Olivia’s interview with Maddie
Hellooo, Carousel Thirteen! My name is Olivia Sipla and I’ve been a fellow admirer of Maddie’s work for years. I am currently in my third year attending The Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design as a Fine Art/New Studio Practice major. During my fall semester I was given an assignment to conduct an interview with someone in the field of creating for 30-45 minutes. I found Maddie’s work… on Pinterest just as many of us did. Her work often seemed to make my thoughts make sense. I found throughlines between our interests when it came to making and media. I related to it all so deeply. It felt like she was reading my mind at times. So needless to say, Maddie was my top pick to interview for the assignment. We ended up spending nearly three hours together on various video calls on a Saturday in October. A dream come true! I hold this conversation very near and dear. I’m so honored to produce the first interview on this blog that I adore as a mere viewer and so excited to share a more director’s cut version. These girls have such a great thing going on here, so being a contributor in any way is insane and I am so utterly grateful!
My instagram is @livi.sip if you would like to lurk and there will hopefully be a new and improved art account coming soon thanks to Maddie’s encouragement during this conversation!
Thank you Maddie, and thank you Carousel Thirteen <3
Olivia Sipla: I found you on Pinterest when I was working on AP stuff, which- it was annoyingly hard to actually find you, which is very telling.
Maddie Duda: We need to get into that because…yes. A lot of people say that they found me through Pinterest or whatever, and… How? Because I've uploaded some of my own stuff on there to try to combat the system of Pinterest a little bit. I upload it myself, then people will be able to see that and it'll direct them to my Instagram or whatever. But if people have already uploaded it and have the most viral pin on Pinterest–the system is so strange. But I'm glad you were able to find me. Did it take deep image searching to figure it out?
OS: I think there were some that had your name in the caption. They wouldn't have the name of the pieces or anything, but it would sometimes have your name. And then I think that might be how I ended up finding you. There were some pieces, too, that just didn't have any information and it looked like your stuff. I would just hunt and peck for more to figure out if it was yours, then I found your Instagram, and was like, Okay, it's all here. And I looked at your website and found stuff, too so I knew what was yours.
MD: I'm glad you found me.
OS: There's some people at school, too, that have gotten stuff stolen on Pinterest. It's so scary.
MD: It's scary. And I try to see it as positive. If it's being uploaded there, then people want to see it. And Pinterest is one of those things where... I'm saving stuff on my Pinterest all the time that I don't know directly who it came from. And if I care about it enough, I'll go deep dive and figure out who it's by or whatever. But there's no system in place to protect artists, I guess, and make sure that proper credit has to be given before uploading something that's not your property.
OS: I don't either. But it's very confusing. The fact that someone takes a screenshot of it and then it becomes their property–that's so evil.
MD: I love Pinterest so deeply. But that means something needs to change.
OS: I’ve had an art Instagram since high school but I haven’t posted anything since then. Your Pinterest situation has scared me so I just post stories. But then no one is looking at my stuff. I’m just scared to get into that space where people are taking things… I don’t know how I would handle it. But now I’m three semesters away from graduating and realizing no one has seen my work.
MD: Don't be afraid to post stuff. I try to remind myself that it's all good because people care to see it. And not that that matters either, but it does create a little more purpose to what you're doing if people are having a response to it.
OS: Exposure is such a weird thing to me because you want people to see your work so that you can gain traction. But all of that feels weirdly selfish, even though it's just not?
MD: I go back and forth in my head about it all the time. I shouldn't care. The whole point of being an artist is to just do it because you have to and your emotions are in it and whatever. But there's two sides to it, right? Some people think art is strictly you need to get rid of all your possessions and dedicate every second of your entire life to art because that's what it means to be an artist. And there's other people that are like, Well, you have to earn a living, and you have to whatever. I love being an artist but it's not realistic to be extreme on either end. It’s just hard. If you don’t care about people seeing it then that’s fine, but there’s also value to art being in the world and people seeing it. Because you have to be realistic. And you can't put your life on the line for artwork. You don't have to do that.
OS: Yeah. Thank you for saying that, too, because there are a few instructors at school right now that are very much like, no, you need to fight. You need to put your life on the line. Nothing matters except your work.
MD: I had a very similar experience with CCS, where one of my professors was really realistic with me. She was like, Maddie, you need to have a more mass-produced approach to stuff you can sell. She was like, You have your crowns, and you can make those, and you know the formula of making those, and it's easy for you, whatever. That's your thing that you can use to support your practice. Then you can also be an artist and not worry about selling your paintings. She was like, other professors at school don't understand that you have to have a job sometimes, and you have to be realistic about being a business owner rather than just an artist. You have to be able to market yourself properly and not be just like, I'm just going to fly by the seat of my pants. That's never going to be realistic for everyone. I appreciated that she was honest and realistic to say, You are allowed to try to market yourself properly and be an artist at the same time. It's not wrong to want to be stable and successful about being an artist.
OS: How do you think your surroundings have influenced you, whether it's CCS or whether it's moving out and going to school?
MD: I think Detroit on the broad scale is a very artsy city, and there's always stuff happening around that feels important and it feels exciting to be a part of. So I think that has made me feel like Detroit is my place for now. I want to be here. And I think on a smaller scale, my surroundings, I guess, would be my apartment or home. I'm always surrounding myself with my things that I love. I have all of my things I've collected– vintage clothes and stuffed animals. All of my furniture has belonged to past family members. I got my couch from my grandma, and my dining room table is from my great grandma, and I have this crazy lamp that was my great grandma's. It just feels like I’m finding purpose in what belongings I keep and there's so much memory associated with physical objects. And that was a lot of what I focused on for my thesis; the material memory of physical objects. It just feels like I find the value in things that belong to other people, and that it helps spark my inspiration in terms of memory and making work about that. There's so much value in second-hand stuff.
OS: Many people just don't realize that, and it makes me so sad. Getting something new is not as fun.
MD: It's not as fun. And there's just so much memory attached to every little thing. We have this store in Detroit called Arts & Scraps where all the CCS students go to get supplies because it's an art supply thrift store, basically. People donate supplies there, and it's a lot of old ladies getting rid of their quilting collection or it's just huge things that at Joanne's would have cost a fortune that someone's just giving away. You go and you fill a bag for $10. It's amazing for art students. But I find stuff from there, and I was able to make pretty much everything from my thesis with just supplies from there. I never had to buy something new besides a couple of random times, depending on what it was. And that added so much to the meaning for me of what I was trying to make work about because it was like this physically belonged to someone else. It just makes it feel more special.
OS: There was something on your website. It was at the bottom of your CV–
MD: I already know. The fast fashion thing.
OS: So back to the Pinterest debacle. It all goes together.
MD: Yeah. A couple of years ago, I painted on top of a dress that I already had, and it got picked up by a fast fashion someone. Because I think they're all the same person.
OS: It’s like a hive mind.
MD: Yeah. They have the same manufacturers and stuff. So if one website has it, then they probably all have it. But I had someone reach out and tell me she saw my dress on this website. And I think that she had image-searched it and it came up or something, so she could see all the different things that had it. That was three-ish years ago. There's pictures of me wearing this dress because I made it. I'm standing in my old apartment, and now that's just on some random fast fashion websites where my face is being used in the photos.
OS: That's horrifying!
MD: I was able to reach out to some websites and others it was just a lost cause. There was no point. It was really weird because I even found one of them on Depop, where someone was claiming that they found it secondhand. I reached out and I think it was a scammy Depop seller acting like they were reselling something. The profile ended up getting taken down. So it definitely wasn't legitimate. But just, it had come so far. And the dress was printed and looked horrible. It went away for a while, and then it resurfaced, and there was another round of it getting put on one of the fast fashion sites that's a little more Instagram-y, they're better at posting and seeming more legit. I don't remember what it was, but it came up as a weird Barbie costume idea. They made this post that was Barbie Halloween costumes, and they used that dress as weird Barbie. I ended up posting about it on Instagram, and people went and attacked them. When stuff like that happens, it's validating because you realize people have your back.
OS: You sent your army.
MD: Yeah, I sent my Madeleyess army. But it's so weird because if it's outside of the US, there's no copyright laws that are going to protect you. There's literally nothing you can do. I've even had my crown design put into MovieStarPlanet. Someone found one on MovieStarPlanet, the game. I had to reach out to them, jump through a million hoops through customer support because they don't want people reaching out. Definitely no one is really reaching out regarding a stolen design in the game. Eventually, it got taken down. They said they didn't realize. It was spot on. Star placement, the same. Lace on star placement, the same, lace on the side, the same in the video game. It was so crazy. But I figured that would be funny to add to my CV because it's interesting to be ripped off by such big things.
OS: It's like a badge of honor.
MD: Yeah. It's like, you realize that your designs are desirable in some way. It felt like I deserved some credit for it, so I wrote it in my thing.
OS: I think you do deserve credit for it. I think more people should do it. I've seen similar things happen to other people I keep up with. There's one girl I follow who makes knitwear [Reagan Flora], and she for a while was doing things where she would blanket stitch very chunkily on them. It was super cute. All the fast fashion companies ate it up. I think she was facing the same battle of like, okay, this is cool because my work is desired and wanted, but also, where is my credit at all?
MD: It's a very difficult thing. The thing that irks me the most is when it's an Instagram brand that acts like they're an independently-owned cool thing, but they're actually like, ripping people off.
OS: How has your sense of home and the sentiment of it changed over time? And how has this change influenced your work?
MD: That's a great question. It's one of those things where you're growing up and it's very confusing. What does it mean to be an adult? Should I feel older than I feel? I feel like since I graduated, I have gone through that thing in my brain of turning 22 and automatically waking up and realizing, I'm older and not a teenager. It just was so abrupt where you can feel the mental shift happen. With home, it feels like I'm trying to learn that my apartment is my home. Because I go home to my parents house, they only live 45 minutes away. I've been going home less just because I'm busy with work and everything. When I'm there, it doesn't feel like home either because none of my stuff lives there anymore. My stuff lives in my apartment. When I think, oh, I want to go home, what am I seeking out? Am I seeking out my family? Am I seeking out the idea of what my childhood bedroom looks like? I'm sure you know that I have a weird obsession with my childhood home.
My whole thesis was centered around my reoccurring dreams about my old house, and that's not home. I haven't lived there since I was 10. So that's over a decade ago. There's no reason for me to be dwelling upon that. But it's the memories associated with that, right? That place doesn't exist anymore. And it's actually still with me right now, but it's just in a different form. So I think my sense of home changes all the time because you're just learning to grow up and be independent and be on your own.
I think it influences my work because I'm teaching myself that it can be wherever it needs to be. Home doesn't need to be a physical place. My sense of home doesn't need to be my old house that I haven't lived in, in 11 years. It can be my things and my family or my friends that are around me- everything that I keep with me and that I hold important to me. Making work about it clearly creates some catharsis for me because I keep doing it.
OS: I second everything. I moved out this summer and as soon as I got everything settled, there was a genuine grieving process. I was grieving my house. It was such a weird thing. I did not understand what was happening. I'd never felt that before. Because in the MIAD dorms I still had home at home, but now all of my home stuff is here. There was a slight shift. I realized, oh, I'm an adult now, and that's really scary.
MD: Spot on what I feel. It's a really crazy thing to go through, weirdly. It really is a grieving process. When I made the replica of my childhood bedroom it was the best critique I had in school. I had my group, and I thought that it wouldn't be relatable and that there wouldn’t be much to talk about because none of those people had ever seen my childhood bedroom. That ended up being the deepest crit conversation I had. People were relating to it even more because I had put more into it. It was reminding them of their childhood bedrooms and things that they had and some of the objects they put in there. One of my classmates was like, ‘You're grieving your childhood. It's grief. That's what that is’. That was such an aha moment for me. It's not just a weird fixation on the feeling. I mean, maybe it is, too, but it's grief. Maybe I have this deep, repressed trauma, even, of moving out of that house at 11. Because I remember being affected by it when I moved, but it was all happening so fast that I maybe just bottled it up, and now it's coming out a decade later, which is ridiculous.
But it's interesting how each person can individually process stuff like that or if you're affected by it, because I'm very emotionally affected by just stuff like that or people's homes or belongings. But what you said was spot on. The dorm felt like a transition year. Of like, I'm out of the house and I don't see my family every single day, but I'm still going home often enough that it feels like home in my bedroom. Or you buy stuff that's for a dorm rather than an apartment. You're still sleeping in a dorm bed rather than your own bed.
OS: It's all very temporary.
MD: Yes. It's very clear that it's temporary. It feels like you're on vacation in a hotel room. It feels like an in-between space that you're confused about. You don't feel 100% comfortable there. And that continued to feel like that a bit for me even till now. But now I'm like, Okay, this is where I live for now. And everyone feels this. Maybe it's to different capacities. We're both very emotionally affected by stuff like that. But eventually, it'll make sense.
OS: Did you always have the desire to cherish?
MD: We had a little digital camcorder. My dad would record videos of me and my sister on it, starting from age four for me. I was weirdly obsessed with rewatching those videos, even during childhood. Maybe it was just some self-absorbed, liking watching myself on video-thing. But I think I could process my memories as a child. So I think it was a little bit of almost creating false memories of stuff that you're watching on video. And I also was very territorial over my toys and belongings. I didn't want to get rid of anything. We had a lot of stuff. I have two younger siblings, and when we moved houses, my mom was like, ‘We're not keeping your old toys. We just can't.’ She would give stuff away to family or family friends and say it would be okay. But it was a very difficult process for me. I think I have always been sentimental about just everything. Which is interesting to me because I'm not a very outwardly emotional person. I don't get worked up very often in a sad way. I don't cry very often, but I think I feel sentimental about stuff a lot.
OS: What are some of your biggest inspirations when it comes to media?
MD: Definitely music. Music, which is interesting because I am not a musical person. I just am very music obsessed and I'm always listening to music. I think that I possibly have some form of synesthesia or whatever the thing is where you can see visuals associated with a song; I create music videos in my head when I listen to music, which is fun because you're like, hm, I wonder what the actual music video looks like. I think in terms of media, music is probably the biggest thing, which is funny because you'd think I'd be a musician then or something. I love Marie Antoinette, Sofia Coppola. That was one of the first movies I watched freshman year at CCS that just affected me so deeply. You can feel your brain changing. I think I took heavy influence from her visuals from that point forward. I got these vintage stuffed animals back in the winter or maybe the spring, and I found three little stuffed animals from different eras, different decades, and they all looked like they belonged together. And I'm obsessed with them. One of them is a 1970s poodle stuffed animal. And then there's a little 1950s…I think it's a little lamb or something. Actually, the last one was a baby doll, but it has a plush body from the '60s. And those all became like, not that those are forms of media necessarily, but I find that physical objects that I just see are helpful in terms of even color palette inspiration.
OS: Would you say that Marie Antoinette is your favorite movie, or what is your favorite?
MD: It's definitely up there, but I also love Mary Poppins. That was one of my favorite movies as a child. I think that that also influenced my visuals more than I realized until I rewatched it as an adult where I realized, oh my god, the carousel, and her dress and everything, the children's bedroom. Oh, and The Red Shoes! It's always everything at once with me. I really like early 2000’s everything, like old iPod commercials. I read this book that's about The Strokes and the early 2000s rock revival in New York City. And I’m deeply obsessed with the band Interpol right now. I've been obsessed with them since the summer.
OS: Tell me about your blog, Carousel Thirteen. How did it come about, who else is involved, what led you to this outlet?
MD: We've been longing to make something, which probably came more to fruition once I was in college, where I really wanted to collaborate with Sophie [sister] and make some creative something. I didn't know what it needed to be. I think it's that I want to be in a band so badly, but I have no musical abilities. I needed something I could do with my friends. I also just love early 2000s internet culture and funny old YouTube skits and stupid stuff that people were making when YouTube came out and whatever. So I also love Rookie Magazine, it was a very girlhood-based thing. They would talk about music and fashion and everything. It was a youth, teenager-based magazine. But the visuals from that were just so pretty. I wanted to make something that I also felt like could be an outlet that was separate from what my Instagram is right now.
I get too in my head about creating and curating what I'm supposed to be doing. If you stray from what you've created for yourself on Instagram, every follower is like, what is this? It has made me nervous for a long time to try to show more parts of creative outlets or other interests of mine or inspirations even if they're not fitting into the aesthetic that I created for myself. I was like, okay, well, I can make a blog and have that be separate. Now I'm trying to find ways to incorporate it because I feel like it should exist relatively in the same space. I love talking about music. I just love talking about stuff, so I felt like I needed an outlet for that. I also hope that it will be more collaborative in the future once I can get my bearings about it a little more. But my sister is also a great writer, and she takes photos, so I was hoping she could just use that as an outlet as well for writing and stuff like that. My roommate Allison, too, also went to CCS. She's a year older than me, and she studied stop motion animation and film. We were all writing for that for a while, and then everything was getting hectic life-wise.
It was getting stressful for me because we had one video on the blog Instagram that went viral, and we were getting all these crazy comments. People were finding the website really fast, which was cool because, oh my god… I made a thing! But people were confused about what the purpose of the site was. It became stressful, and I had to stop for a little bit. It was because I made that diary section to be more blog style, what blogs were, to just write about whatever you wanted. And everyone was like, you should not be sharing your personal diary online. And other people were wondering how to add their own. It was very bizarre. I'm still workshopping a way to make the whole system of it work well. I think I like the way the website looks. It was actually quite amazing. But at a certain point I felt like I needed to accommodate more people’s involvement in it so they could feel like they were more a part of it.
OS: I don't think so. I think that whatever you wanted to be is what it should be, and that should just be the end of it.
MD: That was the stance I ended up falling back into because I was like, well, maybe I should take advantage of the fact that people want to be involved. Then I decided no, because that’s not why I made this. That wasn’t the point.
OS: If they don't get it, they don't get it. Don't be scared to go out and do new things because that's the way that you learn, and that's the way that you continue to make. I always think that's such a funny thing when people get mad at people for doing something new. It's still the same person and they still have the same thoughts.
MD: It's not even a change necessarily. It's just stuff that I wasn't showing on Instagram or whatever. I'm just trying to stick with it and do what I want to do because that's what Instagram is supposed to be. But it is one of those weird back and forth things in my brain where I'm wondering, am I trying to make this lucrative? Am I trying to curate this so that it's more successful to me as a business owner? Or am I trying to be a person? I feel like sharing more about your personality on the internet makes you more interesting or appealing to keep following along with. I feel like I should share more about what I'm actually doing or what my inspirations are because it helps people understand the artwork in a different way. I'm trying to share more, which feels ridiculous because it's like, who cares? It feels a little conceited to assume that people want to see who I am as a person, but maybe they do?
OS: As soon as you put yourself on any platform people are going to have something to say, and you either just have to deal with it or you get too stuck on it and give up. I think sticking with it is the way to go because then you're doing what you love and you're not giving up on it just because of what people said. That's also why I'm so scared to do anything. But again, I just need to do it. It's again that big-headed battle of, do people want to see this or they're just going to think I'm selfish? It always goes back to that. But ultimately it’s all human.
MD: It happens to me, too. I've had to tell myself, just do it. That actually was a thing for me for a while, to be more insecure about people I knew personally seeing the stuff I was posting. Not that any of it was weird or crazy. It makes you shy. But then you just have to remind yourself that it doesn't matter. You're just expressing yourself and sharing your artwork. Instagram is a blessing and a curse in terms of art stuff, but we're very lucky to live in a time where we can utilize that to help push us forward into the art world. Because there's so many people back 20 years ago that had to give up on their dreams because there was no way to share.
OS: Your job- Big Head Doctor? What does this mean, what do you do?
MD: I work at The Parade Company, and we have these old paper mache heads from Italy. There's over 400 of them in our collection, and I'm in charge of repairing them. So the tradition is from this town called Viareggio. They had these parades and carnivals there in the early 1900s, probably dates back further than that because our parade started in 1924 in Detroit. But they had these heads that they would make. The process of making one from scratch takes over a month, at least when we do it at my job. But someone in the '20s or '30s who worked for our parade, which at the time was Hudson's Thanksgiving Parade, which was the old department store in Detroit. He brought some of them over from Italy because he liked the idea of having those heads walking the parade. So I think we had a couple of them back then. And then I think sometime in the '50s, we had more of them brought over, and that's the majority of our collection. So we have literally hundreds of these heads! A lot of them are animals. We have frogs, bunnies, ducks, and all sorts of stuff. Then we also have a collection of famous Detroiter heads or Michigan-based people. Some of those were made in Italy and commissioned out. And then I think in the '90s? I’m not sure of the dates– this stuff is hard to find. But sometime, they had an Italian Big Head artist come make one or show the people in Detroit how to make them. And now it's just passed down through every year of whatever employee knows how to do it through the process of doing it. It's not really something that's super strictly written down anywhere. And there's not a lot online about what the tradition is. It's become a very Detroit thing.
But anyway, I'm the “Big Head Doctor”, so I do repairs on those. And since they're made out of paper mache, they're very brittle, but also weirdly strong at the same time, and they're very heavy. They're made of 18 layers of newspaper, and they have drywall mud on top of that to be plaster, because if we used actual plaster, it would be heavier, and that's also just more difficult of a process. That creates an eggshell coating on them to protect the paper, and then they get painted. I grew up obsessed with the Thanksgiving parade. So I was star struck by the whole process of being there, and now I work there and know how it all works, which is so crazy. But I basically just have to patch little pieces of paper mache. Sometimes they're so broken and haven't been kept up with in so long that the whole head will just collapse in on itself. The paper starts to break down and you can punch your fist through it and the whole thing just breaks. But we use wheat paste to repair, to do the paper mache because that's just what the tradition is. It's one of the only physical things we have at The Parade Company that maintains the tradition of how old the parade is because all of our old floats, besides a select few, get recycled every time the contract is up with the company that sponsored it. So the new floats that we build every year go for three to five years, and then they get taken apart. So we don't have any besides maybe one float that has been consistent in the parade for the almost 100 years that it's been going. So the Big Heads are a very physical piece of evidence of the history of the parade, I guess, which also ties into the stuff I find interesting in my personal art practice. It's a cool through line.
OS: The full circle of it all is very sweet!
MD: I know. I've said to my bosses many times, I hope you guys know that this is my dream. Working there is so insane right now, especially because it's not a year-round job. So it's always crunch time right before the parade, regardless of how much work we actually have to do. So it's stressful in that regard because I'm very organized about my life. I like being on top of everything, and everyone there is the artist type, so it's harder to be really diligent about getting the work done. There's too many hoops to jump through and too many people working on it all at the same time. But it's a really fun job and Thanksgiving Day is magical! It's just so cool. This is just such a difficult time because my hours are crazy. I worked 57 hours last week.
OS: Oh my god.
MD: The work has to get done. And it has an end in sight. You work hard and then it's over. And then you have six months of the year that you're not doing that. So it all balances out.
OS: It's probably so rewarding in the end to see it all.
MD: This is my second season. So, I started last summer as their intern. I got credit for school, which was awesome and then they hired me. I would go to work in the morning for three hours, go to class, then leave class early to go back to work. The pressure was getting to me, then parade day happened and I was like, oh, this is what it’s for! Seeing everyone enjoy it, even if it goes by fast, even if people aren't taking in the same details that we see because we're building all of it, it just feels so rewarding.
OS: Did you seek it out or did they find you?
MD: I literally still don't remember how I thought to reach out to them, but I emailed them because I was looking for an internship after my junior year. I wanted to start figuring some stuff out because I just didn't really have a good grasp on what is realistic for me to be doing after school. They had me come for a studio tour and pretty much hired me on the spot because they needed people.
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OS: I've noticed with younger artists on Instagram versus the vast majority of ‘micro-influencers’ or whatever, there's such a clear line to me. I feel like the artists are a completely different section than everyone else is doing something else. The influencers get so much and the artists are just forgotten about, except the fact that they have followers. There's a strange divide there.
MD: I actually have thought a lot about this, and I feel like you're in my head right now because I've had this conversation before. I feel like artists, visual artists, get treated so much differently than even musicians do. Throughout my college experience I was getting frustrated with the fact that you're not allowed to make work that doesn't have a concept necessarily. Art school does not want you to make work just because you think it's pretty. You have to have some deep intellectual concept behind it, which can be really good because you're figuring out what your purpose is in making art and why you want to do it. I needed to have that structure and learn those lessons to understand why I would spend the money to go to art school. But then also, there's value in making stuff just because you want to. And I feel like musicians get away with that. Lana Del Rey, for example. She never had to explain, and maybe she did, I don't know, but her aesthetic of Americana, vintage '60s, her whole look in the Born to Die era never had to be excused or explained. She never had to say, I like having my makeup like this because it means this. It was more just like, well, I like Priscilla, and I like this. She's drawing inspiration from stuff that she can explain, but she never had to come up with an excuse for why that was important or why it related to the art she was making. I feel like artists should get that, too. I should be allowed to make work that looks a certain way just because I'm influenced by something and not because it means some super crazy thing relating to my concept. We can do both. In terms of what you're saying, influencers get these opportunities for just being on the internet, it's like, where's the room for artists to be influencers, too? Do I want to be an influencer or do I want to be this niche little thing that people don't know my face or don't know anything about me? But it should all be held to the same standard.
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OS: There is the networking side and there's the making side. You make stuff because you want to make stuff, and then you have to network to get it out there to make the money to sustain yourself. But then there's also the people that will just make stuff simply to make money rather than for themselves. I feel like they've really infiltrated the space and made that the entire thing. And that's what everyone expects. Everyone expects you to just make something insane to make money rather than just to make something for yourself. What you're saying about art school and how you're expected to have crazy concepts rather than just make something because you want to. They can all live together, but for some reason, they're totally separate. It's really strange and sad.
MD: Yeah, I agree. It was a weird journey through CCS because our Fine Art department got merged with our Craft department because they were trying to make a statement about how craft can be held to the same standard as art. Textiles can be held as important to painting, even though textiles are seen more as a woman's home-based craft, as in arts and crafts, rather than art, like museum art. So they were trying to say, okay, we can merge all of you together, and then that fixes it, right? But then there's still the question mark of, well, these things can also exist separately from one another and it be positive, because craft, if it is held to the same standard as art, should be appreciated for the techniques and the history behind certain skills and have that be enough rather than painting needing concept. Because technical painting is seen as unimportant, which– I guess I'm not a huge fan of still life realism. But there has to be value to honing your skills and technique. Because concept is one thing, but if you don't have the talent to showcase it, then what's the point? There has to be room for both.
OS: You have to get your bearings first, and then you can take liberties and explore. You have to know what you're exploring.
MD: Yeah. Learn the rules before you break them.
OS: There’s a lot of glitter and ‘abnormal’ fine art mediums in your work, I was wondering how your instructors handled that?
MD: I didn’t get much pushback from my instructors, which was good. They were very welcoming to the idea of all of the different mediums coming together and being one thing. They were very for ‘crafts’ being merged in, and for me to use glitter and nontraditional objects and mediums and whatever. I remember once it came up in class one time during my sophomore year where I poked fun at it and said, ‘Don't use glitter in your artwork’ and whatever. My instructor asked, ‘did someone tell you that?’ I was like, no. But I feel like that's the overarching idea in the art world is you shouldn't be using silly little cute things because it's not serious enough or whatever, or ruins it. I think it helped me get my message across with my themes. I like the whimsical feel of coating something in glitter and having it be whatever. But I think with glitter, specifically, people worry because it stays everywhere forever, and it's going to shed.
OS: That's the best part!
MD: Yeah, I don't care. I probably left a permanent trail of glitter at CCS because I would drag stuff down the hallway and see my path through. I've shown coworkers my work and had them be like, ‘oh, glitter is so messy, though. Why would you do that?’
OS: Because I want to?
MD: Exactly. It's adding to the story I'm telling. It's not taking anything away from the standard you need to hold it at. I don't think it needs to be seen as a childish, crafty thing. If it is, then maybe that's the point.