ACREATIVEDC

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.

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GREATER SENSE OF INTER-CONNECTIVITY: MARYANNE POLLOCK

Artist, “Repression, Resurgence, Reemergence”

In your artist’s statement you mention that you went “to Donegal to retrieve something that was lost. Perhaps it was a pride that had been crushed by poverty and starvation”. What role has your art played in retrieving this “something”?

I found a rich artistic and oral history that was never shared with me since my grandparents schooling ended in the third grade while they were struggling to survive.  I found prehistoric ruins in that were on the same meridian with Morocco, and ancient castles from Medieval times, and manuscripts from the golden age of Irish history. These ties to an ancient past gave me a greater sense of inter-connectivity given my teenage interest in art of the middle east, particularly Samaria and Egypt. Islamic art has its roots in Celtic art, a fact that i had intuited during that trip.

I think that each of my paintings are a type of archaeological dig into the ancient past, a collective unconscious where all of humanity comes together.

Since I lived in Egypt for six years and also traveled to Spain recently, finding that interconnected-ness of common histories, centered in southern Spain in the ninth century has helped validate my intuition in a search for more ancient and international identity.

How and to what extent does your dual nationality influence your artistic process?

I just received my Irish passport so as of yet the dual nationality is more of a cultural experience. However, I begin each painting with decisions that derive from  a kind of passion and emotionalism inherited from my maternal Irish grandparents. The geometric structures that develop are often based on a narrative of living in cities in the US. They play between the lyrical, and the organic and the architectonic.

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UNCHARTED TERRITORY: BART O’REILLY

Artist, “Repression, Resurgence, Reemergence”

Your artist’s statement places emphasis on the present, between avoiding placing all interest in the origin of objects, utilizing improvisational exercises, and focusing on perception. Do you believe this central theme of the present should be used more when trying to understand identity?

I think that in many ways we now live in an endless state of the present. This is not to be confused with being present or mindfulness in the Eastern sense. That is something I strive for daily and attempt to integrate in my studio practice. As culture however I feel that we have lost a sense of history and we no longer anticipate a better future as we did say during the hay day of late 19th century early 20th century Modernism.

Our 21st Century sense of self or identity is very much based on how we are seen now. Right now in this present moment what image will we present of ourselves? I believe the centrality of the image is stronger than ever. How we present ourselves is rooted in now. We rarely look and when we do it is just nostalgia. We look forward in fear. Environmental catastrophe and the end of abundant resources are all becoming real and immediate realities in the so- called developed world.

As a child I read Transformer comics and the future was set in 2006. I often feel that I am living beyond the future I projected as a child. As a result I feel we are now in uncharted territory as a species. Sure I cling to old identities like Irish artist, father, husband and teacher but traditional notions of identity have been shaken and the postmodern prophecy of the fractured self is coming through. Again this has a positive counter meaning in Eastern philosophy. Things such as letting go of self and deflating ego are highly valued in this regard. This is not to be confused with the cultural crisis of identity that we see in 21st Century America and Western Europe. This is an alienated loss of self rather than one that connects. It’s the kind of thing that seems increasingly dangerous, especially here in the US.

Having said all that I do not proclaim to know the central theme of the present or anything even close. The idea that the history of the object is unknowable is kind of skeptical and I realize that. I just feel the certainties that we cling to are often used to manipulate us through the guise of ideology. Often as a group we cling to mantras and proclaim a blind certainties that I believe are very dangerous. Guns don’t kill people. People kill people for example.

How does this idea of present over history relate to the idea of an inherited or contemporary national identity?

My peers and I came of age in a very different Ireland to any generation that preceded us. We had the Celtic Tiger. Dublin was by the late 1990’s a bustling worldly city. Trade with the EU and the United States really seemed to be lifting the entire country out of difficult economic circumstances and I remember growing up feeling that being European rather than just Irish was ok. With a certain naivety I felt that Globalism was a good thing and something that should be embraced by a small country.

Of course we have all seen the downside to this. My interest in improvisation kind of comes from a desire to rebuild things at a small level and navigate uncertainty with a provisional approach. This might work today it may not apply tomorrow. This is the way I operate and it seems to work. What’s happening today? What does it require? How can I reassemble the parts just for right now? Frederic Jameson’s essay the Aesthetics of Singularity was very helpful to me in this regard.

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CONFLICTING FEELINGS: COLETTE MURPHY

On your website, Bryan Wizemann describes your pieces as “haunted by a strong memory of youth, the culturally specific fantasies that one always carries as an immigrant to a new land.” Is this effect an inspiration for your pieces, or an involuntary result? 

As an artist I do not paint in response to emigrating from Ireland to America at the age of eighteen. I do not paint in response to my love of the landscape I grew up with. I do not paint directly to this or any one aspect of my life experience. I do however paint as a consequence of my experiences. With the belief that we do not choose the memories we carry with us, rather our memories are a collective of the meaningful events that transpired. The memories that “haunt” my work are in fact the memories that continue to survive. The collective of unresolved events that occurred amount to the moment in the studio when I put paint to the linen.

In order to lose myself in the work I come equipped with a skill set and a passionate response to the life I live at the time I live in and try to make sense of it all. Sometimes I wish to be free of the troubling events that caused me to leave Ireland. There was not one reason but a curiosity for a life beyond the land I lived in. I left because I needed to know more. I stay gone because I have attached myself to a new way of living but I leave behind a land and people that I love.

The Irish writers abroad (ie WB Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh), have written about the conflicting emotions of an emigrant. I do not want to abandon the great land that gave me life but in leaving it there is a feeling of guilt and of quitting. These nagging emotions interfere with my growth as an individual and in turn continue to show up and influence my paintings. It is a complex life. I am only Irish in America and in Ireland I am a Yank, I am a misplaced entity. Seeking my own identity and finding a fulcrum wherein I can find a balance of who I am between the two lands that I call home will always “haunt” the work I make.

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SEARCH FOR CONTEMPORARY IDENTITY: CONALL CARY

Your artist’s statement discusses a recent focus on the damage outdated conceptions of “masculinity” can have on contemporary young men. Does the theme of inherited identity present in this new focus have a connection to the exhibition on Irish identity? Why or why not?

In Ireland I think that traditional masculinity and traditional ‘Irishness’ both have roots in similar environments, such as The Church and a largely working class industrial and agricultural population. Both are transitioning to a world that is radically different, with a shift away from The Church and the diversification of the workforce to the I.T. sector and cities/urban development.

As such in many ways I think my work for this exhibition can be a commentary on both a ‘masculine’ or an ‘Irish’ search for contemporary identity.

What liberties and limitations does printmaking as a medium allow?

I often say that if I was allowed to make the piece that I initially had in my head it would always be worse than the piece that I end up making, and part of this is because the process of making a print puts its direction on the works regardless of the intentions of the artist, and to me I find this is what allows for an element of surprise and newness to emerge.

For me it is the ‘limitations’ of print that force me to be freer with the work, to let the forces of chance at work within a structured environment.

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