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peter happel christian interview by jason judd
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photography by virginie khateeb styling by glen mban
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photography by hiu zhi wei styling by darren jay
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photography by jakob landvik styling by bror august
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theresa marx marie dehe cruz c, valdez J.SIMS jason judd hiu zhi wei darren jay virginie khateeb glen mban 3 jakob landvik bror august
—i waited for you
Photography theresa marx styling marie dehe makeup celine martin hair kazuhiro naka model beasley (img models)
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jumper — acne studios
jumper — jacquemus long sleeve top — jean colonna trousers —jw anderson boots — bless
trousers —jw anderson shoes —vivienne westwood
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jumper — acne studios shirt — vivienne westwood red label
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top — jacquemus shirt — y project
jumper – veronique branquinho sKIrt — jw anderson tights — falke
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t shirt — jacquemus shirt — vivienne westwood red label trousers — jw anderson shoes — marimekko
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all — veronique branquinho
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turtleneck jumper — jw anderson t shirt — acne studios trousers — jw anderson
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peter happel christian interview by jason judd
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— Peter Happel Christian is an artist based in St. Cloud, Minnesota. When describing Christian’s work people often state a list of subjects concerning nature, time, location, or perception followed by a list of overlapping mediums including photography, sculpture, and performance. Ultimately, Christian’s instincts and sensibilities allow him to distinguish poetic subtleties in everyday occurrences. Christian first identified himself as an artist through the act of drawing. Much like his current practice, the finished drawing held little mystery compared to the process of dragging one thing across the surface of another. He has continued to develop work in this way; dragging things, arranging objects, slicing time, and making camera-less images. In the following interview we discuss authenticity, narratives, and being suspicious of instincts. Some of your process seems to excavate the natural world through light, time, and objects—is the gallery the ultimate place that one can evaluate their purpose? If so, is authenticity of any concern? That’s a tricky question and a one good to open with. I think it might be. The gallery is a unique space to view artwork even though it’s a loaded space. I’m not crazy about the gallery feeling like a hall of mirrors so I usually try to show in spaces that have a couple windows (that’s a joke, but also true). The gallery is cut off from the world at large, but that’s one thing I enjoy about it. I think of the gallery in the way I think of the viewfinder on a camera (or the display screen of a camera, right?!) When looking at the world through a camera, you use the rectilinear window to frame what you declare is important or worthwhile to look at again and again. And what the picture isolates is balanced by what never makes it in the picture. In a similar way, the white cube isolates important stuff from other important, but different, stuff for a period of time. I think the gallery is an authentic space of a unique variety and a legitimate place to evaluate the purpose of work. In my case, much of what I’m curious about could be witnessed on its own outside, but I think it’s much more engaging to view work in a space that lets you go deep if you want. That’s a luxury every single person should have access to. If authenticity means having a mindful or bodily experience with objects and images in a designated space then I’m completely concerned.
When you deal with time in your work, do you also consider distance? If so, is this relationship examined through a narrative element in each piece? Yeah, I think I definitely do. Narratives are a good way to rationalize how to make decisions – the story of how a work comes into the world is often how I end up talking about my work. Narrative is also a compelling way to pull in your viewer, but I’m not out to write easy stories. For the exhibition, Sword of the Sun, I lifted the title from the short story, The Sword of the Sun, by Italo Calvino as a way to reference the sentiment of that story and as way to connect works in my broadening studio practice. In the Calvino story, the reader hears the internal monologue of the main character, Mr. Palomar, as he contemplates the setting sun while floating in a nameless sea. The story is really great, one of my absolute favorites of his, but the title also has such a strong photographic metaphor for me. The sun as a sword that slices up time time so we can make sense of it - the shutter of a camera slices time in the same way so we can make better sense of the world. The work in the show was kind of far flung in that I put the show together based on related, but separately conceived of works. So much of the work in that show deals with time and distance. The narratives that come up span time in years and others deal with geographic distance that seems to grow greater with the passage of time. For instance, one piece, Blood of Kings, is a photograph etched onto a copper plate and inked as though it’s ready to be printed. The image is a tattoo of a Mayan jaguar on the arm of my good neighbor who I shared a yard with in Tucson, Arizona from 2003-2005. My neighbor, now a friend, is originally from Guatemala and got this tattoo when he was a frustrated teenager as a way to connect to his pre-Columbian ancestry. I remembered this tattoo a couple years ago and imagined what it might look like ten years later as his body continued to absorb the ink. I went down to Tucson to photograph it and learned during that visit that he found the image for the tattoo in a book titled “Blood of Kings.” I thought a lot about how a tattoo works, ink injected just under the skin, and made the etched plate as a way to speak to the original image (the tattoo), made of ink, being a tactile thing in a body in which that body is slowing absorbing and, in effect, erasing it. Copper as a natural resource has a long history in different landscapes, Central American included, and it retains it’s monetary value in a way that say, steel, doesn’t. And it oxidizes in such a beautiful way – the air changes it. It’s a living thing itself. There is so much fleeting and temporary aspects to this piece. It’s one from the show that really haunts me in a good way. So that’s just one example where time and distance pull together to create narrative in a deep and complex way. Since most of your source material is found in the natural world around you, do you find yourself critically engaged with nature on a daily basis or is the investigation more of a conscious effort based on studio time, contemplation, and happy accidents? It’s a mixture of all these things, really. I do have scheduled studio time to make sure I am getting things done and have time to think. I get a little twitchy if that isn’t happening. Some days I’m able to tune-in much more than other days, but it’s safe to say that most of the time I’m critically engaged. I wanna make sure that by “critically engaged” I also mean that I’m open to or accepting of happy accidents when they occur. I have a family and a teaching job, which arranges how and when I can get work done. I really wouldn’t have it another way. Some of the things I’ve made or found that have to be dealt with later are in the midst of making a meal for my kids or doing something around the house that doesn’t directly connect to my studio practice. Some of the most productive mental “studio time” I have had was while I was up in the middle of the night rocking our kids back to sleep when they were babies. I’ve learned to let things connect and have really tried to stay out of my own way in the past few years. When do instincts play a role in making connections in the work? Over the last couple of years instinct has played a huge role in how I make connections in my work. I’ve gotten to a point where I can trust my gut and, frankly, not completely knowing what things are is so much more exciting. I mean, does anyone know everything about anything, really? If there’s no mystery in the process of making and thinking then I’d say something is wrong. But I’m also suspicious of instinct because there is potential to go into autopilot mode and not contemplate choices or ideas which I think is just as bad as thinking too much. I know myself and there is thinking going on behind the scenes. I’m not that casual with how I make things, but I think I’ve been making work for long enough that I can go with my instincts and then turn my mind on to what I’ve done and consider where I could take things from that place.
Broken Sun, 2014, tinted glass and mirror, approximately 72" x 48" x 8"
Infinite Field II, 2014. Installation detail
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Infinite Field III, 2014. Installation view
Blood of Kings, 2013, etched and inked copper plate, 10� x 10.125�
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Once Around, 2014, 365 sheets of gelatin silver paper, rope, one calendar year, 11” x 14” x 9”
Aside from the themes of time, what is the role of technology as a concept and process in your work?
In a work like Infinite Field, what is the difference between your experience as the mediator of the images/objects and the viewer’s experience?
The physicality of materials is really important to me. I love things that can collect dust. I love the potential for accidents and chance that comes along with analog materials. I’ve kind of always struggled with making photographs as an end point in my work and over time I have consciously worked with pictures in ways that can retain some evidence of my hand in the process. I first self-identified as an artist, as a young person, through the world of drawing and can’t shake the thought of making work like that where you drag one thing across the surface of another thing. A couple ways I keep connected to dragging things around is by arranging objects to photograph or by making camera-less images. Both of these strategies keep my body and mind involved in what I’m making. In my mind, those two examples are a process that is closer to something like drawing, but once it enters the world of photography it connects to so much evocative theory (is that phrase even possible?) about experience, perception, and time. How those different worlds of process and connotation rub together is really exciting to me and as much as I maybe push technology aside I also fully embrace it. I question the nature of its value all the time and tend to cheer for low-tech more often than not. I’m always suggesting to students to find ways to minimize their “screen time” because there is real value in not sitting around in front of a screen hoping you’re going to make something interesting. Technology can be so deliberate in its use and casts such a shadow on our contemporary world that walking away from it at times is both a relief and weirdly political.
Well, I know there is much more that could be on the tables. As the mediator I’m trying to strike a balance in the relationship of the objects and pictures. The difference between the viewer and I is that I know the backstory of the work and their connections. The viewer is left to sift through the arrangements. Somewhere in the middle of all of that is where we meet. I think of the tabletop presentation as an imitation of a worktable where something gets accomplished – some sort of functional, active display even though viewers are allowed to touch the tables. I also like that the wall or floor is denied as a place to consider images and objects – that both are literally on the same plane and must be consumed all at once.
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How do your concepts translate between objects and images in an exhibition and book forms such as Half Wild and Things Boulders Ate? I don’t know that yet! I’ve shown a tiny bit of the work in Half Wild and nothing from Things Boulders Ate. Each project was so driven by their format as a book – I love them as books and I think I’ll love them more as exhibitions. I’ve got some ideas of how it could work. I’m looking forward to figuring that all out when the opportunities arise.
What are you currently working on? I’ve got a handful of projects going on now. I’ve spent the better part of this year working on a self-published book version of Sword of the Sun. I was really interested in taking that exhibition and the tabletop pieces and seeing how I could translate it all into the format of a book. It’s partly a meditation on where I live in St. Cloud, MN and the latent histories of the landscape of the region. Central Minnesota has a long history of granite quarries and I use that history as a basis for the book. I photographed actions and events in the space of my yard around my home, a nameless pond nearby, and a variety of points in between. Individual and shared histories of place collide and splice together to shape a version of where I live and what some of it looks like. The book asks open-ended questions about how we experience time, how we measure its passing and how history might shape a view of the future all while looking to the landscape around me for answers. In the broadest version of it I’m chasing answers to big questions that shape the human condition and I accept the inherent risk in pretending to know the answers. I am really happy with how it’s turned out – its past the proofing stage and now it’s gone into production. For the first time in a really long time I have a studio outside of my home and have been using that space as an experiment for making Infinite Field on an architectural scale. My studio is on the third floor of a professional building in a lawyer’s former office and has two rooms. One room I use for making things (which has a funny receptionists area) and the other room I use as way to make sense of the growing accumulation/presentation of objects and pictures (and it has a couple windows that overlook a main street in St. Cloud). A lot of what I’m doing in there will be the basis of a solo show early next year at Gallery St. Germain which is just down the street. I’m also working on a publishing project with a long-time collaborator, Phillip Andrew Lewis, who lives in Chattanooga, TN. Since 2007 we’ve worked together under the name, Clear As Day. We are publishing a series of artist books about the work and legacy of Ansel Adams. The third of eleven volumes will be completed in September and we’ll be launching it at Printed Matter’s 2015 New York Art Book Fair. Eva van der Schans, based in The Netherlands, did the design and a really great writer from Minneapolis, Christina Schmid, wrote an incredible essay for it. This volume examines the instructional pictures made by Ansel Adams for use in his many textbooks that are easily found in libraries everywhere in the United States. So, the book is about how a certain kind of knowledge about the landscape and photography was determined, demonstrated and passed on over time. I’ve been to the fair one time before, but this time I’ll be there with a table and I’m so pumped about it.
Search/Shade III, 2013, archival pigment print, 14" x 11"
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photography cruz valdez styling cruz valdez and j. sims casting J.. sims models james martin, khy cloud, tavion nelson, tyler lazzari
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—more than me
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photography virginie khateeb styling glen mban hair kazuhiro naka makeup delphine premoli models Agnieska (women) and marine (premium)
Coat - harmony
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Coat — Georges Rech Trousers — Georges Rech Shoes — Barakyan
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Agnieska's Shirt — Victoria/Tomas Marine's full look — Harmony
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photography and set design hiu zhi wei styling darren jay hair matthew tuozolli (atelier management) using davines makeup hiroshi yonemoto (atelier management) using mac photography assistant gregory farrell models emory (women 360) chloe (supreme) julia (muse)
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jumpsuit — berenik acessories — joomi lim ear cuff — bing bang
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all — pamplemousse
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shearling shawl — pamplemousse
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trousers — daniel silverstein ear cuff — bing bang ring — hysterrico
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jacket — blk dnm ear cuff — bing bang ring — hysterrico
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All knit — Stina Frederiksson
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pants — Diane Von Furstenberg
pants — dries van noten
sequin top — bror august
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