Resident Spotlight: Jules Jackson + Will Sutton

Will Sutton and Jules Jackson, interviewed by Kate Greenwell

Will was a resident at Stove Works this past February, and Jules is a former resident (2023); each of their practices involves identity, expression, and masculinity and how they explore those aspects in today's world.

Will Sutton

Jules Jackson

Kate: Will, you just started your residency here at Stove Works, but you've been involved with them in the past. What are you gonna do with your time here in the next month?

Will: I think before I came here, I was feeling a lot less energized. And I think the Chattanooga Arts scene is kind of supported by Stove Works in a really strong way. As far as the city's art culture, I was feeling isolated, and Stove Works is a place that I align myself with and can successfully work within a community-based practice.

Jules: I agree; I think the community really helped, too. There is time here when you're receptive to the thoughts and perspectives of others. And if you play by yourself too much, I guess, in the studio, then you can get in your own head. There are certain things that you're not thinking about or considering, and you just don't know how to think about them. There is a kind of osmosis that takes place when you're in a group with other artists where you can influence each other in unsuspected ways and can see a different viewpoint of your work.

K: Will your work largely deals with identity and how that stems from community. I feel like you're largely integrated into the skate scene of Chattanooga and the art scene of Chattanooga. Do you feel like it's hard to blend those two things into your everyday practice?

W: As I'm working now, I'm personally interested in what people and artists do outside of their art practice. I think when I was in college I separated my identity as an artist from that of a skateboarder, or a music enjoyer, or as part of the local music scene.

It was not until I finished my senior thesis that I ultimately started combining those identities into my work. The aesthetics of skateboarding, the aesthetics of graffiti, and the aesthetics of aggressive music are the things that brought me into art-making. Those are the things that pushed me and formed my identity into becoming an artist. And then the fine arts provided me an opportunity to express those interests in a way that I think was academic. So I started in this skate culture, and then I ended up in fine arts. It's been about my journey to becoming who I am, what is my work about, what is my community, and how can my work exist in my community.

K: in your artist statement, you talk about young men struggling against masculinity and patriarchy in that skate community. How do you consider largely gendered activities in communities around you whenever you're making your works?

W: I think one experience that has changed me a lot is when I started working at the public library. I think I'm the only guy on the floor, and working in a space where I'm around troubled kids, the way that I respond and the way that young men respond to me, I was able to understand, or maybe kind of think more deeply around what are the reasons that cause those situations to arise, problematic behaviors of, you know, young men in general.

It's a difficult spot to be in because I love skateboarding but every culture has this kind of bad end and good end. Hardcore music, graffiti, and skateboarding all attract people that have a few screws loose. And being at Stove Works, working with other young artists, I feel like we can all relate to having a few screws loose.

The generation we’re in right now, we're all kind of working towards something together and I feel like with young men right now, it's a critical moment to try to think about what's going to happen to the future. I hate to bring it up, but you think about all the Andrew Tates and how young men are ingesting that media, and as the future of masculinity and gender changes, I hope there is a political pushback from the scenes of the hardcore world and music and graffiti to celebrate the disassembledge of gender norms.

Will Sutton, Boardslide, 2023, graphite on paper

K: Jules your work discusses masculinity as well, transmasculinity specifically. How are you processing those ideas through your practice?

J: It started from a place of wanting to make work about my own experiences as a trans man and looking to my own life to inspire the work because I feel like art is in dialogue with the rest of your life. As Will was saying, you have everything going on in your life outside of practice too. I'm interested in the bodily aspect of transition and making work about that and that ties in with my interest in cartoon forms, the cartoon body. I feel like this is maybe a little cliché to say, but I've always loved cartoons.

Jules Jackson, Foreshortened Jules, 2024, oil on canvas

J: It's been relatively recently that I have figured out the connection between my interest in cartoons and my interest in making work about my embodied experiences. Because during transition, you're autonomously taking the lead on the destiny of your own body and what happens to your body. If you're doing things like hormone replacement therapy or having surgeries, you're playing an active role in the kind of creation or recreation of yourself. I feel like that connects to kind of cartoon forms because the cartoon body is very round, it's very like, you know, bends and stretches, it occupies this unreal sort of place where it can be transformative, and that's one of the major ways that I'm exploring transmasculinity in my work. It's interesting to compare and look at the two of us and our work in dialogue because I feel like your work [Will] engages with some of the cultural signifiers of masculinity.

W: I think a lot about your [Jules] thesis work and how the werewolf was a signifier for masculinity, almost this Jekyll and Hyde, or werewolf aesthetic of American masculinity. This thing is so relevant to our social sphere; it has such a violent presence in American media. I think about my work through the lens of an adolescent teenager; how a teenage boy sees through this environment, and that’s where the claws come out, the werewolf comes out.

J: grrrrrrr

W: I think I lean towards cartooning as well because it’s a vessel that oversimplifies something complex.

J: Exactly. It has a flatness, and that flatness brings out a lot of complexity. By simplifying complex ideas, I feel like you can connect with people on a different level. And I think Scott McCloud's work and how he talks about the masking effect, how when you see a cartoon character that's more realistic, his theory is that you relate to them less because you perceive other people in those terms. You see other people as a sort of fully-fledged, realistic, three-dimensional being, but from the inside, in your own perspective, you kind of see yourself as a simplified entity, more of a conceptual entity. By simplifying the body, I want to give people an inroad.

K: Yeah, just like what you talked about earlier, leaving viewers to imagine their own identities.

J: For someone to be able to put themselves into someone else’s position, that's a path towards fostering empathy. In my case, foster empathy for the experience of undergoing gender transition. It's an unfamiliar kind of perspective for a lot of people to consider. So people have, at times, this reaction to seeing these images of surgery or bodily alterations. They almost cringe away from it a little bit at first. And there's nothing wrong with that. I think that that's a natural reaction to people; by bringing it out in the open and having a conversation about it, people can come to an understanding of the experience of going through a gender transition in surgeries. Talking about using the werewolf symbol as a symbol for masculinity and transmasculinity. It is a complex cultural symbol and often has violent connotations with media, like horror movies and popular culture. So, I wanted to bring it in and address that by getting away from its violent connotations and leaning more into its spiritual and transformative aspects.

W: The spiritual and emotional part behind the rebellious culture within skateboarding, graffiti, within heavy music. People are looking for expression and escape, looking for a way to speak and make their presence known. I think it goes back to transmasculinity and how you deal with moving into a masculine space that can be seen as violent and that is uncomfortable. The basis of masculinity is uncomfortable, the way that emotions are cramped.

J: I appreciate what you said about the problematic ways that masculinity exists within our society. I think that in my work, as well as my life, I want to imply a masculinity that doesn’t have that and to show that it can be done. I want to discharacterize traditional masculinity. There is a kinder way to live.

K: It seems like both your art practices have to do with a healing process and a reflection of your past.

W: Figurative social expression can respond to the world. I think within the language of visual arts, you can express the inutterable. A lot of the work I make, I do not have the words for it; It captures a specific idea. I think my practice has been a way of thinking through this complicated social sphere that we live in. In the end, we’re all just trying to cope.

J: I’ve always admired your [Will] ability to deal with change. I feel like your work entertains multiple possibilities at once.

W: I feel like my drawings are maps of experiences, maps of future, past, and present, and how they all happen within the same space. It’s about a visual residue that can be captured by drawings. This is a space I have struggled with in painting, there's something about drawings where I can stack and stack, and through that layering, I encapsulate the properties of honesty in my work.

J: In painting, when the image starts to become believable, you lose a lot of your plausible deniability; you have to make a decision and stick with it.

W: I think your work offers a really interesting, weird spot ….

J: Are you saying I'm a weirdo

W: haha, yeah. Your work is really cohesive in its cartoon style yet deceptive. This traditional American approach to a cartoon representation but it's painted under the guise of realism.

J: The work kind of mirrors something that I think about in other aspects, which is the ability to make a decision, and then you just kinda have to stick with it. It connects to the subject of transition. If you decide to do hormone therapy or gender replacement surgery, you're taking a bold stand. You're in it, and you're occupying a different place in society than you were before, and there's no real walk back. You're taking a bold, decisive stance within your society that gives society opportunity to define you as queer. Boldly and visually queer.

K: Thank you guys for letting me have the opportunity to have this conversation. Is there anything we should be looking for from you guys in the coming months?

J: I will have my work on display at Stove Works on May 3rd, and I will have my work at Coop Gallery in Nashville on June 1st.

W: Keep your eye on St. Andrews Center; we are trying to build some new art spaces in Chattanooga, so look out for that space.

Jules

Jules working in Stove Works studio space, 2023

Will working in Stove Works studio space, 2024

Jules and Will both help to run a collage workshop at St. Andrews Center, for more information visit exquisite_corps_ccc on Instagram.

You can follow their practices through
Willsuttonstudio on Instagram or www.willsuttonstudio.com
Julesinspace_ on Instagram

Resident Spotlight: Zach Hill

Interview with November 2024 Resident Zach Hill.
Interviewed by Savannah Hodges, Fall ‘24 Intern.

Zach Hill

Zach Hill is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and curator working between sculpture, drawing, and moving image. He has been awarded the Mary L. Nohl Fellowship and Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship along with residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Bunker Projects, RAIR, Elsewhere Museum, and Stove Works. His work has been exhibited and screened at Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee, WI; Frontera Garibaldi, Mexico City; High Tide and Peep Projects, Philadelphia, PA; Skylab Gallery, Columbus, Ohio; Studio 10, Brooklyn, NY; Comfort Station, Chicago, IL; James Black, Vancouver; and VisArts, Rockville, MD. Hill holds a BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and is currently the Digital Arts & Sculpture Technician at Haverford College. He is the head chef and owner of Zach's Crab Shack, a queer contemporary art gallery hiding within the facade of a campy, beach-side crab stand. Hill lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.

Artist Statement (Brief)

As an interdisciplinary artist, I create sculptures, drawings, and videos that play with material identity, visual perception, and speculative utility. Formally my work uses a queer logic of assemblage to reference various devices or infrastructures coalescing with anthropomorphic objects and iconography. These human-scale hybrid forms enact gestures of looking, pointing, or signaling through their imagined functionality and imply a relationship between the “operator” and subject of said operation.

My sculptural process involves material misuse and mimesis, combining mass-produced items such as furniture parts, metal poles, lawn decorations, and jewelry with fabricated appendages and video monitors….

My drawings, mounted in shadow box frames of various depths, textures, and colors, layer charcoal and colored pencil to carve out ambiguous images. Similar to my sculptures, these energetic fields of mark-making intertwine to hint at the recognizable while teetering on the edge of total abstraction. The framing of these works on paper has grown increasingly sculptural….

In these multidimensional transmutations, I present objects and images that actively misbehave, challenging perceptions and expectations of function, form, and material. This misbehavior encapsulates my practice, which at its core, physically manifests a type of innate, undeniable, and unable-to-be-hidden queerness.

Read the full statement and view more work at: https://zach-hill.com

Interview

Savannah: In your artist statement, you mention that your work “actively misbehaves”. Can you elaborate on this? How do you think your work benefits from “misbehaving?”

Zach: Three words that I often use to describe my practice are misbehavior, misuse, and mimesis. These words all relate back to my experiences as a member of the queer community. Mimesis being something that queer people do to avoid being outed, to blend in for safety, or to learn from one another. Misuse being something we are perceived to do with our bodies through sex. And misbehavior being the way that many people around the world perceive queerness. I take these notions and apply them to the materiality of my work in a variety of ways. I’m interested in faux or confusing surfaces, combining found objects with fabricated elements, and, in general, finding unexpected ways to subvert traditional perceptions of everyday objects. In general, I see sculpture as a type of misbehavior; there’s not always a straightforward logic or reason for my forms to exist, but they do anyway.

Work in Progress in Zach’s Stove Works studio.

S: You utilize many methods of making in your practice. Do you have a favorite material or method to work with?

Z: Found objects and materials play a huge role in my practice, both as actual things I'm working with and also in the creation of moving images. I’d say that the found or the “surprise” item is my favorite material in the sense that it typically sparks a new project. I’ll often get a bit obsessive, keeping an eye on something for weeks to months before dragging it into my studio. I often walk around and pick up discarded metal or cords I’ve taken the base off of my kitchen table, and I once even stole the old TV antenna off of my apartment building for a sculpture. These objects are like armatures that I can build off of, adding more fabricated elements or combining them with other found materials. The way that I make video work has a lot to do with gleaning or collecting as well. Like most people, I use my cell phone to film all sorts of things that I encounter day-to-day, both mundane and spectacular. Sometimes I do this thinking it will be for art, and other times, I’m just documenting my life or something cool I saw. For example, I’ve animated a screenshot of wildfire smoke radar, worked footage of a burnt-up three-wheeler motorcycle into a sculpture, or simply used these images as formal references to construct my forms.

Muddy Puppy
cast resin, wax, copper paint with green patina, wax, bronze powder, screws
13" x 5" x 7" 2023

S: You use such a wide variety of imagery in your works; from dogs, houses, and umbrellas to less identifiable things like steel apparatuses and assembled kites. Where do you get your inspiration for the imagery?

Z: This is an interesting question because I often feel like my imagery finds itself. I like to start working on something and build up its “ness” throughout the process. I’ll often reconfigure things until they look like something or at least look like something to me. There’s a moment where I go “Oh! That’s a weird spaceship hot rod motorcycle” or “Look, a puppy!” I consider many of my sculptures, particularly those working with larger found metal, to be imagined implements or infrastructures that are also figurative characters. They have functions as well as desires and emotions. I’ve been inspired by a wide variety of things from Galileo thermometers, microscopes, electrical poles, vintage lighting rigs, and everyday objects like a lamp shade, handheld mirror, or fishing rod.

Animality has always been of interest to me and I’ve used representations of domestic and wild animals in various ways. Dogs have popped up most frequently and I think that’s due to their incredibly long history as domesticated animals and the huge place they hold within past and present culture. Canine iconography can be found in every corner of art history so I see depicting these furry friends as a continuation of that. In the USA, the dog is part of the perfect portrait of a nuclear family. My version of a dog is more of a deviant, the animal in the family that kind of resists domestication and tries to return to a type of wildness.

The variety of imagery I use is reflective of this point I’m at in my practice right now of not limiting myself when it comes to anything. If I want to make abstract work I can and if I want to make something representational I can. I’ve developed a lot of different approaches and my use of imagery is part of that.

Spiraling Jewel Girl
looping HD video, outdoor TV antenna, rubber, cords
92" x 50" x 40"

S: Do you have any specific plans or ideas for your time here at Stove Works?

Z: I’m currently working on a drawing and two sculptures. The sculptures are both too large to work on at my home studio so it’s been nice to utilize the space Stove Works provides. One of these pieces uses a vintage lighting rig I thrifted a couple of years ago. The other uses the old base from my kitchen table and has grown into a kind of futuristic motorcycle hovercraft sculpture. I’ve also been developing a couple of drawings that use multiple sheets of paper.

Hot Rod
metal, wood, epoxy, selenite, fuax leather, rivets, reflectors, looping hd video
92" x 80" x 65"
2023

Resident Spotlight: Andrew Scott Ross

Andrew Scott Ross received his BFA from the Atlanta College of Art and his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He subsequently studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Ross has exhibited throughout the United States and abroad including; The Museum of Arts and Design in New York, The Building for Contemporary Art in Geneva, Switzerland, The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, The Guggenheim Museum's Peter Lewis Theater, The Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, Israel, The Knoxville Museum of Art, The Hunter Museum of American Art, The Weatherspoon Museum and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. His work has been reviewed in publications such as Artforum Magazine, Art in America, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Sculpture Magazine, and Artsy. In 2016, Ross's installation Dry Erase was presented at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center for the Atlanta Biennial. He was included in the exhibition Appalachia Now! An Interdisciplinary Survey of Contemporary Art at the Asheville Art Museum (image above) and selected as the 2019 Tennessee Fellow from South Arts. Opening in December, 2021, Ross will present a new version of his Century Zoo installation at the two-person exhibit Symptoms of the Future: ANCIENT WORLDS at OUT OF SIGHT gallery in Antwerp, Belgium. A concurrent event with his video work Curatorial Drift will take place at The Royal Academy of Belgium.

Interviewed by Cass Dickenson.

C: Why don't you introduce yourself and talk a little bit about what you’re interested in?

A: Hello, my name is Andrew Scott Ross. I'm originally from New York City, but I currently live in Johnson City, Tennessee, which is not far from here. I’ve been teaching at Eastern Tennessee State University for 11 years. I’m an interdisciplinary artist interested in the language of museums and how we represent history, which I've been focused on for roughly 20 years now. My methods span everything from sculpture to drawing, installation, video art. So it's very interdisciplinary.

Riding, charcoal on paper, 44 x 30 inches, 2023
Work completed during Andrew’s residency at Stove Works.

Riding (detail), Charcoal on paper, 2023.

You talked about the languages of museums, can you expand on that?

I grew up in New York City in a family of artists and jewelry makers, and museums were a big part of my life. We were raised Jewish, but we weren't very religious. But I spent so much time in the museum and the museum was the one place where there was a unanimous agreement that this was something that you could be faithful about, that everyone could come together for. Art and culture felt cherished. Specifically, institutions in New York, like the Metropolitan Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art, almost became like holy places for my family. When I started to grow up, museums were something that I started to question when I was questioning the structures that I was within, that I believed in. When I was just leaving my undergraduate degree, I started deconstructing my faith around museums and representation of history in earnest. Because of this history, museums are something I approach very personally. How I as an artist can be responsible to these institutions, and the relationships of these institutions to ideas like truth or fairness. What gets exhibited, what doesn't get exhibited, how an exhibit can present a personal psychology–my own concerns, my own baggage and my own biases. 

How has your relationship to museums matured? Is there a sense of nostalgia for you?

I think I feel nostalgic in some elements of my childhood, like many people do. I have a love for those experiences. But just as much, I feel a lot of distance from my childhood.

I believe in museums. I believe that these places are capable of great things, and can bring our community together and in ways that allow us to navigate very challenging topics. And I do think being able to physically see things that are outside of your own culture is a very powerful thing. That can be a powerful experience in positive ways. But it can also be powerful in negative ways. Institutions will probably never be perfect, but our efforts to make them better is, I think, worthwhile. 

Right, that potential is powerful both ways. As far as the work you're making, how is the work you’re making engaged with ,

So I’m currently making two new series, though. One series is kind of the very end of a body of work that I've been producing since 2011. In 2011 I made a piece titled Century Zoo. That piece was the genesis of this decade-long project. It all started from hundreds of drawings that I did in the Metropolitan Museum directly from the objects on display. I’d take them back to my studio and I kept drawing over and on top of them, to the point that it corroded the images. They got so messy, and so filled with my own imagination, my own fan kind of fantasy of his objects as I moved through that process, that they became fairly unrecognizable. And then I used all the detritus of that project as material for further installations. This created a dynamic where every time I would reinstall that exhibit, I was quoting it further and expanding on it with new information that I was learning about, about history–specifically, the very Eurocentric approaches to organizing space and time inside of encyclopedic museums. 

Century Zoo VII (Detail), Mud, Paper, Charcoal, Acrylic and Wood, Dimensions variable, 2011-2018. Photo from installation at Gallery Protocol.

I took a short hiatus with that work and decided I was going to make a final group of sculptures that would hold the very last remnants of those worn and weathered objects that I have affected for 10 years. It's almost like a mausoleum for the remnants of my memory. Some of the experiences of these objects have these histories. And I was going to kind of encase those inside of this. So I've been working on those here.

With the other series, I’ve been playing with the idea of keywords within databases of history objects. Words that are supposed to indicate what you’re looking at in place of a title. So I’ve collected the words writing, lying, hiding and searching. I’m essentially going through historical databases and sourcing images using those keywords, and that information is what I use to construct an image of my own–in this case drawings. I'm very interested in how those words might affect you when you're looking at these drawings, and the play between the different objects. This lets me see the politics that determine what objects are presented within databases, as well as which objects I personally react to in this context. So far, I've done the drawings for “Running” and “Writing” and I’m moving onto “Hiding” now.

With your first project, you’ve conjured images of corrosion, detritus and mausoleums, which is sort of dramatic and macabre. At the same time, you're also starting this other work that is based on actions and processes, things that are actively being carried out. I’m noticing these projects are both exploring progress in different ways. Is this something that’s important to you?

Yes, this current project is much more active and alive in its processes. This work is serving as a break from my previous project, like where I wanted to put those elements from my previous work to rest. But I also want to recognize with my mausoleums that these images and fragments of history linger like residue in our bodies and minds. When it comes to history, we don't have control over the images that linger on with us before we were conscious that it'd be possible for that to happen.

The new work is active, but it's also representing the way I'm exploring images now, which is online. I'm looking at things not in museums but through a museum's digital collection. We're searching and we're looking for things in different ways now. But also I want to represent the dramatic changes that are happening in how we represent history right now. There are things that I'm so excited about, I would have only dreamed about happening 20 years ago. So I think with all of that turbulence and excitement, I want to talk about these things going on right now, but I also wanted to keep it open-ended because I have a bit of a distaste for closing arguments or for anything to be finalized. So I feel like the idea that these things are in motion or that it's at least trying to capture motion feels more comfortable for me in relation to representation and truth.

Thick Drawing (Heads), Wood, Polystyrene, Plaster, Paper Clay, 25 x 94 x 6 inches, 2023
Thick Drawing (Hand), Wood, Polystyrene, Plaster, Paper Clay, 44 x 62 x 6 inches, 2023

These works were developed during Andrew’s time at Stove Works.

So with these new projects, what is your time at Stove Works allowing you to do with this new body of work? How has your residency with Stove Works helped you?

So much! In every way, being at Stove Works has been wonderful. I have been extremely productive because of the balance Stove Works’ residency program manages to walk between the freedom and trust in their residents versus the resources and attention given to us. I feel like there’s just enough programming involving interaction with people from the community, some visiting critics that come here and speak to you, but that’s also balanced with having a live workspace that is extremely functional, clean, private and well lit. I also enjoyed the amount of residents and the scale of community that that created for us as well. And with all of the facilities downstairs, I’ve done a lot of the sculpture work that I don't always have access to. So I think it's been excellent. I’m sad to be leaving.

Is there anything we can look forward to from Andrew Scott Ross in the coming months?

Well, I have. I'm one of the current Art Fund grantees this year, and some of the work that I'm producing here is being produced for that. I’ll be presenting some of these works in public spaces in Johnson City, where I live. 

That’ll be all. Thanks Andrew!

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.