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Tom VanEynde
Paola Cabal is an artist and educator, currently teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and Depaul University. She has received her MFA in Studio from the SAIC. Her works have been exhibited at Chicago Cultural Center Artist in Residence Exhibition (Chicago), A Beige Looking Blob that Resembles Nightmares at Selena Gallery (New York), The Weight of Light at DEMO Project Space (Springfield, IL), and many more. She also has curated many exhibitions including Articulating Time and Space at the Sullivan Galleries, SAIC.
When did you know you wanted to be an artist?
I feel a little abashed to say so because so many of the artists I admire have taken more circuitous routes to becoming an artist and have previous lives in other professions, but, for me, there was never really a question about what I wanted to do with my life! It helped that when I was in elementary school, Dade county public schools piloted a program in which they were pulling students who were exceptionally talented out of their classrooms for one full day a week to do nothing but hone their creative skills. There was a music program, a drama program, and an art program. So for the all of fourth, fifth, and sixth grades I did nothing but focus on visual art every Friday for the entire day. It was a rigorous technical and formal education, lots of painting and drawing from observation, black and white design studies, and photography. I learned early on about the structural underpinnings of images and very much made a home for myself out of this weird, sprawling thing called "Art". My middle- and high school art programs were not remotely as strong as that early experience, but I had been set on a path and for me, there was no looking back.
What does your work address in concept?
I've taken to describing my work as "time compressions": I study things in real time and space and I meticulously document how they change. I then find ways to offer those expanses of time and space such that you can experience them all at once. Past work has documented all of the sunlight that comes into a space over the course of a day at once (I paint the light, trompe l'oeil-style into the space itself so it actively seems as though the sun is coming in, even when it's not), all of the sunlight that came in at a certain time of day over the course of four months (the astronomical term for this kind of a document is "analemma"), and all of the moonlight that came into a space over the course of a full moon night. More recently, I've started incorporating photography and video as ways to address the same concept. Work I exhibited last year at the Chicago Cultural Center offered the entire route of Amtrak's "California Zephyr" at once. The Zephyr originates at Chicago Union Station and crosses the country to terminate at Emeryville station in the San Fransisco Bay Area; I documented the ride photographically, setting the camera to take one image out of the window for every minute of the ride. It ended up being a 5/8" wide ribbon that included over 3,000 images.
Can you explain your work?
I'm often trying to answer specific questions in my work: "How can I show all of the sunlight that comes into space at once?" "How does it most make sense to show the way light on a river changes over the course of a day?" "What can I do in this space to offer you an experience of it that is absolutely accurate about this space, but that you didn't have access to before I intervened into space?" I'm constantly looking for ways to augment your immediate experience by offering more visual information about the space in which you see my work. So far, I've accomplished this by using photography to document the way light changes in a space every half hour. At the same time as I'm making the photographic studies, I'm also studying the way light affects the color of the space. I can then use the photographs as a template to map the light back onto space in a trompe l'oeil spray painting technique I've refined over the course of several years (my first piece of this nature was in 2003). Since 2015, I've started addressing these very same questions by using photography and video alongside painting, juxtaposing multiple frames of still photographs or moving video clips to offer that "all-at-once"-ness I'm after in a different way.
What are your inspirations?
Music was an important influence early on: I went from singing with my high school choir to studying conservatory-style vocal technique as an undergraduate art student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. I was working on ways to merge aspects of musical time, rhythm and visual art in ways that revealed more about each individual component. I looked at work the painter Kandinsky had done on the same subject, but I was still an observational, realist maker of images. Early Art Crushes included the painters Vija Celmins and Lucian Freud, and the installation artist Ann Hamilton. I first experienced an installation by James Turrell in Pittsburgh's "Mattress Factory", an installation museum. I didn't know it at the time, but that was a crucial turning point in the way I approached my own artwork moving forward. A similar example of "things you are exposed to whose impact you don't recognize until much later" was the sculptor and installation artist Doris Salcedo. I interned for the Carnegie International exhibition's 1995 iteration, and Doris Salcedo was included in that exhibition along with Robert Gober and Marlene Dumas: all of these artists are hugely significant to me now, but I didn't recognize their importance until much later on. Current art crushes include the Colombian artist Oscar Muñoz, Brazilian artist Regina Sliveira, the engagingly cerebral San Fransisco based artist Tauba Auerbach, and definitely and forever all of the artists associated with the California Light and Space movement- Turrell, Wheeler, Maria Nordman, and Robert Irwin in particular.
Where can someone see your works; do you have any exhibitions coming up?
I have a piece permanently installed in the office of the Dean at Columbia University's School of the Arts in New York. It's called "Moving in Place"; Dean Carol Becker commissioned that piece back in 2008 and she is, in general, generous about letting individuals who are curious to see the piece into her office at Dodge Hall on the campus of the University. Here in Chicago, I was commissioned to make a piece for four "loop link" bus shelters along Washington Avenue. In collaboration with three photographers, we documented what you'd see through the glass windscreens if you were standing either on the sidewalk side or the platform side of those bus shelters over the course of an entire day (the Spring Equinox). Titled "LIGHT SCRIM", the piece shows the architectural space around those bus shelters over the course of a day; it's possible to see the light change from streetlight to daylight back to the streetlight.
What's been your biggest challenge as an artist?
Growing up as a public school kid in an extremely racially diverse Miami, Florida, I never personally identified with any of the marginalized identities that applied to my family and I. "Economically precarious"? Me? All of us live like this, in little rental apartments, latch-key kids with wide, unsupervised latitude over our own time. "Latinx" or "Brown"? as opposed to what? There weren't that many white kids to compare ourselves to, and what was "white", anyway? Those kids were Israeli or they were Arab or they were Eastern European; what white kids? So, even as late as my arrival in Chicago in 2001, you would never hear me talk about "my subjugation as a woman" or "my marginalization as a person of color": I just didn't see things in those terms. It has taken me a really long, reluctant time to recognize that there *are* structural inequalities, that these *do* apply to me, that they *have* colored my trajectory as an artist. I would see peers launch huge careers and internalize my own inability to do so as my fault. I wasn't working hard enough; I wasn't networking as much as they were; I just needed to do more and try harder. To be honest, I'm no good at feeling sorry for myself or at being angry at the way the world is for any sustained amount of time. I *still* feel that I need to do more and work harder to earn my place at the table. But I'm slowly awakening to the fact that that process may be a little more involved for me than for some of my peers.
Name three women who had an impact on your life...
I can't say enough about the influence of the Chicago painter Judith Raphael. Judy has been a significant touchstone for me since we became friends sometime around 2003 or so. She used to advise graduate students in Painting and Drawing at SAIC and, while we never had a formal advising relationship, she and her husband, the Painter Tony Phillips, would come to my studio to talk about my work with me. An older artist and lifelong Chicagoan, Judy took me under her wing and introduced me to other women artists I've come to love and admire, like the painter Judy Geichman, the sculptor Diane Simpson, and the installation artist Gerda Meyer Bernstein. Talking to these women gave me a sense of the long game that is a life as an artist, that success and visibility do not have to be instantaneous to matter. We would get together and the conversation would be about who got a studio visit from what curator, who got reviewed by what writer, who has a show coming up and where, and what the next move is going to be. And these women have a decade or several on me. So, it's illuminating and inspiring: this life is a vocation more than a choice, and we are here to nurture one another and support one another. Chicago has a pretty incredible community of people like this, and I feel so grateful to Judy for opening my eyes to that.
Another woman who has helped to shape my vision of what it looks like to be an artist in Chicago at present is Edra Soto. Edra also graduated from SAIC, but we didn't overlap in our time there; I met her around '03 or '04 and I feel privileged to have witnessed her endless hustle as her friend. Edra has a tireless, curiosity-and-critique driven work ethic that has taken her from artmaking to running an exhibition venue to independent curating. She is someone I want to emulate: each opportunity that opens up for Edra she turns around and makes into a platform for the inclusion of *still more* voices. That's incredible and inspiring, and to my mind *very*, exclusively, Chicago.
There are so many other women to whom I feel indebted, it would be hard to name them all here. But profound gratitude is also due to Karen Azarnia who as a painter and a mother is showing it's possible to do it all, Annie Morse whose insight I rely on tremendously, Julie Rodrigues Widholm who is using her platform as director of the DePaul Art Museum (and her former platform as curator at the MCA Chicago) to bring visibility to under-seen Women artists, I could go on and on.
What are the benefits of being a Chicago-based artist?
I experience Chicago as a very nurturing place to be an artist, people-wise. Artists here legitimately trade studio visits because they are curious about one another's work (not just as a "networking" move), bring one another's attention to opportunities and deadlines that are coming up, whether it's for a grant application or a residency or a call for entry for a show or project, and just, in general, boost one another and support one another. This sense of community extends, in my experience, to the administrative and critical side of the equation. You can invite a curator or a writer whose work you admire to your studio and chances are they will take you up on that invitation. We give one another time here, is how I would frame it. That's nothing to take for granted, and I can't overstate how much I appreciate that.
How has Chicago helped you to develop your work and career?
Growing up in South Florida, the built environment had a 1960's monotony to it that I didn't realize was so austere until I came to Chicago and experienced what it was like to live in this architectural hotbed. As an artist who responds spaces both internal and external, Chicago is an endless source of visual interest for me. Career-wise, Chicago has been generous to me. I've gotten significant support, almost magically, at the times when I've most needed it, from $10,000 in unrestricted funds from the Driehaus foundation in 2006 to $14,000 from the Illinois Arts Council in 2014, to a $10,000 commission from the city in 2016 to $6,000 last year from the Joyce Foundation via DCASE: combined with substantial smaller grants from the city and from the School of the Art Institute, these funds have enabled me to make things I could *never* otherwise have afforded to make.