Vanessa Mayoraz

Interview with Vanessa Mayoraz for Locate Arts The Focus.

 

Click to read the full interview. 

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.

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

Sarah Best Johnson

 

Sarah Best Johnson received her BFA from the University of Alabama in Huntsville and will graduate with her MFA from the University of Memphis in May of this year. She recently served as Art Editor of the Pinch Literary Journal, and is currently the Co-Chair for Box Gallery. Her work has been in numerous exhibitions in Tennessee and Alabama.  

AB:  So tell me about your current body of work. 

SBJ: I was centering around religion there for a while but now I am kind of moving more in to the infantilization of women and the sexualization of children. To me they feel like they go hand in hand. I have recently developed this obsession with bows. I have been slapping bows on everything, glitter, goulash makeup... these hyper sexualized positions. I recently got some colored light bulbs and started lighting these sculptures with colors to make them even more bizarre and unnatural. I moved away from the human figure about 8 months ago and I’ve just been working with the dolls. All of them are based off of images from obstetrics books, I took pictures and started mimicking some of the medical abnormalities in the dolls and painting from them. I didn’t necessarily want to horrify the viewer and I felt like if I actually used those direct images that it would be just gross. I didn’t want to gross people out, but I did want it to be gripping in a way. So I started using the dolls to soften the blow. 

AB: So you feel like its less grotesque because they are not real people. So how do these images begin for you? Do you have an image in your head about a specific composition or does it begin with a concept? 

SBJ: You are making work pretty much throughout the entire day even if you're not actually making anything. You are constantly thinking about what you are doing and what you are going to be doing. I think a lot of these images just come in to my head and I have to find a way to make them happen. A lot of things end up changing depending on what kind of material you can get. A lot were just happy accidents in a way. I slap bows on them or some glitter. 

AB: So they arrive through the process. 

SBJ: Yea they are constantly changing. 

AB: I know that you have been working with a lot sculptures. Are all of these paintings coming from references to that? 

SB: Usually I make these sculptures then I go light and photograph them and paint from those. What I have been struggling a lot with lately is how to have the sculptures stand alone because they seem to conceptually fall apart by themselves. The paintings feel more complete than the sculptures. Drawing is a huge part of the process and I am not a sculptor so I feel a lot of the sculptures just look really amateur. So I am turning them in to paper dolls.  I am going to blow them up draw from them and add glittered clothing to them. 

AB: So you are making them in to paper dolls as a way to begin a painting like the sculptures or they are going to be a piece in themselves? 

SBJ: Yea I wanted to find a way to have the sculptures stand on their own so in that way they are still drawings mainly but standing up kind of like sculptures. I don’t know, I can't get past this idea of having a nursery in a way. I wanted to somehow make that work.

AB: Do you plan on displaying those with your thesis? 

SBJ: I am hoping so, yea. I am wanting them to be like actual paper dolls. I want them to have the little feet on them and stand up. I am playing with the idea of them being interactive, putting velcro on some of the clothes and you could change them up. So they are definitely going to be more like sculptures. I am trying to decide if I want them to be interactive. 

AB: That will be interesting to see how those interact with these really big paintings. I know you said you were using dolls to soften the blow but they still feel heavy. They have an intensity to them. 

SBJ: I still want them to have intensity. That one is probably the least gruesome out of all. I have my two faced one over here. 

AB: Just heads or will there be bodies attached? 

SBJ: This is the only one I have painted bodies. 

AB: Does it matter to you that people see these and understand that you are talking about the infantilization of women and the sexualizing of children? 

SBJ: I think for the most part I am just trying to make paintings that look interesting. I mean all of my favorite artists I couldn’t care less what their work is about. I just love it because of what it is. I guess I don’t really care. I don’t always understand it, myself. 

AB: How do you deal with any insecurity you might have about your work? 

SBJ: Usually if there is a particular painting that is not going well I just start drawing. I mean right now I have four different paintings that are open. If one is not going well then I move to another. I go back and forth between painting and drawing. You are almost always insecure about what you are working on. 

AB: I know before you were combining drawing and painting in your work. Now they seem to be completely separate.  Is there a reason why they are separate now? 

SBJ: Over the past summer I was doing the painting and drawing and I had the whole summer to just work. The first doll I made was this red one. I put polyurethane on it and something about the shine…I was looking at a paintings by Mark Dargas. He makes these hyper sexualized paintings of women with honey poured on their face. I thought about chocolate baby. It started with my trying to do my own version of that. I was trying to do a hyper-realistic version. It seemed like it would be scarier and weirder if I could get it as realistic as possible. 

AB: Its funny because when you applied to graduate school you were making somewhat realistic paintings. It seems like you went through this middle stage of drawing with painting and then went right back to where you began. Its funny how we end up where we started.

Who are you looking at right now? 

SBJ: A lot of the artists I am looking at, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell. One of them is Travis Louie. I am always thinking about Anne Harris and you can’t see any of that in this work anymore. I am thinking about Rubens and Pontormo, Caravaggio…I am thinking about a lot of those religious paintings. 

AB: So you were saying religion is no longer playing role in this work? 

SBJ: I think maybe not necessarily religion but maybe more southern culture. A lot of my friends are having kids left and right and they are buying these enormous bows. Its all pinks and girly so I think maybe its more influenced by the bible belt. 

AB: Yea well gender has also played a big role in  your past work and I can see it here too. I think that's also what you are talking about with these bows…this is pink so this is for a girl…ultra feminine. 

SBJ: Overly feminine, yea. 

AB: So you are poking fun at that. 

SBJ: Yea, poking fun and critiquing those ideas. Of course typical male standards of beauty and what we are instilling in our children as….

AB: Yea that this is male this is female and there can be no in between. 

SBJ: Yea and also when you should become that female and how far you should take that. Maybe that stems from my now childhood insecurities. When I was 13 I wasn’t allowed to buy makeup. I see 8 year olds buying contour brushes and expertly applying make up. This child is 8 years old and is overly sexualized. That to me is what is terrifying and horror is something that is really important to me.  

"This child is 8 years old and is overly sexualized. That to me is what is terrifying and horror is something that is really important to me. "

AB: I bet you hate little kids beauty pageants? 

SBJ: Its awful! Its also hysterical, but its so terrifying that it makes you cringe. 

AB: Do you think this body of work will continue after your thesis show or do you see yourself moving on to something different? 

SBJ: I have an inkling that at some point I’ll go back to human figures….I don’t know I’m having so much fun with the dolls. 

AB: I remember you were posing people a lot when you were painting the figure so it is probably a lot easier for you to use dolls because you can position them however you want. 

SBJ: I can get weird. I don’t have to worry about making people uncomfortable. When I was painting the figure I wanted to do so many things but I also didn’t want to make my models uncomfortable, which is why I started using myself. With these I can do whatever I want. What was interesting to me also was that this is a child's play thing and there is this innocence that a lot of people are obsessed with in a way and then to just kind of destroy that innocence in way….maybe that's why I like these because I can do that without assaulting the viewer. 

When I was finding some of these images in obstetrics books I was crying. If I tried to replicate that with a child I would get too emotional. It would hurt to much. Yet it was still so important to me, these tossed aside figures.  I still wanted to do it just no in a way that would completely destroy me. 

AB: It references it so it still carries the weight, but yet its a toy so it softens the blow. 

So how long have you lived in Memphis now? 

SBJ: It will be 2 and a half years, 3 years in August. 

AB: I know you moved here from your home town so you don’t have much to compare it to but how do you feel about the Memphis art community? Do you think being in Memphis affected your identity of yourself as an artist? 

SBJ: I think so. Not even just the city but the program is really diverse. That was not something I was around before. I grew up in the church and it made me very sensitive to everything. 

AB: What are your plans after you graduate? 

SBJ: We are aiming to try to move to New York. We are going to try everything to make that happen while we are still young. Memphis is definitely up and coming. I would recommend that people move to Memphis. It gets a bad rap but its a pretty great place to live because its a city that is valuing art more and more. I have really loved a lot of the people I have met here and I have gotten a lot from the program.  

See more of Sarah's work at  http://www.sarahbestjohnson.com/

Carl Moore

This week I met with Memphis artist Carl Moore at Caritas Village. Carl received his BFA and MFA from the Memphis College of Art. In addition to working as a Graphic Designer, Carl curates the art space at Caritas Village and is an established mural artist in the Memphis community. His work has been the subject of countless solo and group exhibitions including;  An American Dream at L Ross Gallery, Portraits and Figures at Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Common Ground at Memphis College of Art Alumni Gallery, Inspired Resistance at Crosstown Art Gallery, and Present Tense at Dixon Gallery and Gardens to name a few. Currently, he is working on curating an exhibition for L Ross Gallery, titled The Man's Show which will open in June. He is represented by L Ross Gallery. 

AB: I am a big fan of your work and I really admire, as a fellow painter, how you have developed your own language. I think it is no easy task to portray complex, heavy imagery into these simple forms. I know you are a Graphic Designer. So I am wondering how you arrived at the imagery you are making now, was it more complex visually at one point? 

CM: When I came out of college I actually was a super realist. The graphic design fell in when I went to MCA in the early 80’s. I went as a painter, and still remain a painter, but the ideology back then was you are an artist, you work as an artist, you sacrifice as an artist and that should be your only focus. I like to eat so… and I had a love for graphic design. I had an interest in graphic design, and so I went in to graphic design. In the 80’s illustration was very big and it still is but you know with all the stock imagery now illustration can go back and forth, but coming from that super realism you know air brushing, under-painting, and getting to this point now. I basically wanted to simplify it. I wanted to say everything that you would say in a realistic image but with less…less. I don’t want to say less effort, that sounds like a lazy artist. You know I've always been a big fan of Jacob Lawrence and a lot of the artists in the mid 20’s 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s when they were going towards this abstract theme and they were simplifying things. You know artists like Stuart Davis were expressing jazz in a very simplistic manor. So I loved that and I like color and I wanted to be able to take my statements, make any statement I wanted with a very simple image and so design played a little bit in that because you know I love that discipline of sketching it out, working it out…building your composition, it played a certain part in that but most of my images are still sketched out in detail even when I am putting them on canvas, and then I go in and start taking out sections.

AB: So are you, and this is totally a painters question but are you kind of figuring these images out as you go or do you have a specific image in your head and then you execute it?

CM: Its kind of funny that you ask that because one of the things that they really hated about me in grad school…I actually have titles before I do anything. 

AB: Oh wow 

CM: Right, I sit down…because its almost like writing a book. You know what you want to write about and so I know what I want to do a piece of art about. So I have a book of probably 200, 300 plus titles of work I want to do and I break them down into a body of work, maybe ten or five and I start sketching. So I guess you can say I take the illustrators point of view. I get my subject and I develop it out. 

AB: That is  interesting that it starts with words.

Fireflies, Butterflies and Helicopters

CM: Yea, it starts with words. Well you know I do my research and my observation and then I go… I guess being a quote on quote social painter, its not hard to find subjects now and so I go OK this is in video, this is in the media, but I want to do my interpretation that can stand the test of time no matter when somebody looks at it. I think my most recent new body of work that I started the end of last year was the Rodney King piece. I sketched that piece about 10 or 15 years ago, if not longer, and it just sat in my sketchbook. It was in an old sketch book and I would tear it out when I would move stuff into a new one…images I wanted to keep working with. Then about 2 years ago I just started re-sketching and re-sketching it and of course with his death the meaning changed from what it was and even my idea and the look of it.  I always associate the idea that you are going to do stuff when you are supposed to do it. So with that said, I started sketching it and sketching it, getting it on canvas. You start sketching and take out areas... that one I don’t know what I put so much effort in to it because it went through two or three color changes. You know everything that's in the original sketch that I finalized is not in the final painting, and I even went so far as to scan it in, move it into illustrator and get all the lines perfect, get it exactly like I wanted....kick it back as a PDF and get a large scale print out of it. Then transfer it because I wanted it to be so specific. 

AB: So you were sitting on that idea for a painting for a while.

CM: Yea, I actually have a lot of stuff in my sketchbook that I am waiting on... when I feel like I have a good concept for it. Along with titles,  I always have something to work with, its just picking out the time to do it. 

AB: So are a lot of these titles coming from the media, people in your environment, or just everywhere?

CM: You know I'm driving down the street and I see, most recently, I see a man with blue bag with yellow hat. That's a title. I keep it on my cloud. I keep a long list on my cloud, and I have a printed copy that I update. Man with blue bag, I remember his posture and how unique…I think of a background, and I think of that social statement of…and its not always so beat down, it has to be a social statement, but anything that happens in the world is a social statement. 

AB: Yea absolutely, so what are you working on now?

CM: I’m working on new work, its coming out slowly. It doesn’t matter how my intentions are; I'm going to whip out a certain amount of these in a certain amount of time…it never happens that way…Im to anal for that. You know…I have a children’s book I wrote 15 years ago, that I recently have rewritten the last four years... now it is time to illustrate it.  Its time to do it. I took supposedly a hiatus the last two years. I have had life changing events and I was going to take a year, and the year ended up being just six months, because I was just going to do little rough sketches and make a list of things I wanted to work out and I thought this will just be a list of 20, 30 things, and its like a list of almost 300.

AB: That's a good problem to have through.

CM: Right, and I was like OK I am just going to mark down a few things to work on, but the ideas keep flowing. I'm driving down the street and I see something, I see something in the media, or I just get an idea from 2 or 3 different variations and I go this needs to be a piece of work, so you know the hiatus ended fairly quickly. 

AB: Yea, that's good.

CM: So I am back to working, I've broken down some of my list into the bodies that I want to do in the next 3 to 4 months. I have some possible exhibitions, some nailed down. I’m curating a show in June. 

AB: Nice, where are you curating a show?

CM: Its going to be at L Ross gallery. Its called The Man’s Show.

AB: OK

CM: Its a whole lot of dialogue…just off the titles, but I picked quite a few friends and artists I admire. The majority of them are over 40, because I wanted the interpretation of what man hood is over the last 50 years, so I got different race, gender, backgrounds, culture, you know and I wanted everybody’s view. We’ve met several times. We met this past weekend out at L Ross Gallery to look at the space and she was very interested, so she said why not have it here. 

AB: That is great. It sounds like a very powerful show.

CM: I hope so. We are putting a lot of planning in to it so…we have some really highly skilled people in this show...

AB: I look forward to seeing it. When does it open?

CM: In June. 

AB: Speaking of Memphis a bit, I saw on your website that you were born in Mississippi. How did you come to Memphis?

CM: I went to the Chicago Institute of Art first because my sister lived there and I went a year early to get college credit. They had a course at the time. Yea, this is…I'm old…1982. You could go and start college early and then you can go do your pre-admittance and all that stuff, and it was great. I loved the experience, I hated Chicago. 

AB: Really 

CM: I made the mistake of getting on the bus at rush hour once with my portfolio…it wasn’t pretty. I had a great time there and I went back, finished out my senior year and I had been contacted by…my sister gave me info for the Memphis College of Art. Then the Memphis Academy of Arts and I applied, they sent down a recruiter. I guess you could call them recruiters then, just somebody in admissions to look at my work and I ended up going there because it was closer to home. I was going to go to school here, graduate, and leave. Of course that never happens. 

AB: Yea, that never happens. So you stayed for graduate school? 

Childhood

CM: Yea, actually I went to graduate school about 5 years ago…I went back. 

AB: Oh wow, I didn't realize that. 

CM: Which is funny because I was like why didn’t I do this right out of the gate? I didn’t think the program was set up for…way back when….I'm not sure what the program was then... I don’t know maybe for painters or what, but I wanted to get out of school. I went to school for 12 years, then I went to college for 4, that's 16 years. You want to just get out into the world.

AB: Yea, live life

CM: Right, but going back was more expensive. I was working full time and going to grad school full time. I did it in 2 years because I went during the summer. 

AB: I think that's nice though, going back when you are older. You have a different perspective. 

CM: Well you are more focused. You know I have an 8 hour, 9 hour job so I need to do this. I don’t have any lag time, so that's pretty much what it was. I didn’t have any lag time, leave work, go to class. leave class go to work,and you are in your studio till 2 in the morning. 

AB: You were working as a graphic designer during this time? 

CM: Yea, I still had my job. 

AB: So you started doing that right out of undergrad? 

CM: Yea, well right out of undergrad... I worked several jobs…even as a billboard painter. I discovered I was afraid of heights. On the job, you get over that really quick. You really never get over it, but you make it work. It was interesting. I worked as a layout, pay stub artist which is a lot different in 1988 than what it is now. 

AB: I'm sure.  

CM: I love it now. I use everything adobe makes and I love it. Back then using press type, and cut and paste was really cut and paste. 

AB: Its changed a lot, I can imagine. So are you thinking about graphic design when you are painting? 

CM: I think about art. 

AB: Yea 

CM: To me, in my world, painting, graphic design, murals, web development…its all one big thing. I am an artist. I love it all. I make it all work. My paintings, if I have a sketch I really really like I will grid it. I still use the grid system sometimes on large work. If I have something that I really have exactly like I want it I'll scan it, create it in illustrator, make it a PDF, take it to FedEx office, have them print it out to scale, the exact size, and then I transfer it. It still changes once I start throwing paint on it . I like the whole thing.  for me as an artist, you should be familiar with it all. You should be familiar, you should be able to represent yourself…you should have a website. If you are a painter or artist and don’t have a website now …that's an issue. You should be able to sell yourself, control how your imagery looks…control where it goes. So being a painter, to me is the creme dela creme, its the icing on the top. Then being a designer and being able to manipulate it, its great. I go in to Photoshop, I color correct my own stuff, fix my own website. You know if I'm working on a mural, I can go build a website for my mural project. 

AB: I saw the mural you did in Cooper Young. Have you worked on one since? 

CM: I'm working on one over on Barksdale. I started late and had to stop for the winter time, but I will probably start right when I get off from vacation in March. 

AB: So are you painting directly on site or are you using poly-tab?

CM: I’m painting directly on site, I want to try poly-tab one day, but now I'm directly on the wall. 

AB: Do you have assistants?

CM: I did with the one on McClain. I paid three assistants and I think I eventually had one who went through the whole project. The other two, it was dependent on their schedule. This one I don’t. I am kind of just filling it. I presented a design and now I am working with the design..but once you get out there... Ive already called them and told them the design is going to change…I'm actually adding more. 

AB: What is the mural about? Do you mind saying?

I really can’t, not that I am hiding it. Its just about the community. The only nailed down thing is that the people who donated to the production of it have photos they want incorporated. I went and scanned those and worked them digitally in the design and those are going in, but everything else is kind of  just what I am feeling. 

AB: That is nice that you have that freedom. 

CM: Yea, there are certain parts just promoting Memphis and the Cooper Young area. There are things about it that they did want but pretty much how I manipulate color and everything is up to me. 

AB: I can see you your work would lend itself very well to murals. So I know you said that you planned to leave Memphis after undergrad, but how have you felt about the Memphis Art Community? 

I am Man

CM: I like it. 

AB: Yea 

CM: Yea, I mean its one of those cities. I think when you get to my age and a city is a city. I mean there are great places you can go, but in all essence its like we used to go to St. Petersburg Florida at least twice a year especially in the winter time and it got to the point, once you stay there..we would stay roughly about 10 days at a time... but once you stay someplace more than 3 days you are not a tourist anymore. You start to see the city for what it is. Its a beautiful place, you learn where all the stores are, all the shops…it becomes a city. Its just another place you live. Memphis is Memphis. Are there are bad things about it, yea, are there good things about it, yea. I love the art scene here….it changes. I think in the last 15 years there are more artists here then there has ever been and they all are doing something. You know when contemporary art came in to the scene, meaning outside of the landscape, or still lives, it got creative, it got interesting. There is a lot of good art in this city. People who leave come back, some don’t, some do, so there's always this constant change. 

AB: Yea, I think there are a lot of really talented people here. 

CM: Oh yea.

AB: And a lot of exciting things...

CM: Yea, good friends, who’s work I admire. 

AB: I feel like Memphis is kind of on the cusp, in terms of the art scene. 

CM: Yea

AB: I definitely get a sense of that. I think Crosstown has a lot to do with that too. 

CM: We have more art districts here, you know, Cooper Young is hanging in there…it will get rid of all its galleries like it did and then they’ll come back. Jay Etkin has kind of brought that area back in to play. You have South Main, Cooper Young, Broad Street, Crosstown, and you have the Marshall Arts area. You have all these art centric places….you can’t help but love it if this is what you do. 

AB: A lot of really driven people here too, which I think is helping move that along. 

CM: Yea 

AB: Are you planning to do more murals in the future? 

CM: I'm playing that by ear, it depends, probably not any as large as the Cooper Young one. I love doing them and to be honest I’ve got to give a shout out to Jamie, my assistant, she was a fast painter. We had so many sections to do. We got a system of I would draw two sections and paint two sections. It got to a point, where she was whipping them out, you know everything has to be coated twice. Its just an anal thing with me. In my own painting, roughly five coats… so you paint it, she’ll paint one, Ill paint the other, then we’ll flip flop so we get caught up. She’ll put the second coat and and I'll go and draw the other two…everything was hand drawn. 

AB: That's impressive. Usually when people do murals of that scale they use a projector or something.

CM: The cost that would have gone in to creating stencils…I like to draw. I just get china marker and draw it. 

AB: Going back to your work a bit, how important is accessibility to you? 

CM: Its important, understanding it. You are never going to get everybody to understand what you are doing. I always tell students, 98% of the time you are not going to be standing there with your work. So you want it to translate  your message. Everyone is going to translate it differently. What you see as an antagonistic, image, someone else is going to say..well that's kind of mild, and maybe think something else, so everybody is going to get something different. It is important that what I am trying to say in the work…if you come close to getting it, or something in relation to it.

AB: Especially since your work is so concept driven. 

CM: Yea, it really is. 

AB: So I know you said when you were driving down the street you saw a guy that immediately gave you an idea for an image...so are these figures in your paintings based on specific people or are they characters that you create based on situations? 

CM: They are characters that I create.  I do have a few media stories that are going to be fairly specific but its still going to be my interpretation. I used to paint oil portraits, many years ago and I kind of never want to do that again. I create my own, I guess, I don’t want to say generic, but I create my own figure to put in that particular situation, but we do have specific stories of specific subjects like Eric Garner, it won’t be Eric Garner’s face because I don’t want to do that, but the imagery will present itself like…I’m going to say Eric Garner’s murder, and because of  what I am trying to portray to the viewer is not necessarily specific…but they will probably relate it to Eric Garner. Those who don’t know that particular situation... I want them to look at the act that's being committed as being wrong. I am not trying to give you the history of Eric Garner, but I am trying to let you know that this particular act is wrong, or it took place. This is based on a true story…I hate those moves, but…so the image doesn’t become generic, but the image becomes a representation. 

Beating Rodney King

AB: Yea, you don't give enough specifics but its enough for anyone to be able to associate it with that.

CM: Right, and it may even be title driven. Unless you walk up and see the title Killing Eric Garner you can still step back from the painting and see this is a violent act, and by the colors, this is the victim, this is the antagonist, you can see who the players are and draw your own conclusion. See even with the painting Beating Rodney King you have the representative sticks, you have him in his crouched figure, you have the city behind him, if you don’t know who Rodney King is, and as I get older, I just turned 50... I am surprised, as I get older, younger generations don’t know who Eric Garner is, they haven’t researched it. Then I realize they probably weren’t born or they are kids and don’t know the story. Just like there are events that happened before me that I had to research. So you know in Beating Rodney King they can see these items that represent somebody being struck because there is an arrow based on where he was probably hit. 

AB: Yea, well that is the power of art...to document these situations, so when someone younger approaches your work, it might prompt them to look it up. 

CM: You know, Picasso’s Guernica would make someone go research it and see what happened. 

AB: Yea, absolutely. You mentioned a children's book, I think it would be great to portray stories through that...

CM: Yea, I don’t want to say too much about it until I…I have been rewriting and reworking it and its going to be a picture book, but it has dialogue. I think the only thing that has changed from my original idea...I went back to my history of illustration and started trying to come up with how  I wanted to illustrate it, fast forward to now, I am going to use my style. I got these beautiful characters that are part of this little journey these two kids are taking but my style will work and I will just build these characters, simplify them…because the original sketches, 5, 16 years ago were very complex, they were very stylized, realistic and I guess that's why I didn’t do them because I'm lazy..I don’t want to have to do 5 or 6 different styles, overtime I do something so if I decide to do a second children's book, if this one actually works, then I have to go back to this style. I'll just keep the same style for everything, then I don’t have to think. 

Justified Homicide

AB: Well I think your style works. 

CM: Thank you. 

AB: I know you don't want to give away too much, but do you see these children's books being about social issues as well? 

CM: The first one is not, its about reclaiming childhood. That's what they mostly are. I think children are forced to grow up too fast now. My daughter is going to be 22 this year and just looking at where she is now, we made sure she stayed a child, and that's why it is so perplexing that I can’t sit and talk to her, when we go out to eat, as my little daughter. I am sitting in front of a young women now and its just weird. 

AB: Is there anything else that you would like to talk about that I haven't asked you? 

CM: I can’t think of anything. If I do it will probably turn out to be a long drawn out ramble. I’m not going to put you through that. I will say that I grew up in an era where there weren’t a lot of highly recognized African American artists, so my research came from Charles White, John Biggers, Jacob Lawrence, but not just them…I love Michelangelo because it was the perfect way for a figure to look. I think students should do their research now. I think the old masters are highly over done in magazines. Overtime you open up one, its like yea there is another Picasso. I think there are a lot of good artists out here and they should start featuring them. There is something to say for doing your research, looking at who’s doing what, and how they are doing it. That's my spiel. 

See more of Carl's work on his website: http://www.carlemoore.com/about.html