 If you watch Common Ground online, consider becoming a member or making a donation at lptv.org. Lakeland PBS presents Common Ground, brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota. Production funding of Common Ground is made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji, continuing their second century of service to the community, a partnership for generations. Member, FDIC. Welcome to Common Ground. I'm your host, Scott Knudsen. In this episode, join Aaron Spangler in two inlets as he creates a work for the sculpture garden at the Walker Art Center. May of 2016, internationally exhibited artist Aaron Spangler invited me to his two-inlet studio to film him sculpt a piece for the Walker Art Center's sculpture garden in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I drove past beautiful Itasca State Park to Aaron's studio on the headwaters. His abstract carved form had taken shape, and Aaron was adding detail to the surface. Victoria Sung of the Walker Art Center was there to talk with Aaron about the creation of his art. So what does it feel like walking around in here? It's great. I mean, it's incredible to see, you know, everything that he's working on, the smell of the wood. Everything's just very evocative. All of your senses are engaged. You know, I started using these patterns where I trace off of tools or bodies. So I'm using that technique that I had with the woodblock prints on the sculpture. Got it. So, like, for instance, this is my deer rifle. Yeah. So these are objects from your everyday life? Yeah. So most of the stuff is from here, you know, from stuff I had. And then once I ran out of things to trace, or there's, like, only, like, a few things I can think of and I can't think of more things, then my assistant would go and find more stuff. And once we exhausted that, her parents have a... or grandparents are kind of junk collectors. So she went there and totally, you know, traced all that stuff. So a lot of this is a mix of all that. It doesn't really matter what they are. It just shapes. I mean, I know this is like a pruner. This is something that's a crossing from my son's toys. This is what I call, like, a gun face, which is a pistol. Oh, yeah. It becomes, like, an animal face. Right. And you trace them from the actual objects themselves? Usually sometimes, and sometimes photos. The photos I've taken and then you can cut that out. What do you think? I think I know what this is. This is a sprinkler. Oh. Right? I think, yeah. I see it, yeah. This is off of an old two-man saw of my great-grandpas. That's kind of a cool thing. What's this? It's like a lamp or... Yeah, it could be. Oh, yeah, it could be a lamp. I never thought about that. Either way, yeah. This is a mystery to me. This looks like some kind of gear with cams or I don't know what this is. Anyway, so all this stuff, it doesn't really matter what it is. And so you're interested in these more for their kind of abstracted properties as opposed to the actual object they represent? As a whole, all these tools together express something. But it's not a specific thing. Right. It's just, you know, just the act of using basic stupid things around, you know, and then creating patterns out of that. And then those create other things and create images that can become figures, I would say. Right. So, let's see. I'm going to try something up here. This is my Marlin rifle that my uncle bought for me for deer hunting. 30-30, lever action. So nothing too crazy. Let me know if I can hand you anything. And a lot of this stuff has been, as you can see, has really worn, has been used over and over and kind of laid out in different ways. It's just, I like, part of why I like carving is it's a limitation working reductively. It limits the choices. And part of just using these things over and over and part of it's probably lazy, part of it's, you know, then I get inspired or just run out of objects to trace. And then part of it just doesn't really matter what it is. It's just a way to get outside of my head and generate imagery and lines that wouldn't otherwise happen if I'm just staring at the wall. So after I trace these on, I'll erase parts of it that's not all going to get carved exactly like it is. But it's a place to begin. It's a place to start. It's a place to have something to say, to react to. You know, so if I start with somewhat arbitrary lines then as things get narrowed down I'm forced into decisions. Sometimes forced into places that I'm unhappy with which then makes me upset and struggle and hate what I'm doing and then forces me to make better decisions or loud enough or better but decisions that I can live with. Sometimes those aren't better decisions. Do you erase and start again or do you add on other imagery that will... I find when there's things that I don't like I have to let them sit for a while because often those things that make me uncomfortable for some reason have value and that's how I learn from it. If it's all stuff that's going the way it should it's usually not... I don't grow. Just like sometimes when you meet people people that you initially are kind of not drawn to become your best friends. So it's a little bit of that. Well these are kind of interesting because I feel like you're amassing this stockpile of imagery that recurs here and there throughout your artwork and so you have your own history of images or archetypes that you draw upon but then too that you're adding again more and more. I think it's also it's like what more can I do with these? Same with the chisels. Basic chisels you have gouges and they come in all kinds of different sizes back bent gouges which are really more for how you're getting into spaces. V-gouges and then these kind of spoon fishtail gouges if you rock them you can create different lines but there's only so many things you can do with them so it's like how do you keep making new marks with them? So that's something that I've brought to the sculptures which is basically using that surface technique of making a wood cut over a form. So the stencils are just another tool for you? Yeah it's just like these it's another thing and it just forces me to hopefully try to keep doing new things with it. I'm definitely more of a more is more onslaught full on dense speed metal. So when I first started carving all I had was flat chisels like let's see now I can barely find a flat chisel but just like these somehow I did all my carving with these and I had a friend of mine Paloma Vargasweiss who also works with wood and she's in Dusseldorf and she came to my studio when I was in New York and she couldn't believe it she was like this is ridiculous This is what you work with? Yeah and part of the reason was that I didn't want the look of the technique from gouges because it looked like wood carving to me like these narrative reliefs they're all done with flat chisels When I graduated to gouges everything got a lot faster and I realized what a fool I'd been And so the different effect you were saying between Well in the end the gouges really just help you clear wood Yeah So then as I had the gouges I started looking at more wood carving and seeing how so far back everybody's using this language and you can see it in African sculptures Indonesian You don't see it so much like in old European wood carving because they weren't letting the tools be seen but I could see it in African mask making I was working at the Museum for African Art as an art installer and registrar and so I got to handle a lot of the stuff and at the time I didn't really think about like I'm a wood carver I just thought of them as something different until one day I just dawned on me that I can see how they're making this stuff and using that language so I think it freed me up to think about using the chisels as the content and for mark making and being ok with that Can you talk a little bit about how you got into wood carving I know you don't have like a formal training I was making sculptures in college out of found objects and the content was pretty similar there's a lot of war stuff and guns and things like that but I was making sculptures out of found objects, a lot of found wood and there was at one point where I had this structure that I wanted to carve murals in in fact, it's out here kind of rotten, did you want to go see it? Yeah, definitely outside so this structure was up on a platform that was a railroad platform, I had built these railroad tracks out of old sheet metal and stuff and so inside here you can still see some of the remnants of the so there was like these carved murals and then you'd look down in there and that was a hole and there was like a carving of like hell with these mountains with upside down crosses and tar on them and this was like a little someone could sit in there, not actually yeah so that was those were the first these were your first wood carvings the way I was carving was so flat and it was just a way to bring out, like to put a background in there and just it's what I had, I had a bucket of tar and I had one chisel and so I started carving with that so when were these from? I graduated in 93 so it would have been 92, 93 it's from MCAD? and then shortly after that and then it was right after that that I started carving nose and I got something about working with illusion and ball relief, you know, that's kind of tension between illusion and real sculptural space which is like well I can kind of do it all in this I worked in just ball relief for a long time until then I just started to get more sculptural and then translate sort of a ball relief onto a sculpture in the round and then that evolved into this more pattern surface like with the woodcuts and that's something I learned from doing the woodcuts so when I did the woodcuts with Highpoint I was well even before that because I was making the woodcuts to make these rubbings and I discovered something there that I could apply to the sculptures so now it's kind of becoming a mixture of both of those things going in and out of the woodcut relief and bringing some objects out but not in this sculpture it's all going to be surface it's an interesting merging because generally you think about ball relief it's on a flat surface you're bringing out the three dimensionality on that flat surface but then you're applying it to the sculpture in the round as well and this merging of the two is very interesting I don't see frequently I can think of have you seen Chris Burton's Medusa I don't know if I've seen that specific one it's like it's just a crazy thing I would say it's a ball relief it's all additive and so you carve out of basswood so these are glued up glued up block that was I think it was about 33 inches by 35 inches something like that so all this has been carved away so this surface technique came from these panels that I was carving to make these rubbings so I would take this is another way like these panels I use over and over and over and they're just collaged I move the piece around and rub certain parts I don't rub the whole thing part of when I was making the panels they were very free because I wasn't concerned about them being a total image I knew that all I was going to do was rub parts of them so I didn't really care how it turned out as long as I could use parts of it then they turned out interesting so that I could use those initially that's how it was so you can see these multiple parts over and over through here from many many other panels and these are just done with a hard wax crayon and sometimes I've melted the crayon and smeared it but mostly it's just that and it just holds to it and so I put that over the panel I rub that with the crayon and then I use a random orbital sander to kind of mix the colors and to also to fade the colors got it so you use, so for pigments you've used wax crayons the work I think in the walkers collection that's the same technique but we also have a sculptural work I think it's I have my soul to the company store is it charcoal or graphite so that is a black gesso with graphite with graphite on top of it what other pigments do you tend to use? well I've done some light paint stains on wood but mostly it's just that it's like straight out of the box and the paint I use is just cheap paint I get at the Ben Franklin at the hobby store so the panels though that you do carve and then you create these rubbings from are those also considered works of yours in their own right afterwards well the panels they could be but I would never want to get rid of them as far as you know and tell them like ready to kick off because I keep using them like for instance making these drawings for this I'm just to get texture I'm just putting these on the panels and I'm just rubbing and it's just really quick this isn't all like drawn out so I get a shape and then I can use that and it's a way to create how something like that could feel so like pretty much all of this is all done from that panel right from that one panel but just using parts of it and you know there's endless ways to piece it together well normally I don't make drawings before I make a sculpture I knew that how I was going to approach this project was to carve the form first generally I'll be doing it all at one time but that can be inefficient it can be fruitful but it can be really inefficient because I'm constantly like what am I doing today every day I'm starting over so in this case I start out with some ideas about just how a shape could be and because I knew I was going to have this block I knew how big of a block can I glue up generally the proportions and the size how I wanted it to be towards me like how I am going to feel towards you know this thing so I did these around and then later I came back and drew from the piece that I ended up carving which obviously isn't like any of these you know the pieces that I started out with and it just is a way to kind of as you walk around the piece the form really changes and is very different so when I was getting the form down you know a couple of things that were necessary for me I did want this sense of as you go around it it feels like a different you know object if you're taking photos you might not know it's the same thing right and also I wanted it to be somewhat of a figure but nothing that would be a clear reference right so whether it's male female I mean it could be like a giant morel mushroom now that I look at you know it's um whether it's human or you know natural right or chimera I just wanted it to be open but also trigger some references which I think you can't help but to do so you know once I felt like I had that then I started working the surface you know so you've already got these kind of lines before it's carved and then the surface is going to like kind of fly over that it's going to add more kind of buzz to that surface and activate it and then as I carve you know if I want to soften I can go in with the sander and soften some of the lines you know so that like for instance over here when these were carved like I'll show you so so I take this little gouge let's see why should I do this so when you cut in you get a pretty hard edge there right so part of what I'm thinking about with the casting it's going to be a little different than with the wood where when I'm using when it's with the wood I do want these edges to catch the graphite when I'm using that and if there's a lot of rounded edges but with the bronze and being a patina it's going to be different and so I can soften those like I did here with the sander because what I'm thinking when it's going to be a metal it's going to be a different thing and it could be a little intense if it was all these real hard edges so I'm trying to make it work with with that material in mind or at least predict that so and then when I'm outlining I'm using like one of these so let's let me get this this piece that I just did and usually while I'm doing this I have the news on or music it's just more of like I think about it like if there's layers of of oppositional forces in my work it's like flipping between one version of the truth and another version of the truth and just letting that be all in one thing so I know we talked about the stencils that you use kind of for their more abstract properties once you eventually fold them onto your sculptural surface but in speaking about the news that kind of infiltrates your space as you're working do you think there is some kind of cultural or you know political viewpoint that comes out in your work? Yeah I think so I don't think it's um I try not to have it a lot of times I'll start with something maybe I'm angry about or something that I'm interested in and usually it evolves into a more complicated perspective as I'm making work and if it doesn't I feel like it's just too simple you know it's just why does it need to be a piece of artwork it could just be a poster although I have my opinions about who's right and wrong as a citizen as a citizen I do I caucus I'm involved I go to vote and an artist um has to go into a different place for me than just why I'm at in my political beliefs you know and what I'm willing to fight for but it's in there and I hope it's all that stuff mixed up and kind of clashing with each other and eating each other Common Ground you have an idea for Common Ground in North Central Minnesota email us at legacy at lptv.org or call 218-333-3014 to watch Common Ground online visit lptv.org and click local shows for episodes or segments of Common Ground call 218-333-3020 Production funding of Common Ground was made possible by First National Bank Bemidji continuing their second century of service to the community a partnership for generations member FDIC Common Ground is brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money by the vote of the people November 4th, 2008 if you watch Common Ground online consider becoming a member or making a donation at lptv.org