Michelle Grabner is an artist, curator, and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is also the curator of Newtonland, the current exhibition at White Flag Projects. I had the pleasure of interviewing Michelle on the morning of the show’s opening; this is the final of installment of that interview.
Lynna Borden (White Flag Intern): Did you and Brad make your piece specifically for the show and did you do it before or after you found the other artists?
Michelle Grabner: We’ve been making mobiles for some time and they always include some of my static silverpoint drawings. We like the contradiction between drawings comprised of silverpoint on panel and something vernacular, in this case, aluminum sections of bleacher seating, which implies a kind of spectatorship. So they’re formal, there’s mathematical proportion being played out and so forth, but there’s always this collision between something vernacular and recognizable in terms of material, and then degrees of abstraction.
So we’ve been working with those collisons for a long time. For the piece here, we were drawn to the structural space and the I-beams articulating the physical space and volume of White Flag Projects. Again, this work is more of a hanging screen than a mobile. What I really like about this piece and how it echoes the main space of White Flag is that you have these secessions of I-beams that horizontally dissect the volume of the space, and then you have the suspensions of these horizontal bleacher sections that echo the I-beams. I like to see it as a metaphorical gesture of flattening out the space that is White Flag Projects.
LB: It’s interesting that you talk about spectatorship because the piece really does change the way you view the rest of the show. You can only enter from the left side of the gallery and if you’re standing on the right, you’re forced to look through this kind of screen.
MG: Yep, it was funny because my concern was that it was going to be much more obtrusive or opaque. That the viewer wasn’t going to be able to penetrate it, but you’re right, to get a clear view of the work you do have to be in one space or the other. You can see work through the horizontal stretches of the bleachers, but not clearly, so you start playing with strikingly horizontals frames.
LB: Do you think that doing this show and working in this space will inform or influence what you do next?
MG: Well, I can tell you that it already has influenced my new work. In the past, the mobiles were true mobiles, where things were moving in multi-directions, balanced out and so forth. We’re working on a piece for New York, a show that will open in April that elaborates on the piece here though, it’s more suspended sculpture than mobile. There are also some architectural elements and references involved in the new works that come directly from working through Newtonland.
LB: Thank you so much for your time!