While much of MK Guth’s best known work engages with performativity and social rituals—creating scenarios for individuals in which to reflect on and explore their interactions with others—she’s always maintained an object-based studio practice. Her most recent exhibition, Distant Dreamer, featured a number of these objects installed in the intimate back room at Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland.
In a recent conversation, Guth and I discussed how these new, object-based works came together in this exhibition to create a performative space for viewer engagement.
Danica Sachs: I found myself intrigued by the discretion of the objects in Distant Dreamer in comparison to the more social elements of your practice. Let’s start by talking about the premise for the exhibition, and the objects within it.
MK Guth: I started out as an object maker and image maker decades ago, that’s where my practice began. Then, I moved into more interactive and socially engaged work right after graduate school at NYU. I appreciate contemplative viewing, obviously, I just did a show that demands it, but when I left [graduate school], I felt there was something that could activate a viewer in a different way and could make the experience more visceral.
I still make objects, and I still make images, but it’s very hard for me not to still be tethered to that interest. My interest in the social aspects of our society has always played in my work, and in the case of this exhibition, I think it happens in a lot of different ways.
Number one, it reverberates previous works—like Ties of Protection and Safe Keeping (2008) at the Whitney or Best Wishes (2011)—and various interactive aspects of my work because the pieces aren’t woven, they’re braided and sewn, and that demands another person. Even in my studio now I work with somebody, because otherwise those braids are just not tight enough to hold up the weight of a tapestry of that nature. For me, that echo from the interactive work also resides in how we understand the social activity of braiding hair and rugs.Those works still amplify human presence. If you look at bodies, there are bodies of water, there are celestial bodies, there’s spiritual bodies, and there’s our physical bodies. All those things are constantly coming back to us in our priorities. I wanted Distant Dreamer to connect to these different ideas of what a body is.
That was the kind of beginning of how that body of work came together: I wanted to work with something that still echoed this kind of interactivity, or socially engaged aspect, or ritually engaged aspect. A lot of my work talks about different types of rituals, and even though this has nothing to do with food, just the act of engaging in conversation or doing a thing together, for me, ties into that.
DS: Looking at the tapestries, I felt strongly that they were bodies of water with movement. I hadn’t thought about the physical bodily labor of constructing them: the actual braiding, the people in the studio. It’s interesting to me, my bodily response to the artworks and the bodily act of making them and how those things come together, or don’t, in the way that the work is viewed in the gallery.
MKG: I was hoping that the material process is clear in that work. They’re tapestries and objects, but they’re braided and sewn together in a way that would have a visceral aspect for the audience. They would feel that work, that labor. Because, again, that’s a thing: labor is all about us. My interest was to still have that line tethered to the work. And it’s different, right?
Those works are different from the drawings. The drawings are something that I can do on my own. They’re just sketches from my sketchbook. I do gazillions of them. I grew up doing watercolors. Now I do primarily ink, sometimes watercolors too, but it’s a way for me to think through those objects.
DS: It’s so interesting the way the tapestries and drawings talk to each other in the exhibition as this attempt at knowing or not knowing.
MKG: I think there’s a lot in that show about the line between knowing and not knowing. I live half the time in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, a place where there’s so much sky, and there’s so many stars, and there’s so much water, and it’s just wilderness everywhere. And you look up to this thing that you see all the time, and it is so part of your life, and you’re familiar with it. You can recognize Cassiopeia or the Big Dipper, but you don’t know anything about it.
This relationship to the absolute, most distant knowledge and your personal experience is like…they’re both operating simultaneously. I think you can say that for the sky or for the water and you can say that for our bodies, too. We live with these wildly familiar things to the point where we know every freckle, but we still don’t really understand how any of it operates. Maybe that’s why social interaction and ritual become so important to our lives, because that is something that’s very tangible that we can connect with, whereas this other line between these bigger things that we’re familiar with but that we don’t know puts us in this position of uncertainty.
All of these things are interconnected to me. I guess in a weird way that process of weaving together, braiding together, is also a way that all this work comes together. I’m definitely an artist where, even though the artwork might be abstracted, my interests still remain in humans and their activities and their social engagements and what creates comfort for them, familiarity and confusion.
I wanted to do a body of objects and things and explore why they might connect to that previous work, that there was something more physically tangible than some of the other previous work. And, you know, my shows, I like that space.
DS: I like that little space too. It’s nice.
MKG: It’s easier to control if you have things that aren’t just hanging on the wall. It’s easier to create an atmosphere in that space, in some ways, because it’s more contained. And I like to create a kind of mood and atmosphere. Like you had asked at one point about the after Paul Klee piece.
DS: I would love to talk about After Paul Klee’s Warrior with a Wing (2024). It’s in the back corner, beneath the chandelier piece, Moonlight (2024). It’s almost as if you’re in a dining space, and the light is illuminating this confusing object. I found myself thinking, what is this actually made of, and how? It’s interesting as a viewer with a body in that space reconciling, how do these fit together in relation to me?
MKG: I guess for me, that’s the human body in the show. It has legs, it has a torso, it has the lumpy clumpiness of a body. I wanted there to be something that was more human and more as we understand a body. Then in the show, I wanted it to be able to look up to the sky. I say the chandelier is a moon, but I suppose it could be a sun. And I wanted those crystals, not to be glass, but to be rocks.
I like to create things in the gallery environment where people aren’t just looking at the work, but they’re also experiencing a kind of atmospheric shift from what their traditional viewing experience would be. I recognize they’re separate objects, but for me, they very much had to be together for the rest of the work to make sense in my head. If on the walls there are a cosmos and tributaries—these different types of bodies—then there had to be a more physical body, and a celestial body, like a moon. There also needed to be something that suggested that the sculptural object was anchored; that there’s one space up here and there’s another space down here and we’re moving through that plane as viewers.
I also love that drawing by Paul Klee referenced in that work. Back in 2000 in my work for my graduate thesis, I wrote a lot about that piece. At that time I was doing photography and video work, but that was also the turning point going into more interactive work. I’ve always loved how that drawing is a hero with foibles: a hero that’s imperfect, that has goals to be a hero. It has a wing. It has some armor on, but then, it has a stick for a leg. It has all these things that make it incredibly imperfect. And yet, for me, the drawing itself suggests that it has greater ambitions, or a greater understanding and I think that’s a lovely way to think about us.
DS: I’m always really interested in the materials and the process of making. Something I keep coming back to is the performative act in which you create parameters for a social interaction with the dinners that you do. And there’s this performance of you creating the parameters for this interaction in a gallery setting. I’m thinking about the difference and similarities between those two actions. For example, you as the artist are not going to know how I’m going to walk through a gallery, what I’m going to look at first, and how I’m going to respond, but you are similarly choreographing an interaction.
MKG: I think you can [choreograph] a little bit though. It’s interesting galleries and artists think about things differently. In entering that space, you’re being pulled in with certain things. So, you might walk in and see a small drawing on the wall or the edge of that Cosmos tapestry which may draw you in because it’s something different than a drawing or a painting. I’m very interested in this. The exhibition is not really a sculptural installation, but it is choreographed.
I didn’t want the first thing they saw to be that hanging piece with the ink drawing on it. I didn’t want that to be the first thing. I want them to go around the corner and see that there was something else. But I also didn’t want them to come in and see the chandelier first, I didn’t want them to be drawn in by that. I wanted that to be a little bit of a surprise, where suddenly you’re in this space that feels slightly otherworldly or different from your typical, you know, hung exhibition. And I also think when you change the lights in a gallery, it changes everything. The spotlight and the overhead lights tell everybody how to view a thing. And when that’s disrupted a little bit, it changes the atmosphere
Balzac wrote this beautiful short story, and in it, he tells the story of a store, but it has Poussins and other very famous paintings, but it also has chandeliers and velvet couches and curios filled with little objects. And how, because the space has so many different things in it, it disrupts the value of all the things: the Poussins have the same value as a velvet couch, as a little bauble in a glass case. Suddenly the value shifts because the markers for how to understand it aren’t operating in the same way, and it creates this equalizing space. And I think in galleries by small little tweaks that can happen.
My interest was in choreographing such an experience that when people came in, it made them want to linger a little longer, not just go in a circle and bolt, but to get a little confounded, and to be able to have to, like, look up, you know, investigate a little bit.
MK Guth: Distant Dreamer
Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, OR
August 1 – September 28, 2024
This review was made possible by generous support from Critical Conversations, The University of Oregon Center for Art Research (CFAR), and The Ford Family Foundation.