Interview with Artist Emilie Halpern, pt. 2
Artist Emilie Halpern’s work is part nature, part human nature, referencing the emotions that are bound in the physical world around us. There is loneliness in stars. Loss in crumpled love letters. Though many of Halpern’s references are grandiose, the feelings they elicit are intimate. Base partner Geoff Cook, who met the artist at her NYC solo show a decade ago, talked to Halpern it seems about whatever crossed his mind.
Base: Can you discuss various themes in your work? Isolation? Love and love lost? The connection between emotions and nature? Your interest in outer space? Other?
Emilie Halpern: The subject of love has had a symbiotic relationship with music for I don’t know how long, but not so much with visual art. The pathway to our emotional heart strings must be more easily reached through our ears than through our eyes. When you get down to it, all along I’ve wanted to make love songs with visual art, or actually I’ve wanted to do what love songs do but with visual art.
“You love her, but she loves him, and he loves somebody else, you just can’t win. And so it goes till the day you die, this thing they call love is gonna make you cry.” Those lyrics have been stuck in my head ever since I heard them blaring in the produce aisle of the supermarket 3 days ago. Now try to turn those lyrics into a visual object. Love song lyrics have this magical use of personal pronouns that allow the listener to plug in their own heartbreak and tears into every line.
The love song creates these little gaps for the listener to fill, expressing at once a universal and an intensely private and genuine experience. In my own work I’ve gravitated towards symbols in nature in an attempt to create that same experience for the viewer. Anthropomorphism is my version of the love song personal pronoun.
Another big interest of mine is magic, or transformation in general. I’ve done several pieces where I perform magic tricks: “Disappearing Act” is a video where I vanish behind sheets of mylar, and “Magicienne” is a video where I appear to levitate because of a mirror placed between my legs. In the natural world, magic can take the form of wonder and discovery, but it’s basically the experience you have when you think things are one way and then they turn out to be another, and that makes you look at the world around you in a completely different way. Like when I first read about Turritopsis nutricula, a jelly fish that’s immortal.
Yoko Ono describes this as changing the meaning of things or changing the value of things in her essay “What is the Relationship Between the World and the Artist?” She talks about how the power of the artist isn’t in creating; children can create, mothers create human life. The artist’s role in the world to is to help us realize that things can change, and that they can be thought of a different way even though we perceive them as immutable.
I was having trouble sleeping last night, so I listened to the latest podcast of Radiolab. The episode opens up with people responding to the question “Do you think humans will ever stop fighting wars?” And what that question actually means is do you think we can change who we are. Sadly an overwhelming majority of people (9 out of 10) nowadays think that war is inevitable. How did we get here, how did we become people who don’t think world peace is possible? It’s so awful. What the rest of the podcast illustrates so beautifully it that of course we can change, and we can change the meaning of what we think is normal.
B: You’ve worked with photography, video, sculpture, even sound. Have you investigated working with (or are you currently working with) “newer” mediums? Namely the web? Social media? Computer animation?
EH: I gravitate towards the low tech and the homemade, so that usually sends me looking back instead of looking forward with technology.
B: Makes sense. How about technology in the sense that it can allow an artist without formal representation to speak to the world? Do you see the gradual leveling of the art world playing field?
EH: I don’t know what artists and galleries did before internet and email. It has without a doubt changed the exposure and the accessibility we can have to an artist’s work. I was just googling Anne Collier, her work is so amazing. But if it weren’t for I heart photograph blog or the Corvi Mora gallery website, I wouldn’t have been able to spend the morning admiring all her new work I had never seen.
It’s crazy to me that so many galleries still don’t take the time to have a proper website or how many friends of mine that are unrepresented don’t even bother having one. The people who have seen my work in jpgs far outnumber the people who get to see it in person, but at this point I still need an exhibition space. Having an installation in a physical space where a whole body of work comes together is an important part of my practice. Maybe that will change. I look at the artist run online gallery Light & Wire and they make it work.
B: I’m curious about your early videos. Can you talk a bit not only about the work itself, but the experience of the productions? Like, was it you and some friends that helped out?
EH: Both the “Solar Kiss” video & photo I made with the help of my boyfriend at the time. In the video I’m approaching the sun really slowly and he tells me stop when I get there. That’s the only one I can think of that was shot with someone’s help, all the others I just made on my own. I usually do a take, and then I playback in the camera to see what I get and then I adjust the shot accordingly. Usually after that I keep shooting it over again with small variations, until I’m too fried to keep going. It’s a little bit of a guessing game, but I’m so in the zone when I shoot it’s hard for to have other people around, I have a hard time communicating in those moments. The shoots are fast and sometimes fairly spontaneous- just me, a camcorder and a tripod.
B: What’s your studio like? Organized? Chaotic? Do you tend to start and finish works? Or are you more of a multi-tasker?
EH: I have 2 studios: my clean studio which is actually totally messy, and my dirty studio which as it turns out is spotless. What I call my clean studio is my office, where I store photos and do my research and any work on the computer. It’s filled with stacks of books, and piles of papers I should organize, and boxes of I don’t even know what. It has a magnetic wall with images and sketches for inspiration. My dirty studio is my sculpture studio, and it’s a recently converted garage with skylights and track lighting and a high ceiling. Right now it looks like a mini-gallery, everything is organized and perfectly lit, but once a kiln gets in there it will probably become a dusty ceramics studio. When I’m researching and sketching, I’m working on a million things at once, my ideas tend to fire off all at the same time in different directions. But by the time I’m in the studio I’m creating one thing at a time start to finish, and I like to work fast and focused.
B: A question I always find interesting… what advice would you give to young artists coming out of school?
EH: The beautiful thing that art school gives you is structure and a knowledge of when you’re succeeding and failing. You get a class schedule, assignments, grades, crits. You know when to show up and what you’re supposed to be doing. Once you’re out of school, there’s none of that. You have to create your own structure and your own measures of success. Initially I think it’s easy to still look to the outside for those things. Your structure is your deadlines. You’re in the studio because you have to finish this piece by this date for this show. But what happens when there is no deadline, when there is no upcoming exhibition, do you stop going to the studio? Do you stop feeling like you’re an artist? The same goes for measures of success. Art Schools really protect you from participating in the art world while you’re still a student, so you get out with this hunger to be part of it. There’s this sense that certain benchmarks will mean that you have arrived, that you’re an artist, that you’re a good artist, that you’re a successful artist: your first group show, being represented by a gallery, your first solo show, selling your work, a good review, the Whitney biennial, the list goes on and on and you can keep chasing the carrot, and you will always feel the same way inside, pretty empty. With most careers the structure is built into it, you work hard and you’re rewarded, you get a promotion, a raise. Being an artist you’re always standing on sand. Who is promoting you? Who is rewarding you? They’re there one minute, they’re gone the next. Your career can go up and down and all around, that’s why you have to be your own rock, or else you’re going to feel like a crazy person. I think it takes an enormous sense of self and self-confidence to survive being an artist. Whatever you can do to create stability in your life I highly encourage, because it won’t come from participating in the art world.
B: What’s your feeling on the ‘celebrity culture’ of LA?
EH: I love TV, I love movies, and I’m easily starstruck. In fact, celebrities tend to run away from me, because I’m one of those people that points and stares. But LA is big, and celebrities don’t really live on my side of town. Life in Los Angeles is pretty insular, you’re in your protected bubble world, in your car, in your house. If celebrity culture is happening in LA, it’s definitely outside my bubble. I’m over here in Highland Park, making art, gardening, home improving, trying to convince my husband we have room in our backyard for chickens and bee hives, Rachel Zoe and Lauren Conrad are no where in sight, except perhaps on the DVR.
B: Who and what in pop culture intrigues you, either positively or negatively?
EH: I have a love-hate relationship with pop culture. The love comes from the fact that I easily suspend my disbelief, and whatever pop culture is selling I’m buying. I’m a premier target audience member in that I believe what every love song is crooning and what every romantic comedy is promising. If you’re a lover of love then you’re a friend of pop culture. I’m a believer, and pop culture needs us to be believers in order to work. That’s the love. Now the hate is because it takes the very thing you believe, that you feel so sincere about, and it mass-produces it for a profit. That’s how you get “Candle in the Wind”, suicide becomes muzak.
B: What books are on your nightstand? What songs are on heavy rotation on your proverbial iPod?
EH: On my nightstand: “Lovely Bones” by Alice Sebold, “The Urban Homestead” by Kelly Coyne & Eric Knutzen, “Wesley the Owl” by Stacey O’Brien, & “Broca’s Brain” By Carl Sagan. Most played songs on my iPod: “Take it on the Run” by REO Speedwagon, “Thirteen” by Big Star, “Trudi’s Song” by Mott the Hoople, “Weekend” by Earth & Fire, “Feeling Without Touching” by Glass Candy, “Half Past France” & “ Big White Cloud” by John Cale, “I Want You to Love Me” by the Poppy Family, & “Grey Sunset” by Ariel Pink.
B: Do you spend time in museums? If so, which ones do you like in particular and why?
EH: I enjoy going to both fine art & science museums. Some favorites are: The Metropolitan Museum (NY), The American Museum Natural History (NY), The Museum of Jurassic Technology (LA), The Exploratorium (SF), The Gallery of Paleontology and Comparative Anatomy (National Museum of Natural History, Paris), and The Pompidou Center (Paris).
B: On a happiness scale of 1-10, where do you fall?
EH: Personal life: very happy. Professional life: working on getting there.
B: A few from the Proust questionnaire… what qualities do you like and dislike most in yourself? What qualities do you like and dislike most in others?
EH: Like in myself & others: optimism. Dislike in myself & others: fear of change.
B: This is purely a hunch… but I get the feeling you dig the weather? Have you ever checked out the NOAA website?
EH: Just looking at it now. Love the space weather prediction center with the Auroral Map. Thanks for the recommendation!
To read part I of this interview, click here.
For more information on Emilie Halpern and her work, visit her website.
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