Artist Emilie Halpern’s work is part nature, part human nature, referencing the emotions that are bound in the physical world around us. There is loneliness in stars. Loss in crumpled love letters. Though many of Halpern’s references are grandiose, the feelings they elicit are intimate. Base partner Geoff Cook, who met the artist at her NYC solo show half a decade ago, caught up with Halpern to discuss, it seems, whatever crossed his mind.
Base: What have you been working on lately?
Emilie Halpern: My art started to loosen up with my last body of work, exhibited in the spring at Project Row Houses in Houston. I got back to making things that were more ephemeral. There was a lightness in the choice of materials, but also in terms of the process. In the past, I would begin a body of work with extensive research, and then by the time I was making something, I was executing an idea that had been polished and chewed over for weeks or sometimes years.
I originally fell in love with art because I loved making it. There was so much pleasure in it for me. In high school you couldn’t pull me away from the art room. Every free second I had I was there. Somehow over the years I’ve made these choices about my process, and I robbed myself of the pleasure of making, and being in the studio. Being an artist is already hard enough and I was deciding to make it harder. Anna Helwing Gallery closing when it did was a blessing for me. It was time for me to change as an artist and I think I would’ve had a hard time doing that while in the public eye. A few months ago I did a residency at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. I had a studio with a black-and-white darkroom and a studio with a kiln, both in the middle of the woods, and I was in heaven. I got out of my head and back into the materials.
The photographs are black-and-white fiber prints of the woods, broken egg shells on a plate that look like the surface of the moon, the lake with swimmers, fingerprints on a found image, moth trails on the window. Very ethereal and poetic; it’s what was in front me, what caught my eye. I also made color photographs of cut-up found images; they’re like photographed collages but I move the parts around and make a series of images. They may turn into an animated film or a slide show or just a series of photographs. So that’s what happening in the studio right now, the photographed collages and the ceramics. Clay is my best friend, I can’t get enough. I’m doing pottery and making sculptures. It’s been two years now since I’ve gotten into ceramics, taking classes, learning as much as I can.
At MacDowell I made ceramic gold slab sculptures that are displayed with burnt wood, and now I’m working on these large porcelain crystalline sculptures. I’m waiting for the weather to cool down so that I can get my own kiln for my studio. The other dream is to build a darkroom in my house.
B: Whoa! Some of the MacDowell gold sculptures remind me of Superman’s crystal fortress! I guess that’s not really a question. Who’s the blonde girl in the b/w photo?
EH: Superman’s Fortress of Solitude is beautiful, but the real thing is even better.
I really want to go to Naica in Mexico to see those giant selenite crystals. I feel like there’s so many places like that, places I’m dying to see: the oyamel fir forests of central Mexico where the monarch butterflies hibernate, the Jelly Fish Lake in Palau, or the bioluminescent bay on Vieques Island in Puerto Rico where the water glows when you swim in it.
I need to write a grant and just go. The artist David Horvitz has a great piece like that where you pay for his trip to go to a small island in Japan where the sand is shaped like stars and he sends you an envelope full of star sand, or to Iceland and he sends you a photograph of the Aurora Borealis.
The blonde woman is from an Imogen Cunningham photograph from 1968. Her name is Phoenix. I found the image in a library book. Her body was covered in smudged fingerprints from where people had touched the image, so I photographed it.
B: Regarding the Houston show and the gold-colored hanging “sheet”… it reminds me in a way of the first time I saw your work, at your exhibition in NYC. You had a large, blue wall that changed from white to light blue and back again. What was that piece? Do you enjoy making these larger, installation-type works?
EH: The large, blue wall piece is titled “Overcast”. It’s made of sheets of thermochromic paper and heating wires from an electric blanket that are on a timer. The paper changes from blue to white when it’s exposed to heat, so it looks like clouds are appearing and disappearing. The first incarnation of “Overcast” was exhibited at the Armory Show in 2005, then I made a larger version for a group show at Tina Kim Fine Art in NY in 2006, and it was exhibited at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum in 2007.
Christopher Williams has this rule where he doesn’t make art that plugs in, and part of me wished I had listened to that when it came to this piece. There were all sorts of malfunctions and technical tweaking that had to happen with that piece over the years, but in the end it was worth it; it’s really a magical piece.
When I’m doing a solo exhibition, I tend to always have a larger piece that pulls the show together, that creates an anchor for the other works to float around. I like to work in a range of sizes from x-small to x-large. It’s like staring up at the night sky and you’re in the city—you just see a handful, but when you get out to the desert you realize those city stars are the extra-bright, super-close or super-huge stars, and the rest of the sky is filled with an infinite variety of stars, some tiny and faint, some somewhere in between. My work is like that desert night sky.
B: What is the greatest hurdle/challenge facing you today?
EH: To stay true to myself. To figure out what I want to do, and allow myself to do it.
B: Until she closed her gallery in 2008, you were represented for years by Anna Helwing. Do you have a new gallery that you work with?
EH: I declined an offer to work with a gallery that I didn’t feel was the right match, and I’ve done studio visits with other galleries but it’s not a priority to me right now. Life is long, I’m not in a hurry. I’m focusing my energy on the art, the business aspect will follow when the time is right.
B: What makes for a good gallery? What galleries do you admire in terms of curation and business?
EH: For me it’s about the art, not the money, and I admire the galleries that think the same way.
B: Do you feel there is a bias in the art world toward art made by men?
EH: There is in the world in general, and it would be naïve of me to think that the art world is the exception.
B: Who do you cite as your main influences?
EH: Yoko Ono & John Lennon, Carl Sagan, Bas Jan Ader, Félix González-Torres, Christopher Williams, Otto Piene, Terrence Malick, David Attenborough, Ray Bradbury, Camille Flammarion, and Nick Cave.
B: Quite a list. Do you see certain commonalities among them? Or are there things about each that you specifically admire?
EH: There are the visual artists (Yoko Ono, Bas Jan Ader, Félix González-Torres, Christopher Williams, and Otto Piene) who combine my love of the romantic, the ephemeral, the minimal, and the conceptual. There are the political activists (John Lennon and Carl Sagan) who tried to make the world a better place. The astronomers (Carl Sagan and Camille Flammarion) and science-fiction writer (Ray Bradbury) who dream of other worlds while putting ours into perspective. The naturalist (David Attenborough) who shares my awe of what’s right in front of us. The filmmaker (Terrence Malick) and songwriter (Nick Cave) who understand the potential for pain contained within love, and the multiple shades of sorrow and longing.
B: The “what is art” question… My maid once asked me about one of your pieces I own, Apollo, and why I had an empty frame on my wall. When I pointed out the speck of film from Apollo 12 and the emotions (namely, isolation) that the piece invokes, it gave her pause and forced her to reconsider the work. Longwindedly, my question is: How do you respond to conceptual art that requires explanation? Is it successful on all levels?
EH: I love that story, as a result of looking at the piece you guys totally had a moment. That’s my favorite part of conceptual art, when you’re going, “what the hell am I looking at?”—that’s the beginning of the conversation. So much can be communicated if the viewer simply comes closer. Whether it’s looking at a piece more attentively and noticing the details, or reading the title, or the press release, or the artist’s statement. I am a big fan of postponed pleasure. But I think an artwork should be generous even if it is delayed. An artwork starts to fail when it becomes so enigmatic it creates no longing or desire for more, when it leaves the viewer alienated.
B: What’s it like to be a Parisian in LA? Has where you live had an influence on your work? Do you identify yourself more with the U.S. or France?
EH: I was born in Paris, and I’m half French and half Japanese. I love Paris and I miss it. Going there is like going home; it’s very emotional and it’s my childhood. France is where I’m from and what I have most in common with my family, but I’ve lived most of my life in California. We moved to the San Francisco Bay Area when I was six years-old, and I went to a French-American school in San Francisco from first through twelfth grade. I didn’t really feel American until I went to college (UCLA), but there’s no doubt in my mind now that I’m a Californian. I would be happy living in a geodesic dome tree house in Big Sur for the rest of my life. Driftwood, humpback whales, the Pacific Ocean, sunsets… I would say that living in California has had a big influence on my art.
B: I didn’t know you were half Japanese!
EH: Yes, my mother is Japanese, born in Tokyo, but lived most of her life in Paris. Her father, Takanori Oguiss, was a painter who loved to paint Paris and Venice. There’s a museum that was founded in his honor in his hometown of Inazawa, Japan.
B: If you could choose any other career, regardless of whether you have the knowledge or talent, what would you do?
EH: Marine biologist on Lizard Island, in the Great Barrier Reef of Australia.
B: OK, that’s not very specific [laughs]. What interests you so much about marine biology? And why Lizard Island?
EH: I love the ocean and all the living things in it. I love being underwater. My mother nicknamed me Dolphin when I was a child, because if there was a body of water nearby I was in it. Besides art class, it was biology class that I most looked forward to when I was in high school. Animals, plants, rocks, the weather, the stars, the planets… I love the natural world.
But actually becoming a marine biologist seems like it would depress me. Our oceans are literally a giant toilet for all our crap and pollution. I just want to cry when I think about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. And then of course there’s global warming and over-fishing. Not that the Great Barrier Reef isn’t affected by all that, but its vast bio-diversity seems like it could easily take a lifetime to study. My husband and I were just in Australia this summer on our honeymoon, snorkeling the Great Barrier Reef and camping on Lizard Island. I never wanted to leave, it’s so beautiful there. There’s a research station on Lizard Island for studying the coral reef, operated by the Australian Museum, seems like it would be the perfect place to be.
Stay tuned next week for part II of this interview.
For more information on Emilie Halpern and her work go to her website.
