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The Art Gallery of Alberta respectfully acknowledges that we are located in Treaty 6 Territory and Region 4 of the Metis Nation of Alberta. We respect this as the traditional and contemporary  land of diverse Indigenous Peoples including the Plains Cree, Woodland Cree, Beaver Cree, Nitsitapi/Blackfoot, Métis, Nakota Sioux, Anishinaabe/Saulteaux/Ojibwe and Dene Peoples. We also acknowledge the many Indigenous, Inuit and Métis people who make Alberta their home today.

Roy Caussy: In Conversation

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Roy Caussy, The King is Dead… (installation view), 2020. Mixed Media. Photo: Art Gallery of Alberta.

Artist in Conversation: Roy Caussy

Due to COVID-19 we were unable to hold Artist in Conversation: Roy Caussy in connection with current RBC New Works exhibition Roy Caussy: The King is Dead… But, AGA Curator Lindsey Sharman and artist Roy Caussy were able to exchange questions and answers remotely and documented their discussion to share with selected images of the exhibition.

Roy Caussy: The King is Dead… is both a sympathetic and celebratory mourning of the fading power and influence of the Baby Boomers. Through ceramics and installation, this exhibition examines how flower children became champions of privatization and capitalism.

Roy Caussy, The King is Dead… (installation view), 2020. Mixed Media. Photo credit: Art Gallery of Alberta.
Roy Caussy, The King is Dead… (installation view), 2020. Mixed Media. Photo: Art Gallery of Alberta.

 

LS: When you started out to create this work it was focused on Baby Boomers and a critique of that generation. Through the process of putting it together, though, there was a definite shift of focus. Can you talk a little about the trajectory that the work took from start to finish and what you want people to focus on in regards to how the work came out in the end?

RC: Yes, there really was! First off, this is a fairly common process in my practice: the process of elimination; starting off very big, then learning to edit, reign in, and streamline to the core of what I want to say.  As I was going through that process with this work, there were other revelations that began to surface and two things in particular:

1) I did not want to present an argument because that would only create a dichotomy – of us vs. them, right vs. wrong – which would only really lead to a “blame-game” (on one side) and a justification or dismissal (on the other). 

2) As I began to further understand my research, I realized how foolish it is to blame Baby Boomers, when they are really just a product of their environment.  It’s kinda like the perfect storm.  You wouldn’t blame a traumatized person for being traumatized, and the Baby Boomers’ experience, I think, was ultimately traumatic for them. 

The shift in the work’s focus that happened through this process is that I realized that the villain (if there is one) is the harmful structures that were part of this “perfect storm” for BBs, and not the individuals themselves.  Again, since we’re all human, this becomes a more important point to discuss rather than the infamy of Boomers. We’re all in this together, and together we can create healthier societal structures if we so choose.  By creating a monument to mark the end of the Boomer generation’s power, I’m also hoping to mark an end to blindly following along harmful paths and to begin to conceive of healthier futures.  That is the importance of marking an end to something: it allows space for new ideas to grow, and the Boomers have taken up A LOT of space.

LS: What viewers who are experiencing the work online or just through images might not get is that there is definitely an atmospheric and maybe spiritual element to the work. Can you describe for people who might not get to see it in person, the experience that you hoped they would have with the piece starting even before they walk through the glass doors to the exhibition space?      

RC: Well, the work is really about contemplation.  Contemplation about how we can undo the harm of the past while contemplating on healthier structures for the future.  That being said, I knew that the space around the piece needed to be quiet, almost solemn, so that viewers could relax around the work and settle into it.  The experience I was hoping for is a kind of bewilderment for viewers approaching the work, even before seeing it. A type of confusion that can open the mind, almost like a Zen koan, because truly it is a discussion about the human experience of living on this Earth, and how we might do better based on past examples. 

Confusion in this instance can be a good thing, rather than presenting a fully articulated and delineated point of view. The confusion allows room for viewers to insert their own ideas into the work, supported by other aspects of the exhibition, such as the blurb used for PR, the title of the exhibition, the didactic write up in the space, and the exhibition publication. Together, all those elements build as an aggregate to colour the reading of the artwork.  This allowed me to focus on the emotional quality being communicated non-verbally, and the exhibition space itself became an extension of that.

Roy Caussy, The King is Dead… (installation view), 2020. Photo credit: Blaine Campbell @bblaineccampbell

LS: I’d like to delve a little deeper into the idea of confusion! How do you think the work walks this line of offering something that might confuse but also giving viewers enough that they will stay with the work long enough to build their own understanding of it?

RC: I think the confusion in my work can arise from the fact that the work is about something specific, yet doesn’t really offer any opinions or conclusions, partially because the work is non-argumentative.  In a way, there is no “point,” other than the marking of a moment in time, while offering the question of “how can we use our current moment – this transitional moment – to be better?”  Since I’m not offering a conclusion, this gives the viewer an opportunity to come to their own opinions and conclusions.  It allows the viewer to participate on a mental level, and in fact, I could say that the work is completed in the mind of the viewer.

This is why I have been putting so much effort into the aesthetic qualities of my work.  I want people to be lulled by the aesthetics, the beauty of it.  I want people to be drawn to it like they would be drawn to a beautiful flower while on a walk.  The other kernel I try to give viewers is the feeling that I’m being sincere in my effort.  I try to achieve this by the amount of research I invest, the consideration of how all the components will work together, and my want to avoid placing “cleverness” at the forefront of the work.  In a sense, the work is there for those who want to dive deeper into it and the deeper they dive the more layers they will uncover, but I also understand that that “depth” isn’t for everyone.  Some people just want to look at pretty pictures.

LS: Something that’s also difficult to capture in photographs of the work is its colour. Would you share a bit about the background process of all of your colour experiments and investigations that went into the making of the piece, and also describe the gradient effect that you were going for?

RC:  Colour was important to me because I knew that the colours would give the work its emotional component.  Almost half of my production time was spent just tweaking my colours, which included revisiting some colour theory books.  The only components with colour are the ceramic works, which are slip-cast porcelain.  That meant dealing with a very delayed process in the colour development. I would add a coloured stain to my slip, then correct the percentages and ratios of stain and slip until reaching the right colour, but the corrections could only happen after I fired the pieces in the kiln and could see the results, which meant waiting four or five days.  Next, I would need time to process the results and decide what’s missing, then try to figure out how to make those changes I wanted.  It felt both manic and alchemical.

My goal with the gradient effect was to reference the night sky at dusk, which involves a lot of colours fading in value from bright to dark, but also in hue from reds to blues, to eventually “black”.  I also spent a lot of time looking at night skies at sunset trying to understand the layering, and interplay of colours in the sky, which then informed which colours I would develop and how they would be applied to the works.

Roy Caussy, The King is Dead… (detail), 2020. Photo: Art Gallery of Alberta.

Roy Caussy, The King is Dead… (detail), 2020. Photo: Art Gallery of Alberta.

LS: Speaking of alchemical, you also were working with gold. Was the inclusion of the gold pigment something new for you and what did that gold come to mean?

RC: When you had first approached me with this opportunity, I just happened to be watching Ken Burn’s PBS mini-series “The West,” and one (of the many) takeaways was just how quickly all the gold had been extracted out of the ground by settlers.  Especially when you consider just how long it had remained in the ground prior to the arrival of settlers/colonialism!  As you listen to the first-hand accounts of people involved in the Gold Rush you realize just how much everyone basically became Gollum.  It’s uncanny.  And so, as a commodity, gold has this association with unfettered greed which predates the Baby Boomers.  It wasn’t until much later into my production that I came across an interview with Van Morrison talking about how the recording industry has changed over the decades, of essentially being overrun by “technicians” now, and it made me think about the fable of the goose who laid the golden eggs. The greed that drove the farmer to kill the goose is the same greed that drove music recording sessions away from creative, open forums and into formulaic, technical undertakings.  Those two aspects, of: 1) a greedy entitlement to the land/resources, and 2) a transition away from creativity and towards standardization, are, for me, a great summation of the mentality and work of Baby Boomers.

Again, because the work is less about a critique and more about a hope for a healthier future, I wanted to see if I could use the gold lustre as something other than a symbol for greed or fetishization.

LS: Your work is so packed with symbolism and metaphor that one thing that I hadn’t really thought about before was that sunset. On the one hand, there is, of course, the obvious reference to the end of an era, but it made me think of sunsets in a commonwealth context in art history representing ideas like “the sun never sets on the British Empire”. Do you think that there is anything here relating to colonialism, imperialism or other globalizing themes? Or are you thinking more of living in relation to natural cycles?

RC: In this instance, I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive.  It really is a bit of both.

You have to ask, who are these Boomers that I’m talking about?  It’s not just anyone born between 1946 and 1964; it’s about White, middle-class (North) Americans and an economy that was consistently structured in their favour.  I think of that as an outcome of both imperialism and colonialism.  To fast forward to the present, when the Ford Conservative government in Ontario repealed the Universal Basic Income pilot program, the rhetoric the government was using to justify their actions was fully imbedded in this outdated notion of the British “Dole” which was never intended to provide citizens with a living wage.  Even the term “commonwealth” is a joke when you think about the centuries of slavery enacted by the British Empire.  There is no sense of remorse, no apology, but instead, it’s a kind of “doubling-down”, and rebranding.  It implies a sense of rightness, in that it was done for the ‘common wealth’.  These are some examples of how colonialism continues to infect our society, which is why it is still relevant to discuss.

I reference the past in this work because it continues to inform the current economic and environmental predicament we find ourselves in (including our current pandemic).  My goal is to point out that we can shift our societal structures because there is no inherent “truth” to them, but rather greed and fetishization, and human error, and that all it would take is a re-prioritization of our values to begin to make those shifts.

Roy Caussy, The King is Dead… (detail), 2020. Photo: Blaine Campbell @bblaineccampbell

That’s why there’s a “juvenile” aspect to my work, because of the ability of youths to be ignorant to the entrenched way of doing things.  Economically speaking, our society has always been structured to favour Whiteness. Another way to put it is that the economy has always been inherently exclusive, and in part, what I’m trying to say with my work is that it’s time for the sun to set (metaphorically) on this exclusive economy, and it’s time to start making it inclusive.  For me, inclusivity would mean such things as: universal healthcare, universal basic income, shelter for all, clean drinking water for all, and so on…

If you can say that our economy, and society, has an inherent bias towards Whiteness, you can also say that there’s an inherent bias towards Maleness.  That’s another aspect of the setting sun reference. The Sun can also be seen as the Male Ego, and the night and the moon as aspects of the Feminine.  In a way, I’m saying there has to be a total shift, not just a shift that only helps one group, only one demographic.  That’s where the idea of natural cycles enters the work, as a way to restore a balance. I believe that natural cycles are inherently balancing forces.

LS: We have had a lot of conversations about eggs. I think people have very strong feelings about eggs as food but they are also a metaphor for a lot of things. Why do you think eggs are funny? Do you have funny stories about eggs? How do you use them in this work and have they featured in work you’ve done before?

RC: HA!  Goodness, I could go on for a minute about this!  There’s something primal, almost elemental about the egg.  If I could define one archetype for nature it’s the scavenger scavenging an egg from some nest.  It’s so common, and I think that some old part of our brains connects with that idea.  The first time I saw an egg as humorous was at a submarine shop in Hamilton when I noticed a giant jar of pickled eggs in the fridge behind Murph (the owner of “Murphy’s Submarines”).  It felt like looking at something that people would use to fight off scurvy or something!  I’ve only used eggs once before in my previous work, for my show at Stride Gallery, but that’s where I really began to give the egg some serious consideration.  From there, I began to look at the egg as a symbol for the unspoiled potential for an unknown future.  The egg also symbolizes a totality (eg: the ‘Egg of Brahma’), much like a circle or a mandala, which has factored heavily in previous works of mine.  For my work at the AGA, the egg evolved to reference the fable of the goose who laid the golden eggs.  To me, it seems that is a perfect summation of our current predicament: destroying the goose in the hopes of extracting more profits.

Roy Caussy, The King is Dead… (detail), 2020. Photo: Art Gallery of Alberta
Roy Caussy, The King is Dead… (detail), 2020. Photo: Art Gallery of Alberta

 

LS: The largest of the ceramic elements in the piece are what you sometimes call “ghosts.” These are elements that have featured before in your work. Can you tell a little about the ghosts – what they symbolize in this work as well as what they represent in your broader practice?

RC: The “Ghosts” are meant to be somewhat amorphous in their reading. The term ghost came about as a quick shorthand in my studio when referring to those forms, but there were three things that were running through my mind as I was building the initial form, specifically: a rubber nipple, a ghost, and a toddler. Those three ideas are what informed the shape, scale, and surface finish of those forms.  It wasn’t until after I read the exhibition essay Tatiana Mellema wrote for my show at Stride Gallery, that I began to consider “haunting” as a conceptual component to my work.  In a roundabout way, my work at the AGA deals with a kind of “passing of the baton” from one generation to the next – death of the old, birth of the new – and I really liked the idea of representing this newer, younger generation as a haunting spectre.  By implicating the Boomers, I am inadvertently making reference to an unknown future, and I liked the idea of these haunting ghosts warning against the pitfalls of the Boomers’ mentality.  It’s kind of like the ghosts of Christmas past visiting Scrooge so that he may develop empathy for others, rather than die alone (I just realized that reference as I was replying to your answer, ha!)

Image credit: Roy Caussy, La vie est la mère, 2019. Porcelain, wood, felt, cinderblocks. Photo credit: Kat Valenzuela
Image: Roy Caussy, La vie est la mère, 2019. Porcelain, wood, felt, cinderblocks. Photo credit: Kat Valenzuela

 

LS: I think its really interesting that they didn’t start as ghosts but through that shorthand, it has eventually added meaning. I think one of the really interesting things about your way of working is that you are really open and allow the work to become this thing that exists outside of yourself and outside of your intention. To me, the really surprising thing about the ghosts is that for me when I look at this work they have actually become less ghost-like and more architectural. The way that they are stacked up in this piece really gives the entire structure the appearance of a shrunk down Hindu or Buddist temple with the ghosts as domes. Can you share a little about how religion manifests in this work?

RC: When I was a kid, my dad used to work for World Health Organization, and by the time I was in high school he was stationed in India and would travel throughout Southeast Asia for work.  So I would spend the school year in Hamilton with my mom, and my summers with my dad.  This meant that, at an early age, I was given the opportunity to visit these temples in India, and to witness first hand the spread, and shift, in that architectural style as Hinduism shifted into Buddhism and migrated out of India and into places like Thailand and Burma (now Myanmar).  I have these very beautiful memories from childhood of seeing these old, crumbling temples scattered throughout Southeast Asia, and then returning to my Western upbringing in Hamilton, typified by my immigrant, Indian diaspora, home life.  I guess, in a way, it’s just something that’s in my wheelhouse, through both exposure and upbringing.  So, as I started to formulate my ideas for this work, in which I knew I would be discussing societal structures, I knew I wanted the work to have an architectural feel, as a way to imply that these structures are built environments.  I began looking at the architecture of Hindu temples for inspiration, specifically the Meenakshi Temple in Madurai, India.  There’s something so gaudy, yet beautiful about the colourful aesthetics that seems to imply an opposition to the clean, muted Scandanavian aesthetic currently dominating our culture and economy.  There’s also this beautiful parallel to classical Greek sculptures, which have been used in promoting this idea of whiteness = purity, even though those sculptures used to be as colourful and gaudy as the Meenakshi Temple!  That’s why the colours of my ghosts are embedded in the surface so that they can never fade or be erased.  So, I guess we’ve just uncovered another aspect to the work, ha!  A shift away from purity, and the idea, or pursuit of purity. 

There’s not really any specific religious reference being made, but maybe it could be defined as a type of reverence.  The ghosts are still staked in a similar fashion to the way the gods and goddesses are “staked” in the temple in Madurai, but instead of depicting the personifications of deities, I’m making reference to the heuristic, the amorphous, the entropic; the night sky.

LS: I think that’s actually super interesting, this idea of purity which of course is completely tied into many religions and a major driving force in colonial violence. But there is something really poetic and subversive in the way that you are adding pigment to porcelain to undermine one of its most desirable qualities, which is its whiteness and it as a symbol of purity. I always feel like I’ve got a handle on your work and then we have another conversation and so much more of the work opens up to me, so thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me more about your work and I am so happy that we can share more about the exhibition in this way!

RC: Haha, thanks, Lindsey!  And, thank you for making this happen!

RBC logoOrganized by the Art Gallery of Alberta. Curated by Lindsey Sharman.
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The Art Gallery of Alberta respectfully acknowledges that we are located in Treaty 6 Territory and Region 4 of the Metis Nation of Alberta. We respect this as the traditional and contemporary  land of diverse Indigenous Peoples including the Plains Cree, Woodland Cree, Beaver Cree, Nitsitapi/Blackfoot, Métis, Nakota Sioux, Anishinaabe/Saulteaux/Ojibwe and Dene Peoples. We also acknowledge the many Indigenous, Inuit and Métis people who make Alberta their home today.