Rachel Grobstein

Rachel Grobstein is a Philadelphia-based visual artist. She is currently an artist in residence at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, NY. Other awards and residencies including a Roswell Artist-in-Residence Fellowship, a Jentel Foundation residency, a Hammersley Foundation Grant, a Studios of Key West residency, and a Vermont Studio Center Full Fellowship and Residency supported by the Joan Mitchell Foundation. She has had solo exhibitions at Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Next to Nothing Gallery, the Roswell Museum and Art Center, and This Friday or Next Friday in Brooklyn, NY. Other exhibitions include Ulterior Gallery and Galleri Urbane. She received her MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and her BA in Philosophy and Visual Arts from Bowdoin College.

Statement
I create miniature sculptures and paintings based on objects from everyday life, inviting close scrutiny through a radical scale shift. My sculptures catalogue a daily world where domestic routine meets consumer culture and personal history. I recently completed a series of miniature tableaus based on the objects found on people's bedside tables. I began by asking friends for pictures of their nightstands, and then expanded the series to include people across the country. I'm interested in how these collections speak to universal themes, from memory and self care to sexual identity and dream life, and also create complicated individual portraits. I have recently begun a new series of miniature sculptures based on roadside memorials. As private markers in public spaces, these transient monuments confront us with mortality in everyday contexts, functioning as anonymous tributes, expressions of love, and collective gathering spaces for negotiating grief and trauma. I use photographs that I've taken as the basis for my sculptures, layering tribute upon tribute. I’m interested in how the memorials facilitate a dialogue between the dead and the living in dynamic ways.

Interview with Rachel Grobstein

Questions by Maura Clark

Hi Rachel, thanks for taking the time to talk. Could you start by telling us a little about your background and why you wanted to become an artist?
I was always easily transported by stories and loved making stuff as a kid. I’d get immersed in projects, especially drawing and writing. My parents were both biology professors, and I was raised with a pretty fluid, non-hierarchical sense of what was interesting and worthy of attention. We’d pick up rocks to see what lived underneath, and their labs were full of bonkers/heavenly things like Hubble telescope printouts, brains in jars, and chicken embryos in incubators where you could see the heartbeat. My mom spent a fair amount of time making slides under a microscope, so I’m sure my patience and affinity for microcosms came from her. I wanted to be an artist of some kind because of the way I felt when I made and experienced certain artwork as a kid—I remember an early trip to see Henry Darger at the Folk Art Museum and feeling physically like I was in the presence of something totally out of this world, almost devotional. But it was mystifying for a while what an artist’s career path actually looked like. My early pantheon of heroes had a lot of writers and filmmakers in it—I think because my parents were academics that felt somehow more attainable. I studied philosophy in college as well as visual art because I had the impression it was a way to be professionally curious, but it gradually became clear to me that I process things most naturally by making stuff with my hands. After undergrad I started doing illustrations for an online children's book company, moved to New York and met some formative friends who could look you in the eye and say they were an artist, which was super impressive. Gradually the logistics demystified, and at a certain point I decided no more futzing around, it was time to go for it. Several false starts later, I did.

Your background is in painting, but you are often working in sculpture, do you feel there is a boundary between the two disciplines or is it malleable? At what point did you start to transition from painting to sculpture?
The conversation definitely shifts between the two disciplines but I think of the boundary as malleable for sure. Early on I was attracted to experimenting with the sculptural aspect of painting, cutting my paintings out of paper and mounting them straight in the wall with pins to evoke natural history displays. I loved the optical effect, the low relief compression of space and the architectural dimension of shadows. I started making sculpture pretty soon after grad school, I think because it allowed me to have a more direct conversation about the things I was interested in. When I was in school, questions about the relationship between the structure and content of my paintings dominated. Right now, I love having both modes of working which often feed off one another. My work in sculpture has very strict parameters for a given project, and painting allows for more improvisation and networks of association. 

You often work on a small scale, when did you begin to make objects in miniature?
I’ve always painted on a small scale—I bought my first box of gouache in my early twenties  shortly after discovering Amy Cutler, Marcel Dzama and Shahziah Sikander, and remember feeling like it was a homecoming. It naturally happened that as the work got more detailed, it also got smaller. In grad school I remember watching people interact with work of various scales in my studio and noticing that with really intimately scaled work, they would get quiet and lean in. They seemed to bring this intense focus to looking, which of course I loved and wanted to embrace as much as I could. The Otherwordly show in 2011 at the Museum of Arts and Design with Patrick Jacobs, Amy Bennett and other fantastic artists was powerful permission for me in terms of showing how much great thoughtful work was being made on a miniature scale. Once it became clear I was flirting with miniature for reals I started to think more specifically about whose work I was drawn to and why. Encyclopedic projects like Charles Ledray’s street vendor collections, Joe Fig’s catalogues of artists’ work spaces, and later Frances Lee Glassner’s insanely wonderfully Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death were all formative. I made my first body of work in miniature sculpture around 2014 or 2015, mostly boxes all made from gouache on paper, which came directly out of my go-to painting materials.

The attention to detail at such a small scale is incredible—you must possess incredible patience. How long does it take you to make a single object?
I never know if my answer to this question is disappointing or not! An object that involves a lot of tight painting like a book can take 6 or 8 hours, but I can make say, six Sharpies in 45 minutes. Ghost Bike (Varick Ave) took about a solid week. I’m not after replication—I discovered early in my miniature journey that getting the essential gesture is more important than packing in too much visual information. It’s a gut thing—the sculptures are often a little wonky, and honestly often less is more at that scale. That said, I get so excited by tactile and textural challenges—like I know the feeling of a ripped thin metallic Doritos bag so well, or a bent book spine or staple embedded in cardboard, and I really want that specific material quality to come across, so if I can’t get it, I’ll remake it again and again.

I love how you view the bedside table as an amalgam of personal items we collect both intentionally and unintentionally. Do you think that this has caused you to look at other spaces in the home differently as well?
For sure. I actually went through a period of infatuation with kitchen junk drawers and medicine cabinets a few years back before I started looking at bedside tables, the recipe being places in the home that tend to be familiar/almost universal repositories of some kind, but everyone has their own idiosyncratic version. At the time I felt like the objects in those spaces were too homogenous though, or told too narrow a story -- you could get only so much out of a Papa John’s magnet, and it felt too invasively stark to just zero in on someone’s pharmaceutical collection. Right now, what’s actually most on my radar are dashboards, which I’ve been photographing for a while now… for some people it’s a home on the road, an archeological treasure trove of all sorts of fascinating stuff.

Are there any favorite objects that you realized someone had collected on their nightstand?
A friend sent me a close-up shot of 3 cat whiskers he’d tucked into a candleholder. Early on I photographed a family member’s bedside table without warning and he had a kazoo, a fake mustache and a detailed shopping list which killed me… that’s when I was like, you can not make this stuff up. Another friend’s hair clip lived on the back of her toy giraffe so it looked like a Pegasus. I also love enigmatic objects that must have a backstory, like a gnarly piece of wood in an otherwise completely utilitarian collection of stuff.

What might we find on your nightstand?
Right now a white noise machine, a little striped bag of worry dolls I think my grandmother gave me as a kid, used daily contacts (mostly not in the bowl my husband put there to collect them in), a thin coating of dog hair... books.

Not only do you highlight the bedside memorials to one’s life, but also roadside memorials to the lives of loved ones. Can you talk a little bit about how you see the relation between these memorials?
I started really noticing and photographing roadside memorials when I was in the middle of the bedside table project because I was hyper tuned in to the way assemblages of objects “in the wild” created compelling portraits/still lives/ephemeral monuments. The more I started researching and learning about the roadside memorials though, the more I started thinking of them in a sense as creating collaborative portraits of the people who build and maintain them as well as the person being commemorated. In both cases, though, there are sacred and mundane objects jumbled together, and accidental and intentional ones.

Many of the objects you recreate incorporate familiar brands or package design (like Advil). Is there a component of your work that involves making us aware of the role that these established products and brands play in our lives? What is it like to recreate such recognizable, albeit mundane objects?
Absolutely. We understand ourselves partially through the lens of brands. Some stuff we buy very consciously to project values and our sense of self, and some stuff we happen to have just by virtue of being a consumer in society. In Jane Bennet’s wonderful book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, she writes that “American materialism... requires buying ever increasing numbers of products purchased in ever shorter cycles...the sheer volume of commodities, and the hyper-consumptive necessity of junking them for new ones, conceals the vitality of matter.” Paradoxically, the more stuff we have, the less tuned in we are to the specifics of the material world we’re surrounded by. I’m very interested in reflecting this dynamic with stuff in my work, particularly ubiquitous products taken for granted. I also think of familiar products like medicine as visual symbols of routine and physical maintenance -- they underscore that we inhabit physical bodies, and whatever else is going on in our lives we have this drumbeat of daily repetition, that we need to feed and clean and take care of ourselves. It’s been more than a minute since I’ve read Norman Bryson’s Looking at the Overlooked but I think he calls this the slowest, most entropic level of human existence, which historically the genre of still life has depicted. I get a huge kick out of making recognizable mundane objects because it’s a way of elevating everyday existence, bringing a focus to the things we interact with so often they are basically invisible. 

Do you think there is a relationship between the dream state and death? Do you see these memorials as watching over those who sleep or have died?
I love this question. A friend recently used the world “threshold” to link the two projects, which I thought was spot on. What are the objects we keep on on our thresholds, to mark a transition between states? I think of objects in memorials as marking an interface between life and death, mediating a kind of conversation between those who are grieving and those who have died -- as offerings, talismans, protection, commemoration, warnings, etc. Because roadside memorials are located on the spot where someone has been killed, my sense is there’s also an element of bearing witness in a way that’s different from a graveside. In sleep we are at our most physically vulnerable, and for sure I think about people choosing objects they want close by which give them a sense of protection, joy or comfort on a deep level. To me this is Joseph Campbell territory, contemporary ritual and myth making in action. 

You talk about consumer culture in your artist statement. How do you think the things we buy relate to a loved one’s memorial, or impact our nightstand collections?
I’m really interested in how roadside memorials often incorporate mass produced items like lawn ornaments and seasonal decorations alongside objects more traditionally used for mourning and commemoration, like candles and flowers. I’ve recognized decorations from memorials in the home gardening aisles of Home Depot and Target, and everyday products like energy drinks repurposed as flower vases or photographs taped to children’s butterfly wings like a winged cherub. I’m really interested in exploring this powerful visual vocabulary of memory and mourning, how traditional symbols are integrated with or refracted through the language of being an American consumer. With nightstands, I think the presence of products is more apparent; we tend to curate our living rooms or clean them more often, but on nightstands you can often see more of the accumulation of everyday consumption and routine maintenance through health and beauty products, chargers for all the devices, receipts from pockets emptied at the end of the day, soda, beer, dental floss, medicine, etc. 

Can you tell us about your studio space? What do you need to be productive in the studio?
For a long time I was a big believer in a strict separation of life and work space, but then I did a residency at RAiR in Roswell, New Mexico where my studio was attached to the house, and I realized how well that way of working suited me. I spend a lot of time in my studio not actually producing anything, just looking around and making mental decisions about what’s working and what’s not, and it’s so helpful to be able to pop my head in for like five minutes right before bed with fresh eyes and immediately notice things I didn’t earlier. Having a studio in my home also eliminates decision-making and prep time, like having to pack food and a change of clothes if I need to go somewhere later in the day. It might sound crazy but this really frees up mental energy and time I can put straight into my work. I love to have a window in my studio with some sky and I always have a wall full of reference photos/images/other artwork for inspiration. I thrive with long, uninterrupted stretches to be immersed in my work -- I try not to answer non-urgent calls or emails until I’m done working for the day. Thanks for not even getting me started on instagram!

What do you do in your daily life to collect new ideas, or thoughts outside of the studio? 
I read a lot and I listen to tons of audiobooks and podcasts in the studio. I take my dog for long walks where I don’t listen to anything, just let my head empty out. My work gets fed by talking to friends, seeing art, walking around and really just watching the world go by. Small local museums have a special place in my heart and inspire new ideas because they tend to display objects in ways that blur taxonomic categories (history and lore, natural science and art) and invite playful speculation. The Museum of Jurassic Technology in LA does this too but of course in its own spectacular way -- that’s not in my daily life but I sure wish it were. My happy place is a tiny natural history museum with bad taxidermy, typewritten text and deodorant tablets in the display cases.

What’s up next for you?
I am super excited for two shows opening back to back -- my solo show will be on view at Galleri Urbane in Dallas from February 22nd through March 28th, and will include a bunch of sculptures from my memorial series as well as several cut paper paintings that deal with memory and loss. I'm honored to have six of my earliest memorials included in a terrific group show at BRIC House co-curated by the Green-wood Cemetery called “Death Becomes Her”, on view from February 20th until April 19th. Afterwards, I’m working towards a two person show at Monya Rowe Gallery in June.

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

To find out more about Rachel and her work, check out her website.