Art Sync: Ambiguities

Elizabeth Johnson: As I scroll through your portfolio that begins in 2005, I notice evolution through the styles of: digital notation, architectural windows, split-screen windows, round pairs of portals, portals presenting deeper space, portals juxtaposing contrasting surfaces, and, most recently, collaged paintings in mixed media. Your BravinLee programs artist statement asserts: "I'm interested in our awareness of our own thinking and sense perceptions––our consciousness. I approach this with a sense of humor that reflects the irrational space of knowing and believing." Does your development express a gradual change in your personal consciousness? Does the arc of change in your work feel chance-based to you?

Clint Jukkala: My work has changed over the years, though many aspects have stayed constant: an impulse towards images that suggest things but aren’t descriptive, a preoccupation with framing devices and spaces within spaces, an interest in the numerous possibilities of color, and a focus on simple and direct means. Other developments reflect a marked change, like the loosening of systems, and an embrace of varying materials and surfaces. The changes come from following a line of inquiry and seeing where it goes. The changes aren’t planned but are a result of the making process. Consciousness seems similar in that there is a core that remains constant while we see and experience things differently over time.

CJ: I try to pay close attention to what I'm excited about. If I'm working in the studio and feeling engaged, I know that is a good thing, regardless of what the work looks like. In some of the recent paintings like Begin Again, I was cutting out old canvases, and I got really interested in the remnants and the frames. I started attaching new canvas inside the frame and keeping the remnants. I hadn’t planned to do this: it was what I was interested in at that moment.

CJ: I've been listening to Rick Rubin's The Creative Act over and over in the studio. It's about paying attention and being open in the act of making. These are things artists know and do, but I find it so helpful to be reminded.

EJ: In the Two Coats interview, you say, “It’s subtle, but in that way, I find my new paintings feel more sculptural or built. I really relate to John [Newman]’s work in this regard. He has such a great sensitivity to shifting materials and surfaces, and it’s a holistic part of his work. You can’t separate the form from the color and surface.”

EJ: The interview was in 2015. Your work now sports many varying surfaces. Would you say that, currently, you leverage how collage separates color and surface from form?

CJ: Those pieces are a series of questions more than a progression, and the order doesn’t matter. “What if this is next to that? How can these shapes and materials create an unexpected image?” The small size of each piece allows for a looseness and openness that can be harder to find in larger work. In that way, they are like drawings. I meditate, though not as regularly as I’d like. 

EJ: Why did you leap from painting contrasting surfaces to collaging with them in recent work? How does varying the texture and feel of parts of new pieces dovetail with your long-held inclination to set up dualities?

CJ: I’ve made collages before, just on paper not canvas. I began exploring textural differences in 2011, and those paintings were preceded by a series of collage drawings. Collage allows each element to have its own physical life. That can be done with pure paint, but it can feel less direct and it’s harder to get a sense of difference. I don’t think of my work as setting up dualities as much as ambiguities.

EJ: I want to expand on what you call "each element having its own physical life.” How do the textures of your collage pieces help this happen?

CJ: I love perspective in paintings for the way it signals depth and is also pure illusion. De Chirico was one of my favorites early on and I don’t think I’ve ever gotten away from that. I think perspective reentered my work after I read The Case Against Reality by Donald Hoffman. The cover image is a Necker cube, which flips perspective as you look at it. It’s an example of how our mind interprets and creates what we see.

EJ: Wow. It is quite a leap from optical illusions to using perspective. And I identify both in Begin Again, Koan IX, Quantum Psychology, TV Dinner, Blank Slate, Koan III, and Spacetime Desktop. I love experiencing the transformation between the two kinds of space in these pieces. Is it a matter of luck to achieve the balance?

CJ: Honestly, I have no idea. A better reference than de Chirico may be Sienese painting. I studied in Siena as an undergraduate, and the not quite rational perspective of paintings like Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good Government have always resonated with me. I love that you are transported to another place at the same time you are aware of the perspectival illusion.

CJ: I love all those artists! I think I'm more comfortable with the ambiguity of image and structure in this new work. Maybe the certainty, if there is any, lies in the materials, and that has loosened me up. The surfaces act as a scaffolding to build on, so I'm less reliant on the more rigid symmetry and structures from the past.

EJ: Your recent pieces elicit television and computer screens as metaphors for the mind. Thinking Table feels like a particularly strong compromise between the digital world and collage.

CJ: I was thinking about the left brain/right brain split when I made that painting: how the two halves of our brain view or interpret the world in very different ways.

EJ: Do you see the works Begin Again, Koan IX, Quantum Psychology, TV Dinner, Blank Slate, Koan III and Spacetime Desktop as operating differently than Beginner's Mind II, III, IV and V, Thinking Table, Channel Change, and Conscious Agent? I could see the first group as balanced between Necker cube and the illusion of perspective, and the second group as fitting into your left brain/right brain description of Thinking Table. Are there other possible categories? 

Exhibition Dates: September 7 - October 7, 2023

Opening Reception: Saturday, September 9, 1 - 4 pm

Clint Jukkala is an artist and educator based in Philadelphia. He received his MFA from Yale University School of Art and his BFA from the University of Washington in Seattle. Jukkala has exhibited widely in New York and across the northeastern United States including solo and two-person exhibitions in New York, Philadelphia and New Haven, Connecticut. He attended the Yaddo Residency and the MacDowell Colony Residency. Jukkala has been a visiting artist and lecturer at institutions across the country and in Pont-Aven, France. He is currently the Dean of the School of Fine Arts at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.