ART CAKE RESIDENT PRESENTATION SERIES
CARL E. HAZLEWOOD: RE-EMERGENT
JUNE 1 - JUNE 19, 2021 (BY APPOINTMENT)
TUESDAY, JUNE 1, 4-7P
For the second year of the studio program, Art Cake is pleased to present a solo presentation by participating artist, Carl E. Hazlewood. On view is a new site-specific installation composed of constructions made of polyester, paper, twine, canvas, and nylon cord attached directly to the wall. On Tuesday, June 1, the artist will be on site welcoming visits from 4-7P. To reserve a time to visit in person, please email info@artcake.org.
This is the third part of a series that Art Cake has organized for the participating artists-in-residence as an opportunity to present and document their work made during the pandemic outside of the studio.
Please view the artists-in-residence for a deeper look into each artist’s studio practice.
CARL E. HAZLEWOOD IN CONVERSATION WITH MARINA GLUCKMAN
MG: Here, we are looking at two of your newest wall constructions that you made on site and directly on the wall. Could you talk us through the process of developing these works?
CH: For large wall works, I tend to respond directly to the space and available light of the room…the atmosphere of it. While I don’t make specific drawings for each project, there is an accumulated ‘alphabet’ of shapes and procedures I’ve naturally acquired through long acquaintance with particular materials and techniques, plus my long experience as a painter. There are also underlying formal and thematic ideas, which one may think of as ‘content,’ that animate my abstract approach.
MG: There's a simplicity to the materials –– map pins, polyester fabric, nylon cord –– yet the fully rendered work is quite complex and composed of multiple layers making the work three dimensional and, in a way, avoiding categorization. They are beautifully unbound, and I like the way you have discussed how the elements respond to each other and work within even without a frame. Do you consider these works sculptures or paintings or both?
CH: I think of my usually ephemeral installations as incorporating aspects of sculpture, painting and drawing. Like a sculptor, I work to find ‘shapes’ and ‘volumes,’ implied or actual. And like painting, the layering becomes an intuitive search for textures, color, and form. Using mainly an X-acto knife, and scissors as drawing implements, I define edges, where things begin and end, where they may find relationships and multiple transitions against or into each other. I think of this as ‘drawing’ the accumulation of parts into active and resonant connections. Then all those ‘active’ parts are pinned into a final configuration, something that feels properly ‘evocative’ yet stable as plastic form. I recall Frank Stella saying something like, “a sculpture is just a painting cut out and stood up someplace.” That’s a funny statement, but basically true. In a metaphorical sense, I define my postcolonial body as the sum of a similar collection of layers: multiethnic and transcultural.
MG: Do you work intuitively or is the placement and construction of these works directly on the wall "mapped out"?
CH: Each work is rarely planned, or “mapped out.” While I constantly make lots of little drawings that may define possible shapes or a possible approach to a particular space, they are rarely used. Each project takes on a life of its own. I sit in the space for awhile, trying to sense my own relationship to the wall, floor, changing light… the ‘box’ of what will contain me and my piece. And as always, I’m responsive to the particular light, natural or artificial, that’s available. I tend to pre-visualize each move, before I make it, seeing each cut, shape, pin, or drawn line in my mind’s eye before making a move. I suppose it’s a sort of high wire act that requires a degree of self-confidence…or experience, which helps me avoid too many visual calamities.
MG: Could you discuss the color palette you use in more depth?
CH: Analyzing color sensibility presents a peculiar ‘problem’ as it is individual to each person. I reach for certain colors and color-relationships as a result of who I am and my personal history going back to my Guyana childhood. I remember the soothing whirr of my mom’s Singer sewing machine as I played nearby with the strips of textured cloth, or bright shiny cotton, buttons, beads, and other material that fell to the floor. I have a memory of our garden; brown earth, grey clay, the yellow and reds of marigolds, sunflowers, and other plants. Then there’s the sharp contrasty white light of hot noontime, and saturated greens and golds toward sundown. But recently, because of my social experience as a black person in America, my color is often somewhat intentional, if not symbolic. In this cultural moment, art, poetry, and literature seem to have much political work to do, but creatives have always responded to society’s needs. While I appreciate various subjective and conceptual approaches, including the social, or explorations of identity, my own tendency is toward an aware universality, something that could embody the complications of the present while speaking to the timelessness of art and objects.
CH: I avoid ‘performing’ limited identity art for the entertainment of anyone, black or white, but I can’t totally ignore my historical position as a black person, an immigrant in the United States. Thus, my abstract art is subtly inflected by this consciousness. It expresses itself via personal poetic visual structures, and in a basic way, through language… naming. If one considers what I do a form of self-portrait, then the ‘BlackHead’ character recurring within the body of my recent work can represent me or people like me. It’s a continuing adventure. I adopt, on occasion, colors taken from the Marcus Garvey Pan-African flag, or Black Liberation flag. It was designed to give pride and an identity to people of the African diaspora. The, red, black, and green colors, with individual additions, have also found their way into the post-colonial flag designs of many countries that gained independence during the 1950s and ‘60s, including mine: Red: the blood that unites all people of African ancestry, and shed for liberation; Black: for the people whose existence as a nation, though not a nation-state, is affirmed by the existence of the flag; Green: the abundant and vibrant natural wealth of Africa, the Motherland.
While idealistic and useful for the time, one doesn’t need that color-coded information to respond directly to my work. For some, it may act as a clue to my cultural position at this time in the country. Personally, I remain much more interested in the drive for an essential intellectual freedom, and an art of aesthetic truth and timeless possibilities. This makes me fully human.
MG: There appears to be a fairly consistent horizon line in the works presented here. Is this a recurring element in your work or is it a new direction?
CH: Yes, the horizon line appears in some larger projects I’ve done recently. That line along with those constant grays and blues, which may be sky or sea, propels an episodic movement from one end of the work to another…like from one place to another. These permeable boundaries have become fluid referents for an ever evolving history of art, coupled with symbolic evidence of my personal story as a black person in the West. One sinks or swims—one survives the metaphoric journey, or not. It’s a ‘BlackHead’ tripping long after that first involuntary transatlantic voyage. But it remains an odyssey towards somewhere one might call home. For me, art is the destination closest to a home I can find.
MG: How do the wall constructions correlate and depart from other works, such as your murals? Are there references to the photography that you do?
CH: Because of their large size, the murals have been actual painted walls with minimal physical additions like the smaller constructions. But they retain the tension between allusiveness and a strictly formal abstraction.
My photography developed independently of my painting, but there has been an increasing convergence of technical processes and concepts over time. In addition to the materiality of the smaller collages and constructions which employ all manner of ‘stuff’ like felt, rugs, strings, pushpins, and tape, I’ve begun to add pigment printing as a base to the mix. And an occasional photograph appears in my abstract compositions. But generally, my photography, in a peculiar way, is related to the other work I do in the sense that it’s an attempt to make a ‘something’ out of ‘nothing’ pinning down a moment—or a structure that could affect viewers; while the content of the pictorial image exists in the world as ‘real’ things, spaces or places, they exist the way they do only because that’s how I see—and what I see. To others much of what I focus on is invisible or not worth looking at: trees, a fold of paper, a dusty corner, wet ground...my backyard at 2:00 a.m., a bit of spider web in a corner, the ceiling of my living room, etc. The photographic work flips back and forth often resembling abstractions. If they document anything at all, it may be the concrete poetry of seeing itself...and that definitely is something which resists explication.
MG: Are the three collages part of an ongoing series?
CH: Yes, the three collages, all 35.5 x 13 inches, are part of an ongoing series. Titles are from left are: BlackHead Drowning; Nude Pink Diver-White Splash; BlackEarth Aura.
MG: The silver lining to the pandemic has been seeing how productive the artists participating in the Art Cake studio program have been. Are there ways in which the pandemic, and being in isolation, greatly affected your studio practice? Whether it was in gathering materials, change of routine, or travel restrictions?
CH: In normal times, I’m very quiet, private, and busy with my art, so not too much difference there. But not being able to visit museums and galleries was more depressing than I thought it might be. The residency at Art Cake is a blessing in the sense that it gives me a place to be productive and focused; in essence, the studio has become a laboratory to work through ideas, while away from distractions and bad news—even if to get there, I’ve had to ride the subway late at night to avoid crowds.
MG: What are you currently working on and what projects are on the horizon?
CH: My immediate goal is to develop a consistent body of work for various upcoming publications and exhibitions.
