august/issue 12

August 2013, Issue 12

Big thanks to all participating artists!

Feature interviewTara Mahadevan

Mini interviewsKylie Gava

Interviews edited byLaura Stamm & Tara Mahadevan

DesignerTuan Pham

Founder/Editor in ChiefKylie Gava

Managing EditorTara Mahadevan

To be considered for our next issue, please visit our website

www.forget-good.com

Cover: The Excitement of Something New

by Monique Atherton

Trey Wright4

Calvin Ross Carl12

Steven Gee18

Justyn Hegreberg26

Danielle Levine34

Matthew Yaeger42

Denia Kazakou50

Monique Atherton56

4

Trey Wright

What is your day job?

I work during the week as a framer. It’s a mixed bag - sometimes we get things that are really cool to frame like awesome world war two memorabilia, but other times I’ll be framing things to go over somebody’s toilet. The uninspiring day job just makes the time in the stu-dio even more precious and exciting. I also freelance. It’s the same situation, but I really do enjoy getting to work with people on different projects; sometimes it leads to something in my personal work. I was commissioned by artist and photo editor Anna Jay to do a photo illustra-tion of products and it totally lead to a lot of the work I’m doing now.

It can be difficult to balance everything. I just try to take advantage of any free time I do get, even if it’s research-ing imagery or reading. I don’t think there’s any mystery to it; you have make yourself work because sometimes there isn’t time to wait for inspiration. I’m not too strict about it, though. Sometimes it just isn’t possible to work everyday, but I just try to stay vigilant about how I’m us-ing my time.

What was your after school routine like in high school?

I haven’t thought about that in a long time. My af-ter-school routine was pretty boring: I usually went home and watched the Golden Girls and ate cheesecake with them. I was pretty shy in high school. I do remem-ber pretty vividly looking at the sidewalk a lot and the little bugs and details on the ground.

If you weren’t an artist, what would you want to be?

If I wasn’t an artist, I don’t really know what I would do. Maybe I’d be one of those people who comes up with the color names for house paint or nail polish.

What are your most frequented online sites?

I have terrible A.D.D., so it can be hard for me to focus. Often, I’m on social media websites where there are tons of pictures updated constantly. When I can find enough energy to muster some focus, I will read some articles on Forward Retreat, Actual Colors May Vary, Ain’t Bad Mag, and Feature Shoot

Do you have any advice for other artists?

My advice is what my dad always told me growing up: “Throw enough stuff on the wall and something will stick.” So, be persistent.

And you can’t do it alone. You have to reach out to your peers. Surround yourself with people that inspire you, even if those people live on the opposite side of the world.

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Ally

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Angie Couple

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Ethan

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Joel

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Grant

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Jamie

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Calvin Ross Carl

What is your day job? How do you balance it with your studio time?

I’ve worked in design firms since I was a teenager doing different branding and web design projects, so finding the proper balance between work and studio has been nearly impossible. However, I’ve learned to think of my studio practice as a second job with just as much im-portance as my day job. Also, remembering that no one cares about an artist who doesn’t make art instills me with enough guilt to always get me into the studio.

What was your after-school routine like in high school?

Growing up in a household of musicians meant that I spent most of my free time playing guitar in our house and with various rock bands. I also painted quite a bit, and like most high schoolers, showed way too much in-terest in Salvador Dalí and other Surrealists. Otherwise, I did everything you’re supposed to do as a teenager.


Regardless of what I was doing, I’d likely be making some-thing with my hands. My father is an outstanding carpen-ter, so I’ve always had an appreciation for working with wood, which has shown up in my artwork occasionally. There’s something magical about seeing a well-crafted piece of furniture or a well-built home.


Sadly, I’m sure the site open most often in my brows-er is Facebook. Besides that, some of the regulars are: Tumblr, Digg, NY Times, Contemporary Art Daily, Bad at Sports, Cargo Collective, Hyperallergic, Daring Fireball, SiteInspire, and a ridiculous amount of RSS feeds in Digg Reader.


I’ll give the very advice I wish I would follow through with: Write about your work and the work of others more often.

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Broncos Versus Bears

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Fleet Week Boys

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Club 21 Matchbook

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This Is Their Last Day

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Red Fanged Maw

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Steven Gee


Currently, hopefully for not too long, I’m working in a coffee shop. Over this summer, between finishing my BA and starting my MA in September, I’m taking a break from making artwork. However, while working on my BA, I worked on Saturdays and a couple of weekday evening shifts. I’m sure once I’ve completed my MA, the difficul-ties of balancing a probable full-time job with studio time will be an immense challenge.


I don’t think I had a strict after-school routine. Although, I remember doing my art homework or various self-pro-posed projects every evening. I prioritized my art home-work over every other subject. I was very positive and stubborn about what I wanted to study in higher educa-tion and beyond.


From a young age, I’ve had a strong love for animals and wanted to be a veterinarian. I undertook a week of work experience in secondary school at the local veter-inary - a week that began with excitement and jubilation and unfortunately turned traumatic through a series of eye-openers. A couple of examples being: witnessing a dog’s balls being sliced open and watching a healthy cat being put down, purely because the owner couldn’t look after the cat anymore. I realize now these situations are just what happens in life. Perhaps, I was too young at the time, with rose-tinted glasses.


Shamefully, I think it’s the NME, but the reasoning is wholly to just keep up with the news in the music indus-try. Other than that, it’s various gallery websites, look-ing at current and upcoming shows. I also often visit my peers’ websites, and distant contemporaries’, as I find it refreshing and engaging to see what’s developing and coming to the forefront in the art world.


I don’t feel that I’m at the age or maturity yet in profes-sional terms to give first-hand advice. However, I can pass on certain points people have made to me. The one that sticks out mostly to me is that to become a “successful” artist you have to be stubborn in terms of what you want to do as a professional; many people or distractions in life will try to divert you down a “safer” professional route. But as long as you are doing what you want to do, and are happy in said profession, then you will be successful in one form or another.

And don’t make work you think people want to see. Make work you want to see.

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Degree Show Installation

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Bouncers

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Bouncer Who Is Compensating

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Curly Wurly

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Top Heavy(Stretch Armstrong)

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Painters Trough

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Justyn Hegreberg


I work at a grocery store. Four days on and three days off with a set schedule of morning shifts. My studio work is usually experimental and full of uncertainty. This freedom can be nice, but it can also cause my mind to spin out. My job is a healthy counterpoint - steady known patterns and physical engagement provide a natural balance. What I find most difficult is divvying up time between the studio and other art activities. Applying, submitting, looking, documenting and writing are the things that can eat up studio time.


I would walk home from the bus and close myself up in my room. There, I read for hours: Vladimir Nabokov, Milton Erickson, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Karen Horney, Gerard Manely Hopkins, and others. I wrote nearly every-day, alternating between imitations of E. E. Cummings, Radiohead lyrics, and my own particular brand of im-penetrable verbiage. I was also very interested in fashion design, so I would buy magazines and remove the pages. My walls were covered with groupings of designers and shows that I rotated regularly.

In the evenings before going to bed, I would watch late night television with my dad. One of my teachers graded papers based solely on whether or not the empty spaces on the worksheets were filled, so I would fill those spaces with things from the shows that I was watching. The most memorable one being a David Letterman bit called “All Things Yellow.”


A writer. Though I stopped writing for some years, I’ve picked it up again. I enjoy painting, but the experience of painting and writing are very different. I feel as though painting is a narrowing from the mind filled with many options to a very specific, small fixed point outside of the mind. Where as language starts from a very fixed and small set of parameters outside of the mind to an expan-sive feeling/environment that the mind inhabits.

There was a time when I did not title paintings. I did not want to append something to a piece that might distract from the visual effect of it. After a while, I looked at ti-tling my work as using language in a way that I’d always enjoyed before but found difficult to implement. As I mentioned above, I really like dense language, but this becomes problematic. Try using the term “arsenic spe-ciation” in a poem!


I would probably have to go with Tumblr and Facebook. These are the places where I see the most work and talk with people online. Computer screens make my eyes dry up into little balls of hate and give me a headache. More recently this has become too problematic to ignore. So, I also enjoy listening to podcasts like Modern Art Notes, which incidentally is also a Tumblr. . .


Help control the pet population. Have your pet spayed or neutered.

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Goal Refraction

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Pink and Green with Masking Tape 5 Pink and Green with Masking Tape 4

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Dropstone

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Gonadotropin Agonist

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Size Grouping

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Danielle Levine


For the past year I’ve lived in New York and hadn’t had a typical “9-5”. Instead – I’ll pick up a few part time jobs and snatch those odd jobs inbetween. Some months I’ll be working a lot and others I’m broke but painting. It’s not the most stable way of living but studio always feels like a privilege.

What was your after school routine like in high school?

In high school there was Chicken Grill. Chicken Grill is a walk in, order at the counter, grab and go —or stay— kinda place. They have a variety of dishes that deviate from their original “Natural Chop” which is composed of three main ingredients.

1. Grilled Chicken 2. Yellow Rice 3. Mustardn’Curry Sauce

I went to high school in downtown Miami and there was a Chicken Grill just two blocks away from our building. It closed 15 minutes after we were let out and every-day I’d rush to that place. Get the last chicken on the grill – the one with all the extra grease and skin and pro-ceed to smother it with double portions of that magical Cadmium - Naples yellow Curry sauce. That was my din-ner and after school routine for four years.


This Question. I don’t know.

When I was a kid I wanted to be an inventor/

architectural planner. Not sure what that meant but I had a whole theory, it involved magnets. The idea was simple. Put them on everything; prevent collision.

Cars, houses, buildings, people, ETC.

In my world we would all live in this liminal magnet space where nothing actually touched. Just a ++/-- kind of world.

I was ready to take it to the bank and spent hours in the shed making functionalist looking abstract shapes and gluing magnets on them so they would almost, but never, “crash”.

I suppose that’s not too far off from what I did with the work you see here. Playing in studio with hammers and bricks, thinking about magnets.


I use the Internet to watch movies and check my email.


Fuck if I know. I’m 23. But I do believe this; never stop making. And when I say, “making”, that can be different for everyone; just do it. Even if you don’t have the “time, money, or space” (I hear those words a lot with recent grads) to do the exact thing that’s been picking at your brain – work around it. Seduce it. Flex the muscle and be ready for the moment you can make the work.

Also, don’t be afraid to deviate and make a lot of “bad” or “unrelated” work to get to the good stuff. If you have the impulse to do something, never suppress it. That feeling is rare and besides, you might find yourself closer to the original plan then you imagined.

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Hit and Miss

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XY Brick

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Sticks and Stones

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Final Sunset 1

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Final Sunset 2

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Matthew Yaeger


I serve tables at a restaurant two blocks away from my studio. It gives me a lot of freedom in regards to when and how much I want to work. Most days I can head to the studio in the morning and stay through the after-noon, and with a quick change, I can go right in to work for the night.


A group of us would usually pile into a car and go skate-boarding in the summer, snowboarding in the winter.


I’ve always had a magnetic attraction toward fishing, so I think I’d be a fishing guide. The last few years, I’ve been really into fly fishing for smallmouth bass.


Facebook is an easy go-to, and an easy way to end up on other websites.


Push yourself to do things you’re not sure about. I think our instincts come out of reoccurring thought or expe-rience that we’re not consciously aware of. I try to trust moments where I venture into the unknown.

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A Levitation

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A Rock is a Rock Until Turned Over

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Compactor: As Seen on TV

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A Quick Fix for Comfortable Living

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Repeated

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Denia Kazakou


I’ll try to keep this answer simple. In my final year of studying Fine Art, I opened my own art-focused public relations company, RedD PR. We focus on gaining pub-licity and organizing events for individuals and organi-zations in the creative industry. It’s a company based in London, but we’re already trading on an international level with extremely successful artists, photographers, and designers. Seeing as though I also work part time in Harrods on the weekends, I generally try and juggle quite a few things simultaneously, so I make my art work when-ever and wherever I can.


Luckily, I went to high school in Crete. In the summer, we used to just go to the beach after school and just relax. Chania has a very small community and everyone trusts and knows each other. We all had a lot of freedom when it came to “curfews” and things like that. We were all rebels in school, though. We used to protest and argue about everything.


I always wanted to either be an artist or work in a bio-medical field. I actually studied Biomed for several years before switching to Fine Art. I was in my final year of Medical Microbiology and Forensics before I accepted that the labs were simply not for me. I still love watching surgeries, though.


I’m always on Facebook and Instagram. I actually use social media a lot in my work and have been getting new clients and interest from it, mainly because I keep people informed about what I’m doing either with my artwork or my PR company. I find people like to see the process of making things as well as the final result - the work that goes into certain events and exhibitions is al-ways surprising to some.


I’d say always keep an open mind and always remember to breathe. The art world is very competitive, so try to go to as many events as possible and never be afraid to ask genuine questions. You never know when you’ll meet the right people who can really help you in your career so don’t give up, sooner or later we all find our niche.

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Waste

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Waste

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Residue

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Frustration

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Frustration

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Monique Atherton

TM Would you like to introduce yourself?

MA Hi! I’m Monique and I’m a thirty-something artist living and working in Brooklyn. I grew up all over the place and the closest thing I have to a home-town (where I spent most of my teenage years) is Bangkok, Thailand. I’m really interested in creating photographs that investigate the worlds we create for ourselves, as well as our relationship to the peo-ple and spaces in those worlds.

TM What’s your day job? How do you balance it with your studio time?

MA I’m lucky for the moment, as I have the chance to work as a full-time artist. It really makes all the dif-ference, so I’m trying to take advantage of it while I can (it won’t last forever!). Of course, this hasn’t always been the case. Until May of this year, I was an Executive Assistant for about three years at a large Fortune 100 company. It was great. I simply sched-uled my studio time around that, and was able to get a ton of work done during the weekends, vacation, and the evenings. I was also very lucky to be work-ing with colleagues and bosses who were super into what I was doing, so it worked out great.

TM What microcosmic state are you depicting with your series “Sometimes We Go Out” and “Tacoma”?

MA Those two bodies of work are very related – they are about the world that we create with the per-son we are romantically involved with. When you are with someone, you develop your own primal

language and behaviors that are unique to that rela-tionship – you exist in your own little microcosm.

TM Do you want your viewers to find these microcosms for themselves? What do you want your viewers to see?

MA I started becoming interested in portraying micro-cosms in my work about three years ago when I was introduced to Vipassana Meditation. For ten days, I went to a retreat at the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. During this time, I did not speak to or look at anyone. We had no phones, TVs, or radios. We weren’t allowed to read, write, or exercise. From 4 AM until 9 PM, all we did was our meditation prac-tice. It was during this retreat that I found a world within myself; it was a world within our larger reality. This experience made its way into my work, so I de-cided to explore the other microcosms that I create within myself and other people. I also became inter-ested in our relationship to the physical earth. That said, I want my viewers to be able to relate to the work and find similarities within their own lives.

TM What narrative are you trying to reveal in these series?

MA I wouldn’t say that I’m trying to reveal a particular narrative. The base of the work is that it depicts two people in a romantic relationship, but I like to leave it ambiguous.

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Sometimes We Go Out

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Sometimes We Go Out

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Untitled, From an ongoing series of homes after owners died

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The Excitement of Something New

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TM Many of your series seem to contain both naturally shot and staged photographs. Do you prefer one method to the other?

MA I like both, but I like to incorporate staged work into the series because it adds another dimension to the work – one that moves away from just documenting the superficial. I like to dig up the underlying tensions that exist between people and places, and staging the work is a tool that helps me accomplish this.

TM Although none of your photographs exhibit you, do you believe your work is inherently a self-portrait?

MA Actually, the foundation of my work is self-portrai-ture. I am the central figure to most of the work and up until recently, I heavily incorporated my physical image into the work. I guess in “The Excitement of Something New,” I appear only once. That’s because I’ve been challenging myself to move away from bla-tant narrative/documentary style photography and push myself to create compelling series with minimal human forms.

TM What roles do nature and animals play in your work?

MA For me, nature has turned out to be a recurring theme in my work. It probably has something to do with the fact that, when I was seventeen, I was moved from a posh expat life in downtown Bangkok to a double-wide trailer in Deer Park, WA (pop. 2,000 at the time). I think this traumatic relationship to rural America has somehow embedded itself into my sub-conscious and is forcing its way out through my work. Animals have a strong thread in my work, not only

because I love them and am around them a lot, but also because we sometimes forget that at the core, we, too, are animals. We have primal tendencies that we often overlook. The big dog in my photographs is a metaphor for that.

TM You photograph a lot of empty spaces. There’s something to be said about empty spaces – perhaps about the absence or remnants of people, or observing the state in which people leave their spaces. What are you trying to say in these photographs?

MA When I photograph empty spaces, I search for a par-ticular feeling of nostalgia and mystery. I’ve moved around the world since I was six months old. I’ve moved in and out of homes, entering empty ones and leaving them empty. I always wonder about who was there before and after me; I am fascinated by sharing such intimate spaces with someone, even though you never meet in person.

Speaking of abandoned spaces, for years I’ve been working on a series of photographs of homes taken shortly after their owners died. For me, abandoned spaces present both loss and opportunity. I don’t have the work online, but I’ve included one of the im-ages here for the interview.

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Sometimes We Go Out

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TM Some of your photographs are blurry, show movement, or contain dust. What’s your intention behind these elements?

MA Since photographs are just fractions of seconds, I use blurs to add a little extra time to the image. I also feel like motion blurs help to create a dreamlike and/or intoxicated feeling for the viewer – there is something very fun about that, feeling intoxicated just by looking at something. As for the dust, I like it too – it adds character.

TM To me, your series “Holding Pattern” captures the minute details and monotony of a 9-5. What are you trying to convey in these photographs?

MA I was working at a company and our division was being sold off. I had known for months that I was going to be let go, but I chose to stay on. It was a surreal experience, and I decided to do a series about it. While this was my original intent, I think that the monotony of a 9 to 5 did end up coming through...because let’s face it: office jobs are pretty monotonous.

TM How do you develop an idea for a series?

MA It depends, but I generally shoot and then edit down. I know kind of what I want to do, but I don’t know the details or have a definitive artist state-ment. I shoot for a feeling, and after several thou-sand photographs, I have an intense editing process where I lock myself in a room and don’t talk to any-one for a few weeks, or months, until I get a story and solid understanding about the work.

TM If you weren’t an artist, what would you want to be?

MA I’m what I want to be! I only started taking art/pho-tography seriously about six years ago. Prior to that I worked in a retail brokerage firm for about four years; got a degree in International Relations and worked in international trade policy for about five years. While they were both interesting fields, they were unfulfilling. I was super depressed and always searching for something else. After an epiphany in 2007, I realized that I’m only in this life for a limited time, and I was tired of spending it depressed and working for someone else’s agenda. A year later I was enrolled at the San Francisco Art Institute and haven’t looked back! Someone once asked me how I knew if photography was what I wanted to be doing since I had done so many other things. Well, when you sacrifice everything you have for your practice, you kind of know that’s where you want to be. In the five years that I have pursued art as a career, I have not once regretted the decision.

TM Do you dabble in any other art forms?

MA Yes, I like to paint, draw and do silkscreens, but I don’t show them very often. I look at them as my hobbies.

TM Which do you prefer – analogue or digital?

MA Digital. Because I love the instant gratification and the ability to be completely self-sufficient with the processing.

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Tacoma

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Sometimes We Go Out

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TM What was your after-school routine in high school?

MA I was involved in a lot of extracurricular activities (drama, art, choir, yearbook, etc.), but then I’d come home and spend a lot of time alone. I would just qui-etly sit and draw, read, or think.

TM What are your most frequented online sites?

MA YouTube, where I like to look at stupid/weird/fun-ny videos to distract myself from what I’m sup-posed to be doing. I also check out art sites such as ArtFile Magazine, Don/Dean, Dead Porcupine, Tiny Vices, HyperAllergic, Featureshoot, Lenscratch, and ArtForum, to name a few.

TM Do you have any advice for other artists?

MA Keep doing it, even if you don’t feel like it or even if it’s not fun. You’ll never regret making work, even if it isn’t your best. Keeping at it during the tough times is what distinguishes a practice from a hobby.

TM Ask yourself a question and answer it.

MA What do you hope to accomplish in the next year?

I’m developing a new series of work involving strang-ers on the outskirts of town, which I hope to release by this time next year.

august/issue 12

Documents

work im

studio time

isnt time

personal work

free time

long time

school routine

high school