DECEMBER, 2023
Todd Aresenault is an artist, musician, and Associate Professor or Art at Dickinson College. The work he makes exists in the magical moments between intuition, memory, and collecting. When making paintings, Arsenault looks for ways to create discovery and surprise in order to tap into something that reaches far beyond his own initial ideas. In a recent studio visit we discussed that studio process, his penchant for collecting, pop culture images and nostalgia. Arsenault is on sabbatical this year from teaching and opened his studio for our conversation, where he is currently fully immersed in creative endeavors.
Interview between Todd Arsenault and Amy Boone-McCreesh
AMY: WHERE IS YOUR STUDIO, HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN THERE
Todd: My studio is in Carlisle, Pennsylvania on the campus of Dickinson College in the Goodyear Building, which is this amazing old factory. And I have to say I’ve had a number of studios, but having this much space is fantastic. You can really move around and spread out. I’ve been in this space now for probably 18 years. Additionally, I share a studio in Philadelphia with my friend and collaborator Kris Benedict. We have this really great collaborative painting project and also a band called The Free Samples.
A: YOU’RE ON SABBATICAL, WHAT ARE YOUR STUDIO SESSIONS LIKE NOW VS WHEN YOU ARE TEACHING?
T: That’s a great question. When I teach I try to have a schedule where I get to the studio in the evening. I can be productive, but some days I’ve already had an eight or ten hour day. It’s like how much more energy do I have, even if I kind of need that thing of putting brush to canvas. So sabbatical is nice because I can make it my priority, my job. I try to get to the studio late-morning and just work until five and then I like to have a little break and I’ll come back some nights. Not every night, but it’s nice if I can. I feel like there’s a very different thing that happens in the day versus the evening. Knowing that the rest of the world is asleep – I feel more solitary and I’m not beholden to answer an email or something. All that stuff tends to dissipate. I’m about three months into the sabbatical and feel like the momentum is starting to build. I’m finding the focus and starting to feel really locked in, I can walk into the studio and start working. Whereas sometimes, like if I’m teaching all day and writing emails, it’s hard to walk in and just turn it on. Time is always weird though, sometimes you have eight hours, but the meaningful work happens in an hour. Other times you can have an hour, come in and do a few things and realize, oh, this is working. Maybe it’s a different kind of pressure and I let my guard down faster.
A: HOW DO YOU GENERATE IMAGES? WHAT INFORMS YOUR VISUAL VOCABULARY?
T: I’ve made collages for years, such as the recent ones that we were just looking at, often serve as the starting point for a work. In grad school I started collecting images and building a database that I continue to add to. The images in the database come from various sources– things taken with a camera, scanning, or just finding things online. I used to be fairly good about filing things away into folders with categories. Now I tend to take a lot of screenshots that end up in a folder marked with the year in cloud storage or iPhoto. I kind of like having folders that are more randomized and tend to be more surprising when I look back through them. After years and years of collecting images, it was becoming a separate job to database things and that takes away from actually making the work. I like it being a little messy and meandering. Jen, my wife, who deals with databases and art image repositories always offers to organize it [maybe jokingly!], but it kind of goes against the way I want to think about it. I want there to be a messiness to it, just as I want in the process of making the painting. We were looking at those piles of printed collages that are randomly lying all over, which I do on purpose in hope of discovering relationships that I would not usually look for. I think if I walk into the studio and just know what to expect, then I’m not actively thinking or looking to discover something new – that is one of the most interesting parts about the process. When you have that thing where you’re actively discovering you tend to push into new territory.
So to get back to the image thing, now I have amassed about 20 years of personal images, and I’ve realized I start to form relationships with these things. So now, I see more images that are recurring in the work that I have formed these deeper relationships with to the point where some of them feel like characters. They can come back or I can recombine them in different ways. I’m thinking a lot about images of printers recently- that very literally embody the constant act of me printing images from the computer as source material, but also represent a way in which we learn and communicate on a broader scale-the printer gives pixels a material substance that makes us consider the thing on the screen in a new light.
So I like this idea that certain things just have started to rise to the surface. Whereas I used to not be interested in repeating or reusing, but now I’m starting to form a little more of what feels like a cast of images or characters or vocabulary. Maybe something similar to Guston – he’s an artist that I have always loved for the world that he created. I have become more interested in the creation of a world with recognizable characters in some ways, but I’m also wary of that. Ultimately, I try not to question some of this that much and just let the work take shape.
A: CAN YOU TALK ABOUT THE ROLE OF TIME OR MEMORY IN YOUR WORK? PERSONAL MEMORY, COLLECTIVE MEMORY
When I was younger, I had a fascination with nostalgic images that I felt a connection to, or a curiosity about. Mostly images from the ’70s or early ’80s, when I was alive but don’t remember much visually. There’s this fascination with knowing I could have seen these things, but just like the present, your physical experience is much more limited than what you experience through images and media. I think over the course of time, it’s become more about the collective memory and how we learn from images–the role that memory plays in how we understand things. An image that I saw 10 or 15 years ago is informing something that I am looking at today and sometimes I’m conscious of that, though often I’m not. But I do love those moments when you see something that triggers your memory and you can’t quite place it. It can feel like an out of body experience in a way. To me, the paintings are most interesting when you have those moments where you’re like, “Oh yeah, this is so familiar, but also it’s changing my perception or it’s flooding me with ideas and memories and you can’t quite place it. It makes the experience of looking highly active and causes the wheels spin as opposed to just being this kind of stagnant experience.
I think it’s a precarious thing too, because I don’t want to get overly nostalgic. That’s why I try to think about aesthetically doing things that connect the narrative to the present. Images of older technologies have been finding their way into the work recently, like the aforementioned printers along with various eras of telephone’s. The phone is a good example of why representations of technology find their way into my work. I look at my parents who really have gone through an immense amount of technological change and they are now in this moment where they have in their pocket something that would have been considered a supercomputer not that long ago. It’s interesting to imagine someone telling them in the 1960’s, when they were coming of age with very limited technology, that their future would hold this sci-fi scenario of living your life with this tiny device that is basically at the center of your existence.
I watched a lot of TV growing up, so I’ve long had a relationship to the screen or portal. Evolution for many of us has been about spending more and more time looking at screens. It is now hard to escape looking at this thing where it is difficult to discern simulation from reality.
Now with AI photos, it is ever more difficult to put trust in images? Though I think it’s the same with memory as well. Memories transform and change over time and you can’t trust memory [I look things up everyday that I remembered a particular way and constantly find my memory has failed me]. And now you really can’t trust any image or video, you can’t take any of it at face value.
The essence of my work in many ways is a riff on the chaos of the visual world. It’s really just this huge pot of all these things that you see and get jumbled in your mind, become intertwined with memory and knowledge, and then get spit back out. I think when I was younger that was the concept I was most interested in. However, I do want to make interesting images at the end of the day. I want some of it to be kind of weird and seem like chance, but composing and constructing the image is always part of the process. I’m critical about what’s there and what’s not, even if it seems like an accident. One of the things I love about painting is conjuring those ‘forced’ accidents and determining if it’s a cool thing or something not worth keeping.
A: YOU ALSO MAKE MUSIC – IS THAT PROCESS CLOSELY ALIGNED WITH OR DIFFERENT FROM HOW YOU MAKE VISUAL ART?
I love that question because it’s something that I’ve done for so many years, but don’t often get to discuss. I always wanted there to be this really literal connection between painting and music. But how do you do that? Is it about synesthesia and the connection of sound and image in a more literal way or is it about the connections between the processes? I’m not formally trained in music, so I don’t have the hang ups that I have with making art or painting where I’m always aware of the precedents. The thing about making art is that I want to challenge the conventions as I understand them, but with music I don’t really have that as I don’t connect with it on a theoretical level, so it’s more about feel and sound and intuition. One of the things I love to do is to work on a painting and when I need a visual break, I go work with sound and think about how it relates to the painting or if there is something from the visual process I can carry into that world. Sometimes it can be through the relationship of formal and compositional elements such as how texture might evoke time, hard vs. soft-edged, or atmospheric vs. lucid.
I love working through those similar ideas in two different mediums. It has really pushed me to stay nimble in a way. It keeps me thinking pretty critically about what’s in front of me with each medium and how they push one another. It also helps me to disengage as I can have a tendency to stand in front of a painting too long and kill it. I can shift that energy to sound, where you don’t have to worry about wasting a bunch of expensive paint–I can, and often do, simply delete whatever mess I recorded.
I was engaged with sound, I would say as much as visual art, from a young age and I loved the drums. In high school, I started playing guitar, but it was very experimental. I liked it as a way to make atmospheric noise–bang on it with wrenches and create magnetic fields around the pickups with power tools. It wasn’t just about playing an instrument as I got into recording early on. It was the same kind of gratification as making a painting and I was especially interested in the recording as a construct. I was making these sound collage things, and layering sound. At the time I probably didn’t think of it this way, but it’s very painterly in terms of process. Just thinking, I have this screeching sound from a guitar, what could I layer over that now? So really it was about making something through recording that got me to use the guitar, not so much that I wanted to play the hits of yesteryear.
I’m okay on certain instruments, but I’ve never thought about it from the point of ‘mastering’ any one particular thing– I like anything that makes noise. We think about songs that we listen to and there are incredible musicians on a lot of these things, but really the final product has been constructed by various entities, especially the person who’s mixing the song and saying, okay, we’re going to put this sound here, and maybe this guitar or drum take wasn’t perfect, but we’re going to cut it up and reassemble it into something that could not have been foreseen at the start. The computer has made music editing a seemingly boundless process that can be very experimental, which provides a lot of crossover into visual art.
A: AS ARTISTS, I THINK WE ARE CONSTANTLY SUSPICIOUS OF OUR OWN IDEAS – HOW DO YOU KNOW WHEN YOU HAVE HIT ON SOMETHING?
Suspicion is a great way to put it and you have to be suspicious, or critical of what you are producing. I think the thing is, and I don’t know if you find this, but I often find the thing that seems really awesome in the moment kind of sucks a few days later. I always equate it to music where if you hear a song for the first time and it sounds awesome, then you usually tire of it pretty quickly. Then there are those songs that didn’t hit you the first listen, but had something interesting that made you listen again, something to figure out. It pulls you in more slowly, you have to work harder at it, but once you figure it out after repeated listens the payoff is more meaningful than that thing that maybe panders to things that are catchy on the surface, but don’t have much going on underneath.
I can’t think of how many times in my own practice that I’ve dismissed something that I did as being this horrible thing that I hated. Then a few days, or sometimes years, later I pull out paintings that I don’t remember making and I realize it held the answer to so many struggles. Sometimes artists and their ideas get ahead of themselves. I tell this to students all the time. Don’t be dismissive of things that you’re doing because there’s often something there and it takes time to figure it out. That question of knowing when you’ve hit on something. For me it’s working through many things at once and starting to assess what’s happening. It’s really getting a bunch of things in conversation and looking for patterns that start to reveal those bigger ideas. I think in reality it takes me a few years to go back and look at work to really understand it. There are periods where I was really happy with the work when it was made, but now I look at it and think it’s horrible and vice versa. Of course, getting work out there is so important because it gives you perspective, though there are ups and downs to that as well. I don’t know if it’s hard for you to look back through old work. I always think it’s something I should do more, but it’s tricky for various reasons. I think a lot of artists are just focused on pushing forward with new work and figure what was important from the old work will stay with you.
A: WHAT DO YOU THINK IS THE GREATEST PLEASURE OF BEING AN ARTIST?
Probably the seemingly endless search for the white whale. Maybe it’s as equally frustrating as it is pleasurable, but those moments when you feel like you are about to crack the code are amazing. How can I make a perfect painting? Is that even a thing? It’s very subjective, of course, but if I made something that seemed perfect would there be reason to do it anymore? For me, there is always something else and artists in general are always building on what came before. It’s a gratifying and fairly addictive pursuit. I sometimes think of how I’m glad I’m addicted to making art and vices that could be more harmful to my health. The process can pull you in a lot of directions. It’s human nature that we want to be gratified, we want to be surprised, and we want something that we engage with on a deeper level.
It can be difficult to make sense of the world and at the end of the day making art is an attempt to investigate what is happening around us and contribute to the broader conversation. In some ways making art can be a selfish pursuit, but most artists know that the pain and frustration that comes with it has to also go to an end that is simply beyond self indulgence. Ultimately, it’s that ability to surprise yourself and take the work to someplace you could not have expected that can hopefully have an impact on others as well. At the end of the day I’d rather make a bunch of failed work for the rest of my life than just make work that I feel is good in a kind of mediocre way.
A: WHERE CAN WE SEE YOUR WORK, OR IF YOU ARE IN STUDIO MODE, WHAT ARE YOUR ART, BOOK, MUSIC, RECOMMENDATIONS?
I’ve shown work for a long time and I wanted this sabbatical to be a time when I could take a step back and really critically assess where I am at and push things ahead, so I do not have any shows planned at the moment, but am hoping to start getting things out there later this year.
I do have all kinds of things happening in the studio. New drawings, paintings, prints. I finished a new artists book last year. Kris Benedict and I have 30 or so collaborative paintings in progress and a new 4 song EP for the Free Samples that we are just completing. Over the last month I’ve been recording a lot of new songs and starting a bunch of new paintings, so I hope that they come together in the next few months.
I also started a channel of one-hour mixes from some of the more random corners of my vinyl collection. It’s called Anti-Skate and hosted on Mixcloud:
Recommended Books Recently/Currently Reading
Moondog: The Viking of 6th Avenue
Karel Appel: Psychopathological Notebook
Philip Guston Now
Louis Bourgeois Paintings
Peter Saul: Professional Artist Correspondence 1945-1976
How Music Works-David Byrne
Recent Studio Music
DIIV: Deceiver
Slowerpace: Barbershop Simulator
Geese: 3D Country
Boards of Canada: Random 35 Tracks Tape (not an official release)
King Krule: Space Heavy
Cocteau Twins (all of it)
Gary Wilson & R. Stevie Moore: Fake News Trending
Versus: The Stars are Insane
Links!
Todd Arsenault: https://www.toddarsenault.com/
The Free Samples: https://www.thefreesamplesmusic.com/music
Deadly Talkers (solo music project): https://www.deadlytalkers.net/
