Stills
Forget Me, I Won't Forget You Untitled (form) Untitled (Vortex) Fig. 06- Suspended Action Potential(encephalogram) Untitled (photogenic drawing) Untitled (audubon oaks) Plastic Gulf (video still) Jane, Jane Doe Untitled (Wild Wood i) Hybrid Woman Memorial to Topsy Untitled (oak) Untitled (river) Heads Manifest Dirty/Pure 2 One Without the Other (video still) Steady Star (video still)Lee Deigaard
“Grapple with your gorgeous visions and don’t let the striving get in the way of making.”
Dash took a mini vacay to NOLA last March. After only four days of white witches, unhealthy food, art shows galore, amazing live music and EPIC hangovers we made nice with some of the greatest movers and shakers in the New Orleans arts scene. Our new mates took us to the Bywater for studio visits and peeks at emerging galleries. It was here that I saw the one thing that made my brain truly melt in this vivid outrageous place – the works of Lee Deigaard at The Front Gallery.
Lee is a soothsayer of words and the visual arts, to boot. She works in 2D and 3D. She draws, paints, takes photographs, uses video, sculpts, and installs. It seems like she works ritualistically yet erratically, going off on tangents only to return to her work’s themes with more conviction.
Craig Cameron/Dashboard Co-op: What educational experience altered or enhanced how you approach and develop your work, ideas, and concepts?
Lee Deigaard: My intro painting professor took us to the country. We’d painted using only white, black, and his patented “paper bag” brown, so we were salivating at the autumn colors. He gave us a few minutes to soak it in. The he told us to turn around and choose a rock in a dim shady glen. This rock was the only thing we painted for the next 48 hours. We had piles of paper of all sizes, and he had a stop watch. We’d have 20 minutes for a 4 ft painting or an hour for a 5 inch one or 5 minutes. We painted without stopping; we were disgusted by our work. But each night when we hung them on the wall, we saw unexpected things. We began to understand raw process versus the platonic vision. It was an object lesson in how to look at a rock and lose control. He drove us hard. If you could paint like an athlete, a trench warrior, and a mud wrestler rolled into one, you might one day make a decent painting. Every day, one way or another, I am practicing how to paint a rock.
Dash: You are currently living in New Orleans. How has the city influenced your work and what about the region captured your imagination?
LD: My emotional access to New Orleans began with its old trees. I walked my dogs every morning under oaks where duels had been fought 350 years ago. Trees inspire me to take the long view. I lost my studio to Hurricane Katrina along with years of work and all the tools I’d accumulated over years. Starting over is demoralizing and exhausting, but the inevitable streamlining- of process and material- contains possibilities. I remembered my calligraphy tutor and colleague in Hong Kong who, opening his desk drawer with his brushes and ink pots, would announce how he’d tidied his “studio.” I didn’t want to be defeated by loss. Repeat evacuations for hurricanes definitely affect what you make and how you make it; drawings on paper—you can roll those up and flee with them! The portable and replicable properties of photography and digital art grew even more alluring. I had been making photographs and shooting videos. I had also been drawing, but I had been thinking of myself as primarily a sculptor. The hurricanes, you could say, broadened my sense of identity. The DIY artist collectives that sprung up like glorious art air ferns in the flooded ninth ward continually inspire me.
Dash: The breadth of mediums in your work is amazing; do you have a favorite or “go to” medium?
LD: It varies. Drawing is always, one way or another, part of even my digital and photographic work. It’s weird. Every day in the studio, I feel like an untrained artist. I feel the blankness of the slate before me more than its inherent familiarity. My various bodies of work are each part of long term investigations into form and content. They conceptually interrelate and cross pollinate.
Dash: What advice can you give to young bucks out there?
LD: Don’t be suspicious of that lurking woman in the woods with her camera. She means well. No really, when your elders tell you how young you are, that there’s plenty of time and you should steep and age in your green wood cask before decanting yourself, don’t listen. However, don’t spill everything, keep your own counsel. Otherwise your neuroses can’t proliferate, and there won’t be anything to reap come art harvest time. If you’re a morning person, work in the mornings, no matter what. Preserve your best self for your art, keep a faithful daily routine; this is how you squeeze water from that proverbial rock. Grapple with your gorgeous visions and don’t let the striving get in the way of making.
Dash: How did you get so close to those deer?
LD: I said, hi young buck, c’mere. Real answer? Making my nocturnal portraits of animals involves a combination of hand held techniques and motion detection. I work primarily on farmland among a familiar population of animals. They watch me from a distance and track me in turn. I am interested in what happens when they choose to interact with the camera. I don’t want to habituate them to my presence or impinge on their autonomy.
