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COPYRIGHT 2006 C The Visual Arts Foundation
R: You used to do work on paper and now what do you do?
S: I'm still doing work on paper but I'm doing a lot of different things, a lot of photograms, photocollages, painting and drawings still, installation pieces or room pieces--pieces that are specifically adapted to exhibition space.
R: And what's the thing that ties it all together?
S: I guess the content that I'm working with is similar in different works that I make. But then I always come to a different sensibility in making it. Something might lend itself to becoming a photogram or something might become a silk painting. Or something might become an architectural sort of project. This comes usually within the process or even before the process, when I'm thinking about what I want to make: I want to work with this picture I found in the flea market; or I want to work with The Golden Notebook; or I want to work with Martha Graham. And these things are usually parts of bigger bodies of work. I usually have two or three bodies of work that are close together in content, and then I try to keep free with the technical aspects of making it. Because often I make things more than once, and the way I make it has to be very specific for it to function. I guess it's kind of about form and function too.
R: You know what you want, you know how to get it, and then you just--
S: Yeah, you just kind of pick up things along the way. Because the way something is made, or using different mediums, is a sensibility that comes with trying to be really clear about saying something in an unclear way that doesn't relate directly to the content. So my process is really necessary to show itself as content. This is something that merges together with the original starting point of the idea that I have.
R: Why do you want to say something clearly in an unclear way?
S: I mean, to say something in a non-narrative way, not one-to-one with the original--the original content or form, rather--because I often use a photo or make reference to something that already exists. I don't want to just simply appropriate--it just doesn't work for me to work with one-to-one appropriation.
R: This is something I noticed, for instance, in 6 or 7 Wolves (2005) (cut out version)--the wolves are depicted in an indistinct way.
S: Yeah.
R: And then also there's only five of them.
S: Yes. This is a good example. I can take you through the process this way. This was in Freud's case study of the Wolf Man, where the patient's obsessive-compulsive disorder was traced back to a dream he had explained in one of his sessions. He had this dream when he was about three or four, he said. He looked out his window and saw six or seven wolves and they looked like white huskies. They looked like white wolves with sheepdog tails; they had really bushy tails and they were all staring at him. And it was completely unheimlich, uncanny. And he did a drawing in one of his sessions with Freud and he only drew--There's five wolves, I think, in the photographs. He only drew five wolves in his drawing, but he said there were six or seven wolves. So because of this Freud went through I think...
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