Documents from The Living Room

Klara Glosova: a brief questionnaire

AM:  Why popsicles?

KG:  The popsicles came to me in a dream. I dreamt about having a show: it was in a clay room, and as people started coming in I pulled out a clay cooler from the basement. I dropped a chocolate cake into it - it was called “lick me.” That’s the verbal account of my dream as recorded in my sketchbook. Interestingly, when I made a drawing based on this dream it was a popsicle and the words on a wooden stick said  ”lick me.” The drawing had a strange, attractive (maybe even sexual) charge to it. I wanted to see what would happen if I made it “real,” three-dimensional. In the end I made many, many popsicles. The shape became very satisfying to work with. 

AM:  And then there are the sweaters.  You learned knitting specifically for this project, right?  I don’t think of your work as being emphatically rooted in craft (as opposed to many NW artists who have backgrounds in glass, ceramics, textiles), so I’m curious about what inspired it.

KG:  I was playing with the idea of keeping warm something that is meant to be kept cold. I began to see popsicles as characters and started projecting human characteristics on them. I thought, how do we humans keep warm? We wear sweaters. Plus there is something weird about an edible object that is fuzzy - it’s a contradiction. Those two qualities - just like warm frozen foods - don’t seem to belong together. I was attracted to the idea of two opposites - two contradictory principles - existing together and making a whole. So you’re right: my knitting didn’t come from my proclivity for craft, it originated in an idea and I learned to knit out of necessity. That said, I was always attracted to wool as a raw material and have used it in my work before, but I avoided knitting. I think the reason was that my grandma, who is 93 years old, used to be a great knitter. She would knit while watching TV - it didn’t seem like she was paying too much attention to what she was doing, but she would end up with these colorful sweaters, finger mitts and hats full of patterns, deer and birds and other animals. I guess I felt I could never measure up. Now I’m happy to have learned it, even though the only thing I know how to knit so far is a popsicle sweater!

AM:  Can you talk a little about the bitter-sweet cited in the show’s title? Is this an allusion to the challenges of being a mother and a serious artist at the same time, or is it more general than that?

KG:  It works on both levels. This work definitely feels like an expression of my feminine side and directly reflects my domestic environment (I mean that not only as a conceptual idea, but also as a fact that I made these objects on my kitchen counter, among the daily fray of running a household, cooking, and taking care of kids). As I see it, popsicles can be read as symbols of domesticity - connected with sweetness of our childhood, but they can also be read as a sexual symbol. Their phallic shape is inherently masculine. To me it symbolizes not the feminine itself, but the nature of  feminine desire. This desire - taken in a broader sense - is connected to self-fulfillment. Motherhood on the other hand is rooted in the nourishment of others and self-sacrifice. When one aspect or the other takes over - that’s where the bitterness emerges. The trick is, as always, the balance between seeming opposites.

AM:  Which relates to your incorporation of the I Ching and alchemical symbolism into some of the work…

KG:  This ties directly to the active part of maintaining balance.  It’s not just about recognizing the opposites; it is also about taking a creative, transformative action based on the knowledge of the whole. I think this is what alchemy is about: the transformation of opposite - or seemingly unrelated - principles into something new, unique and all-encompassing. The I Ching I really don’t know much about. I came across the bar symbols by chance and I really liked them - and, they were easy to knit (three full lines, three broken lines). The symbolism of “Force/ Field” seemed particularly fitting: creative force/receptive field, heaven/earth, northwest/southwest, father/mother, head/belly, strong/devoted, dragon/cow. 

I don’t want to sound too serious though. My attempts at the transformation of hotness into coolness and bitterness into sweetness are fueled as much by humor (cracking myself up) as by any serious thought and deductive reasoning (that, by the way, usually comes later in the game, as part of reflection). In the end, when all is said and done, I just made a bunch of popsicles, some are sweet and all are refreshingly small!

(Klara Glosova’s Hot n’ Cool and Bittersweet opens at The Living Room this Thursday, February 10, at 6pm.)

Summer is ready (video, installation view)