April upstairs at Stove Works. Photo taken by William Johnson
Resident Interview:
April Childers (Sept-Oct 2024 Resident)
Interviewed by Olivia Tawzer (Programs Fellow)
April Childers (born 1979) is an American artist, curator, and educator. She is known for including humor and craft in her work. She combines a variety of art historical, and popular cultural references that accentuate an inherent despondency in their merger.
Childers’s work has been presented in an exhibition at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music), NY., VSOP Projects, Greenport, NY., CR10, Linlithgo, NY., Vito Schnabel and Bruce High-Quality Foundation, NY., White Projects, Paris, FR., Imersten, Vienna, AT., Kurant, Tromsø, NO., The Carnegie Visual and Performing Arts Center, KY., Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, FL., Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta, GA., The Mothership, Woodstock, NY., and many others.
She lives and works in Strawberry Plains, Tennessee.
INTERVIEW
Olivia Tawzer: In your talks, you've mentioned altering objects by enlarging, replicating, or combining them with other things. And I was thinking of this “Follow Your Dreams” rug that you found downstairs that you incorporated into that wall hanging piece. You call them “junky little things”. How do you source your objects, and what draws you to the commonplace, “junky” things?
April Childers: Hmm. How do I say this? I think it comes in a bunch of different ways, but I think what first comes to mind is usually there's something wrong; well, wrong is usually understood as a negative thing, and I don’t mean that here, but usually there's something “off” about it, or it's been overly used.
Like the rug I found downstairs here at Stove Works, it has just been used to death. But what solidified by attachment to the rug was the out-of-context phrase that it proclaims. And the rug itself has been just used to death. The backing on the rug is gone so you can really tell how it's made, the edges are all worn and tattered– it's falling apart. FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS!
I’m always asking ‘what's wrong?’
So I like that discarded kind of love. Finding a little treasure and thinking of how to reappropriate its original context, but have it still retain its thingness of the life it previously lived. I often reincarnate, reanimate, and reappropriate.
Photo by William Johnson, depicting an in-progress work by April Childers. Stove Works, October 2024.
OT: You mentioned loving the Dollar Tree in your artist talk, and that stuff is made to be used once and thrown away. They're these plastic things that fall apart and are flimsy. Things can only get that “used to death” feeling if they have some kind of substance or quality to them so they can endure time versus these Dollar Tree kind of things. And you use both types of objects in your work.
AC: Well, now it's a dollar 25.
OT: I know, yeah. Inflation tree.
AC: Inflation tree. Let's get a tree on fire. That's pretty good. It's about the price at the Dollar Tree or other similar stores. Items are more attainable. Having a mass of objects has always felt really good, and it's something that I've explored in my previous sculptural work. However, I am always questioning myself and trying to strain things out. I try to make the shortest sentence possible, as opposed to something like a giant rotted tabletop at a flea market on the side of a highway. Piled up, but less piled up. It's about finding a place for things– that was a title of an old piece. A place to put things. And it was just this mass of objects that I had organized on this table– there's a coffee maker percolating, a dead bluebird preserved in a jar, a Trump board game, and all of these in-process works and materials from the studio. So much stuff. All odds and ends, or maybe I should say odds with no ends. It was just a piece of plywood that sat on two sawhorses that I had made to look like they were built like Oreo cookies. It reminded me of an outdoor flea market on the side of the highway. I used to go to those all the time growing up and still do, if I can find them.
April Childers, Detail of “A Place to put Things (Whose Fault is it for Livin Anyways?!)” 2013, various materials, 125x64x132″
OT: You also have a curatorial practice, and if you view other artists' work as objects that you're putting together, it’s pretty similar to the way you combine objects in your practice.
AC: Yeah. There are a lot of similarities to that. The exhibitions that I have curated have absolutely been pretty much rooted in that intention. I just don’t have any other way of doing it. And I've always been pretty direct with the artist about that. But sometimes, no matter how direct you are with artists or how direct I think I’ve been, it can be a little off-kiltering to take their work and place it, or at times shove it, into a different context or contention. Like, “We're going to do this show, and I really want for this work to be included, but I'm going to cover the entire exhibition space in aluminum foil, there’s gonna be a wall with a person-sized hole through it, and I’m gonna write about buttholes for the exhibition text.” These are the things I think I convey and try to convey to the other artists involved, and sometimes, I get too caught up in the making to remember to do so. I am grateful that all of these people have rolled with me through these ideas and haven’t come for me yet. Hahaha (nervous laughter), I can’t say that I would have been as cool in similar situations. My need for them to trust me overrides reality sometimes. Also, working and functioning within any sort of institution, big, small, for-profit or not, is a whole other tangle. To be clear, everyone is great forever and ever! I’m laughing at myself right now.
Details from exhibition at Take It Easy, Atlanta, GA., 2022. Full Circle, curated by April Childers. Artists pictured L to R: Natalia Kraviec (hanging) , Zack Rafuls (wall), RB Erin Moran (floor), and Vabianna Santos (hanging).
OT: It can be displacing.
AC: Displacing is a good word.
OT: I feel like a lot of artists think about the space that their art is shown in as neutral, so when you're changing up the space the narrative shifts. It can be exciting and also confusing for artists to have their work be, not misinterpreted…
AC: Used as material. Used as material in another artist’s language. Absolutely. And I think pushing that even further with the last couple of exhibitions that I have curated was good, at least for me. I hope for the other artists as well. All of the curatorial work definitely came from a spot of just not having a space to curate and understand my own studio practice. Not to mention being frustrated by previous interactions with large institutions and whatever the status quo was or is. When I did the curatorial project in North Carolina with artist Maria Britton: LOG (Low Occupancy Gallery), we knew we wanted to work together in a curatorial way, but we didn't have the means or even just space. We did, however, have an old shack on the property in the farmhouse that we were living in at the time in North Carolina. The situation was hilarious (in the true sense of the word) and really great in a lot of ways. Maria actually fell through the floor of the shack at one point. The structure basically sat on two toothpicks and was scotch taped to the side of a small mountain overlooking a creek just above the James Taylor Bridge in Chapel Hill. We did nothing to the space but throw up some clamp lights. We were putting art in a shack in the middle of the small wooded area where the elements, bugs, the opossums, and raccoons, anything could come in and be involved with it. And oh, they did, so it was a forced context in that way. I really liked that. The process of staging something outside of its traditional context to create an environment that has never existed before and do so for actual, real-life purposes with meaningful intention. The conversation about getting out of the white cube…I think it is an old one now, but it will always be important, and it doesn't get done a lot of times in that sort of off-kiltering way.
L: Entrance to parking area for L.O.G. circa 2015. R: April Childers and Maria Britton inside the L.O.G. exhibition space, circa 2015.
OT: Looking through your work, one of the first things that comes to mind is humor and playfulness. I'm thinking about the Chick-fil-A piece that you did. It stirs up multiple feelings in me because, in one way, I almost feel bad for people because of this false hope, but also there were signs it’s not real. Like ‘original’ being spelled O-R-G-I-N-A-L. I also just like people on Facebook calling it like God's chicken.
AC: Oh yeah, Jesus’ chicken. And meaning it. Yeah.
Image: April Childers, “Coming Soon”, paint on canvas, originally installed in Strawberry Plains, TN., 2022.
OT: It also makes me think about the discourse of the far right and fake news. If you look at it and actually pay attention, you could see the things that show itself to be not legit, but at a quick glance, just the recognizable font of the Chick-fil-A registers. There's a lot of humor there, but there's kind of this darker undertone. So, I guess my question is: What do you think about humor and sincerity? If you want to talk about the Chick-fil-A piece, we can.
AC: We can start there. I think that there is absolutely deviancy in it. And when I made that piece, some of my friends who are artists were like, “You're just poking them.” At first, I thought, who is “them”?! And how dare they (my friends) simplify this effort! Hahaha, jeez. In that reaction, I was (now) obviously trying to deny my assumptions about the location to which I had just returned after 20+ years. I’ve since come to terms with most of my assumptions being validated in those and similar ways. However, that did cross my mind…right? I, rather quickly, came to terms with that part of my intention. But for 0.01 seconds I did have a negative emotion for giving as you stated “false hope”. That emotion ran faster away from me than I can describe. It makes me really dismiss any sort of bad feeling for someone believing it. There are jokes, there is humor, and there is a comedic presentation in my work through nods, gestures, and misplaced references. None of it comes from a pleasing state of being. I won’t go much further into it than that it has really gotten a lot more complicated over the past 5+ years.
OT: I was thinking about how after Hurricane Helene, there was this AI Trump image that was circulating of him in the water saving this man, wearing full riot gear, and he had a crab hand. And it was posted. And then some people didn't realize it was AI at first, and when it was brought up.
AC: Like a crab from the ocean?
OT: No, it was like a human hand, but you know how AI can't do the fingers? So it was the same thing as the Chick-fil-A piece, where if you looked at it, you could see that it wasn't real. It had signs of its fabrication, but some people still believed it. But even when it was pointed out that it was fake, I saw people saying, “Well, it doesn't matter that it's an AI image because he actually went there, and the meaning behind it is still there.”
AC: That goes back to humor as a tool for disarmament, right? But in the midst of being disarmed, hopefully, that gives a gap or a space that can allow for even, just even, a little bit of time for the opportunity to process things differently or reconsider something.
I've been avoiding teaching my whole life, but when I moved back to the southeast, I was like, “Okay, this is what I can do, and hopefully, it won't drive me as nuts as working a nine-to-five” or whatever. I'd always had assumptions from reports while I was living elsewhere, but I quickly realized firsthand the lack of arts education and education period really.
Arts education should be mandatory (although I might take issue with that word, haha) from an early age on. It doesn't matter if you want to be an artist, work in the arts, or anything directly related to the arts. To be introduced to different ways of thinking and thought processing is the root of all. It allows you to see all things from multiple views, to consider and question, to problem solve, to be able to exist in various types of environments, to evolve and communicate. I don't care what job one has or what job or life someone wants or has, it is imperative. A scientist, a dog walker, a laundromat owner… it is absolutely relevant to every existence. This education doesn’t even have to take place in academia. Ya, I think it can solve all problems. So, a scientist, a dog walker, and a laundromat owner walk into a bar…. just kidding. Follow your dreams?
Miranda July has this video about workers in the city whose job is to paint over the graffiti and how artful that is. Have you seen this?
OT: Yes, like painting a white square over a brick wall where it's not a restoration of the original wall. It's just covering the graffiti.
AC: Yeah, I love that and I try to show that to all my students. It's all there.
OT: What made you want to be like an artist or showed you that was a path you could take?
AC: A long time ago, I heard somebody say, “If I could do anything else, I would.” I can't really even imagine it. When I was in elementary school, the teacher one day went around and –this is kind of messed up now that I think about it– the teacher went around and told each student what she thought that student was gonna “be” when they grew up. She got to me, and I was cutting something out with some scissors, really zoned in on it, and she said that she thought I was gonna be an artist. And I leaned into that and was like, okay, what can I do with this? This feels right. I wanted to question everything as it was anyway. I figured things out as best as I could because nothing made much sense then to me, and it still doesn’t. And as you know, you never “figure out” anything. It’s just attempts at figuring stuff out, finding answers but with more questions, feeling closer, and new mental architecture and languages to convey. Finding what might not exist. I should have just said “Aliens”.
OT: What do you think is the best and worst thing about being an artist?
AC: The best is the same as the worst thing. Going up against something. One thing is that you are always having to defend yourself, or I am, at least. That sounds really stressful, but you do find answers and new existences within that. You know, “Why are you doing that, April?” Or, “It's not worth your time, energy, money.” That it's not worth it. And I've heard that a lot in my life and have always been able to navigate those statements with little to no question in regard to my being. Unfortunately, I feel like I have been listening to statements like that a little bit more in the past 2-3 years since moving back to where I grew up. My attention has been pulled away from where it usually resides to take care of some necessary things. In this, I’ve positioned myself in an odd state. This is why I am so thankful to have been at Stove Works for the past two months. I've realized how much that kind of thinking has snuck in. I’ve realized how harmful that way of thinking has become to my practice and just overall state of being. Sometimes it takes a long time to figure out who you really are*...sometimes you’re just an asshole, but I hope that's not my case.
I've also known people who are artists who stop making art once they get out of an academic system or even just later on in life, and they say, “It’s too hard.” I don't know if I ever really understood what that means. Don’t get me wrong, it is hard. It’s really hard, but everything else seems too hard for me.
*nod to artist Paul MacMahon