Image courtesy Jen Bekman Gallery

Week before last, we invited you to party with us (in absentia), Sarah McKenzie, and Jen Bekman at Ms. Bekman’s Nolita gallery. This week, after a few days spent stalking the delightful Colorado-based painter, we bring you her words. But first, given that every day is Solipsism Day, a few of ours.

McKenzie’s paintings of construction sites are killer, and, if at all possible, should be seen in person. There’s something about their scale and brightness, about the different levels of paint she applies, about the combination of geometric flatness and material texture, that invites a truth out of architecture-in-progress that’s difficult to see in a photograph. Earlier work—like Lift, and Construction 4—is dense and lush. Paint is escaping the canvas, and looking at the saturated pieces makes your teeth feel a little sticky, like you just chewed on some chalk or a Mika Rottenberg cherry. Later work—like Interior and Interior 3—is flatter, the levels of distance between you and objects and objects farther away more compressed. Your eye searches less for something to hang on to with these paintings, and searches more for a way to penetrate an image that’s so unambiguous you just want to figure it out.

And that’s how we came to find Sarah, and ask her a few questions:

Why did you make the shift from aerial suburb paintings to construction sites?

This shift occurred for a few reasons. First, I made the aerial paintings from about 1999 until 2004, and after five years, I felt like that work had run its course, and I’d taken that imagery as far as I needed it to go. I’m still really proud of that work, but it was time to move on. My last “official” aerial painting, in 2004, was titled Aerial #69, so that gives you a fairly good idea of just how many paintings I produced for that series.

Coinciding with my creative desire to move on was the fact that, in 2004, I stopped using a film camera to shoot the aerial photographs from which I was painting, and I started shooting digitally. Most of my photographs were taken from hot air balloon, and although the balloon occasionally got quite low to the ground, most of the time I was floating anywhere from 200 to 1000 feet above my subject matter. When I switched to the digital camera, I was delighted to discover just how easy it was, using Photoshop, to zoom in on my high resolution photos and see tiny details up close. It sounds so simple, but really the shift in technologies was a huge catalyst for change in my work. Many of my later aerial paintings had focused on construction sites, and I was already quite interested in the structure of unfinished houses, but it was the digital camera that really made it possible for me to pursue that as a new body of work.

My first few construction paintings (from 2004-5) still included the aerial perspective, even as I began focusing on individual houses. I like the way the aerial perspective works to disorient the viewer, transforming these otherwise familiar construction sites into almost abstract compositions. Even though I have never been an abstract painter per se, I have always been interested in abstraction. In these images of unfinished architecture, I think I have found an ideal vehicle for exploring elements of abstract painting (grids, stripes, color relativity, flatness vs. depth, etc.) while still keeping one foot firmly in the realm of observation. At present, I am not taking aerial photos— I think I am able to find abstract qualities in the architecture even from ground level, but I can imagine bringing the bird’s-eye view back in at some point. Lately I’ve been taking lots of photos looking up, and that’s a perspective which can also serve to dislocate the viewer, in a good way.

I would describe the new work as being rooted in suburbia and the contemporary American landscape, but it is not about the landscape in a direct sense. For me, the work is much more about the process of building a picture on a two-dimensional surface, and I am using architecture metaphorically.

How do you look at a building-in-progress as opposed to a finished one? What are you seeing that your paintings are showing?

I really like the transitory state of the buildings I paint. When I photograph them, I am conscious that they will likely not look the same by the following week, or even the following day. So I am capturing these structures in a fleeting moment. This idea of architecture in flux interests me because, as a child, I think I regarded buildings as essentially permanent structures. I grew up in the East, where a lot of buildings are hundreds of years old, and to my ten-year-old mind, a hundred years was basically forever. It was only as a young adult that I realized just how impermanent so much of the built environment actually is—especially in suburbia. I think my recent paintings address this state of constant change. The new works are also about potential— when I see a construction site, I am captivated by the range of materials and the fascinating geometry that is revealed in the making of a building. Ultimately, the finished house (or apartment building, or bank, or strip mall) rarely lives up to my expectations. The unfinished state, when one can imagine what the building might become, is often more interesting.

How do you pick which details to focus on?

This is hard to articulate, because when I’m taking photographs at a construction site, I’m generally just trusting my gut. I’m often looking for moments where a variety of building materials—with different textures, colors, surface details—come together. Or I’m responding to some sort of pattern I observe in the wood framing or in a concrete wall. I think I am looking for moments in the architecture that remind me of abstract paintings I have seen. I’m currently working on a painting which includes a utility light with a bright yellow cord, and I recall that when I took the source photograph I thought that the cord looked just like an Abstract Expressionist brushstroke. That has become my entry point for making the painting.

There’s an amazing tactility that comes through in real life, but a total flatness at the same time. How do you do that? Why?

In the newest paintings, I am really exploring the materiality of the paint. Within a single canvas, you will find areas where the paint has been applied with a roller, juxtaposed with thick, viscous paint, slapped on with a palette knife, and still other passages where the paint is nothing more than a faint, washy stain. I am working with both oils and acrylics, and I have a range of additives that I mix in to alter the texture, viscosity, and sheen of the paint. From a distance, or seen in reproduction, each painting appears to offer a convincing, illusionistic space, but when you get up close, all these varying approaches to the paint surface cause that illusion of space to break down. The viewer is reminded that the picture is really just a series of formal decisions on a flat surface— that the painting itself is a construction.

Your later pieces—like Interior and Interior 2—seem slightly sparer than the earlier ones in the show, a little less warm and a little more defined (typically “architectural,” even.) Can you talk a little bit about that shift?

When I started doing the construction paintings, I really was focused on suburban houses, framed in with wood, and I think wood is an inherently “warm” material. I’m still doing some paintings along those lines, but in the past year, I have also begun working from photographs of commercial buildings made of steel and concrete— that’s a big change. I’ve now painted three “interiors,” and there will certainly be more to come. I was given the opportunity to roam around inside a large bank building under construction, and the day that I was there, the work site was basically shut down, so the building was empty. I was captivated by the stillness of the space. The builders had just begun installing drywall in some areas, but overall the interior was still incredibly raw. I thought, “It’s like a blank canvas,” and I knew that the resulting paintings would be more minimal than my previous work.

Can you describe your process?

Of course, the photos come first. I shoot hundreds of pictures, then dump them into iPhoto, and decide which ones are really worthy of painting. Sometimes the photos I expect to be the most promising turn out to be the least interesting once I’m viewing them on my computer screen, and I will be pleasantly surprised by an image I hardly remember shooting. I do a fair amount of cropping in Photoshop, because I like square compositions. Next, I make high resolution 8.5” x 11” prints which I take into the studio. Each painting begins with a highly-detailed-to-the-point-of-being-obsessive under-drawing, in pencil. Once that’s in place, the fun begins. I really do regard my painting process as a series of decisions. For example: “What I am going to do with that concrete wall? Will the paint be thick, matte, and gritty, evoking the tactility of concrete, or will it be a thin stain of color, suggesting at once the under-layer of a painting and the under-layer of a building?” I take liberties with color, of course, but not to the point where the space becomes completely distorted.

What’s next?

I always find this question to be a bit of a challenge, because if I talk too much about the ideas that I have for future paintings, some of my excitement for the ideas dies a bit. I know I will be painting more interiors and more construction cranes, and I want to continue to push the paint in even more dramatic ways. I’ve always worked with oils, but only in the past year have I started incorporating acrylic paint into the work as well, and that opens up a lot of material possibilities. In thinking about the “meaning” of my paintings, I’ve begun to consider how the recession and the whole mortgage crisis will ultimately impact my work. I think the economic situation is already affecting how people interpret the work. For instance, I think a lot of viewers assume that my paintings depict construction sites where the work has come to a standstill and the future remains uncertain. Although that was not my intention when I made the recent work, I’m open to that reading. It may even wind up influencing the pictures I take (and make) in the coming months.

Show’s up until April 4th and there’s a reception this Saturday. Go and buy us Interior 3? We kind of like the idea of having a spare kidney.