Selected Interviews
Andrew Young
University Club of Chicago, January 2018
- Kate Pollasch, curator
|
The University Club of Chicago is pleased to present artist Andrew Young in a solo exhibition of collage and mixed media works that exhume the mysterious beauty of the natural world. Like a cabinet of curiosities, Young’s two-dimensional works combine fractured and abraded materials into a textured surface of earthly elements. A lifelong collector and explorer, Young’s practice balances discovery and classifying the known world with visualizing the illusory pull of the unknown. This exhibition showcases a survey of work across the artist’s collage repertoire, offering a rare opportunity to review over a decade of artistic expression.
UCC Exhibition: January 8th - February 13th, 2018 |
Greater and Lesser Lights series (c-78), 1999,
Collage of hand-painted papers on museum board, 17 x 14 in. |
Artist Interview: Andrew Young
Andrew, the University Club is really looking forward to your upcoming exhibition on January 8,
can you tell me a little about when and how you started developing your studio practice?
Spending most of my early childhood on the east coast, I loved the outdoors and looked forward to every chance of exploring the ocean shoreline. Not only did I patiently inspect every feature of every tidal pool I came across – nature’s gift of twice-a-day exposing the creatures below the water surface – but I often came home with bags and pockets full of treasures I meticulously cleaned, sorted, and displayed on bookshelves in my room. Nature was my first love and so it was an obvious path to think of biology as a field of study and career. Simultaneous to all this wonder about the world around us (Jacques Cousteau and Rachel Carson being early influences) was an impulse to record this world through drawing, and later photography, as well as a growing awareness of our complex and elastic relationship to the landscape. Later, I felt I needed a practical application for my environmental concerns, which became a declared major in biology and conservation of natural resources at U.C. Berkeley. Never did I abandon my drawing practice, nor my thinking about what compels us – near and far – for the land we live on. A collage semester in Italy awakened my senses and the possibilities of art to express this relationship. Subsequently, I shifted my studies to a general humanities field major and was fortunate to have a very caring and sensitive mentor who saw promise in the artwork I was already making quite independently. For a full year following this introduction, I concentrated my energies to the studio, which resulted in acceptance to a graduate program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Robert Hartman, who passed just two years ago, was present at a critical “threshold” moment in my life. As with the ocean tides, events in my life momentarily exposed something beneath the surface in me and he recognized it. It was his gentle encouragement at a most fragile time that secured my interest in observation and documentation into a practice.
The medium that put me on the map as an artist, coming out of graduate school, was egg tempera. I discovered this in Italy when I was a studying abroad. I think the entire experience awakened my senses to art. Picture the archetypal 19th century naturalist with a watercolor kit under his arm and a backpack full of materials for collecting and categorization, and it is that hybridization of the tactile world and the impulse to record it that speaks to me. There is always this dislocation of the natural world, how it exists with and without us, versus how we “romance” nature. When I went to Siena, Italy, I was really interested in the textures of the landscape and the animation of time seen through the walls of the city.
In writing on your work, you talk about the balance between the known world and the illusory, and how collage creates openings for those two worlds. Can you expand a little more into your artistic relationship between the known and illusory world?
I mentioned above my lifelong interest in the physical world around me, as well as the mystery of connections, origins, and functions in nature. When I traveled to Italy as a college student, it was to study language and history, not art specifically, though one was always surrounded by it. Art was the obvious extension of high-cultural and spiritual events, but what amazed me were subtler connections to the locality through earth pigments used in painting and the architecture as it related to the landscape. The very materials of the brickwork, for instance, were born of the ground they sat on. In art, we take for granted that form in painting and sculpture is referential, that it is symbolic, or narrative, or copying in some way a primary subject. In one sense, this is an illusory world because it is abstracted from the primary and is also timeless. When the materials of art-making are recycled, appropriated, or in an essential way reference themselves – especially when there is an element of past history or decay (a time component) – the “thingness” of it exists in a factual world. Collage is a perfect example for it often takes recognizable elements and recombines them for the possibility of new meaning, never letting go, rather depending in some way on the original utility. In my work, I take it a step further. Apart from the occasional postage stamp (time and distance travel) or archival photograph (an artifact record of a place or event), all of the other elements that appear to have had an earlier life are hand-made by me. The work I made coming out of graduate school was in the medium of egg tempera (mineral pigments mixed with yolk and applied to a gessoed board). The unique physicality of this process, plus my attempts to make the panel look aged or a section of something architectural, strived for a feeling of object/material groundedness and identity, coupled with more illusory light, figural references, and forms that had no gravitational obedience. The surfaces were scarred, gouged, layered and abraded, as if to showcase the archaeology not only of the picture, but of my experience making it. The collage works which came after this period utilized the same mineral pigments, only instead of egg yolk made to look like fresco, I was using hand-ground watercolor (essentially making my own paints and papers) to recreate manuscripts and botanical plates. Re-using something that is old or highlighting the materiality of a process exists in the territory of the “known.” Painting forms to resemble something else is illusory. To labor on making something look like the physical or natural original – that is when “matter” becomes primary
again – is to invert the trompe l’oeil effect. This inversion and ambiguity is what opens up both worlds.
A general assumption about collage is that it is made of torn magazine pages slapped together with rice paper paste. However, the materials that I use are all meticulously hand-made to look like they have had a previous life. This is again that slippery dynamic of the known, or what we assume to be of the past, with the illusory or referential. Hand-making all of those layers in my collage brings a certain intimacy and an awareness of process into my work. I have been asked in the past, where do I find all of these old cards and images “reused” in the work? The answer is I make them all. In this case, I think it is significant that “materiality” looks like reality. Through forging, if you will, the papers to be of a time period, I draw subtle attention to process and material by momentarily suspending or dislocating the present.
Do you sketch before you start working?
I do have a sketch book for small watercolor plans and experiments before I make my larger works, but it is not an exact or direct translation. When I was a tempera painter – which has something of a collage mentality in its construction starting from the laying of the gesso ground – there was both preplanning and spontaneity. In the collage works, there is also a preliminary watercolor sketch with the general scheme. But once I am surrounded by the loose, hand-made individual elements, intuition comes into play. Resolution of any work comes from an intuitive sense of “completeness,” less anything to do with a sketch or premeditation. Sometimes an initial idea or visual is just the confidence to enter into a less certain, visceral realm.
In 2006, you were invited by The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Oregon State University to travel to Antarctica, can you tell me a little about that trip and how it shaped your work?
In 2006, a longtime geologist friend of mine was continuing a collaborative research project with a team from South Korea to look at plate tectonic action (earthquakes), ice movement, and migrations of large ocean mammals in the Southern Ocean off of the Antarctic Peninsula. This was done using super-sensitive sound/vibration-recording devices placed in the ocean’s depths for a year. Given my background in biology, my current study of paleontology, and my general enthusiasm to communicate about this, I was invited to join the American team in the capacity of “educational outreach.” I also participated in water sampling for thermal vents, videotaping sea life with an ROV beneath icebergs, and overall photo documentation of the expedition. If the mystery of what lies beneath the ocean surface was captivating to me as a young person, being physically in an environment so vast and so unknown was in many ways out-of-body. Everything was a challenge: crossing the Drake Passage on a 300-foot Russian research vessel, attempting to recover instruments placed thousands of feet down the year before, navigating a large ship inside the mouth of a half-submerged semi-active volcano. The intensity of every minute brought also a sense of humility, peace, and clarity to our role and impact on the natural world. The word “Antarctica” alone brings with it a legend of early exploration as well as a sense of remoteness and forbidden climate. The truth is that the South Polar ecosystem is extremely fragile and nowhere on earth are we making a larger impact. The point is, again, this massive dichotomy between what is known, what exists in our stories and imagination, and the facts of our presence there which remain incomprehensible to most people. The ice is melting and the seas are warmer and more acidified. This will change the world. But, since we can’t “see” it, it presents less urgency. Further, as rich as the biology was – even in such an inhospitable environment – and as picturesque and sculptural the landscapeappeared, I couldn’t separate from the economics and politics of it all. I’m very interested in the notion of the frontier now, especially as all land today has become political. I cried everyday I was there: for beauty and for loss.
The quandary is the dissonance between what we can measure and what we accept about what we measure, what we project as action and as fact versus the fictional narratives we create. This is the human dilemma.
Some of your recent projects have included work with fossils and paleontology. How do you engage
with researching these subjects and how does that research translate into your studio art practice?
A collection of fossils inside the artist's studio
I spoke earlier about a distinct love of nature, but also of a personal process as it relates to landscape. It’s this middle space that shifts and moves, and is often hard to understand. I’ve always been a collector of things, as much for the adventure of finding as researching and coming to better know my subject. In 2005, an artist friend of mine invited me to join her on a field trip to study Illinois fossils. Though I had been living in the Midwest, painting and exhibiting, for over 15 years, little did I know that one of the most exquisite, comprehensive, and famous paleontological sites in the world exists practically under our feet. I began my fascination with the Mazon Creek area then and I’m obsessed with it today. It is a combination of everything I’ve thought about, in some ways, since my youth, but more emphatically since my experience in Antarctica. Coal mining in northeastern Illinois in the late 19th/early-mid 20th century uncovered the plants and animals of a 300-million year old swamp and shoreline. Energy extraction was the imperative and the fossil evidence was the residue. The ancient plants captured the energy of the sun and through incredible geologic forces of time, heat, and pressure, became coal, which we as a species learned to mine and later unleash (by burning) for our own purposes. The fascination for me is a combination of many things: the geology and economy of coal, the research and community of paleontology, the aesthetic beauty of life on earth millions of years ago, the “miracle” of their preservation and similarity to many organisms we have today, the arduous process of finding the fossiliferous concretions and opening them, the incomprehensibility of Geologic Time and the measure it puts to our species' duration on the planet. Moreover, it is in part coal – the energy source that enabled population and economic expansion over the last century – that is also transforming our planet in making it less habitable, or at least more challenging for us to survive. My art work is not necessarily about environmental activism; rather, it seeks a connection and understanding with some of the subtler (but no less important) features of the landscape we know, that which we don’t know, and what is transforming before us. It is almost a heaven-and-earth dichotomy: our mortal “ground” versus our aspirations, our material origins and the narrative we call “history:” transience being the overarching theme.
There is something rather miraculous about this time period of fossils in Illinois. In order to collect the stones for study, I have to retrace the path of the coal miners. I am looking for ironstone concretions made by a chemical process and tossed aside as overburden to the mining process. (Once an organism – plant or animal - is trapped in a silty mud layer, a mixture of iron in the sediment or leaching up from the buried peat and bicarbonates from ocean water create a chemical cocoon. This atmosphere around the organism hardens over millions of years into stone.) When the nodules are collected, I start a process of soaking them in water, freezing them, unfreezing them, soaking them again… going through multiple cycles until they are open. I could hit the potentially fossiliferous stone with a hammer, but risk destroying its contents. By freezing and thawing over and over, it will hopefully delicately pop open like a clam shell. Now, half of the finds will be empty, others will be broken or “rusted” by the elements, but as I think about it, it was also aggressive coal mining that made these fossils available. It is ironic because coal burning is polluting, essentially compromising our future, but is also making available this incredible evidence of prehistoric life on Earth. Further, I have a large collection of stones that I will never attempt to open. In a way, they are more valuable to me as “mysteries:” beautiful, artistic forms made by something once living and just out of view. There is something metaphorical – say, even philosophical – about it being inside and me being outside that thin stony layer that really strikes me and almost holds my attention greater than any fossil revealed.
I would like to learn a little more about your studio practice, do you work on multiple projects at once, do you find that you stop researching and focus on work at some point? Insights into your working style would be really interesting to hear.
Generally speaking, I have always worked on multiple projects at once, if it means more than one artwork at a time. However, a specific medium or theme is probably the rule. In other words, I’m a fairly single-dimensional worker and I’m most productive when I can immerse myself uninterrupted into one process. In the past, when working on egg temperas or collages, I had a show destination in mind, which set the rough number of pieces, a deadline, and a need that they all relate to one another in some way. This was constructive insofar as it made parameters for the working process. I decided on the medium in advance and tried to develop a totality for the viewer out of “pieces” of art that made some sense together. Today, that process has changed some. With less show pressure and, to a degree, less determination to make an object out of every idea, the realm of experimentation is much more open. It’s also more terrifying. I’ve noticed a progression – despite my dancing around in media, image, and references – toward a more process/material-based production. Twenty years ago, I was making my own panels and then my own paint with egg yolk and dry pigments. A decade passed and I was utilizing the same pigments for a wider array of hand-made paints, as well as diversifying the substrates on which I painted. I was hand-building more of the structure of the object, at the same time letting the paint material be more intrinsically itself. Now, I have come so far as to mine and process my own pigments. Today, I see an inherent meaning in the source of the pigments I alluded to but didn’t fully realize before. The source, the land itself, becomes content in the work. I suppose I’ve been in a protracted “research” phase for some time now. A major shift happened in my life, my home, my studio, and to my process just in the last years. I’ve tried my hand in art writing, show-curating, and consulting in private collections. I have immersed myself into a broader conceptual process that is just now producing physical work. As to the question, it is indeed multifaceted and probably more “open” than ever before. One series I call “Coal Drawings” involves the resurrection of extinct plant forms as ghostly renderings made from coal dust and gum arabic binder. Another series is of chemically similar mineral pigments I collected in geographical areas very different by politics, culture, and history, juxtaposed to draw attention to the human impression of the landscape. Again, the relationship to the land is the complex and shifting piece of the equation.
If I could summarize it, perhaps surprisingly, only 10 – 15% of studio time is the actual making of an art object, the remainder is the administration, the packing and unpacking, the moving of art around, study and research. I do work on multiple pieces at once within a theme. Artworks that return to me from a show or gallery storage run the risk of being altered – say, “updated,” – so I guess this means that the artistic process is really ongoing.
You work across a range of medium and often work in mixed media as well as 2d works on paper. Do you find that you engage with creating in 2-d vs. mixed media differently? Do the different forms of creation lead you to different subject matter or content?
Yes. In the theme of “matter” and materiality, some pigments and substrates seem to have an inherent quality that dictates their use. I don’t mean this simply by the plasticity as an art vehicle, rather, what history they carry forward. For example, I’m experimenting with coal dust and carvings in coal that I sense will ultimately be a form of sculpture. I’ve already learned to paint and draw with coal, but it’s almost as if the medium is begging to be itself and be reconstituted to some form and presence of the original. The element of time portrayed by “decay” in my earliest works also exposed the medium in its elemental state. Physical stresses weathered the surface to where my participation was more of a respectful and gentle negotiation with something that was already happening on its own. Again, I think, this is the push and pull of the “known” in material and something we are trying to make it represent. My current work is the furthering of many processes: paper layers soaking in buckets of water, rusting ironstone nodules exposed to air, and crushing elements underneath the weight of 1200 or so pounds of sedimentary rock. I’ve always tried to present the ethereal, by light or symbol, in contrast to the rootedness of paint, paper, and the physical picture plane. I’ve tried to assist a figural form to levitate above the page. Again, all of this is metaphorical for our own mortal condition and the elusiveness of our aspirations.
There is also a very tactile and relief portion to the materials themselves. Sometimes I end up encasing a portion of the painting or collage out of sight for the sake of the overall work, and therefore remain the only one who knows what is there: the private archaeology of its (or my) becoming.
What artists or movements are your artistic inspirations?
Oh boy. This is huge. While I was an undergraduate at Berkeley studying biology, I saw an exhibition at the University Museum of Martin Puryear’s small, rather abstract and hand-made wood sculptures called “Boys Toys.” I remember liking how they resembled tools and, in some cases, the very instruments that carved them. There was a craft element, as well as a grounded reference to the productive “making” of things that I appreciated. Of course, they were elegant in form, too, but never departed too far from, say, being out of my grandfather’s shop and woodshed. As I looked deeper into art history, as well as to contemporary art, I gravitated to artists who combined process, materials, site, and action (even performance) in their work, to the extent where land and body were in some kind of dance. I thought about the primal and minimal aspects of Richard Long’s “walks,” how he utilizes materials specific to the locality of the site-specific work, and how he addresses the impermanence of everything. His works are powerful with the gentlest of touch. Alberto Burri was probably a big influence early on, as was Kurt Schwitters: Dada and Arte Povera, each significant in the way they reference history and memory, as well as materiality. I’ve been re-reading the writing of Robert Smithson to get a feel again, in his terms, for “site” and “non-site” art gestures as they relate to time and location. Edgar Degas’ monotype landscapes blow my mind for their modern appearance and economical use of medium and information. As with Whistler and his nocturne paintings, they capture a spirit or essence of something or someplace by leaving much for the viewer to fill in between the “seen” or “scene” and what the painted image presents. Material and process come forward to almost steal the moment, but in doing so, the stage is completely wide open for experience. Richard Serra can change air pressure with his sculptures that take my breath away every time. These don’t reference nature, they are nature. And the physicality of the body, our mortality and relationship to nature, is exquisitely addressed by the sculptures and prints of Kiki Smith. So, it’s hard for me to think of an encompassing movement that most influences me. Rather, I look at the relationship of the artist or his or her process and the effect the work has on me from a material and experiential standpoint. In this current social and political climate, artists that take a more activist position, but maintain integrity to message and audience, are becoming very interesting to me. I saw a show at Locust Projects in Miami a couple years back of Theaster Gates. It was practically a recreation of a pottery studio, where the rhythm of production provided a space to think about work, home, and community. His projects and those of Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, I think hit the right tone for awareness and change. So, I guess it’s less what my art works resemble and more the practitioners of a process I relate to or aspire to that influence me. Let’s go back to my very first and probably only, true mentor in art, Robert Hartman. Just as Robert Smithson thought the ideal places for land art were those where destruction or human intervention took place, Professor Hartman took it a step further and started documenting these spaces with infrared film, often from the window of his two-seater plane, capturing the heat imprint of all the elements and disruptions in the landscape. These are the present, yet often invisible things around us. We influence that relationship, and it, in turn, influences us. The concept of capturing this transitory nature of our world interests me deeply.
There is something rather miraculous about this time period of fossils in Illinois. In order to collect the stones for study, I have to retrace the path of the coal miners. I am looking for ironstone concretions made by a chemical process and tossed aside as overburden to the mining process. (Once an organism – plant or animal - is trapped in a silty mud layer, a mixture of iron in the sediment or leaching up from the buried peat and bicarbonates from ocean water create a chemical cocoon. This atmosphere around the organism hardens over millions of years into stone.) When the nodules are collected, I start a process of soaking them in water, freezing them, unfreezing them, soaking them again… going through multiple cycles until they are open. I could hit the potentially fossiliferous stone with a hammer, but risk destroying its contents. By freezing and thawing over and over, it will hopefully delicately pop open like a clam shell. Now, half of the finds will be empty, others will be broken or “rusted” by the elements, but as I think about it, it was also aggressive coal mining that made these fossils available. It is ironic because coal burning is polluting, essentially compromising our future, but is also making available this incredible evidence of prehistoric life on Earth. Further, I have a large collection of stones that I will never attempt to open. In a way, they are more valuable to me as “mysteries:” beautiful, artistic forms made by something once living and just out of view. There is something metaphorical – say, even philosophical – about it being inside and me being outside that thin stony layer that really strikes me and almost holds my attention greater than any fossil revealed.
I would like to learn a little more about your studio practice, do you work on multiple projects at once, do you find that you stop researching and focus on work at some point? Insights into your working style would be really interesting to hear.
Generally speaking, I have always worked on multiple projects at once, if it means more than one artwork at a time. However, a specific medium or theme is probably the rule. In other words, I’m a fairly single-dimensional worker and I’m most productive when I can immerse myself uninterrupted into one process. In the past, when working on egg temperas or collages, I had a show destination in mind, which set the rough number of pieces, a deadline, and a need that they all relate to one another in some way. This was constructive insofar as it made parameters for the working process. I decided on the medium in advance and tried to develop a totality for the viewer out of “pieces” of art that made some sense together. Today, that process has changed some. With less show pressure and, to a degree, less determination to make an object out of every idea, the realm of experimentation is much more open. It’s also more terrifying. I’ve noticed a progression – despite my dancing around in media, image, and references – toward a more process/material-based production. Twenty years ago, I was making my own panels and then my own paint with egg yolk and dry pigments. A decade passed and I was utilizing the same pigments for a wider array of hand-made paints, as well as diversifying the substrates on which I painted. I was hand-building more of the structure of the object, at the same time letting the paint material be more intrinsically itself. Now, I have come so far as to mine and process my own pigments. Today, I see an inherent meaning in the source of the pigments I alluded to but didn’t fully realize before. The source, the land itself, becomes content in the work. I suppose I’ve been in a protracted “research” phase for some time now. A major shift happened in my life, my home, my studio, and to my process just in the last years. I’ve tried my hand in art writing, show-curating, and consulting in private collections. I have immersed myself into a broader conceptual process that is just now producing physical work. As to the question, it is indeed multifaceted and probably more “open” than ever before. One series I call “Coal Drawings” involves the resurrection of extinct plant forms as ghostly renderings made from coal dust and gum arabic binder. Another series is of chemically similar mineral pigments I collected in geographical areas very different by politics, culture, and history, juxtaposed to draw attention to the human impression of the landscape. Again, the relationship to the land is the complex and shifting piece of the equation.
If I could summarize it, perhaps surprisingly, only 10 – 15% of studio time is the actual making of an art object, the remainder is the administration, the packing and unpacking, the moving of art around, study and research. I do work on multiple pieces at once within a theme. Artworks that return to me from a show or gallery storage run the risk of being altered – say, “updated,” – so I guess this means that the artistic process is really ongoing.
You work across a range of medium and often work in mixed media as well as 2d works on paper. Do you find that you engage with creating in 2-d vs. mixed media differently? Do the different forms of creation lead you to different subject matter or content?
Yes. In the theme of “matter” and materiality, some pigments and substrates seem to have an inherent quality that dictates their use. I don’t mean this simply by the plasticity as an art vehicle, rather, what history they carry forward. For example, I’m experimenting with coal dust and carvings in coal that I sense will ultimately be a form of sculpture. I’ve already learned to paint and draw with coal, but it’s almost as if the medium is begging to be itself and be reconstituted to some form and presence of the original. The element of time portrayed by “decay” in my earliest works also exposed the medium in its elemental state. Physical stresses weathered the surface to where my participation was more of a respectful and gentle negotiation with something that was already happening on its own. Again, I think, this is the push and pull of the “known” in material and something we are trying to make it represent. My current work is the furthering of many processes: paper layers soaking in buckets of water, rusting ironstone nodules exposed to air, and crushing elements underneath the weight of 1200 or so pounds of sedimentary rock. I’ve always tried to present the ethereal, by light or symbol, in contrast to the rootedness of paint, paper, and the physical picture plane. I’ve tried to assist a figural form to levitate above the page. Again, all of this is metaphorical for our own mortal condition and the elusiveness of our aspirations.
There is also a very tactile and relief portion to the materials themselves. Sometimes I end up encasing a portion of the painting or collage out of sight for the sake of the overall work, and therefore remain the only one who knows what is there: the private archaeology of its (or my) becoming.
What artists or movements are your artistic inspirations?
Oh boy. This is huge. While I was an undergraduate at Berkeley studying biology, I saw an exhibition at the University Museum of Martin Puryear’s small, rather abstract and hand-made wood sculptures called “Boys Toys.” I remember liking how they resembled tools and, in some cases, the very instruments that carved them. There was a craft element, as well as a grounded reference to the productive “making” of things that I appreciated. Of course, they were elegant in form, too, but never departed too far from, say, being out of my grandfather’s shop and woodshed. As I looked deeper into art history, as well as to contemporary art, I gravitated to artists who combined process, materials, site, and action (even performance) in their work, to the extent where land and body were in some kind of dance. I thought about the primal and minimal aspects of Richard Long’s “walks,” how he utilizes materials specific to the locality of the site-specific work, and how he addresses the impermanence of everything. His works are powerful with the gentlest of touch. Alberto Burri was probably a big influence early on, as was Kurt Schwitters: Dada and Arte Povera, each significant in the way they reference history and memory, as well as materiality. I’ve been re-reading the writing of Robert Smithson to get a feel again, in his terms, for “site” and “non-site” art gestures as they relate to time and location. Edgar Degas’ monotype landscapes blow my mind for their modern appearance and economical use of medium and information. As with Whistler and his nocturne paintings, they capture a spirit or essence of something or someplace by leaving much for the viewer to fill in between the “seen” or “scene” and what the painted image presents. Material and process come forward to almost steal the moment, but in doing so, the stage is completely wide open for experience. Richard Serra can change air pressure with his sculptures that take my breath away every time. These don’t reference nature, they are nature. And the physicality of the body, our mortality and relationship to nature, is exquisitely addressed by the sculptures and prints of Kiki Smith. So, it’s hard for me to think of an encompassing movement that most influences me. Rather, I look at the relationship of the artist or his or her process and the effect the work has on me from a material and experiential standpoint. In this current social and political climate, artists that take a more activist position, but maintain integrity to message and audience, are becoming very interesting to me. I saw a show at Locust Projects in Miami a couple years back of Theaster Gates. It was practically a recreation of a pottery studio, where the rhythm of production provided a space to think about work, home, and community. His projects and those of Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, I think hit the right tone for awareness and change. So, I guess it’s less what my art works resemble and more the practitioners of a process I relate to or aspire to that influence me. Let’s go back to my very first and probably only, true mentor in art, Robert Hartman. Just as Robert Smithson thought the ideal places for land art were those where destruction or human intervention took place, Professor Hartman took it a step further and started documenting these spaces with infrared film, often from the window of his two-seater plane, capturing the heat imprint of all the elements and disruptions in the landscape. These are the present, yet often invisible things around us. We influence that relationship, and it, in turn, influences us. The concept of capturing this transitory nature of our world interests me deeply.