“Where it Always Lands”

Shana Kaplow and Sarah Petersen in conversation for the book Object Objects : Shana Kaplow

During the winter of 2018, the two artists met and recorded several hours of conversation in Shana’s studio in St. Paul, Minnesota. They talked about their artwork, processes, influences, and their overlapping interests. What follows is an edited excerpt from their conversation.

SP: You often make installations that fill a wall or gallery. The work infiltrates a room. There's something euphoric about it, unrestrained, yet it also feels positioned against conventional notions of comfort. It proposes that there will be consequences – as if this thing would need cleaning up if it were in the real world. Something is unhinged...

SK: That makes me think about the physics of contained or released energy. I’m interested in a sense of stored tension that becomes liberated. This happens in the body and I think it happens in human enterprises, too. I’m also thinking about what happens when something is both beautiful and jarring. There’s a confusion in feeling comfort and discomfort at the same time. I feel this way a lot and am looking at the roots of that experience. Making this work is a way of trying to learn from my relationship to the world, both near and far.

SP: Absolutely. Growth is discomfort and excitement. It allows for expansion and a kind of loss of self. I’ve sometimes had this experience when learning new movement techniques. I would feel itchy and weak inside my body, which was really the physical sensation of learning or maybe unlearning. Maybe this is what the breakdown of ignorance feels like. I think there are political consequences to that. The feeling is so uncomfortable that people would do anything rather than feel those feelings.

SK: No matter what we've already learned, a new edge is inherently challenging.

SP: Improvisation is like that too – an embrace of what it feels like to trust learning as you go.

SK: I had a wonderful conversation in my studio with the painter Judy Glantzman. She said, "Fact plus theater equals truth." Of course, truth isn't fixed, but I took her comment to mean that fact plus theater feels true. Fact and fiction together say something greater than either alone.

SP: Wow, right.

SK: I interpret the ‘theater’ in your work as a kind of insertion or intervention – you create fictional conditions that allow participants to interact with something real. I think we both ground our work in familiar and tangible experience, but then go further afield from that.

SP: Yes, I often describe my work as interventionist. It can surprise or confuse the familiar because something unexpected is asked of the participants, like humming into a microphone or in a group, for example. I often make things that people can re-deploy for their own purposes. In your work, you paint the space between the legs of a chair or the space within a cup. Sometimes the object is photo-realistic but often the un-nameable space around it or inside of it is the active thing. It's a depiction of abstraction – matter and anti-matter.

SK: Right, like the matter of labor, or particulates in the air – can we visualize these things? What is their weight? What’s contained within negative spaces? What I could call the theater in my paintings is the ink escaping the nameable images and becoming atmosphere. I want it to feel recognizable as a conundrum. It's not only a chair that's familiar, it's the conundrum that’s familiar. I like that what looks realistic can simultaneously suggest that it is not to be believed.

SP: I love that. The chair points to the problem with the chair.

SK: It’s interesting that the so-called ‘ideals’ of modernist design now come to us by way of IKEA, for instance – through complex systems of mass-production, supply chains, exploitative labor practices, the use of certain bodies, and the consumption of natural resources. There is so much complicity.

SP: There are the things that come out of this elaborate machinery that, apparently, we want, but then scattered around them is all this trouble and hurt that they cause. A couple of years ago, there was a catastrophic natural gas leak in Los Angeles and everyone downwind was suffering headaches and worse. Infrared lenses showed it spewing, but you couldn't see it with the human eye. Your work reminds me of those lenses – it shows us what we can’t see. You’re dealing with shadow, stain, and remnants of presence.

SK: It has to do with how the unspoken can manifest physically or psychologically. I hope the visual tensions and opposition within the work are sensed bodily. Jan Verwoert speaks of “qualities, not quality”. I’m curious about how visceral qualities can lead to the act of thinking.

SP: Maybe the visceral also works similarly to the way sound functions – like a gong vibrating, or like singing. It's direct vibration. Your body sympathetically vibrates. There's no logical interference. You don't have to understand it in a linguistic sense.

SK: It can operate on all these different levels at once. The kinesthetic and conceptual are connected.

SP: I feel this combination quite powerfully in your series The House is Upside Down. I project myself under the chair and "crawl around" the underside. You put me in an uncomfortable space that makes me think about the conditions in which I would be under a chair [laughter]. Has the exploration and use of everyday domestic objects been consistent in your work?

SK: The house and the objects I grew up with do inform my work, but the consistent thread has had to do with the body. I think of the house or the furniture as bodies. The chair reflects the architecture of the body. I began to ask whose body (or bodies) does this chair represent? I also am wondering what happens if I think of the body or objects as spaces? They hold a space that connects the intimate to the distant – the larger economic structures, cultures, laborers, and conditions of lives I couldn’t see. I use the domestic to encompasses something much larger. Even the word means both the private home and the nation's affairs.

SP: …and everything outside of those borders is considered ‘foreign’.

SK: Right. The series The House is Upside Down is as much about the global ‘house’ as the private one.

SP: You address the domestic and foreign, simultaneously.

SK: The chair has been a fertile image for me to riff on. I think part of its power is a sense of absence, as opposed to emptiness. I am always curious about what is present but isn’t seen. I think it comes from the fact that my mother was an artist and my father was a professor of physics and materials science at MIT. They both explored ways to visualize the inner workings of things. There was a strong Jewish ethos of studying and questioning. When I reference photography, I think of it like scientific imaging. It’s perceived as real, but is an abstraction. I want to dissolve its solidity and present a kind of simultaneous contrast. I think of my grandmother, who was so attentive to loss. At family gatherings, she would always invoke those who were not present – those who had died, or simply had other plans that day. I came to realize that I was also holding a sense of absence in my work, trying to hold a space for what is missing.

SP: Your imagery can feel like collapse, like a dam giving way because there's so much spillage. The spill takes over. It feels like a release – an endgame or an aftermath.

SK: That's an interesting thought. It's about the potential for collapse, or that it is already underway. I’m trying to make the surfaces of things and what's going on behind them equally vivid. I think of that feeling when you're at the beach, standing on the sand at the edge of the water and it’s washing the sand out from under you. The ground becomes unstable.

SP: I’m curious about the role of research in your ideation process versus experimentation.

SK:  Both are really important. Reading and research allow me to look outside of the studio, and visual experimentation is more internal for me. If I’m too isolated, it’s harder to engage a multiplicity of meanings and the work can get arbitrary. If I'm reading and thinking about other things, that simultaneity becomes part of my thought process in the studio. I like it when my head is going in a lot of directions at once.

SP: I love this thing you touch on – being against arbitrariness. The force of many things comes to bear in the moment of making.

SK: Yeah, my daily life comes into play, as well. How is my life intertwined with lives halfway around the world? Who made my denim jeans, or my drinking glasses, or my bed pillow?

SP: Yeah, in the store, those glasses are telling you they're nice glasses [laughter], but they’re offered in a way that’s severed from how they came to be here. You told me about when you were in China, where a lot of furniture is built for the U.S. market. You were living in a neighborhood where factory workers lived, and you saw a table on the street that was cobbled together from wood scraps and a used IKEA tabletop. There’s a compelling tension between that table and tables we’ve purchased.

SK: Exactly. I am interested in the actualities that are carried along. I want to see the linkages between the solidity of the objects and the precarity of conditions that created them. There’s a psychological tension.

SP: And is that what you're thinking about when you're making the towers of chairs?

SK: Yes, there’s this looming structure, but there is also a vulnerability that is figurative. I’m asking how my comfort is contingent upon things that are not comfortable. We think of domestic space as private, but the intimate is tinged with massive public realities, hidden in plain sight.

SP: It's built on the anonymity of labor. I was so struck by the story about the Chinese factory worker who was sewing jeans and put a note in the pocket to the future owner. What would be different if our lives were more apparent to each other?

SK: I wonder if it could affect people’s consumption habits or influence.

SP: I'm curious about how you use excision – cutting out the painted objects and leaving the negative spaces or vice versa.

SK: Exploring ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ spaces are ways for me to talk about where to put attention – what the ‘object’ is or isn’t. When I work with cut-out parts, I’m thinking about the larger environment of a room or gallery. The walls become compositional spaces within the architecture. Once I cut into the paper, the pieces are enacted as parts of a larger whole that deals with how tall the wall is, how scale and movement operate, and how the viewer might engage in an embodied way.

With the show at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Near and Far, I wanted to create areas that shifted across the walls and through the gallery. The walls were 16 feet tall and I wanted to move the viewers’ awareness up and down, not just at eye level. I made a painted tower of chairs that extended up the wall from floor to ceiling and a cloud of wafting abstract gestures that I called Particulates, which opened up possibilities for using the space in more fluid ways.

SP: You later had a show that incorporated paintings of platforms, pedestals, and stages.

SK: The chair towers had me thinking in terms of hierarchies. It was right after Trump’s election and I was thinking about false leaders and the structures that hold them up. I painted portable platforms that are designed to fold or collapse. The platform towers were about a kind of exaggeration – a false throne. I wanted them to seem unreliable, liquid-y and precarious.

SP: After the election, there were daily press images of people at Trump Tower going in and out of gilded elevators. I had an idea to make a headpiece with a bunch of shiny surfaces hanging off of it. It would be like having your own ramshackle hall of mirrors – fake and super glitzy, with these things hitting your face, obscuring your vision.

SK: [Laughter] I love the idea of getting hit in the face with the crown jewels! The confusion and fakeness of that is great. It’s so psychological.

SP: A recent curtain piece I made came out of that impulse. It’s an installation that consists of a Mylar party curtain with text on both sides. One side says, "I don't / This isn't / I can't," which refers to our resistance and avoidance of the massive problems we’re faced with. The phrases reflect a personal and political crisis, but they’re meant to be passed through. And then the other side, which faces inside the gallery, says, "we / had / time." It's a shiny and attractive instigator to get us through our reticence. It’s an unexpected experience that is both embodied and intellectual.

SK: I love how it compels, but is also a little scary. It dares you to go through it.  

SP: It’s called Curtains for Us.

SK: It's potent – a thin membrane that holds ideas of action, inaction and consequences. A reminder that something important is at risk of being lost.

SP: “We had time” also implies that we had power. We had the capacity.

SK: Your work has an empathetic, we’re-in-this-together quality, and is also biting. The message is so poignant and even sorrowful in light of it being a party curtain.

SP: I try to ask, what's the need that an artwork can address? "What form can caring take?" Connecting people in a given circumstance requires being honest about where we each are within prescribed social hierarchies. Like you, I am motivated by invisibility and trying to deal with what we can't see. There is a similar drive to recognize it even if its embodiment remains inchoate.

SK: Amy Sillman and Greg Bordowitz published a conversation in book form. In it, they're talking about an idea that Bordowitz calls "objectless yearning". Sillman interprets this in terms of ‘object relations’ theory – that the object of desire is a person. This makes me think of the concept of "object permanence" – that babies develop the ability to perceive that a person or thing exists even when it's not in their field of view. I think we are both intrigued by the idea of what is absent from the picture.

SP: ...and that you want the thing that's absent as much as you want what’s present.

SK: Yes, and to shine a light on the thing that’s not seen. Do you think it could be loss or absence that alerts us to what we want or need?

SP: That makes me think of what they call "trophic cascade" that occurs after too much of a part of the food chain dies off, causing other species to also die. Does human psychology require the devastation of the world for us to value it retrospectively?

SK: I walk around feeling the tension of that question. How does our knowledge of loss inform our relationship to what is present? Seemingly simple objects like mass-produced chairs might imply rest or a gathering place, but they also carry the story of what is left in their wake. Maybe a space of reflection can allow for the desire to reclaim what's left out of the narrative, or at least care about it.

SP: It's not just the objects you address - you're talking about a network of relations in them. You depict mass-produced objects balanced on top of a rendering of a Chinese worker's hand-made stool. Another strategy that I see in your work is exquisite-corpse-like structures. There are pairs of images that don’t quite sync up along a seam – it’s such sweet desperation for them to match. Like, maybe these two different things will fall in love and fix things. It's a hopefulness that asks, "Can these disparate parts work together?" This interest in connecting unlike things speaks of a desire for relationship through difference - which is something we so desperately need.

SK: Yes, there is an attraction to difference and connection. The seams in those pieces are not fixed in their meaning. Maybe they are severing, an interruption, or maybe they are joining and grafting. I often think of the seams as a way to make surfaces porous – a way to see other states of being that share the space. The cultural theorist Sara Ahmed wrote about the concept of ‘shared inhabitance’. And there is a quote by the scientific philosopher Jacob Bronowski that I often return to. He wrote, “What is a poetic image but the seizing and the exploration of a hidden likeness, in holding together two parts of a comparison which are to give depth each to the other?” In my series, Low Lying Area, I was playing with moments of exposure created by the seams – the ‘real’, the ephemeral, and the ineffable are simultaneously operating. I love your take on it – the idea of different things falling in love. Maybe that's a humane way to critique systems that separate people from each other, when really, we are inextricably connected.