Maggie Wong is a visual artist, writer, and educator based in Chicago. Her work has been exhibited in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and Berlin. Most recently, Maggie’s work was exhibited at Pitchfork’s MidWinter Festival at the Art Institute of Chicago. I reached out to Maggie to discuss her various artistic mediums and inspirations. You can find her work on Instagram @ikeanokia.
Don: What most interests me the most about your work is its wide range of mediums: from writing to sculpture to sound. How do you choose a medium? How does the medium alter or enable the message you want to convey with your art?
Maggie: A medium doesn’t just alter or enable the message I want to convey, it is a message itself, one that I want my work to facilitate further. Playing with materials is at ultimate pleasure and can be a rigorous practice. Through play, I get to learn how something behaves and how I relate to that material. The material then becomes a tool or language that allows me to pair an idea to a medium, which is a decision based on how I want to work out an idea. Medium specificity is the term that artist use to describe the particular connotations, histories, and relationships embedded in material and its use or effect. For me, medium specificity is a matter of its mattering, a playful pun. I consider material by its composition of matter, its elements, i.e., wood, silicone, glue, copper, steel, cotton, acrylic. Matter, the word also connotes something having meaning. Certain materials such as plywood have a cultural significance, as well as functional meaning or purpose. There is also the matter of the personal and sentiment. A ceramic cup not only holds your morning coffee, but it can keep memories of having breakfast with a loved one, all the while the handle of the cup holds you. I think what changes most in using different mediums is the form of relationships highlighted between one another and stuff.
Don: Your installation “Close To You” explored sentimentality. What does sentimentality mean to you?
Maggie: “Close to You” was an installation inspired by my sister’s echolalia. Sara, who is on the autism spectrum, loves to repeat lines of pop songs. She will say lines from a song that she has heard when she does not know how to communicate with her own words. For the installation, I made and arrange a series of self-soothing objects and above them from celling mounted speakers played various covers of the pop song “They Long To Be Close to you”, made famous by the Carpenters in 1970. The recording had many skips, loops, and crackling sounds because it was created from making silicon molds of parts of vinyl records. In many ways the whole art piece was sentimental, starting with it being an attempt at understanding and connection to my sister.
The reproduction of pop music, provides a tangible experience of a shared a desire to be in and of the world. Empathy and ethics can build from witnessing others sentimentality. Sentimental songs and the bits of scratches and static on a record become notions of sentimental compulsions of wanting to belong. Highly affective songs such as “The Long To Be Close To You” tunes us to a human capacity for bearing the weight of love, loss, and all that might seem trite but is oh so real. So a part of my work on sentimentality relates to emotional resilience, and how that reliance could flourish within constraints, such as when someone has a limited capacity for a speech like my sister. In the installation a constraint is felt in the repeating of a single song and its lo-fi noisy buried sound. What I am interested in exploring is how we feel human and alive even when we are sequestered by mitigated forms of communication; such as limits of our own cognition, recording devices, or even social norms.
Don: You named “Close To You” after the song “(They Long To Be) Close to You” (most famously recorded by the Carpenters, but evidently, also recorded by the Circle Jerks). You mention that the convertibility of the song makes it a “low brow node of culture that is highly shareable and fluid, which is at the heart of why it is so beautiful.” What are your favorite musical artists? How have music and sound inspired your art?
Maggie: I have too many favorites! Which I don’t find to be a problem. Currently, I have been diving into house music and listening to artist such as Yeji, and into old recordings of legendary clubs like Paradise Garage. I grew up in a punk scene which is also centered around clubs/DIY spaces, and dancing, through the moves in a mosh pit are entirely different than at an old school disco. The first art form that captivated my teenage attention was black and white film photography. I would often shoot my friends and use images to college and also make flyers for friends’ bands. The punk ethos of collective space making and being critical of social norms and conservative politics unabashedly shaped my thinking as an artist, which I was becoming every afternoon I would take pictures and every night at 924 Gilman St in Berkeley, CA.
That quote you pulled is heavily inspired by the contemporary artists Penelope Umbrico and writings of the artist Hito Steyerl. In in her essay “In Defense of the Poor Image” she puts forth notions on share-ability of a pieces of culture that are low quality, like jepgs and pixelated smartphone videos. You can find read it for free by searching the website e-flux.com. I highly recommended it.
Don: Your latest project involves painting on vinyl records and recording the sounds. Can you describe your process for this project?
Maggie: The project entails a participatory element, which is an example of how my work as an art educator folds into my artistic practice. The project invites people to engage in long looking and deep listening. The process is to take a used vinyl record and make a drawing from observation on it through etching into the disc. The sketch can be anything, but the requirement is that it is a sketch from life. This can include working from artwork in front of you, say if the workshop takes place in a museum gallery. Once the drawing is completed, I facilitate a listening session where we play that record/drawing with a turntable and put through delay and other effects. The effects merely highlight the scratches of the drawing such that a scratch becomes a remarkable part of the sonic composition. The idea of the whole project is based on a question, “what is it like to listen to a drawing?” From there a larger question emerges for me, “What informs our attachment to people, places, or things around us?”
This project is a bit of an experiment and a work in progress and I am working in collaboration with another artist James Hapke to make an initial iteration. The first version of the piece was showcased at Midwinter Festival at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Don: You teach courses at the Art Institute of Chicago. Has your work as an educator informed your work as an artist?
Maggie: Art has always been a way for me to play with my curiosities and be a perpetual student. With projects, such as the listening drawing project, I seek to learn something. What being an educator has taught me is that students can show me new ways to sense, discuss, and make art. The practice of drawing, sculpting, writing, talking, listening can be a collective process of meaning-making – like making a new language. There are so many possibilities in forms of knowing and as an educator and artist I have the responsibility of being a part of a collective. My role is also reciprocal. The idea that you can be mentored and be a mentee simultaneously is inspiring and continuously allowing me to learn new ways to engage with artwork.
Don: You grew up in Oakland, and your work has been exhibited across the United States and in Europe. How does the art scene in Chicago compared to other places you’ve lived and exhibited work?
Maggie: My experience in the Chicago art world has been very academic and rich with emerging artists. I came to Chicago to work and study at the Art Institute as a Museum Educator Graduate Scholar. During that time, I was also studying at SAIC in the Low Residency MFA program which I graduated from this past summer. All that is to say that I have been in a bubble. From where I stand I see that there is a strong academic and political influence in the art that is being made and shown in Chicago. I find that many artist and institutions have a radical attention to art that speaks from the margins of society. This might not be unique itself, but what is distinct about Chicago is how students and young emerging artists take up these complex conversations anywhere between their own apartment galleries to art institutions.
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