Cody Rae Knue sits down with Peter McGouran, founder of Polluted Eyeball Screen Printing

\\

PM: This building is really interesting.  I’ve been here for six years.  I’m the longest tenured studio on this floor and have seen many people come and go.  It can be great as you become friends with them but a lot leave eventually.

56B:  It must be nice to always have a community around. 

PM: Totally.  Everyone has his or her own project.  I’m the only screen printer, business wise on this floor.

56B: How did you get involved with screen printing?

PM: I originally worked in music management, for two managers in Manhattan.  One of the bands they represented broke up and the singer formed a new band.  They got a development deal from a label and I got in contact with the singer since I was looking for employment.  I didn’t want to be a manager but he needed someone to book studio time, and I agreed to help out until he could find someone to take over.  It was great because I had been a fan of the band and now I was able to be on the inside of it.  It was really exciting.

56B: When did this happen?

PM:  That was in 1999, so going back a ways.  I was 25.  I had graduated college but I still didn’t know what I wanted to do career wise.  It took for me up until 30 before I knew what I wanted to set my mind to.  I didn’t know what my strengths were.  Working with the band I was around a creative group and everyone had a role, so I started doing their merchandise.  A friend of ours had screens designed, which we then printed onto t-shirts.  Each piece was a one of a kind.

56B:  Did Polluted Eyeball start around then?

PM: No, not until in 2004.  I moved to 56 Bogart in 2006.   Prior to that I was in Williamsburg.

56B: What made you move over here?

PM: My building had been purchased and my landlord owned this floor, which was the blue print for the rest of the building.

56B: You saw this area really transform then. 

PM:  Yeah.  There have been great changes and some less so.  As anyone knows, when this happens, rent goes up, but I enjoy having simple needs at my footstep.  I feel like the neighborhood has passed me by in certain respects.  I’m 38 now and I’m working all the time.  I’m not experiencing it the same way I was when I first moved to Brooklyn.  I lived in Williamsburg and spent days and nights with the bands.  I was a part of something great.   Although, when I look at Polluted Eyeball, I am a part of something better because this goes further for me.  This is my project while the band was someone else’s. 

56B:  Do you make your own work here or is a client base focus?

PM: It’s a higher percentage for clients, because it’s how I make a living.  I don’t have as much time anymore for my own work, but I have never had a problem with that because I get to work with some really cool artwork. 

56B: That’s very exciting.  Do you work with local artists or larger companies?

PM: Mostly with artists but I also work with designers.  Since most everything is digital now, people will come to me because they want a screen print feel for a project.

56B: What do you enjoy the most about screen printing?

PM: When I look at the artwork on the wall, I know how and when all of them were made.  I teach workshops here and I can use them as examples.   For me teaching is great because I am able to pass that knowledge onto someone else.  What they do with it, that’s up to them, but I’m giving them information that I didn’t have when I began.  I’m a self-taught screen printer.  Everything up here is from commitment.  I’m happy I don’t have to sit down at a desk, but I’m on my feet 12-14 hours a day.  It involves a lot movement and a lot of problem solving.  You have to be preparing for X, Y, Z, before they happen.  

56B: I have to ask, where did the name Polluted Eyeball come from?

PM: It’s part of the lyrics from a Guided by Voices’ song, Come on polluted eyeballs, stop scabbing out the fields.  It had a special meaning to me at the time.  

Polluted Eyeball Screen Printing hosts workshops through out the month.  For more information and a schedule check out www.pollutedeyeball.com

Cody Rae Knue sits down with Jacob Perkins and Matt Nelson, founders of Mellow Pages Library. 

 \\

JP: The soundtrack today in the Library is Nirvana, MTV: Unplugged from 1992.

56B: How long have you guys been open?

JP: Since February 21^st of this year, so two months.

56B: With so much of the book world going digital, doesn’t it seem a bit risky to have a library and reading room?

JP: That’s not a risk for us.  It was my studio, so I’m already paying for it.  It was more of an experiment.

56B: Would you classify this as an art piece then?

JP: More of a social project.

56B: Are you both artists?

MN: We’re both writers, Jacob is a painter.

JP: I paint too, that’s what I went to school for.  I started writing a ton in my studio and not painting at all.  At a certain point I felt like the room was wasted on me.

56B: Where did the library idea come from?

JP: Matt was going to move back to Seattle after school and do something similar to Mellow Pages.

MP: No, what I planned on doing was an archive of small press books with a book-signing component.  I was trying to get it set up with a friend of mine and we were going to do it legitimately as a non-profit with boards of directors.

56B:  How does the Library run?  Do you curate what is shown?

JP:  Yeah, you don’t just come in here, check out books and take it home.  We have memberships, but as far as money is concerned, it’s free.  You can bring us ten books, leave them here, people check them out and at the end you can get them back.  That’s where the curating comes in.  We’ll only accept certain things.  Our mission is to support small press publications.  We want to feature fiction and poetry.

56B: Besides having the space already, was there a reason to set up shop here?

JP: Well that was the reason why.  It just felt like the perfect spot.  It’s a studio and a commercial space, so we can do whatever we want with it.  We wouldn’t have done it anywhere else.

56B:  How many publications do you have?

JP: Of what we have catalogued and on Good Reads, almost 1,200, but there are at least a hundred to two hundred more, especially when you start looking at the zines and the journals.  We aren’t really cataloguing those, so I would say we are getting close to 1,400.

MP:  It doesn’t look like it’s that much stuff, but when you start actually counting stacks and how many books it takes to go up to the top, it adds up.

56B: I love the way you display the books on nails, it’s almost like they’re pieces of art.

MP:  We were trying to think of cool ways of displaying them.   We thought of shelves but these walls are just straight dry wall. It just seemed the smartest way, functionally.  Plus it just looks cool.

JP:  Yeah, it was the cheapest and the fastest.  Once we decided to do this, it was like: go!

MP: Yeah there wasn’t a lot of time between once said this is our place and actually making it our place.

56B: Are a lot of these books from your personal collection?

JP: Yeah but there is more than double since we got started.  I think we had 700 books at first.  Matt probably had 250, my brother had almost 300 that I rescued from North Carolina.  He went to school there and when he moved back home to Portland, he left all his books in North Carolina.  At one point I went down there to rescue a guitar, an amp and all the books with a rental car.  Two days after I got the books, we decided to start Mellow Pages.  That was sort of the reason why we thought to do this because I had a ton of books here. 

MP: His brother’s books are interesting because they’re all very dense: philosophy, political and abstract.  Someone came in here today looking for a specific book, which we had, and Luke, Jacob’s brother, had written notes in all his books.

JP: I think that guy just wanted to read it for the notes.  He was doing his PHD and writing his dissertation on political theory, so he took notes with that frame of mind.  My brother would draw a whole box around a paragraph and write four or five words to sum it up so he could go back later for that one specific paragraph.     

56B: Do you have any recommendations for Summer reading?

MP: Tons of stuff.  The book I’m reading now, “Crapalachia,” it’s Scott McClanahan latest book, it’s [pauses] amazing.

56B: What was your favorite book that made you want to read?

JP: My favorite book of all time is Hatchet.

MP: [Laughs] Really? That’s the good book.

JP: That was the first book that had chapters that I really liked.  It was fourth grade and what I was into then.  That book took over my life.  I started reading anything because of Hatchet.

MP: I’d say my favorite was The Phantom Tollbooth.

56B: Do you have any plans to continue the library?

MP: Forever!

JP:  We have year long memberships.  We just got another one today, so for at least another 365 days.

MP: That’d be a cool way of doing this.  As long as we have members, another commitment to that year.  Yeah!  This one is for you Chris!

For more information:www.facebook.com/MellowPagesLibrary

Cody Rae Knue sits down with Robert Walden and Henry Chung, owners and directors of Robert Henry Contemporary.

///

56B: How did you get started with the gallery? You also run a vintage store, Robert Henry Vintage.

RW: That’s actually how it started; we opened a vintage house ware store, mostly from the 60’s and 70’s, in 2008.  Since we had wall space we started showing artwork, our own work and that of our friends’.  It was a great way to get people into the store.  Now five years later we’re doing this.  It just became something else.

HC:  Robert and I are both artists as well. Using the wall space in our store to show work was just a logical decision.  But at some point it really took over and we had to move the house wares online.  Our retail space became purely an art gallery.

56B: You use to be in South Slope, when you did you migrate to Bushwick?

RW: We opened here on June 1^st of last year.

56B: What brought you to 56 Bogart?

RW: Oh well, the aura that is Bushwick.  We were fairly isolated in South Slope and we needed to be in a place that had more foot traffic for art.  Bushwick proved to be that place for us.

56B: What made it the perfect fit?

RW: A community of like-minded people and affordability.

HC: The lack of community over where we were before was really very difficult for us because we were so isolated. We were far.  [Laughs]  It made it difficult to see what else was going on.  Here we have this huge community of peers that we can talk to, throw ideas around with and even have meetings with other gallerists in the neighborhood.  Everything feeds off everything else.  When we have openings the crowd is more than double [than the South Slope location], especially when our openings sync up.  That would never happen at our old space.   They would have their opening and we had ours; there was no cross over.

RW: There were four galleries, including us.  Sometimes we would we have openings on the same night but galleries were fairly spread out, it lacked critical mass.  It’s an analogous to an artist working in his or her studio and never showing beyond the studio.  Some people are satisfied with that and that’s fine, but to me it fundamentally misses a huge part of what art is: the engagement with other people.

HC:  We have a responsibility with the artists that we work with.  Having a space where nothing happens is pointless; it’s kind of a disservice to us as a gallery and to the artists.  In a community like this, when we have openings, people are actually seeing [the artwork].  We get people who are blogging and people who are writing in various publications.

56B: What would you like to see happen to this area?  It’s getting really built up but still a small, intimate community.

HC: I hope to see it continue to organically grow.  I think what often happens with neighborhoods like Williamsburg or Red Hook, and even Long Island City, is it gets to a point where we are now, then people try to make it more and pump in money but all too quickly.   That has a potential to really stop a wonderful thing right in its track.  Not to say that I don’t want to see it grow, we all want to see it grow.

RW: Change is inevitable. Once a neighborhood is “discovered”, real estate people move in and prices go up.  That squelches the ability for things to happen organically and for people to experiment

HC: Exactly, but we don’t want to see it change so quickly or so drastically that it ruins the character.  People begin to show safe stuff because they need to pay the bills. 

56B: Most of the work you show are drawings and collages, why that focus?

HC:  We started showing art that we liked at our original space and it just happen to be that kind of work: some what abstract, some what minimal, and very conceptual.  It’s a personal preference and our programming reflects that.

RW: It’s extremely personal.  We don’t show what we wouldn’t own.  

56Bogart: That’s a good motto to go by.

RW: We know galleries that show works because they think they can sell them.  I don’t want to show work that I’m not aesthetically and conceptually engaged with.  Why should I promote something that is not of any interest to me?  It’s a particular way to run a gallery and I don’t think it’s unusual.  It’s just having a point of view.  Clients go to galleries or specific gallerist for their point of view.  The gallery is the liaison with the artist and to be someone the client can develop a relationship with.  To me that becomes difficult if the works shown at a gallery have no relationship to each other whatsoever.

56B:  Totally.  I think it allows you to reach out to a specific audience, because you are just as involved as they are.

HC: Yeah and people comment sometimes that we talk so well about the artist that we show and about the artwork.  The reason is we are very much engaged; we really, really love the work we show.

RW: Yeah, it’s another aspect of building community.  We have a community with our artists, we’re friendly with all of them, and we don’t show anyone we don’t know.  We very much like knowing whom we work with, because it builds trust.  It’s just more enjoyable for us.  It creates a micro community, as well as making our interactions with the broader community more interesting and more meaningful.

56B: How long have you been working together?

RW: Six years?

HC:  Yeah.  Wait, no, four years and we’ve been together for six years, or is it seven? Yeah, seven.   

56B: It’s great to see a couple working together.  What’s your favorite part about owning a gallery?

HC: Well part of it is being surrounded by art all the time.  I hadn’t really thought about it until someone mentioned it to me and I though “Oh wow, yeah!”  It’s very nice but also being social, especially in this neighborhood.  There’s a lot people we know, even from before we moved here, that are a part of this community.  On any given weekend they come in and just chat, even strangers.  It’s very social, I enjoy that quite a bit.

56B: I’ve been wondering, how did you decide whose name goes first in your name?

RW: Well, that was a long process.

HC: Originally we were going to call it Waldung.

RW:  It didn’t catch on as well. [We all laugh] It actually started with the vintage store and we wanted it to be the name of person.  We wanted it to sound like a person’s store rather than a company store. 

HC: Henry or Robert could be a last name but we decided that Robert Henry had a better flow.

RW: Consequently, I’m often called Mr. Henry.

Robert Henry Contemporary is currently exhibition Louise Dudis, Eye Level with the Smallest Leaf.  They will be participating in Bushwick Basil and Bushwick Open Studios, as well as having a rare group exhibition.

www.roberthenrycontemporary.com

Naomi Edmondson speaks to Casey Opstad. 

///

56B: Tell me about yourself, Casey.

CO: Excellent first question, Naomi. I grew up in in Grand Forks, North Dakota. I went back to school for a Masters in Painting. I went in 2009 and graduated in 2011. I always think people that grew up in North Dakota end up having a better imagination. You grew up in Brooklyn, you’re used to the stimulus. There’s stimulus in North Dakota, but only so much variance.  You end up with a better imagination, because you’re able to keep yourself entertained.

56B: I can imagine that.

CO: My favorite gift was a drawing pad or a blank sheet. That is how I feel about North Dakota. I see it as a blank sheet of paper: you can put whatever you want there. You can make it whatever you want.

56B: This leads to my next question: who are your influences?

CO: That’s a good question too. I guess I should be honest about this?

56B: It’s always nice when you’re honest about these things.

CO: Honestly, I’d have to say my parents. They were always supportive. I have two great parents who never really questioned what I was doing. When you tell your parents you’re going to try to make it as an artist…well, our generation is a little different.  But it can be difficult for that generation to understand. I also had some good art teachers growing up. Again, really supportive people. One teacher in particular was named Ryan Alson. He’s a pretty well known artist, but keeps it low key. He influenced me with his directness and his focus on drawing. I do think drawing is an important thing. I think a lot of people now, what with technology, don’t want to take the time to learn that skill.

56B: It’s becoming a dying art.

CO: Pun intended! I see it as sort of a metaphor. He taught me how to draw. Once given that ability, you’re able to see how the world is formed for yourself and others. The idea of the gaze…of what I want to look at is an important one.

56B: I agree. Drawing fosters the ability to discover your own gaze and your own point of view.

CO: Yeah. When you don’t learn to look, you end up stereotyping a lot of things. You end up assuming you know what you’re seeing. Seeing sort of becomes a metaphor for making decisions and living your life, and taking the time to really look.

56B: With that in mind, how did you get into art?

CO: It was one of the first things I was really good at and for which I was complimented. Growing up in North Dakota, I was really good at drawing log cabins. I was complimented on it. That became the way I received attention.  But I also had a lot of different interests, including improv. comedy and theater. Then as I get older it became, “Do I want to be an actor? What do I want to pursue?”. Art was the area where I felt I had the most talent. It’s the one thing I do where time seems to stop. I mean, it happens on stage for musicians and it happens for me when I paint or draw. It’s sort of an indicator that you’re having a good time; when time completely vanishes.

56B: I wanted to get into the series of work I saw on your website.

CO: Yeah, there are a bunch of different things going on. The chalk drawings are erratic. I got this job doing chalk drawings and it’s been hectic.           

56B: I really wanted to talk to you about the chalk drawings because I think they’re fascinating.

CO: I got this job with General Assembly on 20^th and Broadway. It’s sort of an incubator for high tech companies. It’s a really great business that is expanding. I knew the other co founder of General Assembly. When Steve Jobs passed, he called me to come draw a tribute of him on the company’s chalkboard. I get over there, put together a file. People are used to working on a white space with black material. So it fascinated them that I was doing the opposite. It takes a moment to adjust to that.  I think they liked that bit of magic. Once I finished, they liked the portrait so much that they commissioned me to do a total of 24 pieces over the course of a year. They’re huge, probably six by ten feet.

56B: How long would you say it takes you to finish a chalk drawing?

CO: I’ve gotten pretty good at it now and there’s not much lettering. People assume if you can draw you can letter and that’s not the case. [He laughs]. It takes about three to five hours, depending on the level of detail.

56B: I want to ask about the selection process. The portraits chosen are very varied.

CO: The General Assembly wanted to choose people that have created things. They wanted to foster entrepreneurs, and people that are creating something out of nothing. Usually I give them three or four options and they’ll talk to me about them. For example, when MCA (Adam Yaunch, founding member of The Beastie Boys) passed away, right away they were like “Let’s do this.”  That would be an example, because musicians create music out of nothing. 

56B: Thus far, do you have a favorite portrait?

CO: Oh, good question. It would have to be the Phillip Glass portrait. There was something about it. It was his face and after it was finished, I started listening to his music more. I worked from a good photo and he has an interesting face. He has a really strong face, plus the iconic glasses. That was a turning point: when it became more about the drawing process. It was less about being precise. 

56B: How did you get into chalk as a medium?

CO: They asked me to use it at General Assembly and it was the first time I ever used it. It’s kind of like pastels. But if you look at the drawings from the beginning to where I am now, they’re not very good. I mean, you can tell that it’s Steve Jobs. However, I didn’t trust my hand to do line variations. As I went along, I realized it’s a lot like pastels and pencils. But yes, it came through General Assembly. What’s so weird is that when I got that job, a lot of other people started doing chalkboard drawings for their offices. So now, seven or eight different jobs will call me up. 

56B: Was that intimidating at first, since chalk is a new medium for you?

CO: Not really. My philosophy is:  the advantage of the artist is having nothing to lose. I can tell you what I think, because what are you going to take from me? I’ll give it a shot and if I fail, I fail. I’d rather ride that edge. Even if the artist doesn’t like it, they can always burn it or paint it over. There’s always a new beginning.

56B: My last question: Do you have any words of advice for your fellow artists?

CO: Yes, I do have a bit of advice. Firstly, don’t ever take advice from me [He laughs].

Second, slow and steady always wins the race. The way I view it, it’s all about consistency. I’m not in this for the next five years; I’m in it for the long haul.  That’s the only way to live, and do it right. Take it one step at a time. I’m sure that sounds hokey.

56B: It’s never hokey if it’s true. 

For more information: www.caseyopstad.com

Cody Rae Knue speaks with Magdalen Wong in her studio at 56 Bogart.

///

56B: Tell me about yourself and how you got started with art?

MW: I actually got started at a young age, with my identical twin sister.   We would always draw and paint; basically that’s all we did.  We were always together and did everything together.  We even went to the same art school, Maryland Institute College of Art.  It was great, we could compare work with each other and I think that helps a lot because it pushed our work in different directions.  After college we kind of split, she went to Pennsylvania and I went to Chicago.  That was when I really started to realize that, oh yeah, we’re actually quite different.  We have different interests and we do different things.  I started to move towards more performative, sculptural work and she moved towards painting and illustration.

When I was getting my MFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I really got interested in the little details of every day life.  I would make musical scores from the nutrition facts on cereal boxes, or attach microphones to kites so you could listen to the sky while you fly it.  I continued that investigation of the every day in a lot of my work, but in smaller and more intimate pieces. 

After Chicago, I went back to Hong Kong to teach art for a few years.  I got so tired and exhausted, a little bit depressed that I didn’t have time or energy to work on my art.  I quit teaching two years ago and started doing residencies.  That was really, really refreshing.   I started making work again, little sculptures, projects and larger installations.  It was a combination of everything.

56B: Your work has a lot humor to it, which is refreshing since art shouldn’t always be taken so seriously.  Art is really funny sometimes.

MW: [Laughs] Yeah!   Even though it’s humorous, I still think it’s still crucial and critical.   I want to use a funny voice to talk about that.

56B: Is there a reason behind why you use every day objects? Such as the piece Chain or American Holiday Package.

MW: Yeah, I think that, even though I’m a studio-based artist, it’s very difficult for me to stay in a studio too long.  It’s hard to just think up an idea, but what helps is to go shopping. [We both laugh] Not because I’m a girl!  It’s mostly window-shopping, just to look.  My favorite thing is grocery shopping. A lot of my ideas come from the grocery store, looking at what’s around me or going to flea markets and finding the best deal, like a housewife couponing.

56B: Similar to the TV show “Extreme Couponing”?

MW: Yeah! It’s like, oh my god! Watermelons are on sale! So I bought two, but I couldn’t finish them!  I started to carve them and do different things to them, that’s how I made the piece Peeled.  The Chain piece came from me going to flea markets.   I kept coming upon these really cheap golden chains.  They look nice but you know it’s obvious someone else has worn it.  It doesn’t matter if it’s cheaply made, because there’s a history to it.  I bought a bunch of chains and started to think about how to view them.  Around that time a lot things started to happen with ordinary objects, such as cleaning detergent, milk and cereal boxes.

56B: So basically you use your art practice as an excuse to shop?

MW: [Laughs] I don’t always buy.  I just like to look at things.  I collect.  

56B: What do you want the viewer to take away from your work the most?

MW: For different works, it is different things, but I always want them to be a bit curious.  My objects are pretty ambiguous at times, like the milk splashes (Splashes, 2012 and Splash, 2010): the shapes are so weird.  I still want the viewer to be very familiar with the objects, I still want them to be recognizable but for the viewers to stop and think to themselves: “Wait a minute, something is different.  Why is it like that?”

56B: The milk splashes are so recognizable, because we see those shapes in ads, on TV and on milk cartons but when we look at yours, there is a realization that something is not quite right.

MW: I like that awkwardness.  People will say I’m critiquing the culture they belong to, and one perspective could be that, but on the other hand it’s more about being aware of what’s around you. Maybe you can take the funniest thing out of it, instead of a critique of consumerism…

56B: Besides shopping, what influences you the most?

MW: The minimalists, even though my art uses very recognizable objects and not geometric shapes and solids, I always try to strip it down to the bare minimum.  If the piece is about milk, it’s just about the milk.  I always really love that minimalist quality in artwork.  But at the same time, I’m very contradictory.  I also like work that is very busy and obscure, romantic qualities in things.  I like the feeling of work distancing the viewer in a very sensitive piece.

56B: Like Sunrise, Sunset, it’s a very romantic piece.  It allows the viewer to escape to another world for a while.

MW:  Yeah.  Sometimes I put Sunrise, Sunset together with Unidentified Fountain. It’s another piece that I really like.  It’s just a public water fountain, but when I shot the video, I turned the camera sideways so the water no longer shot straight up. For me that is really great.  A water fountain can be a tourist spot or a place for people to go relax, it’s not something that is often looked at as being strange. Usually a fountain is romantic, but when it’s turned that way people don’t know what it is.  They think it’s a meteorite and often it’s seen as a very sexual piece.  That’s what I like about it, it has multiple meanings and physically weird.

56B: You have exhibited around the world.   Where do you enjoy exhibiting the most and where do you think your work is best received?

MW:  I don’t know. Each place is so different.  Everywhere I go, I am able to make work that is really me.  When exhibiting somewhere, I’m asked how my work relates to that culture and society but sometimes I find it very difficult to answer.  I don’t want to always make work just because I’m in one specific place.  I want to make work because I’m interested in something and maybe it fits in with the location.  The funny thing is that no matter where I go, I am always able to find inspiration, which is really great.  I won’t say that my work is cultural or country specific but I always use what I find there.  In Greece I played with the ATM machines, which were fascinating.  In Korea I started to draw the landscapes I found in the food packaging.   For some reason it’s the craziest in Korea, they can be really cartoonish.  The American ones used to have landscapes but now they just go for big ugly logos or bands of color.  I always keep the same size [of the package] and take out all of the words and logo. Since I travel a lot, I collect them wherever I go.  I get to try a lot of new things, but sometimes I open a bag and the food is really disgusting but I don’t want to waste it! [Laughs]  I just want the packaging!  

56B: What is your favorite thing about your studio?

MW: It’s the perfect box.  I like the quiet and the privacy.  I thought of sharing, but I know me, even if there is a curtain, I would be too conscious about it and wouldn’t be able to focus.  I don’t need a big space, just a little cube.  Plus it actually has a lot of sunlight.  When I’m in my studio, it’s my workspace.  Even if I’m not working, I’ll just sit here and stare at my work.  There’s no Internet and not much phone reception, so I can be disconnected from the world for a few hours. 

Check out Magdalen’s work at www.magdalenwong.com