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correspondencearchive · 2 years

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25. Shaunté Gates, Leah Lewis, & Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann

Shaunté Gates, Leah Lewis, and Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann speak with each other about personal and communal mythologies, games and labyrinths, and breaking down elements in order to create new worlds.

Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann (KM): Our work has a lot of commonalities, we all work in the same physical space and there are a lot of ideas that bounce around this studio that we each deal with in very different ways. The first idea that I wanted to ask you both about is mythology. Te, you create these portholes into fantastical worlds, you’re a myth maker, and the spaces you make feel broad and sweeping. And Leah, it seems like you are also making a mythology, building your own world even though that world feels much more claustrophobic. I’m also trying to work with an alternate universe, a place to feel at home or a place to feel comfort or belonging, and I thought we could talk about that concept.

Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann, Salamander Room, 2020, Acrylic, sumi ink, collage on cut paper, 15 x 60 x 10 ft

Shaunté Gates (SG): That’s a great common thing that we have, whether it’s intentional or not, it’s in there. For me, it’s about finding and taking, like finding a clip from a piece of cinema. One of the movies I watched growing up was the Ten Commandments. I was watching these white cats playing as Egyptians, but I loved the movie. How do you break down and come through some of those things that have shaped your perception of the world?

Leah Lewis (LL): The opening scene of that movie had such an impact on your work. Just the perspective.

KM: Can you describe that opening scene?

LL: Rumbling clouds, this vast sky and this extreme dynamic perspective. I can’t remember if it’s the opening scene but it’s a scene in there.

SG: It had an impact on my life aesthetically and conceptually. It’s almost like Santa Claus in a sense, it’s not real but at the same time it’s a part of my life and how I was brought up. Thinking of that mixed with the environments I grew up in as a kid, for instance the war on drugs, and these myths that came from residential segregation… I’m taking different pieces of myths, and when they come back together, what new story can there be, what’s the story that we don’t know? All myths are based off of something real. I’m trying to find that thing, that unconscious truth. A lot of times when I make the work, I’m not even exactly sure what it is, I don’t need to know. If I know too much of what it is, I’ll fuck it up. I’ll alter it to make it so I don’t understand it. Just trying to find something that I don’t know.

Shaunté Gates, Land of Myth II, 2021, Acrylic, photo, pulled paper, collage on wood panel, 48 × 72 in

KM: I love that idea of scouring the world that we live in for the myths that are woven into the fabric of our lives, drawing them out and resetting them together to make a whole new language.

SG: What’s crazy is when I start putting those pieces together I take them to sleep with me. Literally, I’ll put them into my head, start thinking about them and moving pieces around. Sometimes I don’t sleep well because I’m constantly moving shit. But that’s what it is, a conscious exchange with the subconscious, where I’m like, OK I’ll put this there, and then pull it out, so that when I come to the studio today, I can’t remember exactly what it was that I dreamt about these pieces, but they’re there.

KM: Leah, do you feel like you’re doing that too? You’re pulling from your life and you’re resetting elements into alien places?

Leah Lewis, A Cautionary Tale, 2019; acrylic, oil, photo collage on canvas

LL: Yes, it was something I started doing the last time I went to art school, when I was trying to understand the idea of sculpture because I had never done three dimensional work. I started with a title, and I made a sentence, and I tried to literally translate that sentence, like code, with objects. That’s still what I’m trying to do. It’s the whole idea of still life—I don’t want to use figures—I just want to use objects. If figures are in there it’s because they’re on a label or on a picture. It’s like a rebus puzzle. It’s deeply personal for now, but at the same time I think anyone could pull something out of it. It’s got a psychoanalytic element to it. For example, the kitchen piece, that comes from some shit that happened where we lived, and the way I was feeling at the time.

KM: And you’re taking that experience and coding it.

LL: Yes, I’m taking objects and using them as a code. So it’s a story, or maybe you’ll just feel the vibe. I’m making myths with things.

KM: The vibe is a really anxiety inducing one.

LL: It is. Huge anxiety.

Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann, Fog, 2021, Acrylic, sumi ink and collage on paper, 60 x 80 in

KM: You both have a real interest in texture and incongruity, cobbling things together that don’t belong. Te, you’re literally smashing animals together. Leah, you’re placing objects that are so out of place and therefore are grotesque in their new contexts. You’re both interested in hybrids.

LL: We both do similar things. And this is how we’ve been since we met. And that’s the cool thing, that’s why we gel.

SG: And we’ve been hanging out ever since. We’ve got a kid, that’s who we are.

LL: We’re inspired by the same things, we have a spawn. A hybrid of ourselves. We could always have a conversation, take that conversation and put it in our work, but we both would do it in fiercely different ways. Part of is that our neuroses reflect so differently. He’s like a cyclone; even his studio environment is a cyclone, but he would never let a cup grow mold in it. While I would let that cup sit there and grow mold and take pictures of it so I could use it in my work. I have great moldy photos I used to take.

KM: That love of incongruity seems to manifest in an interest in mazes for each of us. I’m creating spaces that have a sense of passage but also a sense of entrapment, and I feel like both of you have that too. Leah, in your work it feels like you’re trapped, everything you do is really cropped and tight. And Te, your work is more expansive and explosive but it also feels like a labyrinth.

SG: I call them labyrinths of social constructs. Psychologically and physically. The actual structures, buildings and architecture in the work house and perpetuate the constructs. How do you find your way through a labyrinth of psychological and spiritual warfare.

Shaunté Gates, The Great Escape Sometimes, 2021, Acrylic, photo, pulled paper, collage, charcoal on wood panel, 48 × 72 in

KM: But at the same time, your work also has a sense of pleasure, escapism and playfulness.

LL: You got flowers blowing like Disney flowers.

KM: And both of you also have humor in your work.

SG: I’ve always had a little slice of humor, even with shit that seems really serious. I had one joint where there were statues, and a chariot driver, steering horses that are stone. In a sense, I’m saying, take control of your own destiny, make them move, but it’s still a fucking statue. There’s a sense of social immobility.

KM: That’s interesting because you do so much transportation! You’re making mazes that you can’t escape, and then you’re placing galloping horses with their manes flowing, motorcycles and cars. So there’s a sense of breaking through, but to where, and is it even possible?

SG: There’s always a person that I know in the pieces. They could be anywhere in the works. The narrative is escape, but some of the characters are going towards the center of the labyrinth. The labyrinth is the self. Think about all of the stories that have been taught to us about who we are and what we are—how do you come out of them? So that’s how I think about these characters. Some of them have gone to the center of the maze, like the woman who has transformed into an owl, she’s seen it, so she’s on her way out, but some of the other people might be trying to find their way in.

KM: Leah, do you feel like it’s too much of a stretch to think about your work in terms of a maze? What you’re describing, the sense of attempt at escape, but also embrace, that seems like that’s happening in your work as well—attempts at passage but instead of a clear linear narrative you’re entrapping us in layered domestic picture planes.

LL: A house, rooms, that’s a maze.

SG: It reminds me of that, especially your kitchen painting, because it depicts a house that I lived in for 20 years. Batteries in the drawers, playing cards, ketchup packets, random things that remind me of when I was 12.

KM: And you’re inserting these really grotesque elements into that environment.

LL: This was another thing that started at my last attempt at art school, finding the beauty in corrosion. We as a society think we can control this earth, but at the end of the day we have no control. I made these pieces from tile in a bathroom in my old apartment, they’re cracked, they’re getting mildew and mold in the cracks. Little tiny microscopic organisms are going to destroy this tile. There are all these things that are breaking down the building that I lived in and no matter how much everybody tries, at the end of the day it’s going to get swallowed up by the earth and destroyed.

KM: What you’re describing feels to me like a battleground, or a ballet perhaps, between control and chaos.

LL: Not a ballet, I like to think of it as rebellion. The fight against the idea of order.

KM: We’re all dealing with the fight against order, I like that a lot.

LL: Even though we’re neurotic.

KM: Right, like a game, playing with the concept of control but constantly going back and forth.

Leah Lewis, Bless your Heart, 2022; acrylic, colored pencil, marker, photo collage on Bristol paper

SG: Then you think about the game. I use architectural columns in my work that suggest power structures, but I make them out of playing cards. The games you play in controlling people, I’m thinking about that. There’s levels to it. And, how do you lose enough control, because as artists we need to.

KM: And we’re all in the business of building worlds which is this ridiculous god-like stance.

SG: Like who the fuck do you think you are? But it’s world breaking and building. Breaking down one world and building another. So it’s not creating your own world out of thin air. It’s breaking with something that’s there, rebellion, pushing it down and taking the pieces.

LL: That’s why I use flies and maggots in my work, celebrating the idea of the process of death and the process of breaking down.

SG: There you go.

Shaunté Gates is based in Washington, D.C., where he was born and raised. Gates works across mixed media collage and video subvert landscapes with architecture embedded with cultural symbologies and caste categorizations. He produces dreamscape-like compositions rife with cinematic moments of beauty, chaos and glory depicting the labyrinth of social constructs we are all wading through. The works may be most succinctly described as psychogeography, an intersection of psychology and geography. They focus our psychological experiences of the city and reveal forgotten, discarded, or marginalized aspects of the urban environment.

He is a participating artist in Smithsonian Institution’s “Men of Change” four-year (2019-2022) traveling exhibition, spanning ten museums including California African American Museum, Cincinnati Underground Railroad Museum, and Washington State History Museum.

His work has been acquired by the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Collection, the Howard University School of Law, and public schools throughout Washington, DC.

shauntegates.com @studio.gates

Leah Lewis is an artist and mother from Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania who is currently based in Washington, DC. She is a past participant of The Artist’s Mother’s studio at the Washington Project for the Arts and has been commissioned for public art projects through DC’s Department of General Services. She is a current resident of Stable Arts.

@leahleww

Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann examines landscape painting, environment, mythology and cultural estrangement by building luxuriant, cinematically scaled paper paintings and installations. She is the recipient of the Sustainable Arts Foundation grant, a Fulbright grant, the AIR Gallery and Lower East Side Printshop Keyholder Fellowships, and the Mayor’s Award and Hamiltonian Fellowship in Washington, DC. Some of the venues where Mann has shown her work include the Kreeger Museum, Tides Museum, Academy Art Museum, Walters Art Museum, American University Museum, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Rawls Museum, the US consulate in Dubai, UAE, and the US embassy in Yaounde, Cameroon.

www.katherinemann.net @ktzulan

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