Curatorial Interview: Ryan McGuffin and Tomas Mickiewicz Seidita

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.

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.