Lamia Larkin: Please tell us more about yourself, your background, education and what you do as an artist.

Chris Richmond: I will graduate from Chapman University in 2009 with a bachelor of fine arts in cinematography and a minor degree in studio art. In addition to my work as a cinematographer, I have an active practice in installation, performance, photography, video, and conceptual art. My work has appeared in seven shows at Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery and I will have his first solo show this June at Vienna’s C17 Gallery featuring old work and a new video installation. In spring 2008 I was awarded Chapman University’s Faculty Sponsored Student Grant and Best Junior Show for his mixed media work, This Is Institutionalized Space. In winter 2008, two of my performances, Chasing the Horizon and Painting the Sky Blue, were selected for Germany’s Szpilman Award.

As an artist, I am concerned with the postmodernist’s semiotic analysis of the information age – the study of signs and symbols by theorists like Michel Foucault, Hal Foster, Jean-François Lyotard, and Fredric Jameson, examining how meaning is interpreted and understood.  This interest has led me to a similar inquiry of the tangible world and the everyday object.     Employing photography, video, and performance, I invite the viewer to explore his encounters with various phenomena and to facilitate a dialogue around unobserved associations within everyday experience normally overlooked as points of artistic inquiry.

LL: Do you consider yourself an artist? If so what do you think classifies as a real artist.

CR: I hope so. I think Kosuth did a good job encapsulating the premise of art in 1969. “The ‘value’ of particular artists after Duchamp can be weighed according to how much they questioned the nature of art.”  Modern art is essentially self-reflective: its intention is to interrogate what art is, to define the concept of art.  It is no longer a question of producing beautiful objects, but of producing questionable or problematic ones. I am interested in reception and perception—enacting a loss of control in the world. My practice is a consequence of what the work does in the world.

LL: How long have you been creating art?

CR: Since my first word. I believe it was “duck.”

LL: Where do you get your daily inspiration from?

CR: I derive much of my inspiration from philosophy and art. I read books and journals by authors like Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Hal Foster, Jean-François Lyotard, Fredric Jameson, Georges Bataille and even Walt Witman and Antoine de Saint Exupéry. I also look at art. Recently I have spent a lot of time looking at work by artists like Bas Jan Ader, James Benning, Thomas Struth, Sharon Lockhart, and Manfred Menz. Everything else is chance: I trip on a stranger’s shoelace and fall over on the ground. When I look up, I see mystic truth next to a stray cat hiding from the sun underneath the hood of a turquoise sedan.

LL: Who are your top three biggest influences?

CR: Roni Horn, Hans Peter Feldman, Felix Gonzales Torres, Ray Charles, and an ever-expanding list.  Usually when I look at these artists though, I don’t feel like they influence as much as they give you permission to do something.

LL: Who is your target audience?

CR: Everyone. Especially humans. My work relates to anyone looking for answers. When we find answers though, we only find more questions.  This is my point of departure. My work is accessible as long as the viewer is willing to hear a question that will only generate more questions. I don’t make answers. I don’t think they exist.

LL: How would you describe your art to people?

CR: My most recent work, titled As Far As Opening Mail is Concerned, was a four-year project.  After I moved into a new apartment, I began to receive letters addressed to previous occupants. As initially conceived, the project was to be about these letters as displaced objects and signifiers for the knowledge and information concealed within.  Legally I could not open nor keep the letters, so I photographed them and sent them back to the sender.  As I continued, however, I began to see that it made sense to think about other objects, including some photographs I made, in a similar fashion.

Combined with the letters, appropriated images, and images of my father, I created fragments of what were otherwise unknown worlds. Materially, the work consists of photographs, yet the real subject of this project was the way that these palpable, material objects convey what is unknown and intangible.  Together these images actively function and engage the viewer by means of juxtaposition, fragmentations, sequences and implications, incorporating structures of interruption and montage.

The images of this project are displayed as a loose grid filled with gaps and varying size prints, to reflect the complexity of awareness and the nature of existence without signifiers to place them in context. The photographs in this work are not windows into a known world—a souvenir of an exotic land, the face of a lover, a landscape, or a documentation of objects. Rather, the content of this work is like the knowledge concealed in the letters, and is not based upon any concrete information that is known. The meaning lies in the recesses of the photograph.
In another work, Chasing the Horizon (#2), I chased the horizon until the sun set and the horizon was obscured by night and no longer visible. My objective in this performance was to chase the sun, so that it never set. This work can be viewed as both rational and illogical, and challenges the viewer to question and critically discuss phenomenological conditions central to one’s experience of time—a phenomenon linked to the movement of the sun.

LL: What does a typical day of work look like for you?

CR: It takes me a while to work through the development of a piece.  I do a lot of research and photography.  I can’t draw and I can’t sketch, so I take photographs.  Sometimes the work ends in photographs, but sometimes it doesn’t.  I spend hours processing film and looking through film.  Sometimes I end hear, sometimes this leads to large format, and sometimes this leads to performance, video, installation, or text.

LL: What are your favorite tools of the trade?  Mediums, supplies, software, etc.

CR: My Mamiya RZ67.  This is my workhorse camera.  This comes with me everywhere I go.

LL: What is the biggest piece of advice you would give to an artist that’s just starting out?

CR: I can’t answer this question. I’m still asking others.

LL: Finally, where can we see your work?

CR: I’m still trying to tame this Internet contraption. I will have a website up soon, but in the meantime you can see my work that was selected for the shortlist for Germany’s Szpilman Award (www.award.szpilman.de/best08.html). I’m also always willing to do an open studio for anyone interested. You can contact me via e-mail: cyrichmond@gmail.com.