100a forsyth street, new york, ny 10002
toomer labzda talks with TAYLOR BALDWIN / featured in birds, bodies and bricolage STUDIO IMAGES 1 2 3
from / studio : tuscon, arizona / richmond, virginia medium: sculpture and drawing
what do you use most often in your studio?
the most consistent thing i use is actually the iPod in order to listen to audiobooks. i realized several years ago that music was for some reason dictating my mood and my momentum while working in my studio.
it was kind of unsettling and i thought i'd switch to words and see how that works. i'll go through and pick specific books that don't necessarily tie into what i'm currently working on, but that could be cues for potential source material or ideas. i have those going while i'm working in a way that busies the top part of my brain when i'm either doing repetitive labor. it holds the really impatient active part of my brain, and keeps it busy while i do other motor tasks.
i just got through this book Justinian's Flea about the first outbreak of the bubonic plague in the Byzantine empire.
what is your favorite part of the creative process?
the seeds of work for me are not generated in a gradual, incremental process, but come in a flash as linkages between ideas in areas i want to work in, or are attached to certain forms. most of the time it's pretty malformed in that moment of new things–this type of sound, or this music from the twenties has to do with the plague.
it’s that moment. taking notes, grabbing objects or materials in the studio, or making quick sketches as almost physical notes to remember, because i can't write down how it looks.
i'll get really excited and start thinking faster than at any other point in the studio. definitely the most gratifying moment.
what is your earliest memory of art?
growing up in arizona, there's not a lot of what you consider “contemporary art” around.
my first exposure to any type of artistic practice, as with the majority of boys in the 80s i think, was comics. when i got to undergrad, i feel like the majority of people in a foundation art school curricula were inspired to get there via comics, or some type of drawing medium that was aimed at children.
my first exposure to a real contemporary art exhibition was my freshman year in college, when i went to see the 2001 Matthew Barney Cremaster Cycle exhibition at the Guggenheim. you know, where he did all five floors and screenings of all five movies. that really floored me at the time. before that i had really enjoyed making objects and working with physical material, but hadn't really understood how you could employ that. i was thinking that objects needed to be in service to something else, like furniture. after seeing that, objects could just be for the object's sake–it was really exciting.
how did you start working in your current medium?
if you mean the recent materials i've been using–plaster, resins, found objects, natural woods and materials with history that I can try imagine the atomic lineage of–it would be right after finishing my big-push thesis exhibition at grad school.
i distinctly felt at the end of the exhibition that i was really disappointed by the culmination of this piece, which absorbed thousands of dollars in brand-new materials. it felt kind of hollow and purposeless after the show came down. i remember making an oath that the next year i was going to try to limit my palette to things that i could find or only to things that i could gather without engaging the new market. it was not necessarily about spending money. it was about bartering, finding things through craigslist, going through dumpsters, or stealing things.
because of the lack of ease of needing these things, i had to go out and engage the community around the studio quite a bit more, talking to people i would have never spoken to before about trying to get this sheet of plexiglass they had.
what was the last exhibition you saw?
well the last exhibition i saw a few weeks ago was the VCU MFA thesis exhibition at the Anderson Gallery. it was right after i came to new york to install the piece at toomer labzda actually. you have all these kids who are super ambitious, trying to pump out cohesive statement about their entire studio experience in grad school. you get all these weird, exuberant, malformed things that are always fun.
the last exhibition i saw in new york that really stuck with me was a year ago, the big David Altmejd exhibition in Andrea Rosen. that was something that you rarely see. i don't know how you call it. it was like a tour-de-force. or like a vortex. it was totally bananas.
is there an artist you’ve always wanted to grab drinks with?
yeah! robert smithson for sure, because of the way that the talks about what he does. it seems like he's really familiar with the content and the processes of theory and criticism as it pertains to the art world, but he's not holding to the language or rhetoric. the writing that i've read of his is so clearly psychedelic. he doesn't have any walls between the concerns of theory and criticism, and everything else.
if money was no object, what artwork would you acquire?
it would either be the flying steamroller piece by Chris Burden, or his big wheel piece. just because they involve a phenomenological experience that is so initially comprehensible that you would need to sit there for a while with them. it’s something that would benefit from prolonged exposure.
is there one thing you wish you could do?
it's funny because i just heard about this two or three days ago on a radio show. there's a study that’s been done recently and now they can give color-blind monkeys the extra cone that they're missing in their eyes through an injection, and they'll be able to see the color. they said this would work on humans, and it's waiting on FDA approval.
my immediate thought is that there are animals out there with more cones that can see colors that don't exist for us, like ultraviolet and infrared. if that ever becomes available, i'd be the first in line.
interviewed by Serena Qiu on may 28 , 2012 over skype between new york and richmond /
for more information contact gallery@toomerlabzda.com