What sparked your obsession with architecture?

It really began in 2004, when I did the Lodz Biennale in Poland. Lawrence Weiner was my selector and I called him and I said, “I’ve never been to Poland and I’ve never been in a Biennale, what do I need to know?” And he said, “Well they don’t have a lot of supplies or money for supplies, so bring everything you need, and don’t expect anything to get shipped back because they have no budget.” And I thought, “OK, great, I’m going to have to do something on the site.” So I wrote to the organizers and I asked them for photos of things they found interesting. I didn’t want to lead them in any way, I just thought “Oh, well I’ll start with whatever they find interesting.” And it was all photographs of architecture. And I realized, the sort of Soviet-Brutalist architecture was very vertical, and the California Modernist architecture was very horizontal, but they were using similar solutions to different problems. I just got hooked.

And the other thing I got hooked on was when the local people came into this international Biennale, and they stood in front of it, and picked out pieces of architecture that they knew. The funniest story is about this one guy standing in front of a piece saying “New York! New York!” And I’m saying, “No, that’s here, that’s right up the street.” And then someone translated, and he said “Yes, but we call it [the building up the street] New York.” It was this great moment where he was getting into the work… and I totally misunderstood it. But he was getting into the work based on something he knew and could pick out, and that was something I found really interesting.

I like to make a unique work for each show and so I don’t just have stock pieces that I just plug into wherever. I really study the location, I study the space, and I do a lot of research on the history and on the local architecture.

Fax Drawing: #9, Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre, Paris, Ink and Paint on Wall, 2011
Fax Drawing #2, Sam Francis Gallery, Crossroads, Santa Monica, Pen and Acrylic on Wall, 2007

What else goes into your process?

It starts with the research, and then the next step is selecting pieces of architecture that I find interesting. Then I make a freehand drawing from that. After that, I either scan that into the computer or I make a transparency of various percentages and sizes. I have a giant light table in my studio that I love working on. I usually just kind of pick transparencies and mush them around until something comes into shape. And then I make a drawing from that and I do a lot of editing on the drawing table. When I work on the computer it’s the same situation. It’s just mashing up. You know, you can scale in Photoshop much easier, and then erasing lines is a little bit more labor-intensive because it’s not just me drawing and choosing not to draw a line, I actually have to go in and physically remove the line that I want to take out.

So which one do you prefer?

I prefer both. They’re both good tools. One time I was traveling and I needed to keep working on a piece, so I had the piece on the laptop, and that works fine. With the new three-dimensional work, I need the computer. I need the laptop to do the 3-D modeling because I’m coming to it not as a sculptor, but as a person who makes drawings. So I use a 3-D modeling program to really help me see how the 3-D aspect is going to feel and move within the work.

Your color is very striking and unusual. How and why do you make the color choices that you do?

That’s a good question. Mainly I start the work by kind of blocking-in certain hues, and then I tweak. So I’ll just start thinking “OK, I want something warm here, I want this one to be cool, or I want to riff off of this color in this photograph. And then I start building it. I like triads, because you can have two things that agree and one thing that really disagrees and that throws the whole thing off-balance, and I kind of like that. Because like the drawings, which are sort of mashing up balance and imbalance, I like the color to do that too – to spark and create a distraction.

I was just kind of stuck and I couldn’t think of what to do, and I was going to be there for a week. So I decided to construct a project based on instructions and check them off one by one.

I got a fantastic response. Nearly 100 percent of the people responded and sent me instructions. And it was really actually quite fun because some people were creative with their instructions. Like Jens Hoffmann gave me this really complicated instruction, and I kept thinking “OK, this one is complicated, I’ll just put it off to the very end.” And in the end, it was a very complicated way of telling me to make a smiley face. That was really super because it was a really wonderful exercise in giving up control, and giving up that aspect of the work. So I really enjoyed that chaotic insertion, and I thought that the work was truly a success because you had all these different voices and yet it visually made sense. It really worked as a project.

Then I was invited later on to re-do the project in Europe at the Van Abbemuseum and I was feeling a little bit more comfortable that this experiment would actually work. Going into New Langton I thought, “Oh, if I get no responses, then I’ll just kind of figure it out.” But I was treating it like an experiment site and it worked out and I enjoyed that.

When you get these instructions, do you filter them or do you do whatever they say? Do you honor everyone’s request?

I do whatever they say. And the only time I didn’t honor everyone’s request was at the Van Abbemuseum because we literally just ran out of time.

What other participatory projects do you have?

Well there are many. I enjoy that aspect of making work. I enjoy creating projects that engage people in the process, and one of the things that I really love about making wall drawings is that I don’t close the exhibition in preparation for the opening. I don’t close off the gallery. I don’t hang a cloth and say “I don’t want anyone watching me,” I actually invite people to come in and check it out and talk to people about it. I remember when I was doing an installation at the MCA Chicago, it wasn’t an audience participatory work, but the space was open to the public and there was other work in the other wing. It was this long hallway exhibition space. And on one side, there was this really great Paul McCarthy piece and people were coming up to see it. The only thing between the public and me were these stanchions. And I remember one day this guy came in and was watching me for a while, and I went over to him to ask if he had any questions, and he said “Yeah, can I bring my class to watch you work? I don’t think they’ve ever seen a real artist working.” And it was fantastic. He brought all of these kids and it reminded me that we do hide this process, it’s not something that’s on public display that often. And that’s one way that I see my practice as engaging because I don’t like to hide that.

But I also do create specific participatory projects. One I did in Salt Lake City called Color By Numbers and Shapes was for my Catherine Doctorow prize. I couldn’t help myself but to suggest that I create a whole new project and it turned out so fun. The idea was basically the same concept: I do a drawing, it gets translated into vinyl tape and then it’s put onto the wall. And then this time, we went one step further where we went into the back room of the museum and we dragged out extra paint buckets that had been used in previous exhibitions. And we just painted squares of each color, and then numbered them one through 10. There were instructions on the wall and a gallery attendant with a bucket of chalk. Anybody who came to the show could take a piece of chalk and draw whatever they wanted on that wall and then number it for whichever color they wanted.

Parallel Version Series: Los Angeles
(with incomplete dimensional objects)
Pen and Paint on Wood with Dimensional Objects
60 x 60in
2013

[My teachers] were my greatest influences because they really taught me to throw out any previous ideas that I had about what an artist is or what art is, and just look at what I want to do.

This was a really fun project because again, going with my more experimental side, it presented a lot of really cool challenges. Like when you have art that’s moving, what kind of art do you put on it? It can’t be too complicated and it can’t be too simple. And my understanding of DC is that it’s kind of a town where a lot of conversations happen. You don’t want to yell at your audience that gets yelled at all day. So I thought, OK, I’ll go the opposite. I’ll just give them something really super pretty to look at. Something idealized.

My husband and I just visited Portland, OR, so one of the photos is actually of this beautiful, still pond from the Portland area. And then the other image is actually this gorgeous waterfall from Iceland. So that was the basis of working off the photographs, but then I thought, “Well, I have to add something to it,” so then I just started inserting all of my architecture into it and kind of riffing off of the Frank Lloyd Wright Falling Water house idea. And then I ran around the mall as it was driving around, documenting it in all these strange positions.

Closer to Nature Series (Mobile Drawing): Still Pond, Digital Print on Truck Tarps, 2006
Closer to Nature Series (Mobile Drawing): Falling Water, Digital Print on Truck Tarps, 2006

So what do you think about the architecture here in DC?

I think it’s actually pretty amazing. Some of it is very uninteresting, and some of it is pretty awesome. I’m kind of obsessed with the FBI building because it’s just awkward in so many ways, and it probably has the most security cameras I’ve ever seen on a building. It has this sort of raised floating thing. There’s so much about it that is so interesting to me. There are so many areas of DC. And I happened to be there when they were replacing a pane of glass. It was mesmerizing because it was this big modernist box in the middle of all of these ornate buildings. And it’s doing the same thing that everyone else is, you know, you break a window, you gotta replace it. Except to replace this one, apparently you need six cranes and an entire city block closed-off. It was really beautiful. That entire installation process was very choreographed.

I specifically chose the Air and Space Museum because I wasn’t entirely sure what I was going to find there. I was pretty amazed. Their archives are incredible.

Discussion Wall 1
Contributed Art/Not Art, Tape and Pen on Wall
50 x 130in
2007

What do you hope people take away from your work?

I think my hope is that they can see things a little bit differently. The way I’m able to build architecture off of each other in impossible ways. One of the things about my work is that I don’t have to pay attention to gravity. And architects do. To build real situations, you have to deal with “OK, if I put this here and this here, that might fall down.” I don’t have to deal with that, and I think that’s a freedom that I really enjoy, and one that I hope people will take away from it. You don’t always have to draw a nice clean box, and you don’t always have to find one solution, there are multiple solutions to every problem. Just think about how things build off of each other and sometimes you can zag and that gets interesting.

Any words of wisdom for emerging artists?

I think my advice is: Learn everything that you can learn, and then go and work for another artist, and learn everything you can learn, and then probably throw out the first half of what you learned. Go and see as much art as you can, and just follow your gut. And follow what you want to do because one of the biggest inhibitors for me when I was starting off was my own ideas about what was right and what was wrong, and as soon as I figured out that it didn’t matter, it was a freedom that I find very valuable. That it doesn’t matter. That I can just do what I want and then figure out how to make it happen.