Dike Blair With Steel Stillman

SS Starting around 2001 it seems you pared down the subjects of your sculpture and painting, and you mostly worked with images of windows and flowers. What led to these nested pairs of juxtapositions?

DB Well, the experiment got more specific. I was always interested in an interchange or scrambling of formal qualities between painting, photography and sculpture; the paintings are photographic and the sculptures are painterly but include photographs. The juxtaposition of subjects relates back to that notion of flip sides. The binary between the flower and the window gouaches is between fullness and emptiness, nature and architecture, outside and inside; one is centered, the other is edge-related, and so on.

These binaries operate like questions: you might wonder, in an exhibition, why is this flower painting hanging next to that window painting; and both the question and the answer occupy the space in between. And the same kind of question occurs between the paintings and the sculptures: Why does the guy who makes this kind of painting make that kind of sculpture? It may sound evasive, and maybe it is evasive, but for me there is some mystery and meaning in the reconciliation of these approaches and images; and it happens in that funny in-between space.

SS What led you to the packing crate sculptures?

DB I’d reached a point with the carpet and light pieces where they just felt finished, complete. And there were practical issues as well; the carpet and light sculptures were relatively pristine and required careful storage and handling to protect them from damage. So the crate pieces began to form in my mind as a solution to storage and damage.

The crate sculptures are more unitary than the carpet and light works—they are less dispersed or environmental. In terms of scale, they relate more closely to the body, and tend to be more suggestive of particular entities or things. One big difference is that after years of segregating painting and sculpture, I’ve now brought them together by including framed gouaches in the crate pieces. And because many of the gouaches are of women’s eyes, the sculptures have become somewhat anthropomorphic.

SS The crate sculptures seem nomadic, suggestive of bodies or domestic arrangements that can be relocated on a moment’s notice.

DB Certainly the packing crate aspect is one’s first impression. But just as in the carpet and light sculptures, where specific materials and objects became subsumed in a more comprehensive ambience, I’d like you to get over that first impression fairly quickly and begin to see them more abstractly.

SS What inspired you to include the Noguchi lamps?

DB I used them for (IN) in and (IN) out (both 2008). Originally I planned to design lights of my own, but my studies and models weren’t very good. I’m a huge Noguchi fan and was happy to pay homage to him; I also love the way they pack so easily into thin boxes, which can be stored in the crates. My designs weren’t nearly so elegant.

SS Why do you pair the crate sculptures with the nocturnal gouaches of parking lots and footsteps in the snow?

DB For me, the binary that mirrored the windows and flowers was parking lots and women’s eyes. I’m still feeling a little inarticulate about why that relationship seems to work, except to say that it feels completely right. The pairing of sculpture and painting almost always works best when juxtaposing work made over the same time span. Of course now, the sculpture physically includes the painting.

SS It’s curious that you’ve paired these newer, more domestic-seeming sculptures with images of being out on the dark, lonely road. Somehow I think of Godard.

DB Or David Lynch’s Lost Highway. The painted line on pavement must be the most ubiquitous landscape painting in the world. I wasn’t thinking of Ruscha, but now his parking lots come to mind.

SS One difference between your work and his is telling: your images depict the camera’s flash or the sweep of headlights, two very particular kinds of illumination that make the viewer instantly aware of the person behind the light.

DB I’ve always been aware of point of view. I think a lot about where I’m looking from, especially in the paintings. When asked why I paint the things I do, especially the still lifes, invariably the answer is that these are the things within the reach of my arm: a drink, a cigarette pack, a paperback. And I’ve painted them from my own tabletop perspective.

SS Do you think of these images—or of your work more broadly—as diaristic?

DB I do. There is something of a self-portrait that emerges in linking together a series of subjects and themes. It’s fictionalized, of course, and some of the earlier work indicates I’m some sort of noirish guy, and that’s a little embarrassing. Probably more interesting is the stuff that isn’t premeditated but gets revealed to me after the fact. For example, I used to wear extremely thick glasses—some portion of my childhood was taken up with eye exercises—so I’m sure there is a connection between those eyeglasses and the paintings of eyes and my fascination with windows. It’s not impossible to think that I’m a visual artist simply because of all the time I spent just trying to make my eyes perform, to see correctly.

SS Do you think of your artwork as bringing order to the random profusion of everyday life?

DB I’m not so sure I want to order the everyday as much as I want to glorify it on the one hand and escape it on the other. Paying close attention to anything—and painting is one way of doing that—makes it attractive and interesting. One of the reasons I sometimes paint cocktails is because I love them; they take me away, and I’m not above cheap transcendence. I have a desire for a kind of perfect emptiness even though that’s unattainable, at least until I croak.