Sandra Meigs Interview

By Peter Joch

Peter Joch: This "Virtual Museum" exhibition is called Representations: YYZ in the 80s. Hence, there is an emphasis on the shift back to representation taking place in the 1980s. Thinking back, was there, in fact, this shift in this era? Was there a concern for the effect of representation on identity?

Sandra Meigs: In the 1970s, I studied art at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD), in Halifax. It was a very heady time there, and we learned about and made art that had really opened up into the conceptual arena. We learned from Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, Daniel Buren, Cindy Sherman, Michael Asher, to name a few; artists who were questioning the object, yet who had amazing rigour in how they constructed their inquiry for the viewer. There were artists who were working within representational realms, Eric Fischl, for example, and David Askevold, in video. I do remember a real sense of excitement around the idea that an artist could make critical inquiries into how identity is shaped through media (photography and video). When looking back at the work from the 80s, the exhibition Subjects in Pictures, for example, that Philip Monk curated, I do get a sense of the engagement with representation; call it the power and filtration of media, pop imagery, and advertising. In my case, the work I showed there, The Night Tree, was highly influenced by all the cartoons I watched as a kid. I had always been making representational art, using theatrical devices, and personal subject matter to search through the alienation one may feel towards social conventions, using highly subjective imagery gathered through engagement with the unconscious.

So, to get back to your question, the effect of representation on identity may have been a driving force behind YYZ's programming, but I think things happened and unfolded more fluidly, which made the art much more interesting than the motive. In other words I think showing good art was the driving force, not the theory that may have focused the institution.

You took part in Monumenta at YYZ in 1982. Do you remember what you exhibited there? Would you say that Monumenta was more about the return to representation or the return to painting?

SM: My dealer at the time, Ydessa Hendeles, was instrumental in getting my work included in Monumenta 1982. I was fairly new to Toronto, having just moved there from Halifax because of a divorce. I didn't know a lot of the Toronto artists. My work that was shown in Monumenta, were the gouache drawings for Purgatorio, a Drinkingbout, which I had shown at Ydessa's. I would describe them as figurative expressions of alienation within an intoxicated and highly social scene. The term "gothic" might suit them. I made them while spending time in Berlin by myself. It was a hotbed of cultural activity before the Wall fell, very intense with drinking, music, anarchy, and new art. Those gouaches were intimate in scale, darkly colourful and descriptive, or expressive, I guess, would be a better word. They had gotten a great reception, and I was proud to have them included. I didn't get the sense that Monumenta was about a return to representation or to painting. There was amazing art activity in Toronto at the time. There were artists going crazy with making very exciting work, and taking it to the streets, organizing galleries, partying, and drinking at the Cameron. I think Monumenta was a summation of artistic energy and recognition, a time of reusing downtown Toronto in a way one did not think possible before. Although I am not one to really try to digest an "art movement" as it is happening. I think one is just simply caught up in experiencing what's going on in terms of energy. Even when my work was shown at the Sydney Biennale, I didn't pay much attention to the big picture or try to saddle up to any of the big players. I was just devoted to the rigour in my own work.

In 1984, you were included in the exhibition that Philip Monk curated, Subjects in Pictures, at YYZ. Monk described it as an all-woman show about representing women being subjected to the image as the works registered and displayed the process by which one is made into a product-subject. He defined your work as interior as it doesn't appropriate mass media, and is the struggle of representation against representation. Would you agree that there are no elements of appropriation in your work, and can you talk a little about psychology and the gothic in your art?

SM: To tell the truth, I did not think of Philip's Subjects in Pictures as a women's show. I thought of us all as artist, and it never really crossed my mind before that we were all women. I read the essay in his catalogue after the fact. I had respected Philip as a curator, and loved him for the service he gave to artists in recognizing work of importance at the time, but he did not exactly sit down with the artists, and discuss his idea for the show. You see, that is how theory works sometimes. A curator gets an idea, and puts a show together. It's not as if all the artists are even aware of it. Philip is a theorist, and this exhibition had the rigour of consideration that a sharp theorist with a mission had. He said I could produce a new work for the show. So, I don't think he even knew what work of mine I would put in it. Philip was correct in saying that my work fell within its own loop of subjectivity, representation against the cannons of painting you could say, and immersed in dreamy subconscious imagery. The work was not about theory to me, but about sharing a great energy, and looks at ways of making art that was going on at the time. It seemed very vital and significant. I was most engaged by the work of Shelagh Alexander and Nancy Johnson for its sharp wit and visual beauty. As far as I know, neither of those artists are exhibiting at this time, but I would love to see their work again.

The work that I exhibited in Subjects in Pictures is called The Night Tree. It was an experiment in filmic imaging. The psychology and gothic nature of the paintings are there to be questioned. Indeed, it was a very Freudian, sexual expression of orgasmic power. I was, in fact, going through psychotherapy at the time. In The Night Tree, I was exploring a dreamlike trance of sequential sexual images. I had always been interested in cinema. Purgatorio, a Drinkingbout was a film; … the gouaches exhibited at Monumenta were actually storyboards for the film. The Night Tree was an imaginary journey through a sexual encounter, with a tree as its phallic subject. I wasn't really into commenting on appropriation. (I don't even consider The Room of 1,000 paintings to be about appropriation. Even though it included images from popular culture, it was about the pure invention of colour, and endearment, not so much about the reality of the sources.) In that vein, The Night Tree also followed a tight scenic framing. The works were varnished with a highly glossy finish to emphasize their cartoon ephemerality, as if they were made of some highly surfaced acetate.

In terms of my ongoing interests, I think gothic immersion in a subconscious psyche is still a driving force behind my work. Subjectivity, the personal dramas of perception, and dramas of expression interest me very much. I believe that visual structures such as painting can lead one to openings in the mind that may have not been thought or experienced before. Paintings that keep me looking are tremendous.

You exhibited The Room of 1000 Paintings at YYZ in 1986. What made you choose YYZ to exhibit this important work?

In 1984, Philip Monk had included my work in an exhibition he curated, Subjects in Pictures. That show was important to me in bringing together other artists in Toronto whose work I had a great affinity with-Shelagh Alexander, Janice Gurney, Nancy Johnson, Joanne Tod, and Shirley Wiitasalo. In particular, I felt very close to the way Alexander, Johnson, and Wiitasalo were working at the time. It seemed to me that YYZ would provide the critical stimulation that my work needed at the time, two years later, in 1986.

Was there anything you remember about the opening for The Room of 1000 Paintings at YYZ, and/or the show itself that you'd like to share?

I remember working very hard on the installation, because I chose to paint the gallery walls a rusty rose colour from floor to ceiling. Then, I had to install all of the paintings. I also had rented a sofa and La-Z-Boy recliner to offer living room comfort to the viewer. The piece was mocking of a certain aesthetic concern with cuteness and sentimentality. I had the most fun making the Popeye sculpture for the exhibition. I considered him to be my ideal viewer, because he is kind, strong, honest, and funny. So, I placed him as a viewer, engaged in looking at one of the paintings. The opening was mainly just plain fun. I remember many of the viewers would come up to me and point out his/her favourite painting …with just the same sentimentality that the paintings were meant to induce. I remember that Liz Magor, who is a great friend, asked me how much I was selling them for, and when I told her, she said that it seemed like my purpose was defeated by the high price, and that, if they were offered at twenty dollars each, that price would be better suited to the aesthetic value that I was getting at. I thought that was very funny.

How does The Room of 1,000 Paintings interrogate representation?

The premise behind the work was to offer a sincerely sentimental set of paintings in a "living room" that was overwhelmingly abundant with this aesthetic. It was endearing, and at the same time it was irksome.

Has The Room of 1,000 Paintings influenced the work you made afterwards, and your current work? If so, how?

This is an interesting question to me. I had never considered myself to be a painter before The Room of 1,000 Paintings. I referred to all my work as "installations." Well, in a sense any exhibition is an installation, but I did not want to identify with the discipline and history of painting in particular. After this exhibition, I started to wrestle with painting more. So, I know that many of those paintings in Room of 1,000 were tongue-in-cheek, but there was something about some of them that was truly beautiful, and possible to revere. So, I began to seriously embrace painting. Dead Roads (1992), for example, put a highly depicted, narrative image next to a highly abstracted, timeless image together in a diptych. Though the work was based on a personal journey through the southwest desert, it was also more consciously formalized to activate the space between the viewer and the work. It included side mounted text panels that came to be referred to as "rear-view mirrors." That put the viewer in a certain viewing position relative to the five foot by twelve foot paintings. So, the short answer is yes, the Room of 1,000 did influence my future work in a good way.

Could you share your process for The Room of 1,000 Paintings, and more current work, if it is different?

At the time I did The Room of 1,000 Paintings, I was in a long, ongoing legal dispute with my dealer at the time, Ydessa Hendeles (who I dearly love, by the way). Most of my artwork was in the gallery's possession, and I did not have access to it. This was very difficult for me emotionally, and I was in quite a traumatic funk. So, I decided to do a painting a day so that I could build up an inventory, not really for the purpose of showing or selling, but more to do with giving myself emotional support. I figured I would feel better if I had some work to keep me company. So, 1,000 Paintings grew out of that personal need. At the same time, I was thinking of critiquing how what I thought of as an average, middle-class person would think of painting, what they would like, what they would think of as trash or treasure. I was looking at kitsch, thinking about sentimentality, and cheapness. I was also sincere in wanting to create "likeable" images. I had collected candy wrappers, cereal boxes, cartoons, TV sources, ads, and other ready-mades in order to copy them or translate them into fine art. I engaged in reverie with the work as I did it. I had also thought about creating for this menagerie of paintings an ideal viewer-another emotional support. Popeye was a well-loved hero from my childhood, so I made a life size statue of him out of papier-mâché, and enamel. That was my process. Then, I brought all those elements together into the idea of a middle-class living room, complete with La-Z-Boy and sofa, brought into the gallery for the viewer to sit on.

I can't say that I follow the same process all the time. My approach changes from work to work depending on my involvement at the time. But, maybe you can understand from the above that my life is a fluid process of exploring and making, considering how the work will manifest itself to a viewer.

Where would you situate yourself in art history?

Well, it's been a rough couple of decades for art, I think! I think the current globalized state of exchange wherein critical writing and articulate dialogue seems to have vanished, or else there are tiny spheres of this and that relative to localized social groups, which has diluted the atmosphere for focus, and the genuine exchange of ideas. Who knows how to characterize how things are now or where they will go, from an objective viewpoint? Young artists today have access to images that I never had, though they are often highly filtered through the media. I could not say at this point where my work is situated. I will wait for history to tell.

Can you talk about your influences?

I was highly influenced by my studies at NSCAD. We were taught to be fiercely independent. We were taught to talk critically with other artists. The work happening around there was immersed in thought and discourse more than in any particular theory. People characterize it as conceptual, but that was only a small part. It was more about trying to create a currency for art that overlapped life, and brought in all sorts of influences from all over the world. I also took field trips to New York about twice a year, and saw many exciting, very current shows that were happening in the 70s. We would go around together, and critique the work as we walked. It was a very rich experience. It wasn't to be summed up in any way. It was to be soaked in. When I moved to Toronto, I have to say that all the artists there were new to me, having studied mainly with visitors from America, and Europe, like Vito Acconci, Daniel Buren, Benjamin Buchloh, Emmett Williams, Daniel Graham, and many others. The country was less connected at the time, with no World Wide Web or email. We read everything in the art magazines. As I think I said before, David Askevold and Garry Neill Kennedy were big influences on me in the way they pulled much of their work from intense observation-through video, on David's part, and through performance and humour, on Garry's part. Garry is one of art's greatest comedians, and I love his work for that. I learned to party well, and to share ideas. I learned to drink, and play cards, and be very Nova Scotian in intensity with the sea environment. Somehow that taught me to be very direct in discussions, and expressing my ideas, and I think that's a very good thing. I learned high bullshit detection at NSCAD. I learned to distill and separate the profound from what was simply trendy production. If that could be the characterization of a place and time, it would be a good one.

During my thirteen years in Toronto, I learned more about sculpture, painting, and photography. General Idea was influential, as well as artists generating work at galleries like Carmen Lamanna, Sandy Simpson, Av Isaacs, Olga Korper, and the Ydessa Gallery-John Scott, David Buchan, Nancy Johnson, Joanne Todd, Robert Fones, Ian Carr-Harris, Liz Magor, and John Massey. The Cameron provided a drinking and music scene that was amazing for the time, making downtown come to life for artists.

Later, after moving to Victoria, I learned more than I had known before about modernism, and the history of painting and sculpture from colleagues at the University of Victoria whom I became friends with. Roland Brenner, Mowry Baden, and Fred Douglas were so conversant, and talked about the students' work with great dedication. Robert Youds, and later, Daniel Laskarin also have a kind of rigour, and low tolerance for mediocrity, which I admire. I actually became educated all over again through my critical interactions with these friends.

I try to travel, and I am constantly discovering and rediscovering well-known painters. I love de Kooning, Richard Tuttle, Robert Ryman, Imi Knoebel, Adolph Wölfli, Blinky Palermo, and I could look at the full figure portraits of Manet for hours. Even Vermeer has haunted me. I have taken special trips to see single works, Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, for example. I am generally just enthralled with looking at great painting, and every painting I view influences me as I learn great things.

Can you share what philosophical theories influenced Room of 1,000 Paintings, and more current work, if different?

In the 80s, I was influenced by my readings of Adorno and Habermas. I studied their work a lot when I was in Berlin in 1980. I believe their ideas about the importance of abandoning Canons of Knowledge, and the Canons of Philosophy, Science, and History are somewhat behind The Room of 1,000. The paintings were intended to be very humorous when looking at taste, or what was well liked. For The Room of 1,000, I even remade my own version of Monet's sunset after seeing the original at the Metropolitan Museum in Washington, DC. You have to remember that it was a time of poufy hair, wide shoulder pads, and disco dancing. So, it was a kind of over-the-top indulgence in an extreme aesthetic that reacted to popular culture.

In the 90s, I became interested in more modernist influenced visual structure. I explored Dada, Bataille, and Dubuffet, and those making an effort to abandon organized form. I guess that makes sense, in looking back. Postmodernism gave us the attitude that anything was up for grabs. I like to look back at my work, and see it as having rigour. I was, in any case, devoted to clear structure, no matter how base it may have been (the word "Canadian," for example). So, I sort of abandoned theory in the 90s. I have come to believe in art's great potential to expand knowledge in creating new, imaginative structures. When one looks at art, I want to see things that I don't understand, that cause me to become deeply engaged, and to wonder. I would say that my interests are in exploring the phenomena of perception, what the unconscious mind brings to it, and a pure endeavour in coming to terms with the visual language of painting. I do read a lot, and my reading is fairly eclectic. Teaching has been very important to me in knowing that there are multiple ways to approach making art. I see this in the students' struggles with making art. I want to be armed with knowledge about how people "read" visual structures, and see magic in it.

Have you been involved with YYZ in any other way than an exhibiting artist; for example, as a board or community member?

No. But, I probably saw every show there in the 80s.

December 4, 2012