Bari Ziperstein Interview

My interest in the investigation of site-specificity led me to live within this environment for three months while completing this ambitious project often having to physically negotiate the space in odd and precarious ways. Overtime, I placed full coffee cups, incoming mail, and my purse on top of the sculptures resulting in the environment digesting the sculptures.

My kitchen table turned into a hot glue and cutting foam core station while conquering the task of measuring the volumes of objects (green vases, picture frames, the space underneath my coffee table) for each photographic shot. Over sixty schematic drawings were produced in which meticulous measurements and formal choices were made as to how the plastered foam core objects would mutate out of a single object.

The schematics served as the architectural plans for the project. Often, I refined the schematics once the sculptures were produced in anticipation of the final composition of the photograph. Working from room-to-room, my process had a built in failure in which the schematics failed to produce the geometric object or composition I envisioned on paper. The objects would fall, were too tall or short, or not fit into or underneath the domestic object it was measured for. Luckily the use of soft materials, foam core and hot glue, enabled shaving off a few inches here and there too never set back the two day shoot date with Grant Mudford. The pleasure of the project was produced from the mathematical and formal negotiations to produce these precarious sculptures.

Because the sculptures are temporary and site-specific, they manifest only as large format color photographs. It was essential that the photographs replicate the quality of a high-end magazine spread because the work is a comment on the utopian lifestyles proffered by home décor magazines. The photographs illustrate decoration consumed by architectural outgrowths - an interior design gone very much awry. The results were eight light-jet photographs exhibited in the gallery as framed objects alongside five site-specific sculptures.

I conceptually distinguish between which sculptures are props for the photographs and which sculptures are on display in the gallery, ultimately adding to the set quality of the final images. When simultaneously exhibiting both sculpture and photography, there is never a one to one ratio between either. If a sculpture makes an appearance in a photograph it acts as a mere prop and is discarded upon the completion of the shoot.

NEA photography fellow Grant Mudford took the documentation of my site-specific sculptures. As a regular contributor to Home and Garden, Architectural Digest, and Architectural Record, he has the experience and aesthetic sensibility to make convincing images of my sculptural interventions. Furthermore, he is intimately familiar with Southern California architecture, having been commissioned by MOCA LA to extensively photograph Louis I. Kahn and R.M. Schindler architecture, and by the Getty Trust to photograph Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall. My collaboration with Mudford will continue as my projects require his services.

My artistic practice is engaged with the architectural history of Los Angeles and can be read as an investigation of how urban landscapes are defined by consumerism. My work has often related to ideologies centered on mid 20th century American capitalism and consumer excess. The sculptures are interruptive to the living space or plethora of proffered images of sterilized homes, which give themselves up to its environmental context, being formally determined and directed by it.

My work posses an undercurrent of economy, a trait one could trace back to Minimalism, Mondrian's spartanity, Malevich's suprematism, Tatlin's constructivism or even Modernism in general. The minimal and post-minimal artists self-reflective practice incorporated issues concerning the economics/fabrication of materials, phenomenology, and architectural site specificity. My work has developed out of this aesthetics shift, which enabled me to investigate the epistemology of sculptural production, process, and practice. In the essay, Michael Asher and the Conclusion of Modernist Sculpture, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh outlines three concepts, which are crucial to the transgression of modernist sculpture: "the notion of specificity, the notion of place, and that of presence."

Americans are feed utopian lifestyle imagery from upscale shelter magazines, which are a necessary cultural production to maintain the capitalist society. Hoping we will always want more and never be satisfied. My show titled (This Isn’t Happening) Popular Hallucinations for your Home is a manifested hallucination if American ran out of space to build and consume. Resulting in architecture literally started to sprout or grow out of our own mass-produced objects. You can't plant architecture like a seed and watch it grow but I'm interested in infusing sculpture or architecture with a mechanics of growth or parasite qualities. What results is a photographic image or sculpture that is a manifestation of these surreal theories.

If one could say that the work to be done by art includes the solution of social problems, my work gets at these larger issues through the seemingly simple act of solving spatial problems and visually articulating implied geometry.

My previous project (2003-05) reused a single group of 826 cardboard boxes to avoid the excessive consumption myself, but also to reiterate the typical life cycle of a box. In my hands, boxes were recycled to become source material for an assortment of presentations including folded flat stacks placed between aqua oam palettes or monumental towers, which the viewer was able to walk threw. In between each box were neon colored stripes that were hidden from the viewer yet entice with their reflection and glow, reminiscent of the alluring packaging for most consumer products. In preparation for each recombinance, each box was meticulously inventoried, assigned a number, and a new mapping was created which served as a utilitarian architectural plan to construct the sculpture.

Recombined five times, these site-specific installations explored ideas of storage in relation to mass consumption or consumer excess adhering to the dimensions of standardized personal storage units. Pallets, crates and cardboard boxes observed throughout LA's and Chicago's retail and storage facilities, become my source material for site-specific sculptures, mappings, drawings, silk screens and paintings.

Similar to my previous project, the current work continues to carefully consider the arrangement of domestic objects trying to 'make the most' of the space, yet simultaneously asks whether this efficiency is really an ideal. Surely there is something that makes one feel good about maximizing an area, but my work points out the irony of this. There is a parsimony of space applied to a collection of objects that are useless and excessive in the end and are, therefore, put into storage or given to a thrift store.

Ultimately the viewer arrives at a hallucination or complication of a common event, the accumulation and display of unnecessary domestic goods, which leads one to question the aura of objects both within and outside of the context of art.

I am interested in site-specificity that takes the 'site' as an actual location, its identity composed of a unique combination of constitutive physical elements. The overwhelming excesses of consumerism and a baroque sensibility collide in my treatment of frames on the wall creating a third space to negotiate. The simple wooden frames become holes from which the innards of the house spill forth; rectilinear blocks emerge from the walls. In both the photographic documentation and the sculptures in the gallery, my forms are angular but imperfect, suggesting the organic nature of both the builders and the house. I introduce these builders in a variety of DIY poses-men hammering, pouring concrete, or erecting the walls of a house-in small collages of images cut from the likes of Better Homes and Gardens. Sketches of my white beams are then layered on top, protruding from window wrapping around the men, locking them into place and binding them irrevocably to their objects of their labor.

Currently, I am an adjunct professor at UCSD teaching both beginning painting and intermediate sculpture to mostly science majors who are minoring in art. As a sculpture with an undergraduate degree in painting and women's studies, the challenge of teaching beginning painting is overwhelming when traditional painting is no longer a part of my practice. Once the class began, my digested painting skills were immediately unearthed and my resistance to traditional painting slowly eroded.

The first painting assignment was to make a personalized portable still life out of foam core using a clip lamp as a light source. Getting them to think about the fluidity of painting and sculpture, of course mapping my own interests into each assignment. Painting several of the foam core objects various colors of their choice they were required to make three works on paper each with a different composition. The students were extremely anxious about my lack of interest in their choice of style to paint being that I was more interested in their inventiveness. "What inventiveness?" they would say. Teaching a room full of scientists, I was forced to change my language from inventiveness to problem solving.

During the critique, one student commented how the presenter's sculptural still life was more interesting than their actual paintings. I found this to be a mini conceptual victory! The presenter immediately asked me if my enthusiasm for her sculpture rather the paintings would result in a poor grade. Undercutting any comprehension of what just took place, I sarcastically assured her that her GPA would stay intact.

On my many loops around the painting class, a fresh-faced eighteen-year old human biology major asked me some 'career advice.' He asked, "How do I sell my work because EBay is just not working." I almost vomited because of the shock that careerism and economics was being brought into the production of his paintings at such any early stage. Granted that he is talented, but doesn't have a fucking clue what to do with his skills or the art history in which is wants to engage in. "But how do I become famous?" he asked. In the end, he couldn't articulate what it meant to be a famous artist. I told him to concentrate on the work because with out that you've got nothing. I could see the utopian bubble popping hopefully bringing forth the real work of choosing a life in the arts.

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For more information on Bari Ziperstein please visit the artist's website or her represented gallery BANK.

Portrait photograph by Craig Havens.