Shapeshifter

Interviewed by Nate Davis

Samantha Wall is an Oregon based artist who’s project “Indivisible” features portraits that aim to encapsulate the multiracial experience.

Nate Davis: When you are making art, what do you want your work to say?

Samantha Wall: Well you know I think it varies from project to project. When you think about indivisible- the portraits of multiracial women that I started in 2013, that work was about wanting to see more images of women like myself in the art institutions. I wanted to communicate something about the experience of being multiracial, you know like that sort of feeling of being in between.

When I engage with other people who are multiracial there is a sort of exchange that I never seem to be able to experience with anyone else. A big part of the project, which I didn't really anticipate was the conversations. I work from photographs that I take- but rather than positioning myself behind the camera I set the camera up on a tripod and used a wireless remote and just took burst photographs so that I could be more engaged in a conversation with the person that was sitting with me and because I realized as I was making portraits that conversation left a residue and it made me feel more a part of this community that was kind of invisible to me. So this sense that this experience isn't just my own started to dissipate and I start to feel like I was a part of something larger. And it was like these indescribable moments became describable and that was really amazing to me.

I wanted to put more emphasis on that and I realized that those moments found their way into the portrait somehow like the portraits start to feel more- or they started to feel more...they felt like these private moments, like people who spent time together share. And I wanted more of that. I think that with those portraits that's what I wanted to communicate, that's what I wanted to share with these moments of intimacy.

Most of the models I worked with were often racially ambiguous and that race started to kind of fall away and it was more about engaging in a conversation with another human being. And that's what I realized was the most important for me.

N.D:How do you think the intersection between your racial ambiguity and gender connect?

S.W: It's hard to say. I guess that's the experience that I know, that's the one that I'm trying to understand. I just don't know how to speak from any other perspective.  I want it to come from a place that makes me feel vulnerable. I suppose I want the work to strip away these layers of mediation that we create. So I needed to come from a place that feels as close to... as close to me as possible. It has to come from that place where it speaks about my experiences as a woman. But it also has to speak about my experience as being somebody who is, has to, navigate between these various boundaries that we constructed. And so those spaces are really slippery... sometimes they feel... it feels like they're defined, it feels like they have very clear edges and other times are really blurry. And I get lost in a lot of those categories and I want my work to convey that in some way.

N. D: How do you think other people view your art as a reflection of you, in that it’s the work of a mixed creator. Or do you think it's more artwork that happens to be made by a mixed creator.

S.W: I think it's more the latter. I think because I was so aware of how other people perceived me for so many years I pushed back against that in different ways, I suppose like either the way that I dressed, or the way I wore my hair, I don't know just like different...I guess I kind of think of myself as maybe a shapeshifter in that depending on these various disguises I could present as being more African-American or present as being Hispanic or just I could shift that. But through my work I wanted to get at something that was deeper than that, kind of how we present ourselves.

N.D: In the current media, we see a lot of sectioning off of creative work that is designed for people of certain subgroups. We see a lot of hip-hop work that is made specifically for African-Americans or visual art that's made for immigrants, et cetera et cetera. Do you think that this segmentation of artwork is positive, and is something that the mix race community should have access to?

S.W: You know... I do think it's positive because I think that I want to see it. I think that it's important that we see ourselves represented in our community in artwork, in music, in writing, and you know like all aspects. I mean that's the reason why I create that I want... like I want that out in the world.

I think that for mixed race people we... at least for myself like I, I'm able, like because we do so much contorting, you know? like from one day to the next, like I feel like right now I feel very Korean, I feel very much like an immigrant. The work I've been making lately is about my family and my family identity, that is, that both touches on our experience here as as immigrants and the things that we've lost. But also I'm reaching back into the past that I really don't have a lot of access to and so I'm trying to find these, like, well, I'm trying to find like access point into Korean culture. Right now it's shamanism because I think that is an aspect of Korean culture that... is... that remains vital, and it is through women, through women's stories, it's through the handling of or the handing down of this information is power and autonomy. And it doesn't exist in any other way and so I'm able to identify with artists like Korean artists. Because of that part of me but then I'm also attracted to art made by African-American artists because there's like aspects of how I have to navigate through American culture that relates to the African-American experience. And so I think because we are shapeshifters like we're able to relate to a lot of different work and then bring those conversations into our own practice know. So I think it is important and positive that there is work made for specific groups of people. And I think that, you know I can't say that I always feel welcome but I do feel empathy. And I can understand maybe not all of it, but you know I, I feel like I can understand enough of it to appreciate the work and notice that maybe there's suddenly some of that work that finds its way into my own practice.

N.D: So as an artist yourself, what advice would you have for other creators and creatives who are trying to... begin that process, especially with multiracial creators who may not see people that they can relate to?

S.W: Well... it took a while for me to understand that that's what I needed to make work about. I think for years, I was making the work that other people expected me to make or that I saw, but not really understanding where that work was coming from. And as I got older and really committed myself more to my practice and stripped away those of layers of mediation. I think that's the hardest part. It's like being honest with yourself about who you are and why.

Why you are a maker.

The more personal the work becomes the more I think it can communicate to a larger group of people you know because it becomes somewhat more universal. You don't feel so alone in your experiences. And it almost seems like it's counterintuitive to make work that’s so personal and possibly like maybe too subjective but that hasn't been my experience. It seems like the deeper my work moves inward and the more that I reveal, the more it seems to reach out to other people and people who may not even...people maybe who didn't even know I was multiracial. I talked to people recently who have collected my work for several years and they didn't know I was an immigrant. They didn't know that my mother is Korean, my father is African American. I'm not sure what they thought but you know that's something else that we have to go through. Sort of navigating our concept of self and then weighing that against other people's perception. And I think that, if we can let go of that- I mean that's a hard thing right. I think we can get closer to the things that are meaningful to us than start to begin to take them apart or find ways to talk and make work about them.

Then the outcome is just learning more about who we are.