Rod&Cone interviews Megan Snowe
Megan Snowe’s comic, One One One One More, is featured in the newest My Pace anthology, available for preorder here.
1. You typically do not make comics. What types of media do you usually work with? Could you explain some of your past projects? I haven’t done comics since early high school! But animation and comics were both childhood dream carriers for me. Lately I’ve been working in installation and text, and combining the two. Rod and Cone’s Anthology My Pace was a wonderful opportunity to exploring pairing some drawn forms I’ve been working with with text in the space of a publication. It was perfect timing, really. My most recent projects have included an installation of texts in SOHO20’s +/- Project Space, Brooklyn, NY, called The Ambassadors. I explored the simultaneous non-verbal communications that can occur between two people in a face-to-face interaction. I installed the poetic texts in the project space so that they would overlap and be read in no particular order and never in their entirety. At the beginning of this year I made a small contribution to Title Magazine, Philadelphia, PA, with a collection of poems called The Attachments, focused on the residual experiences that can cling to your consciousness. Language is clumsy and, by using it with these subjects, I’ve felt able to explore the general impossibility of conscious and rational understanding of emotional lived experiences.
Often Full 2016 Excerpt from The Attachments, Title Magazine
2. What has inspired you to work more with text and language recently? What has been exciting about it? What has been a challenge? This has been a somewhat difficult question for me to answer in recent interviews…it has something to do with space, the dimensions of the psyche that text can penetrate as well as the multidimensionality of the proper composition of words. Language used to feel so dry to me. Something changed. Now it is thrilling and wet, gooey and so physical. I can feel it some how. The present challenge is to use it as a medium which is equally substantive if experienced aesthetically, as a linguistic composition, as part of a narrative, or as a form. I am excited about using it in ways to fictionalize elements of myself, bringing them up to a slightly increased extreme.
The Ambassadors 2016 text, installation installation view SOHO20 +/- Project Space Brooklyn, NYC 3. You have lived and studied in Finland and Russia. What are some things you took away from those experiences? Scale. I have a new appreciation for small scales and the productive richness of intimacy - ie. small groups, small audiences, small creative communities. I also feel like my expectations for myself and what my artistic career can be, what I want it to be, have changed significantly. Following any sort of particular timeline is not as important as it used to seem. I can go at, appropriately expressed here, my own pace (:-)) and not feel that I have failed in some way. Doing good, rewarding and enriching work is A #1 most important. In Finland, particularly, I felt that it is possible to be productive and personally successful on a smaller scale because you are able to build stronger relationships and spend more time with a subject matter versus expending all the energy on worrying about how big your network is. I’m sure that this lesson can be learned here in the US too, but I needed to leave to learn it deeply.In Russia I learned how to better live in the present, to follow flow and unexpected inclinations. That felt like a necessary survival skill there. I also got a sense of the rich intimacy there as well, but more in regards to one on one relationships. I don’t know if it was because of my time in Russia or if it is a born trait that complemented the social culture there, but I give a lot of myself when I choose to befriend or connect with a person. That was true for the bonds I made when there. 4. Five things you are reading, watching and thinking about right now.
1. Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love 2. Jussi Parikka, Geology of Media 3. J.L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words 4. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion 5. X Files, Season 2
Currently Reading^^^ 5. What are some future projects you are dreaming about right now?
I have several projects coming up this year - some big, some small - that will allow me to hone my budding writing practice. The two most highly anticipated projects this year will be a play and a book - two things I’ve never written before. I will be taking part in SPACE Studio’s Art & Technology Residency in London this summer/early fall where I will write and hopefully produce a video production of this play, the current working title is (Enter The Face). The play is about a near-future technology that can be surgically implanted to assist the patient with physical emotional expression. This device translates the activity of the nervous system into emotive gestures that represent the patient’s feelings and intentions more accurately than their natural system of expression. The book will be part of an installation in a group exhibition slated to open in November, 2016, at EFA in New York.
The contribution to My Pace is an excerpt of a larger work that I would love to finish and publish this year (2016). I would like to make The Attachments into a series of monthly email poetry “publications”. I’m applying to various residencies to continue the series of drawings, Bodies, that are related to the ones in the piece featured in My Pace, so we’ll see if any of those residencies come through.
Body Body 2015 graphite on paper installation view Sorbus Gallery Helsinki, Finland
Megan Snowe (b. 1986) works in a variety of mediums including installation, animation, text, sound and workshop, often collaboratively. Snowe has recently been driven by the question of how we understand, strategize and quantify our immaterial and emotional lived experiences, critiquing various social strategies and subconscious behaviors that perpetuate inhibiting social norms. With a BA in Russian Studies & Studio Art from Oberlin College (2008) and an MFA in Time & Space Arts from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts (2014) Snowe has exhibited throughout Europe, the US and online. You can see more of her work at http://www.megansnowe.com/