15 Questions With… Chase Barnes
Chase Barnes is in the midst of bringing his first monograph, Wilderness of Mirrors, into reality. Published in collaboration with Yoffy Press, designed by Gnomic Book, and featuring an essay by Jason Koxvold, the book is a culmination of four years of work. Pre-orders are currently live on Kickstarter, with prints and t-shirts available to backers.
How are you at the moment?
I’m fairly well. A little tired, a little wired.
What is your morning ritual? How does your day begin?
I usually wake up about an hour before I’m supposed to be at work – just enough time to get ready, stop by the mini-market to grab breakfast and caffeine and jump in the car. I eat a Clif bar while driving to work and listen to music or the news. I am not a morning person so I try to keep the whole event as quick and painless as possible.
What, right now, can you see?
My desk faces a wall, so not much other than my computer stuff, bookshelf and some mild clutter. Taped to the side of my computer is a postcard reproduction of a woodcut print from Bread & Puppet Theater – a nice fiery looking flower arrangement on a black ground with the words ‘RESISTANCE OF THE MIND AGAINST THE SUPREMACY OF MONEY’.
What artist, project, book would you recommend we see/follow?
I can only recommend that everyone who feels invested in photography or art get their hands on a copy of The Photographer’s Green Book (Vol. I). In a field that is overrun by stagnant, automatic institutional practice, the editors of PGB are a force returning thoughtfulness to the medium. Volume I is not only a terrific curation of artists and in-depth interviews, but also offers reflection questions which follow each feature. Questions such as: ‘How am I Hyper-visualized?’ and ‘How do I Hyper-visualize others?’ You will be smarter and your photography will be better if you follow this project.
Tell us about your process when starting a new project
The way I work is to treat picture-making like an ongoing thought process. I will have a general idea or framework that I want to make work about, and I will try and find something either out in the field or in my archive of images that in whatever small way visually articulates the contours of that original idea. I will look at this image or set of images in the context of the concept, see how they resonate, or see how the image fails the idea, and this will lead me to seek out another image to help bridge the gap. This call-and-response repeats itself until I have amassed an unwieldy number of photographs that then create the task of sequencing and editing down to something coherent.
Collecting is a huge part of my practice though. I will make pictures that right now might feel like they have nothing to do with anything, let them sit in my archive knowing that one day they might fill in a gap or complete a phrase. I always recommend this way of working because too often I meet people who like to make photographs but feel like they can’t pursue it because they need to ‘think of a project’. Making the pictures is part of the thinking!
What has been your favourite collaboration?
Working with Jennifer Yoffy of Yoffy Press and Jason Koxvold of Gnomic Book on my first monograph has been a total joy. I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to put our heads together, the resulting book is an object that is so much more than the sum of its different parts and I couldn’t have asked for a better team to make that happen.
Aside from that, I’ve also been collaborating with Shawn Bush on a project called The Tower, The Range for a few years now. It’s a project that interweaves two disjunct landscapes (Shawn lives in rural Wyoming, I live in Philadelphia) to describe the power structures that underpin them. I love Shawn’s photography, when I was starting graduate school he was my #1 friend-crush. The work blends our photographs together as well as archival images we’ve been collecting for ages. It’s going to be a really amazing book when it’s ready.
What is your greatest achievement?
I quit smoking this year, as far as achievements go that feels pretty good and real. All my other achievements right now feel a bit underwhelming or abstract.
I am really proud of my first photobook, but since it hasn’t been released yet it doesn’t feel right to call it an achievement. I haven’t quite achieved it yet, it is an impending achievement.
What is your greatest regret?
There are so many photographs I talked myself out of making for no reason, or wrongly convinced myself I could come back and make later. I wish I could see a whole book of those pictures.
What advice would you give to your younger self?
Not to keep things so photo-centric but I would tell myself that photography is a career. I’ve loved photography since I was a teenager but was discouraged from pursuing it seriously. I wasted a lot of time coming to terms with the fact that photography is the way I move through the world, so if I could I would go back and save myself the trouble of trying to do anything else.
What is your latest project about?
The project I am working to bring into the world right now is called Wilderness of Mirrors. It is a project that uses photography to describe the effect disinformation and digital platforms have on our lives. Through sequencing the series presents these conditions as a figurative wilderness – a landscape of images and devices that infinitely deflects, replicates, and distorts any information within its borders. By guiding the viewer through these absurd surfaces and circumstances, the work gestures to the ways our perception is quietly directed and managed – while wondering whose interests are best served by our collective disorientation.
Put more simply, the work looks at how a hegemonic power structure, namely capitalist white-supremacist patriarchy, learns new tricks (images, technology, disinformation) to keep the same old status-quo intact.
What are you researching at the moment?
I’ve been teaching myself how to use Blender, 3D world is really cool. I’ve also been researching thermochromic offset printing for… reasons.
What can you not work without?
I work best when I can listen to music and drink a carbonated beverage. A happy worker is a productive worker!
What challenges have you faced working in your industry?
My projects make the most sense as a body of work – in book form or as an installation – but when you only see ten images at a time the work can come across as impenetrable. Any work that endeavors to visualize abstract concepts or invisible systems is difficult to get firing on all cylinders at first. I think one small part of it is that I don’t make ‘portraits’, there are figures in my work but they are treated as surfaces or stand-ins for something else. I have a really dry sense of humor too, which can be a hard sell sometimes.
Another challenge that I think many of us can relate to is balancing my studio practice with the need to survive. My studio practice always comes before my day job, but my time and energy are precious resources that I’m forced to divide.
What are you hoping for in 2021?
I’m hoping for a successful, smooth, and generative process bringing Wilderness of Mirrors to press. “Blue skies and golden sunshine, all along the way” is how David Lynch would describe it.
Share a song with us, what are you listening to at the moment?
Boléro by Isao Tomita, it’s a synthesizer-based interpretation of the Ravel song. I am obsessed, anytime it comes up on shuffle I can’t skip it.
