We are so excited for our very first international Rogue Wave Project with Australian artist Grant Stevens. Opening on January 17, 2013, “SUPERMASSIVE” will include a new series of work comprised of video installations, collages and drawings.
In a recent interview with Gallery Director Elizabeth East, Grant shared details into what we can expect in his upcoming exhibition, and shed some light on becoming an artist, as well as his rather impressive educational endeavors:
EE: You are only 32 years old, but you have a PhD, teach visual arts at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, and have a lively studio practice. When did you become aware that you wanted to be an artist and why did you decide to pursue a PhD?
GS: My interest in art became fairly clear during high school, but I can’t say, “I always wanted to be an artist”. I was lucky that my high school art teacher encouraged us to engage with contemporary art, as opposed to the more typical syllabus of Surrealist symbolism. In retrospect, this was significant because it gave me a sense that art was something that could respond in provocative and contentious ways to our lived experiences; it wasn’t only found in books or in historical collections in museums, and it wasn’t simply ‘weird’.
The potential to do a PhD was in my thoughts when I began undergraduate studies. Even at that time I was thinking of study in a long term way. Also, I should say that art education in Australia is structurally different to the USA. Unlike the American system, cohort-based MFA programs are not common and therefore not the main pathway into professional practice. After I had completed my honours year, I felt like I was just beginning to understand my conceptual interests, my motivations and formal approaches. Undertaking a PhD was one way to keep exploring these things in rigorous ways.
EE: You work in a variety of media: video, sculpture, photography, drawing and installation. Can you tell us something of the range of work you will be showing at L.A. Louver?
GS: I often work on exhibitions as constellations of different things that share some common ground. So in the studio, I tend to work simultaneously on a number of works, across different media. For this show, I’ve been working on a suite of new two-dimensional and video works. There are some line drawings based on the geometric pattern underlying theoretical physicist Garrett Lisi’s hypothetical ‘theory of everything’, some fairly concise collages that show male figures apparently jumping into space, and a larger lenticular work that imitates the changing qualities of colour and light at sunrise/sunset.
There is also a single-channel video that features a flowing animated waterfall, sentimental stock music and text appropriated from a popular talk show host’s self-help advice. The largest work in the show is a four-channel video installation. This work is a kind of visualization or abstract mapping of a mental/textual landscape. The videos zoom through and around a number of text clusters, each of which refers to a different topic. These range across deliberately diverse topics such as self-affirmations, an Indian restaurant menu, the periodic table and common prescription drugs. These lists have been sourced online, and so, while they appear to chart inner cognitive and psychological arrangements, they might also evoke the way we navigate through contemporary clustering of information online.
***In Part 2 of this interview, Grant describes the main inspiration behind his L.A. Louver exhibition, and much more. Stay tuned!!
IMAGES: Top to bottom - portrait of Grant Stevens; video still of “Untitled Galaxy Clusters,” 2013, 4-channel digital video, TRT: 11:19