Elena Lavorato Gets to Know Exhibiting Artist Sophia Heymans

March

Can you give me a brief description of your work?

Each landscape painting in my new series represents one month of the year and attempts to express a Minnesotan’s personal relationship to nature within that month.  I often think about the style as layering the figurative narrative of American Folk Art on top of the textural assemblages of Abstract Expressionism. There is a lot of wild and fast-paced surface build-up and then more controlled figures added later. To me, each painting is a different character and I am making a big family of 12.
 
Do you feel there is some advantage to depicting a scene from an angled aerial perspective?

March (detail)

The reason I choose an aerial perspective is because I want to show as much of the landscape as I can. I want the viewer to see everything that is happening all the way back to the horizon with nothing obscuring the view. Because of this perspective my paintings can become a giant stage for interactions between plants, landmarks and people. I give a much bigger role to the land than the sky in my paintings. I don’t have much interest in portraying the sky in paintings because compared to land/earth I think it lacks personality. For me, a very small amount of sky is enough to get the idea across.

How do you use paper mâché in your work? For texture?
 
I use it for texture but it also works as a composition tool. I place chunks of paper mâché (and other textural materials such as string and seeds) down first on the canvas before I use any paint and they become obstacles to work around which helps keep the composition from getting stale or predictable.
 

January

How did you come to use dryer lint with paint?

I first used dryer lint in college. I saw a pile of it in the trash in the laundry room of my dorm building and each piece was a different color from a different load of laundry. I thought “I could use that”. I don’t use it as much anymore because I don’t live in a place with a big laundry room, but I highly recommend it as a material. It almost always has a really interesting color or mix of colors that is hard to make with paint.

Thinking about what these scenes are, a prairie or a park, these are places that are normally depicted as serene or peaceful, but in you paintings there seems to be elements of chaos. Is this correct?

Yes, I think about chaos a lot. I like to play around with order/disorder. For instance the composition may be arranged tidily in a large circle but the plants making up those arrangements are strangely shaped, overgrown or laying dead in the snow.  I do believe nature is chaotic which makes it demand so much awe and reverence. That is the main reason I choose to paint landscapes.

What was your first art related experience?
   

January (detail)

My sister and I were homeschooled through childhood and every place on our family farm was transformed into a world that really only existed in our minds: branches at the top of a tree, a cleared out space in a cornfield, an empty bathtub, a colorful rug. They were all different settings in our highly intricate play world. I grew to understand that people could not see these places the same way we did. When I tried to tell my parents about them with my words they responded with very little interest.  I went looking for a different way to convey what I saw and experienced to others and I am still doing that to this day through painting. My sister must have felt the same way because she became an artist too. 


For more information on Sophia Heymans visit HERE. 
And more about the exhibition opening August 2nd HERE.

Elena Lavorato Gets to Know Exhibiting Artist Aaron Dysart

In regards to your sculptural practice, why are you interested in nature? 

       I really have problems with the word ‘nature’ as it always feels like a false category, as I do not believe in the supernatural, so nature is all there is, it is the grand system.  However it is often thought of as something other then us, and this manufactures distance and problems.  Knowing this, I still feel the disconnect.  I wish I didn’t, but I do. 

       The sculptures are trying to understand where this disconnect comes from and how I can get rid of it.  I want to be a positive part of the natural system, though I harbor a strong distrust of my thoughts of how this might come to be.  Nature is so much larger then us, I often wonder how much we can know for sure.  I am however not content to fester in skepticism, and try to push forward with the knowledge that I am probably wrong and always wear my earnestness on my sleeve.

What does the fake aspect of plastic or painted trees represent?

I enjoy when something is trying to be something else.  It ceases to be anything stable, as it is both the material it is made out of and the thing it is trying to be.  I love the fact that a discrete object can exist in this ambiguous, and at times, contradictory state.  

Do you have a memorable childhood experience involving art?

My origin myth starts with tee-ball.  My parents signed me up, and for our first game all the kids on my team ran onto the field calling the position they wanted to play.  Since I had no idea how the game was played I ended up in left field, which of course is pointless in a tee-ball game played by 6-year-olds.  I stayed out there making piles of grass for a couple innings as the other kids kept changing sides.  Seeing my complete non-interest my parents signed me up for ceramics classes at the Minnetonka Center for the Arts, so technically I was in art school before normal school.

       Where is your favorite place to be outside?     

The Minnehaha dog park is my favorite place in the world.  I could write a whole book on that place, but will just say that I think it's pure magic. 

 Do you have a preference when it comes to displaying art indoors or outdoors? Is one   more effective than the other?

I have been mostly outside for years now, and the work was there for conceptual reasons.  In attempting to understand how I relate and think about wilderness, I need to be physically in that space.  It isn’t always comfortable, and can be a pain in the ass, but it made sense for the work and I let that guide me.  The nice part is I didn’t have to look for shows, or wait for gallery space.  I just found a good spot and put it up.

This show was a conscious return to object making, which I have missed lately.  I love the discrete boundaries of an object and the physical act of making.  The difficulty in having objects seem vital pays off when you make something that holds ambiguity and contradiction yet provides an undeniable permanent physicality.  I don’t think I always achieve it, but it is what I am shooting for.

 

If you could only use three tools to make work for the rest of your artistic career, what would they be?

This sounds like a nightmare.  I am interested in having material being determined by the content of the work.  Because of this, the tools and techniques are always quite varied and can become tool intensive.  Sculpture can draw from anything, which allows me to continually learn new materials and constantly search out new skills.  If I was stuck with just three tools, the work would narrow and become material dependent, and that doesn’t really interest me. 

Come check out Aaron Dysart's show opening June 7th!!!

Elena Lavorato Gets to Know Exhibiting Artist Nate Burbeck

 Many of your paintings could be photographs, why does painting these scenes make them better? 

 Firstly, I'm not technically proficient enough to realize these works as photographs, but in truth I actually prefer them as  paintings. Painting allows for a certain amount of flexibility and I think it more easily opens up the possibilities for what can be done. I also enjoy the challenge that painting presents - to be able to depict what I'm trying to create in a convincing fashion. It's not automatic either and it takes time to accomplish that goal but I enjoy the process.

What do the smoke, balls, glowing light, and other surrealistic elements applied to everyday scenes represent?

They don't really have a ton of specific meaning to me in that one thing means this and another thing means something different, these elements are more there to give the paintings a surreal or psychological edge. Overall I'd say there's no one correct way to read each painting, the onus is on the viewer to fill in the gaps of meaning for themselves. And that's really what I'm most interested in for these paintings. Different people have different interpretations depending on how they see the work and what experiences they bring to it.

Do you personally know most of the people in your paintings, especially the ones with close up and detailed views of the faces?

For the most part yes. I prefer to have actual people pose for me (who I will photograph and use as reference for a given painting) and those people tend to be friends or people I know. There are some instances where I've had to use images from various online sources but ideally I try to find friends to pose for me.

 I’m curious to know if you were bored or dissatisfied as a child growing up in the Midwest and the things you saw made you fantasize about a more interesting world? Such as, what if there were reflective metallic balls over this field?

No, I wouldn't say I was bored with my surroundings growing up in the Midwest. Things were pretty normal, for whatever that's worth. My interest in these kinds of typical middle American settings has only really come up more recently, say in the last five years or so, and I think it mostly is just a result of working with what I see around me. There are interesting things to see here in flyover country, you just have to be willing to look.

 How old were you when you began to paint and what were your ideas or themes like then?

I've been doing art related things every since I was little, though that was mostly doodling and drawing. I got into painting somewhat late (I guess) when I was in my junior year at college. When I was first starting out with my own ideas I was more interested in symbolism, everything had a specific meaning. But now things are more generic, in the sense that I don't ascribe those attributes to what I paint, things are more open ended now. 

 I read your CV, can you elaborate on when you say …creating tension between what is familiar and what is distinctly surreal. I’m wondering because for me personally I get a dreamlike or calming feeling from your work and I was hoping you could tell me a bit more about the aspect of tension.

    I'd say there's some tension in the work but not all in equal measure. Mostly what I'm getting at with that is that there's a strange mix in my paintings, where most of the settings are familiar, maybe even uninspiring, everyday landscapes but within these seemingly mundane settings there's something strange going on, those elements that give the paintings a surreal or psychological edge. So there's a tension in having to reconcile with those two things that are existing in the same space. And like I said this isn't all in equal measure, there are some paintings that have more direct tension and even violent aspects - example, Highlands Ranch, Colorado - whereas others might be a little more quietly mysterious and not so jarring - as in Robbinsdale, Minnesota, etc. 

What art do you have hanging on your walls? 

 Umm, well mostly my paintings at the moment. I would have more art from other artist friends of mine but I just don't have a whole lot of space to do that right now. I have a sculptural wall piece from an artist friend that's currently living inside a box in my studio, eventually I'm planning on displaying it. I do however have a small, growing collection of art books that I'm pretty proud of, if that counts.

What are you working on now?

More painting! Currently I'm working on a larger piece that is based off of some photos I took on a weekend trip to Fort Dodge, Iowa. I'm excited to see how it will turn out.

For more information on Nate Burbeck visit HERE.

Elena Lavorato Gets to Know Exhibiting Artist Theresa Anderson

1. Can you tell me a little about the materials you use? Do you stumble upon them? Are they free? Do you search for certain pieces?

I spend a bit of time before each making spree scavenging freecycle, estate sales and thrift stores. Each sculpture is usually a mix of old and new. In the work, one shot big shot, a new slab of paint embedded with floral foam is tied with yellow electric tape around a structure of discarded wood. Heavy striped vinyl sits/ dangles off the base like a spent balloon.

One of my biggest coups was being contacted by the Artistic Director at PlatteForum Creative Residency a few years to come take a look at the discards from a previous artist. She knows I’m always searching for materials that have a certain kind of history to them, texture or color. The artist had left at least 40 old stretcher bars with the edges and sides of the paintings intact. I immediately loved them. I remember seeing the notes on the sides, the residue of the making and just knowing that they’d be fodder for something.  Old plastic garbage cans, bird cages, parts of lamps, sticks, wallpaper, vintage textiles such as fur, bra straps, pantyhose, picnic tablecloths, pillow stuffing, threads and ropes, feathers, tables, legs, kitsch holiday decorations, fake hair, fake flowers and all kinds of things make their way into the studio.  Quite often I’ll mess around with them over a long period of time before they’re either incorporated into a sculpture or given a new home with another artist to make room for other materials. 

2. Can you tell me about your sculptural practice in general and what your ideas and feelings are towards your work?

Overall my work is very circular moving between the daily drawing practice, painting and sculpture. I’m pulling apart ideas, thinking about the relationships of materials, and moving between abstraction and figuration. The sculptures represent a space of reasoning that often starts much more formally, centered around material requirements and ideas about body pivot points, fragmentation and movement. Each type of work allows me to reflect and push back into the research and notes about the ideas I’m thinking about. It’s pretty layered.

3. Why do you use pedestals to elevate certain sculptures rather than other materials?  Do you build these sculptures with the pedestal in mind?

All of these works have gone through relationships with the floor, furniture and the pedestal. I’ve played around documenting the works with pedestals as a way to bring the work back to some kind of formality- a leaving off of the emotional attachment, palette cleansers. I can put them back on kinds of living furniture or the floor to reinvigorate them with another kind of physicality.

4. Do you have a memory or memorable moment of your first childhood experience with art?
 

Some of my first memories are of sitting in the dirt painting rocks, coding doorjambs and driving nails into wood. I had a pretty vivid imaginary world, making costumes, writing plays, singing and dancing.

5. Do you play a specific kind of music when you work that you don’t normally listen to outside of the studio?

I have a set of 171 rap and dubstep songs that I’ve been listening to since late 2011-12. My then teenage son had uploaded his song list onto my itunes and repopulated my ipod. I pair the violent misogyny with focused readings in the morning.

6. The work you will have in Tenantless Pause (granted I have only seen two pictures on our website) seems more ambiguous compared to your other sculptures which automatically trigger a connection in mind to the female body or other real-world images. Am I totally off or has your work shifted in this direction?

My work has been going more towards abstraction for quite some time. The tension between figuration and abstraction is pretty sweet.

7. Do you keep a special object in your studio that you won’t use for a sculpture but offers inspiration for your work?

Nothing in my studio is off limits. Anything off-limits should stay out of the studio. I spend quite a bit of time collecting, touching and thinking about the things I’ve put in the studio so when I’m ready –it’s incorporation happens quickly. It’s very similar to drawing practice. It’s there when you need.

 
For More Information on Theresa Anderson's exhibit opening June 7th Click HERE.

Elena Lavorato Gets to Know Exhibiting Artist David Lefkowitz

You have successfully painted on many unexpected and intriguing surfaces like Styrofoam, ceiling tiles, and felt, have there been any materials you were excited to paint on but were unsuccessful?

Hmmm, I’d have to think about that a while. The choice of materials and the imagery depicted are almost always linked. For example, interior architectural cutaway views made of joint compound on drywall, which are the basic materials of interior walls, or the manipulated natural forms of topiaries depicted on the manipulated natural forms of plywood. So if there’s a connection between a material and particular imagery that I’m interested in, I will find a way to force them together! 

What was your “gateway” material so to speak that led to painting on non-traditional surfaces? 

Wood is not exactly a non-traditional material, but the way I used it for some earlier work drew attention to particular standardized forms that it comes in, I’m thinking specifically of panoramic landscape paintings about resource use on 2X4’s. That was the first series that emphasized a link between image and object. 

Why did you start painting on cardboard? Is there a moment that sticks out in your mind of the experience? What were you thinking and how did it feel to apply paint to that surface?

I first used cardboard to create artificial tree stumps. On one giant one I added painted tree rings. From there I thought about potential other ways to address cardboard’s physical properties and the ubiquity of the material as a standard container for global mercantile exchange, and the work in Austerity Plans presents several different avenues suggested by that line of inquiry. 

I noticed that your watercolors are almost centrally located on a large piece of cardboard while your acrylic paintings cover their entire surface. Is there a correlation between the paint and the scale or coverage?

  
First, just for clarification, most of my paintings are in oil. I have usually created compositions on cardboard that emphasize an isolated ‘figure’ on an empty ground. They lend themselves to that specimen-like format- there’s a no-nonsense assertion of fact that I like – it helps legitimize these otherwise impossible structures. However, some of the newer pieces in this show fill the whole space or are cropped in ways that activate the ground more.

What is your first art related childhood memory?

It was more like high school than childhood, but I remember loving work that expressed diametrically opposite attitudes about what art is. I responded both to Realist painting like Thomas Eakins, which demonstrated attentiveness to the external world and the craft of illusionism, and Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, which overtly challenged those assumptions in an audacious and hilarious way. I’ve been embracing that tension ever since.

Do you listen to anything while working?

Sometimes I need quiet to concentrate on working out ideas, but a lot of my work involves relatively rote, somewhat repetitive activity, and then I’ll usually put my i-tunes library on shuffle- I love the surprise of an eclectic, sometimes jarring mix- like Thelonious Monk followed by the Monkees, followed by chanting Benedictine Monks….

Acrylic paint seems to conceal the material you are painting on while with watercolor the paint becomes apart of the surface instead of lying on top. Why do you choose certain paint for a particular surface?

I like watercolor for the cardboard work because its translucency does always bring a viewer back to the materiality of the corrugated boxes that make up the surface. 

After looking up the definitions I found austere can mean severe or a simple plain quality and austerity can refer to spending money only on things that are necessary. Does Austerity Plans reference the economic use of painting on something that most people throw away and in the clean and detailed architecture demonstrate a blue print or plan for doing this? 

I like the multiple references that ‘Austeriy Plans’ brings to mind- so the answer to your either/or question is yes. I like that austerity can refer to a simplification- a Modernist, even Minimalist assertion of attention to the elemental, the basic. Some great art has come into being from that premise, but it’s a narrative that can only go so far- an end game. In economics, it implies hardship- government policies that slash services, usually at the expense of those lowest on the economic ladder. I’m interested in suggesting alternative ways to consider the term that reframe it to emphasize doing more with less- to develop a spirit of radical resourcefulness. Modernism and Global capital both rely on an assumption that progress and growth are synonymous and inevitable without much consideration of the costs. I propose rethinking what we mean when we talk about progress. So do paintings of boxes on cardboard boxes accomplish this? I don’t know- think of the work as a catalyst for this kind of conversation.

Austerity Plans runs from April 5 to May 15 at SooVAC with an opening reception on April 5th.  Visit Here for more on David Lefkowitz.

Getting to Know artist Zelda Zinn with Elena Lavorato

Suspension and Belief

Zelda Zinn does not consider her sculptures art. The digital pigment prints of the images procured from photographing sculpted plastic bags and shredded paper are the ultimate work. When I viewed online the suspended fluid masses Zinn created from these originally unremarkable items they felt immediately familiar yet re-worked in a way to make me question the nature of the material. I was frustrated when next to each ethereal form (that looked almost like a cluster of bags but was so otherworldly in lighting and movement it could not be something so common) the only description was a serial number and the words digital pigment print. I realized it probably wasn’t about the materials being photographed, but the results of that process. Zinn explains, “I create these sculptures only for the camera. It is through lighting and shooting and then flattening them down to 2-d that they become interesting. If you saw them as objects they would most probably not hold your attention.”

 
 

          

Zinn’s ability to transform function-specific everyday objects, through her own arrangement of the material and the qualities of the camera lens, into something spectacular, is present in two works titled Irresistible Air and Transformers. In Irresistible Air (which I continue to mistakenly call Irresistible Bliss, likely because it completely exudes that state of being), I can really appreciate the transformation of plastic bags into a series of mysterious entities. Instead of acting as a container for garbage or grocery items, the bags encapsulate air, forming nearly transparent membrane-like layers and subtle gradations of light when photographed. “I like the challenge of taking something common and seeing if I can turn it into something worthy of contemplation. I want to ‘make’ pictures as opposed to ‘taking’ them, which means in one way or another I want to build an image, and have the pictures be about what I created, not the subject I shot. It’s kind of ‘anti-celebrity’ photography; it’s not about ‘who/what’ it is, but how I saw it.”

Her second work titled Transformers displays colorful paper strips bound together at certain points and let loose in others. The subjects in the two series share a similar quality of fluid suspension, but while the bags act as a nonthreatening container, the paper expands outward from itself creating a complementary relationship of subtle confinement and expansion.

Zinn has been working on Irresistible Air and Transformers for about two years. Her interest in what the camera shows that the human eye often misses started at a young age. “The first photo I took that really excited me was when I was about 9 years old. My friend had blown a giant bubblegum bubble, and I took a picture of it. When I got the film back I was amazed that not only could I see the bubble, but I could see my friend’s face THROUGH the bubble! The camera had seen what I could not.”

Zelda Zinn received her MFA at the University of New Mexico, and has taught photography for many years. She lives and works in Santa Monica, California, and has exhibited throughout the U.S., South America and Eastern Europe. Currently, the artist continues to develop work by transforming the obviously present and often unnoticed. Of Zinn’s new series she says, “One is a group of images shot in my neighborhood in which I paint out parts of the picture. That is called Revelations. I like it because it allows me to find a picture within the picture that was hiding there in plain sight. The other series is shot in my studio, and it's called Blueprints. I start with plain white paper, usually backdrop paper, crush it randomly, then use those folds as guidelines to paint on it, then I turn those sculptures back into paper photos.”

Transformers and Irresistible Air will be shown at SooVAC from April 5 to May 18 with an opening reception on April 5 from 6-9pm.

Elena Lavorato is currently receiving her BFA at the University of
Minnesota and will be interviewing artists and writing as part of her SooVAC internship.