Chris Haberman (Artist/Curator)
Posted: August 2, 2010 | Author: lorna | Filed under: Interviews | Tags: Chris Haberman, curator, interview, murals, oregon, portland, urban artist | Comments OffNative Portlander Chris Haberman is a painter, curator, and community arts advocate. Haberman is a storyteller, melding myths and fables with real life grit in a flurry of marks and colors. His studio is situated in a large warehouse space transformed into co-operative studios in the Troy Laundry Building in SE Portland. He is one of the most zealous artists I’ve come across in the Portland art scene. If you live in or have even just visited Portland, chances are you’ve come across Haberman’s art in mural form and in exhibitions. If you haven’t yet, you will. In thinking about Haberman, the R&B musician James Brown comes to mind, “the hardest working man in show business.”
Amidst a whirlwind of art making, Chris Haberman contemplates his next move.
Lorna Nakell: I understand that you left the corporate world to become an artist. What was your career before, and what prompted you to choose the path of an artist?
Chris Haberman: Yep, I needed a job pretty badly, so I took an office job for an insurance company. I told myself, “Well, Kafka worked in insurance and he was a writer, so I can do it too.” It was great for awhile, but then I started selling a lot of art. I decided it was time to cut the corporate cord and do what I really loved.
LN: As a painter you have a distinctly outsider art style. I’ve heard you referred to as an “urban artist,” “ghetto realist” and “urban realist.” Do you mind having such labels? How would you describe your art?
CH: I like labels, they help define things and give focus. Really, every label has some truth to it or a lot of great hype—I like hype too, it helps create a mystique. I define myself as a painter that works from an urban aesthetic. My work is neither realistic nor classically artistic; it is more like cartoons with adult-themed word bubbles. I can draw realistically, its just too much work. I prefer to work with what comes out naturally. Which in my case, is the talent of a 10 year old with a 30 year old’s sense of humor.
LN: Possibly the most prolific artist of his time, Picasso created approximately 50,000 works of art before his death in 1973. You are a prolific artist in your own rite. How many works would you say you have created since becoming a painter? Are there benefits to being prolific?
CH: I have created over 7,000 works in less than 9 years, so I am definitely on the Picasso path. He died the year I was born by the way, so I hold Picasso very close to my heart. My favorite Picasso statement is, “Paint
"French Or Homeless," acrylic and ink on board, 2010.
like a child.” I hold that very dear and never forget it. There is a whole world of subjects, people, landscapes, notions, etc., to pull from, and as an artist, it is your job to digest and redistribute these as your own.
LN: You are an unabashed self-promoter. You leverage social media outlets as well as any marketing guru (Chris currently has almost 4k fans on his Facebook page.). Do you think that’s one of the keys to your success?
CH: Sure, self-promotion is the key to success these days. I do not have an agent or anyone to do this, so I do it myself. I also love people and many of those Facebook friends are really my friends. Mark Twain became famous because he was a relentless self-promoter, self-publisher and self-critic. I follow that school of thought but with a twist: I want to help others as well, and our community.
LN: Do you find that your master’s degree in literature plays a role in your painting process?
CH: I think everything I have digested as an intellectual and creature of study has helped my painting. My studies in literature are very important aspect to my work in the form of storytelling and development of concept. I do not sell pretty pictures, I tell stories in my paintings.
LN: You are involved in many local community projects like street fairs, fundraisers and Caldera projects. What is the importance of this type of artistic outreach in relation to your work or art career?
CH: I am a community person; I enjoy people and helping to organize things at the grass roots level. I never want to be “too” big to be part of a street fair, or to work with kids. Those activities were the basis of my start in
"Restless Nights," acrylic and ink on record cover, 2010.
the art world and I never want to let go of them. A few months ago I donated 7 paintings to different causes. Its good for the cause and its good for me (cross marketing really, if you look at it). I have spread my name out in as many circles as possible, and charity is just another circle, it just happens to have a worthwhile end.
LN: Are you represented by any galleries? If not, what is your experience operating outside the gallery arena in the current financial climate?
CH: I have always operated outside that arena. My best sales are in bars and restaurants (The true Portland gallery), which seems to serve many Portlanders. People know me; know I just want to make art and sell it—to do so I have to fit the market.
LN: In addition to creating paintings for exhibition and sale you do curatorial work in local cafes and bars, and create murals independently as well as collaboratively. What have been some of your favorite art experiences over the years?
CH: I have been curating as long as I have been painting, almost. I curate bars/cafes because that is where I got my start and I’ve remained friends with the owners that first gave me a shot. I am just trying to help new artists and give them some skills to help them figure it all out.
I love painting murals and they are always a challenge. My first experience with Jen Mercede (Francis Restaurant mural, Alberta) was over 300 hours on one wall, on scaffolding, in the rain; it was a definite learning curve. Currently, I am enjoying working closely with Jason Brown, curator of the Goodfoot and Po’ Boy Art Gallery. I respect him very much, as a painter, curator, builder and friend, and I think we make a great team. The older I get, the less I want to tackle things on my own. It takes a village….
LN: What are your upcoming projects?
CH: Jason [Brown] and I are working on a mural project right now, and we just finished working together to open the Po’ Boy Art Gallery in his frame shop. We are gearing up for the Big 100 show (100 artists, 1500 works) at the Goodfoot for December.
I am curating a show for Portland Center for the Performing Arts for September, to open with TBA Festival, entitled “The New Brow of Portland.”
On a personal art level, I am working on a series of paintings for a book by K.C. Cowan (Oregon Art Beat) entitled They Don’t Call Them Saints for Nothing. It’s a look at a selection of Catholic saints, where KC did the writing and I did the illustrations. [Haberman recently was an interview subject on Oregon Art Beat.]
I’m also working on a series due out next year called “Maiden Oregon” – where basically I paint one work for every song Iron Maiden (the British metal band) has written in the last 30 years (nearly 100 works) – pretty fun! I love being an artist.
fin
Tia Factor (Artist, Curator)
Posted: April 27, 2010 | Author: lorna | Filed under: Interviews | Tags: curator, painter, portland, Tia Factor | Comments OffTia Factor is a Portland-based artist and curator. She received her M.F.A. from the University of California at Berkeley in 2001 and her B.F.A. from the California College of the Arts (CCA) in 1997. Factor has taught at the Oxbow School in Napa, California, for the Department of Art Practice at the University of California at Berkeley, Portland State University and is currently teaching at Portland Community College. In this interview, she shares how her roots stretched from a rural region of Northern California to the burbs of Chicago. She explains how those roots, along with other experiences traveling (nationally and internationally), inform her art.
"Willits, Portland, and Everything In-between: Ryan Pierce," gouache, airbrush, spray paint and colored pencil on paper, 2009.
LN: Your paintings have a very relevant feel in relation to contemporary art sensibilities. They incorporate complex color schemes, with a combination of biomorphic and geometric forms to create almost musical, fragmented, frenetic compositions that suggest real or imagined places and times. What is the significance of the landscape in your art?
TF: There are a lot of reasons I’m interested in landscape and place. I was born in a beautiful and semi-remote backwater of Northern California, the Russian River area in Sonoma County. My parents and I lived up on a hill in the redwoods and were hippies, living close to the land. When my folks split-up, my mom and I ended-up in suburban Chicago where I was raised from the time I was eight years old. I had a pretty rough time of it in the burbs, feeling alienated from my surroundings in the sprawl and rampant development of that landscape. As soon as I could, I graduated early from high school and moved back to Sonoma County, where my dad lived. I had the distinct impression of coming back to myself, of finally being allowed to express who I was. The place really had so much to do with it because I realized through that experience that everyone is way more affected by the quality of their surroundings than they think. Once I began exploring how I was so affected both negatively and positively by my surrounds I dove further into the study of geography, wanting to create images dealing with landscape and the affect it has on people.
LN: You recently created a whole series of paintings based on your move from California to Portland. This seems to have been an important life transition to have spawned this project. This project also has the added complexity of having a social practice component. Can you talk about your process in developing this project?
Tia Factor, continuously expanding her horizons.
TF: Moving to Portland has been a pretty intense transition for a number if reasons. I went to school, both undergrad and graduate, in the Bay Area and pretty much every friendship and professional contact I’ve made in the last twelve years happened down there. Though my husband and I bought a house in Portland, it just wasn’t our home even after we put all our stuff in it. I wasn’t really sure how Portland could become my home either. We had actually just come from living in Tasmania for close to half a year and because it was clearly a temporary situation, I retained that privileged sense of being a visitor, not needing to create a real sense of home in that foreign land. But with Portland it was different.
So, I created this project for myself that was related to a project I had just completed during a residency in Tasmania. As part of the residency, I was housed for a month on the outskirts of a prison ruins. I was seriously lonely but I developed a project that remedied the situation. Each morning I would walk around the ruins asking tourists to talk to me about their personal impressions of the place. This helped me feel connected to humanity and the world again. And I found, just as this interview makes me have to clarify my thought process which feels pretty good, people liked being invited to answer questions. They liked participating in someone’s project knowing that what they say may generate a work of art. So, that was the beginning of a more social side to my practice as a painter.
After moving to Portland, I decided to ask the few friends I had here about how it was that they made Portland their home through a formal interview process which I recorded. I took pictures of things they brought up during the interviews and arranged those images into compositions which I then painted with gouache on paper. Sometimes I refer to these paintings as symbolic portraits or a mental map of my interviewee. I’m not sure if it was the effectiveness of this project, having a baby in Portland, being here for over two years or some combination of the above, but I’ve finally began to feel a lot more at home in Portland.
LN: Your paintings combine a beautiful mixture of abstract forms with realistic elements such as building structures, trees and animals. There is also a fine balance between control and chaos in your use of materials. Can you talk about the development of your techniques and imagery?
TF: This combination of abstract and realistic elements is how I represent place from the vantage point of both inner and outer; the fusing of the subjective, personal or emotional reality with the “objectively” real environments surrounding us. I am also interested in the tension between control and chaos. Throughout my art practice I’ve explored issues of order emerging out of chaos and our basic human need to find patterns and meaning in chaotic information. I love the exchange between organic, amorphic patterns and the harder-edges of architectural and geometric forms. In my paintings, this often results in pools of gouache or watercolor drying in naturally formed patterns juxtaposed with harder-edged, refined mark-making.
In terms of imagery, I will often refer to the above themes in my paintings: chaos and order, nature and the built environment, and the interconnectedness of human beings to their environment.
LN: You have been awarded artist residencies in India, Vermont and Tasmania. You talked a little about your experience in Tasmania. How do residencies and travel influence your art?
"Babies, Books and Airplane Travel: Harrell Fletcher (detail)," gouache, airbrush and graphite on board, 2009.
TF: Travel has been a very important element in my life generally and as an artist specifically. I seem to be the most open to experience when I travel, learning the most about the world and myself in relation to it. When I travel, I try to make art even if it is not the most ideal situation for it. When I learned about residencies, I couldn’t believe that there existed such a perfect fusion of what I most love to do, travel and make art.
I didn’t necessarily make my best work while at any of the residencies but that is not what I think they’re about. The effect those experiences had on who I am will always contribute to what I make as an artist as well as deepen my understanding and curiosity about this world. And there is always something wonderful about being provided a studio space and meeting other artists in a foreign land (or even Vermont)!
LN: In addition to being an artist you have done a stint of curating. What has been your favorite curatorial experience?
TF: Curating for me has never been that easy since it takes a lot of coordinating and communicating with many people, which is not my favorite way to spend my time. That said, I’m now curating a group show of contemporary art from Tasmania which will open here in Portland at galleryHomeland in a year. While I’m super into it and glad it’s happening, I definitely feel the stress of being responsible for a bunch of art being shipped from Australia to the US and trying to make all who are involved happy with the results. It’s easy to think of ideas for shows and get really excited about them. Then comes the real work of making the thing take form.
LN: What projects are currently in the works?
TF: I currently have a solo show up, Places We Call Home, at Swarm Gallery in Oakland California. For that show I began a series called Pocket Canyon that explores the place I was born in rural Northern California which I mentioned in the beginning of this interview. I completed four paintings for that series so far and have begun another one. I’m certain I will do more as I’m just beginning to come to terms with that place I no longer call home.
Tia Factor is currently represented by Swarm Gallery, Oakland, CA. You can find out more about her work by visiting her Website.
fin
TJ Norris (Artist, Curator)
Posted: February 15, 2010 | Author: lorna | Filed under: Interviews | Tags: curator, interdisciplinary, photographer, portland, TJ Norris | 2 Comments »TJ Norris is a Portland based interdisciplinary artist, curator and writer. He recently received a grant, his first, from the Regional Arts and Culture Council to enable him to do a complete redesign of tjnorris.net which will be released in mid March. In the process, he has dropped his public service blogging project, ‘unBlogged’, after three years of publishing. He talks about striking a balance between creating and curating, the differences between the East and West coasts and gives a window into his creative process.
"Solstice II," unique archival inkjet print, 2010
LN: Where are you from originally and what brought you to Portland?
TJ: I grew up in Boston and the outlying regions of New England. So much history and tradition, so much of that old Irish Catholic spirit! In the interim of the years I also lived in Nova Scotia while on an international exchange program in Halifax. I also briefly lived in both Washington, DC and Brooklyn, NY. Getting to the West Coast took me nearly ten years. I longed to be near the Pacific and tested the waters of both the Bay Area and Seattle before I found the charm of Portland too hard to ignore.
LN: In addition to being a multidisciplinary artist you are a very active curator. Is it difficult finding time to do both?
TJ: Not really, however that’s where the power of Libra kicks in, but it is a delicate balance for sure – the time commitment aspect. As an active studio artist reliant on our cultural economy I must budget the release of any creative project, and right now I’ve taken a short step back from most of my freelancing in favor of producing new work for exhibition. It feels like a proper break. But when my cravings to write or put together a show flare up there’s not much I can do except act on it.
TJ enjoying his days in the sun.
A renowned writer for Art in America once chortled to me that one cannot split time between an active studio practice and still wear a curator’s garb. It stopped me in my tracks for a moment and called to mind artists who’ve been at this crossroads like Alfred Stieglitz, John Baldessari, Liam Gillick, Jeff Koons – the list goes on. Check out this piece: CuratorsinContext.ca.
At first I completely poo-poo’d his comment, and still do in large regard, but the key of success here is the allowance of time. I guess after owning my own gallery (Soundvision) and curating for several institutions (Tufts University, SUNY/Binghamton Art Museum, Linfield College) I’ve grown accustomed to the academic head cocking that comes with drawing outside the lines. The greater balance can be perceived as a gray area between the obvious overlaps and potential conflicts – I’m still willing to risk it after nearly three decades exploring the genre.
LN: So, it sounds like you are switching your focus to doing more art making. Does that mean you don’t have any upcoming curatorial plans?
TJ: I’m taking a respite except for the traveling ‘SQFT’ show which has been through Portland and Boise; though the intent is to get it to cities in WA, BC, MT and NoCA before putting it to bed. The Sun Valley Center for the Arts has confirmed to be its final venue in mid 2011. The exhibition will include up to 75 artists by its completion.
LN: Your curatorial/artistic experience spans both the East and West coasts. How do the two art scenes compare?
TJ: I find the East Coast a bit edgier. There seems to be a heavier reliance on social practices, color and form from here to LA. In cities like Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Boston and New York you experience more interdisciplinary conceptual art, a combination of genres. And while these generic observations are fleeting, under it all, painters are still painting realistic landscapes alongside both oceans in the infinite quest for an ideal.
I remember a show in the late 80’s that broke the mold which was curated by Dana Friis-Hansen called “LA Hot & Cool” at MIT’s List Visual Art Center. It seemed curious and somewhat shocking at the time. It made a statement. For some reason it seemed explorative, of the “new” new. Today, to really rock the audience one must use a combination of traditional process and a deeper exploration of technology.
"Form II (from 'Random' series)," unique archival inkjet print, 2009
LN: I can definitely see evidence of that sort of combination of traditional process and exploration of technology in several of your photographs. I can also see sculptural concerns of form and mass played out in your photographs. How do you decide when an idea needs to be a photograph and when it needs to manifest as something else?
TJ: Form just makes sense of itself somehow. Though it makes me think of how I’ve really gotten into the groove of the Northwest. Maybe it’s a secret recipe, a combination of what you don’t see and just letting things simply be. I like to experiment with the aspect of chance – it is very important to my process, especially in the digital era, without contact sheets! Although developing something of physicality, something 3D or installation-based dictates itself often by nature of the presentation space. I love playing on the repetition and echo of architecture.
LN: The images in your work are bold and graphic depictions of what seems to be a personal exploration of opposites: internal and external, natural and man-made, private and public. Some of your compositions are meditative in their minimalism. Can you talk about your artistic influences?
TJ: My greatest influences are simply incidental. There’s nothing better than looking at a sudden reflection from a new angle or the way fog erases everything in its wake. The public and private, indeed.
LN: Congrats on your new representation with Beppu Wiarda Gallery. I understand that you are slated for a solo show. Do have any ideas brewing for that?
TJ: Yes, the show is scheduled for 10/10. My birthday is on the tenth. Initially counting, geometries and lots of numbers floated about, as did titles like “Random” which may have stuck. I’m excited to work with Gail, Stan and Stephanie. They have been incredibly supportive of my vision since we met a few years back.
Recently I moved my studio into a rural area outside of Portland and am developing some new ideas for a series of images. I’ve shot about 300 initial test shots that are under review, but probably won’t use any of them. There’s got to be a clean way to visually dissect three visual planes at once, yes? The Velvet’s “I’ll Be Your Mirror” comes to mind.
TJ has several exciting projects in the works. He has collaborated with NY artist Scott Wayne Indiana to create a limited edition, glow-in-the-dark t-shirt. The shirt is soon to be released by Plazm Thread . Next month his photographs will be included in the Red Dot Art Fair in New York. TJ is also working on a collaboration with composer Leif Elggren which will be held in Stockholm. His work can be seen in Portland at Beppu Wiarda Gallery.
fin