Interviews

Name: Josh Azzarella

Age: 31

Hometown: Akron, Ohio

Dream alter ego: Scientist studying the Hubble Ultra Deep Field

Motto: I don’t have one. Never thought I needed one.

Top five albums on your iPod right now:
Horehound – The Dead Weather
Complete Greatest Hits – The Cars
Farm – Dinosaur Jr.
Acid Tongue – Jenny Lewis
Dark Side of the Moon (Ripped from a ‘73 pressing)- Pink Floyd

Where do you find your daily inspiration when creating work?
On some level there is simply a need to make. But on a daily basis, I don’t know any other way to go through life.

Why video?
The short answer is that it wasn’t really a choice. Since I work with appropriated images / footage, I have to contend with decisions made by others.

The long answer is that in early 2000, I began looking at the breakdown of technology and communication. I was watching videos online (5 years before YouTube) and they would stutter, stammer and, more frequently than not, simply quit playing. Sometimes, during or after the initial failure, I would think I saw movement in the image
but wasn’t sure, and worked to detect any change in frames. This led me to question how slowly a moving image could move before it’s no longer a moving image.

Concurrently, I was interested in personal memory, collective memory and cathectic energy, mostly due to the constant replaying of 9/11 images and the removal of the World Trade Center from contexts such as movies, etc. When these interests are added together, the results are Untitled #3, 4, 34, 36 and 45 – works in which a recognizable piece of footage is rendered unrecognizable and new as a result of the obfuscation process. As I was completing the second obfuscated piece I realized what was happening and wanted to make work that didn’t
obscure the source imagery but altered it, which leads to #6 and the rest of the non-obfuscated work.

•••

Name: Mario Ybarra, Jr.

Age: 35

Hometown: Wilmington, California

Dream alter ego: Batman

Motto: Be good, if you can’t be good be careful.

Top five albums on your iPod right now:

MC Spew, DJ Dred, 777, Karla Diaz’s “Where I’m From,” and the Eagles’ “Hotel California.”

Where do you find your daily inspiration when creating work?

Avalon Blvd., Wilmington, California

How do you designate which ideas actually come to fruition – given that you have so many?

The dumber, the better.

***

Name: Matthew McGuinness

Age: 33

Hometown: Is now London

Dream alter ego: I love hearing the the story about my grandparents’ wedding day, where my grandfather showed up to the altar “wearing two dotted eyes” as my grandmother put it.

Apparently my grandpa was out with friends the night before celebrating and upon leaving the bar, some cops tried to bring him down town for being drunk in public. My grandfather was not hearing any of that for that – the next day was his wedding day – an altercation ensued, and I know my grandpa had a pair of black eyes in the wedding album. I can only imagine the cops were worse for wear, as they where unable to apprehend him. I think sometimes I am tough, but differently tough.

Motto: It used to be “Death or Glory”…but as sung by the Clash, it becomes just another story.

I need a mantra with compassion.
Right now, I am working on recognizing how making artwork enriches my life rather than defines it. I feel like a hippie, or maybe even a thief saying this, but I am.

Top five albums on your iPod right now: Unfortunately, I do not have an iPod. I sometimes really wish I did. I do listen to Spotify all the time. It is a European-only based application, hosting everything (music) in the free/unfree world in a database, not on my hard drive.

My top five currently are:
1. The XX-X/self-titled debut
2. General Echo/12″ of Pleasure
3. Rye Rye/(profile on Myspace)
4. The Wavves/Wavves
5. Yeah Yeah Yeahs/It’s Blitz

Where do you find your daily inspiration when creating work?

So much of my inspiration comes from music. I also draw heavily from my life experiences. I have a whole lot of need to be out in the real world doing things, all types of things. These interactions and experiences are just as important to me as visual art or music will ever be.

You work in such a wide variety of mediums, how do you determine which one best suits the concept at hand?

I think in answering this question, there is a strong relationship to the question just prior. I find that the medium is defined by the inspiration for making the particular work. In my last body of work, “Rudolf: A Salutary Pipeline,” the work drew in from my art collectives splintering and my going it alone (which may be a metaphor for my having purchased a truck – “find the open road,” freedom and all that American advice). My life as a truck driver in the teamsters union, the history of truck drivers in my family and the aptitude test I took in high school that suggested my ultimate career be a truck driver, my career as a graphic designer, art director, illustrator and educator, my falling out with the catholic church (but in a neighborly manner)  and my not wanting to believe in limits.

So I made collages; cutting up artifacts of my published designs and illustrations, my art collectives’ drawings and photographs in my possession, my check book stubs from truck driving paydays. I made sculptures cast in soap, as well as bars of soap for consumption made from the processing waste from the Bio fuels for my truck, which I drove on.

My most recent works, the “Casper Disasters,” are silk-screened mostly because it is what I know. I had begun making silkscreens about 12 years ago on paper. I had started a design collective and we would swipe posters around NYC that had certain social political & local relevance. They sought to ask questions in locations generally deemed for adverts. I really fell in love with the idea of publishing an image I had made, being able to change its scale and texture and ultimately give it a physical life.

These paintings remind me of making and printing protest posters. I sometimes talk of these paintings as my protest paintings. I know these are not protest images, nor would people understand them as “protest posters,” but I like to imagine a protest where two worlds collide…like Matthew Barney’s “Cremaster Cycle” installation at the Guggenheim meets Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry’s “Witness: Perspectives of Police Brutality” installation at Cathedral St. John the Divine. That is the protest I would like to see. Silk-screening is immediate and raw in its ability to convey an emotional message. It is also somewhat honest, as it almost can’t help revealing the hand or flaw.

***

Name: Tim Barber

Age: 30

Hometown: Amherst, MA/Vancouver, CAN/ New York, NY

Dream Alter Ego: Bald eagle

Motto: No motto’s good motto.

Top 5 albums on your iPod right now:

- Chances with Wolves

- Ata Kak – Obaa Sima

- Neil Young Live at Massey Hall

- Bill Callahan

- Wayne

Where do you find your daily inspiration when creating work?

The unexpected.

***

Name: Walter Martin, Paloma Muñoz

Age:

W: 56

P: 43

Hometown:

W: Norfolk, Virginia

P: Madrid, Spain

Dream alter ego:

W: That would be the lottery winner who has all his organs nano-tweeked , his brain juiced and picks up where Philip Dick left off.

P: I don’t think I have one, should I get  on that?

Motto:

W: Don’t poop on my happy.

P: Everything that can happen will happen?. That’s corny but it’s my second-language motto. In Spanish I would say: Que pena de pan habiendo trigo!

Top five albums on your iPod right now:

W: I don’t save or buy music anymore but instead stream: usually Soma FM or WFMU when I am working. I like the secret agent channel.

P: I can’t find my iPod, wait a minute…Walter’s got it. We are in Spain where my default setting is Spanish radio and some old CDs I found in a closet; Win Mertens, Michael Nyman…

Where do you find your daily inspiration when creating work?

W: Honestly, when I am at a loss as to what to do next I can get very depressed and anxious. If I can force myself to sit it out in the studio, I can maybe channel that deep visceral heaviness into something interesting. Usually by working the clay with my hands and playing with combinations of things I have in the studio or sometimes by sort of doodling or doing a kind of automatic drawing where series of lines suggest further possibilities. I can also get inspired by riffing with my partner, Paloma. We get high laughing sometimes and good things can come from that.

P: I try to keep open to the world, see what’s going on, feel  the “ectoplasm” and I talk things through with Walter.

All of your globes are set in twisted renditions of “winter
wonderlands” – would any other setting be a consideration, or is this paramount to your work?

W: It is hard to improve on the bleak otherness of deep winter, though we did go south once for a piece entitled “Meanwhile Further South,” where travelers on stilts waded through a black lagoon with big dead trees festooned with Spanish moss.

P: Refer to above motto!

***

Name: Todd Hebert

Age: 36

Hometown: Rhinebeck, NY

Dream alter ego: Paul Newman

Motto: “Work hard and hope for the best”

Fact or fiction: It goes in streaks: non-fiction art mostly… I read Norman Bryson for awhile and Michael Fried for another while. But lately I’ve been reading a lot of classic fiction… just finished “The Scarlet Letter.”

Nervous habit: I used to twist my hair.

Author of your biography: Cervantes

So, which is it? City or country? City AND Country.

After you received the Aldrich Emerging Artist Prize in 2005, curator Jessica Hough told ArtReview your work “leaves you wanting to know more, as if the end of the story that the paintings begin to tell hasn’t yet been revealed.” In crafting your story, do your paintings borrow from the sensibility of a narrative or do they function more as vignettes?

I have no story in mind. I have been interested in keeping the narrative aspect in the work popular and self-evident: seasons pass, bubbles float.

You often use familiar imagery, but blur it just enough to create an enigma of the otherwise obvious. Do you feel that this aesthetic acknowledges the eventual deadening of one’s senses or facilitates in the discovery of new ones?

What the blur acknowledges is the fact that our eyes and brains seek definition. With softened edges, the eye is constantly reconsidering the image for definition and this can create a sort of throb or vibration. And since a lot of my pictures portray a sort of stillness, I think it’s interesting that these static depictions have optical motion or movement.

You’ve experienced regional extremes, from North Dakota, to Los Angeles, to upstate New York; how has this affected your perception of kitschy Americana?

It hasn’t affected it at all. Kitsch is totally relative and definitely class based. I know that some may consider the imagery in the work kitschy, but I have never really taken that opinion too seriously. I have worked to divorce the images from the sentiment commonly attributed to them and I think that this separation contributes to the work’s rub.

In this most recent body of work, we’ve seen a foray into nighttime scenes. What inspired you to make the switch?

I have done night scenes in the past and I think this foray is just an instance of the cycles of imagery my work goes through. And, like the seasons, a lot changes while much stays the same.

In pieces like “Barn Spider with Lights,” you use proximity as a way of both obscuring and creating distinction between your subjects. How do you use intimacy and distance to establish identity of your subjects?

I kind of feel my way through it. Many may sense a tension between the foreground and back, but lately I’ve been thinking about the compression of space in the work and how it elicits an expansion or contraction of focus. So, when the image, the composition, and the edges of the canvas are all in competition, creating a sort of visual pressure, I feel pretty good.

The burning question: why snowmen?

I like the snowman because it can resonate with people in many different ways. People can look at his smile as warm and inviting or blank and disconcerting. In other words, the snowman is an image that vacillates between being seen as an object and a personage. There is an ambiguity in the image and how I’ve been treating it that I think has remained fecund and hopefully will remain so for some time.

Todd’s solo exhibition, “City and Country,” opens Saturday, July 11 (5-7pm) at Mark Moore Gallery, and runs through August 15th, 2009.

***

Name: Kenichi Yokono

Age: 36

Hometown: Tokyo, Japan

Hero: Ushio Shinohara

Motto: Think art every day

Second choice career path: Babysitter

Prize possession: A sharpened chisel

Simple pleasure: Ichiko’s (my daughter) smile

Settle it: 50 Cent vs. Kanye West? The Ramones

Your work uses disturbing images within a traditional Japanese tradition (the woodblock), what does this mean for you?

Traditions always transcend eras. Today simply continues from the past.

What is the “horror of every day life?”

There are “horrors” not just within the context of something modern, like a film, but also within everyday life. My work addresses this timeless and universal notion.

How does the concept of cultural normalcy affect your work?

We are only “normal” as babies. Then something becomes lost. This is why many of my works feature “lost” items – they are the scenes left after children abandon toys. It seems “innocent” as well as unearthly, like an unsettling silence or eerie laughter.

What is the significance of using skateboards in your work?

I can’t skateboard, so I love skateboards. Skateboarding and graffiti are the opposite of my work – something as traditional and structured as the woodcut. I use skateboards as symbol of energy in the otherwise conservative picture.

You use many provocative images of women in your work – as in the “Dreamy Gaze” series. How do these women help illustrate your perception of Japanese culture?

It is my expression against the Japanese cultural tradition of Kawaii – which can be so cheap sometimes. I wanted to depict women’s feelings by utilizing the same rhythmic lines and dots that Kawaii imagery uses to portray a sense of “cuteness” in a different context. Hence my series featuring the “dreamy gaze.”

Do you find that urban living alters our state of reality?

It certainly feeds the notion of “the horrors of everyday life.” My particular neighborhood is far from Kill Bill. But the best part about living in a city is all the different kinds of food.

The new work that you have made for your show at Mark Moore Gallery features a twist on traditional art history: such as still life images and triptychs. What does this mean for you?

My theme for this show is a “fusion” of modern imagery and old methodology. In the case of the “still life” works, they reference the traditionally European concept of Memento Mori within a modern framework. Traditional Japanese pictures employ a similar notion of death, these are my main themes. In the future, I want to make pictures through a complicated technique and method of using India-ink painting and drawing. India-ink brush strokes gives the impression of traditional Japanese pictures.

***

Name: Allison Schulnik

Age: 30

Hometown: San Diego, CA

Dream alter ego: Barbra Streisand

Motto: wrap it in bacon.

Album that would be the soundtrack to your biopic: surfer rosa, pixies

Habit or ritual before working: drinking beer on the toilet.

Hidden talent: drinking beer on the toilet.

Favorite city: LA taco, NY pizza

You have an early artistic foundation based in movement and gesture, given your years as a dancer and your education in Experimental Animation. How do you see that influence operating in your ceramics and works on canvas?

It’s impossible for dance, animation and painting to not influence each other.  I have a lot of energy I need to get out in some creative way. Sitting still is not an option.  Doing something neat and tidy is difficult. Most animators are frustrated performers, that might go for some painters too.  I guess there is something a bit show-offy in my brush stroke that confirms my status as a frustrated performer.

Your subjects range from Iron Maidenesque skeletons to eerie “visitors,” screaming monkeys to dueling cats – all of whom have been reputed to seek sanctuary within your canvases. How do you decide on your cast of characters?

It seems like most works of art are really just self-portraits.  I like to think they’re created in my imagination, mixed with this reality.  Kind of a bizarro world or alternate world version of real world characters and creatures.  Humans are a core to build on – to blemish or make furry, toxic, imperfect and real.

“The Gaze” has its obvious art historical connotations, but you employ it in order to achieve a different kind of tension. How does this tie the viewer to the work?

I can’t speak for the viewer, but for me there’s something really appealing about honesty. I don’t think I’d be doing my characters justice if I painted them any other way.  I guess I’m drawn to the sad and pathetic outsider, but also the foolish and powerful misfit.  It’s all in the eyes.

There’s an evident use of very finely controlled chaos in your paintings –between the (seemingly) manically applied paint and subsequent motion of the subjects themselves. When do you know a work has the right balance?

Probably never.  I think it’s easier to know when they are unbalanced.

Tell us a little about your new body of work – which will be debuted in a solo booth at PULSE Contemporary Art Fair, New York with Mark Moore Gallery (March 5‐8,2009).

Well… it’s a nice little selection of long hair hobo clowns, giant screaming monkeys, ecto-porn girls, flowers and early American pioneers.  I think I’ll title it Go West.

We’ve seen you work with tigers, and now bears….but will we ever see lions?

Maybe… Lions are too strong and mighty.  Not sad or strange enough.

***

Name: Kiel Johnson

Age: 33

Hometown: Kansas City, MO

Dream alter ego: Richard Feynman or Indiana Jones on sabbatical

Favorite word: Sold

Motto: Make a list and do one thing at a time

Artist of personal influence: A ceramic artist named Pal Wright. He worked all the time and emphasized that drawing was the root of it all. Drawing became an aerobic activity…I loved that.

Pet peeve: Prematurely dull x-acto blades, pencils with broken graphite, error messages, missing drill bits, back pain and the strange rattling sounds that started coming from under my truck the week I paid it off.

Greatest achievement: I stocked up at Costco one time and then literally didn’t leave my studio for 23 days. That was pretty cool…

Beatles vs. Stones: Stones in the studio. Beatles while making breakfast on Sunday.

Your work has often been touted as the crossroads between fact and fiction, the futuristic and the historical, stylistically serious and playful…how do these dualities operate in your work?

Fact vs. Fiction is something that comes up a lot.  I tend to see most of my work as excerpts from a diary of sorts, or maybe folk songs.  The drawings loosely come from my experiences.  However, once I get in there and start scribbling around to lay out some kind of narrative, there is a need to make the story better or alter it in a way. Questions start to come to mind:  What if this happened? What if that happened? In the end you come up with a completely different drawing.  That’s where the good ones come from.

It makes it easier to capture the basic essence of a thing when you can’t remember all the details. I’m interested in the bolts, rivets, buckles, zippers, and snaps that hold everything together. .  I like the idea of having images blend around in my head. Then when they come out on paper they are naturally messed up a bit.  I start with a few tossed around bits of fact and end up with a great deal of fiction.

In terms of the Historical vs. the Futuristic references.  It comes from an interest in “the way things used to be” as well as the “way they might end up.” I enjoy engineering and design features of the past.  A time when objects were well crafted and meant to last for a generation or more, not just a season. I want my work to have this feeling of sturdiness and experience.  I like thinking about the various histories objects accumulate.  I try to give life to the inanimate, so thinking about past experiences a particular object might have encountered helps me add character, or clues; helps me tell a story.

At the same time, I am looking to the future.  I wonder about that side of the timeline more often.  Many pieces have developed while thinking about the idea of what will happen in the future.  I tend to draw from the past, in terms of design and engineering references, but the future seems to be where these pieces live. I just think we should not forget the best parts of the past.

The allusion to an Orwellian existence has also been evident in many of your pieces. Combined with a non-threatening medium like cardboard, which is tangible and familiar to most everyone, why choose to illustrate such daunting concepts with a seemingly blithe aesthetic?

I received a couple citations from those sneaky traffic cameras here in LA.  It was around that time I started thinking more about how often our image is recorded.  It was extremely odd to get a ticket in the mail complete with digital images of me driving my truck through a red light at 3 in the morning.  I had lost to a machine.  I lost a game I didn’t even really know I was playing.  It felt so unfair.

I see cameras everywhere. I suppose, I want to be the camera in a way.  With the ability to secretly pan around, zoom in and out, and have total recall. That is what led to the submarine (shown at the A+D Museum, Los Angeles).  I was touring a Russian sub they have down in Long Beach and it occurred to me what a cool stealthy observer this thing is. You can get so close and they never know you’re there.

My relationship with cardboard really isn’t a response to the “Big Brother “ imagery.  I began working with it when I decided to start building my drawings.  I chose it for its strength and cost.   As we got to know each other, I realized how much like drawing working with cardboard is.  If I envision a shape, I draw it out with a marker, cut it, and then fold.  The knife started feeling like an eraser. Everything happens fast, results come right away – I love the immediacy. My drawings are very diagrammatic and have always seemed like plans for sculptures yet to be built. When I was building things with wood, and casting metal, it always felt to me like two different artists were making the work.  It all started coming together when I began working with paper.

You oftentimes present a variety of “dwellings” in your drawings – from towering structures to peculiar huts. What is appealing about the concept of habitation for you?

As a kid, I worked with my dad on his rental properties doing tons of handy-man work.  Then I had a string of different jobs in high school and college framing houses and doing rehab work on old buildings. It was very educational to take apart old buildings and put them back together again. I also got to see many great examples of architecture on family vacations when I was young.  I remember hitting up Jefferson’s Monticello one day, then touring an amazing Mosque in D.C. the next afternoon.  The idea of creating a space specifically suited to your needs is etched in deep.

One recent event that led to my recent infatuation with aerial views of cities started by drawing blimps and airships. A friend of mine convinced the good people at Sanyo to take us up in their dirigible for a few hours over LA – anywhere I wanted to go.  I have seen this city from an airplane many times while landing or taking off, but to hover over it like a rain cloud was mind blowing.  I began making connections with the streets and could see the city layout attempting to be organized in some chaotic manner; the way the city structure flowed with the contours of the landscape.  It was this bird’s eye view that set me off on a major body of drawings.

I thought the submarine was the coolest way to spy, and then I rode in a blimp.

Any new projects in the wings that we should prepare ourselves for?

I have started a new series of drawings based on the web press – the type of press that a newspaper or a magazine is printed on.  It has all those rollers and ink trays.  The paper is woven back and forth like a web, until a multi page, folded document is ultimately spit out.  The printing press changed the world forever.  Gutenberg started the information age.  Now the printed image is in decline due to the computer.  I was raised around these large printing machines and recently toured the Kansas City Star facility.  I thought I would do a series of drawings devoted to those memories.   A sculptural piece will come from it, I’m sure.  I just can’t decide which drawing to build.

I am building a series of metal detectors as well.  I don’t think they will detect metal though.  They are definitely detectors of some kind.  Let’s call them everything detectors.  You will wish you had one next time you are desperately trying to find something.

What would be your dream cardboard structure? Don’t lie.

It would be pretty insane to build a super high-tech, state of the art, mega-telescope, like the fancy new one they have up at Griffith Observatory. I would want real lenses in it if I were going to do it.  I would want the viewer to at least see something through the eyepiece when looking in.  Maybe I could do animation that would run inside.  It could take you on a journey through our universe… or maybe it just looks at a brick wall?