Colter Jacobson: Your Future

The Attic is an art viewing space upstairs within the Four Star Video Shop at 1521 18th St. Potrero Hill. Jamie Atherton and Jeremy Lin are the curators. I discovered this place because it is the only video store in my neighborhood. Luckily it is a good one. And now for my voracious visual appetite they offer well conceived art shows from up and coming artists to watch from San Francisco like Colter Jacobson! I find this juxtaposition of fine art and movies a sophisticated one, akin to concepts of relational display in the art world. The combination of the video store and art gallery transforms the place for me into an inspirational library and idea depot because of the painstaking and obviously lovingly selections in videos and art. The Attic art gallery fulfills a need in the community for an art access point that is integrated into our everyday activities. I took this opportunity to ask Colter questions I wouldn't feel comfortable to ask if the show took place in a more formal setting. Rebecca/ What makes you gravitate to your choice of materials? Colter/ Hmmmmmmmm good question (quest ion (quest-seek, ion-to go, chase after)...what makes molecules gravitate toward each other?). Gravitation is so mysterious. The materials gravitate to me. The matter/aliens use/inhabit my body. No, really... I'm partly kidding. Let's see...What makes me gravitate to the materials? Well, as you can see, there are many materials. In other words, it's not just paper and paint that I use. I use different material for different reasons (in following with that saying, (who was it that said it?) "The medium is the message.' Was it Michael Ma..Ma...Macluen something?). The word medium is good. I sort of feel like a medium sometimes. Anyway, I often ask myself why I am drawn to old things, things that have been lived with, things that are stained, etc., to which I haven't come up with a great answer. Maybe because I'm just nostalgic, plain and simple. But I think it has more to do with story; old found things (especially things found on the street) come with a story, they have lived a life. Found objects, so they call it (but what isn't found?). I am just sort of intercepting them, adding my two cents and sending them back on their journey into the great wide unknowing. I think it may also have to do with self-empowerment, that is, using older materials and recombining them for your own use or value. I remember watching my friend Tiffany Sankary tear apart books, paint over them, cut them up, and make these amazing new beautiful things. And I thought, "Well, look at that, Tiffany just wrote a book, no publisher needed." I was very impressed with her DIY ethos and also felt that by her demonstrating the reconfiguring, she gave me permission to do the same. It's also simply economical to use and recycle material. So many free things on the streets of San Francisco. All those free book bins. The question should be asked, why don't more people take advantage of these resources? I use material that is at the margins of my community, the junk in the gutter. Using this, most often non-archival material, helps to remind me of its inherent temporality. I obsess over objects and often work things into preciousness as much as the next artist (as much as the next art collector) but using these materials keeps the perspective in mind that the Sun will eat our children. It's all going to disintegrate. That's sort of where outer space comes in. After all, we are all floating around in space. I think outer space is a good way to keep perspective on the things, thus the rectangle of space framing the drawings. Another thing about material (God, I could go on and on), when I do indeed go to a store to buy material (more often an office supply store rather than an art's supply store...I actually like that term I've heard flying around lately, 'The Home Depot Artist.' I can totally relate to that. I love going into Home Depot. But I never buy anything there. Things are too big. And too big means too much commitment, ha ha) I am drawn to doubles, like packages of two: two white-out containers (or the two-in-one (so romantic)), two highlighters, two magic invisible tape rolls, two magic markers, two mechanical pencils. Two rolls of masking-tape. All these things and their names, they all draw me in somehow. Like I'm a sucker for their aura. But there is meaning in it all; the meaning just begins to multiply. Maybe it's a bad version of modern day voodoo (capitalist voodoo?). But I am certainly critical of my own superstitions. Spinoza said that all superstitions are rooted in fear (maybe capitalism is rooted in fear). Maybe he's right, but I think superstitions also just help you get by. And so there is a lot of superstition in the materials that I use and don't use. I like the name mechanical pencil too. It's great; you never have to sharpen it. And when I do my memory drawings I can pretend to be a computer mechanically memorizing all the details with my fingertips. Of course, I fail miserably at being a computer. But I'm thankful for that, like Laurie Anderson, who says about herself that she is a 'voyeur interested only in details; I use computers that are tragically unable to forget, like endless rubbish dumps.' R/ What are those tear dropped paper mache sculptures covered with funny papers (cartoon strips)? Do they serve a specific function? C/ They served a definite function for me. I can't say if they serve a function for you. They were really an afterthought. I threw them in the corner just at the end. I brought them with me during installing as a maybe. I made them maybe a year ago or so. Maybe I can better answer this question by answering the next question first. Maybe maybe maybe...it's okay to say maybe maybe. R/ I have noticed you spent a lot of time editing out specific selections in cartoon strips and obituaries with white paint to re-combinate your own renditions. What compels you to do this? C/ I started covering the funny pages after getting dumped hard core by a guy that I fell madly, hurtfully in love with. It was a hard fall. For a while I just watched old horror films because that's really all I could relate to. James Whale helped me through that time. I also read the paper inside out then, even the funnies. But I kept noticing how really unfunny the funnies were. So I wanted to show people what I was seeing. All the inherent sadness, in the windows, the blinds, all the desolate things in the background. And stories began to tell themselves as I kept covering. Correction fluid. Trying to fix an impossible thing--heartbreak. Only time can fix that...so I spent a lot of time with white-out. The fumes may have helped me too, or maybe I was a little addicted (my fix, ha ha). And now they have become something else (a bad habit?); I'll just look at the funnies and the funnies tell me if there's something to be found in them. Sometimes everything has to be whited out, but for one tear. Not sure why. That's where the aliens come in. I am the radio receiving radio waves from something out there, like instructions (a la Jack Spicer). The more 'me' I leave in the piece, the worse the piece is, most likely. Now I don't know what I'm talking about. I think I'm trying to be cool and relate an idea of Spicer's. But he talks about aliens in relation to making poetry. I wonder if it's different with visual art. Whatsoevernonetheless. And to answer the previous question, a little after the break up I started doing these one-hour timed drawings of guys wearing, at least, watches. That project was called Woods In the Watchers and I did 24 (there had to be 24, numbers are very important to me) for a show in my bedroom. Anyhow, some of them were a bit vulgar I s'pose, some even shocked me a bit (I wanted to scare myself a little). To make a long story short, they found their way onto the internet via Dodie Bellamy's contribution to Suspect Thoughts web-page, called Body Language. Well, I should probably edit this (seeing that it too will be online). Let's just say that a certain someone stopped talking to me because of these drawings being on line. It was hard for me and making those tears helped me meditate on my art, my relations, the functions of the two, etc. Interesting too is the difference between having those as a show in my bedroom vs. on line. The tears are sort of piñatas. Waiting to be filled with Sees candies. Smashed. They were both done with identical funny pages. And maybe it was voodoo to get that person to start talking to me again. We are talking again...so that's good. R/ What is happening in the pencil drawing of a child approaching a suspended beam of light or energy source in mid-air, located in a forest clearing or a spacious backyard? Was this a real event or imagined? I noticed the other drawings in the foursome were in contrast with their mundane or lets say more realistic content, a friend helping install the show, and you posing with a friend on a bridge, and a group portrait of a marines I'm guessing from the 1940s-60s Is there a connection between all of these images or are they 4 separate graphite studies? C/ One connection between these images is that I find them all particularly interesting in light of memory. These memory drawings take a while, sometimes a couple of weeks, so the choosing of an image can be difficult. Like, for whatever reason, there are so many that just won't work for me. The image has to match something that I am willing to meditate upon for the next few days. So really, it's trying to predict the future. Often the subject matter of the photograph I choose relates to something that is very personal, something that has been itching at me, whether it's a relationship thing, or something more objective or general or political, an idea that's been lingering (so I wonder if this itch conflicts with Jack Spicer's idea about the artist as radio receiver). I certainly see connections between the images. But they are very loose connections that only hint at a narrative. I could go into how each one works for me but I generally leave that to the viewer I suppose. Also, while working on these drawings (and I knew I was going to make either 4 or 8) I kept thinking about water and light, I'm still not exactly sure why. My work often comes down to just simple, basic elements; water, fire, air, earth. It's interesting, I hadn't thought about how the one image of the girl with light (called L's goddaughter) stood out from the rest. It is indeed a real event. It's a picture taken by my beau, Larry. Either the sun above her blew out the image while she lunged to catch something or an energy field of kinetic particles decided to open up between her arms the second that Larry snapped the button on the camera. Either way, it's magic to me, but by extension, it's the magic of Larry, and again by extension, the magic of his goddaughter. It was a wide collaboration that defies explanation. It also reminds me that it is impossible to really possess something. In my head, the one of Tomo carrying the pillar up the stairs related to the girl, just by way of an associated shape. I like how the light defies the solidity of the pillar but they are both sort of cylindrical. And the Tomo piece may help in answering the next question. R/ The work has intimations of being site specific. Did you consider the location (a video store in Potrero Hill) in the actual fabrication of the objects for the show? C/ I do consider it to be site-specific to some degree (though it can all surely be rearranged later and in other spaces). Knowing that people would have to walk upstairs to see the show helped in my choosing the image of Tomo walking up stairs. I was at first thinking about putting drawings in the stairway (stairway, ha ha) but then I finally decided that it would be better if the stairs were an afterthought, something to look back on. That's where the 'Your Future' came in. And that is why I chose the image I chose for the postcard/poster. If people saw the postcard first, then went to the show, it would indeed be their future. And the real pillars would be waiting there for them as well. When I found those pillars on the street, I knew they were really something, something for my future (I thought of my friend Tariq Alvi, if he were with me at the time of discovering them, he'd say "Colter, you have to take those." So I took them. I happened to be with another friend who helped me walk them to my room up 37 stairs). I love how those cardboard pillars have this amazing power to transform a room entirely. When I transported the pillars from my house to the Attic, they were strapped to the roof of the car and you wouldn't believe how many smiles I got from pedestrians. And I indeed thought about the name of the space, The Attic. A sort of heaven. Thus some obituaries to boot. And then that idea can be extended to the drawing of me with a guy that I had a brief relationship with. It lasted only four weeks but they were four amazing weeks of learning and growing. All our relationships can be seen as a microcosm of the world. Our relations, our views, arguments and perceptions contribute to the world and its ways. R/ Where does the title of your show your future come from? C/ I debated the title for a long while. I was thinking it should be something with light in it. I had several working titles. Then I saw Your Future somewhere, like in an advert. There is enough light in Your Future so...I like how it can mean many things. Meanings multiply. That's why I like puns (though your future is pun-free). I wanted it to be optimistic but at the same time a reminder of our death, that weird thing that happens where anima leaves the body somehow. Weird is a good word for this show. Weird, or wyrd means to turn, or fate. Maybe this show is about what you make of your future. Asking if we have control. There is a little yellow memo that says FREE (not sure if you noticed) that is on one of the pillars. Are we free? I tend to think we are not free though it's so American to say that we are. We are more like water, like bubbles, and do they have choices? I don't know. I also was thinking about Emma Kay. She's a British artist that wrote the Bible from memory. She also did a piece called The Future from Memory. It was projected text of everything she could remember that she ever heard of the future. What a great piece. That really shows herself; it's like displaying your ignorance, and I really admire her for that. My memory drawings are a sort of visual display of how memories are always new; they have nothing to do with the first memory, let alone the event that is being remembered in the first place.