Working in tangent with another artist on a project for any sustained time is challenging. It is only on rare occasion that a distinct unified voice prevails over muddled egos. Though elusive, a recognizable pattern can be found in the art (and life) collaboration of artist duo CatieO & EC Brown. What one will find is a strange amalgam that merges strange environments, illusory time, the occasional spider, and a sense that all of this is quite natural. This week the COMP Magazine caught up with CatieO & EC to discuss their collaborative efforts, merging sonic and visual investigations, Krampusnacht, and the varied time periods and worlds that influence their aesthetic practice.
Q&A responses = C: Catie Olson and E: EC Brown
Catie Olson and EC Brown, Krampusnacht, acrylic and ink on wood, Co-Prosperity Sphere, 2017
Lets begin by defining your partnership as it occurs in your collaborative efforts. Can you identify when you two started working together? What prompted this unified approach? Are there any specific projects the two of you find to be most memorable?
C: We started working together with Erik’s COMA series. I was pretty new to the world of domestic/apartment art spaces and was drawn to the ease and freedom. It was a community that I wanted to be a part of immediately. I asked Erik if I could do something with him, and we collaborated on an installation in the bathroom with sound and visuals. It was a good learning experience with realizing how differently we approach projects. I think we realized that we needed to let each other tackle certain aspects of the same event in order to maintain our relationship and artistic egos.
E: We work best shoulder-to-shoulder toward different pieces, although sometimes they do weave together. In 2008, we moved out of her apartment, and with the empty space created a show called The House of Seven Closets. We filled the space with finished works and half-finished ideas, and general goofing around. Only a touch of it would qualify as “collaborative”. After years of hosting FLAT shows, we now do a more secretive joint series: 6 flags and Tascam. It keeps us busy in our home studio together, but they are separate shows. We can still be partners in crime.
EC Brown, Krampusnacht, acrylic and ink on wood, Co-Prosperity Sphere, 2017
EC you note that “Catie loves spiders” and you give her drawings for the Spiderbug series to use in her DJ promotions. Where did this idea originate? How do you see these illustrations fitting into your aesthetic practice?
E: Just for fun, I made some images for Catie for her Spiderbug series, and they were inspired by the drawings she would leave around the apartment for me. They allow me to step into Catie’s realm a bit. They’re more for the marriage – an appendage to my artmaking, rather than part of the oeuvre.
Catie Olson, Sound sculpture, dancing bees, 2015
Catie, I’m curious about your sonic practice as a DJ. Can you walk us through how you organize a set? Do you have specific music pieces that you regularly work with? How do you switch materials from venue to venue? To what level does spontaneity play a role in your performances?
C: I approach sets with a planned cluster of genres, and I’m thinking about mood, approachability vs. obscurity, BPM, what night of the week it is, if there are other musicians playing, etc. I try to be well-prepared and I always bring extra music so that I can adapt my set as I watch the crowd. I want the sets to be high-energy, fun, a bit goofy, but also have a cohesive flow overall.
EC Brown, acrylic and ink on wood, 2015
EC, can you discuss your painting process. In conversation, we discussed the 1970s, architecture, and a whole mess more. Often you work in non-traditional sizes. There are often distinct color palettes that parallel the people and place. I’m wandering how you conceptualize then implement your idea?
E: My work is event-driven: rather than something that is continuous in the studio. I want to address the motives, context, expectations and themes of an event as a starting point, even though the actual images/themes in my pieces tend to become an oblique response (particularly with Krampusnacht contributions, in which I avoid explicit depictions of Krampus). I do employ constraints in my works to maintain a familial relationship to series that I have been creating since 2001 – essentially colored drawings over red ground, often dealing with enclosed or cloistered societies/lodges.
I do like to write a lot before starting works, to map out possibilities and to articulate my intentions to myself. I also like to think about the wood forms that I will use, and how they might disturb the behavior of a painting as an image. Although I try to be as strategic as possible before beginning pieces, I do tend to let the process become more intuitive, indulgent and surprising. Planning and strategy just seem to be my method to get into the mood, and it’s not important to me if I don’t really carry them out to fruition.
Images and cinema from the 1970s inspire me – the time of my youth when the elusive adult world had such magical potency for my young self. Observational cinema and candid/street photography appeal to me in how characters fall in and out of the frame, with little regard to the viewing eye. It trains me to grant fantastical scenes an ordinariness that gives settings and characters a sense of credibility.
All paintings start with a red ground, and painting is a process of knocking out and tempering that red with (mostly) neutrals, and then rebuilding a sense of color scintillation. There’s always a sense of disappointment in seeing that red intensity subdued – a self-induced loss-and-repair.
EC Brown, acrylic and ink on wood sculpture, GAG Gallery, 2017
What do you value most in your artistic investigations?
C: Things I value in my artmaking:
• interactivity
• complex
• informal
• unfinished
• whimsy
• silliness
• nature
• science-based
• spontaneous selection of materials
• kinetics
• experimentation
• situational
• surprise
• humor
E: I most enjoy the day-to-day intensity in the few weeks prior to the deadline – from developing backstories, casting my eye about for raw materials and inspirational reference points, and seeing all other images, footage and environments through the lens of my current project. This hypersensitivity completely changes the experience of time during that period.
Catie Olson, photo from Catalonia, 2017
Do you have any upcoming events? Catie, spinning any tunes at local club in the near future? EriK, calling closure to any painting series or beginning new works?
C: I always have dj nights coming up—Lumpen Radio WLPN, Sportsman’s Club, Burlington Bar, and now Ludlow Liquors—and I have been doing more tag-team dj sessions. Erik and I will be making work this month at the Co-Prosperity Sphere, for a show about fake album covers. We’ll both make work about Slothwad, which is a band I invented for a sloth+bat show last year. I also have a 6 flags show in the works for this summer.
E: I made something for Tascam 3 in February that I would like to pursue – configuring found wood objects and painting them as adjuncts to figurative images, and allowing the objects to overwhelm the latter. I’ll also look forward to a new Tascam, to coordinate with Catie. I got caught by surprise with some winter session teaching gigs, but I’m starting to think about new projects for this year.
EC Brown, acrylic and ink on wood, Slow Gallery, 2017
For additional information on the work of Catieo and EC Brown, check out:
Catie Olson – http://www.catieolson.com/dj/
DFBRL8R – https://dfbrl8r.org/artist/catie-olson
EC Brown – http://www.ecbrown.org/
Catieo on Lumpen Radio – http://www.lumpenradio.com/planetcatieo.html
Catieo, mixed media from Loo Gallery, 2017
EC Brown and Catie Olson, artists, Chicago, IL 2018
Artist interview and portrait by Chester Alamo-Costello
