Temporary Contemporary

Virginia Overton

March 13 to June 13, 2010

For Virginia Overton, everyday objects and simple gestures offer opportunities to see and even rejoice in our surroundings in new ways. They become the building blocks for sculptures made of the familiar turned unfamiliar. A ladder becomes an abstract object in space that creates a composition with shadows and marks made during installation. Sturdy materials levitate. Tools of construction metamorphosize. The overlooked become ethereal forms. Pallets squish between walls with shims, large sonotubes hang from trees, and chairs balance in elegant, precarious towers. By highlighting what she calls “unskilled skills,” like driving a truck or stacking chairs, Overton rearranges our environment so that we might see it with more poetic eyes.

There is a long tradition of artists using found objects. In 1917, Marcel Duchamp notoriously signed a urinal “R. Mutt” and entered it in a salon competition as a means of proclaiming that whatever an artist calls art is art. In the 1960s, Minimalist Carl Andre used rows of bricks to create a purposely stripped down, unpretentious and unemotive sculpture. Today the use of “non-art” materials is commonplace. Overton stands out in her ability to turn the tools of making things into the things for our consideration. Along the way, she celebrates the fixer, the intuitive righter of situations, and his or her kit of tools—the ladder and the ability to maneuver it in just the right way.

Yet, Overton is not just a sculptor. She is an installation artist and even a performance artist for the way she manipulates materials and space, in a choreographed dance, so that the materials become actors reacting to their environment, one purposely awaiting viewer’s physical and moving presence. With Overton’s site-specific installation in Cheekwood’s Temporary Contemporary space—an old carriage stall in a grand stable—she, as she says, played off the room’s “architectural features to create a rhythm that echoes, reflects and repeats the things that where there when I arrived by adding a few simple interventions.” There are two of everything and sometimes even four or more as reflections multiply. Likewise, the space expands and contracts as mirrors push the space out, while the collapsing plywood and drywall piece give the effect of the room being pulled in. All the while, a real sense of joy and play abounds as if a child has been let loose at this old estate to make mud-pie flowers and gawk at oneself repeated infinitely.

Virginia Overton was born in 1971 in Nashville, Tennessee, and received her M.F.A. from the University of Memphis in 2005. She has exhibited at the Sculpture Center, New York, in 2009 and had solos show at Powerhouse in Memphis in 2007 and the Brooks Museum, Memphis, in 2006. Her current exhibition True Grit is at DISPATCH gallery in New York until April 4, 2010 and her work will appear in Greater New York 2010 at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. She lives and works in New York City.

Claire Schneider: Virginia, tell me on what you’re thinking about for your installation at Cheekwood.

Virginia Overton: I’ve been playing around more with pieces of wood jammed between walls and mirror. I put mirror vertical on two opposite walls and then it’s held up just with a 2x4. It’s a little bit tenuous. Also, it’s kind of a funny thing that the 2x4 then starts to look like a Brancusi endless column turned sideways.

CS: I can see that would be nice to have mirrors in the space—it’s unexpected.

VO: One of the things I really liked about that space is the arched window and the two little windows at the end. I walked out the door I noticed is how many buildings and rooflines come all together all of a sudden right there. So, I thought that the mirror was a nice way to amplify that even more, kind of reflecting off of itself and off of the walls and what you see through the windows and, you know, in a way making the space bigger but more gangly.

CS: Virginia your working method is very process-based. Can you talk me through how you came to this working method?

VO: For me it’s a very natural way to work. I think it’s the way I’ve worked since I was a kid. You kind of take what’s around you and you play with it, or you use it to make what you want to. I think at one point you had asked me what my earliest sculptures look like. And that’s what I thought of first, collecting rocks and fossils.

I used to stack those, or place them, on shelves, which ones next to which ones, and that kind of thing, were sort of sculptures for me in a way, and the rocks themselves had a beauty or significance I really liked.

CS: How did you know that was going to be your voice, as an artist? You might not have been encouraged to necessarily keep going in that direction as a professional artist.

VO: I think it took me a long time of reckon with that as a vocation. I guess, I always thought I should be a doctor, or a lawyer, or one of these things that always seem successful and they add to community. I had to wrestle with it for a long time to realize for myself what the importance of making art is, and how it contributes, and how it acts in community.

CS: How does the way you’re an artist contribute to deciding to be an artist?

VO: I think that I was able to translate the way I grew up and the skills that I learned and an approach to life into a way of making art.

CS: What did you learn growing up? What skills did you learn?

VO: [laughs] It was a skill of economy maybe? I grew up on a farm. And I think in that there’s a need, there’s a necessity to use materials and reuse materials, and for them to be constantly and readily available. So, you might not have such a specific material that you get for one purpose, rather it would be a material that could be very versatile. You know, a chain or something that you keep a certain length that you can use for many things and you just put a nail in the wall or whatever to take up the slack. It’s versatility, reusability.

CS: Being a sculptor is about learning to manipulate materials and say something with that. And you learned how to deal with materials at a pretty young age, growing up on a farm, which is not how all sculptors learn to approach materials.

VO: Maybe it’s the farm, and maybe it’s just my grandparents’ and parents’ style. Like the way that my dad would fix something when it was broken. He never took shop class or anything. And I would just follow him around a lot or watch him do something and, you know, it always seemed to work. And even though it might not be the prescribed method of fixing something, it satisfied the need.

CS: When you’re making your work, how much are you thinking about art history or learning from precedents like Carl Andre, the minimalist in the 1960s with his stack of bricks, or Marcel Duchamp and his declaration that a urinal could be a work of art just by signing it?

VO: Definitely, those are in the mix along with others like Cady Noland or Fischli and Weiss. I think about those as much as any other kind of influence. I don’t feel like those are more important than any other influence, whether it’s my family, or how I grew up, or mathematics, which I really loved when I was in school.

Art history for me can be a springboard, but sometimes it can also be … damning. [laughs] So, you have to be really careful, because I want to learn from history, but I also don’t want that to be a stumbling block that keeps me from trying. I’ve had a lot of art history classes and I continue to read and look at art, but I also continue to go see movies, and read trashy magazines, and… go bowling. And all those things sort of somehow play a part in the work.

CS: What draws you to highlighting, as you say, “unskilled skills?”

VO: It’s not something that you’re taught formally, like to learn how to weld, to really learn how to do it properly and safely... or like in school when you learn how to, you know, diagram a sentence or something… you have to learn the ways in which that is done. But unskilled skills are like … you look at something, you’ve got this problem or this issue and you figure out a way to deal with it. And for me that’s the way that I make art.

It’s funny because I thought of this exactly last week, I was in a cab here [in New York City] and I got in, and it was like a cab that looked like the guy practically lived in there, I mean he had sort of his whole office up in the front seat, and it was kind of decorated, and some pictures hanging and stuff like that. And the thing that I saw that totally drew me in was they have these nameplates that go behind their heads where they drive. And it’s made out of clear acrylic, and it’s attached to another larger piece of acrylic that divides the front seat from the back seat. Well, attached to this small piece of acrylic, (it was like the size of a ruler, you know, kind of, I don’t know, 10 or 12 inches long)… Anyway, he had rubber banded a box of Kleenex, and I was like, “Oh my God, that is so perfect,” because… it held the Kleenex in place, when he got a new box he could easily take it down and put more up… It was all stuff he already had, and when he needed a Kleenex he could just reach behind his head and grab it. And it was like, “That’s the kind of art I like to make,” you know? And that’s an unskilled skill. It’s sort of an ingenuity that this guy found these two rubber bands and put his Kleenex box behind his head. It seems absurd, but it works exactly right, its efficient and graceful in its own way.

CS: You translated this ability to capture your everyday, working man’s view of the world in video as well as sculpture. How did you decide to make the video of the sun setting as you drove your truck on I-40, out the end of a sonotube?

VO: I used a huge tube, it was 12 feet by 3 feet, over and over again in a lot of different sculptures, and so every time I would make a new sculpture, I would have to move the tube, transport it in my truck. And so I spent quite a bit of time looking out of the rearview mirror through the tube, out the back of the truck as I was driving. And I realized that it was such a nice visual thing, a nice perspective and, you know, so often I’m driving around just looking through the front of my car, the rectangular windshield, and it was nice to see something through a circle and so I just started videotaping out of the back of the truck, kind of capturing what I had seen, or what might be happening that I wasn’t seeing as I was driving down the road. To me it was such a beautiful thing to see the sun rise framed by the open end of the tube. The visual was being caught in the circle of the tube.

Organized by Claire Schneider, Independent Curator

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