WEBVTT

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ELLEN GALLAGHER: This is 
almost done, you can take over.

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I think it’s in the work that play with joy.

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I think artists know that you can take a kind of,
an advertising sign and make something joyful

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and um, other with it.

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And I think it’s sometimes uh,

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hard for people who don’t make things
to understand labor and joy and attention

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and uh, whimsy.

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I didn’t really come from a fine arts background,

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although you know I certainly 
went to museums as a kid.

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I came from a carpentry background

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and I worked in Seattle 
building a bridge connecting uh,

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Mercer Island and Seattle.

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It was a floating bridge that 
has since collapsed, but....

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So when I went to art school about a year later,

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that was what I knew how to do.

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And I built a latticework grid and 
stretched the canvas over that.

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That way I could sit on the canvas as I um,

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began gluing sheets of penmanship paper down.

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Penmanship paper for me is more about gesture.

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It’s not so much about grammar as it 
is about how you make your letters.

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So there’s this watery push and pull between the,

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the watery blue of the penmanship 
paper lines and then the,

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the gestural marks made 
in, inside and around them.

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The larger works then are made in a similar way as
the earlier penmanship paper works,

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in that they are built from found material.

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I’m basically collecting archival material
from the 1930s through the 70s,

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these Ebony magazines.

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Ebony, Sepia and Our World.

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They were kind of manifestos in a way, you know.

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And um, but they were magazine,

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they still were entertainment and um, but they,

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they had a kind of urgency and a 
necessity to them, also a whimsy.

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I’m collecting advertisements 
and stories and characters.

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And I see them as conscripts in the sense that

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they come in to my lexicon 
without me asking them permission.

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There’s still yet a specificity in each person’s,

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I don’t know, the way they hold their body

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or some subtle key that says, t
his is who I am at this time.

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It seemed to me to be about identity in,

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in the most open sense of that word.

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No matter how uniform or altered,

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it just refuses to be stamped out.

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ou know when you’re reading a magazine or a book

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that’s a particular kind of reading.

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It’s a kind of sequential, page by page and you,

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you know, remember what
you’ve just read five pages ago or you don’t.

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And, but it’s, that’s how 
you keep that information.

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And the reading of a painting, what I,

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what I loved was this idea of opening up the pages

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so that your sequence was then more 
spatial rather than sequential.

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In the paintings there are 
characters that repeat and recur.

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Pegleg is one.

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Sometimes there will be a compass next to Pegleg.

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Those kind of signs are in the paintings to um,

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activate Pegleg as both Ahab and Pegleg Bates.

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I’m attracted to the 
visceralness of the body of Ahab,

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that wooden leg.

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I also like the way in Moby Dick,

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you’re so aware of people’s physical presence and,

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and the sound that you know this 
idea of these men hearing this

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sort of scraping of the wood as, as uh,

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Ahab dragged his leg across.

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And the paintings for me functioned
as a gate into the watery static realm.

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And then that room in the back was

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another kind of cabinet,
the species cabinet.

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That work is work I made as I traveled
either in Cuba or in uh, Senegal.

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And in Cuba is where all those colors came from,
the green in particular.

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And the red came from this,

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this berry that you use to dye meat and rice.

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So the kind of coral, red color came from that.

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They’re also made by scratching 
directly into the paper

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and carving into the paper, much like scrimshaw.

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I liked that idea of making 
something so focused in this um,

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in my case, in a new environment.

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And I think in scrimshaw, it’s interesting to me

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that you would make something on a,

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a bone so like these detailed worlds that,

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while you are out in the middle of nowhere,

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trying to catch this giant monster.

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I think there’s a way in which my 
interest in the water and travel

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in some specific ways may 
have to do with the idea of

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my family arrived here by water.

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My father’s family came on 
whaling ships from Cape Verde.

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But the Irish came a while ago.

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In a way the films do literally what I would hope

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people would do with their 
paintings in their mind.

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The films, they’re also this grid 
and it’s this grid where the, the…

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each frame erases the frame 
before it as you move forward.

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So it’s, it’s literally a 
projection of a grid in space,

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but it’s in the same place over and over again.

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The first film in that, in MURMUR 
that I made is water ecstatic,

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which is made much like the series 
of drawings, Water Ecstatic,

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through thick water color paper, 
cutting into it and drawing over it.

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The grid to DELUXE is each individual 
page is its own drama or its own stage.

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I wanted to mark him.

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But I, I certainly couldn’t 
give Isaac Hayes a wig.

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I also didn’t want the tattooing 
to obliterate his face.

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And his shoulders just seemed 
to be so beautiful to highlight.

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The two marks on the shoulders 
will be printed in black

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and the face will be printed 
in a transparent base,

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sort of just an embossment over his skin.

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Oh wow, so cool.

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Can see it from the side.

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Love that it’s so beautifully inked that 
the engraving just looks like soft velvet.

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It’s beautiful, thank you.

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SPEAKER: My pleasure.

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GALLAGHER: The necklace, which is 
this sort of magic constellation

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traced on the computer

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and then a laser cuts all along the tracing lines.

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That’s then removed, plucked away from the,

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the skin of the paper.

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This idea of repetition and revision 
is central to my working process.

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You know this idea of stacking and layering

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and building up densities and you know recoveries.

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He’s been altered in a way that um,

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the character that is now 
my conscripted Isaac Hayes

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should be altered to be in my lexicon.

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I think there is a nostalgia in…

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in my uh, gathering of this material and,

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and looking at this material 
and trying to hold it still for,

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for a moment in these paintings or in the films.

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It’s not just a nostalgia in 
terms of looking backwards,

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it’s a way of imagining forwards.

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As a way of constantly looking for home, you know,

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yet your in that gesture you’re,

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you’re continually moving forward
and continually seeing the world.