Photograph by Jason Acton
At times, challenges come like a thief in the night, at our most vulnerable, complacent, and satisfied. They are unexpected, at times unwelcome, and require from us a level of uncomfortable stoicism. The work of Michelle Rawlings requires from us a level of empathy beyond the ephemeral. This interview took place over the course of many months, part of a larger conversation on painting, the videos of Whitney Houston, and the gestures of Catherine Deneuve. This Q&A is built around what I believe to be the most invested qualities of Rawlings’ work and persona. A practice that produces paintings that are definite, questioning, and calculated, but also warm, inviting, and romantic.
As the second artist chosen for the prestigious Goss-Michael Foundation’s FEATURE series, Rawlings’ work is asking a lot of questions, giving few hints, while deeply invested in investigating beauty. Rawlings, in her strength and sensitivity towards beauty, is dealing with images, both classical and carnival, and how we wrestle with our anxieties to empathize with either. For the future, Rawlings has a solo show planned at Houston’s Hello Project Gallery next Spring. In advance to the FEATURE series opening, I spoke to Rawlings about preparation, discernment, and instincts.
What influences you when choosing your work? Do you have a list of images you want to create or do you paint based on immediacy?
It’s both. I have a loose mental list of things I’d like to try, but what I end up making almost feels like a reaction against that previous list. I am very impulsive in the studio but at the same time I might have been thinking about these things for a while. I like being scared at the idea of showing something coupled with a sensation that I don’t know how to physically make or paint it. They are all experiments and that’s really the motivation. I’m extremely impractical and I don’t use materials the right way. If I feel like it’s a really dumb idea and I keep saying to myself don’t do this, don’t waste your time, then there is no turning back, I’m hooked. Right now I’m doing a Hello Kitty piece and I don’t for a minute think that’s cool or smart or funny. Rather, I feel moved by compassion.
Define appropriation/re-appropriation in terms of your work. For me, approaching your work, which questions authorship and at times, accountability, brings to mind Barthes, “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text.”
Sure, I definitely agree with that quote. I remember in an undergrad art class we were supposed to make a journal. Typically, my journal was full of pictures. For all the pictures that were actually of art, my teacher admonished me for not writing next to them who the artists were. He said, “you always have to give the artist credit, it’s very important.” He made me feel ashamed. But I wanted, and still want, all images to feel anonymous. They are all just pictures at the end of the day. What they may be of gets flattened out. And if you know art well enough, those images can never really be anonymous, so that’s kind of interesting to me. You could say I am definitely relying on the viewer in that sense.
Concerning an audience’s “response”, what does it mean to you for your work? What are your ambitions concerning it, and what do you hope your audience takes away when viewing your work?
I identify with outsiders and that comes through by a repeated attention to certain subjects in my work- women, minorities, and the sexually perverse. I want each piece to have the presence of an artifact- curious, idiosyncratic, delicate, mysterious, and difficult to duplicate. They are examples of phantoms – non existing bodies of work that still seem familiar since we know the genre – even if it’s a thwarted one. Humans are genius at pattern recognition so I hate for anything to be too obvious. I like for people to feel disoriented. I like to do things that seem obvious but somehow I’ve done it in a way people can’t put their finger on- but it’s different. I like confusing people, but I also like entertaining them. And to me, the most entertaining things are constant surprises – revealing the shifting sands – revealing the ruptures – not letting things always resolve themselves. It’s about an unwillingness to ever let the arousal go away. And it’s not about an esthetic seduction, it’s an intellectual seduction, which is more exciting. It’s about there being so many layers to each image and at the same time they are easy to enter. I as an artist want to serve the audience. I want them to be smart. I don’t want to seem smarter than they are. You might get more from my work if you’ve seen more art but that’s how it is with everything.
Look for the complete interview in THRWD Magazine – Issue #5, on sale Oct. 10 at Red Arrow Contemporary.
Michelle Rawlings’ next show will be at the Hello Project Gallery in Houston, spring of 2015.