We caught up with San Francisco-based artist Jeff Eisenberg, and his pencils, about his first solo show at Swarm Gallery, opening October 30 (with a reception on Friday, November 5, 6-8PM. Live music by BEEP!). He’s preparing more than work on paper for this show (you’ll get a preview of a couple of exciting new pieces here!) - and including new media works from a collaborative project with Indiana-based artist Kristen Wilkins, “M0bile Pr4ctice”.
Swarm Gallery: So are you excited about your upcoming show at Swarm?
Jeff Eisenberg: Yeah!
SG: What words would you say best describes “Some Re-Assembly Required”?
JE: Harold and the Purple Crayon.
SG: How did you embark on this project? What piqued your interest?
JE: In a lot of ways it’s a continuation of things I’ve been exploring for a while, but in the mix are also my thoughts and frustrations about the real estate bubble burst and the economy crashing. I started addressing some of this more directly after I was at a residency in Nevada in May 2009 at this place called Goldwell Residency. The residency is next to an old mining ghost town, Rhyolite, and near Yucca Mountain. There is a lot of boom and bust stuff littered all around that region of Nevada as well as people living off the grid - opting out of the system all together as an answer to the system.
SG: You have many intersecting themes in the show (abstraction and form; space shaping and architecture; territorializing and the built environment; utopian strategies and speculative futures…). Does one top another in respect to the show, or do they have equal relevance?
JE: There isn’t one that’s more dominant than the others. When I make work it really just depends on what I’m doing with each particular piece. Some of the work in this show has more of some things than others, but for the most part it’s all going on together in my head at different stages. If I had to pick one, then I’d say “utopian strategies” and the inevitable dystopian aftermath.
SG: So how does M0bile Pr4ctice fit in?
JE: M0bile Pr4ctice is an artist team that my friend Kristen Wilkins and I formed in 2009. I met Kristen at Wabash College in Indiana, when I was there as a one-year visiting faculty member. Kristen was there as a visiting faculty member too. Her area of practice is photography and new media. We really connected in terms of our interests, especially our reaction to the economic crash. We decided to do some projects together about this. We thought it’d be fun to make a video game that looked at some of the contradicting narratives and myths in America that we believe played out in the crash: ideas about making it rich-quick on resources that we tell ourselves will never run out, the “American Dream,” always being in motion and moving up and up, and the notion of setting down roots through land ownership as a way of getting your slice of the pie, and becoming respected. Video games have always been about racking up points, vertically progressing through levels of greater and greater achievement, and gambling with the limited resource of “lives”. M0bile Pr4ctce has also done other projects that are offshoots from the video game and a lot of these projects are included the upcoming show.
SG: You’ve departed a bit from 2D drawings into installation/sculpture/sound/video. Is this a direction you will continue to move forward in?
JE: I’ll always keep drawing and painting, but I definitely see more and more of these other projects happening as I keep making work. It’s been going on for a while, even before M0bile Pr4ctice, but it’s really starting to ramp up now. It allows me to address ideas from other angles and it also lets me discover new ideas and thoughts I might not realize when I’m drawing or painting. Plus it’s kind of addictive. The other thing I like about it is that it’s very social, or at least it is the way I go about doing it. I wind up working with lots of other people to make it happen, sometimes because I don’t always have all the training and know-how, or other times because the idea for it actually requires other people to participate.
SG: Ah. The core of collaboration. There is a “social experiment” aspect to the show. Care to share?
JE: Yeah, M0bile Pr4ctice has this piece in the show called Swap Meet. It’s a long table with cut and fold paper sculptures set on the table. The sculptures are inspired from the video game, and each has a Lot #. We will post on Craigslist, in the “wanted” section of the “for sale” listings. The listings will ask for different things for trade for the paper sculptures according to Lot #. So for example, there might be a listing designated with Lot #4 that asks to trade a paper sculpture of a trailer for a pencil drawing of an old tire. Anyone can come in to the show with a pencil drawing of an old tire and grab the trailer that’s numbered Lot #4. The drawing can be totally crappy, it doesn’t matter, just so long as it’s hand made and signed. The paper sculptures are made from digital print-outs, and they’re signed M0bile Pr4ctice, but the signature is typed, not hand signed. The idea is to set up an alternative, barter economy in the gallery, so it circumvents the traditional capital model for the commercial gallery (sorry, Swarm. Um, no problem, Jeff). It also plays with the idea of how we value art. Someone who might not be an artist hand crafts a one of a kind work - maybe they do a really good job too- and then trades it for something that we can make a zillion identical copies of and don’t even bother to hand sign. It gets into the issues of how perception and speculation alone stands at the heart of our economy. But to be fair, the sculptures are really cute and cute things make you feel good. That’s worth something.
SG: Getting back to the works on paper (which are stellar, by the way), who/what are your primary architectural influences for your drawings?
JE: It varies depending on the body of work or project. For the set of drawings I’ve done for this show, things I encountered in Nevada were a big influence - ranging from the derelict buildings of the strip in Vegas, the old mining towns and the kinds of structures that once existed in support of mining operations, and the un-incorporated compounds out in the desert. Along with that there were also the kinds of squatter communities and structures I saw when I was in Berlin this past spring and the things I saw in Detroit this summer. Buildings that had a sense of being re-purposed for one enterprise or another, or buildings that have been stripped bare for whatever valuable parts they had. Basically, abandoned structures that people saw as open ranges of new opportunity.
Don’t miss Jeff’s upcoming show! Check our web site for more details.
