Interview between Saria Smith, Curatorial Assistant, and io, Artist-in-Residence.
io in their studio at Stove Works. Photo: @wolfrancis
The Interview
S: Where are you from?
io: My home is Abiquiu, New Mexico, where I've been living for the past few years. My former partner and I purchased a piece of property there, and have spent a lot of time fixing up the house and creating a space where queer and trans people can come and find solace together.
S: The oldest works on your website are photographs, was photography your first entrance into art?
io: Yeah. I started taking photographs when I was in high school. I was exclusively shooting in black and white and mostly working with my body. I was thinking a lot about the relationship between myself as a photographer, subject, and object; and what my responsibilities to each of those three people was. And what it would mean going forward showing photographs of my body as a teenage girl in my work. This was when I was starting to think a lot about my gender. It was intentionally very feminized.
untitled (self portrait), c. 2004, silver gelatin print, 3 x 2 inches
S: How did you go from photography to then making these creature drawings?
io: When I was at SAIC, I started feeling like I wanted to have a conversation that was more expansive than a sort of document of a trans body. I started thinking a lot about the way trans photography has been a process of legitimizing trans people and making us accessible. I felt at that time that photography was failing me as a medium. Because I wasn't interested in the static-ness of a moment or a body. The drawings are successful to me when they are in a space of being able to see multiple things over a span of time. Two little dots can be nipples or eyes, and elbows can be knees. There's a way in which they keep shifting and keep revealing things about themselves.
untitled, 2015, pencil on paper, 3 x 5 1/2 inches
S: How do you see your art?
io: One of the things that has become clear is that it's an articulation of a series of successive states; it's about the process of transformation. The drawings, in particular, are things I've been trying to make for like ten years. There's something I'm trying to capture that hasn't come. There's this other way where I almost feel like they are channeled through me. They come when they want to. I see them as having their own energies and life forces, and I feel in some ways I'm just helping manifest them in the world. My work is figuring out what it means to never be a static body.
S: Did you always feel like an artist?
io: No. My grandmother really influenced me a lot. She was like having a personal docent and having someone who always put materials in front of me. I worked with her with clay a lot, but I don't think that is why I became an artist. I think I became an artist to deal with trauma in a more somantic way. Especially as a younger person, there were some things that I just couldn't work out through language.
S: How does your identity factor into your work?
io: Firstly, it's me trying to figure something out. For myself and broadly in many ways, what it means to be human and what it means to continue to stay alive. and how to be in a body in the world and in relation to other people. It's an articulation of a deep struggle that I feel. My process with articulating my own embodiment has been very tangled up in my making process.
S: What are you hoping your art does for people?
io: Part of disturbing subjectivities is that the subject gets kind of messy. I'm hoping that might evoke in the viewer a thought that maybe they're not just a linear person who has always been this specific thing and will always be this specific thing.
untitled, 2015, pencil on paper, 4 x 6 inches
S: What does community mean to you?
io: In particular with queer and trans community, its multiple things. What I feel is important to me about having created that space is that there are particular conversations that sometimes need to be had with people who have had similar experiences. It's important for people to have spaces with sameness. Going through grad school, I found that the conversations I wanted to be having, I wanted to have with queer and trans people. Having spaces where there are shared experiences is really important and can be healing as well.
S: What do you think Stove Works has done really successfully?
io: Stove Works has really honored the importance of space and time as incredibly valuable assets for people who are articulating something and also being in a community of artists and being able to have the space to have conversations about what I'm thinking and making. It feels in so many ways the same as doing healing work because we are all in our own spaces doing our own thing, and then we are coming together to validate and support each other. I think that is really special about this space.
About io:
io (fka Aiden Simon) is an artist in residence here at Stove Works with an aim to disrupt stable states and subjectivities, with playfulness being a key character in their work. Io uses photography, sculpture, drawing, and writing to explore what it is to be human and create safe places for each part of that experience. They received their BFA in Photography at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 2009 and MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) 2013.
They are a Resident at Stove Works through the end of January. Thankfully I get to interview them before they leave.
ABOUT ME, THE INTERVIEWER:
My name is Saria Smith, and I am a BFA Student currently working as the Curatorial Assistant at Stove Works Gallery. I am an artist and find joy in expressing myself through various mediums, especially music, printmaking, and painting. I decided to start these artist interviews as a way for the public to connect more with the residents who flow through Stove Works perhaps unseen, especially during this pandemic.
Each week, I will be conducting an interview with one of Stove Works’ Artists-in-Residence. This week I am in conversation with Le’Andra LeSeur, who has been a Resident since November of last year. Check back next Friday afternoon for my discussion with io.
io’s work installed in Hot Donuts Now at Stove Works, curated by Ash Eliza Smith