Vanessa Marsh: Model Sentimentality
an Interview by Matthew Hughes Boyko
“Always Close But Never Touching”, that is the title of your exhibition. Why did you go with this specific phrase, I’m curious?
“Always Close but never touching” was the title of a series of photographs I was working on earlier. The two photographs in the show are from that series, the sculptures grew out of that work.
Vanessa didn’t really answer my question. I should have asked, “What do you mean by...?” I guess this is just one of those wonderfully abstracted intriguing themes that artists provide and you have to assume that it means something to the artist, to the work and hopefully the viewer...
You grew up in Seattle, a recurring theme in your work. Why are you in San Francisco?
I have a weird relationship with the place, specifically with Western Washington, West of the Cascades. These models are all from Western Washington. I decided to move away from Seattle because it couldn’t provide me with what I wanted from life... and as an artist, what I needed from art.
When I decided to apply for my Masters study none of the schools in Seattle really spoke to me. I knew I didn’t want to continue to live there, since that’s where I lived for my entire life and I knew there were certain things Seattle couldn’t provide. I picked San Francisco as an area I felt I could settle down in for a little while. Part of why you go to graduate school is to find out how to build a community and begin your network of people. The idea of doing that and leaving right afterwards (leaving Seattle) just didn’t make sense to me at that point. Now I’m part of a community, I know people and people know who I am.
I first met Vanessa when she was going to school at CCA, she was in her 2nd year of the MFA program. The community she talks about are some local favorites: Mitzi Pederson, Sean McFarland, James Chronister. Schools help to nurture the special community of art friends you develop while you are in the 2-3 year program. The relationships you initiate while in school tend to last and are integral in your professional development as an artist.
Can you give me a little history of your art making practice? How did you arrive at the model pieces that represent a majority of this exhibition?
I began making the models to create a certain type of photograph. I would create the model with a certain image in mind; both with the end result of the photo piece and the role the model would have in the photograph.
The “False Horizon” series that I was doing in graduate school (2003-04) and the work that I did during my time at the Headlands Center for the Arts were made by my buying model kits, putting them together, weathering (painting) the model and then photographing it. Sometimes I would only finish the model to the point it needed to be worked just for the photograph. I had always wanted to make models of specific places, but I didn’t have the skills at the time to build it from scratch.
In this last year I had a job at a place called Figureplant, a model making business. It was a fabrication plant and I was working on a project for the Conservatory of Flowers building models based on San Francisco landmarks. Detail and recognition were key points of the job and that experience helped to develop my model making skills. After that I got more comfortable with building things. I was excited because I recently went to Seattle, took some reference shots of my memories growing up there and started to develop the model work based on these new/old locations.
It was a combination of factors, like having that job, going to Seattle, taking those shots of specific places and wanting to create models that I felt a lot of sentimentality towards...a longing to be at this place had a fair amount to do with this work.
This term sentimentality comes up a lot during the interview. Vanessa’s use of this concept, how it is built into her practice and how she defines it has certainly made me reconsider how I see her work and the sentimental aspects inherent to the psychological places she creates.
That was certainly a clear explanation of your process in making the physical piece. What decisions have you made when considering the conceptual frame of the works?
How do you keep the composure of psychology in this method of art making? Of creating models instead of photographs, how are you using the mediums involved and dealing with the spatial requirements demanded of a three-dimensional work versus a photograph?
With the photographs the dreamy/surreal quality of that visual look is coming from putting the model in front of my camera and taking a picture of it outside in a real environment. Creating an image that looks real, but that also has a dream-like quality in the sense that there is something super realistic about them. It was about being able to enter into the photograph and go into a place, experience a place that I remember, or want to remember.
There’s something special about building the models, I really enjoyed the tactileness of them... I liked the perspective that I get when looking at it. A photograph is a photograph, it’s a flat two-dimensional thing and the psychology involved comes from the picture plane. The models can be viewed in a different way, in that you can get close to it and have that psychological experience with this recreated physical place. You see them from different angles, different perspectives, literally and figuratively.
I am making a work of art, not a model. I want it to be presented almost like a painting or a sculpture, as opposed to it just being a model, not “oh I’m a model-maker and I make these models...” I want it to be something that has more to it than just a model. These places are built from a time in my life when I knew that I wanted to be an artist. I started to feel a lot of creativity in high school, I got my first car, my first camera and I would go on these long drives to the places I am referencing in the models. I would trespass. I would take pictures and spend a lot of time by myself in these places.
Vanessa’s history is in direct correlation to the works she has made. This is always the case with artists and the art works they produce. Being able to see and understand that subtext may or may not offer additional insight into the work but it is always entertaining. An artist that allows you to build a narrative from their artwork, to construct your own fantasies of what is happening or what has happened is a good thing. Vanessa has created pieces that do not force a prescriptive viewing; rather they softly open the window of interpretation for the viewer, granting them their own narrative and personal histories they associate with the sites she has created.
How does the element of your history get to the viewer without you being right next to them telling them why the places are important to you? Is this a concern you have with your work?
I guess one would hope that the work is good enough, that something just comes through...
The foundation I use when making these pieces is about me revisiting those places, revisiting a time when I started on the path that has led me here today, those starting points. I think it’s okay for people to come to them and bring their own stories, their own impressions of what it is they are looking at.
The titles and the artist statement are available and it describes what you are asking to some extent.
I first made the “Waterfront Building, Aberdeen WA”, then the “Georgia Pacific Storage Warehouse, Bellingham WA” then the “Incomplete Freeway On-Ramp, Seattle WA.” and then I made the “Cement Factory Seattle WA “ and the “Bridge House, Harbor Island WA” at the same time.
Out of the 5, the “Incomplete Freeway On-Ramp, Seattle WA.” is the closest to me, this is the most sentimental, this is actually a point that I’ve been to multiple times in my life, a place I have multiple memories from. It’s in the Arboretum, they were planning on building this whole crazy freeway network and they never finished it.
I want there to be immediacy between the works, I don’t want there to be a barrier for anyone.
Did you jump off there (referring to the end of the freeway)?
I did, I jumped off from it in High School a few times, into the lake, in the summer.
I ask this question because when I look at that On-Ramp... One part of me does react to the piece as a model, I think of an abandoned bridge/freeway thing going over water but... one part of me, just looking at the railing detail, reminds me of the Little Piney River Bridge, just on the outskirts of Newburg, Missouri and relentlessly recalls the fact that I never did jump off, not once.
The detail work in these pieces allows me to enter my own memory of a like place. How are you considering feeling in relation to the physical process of producing these sculptures?
A lot of the production quality and surface textures were made with aesthetic purpose. I wanted to take an approach with these sculptures that was really honest and not over thought. I didn’t want to sit around my studio wondering why I was doing what I was doing. I wanted it to be a more organic process. In that way, it’s been a very liberating experience to make this work. Just being in my studio and being like, “Oh I have a pile of old shelves, I’m going to cut them up and see how they look as a pedestal!” or “Hey, I have this piece of wood, I wonder...”
In a lot of ways I’m really nervous and scared about this show because it’s still really new to me and I just don’t feel super confident about it. They are all abandoned places, except “Bridge House Harbor, Island WA”. But even that one had an interesting vacancy about it because, even though there was someone living in it, it felt like the building and the people were abandoned somehow... that’s the type of mental response I am trying to evoke from these works.
That the viewer is able to find a “like place” in their own set of memories is a good response since I am attempting to instill a sentimental experience with the artwork. I mean, that’s the artist’s hope, right? Even in the most abstract painting there’s some sort of emotion that goes into it from the artist and if you were the artist creating that type of work you would hope that emotion would carry through to the viewer. This was another case of my letting myself go in terms of how I was working and letting myself create a literal level of abstraction with the painted sections in the model pieces.
Vanessa truly does take license with the soothing level of abstraction the watered areas of her sculptures. The painted abstractions add a feeling of unease and pollution to an already dilapidated building structure that feels deathly quiet and unwelcomingly serene as a real location.
Vanessa’s use of sentimentality to describe her work seems congruent to the finished pieces. She uses the concept to emotionally invite the viewer into these places. They are art works that requires you to minimum ally believe that these model sculptures mean something special to Vanessa and subsequently something to you, the viewer, which will eventually claim their own special memory and interpretation of the work.
I wanted to ask Vanessa why she had not included the same people models that were indicative of her earlier photo works into the model sculpture works. Her answer to the question satisfied my understanding of Vanessa Marsh, the artist and finished our interview with the sentimental thought that I would hope anyone seeing her art comes away with. The romantic intrigue of the artist, the exciting mystery surrounding the work and the patient wonder to see what this sentimental person will create in the future.
The work you are showing me, this model slide show of Vanessa’s life growing up, her memories of these spots and feelings accompanying them... why in these works are there no model people, no evidence of you being in them?
I think that’s one of the main reasons for having the ”The Girl Standing” photograph part of the show, that image is me. ”The Girl Standing” photograph, in a lot of ways... that’s me.
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