Carve Out Time And Save Energy
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amboozled: How Movies Have Deceived Me (Snow, Sand, Rain) 2010 Appropriated video footage. Displayed on 3 CRT monitors 2:16 min. Video stills from 3 channel digital video installation (color, silent)
When reading about a friends project on Kickstarter, I ended up coming across an artist by the name of Rayna Savrosa hailing from Brooklyn, NY. Her medium is photography and video and is super excited to interview for her first time ever regarding her artwork!
What advice would you give an artist just starting out?
First of all, I think it’s important to have fun when you’re making art! I think it really shows when an artist is in love with their own work. And the opposite is true too: if a project is excruciatingly painful and you’re tearing your hair out trying to force yourself to work, that comes shows too.
That said, I don’t think strong work just pours out of an artist without an enormous amount of discipline. A professor once told me to protect my work from myself. In other words, don’t let your life interfere with your work. Especially in a city like New York, it’s important to carve out time and save up energy to focus on your process, and give it the attention it deserves. So treat your art as if it were your significant other. Spend quality time with it, but be able to step away from it too.
Hutong Stream 2010
Your photography has a ton of emotion – when was the first time you picked up a camera and knew this was your calling?
I think I was actually drawn to photography because I’m an incredibly impatient person. I’m an instant gratification junkie, and a camera can deliver that sensation. Of course, I often spend hours on PhotoShop sewing multiple images together into one composite, so it’s not exactly a quick process. But when I take pictures I still feel giddy the way I did when I was a little kid snapping polaroids in the 80s.
But sometimes my favorite work doesn’t require using a camera. A few months ago almost all of my equipment was stolen! It was traumatic at first, but it also forced me to be creative in new ways. I started working on production design for films, which turned out to be incredibly rewarding work. I’m currently in the process of building an eight foot long tongue made out of foam and spandex for a video. It’s really cool because I get to actually enter these worlds that I have created, instead of just purely observing. And of course I expect this will really change my photography as well.
In the end, I don’t feel attached to one medium. It’s the collaboration that I’m attracted to, whether I’m behind the lens or preparing a scene. I hope to continually expand the range of materials that are available to me, and explore the themes that interest me through various forms.
Where does your inspiration come from and what thrills you most about creating art?
I’ve always been interested in people and social trends, maybe even more than I am interested in art. My father is a psychiatrist and my mother is an anthropologist, so I came from a family that analyzed humanity, both on an individual and cultural basis.
I borrow moments from mass media sources, I follow friends and strangers around bars and parties, and look for ways to translate the patterns I find visually. I’m attracted to personal ads on Craigslist, Chatroullette, and Hollywood romance movies, but the most thrilling part of creating art is when I am able to give these sources a deeper meaning through the context of my work.
The Dream 2006 Acrylic on Canvas 13×31
One of my favorite pieces is titled “The Dream” can you tell me more about it, does it represent an emotion you went through or what was your thought process behind it?
It’s funny that you ask about my thought process behind this piece in particular. When I paint, I feel like I’m actually not thinking! It’s a totally different process of working for me than photography or video. When I go out into the world and take pictures, I’m usually looking for something in particular that I want to investigate. When I paint, I really don’t know where these characters come from. They are usually pretty dark and intense, like they are all lurking somewhere in the back of my brain waiting for me to discover them. And I never know they’re there until suddenly I look at the canvas and say “Oh my! Who are these people!?” (Then again, I think I was going through a break up when I painted that one.)
You describe your work based on excess, overindulgence, decline and destruction of the self and society. What moved you to focus on this and start your ongoing project “American Binge”?
For the past five years much of my work has been inspired by this one line from Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men. Theo is meeting his cousin Nigel, who is the curator of the “Ark of the Arts”. As the world falls apart outside Nigel’s window Theo asks what keeps him going. Nigel’s answer: “I just don’t think about it.”
Choosing not to see, choosing “just not to think about it” is a recurring theme in my work. Playing with tensions between engagement and disengagement, I’m interested in critiquing this state of behavior.
So it’s the act of communal blocking out that lead me to “American Binge”. It is both strange and fascinating to me that as human beings, one of our favorite pastimes is to get completely inebriated and forget who we are.
Can you tell me more about “American Binge” and when do you think you’ll have it “completed”?
Ooh, that’s a good question. Ideally I’d like to travel across the country and photograph every bar and every party—the good times and the bad, the glamorous and the not so glamorous—but I haven’t quite figured out how to get that grant yet.
Hogs and Heifers. 2010 Digital C-print 20×78'' digital composite consisting of 15 images. Hogs and Heifers Saloon in NYC.
What are your plans for “American Binge” will this be a gallery or on line only series?
I’ve always imagined it as both, actually. And in addition I’d love to produce a tightly edited book with the images from the exhibition. Sort of in the vein of Robert Frank’s The Americans,
Do you have any shows you’d like to talk about?
Right now I’m actually preparing to go to China for a residency at Red Gate Gallery in Beijing. I am working on a photographic series that explores the globalization of food in China—a project that is my response to a factoid that I heard claiming that a new KFC opens every 18 hours in China. I’m also going to continue shooting “American Binge”, focusing on tourists drinking abroad. We do get a chance to show our work in the gallery there, but of course that’s a long way away from here. When I get back I would love to start hunting for the right venue to show my binge series here in New York.
Where can we find your work?
On my website at www.savrosa.com. And on Youtube. I’m also planning on having an open studio in Brooklyn once I return from Beijing in late August.
