I Like Your Work: Conversations with Artists - The Work Doesn’t Stop When You Leave: Artist Catherine Haggarty

The Work Doesn’t Stop When You Leave: Artist Catherine Haggarty

02/05/21 • 65 min

I Like Your Work: Conversations with Artists

It was such a pleasure to have Catherine Haggarty on the show! Catherine is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY who recently had a solo exhibition at Massey Klein Gallery. She is also co-director of NYC Crit Club, a space offering community, connection and critiques for artists. In this interview, Catherine talks about learning how to make work when no one is looking and how this has served her as an artist moving forward in her practice. We also discuss her current work that she recently exhibited at Massey Klein Gallery in the Lower East Side.

Catherine Haggarty’s paintings are reminiscent of the brief moment we experience waking up from a dream. When everything rises to the surface at once. The edges of objects blur and we wonder what we just saw. You can try to hold onto the experience, but you can’t completely keep the image in your mind, rather the image dissolves into something else. This is how I read Catherine’s paintings, as a back and forth between reading forms and reading space. The painting continually reconfigures itself as your eye is drawn to references of animal figures that you read as a positive shape. This figure then flips to become a negative space, bringing your eye deeper into the painting.

Haggarty’s paintings and curatorial work have been reviewed by and featured in Bomb Magazine, Artnet, Hyperallergic, Two Coats of Paint, Brooklyn Magazine, The New York Times, Maake Magazine, Art Maaze Magazine, Art Spiel, Final Friday Podcast, Sound and Vision Podcast, The Black and White Project, Curating Contemporary’s book Eraser, and Young Space. Catherine has been a visiting artist & critic at SUNY Purchase MFA (2020), Hunter MFA (2020), Denison University (2020), Brooklyn College MFA (2019) and in 2018 Haggarty was the Anderson Endowed Lecturer at Penn State University. Haggarty’s solo, An Echo’s Glyph at Massey Klein Gallery in the Lower East Side is on view Dec 18th 2020 - January 30th, 2021. Previous solo shows include This Friday Next Friday (NYC), Bloomsburg University (PA), One Main Window (NY), One River School of Art and Design, Proto Gallery (NJ), and Look and Listen in Marseille France.

Haggarty earned her M.F.A from Mason Gross, Rutgers University in 2011. Currently, Haggarty is an adjunct professor at The School of Visual Arts (SVA) also co-directs NYC Crit Club with artist and critic, Hilary Doyle.

“In the summer of 2019 I visited ancient caves in France. I remember the temperature of the caves, the lines of raw earth pigment that formed figures & animals on the dark, damp walls. The connection to drawing and to pigment begins with our ancestors and threads through time to present day. I explore the differences between painting and drawing because the shared language offers insight on how we perceive and understand images.

By combining color, form, and patterns, I am able to expand the associations sparked by abstract animal signifiers. The level of representation in the work oscillates between recognizable figurative outlines to fields of color suggesting shape. To me, painting is both additive and subtractive and has no exact set of steps of production - rather a framework that allows in specific gestures, colors and marks in an irreversible order. This unplanned exchange requires my attention to where the patterns and marks lead me. I aim to remain open to movement and unforeseen connections in the work, a practice that reflects my studio habits and my way of operating in the world.

I avoid the notion of ‘knowing’ a form in visual language by conflating soft edge form that pushes against high saturations. Confounding spatial logic and touch in this way offers more questions than answers. The collection and also the subversion of various animals' coats, footprints and patterns in the paintings is far more interesting to me than the naming of the animal. I am not interested in the depiction of the one thing, rather I am interested in how my processes and materials can work with me to create new associations of the subject at hand.

The slippage of form in my paintings mirrors a slippage in language and meaning I notice in the world. Words are entirely abstract - they signify the subject at hand but often morph meaning with context, time, and language. Visually, I am interested in my process and subjects can mirror this dance. This fictional space I build is not based in a logical perspective or specific environment. Pattern is used as a tool to build an environment through repetition and motion - this defies the idea that animal forms might live in a specific space.”-CH

TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS EPISODE:

-Learning how to make work that nobody likes or will see

-Not knowing how you are going to get where you want to be, but taking the steps anyway

-Building the community you want to be a part of

-Supporting and being in contact with more artist...

TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS EPISODE:

-Learning how to make work that nobody likes or will see

-Not knowing how you are going to get where you want to be, but taking the steps anyway

-Building the community you want to be a part of

-Supporting and being in contact with more artist...

Previous Episode

Being an Ally, Mombies, and Reclaiming the Personal: The Inventive Work of Amy Reidel

Amy Reidel makes work that I can relate to. She brings the viewer into her world that is filled with color, sparkle, and rainbows but all the while, underlying insidious imagery creeps in to complete the picture. Amy’s painterly vocabulary allows for her sophisticated application of materials to slam up against visions of the figure in various states of psychological distress. Through her work, she shows us the underbelly of care, and the mess of loving another human. Glitter coincides with a face that forces itself to manically grin but leaves us with a foreboding feeling that there is nothing to smile about...or is there?

As mothers or primary caregivers, we are told that our experience will be filled with saccharine moments but the emotional turmoil many will face is only whispered about. This dichotomy comes through clearly in Amy’s sculptural, “Mombies”. Mombies are defined as: “A mother who is consumed by raising her children to the point of being sleep-deprived or simply obsessed, and hence zombie-like.” In her ceramic pieces, the mother or caregiver in question, attempts to become three-dimensional but continues to present themselves in two-dimensions with their painted on face gazing out towards the viewer, mouth agape.

Reidel’s work lays bare the complicated experience of loving another. To love is to straddle a line between sorrow and joy and she walks this line with precision, balancing the wide-eyed, struggle of her figures with colorful, dazzling, sparkly hope.

Amy Reidel is a St. Louis-based artist who has exhibited work nationally since getting her BFA from the University of Missouri-St. Louis and her MFA at The University of Tennessee. She has been awarded residencies at ACRE (Artists' Cooperative Residency and Exhibitions) based out of Chicago, the David and Julia White Artists’ colony in Cd. Colón, Costa Rica and at the Luminary Center for the Arts in St. Louis. Reidel’s artwork has been exhibited at the Contemporary Art Museum-St. Louis, The Sheldon Concert Hall and Art Galleries, Granite City Art and Design District (G-CADD), Lambert International Airport, Flood Plain Gallery, ACRE projects gallery in Chicago, Fluorescent Gallery in Knoxville, and the Amarillo Museum of Art among others. Her work has been showcased through media like Young Space, I Like Your Work podcast, Brenda Magazine (UK), St. Louis Public Radio, the PBS program Living St. Louis, the international publication Daily Serving and the Studio Break podcast. Reidel received a Critical Mass Creative Stimulus award in 2016 and the Regional Arts Commission Artist’s Support Grants in 2014, 2019 and a COVID-19 artist relief grant in 2020.

“Through painting, drawing and sculpture, I abstractly combine imagery to illuminate the bittersweet conditions of motherhood, family and sexuality; topics most people experience but are not encouraged to discuss professionally. The innocuous, inherited patterns of Grandma’s scarves and decorative rugs merge together with darling babies and scared caregivers in an absurd representation of home and love.

My work results from a cacophonous use of materials, layering and erasure, which have become my primary language as a progressive mother in the conservative Heartland. Personal and political issues conflate in my work and result in aggressive but candy-colored marks reflecting the dualities of fear and joy, rejection and protection. The saturated spectrum is used as a defense mechanism to make magic of this earthly existence.”-Amy Reidel

TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS EPISODE:

Dealing with LGBTQIA issues as an adolescent and teenager through artwork

Being an Ally

Confronting the pressure to present yourself as a “professional” in the artworld

“The Artwork is Not Judging Me”

Being the boss of your work

Taking a break from making work and how we, as the art world, have deemed certain reasons as “honorable” or allowable.

“What are you making Work About if you Aren’t Living Life”

“Mombie”

-Working with craft materials

-Exploring other media to take the pressure off

-How Amy works through her pieces

-Embracing autobiographical imagery

LINKS:

www.amyreidel.com

@amy.reidel Instagram

https://www.brenda-mag.com/post/on-motherhood-amy-reidel

Jered Sprecher http://www.jeredsprecher.com/ Marcia Goldenstein https://marciagoldenstein.com/home.html Jessica Dickinson https://www.jessicadickinson.com/ Rachel Dove

Next Episode

Claiming the Time In Between-Making Every Day a Studio Day with Artist Hilary Doyle

The time in between is something we all deal with in life. The time between waking and coffee, the time between arriving in a doctor’s office and waiting to be seen, the time spent in transportation going from one point to the next. Hilary Doyle took that time and claimed it not only as studio time, but it became a jumping off point for her recent work.

Hilary Doyle is an artist, teacher, curator and gallery co-director. Doyle’s work includes painting, drawing, printmaking and sculpture about gender, class and psychology. She is newly represented by Taymour Grahne Gallery in london. Recent solo shows include “Metropolis” with Taymour Grahne online in august 2020, as well as “Echoing Voices” at One River School in November 2019. Her work has received press coverage in Hyperallergic, Bushwick Daily, and New American Paintings Blog.

Doyle is faculty at Rhode Island School of Design. She has taught for the last 8 years at various schools including Purchase College and a three year appointment with Brown University.

Doyle founded and co-directs NYC Crit Club with co-director Catherine Haggarty which was just included in observer magazines Arts Power 50: Change makers in the art world. She is also a gallery Co-Director and curator at Transmitter gallery in Brooklyn.

Doyle received an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design and a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She has an upcoming group show with Taymour Grahne Projects Contemporary Domesticity and Solo Show there in 2022. She also has an upcoming group show “The Symobolists: Les Fleurs du mal (the flowers of Evil)” at Hesse Flatow in Chelsea in February.

“Worcester, MA, where I grew up is one of many downtrodden, post-industrial cities across the US, filled with dilapidated factory buildings, joblessness, and overgrown yards. In cities everywhere people travel through similarly distressed spaces daily: the streets and subways full of zoned-out people caught up in the daily grind, staring with purple rings under their glassy eyes. This work examines contemporary working-class life. Focusing on the conditions in which people live helps us examine the rituals, psychology and emotions of daily life.

The work starts with mundane moments observed while commuting or while at home: a man staring at his phone while laying in bed or a woman balances on a yoga ball holding a baby. From these moments I make sketches, videos, iPhone drawings, or sculptural models to inform drawings and paintings. I experiment to discover relevant marks for each subject: a quick mark for the view out a window of a speeding bus, or a slick mark for tiles on the wall of a subway station.

Strangers, although unknown to us, are always leaving evidence about themselves as we catch a glimpse of them. People reveal their disposition in their folded arms, baby carts, laughing eyes, tightly clutched bags, or work uniforms. These clues spark imaginary narratives about peoples lives in each work. To examine fragments of people's lives, brings attention to the joys and struggles of ourselves and others.

Since the pandemic the work has become more imaginative and symbolic - using paintings within paintings to talk about the subjects within them. In our new surreal pandemic era fiction has become reality.”- HD

TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS EPISODE:

-Claiming “in between time” as your studio time

-Tips on Monotype Printmaking

-Printing at home

-Not wasting materials by planning ahead

-Using digital mediums

-Guerra

-Consider everyday a studio day

-Make art at any moment

-Working while breastfeeding

-Try not to go a single day without being creative, even if it’s just thinking

-Becoming more inventive

-Becoming more fearless after becoming a mother

-NYC Crit Club

-Transmitter Gallery

-”Stack your life”

-Having a routine

Artist Shout Outs:

Thank you to friends who do text critiques with me over the years

Catherine Haggarty, Claudia Bitran, Francisco Moreno and Meredith Iszlai.

LINKS:

HilaryDoyle.com

Represented by Taymour Grahne Projects in London

Recent solo shows include “Metropolis” with Taymour Grahne online in august 2020, as well as “Echoing Voices” at One River School in November 2019.

She has an upcoming group show with Taymour Grahne Projects Contemporary Domesticity and Solo Show there in 2022. She also has an upcoming group show “The Symobolists: Les Fleurs du mal (the flowers of Evil)” at Hesse Flatow in Chelsea in February.