COMPLEX NARRATIVES AND CONTEMPORARY ISSUES: Q&A WITH CRAIG SUBLER

Your pieces revolve around the nature of museums, which you have a long personal history of working in. How has working in the museum world influenced your own work?

Museums are highly choreographed spaces. The art museum’s fractured discontinuity is a place where visitors have to navigate an artificially constructed world in which the narrative is interrupted from gallery to gallery.
I have always been interested in how Museums direct the viewer’s gaze. However, moving through museum galleries is itself a fragmented experience. My works has been profoundly shaped by visitor’s experiences. The drawings/paintings center on the disconnected narrative that results when one traverses the museum. I am interested in how this endless stream of images and objects of vastly different cultures is embraced by the viewer. The art historian Robert T. Soppelsa has noted that the my work “forces the viewer to interpret the images critically and to think about themselves and how they see and respond to specific objects and the ways those objects are displayed in museums.”  I am interested in this complex reflexivity and the conundrums that it creates for the viewer. My works is influenced by this complex accumulation of fragments and viewpoints found in a Museum. It is puzzling for the figures that inhabit my works while at the same time I seek to remind the viewer of their own museum encounter.

You were a professor at the University of Missouri, how do you compare life creating art through others versus creating it through yourself. Do you think teaching has altered how you create art? What are the main messages you wanted your students to take away?

Teaching and art making is a dialogue be it with a student or a wider public. Teaching has not altered my work but rather helped to inform it. As a faculty member in a university you have many students seeking to discover their own vision. As a faculty member it was my job to help them do just that so that their takeaway is a body of work that is well-argued and ground breaking. One is always shifting gears, so to speak, with every student as each presents you with different issues and ideas to be unraveled. The main message I wanted students to understand is that art making is problem solving, and there is no right or wrong answers just ones that are better and smarter then others.

How would you compare the artistic process in your pencil drawings versus your digital prints?

Whether drawing for a digital print or on a large sheet of paper, what is important to me is that the line remains fresh and expressive.
Drawing is always a starting point for my work. It represents that intimate moment between the material, the viewer and ultimately myself. The digital prints start out as drawings on paper. A series of separate drawings on paper are scanned and resized. Once digitized the drawings are then reassembled in the computer. Then using a pad and electronic pencil I work to do additional drawing to knit the image together. What I am interested in is how the digital line differs from the pencil on paper line. “Scale” and “touch” play an important role in the digital prints to make them appear to have been done effortlessly and without the assistance of a computer.

What sets the digital prints apart from their smaller drawings on velum is scale and orientation. The small drawings are meant to be intimate works that draw a single viewer into the image. The works embrace a single moment of contemplation by the viewed and the viewer. The digital prints are larger horizontal works with multiple figures that invite the viewer to read them as a narrative. A narrative, albeit truncated, is one that the viewers themselves must construct. These works present a complex accumulation of fragments and viewpoints. It is puzzling for the figures that inhabit these works, reminding us of our own museum encounters.

Each of your series revolves around very diverse themes, from terrorism to the environment to museums. Where do you find the inspiration for these themes?

The subject matter of my work may appear initially diverse but what links all these series is my interest in complex narratives around contemporary issues. Whether the themes are about Museum Encounters, inspired by Degas’ print, Mary Cassatt at the Louvre, or Suburban Terrorism, inspired by Durer prints, or Hiroshima, inspired by Goya’s, Disasters of War, the important thing for me is that I bring new and complex dialogues to my subject matter. With the Suburban Terrorist series there is an intended ambiguity in the works that engages the tension between natural habitats and the built environment. This ambiguity is equally true for the Hiroshima prints and drawings and for Museum Encounters. My intention is always to encourage the viewer to be active in the interpretation of the work.