Last week I visited Isaac Resnikoff in his East LA studio. Before moving to LA for grad school Isaac spent 5 years in Philly, as a member of Vox and showing at Fliesher Ollman. Now that Isaac is out of school he recently built out studios in a large industrial space he and his wife rents in East LA. I got the chance to meet up there and talk about his work past present and future.

FunnelPages: What are you working on?
Isaac Resnikoff: This photographic series, it doesn’t have a name yet. The idea is to make seven house frames, and to shoot them head on. They will be displayed as a series in a line so they look like a city/suburban block. They will all be different types of houses, and will all be built in the space behind this studio.

a beginning photograph from the series

FP: Are you going to keep all of the houses together?
IR: No, the wood is the same wood in both of the frames I have already built, which at first was a practical concern but the more I think about it I think it’s a pretty important part of the project. Since these images are going to be a house not yet built, I like that once you know that the wood is being re-used it may not yet be un-built; it has just as much relationship to its past as it does to its future. My work in Philly was always being influenced by being in Philadelphia- in this goofy/cartoony colonial way. I never do that on purpose but it seems to happen- like last year I built a palm tree, and a concrete barrier, which seem to be influenced by being in LA. These houses seem to be a bit subtler. As an idea, California was always defined as “in the process of being made” and more recently it’s “in the process of being un-made”. Where as places like Philadelphia and New York may have a point of being built and a point of being un-built, its with a hundred or two hundred span in between. In California it just has a moment in between.

a house in the process of being built

FP: Is it now a rule in the project that you can’t buy/use other wood for the rest of the seven houses?
IR: No, I have already bought more wood and used some of the older wood for other things around the studio. It’s more that there is a process of taking it apart. And if I just used specific wood for one house and kept it aside- you could essentially rebuild that exact same house. But with reusing the wood it’s a city block (in the photographs) but at the same time it’s just one house, since I am using the same stuff.

FP: Why do you like to use wood so much?
IR: While I was in under-grad I was making abstract sculptures with plexi and wood. The wood was minimal and fancy (sanded and polyurethaned) with all of this bent colored plexi-glass bolted to it. It was really strange looking back at it. I felt at that point very strongly that I didn’t want the work to be autobiographical or didactic. At a certain point I realized that I wasn’t making abstract sculptures, but sculptures about abstract sculptures. Then I realized that I could make sculptures of what ever I want. And I enjoyed working with wood.
I think that there is folksiness in the craft. When I worked at Freeman’s for the years I was in Philly it was a great experience because I just got to look at so much stuff. The painting department is big, though since they aren’t Sotheby’s or Christie’s they aren’t going to get Picassos, and what they did get was great stuff. But their Americano Dept got top notch pieces since the money wasn’t so much of an issue because that stuff never got as expensive as the paintings. While there I saw this one set of chairs, they weren’t super-ornate, just simple turned wood. A whole chair was painted black and there were these thin yellow lines painted down the legs to make it look like they were fluted. A European would have carved flutes into the column, this chair seemed specifically American to me – the “just enough-ness”. And in wood I feel like I am good enough at using it, I’m not fetishizing the craft. I think it’s important especially now to be making American work, and for the work to be located in this time and place.

Untitled (Jersey Barrier).Carved Wood. 20ft x 2ft x 3ft. 2009

FP: What do you mean by “its important especially now”?
IR: 9/11 happened in the beginning of my senior year of undergrad. I was living in New York and had a view of the World Trade Towers from my living room. So there is a personal relationship to that from my experience. But it seems like that’s our generation, not to rehash 9/11 over and over, but…

FP:There’s a before and after.
IR:Absolutely, I think it’s an important thing to try and deal with that. Its funny to me that right after 9/11 we had the craziest art market ever- but people did not go there, instead there were a lot of super banal, flowery stuff that people made.

Complete History of the USA, Versions I & II. Acrylic on carved pine, plywood.
14.5 x 14.5 x 96 in. each. 2006

FP: Do you have a definition of American work, or is it more about being aware of the time and place that you are living in and through that awareness it will come into the work?
IR: I think of my work as being political but not activist. It has more to do with the importance of someone’s location. Before I moved out here. There was this kid on the Main Line who had gotten hit by lightning and all the local TV channels where covering it. They were interviewing his neighbors about what happened and he ended up being fine. But there was one moment when I realized- that was the stupidest conceivable story, but since I live close to this kid it means that it matters to me in a way where if I heard about someone in Indiana I would wonder –why am I hearing about this? But it does matter when someone nearby was hit by lightning. So I see local-ness as a pretty complicated and important part of civic-ness and empathy.

FP: So you were happy you heard about this story?
IR: I was happy to realize that it actually mattered to me. Local news sensationalizes the dumbest shit and is ultimately pure entertainment. Where as on the flip side the most important stuff to the community, like your neighbor loosing their house or a cross walk being put in, doesn’t make the news. But as far as that kid is concerned, even though that story was totally sensationalized, it was especially significant to realize that something bad that happens closer to you is worse than something that happens further from you.

FP: Something that comes up in the work for me is a kind of poetry, like in your work Other People you have included the quote “the closer we get to them the more they fall apart”. Can you speak about that?
IR: The Getty Museum has James Ensor’s Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889. Seeing that painting made me want to do a piece involving a crowd. I was in my car before I made that piece, at a stop sign. As I was about to drive forward in front of me a small protest walked by, they were protesting water rights, so there were only about 300-400 people. The group wasn’t especially large, so it was more like a clump that moved together. And it was a very specific spatial thing. And with Other People I wanted that space to have a bellows effect, from either the front or back it represented a larger space, but from the side it collapsed. And where ever you stood in relation to the sculpture it contextualized the piece. I like as a viewer the way you chose to read the piece contextualized your role in it, and would be ultimately be a moral decision. The crowd could be a parade, a rally, a mob; leaving that open people automatically form some sort of relationship to it and that defines them as much as it defines the work. The difference between a protest a march and a mob usually depends on which side you are on.

Other People .Carved Wood.72 x 96 x 8 in. 2009

FP:Do you think that is poetry- how a work can reflect you as much as it reflects itself?
IR:I think it’s a poetic device. I used to think that I hated poetry, but recently I’ve been thinking that’s the dumbest thing in the world, how could you just hate all of poetry?

FP:Poetry is like video art to me- when it’s good its really good but when it’s bad it just makes me aware of the time I have to sit through to get to the end.
IR:I think that is fair. When its good you don’t pay attention to the artifice of it at all, and when its bad you think- what are you doing? Fundamentally I think that is how is how an actual poem works- that it asks a little bit more of the listener/viewer in terms of comprehension. To just comprehend the thing it needs unpacking and the act of unpacking it involves you in the work and potentially implicates you.

FP: What do you think about Philadelphia, having lived there for 5 years and now being out of Philadelphia
IR: I really liked living there for those years and I still recommend it to many people. Philly is very much built, it still seems provincial in way where you can get stuff done. And there are a lot of interesting things that get done there because of that. But that provincial quality is colored by its proximity to New York. A lot of people in Philly are living in Philly until they eventually decide to move to New York. Where as here, in LA, that provincial quality  seems to develop into something more productive. All of the big blue chip artists that live out here teach. Which is not something that happens in many other parts of the art world.

To see more of Isaac’s work you can check out his website here.