Miss Expanding Universe Interview by Geoffrey Young

ASHLEY YANG-THOMPSON MISS EXPANDING UNIVERSE

Interview by Geoffrey Young Photographs courtesy of Ashley Yang-Thompson

Geoffrey Young: Before moving to Great Barrington what kinds of work kept you alive while you were doing your art in Manhattan?

Ashley Yang Thompson: Before I moved to GB, I was a resident at Flux Factory in Long Island City, Queens. As part of my residency, I had access to a warehouse filled with old SNL props, art books, decorations, paper, et cetera. It was like Christmas all the time. I'd take the best looking books and haul them to Strand and rare book stores, where I'd sell them. Other than that I was lucky to sell nearly every single oil painting I made while living in NYC. I also got paid to handwrite letters for a matchmaking service for single Jews. I have gorgeous cursive.

The first work I saw by you was the perform

ance you did at my gallery in 2018. You’d memorized some poems, and, sporting a wig with green pulsing battery-generated lights, you delivered the poems while moving, bending, spinning, stretching, so that we were as aware of your body in space as we were of the content of the poems. And the content of the poems was sexually candid, if not transgressive. Is performance central to your art, still?

I grew up in a theater school in San Francisco that my step-father taught at. It was considered acceptable behavior to break out into song in the middle 30 • JUNE 2020 THE ARTFUL MIND

of a math test. I regularly cartwheeled out of classrooms. When I was twelve I played the main nun in Guys and Dolls. Performing is as much a part of me as my nails or ear wax. I do a bit of performance art, and it’s an intense experience for me. I’m usually terrified, and art has always been a vehicle for me to overcome my fears. Because I’ll do anything the art demands; I’m committed. Even if it’s publicly humiliating. Especially if it’s publicly humiliating. The embarrassment is informative. It’s a thread I am compelled to follow. There’s often nudity and urine and transgressive elements because I want to investigate why that is transgressive. Why can men casually stroll shirtless in the summer, while a woman might be arrested for doing the same thing, or at least cause a big scene? Why is my body so loaded? And what are the beliefs I’ve unknowingly latched onto that cripple me? And so I use art to confront that status quo and uproot business as usual, and it’s very awkward.

The kind of permission that artists give themselves, to look into dark corners, or under the bed, for unprocessed memories, or unexplored assumptions, is not given to everyone. Most artists remain content to stay within tried and true conventions. One beacon for me has been something Carroll Dunham said: “I just paint what I want to look at.” Easy to say, but harder to do?

I love that! I’ll add it to my long list of pithy words to live by. Toni Morrison said something similar: “If there’s a book you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” Otherwise the same stories will be told over and over again, otherwise I’ll keep trying to fit my extrawide, size 8 ½ feet into Cinderella’s impossibly nymph-like glass slipper by cutting off my own toes. I make Worm House because I want to see pro-acne, pro-wrinkles, pro-ugly, pro-excess body hair, pro-egregious human error advertisements. I want to love all the sloppy parts of myself, and of others as well -- by giving yourself permission, you give others permission. I am so much more curious about the evil stepsisters than Cinderella -- this idea that you have to maim yourself and swallow the pain in order to be accepted. The idea that there is only one ideal woman, and that you have to destroy others and destroy yourself in the process of becoming someone you’re not. What also comes to mind is the title of Bruce Nauman’s neon spiral wall sign: The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths. That’s pretty ambitious, but as the poet Dean Young said, “The error is not to fall, but to fall from an ungreat height.” Anyways, I’m not trying to save the world, but I’ve got to save myself. I’m severely

Worm House #35 magazine cover published by

Ashely Yang-Thompson

emotionally constipated. If I don’t find a way to bring those dark parts of me to the surface, something very nasty will happen to my soul. Art is what happens when I perform a positive exorcism on myself.

Not long ago you began producing WORM HOUSE, a weekly “magazine” with but four pages of writing, artwork, and graphic mayhem per issue. Looking back at previous weeks, it begins to read like an up to the minute diary of a pissed off satirist. No subject, no theme is safe from your “attack.” You load the pages with obnoxious bons mots, hilarious confessions of an emotionally self-chastising artist, and advice for your readers about whom you assume they share the same frustrations, obsessions & compulsions as “the writer” does. Peeling the emotional onion, down to the tears in both eyes, seems to be your default place to go. I can imagine the exhilaration and anxiety these issues cause. Can you keep up this torrid weekly pace and not crack up?

That’s just who I am, psychic warts and all. Sometimes I generate work specifically for Worm House, but more often than not, it’s my unedited notes on life. I’m an intense, anxious, strange, loving, brutal, absurd, creature, but I’m convinced that I’m not alone in this. Emerson said, “to believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, -- that is genius.” That resonates with me. Although Worm House goes to dark places, I find extraordinary lightness while working on it. For some reason, I find the worst parts of me and others to be funny. And I like to laugh. I am usually laughing as I write and draw. If there is no joy in the process then it's a sign I need to stop and consider taking another approach. I try to take the work seriously without becoming serious. It’s the weekly homework assignment I give to myself. As long as I’m learning, whatever I do is ok, no big deal.

Humor, of a happily twisted kind, saves the day. We readers turn the page, waiting for the next surprise, and are met with quarantine poems, or yellow lined paper filled with drawn faces and thought balloons, body-obsessed acknowledgments of off-color activities: and now the VIRUS as an unexpected reality that you begin to use for the opportunity it provides to face a new demon. Winging it, when uncertainty is the rule. How has the pandemic affected your daily life? Do you find yourself drawing upon things you learned in school, mentors you might have had, in negotiating the new abnormal?

Silver linings: I can see my therapist twice a week because she has more time. I’m taking free virtual creative writing workshops every day through the New York Writers Coalition, which my dear friend (and OG Worm House subscriber) Aaron Zimmerman founded. Colleges and universities are making their classes available to the public for free, and I am virtually auditing a kick-ass class on Contemporary Art. I love homework. I love an excuse to stay up late reading a textbook. I love how excited students are. I’m a life-long student. I love talking about art and ideas and philosophizing about the approximately infinite universe. The whole world is on pause. I used to need acid to trip, but this is about as surreal as it gets (knock on wood) -- a reality TV president, the ratio of online to offline lives, a pandemic, quarantine - - has mother nature grounded all of humanity? Maybe we’ve all lost our marbles.

And through it all we consort with our built-in navigators (Plato’s daimon, Lorca’s duende), who remind us that art is necessary to redeem if not explain the unraveling, that the humor, critique, self-loathing and self-love can be instruments of understanding and regeneration. All the voices echoing in our heads: and yet, not cacophony. You seem to channel (explore, exploit, gobble up) each passing fancy for what it

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Art work for Worm House magazine VIII by Ashley Yang-Thompson

can reveal. Is it fair to ask if there is a single troubling event in your past that you can only face via the sublimation of art or writing?

I am more concerned with troubling patterns than any single troubling event. I don’t want to walk into the same trough over and over again if I can help it. I am not sure if art redeems anything, although I remember as a child plotting my memoir and filtering events through the lens of a story to make my experiences more palatable. Story-telling is a dangerous business. The story “I am a victim” or “bad things happened to me” is as easy and ubiquitous as a bag of potato chips. A story may seem harmless, but too much of the wrong kind of story can have a devastating impact on the collective psyche. Muriel Rukeyser said “the universe is made of stories, not atoms.” I’m a big fan of Kenzaburo Oe’s book “Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness.” Nobody is innocent, not even the children. Everybody is a victim. Or nobody is a victim. There are so many layers of oppression and selfimplication. Oe really turned my perspective inside out, outside in. And the title alone is a poem.

Have you met with any censorship in your work? Whether in the showing of it, or in the effort to make it public? I’ve heard of print shops who refuse to print certain images deemed “offensive.” .

I have been censored many, many times, beginning with my mother, who is highly disturbed by the self-referential nature of my work (not that I blame her). In high school, the Head of School and Academic Dean censored my commencement speech and asked me to rewrite the best parts of it two days before the graduation ceremony, saying that it was “inappropriate for the grandparents in the audience.” I think that’s ageist. The wackiest, most open-minded, ready-to-laugh folks I know are septuagenarians. Anyhow, I gave them their speech and memorized mine and it was a big hit. (A few years later, that same Head of School was on the cover of the NYtimes for being found in a hotel room with a young woman and massive quantities of hard drugs. Life is weird.). I made my professors nervous in college, they never knew what might happen. Here in Great Barrington, Worm House arrived with a rocky start -- I used to put out the zine on bulletin boards around town, and after issue 6, which featured critical intel that Jane Fonda had “sucked her last dick” (true story!) and an advertisement for urine tea, the police did some light detective work and found my muse/assistant/chauffeur: Uncle Fingers (they recognized him from my drawings) and threatened him with a 5 year prison sentence! They put him in the back of the cop car and made him reveal my address, whereupon they interrupted my serene, healthmound lunch to warn me that the bulletin boards are private property and informed me that I “can’t talk about urine and blowjobs.” They claimed I was distributing obscene content. In preface to his poem “The Concubine,” Evgeny Baratynsky said: “Accusing an erotic poet of depravity is as unfair as accusing a tragic poet of cruelty.” But I didn’t quote Baratynsky to the police officer. Instead, Worm House went underground, because that’s where worms belong. I used to print Worm House at Staples, but I ran into trouble with them at Issue 10, which featured a painting of my best friend’s vagina. I tried to explain to them that I was doing portraits of my friends’ genitals, the way trees communicate from their sexual organs, but they refused to print a gorgeously rendered vagina because Staples is a “family friendly” business. Obviously, every family emerged from a vagina. But it ended up being a blessing in disguise because I found Kwik Print -- they’ve never batted an eye at my art! -- and I’ve been printing with them ever since. God bless Kwik Print.

In the absence of an art scene—galleries as locked down now as other businesses—are you concerned to earn a buck selling work out of your studio? Do you see the punishing irony of being “Miss Expanding Universe” (your self-selected nom de plume) in a world fast shrinking, self-isolated, opportunities contracting to the size of a belly button? And how did Miss Ex

Ashley and Uncle Fingers Photograph courtesy of Ashley Yang-Thompson

panding come to you?

I just wrote a poem about what’s inside of my belly button (Quarantine Poem No. 19). Anyhow, the world is only shrinking from an anthropocene perspective; the rest of the planet is thriving while we shelter in place. Personally, I’m feeling more connected to humanity than ever. This virus is evidence that we are all literally connected. The fact that the life of an ordinary individual across the globe that I’ve never met can ripple into the small town of Great Barrington, MA is astounding. Luckily, germs are not the only things to spread like wildfire (or wildflowers) and change our lives. Every decision matters. By making a drawing or writing a poem or highlighting a passage of a much-beloved book, you are altering the world. When Trump was elected I began taking my work outside of the gallery, under an alias. I was painting all over my clothes, distributing fliers, pamphlets, and doing a lot of street art. They were poetic calls to action. I rapidly disseminated hundreds of love letters. I invited shopkeepers in the neighborhood to take naps in my exhibition (with an optional erotic poetry reading). Simultaneously, I was selling my paintings through a Chinese Art and Design company that changed my name from Ashley Thompson to Ashley Yang-Thompson, because it would make my work easier to sell to Chinese clients. As a mixed race person, I’ve felt the need to prove my Americanness to Caucasians or prove my Chineseness to Chinese my whole life. I just got sick of that narrative, so I decided to name myself and forge ahead with a new kind of identity, one based on how I see myself, rather than my feeble attempts to fit myself into a container. I was living in Queens and I had a community membership to the Noguchi Museum, which is one of the rare museums in NYC that doesn’t feel like a zoo. I’d walk there every day, since the membership included free coffee, and I devoured every book in the gift shop in the process. When I read about a sculpture that Noguchi made for Gandhi’s god-daughter, whom he fell in love with, called Miss Expanding Universe, I instantly recognized that as my rightful name. It was destiny calling. As a side note, Isamu Noguchi is half-Japanese, and his fraught attempts to claim his Japaneseness resonated with me. At one point, he self-interned at a Japanese internment camp. He was trying to be helpful by bringing art into a desolate space, but he only realized how much of a gap there was between him and the other Japanese interned there. He had to face the fact that he was far more educated and privileged, and that a shared heritage doesn’t guarantee belonging. Only the Japanese wives swooning over his good looks didn’t resent his presence.

Artists are like gods in the heaven of their studios. They get to present themselves a problem, then they must solve it (in whatever medium they find necessary). Autonomy is a privilege. Yes, it might be thought to be a curse if the problems raised can’t be solved, but who knows? If you had a wand, were a magus with extra powers (and you are!), is there anything you’d like to do right now to alter the course of global drift---be it the pandemic, the warming, or the inequitable distribution of goods? And is there a danger in confusing aesthetic solutions with political ones?

Gosh, I don’t think I’m smart enough to answer this question. My wand must be my pen and my power is to make myself laugh. I find it fascinating that just about the most noble thing anyone can do right now is simply to stay at home. It reminds me of Yoko Ono and John Lennon’s Bed-in for Peace. Can making someone laugh be a radical form of protest?

Humor, rarer than discourse, almost always has its targets, whether it’s vanity, or human foible. In any case, as we roll with the punches, it’s a tonic to see you pushing back against conventional thinking, making use of less palatable subjects (acne, bad sex, incontinence, weight) as a way of releasing the id in all its unpredictable forms. There’s funny funny, and funny obnox

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Ashley’s studio wall of thought-provoking art and text Photograph courtesy of Ashley Yang-Thompson

ious, and both are necessary at getting under the skin. And as a way of reaching your readers who are nothing if not draped in skin. You seem to like Great Barrington, as I feel the town has taken to you. Does it feel like home yet, even with the Triplex closed and the citizenry wearing masks?

I am obsessed with the movie Groundhog Day. I’ve seen it at least a dozen times. I was stranded in Great Barrington during a blizzard, just like how Bill Murray’s character was stranded in Punxsutawney. At the time, I was a nomad straight out of On the Road, hopping from artist residency to artist residency, and living out of my backpack. I was hitching a ride from Vermont Studio Center to The Wassaic Project, and cars were starting to veer off the road in the heavy snowfall. The sculptress I was hitching a ride from knew someone who lived in a community house in Great Barrington. We had no option but to stay there overnight. Suddenly, I found myself in a victorian mansion, sleeping on a golden velvet couch, surrounded by red velvet wallpaper, with the dim romantic lighting of a pellet stove and a chandelier, and the most generous, trusting, healthy, creative group of young people 34 • JUNE 2020 THE ARTFUL MIND

I’d ever met. And the rent was impossibly low. I was smitten. I felt like I was in a fairy tale. All the artists I knew prior to then communed over drugs, drinking, and the promise of sex. I was trying to change, trying to be healthier and saner and develop some kind of sustainable lifestyle. The constant drama of my New York City life gave me some fantastic war stories but depleted me by the time I was 23. (Actually, it would be more accurate to say that I communed with others over the drugs, drinking, and the promise of sex. I had to transform, and as part of that process, my relationships transformed.) Back to Groundhog Day. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d end up in a small town in Massachusetts. For the most part, I see the same people every day. And I go to the same places every day. A place like Great Barrington used to be my idea of Hell. Now it’s my idea of redemption. Everyday is an opportunity to live the same day, but better. To practice getting better at practicing. The more activated I am, the more I’m paying attention -- and there’s always so much going on when you’re paying attention -- the better my day is. I’ve met the most remarkable people here. My “Uncle Fingers,” who has four pugs and two cats, has read all of In Search of Lost Time but cannot tie his own shoes, and writes the most heartbreaking poetry from the confines of his mother’s basement, Michelle, Morgan, you, Sharon, Nana Fran and her mystic outsider art garden, Connie, Guzman, the list goes on… Groundhog Day is the most philosophical movie of all time. Bill Murray kills himself hundreds of times in the process of transforming himself into a Real Human Being. I, too, have destroyed myself over and over and over again. That is what it means to be an addict. Louis Bourgeois stitched the following words into a handkerchief: I’ve been to hell and back again. And let me tell you, it was wonderful. Early on in my career, I sold my soul. Now I am devoted to spending the rest of my life redeeming it. Doing the work is my only option, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Julia Grey, Find My Heart, B&W archival pigment print, 2020.12"x18"

Coming soon www.xgender.net

Julia Grey

Gotta Minute? Great! Because every Monday I introduce you to one of New Brunswick Canada’s finest artists! Just mosey on over to Instagram or Facebook and check us out! Remember, if you like what you hear and see, leave a comment and share the post! Or, visit my YouTube page to easily find past episodes! —Thanks, Jennifer

https://www.instagram.com/jenniferpazienza/

https://www.facebook.com/jenniferpazienzaartstudio/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiqXBQdVAQ0

www.jenniferpazienza.com

CLAUDIA D'ALESSANDRO

The natural world offers a not-so-distant mirror of our experiences reflected in sky, water and earth. Great drama, intricate patterns, hidden faces, abstract shapes and a spectrum of colors abound in shifting light. But sometimes, they last only for an instant.” I strive to artfully capture such quixotic moments and transform them into paper, canvas and metal prints that can ornament and inspire our living spaces. It is one of my life's joyful pleasures to share these images with others.” Claudia believes that the beauty of nature provides a powerful ally, defense and inspiration against the dismay and worry of the human condition. She shares her life with her beloved David, and divides her time between Berkshire County, MA and St. Johns County, FLA.

Prints on canvas, photo stock, aluminum and glass are available in a variety of sizes. Claudia d'Alessandro – 413-717-1534, cdalessandro26@gmail.com, https://www.dalessandrophotography.com. PELICAN SQUALL, 24 X 30”

PENGUINS PHOTOGRAPH 11X17”

INTERCONNECTED 2020 9 X 12” OILAND WAX MEDIUM ON WOOD PANEL

LARRY FRANKEL HOW BAD IS C LIMATE CHANGE NOW? I S WHAT I DO IMPORTANT?

The growing issue of Global Warming became the inspiration and impetus to create these new images. My imagination transformed Flora and Fauna into a future representation of a newly created landscape. My newly created world consists of constructed photos using combinations of various imagery I have taken and have in my inventory. Shifted colors become my new reality in which to view our environment.

Larryfrankel photography.com / Larryfrankel@me.com / Cell 914-419-8002 RED LILY PHOTOGRAPH 11 X 17”

GHETTA HIRSCH

The pandemic is expanding all over the world and my paintings cannot focus solely on the Berkshires. Somehow as in the other paintings exhibited in this June magazine, I seem to be up on a plane looking at the disaster down below. “Pontoosuc Lake” seen in my ad insert is the view of Pontoosuc Lake in Pittsfield viewed from above. It is called “Vol d’Oiseau” which means “Bird’s Eye View” from the French. Then I started seeing the earth and oceans in my artist mind. “Interconnected” hints to the unavoidable spread of this virus when we believe we are protected by the separate landforms and our physical distancing. “Shoring the Coast” was painted after “Interconnected and it is a symbolic coastal barrier trying to push the viral enemy. Alas! We are not done with this pandemic yet and I have a hard time painting our beautiful Berkshires these days. It is frustrating to be in quarantine for so long but wish safety to all. Three Stones Gallery in Concord is still representing me, but all views are on a virtual tour just like some of our work that should be at The Artful Mind Gallery. I have upgraded my website to show you more samples of my work and invite you to visit. You can also view the pages of this magazine and Instagram @ghettahirschpaintings. We need Art to survive! Ghetta Hirsch - ghettahirsch.squarespace.com “SHORING THE COAST” 2020 8”X8” OILAND WAX MEDIUM ON WOOD PANEL

SHARON GUY

CONNECTING WITH NATURE My purpose as an artist is to connect with the healing power of the natural world and to encourage others to do the same. Nature is alive and infused with spirit. I constantly seek to reconnect with this spirit of nature through creating art. While I quietly observe and study land, water, and skies, the ordinary world around me is transformed by light and shadow into the sublime. I enjoy painting the dramatic seascapes and clouds of the Gulf Coast and New England scenes. My work is in private collections in the United States and Canada.

Sharon Guy - sharonguyart@gmail.com , 941-321-1218, http://www.sharonguyart.com SHARON GUY PARADISE

JOHN HOUSEMAN

Welcome to my art show! The paintings are done in gouache, an opaque watercolor, on illustration board. I draw them directly onto the board, with much erasing and reconfiguring. When it's done, I fill in the lines with paint. I don't begin with a clear vision, making it up as I go along. Please visit my website where you will find many more surreal images along with portraits of people, portraits of snazzy automobiles, mandalas, architectural works, pen and ink drawings, editorial illustrations, and photos. I have yet to discover an artist whose work resembles my surreal paintings. Thank you so much for looking. John Houseman - john-houseman.artistwebsites.com. ONE WAY TRIP TO FISHKILL

SORELLA 1, OIL ON CANVAS, 54 X 54”

JENNIFER PAZIENZA

Jennifer Pazienza, born into an Italian American New Jersey family, has spent a lifetime making art. Beginning with her mother’s kitchen and backyard garden. Jennifer is currently working on a new series of paintings, Embracing the Square: Love Poems from the Ridge that continues her Keswick Ridge painting narrative and will be curated by Paul Edouard Bourque opening June 2021 in Moncton’s Capitol Theatre Art Gallery. She has an extensive exhibition record. Her work is held in significant Public, Private and Corporate Collections in Canada, the United States, Britain and Italy. A Jersey girl from an Italian-American family, Jennifer has painted, for nearly 30 years, from her beloved Keswick Ridge, New Brunswick in Atlantic Canada where she lives with husband Gerry Clarke and their dog Mela. Jennifer Pazienza - www.jenniferpazienza.com, @jenniferpazienza