LISA SOLBERG

26 year-old Los Angeles-based painter Lisa Solberg is someone whose career we’ve been watching for a while, but whose work has recently jumped to a new level of sophistication.  We catch up with Solberg in her downtown loft to take a closer look:

MC: You’ve made a big progression in your work recently.  Can you tell us about this change?

LS: The best way to explain it is, it’s the most honest way that I can create anything right now.  I’m pushing myself, but I’m not forcing anything.  So it feels completely natural and it’s completely expressionistic and in the moment…and surrendering.  I used to look at a piece and if I were missing something, I’d add a gorilla or a lion in the corner to fix the movement.  But now it’s all based on the speed and length and width of my stroke, and the color combinations.  It’s just all based on energy. It’s harder to finish a piece, but that excites me because then I never get bored.

MC: How long do you work typically on a piece before you feel that it’s done?

LS: Sometimes it will take a month, but typically a week or less. I can’t really sleep if a piece is unfinished – it drives me insane.  But I also sometimes do live arts, like a hotel may hire me for their opening party and I may do a ten-foot piece working 7 hours straight.  It’s the rawness of it and the energy of all the people around me, I totally go crazy off that and it just creates something really unique and dynamic in my mind.

MC: Do you have a preconceived notion of what you want to create in a piece, or is it just pure in-the-moment abstraction?

LS: Well recently, I’ve been starting with ebony pencils and china markers, and I kinda’ just close my eyes and scribble.  I love scribbling – I think it’s the truest most telling art form.

MC: So you probably like Cy Twombly?

LS: I think he’s genius.  When he talks about how quickly he works, he says, ‘What matters most is the time before.’  Because to get yourself, your subconscious and your conscious, everything in sync, and your energy all ready to actually create a piece…that time before hand is the most essential.  That’s when it becomes a more natural, instinctual action.  I view process the same way as him.  I’m not worried about how much time something takes, just when it’s done, it’s done.  I think with a lot of contemporary art it’s all about more, more, more, so I want to go less, less, less.

MC: What’s the next level of progression for your art?

LS: I’d like to start working more in the fashion world; for example I’d like to create a one-off gown with Alexander Wang and then create an environment around it, like in a display window or museum.  I also want to create huge outdoor installations like Richard Serra, in public parks, with tree houses and lighting…Swiss Family Robinson-style.  But I think the most important thing is day-by-day just creating work non-stop…not always talking about what you’re going to do tomorrow or next month…I mean, I think it’s important to have goals, but it’s more important for me to be constantly working.

Solberg’s new works will be exhibited at the grand opening of the new Kinsey/DesForges gallery in Los Angeles on April 10^th, 2010.

I stopped by Jonas Wood’s studio today to check out some of his new work.  Unfortunately I didn’t shoot any of his new work as it hasn’t been shown anywhere yet, and he’s rather protective of where his work pops up.  Anyway, He has a whole batch of other new work over at UCLA’s Hammer Museum for a show that runs from now until May 9th.  The work he has at the Hammer is all abstract potted plant still lifes.  He said he doesn’t normally focus an entire show on just one subject like this, but he’d been saving this work up and it just seemed right to put it all in one show together.  It’s interesting to see the progression of these works from the more realistic potted plants that he’s incorporated into his interiors paintings to the abstract, flat, almost sculptural pieces he’s included in this show.  Also, if you are in Boston, Jonas has a show coming up with Chris Caccamise from February 20th to March 27th at the La Montagne Gallery.

I recently visited fellow Angelino artist Lisa Solberg in her downtown studio for a piece I’m writing in the upcoming issue of Monster Children Magazine.  Here is one of her new pieces which is just amazing.  We got talking about Cy Twombly which made me want to post this below.  It’s just awesome.  I’ll post the interview once the new issue reaches the newsstands.

Los Angeles-based photographer Augusta Wood has a series of new work currently showing at her brother’s (painter Jonas Wood) studio space in Culver City. The show is closing this weekend, and if you live in the Los Angeles area, is well worth a hustle over there to view it before it moves on. Wood’s approach to photography is more that of an artist than a documentarian of moments. Her works often contain words or phrases that interact with the imagery and scene. Her latest series of work, “I Have Only What I Remember,” was shot inside her vacant grandparent’s home, using layerings of projected slides to approximate her memories of the space from her childhood. We sat down with Wood after the opening to find out more about what drives her work, as well as to bring you her suggestions on an end-of-summer reading list. Enjoy!

When did you first start taking photographs? Was there a pivotal moment when you decided that this was something you wanted to pursue as a career?

My parents remember me saying that I wanted to be an artist when I was 5. When I was younger, I drew a lot and started making photographs when I was 10 or 11, but I don’t think I really thought about focusing on photography until I went to art school. I went to Cooper Union [for undergraduate], where you can take any medium you want as long as you fulfill your studio requirements. I took drawing classes, I took photo classes, I took film and video and printmaking. But I ended up gravitating towards photography. It really captivated me. There was something about whole process, the act of looking, thinking about optics, framing, light, working in the darkroom. Then I got my masters in photography and media at CalArts.

Someone once said to me, “If you can’t imagine yourself doing anything else, then you’re doing what you should be doing.” I could never imagine myself doing anything else, so there wasn’t really a question about what path I would take.

Your recent project, “I Have Only What I Remember,” seems filled with a sense of nostalgia. What were your goals with this work?

This series of photographs was made in my grandparents’ modernist house. It was a very influential place for me. My grandfather was a doctor and he was also a painter, and my grandmother was a painter; they were both art collectors also. So in a lot of ways, visiting the house [as I was growing up] was my early art education. There was always so much to look at and many spaces to explore.

In this work I’m interested in the relationship between the ways we remember things and the ways photographs depict a place or experience. There’s how we remember in our minds, how we remember certain photographs, and then there’s negotiating a physical sense of space. To go back and revisit a space that is really familiar to you and how you remember it and how maybe it’s different from the way you remembered it.

Since the house was empty, I wanted to remap the way the house used to look when it was lived in back onto the empty architecture, using these slide projections. I specifically chose slides that more closely matched the way I remembered the space. So there’s something in there about the subjectivity of memory too―how I remember that space might be different from how my brother might remember that space. The layering of the projections within the house creates spaces within spaces―there’s the photographic space that’s depicted in the slides and the physical space that they are projected onto, and then I’m making a photograph. So there’s a visual exchange within the picture plane where all these layers of space get confusing, which I really like. The seam between what is really in the space and what is in the projected photographs gets a little fuzzy, which I want in the work. The slides are from all different dates, so there is also a collage of various time periods in those layers, pushing the past into the present.

I don’t think ‘nostalgia’ is the right word… I think that’s kind of a loaded word. I would distill it down to an exploration of how we relate to memory and photography, time and influence. [This work] is personal, but I’m more interested in addressing these broader questions of space, photography, the psychology of experience and how we remember.

What are your feelings about film versus digital photography?

Well, it’s getting harder to do these days, but I’ve always been committed to shooting film. I just like it better. I like the quality and material nature of it. There are things about shooting digital that have their advantages. It’s like digital is the Polaroid of today―the instant gratification. And in some circumstances that’s exactly what you need, you need to see it right away. But I like the process of shooting film and working in the darkroom. I like having my hands in it. And there’s something really nice about having that anticipation in waiting to get your film back from being processed and being in the darkroom and seeing the image emerge. There’s this sense of mystery in that time of waiting. There’s something very satisfying about it.

What is your process like?

I’m not a photographer who has her camera on her all the time. I definitely plan out a bigger idea for a project first and then go make photographs. In the process of making the work, of shooting the work, I make discoveries and make decisions.

I tend to work in groupings. It’s not often that I make a singular photograph, that stands separately on it’s own. I mean, they all function that way―they can each exist as an autonomous image, but there’s always a relation to the others in a given project. I think that’s just how my brain works. You get to work through lots of permutations and nuances of a larger idea.

What are your interests outside of photography?

Well, I just love art in general. I love reading, I like swimming. I like people watching. People watching’s a big one. It’s really fascinating to watch how different people carry themselves, how they interact in various situations.

How about a short list of some of your favorite books?

The Miner’s Pale Children by W.S. Merwin, The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem, Where I’m Calling From by Raymond Carver, The Size of Thoughts by Nicholson Baker

augustawood.com

Sept 5–19, 2009

“New Work”

Jonas Wood’s Studio

5920 Blackwelder St.

Los Angeles, CA 90232

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Sept 19–Nov 7, 2009

“Baker’s Dozen”

Torrance Art Museum

Group Show, Opening Reception Set 19, 6–10 PM

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Houston Fotofest Biennial 2010

A couple weeks ago I interviewed Cleon Peterson for Anthem Magazine.  He lives over near the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the outskirts of Los Angeles.  I ended up hanging out there for about 2 hours and had a great conversation with him.  He’s a super nice dude, and as a fellow designer/artist, we had a lot to talk about.  Below is the interview as it appears on Anthem Magazine’s website.

I dropped out of high school on the second day.  I got my GED that freshman year and decided to study art in college.  I did that for a year in Seattle, then got a scholarship and transferred to a school in New York (studied painting at Pratt).  So I was living in New York and I got all strung-out.  That’s where things started getting crazy; things were crazy before that but they really got crazy over there.  I quit Pratt about a year after I started and the drugs ended up taking up the rest of the decade.

So what was the impetus to going to art school?

Initially when I dropped out of high school, I was on the road to becoming a painter.  I was into De Kooning, abstract expressionism and modernist stuff.  I was doing quirky landscapes and flower paintings (laughs).  I’d had a lot of shows at churches, community colleges and malls.  But then I got into drugs and I just put it down; I just didn’t chase after it like I had initially.

Eventually I started doing graphic design to make some money.  But after a few years I got disillusioned with it – it seemed boring.  So I went to undergrad and then grad school, both for design.  But Cranbrook was really more fine-art oriented.  I made a lot of crazy stuff, installations and things like that.  You know, your life goes one way and then another way…(laughs).

Do you see painting as work?  Would you like to just live off your painting?

I’d do it. Hopefully someday that will happen.  It’s all about how excessive you are.  I’m pretty excessive.  I need cash (laughs).  If I lived in a little shithole…I mean I’ve done it for a long time; I lived with no overhead.  If you do that, you don’t need much money coming in.  You could probably get by doing just art.

So is working at [Shepard Fairey’s] Studio Number One just a gig to pay the bills, or are you passionate about design too?

I still like design too.  I enjoy just making…and solving problems in the design sense, while also having my own voice in the art world.  It’s nice to be able to make stuff and not have it be personal…like it’s just commercial work.  At the same time, graphic design and art are not necessarily that different from each other.  People like to label things, but I think there’s a bridge.  Like the Dada stuff, which was very aesthetically design-ey, but it was fine art.  So there’s a bridge between the two.

With design I try to put myself where I want to be.  Like, I designed Shepard’s book, and that started from nothing.  I just wanted to be doing work with other artists. I designed a book for Harmony Korine and Ari Marcopoulos.  I also sometimes work with Aaron Rose.  I try to get the design to merge into the art world.

Well, in your painting, you portray these scenes of chaos and mayhem, but in a manner that is highly organized and meticulously executed – your work is clearly “designed.”  It’s not surprising that you are also a graphic designer.

In my paintings, I like working with elements that are common to both disciplines: compositional balance, kinetic movement and a basic color palette.  Aesthetically I definitely carry over aspects from my design background.  Actually, what I’m doing in my paintings today was initiated from a design project.  After grad school, it wasn’t my ambition to go out and do art shows.  I was working with Marsea [Goldberg] from New Image [Art Gallery] on a catalog for the Faile, Swoon, Dave Ellis show.  She came to my house and saw this set of paintings I had done at Cranbrook and she asked me to put them in her gallery for an upcoming show.  And from there Jeffery Deitch (and Kathy Grayson maybe?) bought the paintings.  Then I was in his show, Mail Order Monsters in New York two years ago.  So it was just this weird series of events that came together.  I mean, I guess I did have ambitions to be an artist but I wasn’t out there sending slides to galleries.

When we first spoke, you said you didn’t want to show your work in progress – that you didn’t feel you had a “painterly process.”  Do you feel that there is some accepted process that artists must follow to be considered valid painters?

I feel that people have an idea of craft, especially for painters.  It’s the whole Jackson Pollock-ey, romantic, thing.  And I don’t feel like I fit into that kind of mold.  Like, I’m not out drawing on subway trains and shit.  I used to be all into making a mess and working on like 20 different paintings at one time, and slopping color around, but now I’m more reserved.  My style has just turned into what it is.  Right now it’s very tight.  It’s not loose like that.  I just feel that this style and my process to achieve it doesn’t really fit that romantic notion people have of  “painters.”

Your work kind of reminds me of Henry Darger; not in style, but in subject matter – these scenes of chaotic violence.  Why this choice of subject?

A psychiatrist once bought one of my paintings, and he said I must be mad at my mother (laughs).  Maybe, I don’t know.  I’d say that part of what I’m painting are things that I feel like I’ve experienced – when I was at the low points in my life; when I was living on the streets, and a junkie…this world of turmoil and aggression and dualism.  Where there’re rights and wrongs, and men, and women, and criminals, and normal people.  I’m just interested in this high drama.  Depicting this passionate event.  I see violence and drugs and sex as those passionate, climaxes of the plot.  With the color and energy within these paintings, I’m trying to create this world where everything is about to fall apart at the seams – where there’s so much intensity and deviance that there’s no room for anything else in a way; it’s just this image of chaos.  That was what was interesting to me.  I tend to like stories like that, films like that.  This is a world that is pushed to the limits, but at the same time, I feel like I’m painting a reality.  Like you see other painters using symbolism, but I try to stay away from that and paint a reality, but a chaotic, brutal reality.

Do you consider the viewer and what they will think when you create your work?

I don’t feel that as an artist, you should be an ambassador for what the world thinks you should say.  Or create work that doesn’t push boundaries, or challenge.  I like to do stuff that people aren’t necessarily going to like.  I’d like to make something that people hate, but have to like at the same time.  Even though I say that, it does bum me out when people walk out of the show, though (laughs)…especially when it’s your wife’s parent’s friends (laughs).

What is coming up?

• Now: Octo Pusses at New Image Art in LA until May 28^th, 2009

• The Alice Gallery in Brussels in September 2009

• Flo Zavala from Studio Number One and I are going to be speaking at a conference in Mexico when I get back from Brussels: Esquina Norte Design Conference in TJ.

And a few other things for next year.  There are a lot of opportunities right now, but I’m trying to chill out and be able to make new stuff.  It takes me a while to paint stuff and if you get too booked up, it’s hard to get good quality work out.  I want to step back and think things through.

Saturday night was the Girl Skateboards Art Dump show “Make The Logo Wooden” at The Little Bird Gallery in Atwater village.  It was a pretty small show with small mixed media works.  Here are a few shots:

On Sunday we went up into the Angeles Forest and did a little swimming and a little wine & cheesing.  The water was freezing, but it was a warm day, so it was pretty nice.  We did some cliff jumps into the pool and sat in the sun.

After that, I made a stop by Cleon Peterson’s home studio to do a little interview for Anthem Magazine.  The Peterson family is amazingly nice and Cleon’s work is ridiculously good.  We had a nice talk about graphic design, what constitutes “real” painting, the Bush administration, and the controlled chaos that is captured in his work.  The full interview and photos should post up on the site in a week or two and I will post a link when it does.  Until then, here’s a little taste.

“Initially when I dropped out of high school, I was on the road to becoming a painter.  I was into De Kooning and abstract expressionism, and modernist stuff.  I was doing quirky landscapes and flower paintings and stuff like that.  I’d had a lot of shows.  But then I got into drugs and I just put it down; I just didn’t chase after it like I had initially.”  - Cleon Peterson 4/26/09

Mark has a show at Merry Karnowski’s gallery in Berlin opening this Saturday, Nov. 22. I went by his studio to shoot a preview of his work and talk to him about the show. Here are some of the photos, but for the full story, check here: Anthem Magazine.

A couple weeks ago I hooked up with Ed at his HB home studio to check out the work for his upcoming solo exhibit at Roberts & Tilton.  The resulting photos and interview are posted here:  Anthem Magazine.