Tag Archives: artist interview

Interview With ‘Open Ended Narratives:’ Artist Schroeder Cherry 

Open Ended Narratives: Mixed Media Assemblages on Wood by Schroeder Cherry from February 18 to April 5, 2025 at The Stamp Gallery | University of Maryland, College Park | Written by Olivia DiJulio 

To start, could you tell me a bit about yourself and your background? 

I grew up in Washington, D.C, and I’ve always been an arts kid. When I was a child, I played with blocks, very colorful wooden blocks. I also played with puppets. I received puppets as presents when I was very young in elementary school. In fact, I still have a puppet, I have a string marionette. I started off with hand puppets and then later I got into marionettes by third grade and fourth grade. I stopped playing with puppets when I was in junior high school because it just wasn’t a cool thing to do for high school kids. In college, I started working with puppets again and I like them. Someone introduced me to a puppet master in Chicago and I ended up apprenticing with him for a while. 

When I was in school in D.C. I had the fortune of being exposed to university students from Howard University and they had put together a program called Workshops For Careers in the Arts. Although I was a visual artist, I hung out with the theater kids. I learned a lot from the theater kids, like the importance of rehearsals and preparation,  but I knew I wasn’t one of them. I still apply those lessons today as a museum educator and also as an artist. 

Do you have any experiences that have influenced your creative process?

I actually finished high school in Switzerland. I was an exchange student, and in my senior year I was taking art classes in Switzerland. I went to the Münchenstein high school, Gymnasium Münchenstein. I was exposed to how the Swiss went about doing their artwork, and that was much more regimented and formulaic, but in America it’s much more wide open. I really enjoy traveling and being lost in different cultures finding my way. There was a period where I would almost annually go to a different country just to immerse myself in another culture. How do you go about making your art when you’re exploring unfamiliar territory? All of that feeds into the art practice. Creativity is all about trying something different, something new, and I try to remind myself of that in the process.

Given the title of the exhibit, “Open Ended Narratives:” what draws you to create nonlinear stories for your work?

I’ll start off by sharing a proverb that I came across. It’s an Islamic phrase and it goes: Allah delights in truth, and varying degrees of truth, but even Allah does not like the entire truth. When I first read that, I had to meditate on it for a while. I realized, wow, this means that there is never one story. You know, Allah likes all truth, but never the absolute truth. There’s never one absolute truth. 

With my works, although I might have a narrative in mind, what I appreciate is the visitor being able to look at the work and come up with their own narrative. Sometimes I try to eavesdrop in a gallery to hear what people are saying before I identify myself as the artist. When I come to actually hear what they’re saying, I get that unfiltered response. I would say one of the things I would like people to do is to take time with the work and to look at it. I don’t really expect people to love everything. That’s not my interest. What I really am more interested in is having them just be engaged with the work and come away with something.

That actually leads into our next point. I often hear this question of “can we separate the art from the artist?” What is your stance on art being inherently political, or art for the sake of art? 

Now, I have to say, I had an experience recently in a gallery. It was about political movements and how people resist certain movements. There was this one person and she came to my work, looked at it for like a split second, saw some writing and said, “oh, propaganda.” Now, the piece itself was called Huddle, and it’s actually in the gallery right now. It’s of three teenage boys, they’re standing together and they’re on their phones and they’re communicating with each other. The text says “How Republican States Are Expanding Their Power Over Elections” so it would actually be talking about the political movement and what Republicans were doing. It wasn’t propaganda, it was news. 

Schroeder Cherry, Future Voters #20, Huddle, 2022. Mixed Media on wood, 36 x 28.5 in.

The viewer brings their own baggage to the work. You can’t disengage from your own experiences when you’re looking at the work. Whatever their experiences are, they’re going to bring that to the piece. It’s always inherently political, because when an artist decides what they’re going to do, that’s an intention. It may or may not be political, but what they’re going through mentally can easily be either political or not.

The next question I want to address is, as a mixed-media artist, how do you decide on a medium? Is there a particular reason why you’re drawn to them? 

The mixed media for me is something that evolved. I was trained as a painter so I painted on canvas, I drew on paper. But I got to a point where I was abusing the canvas. I realized I needed something that had a stronger foundation because then I was attaching objects. So I went to wood, but I didn’t go to wood as a sculptor. I went to wood as a painter who just wanted to work on a flat surface. As I jumped over to these flat panels, I moved into carving and using power tools to shape the edges. I didn’t want to create pieces with straight edges on all sides. That led me wanting to experiment with the texture inside the composition. I got more power tools, I got some burners, and then later I got jigsaws and other saws that allowed me to gouge into the piece. 

How do you go about including the motifs and imagery we see in your work?

There are some things that repeatedly appear in my works and they include, keys, watermelons, playing cards and there may even be glass shards. The keys for me represent tools of access. Everybody I know has got at least one key that they’ve had for more than a year and don’t know what it belongs to. But they don’t want to give this key up. You can either close something up or you can open it up if you have the key, and the same thing goes with locks.

Watermelons for me, I’m reclaiming a negative, racist image as a positive one. First of all, I’m a vegetarian. I like watermelon. When I first moved to Baltimore in spring, it was the rainy season and there was a bumper crop of watermelons. I started eating melons every day, even for breakfast with a croissant. This is a very nutritious fruit and it has been maligned. I learned that historically, watermelons originated in continental Africa. You’ve got these different melons of different colors. In Maryland you have what you call sugar babies, and those melons are yellow on the inside. There’s a great variety of melons and even the seeds are beautiful. Doing a deep dive into the visual of the watermelon, I thought this is something really to work with and we need to pay attention to it.

I want to highlight again your puppeteering experience. That seems really important to you. What is it like as a role of a puppeteer when communicating information through that medium?

First and foremost, it’s a performance for the audience. No matter what shape the puppet is  it could be anything. It could be a book. It could be a stone, but the purpose is its movement in the narrative. I’m doing two things when I’m working with puppetry. I am a visual artist because I’m sewing and constructing them, and I’m a performer because I’m manipulating them in a show. All puppeteers are hybrid artists. When you get a group of puppeteers together, they’ll start talking about their materials and their performances. That’s what they do, it’s about how you make it and how you perform it.

Do you have any stories of performing for older audiences? I feel like puppeteering usually gets associated with children. 

Yeah, there’s a puppet. Her name is Ms. Lily, and she’s actually a puppet docent. I designed her when I was working at the Baltimore Museum of Art years ago and I wanted to create a safe place for adults to play. She’s got this white knit sweater, a red skirt, and black patent leather shoes. She became very, very popular because the adults knew that they could come play. She starts in the beginning and says “This is an adult tour. It’s not for children, if you have a child, please take them to the next room. There’s a workshop there, which is lovely for children, but this is not a tour for children.” That’s how she started the tour and then she would introduce me as her technician. I’m dressed in all black, so I’m fully visible. But she introduces me as her technician and she lets the audience know that if there are any questions, they are to be directed to her and not to the technician because the technician will not be speaking. 

Ms. Lily, Puppet Art Docent, at Wits End Puppet Slam, Takoma Park, MD

Occasionally in Baltimore, we have what we call puppet slams. It’s when a group of puppeteers come together, usually anywhere from six to ten puppeteers or companies will come together and we’ll each have about five to eight minutes on stage. Sometimes those performances are more for adults than they are for children.

I think that is an amazing form of visual and performance art. Thank you for sharing your puppeteering and your mixed media processes. To wrap up our conservation, 10 years from now, where do you think you see yourself in your art?

I would say I hope to still be creating because I’m going to be one of those people who’s still creating when I’m 95, so I want to continue to do that. I would hope that I’m in a place where people are aware of my work and are enjoying it.

Thank you to Dr. Schroder Cherry for this interview, from the Stamp Gallery. 


Schroeder Cherry’s work is included in Open Ended Narratives: at The Stamp Gallery of the University of Maryland, College Park, from February 18 to April 5, 2025. For more information on Schroeder Cherry’s work, visit https://bakerartist.org/portfolios/schroedercherry.  For more information on Open Ended Narratives: and related events, visit https://stamp.umd.edu/centers/stamp_gallery.

Interview with ‘MEDIA LUX’ Artist Clay Dunklin

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[detail] Catatonic Tomography Cycle (2018) by second-year MFA candidate Clay Dunklin, is available for view at The Stamp Gallery’s MEDIA LUX exhibition through May 19, 2018.
This is the fourth installment of the MEDIA LUX artist interview series. MEDIA LUX features work by Clay Dunklin, Mason Hurley, Irene Pantelis, Monroe Isenberg, and Gina Takaoka.

Clay Dunklin | Second-Year Master of Fine Arts Candidate | Exhibiting in MEDIA LUX from April 2nd through May 19th, 2018 at The Stamp Gallery | University of Maryland, College Park | Interview by Grace DeWitt

To start with some background, where are you from, and what brought you to the MFA program at the University of Maryland?

Really, I came here for location. I grew up in the middle-of-nowhere in East Texas where there is virtually no arts culture or art opportunities and then spent the last several years in Orlando, FL. Orlando is great but the contemporary art world there is still in a stage of infancy and opportunities are few. Here we sit in this nice place between Baltimore and Washington–even New York and Philadelphia are in close proximity. So there’s a lot to engage with and see. I really wanted to be someplace where I had all of that at my fingertips.

Can you briefly summarize the focus of your artistic practice?

My practice is very much project-based and contextual–I create a lot of parts but they really need to be installed and viewed together to make relationships and begin to make sense. I’m also not really media specific. I mean, my background is in drawing and I still think of all the work in terms of drawing, but my practice is not really just drawing, or sculpture, or video. It’s all of that. I guess I use whatever media feels right for the work.

Are there any artists you are following right now, or any specific artists who have inspired your work so far?

I’m really into Mark Leckey right now. He won the Turner Prize a few years ago and does video, image-based, and object-based works. He creates these great installations with found objects usually in front of a green screen. This really influenced the current piece, Catatonic Tomography Cycle, with the painting of that flat color on the wall and the flatness of the prints. His work made me think about achieving a kind of compression of the objects or alternatively a slight dimensionality as if just beginning to poke out into space. This is aided by the one-sided viewing of the work–even though there are objects it’s not really in the round like in Leckey’s work.

I’m really drawn to Jannis Kounellis’ work as well. For me, his installations sat in this really beautiful place between complexity and simplicity. Objects would be hung with rope from the ceiling or piled on the floor or he’d just fill a gallery with live horses–it was very straightforward like that. But the scale and the way he could fill a space was pretty awe-inspiring.

I also have a bit of a crush on Anicka Yi. Her exhibition at the Guggenheim for the Hugo Boss Prize was pretty fantastic. The piece Maybe She’s Born With It is like this huge inflatable plastic dome with tempura fried flowers in it. I kind of want to live in there.

I understand that you underwent a pretty extreme medical illness about this time last year, which plays a role in your work now. Did your practice focus on the body before this illness? How would you say your direction changed because of this experience?

Yeah, it was pretty scary actually. I had several extended stays in the hospital with this weird and kind of rare neurological disease. Most of my time in the hospital was spent just trying to figure out what this was. Then I got put on these wacky medicines that took my mind to weird places and really affected my body and how my body reacted to external stimuli. It was a wild ride for sure. I took a bit of time trying to figure out what to do with that whole experience in terms of my work and I honestly tried to avoid it. It couldn’t be helped though, it just began to creep into the studio, so I gave in and decided to just see where it takes the work. And I think a year was enough time to sort of process and be ready to talk about it. However, I don’t think it totally uprooted the direction of my practice. I’ve always been working with body as subject in some capacity–I come from a very heavy figure drawing background so I guess that is just kind of ingrained in me somewhere. I’m interested in the body as this sort of mediator between us and the world. It’s how we contextualize and make sense of everything. But I think technology is really redefining that role as we’re becoming more and more cyborgian with our phones and such. But your body still has to interface with technology so that specifically is where I want my work to be situated–that little meeting point between body and technology.

Can you share some information about the title of your MEDIA LUX installation, Catatonic Tomography Cycle?

This piece deals with my experience of being sick in a pretty overt way. Here I’m using some of the more conceptual elements of the work to steer the formal qualities and I think this becomes really evident through the title. A catatonic state is an altered mental status that can be brought on by neurological disorders. This is what I experienced several times throughout my illness. It was like being a zombie or something. I have little to no memory of those times but apparently I wouldn’t speak or even move really, like being frozen. This is referenced in the stillness of the image-based components and in the slow looping videos that maybe start to reference time as something structured in layers and less linearly. This directly relates to tomography, which is a kind of imaging used most commonly in the medical field where the whole is broken up and viewed as layers (think MRI images). Again, this is referenced in some of the actual physical medical imagery used, but, it is also labeling all of these individual components as layers or slices of the whole that still contain information about the whole, and then compressing all of that into a kind of flatness (back to the Mark Lackey reference). And cycle goes back conceptually to the cyclical nature of the disease but also formally to the looping of the videos and as an indicator of the singular installation being composed of many parts: like an opera or song cycle in music composition.

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Detail from one of two looping videos in Dunklin’s Catatonic Tomography Cycle (2018) installation in MEDIA LUX at The Stamp Gallery.

We’ve talked a little bit about how the footage in your installation touches on ideas of creation. Can you go into further detail about how the footage builds into the more complex idea of the MEDIA LUX installation as a whole?

This work has really taken on a kind of language all its own, as I think most works tend to do, and if you understand the artist as mythmaker, this language becomes inherently mythological. So I am constantly reflecting on the relationship between what is a deeply personal mythological language and a more universal one. I was reflecting on this relationship between creation and destruction and how water or fluid can act between those two modes. I think about the Grand Canyon where water has destroyed the landscape yet simultaneously created a new one or how this fluid around my brain acts as protection yet is the main antagonist in the story of my illness. Newborns emerge from a fluid incubator in what is a very traumatic process. None of this is new. But how do we reference these ideas that are inherent to our body in a relevant and deeply personal way? What kind of contemporary Athene can emerge from the fluid site of the head? The Native Americans around what is California today had a creation myth of humans being made from clay of the earth, as most cultures did, but with the added idea that the creator-god mixed spit with the earth to give humans life. So again, what does that mean for a contemporary body as a fluid site?

I’m interested in hearing more about your photographic/record-keeping processes and preferences. Could you highlight some other works of yours that applied captured imagery to installation? What are your intentions when it comes to image resolution and image manipulation in your work?

Like I said earlier, I’m interested in this intersection of body and technology and specifically how we negotiate those two as mediators between the self and the world. We’ve really embarked on a time where we’re beginning to experience everything through tech, even things we’re physically present for. Think about a concert where people snap every single song. Yes, now all of your friends can experience that too through an app on their phone but also you as the physically present viewer are experiencing a live event through compressed, digital, pixelated images and videos via your handheld device. That’s fascinating to me. It’s becoming second nature to understand our world through compressed images. So in terms of the work, I’m not intentionally after low quality images verging on pixilated abstraction just like I’m not intentionally after the most high quality images aimed at some kind of illusion. I don’t care about the illusion. If the image even slightly or in a subversive way recalls a quality of imagery experienced in the everyday then it brings it into that space of body/technology interface. It also begins to recall or make visible the process of the image-making, similar to how the process of tomographic imaging is inherently stamped on the images it produces simply because of the kind of images it produces. It’s a performative process where the thing is the action of its own doing and in this way, the images now become objects.  

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Detail of water images, blacklight, and clay component in Dunklin’s Catatonic Tomography Cycle (2018) installation.

Thinking back to the installation at The Stamp Gallery, what drew you to the use of those dark water images, applied directly on the left portion of the installation wall?

Those images come from documentation of a previous project where I was changing or obscuring the surface of my body by applying charcoal powder. I would then wash that off and be left with this deep dark charcoal water. From that, I began to pull paper thinking that these new surfaces and objects could be made from my body sluff. So the water became a transformative site where something new could emerge–this goes back to your previous question about creation and the metamyth. I had prints of these images and it just kind of hit me that they needed to be included with this project. The water references fluid around the brain but also starts to resemble images of space. That push and pull between something recognizable and something alien interests me and speaks to cosmic or magical thinking and some of the mental imagery conjured while on medication that was making me totally loopy. The application and composition of the prints is pointing to digital glitch in a way. The long linear format of each print is kind of filmic but really isn’t about time as we perceive it. As said earlier, it’s about something layered or sliced and reassembled.

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Detail of wall sculpture in Dunklin’s Catatonic Tomography Cycle (2018) installation.

MEDIA LUX is an exhibition that presents five artists’ interpretation of, or association with, light. How does light relate to your concept in Catatonic Tomography Cycle?

Light is really a formal element here. When the decision was made to have the gallery dimly lit I thought that was great because video work is self-illuminating. For the rest of the installation I had to be more strategic about lighting. I knew the sculpture emerging from the wall was the one thing I wanted to be lit pretty intensely. Then the blue glow of the black light was again a formal and strategic color choice as it stands in relationship to the warm yellow of that spotlight. So that really was a further iteration of the colors found in the video works.  

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Detail of wall drawing in Dunklin’s Catatonic Tomography Cycle (2018) installation, available for view through May 19, 2018 in The Stamp Gallery.

Is there any advice you have for undergraduate artists or others at the beginning of their art careers?

I think one of the biggest things that I needed to hear as an undergrad was to really invest in the learning processes. It’s easy for people who have some talent to take the time in studio for granted or to not really put themselves out there because they’re afraid of failure. Make a ton, experiment a ton, be confident even in ‘failure,’ and pull everything you can out of your instructors and fellow students. Otherwise, you’ll likely only be performing at a slightly higher level than when you started college. How much good will that have really done you?  

I know you have an installation up right now at VisArts, yolk | shell | source | system, a collaborative with another UMD MFA student, Bekí Basch. Anything else you have going on or coming up that you’d like to promote here?

Yeah! This was actually my first collaborative project and it was really the best experience. It’s a huge 70 foot long window display a couple of blocks from VisArts. So it definitely presented its own set of challenges but made for some great experimentation. We had a reception and artist talk for that on May 4th, and the installation will be up through June.

 

Clay Dunklin’s work is included in MEDIA LUX at The Stamp Gallery of the University of Maryland, College Park, from April 2nd through May 19th, 2018.

For more information on Clay Dunklin, visit https://claydunklin.com/.

For more information on MEDIA LUX and related events, visit thestamp.umd.edu/stamp_gallery.