Artists Statement

• Interview

Biography

My first encounter with satirical collage was the piece by Richard Hamilton (Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? 1956) in one of my art history texts. I loved the way he created a populated interior space using magazine cutouts, and I was quick to absorb that information. The work of Romare Bearden and Max Ernst also influenced me at the time. But I was still making flat, patterned, pretty, formal pictures until graduate school. In that situation, I was (I still am) surrounded by artists for whom discussions of the voluptuousness of paint and vicissitudes of color spawn nirvana. Out of boredom, I felt called upon to defend my use of collage as a medium. Which led me to the work of John Heartfield and Hannah Hoch. There were no women artists represented in my art history text. All my professors in both art departments were male. So gender equity continued to be a favorite subject of my work.

How do you work? Are you constantly clipping images you find in magazines? Do you file them in labeled folders? Do the images trigger an artistic idea or does an idea send you looking for particular images?

I am indeed constantly clipping images from magazines, stealing pages from waiting rooms, etc. I store the poster-size material in flat files, and cutouts in big expandable labeled 18 x 12 inch folders. Here's a current list of categories: Accordion (& other musical instruments); Architecture; Dissent; Epic; Face & Head; Fire; Flesh; Flora; Food; Group (my favorite category, full of crowd scenes); Illuminated Ms.; Inquisition (this includes all religious imagery); Indigenous; Landscape; Men; Patrioticaca (sic); Objects; Pattern; Science & Medicine; Valentine/Wedding/Xmas/Birthday; Water, and Women. And for the current project I have a new fat folder named "Utopia," with subcategories: Play; Work; Psycho-spiritual; Environmental; Architectural, and Dystopia (which includes images of Hell).

Usually, an image triggers an idea. For example, last year I came across a 1950s cigarette ad where a gaggle of white people-each holding a lighted cigarette-- cavorts around a trailer. "That looks like somebody's version of Utopia," I thought. A composition grew around it, a whole landscape of imagery that spoke to me of the Ideal. I had to integrate the group (Jacob Lawrence and a bunch of other people joined the party). Some of the landscape images had been in my files for years, waiting for the right site.

But I also work the other way, for example in 1990 I felt compelled to start a piece about the Gulf War. I knew what the text would be, just from reading the newspaper: that infuriating language --like "collateral damage"-- they popularized during the bombing of the Fertile Crescent. But it took a lot of searching to find appropriate imagery, until I put a veiled woman in the center surrounded by crosses, and realized the piece could be called "Sheherezade and the 1,001 Sorties." Sometimes I spend a lot of studio time hunting through my files for something I think I cut out in 1978. Or leafing through my 8 feet of National Geographic or four feet of Horizon.

Friends save magazines for me, so there's rarely a shortage of imagery. I'm very loyal to the spirit of randomness in collage. I want to use what comes across my table whenever possible, rather than download something from the Internet or spend hours in the picture files at the public library. But I can't adhere strictly to this fundamentalist doctrine, so I occasionally use a scanner and color photocopies to duplicate or change the scale of things to suit my needs.

You were commissioned to do the work "Justice is Served" for the Seattle Justice Center. You chose to honor four activists by representing them with collages on tin food service trays. How did you come up with this idea? How has the work been received?

The notion to use recycled serving trays occurred when my grandfather died, leaving behind a cupboard full of greasy classic TV trays collected by my grandmother during the 1950s. I began using the serving trays as a ground for collages about social justice, mindful of the different kinds of service people have engaged in, from the dutiful wife's heroism and volunteerism to slavery and military duty. It seemed natural to call the artworks Service Trays.

The "Justice is Served" installation of trays is situated in the elevator lobby of the courthouse, on the 10th floor, directly below the jury assembly room. The display is very public. I don't know how the populace has responded to that particular work, but I've had the thrilling experience of observing people move up to closely study and discuss my work in other public, non-art venues. In fact, it's this field research that's encouraged me to continue using text and detailed imagery, because they hold the attention of the audience for a little longer than the seven seconds most people are willing to spend.

I make a composition according to my own embarrassingly conservative notion of what art looks like: it's flat, things don't dangle or protrude from it, there's a figure you can identify as human. and the arrangement is usually symmetrical. So from a distance, it seduces a segment of the population that's attracted to representational art. Up close, it's a different story. By the time someone gets close enough to read, it's almost too late: they might have to think about the issues in the piece, maybe walk away angry or encouraged to make their own statement in a creative way.

One of the first key texts on advertising was titled "The Hidden Persuaders." Some of your works, like Big Pharma and Twinkie Nation, appropriate advertising images to, it seems, pull the curtain away to expose the persuaders. Do you find naked persuasion -- propaganda -- more artistically interesting in a landscape saturated with advertising? How does your work reference the early Soviet experiments in collage and photomontage?

I'm simply inspired by the political realism of the Mexican muralists and Soviet painters and anti-Nazi German collagists because of their idealism and directness. The vacancy of meaning in contemporary art makes me miserable. I'm so bored with euphemism and obfuscation. There's so much to say! That's why I love the artwork of Sue Coe.

And I find the propagandistic content in the general visual climate deeply alarming. When I walk past the two new gigantic sports arenas in Seattle (we voted both of them down but they were built anyway), the behemoth portraits of sports stars seem very political to me in their soporific, narcotizing message. It would be unthinkable to impose the naked emperor's visage where the baseball player's face is, wouldn't it? By the time that happens, the fans will be so deeply massaged, they won't notice.

My work is a reaction to the shameless propaganda of consumerism. I am not comfortable with the "free enterprise" mandate to make art that is beautiful and subtle: that dictum seems prescribed by the Project for A New American Century. Now, if the regime were one I could wholeheartedly support, maybe I could make Abstract Expressionist landscape paintings.

You do a lot of work on utopia. Many of the classic statements on utopia celebrate a single, homogeneous system. But your utopias are bursting with diversity. Is utopia for you just another word for collage, the juxtaposition of many different patterns and textures and images? Is utopia, like collage, the bringing together of several simultaneously existing alternative realities?

Sure. I've been very happy exploring this exact concept. The project, Dee Dee Does Utopia, has been fed by dozens of responses to my query "What does utopia look like to you?", which I sent out via email on Inauguration Day, 2004, as an exercise in sanity preservation. I have been combining my depictions of people's answers into collective collage images of the Ideal. I didn't start out with my own answer to the question, because I really didn't have one. But the other night I woke from a dream where I was able to use my computer to capture time. I could hit "save," and keep a fully three-dimensional file of a day. Then I could hit "find" and re-enter the day, experience it from the angles I missed the first time around. It was so REAL. I woke up feeling so ALIVE.