Sunday, July 17, 2016

Melissa Dunn


Melissa Dunn was born and raised in Memphis.  She’s exhibited throughout Memphis and the region, including L Ross Gallery, David Lusk Gallery, Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Crosstown Arts, Cheekwood Museum, and the Arkansas Arts Center.  Both a teacher and arts advocate, she teaches at Flicker Street Studio and Carpenter Art Garden and serves on the Artist Advisory Council at ArtsMemphis, which facilitates the individual visual artist grant ArtsAccelorator.  She was selected as an Artist in Residence at Calumet Artist Residency and has recently had her work published in the Pinch Literary Journal.  She is represented by L Ross Gallery and will have a solo show there in March 2017.


MD: I have been wanting to explore minimalism more. Before you came over I was reading some things I have been writing about my practice. These systems of my studio are very similar to what they have been in the past. I have been developing this process for 12 to 14 years now, but it’s getting so now that I am refining it. It feels like it is finally landing.

AB: What is your source material like?

MD: My source material is wide and varied, it’s everything from botany to fashion, to astronomy to art history to all of this visual information in the digital, visual and printed world. Twyla Tharpe says, “Everything is source material.”  That’s my process in a nutshell.  5 or 6 years ago I had this blog called “Accordion File”, it was called Accordion File because the images came from these physical accordion files that I keep. Then Instagram happened, which is basically my ‘Accordion File’ now. 

AB: So it was a process blog? 

MD: Yes, exactly. This is my most current physical accordion file, it has various images I find, things I get in the mail….

AB: Anything that strikes you? 

MD: Yes, so this one I’ve been adding imagery over the last few years to yesterday. You can just see my work in these. I could sift through everyone and tell you why. This one of the hot air balloon, for example, is something I have been looking at for years. I think it was in the New Yorker. It looks to me like it fell. This head like shape is something that I am really comforted by, I draw it all the time. I also look at a lot of photography, compositionally. I will borrow compositions from photographs. That photograph in that Huger Foote show of the Zippin Pippin, I’m appropriating that. So this image is still in this realm of ‘I don’t know why I’m looking at yet’. 

AB: So do you pull these images out when you are stuck or just whenever you are working? 

MD: No, this is just a constant process of looking, if I’m jamming or if I’m stuck. If I’m stuck then I’m constantly flipping through. 

AB: This resonates with me so much because I like to think of the process of trying to figure out a painting as a puzzle. You have all these clues around you, you have to gather the clues and sometimes it seems like the universe will present a clue, it’s your job as an artist to put that together. I do the same thing except I do it digitally. I use Evernote and drag images that I find into folders. I have hundreds of notes just like this. 

MD: I do like the digital and I do use it but I still feel like I have to have both because I like the tactile quality. This one right here has been in my accordion file for years. I mean I could make 10 paintings of this. Sometimes I think, “I should make 10 paintings of this, have a show, let this be a body of work and then have another show based on some other thread in the accordion file”, but that’s just not how I work. 

AB: Yeah, things shift, you get tired of it, it changes. 

MD: Yes, things rise and fall. I am trying to embrace my process of doing one painting or drawing one way and then doing the next one really different.  I’m trying to not to judge myself so harshly. I mean it doesn’t fit the ‘professional practice’ method of “do a body of work, name it, do another body of work . . .” 

AB: It doesn’t work like that for everyone. 

MD: It doesn’t. I sometimes think I could keep filtering the world through my way of abstraction for the rest of my life, like I have in me five hundred more paintings of a continuous body of work. I like to keep copies of older paintings, just to flip through. For example, lately red, white and blue are colors I’ve been thinking about a lot the last few years, using them in a pop way, not a patriotic way. My struggle right now is being kinder to myself about my process. Accordion file is the big overarching idea of source material, of where it lands, it shuffles and it rises and it falls. Sometimes I make copies of accordion file images and then make collages from those.

AB: So now instead of having a blog showcasing these visuals, you put these on Instagram? 

MD: Yea so now I consider my Instagram feed to be “Accordion File”, but the thing I miss about having the blog is that I wrote as well.  I like writing about how my source material lands, even if I’m the only person who reads it.  Talking about it really makes me want to start doing the whole studio blog again.

AB: I think that is a great idea, all of these images are so important to how you arrive at your work.


MD: That’s the thing about my work, there are variations, the paintings are different, but what is the connective tissue? The connective tissue is all this behind the scenes stuff – the collation of source material, drawing, collage, etc. I do feel that there is a continuity behind my work, undoubtedly. 

AB: Absolutely. 

MD: I feel like this painting ended up being a portrait of my studio. I mean look at the color scheme, all the blue and browns. It’s basically an extension of my studio, of the real physical space.  

AB: I like this painting a lot, it feels like an optical illusion. 

MD: I know, I’ve been playing with that too, how things change and what happens if you move it and push it in space.  This painting is not done, this painting is about halfway through. All these drawing marks, I want more of that and less of the painting.  I want those marks in the illusion of paint. I put unfinished pieces up and look at them for a long time. 

AB: And you also hide paintings from yourself?

MD: Yea I do that too. These are some watercolors I have been doing to work out some ideas.

AB: This dark mark at the bottom is so strange. 

MD: Yea that is something I look for in my work, for there to be an uncomfortableness, I like there to be some dissonance.  

 AB: Do you consider these finished pieces? 

MD: Yea, some of them. I’ll show you my drawings, because I have different levels of drawings.  I mean I have a sketch book in my purse, a bigger sketch book, drawings that are sketches on big pieces of paper, and then plenty that are finished ‘works on paper’ that I consider to be finished pieces. (Sifting through images in the Accordion File) I also use the combination drawing and source material as a way to develop what I call ‘trains of thought’. So this painting, for example, was in a show last year at L Ross Gallery and it was the hit of the show. I got this book from the Brooks, its on interior decoration and this is a rug from the 20’s. I love this pattern. I have done so many drawings about this pattern. I am really interested in imagery that has a lot of information and a lot of breathing room.  


 


 AB: Yea it is so simple, yet so complicated, it looks like a loose drawing. 

MD: I know and I love the color, I love all of it. So I did a tracing of it then I put it in this painting. This painting is really just about pure formalism. I am still wrestling with this painting and I may for the rest of my life.  I think about these things a lot, repetition, continuum's, years of making, having a studio for 10 versus 20 years…it is all rising up. What does it mean to make a lifetime of work? I’m also thinking a lot about three dimensionalities and wondering what kind of material would lend itself to making this painting in 3D? Maybe that will be what I do in my 60’s (laughs). 

AB: Is this a bag?

MD: This is a barf bag from an airplane in the sixties.  

 AB: It’s beautiful, it looks like a piece of art. 


MD: I know, industrial design has just gone down the tubes. I love stripes. I am always thinking about different kinds of stripes. I mean, truly, I could just paint stripes all the time. Agnes Martin, I bow at her alter. My new favorite tool is art center’s sign painter brush because it gets such great lines. So this is a drawing I did in 1999.

AB: Wow, it is so strange how things resurface in our work. 

MD: The subconscious mind is a powerful thing. I really think about that a lot and where I am on that trajectory. I think that this is where artists can get confused is when they don’t let this process of discovery happen. If you don’t work on the side of things, do lots of playing in the sandbox, then making can be stifling. I feel like the Accordion File is my research and development.

AB: You are gathering information. 

MD: I am gathering information, creating a theory that turns into a train of thought. Are you familiar with Leigh Bowery? He is a performance artist extraordinaire from the 80’s. He was influential to Boy George and Alexander McQueen. I had been seeing him around my whole life without really knowing who he was. After I watched the documentary The Legend of Leigh Bowery on him, I realized that he modeled for Lucien Freud. He is THAT guy! I was really interested in the girth of this back. This is a large 6 foot plus man who would put on these massively heavy constructed costumes, manipulating his genitalia and doing all this body contour stuff to get these incredible looks. Then here he is posing for Freud, fully nude and it’s just flesh. This painting looked so familiar to me and I realized that I had done this drawing. I was looking at this head and wondering how to take it into a train of thought, so I have been doing drawings based on Leigh Bowery’s big head. That is the extent of where I am now. I don’t know where this ‘train of thought’ will go, but eventually it will find its way into a painting. 

AB: Again with the head. 

MD: I know, I love the figure. I did some self portraits recently because I was teaching that at Flicker Street. I have also been categorizing collages. These are collages for paintings. It’s that red white and blue again. This is a piece where again I got out of my comfort zone and started using those colors you aren’t supposed to use together. 

AB: I don’t think there are any rules like that anymore. 

MD: Yea I guess I mean my own personal rules. This was based on a book I have on Vogue covers from the 20’s. This one has the head shape again. It is just looking at things in a different way. I do play with Photoshop a little bit but I get bored on the computer really fast. This is a project sketchbook that I did a few years ago that I am still thinking about. The Rozelle Artist Guild did this sketchbook project where everybody got this tiny sketchbook and could do whatever they wanted to do with it and then for the show.  At the show, all of these hung from the ceiling at equal height. It was totally democratic.  I liked making these drawings because it forced me to do something within different parameters than I am used to. I can’t tell you how many times I get stuck and look through this book.

AB: These images are great. They remind me of Amy Sillman, yet they are minimal.

MD: I love Amy Sillman. My summer vacation is to go to the mecca of minimalism in New York – Dia Beacon.  I want to absorb that courage because minimalism is where I feel my work is going …I want to show you this.  

It was in my early 20’s when I really started developing my taste and it is still the same. There are like 5 things that I want to spend my life thinking about, one thing is I want to study how this Ellsworth Kelly painting and this Joan Mitchell work, both of which I discovered as a young artist. How are they related? This Ellsworth Kelly is really my comfort zone though.

AB: Even though it is so minimal?

MD: Well, it’s the hard edge.

AB: Is it expression and looseness that makes you uncomfortable? 

MD: It’s the mark making, I can do it but this is the part of me that I would like to lean in harder. It is hard for me to make expressive marks. That’s why I do things like making expressive circular marks over and over again before making them in a painting.  Another life-long thing I’m working on, pulling drawing marks into my paintings.

AB: That’s interesting because this is a perfectly married image of these two, expressive marks and hard edge. Now that you say that I see your struggle with that in all of these paintings. It seems like you are slowly letting go of it. However, in some of your earlier work, on your website, there are paintings that are pretty expressive and loose. 

MD: It’s almost like I kind have gotten tighter as I go. I am still learning from this little Rozelle sketchbook. Its like saying, what is your teacher now, who are your teachers? Sometimes you are the teacher and sometimes you are the student. Being aware of what informs you. I feel like all the answers are in my studio though, they are hidden in all these things.

AB: It’s like a puzzle and you have to put the puzzle together. 

MD: Yea and you have to be in a good frame of mind to do that. I paint but I really think of myself as a multimedia artist because I look and think about so many different things.  I am excited to lean into that in the coming years and wonder what my sculptures will look like. 

AB: It is exciting to be planning for that and feel comfortable with those changes.

MD: Yea because it is not always comfortable. 

AB: Yea it won’t be. I think the most exciting work is when you get a sense that someone is truly following their intuition without worrying about what anybody else thinks. 

MD: I know intellectually there are no rules but I am always creating rules for myself and I am just trying to slowly, over time, break those down and just do what I want. 

AB: I feel like that’s what we are all trying to do. However, I think it can be good to create parameters for ourselves. I mean we have to do that to an extent, if we don’t it is so easy to quickly become paralyzed because then your options become too limitless. 

MD: It’s like you want parameters that can be breathable and moveable and not too fixed. 

AB: Yes.

MD: That’s where the idea of space comes into my work. I want a mental space, an interior space. I do a lot of work to create an interior space so that I can have the space to make work that is more free. When people see my work I want them to get lost in that non-verbal place where constriction doesn’t exist. We as artists are often asked what is your work about.

AB: I hate that question.

MD: I hate it too. It’s especially hard for me because I don’t exactly know what it’s about. I’m thinking a lot about how it makes me feel out in the world. I recently went to visit a friend in Asheville. I walked in and on his mantel he had a painting of mine tucked in-between all these little treasures. It made me so excited to see my work in someone else’s stuff, just gathered around it, it wasn’t’ like this precious painting on the wall by itself. It made me feel so connected to this human being in a way that is completely non-verbal. 

AB: It’s a piece of you and your time wading through all of these clues that you have gathered. 

MD: That are just essentially formal visual elements juxtaposed in a certain way.

AB: Very formal and something that someone else would see and maybe not think twice about, a scrap of color or an old ad. They become so personal and intimate to you and it goes into the work. Then you are confronted with a piece of you that becomes their everyday life. 

MD: Yea and resisting self doubt, I wonder does the world need another pink circle on a white background? Well, it needs mine. 

AB: I think there’s something to that. When I got out of school I felt so tired of defending what my work is about because I hate that question so much. I will often avoid telling someone that I am a painter because I know that question is the next thing. I like the idea of unapologetically making formalist work. 

MD: I like the idea of unapologetically making anything.

Monday, March 7, 2016

Alex Paulus


Alex Paulus is originally from southeast Missouri, but has been a resident of Memphis, TN since 2007.  He received his MFA in 2009 from the Memphis College of Art and has been teaching ever since.  Paulus’s work has been shown in numerous galleries in Memphis, Nashville, Dallas, St. Louis, and many others.  His work has also been published in Studio Visit magazine and Beautiful/Decay.  Additional information and images of his work can be seen at www.alexanderpaulus.blogspot.com.

AB: When you graduated with your MFA did you want to teach?

AP: Yea, that’s what I was expecting to do after I got my Masters.

AB: Did you get your position with Southwest right away?

AP: I got a job the following fall because a girl who graduated with me got a job teaching Art Appreciation at Southwest and ended up moving. She put me in touch with the department head.  I’ve been teaching there ever since. Well I taught there and MCA as an adjunct for around three years.  Then Southwest offered me full time.

AB: That’s great that you have a full time position now.  Is working full time too much sometimes? You seem to be so prolific.

AP: I think it’s pretty easy for me to balance several things at once. I have been teaching 6 or 7 classes a semester since I became full time.  I’ll get my painting class started on a project and then I’ll start on a painting of my own and let them watch what I’m doing. That has been helpful. When I have a show coming up then that’s all I do. I’ll just come home and work on art. Like this last show at Crosstown we had about 4 months. Clare came in November and we figured out the topics, then I just spent the next 2 and half months working on stuff everyday. 
 
AB: Did you and Clare share images back and forth during that process?

AP: Yea, we came up with a general idea with a couple different topics. Then whenever we would finish a piece we would send an image to each other. I think I did that dog chasing its tail and she said she was going to do a snake that had caught its own tail, so we were having similar ideas. She had a piece with a big Band-Aid across the drawing of a statue or a bust and I ended up doing a piece with a weird little cut out Band-Aid that I pushed into thick oil paint.

AB: Yea everything worked well together. It was a nice show.

AP: Thank you. We are going to try and pitch the show to some places in New York and try to do a similar show there.

AB: That would be nice. Have you ever shown there?

AP: No

AB: Are you from Memphis?

AP: I’m from Southeast Missouri.

AB: So you moved here for school?

AP: Yea moved here in 2007.

AB: Why did you decide to stay?

AP: Because I started teaching immediately.

AB: Yea, a job helps. Have you grown fond of Memphis?

AP: Yea, when I first moved here the orientation people at MCA made Memphis seem really dangerous. I mean there is crime in any city but they almost made me afraid to go out at night. I also didn’t know anyone so that was weird.

AB: Were the grad studios downtown then?

AP: No they were in the office buildings down here. So for the first year or so I just felt really weird here. I didn’t know where to go or what to do. Eventually I got more comfortable and met a bunch of people.

AB: So I’m not familiar with much of your early work. Do you feel like your work has changed drastically since your time here?

AP: Yea, I don’t know if I have much in here.  This is one of the early ones I never finished from undergrad. Ok, this is a really big one. (Pulls out a large rolled up painting of a nude woman)

AB: Whoa!

AP: There is this weird double figure over here. I was doing a lot with this pattern. I don’t know, I don’t really like this painting.

AB: I would have never thought that was your painting. Yet you haven’t thrown it away…

AP: Yea, after undergrad a lot of stuff I did was figurative.  I kept painting figures and then I moved to St. Louis and took a painting class at a community college up there. I started doing stuff like this.  I remember Dwayne Butcher came in and looked at one of these and was like anybody can paint like that.  When I got in to grad school I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. They give you no guidelines and I just sat in my studio making really terrible looking drawings and paintings because I didn’t know what I was doing.

AB: Did you paint nude women a lot?

AP: Well I was going to start getting models and I just didn’t really want to do that anymore but I didn’t know what to do. Have you seen any of my stuff from grad school? A lot of it was really thick oil painting; I would carve in to it.  I got really scared to use color. 

AB: Was that because of your professors?

AP: I remember having a critique and they questioned why I was using certain colors. I was like, I don’t know, for aesthetic reasons. They said I needed to come up with a reason for every color I chose.  Then I got really nervous and didn’t paint for a month and a half.  They criticized the way I was using a palette knife, it looked too much like a palette knife.  Ultimately it made me think more about the stuff I was making, and that was helpful.  When I got out of school I just did whatever the hell I wanted.

AB: Yea that’s a great feeling when you graduate and you don’t have to answer to anyone. 

AP: (pulling out thesis work from MCA)

AB: Are these dead bugs?

AP: Yea a lot of the pieces had to do with the Old Testament.  I was looking at the bible as an evolutionist would instead of a creationist. So I was taking things that humans had done to counteract the punishments that god was doing to people. This one is a bug truck that people use to spray…one of them was the flood.  The titles of the pieces were all just bible versus. So a lot of my stuff from grad school looked like this.

AB: So different from now, no color.

AP: Then I did animal heads in a similar style.  Eventually I started doing some collaborative stuff with Adam Farmer and Tad. I think doing the collaborative stuff really helped me make stuff in a different way. I started thinking about how we would each start something and then trade and work on top of what the other person did, so then I started treating my own pieces like I was doing a collaborative piece except I did both parts. So I really liked that, it made me think about different ways to make art.

AB: So was it when you started collaborating that you began making more humorous imagery? 

AP: I guess so.

AB: You have such a distinct style now that you have had for a while and I guess I’m just curious as to how you clicked in to that.

AP: The collaborative pieces helped but then I really got interested in George Condo. He is one of my favorite painters.  Then I have these books, they are sort of comic artists but they are really bizarre…they are like illustrations but they are really messed up. I liked how funny that was. Another thing that is really influential is Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job! It was on Cartoon Network. These books are pretty recent influences.

AB: Your most recent paintings particularly feel so sure of themselves, I don’t see a lot of you repainting or struggling or being unsure of the images. Maybe that is partly because they are so graphic…are you struggling with this imagery or does it just come in to your head and you make it?

AP: I think sometimes if I get an idea and I don’t know exactly how I want it to look then it’s a bit of a struggle, but usually I can imagine what this stuff is going to look like in my head and for the most part it comes out how I want it to look.

AB: Do you feel like you’ve reached a point where you are making exactly what you want to make?

AP: I think I’m almost there.

AB: Do you sell a lot of your work?

AP: If I have a Yart Sale I sell a lot. I’ve sold several things through the price is right. I’ve done more online sales in the past year or two just because I am getting more of an online presence.  I got a couple of images in this collage show in Tate Britain.

AB: What!

AP: They did this big display of the collage work they have in their collection and people submitted collage work and if you got picked they would have rotating images on these screens. Then an architect from Paris saw that show and he bought two of my paintings.

AB: Wow, so you have the Tate on your resume. That’s awesome.  When was that show?

AP:  It was last year or the year before. The show was called Texture and Collage.

AB: Is there anything I didn’t ask you about that you want to talk about?

AP: I recently got representation in Dallas.

AB: Congratulations, that’s awesome!

AP: It’s called the Ro2 Gallery. I got asked to be in a show at Central Track, which is an artist residency program, they have a gallery. Trenton Doyle Hancock had a piece in the show too so I thought that was cool. They saw that show and contacted me. They had a price is right style show…then they asked if they could represent me.

AB: That is awesome. 

AP: So I am going to do a show there in June. I think they are going to be a part of the Dallas Art Fair and they said they would put a few pieces of mine in that.

AB: Well that’s big news. Have you already sent them a bunch of work?

AP: I’ve sent them 11 or 12 and they’ve sold maybe 4 or so.

AB: What are you going do for your first show in Dallas?

AP: I don’t know because I’ve only shown a handful of pieces down there and I’ve got probably over 200 pieces of art in here and I don’t know if I should make a huge body of work. I could probably just take groups of these that fit together and hang them in installations. I’ll probably end up making new stuff just because I keep making new stuff anyway.  I think the show will be up through June.

Friday, February 19, 2016

Toni Collums Roberts


Toni Collums Roberts received her BFA from The University of Mississippi in Imaging Arts. She then found herself at another U of M (The University of Memphis) for her MFA in Photography, which she completed in December. Roberts has regionally exhibited work, and was selected by The Commercial Appeal for Top 10 Exhibitions of 2015.

AB: OK, what were you saying about your thesis? 

TCR: My thesis marked a huge transition in my art. From shedding the aesthetics of visual culture-approaching it in a more minimal way, and the process in endurance art. So I still haven’t figured out my new direction. I’m still processing that. 

AB: Its funny that you say that first because that was one of the things I really wanted to talk to you about. I was looking at your website last night and I thought your work was so so different up until the thesis show. It was so heavily conceptual and you went from working with  film/photography to the physical labor of building these cubes and then doing a performance piece. That is such a bold move. I mean its awesome, but a bold move. 

TCR: Yea but I guess in undergrad a lot of my video, which is not on my website, a was performance video.  I was doing a performance for video, I had just never done a performance live. Also in undergrad many of my photographs were of me, they weren’t self-portraits, but I was in them. I was at this conference and I met some photographers and performance artists, Morgan Kohn and Erin Sotak, who were working in that way. They were working with their body and filming it. One of the things they were talking about was the camera as the theater so I feel like in my undergrad, thinking about it now in retrospect, I used the camera as the theater.  Now making this transition where I’m interested in performance, but live, removing the camera.  Which is really funny because I just got my MFA in photography.  When I was finishing grad school I was thinking about having to defend the work that I was making because I was no longer using photography. I mean I did have the live video feed. 

 AB: That’s true

TCR: I mean really the live video feed was what the end result was supposed to be, so all of that was just for a 4-inch projection.

AB: Yea but your performance and the beauty of all the cubes totally took over. 

TCR: Now I’m kind of thinking more about how to make something that is monumental without it being monumental? 

AB: Yea I remember when you were originally talking about this idea for your thesis show you said you wanted it to be anti-monumental and boring. I remember we all told you this is not going to be boring. Were you still trying of that or at some point did you realize this is going to be monumental and I need to accept it.

TCR: I didn’t realize until after I installed them. I was standing there like oh man. You have to think that I was working in a small studio; I was only making 1000 at a time. 

AB: Yea, you were really only seeing them in small groups. 

TCR: So at the end when they were all together it was like whoa, this is huge.  But I knew that it was huge deep down because my body physically knew that it was huge. Even the performance, I exerted my body in a way that I had not. From that experience I started thinking about work and questioning it. 

AB: Physical labor? 

TCR: Yea but also just the idea of work. I guess since I’m not exactly happy with my job situation.  Thinking about purposeless work it makes sense that I am interested in it. I think that Inveterate would have become boring if people spent more time with it. I think it failed in some ways but was successful in others. 

AB: In the attempt to make something anti-monumental? 

TCR: Yea 

AB: It was so overwhelming though to walk up to that space and see all those cubes. That’s interesting that after making Inveterate you didn’t think OK I want to make monumental work now.  

TCR: I do want to make monumental work; I just want to figure out a way to make it non-monumental.

AB: That’s right so you want to make monumental work that feels lacking or uninteresting… But anything that is monumental becomes interesting.

TCR: Right. Well I am going to try. I also really liked working on a site-specific installation. 

AB: Have you ever thought about doing something outside? 

TCR: Yea now that I have the cubes I am interested in how they retain smell and how they made that entire space smell like chlorine. I was thinking about using other fragrances to alter space, thinking about scent in space, and trying to push that further.  I wasn’t considering that they would make that entire space smell like chlorine, or that I would have to bleach all 8,000 because of mold.
AB: It fed the aesthetic though. You created a sterile feeling environment. 

TCR: I definitely want to use the cubes again; I don’t want them to die in that space. In regards to participating or embarking on a Sisyphean task…that is something I have become really drawn to from that body of work and I have a bunch of ideas, performance wise, endurance performance wise, in a similar way.
AB: Combined with labor or do you mean labor just in terms of preforming? 

TCR: Both, one of the things I’m thinking about doing right now is, so I created a character based off the idea of Sisyphus. I was thinking about southern culture, the idea of work, and then women in the south and the name or nickname sissy. 

AB: Is that the name of the character? 

TCR: Yea 

AB: So what does this character do? 

TCR: So I don’t have the space to do this yet but I am just going to do it. I am going to plant 300 purple hull pea plants in pots, I think 300 will be enough. Then I am going grow them, pick them, sew them on to a dress, and then I want to wear the dress and shell the peas. 

AB: So you are going to film this or have a live audience? 

TCR: I want to have an audience, but this is pretty new.  The reason I was going to use peas is because of the agricultural dominance in the south and the disintegration of that and the decline of the antebellum….the decay. Also there is something I like about the idea of shelling peas. 

AB: That is a very feminine act too, traditionally feminine act. 

TCR: Yea, maybe I am trying to combine conceptual interests in my past work with my new work, and then having my hands stained purple because the peas will stain your hands.  There is something I really like about the staining of purple.  I am going to bag the peas and sell them after the performance.  I think it would be beautiful to have the pea plants in the space. 

AB: So can you say more about the idea of boredom. 

TCR: There is this really interesting article that I just read about boredom and how it is now being researched and all the different facets. Colleen Merrifield in her thesis made a video to bore people, two actors hang white clothes in a white room on loop. She wanted to see if boredom affected a person's ability to focus.  She had the participants carry out a classic attention task, sit through the video, and then do the task again.  She found that the task was more boring than the video.  I think that is what happened in inveterate.

AB: So then I guess that's a question for you. Is it about you being bored or your audience? 

TCR: See I want my audience to be bored not me. 

AB: It seems like in your thesis show you were bored making all those cubes and we as your audience were in no way bored seeing the piece and watching you preform. And with the peas we wouldn’t be bored watching that but you would be bored shelling all these peas because we are coming upon something new that is unexpected to us. Why is it so important for your audience to be bored?

TCR: In my previous work when I was making those videos.  There was so much happening, I was appropriating imagery and trying to make it overwhelming to make statements about fetish and women and power dynamics and gender. With Inveterate I wanted people to wonder what it was, wonder what was happening, and then get really bored and start playing on their phones. So I wanted boredom to facilitate fetish. You know check your Facebook, watch a cat video, and then see an ad.. I mean now boredom is something that is being researched as this psychological state, what is it? How can we use it? In literature boredom is used to draw you through the piece in text. I guess I was trying to figure out how to do that visually. I really want to figure out how to harness that lull. 
 "In literature boredom is used to draw you through the piece in text. I guess I was trying to figure out how to do that visually. I really want to figure out how to harness that lull."

AB: Well I guess a question is how do you keep your audience there long enough to create that lull? If they happen upon something in a gallery there will never be that lull, unless you lock them in a room. 

TCR: Yes come to the gallery and I will lock you in a room. I don’t know I guess I’m just boring myself right now. I need to figure out how to bore other people. Maybe I can’t, maybe it’s not possible.

AB: How would you recognize boredom? How would you know if your audience is bored? I mean how then would you define a successful piece? 

TCR: Maybe I need to have someone write about it and say that was boring…this is boring, what a waste of time…don’t go. I mean if I read a review like that I probably would go. 

AB: Why is it so important for your audience to be bored? 

 TCR: I feel like boredom is the root of a lot of the escapism that is happening in society today. I think that’s why a lot of social function has become more and more important. I think unlike in the past with the TV being an escape it’s a whole other social component. I mean also from working at a bar and seeing infidelity and poor decision making on a nightly basis, I feel like most of the people who come in are unsatisfied with their situations and they are escaping in various ways which is destructive. I think a lot of society is exhibiting these behaviors. 

AB: I think that’s true and I think its happening more with younger generations in that people can’t sit still or they can’t be quite or don’t know how to be alone without distracting themselves, which then maybe means people reflect less.

TCR: Right, we have to constantly be engaged. 

AB: So you are asking or drawing attention to that fact with this work saying we need to be quite, maybe you won’t be able to, it will probably bore you, and hopefully it bores you…

TCR: I think boredom is really misunderstood psychological state.  

AB: Its changed though because of technology and the need to be constantly connected, or our need to document everything. 

TCR: Yea a lot of people did stand in the space on their phones but they were taking pictures or video of the work or me.  I’m OK with it being a failure though. One of the things that I was talking about in the beginning that I want to circle back to is my shift away from the camera.  I think that what I was interested in in graduate school was tackling contemporary issues.  There is so much nostalgia associated with photography that I can’t effectively use that medium right now.  I think every image carries nostalgia for someone. 
 "There is so much nostalgia associated with photography that I can’t effectively use that medium right now.  I think every image carries nostalgia for someone."
AB: I have never seen you make work with photography or film where you are embracing the medium, you have always been critiquing the medium.

TCR: That’s funny you say that because I am creating a body of photographs where I make images of traditional landscapes and naming them nostalgic titles like field at sunrise and butterflies.  People would always ask me what do you take pictures of, flowers? I laugh. Then I am pulling them in to text programs so it’s just the data. I am going to print the data, so it’s just the letters and symbols then frame them. 

AB: So you are again critiquing the medium. 

TCR: I think the medium of photography is growing in so many ways. Everyone has a cell phone with a nice camera.  Also with the Internet becoming a whole new space with online galleries. People are making work to exist solely online. I think that stripping down photography to this raw data has been a lot of fun. 

Toni's website:  http://www.tonicollums.com/
Review of her thesis show: Commercial Appeal 
Toni's show Inveterate was named one of the Top Ten art shows in Memphis for 2015: Top Ten in 2015