https://www.amysillman.com/

Quotes from Amy Sillman writt interviews…..

 I’m looking for complexity. I’m uninterested in images. I’m uninterested in iconography.

 You may feel like you’re finished when the painting is just the thing that was there first, but after having gone through a narrative of being built and unbuilt and rebuilt until it finally arrives at something. 

I’m always interested in creating a certain kind of tension, something that feels like it holds together and it’s falling apart at the same time…

 I think abstraction allows you the freedom to not make something look like the thing. But I think my paintings look like a thing that isn’t a thing. I’m going for something that’s increasingly elusive as you go forward. I’m also not interested in a single picture,  but in the way that something changes.

 I make paintings that are a million layers that you can only see the top of, like a packed suitcase where you just see the top layer of the suitcase but you can’t see all the contents

Then I make these long, horizontal drawing, printmaking, and painting sequences to make a situation of time, or invite or inveigle the viewer into a situation of time, where it’s really about sequence and the difference between this one and the next one, which is very filmic, but it’s non-narrative. 

So you’re seeing changes and shifts and adjustments, getting the impression that everything is constantly moving, and that’s its formal quality. 

I’m looking for paintings that are both still and suggesting that they can never be stilled, and all of these things are hard to get at. 

I can try to explain it for hours, but I don’t think it’s really the thing. It’s just an analogy on the edge that I can make to answer the question.

I ended up with this huge stack of small drawings, and one day I put them all on the floor and started moving them around and cutting them into a sequence that was not narrative. But it was about things that seemed to open up, and clear out, and be really bare, and then clutter up and get complicated. The trajectory of those little drawings was about densities, open passages, and then increasingly dense areas.

My whole impetus in making art, making work, writing, drawing, is to function as a kind of combination bricoleur, flâneur, voyeur, radish farmer, auto mechanic. To take parts, and with my labor, remake a strange new language.

Can we still find intimacy in painting?

But when I started to have more public shows, a major discovery for me was realizing that I had “viewers” and that I should think about how strangers might move through spaces.

I always wanted to make shows that SHOWED a motion, and E-motion, a gamut of feelings from one thing to another. 

The video/ film/poetry/music people I was hanging out with were rigorously experimental, but there was more fresh air around what they did. So, I just wondered if I could apply their methods to my own medium.

 I feel like a great art school critique is an incredibly intuitive, collective activity, a group of people on the threshold of understanding together

I’m also giving the viewer a key to my attitude about the work—my paintings are complicated constructions. They’re slow, precise, and hard to make, but also funny and off the cuff too. So I want you to enter knowing that there’s risk and a weird combination in here—like I don’t really “know” how to do animation, but I make these anyway, but kind of badly, on my phone.

I want them to be “readable” on many levels, as an attitude toward art, not just a bunch of glamorous, successful things. I hope that’s the motion that runs through the show, making the viewer aware of simultaneity, of having to encounter a whole spectrum of different impulses and objects all in one room, at once.