Ava Seymour: Domestic Wild

AVA SEYMOUR DOMESTIC WILD 9 March – 26 May, 2024

You’ve drawn these kitten portraits from your collection. How do you like to organise this collection, if at all?

It is necessary to organise my material and sadly this starts with tearing pages out of books.

I collate much of my material according to gaze directions (left and right, midpoint, up and down, etc). I separate bigs and smalls within these categories. Then I have folders with cats represented in paintings, cats in trees, cats in flight, people holding cats, artists with their cats, cats looking at fish, and so on. I also have a box titled ‘eye to eye’ with hundreds of images of cats looking directly at the camera.

You mostly lift your print material from books, using analogue imagery that often carries a distinct sense of age. Why this preference for analogue images and older books?

My focus is on books that pre-date digital photography. The end of the 80’s saw the transition from analogue to digital. 1980 is my cut-off point as a general rule but there have been exceptions.

Film photography has always been my preference, black-and-whites are much better captured in film—I like the grungy, grainy, punk quality. It also conveys a sense of moodiness which translates well with the cat content.

I’d love to touch on the ‘punk’ quality in your work because its culture and music were formative in your life, weren’t they?

Auckland was an exciting place in the early 80’s, with lots of venues supporting live music. It was a formative time for me. I was so lucky to see bands such as Fetus Productions and The Skeptics.

The Birthday Party gig at Mainstreet in 1983 was one of those influential moments, and years later I finally caught Pere Ubu in Berlin. The bands I liked all shared something that seemed to me the perfect embodiment of everything creative: music, style, attitude.

Does music inspire your work today?

No. You’ve made collages, videos, assemblages, prints, and even billboard imagery from your cat collection, sometimes using original material as-is, sometimes scaling or adapting it.

Do you prefer to work in any specific way?

I don’t have a preference, it’s great working across disciplines and I enjoy the process of experimentation. My way of working is usually dependent on a site or space. During the 2020 lockdown I made a lot of small collages. In 2016 I had the opportunity to present work in the Rockies window on Karangahape Road, an artist-run gallery which is essentially a cubicle space, so I stacked monitors on shelves and showed cat videos, which looked great at night. But my first real foray into public art was the Te Tuhi Billboards project in 2022. It was a great opportunity to upscale and I loved the giant cats!

I remember seeing those works and laughing at the absurdity of supersized cats, which did something to reverse the dominant gaze of humans. We became the subjects of the cats. I see humour being important to your work. Is it?

Sometimes it is, and my preference these days is that it’s subtle when it arises in my work.

It might be seen through close scrutiny of the gaze of the cats or in a title.

The following conversation between Ava Seymour and Te Uru Curator James Gatt was held on the occasion of Domestic Wild at Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery (9 March – 26 May, 2024), the first survey of Seymour’s ongoing series of cat-centric composites.

You have also made assemblages using book covers, presumably those from which you’ve lifted pages for your print collection. Why did you start working with these ‘containers’?

Drawing from her vast holdings of books and ephemera, Seymour adapts print material into collages, prints, assemblages and videos. The focus on a single or primary subject, in this instance cats, is characteristic of her work—Seymour has previously focused on flowers, high heels, dogs, and smokers. This restraint highlights differences within an otherwise general category and emphasises the formal properties of Seymour’s light-handed compositions. The single subject becomes a vehicle for meandering relations between wideranging histories and disciplines. Like a Google search for ‘cat’, Seymour’s composites traverse time and place, guided by simple groupings that generate series. Over the past year, the artist has introduced text into her compositions, giving literal dimension to the intertextuality of her work. The constant flux of Seymour’s cat oeuvre manifests in several new works developed for Domestic Wild, including a video of sequenced kitten headshots and two cat classification chart wallpapers.

In 2019 I was invited to make an exhibition with Peter Robinson at SydneySydney. I started pairing these book covers together for this show, these ‘readymades’ complemented the colour employed in Peter’s anodised aluminium sculptures, and we consequently titled the show Companion Pieces. Right from the outset of my collecting, what was revealed underneath the dust jackets was just as exciting as leafing through the pages. I was responding to fabric, colour and text—all constituent parts—the titles of the books and publishing houses down the spines.

These works have always reminded me of a Blinky Palermo survey I saw in LA of his linen monochrome paintings.

Ava Seymour was born in 1967 in Papaioea (Palmerston North) and currently lives and works in Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland).

Cover image | Ava Seymour, Domestic Wild, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.

Has the work of any other artists or exhibitions informed your work?

Yes certainly, there are many, for example Wade Guyton, Cady Noland and Fernanda Gomes, but three artists that have influenced my current direction are Sarah Rapson, Lorenza Longhi and Henrik Olesen.

Though your collection of cat material is much larger, you have also previously collected and worked with prints of flowers, high heels, smokers, and dogs. These series have occupied less of your focus to date but indicate your interest in working with a single subject at a time. Why is this?

Working with a single subject is a self-imposed limitation, and I’ve found it helps to establish clarity and direction.

It’s easy to forget that what artists do is research. How do you define your research?

You have a vast collection of printed cat material. When did you start collecting this and why?

My research is mostly studio–based. It involves exploring images and materiality. The intention of the work is found in the process of making—it’s difficult to define what it is, really.

The serious cat book collecting started in 2015 following my exhibition Safe As Milk at Peter McLeavey Gallery in Pōneke (Wellington). In this show, found photographs of smoking rockstars were juxtaposed with moving-image works made using sequenced stills of ‘cool-looking’ cats.

I think the subject of cats seemed desirable and I recognised the huge potential for exploration in my work by focusing on them. I also like the suggestion that cats serve as ambassadors between cultures, transcending geographical and linguistic barriers—they have the power to unite people through mutual admiration.

An important distinction in your practice is that you usually don’t take photographs.

You collect cheap, discarded or second-hand prints and materials to use in your work.

In this sense, your work belongs to a long tradition of utilising readymades. What draws you to affected materials?

You’ve made a new cat video for this exhibition called Bring Back Disco. Tell us about that.

I am really happy to have made this video. My friend, artist/filmmaker Theo Macdonald helped me. It’s single channel, has no sound, but is high-octane. Bring Back Disco sequences images of animated kittens, all with their mouths open. It loops quickly and subsequently has a hypnotic effect.

Cost is always a consideration. My repurposing of stuff pertains to an environmental ethic as well, but ultimately it’s an aesthetic decision. A degraded, scuffed piece of foamboard might be more favourable than a clean piece for its surface qualities. In the case of my recent show at TG Gallery in Nottingham, I tried to achieve a similar nuanced look through an unconventional use of screenprinting by using solvent-based ink over water-based ink (on aluminium).

These were my first experiments with serigraphy, made with the help of the company Artrite.

The way you adapt source material is usually light-handed—the originals you use differ only slightly in their final articulation in your work. For example, edges of torn pages are left raw, salvaged sheets of card or plastic maintain their roughness, images lifted

from books are repurposed without treatment, etc. It’s very difficult to achieve this slightness but it establishes a feeling of quickness or precarity that is characteristic of your work.

This approach suits me best at the moment. I enjoy the freedom that comes with a light practice.

Sometimes outcomes are quick, conversely, a simply decision can take a long time. Cuts and rips have to look and feel confident. I’m always conscious when working with original material that I only have one crack at it.

The idea of archives springs to mind when thinking about your work. One key takeaway from the literature on this topic is that archives are generative, that maintaining a collection is future-oriented. Archives resist amnesia by creating important sutures between past and present. More basically, they give order to an otherwise amorphous exponential expansion of stuff. Do you see yourself operating as an artist-archiver in this sense?

In a way yes, but the word ‘archivist’ sounds very institutional. I’m probably more of a collector because my filing system is fairly rudimentary. It appears disorderly but it has strict principles and so that works for me. It is an exciting, future-oriented, messy archive!

One of the most impressive things about your focus on a single subject is the way it maps vast networks of information. Like a Google search for ‘cat’, your cat oeuvre traverses disparate contexts from the mid-century photography of Walter Chandoha to the study of cats in art and science, etc. One of my favourite examples is when you pair cat images with colour charts.

The link between the cats and the charts is simply a colour relationship—that’s the primary reason the charts are there, but they really help to anchor compositions as well. These paint charts are very attractive things in themselves. I’ve always been drawn to them. It was great to introduce this new element into my work.

Well, these combinations give us different ways to perceive the same thing: it’s an image of a cat, sure, but it’s also a combination of colours. And I would say this is a primary concern in your work, this distillation of general entities into specific qualities. Collage is a great way to achieve this because it very efficiently enables you to splice different readings together, say text and image. The classic art example of this semiotic play is Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs (1965), of course.

I love that Joseph Kosuth work, I’ve seen it at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. You have just reminded me of what a great artist he is.

Historically, cats have featured strongly in superstitions and mythologies—having nine lives, for instance, or accompanying witches, or being magical or lucky. Is this part of what draws you to them to begin with?

I think the history of cats is fascinating. I completely understand the deep reverence bestowed on them in Ancient Egypt, and am horrified by their subsequent persecution in the Middle Ages— this is all really compelling reading. Perhaps my imagination was fuelled by children’s books when I was young, but the cats, as you say, are just one of several subjects I’ve worked with.

For this exhibition, you have scaled two classification charts for cat species, domestic and wild, which is also where the exhibition title comes from. These overtly reference your interest in taxonomy, which seems to apply to your way of working.

Yes, I love these indexes in the exhibition. They look very serious in their giant form, and I thought it was excellent data, therefore had to be included. Also I felt it was important to represent the extended cat family, the big cats. My collecting to date has focused on felines of the domestic variety.

I have been thinking about your increasing use of text in relation to these wallpaper works, both of which comprise only text. How do you think through the relationships between image and text?

Image and text in the found material has its own rightful relationship. Decisions to include found text are intuitive, it either works or it doesn’t. It often comes down to a compositional question—a slice of text might serve as a hint or a clue, or it might suggest something more clearly. Regardless, it adds another layer of meaning. Titles for my works are frequently lifted from found texts, book pages, or perhaps a colour chart. Title decisions are otherwise realised by looking at the characteristics of the cat: physical, behavioural, their expressions.

When did your interest in collage start and why?

My interest in collage came into focus with the era of punk and industrial music. Bands were making their own album art, posters, zines, etc. John Heartfield and Hannah Höch were sources of inspiration here. William Burroughs influenced a lot of contemporary culture in the early 80’s, I recall reading about his ‘cut-up technique’. Collage was the perfect medium for punk because anyone can do it, it’s very DIY. My early 90’s collages were not at all restrained, they were complex, and consistently each body of work carried some kind of narrative. My source material was more disparate, ranging from 60’s home interior books to medical books to books about poodles. I enjoyed making these works but they were intensive and of their time. Now I’m aware and much more concerned with where I am positioned in a contemporary art context.

What do you mean by ‘contemporary art context’?

My understanding of contemporary art is that it is about new ideas. It often embraces new technologies. Traditional skills-based disciplines seem to have lost the status they once enjoyed.

It rejects preconceived ideas of what constitutes good art. Taste is redundant—it’s distasteful to be tasteful. None of this concerned me earlier in my career but actually the term didn’t even apply thirty years ago. The internet changed everything of course. Now all this information is at the touch of our finger tips so there are no excuses for not being informed. Having said that, perhaps we were all better off before the invention of the iPhone. The question begs, where then would that leave contemporary art? It’s an interesting proposition. In many ways I think my practice resists the glut of post-digital and post-internet accumulation.

Like punk, collage has been used historically as a political device, most basically to appropriate existing material in order to redefine its original message. Collage has a rich history as a dissident medium. Is your work political?

According to Google it is! A quick search turns up a piece by Ron Brownson on the Auckland

Art Gallery website. In 2013 he writes about the Health, Happiness and Housing series being challenging, tough and truthful. I knew I was dealing with a politically charged subject at the time, and I anticipated I would offend some people, but making a statement about the failure of this utopian ideology wasn’t my intention. Returning to the cat series, they do polarise people so there is a subtle politic going on in these works. I have noticed people tend to identify themselves as cat people or dog people, it’s very interesting how divisive this conversation actually is.

There are two related conceptual tropes that seem important to your current practice: repetition and reduction. The first is concerned obviously with the way you revisit similar content, in this instance cats, and the second has to do with the isolation of this content. What’s interesting about these approaches is how your work reveals their alternate possibilities: repeating or reducing comes to highlight a lack of sameness, reproducibility or generality. I’m reminded of Gilles Deleuze’s notion that ‘repetition is not generality.’

It’s an interesting point. I only have a cursory awareness of Deleuze. I’ve never found his work or any theory particularly useful for my practice. I find looking at artists much more helpful, artists such as Warhol, Prince, Olesen, all of whom deal with photomechanical processes. I like the word ‘repetition’. I have come across multiple copies of the same image in my collecting so in relation to my work it seems pertinent to apply this idea. Many times it has come to my attention how print quality differs with different publications of the same book. We assume these pages should be exactly the same but when I place copies of the same image side by side they’re not. I’ve learnt that repetition seems to reveal disparities—it’s our minds that do the generalising.

‘Minds that generalise’—I love that. I remember thinking about Warhol’s Empire (1965) when first encountering your cat oeuvre, which has to do with the prolonged fixation on a single subject and gives, as Luis Camnitzer would say, a new social value through accumulation. Pop and Minimalism are apt predecessors for your work, both prominent in the 60s when you were born. Though they diverge conceptually, key works from this period are characteristic for their repetition of single forms and the use or adaptation of industrial processing. You’ve titled one of your series Judd Cats, referring to Donald Judd, and your videos in particular seem to hark back to Warhol. Are these predecessors important to your work?

I find it hard to imagine any artist that doesn’t look to historical precedents to generate ideas for their work. Warhol and Judd have both been useful in this respect especially as you say for their exploration of repetition and innovative use of industrial processes. I’ve seen a lot of post-war American art in America. I’ve been very lucky to have had the opportunity to visit the Judd Foundation in Marfa and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Seeing great work has definitely informed me but in looking to artistic models for ideas, it’s important to find a way to break your own ground, which often involves subverting or undermining aspects of approaches by these artists. Both Warhol and Judd championed industrial processes and that links them to capitalism. I frequently choose recycled material from this domain to resist extractive processes where possible. I like to think I shift away from the bravado often found in work by American artists. Judd Cats was an easy title—Donald Judd and kittens, formally composed, cool and detached. I’ve often wondered if he would like this work. It is also an unexpected confluence, which I find amusing.

We can read practices that utilise industrial processes or capitalist channels as subversive, too. I’m thinking here about Cildo Meireles, for example. Artists overall are finding more sustainable approaches, but there are still those who see art as a licence for exploration no matter the cost—Jeff Koons’ recent ‘moons project’ is a great example. It’s possible that all art is a form of exploitation in one way or another.

I really appreciate Louise Bourgeois’ notion that sculpture is a form of violence, that it requires bending materials against their will. Your work seems more aligned with artists who embrace the qualities or even agency of materials, though.

Yes I try not to mess with things too much. Although cutting and tearing pages out of books seems like a violent act, I like to think I’m keeping the integrity of this material. I’m trying to keep my footprint light wherever possible. Of course I do use new manufactured materials such as aluminium for my book-cover supports and my recent serigraphs, but to be honest I’m a bit repelled by heavy industrial processes in art—it seems to me a thing of the past.

Something we’ve discussed previously is that your ‘cat works’ aren’t really about cats.

I’m interested in this idea, in the distinction your work makes between its content (cats) and its intent (which I would say varies from composition to taxonomy to semiotics to transhistoricity). Would you say your chosen subjects function like red herrings in this sense?

Yes, this could be said. The cats are really just devices to speak about other things. Meow.