Chris Bogia

Chris Bogia received his MFA from Yale University, New Haven, CT and his BA from New York University, NY. Bogia was a recent recipient of the Jackson Pollock-Lee Krasner Foundation Grant, a Queens Council for the Arts, New Works Grant, as well as a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Artist Community Engagement Grant. He also was an artist in residence at the Queens Museum Studio Program between 2017–2018. Recent exhibitions include, Grizzly Grizzly, Philadelphia, PA; The Bureau of General Services: Queer Division, Bravin Lee, Kate Werble, Spring/Break, the New Museum, New York; Mrs., Maspeth; Ortega y Gasset and BRIC, Brooklyn, NY. Bogia is also the co-founder and director of Fire Island Artist Residency, the world’s first LGBTQ artist residency. His work was recently reviewed by Dawn Chan for Artforum.

Statement
Chris Bogia’s work reflects his ongoing interest in interior design and decorative art. Domestic objects lived with over time or desired from afar can be charged with personal meaning that often exceeds their intended use. How can that meaning be visualized? Bogia employs many of the strategies and materials used by interior designers, but unburdened by a client or a room the work can refer to spaces both physical and psychological. As Bogia says, “My work sits in a queer space between contemporary art and decorative art, courting and resisting both world’s simultaneously". Bogia’s practice also includes social practice and activism: he is the co-founder and director of the Fire Island Artist Residency, the world’s first LGBTQ artist residency. He is currently an artist in residence at the Queens Museum. Recent sculptures suggest furniture and decor in both scale and surface. Lacquer finishes, walnut veneer, grass cloth wallpaper, and folksy hand-laid yarn mixed with other decorative objects like scented candles and West German pottery suggest an abstraction of a specifically urbane kind of domestic interior. The modern comfort and beauty expressed in these works is precarious: the sculptures are precisely designed to be held together by only balance and tension, suggesting that even private personal utopias are fragile and easily disrupted. A selection of drawings from an ongoing series titled “Plants Vs Zombies” illustrate these ideas further. In these works, an ongoing conflict between two forces is depicted within the same domestic archway. The title, the flatness and even the repetitive “level design” of the archway are all inspired by Bogia’s lifelong interest in video games. Newer works from the Plants Vs Zombies series take on a much larger scale. Bridging a gap between the works on paper and Bogia’s sculptures, these new large scale “tapestry paintings" are rendered in hand laid yarn, engaging in a dialogue with the current cultural trend of indigenous people’s tapestries in both the design and art worlds. Bogia has been making yarn tapestries since the 90s without the aid of foreign weavers, assistants of any kind or machinery in an entirely self-taught process that involves laying each strand of yarn out by hand, gluing it, and trimming it in place.

Interview with Chris Bogia

Questions by Emily Burns

Hi Chris, can you tell us a bit about your background and how you decided to pursue a path as an artist? Do you have any early creative memories? Are any of your family members artists?
I am from a big Italian/German middle-class family from Wilmington Delaware. My dad was a salesman before taking over running a bakery for my mom’s family. I am the baby of my family by 12 years. I basically grew up in a big empty house that my siblings were all moving out of to begin their adult lives. I had a lot of time to myself, and a natural inclination towards making art. My mom was really supportive and took me to Michael’s regularly for craft kits and art supplies. I also played with Legos and those nice Scandinavian wood building blocks all the time (and now I get told my work resembles them which is not intentional but definitely makes sense). My earliest ideas of what “art” was came from seeing my mom sew and embroider, and seeing finished projects around the house reinforced this idea that art was decorative and for the home. It was something families could make for themselves. As far as choosing to be an artist? I was good at singing, video games, and art. I picked art because I hated singing competitively, and I didn’t think video games were a real thing I could do as a job. Boy was I stupid! And here we are…

Your work is inspired by your love of interiors. Where did this interest come from initially? Have you worked as an interior designer in the past? Do you enjoy designing and outfitting our own space in addition to the influence this field has had on your practice as an artist? 
I love interiors! I love textiles, color, decorative art, furniture, pottery—all that stuff. I grew up in my grandmother’s house that she had decorated in the 70s: Bright shag carpets in purple, blue, and fuchsia, velvet furniture (without plastic on it thank goodness), graphic floral wallpapers, figurines in china cabinets, glass knick-knacks from Italy. Nothing was left its natural color, and there were seductive textures everywhere. I played at ground level among the thick pile and I think it all just seeped into me and imprinted on me what “home” was. As I got older I just keyed into interiors as a way of understanding the people in them. I recently saw a candid picture of Joni Mitchell dancing in a domestic setting on her recent birthday and I was obsessed with trying to figure out if it was her home. My friend and fellow Joni fan pointed out that there were paintings on the wall she had done and all I could think about was flying through her house like a drone and just looking at her stuff. I felt like I could know her better than talking to her if I could just examine all of her belongings and décor choices. It’s like when you see a person’s bookshelf or album collection and try and size them up, but more unguarded and personal. As you can probably guess, I enjoy decorating and nesting, though I would say I don’t change things around much once I’ve made those decisions.

Your sculptures are comprised of many different materials including yarn, steel, wood and more. I find the experience of seeing the different textures on the flat planes of the surfaces of the forms to be incredibly visually seductive. What is the experience you hope to evoke in the viewer with these juxtapositions? 
I am always aiming to seduce. I come from a place of thinking of artwork as something to live with in a private domestic space. Therefore, I have to give my viewer visual pleasure. I think I tap into my own lifetime of observations to create something that functions in the tradition of what we culturally consider beautiful while pushing the work to explore places where more layers of meaning and less comfortable feelings can also reside and reveal more slowly.

You previously focused on installation and performance work—When did you begin making work in this way? What inspired the shift?
For about 9 years I’d been making these installation type pieces, I called them Shrines—they were mash-ups of domestic objects, forms relating to furniture, store window displays, centerpieces made from yarn tapestry-like panels featuring album covers or mimicking the mandalas found in decorative pillows. I took photos of myself and others “activating” them, and I showed the photos as separate works. These pieces were very hard to make and would take me months to learn new materials just to finish a small element, and I wasn’t moving through my ideas fast enough. I felt a burden to make each work function as a “flagship” carrying every idea about art, my own identity, and decoration my practice explored. This was partly a reaction to being an emerging artist and only getting a few opportunities a year to show work in public. I needed to give anyone who saw a group show I was in the “full Chris Bogia experience”. I really loved those installations, but I also felt constrained by them. I was most interested in design and decoration, but I was afraid to create simpler works that solely embraced those interests from a fear of being thought of as stupid or shallow. I started getting inspired by peers like Matt Connors and Keltie Ferris who were queer and making abstract works as well as the writings of Chicago art historian David Getsy who was writing about a new kind of queer abstraction. It was a window into a new possibility of making, and then it became a door and I walked through it. I started experimenting with abstraction using the same principles of design and decoration that I had been working with in the previous installations, and the work just flowed out of me. Narrative and illustration has been creeping into the work intuitively since the first abstractions, and I like the direction it’s currently taking me.

How have textiles inspired your current you use tactile, textured materials and surfaces?
I started working as a shop boy for the designer Todd Oldham when I was in college at NYU in the late 90s. Working there had been a secret goal of mine since watching him on MTV’s House of Style in high school. Todd’s textile surfaces used craft techniques like crewel embroidery, tie dye, beading, and cross stitch in a way that felt glamorous and powerful and far beyond their historical roots in arts and crafts which was so freeing and empowering for me. Here was a kindred spirit (and incidentally a fellow dog lover, libra AND huge Joni Mitchell fan) who liked the things I liked and made a massive wonderful career out of exploring it. I never wanted to be a fashion designer, but so much of my early inspiration came from those early experiences in that shop on Wooster street.

In a previous interview you have said that when you get stuck you say: “what would I want to hang over the bed”, and I make whatever that is.” I have often thought this exact thing. Can you tell us a bit more about how this functions for you?
I think to get to the heart of what inspires MY work, I have to make something that has enough visual pleasure, and enough meaning to be placed in a home’s most precious place. Over-the-couch comes close, but that’s the work you show your invited guests. The bedroom is private. You don’t have to please anyone but yourself. That mental exercise helps me shake off stale ideas and be really honest with myself about what I want to be looking at—and making—now.

I am always fascinated by the art object's journey beginning in the studio, passing through the gallery, and then eventually, often to a domestic space, and the works relationship to that process when its first made. How does domestic space influence the work? Is that just a starting point, in particular when the work is large-scale, like your large sculptural work?
Domestic space is the subject I keep going back to. It started as installation works like the shrines, moved to abstracted domestic materials in the balancing wall works, and more literally depicted in illustrative watercolors. Sometimes, like in the watercolors I am depicting a literal window into a domestic world, and sometimes, especially with the larger works, I am bringing that abstracted domestic world into our real one. Especially in the more abstract works, the psychological domestic world is what is being conjured as much as the material one. Most recently I have been making bonsai trees in the geometric style I’ve been working in. Those pieces, usually made to scale with their real botanical counterparts are almost a way of blurring the reality between the illustrated domestic world in my work and the real domestic world. Rather than an artwork depicting a bonsai tree, they are bonsai trees and can function like a real one as much as they are a sculpture. 

You have spoken about how the ‘perfect’ room can't necessarily protect us from the imperfections of being human, flawed relationships, and even being alone with our own thoughts. I often think about how humans often pursue a place where perfection and beauty surround us, while we are well aware of how objects alone can’t really make us happy. Yet—we can’t help but pursue this beauty and it certainly does feel good when a room looks great! I often feel caught in this web. Is this one type of tension you are interested in exploring in your work? 
Humans are wired to need shelter of some kind, so exploring the universal tension one feels in a domestic setting, or the urge to make a domestic space comfortable in spite of that tension is something that most humans can relate to. Coming from a family of folks who aren’t artistic and living in a world of people who have not received art education but who I want to relate to, I feel a certain responsibility when I choose themes and imagery in my work. I am not interested in communicating in a visually obtuse way. If I have to explain to someone what they are looking at, then I have failed. If it’s abstraction and the title wasn’t enough to nudge the viewer someplace where they can be engaged, same problem. I also feel this way about Halloween costumes. If someone asks me what I’m “supposed to be”, I missed the point of the holiday. I don’t know how to make clever or ironic or purely conceptual feel generous or accessible when it comes to visual art so I avoid it.

To respond to your point about objects and their relationship to happiness, I say forget what they told us (me) in Catholic School! After 12 years of being told “worshipped objects” are “false gods”, all the while falling in love with books, albums, decorative pillows, and fashion and having those things guide me as I pursued my passions, I can honestly say that things can not only make you VERY happy, they can save your life! It’s the quality of the thing, and one’s relationship and desire for it that can become compromised or wayward, not the thing itself.

You have created a truly unique language that appears almost like video game characters or cartoons that have come to life in 3D. How did you begin working in this way? Are there any visual references that have inspired your aesthetic?
I am a lifelong gamer from the early days of Pong and Atari. When I was young, I struggled with being a sissy. I hated playing and watching sports, and didn’t have a lot in common with other boys save for video games. Although I enjoyed playing video games, it was the passive reassurance of knowing I was doing a “boy thing” and excelling at it that made it comforting on a higher level. Getting lost in those flat side-scrolling landscapes in the role of “conqueror” was intoxicating—even soothing. It still is, lol. Although the medium still has tons of progress to make, it’s amazing that I can now pick up a major Game-Of-The-Year AAA studio title like The Last of Us by Sony or Blizzard’s Overwatch and play as a scripted gay character (even if I am just shooting things in the face). If only blockbuster films could be as progressive…

It’s always been more subconscious, but the flatness in my work, the use of symbols (hand, bowl of fruit, bonsai tree etc.), and the repeated motifs of bracketing environments with archways and frames are easily tracible to the visual language of golden age arcade games I spent so many hours with.

You co-founded the Fire Island Artist Residency, the world’s first LGBTQ artist residency. Can you tell us more about the residency and your involvement in starting the residency? You are also currently the director—what are the goals of the residency moving forward?
I always balanced a full-time job and my studio work. At the time FIAR was founded, I was working as the academic administrator in NYU’s art department (where I’d studied and where I now teach). It was a great job, the people were like family, but I felt stuck. I wouldn’t apply to residencies because I couldn’t take the time off to do them. I was becoming scared that my chances of being an artist were slipping away. At the same time, I had begun to visit Fire Island, the world’s oldest LGBTQ town according to local author and historian Esther Newton. The first day I was there I had the idea for an LGBTQ artist residency. It was a fantasy—something I wished I could participate in—not found. There were no other residencies in the world for LGBTQ artists and I’d never had many queer peers in my years of art school (which is pretty strange really because I went to very liberal schools). It took the nudging of my curator friend and FIAR co-founder Evan Garza, as well as my partner (really the unsung “third” co-founder) to really get it going. I took out $6000 of my savings, rented a beach house, and the rest was history. Eight summers of FIAR later the organization is both an officially registered non-profit artist residency that brings LGBTQ artists together for four weeks of intimate art making, idea exchange, and public programming AND a social practice component of my total work as an artist. I didn’t always see the latter, but after Evan moved on and I evaluated the personal financial sacrifices I was making to keep FIAR going during difficult times (our low-cost rental burned down during the off season with all our stuff in it!!!) I came to the realization that both my studio work and FIAR were my combined practice. Since then it’s been an amazing journey, and I can’t wait to make it to ten years of FIAR in 2020! In the future I’d like FIAR to acquire a permanent residence on the island so we can expand the kinds of practices we accept include writers, drag, theater, dance, film, and music!

You make drawings as part of your Plants vs Zombies series. Does drawing play a part in your sculptural work as well?
My practice is totally grounded in drawing. I am SO not the artist who takes materials and just starts “making”. I do preliminary sketches, color studies, finished renderings, digital mock ups, cardboard models... I work like a designer. Every sculpture I make has a corresponding drawing made before or even sometimes after. It’s a way of recording as well as planning, but finished drawings must also be able to stand on their own.

Are there any other themes that are at the forefront of your mind right now?
Not so much themes but things. The illustrations of Erté, gear from fantasy video games like shields and swords, fountains, mazes, Greek gods and monsters, and as always, Joni Mitchell.

What is a typical day like for you? |
Ooof, who answers THIS honestly? Get ready. Lol. I wake up, walk my dog, make coffee, masturbate, make a ham, egg, and swiss on an English muffin, then I do things like email or prepare for my class. If it’s NOT a day I am teaching sculpture at NYU I head to my studio in the Bronx. Studio time is like this forever ongoing sinewave of listless procrastination and lethargy (while thinking of what I might want to start making) followed by long stretches of productivity and often if there are deadlines, anxiety. I mean when it’s good it’s a wonderful time where I feel most happy and at peace. Fortunately, usually it’s good. When I come home around 6:30–7pm I hang with my partner, eat and watch soothing things like British Bake Off or Drag Race. He goes to bed early, and then I like to smoke pot and play video games for a couple hours. Then I plug in my C-pap machine because I snore and conk out.

Can you tell us about your studio? What do you need to be productive there? Does it lean more toward an organized and designed domestic interior or more toward a utilitarian workspace?
I got a studio a year ago in the Bronx, after a decade long stretch in Long Island City and an incredible two years as an artist in residence at the Queens Museum. It’s big, cheap, sunny, and comfortable (it even has a kitchen and a private bathroom!). It’s also the first studio I haven’t had to share or be mindful of with regards to being in an institutional setting. I can blast music and smoke cigars all I want and walk around in my undies when it gets too hot in the summer. It’s the best studio I’ve ever had (except when I have to move heavy things up and down two flights of stairs). The Sinewave of productivity I previously described influences what my studio looks like as it shifts. When I am in a “thinking” place, i.e.: lazy and feeling meh, I clean, organize, and try to create the “studio fantasy” and that helps me want to be there and to get motivated. I burn incense, water my plants, play with the dog. There is a living room sitting area I hang out in. Then when I get busy I turn into a major slob. I leave tools where I last use them, never sweep up, forget to close windows before storms, become unable to find the simplest things, and focus only on what I am making. Then the work goes out into the world and the cycle begins anew, lol. Sounds fun right? Interns apply!

Do you prefer to be energetic and upbeat or calm and reflective when working? How do you cultivate the mood in the studio?
Sounds of my studio: Mamas and the Papas, Neil Young, Broadcast, Dirty Projectors, Joni, The Breeders, Imperial Teen, classical choral music, Tori, NPR. You get the idea. Fairly Chill. Very Gen X.

What is one of the most exciting or interesting exhibitions you have seen recently?
I just saw Pierre Cardin at the Brooklyn Museum and a historic show of art from Kyoto at the Met. I hate being that person that takes a million pics at shows, but I took a million pics at both. Textures, colors, design, super specific visions—I was majorly inspired by both.

Who are some of the artists you look at most often? 
I LOVE rooting for the home team! For me that means artists I’ve met through schooling like Hein Koh, Damien Davis, Mamiko Otsubo, Dave Hardy, Rachel Mason—folks I met through FIAR like Matt Connors, Keltie Ferris, Travis Boyer, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Joel Otterson, Jack Pierson, Marta Lee, Paolo Arao, Dominic Nurre, Babirye Leilah, Leeanne Maxey (I mean there are way too many to mention and I love so many like family: Hi FIAR FAMILY!), mentors like Jim Hodges, Nayland Blake, and Marlene McCarty, and just so many more folks I fell in love with on Instagram and later in person like Matthew F Fisher and Robin F Williams, and of course all of the artists that I show with at Mrs. I can’t wait to see the new show of photo-based work by Sarah Palmer about to go up this weekend. Also, I don’t know her at all but Allison Schulnick - damn woman. Oh, and Liz Craft. Amazing.

What’s up next for you? 
I need to get my ass in gear and start making new shit! Lazy time is over.

Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us!

To find out more about Chris and his work, check out his website.