Amy Adler with HereIn
Installation view of the exhibition Location at Acme, Los Angeles, 2014.
[Image description: A white-walled gallery interior is bisected by a perpendicular wall. On the left side of the wall, a woman stands next to a monumental picture of a playground at night. The play structure, drawn in turquoise and rust, is set against a background of leafless trees and a full moon. On the right side of the wall is another large-scale image of a children's play structure, in royal blue, orange, turquoise, and beige. The scene is bright with a chain link fence and palm trees in the background.]
Amy Adler’s practice traverses the territories of drawing, photography, performance, and film. For nearly three decades, she has blended narrative fiction, appropriated imagery, and personal history to generate images activated by the tension between what we are given visual access to and what is withheld. Adler speaks with HereIn’s Contributing Editor Jordan Karney Chaim about creating a world through her art, the power dynamics of being on both sides of the camera lens, and the infinite potential of drawing.
HereIn: I am so curious to know what you’re working on, so maybe we can just start there.
Amy Adler: I tend to hold things close while they are in production so I’ll try my best to answer this without being too specific. I’m working on several projects at once, trying to figure some things out relating to the animate and inanimate in drawing. About ten years ago I realized that I had been almost exclusively drawing people and I began to wonder about the spaces these figures occupy, or could exist in, and if they could travel between images. In 2014 I completed a series of large-scale oil pastel drawings on canvas called Location, which was the first project I did with no people at all. So what I’m doing right now continues that trajectory by placing figures in specific, fixed environments. The imagery considers how the canvas or page is this constant, immovable object that is being negotiated through the act of drawing.
Location (no.2), 2014, oil pastel on canvas, 132 x 108 in.
[Image description: A dramatically-lit children's play structure stands against a leafy green hedge. Twisted red climbing bars and a curved blue slide attach to a central element comprised of yellow posts and a green roof.]
I’m also currently in preproduction on a feature film that I wrote and plan on directing. This project was awarded the Guggenheim [Fellowship] last year, which was amazing. It’s a coming-of-age story of a queer, young Mexican American woman who has Cerebral Palsy. It’s also a love story. I’m collaborating on the project with my younger brother, Ekiwah [Adler-Belendez], who lives in Mexico and who also has CP. It’s based on a true story, so it weaves together documentary and fiction, and there’s a lot of personal stuff in there as well. If you just take that last sentence, it really applies to all my work.
I just want to add here that I’m not trying to force a relationship between my drawings and my films at all. If and when they overlap is curious to me. Like Location—which started out as a location scout for a film scene, but wound up becoming drawings instead. Right now, my film and drawing projects are moving in their own directions. It’s an amazing experience to work on both at the same time and witness the various ways they intersect.
Director (from suite of 12), 2006, pastel on canvas, 50 x 60 in.
[Image description: A side view of a young woman with light hair and pale skin crouched next to a film camera. She covers her left eye with one hand and holds the camera with the other. The image is rendered in gray on a white background.]
HereIn: So your drawing practice is constant, no matter what else you’re working on?
Adler: My drawing project, in general, is pretty expansive at this point, in terms of number of images. I remember in grad school I had this idea that I wanted to create a kind of world, like an extended and ongoing animated film created in still images, where characters from one sequence might intersect with another seemingly unrelated series. I recall thinking that this world would take a really long time to create. That’s sort of what’s happened and what is still unfolding. There’s a lot of territory in there, and there are a lot of things that I still want to try and figure out. There’s just no end to it—it’s like an infinite labyrinth. Drawing is so fascinating to me. I am sure I will draw for my entire life and still only scratch the surface of what’s possible.
HereIn: Do you mean potential of what your hand can yield? Or your mind? Or the connection between the two?
Adler: My projects often require a kind of physical endurance, which I love. Location took three years to complete and sometimes required drawing on my tiptoes on the top of a scaffold, or literally lying on the ground. This physical commitment is always reflected in the imagery itself so it’s kind of impossible to separate the technical and the conceptual. I always consider why and how drawing is applied, in what circumstance, and what kinds of interventions can happen with drawing. The potential is just enormous.
What Happened to Amy? (from suite of 5), 1996, unique C-print, 16 x 20 in.
[Image description: A preteen girl with long hair and pale skin sits in a children's wagon, looking out at the viewer. She is barefoot and holds a small toy in her lap. The image is rendered in a range of oranges and yellows, giving it a sepia-toned effect.]
HereIn: I love this idea that you set out to create a world. Actually, one of the things I was thinking while looking through your work is that the whole corpus has a kind of continuous cinematic quality. I feel like I can pop in and out through the years, especially because there is the recurring character of “Amy” who appears off and on, from youth to the present. It was interesting to then learn that you decided to go to film school ten years ago, because it feels like your works has always inhabited a cinematic realm.
Adler: I went to film school when I was forty; the only reason I mention that is because I was well into my career. I had an MFA from UCLA and was already on the faculty at in the Visual Arts Department at UCSD. I made the decision to go because I began to feel limited in the cinematic aspect of my art practice. Even though I’d been using film references in my work for so many years, I didn’t really understand what it meant to stand on the other side of the lens and have access to the knowledge and craft of film production. With drawing and photography, I felt like I was educated and experienced, but not as a filmmaker. I decided, in order to bolster the cinematic leg of my practice, I would go through this intensive three-year master’s program at USC, which was an unbelievably incredible experience. It was so challenging, especially while teaching at UCSD, but it was also so much fun and so exciting to me. Everything about it was fascinating—all the language, the demos, the gear, the people I met, and the productions I worked on. It all made so much sense to me.
After Sherrie Levine, 1994, unique silver gelatin print, 24 x 17 in.
[Image description: A closely cropped black and white drawing of a preteen boy's torso.]
As far as being in my own work, I’ve only ever appeared in my work when it makes sense considering the larger context of the project. The first time I was in my work was What Happened to Amy? (1996). What interested me then was precisely this idea of standing on both sides of the lens. I had just made After Sherrie Levine (1994), so I was thinking about the body and the power dynamics of the gaze. What Happened to Amy? were pictures taken of me by a stranger who approached me on the beach. Drawing them put me in his position. The notion that the person standing behind the camera is not necessarily me but can be a stranger—a man or teenager for example—is something I’ve been interested in for years. So appearing in my work has to make sense with what I’m thinking about conceptually, I guess you could say.
Once in Love with Amy (no.1), 1997, unique Cibachrome print, 48 x 74 in.
[Image description: A nude young woman with blond hair and pale skin reclines in front of a fireplace flanked by sculptural objects and plants. She looks off into the distance, away from the viewer. Her right knee is bent and her left leg outstretched.]
In Once in Love with Amy (1997), in which I also appear, the press release described the project as, “photographs of the artist taken by an older woman.” I wanted to specifically embody the queer female gaze but was also thinking about how I could make the camera aggress on the subject, about how to cross the sort of unspoken line that exists in What Happened to Amy? or After Sherrie Levine, where the photograph almost acts as a shield. How do you actually cross that line of vulnerability with a camera, and then through drawing?
I genuinely feel vulnerable knowing that these images will circulate forever, but when I made the piece I was well aware that that would happen. And the reason I did that really was to test drawing’s ability to create this exact sense of vulnerability. It’s not really my body, it’s a drawing—and ultimately it’s not even a physical drawing, it’s an image seen through a screen—yet somehow, even with all these layers of removal, the images still make me feel incredibly vulnerable. And so even though it’s painful and embarrassing, it’s there for a reason. I had to be able to put my own body on that line to make it real.
Hotel (no. 4), 2018, oil pastel on canvas, 56 x 80 in.
[Image description: A woman with shoulder-length blond hair and pale skin sits in a chair in a darkened room. She is wrapped in a bath towel and looks off to the side, toward a window. Her right leg is crossed over her left, and her left hand rests on her forehead. An unmade bed is visible in the foreground. The image is rendered in a range of brown and yellow tones.]
And I am still exploring this. My most recent show, Hotel (2018), was a series of large-scale drawings on canvas based on photos of me taken in different hotel rooms over the past ten years. I appear alone in each image, but it’s unclear whether there is anyone else in the room with me. There’s no way to know if these are private images or if they are performed for the camera. This precipice is really interesting to me as a site for drawing.
HereIn: This makes me think about how much the technology of personal photography has changed in the decades since you began these explorations. I imagine that when you started, your images were based on your own photographs or photos taken of you, but in your possession. How have smartphones and selfie culture affected your relationship with photography?
Adler: From about 1995 to 2004 I worked exclusively in this process of making a drawing, photographing it, and then destroying the drawing. The result was a unique photographic print. This forced both the drawing and the photograph to give up a kind of fundamental part of their reason for existence. Drawings want to be luscious, unique objects that are very challenging to physically destroy. And the photograph wants to multiply, so in my process they each had to relinquish a core element of themselves to meet in this space of tension. This tension was reflected in the dynamics within the images themselves.
When I started this practice and this process, it was the mid-90s and it was just at the advent of AOL, personal computers, cell phones, and Photoshop. The proliferation and pace of imagery was very different. The idea of looking at a piece of artwork through a computer screen was somewhat novel, and now it’s the primary way to look at artwork, so it means something very different. The shift in my process caused me to reconsider the core issues of the work. I had made a big commitment to this specific process, and the implications of taking such a radical turn away from it were unknown. My process already existed between paradigms, so to speak, and now I was upending it further. But besides that, in terms of the work itself, I knew it would take a while for all the images to be able coexist in a way. I think now my past and current processes have evened out visually and everything sort of exists on the same plane, but it’s taken a while.
Installation view of the exhibition Director, at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 2007
[Image description: Seven canvases hang on two adjoining white walls in a gallery. The images on the canvases are rendered in gray against a white background, making them difficult to decipher.]
While my process shifted, my projects have continued to address a consistent set of concerns. The first project I presented as drawings was the series Director (2006), which was shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. These images are based on a 16mm film shoot I was cast in by a young director, and they are of her directing me in her film. The drawings are so light that they can barely be seen in photographs. When I show them, or reproduce them online, they almost look like blank canvasses. They became this kind of reversal of my previous process where an aspect of denial is still foregrounded but in a different way. Similar acts of reversal, or denial, continued into performative pieces like Phantom Instrument (2007), in which the protagonist of the image (the instrument) is an invisible entity, withheld from view. So in earlier projects, the drawings themselves were withheld, and now they’re not but the primary act of denial remains intact.
Phantom Instrument (from suite of 7), 2007, pastel on canvas, 40 x 40 in.
[Image description: A drawing of the head and torso of a woman with blond hair, pale skin, and blue eyes set against a red background. She wears a black shirt with white polka dots. She holds her hands up by her face, as if to play an invisible wind instrument.]
HereIn: Your interest in withholding really resonates with my own experience of your work. It feels simultaneously innocuous and really charged—revealing but also totally impenetrable. You sense that there is more to the story, which I think also contributes to this larger cinematic universe that it feels like all of this work is orbiting in. You balance this tension between the knowability of the subject matter and the enigma of the narrative.
Adler: There is always more to the story, isn’t there? Queer subjectivity, for example, is a subtext that runs throughout, but maybe that’s another conversation. I think about it like this: there are a lot of different trajectories operating in my work and in order to settle on an image for a project, it has to be struck by multiple tangents at once. It has to belong in several storylines and yet offer something new. I’m constantly trying to push the conversation outwards in some way, by asking new questions and testing unfamiliar dynamics.
This conversation was edited by HereIn and the artist for length and clarity.