[JULIE MEHRETU] My earlier drawings And paintings had this maplike,
diagrammatic element to them.
As the work has shifted to being
more atmospheric or painterly,
I refrained from trying to explain what's going on in the paintings as much because
they're not these kind of rational descriptions or–
or efforts to articulate something in that way.
I'm not trying to spell out a story.
I still think you feel the painting, and the reason you
read the mark is also because you also feel the mark.
[soft whirring]
- So the two projects that we're doing in Berlin: one is
a work that's about 21 feet by 85 feet long, and--one painting.
And the other is another project where we're doing seven
paintings that are small in comparison, 10x14 each.
[airbrush hissing]
The 21x85-foot painting will take about a year and a half.
It's really one painting even though there will be either five
sections or ten sections;
it functions as one painting.
The stretchers that we're using
are not gonna be the stretchers that we're using on-site.
So these paintings will be taken off of these stretchers, rolled up,
shipped back, and then restretched at the site.
- Just watch out for the column, though.
- The reason that we're in Berlin
is because Julie's studio in New York can't accommodate
something of this scale.
This project just kind of had to dictate where it was gonna be
more than we were gonna dictate where it was gonna be.
It's epic.
This place was three times bigger than what we envisioned.
So we were able to design all the walls, do whatever we want
to the spaces, and just have everything that we needed and wanted.
This is just something that you can't, unfortunately, get in New York.
So we just took it and ran with it.
- This project is crazy.
[chuckles]
Everything is new: the size, the space, just working in
a different country, trying to get materials.
It's just– it's crazy.
[sprayer hissing]
We all kind of have our own different jobs that we've kind of developed.
Mostly I do the surfaces.
Julie is all for experimentations.
I started developing this new surface: kind of this, like,
acrylic-based, almost like absorbent paper surface.
So she can actually paint on these surfaces almost like
paper, but they can be any scale.
[MEHRETU] January of 2007, I was working on some new paintings,
and in that process, I had been doing a bunch of watercolors.
When I was working on the watercolors,
there was this phenomenon that was happening
in those that I wanted to try and bring into the painting.
In one painting, it was just not working.
I kept pushing the color into
this painting where there'd been this intense amount of drawing
and this intense action between all these different marks.
And so at one point, I just started to sand away all the–
all the color that came into the work.
And at one point when I had finished sanding it, I turned
around and looked at it, and it was a finished painting.
That– it was almost–
That's when I called it this poltergeist in the work.
And it became this absence,
this– the– the erasure itself became the action.
And it reminded me the caves of
the Buddhas in Afghanistan once the Taliban removed those
Buddhas: that image of their absence.
It was almost that type of feeling to this area in this painting.
It felt to me to kind of suggest a moment in terms of how
sad or pessimistic you can feel in a political environment and–
or kind of historical situation that we're in globally.
So it felt like this really, you know, kind of hopeful
gesture in the painting, for me.
I'm an Ethiopian-American.
My– you know, a big part of my family is Ethiopian, but I've
been in the states since I was six.
I was raised in Michigan.
I live in New York City, for the most part.
I'm in Berlin now.
But, I mean, when I move around
the world, I move around the world as an American.
Being a citizen of the United States or of any one in the
European Union, you are a citizen of incredible privilege.
I think anyone who is aware of that, you have to have some responsibility.
- We basically have a plan from Julie that has these
multi-layers of shapes and line work and these forms that
she's gotten from different areas, and for us to be able
to actually replicate that successfully, we then have to
take it and just say, "All right, well, this shape,
this shape, this shape is under these ten shapes, which are
under these five shapes but are above these six shapes."
And then layer by layer, we'll
project and, you know, mask and paint or airbrush or draw,
however we can, get her original source up onto the surface.
So sometimes it can be a simple
composition that we only have to break apart into three or
four layers, or sometimes it'll be a detailed composition
that we have break into 15, 20 sublayers.
[indistinct conversation]
[MEHRETU] For this next show, which is for the Guggenheim, I'm making
seven paintings that are 10 feet by 14 feet.
Many parts of the drawing will also be erased.
So the paintings will build up, and then a big portion of them
somehow or another will disappear.
So then hopefully, the paintings
will also just interact to talk about disintegration.
I try to start the group of paintings with each having their
own kind of architectural information.
This piece right now, it's just different views from Google Earth,
you know, of New York City and Tokyo.
Basically, it's tracing, because
that takes so long, and a lot of the stuff that the assistants do,
it becomes a ground for my work.
I'm so blessed to have such a great team.
This would be a nightmare if it wasn't such a great group of people.
The difficult part is, we have not that much time.
we have a year from now.
And we have to trust the process
and trust the intuition and trust– and trust that hopefully
it manifests itself, and we'll– and that I'll be able to make
these pictures work, I mean, because after the initial work
is done by everyone else, it’s up to me to really go in
and draw on all of them and complete them.
[indistinct conversations]
The large commission has a really specific point of
departure in terms of what it's conceptually trying to deal with
if you're gonna make a picture of that scale and embed that and
locate that in Lower Manhattan, which is where it's commissioned for,
can you deal, then, with what Lower Manhattan symbolizes?
It's something that's been a big part of trying to figure out
who I am and my work, is trying understand systems.
What you've seen here is only the first layer of information,
and that first layer of information is hopefully
something that mimics early maps from the early silk road
through the evolution of the marketplace.
Can you actually make a picture that in some way maps and gives
a picture of this history of the development of– you know,
capitalist development, economic system?
Which is absurd. It's– [chuckles]
- Can you separate it out? - That I can.
- No, but if they just draw–
Like just draw these little sections.
-Right. -You know what I mean?
You can't tell what's what, then.
That whole– what it does is, it just builds
like these plateaus of space. it creates a space.
[machine rumbles] -[speaks indistinctly]
- That kind of drawing, but I think that if you had it
with no recognizable buildings whatsoever-- - No.
[JESSICA RANKIN] I think inevitably as an artist couple, you're gonna
impact each other and influence each other and...
- It's, like, about, like, fragmented space,
and then so much of that is like...
[RANKIN] I mean, we've always worked
that way, ever since we first started living and working
together, eight years ago now.
We've- -it's just a very organic process,
and that's sort of the way we lead our lives.
And in New York, our studios are in our house, so until,
you know, recently– our son started going to school
recently, but he was in and out of our studio all day too.
And it's– you know, we look at each other's work all day.
We sort of give each other feedback.
We notice something in the newspaper and mention it.
I mean, it just– it's sort of, I don't know– it's been–
it's grown organically, and that's– it really works for us.
[MEHRETU] There is a lot of fluidity between us.
There are moments where her work
seeps through my work and in and out of it.
We look at each other's work
more than anybody else's work, and so that has to happen.
Almost anything in the environment tends to inform
your work, for me, in one way or another.
Different studios have done that for my work as well.
Different– different–
living in different places, whether it's a place that has
A view or no view, it all– kind of that space and
the light, all of those elements affect, for me, a big part of
the way that I end up evolving with the work.
The thing that keeps me going is the painting,
And in getting lost in doing that, language is invented.
A way of working in the language has evolved for the last–
through the last ten years, but the paintings have changed
every year through that, slowly, because painting is slow.
In the end, it's about trying to make the painting.
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