“A lot of my pieces balance one force against another, such as balancing surface color against illumination.”

Interview by: Natalia Gonzalez Martin

Your practice involves public spaces, erasing, as you say the framework in which art is many times contained, how did this begin?

Many of my early works arose from quiet, subtle phenomena I had witnessed in the world—sunlight reflecting off a brightly colored object and changing the color of a room, for instance. I would try to recreate conditions to produce that phenomenon so as to present it for someone else to appreciate. But if I built an elaborate structure out of wood and electric lights, that setup would distract attention from the quiet moment I was trying to recreate. So I began looking for existing places where the arrangement I needed was already part of the environment so viewers could focus on my intervention itself.

It’s like a joke you tell in the flow of conversation, as opposed to one that requires an elaborate setup. The more laborious the setup, the greater the punchline must be in order to pay it off. A succinct remark in the perfect context is a more economical form of wit.

Could you tell us a bit about yourself and your background? Where did you study?

I grew up in rural Arkansas. My parents were late-generation, back-to-the-land, homeschooler hippies. We lived part of the time in a makeshift shack with a dirt floor overlaid with dry bricks, no electricity or running water. I split firewood for heat and drew water from a well with a bucket and a rope. 

I went to a small school in Illinois called Parkland College, before transferring to the Rhode Island School of Design to finish my undergraduate degree. My MFA is from Yale University, where I studied Painting and Printmaking.

In your work, the viewers are a big part of it, what are the different stages a piece goes through and when do you consider it complete?

It’s interesting you ask about completeness—I think more about the real-time encounter someone has with the work than about the work as an object. That makes the work more event-like, like a play or a game, than object-like. The physical work is like a prop, an apparatus to facilitate an experience. So in that sense some pieces may be always up for revision in order to serve that experience ever more effectively.

I keep a list of half-baked ideas that occur to me over time. Many of them are mutations of things I’ve worked on before. When I get serious about one of them, I’ll play around with small scale tests, just to understand it better. Some ideas are simply processes I’m curious about—I just tried freezing wet paper in liquid nitrogen to see if it would shatter. It does, sort of, but when it thaws it just looks torn. 

As I’m playing, I’m looking for some form of concise symmetry, where one aspect of a piece interlocks and makes sense with another. A lot of my pieces balance one force against another, such as balancing surface color against illumination. I try to draw as much as possible about a piece from its location, or the process of its making. I don’t like to throw in a lot of arbitrary elements. Completeness—or provisional completeness—happens when the piece appears to agree with itself and all the parts need to be there.

How does presenting your work in a gallery context affect it?

Gallery enclosures are of course one of the standard conventions by which Western culture invokes and focuses aesthetic attention. They function in part by demarcating the “sacred” art space from the “profane” space outside it. When circumstances allow, this is exactly the type of distinction I like to challenge. But even within gallery spaces, as within all environments, there are elements we lavish our attention upon at the expense of all the things we ignore—and my task is often simply to make that a little more difficult to do.

One of the primary challenges that comes with working within a gallery context is that viewers arrive fully expecting to have an aesthetic experience—indeed that is why they have come. But that expectation sometimes makes it difficult for me to create conditions for genuine surprise or discovery. My favorite spaces to work are those in which one isn’t expecting an aesthetic experience. I am thinking of public street places of course, but I also think about office corridors, elevator rides, bathroom breaks. Those places often have more idiosyncratic features for me to play off. 

Tell us a bit about how you spend your day / studio routine? What is your studio like?

My current studio is a room converted from a tiny apartment owned by my University. There’s not much space or light, but there is a kitchen! I don’t have much of a routine, unfortunately—I wish I did. Instead there’s a lot of chaos to swim against. Hopefully that’s a temporary state of affairs.

I teach, so a lot of day-to-day energy goes toward that. For site-specific work, I tend to approach from two directions. Sometimes I have ideas seeking sites, so I keep vigilant for when a suitable location presents itself. There are also sites seeking ideas—places for which I’ve been invited to propose an artwork. I’ll visit the site to observe what happens there, how people move, how it feels, etc. I try to spend as much time there as possible. I take a lot of photos and measurements, sometimes build a 3D model. Then I think about it a lot and see what occurs to me. I have a few of these going at the moment.

I would like to make more time for meditative play. I think that’s really important for seeing new possibilities. But once I have something to produce, I can enjoy getting into production mode. I love putting on a good podcast and settling in for a few hours of labor. 

You ask the audience to look twice and not take their surroundings for granted through subtle alterations to everyday spaces and objects, can you talk about the space that surrounds you and how you understand it?

The space that surrounds me is just so full of details! There is just so much information all the time—the only way to function is to use a tiny fraction of it. Sometimes I think about fictional characters like Sherlock Holmes, or Funes the Memorious from Borges—characters who are capable of noticing and remembering absolutely everything. It is impossible, of course—to make a map the same size as the territory is to make a useless map. Borges acknowledges this in his stories. Arthur Conan Doyle treats it like a super-power. 

We all tell ourselves a story about what the world is like, but I think there’s value in remembering that the story is a convenient fiction which doesn’t necessarily accord with reality in all cases. 

Your work questions the real, offering alternative versions of how we perceived, materials are not what they look like. Trompe l’oeil techniques have been used through history for different purposes, what is your approach for it in a contemporary setting?

For me, it’s about invoking the image-ness of the immediate environment. I want people to respond to the environment with the same sensitive attention we usually reserve for works of art. To that end, I want people to lose track of the distinction between the representation and the thing represented. That works best when the representation is an almost exact copy, rather than a stylized or impressionistic depiction.

I think of trompe l’oeil as originally about displaying an artist’s skill by making an art object so similar in appearance to an everyday object as to fool the observer’s eye. I’m more interested in reversing the polarity on that relationship—making the artwork appear identical to a mundane artifact in order to assert the aesthetic value of the mundane.

I’m interested in the philosophical question of the point at which the image become so similar to thing it depicts that simply becomes that thing.

Start with a humble item, like a piece of cardboard, and start making a copy. The more aspects of the original item you can faithfully imitate, the more skillful your image appears, and possibly more rare and elevated and valued. But the moment you succeed in imitating absolutely everything about the original, right down to the material that makes it up, you close the loop and your painstakingly crafted image becomes a mute and humble piece of the world again. 

The moment that loop closes fascinates me. It forms a short-circuit between the  representational and the concrete, for which we tend to have very different responses. I think it’s healthy to have your protocols for navigating the world challenged occasionally. So my work is sometimes giving you a moment in which you’re not sure what you’re seeing and you’re not certain how you should respond. 

What artwork have you seen recently that has resonated with you?

Rachel Whiteread’s retrospective at the Saint Louis Art Museum. I left energized and eager to make art—isn’t that the best type of response to a show?

I saw a number of interesting works at the Venice Biennale this summer. What resonated with me? Some plastic bags and soggy cardboard carved from marble by Andreas Lolis.  Also, I’ve always loved Tavares Strachan’s submerged figures. Interesting fact: he was my downstairs neighbor for a couple of years, though unfortunately I never got to know him well. 

I just saw a great piece by Gisela Colon at the Chazen Museum in Madison, Wisconsin. I expect to see another of hers in a few days in Bentonville, Arkansas, near where I live.

I’ve been watching old Steven Wright standup sets online. Some of his jokes are philosophically profound—like tying two knots in a rope and pulling to reveal there is no rope!

I saw some Mary Corse paintings for the first time in person at PACE London in July. I so wish I’d been aware of her work when I was younger!

Been admiring Susan Collis and Alicja Kwade’s work online for some time, though I’ve never had the pleasure of seeing their work in person. 

I’m really looking forward to seeing the Vija Celmins retrospective at the Met Breuer—I’m going in December. I’m making a pilgrimage. I am preparing myself.

Is there anything new and exciting in the pipeline you would like to tell us about?

I have a couple of site-specific projects in the works, but nothing I am at liberty to announce at the moment. I am looking forward to a month-long residency at MASS MoCA in the spring—I hope to make some new light works there.

dylandewitt.com

@dylanjdewitt

All images are courtesy of the artist
Publish date: 24/10/19