Q: So what initially inspired this work?
A: It goes back pretty much to freshman year when I was in a printmaking class where we essentially had to choose a theme for the semester. At the time I was in an Andy Warhol class, we were learning about the destruction series that he did, so I decided to go down a destruction route. I started mostly doing houses being destroyed – like car crashes into houses and burning houses. I got obsessed with burning houses and I developed this tall, skinny, outhouse-looking motif. I have used and reused it since then. But the contents have changed. It was originally kind of angsty, like, “destroy everything because everything sucks” type of thing. Thinking about where this angst came from led to working with the history of suburbia and the oppression that it represented. Then for this most recent work I took a little bit of an introspective turn and thought about how I make all this art of destroying houses, yet I love suburban, colonial-style houses. I feel really comfortable when I'm at home. I grew up in a suburban house and I don't have a bunch of terrible memories or anything like that. So this was me thinking about my own personal memories and the way we store memories in this age. Our entire life is somewhere on a computer spread out across different hard drives and websites and things like that. I’ve been thinking a lot about the contemporary idea of the sublime, things that are incomprehensible. I think my prints are definitely entering that realm.
In quarantine I can't really lay my stuff out as well and I don't have as much space to really see all of it… but it’s also been kind of exciting thinking about how I had to change my project for the circumstances. Before quarantine I knew exactly what had to be done to finish everything. Now I have to do all this creative problem solving to find a new way to do things. I’m having to think about photography; at least for the digital show, the prints are kind of like props now.
Q: Can you tell me about your artistic process?
A: The way I generally create is by cannibalizing my own work. I take from my old prints – a lot of the stuff I can reuse. I hate to throw plastics away, so if I’m using a transparency to expose a screen I’ll save it and repurpose them, or just hoard them. So I'm always just pulling from my previous work. For this project, I definitely moved into abstraction, which is something I'm not usually doing as a printmaker. I'm usually thinking very graphically, like a really bold image. This work was much more painterly, not really exactly knowing what it would look like in the end.
Q: What are some of the constraints you’re facing now? How are you navigating them?
A: So a major thing is space. I don’t have high ceilings here and my prints are eight feet tall. The biggest thing though, is that my basement is pretty cold and musty, and it’s sometimes hard just to get myself down there. I should probably buy a space heater.
Q: Why printmaking?
A: When I was in high school and playing in a bunch of bands I was into the whole DIY thing: recording your own music, throwing your own shows and making your own stuff. My older sibling taught me how to do really basic wax paper screen printing, where you just put a stencil behind a screen and print through it to make t-shirts. So I've always had that connection to the punk, make it for yourself mantra. Once I got to college I took a printmaking class and it just clicked. I really like the graphic qualities, I really like the type of glitches that can come out of it. I like the ability to control errors almost, like knowing how much error you’re going to get out of something, or where there’s going to be an error without, you know, totally throwing caution to the wind. I also really like the ability to have multiples of things and reworking things. It’s practical, in a way.
Q: Has the current situation changed your work entirely? Are you still making the prints you set out to make?
A: For me, it's not the hardest thing to conceptualize. Like I said, I cannibalize my own work a lot. So this is not entirely unlike what I've done before; I'm using the same prints for multiple things. I’ll have these props for photographing for this online show, but then I still have the prints and a plan for how to hang them for an in person show, whenever that can happen. So I wouldn’t say this is an entirely new work, but it’s definitely different… like an offshoot, I guess. It’s a way of experimenting with what I have already. So it is exciting in that regard; I have this new opportunity to take something that I thought was done, and reuse it in a new way. The houses that are in these prints for this body of work are actually taken from the houses I made for my summer scholar work. The imagery from those prints is photographs of those houses. So like I said, I’m always pulling from my previous projects and working it into something new.
Q: What’s inspiring you right now?
A: The fact that we're all reduced to digital interactions right now plays pretty well into my content. It complicates it in a lot of ways, though, because what I was doing originally was taking the digital world and making it into something physical, but now that physical thing is turning back into something digital.
Q: What do you want to do?
A: I’d like to see where fine art and printmaking can take me. I’d love to continue making installation based work for galleries or wherever will have me. I really like to know where I’m going to put something and plan around a space so I can come up with the most interesting and exciting art for that specific place. I also still play in a band and I’d love to continue down that road.
Q: Is there anything you want your work to do in the future? Whatever that work may be?
A: I’d like it to excite people to make their own stuff. Though it's weird thinking about how printmaking and capitalism overlap – a lot of the empowering things about printmaking are related to its ability to be commercialized. So I don't really know what people will get out of my work. Maybe like a sense of catharsis in the same way I like to see things destroyed. Maybe the person who would pull over when they see a house getting demolished is the person that gets the most out of my work.
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