Speaker 1 (00:00): Coming up on Art Palace, Speaker 2 (00:02): This constant through line in our work is we want this eerie strangeness, something that's a little off, something that's not quite right, something that's a little dark. Speaker 1 (00:24): Welcome to Art Palace, produced by Cincinnati Art Museum. This is your host, Russell eig. Here at the Art Palace, we meet cool people and then talk to them about art. Today's cool people are Katie Parker and Guy Michael Davis from Future Retrieval. We recorded this conversation for a video that we made, but had to cut about half of the content for time. This extended cut will let you hear more details and insights into their process. If you want to check out that video, visit Cincinnati art museum.org/behind the scenes, and it's also linked from the Future Retrieval exhibition page. Speaker 2 (01:06): Hi, I'm Katie Parker. Speaker 3 (01:08): Hi, I'm Guy Michael Davis, Speaker 2 (01:09): And we're future retrieval, and we're here to talk about our exhibition Close Parallel at the Cincinnati Art Museum. Speaker 3 (01:16): I'm originally from Bartlesville, Oklahoma. It's in what they call green country in northeastern Oklahoma. Speaker 2 (01:21): And I grew up in Plano, Texas, which is a suburb of Dallas, Texas. We met at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1999. Our freshman year we both were in foundations and hung out together, and then both ended up being ceramic majors from 2000 to 2003. Speaker 1 (01:47): What brought you to Cincinnati? Speaker 3 (01:49): Well, after kind of meandering all over the place, ultimately it was for work, but we'd kind of been following each other for different opportunities. We lived up in Massachusetts for a little while. We'd gone to graduate school at Ohio State University at different times, but we'd kind of been just bouncing around and like I said, just tag teaming on each other's opportunities. And then a position opened up at the University of Cincinnati and we ended up moving down there. Speaker 1 (02:21): How did you decide to start making art together? Was there a particular project or anything where that started? Speaker 2 (02:28): When Guy was in grad school, I shared a studio with one of my professors from the Ohio State University, Rebecca Harvey. And when we were working in the shared studio, the two of us just started coming up with ideas together and making art together. And then her husband, Steven Thurston and then Guy were both at Ohio State University and guy was Steven and Rebecca's student at the time. We talked about maybe the four of us could work together, come up with some ideas together and apply for some grants to figure out some kind of larger projects that utilized all our skills. The main idea was just the four of us with very similar interests, but very different skills. How could we come together and make something that was larger than what we could do individually? And we did that for about a year and a half. And then when we moved to Cincinnati, that was sort of the beginning of the end, and the two of us split into two groups of two. And ever since then we've been working together as future retrieval, and we just realized it was so much easier to make work as a duo. We just got further faster. Speaker 3 (03:45): At my core, I'm much of a formalist and I'm very sensitive to line and shape and all these things, but with a bent towards minimalism. And so I have a tendency to mass produce a lot of blank, very simple kind of clean things. And I always say Katie might be a maximalist or something like that. And so I was amassing all of these kind of sterile looking things and Katie's on her side and texturing and layering all of this stuff. And at one point it was just handing something off. Speaker 2 (04:20): I was looking for things that were blank to decorate, and then you were making only blank things in your studio, and it just seemed like if I could just have one, I know I could make it better. And that's kind of how it started. Speaker 1 (04:34): Are there any other differences in your working style that compliment each other? Speaker 2 (04:40): The way you work is very formulaic and organized and prepared and measured, and nothing's ever done without doing some kind of trial. And then the way I work is really intuitive. I don't want to measure, if I try to measure, I'm usually wrong. I just want to start it and I'll sync hundreds of hours into something without testing it first, just because I want to see if it actually works. And so there's this full steam ahead, let's plan a plan. And I think those things really compliment each other Speaker 3 (05:17): More Speaker 2 (05:17): And more because Speaker 3 (05:19): The way I work, maybe nothing would ever get done or would take a long time. And then Katie will jump right in. And the first one is the work often. So yeah, it's a balance Speaker 2 (05:30): Really. Speaker 3 (05:31): Yeah. Speaker 2 (05:31): But with the show at Cam, really trying to balance those two ways of working, knowing this was coming up and knowing the lead time we had on one end, we really had to slow down, look at what we were using, figure out how that's going to work, make a series of mockups and do a lot of tests in the studio. And on the other hand, we just kind of needed to get started. I think that's always something we're trying to talk about in the studio. And then just in terms of what we each do, I think it really does fall back into how we started, where Guy is really the form maker. You focus on forms, you develop a lot of the forms and make molds for the forms. And then on the other hand, I do a lot of the decoration and the extras, the slower, more tedious pattern driven pieces Speaker 3 (06:28): That could even be distilled down into two D and three D. Speaker 2 (06:32): Yeah, I guess so Speaker 3 (06:33): In a way, but it's muddy. And also Katie likes to sit and work, and I like to stand and work, and that kind of also speaks about the type of what we're into. Speaker 1 (06:48): So I don't think we talked about where the name Future Retrieval comes from, did we? Speaker 3 (06:53): No, no. Speaker 2 (06:55): So the name Future Retrieval? Speaker 3 (06:57): Well, yeah. First we had a brand, whenever we had our collective, it was a design collective, and so it was a brand kind of that we were developing. Then whenever we kind of split off, we still felt like we were in this more business vein or something, and that we needed, if we were working as a team, we needed some kind of a label, I guess, Speaker 2 (07:18): Or like a team name? Speaker 3 (07:19): Yeah, team, yeah, yeah. Something that kind of brings everything together. But ultimately we were looking at, it goes multiple ways, but it started because we were looking at our contracts to our student loan forms, and this word kept coming up for future retrieval, for future retrieval, for future retrieval. And we thought it was kind of comical actually. It was something that we didn't want back. We wanted to get rid of this thing, but it was also the tongue twister of it. It was seemed just kind of like a strange thing, Speaker 2 (07:49): And we thought maybe how do we make work that's good enough that in the future we'd want to get it back in some way, something that we're putting out in the world that we'd want to Speaker 3 (08:00): Pull Speaker 2 (08:00): It back into our Speaker 3 (08:02): Lives. It made sense technically with the loan or it didn't make sense with that, but we automatically connected with it with the fact that we love libraries, we love digging into old things. We love bringing things to the surface and making new of it or re-envisioning it or refreshing it or giving these things new life. I Speaker 1 (08:26): Wanted to know about your perspectives on art from the past and why you seem to be drawn to recasting and repurposing older styles. Speaker 2 (08:38): I think we're looking at the past because there's just such a rich wealth of information there a lot of times as we're maybe we could each speak from each end, but I'm so interested in pattern and ornament, and when I am looking for that, the first place I go is I'm looking back at the past, I'm looking at old wallpaper patterns, I'm looking at decorative patterns that were used on ceramic plates and dishes and vs. And I'm looking across history to see how that was done and what changes and what colors are used, what shapes are used, how those move and morph depending on the form or the place or the time. And if I was starting with kind of what's happening in a contemporary landscape, there's plenty out there, but all of that's informed by what's happened before, so I just kind of naturally want to go backwards. I think also growing up, I grew up in a really suburban town where I never really saw old things. And it wasn't until I went to art school and actually got a job at architectural Salvage where I was surrounded by old pieces and repaired them that I really got interested in looking at that and kind of looking for those clues around me. Speaker 3 (10:02): I think one thing that kind of gets me charged up about old stuff like this is that it's so alien but validated at the same time. So there's these things that we can't possibly understand. They were made by us humans. It's like human evolutionary design for a time, for place for political, psychological mindset that we will never have anything to do with. We can't possibly fathom the feelings that went into these things and surround them. And then the fact that somehow these objects that were made in the past have kind of risen to the surface and been preserved in these institutions and decontextualized, and then we give them this value. And so I think all of that, there's a mystery to it for me that helps me want to dig into it and be a part of that trajectory of making. I think, I don't know, it's similar to why are we fascinated with things that are deep under the sea that we don't know about, but we know it's there and we know that it's been there forever and it has this inherent value to it. And I think it's just these kind of things that I want to be a part of. Speaker 2 (11:23): And also both being trained as potters, we would go to the Nelson Atkins Museum in Kansas City and look at old pots, and that's how we learned what to make. Speaker 3 (11:33): Yeah, I would go to the Nelson every day and look at the same pieces. And I knew that if I could, as I was young in developing these skills, if I could recreate one of these objects, then these objects that have already wasted the test of time have been validated within our culture and the institution is the most valuable things that represent human making. If I can achieve that caliber of skill, then I've gotten somewhere. And so that was the standard that we held was like, okay, if we can get to that level of the quality of these things that have been validated, then we're part of that. Speaker 2 (12:15): And that's where we were told to look. It was never go to Denny's and figure out why they're giving you this mug and why they give everyone the same mug and why that works for the Denny's restaurant chain. It was like, go to the art museum and see what's there and come back with some ideas. Speaker 3 (12:31): And Denny's came later I think, and we figured that out too. Speaker 1 (12:35): I'm just thinking of your relationship with 19th century furniture and things where nature is sort of decorating every surface and things like that. I guess I am just kind curious if that is an influence. It's something I'm reading into the work, I guess when I look at it. Is that a direct influence for you? Speaker 2 (12:56): Yeah, definitely. Something will forever be fascinated by is wallpaper. And so that was a way to bring the outside in a way to very quickly and somewhat cheaply elevate your surroundings and then based on what kind of wallpaper you have or what kind of furniture you have, and thinking about architects like Frank Lloyd Wright building these homes where everything's considered from the beginning, the furniture, the ceiling height, the wall, the windows to make this idealized living space. And I think because we were in New Bedford, because we've lived in these older cities that have these rich histories, we're always looking at the American wing of art museums and antiquing is huge. We love going antiquing. That's really taken a hit during the pandemic. But this way to kind of look at what's around us, what did the people who lived in this region collect what's available as someone who, or people who want to pull from collections and archives, a lot of that is antiquing. What's here, what do we have access to? What can we bring into our studio? Speaker 3 (14:11): I'm trying to think about the human desire to bring the outdoors indoors. Speaker 2 (14:16): When Speaker 3 (14:16): Did that start? When did it become such a driven thing connected to the decorative arts? And I was actually just looking at Augustus, the Strong's hunting palace, morts burg, and that was also a place that was where he was really trying to bring the outdoors in and encrust the inside with natural things like his sleeping quarters was completely covered with peacock feathers, but there was definitely a boost post industrialization and maybe we're kind of in the show where we have a little bit of that going on with the mushroom chamber, thinking about Aquaria and the containment of the natural world on the inside. And I don't have any answers for that, but there's a thirst to be part of the world that we come from, and it seems like our nature, our human nature, because of our consciousness and our abilities to communicate and everything that we're constantly separating ourselves. Speaker 1 (15:12): I was kind of curious about your ideas about edited nature, if that's a way to describe it. There was a screen or something that was sort of a symmetrical floral pattern, and it just struck me as odd because it's not something you would typically see in that way where, but to see it sort of divided, so symmetrically felt very eerie almost. There was almost an eeriness. Speaker 3 (15:40): Yeah, thanks. That's definitely, I mean, part of it. Speaker 2 (15:43): Yeah, Speaker 2 (15:45): I think, well, I was just thinking this constant through line in our work is we want this eerie strangeness, something that's a little off, something that's not quite right, something that's a little dark. When we started looking at just even early my sin figurines, they're kind of grotesque. They have this little dash of evil in them in terms of the way that they're sculpted, the way that they mimic reality, but they're not quite real, not soft and cute in any way. So with the screen and with the way that we kind of control ornament and move that around the page, I think we want something that's just kind of uncanny. So we always are mirroring or doubling or making things in multiples to kind of push that forward. And a lot of that's coming from interests and films and literature that have that little thing you can't quite put your finger on, but just makes it a little off. But I also think the mirroring kind of pulls you in a little bit and gives you a focal point of where to start. Speaker 3 (17:00): Yeah, I don't know the core of the work that we hope exists somehow, but there's two of us, so we make two different things all the time. It seems like we're always negotiating this duality, and we are inspired by films, things by Stanley Kubrick who used mirroring and doubles to kind of create this strange atmosphere. And Peter Greenaway, it's reoccurring. Speaker 2 (17:33): We had twins, so we just really committed to that theme. Speaker 1 (17:40): When I was looking at the images, there was the piece that, I think it's hinged, sort of a hinged environment that Speaker 2 (17:49): Oh, the kind of period, the dual, oh, Speaker 3 (17:53): Yeah, Speaker 1 (17:53): Yeah. Oh yeah, I saw that and I was like, oh, it's like 2001. That's what it's sort of little sculptural inset pieces. It was like, oh, this feels very much like the end of 2001. Something about the, it was like lit from below. Speaker 2 (18:08): That's exactly what we were trying to do. Thank you. Speaker 3 (18:12): And it is the monolith. It's the monolith that opens up into these scenes from the movie, basically. Speaker 1 (18:18): Yeah, totally. I feel like tropical birds are a recurring motif in your work, and I'm just kind of curious where that comes from. Speaker 2 (18:28): Well, I guess the birds started with your scans, or did it start before? I'm Speaker 3 (18:34): Trying to think of really where that comes from. Speaker 3 (18:37): Personally, I grew up with a parrott, but I don't, well, I mean unconsciously that stuff always rises to the surface. But I think ultimately, we had this fellowship at the Smithsonian and I had access to three D scanners, and I was going through their collections of taxidermic forms, which there isn't a lot of, and really it was kind of a process thing and an economy thing that the tool that I had happened to capture the texture of bird feathers very, very well. And so I decided to explore that. And so that just kind of led me down a path of selecting aviary. Speaker 2 (19:23): I think a lot of the imagery that's in the show and that we've been using for quite a few years is from zoo bear's French landscape wallpaper, scenic titled El Dorado. And it's sort of this view of four continents, but in the most idealized version. So there's these giant palm trees and the skies, this beautiful fade and bouquets of flowers on steps covered in vines, and there's these birds that kind of fly through the scene. And I think it's just this kind of uplifting, idealized, beautiful, magical world that Speaker 3 (20:06): Thanks for adding that because No, that's true because we could have selected any bird. And so I think the parrot in particular brings a level of exoticism, and with exoticism is also this unknown that I was kind of talking about earlier about things from the past, having these questionable things that we can't possibly understand, Speaker 2 (20:28): But then we have the vulture. Speaker 3 (20:30): We have the vulture, Speaker 2 (20:31): Which is to me just feels very spot on for covid times, just this doom and gloom bird that's out to ruin the party and is looking for things that are already going wrong. I don't know. Speaker 3 (20:49): Oh yeah. Is it too much? Okay. No, the vulture kind symbolizes death and rebirth in a way. It's a transformative animal. And in the exhibition there's a lot of clues towards transformation. Do Speaker 1 (21:02): Particular animals stand in for ideas for you, kind of like a fable Speaker 3 (21:09): Does Speaker 2 (21:09): Anything for you? Well, yeah. I Speaker 3 (21:10): Mean, for on one hand the animal is a stand-in for the human, and we've never brought ourselves to actual, well, maybe a little bit working with the human figure, but I think because we're animals, it's just becomes this vehicle for working with life in a way Speaker 2 (21:29): On a piece that's not in the show, giant kind of landscape diorama. We were looking at Thomas Cole's course of empire paintings and this kind of beginning bucolic scene and then the end where everything falls apart. And we were thinking, what happens when maybe this whole experiment doesn't work out and it's just the animals left? How do they live amongst our ruins and how do they navigate this world that we've come in and changed and then have left back in their hands? The fireplace at Cam, we were kind of thinking a little bit about Rockwood being located in over the Rhine and what happens if that kind of grand experiment of transforming a whole section of town doesn't play out, and what happens to those animals that are left? So those are stand-ins. That was coming from a 15th century Indian tapestry that again, it was this mirrored beautiful animal scene. So we changed a lot of the animals out there were these very fancy birds, and so we changed those to pigeons and we put in pit bulls. So the animals are kind of like an inside joke a little bit. There's the dogs of the factory owners of the artists involved in the project. Speaker 3 (22:49): They are, but not directly. Also, another thing that keeps us going about the animal form is our kind of pursuit towards perfection and perfect form. And that couldn't be more evident than in evolution. And so we see these things as highly refined, perfectly designed, and things that function quite well, and through their ability to live and function and live in particular biomes and have developed and evolved in these specific environments, they've taken specific shapes as well. And these shapes are perfect. And so that's kind of just like us looking towards perfection. Speaker 2 (23:40): And a lot of this is coming from taxidermic specimens, so then those are perfectly crafted to mimic reality. So then we're trying to mimic that. Speaker 1 (23:52): Kind of going a little bit backwards and just thinking about the historical influences where we started, I'm kind of curious how that has influenced the small special feature you've curated in the museum, also the for now or future retrieval and how you selected those objects and if any of those objects or sort of their time period, how those things have influenced your work. Speaker 3 (24:20): Some of the stuff is stuff we've looked at for a very long time and some of it was completely new and kind of gave us some inspiration to move forward with. A lot of those things are things that we've respected and held in really high esteem anyway, and we feel like very lucky to be in the vicinity of them and to be able to make decisions with them and pair certain things together to level the playing field for some and elevate others. And Speaker 2 (24:50): I was going to say, part of this started when we had first moved to town. I had emailed Amy and asked, could I bring my students down into the collection to look kind of through the Cincinnati Art Museum's collection of ceramics? And she said, sure, come on down. So myself and a group of my students had gone down and looked through the ceramics collection. So I think from the beginning we kind of knew what the art museum had and what was available, and that's always been in the back of our minds. I knew there was a kin price, I knew there was a Betty Woodman, I knew there were these different things, and then we kind of got this sense of what was available. And so I think it's always been percolating. And then when we were able to go actually select things, it was kind of this magical, how would you see fit to organize this? And that felt like, oh, actually it would be really cool to pair this with this and that with that. And has anyone ever seen this? And oh my gosh, I can't believe the art museum has that. Speaker 3 (25:59): I'm just going to, off the top of my head, there's some things that are direct. Right before we became so involved with the Cincinnati Art Museum collection, we were making apothecary jars. And so collection had an apothecary jar, an original Italian one, I believe. So we were like, oh, we want to show that because we've already kind of dug into that a little bit. There's the Jeffrey Mann piece about the conversation and where this was happening in the early 2008, 2006 or something like this, whenever technologies were just starting to make their way into the craft world. And that's about the same time that we started using digitization in our work. And I remember looking at that piece, it came to the surface and really kind of having that as a source of inspiration. There are a couple of small wedgewood pieces that are very angular, and those were kind of shapes that we'd been working with before, but not even knowing that they were just kind of similarities. And then there were some things that we'd never, well, the Ken Price and the Speaker 2 (27:03): NIDA June, Speaker 3 (27:04): NIDA June, we'd seen the June piece in Boston out of nowhere. We never knew about the work and we were so moved by it and the transformation and the violence and everything that's involved in that work and really got us going. And then to see that there was one at the Cincinnati Art Museum and then just be able to pair that next to Kin Price. And that was kind of two different ways we felt of getting to a very similar subject for Kin's was much controlled, but it was this biomorphic thing that was, it speaks about movement and fluidity and all this stuff. And NIDA's work was about fluidity and transformation, and that's how the work happened through the molten ness and the melting and the alchemy of it. And so that's just kind of some samples of how we were kind approaching this. Can you think of anything? Speaker 2 (28:01): I seen the Overbeck pieces, the little rug, and Speaker 3 (28:06): Yeah, we never seen George, Speaker 2 (28:07): Martha, Washington. Yeah, there were just some little sweet gems down in the collection that we really wanted to bring out and highlight. And I guess because this exhibition is taking place during the National Council for the Ceramic Arts conference, we were thinking as ceramic artists, if we came into a ceramic show at a museum, what would we want to see? And so we really wanted to fill the space with a diverse group of objects that showcased not only ceramic history and our interests, but what a museum actually collects and what's possible and what is down in a museum's archives that maybe doesn't quite fit or maybe will never fit with specific shows and exhibitions. Speaker 1 (28:53): I'd like to talk a little bit more about close parallel, about the exhibition. And so just to start, what does the title close parallel mean to you? Speaker 2 (29:05): What is close Parallel? Speaker 3 (29:06): Yeah, what is close parallel to us? And so I think it's about, part of it is about us running concurrently to these objects that already have these sometimes dicey histories or we have these stories for these things and then they ended up at an institution. And so maybe for stances, when did we go to Germany? 2000? Speaker 2 (29:34): 2008 eight, Speaker 3 (29:35): We went and worked at the Dres and Porcelain Factory, and that's really whenever things started going as far as us collaborating, we were sharing shapes that were the factories forms, and we got these molds and we were trading them around and making things out. So the work wasn't ours, and those forms actually came from my sin. So they were copies of original my sin forms. And so we always had this high respect for mycin porcelain because it seemed like it was the grandest European porcelain in the first European porcelain when we were working in Germany, we were there for the 300th anniversary jubilee of the discovery of porcelain in Europe. Now to fast forward to being in the collections of Cincinnati Art Museum, Speaker 2 (30:21): So we Speaker 3 (30:21): Saw this, my Sin Kaler tore and the Cams collection, we knew we wanted to work with it, and it had this a cool history as written in one book as potentially given by Saxony to the Queen of Naples. I'm not too sure about that because after we looked at the terrain, it has this crack in the bottom, and I wasn't sure if Saxony would actually be giving away as a gift to another country, a defective piece then. So we took a three D scan or a photogrammetric scan of the terrain and then decided to start reproducing it, and everyone we made had this crack in the bottom of it in the exact same place. So essentially we discovered this 300 year old design flaw. So I mean, I think that's just an example of how we've dug into these objects and we're running parallel to this thing that already happened. Speaker 3 (31:18): So we did a pretty kind of low tech, high tech processing of that. So we just took a series of photographs, I don't know, maybe 15. It was totally, like I said, as easy as possible. And because of the reflective surface of the glaze that actually shows up in the texture of the digital processing from photograph to three D object. And so it's that those refractions of light are actually being translated or transformed into surface or object. And so it's taken this slick sheen reflective thing and texturized it, and that's us losing control. We were trying to actually make a three D scan of this thing to a degree, and then it got us to something that we would've never had control of or never made the decision to do that. And then we embraced that and kind of ran with it. Speaker 2 (32:11): And I think a lot of times when we're copying an object or being inspired by an object, we don't need to make that object because that object's there, it's going to be in the other show, you can go around the corner and see that too. So we don't want the exact same thing, but to be able to use that and make something while it is literally the thing, it's so far removed from it and it makes you look at the original completely differently. Speaker 3 (32:39): And that's also how we're taking it to another level or another place. And that's that parallel that we have the original here and we have this quasi replica that's actually nothing. It's barely a resemblance of the previous one, but it's also at the same, it had those flaws that the original one had. And so there's this, we're not together, we're like here and we're running alongside of it. And these mistakes, things that we're starting to embrace, that's something that we're embracing more and more in the world that we're living in now, is that resources are dwindling up, access to things have dwindled, and sometimes you get what you get and you just kind have to accept it and be as creative as possible with it. Speaker 2 (33:24): I was thinking no matter how much can it Speaker 3 (33:26): Feels like we're part Speaker 2 (33:27): Of this, we're Speaker 3 (33:28): Part of the terrain now. We're part of the history of the terrain now in a way in our minds, Speaker 2 (33:32): And we can interject as much as we want into the terrain, onto the terrain changing literally the entire makeup of the terrain. But it still goes back to the way it was originally designed in the very beginning in this cluster model. And we can't outrun the fact that that wasn't never going to work. Speaker 3 (33:50): And then I think maybe it's a lot of questions too. What happens when we put our object on this object and then what is authorship then and who owns what? And it gets really muddy a little bit, but that's the way we feel like we're running parallel to these things that we're part of them. Speaker 1 (34:12): I noticed your dog walking around and I noticed in the photos there's in the process shots, there's a very tiny puppy and then now a very grownup looking dog. So how long have you been working on this? Speaker 2 (34:30): Yeah, that weaving, that first weaving was 20, so I guess we've had the dog for three years. So that first weaving was started exactly three years ago. Speaker 3 (34:41): I think whenever Amy first approached us about the show, the idea was that maybe it would be more of a survey of our work and that we could use old pieces or even borrow things that made it up to other collections and things like that. We jumped in and said, well, could we just make pretty much all new stuff for the show and dig into the collection and see what's available there and respond to the Cincinnati Art Museum collection and maybe show some things or respond to some things that haven't seen light of the ground level in quite some time. And so yeah, there's a couple things that were made prior to us knowing that we were going to be having this show Speaker 2 (35:21): Or the shag rugs and the show are so slow. So that first one probably took, I don't know, eight months or so. Then the second one took six months, and now I feel like I'm really making headway on a new, but some of the stuff, I think the way we work is this a long game where we see where want to be at the end and we're just slowly inching our way there. But with each experience or each exhibition or every time we're able to have access to more information, data collections, images, we just slowly build on this thing that just keeps rolling forward. So a lot of work just feels like rather than a show ends and we stop and they completely retool the start again. We just keep going. And as each thing builds on itself, it becomes part of this larger narrative that is forward-looking, but it also looks back to where we started as a collective. So we're always pulling from these earliest influences that trip to Dresden and working in the porcelain factory to now these pieces that we are using from the art museum I think will influence probably the next two shows worth of work. The more information we gain, the more we want to put that forward. And the show always feels like the end of an idea, but also just the beginning of the next idea, and that one's going to be the thing Speaker 3 (36:51): In the new exhibition. What's a piece that does kind of harken back to that sort of work in the porcelain factory? Speaker 2 (37:00): I mean, definitely highrise frago with the Mycin tour, literally the museum saying, yes, you can reference news this MN piece that you love, Speaker 3 (37:14): But Speaker 2 (37:14): Also the vulture. Speaker 3 (37:16): Yeah, I think the complexity of the ceramic pieces are definitely influenced by the experience of working in Dresden. I think that's where we saw that porcelain could be anything, and it can be a very detailed and complex sculptural material. And so whenever we did go into the collections of mycin at Speaker 3 (37:46): This vinger and we saw that molds may have only been used a few times before they were worn out beyond the quality that they were looking for and that things weren't just like factories. There were called manufac factories, and so they were kind of more about human production than machine production. And so you have this certain level of detail that an artisan is putting into the work on in every individual piece. And so I think it's just the quality that we saw or that we experience from working in Germany is what kind of came to in the ceramic pieces. Speaker 2 (38:28): Yeah, because giant vase forms that are covered in these small porcelain flour bowls, and then I think we're doing, it's just women by hand pumping out these tiny little flowers and applying them one by one. And then on the mushroom pieces, we're doing the exact same thing, making that mushroom form in a pressed mold that we can pop those out and then hand form mushrooms one by one to kind of ornament, Speaker 3 (38:57): But also Speaker 2 (38:58): Showcase what porcelain can do that the material, although it has so many limits, if you can work it right, it is limitless in what it can make every year. Except the last two years we've been going to J de China and working in what is the porcelain capital of the world, and it started with a research grant where we went and made a body of work for a month, and then since then we had been taking students every December and staying for a month, month and a half, two months to make work in this city. And then guy's been going in the summer to work with a lacquer master to learn ceramic lacquer and repair. But when we go to this city, we're able to design forms and have those modeled or lathed out of plaster, and then we cast those and then because this whole city is set up for ceramic industry, you can go to glaze shops or glaze stores where there's thousands of glazes that you can buy and bottles and just take 'em right back to your studio. Speaker 2 (40:07): So when we go there, something we really like to experiment with is just glaze painting and it's really, that's very traditional in terms of ceramic arts is painting with glaze, but being able to have any glaze of any texture that all works at the same temperature available so easily that we're not mixing and testing to then put 'em in these public kilns and have a turnaround in a day is really amazing. So a lot of those VAEs are layers and layers of ceramic glaze and those pieces are fired multiple times to get, I think that's as close as we're getting to painting in our work Speaker 3 (40:47): Studio Ceramics probably started in America, and what studio ceramics is, is the ability for a single person to have complete control over all the material and processes in their studio. It's just like self-contained private ability to be an individual factory with artistic expression to a certain level. And so what going to China has enlightened us on is that we don't have to be in control of everything, so we can do a certain amount of outsourcing, we can save our bodies on a certain amount of process. We don't need to prove our skill in every facet of our making. And so what that does is it actually gives you a certain amount of freedom to be able to pick and choose and have more time to spend on certain things. And I think that opportunity to work a little bit more as a painter and not be so fixated on the time and process of the making of the object Speaker 2 (41:50): And be more playful and experimental. Speaker 3 (41:54): And so that glaze was available and that's probably not a glaze that we would've made in our studio, but by having that access to that and the ease to it and being able to experiment with it than has freed us up now. So we're more accepting of things and we're working in different ways. Speaker 1 (42:13): I noticed in one of the photos, I believe there's an enormous kiln that works are being rolled into. Is that correct? Speaker 3 (42:22): Yes. Speaker 2 (42:23): Oh, in China, yeah. Yeah, so I was going to say every night basically, or every afternoon basically, unless it's raining, the public kilns get fired and then they're fired all night long to a crazy high temperature. As soon as the kiln is done, the door is pulled open and it just, all the heat pours out, so then it can be open the next morning at around, I don't know, 600 degrees. It's crazy hot. So every morning when the kiln opens, it's just this kind of, everyone runs to see the, or if you have work in it, I don't think regular people care, but you're running to see what's in the kiln. And so as they open the kiln and with those big vases, you could see 'em and you're just either like, yes, it worked, or, okay, we got to retool and start again. Speaker 3 (43:16): Yeah, so this place has this very old history going back to, well, I mean it goes probably over 10,000 years of ceramic making, but this was the imperial city for porcelain manufacturing, and so it's a factory town and I think, I don't know, 40% of the population now of a million and a half people is probably still associated with ceramics in some way, but it is being gentrified and stuff. So the old factory stuff is going away and the new museum stuff is coming in and the people that were living and working in the factories are being pushed to different parts of town and so forth to keep up their work. But basically I think the government thinks that that age is over with. But the j Dechen that we still know a little bit is essentially a bunch of factories which are more like villages, and so there are people living there and working there, and essentially everything is public. Speaker 3 (44:20): So there's some privatization of workshops under the umbrella of the factory, and so maybe you work in Latan, the tile factory producing some tile stuff, but your workshop is your private workshop and things are being passed around between the specialties within Latan, the tile village or whatever. And so there's the person with the kiln and there's the person that's rolling out the tile and there's person that's hand painting the tile, and all these things are going on in these private little areas, and so what we can do is make some friends and go in and collaborate with these people, with these special skills, these artisans, and so it, it's a public environment, and so the kiln is working and it's public and everyone does this, the locals, and so where the public kiln is, you bring all your work to it, the kiln boss puts the work in the next morning you come and take your work away, and that's how you negotiate these factory settings. And so the turnaround is very, very fast because in a sense it is a factory and there's things coming and going and it's a breathing like an organism, and there's a day and it's like it breathes in at night and exhales during the day or something, and it's constantly moving, and so you have this rhythm of the factory and it allows you to produce a tremendous amount of work. Not that it's all good, but you get to spill through a lot of ideas without killing yourself basically. Speaker 1 (45:54): Something I noticed also that I loved are the pieces that are just sort of these flat cutouts that are just kind of jammed into little balls of clay. They make me laugh. I think they're funny. When I saw it, I kind of laughed just like there's something funny about the crudeness of the lump and then the precision of the metal. To me it's like a visual joke almost. Speaker 3 (46:20): Yeah, it is. Yeah. In regards Speaker 2 (46:23): To, you're totally right. Speaker 3 (46:23): The aluminums cut out silhouettes jammed in the pieces of clay. It is kind of a joke that's super like high tech stuff using a water jet cutter, cutting out aluminum powder coating it, and then Speaker 2 (46:38): How do we make it stand up? Speaker 3 (46:39): The simplest thing known to humans, the wad of clay with the finger marks in it and just jammed in it. So there is a little bit of a play there with high low. There's also something that we talk about a lot more is economy of means. It just worked. We had clay, we had this thing, we had to make it stand up, let's just do that, but then embrace that as a conceptual gesture. Speaker 1 (47:05): I noticed a photo Mike of you with a large old book with flower illustrations. What was that? Speaker 2 (47:14): Oh, that's from, that's from the Lloyd Library, so we were artists in residence at Deloitte in 2019, so we spent about three months there in the stacks just taking turns, and then Fridays we'd go together and just leaning so heavily on the Lloyd staff to help us kind of unearth some of the Speaker 3 (47:39): Most Speaker 2 (47:39): Beautiful floral and botanical psychological illustrations we'd ever seen. Speaker 1 (47:46): Then how did those kind of work their way into the objects? Speaker 3 (47:50): From our experience at the Lloyd, we started working with the, that's where the apothecary jar kind of came into play, thinking about medicinal and pharmacological plants. Also the aluminum silhouettes. Those are directly taken from the page of a rare book and then made into three D, and so I dunno, you can kind think of it in terms of almost like a pop-up book that we're taking all these images that are flat, these plates, and then we're kind of bringing them into the world a little bit. Speaker 2 (48:24): Yeah, the patterning on the screen that mirrors, that's different pieces from the Lloyd that I've kind of mixed and matched to make that radiating pattern, and then the ovals with the sconces that it's a longrun floral scene that was probably a combination of, I don't know, maybe 10 different volumes from the Lloyd all kind of mixed and matched together to make a wallpaper and then broken back up again to kind of separate that pattern out to make a linear composition. Speaker 3 (48:58): There are also some tile in the exhibition, which they are plates in China they call the tile factory that we work in. They actually call the tile plate, but then also the page out of the book is a plate or the image, and so we've made these kind of smaller kind of volumes or ceramic books also taken from our digitization of volumes from the Lloyd. Speaker 1 (49:24): Cool. That kind of brings me to another question, which is a bad question because it's just so open, but I've just kind of noticed a lot of interaction between object and image, and you're kind of hitting on that there, but also thinking about the rug that's sort of a drawing of sculptural objects, is that sort of where you're coming from with that? Is this interaction between object and image something you're thinking about? Speaker 2 (49:56): Yeah, Speaker 3 (49:56): We're trying to figure out object and image, Speaker 2 (49:58): And Speaker 3 (49:58): Maybe that's why it's always there is. I don't think that we've resolved it, but we're trying to figure it out Speaker 2 (50:07): And we want to put our objects in a scene, in an environment, in some kind of home, and I think that's part of this museum room connection is when you look at decorative arts objects, they're always contextualized in some kind of environment or space that makes them make sense. When you see them kind of pulled away maybe in a different exhibition that's focusing on something else and they become an auxiliary thing that supports a larger narrative, that's one way to look, but the best way to see 'em is in the way that they originally function to make it make sense. So I think also thinking about our background as potters function has a lot to do with it, the vs. The rugs, the tables, these things do have another life or an implied life as we're making them. Then this is probably a super misquote, but Betty Woodman had said A painting goes on the wall, a sculpture needs a home. So I think we're always thinking about, well, where do these belong? And if we're artists making ceramic objects, is the mantle the only place that they live? And then once you fill your mantle, are you done or you move to Scottsdale and you have no mantle, so now, and so we just want to figure out other places these objects can exist and kind of build the larger world in which we want them to be seen in. Speaker 1 (51:32): I noticed just a few sketchbook shots also in your process photos. Does drawing play a part in your work and in idea generation? Speaker 2 (51:43): Yeah, Speaker 3 (51:44): Drawing everything starts with a drawing, but we're given a prompt, Speaker 2 (51:48): Basically Speaker 3 (51:49): Prompt or we give ourselves a prompt and then we get together and start doing sketches and start visualizing these things, and then we decide who wants to do what and then we just start getting to work in the studio and that we're not always have both of our hands on something all at the same time. We just kind of make a decision and we trust each other and we trust each other's quality of work, aesthetic decisions, all of that stuff, and then we can kind of branch out knowing what that original drawing looked like and then bring it back together, critique it, make more decisions and so forth. And that's kind of how the process of us working together. Speaker 2 (52:31): But I think the drawing, because we're working in these installation, the realm of installation or these projects are getting larger than just an object that goes on a pedestal, we kind of need to nail it down. So once we have the drawing, or lately we've even been doing a lot of Photoshop renderings and we see it, then it's kind of like, okay, that's the thing. Go do your job and we'll slowly bring it back together. But it's kind of like a guidebook to where we want to be. Speaker 3 (53:01): Also in regards to us drawing and sketching and stuff, the Photoshop renderings that are very crudely done, that's probably the next step in drawing. So first is probably traditional in a sketchbook or something like that, and then we might want to try to visualize what we did then in a space, and so then we kind of move to Photoshop and those are just quick things to help us understand, okay, now it seems like this can happen. Speaker 2 (53:29): Then the next step is printing it out as a giant bond print, tacking it on the wall and then holding something up in front of it and taking a photo with the phone. Okay. Yeah, and then keep going. We've been doing drawings that we'll both draw separately, but combine 'em together and then have under glazed transfers made in China that then we can apply onto the pot and then basically make it almost like a coloring book for glaze. Speaker 3 (53:58): Yeah. That enables us to, if we make our drawings, then have a transfer made and then we have these stacks of repeatable images, then that gives us some liberties to collage and compose and eliminating that labor of redrawing something every time. Speaker 1 (54:17): What do you think this exhibitions says about where you are right now? Speaker 2 (54:23): Oh, that's a great question. I think maybe I'll start. Speaker 3 (54:28): What does the exhibition say about where Speaker 2 (54:30): We're at now, where we are now? Right now? I think one, just in terms of feeling like extreme gratitude towards Amy for her belief and faith in us to be able to tackle the space, but then also to trust us with the museum's collection, with her collection, with these objects that we've looked at for years. Every time we go to the museum in Cincinnati, for us to be able to come in and use those to then elevate our ideas to then produce things that again, are kind of larger than what we would be able to do with just the tools in our studio, make it feel like this kind of, I don't know, where everything's really coming back together again in the time that we spent in Cincinnati and the time that we spent with this collection lets us envision our work in the kind of context that the work we love is presented. Speaker 2 (55:34): The way that we've been working with installations and period rooms to be able to have the space and the resources to actually execute rooms or room like scenarios at that scale, I think we're always playing around with museums in our work stands and tables and arrangements, so then to be able to work with the cam team of fabricators, of the installers with the plexiglass cases, with the right text, with the right floor stands, with the wall paint, it just feels like all of a sudden all these things that I think we tinker around with are really happening, and that's exciting. Speaker 3 (56:18): Yeah, because thinking about what this exhibition means, how does it reflect on where we're at right now, and I think we're remote, so we're in Arizona. That was a major push at a massive point of our lives of change, and we're still trying to reflect on it. I don't know if it means there's closure to a certain trajectory that we were on in our work. There might be who knows where we're going to go from. We're farther from Europe and our work was very Eurocentric, and so I think we're turning the page in a sense and excited to see what comes next. Speaker 1 (57:14): Thank you for listening to Art Palace. We hope you'll be inspired to come visit the Cincinnati Art Museum and have conversations about the art yourself. The museum is currently open, but please visit our website for the most up-to-date information about operating hours, and also to reserve your advanced online registration, which is required to limit capacity. The museum has been selling out often on the weekends, so you'll definitely want to reserve your spot before making a trip. Current special exhibitions are future retrieval, close parallel, Frank Duveneck, American Master and Aila Kum aga, all the flowers are for me. You can follow the museum on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and we also have an Art Palace Facebook group. Our theme song is Music by Baal, and as always, please rate and review us to help others find the show. I'm Russell Iig, and this has been Art Palace, produced by the Cincinnati Art Museum.