Maximalism, Modularity & Seemingly Futile Laborious Processes

 

GM: Pattern-making and your interest in kitsch is palpable in your recent Patchwork series, which is a beautiful body of work, yet in pieces such as Quilted Medley, something disrupts the harmony. It’s as if these works refuse to recede completely into the role of being decorative objects for a wall in a domestic setting. You move between quilted paper landscapes and more minimal, subtle interventions through works like Folded Grids. This oscillation reinforces my reading of your pieces as meditations between dualities, elegance and vulgarity, ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, as well as notions of women’s work in relation to the history of abstraction in a capitalist system of commodification. Can you talk us through the processes behind these different two-dimensional works?

JS: The Patchwork series is about maximalism–thinking about excess, taking the decorative and pushing the limits of it in each piece. I use a lot of 70’s fabric patterns and look at a lot of vintage quilting magazines for inspiration and the specific ways that those patterns come together. When I’m layering all these patterns from different sources on top of each other, I kind of imagine working like a confined housewife who is just “going for it”. She has no sense of an “appropriate” place to stop and does not care about what the pattern-book says. She does not exercise any restraint. What results is an image where all these different patterns kind of throw up on each other. It is both beautiful and vulgar, they are a little ‘too much’ at times, not giving your eyes a place to rest. They are meant to be overwhelming in that way.

GM: This is exactly what I meant with the word vulgar, as the opposite of taste when taste is something that lets you rest, lets your eyes recede into the picture plane, and brings calm into your home. You create something that is alluring and feels like one whole image but then it disrupts your gaze into fragments, causing an irritation that sparks thought.

JS: The play with taste is very important. The Folded Grids series, on the other hand, is an exercise in restraint, but also very much related to the Patchwork series in the idea of a futile or unnecessary labor involving outdated technologies. With Folded Grids, I used the Risograph machine to print onto fabric, which you are not really supposed to do. I had paper-backed fabric that I ran one sheet at a time – a totally inefficient way of using this already dated technology.

In fact, I started off by hand drawing and painting these grids, scanning them in, doing the colour separation on photoshop, then printing them through the risograph onto the fabric-backed paper. Once I was at this stage, I put these back into the scanner and fold them into different shapes, THEN I did new colour separations and printed them out again. Some of these were mismatches from two separate versions and the folds don’t really align on purpose.

Long story short: it’s about absurdity, even though that might not be entirely visible when you see them online. There’s just a ridiculous amount of work involved in making the final product, similar to a lot of crafting at home these days, whether that’s knitting a sweater, or making your own cheese. But that unnecessary labour attaches itself to the object in some way. When you look at them there’s a confusion about what it is you are looking at–paper, fabric, or a digitalized rendition of both. And there’s a sort of humour for me regarding the amount of work taken to make this simple, little, restrained, folded modernist grid. I’m still working out how I want to show them best and trying to figure out how I can bring in the story of their process curatorially, perhaps even including the original printed fabric.

 

“The project, developed while a Gaia Studio Wonder Women resident, and realized at Gallery Aferro, brings together food and music. Elements include photographic wallpaper of homemade tapes, digitally printed domestic textiles such as a tablecloth and tea towels, an artistbook/ zine with recipes and lyrics, artwork made from cassette tapes, an editioned mix tape with a suggested song and snack pairing insert, and a mix tape making station”.

 

GM: In projects like ‘DRINK WITH ME’, ‘MIXT TAPES | MIX TAPES’, ‘ZAZAZA’, your aesthetic practice spills and mixes with more social and relational events. By adopting processes of industrial printing on materials that can be reintroduced into the rituals of commonality, you seem to dissolve the ‘art’ from the ‘object’, expanding a set of layered aesthetic relationships to a whole event and its participants. I was wondering how you transitioned from individual studio-based work to work that verges on social practice, and how you deal with the shifting value systems between both?

JS: I think the works are all related. The work on paper is looking at patterns referencing the domestic and excess and this sort of celebratory excess of domesticity, instead of hiding it – and that’s also what is happening with the more community oriented relational projects. And in both there is always a play with the structures of labour.

So with Drink With Me, I used flat origami patterns to make a cup, the idea was that I didn’t fold them for people, if you wanted a drink of water or wine, you had to fold your own cup from the pack. The whole event revolved around the act of folding one’s own cup, which pointed again at this idea of absurd labour. The cups were also a bit too small and quite awkward to hold, and the fact that people had to figure out how to make their cup didn’t add to the functionality of these objects as temporary liquid holders.

The first time they were shown, I had a GIF showing the cup being folded as an instruction that played on a loop. Later there was concern that the video or GIF wouldn’t be enough for people to follow the steps correctly, even though the whole challenge and frustration and eventual spread of the ‘successful’ way of folding these cups was entirely the point of the whole experience.

In any case, the second time I showed them, I stood for the entire opening folding and unfolding the same cup. Some people of course still didn’t get it and created their own cone mechanism and had to drink as fast as possible to try and not get wine or water on their clothes. So as a piece, it’s meant to be frustrating and funny and to bring people together.

GM: Your project ‘PROGI’ seems to be the culmination of all we’ve been talking about. 

JS: It was actually the first relational project to come about, when I was living above the rectory of a Polish church in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I grew up eating and making pierogi. In America, at least, there’s this tradition of churches hosting BINGO games in their basements, and I got it in my head that I wanted to have a Bingo game meets pierogi dinner in the basement of the Polish church. So I made these Bingo cards that had ‘progi’ written on them instead of ‘bingo’.

With the quilted works on paper there’s something systematic–geometrical, mathematical, like a set  of indecipherable hieroglyphs collected and displayed. With the Progi Bingo project this was also the case – generating the numbers for the grids was both systematic and disruptive. I ended up giving a bunch of these cards to different artists who I knew so they could alter them as they wanted, through drawing, printing, painting and collage, returning these cards for the actual bingo game. In the event, each person at the table had bingo blotters, (fat markers pens), which meant people were drawing on top of the drawings, turning the original pieces into a cumulative, collaborative thing.

In the meantime I was cooking in the basement and struggling because the pierogi was all falling apart. A friend of mine had to come to my rescue! Her family owned a Chinese restaurant and she taught me how to make them the way you do dumplings. So an amazing turn of events saved the day. This friend also acted as the bingo caller, calling out the prizes, and overall it became a really fun, unscripted event–different and better than what I could have imagined.

GM: Going back 180° to your two-dimensional work, I am very interested in your new modular experiments, where you have been mounting paper on board and creating cut-outs with flaps that open up like advent-calendars. They seem to offer themselves up to touch, use and re-arrangement, and I wonder if you have been influenced by your daughter Poppy and the relationship children have with craft and with playing. 

JS: Actually, I’ve been thinking a lot about this: Poppy is always making these assemblages with anything she can find, even using a projector that we have for the TV connected to the Internet. She knows how to turn it on and move it and point it towards different angles, and in this sense she seems more technologically advanced than me in my investigations! But it’s definitely influenced what I’m doing. I’ve been thinking a lot about building blocks and tangrams, those specific sets of shapes that you can move to make other shapes, dominoes and matching cards, things that you can keep shuffling around. There is an element of play there that is influenced by kid crafts and kid games.

The modularity of this work has been important for me. Raising a child in a small Brooklyn apartment, and not having an external studio for a while, I had to make work that I could mount and dismount, that I could tile together to make something larger, and then pack up and put away in a box. Now I have a studio because Poppy’s in Pre-K, which helps a lot – but at this very moment where we are all at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I am back home and in the world of modularity.

I was definitely thinking about advent calendars with the new works on paper, and I’ve been toying with the idea of putting something edible inside these too. Or those origami “cootie catchers” that you make as a kid. Maybe I need to make some really crazy ridiculously ornate cootie catcher work to combat the corona madness.

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