David Ellis, Chuck Webster, and Yuri Shimojo sat down with the Phoenix to discuss their new installation at SPACE Gallery. Together with Mike Houston, the group represented the Barnstormers, a collective based in New York, Tokyo, and North Carolina. Their collaborative effort fills the entire space with paint musically sprawling across walls and coursing through salvaged artifacts, including the façade of a barn and a boat.
David Ellis: We don’t do a lot of preconceiving. It comes from the work process. We just get in there and start making a mess. In this case, I think [SPACE] were expecting us to paint on the stuff they brought in. We were a little hesitant at first to go over it; it was so beautiful. Doing the barns and stuff all these years we started to really appreciate the weathering. We’re trying to let that breathe here. So we started with the walls. I don’t think SPACE knew we were going to go so crazy with the walls...
We have our language. We all have our own backpack we carry in as individual artists. I usually default to exploring the flowing lava stuff that wraps around the room. Those are the arcs of my body and arm. It finds its way around the room.
Chuck Webster: I look at everything and run it through the mill in my head, personal experiences, art historical references. I think about how the scale changes in relation to the forms. When Yuri did the mountainous wave, the blips I had painted changed because they had a landscape reference. That’s one of the best things about working together is we enjoy each other’s sensibilities but we still get to go into our own world.
DE: I don’t think any one of us could do any of this, as you see it, on our own. This is a wide bandwidth. We love each other.
Yuri Shimojo: We travel a lot and paint on different backgrounds. It’s always involved place and time, history. This time was emphasized so much more because the barns and boats we painted on . . . I was overwhelmed to see them, they say they’re at least 150 years old. I feel so respectful for the history. You feel it from the wood. It has energy.
DE: You’re dragging a brush across years of rain and sun and snow and ice...
YS: I become humble. The wood is alive, breathing in front of me. The deer I did on the barn, at first I wanted to do something that presents the old spirit of the woods. I wanted to paint something fragile, but with strong dignity. I really appreciate the barn itself because I never would have painted that on paper.
DE: It’s an obvious moment when all four of us don’t know what to do. We all read each other’s minds. We were staying away from the boat. If anything I was skirting around on the bottom. Chuck was the first to attack it. He did this blue emblem...
