toomer labzda talks with TAMARA GAYER / featured in the inside                                       STUDIO IMAGES  1   2   3 

                                                                              

from / studio: manhattan / greenpoint, brooklyn                                                                          medium: digital industrial manipulation

what do you use most often in your studio?

i suppose i would have to say the computer. now i depend on my computer a lot because it's both the drawing tool and fabrication tool. since i'm interested in the process, it really helps make the creative act into a process as opposed to discrete-object-based. the process becomes a very central part of it in addition to what it looks like on its face. so as boring as that answer is, [laughs] my computer gets at least 50% of my time.

what is your favorite part of the creative process?

it's really exciting when you work with things for a while, but there's a moment when you've stumbled on something and they coalesce into something. and you can see that there's some [pause] let's call it magic. [laughs] that being said from a very rational and not very spiritual person. that part is great–when you've just learned to use something in a new way, when you've just stepped out boundaries of "things are done like this," or "i was doing it like this all the time" and then something just lets you go to another place. those moments are treasures.

what is your earliest memory of art?

art and culture were really important for my mother. she grew up in long island, but for as soon as she could move and get out, she was in new york city going to concerts and museums and going to see things in different places. if there's a festival somewhere or if there's something to be seen, whether it's Lincoln Center or on a rooftop in the middle of nowhere, my mother is generally there. [laughs]

and she took me with her around constantly from a very young age. and through today, still, that’s a thing we do together. she doesn't live in new york anymore, so when she's here, it's like that. wherever she's lived, it's always been like that.

how did you start working in your current medium?

well i always had a predisposition to really bright, colorful, shiny things. physically, plastics are the material that can be saturated with the most color, except for having just a handful of pure pigment. so i started working with vinyl because it was really cheap and available. i did spend a year or two making things only out of vinyl. i had a friend, not with kind intentions, call it my "shower curtain art." [laughs] she was not joking.

i started to look for ways to still use the plastic and have some of the physical elements i really like–the saturation, the translucence. i had to move away from that vinyl that you used to be able to buy on Canal Street, which is no longer as easily available. once i started to look for these [materials], i became more involved with things that were more in the realm of the industrial and less in the realm of the art store. there was a several-year transition at the end of which i no longer went to the art store at all.

so i go to the hardware store if i need something. and i source the internet a lot to find the cheapest versions of things so i can play around as much as possible.

what was the last exhibition you saw?

the last exhibition i saw was a combination sculpture and painting show at Feature. he shows a lot of work that i am sympathetic to. and it was all about geometry, and it was a really was an interesting notion of reflecting these repetitive patterns in both 2D and 3D. so. [laughs] it was much more historical than my work is, especially some of the paintings you could even locate in history. it was a very lovely show.

is there an artist you’ve always wanted to grab drinks with?

i have narrowed it down to two.

one is louise nevelson. i always thought that. she branched out in sculpture, which was not the given practice of the era. and there are descriptions of her being the only woman at Cedar Tavern [a famous 1960s New York City hangout for abstract expressionists]. and also there's a really amazing video of her studio practice when she was old. i think i saw it when i was in high school. she has all these young, super buff studio assistants without shirts walking around, and she's like "honey, will you move this from here to there?" [laughs] fantastic movie.

then the other person is diane arbus. what's so interesting about her work is not only the weirdness she finds, but once you spend a little time looking at her photographs and you go out onto the street, you really find that weirdness. and you didn't see it before. i hope my work does like that–lets you see the city a little bit differently. see the potential of living in a super brightly colored geometric warp time zone.

both together would be really great. because they're new york women also.

if money was no object, what artwork would you acquire?

i don't know. i'm just not a collector. if i had lots of money, i think i would get the funding to commission something that lots of people could see, for a large slice of a mixed socio-ethnic crowd. some weird thing that brings them together.

also being a mother, i see my kid get frustrated now that he can walk around because he can't touch this or that at art events. that's the thing, a lot of art objects look like you should be able to touch them. so for my art piece, none of this half-play of "i'm very enticing, but don't touch me." my public art thing you'd definitely be able to touch.

is there one thing you wish you could do?

anything? i really want to learn how to do a handstand. i really do. i've never been able to master that. i think it would be an awesome moment of both power and fun. and i can totally see that revolutionizing my way of seeing things. it's weird, there are some things you learn how to do and it changes your whole perspective on everything. [laughs]

TAMARA GAYER interview.pdf

interviewed by Serena Qiu on july 2, 2012  at Tamara Gayer’s studio  / contact gallery@toomerlabzda.com