Interview with Chad Wys
Noelle Tamara Tobing
Chad Wys is a multi-disciplinary artist from Illinois. His artistic practice spans different genres and media and he often employs digital techniques in his visual production, using appropriation and reproduction while experimenting with composition, colour and form. Several years ago, I came across his art online and have been following it ever since.
NOELLE TAMARA TOBING: Could you tell me how your journey as an artist began?
CHAD WYS: A lot of people seem to be in one of two camps that happen to correspond with the two hemispheres of the brain: "creatives" or "logicians," or right side or left side respectively. That's certainly not to say one couldn't be both or neither but I find that people tend to favour one or the other. People seem to be born with an inclination to be expressive and creative or they're more attuned to facts, figures, the sciences... that sort of thing. I say this because I think things began for me early on, perhaps as I was being formed by bits of biological goo. I've been interested in art since I can first remember and there was no environmental reason for it. My parents certainly never championed the arts and there's no family history linked to any creative fields. My intense passion seems to have fallen on me out of nowhere. And it's from that early fascination that I've taken a long, meandering journey resulting in my current role as an artist. I came at this vocation not from technical study or from a studio art curriculum, but from the experience of studying art history and visual philosophy, like an art historian who suddenly picked up a paintbrush.
NTT: Art history and visual philosophy has certainly influenced the visual approach in your practice, especially in terms of using appropriation as a methodology. What do you wish to capture, recreate, or reconstruct/deconstruct in the process of appropriating classic images? What do you find the most interesting and challenging in this?
CW: People often refer to my work as "destructive" or they liken it to "vandalism." I don't feel this way at all. I'm deeply in love with art, with people, with cultures, with anthropology. I see my appropriation as an act of protection and compassion. I see myself as defending the far-removed, underlying work of other artists and craftspeople rather than mutilating it. I see myself as critiquing reproductions but not necessarily the historical motifs that are often reproduced therein. I suppose I see appropriation as a tool for drawing out and distinguishing the replicas and the simulacra from the "real things," the "referents," and thereby comment on those copies through my marks and gestures. I want people to think about information and how we process it. I want people to consider how we make meaning and how, sometimes, the meaning we make is incomplete, inaccurate, or just plain wrong such as believing a reproduction to be as good or as representative as the thing it imitates. In other words I don't really appropriate classic images, I appropriate the reproductions.
NTT: You experiment with painting, photography, sculpture, mixed media, video and digital works. What drew you to digital technologies in art making?
CW: I've always been a computer nerd. And I've always been eager to use computers for visual production. I remember as a child using my dad's primitive PC to design CD covers for my imaginary band. Using computers to create artwork as an adult is absolutely natural for me. I feel comfortable in a digital space. Always have. And I'm deeply interested in where digital technologies have gone and are going. It's fantastic. I've very optimistic about the state of digital tech.
NTT: How was the process of your digital works, for example, in the Legato series?
CW: Most of my work is rudimentary in its construction and execution. The Legato series is no different. It's very simple, very minimal. That's the sort of artwork I'm personally drawn to so it has manifested in my output. I won't bore anyone with the specifics but the Legato images are born from a process I developed several years ago when I executed my first Arrangement in Skintones work. I was into photography at the time and the notion of repeated exposures and copies of copies. I liked the loss of information that occurred when you got very close and when the quality of the image was significantly degraded. I also liked the story that the geometric grids told in relation to the loss of visual information occurring beneath. It's about order versus disorder.
NTT: In the age of the Internet, it is nearly impossible to use a computer without going online, especially when you frequently use it in your body of works. How does the Web impact on your visual production?
CW: For the past several years the Internet has been my primary and frequently only exhibition space. That suits me fine because I'm extremely antisocial. I seriously doubt I'd even be an artist if not for the feedback I've received online and the format of engagement and privacy the Web affords. I'm no attention-seeker and in traditional art world settings like galleries and art fairs, the artist is obliged to sell him or herself as much and often times more than they advance the artwork itself. That really doesn't suit me at all. On the Internet, the work is front and centre and the viewer can respond to it entirely on his or her own terms. I think that's fantastic. I think it suits not only my personality but the work I produce... which is inherently wide open for interpretation.
Chad Wys, Brutalized Gainsborough 2, 2009, mixed media/ Image courtesy of the artist
