For Deborah Anzinger, Ecology Is Of Utmost Importance
Deborah Anzinger, I am so glad to have the opportunity to conduct this interview with you, not only because I have long admired your work as a visual artist, but because I also have tremendous respect for the work you do in building and facilitating the art ecology on the island. Let’s start off then with you telling us what the New Local Space (NLS) is and why you decided to start NLS in Kingston?
Thank you, Jacqueline, for creating space to discuss this work. New Local Space is a visual art initiative that I started when I moved my studio to Kingston from Washington, DC, in 2012. At the time I didn’t have a feeling that there was a space in Kingston for the formation of community around the visual arts beyond art school. I also took note of the lack of infrastructural support for artists who were committed to challenging work, and wondered what could happen for these artists, their practices and our space locally if there was investment in them critically, socially and financially.
NLS programming includes artist residencies, curatorial fellowships, internships, exhibitions, guest lectures and a podcast. Our space is also available for rental to creatives for independent pop-up events. NLS has presented exhibitions and other programming including the work of local, regional and international artists such as Oneika Russell, Phillip Thomas, Leasho Johnson, T’waunii Sinclair, Kelley-ann Lindo, Prudence Lovell, Camille Chedda, Rodell Warner, Wilmer Wilson IV, Kearra Amaya Gopee, Marlon James, Deborah Jack, Autumn Knight, Julia Phillips, Joiri Minaya, Cooking Sections, Alberta Whittle, María Magdalena Campos Pons and others.
A Nextgen partnership with the Prince Claus Fund partially funds all aspects of our programming. The grant is aimed at supporting the work of people aged 35 years and younger whose artistic practices help to shape ideas and discussions on gender. The funding from the Nextgen partnership has gone towards providing work stipends for art practitioners in our programme and paid internships; expanding our building for more studio and exhibition space; and to help pay staff. From the total NLS revenue, about 80% of our income goes directly to artists in our programmes. This revenue comes not only from partnerships, but via individual donations that we get throughout the year and during fund-raising, as well as from sales of art during our exhibitions. There are a number of non-monetary ways the community also supports the work NLS does too. Support also comes in the form of publications about our work (like this interview), donations of books and journals to our library, and from audio recording studio Creative Sounds which has, among other things, allowed us space to share the property at 190 Mountain View Avenue with them.
Turning to your work as a visual artist, someone I think we both know, esteemed Caribbean art historian Dr Erica Moiah
James said recently to me about your work, that you are “slaying” these days. Three major exhibitions in 2019! Firstly, what media artist do you understand yourself to be, and why? Secondly, am I correct in sensing a new momentum to your work? If yes, what is propelling this new work?
Though my foundation in art is as a painter, I work across media in painting, sculpture and video. I would say I have become more confident while focusing on the subjects I feel to be important. I think art that intersects with environmental issues may have been culturally easier to sidestep or be seen as separate or irrelevant to society and popular culture. Now that we are bombarded with massive environmental catastrophes, it is perhaps easier to see how our social, cultural and economic activities are inextricably linked to the environment. So maybe my work feels more relevant to other people now. Regardless, I’ve done the emotional work of understanding that even if the work I do doesn’t get airplay, it doesn’t mean it’s not important to do.
I’ve taken the same approach with founding and directing NLS. I think people
really didn’t understand NLS at first. I used to get questions about why anyone would ever start a non-profit art space. For several years of its operation,
NLS programming ran on income I earned independently from other work. I believe that culture has other, more important, purposes than being an exploitable resource.
The land and ecology are baseline issues in your work. It is what you return to, time and time again. Why are issues of ecology of such importance (to you)?
How can ecology not be of importance? Every aspect of my survival is dependent on the environment — clean water, the air we breathe, a climate suitable for the masses of us who don’t live in air conditioning — these essentials are all results of the work non-human life forms do. It seems self-destructive on a personal and cultural level to rely on economic and social systems that compromise the availability of clean water, fresh air, and a suitable climate. This is as self-destructive as it is to invest in a system that is premised on domination and extracting the most from each other with as little as possible in return, eroding trust and social safety nets.
I feel my own mortality and precariousness and it heightens this awareness of co-dependence on the environment. It may also be that working during summers of my teen years for my father who is an environmental scientist, and studying biology in school gave me this perspective of the natural systems that comprise the watersheds where we get our drinking water, and the complex milieu and interdependencies required for living cells to survive in a lab in the case of the latter.
As it relates to the land and ecology, you have paid particular attention to how colonialism in places like Jamaica structures people’s relationship to the land. Given that we are in a postcolonial period right now, why should one still look to the impacts of colonialism on the local ecology? Isn’t there a danger, in doing so, of obviating present-day responsibilities?
I pay attention to how imperialism continues to structure our relationship to each other as well as to the land. These relationships seem to follow the same pattern: Our most fundamental, precarious and valuable resources are cheaply traded or sold to centers of power — human and natural resources — from exploited bodies, to the sacrificing of watersheds, mangrove forests, coral reefs and other resources for mining and tourism today. So while one might say we are in a postcolonial period right now, we are still very much in the clutches of imperialism.
In your work you utilise the Aloe Barbadensis plant paired with polystyrene and mirrors to “embody more complicated understandings of relations and existence to the “other”. Can you firstly, explain what you mean by this statement and why you utilise those particular objects? Secondly, I did a quick Internet search and learnt that the Aloe Barbadensis originated on the Arabian Peninsula. What do you make of this plant’s relationship to Jamaica and the larger Caribbean vis-à-vis the colonialism discourse you talk about and how the plant is recouped and used in your work?
When we think of freedom and exploitation, we tend to think in racial and gender terms.
I think if we look at ourselves carefully we will find blind spots on how even as people on the losing end of capitalism, and imperialism in general, living in geo-politically marginalised spaces, we’ve adopted these same destructive modalities and continue to give them life and deploy them in our personal and economic relationships on to bodies so we can exert power over, human and non-human. My work is very much about playing with systems, reconfiguring space and our position in that space, our relationship to other bodies, and possibilities for dislocating hierarchies of power and value.
Bringing living plants into the paintings and sculptures decentres the issue of exploitation, extraction, imperialism from only being a social problem to being a larger ecological problem incorporating both human and non-human life. The journey of Aloe Barbadensis and other plants with us across the globe, as well as how we have relied on this plant in particular throughout human history is a testament to how inextricably tied we are to nature. Mirrors, which physically reflect the viewer, are a device for bringing our own blind spots into the fore, implicating even the bystander both in the present systems we negotiate in, as well as possibilities for a different system.
In practical terms, can you explain how you use the Aloe Barbadensis in work that is exhibited? I am assuming that the plant has to be transported and it has to be cared for during exhibition and I am wondering how those practicalities are facilitated and if that too is part of the story that you are telling?
I source the plants locally wherever the work will be exhibited. So the sculptures and paintings are shipped from Jamaica without the plant. The living aloe in the paintings and sculptures has to be cared for, for the duration of the exhibition, whether that is one month, six months or a year. They require someone to look after them, ensure they are getting adequate light and water. I talk with and write instructions for the staff at the gallery or museum where the work is being shown in advance about how to care for the plants. It makes the work more challenging to show but it also ekes out space for consideration and care of a particular life form with little agency, which happens to be a species we’ve extracted from and used a lot throughout the course of humanity.
One of the joys of the interview series is that oftentimes readers come away feeling that they get to know someone outside of their work. Can you then tell us something of your childhood, where you were born and grew up, what schools you attended, and how someone who is a noted visual artist ended up having a PHD from Rush University Medical Center?
I was born and raised in St Andrew in a family of five with three girls. I attended St Hugh’s Prep School and then Campion College, where I studied the sciences and art. I decided I would be an artist when I was a little girl but my parents told me I was too smart to focus my studies on art. After sixth form I attended UWI for a year. I went on to study at a small liberal arts college, Washington College in Maryland, where I was required to take courses in a wide range of subjects, along with the biology courses for my major, which included art courses. From there I went on to attain a PHD at Rush University Hospital in Chicago where I studied immunology and focused on working out mechanisms of HIV neuropathogenesis. During this period of my life I felt lost, miserable and that I was without direction. I did continue to draw and paint, and take art courses independently while I was completing the PHD programme at Rush. I got married while in grad school and we moved to Washington, DC, where Josh did a post-doctoral fellowship at the National Institute of Health and I joined an art collective and worked at a non-profit art gallery. This was a period of exponential self-directed learning and financial struggle for me since I was working outside of the field I was formally educated in. I used the
time to learn a lot though, and had so many educational resources I accessed for free while living in DC.
I note too that you have been the recipient of several notable and quite prestigious artist residencies. Can you detail some of the residencies you have had and tell us the impact being at these residencies have had on your work and its development?
I guess the most prestigious residency would be Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, but I’ve also done residencies at Ox-bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency in Michigan, and Pyramid Atlantic then located in Silver Spring, Maryland. Residencies have been formative times for me to do emotional work and confront the concerns that are central to my practice. There have also been times where I am juggling less day-to-day errands, since I am physically away from NLS and regular routines and don’t have to worry about basic things like making meals. Residencies are also a time of exchange between artists who have mutual respect for each other’s work, where we lend intellectual and technical support and feedback.
Grants, honoraria and fellowships I’ve been awarded in this time are just as important, as they allow me to make work in my local context rooted to the issues and challenges I’m addressing. This also means I don’t have to worry so much about the international logistics of transporting materials or work I’ve made at the residency back to my studio.
The titles you give to your work absolutely fascinate me and time and time again I find myself wondering, where does she find these titles? Similarly, in a work that you had in the Jamaica Biennial in the past I know you drew upon the work of Guyanese writer Wilson Harris in producing it. Consequently, how do you (or might you) use creative writing in your work as a visual artist?
I usually create the titles for my work based on personal experiences. I use the titles to weave personal experiences together with larger themes, the immediacy of materiality and visual abstraction.
I have admired how surrealism in literature can be used to connect disparate elements, and weave together the physical world with the imagination. I was particularly taken with the instability of the structured, physical world in Wilson Harris’ book Palace of the Peacock, and how that was used to write about race, gender and the environment. I thought it had some similarity to what I was trying do visually, and I think reading this gave me more confidence to continue imagining different relational structures. Though her writing is more along the lines of science fiction, in the past Octavia Butler has been inspiring for me in her ability to reconfigure social and environmental relationships in unexpected ways.
I also found it personally inspiring that Wilson Harris didn’t formally study literature or creative writing; he studied land surveying and I liked how that first-hand experience with the land, the flora and the fauna as a surveyor could ultimately be channelled and appropriated into a different discipline to shape our understanding of the land and social conflict.
Finally, in addition to being a visual artist and art facilitator you are also a wife and mother. What role if any would you say being a mother has played in you becoming the visual artist you are today? Oftentimes, motherhood has been posited as the detriment to women artists, but it does not seem to be so in your case at all. Also, what are you working on these days?
Hmmm…. I’m not really a wife in the sense that there are wifely roles and duties. I do have a life partner, whom I share creating the best possible life for our children with, based on our individual strengths. In order for me to be able to do the work I do, there has to be equitability in our home, workload has to be equitably distributed. I’ve worked through and left behind the idea that raising children and making a home is a sacrifice borne by the mother, even though there is labour I do that he physically cannot. It is my experience that people better understand the value of creating something if they share in doing the work. I have daughters and I think it’s important for me, as one of their first role models, to cultivate the types of gender and racial relationships, as well as relationships with themselves, that imbues in them the imagination to sustain a life in which they have agency, and are empowered to affect their social and physical environment in mindful, generative ways.
These days I am doing what I generally do. Currently, I am planning an environmental sculpture and paintings in the studio, trying to manage the administrative work and travelling that comes along with exhibiting the work. I’m working with the art community through NLS.
I’m doing a lot of gardening.
I plan to work more with an environmental organisation
I’ve worked with recently. I’m taking care of and cherishing my daughters, a seven-month-old and an 11-year-old about to take PEP; enjoying spending time with family. I’m continuing to create quiet time and space where I am less accessible and manage my emotional health.
The Gymnast & Other
Positions is Jacqueline Bishop’s most recent book, which was awarded the 2016 OCM Bocas Award in Non-fiction. Bishop, an associate professor at New York University, is also the author of My Mother Who Is Me: Life Stories from Jamaican Women in New York and Writers Who Paint/painters Who Write: Three Jamaican Artists. She was a 2008-2009 Fulbright Fellow to Morocco, and the 2009-2010 Unesco/fulbright Fellow.