Conversation with Robin Dluzen
"Home Series (Face, Drawing of a Drawing My Dad Made)," 2014, charcoal and enamel on lawn refuse bag, 16" x 12"
What interests you in collaborative work?
I’ve been engaging with found materials and imagery to different degrees for my entire career, from the strips of newspaper I would adhere my canvases with hot wax in undergraduate school; to the graphics of hardware and construction material I appropriated in grad school; to the collage and found object work I’m using today. Collecting and using objects and images created or designed by someone else has always felt like collaboration to me, albeit with people I don’t know and likely never will --and who, I suppose, are unwitting and/or unwilling collaborators. However, I don’t always collaborate with strangers. In fact, quite often the opposite is the case.
My mother and father play a large role in my work, and their presence is often characterized by my re-drawing of drawings made by them. Years ago, my father was telling me a story about his time working in an iron foundry in the late 70s and grabbed a piece of notebook paper upon which to scribble an illustration of a crucial mechanical detail. While it wasn’t his or my intention at the time, this haphazard doodle later became subject matter for my drawings, blown up, painstakingly traced, and rendered in charcoal.
2020 CoLab collaboration in process, inkjet printed fabric fused to found tablecloth (small skull by Maggy Hiltner)
What interests you in collaborative work? (cont…)
Likewise, my mother’s botanical illustrations from her career as a horticulturalist have resulted in a large body of work in recent years. These are illustrations from decades ago, and that I literally watched her create when I’d go to work with my mom on summer days or when I left school with a stomachache. These I re-draw, retaining the intricacies of her hand, right down to her signature in the corner or inconspicuously along an edge. And again, like my drawings of my father’s drawings, my mother created her illustrations for a different purpose, obviously with no inkling that these works would be the means by which she’d collaborate with her daughter in twenty year’s time.
While the collaborations I’m currently working on with Maggy Hiltner and Elina Ansary are happening all together, each of us working on one of three panels that are being mailed among us (Montana to Chicago to Brooklyn), the remote nature of this project does bear some resemblance to my previous collaborations: all three of us are unaware of the other artists’ plans and intentions when working. When the next panel arrives in the mail, each of us must embrace the previous artists’ additions and react to it in the privacy of our own studios, our actions (again) a secret from the group until it’s time to pass the panel along once more. While we are making work with the next artist in mind, it still feels to me like I’m “finding” something when I lose a panel from its packaging and see what Hiltner or Ansary has done.
2020 CoLab collaboration in process, collage and aluminum tape on lawn refuse bag
When did you first begin working with this medium, media?
I’ve been working with collage for about a year; prior to this, I made my work with a variety of non-art materials, such as lawn refuse bags, cardboard, concrete, caulk, plaster, and wood stain. But, paper material has always fascinated me, and as my living situation fluctuated in 2019- 2020, the gathering of paper from my surroundings helped ground me wherever I was. It started first as an easy way to initiate some projects --no extra space or special tools needed. As I made more and more drawings and collages with these found papers over time, I was able to assess what I was doing, and how it related to and evolved from my previous practice. As a drawer, I have been fixated on the marks and gestures of the hand for so long. With the collages, I realized that my choices are a kind of “mark” --that what I choose and how I then contextualize it is as unique as a smudge of charcoal or a pencil line. I’ve begun seeing my actions of picking and culling as a manifestation of taste and point of view --both things that are molded by where I come from and inherited from my family.
"Home Series (Face, Drawing of a Drawing My Dad Made)," 2014, charcoal and enamel on lawn refuse bag, 16" x 12"
"Drawing of a Drawing My Mom Made (Bloodroot)," 2016, charcoal on lawn refuse bags and stretcher, 26" x 18"