The Art of Domesticity: An Interview with Brian T. Leahy

BY ALISON REILLY

CGN is thrilled to partner with Chicago-based artist Brian T. Leahy to present Prop(House), an exhibition of new sculpture and drawing. We invite you to join us for an opening reception on Friday, June 2 from 5-8pm at our space in River North.

In advance of the opening, we had the opportunity to interview Brian about his background as an artist and art historian and his particular interest in domestic spaces, interior construction materials and the history of Minimalism.

Brian received a master's degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015 and is currently pursuing a PhD in Art History at Northwestern University. Prop(House) is on view through July 21 at Chicago Gallery News.

Chicago Gallery News: You’re an artist, an organizer and an art historian.  How does your research experience influence your art practice?

Brian T. Leahy: This is an ongoing and active question for me. My background as an artist is rooted in studio painting and a commitment to abstraction; however, my research interests have tended towards conceptual and performative practices, such as the work of Tehching Hsieh. The easy answer—which is also truthful—is that my research, reading, and writing practices are always somehow informing how I am thinking in the studio, and vice versa, even if those connections are not always explicit.

However, over the last few years, I’ve been trying to work through how these practices might more specifically coincide. These recent investigations of wallpaper, a bit of which I’ll be showing at Chicago Gallery News, are one attempt in that direction. They arose out of simultaneous considerations of wallpaper as a pictorial strategy—which has a long history in modern painting, including the seductively patterned backgrounds in Matisse, Bonnard, and Vuillard, and an active life in contemporary painting, which you can see in work by a number of Chicago-based artists who are exploring ideas around pattern, textile, and abstraction now—and thinking about the cultural, aspirational, racialized, and political dimensions of wallpaper as a social material.

CGN: Tell me about your background. How did you end up in Chicago?

BL: I grew up in a small suburb just north of Milwaukee. I was able to escape the northern cold for the southeast, and spent a number of years in North Carolina. I went to school there, where I first wanted to study biology, and then realized I didn’t want to spend sixty to eighty hours a week inside in the lab. I decided to study art and Buddhism, instead, and that’s where I first learned what painting might do. After school I lived in the western part of the state in the Appalachian mountains—first I helped get a Buddhist community center started, and then worked with a small construction company as a carpenter’s assistant, all while trying to keep making paintings. At some point, I wanted to be involved in the conversations around art that only seemed possible in a larger city, and ended up at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I’ve just begun studying for a PhD at Northwestern University, so I’ll be in Chicago at least a few more years—and now I spend all my time in the library, instead of the lab.

CGN: Can you describe your experience as a carpenter and homebuilder in North Carolina?

BL: I was working with a construction firm that built large, well-made, super-insulated, expensive homes. I did it for a few reasons, other than just needing a job—at that time, I was thinking about trying to work in architecture. But I was also interested in knowing how a house goes together, how a pile of industrially produced materials gets re-configured into a place in which life happens.

CGN: How does that influence your art practice?

BL: It influences how I think about sculpture, certainly—often, when a house was framed but not yet sheathed in plywood, I wanted nothing more than to paint the whole thing monochrome and call it a sculpture. There are many sculptural moments that happen when building a house, from the way materials are stacked, to provisional two-by-four braces put up when the walls are raised, to the strange perspectives you get when installing hardware underneath the eaves of a three-story rise. It changed how I thought about form, but also how I thought about what materials might be meaningful, what kinds of things I could bring into the work I make, and how I thought about some of the relationships between labor and material.

CGN: Your work Prop(House) appropriates Richard Serra’s 1969 sculpture One Ton Prop (House of Cards). What prompted your interest in Serra’s work and in Minimalism?

BL: Richard Serra’s work is complicated for me. He has an epic status in histories of sculpture, and the October editorial board has championed his work for some time. On the one hand, I do love his work. The lead throwing pieces were important to me when I first saw them, and the Verb List is an incredibly beautiful moment in which language, drawing, and sculptural concerns all coincide. Balance as a component of sculptural practice is something that I am deeply interested in, and something that I first learned from Serra.

However, his work certainly has a darker side: multiple incidents in which preparators were injured during installation of his large plate works, and the installation of Sculpture No. 3 actually killed one technician, Raymond Johnson, in 1971. (Not incidentally, wallpaper also has a deadly history, something Lucinda Hawksley writes about in Bitten by Witch Fever: Wallpaper and Arsenic in the Nineteenth-Century Home.) Serra’s work also seems to refuse to consider the social dimensions of its context—while he has often insisted on site-specificity, best exemplified in the legal case around Tilted Arc, he seems invested in the spatial and formal repercussions of site, rather than the socio-political implications. At the same time, I think Minimalism offered a kind of serious consideration of material that is still important now—and so, I’m interested in working through the ways in which materials interact with the socio-political.

CGN: Serra’s sculpture uses lead antimony plates, but you’ve decided to use sheets of drywall and wallpaper. What is the significance of the material?

BL: The idea for Prop(House) actually began for dimensional reasons. I noticed that each of the lead antimony plates for One Ton Prop (House of Cards) are 48” square—this is precisely one half of a standard sheet of drywall that you can buy at any building supply store. So, there was a kind of potential material efficiency in the replication of Serra’s work with drywall—and, as anyone who has ever installed drywall before will know, it is always a question of material and temporal efficiency, minimizing waste and maximizing speed.

I was also interested in how drywall as a mass-produced, standardized material might update the rhetoric of industrial materials and standard sizes that Minimalist artists were engaged with, while simultaneously deforming their insistence on a kind of over-determined masculinity that materials like lead antimony seem to signal. I wanted to domesticate Serra, somehow—something that I feel like has already happened, in a certain sense, in the way that the imaginary of the cheap, rough, downtown New York loft scene of the 1960s and 1970s—which is crucial to early images of One Ton Prop—has been commercialized by real estate practices of the “soft [newly constructed] loft.” Indeed, this is the situation in River North, to a large extent, and one for which artists, galleries, and artworks have been a driving factor.

CGN: You’ve described your interest in binaries, particularly the domestic versus the industrial. How do those relationships relate to Prop(House)?

BL: I suppose it’s important to clarify my own interest: I am not interested in constructing binaries, per se, but rather in the processes by which binaries tend to structure so much of our cultural and psychological perspectives. A friend once told me that she thought good art is that which can hold multiple, seemingly contradictory things together. That’s what I would hope my work as a whole, and specific works like Prop(House), might do: to hold the poles of a binary together in a single object or event. In that sense, I’m interested in the way Prop(House) might be both industrial and domestic, unthreatening and disturbing, all in the same moment. To collapse seemingly disparate poles into a single object, I think, can make us a little more conscious of how those binaries get constructed in the first place. To me, houses themselves already do this—the contradictions are already present—but making a sculptural version of a “house” is a way of intensifying some of those contradictions, making them more distilled.

CGN: In November 2016 Mayor Emanuel announced that a record 33 tower cranes were installed in the city. However, the Chicago metropolitan area as a whole lost 19,570 residents in 2016, which was the greatest loss in any metropolitan area in the United States. Do you see a connection between your work and the current Chicago landscape?

BL: That’s an incredible fact. I think the work can relate to similar changes happening across a number of urban centers in the United States—I’m not sure how much of Chicago can be specifically read into the work. But, this fact—that high-rise construction is increasing even as population dwindles—certainly gives us some clues about the relationship between high-end construction, cost-of-living, and the political and economic priorities of a city. For me, the question is: what kind of material reconfigurations are occurring, and who are those arrangements affecting and how? And, what kind of questions can artistic labor introduce into those dynamics?

CGN: Do you often collaborate with other artists?

BL: I try to collaborate with artists as much as I can. It can be a way of having a more intensive kind of conversation with someone, one that allows each of you to figure out more clearly what the stakes—and blind spots—of your own practices might be. As just one example, I worked on an exhibition last summer called Our Lovely Secret Wreck at Hume Chicago, a non-profit gallery in south Logan Square that is run by an amazing group of artists and organizers. That show involved my own work, but also the work of J. Michael Ford, an artist here in Chicago, and Margaux Crump, who is based in Houston. I also worked with a large group of writers to develop something in between a catalog for the show, a collection of experimental writing, and an artist’s book, which was in turn designed by Kitemath, an incredible design collective here in Chicago. The Chicago Design Museum has actually just acquired that book for their collection, in large part due to Kitemath’s efforts. That whole show was a huge collaborative effort.

CGN: What’s on the horizon for you? Do you have shows or projects planned for the summer and fall?

BL: The next major project is a solo show in Charlotte, at the New Gallery of Modern Art, opening July 13th. That show is called Easy Colors, and will involve an installation, paintings, and some works on paper, all thinking through the relationship between wallpaper and painting. In some ways, it’s a companion to the work here at Chicago Gallery News. After that, I’m not sure—I’d like to find somewhere to show the new material that is more about aspirational, DIY diagrams from the 1970s and 1980s, these drawings and paintings on drywall that I’ve mentioned. I’ll be travelling some for research related to art historical projects, and I always like to draw when travelling. There are some projects that I’ve been thinking about for a while that I’d like to move forward on, including a large artist’s book, and another painting series. Hopefully, there will also be time for some new collaborative projects.

For more information about Brian T. Leahy visit: briantleahy.com. Prop(House) is on view at Chicago Gallery News through July 21. Please email or call to schedule a time to visit the exhibition. 

Top image: Brian T. Leahy, Prop(House), 2017. Installation view at Chicago Gallery News, June 2-July 21, 2017.