By Michael Rutherford
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Image One Hundred Ninety, 2011-2013, oil, pastel, lacquer, wax, resin, fiberglass, epoxy, canvas, and paper on cardboard mounted on plywood, 20 x 10.5 x 4 inches |
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Image One Hundred Thirty Four, 2011, oil on cedar shims and linen mounted on gypsum panel, 16 x 10.5 x 2.75 inches |
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Studio |
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Work in progress in studio |
The work of Joseph Montgomery has the
structure and syntax of sculpture, but it also has all the trappings of
painting: wood, canvas, various types of coatings… and paint. It’s the blurring
and confounding of classification that lends it a strange sense of hybridity,
and its inclusion in the Painter Painter
exhibition at the Walker earlier this year was a vital choice, since the
curators wanted to highlight work that represented an expansion of abstract
painting.
What further complicates things is the fact
that Montgomery considers himself a painter, and it’s a complication I
appreciate. His experimentation with materials has resulted in paintings that
need a good walking around in order to see them in full. The images they
project have such a basis in dimensionality that they require viewing from
multiple vantage points. In essence, these are images that are grounded in
object-hood.
The following interview sheds light on
Joseph’s viewpoints and studio practice.
PB: What
I like about your work is that it seems constructed rather than painted, yet it
can still be classified as painting. How do you feel about that aspect of it?
JM: In
2008, I wanted to make work that embodied the idea of paintings as lies, fibs.
I have since developed a studio practice that facilitates the building of
objects that look and act as paintings while I publicly call myself a painter.
I assemble the image of a painting from a variety of materials that achieve the
component elements of painting (color, form, overlap, transparency,
figure/ground, etc.) in three dimensions and without the use of brushes. It is
my intention that you see the work as constructed because I want the object to
document studio labor in pursuit of formal images. The act of painting is, at
this point in art history, only a portion of image creation labor. The emphasis
on construction, assembly, and relief act to represent painting and in doing so,
define the boundaries of painting’s usefulness. Painting is the object of my
study in the studio and a useful tool, but I am hesitant to participate in
painting. The incongruity in the categorization of my work by my own
dissembling and the presentation of their position should highlight these
distinctions.
PB:
What’s your daily schedule like and how would you describe a good day in
the studio?
JM: My
work, as you may know, contains two distinctive types of painting. Reasons for this include what I said earlier,
especially the attempt to represent painting.
Representations include the collage, which is the image of gestural
abstraction, and the shim, which is the assembly of minimalism. These two
genres also represent two very different types of labor.
Much of my interest in studio labor stems
from my interest in “having a good studio day,” i.e. how can I be productive,
how do I make something, how do I keep making something. These two types of
painting exist because they demand multiple types of labor in the studio, and
in their requirements provide a mental and physical choreography to the day. The
movement from one to the other and within their purviews keeps me fit, keeps me
questioning, and provides solutions across difference. So, specifically, the
past six years of operating within this project prepare a daily studio practice
through institutional studio knowledge, buckets of materials, and
self-awareness of how to begin and end a studio session given the usefulness of
the different kinds of labor for different kinds of mindset.
The shims are straight up process work. I
find it is best to start the day with this kind of effort.
That might include gluing, sanding, cutting, spraying, or coating. After a few
hours of this I move on to looking at things hanging on the wall. At this point
in the day I begin the contemplative collage tasks that I group with painter
labor: watching the paintings in various states of completion for gaps in their
performance and attempting to solve the problems with materials. A good day
equals progress on both fronts with perhaps something new started in the mix.
PB: I’ve
wondered about the kinds of problems that your collaged canvas pieces have
posed for you. What steps have you had to take in order to keep the material
fixed?
JM: If
you are referring to any issues with conservation, I have yet to run into
them. Different materials call for
different adhesives: epoxy for metal and heavier objects; jade adhesive for
papers; wood glue for wood. I am also interested in paint being an adhesive. Some
of the materials are jointed together with cuts and penetration and then
adhered. I am in no way cavalier with the assembly of the images but I do want
the fragileness to be on your mind as you look at them.
PB:
Your other works made mostly with wedge shaped wood seem to offer a good
amount of counter-balance to the canvas pieces. What kind of art historical
heredity have they emerged from and how do they fit into your body of work as a
whole?
JM:
As I discussed earlier, a majority of the reasons for these works to
exist in my practice is because their role has to do with types of labor and
representation of painting’s diversity. I began making them in the midst of the
collage process because they were fast, immediate methods of constructing a
minimalist, monochrome image. They were both literal and figurative reliefs
from the slow build of my collages. The shim paintings knowingly emerged from a
personal development in studio practice. In retrospect, their subconscious
antecedents were what I knew of Rudolf Stingel’s practice, Judd woodblocks,
minimalist progressions in general, but with the softness of paint, wax, and
canvas frames as final layers to keep them in the painting conversation.
PB:
Looking back through art history, whose work keeps feeding you visually?
JM: Soutine,
Dubuffet, Frank Auerbach, Guston, Ben Nicholson, Sherrie Levine, George Stubbs,
Constable, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Bonnard, Schoonhoven.
PB: What
kinds of things outside of art have influenced or made their way into your work?
JM: Methods
of fabrication as I mentioned above enter my work through experience in
construction and house building. When I
first began making small abstract paintings, I thought of them as illustrations
for science fiction book covers, particularly imaginations of outer space,
planets. This reflected an interest in physics, which still applies, and I
think is visible as a metaphor in breaking painting apart and reconstituting
its component parts with emphases on gravity, laws of attraction, and entropy.
Physical issues of resistance and repetition also come into my studio and work
through my interest in power lifting and kinesiology.
PB:
Tell me a bit about what’s on your bookshelf and the music you’re into.
JM: My
wife knows a lot about the Shakers and my friend Rosy Keyser and I picked up a
history of the group to read and talk about together. A writer/critic just
recommended a speculative science fiction author who is excellent: James
Tiptree, Jr. and her (Tiptree was a pseudonym) collection of short stories, Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. I read a lot
of speculative science fiction and am also on a Margaret Atwood tear and
finished up Hugh Howey’s entertaining Silo trilogy (Wool, Shift, Dust). Art wise I’ve been reading about studio
practice and painting, making my way through the Institut fur Kunstkritik
series from Sternberg Press.
Music: I start the day hard – lifting music
at the gym – black metal (Vreig, Burzum, Immortal, At The Gates) and then at
the studio am a little more mellow but with a Texas flavor– country, zydeco,
public radio (Yoakum, Strait, Waylon, David Allen Coe, Jimmie Dale Gilmore) and
then after dark I go back to the metal.
PB: I
thought your contribution to the Painter
Painter exhibition at the Walker was significant. What other projects will
you be involved with in the near future?
JM: I
am preparing my third solo show with Laurel Gitlen in the fall. I’ve given
myself the next nine months to sort that out. It will probably be a show that
exhibits recent iterations of the two main bodies of work, shims and collages,
in pairings.