Jim Gaylord

Jim Gaylord is a visual artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His work has been exhibited at DC Moore Gallery, Pavel Zoubok Fine Art, Jeff Bailey Gallery and Gregory Lind Gallery, among other international venues. He is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Berkeley Art Museum and the West Collection. Jim received his MFA from the University of California at Berkeley and has completed residencies at the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. He has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Joan Mitchell Foundation and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.

Statement
My recent work grew out of a response to the physical characteristics of the heavy watercolor paper I’ve been using over the past ten years. As I cut up and layered the paper together, the surfaces gradually began to build up in three-dimensional space. Light and shadows cast by the raised areas soon became as important as the colors painted with gouache. Now, treating the work as something between painting and sculpture, I’ve looked toward the tradition of bas relief. The depth and contours of a figure are communicated sparingly and efficiently in space while ultimately operating on the picture plane. With this in mind, I’m focusing on minute (sometimes microscopic) features of the body, isolating and reducing them to almost architectural forms and presenting them in specific yet open-ended ways.

Interview with Jim Gaylord

Questions by Sonja Teszler

Hi Jim, and lovely to virtually meet you! Could you first talk a bit about your background – how you got interested in making art, where you studied and how it shaped your practice?
Nice to meet you, too, Sonja! I grew up in rural North Carolina where my first exposure to making art was through watching my mom work in her ceramics studio. With her help, I got involved in all kinds of arts and crafts projects as a small child. I made dioramas and hand puppets and recreated things from my dreams out of felt and magic marker.

My family later moved to a small college town, where I spent a lot of time painting alone in my bedroom. I got a summer job as a scenic painter for the local university theatre, which helped to bring me out of my shell. I worked with theatre artists from New York and all over, and art majors from the university. Even though I was still in high school, I became immersed in art school college life.

When I did go to college (at UNC Greensboro) I majored in Film Production because I thought it would be a practical career path. I also took a number of art classes, but my plan was to work in the stop-motion animation industry. I moved to San Francisco where I worked briefly at an animation studio and other odd jobs, but ended up returning to my first love of painting.

I earned my MFA at Berkeley, which was a small program, but everyone got full fellowships and huge studios on a nature preserve. A lot of great artists came through, like Vincent Fecteau, Julie Mehretu, Laura Owens and Amy Sillman (who told me I should move to New York as soon as possible, so I did).

What do you think makes abstract art relevant today? You’re tapping into a quite robust tradition – what drew you to it and have you been conscious of any challenges?
When abstraction works, it helps us understand the world in ways we can’t always put into words. It can transcend a singular moment or interpretation. I’m interested in art that doesn’t reveal its mysteries all at once, but keeps bringing you back to discover something new each time.

My biggest conceptual dilemma lately has been figuring out if I’m still a painter. I still feel like one, even though most of my recent work isn’t actually painted. I don’t consider myself a “paper artist” because my primary interest is in picture-making within the historical context of painting. And even though I sometimes secretly have the urge to work on canvas again, I think there is still a lot of territory to explore in what I’m currently doing.

I’ve read some of your exhibition texts and you seem to be drawing on a lot of sources, including psychology, mythology, popular culture and so on. Can you talk about these and how you usually go about your research and creative process?
I’ve always thought of source material in terms of collage, combining found images to get ideas for paintings. This led me to the work of the German Dadaists like John Heartfield, Hannah Höch and Kurt Schwitters, whose appropriation of propaganda and mass media resonated with me. For a while I was lifting imagery from American action movies for my work, which are a kind of propaganda if you think about it.

This film still series spanned several years until I decided to reevaluate everything I was doing – my mid-art-life crisis. I let go of external sources altogether to try to isolate the aspects of my work that were the most personal. Looking at what was around me, the pile of paper scraps I had accumulated from my cutouts became the key. These discarded shapes seemed random but also specific, like words in a story only I could put together. The small compositions I made with these scraps became the source material for larger, more complex works. These, in turn, yielded more scraps, and so a symbiotic relationship emerged. The best part was that I felt like I had thrown away a cheat sheet and began relying on my own instincts.

I really like your titles, they’re quite playful and poetic – ‘Musical Spine’, ‘Meme’ etc. To me they add a lot of conceptual dimension (even a bit of a postmodern twist) to how one might look at or think about the artworks – do they point to the subject driving the work throughout or do you think of them post-creation?
Almost all of the titles come after I’ve finished the work. I choose turns of phrase that feel to me how the piece looks, trying to match the interplay between mystery and specificity within the image.

Musical Spine is a large black and white piece that reminded me of those old cartoons where skeletons play each other’s bones like a xylophone. There are lots of stretchy appendages, like body parts and limbs harmonizing together.

Meme is part of a series I did based on small anatomical forms within the body. It references the structure of a bacteriophage virus – I was thinking of duplication, like in viruses, and how the phrase “going viral” can refer to images, such as memes.

You refer to the shapes in your canvases as „bodies” – do you think of them as abstracted body shapes or fragments of the body as a subject?
The series I previously mentioned is only direct abstraction from bodies that I’ve done recently – a group of works I called Pairs. I was thinking about figurative painting, but on a minute (sometimes microscopic) level: the musculature around the eyes, the hemispheres of the brain, a mustache. And I think abstraction always comes down to figuration anyway. We want to see the relationships between abstract forms in human terms, like the way we look for faces in inanimate objects. I think a lot about the bodily and architectural aspects in my work, and the way architecture imitates the anatomy of bodies.

You described your development into making your recent, more sculptural paintings as a very organic and intimate process, growing out of your 10-year long practice working with heavy watercolor paper. Can you talk about any techniques, themes or artists you’re looking into within the relief tradition?

The more I worked with the layering process and building up the surfaces, the more architectural the work became. Living in New York City, I’m surrounded by iconic buildings. My dentist is located in Rockefeller Center, so each time I go I try to spend some time with the Art Deco reliefs and sculptures there. Elements of them have made their way into my work over the years – the figures, themselves, seem architectural to me – like a perfect integration of the body and the facade.

The exhibition of Isamu Noguchi’s designs for “Contoured Playground” at the Noguchi Museum last year also left an impression on me. His proposed “compact landscape for freeform play” was never constructed, but the scale models on view were compelling works on their own. Relief sculptures in bronze and plaster seemed to reveal the curves of a figure emerging from the land.

Given your abstract practice and tendency to move from flat to sculptural paintings, I can’t help but think of Frank Stella in relation to your work. He eventually gravitated towards 3-D printing and various technologies, as do many others working in a similar vein - have you considered using such methods?
I think a lot about materials and whether I really need to limit myself to paper and an X-acto knife. But the collage process is a big part of how I create my imagery – I’m constantly adding and taking away until it’s right. The finished works may look refined, but I have piles of rejected shapes that didn’t work out and I often end up cutting out and replacing entire sections. Each one is a struggle, but I think that’s the difference between art and craft. I’m open to different materials for large-scale projects where paper isn’t practical, but it would be important to find a way to preserve the hand-made quality, like with casting, woodworking or stained glass.

Can you think of an artist or artwork (whether it’s Fine Art, design or even a building, film or piece of music) that has a permanent spot on your inspiration board (has been a lasting influence on your work)?
Aside from the architectural influences I mentioned, the source I’ve drawn the most inspiration from recently is the work of Louise Nevelson. Her compartmental assemblages of wooden shapes are like stacks of windows into harmonious worlds. And the monochrome of their surfaces simultaneously unifies them while opening them up in endless directions. Her mastery of balance and formalism advanced the traditions of abstraction, sculpture and collage all at once.

You use words such as „sparing” and „efficient” when you’re writing about the relationship between figures and space in your works. What makes „efficient” space in your opinion, both within the canvas and in a broader sense, space in general?
There’s a lot of editing involved in my process. One reason I work with collage is because things move around so much before I finally commit. In abstraction, you’re constantly figuring out the rules as you go along, and I’m learning how to keep only what’s essential, while cutting out the extra stuff. It comes down to formalism – do all the parts work together, or is one just getting in the way? One could also apply this idea to the spaces we live and work in. I keep my studio fairly tidy, aside from the chaotic piles of paper scraps on my floor and worktable, and that helps me to keep focused.

In one of your other interviews I read you’re interested in public art and potentially making your own public work – that’s interesting because many people are advocating the importance of public art in the times of COVID. I was wondering what you thought of that, as well as your thoughts on public art and its relationship to shaping urban space in general?
In one way it makes sense to think about public art right now since most of our private cultural institutions are shuttered. But on the other hand, public art is so often a communal experience since it’s found in places where people congregate. There are many great artworks in New York City’s subway stations, but most of us aren’t seeing them right now as we stay at home. And gathering in our parks and courtyards can literally be a public health risk. If the current situation persists for long, one could imagine city planners removing benches from these sites and clearing large spaces around them to keep people moving at a safe distance. But I really hope the pandemic doesn’t permanently alter the flow of life through our cities.

How’re you coping with the ongoing crisis in terms of creativity and productivity, and what are you working on at the moment?
I realize I’m very lucky I can still walk to my studio and work right now. A lot of artists I know can’t get to their studios safely at all and have set up makeshift workspaces at home.

A sense of routine has helped, and when I’m working it forces me to stay in the moment. My perception of time is totally warped, though, like one endless week. I’ve been trying to set more attainable goals for myself by making smaller pieces I can finish more quickly.

Something I’ve been thinking a lot about is how most of us are only seeing art online right now (and each other), and we’ve become more dependent on social media than ever. I hope that when this is over we can all collectively take a step back from our online lives and find a deeper appreciation for in-person experiences – and life in general.

Do you have anything exciting coming up?
I’m honored to be participating in the very first show in Maake’s new project space. It’s a group show curated by Emily Burns and Deanna Evans, featuring artists Heidi Norton, Nickola Pottinger, Lina Puerta, Winnie Sidharta and me. Like so many other shows, it has been postponed indefinitely due to the pandemic, but it’s something to look forward to.

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