slogan for me, particularly when I teach, pinning the butterfly. The moment that you name something and you decide what it knows, it's comfortable, and you can move on, and you know it, but now it's effectively dead. And it's a bit of a kind of violence in a way as well. So I find abstraction to be an easier way to create a space of possibility, of meanings, definitions, and communication. I like things that are a little nuanced, or a little bit vague, fuzzy around the edges. I don't like defined boundaries, because it feels like a trap to me, which is why I abandoned figure painting, when I was in grad school, I started to find myself really constricted by it. Especially coming out as a painter, all of that history, all of that kind of heavyweight of representation, and all of the definitions and kind of anatomy, their end just became too limiting. And that's usually why I go with abstraction; it allows a lot more possibility of meaning.

Saria: What are you most inspired by?

Allison: I watched a lot of films. It's one of my main sources of research. I do a lot of work that deals with like I've mentioned before, body horror, where the body is the kind of the main antagonist basically, sort of what your body can do or will do to you. When people ask me about artists, I usually don't say painters, and I sometimes don't even say artists in general, but I tend to drift towards biological science and medicine, experimentation and also natural bodies, organic bodies in nature. It relates to a series of work that I did about transplants if you graft an organ, you know, or some sort of part to a human being, the body is going to immediately try to reject it because it's foreign. Folks take medication, to stop it from being rejected, their entire lives, but plants you can graft together no problem; plants are a lot more accepting of new states of being. I'm inspired by things that give me moments that are outside of definable things, things that don't have an easy explanation. Strangely enough, the pandemic is super fascinating to me, even as it's incredibly distressing because suddenly everyone is super hyper-aware of their bodies in space in a manner that I think a lot of folks never really think about. In the kind of extension of their bodies. Like, breath is somehow connected to us and a weapon of some kind of virus; that I find fascinating, even if it is terrifying.

Saria: What is your process of actualization like?

Allison: I actually just finished with a two-year block, but usually what happens is I come across an idea or an instance of something that has happened; it might be a film, it might be a series of images or a book, or some sort of strange fact that I've read, or somebody told me. I'm really big on fun facts, something really odd, and I will get fixated on it. And then I will kind of think about how best to explore that. What would best communicate the things that fascinate me about that? So I sort of fly from thing to thing. Right now it's embroidery, before it was digital prints, there's a video that I've been trying to work on for a while. So it just has to do with the kind of underlying idea, but I'm generally very consistent with the things that fascinate me. Most of the time it’s kind of a waiting game, which isn't the most productive. For instance in my grad work A            MASS, it's sort of like my origin story. I was researching something completely different. At the time I was really fascinated with Emma's anomic keys, which is a theme and in Greek art whereas the Amazons are fighting the Greeks. So I was trying to make one at the time and it was not working. I kept hearing about Wonder Woman, I didn't want to, I didn't want to paint Wonder Woman. And I was getting really frustrated, but at the time I was researching, like wrestling poses because it's a European Western wrestling style. So I was watching a whole bunch of wrestling videos And I somehow found a bunch of Japanese women's wrestling, which was really cool. So because they were so badly rendered I just started to pause them just to get images of possible poses. I kept on pausing between and the camera didn't translate it in the way that our eyes are translated. It just sort of translated it through the mediation into these blocks, and pixels. And then all of a sudden, I realized, I started to get really attracted to these. It was like crumpled-up cars or bubblegum.  I started painting those because they excited me. From there, I just kind of never went back.

Saria: Did these ideas grow on you or have they always been on your mind?

Allison: I think I was. I've always been conscious of being in space, kind of filtering things through my own body in space. Probably that's, I think that's more of a personal quirk. I can't fully pinpoint where the fascination came from. Other than just simply being fascinated by things outside of our direct knowledge of things. I think I just generally have been suspicious of systems. 

Saria: How does your personal identity factor into your work?

Allison: I'm conscious of being a body in space and the fact of being a woman that is a body and space. I kind of grew up around a certain amount of distinct categorical systems that I didn't feel comfortable in. When I was little, I was in a fantasy, and I was into science fiction. I think it was partially a form of escapism, but then those kinds of ideas of being outside of this sort of structure always excited me, so it led from there. My mother was a librarian so, I grew up with books everywhere and I was a fairly solitary person. I always had a lot of things in my head. And I could just process on my own, and then kind of externalized.

Saria: Have you seen a big change in your art?

Allison: I'm very consistent with a lot of the stuff that I do, I haven't felt like I exhausted my interests but I have less of an attachment to the methods that I use. I've got almost a little bit of an antagonistic relationship to material. I mean, I have that whole series of paintings that are literally just kind of crumbles and I believe when I was making those, I just had them on the floor and I would like to step on them. So, material is the thing that always changes. It's never my theme, that's constant.

Saria: What was the greatest part of your residency at Stove works

Allison: It was good to have a space that was so focused on art-making. Coming back from Stove Works has been such an interesting experience because I'm still teaching a contemporary foundations class. During that, your practice kind of goes into sort of talking and thinking about the systems, all these interlocking systems that power and define these other systems of meaning. Meanwhile, I still have a constant practice in the background. Stove Works provided us space, a kind of concentrated space of art-making and talking about the work with the community, however, distanced that was, it was useful and kind of Eutopic for a while, for my practice. And I'm sad now. It was like the real world and all of my responsibilities had just been waiting. I hadn't been putting them off, they were just waiting to dump on me. It was this really cosmic unfairness that came after leaving Stove Works.

Saria: What are you working on now?

Allison: I'm here in Florida back to teaching. I'm teaching and I'm continuing the projects that I started and worked on at Stove Works.

Resident Spotlight: Laura McAdams

Laura in front of Stove Works. Photo: Saria Smith

Laura McAdams is an artist from Kingsport Tennessee who lives and works in New York City. Her work describes our built environment, a cultural landscape that she sees as the real mirror of being alive. Through sculpture, installation, and writing she attempts to unbuild, rebuild, and reinvent these structures in physical and conceptual forms that place the human at the center, either the self or collective. She allows the idea or material to lead the work to its final form. She is also pursuing other interests in social work and community organizing in New York. She is currently collaborating with Peyton, a fellow resident, on an upcoming project. They have installed a piece in the Hot Doughnuts show, the resident showcase at Stove Works.

Saria: Why do you create art, what is your art a response to?

Laura: For me, the seed of an idea can turn into anything, for instance like my bread essay, it's seeing a metaphor as it applies to my life. I'm really attracted to materialist metaphors that are metonymies for the body, the self, the collective. For me, it's the experience of making the thing and the ideas behind it. While form is important aesthetic qualities don’t drive the work.    

Saria: What have you been thinking about lately or reading or looking at?

Laura: I kind of stopped looking at art about a year ago. I've been working in the art world for a while and it's been challenging to be inside of that system and I felt a need to return to the ritual of daily life. A lot of my past work comes from modes of production that I was around.  I was always working with those processes and people so it's more like construction heavy, 3D modeling, 3D printing, and things like that. Lately, I've been really drawn to craft traditions and making in a more meditative way to reconnect with the work. This is also tied to the things I'm reading. I've been reading Silvia Federici and breaking away from art theory and thinking more of political ideas. That's been really satisfying for me creatively. Also, Ursula Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of  Fiction has been a touchstone for me lately.

Saria: What have you been working on recently?

Laura:  I'm actually here collaborating with another resident Peyton, her studio is right next door to mine. We have something installed for the Hot Doughnuts show. It's been really fun to work together and very encouraging. There have always been overlaps in our work but it feels like it's turning into something real. Our collaboration is still very early on, there's a lot to figure out but it feels great and I'm really excited for the future of it.

Saria: What attracts you to art that focuses on installation?

Laura: I often describe my work as an example of a cultural landscape or what it's like to be a body and have an experience inside of a place. I think an altered physical space sometimes feels like the most palpable way to experience that, it's tangible. I don't really like rules in terms of what kind of art I like to make, sometimes it's a video, sometimes I like to let the idea drive the product. There's a very healthy incubation period before it turns into a thing. Often it becomes an installation because it's the most open-ended form.

Saria: Do you think art school was beneficial to you?

Laura: In short, yes. It has its negatives, but it was a great experience. I’m really lucky to still have mentors from that experience. It's trite but it’s true that you have to learn some rules to break them. I feel like I've learned so many rules at this point that all I want to do is unlearn. That’s what my work feels like it is now,  this unlearning back to very foundational ways of making. Sometimes when you're given examples in the history of other artists, you see kinships in ideas, lineages of your craft. It can be exciting, someone giving form to something you've felt for a long time. And it can be really informative to feel the legacy of an artist before you. I loved my undergraduate education, It was worth it for me. I think art is such a personal expression and it's not right for everyone. I think art schools are a flawed institution but they also do give people community support, and access to knowledge at the same time.

“Untitled” by Laura McAdams and Peyton. Installed during Hot Doughnuts Now at Stove Works.

Saria: Can you talk about the inspiration behind your Bread essay?

Laura: I was particularly frustrated at that time of my life with both personal and art worlds. I felt a lack of humanity in that moment. I needed to connect with something that expressed collectivity. A real foundational part of human experience, to be nourished, figuratively and literally. It was written in a cultural context more than an art context. One reason I used that as a form was that it was not explicitly art, it was something a little different. I had been frustrated with trying to make sculptures. The inspiration was also all the things I was doing. I was working at a food pantry volunteering, and participating in mutual aid. Cooking a lot, like a lot. It was written at the height of Covid so no one could go anywhere. Something I've always loved is cooking and sharing food with friends and family. The pandemic really solidified some of my feelings around my neo-liberal life. I found this revolution in words and actions. For me, sometimes the art is in charge of the form. That was definitely the case for this piece, it just happened to me. 

Saria: Your work has a lot to do with the human body, what inspired that influence beyond just the fact that you have a body?

Laura: I’ve thought a lot about the location or site of knowledge. Where does that come from? We all have pedagogies that teach us ways to know. But for me, knowledge also comes from experience. It is embodied or felt rather than taught and internalized. That’s a central part of my work. That’s why the body is always present, it is the site of embodied knowledge. It is a metonymy. A part becomes whole. A singular expression of a metaphor that lives inside of you.

Saria: You're also a writer, Is writing an integral part of your process with the physical pieces?

Laura:  For me, writing isn't really a linear process to develop ideas, but it is another creative mode. It's very different from sculpture because of the way sculpture unfolds in front of you. There's material research, you have to touch it.  Sculpture just is and writing translates that experience. It might be like a mode of processing but it's not a way I really work through ideas, more as another means of expression. It can be freeing because it is so immediate, You can always pull out your phone, or pen and paper and get things out.

Saria: What is the relationship between images and audio in your work? What do you want that to do for the viewer?

Laura: Writing, installation, and sculpture are my primary modes of working and I wanted to try and figure out how to combine these two things. There are some pieces not on my website, because they're older, where I've made videos that attempt this, but it doesn’t work as well for me because I prefer to work on a physical plane. I feel most at home in sculpture as a form, but writing felt like a legend for some of the pieces. I want to join them and create a unique experience with the work. The works you're talking about are together as a four-part installation, married with a four-part essay. I'm not sure how well that really worked because the nature of an installation is that it is more amorphous. In writing formats, the writer has more power over what the viewer experiences first. Which anecdote or essay comes first. In sculpture, the viewer has more freedom when you look at each thing. I'm trying to explore playing with that format.

Saria: How do you relate to your art personally?

Laura: It's always personal, it's always expressive. It's just a matter of how many lenses I put between the viewers and my feelings or how much ambiguity I layer into the work. It happens sometimes where I don't know how I feel and I need to express that ambiguity. Of that in-between feeling, that's something i feel will never go away, there's always conflict. The bread essay too. There's conflict. My strategy of survival and my family’s, collective survival, they don't all go together, we're all just trying.

A Spill, A Line, A Drift. water, aluminum, paint, foam, 2016. In collaboration with Sam Morgan

Saria: Has there ever been a moment where you wanted to drastically change your medium?

Laura: Yeah all the time, I crave novelty in the work and when it starts to feel formulaic I need a new form. I don't stick to the media. I flirt with all of them. The one thing that I don't sit with often or don't use anymore is drawing but that's just because 3d modeling took over that in my practice so it's not gone just digital. I'm always looking for the next format for the next idea I have.

Saria: What does community mean to you?

Laura:  I've kind of struggled with that this year as well because Covid has been really isolating and we are all just trying to be okay. I'm really involved in Mutual Aid and I've decided to pursue social work as a new career and to be engaged with communities of all different backgrounds because I feel like that doesn't happen in art, it just isn't real. I want to live my People are egalitarian in their viewpoints but they don't really approach them in a practical sense, that's something I'm trying to do now. I want to live my values every day. That's a shift for me and part of that is because my art is very personal, it's not community-oriented. Community is your friends, locality, family, chosen or natal. People build communities of resiliency at all different scales.

Saria: What has it been like for you here in this community at Stove Works?

Laura: I think it's a challenging time but I've appreciated getting to know the other artists here. I kind of removed myself from the art world for the last year for self-preservation reasons and it's been good to meet other artists who have the same values. We're in a setting where no one's trying to win, we are just here to get to know other people and share our work    

Saria: How has this time as a resident at Stove Works grown you?

Laura: I really needed to pay attention to my practice and allow it to grow in new ways and I think having space and time away from my life could help me find it again in a way that is productive. Collaborating with Peyton has been affirming because I've made lots of radical life changes in the last year and it's challenging to be creative in a  global crisis. Working with her has been great because every time I have an idea I have someone to bounce it off of, we can workshop. A word that keeps coming up is resonance. When you can resonate with someone you know it’s a real experience.

Saria: What are you doing after you leave Stove Works?

Laura: I'm going to move back to New York City and I'm going to go to grad school for social work. I also haven't been organizing when I've been here because I don't live in Chattanooga. To do community work you have to be there a long time so I will get back into that. I've been a little involved but at a distance. I'm looking forward to that. I also think that Peyton and I will formulate some kind of proposal for a future project.

To see more of Laura’s work:

https://lauramcadams.net/

Resident Spotlight: Terry Thacker

Terry in his Studio at Stove Works. Photo by Saria Smith.

Terry Thacker is an artist born and raised in Nashville,Tennessee. He received his BFA from Austin Peay and his MFA from UT Knoxville. He has taught Painting, drawing and seminar classes for forty years, retiring two years ago to spend more time in the studio. He came to this residency to enjoy the exchange and conversation that you miss being an artist away from academic settings. It was great to sit down with Terry and hear more about art from his perspective.

Saria: Why do you make art?

Terry: My earliest memory is of drawing. For children it becomes a pre-verbal language. It becomes a marking of your world and a language that names you and your relationships in the world. At first it's a personal language and then it begins to mature as a social language. It becomes increasingly subtle, challenging and rigorous as it attaches itself to other points of view and languages. Children often leave drawing finding other interactions and languages that are more sustaining for them. Sustaining languages begin to find their viability and vitality as they effect historical, social and political conditions. The word art means to make with intention, the word aesthetic is the opposite of anesthetic. So, to get back to your question, I make art to build a self that desires liveliness in sustainable communities. 

 Saria: What is it that intrigues you about collage?

Terry: It's a way to use imagery, you move through the world, things trigger your thoughts or your imagination including mechanically reproduced images. So I have file folders full of things like spatial constructions, color relationships, or trigger images. Sometimes the images are interesting formally at other times they can hint at metaphoric content. Occasionally I will simply paint the found image, at other times it is easier to collage or print the image. There’s one nine foot painting I’m currently working on where I am superimposing graffitied numbers on a collage made from two vintage Bible illustrations. With collage you are fragmenting and stacking images montage-like which, for me, alludes to cinematography, television, and computer screens. Additionally, I often doodle and collage the doodle directly onto the painting. Sometimes the drawing may be a quick five-minute blind contour drawing that I'll enlarge and attach, or screen print onto a painting. So there are all kinds of ways of suggesting the interaction, translation, and hybridizations of images.

Saria: What do you think about the idea that everything is a collage, for instance, personalities being a collage of influences throughout our lives?

Terry: I think you're exactly right. Every person is a set of biological and physiological conditions; genetic things, but then there are environmental conditions that determine identity (nature/nurture). The fact that you were born in the United States in the twenty-first century determines a lot of who you are: race, gender, sex, economic status all determine identity. Basically, you're layering and editing things to build a self. One of my favorite essays is by Walter Benjamin, titled, Unpacking My Library, where he's writing about building a self. He writes, “I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order.” We have the possibility of collaging and editing incomplete selves and communities. I can arrange them in multiple ways, add new texts, take away other texts and so on. Benjamin’s essay suggest the broader possibility of the reanimation of categories and systems that have become calcified. Benjamin is proposing the possibility of building more functional societal, political, and economic systems . All systems are cobbling together fragments of previous ideas and previous systems to come up with better ones. At the heart of what I'm doing is attempting to make sure that no single thing or structure presents itself as a singular, codified system.

Saria: Dealing with abstraction, what are your thoughts or attractions to abstracting objects in work?

Terry: The word abstract simply means to draw away from. There are all kinds of reasons to pull away from something. For example, you’re looking at a tree and you abstract it because you're trying to emphasize certain conditions of it. I started off as a figurative painter which was an important learning process for me. Trying to respond to and mimic a physical object was and is a powerful discipline, it teaches you how to slowly and specifically listen to the world. The idea of abstraction is that you're starting to move the objective world into language, you begin to admit that what you are doing is not purely objective. Our names for things are incomplete and sometimes misguided. To judge the painting of the tree is to judge the artist’s translation of the tree not the tree itself. The “truthfulness” of the painting lives in its formal, metaphoric, metonymic, and historical constructions - its abstractions. All kinds of figurative devices or tropes are being used, stacked and erased. I cobble these materials and figurative devices together to form loose, hybrid, narrative structures in an attempt to privilege allegorical readings over formal readings. Allegory means to speak other, that the materials and forms are not ends in themselves, but are used to speak outside themselves. 

I grew up in a fundamentalist church with stories like Adam and Eve in Eden, for instance. You could take the story literally as an objective historical event, or you can think of it allegorically as it represents other things. Abstraction is not trying to trick you into believing it's of nature. It's trying to speak other; it's trying to point metaphorically to essential conditions that run beside or transcend the limitations of the incomplete names we call facts. Allegory has the advantage of translating multiple histories - we may not have TRUTH, but maybe together we can build useful “truths” (truth collages).

A Theory Cloud, a 13-part series

Saria: You mentioned in your webinar that you plan to move your abstractions toward more narrative and figurative ideas, how do you plan to do that?

Terry:  Modernist abstraction arrived at its end game with Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and maybe Robert Ryman. The endgame was to reduce art to its singular, essential nature (i.e., its distinct objectivity). So to return figuration or the possibility of allegory to painting was to restore a condition that had been severely critiqued in Modernist discussions. Surrealism and Dada did preserve some of the conditions of allegory but with some suspicion in that those modes lacked the scientific objectivity that Greenberg insisted on. The idea of contaminating the reductionism and high purity of Modernism was something I am hoping to do. Painting is allowed to display doubt, to equivocate, to hybridize.

Saria: You often work from photography to create your ideas, what is that process like for you?

Terry: My father passed down a camera to me when I was probably 11 or 12 so I've shot a lot of films. I also keep a sketchbook but some things you just can't sketch so I record things with a camera. After a few years, I realized I was limiting my experiences by habitually looking through my camera’s lens and framing. But photography remains a powerful medium especially with the speed and informality of digital imaging. I shoot and download hundreds of pictures and then edit and organize the few that seem useful at any given time. Going through my files I’ll find five or six images that hold my attention either visually, or because they evoke narrative or psychological possibilities. Within painting, photographs can function as an intruding voice suggesting the necessity of multiple voices. Photography humbles painting’s autonomy and its historical privilege setting up debased theatrical and historical tensions. The theatrical and allegorical elements suggest a reciprocity between multiple times, hierarchies, and processes. I’m usually doing something to the photograph like collaging or hybridizing. I’m “unpacking my library, yes I am.”

Saria: You have a teaching background. How does that inform your work now?

Terry: I initially had no idea that I would teach, but after my first few classes I was hooked. I loved the humbling interactions. After a few years of teaching, I realized, good teachers probably listen more than teach. They're listening to what students are thinking, looking at, and listening to. The marks they make or the odd ways they put things together is exciting. The things that excite them begin to excite and motivate me as well as expose my own limitations and narrow views. After several years you find yourself working collaboratively with your students and colleagues. In my last few years of teaching, there would be five or six of us that would get together in each other’s studios where teaching dissolves into collegial relationships. I do believe teachers have a necessary role in the maturation of students. Teachers can be experienced, proactive builders of art communities. They can build a sound grammatical base within a useful, logical curriculum. They can help navigate the historical and theoretical arenas necessary for art practices today. Teachers in collaboration with institutions can help expand community resources, spaces, processes, and tools. However, the “art” part has to be professed and cultivated and not prescriptively taught. The goal then becomes overcoming the limitations of the grammatical and structural codes you’ve worked so hard to instill. You can't resist and overcome systemic limitations and deficiencies without knowing how they systemically work.

Saria: What have you enjoyed about being a resident at Stove Works?

Terry: Well I have a family and so I miss them, but I get up every morning and there's no television, and there are no real distractions. What I was hoping to do is find a rhythm that I was missing at home. The other thing is that there are some interesting people here, and so you have conversations about what they're doing. I'm hoping maybe this week I'll prop the door open and put a sign up so they can come in and see what's going on or what I'm thinking. It’s good to see how people react to your work.

ABOUT ME, THE INTERVIEWER:

My name is Saria Smith, and I am a BFA student currently working as a Curatorial Assistant at Stove Works Gallery. I am an artist and find joy in expressing myself through various ways involving, working with found objects, collage, and music. I decided to start these artist interviews as a way for the public to connect more with the residents who flow through Stove Works perhaps unseen, especially during this pandemic.