A “Digital Art Revolution” Interview with Artist Susan Greenspan.
Susan Greenspan is an artist and educator living in the Hudson Valley, NY. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Her project, "My Rock is a Purse," appeared in Cabinet Magazine, Issue No. 33/Deception.
This is a recent interview with Susan Greenspan, conducted by Scott Ligon, author of “Digital Art Revolution, Creating Fine Art with Photoshop”, specifically for this blog.
Your work has a lot of different facets. I look at your gallery shows and I see photographs. I see installations. I see digital paintings and manipulated images. Is there a common factor to all of your different approaches? Do you feel like your different approaches influence each other? How?
The thing that connects most of my work is thematic: looking at the mundane stuff I do everyday, the objects I use, things that I come across. But each project or idea develops from a give and take between subject matter and the usefulness of certain media. It evolves as I go along.
For example, the installation "SEVEN ELEVEN SHOOT" (2007) came out of a game I played with my cell phone camera that was at first just something to relieve boredom. I was living in Roger's Park in Chicago and taking the train to work every day, and I would try to take a picture of a particular 7-11 sign near the Morse Ave. El stop so it would be centered in my cell phone screen. This was difficult because of the limitations of the camera and the situation. There was a long delay between clicking the photo button and when the picture was taken, the train was moving, the cell phone camera was low resolution, the screen was only one-inch square, I was shooting through a window... It was a challenge to get the image onto the screen, and I became obsessed with it. Later I started thinking about the process itself, about trying to use an inadequate technology to fix an inadequate moment. As the number of images grew, they became interesting in themselves and as a collection. Sometimes the sign was centered, sometimes it was out of the picture entirely. Some images were distorted or abstracted because of the camera's automatic focus and light features. Ghost-like images appeared in the nighttime pictures. They also looked like they were taken with a surveillance camera. Patterns developed when I looked at them printed out side by side. When I had the chance to show the images in a gallery I wanted people to see these patterns and feel the repetition of commuting, and also the one moment I was trying to shoot. So 30+ images were shown as a line of framed 3"x4" photos, one butted up to the next, alternating between the morning and evening commute. The end result also became a comment on how the small rituals of our everyday lives are so often mediated by commercial technologies.
"Science Project," (2004) began when I came across unused science equipment in a basement at Smith College. I thought it would be interesting to see how these objects looked in a gallery, outside their context as (now dated) science apparatus.
I put the equipment on plinths and display tables, and made up labels for them.
For this installation it was important that people examine and contemplate the actual "science" objects, now as curiosities in the space of art and not once-removed as representations in some other medium. My photographs of those objects go a step further and abstract them into visual art.
"My Rock is a Purse" (2009) developed from my collection of rocks that look like other things. I have a rock that looks like a purse, one that looks like an egg, others are like a piece of bacon, a bean, and so on. I have been thinking about collections, archives, and their relation to the "truth" of photography, so it made sense to me that my little mimic stones should be the basis for a photography project.
All of my work deals in some way with how meaning is created out of everyday experience, and how the relations between various technologies for representation affect our perception of those experiences. I develop the concept and the medium for each piece as I go along.
Why is digital technology part of your work. What do you gain by working digitally?
I started working with digital technology when I got a job at a commercial photo archive. I was kind-of thrown into it. I had a clerical job, but my desk was in the room where they were starting their digital imaging dept, and they had an open position, so I learned Photoshop on the job. In my own studio work, I had been drawing and painting over postcards and other found images, and I found the transition to using Photoshop to manipulate my images very natural. Now I am interested in using and thinking about digital technology because it affects perception and everyday experience in novel ways.
I still also paint and make prints whenever that best expresses what I am aiming at in a particular piece.
What role does Photoshop play in your digital work?
In the past I used Photoshop to make minor adjustments and to do retouching. But, now one of the projects I am working on is actually about the process of using Photoshop, responding to the program itself. I am interested in how Photoshop acts as much as the final product. I'm using the program to comment on the program. So Photoshop is the subject and the medium for my current work. Ask me again in a few months!
Is Photoshop a regular part of your workflow in your photography as well?
I may use actual film, or scan, or take digital photographs, but I never do darkroom work. I only use Photoshop to process my images.
Tell us about your background as an artist…did you start out as a photographer?
I started out as a printmaker. In some ways I am still a printmaker, but now I more often make digital prints than traditional etchings or lithographs. I have always been drawn to the idea of multiples, series, and the once-removed quality of the printmaking process, the fact that it is not my direct hand that shows up in the final work. The printing-out aspect of digital photographic work interests me in these ways as an area of great potential.
Could you tell us a little bit about your creative philosophy or what interests you as an artist?
Aside from my ongoing interests in everydayness and the intersection of high and low technologies, right now I am interested in using digital tools in a restrictive kind of way. This interest came to me recently when I was doing freelance graphic work. For the past few years I have been part of an image bank development project run by the Monarch Center in Shaker Heights, Ohio where we are making thousands of pictures using Adobe Illustrator to help teach autistic children. I get a list of things and concepts, like "apple", "allergies", "don't spit", "leftovers", "sewing", "terrified". I have to illustrate these while only using a few colors, black outlines, and simple shapes, like airplane brochure images. Basically I have been using the digital tools with a strictly defined set of limits, using the tools to pare down or standardize images, and I have started to bring this approach into my studio work as well. Most of the time you think of Adobe programs as expanding, with unending possibilities, but I have been experimenting with doing the opposite, giving myself limitations.
What would you consider your career highlights as an artist?
One highlight was when I was a visiting artist at the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Scotland. I taught a couple of etching/litho courses, but also was able to do my own work. It was fantastic. Recently, Cabinet Magazine published part of "My Rock is a Purse." It made me so happy! I have been a fan of the magazine for so long. Also, my work for the Monarch Center for Autism is really important to me. Even though these drawings are standardized to fit Monarch's requirements, I think my personality comes through in them. Doing these drawings gives me such great pleasure. And making images in a visual language that autistic people can understand has taught me about my own preconceptions about images.
What are your current and future projects?
For one current project I'm using scans of old family snapshots to play with Photoshop's retouching tools. And I'm just getting my ideas together for an animation project in the style of the pared down drawings I have been making with Illustrator. I am also doing sketches for a video project that is based on my garden and the problem of global warming.
Anything you’d like to do that you haven’t already?
Textiles.
Anything else you’d like us to know about your work?
I tend to shy away from spectacles but dry humor and irony is always in there somewhere.
Learn more by visiting Susan Greenspan’s website: susangreenspan.com
