Cammofleur #3, Kristin Calabrese

Self-Portrait of the Artist, 2013

MAP               Tell me about the big black paintings.

                     

KC                  Are you talking about the one unfinished black painting I have in my studio, the crumpled piece of waxed, dyed black canvas, or the two large drawings on paper?

                   

                        I’d like to talk first about the show I’m trying to plan for The Eastern Star Gallery at The Archer School for girls. They have a small gallery space and we were trying to figure out which pieces of my work to show. I was thinking I didn’t like the space very much because it has a large staircase that is almost the centerpiece of the room and an acoustic tile ceiling overhead. I’m leaning towards wanting to exhibit a combination of pieces that would transform the space and make it into a kind of experience. I’m envisioning hanging a big black trompe l’oeil painting, the dyed canvas that had been the still life for the painting, and the drawings that were basically prints of the ironed out wax I had used to make the curtain still life pieces able to hold wrinkles. This would transform the space into a room completely covered all the way around in some kind of large black surface that varied between the real, the fake, and the byproduct. One piece that is influencing my idea to do this installation is the dark mazelike room that was part of the LACMA. James Turrell exhibition – where the viewer goes down hallways that are pitch black and has to navigate the space hugging the wall.
 

                        As far as the black paintings, I’m working on a series of 4 or 5 black paintings. They also have something to do with wanting to make a feeling, but instead of being like sensory deprivation, I wanted them to have the feeling of a poem that I wrote that’s not really a poem, but more like a cry to the universe – ha! – So the paintings are platforms to hold up the words and something in their own right as well.  Truthfully I want the paintings to be devastating. I really hope they will be. I only have so much control and I’m only who I am, so you know, I need luck or something.

                       

t have a lot of stil-life material. Most of my work is made by painting from observation some still life object or installation that I made to be painted. I still haven’t really shown the still life pieces or installations yet, although I think I’m about to do that soon.

 

Portrait of the Artist in the Studio by Joshua Aster

MAP:              Yeah, it’s nice. I think that a lot of times people maybe think that representational painting is a one-liner, or a thing, but it’s a whole process of thought. I think that depicting and showing that thought in different forms is actually an extremely vigorous way of thinking and interpreting. That’s always one of the things I’ve really liked about you work, is that your process is so rigorous; you can see it. You’re into that and you’re into going through all of the rigor of all of the steps of the entire process. You look like you’re enjoying it. I don’t know if you’re enjoying it, or if you’re arguing with yourself when you’re painting, but it looks like you’re enjoying it.

KC:                 Oh, yeah, I’m probably doing both at different times. I’m suffering – I’m suffering. My work makes me suffer, but I love it. The contemporary dialogue around the crazy art market is making me suffer, but I’m interested in it. I’m like, why am I thinking about these things … Whatever, the flip art stuff; I shouldn’t talk about that. I don’t know why anybody’s talking about that stuff. Do you know what I mean? It’s just like, damn it, it’s awful.

MAP:              The series of interviews I am conducting are on female power in the art world and what that means.

KC:                 Do you mean like Georgia O’Keefe, who just sold the most expensive artwork by a woman at auction or do you mean a curator like Connie Butler or Michelle Grabner, the artist who just was one of the Whitney Biennial’s co-curators, that kind of power?

MAP:              Well, that’s the interesting thing about the topic of power, because power manifests itself in so many different ways. There are many kinds of tremendous cultural influencers.

KC:                 I think Michelle was just on the ten most powerful women list, but it is interesting because there’s a lot of different kinds of power. There’s power here on the ground.

MAP:              There are powerful teachers. I think about Sabina Ott, who we both know.

KC:                 She wasn’t my teacher. I was an artist in residence at the San Francisco Art Institute at the same time she was the head of the grad program.

MAP:              Well, I guess the reason why I mentioned Sabina’s name is because I think that she creates a lot of opportunities for young artists, and I think that’s one of the things she introduced me to as a concept; that it’s great to be an art star, but it’s even greater to expand that opportunity to everyone around you. You create more energy everywhere you go that way. It was just her ethos, I think. It’s just something that’s always been there as long as I’ve known her.

"For Your Own Good", 2010, Oil on Canvas, 43 x 49 inches

KC:                 Yes, Sabina’s great. I am particularly obsessed with some of her drawings. Are you asking about curating because you want me to talk about my experience with it? I don’t know exactly what this interview is. Maybe that’s what we are talking about when you mention female power in the art world. I’m always looking for things that I’m excited about in other artists’ work. I don’t know if I’m really thinking about it in a way where I’m trying to help anybody, necessarily. I am--because I definitely am very nurturing to my students and I want all my friends to do well. But, in a way, I think I put art first. I think about art a little bit more than I think about people.

                        If there’s work that I think is amazing in some way, I try to support that work. If I come across work that gives me insight, I’m compelled to want to put something together around it, probably because I’d like to engage more with it. If I know somebody who makes things that I just don’t understand that I think are amazing, I might work to give that work a platform and try to find other things that go with it – or I might just talk about it with other artists who might also go look at it. There’s artwork that inspires me to want to work for that artwork, and then there’s people who make that artwork, who I want to work with a lot because I want more of that artwork.

MAP:              It’s a great answer.

KC:                 Thank you. One thing though, even if I really like the work, if the artist is a mean, I make a point to not include their work, even if I really like the work.

MAP:              Good for you. That can be hard as a curator because you do so much for the people in the show when you’re a curator. I don’t think people who are on the outside of it realize how much the curator does.

KC:                 Right, it’s an unbelievable amount of work.

 

"Corner of the Flag (Cat in the Hat)", 2013, Oil on Canvas, 7 x 7 1/2 inches

MAP:              I always tell young artists, just always say thank you. Just say thank you a lot when you’re working with the curator. And if they ask you for something, be on time with it. Or, if there’s a time you have to be somewhere, or if you’re going to install, bring your tools, little stuff, because you don’t want to be the person who’s constantly not saying thank you and asking for things, because that person will never ask you to do anything again. You wind up on the person’s mental list: a crossed-off list.

KC:                 Well, sort of, or if you’d rather be on the crossed-off list, you could be difficult.

MAP:              People think that that’s what they’re supposed to be like if they’re to be taken seriously as an artist.

KC:                 It never occurred to me being difficult was on the checklist for being taken seriously as an artist. I always try to be professional. Have you heard that quote: "Be regular and orderly in your life ..., so that you may be violent and original in your work." -Gustave Flaubert. When someone is difficult, (there are all kinds of difficult), it might be simply two people trying to communicate but having different ways of doing it and having misunderstandings. Sometimes artists are sensitive about their work and need a lot of reassurance that the curator is really invested. Art making is taking a stand and being vulnerable. Artists have to protect themselves. There are so many opportunities for people who are young to be treated badly, and being difficult often comes from having a wounded ego because of past mistreatment.

                        The more power you get, the less people treat you with disrespect (my best argument for power). This isn’t just art; this is in any field. Some bosses never miss a chance to make an underling feel bad. Many jobs won’t even allow an employee to have a personal phone once in a while! There’s a lot of disrespect all over the place, which makes people think, “Oh, you’re disrespecting me,” “Oh, you don’t think I’m…” A lot of artists have very fragile egos. I empathize. Art is a location that artists go to be in charge of their own world, so it’s a delicate balance navigating between art being the most special emotional place and other people who do or don’t understand it.

                        My approach when I’m curating is that I try to figure out what the other person needs--and I know we’re all really busy. I know how I want to be treated, so I try to treat other artists that way. I feel like the artist is doing me a favor in letting me use their work to define my concepts about painting and/or art in general.

                        A simple example is the “Unfinished Paintings” show that I curated for LACE a few years ago. There were forty unfinished paintings by forty different painters – all a similar size. I arranged the paintings in alphabetical order, rather than by some arbitrary criteria like what looks good next to each other. I think it could never look as good if it had been hung in a way where I would have been trying to form relationships between the unrelated paintings by color, form, style, etc., because how the paintings look and what each one was about had nothing to do with the concept of the show, which was something like, many paintings, all a similar size, all unfinished. I think the framework allowed each painting to speak it’s own message unencumbered by some sort of thematic organizing principle. The show reflected the structure of a painting: ie, anything can be on a canvas being similar to any painting can be in this show. Of course, I had to love all of the paintings. The artists who let me use their work in the show allowed me to make my idea visible, and I am grateful that I know so many artists who will help me put forward these ideas and others that, in some ways are ordinary, and then, in other ways, are revolutionary or are at least thrilling to me.

                        I really put myself out when I’m curating. Conversely, I also want to be treated well when I’m working with other people. If I’m putting my work in a show and then somebody’s like, “Bring it here. It’s only for one day or two days. First come first served. Hang this whatever,” I say “no”. I put too much effort into these paintings to put them in jeopardy like that.

                        Speaking about the ego thing, I don’t think I have that problem too much, because I’m pretty secure. I get treated okay, for the most part, and I know what I’m doing. I do have these moments where I have a little bit of a failure of confidence in the work, but it’s because of some other thing.

                        My husband and I have recently started our own small stretcher bar business. Often the customer, who is pretty much always a friend, already knows exactly what they want. Other times I’m helping to figure out how to make what they want. With this company, I do it like how I curate. I bend over backwards. I guess I have a little bit of a crisis when I can’t figure out how to help somebody. Where, if I’m helping them, it’s going to be hurting me too much.  That’s when I have a crisis. Again, not just the little business, not just the curating, also happens to me sometimes with teaching. I think it’s a boundary drawing issue, knowing how much is the right amount, how far to go without giving everything away, but not giving too little either – auctions are another example where I can get into trouble with regards to donating work.

                        When you talk about female power, I think what I have left over from female un-empowered behavior is trying really hard to make everybody happy and meet everybody’s needs.

MAP:              It’s like trying to be Wonder Woman. It’s trying to save the world in high-heel boots.

KC:                 Trying to make everybody feel okay. Isn’t that just what it means to be polite, or what it means to be a good hostess, or what it means to try to make everything run smoothly? I think that actually is what sends me into the arms of the painting, because you don’t have these conflicts if you’re not around people! 

Cammofleur #2, Paige Wery

Paige Wery director of the Good Luck Gallery, portrait from the Makeover series by Austin Young, 2014

MAP:               For these interviews, I have tried to pick women who were working and successful and seemed like really strong people. I picked a variety of women with different roles: a gallerist, a fine artist, a video production artist, a student, and people with different cultural backgrounds.  I want to explore what it means to be a powerful creative woman.

PQ:                  It's a nice group to be a part of.

MAP:               Definitely. Well, I thought it was really interesting, when we talked, that I had no idea that you had been an athlete as well as being an artist and a director of a gallery. I thought that was such a fascinating, powerful thing that you brought to the conversation. I guess I was hoping you would talk a little bit about that: about your background an as athlete and how you became an artist.

PW:                 I was an artist. I was always drawing as a kid, but the athletic part was more for fun until.... What should I say about the athletic part? I'll tell you what, I enjoyed being an athlete up to a certain point, but it was a really.... It wasn't my passion like art was. I learned so much from being an athlete and I highly recommend kids to be athletic, and go out and work on a team, and learn how to get along with other people, and to learn how to be competitive in a positive way. I don't know what else to say.

MAP:               You played golf right?

PW:                 Yeah, I played golf. I started when I was a kid and it got me into UCLA. I went to UCLA on a golf scholarship. I was there for three years, but it was... tough. When I signed up for UCLA, I said that I wanted to go to the art school. They said, "Sure. Great. Here, sign the paperwork." I signed the paperwork and then I showed up and I asked where my art classes were and they were like, "Oh, that's a whole different school." They screwed me over because they wanted me to play golf and I couldn't play golf and be in the art school at the same time.

                        College athletes miss so much school. When you go to UCLA and you're on an athletic team--even the women's golf team, which is really low on totem pole--you are still there to be playing golf. They're paying you to play golf. Your grades and your desires and things like that really come in second, but you don't know that until you're there in the middle of it all.

MAP:               Then you dropped out to make art, right?

PW:                 I did, to go to art school. I did that for about a year. I took junior college classes down in San Diego, moved back in with my parents, and then a family friend was devastated that I wasn't playing golf anymore and sponsored me to go out on a mini tour. I ended up playing golf for another five years. I also got married and insisted on going to art school, so we moved up to Northern California.

MAP:               It’s an interesting story.  When you first mentioned it to me, you were working as a co-curator of “Perform Chinatown.” I was picking up my t-shirt and you were talking about your background as an athlete. I didn't know anything about that: about you. I guess as long as I’ve known you in the art world, you have always been this icon.  I've always seen you as being very statuesque. You're taller than most women in the art world, and you have a loud, gregarious laugh, and you have a lot of energy and spirit. There always seems to be a party around you. To hear that you are an athlete makes total sense.  I only know you from the art world or in your role as a director working for Artillery Magazine. It's always interesting to hear that there's this whole other side to your life.

PW:                 It was everything right up until I was about 27.

MAP:               Not only was there this other side of your life, but you were very successful at it. That you had a successful career as a golfer and that it was completely of another world--that's really interesting.

PW:                 I definitely had that option. It was on the table.

MAP:               It makes you very confident. I don't know if you directly credit it but, you're very confident.  You’ve switched from publishing to owning a gallery. You're very clear, quick, and decisive when you decide to do something. 

Paige Wery in William Dailey installation,  portrait by Marlene Picard

PW:                 I do. That's why I think of my dad, who's an extremely athletic person. When he was 67, he did Ironman. He's that kind of athletic. I learned so much by playing golf or just even competing and being on a team and things like that. You learn a lot. I learned self-confidence through the experience of going to a big school like UCLA. Being on the traveling team with them, I was basically forced to go play with these country clubs. I came from a pretty lower middle class family.  My mom was a secretary, my dad was a high school teacher. I would go to these fancy country clubs that I had never been to before and I had to play golf with these people. I actually really learned how to get along with them and I just learned a lot. Now, I feel like I can talk to whomever on the streets; sit down on Venice Beach while I'm selling my art, and I can also show up at a fancy person's house and I feel comfortable in both places. I completely thank golf for that because I did not know how to handle being around these super rich people when I first went to UCLA. I was never around anything like it before. These people had huge houses and had maids and people cooking for them and everything I never witnessed before.

                        Now I feel comfortable being around it because I got to know them and they were friendly and everything was fine. It did help me a lot with who I am.

MAP:               How did you wind up at Artillery?  What was the story behind that?  And then you decided to leave and found your gallery.  Do you want to start with Artillery?

PW:                 Sure I'll start with Artillery. A friend of mine was writing for them in their very second issue. The second issue that they ever published. I wrote for the first time--a little review, a 500 word review. I wrote for them for about a year and I really didn't have the art history background because I'm an art school dropout. I started feeling really uncomfortable because I was trying to be an artist and I was trying to write about this stuff, but it was taking so much time to do all the history. I just felt like I wasn't a good enough writer.

                        “I quit,” I told Tulsa, the editor and founder of Artillery. I told her that I wasn't going to write anymore. She came back to me two weeks later and said, "Are you interested in being a publisher?" I said, "Well, let me think about that." Because I didn't even know what that job was! I literally went home and Googled “publisher.” I was like, "I can talk about art. I like the magazine. We'll just try it for 3 months." 6 years later, I had brought in a lot of money to the magazine. I'm really proud of what I did with that magazine. I'm still a huge supporter. I still buy ads. I think it's a really important thing in Los Angeles. We need more art magazines covering what's happening here because there's so many important things happening here and all the newspapers--they're all getting cut. The budgets are all getting cut.

I loved that job. It was a real good job and I had more responsibility than I had ever had. I'd been an artist when I was working in a frame store part time and when Tulsa asked me to do it I had never done anything like it before. I think that that was good, too, because we're going to make up our own rules. I made up my own rules. I didn't really know what a publisher was really, how they were really supposed to do it. We just made it work. By the time I left we had raised ad sales 300 -400 percent.

PW:                 We worked really well together and I feel like we accomplished a lot. At a certain point, I felt it was time to move on and I started thinking of what else I wanted to do.

                        Having been an artist and having run the magazine, I felt capable of opening up a gallery. I also saw a huge gap in the fact that there was no self-taught artist galleries in Los Angeles that focused on outsider art. Sometimes when I was with Artillery and going around to all the galleries, the artwork was just really looking all the same to me and I just wanted to shake it up a little bit.

MAP:               Before your gallery, “Good Luck Gallery,” no one in Los Angeles was focused on outsider art.  I’m from the midwest and in Chicago there's such a huge outsider art presence. It's because of the aesthetic of Chicago Imagism and artists, like Ed Paschke and Barbara Rossi.  They were really interested in looking at outsider art. There have also been outsider art superstars like Henry Darger and Mr. Imagination. Mr. Imagination has a huge career as an artist in Chicago. Nationally, there is a huge collector pool of people who are fascinated by outsider art and I've never seen it exhibited anywhere in Los Angeles. When you announced that's what the focus of your gallery was I thought, "That's so smart." It's such an interesting area of research. There are so many people who are fascinated with just that one genre of painting, drawing and sculpture.  And then there are Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers. The Watts Towers are an icon of that whole genre and they are right here in the city. The idea of an outsider Los Angeles gallery seemed just perfect and really very timely.

PW:                 I'm pushing the limit. I'm not just focused on that. I'm also showing collectors as artist. I felt justified in doing that because of the Venice Biennale only just last year which I didn't get to go to. I was supposed to go, but I couldn't--I didn't. I wasn't able to make it. He showed, for the first time--the curator of the Venice Biennale, last summer--he showed outsider art for the first time and next to contemporary artists. He also showed collectors work. A rock collection and people that have collected little tiny ceramic figures and all of a sudden I was like, "Duh." I'm reading the catalog. I love the catalog. All the essays that were written about the stuff. It totally clicked; that's an art form.  It's very personal. I love opening that door because they're not trained to be a collector. You don't go to school to learn how to collect art. I'm opening up the door for that, too, in the gallery and I'm really enjoying that. It's been fun.

MAP:               It totally makes sense, too, because when I think about the biggest aesthetes in my life, they were my grandmother and my aunt and any woman that I grew up with who was making little arrangements of things or had a glass menagerie--some kind of collection of things--was always going on. Whether they collect turkey plates, like Mat Gleason’s mom, or Lladro figurines. There's something that is really fascinating about that form of culture that doesn't get talked about because it is overtly feminine. It's really fascinating because it's something that every woman knows how to do, which is to create a home. That feeling of “this has not just been cleaned, it has been organized for your pleasure,” which I think is fascinating.

                        You had a show of basically a book collection, which is a beautiful show. I don't remember the name of the collector.

PW:                 William Daley, who retired about 5, 6 years ago. He closed his bookshop. He brought in all of these books, including books from 1717 and out-of-state art or out-of-print art catalogs and first edition novels. No gloves required; every one was allowed to just hang out and look through the books. We brought in his furniture, his table, his chairs, his rugs, his lights. Everything was beautiful because he's an amazing collector all the way across the board. In that show, which I had no idea what was going to happen--it was amazing. We brought in really great people into the gallery. I had an NYU retired librarian come in who's come back to the shows since, too, and has come to our readings. I just ended up meeting all these people that aren’t typically going to walk into an art gallery, but they love books. It was really great.

                        Something else that I think is important, too, is that when I ended up going at art school up in San Francisco, right before I dropped out of art school, I had an instructor that actually said, "You guys think you're artists? You're not artists. The artists are in the studio right now, painting." The next day, I quit school. That guy is singing my song right now. I'm out of here. I'm tired of being graded on my art. Whatever. I moved back down to L.A. and I refused to wait tables, which is what I had been doing while I was going at art school. I went down to Venice Beach and sat on the boardwalk with all of these other people, selling my artwork. That was when I really had my first taste of outsider art. It wasn't that I learned about outsider art in school. They hardly ever even touch on it at the colleges.

                        There were homeless people and people with mental problems and people that were just doing it because they just loved it and it had nothing to do with... they were making this art for something that they could hardly even explain. They were stealing tubes of paint instead of stealing food to make this art and it was a passion that I did not see at California College of the Arts where everyone is paying $48,000 to get graded by (a lot of times) miserable instructors that didn't want to be there. Then here I was out on the beach with these people and it just became a club of artists.

Because I had a car and I had an apartment. Once a month I would go down and say, "If you're here Saturday, meet me down there." At 9:00 I would show up with my truck. Everybody was allowed to bring one painting and then I would take it to a coffee shop and curate shows with everybody from Venice. Nobody had ever approached them for anything like that before. That's really how I started curating with outsider work. It wasn't that the artwork was fabulous, it was just that it was passionate and it was amazing. We would put prices on them and sometimes it would sell and they would come back for the opening. I would always have an opening for them and they would get as dressed up as they could. They would invite their family. They would all take their buses from all over the city. I'm talking about homeless people finding ties and showing up at their first art opening at a coffee shop and treating it like it was a godsend. It was so fun and beautiful and amazing.

                        That's really how I first started. That's when I was first introduced to outsider art. I was sitting on Venice Beach and meeting these people and working with them. It stuck with me. I did that for a year. I sat down there for a full year with a friend of mine that was also selling her paintings. After a year, it was time for me to move on. I'm still in touch with two of them and I'm still friends with them, but I just had to tell everybody, "I'm sorry, I have to go do my own thing." I'm not making enough money selling paintings on Venice Beach for a buck and pay my rent. I had to leave. But that's always stuck in my mind. Helping these people that never consider themselves worthy of hanging their work in a coffee shop. Even though they worked on it every day and that was their whole life.

MAP:               I guess you have a whole other idea about what is successful and what's creative and all kinds of really interesting conversations about those ideas.

PW:                 Yeah. It was quite an experience to go from CCAC and go sit down on Venice Beach.

MAP:               It sounds like it was fun, too.

PW:                 It was really fun. It was intense. It was sad. It was one of those things where you wanted to take everybody home with you.... There was definitely some guilt with me. Getting in my truck and driving home and knowing that I had food and shelter. I think part of that guilt is what drove me to think, "You know what? I got to do something. I don't want to feel bad about this. Let's work with these people and I can go out and find a coffee shop and we'll show their work." I really didn't think anybody would show up at their opening but they all showed up and then it became a monthly thing.

MAP:               That's so sweet. I didn't know that, actually. That's so connected to what you're doing now.

PW:                 It's on a different level, but ...

MAP:               But it's related.

With gallery artist Harry Steinberg, 2014, by Eric Minh Swenson

PW:                 It's the same thing.  At the gallery I'm showing a lot of people that have never had a show before, and I love that. I just thought it makes me so happy to have people that just thought that.... My 103 year old ceramicist, Harry Steinberg--he never thought he would have a show. I met him when he was 103. He never had a show before. His work is amazing. It's a group show, I'm taking it to Miami. Now he's 104 and I just went to his house and picked up a new set of work.

MAP:               Oh my God, that’s amazing.

PW:                 Yeah. He's so beautiful and so happy and just making this child-like gorgeous work. It's thrilling to be working with people like this. So far, so good. I haven't even been open for a year. I'm talking like I've been doing this forever. It's a new thing, but it feels like a good fit.

MAO:               What's more like, you'd been around for a year. It's pretty hard to make a gallery fly in L.A. It’s so awesome that you're doing so well and you're happy and it seems like your flow is going to the right direction. And you're going to Miami! That's really exciting.

PW:                 I'm feeling very supported, and I got into the Outsider Art Fair. Which is really, really difficult to get into.

MAP:               That's exciting.

PW:                 I am so thrilled.

MAP:               It's your first year. That's awesome.

PW:                 I know. I went to it last year, and I hadn't even open up the doors yet, and met the owner a couple of times, Andrew Edlin, who has a very successful outsider art gallery in New York. He represents Henry Darger and people like that. He's the bigwig guy and he's been very helpful. He gave me a booth and invited me in, which is amazing.

MAP:               Yeah, I should show you mine. I have a Mr. Imagination paintbrush from Chicago. He showed up when I was in grad school in St Louis and he had a crush on my ex.  He would carry these paintbrush sculptures in his bag and he handed one to him and somehow I got it in the separation. It's neat, it's really different, and he was really, really neat, too. There's so many people that make work in Chicago, and it is so loved there and beloved there. Because Darger’s work was discovered there, I remember seeing those Darger drawings in the 90s and thinking, "Oh my God. This is so much more interesting than anything I've seen." There's so much of it, too. These giant drawings, such beautiful drawings.

PW:                 They're so beautiful.

MAP:               All sides of the paper are incredible, beautiful work. And just that obsession when you're making so much work and...

PW:                 And never sharing it.

MAP:               Not needing to. He's amazing.

PW:                 I hadn't really thought about that. Not needing to. I was thinking of it as not thinking anybody else would like it. But I think not needing to is also a good way to put it. Like the recent female photographer Vivian Maier, whose work was discovered at a garage sale. Some people probably just don't need it and don't want to put it out there and deal with the audience. And then some people don't think that anybody would want to look at it: it's something so private. I definitely have worked with some people like that. They just consider themselves hobbyists or something, but when you look at the work, it's beautiful. I have been turned down for shows. I've asked people to do shows and they're not interested. They're too nervous. Some people can't handle putting their work out in front of an audience. It's way too personal for them. Other people--it's just celebration! It's a celebration for what they've been doing, which is great. With 103-year-old Harry Steinberg, I rented a couch. We brought in 103 of his ceramic pieces. It's his first show. I rented a couch because I figured he was going to have to sit down and he wasn't sitting down the whole time. I kept looking over, my friends were drinking on his couch. I was like, "Get up, that's for Harry." He's like, "I don't want to sit down. I don't want to sit down." He kept running around and shaking people's hands. That was so great. It's awesome. There's so many people like that in the world that, just--for whatever reason--nobody knows about or talks about, but they have such a compelling, exciting practice that makes the difference in so many people's lives, whether they know it or not.

MAP:               It's great that you're able to offer people a chance to celebrate that.

PW:                 Yeah, and for people to see his work and to hear that his age and still making art, still with his young, lovely wife, who's 87, who takes care of all the phone calls and all the emails.

MAP:               That's sweet.

PW:                 They're adorable. They're just so cute. Such an inspiration for everybody. Looking for outsider artists is…. It's different. I even want to say it might be a little bit more difficult because you don't go to the colleges and go culling around for the young kids. You're looking underneath rocks.

MAP:               Right.

PW:                 And hoping to hear something word of mouth.

MAP:               Yeah, totally. I could see that.

PW:                 Yeah. It's been interesting.

 

Portrait of Paige Wery by Mary Anna Pomonis 2015

Cammofleur #1, Jennifer Juniper Stratford

Jennifer Juniper Stratford and collaborator Christine Adolph (Devastina) of "the Multinauts" 

Cammofleur #1, Jennifer Juniper Stratford is the first in a series of transcribed interviews between the artist Mary Anna Pomonis and creative women in the art world.

MAP:               Do you remember Art School Girls of Doom?

JJS:                  Totally.

MAP:               I was trying to explain that to somebody who had never seen it and I thought, This sounds    terrible.  But it was kind of amazing.

JJS:                 I loved the stuff that was on Liquid Television because it was so truthful in it’s humor.

MAP:               It’s been a long time but I remember, because you had to wait to see it. You had to plan to see it, and when I was living in the dorms in college we would schedule everything around that.

JJS:                 I miss that anticipation.  Many of my best memories are of running to catch something on television. 

MAP:               MTV at that time was in such a golden era. There was “Aeon Flux.” They were playing really beautiful cartoons.

JJS:                 The early days of MTV created a huge space for experimental animation.

MAP:                It was amazing, and the level of production for videos was maybe not figured out, but there was more variety.  It felt like there was. Or maybe I’m just wrong because I’m not watching it the same way I did when I was in my 20’s.

JJS:                  A few years ago I interviewed one of Liquid Television’s producers. Her name is Prudence Fenton.  She is who created many of the station ID for MTV as well. She then went on to produce Pee Wee’s Playhouse. After working with so many animators on staion ID’s she convinced MTV to make Liquid Television.  

JJS:                  Back then the world was open to things that were strange or cable TV was open because there were so many channels. But now everything has to sell something. Or it has to fit a brand. Everything has to be a mega success and to reach the masses you have to be pretty bland. It’s a lot like how Hollywood only wants to make blockbusters like Titanic and Star Wars; movies that make crazy amounts of money in just one gulp.

MAP:               Or even young musicians want to sound like a cover band. There’s always this contest to sound the most like the thing. It’s almost a Glee culture where everything needs to be a version of something perfect.

JJS:                 These days it feels everything has to fit into a defined category.

MAP:               Everything that you make is directly a backlash to that. I mean, everything.  I was looking through all the history of your video work. When did you pick up your first old, thrown-away piece of equipment?

JJS:                  I didn’t get to have a video camera in high school. I remember seeing skater boys rolling past me with  video cameras. They were all starting to make their own skateboard movies and I was just so jealous. But my mom honestly couldn’t afford it, so I actually stole a super 8 camera from school.  From there I was babysitting for money for film.  My sister and my best friend Marisa and I  we were determined filmmakers in high school. If you talk to anybody that I went to high school with, they would probably bring up my “Barbie movie” immediately.

MAP:                That’s amazing.
JJS:                  The three of us decided we were going to make this movie about these Barbies that go on this adventure to a male strip club. It was all stopmotion and inspired by the Wizard of Oz. When the quest begins, the three Barbies meet up with their friends and they get in the car, and they drive to the strip club, and they have to wait in line.  The set up is all shot in black and white, but as soon as they get into the strip club it turns to color. We spent all of our time doing it. Our bedroom has two twin beds with a miniature set in between them. This went on for all of 10th and 11th grade.

MAP:               What’s really interesting, have you seen the LPS [Littlest Pet Shop] videos that are online?
JJS:                 Yeah.
MAP:                My daughter watches them and it’s just girls playing with toys and video cameras, so they move the dogs and then the dogs talk to each other.  And there are all kinds of versions of teenage drama, but told from the perspective of a kid who has no idea what’s going on.  And they’re awkward and funny and you see their broken fingernails moving the dogs’ mouths. As I’m watching it--I watched it with her--I’m thinking they’re tremendously motivated to learn editing and how to create a scene …

JJS:                  Today it’s slightly easier with the home computer. But  because we were working with film, we would have to babysit to get the money to have the film developed. Then we’d have to babysit some more to get more film to shoot the next part. We could also only edit at school during a half-hour film class. It took so long to complete our ideas.

MAP:  Did you use that work to get into art school?
JJS:                 Hell no.

MAP:               That would’ve been a trip.
JJS:                 No way. I went to Art Center, so if they saw that they would never let me in.  

MAP:               Maybe, yeah. I don’t know. The Barbie might have freaked them out a little too much.

JJS:                 I always wanted a video camera. I didn’t get one till after college.

MAP:               Wow.

JJS:                 My thirst for a video camera never went away. By the time I got one they were almost obsolete. I think I fixated on video cameras because  I  took classes after school classes at the public access station so my first experiences with video were on television studio cameras. 

MAP:               That’s amazing. Are you using old public access cameras?

JJS:                  I use a lot of old broadcast equipment.

MAP:               Gosh, I wonder how much it cost when they first bought it. It must have been huge!

JJS:                  I’m fascinated by theatrical television productions mostly those that came out of the BBC and ITV in the 80’s. Dr Who, Top of the Pops, and any early 80’s music video. That’s why I was so pleased that Gerard Way wanted to work with me and help bring that style back to the mainstream.

Video still from "Millions" by Gerard Way directed by Jennifer Juniper Stratford , 2014http://telefantasystudios.com/GERARD-WAY-Millions

MAP:               The production on it looks so much like my childhood. I was watching it few times today. It’s all mixed up production styles and it’s all different but it still reminds me of Abracadabra by the Steve Miller Band. 

JJS:                  Somebody else said that in the article. MTV wrote a review of my videos for Gerard and it’s totally because of my early days.

MAP:               Yeah, I remember seeing Abracadabra and thinking it was really hi-tech at the time.  I’m looking at it now, and it’s so funny because obviously you can see what’s going on, but there’s something nice about being able to see what’s going on that I miss. I remember when things looked hi-tech there was a grid-thing going on that was always there. It was always inherent underneath everything.  That’s all gone now. Everything is so sleek that you don’t see those things.

JJS:                  Everything’s so sleek it’s so boring. So high definition. I get annoyed when people as “Why do you try to make it look old?”  because that’s not really about that.  For instance some artists are photo-realistic painters while others draw comics. It’s my medium of choice.

MAP:               Yeah, it’s like your texture.  But I also think nothing becomes fine art until it’s obsolete as a technology.

JJS:                  You think so?

MAP:               I think so, because when you think about photography, photography was just a commercial industry and then as it became obsolete…

JJS:                  Photography definitely had to fight to be seen as an art in the early days.

MAP:               Because it was obsolete it became an art form.  All of a sudden somebody who knew how to print really well has an amazing skill nobody has that anymore. Or somebody who can create a compelling image that tells an entire story is important. That’s a really amazing skill because everybody is just pointing and shooting and nobody is thinking, “I only have one plate in the camera. I’ve got to get it right.” The preciousness of photography is totally influenced, I think, by the technology being obsolete.

JJS:                  Yeah it almost refreshed photography now that there is a respect for people who use film.

MAP:               Maybe there’s something to say about that; the idea that because the technology is obsolete, now it can become an art form, truly.  The idea of seeing video in the gallery--it’s been around now for a good 20 years--people have context to think about it and understand it. There’s been enough that’s been seen to a point that people get excited about what’s different or exceptional.

MAP:               Even the set-work in your pieces is just as important as the technology. I was looking at this level of the detail with the costuming and set. It’s beyond a sleek surface: there’s an inventive mashing of genres going on, too. You mash Dungeons and Dragons with space travel. It’s like this low-tech, hi-tech thing again because of the costuming and the hair so retro. Your main character is a guy with long hair that looks like somebody in a romance novel from the 80’s. Where did you find that guy because he totally looks like a book jacket cover?

JJS:                  That’s Riley Swift. He was our friend and the greatest Dungeon Master in the entire universe. We were already playing D&D with him before we decided to make Dungeon Majesty a TV show.  From there it developed organically. The five of use were so into our adventures that we decided to make it a television show and it just took off. It will always be my favorite project because it came out of the cast’s friendship at the time and is what formed the foundation for Telefantasy Studios. 

MAP:               So it was a collaborative piece between all of you?

JJS:                 Yes it was a very successful collaboration full of lots of good times on an off screen.

MAP:                You guys financed all of it yourself and you put it all together and got all the people to be in it?

JJS:                  Not only were we the cast, we were the crew, post production, model makers, and creature department.  AND  still, at that time we didn’t own a video camera.

Video Still from, "Dungeon Majesty"

MAP:               Wow.


JJS:                  We used the cameras in the public access studio. The reason we did it there was because we wanted to broadcast our show. I cant say enough good things about Dungeon Majesty, They are my dearest friends and without them there would be no Telefantasy Studios. Christine, the woman that plays the barbarian, Devastina: she’s been my best friend since high school.

MAP:               That’s the best name: Devastina.

JJS:                  It’s so good. In  a lot of ways she my favorite character, because I loved seeing her transform  but then again  I love all of them . A Druid, Sorceress, Barbarian, and a cleric is pretty much an ideal team! 

MAP:               Why isn’t there a person named Devastina? That’s such a great name.

JJS:                  Christine is a genius. She thought of her name in two seconds.  Sometimes I regret never being in a band but then I remember Dungeon Majesty. Some girls form bands, and some girls make public access shows.

Video Still from" Dungeon Majesty" featuring Devastina

MAP:               It’s nice to see. Maybe because we don’t see images of women doing really great things all the time.
JJS:                 Everyone assumed a man was behind the show too. That always made us laugh. 

MAP:               Really?

JJS:                 Yeah. No one believed we were actually gamers.

MAP:               I thought it was the other way around. I thought you guys cast Riley because he looked like what a Dungeon Master looks like.

JJS:                  No, Dungeon Majesty is completely sincere.  He was already our Dungeon Master and he also wrote the adventures that  we actually played live  in the studio.  

MAP:               It’s funny. That didn’t occur to me. Because I know lots of women that are into Sci-Fi and into fantasy.  And if you look at the genre, Ursula K. Leguin has won the Nebula Award more than any other person, which is amazing. There are all these women who dominate that field, like Eugie Foster,Margaret Atwood, and Octavia Butler, but people still think of it as a guy thing. I don’t know why that is, but there are so many great authors and people who are in that world.  The presumption is that it’s a male world, but it’s not. I mean Mary Shelly invented the genre with Frankenstein.

JJS:                 Plenty of women play D&D and are into science fiction. 

MAP:               Why is there a presumption that its male?

JJS:                 It’s an old school mentality. 

MAP:               It sounds so weird to think that that’s still in society’s subconscious, because it feels like we grew up in a time when we should know better.  I think about my mom reading Ms. magazine and then talking about feminism all the time and thinking prejudice against women was going to be gone in the next century. There was going go to be no discrimination by the time I was an adult. Then, still seeing it so blatantly on display--it’s kind of shocking.

JJS:                   I remember I went and did an artist talk at Otis College of Art and Design about Dungeon Majesty and during the Q&A  the teacher that invited me, raised her hand and she said, “Is this purposefully a feminist show?” Honestly, I had not thought about it until she asked.  But I suppose seeing a badass barbarian wielding an axe and taking down a warlord is powerful imagery.  We were just living out our fantasies. Never did we think that we were portraying a feminist agenda. We were merely  slaying monsters but I walked away from that talk and felt proud of of our representations of women.

MAP:               It’s a little too bloody for my ten year old, but for older girls it’s awesome.

Video still from the Multinauts

JJS:                 There isnt much human  blood in Dungeon Majesty. Maybe a few goblin guts but thats about it.  I actually don’t  think I like gore anymore. Actually my mom saw The Multinauts, and she is a woman who has worked in surgery her whole life, and she thought it was far too gorey for an audience.

MAP:               I thought it was funny that the first person to get their neck torn out in the second episode is the frat guy at the keg, because usually the first person to die in a movie is always a woman.  However, the first person to die in your movie is …

JJS:                 Is the jock.

MAP:               How funny is that? That’s something that I think probably every girl would want to do.

JJS:                  Yeah, you know that’s the idea that’s an idea Christine came up with. We had a lot of… Well you can see what our issues are with privileged people were right under the surface of that episode of the Multinauts.

MAP:               That’s awesome.

JJS:                  Multinauts was an extension of Dungeon Majesty. All of the same people were involved as in Dungeon Majesty, but here we combined several worlds and created our own multiverse.  This time we had a script (written by Riley, Christine, and myself) and we shot the first episode in my garage.

MAP:                Looking in the background, I thought, Oh wait, that’s Pearl Hsuing who’s going to the bathroom.

JJS:                  Yeah we would cast anybody we knew that we thought would be good in front of the camera. We loved turning everyday people into some fantasy character. We’d hand them a script and  send them into the dressing room and they come out ready for action.

MAP:               Did you play dress up a lot as a kid?

JJS:                 No, but I played Barbies for way too long.

MAP:               That’s amazing. I never was allowed to have one and so as a result I was always very jealous of people who had them. Because my mom was a feminist, so she would go out and buy gender-neutral, or opposite toys, on purpose. My sister and I had a Hot Wheels collection we had more Hot Wheels than anybody else. We had carrying cases that were in the shape of cars, because we would go to the store and ask for Barbies and she’d say, “No, but you can have any hot wheel you want.”

JJS:                 Wow. That’s so funny.

MAP:               Then we would go to people’s houses and that’s all we wanted to do was play with Barbies, because they had Barbies and we didn’t have them.

JJS:                  For me Barbies were a vehicle for storytelling. I knew I would never look like her!  Plus, my mom didn’t care if we cut their hair. The best thing is that we had a bunch of dolls and then Jem and the Hologram dolls [came out].  But they were bigger, because they weren’t made by Mattel and soon figured that all of Jem and the Hologram’s clothes fit on Ken. So most of our Kens were in drag.

MAP:               Nice.  So you cross-dressed Ken--that’s great. Barbie tried to do a rocker show to rip off Jem …

JJS:                 Yeah, Barbie and the Rockers.

MAP:               I totally remember that one. I watched both of those shows.
JJS:                 Cool, but not as good as Jem.

MAP:               No it wasn’t. Somebody printed a video clip of a bunch of Jem episodes to P.J. Harvey’s "50 foot Queenie."

JJS:                 No.

MAP:               It’s really neat.

JJS:                 I’ll take a look at that.

MAP:               Because I love that song and then to see it with … It must be one episode where Jem becomes giant and she goes smashing through the city like the 50 foot woman. It’s awesome.

JJS:                 I still really love Jem. I think it’s a great show for girls.

MAP:               Totally.

MAP:               I remember there were a lot of great characters in cartoons at that time, too, like ThunderCats. I remember I loved ThunderCats. There was a black character, Panthor, who was the cool cat, and I thought, this is an awesome character. There were all these different creative characters on TV.

JJS:                 Yeah, and they were weird. Their genders were not totally identifiable too.

Video Still from Meet Cynthia a Telefantasy Studio Production and a part of the MOCA Step and Repeat Performance Series, 2014

MAP:               I just want to make sure if there are things that you want to talk about that I haven’t talked about.  Are you doing a project that you’re working on next that you want to talk about?

JJS:                  Im excited for the new year and making more mutant forms of television. Without being heavy handed I know that  I want to continue to make work that is feminist and queer and is a voice for the underdogs.   I don’t think I’m that interested in being an art star or making my work fit in a gallery. I just want to be my own Hollywood, a self sustainable movie factory focused on innovation.

MAP:               It’s interesting because a lot of female artists are moving away from the idea of the galleries taking care of them like a husband.

JJS:                 I never thought of it like that.

MAP:               When I was talking to her about those ideas of marketing herself in any way, or making projects and then making money in any way, outside of her gallery, it was scary to her. She’s been around for a long time. She’s a famous female artist in Los Angeles and I said, “God, you just go to your gallery like it’s your husband. You ask them what to do and how to deal with our money.”  I said, “I don’t think male artists do that.”  You can buy John Baldessari pillows online. He markets pillows and Ed Ruscha markets towels.I don’t even think I was talking about t-shirts. I think I told her she should make a poster so that somebody who wanted to buy a $100 object at her show could afford it, because her paintings are expensive. I want to buy a painting, but I can’t afford it.

JJS:                  That’s the thing about contemporary art that scares me. When the artist has to become a brand.

MAP:               I said, “If you went to your show and you sold 100 posters, that would be a great thing, because more people would enjoy your work and I don’t think it would be bad for you to do that. She said, “I don’t know. I have to talk to my dealer.” I thought, Oh my God, it shouldn’t be like this.  I don’t think guys ask permission as often.  But one of the things I think is great, looking back, is that you didn’t have to ask or wait until anybody said, “I want you to produce a TV show.” You just started producing TV shows before you knew how to make them. 

JJS:                  Because I grew up in Hollywood, and I knew that most people go crazy waiting for someone to green light their dreams. Especially women.  I saw that happen to so many people growing up that  by the time I was in high school I thought, I'm never going to wait around for Hollywood.

Portrait of Jennifer Juniper Stratford, By Mary Anna Pomonis, 2014