Sculpture 56: The interviews @sculpture56-blog - Tumblr Blog

José-Ricardo Presman

s56: Why sculpture? What is it about sculpture that makes it a compelling medium for your art?

JP: I work in mixed media, so I don't necessarily use sculpture as a medium unless I'm depicting a balance between the gravity defying forces that "draw up" from the periphery of the work, and the pulling down of the forces of gravity. Most sculpture is actually made in the form of "construction" from a central point to the physical edges of the work, point-by-point, with an emphasis on its weight.

s56: Please describe your process of working with three dimensions. Where do you start?

JP: The classical sculptors are well known for starting with a piece of material -- stone, wood, etc. -- and imagining a form "inhabiting" the material. They then carried out their work, releasing the form from the raw material. This manner of working for me must be the starting point -- the raw material gives way to the internal imagined form. thereby freeing it from "imprisonment".

s56: In what ways does sculpture invoke the body?

JP: Sculpture involves the degree of lightness or heaviness of the body -- it doesn't have to be the human body. If the work is more detailed, it could describe the range of the body and its three parts of head, circulatory system and limbs; or in nature, sky, water and earth. The skill of the artist adds both internal and external warmth, giving it life.

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Sam Jones

s56: Why sculpture? What is it about sculpture that makes it a compelling medium for your art?

SJ: Two dimensions invite a suspension of disbelief that sculpture does not- sculpture is honest in its theatre- it participates with the body. It provokes, and it fails in the world, a reminder of our mortality, our facade, our fragile state of being.

s56: Please describe your process of working with three-dimensions. Where do you start?

SJ: My process is all about subverting my own notions and preconceptions. I use material to decreate myself. What comes from this is the work. It first unmakes, and then makes me.

s56: In what ways does sculpture envoke the body?

SJ: Again, I think of this concept of 'decreation' as defined by Simone Weil - a renunciation of free will as a form of acceptance of everything that is independent of one's particular desires and “to make something created pass into the uncreated”. In this way, the work becomes a catalyst of the ecstatic; the angel “piercing through to my entrails”, as St. Teresa of Avila would say. The work then functions as does the body; a permeable vessel and conduit between the realms of self and other.

In many ways, my forms are artifacts of becoming; unfinished, permeated, unraveling, melting and disintegrating as they are suspended in a moment of passage from one dimension to the next. The eye is unsettled, and the viewer’s attention is diverted from subject and object - evoking Weil’s idea that attention alone, “in which the ‘I’ disappears” is what is required.

These invitations to seek and surrender to something beyond the self become catalysts for new growth, allowing artist and viewer to undermine established modes of creation and perception in favor of more mindful, careful ways of being.

s56: Talk to me about verticality in sculpture or the lack thereof.

SJ: I find that I am often trying to levitate material in various ways- I think this comes from a phenomenological need to transcend.

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Tom Butter

s56: Why sculpture? What is it about sculpture that makes it a compelling medium for your art?

TB: When I started making sculpture in grad school, what I liked was that it forced me to slow down: the processes involved imposed a “thinking time” on the way to making a piece. Before this, I had been making prints, which has its own demands of extended process, as compared to say, drawing.

Painting at the time just happened too fast for me. The very thing I like now – that you can make it as fast as you can think of it – was a problem when I was younger. So it is gratifying to be able to “slow down” on my own enough to work on paintings now. It has always seemed to me that sculpture is many things, painting is one thing. Both are incredibly complex.

s56: What does sculpture do that painting cannot do? How does sculpture relate to other art forms? Think: video, social sculpture, performance.

I like very much what the philosopher Susanne Langer has to say about the different disciplines in the arts, and the inherent boundaries and qualities of those disciplines. She is the clearest writer about these I have read. She uses the phrase “virtual space” way before the idea of being “virtual” was in common usage. Her definitions of sculpture as being “the image of a kinetic volume in sensory space” and painting as being a “virtual scene” are really definitive. Her book Feeling and Form (1953, Scribner's Sons) delves deeply into the way the visual arts achieve meaning for us.

But I have always liked the rules as they are: painting is flat, it demands thinking about, and using, surface and space in tandem. In fact that dynamic is a dialectic which produces a kind of thinking about the world the philosopher Jay Bernstein (philosophy professor at the New School) calls “eventful.” As Langer says, we experience painting as a “scene”- “a space opposite the eye, and related directly and essentially to the eye.”

Sculpture can create a virtual space related to the body – by being both a semblance of the figure and by having a body relation. Or being primarily one and not so much the other, or being both. A physical volume creating a three-dimensional virtual space right in front of us makes for incredible dynamics, and very particular sensations!

Video, “social sculpture”, and performance all exist at some point in real time, where time passing participates in how their meaning grows and adheres. I do think it is possible to blur, and merge, these areas or disciplines and produce great things!

s56: Please describe your process of working with three-dimensions. Where do you start?

TB: I start with drawing, which I find gives me the most direct connection between thinking and making. Then working is a process negotiation between space, materials, ideas, and feeling.

s56: In what ways does sculpture invoke the body?

TB: I mentioned above that I think sculpture can create a virtual space related to the body – by being both a semblance of the figure and by having a body relation. This dynamic has to do with the figure or body functioning as a discrete entity. I think sculptural installations propose a way to have the body move around and through sculpture. With this, the viewer experiences form as a kind of theater or movie set. Here, sculpture is an environment, and the viewer becomes an actor, voyeur, or witness in another world.

s56: Talk to me about verticality in sculpture or the lack thereof.

TB: My sculpture “Host” at Studio 10 is vertical so it can signal its own identity as being part of nature, by “standing” up and supporting itself, by having that kind of presence. Also as a machine it tries to hold the space as the foam line unwinds from the ceiling to the floor. The verticality allows gravity and the foam line to interact using almost the total height of the gallery. “Rope Trick”, a work I am showing in the other exhibition space, is primarily horizontal, so that the length of rope involved can seem to be moving like a snake.

I saw three wonderful fabric figure sculptures by Louise Bourgeois at the MET Breuer. They had incredible presence as they exist, which in this case is lying down. Her materials and figurative forms always evoke very unsettling and disorienting thought and feeling.

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Noah Loesberg

photo credit: Jennie Nichols for Romanov Grave

s56: Why sculpture? What is it about sculpture that makes it a compelling medium for your art?

NL: I like altering material, with an emphasis on the physicality of the process. Not necessarily athletically, but certainly manually, and on a certain scale. I think of my 2 dimensional works in the same way, material processes are applied to objects.

s56: What does sculpture do that painting cannot do? How does sculpture relate to other art forms? Think: video, social sculpture, performance.

NL: In comparison to painting, sculpture (since the mid 20th century) both benefits and suffers from its relative lack of access to narrative. Painting can easily claim its ‘window’ status, to represent reality, and has to work a little harder to deny it and be an object. In contrast, sculpture is always an object first.

s56: Talk to me about verticality in sculpture or the lack thereof.

I’m interested in gravity, so verticality is tangentially related. And a total lack of verticality would result in a flat plane. But I don’t prioritize it, or really think about it very much. Usually in my work there are conceptual and process parameters in place before the final form is realized, so whether or not something ends up vertical is of less interest to me.

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David & Schweitzer, part 2: Kelin Perry, Helen O’Leary, Rosa Valado, and Kurt Steger

Kelin Perry

s56: What does sculpture do that painting cannot do? How does sculpture relate to other art forms? Think: video, social sculpture, performance.

KP: My goal is to breathe life into my work, to give it a sense of being alive. I find that I am able to achieve this in 3 dimensions in a way I cannot 2 dimensionally. It’s just me and the piece I’m working on. That dance is very intimate and solitary in its’ creation. The life I work to evoke ultimately does become a social sculpture in the sense that in finding the beauty and honoring the forgotten in the material world, I am also reflecting the humanity and spirit of the unseen and discarded in the our society as well as questioning our concepts of beauty.

s56: Please describe your process of working with three-dimensions. Where do you start?

KP: I am an architect and have always been driven to make things and 3 dimensional thinking comes most naturally to me. Most of the material in my work is found on the side of the road or around neglected urban buildings and railroad tracks. Sometimes, I find a piece that helps inform an idea of what the sculpture might be. But more often I have some concept of a form and from the many boxes of materials I have gathered over the past several years, I find material that has a dialogue with the form that is taking shape. They found materials and the concept of the form I am making find a dialogue with each other from that point and inform the process and outcome as I move forward.

s56: In what ways does sculpture invoke the body?

KP: In my work, the pieces I make do not invoke the human sbody so much, but I do want my pieces to evoke the sense of a heartbeat or life. Every piece of material I find is already imbued with its’ own unique spirit that is palpable to me. The task for me is to maintain that integrity of the material by finding a way to show it in its’ highest beauty. This means letting the material speak for itself with as little manipulation as possible.

Helen O’Leary

s56: Why sculpture? What is it about sculpture that makes it a compelling medium for your art?

HO: I don't see myself as a sculpture, I see myself as a painter, a very fat painter. I might delusional, but I see painting in space, I even consider my house a painting.

s56: What does sculpture do that painting cannot do? How does sculpture relate to other art forms? Think: video, social sculpture, performance.

HO: I think expanded painting can include all of these things, it's material meets idea, brain and heart.

s56: Please describe your process of working with three-dimensions. Where do you start?

HO: I start by unravelling something, usually it starts as a minor modification but can go way out of hand. I edit, and edit, it's much like the house I grew up in, it started modest, archaic but grew into a clump of barnacles to accommodate tourists.

s56: In what ways does sculpture invoke the body?

HO: I see the body in everything, it stands, it has bulges, bumps, it takes hits, and keeps going.

s56: Talk to me about verticality in sculpture or the lack thereof.

HO: I Scrutinize each piece from the side to see how it tilts, how it defies gravity, and how it has a humanity to it. If it is too rigid, I dismantle it and start all over again.

Rosa Valado

s56: Why sculpture? What is it about sculpture that makes it a compelling medium for your art?

RV: I think of my 3-D work as part of an environment that might have started with a painting - an idea I wanted to explore and then needed to grow out into this physical reality. My main concern in this area is SPACE ... how the viewer interacts with my ENVIRONMENT.

Activating a space with an idea, a feeling, a metaphor compels me. Space invites a certain interaction that is physical, intellectual, and emotional.

s56: What does sculpture do that painting cannot do? How does sculpture relate to other art forms? Think: video, social sculpture, performance.

RV: When I think of large sculptural works, I usually consider the space they are in - and the context. And almost always consider the architecture they are housed in. When considering my own work and installations, the architectural enclosures are often considered first. I think of architecture as an enclosure, a space where all mediums can exist.

I can see all art forms existing together as they all belong to the same source; they are aspects of the language of creativity, and creative expression. To consider them by themselves is possible but feel a bit isolating to me. This is valid of course, and has its place.

s56: Please describe your process of working with three-dimensions. Where do you start?

RV: When I started working on multi-media installations I was coming out of painting. The ideas I was working with in painting pushed me into architecture and 3-d work. I never said I'm going to make a sculpture - I loved all forms and formats. Painting remains central to my work but does always have the opportunity to be included in shows.

Scale is very important to me, large, very large, to very small - all have their place and impact the viewer differently.

s56: In what ways does sculpture invoke the body?

RV: There is almost total physicality when dealing with 3-D work. In making the work the body is engaged. The physicality of the materials, body, and gravity are all part of the work. I've enjoyed how this combination has pushed me to develop my engineering skills.

s56: Talk to me about verticality in sculpture or the lack thereof.

RV: Verticality is something present in nature. The eye moving up towards the sky and down, below the ground. Horizontal, usually thought of as landscape, the way we read text etc. Mondrian in his explorations into the existence of life and universe began to make plus signs + at the intersections of vertical and horizontal planes.

Kurt Steger

s56: Why sculpture? What is it about sculpture that makes it a compelling medium for your art?

KS: Sculpture exists in the dimension of our reality, which compels us into a relationship with our physicality. I find this important in this age of concentrated focus, in both virtual and mental constructs. Returning to the physical reality allows us to touch into our basic instincts, birthrights, and humanity.

s56: What does sculpture do that painting cannot do? How does sculpture relate to other art forms? Think: video, social sculpture, performance.

KS: Some of my work is performative, ceremonial, and ritualistic. Sculpture as a medium can incorporate the viewer to participate with the work, and with this interaction it is possible to alter the meaning of the work.

s56: Please describe your process of working with three-dimensions. Where do you start?

KS: My work typically starts with a found object. I contemplate its history and begin to create a story that resonates with my passions and concerns. I let the first move dictate the next and allow the work to evolve organically by creating a dialog with the process.

s56: In what ways does sculpture invoke the body?

KS: The physical work is vitally important in my sculptures. The concentration and relationship of hand and tool, the challenges of skill to create the vision, and the maneuvering of material by either hand or crane or tweezers, I find all this incredibly satisfying.

s56: Talk to me about verticality in sculpture or the lack thereof.

KS: I like to view sculpture by walking around the piece, never taking my eye off from it, and seeing how each angle morphs into the next. I do not want to make work with a “front” and even though usually a bottom or back exists I want this aspect to be resolved as well.

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Amie Cunat

s56: Why sculpture? What is it about sculpture that makes it a compelling medium for your art?

AC: What I enjoy about sculpture is its capacity to tangibly approximate a known experience. In a perceptive space between knowing something and invention through artmaking, a sculptor can produce exciting outcomes for a viewer. I created Rocking Chair by following building plans from a Shaker furniture-making book. The book assumes its craftsmen will be using wood, and since I was using cardboard, I had to translate “density” and “rigidity” in my own way. Using materials like cardboard, paper and paint, makes the work appear a bit crunchy, muscular, and marshmallow-like. Furthermore, what looks like a rocking chair is actually void of its implied function due to the fragility of paper materials.

Meetinghouse relies on a visitor’s knowledge that the objects, which collectively form the installation all are individual parts. You can see seams between wall panels and peg boards and see that they were all made one-by-one to function as a whole. I want the viewer to understand the terminal limits of a material-based experience. In other words, all of the objects, panels, rooms…etc. do not extend beyond what is there. When these limitations are understood, a person can begin to understand how significant “framing” is with Meetinghouse.  

s56: What does sculpture do that painting cannot do? How does sculpture relate to other art forms? Think: video, social sculpture, performance.

AC: Installation, which reacts to the architecture of its space, has an amazing ability to construct alternate environments that appeals to an immediate emotive response. Immediate responses such as awe, surprise, horror, disgust can cultivate lasting, more complex feelings that demands empathy on the part of the viewer. For example, upon entering Meetinghouse, a visitor is confronted with bright yellow walls and some understanding that the behavior of their surroundings has greatly shifted from the 56 Bogart hallway. Already, a person is having to instinctively reconstruct their knowing of place, because their environment has dramatically changed. The slower burn happens when a person begins to think about what the environment might be referring to, what else is in the space, materials…etc.

s56: Please describe your process of working with three-dimensions. Where do you start? 

AC: Whether working on a painting exhibition or installation, I make scaled models and other relevant drawings or schematics of a site. This is because I want to be sure that all parts symbiotically work together to produce a singular event. Coincidentally, this is why using the reference of Shaker meetinghouse worked in my favor. When I visited the Hancock Shaker Village (Hancock, NY), I was amazed by the customization of furniture and other objects of utility to function in reverence to the architecture of their interior rooms. Everything inside of a Shaker building is made in service of functionality and utility as well as a higher efficiency relative to use of space. When I was invited to exhibit at Victori + Mo, I began thinking about what Shaker features I could customize for the gallery and how these components would come together to propose a new space –one that nodded to its source, but opposed it relative to function.

s56: In what ways does sculpture invoke the body?

AC: Sculpture invokes the body through scale ---and hopefully the uncanny.

s56: Talk to me about verticality in sculpture or the lack thereof.

AC: I think less about verticality than I do about a sculptural-based experience in the round. I think the work in Meetinghouse doesn’t feel as if it’s reacting perpendicularly to the ground, but rather that its largely informed by the gallery walls. I suppose in this way verticality is present through the “tallness” (approx. 10ft) of the cardboard walls I constructed.

Stacked Boxes is the only piece in the show that I made where I actively considered verticality. To oppose the horizontality of the floor, I made twelve, Shaker-influenced, ovular boxes that are sequentially organized by size and color. Chromatically, the boxes gradate from deep turquoise to yellow-chartreuse as if the subtly of its palette is dictated by the terms of this stack’s growth–similar to the way lighter whites/greens of asparagus or bamboo shoots are concentrated toward the base of the plant and its deeper green colors are at the tip-top.

David & Schweitzer, part 1: Rebecca Smith, Carol Salmanson, Babs Reingold, and Ruth Hardinger,

Rebecca Smith

s56: Why sculpture? What is it about sculpture that makes it a compelling medium for your art?

RS: I started with painting but eventually wanted more of an object feeling because I just wanted MORE. Painting didn’t seem enough. But I wanted to keep everything painting had so I continued to have color and drawing in my sculpture.

s56: What does sculpture do that painting cannot do? How does sculpture relate to other art forms? Think: video, social sculpture, performance.

RS: Sculpture impersonates people, even when it is abstract. A sculpture should make you feel there is a spirit inside that animates it. Otherwise it is an inert pull of stuff that wastes space.

s56: Please describe your process of working with three-dimensions. Where do you start?

RS: I do a lot of drawing and I make smaller maquette using different materials to get to an idea and a set of materials that I want to use. I like to make things that will last at least awhile because sculpture is also memorial — it stands in for something and fights against death.

s56: In what ways does sculpture invoke the body?

RS: If it is close to the scale of your body it addresses you as a body; it appeals to you as a body. If it is considerably smaller it can ask your imagination to envision it as very big; in this case, it is appealing to your imagination and not talking to your body.

s56: Talk to me about verticality in sculpture or the lack thereof.

RS: Verticality is fine but not the most important thing, like it was in a lot of Western sculpture of the past. This is the least interesting question.

Carol Salmanson

s56: Why sculpture? What is it about sculpture that makes it a compelling medium for your art?

CS: I came to sculpture from painting, where my work had always had both movement and stillness in it. it's indeterminate depth often gave the illusion of moving back into the wall and out into the space. The transition into sculpture was a natural one, especially since those elusive qualities almost defines light.

s56: What does sculpture do that painting cannot do? How does sculpture relate to other art forms? Think: video, social sculpture, performance.

CS: Painting has scale, while sculpture has mass. Sculpture occupies the same space that we do -- we can walk around it or, alternatively, it can obstruct our paths. Light also has volume without mass; my work has the mass of the physical object plus the light radiating around it, expanding into the space without obstruction.

s56: Please describe your process of working with three-dimensions. Where do you start?

CS: The work I'm showing in "Painting into Sculpture" has a structure that is free-flowing, that evolves naturally. When I'm making it each step leads to the next one, and I don't know what I'm going to do two steps before I do it. I also do more architectural work which is designed in the computer, and both kinds encompass the many ways that I conceive of structure.

Babs Reingold

s56: Why sculpture? What is it about sculpture that makes it a compelling medium for your art?

BR: One views sculpture in the passage of time, obviously because of its dimensional aspect. This is a compulsion in my art.

s56: What does sculpture do that painting cannot do? How does sculpture relate to other art forms? Think: video, social sculpture, performance.

BR: I began as a painter. Over time, however, the constraints of the two dimensions began interfering with my concepts. I noticed my response to sculpture and installation in a unique and freeing way. The open-ended use of different materials is exciting. That being said, contemporary painting breaches the two dimensions with projections, which I use today in my work. There is no distinction for me. Painting and drawing are a part of my sculpture. I use the wall, the ceiling, the floor and all space amidst the three as well as video.

s56: Please describe your process of working with three-dimensions. Where do you start?

BR: Concept and drawing, then material investigation which meets the concept.

s56: In what ways does sculpture invoke the body?

BR: I think of substance moving through space. The all-familiar body is always ready to begin the journey.

Ruth Hardinger

s56: Tell us something about your work.

RH: I’m attracted to sculpture that has been being made since ancient times around across the countries. Its brings up legends, feelings and even parts of buildings. Carvings into stones is a continuation of sculpture. We humans are three dimensional, such of trees, plants, stones, etc. I echo myself with things around to create the art of forms. Conceptually I'm expressing pleasure, environment issues, symbols, and material varieties for construction. Time happens when its embodies the work that becomes YES. Tapestry, drawings, and painting have been conceptions and abstraction with my sculpture.

Melissa Vandenberg

Photo credit: Erica Chambers Photography, #ericachambersphotography

s56: Why sculpture? What is it about sculpture that makes it a compelling medium for your art?

MV: Sculpture confronts the viewer more aggressively, in the "round". Objects have a certain sensibility that surfaces just do not have. Being able to walk around an artwork, it being literally in the way, taking up space, in glorious inconvenient ways, appeals to me. They are figurative this way, taking up space just like people.

s56: Please describe your process of working with three-dimensions. Where do you start?

MV: I grew up in a house with a lot of things I could not touch. My family collected antiques, and our home was thoughtfully arranged. Because of these surroundings I learned at a very early age to appreciate objects, and to wonder way they used were for? What did they do? This sort of utilitarian speculation always leads me back to sculpture and installation, despite working as a multidisciplinary artist in various modes and media. I retreat to three dimensions for many of the same reasons I use textiles. Our bodies know objects, they know fibers–we are always surrounded by objects and fabric. The forms are accessible this way, an inherit relationship to our bodies, occupying our space.

s56: Talk to me about verticality in sculpture or the lack thereof.

MV: In my ongoing series of stuffed gravestones, the soft sculptures are not erect. The vertically is passive, perhaps exhausted. The obelisk forms are flaccid, lacking strength and virility. They are symbolic of contemporary politics, and the lack of community surrounding humanity. The gravestones are somewhat absurd, appearing to have a function or purpose, but are superficial monuments, almost sad and weeping. The verticality they do have is figurative, human... and in turn limited.

Erik Patton, Lamppost, 2017, Amos Eno Gallery

Erik Patton

s56: Why sculpture? What is it about sculpture that makes it a compelling medium for your art?

EP: I like what sculpture asks of the viewer, the art object, and the exchange between the two. I make works that are inherently participatory, so I'm mostly interested in what sculpture asks of the body.

s56: Please describe your process of working with three-dimensions. Where do you start?

EP: My process is relational and responds to my lived experience. For instance, I have an ongoing performance called Dating Performed that incorporates and re-presents (in a lecture-cum-performance format) my dating and sex life. And Solar Anus were plucked from the ass casts created during came from A Casting Call for Assholes, a performance that took place at Soho House.

s56: In what ways does sculpture invoke the body?

EP: Does naming the phenomenological inherently asks questions of the body? What then does this ask about sculpture in relation to materiality, surface, and facade?

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Sculpture 56: The interviews