Paths of Least Resistance
Roman Susan at 1224 W Loyola Ave, Chicago IL
December 1 - December 22, 2018
Tell me about Paths of Least Resistance.
The work in that show represented a line of making that deviated from what I had been doing in one form or another since I've been painting. It wasn't a complete departure, and no show ever is a complete departure, but it was the first time I had shown pieces that were small, intensely handmade, not really as declarative.
There's a visual similarity to my previous work. The idea that I would erase in a painting or do anything like that was just very far from my thinking in, say, 2004. But by 2018, I was developing an appetite for that kind of difference in alteration and for a different way of engaging with similar vocabulary.
They graciously gave me this opportunity to just show that work, which I hadn't really shown much of. The work hadn't been shown together in that way in public. I'd been working on work like that for a couple of years at that point. In some ways, what I'm doing now is a return in some way to the kind of limits that I imposed when I was doing the work in 2004. More typical of how I've worked over the last two decades. Some of the forms I'm working with now were directly coming from things that emerged from that process. It wasn't quite doodling, but it was very much more like doodling than what I've been doing before and what I've been doing more recently, allowing my representation of vector in the work as a gesture as opposed to structure. So the things I'm doing now are structures that are related to the kind of vectored forms and curves that I was working with in the show.
How does this project connect to your art practice at large?
Compared to a lot of other stagings of work that I've done, that particular work and the way it was displayed, the setting was much warmer. It was warmer. You know, and the opening felt warm. It was literally kind of humid. It was rainy, I think. It was like a humid day in December. So it was like there was steam on the windows. There's documentation of the opening. There are people inside. There were students from my class who showed up. It's like this really intense, relatively warm work full of curves, revisions, and atmosphere.
Even the way the space is, you're very much like together. It was the exact opposite of a group show within a year or two of that at Shane Campbell Gallery. That gallery used to be a luxury car or automotive display space. Empty, vast, high-ceiling luxury space. Even with alot of work in that space, everything is really far apart. You'd go there for an opening, even if it was really well attended, you could easily avoid anybody else because it was just so big.
Roman Susan's space is concentrated. It comes to an acute angle. I liked that compression. I think like a lot of artists that stick around Chicago, broadly speaking, get accustomed to working in spaces that are closer to that than to the sprawling warehouse kind of idea. I feel very comfortable in those kinds of project space sort of settings. I like the idiosyncrasies of that space.
Hanging it was easy because my studio is kind of like that, too. It's like a small space.
You almost feel like you could touch each opposite wall at the same time. You might actually be able to do that near the doorway at Roman Susan. But there's something about that that has personality and warmth to it, which I think was very consistent with what I was bringing to the space to show.
How was this show a divergence from your prior work?
One thing that was liberating about the work that I was making at that time was that there was no possibility of going through all the possible versions.
I've been looking at Stella a lot again, recently, because of a group show I'm in. We were asked to choose an artist who influenced us, and I chose Stella. There's something I always admired, the way that you could basically map out a couple years of his work in a diagram. You could say, he did all the versions. Every version he could do, he did. I always found that satisfying as a model. When you actually dig into it, you realize that even with that kind of project, there's like an arbitrary limitation even for Stella. He did four color versions of each of the irregularly shaped polygons, wherever they were.
As somebody who teaches color, there's an infinity of variations he could have done with. Each of those formats within that series, there's an infinity of collisions he could have. he actually did choose a specific kind of arbitrary embodiments to encapsulate that whole potential. I always struggle a little bit with the desire to do every variation, at every scale. You have to make choices about which things you actualize and which things you choose to leave as potential.
Those curved pieces were very much about thematizing that kind of process of figuring out, within a set of limits, what things are emergent, patterns of sameness, and which things are random. How do those things interplay? How does one emerge from the other?
To go back to your question about the relationship to the other work, what I've been doing lately is informed by particular kinds of structures that developed out of building out of curves as opposed to things, like triangles and stacks. There's an element of touch in what I'm doing now that's different than what I was doing 20 years ago.
That's informed by the warmth of that work. There's a bit of a John Henry aspect to the labor in those pieces. They're very small, but they're very intensely physical. I'm happy to be making some work that's a little bit more aloof. I tend to go back and forth, but at the moment, I've found a nice kind of middle path. There's warmth that emerges from something that isn't required, the level of bearing down on the surface.
How do you initially approach the color decisions for a work?
It's vibe. There's an element of design to it. There's an element of nostalgia or pointing to absent contexts. Like smell, you have a strong memory to things with certain sensory inputs that are separate from language and narrative.
With color, it's very difficult to talk about. I teach color, and it's actually the thing that the students are most interested in. It's also the thing that's the hardest to talk in a really analytical way that feels productive. But with color, it's always pointing towards something else. There's an evocativeness to it. There's that element with color choices, which reminds me of some vague feeling about design sensibility. There's a 1960s/1970s kind of sensibility that informs my choices. Just teaching color, I've actually broadened my approach to color. Because of teaching color, I've been able to actually test variations more systematically.
The work that was at Roman Susan, in addition to the atmosphere caused by touch and erasure, there's also the atmosphere of different intensities in a narrow range of hues bleeding through each other, which was something that was novel for me.
The erasure and hesitance in the graphic elements of the work have something to do with the warmth of a psychological picture. The color breaking in that way also has something to do with a kind of crack in a facade. Color can establish a consistent kind of space or mood. Breaks can almost suggest dissociative, non-present other potentials, or spaces that are inferred.
What role have you seen Roman Susan play in the Chicago community?
It feels very open. I was just looking at the website, maybe yesterday. I was just looking at the list of artists that they've worked with – this block of small text. I was like, oh my gosh, they really touch a little bit of everything. There are many different sensibilities and communities of making that find themselves intersecting there, some more briefly and some more long-term. The word warm came up. There's something very warm about their whole project, their whole approach, it's very welcome.
There have been different moments where things that I was already kind of, like, following or participating in were finding themselves meeting there. It was an opportunity to actually hang out with people that I hadn't hung out with before, who work related to what I've been doing. I just never had a chance to actually, you know, interact with them.
They provide a space for that kind of happiness and convergence. That space really is very specific. There's actually a lot of artists up here, probably mostly for economic reasons. There are a lot of people doing creative things up here that need a place to stage what they're doing.
I think it's unfortunate that Loyola didn't see an opportunity to tap into an already existing phenomenon. It seems a little short-sighted. I don't know what their thinking is there.
What decisions were behind the exhibition design and hanging of this show?
It was one of the easiest shows to hang. I brought the work over on a wheelie cart down the alley. I'm about a block or two away. I hung it like in the afternoon by myself. I just came in and did it. And there were certain things that there was really interesting opportunities there, like hanging over the door.
There's a door to a bathroom space or closet, and I hung on that. I hung a piece on a window that was painted white above a radiator, and there's something really nice about it. It's warm, but there's also a Cy Twombly-esque white-out-over an existing thing that takes it outside of its original.
It's that kind of nice blend of a Duchampian ready-made and then also the kind of aestheticization of the erasure and elimination of details. The floorplan is this pizza, this little sliver, and so it's like there's specific kinds of like combinations that that you just can't you couldn't do anywhere else. I put some stuff in the window, propped along the windowsill.
I like when spaces have enough personality in their structure, going back to the idea of possibilities, it actually limits the possibilities in a way that's freeing. Those are the limits for what I can compose with. I found it easy. It's not just a big, giant, open vacuum where I just have to create an entire world from nothing. It's a world already. It's more like placing things in your living space.
What do you have going on now?
I'm in a group show at SECRIST | BEACH called Masterclass. It's all SAIC alumni. I also have a group show coming up in the fall in New York, which is exciting because it'll be my first New York show.
Other artist histories: hiba ali // Tallulah Cartalucca // Julietta Cheung // Kandis Friesen // Juan Molina Hernández // Kevin Norris // Ruby Que // Olive Stefanski // Chiffon Thomas // Gwyneth Zeleny Anderson