Astri Snodgrass lives in an artistic intersection of styles
The arresting collages of Astri Snodgrass have a raw, yet paradoxically tempered complexity that belies the simple intentions and materials—including masking tape—behind her body of work; bridging various disciplines, her distinctive abstractions combine watercolor-like qualities and jagged shapes in what can appear to be a celebration of irregularity.
Snodgrass has studied domestically and abroad in Argentina and Norway, and she joined the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Art Department last year as a lecturer in painting and drawing. Her upcoming exhibitions include the two-person show “Frame Work” with Masha Vlasova at the Fuller Projects in Bloomington, Ind. in November and a solo show at Channel to Channel in Nashville’s Packing Plant next March, and she took the time to discuss her work with The Pulse via email.
The Pulse: You use some uncommon techniques for your collages, sometimes using printmaking and photography techniques. Can you discuss these? How did you start creating work using masking tape?
Astri Snodgrass: In graduate school I was making works on cotton rag paper through a highly physical process of working reductively, like an eraser on a charcoal drawing. Masking tape was simply a tool to remove a layer of paper fiber by transferring marks from the paper to the adhesive. Each mark became doubled and inverted, like a positive and negative image in photography. Ultimately, it’s a very rudimentary kind of monotype.
The unpredictability of working blindly on the back of the tape surface keeps me in suspense. This led me to shift my focus from the paper to the tape itself as a substrate. Later, I started working with silver gelatin photograms and cyanotypes printed from the tape collages, which are somewhat translucent.
I like that with strips of masking tape, I can create the surface as I go. The abstract image and the object, by which I mean the very physicality, shape and scale of each piece, come into being at the same time. I relate this process to weaving, where the image is a part of and formed by the structure itself. This forces me to negotiate the actual structural integrity of the piece as I work, which is really more of a sculptural concern than a painterly one.
TP: Your artist statement mentions using “dumb” materials to challenge the idea of an artist’s “heroic” gesture. Can you elaborate on this and the intention behind this challenge?
AS: I think a lot about the baggage that any painter inherits along with the medium. Painting is a grandiose discipline, steeped in mastery and tradition but also problematic exclusionary histories: who has traditionally been represented in paint and in turn who has not; who historically has had access to painting as a practice and owning or viewing paintings, and who has historically been denied that access.
Because of this historical weight, I tend to avoid gestures that can be read as overly heroic, masterful, impressive or virtuosic. Bold, macho Abstract Expressionist brushwork comes to mind. I favor instead marks that reveal less of my hand than the inherent behavior of the materials. My gesture is often either amplified in scale through tears and rips, or mediated through transferring or printing.
I describe my work as situated between painting, drawing, printmaking and photography, because it really has elements of all of those disciplines. The medium of my collages can appear somewhat confounding and mysterious, even though they are comprised of the most ordinary and basic materials. I use the word “dumb” to refer to a few things.
For one, I mean that the materials and techniques that I use are so simple that they are almost comical, and as such they don’t carry the same kind of historical baggage as something like oil paint. I also like that the word can refer to muteness (as in, struck dumb or dumbfounded). One of the most captivating aspects of abstraction for me is how elusive it can be when trying to put language to it.
TP: Do you assign titles after a piece is completed, or does an initial title idea help shape how a piece turns out?
AS: Titles are so difficult! They almost always come after the work is finished. I keep lists as I work through ideas in the studio, and every so often I sit down to title a whole body of work at once. Often my titles are informed by whatever I’m reading or listening to at the time, but the best ones come from a moment of clarity during a studio visit with an artist or writer friend.
It’s such a gift when someone can enter into your space and put language to what you’re doing that fits better than any words you yourself could have strung together.