jess kiel-wornson
artist statement Our human history is a collective one. Our shared physical spaces act as mirrors of this collective existence. We leave pieces of ourselves behind, scratched in walls, under chairs, in the air. Always our souls are chipping away at themselves while picking up foreign pieces, a constant cycle of breakage and patching; These pieces merge and morph within us, making us not singular beings moving isolated through the world but individual manifestations of each other and of our surroundings. My work considers that with which we surround ourselves— our temples, our art, our homes and grocery stores— as containers for the human condition and evidence that this is a world we have built of and for one another. I use traditional building materials: wood, drywall, plaster, etc. to construct architecturally-inspired installations that I build from some combination of actual and appropriated memory (all memory being fictive, I relish the breaking down of the false boundaries “real” and “imagined”, “mine” and “yours”). These installations take the form of ghostly, unsteady, staircases, patched walls filled with disparate objects, rebuilt furniture bearing clear scars. I am interested in exposing and investigating these moments where an object, a place, or a person must be rebuilt and in so doing merges with its surroundings and becomes a new arrangement of old matter. These considerations translate into small works as well, collage and drawing on glass panes, parchment, or typewriter paper. The layering and altering, cutting apart and healing of these images is a further investigation of the ways in which the fragments of our memories and the physical evidence of our lives fit together to make up our understanding of the world. We can only know the room in which we stand through the lens of all the rooms that came before, and that remain, with or without us, integral and indifferent. My sculptures, drawings, and collections are assemblages of that inevitable connectivity. They are investigations of human empathy as well as knowingly inappreciable tributes to the indifferent universe that sustains it. Jess Kiel-Wornson 2014
(Pages 6-7) 2007 Untitled, First Assemblage
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st. louis, missouri
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des moines, iowa
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richmond, virginia
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queens, new york
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champaign, illinois
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where i’m going
10 30 50 74 92 126
1
st. louis Missouri
siuol .ts iruossiM
st. louis, missouri
notes to self:
Undergrad
studio
developed
densely
and quickly, always people around dropping off objects or clippings or photos I might like. Discarding their things with me.
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Suadade 14
st. louis, missouri
48th Pl, Other Tendencies 2010 Reclaimed building materials, mixed media, eggshells
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jess kiel-wornson
48th Place Chapter 1 2009 Reclaimed building materials, mixed media, eggshells
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st. louis, missouri
I Think it’s Wednesday 2009 Reclaimed building materials, mixed media, eggshells
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jess kiel-wornson
48th Pl, After Cinders 2010 Reclaimed building materials, mixed media, eggshells
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des moines, iowa
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jess kiel-wornson
48th Pl, It Wasn’t, There Wasn’t 2010 Reclaimed building materials, mixed media, eggshells
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st. louis, missouri
Prologue (48th Pl.) 2009 Reclaimed building materials, mixed media, eggshells
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jess kiel-wornson
48th Pl, And Again 2010 Reclaimed building materials, mixed media, eggshells
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st. louis, missouri
48th Pl, And Again 2010 Reclaimed building materials, mixed media, eggshells
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an interview with jess kiel-wornson part 1
conducted by kaity tighe and meme betadam
st. louis, missouri
Where did you grow up?
I went to school in St. Louis and grew up in Des Moines, Iowa. I went to Webster University for undergrad, which is a small liberal arts college, and I had a really good experience there. I can give you a trajectory: I grew up in Des Moines, my parents ran an outfitter, similar to Champaign Surplus. It was full of camping equipment and adventurer lifestyle clothing. It was a family business, and I’m not entirely sure why that’s relevant, but it feels important to me. I ended up going to school in St. Louis, so I was there for my four-year degree, where I got my degree in sculpture. I stayed in St. Louis for a year after I graduated, and I had my first solo show there at a little frame shop and gallery called Pace, downtown. Then I moved home for nearly a year and lived with my sister is Des Moines in her house. I worked in a restaurant to save money, and then I moved to New York. I lived in New York for about 3 years, and then I left New York to come back to Des Moines to apply for grad school and to get out of New York.
What was New York like?
New York was a lot of things. New York was hard. I went there without a lot of direction. I moved and stayed with a friend of mine in Astoria for a couple of months. I got a job working as a maid in a hotel for a while and in that time I showed as part of an exhibition project in Brooklyn. A wonderful curator named Guillermo Cruise ran it. Anyway, I did a little show there in Brooklyn, which was very fun and exciting. I worked there and then I worked at Urban Outfitters as basically a carpenter for their displays. That was actually an awful experience. Ultimately I got a job working for Pablo Helguera, who is a really, really incredible multimedia, performance, social practice artist. I was his studio assistant for most of the time that I was there and then I got a number of other odd jobs freelancing. I ended up leaving because I didn’t feel like I was moving forward; I was working all day and all night. I ended up working in this little Albanian bar in my neighborhood in Queens which, when I think of in hindsight, was really an amazing experience. At the time it was just working 12-hour days for no money and blah blah blah, you know, the New York stereotype. I was tired, my self-confidence was drained, I was broke all the time. I couldn’t afford
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to go home for Christmas ever. To go anywhere really. I wanted to be in the studio. I left to come back to school and went home to live with my sister again and applied to grad school and came to UIUC. I started last September. That pretty much brings us up to date. At some point, I lived in Vienna for a little while.
Is there a reason you wanted to come to UIUC?
Part of it was wanting to study in the Midwest just for issues of space. There’s the song by Chelsea Wolfe called Flatlands. I think of that a lot when I think about why I moved. When I was working in New York, I got an apartment with my former partner. It was a beautiful apartment that was super bright and sunny. We got a great deal on it in a neighborhood called Ridgewood, which was a largely blue collar eastern European and Hispanic neighborhood. It had just been redone and had these great hardwood floors, but in order to have a studio in it I went and got the foam that you are supposed to line your cabinets with that you can get rolls and rolls of at the dollar store. So I lined the entire room with this foam, and then I put plastic tarping on top of it. So there really wasn’t a lot of space or a lot of freedom to work and make things. A large part of me moving to the Midwest was to have this space. I missed the flatlands. There was no room to do large scale installations. I did some set building in New York, but when I asked these companies about space to do these projects, it was just impossible.
Have you always had an interest in carpentry?
No, I’m actually a really terrible carpenter. I was never trained in any carpentry so I’m really bad at it—getting better though. You just shim things together and learn as you go and I’ve had help. I’ve always been very good at barter, labor for labor, or six pack for labor.
How did you start your whole artistic practice?
I came into college as a painter. I painted people a lot. I painted people with objects a lot. I did a project in high school about the people in my life and the objects that they held dear to them and treasured. I think about that sometimes when I come back to this thread of how physical nonliving objects and entities, surroundings, end up talking a lot about the people who are associated with
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them. So I came in as a painter, but in my program, I knew that I could work in any media that I wanted to. The sculpture professor, John Watson, gave the best critiques I thought. He had a lot of energy. I ended up switching to sculpture because I knew that he would work me the hardest and I would be the most challenged there. The switch was very difficult because I hadn’t worked in 3D before. I still have an interest in painting. There is a lot of collage work, things like that, and I think that, as you talk to contemporary artists, we don’t really define ourselves by media in a lot of ways. When I am working on a particular project, it’s always some combination of writing, reading, collage and material explorations, with painting and building—things like that.
Is there anything you have read or taken inspiration in your work because it seems like you may have some ties into Buddhism or related philosophical thoughts. Where do your ideas come from?
There are a ton of influences. I’m reading a book called Memory of Place: The Phenomenology of the Uncanny, by a scholar named Dylan Trigg. He actually spoke here last semester, and he deals with a lot of the same conceptual threads that I deal with in my work. So that’s been really wonderful. Poetics of Space by Bachellard—the definitive work on human nature of place—our connections as humans to our surroundings and our constructed surroundings and domestic space. That’s something that I am interested in. I’m reading about performance theory and history right now. One of the best has been Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repetoire. And novels, short stories, poetry.
You talked a little in your artist statement about being interested in memory as well. Is that from something that you read?
I read a lot about memory. I think that I am turned off from talking about “memory” because I think it often has a very gendered connotation. As a woman it’s hard to talk about memory without someone thinking you are talking about nostalgia or sentimentality. I do a lot of work that is about memory. I think that memory and loss and the construction of place as an accumulation of all of the places we have ever been is very central to my work—The way that memory is held in space, how history accumulates, where memory turns into history, what is lost, what is added. Who gets to decide, etc.
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2
Des Moines
Iowa
senioM seD
awoI
des moines, iowa
notes to self:
Fire paintings happened, partly because of the spaces I had just left in St. Louis, but also because the house didn’t have a fire alarm and I could start large fires in the basement without consequence. Easy access to water too.
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FIRE PAINTINGS
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des moines, iowa
Untitled 2010 Polyurethane, Acrylic paint, charcoal, casting sand, plastic wrap, mixed media, on canvas 24� x 18�
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jess kiel-wornson
Fire Painting #45 2010 Polyurethane, Acrylic paint, charcoal, casting sand, plastic wrap, mixed media, on canvas 24� x 18�
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des moines, iowa
Fire Painting #4837 2010 Polyurethane, Acrylic paint, charcoal, casting sand, plastic wrap, mixed media, on canvas 24� x 18�
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jess kiel-wornson
Untitled 2010 Polyurethane, Acrylic paint, charcoal, casting sand, plastic wrap, mixed media, on canvas 24� x 18�
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des moines, iowa
Untitled 2010 Polyurethane, Acrylic paint, charcoal, casting sand, plastic wrap, mixed media, on canvas 24� x 18�
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jess kiel-wornson
Untitled 2009 Polyurethane, Acrylic paint, charcoal, casting sand, plastic wrap, mixed media, on canvas 24� x 18�
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des moines, iowa
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jess kiel-wornson
Untitled 2009 Polyurethane, Acrylic paint, charcoal, casting sand, plastic wrap, mixed media, on canvas 16� x 16�
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des moines, iowa
Untitled 2009 Polyurethane, Acrylic paint, charcoal, casting sand, plastic wrap, mixed media, on canvas 24� x 18�
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an interview with jess kiel-wornson part 2
des moines, iowa
Can you pinpoint a certain moment when you decided to explore these concepts (memory)?
It was more moments where I discovered threads through everything that I was making. I remember in 2007 being in my apartment, a beautiful little duplex in St. Louis, and I was just terribly bored. I don’t remember what was going on but I pulled out this trunk of stuff that I had been collecting over the years and I started to glue it together and made three little assemblages. I think that that marked the start of the way that I work now. I just pulled out one of these little sculptures and I have it in my studio now. It’s beautiful and silly and just this associative exploration of these things that I have collected over the years with various levels of meaning, and at the time it was literally just sitting on the floor of my apartment spread eagle thinking, “I don’t know what to do,” and yeah, I don’t think it was a moment but I do definitely come back very regularly to specific themes.
You have a lot of pieces that incorporate staircases. Can you explain the meaning behind that?
Staircases are something that I always come back to. They are a place I go when I don’t know what else to do in my practice. I am realizing this anxiety cycle of making and making, believing that I am never going to make again and going through this visceral process where I really think that my art practice is completely over. I really think that I am not going to make again. The stairs are something that have really brought me out of that. I’m afraid of heights and I am specifically really scared of stairs. I have a lot of dreams about stairs and being stuck at the top of a staircase and not being able to get down. The first one I made was at a little gallery called Drive-By, in the Cherokee neighborhood in St. Louis. I had just had this beautiful frightening dream about stairs and that was Dream with Stairs #1. They have always been a good point to come back to and they have shown me other things that are happening, so it’s like I have this form or formula to come back to. It’s like I don’t know what else to do, so I’ll just make some stairs, and when I make them it reveals a lot of other things that bring me out a little bit. Recently, it was suggested to me that I had been talking about stairs and roads. I am interested in hallways—and these are all transitional spaces, in between, which I like to think of when I think of the stairs
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now—the places where things collect incidentally while moving from one point to another. A lot of them are spread out, but there are two that are right next to each other, 3 and 4 I think. That was when I was living in Virginia and I was doing a workshop at Virginia Commonwealth University, just before New York City, and I did two similar projects right in a row. Still in the same vein as being lost and thinking about moving from one place to another, that transitional or disregarded spaces also collect, and bind. The second and third Dream with Stairs were in Virginia—fitting, as I was very much in transition in my life. Virginia was a pit stop between the Midwest and moving to New York. Dream with Stairs #3 was a funny one because the night before it opened (part of an exhibition Agent Form) the Fire Marshal came in, shut me down telling me to take everything down because I had built everything in this tiny room and it was blocking the sprinkler system. So I had to tear the entire thing down the night before and start completely over. It ended up being better than it was the first time, but it was terrible, I was up all night. So many tears, so much working, but it ended up being really great. A friend of mine drove down from New York, he rented a car and drove down that night and helped create this piece, so that one is subtitled the Death of a Fire Marshal. The most recent one was outdoors at a residency in Maryland, just outside of Baltimore. The landlord at this residency that I was staying at came and tore the stairs down ages before so this door was leading out into the abyss on the second story. Just led out into nothing. It was also an interesting place to be in because the people who were running the residency, who are very dear to me, very wonderful people, they were having a hard time in the place that they were, and the work that they were doing. There was just a lot of tension in the space and I called this one Don’t Worry I’ll Fix It and I think almost subconsciously it was a moment of trying to deal with all of these breakages. All of these things that you could feel and sense breaking down around you, trying to put something together and knowing that its not going to go to the door where it should go, it’s going to shift over and end up somewhere else.
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des moines, iowa
Do you have a plan when you begin to build or do you build as you go?
I’m trying to get better about planning. It starts with some combination of writing nowadays, or some combination of text and drawings, and there are plans but it never ends up being exactly what it was intended to be. I don’t do well with the whole “I’m just gonna play and see what happens,” I do need to have some guideline to follow.
Do you reuse pieces, or buy them specifically for projects?
I cannibalize a lot. I’ve moved a lot in the last couple years, so I’ve gotten good at just tearing it down and just being done with it and letting it go. It’s hard to leave materials behind. I’m haunted by the things I’ve thrown out or left behind—materials, objects. I am generally pretty bad about documentation and need to improve.
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3
richmond
Virginia
dnomhcir
ainigriV
richmond, virginia
notes to self:
I decided to leave all my materials behind and see what happened. it was disastrous. I didn’t know what to do with myself. Not surrounded by my things, and without direction. I wanted to make big things but didn’t know which direction to go, I didn’t know what those “big things” were supposed to look like. I wanted to respond to all the southern architecture but couldn’t find a starting point— which I imagine was due to the sort of paralysis being away from my “things”— there seemed to be nothing from which a conversation could begin. Times of discomfort or this sort of paralysis, the stairs come back.
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Dream
with stairs
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richmond, virginia
Dream with Stairs #1 2009 Reclaimed wood and hardware
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richmond, virginia
Dream with Stairs #2 (Summer in the South) 2010 Reclaimed wood and hardware 16’ x 10’ x 12’
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jess kiel-wornson
Dream with Stairs #2 (Summer in the South) 2010 Reclaimed wood and hardware 16’ x 10’ x 12’
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richmond, virginia
Dream with Stairs #3 (Death of a Fire Marshall) 2010 Reclaimed wood and hardware 10’ x 9’ x 14’
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jess kiel-wornson
Dream with Stairs #3 (Death of a Fire Marshall) 2010 Reclaimed wood and hardware 10’ x 9’ x 14’
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richmond, virginia
Dream with Stairs #4 (Don’t Worry, I’ll Fix It) 2012 Reclaimed wood and hardware 12’ x 7’ x 8’
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jess kiel-wornson
Dream with Stairs #4 (Don’t Worry, I’ll Fix It) 2012 Reclaimed wood and hardware 12’ x 7’ x 8’
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richmond, virginia
Epilogue 63
jess kiel-wornson
Epilogue 2010 Drywall, eggshells, lumber, hardware, interior latex paint 12’ x 2’ x 2½’
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richmond, virginia
Epilogue (detail) 2010 Drywall, eggshells, lumber, hardware, interior latex paint 12’ x 2’ x 2½’
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jess kiel-wornson
Epilogue (detail) 2010 Drywall, eggshells, lumber, hardware, interior latex paint 12’ x 2’ x 2½’
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an interview with jess kiel-wornson part 3
jess kiel-wornson
What excites you right now?
I did a project this last summer at St Louis at my old university; it was a really neat project. They had three of their alumni who were, at the time, chosen in their first year of their MFA programs. They were all asked to curate in another person from their program and so it was. It ended up being this collection of us who had gone through this program at totally different times. I did an installation for this project called Building Home. I built a wall in the gallery, making the space look about 8 ft narrower, with a door that took the viewer into a series of two rooms. The first room was a sort of formal and narrative accumulation of all the places I had ever thought of as “home,” then the viewer walks through that to another door. It was high off the ground, sort of surreal, and walks through it into another room where they are prompted to describe a place they “knew well”—a home. The idea was that all these stories and memories stack on top of one another, that their descriptions would be influenced by the room they had just passed through that was made up of my homes. Accumulation. That was interesting, though I’m still grappling with it. The most recent project I did was a series of corridors I built called Ruin and Trace: Stranger’s Stories, and that was a lot of thinking about narrative and the way that place and choices can be made physical. It was about memory and how we move through space and very much about these spaces where evidence about human interaction collects incidentally—as opposed to how the living room is set up with your collections, the things that you want to show about your life. Your hallways, stairs and basements end up being all of the things that you are not totally interested in, or even are hiding, storing away, so those spaces tell a different story. That piece is entered through a busted out hole in the wall—a doorway that has been dry walled over and broken through. You walk in through this corridor and there is an old slide projector on a shelf. It makes a very visceral sound for me, and gives off heat, and then the images are projected onto the wall but they are all blurred and distorted. You have the image that you are walking down this very narrow hallway and there is a heater, so at this point you turn and look back out the other direction. You reach an area where you must turn and if you turn
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to your right you come to a ladder where a plum line hangs. If you climb the ladder, you kick the plumb line with your foot and it makes this great resonant dong. At the top there is a set of keys on a ribbon and a note that you can’t read from below. You can see that there is one and there is also a deck of cards, so in theory it baits you to climb up this ladder. And you climb up and there is a lock through the ceiling and you look through these cards and there are these notes and one reads, “one of these is yours, you should take it with you.” The cards are playing cards that have old snapshots glued to the back of them. So you come back down the ladder with your card and you come back out the hallway. You go to the right again and there is a third hallway. You can pull your way through all of these curtains and it will lead you outside, a process of revealing until you get to the end of the hallway—outside. You go through this whole labyrinth only to end up in a cold, grey, parking lot. I did a few iterations of this; in one I took the curtains out and replaced them with doors. There was a music box in one. The more that I think about it, the more it becomes a fairly simple metaphor.
Is the narrowness of the hallways meant to make you feel trapped?
It ended up being a claustrophobic experience when I was in critique with it. There was an enormous number of people who came, but when I first built it I thought of it as a solitary experience. I thought of it as people coming in one at a time, or two or three at a time, and I thought about making the narrowness not as much claustrophobic, but to make you very aware of the physical space that you were in. You couldn’t see quite where you were going when you would make these turns, that was a big part of it. I was thinking about ways to make narrative physical, thinking about when you tell a story and the person starts out on this path, point A to point B, and either point B shifts to somewhere else or something happens where the character has to veer off course and go somewhere else. It’s another piece I continue to grapple with.
Is “moving from point” A to point B taken from a personal experience?
Yeah, I guess that is part of it. When I left New York I had a fiancé, and that relationship ended shortly after I left. After I had gotten into graduate school, it felt
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like it very much changed the course of my life. So I don’t know if that was a direct response to that but it is something that I had been thinking about in terms of the way that we set up and plan out our lives, and the different directions we take and the places we end up in unexpectedly.
Do you have any work directly influenced by the break up?
Yeah, the big break up piece was Everything Until Then. It is something that I am most interested in: seeing how it would be taken apart. This project started because I just had this big collection of stuff, and it wasn’t stuff that was necessarily associated with this relationship. It was just stuff that I had been collecting my whole life. Little trash and knick-knacks and everything else, and when this split happened with me and my partner, it felt like I had lost this future entirely. That all of the things that I had been building and moving toward suddenly seemed very far away and adrift. That they were in my way and I had to get rid of them, but I had to come to terms with the idea of throwing them away or burying them. So I sent out an email, and at the time I was also thinking about distance and what it meant to be distant to people and to have connections with people, and he and I had had all of these phone conversations that felt far away and I felt like every time I got off the phone I felt further away from him. So I was thinking about the ways that we try to connect with people over great physical distance, and the way that technology plays a part in that. I sent out an email to anyone that I had ever had any internet correspondence with. We had to have stood in the same room before, not necessarily that we had to have been in the room together, but we had been in the same place before. Mostly that ended up being friends and Facebook friends and people I had gone to school with. The most distant people I sent it to were people that I had worked with, but there was an artist named Kate Casanova— she was a graduate student at the University of Minnesota. I sent her an email asking her about the program, so I had an internet correspondence set up, and had never met her, but I knew that I had been in that university and that gallery, so I knew we had been in the same room. I sent this email out very vaguely asking people to take part in
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this process, I then set up a constant live feed that showed a room where I was building all of these objects up into a wall (the objects I was trying to get rid of) and everyone that had been invited by email could visit this live feed whenever they wanted, day or night, and they could see what was going on with it—with the process, with the objects. I wanted us all to have the opportunity to virtually share a space. I did this for 10 days and it ended on a specific day but not a particularly specific time. I was interested in the shiftiness of the way that our memories capture moments: “This happened on this day, but was it a Monday or a Tuesday, or was it a day” because you remember parts of things but often not the expected parts. During the live feed, the invited people were asked to leave a physical address, somewhere I could send them a “piece of these converging and diverging histories.” Ultimately out of nearly 500 people, 97 responded with addresses. So after the live feed I divided the objects up into 97 collections and built a box for each collection. The boxes were built out of fragments of the wall that I just built and broken into on the live feed. I then made a book, archiving the process, the responses, the collections, and the boxes, and each box was delivered to its new address. About half the boxes I had delivered and half I sent through USPS. Two boxes went overseas; one was lost on delivery. A few people responded with concern (having forgotten about the whole thing), and all with surprise. Some with delight. There were so many different parts and it happened so fast and with so much crazy going on that I am still clearly having a hard time talking about it in a sensible progression.
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4
queens new york
sneeuq kroy wen
queens, new york
notes to self:
Here I unpacked really, I started to collect again. I was happy to buy materials because I was there indefinitely. I lived with other artists and packrats to acquiring discards was no trouble. The work had to be small, and contained, no fire paintings. It couldn’t need clean space because that was impossible in that space, or much light. Power tools were difficult because there was no ventilation. This is where I began to revist wall-hanging works, collage and paintings. No space to build, but also no space to store. upon leaving work... It was good to go small for a bit.
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other rooms
near to me 78
queens, new york
Pocketfull 2011 Mixed media collage 6” x 10”
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jess kiel-wornson
Untitled 2011 Mixed media collage 6� x 10�
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queens, new york
She is Almost a Mirror 2011 Mixed media collage 6” x 10”
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queens, new york
Untitled
2011
Mixed media collage 6” x 10”
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jess kiel-wornson
Untitled 2011 Mixed media collage 4� x 6�
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queens, new york
Logical Fallacy I 2011 Mixed media collage 6” x 10”
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an interview with jess kiel-wornson part 4
queens, new york
Did the process (Everything Until Then) help you at all?
I don’t think about art as therapy, but I guess it is and has to be to an extent. I think that it was something that I needed to do, but, I don’t know that it helped. I didn’t make it to help. It may be disingenuous to say that I didn’t make it as therapy, because part of me just needed to have these objects out of my life. I was just looking through a bunch of notes that I was taking at the very beginning of this, when I was first thinking of this process, and in the notes there were all of these moments where I said how do I make this something more than “I need to get rid of this shit, will you take it from me?” and “will you take this piece of my sad sack past,” “take my broken heart.” My sister didn’t want a box because she knew too much about it; she brought me through the whole thing. She ended up signing up for one anyway. It became about connection and about empathy and about transferring objects through space and the way that memory and hope move through place and time. There is a video associated with it, taken from footage from the live feed. It’s music and a story about leaving New York, mailing my stuff out of the city trying to package up my stuff and my life and love and move it across the country. Like that ever works. The piece felt huge, ultimately, it still feels huge. I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever made. I hope that doesn’t remain true for very long.
What is something that you are working on now?
I am at the very beginning of a project right now that is a piece based on a ghost town in Indiana. There is a restoration project there in an old oak savannah that is part of a greater prairie restoration project through The Nature Conservancy. One of these woods has the remains of a town that was built up at the turn of the century, early 1900s, by a woman named Jenny Conrad. She had all of these bizarre little soap opera-like dramas with her family and her neighbors, apparently. The writing on it is pretty strange—local histories usually are. I am interested in the way that this town was built up by this one woman in order to support her hog farm—the railroad was going through the area so she convinced them to pass it near her farm if she built a train depot. So she started a town to support her business—a brick factory, train depot, school, processing
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facilities, a hotel for folks doing business with her… So anyway, she builds this town and it crumbles after she dies, and I am interested in the way that these very small personal relationships and personal feuds and transgressions and dramas had this effect on the social and political and industrial and economic development of the area. But also it is hugely environmentally degrading. They dammed up the river and all of this wildlife that used to be there is no longer there, so it had this enormous in environmental impact on the area, and it seems so silly, but I’m interested in that scope and the way that we remember it and the way that we think about it. And that investment as a woman in that time was very strong and now there is this other reinvestment by this small group of people who are also really interested in that area, and in restoring it and all of these histories. I’m working on the research portion of that right now, and will be working hopefully with some dancers, and musicians, and hopefully make it into this combination performance theater thing too. These dancers that I’m hoping to work with are also visual artists and conceptual artists and really wonderful thinkers. I am really interested in these immersive experiences. At some point my installations turned into areas where I wanted people to be able to interact with the space and that leads quickly into performance work, and making things happen in space. I’ve done a couple performance pieces in the past; I took a performance art class with Deke Weaver, an absolutely phenomenal performance artist, and an incredible person. I would encourage anyone to take it if you have the opportunity to do so, so I did some performance in there, and the video and live stream from Everything Until Then was a very performative piece, even though I didn’t think of it as such at the time. But it certainly was. Knowing that you are on a live camera… There was an interesting moment where my dad went to visit it and was very confused about the internet part of it—I was using JTV to host it and he saw all of these comments from like internet trollers, and my poor father was just standing there being horrified at the things that people say about videos on the internet, and yeah, if you put something like this out there into the world there are going to be guys who say
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stupid shit. It was interesting to see how it fed into these audiences that I had not intended initially. I’m newly interested in that stuff.
Are you more interested in installation work than painting at this point?
Yeah, I am doing some collage work right now that I am really excited about, but I think about it as part of the research for this larger project. Increasingly it becomes, not necessarily, but it could be. I guess I think of them as the same body of work, but not necessarily the same piece.
What movies do you like, recommend, or inspire you?
I watched a really great series recently called Les Revenants. It’s on Netflix. It’s a zombie show and it’s a beautiful French series about this small mountain town and it’s full of all this incredible modernist architecture that is crumbling. It’s present day, but these people start coming back from the dead and they don’t know that they’ve died, and it’s actually very sad. There’s nothing gruesome or scary about it, its just about them trying to make space for themselves, and their loved ones having to tell them that they’ve died and then trying to make space for them in their lives presently. So this beautiful architecture and eerie mountain landscape is the perfect poetic backdrop for this incredibly sad story that is full of loss and haunting, and the impossibility of the notion that people “live on in our memories”—well they don’t, not really. Memory is a very strong and important thing, but memory as such is not the equivalent of a human and all of the experience in their own memories and their own moments that have come with them. So I love that this show complicates these notions of loss and haunting and humanity, which are things that we as humans notoriously oversimplify. I think about that show a lot. I’ve been watching a lot of Tarkovsky movies, one called Nostalghia that is really beautiful and also very much about space and possibility and haunting and people having a tough time negotiating the world. I was a big Twin Peaks fan once upon a time. I don’t know why I thought to bring that one up.
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CHAMPAIGN
ILLINOIS
NGIAPMAHC
SIONILLI
champaign, illinois
notes:
Humanity as it is held within place, constructed spaces specifically, we understand ourselves and our surroundings in relation to one another. The understanding of that connectivity, myself standing on this balcony, across the street from that bar, looking through this window into this home, inside which all of these things happen that make me me, and these other people them, and all of us are composites of these places—the implications and results of this connectivity, of person and place, place and memory, time and transference—these are the basis of my investigations as an artist.
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everything until then 96
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Narration taken from youtube video of Everything Until Then live feed. December 2014. I left New York in November. We packed up the things I was taking with me, mostly books and tools, into all these little flat-rate boxes from the post office. The boxes sat stacked in our apartment, blocking the couch, for weeks maybe. We shipped the boxes a few days before I was supposed to go. I remember walking them to the post office. A neighbor offered his hand truck another neighbor offered her shopping cart. We muddled down the street, uneasily, laughing at how absurd we looked, overtaken by the weight of all these boxes, sliding and catching. There is satisfaction in mailing so many boxes, a sense of relief. We went back home and when I left a few days later, it was with just a suitcase. Our home still furnished, the things I needed en route to my sister’s house, where I would be living. When I arrived at her house the flat-rate boxes were stacked in a corner. I didn’t pay them much attention for the first weeks I was there. I wasn’t reading or making, so there they sat until one day it was pointed out to me that one of the boxes arrived empty. I picked it up and one side of the box was torn open. A sort of violent tear, not just at a seam, but a hole. What struck me about it though was that someone, some postal worker between Queens and Des Moines had bothered to tape up the hole, to mend the broken box and send it along its way — empty. Such a strange thing to do. I put the box back in its stack then, refusing to unpack any of the boxes now. I didn’t want to know what was in there, what I had lost. I ignored it and stewed on it, and I thought about a box full of tools and books and photos bursting open in a parking lot somewhere. Hershell B. Chipp’s Theories of Modern Art laying on the ground next to my photographs and pliers. Maybe someone picked it up, maybe they took it home and read it, or gave it away. Maybe someone needed pliers. Maybe there is some postal lost and found box where those things end up. It hadn’t occurred to me when I left New York, to be concerned about whether or not the boxes would arrive, packed up with my life. In my head, those things would cross this distance intact without question, we would cross this distance, our lives could spread out over such space. Everything would move about in the world as planned, I hadn’t thought to worry that they might not make it, I hadn’t thought of what might be lost.
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(Pages 98-109) EUT detail from book
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Everything Until Then Installation view at Figure 1 Gallery in Champaign, Illinois 2014 97 drywall boxes, film, book
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Everything Until Then Box 2014 Drywall, found objects, paper
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dust scrolls
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Dust Scrolls: Space that Binds is an ongoing work of collection. It is an effort to find the physicality of memory and to gather the power of place. Each panel begins with a visual memory from within a room— a shaft of light over sheets, through blinds, the sense of displacement created by a window’s reflection— and is stacked upon other memories from other places, blending and growing with the space it inhabits. Each time these panels are hung, they collect the dust and the light, the new lines and memories of the space, creating an increasingly vast, shifting, landscape that parallels the construction of memory. The Dust Scrolls guide us through an inherently intertwined memory, remind us of the uneasy terrain that grows within and without us, that binds us inevitably to one another and to a rich and indifferent human landscape.
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Glass Panes, Astoria to Present. From the series Dust Scrolls, the Space that Binds, 2014 ongoing. Dust from each installation site, graphite on parchment, tape, mixed media, 9’ x 11’.
(Right) Glass Panes, Astoria to Present. From the series Dust Scrolls, the Space that Binds (detail), 2014 ongoing. Dust from each installation site, graphite on parchment, tape, mixed media, 9’ x 11’.
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Glass Panes, Astoria Fire Painting 2000 to Present From series Dust Scrolls, the Space Binds This isthe a fire painting. New York was athat lot of dust from each installation site, graphite onwithout parchthings. New York was hard. I went there ment, mixed media a lot oftape, direction. I moved and stayed with a 9’ x 11’of mine in Astoria for a couple of months. friend 2014 ongoing 115
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Glass Panes, Astoria to Present. From the series Dust Scrolls, the Space that Binds (detail), 2014 ongoing. Dust from each installation site, graphite on parchment, tape, mixed media, 9’ x 11’.
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Glass Panes, Astoria to Present. From the series Dust Scrolls, the Space that Binds (detail), 2014 ongoing. Dust from each installation site, graphite on parchment, tape, mixed media, 9’ x 11’.
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an interview with jess kiel-wornson part 5 (final)
jess kiel-wornson
Do you have any other hobbies outside of art making?
I was just thinking about that, I don’t think I have enough hobbies. I love to travel, you know. My family did a lot of traveling and just being outside, and I had a lot of privacy as a kid. My mother grew up with eight brothers and sisters, so I think when she raised my sister and me, it was very important to her that we have a lot of privacy and a lot of our own time. We lived in town in Des Moines, but we were backed up to these woods and a creek so I had a lot of exploration time and a lot of time to nest. I built a lot of forts and made a lot of spaces for myself. I guess I started my artistic practice as it is now long ago, you just never think of it as that, right? Yeah, exactly, we all do. I always try to take up knitting or something, but, I don’t know, I just watch a lot of movies in the winter, not all fancy pants movies. I gave you my “interview movies.” I’m not telling you what I am going to go home and watch tonight. I like music that tells a good story. I listen to a lot of old country, actually. A lot of old Waylon Jennings and Patsy Cline, Feron Young, Merle Haggard and those guys, and the outlaw ballad guys like Johnny Cash, There is a band called Shovels and Rope that I have been really excited about recently, But it’s a lot of ballads; I like good story telling, Nick Cave and Tom Waits are two of my great musical loves, this really incredible poetry. The thing that I love about a lot of those musicians is the way that the song is sung, the things the lyrics say, and then the instrumentals, they all come together to make it completely different than the sum of its parts—gestalt—so it’s not just all of those things coming together, it becomes something greater than that, something complicated and difficult. That is really exciting and that is something that I am really thinking about when doing some of these multimedia works and getting into performance. I want to be able to tell a story that can’t just be told through words, or just with images, or just with sounds, or just with space; I want all of those things to feed into each other to become something greater than that. I sometimes listen to music when I am working, like when I am building, or when I am doing things I don’t have to think about. I’m not one to listen to music constantly. There are some people that really need to have sound all the
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time, and I have a lot of quiet time, and I have a lot of trouble tuning music out. My father is a musician, so think there was always this assumption that we were always listening to music, which wasn’t really the case because music was very involved, you were very focused on the music when we were listening to music. When we listened to music, that was the thing we were doing, and sometimes we were sitting around and we were talking and singing too and people were playing instruments and stuff, but it was an activity, it was never background noise, and I think that has come into my adult life and into my artistic practice pretty significantly.
Where do you see yourself after you graduate?
This is my second year at UIUC, or third semester, so I am half way done. I have no idea where I want to be or what I want to be doing after this. I have started over the last several years to make a list— I’ve always been a list maker— and I have started a list of things that I know that I want, things that I think that I want, and things that in a perfect fantasy world I would have. And I keep all of these lists going and the things that I am certain of are that I want to make and show art, and I want to be part of an art community and a contemporary art conversation. I know that I need to have that for the rest of my life. I also know that I want to have a great deal of land; I would like to live in the country, and that is as long as that list is right now. Those are the only two things that I want. I think that I like teaching but it makes me very nervous. That first thing, that is the most important thing, will fall by the way side, in order to teach, so I have to figure out if I can negotiate that or not. But I don’t know, I don’t think that I want to live in New York; I might want to live overseas. I could live everywhere. I spent a lot of time in Mexico growing up. I was there in December and definitely had this fantasy of just giving up my life and moving to the beach and make fucking jewelry out of sea glass, and I could be so happy; it would be so good. So sometimes I fantasize about that and then I think that I would probably get bored and I’d want to do this and that… I don’t think that I will actually end up doing something like that. I want to spend more time in Eastern
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Europe; I want to check that out. I lived in Vienna for a while and had a really amazing experience there, really met a lot of interesting people, and had a lot of interesting relationships and experiences; it was all bizarre and wonderful. I’m not committed to any of it. I could go anywhere. I want to spend some time after I graduate traveling around the US. I haven’t done enough traveling within the states. There is a lot of really incredible culture and subculture in this country and I would like to know more about them for sure. I think it is really interesting what our brains pick up. They cling on to these other things and it makes this entirely new idea that is inseparable from the what is real. What I am most interested in is thinking about the way that public and private inhabited space collects us as humans and how we are built up in these rooms that we inhabit, and what that means about inhabiting a shared world. I don’t really think of people as individuals as much as these manifestations of one another and the places they’ve been and the things that they’ve done, and so that connectivity is really important to my work and thinking about those networks, if that makes sense. Sometimes you go into a building and you can feel that something is off or you can feel these presences, and they are real. I don’t have any religious background or anything like that but I do think that history does build physically in places, and I think that my home is what it is in my mind as a result of all the other homes that I’ve ever had. It is all accumulating on top of one another and everybody else who has every lived in the apartment that I live in now, they are there too in a way. I have certain personal motivations for work, and that’s not exactly what I want the viewer to get out of it. Everything Until Then for me was very much about the loss of this person and this life trajectory that I had planned with him, but by my putting it out into the world, I didn’t need anyone else to know that. I didn’t need the people on the other end to know that that was what I was doing. They knew that there was a loss, I think I noted it as a shift and with that shift a future was lost. One way that my life could have gone was lost in that shift, and
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they knew that, but that was all that they knew. Some people knew; my poor sister that had to prop me up and put me in the kiddie pool on her back deck for three months, was aware. We had a ghost in the first house that we grew up in, and I loved this house; it was so beautiful, but there was totally a ghost living there. It was super friendly and fine and it was never problematic, like it was very clearly haunted but also very clearly okay. We all coexisted with one another’s histories and problems and traumas and whatever. I don’t think of haunting as such an odd notion.
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where i’m going
erehw gniog m’i
where i’m going
notes:
As for goals for the semester, I would like to work on figuring out the critical points of these considerations: the risks, what is at stake, why I care about these things, why I think other people should care about these things, and how much it actually comes through in the work‌I would also like to just be making more work, small concept work or sketches/collage etc. A smaller practice supporting a larger one. And lastly, I have the very beginnings of a larger scale multimedia project that I hope to complete by next fall and begin research/making now.
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How much space you keep after you die, what a hotel might be in a memory, how a disagreeable woman builds, 2015. Inkjet print of xerox collage, 32” x 24”. 32” x 24”. 130
where i’m going
What might have happened in the basement, the place where a tree stands that used to be a dresser, what a local historian and a fashion photographer share, how a town in also a ghost, 2015. Inkjet print of xerox collage, 24” x 32”.
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What it is to spy and what the building already knows, 2015. Four digital prints of ongoing installation, 16” x 24”.
(Right) What it is to spy and what the building already knows, 2015. Four digital prints of ongoing installation, 16” x 24”.
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Conrad Savannah ghost town project, 2015 ongoing.
(pages 138-139) Collage research for Conrad Savannah ghost town project
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about this book
This book was designed in the Spring of 2015 by Meme Betadam. The typefaces used are Arno Pro, Orator Std, and Homestead. A kind thank you to the following people: Jess Kiel-Wornson for her time and willingness to make this book possible Matt Peterson for his supervision and editing of this book Kaity Tighe for her collaboration and support Jack Geist for editing the interview Lance Dixon at Dixon Graphics in Champaign, Illinois for printing this book Christopher Hohn and Tedra Ashley-Wannemuehler at Lincoln Bookbindery in Urbana, Illinois for the sewn hardcover binding Sue Steinfeldt at the Illini Union Bookstore in Champaign, Illinois for the softcover perfect binding
All artwork Š Jess Kiel-Wornson