Saint Mary's College, Notre Dame, Indiana, January 22-February 19, 2010

"Battle of the Sexes," Clayman Institute for Gender Research, Stanford University, Stanford, CA

Currently making drawings, prints and masks (take one!) for the show at the Clayman. The drawings are imagined sports posters of Billie Jean King in her prime. Conceptual historical intervention. Masks are Bobby Riggs on one side and BJK on the other, classic girls vs. boys circa 1973. BJK achieves Wheaties box fame, and cancels out Reagan America Cold War heroine Mary Lou Retton in the process. More soon.

"De-Tranquilizers," 925 Penn Ave., June 5-14, 2009

The Three Rivers Arts Festival finally paired smart people with pristine (see partially torn-up carpet and industrial adhesive on floor) empty spaces. The result is "De-Tranquilizers," curated by Eric C. Shiner, Milton Fine Curator at The Warhol.

Eric C. Shiner, the Milton Fine Curator of Art at The Andy Warhol Museum, curates the work of Lilith Bailey-Kroll, Cara Erskine, Fabrizio Gerbino, Gregory Witt, and James Wodarek in two vacant commercial spaces on Penn Avenue downtown. Featuring paintings, sculpture, illustration and video, the show brings together a diverse grouping of works that undermine notions of tranquility.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09164/976993-437.stm

"8-Hour Projects" Allegheny College, September 2-30, 2008

This weekend was the installation for "8-Hour Projects" at Allegheny College in Meadville, PA.

Above, in-progress photos:
Devil's Slide, 144x120 in., latex on wall, 2008.

Documentation of project, in-progress photos:

"Solid Gold" Vox Populi, June 6-27, 2008

If you're in Philly this month check out Solid Gold at Vox Populi. I have two paintings in the show, and the opening night vibe was great and the other work is good.

Read Roberta Fallon's review of Solid Gold in the Philadelphia Weekly: http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/articles/17158/a-e--art/

Plastic Poetics interview: Ian Finch in conversation with Cara Erskine

“…I usually refer to them as diagrams. You referred to them as drawings earlier. That also works. Lawrence Weiner and Glenn Ligon are dubbed conceptual artists, while Emmett Williams and the de Campos brothers are visual poets. I don’t really see the difference.”

CARA ERSKINE: Your Venn diagram poems call to mind the work of the Imagists, Oulipo, Edward Tufte, and the flow-charts of the late Mark Lombardi. Do you see your work as part of a particular lineage?

IAN FINCH: Yes, the lineage would include things like: puzzle books, E.E. Cummings, atlases, hypertext, speech bubbles, and Mary Ellen Solt’s Concrete Poetry: A World View. Tufte has definitely been a good source for understanding how relatively complex information can be conveyed through diagrams. Even though I usually consider this work to be visual poetry because of my own background, it could also be called graphic design. Or conceptual art. Or information architecture. Right now I have a bunch of different devils on my shoulders, and they all have a say.

CE: Plastic Poetics presented the opportunity for you to work on a large scale. How has this affected your practice as a visual poet?

IF: The larger size may have had a recognizable effect on a reader’s interaction with the poems; the text becomes public, like graffiti or billboards, and it loses some of the privacy of a poem that lives in a book. The poems for this show started out small, but they were altered to suit the architecture of the gallery. Trying to situate the work in a gallery space, especially in relation to the other artists’ work, is what changed the writing process. Some of the forms were directly affected by the presence of architectural details—kick plates, sockets, and ductwork. The shape of the other artists’ work also influenced the overall structure of the relevant poems; I wanted to hint at the connections between the various works without creating a redundant form in the gallery.

CE: What was the catalyst for making Venn diagrams?

IF: The form came out of an argument with some friends about the Pittsburgh Steelers logo and what the diamonds (technically hypocycloids, for you geometry nerds) inside the circle represent. I had assumed they represented the three rivers in Pittsburgh…totally wrong. Today, the hypocycloids represent the materials used to produce steel: yellow for coal, orange for iron ore, and blue for steel scrap. Originally, according to the U.S. Steel Corporation, the three symbols represented the idea that “yellow lightens your work; orange brightens your leisure; and blue widens your world.” This concept seems strange to me, especially as a marketing tool. Poetic, even. The logo’s circle was originally labeled “Steel,” much like a Venn diagram. I wanted to take it one step further by adding more circles and text to make some nonlinear poems.

CE: Moving laterally, crab-like, the poems amble rather than progress and present a possibility of visions or combinations, without being too wide open. How do you shoot for this range?

IF: Early on, I was mostly interested in shorter forms for poetry, and spending a lot of time on haiku, tanka…I think brevity in poetry, if done well, results in maximum possibilities. Expounding isn’t necessarily expanding. I’m a fan of the French poet Jean Follain, a master of the wide-open vignette. He was able to use parataxis to create scenes and characters in a way that dips into the surreal without losing control. I want these diagrams to work in that way, hopefully allowing readers to make connections between the words and phrases without limiting their interpretations. I spend much of the time on word play between the parts, and creating scenes or landscapes that can be read in both a concrete and abstract way. The presence of the diagram form itself—the circles and dotted lines—complicates the meanings, because although it might help illustrate relationships between the words, it can also confuse or allow unexpected readings. Without the diagram form to show combinations, proximities, and scale, the words would mean something else.

CE: Were you seen as a misfit by other poets in the MFA program at University of Pittsburgh?

IF: I might have been the only person there whose work became primarily “visual poetry,” but looking closely at anyone’s poetry, there is always some visual structuring to the printed word. Line breaks, spaces, stanzas, and punctuation are all evidence of either purposeful structuring or unconscious imitation. The printed word is not just a record of orality, but is an object on a page, something poets have to wrestle with. It’s a golem, and we have to figure out what goes where. Visual structuring might be a way to hint at how a poem should be read aloud, helping the reader break down the rhythms or breath, but it can also be used to help (or hinder) our silent reading process. The form is not just a vessel.

CE: You've constructed a shield out of foam, duct tape and cardboard. What are you protecting?

IF: My honor on the field of battle? A couple of years ago, my brother-in-law and I created a sport called VikingBall (plug: http://www.vikingball.com which is a variant of street hockey. The main difference in VikingBall is that instead of a blocker and goalie stick, our goalie (the Viking position) defends the goal with a large hammer and a round shield. It has been described as a performance art-sport. Strangely, I think the Venn diagram poems helped to create the sport because I had circles on the brain, which is what gave me the idea for the round shield.

CE: What have you always wanted to be asked about your work? What am I, or what is anyone, missing?

IF: Does calling the work “poetry” limit the viewer’s (or reader’s) perception of what the things are, or how they function? I wish I knew. I’m not sure what people expect to find in a poem, but it seems different than what you’d expect from a piece on a gallery wall. I used to call them Venn poems, then just poems. Now, I usually refer to them as diagrams. You referred to them as drawings earlier. That also works. Lawrence Weiner and Glenn Ligon are dubbed conceptual artists, while Emmett Williams and the de Campos brothers are visual poets. I don’t really see the difference.

***

Ian Finch is a poet from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
http://thediagram.com/5_6/finch.html

Cara Erskine is an artist based in Pittsburgh. She is covered in an unfathomable number of freckles, has a hellacious allergy to buckwheat, and has Celiac disease. http://www.caraerskine.com

Plastic Poetics interview: Maya Schindler in conversation with Cara Erskine

“…English is my second language and I think maybe because of that it allows me to see strange possibilities for meaning in words, but I am mostly interested in the simple logic behind interpretation, and I believe language is a code, and we can each relate to it differently...”

CARA ERSKINE: You’ve talked a lot about humor being in the work, but I see it balanced by cynicism, it’s both sunny and very dark.

MAYA SCHINDLER: I think humor is part of my work as it’s part of me, at least you may say it’s a kind of tool or a filter for understanding. I guess the term “understanding” is underlying in my work. This term can be very personal, but also very impersonal at the same time. It can be very pointed— at you or me, but it’s also a very big generalization of the idea behind it. All of my work, even if it’s text-based, or image-based—sometimes that is even the same thing—comes from that, from the simple notion of searching for meaning, trying to understand, or simply put, existentialism. So, I use humor to clarify or create a filter or an opening for someone that just walks into the situation that I’ve created.

CE: Text serves as a clarifying agent for you. I remember the “We Love To See You Smile” text piece you made at Yale, and at the time it was a Mc Donald’s slogan, which was one your first text sculptures...

MS: My use of text is intuitive…English is my second language and I think maybe because of that it allows me to see strange possibilities of meaning in words, but I am mostly interested in the simple logic behind interpretation, and I believe language is a code, and we can each relate to it differently.

CE: I’m thinking of your text work based on pop songs and commercial slogans. Mediated, pop culture seems to have a magnetic pull for you.

MS: I use things that I find, materials, text, or random images, and I try to understand them, or to make some sense of them. Most likely I would compose a meaning from that collection, and will find a way to "make" them "make sense." Sometimes it comes in the form of using media, and maybe some pop star, and I think I use that because it’s so approachable, and again, it’s that weird relationship. How can I make “McDonald's” all mine, but yours too? I look at all those things through my own filter, but to show them to you, the viewer, again.

CE: The sculpture SOLUTIONS presents a conundrum. Solutions create more problems or different problems, more decisions, complications. The sculpture presents the word “solutions,” but only to point to the “problems.” Can you talk about this relationship between two halves?

MS: You’re right about solutions, it is a strange word, and I just couldn't let it go. It points out what is not there, hence the shape of something complete or incomplete. Lately, I find myself more and more attracted to be even more daring, and more political in my choices, and I think the work is going in that direction.

CE: Politics informs your work, but it appears in a very subtle way. I sense the political content because it is not overt. I think the way your work is political has to do with perception—something is always bubbling under the surface.

MS: Politics is a big part of my work. Not necessarily making a statement or being political, but the issue of politics, or maybe the definition of “being political.” By stating the obvious or not so obvious, I am taking a stand to begin with…you could say I am dealing with the phenomenology of politics, and the endless hope of making sense of it all…I think growing up in Israel makes one maybe more aware of the notion of normality. My view of what’s normal is almost the complete opposite of someone on the other side of the fence’s view of normality, and to me that is almost incomparable, or at least the notion of it.

CE: I think words and pictures are interchangeable for you, both hit hard in different ways. You treat text and image as though they were the same, having almost the same physical power. I think you're interested in how powerful words are as an icon like a single image...

MS: I think you are right about that. Words can function as an image, and sometimes the image is so different than the word that it makes the form irrelevant, and vice versa. I think image is always text, just in a different form. The form that my work takes is one of the most important elements. Introducing a familiar form, but with a different meaning or a different meaning in an unfamiliar form, is super important to me.

CE: I feel like you want to disrupt the norm of visual experience within art. I think Martin Creed works in a similar way. What are some artists that you look to?

MS: I do like to dispute the norm, but I also appreciate the norm, that is why I use norms all the time. I really appreciate Martin Creed, but honestly, my all-time favorite is Bruce Nauman. His interest in the "personal/political" is super interesting to me, and I just really appreciate the simplicity of his practice.

CE: The after-image from wishful thinking wishful was a really toxic, absinthe green due to the pink and white paint being so close in value. I walked out of the gallery with “Wishful Thinking” emblazoned on my mind due to the optic effect. Does this interest you at all for future works?

MS: Yes! Definitely. I thought that was super successful, creating the notion of an after-image, with just the color theory effect. The dichotomy of being aggressive in a hidden way is what works best in art these days (at least in my opinion) and that is something I am always after!

***

Maya Schindler is a Los Angeles-based artist originally from Jerusalem, Israel. She received her MFA from Yale University and her BFA from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, and attended the CORE program in Houston. Recent solo exhibitions include THE NEW DEAL at Anna Helwing Gallery, Los Angeles; and In Confidence at SouthFirst, Brooklyn. http://www.annahelwing.com/artists/maya_schindler/maya_schindler.html

Cara Erskine is an artist based in Pittsburgh. She is covered in an unfathomable number of freckles, has a hellacious allergy to buckwheat, and has Celiac disease.http://www.caraerskine.com