OPEN LAB ARTISTS

Baltimore based painter Magnolia Laurie on her elegant constructions, the intimacy of drawing, what books she’s reading, and how to Slow Down for the subtlety of darkness. 

Can you describe what you were thinking about while working on Caught in a Vast and Benevolent Lethargy of Well-Wishing, We Did Nothing? 

I was working on it in July/August 2012 for my show in September at frosch & portmann, which was titled what could hold us together. My mom lives in Montana and that summer there had been quite a few bad forest fires. There were fires in multiple western states really, but my mom was sending me daily pictures from out of her window for a while there and they were really stunning images. The view that I knew to be out her window was transformed, the vast sky filled with low hanging smoke, everything beyond her driveway hidden in this foreboding dark haze. The images were in my head and they seemed ripe with metaphoric potential. 

What sort of concepts are you working with in these paintings from What Could Hold Us Together?  Are they influenced by the recent hurricane? 

This work was made before the hurricane, so no.  Though I think the implications of upheaval, vulnerability and endurance are relatable. 

In creating the work for what cold hold us together, I thought of the title as a somewhat hopeless question of what could hold us back from the brink of falling apart - as the mounting political, social and economical calamity of this past year has perpetually threatened.   On the other hand, what could hold us together may also be a resilient statement of assurance of what will persist and endure and maintain. I prefer the title with no punctuation, leaving it open to either a question or a statement. 

The words come from a line in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.  I reread it last year, along with Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and John Steinbeck’s America and Americans. It seems I was seeking out narratives of precarious transition with wandering narrators. They struck me as appropriate for our time and my state of mind. The paintings work to balance domesticity with survival, the falsity of façade and the reality of barriers, and the hopeful with the hopeless.  

Tell us about Left Alone with Architecture that Grows in the Dark.

It’s a dark and subtle painting. 

 I wanted to create a series of paintings that worked with the idea of barriers as the subject. Within these paintings, I was thinking about how an aesthetic can function as a kind of barrier or foil- slowing down, distorting or hiding the content of the work. In turn, this function of the aesthetic becomes additional content. Left Alone with Architecture that Grows in the Dark is predominantly black on black and you have to slow down to look at it or you will miss it. It is really the texture of the paint that creates the contrast and allows you to see the space. The barrier is delicate and you can easily look through it, but then you realize that the real subject is the barrier itself. With the title I was thinking about sitting in the dark and allowing your eyes to adjust and how you can adapts and learn to look under new conditions.

What sort of imagery were you working with before the structures?  

I think I’ve always been interested in thinking about place, suggestive narrative and human behavior, while lacking any real interest in depicting people. In graduate school I was making installations that worked with adjustable and adaptable structures that were meant to affect our perception of space with very little material.  Before that I was painting public spaces and non-spaces: empty waiting rooms, airports, train stations. These paintings focused on the evidence of human activity. They were very small and painted with gouache on found cardboard and intended to be shown in small groupings that allowed the viewer to move from one instance to another and try to piece together a rather allusive story.

What initially drew you to the structural figures?

The structures stand in for human figures while also implying human presence or activity. They have the potential to evoke narrative or psychological association. They are built and allow us to question: By whom? For what? Are they in the process of being made? Destroyed? Left behind?  I’m interested in the instinct to build and the potential for it to be something rudimentary and basic, a mark of civilization and progress, and a complicated range of something in between. In this way I am interested in architecture and its history, including constructivist architecture, and the ability to draw on its rich social and political context.

Drawings for Crossing are incredibly sad.  How does the drawing process differ from your painting for you?  You appear to have a much softer hand when it comes to drawing.  

Drawing is very intimate for me. I draw constantly and for my own practice but the drawings are rarely shown. I tend to work in series, giving myself an idea and a stack of paper, in the hope that I will get a little lost and discover something new and unfamiliar in the process. Drawings for Crossing were made as part of a collaboration with Joseph Young, a writer here in Baltimore. He writes microfictions, which are these beautiful instances of a moment. We exchanged some work and over the course of a few months created new work in response. So each drawing in the series was made in relationship to one of his stories. 

Can you tell us about the Holding Up Drawings?  

Within these drawings I was exploring variation in repetition. Not all of them survived, but there were about 25 drawings made using the same scale, materials and subject. There is a structure and weight in each and within the series the delicate structures change and adapt, as do the weights. In the end, the series is about enduring weight, but there are a number of ways to find the point of balance where that enduring is possible.

What are you thinking about, reading about, watching etc?  

I listen to a lot of podcasts in the studio: This American Life, Radio Lab, Studio 360, 99 Percent Invisible. And I seem to have stacks of books I’m slowly digesting, this past year it was: To the Light House (Woolf), Moby - Dick (Melville), America and Americans (Steinbeck), A Place of My Own (Pollan), The Daily Practice of Painting (Richter), and Cabinet Magazine.

What sorts of projects can we look forward to in the future?  

I am in the proccess of working on some larger paintings as well as exploring a series of paintings that function more as sculptures.

Brendan Monroe has a bunch of group shows all over the place this December:

Rethink the corporeal with the incredible Julie Evans. 

Tell us about your recent work. 

My recent work is very different from any of my previous work. Up until about two years ago, my work had been very influenced by Indian miniature paintings and ideas drawn from my many trips to India over the past 15 years. But the collaboration I did in 2010 with Ajay Sharma – a good friend who is a traditional miniature painter in Jaipur - felt like the culmination of my exploration. So after we completed those works, I felt ready to move on from there and to throw out both the baby and the bath water. So I began exploring new ideas, and slowly developed completely new processes and imagery. I began making these assembled constructions that I piece together from many small, cut-out, abstract shapes of painted mylar. I seam these pieces together to form new “wholes” which I never could have arrived at directly. Some of these mylar forms are then mounted on paper, some onto wood panels and drawn into with pencil, and some – like the Wild Garden Series which I exhibited recently at Wave Hill – are mounted directly onto the wall. I didn’t want them to look like any animal mineral or vegetable specifically, but to resemble something possibly in between – and to suggest the atmospheric, the geological, the aquatic, the biological, the corporeal. It’s important that the works feel or look kind of like something, to sort of tease out your attention and get you thinking about what they are, making leaps off the point of familiarity they start from, but then you can’t ever really put your finger on it. Their dimensionality and almost photographic qualities add to their sense of connection to something “real”. But they aren’t anything knowable, which requires you to call on something other than recognizing and naming – you have to use different mechanisms to interpret them – take a different path to process them. I want the works to suspend knowing and activate thinking.

 The new paintings appear so natural and organic, and are yet so totally bizarre and otherworldly. Are you developing any preternatural abilities to perceive and understand form through this recent work?

If I had to just paint these forms whole, I would never have been able to conjure them up in my head – nor would I be able to create the somewhat photographic effects that often occur from the pooled ink which are so suggestive of dimension. They are a result of process. What’s been interesting has been recognizing that my perception and understanding of form in these works is very consistent, but very personal. No two people see what I see in them, nor would they have cobbled the same forms together, given the hundreds or probably thousand of little pieces I have to choose from.

Do you look at any source imagery before working, or do you try to let the “random pours and gravitational pulls” happen as arbitrarily as possible? 

No, I don’t look at any source material beforehand because there really IS no source material for the random splatters and pools of paint that the painted mylar sheet starts out as. They are nothing more than a collection of chance moments of ink spreading, floating, and accumulating with not that much intervention on my part. Then comes the most difficult stage of the process: deciding where and how to cut up the painted sheet – which edges to follow to isolate and designate as shapes. As I cut the shapes out, I have no idea how they will later be used or what they will eventually contribute to a larger form. Sometimes, an entire painted sheet will not reveal a single, interesting shape and will just get tossed.

What prompted the switch from the dense and highly saturated paintings of 2005-2008 to the subtler washes and bleeds of color into negative space of later paintings?  What does the empty space around a form mean to you?  What does a partially transparent bleed of color into white space mean to you? 

Wow, that’s actually three separate, loaded questions. To answer the first one, about the switch from my earlier works; in 2008 I did make a deliberate move from the work I’d been making for years which were all-over compositions and as you say dense and highly saturated. I had become more and more obsessed with color, and found myself obsessively tweaking it, even repainting thousands of polka dots just to make the color even the slightest bit warmer or more neutral, etc. Eventually, after a few years of doing that, I felt I had learned what I needed to. I understood how to make them vibrate the way I wanted them to – and since I hear color (which is another whole long thing), I understood how to make the piece “sound” the way I wanted it to sound. So I decided it was time to stop doing what I already knew how to do. And the same applied to composition – I felt like I could solve whatever compositional problems each piece confronted me with, working off the edges, making certain “moves” or adjustments through color or form that would keep things flowing and directed. So basically, I felt like it was time to put color and that kind of composition away for a while since it felt like I was starting to repeat myself – use things I already knew how to do. So I gave up working with strong, saturated color and began working more monochromatically, and gave up working out all-over compositions and began just isolating central forms floating in white space. The first series of that kind f work was the Ahmedabad Drawings – which I made when I had set up a studio in Ahmedabad, India for a few months. Then came the Lessons from a Guinea Hen series, which also consisted of floating, central forms, followed by the Cowdust series with Ajay. But I’ve slowly been working strong color back in – and really miss painting directly and dealing with all-over space. So I plan to bring those things back in my next body of work.

  Can you tell us about the collaborative pieces you did with artist Ajay Sharma?  They are so amazing. Any more projects like that in the works?   

Thanks! That project was quite a trip, in every sense of the word. It was actually the most difficult work I’ve ever done. But working with Ajay was amazing – he’s such a wonderful person. We’ve known each other for years – about ten –and consider each other family. We decided we would collaborate on a group of paintings, so I went to Jaipur and set up a studio in a hotel room for about two and a half months (!!), painting everyday, racing against the sun going down in my room. Ajay is a traditional miniature painter and as such has mostly worked copying historical paintings out of books. He has never really had to generate his own imagery, so paying attention to composition or even color relationships wasn’t really something he’d had to think about before – let alone content and context. He has worked with other artists in the past, but was hired to paint something very specific. (I had hired him back in 2003 when I was in India on a Fulbright. I asked him to paint garlands into a few of my works – which he would only do if I first showed him exactly where I wanted them and exactly what I wanted. This was out of respect for my work and his fear that he might “ruin” something). So when I told him these works were half his, and that he could paint whatever he wanted and should paint over anything I had painted if he didn’t think it worked, it was a very new and different kind of challenge for him. So these paintings were at times quite a struggle, with both of us having to somehow contextualize what the other had done even though we were coming from such different places with such different ideas about art and no real common frames of reference. Yet, I think we did come up with a few interesting works. Each piece has it’s own story, some of which are hysterically funny, others insanely frustrating, but it was a pretty amazing experience for us both. We both learned a lot. As for any other projects like it in the works – nothing at the moment, but I would like to work collaboratively again. I would also like to do another project with Ajay because there were a few things that kept coming up in the works that got censored out. I would like to addresses some of these things full on. 

 How did the Wave Hill project come about?

First I have to say that I LOVE Wave Hill! It really is an amazing place. And the curator Jennifer McGregor, and assistant curator Gabriel de Guzman are so wonderful to work with. I had applied to do a project there based on their Wild Garden and was then invited to be part of the exhibition that focused on that. My work changed between the time I made the initial proposal and when I began working on the project, but they were very receptive to my new work and were so incredibly supportive throughout the time I was developing the installation.

What are you inspired by and thinking about recently? 

I do get very inspired by looking at a lot of other artist’s work – (the list is very long), and music propels or enables me to work like nothing else (that list is even longer!). But lately one of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about is perception – both visual and psychological - and how one affects the other. How shifts in perception can shift ones perspective and vice-versa – how your eye can play such tricks on your mind and vice-versa. I’m interested in that gap between your eye seeing and your mind finally catching on and trying to recognize.

With my new work, the endless possibilities in piecing the small shapes together - how turning and turning each of them by a few degrees could change everything, from seeing nothing to seeing something - has taught me a bit about judgment and how important it is to wait and keep looking before making a decision – and how that is important to apply to life and the bigger picture, (it’s one of the many lessons art teaches us). So I’ve been thinking a lot about judgment – in relation to making things that don’t necessarily look like anything you can recognize for certain, so you cant make assumptions using your usual systems. You have to use alternate ways of processing what you see. I’m interested in what those other processes are, how you access them.

You have a show coming up soon - can you tell us some more about that?

It actually just opened this past week at John Davis Gallery up here in Hudson, NY - where I’ve recently moved to from the city. It’s been great to have the chance to see all the work from the last two years up together. It gives me the opportunity to pause and assess things after a very focused period of working, and to think about where I might want to take it next.

Kierkegaard died this week in 1855 - November 11th.

Here is a photo of his gravesite in Copenhagen, photo credit thank yous to Johannes Birke.

And, as accompaniment, here is an excerpt from a 1986 interview between Gerhart Richter and Benjamin H.D. Buchloch.

BB: That’s what your paintings have at their best; they seem not to try too hard, but to br produced with verve, indifference, and virtuosity.  But - to revert to the issue of content for a moment - how can you say that the palette knifed surface on this painting here doesn’t stand for materiality as such, when the painting itself has been made with such obvious emphasis on the process of its making?  If you weren’t interested in these qualities, you surely wouldn’t use the palette knife in this way, depriving the colors, composition, and structure of the painting of any possibility of generating a meaning beyond the bare materiality of the picture.  It seems to me that you introduce process-related paintings as just one of painting’s many possibilities, while not insisting, as Ryman did, that this is its only aspect.  It’s one aspect among others.

GR: Then why would I go to such lengths to make it so varied?

Because you’re setting out to call out all the aspects there are, like a catalog; because you’re really trying to pursue both a rhetoric of painting and the simultaneous analysis of that rhetoric.  

If this were all just a display of matter - the way the yellow, tatter-edged area rises up against the blue-green background, how could it tell a story or set up moods?

A mood?  You mean it really sets up an emotional experience?

Yes, and aesthetic pleasure, too.

That’s something different.  Aesthetic pleasure I can see, but absolutely not a mood.  

So what is a mood?  

A mood has an explicitly emotional, spiritual, psychological quality.

That’s exactly what is there.

Fortunately only in the weakest parts.

Surely you don’t think that a stupid demonstration of brushwork, or of the rhetoric of painting and its elements, could ever achieve anything, say anything, express any longing.

Longing for what?

For lost qualities, for a better world - for the opposite of misery and hopelessness,

The longing to be able to present culture as a contemplative spectacle without losing credibility? 

I might also call it redemption.  Or hope - the hope that I can after all effect something through painting. 

Again, this is all so generalized: “efffect” in what sense?  Epistemological, emotional, psychological, political?

All at once. I don’t know. 

So if you maintain that art can have this function - something that other artists would deny absolutely - then it’s all the more of a paradox that you simultaneously insist of being able to do it only with the means of painting.  Or, to put the question another way: Do you believe that this dichotomy is concretely visible in your paintings?

Yes, possibly.

Do you believe that these are ultimately conservative paintings, conservative in the sense that Broodthaers’ art seemed conservative?

In terms of the means - oil on canvas - even more conservative.  I knew Broodthaers, and I had a lot of respect and sympathy for him, but I never really understood his pictures. Conservative - I certainly don’t intend to be, and I also know that painting per se does not have to be conservative.  So I carry on in the same way, just better if possible.  

The question is, how far can this schizophrenia be stretched, how far can it really be kept alive, or what does it become an empty pose: to assert this contradiction over and over again, and to act within the contradiction again and again, but without trying to get over the contradiction?

I don’t know what contradiction you’re talking about.

It’s the contradiction of knowing full well that the means you are using won’t achieve what you aim for, and at the same time not being prepared to change those means. 

That’s not a contradiction, it’s a perfectly normal state of affairs.  The normal mess, if you like.  And that couldn’t be changed by choosing different means and methods.  

Because all means are of equal value?

No, but all are similarly inadequate.  The question is, what are my means, and what can I achieve with them? 

But under certain historical conditions painting had different functions, and had a possibility of having an effect on its contemporary context. 

If I’m thinking of political painting in our time, I’d rather have Barnett Newman. He painted some magnificent paintings.

So it is said. But magnificent in what way?

I can’t describe it now, what gets to me in them - I believe they’re among the most important paintings of all. 

Perhaps that’s a mythology that needs reexamination.  Precisely because its so difficult to describe; and because, in the encounter with paintings, acts of faith are not enough. 

Acts of faith are unavoidable. They’re part of us.  

Do your paintings invite acts of faith, or analyses? Which matters more to you?

Either would be fine with me.  In your case they invite you to analyze; others find them an invitation to perform acts of faith. 

Perceptive perspectives with Mary Iverson.  

 Give us a brief synopsis of artistic interests that captivated you until the cargo container series came into Being.

Before my container series, I think I was looking for the containers but didn’t know it. I was painting buildings and warehouses around Seattle; anything large, geometric, and colorful.

You mentioned in your interview with the Citrus Report that you were originally drawn to the cranes at the ports - and then became interested in what the cranes were actually lifting and moving around. Was this a slow transition, or was there a particular moment or movement that struck your fancy and caused this switch? 

In 2004, the Port of Seattle purchased its first three Super Post Panamax cranes. The three new cranes came in on a ship and were rolled onto the terminal to accommodate the biggest container vessels in the world. When the huge cranes arrived, I began reading about the growth of the industry, especially the sizes of the new ships and the cranes required to unload them. Since 2004, Seattle has purchased 10 additional Super Post Panamax cranes for a total of 13. After the arrival of the cranes in 2004 I began studying container volumes worldwide and learning about the environmental impacts of the global economy. My work changed at that point.

There’s this famous story of how Turner once lashed himself to the mast of a ship during a storm in order to better observe the wind and rain and waves for a future painting. I’m not suggesting you tie yourself to a crane during the next hurricane, but I’m thinking of certain paintings of yours with overturning cargo ships and tumbling cargo containers. Did you ever witness any storms during your plein air port painting sessions?

Turner was a nut! I haven’t witnessed any big storms first hand and I hope it stays that way because I have Google images to show me what’s what. Besides, I am prone to seasickness! Watching (via the internet) the horrifying images of the tsunami in Japan and the destruction of hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, it was surreal to see the images I conjured up in my paintings occurring in reality. 

What’s your favorite kind of environment to place your cargo containers in? Was there a thrill of creating the unnatural when you first placed them in settings like Yosemite, or Mount Rainer? 

I love portraying the national parks because so many people are familiar with them, and the parks represent the best of our intentions. Most people would be horrified to encounter evidence of environmental destruction in our parks. That’s why I put my shipwrecks there, because it offers a shocking combination. Most people would agree with the sentiment “not in my back yard!” The irony is how frighteningly close we are to this becoming reality. 

What are your thoughts on plein air and observational painting?

Plein-airing for me was a devotional practice and I miss it, but it didn’t answer all of my questions. I still like to do watercolor sketches on location because the process situates me in a place like nothing else can. The product isn’t as important as the experience it gives me of being fully there. It’s like catch-and-release fishing. I also feel like I learned everything I know about color by painting outside.

Do you have any favorite artists who are working with data visualization? 

I am contemplating the idea that my container paintings are data visualizations of a sort. I recently met Justin Lincoln, professor of new genres at Whitman College, and he steered me toward the work of Jer Thorpe and Amanda Cox. 

Can you give us any advice on dispelling consumerist behaviors and habits?

The system is rigged against the environment right now because the lure of cheap goods is too much for most of us to resist. So much would change if the price of goods reflected the real cost of manufacturing. The true cost would including shipbreaking, the end of life for container vessels, which is now done cheaply in third world countries with zero environmental regulations and zero protection for workers. The true price of goods should also reflect the loss of our landscapes from mountaintop-removal mining, which produces the coal that fires the factories cranking out cheap goods in China. Coal production may support mining communities in the short term, but the long term impacts on humans and the ecosystem are profound and devastating. As much as we can, we need to vote with our dollars and buy products that are produced sustainably. 

What are you working on now, and what are you inspired by recently?

My travels to Europe the last two summers inspired me; bicycle commuters everywhere, solar panels, transit systems, and universal health care. Europeans don’t argue about whether or not the environment needs to be protected, they argue about how best to go about it. They don’t argue about whether or not they should have a social safety net, they argue about how best to maintain it. 

I also visited Yosemite national park this summer and am working on some paintings fueled by that spectacular trip. My most novel project is an animated video sequence I am developing that portrays the struggle for balance between nature and industry.

 What kinds of upcoming projects, shows, and work should we be looking forward to?

For shows, I have some really nice ones on the schedule: at Thinkspace Gallery in LA (group in Feb. 2013, two-person in Aug. 2014 with Stephanie Buer), Shooting Gallery in SF (project room installation April 2013), and Davidson Galleries in Seattle (solo in Nov. 2013). I may even be traveling to Singapore for a show. Singapore has the fourth busiest container port in the world. Stay tuned!

Brendan Monroe’s new zine Islands N.2 is available!

“This is the second visual story of my wandering dream based comics. The couple explores the deep sea floor and the gravitational relationship of moon and tide.”

You can purchase it here.

Happy Birthday Francis Bacon!

Interviews with David Sylvester