Over the course of the next few posts, we’ll share artist interviews and insights about this year’s ON SIGHT visual arts line-up. You can experience all of TBA:09’s visual arts installations from Sept 4 – 13, every day 12 – 6:30 pm. And join us for a free opening night party September 3, from 8 – 10:30 pm at Washington High School (map).
Whether it’s with painted toothpicks that participants stab into an amorphous armature or, as is the case with FOREVER NOW AND THEN AGAIN, with several hundred painted, stackable boxes presented for our collaboration, Jesse Hayward creates installations that are intended for direct audience manipulation. Utilizing repetition and ritual, he builds and paints objects in his studio that are then reimagined through a collaborative installation practice, articulating a space wherein boundaries are blurred. The sculptural commingles with the painterly, the coactive with the drawn.
Hayward’s work exists in diminished hybridization, with multiple genres collapsing parasitically one upon the other. Rhythms of color and form soften and obscure their own structural underpinning, foreshadowing the instability and immateriality of all future outcomes.
This text has been transcribed and edited for print by Kristan Kennedy from an audio interview between Arcy Douglas and Jesse Hayward in the summer of 2008 for “Daisy Chain,” a project of artist-to-artist interviews initiated by artist Sandy Sampson for Parallel University. www.parallel-university.org
AD: Tell me where your work is right now, what are you working on?
JH: Stuff, boxes.
AD: Something that a lot of people might not know about you is that you helped Sol Le Witt do a wall drawing. I was wondering what that experience is like, and if it has stayed with you?
JH: It definitely has. I almost feel that I have been subconsciously re-creating that experience, working with people collaboratively, having them create abstract art with me. So now I have embraced it, I consciously do it.
So the boxes came from something Le Witt did, actually some of my least favorite work by him, he did a series of boxes…I really liked his instructional drawings, pure conceptual abstraction, the early stuff, beautiful ideas. And then later there is some lush sculpture and some watery painted pieces, those geometric pieces. Right after the early stuff and before the lush stuff he did this really esoteric study of cubes. You could have made instructions for those–how to make them, they were white structures, made up of edges with various bits and pieces missing…
AD: The “open cube” series? or “incomplete open cube” series…
JH: Open cubes! Yeah and all of those variations…
If that word incomplete is not in the title it should be. Having one of those experiences when I was young, it is one of those things…I can’t really calculate how important it was to me. Because it looms, it is an echo, or it is like getting hit in the “kiwis”…it aches but it comes and goes. So the new box project is really a manifestation of my feelings about his incomplete cube series. I was very much thinking about how that was an idea that could be worked out more.
AD: It seems that in your last two shows that you embraced having your friends, other artists, or people from the community actively participate in the arrangement or composition of your project…
JH: Well, yes…so the last show at Jáce Gáce was the first time that I had people who came to the show, or some of the events and paint lines on the wall of their choosing. I basically gave them a choice of colors and a brush–that was a lot of input on my part–the continuum to my experience with Sol LeWitt’s work is amazing to me. I also see this tie to surealism–there is a long thread of this kind of thing–John Cage’s music…not that I would listen to it! But that becomes interesting too. I think those Le Witt cubes were almost un-lookable. It feels like a different thing to look at his work and to physically participate in making it. When you make one of his drawings, even though there are instructions, you are reacting to the physical space, the corner of a wall, the architecture, your hand, the people around you. His cubes felt devoid of that human experience, they seemed computer generated. My work is about letting that back in.
AD: In those shows when you are collaborating with people that you invite in, what do you see as their role and what do you see as your role?
JH: The show at Jáce Gáce had people coming in all the time… The most interactive pieces were the painted sticks that people could stick in the wall or stick in my foam sculptures. People took great liberties with them, they did crazy strange things with them. The more you give up personal control–it is not that you are giving one person control–it obliterates anyone’s control and it becomes a collective drawing. Working with curators is a collaboration; when you make things, you are going to be interacting on some level with other people. You might as well use it.
AD: Your boxes are painted differently on each side, so you have the physical language of the cube but you have the visual language…
JH: In order to make an impactful number of boxes, I wanted to make about 150 in a year, about three boxes a week. Each box is made up of six square foot paintings screwed together. This way of working brought my painting down to elemental things. It became about the imperfections…the cracks and the smudges. It has been great to tile and sort them, like a puzzle.
I just recently painted some lines on my floor with enamel sign paint, and in the end it turned out to by almost 350 yards of line. You’re almost a different person after that. Your first line will not be like the last. To paint them changes you.
So I had to decide, were these cubes made up of six paintings from one day, or six paintings made over six months?
AD: So the element of time is really important then?
JH: Yes, it is about the fourth dimension.
AD: When you talk about the 4D experience of your work what do you mean?
I do things where the objects in the show are changed, or are moved…over time. I plant things, give visual directions. Still, at any point in the show it has to be right and real to me. So I have to go back in there, and bring it back to my process. If you are in a zone making things you want to stay there as long as you can–you want to have the objects to have this life. They are your children–who wants their children to go live out their lives in some rich person’s living room? Or in some collection stored in an unlit room? I want to manipulate, organize and disorganize. I want the objects to have a longer life. I am notorious for deconstructing my own work and reassembling it.
AD: Which is like giving it a new life, or maybe it implies that any one work cannot reach a perfect form. You change and the work changes.
JH: Right, all of this stuff back here are old paintings that I have cut up and re-stretched over new forms. Then it gets even more absurd.There were the old paintings that I screwed together and reworked and then after I lived with them for a while, I started unscrewing them, and there they had all of these weird sections where they were painted on one edge and not on the other. They revealed something.
The boxes tell you, in a quiet way that you can re-stack them.
The thing that really inspired these boxes is that I have been reinvigorated about the idea of elemental forms. Just seeing their history repeat itself, even in the short life I have had is something special. Looking at them forces you to relate to the other grids in our lives.
A project like this is a big part of my life, I never try to hide the seriousness it has to me. I care about the things I make, I want to make them safe and to have them survive. In the past I made immaculate work, and then when I put it out there, it got hurt. One scratch and it doesn’t work anymore. It’s over. Now I make things that if they get scratched it is just another truth.
About
Jesse Hayward received his MFA from California College of Art in 2002. His work has been exhibited at PDX Contemporary Art Window Project in Portland, OR; Southern Exposure and Eleanor Harwood Gallery in San Francisco, CA; and at The Affair at The Jupiter Art Fair. In 2006, Hayward’s work was included in the Oregon Biennial at the Portland Art Museum. His work has been reviewed in The Oregonian, PORT, PDX Magazine, Willamette Week, and The Portland Mercury. Most recently, Hayward was shortlisted for the Portland Art Museum’s Contemporary Northwest Art Award.
The commission and exhibition of this piece is supported in part by the Kristy Edmunds Fund for New Work.
www.jessehayward.com
