Part way through the second verse in that Jenny Hval track, we hear her declare to a partner in a very matter-of-fact way: "My heartbreak is too sentimental for you" and as she does her voice soars upward and at once, we are in the middle of her cry. She brings us in the middle of a cascading end of what sounds like a relationship or her actual life or perhaps both. "I'm high, high on madness/These are my combined failures/I understand infatuation, rejection/ They can connect and become everything, everything that's torn up in your life." In different contexts these same exertions Hval makes can sound needlessly grandiose if not hifalutin. And yet, it seems like the only way to utter what is being felt in that moment. Winnipeg based artist Rachael Thorleifson can almost identify with this heightened out pouring of one's emotions "I think heartbreak is really melodramatic, but it can also be genuinely and insanely emotional. It is somehow twisted to look insignificant through media." Thorleifson does something really smart in presenting her ideas that speak to grand sometimes abstract concepts like death, heaven, and yes, romance through the shiny shimmering gloss finish of retail display so we can move in closer to look what these big ideas even mean...or if there's any meaning at all worth looking for.
Though we met up with Thorleifson to have this conversation late last summer, and her work is evolving, the sentiments on her work still rings true in her current work. Please check out what she shared with us below.
Luther Konadu: You were trying to describe what you'd been work on the last time we met, but I couldn’t quite picture what you were describing then. Can you show me?
Rachael Thorleifson: Oh yeah, it’s kind of hard to picture it, but it’s this piece here. [She points to the work] A guy I’m pretty sure I’ve never spoken to who I went to high school with DM’ed me trying to figure out what exactly it was made from so he could build a rave jellyfish, but I never messaged him back. I feel like I need to keep it my secret.
[Laughs]
Robyn Adams: It reminds me of something you’d see at Forever 21 behind their cash desk or something
RT: Yes, that’s the same stuff! It is typically seen in retail or on billboards for Broadway musicals. That’s where I first saw it, for some sort of Rolling Stones themed musical in London.
LK: Where did you find the sequined material?
RT: On the internet. I googled 'retail display glitter' and eventually tracked it down. Everyone’s going to know now. I doubt rave-jellyfish guy will read this interview though.
LK: You initially wanted to install this during meteor showers?
RT: I liked the drama of connecting it to a meteor shower as if it is was monumental, maybe more like melodrama. I was attracted to the ridiculous display of emotions. It reminded me of horoscopes and fate or cosmic energy. It also dictated a start and end point, since the work won't exist within a gallery. The duration the piece was up became based on an external event, as a means to frame it. Unfortunately I missed the meteor shower I was going to dedicate it to. I’ll have to come up with another astrological phenomenon.
LK: Is this work connected to your previous works?
RT: I don't think I make work that disconnects from previous works. My work is always changing but it’s probably impossible for me to start a new project that disconnects from everything else I've done before.
Looking back on when I was in my undergrad, I was making projects that didn’t seem like they were my own. They seemed arbitrary. I was obsessed with Catholic imagery. I started collecting religious knick-knacks. I became obsessed with dressing my friends and myself up in Mary costumes and taking photos. I really liked Mary as a character. It feels super hokey now, but contrasting religious imagery and contemporary culture felt interesting to me in that moment.
Some of my work still has elements of that same interest where I was still thinking objects and their relationship to holiness. I wasn't interested in Jesus as a character, rather Mary as a person; her potential angst, and being a shuttle for this holy baby. Eventually that interest translated into thinking a lot about life after death.
“Romance is cheesy and goofy and overdone, but it is my favorite thing to think about right now. The dynamics at play are funny and fun. It can be the most important thing but at the same time not important at all.”
LK: How do you know what you are looking for in a material? It seems like even your other works have particular materials which come together to form the piece. How do you know where and how to source materials?
RT: I’ve worked in retail and merchandising for over six years and that’s a big influence on a lot of my work. Sometimes I see a material and I know, “that stuff!” Then I’ll go searching for it, usually online. I made a big, chrome balloon as part of my solo show last February at Flux gallery. I started looking for the material before even having the idea for the piece. I knew I wanted something that resembled the inside of a bag of chips, like a silver foil, so I spent a lot of time searching for this material and ended with silver safety blankets made from Mylar, a type a plastic that is used for a variety of different applications.
RA: Are you planning on having these new pieces in a show?
RT: Not as of right now. I don’t want to make work specifically for a gallery setting. I’m planning on installing it on the fire escape outside of my studio so that people can see it from the street. But I’m considering putting it up at other locations as well.
LK: Does that affect the way you work because the work is not presented in a formal gallery setting?
RT: It takes the pressure off a bit. I also don’t see it as 'public art', because it's not made in that context. The fact that it is accessible to anyone walking by is nice. People can see it and not necessarily know what it’s for.
I hope you see this, 2016 Installation View
I like to use retail materials because they are designed to discourage the separation of retail spaces from the customers and their lives. Art spaces are often seen as places to disconnect from one's own lived experience. But retail spaces are aesthetically curated with a specific goal. There is a lot behind how a retail space is presented in order to manipulate its viewers, in a way art often fails.
LK: I’m curious about the materials in relation to the work itself.
RT: I often see a material and feel so drawn to it. Once I get my hands on an object I’ll make work around it. Not in the way where I would find a piece of stone and chip away to realize a thing through the process. Obviously that’s really difficult and requires a high level of expertise. I want the material to bring as much to the final work as the ideas.
That is, in a way, how I see the fluorescent paintings. The colours are more important than the painting itself. I wasn't interested in trying to sit with the painters and be in the painter’s club. The colours were what I was after. Painting was the only way I could present that. I wanted the colours to exist on the canvas without my involvement at all.
LK: They remind me of modernist colour field paintings, in that the subject of the painting is the colour itself.
RT: Yes, exactly. I really like Mary Weatherford's gestural, atmospheric paintings of colours. That series became was a major influence when I began this series. The colours express the ideas I was interested in.
I dreamt [last night] my teeth were crumbling, 2016
LK: I think having the chrome balloon and the colour paintings and the other sculptural pieces allowed for a certain kind of 'other' space that felt less like a gallery space than an experiential space created for the viewer.
RT: Oh thanks, I'm glad. I didn't want the show to be one separate piece after the other. I wanted the work and space to cohere.
"I think the expression of emotions in pop music or movies and TV are more genuine then people give them credit for, no matter how over-the-top and ridiculous the expressions may be. I think what’s happening in pop music is as real as anything else. There's something so raw and also so fabricated about it that it becomes an interesting comparison to real life."
LK: Tell me about the Pillow piece?
RT: I got deep into heartbreak art. Probably because I had a couple gnarly breakups and received some mean emails. I had also gotten back into the teen-drama SKINS (the UK version obviously). I think heartbreak is really melodramatic, but it can also be genuinely and insanely emotional. It is somehow twisted to look insignificant through media.
Romance is cheesy and goofy and overdone, but it is my favourite thing to think about right now and for the past 3 years. I question whether It is really a worthy thing to talk about seriously in art, but for people participating within a romantic context it can feel all-consuming. The dynamics at play are funny and fun. It can be the most important thing but at the same time not important at all.
3:47, 2015 Installation View
I'm not a Taylor Swift type situation, where I'm saying, "this song is about this specific person and this other song is about this other person". The work deals with a more collective experience, despite being deeply personal. I want to emphasize the weight of a breakup. I think about pop music as being a good realization of that balance. It's seen as the least important music. It’s always presented as being light and fluffy, but usually it's so sad. It's typically very melodramatic, extremely polished and a little bit contrived. The emotional force behind it is appealing. The display of a tender, heart-wrenching, messy personal experience presented in a polished and cinematically glossy way is very interesting. That paradoxical framework is where I was coming from with 3:47. Initially I had that song by Calvin Harris featuring Ellie Goulding “Outside” playing inside of it, but you could only hear it if you were very close. The pillow felt like this intimate bedroom object and it represented crying in bed, dreaming, sex. I wanted to blow it up and give it increased importance, more than it would typically have. It feels like the only thing you need when you are going through a breakup, right?
LK: Do you think the way we respond to the end of relationships growing up mimics what we see through popular media?
RT: I wouldn't claim to understand it. It would probably be false to say that the media doesn’t influence how we interpret relationships, especially as a young person. I think the expression of emotions in pop music or movies and TV are more genuine then people give them credit for, no matter how over-the-top and ridiculous the expressions may be. I think what’s happening in pop music is as real as anything else. There's something so raw and also so fabricated about it that it becomes an interesting comparison to real life. I’d like to think that in my work I take queues from pop music, rather than being directly influenced by it. I use these gaudy materials you'd see at retail outlets as a method towards presenting these emotions and ideas. The way pop music presents itself is how I'm presenting my own work. I wouldn't say the work is about pop music per se, but those themes are certainly a part of it.
LK: So marketing and advertising is a facet of the work as well?
RT: I would say so. Presenting those ideas through the theatrical nature of retail and advertisements is like a trick. In Halo, I was presenting death or after life, concepts that are impossible to grapple with, through the comparatively simplistic language of retail.
You are my skin, 2015 Installation View
LK: In your work "You are my skin" I like how overt and assertive it's presence is. It is an object which feeds back into what it is saying.
RT: Producing that piece felt bold. I'm emotionally connected to it. I don’t usually try to address as specific a personal experience. But for You are my skin, it dealt with a variety of things but feels very literal. It is tied to a very particular moment and experience. I am attracted to the scale of the sky and the heavens, the hugeness of it. I really like how text-based work can be confrontational. Other people have come at it in different ways because it comes off as an ambiguous work. Ultimately I don't think it matters that it holds such a specific meaning for me.
LK: It reminded me of a still from an '80s karaoke screen.
RT: Cheesiness and corniness are characteristics that I really love. In pop music I love the inherent silliness. There is humor behind something overtly gaudy, and I find that appealing.
LK: At what point does something become cheesy?
RT: I don't know for sure. When it's just too much - the point that makes people uncomfortable. When you want to resist having an emotional response and feel embarrassed.
LK: We think of the '80s being full of cheese now that we look back on it.
RT: I was only born in the 1990s, but it feels like stuff made then was a means of making sense of the moment. In a contemporary context the whole style seems completely out of touch, especially when you step away from it. Although, even now certain experiences can feel that way, like being embarrassed by how you reacted in a break up.
Photo contribution by Robyn Adams