Cure the Blind

Jackie Tileston’s work seems to defy rational explanation while hinting at a more meaningful internal logic. Her images use eastern iconography and copious negative space. She was kind enough to answer a few questions to give us a hint at the thought process behind the work.

What are you trying to convey in your work?

I consider myself primarily an abstract painter, and so I’ve always been interested in things that don’t exist yet, that aren’t ordinarily visible, that are hypothetical realities, etc. Representation is sufficient for exploring and communicating certain ideas, but thoroughly inadequate for others. I sometimes use pictorial/landscape type space, and even photographic collages, but they are always simply elements within a larger invented world, and not the main event.   I’m curious about what the possibilities are for a contemporary sublime, for transcendence, for an intelligent visual beauty.  I love the historical notion of  “El Dorado”, an invented  hybrid utopian continent, a sort of paradise unfound, and I connect to the idea of that search through imagery,  the process of painting, and even as a parallel to states of consciousness.

I just finished reading Nicholas Bourriaud’s new book “The Radicant”, and I loved some of his descriptions of what an “altermodern” artist is doing…..Here are a couple of quotes that I think could be summaries of much of what I’m trying to do in my work:

“What these artists aim for in their works is not to accumulate heterogenous elements, but to make meaningful connections in the infinite text of world culture.  In a word, to produce itineraries in the landscape of signs by taking on the role of semionauts, inventors of pathways within the cultural landscape, nomadic sign gatherers.”  (p. 39)

“The fictional dimension of art pierces the chain of reality, returning it to its precarious nature, to the unstable mixture of the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic that it contains.   This fiction augments reality, allowing us to keep it in perpetual motion and hence to introduce utopia and alternatives to it.” (p. 100)

Do you feel this comes across without explanation?

The visual experience is always primary for me – what do you see, how does it feel, what are the associations and thought processes that unfold, etc.  I think there are many levels of responding to and reading artworks; some things are available visually, and other things become evident when you know a little more. Much conceptual art requires that you know the text, and often there is no real experience of the work available if you don’t have access to this . I think my paintings are generous in the sense that there is a lot to get visually, and once you have more information, (such as the specific visual sources and references) you might have another experience that unfolds from the painting.  For example, if you recognize the print from a geisha’s kimona,  a shrine from Varanasi, a pattern from Persian miniatures, or a Church landscape, does this change how you perceive and interpret what is going on?

Is the viewer’s reaction a meaningful part of your work?

I’m always interested in how the viewer receives my work, as is any artist, and what kind of meaning they construct from their experience, but the work is always completed before I have access to those reactions, and ultimately the process of making decisions in the studio is very private, intuitive, and is wholly geared to satisfying my own intentions for each piece.

You refer to an internal logic of the pieces – would it be possible to elucidate this logic?

The process in the studio is one of searching for just the right combination of visual events that create specific and hybrid worlds within the canvas. I use a lot of different references, techniques, surfaces and textures, etc. in an effort to generate a complex, intelligent, ecstatic space. The paintings work when this happens, and when they don’t, it just feels like a bunch of stuff stuck together without any meaning. So I’m looking for the right,  provocative interfaces so that some kind of alchemy can happen, and something new arises from this particular recipe. I spend a lot of time sitting on my couch and staring at the paintings – there is a pretty high contemplation to action ratio.

What is the significance of the Asian iconography?

I was born in Asia  (in the Philippines) and also lived in India. My mothers family were German/Americans  who lived in Shanghai for three generations, I grew up with Asian art and furniture in the house . The aesthetic of Asian cultures feels very much like home – in some ways these were the popular/commercial cultures I was first exposed to. But I also spent eleven years in Europe growing up, so the history of western painting and influences of painters like Turner and late Monet were also early inspirations.

I really connect to much of eastern philosophy as well – the idea that the meaning of things is immanent in all manifestions.  For example in India, where you see images of the deities on EVERYTHING, everywhere, because the divine is just pouring through into the material world in all kinds of magnificent, exuberant, grotesque, raucous forms. What better condition to start from for an artist?

You mention “a constant flux between empty and full” and your pieces are certainly notable for their use of negative space. How did you come to your use of space?

I went through a transitional phase about ten years ago, where i felt that I really needed to empty my studio of everything I thought I knew and reinvent what was happening in my work again.  (I had been doing very dense paintings based on fractal like imagery).  I spent a about a year doing these collage and gouache drawings in which there was a lot of empty space and blank paper. I was experimenting for a while with how this might translate into painting. The traditional white canvas seemed to be reading as the first layer of a photoshop document, a flat ground. The linen ground seemed to create the sense of space that I wanted – an undifferentiated field of potential. A friend gave me a book on Chinese painting called “empty and full”, describing the Taoist approach in which there is an unmanifest reality out of which arises the “10,000 things” of the universe. It seemed a perfect metaphor for what I am trying to do. I think about the space in Chinese landscapes a lot, and Japanese woodcuts. I just finished a group of drawings that use some of the compositional motifs in “Floating World” prints and paintings.

You have a master’s in painting and you are now teaching painting yourself. What are some of the things you try to impart on your students?

It’s different for undergraduate and graduate students. With undergrads, it’s a combination of learning and experimenting with technical skills, awareness of contemporary currents (it’s amazing how many art students are unaware of what the generation closest to them is actually doing) and then to begin articulating what it is that most interests and defines them as an artist. And these processes never really stop. With graduate students, I think there is more emphasis on how to make their ideas and obsessions into viable work, to effectively translate what drives them and make the transition from the private sphere of their own studio/sketchbook/head into the public sphere of the art world, whatever form that takes.  I also think that one of the most important things that graduate education offers is the experience of critique – through studio visits, visiting artists, group crits, etc. so that the understanding of many ways of looking at, thinking about, questioning art becomes really internalized.  It’s an incredibly intensive way of honing the work, and most artists will tell you that
this was the most important part of graduate school – that, and the sense of community. I think if a student leaves graduate school with the ability to do effective self-critique and a small cluster of like minded artist friends to interact with, they’ll be fine.

What are you biggest criticisms of artists now?

I think that the artists that I like and dislike are always based on some kind of internal radar: there are some artists whose take on the world we are in complete alignment and awe of, and others whose work seems to violate everything we believe in and want for own work,  but that’s just the complexity of the (art) world we’re in. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

What are some of your favorite artists?

One of the last shows I saw and loved was Keith Tyson’s “Large Field Array” at Pace. It was really jaw dropping in terms of the complexity of ideas, the ambition, etc. People spent HOURS in there……

Is there anything you’d like to add?

There was a recent article in the New Yorker about David Foster Wallace in which he is quoted as saying something like ” these are dark and scary times. Why in hell should we have to read stuff about these being dark and scary times?”. I love that – that it’s okay as an artist to break with the world and postulate other versions of reality. It is not necessarily our job to reflect back to the world how screwed up it is. I’m more interested in what could/might be and is available.

http://www.jackietileston.info/

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