| ART:21: |
Can you talk about
you work in relationship to fun?
|
| STOCKHOLDER: |
Sometimes it’s fun and
there are moments when it’s exhilarating. In the end
it’s a kind of pleasure, at least in part—but it’s
not always fun making it.
|
| ART:21: |
What about play?
|
| STOCKHOLDER: |
Kids’ play is a kind of
learning and thinking that doesn’t have a predetermined
end, I think I’m involved in that.
|
| ART:21: |
Talk about the piece you describe
in the accompanying text as a yellow brick road.
|
| STOCKHOLDER: |
I didn’t think so consciously
about the yellow brick road from "The
Wizard of Oz." When I make these pieces I don’t
have a literary story in mind. I work thinking about the
experience
of color and space—what things are going to look like visually
and the excitement and impact there is in that for me.
Afterwards
I can put words to what I’m doing.
I wrote about this piece and used the yellow brick road from
"The Wizard of Oz" as
some kind of poetic text. I think all those kinds of fantasy
fictions have
resonance with what I do. I once titled a piece "The
Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe." In that story
the kids disappear into another world through a closet
door. I
think my work is about this possibility for some world other
than the one we experience. It’s like going into
a mundane closet and disappearing into something that’s
extraordinary and full of fantasy.
|
| ART:21: |
Can you explain the title for
the work, "Sam Ran Over Sand or Sand
Ran Over Sam?"
|
| STOCKHOLDER: |
The title? Dr. Seuss immediately
comes to everybody’s mind. Dr. Seuss is very playful
with sounds of words as well as their meanings—the way words
sound and play with each other internally is as important
as what is being told. That resonates with my work: I’m
as interested in formal play and how that intersects significance
as in what things mean. So I do like that reference in the
title. But it’s also descriptive of something I am thinking
about in my work generally—and in this work—about how things
have character. I don’t think it’s fair to say
that my work is just formal. I don’t think anything
is just formal; I think formal things have significance. And
the word narrative isn’t the right word
to use in relationship to what I do. I don’t construct
narratives.
I haven’t found the right word, but there is some kind
of storytelling, for lack of a better word. There are evocations—floating
significances—that combine in a poetic way. That title posits
Sam as a character, and the sand as a character. Things have
character. So I’m interested in how the character of
things might function as a protagonist in what isn’t
a narrative here.
What I find most interesting about people is that the structure
of meaning and significance that each of us lives with isn’t
easy to articulate. That’s why storytelling is so important—and
art making—because in those forums, as opposed to something
like an academic essay, we create structures that are difficult
to pin down and we accommodate floating kinds of significance.
|
| ART:21: |
Describe your use of the icebox
in the piece.
|
| STOCKHOLDER: |
I’ve used refrigerators
in my work more than once. I’m interested in temperature.
I’ve used things that make heat and things that are
cool. In this case, this is a freezer chest. It’s a
white cube like the gallery is a white cube. I’ve always
enjoyed refrigerators and freezers because they are the place
of food in a house. And food and cooking have to do with loving
and giving in a family. Also freezers and refrigerators are
cold and frozen, as an emotional mirror that has to do with
withholding and not loving. So for me they embody that duality—which
is also in the gallery. Institutions of art are both full
of possibility and extraordinary feeling. They also put art
in a place of remove, and in some ways, it has less power
than if it weren’t removed.
|
| ART:21: |
The icebox—it’s
perfect.
|
| STOCKHOLDER: |
Yes, it’s very perfect.
It’s a beautiful object and it’s full of geometry.
I just love that.
|
| ART:21: |
Talk about you love of Matisse.
|
| STOCKHOLDER: |
Matisse has clearly been an influence
on me. I love color, Matisse is completely involved in color.
It’s hard to articulate why color is so exciting or
wonderful, but I think it can be. Also in my work I’m
interested in systems—how things are organized and then how
the system breaks down and becomes eccentric or quirky. How
a thinking process can meander in unpredictable ways in contrast
to a system that’s been planned and shared amongst people.
I think Matisse’s paintings occupy that place too.
|
| ART:21: |
Can you explain the purple and
pink wall in this piece?
|
| STOCKHOLDER: |
I’m interested in abstract
expressionism. Through my life, that’s been kind
of taboo. Abstract expressionism has been debunked and sneered
at—the idea that expressing oneself is interesting to anybody
else has been laughed at. And I understand the reasons for
that but I think, nevertheless, that each one of us has personal
reasons for making things and that the work wouldn’t
be interesting or powerful if we didn’t. Each one of
us is a subject, a person. And each one of us does have handwriting.
You know, we have a way of making marks and that’s not
uninteresting. I don’t think my person is what’s
interesting about my work, but what I make of my person, how
I think of my person and manage my person in relationship
to the culture we share, is of interest, because we all have
to do that. Everybody has to manage their person in relationship
to others. And so in this work, this drip and the hand of
the brush and everything, it’s my handwriting, mark
making. It’s very self-conscious.
I’m aware of how the work intersects with a history
and critique of abstract expressionism. It also refers to
Mondrian, Agnes Martin, and minimalism. I
don’t think my work would exist without minimalism,
though it doesn’t appear minimal. My work points at
and refers to a whole history—a myriad of different people
and structures that the work rests on.
|
| ART:21: |
What about the quality of drawing
in space in your work?
|
| STOCKHOLDER: |
Other people have done that—
Fred Sandback drew in space with string. I’m not the
first one.
These cords that draw in space are coming from the lighting
fixtures in the wall, in the ceiling. They describe a kind
of grid in space. The wires form a grid that mirrors the
grid of the architecture. And then there’s a grid of
stone tile on the floor, and these light bulbs make a chaotic
grid that mirrors the grid of the wires in the floor. My
work rests on a formal pattern making. These wires, by drawing
in space, also carve up that air—they describe the
volume of air as significant next to this volume of Styrofoam
and the color volume on the floor.
|
| ART:21: |
What about the green and the
red?
|
| STOCKHOLDER: |
I’m always playing with
the way that things are pictorial from certain points of
view,
and then more physical. So it’s less about picture
making, though I don’t think that disappears entirely,
and more about your body—this orange color kind of floating
onto your
body and filling the air, and how that’s similar to
light generally filling the air—and the feeling of the Styrofoam,
the weight of the Styrofoam next to that weight of that color.
The green is flat; the Styrofoam is white but not flat.
But
that green has an illusion of volume or space. I like to
put together those things that have illusion of weight and
space
with things that have real weight and space. So here we have
a real rectangle of orange and white, a volume of it, sitting
next to a flat kind of illusionistic volume of green. And
red and green. Generally I’ve used a lot of red and
green. When I first started painting and drawing, almost
everything
was red and green. There’s a kind of optical buzz between
them. And I think there’s something very charged and
almost sexual about red and green.
|
| ART:21: |
And the notion of mapping?
|
| STOCKHOLDER: |
The thing that comes to mind
is how memory functions. Moving through the work it matters
that you remember what’s on the other side, how it looks
from over there. There’s a kind of mapping of memory
that this addresses. I think mapping and composition
have something to do with one another. Composition has been
jeered at over the years in terms of art making and painting.
But I think composition is everywhere—you don’t make
a car, clean your house, or have an office without being involved
in composition.
|
| ART:21: |
What about the connections to
home, lamps, etc.?
|
| STOCKHOLDER: |
I use a lot of domestic objects
and I use other kinds of objects too. I always worry talking
about the domestic in my work because people very readily
tie that to being a woman. We all live in homes, we all have
domestic lives, it’s part of being a person. My work
has to do with the domestic and the private but it also has
to do with public space.
|
| ART:21: |
Anything else you want to debunk?
|
| STOCKHOLDER: |
People often describe my work
as being concerned with trash or garbage. I use castoff things
and new, bright, and shiny things. My work is not about a
particular kind of object so much as it’s about stuff
in general. I’m not interested in having the work be
caught in one kind of stuff.
|
| ART:21: |
There’s a kind of classical
way all of this stuff is arranged.
|
| STOCKHOLDER: |
I think my work is very classical
which is sort of ironic to me. It started out as a kind of
elbowing the art institution, being upset at how art’s
muffled because it’s precious and packaged and put on
a pedestal.
My work participates in a shared history of poking at the
container of the gallery. Of course we need art institutions—we
don’t communicate with one another and have a place
to share work if we don’t have galleries and museums.
But I think their particular nature needs to be addressed,
understood, and played with in people’s work.
|
| ART:21: |
Can you expand on that?
|
| STOCKHOLDER: |
I think that my work is classical
but also very contemporary. I do a lot of shopping at Home
Depot. I don’t know how much I want to give credit to
all those different big conglomerates, but stuff is cheap
and easy to buy and I participate in that. I use material
that’s inexpensive, readily available. It’s really
a pleasure that we have all this stuff around us. I love plastic,
I think it’s gorgeous and I love it. All of these objects
are full of design and other people’s thinking and I
ride on the backs of that. I think that my work engages the
means of production that we live with even while it embodies
things from a long time ago.
|
| ART:21: |
What about the temporary aspect
of your work?
|
| STOCKHOLDER: |
The installation work won’t
exist past the end of the show. In a way it’s a very
slow performance, not very much happens here—everything is
kind of still and static. It has a beginning, a middle, an
end and it’s over. It’s a material performance.
|
