Labrish, and other words
Eliza Myrie
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Eliza Myrie works with the in-between spaces—clothing lines, masonry, fences, kinetic boundaries, language. A particular tenderness charges the spaces she moves through (both physically and metaphorically) and in the intimate relationship Myrie has with her materials. Her work asks viewers to question the complexities of personal experience, form, culture, and environment.
Our interview with Myrie explores her artistry and process, her work to connect and support black artists in the Chicago community, and her upcoming projects.
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COURTNEY SIMCHAK: What drew you to working as an artist? Have you always been artistic or was it an interest that came later in life?
ELIZA MYRIE: I’ve always been interested, you know. I was a Girl Scout and made all kinds of crafts and stayed after school to work on projects created by my art teachers, but I didn’t always think of it as a professional interest. I went to college thinking I was going to become a scientist, working in a lab and wearing a white coat. Turns out I had some less than positive experiences early on with science professors and redirected myself to art. I was really welcomed there and, of course, we can think of them as very similar practices.
I’ve also spoken about my practice in the past couple of years as a sort of inheritance or lineage in the family business. My father is a brick mason, and while it took me some time to realize, I now admit I am partly working in that image of physical laboring and making.
SIMCHAK: Have you always worked in sculpture and installation? What are the best and most frustrating parts about working in 3-dimensional spaces?
MYRIE: Sculpture definitely has my heart. It was one of the first things I was formally taught, but I also really deeply love printmaking. There is an analogous physical process in printmaking and a kind of methodicalness that I revel in and love fussing over.
One of the things that excites me most about sculpture and installation are multiples and objects either at a miniature or monumental scale. I’m attracted to the implications of looking and positioning that miniature and monumental scales present. I love small component parts that materialize into something much larger or a more expansive installation in space.
Material proficiency is sort of two sides of the same coin—frustrating and rewarding—aspect of sculpture. I don’t usually work with anything chemically complex, but I do work across a variety of materials and at times combine things not meant to meet. Succeeding at and perfecting one’s personal material vocabulary, where you plan to join things together in a very specific way and it works, is such a joy. The work of sculpture is that there are many iterations before that joyful time where they do not join in harmony, and that is the space where you learn about the material and the object itself. The scientist in me still reigns in this way.
SIMCHAK: What kind of art practice do you have, when working on a new project? Do you have a particular routine of how to approach new work or an art problem?
MYRIE: I see my work as a series of connected points, a kind of constellation model, where it is necessary to look at the works in the context of the whole practice. Things can be fragmented or faceted as I work at rendering a whole. This also looks like a lot of overlapping thematics, from work to work. As a model, this looks like circling around or triangulating around a problem or concept.
I’ve been detached from working in one specific studio for the last few years, working intensely via residencies outside of my own space or wherever I may be. A lot of the thinking and creating has happened outside the traditional frame of the capital “S” studio. I like having to be flexible with realizing work. It teaches you things about your practice. You can consider and imagine in-between places, while traveling, waiting. Turning over the observations you have in the world that stick with you is an incredibly important part of working for me. When I say observations that stick with you, it usually means something that seems not quite right. I used to cite rage specifically as a motivating factor in the work, the anger that came up as I did mull something over and became increasingly frustrated that x, y, or z was not being paid enough attention to. I think I’ve softened a bit into a more nuanced set of relations and understanding of my subject position in the world, how people see me and how I see myself within the systems of society.
I do feel kind of obsessed with these extremely small perspectival shifts from one to the other. It feels like rubbing two fingers together, the smallest recognitions between positions can be so enlightening and informative to how we operate and construct our interactions with ourselves and one another in the world.
SIMCHAK: Can you talk a little bit about your most recent project, “garden/ruinate” and your collaboration with the Arts Club of Chicago?
MYRIE: I was invited to realize “garden/ruinate” by Daly Arnett and Janine Mileaf, and it has been a lovely experience with the Arts Club. There is a main interior traditional gallery space and a fenced exterior garden space, which hosts a little bit more atypical and obviously outdoor projects, in what has been deemed a semi-public space. When I first was imagining the project, I was really focused on being able to make something that was available without obstruction to people passing by but also being able to welcome people to gather in this garden. The term garden was crucial, I really wanted to frame this as a question of the possibility of cultivation and harvest.
This ten-panel fence, a literal framing device, kept sort of shorting out how I thought of the experience of viewing sculpture. One of my favorite art-viewing experiences was walking right up to the edge of Michael Heizer’s “North, East, South, West” and seeing unexpected forms and shapes of those voids rush back up to me. I wasn’t planning on making Heizer’s, but I didn’t like the restrictions of form that semi-public setup.
After some conversation, it made the most sense to address the issue of the separation itself set up by the Arts Club. And because a part of my practice is to engage socially the work really became about how to negotiate access to that space for people within this specific site. Thankfully everyone worked with me to temporarily remove a panel of their fence and install a gate in a vernacular architectural style of Jamaica, many island regions really. The installation of this gate allowed people to access the garden directly which had also been fitted with these piers and bamboo trees.
The gate is temporary and I think the question that has yet to be answered is what will happen when the exhibition ends and the institution replaces my gate with an inaccessible fence panel? What does that mean for their engagement with different publics, who does a project like this benefit long-term, the artist or the institution?
SIMCHAK: Many of your projects have an element of performance to them, whether the performance is actually portrayed or not. I think this is one of the aspects of your work that makes it so powerful– your presence and thought process are built into each piece and require their consideration, whether you’re physically performing or not. Can you talk a little bit about what your relationship to vulnerability and intimacy is, as an artist, and how you navigate this in your work?
MYRIE: This is the newest element of my work and one that I haven’t entirely accounted for. I have been making performative objects and in their realization find that I am the one to be in collaboration with or expected to activate them. That may sound sort of backward, that the object tells me and not the other way around, but I don’t start out thinking that I am going to be specifically visualized but in the making that partnership becomes clear; it is not scenography or choreography for another, I am specifically required to be present in my work.
I have wanted to unsettle how pat the work can be to some degree. I think it figures itself out and that can limit the opportunity for some chaos I want in the work, let’s say lite chaos, which I think is why the performative element can be exciting. I don’t want to deaden what has begun to happen there and I am leaving room for the possibilities of the performative and not scrutinizing too much. I care deeply about the subjects I’ve taken up in the work and that subject is really, mostly, if not entirely black women, their material and psychic conditions. In my own thinking, the performative element is shifting a distinction and separation I’ve made, and maybe this is a delusion in my own mind, I have between myself and the work. I want separation but this may not be possible as I am myself the subject and one that also operates as a proxy for other black women.
SIMCHAK: Much of your work explores the visible and invisible divisions that exist within the world around us—energetic, cultural, physical—especially in black communities. This takes place in the form of physical barriers, like walls, masonry and physical resistance, such as your piece, “ring.” But, you also work with more subtle barriers, like in language, culture, and gesture. What draws you to these concepts over and over again?
MYRIE: This seems to be a thing, doesn’t it? Aren’t all these separations really just fake and arbitrary though? Like fences and walls? What really is property ownership? What I really think my engagement with these boundaries, real or imagined, is a method/tool/formula that forces an examination between things and how things marked for division are actually connected. They support one another, even in their distinction!
My series of text works, “labrish,” for instance, vacillate between spellings in English and Jamaican Patois. I like thinking about the fact that positionally patois is the deviation from the standard. But how can that be when the speaker has mastered the standard as well as creating an additional system of nuance that the originator does not have access to? Look, I’m not a linguist, but I am interested in our shifting subject positions in the face of things like language and cultural translation. It is exciting to think about.
I’m interested in problems with language and lots of other things. But for example, my experience of spoken Jamaican patois does not include any gender pronoun differentiations, everyone is ‘him’. On the one hand, great, everyone is equally flattened on the other I want to look closely at all the ramifications this has for the obviously patriarchal society of Jamaica and what the lack of individuation in language and further in life means for being a part of this society.
I do feel kind of obsessed with these extremely small perspectival shifts from one to the other. It feels like rubbing two fingers together, the smallest recognitions between positions can be so enlightening and informative to how we operate and construct our interactions with ourselves and one another in the world.
The most important part of the Retreat for me was the care and generosity it offered to other artists. There aren’t a lot of moments to collectively celebrate the position of the artist, let alone the black artist, without qualification, no show, no award. Don’t get me wrong the art world is coming very late to celebrate individuals but in some ways, this reinforces models of scarcity and competition I can’t or don’t want to get with.
SIMCHAK: Do you have any favorite artists or writers you find provide inspiration or support in your work?
MYRIE: Gosh, the ways I am reading and looking right now are sort of AT EVERYTHING. I’m like a Sankey diagram with 1000 needle thin lines to seemingly unrelated topics and makers. Water and fountains have been a focus in the last few years so I am looking for artists variously imaging water, Sugimoto’s 1980 photograph “Caribbean Sea, Jamaica,” Roy DeCarava’s 1985 “Dark Water,” André Kertész’s 1917 “[Underwater Swimmer],” Vija Celmins are all in rotation. I like thinking about those in relation to like to Robert Smithson’s concrete pour for inclusion in the MCA Chicago’s 1969 exhibition “Art By Telephone.” I’m always looking at Lorraine O’Grady, Teresa Margolles, Beverly Buchanan, N. Dash. Writing-wise Sylvia Wynter is the ultimate guide at the moment, providing deep thoughtful analysis and a guide to the scholarly work of so many others. Michelle Cliff’s novels played centrally into my thinking for my Arts Club project and happily that had me reading a lot of Adrienne Rich as well. I don’t know, this is like a section of it, I feel like artists can go on and on about influence.
SIMCHAK: How did you get involved as a co-founder for Black Artists Retreat [B.A.R.]? What has it been like to be involved in such an important community space in Chicago? How does this work fit into the conception of your studio practice?
MYRIE: Chicago is great because it is a big, but sort of quiet city that keeps up an active arts community. It feels as though everyone interfaces with one another through all of the cultural goings-on pretty quickly. So, the genesis of wanting to foster a space of fellowship, rejuvenation, and intellectual rigor for black artists specifically was a natural deepening of the kind of community that existed in town already.
The most important part of the Retreat for me was the care and generosity it offered to other artists. There aren’t a lot of moments to collectively celebrate the position of the artist, let alone the black artist, without qualification, no show, no award. Don’t get me wrong the art world is coming very late to celebrate individuals, but in some ways, this reinforces models of scarcity and competition I can’t or don’t want to get with. What I hoped [B.A.R.] did was to offer opportunities to artists to engage and meet one prior to other institutional, more charged arenas. If two black artists met at [B.A.R.] in advance of being in an exhibition together or in grad school together, that’s a potential alliance that can alter their power in spaces where they are often few and far between.
Being a co-founder and director for so many years allowed me to be caring for other artists and that work has brought me a lot of joy but my studio practice was in a secondary position for some time, and that becomes untenable for anyone who really loves the work of the studio. Working for and supporting black artists remains in my practice through work I do with The Black Lunch Table editing a specific set of Wikipedia articles about the life and work of black artists. It also lives in a newer nascent project, “Call Me Now!”, a hotline for black artists. Self-identifying black artists can call 1-833-4BLKART, leave a message which is populated on a feed, builds an archive of artists’ voices, and sets up a new set of connections and solutions for artists.
SIMCHAK: Do you have any exciting news or a new project you’d like to share?
MYRIE: I’m going to be in New York for some time participating in the Whitney Independent Study Program, and I’m excited about fabricating new work while here. I’m working on some hand-blown hourglasses as a component part of a new sculpture. Also, a colleague, Joanna Roche, from The Ox-Bow School of Art, where we were both teaching this past summer, introduced me to klepsydras, ancient devices that measured and kept time using water. I am looking forward to getting into some research about those!
Eliza Myrie received her MFA from Northwestern University and BA from Williams College and was a participant at The Skowhegan School. Myrie has been in residence at Yaddo, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, The MacDowell Colony, and Arts and Public Life at The University of Chicago. Myrie is a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a co-founder of The Black Artists Retreat [B.A.R.].