[MUSIC PLAYING]
Welcome.
Thank you for joining us for today's program
featuring artist Amy Sarkisian presented
as part of the Wignall Museum's Home Edition.
Home Edition is a series of curated artists talks,
workshops, and discussions featuring
artists and cultural workers.
My name is Rebecca Trawick and I serve
as the director and curator of the Wignall Museum.
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to innovative contemporary art objects and ideas.
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resides on the traditional and unceded lands of the Tongva
people.
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to the elders both past, present and future.
And hello, my name is Roman Stollenwerk.
I'm assistant curator at the Wignall Museum.
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Thank you.
And Hello, everyone.
My name is Andy Hadle.
I'm the preparator at the museum.
In a moment Amy Sarkisian will present.
Any time remaining after the presentation
will be available for Q&A.
Thanks Roman and Andy.
So today I am pleased to introduce our guest artist, Amy
Sarkisian.
Amy Sarkisian grew up in a working class Cleveland suburb
where she absorbed art through comics, Saturday morning
cartoons, and Mad Magazine.
She received a BFA from Kent University followed by an MFA
from UCLA in the late '90s.
After graduate school, she ran the project space
Studio 870 for emerging and underrepresented artists.
Sarkisian collaborated with author Janet Sarbanes
on a children's book titled People
of the Pancake published in 2015.
Sarkisian and her life partner, Tyler Vlahovich,
currently run an outdoor project space
in Northeast Los Angeles called The Yard.
Amy has exhibited internationally
at galleries in Paris, Milan, and London.
She's been included in various group shows
in London, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles,
and museum shows that include the Art, Design, & Architecture
Museum at UC Santa Barbara, Torrance Art
Museum, The Chicago Cultural Center, and the Mak
Center in Los Angeles.
At the Wig, we're proud to call Amy a colleague.
She currently teaches at Chaffey College
and in 2014, Amy participated in the group exhibition
Unruly, curated by our assistant curator, Roman Stollenwerk.
Amy currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
So please join me in giving Amy a warm, virtual welcome.
So these are selected works from just about
after I got out of grad school till present.
So this doesn't include everything.
Often if I'm working on something larger,
I'll be trying to do quicker things like collage or drawings
in between just to kind of keep my sanity.
So once I went through and kind of organized this lecture,
I realized I was going to have to leave a lot out.
This is the first solo exhibition
I did after I got out of graduate school
and it's just called The Perfect Ham.
And I like the pun about of presenting yourself
or your work being kind of hammy,
but also this was about me trying
to perfect the process of something
and I just decided to perfect ham baking.
So I practiced for several months
before the show opened, buy a ham,
bake it, try to make it perfect.
And this is probably maybe the seventh ham that I did
and I decided, OK, I'm pretty good at this.
So the evening of the exhibition opening, a few hours
before that I baked the ham, dressed it,
tried to set it up in the way that you see perfect holiday
food presented, and then I presented it
in the gallery space.
Put some heat lamps on it and then
when it started to become less and less perfect,
the show was over.
So it was just a couple of hours of just experiencing the ham,
being in the room with it and you know, you could smell it.
The room smelled like ham.
No one ate it, it was just about witnessing this thing.
And then at the time I was living in my studio
and I was unemployed.
I just got out of school, so my materials at the time
were the things that I would just kind of find,
and I was living in a studio in Virgil Village in Los Angeles.
And right next door I shared a wall with a small market,
so I got a lot of stuff from them that they were discarding.
And I found this cool cigarette sign laying on the ground,
so I pulled it in.
The other free thing that I used quite a bit back
then is before the internet was really ubiquitous,
I would still get mail and I would still get these catalogs.
So I would get catalogs from Halloween stores, J.Crew,
whatever catalog you could get I was somehow getting
all this junk mail, which was great
because I had a lot of fodder to do collage with.
So these are just-- it's called Kool Sign with Monsters.
It's just a bunch of little masks
on the bottom of this sign.
And this piece was done--
a friend of mine who I went to Kent State with, sort of-- he
lived in Kent and he was also an artist.
He went to New York when I went to LA.
So he came to visit and when we got together we would always
play music and he wanted to cover a Fear song
called I Love Living in the City,
but I wasn't that familiar with the song.
So he wrote down the lyrics for me
to sing it while he played guitar
and I found the lyric sheet a couple of weeks later,
just kind of in the corner covered with dirt.
And I was like, now this is really like a good lyric sheet,
and I liked his handwriting.
And it was like a nice memory, so I made a collage
with the lyric sheet and it's just kind of
flanked in a nice kind of sunny smiles
from all these J.Crew models.
So that's called I Love Living in the City.
And then when I was in grad school I had this notion that--
you could see my pointer, this little skull right
here is one of those Halloween treat skulls
that are like vacuformed.
Sometimes they're jack o' lanterns,
sometimes these cartoony skull heads that kids carry around,
they put candy in.
And I thought, well, that skull is--
if you think about it, it's really pretty disgusting
that these kids are carrying around a decapitated head
and putting candy in it even though we
don't think of it that way because it's been codified.
So I thought, well, what if that was reconstructed.
Whose head would they really be carrying around?
So I decided to use this forensic anthropological
technique where you build up muscles on a skull,
you add the eyeballs, and then you can kind of figure out what
that person used to look like.
So I did that with this cartoony skull
and then I started collecting these Halloween and cartoonier
skulls, some are more realistic, and I just
wanted to see who all of these people would be.
So I reconstructed these five skulls and the people on top
were the images that I had cast from them.
And then I was looking at a lot of glam rock photography
by Mick Rock, who did a lot of photography of Bowie and queen
and I started thinking of these five people as maybe a band.
So I would dress them up in different clothes
and take photographs and this was the final presentation
of this band, and they're kind of heavy metal.
This is kind of based on the White Queen, Black Queen
album that Mick Rock took the photos for.
But this is just toy skull reconstructions,
the dark version.
I had a lot of fun just coming up with each character.
And then because I was thinking a lot about skulls
and symbolically what they mean in our culture
and then how the skull in other cultures and how other cultures
deal with mortality and loss.
I started reading about ossuaries and other cultures
that will use the bones of their beloved
and decorate them to kind of celebrate their life.
And in our culture we use the skull
as just, it's on bottles of poison,
it's a symbol of death and no rebirth,
and it's this feared symbol.
So I decided to take a cue from all of these other cultures
and decorate these skulls and try
to make this symbol into something beautiful,
trying to kind of neutralize the darker
aspect of this symbol with something
that's more seductive.
And then I realized I do that quite a bit in my work,
or I used to at least, try to find
this neutralizing middle ground.
I'd take something that's somewhat grotesque
and add something silly or something dark
and add something beautiful just to play
with that juxtaposition, what that does.
So I did a series of these skulls,
so this is the first one I did.
This is with some wood beads, and these are all
just skull-sized.
And then my grandmother passed away
and my mom gave me all of her costume jewelry,
so I started adding her costume jewelry into the skulls
that I would make.
So I would make a basic pattern and then fill in the rest of it
with another kind of pattern with beads
that I would get from the bead district downtown
or wherever I could find them.
And then they became even more personal to me,
because these were something that came from my grandmother.
So a lot of these have her jewelry
in them, the later ones.
This is her brooch right here and it just kind of built off
of everything else.
And then I was looking a lot at this artist named James Ensor
and I thought, well, he has just such a funny way
of dealing with dark subject matter, mortality.
He'll kind of make something grotesque silly
at the same time and this etching
that he did is my portrait in 1960, which I thought
was really kind of brave of him to even just go there mentally
and figure out like, where am I going to be in 1960?
Well, he was born 1860 so most likely I'll be dead,
and then he did this silly little etching of himself
in the theater, just so funny.
So it really resonated with me.
So I did my portrait in 2060, where
I'm not going to be dead, hopefully,
but I'm going to be really old.
So the Ensor piece was the impetus for me
to make this little homage to his piece,
this little sculpture that's about doll size.
But when I was working as art handler, a friend of mine
named Matt, we were having lunch and he had an apple
and he carved a face into it and then he set it outside.
At the end of the day, because it was a really hot day,
the apple just kind of shrunk and dehydrated.
And then I remember doing this project in Cub Scouts--
even though I'm female, my mom was a den mother for my older
brother and I was too young to be on my own
so I went to Cub Scout meetings and did all of the crafts.
And we would do this apple head craft
and I remembered it really fondly,
and researched apple heads, apple head dolls
and this other phenomenon came up called kitchen witches,
which are apple head dolls that you make
and you make it into a witch and you put them into your kitchen
and they're supposed to be good luck.
So this piece is kind of a combination of a self-portrait
based on the Ensor piece and that kind of humor
and then this idea of a kitchen witch
and then just this nostalgic idea
of revisiting an old craft, which
I do quite often in my work.
Oops.
Get rid of that.
This piece, so again, I'm still living in my studio,
still getting stuff from the market next door.
They discarded a paper towel box where
they would get masses of paper towels
and it was a Brawny paper towel box.
I'm going to flip to the next slide
because you can see it a little bit better.
Right here.
And the box had the Brawny logo on it,
it had just the Brawny guy's head and shoulders and a couple
of trees behind him, which is all
you ever see of the Brawny guy.
And then I thought, what's the rest of him look like?
Maybe he's super dopey from here down.
So I made this dopey kind of paunchy version of him,
and I filled in the rest of him with what
I would imagine what the rest of that view
is that we never get to see.
And then I thought it was like a TV set.
Then we decided to make a really paunchy, dopey, bad, abstract
version of the Brawny guy holding a realistic version
of his own head.
So it's kind of like this self-reflective thing
where he's watching himself on TV
and he's holding his own head and maybe the head's looking
at him and it's just this triangulation of the Brawny
guys.
| was in the same show.
This is a show I had at Sister.
Brawny Guys, this piece called Good Kitty Gone Bad.
Good Kitty Gone Bad is just the t-shirt
I found at the thrift store that I put on this little figure,
but from across the room-- you can kind of
see it in this photo-- from across the room you just
see the little girl looking in the mirror, kind
of contemplating herself.
But then if you go over her shoulder
and look down at what she's seeing in the mirror,
you realize she's got this horrific old grotesque mask on.
It's not her mask, it's her head.
So it gives you maybe a little jump scare or something
when you look over to it.
And I like to think about Caro and how
you have to move around his sculpture,
and you kind of have to do that with this piece just
to get the entirety of it.
So this was another show, different show,
called Deep Red that I did in Paris.
So this font, this bloody font, this actually says my name.
This is called Bloody Amy Sarkisian.
When I was younger, a lot of us were into metal.
My friends would have bands and then they
would make these fonts and logos for their band,
but they were so bloody and over the top
that you couldn't actually read what the band name was anymore.
It just became this abstract drippiness.
So I did that with my name, and I covered the Amy Sarkisian
with red sequins, which kind of hearkens
back to this glam rock kind of aesthetic.
But at the same time, since it's blood
dripping down the wall, as you move the sequins
will capture light differently.
So it gives the sense of movement
even though it's a completely static object.
So I liked that, again, that combination of something
seductive and beautiful and being almost cryptic
and not being able to tell what you're looking at.
And then it's flanked with these two
cloaked, scary, bloody heads.
Then same show, this is called Profondo Rosso,
which is deep red in Italian which is the name of a Dario
Argento film.
I was watching a lot of Dario Argento films at this time.
There's a movie called Tenebrae or "tenny-bray."
I don't know how to say it, but I
think it means darkness if I'm not wrong.
There's a scene in that film where one of the actors
gets her arm or hand cut off and then slow motion
she just turns across this white wall
and the blood is just splattering
all over this white wall.
And again, it's just like the most gorgeous thing
you have ever seen and the most horrific, which Argento's
the master of doing this combination
of beautiful and violent, horrific imagery.
So I took that blood splatter and traced it
and then recreated it and covered it with sequins.
So this piece is about 12 feet long; it's not small.
So it would be the size of what it would be if that actually
was traced from the film.
And then at the bottom these blood
pooling up where the wall might meet
the floor, which feels like another horror trope or a movie
trope.
And then this is a view of the entire show where
I've got the Amityville Horror bleeding
wall on the other side.
And then behind on this little wall,
there's one more piece that's called
Don't Worry, It's Almost Over.
This piece was one of those kind of distraction pieces
that I was doing in my studio while I
was gluing little tiny pieces of sequins
all over these giant cutout wood pieces.
Which again, I like getting into that meditative space.
I like having that process where it slows you down
and you get into a certain headspace.
But at the same time, it's nice to do something
like this that was just so fun and I didn't think about it
at all and then I found this super ball
and just shoved it in the eye socket.
And I thought, well, that's the perfect metaphor for someone
winking at you, right?
And it's also giving this lightheartedness
to the whole bloody, violent show.
So I really like this because there's a freshness to it
and I didn't expect it.
It wasn't something that I plotted
out and intellectualized and so really love that piece.
Sometimes you do things like that, it doesn't work at all;
it goes in the garbage.
That's fine too, but this one was pretty fun for me.
This was a piece--
I was still getting a lot of my materials from thrift stores,
so I would get old clothes, cut them up, use the fabric,
see what I could make.
And this is called Rose.
So I made a rose out of some red felt or maybe it was velvet
and I had this head laying around, this wig head.
And I decided, well, it kind of is the size and shape of a cut
off neck so I just combined the two.
So this piece actually sits on the floor.
So it's like some sort of foliage
growing out of the ground, but then you
come around to the other side and it's this decapitated head.
Again, watching too much Argento,
it found its way into my work.
But there's also a kind of a Muppet-like quality to this
that I like.
And then I did another show in Paris
and this is a lot less bloody.
So I was getting a lot of furniture,
I had moved in with my now husband
and we went to IKEA lot.
And I just hated this end table so much because it just
screamed IKEA to me.
So I bought it because I hated it
and then I decided that I'm going
to do this antique marquetry technique on it.
I was looking at a lot of wood inlay
but since it was a shitty IKEA end table,
you couldn't do real wood veneer so I did contact paper wood
veneer inlay on it.
But I didn't try to make it look shitty,
I wanted it to be beautiful.
Within this realm of IKEA, this makes sense to me.
So I did several IKEA furniture pieces where
I inlaid with contact paper.
I like this table because it's kind of hearkening back
to a minimalist cube in a way.
There's a close up of the top.
So I looked at a lot of quilt patterns and marquetry patterns
and I really tried to make something beautiful,
not to make fun of IKEA furniture.
I mean, I have tons of IKEA furniture.
I can't make fun of people who own it because I'm that.
And then in the same show, this is another example
of me kind of looking back and getting nostalgic craft
and bringing it back into my practice,
which when I was younger I did a lot of latch hook rugs.
It was very big in the early '80s and '70s
to make latch hook.
I'm also Armenian, so my house was full of Persian rugs.
My dad loves Persian rugs so they were everywhere,
so I just grew up with them being just a very normal thing
in our house.
So I decided to recreate a real Persian rug
but using latch hook.
So if you look at the back of a really nice Persian rug,
you'll see that like maybe within a square inch
there's 25 to 50, maybe more, little pieces of wool
in there creating the design.
But when you have a latch hook, you get a choice of four.
It's just such a big mesh and I'm using yarn.
So it actually doesn't translate super well in this photo,
but when you--
it tightens it up in the photograph,
but when you see the rug in real life it's blurry.
And a friend of mine said, I feel like when I look at this,
I'm drunk.
You can't really focus on it quite well.
So again, it's kind of taking this high
and adding it to this low, and then what happens here?
Neutralizing.
And it's just called Rug Sculpture,
and this is a shot of all three pieces together.
Then I did a show at Sister in Los Angeles.
This is the poster I did for it where
I had been doing a lot of just goofy, doodley face
drawings in a sketchbook, maybe 9x12,
but I didn't feel like they were resolved enough to exhibit.
And I didn't want to just frame these little drawings.
I felt like because they were so quick and silly,
I needed to give them a little bit more grandeur, I guess.
So I took these small drawings and I created oil paintings
with them but I didn't use color,
I just used like a buff toned ground
and used black oil paint-- oh my God, a rat just ran by.
Ugh.
Sorry.
Black oil paint and that's what these paintings are.
So I feel like I've taken the drawings
and got them to a point where they were resolved enough
for me to exhibit them or they're resolved enough for me
to say, OK, this is the artwork.
This is 6x4 feet, which is a pretty big for a painting.
And then this was before, this is after.
Which is 11x9 feet, which is the biggest painting
I think I've ever done.
This is a shot of it in the space.
If you've never been to Sister Gallery,
it doesn't exist anymore, but when it did
it wasn't a huge, cavernous gallery.
It was a little more intimate.
So with those two larger paintings and then
these smaller paintings, which were flanking either wall,
when you walked into the room you really
felt like someone was invading your personal space.
The energy in there from the paintings
caused people to leave the gallery and lots of people
were like, I just can't be in there with them.
They're just too crowded and there's no one in the room
except for you and these creepy paintings.
Here's another view.
So I liked this idea of a painting physically making you
move, which is what sculpture typically does.
So that comes back a little bit later
when I start doing more painting,
and this idea of personal space too with images.
Then I did a show--
I lost both of those galleries.
My LA gallery and my Paris gallery
didn't fare too well during the recession.
So I was kind of a free agent and I
joined an artist collective called
WPA and we had a space in Chinatown in Los Angeles.
We would all pitch in, pay the rent for the space,
and then either curate a show or we would show our work
or do whatever we wanted for whatever month
we got designated.
So I did a show and I was teaching sculpture
and I was reading passages in modern sculpture,
again, by Rosalind Krauss, and so I
was thinking a lot about modernist sculpture.
Also looking at-- well, not looking at,
kind of remembering gag gifts and prank
stuff that you'd find like at the back of comic books
when you were young.
They don't really do this anymore.
You could get like a dog barf or a hand buzzer or something
like that.
So I started looking at those objects
again and based the show on that idea,
and this is called American Gag.
So this is just the world's largest underwear,
and then I made this perfect, nice linear-based sphere
to fit the underwear.
This is 3 feet by 3 feet.
And again, it's kind of taking the highness
and the haughtiness of modern art and just making it human,
giving it this figure development
and making it more human, knocking it down.
This piece was in Unruly.
Remember?
Double Mohawk.
So this piece is lifesize, little taller
than the average person.
7 feet.
This was another piece called Perv.
So very clearly you can see I'm thinking
a lot about abstract sculpture, modernism,
but again, adding this silly element
with the wingtip shoes and the mirrors
on the feet, which are like this old trope of men trying
to look up women's skirts.
And then I did a lot of these.
I actually don't have a slide of it.
I did these smiles in the last show
where I just sold these little smiles that were maybe
around 12 inches big on pieces of wood.
I'd paint all these different smiles
and sold each one for $100 at the show
and then I decided I was going to make a gigantic smile.
So this is actually three pieces of plywood
that have been connected together, so it's quite big.
It's about 12 feet wide, so it towers over you a bit.
And it just leans against the wall.
It's 3/4 inch ply that's been supported in the back
and this is a good example of how
things in your life when you're making your work
can find their way into your work because at this time,
I was dealing with getting braces.
And so all of a sudden, everything was about teeth
and smiles.
This piece I'm including because I
think it's important to note that I
don't work in studios anymore.
I can't afford the double rent and I got really sick
of living in a studio and having a hot plate.
I just want normal comfort at a human American level
and then I will find places to make my work.
So it's scary for a lot of gallerists who see this
because they really want to take collectors
into a nice, cavernous studio to show them the work
and say, oh, this is the artist and where they work.
I like to work where I live and I like to work in my house
so I just figure it out, and that's totally fine.
You can make great work in your living room,
in your kitchen, wherever you need to.
Just do it.
Yeah, I mean, this is a pretty big piece
and it's in my living room and it's fine.
So this is another piece that I did.
Again, this kind of figurative and abstract that's
happening at the same time.
I just had some old Uggs that were
becoming very out of style; there was a hole in them.
So I combined them with these two sheets
of just store-bought machined 4x8 sheets of birch ply,
cut a little slit so that I could
put the boots on the panels there,
and then just pushed them together.
So for me the rise that the others are giving the corners
creates a really nice void in between the two pieces
and then it's just about that simple gesture, right?
But then it also becomes these giant legs in a way
because there's boots on the bottom.
Another obvious figurative piece.
This is just a little wall piece painting called Torso.
And then I did a show at a friend's space
called Weekend in Hollywood and I
was thinking a lot about still, again,
sculpture, using a lot of wood, glam rock.
So this is a heavy metal boot with one Spandex covered leg
coming out of it.
And then I think of the thing that it's standing on
as a stage, and if you've ever gotten onto a stage
there's always these little wood two step risers.
So I put those all the way around each four side
so it creates this kind of worship pedestal,
a ziggurat that the glam rock leg is on that you can worship.
There's a back side view.
So it's very angular and very abstracted,
but there's a little silver wooden spikes coming out of it.
It was very fun to paint the tiger leg pattern.
And then in the same show there's a--
I think it was David Lee Roth who wore assless chaps once,
and I just thought that was so funny.
So I made these band members, hair band members.
The lead singer's in the middle, I guess, with the assless chaps
and the other two guys are wearing their Spandex.
And these are just planks, again,
that lean against the wall that I painted.
And I love adding hair to anything.
I think it's really--
I don't know, there's just something about it
that's so grotesque.
I love it.
So this was in the same show.
So also considering the misogyny of a lot of those hair bands.
And again, thinking about how painting
can manipulate a viewer.
So this is called My Eyes Are Up Here,
so you actually have to either look at the eyes or the boobs
and they're so far apart that there's nothing
to focus on in the middle.
So it kind of forces you to keep moving your head up and down.
And I just like that idea, that kind of manipulation.
And then I started doing more paintings.
I realized that if you paint, all of your materials are there
and then you have leftover materials
and you can keep painting.
There was something really immediate and satisfying about
that instead of spending a weekend trying
to find all the materials we're going
to need and then learn how to make
the thing you want to make.
There's something so immediate about painting,
and then I could still get into a really meditative headspace
with it and I enjoy the act of painting.
And I still consider myself a sculptor
because I feel like I'm just carving up 2D space,
but it's very much about space.
And then it is very much about the viewer
and how the viewer responds to that piece.
So when I paint, I feel like it's
as sculptural as you can get even though they're quite flat.
I do mostly this flat, color field shapes.
I started doing these animal paintings
because I like this idea, again, of it's kind of taking up
your personal space a bit just to look at them.
And then the shapes themselves, if you focus on a shape,
you kind of lose the representational part of it.
And then if you can look at the thing in its entirety,
it comes back.
So it kind of flickers between abstraction and representation
and there's something about the symmetry
that I also find really intriguing.
It's a cat.
Bat.
So they get a little abstract, so you
have to figure out what to do with all
the space in a painting.
There's no real empty space.
I mean, I guess you could just leave it,
but you could leave it white gesso
or you have to figure out a color.
Whereas if you're making sculpture,
that's just empty space.
You don't have to fill it in because space fills it in.
So it's a different way of carving up space and using up
the space of the rectangle.
This is a squirrel acorn nut thing
that I did and I was looking at it and I just thought,
there's something so vulgar about this.
It's turning into like these spread legs or something, which
I liked.
So then I did this panties kind of tan line butt
with the cheetah print panties, but it's also sort of an owl,
so then they started getting more and more abstract.
And then looked at these together,
this is like another kind of owl almost.
But I thought to myself, what are you
supposed to do with painting?
What is painting about?
And I thought, well, the thing you're not supposed to do
is put just a giant x on a painting.
So that's what I did.
I put a giant x on a painting, but when there's an x
it's a bullet belt for me because of my metal history.
So I started thinking about Judas Priest and all of that
and made this bullet belt guy.
So I really like the dumb way this is divided up
into four sections, but there's this really juicy bullet belt
that you also visually get to latch on to, right?
Still thinking about this hard cropping in on a chest,
kind of thinking about Michael Jackson's leather jackets.
I used to have a black biker jacket,
but this interested me because those biker
jackets are so triangular.
So to put all of these triangles on the rectangle
and then to try to create all of these different reds
was a real challenge for me.
So for me, this is just the red painting
because each triangle is a different shade of red,
and that was a challenge because I never
had to think too much about color before.
So it was fun, but I like this one.
I think it's successful too.
This is just called Black T. So again,
cropping in on arms and a t-shirt, but it
also just being this really blank, monochrome
with this kind of expressive cartoony hair
flanking those two little sides.
So it feels really wrong to me that it's just
this for a painting, but that's also
what I really love about it.
This piece, still thinking about men's chest.
I don't know if you guys are familiar with this,
but when you see muscle guys like Muscle Beach
or you go to a gym and you see the super tough guys,
but they have a super skinny tank top that
doesn't cover their nipples.
It's always so confusing to me, so I'm like,
I got to make that painting.
So there's a tie dye wrestler or muscle guy shirt.
Also again, just super abstract too,
like what can I take that I find interesting and just really
abstract it but also still give the viewer something to latch
on to or something to kind of see that's representational?
This is a little bit smaller.
All of those other paintings were
about 50x60, this one's 24x36.
This is more of a test, kind of trying out the hair again,
trying out the black t-shirt again.
And when we used to go see shows when I was younger it was just,
you go to a hardcore show and the walls
were just lined with dudes with their arms crossed
wearing their black t-shirts just listening.
So that to me is just this iconic band experience,
music experience.
Then I kept thinking about, what is painting?
And I was telling my husband, you know,
there's diptychs and triptychs.
I'm like, I should just do a painting called Tripdicks
and make just three giant dicks.
I was kind of mad too because the MeToo
movement was happening and I was just pissed.
So I'm like, I'm going to do it.
So I just did a tripdick, but I didn't want to make it vulgar.
That wasn't my intention.
My intention was just to make giant dick paintings
that you could just have on your wall that aren't offensive.
But every guy that sees this and sees the one that's
squirting out blood is horrified by it, but you know,
I needed a third thing.
My husband thinks this would look good
on an ice cream truck.
I don't know.
It's cute.
That's Bones, one of my dogs.
She's in there for scale, but this is a diptych.
So I'm thinking a lot about things that come in pairs
and how you can create diptychs out of anything
that comes in pairs.
So also about just the dumbness of two feet that is a painting.
It's just so dumb.
It's just taking up so much space and it's just
this fleshy color--
that matches my flesh at least.
And then the act of creating this multiple toe thing
was meditative a little bit to just draw those in.
Yeah.
When I think of something to make that's really dumb,
it motivates me.
Again, another giant dick painting.
But there's a quote by Betty White where
she said, "I don't understand why everyone says,
oh, he's got big balls.
Big balls."
She goes, "they're so weak.
Balls are so weak."
She goes, "Now a vagina, that thing can take a beating."
And I was like Oh my God, she's so right.
Why do we use that term when it's the weakest
part of a human being?
So I thought about what balls were and how fragile they are
and then I just immediately thought of fabergé eggs and I
was like, there's my next painting.
This fabergé egg ball painting.
So I looked up fabergé eggs and did my research.
This is an actual design on one of them.
I used a gold leaf paint, so you can
see in the video there is this really beautiful sheen to it.
But again, it's not this super graphic, gross dick picture.
It's kind of a cute dick with really beautiful egg balls now.
And this painting, again, dealing with this
cropped in chest area.
I was at a Pink Floyd concert right out of high school
and it was a stadium show and I was a little stoned
and I looked up.
And because people were just coming down
this really steep stairway, I saw this couple and the woman
was wearing an AC/DC t-shirt.
And she had cut it off, but she cut it
off so short that her boobs were hanging below it.
And I was so intimidated and freaked out.
I'm like, where am I?
And that image burned into my brain so I'm like,
oh, I got to make that painting.
But there's also something really off-putting
about almost dissecting a painting in half
and not really getting the complete picture
of either side.
And then I do like AC/DC, so if I
could put things that I love into my paintings, all
the better.
So it kind of does all of those things.
And again, it breaks up and exists
as something representational at the same time.
And then this piece--
when I was talking to you about my teeth
finding their way into my work, you know,
I'm crazy perimenopausal, my body's changing.
I keep making jokes with my friends
about how our tits are going to be laying on the floor soon,
so I decided to make this really flappy boob piece where there's
basically just a pink rectangle with these flaps that
are hanging below the edge of the painting.
And this is on my Instagram page.
This is a little video, so you can
see how they just blow if they're outside in the wind.
This is on my deck.
So they're not held down at all; they're just
at the whim of whatever the breeze does.
If they're inside they're not going to move that much,
but you get this feeling of just super flat droopiness, which
I think is really funny.
And this is where I'm going with my painting is
kind of getting my sculptural chops back into it.
So I'm doing less pure, flat imagery
and I'm starting to add things to the surface
or have things come out.
So I'm dealing with painting now as wall sculptures.
And this is the last slide.
So this is just so far called Monster.
It's kind of new.
I'm doing a series based on Frankenstein
and this was just a trial for an abstract Frankenstein version,
and it didn't really like it very much
but it's grown on me a little bit
and I like it more when I put the fur all the way around it
because it makes it sillier and more monster-y behind me.
And the red and the green are really close in value.
So there is a painting that I grew up
going to see at the Cleveland art museum
by Ellsworth Kelly where it's this red blob
with a blue background and the values--
or maybe it's a blue blob with a red background.
I can't remember.
The values are so close that you look at the painting
and it just flickers like it's almost electric.
And I really wanted to get that effect with this,
and you can kind of see that it's happening in the slide.
It's a little bit more effective in real life.
Not quite Ellsworth Kelly level, but it's doing that.
And I like the softness and the goofiness
that the fur brings to this really hard geometric design
in the middle.
So that is it.
Thanks, Amy.
How cool to see the trajectory of your career
and the influences that you continue to explore.
I love that.
So we'd love to see if attendees have any questions for you.
In the meantime, I think Andy can kick us off with a couple.
I know we only have a few minutes.
Yeah, awesome.
I don't really want to presume too much
about your particular life but I think just in general,
things have been kind of weird this past year, obviously,
pandemic and all.
And you mentioned that you work from home.
You're probably don't leave too often, other than
to go into your backyard you said?
Yes.
I mean, how is that working with your studio practice right now?
Is it good?
Is it bad?
Is it none of the above?
You know, it's bad.
But I want to preface that by saying it's bad because I'm not
getting a lot of work done, which you'd think like, oh,
this is the time to do it.
But because I'm at home so much, there's less in my life
to put back into my work.
So I have less moments where I'm like, uh, that!
And it's making connections and I have to make this thing now.
And I think that's fine.
So I say bad for the work because it's not
getting produced as quickly, but I
think it's just a weird time so I
kind of need to ride this out.
Maybe there will be a crazy spurt of energy
after we start to get back to normal
and I'll have a bunch of things I need to make,
but I just don't have the fire under my ass
right now that I sometimes have.
And that's normal for me, it just usually
doesn't last a year in my last few months of like,
I can't do anything.
And then I make a bunch of stuff and then I stop again, so yeah.
So I have a question.
Because this video will be watched in the future
by a lot of students at the college,
we hope, can you talk about longevity?
I mean, I think you've had a very long career.
I don't know, any advice for young,
emerging artists or emerging artists, I should say,
who are interested in having a life in the arts?
Well, this is what I tell all my students.
Andy's heard this speech.
If you're interested in becoming a fine artist,
a visual artist where you don't go get a job working
for someone else or that job is tangential--
like teaching is great for visual artists,
but they're hard to get those jobs--
you need to get your master's degree.
Go all the way.
You get your bachelor's, then you get your master's, then
you can teach.
Your instructors are not teachers from college,
they are artists from the world and they will teach you.
So even if you don't want to teach
or you are a trust fund kid and you don't need the money, when
you go to graduate school you really
can hone in on what you're trying to do.
You meet lots of other people that you
will be in touch with for the rest of your life
and they become a community that you can depend on.
You can have those artists or those curators
that you went to school with come over
and talk to you about what you're working on.
You don't have the luxury of being in school anymore
and having just direct input from other people.
The longevity thing is super hard, especially for--
I went to community college, then
I transferred to Kent State, then I got my graduate degree.
I don't have a big well of money like a lot of artists
do to pull from when they just want to make some art
and kick back.
I don't have that luxury, and I'm
assuming if you're at a community college,
you're like me.
You, again, need your peer group.
Do whatever you can to make your work,
even if it's just getting shit off the ground
like I was doing.
Use your friends.
When I lost my galleries, my other artist friends and I
got together and got a space, put on a few shows.
It didn't last forever, but it keeps you motivated
and it keeps you active and you create the art world then.
And I think that's where the longevity comes from,
because you can't depend on a gallery to do that for you.
It's just too flighty.
And try not to get discouraged, because it's
a very difficult profession, if you want
to even call it a professional.
Life practice is probably more accurate.
Yeah.
That's great.
So a comment from Cindy Reem.
"Thank you for sharing your work.
I love your use of humor and materials."
And I appreciate your remarks about longevity.
I think it's interesting that you've had multiple spaces,
right?
Currently you still have The Yard,
which I assume is in your yard?
Front yard.
Oh, that's what-- Andy, that was where my focus shifted.
Not that I like going to see shows,
it's not my favorite thing to do.
My husband's like, you're almost allergic to going
to look at art unless it's somebody
you know you want to see.
I was like God, yeah.
But we have this space and the front yard
and no one was going to see shows and I thought,
I know so many artists that are not showing their work.
Let's just show it in The Yard.
People could drive by, why not?
And then it turned into this thing.
But as soon as the weather kind of got a little worse
we put a pause on it and I still haven't opened it
up for this summer yet, but we'll probably do
at least another summer.
So that is one thing, Andy, that kind of
shifted where I put more concentration into showing
people's work and it is a way to keep involved.
Like you're saying Rebecca, to kind of keep your foot in.
And I'm not a trained curator but when
I had a space when I was younger,
it was more about people who I liked,
who made good work that was sincere that
didn't have a space to show.
And if I had a space, that work was
going to get put up and seen because that's
what you need to kind of stay into it, I guess.
It's not even about the money, it's
about having your work be seen.
It's so fulfilling.
That's why we make it.
You know?
Well, thank you so much for your generosity and time today, Amy.
Please keep poking at good taste.
We all enjoy it a great deal.
And we're grateful to spend time with you today
and hopefully you all can join us next time.
So thanks so much.
Roman will put a couple links in the chat
and we hope to see you next time and everybody take good care.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Thanks, Jamie.