I was a latecomer in the the life of Flywheel's first venue on Holyoke Street in Easthampton. I had heard of Flywheel but never had a chance to check it out until 2006 when I moved to town and saw there was a film screening happening. I went to the event with low expectations because the building's facade looked pretty run down and because I had heard that Flywheel was primarily a punk rock venue-- although I am a fan of loud music and noise, that conjured up assumptions of what I thought the space would be.
I ended up being absolutely blown away.
It was a screening of Who is Bozo Texino, a black and white film of the hobo train journey and a legend train tagger. After the screening, there was a low key talk and Q&A by the filmmaker Bill Daniel. It was fantastic and so unexpected. And it only cost $5 to get see it.
I believe that the opening of Flywheel in the Old Town Hall will generate needed foot traffic on Main Street. Easthampton has seen tremendous revitalization and arts flurry in the past year with thanks to the ECA and artists just coming out of the watusi in this funky little city. Last Thursday evening, I had to search for parking on Main Street to attend the ECA art party. How exciting!
Let's keep the momentum going in Easthampton.
Memberships have many incentives and make great gifts.
Or give $10 for the "$10 from 200 people" campaign
If you haven't seen the space in the past month, you must check it out. It will amaze you and entice your imagination to infinite possibilities for Easthampton! You can sneak a peek at the Flea Market happening Sunday, December 13, 2009 from 10 to 3. Flywheel is almost there!
An Interview with Maggie Nowinski photos by John Polak
A fantastic facet of Project Elements Easthampton: Earth was that I had the great fortune of meeting some extraordinary artists that I had no idea were creating in my neighborhood. There is undoubtedly a strong contingency of innovative artists who are working in Easthampton, if not in the surrounding Pioneer Valley. They get a little lost in the mazes of the mills and the hills but they are here, working. When I met artist Maggie Nowinski a year or so ago she told me as I was leaving her studio that she was pleased to think of me working hard in my studio just across the pond as she worked in hers. I think that sentiment rings throughout these studios that we toil in.
Nowinski has been toiling away indeed. After completing Project Intersect, a three-part collaborative video project, projected onto Easthampton buildings, she has added plastic to her list of mediums. After piecing together thousands of empty water bottles then exploring the ubiquitous plastic bottle through video, drawing, and performance, she is due for an exhibition at the Hampden Gallery at UMass, Amherst on January 21 – February 23, 2010.
I had a chance to talk to her before her show and get an inside glance at her process and thoughts.
Your upcoming show at Hampden Gallery is called Swallowed-suggesting both the consumption of liquid and the consumption of unnecessary goods. Tell me more about that title.
Swallowed has a lot of connotations. The first, you mention, consumption of liquid and next the consumption of the commodity object/concept, which of course bottled water so blatantly signifies. The process of swallowing bottled water is extremely problematic and loaded – and it was something I thought about a lot when I drank bottled water. So many practices involve voluntary and involuntary swallowing of ideals, mythologies, and violence – it is something that we can’t avoid if we are to participate in this world. I think of the word swallow as interchangeable with consumption, absorption and integration. I often experience small inner battles. It’s like I gulp my emotional response to something concerning the war or a natural disaster, and then I’ll turn around and see some information about drinking bottled water for health and purity and I’ll reach for it – or I’ll sneak a peek at a tabloid magazine or admire the airbrushed skin of some actress on Vanity Fair that is impossible to obtain – infuriating – swallow.
We consume and absorb our identities through visual experiences and language and bottled water seems to be an extension of this. We even consume notions of recycling to relieve our guilt about consumption – another problematic concept. It sounds like a real downer, and I guess it is, but there is something sensual about this project that has kept it beautiful to me. (There is also the connotation of swallowing ejaculate, which seems not completely irrelevant, but certainly not central).
What is your relationship to the plastic water bottle?
I used to drink bottled water and I would experience anxiety around buying it. It has always seemed so obviously wrong, the notion of bottled water – in a way that seems almost redundant to even talk about – I don’t know how often I’ve heard someone say, “what will they bottle next, air?”
But at the same time I have always loved to drink water – I love the somatic experience of hydration. Believing that it was healthy to drink water, I would purchase this object that seemed so inherently wrong and I’d feel both that I was swallowing all of the bullshit that brought the water to me, and at the same time felt I was committing a healthy act. I sometimes wonder if the whole hydration thing is part myth. Anyway – it was a charged relationship. I also started to become visually aware in a kind of neurotic way, whenever I saw bottle water – which happens all the time. I’d be in a room and I’d be distracted, peripherally by the plastic bottles – so in order to resolve this I started to photograph bottled water with my phone. I feel like I’m photographing them in their natural environments. Evidence. I did finally buy a reusable water bottle.
How have you created this piece? Is the process an important part of this work?
The process has become integral to the significance of the work for a few reasons. I collect bottles in different ways. I dig through recyclable and other trash in public places (behind fitness centers, at the dump, on the street, etc.) and people see me doing this – mostly they don’t say anything on the street, but at the dump I get questions, which is interesting. I found that having someone documenting this process collecting bottles makes for a more interested public – like when you filmed me collecting a that outdoor concert this past summer.
Some people are on the lookout for bottles, or consume bottled water and save the bottles for me. I try to encourage everyone to stop using bottled water, obviously – it can be problematic to have people think, “I’ll just give this to Maggie for her project” before they reach for a Smartwater.
This is the most public and participatory project I’ve made. The bottle collecting can be a collaborative effort as is the creation of the strands. I’ve had work parties where I give simple instructions on how to string the bottles (technical and formal/aesthetic) – and I’ve had help with thousands of bottles this way. It’s really been an interesting way to connect with people and to make my studio practice less solitary.
One other thing about the process that I have found significant, is that I’ve created a bit of a monster – not only because multiple bottle strands have a tentacle look to them, but also because I am constantly tripping over the tentacles and having to drag them around. They are a pain to deal with – a kind of burden both in physical presence, but also in their creation – it is the most repetitive activity I’ve ever engaged in my studio. This burden is a kind of microcosmic reflection of the burden that bottled water is to our world environmentally, economically, and socially.
The drawings, videos, photographs, and sculptures have the connected underlying theme of the ubiquitous water bottle. How do you see the media representations differing from each other? How do they interact?
That is a good question – I’m trying to work out what notions are repeated in different mediums, and what ideas are teasing out a unique moment in the larger project. Some of the videos, I call short performances. In them I am interacting with the strands of bottles –trying to organize them, manipulating them into different shapes, getting tangled, dragging them, etcetera. I am trying to access the many levels of my anxiety around bottled water and by extension my own participation in the world. In one I am mimicking digestion, in another I am trying to maneuver my body through the mess, in another I am building a waterfall with strands backwards so there is a sort of graceful, snake charmer like control I have. I suppose I’m looking at how my body makes sense and maneuvers the bottles, and by extension, society.
The drawings are a playful reaction to one of the videos and to the shadows cast on the studio walls from hanging strands. I’m trying to expand upon the idea of digestion and the internal in these, but also make them seem a bit like swollen intestines meet parasitic worms. I like the directness of charcoal here. These are a bit more playful and removed from the performances.
The photographs of the bottles in their natural environment are a way to address my anxiety about the ubiquitous presence of them in our visual milieu.
I also have some stop motion videos that are intended to be humorous. In one, two water bottles, of the big and little Poland Spring variety escape from my bag and make their way down a dirt path to a stream where they empty their contents and float away. I am directly addressing the paradox of natural and unnatural – kind of like when I project running water onto the plastic bottle waterfall sculpture. Maybe there is some redundancy here.
I hope you don’t mind me saying but this work definitely has an OCD quality to it. I suppose all repetitious art does to some extent. It’s odd though because when you see the thousands of bottles together, there is a formal quality to the work. Was this a random formalist accident or did you envision that occurring?
First and foremost, I want to see what things will look like. The visual and visceral qualities of the sculpture are what I’m most motivated by. I want to see it. I also was interested in seeing the pattern the labels would make, and how the light would play with the strands. They are quite beautiful, I think, and I’m attracted to that. Formal qualities are definitely an important incentive always.
It is sort of interesting that this kind of OCD aspect is a way to engage in a process that is immediate at a time in my life when I am working a lot and my studio time is precious – building these strands gives me immediate access to an aspect of this project without having many consecutive hours at a time. Plus it has been a way for me to sort of exorcize and iterate my anxieties. It’s strange because it feels proactive in a kind of activist sense, too, but it isn’t.
How do you know when a bottle piece is complete and how many bottles does it take?
I am looking for a visual grace, power and density. How many depends on the site. At UMASS’s Hampden gallery I think between 10,000 -12,000.
Do you consider yourself an environmental artist?
Nope, but I like a lot of work that had been characterized as environmental art and I think this work fits into that category.
Art with refuse and even particularly water bottles seems prevalent today. You were recently in a show in Philadelphia that had varying responses to the ecological, economic and societal problems surrounding water, some others using plastic water bottles. What do you think about this phenomenon?
I think the issue of water is so outrageous that it has entered the visual and conceptual language of a lot of artists work. Maybe it has to do with a blatant instance of injustice. All of the issues surrounding water – access to clean water – are so intertwined with capitalism and corruption (a recurring theme we have become somewhat numb to over the years – what else is new?), which is in such a stark contrast to the simplicity of the element of water. Water corruption is just so impure it became impossible for me not to make some work about it. Personally, it has been an experience for my ego to deal with being “one of the artists working with plastic water bottles” – but it feels kind of good to be part of this larger dialogue.
Is it plastic forever? What’s next in your bottle or outside of it?
NO! I want to recycle the plastic bottles and move on after a few months. I’ll be installing a version of Swallowed in Boston in 2010 at the shipyard as part of an international exhibition through HarborArts Boston. I always have many ideas in the working, but I’m looking forward to being able to explore some different ideas in my studio and seeing what develops.
Flywheel is almost there!
