Lael Corbin with HereIn

Thrust Weight Drag Lift - Process Photo, 2017, photograph

[Image description: The unfinished armature of an airplane rests on the ground in a desert landscape. The body of the airplane is made of bent wood, while the wings are covered in white paper. A sunset over mountains is visible in the background.]

HereIn talks with Lael Corbin about his recent work in sculpture, installation, photography, and (maybe) performance. Corbin teaches in the Department of Art & Design at Point Loma Nazarene University. He lives in San Diego with his wife, artist Christina Corbin, and their two children. 

HereIn: Lael, why don’t you begin by telling us about your larger practice? 

Lael Corbin: I’m primarily a sculptor and installation artist, but I also work quite a bit with photography. So I’d say my practice spans those three genres. For the first big chunk of my career, I was focusing on installation work and doing these workspace-type installations, designed to look like they’re in process and to even hint at the type of character that might inhabit them. In the last five years my work has shifted away from that and I’ve been working on sculpture again, using aircraft as an inspiration. I’ve also been working on this project that I’ve been calling Objects To Wrestle The Wind, which is designed to engage the more experimental side of my practice again. I felt like I had, with the workspaces, started to get a little repetitive and I needed to push myself into some uncertain territory again. Objects To Wrestle The Wind has been fantastic because it’s a really open-ended project. I don’t even know where it’s going yet. I’m making these wearable sculptural objects that I’m then wrestling the wind in and photographing. 

Lael Corbin, Thrust Weight Drag Lift - Flight, 2017, photograph by Stuart Ballew

[Image description: A dark blue pickup truck drives across a desert landscape, towing an airplane behind it. The airplane is unfinished, with a body made of bent wood and a nose, wings, and tail covered in white linen. It has red wheels, which hover above the ground as the airplane lifts off in flight.]

HereIn: When did you begin that series?

Corbin: I did a show at Bread & Salt Gallery in 2017 and for that project they gave me one of their big warehouse areas. I decided for the centerpiece of that show I would build this large airplane similar to what I did at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego [in 2010], but early on in the new project I decided that I was going to try to get the airplane in the air and see if the thing could fly. So the project consisted of taking a model airplane and scanning all the pieces and blowing them up, back to its full size. I spent about eight months building the airplane and then took it out to the desert, towed it behind my truck and got it to fly. In working on that project I realized that’s something I had been missing for a while: that type of experimentation, where I was launching into something and had no idea where it was going to go. 

Object to Wrestle the Wind #2, 2017, 48 umbrellas, waxed cable, harness

[Image description: An installation view in a room with a brick floor, brick wall, and wood ceiling. In the foreground of the image, a blue and yellow harness hangs from the ceiling by cables. 48 black umbrellas are affixed to the gallery wall, their undersides with metal ribs exposed to the viewer. 48 cables tied to the harness run back and attach to the umbrellas.]

Corbin: The next big project I worked on in that show at Bread & Salt was a giant set of 48 umbrellas I sewed together and attached to a harness. That became the first of the objects. I thought, if I wore this thing and took it out in a light breeze it could be interesting to see what would happen. That led to some more objects where the intention was to do just that. I never did it with the umbrellas because they were just so big, I would have ended up dragging myself halfway across the desert. But the first serious one was taking a sheet of plywood, attaching two handles on it and going out on a breezy day and just seeing what it did. My wife actually ended up shooting the photographs for me. It was fun, it was a blast. It was just blowing me all over this field and knocking me down. It was more fun than I’d had in a long time. 

Wrestling the Wind_Object #4, 2020, documentation photograph

[Image description: A black and white image of a man standing in a desert landscape. He has light skin and dark hair, and is wearing dark clothing. He is holding a large wood panel with handles. His right leg is bent and his foot hovers above the ground, as if mid-step.]

HereIn: It seems that aircraft and, more generally, flight have been elements in your work for quite a while. What is it about these subjects that interests you? 

Corbin: I continue to find new areas in it that interest me. First and foremost, it’s a really beautiful form. There’s something about aerodynamic forms that intrigues me, airplanes in particular. I had Walter Cotten as a professor in grad school and it was working with him that brought that out in my art-making practice, because we shared that interest. Also for me, on a personal level, I was a very shy kid and travel became a way through that, by getting out of my comfort zone. Often that involved airports and using an airplane to get somewhere. I think, too, that 9/11 taking place, right as I was graduating from undergrad, shifted the whole airplane dynamic. Certainly people have been weaponizing airplanes for a long time, but to turn one into a weapon… particularly during the project I did at Bread & Salt, where I was making that airplane, I was thinking a lot about taking this image that had been weaponized and trying to push it back into something that was more about dreams, the love of flight, and the better things that we can aspire to. 

Dragonfly, 2019, basswood and glue, 54 x 39 x 12 in.

[Image description: A sculpture of two model airplanes—merged diagonally into one—nose pointed upward, hangs on a white wall. The airplane does not have a skin, which reveals intricate armature constructed of light-colored wood. The sculpture is spotlit so that its shadow appears on the wall.]

HereIn: The way that you’re removing the skin from the aircraft and exposing its structure— there’s a kind of vulnerability in that, and it takes on a lightness and fluidity that makes it much more dreamlike. Why make that decision to remove the skin? 

Corbin: It’s multifaceted for me. There’s something that attracts me to large volumes being created in a way that are very light and airy. When you look at an airplane when it has all its metal paneling on it, it looks like a gigantic heavy object. But the reality is those planes are built to be as light as you can possibly get them. When you remove all the metal from the exterior, you realize that there’s not much to this object. It’s like a cloud, in the sense that it’s a huge volume made up of a fairly small amount of matter. So there’s that aspect to it. When I was making the airplane at Bread & Salt, and this goes back to the work at MCASD, there was woodworking, too. I grew up around that—my dad is a finish carpenter—so the woodworking itself is really beautiful. 

HereIn: This element of craftsmanship extends throughout your practice. There’s a fine balance between what looks like technical perfection and a kind of craftsmanship that tells the viewer somebody made this. 

Corbin: Craftsmanship has been an interesting journey for me because it’s coming out of the fine woodworking tradition my dad does. It took letting go of that to allow the work to become chaotic and messy the way it was in grad school and in those early installations. It was hard for me to be ok with that, but it was incredibly liberating. I feel like that’s when I found my work and didn’t feel like I was just playing “artist.” But it’s funny because at different times now I wonder, have I forgotten how to make stuff? Have I allowed the mess to become so much a part of it that fine craftsmanship can’t exist as part of it anymore? I’ve been moving back toward that with some of my work— this idea of allowing craftsmanship to be important. 

Wrestling the Wind _Object #3, 2020, documentation photograph 

[Image description: A man stands on a sand dune in front of a blue sky. He has light skin and dark hair, and wears a blue t-shirt and green pants. On his head, attached with headgear, he wears an orange windsock that trails down past his feet behind him. Two orange antennae extend from the headgear up into the sky. He gazes into the distance.]

HereIn: Materially and conceptually, it’s a big move to jump from sculptures that are stationary, and are objects in and of themselves, to a place where sculptures are being activated with movement. And then with this new work, you’re actually integrating your own body with the materials and making them performative. Well, I don’t know if you conceive of them as performative. What has that change been like? What is the experience like when you’re activating these pieces?

Corbin: I’m not sure yet if I consider them performance and I’ve debated whether or not they should be. I’m still trying to figure that out myself. I think the main drive, the reason why I’ve moved that way, is feeling like I’m living more in my brain than I used to. I don’t know if that’s just age, my job as a professor, or the technological era that we live in where we spend so much time on the computer and researching, even recreationally researching, using the internet. But I definitely have felt a drive to move back into the physical world and put myself into a situation where I have an awareness of my surroundings. Activating my senses has become important to me. So that’s what I’m feeling when I’m using the Objects To Wrestle The Wind : the joy that comes from being in the moment. So much of studio practice can be cerebral— we’re sitting there, we’re spending tremendous amounts of time just allowing things to play out in our brains. It’s been this desire to feel the wind, to react to sight and smell, and muscles being tired. 

Wrestling the Wind_Object #3, 2020, documentation photograph 

[Image description: A black and white image of a man standing on top of a sand dune. He has dark hair and light skin. On his head, attached with headgear, he wears a windsock that trails out behind him as if caught in the wind.]

HereIn: The title, Objects To Wrestle The Wind, is poetic but also has a certain specificity to it. What is in that title? 

Corbin: It’s a placeholder for me at the moment. I think about Matthew Barney and Drawing Restraint, and certainly about Matt Mahoney’s work and the idea of wrestling the bear. Wrestling the wind implies something futile. I think about Don Quixote and tilting at windmills. Pitting ourselves against a foe that really we can’t beat and also that kind of doesn’t exist. Obviously the wind exists, but it’s a placeholder for wrestling against ourselves. I see it as an opportunity to learn, to grow, to see what happens when I set a ridiculous goal and see it through. 

Wrestling the Wind_Object #5, 2020, documentation photograph 

[Image description: A black and white image of a person in a desert landscape. The figure is tiny in scale against the expansive sky. They stand on top of a sand dune, holding a curved panel above their head.]

HereIn: Speaking of those kinds of opportunities, are you making work in quarantine? What is it like for you working in this context? 

Corbin: I don’t know if every artist feels this way, a lot of the artists I’m friends with do, but we’re suited for this. It’s forced us to make under unusual circumstances. I also think that’s something that artists as a whole respond well to. I know that for me, I’m enjoying the slower pace. It feels a lot more like the pre-internet era, even though we’re using the internet to communicate a lot more right now. The daily pace of life just feels more like when we were young, where we didn’t have a billion distractions all the time. So I’m embracing that. I feel like my studio practice doesn’t have to be as hurried because there are no shows imminent and the handful of group shows I had lined up have been postponed. So the opportunity to just go make, without having to consider all the other stuff that goes into one’s art career, is refreshing. As tough as the quarantine is on so many levels, I think that for artists just being forced to slow down benefits our creativity.