NYA: What artists were important to you during your development? Was there a particular artist or movement you were looking at in your formative years?
JS: Piero Della Francesca, Peter Paul Rubens, Goya, Carravaggio, Picasso, Madonna, Janet Jackson, Bjork, Neo Rauch, Lisa Yuskavage, Dana Schutz, Deee-Lite, Grace Jones, Marlene Dumas, Chris Ofili, Kara Walker, Joseph Beuys, Inez and Vinoodh, Antonio Biaggi, Paul Mcarthey, Andy Warhol, Bruce Nauman, Adriane Piper, Matthew Barney, Terence Koh, Nintendo 64, Sega Genesis, Dreamcast, Playstation, and music video directors like Mark Romanek, Chris Cunningham, and Michel Gondry—just to name a few out of a ton of influences.

NYA: Aside from performance, anything from photography, fibers, drawing, or computer-generated environments seem to make their way into your work. Is there a rhyme or reason as to the medium you decide to create a work with?
JS: The mediums I choose to work with are components of a more grand idea. Photographs and drawings are static, and give me the opportunity to make focused gestures in my work; those mediums are where I am most didactic. The CG animation and costuming is where the fun is. That is the territory where I am negotiating story, colors, textures, space, and composition.

NYA: The performative aspect seems to bleed through into a lot of what you do, whether in the form of actual performances, incorporation of these works into the realm of video, or stills taken from one or the other. How do you see your own body in relation to the work that you make? Is it just another tool or do all the creative ventures point back to it in some way?
JS: When talking about the work I usually use pronouns like “he”/ “him” to speak about the passive bodies that flow around in my animations. The way that I use my body in my work is similar to how I’d play with G.I. Joe dolls when I was a kid. The way I mediate my body between the animation and drawings gives it an unlimited terrain for what it can do and participate in. I have been outsourcing performances from others lately, and seeing what happens from there. I guess it’s like I’m getting 500 more G.I. Joes for my toy box.

NYA: Your work deals a lot with a personal or familial history. Can you tell us a little bit about what makes your background so important to the nature of your work?
JS: My background is important to my work, because I am the only person in the world with my background. You are the only person in history with your background, so by default it’s a great platform for original material. A lot of the content in the drawings are schematic documents of occurrences that happened around objects and the home. It’s my mother’s journal documented by short sentences and drawings of objects. The family photographs are separate performance documents that act as evidence that the objects in her drawings existed in her home, and people performed around them. So I usually mediate between the drawings and familial documents to influence a more surreal possibility for how those objects could function in the present animations.

NYA: How would you describe the relationship you have to your mother’s drawings?
JS: I watched my mother make her drawings since I was a child; she told me if I wanted to assist her in making them, I’d have to learn to be a better draftsman. So it technically is the genesis of my art practice. I also was the best at drawing Jesus in bible school. That was a minor influence on my ambition to pursuit art.

NYA: Her drawings seem always to have been translated to a new medium, either in being prints of the originals, or having been re-drawn into a 3D modeling environment. Do you see her need to create as flowing through your work in some way?
JS: The use of them is my system for restraining my creativity. They give me order and rules.  It’s also a way to continue a creative lineage. The sheer volume of the drawings makes it necessary for me to use them to their full potential.

NYA: I hope you don’t mind me saying this—there is certainly an aspect of humor that comes through in many of your works. Can you share a little bit about the way this operates within your work?
JS: I think humor is a great subversion technique. It’s a great medium to deliver heavy content. I’m also a really goofy, nerdy, perverted guy … so it’s also a subconscious default.

NYA: You seem to have a very organic relationship to the technology you use, that is to say, you know exactly how you want it to operate and you are less concerned with a professionally polished look, and more interested in making the technology work for your project. Is this by necessity or design?
JS: I think it’s by necessity and design. My process is very analog because of tracing, rotoscoping, modeling, scanning, and performing. The design automatically results into a D.I.Y. aesthetic. I am satisfied with that, because it’s more human and porous. As I continue to learn and grow with the medium, things become more sophisticated.

NYA: Tell us about the inspiration behind the wild nature of the worlds you create, do the performances exist to be inserted into the worlds, or does the process usually happen the other way around?
JS: My live action performances are just as much of a world-building technique as my 3D animation videos; they co-exist. A lot of the footage from my live action performances informs the imagery in the animations. I compare it to an Ala Prima landscape painter like Milton Avery, Monet, or Edward Hopper going into the landscape with a sketchbook and easel, to return to their studio and make a refined project from it. I work from observation, and performance is the way that I observe the world.

NYA: Is there anything about your process or your oeuvre that you feel people overlook when encountering your work?
JS: Not in the current moment, which makes me desire to blur the lines a little more.

NYA: What upcoming exhibitions or projects do you have in the works that you are willing to share?
JS: I’m excited about a project I’m working on at Recess Art’s Sessions program. I’m outsourcing performance from the public. They’re invited to choose one of 500 drawings to re-inact on the green screen. It’s kind of like a performative Rorschach test. I’ve been working with the Kinect and 5D Camera to explore motion capturing too. Regarding upcoming shows, I am excited about Monya Rowe’s Inaugural Group Show for her new space on Orchard Street, Radical Presence Black Performance in Contemporary Art at the Grey Art Gallery and Studio Museum in Harlem this fall, my solo show at The Bindery Projects in Minneapolis, Minnesota, some upcoming solo projects in Oslo, Norway, and Mallorca, Spain at Mallorca Landings Gallery, and Untitled Art Fair in December. The 2014 stuff is tentative, but even more thrilled about that.

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Being an artist has always been so much about one’s handle on previous visual history. Our access to information is now blown wide-open thanks to the Internet. It’s a resource quite available to all of us, but as with most things, it means a different thing to grow up with a technological innovation than it does to realize that the same innovation is causing rampant change within the world you are accustomed to. It must be similar to the ripple of disruption that happened the first time the camera was being fully utilized as an artistic tool. The reality of it all is, thanks to this proliferation of information, now all artists have to be aware not only of the generations before them, but also of contemporaries by their side, not to mention the young up-and-comers who are greedily sucking up information in their wake. An artist has to have his or her head on a swivel, constantly keeping an eye on all other creatives around them, knowing that with the vast sea of information available, any artist could be the next daunting aesthetic pirate. As we all know, art has always been very much about stealing.

Some young artists are making work that takes on a refined look in order to bump their name into the ring of commerce, while some older artists are making work that appears fresh and young, hoping to stay in the conversation by taking on the look of those breaking onto the scene. Meanwhile the Internet has its eyes on all of it, doing what the Internet does best, widening the spotlight and democratizing information. The funny thing is, regardless of their technological prowess, this actually means the young people have to be watching their back just as closely as the old.

There’s something great about it all.

In 2009 the New Museum ran a blockbuster of a show called Younger than Jesus, showcasing a promising group of artists who at the time were younger than the age that arguably the most documented historical figure was when he died. As far as we can tell, maybe Alan Kaprow would consider Jesus an artist, but for us it’s a bit of a stretch. This got us thinking, “Who the fuck cares? What does it mean to be young as an artist anyway? Isn’t the point that you are engaging in a lifelong pursuit? Why should your age matter at all?”

We know, it’s a lot of pointed questions.

Once we cooled off from our little fit, what this really got us thinking was, “How long does a typical artist live, maybe 80 years?” A quick check into the standard life expectancy revealed an actual statistic of closer to 78.6 years. We decided to draw a line in the sands of time at the age of 40, conceivably half way between an artist’s birth and death. Instead of taking it upon ourselves, we asked a group of artists younger than forty years old to pick a group of twenty artists they admired older than forty, and we asked a group of artists older than forty to select a promising group of twenty artists under the age of forty.

Artists have a very discerning eye, keeping their mind tuned by viewing a multitude of work, often what they really like can be quite different than the work they make themselves. Always being on the scene, on cannot follow all the trends but instead must pick and choose patterns they see as relevant and built to last. The people we selected to choose their favorite artists from across the age divide are people we knew were always out surveying the openings, meeting new people, shaking hands and forging new connections and professional relationships. In asking them to select the artists that had caught their eye, we knew they would filter out the bullshit.
Although it was a pretty specific idea, requiring a good amount of explaining on our end, we ended up with a solid group of artists doing their thing with aplomb. Age be damned, really. The more interesting thing that came out of this little experiment was the reality of how little age mattered to an invested artist these days. It seems a talented artist will always be making engaging work.

The artist’s age comes into play more readily in the way others approach the work. Gallerists and collectors will project value on the art based on the stage of development they connect to whatever age the artist seems to be. There is a perceived gamble involved with collecting young artists work in that it may be strong now, but later may unravel as studio process proves not to be sustainable. These selections represent a group of individuals who have been chosen by attentive contemporaries as artists engaged in sustainable, serious work that is built to be part of a life-long pursuit.

It proves that age matters less than ever. With the expanded field of accessible knowledge open to all and growing wider by the second, information is sometimes able to bypass actual experience when in the right young hands, paired with hard work, and a sprinkle of luck. It also doesn’t hurt to have someone else pat you on the back once in a while.

This piece began as a bit of an experiment, evolving as we began to feel out its strengths and weaknesses along the way. In the end we are pretty excited by the result. The forty artists we ended up with are making work that is only showy when appropriate, poetic but not inaccessible, and ranges many media. In the end, we feel like it’s an eclectic mix of pertinent work that may only share one thing in common: collective admiration.

40+

Linda Francis, Wendy White, Stanislav Kolíbal, Abel Barroso, Xenobia Bailey, Jane Evelyn Atwood, Tom Butter, Roberto Molla, Jim Lee, Bram Bogart, Johnny Mullen, Armen Eloyan, Annie Albers, Christian Bonnefoi, Imi Knoebel, Kes Zapkus, Peggy Ahwesh, Nancy Shaver, Taylor Davis, Rose Wylie

40-

Aaron Stephan, Abigail DeVille, Esperanza Mayobre, Fawn Krieger, Helen Benigson, Ilona Szalay, Jacolby Satterwhite, Jacqueline Cedar, Lauren Seiden, Mala Iqbal, Mark Sengbusch, Matt Mignanelli, Nichole Van Beek, Osamu Kobayashi, Rudolf Reiber, Sarah Maple, Shinsuke Aso, Tameka Norris, Laura Bottin, Nate Ethier

The post Art and Ageism: The Decisive Eye of Fellow Artists appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.