Resident Spotlight: Jodi Hays

Photo: Benjy Russell Photography

Why don’t you tell me about yourself?

I’m Jodi Hays. Large-scale collage-based paintings using reclaimed materials like cardboard, which I usually dye to expose those parallel rivulets you get from the cupboard corrugation. They’re not always large-scale. I’m based in Nashville and am so excited to be here because my studio at home is a garage. The ceilings in my garage are 8 feet tall and I have a lot of large projects coming up that I need to be able to see.

Jacob’s Ladder, 100x91 inches, dye, cardboard, tape, fabric and paper collage, 2022

What kind of work have you been getting done during your residency?

I’ve been getting a lot of large-scale work done–which you can see in this studio–as well as some smaller works. With this space, I can see 4 or 5 large-scale works in here at the same time. It’s amazing to work in a space that doesn’t have any history, compared to my garage. When I first applied [to Stove Works] I had a group show coming up at a Museum, but since I was accepted to this residency, it’s gotten pushed back, so the urgency of the work I’m making for that isn’t there anymore. It’s great because I can experiment more here.

A work-in-progress shot from Stove Works’ workshop space.

You mention this studio’s lack of history. What does that mean, and what is that doing for your work?

Practically and spatially speaking, my garage is my studio. It’s very private. When I'm driving my kids around the neighborhood and I’m collecting trash, my kids will see apartments being built and they’ll say, “Mom look, that house has a studio,” and I have to remind them that, no, that part of our house is actually a garage for the rest of the world [laughs]. But for me it’s a two-car garage that I share with the bikes and the lawn mower. Living in the city, it’s what I give up by having a private space in my home but it’s also about what I gain. I can clock in more hours because walking 20 feet from my house to my studio suits my lifestyle, but what I lose is the separation, the deep, deep 12 hour days where no one can find me. A three day block here is probably equal to like a month in my 20s. That's why I have so much work already here at this studio.

I can feel that development in the work around me.

Well yeah, there’s that. There’s the material labor and the invisible labor that goes into it. That’s kind of a nod to domestic labor; it can be dying, folding, organizing, cleaning.

A detail from Jodi’s studio

Is there anything else you’ve been able to do because you’re working here in Chattanooga?

I’ve had a good lineup of studio visits here, because I’m 2 hours from Nashville and about as far from Atlanta. And that was my aim: to take advantage of this luxurious amount of space. Also, the hands-off nature of this residency is brilliant. The way Charlotte and everyone have orchestrated time and space with this program has been great.

It has been a great opportunity to just get some deep work done with a clear head. I’ve got a pretty hefty showing schedule in 2023.

That’ll be all. Thanks, Jodi!

The following was written by Jodi after the completion of her residency with Stove Works.

I loved the short time I had with other residents, coffee and meals in between working in the studio were so nice!  I hosted a few studio visits with curators and art dealers. I was also able to give a talk at UTC. My home studio is a garage with low ceilings, so I was able to stretch out and work large without interruption, spilling out into the workshop areas. I cannot overestimate the impactful timing of this gift. THANK YOU.

Resident Spotlight: Jen Shin

Bio

Jen is a Korean American writer and mental health advocate based in Portland, Oregon, entering into her eleventh year in recovery from alcoholism and bulimia. Her writing focuses on her addiction, exploring the impacts of identity, race, and intergenerational trauma. Through her work, Jen hopes to reach communities of color to destigmatize the stigmatized, decolonize shame, and encourage healing. She is the recipient of HrStry’s 2022 Eunice Williams Nonfiction Prize and has received fellowships from Anaphora Arts and Fishtrap. In 2021, she published a zine through zines + things and her essays can be found, or are forthcoming, in Oregon Humanities, aaduna, and The Rumpus.   https://www.jen-shin.com/about

Jen was in Residence at Stove Works during October and November of 2022.
Interviewed by Cass Dickenson

Cass: Why don’t you tell me about yourself?

Jen: I am a writer, and the identities that I write to are being in recovery from addiction and being a woman of color. The memoir I’m working on during my residency is about my experience with addiction and understanding the roots of addiction. That’s really how I see the world, and those are the lenses I use in my work. Those are the things that have impacted me and led me to this journey.

What else? I live in Portland, Oregon, but was born in Chattanooga. I’m also a baker. I’ve been recently baking bread and selling it at farmer’s markets. The baking is sort of a healing process for me since part of my addiction journey has been having an eating disorder, and being able to make food for people and eat food with people has become healing. It’s sort of a full-circle moment for me. I also lead camping trips for people of color and queer people. To see our own representation in nature is really powerful for me.

C: So, how’s that going during your residency in Chattanooga? Are you getting in touch with Chattanooga’s landscape outside of your studio? How are you spending your time outside of your studio?

J: It’s been great to have my residency during the fall because I always hated the summers. You know, when I was growing up I didn’t like being outside. When I was younger I loved it, but as I got older, there was no interest. It was too humid to do anything in the summer. After moving to the PNW, though, I’ve found my own relationship with nature in such a new way. My own spiritual practice involves being really grateful to the earth. In terms of my time with Stove Works, I’ve been walking a lot: to the sculpture fields, for instance. Part of my writing practice is–y’know–30% of it is writing, and the rest is thinking. I can sit and think but being out in nature and observing and feeling present is something that helps me process things. I’ve gone to the sculpture fields, I’ve gone to the river walk, and I saw like 5 great blue herons. 

When I was younger, I’d laugh at tree huggers, but now, 20 years later, I’m literally doing that [laughs]. Being outside has been really grounding, and obviously, fall in Chattanooga is the best time to be here. It’s been helpful to have nice weather and be able to take a walk just to clear my head.

C: You’re writing about very personal history in relation to nature. I take it it helps to be grounded in the place you grew up?

J: Yeah! For the past year, I’ve been struggling to write the story of high school. And I’ve been chewing on this for a long time. It’s only a facet of the broader story, but I’ve been needing to crystallize that specific moment of time. It wasn’t until I got here, started walking in the places I used to hang out with friends, or park my car or go to the Aquarium – All of these places have so much memory for me. It’s what I really needed to put myself back into perspective: what were the good things? What were the bad things? 

I was really nervous coming back to Chattanooga because of racism because of being Asian in a predominantly white area. It was easy to say, “oh y’know the racist south” and all that, but I can view it more holistically now, with the right vocabulary and perspective. I’ve been in recovery for a decade so being able to have the time and space to process this has let me write new material that I needed to get out. That can be kind of difficult, and I don’t like to force things, so being able to process and listen to myself back here has been very, very helpful to bring myself back.

C: I can tell from your studio knowing these photos or these notes happened where we are now feels really familiar.

J: Yea, totally.

C: Anything else you want to tell us? Things we can look forward to after your residency?

J: So, like, 75% of the memoir is just setting up the experiences that led to my addiction, and 25% of it is devoted to having the addiction. I feel like a lot of literature is about the neverending suffering of addiction, so that’s not something I feel like I need to do. I want to explore the experiences that shape addiction. I kind of wanted to be seen, but I also wanted to be invisible. I wanted to be Asian, but I also wanted to be accepted by White people.

C: So, like sidestepping putting yourself on a pedestal?

J: Yea, my addiction sort of gave me that experience. Getting, you know, blackout drunk was like a form of disappearing. Those are the two poles that I’m speaking to. What are the ways that I was trying to assimilate, and what are the ways I was trying to cope? I just finished my first draft, so I’m going through high school right now. I’m using my second month to start cleaning up those parts of the book that need cleaning up.

Resident Spotlight: Muse Dodd

Muse Dodd (They/Them) is an  Anti-disciplinary Artist, Curator, and DJ from Severn, MD based between New York and New Orleans. Their work centers on the questions, How do you remember and what do you choose to forget? Through the act of remembering, Muse uses their body to map the lived experience of Africans in America. Muse channels trauma to connect with, process, and alchemize pain; both personal and collective through movement, ritual, and collective dreaming.

Cass: Why don’t you tell me a little about yourself?

Muse: My name is Muse Dodd. I’m an anti-disciplinary artist. I work in the mediums of film, photography, and performance. I also DJ and curate. Outside of that, I enjoy spending time with my family, nature and history.

Cass: What have you been using this studio space for?

Muse: This is month three for me, I’ve been using this time to expand how I use space in my practice. This is the first time in my practice I’ve worked outside of my bedroom. I’m seeing how it feels to have things on my wall for weeks at a time and see how it speaks to me. I’ve been working on a project with my ancestors thinking about how I fit into this large context of my family. A lot of the time I think about belonging and legacy. Contextualizing myself, my family history, and my family in terms of nature, situating ourselves in that space, and grounding ourselves in those roots, literally and figuratively. That’s been the guiding principle for me.

Muse’s studio in Stove Works.

Cass: I’d love to hear how you’re exploring personal history in terms of nature. Both in the studio and around the city. Is space helping you process these feelings?

Muse: I don’t have any family around here. I enjoy being situated right by the mountains. I grew up in the suburbs, and I wasn’t that close to nature, but I’ve been living in the South for the past two years. That’s shifted my context, and I’ve been thinking a lot about history, and how we reconcile with history. Thinking about the trail of tears, slavery, and how that influences architecture and monuments.

Cass: So many monuments.

Muse: What do you do with those, right? A lot of people like to glaze over those things. Even if you don’t acknowledge it, it influences what you do. Being here, building some stability in my practice, I’ve enjoyed getting integrated into Chattanooga and its art scene, but then I’ll also be leaving here very soon [laughs]

Cass: Yes, that's unavoidable. How has your work progressed over the past two months, and how are you continuing that during your final month?

Muse: It’s caused huge shifts. There’s so much work that’s been happening internally, and it doesn’t show a lot. I feel like I have these pulls between wanting to make work with all this space, but also being pulled to be more internal. I’ve been returning to writing during this time. There’s also the social aspect, I’ve been pulled to be with the other artists as well. I want to use this month to take the pressure off and ease more into my practice.

Resident Spotlight: Catherine Rush

Catherine in her studio at Stove Works. Photo: Wolf Francis @wolfrancis

Catherine Rush is a performer and poet at heart. She hails from Atlanta and considers herself a non-career artist. Her art can be considered multidisciplinary as it involves many themes explored through many mediums. Catherine often explores the world through performance art often incorporating video, costume and poetry into her communicative creations. She has written art reviews and interviews for publications such as Burnaway, Arts ATL, Jump Philly and many others. If you were to meet her you would likely see that she has a unique position as someone who is free to explore the strange, fun, slow, and enticing moments in life all in her own time and also use her skills to create platforms for other artists. It was a pleasure as always to sit down and talk with such a thoughtful artist.

Saria: How would you describe your artistic style?

Catherine: I do poetry and performance art and I tend to do it in an intuitive way. It also

responds to the audience. It's interactive and aims to open people up for thinking about things in a different way. So I guess the way that the sequences of images or words are organized, it's disorienting but it's reorienting too. When you're changing and things are changing. It's disorienting, it's uncomfortable. But I think there's a future logic to my work.

Saria: What attracted you to performance art?

Catherine: I started reading poems and I found that I would get really nervous reading poetry. I wanted ways to help people engage with it and be more open to listening to poetry. Poetry, by itself, can be really boring; of course I love watching people read their poems, especially for the first time, especially in a shared space, where you feel the electricity between people and the tension and excitement and nervousness, I love that. I started finding connections with my actual body beyond just kind of clowning or bringing in task based movements and things. When I started working on performances with my friend, Aida Curtis, she brought me in to help with a tribute she did to the film Wicker Man where she choreographed these song and dance numbers in a way that was very accessible for even someone like me, who didn't have a dance background. It was so painful and uncomfortable but I ended up helping her with a few more group performance pieces. Then she and I started making pieces together as The Clutching Dream. That was more performance art than poetry although she's also a poet. Now we've come full circle and are making a poem together.

Dehiscence, 2020. Installed in Hot Doughnuts Now at Stove Works.

Saria: Where do your ideas come from?

Catherine:  Ideas come from all their places. While you're walking, hearing people talk about seeing something funny or out of place, being hit by memories and how they sort of dovetail or don't connect with what's happening right now. I think a lot of my poetry comes from looking at uncomfortable things, be it finding ways to express or understand trauma, personal trauma, collected trauma, or just witnessing being close to someone having trauma. I think that is where a lot of my earlier poetry was coming from. And now, there is a sort of folding into grief and being in a country where there's not like, any scaffolding for grief collectively. That's been something my work has focused on for a long time. But I do it, I guess, in a really playful way to try and get people into a comfortable place where they can open up. My ideas come from everything, from life, I’m a big believer in things like ordinary poetry and ordinary art.

Saria: What is the difference between doing performance art and just being some weird girl at a party?

Catherine: Right, like that sort of ties into questions of identity and intention. If you are aware as a person at the party, and in your head, you're doing performance art, then you're doing performance art. I've known people who have had really sort of rampant unchecked mental health issues that also believed that they were just doing weird performances and nobody understood. Who's to say they're wrong, they're not wrong, both things are true. For me when I do a performance, it's a different space than when I'm just walking on the street and dancing by myself. I have some characters that sometimes appear, but a lot of the time, even if these characters appear, it's sort of a mishmash, weaving, I guess, between different identities and personalities.

Dehiscence, 2020, performance.

Saria: How do you feel when you participate in a performance? What's it like to subject yourself to a certain role for an extended period of time?

Catherine: Usually it's very calming. I kind of got into a different state. I feel like it's almost meditative. Obviously, there are times when something goes wrong, or there's something else outside of it in my life that's keeping me from wanting to access that space. But once I am committed, the performance has started. I am in a really restful space, even if I'm doing something more endurance-oriented. It's something that is less comfortable. It feels like I'm sort of sinking into a more meditative space. I also love the idea that how someone is viewing something changes it, and so I feel like people viewing my performances, or hearing my poetry, changes it. When you have an audience, it undoes illusions of control, but you also are acting on them; you're on the level where there's nothing being taken. I think you get a lot out of just seeing something surprising and different and absurd and funny and sweet.

Saria: How does your personal identity Inform your work?

Catherine: I think that for a long time, I didn't realize it till I was in therapy, but I was very afraid of being thought of as crazy. I think that's something that I looked at a lot in my writing and sort of something I wrestled with a lot in my early writing was what is it to be crazy, especially like the crazy woman, right? I've found a lot of meaning in my work personally, which has come back directly to my sense of self. I feel like performance and poetry are both ways to sort of find your center again and to affirm your own reality. In James Baldwin's Uses of The Blues, he talks about these three different musical impulses and all of them are sort of ways to deal with suffering and how so much art-making, in general, is our way of dealing with suffering. Sort of what he strips down to is that one of the more, isolated ways of meaning-making is self-affirmation as a route to joy. So by transmuting your experience into something lyrical, it gives you self-authority. You can apply that to any art form, or you can apply that to other things that we don't traditionally identify as art. What makes it really powerful in the realm of language is that you are actively changing language. Another Baldwin quote says that “Every writer is born into a language that you have to help change,” and I think when you bring in the physical element, I think it's even more alchemical.

Dehiscence, detail.

Saria: What do you hope to accomplish in your art?

Catherine: On one level, it's always about survival. It's always about yourself. I think that sort of ripples out to other people. Because writing even though you do it in isolation, usually, almost exclusively, it's deeply social. You are communicating, even if you're writing the most coded, secretive, redacted kind of thing. You're still communicating. Performance also is deeply social, even when I'm not interacting with people, and even when I'm completely ignoring everybody around me. In that sense, it's also about fluency, harmony, and connection. All of those things are healing. And for me, especially to someone who's not a career artist, it's all bound together. Like there's definitely like a lifeblood of community and survival running through all of it; even the things I do in isolation. The more people come together especially through art expression, the more we find that we're talking about and wanting similar things. Writing in terms of transformation is just changing the language. Changing the story, changing the myth, changing the metaphor.

Saria: What have you been reading/thinking about recently?

Catherine: Well, I couldn't sleep. So I read in one night the gifts of imperfection Brené Brown. She's amazing, she does research in shame and vulnerability and fear studies. It’s really good. I've been thinking about it and I'm really interested in PTSD. I think, coming from army families, I definitely have complex PTSD. I feel like almost everyone I know has some variety of PTSD. I feel like we are such a traumatized world. I think I'm really interested in how we can heal through community, even on an individual to individual basis.

Saria: What was the best part about your Stove Works residency experience?

Catherine: Definitely meeting the other residents, and in Covid times, learning to have a bunch of roommates again was a really special experience and to be brought together with so many dynamic inspiring personalities has been really nourishing and encouraging and I've learned so much from everyone I've met here, including you. Seeing people's practices and how people work has been super cool. I've lived with many artists always but never in this more professional setting.

Resident Spotlight: Allison Spence

Allison

Allison Spence is a multi-disciplinary artist seeking to subvert our expectations of form and representation  She is currently a professor at Florida State University. In her art, she deals within a level of abstraction and figuration and creates a fragmentary existence based on the themes of bodies and how they take up space. She embraces the potential new meanings that abstraction allows for. She uses the masterful blending of boundaries to create work that is not easily categorized or defined. Recently, she's been making work that relates to the pandemic and her experiences.

Saria: How would you describe your artistic style?

Allison: My style, I don't think anyone has ever asked me about my style before. I usually tell people that I'm interested in doing non-paintings. I came from a background where I was trained to be a narrative figurative painter, which I completely abandoned after graduate school, and started to abandon that kind of body of painting altogether. It wasn't until the pandemic that I started to go back to more representational stuff. Actually, I don't know what it was, maybe it was the kind of sitting with myself too long and working on a small scale and touching things that made me sort of want to represent things a little bit more, at least this time. I generally like things that are beautiful but in a fundamentally upsetting or uncomfortable way. So, I do a lot of stuff about body horror, and I'm really interested in these indeterminate, determinant bodies that can kind of exist outside of our desire to categorize and label.

Saria: What do you think of abstraction as a form of expression, why do you use it?

Allison: There is a term that’s become a kind of like a slogan for me, particularly when I teach, pinning the butterfly. The moment that you name something and you decide what it knows, it's comfortable, and you can move on, and you know it, but now it's effectively dead. And it's a bit of a kind of violence in a way as well. So I find abstraction to be an easier way to create a space of possibility, of meanings, definitions, and communication. I like things that are a little nuanced, or a little bit vague, fuzzy around the edges. I don't like defined boundaries, because it feels like a trap to me, which is why I abandoned figure painting, when I was in grad school, I started to find myself really constricted by it. Especially coming out as a painter, all of that history, all of that kind of heavyweight of representation, and all of the definitions and kind of anatomy, their end just became too limiting. And that's usually why I go with abstraction; it allows a lot more possibility of meaning.

Saria: What are you most inspired by?

Allison: I watched a lot of films. It's one of my main sources of research. I do a lot of work that deals with like I've mentioned before, body horror, where the body is the kind of the main antagonist basically, sort of what your body can do or will do to you. When people ask me about artists, I usually don't say painters, and I sometimes don't even say artists in general, but I tend to drift towards biological science and medicine, experimentation and also natural bodies, organic bodies in nature. It relates to a series of work that I did about transplants if you graft an organ, you know, or some sort of part to a human being, the body is going to immediately try to reject it because it's foreign. Folks take medication, to stop it from being rejected, their entire lives, but plants you can graft together no problem; plants are a lot more accepting of new states of being. I'm inspired by things that give me moments that are outside of definable things, things that don't have an easy explanation. Strangely enough, the pandemic is super fascinating to me, even as it's incredibly distressing because suddenly everyone is super hyper-aware of their bodies in space in a manner that I think a lot of folks never really think about. In the kind of extension of their bodies. Like, breath is somehow connected to us and a weapon of some kind of virus; that I find fascinating, even if it is terrifying.

Saria: What is your process of actualization like?

Allison: I actually just finished with a two-year block, but usually what happens is I come across an idea or an instance of something that has happened; it might be a film, it might be a series of images or a book, or some sort of strange fact that I've read, or somebody told me. I'm really big on fun facts, something really odd, and I will get fixated on it. And then I will kind of think about how best to explore that. What would best communicate the things that fascinate me about that? So I sort of fly from thing to thing. Right now it's embroidery, before it was digital prints, there's a video that I've been trying to work on for a while. So it just has to do with the kind of underlying idea, but I'm generally very consistent with the things that fascinate me. Most of the time it’s kind of a waiting game, which isn't the most productive. For instance in my grad work A            MASS, it's sort of like my origin story. I was researching something completely different. At the time I was really fascinated with Emma's anomic keys, which is a theme and in Greek art whereas the Amazons are fighting the Greeks. So I was trying to make one at the time and it was not working. I kept hearing about Wonder Woman, I didn't want to, I didn't want to paint Wonder Woman. And I was getting really frustrated, but at the time I was researching, like wrestling poses because it's a European Western wrestling style. So I was watching a whole bunch of wrestling videos And I somehow found a bunch of Japanese women's wrestling, which was really cool. So because they were so badly rendered I just started to pause them just to get images of possible poses. I kept on pausing between and the camera didn't translate it in the way that our eyes are translated. It just sort of translated it through the mediation into these blocks, and pixels. And then all of a sudden, I realized, I started to get really attracted to these. It was like crumpled-up cars or bubblegum.  I started painting those because they excited me. From there, I just kind of never went back.

Saria: Did these ideas grow on you or have they always been on your mind?

Allison: I think I was. I've always been conscious of being in space, kind of filtering things through my own body in space. Probably that's, I think that's more of a personal quirk. I can't fully pinpoint where the fascination came from. Other than just simply being fascinated by things outside of our direct knowledge of things. I think I just generally have been suspicious of systems. 

Saria: How does your personal identity factor into your work?

Allison: I'm conscious of being a body in space and the fact of being a woman that is a body and space. I kind of grew up around a certain amount of distinct categorical systems that I didn't feel comfortable in. When I was little, I was in a fantasy, and I was into science fiction. I think it was partially a form of escapism, but then those kinds of ideas of being outside of this sort of structure always excited me, so it led from there. My mother was a librarian so, I grew up with books everywhere and I was a fairly solitary person. I always had a lot of things in my head. And I could just process on my own, and then kind of externalized.

Saria: Have you seen a big change in your art?

Allison: I'm very consistent with a lot of the stuff that I do, I haven't felt like I exhausted my interests but I have less of an attachment to the methods that I use. I've got almost a little bit of an antagonistic relationship to material. I mean, I have that whole series of paintings that are literally just kind of crumbles and I believe when I was making those, I just had them on the floor and I would like to step on them. So, material is the thing that always changes. It's never my theme, that's constant.

Saria: What was the greatest part of your residency at Stove works

Allison: It was good to have a space that was so focused on art-making. Coming back from Stove Works has been such an interesting experience because I'm still teaching a contemporary foundations class. During that, your practice kind of goes into sort of talking and thinking about the systems, all these interlocking systems that power and define these other systems of meaning. Meanwhile, I still have a constant practice in the background. Stove Works provided us space, a kind of concentrated space of art-making and talking about the work with the community, however, distanced that was, it was useful and kind of Eutopic for a while, for my practice. And I'm sad now. It was like the real world and all of my responsibilities had just been waiting. I hadn't been putting them off, they were just waiting to dump on me. It was this really cosmic unfairness that came after leaving Stove Works.

Saria: What are you working on now?

Allison: I'm here in Florida back to teaching. I'm teaching and I'm continuing the projects that I started and worked on at Stove Works.

Resident Spotlight: Laura McAdams

Laura in front of Stove Works. Photo: Saria Smith

Laura McAdams is an artist from Kingsport Tennessee who lives and works in New York City. Her work describes our built environment, a cultural landscape that she sees as the real mirror of being alive. Through sculpture, installation, and writing she attempts to unbuild, rebuild, and reinvent these structures in physical and conceptual forms that place the human at the center, either the self or collective. She allows the idea or material to lead the work to its final form. She is also pursuing other interests in social work and community organizing in New York. She is currently collaborating with Peyton, a fellow resident, on an upcoming project. They have installed a piece in the Hot Doughnuts show, the resident showcase at Stove Works.

Saria: Why do you create art, what is your art a response to?

Laura: For me, the seed of an idea can turn into anything, for instance like my bread essay, it's seeing a metaphor as it applies to my life. I'm really attracted to materialist metaphors that are metonymies for the body, the self, the collective. For me, it's the experience of making the thing and the ideas behind it. While form is important aesthetic qualities don’t drive the work.    

Saria: What have you been thinking about lately or reading or looking at?

Laura: I kind of stopped looking at art about a year ago. I've been working in the art world for a while and it's been challenging to be inside of that system and I felt a need to return to the ritual of daily life. A lot of my past work comes from modes of production that I was around.  I was always working with those processes and people so it's more like construction heavy, 3D modeling, 3D printing, and things like that. Lately, I've been really drawn to craft traditions and making in a more meditative way to reconnect with the work. This is also tied to the things I'm reading. I've been reading Silvia Federici and breaking away from art theory and thinking more of political ideas. That's been really satisfying for me creatively. Also, Ursula Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of  Fiction has been a touchstone for me lately.

Saria: What have you been working on recently?

Laura:  I'm actually here collaborating with another resident Peyton, her studio is right next door to mine. We have something installed for the Hot Doughnuts show. It's been really fun to work together and very encouraging. There have always been overlaps in our work but it feels like it's turning into something real. Our collaboration is still very early on, there's a lot to figure out but it feels great and I'm really excited for the future of it.

Saria: What attracts you to art that focuses on installation?

Laura: I often describe my work as an example of a cultural landscape or what it's like to be a body and have an experience inside of a place. I think an altered physical space sometimes feels like the most palpable way to experience that, it's tangible. I don't really like rules in terms of what kind of art I like to make, sometimes it's a video, sometimes I like to let the idea drive the product. There's a very healthy incubation period before it turns into a thing. Often it becomes an installation because it's the most open-ended form.

Saria: Do you think art school was beneficial to you?

Laura: In short, yes. It has its negatives, but it was a great experience. I’m really lucky to still have mentors from that experience. It's trite but it’s true that you have to learn some rules to break them. I feel like I've learned so many rules at this point that all I want to do is unlearn. That’s what my work feels like it is now,  this unlearning back to very foundational ways of making. Sometimes when you're given examples in the history of other artists, you see kinships in ideas, lineages of your craft. It can be exciting, someone giving form to something you've felt for a long time. And it can be really informative to feel the legacy of an artist before you. I loved my undergraduate education, It was worth it for me. I think art is such a personal expression and it's not right for everyone. I think art schools are a flawed institution but they also do give people community support, and access to knowledge at the same time.

“Untitled” by Laura McAdams and Peyton. Installed during Hot Doughnuts Now at Stove Works.

Saria: Can you talk about the inspiration behind your Bread essay?

Laura: I was particularly frustrated at that time of my life with both personal and art worlds. I felt a lack of humanity in that moment. I needed to connect with something that expressed collectivity. A real foundational part of human experience, to be nourished, figuratively and literally. It was written in a cultural context more than an art context. One reason I used that as a form was that it was not explicitly art, it was something a little different. I had been frustrated with trying to make sculptures. The inspiration was also all the things I was doing. I was working at a food pantry volunteering, and participating in mutual aid. Cooking a lot, like a lot. It was written at the height of Covid so no one could go anywhere. Something I've always loved is cooking and sharing food with friends and family. The pandemic really solidified some of my feelings around my neo-liberal life. I found this revolution in words and actions. For me, sometimes the art is in charge of the form. That was definitely the case for this piece, it just happened to me. 

Saria: Your work has a lot to do with the human body, what inspired that influence beyond just the fact that you have a body?

Laura: I’ve thought a lot about the location or site of knowledge. Where does that come from? We all have pedagogies that teach us ways to know. But for me, knowledge also comes from experience. It is embodied or felt rather than taught and internalized. That’s a central part of my work. That’s why the body is always present, it is the site of embodied knowledge. It is a metonymy. A part becomes whole. A singular expression of a metaphor that lives inside of you.

Saria: You're also a writer, Is writing an integral part of your process with the physical pieces?

Laura:  For me, writing isn't really a linear process to develop ideas, but it is another creative mode. It's very different from sculpture because of the way sculpture unfolds in front of you. There's material research, you have to touch it.  Sculpture just is and writing translates that experience. It might be like a mode of processing but it's not a way I really work through ideas, more as another means of expression. It can be freeing because it is so immediate, You can always pull out your phone, or pen and paper and get things out.

Saria: What is the relationship between images and audio in your work? What do you want that to do for the viewer?

Laura: Writing, installation, and sculpture are my primary modes of working and I wanted to try and figure out how to combine these two things. There are some pieces not on my website, because they're older, where I've made videos that attempt this, but it doesn’t work as well for me because I prefer to work on a physical plane. I feel most at home in sculpture as a form, but writing felt like a legend for some of the pieces. I want to join them and create a unique experience with the work. The works you're talking about are together as a four-part installation, married with a four-part essay. I'm not sure how well that really worked because the nature of an installation is that it is more amorphous. In writing formats, the writer has more power over what the viewer experiences first. Which anecdote or essay comes first. In sculpture, the viewer has more freedom when you look at each thing. I'm trying to explore playing with that format.

Saria: How do you relate to your art personally?

Laura: It's always personal, it's always expressive. It's just a matter of how many lenses I put between the viewers and my feelings or how much ambiguity I layer into the work. It happens sometimes where I don't know how I feel and I need to express that ambiguity. Of that in-between feeling, that's something i feel will never go away, there's always conflict. The bread essay too. There's conflict. My strategy of survival and my family’s, collective survival, they don't all go together, we're all just trying.

A Spill, A Line, A Drift. water, aluminum, paint, foam, 2016. In collaboration with Sam Morgan

Saria: Has there ever been a moment where you wanted to drastically change your medium?

Laura: Yeah all the time, I crave novelty in the work and when it starts to feel formulaic I need a new form. I don't stick to the media. I flirt with all of them. The one thing that I don't sit with often or don't use anymore is drawing but that's just because 3d modeling took over that in my practice so it's not gone just digital. I'm always looking for the next format for the next idea I have.

Saria: What does community mean to you?

Laura:  I've kind of struggled with that this year as well because Covid has been really isolating and we are all just trying to be okay. I'm really involved in Mutual Aid and I've decided to pursue social work as a new career and to be engaged with communities of all different backgrounds because I feel like that doesn't happen in art, it just isn't real. I want to live my People are egalitarian in their viewpoints but they don't really approach them in a practical sense, that's something I'm trying to do now. I want to live my values every day. That's a shift for me and part of that is because my art is very personal, it's not community-oriented. Community is your friends, locality, family, chosen or natal. People build communities of resiliency at all different scales.

Saria: What has it been like for you here in this community at Stove Works?

Laura: I think it's a challenging time but I've appreciated getting to know the other artists here. I kind of removed myself from the art world for the last year for self-preservation reasons and it's been good to meet other artists who have the same values. We're in a setting where no one's trying to win, we are just here to get to know other people and share our work    

Saria: How has this time as a resident at Stove Works grown you?

Laura: I really needed to pay attention to my practice and allow it to grow in new ways and I think having space and time away from my life could help me find it again in a way that is productive. Collaborating with Peyton has been affirming because I've made lots of radical life changes in the last year and it's challenging to be creative in a  global crisis. Working with her has been great because every time I have an idea I have someone to bounce it off of, we can workshop. A word that keeps coming up is resonance. When you can resonate with someone you know it’s a real experience.

Saria: What are you doing after you leave Stove Works?

Laura: I'm going to move back to New York City and I'm going to go to grad school for social work. I also haven't been organizing when I've been here because I don't live in Chattanooga. To do community work you have to be there a long time so I will get back into that. I've been a little involved but at a distance. I'm looking forward to that. I also think that Peyton and I will formulate some kind of proposal for a future project.

To see more of Laura’s work:

https://lauramcadams.net/

Resident Spotlight: Terry Thacker

Terry in his Studio at Stove Works. Photo by Saria Smith.

Terry Thacker is an artist born and raised in Nashville,Tennessee. He received his BFA from Austin Peay and his MFA from UT Knoxville. He has taught Painting, drawing and seminar classes for forty years, retiring two years ago to spend more time in the studio. He came to this residency to enjoy the exchange and conversation that you miss being an artist away from academic settings. It was great to sit down with Terry and hear more about art from his perspective.

Saria: Why do you make art?

Terry: My earliest memory is of drawing. For children it becomes a pre-verbal language. It becomes a marking of your world and a language that names you and your relationships in the world. At first it's a personal language and then it begins to mature as a social language. It becomes increasingly subtle, challenging and rigorous as it attaches itself to other points of view and languages. Children often leave drawing finding other interactions and languages that are more sustaining for them. Sustaining languages begin to find their viability and vitality as they effect historical, social and political conditions. The word art means to make with intention, the word aesthetic is the opposite of anesthetic. So, to get back to your question, I make art to build a self that desires liveliness in sustainable communities. 

 Saria: What is it that intrigues you about collage?

Terry: It's a way to use imagery, you move through the world, things trigger your thoughts or your imagination including mechanically reproduced images. So I have file folders full of things like spatial constructions, color relationships, or trigger images. Sometimes the images are interesting formally at other times they can hint at metaphoric content. Occasionally I will simply paint the found image, at other times it is easier to collage or print the image. There’s one nine foot painting I’m currently working on where I am superimposing graffitied numbers on a collage made from two vintage Bible illustrations. With collage you are fragmenting and stacking images montage-like which, for me, alludes to cinematography, television, and computer screens. Additionally, I often doodle and collage the doodle directly onto the painting. Sometimes the drawing may be a quick five-minute blind contour drawing that I'll enlarge and attach, or screen print onto a painting. So there are all kinds of ways of suggesting the interaction, translation, and hybridizations of images.

Saria: What do you think about the idea that everything is a collage, for instance, personalities being a collage of influences throughout our lives?

Terry: I think you're exactly right. Every person is a set of biological and physiological conditions; genetic things, but then there are environmental conditions that determine identity (nature/nurture). The fact that you were born in the United States in the twenty-first century determines a lot of who you are: race, gender, sex, economic status all determine identity. Basically, you're layering and editing things to build a self. One of my favorite essays is by Walter Benjamin, titled, Unpacking My Library, where he's writing about building a self. He writes, “I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order.” We have the possibility of collaging and editing incomplete selves and communities. I can arrange them in multiple ways, add new texts, take away other texts and so on. Benjamin’s essay suggest the broader possibility of the reanimation of categories and systems that have become calcified. Benjamin is proposing the possibility of building more functional societal, political, and economic systems . All systems are cobbling together fragments of previous ideas and previous systems to come up with better ones. At the heart of what I'm doing is attempting to make sure that no single thing or structure presents itself as a singular, codified system.

Saria: Dealing with abstraction, what are your thoughts or attractions to abstracting objects in work?

Terry: The word abstract simply means to draw away from. There are all kinds of reasons to pull away from something. For example, you’re looking at a tree and you abstract it because you're trying to emphasize certain conditions of it. I started off as a figurative painter which was an important learning process for me. Trying to respond to and mimic a physical object was and is a powerful discipline, it teaches you how to slowly and specifically listen to the world. The idea of abstraction is that you're starting to move the objective world into language, you begin to admit that what you are doing is not purely objective. Our names for things are incomplete and sometimes misguided. To judge the painting of the tree is to judge the artist’s translation of the tree not the tree itself. The “truthfulness” of the painting lives in its formal, metaphoric, metonymic, and historical constructions - its abstractions. All kinds of figurative devices or tropes are being used, stacked and erased. I cobble these materials and figurative devices together to form loose, hybrid, narrative structures in an attempt to privilege allegorical readings over formal readings. Allegory means to speak other, that the materials and forms are not ends in themselves, but are used to speak outside themselves. 

I grew up in a fundamentalist church with stories like Adam and Eve in Eden, for instance. You could take the story literally as an objective historical event, or you can think of it allegorically as it represents other things. Abstraction is not trying to trick you into believing it's of nature. It's trying to speak other; it's trying to point metaphorically to essential conditions that run beside or transcend the limitations of the incomplete names we call facts. Allegory has the advantage of translating multiple histories - we may not have TRUTH, but maybe together we can build useful “truths” (truth collages).

A Theory Cloud, a 13-part series

Saria: You mentioned in your webinar that you plan to move your abstractions toward more narrative and figurative ideas, how do you plan to do that?

Terry:  Modernist abstraction arrived at its end game with Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and maybe Robert Ryman. The endgame was to reduce art to its singular, essential nature (i.e., its distinct objectivity). So to return figuration or the possibility of allegory to painting was to restore a condition that had been severely critiqued in Modernist discussions. Surrealism and Dada did preserve some of the conditions of allegory but with some suspicion in that those modes lacked the scientific objectivity that Greenberg insisted on. The idea of contaminating the reductionism and high purity of Modernism was something I am hoping to do. Painting is allowed to display doubt, to equivocate, to hybridize.

Saria: You often work from photography to create your ideas, what is that process like for you?

Terry: My father passed down a camera to me when I was probably 11 or 12 so I've shot a lot of films. I also keep a sketchbook but some things you just can't sketch so I record things with a camera. After a few years, I realized I was limiting my experiences by habitually looking through my camera’s lens and framing. But photography remains a powerful medium especially with the speed and informality of digital imaging. I shoot and download hundreds of pictures and then edit and organize the few that seem useful at any given time. Going through my files I’ll find five or six images that hold my attention either visually, or because they evoke narrative or psychological possibilities. Within painting, photographs can function as an intruding voice suggesting the necessity of multiple voices. Photography humbles painting’s autonomy and its historical privilege setting up debased theatrical and historical tensions. The theatrical and allegorical elements suggest a reciprocity between multiple times, hierarchies, and processes. I’m usually doing something to the photograph like collaging or hybridizing. I’m “unpacking my library, yes I am.”

Saria: You have a teaching background. How does that inform your work now?

Terry: I initially had no idea that I would teach, but after my first few classes I was hooked. I loved the humbling interactions. After a few years of teaching, I realized, good teachers probably listen more than teach. They're listening to what students are thinking, looking at, and listening to. The marks they make or the odd ways they put things together is exciting. The things that excite them begin to excite and motivate me as well as expose my own limitations and narrow views. After several years you find yourself working collaboratively with your students and colleagues. In my last few years of teaching, there would be five or six of us that would get together in each other’s studios where teaching dissolves into collegial relationships. I do believe teachers have a necessary role in the maturation of students. Teachers can be experienced, proactive builders of art communities. They can build a sound grammatical base within a useful, logical curriculum. They can help navigate the historical and theoretical arenas necessary for art practices today. Teachers in collaboration with institutions can help expand community resources, spaces, processes, and tools. However, the “art” part has to be professed and cultivated and not prescriptively taught. The goal then becomes overcoming the limitations of the grammatical and structural codes you’ve worked so hard to instill. You can't resist and overcome systemic limitations and deficiencies without knowing how they systemically work.

Saria: What have you enjoyed about being a resident at Stove Works?

Terry: Well I have a family and so I miss them, but I get up every morning and there's no television, and there are no real distractions. What I was hoping to do is find a rhythm that I was missing at home. The other thing is that there are some interesting people here, and so you have conversations about what they're doing. I'm hoping maybe this week I'll prop the door open and put a sign up so they can come in and see what's going on or what I'm thinking. It’s good to see how people react to your work.

ABOUT ME, THE INTERVIEWER:

My name is Saria Smith, and I am a BFA student currently working as a Curatorial Assistant at Stove Works Gallery. I am an artist and find joy in expressing myself through various ways involving, working with found objects, collage, and music. 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.

Resident Spotlight: Kris Bespalec

Kris in her studio at Stove Works. Photo by William Johnson. www.wmjohnsonphotography.com

Saria: How would you describe your style?

Kris: It's weird because I used to feel like I was all over the place and now I start to see how work all has a similar thread, looking back. I'm interested in the multi-faceted layers of womanhood and the different ways I've been a different woman at different points in my life and what that looks like. And the roles that are traditionally played or traditionally challenged by women and I'm also really interested in the materiality and ways of portraying that and I'm really interested in the role of memory and how it is very malleable. Memory is always affected by experience and time and it can be influenced by other people. I'm interested in the way we are constantly constructing and deconstructing memory and I like making work that evokes how something might feel to me like a memory but might feel different to someone else. I do work that’s very personal but I also make it something that is tangible to others. That's why the materiality is important like the use of rust or salt, it's always changing. Some people can literally see its history and its time.

Saria: Have you always been collecting?

Kris: I've always been a very selective order. I've really been interested in how objects carry memory. I have a hard time getting rid of something if when I pick it up I have a memory attached to it. Everyone does that. Objects carry this weight of memory and I find that really interesting and I started doing that when I was really little. I had drawers of rocks from places that I went to and little objects and things like that. I kept a calendar in my room where every day I wrote down one or two things that I thought were important. I've always been really interested in the way our brains remember and forget.

Saria: How does your role as a mother inform your art?

Kris: It informed it more than I might realize and it was weird to see certain things trend. I was really fascinated with the physical aspects of being a mother that kind of blew my mind in ways I didn't expect that it would. For instance, I do a lot of work with breasts. I didn't really realize that breasts were functional first until they had to be functional and it was sort of like; these things are amazing! They look good in shirts and they support life. I knew all along about breastfeeding but breasts were so sexual for so long for whatever reason and I was very body-conscious. All of a sudden it was like; why did nobody emphasize that these are tools?  It's not like I couldn't come to this realization without being a mother but for me, that was a huge lightswitch of just how powerful the female body can be. 

Prayer to St.Anthony: Lost Objects Found, Lost objects, cast resin, 2013

Saria: How did you get interested in working with found objects?

Kris: I think it started with the collecting and when I was going to school and spending a lot of time in museums and seeing an artist that incorporated that into their work and realizing how much that could play a role in what I'm trying to do and instead of doing a literal image I could do a literal material. A time I really did that was a show at the Chicago Jane Addams Hull-House Museum and this idea of really using milk, and really using sugar and physically using the thing I had an emotional attachment to make that work so much richer to me and so much more meaningful.

Saria: What do you think people gain by cherishing objects?

Kris: That’s a good question because there’s that whole Marie Kondo thing where it's like getting rid of everything except for the things that really mean something to you and well for me that looks like a house full of stuff. Our spaces and our objects become self-portraits of ourselves and especially for creative people, you walk into their house looking at a self-portrait. The way that they arrange what they have. I hate disposable society, this sort of capitalist notion of buy and replace and so that kind of object mongering is really gross to me but when it comes to objects with meaning when we have an object that reminds us of other things that are really precious. People who love books have every book. If you have an object that means something to you I don't see any problem with it but if you're just stuff for the sake of stuff, that’s gross.

Saria: What's the idea behind your constructed memories series?

Kris: I started to really look, again, at this idea of how our homes can almost be a self-portrait and I started to think about how I didn't always want my artwork to be about me. It always is, and there’s no way it can’t be but there were certain artworks I looked at that were very much about a certain experience. I thought of how I can construct something that feels like a memory to me even though it doesn't actually have anything to do with me. I had been collecting found photos and objects for a long time and the reason I had these things is because for some reason they felt like I could've had a memory about it. Even if it wasn't my family or people I knew there was something about it that felt nostalgic and so I started to have all these things that were nostalgic and play with that and create these things that represented how a memory feels to me. All of them have this same energy to me so I was interested in evoking the feeling of nostalgia in other people that wasn't directly my story.

Constructed Memory, Installation, 2018

 Saria: You've worked with a range of different materials, do you think different ideas, installation vs a 2d work create different narratives. What are you more drawn to?

Kris: Even when I'm working 2-dimensionally my work has a lot of tactile elements, so when I'm doing collage, I’m collaging found objects. Even if I'm taking a photograph I'm doing layers and layers of acrylic and that have a plastic, fleshy look and feel to them. The material a lot of times before I make work I do a lot of writing and journaling and I'll find that there are certain words that sort of stand out to me or words that can be translated into a material and then I challenge myself to use that material in the actual product. I find that's a way of bringing it to life, to me it feels like I'm bringing that emotion into a physical realm.

Saria: Can you talk about your work with Excavating History?

Kris: I met this awesome woman, Rebecca Keller in college. She was my professor and then we became good friends and colleagues. She started talking to me about work she did call Excavating History where she would go to historic sites and make art in response to either the building or the space and that’s how I did the Jane Addams Hull-House installation. After that, I was really interested in working in the old steel industry because my family had come from eastern Europe and had all worked in the steel industry on some level. I was really interested in getting to know that part of my history and I was told about a small town called Braddock, Pennsylvania which is just outside of Pittsburgh and it was Andrew Carnegie's first steel mill, first bank, and his first library so it was like his town. It had a booming steel industry and all these immigrants would come from different parts of Europe and when they would come they would establish: a church, a school, and housing for their workers. Then the steel industry fell and they went from having like 30,000 people to less than 3,000. The steel mill is still there and Braddock was trying to find a way to revitalize and support the people that were still there. I ended up making a phone call to the Mayor and he really felt like art was an integral part of revitalizing the community. I ended up spending two years on and off making art and inviting other artists to come out to make art in the space and do an exhibition that involved installing art at the bank, library, church, and school. Some things were left behind to be and see what happens to them. The gallery that used to be a school and space for artists are still there.

What Remains, Mixed MediaObjects gathered during meditative walks during the pandemic, 2020

Saria: Some of your work uses themes from religion. How did that come to factor into your work?

Kris: For much of my life I walked away from Catholicism and Religion. I grew up Catholic and it's really strange how I'm constantly thinking of how beautiful and how important the church was to the Renaissance. I'm always wanting to collect information from other people and the first thing that I remember not liking is the idea that one group is better than others because that seems in direct conflict with the very first thing you learned which is God loves you, and everybody. Every religion kind of does that in some way. Because if I believe in this I don't want to, in any way, give the impression that I'm better than anybody else but I couldn't deny the fact that I loved the imagery that I grew up with.  So many of my early memories of things that really struck me as beautiful were really based on that catholic teaching and faith. All of those scriptures and even some of my current work are related to a bible story and it was because there was something about the poetic language that I like to play with visually. Like with St.Anthony, I grew up where if you lost anything you pray to St.Anthony. And then as you get older it can be seen as a strange thing to do. So what I did was I made a cast of St.Anthony and I filled it with objects from people who were no longer in my life. So each one of those is a story that I found interesting and then I tried to show a visualization for how it made me feel.

Saria: A lot of your older works are drawings and are different from what you create now. How did you progress to where you are currently?

Kris: I didn't really do any formal art learning until I went to college so the first thing I really struggled with was drawing and I really wanted to be better at it because a lot of times it seemed in order to be a good artist you have to be able to draw, which you don't. It’s interesting, I keep those images on my website because that was my first kind of artwork I made about the body and I was interested, of course, in the female form.  I did a lot of drawing that was layering and overlapping of these bodies and at the time I was sort of compulsively making it and now I have such a better understanding and they are still so important to me and I like having them on there because it's like the roots of that thing that I've grown.

Reflecting Forward: Forged Memories, Coal dust, steel filings and sugar on mirror Period photographs (1894-1926, Slovakian and Sicilian immigrants/Artist’s Family) 2016

Saria: You work a lot with students and help them see art in a new way. In what ways has that been rewarding to you and the students?

Kris: I don't know how it's been rewarding to the students. I can only really speak for my gratitude and the way that I've tried to be better and the ways that I've tried to realize when I haven't done as good of a job as I could have and how I try to be better every time. I started off in elementary school and I've worked with so many ages and so many different groups and I think all of them have helped me be more understanding of people. Overall I'm just really grateful that I've had the opportunity to get to know people on so many different levels. I feel like that helps me overall to just be a little more humble and a little bit more myself and a little less afraid about where I am in my journey because I know we are all on a path somewhere.

Saria: What has Stove Works done well during your time as an artist in residence?

Kris: Because now I've seen three different groups of residents come through, I'm impressed with the different areas people are coming from, the different types of work they're making, the different stage they're at in their production whether they are in the early stages of figuring things out or are a little more established I've really enjoyed that kind of dynamic of so many different things coming together despite the pandemic it's just great to get an idea of the potential of what Chattanooga can be and what Stoveworks can be as a place where an artist will want to come to make work and not just one type of artist but a wide variety.

Saria: What are you doing after you leave Stove Works?

Kris: I really hope I can stay in touch and support Stove Works as much as possible because I think it is essential to moving forward with being a dynamic art community in Chattanooga because it's really easy for things to become repetitive. The city kind of has this tendency to kind of just default to certain artists because they've already figured out that they're good at certain things. Stove Works has an opportunity to be a space and always offer new things. So I really want to support that and be able to contribute to future work.

About Kris:

Kris Bespalec is a multimedia artist who incorporates found objects, mementos, and ideas dealing with memory in her work. She also incorporates ideas of womanhood and her personal experiences as a mother. She currently lives in Chattanooga and is a resident here at Stove Works till the end of April. Kris works teaching various ages and has done a lot of work with communities such as teaching art classes to inmates at Walker State Faith and Character Based Prison in Georgia, among many other projects. Looking at her work invites us to experience these memorable feelings and recognizable objects that can be interpreted by our own memories and feelings. She shares herself with us through her art while leaving more than enough space for us to bring our own story into the experience.

https://cbdavisart.com/

ABOUT ME, THE INTERVIEWER:

My name is Saria Smith, and I am a BFA student currently working as a Curatorial Assistant at Stove Works Gallery. I am an artist and find joy in expressing myself through various ways involving, working with found objects, collage, and music. 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.

Resident Spotlight: Devin Balara

Devin in her studio. Photo by William Johnson. www.wmjohnsonphotography.com

 Saria: How did you hear about Stove Works?

Devin: I was friends with Mike Calway-Fagan, he was one of my professors in grad school. He came during my last year so I only really knew him for that year and afterward, we collaborated on a couple of curatorial things together and we decided to keep in touch and have been really good friends. I toured the building three years ago when it was just still bare-bones and I thought, “maybe one day I'll get to be here,” and here I am.

Saria: Where does the inspiration for most of your work come from?

Devin: I've gone through lots of similar ways of working but I've always drawn as a practice. Drawing has always been the way that I figure most things out and I think deciding to give the weight to just the drawing itself was something that I was interested in doing. Instead of the drawing being a plan to make something else that was a little more 3 dimensional, I like letting the drawings speak more for themselves and whatever style I have innately drawing-wise can really translate well into steel, using that line. It's cool too because ultimately the steel kind of does what it wants to do so it gives a little bit of control to the material. I think I get a kick out of that, in the kind of inconsequential way that I've always doodled. I really can take it to the next level and really commit to something that was maybe just meant to be silly or fleeting and take something that I drew in five seconds and then spend 20 hours realizing it.

Saria: How would you describe your style?

Devin: I've always been pretty meticulous. I think my work is always something I'm coming up against. It seems like things can sometimes look too finished or too polished but I think that's just me. It's something that I've always gotten criticism for. The ideas in my head are loose and I think that sometimes it can feel different for people who perceive it as being very skill-based. My style is detail-oriented and in my mind, I don't think that I come across as too much of a control freak with everything that I do but I think maybe that is something I just need to accept. I want to feel loose and I'm constantly trying to give myself that challenge to loosen up a little bit but the more I accept my natural tendencies. Idea-wise, that's where I try to insert the messy or silly, looseness. I definitely prioritize humor in my work. If my work is being its most honest reflection of me I want viewers to have a laugh.

Saria: Were you always interested in sculpture, how did you start working with steel?

Devin: When I was little I drew a lot, I was always fussing on making things like getting in the bath pretending that I was like a chemist and mixing all of my mom's shampoo together, and building things out in the woods. Coming of age I was way more into music and I played bass clarinet and I was in a band and the kind of school I went to, you were only allowed to do one creative thing at a time and I chose music. When I got to college I thought I was going to study psychology or some facet of sociology and for undergrad, I needed credit so I took a drawing class and I ended up meeting four or five people that I am still really good friends with. All of us burst out into different areas of the art world. During those drawing classes my teachers were like, “you're an artist” but I was like “I am?”  Then I took sculpture and I was shyer back then and it was an intimidating environment.  I was really intimidated working around these skilled people, luckily the metalworking area happened to be in the very back of the sculpture studio and I would pull the curtain and be alone and get to do my own thing. In the department, there were really incredible teachers. There was a husband and wife team and they are so encouraging and through that experience, I realize I love steel and it loves me back. It's such amazing material.

Saria: Some of your work like the pieces from your solo show, What Did You Expect? What More Do You Want? have a feeling of playfulness in them, you create these little characters who go on to have their own life. How do you see your sculptures as they exist in space after you’ve made them?

Devin: That body of work was definitely centered around the idea that if you go outside things are going to happen or if you go outside you're gonna see something. Outside meaning outside of your house or maybe hiking or in a space that you haven't been. In that show there's a snake coming out of a mailbox, there’s a narrative there, maybe a short one but it's there. That was an idea that I didn't see happen but I'm sure it has happened.  I like working the way I do because I like that you can see everything through each other and they morph and change as you walk around them. I like that each one comes with a kind of narrative.

with Dove Drury-Hornbuckle in "Faeries in America"

Saria: How does your personal identity factor into your work?

Devin: Humor, it's definitely the most “me.” I think I'm funny and I love to make myself laugh and it's a gift when I make someone else laugh too. First and foremost it has to do with what makes me laugh and then I think about the degree of laughter. Especially the work that I've been making here. I didn't work for almost a year before I got here. When you make work that's intentionally silly, it's really easy to talk yourself out of things. Like who cares and who is this helping and why bother? How do I reconcile making jokes when things are getting sad and scary? So, instead of making work, before I came here, I was by Lake Michigan at Oxbow and collected rocks. When I was young I always collected things. Then I got interested in teaching myself about these rocks and learning names and other information. I broke into it and saw how it was connected to everything, thinking about prehistory time. I drew from those ideas and also the object and tools of learning. I'm trying to pick from all the things I've learned. I have to think about what is the thing I care the most about lately and its rocks!

Saria: A lot of your work also stands on its own, seeming precariously balanced, is that a feature that relates to the meaning of the art or just a stylistic choice?

Devin: I think it's stylish in that I like the illusionary aspect of it. There are a couple of things I've been making that sort of deal with that. I made a couple of things that look like a table but it's a flattened drawing of a table where the legs are kind of floating, two are attached to the ground and two are floating. It looks like it's foreshortened but you come to it and it's actually flat. I also like magic in general so the magic aspect makes me want it to feel weightless. I also like my object to have a relationship with what they are shown with. The best exhibitions I've had have been with one or two other friends. I make my work so it can be around other people's work, and I like the way that it becomes a drawing that is superimposed on whatever someone else has made, at the same time it’s hyper present from one view and could completely disappear from the side.

Saria: How have you seen yourself grow as an artist since your time here at Stove Works?

Devin: Yeah, I don't often have the studio., I always have the metal shop but outside of institutions or some residencies, I've never had an actual studio that’s mine. I get to pretend and play artist and it actually does affect you, acting it out. Here is my desk, and I hang my drawing on the walls, and I have my coffee and here I draw and I look out the window. That's been a fun aspect of it, to embody and act like an artist. It helps. Also, it's nice to have people around you that are kind of doing the same thing. It's great always to have fresh eyes and opinions on your work, and you see people working with new techniques. I've definitely come more to appreciate this region and the many gifts of the Cumberland Plateau. I've done lots of long drives, looking in creeks for rocks. And it's great to have a studio just to feel like you can really look at what you made. I don't get that in the metal shop as much, there’s never quite the white wall to see something up against. I still always leave spaces like this feeling recharged, and I gain enough personal momentum so when I leave here it's not over. And I've re- fallen in love with drawing.

Saria: What are you doing after you leave Stove Works?

Devin:  I'm going back to Oxbow, back to the snow. The metal shop unfortunately is entirely outdoors, open-air so it won't be workable till May. But there's plenty of indoor spaces and many places to be. It's such an excellent place to live and work.

About Devin

Devin Balara is an artist who works with sculpture and metalwork. She has been working with metals for 11 years. She studied in Jacksonville at UNF and got her MFA in sculpture at Indiana University in Bloomington, where she saw snow for the first time. She has worked at the University of Tennessee in the metal shop and at the Ox-Bow School of Art in Michigan. Now she calls Ox-Bow home though she would say she feels very nomadic. She values humor in her work and is interested in working meticulously while still embracing the idea of looseness and fun. She is also interested in geology and collects and studies rocks which inform her newer work. She has a piece in the Stove Works gallery in our Resident show Hot Doughnuts which is up till March 27th. She was a resident here from December through the end of February.

http://www.devinbalara.com/

ABOUT ME, THE INTERVIEWER

My name is Saria Smith, and I am a BFA student currently working as a Curatorial Assistant at Stove Works Gallery. I am an artist and find joy in expressing myself through various ways involving, working with found objects, collage, and music. 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.

Resident Spotlight: Bradley Marshall

Bradley in his studio at Stove Works. Photo: William Johnson, wmjohnsonphotography.com

Saria: How did you find out about Stove Works?

Bradley:  I heard about Stove Works through some art friends in Nashville initially and then learned more about it through Mike Calway-Fagan. I came to a Stove Works’ show before they were in their current building and I spoke with Mike and he asked if I would give an artist talk that night, and I said, “No, I can't do that.” I had driven from Nashville for the day and he was like, “Okay. You'll do the next one.” So, I came back down for the Slideshow nights and I gave a talk and that sparked some studio visits.

Saria: Did you always feel like an artist?

Bradley: I would say no, I was actually reluctant to use that term for a long time, even when I was making art photography. I think I didn't have enough of a bearing on what that term would change about what I do. So, I called myself a photographer, and I was also trying to avoid some kind of pretension that I felt would come across if I claimed an artist with a capital “A.” Once I went to grad school I felt like I had to since I was getting my masters in Fine Arts.

Saria: When did you move from straightforward photography to the art you're making now?

Bradley: I initially started experimenting with video in grad school and that opened the floodgates of other potentials. Once you start to mess with 4D art, it breaks a seal. I got interested in how I can project video and different ideas around what our relationship to images are. I'm still interested in externalizing these images that were never deemed worthy of holding an objecthood.

Quarter Lever, 2019-2020, silver gelatin photograph authored by artist's paternal grandfather, epoxied potato chip, air wedges, pvc tubing and connectors, acrylic, aftermarket valve cover for 1957 Chevrolet, screen (HD video 01:27" looped, no audio), electromechanics, machined hardware, turnbuckles, miscellaneous hardware, miscellaneous wiring and cordage, various epoxy and adhesive, dimensions variable

Saria: Your website doesn't include a bio or artist statements for the artwork, why is that?

Bradley: Websites are weird in that sense because they're so often seen as being made strictly for an audience, it's very commodified in that sense so I hate thinking about it in that way. I want it to still be interesting for me and part of that is withholding some information. I'm easy to get in touch with, my email is on there and I'm willing to chat more. There's something about presenting art in a manner where it has some kind of quality that is not fully defined.

Saria: How would you describe your art style?

Bradley: I’m apprehensive to that term because of the way it is used to create genres in art and usually I think we tend to think about how our style is by someone telling us so I end up thinking about how other people have labeled what I do. There's definitely a movement of people making sculptural photographic works right now, but if I realize that I'm creating a style it's often in my best interest to break that.
 

Saria: Why do you choose to not include artist statements on your works as they are presented on your website?

Bradley: What I make has lots of context involved. They are conveyed in certain ways on my website that don't require any sort of institutional artist statement, which was definitely crammed down my throat from grad school. On my website, I think engaging in an explanation of how things work also with a materials list becomes more telling. Reading that to me creates a more rich space around the work. It provides most of the context for the viewer to create a narrative on their own. I have an artist statement for most of those works if I need to provide that context and that framework.

Saria: What do you find most intriguing about sculpture?

Bradley: Sculpture is most interesting because everything can be sculpture, it's much more about a heterogenous relationship between materials and finding these links between how two materials relate to each other to create meaning. It can create a kind of awareness to consumption recycling and waste and excess but also to things like labor and bureaucracy and politics and identity can coalesce through. Conversation is as simple as tracing the lineage of how one thing is made.

Console, Console (Diptych), 2020, Parametric speakers, speaker wire, proprietary amplifier, two-channel audio, OLED screens with micro controllers, three-channel bitmap animation, custom code, various adhesives and hardware

Saria: What enforces your choice to use certain materials?

Bradley: I use memory in my work a lot, so misremembering. How things may appear visually and not actually be so, kind of like magic, it's more about the sleight of hand, it's like an illusion through a kind of decoy. My relationship to materials shifts between the demand of a project and the ideas and the materials can be iterative, leading to another. Research rigor comes into play and reading about certain historical events. And also thinking about the materials that exist around imagery. My piece Quarter Lever especially is thinking about the way that images are presented at eye level especially on storefronts, and there is a video low on the ground which is dealing with the fact that video is clearly the most interesting thing you'd want to see and it only about 3 inches wide and above is a huge device used for showing imagery, but it just has these small pieces being smashed at eye level. So, I'm kinda playing with those contrasting feelings, the way that we feel about something that is factory produced and has been processed and things that are more raw and have more warmth to them.

Saria: Your work, An Imperfect Offering, A Windowless Room (Skeeeedaddle!), creates this sort of dreamy, disconnected space while using a can and pencil to mount it to the wall seemingly with magic. What inspired you to make this piece?

Bradley: Sally O'Reilly talks about a certain type of art that exists at the "edge of the credible."  The way that piece is functioning, there are some things that have a kind of anti-logic. That piece is about someone very special to me dying of dementia and so watching how memory starts to behave illogically and unexpectedly, it's interesting because someone's memory is different from what people say and whether or not they remember you. That was one of the major ideas going into that work and an influence about it. But It allows for inference too.
 

An Imperfect Offering, A Windowless Room (Skeeeedaddle!), 2021, Hand-cut MDF, inkjet print, steel, wax, tin can, pencil with lead replaced with steel, hardware and adhesives, 36.5"x26"x8"

Saria: Do you strive for perfection in your work?

Bradley: I do really like to strive for it but my work also thrives on the failures that happen, that are ultimately going to happen.

Saria: What's your most personal piece?

Bradley: An imperfect offering is my most personal because it's about that process of letting things go and settling for those imperfections of trying to represent them. I know that my sentiments and my attachment to the work I make is never going to be felt by someone else and can't. I use personal experience as a way to attempt to get to collective experiences. Creating shared empathy over an artwork.  That piece has the most earnestly behind it.
 

Saria: What is the best thing that this opportunity at Stove Works did for you as an artist during this residency?

Bradley: Two things: meeting new amazing artists and time, space, and access to tools and equipment is very crucial. With that comes making relationships with people who know how to use those tools better than me and learning from them.

Saria: What are you planning to do after you leave Stove Works?

Bradley: I don't know, looking for that first warm day of summer, maybe find a pool or swimming hole, that's all I have on the horizon.

About Bradley:

Bradley Marshall is an artist in residence here at Stove Works till the end of March. He received his masters at East Tennessee University and along with art making teaches photography Bradley is interested in sculpture that incorporates often photography and video and different ways of creating a narrative through artworks inspired by personal events in his life. After sitting down with him I've come to recognize that his work is very thoughtful and aims to allow space for the viewer to project their own understanding onto his work. He pulls from life experiences to create an object or collaborate objects that play with how we view objects and memory. He has a piece currently on view in our show Teachable Moment titled Console, Console (Diptych).

 http://bradley-marshall.com/

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 ways involving, working with found objects, collage, and music. 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.