What the hell is Nicolas Sassoon doing in his studio all day? Getting high, if his latest GIF is at all autobiographical. It is the second in his Pandora series, which renders his studio in different states. Sized to fit the full screen of the browser, each shows a straight on view of the same space.
A bit of background: For Sassoon’s first installment of his residency at Opening Times, an online arts organization based in the UK, he created an idealized representation of his studio space. That was back in July, and I interviewed him about the GIF and residency over at artnet News.
My studio is a very dark space inside a basement located in a city that is pretty dark for eight months of the year. A lot of my work emerges from extended periods of time immersed in that environment. This lifestyle allows me to project myself into a virtual world, but it also lacks the physical interactions of the real world. A lot of my work tries to give a physical quality to my drawings and animations. The bleakness of my aesthetic is also what I use to give a physical quality to my art.
In an email to me last week, he described the second iteration, (detail pictured above), as even darker. Literally speaking that seems unlikely given all that pot—if he wants that stuff to grow, the actual studio space has to be brightly lit.
I’m on the fence about this piece. Its size and detail is impressive, but the message doesn’t seem all that different than the pot leaves that get printed on T-shirts. If drug use is really so critical/destructive to the artistic process, there’s probably more to say about it.
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Hi there. I should have probably communicated better about this second chapter, as the work is definitely not meant to be a celebration of pot. One of my goals with this online residency is to project different scenarios in my studio. This second scenario is not an idealized representation or a realistic representation of my studio, its an imaginary projection where I use the studio space as an illegal growing operation. In BC, there is a lot of growing operations happening – legally or illegally – and it crossed my mind before that it could be one risky option to sustain my living. The work acts as a release of this thought, as I never really considered getting into this business, for the reasons you can imagine. It took me quite some time to make this piece as I had to inform myself on whats needed to grow pot to represent it “realistically”. In a way, this piece allowed me to project myself into this scenario in depth, without comitting to it physically and putting myself at risk. As an artist you almost always have to work on the side to sustain yourself, and the second and third chapter of this project are opportunities for me to project some of these “side-jobs” and represent them, without committing to them. I was interested in this projective dimension when I made this work, but I realize the piece is not very clear about its message. Maybe there is something slightly romantic on the surface about the idea of an artist growing pot to sustain himself. But I have met growers here and there is nothing romantic about their lifestyle in my opinion. I also can’t smoke, it gives me paranoia and heart palpitations. But I realize all these details don’t translate in the work, maybe the piece should have come with a back story explaining all this more in depth.
Thanks for all this background. I think generally the meaning of GIFs can be easy for the viewer to construct, since most aren’t published with the extra information an artist may want to include. I’ll update the post tomorrow with some of your clarifications.
What’s Nicolas Sassoon up to? Getting high, and having it both ways!
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