February 4, 2008
Interview with Lisa Dahl
Lisa Dahl has used paint, real estate magazines, text and fabric to speak about home ownership and the myth of the American Dream, economics, nostalgia and dystopia.
10N: One of the interesting aspects about your work is the dialogue you create between photography and painting. You seem to be calling attention to the media of paint with your titles “Cadmium Red Light” and “Cerulean Blue”.
LD: Despite working representationally for a number of years, I often felt dissatisfied with the trick of manipulating paint so that it looked like something “real.” My earlier roots had been in abstraction and when I started painting on photographs, it felt honest to let the paint just be itself – a thick, gooey, opaque covering – and let the photograph do what it does best: 10 represent a visually familiar reality. When you choose to use one medium over another, that choice conveys a context. I view painting’s strong suit as being its ability to show overt intention: “I meant to do that. I did it on purpose with my own hand.”
I used to employ text in my paintings and I considered inserting text via the titles of these works, but opted for just naming them after the color I had chosen. I usually use very non-houselike colors, so the reiteration of this point adds a little fun into the work and often will reference something ridiculous (i.e. “Bubblegum”), comment on the toxic nature of the paint (“Pthalocyanine Blue”), or even make a pop culture reference. The painting included in the Lack of Desire show, “Robin’s Egg Blue,” is named after Tiffany’s branded color and the idea of those little blue boxes filled with some high-priced gift of the elite.
10N :In your statement about “There goes the neighborhood” you remark that altered structures in your images have no form of entry or sense a of comfort, but when I viewed “Robin’s Egg Blue” in “Lack of Desire” I found it a bit soothing, because of the color, it seemed like you were restoring the house site back to its natural state. Do you have feelings about suburban development and its impact on the environment?
LD:I do want my work to be accessible, and using beauty and humor is one of the easiest ways to achieve that. I once saw a grumpy 8-year old get dragged into an exhibition of mine by his mom, and when he finally got around to looking up from the floor, a huge smile spread across his face and he was immediately engaged. Witnessing that reaction was great positive feedback for me. Of course, there are more conceptual layers to my work, many of them much darker and cynical than the aesthetics alone belie. But if I can actually make someone happy with my painting, I feel like I have done something quite difficult, and they might then be open to considering the work more in-depth.
In some ways, I do feel like I am removing a blight from a landscape when I paint over a house, but in most instances I am also highlighting the house even more and making it an even larger and more artificial presence. Most of the “natural” landscaping that I leave intact is as equally unnatural as the house was, and it looks a little ridiculous when its context is removed. I have even been asked if there ever really was a house in the photo to begin with – so there’s an element of trust that comes up too.
I have read a number of books about the development of suburbia in this country, and find them interesting because it is a topic that touches so many facets of our daily lives and how planned development vs. unchecked sprawl has impacted us all. I think the book I recommend most, largely because of the unbridled energy of the author James Howard Kunstler, is The Geography of Nowhere. Even though it is from 1993, it is still very relevant today and helps get you properly angry at issues you may have not considered before.
10N:How do you feel your work relates to Christo and Jeanne Claude’s building wrappings? Certainly there is a visual continuity between your works. Do you feel that they are coming from a similar place conceptually?
LD:Emerging artists are sometimes advised to have an “elevator pitch” honed just in case someone of art world import asks them the dreaded question: “So what kind of work do you make?” I could always feel my ears burning red in embarrassment as I tried to answer that question, so instead I came up with the idea of describing my work Hollywood-pitch style: i.e. only use big, established names that everyone already knows. I like that you bring up Christo because the Hollywood sell I came up with is: “Rachel Whiteread meets John Baldessari with a nod to Christo and an indebtedness to Gordon Matta-Clark.”
The impulse to cover something over, reduce it down to an elemental state, or even destroy it is a very basic one that a lot of artists, myself included, find very intriguing and cathartic. Methods of destruction paradoxically turn into acts of creation, and always include a great element of surprise.
10N:You deny entry to these homes with your barricade of paint, in effect you are obliterating the access to that American Dream, do you feel like it is a fallacious, unobtainable state, or is it simply becoming economically unfeasible to so many Americans?
LD:I recently discovered the new blog Sellout by artist Deborah Fisher and she has made a couple postings about this house ownership conundrum, especially as it relates to artists in NYC. Many people know that home ownership, beyond signifying attainment of the American Dream, is one of the most basic and elemental steps toward financial security. But the hurdle of a 20% down payment, the recent mortgage crisis, and ever increasing property taxes prove to be insurmountable barriers to many hard working and educated people. And of course for me personally, living as an artist in one of the most expensive cities in the country, I feel tremendous real estate envy in regards to the sense of stability it represents. Part of me hates the over-simplified naiveté of the American Dream, but another part desperately wants to achieve it for myself, at least on my own terms. My internal battle of desires gets thrown into my artwork and hopefully makes for an interesting combat to dissect.
10N:After growing up in the great Midwest, how do you imagine that this work strikes your fellow New Yorkers? With the astronomical prices of condos in New York, people in the U.S. as a whole own their own homes at more than twice the rate of New Yorkers. (According to a Columbia University Study). Do you believe the ideals and associations around home ownership translate to New Yorkers?
LD:Considering the high cost of living in the city, I think New Yorkers are actually some of the most real estate obsessed people in the nation. The fact that they’re focused on high-rise apartments instead of single-family suburban homes makes little difference. I remember going to an intimate salon evening for an arts organization where wealthy art patrons were invited to a discussion with three established, interesting artists and the talk was moderated by a very revered curator-critic. The whole evening quickly devolved into an hour-long discussion of real estate, neighborhoods, prices per square foot, utilities, etc. It made no matter that the attendees lived in Park Avenue penthouses and the artists were in commercially zoned Brooklyn warehouses. Actual dollar amounts were getting bandied about. I don’t think any art was actually discussed the entire evening, but no one else seemed to be upset about the course of the evening’s discussions – they loved it!
10N:The Dahl House series, is obviously very personal. If the paintings are any indication, you also seemed to have lived in architecturally very distinct places. What impressions did this give you? Your other series seem to function as a social critique, but after considering the “Dahl Houses” if there is not also a bit of nostalgia in the later works, too.
LD:Although I only moved a few times growing up, the places I lived were so different that I spent most of my childhood very much being a fish out of water, and as an adult I don’t consider a single building from my past to be “home.” I was born in Minnesota – a state that felt and still feels a natural fit to describe me as a person. But then my family moved to the deep South for a significant chunk of my formative years and then on to a small town in Indiana for my final three years of high school. I had good friends in both places, but it was always understood that I didn’t belong. In the South I was probably called a Yankee weekly for all six years I was there, and in Indiana the newspaper actually insisted on calling me the “Move-In from Tennessee.”
The Dahl House series – portraits of the houses I grew up in – were what started me on the whole house theme. I worked on them all at the same time and they actually took almost a year to paint because of the arduous nature of tackling their autobiographical aspects. It was easy enough to paint the house structures, working from memory and old snapshots, but incorporating all the other elements took a lot of trial and error. I wanted to capture my own biased recollections of those places as a whole. As a relief to their intensity, I started to make the Home Sweet Home series of works concurrently.
During the years I worked on these earlier series, I accumulated real estate magazines to use for references and I found myself both intrigued and disgusted at their pornographic nature. They were filled with half-truths and euphemisms, and photos that pretended each house was idyllic and didn’t have neighbors. Finally, in a fit of mild aggression I just started painting right on the magazines and attempted to cover over the houses with paint. And several years later, it still feels good with each painting I make, so I haven’t been compelled to stop or switch courses yet. In the end, I guess I’m the kid who prefers the part where the sand castle gets destroyed.
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]