| I’ve been calling myself an artist for about 30 years, so maybe it’s natural that my creative narrative has gotten lengthy and convoluted. I paint as well as sculpt and, in my case, any description of the relationship between those two practices gets awfully tangled. So in thinking about less unwieldy subjects to write about, it occurred to me to describe two circumstances in which simple creative solutions to mundane practical problems opened new possibilities in the studio. |
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Dike Blair is a New York–based artist.
I’ve been calling myself an artist for about 30 years, so maybe it’s natural that my creative narrative has gotten lengthy and convoluted. I paint as well as sculpt and, in my case, any description of the relationship between those two practices gets awfully tangled. So in thinking about less unwieldy subjects to write about, it occurred to me to describe two circumstances in which simple creative solutions to mundane practical problems opened new possibilities in the studio.
In the early nineties I was making “installation art” as well as painting. The image here is from an exhibition themed around Epcot Center and involved mixed media works, carpet, lights, music, and furniture. After producing and showing a handful of installations over a four-year period, I realized that I didn’t really like the process. Being small potatoes, I’d do all the work myself, often under a good deal of stress and at a fair amount of personal expense. My installations would (usually) only be shown once, and that would be my first and only opportunity to see them fully realized—afterwards the components sat either in a storage bin or a dumpster. I also came to recognize that I don’t particularly like to travel, and that I’m neither an extrovert nor particularly clever—all assets, if not prerequisites (along with talent) for the successful installation artist. There were, however, elements of the installations that very much appealed to me: artificial lighting, carpet, photographic images, and furniture: things that, in combination, could yield some very interesting ambiances and sensations. So I decided to keep those things (I jettisoned sound) and to create discrete sculptures with them. These sculptures functioned much like compressed installations: they didn’t need entire galleries to be exhibited, and they were scaled so I could see them fully realized in my studio. And I could work alone. I also found that those elements could recombine easily to accommodate a broad range of my subjects and interests. I worked with those general materials for over ten years, from the mid-90s until 2006.
Toward the end of that decade of working with pretty much the same materials I began to feel I’d gotten to where I wanted to go, and it was time for change. That’s a (happy) creative problem, but not really a practical one. The practical problem was that as the sculptures evolved they had gotten larger and had more fragile elements, including some highly finished wood surfaces, so they damaged somewhat easily. Also their differently-sized components made them awkward to store and ship. The solution to both problems was to make sculptures in which all the elements (including, for the first time, a framed painting) fit into a funky packing crate, which was also an element of the sculpture. All the elements were roughly finished, and any damage to the packing crate became part of its “finish,” or could be refinished by a child. This rough finish also allowed me to return to creating some painterly surfaces, on the boxes themselves, that I’d enjoyed playing with in the 80s. Something has loosened up.
I think my work is romantic and somewhat spiritual (certainly escapist). It has aspects of inside-and-outside that has something to do with consciousness. Although very sublimated, I think it addresses beauty, sexuality, and death. But all those aspects of the work I find in retrospect and are largely unconscious, or at least unconsidered in my studio practice. What I do consider in advance of and during the making of work is the orchestration of images, forms, and materials; their medium specificity; their individual and combined ambiance; and the successes and failures of the pieces that immediately preceded the present ones. That last bit is important because the two “practical problems” above come under that umbrella. Moving from installation work to sculpture gave my work a scope I don’t think I’d otherwise have been able to realize. It’s too early to tell whether the simple solution to damage and storage will be as rich as the one that marked the move from installation to sculpture, but it might…
