interview
i conducted this interview with myself during
a caldera artist's residency in sisters, oregon.

let's start with an easy question, how do you describe your work?

well, that's not so easy, people on the street ask me what kind of work i do, and i feel incapable of describing it in terms that make any sense. i get stumped between extremes of descriptors so i'll try two versions:

i create dialogue-driven conceptual art that engages contemporary social issues through the media of assemblage and installation. i reconceptualize everyday objects and cultural icons to create a shift in a viewer's perspective on our world and their position within it. i am enamored with two key notions of conceptual art described by Grant Kester as "performativity" and "localism." the performativity of my work exists in its relentless desire to engage the audience and generate an audience reaction as an on-site companion piece--enhancing the work itself, and offering the viewer an immediate take-home portion of my art. i consider my work experiential for this reason, as well as for it's direct interactive elements. localism is evoked by my adherence to social/political issues that permeate our culture and my everyday experience. i am fully committed to the aesthetic and want my art to be visually captivating. my art is vain. it wants to feel beautiful even if it describes things we consider ugly.

on the other hand i am a junk artist. i love the things i discover in my environment. everything is potential art. it might be a destroyed television, a rusty pipe, old photos, antique salt and pepper shakers, my caller id box, conversations, or the songs on the radio, that gets me going. it all inspires me and i consider it all junk. everything in our world is post-consumer. in our capitalist-driven society objects are given meaning by their purchasability. our social/political issues are junk, things we once bought (or bought into) and keep around because we are accustomed to their presence. sexism, racism, class stratification, objectification, are all social junk. and like the other junk i use in my work, i seek to reconceptualize these items and help us to examine their continued function in our lives.

i believe art should make people think and feel. i want to leave my audience pondering discomfort, confusion, anger, joy, sadness, emotions of all kinds. i am an honest manipulator, presenting contradictions and demanding response.

why is your name always in lowercase?

it looks best that way. i like the roundness of the lowercase letters.

how did you come to live in portland?

portland is a funny place. i moved here site-unseen on an intuition. i grew up in the city, and hope to retire to the country one day (farm, chickens the whole deal). portland is a wonderful hybrid of the two. it has allowed me incredible creative opportunities. it's affordable, and if i don't let the racism and provinciality get me too frustrated, i am generally very happy here.

racism?

yes, portland is the whitest per capita city of its size in the u.s. there are very few people of color. the white people here are pretty ignorant (whether liberal or conservative), and since they are also underexposed to people of color, their ignorance tends to go un-checked. moving to portland felt like moving back in political awareness about 20 years. it's driven some people of color crazy. it's driven me crazy, but it's also inspired me. and i've made connections here that i know will last a lifetime.

you are a co-founder of a small theatre company in portland. what do you see as the interface between your visual work and your performance work?

my work with defunkt provides a collaborative experience that my approach to art does not. in my studio i prefer isolation but in theatre we do the work together, in front of each other, and this balance keeps me well rounded.

do you think that theatre distracts you from your art?

theatre often revives me, gives me new things to look at, and enables me to interact with people which is where most of my art comes from. it is a powerful and challenging combination. running a theatre company and my art career is a lot for me to do all at once. so i have to make sure i strike a balance.

and you know, the theatre community validates a side of me that the art community does not. i hope to find a way to create a home for all sides of my personality in both of these communities of mine. i'd like to build a career where i can exercise my existing skills continue to learn new skills and use them all in the creation of art without being accused of betraying my medium, or of being scattered.

that brings up a good point. in this last show, shift. you chose to use a wide range of media including quilting, a medium most often defined as "craft" can you talk about the quilt?

the quilt was an amazing adventure for me. i didn't care that the medium might be seen as outside of the realm of "fine art" i didn't care that i don't know how to quilt. i didn't care that i was two weeks away from opening the show when i started it. that work, that concept wanted to be made into a quilt and i am obligated to do what my art demands. to me that is the heart of being a conceptual artist.

i was working on the concept that people are constantly comparing me to the same 5 or 6 celebrities. i became curious about what these women looked like. i began to find pictures of them and seek out my likeness within the lines of their faces, their eyes, smiles, teeth and hair. at times i saw the comparison, other times it totally escaped me. it made me think of cross-racial-identification and the mess angela davis went through when she was wanted by the police and hiding underground. black women with her hairstyle were arrested left and right. i joked to myself, if i were wanted by the police would they arrest lisa bonet? or the other way around? i have been walking down the street and had people yell "lisa bonet" at me. i've had a lover of mine recognize why she liked me with my glasses on and my hair down....i looked like alice walker to her. i've had people tell me i look like meg ryan because we do the same things with our lips when we talk. in all of this, i wonder do i not define myself? am i just a reminder of someone else? are people seeing me when they look at me, or do they need some other landmark to compare me to, for their own comfort or to make me more interesting? i ask these same questions of art curators, critics and audiences who exhibit a compulsive need to define emerging artists by their similarities to others in the field.

anyway, i wanted to interrogate all these notions. i was working with fabric and wanting to use a lot of white sheets in this show. i wanted the work to take the shape of a police line-up while being intimate and feminine. i have no idea where it entered into my mind, but it became insistently clear that i had to create a quilt. i began to transfer photos like mad. i transferred text onto strips of fabric to go in between the patches. i remember working on it constantly even on it on the bus to and from my studio. then i began to sew. i discovered that quilting is a community activity. the quilters came out of the woodwork. one white woman who had twice called me by the wrong name (using the name of the other black woman in the room) offered to lend me her sewing machine or to come help me stitch. the woman at the fabric store brought me more white sheets from her home, i got advice from every woman in my life and at least one man. it was incredible. it made me realize how the creation of our identity, our formation of ourselves is not done in isolation. everyone contributes to our self-definitions. this creates a kind of comfort. the quilt was full of love. all of these beautiful women whom i admire i stitched together to create an image of myself (through my art as well as through perceptions of me). they kept me company for the weekend as i sewed us together. it was soft, made of organic cotton as if there is something natural to comparing ourselves to one another. and then stitching in the interlocking strips of text was hard. the fabric was harsh from the transfer process and i had band-aids on most of my fingers. my back was in pain as i finished the project. there were quotes about innocent people being executed because of poor identifications. quotes about how witnesses saw only certain features- wide nose, big eyes, gummy smiles, and that these descriptors, as simple as those used to link me with these women, were what sent people to prison or to their deaths. the quilt became a wonderful contradiction of comfort and confrontation. i think that's why so many people were confused by the work. most of the stuff in the show made people uncomfortable, but the quilt was beautiful, snuggly, (even though crudely made) and so it caught some people off guard. i think even the idea that i could sew confused those people that see me as harsh in my approach. and it utilized my sense of humor which often makes people uncomfortable when dealing with intense issues such as racism.

one other powerful reaction came out of the quilt. many people became defensive. "i don't know who most of these women are, so the point of this work escapes me" said many including a prominent curator in the area. my reply is simple. "why can't you identify the photos of 6 famous black women? doesn't that tell you something about our society and your complacency within it?" the quilt turned out to be one of the more multi-faceted works in the show because of all of the layers contained within it. as a conceptual tool, i have fallen in love with quilts and quilt patches. it evokes all the senses as well as the intellect. it challenges notions of comfort, coverage and challenges what we decide is art. in the art world we have allowed people to decide what is art. we should let the art decide, that's what i do.

there are a few pieces in this show that expose racism in cultural icons or images from our everyday lives. how did you choose those specific images?

there are three pieces that i think you are referring to. eye-con, brown sugar #1,#2,#3, and resemblance. all of these use junk from our daily lives: mickey mouse, a rolling stones song, and an absolut vodka ad.

i'll start with mickey mouse. i was never allowed to watch disney movies as a child. they are incredibly racist, sexist, and detrimental to the self-esteem and development of girl children and children of color. they contribute significantly to misconceptions we have toward each other in society, as well as perpetuating stereotypes and limiting choices for women and people of color. one day i had fallen asleep in front of the television and was wakened by a phone call. somehow mickey mouse was dancing about on the screen, making the usual ass out of himself. i said sleepily to my friend on the phone "isn't mickey mouse just a little blackface minstrel?" he agreed.

i became moderately obsessed with exposing mickey to the world. i tried a range of ideas for this project, i could have pursued an entire show about it, but didn't want to give disney that much wall space. as i looked at images of blackface performers i saw striking comparisons, the hair line, the emphasis on the ears and eyes, the costumes, the poses, it all became so obvious, that i was shocked that it wasn't common knowledge that mickey mouse is a modern day al jolson. then when i discovered that one of mickey's early movies was titled "the jazz fool" after jolson's "the jazz singer" i realized just how intentional ole walt disney had been. he created a monument to racist mockery of black people that has endured the test of time and become (much like al) a national treasure.

i can gladly say that most people who see this work have said to me "you ruined mickey mouse for me, forever."

wanna taste (brown sugar #1), background music (brown sugar #2), and comic strip(brown sugar #3) all use the lyrics from the popular rolling stones song "brown sugar." ugh. this song. i chose it because it has haunted me for years. i've dreamed a million ways to show the lyrics to this song. i don't get how the bastard rolling stones get away with something like this. well, except that the general public it too lazy and complacent to even know what they are listening to.

resemblance uses an absolut ad that depicts a black woman's back pierced with acupuncture needles in the shape of an absolut bottle. her hips and head are wrapped in crude cloth, but her torso is naked and we cannot see her face. the pose of her body and the angle of the photograph reminded me of an archived image of a slavery survivor showing his back filled with scars from a whipping. i had seen this image in every history book and lesson i had about slavery as i was growing up. it seemed like this image was so deeply rooted in our society, that even if it wasn't intentional or conscious, the ad recreated the image. alternatively, the ad could be seen as black-woman-as-voodoo-doll which is equally disturbing. the ad arrived at my door on the back of a magazine only a week or two before the show opened. it fit in perfectly, and provided a great opportunity to show how present our struggle with racism is. another reason i like using the absolut ad is that many artists are endorsing the use of their name and artistic style for this company, so i feel like i turned the appropriation tables on absolut while interrogating their use of racist imagery.

can you talk about your use of kitchen cabinets as frames/mountings?

well, again, i am a junk artist, and a financially challenged one at that. professional framing isn't only out of my economic reality, but i hate the way it looks. i've seen some beautiful, raw works of art ruined by an expensive "clean" frame.

there is a wonderful recycled-everything-for-your-home place in my neighborhood in portland. sometimes i go there just to get inspired. i picked up a bunch of these doors and stained them, originally to use in the mickey mouse/al jolson stuff. but i didn't like what i was doing with them. eventually i saw the potential for a beautiful brown wood theme to emerge, joining the work, and i began to recycle these doors into frames for some of the other pieces. i like that they are every day objects, things torn from our homes, just as the issues i interrogate are part of our homes as well. mostly, these were an aesthetic draw, not so much a conceptual tool, but i found that they served a dual purpose. also the white wood i used was recycled from a set i had built for my theatre company. every object in the show was created from at least 50% recycled material, most more like 80%. that felt great, and is true to the way i have been making art since i was a kid.

what kind of art did you make as a kid?

junk art. i used anything i could find. i made a lot of homes. i think i must have been interested in the idea of domesticity. i made houses for my toy mice out of shoe boxes. i remember sewing miniature curtains that pulled opened and shut. i liked figuring that out. i turned my bookcase into a refrigerator once. in fourth grade i made a replica of the white house. i was really interested in how the rooms are color decorated...the green room, the red room etc. my senior project in high school was junk sculpture. i made earrings out of key chains and those soda can pull things- we used to call them "fuck tabs." you were supposed to give one to someone you wanted to have sex with. my earrings must have had 20, so they were also a statement about sexuality. i wore them all the time. they generated a lot of discussion.

sexuality used to be a predominant theme in your work, but not this show, was that a deliberate choice?

sexuality comes and goes in my work, just as it does in my body. sometimes my work and i are more sexual, sometimes we aren't. it was nice to have people looking at my art in a less personal way, not getting embarrassed at seeing my naked figure. but i am interested in bodies, sex, and the physical evidence of trauma and memory. i am fascinated with the idea of subjectively objectifying myself, so i am sure i'll return to that at some point. i think that will emerge again when i do more performance work.

and you didn't go to art school?

no, i didn't. which for the most part i relish. it gives me a freedom with my media and approach that is critical to the formation of my work. a well established artist and curator once looked at my work and said "you'd have to be 6 years out of art school to be this free." i took that as validation of my path to becoming an artist. at times i find myself a bit hindered by my inability to talk "art-code." i trip over the names constantly dropped around me in artistic conversations. so i play catch-up, which at times can be entertaining, and at times makes me uncomfortable.

recently people have been calling my work "unpolished." which is interpreted as a lack of schooling or experience, but my choices are deliberate. many of my rough finishes come from my nature as a junk artist, and is appropriate to my subject matter. perhaps my work will develop a more polished feel, but i don't want to rush my process. i am comfortable with the way i arrived at art, it's honest, compelled, and comes from a place within me that i don't think one can acquire at art school. so, i learn as i go, as the art demands. which keeps me engaged and amazed. that's one of the things i most love about doing art, theatre, and living life in general.

who are your artistic influences?

the artists i love now came to me after i began creating art. Adrian Piper, Cildo Mierles, these are my two favorite. i find their work consistently inspires me to create a voice for myself that is equally strong, yet unique. i grew up surrounded by images of black inventors, politicians, trailblazers of all kinds. academically, black intellectuals and postructuralist theorists inspired my thinking. as a child, the work of art i remember most is Gaugin's ta matete, an image of seven tahitian women that my mother had in the hallway outside my room. it is now hanging in my apartment. my dad was always making things. he showed me found-object art through his ingenuity. once he turned pipe fittings into candle holders. in my home i learned that mind and my hands are powerful tools, and with them anything is possible.

what is the source of your artistic pursuits?

simply, the need to express is my sole source. but thematically at the moment, i've been exploring contemporary racism. i think people are beginning to think of me as someone who deals with race, rather than a conceptual artist who utilized racism as a thematic scheme for an exhibition or two. i may continue to use race as a theme in my work: since it is a central part of my life, it is certain to re-emerge, and there are things i would still like to say about it. but my inspiration comes from all of my life and the world around me, and i expect to spend a lifetime investigating all of the corners of that experience.

what's next?

well, that remains to be seen. several things are tugging at me at the moment. the idea of flesh-tone is my newest project. blackface minstrelsy continues to nag at my creative consciousness. and i would really like to engage an examination of human verbal interaction. i am fascinated by phone calls, eavesdropping, conversation, communication and mis-communication. i am becoming enamored with sound. performance is coming out of me as a natural product of my work in theatre, so that likely to be a new medium for me as well.

verse 1:
"gold coast slave ship bound for cotton fields / sold in a market down in new orleans / scarred old slaver knows he's doin' alright / hear him whip the women / just around midnight.
brown sugar, how come you taste so good? just like a black girl should."
© mick jaggar and keith richards