Leah Dyjak
I really do need to call out this interview as an eye-opening experience for me. I never thought of a project that was more research-based than what I usually would examine as being something that would seriously draw me in. However, Leah Dyjak’s work for their series, As we play god, is precisely that.
Now, I’ve long been a fan of the city of New Orleans for its people, architecture, and culture. On my visits there, post-Hurricane Katrina, I’d discovered that something was amiss with the way the infrastructure had been handled and the way local government seemed to be turning a blind eye to what was happening all around. Honestly, I believe many people did, but it was upon seeing it up close and personal that it hit home in a much more profound way. Then I got into the details behind Leah’s imagery, and it was like she put the pieces of the puzzle together for me and made me take notice much better than before. Isn’t that what a thoughtful and robust project is supposed to do? Shouldn’t it make you think and want to dive in even more? Well, this one does in a big way. In fact, I don’t know that I’ve spent more time examining the photographs from a research point of view this way before. I have to hand it to Leah for not only committing to this project from a photographic perspective either, but one that includes a great degree of installation work as well – and again, these efforts flesh out the series to an even greater degree.
Thank you, Leah, for taking home the CENTER me&Eve Grant for 2021 and giving me some food for thought on an area that I wish to learn even more about now that you’ve introduced it to me in a concise and intelligent package. My hope is that this interview and these photographs do the same for everyone. Damn, I love this part of my job.
FEMA Care, 2019
Bio -
Leah Dyjak (1981, Springfield MA) received their BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2006 and their MFA from the University of Texas at Austin in 2015. In 2021, As we play god, Dyjak’s most recent body of work received the prestigious CENTER Santa Fe 2021 me&EVE Project Development Grant. Dyjak’s work has been exhibited across the country at places such as the Houston Center of Photography, Blue Star Contemporary in San Antonio, and The Front Gallery in New Orleans. Their work is in multiple private collections and has been acquired by the Archive of Documentary Arts at Duke University. They are a past recipient of a Goldfarb Fellowship at the Djerassi Resident Artist Program in Woodside, California, and have been in residence at the Anderson Ranch in Colorado and most recently at the NARS Foundation in NYC. Recent publications include the Architectural Review, London, and the Leonardo Journal of Art and Science, MIT Press. Currently, they hold the position as Assistant Professor of Visual Art at Wheaton College, MA, and live in Providence, Rhode Island. Their work is represented by the Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Interview -
Michael Kirchoff: Thanks for joining me here, Leah. Looking back, what was it about the photographic arts that led you down this path? Was there anyone, or any specific event, that helped supply the inspiration?
Leah Dyjak: When I was sixteen, I was a lifeguard at a wave pool. The night before, I had a dream that told me that I should be a photographer. I drove to a camera store that morning before my shift and bought a 35mm film camera. I taught myself what I could and then ended up at a community college in Western Massachusetts with an amazing teacher, Tom Young. I ended up sitting in the back of his class, I was not even enrolled, and he saw something in me. He said, "I know you have a lot to say; why don't you join the class." I did that. We are still close friends twenty years later. At the time, photography was the most accessible medium to me as it could be considered a trade. I am a traveler, and I move around a lot—sculpture, ceramics, or painting tether an artist to a studio and materials. In a way, with a camera, the field becomes a studio. I have always been a driver on the road. It was the most comfortable place.
I am a first-generation college student from a service class background. Education and curiosity were not a touchstone of my upbringing. I used to sometimes wonder if my family was invested in education what my path would have been. Being an artist has allowed me to do things I never would have dared dream of coming from my background. It allows me to work alongside brilliant writers, scientists, scholars, and engineers in a collaborative interdisciplinary way. I have been able to travel to incredible places and meet people interested in my work and ideas. Because I've been able to listen to myself, find some bravery, and really good teachers, I am able to live this incredible life. I feel very fortunate to have found my way here.
MK: I notice that your art often makes use of installations and film work. How do all of these elements work together and inform one another? Do you prefer working in one medium more than the others?
LD: I am a very kinesthetic person, and photography tends to be very flat, two-dimensional. I think and make things in multiple dimensions, thus leading me to make these more expansive installations. I would have been a hotshot (wildfire fighter) or a queer sculpture daddy in another life, think Robert Smithson or Richard Serra. I am most focused and in alignment with my work when I'm in some kind of extreme situation. which is why a lot of my work represents this.
Sitting in front of a computer processing images does not allow for this kind of experience, though, so the work transmutes into these larger installations where I have to get up on a ladder and figure out how to reconstruct images that work with both the space and the body. It is important to me that when people are looking at the work, they have a visceral response, so the work is intentionally made and positioned to correspond with meridian lines and where one stands in space.
MK: What is it that you get out of creating photographs? Is there an overriding theme in your work that you feel best represents you as an artist?
LD: Through making pictures, I can find my way into things. In my life and my work, I am searching for non-duality. Another way to think about it is as a threshold, cusp, or fulcrum — think about being in the transitional space as a wave crashes into shore with its particles dispersing and becoming something else. A lot of artists use the term liminal space to describe this, but I am after something else-the transcendence of dimensions and what is physically understood. I am always thinking about the in-between, becoming, transforming, coming into the center, queering.
A visual example of this is in-between is as if you were the water-imagine seeping into spaces imperceptible to us in physical reality. The water is such a force both instantly and over time. We have no control over water-yet it is what we are made of and our life force. My camera becomes the water —trying to find the spaces, portholes, or ways to recreate through visual metaphor what we can not see. When I am cutting images and reassembling them like a river, I am trying to find new pathways in response to both space, material, and visual elements. I want the photographs to emulate the essence of material action, such as having the asphalt cleave away from the shore. The images cleave away from themselves—thus creating a direct relationship to the body by asking the viewer to experience a third and fourth dimension. Photographs are not usually typical of this kind of engagement.
Life Way, 2020
Stage IV, 2020
Diversion Points, 2020
Sand Storage, 2021
Morgan City, 2020
Fossil Porthole, 2020
MK: I wanted to congratulate you on receiving the 2021 me&EVE Grant from CENTER. The work that took the prize is As we play god, and is what we are highlighting here today. Can you give me a brief synopsis of the work and why this particular environment is where you chose to investigate?
LD: On a road trip from Texas to Massachuttes while I was in grad school, I took I-10, the southernmost route. The interstate over the Atchafalaya River delta is 18 miles of concrete and asphalt suspended over the water, the Atchafalaya Basin Bridge. It is the intersection of two massively complex systems, one natural and one engineered. This visual and conceptual collision encompasses so much of what I am interested in. I knew in my body I would come back to the region to make work. I'm fascinated by the complexity of the intersection systems. The highway is such an absurd spectacle in the sense that you have all of this concrete, so necessary for daily living, hoisted over this dynamic, living ecosystem. In addition to that initial hit, New Orleans and southern Louisiana share some similarities with Provincetown, MA, on the tip of Cape Cod, where I live part-time. My previous work (Collect/Disperse, New Beach, and Force Majeure) was made there a land's end where water is constantly changing the shoreline. It is such a dynamic place that beaches and dunes look dramatically different from one year to the next.
I am interested in our collective relationship to water as a life force and threat. My photographic work attempts to trace the fine line between hope and denial. I am interested in how our perception of place is derived from an ever-shifting river and always-constructed levee edge and how we can settle into a false sense of safety within the confines of manufactured landscapes. Southern Louisiana's disappearance was an obvious choice. A lot of our infrastructure and current water policy is based on bad science, white supremacy, and the hubris of patriarchal ideas and desires in bending nature. I hope to breach this long understood notion of engineering as the best way to save us from ourselves through my work. My photographs attempt to unveil the absurdity of a white supremacist culture's continued reliance on outdated technologies and ways of thinking—sandbags, small-scale physical models, myopic, protection of private interest —to provide a remedy for current environmental collapse.
I was very inspired by Elizabeth Kolbert's essay Louisiana's Disappearing Coast, published in the New Yorker in 2019. After reading it, I just drove down there. At the time when I visited Louisiana in 2019, the Mississippi had been at flood stage for 211 days, just 49 days into the Atlantic hurricane season. It was the first time in history the river rose to these levels and the first time the Bonnet Carré Spillway—designed to divert the swollen river into Lake Pontchartrain to prevent New Orleans and the refinery's upriver from flooding—was opened twice in the same year. It was an incredible time to start the project as New Orleans was essentially an island.
During the pandemic, my focus has also expanded to include the ways small-scale physical modeling is used in an attempt to predict and contain catastrophic weather events. Fortuitously, I happen to live close to Alden Laboratories, which operates the nation's oldest hydraulic laboratory in Holden, Massachusetts. This firm is contracted by the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA) to design and test flood-prevention infrastructure and coastal restoration projects in Louisiana by building scale models of the river and surrounding infrastructure. During the summer of 2020, I gained ongoing access to study and photograph Alden's scale models of the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion and the Houma Navigational Lock and Canal, both in Louisiana. My work now includes reflection on the scale models that are built before massive engineering projects.
MK: What is the long-term goal of As we play god? Do you see it as a way to move from educating people about the futile efforts of trying to control nature into thoughtful and plausible actions?
LD: I hope that work inspires us to start asking better questions about what we are being told. I was raised Catholic and went to Catholic school. This has caused me to always question authority. It was very clear to me at a young age that the adults in my life did not have the right answers and were willfully not answering my questions. Far too often, we just believe what we are being told. To be clear, I believe in science and scientists and do not subscribe to conspiracies. I am simply suggesting that we start asking questions like "how did we get here?"
The levees and lock systems, control of the Mississippi River have proved to fail over and over again, yet we continue to tighten the grip instead of thinking about other solutions. For example, after Katrina, the levees were rebuilt "higher and stronger," and now they are just sinking because the ground is subsiding. This is not a solution. This is a band-aid and creates a false sense of safety. People often think I am pessimistic, but in fact, I believe in radical hope and being with reality. Culturally, we do not like to name or face the elephant in the room and will go to great lengths to talk around it. Collectively, I hope we can learn to see the elephant – be with it. I hope my work helps with the process. I believe we have to get real about what's happening with the climate, learn to be with the grief, and from there take action. Neo-liberalism will have us believe it is about individual responsibility, but it's about collective action-policy change on huge scales. I compare the situation in Southern Louisiana, like starting to treat terminal cancer with chemo. We have passed the point in the timeline we can reverse these effects. It looks like the powers that be are looking to things like geoengineering as a lifeline to humanity.
Making work is a way for me to be with the water and my grief about what is happening with the climate. Materially speaking, in the long term, I would like the work to be big and in a space where viewers can have a physical relationship with what they are encountering. Scale is often obscured intentionally in my images, and it is unclear where I was physically standing when I made the picture. This dislocation is important to me because it gets us out of our head, into our bodies, and connects to something more visceral.
MK: Let me ask some questions about your process as a creator. Do you find it better to construct your images mindfully or work more intuitively?
LD: I do both. My dream life is very active, to an overwhelming degree at times. I often talk about cross-dimensional collaboration because I am so informed by those coming to me with instructions when I am sleeping. This guidance provides underlying confidence when moving through the world and making work like I am often on the right path. It is a balance of really tapping into intuition and being mindful-intentional about choices I am making-both visually and with my body. Images are constructed both in the camera and in the studio. In a past body of work, Force Majeure, I cut images and then reassembled them intuitively. I wanted them to be the water, finding and penetrating the spaces we can not see ——mapping the negative space, creating new forms.
I am currently an artist in residence at the NARS Foundation in Brooklyn, New York. It is an amazing opportunity as I have a huge studio overlooking the water with big windows. This amount of wall space allows my work to get big and messy. I have printed a set of traditional images on one wall and make a more immersive installation on the other wall with the very same pictures. It is an interesting juxtaposition for visitors when they come in. It's been incredible to have people in the studio again looking at work and providing feedback. The work gets really interesting when I have this kind of space and time.
Evacuation Route, 2020
BluePrints, 2021
Lift, 2020
Sediment Shifts, 2021
Some Salt, 2020
Ghost Forrest, 2020
MK: Was there a specific point in time where you felt that you had found your voice in photography and became satisfied with the direction of your work? Do you ever truly find yourself in a good place with your images, or are you always searching for more?
LD: Although I have classical training in photography, I consider myself an artist working with a lens-based practice. The definition of what is considered a photograph has expanded in recent years in really exciting ways. I think photographic makers have found the courage to break out of tradition in ways that are essential in propelling the medium forward. It has taken me a long time to embody —I mean believe— on a molecular and spiritual level that I am an artist.
I had the great privilege of being in residence at the Djerassi Resident Artist Program in the Santa Cruz mountains of California. It was a profound experience on so many levels. I was moved by the story of how it started in honor of Pamela Djerrsai, who frequently came to me in my dreams, especially the other residents. I could not believe I was there with award-winning writers, scholars, and scientists. It then occurred to me that it was not a mistake that I was in the company of these brilliant people. Everyone was so supportive of my work; I had just started As we play god, and they were so interested in who I was, where I came from, and where I was going. I was not used to this level of investment. It was a huge growth moment for me. Since then, I have believed in my ideas, my work, and my abilities. The tendrils of information that I become curious about are never arbitrary. They are all essential in connecting this creative web. It all has value when making things and choosing to believe in one's life as an artist.
MK: Is there anything about your creative process that you feel people miss or are misinformed about?
LD: When looking at the work through a screen, it is hard to see all of the details. The way the photographs get stitched together in the material world is sometimes lost in translation. The evidence of my hand though cutting or adding tape is not always easy to locate when looking at the documentation of the work. My work really straddles this place between straight photography and art. Because I work bi-modally with straight pictures, installation, video, and sculpture, I think it requires some digging to get at the essence of what I am after. Photographs can often seem straightforward in a read. It is important for me to find ways to expand the read by physically manipulating images, adding video or sculpture. It is important for me to find other conceptually congruent ways to communicate visually about what I am after other than relying on an artist statement.
MK: Over the years, the tools we use to make photographs have changed in dramatic ways, not to mention the vehicles we use to promote the final works we make. How do you keep up with these changes, and do you see any further significant change as we continue to progress?
LD: The fact that my work explores thresholds is directly related to the moment in history I was born into. Dreams, especially as someone born in 1981, I was too young to be firmly rooted in Gen X, and I am definitely not a millennial. This theme has proved true in most dynamics in my life. Between things, people, places, time. This is also true for my experience as a photographer.
I was trained in wet labs, making silver and C-prints. Photoshop and Digital printing were just being integrated into programming my last year of college in 2006. This was an incredibly destabilizing moment in the sense that many of the teachers I looked to for advice were in the transition with me, so we were all learning together. Good digital cameras were not affordable for a long time, so I continued to shoot 4x5 film and make scans. For a while, I was so frustrated by this timing, and it took a while to find my footing in this new digital reality. I now see it as an invaluable experience as an artist and educator.
I am not sure I can "keep up." I am not a tech nerd but know a lot about available technologies and programs that are useful to my creative practice and pedagogy. Social media is complicated, and I love Instagram. It is such a useful tool, and I look at it as such a tool. It is incredible to me to be able to see work from artists all over the world. It is such a gift to be able to see what former students are up to. All of that said, I think it's incredibly important to learn how to look at images critically and in context. It can be terrifying to think about the negative impacts of altered photographs, images taken out of context, and misinformation. An effective way to counter this phenomenon is by teaching visual literacy.
MK: Does a body of work ever begin to form strictly through the editing process? Have you ever changed the direction of a body of work midstream?
LD: I have several unrealized side projects that have come out of the editing process. When looking at my archive, I begin to see threads, either conceptual or visual, and I may pile them together to see if it's worthwhile to pursue. I have the good fortune to be an artist with too many good ideas, not enough time or organizational bandwidth to complete all of the projects, so some just rise to the top. At this point, I trust my process, so when I find the thread, I follow it. The projects don't change in the editing process. However, they do change dramatically in the printing and studio process. I am so interested in the material world, so I prefer to play in real space rather than digital space. I try to avoid at all costs what I call the digital wormhole where I am going in circles with my archive or making really bad choices in photoshop. This is all part of the process, I suppose, but I need to be mindful of limiting work on the screen.
Untitled, 2020
ORCS, 2020
Split, 2020
Basin Model, 2020
River Model, 2020
Star Sands, 2021
MK: How do you know if you're ever really done with a specific body of work? Do you ever go back to revisit images or collections to improve upon what you felt was previously finished?
LD: I am notoriously bad at ending things. There is always some kind of gradient. I have had to work on completion and clarity in many areas of my life. Astrologically speaking, I am ruled by Mercury. It has to do with my utter lack of linearity and everything existing in a web or constellation of connected elements —so there is often not an end in this formation. The only way a project ends for me is when the place ceases to exist. This happens quite frequently in my work.
Collect/Disperse is an ongoing site-specific work that I will revisit this autumn. I worked on it intensively in grad school and directly after. Because of major construction on the site, it has had a long pause. This break from the work has been productive. I think the project will take on new meaning and form in this fallow space. Originally this work was born from what was going on in my life. I think some of the best work starts from a deeply personal place. However, it was overshadowed by a personal narrative that people attached to instead of the more interesting ideas I was after. I am now able to enter the work again with more agency on how the project moving to the future.
MK: I understand that you are a part of the faculty at Anderson Ranch during the Summer months. Do you see your teaching as another extension of your photographic practice? Do you ever find that your students bring something to how you make work?
LD: Because of COVID, I have not made it out to the ranch yet but hope to in the future. I am, however, a professor at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, and yes, teaching is an extension of my practice. For me, the student-teacher relationship is symbiotic. I learn so much from my students and know they get a lot out of working with me. It is really exciting to teach photographers in this moment in history and as an interdisciplinary queer artist. I had the privilege of studying with an incredible lineage of photographers beginning with Minor White (who was a teacher of my teacher) to studying with Laura McPhee at Mass Art. It is amazing to be in the position of a bridge generation where I can bring all of the knowledge forward while simultaneously poking holes in the canon and the institution of photography as it was taught to me.
MK: What's next for you? Is there more to be done for As we play god, or are you developing any new projects in the near future?
LD: Currently, I am working in the studio at the NARS foundation in NYC with images from As we play god. I am cutting them up and turning them into installations that are conceptually congruent with the subject matter. This is my favorite part of the process.
While on sabbatical this past semester, I spent a lot of time out west in the Rio Grande Valley. I am interested in the water crisis happening with Lake Powell and Lake Mead. I feel the start of something new developing. The north and southeast have too much water and the west not enough. Because of our grotesque devotion to capitalism, the climate is out of balance. We can see the effect of these choices simply by looking at the water.
You can find more of Leah's work on their website here.
All photographs, ©Leah Dyjak
