I love the texts that you use in your work. I'm curious to hear how you developed that as part of your practice. What does that process look like?
I was making representational work in grad school, and the critiques that I got in response to the work I didn't know how to respond to. All of the work had been about American history and racial identity for a while. And so the critiques I got were personal questions versus actually being about the work and I wasn't sure how to respond to them. So I actually started taking that language from those critiques and writing it obsessively, repeating it, and that's how I uncovered the formal threads that still exist in the work today. They come from that attempt at figuring out, what are you really asking me? And where's the problem in the language that I can feel it, but I can't pinpoint, I can't name it yet?
And then if I repeat it long enough and obsess on it, can I transform the language into something more for me, beautiful? Beauty is often what I'm aiming for. I want to go from problem to beauty.
And this continues into my work with The Odyssey, something that feels unwieldy and not mine, by the end of it, can I make it mine too? I've stopped using personal language because I'm less interested in sharing biography. I look for much more historical documents.
It's so hard to connect to The Odyssey in a personal way.
I enjoy the series because I'm still interested in why other artists are so in love with this text. And maybe by the end of the series I'll get there too. Not so far. It's not my fave.
Interesting. I assumed that you were working with texts that you enjoyed specifically… I guess that there's some emotional response or attachment there, but can you articulate what that response is?
I came to the The Odyssey after the 2016 election, and I'd been reading all that apocalyptic literature, a lot of which I enjoy reading. Then I read an interview by Emily Wilson because her translation came out in 2017 of The Odyssey, and she was the first woman to translate it. What caught me first was her articulating why she felt like a new translation of The Odyssey was necessary. She mentions that the first line of the text has already been translated 36 different ways. And from one word we've gotten 36 often opposing, contradictory translations. The word has been translated to mean that he's adventurous or cunning or shifty or restless or mysterious, tossed to and fro by fate. It's positive and negative.
And she finally translates it to say he's just a complicated man. And in that one word, she manages to encircle all the other translations that have come before her. So that caught me.
And then in Book 13, Odysseus finally reaches his homeland after 10 years of war. He finally stands on his own shoreline, looks around and doesn't recognize where he is. And that felt like a metaphor for America post-2016. That your homeland can feel really familiar and also deeply estranging simultaneously.
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Read full interview at thecreativeindependent.com.