Dike Blair With Steel Stillman

SS Much of the imagery in your early gouaches seems to come from being on the road.

DB Initially I painted the gouaches either from direct observation or from memory. But as I got more serious about them, I started painting from my photographs. Like most everyone, I find myself visually stimulated when I leave my usual environment, so many of the earlier gouaches are based on images I’d take at vacation destinations, like Las Vegas or Disneyland, or on the roads in between.

SS Did the materials you began to use in the mid-’90s for the carpet and light sculptures also come from those kinds of places and experiences?

DB There is a paradoxical overlap between the paintings and the sculptures: they get at the same information in different ways. I might have a painting of a casino interior and a light sculpture that includes casino carpet. The painting uses deadpan illusionistic rendering, whereas the sculpture is an abstraction, conceived in a constructivist form. One is a near-photorealist representation of a subject that may contain a certain ambience; the other is a concrete manifestation that, among other things, tries to get at a similar ambience.

I tend to work in binaries, and they show up not just between one practice and another, but within each of my practices. It always seems to me that if you make a decision to do one thing that the opposite decision makes just as much sense. There’s always a flip side. I often work on sculptures in tandem—a tendency that the installation at the Weatherspoon will highlight. As I’m developing a piece, I’ll make a decision to go one way, fully aware that I could have gone the other; the second sculpture is about what happens on that other road.

SS How will viewers encounter these pairs at the Weatherspoon?

DB I’ve divided the main exhibition hall, which is long and narrow, into thirds, with two large, nearly square sculpture courts at either end. In the middle third, separating the sculptures, will be a series of three painting galleries. My idea is that viewers will travel from one sculpture court, go through the paintings rooms and into the second sculpture court, where they will discover that a number of the sculptures are siblings of works in the other court, and that the layouts of the two spaces are, to some degree, reflections of one another.

SS When you were working on the carpet and light sculptures, all of which include photographs, were your snapshots sources for the sculptures?

DB Some were prompted by an image, some were prompted by a particular material, and others were based on a formal composition. For instance, not one leaf remains the way it was (1998) started with a photograph of cherry blossoms. But for another work, spring snow melts easily (1999), I began with a marbleized linoleum mat that reminded me of a childhood friend’s kitchen in western Pennsylvania, and the way it felt and looked when we’d come in from dirty snow and track a slushy mess across that floor. The sculpture was built from that memory, and the abstract photographic image it includes is one that I found in my files.

SS The carpet and light sculptures can feel like fragments of rooms; or like fragments of non-places, those transitional spaces of contemporary life. Strangely they feel already inhabited. The person who rolled up the carpet has just stepped out, leaving the lights on.

DB I think that’s a good read. They certainly have aspects of interior design, but one might also enter them as a landscape or as a 3-D painting. They were always intended to be very open despite how specific I was in their making. My interest was in seducing, not controlling. My aim was to create sensoriums and possibly to encourage contemplation of formal flip-flops while I indulged my decorative tendencies.

SS The photographs you include in the carpet and light pieces seem enigmatic, like clues to be interpreted.

DB The photos are a possible key, and people look at them right away because we’re all so well trained to search for meaning in photographs. Often they’re very abstract in order for the key not to be too obvious.

SS By contrast, for all their photographlike illusionism, your gouaches are so evidently not photographs. Looking at them, one becomes absorbed in the grain of their making.

DB The invested labor in the paintings slows down how the image gets read. Obviously a great deal of the pleasure in looking at paintings comes from decoding the sequencing of their making. Much of my pleasure in painting them is simply figuring out how to do it, how to get gouache to look like something. Perhaps there is some pathos embedded in the paintings, some residue of my repeated efforts to approach a photograph without ever getting there.

SS The windows in some of your most beautiful gouaches are impossible to see through. Frosting, or textures, or raindrops thwart our gaze. The subject of these is the surface itself, its impenetrability, along with the radiance of glowing light beyond.

DB I’m something of a luminist and have always been fascinated by glass. I think there’s a certain romanticism about the glow, a transcendental thing. Perhaps there’s some sweet sadness about looking at light through semiopaque glass.