Three young artists talk about winning the Contemporary's Great Rivers Biennial, what drives their work and what they'll unveil in February
Designed to recognize talented, emerging artists in the St. Louis area, the Contemporary Art Museum’s Great Rivers Biennial receives hundreds of applications every year. These are then winnowed down by a panel of nationally recognized art professionals, who must choose just three young artists. Winners receive $20,000 (up $5,000 from past years) and, most important, have their work shown in a group exhibition at the museum. Elizabeth Wolfson sat down with this year’s Biennial winners for a one-on-one discussion of their work, their process and being a working artist in St. Louis.
Juan William Chávez
Mediums: Drawing, Painting
On his current work:
I’m interested in taking situations, time-based situations, situations that have a beginning and an end, and looking at that as a subject matter. To draw Lake Shore Drive, or a drum solo, or a soccer game, it’s not capturing one image, because that’s not what those things are. So I’m capturing the entire experience, I’m not just taking a snapshot of it. I call that live drawings.
The live drawings lead to this new body of work where I’m drawing from film. This body of work is called “Drawing From the Cave.” There’ve been theories regarding earlier cave drawings… You’re in a cave, it’s dark, so you need to have a fire so you can see what’s going on. There’s light, so there’s the projection of shadows. These shadows may have interacted with drawings on the wall, creating a primitive cinema which was at the birth of cave drawings. These are all collective moments … The collective at a soccer game, the collective at a concert … But it can be mental too. Like how we all read a book, and it’s in our collective memory. So in this particular situation, on two levels, we can collectively understand movies like “A Clockwork Orange,” or “The Goonies,” and we relate to these on a collective level.
Part two of the collective is you do have a very individual but collective experience while you’re in a theater. When you’re in collective you have the power to do whatever you want to do. People will riot… The collective empowers. And usually what happens is you engage in taboos, or non-normal social behavior, and it’s okay for the moment. The cinema has this type of collective energy, its really primitive though.
Not everyone was allowed in the cave, the cave was for shamans, it was sacred. The unreal happened, monsters would be killed. But in the audience you have an experience too. Everyone’s focusing on this one image, the lights go off, and you feel like it’s totally cool to engage in sexual behavior, for example. But great things happen too. Like everyone claps at the end of a movie, what’s up with that? Cause we’re all in it together, watching this thing.
On inspiration:
I look for epic performances. It’s set design, it’s fashion, it’s dialogue, it’s music, it’s raw imagery, it’s humor… Anything that makes an epic performance. It can be the circumstances the film was filmed under, the necessities of production that created great moments.
I don’t really look at art, contemporary art, for inspiration. I like looking at it, I just don’t go to it for inspiration. What inspired me was driving down Lake Shore Drive. It wasn’t an artist that inspired me, it was the environment that inspired me. With film, you could say that it’s contemporary art, but it’s more the environment of viewing that that inspires me.
On being a galleryist and an artist:
Boots is an extension of my art practice. It’s a way to continue a dialogue with artists, curators… I’ve always done stuff like that, parallel to the art practice.
The studio practice is an isolated event. Running the gallery is a collective event. The collective is definitely something I’m very, very attracted. As much as I like the studio practice, it needs to be balanced with initiatives with other people, with dialogue. It’s like being in a band, and then having a solo project on the side.
Corey Escoto
Mediums: Drawing, Watercolor, Sculpture
On his current work:
This most recent series of work is all about saving the world. And that in and of itself is a humorous idea, especially for an artist to think he or she knows what it would take to save the world. I have this collection of vintage United Nations memorabilia, and it lead me to start making this organization modeled after the U.N. called “the Global Repair Service.” There’s this logo, the hand wrenching on the Earth, and the Global Repair Service is going to save it all. There’s a couple of other ones where it looks like they’re struggling really hard … So they’re slightly directed at the U.N., being critical of these large, maybe too large, organizations that are maybe really inefficient, and maybe don’t do as much as they could do because they are so large. But at the same time, my organization is modeled after them and has these big trucks and gas guzzling type things. So it’s filled with a little of humor, sarcasm, irony…
And I did other series of works that in some ways relate to this. A lot of the stuff has to do with the idea of inspiration and motivation. I did this series of works called “The Library of Audio, Visual and Textual Sources of Inspiration and Motivation.” It’s another fictional organization that has this building in the desert… I’ve been struggling with whether I will include these organizations or if I’ll just focus on one and kind of elaborate on that.
On his creative process:
Mostly, everything kind of comes out of drawing. That leads into watercolor, because it’s so much like drawing, it’s a good way to get ideas out on paper quickly. I like paper as well, I don’t like to work on canvas, I haven’t really done oils. From there it’s gone to making other things that support the drawings, or anything that could support the ideas I’m drawing. I’m completely up for sculpture, video, animation, whatever.
I think good ideas are hard to come by, probably the toughest part for me now, because I feel like I can pretty much draw or paint anything, but the hard part is coming up with a solid idea that makes sense and it’s clever in whatever way. Once I come up with that it goes into the making part, which, for me, is easy.
On the role of politics in his work:
Yeah, it’s political artwork, just not the brand that wears me out. I used to hate political artwork, and I still kind of do … I generally don’t like it because often it tells people what to think, so you’re turned off before you get to see into the work, even if you might agree with what it’s saying. I wanted to find a way to make it enjoyable for myself … The idea of making something you don’t like, and trying to make it better, conceptually improve upon it. So then it went into a more satirical mode, where humor is important.
I try to not be preachy, I try to include myself in the things I might be critical about. In being an artist, all your energy goes into making your work, not necessarily changing anything. At same time there are groups of artists that are like intervention or activist artists that maybe do a project. But even those artists, in my opinion, don’t do very much, because they only do the project for as long as the show is. The people who really inspire change among the masses are people who devote lifelong attention to an idea.
Michelle Oosterbaan
Mediums: Drawings, Mixed Media, Installations
On her current work:
For the show at the Contemporary in February, I’m planning on making big drawings, and then there’ll be grounds of latex paint, to be decided on site. I’ll decide on the color, the shape, and the proportion of those latex colors once I’m there. But I’m trying to create a little world that I’m going to import it into a space. So half of the work will be made in studio, developing an object. These take a long time. And then there’s that element of chance, or something temporary.
I’m trying to think like an installation artist, which is, just bring your studio to the space, but also I’m making an object, like a craftsperson, or a furniture maker. This is different than installation art, where you make an experience. So I really want to target this idea that the viewer will have an experience, based on how I’ve arranged these objects in the space. They’ll change their meaning in that space. Just as much as I see them in a certain way here, I’ll shift what’s important and what’s not important when I’m there. Like, you can plan a trip to Europe, but you still have to literally be there to figure out how good your high school French really is. There are certain things that just don’t work as well.
I think of my large drawings as maps, which is about cause and effect and relationships. You’re at point A, or “you are here,” and then you look to your left, your right, above, below. I like the idea of taking the viewer, surrounding them and creating a theater of space which is part real, part fantasy, part memory of something that happened before, combined with what you want, what you desire, what you wish to happen. There’s these several fields of space, literally, foreground, middle ground, background, and also mentally. Where you are physically in space, and where you are emotionally, where you are mentally.
Growing up we moved a lot—Detroit, three places in Boston, and then a couple of places outside D.C., then school in St. Louis, grad school in Indiana. The appropriation from lots of different places is how I see things. Sense of place is a very important part of my work.
On the role of time and movement in her work:
Medieval calligraphers said you shouldn’t have a piece of paper that was any bigger than what one person can hold. So these are a little tentative, they’re like wallpaper scrolls. And I’m attracted to that aspect, that they’re larger than life. They’re a way for me to segue from installation work, which was right on the wall, where I wanted big color, I wanted people to be influenced, either loving it or hating, to create this memory for the spectator. So this was a way I could have my cake and eat it too. I could make a big thing, roll it up. I loved that it was temporary. I would make it, photograph it, and I’d paint it over.
Because of moving around a lot, I was not interested in adding any more to the world. This was my way of doing that. In grad school I made very large paintings. Artists always have this problem of what to do with the stuff. So this was my solution. You don’t have to pay for shipping, you don’t have to pay for storage, and I have just a slide, just the thinnest possible thing. So I was interested in the economy of it all. And this partly is there, because you can roll it up, it’s expandable, and it can change a space rather quickly. Moving around a lot, I would always try to make one nest, one space that was a contained space.
On the expanding art scene in St. Louis:
It seems really vibrant, with the museum [CAMStL], right next to the Pulitzer, which is a beautiful building, and the new curator… It seems like everything’s shifting and growing, getting beefier. And then Boots [Contemporary Art gallery] is a really great thing; I was part of a couple artist collectives in Philly, that underground movement is pretty freeing, innovative stuff can happen. So it feels like there’s a little buzz happening around town, which I’m really glad to be a part of.
There’s so much space… I lived in a row home, and the streets are very skinny, space is a premium. I think where my studio is, Cherokee Street, is like what Philly was like twenty years ago, an old industrial town, then developers starting to see the potential, and artists doing the same thing. St. Louis feels like it’s at that point where it’s about to metamorphasize. Plus with Washington Ave., all the development down there, so it’s very exciting. Being far away from both coasts kind of allows you to be in your own world too. If you choose to be exposed to some of the new stuff you can, but you can also allow yourself to just putter with an idea.
The 2008 Great Rivers Biennial opens Friday, February 1, and closes April 20. See it at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 3750 Washington, 314-535-4660, contemporarystl.org. Hours are 10 a.m.–5 p.m. Tue–Sat, 10 a.m.–8 p.m. Thu and 11 a.m.–4 p.m. Sun.
