Active Blur: An Interview with Tsherin Sherpa
Tsherin Sherpa has a unique background. Trained as a Tibetan thangka painter in Nepal, he was raised within a specific regime of mark-making, proportion, and subject. Embedded in that tradition is the need to preserve and pass on an exiled cultural heritage. As such (and having relocated to California), Sherpa has carved out a practice painting traditional Bhuddist thangka paintings. In the last five ten years, however, he started working outside the traditional confines he’d inherited, embarking on a course of personally expressive work. Transferring the aesthetic of his background into the relative freedom of the contemporary art context, Sherpa currently maintains two styles at once. For that, and in both spheres, he has achieved some real success. He has exhibited internationally in a variety of museums, he is represented by a gallery, and worked on a national ad campaign. Every aspect of his work has begged a delicate balance of reflection and production. In the following interview, we talk at length about the the process of Sherpa’s development and the relationship he has with its course.
Tsherin Sherpa, "Baby Spirit # 1," 2010. Gouache, acrylic and gold leaf on paper.
Caroline Picard: Could you talk a little bit about your background and what your artistic training was like?
Tsherin Sherpa: For a couple of generations, my family had been creating traditional art. My father was originally trained under his uncle. In turn, my uncles, my dad’s cousin, and I were handed down this craft [thangka painting] by him. At the age of 12, I began studying this art form during my school breaks. Growing up in Nepal, I was immersed in Buddhist culture and iconography. Even though I was not a monk, I studied Buddhist scriptures in a nearby monastery. So, alongside the traditional art, I was seeped in the meaning of it.
As for the process of learning thangka painting, the traditional training begins by creating specific measurement grids for the Buddhist deity. Once that is understood, then we learn paint application and fine brush stroke detailing. The basics took me about 5 years then I continued perfecting my skills for many years.
Only in the last few years did I begin experimenting in contemporary forms.
At the Center: An Interview With Brandon Alvendia
Brandon Alvendia, "Headshot Inside a Dan Graham Sculpture," Washington DC
While conversations continue (albeit tiredly) to predict the demise of physical book production, new publishers continue to produce books. There is a wealth of new, bright-eyed small presses all over the country. None so unique as Brandon Alvendia’s Silver Galleon Press. There is a pioneer quality to Alevendia’s style of book making. It’s cheap and fast and easy. It’s also utilitarian. The preciousness of the object he creates comes from it’s easy, DIY production. These books are art objects as a result of their disregard for self-fetishization. Silver Galleon Press is one of many Branches in Alvendia’s art practice. First and foremost, Alvendia creates. The material in which his ideas manifest vary–whether its curatorial, written, published, performed, taught, filmed, or sculpted, the work follows from a verb of action. Alvendia is at the center of that action.
Caroline Picard: Where did the idea for the Silver Galleon Press come from?
Brandon Alvendia: The Silver Galleon Press comes from a desire to read from the infinite repository of texts stored online in a form that can be handled, highlighted, written-in, dog-eared, torn, collected, exhibited, archived, shelved, lost, given as a gift, traded or burned for warmth.
CP: How do you choose your publications?
BA: The continually growing collection of texts represents years of maintaining a folder on my computer named “readme.” Approaching one DVD in size, the library of PDFs is slowly built from a daily practice of hunting and gathering new reading material online. The books are published on an as-needed and on-demand basis to suit a wide range of distribution and exhibition contexts. Titles are also published by request or for personal enrichment.
Brandon Alvendia, "Silver Galleon Press," Mobile Printing Workstation
CP: Can you talk a little bit about how you make your books?
BA: The Silver Galleon Press method of bookmaking is an economical and efficient process that can be learned by all. First, the captured PDF is minimally processed using the budget page-imposition software Cheap Imposter (OS X) to rearrange pages for printing. The PDF is then printed using generic printer ink, found online for as cheap as $1.99 a cartridge ($.01/page B+W). The pages are cut, folded and bound using common office supplies such as heavy-duty staples, two-hole brackets, and a wide variety of glue and tape (as in hot and duct, respectively). Covers are made from salvaged materials of all kinds (file folders, cardboard boxes, canvas, photo-backdrop paper, fabric, mass produced books, etc) manipulated with collage, paint and other mixed media. The whole operation can be reproduced anywhere and will adapt to exploit specific resources at any given venue/institution (ie color copiers, interns, etc…) Finished titles are distributed freely, by barter or on a pay-what-you-wish basis (and often part of a larger sculptural installation.)
Negotiating an Artistic Practice in a Capitalist Ecology: An Interview with Anne Elizabeth Moore
This introduction is short. Anne Elizabeth Moore gave such thorough answers, it seemed more important to let those stand than offer an interpretation of her merit. Safe to say having published four books, Anne Elizabeth Moore is an accomplished author. Having shown internationally, she is a significant artist and permeating those facets of her work is a strategic, cultural investigation. She is presently on a Fulbright scholarship in Cambodia.
Caroline Picard: How would you characterize your work?
Anne Elizabeth Moore: Actually, I try not to characterize my work. This is the central issue in work that at its root hopes to investigate capitalism and the ethos of branding. Those boxes that make it easy to mark, identify, and sell something (either metaphorically or literally) also make it easy to either shut down criticism—if you identify with or have bought the item/idea/approach in question—or underscore it—if you are not the intended audience for that thing, pretending for a moment that we’re talking about “things. My work is like Justin Bieber if you like Justin Bieber: it defies categorization automatically because you adore it. But if you think Justin Bieber is a tool, then my work is not like that at all. In fact it is the opposite of that. Except for the fact that both Justin Bieber and I tend to be adored by teenage girls. That is exactly the same and there is no use denying it.
Anne Elizabeth Moore, cover for "Unmarketable," pub. The New Press, Fall 2007
What I’m interested in is how easily systems of oppression become adopted and policed by the individuals they are aimed at oppressing. Branding is one of the primary ways this happens in the hyperconsumerist culture of the United States. But, like, you can’t just go get a job in that. You have to be a writer and an untrained lawyer and study sociology, and you have to speak a fair number of languages and appear friendly and approachable but also not be too scared when the guns come out. And also, because sometimes talking about this stuff is dangerous, you have to be willing to invent a new language, or perform, or work through ideas with a different, non-verbal part of your brain. Let’s be honest, if you study a lot of languages then you might get easily confused; sometimes you speak German or Italian to someone who only speaks Khmer, so visual communication—again, in its pure sense, as a two-way system, and not in the way they teach it at business school—is important.
Reenacting a Many Possible Past: An Interview with Irina Botea
Irina Botea, "Out of the Bear," video and photos, 2004
In college, I worked at a barn and my boss kept a special reenactment pony. The horse was prized above all others and regularly traveled the Southeast to reenact Civil War battles. My boss was very proud of this practice and boasted that he and his horse had worked together on the set of Mel Gibson’s Patriot (this was his mark of success). He also complained that standard tents of 1860 were not big enough to accommodate his 2002 stature, though here, too, there was a blushing kind of pride: he considered himself greater, at least physically, then the forefathers he so admired. Perhaps because he struck me as such a comical authority, I did not think very deeply about his reenactment practice. Like many things, it seemed such an obscure fascination as to be easily dismissed. I also took the lens of history for granted.
I’ve since discovered the beauty of an unsteady past; I’ve grown suspicious of historical interpretations that seem too sure of themselves. Talking to Irina Botea, I gathered more perspective. Via reenactment, Irina Botea delivers the past into the present. As one intent on facilitating freedom, Botea examines the preciousness of documentation while delving into personal, political histories. Her work examines the potential possibilities of choice embedded in every outcome — while also exciting, it involves sometimes difficult, empathic responses. She is a photographer, a performer, a filmmaker, and a teacher. These various facets of her creative work weave in and out of one another.
Irina Botea, "Out of the Bear," video and photos, 2004
Irina Botea: The Courage Of The People is a really amazing example of reenactment. Jorge Sanjinés went to a village where police murdered miners from a tin mine when they tried to unionize; the miners wanted to join Ché. Sanjinés came back three of four years later to reenact the event with the survivors. It’s striking because at the beginning they make a statement, “We have reenacted this because we want to make sure that the history is told the way we want it to be told.” I mean, it’s a very conscious decision to mediate their history. This is important in reenactment, this attempt at personal mediation. When you know the ending, you’re really focused on how something happened and what possibilities were not taken advantage of. I think that’s very important for the present.
Caroline Picard: Do you feel like there are opportunities to take new steps [within a reenactment]?
IB: Absolutely. And they really happen during reenactments. It’s not just a repetition of the past—because you can never really repeat it—it’s a remediation of the past for the present.
In Flux Samples: An Interview with Young Joon Kwak
Young Joon Kwak, "Invocation," 2010, (still) video
Young Joon Kwak and I met a week before his solo-show, Eating Without A Face & Death Rites. The work was inspired by his time spent at the ACRE residency this previous summer. Everything was near completion. His studio was full of works-in-progress and was largely based around the idea of compost (what was a practical aspect of life at ACRE). Roxaboxen Exhibitions, the site of his exhibition, used to be a funeral parlor and Young’s studio is in the basement. Running alongside the stairwell, there is a ramp that used to bear coffins between floors; it is possible that bodies were prepared in the same room Young uses as a studio, what feels fitting given the topic of our conversation and his interest in life/death cycles. In all his work, as a writer, performance artist, collaborator, and sculptor, he strives to occupy the liminal space between identifiable categories in order to maintain a level of freedom. As such, the traditional identity of the singular, static self is a constantly shifting, accumulation of parts. Similarly, the “artist” as a singular and possibly heroic identity is problematic and something Young struggles to shed. Culling his materials from banal sites of everyday life, he appropriates objects already imbued with meaning, samples and reconfigures them in order to devise an uncanny experience.
Young Joon Kwak, "The Big Reveal & Jerry Curl Queen," 2010, mixed media
Young Joon Kwak: Jasbir K Puar’s book Terrorist Assemblages solidified a lot of what I was interested in about trauma, affect, and queer theory. She talks about how people are kept in line as citizens and the cooption of queer identities—the nature by which any attempt to produce a new subjectivity eventually gets co-opted into the system of capitalism. Puar proposes the “assemblage,” as a theoretical framework for imagining new forms of agency. Rather than normative static identities, the assemblage is formless, fragmented, and always in transition—falling apart and coming back together. A sort of continual cycle of death and regeneration. Puar talks about affect as that which is of outside commodified senses: indescribable bodily sensations, weird ticks, or feelings. Throughout the year I was trying to imagine empty spaces, these holes or gateways, that are the passageways for affect. The seams between the fragments of the assemblage, wherein unexpected interactions and transformations may occur.
Memorial Photographs: An Interview with Jason Lazarus
Jason Lazarus
When Michael Jackson died, an impromptu dance party took place just outside my window. A young woman pulled up in a car wearing her best 80s outfit; she turned on her hazards and took a votive candle and a stuffed monkey from the back seat . Resting those against a nearby lamppost, she left the car windows down and played the same 5 MJ songs while dancing in the street. More and more people gathered around her, many started to dance with. The ceremony lasted about four hours.
Jason Lazarus, "Untitled," found Family of Man catalogue with marginalia, 2010. Archival inkjet, 60" x 89".
Michael Jackson epitomizes celebrity and, while alive, collapsed under the weight of his own signification. He was not a person, he was a pop star, and works like Jeff Koons‘s Michael Jackson and Bubbles is endemic of the mockery/adulation his life possessed. Jason Lazarus dives headfirst into that din. While his Michael Jackson Memorial Procession is one piece of many, he consistently manages to memorialize events, transforming their potential irony into intimate, artistic monuments. Similarly, when Lazarus and Claire went to get an HIV test, it was a performative gesture. While she took the test, she had not been previously concerned about her health. Lazarus asked her to do it. Nevertheless the fifteen minute wait period transcended that performance as it gathered anxiety. The photograph was taken, as evidence. [Claire awaiting 15 minute HIV test results, (Chicago)] Photography is a suspicious medium. Lazarus acknowledges this and uses it to his advantage.
Caroline Picard: Can you tell me a little bit about your background and how you came to be an artist? Would you call yourself an artist? What would you characterize as your medium?
Jason Lazarus: I moved from Kansas City, MO, to Chicago to attend DePaul University, where I majored in marketing…upon graduation I worked in marketing at Court Theatre in Chicago. Court features contemporary adaptations of classics: Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, et al. And I swear that was my introduction to creative conceptual thinking, watching them mount alternative costume, set, and script strategies. At the same time, I just happened to start taking photography classes at night for fun at Chicago’s Hyde Park Art Center.
Jason Lazarus, "Claire awaiting 15 minute HIV test results (Chicago)," 2010, archival inkjet
CP: Do you feel like there are any pivotal moments in your artistic development? What would those be and why were they significant?
JL: Yes, I had no art background whatsoever and then just plunged into an MFA program at Columbia College in Chicago, where I focused on photography, worried about whether I could “make it” there or anywhere. Midway through, the Chair of the department, Bob Thall, told me he was worried about me when I enrolled, that they had barely let me into the program. He added that [because of my] critique I had, to him, proved he had made the right bet to let me in. That felt good. Later I was working at an apartment leasing agency and almost took a job teaching high school math in NYC, but decided to redouble my efforts to be an artist. Soon after, I was teaching at Columbia College, the start of my teaching career. It was an epically important moment, now, when I look back.
Light and Desire: An Interview with Melanie Schiff
Melanie Schiff, "Self-Portrait After John's Party," 2008, Digital C print
While always being aware of her work, Melanie Schiff snapped into focus shortly after I first heard about Ox-bow, the School of the Art Insitute’s residency program in Saugatuck, Michigan. Friends came back from a summer there looking a little wild. Melanie’s work–color-rich photographs of youths blending into trees, whiskey bottles glinting like a candle in a bath of morning sun–offers a portrait, not just of Ox-bow, but of a feral, post-adolescent youth. It would be inaccurate to distill her prolific energy into one characterization; her work is lush, well-composed and ever-sensitive to silky light. Those aesthetic concerns transcend specific subjects. In addition to empty skate-park landscapes and attic rooms, she has made self-portraits with bong hits, another with raspberry-nipples, another involves spewing water in the sun (always reminds me of Tony Tasset), or the one above, where she reclines in a sea of empty bottles glinting like a deteriorated Jeff Wall interior: these gestures position her-self-as-artist, approximately tied to a flanking landscape of, often exclusive, culture. Whether holding the Neil Young album before her head, or photographing a motel room once occupied by Kurt Cobain, her presence adds an idiosyncratic awareness to these cultural referents. In an effort to explore that affect, I asked her a series of questions, primarily about the camera and its gaze. This is one interview in a series of many that explores the self on either side of the camera, while thinking through the respective position of the artist.
Melanie Schiff, "Emergency," 2006, Digital C print, 28" x 20"
Caroline Picard: What happens to your perspective when you look through the camera?
Melanie Schiff: I think a lot of it is just practice. When I look through a camera, everything exists on a plane; now start to try and organize the visual space, which is a lot easier said than done. It can be fairly frustrating — many times things don’t translate right away and it takes a lot of problem solving. I think there are perspectives that I find pleasurable that I also feel have a universal appeal. Art history is an archive of compositions, and you end up referencing them consciously or not. I feel like when I’m trying to compose a photograph, that there’s almost a sweet spot in the frame, and it’s just about trying to figure out where that is.
