Duets: student and artist-mentor exchanges<\/h1><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n
<\/div><\/div><\/div>\nOne of the two main components of a student\u2019s course of study in the MFA-VA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts is a semester-long studio project in which the student develops and\/or challenges specific aspects of their art practice under the guidance of an Artist-Mentor.<\/em><\/p>\nThe VCFA Artist-Mentor network is comprised of prominent contemporary artists who mentor students individually, during the semester. With over 1500 Artist-Mentors across the United States and Canada, VCFA students are ensured mentorship with a different Artist-Mentor each semester.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\nStudent:<\/strong> Josephine Chase (S 22)<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\nArtist-Mentor:\u00a0<\/b>Zun Lee<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n
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<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\nVC Project Title – How To See A Work of Art in Total Color: Race, Representation & Reclamation<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\nStudio Title – Driven Into Nature: Transforming Topographies<\/b><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nThis semester I’m working on\u00a0overhauling a ’74 MG into a new installation. I’m painting and detailing every\u00a0inch of it! I’ve also been working with other\u00a0automotive\u00a0signifiers like maps and traffic signs using sourced materials from hardware stores like paint chip\u00a0samples and wallpaper.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>Zun Lee<\/a>, Josephine Chase’s 2nd Semester Artist-Mentor,<\/em>\u00a0is a visual artist, physician and educator. Born and raised in Germany, he currently lives and works in Canada and the US. Through lens-based storytelling, archival and socially engaged practice, Lee investigates Black everyday life and family spaces as sites of intimacy, belonging and insurgent sociality against cultural displacement and erasure. Lee has exhibited and spoken at numerous institutions in North America and Europe. His works are widely published and represented in public and private collections around the world. More of Lee’s work can be seen on his website and on his Instagram<\/a>. Selected honors and awards include: Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition Finalist (2019), Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Practitioner-in-Residence (2019), Knight Foundation Grantee (2018), Art Gallery of Ontario Artist-in-Residence (2017), Magnum Foundation Fellow (2015), PDN Photo Annual Winner (2015), Paris Photo\/Aperture Photobook Awards Shortlist (2014), PDN 30 (2014)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div><\/p>\nIs there a structure to your exchanges?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\nJ<\/strong>: Yes, but there is a lot of built-in expectation that things change. The process of working as an artist is often organic, you find inquiries or adventures along the way in the studio that you get really excited about. One of the great things that comes out of working with Zun is that I find our meetings are also a great check-in point where I have all of these light bulb moments. Knowing that we will be having our conversation gives me time to meditate and vocalize things going on in the studio and to realize \u2013 \u201cI see what I am doing there and now this conversation is making me think about this other venture\u201d. I really enjoy that room to grow.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\nZ<\/strong>: I can echo what Josephine said. Specific to still ongoing pandemic constraints and the way that Josephine decided to continue expressing her work by blurring the lines of the institutional and the domestic, it was important for me to make space for the fact that there\u2019s no dedicated time within which inspiration strikes. A lot of the current work that Josephine engages in hinges on moments that become these light bulb moments occurring out of everyday life. They may not necessarily be moments of production or conceptualization. It\u2019s just for Josephine to get a better sense of how she functions in her space whether it is the studio or the home and what that means in how the work articulates itself. In that sense there is a structure, but it\u2019s not bound by space and time. It\u2019s more about those moments of inspiration that we try to build structure around.<\/p>\nJosephine has been really good about sending texts with images of something that spontaneously unfolds or when she has an idea. I look forward to seeing those. Our practices are very similar in that we both focus on Blackness and domesticity and the domestic space as an expression for a kind of interiority, and how that interiority manifests in terms of how Blackness performs and signifies. It\u2019s always interesting for me to see what her take on these things is.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n
Josephine, how have the conversations with Zun affected your process and thinking regarding your work? <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\nJ<\/strong>: I feel more freedom this semester in terms of really wanting to go for it and really push some of the ideas and projects that I have been interested in for a while now. It\u2019s also my second semester in the program and I think my first semester was figuring out the mode of working in a grad program. I was thinking about what kind of work I should<\/em> be making but this semester I don\u2019t really feel that way. I have done some landscaping so far and I\u2019m tackling a larger scale piece that I have wanted to do for years.<\/p>\nIn my conversations with Zun I feel really supported and I just want to go for it. I also feel our conversations are really generative and I am appreciative of that; I come away with more ideas. I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s just me, but as an artist you can get so stuck on how you are working and Zun always does a great job of brainstorming big picture ideas and asking questions. How does this function in a longer format? Where is this going to create a new path of departure for future work? And that\u2019s a really cool way to be thinking \u2013 in terms of the micro and the macro.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n
Can you give a specific of when that happened \u2013 where you were directed to think about something in the micro and the macro?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\nJ<\/strong>: All of these arenas of making \u2013 landscaping, transplanting trees or food work, I call the sides of my practice. Zun does a really great job of pushing those elements of making \u2013 the daily sorts of material investigations that really excite me. He puts as much emphasis on those peripheral activities as some of my main focuses, like the maps from this semester.<\/p>\nI am also thinking about working with hardware and the idea of having a matrix or format built in where I am able to switch out all of these different materials to still work with each other and how that idea of an index of materials is also another point of departure that I can always be referring to and using. It is a way of thinking that becomes a tool for me to use.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\nZ<\/strong>: That was interesting for me because I am primarily a lens-based artist, even though I focus on the domestic and what the domestic can be in terms of representation, identity, and self-expression. To play devil\u2019s advocate \u2013 the fact Josephine does a lot of work in landscaping and home improvement and things that are dismissed as crafts like paper making, textile work, quilt making, gave me permission to look at what she does, and ask, without necessarily giving her direction, what would I do if it was my practice to work with textiles, or plants, or discarded objects from around my house?<\/p>\nWhat are the questions that I would ask of myself and the considerations I would place around my work if I had to think about how would this work in an institutional context and how would this work in a very specific domestic context where I think specifically about use value more than the aesthetics? Looking at her work as it unfolds gives me permission to think about those things for myself. In that sense it has been very much a mutual thing.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n
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<\/div>Josephine Chase - MG 1, 2021<\/small><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nHow do you think about those questions of use value and context as they relate to your process? <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\nJ: <\/strong>I have always had this question about how the institution functions to support my work and ways that I am fighting against it in my modes of working. It is especially interesting now because I\u2019m not a digital artist. A lot of my work is based on being able to experience it in person. I get a lot out of being able to see people in a space next to my work. That\u2019s always been a reward I built into the amount of time and labor I spend with things. I like the idea of people being able to spend time with the work in its space and discover all of the detail which is just really hard to capture sometimes.<\/p>\nIn this pandemic space I have been really thinking about being in an art school and how you have this idea of having an installation space, that privilege of having a space that\u2019s dedicated towards your re-imagination. And now not having that has instead presented formal parameters that have made me look at my domestic space, which I have always been pulling from to bring into the institution any way. I am now cutting out the middleman in essence and thinking about what does that look like when I am turning my home into a site for experiencing art?<\/p>\n
And that is a really interesting conversation. What is it like to invite somebody over to your home vs what is it like when somebody is moving through a museum? What are the patterns of behavior that we observe? That has been really exciting too, it allows me to spend time thinking about the viewership of my work. I am always thinking about that hospitality aspect. What is this doing for someone when they look at it? That\u2019s one way in which those questions about the institution vs domestic space manifest in my thinking.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n
Can you describe a pivotal exchange or moment that helped shift something for you?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\nJ<\/strong>: Pretty much after every meeting it\u2019s been like a checkpoint and a time to push things further. Our first meeting, coming out of the last residency, I was thinking about a lot of two dimensional work: map making and working with readymades. After our second meeting –\u00a0 [Josephine’s dog Pluto can be heard barking in background]<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nZ<\/strong>: What\u2019s happening now is very much the way we worked: daily life inserting itself, not so much interrupting, but inserting itself as a reminder that these conversations have a context of what\u2019s actually happening. The dog is very much part of it.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\nJ<\/strong>: After our second meeting, I had been working on excavating this 1974 decrepit MG<\/a> from my back yard. I was talking about the history of this vehicle and how I really had it in my mind that I wanted to work on this car for two or three years now and I just remember it being a really great conversation in the sense that Zun just got it. He was asking questions that were directly tied to some of the studio questions I had: how do I reanimate these family stories? What does it do to something to reimagine its function?<\/p>\nWe just had a meeting, our first after receiving news that this next residency will be online. It was a really interesting conversation because that\u2019s when I started to say \u2013 ok this is how I am going to display the work. I\u2019m going to use the sites that I have already been working from, my home, as installation sites for art. Then we started talking again about those ideas of how the museum functions against this backdrop of home. That was a pretty recent breakthrough conversation.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nZ<\/strong>: I never know what questions to ask or how to structure the conversation. I draw the inspiration from just how Josephine throws things at me. Including the example of the old car chassis in the back yard and her intention to repurpose it for some kind of studio work. I have a penchant for the discarded and the throwaway so that kind of intrigued me but also it was the way in which she spoke about this discovery that this could be something used as part of her work.<\/p>\nAnd you mentioned this groundhog \u2013 the car had been covered by vegetation and underbrush and in order to use the car or repurpose it she would have to clear out all this vegetation that had grown over the car and then she realized that this groundhog had used this car to hibernate in and she said she had to wait until winter was over because she couldn\u2019t just displace this groundhog from this car. Again, this whole idea around displacement and migration.<\/p>\n
The way she cared about not doing it to the groundhog triggered this whole conversation around: what does it mean not to show the finished product or the end result of the repurposing or reclamation of something that was discarded but to show all the care and considerations that go into this process even before you\u2019ve begun the process? Can caring about the groundhog having a home to hibernate in before you even touch this car\u00a0 somehow be part of the process? Can you work all these care considerations into the work itself?<\/p>\n
So that became central to the investigation as well. What does it mean to hear stories about the groundhog and all these things? We are not sure yet where this will go in terms of how you can show this, now that again, the pandemic has imposed some constraints around what can be shown and how. Again, for us these are not so much challenges as considerations for thinking more deeply about materiality and how to deal with the haptic in this work. Especially if we can now only visualize it \u2013 is there still a way to imbue the haptic quality of this work?<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n
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<\/div>Josephine Chase - MG 2, 2021<\/small><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nWhat is the relationship of the car to you and has it always been on the property?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\nJ<\/strong>: It was my paternal aunt\u2019s first car. She was a painter. The car sat outside, dug into the ground of another family property for decades. When that family member passed the car made its way over here and the same thing happened, nobody was using it, nobody was fixing it. It just became overgrown in this other location. And it still would have been.<\/p>\nI am trying to find a use value for it and a way to honor these stories of whoever had it. It sat next to another aunt\u2019s car, my maternal aunt\u2019s, who abandoned her car when she got deported. So they sat next to each other \u2013 sister cars. The MG I am working on is embedded much deeper into the soil than the other car. I worked with it a bit, pulling parts off,\u00a0 painting them and thinking about that deportation, the migration, and the idea of an abandoned car that clearly doesn\u2019t function any more as this really visual signifier of a person having left. Thinking about how it used to move and take somebody somewhere but now it can\u2019t move, and it\u2019s clear that nobody has been in it for a long time. It has all of that residue of human experience.<\/p>\n
Like for Zun, that type of degradation of an object is very poetic to me too. I see something in there and I definitely get fascinated by it. That\u2019s what that car meant to me \u2013 existing there as this problem that no one wanted to look at and me actually looking at it and thinking \u2013 wouldn\u2019t that make a really great painting?<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n
<\/div>\nHow have you been challenged by your exchanges with Zun?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\nJ<\/strong>: One of the biggest challenges is having me get what I need out of this MFA Program and the idea that getting your MFA does not make you an artist. I came here as an artist so having this experience really work for me is where I feel I get pushed the most by Zun. Not just to think about what I should be making for this program or what I should be making semester by semester. What I value about our mentorship is that he sees me as an emerging artist and my career with the big picture in mind.<\/p>\nHe is in that space of supporting these projects but also asking \u2013 \u201cWhat is this doing? How does this help you grow as an artist?\u201d The idea that nothing is just for school. That all of this is going to stack up to become these other possibilities for me to work with. I may be making it all sound rosy but that is a challenge too. It\u2019s a good thing to be pushed in that way too, having my experience mirrored back to me, to get what I want out of it. That\u2019s a really helpful mode of thinking.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n
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<\/div>Josephine Chase - Maps 1, 2021<\/small><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
<\/div>Josephine Chase - Maps 2, 2021<\/small><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nWhat will you take into the next semester from your work with Zun?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\nJ<\/strong>: I think there is so much. I\u2019m trying to think of quantifiable things. I think overall there is a freedom to how I am working this semester that is important. It feels like the work I am doing now in terms of scale and the amount of work is really big, and I am certain that this not just a put a button in it in July kind of thing. Working on these cars is going to take me right in to next year when I will be graduating.<\/p>\nI want to make sure that each semester I am working on things that make sense to me \u2013 things that make sense to what my vantage point is in a really exciting, overwhelming landscape of artists making really cool work. Asking myself \u2013 what do I like to make \u2013 and being connected to that part of self and really feeling a lot of support that these stories I like to work with and animate are important. Never to lose during this time that they have something to add to the conversation.<\/p>\n
And hopefully too, that\u2019s the great thing about the program, is getting to stay in touch with your artist-mentors and have this resource of people who understand how you are working that you can check back in with to say \u2013 this is what I am working on and up to. I\u2019m really excited to have those conversations too.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nZ<\/strong>: What you just said is something that often gets lost. What do I like to do? What do I get joy out of making? There is always so much pressure to deliver in an MFA program where everybody works towards a final show and everyone thinks in terms of milestones. What gets lost is the initial wonderment that made you an artist in the first place. The question of what do I like to make and not what gives me an A or what this professor likes to see or that professor likes to hear. Being mindful that you are allowed to actually think about what brings you joy and make things that you enjoy making. That\u2019s the place from which it all starts, and all comes back to. You will succeed in a program no matter the intensity if you focus on what you like to make.<\/p>\nAnd this isn\u2019t a trivial question, not even in terms of how Josephine and I interact, because a lot of these conversations, even though they seem free form and very spontaneous and driven by the moment, are actually very rigorous and all undergirded by critical theories. Very specific theories that we always keep coming back to and we are mindful that yes, this is still an MFA program, and we are having to hang our free form conversations against certain frameworks. We are always mindful that these frameworks exist, and we also don\u2019t forget that these frameworks are not corsets, they are not constraints. They are supposed to help us ask deeper and deeper questions. A lot of people think of the framework first and ask how does my work fit into the framework? I think it should be the other way around. I\u2019m the artist that I am and what frameworks are there that support what I am doing?<\/p>\n
We are always mindful that there are specific thinkers in this space that we both resonated with, and that as much as we have these free form conversations, there is always something that undergirds that. It’s important to focus on what made you a maker in the first place and to see yourself as part of a lineage of critical thought and creative inspiration. That\u2019s always been in the back of our minds. As much as we like to be spontaneous, there is some framing of that spontaneity that goes on as well. There are specific people that we constantly quote.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n
J<\/strong>: One thing that we really connected on was \u201cIn Our Glory\u201d<\/a> by bell hooks<\/a> from Visual Politics. <\/em>It was so exciting to think about how, in that particular text, black photography within the home functions as a site of resistance against white supremacy from the outside. To read how this domestic space was being considered as this very important artscape was really connecting and to think about pictures of ancestors within my home serving as these art objects or these places of worship. For example, there is a photo of my maternal grandfather, Yarkpazua Komeyan, that my mom speaks to if we are nervous about something. When I wanted to get into grad school I asked my mother \u2013 can you talk to grandfather and make it happen?<\/p>\nhooks\u2019 method of working and writing that blends personal narrative with critical theory was so impactful for me to discover because I am working with personal narratives and tribal narratives. I\u2019m also pulling from a legacy that doesn\u2019t have a written language, where all the information is disseminated to you orally. It is so important finding writers that are able to blend that and use these examples that aren\u2019t exploiting a family and also showing how these examples operate in and amongst a network that serves to support or dismantle Black domestic life. To have Zun\u2019s connection with that reading acknowledged that now we can talk about this stuff that I really do want to talk about.<\/p>\n
<\/div><\/div><\/div>\nOne of the two main components of a student\u2019s course of study in the MFA-VA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts is a semester-long studio project in which the student develops and\/or challenges specific aspects of their art practice under the guidance of an Artist-Mentor.<\/em><\/p>\n The VCFA Artist-Mentor network is comprised of prominent contemporary artists who mentor students individually, during the semester. With over 1500 Artist-Mentors across the United States and Canada, VCFA students are ensured mentorship with a different Artist-Mentor each semester.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n Student:<\/strong> Josephine Chase (S 22)<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n Artist-Mentor:\u00a0<\/b>Zun Lee<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n VC Project Title – How To See A Work of Art in Total Color: Race, Representation & Reclamation<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Studio Title – Driven Into Nature: Transforming Topographies<\/b><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n This semester I’m working on\u00a0overhauling a ’74 MG into a new installation. I’m painting and detailing every\u00a0inch of it! I’ve also been working with other\u00a0automotive\u00a0signifiers like maps and traffic signs using sourced materials from hardware stores like paint chip\u00a0samples and wallpaper.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div> Zun Lee<\/a>, Josephine Chase’s 2nd Semester Artist-Mentor,<\/em>\u00a0is a visual artist, physician and educator. Born and raised in Germany, he currently lives and works in Canada and the US. Through lens-based storytelling, archival and socially engaged practice, Lee investigates Black everyday life and family spaces as sites of intimacy, belonging and insurgent sociality against cultural displacement and erasure. Lee has exhibited and spoken at numerous institutions in North America and Europe. His works are widely published and represented in public and private collections around the world. More of Lee’s work can be seen on his website and on his Instagram<\/a>. Selected honors and awards include: Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition Finalist (2019), Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Practitioner-in-Residence (2019), Knight Foundation Grantee (2018), Art Gallery of Ontario Artist-in-Residence (2017), Magnum Foundation Fellow (2015), PDN Photo Annual Winner (2015), Paris Photo\/Aperture Photobook Awards Shortlist (2014), PDN 30 (2014)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div><\/p>\n Is there a structure to your exchanges?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n J<\/strong>: Yes, but there is a lot of built-in expectation that things change. The process of working as an artist is often organic, you find inquiries or adventures along the way in the studio that you get really excited about. One of the great things that comes out of working with Zun is that I find our meetings are also a great check-in point where I have all of these light bulb moments. Knowing that we will be having our conversation gives me time to meditate and vocalize things going on in the studio and to realize \u2013 \u201cI see what I am doing there and now this conversation is making me think about this other venture\u201d. I really enjoy that room to grow.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n Z<\/strong>: I can echo what Josephine said. Specific to still ongoing pandemic constraints and the way that Josephine decided to continue expressing her work by blurring the lines of the institutional and the domestic, it was important for me to make space for the fact that there\u2019s no dedicated time within which inspiration strikes. A lot of the current work that Josephine engages in hinges on moments that become these light bulb moments occurring out of everyday life. They may not necessarily be moments of production or conceptualization. It\u2019s just for Josephine to get a better sense of how she functions in her space whether it is the studio or the home and what that means in how the work articulates itself. In that sense there is a structure, but it\u2019s not bound by space and time. It\u2019s more about those moments of inspiration that we try to build structure around.<\/p>\n Josephine has been really good about sending texts with images of something that spontaneously unfolds or when she has an idea. I look forward to seeing those. Our practices are very similar in that we both focus on Blackness and domesticity and the domestic space as an expression for a kind of interiority, and how that interiority manifests in terms of how Blackness performs and signifies. It\u2019s always interesting for me to see what her take on these things is.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n Josephine, how have the conversations with Zun affected your process and thinking regarding your work? <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n J<\/strong>: I feel more freedom this semester in terms of really wanting to go for it and really push some of the ideas and projects that I have been interested in for a while now. It\u2019s also my second semester in the program and I think my first semester was figuring out the mode of working in a grad program. I was thinking about what kind of work I should<\/em> be making but this semester I don\u2019t really feel that way. I have done some landscaping so far and I\u2019m tackling a larger scale piece that I have wanted to do for years.<\/p>\n In my conversations with Zun I feel really supported and I just want to go for it. I also feel our conversations are really generative and I am appreciative of that; I come away with more ideas. I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s just me, but as an artist you can get so stuck on how you are working and Zun always does a great job of brainstorming big picture ideas and asking questions. How does this function in a longer format? Where is this going to create a new path of departure for future work? And that\u2019s a really cool way to be thinking \u2013 in terms of the micro and the macro.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n Can you give a specific of when that happened \u2013 where you were directed to think about something in the micro and the macro?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n J<\/strong>: All of these arenas of making \u2013 landscaping, transplanting trees or food work, I call the sides of my practice. Zun does a really great job of pushing those elements of making \u2013 the daily sorts of material investigations that really excite me. He puts as much emphasis on those peripheral activities as some of my main focuses, like the maps from this semester.<\/p>\n I am also thinking about working with hardware and the idea of having a matrix or format built in where I am able to switch out all of these different materials to still work with each other and how that idea of an index of materials is also another point of departure that I can always be referring to and using. It is a way of thinking that becomes a tool for me to use.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n Z<\/strong>: That was interesting for me because I am primarily a lens-based artist, even though I focus on the domestic and what the domestic can be in terms of representation, identity, and self-expression. To play devil\u2019s advocate \u2013 the fact Josephine does a lot of work in landscaping and home improvement and things that are dismissed as crafts like paper making, textile work, quilt making, gave me permission to look at what she does, and ask, without necessarily giving her direction, what would I do if it was my practice to work with textiles, or plants, or discarded objects from around my house?<\/p>\n What are the questions that I would ask of myself and the considerations I would place around my work if I had to think about how would this work in an institutional context and how would this work in a very specific domestic context where I think specifically about use value more than the aesthetics? Looking at her work as it unfolds gives me permission to think about those things for myself. In that sense it has been very much a mutual thing.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n How do you think about those questions of use value and context as they relate to your process? <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n J: <\/strong>I have always had this question about how the institution functions to support my work and ways that I am fighting against it in my modes of working. It is especially interesting now because I\u2019m not a digital artist. A lot of my work is based on being able to experience it in person. I get a lot out of being able to see people in a space next to my work. That\u2019s always been a reward I built into the amount of time and labor I spend with things. I like the idea of people being able to spend time with the work in its space and discover all of the detail which is just really hard to capture sometimes.<\/p>\n In this pandemic space I have been really thinking about being in an art school and how you have this idea of having an installation space, that privilege of having a space that\u2019s dedicated towards your re-imagination. And now not having that has instead presented formal parameters that have made me look at my domestic space, which I have always been pulling from to bring into the institution any way. I am now cutting out the middleman in essence and thinking about what does that look like when I am turning my home into a site for experiencing art?<\/p>\n And that is a really interesting conversation. What is it like to invite somebody over to your home vs what is it like when somebody is moving through a museum? What are the patterns of behavior that we observe? That has been really exciting too, it allows me to spend time thinking about the viewership of my work. I am always thinking about that hospitality aspect. What is this doing for someone when they look at it? That\u2019s one way in which those questions about the institution vs domestic space manifest in my thinking.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n Can you describe a pivotal exchange or moment that helped shift something for you?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n J<\/strong>: Pretty much after every meeting it\u2019s been like a checkpoint and a time to push things further. Our first meeting, coming out of the last residency, I was thinking about a lot of two dimensional work: map making and working with readymades. After our second meeting –\u00a0 [Josephine’s dog Pluto can be heard barking in background]<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n Z<\/strong>: What\u2019s happening now is very much the way we worked: daily life inserting itself, not so much interrupting, but inserting itself as a reminder that these conversations have a context of what\u2019s actually happening. The dog is very much part of it.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n J<\/strong>: After our second meeting, I had been working on excavating this 1974 decrepit MG<\/a> from my back yard. I was talking about the history of this vehicle and how I really had it in my mind that I wanted to work on this car for two or three years now and I just remember it being a really great conversation in the sense that Zun just got it. He was asking questions that were directly tied to some of the studio questions I had: how do I reanimate these family stories? What does it do to something to reimagine its function?<\/p>\n We just had a meeting, our first after receiving news that this next residency will be online. It was a really interesting conversation because that\u2019s when I started to say \u2013 ok this is how I am going to display the work. I\u2019m going to use the sites that I have already been working from, my home, as installation sites for art. Then we started talking again about those ideas of how the museum functions against this backdrop of home. That was a pretty recent breakthrough conversation.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n Z<\/strong>: I never know what questions to ask or how to structure the conversation. I draw the inspiration from just how Josephine throws things at me. Including the example of the old car chassis in the back yard and her intention to repurpose it for some kind of studio work. I have a penchant for the discarded and the throwaway so that kind of intrigued me but also it was the way in which she spoke about this discovery that this could be something used as part of her work.<\/p>\n And you mentioned this groundhog \u2013 the car had been covered by vegetation and underbrush and in order to use the car or repurpose it she would have to clear out all this vegetation that had grown over the car and then she realized that this groundhog had used this car to hibernate in and she said she had to wait until winter was over because she couldn\u2019t just displace this groundhog from this car. Again, this whole idea around displacement and migration.<\/p>\n The way she cared about not doing it to the groundhog triggered this whole conversation around: what does it mean not to show the finished product or the end result of the repurposing or reclamation of something that was discarded but to show all the care and considerations that go into this process even before you\u2019ve begun the process? Can caring about the groundhog having a home to hibernate in before you even touch this car\u00a0 somehow be part of the process? Can you work all these care considerations into the work itself?<\/p>\n So that became central to the investigation as well. What does it mean to hear stories about the groundhog and all these things? We are not sure yet where this will go in terms of how you can show this, now that again, the pandemic has imposed some constraints around what can be shown and how. Again, for us these are not so much challenges as considerations for thinking more deeply about materiality and how to deal with the haptic in this work. Especially if we can now only visualize it \u2013 is there still a way to imbue the haptic quality of this work?<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n What is the relationship of the car to you and has it always been on the property?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n J<\/strong>: It was my paternal aunt\u2019s first car. She was a painter. The car sat outside, dug into the ground of another family property for decades. When that family member passed the car made its way over here and the same thing happened, nobody was using it, nobody was fixing it. It just became overgrown in this other location. And it still would have been.<\/p>\n I am trying to find a use value for it and a way to honor these stories of whoever had it. It sat next to another aunt\u2019s car, my maternal aunt\u2019s, who abandoned her car when she got deported. So they sat next to each other \u2013 sister cars. The MG I am working on is embedded much deeper into the soil than the other car. I worked with it a bit, pulling parts off,\u00a0 painting them and thinking about that deportation, the migration, and the idea of an abandoned car that clearly doesn\u2019t function any more as this really visual signifier of a person having left. Thinking about how it used to move and take somebody somewhere but now it can\u2019t move, and it\u2019s clear that nobody has been in it for a long time. It has all of that residue of human experience.<\/p>\n Like for Zun, that type of degradation of an object is very poetic to me too. I see something in there and I definitely get fascinated by it. That\u2019s what that car meant to me \u2013 existing there as this problem that no one wanted to look at and me actually looking at it and thinking \u2013 wouldn\u2019t that make a really great painting?<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n How have you been challenged by your exchanges with Zun?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n J<\/strong>: One of the biggest challenges is having me get what I need out of this MFA Program and the idea that getting your MFA does not make you an artist. I came here as an artist so having this experience really work for me is where I feel I get pushed the most by Zun. Not just to think about what I should be making for this program or what I should be making semester by semester. What I value about our mentorship is that he sees me as an emerging artist and my career with the big picture in mind.<\/p>\n He is in that space of supporting these projects but also asking \u2013 \u201cWhat is this doing? How does this help you grow as an artist?\u201d The idea that nothing is just for school. That all of this is going to stack up to become these other possibilities for me to work with. I may be making it all sound rosy but that is a challenge too. It\u2019s a good thing to be pushed in that way too, having my experience mirrored back to me, to get what I want out of it. That\u2019s a really helpful mode of thinking.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n What will you take into the next semester from your work with Zun?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n J<\/strong>: I think there is so much. I\u2019m trying to think of quantifiable things. I think overall there is a freedom to how I am working this semester that is important. It feels like the work I am doing now in terms of scale and the amount of work is really big, and I am certain that this not just a put a button in it in July kind of thing. Working on these cars is going to take me right in to next year when I will be graduating.<\/p>\n I want to make sure that each semester I am working on things that make sense to me \u2013 things that make sense to what my vantage point is in a really exciting, overwhelming landscape of artists making really cool work. Asking myself \u2013 what do I like to make \u2013 and being connected to that part of self and really feeling a lot of support that these stories I like to work with and animate are important. Never to lose during this time that they have something to add to the conversation.<\/p>\n And hopefully too, that\u2019s the great thing about the program, is getting to stay in touch with your artist-mentors and have this resource of people who understand how you are working that you can check back in with to say \u2013 this is what I am working on and up to. I\u2019m really excited to have those conversations too.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n Z<\/strong>: What you just said is something that often gets lost. What do I like to do? What do I get joy out of making? There is always so much pressure to deliver in an MFA program where everybody works towards a final show and everyone thinks in terms of milestones. What gets lost is the initial wonderment that made you an artist in the first place. The question of what do I like to make and not what gives me an A or what this professor likes to see or that professor likes to hear. Being mindful that you are allowed to actually think about what brings you joy and make things that you enjoy making. That\u2019s the place from which it all starts, and all comes back to. You will succeed in a program no matter the intensity if you focus on what you like to make.<\/p>\n And this isn\u2019t a trivial question, not even in terms of how Josephine and I interact, because a lot of these conversations, even though they seem free form and very spontaneous and driven by the moment, are actually very rigorous and all undergirded by critical theories. Very specific theories that we always keep coming back to and we are mindful that yes, this is still an MFA program, and we are having to hang our free form conversations against certain frameworks. We are always mindful that these frameworks exist, and we also don\u2019t forget that these frameworks are not corsets, they are not constraints. They are supposed to help us ask deeper and deeper questions. A lot of people think of the framework first and ask how does my work fit into the framework? I think it should be the other way around. I\u2019m the artist that I am and what frameworks are there that support what I am doing?<\/p>\n We are always mindful that there are specific thinkers in this space that we both resonated with, and that as much as we have these free form conversations, there is always something that undergirds that. It’s important to focus on what made you a maker in the first place and to see yourself as part of a lineage of critical thought and creative inspiration. That\u2019s always been in the back of our minds. As much as we like to be spontaneous, there is some framing of that spontaneity that goes on as well. There are specific people that we constantly quote.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/section><\/div>\n J<\/strong>: One thing that we really connected on was \u201cIn Our Glory\u201d<\/a> by bell hooks<\/a> from Visual Politics. <\/em>It was so exciting to think about how, in that particular text, black photography within the home functions as a site of resistance against white supremacy from the outside. To read how this domestic space was being considered as this very important artscape was really connecting and to think about pictures of ancestors within my home serving as these art objects or these places of worship. For example, there is a photo of my maternal grandfather, Yarkpazua Komeyan, that my mom speaks to if we are nervous about something. When I wanted to get into grad school I asked my mother \u2013 can you talk to grandfather and make it happen?<\/p>\n hooks\u2019 method of working and writing that blends personal narrative with critical theory was so impactful for me to discover because I am working with personal narratives and tribal narratives. I\u2019m also pulling from a legacy that doesn\u2019t have a written language, where all the information is disseminated to you orally. It is so important finding writers that are able to blend that and use these examples that aren\u2019t exploiting a family and also showing how these examples operate in and amongst a network that serves to support or dismantle Black domestic life. To have Zun\u2019s connection with that reading acknowledged that now we can talk about this stuff that I really do want to talk about.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>Josephine Chase - MG 1, 2021<\/small><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>Josephine Chase - MG 2, 2021<\/small><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>Josephine Chase - Maps 1, 2021<\/small><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>Josephine Chase - Maps 2, 2021<\/small><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n
<\/div>Josephine Chase - MG - detail, 2021<\/small><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n