| Leah Oates: What is your background, and what was your progression as an artist? Carla Gannis: I’m originally from a small town in North Carolina. In third grade, for a school project, I made a model of New York City (complete with little miniature taxi cabs and people). I suppose even then I knew I wanted to be in “the City” one day. As a kid I had a fascination with miniatures. I had three dollhouses that I took great care in furnishing and decorating. And I created the most elaborate, often Gothic, stories for all my dollhouse people. Sometimes I think I’m still doing a very similar thing content-wise. That said, there has been a great deal of change in my process along the way. Until 1996 or so, I was a painter, an oil painter. |
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Carla Gannis interview by Leah Oates
Leah Oates: What is your background, and what was your progression as an artist?
Carla Gannis: I’m originally from a small town in North Carolina. In third grade, for a school project, I made a model of New York City (complete with little miniature taxi cabs and people). I suppose even then I knew I wanted to be in “the City” one day. As a kid I had a fascination with miniatures. I had three dollhouses that I took great care in furnishing and decorating. And I created the most elaborate, often Gothic, stories for all my dollhouse people. Sometimes I think I’m still doing a very similar thing content-wise.
That said, there has been a great deal of change in my process along the way. Until 1996 or so, I was a painter, an oil painter. My father introduced me to computers when I was in high school, took me to computer graphics conferences, encouraged me to be open to technology, but at the time and throughout six years of art school, I couldn’t conceive making my own art with anything but traditional mediums. My opinions on that certainly changed by the time I got to New York City. I cut up old paintings and began to reassemble them, making them into reliefs with strange forms jutting out. Soon I was no longer painting surfaces, but covering them with cloth, wallpaper, resin, stickers, or texts I found from Internet searches. I began to experiment with creating installations of found objects, Xeroxes, body photographs I’d take, cut up, and reassemble. The work of Annette Messager was very influential to me at the time. Before long I found video and spent a few years making moving images instead of objects or static works. Through video and digital editing I found the computer—the tool I use the most today for digital print work and some interactive experiments.
LO: Your work seems uniquely American to me. Does your work comment on American or Western culture or is it commenting on something else?
CG: Yes, I think a strain of dark Americana runs throughout all my work. In some works I am more intentional about the Americanness being specifically from the “American South.” My mother’s side of the family is from the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina. Most of them were gifted storytellers. It must run in the water in those parts. As a kid I would listen to my grandfather telling one of his tall tales. He’d transport me to a world where bears were 25 feet tall and a mountain boy in a cowboy hat could “wrestle” the bear down without receiving a scratch. Or my grandmother would sing dark, lonesome mountain ballads to me before bed. They all seemed to deal with love and murder! Those stories became interwoven into the fabric of my dreams and later into the language of my art. As Louise Bourgeois says, “My childhood has never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama.”
In my work I am simultaneously laughing and crying with, reflecting, and re-imagining, critiquing, and revering American culture, as a tremendous experiment rooted in Western culture. The West is where I have always lived. It is the culture that is familiar to me. Even today as I make art with a computer, on a vastly networked planet, when I can instantly access images of towns in Japan or India or Russia or Nigeria as easily as images of say, Kingston, New York, to inspire a setting for one of my works, I’m more likely to choose the Kingston image. Not because I find it to be the most captivating photo, but because it is the one I’ll express myself most authentically through—drawing from the set of physical and emotional experiences I’ve gathered on the planet thus far. I never want to limit the possibilities in my work though, in form or content, its ability to evolve and shape shifts. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the future, so my next series may take place, at least partially, in outer space, partially in cyberspace, where distinctions like north and south, west and east are negligible.
LO: How do you create your work? Do you begin with photos and then reshape the images on the computer?
CG: It’s a secret. Just kidding. I often begin with drawings of different “characters” who have sprung into my head and build out from there, with photos I take, photos I find, and stills from movies, all thrown into the veritable “art soup” that I then stir and mix (often for months) with digital painting and collage techniques.
LO: Working on the computer must give you tremendous freedom to create visionary worlds that are derived from the real world but that are surreal and ring true. What are your thoughts on this?
CG: I began working on the computer, because I could not afford, in the “real world,” the amount of costumes, sets, and actors it would take to produce the works I imagined in my head. The works of Gregory Crewdson and Matthew Barney amazed me, but their elaborate film sets, the expense of their process, the number of people involved to create their illusionism, and in Barney’s case, alternate worlds, was an avenue barred to me at the time, being a small “studio of one.” The computer offered to me a vast virtual space where I could create visionary worlds akin to theirs, but also, especially as I developed a fluency with my tools, something uniquely my own.
Now that I’ve been making art on computers for some time, I try to set parameters for myself regarding the amount of “finishing work” I do to a piece. Sure I can place a four-breasted, twenty-toed woman in a room, hovering in lotus position five feet off the ground, both defying laws of gravity and anatomy, easily enough. I can then make the image look convincing and seamless, like a photograph. Although to be more accurate, it is really a photo-realistic digital painting. But the “craft” in doing this does not make a work of art, particularly within the context of the digital age. If visually and emotionally my floating woman resonates on the level say, of a Dolce & Gabbana ad, well I should probably try to get a job with D&G, but I should not expect to be considered for the annals of art history.
In many of my works I consciously leave areas “unresolved,” not perfectly rendered to pristine photo quality, so that the artifacts of my layering process (things like banding and pixilation, digital paint pours and strokes, resolution differences in juxtaposed images, strange unaccounted-for light sources) are visible and proudly so. Even though I share tools with commercial industries in digital compositing and photo manipulation, I am not interested in applying industry “production values” to my personal works of art. I want my works to convey their hybrid nature for a viewer to intuit that my additions of “untruths” or exaggerated truths; I want my works to have at their core a relationship to our perceptual universe, much like a Magic Realist work of fiction, and to show that they are made with a spirit open to awkwardness and anomaly.
LO: How has digital art changed over the years? What are you excited about, and what would you like to see?
CG: Well, John Whitney is considered to be one of the first digital artists. He began producing computer-based art in 1951! Computer-based or digital art has been around far longer then most people imagine, but up until the mid-1980s, digital art required the artist to additionally be a programmer, who for the most part, found himself working within scientific communities. Access to equipment and digital tools was incredibly cost-prohibitive. With the creation of affordable consumer-based hardware and the development of software applications like Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, and After Effects, where the algorithms have already been sequenced for the artist, a broader range of artists, for instance, a traditional painter like myself, began to experiment with “technology.” Hence a new kind of digital art has emerged and become accepted as a “fine arts” practice, one that uses digital tools to address broader concepts than the nature of the technology itself.
Thirty years ago, for an artist to program one face morphing into another on the computer was revolutionary, like the execution of an anatomical drawing by Leonardo da Vinci in the 15th century, whereas today morphing effects are ubiquitous, and can be produced in an extremely shorter time span. Thus a viewer is less inclined to reduce a digital artwork to sheer technique: “How did she produce that effect?” Today an art audience might ask of the digital work, questions it has asked of more traditional mediums for some time: “What does the ‘morphing’ mean within the broader context of the work?” “How does it relate to my own experiences of being alive in the 21st century?”
That said, separating the wheat from the chaff in a field as democratic as digital art, can be frustrating at times. It remains our youngest and perhaps most amorphous field within the visual arts. Even though it has begun to shed its reputation for gimmick, slickness, or effect over substance, it incorporates tools and processes that are also part of many other activities in our lives. For example, a banker does not, on a daily basis, use the tools of a painter, of a sculptor, even of a professional film photographer, videographer or filmmaker, but throughout his workday, the banker does use many of the same tools the digital artist uses. How might that change the banker’s perceptions of a computer-generated work of art that he views in a museum or gallery? Is some amount of mystery removed from the process? More daunting, for the digital art students I teach today, with infinite tools at their fingertips, which tools do they choose?
Nonetheless, similar questions were asked about film and photography during their formative years. I’m really quite optimistic about the future of digital art and its further integration into the fold of capital A Art. Particularly exciting to me are the intermedia possibilities that artists are exploring today by combining analog and digital tools. I look at works in galleries and no longer feel the need, or am even capable of categorizing something as digital media or traditional media. Hybrids abound now, and I think we are living through an amazing epoch within the history of art.
LO: Who are your favorite artists and why?
CG: As I get older the question of who my favorite artists are becomes harder to answer. My list has grown so long and varied—we’re talking Caravaggio to Pixar Studios here. A “short” list includes Giotto (pre-Caravaggio actually). His work are “hybrids” to me, in the sense that he was a post-Byzantine, pre-Renaissance artist—someone working in the gap between any kind of codified stylization. Giotto’s angels, simultaneously embodying ethereal spirit and earthly weightiness, are sublime to me.
The gothic and the absurd have always appealed to me, in the artworks of Annette Messager, Louise Bourgeois, and Yuliya Lanina; the interactive stories of Donna Leishman, the writings of Flannery O’Connor, George Saunders and Neal Stephenson; the films of David Lynch, Terry Gilliam, and Federico Fellini; the music of Nick Cave and Barry Adamson. I find some kind of “punctum” in the digitally altered photographs of each of these artists: Loretta Lux, Ruud Van Empel, Anthony Goicolea, and AES+F.
Scott Kidall, and the collective art group he is a member of, Second Front, are digital artists to watch. Second Front’s avatar performance works in Second Life are entertaining and provocative, opening the door to new forms of virtual art.
LO: What do you have coming up in 2009 and 2010?
CG: Alluding to my new fascination with the future, I’ve currently been working with the artist and designer Tom Klinkowstein on an Interview From the Future. A future entity interviews Tom and I, as future entities ourselves, in the year 2030. We discuss technological and societal changes that have occurred over the last 20 years (so from 2010 to the present) and how media artists from the early 21st century helped shape them. We also look to the future and make forecasts about developments on the planet (and beyond) in 2050. This will all be sent back as a text message to 2009, and is being published by Virtueel Platform in Amsterdam. In addition, I have two solo exhibitions lined up, one with Pablo’s Birthday in New York in Fall 2009 and the other with Jenkins Johnson Gallery in San Francisco in early 2010.
