Photo of CC in her Studio at Stove Works. Captured by William Johnson: http://www.wmjohnsonphotography.com/
Saria: How did you find out about Stove Works?
CC: I had a studio visit with the past curator Mike Calway-Fagen the last two weeks before I finished undergrad. Someone told me that Mike and I were a “similar kind of weird” and that we would like each other. They were right. We’re both freaks. After that, Mike helped me land my first paid writing job at Number Magazine, and he curated me into my first solo show at the University of Tennessee - Chattanooga. We kept tabs on each other as I moved around. At a really ideal time, as the world was shutting down, Mike and Charlotte asked me if I wanted to come to Stove Works.
Saria: What was the best thing about your residency at Stoveworks?
CC: Well, I was in graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin when COVID-19 hit. We got kicked out of our grad studios in March and I had to move home to Augusta, Georgia with my family. For the six months leading up to my time at Stove Works, I didn’t have the space or the ability to focus on work, there were so many distractions. So there were all these pent-up ideas that I couldn't make happen for months. When I got to Stove Works, with all the time and space they gave to me and all that pent-up energy, I was able to just explode here. I made so much work.
Saria: Much of your work focuses on the technological age and how it impacts the human condition. How important is it, to you, to incite this conversation about technology?
CC: A lot of the efforts I make in my practice are to help viewers reconsider and look more deeply at elements of mundanity. Our relationship to technology, for example, could easily be one that involves a lot of blind faith, we have so much trust in these new inventions but we don't always consider how it changes our relationship to other people or how it impacts the world socially. I do hope that it brings up that discussion. I am also speaking directly from the lens of my experience growing up at the dawn of social media; I was in the first generation of teenagers that had social media. I experienced parts of adolescence with and without it. Watching the social fabric of our world shift, this was a huge cultural reset.
CC’s work in “Hot Doughnuts Now” at Stove Works. Curated by Ash Smith.
Saria: You have 4 books of poetry and one book of photography; What was it like to create and self-publish your books?
CC: For me, the basis of my writing practice happens on Twitter. I got a Twitter account when I was twelve. The goal of getting the account was to try and talk to celebrities, and of course, none of them ever responded. None of my friends were ever on Twitter, in those early stages, no one really knew what to do with it. So I had this account that none of my friends cared to look for and there was this anonymousness to it that really drew me in. I always wrote in this very vague style because I feared that my mom would find my account. It was like this kind of cryptic diary. I never thought of it as poetry until I got to college and saw Steve Roggenbuck's exhibition at the New Museum. That was when I realized poetry could be art, so I started mining that archive from my Twitter. I kind of think of this archive as a widespread epic poem of my adolescence.
Writing books just comes naturally to me. I’ve always been writing, even before I knew what I was doing could be called poetry. In terms of publishing, my background in printmaking really helps with that. I think reading a lot is the key to being a good writer.
Saria: Your work, Circular Score deals strongly with female virginity and innocence, what made you want to create art that dealt with that?
CC: Circular Score is about consumption of women in media, I chose to focus on the character Stacey Hamilton from Fast Times at Ridgemont High because the burden of double-standards placed on women’s sexuality is so clear in that film. In particular, the video focuses on the scene where Stacey loses her virginity to a 30 year-old man in a baseball dugout. Afterward her male suitor never calls her again. Stacy goes on to be continually crushed and disappointed by male sexual partners throughout the film, leading her to pregnancy and later abortion, then at the end of the film she eventually resorts to abstinence to find stability with a romantic partner. I saw that film for the first time when I was 16 and was always bothered that Stacey wasn’t able to have the sexual freedom she wanted so badly.
In one of my other videos, My Loneliness is Killing Me, I highlight a similar theme with Britney Spears. Britney is the central victim of media consumption in my mind. She has been consumed and re-consumed endlessly during my lifetime. Images of her are constantly stripped of their origin and recontextualized to fit whatever narrative serves TMZ best. In the early days of her career, especially while dating Justin Timberlake the media was obsessed with her virginity. I used gum in that piece not only to directly reference consumption and the human body, but also because it is a nasty, yet oddly common metaphor for female virginity loss. When I was 13 while at summer camp, I heard this metaphor for the first time. In order to scare us into abstaining from sex until marriage, my counselors told us that if we did not wait, we would be as desirable to our future husband as a piece of chewed gum, “and who wants to chew a piece of gum that has already been chewed?” Unlike chewed gum, in Britney’s case, her image is more likely to be pulled off the wall, re-chewed then spat out again somewhere else. This metaphor really messed with my head growing up, not that I bought into it, it just disgusted me and never left my mind so I made a piece about it.
There's a lot of abuse of women that goes on in the media that is very much a product of purity culture. The way we perceive our bodies, our sexual desires and our self-worth is based on what we see online and in films. It is a sort of ‘hyper-glamorization’ of a myth of what a woman is and should be. That affects all women.
Circular Score, four-channel video installation, rotating platform, 2020
Saria: How do ideas come to you? Such as with your piece Head, did you see the parts first and get a spark of were you already thinking of the idea?
CC: It's different for every piece, a lot of times with my sculptural practice I’ll find something really jarring, that feels like not a lot of people would acknowledge, something out of place, weird, yet beautiful. I'm a big collector of random objects. Being a sculptor is kind of like being a hoarder. All the materials I use for the most part are not brand new, I do very little fabrication and when I do it is usually just furniture to hold the object. I like to use material that has a life embedded into it.
Saria: How does your art relate to your personal experiences and background?
CC: For me, art and life art are very much intermingled. I think there's no way my life could not influence my work. I think this is true for almost any artist. Our interests have a lot to do with how we grew up and who we are. In my work, it is a conscious effort to incorporate my personal life and background. It is also a therapeutic practice for me and involves a process of detachment that helps me see myself more clearly and understand what I am feeling. Sometimes the personal elements are obvious in the work and sometimes they’re not.
I am a lot more detailed in my writing practice. I try to be straight-forward about my identity, often making fun of myself for being a semi-petty, emotional, wildly romantic, white girl living in America. I want to be real about where I’m coming from and who I am.
I classify my written work and the art sourced from it within the genre of Autofiction, meaning that the narratives I bring forward in my work are grounded in reality, with subtle elements blurred by fiction or exaggeration. In my writing, the character that I'm sort of playing is the most emotionally reckless version of myself. It’s all over-dramatic, but the feelings are real.
The Twitter account is where I just like puke my feelings out on the spot. With the incorporation of media, those feelings go through many filters before the work gets released to the world. That said, I try not to take it too far away from the origin. The work I make has a lot to do with how I'm living at the time. I try to think a lot about the present and the work tends to come off as a response to what's going on in the world and the way society perceives it.
I LOVE ME (IN ADVANCE), single-channel video installation on iPhone; 6 minutes, 25 seconds, 2020
Saria: Do you do a lot of planning for your writing and videos? Such as with I LOVE ME (IN ADVANCE)
CC: It depends on the work. I LOVE ME (IN ADVANCE) had no planning whatsoever. It's slow at the beginning because it's completely improvised and then when I say “IT’S ALL FUCKING SCRIPTED” I start just reading my unedited Twitter feed. Usually, there's some editing and reordering involved in my writing process, so making this video so improvisationally was new for me. Things don’t always come together that easily, but I will say in general sometimes the best things get made by accident. A lot of my work is made impulsively, I do it on the spot because I have to get the feeling out so I can look at it. When more complicated media gets involved that’s usually where the actual planning begins.
Saria: Would you explain the thought behind your sculpture piece A Baby and a Sponge?
CC: That piece is a sculpture that also performs. It cries and cleans itself up. Every 45 minutes someone (usually me) has to squeeze “the tears” out of the sponge so the piece doesn’t flood the gallery. In the work, there is an image of my hand with a very subtle stigmata. In history, it has been relatively common for artists to depict themselves as Christ. Some examples include Kanye West and Albrecht Durer. This is something men do, it is not a common thing for females, so I decided to do it. I was thinking a lot about my Christian background and my relationship to faith when I made this piece. A long time ago I wrote this tweet that I saw to as the ideal mindset to be the best student possible, “just wake up every day and think of yourself as both a baby and a sponge.” You're ready to take things in, you're ready to learn what life is, everything is new, soak it up, spit it out. I made this piece a water fountain that drips into the sponge, so it basically cries and cleans itself up which I felt was a practice that is inherent to being female. We're always crying and cleaning ourselves back up, performing every day, holding ourselves together.
Saria: You are an interdisciplinary artist, do you feel like there are different ideas you can communicate through each? How do you incorporate that choice of medium into what you're trying to say?
CC: I choose media based on what I feel is the best outlet for the idea. I like to experiment with different forms of communication, both present-day communication technology, and early print media. I find that different media communicate differently. A book, for example, is an intimate experience someone can take home and read on their own time, no one is watching them watch it. And a video is something we're immediately attracted to because we're so used to looking at videos, it has a direct relationship to reality. Videos also have a digital form so you can post them online and reach thousands of people easily. What I really like about fashion is that you can put art in the world and people will see art when they're not expecting to see art. I like to think of fashion as an alternative gallery model, one that brings the work into the work in a very direct way. Sculpture is more about the body and your body’s relationship to the object and the space surrounding it. It’s all about how it makes your body feel. In those pieces, the physical is part of the experience. I think I am attracted to print and books because of the intimacy of them, the quietness. I like to make people have to get really close to my print work to read the text, often I even have to include magnifying glasses. My work usually starts with the text and then I find the media that fits the message best.
Saria: What was the first kind of art you ever made?
CC: Painting and drawing I guess. In high school I did a lot of oil pastel portraits, they were like fauvist-looking portraits, really different from the work I make now, but certainly nothing I feel ashamed of. I wanted to be a figurative painter when I started college and then I realized that I could always be a painter, but inside the university, there were all these sweet machines I got access to. I got totally obsessed with machines and processes. My major in undergrad was printmaking and book arts. My interest in print started with a love of the chemistry and techniques. Then later, I made this connection between printmaking and the internet. Much like the invention of the internet, the invention of print was also a huge cultural reset. Newfound mass literacy connected the world and made it feel smaller. Information became accessible to the masses. Before printmaking was invented, books were handwritten and only the wealthy had access. As we know, information is power and the invention of print sort of leveled the playing field. When the internet was invented, the world got even smaller, connecting us globally at an instant.
HEAD, two-way reciprocal mirror, time manipulated floodlight (6 seconds on, 6 seconds off), altered found object (road sign), steel, 2019
Saria: What are you doing after you leave Stove Works?
CC: I'm teaching at The University of Tennessee in Chattanooga and in March I’m doing an installation for South by South West specifically for TEDx annual conference, it's going to be a drive-through exhibition in a parking garage. The title of the exhibition is “Here and Now. I'm going to show that HEAD piece. Still working out plans for summer but I’m staying in Chattanooga for now. I'm also working on a new book of poems and learning a lot about teaching.
Saria: What has Stove Works done that was really good for you as an artist?
CC: Stove Works gave me security in a time that felt really insecure, during maybe the hardest moment of my career (really, the hardest moment of many people’s careers.) Graduating from my MFA program in the midst of a pandemic was totally destabilizing. I felt hopeless at times so having this support really helped me allow myself to do the work that I wanted to do. Sometimes that's all you need. One person who is down to help you out, some else’s confidence that your work is worth making. Especially in the midst of the pandemic, the support did a lot for me. I definitely made a lot of great friends here. This has by far been the most productive residency I've been to. I made everything I wanted.
MY LONELINESS IS KILLING ME, single-channel video; 3 minutes, 54 seconds, 2019
About CC:
CC CALLOWAY (b. 1993, Augusta, Georgia) received her BFA in Printmaking + Book Arts from the University of Georgia and her MFA from the University of Texas at Austin. CC’s art practice is interdisciplinary, ranging from traditional printmaking processes, sculpture, and installation, to new media, sound, video, and web-based work. In her work and research, she considers technology’s impact on the human condition, communication, gender, and spirituality. CC has written and self-published four books of poetry, including one book of photography, entitled My Favorite Word is Nothing.
CC has exhibited widely across the US and internationally, most notably at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Peckham Park in London, UK, and Jonathan Hopson Gallery in Houston, Texas. Currently, CC is an artist-in-residence at Stove Works in Chattanooga, TN. CC has participated in many residencies including the Ox-Bow Fellowship, Atlanta Printmakers Studio (EAR), the WonderRoot Hughley Fellowship (formerly known as the Walthall Fellowship), and the Ossabaw Island Residency for Arts and Science. Her work has been featured in BURNAWAY Magazine, Glasstire, Number Inc., LOCATE Arts, and GLITTERMOB Magazine. CC is also an arts writer and poet. She is currently the co-editor of Number Inc. Magazine.
https://www.cccalloway.com/
ABOUT ME, THE INTERVIEWER
My name is Saria Smith, and I am a BFA Student currently working as the Curatorial Assistant at Stove Works Gallery. I am an artist and find joy in expressing myself through various ways involving, working with found objects, collage, and music. I decided to start these artist interviews as a way for the public to connect more with the residents who flow through Stove Works perhaps unseen, especially during this pandemic.