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Alisha Kerlin’s paintings have the ability to get past the mind’s usual categories of rational beliefs or humming discursiveness to resonate in a place that’s hard to name. Solitaire games, measuring tapes and dangling carrots are recurrent images, but an equal player in her work is her glowing, murky backgrounds, which often question or even threaten the objecthood of whatever they surround. Recently I spoke with her on the eve of her solo show at Guerrero Gallery about repetition vs. series, the addiction of painting, and the sexism of dictionaries. |
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“I think about “periphery” often and how within the confines of a rectangle, so much can happen outside of the canvas.”
Alisha Kerlin’s paintings have the ability to get past the mind’s usual categories of rational beliefs or humming discursiveness to resonate in a place that’s hard to name. Solitaire games, measuring tapes and dangling carrots are recurrent images, but an equal player in her work is her glowing, murky backgrounds, which often question or even threaten the objecthood of whatever they surround. Recently I spoke with her on the eve of her solo show at Guerrero Gallery about repetition vs. series, the addiction of painting, and the sexism of dictionaries.
Emily Auchincloss: Your paintings often include repetition of a theme -solitaire games, measuring tapes, carrots on a string, trees falling. You seem to break down a symbol, cliché or object, and through the repetition, know some really strange things about how this object and how this background can live together in ways that one wouldn’t expect. Do you think it is because you have done it so many times that you discover new relationships that make no sense to the rational mind, but because you give them respect, you raise them up for us to see?
Alisha Kerlin: I don’t feel that I work in series. Each painting has its own title, and its own set of concerns. So as much as I resist describing my paintings as being “about” the isolated object…I repeat these things as subject matter over and over again. If I were to try to connect the dots, most of the things I choose to paint deal with some kind of infinite space or loop. Circling vultures, measurers that reach towards a vanishing point, and the enticing carrot hanging just out of reach. Making feels like this—like retracing my previous path or doubling back to move forward. I think what I learn from repetition is cumulative, and although it would be great to make something that culminates in something that includes it all, I deliberately zigzag around this. It’s interesting that the more I paint something, the more the hierarchy of object to ground melts away.
AK: Maybe it’s both…why make a distinction? I think about “periphery” often and how within the confines of a rectangle, so much can happen outside of the canvas. There is a sensation of thinking and feeling. I expect a lot from the viewer when they stand within range.
EA: How do your titles relate to the what’s happening in your paintings? You made the choice to include the titles as an element in your show in June at Zach Feuer. I remember they were placed over or under the paintings themselves, and made of laser cut wood.
AK: Sometimes I finish a painting and think, what have I done?! I spend as much time naming the works as it takes to make them. For me, words are just as slippery as images, and I have four dictionaries here, including the desktop dictionary on my apple computer, which is very sexist. There are so many negative, stereotypical, and trivializing references to women. For example, the word “hover” is accompanied by the usage sentence “She hovered anxiously in the background.” Not “he”! The painting with circling vultures is titled “They looked up when he came quietly into the room” is taken from the example sentence for the word “look.” The ones that are ‘looking up’ are vultures, so I feel I’m being a little nasty. “Look” led to “In the distance she could see the clear blue sea”, the title for a painting with a dangling carrot. I ask myself is anyone going to actually see these things? So I look up the word “see” and there is the longing “she” gazing over the watery abyss. Is she the carrot? I’m not sure.
EA: I didn’t know about this part of your process! Or about the hidden sexist poetry of dictionaries. So how is it working with these smaller canvases? These are about a third or quarter size of the paintings you usually make.
AK: It’s hard! The intervals are just shorter-but just as difficult-like rapid-cycle heartbreak.
EA: Do you think that that is part of the addictive aspect of painting?
AK: Yeah! Like with this yellow painting here, the carrot is resting on a weird brush mark. And so, I like that and try to do it again. Luckily something new happens, and this next carrot becomes for example, a levitating saint, and I can’t plan that.
EA: These carrot paintings are all for the Guerrero show, right? Have you thought about how you’re going to show them?
AK: I’m thinking of them as weathervanes, with directional strategies of North, South, East and West. And if I don’t have enough paintings to fill the space, I’m putting up traffic cones. The gallery I’m showing in has very shiny floors, so the cones are doing double duty: caution the floor is wet, and stop, you cannot go past here, the show is done.
EA: Laughter. I love it!
