Upon their return from Syracuse, I sat down to chat and catch up with our SPARK Residents, Adrienne Crossman and Ursula Handleigh. Both artists discussed the important influence of their surroundings on the artwork they created and the unique shared experience in Syracuse. They also gave me a sneak peak into the work they created for the exhibition, Neither Here Nor There opening at XPACE on Friday September 14, 2012.
Neither Here Nor There will be up until October 6th, 2012
Jessica
Cappuccitti: What was your favourite
part of the SPARK Residency?
Adrienne
Crossman: I think what I liked about it
was that I was in a different place.
When you are having trouble finding inspiration, it’s kind of helpful to
be in a new environment. Syracuse was
completely different from Toronto in so many aspects. Being in Syracuse was isolating in a way
because I didn’t know anybody and there’s not much to do but it gave me all of
this time to just constantly think about, and do my work, which I have
never had before. So I would
probably say that was the best part.
JC: What was your favourite part of the city
itself?
AC: The city is small and kind of abandoned and
there’s not a lot going on there, but the nights when something is going on,
everybody that’s interested in it, is there.
SPARK is beside this hardcore music venue called Badlands which was
having a concert / travelling film festival that was screening films the same
night we had our show. We had our opening
and then they had that event, so everyone that was at either event was kind of
comingling. It seemed like it was the
only thing of that kind going on in the city that night. That was what was cool about Syracuse.
JC: What was your favourite thing to do or see?
AC: Dinosaur Bar-B-Que - I went 3 times...
(laughter)
(See
“XPACE visits Syracuse !” blog post from Tuesday July 3, 2012 for pics of
Dinosaur Bar-B-Que and more...)
JC:
(jokingly) What was your favourite thing to eat there?
AC: It would have to be, pulled pork and brisket
with a side of mashed potatoes and gravy, and a side of macaroni and cheese...
with a Syracuse beer.
JC: That’s incredible!
AC: It was incredible – it’s worth the 6 hour
drive!
JC: How did your surroundings affect your work?
AC: The work that both Ursula and I did took a
lot from our surroundings. Because the
architecture, the layout and the feel of the city were so different from
Toronto... but also, different from any city I have ever been in. In one block, out of 5 buildings, 3 will be
abandoned and boarded up. You can walk
for 20 minutes and not see anybody. So
there’s something about that feeling... We’re in this kind of desolate,
abandoned city. Also, we were housed in the attic of this 200 year old historic mansion that had been restored - so we were staying in this really, really
expensive house but our neighbourhood was kind of run-down, so it was the clash
or the mix of really nice stuff versus this run-down environment.
There’s
wood everywhere, all of the windows are boarded up and I would just see wood
grain everywhere. The floors and doors
of this house we were staying in had fake hand-painted wood grain on it, so it
was like, people had been hired to hand-paint this unique wood grain all over
the floors and all over the doors to make everything look more expensive. So a lot of my work came from making faux
wood grains and taking a picture of that wood grain and replicating it in different
ways, because I think it’s really weird to hire somebody to paint fake wood on
wood to make it look like wood. So there
was this whole contrast between rich and poor, fake and real. So in terms of my surroundings, I made work
in Syracuse that I never would have made outside of that environment.
JC:
How did you like working in SPARK
Contemporary’s space?
AC: At the beginning we both spent a lot of time
in the house. I ended up doing some
printmaking - some lino cuts - so I would just carve them at the house. We would work during the day at SPARK and sometimes I would stay up late working in my sketchbook or working on stuff in the house. Everyone told us that you don’t really want
to be out at night, so if you’re working in the studio during the day and you
want to take some stuff home then it’s better to not be walking or biking after
it’s dark. We didn’t run into trouble
though. As we got closer to
the show and I had a lot more stuff to do that was messy, I would work a lot in
the studio. It was great because it was
a really open space and there were 2 big open spaces so there was a lot of room
to work.
JC: How did you like working with the people at
SPARK?
AC: They were really helpful because they picked
us up from the bus station and Casey, one of the girls that runs SPARK, brought
us to the grocery store, and after that we were given a lot of freedom. They gave us the key and the space was ours
for 3 weeks, to do whatever we wanted with.
It was good because we had to be very independent and come up with
creative solutions. It was very
undirected.
JC: Tell me more about the work you created – the
final product.
AC: I bought 5 large pieces of thin cardboard and
made wood grain on them. Ursula told me
about this wood graining tool – you take a flat surface and you put wet paint
on it then you run this tool through it and it makes wood grain. I did a brown one, so it really looks like
wood and I did a red, yellow, and blue one.
So I did panels of that, and then I did 4 lino cuts with different
representations of different kinds of wood grain. I also found pieces of a broken down desk that
was made of that fake wood, cardboard stuff that desks are made of, so it looks
like wood but it’s not wood, and I wood grained those so they look like wood
but they look fake and real at the same time.
And then I hung everything on the wall and made a video piece that I was
projecting in the other room.
JC: What was the video piece?
AC: I took footage of different kinds of wood
grain all around the city and the spaces I was in. And then I edited it together. The video I made is a rough sketch for what I
am going to be showing at XPACE in September, because I didn’t have enough time
to complete the piece.
JC: Which leads into what I wanted to ask you
next –you seem to have done a lot in a short period of time
how
were you able to complete so much work in such little time?
AC: In terms of the prints, I made all of those
prints 2 or 3 days before the show. 3
weeks is not a lot to make a body of work; to come up with the idea, make work,
have a show. So, I think in terms of the
prints and the wood graining stuff, all of that as is will be up here, but in
terms of my video – video work because it’s time based just takes more
time. I took a lot of footage there, but there’s a lot more tweaking I have to do before
it will be totally done.
JC: Did you and Ursula inspire each other?
AC: Yea we did actually. The house we stayed in interested us both a
lot. We had a lot of similar ideas in
terms of how our surroundings were inspiring us. She was really good to bounce ideas off of
and vice versa.
JC: How will this residency affect your future
work?
AC: I think it will be good in the sense that, it
was really good to come out of Thesis which was so serious and so academic and
so long, to go into something that felt like it didn’t have a lot of pressure;
it was just like," we believe in you enough to go create somewhere". It was undirected and it felt very
freeing. I think it was good to have one
extreme situation and then another extreme situation, because I think my
practice is going to be somewhere in the middle. I usually approach things very academically,
but you need a lot more time to do that and you can’t really work that way in 3
weeks. It was really good to have so
much freedom after being so constrained in Thesis.
JC: Any final reflections?
AC: Just to emphasize the importance that going to another place and taking yourself outside of your norm is really good for your work.
