Evan Cameron and Liz Laribee - "Palimpsests"
August 16 - September 11, 2011
http://palimpsest-art.tumblr.com/
What is the inspiration for your (series of) artwork?
Liz:
With this project, I’d wanted to reintroduce myself to the act of drawing. I’ve not taken an art class since high school, and that was the last time I’d spent any significant time with a pen and piece of paper, or in this case Sharpie and cardboard, in terms of attempting a recognizable form. I suppose it was sort of a gamble to commit to a largely unfamiliar technique for an art show, but I have had a lot of fun reteaching myself. I like the logical part of it: letting the topography of the skull dictate where features are positioned on a face; letting the shape of the head form out of unequal parts shadow and light; letting the hint of an eye socket be the reason behind Pablo Neruda’s wandering eyebrow. I remember learning in an anatomy class that the human nose is made up of two halves of cartilage which meet in the middle and push apart with age, Richard Nixon style. I actually thought about that strange detail a lot during this project.
This particular series involved cardboard scraps that had been discarded by the Midtown Scholar Bookstore, which is where I work, and which is where the art went on display. Since I would be displaying the venue’s own trash, essentially, I decided to create a series that would refer back to itself in a meaningful way.
Evan:
I have been interested in poetry for the better part of my life, but only in the last year or two have I attempted anything involving visual art. I had a show in January ’11 entitled “Fence Poems” that featured visually rendered Found Poems mounted on frames made from reclaimed fence wood. This experience got me interested in furthering an understanding of poetry as visual art. As part of my grad school work at Lesley University I have undertaken a semester long project that attempts to find an
effective and aesthetically pleasing way combine poetry and visual art. One of the concerns I had with
my last show was the size of the pieces – in this effort I wanted to attempt pieces of a larger scale.
Color is my favorite aspect of art. A simple statement, certainly, but its basic nature is why I love it. Color is dependable – red is always red until I ruin it. Color is variable: understated, bold, warm, comforting, grating. Color is changeable: easily mixed, easily thinned. A method I often use is watering down some paint, applying it, and immediately blotting it off with paper towel – sometimes all that is ever required is an after image, residue, to convey meaning. The idea, then, was to find ways to use color to bolster, support the poems. As it developed I noticed that some of my favorite poems, the ones I found most compelling before I applied them to canvas, ended up with very non-descript layers of paint. The point, as I see it, was to have an application of paint that would pique interest and bring the audience closer so they can appreciate the poem, the main thrust of the piece.
How did you decide to incorporate writing / literature into your artwork?
Liz:
You work with what you know, yeah? Evan and I have a shared upbringing in the literary world, and probably even a shared level of confidence therein. I think we’ve found it meaningful to remain connected to familiar ground while trying to broaden creatively. I love it when a person’s expression, whatever form it takes, can provide a context for what they create. For us, that context is a love of language, of history (both personal and canonical), of reverence and reference.
Evan:
I don’t know that, at this stage in my development, I could comfortably attempt anything in visual art
that wasn’t somehow tied to poetry. My brushwork is a long way from where I would like it to be –
all brash strokes and masks of spray paint. There are details scattered throughout these pieces that I
am proud of, but I believe they work best as backdrops, screens onto which the poems are projected.
Perhaps as I continue to work on craft and gain experience I will produce visual work that I believe can stand on its own.
The incorporation of poetry into visual art is tricky, taboo even, but there is a long, well regarded history of poets and artists interacting to great effect. The other part of my project is producing ekphrastic poetry, poems about pieces of visual art. I would love to do a poem about one of Liz’s pieces someday – maybe from our next show.
When did you discover that you were a writer / your artistic talents?
Liz:
Something about this question makes me cringe. I’ll say eighth grade. That year I won an award for an essay I wrote on Levi Strauss. (He thought to make jeans out of his tent when his fellow gold-rushers kept ripping their pants! He is a hero among us.) That year I also started doodling caricatures of my teachers onto the backs of my tests. The first got me praise from my teachers, and the second got me praise from the one classmate I talked to when I was in fifth grade.
Evan:
Great teaching coaxed a love of poetry out of me in 4th grade. Great parenting kept me interested
through middle school and by the time I got to high school poetry was simply another aspect of my
personality. Mrs. Ko, in 4th grade, had us do this wonderful project where we each chose three pictures out of old National Geographic’s and wrote poems about them. That introduction showed me that poetry could be about more than flowers and love – my pages were a bleak desert scene, a snow blanketed forest and a lightning storm over a city scape - a lesson my fourth grade self needed to learn. From there my dad, who loved Ogden Nash and wrote a Nash-esque poem for any occasion he deemed worthy (Christmas letters, graduations, end of the season soccer parties), reassured me through his own enthusiasm that it was perfectly alright for a young guy to like poetry despite what some of the other students at school might say.
I can’t draw but I always did like painting. About a year and a half ago I was bored and looking for a
project. I bought some canvases and acrylic and, after I moved to Harrisburg, started spending my
afternoons in Liz’s kitchen listening to Dylan bootlegs and figuring out how to turn color into something
worth looking at. So often it is the smallest changes that make art possible, about 10 months ago Liz
gave me a protractor to use while I was making the poems for my show in January and it completely
altered the look of my show. That piece of 99 cent plastic re-made my world. There is no doubt in my
mind: without Liz’s encouragement I would never have attempted to turn my projects into anything
serious.
Could you talk about the importance of repurposing materials in your artwork?
Liz:
My artistic ventures serve as a broad apology for how many plastic bottles I threw in the trash as a teenager. I am very interested in recycled, repurposed art, and I work almost exclusively with materials that have been thrown away. Most of my previous art shows have featured large, clunky pieces scrapped together from housing fixtures (doors, windows, etc.) I like that aesthetic a lot, and most of the painting, collage, handcraft and interior design I’ve done has incorporated an ethos of upcycling. There is a paradigm of art I am increasingly interested by called bricolage. It’s a term that means creating within your discipline out of whatever it is you find laying around. (Even punk music is considered to be bricolage in the way it favors creative experimentation over technical accuracy.)
One of the most meaningful settings I saw employ this method was Jacmel, Haiti. Jacmel is this great artist community on the southern coast, and the norm is to use the whole buffalo in the creative process. Since the earthquake, they’d begun using bits of rubble in their work as a way of redeeming the story they are in. I think that the longer I live, the more interested I am in redeeming the story I’m in. Waste not, want not. Okay, forget that whole paragraph and remember “waste not, want not” instead. It’s faster.
Evan:
Aside from the found poems and scavenged acrylic not much of my show is made of repurposed
materials. The concept, however, behind the found poem – creation as destruction - is one of the best,
most powerful things I have discovered in art thus far. Liz employs it so well with her cardboardraits
(portmanteau’s are always so tricky to spell) – transforming what is effectively trash into something
people will love having in their homes. I get the feeling that Found Poetry isn’t something either of us
will be able to walk away from any time soon.
What are your favorite materials to use?
Liz:
Sharpies. They are my single favorite art tool on this green Earth. I love how final the black of it is. The moment the black wanes? That’s the biggest stressor in my life. (I’m kidding. It’s my student debt.)
Evan:
More and more I enjoy using spray paint. It is so versatile. Spray paint is one of those materials that has a bit of a stigma – hooligans and gangs and the like tend to come to mind when spray paint is brought up – but I have found it effective for layering, dusting a piece. The effects that the use of spray paint affords simply can’t be achieved with acrylic or oil.
As far as books – after having gone through a few of them I have noticed that my favorites tend to be
fiction that I’ve never heard of printed on darker, heavier paper from at least 40 years ago. The paper
gathers an attractive mustiness and is sturdier, the breadth of language used is richer and you don’t
have to worry and I am less likely to be annoyed or distracted by the content – the further I am removed from the novel as a narrative the easier it is to see the page as simply a collection of words and not an integral part of something I am destroying. I recognize that someone, at some time, put a lot of effort into their own creative process, effort that I am now hijacking for my own purposes and while I love the idea in theory, I can’t help feel a little bad about it. I have often wondered if I would be able to mark up and rip apart a book I actually cared deeply about. Rushdie or Fitzgerald, The Bible even, would certainly have such incredible potential from a raw material, language perspective but I don’t know that I could get away with imposing my scrabbling, so often traction-less vision onto something I revered.
Any particular books you like to find words in?
Liz:
This is an eye-of-the-beholder situation. For Evan’s first art show, he created a series of poems from a strange, old book called Merton at the Movies. It worked beautifully for his purposes. The pages were old and yellowing, and the words felt old too. The reality is that a text will dictate the poem in a big way, so I prefer recognizable titles with un-jargoned text. Children’s chapter books work really well, actually. Since they’re geared toward young readers, the words are simple and fundamental. It makes the poem itself a cleaner read than if you were using, say, the Communist Manifesto. It’s just really tricky to work the term “proletariat” into a poem.
Both of your artworks involve layers -
Either with Evan's layers of paint and color or Liz's pieces of cardboard which have been physically altered to reveal new layers and textures (and it could be said this cardboard has layers of history, especially from being repurposed) Is this why you chose to call your collective show Palimpsests?
Liz:
Exactly. The news just seems a bit more interesting when you can tell there’s back story.
Evan:
This concept, Palimpsests, is fascinating. Those layers that you refer to are exactly why we chose this
word to represent our show. Scraping clean the papyrus, the canvas, the page and imposing new art,
new meaning, was the unifying thread, the link between my paint and her cardboard. The process I go
through with many of my canvases, adding layers every few days, every few weeks, often makes me feel as though I nearly finish four different images in the pursuit of the final product. Most of these pieces were almost something else entirely.
Could you talk about the decision to have people make poems by circling words on pages torn out of novels? What new meanings are created?
Liz:
It largely boils down to a hope for connection, doesn’t it? It seems like you’ll understand what I’m saying better if I’ve taught you the language first. When planning the art reception, we’d decided to set up a station with our fraying copies of Nancy Drew and Farmer Boy. We asked people to find poems and leave them behind to be published with the rest of the show photos. I promise you that that was the best part of that art show. The collaborative act is so much more interesting than standing around deciding whether or not to compliment a person on that flap of cardboard she cut up.
On a broader note, we are both interested in what this method can mean within the context of strengthening a community. In fact, we picked up found poetry again, since college, last summer when Evan would sit at the coffee bar at the Scholar and teach the process to whomever was around. I can name people who are current friends because of that specific experience.
Evan:
I was thrilled by the willingness of our guests to jump into the fun of Found Poetry. As some of my
pieces show - art, poetry, none of it has to be Furrowed-Brow-Serious all the time. Art and poetry
are frequently cheeky, playful, and that was something I think a lot of people connected with when
they saw pages from Nancy Drew and Little House on the Prairie waiting for them. Found Poetry is a
wonderfully revelatory exercise. If you are ever unsure of what is bothering you some night grab some
pages and find a few poems – my mind always seems to suss out the words on the page that relate
to my current state of mind. Each page holds any number of potential poems within it and only the
craziness of our brains dictates which subject will end up being highlighted – I have found a poem about the immensity of fatherhood on a page from a biography of a civil war general that primarily detailed troop movements. The words are there, no matter what the page is, and your mind will find them if you let it.
As writers, how do you approach art-making that may be different than, say, a painter?
Liz:
Writing has always been an act of discovery for me. I’m not sure what conclusion I will draw when I set out to write about something. It’s dragging a thought through my brain wrinkles that allows me to make decision about it .I mean this even in terms of description. If I describe my grandmother aloud, I may be satisfied with “that lady who gives me a hard time for not being married yet.” But if I allow myself to scrape the depths of my imagination, I can puzzle out a way of describing her that makes my knowing her more interesting. More layered.
The portraits are line drawings, which means that the pen leaves more marks than are necessary. It’s very much like the process of writing in that the pen allows me to test the parameters until a form emerges. This becomes, of course, a process of trial and error. And just as in writing, it’s important to know when you’ve written yourself into a corner. Sometimes the result is surprising and fresh, and sometimes I flip the cardboard over and try again. I can’t remember which one it is, but one of the sold pieces from this show has the beginning attempts of a portrait of Beverly Cleary on the B side. It’s the worst, ever. The first attempt I made in this show was to draw Kurt Vonnegut’s hair. I realize now that I made it look like a rhododendron, but it’s the mop that made it into the final version. Something I discovered about the curvature of his head rang true to me.
Evan:
I would say I am a bit more laissez faire than I imagine a serious painter to be. I have the luxury of
distance, unfamiliarity and am perhaps more willing to jump into a piece with little regard for what, or
if, it will become. Much like writing, whenever I put paint down I am acutely aware of how easy it is to
erase, by painting over, it. Unlike writing, the process of erasure in painting always adds something to
the final product and that idea, the value of missteps and mistakes in visual art, is why I am willing to
try at all. I would be far too frozen or blocked if I thought I only had one shot at each piece. I have entire folders full of halted beginnings of poems and most of them will never turn into anything worthwhile but in painting a poorly executed series of brush strokes might eventually turn a piece that I thought was a city scape into a beach scene – which is exactly what happened with “Widow’s Walk.”
How did you two meet?
Liz:
College. Both of us have much better hair now than we did then.
Evan:
Liz is better at telling this story than I am, so I will refer you to her account of the encounter, but it boils
down to mistaken identity. During the first semester of our freshman year at Messiah College Liz was
absolutely convinced I was someone else, someone she knew from church or home I believe. She was so convinced that she attempted to change my mind about who I was a few different times. From there we ended up in a number of writing classes and critique groups together and developed a great friendship and mutual respect.
Have you collaborated on other projects?
Liz:
Evan is one of my favorite friends to be creative with. We have very similar aesthetics, especially in a literary sense. Quite honestly, I think we have spent most of our creative time coexisting and commenting than working directly together on one piece. Next time.
Evan:
We spent most of last fall and winter working on projects in the same place, either of our kitchens
usually. In this way while we weren’t directly collaborating I would say that our eyes definitely
influenced the work of the other. I was doing my Fence Poems show and she was working on her map
series. It was a lot of fun, I respect her eye for visual art as much as I respect her ear for poetry.
What were you like growing up?
Liz:
Increasingly less young.
Evan:
I like to think that I was exactly as I am now, but in truth I was probably quite a bit more of everything
than I am now: nicer, more active, better behaved, etc. It’s an old story where writers are concerned – I was pretty quiet and spent much of my time reading.
Who/What are you influenced by?
Liz:
I’m realizing, while thinking about this question, that I like artwork that rejects shading: woodblock prints, screenprints, posters and sculpture. Lately I have been interested by the work of Barry Moser, Edward Gorey and Egon Schiele. Their renderings of people are always a bit stranger than visual reality, but more accessible than, say, Picasso’s loopy, floppy faces. That may be a bit unfair to Picasso. Um, good job on Guernica. In terms of poetry, I greatly favor poets who are brief and surprising and who write simple, clean poems. I love Charles Simic, Wendell Berry, Li Young Lee, and Mary Oliver. Also, my roommate, who leaves haiku on the chalkboard on the kitchen most days, has recently turned me on to Yusef Komunyakaa. This has been a very pleasant suggestion.
Evan:
I really do approach painting as a poet, I don’t know enough about art history to be worried about what
great artist is standing over my shoulder with their brush, shaking their head the way I am when I’m
writing, always concerned that I’m being derivative or irreverent or cheap. I do have a few painters
that I like but they always seem to line up with my aesthetic for poetry: Edward Hopper is one and he
dovetails into one of my favorite poets, Ted Kooser. They’re both all about Americana and home town
life and finding the shadows, the sunlight and the spaces that exist in our relationships: with people,
with infrastructure, with nature.
I love Mondrian for his boldness and unabashed reliance on the interplay of pure color and straight
lines. Ben Lerner is a current poet who does a similar thing with poetry – always creating hard contrasts between vernacular and jargon, letting shades of language play against each other as if they were swathes of paint.
Places you'd like to travel to? Either new or revisted...or both.
Liz:
I have compulsive wanderlust. I grew up moving around, and it takes a lot of concentration not to daydream about plane tickets. I seriously cannot pick a place I wouldn’t be eager to see, except maybe for prison. And even then, I think it could be an interesting experience. In the States, I prefer city travel to wilderness camping, but I’m up for mostly anything. Internationally, my favorite places to visit have been Port au Prince, Istanbul, Lisbon and Cairo. Additionally, most of my family lives in the Middle East as of October, and that very obviously provides a compelling option. Also, there’s a character who comes into the shop daily who likes telling fortunes. According to him, I’m to end up in India. I accept.
Evan:
I grew up on the west coast in Vancouver, Wa on the banks of the Columbia River and still think of
that area nostalgically as a place almost without fault, certainly weather-wise. I am always looking
for a chance to visit. I love the harsh edges and enormity of the Oregon coast and the kindness and
strangeness of Portland. Internationally, I would love to go back to Scotland. My family has its roots
there and I love the weather. As for new locales, India is high on the list – Salman Rushdie is one of my favorite authors and his passion for India makes it easy to be intrigued.
Any new skills you'd like to learn?
Liz: UGH so many. Imminently, however, I would like to learn book binding, carpentry, and French.
Evan:
Drawing. I would love to be able to draw and imagine it would improve both my visual art and my
poetry. Away from visual art though, I have always been jealous of people who can just pick up an
instrument and find new sound in it. I took piano lessons as a kid but was never able to bring anything
interesting out of an instrument unless there was music in front of me.
What music are you listening to lately?
Liz:
It’s getting to be jacket weather. I am currently very fond of music I can mull wine to. I’ve been floating through albums that came out around this time last year by the National, Josh Ritter and Arcade Fire While creating this show, I listened to Tallest Man on Earth almost exclusively.
Evan:
Let’s see, what was I listening to while preparing for this show - always Dylan, I have a few of the bootleg albums that have been released in the last few years and love hearing how he developed his songs. Twin Shadow (Forget), Lifter Puller (Craig Finn and Tab Kubler before they started The Hold Steady) is a band I appreciate more each time I listen to them – amazing stories over churning, chugging, clanging rock and roll, Ryan Adams (Gold, Demolition, Heartbreaker) and The Faces (First Step, A Nod is as Good as a Wink, Long Player) and fun Stax Records cuts from the 60’s (Booker T, Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett).
What books you are reading?
Liz:
A good friend of mine lent me his copy of David Byrne’s Bicycle Diaries which is a sort of travel diary/guide of large cities around the world via a fold-up bike. The whole premise makes me feel very unhip. A book I thumb through almost daily is The Meaning of Tingo which is a laundry list of extraordinary words in other languages. A favorite is backpfeifengesicht, which is German for “a face that cries out for a fist in it.”
Evan:
My reading list for school leaves little room for prose but in the last week I have started re-reading Neal
Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle it’s a dense and fun look at the rivalry between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Liebnitz. The three books span six decades and feature some of the most famous and infamous historical figures of that time. As far as poetry, I am currently reading Kevin Young’s Ardency, a beautiful poetic account of the slave ship Amistad.
What websites do you frequent?
Liz:
I dearly love watching Blogotheque music videos.
Evan:
I end up reading almost everything on Slate.com but, specifically, they have a really wonderful poetry
section. They record their featured poet reading their own poem – it is a great opportunity to hear
current poetry read aloud.
Any recipes to share?
Liz:
The dish I most like bringing for shared meals is salsa, the recipe for which is a guess every time. The best I can do is to recommend minced garlic, big sloppy garden tomatoes chopped fine, corn, black beans, a sweet onion, sea salt and the juice from one lemon. It’s the sort of salsa an omelet begs for. 
