Episode 2: Reviving Ambitions
Back to the Future, Think Tank Gallery
March 11, 2011
Can you tell us something about the gallery space?
McGuffin: This space is called Think Tank Gallery. It’s a space that I live in. I live with a group of people who are interested in a different realm of art than I would say we’re interested in, but they didn’t have anything booked for the next couple months. So we jumped in, and I asked if I could have the space for this period of time and curate this show before they get going on with what they wanted to do. I don’t know so much if there is a mission to the gallery space in general. It’s sort of a jumping off point for getting in and curating other spaces. This show, in particular, we’re not stating as a gallery show. We’re more interested in it being a studio show. This is my studio. This is where I produce work. It’s a pretty big space. Prior to doing the show, me and Tomas were really interested in the fact that we were both painting and still painting, and that there weren’t that many people painting after college.
Seidita: Or even in school for that matter.
McGuffin: Anyways, one day we’re sitting around and we decided we wanted to have a show in my studio. So we cleaned it up and made it look like a gallery for a couple weeks, and here we are.
Can you elaborate more on what led to putting on this show?
Seidita: I think that, as Ryan just said, we were both very much interested in pressing painting specifically outside of school and presenting it as a viable, critical medium. I had started painting again after school, and Ryan had been painting all throughout Cal Arts. It was just sort of a product of us both saying “I’m really interested in painting. I am painting. Who else is painting? What is going on there? There isn’t a lot of this going on in L.A.” It seemed that this was the right moment to begin exploring painting as a viable, critical medium, and from there, Ryan sort of suggested that let’s do this show. Ryan pitched “Hey, I want to do this show.” Then we started investigating what would go into that. I was interested in helping make that happen. I talked to Abel, one of the artists in the show. I think he was the first person who wound up getting involved, and from there, it just kind of just took off. It was very much a matter of “shooting the shit.” We were just kind of throwing out ideas and talking about things that we were mutually interested in and interested in independently of each other. The ball just got rolling with Abel, and then we started sending out emails and talking to different people. Amy from Las Cienegas Projects gave us some emails, and we wound up with some contacts that way. We went to some schools and just sort of tried to kick out as many feelers as we could, and the end result was this show. It started very much as a “Let’s do this thing. We can do this,” and then it turned into a relatively serious, pretty much full-time job for about a month.
McGuffin: It turned into a thing that we both have decided to do from this point on: curate and continue making art.
Seidita: Very much so.
What led to deciding up the showcasing artists and/or the works?
Seidita: It was a combination of things. There were certain people that we knew already: Antone and Abel we already knew.
McGuffin: It was kind of difficult. There aren’t that many painters in L.A. who are post-school, really practicing as artists that are painters, or producing painting, for that matter. It was really like sending out emails, like Tomas said, getting responses, and going to quite a few studios and talking with artists. If they didn’t have anything interesting to say or we weren’t visually stimulated by the work enough to create a dialogue for it, it was “Thanks for showing us your work” and on to the next person. We were lucky enough to find a group of people we were really excited about in talking about their work and talking to them about it.
Seidita: To a certain degree, it was definitely luck. John is sort of the best example in that in a way because both, Theodora and Beatris, we had gotten their emails from a third party, and we very much pursued them. John just fell out of the sky into our laps. We had sent an email broadly to a bunch of different schools, and the only reply that we got was through someone at UCLA and it was four or five people removed, and John was replying. He was very enthusiastic from the get-go.
McGuffin: That was the moment that we knew we were doing this show. It was totally real, and it became studio visits almost everyday. It turned into this constant thing that costumed everything. Working on this everyday had to happen.
Seidita: There was an element of it that was premeditated, very much about people that we knew and trying to present things that we are familiar with, and very much another part about serendipity and luck.
How many studio visits did you make? How many artists did you look at?
Seidita: Five or six people.
McGuffin: We did more than that. There were a few that we didn’t like. I say we did about eight studio visits before we found the people that were right for the show. We weren’t necessarily being picky so much, we just wanted to like the work, and we wanted to like what the artists had to say about the work. The whole point of the show is to jump off into this project of really creating a dialogue between the artist, the art, and the what each is saying.
Seidita: I think that what you mentioned about what the artist had to stay, that was maybe the most critical thing when it came down to it. There were a couple people that we met with who had interesting work, but the second they tried to talk about it, they either couldn’t really talk about it, didn’t really know what they were doing, clearly were just flying by the seed of their pants, but were really making decisions on what they thought might be right as opposed to what they genially thought was right. They were not necessarily that invested in the decisions that they were making. They were sort of just doing what seemed appropriate, which was something we were not interested in. We wanted people who were really determined, specific, and studied in terms of what they were presenting. We were looking for artists who could talk about their work in a really solid and straight-forward way.
McGuffin: That’s when people ended up being good painters. Those people who could talk about their work in that way, who put the investment and time into making their work, they had a certain quality that was also something we were looking for. Those things went hand-in-hand.
Why is the show called Back to the Future? What links everything together?
Seidita: We’d kicked around a few different titles. One was “Future Painting.” There were a couple different ones that had “future” in them too.
McGuffin: We’re really interested in it being this moment in time in painting in which painting states itself as something that is going to exist in a very powerful sense.
Seidita: It’s an arrogant thing to say, but I think it was very much a “painting is the future, let’s get back to that.” In a sentence, that’s what it came down to.
McGuffin: As a painter, you’re totally emersed in this historical reference. There’s no getting away from it, and it’s something you have to be really aware of. There’s a correlation between the past and future, and doing this thing in that moment while knowing what this could potentially lead to and knowing its history, that leads to wondering what to do with that.
Seidita: I think that’s often a big criticism of painting: you have to take in all this history, which some people see as problematic, and I think it comes down to a measure of laziness. They don’t want to cope or deal with all this history. They think it’s too hard. I think what the painter does is … what this comes down to is living up to an expectation. I think that’s what other people fear. I’m not afraid to live up to it, and I’m also not afraid to fail. If I fail, I’ll just get up tomorrow and fail again, and fail better, and that’s fine.
From a curator’s perspective, what do you look for? In other words, how do you empress a curator?
Seidita: For us, it’s pretty straight-forward. You need to be able to talk about your work in an intelligent and educated way, and I don’t mean academic at all. I don’t think either of us are particularly academic when it comes to talking about our work. I tend to think of us both as pretty straight-forward. We’re not speaking necessarily in lamens terms exclusively, but it’s not a conversation in which we are both constantly referencing other people, whether its writers or painters. I mean, yes, there’s a little bit of that, but we definitely blend in part of our dialogue, and our conversations are also very much based on what we think. One of the biggest thing is having your own ideas about something.
McGuffin: I don’t think we really care so much about having this totally academic dialogue, although we are interested in producing that, as sort of this post-thing, but when looking for artists, I really want someone who cares about their work and isn’t afraid about it. I’m interested in people who are being total badasses but without being reckless, who are also being very conscious about what they’re doing.
From a curator’s perspective, what advice could you give to artists who are tying to apply to an exhibition or submitting proposal?
Seidita: We’re maybe not the best people to ask that simply because this is our first major, curatorial project.
McGuffin: I think, in someone submitting a proposal for a show, they need to submit a certain question, one that they care about and is relevant to the work they’re making. It shouldn’t be an attempt to be something. If you have the idea, and it’s a really good idea, go for it.
Seidita: Don’t try to impress us by telling us what we want to hear. If you’re true to yourself and if you’re true to what you’re interested in, chances are very good that other people are going to be invested in that and interested in seeing that. And if you can speak about your work and ideas intelligibly, then you are on the right path.
Emerge Through Art 