Artist Interview: Ryan McGuffin

Episode 2: Reviving Ambitions
Back to the Future, Think Tank Gallery
March 11, 2011

Please tell us a little bit about yourself.

My name is Ryan McGuffin. I’m a painter. I studied art and got my Bachelors from California Institute of the Arts. I’ve been painting and making art since I could walk, as far back as I can remember.

Can you tell us about the exhibition, and how your work fits in?

The show Back to the Future is generally just a group show of painters who are invested in painting as a practice. It’s also a way to create a new dialogue amongst young, contemporary painters. Personally, I’m totally invested in painting. Most of the work I make that I end up showing ends up being painting. There’s not a general theme to the show. My work deals with subjects of nostalgia and the dishonesty and disillusions within the act of remembrance and moments of remembrance.

How did you get to where you are now in terms of your art practice?

I actually decided not to go to school, and my parents applied to school for me. I moved to Oakland, and they called me and told me they got me into Otis, which was the first school I went to. They got me quite a bit of funding, and they told me “It’s paid for. You have to go.” They sort of bribed me into moving back to L.A. It’s sort of a moment in which I almost abandoned art but got forced back into it, which I’m so grateful for. I ended up in the painting program there, but it wasn’t quite what I needed. It wasn’t really that progressive in my opinion. So I applied and went to Cal Arts where painting is pretty looked down on. I didn’t care. Fuck it. I told myself I’m going to be a painter. It’s what I love, and I’ve been doing it ever since.

What are your sources of inspiration?

I pool a lot from my own photographs of my past and reflect on them. I distort them in a way in which they become ambiguous, and the narrative is stripped from them. They become more about this feeling that the viewer can project their own meaning onto. The most recent painting I did is of Santa Clause shoot-gunning a beer, and Santa Clause is totally out of focus, and the beer is in focus. I make the images I want to paint: I decide what I want to paint; I stage the photo; Take the photo; Paint it. Opposed to dealing with a moment in time, I was dealing with the idea of a moment in time with that photo. The other painting is this distorted image of a past moment. I pool a lot from personal experience, but I also do series of works that deal with found photos that sort of have this feeling that I’m interested in and the moment that I’m looking for.

What advice could you give to other young artists?

Say “fuck it” everyday, honestly. If there’s something that’s keeping you from doing what you want to do, stop doing that and figure out a way to make it work without that thing, and do what you want to do. Don’t stop. Make something everyday.

Artist Interview: Tomas Mickiewicz Seidita

Episode 2: Reviving Ambitions
Back to the Future, Think Tank Gallery
March 11, 2011

Please give us a little background about yourself.

My name is Tomas Vincent Mickiewicz Seidita. I’m from the bay area originally. I grew up on the Peninsula south of the city. I did a year at the San Francisco Art Institute, and then I transferred to Cal Arts, which is where I completed my BFA. I graduated last spring, 2010.

Could you tell us something about the exhibition and how your work fits in?

Overall, the concept behind the show is to really assert painting as a viable, critical medium and to present painters who were really aggressively painting as a practice. The way that my work fits in to that is… Actually, first let me say that I stopped painting for a little while when I was at Cal Arts, particularly in my last year. I’ve always done politically work, but I found that painting became very difficult for handling political work, and so I stopped painting as much. Then I had this little spark after the Arizona incident. One of the persons that I painted is Jared Loughner, who is the Arizona shooter, and that became the genies for the following portraits. I built from there. The other two are Byron Williams, this guy who tried to shot up a progressive organization called The Tides Foundation, and Andrew Joseph Stack, who flew a plane into an IRS building last year. Those paintings are about attacking a fairly complex political issue in a moderately complex way. I think a lot of political art tends to present an answer. This becomes a common problem with agitprop art. You’re being told what to think. You’re being told what a position is and what your position should be, which I think turns a lot of people off. I think people don’t like political art as it is because a lot of people aren’t politically engaged, and they don’t like having that reflected. Secondly, they really don’t like being told what they should be thinking. So with these paintings, what I wanted to do was attack this political issue in a complex way in the sense that, instead of telling people what to think, instead of saying Jared Loughner did this bad thing, and Andrew Joseph Stack did this bad thing, and Byron Williams did this bad thing, I just wanted to just present the images that were widely circulated after each of those incidents, each of their crimes. I think the media presented a very, one-sided simplistic vision of what those people were, and both the Left and the Right immediately stopped and distanced themselves from those individuals, and at the same time, they voiced the culpability for the act on the opposition. The Right said “Oh these people are… This is all… It’s because of Obama,” and the Left said “Oh this is because of violent political rhetoric.” Maybe there’s some truth in both, and I sort of wanted these piece to raise questions that might get to those issues: to present these people as a reflection. I think that what they really represent is… this is something Americans really are uncomfortable with, they represent, both the highest aspirations of an American political consciousness. They represent this political ideal in an attempt to carry out the vision of the founding fathers, this urge to create incredible change in the passing of an instant, like a revolutionary moment. They sort of represent that, and at the same time, they represent our worst failings. They’re this representation both, of our better and lesser angels. At the same time they represent this ideal, they also represent the every individual’s ability and capacity to commit horrible, horrifying deeds in the name of their country and in the service of their country. I wanted to get into that. I think that what the paintings ended up becoming is this reflection of that, this moment of empathy that we don’t want to have. We don’t want to empathize with these people because it humanizes them and forces us to see those dualities within the American political consciousness.

In a nut shell, how would you define your art practice? What specific themes or issues do you deal with?

I’m very much interested in a exploration of that which defines the American as sort of an overarching ideal. I’m really interested in investigating American politics, an American political and social consciousness. I’ve tried to work with everything, such as the American healthcare system. During the 2008 election, I did a bunch of work that was relevant to that. My whole thesis show at Cal Arts was about a violence in American political rhetoric. It was very much a precursor to the work that is present in this show. When it comes down to it, that’s what it is. My work is all about how Americans define themselves, particularly in the 21st century. Especially since George Bush was elected, I think Americans are always presented to themselves as being very polarized and very different from each other. The truth is we’re actually pretty similar by and large. We all pretty much want the same things. Its just that, I think that, there are people who have a lot of power and a lot of money who don’t want the general populace to realize that they have a lot more in common than they have differences. At the end of the day, this country is very much a bottom-up system. If people remembered that and really took control of that system, it would cause a lot of problems to a lot of people with a lot of money and a lot of power. I think that my work is all about those hypocrisies and the problems that they cause.

What are your sources of inspiration?

A vast majority of my work comes from news media. I’m very much someone who follows the news on a fairly regular basis and tries to stay abreast of what’s happening, particularly domestically but also internationally. I spend a lot of time reading history books. I think that’s a lot of what it comes down to, just the media.

What advice could you give to young artists still in school?

I’m a young artist, so I could use plenty of advice myself, but for people who are still in school, I think that the important thing is when you get out, don’t stop working. I mean, you need to be aware that there’s a break period. I stopped working for a while. But the most important thing to do when you get out of school is to work. It doesn’t really matter if you finish things. It doesn’t matter if every idea is genius. You’re not in “crit.” You don’t have to present anymore. You don’t have to show off. It’s just important that you start establishing a really consistent work ethic, and that will go farther to getting you somewhere than anything else because the more you work, the better your ideas will be, the more stuff you’ll put out, and the more opportunity you’ll begin to create for yourself.