harmon art lab (HAL) is a creative collaboration that ties

art curator, artist and viewer into an interactive dialogue of

ideas and engagement.

 

Q&A with Joren A. Lindholm

HAL: What were some of the references you used for your installation and how did it affect your decisions?

JAL: For this piece, I did look at photos of numerous installations. They of course, vary quite a bit. I also looked at reproductions from the Textile Museum in DC. There is a new artist in the DC area who is doing installation work with clothing. I became aware of that while I was halfway through my process. That unfortunately had me give a bit of thought to the appearance prior to completion.


HAL: The subject matter of your installation has a lot to do with the loss of identity through the conformity of the "work idenity."  Does this conformity extend to the realm of being an artist? How?

JAL: I don't know. I do think about it, yet that's interpretation. The longer I practice being an artist, the more it seems I am clueless as to what it means and how it works. Now that I've made this piece, however, I feel less like I was playing a role, and more like I was just being myself.


HAL: Since painting and print-making has been your focus recently, what has been your creative reaction to working in a three-dimensional zone again? Do you see this expanding your two-dimensional work or are these two separate concepts?

JAL: I have been looking at and noting installations for many years, so I guess by now I could have mentally synthesized a so-called language of installation. In other words, a world where things cohered became available. Differing sensibilities and flavors of installation are called upon via memory or imagination. Making an installation at this point amounted to lots of time and lots of fun. Because I wasn't doing it for a long time before, there was a warm-up period. After that had passed, I just had a ball. I'd like to have that experience no matter what it is I do.


HAL: What is the significance of the clothing to your theme? What about the gate of ID badges?

JAL: Clothing and work badges both have the roles of admittance and identification. I wanted to pitch a juxtaposition between the two. How they are different, obviously as well as logically, leads us to know and see evidence of hierarchy. Yet the point is to also show how, in terms of reality, they are no different from each other—just material that goes on top of our skin. This is reflected in the material application. The manipulation of color and placement imply a hierarchy of what's important, yet the scale and repetition of each imply a situation of equality. The whole piece is like an interpretive abstraction of a meta-structure. That in itself is nothing terribly profound or obscure. The subtext could be about how it's paradoxical.


HAL: Tell us about the material choices and how they contribute to or clarify your meaning?

JAL: Clothing is something that we all wear. In this piece, the articles of clothing came from an orphaned lot that was waiting for donation. That could be representational of the wasted, and also of an average medley—this and that. The badge images are reproductions of real badges I found on the internet. They are seen as comparatively visceral in their color, yet they are flat. Another paradox. I wanted to remove from them just about all of their object-ness, so they may be recognized as simply the idea or perception of visceral.


HAL: As a full-time artist, what was the impetus to create a work that speaks about the 9 to 5 world? Is that too specific to your goals? If so, in what way?

JAL: I don't have an impetus like that. I don't mean to single out the 9 to 5 world, because I don't see a clear separation. The terms I think in are of people and individuals, and people are fluid. The ID badges were meant to be a stand-in for the notion of power existing and having a fixed position “out there.” Having been an independent artist living in DC (the country's most dense city for employment) for more than a decade was partly an inspiration for the focus in the piece.


HAL: You are very much a process-driven artist. Tell us about how you approached this installation? How did your process help or hinder your progress?

JAL: I wanted to start conceptually. When I am engaged with making something, I speak through the visual. So this was a new—and risky—approach. Risky because I am good at being analytic. Thinking is important. It leads to engagement. However, the latter is what really counts. I probably could have made three or four installations from the amount of thinking I put into making this piece. Yet, I don't mind. It was worth it because I was employing my sense of “beginner's mind” the whole way through it, which makes the process fun and satisfying (despite being exhausting).


HAL: When it came time to work in the space, what challenges did you face? Did you have to adapt your original concept in some way to address the actuality of harmon art lab's project space?

JAL: The compositional layout changed—for the better. I moved the central motif, that was supposed to be right in the middle, into the corner. This added some drama to the quality of the piece that wouldn't have really been present otherwise. The project space is real quirky. Beams and knobs are coming out of the wall. It's hard to know beforehand how they get incorporated with the whole. I had to trust that would happen naturally, and it worked out in the end.


HAL: If someone were to leave your exhibition space with one over-arching idea, what would you hope that to be?

JAL: I would hope they leave having a bodily experience of knowing that there's no difference between abstraction and representation.


HAL: You decided to interview people as part of the knowledge-building part of your work. Who did you interview? Why? What did they contribute to your understanding of your theme?

JAL: This was meant to compliment my own paradigm. It ended up being a cross-section of people in the area whom I know to various degrees. I was looking to tap into a range of different situations and viewpoints on employment and the relationship that people have with it. The first person I spoke with was a writer who is simultaneously working full time and pursuing the creative life. Another interviewee has been self-employed for decades. I mainly discovered that the “big picture” regarding employment is pretty clear to people no matter in what part of it they are located.


HAL: How does your installation fit into your oeuvre of past works?

JAL: All my work asks people to look at the relationship between things. If the viewer doesn't want to do any seeing with intellectual effort, then it's time for us to go get a beer. The installation piece is just a different mode that I elected to work in for the sake of play and leaving a track record. It closed a 15 year gap since the last time I made one. The theme of this one was new. The scale is also new, which made me think more of the body (and less of perception). Yet it was me there for the whole time it was made, just like with all the 2D work I've been doing for years. What we have now is an object that's fairly complicated, which is also how my latter-day paintings have been coming out. Each and every work that gets fully realized is a reflection of a person as well as a moment in time.

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