Carol Hepper is an artist based in New York City and the Catskill Mountains.  She has been extensively exhibited and collected by seminal institutions including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, MoMA, The Walker Art Center and the Detroit Institute of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre in Thailand and the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam in the Netherlands. She has received numerous awards and grants including from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pollack-Krasner Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. Her work has been written about in The New York Times, Art in America, The Washington Post, Artforum, and Sculpture Magazine.

QUESTION:

Your recent reliefs of frames feel truly mixed media to me. The frame is the sculpture, sometimes taking up more visual real estate than what is in the frame. Inside the frames you include photographs of portions of your sculpture, playful configurations of studio jetsam, nature photography, and abstract painting. All the genres are present but seem to change places with each other. The media are mixed up. In a good way. As we switch focus from one media to the next multiple points of view open up to us. Please talk about your playful attitude towards multiple media. Is it new? Hard won or does it come naturally? Are these new works different in this regard than older works?.

ANSWER:

Multi media in my work, in some ways, has always been there. It has mostly come out in the form of sculpture which we don’t usually regard as multi media, but if you think about it sculpture paves the way for multi media. Spring in Winter, a work from 2008 was created after we began experiencing 300 year floods in the Catskill Mountains which are now, at times, annual events. The detritus: large trees, a baby stroller, bottles, cans, a concrete front porch, clothing etc., gathered with the force of water, blocked drains and culverts and would linger entwined in rivers and streams. It was horrifying and absurd, yet illuminating to see the way nature pulled personal worn and treasured items into its grip and entangled shelter, clothing and industry with trees, grasses and stones into a frozen gesture. I started to incorporate ideas from these forces and their collided results as I saw how disparate, absurd and revealing the juxtapositions could be.

Spring in Winter, 98”x 84”x 55”, wood, plywood, clamps, glue, blown glass, pigments, 2008

With this new work using frames I made from wood fallen after storms or pruned from fruit trees near my studio in the Catskills, I explore the device and action of framing an object, much the way photography can still an image. By paying attention to the original function and purpose of a material, I’ve explored the randomness of a storm plugged culvert and used this to literally frame an action of nature by recreating the process of the random yet systematic change of enlargement, for example, the swelling of blown glass and foam and the entanglement of objects along with the physical memory of impediments in its wake. Though it is called mixed media or multi media outside of the studio, it feels very different while in progress. By observing these powerful and sometimes destructive forces, and reinventing them in art, there is an irresistible impulse to use humor to put them in their place.

Swell,12.5x12x2 inches, spalted hardwood, plywod, foam 2019

Crown, 51x24x4 inches, wood, cow hide, foam, glue, fabric, pigments, 2018