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Margaux Williamson is a Toronto-based artist. Catherine Yu-Shan Hsieh is an associate editor at NY Arts.
Catherine Yu-Shan Hsieh: Last fall you had your first solo show The Girls Show Dostoyevsky the New Darkness at Marvelli Gallery in New York City. How did that feel? How did the audience receive it?
Margaux Williamson: It felt ok. Growing up, I saw art mainly in art books, or Laurie Anderson at the hippy record store, or James Joyce in the local library. Mainly I understood that an artist could be in a big museum or on an album cover. I was pretty excited about both those options. I still think a lot about medium accessibility, not necessary content accessibility.
I think of my “audience” as maybe eight people I know whose opinions I care about. They thought this was a good show. Also, I have hopes that maybe, like, a 15-year-old in Cincinnati looked at my paintings on the Internet.
CH: Your paintings seem to deal a lot with sorrow and despondence, coupled with images of children, girls, or animals like lambs. What is the message behind this imagery, if there is one?
MW: I don’t know if I’ve painted children. Maybe toys that stand in for humans. The lamb I painted was resting easily next to someone else’s remains on the sacrificial chopping block, and the girls of course, have just as much weight, responsibility, sorrow, and guilt as the monsters. I’m not shy of portraying beauty, and of course beauty isn’t scared to be a dark thing. Though it does seem about time for someone to have a go again for portraying a girl who’s truly innocent and a monster who is truly scary.
CH: You were born in the United States, but later moved to Canada from Texas at 13. How has the experience of moving influenced you as an artist and the way you observe the world?
MW: Whenever I moved, people in the new place would seem to be unified by some damning prejudice, specific to their town. I concluded quickly and without too much questioning, that if I had born in that place I might have the same prejudices, too. This seems to have made me overly sympathetic to contemporary villains and a little too much of a relativist, but also gives me a healthy dose of suspicion for myself. Also, I got to start over a few times without a recorded past, be a new person. Though the feeling of doom that caught up with me when I first started to see my name in the paper (good or bad, big paper or tiny paper) was pretty surprisingly awful, having never really been forced to live with a recorded version of myself, even one that just exists in your neighbors minds. I feel like a lot of 19-year-olds right now are pretty lucky to live in a world where you can do both, experiment with different personas with audiences of two or more, but also have to grow alongside the evidence of your life.
CH: What inspired you to create the film project Teenager Hamlet 2006?
MW: At the beginning of 2006 my friend the writer, Sheila Heti, started recording all of our conversations. The idea was awful for me, especially with my fear of this kind of text evidence, but I valued her work more than my fear, so I agreed. Along the way, this fear transformed my brain into a life as art studio, complete with a Herzogian “lie for the ecstatic truth of it” philosophy.
At the time, I was starting to work on this project Teenager Hamlet. I had no money and it was important for me that no one wasted their time with it, so I thought of it as an experience I’d construct for others and myself. Like a heavily constructed reality show. My resources and world around me would dictate the narrative. Maybe I could say I spent two months on paper working to find the invisible object that all of these elements created a visible outline of.
CH: As an artist, you utilize a paintbrush as well as digital technology to materialize your artistic ideas. Which do you feel more at ease using in your creative process?
MW: The primary part of my creative process starts with unloading little scraps of paper with abstract text messages onto an empty table. I organize them sort of like speedy improvising with a lot of structure, intention, and choice, but also with a lot of patience, boredom, and silence. I don’t really draw, so all of my painting studies and film studies are all just “text” studies that are very similar. The rest is just the pleasure and/or pain of the execution.
CH: Please try and describe your work in one single sentence.
MW: I sometimes think of it as a checkmark, like a checkmark that you put beside something you’re sure of, but may forget. That’s what the check mark is for.
CH: In terms of your art, where do you see yourself heading next? Are you planning to show soon?
MW: When we started shooting Teenager Hamlet 2006, I was asking myself, “How did this happen?” It’s like one night a long time ago you get drunk and excited and have sex and then suddenly one day you’re giving birth to this thing. You think maybe you won’t do that again, but it just happens all the time.
