Noelle Mason
I’m always happy to highlight work by someone whom we might not simply slap on a label as a photographer. There’s always discussion there, right? Is someone a photographer, an artist, both, or my favorite centrist term, photographic artist? The labels aren’t necessary anyway, it’s the imagery that is created by the individual that is. I just feel it is especially gratifying to investigate someone who branches out, experiments, and puts in the hours and days to fulfill their vision. Noelle Mason is the latest subject to endure my questions and curiosity. Thankfully she is more in tune with not just her own work, but the daily process as well. Oh, and there’s more of course…always, right?
I had mistakenly lumped this project in with some other work that had a strong social documentary slant while working on multiple interviews at the same time. Truly, the images in X-Ray Vision vs. Invisibility focus more on the dehumanizing machine images used in surveillance and their transformation by Noelle. Thankfully she was forthcoming with getting us the details that mattered to the work and its intention. I may have (okay, I did) added a question that was meant for someone else, but seeing as how there are subtle shades of this type of work in the sourced imagery, I thought I’d leave it in, as I was intrigued and interested in Noelle’s answer nonetheless. An unintentional experiment that helped to clarify the substance and intention of Noelle’s substantial work, and we get some additional insight we may not have received otherwise.
The project with a spotlight on it here is merely one of the myriad collections of work that Noelle has completed. With that, I would say after you peruse these images and read her words, you definitely need to investigate for yourself much further. In fact, I highly recommend a visit to her website. You will discover and appreciate so much more while you’re there. Fascinating work all around. So however you wish to label someone (or not), what is seen here is someone who defies basic descriptions and buckles down and produces the work that we get to experience, consistently and effectively. A debt of gratitude to you, Noelle, for all of your efforts here and beyond.
Backscatter Blueprint (La Maleta), 18” x 24”, Cyanotype
Bio -
Noelle Mason is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work is about the subtle seductiveness of power facilitated by systems of visual and institutional control. Noelle has shown nationally and internationally in a variety of non-traditional spaces, galleries, and institutions including the National Museum of Mexican Art, Orlando Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Artist Grant, Jerome fellowship, Santo Foundation Individual Artist Grant, the Florida Prize for Contemporary Art and the Southern Prize. In 2004 Noelle was a resident at the Skowhegan school of Painting and Sculpture. She holds a BA in both theatre and fine arts from the University of California, Irvine and received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Noelle currently holds the position of Associate Professor of Art at the University of South Florida and is the Founding Director and Curator of Parallelogram Gallery in Tampa, FL.
Interview -
Michael Kirchoff: Thank you for joining me, Noelle. Normally, I’d start by asking you how you got into photography, but after a more thorough examination of your website, I should be asking how you got into the arts. Was there a particular inspiration that set you on a path as a visual artist?
Noelle Mason: It was something I just always was interested in. I don’t come from particularly cultured stock but my parents were very supportive of my interest in painting and sculpture at an early age and got me into some community kids classes at the art museum in San Diego where I grew up. In high school, I fell in with a group of kids who were always trying to push boundaries and we had a great teacher, Ms. Martinez, who helped to expand our tastes for the 20th century Avant Guard. We did theatrical productions of Pirandello and Becket and my favorite artist was Duchamp, I even made an unsuccessful attempt at Finnegan’s Wake. I had friends in bands who were really pushing the limits. When I was in 10th grade a friend of mine lit himself on fire while chained to his drum set during a show, but most of them just started to write songs with increasingly bizarre time signatures. We hung out at the communist club on the campus of UCSD, The Che Café, and would frequent the Museum of Death in downtown San Diego that also had a gallery attached to it. The 90’s was a good time to be a high school student.
MK: I recently came to discover your work through the series, X-Ray Vision vs. Invisibility. Referring to this work as strictly photography seems inaccurate, as these are photographic methods combining new technology with hand-applied craftsmanship to achieve something inherently collaborative and new. In fact, there are multiple methods involved in creating this work. What is your intention behind using these methods to help you tell the story?
NM: My work is really a critique of photography, and more and more of photography made by machines for machines. I find that insisting on the objecthood of the photograph makes the viewer more aware of the construction of the image. Machine images are often given a kind of forensic and reified authority which I want to show as a set of constructed aesthetic choices which often have dehumanizing effects on the subjects who occupy the images. I am also trying to answer a particularly sculptural question; what kind of work can material transformation do in how an image affects the viewer? Can I transform an image intended to dehumanize people into an image, which instead creates empathy through subtle shifts in medium?
MK: I have to ask, where did you get the imagery used to create your textured and layered work in X-Ray Vision vs. Invisibility?
NM: These images are all appropriated from Border Patrol websites or news articles detailing the activities of international border control. Early on I was getting images from Minutemen websites, a vigilante group who would traffic in such material and often had ties with Border Patrol agents who would photograph their screens. One of the recent images I actually got from an official Whitehouse Tweet.
https://twitter.com/whitehouse/status/1146552905358553089
MK: What is at the core of your work? Is there a theme that runs through everything you create?
NM: Surveillance and it’s relationship to law enforcement, taken literally to mean the Police as well as in the Lacanian sense of the word “law”, as a kind of structuring element which is part of our entry into and maintenance of the symbolic order. I am fascinated by how our image technologies continually restructure our world. I am pessimistic about our ability to keep up with them, I believe we are being increasingly made in the image of our creations and not the other way around.
Backscatter Blueprint (Gallinero), 18” x 24”, Cyanotype
Backscatter Blueprint (La Barque de Dante), 18” x 24”, Cyanotype
Backscatter Blueprint (Las Tres Gracias), 18” x 24”, Cyanotype
Backscatter Blueprint (Los Tristes), 18” x 24”, Cyanotype
Backscatter Blueprint (Man at the Crossroads), 18” x 24”, Cyanotype
Backscatter Blueprint (Olympia), 18” x 24”, Cyanotype
Backscatter Blueprint (Ultima Cena), 18” x 24”, Cyanotype
Backscatter Blueprint (Un Demanche Apres Midi), 18” x 24”, Cyanotype
MK: I often ask about achieving a particular style or voice in your work, and if you ever feel the need to break out and follow a different path. However, you appear to embrace many styles and methods in your projects. Is this a conscious choice, or are you just reacting to your subject matter in a way you feel most appropriate?
NM: It is both conscious and pre-conscious as I have never really felt particularly bound to one medium or another. Every project has to have something that excites me consciously but more importantly it must feel right….it has to work at the level of the body/subconscious/intuition. I am trying to write this without falling victim to artificially splitting the mind and body, but that seems like an almost impossible task. Working in multiple mediums allows me to problematize an easy 1:1 juxtaposition and allows the viewer to experience different the effect of mediums side by side.
MK: Exploring this a little more concerning creativity and the projects you take on. Do you feel it is better to create work that fits a particular style for yourself, branch out and try new things, or better to simply leave yourself open to possibilities that happen organically?
NM: I don’t really concern myself with this question, as it feels a bit too close to something that relates to marketing. I think you have to work and you have to be open to where the work takes you. You have to develop of sense of integrity and trust with the work, which can allow you to throw out a project, or a practice you spent years on when you have exhausted it or find that what you thought was there isn’t. There is no replacement for a daily practice, the practice has to take the lead if you are ever going to make anything smarter than you.
I love this quote by Phillip Guston which I think sums it up pretty well:
“When you’re in the studio painting, there are a lot of people in there with you – your teachers, friends, painters from history, critics… and one by one if you’re really painting, they walk out. And if you’re really painting YOU walk out.”
MK: Is there anything from your past that you feel has had a dramatic influence on how you create images today?
NM: My father was a SWAT sniper. I would be foolish to think that didn’t have some effect on my interest in surveillance and law enforcement. My view of art as having a political dimension was probably influenced by growing up in a anarcho-punk music scene in San Diego and then being introduced to Marxist aesthetic theory in undergrad. More and more I have been interested in differences in physiology that may have had an impact. I have what is called aphantasia - an inability to visualize mental imagery - I am not sure what effect this has had on my work specifically but it might have something to do with my distrust of images.
MK: There seems to be a lot of projects lately that center around social documentary studies. Have these issues and topics suddenly become more important to people, or is it a sign of the times?
NM: I think it is more a trickle down effect of the 1990’s anti-aesthetic identity art. Those artists that came of age then are the head of art schools now. Post-modern Critical Theory moved away from the aesthetic theory of the early 20th century and now it seems fewer people seem aware of the modernist arguments about form. Work became less and less about form and more and more about subject matter. In addition there is this institutionalization happening within academia, which channels everything through a type of language that can be easily understood by the upper administration--the language of the social sciences. I think it is very disingenuous. The market and institutions put pressure on artists as well. Collectors and curators want to buy or show work that is about the hot topic of the day. It makes them seem relevant and slightly edgy but without much at stake (I myself am implicated in benefiting from this.) The aesthetic debate becomes entirely overshadowed. I don’t really like social documentary work, not really my thing, I am much more interested in formal fictions.
Ground Control (Mexicali/Calexico Insert), 72” x 92”, Hand Woven Wool
Ground Control (Colorado River Delta), 120” x 120”, Hand Woven Wool
Ground Control (El Paso/Cuidad Juarez), 96” x 132”, Hand Woven Wool
Ground Control (Brownsville/Matamoros), 108’” x 144”, Hand Woven Wool
MK: What does a typical creative day consist of for you? Do you consider yourself a workaholic, or do you keep a schedule of time for family, socializing, vacation, etc?
NM: I work in the studio every day. Sometimes its 12 hours and some it’s only 2 but I try to do something studio related every day. I teach Sculpture and Graduate student at the University of South Florida, so even when I am not working on my own work I am talking about art. I am also a competitive skydiver so two days out of the week I am at team practice. Before the virus my partner and I travelled a lot but mostly to see art. I am not really a nature person--Too green, I like my landscapes to come in the color of concrete.
MK: Is there anything about your creative process that you feel people miss or are misinformed about?
NM: They think I am a social documentarian? LOL. All joking aside, that is probably the biggest mistake made. My work is first and foremost about the history of western image making, the particularity of the social issue at had is less important to me, which in some ways makes me radically anti-documentary as I am not concerned at all with facts. Another big problem for me is the reliance on digital images. When seeing my work on the Internet it looks digital. When in fact much of it is hand embroidered or woven. So that is also a concern, as you miss much of what the work means if you don’t understand how it was made and the scale of it.
MK: Nicely done. Happy to provide the opportunity for clarity. I notice that you are also the Co-Founder and Curator of Parallelogram Gallery, in Tampa, Florida. How is having an active role in this capacity informing, if at all, your work as an artist? Honestly, I could ask the same about your career as an educator as well.
NM: The best parts of the art world are the ones made by artists themselves. I have always believed in the DIY ethic and I see it as teaching by example. If I want to be part of a vibrant art scene I need to have a hand in making it. It is really as simple as that.
MK: We are in the midst of a worldwide pandemic and have suffered some dramatic and possibly permanent damage in the art world, especially regarding in-person events. How do you see artists moving forward in this new world, or do you feel that they will overcome without any significant change is necessary?
NM: I hope that it reorients the art world back onto the work itself. It has been so much about spectacle in recent years I am hoping that people will be sick of looking at their screens after this is all over and that there will be a resurgence of the physical presence of the object. Honestly though I don’t really think about it. I am more of a focus on the work and take it as it comes kind of person.
Coyotaje (Load Truck), 8” x 29”, Hand Embroidered Cotton, 2014
Coyotaje (Pollos), 12” x 16”, Hand Embroidered Cotton, 2015
Coyotaje (Rio Bravo), 13” x 15”, Hand Embroidered Cotton, 2014
Coyotaje (Via Dolorosa), 12” x 16”, Hand Embroidered Cotton
Coyotaje (Los Conocidos), 11” x 18”, Hand Embroidered Cotton
MK: In speaking to future generations of artists, do you have any words of wisdom to those setting out to make their mark in the visual arts?
NM: I fall somewhere between Bukowski and Beckett. Between “Don’t Try” and “Try Again, Fail Again, Fail Better”. Go to the studio, don’t chase the ‘mark’, just go to the studio (whatever that means for you). Work. If you try too hard you wont ever be able to get out of the way of yourself, but if you don’t try hard enough you won’t make anything worthy of being called a failure. Do this every day.
MK: How do you see your work progressing into the future? Do you have anything new you are currently working on that we should be on the lookout for?
NM: I always have multiple things going on at once. I am currently working on an installation based on a Langston Hughes poem about public protest images that goes up in November and includes 15 mirrored crystal chandeliers and audio collage. I am also working on some tintypes and a 24-long cyanotype on silk. I’m looking to carve out some time to make some formal sculptures and do some material tests but I am too busy catching up on works which should have been finished by now….things always take three times longer than you think they are going to.
You can find more of Noelle’s work on her website here.
All photographs, ©Noelle Mason
