The Spell: Interview
Jonathan T. D. Neil & Emerald Rose Whipple

TRANSCRIPT

Jonathan T. D. Neil (00:00:02): What are the kind of broad contours of this new collection you're working on?

Emerald Rose Whipple (00:00:43): The Spell? After reflecting on my portfolio of the last 10 years, I really wanted to do something that felt like this full circle moment in terms of technique and subject matter. I wanted to make something that felt like a family photo album, but also something really grounded in a cinematic narrative of my life in New York City and the people who are particularly important to me – honoring the experience of life here.

Jonathan (00:01:52): And who are these friends of yours that are being captured in the images? From what walks of life do they come?

Emerald (00:02:02): They are mostly in fashion or people that I met before working in art, when I moved here, not knowing anyone. They are the relationships that I established as I was growing into an industry that didn't feel totally in alignment with me at the time. They are people that feel like family, people who are important to me, people I met after a time in my life when I felt very much like a black sheep. I had to leave California to get out of the box that I was in. And fashion and art in New York felt like the place to be. They are the people I first met when I moved here. There was just this resonance that I hadn't experienced with anyone else in my life. So, following almost 15 years of living in New York City now, these are relationships that have grown into my chosen family. This has become even more important following the loss of my father and this sense that I am existing in the world without, without parents. So, this community that I've created has become extremely important to me. Painting these people is my way of honoring that relationship.

Jonathan (00:04:43): How has this collection become also your portrait of New York as a city?

Emerald (00:04:58): It's very much New York through my lens instead of New York in the way that I imagine people think of it. It feels like New York for New Yorkers, and it's very downtown. I have a hard time not thinking about the way that I looked at and experienced the city prior to moving here. I’d seen Larry Clark's kids, and I had followed Ryan McGinley's early work, and Dash Snow, and the scuzzy downtown punk kids. That's the kind of the scene I fell into when I entered New York City. So, I feel like that still very much informs the way that I look at the city and participate in it and the people I'm documenting.

Jonathan (00:07:16): The palette of the works is very different from prior collections that you've worked on. It's a little darker, a little more ethereal. It’s very much about nighttime experiences and engagements, with friends on the streets or in interiors where the light is being pushed to the margins. These images, at least in my experience, make the viewer both participant and observer. There's a distance, and the dark palette adds to that sense of distance. How has that shift to a darker palette, and to a different way of observing your friends, informed the work and how you think about what the works are after?

Emerald (00:08:39): “Distance” is definitely the word that I think of when I look at them. I think that's why who I've selected is so important, because they've witnessed so many of my personal experiences, and they act as a reflection point for me, this feeling of being connected and then disconnected, while integrating grief and allowing myself to connect more deeply with the people in my life and the world around me. It goes back to the Emerson quote, this concept of God being present in everyone and in all things. That's the magic that I was trying to capture when selecting the images, touching on this idea of an evening that never ends or those moments that we all experience where life feels a little bit richer or more expansive. When I was reading that Emerson text, it just felt like it should be night, something about the way light touches people in places and the different hues, like a red light coming from a car break or a streetlamp. There is a distance in the night where you can't fully see everything around you.

Jonathan (00:12:02): A bunch of these works depict or represent moments at various different clubs or performance venues, like Brooklyn Mirage or LeBain. It’s an interesting attempt to try and capture something that's otherwise very ephemeral. How has that subject matter, and those images, changed the way that you've approached the technical aspects of your painting, the ways of getting at that image and getting at that sensibility?

Emerald (00:12:57): It feels less about trying to capture the ephemeral and more about the relationships. My friends and I wouldn't have ended up at Mirage or LeBain if we weren't friends with the DJ. It is still very much about celebrating the people in my life and the community. I have been gravitating towards the colors and the memory of the experience and that is the magic I am trying to capture. But depicting nightlife has been challenging from a technical standpoint, selecting these really dark shades of purple or green that are intended to appear black. My previous work felt so rigid in comparison, as a lot of them are these high-flash snapshots, or moments in daylight. The process of capturing highlights and shadows and the texture of the surface that I was painting felt very different and more challenging to communicate. There are some earlier pieces that I do feel like I'm referencing in this work. There's this painting of Lindsey Wixson at Le Baron that I've been looking at a lot throughout painting The Spell, and a painting of Hanne Gaby and Megan Marie Dodge, where the light is really similar in the Lindsey painting. There are lots of reds and blues, and she is cast in the light of this club and wearing this sparkly dress. So, the technique in that painting is something I'm really trying to emulate in this body of work. 

But going back to the distance, I think that's just how I've been feeling these last two years. I am not fully in the world, so why would my subject matter be. I have this feeling that I've barely been participating in life and not feeling fully connected unless I'm with some of these people that I'm painting. The figures are floating in the dark because that's how I've been feeling.

There is this universal sense of longing for something that's passed, or even this practice of tuning into the moment as it's unfolding in the present tense and having this sense of longing for something that hasn't even left yet – that's what I'm trying to touch on.

Jonathan (00:23:13): This idea of transmutation is an interesting one, particularly as it relates back to the Emerson quote about The Spell. Does painting as a practice become the medium of trying to transmute or to conjure those moments, not to retrieve them, but to produce them again?

Emerald (00:26:30): There's a few things there: the understanding of the ephemeral, and being conscious enough to recognize that as a moment is coming into being, but It's also passing in time and becoming the past. It feels like a paradox in some ways: to have an experience with someone, and be entirely present to it and grateful for it, and witnessing the emotions that come up in that experience, whether it be joy, excitement, or sadness, which is also a positive in some ways – but sharing an intimate experience with people and really embodying it, all the while understanding that we'll all go our separate ways either that evening or in time. It's complicated to articulate, because in many ways I am painting these memories, but it's not about memory or nostalgia in the way that I imagine people think of it. It's a way to hold on to that moment a little longer, because when I'm working on the pieces, I am remembering that day or that experience or the feelings that were present. I want to create this sense of resonance and connection and solidarity with my depictions of the people that I'm painting that I really care about and value. At the time I started painting, in 2012, I didn't feel like there were paintings about my generation. There was a lot of photography, but not paintings. Elizabeth Peyton, I think gets close to it, for me anyway.  But at the time I started, it didn’t feel like there were paintings of people in their early twenties having fun. And I felt very removed from fine art and I wanted to make paintings that my dad or even my younger self could understand.

Jonathan (00:35:38): What are the associations that you are after or interested in seeing from your audience?

Emerald (00:37:10): I mean, I hope they feel invited. I wouldn't want it to feel distant in a way where my friends are too cool or there's that energy of “you can't sit with us.” I've seen those paintings, and they do give that air. They're all really beautiful and really stylish, but they're all the misfits that I touched on earlier.

Jonathan (00:37:54): You’re making me think of David Hockney’s portraiture, where it's a whole train car filled with notables and creates a sense of wanting to be a member of the club versus not being a member of the club. You could call it a genre of work that feels like it's had its apotheosis in the Instagram sharing of one's life. Your work is more like a strange archeology of someone else's social moment. The people that are pictured and the moments that are pictured are not the “decisive moments.” They’re not some unique thing. It's almost as if they’re scenes of what happens between these decisive moments. It's not the sunset, it’s the drive to the beach for the sunset; it’s the rise of feeling in the room around some crescendo of music, or the walking into the club. These things that are just outside the frame. It's neither a landscape nor a portrait. It doesn't accord with any genre. Even the figures themselves kind of blur up into the background bit, or they're hazy, in terms of how they're depicted. There’s a relationship to the photographic as a note taking device, of the image as disposable, as easily caught. The work that one has to do comes afterwards, to produce from that image the character of an environment and making it something more than just the fleeting, the ephemeral moment, the work of making it something more than just a fast picture. These are the wages painting has to pay to photography today.

Emerald (00:44:48): The social media piece is really important. Stumbling on an old MySpace or Facebook or now Instagram. I think I was in high school by the time MySpace had come into being, and I cared a lot about photography. My parents were bohemian and always creating in some form or another. My mom loved photography and that’s something I picked up from her. I would steal her camera and go to the beach with my friends and take pictures of them climbing trees or surfing or going on bike rides. Even prior to social media that felt very true to me as a way to hold those people and those moments. I moved so much growing up, I was almost in a new place every year, so it helped to hang on to those friendships a little bit longer. That has always been an important piece of it for me. Having lived in a time before social media, images have never been disposable to me, but I notice how disposable they are to other people, how we'll take pictures and not really be with the image. I guess I'm questioning the importance of the image. I don't want to live my life through my phone or through a camera lens. So, they are really quick candid moments. I'm not sitting around constructing these scenes or these memories. If something feels magical, I'll reach for my phone and try and capture it very quickly. Then I’ll go back later and find the pieces that I think would be great paintings. There is this sense of naturalism I think I'm reaching for or wanting to celebrate the mundane because that is so much of what our life is.

Jonathan (00:51:15): I think of an artist like Dike Blair, who for years my has been making brilliant paintings of interstitial spaces. There is a whole genre that goes with the poetics of the everyday. If you just take a beat and look, with a compositional frame that gives you an arrangement, or allows you to bracket the world and pay attention to some detail – the work of painting in Blair's hands makes those things quite beautiful and quite attractive. They work as images, but at the same time, there is a cliche at work in this work. It's not an entirely unconventional move. Blair does it very well. It’s a genre of late modern still life. It’s the expected mundane, and it's a challenge to make work. Obviously, Blair does it better than most. The paintings that you're making, they have a different challenge because, again, it's not still life, it's not portraiture, it's not landscape. The network of friends and the relationships become a substrate for you as an artist. The image is one that is highly recognizable and yet almost impossible for anybody to place in a conventional sense or in an experiential sense for themselves. There's a vast separation, and there's a real alienation that is created.

Emerald (00:55:24): That is true. There's an unintentional alienation in the sense that not everyone is living my daily life. And perhaps the things that feel very mundane for me are experiences that not everyone has, simply because they're not living in New York City. The works are very sentimental to me and idealized in the sense that they're these people who are extremely important to me, painted in what I imagined to be their best light. But in my mind, they are an invitation. In some ways I feel like I'm painting them for my younger self. Thinking back to Dike Blair, I'm not painting my morning coffee, but there is this kind of ritual and daily life that I'm trying to capture. Even though my daily life is very different than most people’s.