Randall Steeves

Randall Steeves
Show Me Everything

This exhibition at the Nanaimo Art Gallery was proposed originally under the title Proper Research. I am interested in why you have reconsidered this and changed the exhibition’s title to Show Me Everything?

The project has changed. The original idea involved the creation of a distinct set of paintings dealing with the relationships that exist between paintings. The work would be an examination of how one painting influences the next and how a painting is informed, enriched, or imbued with meaning through its proximity (either physically or chronologically) to another painting. It began with my interest in Charles Olson, the American poet, and with his idea that if an artist is capable of maintaining focus or achieving this state of heightened perception then these recognitions will occur, these connections will be made, and the art will take on a life of its own. It’s about paintings generating paintings, or responding to recognitions that occur while actually painting and trying to allow these recognitions to drive the production of more paintings. As the work evolved I began to incorporate earlier works and pieces that were intended for other projects, and it became clear that Proper Research was becoming less about creating a specific series of paintings and more about articulating this organic, intuitive thing that persists in my work from project to project. The result is an eclectic group of paintings that represents what’s actually been happening in the studio over the last couple of years and the new title is intended to reflect that.

You work predominately in the medium of encaustic paint. What particularly attracts you to this technique and how does it correspond to your concepts and ideas with regard to your work?

My work is always, at its core, about questioning painting’s function or its vitality in today’s pluralistic art environment. I see encaustic as a kind of exaggerated painting medium. It exaggerates the things about painting that I think make painting important; things like its physicality, its temporality, and its susceptibility to chance.

You’ve stated that you are not specifically interested or “concerned with psychology or social behavior and more with the perception of space and the body’s inescapable submission to time.” I’m really intrigued by this comment. Could you elaborate on this and how it connects to the work in the exhibition?

I think that painting is useful because of how it connects us to our physicality and to the physical nature of the world. And I am interested in how a painting, particularly an encaustic painting with its translucent layers of distinct marks, records its own emergence as a document over a specific period of time. The most common criticism of painting has to do with the archaic quality of it. Painting has nothing to do with how we live in the world today. It’s made by hand and there’s this precious original. And we live in a technologically dependent world. Well, we make painting with (and in relation to) our bodies, and I think that’s the very thing about painting that makes it valuable. As human beings we’re social, we’re cultural, but much of what goes on perceptually - much of how we function in and experience the world - has to do with our autonomic nervous system which keeps us breathing and keeps our hearts beating. We have these receptors, proprioceptors and interoceptors in our joints and in our tissues, which provide our brains with information about our movements and about our body’s position in space without us having to consider these things consciously. I think of a painting’s surface as a record of the artist's gestures, movements, and position during the production of the work. And when the viewer takes a position close to that surface they are connecting physically with another person (the artist) in a way that is very intimate. It's similar to following someone's footprints in the snow and realizing that everything you're experiencing as you walk is likely similar to what the footprint maker experienced.

What source material do you work from? Does the visual imagery that you use have a historical reference? Is technology and science a major influence in your work?

I’m interested in what science can teach us about art making. For instance, an earlier project called Science Against Modern Crime was based on fingerprint imagery drawn mostly from FBI and Scotland Yard technical/procedural manuals dealing with fingerprint science. Human Heart and Altered Patterns, two pieces that I’ve included in this exhibition, are based on that imagery. The project involved using the methodology of science - classification, categorization, a breakdown of the specific intrinsic qualities of painting - to demystify the activity of painting in order to clarify how paintings function. Once I decide that a particular image or source of images is useful I’ll work with it for years. The FBI material is an example of that. I’m still working with it nine years later. And 1977 T-Bird, which is based on stills from a film of my car in Death Valley (shot by a friend on the way back from a trip we took to Las Vegas), is something that I’ve been working with for just as long. This is the second set of paintings based on that imagery. The first was completed and shown in 2003.

What upcoming projects will you be working on in the future? Do they relate to your work in this exhibition?

Proper Research is a work in progress that might keep me busy for years. This exploration of the relationships between the paintings, of what it is that is constant or recurring in the work, is keeping me engaged and getting me into the studio every day. And the question “What comes next?” is what I’m usually asking when I’m there.