Process Magazine // Issue 2 // August 2009

Diana Lozano Talia Perry Mania Taryn Wiens Sara Haley Micah Hesse

Conversations About the Creative Process // Issue 2 // August 2009 // prcss.com

John-Elio Reitman

PROCESS2

Audrey Snyder

PROC 2

CESS2 3

Audrey Snyder

feed the local squirrels on her block. The

ture projects: if it can’t be right, it should

key word is “local”. If she suspects there

at least be epic.

is an outsider squirrel mooching off of the bread soaked in sugar water that she throws at them to enjoy, she gets mindbendingly angry and violent. What does this have to do with ART? How about this?

Da Vinci would have done the same thing

Mania resides in New York City where he

I’ll bet.

attends the Cooper Union School of Art.

John-Elio Reitman

Mania

“Dianamite” would rather put so

Through his art he seeks to raise a voice

much Kool-Aid mix into lake Okeechobee

against the society’s “quiet desperation”.

that it becomes one huge soft drink, and

In doing so, he explores the boundaries

so throw off our world’s economy, than

between gallery art and street art. He uses

to go even one minute not holding a

printmaking, spray paint, and mixed me-

paint brush sopping with paint. That’s not

dia techniques to question the pervasive

selfishness, that’s reality.

apathy of modern society. He focuses on

themes such as the impermanence of the

Just be quiet for a second. Diana

has more talent drooling from her swollen

human condition, the ephemeral nature

art pores located all over her hands and

of art, and the lessons of tragic historical

neck than you’ve got in your entire shell

events.

of a body. You’d better understand this.

Einstein would have, and he invented everything that Thomas Edison didn’t invent. Though I highly, highly suspect

Taryn Wiens

john-elio reitman hails from canada. he

Edison would have known this too (There

passes his time eating, taking pictures,

is sadly no way to prove that about Edi-

biking, drawing, making music, swim-

son).

ming, and hanging out with his little

brother. he will be attending the cooper

teenth twentieth centuries. Thank you for

and she makes stop-motion in my

union in september 2009. he is also tall.

your future choice of Diana”

bedroom and she tacks Anthropologie

Edison lived during the nine-

Written by Kyra Wiens, sister Taryn is an adventurer. She makes crepes

catalogue kitchen pages to her wall and

Diana Lozano Diana Lozano is a 17 year old Colombian heiress and will be attending The Cooper Union this fall, class of 2013.

Best Regards,

is learning to do flips off the diving board.

“I’m going to miss you when you’re in Ne-

Scott Armetta

pal,” I say. “They don’t even have internet.

Or toilet paper.” “Oh, they have internet!”

Talia Perry

she says. “But yeah, probably not toilet paper.” But before she goes, she returns to Colorado and takes a picture of the playground where I cut my lip and she learned

Extended bio written by Scott Armetta, Painting

Talia Perry is happiest working on hun-

the word FUCK, and they’re in a blue sepia

Instructor at AW Dreyfoos School of Arts, in the

dreds of things simultaneously and finds

that feels nostalgic. “It’s so much smaller

format of a recommendation letter.

it difficult to read one sentence, let alone

than I remember,” she says.

one book, at a time. Excessive reading Dear Dr. Colleges,

at a young age has made her appreciate

There are some people that you meet,

puns and obscure references, much to the

and you just know they have to breathe

dismay of family and friends. After having

to stay alive. Diana Lozano is one of those

an assignment declared a “spectacular

people. Every day, two hours before the

failure”, she made it a personal goal to

has been told that she is “both outgoing

crack of dawn, she makes it her duty to

achieve this sort of non-success in all fu-

and quiet&shy...bookish...

4

Sara Haley

and at the same time...like california girls calling out the boys to beach volleyball...”

Her art can be described as the information-loving, teenage equivelant to fingerpainting; its all just about figuring stuff out, squishing materials together, making a gawdawful mess, prying the paper from the coated tabletop and observing the

PROCESS2 Conversations About the Creative Process // Issue 2 // August 2009 // prcss.com

blankness in its place.

Sara is an avid collector of

mostly small and scrappy things: matter, information, emotion, dotted connections in-between. It is her goal to make these connection lines more tangible.

Editor’s Note

Casey Gollan

She wants everything to feel really real,

This one almost killed me. I think I’m done with maga-

striving so sincerely for her clear vision of

zines forever. Just kidding. But I do want to move on to

Practicality that from an outside perspec-

video, collaboration, etc. Instead of a note about this

tive she may seem at times “crazy.” She’s

issue, here are assorted notes about, vaguely related to,

not great at presenting herself as one

or occurring during the process of putting together it

cohesive body, but sara haley Can make

together, probably all too crazy to make sense of:

a mean coconut broccoli stir-fry. She’s 5’3”. She has dirty blonde hair, green eyes, a delectably average build, Celebrity friends, and a great personality. Please email her a picture of yourself at sarahaleyart@yahoo.com and she will print it out and put it on her wall in college because she thinks you’re just fantastic.

Micah Hesse Hello. My name is Micah. I was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I grew up in wonderful Copenhagen, Denmark. Then I went to high school in London. And now I am going to New York.

The work that I do takes shape

in a range on media that I can narrow down to about anything that doesn’t include paints. I am a big fan of light and movement, and enjoy mixing them up. It happens that I let chance do some of my work for me because I am also a big fan of serendipity.

I hope you’ll have a look at my

photographs in the back of this fantastic magazine, or take a look at the website.

5

1. CONVER 6

RSATIONS Audrey Snyder / p. 8

John Elio Reitman /p.22 Diana Lozano /p.34 Talia Perry / p.42 Mania / p. 52 Taryn Wiens / p. 60

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Photograph by Audrey Snyder

8

Audrey Snyder

Casey Gollan Oh my god, you’re in Alaska?

Audrey Snyder Yeah!

CG Why are you in Alaska?

AS I’m in Alaska with my friend Amira, her cousin lives up here and is a wandering man of many interesting jobs and such but he’s just hanging out here. She came out last summer and had a really good time and she went again and I decided to come with her! We are just hanging out in some person’s house, I don’t know whose house it is, haha.

CG I love Alaska. We went I think three summers ago and I wanna go back so much, it was so nice.

AS Where did you go?

CG We were on a cruise so we went to all different places but it was really cool. We hiked on a glacier and saw different cities. It was really nice.

AS A different kinda state.

CG Totally. So anyway, I 9

wanted to bother you in Alaska to tell me about your art project that you sent me and all your stuff that’s going on.

AS I don’t remember what I sent you, haha.

CG I know you’re in a different mode of thought, let me refresh your memory.

AS I’m totally in a different mode of thought. Let’s see...what am I working on right now?

CG Last time I checked in you were working on a bunch of different things. Foremost were the water samples, then the suit, the book, illustrations, labels, children’s books, and like a hundred other things.

AS It’s craziness!

CG Tell me about the water samples.

We got one sample from an old industrial district in San Francisco and the water is just black and cloudy.

Photograph by Audrey Snyder

AS Before I took this class at Urban I was talking to the person who was teaching it who happens to be our outdoor trips teacher, who has been really influential to me and to Urban and we were just talking about how excited I was to be studying water. It somehow came up that we were fascinated with more than just water as a substance but more as a conceptual idea, and how could the class be more like that? And what could we do as a class to document that and document where we were going and what we were learning in kind of a separate way that wasn’t taking notes or taking pictures so we decided to take water samples. And it started out really fun, the first water sample we got was from the tap at Urban and we labeled it and it was really exciting. It became this ritual, at least for me. A lot of people helped and reminded me to take water samples or got jars and stuff. It was definitely a community effort and I turned out to be the coordinator. I have most of them. It was an interesting way to show people what we had seen and try to talk about where we had been through this chronology of these samples. A lot of them look the same but you can line some up and see that certain ones are a lot different from the others. We got this one sample from this place that was an old industrial district in San Francisco and the water is just black and cloudy.

CG Ewwwww!

AS And then we went to a nature preserve. I think I showed it to you when you 10

were here, it was in the back of my car.

CG Yeah they were all sitting in your trunk, hahaha.

AS Haha they were. And you got to see the ones from Mono lake with the shrimp swimming around in it and I thought, “Oh my God there’s shrimp in this!” Stuff like that was really fun for me to look at. We think about water and it’s just that. It’s just this substance or concept that we talk about. Then you have all these samples and each one is really indicative of where it came from and what was there. It was also really super telling of our experiences, the Cal Studies group that I was in. Seeing that little shrimp in the Mono lake sample that I was showing you made me think, “Oh my God, it’s so cool because when we were at Mono lake we were collecting shrimp to see how many we could get and identifying them to see if they were male or female.” There’s this whole long train of thoughts that come up when I see each one of the samples. I made a map of the state, everywhere we had been, and then the locations of where we had taken samples and it was so cool to trace our path, to have a different kind of record. I don’t know if it counts as art unless I do something with it. I think, “Oh I’ll photograph them!” But I don’t even own a digital camera, haha. “Good job Audrey.”

I went exploring the other day and

CG Wow, that’s crazy.

found Bass Lake, the only swimmable lake in Marin county (just north of

AS I have to figure it out somehow because I’ve gotten really excited about making little books.

San Francisco, across the GGB). The picture of the lake is from that little trip. Its a ridiculously hard place to

CG That’s awesome.

find directions to and people only find out about it through word of

AS I don’t know if that’s enough of what you wanted me to talk about.

mouth. There’s something important about exploring. — AS

CG No, totally. Anything goes, it’s just interesting to hear. I like how it’s a kind of very thoughtful documentary compared to just a scrapbook of that experience.

AS Well I think that’s why the process was really interesting because a lot of the places we went, I can’t remember which place it was, but this guy was like, “That’s probably the only private water sample of this body of water that’s ever been released.” We had to ask at a lot of the places. The Pilarcitos watershed was where San Francisco first got all of its water when it was up and happenin’ and the land is now owned by the SFPUC and no people are allowed in. It’s not open to the public but since we’re a school we got to go in and I guess they have the 11

Photograph by Audrey Snyder

reservoir keeper who lives out there and makes sure no one is out there but I don’t think that water has ever touched humans. They don’t do a whole lot of filtering before it goes into the tap so it’s like this beautiful lush watershed and we got to walk around in it. I asked, “So can I like take this water sample?” And he was like, “Yeah. You can.”

CG Oh my God! AS It was just an honor. That’s where I had the most fun. A lot of the whole history of water and water transport in California has to do with scientists and water quality and availability of water so it was kind of interesting to come into from an art standpoint instead of a science standpoint. They were like, “What’re you gonna do with it? Are you gonna test it?” And we were like, “Uhhh no we’re just gonna keep it, haha.” It felt like some kind of scientific exploration of what we were doing but it was more artistic.

CG When did you start being fascinated with water? Where did that come from?

I knew you liked science and all that stuff but I’m just interested in where or why you have that very specific fascination. Was it just because of that class that you start freaking out when anyone mentions water cycles?

AS I think it comes from being a gardener.

The class is called California Studies and we study California in the context of a theme.

The theme that we usually do is food and, as you know, I’m super into that and really excited about food and food policy, especially in California. I think water is just the root of it all. Water is life. That was our conclusion at the end of the class. Nothing is there if there’s no water. Life happens because of water and you can’t talk about food issues or housing issues or land right issues before talking about water issues because you can’t live on land if there’s no water, you can’t grow food if there’s no water, you can’t live somewhere if there’s no water.

In California it’s a really big deal because of the way that we’re mostly an agricultural state in the middle but all the water’s up north but the majority of the population lives in the south. It’s this huge deal to know about it and the majority of people don’t know about water. My personal thing to that is that I’m always fascinated with it.

I was born in and grew up in San Francisco and I feel like I have a really big connection to the ocean and to water. A spiritual connection. I’ve always been fascinated with Glove for a performance art piece by Audrey Snyder

12

it but until I took this class it wasn’t as much of a scientific interest or philosophical interest. I think that’s what really changed it. I love looking at the water, I love lakes, and ocean, and rivers, and swimming, and kayaking, and being outside, and being around it. Towards the end it became a lot more politicized when I became aware of the industrial aspects of water. How it can be something that’s so invisible, you don’t think about it, and yet it’s the backbone to everything.

CG Yeah. I was surprised when you said that water is pretty different looking from every source and has a different composition, I mean I guess I knew that but when I think of water it’s just from the tap or from the bottle.

AS That was something that was really cool, I don’t remember who said it but we were talking about the electromagnetic charge of water and how it affects the environment its in. Like this water conducts electricity a lot better than other water because of high mineral content or high heavy metal content so we can’t treat it or handle it the same way as other water. That was the tipping point for me.

I was like, “Whoa this is so much more complicated and therefore interesting than I thought.” It’s not just one all-encompassing term. You can’t treat this water the same way and you can’t handle it the same way. Another thing we learned that was kind of our concluding idea about water, especially in California, is that you don’t actually pay for water you pay for its transportation. That was the biggest thing for me when I was like, “It’s water, everybody should have water! It’s free! It’s nature!” But that’s one of those public/private things that I’m still trying to work out. I realized, “Oh, it makes sense. We’re not actually paying for water, we’re paying for treatment and transport of water.” And that’s where the problems happen.

If you don’t do any of that you don’t get it. I don’t know.

CG This is almost like research for other stuff. Even if it doesn’t amount to anything except loving to do research. It’s interesting that I sense these threads of activism art in there.

AS Oh totally.

CG Like with Amy Franchescini and gardening. It’s just funny because the juxtaposition between clean water and industrial water. I think it’s interesting as whatever you call it just to bring awareness to water. It’s interesting because I would never think that it’s interesting. To me it’s just textbook dry.

AS And that’s the thing, Casey, that I love most about it and why I love having water samples. We did this huge presentation at the end but it was almost more about the people that we met and what they were doing and how they responded to us being interested in what they were doing. We met everyone from people who worked for city government who were managing water and were really suspicious of us and our liberal questions to environmental activists out in Owens Valley who were advocating for water use up there, there’s like a whole water war with LA to get water up there that I’m not even gonna get into. It was more about meeting people and hearing them talk about what they were doing and their stories and their connection to water. And I got kind of a reputation for asking about environmental and social justice, which was kind of silly, but I definitely agree that 13

Homemade Ginger Beer Cultures!

Amy Franchescini San Francisco based artist / activist en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Franceschini sfvictorygardens.org/ futurefarmers.org

“The artist comes in and does things differently than a scientist would, you definitely wouldn’t get that dry annual report.

You would get something more biased, more opinionated, and for sure more interesting.”

it made me want to make art about it or it made me want to do something. The whole time I was there I was having conversations with people about, “Do I really want to become an artist?” Because I could devote my life to science and this is so interesting to me and I want to figure out how to be involved in it from a scientific standpoint and a research standpoint: writing papers and getting people to learn about and understand the significance of this and affecting policy. I was like, wait a minute I can still do all that but from a different place. That’s what I talk a lot about with Amy. CG That’s what I think is interesting about what you’ve done and also my fear with art school is that it’s too much about art for art’s sake. For example, the problem in talking about this as an art project is what qualifies something as an art project?

Collecting water? Talking to people? Having conversations?

AS That’s totally an art project hahah. (Or components of a good art project!)

CG Is that an art project? That question is so irrelevant to what actually matters which is doing interesting things and following passions. That’s why I’m scared of art school. I’m like, “Is this going to lock me into only making things?” Like, “What’s your concept behind collecting water?” I don’t wanna give anyone bullshit.

AS It’s about learning!

CG I think what’s interesting is that the way you might approach changing it from a scientific standpoint could be less effective than the way you would approach change from an art standpoint.

AS I think it’s a matter of responsibility and also people believing what you say. I think scientists get a lot more credibility than artists.

CG But I think you also get a lot less...you can have a shocking tabloid headline like, “DISGUSTING WATER, SAY SCIENTISTS” But a lot more attention and creativity comes through art.

AS I think it frees you up to do things that scientists wouldn’t normally do or wouldn’t think would be effective. I’ve been grappling, as I know you have, with the idea of going to art school and the ideas that I have about affecting change and being interested in a lot of stuff. I think it’s really valuable to be able to take interesting experiences with my obsessions and passions and interests and turn them into something that’s a little more tangible than me pursuing an idea. I’m taking water samples and talking to people but how can I display this information and make a statement about the information that I’ve learned? That is ultimately where the artist comes in and does things differently than a scientist would, you definitely wouldn’t get that dry annual report, but you would get something more biased, more opinionated, and for sure more interesting.

CG That’s also what’s interesting to me about design too. I saw a lecture yesterday

by Edward Tufte at the Met yesterday. It was awesome AND it was free! He was talking about this poster which is one of his favorite pieces of design ever and this 14

is almost the opposite of your situation. It’s a giant infographic showing a war between Russia and France and it’s showing the French army going into Russia and it’s plotting six different variables like: temperature, retreat, geographic progression, size of the army. It’s this really beautifully made infographic but what Tufte said about it is that the thing that surprises people most about it is that at its heart it’s an anti-war, pacifism propaganda. The guy who made it, Minard, was a huge pacifist and he created this to show how disgusting war is.

Napoleon’s March

AS He created something that’s really visually interesting and beautiful, hahaha, despite the awful subject.

by Charles Joseph Minard http://www.edwardtufte.com/ tufte/minard

CG It’s visually interesting and beautiful if you look at it but once you take the time to understand it it shocks you. I can’t believe they lost that many people. It’s interesting to see that they were defeated more by the weather than by the other army, it got so cold that they retreated. But, I don’t think it would have the same effect as other war posters. When you at design history or art history, protests of war are either visceral or emotional or musical. When I think of famous anti-war propaganda, until yesterday I hadn’t thought of that. That, to me, is strange because the infographic is kind of a scientific way of approaching a problem versus an art or creative way.

AS But like it’s combined in a different way I think. It’s artistic to want to do it that way.

CG I think it’s actually a smarter way, which I really like, but in terms of reaching people and creating change I think it would be less effective. People might not understand it.

AS Totally. Definitely. I’m not the kind of person who takes on authority in that way or projects it onto myself. I don’t want to have that authority over people. I don’t want to tell them what to do. That’s kind of what I struggle with in terms of being an investigative person, looking at something and realizing that maybe there is a problem that I want to call attention to something. But at the same time not feeling like I should or can or want to. I’m not making too much sense.

CG When you were talking about collecting water samples I was thinking about Erin Brockovich, the movie but also the person, when she’s sneakily collecting water samples. You’re like Erin Brockovich!

AS I think I’m more of a poetic person in that way. I like having all those water samples and having the nice labels on them and looking at them and thinking about them more as part of the class and really being happy that I got to have the chance to explore where it came from and learn about something that is so important in the state. And less about making a statement or trying to change something about what I saw. Maybe that’s what I’m trying to say.

CG That basically goes back to my fear that I have to make something or say something. I can’t just pursue passions without having some sort of product or statement.

15

“I’m more of a poetic person in that way. I like being happy that I got to learn about something important.

And I’m less about making a statement or trying to change something about what I saw.”

AS It’s so funny because I was talking to Amy about this the other day and she was like, “I find things that I think are interesting or cool...” and she just does stuff. My interpretation of how her studio works is that her and her collaborators are generally interested in what they’re doing and they have fun with it. It’s sometimes serious but the way that they think about doing a project is, “We’re artists so we have to visually respond or materially respond somehow to appease our want to do something creatively and then it’s about the actual thing that we’re interested in.”

And this is just my idea of what they do, those aren’t their words. But I think that’s how I want to operate. I can’t just make art for the sake of making art. I’m interested in so many different things and art will always be the way that I take action or look at it or learn how to solve the problem.

CG And it’s not the end or it’s not its own point, it’s just a way of exploring.

AS The process! How I process things is through art and through making things and through putting things together visually or materially or exchanging information with people and I think that’s part of art making. That exchange of information is something so basic that I need to do just to work through things, to make something happen, to think about everything that I encounter. That’s what makes me nervous about going to art school, not having the connection to other things.

“Most people bake cookies or something as a gift but I’m making drawings because this is what I can give you that I think you would like.”

CG Yeah. It just seems very...I don’t know. Honestly I’m so bad at predicting what things are going to be like that it could be not at all what I’m scared of. But it seems like what’s actually important is to just pursue things that. It’s like how Ari is going to film school but for me going to film school would be like, “Oh, film is the way that I have to express all these things.” It’s like a limitation which could be good or interesting but I feel like I don’t want to be limited in some sense.

AS Well I feel like I have the opposite thing of you. I don’t feel like I’m going to be limited at all and that’s what kind of scares me. I feel like I’m going to get there and like...I feel like I’m very freed in the way that I think and the way that I’m going to do things or respond to assignments but I’m more worried about finding things that interest me again. I feel like I’m so keyed into San Francisco and everything that’s going on here and like my whole theme is here and what I’m interested in and involved in. That’s what I’m worried about, finding that in school again. I guess it’s about not being limited but that’s really telling of our educations.

CG Definitely.

AS I’m really excited to make some real art though, to feel like I have a completed project. Because the water was interesting but it’s a project that doesn’t really feel like one in my mind.

CG I just had a flash of what I was holding my brain before. You were saying that you don’t necessarily want to make a statement but the interesting thing about design, what Tufte was saying yesterday is to beware of people who are trying to make statements. That’s also the difference between science and art. Art tends to be very personal and subjective and science is trying to be objective with methods and whatever.

16

AS They’re exact opposites. It’s whatever projection those methods have from the person that’s doing them. That’s why I love it so much.

CG Right! It’s just interesting to me because if you were to put those two samples of the clean water and the nasty water next to each other and photograph it you could be like, this is an art project.

That would be a statement but for you to just have them in your trunk as more of a science project or a passionate thing than explicitly an art project is just interesting. I like the idea that you’re not telling people what to think. You’re not saying, “I have the answers and I’m imposing them on you!” It’s just this thing to study and ultimately I love that too. It’s just learning and considering and philosophizing.

AS And also very telling of my aversion to cameras.

CG Haha yeah.

AS When you were talking about that I was like, “Hmmm maybe I will display it differently.” I’m thinking of a big piece of paper with a pencil grid where you put water on it so you can’t even see but each one is a different sample hahaha.

CG There’s an amazing project by one of my favorite design-artist-crossover guys, Daniel Eatock, I’ll send it to you. He did a series of paintings of water bottles out of watercolors using the water from inside each bottle. I don’t know why that’s so funny to me but that’s the funniest thing ever to me.

AS Yeah that’s like when I told my art teacher what we were doing and she have me a whole talk about journals and how to document things and part of it was like, “Oh, if you’re taking water samples you should paint with your water samples and make them a part of what you’re thinking and writing and drawing!” It was really funny to me and now it seems a little more attractive maybe. But yeah it’s funny, I agree with you.

CG Tell me also about your other random stuff that’s going on. You had a lot of stuff with illustration and also your stuff with Amy is really interesting.

Toluma Farms Petaluma, CA

AS I’ve started to draw a lot of line drawings and I’ve been doing it for a while using them as gifts. Like when I was working at the farm, I drew the favorite goat of everyone that worked there for them.

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http://www.tolumafarms.com/ CivilEatsTolumaFarms.htm

Drawing by Audrey Snyder

CG Awwwwwwww.

AS I love the idea of gifting your craft or something that you’re good at. Most people bake cookies or something but I’m making drawings because this is what I can give you that I think you would like. I don’t even know. It’s also this technical skill that I can capitalize off of and it’s kind of comforting because something that also freaks me out is that if I’m going to be doing art then I do need to support myself and I do need to support my art making. Like how am I going to buy a sewing machine if I can’t make any money off of art?

CG Are you considering being an artist in the future professionally?

AS That’s the thing. Having people be interested in my illustrations—let’s see what I’ve done recently: I’ve done a couple drawings for menus for my friend who’s a chef and a couple of his friends who do underground dinners in San Francisco and the Bay Area. I’ve been doing some typography type things like giving my handwriting to people to use on business cards and stuff—so I’m like, “Okay, this is what makes money.” It’s just an interesting thing that I just realized this summer, that I could use this.

Sketchbook Page by Audrey Snyder

18

CG I just think about the concept and the research and the passion part so much because I straight up do not have that drawing ability. I just don’t even see myself at all being a professional artist.

Stanford University Commencement Speech, 2007

by Dan Gioia http://news-service.stanford.edu/

AS Me neither!

news/2007/june20/gradtrans062007.html

CG But I feel like it’s not an issue with going to art school. There was this speech by the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Dan Gioia, where has said the purpose of art education isn’t to create artists, it’s to create creative people. If you’re looking at it on a global economic machine, however people look at it, if we can’t compete with other countries in having the lowest prices for labor we have to be the leader in creative thought is what he was saying. Not even from an economic standpoint but creative thought is so important, I think.

Statement (I’ve always had this crazy and melodramatic idea that if there were to be an apocalypse, or some kind of largescale societal meltdown then I would need to be able to survive despite the

AS I agree, I think we’ve talked about this too.

wreckage of my previous existence.

This has subtly prompted a lot of in-

CG Yeah I’ve probably brought it up to you because I bring it up to everyone I know.

terests I thought were disconnected; I had not thought that food and farmwork could be a model for process

AS You know what I feel like is gonna happen, Casey? We’re gonna get out of art school and I always thought I wasn’t going to be an artist but I realized that maybe it’ll be the only thing I know how to do eventually hahaha and it’s just gonna fall into my lap and maybe I’m counting on that. Yeah, it’s scary.

and source material for my art. I think of the idea of preparation more as a metaphor and less of an fear or prediction that something big and gruesome will happen. I do have this

CG Future! Don’t wanna think about it.

fascination for knowing how to make everything for myself; from growing

AS But it will be happy!

vegetables to making fabric, cheese, books, tools. I guess it came about

CG So true.

at the same time that I realized that I had lost something valuable with a

AS The suit was fun, I just finished before I left. So basically Amy had me make a suit for one of her friends, this politician that helped her when she was starting the Victory Gardens program in San Francisco. He’s a green party member kind of a really cool, awesome, forward thinking guy and Amy was like, “I wanna thank you, how can I thank you?” And he said, “Well I’d like a suit that I can wear in the court of law.” He’s working as a lawyer now and she came up with the idea of making him a suit but making it kind of like an art piece. It’s like a talisman that has all these secret things in it that we put there for him: there are strap-in knee pads for when he has to kneel before the judge, textured elbows so that they won’t wear through, and a little loophole on the inside where we were joking that he was going to steal the judge’s gavel to take justice into his own hands. It was really funny. The suit is really plain cut and ordinary on the outside but on the inside we’re going to embroider a crazy sunburst or something because inside he’s really just a big hippie. It was fun for me because I’ve never tried making something that important.

Amy gave me his suit and was like, “Here, you can copy it.” And so I basically used newspaper and made a pattern and figured out how I wanted to put it all together and then just kinda did it. It was fun because I make a lot of my own clothes but nothing that’s really tailored. All my stuff is like, “Oh it’s stretch fabric so if I mess up it will be fine!” But I still haven’t fit it yet so who knows.

19

lot of the objects that I use on a daily basis, they were something I didn’t have a connection to other than to use them. So I see this investigation as my way of re-connecting as much as it is also a way of taking care of myself. The idea of self-sufficiency is an attractive one, and something that I apply conceptually and literally. As a contingent idea, I am interested in the process of transforming raw materials into useful objects because it is often so simple but time-consuming.

I am astounded that a simple repetition of movements can transform something like wool into felt, that heat can turn raw milk into cheese.

Process+Intention+Purpose)

—AS

CG That’s what’s more interesting to me than works on paper. Photography and painting and drawing can be interesting but I guess what draws me to sculpture is that it’s real stuff. I don’t know how to explain it but it’s more about other things. I guess that’s not fair to say. I’m generally drawn to art projects, if that’s what you’d call them...

AS I think I do the same thing and it’s a natural progression because we’ve been schooled all along that “this is art” or “this is fine art” and as you get more conceptual it’s about ideas. Sculpture kind of lends itself more immediately to concept.

CG Yeah. People keep asking me what I’m studying and I keep telling them “fine arts and design” but it kind of freaks me out. I’m like, “What is fine art? Why do I care? Why would I want to study it? So I can be an illustrator?” Commercial art is to me, especially kind of like a crapshoot.

AS Yeah, well. It works out either way.

CG It will all be okay.

AS I’m kind of worried. I should probably get off the phone because I don’t know if I’m roaming or not.

CG OH MY GOD I was going to ask you but I totally forgot.

Goat at Toluma Farms

20

AS Is there anything else you wanted to talk about? I want to talk to you in general!

I can send you pictures.

CG Yeah if you ever get a digital camera or borrow one or whatever. Maybe you can draw instead of photographing.

AS Audrey Snyder’s camera...

CG ...is a pen and paper.

AS Maybe I will draw you something on my iPhone!

CG The website that I intern at sells prints of Jorge Colombo, who did that New Yorker cover on his iPhone, and they did so well! First of all it was on the cover of the New Yorker and a lot of his prints have sold out. So crazy. Anyway, I will talk to you soon and I seriously hope you were not just roaming and even if you are this was totally worth it.

Recipe for Doughnuts 1 (1/4-oz) package active dry yeast (2 1/2 teaspoons) 2 tablespoons warm water (105–115°F)

AS I’ll send you pictures when I get back or I’ll have my brother send you pictures from my computer.

3 1/4 cups all-purpose flour plus additional for sprinkling and rolling out dough 1 cup whole milk at room temperature

CG When do you get back?

1/2 stick (1/4 cup) unsalted butter, softened 3 large egg yolks

AS I get back on the 30th to LA and then I’m in LA for 3 days and then I’m going home.

2 tablespoons sugar 1 1/2 teaspoons salt 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

CG Okay, well have so much fun in Alaska, that’s amazing, and I will see you soon!

About 10 cups vegetable oil for deep frying

— AS AS Yeah! I get into New York on the 27th. Bye Love!

CG Byeeeeeee!

21

Paper Cutouts by Audrey Snyder

Photograph by John-Elio Reitman

22

John-Elio Reitman Casey Gollan So I just wanted to call you and talk about your photography, and what you’re up to, and what it’s all about. Tell me about your project!

John-Elio Reitman The body of work I just sent you?

CG Yeah. It’s six photos, right?

JER I think it’s six, I don’t remember. I think what’s weird about it is that I didn’t take each photo in the same day and I didn’t take each photo for the same purpose but it really kind of fit cohesively.

I think you can relate to this because you kind of use your camera as a sketchbook, right?

CG Yeah.

JER It was like that, it was just sort of documenting. Then I chose from the hundreds and hundreds of images I have...sorry, my friend is climbing up a fence. Um. So, it’s really strange because I haven’t been keeping that body in mind so I’m a little rusty. I just move really quick. Basically it was all about this little section of time before I go to New York, and enjoying time outside of the city, time with family, and time with nature. It was really really simple.

I didn’t get too philosophical with it.

CG That’s totally cool. So you said

23

you’re moving really quickly and you’re already onto other stuff?

Further Reading: Photography is Easy,

JER Yeah. We went on a trip to Israel, my family, for my cousin’s wedding. If you check my

Photography is Difficult

Flickr you can see that I moved pretty quickly into this next body of work which is archiving

by Paul Graham

bits of my family and history, which I haven’t been too familiar with or even aware of. A lot of archiving of objects. And I’ve been doing a lot of painting and drawing but nothing I’m

Source:

too fond of yet.

Yale MFA Photography 2009: We Belong Together

CG When you photograph—you keep calling them “bodies of work”—are you shooting with that in mind?

Read it online at: http://www.americansuburbx.

JER No. When I see something that interests me I take pictures and later I gather what I’m

com/2009/07/theory-paul-graham-

attached to or what I really felt I connected with there and later. Then I sort them into these

photography-is-easy.html

separate “bodies”.

CG I was just thinking about photography in the past couple days because I read this awesome essay, which I’ll send you, called “Photography is Easy, Photography is Difficult” and it was talking about how with digital photography we no longer have to worry about shoot-

Related Conversation:

ing film, we can just shoot 1000 photos. Like, what’s so difficult about it? You just shoot

Phoebe Pundyk w/ Casey Gollan

what you see! Then he was saying the reason it is difficult is that it’s all around you and you just missed it.

Source: Process Magazine Issue One, p. 21

JER I guess what I’m finding difficult is not taking pictures but choosing which ones I find are important. And I have been shooting a bit of film lately. Kaila and I shot this really

Read it online at:

interesting roll of film that she has yet to process. And I shot three rolls of film in Israel.

http://issuu.com/process/docs/

The main thing is that I need the photos that I’m attached to to be as sincere as possible

one/21

because I think it’s really really really easy to capture something. At a very precise moment I need to have captured what I want captured, not only compositionally but the moment.

I feel like my photos seem like riddles or proverbs, I don’t know exactly what would go along with them, but the ones which I’m most attached to or impressed with are the ones which I understand because of my thought process. They’re a lot more mindful, I guess. There’s one shot of my brother in the woods and you just see his back. It’s probably one of my only shots ever where I tried to control the situation. He already had his shirt off but I had to make him walk out into the middle of the woods. I feel like I used to find photography so easy but now I find it a lot harder because I’m being harder on myself. I find it so easy to mass produce but I really want to avoid creating shitty work.

CG Right.

JER It’s so easy for me to take so much and

mm1, 2009 by John-Elio Reitman and Kaila Guilmet

24

have it be aesthetically enjoyable. Or not even aesthetically enjoy-

that you sent me, they look “narrative” to me, and the one of your

able but just to please myself. Now it’s really more about focusing

brother looks like it was more composed.

on what is important and the thought process that is attached to it.

JER Well actually a couple were taken on the same day but for the CG So with other stuff where you’re actually painting or drawing

most part they were taken on different days.

or writing or speaking or performing or anything you have control over how you present it. But with photography like yours all you

CG So you’re taking these different pieces and putting them to-

have is what you capture and the way you sequence it. You can

gether to make a narrative or body of work but is it specific enough

combine photography with writing and other stuff. I don’t have

that you have something in your head that I wouldn’t have in mine?

your thought process in my head so when I look at those six photos

Is there actually a story or words or titles?

25

Photographs by John-Elio Reitman

JER The main bubble is that connection to the environment but the main reason why I’m attached to those photos is because of what was happening at that moment and how I was feeling. The main problem is that I find it so hard to get across how I feel and how I relate and connect and process.

That shot of the wasps nest was taken in Massachusetts at Kaila’s house. She has this barn on her property and we went up and there was just this moment where I was so scared to take pictures because I couldn’t tell if there were still wasps flying around.

And everything was kind of fragile, the floor was really old and rotten and the wasps nest was fragile. In that moment I felt the fragility of everything, but in other shots I felt completely different. I feel like they all have a similar energy to them, things don’t seem to be moving too fast. I also feel like it can go either way, either I’m actively a part of where I am or totally separate from it. I really fucking hate talking about my work.

Photographs by John-Elio Reitman

26

CG Hahaha.

JER I just find it really hard because I can’t find words to describe how I feel. I can only organize.

CG That’s really cool.

JER Basically it’s just a giant selection process. I’m doing a major screening process and organizing what’s relevant and important.

CG I think I’m really different because I am a very visual person but I don’t think visually.

I would rather write in my notebook than sketch. I guess if you went through your series you could probably say why everything is where it is and do titles and captions and nail down a narrative, but there’s something intuitive about it.

This is kind of random, but I used to take a ton of photos. Over the summer last year I took at least fifty photos a day but it was a different style where I was shooting from the hip or not even looking through my viewfinder. Before that, when I first started doing photography, I was very intentional about it. I wouldn’t necessarily be thinking about composition and stuff but I would really be intuitively caring about it. And when I look back at those photos I now think, “Why am I taking a photo of my family and I’m not in the photo?” I started getting freaked out about always being behind the camera and not actually being part of the moment. It was weird because I had this statement about a collection of images but I wasn’t part of it.

JER I don’t know how you might feel about this but if you check my Flickr, the most recent body of work, I’m in a lot of them.

I’m holding objects and I did a little bit of self portraiture. I’m actually experimenting a lot more with being a part of it. Maybe I just assume it’s obvious that I was the one who chose this moment and I’m the only one who was really allowed to experience it 27

Photographs by John-Elio Reitman

For posterity, here is John’s written statement

in my way as opposed to something like landscape photographs where...I don’t really know

about the woods series. — CG

how to put this in words right now. I feel like I could write you a very cohesive essay and get

The woods are important: before i was born,

rid of all the bullshit.

my parents bought some land smack in the middle of glenn sutton. the land featured thick

CG That’s what I like about the phone though or just talking about stuff. People feel really

woods, streams, and a view of the surrounding

comfortable when they write stuff but when you put someone on the spot it’s totally a dif-

mountains. after building a house in a clearing,

ferent process then writing.

they began to explore the surrounding forest. as a child growing up in these woods for brief

JER When you’ve written something it feels so nice to be concise but in thinking about

periods of time, i developed an affinity for for-

something I feel like you always have to keep explaining yourself until somebody cuts you

ests in general. the images are documentations

off. So I feel like I’m just continuing and continuing and straying from the original idea

of certain moments during escapes from city to

behind it. Not because I really want it to be about that but I don’t want it to seem like this is

whatever woods i have found. what is signifi-

about everything, because it really isn’t. Like, “Yeah, this talks about my connection to food

cant about this experiences is less the actual

and I really like salad so the forest is green.”

moment, but more about the way in which i have begun to realize what is important in life.

CG Hahaha. That’s what I love though. I love when conversations wander in a way that es-

the absence of the city in which i usually live

says can’t.

in has allowed me these small epiphanies, and ultimately help me grow in this past year. — JER

JER That’s definitely true. I guess something I hadn’t thought about is, “How a part of the photo am I?” I guess it’s hard to think about how I was in that moment but I do feel like

The statement is interesting to me but, as state-

most photos are not necessarily self-indulgent, but very personal. I feel like my photos

ments tend to be, too sharply focused on the

reflect intimacy. It’s quiet, it isn’t busy, and I feel like the public wasn’t necessarily invited at

artwork to break new ground. I have a love/

that particular moment. How ‘bout that?

hate relationship with being concise, hence the rambling conversations. — CG

Photograph by John-Elio Reitman

CG This is kind of jumping around again, but what did you say for the question, “Why is it

28

important for artists to speak and write about their work?” On the Cooper supplement?

JER I went on this tangent about the importance of being understood, even though it’s not necessarily black and white. I didn’t really give them a full answer. People should be given the option to see them in the way they would want to be seen, because at first I thought, “The artist wants to get their point across, they don’t want to be misunderstood.” No one wants to write them off as stupid. Especially with contemporary art I feel like it’s easy to just look at it and think, “Kay that’s about nothing.” But then you realize that it is about something. I also talked about how it is important for there to be discussion and interpretation. I don’t know. I was so weird about those questions for Cooper because some of my responses were like three words long and some were a thousand words long. Like, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I was just like, “A good person and possibly a dad.”

CG That’s so funny. I just remember that I spent a lot more time on the questions than on the actual artwork.

JER That’s what Loretta said too.

“People should be given the option to see them in the way they would want to be seen.”

CG For me, it’s the same way with images, I can send them artwork and they can think whatever they want about it but that was my chance to be like, “Hey, this is me!”

JER I don’t know if you heard about Selena Doroshenko, she’s one of my buddies from Montreal that got deferred, but Diana and Sara Haley and Lindsay and I all hung out in

29

Photograph by John-Elio Reitman

Florida. And Sara and Selena both went to SMFA and SAIC together and she’s really brilliant so we’re all kind of pissed off she didn’t get into Cooper. The main problem, she was saying, was that the whole time she was doing it she was worried about impressing them.

She was worried about cleaning up everything and she totally felt like if she wasn’t being honest she was gonna get fucked and if she was being to honest that they were not gonna like her, so it was really strange.

She has all these notes and Google image searches that she printed out and then she was like, “They’re not gonna wanna see this.” So she didn’t give it to them and I was like, “Selena, they totally would’ve wanted to see that!” Or when she was writing about what she wanted to be when she grew up she totally went with her gut and was like, “I wanna be a librarian.” I was like, “That’s so good!” Then when she got rejected Coincidentally, a conversation with

she was like, “I shouldn’t have told them I wanted to be a librarian!” I’m like, “Actually you

Diana can be found on pg. 34 of this

should’ve, it’s fine because I said I wanted to be a dad.”

very issue.

CG Hahaha. I totally went through the same thing.

JER My understanding was the you didn’t finish, you almost like gave up?

CG My thing was just so last minute, but I think that’s just how I always work.

JER I think the whole finding out who got in thing was the most surprising thing of my life.

Because Kaila didn’t get in, I didn’t even know you had finished your hometest, then I got in after they didn’t call me—they sent me an email—which was like triple what the fuck. Kaila not getting in was probably the biggest shock ever though. Everyone on the LiveJournal group was furious when she got deferred.

CG I saw that!

JER Even her essays made me self conscious because they were so good. She made a 1600 square foot blanket, how did she not get in?

CG I saw what other people were doing and I was like, “Oh my God.” I think the common thread of stuff that I saw in other peoples’ work was really hard work and long hours.

JER I had to force myself to be not to influenced by other people’s stuff. As far as I was concerned it was just Kaila and I and I ignored everyone else. And I was also talking to Diana a lot on the phone and I kept reminding myself, “No, it’s okay that you’re not doing cool things, you do what YOU wanna do.”

CG I talked to Diana too and it was really hard for me.

JER Well, everyone knew she was getting in before she even started.

CG Yeah.

Photograph by John-Elio Reitman

30

JER Selena was talking to her friend Laura, who also knows Diana, about doing the hometest and she was like, “This one girl finished her hometest in the first week.” And she was like, “Oh shit, that’s really bad, she should probably think about it more!” Then she was like, “Who’s this girl by the way?” And she was like, “Diana.” And it was like, “Oh, never mind, she’ll be fine.”

CG Yeah. Again going back to having to do your own thing. I had put together a portfolio in InDesign and had it printed and it was really slick looking, and I feel like a lot of the stuff I saw was very handmade or rough and crafty. I showed it to someone who went there and I was like, “Do you think this is OK?” And she was like, “I don’t knowwww, but if it’s your thing then do it.”

JER Did you go to the portfolio reviews?

CG Yeah I did and I got really mixed results. The first time I talked to them it was kind of on a whim. I was done talking to another school that I liked so I talked to them just for fun because I know they’re hard-asses. The woman was really pissed at me because I only had my laptop and they really like to see original work. So I only had things on my screen and she was like, “I’ll see what I can do.” But by the end of the review she was like, “Please apply!” And I was freaking out. Then I went to an open house and this woman was like, “I don’t know if you’re there yet.” It’s just weird because it’s so subjective.

JER You didn’t get a faculty referral?

CG Right. That was scary for me because everyone else I knew got faculty referrals.

JER Yeah, Kaila got like two. One from the year before and this year. I was just like, “This is absurd.” And Tarik brought his backpack. I bumped into him and he was like, “I just brought my snack.”

CG Hahaha.

JER It’s so funny! Casey, how much longer would you like to talk because I think I have to be 31

Photographs by John-Elio Reitman

“I was finding photography to be the medium I was the most comfortable with and the most uptight with it too.”

done in the next five minutes.

CG We could be done?

JER I wanna know more about Process.

CG In the last one I recorded really long conversations with people that I know really well and have spent a lot of time with. The idea is that I love having this conversation where I talk to people about what they’re doing, because it is that whole being understood thing.

I’m trying to think of ways that it could be better because for the last one I just recorded, transcribed, and published entire conversations with the artwork, but I think that it’s not really readable even though it’s interesting for me.

JER I almost feel like you should come up with maybe twenty questions, the way you interview a celebrity. Apparently my friend says that there’s something called the Proust questionnaire. In any case, I feel like it would be interesting to have these ground rule questions that everyone has to answer. Then you sort of stray from that format of question and answer. It would be interesting to see what people come up with because with open submissions you’re going to get what everyone’s most proud of, or what people feel is most relevant or what they’ve just finished, but I feel like when you give everyone these really precise questions you’re going to get strange an interesting things. Once you understand what a person is like then you really understand the work. For example, I notice my work seems a lot more serious than I am.

CG Yeah. That is totally strange. I’m totally anti-bullshit and also a lot of times, especially with photography, I’m like, “I don’t have a concept leave me alone!!” I shoot and organize.

JER For the lonnnnngest time I was like that. Have you seen Erin Jane Nelson’s work? She goes to Cooper, she’s a second year. Go to erinjanenelson.com, she’s like my best buddy.

When I was still waiting to find out if I got into Cooper I emailed her kind of whining like, “What the hell, I just wanna go to school with you. I love your artwork.” And then we realized we’re like best buddies and we hung out in New York a couple of times and she visited me. But basically for the longest time she was getting grilled because I remember asking her like, “What does this mean?” and she was like, “It doesn’t mean anything, it’s human nature. Just one giant gesture, living. This is how I’m experimenting and this is what I’m interested in.” And like, she’s fucking brilliant. The second I understood that I just stopped and the entire way I took pictures changed. I sketchbook all the time and I write little things all the time, but I was finding photography to be the medium I was the most comfortable with and the most uptight with it too.

CG Huh. At the same time?

JER Yeah. I felt like I was the best at it and because I was the best at it I felt like I had to be as good as I wanted it and I felt like everything had to mean something. Now it’s more that I just want to be aware of how I was. Not everything has to mean something but I have to be honest.

CG It might just be thematically at this point in our lives everyone goes through this phase but, being the seventh person I’ve had this explicit conversation about their creative 32

process with, every single person has been like, “Yeah. I’m at this point where I’m like, no concept, I don’t give a shit.”

JER Especially after the hometest I think everyone got really tired.

CG Hahaha. So I’ll let you know how it goes. I’ll probably end up transcribing the conversation. I might not publish it but I didn’t do the twenty questions things because I didn’t want it to be too premeditated.

JER I was thinking that maybe Process can just be an entire blog and maybe the only thing that you print are the images of peoples’ work. I’ve seen plenty of blogs where it’s questions and answer and ten photos from the artist and that is so nice. Then if people wanna buy them they are getting prints or a catalog of their work.

CG That’s interesting.

JER Then you don’t have to edit as much for the catalog.

CG I focused on doing a printed one the first time because I felt like if I’m going to publish hour long conversations, which are like twelve pages long each, it’s really uncomfortable to read online. One idea I had is to bounce back and forth with the person and come up with the questions not before but after. So summarize what we talked about into ten or twenty volleys back and forth. Maybe the conversations are just food for a really good essay. When I was at Oxbow I would turn on a tape recorder and talk to myself until I had something written, it was really weird. So I don’t know. Anyway I will let you know how it goes and thank you for talking to me. I’ll talk to you soon and say hi to your mom for me!

JER Hahaha.

33

Photograph by John-Elio Reitman

Untitled, 2009, by Diana Lozano

34

Diana Lozano Casey Gollan What’s up?

Diana LOZANO Um nothing.

CG Okay, cool! So tell me about your project that you sent me.

DL Okay, so the project that I sent you, that was the first film photography that I’ve done ever.

CG Oh, that’s film?

DL Yeah.

CG Cool!

DL And that’s something that I am really excited about at the moment but right now I’m working on something different.

CG Really? Did you work on it so much that you’re like over it?

DL No I mean the fact that right now I’m working really slow and I’m working really analytically in the way that—how do I make this make sense—I’m really excited to make more things but I feel like I’ve reached the end of something. So right now I’m trying to slow down before we start something new and I’m trying to slow down so I start at the same pace in which I start school.

CG Right.

DL It’s almost like being not nec-

35

essarily afraid of starting something new but more like waiting things out but still keeping my hands busy. Know what I mean?

CG So are you just mostly chillin’?

DL No. What? I’ve been painting off those photographs. Right now it’s kind of at a standstill, I’m just layering over and over and over and over. They’re getting farther away from the photographs then coming back into the photographs. It’s a really weird thought process that I’ve never gone through before.

CG Where are the photo from? You went to Colombia?

DL I went to Colombia, which has a lot to do with the fact that I do want to expand on

“It’s hard to get away from the concept once you’re used to working conceptually”

those photographs because they kind of do...Right now I’m not really working conceptually, necessarily, even though it’s hard to get away from the concept once you’re used to working conceptually. The photographs are mainly about memory and little details of those memories and expanding on them. If you look at the mountains that I sent you it’s kind of an abstracted way of looking at those mountains but it’s always the way I’ve thought of those mountains because I’m not used to living there. You know what I mean? So I’m stretching this memory that I have into something that I can relate to more by kind of altering it aesthetically.

CG Did you do that manipulation on Photoshop or is that also darkroom?

DL No it’s not darkroom manipulated at all. I kind of just sent them out to be developed.

CG I’ve been thinking and talking a lot with people about how something feels versus what it is. Like what does something in your head actually look like? There’s not really an answer.

Y’know?

DL So what I’m working on right now is mainly on that one image of mountains. It’s the one that I’m most interested in right now. There’s something about the way that—and there’s only one place in my entire life where I’ve seen this happen and it’s those mountains in Colombia—and it’s the way that the fog hits them midday and it happens all year. There’s 36

something about that that just calls for a painting. I just keep thinking of painting. I’m not a photographer and whenever I do photography I use it as a reference.

DL I’m trying to get that really specific image and feel from that photograph and expand from that without using the photography but using painting. In the end it might be a completely different image. So right now this is what I’m working on and I’m working really slowly. It’s something really therapeutic really. I keep working on that and layering and layering on the same painting but I wanna get the same feeling but not necessarily the same image if that makes sense. So it is based on memory.

CG Huh. CG So you’re taking it far away from what it actually is.

DL But I’m working on several projects at the same time which I haven’t told you about yet. I don’t know if you wanna hear about them.

CG Yeah!

DL So you know how I go to an art school and the other majors are music, performing arts majors? Well I’ve been having a lot of conversations with people that work in different arts. I was gonna focus mainly on dancers which I think I’m gonna do later on but I think I’m gonna focus on musicians, especially string musicians. There’s something about the way you see one solo musician perform, like a cello player, there’s something about their breathing patterns that’s really important to the actual piece. So they’re taught, in a way, to combine their breathing and the sound that they make when they exhale and they inhale as part of the piece. I’ve been setting up rooms and getting those soloists with different instruments, right now I have a cello—I haven’t talked to him that much yet actually—and I have a viola player. They’re both going to perform a piece. Once I record them as a video— I’ve recorded one of them already but I haven’t edited—I plan to edit all the sound out that the instrument makes and leave only the breathing.

CG How do you do that?

37

Photographs by Diana Lozano

DL You can make that on any sound editing program at a certain clip of the audio and each

“If I’m making

note. Let’s say there’s a lot of B notes. You take one B note and you say “extract that sound” and it will extract all B notes, and then you do that with every single one. It takes a while.

things and

CG Wow.

they’re being

DL So ideally what will be left is the breathing. That’s something I’ve gotten more excited

finished it just

CG That’s super exciting! I saw a piece at the New Museum it was just like this weird stairwell

about than the paintings but the paintings are still there and I’m working on them.

where they have a video screen—their shows are always kind of weird. But there was this one piece that I just really loved. It was this video of a person playing the piano but the

feels really

keys were disconnected from whatever makes the sound so they were playing some sort of

empty because

DL Oh that’s cool!

piece but all you were hearing was the sound of the keys banging on nothing.

CG It was just really interesting, you were hearing the beat instead of the melody I guess.

I’m at the end

DL Yeah. I really wanna incorporate music theory in a lot of things that I’m thinking about right now.

of something.

CG You’re reading music theory?

DL Yeah. It’s really hard to understand because I have absolutely no musical background or talent.

Opposite Page Here is a document file of the piece i

CG Hahaha. For me, anything-theory is too crazy. It just gets very academic.

have been experimenting with (fifth string quartet!) but those experi-

DL It’s like the same ideas that I’ve always had but evolving a little bit. Because I’ve had a

ments are not at all tangible yet

ton of time to think about things and I’m not trying to produce but I still wanna keep busy

i just realized i have two weeks left of

and still wanna feel like I’m working on something. I’m not necessarily interested in coming

slow paced experimenting, thinking

to that finished product. I am most excited when I’m working and if I’m making things and

of nothing but everything, freedom.

they’re being finished and I’m producing it just feels really empty because I’m at the end of

but i dont really feel the need to get a

something.

move on i just want to learn the ukulele (thats what im doing right now)

CG So you’re keeping yourself in the state of making.

(Im still super obsessed with sound

DL That’s really what I’m doing, yeah.

and i want to make symphonies with the different notes that come form

CG Painting over and over and over! What’s your other project?

the death valley sand dunes, but i feel that might be a long term project. lat-

DL It’s also based on music. There are certain pieces that I really love, sonatas by Mozart,

er, later, later. Im also obessesed with

and I don’t know anything about classical music like if they’re considered to be mainstream

the idea that i can cry on command,

pieces or not. Really recognizable. But I’m getting the sheet music from those pieces and

i wanna do some video stuff with

they’re quartets so there’s four string instruments. You can isolate each instrument—if you

that because i feel thats a talent that i

go on the internet they give you what each part is in sheet music—then if you take that

— ­ DL

sheet of music, literally it’s a drawing or an image. So it’s also playing with the fact that I

should put to use.

don’t know what it’s saying so I don’t know how to read it, it’s like a completely different 38

language. When I look at it I look for shapes that I recognize and there are circles in each note. So I want to make drawings that are based on that language of that specific piece. On the sheet I was looking at I whited out everything that wasn’t a circle and it left something that looked kind of like Morse code. So that’s something else that I’ve been looking at, it just looks really great too. It’s just really interesting to look at.

CG It reminds me of John Cage almost. It’s actually super John Cage.

DL Yeah!

MonaTweeta

by Quasimondo

CG I have his book Silence where he wrote poetry like you would write music so he wrote

flickr.com/photos/

poetry on a scale. It’s really crazy.

quasimondo/3518306770

DL Mhm. I really like the things he does with that. Oh and what I’ve been doing is I have all these dots so what I’m in the process of doing is putting them on these pieces of wood and I’ve been working a lot with wax and I just wanna see what happens when I pour wax into these holes and it goes through and dries.

CG That reminds me of this other thing I saw on the internet where someone took the Mona Lisa and they broke it down into 140 shapes or something that were converted to Chinese characters. Then they translated the Chinese characters to English and then had people spin it off into something readable. So it’s a poem that represents a painting. It’s a weird way to think about an image, you’re looking at the encoded language of an image. What

39

you’re doing is almost like the encoded visual of a piece of music.

DL Wow that’s so cool! I find it really interesting when you an translate something from an image to words or vice-versa or a different language. Images are a language, they’re a way to read things and there’s something about that. What I’ve been working on is translating memory into image and then image into memory. Then the videos are taking music, breaking it down into different elements of the piece and then...it’s something that I’m really excited about. Whether I get those things done is irrelevant at this point.

CG So it’s like, “Whatever, just gonna pour some wax one day!”

DL Haha yeah.

CG “Paint some layers another!”

DL Yeah, it’s really hard for me to be really focused on a beginning and end when I know that very soon things are going to be really different.

CG Right. I relate in a way. When I was having my portfolio reviewed someone was like, “Well, what about independent work?” and I was like, “What do you mean independent work? My entire life has been one giant art program after the other?” This is the first summer where I’m not in an intensive art program, I’m doing internships. It’s really weird because I’m not making anything but I’m just trying to talk to other people and do like synthesizing.

DL I think that the things you’re doing right now like I’m really excited about them. I see them as a way of even helping me figure things out, I don’t know if that makes any sense.

CG I was telling John, I talked to him the other day, I think he though I was crazy but I was like, “Yeah when I was at Oxbow I would lock myself in a closet and talk into a tape recorder and talk until I had an essay written.”

Sometimes I think it really is helpful to talk about stuff and hear about stuff and I don’t think that conversation happens all the time between people in different places.

DL I really like what you’re doing.

CG Ha, thank you. I really like what you’re doing!

Photograph by Diana Lozano

40

DL Oh thank you. I don’t know if I’m necessarily Process material right now.

CG You are! That’s the thing, it’s seriously anything. I’ve been thinking about things that are interesting and I’m like, “Actually, why am I just talking to artists that are 18 years old? I wanna talk to my friend’s mom! I wanna talk to my friend who’s biking across the country!”

That’s my fear with art school too is that my interest is not just art I think it’s everything. So, I don’t know. It’s totally interesting to talk to people.

DL That’s so great. Well if you want to I can send you images periodically.

CG Totally. Keep me updated! I’ll be putting this together over the next couple weeks. I’m thinking it will be ready mid to end of August. So through August feel free to send me images of anything. Any images you have are relevant. I’m just totally gonna go crazy and experiment with how the images and conversations relate and stuff.

DL That’s so great.

CG Yeah. I have one exciting internship and one boring internship where I sit at a computer.

DL I don’t even have a job hahaha.

CG Well one is super awesome in an art gallery office and the other is at an ad agency where I’m really suffering but they give me a computer that’s loaded with software in a cubicle so I can just do my own thing all the time.

DL That’s really great.

CG Yeah, it turned out to be a really bad and then really good once I figured it out, haha.

DL So you’re working in the city now?

CG Yeah. Five days a week.

DL Oh my God, crazy! You know John-Elio is in the city right now.

CG Oh, I had no idea. I talked to him last week, was he here?

Overstatement of the century

DL No I think he just went in for the weekend.

I have since come to terms with this internship and daresay actually am

CG Oh, crazy! How do you go in for the weekend from Canada?

enjoying and learning from it. Was feeling a little emo at the time of this

DL I know!

conversation. —CG

CG Cool, I should see if he’s around. I’ll let you know how things go. So good to talk to you and good luck with not making anything!

DL Thanks!

41

Photographs by Diana Lozano

Rendering by Talia Perry

42

Talia Perry CG So tell me about your project.

TP Which one?

CG I’m not sure exactly. I guess there’s a bunch of things here. It actually all looks like the same thing. It’s an angular kind of thing that people are walking on?

TP With planes and stuff?

CG Yeah!

TP Yeah! That was my final project for the spring semester at Carnegie Mellon. We had to design a space for the projection of movies at Flagstaff Hill, which is behind the school. I’m a big fan of reading so I was reading a lot.

I read a book called The Digital Baroque about cinematic theory, which I know nothing about. So I was reading that and I was reading some philosophy that kind of got me thinking about space in terms of time and moving through space so I tried to apply it to the project. That’s kind of what I ended up with. And I did a lot with projection systems which again I knew nothing about so it was a huge experiment for me because I was combining all the ideas I had at the time and learning as I went. It was fun.

CG Cool! Could you walk me through the pictures?

TP Those are actually all the pic43

tures that I have right now because my computer is dead.

CG Oh no that’s horrible!

TP But I’m very happy that I sent you these pictures because now I have them saved on my email!

CG Yeah! So it’s a place for watching movies?

TP Yeah. The first few images are of my “Knot Project” which is the project that we had before this. That was more about how you could define space with a knot, which is like the anti-space. So that was all about going from solid to void and back again but what I got out of it was more the change in the knot over time. That was what interested me, so I took a bunch of cuts through it and projected it onto itself. That’s how I got something that almost looks like a building.

Then we had to do another project where we drew a television, which I’m sure Liza’s mentioned before and so mine was about music and how music can tell you different things about the space. What I became more interested in though was how a character is moving through a space or just how a camera is moving through a space and how the two kind of relate to each other through the passage of time. I kind of took that into my next project, the Flagstaff site. The hill is used as a transitional space because people are constantly cutting across it and moving through it so I wanted to emphasize that and how the landscape changes versus how I didn’t really answer your question at

the people are changing as they pass through it, similar to the subject-camera relationship.

all, did I? Should have been in politics...

That was when that project started. I tried using different types of projection systems.

—TP CG What exactly is a projection system?

TP We were given the screen size for the movie that would be projected. There’s a little rectangle there, which is the space where it would be projected. But I didn’t want just one structure on the space, I wanted a series of manipulations throughout the site because it’s not really used specifically as a space to watch movies. So I took that rectangle and I Related Conversation:

projected it to make it a 3D object. I eventually ended up using the Taylorian method of

Liza Langer w/ Casey Gollan

projection. You can see all the different boxes that were kind of the result of that. And then those boxes—hahaha it’s so convoluted—I made a two-dimensional object into a three-

Source:

dimensional object two-dimensionally and then I took those two-dimensional frames and I

Process Magazine Issue One, p. 34

unfolded them in a three-dimensional realm...

Read it online at:

CG What? Oh my God.

http://issuu.com/process/docs/ one/34

TP ...using a computer program, Rhino, to relate what was going on between these frames to the topography. Then the two-dimensional frames unfolded three-dimensionally became three-dimensional objects in and of themselves.

Rendering by Talia Perry

44

CG So could someone else with the same software and landscape get the exact same result if they followed what you did?

TP I don’t think they would get the same results but I guess they could get something similar, form-wise. I had to do a lot of decision making as far as where these frames were going. Like I had a rough idea of the space and I had to choose where I wanted things to be. I ended up building a bridge from the hill to Carnegie Mellon because I wanted to engage the neighbor of the site.

Things like that can’t be generated by a machine.

CG It’s not part of the computer program.

TP Yeah exactly.

CG It didn’t even occur to me at first that it was for watching movies, which I think is interesting, because it’s just an interesting shape. At first what stuck with me was that bridge and I thought it was like some kind of little Highline that you could install in your own yard or whatever. But it’s kind of cool that it’s a space for watching movies and you can walk on it and it’s all these different kinds of things.

TP Yeah I wanted to have multiple places where I was engaging people in different ways so they’re not all necessarily connected but they use the same language.

CG Did you have in your mind what it would look like or did you find out what it would look like once you punched everything into the computer?

TP I had a few ideas earlier on that were sort of similar. I kind of knew what parts of it were going to look like based on the way I was placing them but at the same time there were definitely parts of it that took on a life of their own, where the forms had a different relationship with themselves that I didn’t expect.

CG Huh, that’s cool.

TP I did similar things in the first version of the project and took on a few more ideas in the next iteration. So after I did the first one I kind of knew that it was going to look similar but it came up with a lot of elements that I didn’t expect.

CG I’m just curious because I saw this talk by this guy Edward Tufte who was saying that a lot of design today, in his opinion, is whatever the computer throws up. Which I thought was really funny. How much of what you do is hand drawn? What you sent me, those renderings look really good. They’re not super photo-realistic but they actually look like they fit in the space and they’re really effective. But how do you start?

TP I did a lot of sketches before I started. Those renderings took me a long time. Originally

“I became interested in how a character is moving through a space or how a camera is moving through a space and how the two relate to each other through the passage of time.”

I started out doing a bunch of models forecasting what I expected it to turn out to be and I just started with one method of projection so I pretty much did what I told you that I did before except I did it manually.

WAY TOO LONG —TP

45

Drawing by Talia Perry

CG Oh, wow.

TP And I saw what the outcome would be. I just did one version of a projection, a frame, and a structure and I would take that and fold chipboard and see what happened.

CG Oh my God. TP It was kind of similar to the shapes that I ended up with eventually but there were a lot of variations involved and trying different things. Once I had all the frames pulled out and gathered throughout the site then I had to fold them. There were a couple places where it was kind of arbitrary and I didn’t really know exactly what I was doing.

And it wasn’t like the computer was doing all these things for me. I had to sit there and—haha a lot of what I did on the computer I could’ve done by hand except some things were a lot faster on the computer and I didn’t have that much time to do the whole thing. It also gave me a framework to start with for the renderings, which was helpful.

CG Right. So it lets you do things that you couldn’t do or would just take so much longer to do by hand anyway.

TP Yeah, but I did do a lot of things by hand earlier in the project.

CG Cool. I was just bringing up that quote because I’m the type of person that does everything on the computer. I’m just not crafty.

TP Yeah I have horrible craftsmanship.

CG To me it’s just like, thank God that there are computers. It’s just funny because I’m not very crafty and I’m always self-conscious of “Is this what I want to do or is this what the program wants me to do. Y’know?

TP Yeah.

Handmade cardboard projections by Talia Perry

46

CG So what are you working on now? This was your final project for your first year.

Further Reading:

TP Yeah. This summer I’ve been kind of just stuck in the house because I don’t have a car

Project Manifesto:

this summer and I was going to try and find a job but no one’s hiring and all that. I’ve been

(TELE)VISION and (talk)itecture:

doing a lot of reading. I’ve read a lot of the things that—we had to write a manifesto for our

a textual collage

final project and for most people it was like, “Ughhh I hate writing essays” but I love to write

by Talia Perry

so it was hugely amusing for me.

Available to read online at:

CG Hahaha.

http://thegarrulousscribe.blogspot. com/2009/04/television-and-talkitec-

TP I vomited up all the information that I had been thinking about and I didn’t really get a

ture-textual.html

chance to verbalize in my presentation of the project. I kind of went back and reviewed a lot of those ideas that I didn’t get a chance to fully comprehend at the time. And I still don’t

Excerpt:

really understand them. I think it’s really important to look at things that you’ve already

Snakes and ladders indeed. A fore-

done because you get a better understanding of them.

warning of what follows: There is a lot I want to say here, and this is due

CG I’ve definitely wanted to go back—I don’t do architecture I do art—but I’ve definitely

in part to the exhaustive suppression

wanted to go back and redo a project. I’ve thought about it and I’m like, “Actually, I could do

of my writing that has occurred this

something different with this.” It’s strange that people don’t do it more I think. This is kind of

semester – this would seem ironic

jumping around but what are you reading now?

to anyone who knows my academic schedule swapped Interp for Critical

TP I just got back from Beach Haven and the library there was having a book sale, which was

Histories in January – so if what

amazing because I got like eight books for six dollars or something like that. I got a book

follows is a sort of incomprehensible

called The Way Things Work and it’s just a bunch of diagrams of machines and ballpoint

rambling of subjects seemingly

pens and all this random stuff. There’s no order to it whatsoever, it’s just a bunch of draw-

unrelated to the nature of my project,

ings about how things work.

I can only suggest in a Baudrillardian way that my urge to convey my intent

TP The guy at the library was like, “People don’t usually like old books but I guess it’s kind of

relies more heavily upon the fact that

interesting!” It’s cooooool!!!

I get to write anything at all. Also, I think and design by writing, so most

CG That’s amazing!

of my ideas are far from completely formed, much less developed and

CG Totally.

applied, and the disorganized nature of this “manifesto” would better lend

TP What else am I reading? I read like five books at a time...hold on one second...okay I’m

itself to serve as the compositional

back. I’m reading The Urban Wilderness, which is about the American city and how cities

equivalent of an intensively studious

develop and stuff. I read The BLDGBLOG Book.

sketch (or maybe collage)...

CG Oh my God, I’ve got a copy of that. I’ve only read the first forty pages but I love it.

TP It’s like reading a blog...except better!

CG It’s kind of cool. I’m also obsessed with books. I don’t even sometimes read whole books but I just am obsessed with the way they’re printed and how they feel and how they look.

That, to me, is such a beautiful book.

TP It is, it’s very well designed! I read a few books by Paul Shepherd, who’s a British architect, writer, and critic and they were also random finds so I was really excited about them. My mom made me read this book called Breakfast with Buddha, it’s just a novel, it’s cute.

47

CG Yeah, my mom always gives me books like that. She’s like, “Here’s a book!” And it’s like “How to Love Yourself” or something. I’m like “...thank you.”

Further Reading: Notes for Those Beginning

TP It’s good to read stuff like that every once in a while though.

the Discipline of Architecture

by Michael Meredith, MOS Architects

CG Yeah, totally.

Read it online at:

TP I just read Michael Meredith’s essay, Notes for Those Beginning the Discipline of Architec-

http://mos-office.net/uploaded_files/

ture. It’s an amazing and it referenced a bunch of things so I ran out to my library and tried

project_file/path/84587/01_

to find them.

PosterText_01.pdf

CG And you got the references?

TP Yeah I found some of them.

CG That’s funny!

TP Well I don’t like to not know things. Hahaha that’s a weird thing to say but when I find a reference and I don’t understand it I usually try to look it up.

Related Conversation:

CG I don’t know why I’ve never thought of that. I guess on the internet it’s like following a

Theresa Zeitz-Lindamood

link or something, you just find the reference.

w/ Casey Gollan

TP Yeah it is like that.

Source: Process Magazine Issue One, p. 28

CG That’s awesome.

Read it online at:

TP Hahaha.

http://issuu.com/process/docs/ one/28

CG So a lot of what you read is non-fiction?

TP Yeah. I read a lot of non-fiction. I also like novels. I read something by J.G. Ballard the other day too.

CG It’s just interesting for me because at least one person I’ve talked to has said that she’s an artist and I said, “What artists do you like?” and she said that she really draws her inspiration from outside the world of art. So just random stuff. But architecture is super interesting to me because, like The BLDGBLOG Book introduction was saying, you can think about it as everything.

TP Yeah I agree. It’s hard to draw the line, I think especially now. We always have this discussion like, “What is architecture? What is the defining attribute to what makes a building architecture? What makes a drawing architecture? What makes a lampshade architecture?” It’s interesting but it’s kind of one of those “no solution” questions.

CG Yeah. Why not just make some architecture instead of debating it? That’s funny. So I know that you’re in school now but would you ever attempt to

Model by Talia Perry

48

build the things you design?

TP Haha. I think it would be fun. During the initial proposal of my final project to my studio professors, one of them noticed the bridge that I designed for the back of Carnegie Mellon and she was like, “Talia! Let’s go out and build it right now!!” and I was like, “Err, I don’t know if it will stand up.” Hahaha.

CG That’s really funny.

TP That’s one of the things that did draw me to architecture. The idea that something will be built. I can’t really explain it that well.

Especially when buildings outlast their creators. I mean, nowadays people are tearing down buildings like crazy but there’s a lot of old stuff out there too like St. Paul’s Cathedral. It’s interesting.

CG Yeah. I was giving Liza a really hard time about it when I talked to her because I was like, “What is the use of something if it never gets built?” I’m really interested in design also and a lot of practical design solutions are not ones that would be complicated to build. You could kind of hack something together. So I guess that was my question about building the things you make. You could design the best skyscraper but what are the chances of it getting built? How much are you actually solving problems?

TP I think it’s kind of hard because people are trying to make their buildings or their designs into solutions but at the same time there’s a lot of stuff out there that’s not doing anything. A standard house, maybe it does do something for someone, but a lot of architects out there aren’t actually doing anything interesting. It’s just their job.

CG Right, it’s just boring. And I guess a lot of people probably wouldn’t want to live in crazy architecture either. There are some people that really want a white picket fence or something.

TP My friend Becky was talking about how people who have lived in the Villa Savoye

Photo: Wikipedia: Valueyou

complain that it leaks and is horrible to actually live in. But I think it’s interesting because

Villa Savoye, 1929

sometimes good architecture isn’t comfortable living or vice versa. What makes good archi-

considered “the seminal work of Swiss

tecture is a whole other debate.

architect Le Corbusier”

CG Yeah. That’s what I’m fascinated with too from the design standpoint. I was giving Liza

More Information

a hard time about this because she was saying “form over function” or “function over form”

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villa_Savoye

whatever the adage is. But I was saying that, to me, a perfect object can’t have function without form and can’t have form without function. If one is too much or too little then the other can’t be right. You have to have a balance in my opinion. Have you read The Fountainhead?

TP Yes, I have.

49

Rendering by Talia Perry

“I have so many ideas flying around that I’m going to explode from trying to combine it all and it’s not going to work.

CG So we also talked about that and I would say that Roark is the best architect. Without ever actually seeing a plan his philosophy of designing a space for what it needs to be rather than anything else just makes so much sense to me. But at the same time you could argue that you would lose statements that are being made, visually.

TP I know what you mean. I’m also reading Learning from Las Vegas right now, which is a lot about popular taste and architecture and signage. It’s weird because it’s difficult to design a space for what it needs to be, especially nowadays when spaces are being changed into other things constantly.

CG Hm. TP I think I read something by Bernard Tschumi, he was talking about how a firehouse can be changed into a kindergarten. But it brings up this whole thing about, “Is your space going to be adaptable? To what extent? How permanent is architecture? Is it stuck in its ways?”

It’s a very interesting debate and I don’t know where I stand on any of it because I’m just doing things on paper and not building.

CG Right.

Rendering by Talia Perry

50

TP I feel like I can’t make a statement about anything quite yet because I don’t wanna look back years from now and seem hypocritical about it all.

CG Oh my God. That’s sort of my life. I was given this final project assignment and my statement ended up being, “I’m not going to make a statement.” Because when can you? But what it came down to is this cheesy Thoreau or Emerson quote that’s like, “Speak loudly today in words what you mean to say and also speak loudly tomorrow what you mean to say, even if it contradicts the first day.” And I’m like, “Yeah, but I’ll still feel stupid.”

Further Reading TP Yeah, hahaha. No denying that.

CMU 2nd Year Studio Blog cmuarch2013.wordpress.com

CG Those are those circular debates where you can go on forever. But I think it’s definitely an exciting time to be in architecture.

TP I would agree!

CG I keep having my thoughts about it because I’m like, “Hmmmm maybe I should just drop this whole ‘art’ thing and go to architecture school.” But I think they’re all different ways of doing the same things. So that’s super interesting. What’s next?

TP What’s next? Hm. I don’t know. I was joking with somebody about the fact that because of everything I’ve been reading and how I’ve been trying to be involved in the architectural community stuff this summer with the blog and everything, I have so many ideas flying around that as soon as I get my first studio assignment in the fall I’m going to explode from trying to combine it all and it’s not going to work.

CG That’s hilarious.

TP I’m excited to see how certain things are going to turn out and it should be good. I don’t know what the future is!

CG Neither do I. Awesome. Thank you for talking to me.

TP Thank you!

CG I will let you know soon what the deal is with everything that is going on and I’ll get back to you.

TP Sounds good!

CG Enjoy your summer!

TP You too!

51

The aftermath of doing a street piece by Mania

52

Mania CG So basically what I’m doing is talking to different people about what they sent me or what they’re working on. So I know you sent me a bunch of stuff but tell me about your two projects that you sent me. I think you sent me two right?

M Can you refresh my memory of what I sent you? I know there were pictures of a wall that I did and then something else. I think I drew a bunch of random shit on a piece of paper.

CG There were the scribbles, haha.

I have a bunch of pictures. There’s a wall that is slowly getting stenciled on. There’s your broken up self-portrait. There’s a bunch of symbols on a repeating pattern.

That’s basically what I’ve got. So tell me about those a little bit.

M Those are my two most recent undertakings I guess. I finished my self-portrait a little bit ago and the wall was a big outdoor painting that I finished recently.

This whole summer I’ve been trying to chill out and only really do what I really want to do artistically because I don’t want to burn myself out before I start school next year. I’m sure next year we’re all going to be doing a lot of stuff that we probably don’t want to do. Now has just been a time for me to stick to my artistic freedom, hahaha. The self-portrait was kind of my last big hurrah of high school, the last major piece I did. I guess up until that point none of my work had been introspective, it was all trying to 53

talk about other stuff or portray other ideas so the self-portrait was really a way for me to do that. I feel like I’ve always put a lot of myself into the work that I do but the self-portrait was all me I guess.

CG It’s a bunch of layers, right?

M Yeah, shit. There’s a stencil layer for each color value and there’s four color values. So on the main stencil there’s six sections of four layers each, if that makes any sense, because it’s not just one giant stencil. And the background has its own special elements in it and there’s a lot of paint drips and other stuff going on.

CG I’m kind of curious about the one where it’s on a wall and you stenciled a repeating pattern over it.

M I’ll have to figure out which one that one is.

CG It’s a wall with a bunch of tags on it but then it looks like you did a pattern over some Above:

stuff.

Detail of Self-Portrait Frame by Mania

M That’s the thing with the camel skeleton?

Untitled (Camel Skeleton) by Mania

54

CG Yeah.

M Those are a bunch of pictures which led up to the final piece. With that I primed the wall first and then it was a layer based process. So you don’t know what it’s going to look like until the very end.

CG Were you doing it over someone else’s stuff though?

M Yeah yeah yeah. It was this dude who writes “Roy” here in Richmond. He’s a pretty good graffiti artist. One of my friends is friends with him and writes with him so I kind of asked his

Below: A Great Way to Get Punched in the Face, 2008

permission through someone else.

by Casey Gollan

CG I had a really awkward experience the one time I tried stenciling. Last year I was at the Museum School in Boston and they have a wall on their campus where you’re allowed to tag. People do amazing stuff on there and I made this kind of shitty stencil so that I could make an animation of it covering the wall. So I was doing a timelapse while I sprayed it on and these big guys came out and saw me covering up whatever was there and they were like, “That’s a great way to get punched in the face.” And I was like, “Ahhhhhhhh

I think graffiti is actually one of the more

noooooooo!”

M Yeah, definitely.

CG It was really scary so that’s why I was wondering if you asked permission.

M Well sort of. The world of graffiti is a very strange ego filled world. I think it’s actually one of the more conservative art forms there are. When you think about it there are so many unwritten rules to it, like you can’t paint over people who are your elders or better than you or have been around longer than you. Because you will get beat up. People have gotten killed over stupid shit like that and I think that’s ridiculous. I can understand defending your turf or whatever. If you’re a really good graffiti artist and you do piece somewhere that’s illegal or really dangerous for you but you pulled it off and then someone comes along and trashes your piece that kinda sucks.

CG I was just oblivious.

M It’s kind of weird. Graffiti is one of those little subcultures where it’s complicated.

55

conservative art forms there are. There are so many unwritten rules to it.

CG It’s also expensive too right? I was talking to those guys before I ran away and they were saying, “Do you know how expensive it is to do this huge piece?” Whoever did it had used like twenty colors and metallics. I was like, “No, sorrryyy!!”

M Yeah, it can be expensive but most graffiti writers aren’t paying for their paint, they’re stealing it. No real graffiti artist worth their salt who wants to be respected will pay for paint.

CG Oh, huh.

M When you do it a lot, at three to five dollars per can, you could go through millions of dollars worth of spray paint. That’s sort of an impossible habit to support, it’s like a drug habit. For legal pieces or something that you’re going to spend a lot of time on and someone will buy there are special spray paints. Companies like Montana and Belton that make art spray paint and you can’t really steal that because it’s only at specialty stores or sold online.

That’s expensive stuff but it’s really good at the same time.

CG Yeah, I had some roommates that were really into tagging and they were always talking about Montana paints. This is just so interesting because I’m such a novice with this world. I was talking to someone about Shepherd Fairey and they were really pissed off. My friend was saying how much he hates Shepherd Fairey he was like, “He’s not legit. He just copies stuff and then sells it.” It’s part of the whole cred thing that he can’t be so commercial.

M Yeah. There’s definitely a lot of criticism of Sheperd Fairey. I mean he has sold out whether that’s a derogatory term or not.

He doesn’t really do his own street work anymore he has minions do it for him. Just like any established artist now he has a whole factory of artist’s assistants that help him churn out two hundred pieces a year. I don’t know how I really feel about that because I don’t think of him really as a street artist anymore. He doesn’t even claim himself to be a street artist anymore even though he’s heavily influenced by it and that’s where he came from. He’s done a lot for street art as far as showing the world what it’s about and what it is and to some extent that’s a bad thing because now it’s the cool thing to do and all these suburban kids are like, “Oooh I wanna be like Shepherd Fairey!” But at the same time people are getting to a point where they understand it more and it’s familiar to them. Shepherd Fairey’s like a household name but for most of his art career he’s been a fuckin’ vandal. That’s pretty impressive, I think. If you can make a living off of your art then why not?

CG Definitely.

M He’s not one of my favorite artists but I don’t hate on him either.

Self-Portrait by Mania

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I respect what he does I guess.

CG My other question is about how you wanted to use your tag name. That’s cool, but where did that come from?

M Well my pseudonym or nom de plume is “Mania” and where does the come from? I guess for a while I started out just like doing traditional graffiti or whatever and I kind of got out of that because I didn’t like it as much and I got into stencils. Mania is when you’re manic depressive which is bi-polar disorder. There’s two sides to you, one is the depressive low down state where you don’t want to talk to anybody and you’re very closed in and mania is the highs. That’s like when you’re really happy and out there and talking to everybody.

One of the characteristics of that is that you share everything with everyone and anyone.

You’ll tell your deepest darkest secret or somebody else’s secret that they entrusted to you or something because you have this disorder going on. A lot of my street work is me in a way sharing whatever is in my head with anyone or everyone and not really giving a shit whether they liked it or not. Just putting it out there for anyone to judge and at the same time being anonymous doing it.

CG You brought up the difference between graffiti and stenciling. When I was at this art school in California with those roommates that loved tagging, we covered our walls with paper and we would tag all over the walls, one of our teachers came in and was like, “If you’re gonna do this and use all these markers you should write more than just your name over and over.” I think it’s interesting because the stuff you sent is bordering more on fine art than vandalism.

M Right. No one even within the graffiti world can agree on what the difference is between street art and graffiti is. There definitely is a clear difference I think. Like, graffiti is it’s own little world and it has its own culture and it comes from roots that are different from the roots that street art has. Street art being like stencils, wheat paste, just about anything that isn’t traditional graffiti. The average graffiti artist, I would say, doesn’t really like street art and doesn’t really give a shit about whether they’re making art or not, it’s more of the vandalism aspect. When you’re doing traditional graffiti you’re really only doing it for yourself and for others within the graffiti community. With street art you’re doing it for yourself and people in the street art community but you’re also doing it for people outside of the community. I think people can relate to street art and find more meaning in it than just a tag that you can’t really decipher or graffiti that people can’t understand. I guess graffiti is more like a fuck-you thing and street art is kind of like fuck-you-but-not-really.

CG More like a legitimate contribution?

M I think graffiti is a legitimate contribution too but I mean not everyone thinks so.

CG Graffiti and street art have been around forever but just because they’ve blown up so much right now do you think the whole thing is a fad? I just read that a lot of street art is being pulled from auctions. We’re in a period like no other time in history where Banksy is being sold in a Sotheby’s auction for millions. But I heard that in this bad economy people don’t want to invest in street art. Do you see it sticking around forever as something traded?

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Untitled (Process Shots) by Mania

M There are always going to be people doing street art and graffiti whether it’s popular within the art world. Right now there’s a lot of hype that surrounds it and that’s good and bad. I don’t care what people at Sotheby’s think about street art or what I’m doing. Well, I say that now but when I actually have to support myself I’m gonna regret saying that.

CG Hahaha.

M I don’t know if it has reached critical mass within the fine art world yet but eventually it will reach that point. But I don’t think it’s going away, there’s just too many people doing it for the right reasons rather than because it’s just a cool thing to do or a fad.

CG That’s true.

M The difference from graffiti is that street art has so much more — new ways of creating street art, y’know? Rather than just stencils or spray painting. People are doing sculpture installations on the street and all this crazy shit.

CG Right.

M So anything goes.

CG So what are you working on now?

M I’m doing a lot of street work. Tomorrow I’m going to work on a mural for a little bit.

CG One sec, my reception is really bad. Hello?

M Hey CG So what’s the difference for you between deciding to do something on a wall in public or doing it on canvas?

M What’s the difference?

CG I guess they have different purposes, right?

M Yeah. One of the biggest differentiating factors is context. If you take the same image and paint it on the street it has a different meaning than if it’s painted on canvas and is hanging in a gallery. That dichotomy is something that’s very interesting to me. As far as motivations for why I do a piece on canvas or a piece on the street...the thing about street work is that it is completely ephemeral. It won’t last for long at all. Someone will write over it or it will just fade out. That’s one thing that interests me because it’s a release in a way, but at the same time it kinda sucks too.

CG Yeah.

M So that’s a reason to work on canvas, because it’s gonna last a lot longer and you will probably learn more from it.

Process Shots by Mania

58

CG I saw two really cool projects online. One is a website where people are documenting spots where it’s popular to do graffiti, so everytime someone notices something new they’ll take a photo and upload it. They group all the photos by place so you can watch the spots evolve. Then there’s an even newer site from Paris where someone took different tags and they extracted the alphabet.

M Yeah!

CG I thought it was so cool how you could see the typography. How different people drew their A’s and stuff.

M It’s pretty cool. The internet has done so much for graffiti, like really expanded peoples’ knowledge about it. There’s this guy who went around Europe, he’s still doing it I guess, but he’s taking pictures of graffiti on trains to match the words in songs so it’s like a sing along with graffiti.

CG That’s really funny.

Graffiti Taxonomy: Paris, 2009

by Evan Roth

M Yeah it’s pretty cool.

http://fondation.cartier.com/

CG So the difference between canvas or a wall but also between spray painting and stenciling is that spray painting without a stencil is kind of spontaneous and ephemeral but if you’re making a stencil, it’s a very different process because you’re spending 200 hours or whatever cutting out this design that has ten layers so you can reproduce it.

M Right, yeah. But even though it’s the same design, every time you do it it’s going to be slightly different just because of human error.

CG Right.

M Just like any form of printmaking you can reproduce it. That’s what I like about it alot, you can take the same image and do completely different takes on it. That goes back to the whole difference between working on the streets or on canvas. You can do the same image in two different places and discover the differences between the two, how the context is different and how it changes the meaning for you and for the audience. I feel like I’m definitely gonna stay within printmaking at Cooper, maybe it’ll change but the ability to reproduce images and everything is very cool to me.

CG Yeah, I really like thinking about it as a form of printmaking. That’s really funny, but it’s true.

M It is! It’s just like ghetto printmaking.

CG Hahaha totally. That’s awesome. Thank you for talking to me and I will let you know how everything goes and I will talk to you soon.

M Cool thanks, just let me know if you need anything else. Later.

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Untitled (New Work) by Mania

Wall of Awkward by Taryn Wiens

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Taryn Wiens CG Oh my God. So I haven’t seen you in a year and a half, right?

TW Yeah.

CG Is that true? That’s insane.

TW I can’t even believe it’s been that long since Oxbow.

CG I’m so happy, I’m sending one of my best friends to Oxbow. I enlisted her and she’s amazing so she called me today and was like, “Guess what I’m doing?” I was like, “What?” and she was like, “Buying sheets for my bed at Oxbow!!!” and I was like, “Oh my God!” TW Did she get the Einstein’s dreams project yet?

CG I don’t even know. I should probably ask her about it. I was so scared.

TW I know!

CG I was like, “Oh my God!!” So, tell me about your project!

TW Which project?

CG I think it’s the awkward project?

TW Oh, the awkward project.

Yeah. That was really fun to do.

I had a really good time with it because I really really enjoy the idea of awkward so it made the

61

“Awkward usually has this negative, uncomfortable connotation but once you recognize and embrace it as being that, it can be really fun and make things really interesting.

project really fun.

CG Did you start that with a Facebook note?

TW Yeah. Before I started doing the art part of the project I was doing a lot of just talking to people about it. Because with awkward there’s not really encyclopedia articles on it or there are definitions in the dictionary but it doesn’t really cover it.

CG That’s so funny.

TW The best way to get ideas for it was just to talk to people because everybody has stories about awkward.

CG Right, yeah.

TW So it’s not just like one person’s experience. I got some really funny stories too.

CG So first you interviewed and talked to people. When I look at your project there’s a bunch of stuff, lots of components to it: things in jars...

TW Yeah. Well I came up with...hold on let me pull up my journal from the project. I made a project journal and wrote down all the definitions and everything then boiled it down and got the basics of what everybody was talking about. So then I had my own basic definition which became an artist statement. From that it was like I had ways you can express awkwardness, like facial expressions, so I wanted to paint these close-up portraits. Also body language, so for that I did silhouettes. And then I find hands and feet really awkward so I did drypoint prints of those.

CG Huh, that’s funny.

TW Hands and feet are definitely the most naturally awkward things.

CG I think feet are really awkward.

TW Yeah, and then awkward has a sort of...you can’t really express it all in 2D so I wanted to have a chance to put in kind of random things and the awkward relationships. You can’t really see in the pictures too well but one of the jars has a little jar inside a jar. One of the jars had this broken rock and I glued all the pieces together except this one little piece which I left a little bit out.

CG Hahaha.

TW I got my old iPod, the very first iPod mini that came out, and I recorded awkward noises and awkward stories on my computer and put that on the iPod. Then I had a couple songs by artists which I just kind of find awkward so I had that playing.

CG Haha what songs?

TW Some Joanna Newsom and Animal Collective.

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CG You find those awkward!?

TW Mhmmm.

CG That is so funny.

TW Yeah I think it was like “Leaf House” and something else.

CG That song was like my Oxbow anthem.

TW The point of the project is that awkward usually has this negative, uncomfortable connotation but once you recognize and embrace it as being that it can be really fun and make things really interesting. The iPod was really good because I didn’t have it playing on speakers or anything I just had a pair of headphones hanging out of the jar. So people would be walking around the gallery and there were a bunch of different pieces but you know when you hear music playing really quietly and you can’t tell where it’s coming form? I had a lot of people come up to me and be like, “I was just in the gallery by myself and I heard music and it made me really uncomfortable!”

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Detail of Wall of Awkward by Taryn Wiens

CG That’s really funny. Have you changed your stance on awkwardness?

TW I think so. I used to just kind of deny and glaze over it and shut it out. If I sensed an area that was getting awkward I would pretend not to notice but now I recognize it more.

CG But this isn’t your super newest project right?

TW No. This was my final school Art 500 project. Since then I’ve been sort of doing more “not thinking” art, y’know?

CG Like what?

TW Just like a painting class, which isn’t really a class, it was at the community center and you just kind of went and painted for three hours every week however you wanted and then we would talk about it.

CG Cool!

TW I’ve taken a lot of pictures and I’m like, “This isn’t the best picture but it would be a really awesome painting!” So I’ve done a lot of those. The newest thing I’m working on, I haven’t finished it or anything, is a stop animation drawing. I’ve seen some examples of it a while ago and I just kind of wanted to try it. So I just figured why not now?

CG Cool! So what are you up to this summer?

TW This summer I’m mainly just life guarding so I can make enough money for my gap year.

CG Oh! You’re taking a gap year?

TW Yeah.

CG Cool! What are you doing?

TW I’m going to Nepal in September.

CG Whoa! What are you doing there.

TW I’m going with this program called Volunteer Nepal which is a really nice volunteer program because it’s not like a lot of other gap year programs which are sort of “have fun on your gap year and pretend to do stuff but really just kind of hang out in a different country.” It’s a program that anyone can go to, they have professional people, college kids, gap year kids, and you can go for any period of time you want, start when you want and end when you want. You just pay the program fee and they set you up with all these different opportunities, whatever kind of volunteering you want to do. It’s really simple. I’m trying to decide what I’m going to do.

CG That’s so exciting! Do you know what you’re volunteering for?

TW Not yet. You kind of decide the first week you get there. I kind of know what the options Paintings by Taryn Wiens

64

are. I want to teach art in schools and learn what Nepali kids’ idea of art is. I can work in orphanages or little villages helping people farm.

Artist Statement

by Taryn Wiens

CG That sounds really awesome.

Awkward is fun to think about

TW So I get back from that in February, I’ll be home for a month, then Italy in March.

because it is not an easily definable word. My definition of Awkward is

CG Oh my God, that’s so cool!

some sort of combination of the following:

TW Yeah!

Being conscious of shortcomings

CG When did you decide on a gap year?

Being out of place

TW I was kind of thinking about it for a really long time and two years ago I was like, “I’m definitely gonna take a gap year” and then a year ago I was like, “Maybe, maybe not” and

Unspoken criticisms

then it just sort of...I felt like I really needed to do this. I need to spend a year in the real world before going back into academia.

Miscommunication

CG Right, yeah. I mean your school is kind of intense too, right?

Tension that is not resolved

TW Yeah. It’s more like college than high school sometimes. So it’s just nice to get a year to

A lack of tact

do it all. And the thing that I like about the gap year is that everything I do in the gap year I’m doing for myself. I’m not doing it to impress anybody, I’m not doing it to get a job or get

Obsolete

into college or to advance my career. Y’know? It’s really what I wanna do.

Causing embarrassment and dis-

CG That’s like what’s kind of stressful about internships.

comfort

TW Yeah.

Failed execution of intention

CG Like you’re either creating or destroying a job opportunity. So...but that’s awesome. I

Realization of previous oblivion

definitely went back and forth in my mind about a gap year but I never got serious about it. I thought I would have to do Finnish military for a year to keep my EU citizenship, which

Impossible to either ignore or ac

was funny, but that’s really awesome.

knowledge

TW Yeah I’m really excited about it. It’s really nice to be on a gap year because I’m doing all

Breaking social norms with modera-

this reading and stuff. You do a lot of serious reading when you’re in school and applying to

tion

colleges and it’s kind of for me but you can’t really tell if it’s for something else. I know that everything I’m doing right now is just because I want to. To make me better.

Lacking harmony of parts

CG That’s so nice. I feel that way but I also feel like there are just not enough hours in the

Even so, all of these phrases don’t

day. I’m just always running somewhere between random things but it’s awesome. I never

seem to encapsulate what awkward

found out where you’re going to school?

really is, and that is where the art comes in.

TW I’m going to Colorado College.

CG Oh awesome! Is Sophia going there?

Stop Motion Drawing

by Taryn Wiens

TW I don’t know is she?

http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=ALHhIqUZFgc 65

CG I think Sophia is going there but I’m not sure.

TW Seriously? I’m gonna Facebook her and find out. It’s a really small school and I don’t know anyone else going.

CG That’s so weird because my school is like ridiculously small and I know like half the people already. I’m so scared. Then again I get Sara Haley and Audrey and all these other art Not only are Sophia and I both going

program people.

to CC, but we’re also going to Nepal this fall. How eerily parallel, right?

TW Yeah, that’s cool. Colorado College often gets confused with the one in Boulder though.

—TW CG Oh okay. Colorado is the cooler one though because they do one class at a time.

TW Yeah!

CG And lots of hiking as it looks like in the brochures.

TW Hahaha. Yeah I’m so excited about one class at a time though. That’s just so much more the way I like to do things.

CG That makes sense to me. I mean, on one hand I really like to multi-task, like this summer I have a yoga schedule, a work schedule, a conversations-with-people schedule, an eating schedule, just everything is like regimented. It’s psycho but I like it. At my high school I had 9 classes a day that were 38 minutes each.

TW Oh my God. CG But that was a horrible example. I was like, “This is the worst system ever, someone needs to kill the state of New York for making this happen!” But I totally agree, that’s really awesome. You can get more into one thing, right?

TW Yeah well it’s also like you can completely get into one thing for the entire time you’re taking the class and it kind of depends on what you like to study, whether it works well, but another thing I’m interested in is psychology I guess.

CG Cool! So that’s where your awkwardness fits in.

TW Haha.

CG You can be someone’s awkward therapist or something or a therapist to awkward people.

TW I would love that, that would be so great.

CG I’m totally that way too, I like to get really immersed in one thing also. I guess I’m also a lot of the time immersed in ten things but one thing just consumes me and everything I do is actually about that.

TW Yeah. The Intro to Psychology class there they actually give everybody their own rat and 66

you have to keep it alive for the three-and-a-half weeks of the class and do all these tests with it.

I looked up awkward in Italian on wordhippo.com and they have

CG Oh my God! That’s actually really cool. I just remembered this random fact. have two

several words for awkward, but they

awkward stories. One is that awkward moments happen like on average every x amount of

only cover one aspect of it at a time.

minutes in any given conversation so you can be like, “Oh, it’s just happening again right on

Like they have a word for physically

schedule, that’s not so bad!” That’s a coping strategy from my math teacher.

awkward, a word to describe someone who makes awkward situations,

TW Hahaha.

a word to describe an uncomfortable situation, and a word to describe

CG Also my sister studied abroad in Florence for a year and she said that there’s no word in

ineptness, like a failed execution of

Italian for awkward. I don’t know if that’s true of not. There might be no exact translation.

intention. The cool thing about awk-

But we always use the word awkward, we’re like, “Oh my God that’s so awkward! AWK-

ward in English is it covers all of these

WARD!! So awkward!” So when she went there, I forget what her way of expressing it Italian

definitions and more, it’s such a broad

was but good luck with that.

term. My favorite phrase I came up with that touches most or all of the

TW Haha, thanks. I’m definitely gonna research that.

aspects is “lacking harmony of parts”

—TW CG Oh man. That’s awesome. I’m so glad. It sounds like you’re having such an exciting time coming up.

TW Yeah right now is a really good time because I have so much to look forward to.

CG I know! I’m like, “I want your life!” Anyways, awesome to talk to you and I will let you know how everything goes.

TW For sure.

CG I’ll talk to you soon, let’s not talk every year-and-a-half again.

TW That would be good. And I’ll send you mail soon!

CG Even if it’s just awkward silences.

TW I love awkward silences on the phone.

CG We can be on the phone like, “...................” Talk to you soon. Have so much fun with your summer!

TW You too!

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2. EXPER 68

RIMENTS Sara Haley / p. 70

Micah Hesse / p. 72

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Sara Haley My friend Sara Haley is the rare breed of teenager that does not have a Facebook. Because of this fact, when I called her to talk about what she was working on we joked that we should have a really shallow phone conversation and then text about the creative process. So we did. Neither of us expected it to go really well, but it went worse than either of us could’ve imagined. — CG

70

71

...at which point both of our wills to live and/or continue texting were finally broken.

Sara and I talked on the phone twice but I was out of the energy and the space required for a transcription so you will have to trust me that it was absolutely brilliant and will result in new directions for both of us.

Also: Sara’s magazine is called Excerpt. Above is a picture of the cover, you can look at a preview online and buy a copy at the link below...to my amazement it was made entirely in Powerpoint. http://magcloud.com/browse/Issue/27637 72

Right Sara tells me that one morning she woke up early (as usual) and dragged all this wet cardboard from where it was being thrown out to her house.

She built a rocket ship and sat inside it all day.

Above The fans in the installation above play The Graduation Song

by Vitamin C on the bottles (“As we go on we remember�), but since the fans all oscillate at different rates, the song is played at unpredictable intervals.

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Assorted Projects by Sara Haley

Video Stills from Liquid Crystal Display by Micah Hesse

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Watch and respond online at: http://prcss.com/mh/

Micah Hesse To watch Micah’s videos and submit a response, opinion, or interpretation, visit: http://prcss.com/mh/ Responses will be included in a followup.

Thanks and enjoy! — CG

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Video Stills from Discord by Micah Hesse

3. FOLLO 76

OWUPS Andra Khoder

Daniel Boccatto Phoebe Pundyk

Theresa Zeitz-Lindamood Liza Langer Aliyah Taylor

77

Andra Khoder

we talked about. Sure, I kept sketchbooking and thinking about lots of things and collecting things for my mind, but I have sort of abandoned the need to produce anything. The movie idea is totally on hold for now. My trip to Brazil (for about a month) was a great opportunity for me to stop working on these things and start working on some other things. In a sense, it was a great lesson about what it means to be “working”; sometimes, that could be to just take in everything that is around us, in order to increase our awareness and our senses. We must sense first. Then, produce.

Phoebe Pundyk This summer I was a sponge. I spent the past 3 months looking and thinking and being inspired.

Theresa Zeitz-Lindamood

I’m trying to create new systems of organization by folding paper into loops and I’ve been working on making a huge blanket that will take about half-a-year to create.

Since I talked to you about two months ago for the first issue of Process, I’ve been pouring most of my creative energies into learning how to cook. It’s been such an enjoyable challenge for me, with a pretty steep learning curve – before June of this year, Plus I’ve been working on my first Oxbow project.

I’d only baked (cookies, bread, granola, that sort of thing). Two months ago, I was so timid with the chef’s knife that it took me a good ten minutes to chop an onion, and touching raw chicken felt

Daniel Boccatto

so, so bizarre. And now, mid-August, I feel quite comfortable in the kitchen.

I love to try new things; I don’t think I’ve made the same

I have not been really working since the last time we spoke. Or

recipe twice this summer, though I have been keeping track of my

rather, I have not done anything faintly related to the things that

very favorites in my personal recipe-book. I’ve also been trying to 78

learn as much about the theory and science behind it as possible.

to Amsterdam. Finally, I am completing thoughts on my summer

Pretty much all my reading material has been foodie stuff: Alton

assignment for second year, analyzing buildings of Le Corbusier,

Brown, Ruth Reichl, Mark Bittman, and the giant stack of cook-

Mies Van Der Rhoe, and Louis Khan. Another new semester for my

books I have checked out of the library right now.

ideas to digest assignments.

It’s wonderful cooking just to cook, it’s so much about

being mindful at every moment. Watching onions caramelize in

Aliyah Taylor

butter is like seeing a preliminary sketch on a canvas; adding a final dash of sherry to a sauce is like putting that final glaze on a painting that pulls it all together. The more I learn and read about food, I realize it’s startlingly similar to the visual arts: it’s all about the relationship between the individual parts and the whole. It’s equally about process and product.

Liza Langer

I don’t know what compelled me to be a part of this project. It’s rare for me to put my work out there at all, but I loved this idea so much that I knew I had to voice my immediate support. The whole interview was a lot of fun! It’s so helpful talking out my art and process in general, but I never anticipated how terrifying it would be to see my conversation in print! Wow! I couldn’t get through Since we last spoke, I have been overwhelmed with thoughts.

ANY of my interview (I mean, I had no idea the whole thing would

Thoughts about the competition Michael Jeffers and I are working

be transcribed let alone how verbose I really am) especially after

on for the Northern Ontario School of Architecture. Thoughts

being so impressed by the rest of the participants. All in all, job

about Process projects, how to make Process into a community, an

well done Casey, and thanks for the inclusion! Your hard work paid

art project, an art form, a diving board. Thoughts about applica-

off most wonderfully!

tions that my internship with the Design Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art can offer to my architecture endeavors.

Thoughts about architecture, design, and art from my recent trip 79

Thank You for Reading PROCESS Magazine!

I hope you have questions, ideas, and art to share, send an email to process@caseyagollan.com and we will be in touch!

Conversations About the Creative Process // Issue 2 // August 2009 // prcss.com

PROCESS PROJECTS IS AN IDEA BY CASEY A. GOLLAN