2015 Time-Based Art Festival | PICA, Portland, Oregon
KK: What is spirit?
TF: I love that the Latin translation equals breath—an operation that is conscious and unconscious—availing us to be present or helping us bypass the moment. A type of echo between the seen, the felt, and the imagined.
Why go on? Why go on as an artist when the work that we do is sometimes unseen? Not just because of lack of opportunity, but because of indifference or lack of perceived value?
My relationship to art has changed over the years.
In my twenties it was a lifeline that helped me give form to ideas about community, value, and identity. In my thirties I started to think about art-making becoming a profession. In this coming decade I want to say no to rules; no to constraints; no to austerity measures in my art practice!
There is a type of freedom in art- making that gives me autonomy and agency; it is deeply rewarding to realize an idea, give it form, make it better, and learn from the process. It is an uphill battle when value is generated from the vantage point of a capitalist system—where productivity is the desired outcome and the act of laboring itself is undervalued. I have trouble understanding what collective value is at this moment and why I should feel compelled to prescribe to it.
Can you tell me how you arrived at selecting the verse “There are some who are in the darkness / And the others are in the light / And you see the ones in brightness / Those in the darkness drop from sight,” from Brecht’s Threepenny Opera? It is a verse that is seldom used in modern versions of the play/poem/song. Do you think that is because it goes deep and dark into the power dynamic between rich and poor?
Actually, that is not quite the translation that I used— it reads: “Some are in the dark and others are in the light / we see them in the light / in the darkness we do not see them.”
My work is continually influenced by my experience of other works of art, and this spans visual art, sound, writing, theory, news, and images.
In this case I saw a program of music by Kurt Weill, the German composer, sung in German by an amazing soprano. It included “The Ballad of Mack the Knife,” a song from The Threepenny Opera, and the lyrics are written by Brecht. When I was looking at the translation, this verse somehow illuminated something humanistic about power, about class, about poverty, about difference, without placing geographic specificity—it somehow emotionalized suffering. The play as a whole is a critique of capitalism.
I am not sure why it isn’t always included—but for me the tenor shifts from symbolically describing the brutality of this character to a didactic use of language. Maybe it is a jarring departure in form that doesn’t make sense in popular covers.
How did you arrive at the form of your piece? Why language? Why light? Why five thousand lights? Why do we see it from front and back and why the choice to have the text erode and reappear over time? In other words, how did this work emerge from a thought into a sculpture?
I was messing around in Photoshop using the selection tool, and it glitched—somehow the text became hypnotic and alive, and I really loved the idea of mimicking this selection as a means of materially and experientially translating the text. The number of lights is dictated by the text itself. The piece has a complex circuitry and
it is completely exposed in the back—I am always interested in juxtapositions of objects, of material qualities, and oscillating between control and chaos. While the front is hypnotic and seamless as a surface, the back be- comes corporeal, reminiscent of hair and map lines, and it supports an anxiety associated with these territories.