Ellen Gallagher in “Play” - Season 3 | “Art in the Twenty-First Century"

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

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

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

and um, other with it.

And I think it’s sometimes uh,

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

and uh, whimsy.

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

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

I came from a carpentry background

and I worked in Seattle 
building a bridge connecting uh,

Mercer Island and Seattle.

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

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

that was what I knew how to do.

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

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

began gluing sheets of penmanship paper down.

Penmanship paper for me is more about gesture.

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

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

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

the gestural marks made 
in, inside and around them.

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

in that they are built from found material.

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

these Ebony magazines.

Ebony, Sepia and Our World.

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

And um, but they were magazine,

they still were entertainment and um, but they,

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

I’m collecting advertisements 
and stories and characters.

And I see them as conscripts in the sense that

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

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

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

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

It seemed to me to be about identity in,

in the most open sense of that word.

No matter how uniform or altered,

it just refuses to be stamped out.

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

that’s a particular kind of reading.

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

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

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

And the reading of a painting, what I,

what I loved was this idea of opening up the pages

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

In the paintings there are 
characters that repeat and recur.

Pegleg is one.

Sometimes there will be a compass next to Pegleg.

Those kind of signs are in the paintings to um,

activate Pegleg as both Ahab and Pegleg Bates.

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

that wooden leg.

I also like the way in Moby Dick,

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

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

sort of scraping of the wood as, as uh,

Ahab dragged his leg across.

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

And then that room in the back was

another kind of cabinet,
the species cabinet.

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

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

And the red came from this,

this berry that you use to dye meat and rice.

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

They’re also made by scratching 
directly into the paper

and carving into the paper, much like scrimshaw.

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

in my case, in a new environment.

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

that you would make something on a,

a bone so like these detailed worlds that,

while you are out in the middle of nowhere,

trying to catch this giant monster.

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

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

my family arrived here by water.

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

But the Irish came a while ago.

In a way the films do literally what I would hope

people would do with their 
paintings in their mind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wanted to mark him.

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

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

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

The two marks on the shoulders 
will be printed in black

and the face will be printed 
in a transparent base,

sort of just an embossment over his skin.

Oh wow, so cool.

Can see it from the side.

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

It’s beautiful, thank you.

SPEAKER: My pleasure.

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

traced on the computer

and then a laser cuts all along the tracing lines.

That’s then removed, plucked away from the,

the skin of the paper.

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

You know this idea of stacking and layering

and building up densities and you know recoveries.

He’s been altered in a way that um,

the character that is now 
my conscripted Isaac Hayes

should be altered to be in my lexicon.

I think there is a nostalgia in…

in my uh, gathering of this material and,

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

for a moment in these paintings or in the films.

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

it’s a way of imagining forwards.

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

yet your in that gesture you’re,

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