After seeing Hope Esser’s art in a local gallery last spring, I spoke with her about her MFA work in her cute apartment in Logan Square. This week we touched base again to talk about her involvement in some upcoming exhibitions at SAIC, particularly New Blood IV, happening this Saturday and Sunday. Portions of the old interview and our recent conversation are below. -MD

March 2010

There is a dress form wrapped in fabric, and a large, stiff buffalo hide rolled up like a map in artist Hope Esser’s living room. Colorful vintage curtains cover the windows, and a bold Native American rug spreads out across the wood floor. The room dissolves as she tells me much of her work is a product of grief. In 2005, her close friend, Julia Armstrong Minard, was found raped and murdered on a backpacking trip through Belize.

Esser holds a BA in Studio Art and Art History from Oberlin College, and is currently working towards her MFA at the Art Institute of Chicago. She recently exhibited in the show While in Class… at the Woman Made Gallery, and received a membership award for her piece “Power/Suit.”

Esser’s garment-based art uses clothing as the connective tool that binds bits of her autobiography with a more general discussion of memory, gender, and violence against women. She speaks candidly about her struggle, the evolution of her work, and the future use of the buffalo hide.

Mia DiMeo: How different was your art prior to your friend’s death?

Hope Esser: Her death was definitely a big turning point in my work. Before, I was working with somewhat similar ideas about time, nostalgia, and memory. But when she died, it was totally different. I felt completely drained of any creative thread, for around a year. I don’t know how to quantify it. I couldn’t make any work. And then something started to happen, partially from going to therapy, and realizing that even if my friend was dead and her relationship with me couldn’t continue, my relationship with her could continue. Once that happened it was like [snaps] and I started creating rapidly.

MD: So initially, you didn’t want to discuss the story behind your work?

HE: I realized I had a lot of things to say about grief, but I think part of why it took so long was that I think talking about death is taboo. Not when someone old dies, but in this case. I felt bad about talking about it, I didn’t want anyone to know.

MD: Is this cathartic as well as what you describe as an “impulse to protect all women from the same fate?” Is it autobiographic advocacy?

HE: I think that a lot of what I do in my work combines my personal challenge with what I’m trying to say to society. On one level, I have to get through my distrust of people in order to continue and be positive about human kind, but there’s also a universal level that rape is a common thing.

MD: Can you tell me about the older body of work Shirt Studies?

HE: They were my first attempt at tackling the grieving process, and part of two shows based around Julia’s death. The shirt was Julia’s  father’s. He died of a heart attack when they were hiking together when we were in high school. She took his shirts and tailored them to fit her, and gave me one. The idea had to do with the shirt being ritualized, and continuing the ritual. Once I started to get to know this object through drawings, I began cutting and re-sewing it into a scarf, adding in my own ritual. I wanted to take the masculine object and make it feminine.

MD: I saw a still from your video Alone Together. Is it also about the shirt?

HE: When I was intensely involved in the project I would see the stripes of the shirt all the time…red, black and white. I had a dream the stripes were following me. I thought about it for a few weeks, and realized this is exactly what I’m trying to say. What I had with Julia isn’t going away, the experience will follow me. The video is of me walking through a field in Ohio, with stripes following behind me.

MD: You use objects and materials that are specifically feminine; thread, textiles, flowers, pearls, lipstick, and gloves. Are you being critical of widely accepted gender roles?

HE: Yes. I’ve been shifting gears to talk about gender more. Last semester, we had a project titled, “running with your pants” that was open, and left for us to interpret. I had been reading about political sex scandals, and how politician’s wives always have a uniform with a suit and pearls. They stand next to their husbands, voiceless at press conferences, I was wondering about these women as role models. What are they teaching their kids? That was the basis of the piece “Power/Suit.”

MD: Are you afraid of your art being marginalized because it discusses feminist issues?

HE: Feminism has a negative connotation in culture, but I’m not afraid to call myself one. The feminism in my work is subtle, but not less important. I have respect for feminist artists before me, because without them, I wouldn’t be able to do what I do. But I also think my work and work being done by other artists my age is trying to show that feminism can be more mainstream, and about the world at large. It’s important for it to be viewed as more relevant. I think that using a personal experience takes some of the stereotype of feminism away because the audience can relate to a personal story more directly.

MD: You have worked with a spectrum of media. Do materials inspire your concept, or the does the concept inspire the materials?

HE: Can they happen at the same time? I guess I’ve never thought about it that way…

I think sometimes the material inspires the idea. I got the buffalo rawhide before I knew what the project was going to be about. I wanted to work with a material closest to the animal in nature, less removed. Then I was thinking about shell or armor as a second skin.

MD: The tentatively titled “Arms and Armor” buffalo project is a continuation of ideas of clothing as protection and its relationship to the body. Now you’re looking at myths. Is it more complex than your past work?

HE: It’s more complex, but more clear at the same time. With this, what I know about the history and mythology of the animal is only going to help steer where I’m going with the project. Rawhide has a specific history and connotation, so to ignore that… you can’t ignore its history. I didn’t know about its uses until I researched it, then everything came to me more clearly. It was used in shields for battle, drums, saddles, and that’s what inspires what the forms will look like. But the surprising part was the significance of the buffalo. It’s the protector of unmarried women in many Native American societies. It’s not Venus or some sexy character; it’s this giant beast that isn’t feminine in any way, but is really important.

MD: What’s it like to work with untanned leather? Can you tell me more about your idea to make bodily armor?

HE: It’s hard. Here, touch it. I can show you, I have some in the bathtub I’m working with. I was so freaked out when it came in the mail. I’m a vegetarian. I do see it on the body, possibly part of a performative or video work. I haven’t figure that out yet.

Fall 2010

MD: Tell me about the buffalo hide piece since its conception when I spoke to you last spring?

HE: Once I had molded the “herd” or armor out of rawhide, I decided that I needed to perform with them to give the pieces a stronger voice. They looked almost like dead animals, but I still wanted them to have a presence, so through stringing them up in a herd formation and moving them with my body, they had a lightness, and they also created an eerie, animal-like sound. I have just started working more collaboratively and will be including the other first year performance grads in the work so they can respond to their own fear as women in an unpredictable world.

MD: Can you talk to me a little bit about performance, in a world where art is a huge commodity and art is still understood to be, by many, only painting and sculpture. Also, performance doesn’t fit squarely into the market or a museum unless there’s some record (photo, video, object), but that’s what’s great about it.

HE: I think that performance is hard for some people because it’s time-based and usually live. It requires a patient audience. Unlike video, which is now a recognizable format, it is hard to get someone to give the work the time it needs. I think that while the same is true for painting– most people don’t give any work the time it really needs to sink in, there is an element of duration to performance that makes it seem perhaps more daunting.

I do think that a lot has changed since Marina [Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present] at MOMA though. Like it or hate it, a lot more people are familiar with performance now as a result of Marina. But like you mentioned about the documentation and how that fits into the art market, she really changed this too. After I sat with her at the MOMA show, my photo was up on Flickr the next day, and the video of her sitting (the so-called Marina cam) was being broadcasted live on the internet. I think she even pushed her work too far in the documentation and accessibility direction, but on the flip side, I think people are still talking about that piece months later and will continue to do so, because of how crazy she was about creating an experience that sticks with you and can be experienced through other forms on the web after the fact.

MD: Do you feel lest restricted now, since you left the Fashion program for the MFA Performance?

HE: In some ways I feel a lot more on my own in the MFA program– if you aren’t doing your work, no one is going to barge into your studio and yell at you. But I think that’s a good thing—if you don’t have that self-discipline now, how are you going to have it after grad school? Also, I have learned to look for support from my colleagues, regardless of what department they are in, so it feels like a much more convivial environment than fashion did.

MD: Do you see garments as less of a part of the total work now? Have you done performances that don’t involve body coverings, now that you have changed departments?

HE: I think the garment is still really important in my work, but it is definitely not the most important thing. I don’t have a fashion background to begin with, but I have always been an artist, and I do think that there is a link between the work I did in fashion and the work I do now in performance. Both involve the need to be keenly aware of the human body, and especially in regard to how a body moves through a space in interacts with the environment. As a performer, you always have to be aware of what you are wearing and how that is contributing to the piece.

MD: What are you working on lately?

HE: I’m developing this piece for New Blood [a performance festival at SAIC], and also tweaking the piece and performance that I will have in the Sullivan Galleries December 10. I’m also editing the video documentation of a 10-hour performance I did over the summer where I walked 24 miles from the beginning of Milwaukee Avenue along Milwaukee to Buffalo Grove, IL.

MD: Does Julia’s death continue to inspire your work?

HE: Yes, the 5th anniversary of her death is this week, and that is why I am focusing on this for my New Blood performance. In most of my work I feel that I have moved on to broader issues about what women deal with every day, for instance not wanting to be hassled when they walk home at night.

In a lot of my early work that has to do with Julia’s death, I was obsessed with the time that had passed since her death as a way of keeping track of my grieving process, and realized that there is no real way to quantify this. So for this anniversary I am returning to this theme of counting as a way of marking a relationship. For New Blood, I am typing 1,833 letters to her on a typewriter, one letter for each day that has passed since her death five years ago.

See more of Hope’s art here, and check out New Blood IV at SAIC’s Columbus Drive Building, this Saturday and Sunday at 7pm.