In Conversation: Rob Carter Interviewed By Leah Oates

Rob Carter, Faith in a Seed [installation view], 2012. Multi-media installation at Art in General, NY

In Conversation: Rob Carter Interviewed By Leah Oates

Rob Carter: Without giving you my complete life story, I was brought up in a small-ish town in England: a beautiful area with a bunch of historic buildings. Towards the end of high school it seemed more likely that I would go into theatre design but I went to Cheltenham for a year to do a foundation course in art and design. There I focused on painting and got a place at Oxford University for a BFA. Given my current practice, it’s somewhat surprising to me that I was very focused during those three years on minimal, process-based abstract painting—mostly semi-sculptural colored monochromes.

When I finished Oxford in 1998 I headed to the south of England where I took a position as artist in residence at a school. I worked and taught there for two years and worked through a whole host of methods and concepts in the studio. It was a very experimental time and their gallery space allowed me to mount four contrasting solo shows during that period.

I wanted to follow this up with an MFA and was quite keen to do it in New York where I imagined I had a greater affinity for the contemporary art world than in London. In August 2000 I headed to the US to attend Hunter College in NY (just in time for the last months of the Clinton administration and a crash course in American politics) and have lived here ever since. I spent three years at Hunter, moving from painting to photography, film, and video during the course.

Since then the development of my work and practice has been punctuated and often facilitated by residencies, the most recent of which was the LMCC workspace in Lower Manhattan.

Rob Carter, Stone on Stone , 2009, HD video, total running time: 7 minutes 44 seconds

LO: Where there any creative types in your family and when did you know you where going to be an artist?

RC: We’ve recently been piecing together my family tree and if I trace back a few generations there’s an architect and two photographers. My uncle by marriage was also a photographer and I still use some of his equipment.

I remember that art class was my favorite from about age 7 onwards but I suppose it wasn’t until I was about 18 or 19 that pursuing a life as a visual artist seemed like a vaguely realistic future. Of course the unrealistic side was pretty apparent too, but at Oxford I found myself immediately committed and engaged with the work and making a go of it.

LO: Your work involves architecture, the history and science of plants, the environment and colonialism. How did you come to focus on these themes and how do you see these themes evolving in your work?

RC: The starting point of almost all my projects is architecture. It’s a theme that probably became more defined and consistent when I moved to New York. Buildings of all kinds define the history of civilization and act as a mirror of society, whether it be societal needs from within or the imposition of history or authority. A building, whether it be house, castle, stadium or church often outlives the people who built it, sometimes by thousands of years; their context is constantly changing through time. It’s this evolving and malleable history that holds my attention, and looking back it’s easy to find the origins of my interest in my family vacations. Amongst some trips to the beach, summer holidays in the Carter family usually involved exploring castles, churches, stately homes, cathedrals and pagan sites in the UK and France.

It seems that moving to the USA from Europe gave me a new freedom to explore these themes as the perception of architectural time is so different in the US. In fact, to begin with, I became more interested in the disposability and fragility of buildings here, especially in terms of stadium architecture.

The plants initially developed from thinking about different forms and periods of experienced time especially in relationship to video and photography. To some extent I was interested in the plants as actors, making their own stop motion performance; introducing a calculated but more random strategy into the work. As my work has evolved, the meaning and history of the plants themselves has become more significant. This can be seen as a development of my interest in their symbolic power and history, but also as a response to our evolving understanding of our relationship to food and the environment.

Rob Carter, Union Territory, 2009, digital c-print, 35 x 29.5 inches

LO: Some artists are very methodical while others are more instinctive or process-oriented. Would you elaborate on your art-making process?

RC: My working process needs to be quite methodical, but I try to make it as free and instinctual as possible at certain times. One of the most significant periods that I can be most instinctive is with the initial research and planning: extensive period looking at books and exploring information available online. Based on an initial idea this process allows the project to evolve and grow until it reaches a point where I can commit to a creative process that will likely take many months to complete.

Much of the work clearly reveals its process, but the seamlessness of the single camera lens does create illusion. I am keen to find this unsteady zone in-between seamless illusion and certainty, represented more overtly by my recent exhibit at Art in General: Faith in a Seed, but also in photographs like the Union Territory series.

The work that involves the stop-motion animation of inkjet prints requires a systematic approach. Once my idea is clarified and the images are collected I commence on a period of Photoshop work to combine/collage the images so that they can relate to one another, and reveal or transform each other. The animation itself is the most structured and also most intuitive part of the process. The images I have created form a framework of evolvement and movements that I need to adhere to, but within the defined parameters there’s plenty of room for intuition and accident within the stop-motion animation shoot. Once the images have been shot, video editing brings everything together, and depending on the project can be as complex and significant as anything else; there’s plenty of room for conceptual and digital manipulation during this process. The final stage is the soundtrack, requiring another phase of recording and sourcing. This can involve recording sounds in multiple environments whether it be Madison Square Garden or my kitchen. These sounds then need to be synched and edited to conform to the visuals and this could apply to both the movement of a building or that of a seedling.

LO: What advice would you give younger visual artists new to New York City who have no idea where to begin?

RC: That makes me sound old and very experienced—not sure there’s much truth to there. Maybe a good starting point would be Walter de Maria’s wonderful Earth Room in Soho (free admission!). The main thing I’ve learned in my studio practice is to focus on the quality of the work and keep making it and developing it as much as you can even in the face of a deathly silence. There are many for which patience is not such a virtue, so you will find you own pace, but I have found that things often move very slowly in the art world and it just might be years before a meeting or studio visit pays off. Also, don’t feel you have too look at too much art… go and see anything that interests you.

LO: Artistic success in New York City sometimes seems to be marked by sales at big name galleries, connections and status rather than on if the work has anything new or fresh to say. Do you think that there are other ways to mark success as an artist?

RC: Success depends on what angle you see it from. Unfortunately money and success are very closely linked in the art world – the topic of a great deal of writing. Lets just go with this dictionary definition:

“the favorable or prosperous termination of attempts or endeavors”

That makes it sound like the very end and I doubt I’ll care by then.

LO: Who are your favorite artists and why?

RC: I’ve been asked this before in interviews and I usually give different answers… it’s constantly changing. So… ever since I saw a Marina Abramovic show in Oxford in 1995 I have always loved (or been repulsed) by her work and that of other physical video performance artists especially Bruce Nauman and Vito Acconci. That probably led to my great admiration of artist turned film-maker Steve McQueen, and the way a video like Deadpan takes a moment of high comedy and turns it into some kind of narrative of survival. I always eagerly anticipate seeing/experiencing his work, new or old.

LO: What shows and projects are you working on and what do you have coming up in the future?

RC: As I write this I am returning from the opening of my show in Cologne at Galerie Stefan Roepke, which runs until mid February 2013. The time-lapse videos that were created in the Art in General space this summer are now complete and will be shown in Madrid in February. I am currently finalizing a new stop-motion video about the sun, tourism, and architecture, which I also hope to show in early 2013. Next up will be more editing and the creation of a soundscape for a new two channel architectural time-lapse video that I shot in Austria.