The Conspiracy Of Interpretation: An Interview With Rhonda Schaller - Robert Blanchon

RB: I think we should start with anything you want to say first.

RS: I love what I'm doing.

RB: What are the circle shapes and how often do you draw?

RS: The shapes are usually me or someone else playing a prominent role in my life at the time of the drawing. I draw all the time. I draw to reconnect with the studio. I draw to know my feelings better. I always draw before, during, and after a sculpture. The drawings are a link between me and the sculpture, as well as a link between my feelings and the outside world. It's like keeping a journal.

RB: Are the drawings finished artwork?

RS: It's funny, I don't think of them in that way, but more as thoughts and less like sentences. They are moments in time, where the sculptures are journeys.

RB: It's interesting that you sue the words journal and journey to describe the process of drawing and how it leads to the sculptures.

RS: The drawings are a moment of time, a way to place me in a context. The circles are different parts of me. Sometimes I feel really conflicted. For instance the chaos drawings are very emotional.

RB: They are expressionistic. Whereas, I find the other drawings more controlled with clean backgrounds, completely different in regards to a free-for-all emotional expression, cold even. Considering both, its important to explain why these aren't artworks since, for me, there is something incredibly intriguing about the psychological space in between the chaotic imagery and the clean drawings. Such a vast difference in style creating a curious change that remains unrecorded.

RS: the in-between spaces are the sculptures. The drawings are anchors, they are more analytical.

RB: There is a great deal of personal information, as well as ideas and beliefs you have about defining "self". What about communication? That's a word truly important to me and my work.

RS: I don't see my role as an artist as the conveyor of information. I feel I am creating spaces, giving objects meaning. What I am really interested in is creating a place where people can approach the work and have an experience that belongs to them - one not dictated or communicated by me, but by them. Shaman Song is about death for me but it can be about anything for a viewer. In my own life, I believe that a visceral reaction to art comes from the belly - much like how the drawings are made. (Rhonda is gyrating her hips and motioning her hand too and from her belly in a circular rhythmic pattern) It is here, from someone's belly that they may hate the work, love the work, or bring them from X to Y to Z. In this form, the sculptures are like alters, to be approached and experienced. People can come to the altar and go off on their own journey. It's not important to me if their journey parallels mine - I suspect their direction will be completely theirs. I'm more interested in getting people to move from their bellies and their heads - I don't want them to think about the work. I want them to feel the work -- a relationship between them and their world, what I consider a healing journey that leads them to another place. If they get it - meaning what I've been through to make the work, than that's truly fascinating. However, its not required.

RB: Well, it's important to confess that I know little about the belly. I don't know if I even have a belly. What is the chance of myself, with only my mind active, understanding this journey of healing?

RS: Good question. That's fine. I want the work to move you, I want you to have a response. If it is a matter of thought, thinking your way through the work, that's great.

RB: This brings me to question you about what is a very individual and personal visual vocabulary for you. The reason I say this is not out of an interest to babble on about what constitutes art, since I think we can agree such a discussion would be an empty melodramatic conversation best left to those with too much free time. What I think does warrant discussion is the materials you use in the objects. Wax, wire net, dried flowers, and paint come together to create romantic, painful, and deliciously vulgar sculptures. Consider I'm on a game show and asked to describe your work in 2 or less words, I'd say baby baskets. You must hate those 2 words.

RS: It used to drive me crazy.

RB: If the game show increased the earnings by limiting me to one word, I'd say coffins or death. They look like you've beaten the hell out of a precious vessel for dead ideas or emotions. Is this pain in your belly? I pick up on the pain in my head. When your hands were gesturing to and from your belly, I was thinking I have never made such bodily movements. At least pertaining to my work, or too much subsequent discussion about art in general. And here you are about ready to fly out of here (the studio being a metaphor for the world at this point). You're hoping something will come our of a spectators belly, where I dream of knocking loudly on peoples' heads. The belly is perhaps the best analytical description of your sculpture. I think they look like bellies (now the metaphor for life) that had their heads ripped out.

RS: From a pure thought space, I have always been fascinated with caverns, and specifically what is held and what is released. What overflows. What do we give. What do we hold onto. It's a very female place. I am the vessel. I am the house. Out of that house springs forth light and birth. From an alternative spiritual place, the belly is the location of personal power. Right below this is sexuality and spirituality - the creative center. And right below that is the right to exist. For me, my art making rises up from the base of the spine into the space of existence and spirituality and sexuality. The driving shapes and forms of my work rise up and finally exit my body and enter clearer places of interpretation that exist outside of my ego and self. Here is where ideas of myself as a creator come into play. Here the work manifests into objects that are fluid and representative of bodily functions. This process about healing, is a wonderful experience that I hope someone approaching the work will be able to access as a process for themselves . It is not necessarily about feeling good, just truly feeling at all. Being alive, feeling alive. This is healing.

RB: I know you well enough to know that what you say is true to you. And learning more about how you live life certainly informs me and aides my understanding of your artwork. However, I never approach things with my belly. It's always my head. We might agree that what you have going on down there (pointing to his abdomen), I have going on up here (pointing to his head), and that it's not so oppositional as one might think. I find the work to possess a medicinal reference, like dried remedies that were created to fail. Instead of healing, the work appears to be more about death.

RB: Our differences in personal conviction frames the meaning of and responses to our art. For example, your work seems raw, al most ugly, definitely elegant and always presentable. I don't find the work to be unfinished in any way. Now knowing how you work, knowing about the healing, the journey, if not having seen anything, I would suspect the work to feel open-ended, perhaps in a state of continuous change. For example, the drawings feel more connected to your work process that the sculpture, which is very punctuated.

RS: I understand what you are saying, and I feel I need to explain more about what a journey is to me. A journey is complete with each step. So, I will work on a piece for months, some take what seems like forever. Journey means entering a place and being present. And once your present you're done. In a way, they are meditations on pain endured during the journey. That's probably why you find them complete and punctuated. Certainly, the drawings would seem unfinished since they are more like thoughts during the journey. The sculpture is when the journey ends.

RB: I do know how personal this work is to you and what you been through in your own life hat has brought you to a place where such work would be made. I believe there is a system of signs in place, shared by all the work you make in different ways. These signs are in the fluids like shapes. I see canals and entryways into vulnerable spaces - incredibly sexualized places. While some of this might be from the belly, they are fairly universal in meaning.

RS: I've been working with wax since 1980. I used to work in clay. Someone said use wax; you could do more with it. I find most of the materials, like the birdcage. It's interesting to use objects and materials that someone else has discarded and bring a somewhat posthumous meaning to what was thrown away, or regarded as meaningless.

RB: The potential references and almost imitations of bodily fluids is my favorite element in your work. These might be found by others to be ugly or discomforting, in terms of the coffin shape (lets be damn clear these are not baskets people) and the vulgar quality of materials. Yet, its fascinating that the sculptures are all these things as well as being beautiful and elegant.

RS: Its really about death. There were a lot of things dying in me. The wife. Rhonda the wife for 7 years is dead. Some of these are actually meant to be urns or shrouds.

RB: This piece (pointing to Death on the Nile) if about death, also feels like salvation. And we know that's something you like. The salvations being the boat-like quality of the object floating down a river desiring to be found. There is a distinct feeling of rage in most of this work.

RS: I think rage is beautiful. It's very hard for me to be angry. To get in touch with my rage is often impossible. Rage is gorgeous. Rage is like a woman eating her enemies, elegant in a way, it sets me free.

RB: Your work, stemming from such a personal place, really suggests to people to get closer, come to the work and enter. It's intimate. It sucks you into it.

RS: The idea of movement, and truth, is about being present. The journey, as we talked about, is about getting somewhere and staying idle.

RB: Another part of your work is how damn hard you work. I work in a very plotted manner, like a film script. You don't have a destination. I want to say, hey Rhonda, go this way, go that way, go this way … The fact that you seek from your work opportunities to grow yourself is part of a fantasy of mine. I always think my work will do something good for me. I've waited this long. I can wait longer. The drawings, knowing what I now know, see more vulnerable for you than the sculpture.

RS: And I didn't start sharing them until recently.

RB: But you've done them all along?

RS: Yes. People started buying them off the studio wall. When I was pregnant, I couldn't work with the wax, or any toxic materials, so I drew even more. That's when I did the pregnancy diaries.

RB: I'm going to suggest a bit of self disclosure, as if we haven't killed that concept already, and end this discussion with each of us sharing something we held back on and why. We can start by noting that we replaced a traditional catalogue essay or interview with an open-ended discussion between two friends who are also artists. The last note could be anything ranging from you saying, "shit, I should have insisted on a traditional essay" to me saying "how well do I know Rhonda and will she still love me knowing I don't have soul or spirit".

RS: Yes, I still love you. On one hand, I am very connected to this work. I am living this work. On the other, I was terrified you would question the validity of what is personal in regards to artistic process, and I would be stuck explaining myself.

RB: Well, I wish I went first, because you essentially expressed what I held back on during this talk. The most obvious thing about me I didn't share with you is that I am faithless. And in some way, this has prevented me from fully understanding your work. I did not bring it up or assertively question your philosophy of the belly or healing, etc. Mostly, I chose not to enter a debate on such beliefs because it would then suggest to you that you should question my own philosophy or psychology. I did not say that I think we all lack purpose and life is a fairly empty, therefore leaving the darkness to find the light is a bit of a pipe dream. I held back, well until now, out of respect to you and to the work. I think this is going to be a great show.

... Like the young trees in the wintertime, I'll know how to build. After all the tears we've spent, how can we make amends? So, its one more round for experience, and I'm on the road again. And it's going to take sometime this time ... The Carpenters (as randomly appeared on the tape immediately following our discussion; we used a discarded tape).

Robert Blanchon
The Conspiracy of Interpretation
Catalogue essay; Shared Stories, Recycled and Retold
Ceres Gallery NYC 1995