Gallery 400

Soheila Azadi in "Gush"

Thu, 09 Apr 2015 13:28:00 -0500

The University of Illinois at Chicago’s 2015 Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibitions are underway, and I was granted the opportunity to learn more about one of the ten newly minted masters featured: Soheila Azadi. An interview’s catalyst is to delve into the mind of the subject, and I wanted to identify the process that Azadi took in producing work for her thesis exhibition.

Azadi exhibited her work during the first installation entitled Gush. The intent of Gush was to explore elements that touch, congeal, and drip from above, and Azadi’s performance video and interactive installation pieces delivered a powerful and humorous manifestation of this. Through her use of oppressive images, textiles, and subtle comedic hints, elements converged and defied boundaries.

Azadi is a storyteller, and through her performances traces of those who influence her become apparent: family, and in particular her mother and her two older sisters. Since growing up within a theocracy, then living in the U.S. as an adult, Azadi has needed her mother and sisters’ love and support not just as family, but also as women.

Soheila Azadi's artistic practices have changed and developed since she began the MFA program at UIC. “My work has changed dramatically,” she says. “My performances were dark, angry, provocative, and excluded men. Now, my work is humorous and all-inclusive.” The emotional, and now comedic, aspects of her work combined with her familial and gendered influences led her to create two innovative works for Gush.

The first piece was a video installation in which the viewer witnessed ironic situations with subtle tones of theocratic oppression. The video provoked the viewer to experience an internal gush of emotions from enjoyment and humor to surprise through her visual use of textiles and music to illustrate cultural customs. After the initial gush, a second gush activated heightened awareness surrounding political, religious, and gender-based oppression.

Contrasting her video installation, Azadi’s second piece Ball Swing allowed the viewer to interact with it physically. Her incorporation of different textiles and materials allows the elements to touch physically while defying conceptual expectations. Azadi explains, “My work isn’t consistent with form and material, but I use a lot of fabrics and textiles because they are domestic, gendered, they classify you, oppress you, liberate you.” In Ball Swing, the viewer is able to touch and feel the different materials, a key component in Gush. Azadi wanted the viewer to enjoy and have fun with the piece, while understanding the seriousness and raise awareness of life under a theocracy, and the gender boundaries within society.

As Azadi begins her career, she has a parting message for emerging artists, whether undergraduate students or next year’s MFA thesis students. “Have an open mind, be open to change, and constructive criticism. Not everyone will love your work, so listen to the constructive feedback and critiques, but if you hear anything negative or not constructive, just disregard it.”

More information and works by Soheila Azadi may be found at her artist page:
http://www.soheilaazadi.com/

Written by Communications Intern Nick Hancock

Patches Aren't Just for Girl Scouts: A Review of Trevor Paglen's "I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed By Me"

Wed, 04 Mar 2015 17:01:00 -0600

Trevor Paglen’s I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed By Me – Emblems From the Pentagon’s Black World attempts to uncover the material culture of the military’s “black world” by highlighting a series of uniform patches belonging to top-secret divisions of the military. The emblems on the various patches, which display cartoon-like figures or amusing mystical symbols, represent the Pentagon’s most classified programs and were worn on the uniforms of military personnel. In his book, Paglen highlights about 40 different patches and speculates about their undisclosed meanings.

Among the insignia is “Alien Technology Exploitation Division,” a patch designed for a limited number of people working in a special facility at Air Force Space command. The small patch includes an embroidered alien with a collar and chain leash around its neck. “Don’t Ask!” is scrolled across the bottom in Klingon, the fictional Star-Trek language. While this patch was created unofficially and more as a lighthearted gesture, others were not. “Tastes Like Chicken” pays homage to a series of flight tests featuring a B-2 Spirit. The aircraft, also known as a stealth bomber, is capable of ruthlessly deploying nuclear weapons. This patch also features an alien, which refers to the 509th Bomb Wing that originated in Roswell, New Mexico. “Classified Flight Test,” now replaced by “To Serve Man,” was originally written across the top of the patch. Military officials demanded that the phrase be removed, as they believed the patches posed threats to the mission.

A man of many talents, artist and author Trevor Paglen received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a PhD in Geography from UC Berkeley. He has written five books, and has shown work in solo and group exhibitions in major museums around the world. Now based in New York, Paglen devotes his artistic research to revealing different modes of perception through means of science, journalism, contemporary art, and geography. He uses these outlets to emphasize the manipulation of perception by the military, politics, and cultures. The works by Trevor Paglen that are on display in Visibility Machines at Gallery 400 are no exception to his provocative style. His innovative photography techniques seek to bring to military secrets to light through observation and infiltration of the “black world.”

Although Paglen is able to explain the content and significance of a handful of the patches in I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed By Me, we are still left partially in the dark. The collection of iron-ons seem to taunt us through caricatures of skunks and smiley faces. The fact remains that a vast amount of information about the military's classified missions is still unknownable, and the people involved will likely take these secrets to their graves.

Written by Communications Intern Rachel Gonzales.

An Interview with Chris Reeves and Aaron Walker

Mon, 23 Feb 2015 16:16:00 -0600

Chris Reeves and Aaron Walker's Art & Exhibition Hall Lobby Installation, Thing-stead, is on view through the end of April at 400 S. Peoria St. In this interview, they talk about the concepts and inspiration behind their ongoing artist book publishing endeavor and the accompanying print installation.

What was your motivation to begin publishing artist books?

C: I’ve had a longstanding interest in artist’s books. I wrote my master’s thesis on Fluxus artist Dick Higgins’ Something Else Press (published beautiful books by John Cage, Ray Johnson, Dieter Roth, Merce Cunningham, just to skim the surface), which, arguably, set the standards for the approach to artist books today. To me, the "artist book” isn’t any different from the artist’s anything else. I imagine artist books as I would any other medium, the difference being its harder to put a painting or a sculpture in your book bag.

A: Something that I'm always grappling with is distribution. What's the form of the project and how does it potentially circulate? The lobby is a somewhat unique space in that there is a lot of foot traffic, most of which is consistent from day to day. I'm a fan of captive audiences. The opportunity to create a series of works/texts/happenings that built off one another seemed ripe. Chris and I have a shared love of the small press books and zines. Half Letter Press has and continues to be a big influence, as does Ooga Booga, Primary Information, Dexter Sinister and, of course, Something Else Press. In our case, the self published booklet provides a handy platform for these collaborative projects that combine some of the rigor of historical, critical research with some of the invention of art making, a hybrid that we are both fond of tinkering with.

How did you conceptualize and produce the different works?

C: I think conceptually all of the content has come out of some facet of interest or research we’ve had with a certain subject or author. This forum (self-publishing) gives some allowance towards experimentation that is maybe not so available in other more traditional publishing endeavors. This is also the first time Aaron and I have worked together on a project like this so it is also a kind of process of figuring out what works and what doesn’t, both conceptually and on the production line.

A: Four of the five publications were conceived specifically for this project. Two are written by other artists, Arthur Brum's Oulaf Volumes 1 & 2 and Ryland Wharton's Legend and History. Arthur's Oulaf was written in 2011 and circulated among friends as a PDF but never saw print form. This text became a focal point around which several of the other booklets were conceived. The books are united in their embrace of structural and conceptual restraints. Each text practices this differently and has it's own area of investigation. Oulaf smashes together elements of Pataphysics with the form of the travel memoir where Exercises In the Chicago Manual of Style plays out Oulipo prompts through a maze of academic footnotes. Exercises is seven stories told through the same humorous set of prompts where Oulaf tries to tell one story but keeps getting sidetracked, absurd and somewhat brazen in it's complete lack of editing.

The five publications are unified by the use of excursus. Why did you select this technique? How are digression, invention, and play important to your work?

C: Excursus in a text is interesting in that, by its design, it is ultimately an arrow leading you away from the main idea to something else. Unless it is designed otherwise (usually in fiction in the case of something like Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy or Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine), it kind of has this two-fold oxymoronic relationship as a wholly necessary afterthought. I think in a way these books are an exercise in seeing what happens when you flip the role, when digression usurps the main idea and itself becomes the main idea. So in a way it becomes this kind of textual emancipation for the footnote or digression, but on the other it becomes a restraint of sorts, which makes you realize how difficult destabilizing a structure can be. The trick, really, is how to keep a restriction in writing (or in art with a capital “A") from becoming meandering, and this is where play comes in. I learned long ago that the best way to tinker with presenting potentially difficult ideas to others is to gift it as something enjoyable.

A: Each of these booklets could be seen as individual digressions all stemming from a shared argument, an appeal for a more hybrid space. In a sense you could call a few of these books creative art historical writing. They are research-informed texts that seek a poetic form, that want to put the ideas entertained into practice as means of both investigation and expression. They are also meant to be funny.

What has been people's response to the installation? Are they confused or do they take the publications?

C: We’ve debated putting up a “take me” sign. The books inevitably disappear through their display cycle, but I do sense a reluctance to pick them up and take them. To “touch” or “gift” art is still, despite a lot of avenues in art that promote such a thing, a taboo proposal. Some of the books have popped up in the stalls of restrooms in the 400 building so I know at the very least they’re being read somewhere.

A: It seems to me that often when you ask for more than passive viewing, those engaging with the work are likely to get confused. The two of us are always looking for take-aways and constantly trying to put our hands on or interact with artwork, so we figure we're not the only ones. Hopefully these little booklets find their way out into the world.

The prints on display are pulled from the various publications, giving the installation a transitory and growing quality. Can you say more about the idea behind this?

C: It seemed important, if having a restraint based upon excursus in the books itself, to play that out in a visual way on the walls surrounding the book. The idea was that we directed, however ambiguously, some of the ideas within the book into the visual field to mirror this strategy. Our first publication, Exercises in Chicago Manual of Style, had the Chicago Manual of Style as a main idea and as a restraint, so it made sense to hang up a Chicago Manual of Style as both things on the wall surrounding the main event— the publication itself. Ultimately all of the visual ephemera that has been attached to each book will find its way back on the wall, mirroring this further.

A: We envisioned the print installation accompanying each of the books as a studio wall, a place for test prints, nixed content, and playful arrangements of excerpts and enlarged quotations.

Images: Chris Reeves and Aaron Walker, Thing-stead, 2015, print installation with take-aways.

Highlights from the Standard of Living Reading Room

Tue, 16 Dec 2014 16:16:00 -0600

Gallery 400’s exhibition, Here, There, Everywhere, features works by both individual artists (Lara Almarcegui, Guy Ben Ner, Ramiro Gomez and Alevtina Kakhidze) and collectives (The Beehive Collective, Ryan Griffis & Sarah Ross), who focus their work on the effects of the modern global economy. The gallery’s Reading Room is a public space filled with books and essays related to the show’s topic and recommended by local artists, historians, economists, and professors within the UIC community. The Reading Room actively works to supplement the viewer/reader’s experience of the show. For Here, There, Everywhere, the gallery decided to reach out not only to UIC faculty but also to graduate and doctoral candidates in the Art, Art History, and Museum Studies programs. The reading lists compiled for this particular show are thoughtful and diverse; we are excited to share a few of them with you.

• Informed Agitation: Library and Information Skills in Social Justice Movements and Beyond (Feb. 2014).

Part of Chris Reeves’ reading list, Informed Agitation is a collection of essays. Edited by Melissa Morrone, the book focuses on librarians and archivists using their skills in research and curation for activism and social justice. Reeves suggests one essay in particular, “People’s Library of Occupy Wall Street,” which focuses the reader’s attention to the library and archival work surrounding the Occupy Wall Street movement both in its active state and in the aftermath. The book itself is in keeping with the Beehive Collective’s mission to educate through data curation and mapping. This act of mapping and curating leads to the group’s creation of visual information systems as a means of education and activism.

• "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color" (1991).

Recommended by Soheila Azadi, Kimberle Crenshaw’s essay deals with psychical and structural violence perpetrated against women of color. It can also be read as a part of a broader discussion of systemic violence, discrimination, and silence against people of color and the working class. Similarly, Ramiro Gomez’s work focuses of the invisibility of people of color within the white male-dominated economy of luxury capitalism.

• Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and Its Political Masquerades (2007).

Most conversations about architecture, specifically architecture built as a part of the globalized economy, work under the premise of a “globally legible” world as the ideal model. Recommended by Johnathan Mekinda, Keller Easterling’s thesis resists this idealized dream and instead reveals the segregation and vulnerability that this idea and the resulting architectural spaces create. Ryan Griffis and Sarah Ross explore the interconnectivity of a small town in Illinois and its place in the global economy.

• ABC of Anarchism (1929).

Therese Quinn suggested the ABC of Anarchism by Alexander Berkman. The book’s call to anarchism is similar to the workers in Guy Ben Ner’s video work, “Foreign Names.” Although Ben Ner does not overtly call for the overthrow of the establishment and full anarchism, he does force the workers appearing in his video to pronounce “names.” These “names” make up a statement by the artist taking a por-labor position and eschewing the established norms within modern western society, especially that of Israeli society.

• The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media and Corporate Space (2003).

While The Organizational Complex deals mostly with corporate space, the ideas set forth by Reinhold Martin can also be applied to model homes in New Zealand. Taken out of their original context, Lara Almarcegui’s Relocated Houses juxtaposes the minimalist rows of corporate office buildings, often called “glass boxes” with rows of small model homes removed from their original locations and arranged meticulously for sale.

Written by Gallery 400 Archive Intern Melissa Nunchuck

An Interview with Fall 2014 Lobby Installation Award Winner Timothy McMillan

Fri, 14 Nov 2014 09:50:00 -0600

Timothy McMillan is a current MFA candidate at UIC and winner of the Fall 2014 Lobby Installation Award co-organized by Gallery 400 and the School of Art & Art History. This competition showcases the work of BFA and MFA students at UIC. Once per semester, the committee selects one student to exhibit a site-specific work in the Art and Exhibition Hall lobby. Timothy McMillan's installation If Not Whatever, Why Now? is on view through December. In this interview with Gallery 400 communications intern Eric Perez, McMillan shares some of the inspirations and processes behind his work.

Your installation draws from mythological and religious symbols. Why is this a source of inspiration for you?

I want to create new mythologies and fables that suit to insert magic and fantasy into our contemporary world. Myths should be constantly created and re-imagined and passed down to future generations to describe our contemporary world within the fantastic blanket of allegory. Are my figures a complete representation of the 21st century? No. Just fragments of the puzzle. It's up to the viewer to fill in the blanks.

How are your own personal experiences reflected in or related to folklore and mythology?

I grew up going to church. So my childhood was filled with what I now consider fantastical stories. Now that I'm an atheist ( that's still weird to say) I find equal meaning in religious fables and secular fables, like Aesop. It's like knowing that there really isn't a plump old man with a toy factory on the North Pole, but seeing the beauty in the ideology of unwavering generosity.

What is the role of fragmentation in your work? Are you interested in reconstructing fables through collage, or does your work resist narrative?

This show originally existed as a series of dioramas at QUAID gallery in Tampa FL. The figures were more interactive this way, which led to more implied narratives. However, the narratives were still fragmented. It was like a series of puppet shows frozen in time. This show at Gallery 400 is a fragmented fragment so the narratives are even harder to imagine. I suppose a more apt title for this display would have been "If Not Whatever, Why Now? Again?"

Why do you work with craft materials and found objects?

I want my work to have an inherent resourcefulness and feverish intent. They are like dreams that needed to be written down quickly before they faded into oblivion.

How would you describe the experience of sorting through your grandfather's notes and sermons? Was that a cathartic process, even if not religious?

My grandfathers mental health had been demolishing before he passed during the making of this work. It was interesting to actually read through his notes and sermons to understand his fluctuating opinions and beliefs. To me the sermons give purpose to the bizarre and fantastic implied narratives of the creatures. There is an implied morality that overshadows the fantasy.

Images: Timothy McMillan, If Not Whatever, Why Now?, 2014, mixed media installation

An Interview with Sheila Bapat

Wed, 29 Oct 2014 14:02:00 -0500

Author and advocate Sheila Bapat talks with community engagement intern Maxim George about her recently published book Part of the Family? Nannies, Housekeepers, Caregivers and the Battle for Domestic Workers' Rights, her work for justice on behalf of vulnerable workers, and her upcoming event with Gallery 400. Please join us Thursday, November 6 at 6pm for Solidarity & Struggle for the Rights of Domestic Workers, a public conversation in partnership with Sheila Bapat, Arise Chicago, and the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum.

Maxim George: How did you become invested in domestic workers rights? Was there one event or story that made you begin to advocate for the cause?

Sheila Bapat: There wasn't a specific event that led me to this topic; rather it was a more the result of a meditation throughout my adult life on the different roles women and men play within family relationships. I observed throughout my life how hard the women in my family work— cooking, caring for everyone in the household, cleaning up after everyone— and yet all of these women remained economically vulnerable while their husbands controlled the family's wealth. As I grew older, I learned there is a whole field of study, feminist theory, that is focused on understanding why the very hard work of the domestic sphere is deemed unworthy of economic value or protection. I've been obsessed with this issue since.

MG: What led you to work with ARISE Chicago and why was Illinois the next place for you to campaign?

SB: In writing the book I connected with Ania Jakubek and spoke with her a few times about progress on the Illinois legislation. I think there is a lot of potential to discuss this issue in large cities where we see nannies so often on subways and in parks yet they remain so invisible, and I am very glad ARISE is bringing the issue of domestic workers' rights to the fore in Chicago.

MG: Do you feel the fight for domestic workers rights is finally making progress, and if so why?

SB: The domestic workers' movement is, quite impressively, fighting the centuries-old legacy of excluding domestic work from basic labor protections. It seems impossible to uproot such deeply systemic trends, and yet that is exactly what domestic worker advocates are accomplishing through state legislative campaigns, direct representation of domestic workers, and other strategies that shines a light on how critical caregiving labor is. It is a well-funded movement because the advocates at the top, like Ai-jen Poo and many others, are so effectively conveying the message of why domestic labor is so crucial. I hope it continues to be well suported. It is brilliant, triumphant activism that we should all be paying close attention to.

MG: Have you gained much support from people who employ domestic workers?

SB: The domestic workers' movement has gained support from employers, which is a very happy development and not common globally. Hand in Hand, the domestic employers' association, is a great resource to look at— this group is organizing, educating and mobilizing employers of nannies and caregivers to advocate for domestic workers' rights.

MG: What do employers gain from not paying their workers a living wage and not providing them with suitable living conditions?

SB: That is a great question. Who knows what anyone gains by denying wages or failing to pay what they promised. I think at its core this is a failure to see domestic workers' rights as a systemic issue affecting millions of women. I met a woman recently who is an attorney and her husband works in technology. She was filled with indignation that she and her husband have to pay their daughter's nanny overtime. I was saddened by her indignation. It was a real reflection that many don't see this as a systemic issue that needs to be addressed for many women.

MG: Why did you want to partner with Gallery 400? How do artists come into play with the campaign?

SB: I am deeply honored to partner with Gallery 400. Art, poetry, other creative expressions add so much depth to any social justice topic. I've actually been hoping for an opportunity to incorporate art into my book tour. I think art enables us to explore the core values at the heart of any work, and I am looking forward to doing exactly that at our event on November 6, 6pm! More»

Image: Sheila Bapat, Part of the Family? Nannies, Housekeepers, Caregivers and the Battle for Domestic Workers' Rights, 2014. Brooklyn, New York: Ig Publishing, Inc.

My Barbarian at Gallery 400: Interview by Ionit Behar

Fri, 17 Oct 2014 16:11:00 -0500

Universal Declaration of Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in the Creative Impulse is My Barbarian’s first solo show in Chicago. Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon, and Alexandro Segade constitute the energetic artist collective. I was delighted to have the chance to chat with the artists during their visit for their performances of The Mother. Among many things, we talked about their “imaginative reenactments,” alienation, and appropriation.

Ionit Behar: Many aspects of your work include references to the past. The reinterpretation of Brecht’s 1930 play The Mother that is based on Maxim Gorky's 1906 novel of the same name is one example. In your video Universal Declaration of Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in the Creative Impulse, you collaborated with an older generation of women: your mothers and artists Eleanor Antin and Mary Kelly. And the use of theatre as a tool for change seems to be rooted in the past as well. Why is this important for you?

Malik Gaines: We always use historical settings in one way or another. In earlier works, we chose theatre genres from certain periods like antiquity or classical theatre. Using this modern theatre language is related to that, but it has to do with a few other things I think. One is performing social and historical power relationships. Sometimes the present feels too encompassing, but when we use a historical setting those relationships become easier. When you reenact things it seems anachronistic, but you can have critical distance which can be playful and funny and serious. All of the things that the present overwhelms. Usually we are projecting contemporary problems and ideas that still feel important onto the historical setting. In this play, the Marxist critique is outdated in terms of its language and its location; but the problem of capitalism feels completely the same, even if the factory is not the setting anymore. So it creates an allegorical comparison that allows you to think about current conditions through this other kind of setting.

Jade Gordon: It’s interesting reenacting this particular work of Brecht’s because he did that himself. He would place his plays in other times, far away, like this one during the Russian Revolution. It’s as if we’re adding a second layer to that.

Alexandro Segade: Which was a strategy that you find in Shakespeare— ways of talking about the current moment through the lens of another time period or another site. There were different political reasons for Shakespeare’s choice, but it has reverberations in the way that other cultural producers have approached how to explore theatrically various social and political conflicts by taking them out of one site and placing them in another. I think for us another issue is asserting historicity and a lineage for ourselves. Think about the terms that we identify with— queerness or non-maleness, non-whiteness— all these ideas outside of our hegemonic historical trajectory. Within art history, the kind of canonical understanding of art history as an oedipal relationship between men. We’re using those strategies inverted and saying that we do have a lineage, that performance art did not come out of nowhere; it is actually connected to things like theatre, like Brecht, Mary Kelly and Eleanor Antin, and a lot of other people who helped form it. Although we think that is well proved, if you look at the way art history is written, it’s not actually part of that [canon]. We’re always interested in things that are suppressed or overlooked, and we identify with those things. So we’re calling them up and attaching ourselves to them.

JG: In terms of the personal, we’re looking as a collective at our influences. With our own mothers obviously and our own histories, and with artists Mary Kelly and Eleanor Antin that are part of our groups. This video is the first time we used our actual mothers. I was a little bit nervous about doing that. The personal in the past with other pieces, especially the one called “The Pagan Rights,” was looking at the California hippie culture as where we came from, where we were raised. Through this utopian fantasy, we are looking at that history as well as being critical of the idealistic or utopian idea [of mother].

AS: Maybe, essentialist. There are a lot of historical projects that are in some way or another reasserting the position of the mother figure or the matriarch. We didn’t want to do anything that was essentializing. That is not the kind of training we got from people like Mary Kelly or Sue-Ellen Case. What we found was that looking at our own mothers was a way out of that.

MG: Especially because we don’t have one mother. We have three in these very different scenarios. And then Mary and Eleanor appear in the same chapters of art history but very different projects. So we could look at this personal relationship to history in an intimate, specific way, but at the same time think about how it plays out so differently. It doesn't create a total idea of the mother. The mother is a varying role just like in the play we all play the mother.

JG: But what does it mean to be that caregiver? The person that is going to make the sacrifice. What does that mean to take on that role?

AS: Responsibility to the community, which is what Mary points out in our video.

JG: When we started working on this piece, I just became a mother. It was nice to also have Alex and Malik to get to play the mother role and question what that means.

IB: Do you think that these different perceptions of what a mother is, or what motherhood is, are connected to alienation? You were talking about Brecht and Artaud, how you’re in conversation with both of them. I’m thinking about how these differences in the definition of a mother, and at the same time your avoidance of a “total definition,” might relate to alienation. A second question would be, how are alienation and appropriation related to each other, if they are?

MG: You think about all the influences that have come from queer performance or…

AS: Identity art.

MG: Having a generation ahead of us with approaches to alienation that are much more wrapped up in desire, identification of problems being legible— we are in a messier area, different than Brecht’s, which is “You are here, the character is here, and here is where Marxism happened.” That project has been very inspiring, but is coming from his masculine directorial vision and through camp or other theatrical moments that have more to do with the ‘60s and later. Alienation can be for us a complicated area that doesn’t necessarily create a kind of mathematical equation (that this proves that) but that all of these forces are happening at once; you’re alienated because you can’t fully identify yourself with the terms, even of this play. This revolutionary mother is obviously very… Brecht has this idea of a mother that is totally idealistic.

JG: When we started working on the play, we hadn't built in all of the interruptions yet and it seemed like there was something missing. Like we needed an extra layer of alienation or an escape root from the structure.

MG: Where we become ourselves. Which is maybe that kind of ‘60s anarchistic theatre where we don’t quite know what's going to happen— and leaving space to even be critical of Brecht.

AS: Like in reality TV, the confessional moment when you get to be yourself and just talk directly to the camera. I think it’s interesting that you bring that up, that this is alienation at the same time that it is appropriation. It functions to expose the apparatus, the way the Brechtian model works, but at the same time it actually makes us connect directly to our own lives and to the audience.

JG: But those moments aren’t completely improvisational. There is another layer that is the scripted improvisational moments where we riff off the outline.

MG: It’s a complicated question. There’s that moment in the movie where my mother is talking about the party they had after they’ve done this totally alienated performance, carnivalesque, white-trash party. They are sitting there and she says something super sentimental right into the camera. Like, “I can’t imagine ever…” From there we go straight to us singing a ‘60s girls group song, “You can never go home anymore.” We always have to keep this personal, affective, intimate relationship that we are really interested with each other, in conversation with alienated performance.

JG: It’s almost like it contextualizes; it gives it a container. The sentimentality doesn’t really ever exist.

AS: We only started working with appropriation directly very recently. This last summer, every project we did was some kind of reenactment of a historical text or situation. I don’t think we’ve completely worked out exactly how reenactment works in term of theorizing. Our next project is one where we are adapting a Fassbinder piece and looking very closely at the Fassbinder actors as part of the anti-theatre. We’re not just taking the text and thinking about Fassbinder as the author, but actually we're interested in how those actors interpreted it. There is something very important with estrangement in our work and its relationship to reenactment. I would use that term [estrangement] more to define what we do than appropriation. In the past, the way we approach a kind of appropriative model was to make our own version of things. So rather than do an ancient play, we would write our own piece that actually brought all these strips together but was reformed around our own aesthetic sensibility and our own language. And now we are very interested in direct quotations, but also always adapting it. This play for example, it’s not the original. We bring up the power dynamics, the language— all that can actually be clearer.

IB: Maybe appropriation is not the right word, but there are many aspects of your work that have this characteristic. The title of your show, for example, where you borrow from the post- World War II document the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” (co-authored by Eleanor Roosevelt) and Melanie Klein’s 1929 essay “Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in a Work of Art and the Creative Impulse.” How would you define that?

MG: It’s exactly that, appropriation.

AS: You can call it collage, pastiche, assemblage. All of those terms I feel more comfortable with than appropriation, and I think it is because of the ways appropriation plays out in the visual field as this sort of taking and displacing, reframing. That’s not exactly what’s happening with us.

JG: It’s more along the lines of the camp model. Even like the drag model, like taking a…

AS: Taking a popular song and rewriting the lyrics.

JG: Or taking a popular figure and…

MG: Satirizing.

JG: Yeah, exactly.

AS: We make more direct appropriations. We are going to do a Brecht play.

MG: Rather than, we’re doing a Baroque-style play.

AS: What we found is it does speak to audiences more directly in the currency of those figures. Cultural capital. They understand. When we do our own version of Fassbinder without saying it is Fassbinder, for example, people get the feeling but they don’t get connected to that particular lineage and doesn’t function in the same way. Maybe because we’re more mature and confident as artists we feel we can address these big guys of history.

JG: In a way, it historicizes our own practice by setting ourselves alongside them.

AS: That is what I was saying about Mary Kelly. When we asked her to play Mary Cassatt, which was totally a crazy thing to ask her to do, and she was down from the beginning. I didn’t even say Mary Cassatt, I said painter, an impressionist woman painter… and she was like, “I’m playing Mary Cassatt.”

IB: The first thing you see when you enter the exhibition at Gallery 400 is the triangular stage covered by beige carpet, the same color as the Gallery floor. The stage is built site-specifically every time the show travels, and the aesthetics change slightly. In terms of reception, many visitors ask us what this is for, why this stage is standing in the gallery. Besides the answer, “This is where the artists perform, and they will perform on this and this date,” I wonder if it stands for something else?

MG: The proposal is that it is a site for action of a different kind; so people recognize that and would think, “Where is the action that I’m missing?” But maybe the action is just being there. The drawings are used in the background for the slideshow, and the masks are used in the play. The objects get incorporated in a higher level of activity, but they also are installed. The stage is pointy, and people would accept it as a large sculpture in the middle of the room. So that anxiety of the viewer of, “What kind of space am I in?” has always been part of our set of questions when doing performance in a visual arts space.

JG: Showing a stage and showing masks are like quoting: “This is an object,” “This is a stage,” “This is a theatrical object,” and “This is in a gallery.” In a way, [the stage] exists on its own, but I think the triangle also skews the idea of what a stage should be. The height of it is special and the fact that the three points reference us.

AS: Anxiety is important here. Theatre can function in a number of different ways, but in a gallery or art context it always seems to provoke a kind of anxiety.

JG: They think they’ll have to participate.

AS: And also the fear of missing out— you don’t really have access to us. But the way this particular installation works, we do have for the first time the documentation of past performances so there is a kind of detective work that the viewer can do to become an audience member. It is also about these different ways in which the spectator is formed in different types of art. On the one hand you have an audience that is a communal viewer, and then you have this viewer who is supposed to wander around galleries alone. So I think it does provoke crisis even if it’s subtle.

IB: Maybe that is part of estrangement.

JG: I hadn’t thought about this idea of the individual lone spectator versus being part of an audience. Because it really feels different when you are sitting down with a group of people and having this collective response and experience.

MG: But everything, the amount of time you are supposed to spend, the way you experience the lights, the way time passes, all of that shifts based on what you think is supposed to happen in the room.

AS: I do think that in this particular installation, the confrontation with the empty stage is pretty stark. In others there has been more space before the stage comes, maybe the masks were what you first saw. Here it actually is even more of a provocation.

MG: You go up the stairs, you look up and then…

AS: You see something, but then there’s emptiness. It’s something we’re going to work through in the next piece where we are thinking about how we are going to install performance aspects. And we are thinking a lot about stages as sculptural installations.

IB: We need to wrap up because you’re about to perform The Mother here at the Gallery. But I wanted to ask, how do you prepare for the performances? Is there something that you religiously need? Are you yourselves on the stage? How is this performance different from the one you presented at the Whitney Biennial this year?

MG: I think we are all a little bit different.

JG: I use some vocal warm-up.

MG: There is an element of theatre where you need to get your body ready to perform and focus. It’s different than what we played early on in rock shows, where you can just run on stage and…

JG: and be drunk! This is not that kind of thing.

MG: And it’s a little different than a cliché performance art, where you come and rehearse action in the gallery. For that, you need to go in the zone; but this really requires a lot of negotiating text and body.

AS: Something that is important for us is that we are ourselves when we are performing. We use the mask as a representation of how we think about performance: as something that you put on, but you are always yourself under it. Which connects back to the alienation effect that Brecht saw in our own estrangement. You always remember who you are, so that you use yourself to be the barometer of how you feel about the character you act out. It’s funny— the way this play starts is with us sitting on the stage just talking to each other. We are often running lines, which means going through to make sure we remember how the scenes go and talking to each other so we feel like ourselves.

JG: It’s a normalizing exercise. It’s not a solo performance, so we need to connect.

AS: We don’t stare at a mirror for half an hour.

JG: We’re not saying, “Are you nervous?” But we’re connecting.

AS: At the Whitney when we did this piece, it was daunting. We need to connect to each other because the audience started to fill and you see all these people…

JG: It’s frightening.

MG: That is why it’s good to be a team.

AS: And we all say to each other, we got this.

Interviews with Anne Elizabeth Moore & Paul Durica, Reading Room Contributors

Thu, 07 Aug 2014 15:05:00 -0500

As a supplement to Standard of Living: Art and 21st Century Economies and Work, Gallery 400 has created a Reading Room with articles, videos, and web resources. Exploring the legacies of industry, immaterial labor, service work, invisible labor and more, the texts and resources in Gallery 400's Reading Room articulate a variety of responses to the relationships between labor, economy, and politics. Gallery 400 Curatorial Intern, Claire Kissinger interviewed two artists included in the Nice Work If You Can Get It exhibition about their contributions to the Reading Room.

Anne Elizabeth Moore of The Ladydrawers

Claire Kissinger: Why are the texts you selected important for you?

Anne Elizabeth Moore: Probably all of my work treads the line between journalism and art, and so regardless of whether I am reporting, writing a critical essay, installing a conceptual show, or doing comics journalism in collaboration with smart women and trans and non-binary cartoonists, there is going to be a body of research at the ready to inform and deepen my understanding, and the understanding of the folks I'm working with. These texts in particular are written by my peers, and other reporters in the field (or by me) and have a direct bearing on the comics in the Gallery 400 show. In many cases they were cited in our comics, or formed a basis for understanding the approach we would take in a strip, or in the case of the pieces I wrote, drove me to ask the questions that the Our Fashion Year series seeks to answer: What are the connections between the sex and garment trades worldwide, and how much responsibility do those connections hold for deliberately limiting women's economic power?

CK: How are "work" and "art" related?

AEM: Well to me there's no difference, because all labor has aesthetic implications and all cultural production makes use of labor. These are often covered up or ignored, however, and that's when things get boring.

CK: What can workers in your field do to support workers in other fields?

AEM: Ladydrawers started as a place for comics folk to start viewing their practice as labor, valued labor. Once we established that in comics, there is a vast economic divide between producers based primarily on gender, and to a lesser degree on race, we began to look to other fields that are founded on that very same economic divide, and in fact perpetuate it. Then we used the skills we gained in data-gathering, reporting, and nonfiction graphic storytelling to make that information public. But that's just our method. There are certainly others.

Paul Durica of Pocket Guide to Hell

CK: Why are the texts you selected important to you?

Paul Durica: These books form the backbone upon which my projects are built. They offer not only the raw historical material but also some of the forms that I use in sharing this material with a public. They all contain narratives that help one make sense of the present, to recognize the present as the culmination of a series of decisions and actions rather than a given.

CK: How are "work" and "art" related?

PD: Art is work a lot of the time, and there's an artistry that goes into many forms of labor. My father is a letter carrier and I do these history-based projects, but both of us make use of a process; have developed and refined various techniques; and are committed to completing the tasks before us. The difference is that my dad has a salary, overtime, benefits, etc. while the work I do (and that of many, many cultural workers) is, on the one hand, valued by those who receive it but then, on the other, can be dismissed as "art" when it comes time to compensate it.

CK: What can workers in your field do to support workers in other fields?

PD: Listen to them, respect what they do, and produce work that either engages them or reflects the dignity of all labor. Recognize one's self as a worker (a cultural worker is still a worker) and regard things like benefits, a pension, and a salary as connected to what you do and join other workers in fighting for those rights rather than regard them as somehow outside the purview of cultural production.

An Interview with MFA candidate Elena Feijoo

Mon, 07 Apr 2014 13:17:00 -0500

Elena Feijoo is a current MFA candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work for thesis will be featured in the upcoming MFA show This Is What It Felt Like at Gallery 400. She was interviewed by Anna Lepsch, a student in the Museum and Exhibition Studies program at UIC.

Anna Lepsch: Tell me a little bit about your background.

Elena Feijoo: I was born in Toronto. My parents are both immigrants. My dad was born off the coast of Africa in a Portuguese colony called the Cape Verde Islands. He has a sister who lived in Toronto and he moved there. That’s where he met my mother who is from Québec. So both of my parents have these extremely distinct, strong cultures—loaded cultures with colonization, immigration, and diasporas. In the mid-1990s, my dad moved us to Florida, which had a huge impact. It’s when I started making work about my identity and my family.

AL: How old were you when you moved to Florida?

EF: I want to say I was eight? I was in third grade.

AL: So you were pretty young.

EF: Yeah, I was really young, but I was still aware of what was happening. I had all of these ideas about what Florida was going to be like. I thought I was going to live in Disney World, and it wasn’t reality. When I came here, it was a huge culture shock. People like to think that Canadians are so similar to Americans, but when you traverse any large body of land, it's completely different. It was the start of the trajectory for my work now. It’s trying to deconstruct that experience in some way to try to pinpoint what it means today to be a woman, an American, a Portuguese-French person. I think that there is conflict there.

A lot of my work has to do with my father because there is a constant undertone of conflict even though we love each other. On the surface we’re fine, but when you look harder, you see that he comes from a culture of oppression. We just do not see eye-to-eye because of all of the conflict of all the cultures and it fascinated me. I had this drive to fix it or to understand more clearly why it was that I felt a distinct shift in our relationship or a distinct shift in my context.

AL: Since your work is so tied to family, what was behind the decision to pick yourself up and move a thousand miles away from them? Was that a deliberate choice?

EF: I knew I wanted to go to grad school. I knew I needed to fine tune the ideas I was thinking about. I wanted to get out of Florida. It wasn’t that I wanted to get away from my family; it was more that Florida was not the place for me to discuss these ideas.

AL: Do you think that Chicago has added to or modified your identity?

EF: Totally. I think that identity—the thing that makes it most fascinating to me is that it’s indefinable. It’s constantly shifting. I think that identity is self-defined, but also defined by others, by the communities that you say you exist within. So every experience shifts that definition between you and others. It’s a constant negotiation, which I think is not just a negotiation between you and another group, but with you internally. And I think that’s forever fascinating to me. It’s a subject that isn’t stagnant. It's in flux. So as soon as I think I get a grasp on it, it falls completely in on itself.

AL: Going off the fact that you are doing this work, looking at your family from a long distance, I noticed a lot of your work includes phone calls. I want to know a little more about that, and why you’ve chosen video work in combination with phone calls?

EF: Yeah, that was a mode of production in my first year here, just because it was my way of interacting with [my parents]. When I moved here, I was struggling, maybe not struggling as a person, but struggling to define myself in this new context. I think it has shifted a little bit further away from my family into larger ideas of identity or about defining the self, but in my first year here, I felt like I was going through this major shift as a person. I’d never lived away from my family and I felt like I was changing so much in the way that I saw things. It started to shape me and my definition of myself. For instance, before I moved to Chicago, I didn’t even really know what feminism was. I didn’t understand it nor did I identify with it and now I’m totally a feminist. Now it’s not even a question in my mind. But I was struggling because I was living under the oppression of my father’s culture and my father for so long that I didn’t know that.

AL: You mentioned that there is tension. Do you feel like as you’ve evolved, it has become more easily seen, just a scratch-the-surface-and-it’s-there type of thing?

EF: I think that, yeah, there’s a super real tension. Also, in that first year of grad school, my parents got a divorce. So there was already thick tension in the air. I was already dealing with that and I started to see my father in a light that I hadn’t since I was so close to it. There was a lot of ethical complication, you know?

And I just felt like, “man you are kind of an ass and I couldn’t see it.” I love him and it’s complicated. So I think my work has shifted away from that relationship with my father. I mean, if we’re going to be Freudian, maybe it never will. But I’m really interested in relationships between people and especially people who are different and come from different places and especially how you negotiate those differences from a place of love and want—want for intimacy, and want to make a connection. With my father, it’s the ultimate case. I want to have a relationship with him and I want us to be close, but because of our polarities, we are hindered by that. I mean, the stories can go on forever.

AL: Now that maybe your work is a little bit more focused on relationships and want for connection, what types of things and what types of media are you using to explore that?

EF: I’m constantly looking at what my relationship is to my context. I’m really interested in indexing and cataloging and just gathering materials and documentation of things. The book that I just printed between my father and me—I gave him this task and then he sent me all these things. I just documented them, archived them, and compiled this thing. I’m really into that method of working because I feel that in other ways I’ve worked in the past, I’ve self-censored. There’s so much subjectivity in my process and my craft. I like the idea of just matter-of-factly presenting materials that exist in the world without much mediation, letting them tell the story themselves. I’m also working on a piece that’s completely about process, completely about going through processes over and over and over again as a means to no end.

AL: Wouldn’t you consider archiving a process and collecting materials a process? I think I see that connection.

EF: Totally.

AL: What processes are you working with now, coming up for your thesis show?

EF: For the thesis show, I have kind of a compilation piece. Maybe they could be seen as separate, but I see them all under the same title. It’s called How To Make a Mold: Step One. The piece is two photographs of my hand. One [photograph] is with these acrylic nails and is just posed in a very stock photo way. The other one is in the same pose but my hand is covered in plaster and you see the nails. Another work of mine in the show is made solely from the mold-making process. I like the confusion of — what is step one? What is the object? Is it my hand? Is my hand the tool? Is this sculpture I’m making from the mold-making process the object? Or is that just the process to get to something else?

AL: Do you think through that way of working you’re negotiating how you define context for yourself? Or is that something you’ve thought about at all?

EF: I think with this piece specifically, I’m defining an identity for myself in a different way or presenting an internal struggle I’ve felt. This art person—this artist that is making and also me as a woman in that sphere and the negotiations I have to make being a female artist. I think with the nails, it is kind of this bratty humorous piece that I can have my cake and eat it, too. I can have my big tall acrylic pink fingernails and also make this ridiculous mold.

AL: It’s funny you say that, because as soon as I saw you, I thought, “you’re the first art maker I’ve ever seen to have acrylic nails.”

EF: That’s why you need acrylic nails or else these nails wouldn’t exist. You’d think we’d be beyond it, but I still have a feeling of needing to prove myself as a sculptor a little bit more. I want to dress the way I want to dress and I want to look the way I want to look and I also be considered a legitimate sculptor. People think it doesn’t exist any more and it totally still exists. It’s not the driving force behind the work necessarily, but it’s kind of my little feminist “fuck you” in some way.

Image: Elena Feijoo, Turn Down Service, from Room With A View, CAA 2014, pop-up art space.

AL: I saw your piece at CAA (College Art Association) and I think this notion of humor in art is really interesting. Can you give me a little description of how you feel about humor in art and its legitimacy and why you chose to take that view for CAA?

EF: I feel like there’s humor in life, therefore there’s humor in art. You can’t separate them. Especially in my practices, I have a really hard time separating life from my practice. I don’t think it doesn’t have a place. It probably needs more space in art and in people's work.

Anna Lepsch is a student in the Museum and Exhibition Studies program at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

An Interview with MFA Student Macon Reed

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 12:09:00 -0500

MFA candidate Macon Reed is a self-proclaimed feminist artist and aptly so. Reed explores social themes via intricate sculptures that manifest notions of trauma, healing, gender, and spectacle. Her sculptures are in conversation with broad social issues, demanding attention and interpretation, and ultimately creating a powerful dialogue between object and audience. In this conversation Reed shares her artistic inclinations, which include works in a variety of media and an emphasis on social practice. She also discusses her sculptures in great detail, and explains how and why they might be read as spectacle. Art History student Adriana Magnolia Ruvalcaba interviewed Reed earlier this semester.

Adriana Magnolia Ruvalcaba: So, I don’t know much about your work. Tell me, what medium do you work in the most?

Macon Reed: The most? It really switches, it’s funny because I’ve joked that during grad school it’s been seasonal. But, in the fall, I have both years in a row, made a sculpture that then I have in one way or another set on fire, and then shown, then videotaped and photographed. Then I notice after that, I try to make a video, which I haven’t made many videos. So fall is burning sculpture time, and then winter seems to be when I start making videos, and then towards summer I start doing more social practice stuff. I started a summer camp last year. So, it’s really been all over the place in terms of medium; it almost feels like it’s less about "what do I work with," as opposed to what season is it...which is hilarious, and it’s not on purpose, it’s just happened twice in a row now. Maybe that’s a thing. We’ll be doing the camp again this summer.

AMR: Where is the camp?

MR: It’s in Rochester, Washington, on a friend’s farm. I can geek-out about all that stuff.

I don’t know if I should start at the beginning of the season? Like the year?

(Collective laugh)

AMR: So, how do you define seasons then? Do you define them academically, or the way they work in nature, like: spring …fall …winter?

Image: Macon Reed, Invocation, photograph, 41 x 61 in.

MR: That’s the thing—it should be how they work in nature. And its really not an intentional part of my practice, it’s just an ongoing joke with my friends, where we realized it was fall again and I was lighting a sculpture on fire, and I needed them to come help me again, and I then needed help with the video editing.

The thing about me is that I’m always learning a new medium, and that’s something I’m trying to learn to have be useful instead of a problem, where I feel like I’m constantly at the beginning of something and it’s more where the idea goes as opposed to being medium specific at all...which is exciting, but also means I don’t have the skill-set of just being a really good sculptor or something, because that’s what I’ve been doing mostly. So I end up having to pull friends in to help…I end up being really community oriented in a way that I don’t necessarily mean to.

…I can tell you about things that I’ve been thinking recently, and maybe how that’s popped up in my work…

AMR: Great!

MR: …the piece I did in the fall was a set of megaphone sculptures that I made. I like everything to look like it’s made by hand and not look too slick and polished. It’s that classic critique of going into galleries and having everything be so pristine and perfect. So I made these megaphones and they were made out of woven cardboard that was then covered with plaster and joint compound, so they almost look ceramic, and I had them all pointing down at a giant pile of pompoms that I had made—this is really funny because I was never a cheerleader, never [was involved] in sports, and suddenly I’m thinking a lot about sports and P.E., which is so weird. So there was a pile of pompoms and then basically I had a backdrop and I went and got a bunch of fireworks and set them off out of the megaphones into the pile of pompoms until they caught on fire.

And what I was thinking about with that was just sort of…the point at which being cheery or positive can become self-destructive, specifically with being socialized as being female, but also in general. Because a lot of my work is thinking about feminist and queer topics, but I try to not make it super obvious in the work. I like for it to be a bit sneaky in the way that it comes around. So I was thinking about that. I guess I can tell you why I was thinking about cheerleaders at first, but that was that project. What happened was then I had the megaphones, which I liked because they were totally scarred from it: the color smoke bombs had changed the insides, so they were colorful, but then they’re burned, and then they smell like fireworks, and the pompoms were almost all burned up. But then, that’s the thing that I keep having with my sculptures, is all of them seem like —even if they’re not all on fire—they’re like a prop at one point, in order to make photographs or a video. So I have these photos in the end of the fireworks shooting out. And that’s the moment that I really was thinking about catching, but then I also have the objects….

Everyone says, “There’s a redundancy between those two things.” It’s true. There’s them burning, there’s them having been burnt. But I kind of like that you’re “not supposed to do that,” where it’s redundant, so I kind of like that it’s all in there.

Last year I made a hot air balloon also out of papier-mâché and cardboard and things like that. I hung it up and lit that on fire. That was a reenactment from something that happened. Some people had actually died in a hot air balloon that had caught on fire and I was really depressed and working one of my manual labor jobs that summer and saw this image one day at work and it just stuck with me for a long time.

AMR: What did you make the hot air balloon from?

MR: It was cardboard and canvas. The paper mache was fancy papier-mâché, but I didn’t make it right exactly—it’s funny because it was a piece kind of about failure and I failed at making it, too. It didn’t burn well enough, so it only burned some. But we got the image of it burning okay. But then after that it’s the weird burnt sculpture and the weird photograph, and that’s something I just kind of have to resolve.

AMR: How big are your pieces?

MR: The hot air balloon is maybe that big (motions a 3D size proportion by spreading arms out and up-down), I can give you specific measurement too, if you want. The megaphones were on stands, so on the stands they roughly took that amount of space (again motions with arms).

Image: Macon Reed, UIC MFA Open Studios, 2012 (installation view).

AMR: When you fire them, is this outdoors?

MR: Yeah, and it’s in front of a backdrop...at least with the megaphones it was. With the installation in the gallery I had the photographs of the megaphones on the walls and then the [actual] megaphones. I didn’t want them to be set the same way they were in the photos, so I shaped them out so they were pointing more aggressively, defending the pompons, and I had three gymnasts come into the room and they were in uniform. At that point I started thinking about cheerleading, military, and nationalism and stuff that had happened. I had them standing facing the megaphones, so they were three-on-three. They were sort of facing off. I love gymnasts because they are super tough, and also really high femme at the same time. I like how they’re fucking with gender without necessarily knowing or doing it on purpose.

AMR: Right.

MR: Those little gestures are so funny to me when they’re doing all these badass flips and things and then still have to add that in. So they were just doing those gestures and sort of facing down the megaphones.

AMR: Did you choreograph the gymnasts’ movement?

MR: Very minimally. But they all have little gestures that they do as part of their routines...they are all slightly different...so I just said, “can you guys just do those little things occasionally, as you feel?" The tension was really nice because they never did anything “gymnastic-y”—they have this super intense presence, it was really interesting. They kind of stand in for different ideas of different feminists waves of thought for me, but I’m still working on that.

AMR: Can you talk about that a little bit?

MR: Yeah, I definitely call myself a feminist. I feel like that word is really loaded, and historically when I look at a lot of feminist work I kind of cringe, because even though I feel I benefited from the heritage of that work, and I want to like it, it’s like, now it’s a little bit embarrassing. And that’s really confusing. Because I’m like “Yes! Feminist stuff! And I love female artists, and that’s awesome!” So, I’ve been thinking about ways to make that conversation and conversations around gender in general a little bit more accessible and relevant to now, and get people thinking and talking about them again…also adding a queer element…the whole conversation is something that I would like to see updated a little bit more. I’ve been thinking about ways to do that, and humor is a big part of that for me.

The gymnasts and the cheerleaders were interesting, because I originally started looking at the cheerleaders because there had been this awful rape that happened in Texas by a bunch of football players to this cheerleader, in Silsbee. Did you hear about that, by chance?

AMR: Sounds vaguely familiar, how long ago was that?

Image: Macon Reed, Landscape, 2012, gouache on paper, 49 x 42 in.

MR: It was three or four years ago…yeah, Silsbee, Texas. Basically, she was a cheerleader and [during the game] she was forced to cheer for the guy who raped her. The cheer that she was supposed to say was, “Two, four, six-eight-ten! Come on, Rakheem, [put] it in!” or something like that… And so she, in front of everybody in this small town where football is huge, stood aside quietly and didn’t participate. She just didn’t say anything. She was chastised for it in front of the whole town, for these events, and then she was kicked off the cheerleading team, because she wouldn’t cheer for him.

Then later, when she sued for her first amendment right to free speech the court said that when she became a cheerleader she lost her first amendment rights, that she was speaking through the school, not for herself, and that she suspended the ability to do that. She lost the lawsuit. It's a small town, and the lawyers are connected to the football players. They are charging her family something like forty-grand for legal expenses for a frivolous lawsuit. It's horrible. So this girl got raped, got humiliated for trying to stand up for herself, and then whatever college education money her parents might have set aside has now gone towards this lawsuit. So that’s what originally interested me in cheerleading.

AMR: So you saw this in a newspaper, online, how did you stumble on it?

MR: I think it was on Change.org, a petition to support her, and try to reverse the court's decision. What I wanted to do was assemble a group of cheerleaders and work with them, to create a cheer for her, and then do a video that would go simultaneously in a gallery and be sent to her, without having her name mentioned specifically in it.

But I wanted to both bring it into the gallery as something that had happened—I was just really angry about it—and also send her a supportive thing. But I didn’t end up doing that project because that’s her story; even though it’s a public media thing it started to feel hard to know if that’s something she would want or not. I also had a really hard time finding cheerleaders. Cheerleaders and artists do not work together historically. They’re kind of in separate camps. So I just started thinking about the spectacle of cheerleading in that process and it has gone a lot of different directions from there.