Another installment from my trip to Los Angeles. This week features my visit to Jesse’s Culver City studio. We talked about his work using sculpture, video, and photography.

Funnel Pages: What are you working on?
Jesse Robinson: I tend to work on a few projects at once. Most of the stuff I’m working on now is going to be in a show in Richmond Virginia at the end April. This piece is called “Gleam”. It’s spray paint on MDF with a chrome molding that is illustrating a photographic gleam- like what you would see on a pretty woman’s smile, or from a car. I’m using the material for what the material purports to do. The stencil is of collection of different shapes, I want it to suggest a grouping of objects but not be decodable. The piece is more about the subtraction of everything, so that all that’s left is that gleam.

Gleam. MDF, spray paint, chrome molding. 2009.

FP: How long have you been in LA?
JR: I’m originally from LA, then went to grad school in Virginia for two years and moved back here about a year and half ago.

FP: How do you start a piece?
JR: I usually start with an object and a process. For instance, this smashed box piece started from being interested in a process called “greeking”. You use it in film and television to obscure product labels, so you don’t have to pay royalties. So this started out by taking a box and trying to strip away all of that information. Where as this other piece started with Le Sport Pack bags and using that as a perimeter I built these inserts that fit perfectly inside them, and it goes on from there. I will often make four or five version of the same piece, reworking parts of it. I don’t have a good imagination, so I need to see something in order to respond to it.

Detail of the box that has been greeked.

FP: Do you see this process as deconstructing the object?
JR: I try and isolate a particular quality in it. The first time I make something I might be focusing on one aspect of it and then realize that part dead ends, where another part of the process/object might have a longer more fruitful investigation to it. I don’t ever really see a piece as being fully done. When they are in a show there is a snap shot of what they are in that moment. I’ve shown pieces only to take them back and totally change them. Although some are closer to finished than others.

LeSport Stack. acrylic, plaster, fiber glass, LeSport Sac plastic bags, enamel. 2009

FP: Can you talk more about this isolation in your process?
JR: A lot of my process is subtractive. Its not as much about trying to locate the essence of a thing, its more about locating and exploring a particular quality. In this photograph there is an image of a tree that is printed all green, and placed over it is a pattern of a matt with all these little windows. We understand how to use the matt by putting a single picture in each of these little windows, but there’s another logic at work that tells us that we should only have one picture in the whole frame. So I see this as a logical use of this matt- physically obstructing the exposure of the photograph. Its really important that the information between the image isn’t there, not that a matt is covering it, but that information actually doesn’t exist.

FP: What else are you working on?
JR: I am interested in using video in a sculpture as a sculptural material, not an illusion or theatrical space. So these chairs are painted as a green screen. In the show the video and the chairs will be in the space, but it won’t be a live feed of the chairs- there will be a video and a separate object (the chairs) on the other side of the room far enough away that you will forget about their relationship and just recall the video as you view the chairs.

FP: What are you excited for?
JR: The moments when things work in the studio, while it doesn’t happen very often it’s extremely exciting and energizing. And the moments when I forget what an object is, when they stop being a “found object” and I gain ownership in my mind.

For more information/images of Jesse’s work check out his website here.