an interview with
Joy Meyer
by Olivia J. Kiers
March 27th, 2018
Region > Hillsborough, North Carolina
Joy Meyer is an emerging painter, performance artist, and videographer currently based in Hillsborough, North Carolina, not far from the state capital of Raleigh. While Meyer is a founding member of the all-women artist collective Subverbal Collective, she is also preparing work for two upcoming solo exhibitions: The Lovers at Lump Projects in Raleigh in May, and a show for Guest Room Project Space, an emerging artist-run project gallery in Carrboro, NC. Also in May, Meyer’s video The Wilderness will be screening at Block2 Gallery as part of Raleigh Arts, and in June, Meyer will be in residency at the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, CA. She graciously took a break from her busy schedule to speak with me about her current work, and life as an emerging artist in the South.
Still from "Always + Forever, (The First Five Minutes and Fifty-Seconds of Falling in Love)".
Joy Meyer. Single channel video for monitor, 7:08 minutes looped, Variable dimensions, 2017
Olivia J. Kiers: Since you are a recent MFA graduate from UNC Chapel Hill, let’s talk about what it has been like to transition from being a student to a professional artist and teacher.
Joy Meyer: I came into the program as a classically trained painter, knowing that I wanted to break apart my practice… I experimented and made a lot of crazy work—the kind of work you can only make in graduate school. My entry into that process was an interest in alternative, feminist mark-making. I also incorporated video towards the end, which is how I’ve transitioned into doing both painting and video now.
The pace in grad school was so busy that the quiet of post-grad life was the most surprising to me. I did need to rest a bit, but I quickly set up a little studio for myself. While I film a lot on location, I have an office space I use for editing, and an unheated garage that I use for the messier stuff. I feel lucky that I’ve been able to find space to work in… Of course, I don’t have the same access to equipment [as in grad school], though I always try to turn studio problems into challenges. But, I guess you are asking less about the technical aspects, and more about the supportive, emotional aspects of being out of school?
Still from "Story of an Hour" by Joy Meyer
OK: The technical aspects are definitely a valid response. However, I am curious about support, certainly with regard to your location in Hillsborough, NC. Are there advantages or disadvantages to being an artist in your area?
JM: There are some disadvantages. The “art world” can seem so far away, especially if you imagine it’s in New York, Los Angeles or Chicago.
But we actually have a pretty supportive cluster of artists living here, and everybody knows each other and supports each other… There’s also space for you, as an artist, to create whatever you want. Once you realize that you are the art world here, you can build your own version of it. It’s really daunting but also exciting.
I also have Subverbal Collective, which I helped to start while in grad school. They are all women, all UNC MFA grads. I have been able to lean on them for a lot of support, and definitely on local places, too. The Carrack is a really great space in Durham, and LUMP, where I’m having my show, is also very supportive of emerging artists. It feels good to be here… but it might be time for me to start expanding beyond the region.
Still from "Story of an Hour" by Joy Meyer
OK: About Subverbal Collective: was there something specific that pulled you all together as a group?
JM: Two years ago we were on a trip to Marfa, TX (something that’s a tradition in the UNC Chapel Hill MFA program). We all started talking about the need for support. For me in particular, I feel a need for support among other women artists. We started texting about it… We said “Let’s start an artist collective” in an offhand way, but as soon as we said it, all of us recognized how much we needed it. We’ve been working really hard to build it ever since.
OK: I enjoy the clever titles that you’ve all given yourselves within Subverbal, like your “Resident Feminist/Clairvoyant.” I assume they are somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but to take it seriously, what do these terms mean to you?
JM: This was a playful way for us to celebrate our individual voices. One challenge of being in a group is to make sure that you recognize everyone’s voice.
I think that “clairvoyant” works for me, because I do feel like I have this vision. I mean, I’m always thinking ahead. That can have its drawbacks, because you need to spend time in the present, too. Also, as a feminist, I’m always thinking about how we are as an all-female group. That’s why I took on that title, both jokingly and seriously.
Still from "Lavender Mystical" by Joy Meyer, a 45 minute single-channel video of the endurance painting/performance. Materials used include: Lavender latex house paint, Noble Blush latex house paint, Cream latex house paint, eggs, milk, flour, foundation make-up, lipstick, cotton balls, calamine lotion, on stretched unprimed canvas. The three artifacts of the performance are displayed as paintings. 2016.
OK: Let’s talk about your 2016 performance Lavender Mystical. You’ve described it as a humorous, feminist response to Jackson Pollock and this lineage of male painters that art history has deemed canonical. Do you also respond to female artists in your work?
JM: In my recent research, I have been trying to be more sensitive to the fact that, of course, there were women making art in Pollock’s time. There were female modernists, and people of color making very important work. But in Lavender Mystical especially, I’m reacting to the weight that the white male canon still has. Even as an undergrad painter at [University of] Virginia, I remember when one of my professors told me, “You can’t drip anymore.” It was just an off-hand comment, but I wondered, “Why is that? Why is the drip off-limits to me?” Thinking about it over the years was partly how that work emerged.
Initially, I had two canvases placed across from each other, and I was also thinking about the Marina Abramovic piece that she did with Ulay, where they run into each other over and over. I was going to run back and forth into the canvases. Then, I started to envision myself doing this while wearing a wedding dress, and I started seeing it as a “Bride of Pollock.” From there, it bloomed into this other, entirely different piece.
So, I don’t react to women painters from the ‘50s and ‘60s in Lavender Mystical, but I definitely see myself as a woman in a lineage of women making art.
Still from "Lavender Mystical" by Joy Meyer, a 45 minute single-channel video of the endurance painting/performance. Materials used include: Lavender latex house paint, Noble Blush latex house paint, Cream latex house paint, eggs, milk, flour, foundation make-up, lipstick, cotton balls, calamine lotion, on stretched unprimed canvas. The three artifacts of the performance are displayed as paintings. 2016.
"So, I don’t react to women painters from the ‘50s and ‘60s in Lavender Mystical, but I definitely see myself as a woman in a lineage of women making art."
OK: There’s another kind of group of women—these Southern characters in the films of the ‘80s and ‘90s, say Steel Magnolias or Fried Green Tomatoes, who are strong characters navigating plots often involving romantic or highly emotional elements. Since you are in the South, dealing with romance and desire in your work, are you at all interested in drawing from aspects of pop-culture like that?
JM: Well, I’m going to say yes, that I am interested in this in some ways. You can lean on a genre. How is romance portrayed in it, and what are its signs and symbols? I think about weaving some of those symbols—ones that are definitely used in a lot of the films that you’re talking about—into my work. Take the magnolia, which suggests thinking about women as flowers. That’s somewhat interesting to me.
OK: Tell me more about the video project that will be featured in your upcoming show, The Lovers, at LUMP Projects in Raleigh, NC.
JM: All of my work raises questions of the body and about love and desire. Love is something that a lot of us think about. It connects us. Our bodies are vessels of it—vessels of how we, as persons, try to express ourselves and our emotions. I think a lot about what that means to love. What are the metaphysics of that feeling?
The project grew from its first video, Story of An Hour. It’s a 2-channel video—two big screens projected and overlapping. One of them is 30 minutes long, and the other is 25 minutes… One of them has the sound of me reading from Kate Chopin’s story from 1895 of the same name. This is overlaid with me reading a poem that I wrote in 1995, so there’s a separation of 100 years going on. I’m playing a lot with overlapping: overlapping voices, overlapping sound, and overlapping images.
What I struggle with in my work is that all of it comes from a very personal place. I know a lot of artists who don’t make work about their own lives; they’re very formal. But I do. I always struggle with how much I can reveal about myself without over-revealing. So, this series—this show—is partly about me figuring that out as a professional artist.
OK: What struck me most about the first two videos of this series, Story of An Hour and Always + Forever, (The First Five Minutes and Fifty-Seconds of Falling in Love), was the suggestion that the viewer is the one who is present in the space depicted. There’s no visible, human actor in the scene, so one almost automatically projects oneself into the scene instead. Was that intentional?
JM: Yes, I think it was. Those videos implicate the body without having an actor, because I wanted to recreate the feeling of sensuality—the sense of being right there. I want the viewer to enter my feelings, or maybe even think that the work is about their own life.
OK: Is this how the rest of the series will operate?
JM: So, here’s my vision for the LUMP show: Imagine entering a space. In the first room, you will encounter Story of the Hour projected on the wall...Then, when you come around a corner, there’s a connecting hallway where Always + Forever will be, as a monitor piece. In the next room, there will be ten, old-fashioned TVs from the ‘80s, with the ten other videos from this series. That work will have a few pieces featuring my body. I have all this footage that I’m editing now, and I’m wondering if this show is going to have an exterior/interior shift. Is it going to end up projecting that kind of relationship?
Still from "The Wilderness" by Joy Meyer. Single-channel video, looped 4:03 minutes with sound (field recording). 2017
OK: Has the recent conversation about sexual violence and non-consent, highlighted by the #MeToo movement, affected how you approach the topics of love and the body?
JM: Although these topics directly affect me—and all women and other vulnerable persons—and although I am a feminist, I am not currently making work that speaks to this issue… I am making work about consensual desire and love.
Filming Lavender Mystical... was one of the first times I appeared on camera in an artwork. It felt particularly vulnerable, and given that it was an endurance piece, I had to find my way through that vulnerability. [As] one approach to opening up to the work, in order to let the work that needed to be made come forth, I invented my performance double, my artistic alter ego, joy tirade. She stars in all of my video work involving the body. In this way, I am engaged in a kind of personal exchange with myself—not invoking the male gaze but sidestepping it by closing a kind of loop.
In The Lovers, the title refers to the Tarot card “The Lovers,” which is a card about choice. This show draws on speculative fiction, the tarot, theories of possible worlds, epistemology and feminism to explore questions surrounding love and desire. In particular this show is raising questions about space, time, gender, and romantic love.
OK: Where do you see your work going in the future?
JM: I love working in video, but I miss painting. There’s this physical quality to painting, and the time spent making a painting is a different kind of time. I had been working on velvet, so I think I’m going to return to that, maybe working on leather, too. I’ve been experimenting with natural dyes… So, it’s very likely that I will be working on a series of paintings after these videos.
ABOUT JOY MEYER
Joy Meyer is an artist and a writer. She works across painting, video, voice art, performance and installation. Meyer's work creates connections between art history, epistemology, and feminism to explore the metaphysics of love and desire.
See more of her work at: joy-meyer-art.com
ABOUT OLIVIA J. KIERS
Olivia J. Kiers is an arts writer, printmaker, and poet based in Boston. She holds an MA in the History of Art and Architecture from Boston University. She is the Assistant Editor at Art New England magazine, contributer to Big Red & Shiny, and her poetry has appeared most recently in The Ekphrastic Review and Sunset Liminal.
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