Carrie is currently finishing up her residency in Scotland and will head back to her current city, Portland.
About a year ago, I did an interview with Carrie about her work. Her transparent answers were helpful for me at that time and I got reminded of that interview recently. So here it is. I hope you find her insights helpful as well.
Interview with artist Carrie Iverson (2009)
Gyun Hur: You are currently based in Portland. Could you tell me a little bit about
Portland and people and the art scene? What about Portland that suits and reinvigorates
your studio practice? What drew you to Portland?
Carrie Iverson: I've been in Portland for about nine months, so I'm still getting
acclimated and discovering the scene. There is a thoughtful and
introverted quality to the work here that resonates with me- it feels
very personal and vulnerable; industrial yet delicate. There is also a
strong non-commercial and collaborative tradition here which appeals
to me; it has been a great environment to refocus on content in a more
leisurely way.
I lived in Portland briefly after college, and have always loved the
city. A few years ago I started working in glass and began making
periodic trips here to study at the Bullseye Glass Company. My
developing relationship with them- I am now represented in their
gallery, and work and teach at their factory- was a major part of my
decision to move back to the city. I feel like there is a new
movement in glass coalescing here, and it is exciting to be a part of
that.
On the personal side I had also just gone through a period of intense
upheaval (ending a long term relationship) and was looking for an
environment that was nurturing yet still urban. Although it is a small
city there is a great deal of innovation going on in industrial design
and a thriving environmental movement. It is also linked into the west
coast art nexus from San Francisco to Seattle to Vancouver.
In addition to developing as an epicenter for glass, I also have a
strong intuition that Portland is going to emerge as a significant art
center in the current economy. There are a lot of young artists moving
here, and an innovative non-commercial sensibility.
G.H.: Where were you before?
C.I.: I grew up in south central rural Virginia where my father was a philosophy
professor at Hampden-Sydney College, a small all male
Liberal arts college. I then went to Yale as an undergraduate,
spending four years in New Haven, CT. After college I moved to
Portland, OR where I worked a variety of jobs (bartender, cook,
waitress, etc.) and set up my studio. I missed the intellectual
engagement of school, and decided to attend the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago for graduate school. I was in the first class of
their interdisciplinary MFA in writing, and focused on learning offset
printing and artist's books. I then stayed in Chicago for twelve
years, connecting with both the printmaking and conceptual art scene.
G.H.: I am curious about how your art career started to unfold. Was there a pivotal point (it could be a place, a project, a person, an event...) in your life, which became a platform of you becoming an artist?
C.I.: I have always used art as a way to process my experiences. Initially
my focus was on examining the inter-layering of my own memories, but
my interest has gradually shifted to creating more interactive
environments that incorporate the viewer as well.
I think my preoccupation with the processes of memory can be traced to
my childhood. Although I grew up on a college campus as the child of
academics, that campus was located in a very rural and primarily black
southern community. As is probably typical of a bi-cultural child, I
viewed myself as partially belonging to both groups but fully
belonging to neither.
This cultural disparity was also exaggerated by historical factors; my
particular county in Virginia was saturated in history—from the civil
war to the civil rights movement—and the presence of those events was
still palpable in the air. For example, the school I attended for
twelve years chose to close rather than integrate during the civil
rights movement. At the time I entered elementary school, there was
still implicit segregation and my parents were criticized for sending
me to the predominately black public school instead of the local all
white private school. There were also physical remnants of history all
around—from abandoned slave cabins, mass confederate graves, and civil
war trenches to the division of the town into black and white
neighborhoods.
The need to be able to read multiple sets of cultural signals also
heightened my perceptive abilities and made me more attentive to the
inflections and nuances of language. As a child, I would hear the
story of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, then the story of a slave who
be-headed his master in the field with a scythe. Although only one of
these stories is officially historical, both showed me how my town and
community perceived itself.
Consequently I spent a lot of time exploring abandoned buildings and
houses- in the woods near my parent’s house there was a whole
abandoned community of “freemen” houses built right after the civil
war. In most of them the kudzu and the vines had taken over, leaving
brick chimneys and sometimes even just vines in the shape of a house.
There was also a more recently abandoned church camp, which had rows
of beds, books, magazines- even clothes and shoes. It was eerie, as
though the people had just left, and would be back momentarily. There
were trenches, and tree stands and roadside shrines. Everything was
always perpetually falling apart, splitting and being spliced back
together.
G.H.: I would like to revisit your project Wake in 2006. I think it has brought a lot of attention, not only because of its political assessment in the situation with Iraq at that time, but also its public and poetic gesture in creating a memorial. Could you talk about how the project started and the process of you gathering archives of information of these soldiers?
C.I.: It started out, in fact, with the Façade Project in 2004. I was
working as a printmaking tech in Chicago. The studio was beautiful, and its
building was half vacant. I kept having an urge that there is something that
I could do in that space. I was on my research on the soldiers in Iraq at that
time, and I thought perhaps the images of these soldiers could be somehow
complied as a memorial. The process was quite simple. Once I had a collection
of portraits, I photocopied them and started to tape on the windows.
The lights illuminated from the inside of building at night was allowing
these portraits to be seen in the most beautiful ways. Many people responded
to this project, especially because of our situation with Iraq at that time.
Then after two years, I was commissioned by the Brooklyn Public Library
to do a similar piece. One of the critiques on the Façade Project was
the absence of the Iraqi soldiers. So that element was added in blank
sheets of paper with individual’s names printed.
G.H.: How was your interaction with the public while installing your piece at Brooklyn Public Library? Did people's infused political and personal views affect the way you were installing the project?
C.I.: People responded with a lot of emotions. The dialogues that
I started to have with the real people who were being affected by the
event was incredible. Many told me about their own family members
who were in Iraq, and anxiety, frustration, and sometimes pride came up
in the conversations. I exactly knew how I wanted to execute the piece,
so being in a public space installing did not affect my work, yet impacted
my process of making this project.
G.H.: You recently have been working more with glass. You talk about glass’s evocative delicacy as well as its harshness. To me, the material seems quite contrary to printmaking paper and its process. How did you come in contact with this material glass and what about glass that you found intriguing in addition to your printmaking studio work?
C.I.: When I was traveling in Northwest few years ago, I saw a show
that infused printmaking and glass, which I thought as incredibly intriguing.
In fact, it was with the Bullseyes co., and they were also conducting a few
work shops during their show. I took a fusing glass workshops and ever
since then, I have been using glass. Glass art, to me, can be challenging,
because of its delicacy that a tendency of glass art product can be very limited.
It is where I started allowing other processes of making images into glass
I found an attraction. Its tangibility and fragility, I think, works beautifully
in my interest of encapsulating the memories.
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| FACADE PROJECT Site specific installation, laser printed photos, 2004 |
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| FACADE PROJECT Site specific installation, laser printed photos, 2004 |
Thank you, Carrie.
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