Artist Interviews

Neil Forrest is an artist and professor at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and taught at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts in Norway. He has exhibited at the Denver Art Museum, the Museum Hilversum in The Netherlands, and the Cheongju Biennale in Korea, and has received Established Artist’s grants from the Canada Council and the Norwegian Artistic Research Council.

The Washingtonian Service was on view at Hillyer on January 3 – February 2, 2020.

There are a lot of different ideas explored in your exhibition at Hillyer. Can you give us a short summary about The Washingtonian Service?

I wanted to discover something specific to Washington and incorporate it into my own interests around architecture, landscape and pop culture. The Washingtonian Service hosts the chance collision between a celestial object with a contested landmark, giving me a chance to forecast a cosmic problem that might have originated in an artistic disagreement about a building.

You are from Canada and your work references a Washington, D.C. landmark. How did you decide to make the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library the centerpiece of your exhibition?

Part of my juvenilia was to draw buildings. My father’s desk was perpetually covered in blueprints of institutional buildings, and these severe representations became my boyhood companions. Much later and in conversation with architecture colleagues, architect Mies van der Rohe would be discussed for the way he used the I-beam as a kind of signature for his vision of modernism. He co-opted an element of structural engineering as ornament, and configured his buildings into elegant monoliths. Mies presented a jarring revision of architecture.

In the past few years I’ve tried to use the notion of ‘place’ as a means of generating ideas. An artist friend of mine always studies geological maps prior to travel. I look for architecture that I can visit. In preparation for Hillyer, I began searching in journals for something that formed Washington’s modern identity, and found newspaper articles about the controversy over Mies’ selection for this important civic commission. It was immediately clear the Mies’ Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library was the artistic irritant that I wanted.

The MLK Library was a work of modernism unlike any other in D.C. at the time, for which every citizen could form an opinion. People did. Academics and aficionados might appreciate it, the city’s youth might come to love it as a new home for their imaginations, and yet others would find it dark, unwelcoming and even detestable. The burden of selecting an emblem to represent the aspirations of a golden age is fraught, and the 1960’s MLK Library spotlights the risk of art and architecture in creating an identity. For me, the Mies-designed library became a kind of antagonist.

As I began to think about the Hillyer exhibition, the idea to formulate a story around a miniature building reminded me of the greatest centerpiece of all, Napoleon’s Egyptian Service commissioned for Josephine. I went to London to see it in person as I started the project, having known it through photographs. This ceramic paraphernalia was meant to glorify his (in)famous expedition to conquer Egypt, and was composed of exquisite replica temples and monuments, plus a fleet of painted dinnerware. My installation would work in this tradition of European centerpieces and would exploit the same whiteness of Sèvres porcelain. This would distinguish my model from the black finish that Mies favoured in the actual MLK library.

To make a model that might come close to the precision of Sèvres, I arranged for accurate digital drawings (which would also respect the Mies commission), and these files were exported to a CNC machine in order to mill plaster molds for the porcelain model. This was undertaken by a talented student of mine in Seoul, South Korea.

As Washington itself is the place of contests, I came to think that the Mies’ library was much like a stadium or even the Coliseum. Eventually it became a catastrophe story-line that was organized around a celestial body that collides with the earth – and into the library. When I went into my studio and experimented with how to make the necessary impact, I realized it needed the force of a real collision to be convincing. I would make a heavy clay ‘meteor’ and drop it from a ladder. A dozen test drops later, I had punctured a proper hole, as though by a meteor strike. Since I had filmed the test ‘drops’, I decided to loop all of them together and project them in the gallery, hoping to pull back the curtain on the artistic process.

With the MLK model are other celestial bodies who I auditioned for the role of primary collider: there is an astronaut (represented by their helmet); a ‘bunhead’ (the head of young ballerina with her knot of hair); and lastly, a portrait of Musa McKim (American painter/poet, married to Philip Guston, a celebrated and controversial painter). I couldn’t bring myself to choose just one, so I included them all on a bench behind the centerpiece.

Ceramics is the underpinning of all of your work. You also included a performative element in this exhibition. What draws you to ceramic work? Do you always include ceramic elements or do you sometimes use other mediums (such as the video in your Hillyer exhibition?

Yes, ceramics and drawing are my main tools. I inherited my love of drawing from my father, and it was him who brought home a bag of wet clay from a Montreal ceramic sculptor when I was thirteen. I was immediately enraptured and never lost interest in the medium, and later became fond of its rather peculiar history and artistic discourse. As my work has taken the form of installations for a long time, I am careful to ask myself the most appropriate way to make something, and with what materials.

After debating this thoroughly with myself, I usually re-negotiate the content around what I imagine to be interesting in clay. Contemporary art mostly dictates the concept for a work of art has a logical material outcome, but I think that notion is didactic and prescriptive. Disciplinarity should have novel outcomes as well.

I arrived at this particular set of questions because of the physical dialogue with the plasticity of clay, and you soon realize that this elastic material pushes you in certain ways, towards a certain vocabulary of form. And form will lead to content. It’s very hard to know what comes first, but most of my ideas succumb to the immediacy of clay. Ceramics supports the gamut of sensibilities for the artist – it can be rough and expressionistic but also precise and cold, and I attempted this range for the Hillyer installation. I wanted some pieces to be rougher, some more elegant and crafted.

Ceramic glazes can be engineered for a wide colour spectrum and a highly unique palette because refractory (heat resistant) pigments behave differently when mixed within different fluxes. For the glazed spheres and portrait heads in The Washingtonian Service, I brushed different lead glaze layers and when fired in the kiln, the minute particles of pigment were drawn downward by gravity at different rates – these glazes really move and mix in the high heat. When cooled, the result is highly variegated colour with striations, veins, staining and dripping. I am passionate about fritted lead glazes (lead is now manufactured to eliminate toxicity), and because lead produces a remarkably shiny glass with a powerful impact on colour. When one becomes experienced in clay and glazes, you realize that it’s’ a charismatic medium so completely dependent on the geology and mineralogy of this crazy planet.

The work you showed at Hillyer was very specific to the city it was being exhibited in. Will you show this specific group of work again in other locations? If so, will you reinterpret it to be site-specific?

A curator in Arizona had told me that one of my works would not appeal to his audience – it was based on four ships used by the Norwegian heroes of early arctic expeditions. Although we settled on a different work, I began to see that place-specific or place-referential installations could be deemed to have limited interest beyond their borders.

Being too particular, an artist might alienate an audience if no one grasps the idea or cannot find their own relationship to it. It could be argued that it’s incumbent on an artist or writer to develop the reasons why readers should care about Tacoma or Toronto. Yet, we read novels that scavenge the uniqueness of Tacoma or Toronto to great effect.

One of my favourite artworks is by the French artist Pierre Huyghe and entitled “This is not a time for dreaming”. Had he not made it a captivating and beautifully naïve puppet show, the presentation could have been opaque to viewers who didn’t know him or Le Corbusier. I saw a single photo of the exhibition and was enthralled. Only later was I to understand that Huyghe used marionettes to tell a fanciful story of meeting the architect Le Corbusier (also French, and who had much earlier won the commission for the Carpenter Center at Harvard, where Huyghe was invited to exhibit). Even though my knowledge of this Huyghe’s artwork is now richer for knowing his motivation, my narrow interpretation didn’t deter me from immediately loving it.

The question of how much we should know about an artwork is addressed by the thinker Susan Sontag in her essay “Against Interpretation”. She cautions that form must not be separated from content, and that meanings can be over-interpreted and suffocating. It seems to me that artists connect things, and sometimes the connections are not designed to be logical, and in fact depend and benefit by their discursive and inconclusive nature. This is a very long way of saying that I have no plans to modify my installation were I to exhibit in a different venue, and it would be a Washington story wherever it goes. In the future I might add or subtract, but that would be more about impulse and the propulsive instinct to evolve. And if The Washingtonian Service is exhibited only once, I’m grateful to have had the opportunity.

What’s next for you? Do you have any exhibitions or projects you are currently working on?

I’m developing an idea for an exhibition by curator Anna-Marie Larsen whose overarching question is, “what are the connections to be made between ceramics and architecture”?

My current plan involves long, tapered Greek-type amphorae leaning against a raised viewing platform. I’m imagining this as a way to express the interior anatomy of a wooden ship hull – and am therefore proposing that ships are a class of architecture. I’m using both the viewing platform and contours of the amphorae to imply the curvature of the hull.

Usually amphorae carry cooking oil and grain, but inside mine will contain small models, partially submerged in water, describing several contrasting stories. Water is a massively suggestive environment: unstable, formless and immersive. It shifts the narrative.

Some of the amphorae models will be sourced from Canadian history – one that I’m thinking about is the loss of the Franklin ships in the quest for Northwest Passage in the high arctic, but another story is more personal, and I’m considering a portrait of my mother. Each of these memories are in my possession…I belong to both but in different ways. This project would be like constructing a personal grotto, and the grotto is a gesamtkunstwerk: an ark, tomb and library wrapped into one.

Amarist is a creative studio based in Barcelona, Spain, founded by artists and designers Arán Lozano and Clara Campo. Childhood friends in a small village in the Pyrenees, Lozano and Campo grew up surrounded by nature and a craftsmanship ethos. Soon they began sharing creative concepts and ideas, and eventually formed an artistic partnership. Amarist Studio enjoys blurring the boundaries between contemporary art, design, and craft, with singular works that are both richly evocative and functional. In 2018, they were featured in Forbes’ “30 Under 30” Arts & Culture Europe edition. They were finalists for the 2018 Global Art Awards and the Bombay Sapphire Artisan Series, and were honored with a Silver award and an Iron award at the A’Design Competition. In 2018, they were selected to exhibit at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, and in 2019 they exhibited at the Priveekollektie Gallery in Heusden, Netherlands. Welcome? is Amarist’s first solo exhibition in the United States.

Welcome? was on view at Hillyer on February 7 – March 1, 2020.

You work as a duo and have other members that are a part of your design studio. Can you give us some background on how you started working together, and how you maintain this relationship now? Do you always work collaboratively on each piece, or are some works created by one of you individually?

Our work relationship started casually, due to the interest and passion of both for the art and design worlds. Little by little, it grew and it professionalized to what is now Amarist Studio.

We always work as a team; we are both involved in the entire creation process, from the conceptual part to the physical execution. We have not set a specific role for each one, but we have organized ourselves in a very natural way to monitor and complement the entire creative process.

You create visually powerful work that invites reflections of the self and society but also reveals the consequences of our actions and interests as a society. Particularly in your exhibition at Hillyer, Welcome?, you focused on one of the most pressing issues of our time—immigration. What kind of responses towards your work have you witnessed? What do you hope the viewer takes away from your work?

When we create a work like Welcome? we try to make the viewers reflect and question themselves. No one leaves the exhibition indifferent and usually everyone has a conversation with themselves about the contradictions we are made of, each one of us as an individual, and as a whole as a society.

We have had all types of reactions towards our work; people have cried, people have laughed, people have sparkled very interesting and deep debates, and a few even have insulted us. The most beautiful thing is when dialogues and discussions are generated between strangers, they are all in the same place, observing the same work, but each one does it with a different gaze and background.

Since the end of your exhibition, the world has seen drastic changes due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Spain, in particular, has been hit very hard. Many of the artists here in the US are just starting to deal with what this might mean to their art-making practice. Can you tell us how you have been dealing with it? Much of your work involved complicated fabrication and needs a studio space to create and build. Are you looking at other ways to shift your practice during this time of quarantine?

As observers and thinkers is thought-provoking to see how the current pandemic shows a new social and economic paradigm, it is very interesting to observe the different actions that governments, companies and citizens are taking to overcome the crisis and to adapt to the ‘new normal’. We are also devoting a lot of attention to analyze and try to understand how this health crisis is affecting the global powers and relationships between countries, at all levels, and how it might bring a new shift in world’s center of gravity.

Regarding our daily work, our small structure allows us to adapt to different circumstances. We also do not work linearly; we are always working at the same time on short-term projects and medium or long-term projects.

So in the current situation, with a total lockdown in place in our country, we can’t work on our short-term projects like the physical production of sculptures, but we can and we are working on our long-term projects, developing new ideas and concepts to be developed in the future.

In addition, in our field it is important to be in a constant process of research and learning, so we are now also taking the opportunity to expand that knowledge, learning new skills and how to use innovative digital tools as augmented reality.

In situations of global shutdown and social distancing like this, where the exhibition spaces like museums, galleries, fairs are closed, Augmented Reality will play a very important role and it will definitively be a crucial tool to exhibit artists’ work and to bring art closer to the general public. It is a tool that will literally bring art to people’s homes.

Is there anything else you would like to tell us about? What you are working on now? Dreams for future projects, etc?

Right now we are developing and planning what the studio’s work will be next year. We have been immersed in a research process on the geological formation of the Alabaster stone in the ‘Ribera del Ebro’ (Spain), its use throughout history and the mineral extraction process in the quarries near our studio. The result is a series of creations that will transport the viewer to a landscape of unknown nature, where each sculpture will seem to reveal the main element of the molecular composition of the Alabaster Stone: Water.

Through this concept we are also working on pieces at an architectural scale for public spaces.

Check out Amarist’s Augmented Reality Project HERE and watch the video below to see it in action:

Originally from Silicon Valley, CA, Suzy Kopf was a resident of NYC for eight years and currently lives and works in Baltimore, MD. She completed her MFA in studio art at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2016, and holds a BFA from Parsons and a BA in art history from Eugene Lang College. She is the recipient of numerous residency fellowships, including Kala, The Studios at Mass MoCA, Playa, VCCA, Byrdcliffe, Hambidge, Elsewhere, and the Vermont Studio Center, among others. She has received a Design History Society Travel Grant, as well as several research grants to support her practice. Kopf is a cofounder of the Gowanus Swim Society, a Brooklyn, NY-based art collective. In addition to her own studio practice, Kopf is the Director of Sales and Marketing for BmoreArt, a regional arts publication and website. She also teaches watercolor painting and museum studies at Johns Hopkins University and the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Bow and Arrow was on view at Hillyer on February 7 – March 1, 2020.

Tell us about your solo show at Hillyer, Bow and Arrow. What was your intent behind the materials used and the combination of the sculpture and 2D works?

I saw my show at Hillyer as an opportunity to experiment since I had about 14 months from when I found out I had been selected for a solo show to when the show opened. I had already made the oil paintings but knew I wanted to make some watercolors as well. I hadn’t made a sculpture since undergrad, but I thought a three-dimensional element could really activate the center of the gallery in a compelling way, and get visitors to walk the entire room and spend more time with all the work.

Studying midcentury building and design decisions, I have been obsessed with breezeblocks, the decorative cinderblocks made of cement. They are used to promote airflow and create a sense of partial privacy between public and private spaces. They are a shorthand for midcentury leisure and design ideals. Breezeblocks are also a study in contrasts; mass produced yet difficult to make and transport, they are heavy yet incredibly fragile, functional yet decorative. Once widely available, breezeblocks are now made by only a handful of companies globally, providing yet another contrast of scarcity in abundance. I recreated a breezeblock pattern Bow and Arrow in Foamular that I learned how to cut on the CNC router. It was important to me that the sculpture be made out of a lightweight readily-available housing material, so Foamular insulation seemed like a poetic solution that connects to the breezeblock walls seen all over the world. Hilariously, it might have been too convincing! A lot of visitors to my show assumed it was cement and got way too close.

In preparation for Bow and Arrow, you returned to Puerto Rico in February 2018, 18 months after Hurricane Maria to continue a series of work, Dream House, you’ve been developing since 2014 on planned housing suburbs in the United States. What drew you to create work focusing on Puerto Rico’s Levittown?

I first visited Levittown, Puerto Rico when I was in PR to attend a wedding in 2017. I had read that it is the best preserved of the 4 original Levittowns (the others are in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York) and I was immediately struck by how eerily similar and different this Levittown was from the other 3. Sure, there were about 5 different house layouts repeating through a neighborhood but the use of cement breezeblocks, the fully grown tropical plants and the vibrant colors homeowners have used to decorate their homes root this place as firmly in the Carribean. It felt familiar but contrasted so much with the neighborhoods in the states I knew immediately it was a compelling subject for me.

The history of Puerto Rico is deeply immersed in colonization and Levittown, PR is a midcentury reminder of that— these single family dwellings with a fenced front and backyard and a carport speak more to mainland values and commercial interests than Latin American ones. Still, I love it as an example of how planned housing can be adapted to how people actually live in a place. In the years since Levittown, PR sold its first house in 1963, the place has been reclaimed by the residents from the developer’s plans— it is their home and they have altered it to serve them. 95% of what I saw in Levittown 18 months after Hurricane Maria (when the power was still out in San Juan) was rebuilding and reclaiming space.

Has the work and research from Bow and Arrow led to other projects you are interested in exploring? What are you working on now?

When I am working on a series for exhibition, I typically spend at least 6 months learning as much as I can about my chosen subject, which involves traveling, visiting archives and libraries and talking with people to get their first hand accounts whenever possible. I have my next 2-3 research subjects picked out but much of that work is impossible or would be extra challenging with COVID-19 restrictions, so instead I have been focusing my energy in the first few months of stay-at-home on some of the admin tasks involved in being an artist. I wrote a piece about actionable steps anyone can take with my colleague Mary Negro. I recently concluded a large sale of 103 works on paper to benefit the USPS and the #artistsupportpledge, a pledge any artist can take to spend $200 buying the work of other artists for every $1,000 they make. Just now, as we get into week seven of stay at home, I’m thinking about painting and collaging again and being in my studio creatively. I have a commission to complete and then I’m ready to take out some LIFE magazine cutouts and get to work experimenting. Like Mary and I say in our article, now is probably not the time to start a really big project, but a good time to try something new that feels fresh.

Since the end of your exhibition, the world has seen drastic changes due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Many artists we have heard from are just starting to deal with what this might mean to their art-making practice. Have you had to adjust your studio practice in any way?

The way I think about my work hasn’t really changed but my motivation to paint as the world falls apart has been rather low. Being an artist is a lot of things and there are seasons of production and seasons of where it makes more sense to reorganize your work space and do Youtube pilates videos. Like everyone else right now, I am trying to be gentle with myself and not focus on what is or isn’t getting done too much. This has been hard for me but luckily, I’m still over-employed right now and have had lots of WFH tasks everyday.

When we were looking for our house, my partner and I knew we wanted at least a two bedroom so one bedroom could be my studio and that has worked out really well. It’s been harder to focus during stay at home because he’s downstairs in the living room on his WFH Zoom calls and I’m upstairs in my studio on mine with our dog, Theodore Roosevelt running between us asking to go on a long walk but I am grateful for the company of this small chaos. I used to have to spend so much money on studio rent, utilities and transportation/parking; having a home studio has been a significant savings for me! I tell all my artist friends, crammed into shared spaces in Brooklyn and DC—”Come to Baltimore! We have space for you!”

You founded an art collective Gowanus Swim Society in 2014 with your cofounder K Haskell and ten other Brooklyn-based artists. Can you tell us about how that came about and what it means to be a part of this collective?

K and I were both members of a shared studio space in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Gowanus which has since relocated to Sunset Park due to gentrification. I told K that, despite living in New York City, the assumed art center of the world, for seven years, I was having trouble meeting other artists and wanted to create a sense of community where we were. We wrote up a manifesto and asked some acquaintances to join us for drinks and Gowanus Swim Society (GSS) was born. Since 2014, we’ve met monthly to organize exhibitions of our own work, curate other artists and hold one another accountable to goals in our own practices. We share resources and connections and go on an annual retreat together. Collectively, life has changed a lot in 6 years—we’ve seen several marriages, babies, a divorce, job changes, and many, many moves but our commitment to making work and meeting up remains. I think every artist should be part of at least one collective. In Baltimore, I’m part of Fluid Movement, a performance collective known best for our annual summer water ballet. Collectives are essentially big groups of chosen family who share an interest– what could be better?

Noel Kassewitz is a contemporary artist and third-generation Floridian currently based in Washington, DC. After receiving her BFA in Studio Painting from the University of Florida and working with the prestigious Rubell Museum, she later completed an artist residency in Carrara, Italy with marble master sculptor Boutros Romhein.

Kassewitz has guest written for Union of Concerned Scientists and her work has been featured in the Washington Post, Huffington Post, Financial Times, and PBS WETA. Kassewitz has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally, with recent solo exhibitions at Arlington Arts Center (Arlington, VA) and IA&A at Hillyer (Washington, DC), along with exhibitions in Miami, FL; Chicago, Il; and State College, PA; as well as in Milan and Bologna, Italy. Her work was recently acquired by the University of Maryland’s CAPP program for their permanent public art collection.

Rococo Remastered was on view at Hillyer on January 3 – February 2, 2020.

Your work examines your own relationship as an artist with a rapidly changing cultural and environmental landscape, often creating work that simultaneously serves as “artwork and a survival tool.” Tell us about what this means to you.

I think there is a lot of incredible artwork being made that explores and exploits new advances in technology, but I chose to go in the other direction for a specific reason. We live in a world where constant adaptation at breathtaking speeds has become the norm. I find it interesting trying to navigate this digital moment in a much slower paced physical body and find a lot of correlations to that within traditional forms of artwork like painting and sculpture. Simultaneously, the majority of the world’s population does not have the luxury of simply “moving somewhere else” or using technology to save themselves in climate crisis situations and will instead be forced to jury-rig solutions to survive and adapt to newly inhospitable environments.

Finding ways to adapt, or maladapt, my works to a world rapidly leaving them behind has become an interesting metaphorical concept for me. In weaving, sewing, painting, dying, and salvaging materials, the studio becomes part wistful shrine, part research and development lab for continuous adaptations and augmentations needed for painting to survive. About three years ago, I started exploring various ways to make paintings climate change ready, particularly in regards to rising sea levels. I have spent time extensively researching materials and consulted with an expert art conservator. I learned to weave my own canvas and embed buoys and other found flotation devices into the fabric of my paintings, as exemplified in the series They say hope floats, but I’d rather be sure. I have tried approaches as simple and playful as wrapping existing paintings in common pool noodles and as complex as creating new waterproof paintings using synthetic sailcloth & marine foam, as in the piece Rococo Remastered: Sunset on the Empire, which I used to float down the Potomac River in August of 2018.

Your exhibition at Hillyer, Rococo Remastered drew connections between climate change, art historical references, and Miami pool culture. Those seem like three very different concepts, can you tell us about how these intersect for you and how you brought them together for a cohesive exhibition and body of work?

I know they can seem so different initially, but theres an important common thread that ties them all together: namely the complacency and absurdities that accompany a late capitalist society. As a big believer in the cyclical nature of things, I often find myself looking to the past in an attempt to understand our current times and it was diving deeper into art history that I discovered our current moment’s historic parallel. This discovery is what launched my color palette in a new direction and began this body of works.

Rococo, is the term used for a particular artistic style that was very popular in the few decades leading up to the the French Revolution. It was characterized by a pastel palette and a focus on the playful, decadent, and frivolous by a governing aristocracy who were intently ignoring the warning signs of a system out of balance. Then the French Revolution happened… which rebalanced the system, but at a very bloody cost. I can’t help but relate this chapter of history to the current one we are in. There is growing inequality between the classes in society and an increasingly unstable climate, both politically and environmentally. What caught my eye artistically was that pastel colors were suddenly in vogue again. It even had a name, “Millennial Pink,” and unlike typical color trends it was popular year after year after year. Is it a pattern that we seek these colors to soothe or fool ourselves as outside pressures builds?

My hometown of Miami is the natural stage for this story to play out upon. Sea levels are rising, without a doubt, and as one of the “canary in the coal mine” cities Miami is now regularly flooding. Yet, decked out in the pastels of Art Deco (which, in and of itself was a re-examination of the Rococo time period), I still see realtors attempting to sell properties as if the city isn’t in critical danger. Miami, with it’s over-the-top, celebrity-studded pool parties proudly flaunts its excessive and conspicuous consumption, which means the stage is being set for a clash between this late capitalist “the party must go on!” refusal to capitulate and the climate crisis. I believe people will still be in these pools, continuing to party even as the seas rise and pour in.

Which brings us back to this body of work. The Rococo Remastered series is a body of my climate-adapted works that draws its aesthetics from the Rococo. Frivolous, tongue-in-cheek, and hosting an abundance of pastel tones they nod towards to the absurdities of our contemporary late capitalist culture, while simultaneously being disaster-ready through their buoyant capabilities. It focuses on that moment when the boundary between pool and sea is erased and I use pool floats injected with expanding marine foam to recast some of the classical characters from famous Rococo paintings. For instance, Apollo the Sun God becomes a “bro” in sunglasses unaware that the party is ending. The nymph Europa, who is abducted into the sea by Poseidon disguised as a bull, warns of the dangers in allowing the temporary allure of a bull market economy to drag us all under with it. Putti, the cherubic figures often populating historic paintings, function as personifications of our naivety and the baser activities we engage in to distract ourselves.

Whether the coded warnings in these works are enough to get people to change in time remains to be seen. Yet, with the built-in survival capabilities of these paintings, one this is assured: regardless of what their collectors do, as sea levels rise and inundate cities, my paintings will float up and off the walls of their homes, bearing witness to this important time in history and surviving to be found at a later date.

Do you have any predictions as to how your work might evolve alongside climate change?

Our climate crisis is manifesting in many forms. Rising sea levels are one, but there are also stronger storms, longer droughts, torrential flash flooding, and severe wildfires. These all can then ripple into food shortages, destabilization of governing systems, and widespread immigration crisis. There’s a lot to unpack in a situation of this magnitude and I can see a lifetime devoted to the attempt. I’ve already begun exploring other modes of preservation, such as encasing drawings in sheets of resin – like prehistoric insects caught in amber. I hope that my works continue to evolve alongside the situation and through their cultural push-back and irony help highlight the fallacies we are unwilling to face while we still have time to understand, change course, and adapt.

You recently took a trip and were “off the grid”. Can you tell us about where you were and what that was like? Did it inspire or recharge you artistically?

The trip was quite the adventure — let tell you about the miracle that is the gray whales of San Ignacio Lagoon and how I lived at an eco-camp in the desert for a week all so I could experience it firsthand!

We arrived at Kuyima Eco Camp on March 10th after driving for 5 hours through the sparsely populated Baja peninsula of Mexico to the small mission town of San Ignacio, and then one further hour through truly remote desert terrain. Once at the eco-camp, you get assigned to a small cabin or tent. Since my mom, grandmother, and I were traveling together, we were assigned one of the cabins capable of sleeping three. The camp facilities are run by solar power and they had a composting toilet in addition to two “boat” toilets. You shower by filling a bucket with solar heated water and then take it to your shower stall. Needless to say, I was living out my environmentalist best life.

What’s so unbelievable about the experience is what happens once you go out in tiny boats into the waters of San Ignacio Lagoon. It is one of the only places in the world where whales choose to engage with people and come up to your boat! There’s no food involved, which makes the encounter so additionally surprising. But most surprising of all is that Gray whales were once hunted to the BRINK of extinction. Whalers dubbed Gray whales in particular the “Devil Fish” because they wouldn’t passively give up when harpooned but instead would capsize boats and do everything in their power to fight back. Gray whales are long lived enough that some of the whales from then would still be alive today… which makes their choice of peaceful interaction so unbelievable! Here we were horrifically killing them mere decades ago and, through an incredible act of forgiveness, they now interact with us and even bring their babies over to the boats. So you better believe that over the course of the next two and a half days I reached out to touch and kiss those whales every time they chose to interact with us. It gave me such hope. We might have just enough time left to learn to co-exist with nature and be forgiven for the path we’ve previously taken.

When you returned home, a lot had changed quickly due to the COVID-19. What was it like to return home and to your studio in the midst of this?

It was a whirlwind! Again, being off the grid meant none of us knew how much things were escalating. When I finally got cell service again, my fiancé was adamant that I needed to get back into the country ASAP since the borders with Mexico could close at any moment. Luckily we made it back into the country with no issue, but of course we all then had to quarantine ourselves since we’d been passing through major international airports. I’m a believer in quantum physics and the possibility of multiple timelines, and that is exactly what this felt like. We had left the country on one timeline and come back in another. It was pretty surreal. Since then I would guess that I’ve been experiencing things with much the same mixture of emotions as everyone else. I am the type of artist that needs time to synthesize and process, so the pandemic has been pretty disruptive to my creative practice. Not to mention it delayed or canceled a lot of projects that were important to financially supporting my endeavors, which has resulted in mountains of paperwork on my end.

I’m happy to report though that the creative juices are flowing again. Last week, I noticed an appreciable mental shift that pushed me back into the studio to create. I’m curious to see how the effects of this global event ripple into the works of artists over the coming months and years.

Tessa Click is an artist in Portland, Oregon. Originally from Carmel, Indiana, she received a master of fine arts in visual arts from Lesley University in Cambridge, MA, and a bachelor of science in visual art education from Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. She was a resident of Washington, DC between 2012 – 2020.

Search Party for Two was on view at Hillyer on January 3 – February 2, 2020.

Tell us about your exhibition at Hillyer, Search Party for Two. What is the work about? What was the importance of the materials you use?

This body of work seeks understanding of real-world conflicts through absurd characters, props, and settings as proxy. I wanted to create these non-linear narratives that had symbols and places that seemed both familiar and otherworldly at the same time. The work features some playful references, but is undercut with feelings of disequilibrium and uncertainty. Things aren’t always as they appear and sometimes, when we talk about one thing, we are really talking about something else.

While the shapes and forms may seem unrestrained, I actually tried to follow a set of self-imposed restrictions. I tried to break out of the standard rectangular format by beginning with shaped plywood or paper cut in irregular shapes. I wanted all of the pieces to feel teetering or off-balance, so I tried to avoid using level, horizon lines and instead combined multiple vantage points. In addition to playing with atypical forms, I was also influenced by set design, puppetry, and toy paper theaters. When I watch live theater, I love that actors and scenery are unapologetically artificial, and yet an audience suspends their disbelief long enough to enter into an invented world. In creating these two-dimensional surfaces with clear facades and pop-out features, I liked the idea that the flat surfaces were aspiring to become 3-D objects, but couldn’t quite transform into full sculptures. I’m really interested in figuring out how to transform humble materials like paper, plywood, and paint into unexpected forms.

The pieces in your exhibition had clever and humorous titles, such as It started off well and mostly went downhill from there and That Podcasting Conflict Popped Up Out of Nowhere. Tell us about how you come up with these names and what is the inspiration. 

Thank you for noticing the titles and asking more about that, I appreciate it! Sometimes, I wonder if the titles can almost become inside jokes with myself and exclude the viewer, which I am not trying to do. I’ve read about some writers or comedians that take note of real dialogue that they hear in their everyday life as a way to research for their work. When I can, I try to pay attention to interesting or absurd or visual phrases that I come across in my job, in entertainment, or in conversations. Thinking about wordplay and visually charged snippets of dialogue really amuses me. I expect that the titles of these pieces bring up more questions than provide answers, but I hope it encourages the viewer to make sense of narratives with limited viewpoints. Kind of like eavesdropping on an absurd conversation and coming away being amazed at how strange our world is. Sometimes, I come up with a title first and use it as a jumping off point for the content of a piece, and other times, I’ll appoint a title after finishing a piece. I think some people envision artists feeling so inspired and having these therapeutic, relaxing studio sessions, when oftentimes a studio practice includes a lot of labor and problem solving. The humorous titles remind me to keep playing and to keep looking for joy in the process.

What do you hope the viewer takes away from your work?

When I was making this work, I thought about the in-between times of dusk and dawn and how the light makes familiar scenes look and feel different. I want the viewer to be curious about the materials and unfinished narratives, and more importantly, walk away with more questions than answers.

You recently had a lot of big life changes—you moved across the country, got married, and there is a lot going on in the midst of the COVID-19 outbreak. Have you been able to focus at all on making new work? How are you connecting to your new arts community?

That is true, there have been a lot of life changes and transitions recently! Transition and searching for a new place were definitely themes that came up in the Search Party for Two show. We are really grateful that we were able to celebrate our wedding and move to Portland, Oregon before the COVID-19 outbreak. We moved in February and due to COVID-19 restrictions, I haven’t really been able to connect with the local arts community in the way that I originally intended. During the past couple of months, I’ve been focusing on adapting to COVID-19 related demands at my job, so I haven’t had the capacity to tackle a new body of work in my art practice. I recently set up a new studio space in a studio building, so that is a good step in the right direction! I’m trying to be patient with myself and celebrate small wins like setting aside studio time or checking in with artist friends who live far away. If anyone reading this knows a friend in the Portland arts community, feel free to reach out and I’d love to connect!

Thank you so much Hillyer team for taking the time to feature my work and I hope you all stay healthy during a difficult time!