Issue 65 is off to the printer, and we will reveal our cover soon! As part of our countdown to the new issue, art editor Leslie Vega has interviewed our cover artist, Andy Kehoe. Kehoe creates evocative work in both the traditional and digital realms. With nods to mythopoetic fantasy and folklore, his paintings feature figures so small that you may not notice them ensconced in trees and moonlight. These animal-human hybrids beckon us into Dante’s dark forest or a Grimm’s fairytale, and we really wouldn’t mind joining them.
Leslie Vega: Tell me a bit about your process. Does it differ between your paintings and your digital works? They look remarkably similar.
Andy Kehoe: The process with my traditional and digital paintings is actually pretty similar in a lot of ways, especially in the beginning stages. With both mediums, I have pieces that are very planned out, which will involve detailed sketches and some black-and-white studies. Then I have paintings that are more loose and improvisational. I’ll just start throwing paint and textures down —whether they be oil paints or pixels— and see where it takes me. I also tend to work in layers from back to front, which I do with both mediums.
The major difference is the crazy flexibility of digital work. I can move and rescale different components or change the entire color palette on the fly. There is so much freedom to experiment, readjust, and improvise. [I] love that aspect of working in digital.
Oh, and I can also finish a digital painting in days to weeks, instead of months with my traditional work. With digital, I can get my ideas down and out there into the world rather quickly, which is awesome. With traditional painting, the process is much more prolonged so my initial concept often evolves and shifts with what has inspired me and affected my life along the way. That brings a different quality to the work, which I very much love and appreciate.
LV: Your work is influenced by fantasy and sci-fi art, which has been heavily shaped by epic poetry, myth, folk tales, 19th– and 20th-century fantasy, and current speculative fiction. What are your go-to works of poetry or literature to draw upon for inspiration?
AK: Folklore and fairy tales really shaped my young, imaginative mind when I was growing up. There’s a certain indescribable feeling that those stories gave me, which was amplified by the fact that I was young, and all of life was a mystery. Much of my work is trying to tap back into that specific feeling and to bring some mystery back into people’s lives. It’s a tough thing to do these days, with all the answers to the universe at our finger tips—living a constant existence peeking behind the curtain. I feel like this breeds a real desire for worlds that encompass mystery and diverge from the mundane, such as the realms of fantasy and sci-fi.
Currently, I listen to a lot of audio books as I work, with the vast majority being in the fantasy genre. The biggest draw to fantasy writing for me is the world building. Creating a believable world where unbelievable things happen is some tricky business and also a such a tantalizing prospect. Authors like Brandon Sanderson, Scott Lynch, and Joe Abercrombie excel at creating very rich, unique, detailed worlds that you can lose yourself in. This kind of imaginative thinking really fuels my creative mind while working.
LV: And who are your favorite illustrators?
AK: Some contemporary artists I love are Aron Wiesenfeld, Kilian Eng, Boris Pelcer, and James Jean. I’m also inspired by legendary fantasy artists like Michael Whelan and Paul Lehr, and painters like 19th Century Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich.
LV: Working both in traditional painting as well as digital, what do you think about AI generated art applications such as DALL.E 2?
AK: The debate on AI art is a tricky, layered one. Kind of a mess right now. A real mixed bag scenario. On one hand, it’s very cool technology that makes some truly amazing imagery. It’s also really fun to see what crazy things you can come up with and get immediate results.
On the other hand, it’s creating this imagery by training its AI through the use of copyrighted imagery without artists’ consent. That’s a big negative and a big problem. I’ve rarely seen any technology go so quickly from “Wow this is cool” to “This is a travesty. Burn it all down!” The vitriol for AI art in the community is intense because of this non-consensual image usage. An uproar I totally agree with.
We are definitely wading into unknown legal territory in which distinctive boundaries will (hopefully) have to be drawn. It feels like this technology is here to stay, so where those lines end up is anyone’s guess, but [it] will have ever-lasting ramifications for visual artists. I know music IP is protected very staunchly by the law, and the industry would not put up with this kind of unfettered usage one bit. I’m hoping visual art can be treated equally.
Personally, I have played around with Midjourney and I’ve used it as a tool to work through concepts and to get some fresh perspectives. But I’ve never used it to make completed art work and never would. Interestingly, I can just use my own name in the prompts to get a new concept inspired by my paintings… but that also means my copyrighted work is in the database without my consent. Since I’m the original artist, is it then OK to used unlicensed images of my own work to create something new? Like I said, it’s a mixed, convoluted bag.
LV: Do you have any projects in the works that you’d like to share?
AK: I have a Patreon page where I’ve been making a digital painting every month and posting it. That’s where I post most of my new work these days.
This year I have a couple [of] group shows, then next year I have a solo show at Outré Gallery in Melbourne, Australia. The best way to keep updated is to sign up for my newsletter, which can be found in the contact page on my website.
For the 63/64 issue, we spoke to members of Crab Devil, an art collective based in Tampa, FL. Art Editor Leslie Vega’s interview is reproduced here:
The Peninsularium is an immersive interactive art attraction that will undoubtedly draw the crowds. Crab Devil is adamant about bringing a sense of wonder and excitement to both locals and visitors when the Peninsularium finally opens its doors. In my discussion with two principal members of the Crab Devil collective, Janine Awai and Devon Brady, we talk about the importance of conveying a sense of place and the necessity of supporting and promoting area artists in the service of local enrichment. Our extensive focus on Tampa as a distinctive city is not surprising. Tampa Bay is experiencing massive economic and population growth, and keeping Tampa weird is a priority.
The Peninsularium is not just a tourist lure, a quirky roadside stop, or even a gallery of art; it’s a marker that Tampa is growing into its potential as a cultural destination. https://www.crabdevil.com
Skunk ape housed at The Peninsularium. Photo by Leslie Vega.
Leslie Vega: Let’s begin with the origins of Crab Devil and the collective. Are all the members from Tampa, and did the art collective sort of evolve in parallel with The Peninsularium project?
Devon Brady: Yes, all of the members are at least long-term Tampa residents. Twenty years or more. There are three Tampa natives. Myself, Tracy, and Gianna. Jan’s been here since college.
Janine Awai: And everybody else has been here since their college days. There’s nine of us total. We are all entrenched.
LV: I asked that because, at least among the people I know, so many of us are transplants, and it’s hard to get a sense of place. I feel like the theme of The Peninsularium is, of course, Tampa.
JA: It’s a little broader… it’s Florida—
DB: —But very Tampa centric, right. And, you know, when we talk to people about it, and talk to investors about it, we’re always pitching that idea in different ways. You know, there’s people that want to see Tampa recognized as a cultural destination, and there are people that want to see Tampa recognized for its food, its music. There’re other ways to approach it; some people have an inferiority complex that comes along with being from Tampa. It’s interesting to kind of play into that in a way to get people on board and to say, even if you’re not 100% interested in what it is specifically that we’re doing, what we’re trying to do here is raise the tide for all the boats so that if you have other projects that are poised to benefit off of an increased interest in Tampa as a cultural destination, that’s a reason for you to get involved with us too. To just kind of jumpstart everything that’s going on here.
LV: Yeah, the more the merrier, right.
JA: And I think that one of our objectives is to elevate all the things that people take for granted here in Tampa—they’re pretty awesome, pretty unique things. Really unique history. And also, there are a lot of reasons that people move here. There are things that are attractive about this area. Even if you just look at the flora, fauna, you know, those are things that we gloss over all the time, but it’s still Florida, it’s still a part of our everyday psyche.
LV: Yeah, so I kind of want to lean into the weird Florida aspects [of the Peninsularium], and in particular, Tampa, as opposed to St. Pete, because I think of them more as boroughs. But other people are like, “Oh, that’s a different city.” And of course, St. Pete has historically always had more of the art scene. I’m really interested and excited to see Tampa tap into all the beautiful weird stuff that’s here, and I just wanted to get your take and understand more about the uniqueness of what’s here.
DB: Well, first, I would say that the idea that St. Pete is more of an arts destination is to me, after forty-seven years here, that’s kind of a relatively new idea. When I was in high school, and even going through art school at USF (The University of South Florida), that wasn’t really a thing. St. Pete, in the last twenty years or so, has done a good job of branding itself that way and encouraging very visible things like murals, you know. St. Pete had a lot more murals than Tampa ever had or still does have, and to a lot of people’s minds that makes it a destination for the arts. I’m kind of like, famously cantankerous about murals, but that’s just my thing.
LV: [laughs] How come?
DB: Well, first of all, I love shitty old industrial buildings. And I like it when they’re shitty, old, and industrial. I don’t like it when somebody paints a big mural on the side of one of them…. It’s always kind of saying, like, don’t look at this thing. Imagine that it’s something else, you know. I’m always interested in architecture and spaces, and so the murals that I really dislike are murals that employ things like force perspective where they’re trying to create an illusion of depth on a flat surface. That was a beautiful, flat surface before somebody came and painted a horrible mural, you know. There’s a lot of bad murals out there.
[laughter]
JA: I’m not opposed to them. But there are so many badly rendered murals. When I think of murals, I think of WPA, right. Like Diego Rivera. Beautiful—
DB: —But also, when you look at the Diego Rivera murals in Rockefeller Center—those were prepared spaces to take murals, you know. They built these walls with these proscenium arches and prepared these flat spaces to accept a mural. They didn’t come and paint over a building with this image that’s drawing your attention away from the building.
JA: But for me, you can do that sort of thing on a building and have it work well.
LV: Have you guys been to Philadelphia? They have a whole funded Mural Arts Project and people take tours of the murals around the city: they have these in a lot of other cities too. And, I’m laughing because, yeah, there’s a lot of bad ones. But it’s also a big tourist draw.
DB and JA: Right. Right.
DB: But I think that it’s a good distinction between Tampa and St. Pete, because Tampa has always had an art scene, as has St. Pete. And St. Pete’s has always been a little different than Tampa’s. And they nurtured and grew what they had there. And that’s all great. But I’m more partial to what Tampa has and has always had because it’s a different scene. It’s more conceptually based. It’s grittier. It’s a little harder to digest. Yeah, a lot of that is because of the academic influence of USF, because USF is a very conceptually based art program. St. Pete has always had a strong emphasis on craft, which is great.
[This is to] draw a distinction between what you will see from us and what you see from Fairgrounds (an immersive art space in St. Pete) over there. Their work is more poppy with brighter colors, with cleaner lines that is in keeping with a more St. Pete aesthetic, you know, and if you look around here, it’s like, there’s no straight lines. It’s all organic. Things have moss growing on them, so it’s a different approach. Fairgrounds has been great with us—we talked openly from the beginning about making some differentiation between us and them. The ultimate goal is that you can buy a two-day ticket to visit both places. Having more of this sort of thing is just better.
JA: The moss growing on things reflects our approach to Florida because if you stand still too long, the moss is gonna grow on you. [laughs]
LV: Oh, yeah. It’s so much about decay, right?
JA: It’s about decay, it’s about swamps. It’s about this little atmosphere that we live in. And I think that instead of trying to ignore that and sweep it out of your house, you know, we’re letting it in, because that’s a part of what makes Florida Florida. It’s about the uncomfortable things.
LV: That’s what makes it way more interesting to me personally. I think you both articulated a lot of my thoughts that I’ve had about Tampa over the years. When we first moved here, we thought we should live in St. Pete; it’s so much nicer, you can walk down the main street. Tampa is more exciting because it’s growing. There’s an opportunity here to sculpt and shape your neighborhood. And it’s grittier, definitely.
DB: This is why I got into a project like this because I’ve always been a booster for this area. I have plenty of friends as artists who finished up at USF and moved to New York to pursue their career in New York, which anyone who was thinking logically about how to have a career as an artist would and should do, you know, go to the place where the thing is happening. If you’re an actor, you don’t stay in Branson, Missouri, you go to fucking LA and start trying to get jobs. And eventually you will, if you work hard enough, you will—that’s the way that it works. But what I always said to people was like, in Tampa, if you stay here, if something cool happens, either you did it yourself, or you know the person who did it—here’s only that many degrees of separation….Here we have to do it all ourselves and suffer all of the pains that go along with that, so it’s only for a certain type of person.
JA: For sure, it’s difficult, it has been difficult to convince the people that they want to see the show.
LV: It’s interesting to see the reality of how this stuff can come to be. Are you going to charge admission?
DB and JA: Yes. Yeah.
JA: We were going for the idea that The Peninsularium is a ticketed, admission-based attraction with art installations. People are going to go through, and at the end there will be some kind of identification so that they can know which artists were involved. Tempus Projects (a local non-profit art gallery) will be on site, and so hopefully they will also then be able to go to a more traditional art venue, and see some of those artists’ work in Tempus, and we can help push them towards maybe acquiring and collecting the art. Building a collector community, our community in Tampa, is important to elevate the whole art culture here. I mean, that’s what New York has.
LV: Sure. And there is money here, of course.
DB: Yeah, you have to be able to make a living as an artist in order for there to be a real art scene here. And that’s the nut that hasn’t yet been cracked. And you see all these efforts, which are great, you know—we need to have affordable housing for artists, and we need to have an arts district. All of that stuff is good. But nobody buys art from an artist—that’s the third leg of the stool that has to be there. And so, in order to make that happen, this is the project: you have to sell the validity of Tampa as a place to buy art from, and that its artists have their own perspective and viewpoint on their own terms.
JA: We’re viewing The Peninsularium as a bridge to that summit, a way to make art more accessible and more approachable to the general community.
DB: And that’s something that hasn’t really happened in these other places…. This is a pathway in for people to experience art in a way that they haven’t experienced it, and then walk out from this experience and go into a traditional gallery setting and see the name on the wall and go, oh, that person made the thing that I just saw in there…
JA: That’s really, really important.
DB: … and now I could take home a piece for not a whole lot of money, and then the wheels start turning about how this all works.
JA: We definitely want to promote the artists who are involved, all of them, so that they get something out of this and their names are definitely associated with their work. And that’s something that I think a lot of immersive art installation places have not done so well.
DB: Yeah, I don’t think it’s something that they do intentionally, but I think they struggle with how to highlight the individual artists and show whose work is whose without breaking the fourth wall of the experience.
LV: It becomes like an Epcot Center sort of thing, where people aren’t specifically thinking about who’s actually making the stuff. It’s just kind of turns into all one thing.
JA: Yeah. And that’s great, you know, for the whole experience. You don’t want to pull people out of it, but at some point in time you have to give the right attribution, make sure those people who are participating in this are getting something out of it. You can send visitors to these artists’ spaces and show them we have their work over here. Get to know these people. A lot of them are local artists. These are the artists in our community.
LV: People won’t have to pay to go to Tempus. That will still be a separate thing, right?
JA: Yes, Tempus is a non-profit. And so, they’re not a part of The Peninsularium.
LV: They will just be attached in the same space.
JA: Right, just like Deviant Libation brewery will be a separate entity: they are tenants.
DB: But the idea here was that we could create this kind of symbiosis. We [The Peninsularium] could hopefully attract a few 100,000 visitors a year, some percentage of which make their way through Tempus, which is a few 1,000 more people a year than they have typically seen, so we increase their exposure by a huge amount. And then in returning the favor, Tempus has already this established roster of artists and contacts and people that they work with and a respected name and a visiting artists residency program that’s been up and running for years.
JA: They are a traditional contemporary art gallery, yes.
DB: So that’ll help us to attract artists, larger names, and more mid-career artists. We’re still looking at a lot of local artists and non-established artists, but it also helps to have some of those bigger name people here, and Tempus has those contacts…. But now that we’re kind of working together, we can have somebody come down, do a project for Tempus, we can consult with them about building out a larger environment for Crab Devil, which might be, you know, a $15,000 or $20,000 or $25,000 commission for them. So now you’re talking about a real serious project that could be a person’s half of their year producing something like that. So, there’s a draw for them to come and work with Tempus and be able to work closely with us and see what we’re doing. And we can kind of tap into their network of contacts, bringing people here and then doing the same thing with the brewery (Deviant Libation). We bring people through there because they’re there already. They’ve got beer to be sold. People like to hang out and drink beer! It’s good for everybody.
JA: It gets their attention!
DB: And it helps with our customer retention.
LV: Bolstering each other up. That’s super exciting! That leads me to my question of what’s with the Bait Shop.
DB: Well, it came from a bunch of different directions. I’ve always had kind of an obsession with what are the last few vestiges of mom-and-pop businesses that have not been franchised and corporatized and sanitized. And when you think about it, there’s only like a few. There are barber shops, tattoo parlors, nail salons, and bait shops would be another one. There was never a Blockbuster Video of bait shops. They’re all their own weird little thing. And in Florida especially, we’re surrounded by water. So that’s just one of those things that, growing up in Florida as a kid, it was one of those environments that you’re going to where there’s little objects of fascination all around, like the rubber worms that smelled like that weird oil they put on them and they had sparkly glitter in them, you know, and lead weights, and all kinds of weird little hardware and stuff that you don’t see elsewhere, you know, so it was always kind of like a place of intrigue as a kid.
Tracy and Sarah came to us with that idea. We were kind of casting about for, like, what is the first experience that introduces you to this whole thing?
JA: Something very Florida. Something also kind of in keeping with this roadside attraction concept.
DB: Yeah, DIY, and that’s kind of the whole narrative that we talked about, making it known that these things are made by human hands. We call it the artifacts of artifice; we never cover over the mechanism.
What I like to see the most is young children, especially young girls experiencing art because I think they aren’t encouraged to investigate mechanical things. They walk up from a distance with a big smile on their face, and they’re like, look at this big crazy trippy thing, and they walk up underneath it, and they’re looking up at it and just enjoying it for the illusion that it is. And then a minute goes by, and you see them looking closer at it, and then making their way around to where the motor and the gears and everything are. And then you can see the wheels in their heads turning— “Oh, that spins that way, and it turns this gear, which spins in the opposite direction, and now these two shafts are moving in opposite directions, and they’re two oppositely oriented spirals, and they’re spiraling into each other, and that’s what creates the illusion.” And you see the moment when they figure it out. And then they go back to it and they’re like, it’s still cool!
LV: It doesn’t take away from the magic.
DB: Magic, to me, is the understanding that it’s of human hands and minds. And we create it; we’re the ones that make the magic and that’s the whole message. We did this out of our own brains.
LV: With these big immersive installation experiences like The Peninsularium, how do you foresee people interacting with the space? Will people be able to touch things?
DB: They’ll be able to touch, and they’ll be able to move through and investigate the spaces. There are a lot of kinetic elements. And like I said, it’s all that kind of old school mechanical stuff—
LV: —Sort of circus-y.
DB: Yeah, there’s a lot of those kinds of elements. There are also narrative elements to be discovered through audio and through text and through ephemera. So, there’s that whole kind of aspect to things as well. And yeah, I think, people will experience it in different ways…. We’ve been calling it an all-ages show in a punk rock sense, you know. It’s an all-ages show, might not be for everybody and you’re all welcome to come, but there’s not going to be, like, overtly sexual content, at least not to be viewed by the eyes of the children.
We’re working on an audio element in the vein of a silent disco kind of thing where you have a headset that you can switch between channels…. So when you give a kid a headset, that headset only gets two of the three channels, so you can all be standing in the space, experiencing the same thing. But mom and dad might be listening to something different than what the kids are listening to.
JA: And then just physically navigating through this space, the mere fact that it’s in shipping containers, as opposed to, you know, a bowling alley, in comparison, it’s going to make the experience a lot different, because of the dimensions of the space. So our intention is to have people lose their way, and then find that there’s the potential for more discovery.
DB: Another difference here is that there’s going to be a lot of these transitions from interior to exterior spaces. The way these containers go together is this kind of grid to create all these little courtyard spaces between them. So a lot of times you don’t move straight from container to container, you step outside and then back in.
JA: And there’s going to be programming in all those spaces.
DB: We can landscape and do things in those spaces, which I think really differentiates us from any other immersive experience that I’ve seen, because I haven’t seen anything that has really involved the landscape.
JA: And that is another place where Florida steps in—the outdoors. That’s a huge part of being in Florida. I think that that is going to be an added experience for us.
LV: That’s wonderful…. You mentioned ephemera. So where do you think archives fit into all this? I’m sure you have pictures of Old Florida and memorabilia, and you’re collecting all this stuff.
JA: And we’ll be creating some things, some things that are printed, photographs. And then some of those things will possibly be available to investigate more closely or even purchase. There’s going to be a bus at the end, outside of [The Peninsularium] experience by the gift shop, which is going to be a place where there’ll be a lot of printed matter—
DB: —Pamphlets and literature and takeaways and things like that. But also, in the way that we’re approaching things, we’re kind of always trying to keep it up in the air as to where the reality stops and the fantasy starts. So we want to tell actual, historical stories about the area. And those things get weird enough that you’re not sure you know where the line is. It’s a trick because you also don’t want to have it filtered too much the other way in that people take fantasy as reality and go telling a story that’s not true. There are all these cool stories and history here that people don’t know about and that people will get excited for; it’s really about creating an identity. When you tell someone you are from Tampa, they will have a sense of exactly what that means.
Coyote Shook is a cartoonist, PhD candidate, and medieval mystic derailed by circumstance. Their writing and comics have appeared or are forthcoming in a range of Canadian and American literary magazines, including Tupelo Quarterly Review, LandLocked, Vox, The Portland Review,The Michigan Quarterly Review, The Puritan, Shenandoah, and various others. For more on their work, visit their website, coyoteshookcomics.com or their Instagram, @coyoteshook
Our art editor, Leslie Vega, asked Coyote a couple of questions about their captivating Tamar Mepe, which we are thrilled to publish below:
Vega: Tamar Mepe is a bleak, beautiful tale of two Georgias. How has the Appalachian South shaped your identity as an artist?
Shook: I love this question, and I am in the process of working on a paper about why Appalachian culture lends itself so beautifully to comics-as-story-telling. I think that growing up in an area that is so misunderstood, centering individual experiences that look from the inside outwards tends to do the work of social justice-through-story-telling that is so crucial to Appalachian studies. Partly, growing up in Appalachian Georgia was a remarkably visual experience. There are many visuals from my memories there (quilts, canning supplies, abandoned distilleries, raccoon pelts, etc.) that stick out in my mind when I think about what stories I want to tell and how I wish to tell them.
I struggle with being from Appalachia and trying to communicate that in my writing, but perhaps not in the way I might have once thought. I think people of all stripes tend to mythologize and homogenize a region of the US that is as big as California. I also think that part of my journey as a writer and artist has been influenced by authors like NK Jemisin about the need to break those myths by de-romanticizing the rural space as innately idyllic and wholesome, something that applies to both my background in Appalachia and my approach to medieval studies. I did not want to create an idealized Appalachia that glosses over the harsh aspects of living in that place, nor did I want to present an easy list of cliches that the region is backwards and innately hateful. My experiences would be out-of-place with such reductive conclusions. My childhood, as did many childhoods, had beautiful and bleak moments that existed simultaneously. It was not a jolly-holiday of socialist, striking coalminers and Dolly Parton music, as many a paternalistic people not from the region might insist. Nor was it some sort of wholesome dip into small-town Americana that gives people the chance to bask in small-government ruralism (like a right-wing relation through marriage of mine who lives in a suburb shops exclusively at Whole Foods recently said). Disturbing things and lovely things could happen. That is the sort of earthy, sometimes acrid hummus I want to dig into in my work as an Appalachian cartoonist.
I draw a significant amount of inspiration from the work that places like Foxfire, John C. Campbell, and the Highlander Center do in terms of a fusion of folk-knowledge and wisdom and a dedication to progressive action in the region. I am still working on how to fuse my methods of folklore studies and forward-facing story-telling, but reading my long-dead great-grandpa’s Foxfire books really helped in that regard. There are stories, for example, about snakelore, about how to tend to a dead body in areas where there is no access to embalming fluid, ghost stories, and individual tales of elderly people picking blackberries to sell to afford a trip to the eye doctor. Those sorts of anecdotes interest me greatly.
Vega: Describe your process. Does the writing come first, or is the story unveiled more like a series of film stills?
Shook: This varies depending on the piece. Tamar Mepe was a VERY visual piece for me. I knew how I wanted the piece to end (because it begins with the ending). A lot of this was looking at pictures of abandoned churches in coal country and in Georgia’s and North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains while also looking at photos of monastic ruins in Georgia and original artwork of Queen Tamar. The innards and guts of the story came later, in this case. Other times, when a story is more word or plot driven, the drawings tend to respond to the words. Sometimes, I like to make a deliberate disconnect between words and images when I think it might be constructive to do so.
Vega: Comics are a popular contemporary platform for autobiographical narrative. What makes this particular form of storytelling so evocative for you?
Shook: Plasticity and the boundaries of narration being flexible. I love the idea of an autobiography told through folk-comics. Many of us are unreliable narrators when it comes to our own lives. Memory and perception are not trustworthy, and, as a queer writer, I get irritated and disheartened by the over-saturation of queer comics that feel they must a) be completely truthful and accurate stories and b) evoke empathy from cisgender and heterosexual readers. I think queer cartooning and folk cartooning are well-positioned as forms to allow for a universe where the grim, the magical, and the fantastical exist side-by-side. I might tell an accurate story (such as the time I accidentally attended a Pentecostal mountain church service on a classmate’s invitation), but pair the “truthful” aspects of the story with magical-realist and disturbing folk imagery. It stretches the boundaries of category and does really fascinating work in the “speculative nonfiction” category. It is interested in truth, but less so in accuracy. Is folklore truth or fiction? Do those distinctions even matter? What truth comes out of meditation? What observations or sharp moments stick out from a blending of memory and a desire to remember how something ought to have been as opposed to how it was? I think cartooning is evocative for me because I like the desire to lean into my own unreliability as a narrator and, by doing so, subvert expectations that queer people and queer cartoonists “owe” accurate (and usually tragic) narratives about persecution and coming out to readers. I believe that queer story telling can and should be risky and challenging, and, ideally, disrupt and disturb the status quo rather than soothe it.
Cynthia Reeser (Tampa Review Online): Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. It’s a pleasure to be able to talk with you about your work. Visiting your website, I’m reminded of the breadth and scope of work you do (and that of your husband and artistic partner, Peter Tieryas Liu). Could you talk about your work as an artist, and all the forms you work in?
Angela Xu: I’ve never thought of myself as an artist per se. In my mind, Shakespeare is as much an artist as the famous sushi chef, Jiro, as well as the random graffiti you see on the walls of the urban nightmare of cities, exemplified by Banksy. While Van Gogh is an artist in the traditional sense, as is Picasso, I admire both mostly for their passion bordering on the psychotic. You have to be that crazy to be able to view things from an atypical, almost bizarre perspective. Their influence on art history correlates to the madness with which they viewed the world and the ways they exposed a vision audiences had never contemplated before. In many ways, I think of myself as a recorder, and it’s the interpretation that I focus mostly on—the angles. A subject will look completely different if I shoot her from a lower angle versus a higher angle or a wide shot, which might reveal decay or decadence. Artistry revolves around perspective, and I don’t try to limit myself in terms of forms, though I enjoy photography. The collaborations with my husband are a completely different beast as we try to find a thematic bridge in visual cues that he can then accompany with text. At the same time, pacing is important because too much text bogs down the visual flow of imagery, so it’s a constant balancing act. I also enjoy expressing myself through paintings, calligraphy, and music. I understand delineations in terms of making it easier to categorize someone. But I like to experiment and push the canvas where I play so that it’s more about the “angle” I’m trying to show rather than the medium itself.
CR: One of the most striking things, to me, about your photography is the focus on people; your photographs show them simply going about their daily lives, but the wide variety of emotional nuance you’re able to capture is notable because there is so much honesty in it. Is this something you aim for in your photography?
AX: Absolutely. Every face is like a thousand paintings in constant flux. I just visited La Jolla, and the sunset there was so beautiful. A golden haze sprayed out from sunset on the sea waves, and there was an incredible beach with hundreds of sea lions. I took a ton of pictures. They were like paintings. But I guarantee you, if you put up the most beautiful picture of scenery in the world, and right next to it, have an interesting-looking person, everyone will be drawn toward the portrait of the person. Maybe it’s the herd instinct in us or we’re just gregarious by nature, but people are what make life and art so interesting. The ultimate punishment in Eden wouldn’t have been banishment from the garden, but from each other—complete isolation. We need others. At the same time, in my photography, I really try to capture those moments where everything is laid bare. People can’t fake it though (unless you’re just an amazing actress). Their whole life is a form of art. When I photograph, I’m trying to capture frames from the living picture. I’m a curator of emotion. How many struggles, how many loves, how many tears have vanished undocumented. I want to capture as many of those moments as I can. Both Rembrandt and Robert Henri are inspirations in that sense. In their paintings, versus other pictures during that same time period, there’s an unmistakable attitude they capture. I want to lay bare the humanity of those I record, even if just for a fleeting second. In the case of these photos in Xi’an, I wondered about their lives, their tragedies, and their triumphs. Who were they? That question drove the thousands of photographs I took that day.
CR: What do you feel good photography should do for the viewer?
AX: That depends a lot on how the viewer defines “good.” For me personally, I look for something I’ve never seen before or something around me I’ve never noticed. Then again, the photography could be something I see daily, just in a way I’d never experienced before. It should shock, disturb, even be provocative, but that’s general, as even pornography can encompass those three.
The tricky part is that a lot of it depends on mood, too. Sometimes, I’ll want to see dramatic photos, and other times, I’m happy with pictures of cute puppies. In that sense, I feel anything that makes you emote is a good photograph. However, if you want it to transcend individual meaning, there has to be some kind of message in the photo. If a photo can tell a story that supersedes race, time, region, and even place, it’ll haunt and resonate far beyond the initial viewing. That’s why I think the photo of “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima” still has so much poignancy—because of all it represents decades later.
One of the most interesting shifts in our approach to photography now is that with the spread of digital photography, it’s hard for there to be a single image that represents a moment, as you can take millions with your digital camera and your phone. Even if the image isn’t perfect, a couple waves of the magic wand and cropping tools in Photoshop, and voila, you’re creating reality edited to your desired parameters. The difficult part is, you can’t doctor emotion on a person’s face. Like Heisenberg’s Equilibrium, when a subject knows they’re being photographed, they immediately change and react to the camera. For me, one of the biggest challenges is capturing people in a natural pose so that it’s authentic without being intrusive. I try to photograph the images that are most interesting to me. Sometimes I succeed, most times I don’t. My hope is that the ones I do end up liking the most are the ones audiences will react to.
CR: Do you have an artist’s philosophy?
AX: Picasso’s quote, “Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth,” is something I espouse. At the same time, can art and truth ever cohabitate? Art is by nature subjective, an interpretation of something external. Even math is quantified art constrained by the numerical points that form the sums of its equations. So I have to wonder if truth is something we should strive for as artists. I’m not talking objective truths, nor ethical questions of right and wrong, when it comes to the matter of truth. I mean the nature of reality as interpreted by art. Some of the best art I’ve seen rejects the truth and encourages escapism. Others strive solely for truth and are soporific as a result. I once spent several hours in a garden observing a colony of ants. They were extremely busy with their job, rushing back and forth, waving their antennae, communicating with each other. From above, there was an esoteric beauty in their movements, a symmetry inspiring a sense of wonder. Again, angles. If I were an ant, I would probably be miserable, slaving away day after day as a mindless drone. In my art and photography, I want to explore those angles and make a connection to those who see their reality from different perspectives. I want all our truths to connect. Somewhere in those threads is my philosophy. Somewhere there is my lie Photoshopped as truth, or is it the other way around?
============================================================================ Angela Xu is an international photographer who enjoys taking photos of the obscure. Her work has been published at places like Calyx, Juked, Prick of the Spindle, and Redivider. She is the art editor atEntropy Magazine.
Cynthia Reeser is the Founder and Publisher of Aqueous Books, and Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Prick of the Spindle literary journal. She has published more than 100 reviews in print and online, as well as poetry and fiction in print and online journals. Her short stories are anthologized in the Daughters of Icarus Anthology (Pink Narcissus Press, 2013), and in Follow the Blood: Tales Inspired by The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew (Sundog Lit, 2013). Cynthia is currently working on a literary short story collection inspired by fairy tale lore. Also a senior editor for two association management companies, she lives and works in the Birmingham area and attends the University of Tampa in pursuit of her MFA in Creative Writing (fiction). Visit her on the web at www.cynthiareeser.com.
