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Spraygraphic Interviews Scrapworm
By Spraygraphic | August 13, 2007
Spraygraphic Interviews Scrapworm
SG: Where do you currently live and work?
SW: I’m currently living and working in Baltimore, but home is an old wire factory in East Williamsburg Brooklyn on the way to Maspeth. I lived there June 2001 to August 2006– and owe much to the enclave between Grand and Montrose, Bushwick and the canals. My favorite person in the world still lives in the Scholes St. space. It remains dominated by the tree universe I’d spun up over the years.
SG: Tell us about how you got the name scrapworm?
SW: scrapworm came to language in August 2001 when I was hanging out with my writer friend Kristin and our theatre design friend Simone. I’d been working with a pseudonym/symbol for a few years, but it was too esoteric for my whole purpose of finding a name to allegorically identify with collective entanglement. We were reading the dictionary, choosing relevant words and making a 2 columned list. Then it was like scrap and worm floated off the page, illuminated. scrapworm has evolved through existing and making, growing from a metaphoric combination of words into a philosophy of art process. ‘scraps’ signify various parts of the whole (human predicament/society/universe), whereas the ‘worm’ is the creative, living intelligence. As scrapworm, I am working within the concept that I (and generally, observably, we) survive days by perceptively synthesizing images, and forms of existing - searching for something that is actually indefinable. We collect fragments of the sensory experience of external reality based on uniquely personal aspects. As we perceptively meander routes through such mental accumulations, we each process and produce uniquely new things. As I wind an individual path, I consider examples from the world document (of which I experience the landscapes, societies, and artifacts) as ‘scraps’ that I find either ironic in coexistence, beautiful in balance, sad in calm emptiness, terrifying in violent inundation, and/or (especially in found print materials) absurdly propagandized.
SG: What mediums do you work with?
SW: Installations involving sculptural assemblage, surfaces of torn/woven paper, printmaking, video layering, electronics, & other digital and/or socially interactive experiments…. I used to call my approach cross-medium collage, but now it seems more about creating meditative/associative environments (as interface for empathetic communication and self-referring technology).
SG: Describe your working process when creating a new work?
SW: I follow investigative trajectories based on noumenal intuition. I’m fueled by awareness of meaningful synchronicities. I think we all have access to some implicate order- an unconscious spiritual dimension (yet fully revealed) and/or a web of universal intelligence. I consciously explore what I come across and how it strikes me emotionally. This active observation helps me make sense of life- past and future- living in the now. My process becomes the scrapworm allegory. or vice versa. Activate the noosphere!
SG: What’s your Studio like?
SW: While usually a perpetually evolving ordered chaos, it depends on the day. If I have shows up, it is more like a shelter left rapidly for some unknown urgency. I love information and artifact, so sometimes my studio has the scientist/recluse/survivor feel. Generally it exists as a transformed space of accumulated ‘WHY?’ It’s engaging and wondrous to me; and often others as well, relative to their unique perspective/background. While some things are recognizable day to day, it’s almost like every bit of matter exists in a morphing vortex, beautifully dark.
SG: What are some of your inspirations influencing your work?
SW: We can avert total apocalypse by accepting pain and achieving a self-aware extra-dimension that lets us see on top of binary polarities. I’m otherwise inspired by tragic irony, confronting my fear of death and loss, imagining quantum dimensional possibility, involving myself in various philosophic inquiries (like J. Krishnamurti’s), and experiencing music– black metal, darkwave, industrial, and truly passionate metal-core. I personally find breakthrough via scrapworm creation and the experience/questioning of time. While still totally fringe to the mental-rationalists, I work to prepare for a potential shift of consciousness– with the precession of the equinoxes and unknowable phenomena produced by sun’s ecliptic rise in alignment with our galaxy’s central black hole (winter solstice, 2012). Sometimes called the 100th monkey phenomenon, I try to evolve myself within society toward a larger morphic resonance for humanity. I feel upheaval/collapse coming on, and I can only hope we’ll make a leap to see the holistic sustainability of living systems through layer-reflective understandings of suffering– personal and collective. I try to question the authority of everything and redefine validity as coming from inside of myself. This opens up the wonder of mystery and infinite potentials, allowing me to look inside the charges of historical image accumulation and cycles of expanding thought.
SG: Where has your work been seen?
SW: I just had installations in two Baltimore City Artscape exhibitions: Ceci n’est pas a Booth, Kiosk or Gazebo and Other Radical Shacks (in the Uof B food court), and Visions of Conflict: Rendering Dissent (Gormley Gallery). I’ve been involved with NeoIntegrity shows: including This Land is Your Land (roof fest in 2002, stretching between Waterbury & Bogart, Scholes & Stagg) This is Your Dinner (American Fine Arts), Burnt to a Crisp (Asterisk Young Artist Project), and the current cornucopia at the Derek Eller Gallery (through August 14)…shown via opportunities from Chashama, (Tixe @ 113 W42nd, 40 Worth St., AMC Empire Theaters 234 W42nd, 217 E. 42nd St., and a solo show at 208 W37th)… and participated multiple times in Brooklyn Peace Fairs, LivinGallery group shows (in Lecce, Italy), and in Red Hook Pier Shows with BWAC. My work has also been in some more institutional spots like OfficeOps, HERE Arts Center, City Without Walls, and MICA. + I like doing artist projects publicly and with theatre and music groups, including regular collaboration with Anti-Social Music from Merkin Hall to the Issue Project Room. Other installations/projections/projects have been at Artland Bar, Crow’s Pace, Matchless, Capone’s, Montrose Café, WOW Café, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, WestNorth Studio, with the LDC Garden Art Project, Bushwick Art Projects, the dumbo art under the bridge festival, and on various band posters, albums, roof-tops, walls, and web-spaces. www.scrapworm.info; www.scrapworm.wetpaint.com (public wiki)
SG: Where will it be seen next?
SW: I’ll be doing a “5th Day into 5th Night” discussion group on Sept. 6 at the Current Gallery associated with the Endwise show, and Mount Royal has a fall show coming up (both in Baltimore). I’ll have installations in the Pro Arts Jersey City Anchor Shows, “Ignite/Extinguish” and “Apocalypse wow” (September 21-October 20). A new piece will at the LivinGallery in Italy with the show “Uncomfortable Landscapes” (October) and I’ll be showing a video premiere with Anti-Social Music in NY for Warn Defever’s most recent ASM composition (December). My MFA thesis will be up in Baltimore at MICA (April 2008). I’ve worked with the musician Malcolm Rollick for a few years and will have a film short in the upcoming Clarisse McClellen project.
SG: What would your like your audiences to take with them from your work?
SW: It seems that sometimes we can’t see certain truths because of our built-up assumption lenses. I don’t expect to change people’s views, but a little nick in a window-pane spiders out in time. Then maybe, in each of our lives, a new worldview is possible. I hope my work to be but a catalyst for other people- as it is for me.
SG: What is your dream art assignment?
SW: My dream art assignment….I just have to keep going and see where it leads. I wish I could record my sleeping dreams sometimes. They become animated fields that my awareness can fly through when I’m deeply involved in a project. After effects is just not the same, but Wim Wenders already revealed the danger of such in Until the End of the World. Otherwise, I’d say something public- an adventure through underpasses, tunnels, abandoned buildings. It seems a wild dream to involve people in the experience of such sanctuaries because they are typically patrolled for ‘national security’ or pose liability risks!
SG: What’s your favorite color?
SW: Earthy green browns and shades of ash; faded iron ore-like sea green in decay is cool. I go for warm colors in fire, sunsets, and infrared telescopic images (reds-magentas), but I frequently work in black and white with spectrum-ranging vivid light projections (from lime green to safety orange).
SG: What book/magazines are you reading this week?
SW: The Unknown Spirit, Jean Charon; The Road, Cormac McCarthy; The Urgency of Change, Jiddu Krishnamurti; The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin; and the Maya/August issue of National Geographic. I like to get into a lot of different things at once.
SG: Ever do self portrait? Where is it now?
SW: A few, both literal and not– usually in times of crisis. A larger than life charcoal one is still on the wall at Scholes St.- naked, angry, and in mid-punch.
SG: So let’s end with your favorite place to hang.
SW: With my gardens in Baltimore and NY…. or by train tracks, landfills, cemeteries, and within other sad contrasts of life/nature against our mechanical systems– like witnessing swans slurping oil-coated tampons in Newtown Creek. Otherwise I’m embarking on urban archaeological adventures or at music shows with Jo Scari.
Topics: Artist Interviews, Paintings, Sprayblog |
August 14th, 2007 at 12:37 am
This is WILD!!!
August 20th, 2007 at 7:50 pm
Jiddu Krishnamurti ;
“There are three monks, who had been sitting in deep meditation for many years amidst the Himalayan snow peaks, never speaking a word, in utter silence. One morning, one of the three suddenly speaks up and says, ‘What a lovely morning this is.’ And he falls silent again. Five years of silence pass, when all at once the second monk speaks up and says, ‘But we could do with some rain.’ There is silence among them for another five years, when suddenly the third monk says, ‘Why can’t you two stop chattering?”
http://www.katinkahesselink.net/kr/jokes.html
http://seaunaluzparaustedmismo.blogspot.com/