Elliott Hundley in "Secrets" - Season 7 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

Okay, let's do it again. Can we try one more thing before Ann comes out to see if it works? Maybe just leave it like that. Don't even turn it. Can you do it again, Evan, but then do something more dynamic so we get a sense of, like, a change gesture, like, lift your arms up and put one foot forward. Three, two, one. Okay. Okay, I think we're ready. Can you put them on? You look very beautiful. I've never seen such a beautiful lady. I was working with the idea of Ann playing the part of Eurydice, inspired by Cocteau's Orpheus. That's it. That's it? We're ready. That's a lot of dress. Tilt this this way so you can see. So you stand here and just make sure that you're staring at the camera into the mirror. Elliot knew that I had modeled a number of years ago. It was something that he asked me to do, and I thought, well, why not? It would be fun. Okay, go. Ready? Ann, will you step six inches forward towards the mirror? Right after that light goes off, you turn to look at Teddy. Three, two, one. Perfect. I wanted it to be very mannered, very artificial, very posed and theatrical. Three, two, one. I wanted the image to be about her relationship to the mirror, and the mirror as a picture within a picture. Three, two, one. I'm not afraid of bringing the character to the image. I enjoy that, and I think that Elliot feels comfortable with that and maybe inspired by that. I also enjoy the fact that I'm helping create a work of art. To me, it's wonderful. Perfect. We've made it. Let's do several of those. Keep changing the way that you do it. That's perfect. I remember seeing myself in the museum in San Francisco. That's quite a feeling, looking at the painting and thinking, oh, my goodness, that's me! Turning or not turning? Not turning. Let's try that. I believe in him as an artist. I feel that I've been a part of his growth too, which is amazing. The photo shoot is so elaborate, but not because I want a certain effect, but because actually I want to not control the effects. So that adds a layer of unexpected results. Three, two, one. Good. Made it. What happened? Where are the ice machines plugged up, y'all? Uh-huh. I think it's that. I am laying down arbitrary color and drawings and compositions, some of which are taken from photographs or even still lifes. I consider them the underpaintings of all the things that I'm making for the show. They're pretty developed because I want to start the painting with a picture already. First known collage that I've read about was made over a millennium ago. Collage has been used in so many different ways for hundreds of years. Cutouts, silhouettes, forms of scrapbooking. Within the last hundred years, it's become one of the most relevant forms of art making. It is so important because of the quantity of images that are in our lives. Intrinsically, it is our world. It reflects our reality. I'm just a natural hoarder or collector. Acquiring objects is learning about objects. Elliot and I frequent swap meets and thrift stores. I work closely with him on these large collages, preparing materials. Everything you see here is what we use for the sculpture, from wood to metal, plastic. Bits of paper that have been cut apart and will be pinned into the surface of these collages. We get this large collection of materials like this that we'll file away until we need it. Anyone who's ever put a stamp on an envelope or a note on their refrigerator knows what it's like to make a collage. There's no esoteric technique. I enjoy the transformative aspect of collage. You can take something cast off and give it a new life. I first went to Rome in 1995 to study. My school had this program to go to Italy, and I would have gone anywhere. I was so ready to see the world at that point. Not only did I feel that very immediate, intimate connection with historical works of art, I also found that sense of time that I'd never encountered before. I lived in this basement apartment, but it happened to have a courtyard with columns that were over 2,000 years old. Because of that experience, I'm always trying to layer in a sense that the picture was built over an extended period. I selected several images when I started working today. I thought that these shapes were like an effective way to throw a really simple pattern into the background. I used it in a completely different palette. It's a very simple shape made with brushstrokes that references a landscape. I use these envelopes as if they're tubes of paint, like paint chips. There is no perfect painting, and there is no perfect solution. At any given moment, there's 10 pieces of paper that I could pick up next, and they would find their place, and they would lead me on a different path to a different sort of picture. I just have to trust that process. In relinquishing some control, it allows me some distance. I start to feel like the artwork is responding to me, giving me something back or becoming something that I never expected. I enjoy that moment of not recognizing my own hand. The most exciting aspect of this was to see the choices Elliot makes in a piece, how he'll work on it for a while, but feel comfortable putting it aside and coming back to it. Things are a bit malleable. They can change. I think it's pretty brave to be able to change something up midway and feel very comfortable and fluid. Elliot's a great teacher. I think he does a really good job of finding people's strengths. It's almost like working with a choreographer. I get notes from Elliot. Connect these two forms. Okay. Basically build this... A lot of it is trying to enhance or bring out a lot of what's happening on the surface. We collage an image down onto the carved piece and then glue it down, but a lot of color and detail gets lost in that process, so we use a photograph as a reference. I was dazzled by the amount of labor that was put into a piece. My family's lived in North Carolina and Virginia for as long as we know. I was the first grandchild and the first great-grandchild. One young person spending a lot of time with about 20 people who are much older than I was. I'm sure that that affected me from a young age. The pieces of paper that are just hanging on the surface right now are almost like sketches, and they change constantly, but I'm blocking out potential compositions, seeing what it would look like if the color of a certain section went in a certain direction. I am gluing it, and by using this little thing, I'm just, like, playing pressure, making sure that it's, you know, flat and really well glued onto the surface. The compositional structure for this picture is directly based on Japanese prints from the late 1800s. The scale of the figure within the picture, the repetition of panels. In Japanese triptychs, the figures are distinct, but because the composition is divided in that way, there is a feeling of a sequence of events unfolding frame to frame. And another influence of Japanese prints is in the intricacy of conflicting pattern and the vibrancy of the color. I first became interested in Japanese prints when I discovered the work of Kunisada, for sort of mid-1800s. When woodblock printing started, there were fewer colors, fainter and more simple. As the form progressed, the complexity of the images increased. Very intricate patterns, often conflicting, brilliant colors. They're so energetic, they're almost noisy. Seeing a work in its ripest point in development, I think that it would be impossible for some of those Kunisada triptychs to get any more information in them. I keep every photograph and every material I've ever made. I keep all of the pieces that I remove from works of art. When a work's complete, I sweep the floor underneath and put all the contents in a box and put away in storage. All of that material is ready to become the beginning of new works in the future. Ooh, that's good. I'll use both. I grew up in a culture of saving. I've come from a family where every object has a story and the object becomes meaningful. Probably every attic and every basement in my family is full of all that junk. My mother made costumes for all of her kids, but she also did it for a job, for a local costume rental place, costumes for Halloween or for the theater. I was thinking about all of the things my mother and I used to make together, all sorts of crafts or ceramics or dried flower arrangements and definitely drawings. She was teaching me the joy of making things. Maybe it kind of starts right under that, but then remove this. This is her arm and this and this and maybe some of that, this, this. It might go down that far. Yeah, it will. I've always looked at Rauschenberg and Twombly's work. I have an intuitive relationship to those artists and the formal connection of my work to Rauschenberg is apparent. I think of the materials that I use as being on a spectrum from the identifiable found object to the fictive illusion. The fiction of a picture is its transformation, but to make that transformation compelling, it still needs to be tethered to reality, which is the found object. After the collage process, Elliot will choose an image to be carved into the collage. In this case, it was a broken window. The piece will get carved, things sort of change and alter, and then Elliot will choose an image to be embroidered onto the carved surface. The collage is placed on foam and then that allows us to carve into the surface. It looks very much like a canvas. I call it embroidery. It's just pinning one string with one pin to a painting, almost like the surface of a tapestry. You follow that train of thought until the entire surface is covered. A lot of the embroideries are actually my own paintings translated into a new material. I'd read a book about Bernini. He was a sculptor, he was an architect, he also had a large studio and he worked with other artisans. It was interesting to come in here soon afterwards and work with Elliot and see that there's sort of a continuation of that tradition. I'm trying to keep the embroidery in the middle for most of these pieces because it's such a concentrated sense of activity, almost a metaphor for a sense of focus. As you move towards the perimeter of the picture, things are moving into your peripheral vision. I'm really thinking of them not only as pictures within pictures, but almost like setting a stage. You can pan out further away and have a sense of the wings of the theater or the table that the piece was made on. Initially I was just working in painting. That led me to work in collage. The ideas that I had about collage led me to incorporate straight pins, which meant that I stepped into sculpture. As those ideas grew, I followed my train of thought and disregarded making a distinction about what's a painting or a sculpture. Everything that I make, I really try to take the attitude that they could be finished at any moment. You have to think that way because at some point you have to stop. I put the work in the gallery to show evidence of the entirety of the life of its making. No mystery is lost. It's all here. Every technique is self-evident. There's no secrets. To learn more about Art in the 21st Century and its educational resources, please visit us online at pbs.org slash art21. Art in the 21st Century is available on DVD. To order, visit shoppbs.org or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS.