November 2011 Archives

Dana Dunham on Humanality and the Blessings of Printing and Process

You recently moved to Providence to a studio in AS220's Mercantile Block. What led you to Providence and AS220?

I was really interested in finding a community that was supportive of the arts. I had the opportunity to meet some of the staff of AS220 and fell in love with the organization. I've always felt strongly about community-based organizations and I felt inspired by AS220 to follow my dreams on becoming an expressive artist. I have been very impressed with the AS220 staff and community for devoting themselves to an organization that is in support of the larger community as a whole, while not forgetting the ever-special refuge for the artist. I feel very thankful to have been welcomed into this community and hope that I can contribute not only as an artist, but also as a person who really wants to make a difference in this world one photograph or moment at a time.

You have several bodies of work including a series entitled, Dialog with the Homeless shot with a 4x5 camera this past winter in San Francisco. Some of the photographs from the series seem quite intimate and I believe you must have established some amount of trust between yourself and the individuals you were documenting. How did you create that bond between yourself and individuals to create such intimate portraits? What was the origin of this body of work? Did you set out to document the homeless or did the project develop organically from conversations and chance encounters? Did you move to San Francisco that winter expressly to document the homeless?

The homeless project was a challenge. I knew that I was drawn to the homeless in San Francisco from living there in the late 90's. I have always felt a certain amount of isolation as a person, so the main focus of my project was to try to communicate the isolation that these people may feel.... I feel that I have been spiritually homeless for years, so this project was a way to get closer to expressing an aspect of the human condition and perhaps isolation, not only as a person, but also as an artist.

As part of my graduate program, I decided to take advantage of my opportunity as a student to relocate to work under the mentorship of Reagan Louie, who as you may know is a well known documentary fine art photographer. It took me a few months to narrow the focus of my project. I started volunteering in shelters and was searching for a way to get closer to the people that I felt a connection to. My project was really about observing. For months I would go out and just talk with them, sharing a cup of coffee or a cigarette before I even picked up my camera. I tried shooting some 35mm and had thoughts of just focusing on one or two from the street community, but knew that I wanted to get closer, not only photographically but also personally. The 4x5 camera forces me to slow down as a photographer, learning these skills in an intuitive way allows me to focus on the person that is in front of the lens...

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Interview with painter Dan Talbot

Your work straddles the line between abstraction and figurative painting. You have made dense layered abstract doodle-like paintings as well as straight observational plein air paintings, and now your recent work combines the two. What does each approach offer you as a painter? Are the processes vastly different? Are you asking different things from each one? Can you talk about your process and how your current works fit into your overall work?

The two are related I suppose in the sense that any two things one does are related, but I think that they each take place in different parts of my brain. One I would call a drawing sensibility, which integrates lots of different ways of thinking (verbal, conceptual, sexual etc.), and the other I would call a color sensibility and seems more specific or discrete, an end in itself. I feel like my drawing sensibility prepared me for experiencing my color sensibility, brought me to a place where I was ready for it and wanted it. But they seem like separate things. And, yes, in my latest work I'm trying to integrate them somehow.
In my older work I would doodle a lot and then fuss over the doodles. I'd start out with a bunch of random thoughts spilling out onto the page and then spend a lot of time trying to hammer or distill that mess into something more substantial.... a sort of abstract expressionist process. I started getting more and more fussy about it and then getting irritated by my own fussiness and would need to do something stupid to the painting to try to fuck it up and save it. Sometimes this worked, sometimes it didn't. Guston describes this type of ab-ex process as like being stuck in a corner, smashing your head against a wall.

But I started to notice that after leaving the studio, say going for a walk or something, the world would look different to me, clearer. Like the chaos had an order to it. I could see all the particulars and how it all fit together. I started getting seduced by all this color around me, and all the random junk we have hanging around in the spaces we live in. I thought, "why not just paint that."

There's a description of a story I read once.... I can't remember whom it was by, but it was in reference to an Ingmar Bergman film.... an article in the New Yorker. The story's about a demon who is stuck in Hell but every hundred years or so he's allowed out onto the surface of the earth for a day. On one of these trips he sees a bowl of apples. It's just a bowl of apples but he sees it with the clarity that only one who's been stuck in Hell can see it. That's what I felt like when I started doing the landscape stuff. They are everything that the other work wasn't, so in a way they are obliquely referring to it, to that hell. Of course, you might not see that. You might just see the bowl of apples. Also, there's the whole Providence hipster thing from 10 years ago.... which is a type of Romanticism.... Caspar David Friedrich taken over by Saturday morning cartoons...where it's no longer the natural world we are confronted by/drowning in, but instead our own absurd culture. I wanted to show that that sense of "magic" or awe didn't need to be represented by rainbows, crystals, and people with animal heads, but could also be seen in the colors of your neighbors soffit, skylight, and fence.

So now I'm trying to combine these two ways of working. I'm trying to have that drama I was describing above take place within one painting, the soffit and the satyr side by each. Only, now the landscape stuff is what I start out with...those are the random things I put down first. Then I follow up with the abstract doodle stuff to try to tie it all together. Under the influence of the landscapes the doodles start to become more about color. And again I can get stuck in hell... an endless and open-ended process of fussy adjustments. It seems unavoidable. I'm not sure what I think of this work yet.... It's growing on me is all I can say. I try to focus on the sense of engagement I get when making the work, and not the result. It's still pretty thrilling to sit down in front of something and start making decisions. This is what I want the viewer to connect with.

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