attnzine

[attnzine]

ATTN: featured in the display case at the Bay County Public Library alongside some of my personal work and a brief history of zines. This will be on view until the end of January.

[attnzine]

Some notes on the making of ATTN:

There are definitely much simpler ways to make a zine, but the format of ATTN: requires some extra planning - each single sheet of paper ends up as sixteen double-sided pages in the zine. If folded in the proper order, I can make two cuts and have all the pages already assembled in order and ready to be stapled. I compose everything Adobe InDesign ahead of time, and it takes a few test runs to make sure everything is laid out correctly. Here you can see the multiple iterations it took to reach a final draft. Also pictured is a bone folder, a very useful tool when you know you’re gonna be folding paper all day.

[attnzine]

Tesa Burch is a painter and multi-media artist who is deeply involved in organizing art shows in the local area. In her recent work, she explores incorporating toys, taxidermy elements, and other found objects into her painting.

See more of her work at http://www.instagram.com/lets_lets

Again, I’m hoping to post a more final version of this interview when I get some more free time, but until then, please enjoy the rough version. - Ed.

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ATTN: How does art fit into your life? what does painting do for you?

TB: In a general sense, I do it whenever I have spare time. I have to make time for it or I get really upset and frustrated… I would say a lot of it is catharsis, and just liking to do things that are technical, I like to play with the technical side of it, too.

-and just playing with different materials, you mean?

mhm. I’m a collector of items, so collage is really important because I find very strange things and then try to move them into art process. I’ve been translating a lot of taxidermy items lately, trying to get more into that. The taxidermist thinks I’m nuts, he’s like, “why do you want the odds and ends?” [laughs]

I’ve got alligator backs right now that I just purchased, bear claws are pretty much my favorite, they’re really pretty and purplish… alligator teeth… I got a goat skull I wanna do something with. So unique objects and moving those into process. And then with drawing and painting, it’s mostly like, trying to do technical things with the figure, ‘cause for me I like my art to have a difficulty level that isn’t easily reproducible or maybe someone can’t tell exactly how it was made.

-So along with the taxidermy, you’ve also been experimenting with adding found objects and toys into your painting. What do you get out of that practice that you don’t get out of your “regular” process of 2D drawing and painting?

It’s more sculptural, I like the additive / reductive process to it… I like building off of the wall and 3D has always been a fascination of mine. I guess I’m super interdisciplinary as far as things go.

-Yeah, I think that’s apparent in your work, for sure.

Yeah I’m all over the place, which maybe I’m not perfect at any of it, but… [laughs] The toys came about because I have a three-year-old so the toys are around. I really liked the horses and then I started splitting them so that they would face each other. It creates an aggressive look where they’re facing each other and looking at each other or passive and looking away. A lot of my themes in my artwork deals with love or male/female interaction in romance, so they’ll have titles that are talking about either - you know, is this a good thing or a bad thing? One was called, “We’ll Either Lock Horns or Join Forces”, so it’s the two pensive horses looking at each other like, “what are we gonna do?” [laughs]

-Horses seem to crop up in your work a lot, do they have any particular meaning to you?

I guess it’s just a techincal, classical theme. There’s a regality to them, they don’t smile, they’re not a goofy animal. And they’re just hard to draw or reproduce. There’s a million muscles in their face.

-And lot of your work has a dream-like, stream-of-conciousness quality to it. What’s your process when working out the composition of a piece? Is there a lot of planning and sketching involved or do you prefer to just sort of dive in?

It depends what it is. Sometimes it starts with like, a little metaphor that I want to pose figures to look like, and then sometimes it’s just materials process and I just add poetry to it and it pops the meaning on. The collage is definitely intuitive, but it’s just building… when you’re using found objects, you just gotta go through things and it’s what you come across. It’s very much going and selecting and then getting in a vein, and you run out of things, you find more… I’ve got objects I’ve held onto for years and I dunno what I’m gonna do with them, but they’ll get added to a new piece of work, you know, and I’ve had it for ten years.

-How do you know when a piece is done?

I definitely spend long periods of time on things. I’ve put things on display and then taken them back apart and they’re still in the works. I’ll think they’re done and they’re not. [laughs]

Knowing when it’s finished - I mean, it’s definitely more with the drawing and painting there’s a stopping point I can pinpoint. With the collage, I dunno, it gets to the point where you just can’t glue anything else on there. [laughs] The puzzle strategy of building the materials into each other has really started fascinating me lately.

-It sounds like a lot of your process is just about observing the formal qualities of the materials themselves and just seeing what they do with each other.

Yeah. Sometimes it’s pre-planned, but my collage is just like painting, it’s just using objects.

-What have you been working on lately? What kind of ideas or themes have you been interested in most recently?

I’ve been getting really into risk-taking more, and independence…

-As a subject matter?

Yeah. Questioning the self and decision-making process. It’s all very emotive. I used to get into political themes, but I really don’t do that a whole lot any more. It’s a general theme of apocalypse if I do. [laughs]

-So now you’re sorta taking it, like, inward. Your subjects are more about abstract feelings or emotions.

Mhm. I have tons of sketchbook work and poetry is a huge part and when I keep coming back to something like broken-hearted love poetry, it’s like, “I should be doing that as a theme in my work”.

-You’ve participated in and helped organize a number of art shows over the years. Can you talk a little about what it means to organize and participate in the local scene?

Everything, you know? I’m not one to display in galleries where I don’t feel super comfortable with my work in relation to other works. We’re in a small city, so finding a gallery that you know, is just all… crazy? [laughs] You know, contemporary styles, very dark styles, it doesn’t necessarily sell in a, you know…

-In a beach town.

Yeah. So the art shows come about from just wanting to get my friends and family members who happen to be artists locally out of their caves and get their amazing work on display. It’s like pulling teeth to get them to put it out there sometimes. [laughs] Like, “come on, let’s do this show, let’s get it out there.” It’s awesome, we gotta show this to people and unify people who do things that are strange.

-I think it’s a valuable service. Otherwise I feel like it’d all just be watercolors of the beach… which, like, has a place but there’s so much more…

Yeah. I always try to put the word “local” in all of my art shows, so people know that locals are doing things you’re not gonna see elsewhere… it’s just a matter of exposure. Getting in the newspaper is really fun, too. Like, I still get proud of myself when do a show and I get in the paper and I got some weird stuff in there.

-Yeah, I always get a kick out of seeing local shows advertised, cause it’s like,

“This is not what’s normally in this magazine.”

-Yeah, it’s the only time you’re gonna see that stuff in the Arts and Lifestyle section.

Yeah, and that’s a thrill for me.

-Any artists whose work you’ve been into recently?

I’ve been looking back at Henry Darger a lot, his tracing and his use of color. He was a recluse janitor who painted a world theme in books, I think they discovered something like seven thousand watercolors after he died. Glandelinian and the wars between - yeah, the girls all have butterfly wings and it gets really morbid at some points too, when the battles are taking place, there’s torture in it and everything… it’s the balance between the beauty and the darkness, which I get to in my work, too, you know?

And recently I’ve been looking at Julie Mehretu, she does drawings and installation-style murals, and applying projections over each other and layering work like collage and using it as drawing. She does a lot of architectural style stuff, too, which I like.

-Read any good books lately?

I mean, I read The Help recently, like, a best-seller. When I get on a reading kick, I wanna read like, Holocaust history. Elie Wiesel, I just read his trilogy - The Night Trilogy, which is really dark, it’s him surviving concentration camps.

Here lately, I’ve been trying to read back through my own sketchbooks because I’m doing a sketchbook show coming up. So that’s been predominantly the books I’ve had my hands on, going back through my stuff I’ve done over the past - I said ten years in the paper, but I think have about fifteen years of books, it’s ridiculous.

[attnzine]

Sarah Burris works in a variety of media, including soft sculpture and photography. Most recently she’s been drawn to collage, incorporating visual elements sourced from her job as a librarian. You can visit her blog at http://theartistandthelibrarian.tumblr.com/ I’m hoping to post a more final version of this interview when I get some more free time, but until then, please enjoy the rough version. - Ed.

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ATTN: so to start, you run your own interview blog - the artist & the librarian - can you tell us a little about that project?

SB: It started as a way to... well, it's hard to survive as an artist, and so lots of artists, musicians, and writers are librarians as well. So I tried to interview those who are both artists and librarians and how those two fields intersect with each other. last year I had a show where I used only those who had an MLIS degree as well as working artists or who did art on the side.

-does being a libarian play into your own personal art practice? recently i've been doing collage work with discarded books. I look at what is too horrible to sell in the bookstore, too horrible to put on the - [laughs] well, they're sad, sad books and it's nice to know they're going to a good home.

-your work often touches on themes surrounding femininity, and you tend to depict the female form with a quiet sense of humor that occasionally dips into the grotesque. what appeals to you about that paradoxical balance between stereotypical "girly-ness" and the grosteque?

i think it kinda started in grad school, or even before then, i was kinda diving into that... cause even undergrad i had a little bit of shock value in my work. the artists i was inspired by have that balance as well and there was a period of looking into ways that can you alter your body or change your body to fit beauty ideals and i think kind of playing off of that...

-and I know you're into marilyn minter

she's awesome.

-and that's sort of that same idea so you have these stereotypical beauty ideals that are

they're kind of falling apart a little bit

-yeah, they're exaggerated to the point that they're like, monstrous, almost.

And Wangechi Mutu, i really like her collage work, they do these kind of hybrids of animal or creature - beautiful works.

-you work with your own body as a subject, but i wouldn't necessarily call them self-portraits; there's a sense of anonymity to it. do you feel like you gain something by removing yourself?

i think i try to leave the anonymous element so that more can fill themselves in the shoes - i often mask out the face or distort the top part of the figure. it allows any woman to, hopefully, be able to put herself into it.

-you've started working with collage recently - do you find that you respond to the medium differently than with other methods of artmaking more familiar to you? does it change how you approach creating a work, for example?

It's much more spontaneous; it's quick, it's more like exercises in a way. i can usually crank one out in like, five minutes. the challenging part is finding the images i like. but then once i find the images, it falls together really fast. i have three elements i work with - a background, sometimes its a blank background, it depends on what it is, and then there's the main subject, and then there's the gold leaf or sometimes i like glitter as well, on top of the gold leaf. With gold leaf, I love the element of surprise, and i think that's the element i love most about the pieces, because I have an idea of how I want it to fall, but it doesn't always work with me and so sometimes that randomness of how it lays

-of the material itself

yeah, and playing with the building up and the materiality of the gold leaf.

-and i feel like it lets you put your own spin on source material that you don't - because with collage you don't have the control over the material, you get what you find, so you have a little bit of -

you can manipulate it, yeah.

-and you were saying the collage material comes from old books that are getting weeded out?

yeah, they're going to get discarded because they're in really poor shape. the photos that i look for are so gaudy - if it's in color, i want it to be from the 1970s, where it looks like it's from the 1970s. the colors are like that, puke green, and horrible oranges and reds

-and all the beiges

yeah, no one wants it, but it looks great in a collage [laughs]

-i've noticed that in a lot of your collages, you use architectural photos? that's a really cool shortcut to creating actual space and depth - collages are sometimes so flat.

yeah, and i've been taking the architecture and moving it to where it's not in it's normal orientation. surrealism is often also a tie within my work and is aimed, within the work, from the beginning. i went to college in st pete, the salvador dali museum is there so, yup, influenced by surrealism for sure.

-you're right, just flipping these hallways or what have you upside-down and all of a sudden you have these like, anti-gravity sort of settings.

things start floating, mhm.

-what have you been working on lately? what kind of ideas or themes have you been interested in most recently?

well, most recently i've still been doing collage work and they've been heavily influenced by our election, so... we'll see how it goes, we'll see where it goes.

-that can be tough, in this area. it's not a very progressive area, i think it's safe to say.

no...

-do you have any plans on how you might exhibit that work, have you thought that far yet?

I almost think anonymously! [laughs] I haven't figured that one out yet. I might have to come up with a pen name...

-any artists whose work you've been into recently?

I've been really behind in following artists, Kehinde Wiley was probably the last art book I bought for the library... actually, I've been really enjoying photography. I picked up a Mary Ellen Mark book. She follows like, families, certain individuals who have a tough lifestyle. There's one whose name is Tiny, and she tracked her for years and she became a prostitute and has lots of kids... but the photos are beautiful. Three's one photo of a girl and her cousin and one of the girls is smoking a real cigarette, where Sally Mann had her daughter with the fake one, a candy cigarette. But yeah, Mary Ellen Mark's, it's real. The pieces are beautiful, the compositions are fantastic, and they're *dark*. I like how dark they are.

-read any good books lately?

I have been in a drought! I don't know what's happening, but every book I pick up, I'm just like, "eh". I just haven't found a good one recently, I don't know why. I'm in a Mecca of books and for some reason I've been having a lot of trouble finding one that just speaks to me.

It's been a couple of months where I just haven't found a good book. I don't like the one I'm reading now... I really liked The Notorious RBG, that was fantastic, but that was this past summer... Um, yeah. Highly recommend it. [laughs]

-Sarah texted me the next week to say: Just started a new book and love it so far (finally) - The Sun is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon. Add to the list :)