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Interview with artist Christina Pettersson by Elizabeth Perry, Gallery Assistant
October 2009
Q: You said that you often use images of yourself that “are not rightly you” do you use yourself as a model because see something of yourself in these women depicted? like with Judith a quality of heroicism? Or maybe a temporal quality of entrapment or helplessness like with Ophelia at Fourteen or please don’t bury me in wood?
When I say the self-portraits are not rightly me, I mean that I use my body as a stand-in for the viewer, to imagine the scenarios I would place them in. The same is true for me. I am attracted to certain stories like Judith or Shakespeare's murdered women not because I can possibly identify with their heroism! but because they face a death I have not known. There is an old adage which says we will come to know the world is real only by dying in it. Blood is the ultimate proof of life. I cannot make a drawing more real than that. I cannot make life more real than that. Life is beautiful because of it. I look at the work and understand that I miss what I hardly know I've lost as a human, to bury my own dead, or kill my own meat. I think of Ingres raging, "Let me hear no more of that absurd maxim: 'We need the new, we need to follow our century, everything changes, everything is changed.' Sophistry - all of that! Does nature change, do the light and air change, have the passions of the human heart changed since the time of Homer? 'We must follow our century': but suppose my century is wrong? Because my neighbor does evil, am I therefore obligated to do it also? Because virtue, as also beauty, can be misunderstood by you, have I in turn got to misunderstand it? Shall I be compelled to imitate you!"
Q: What inspired you choose the subject of Judith and Holofernes?
Art history had me chose that subject long ago I suppose. I spent years mesmerized by Caravaggio's version. The expression on his Judith's face! So bizarrely disconnected to the severed head, as if someone else had just committed the deed. On the other hand, I have no interest in making tired versions of exhausted themes. The actual story of Judith and Holofernes does not interest me at all. She allows me to test the boundaries of life and death.
Q: You said that you are not actually interested in the characters, but rather just rendering your own version of history, but why not invent your own erotic violence?
You cannot escape who you are. Art history is my history, as much as my own, maybe more. But beyond Judith I have created plenty of my own myths, from She Walks the Plank to please don't bury me in wood.
Q: I saw you have a BFA in painting, and yet your portfolio on your website consists of various drawings and video, these are two very different forms of art, one with a history of tradition and one relatively new; what connects these two forms for you and how were you drawn to them from the position of a painter?
I hardly know an artist who sticks to one medium! Years of art school and hanging around other artists makes us great experimenters I suppose. I went from being a painting major, to receiving a Fulbright Grant in sculpture, to applying to graduate school in fibers. In the end, I started drawing again. Then my predilection to travel and my love of film led me to start carrying a camcorder. We are all great disregarders of boundaries, but you can never escape yourself regardless.
Q: What is your inspiration for your films?
Most of the time I'm completely happy making these really big drawings, slow, tedious things, the result of what occasionally happens when your mother enrolls you in art classes before you can even remember. You're left content to spend most of your time alone - facing walls, holding pencils, telling your own odd tales of resurrected ghosts and quiet mysteries. Video is only my most recent discovery. I find that whenever I hit the road, the medium of drawing leaves me unsatisfied. Merely sketching a landscape or the people within it was such a pale substitute for riveting first-hand experience. So on a Christmas whim, I asked for a camcorder. I should have known! Soon enough I was studying the thousand page manuals of video editing programs and making movies. Soon enough I was telling stories again. Just like in my drawings. That was three years ago. Yet until my latest video, Legend, showed at a museum here in Miami last month, I continued to think of it as a side project. At the opening I surprised myself by discovering how central to my work it really is. In fact, at my very first residency, in January of this year, I kept finding myself outside the studio, traipsing the knee-high snow and freezing temperatures of Vermont (not to mention the health of my camcorder!) to capture a buried church cemetery or lonely field. How I loved it. That's the footage in The Lost Year. I have always been a storyteller, whether I am drawing cemetery trees or recording myself standing under them.
Q: You use metaphysical narration, is the film based around the phrases like “a sound like the final sound” or “murmuring fairies, murmuring” or do those come later?
The images and the words evolve at the same time, and edit towards each other. This has been one of the most satisfying aspects of video, the ability to finally incorporate words into my artwork. I could never manage to do that with any other medium.
Q: Many of your videos have typewriter sounds, what is the significance of typewriters to you?
While I wouldn't definitively call myself a Luddite, I have always been more drawn to the aesthetics and sounds of older machinery. The sound of my grandfather's typewriter filled the house and my memories of him. Decades after he died I was buying them here and there, drawn to their variety and beauty. Typing is a bit like drawing you know, the way they make you feel as if you are physically carving a word into the paper.
Q: Your drawings are always on a very large scale but under life size, what is your intention with the size? is it to be inclusive to the viewer on an almost life -size scale, or rather to give it a bit of distance with being just under human scale? Are they just under life-size?
I think most of them are about the same size as me. That's my notion anyway. I can't relate to drawing the figure much smaller than life size. I need to feel that I can walk into the paper and envelop that space in order to relate to it.
Q: And lastly, What is your favorite work to date?
Whichever one I've just finished! However, I have started to consider the need to save a piece here and there, so the first piece I made a point of saving was Levis (Light), the portrait of myself levitating, which is now hanging in my father's house, since it doesn't fit in mine. I did that piece while I was working on the brick series, and it was seminal in that it taught me to look at a body and brick in the same way. Both are mere objects floating in the world, only marked by how they are held up to the light, and how you tell their stories.
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