with Joe Brommel, March 2021
What keeps you interested in Ebony magazine in particular? The work featured in this show is from a series called Ebony Reprinted, and a lot of your other work pulls from it as well.
I'm interested in Ebony magazine specifically because it has a lot of Black women in it, and that's something that is not generally seen in other popular media. It’s fun to play with those images and see where I fit into that whole situation, because my life doesn't look like the pages of Ebony magazine, but I do see parts of myself in there. It displays a certain lifestyle of Black excellence. It's just one version of life, but it's portrayed as something that you should aspire to be. So I want to open up the possibility of using the advertising, instead of the advertising using us.
I like that. There's another interview where you ask, “Why can't we just be mediocre?”
Yeah. [Laughs.] I feel like that's an unpopular thing to say, but white people all the time are super celebrated for doing whatever. Why can’t I do that? Why do I have to be punished for being mediocre? That’s the thing.
How do you think about the actual people being photographed for those images? Especially in the context of them being used in service of this particular vision of life or beauty.
I think about them as individuals. I think about them as people that function in this world where there’s this need to work towards this idealized level of beauty, and that their role is to be the display — to be a vision of this beauty — in part as a survival tactic. But by taking away the advertisement part of the image, they're just able to be people. In their context, I don't feel like they have the ability to speak for themselves, so I'm trying to make it possible for them to decide something else for themselves.
Can you talk about how that plays through in painting as opposed to collage? In the Ebony Reprinted pieces you keep the images’ shapes, but distort them — whereas your collages keep the fidelity of the images and the people in them, but extract pieces and rearrange them.
They’re different ways of obscuring the image. It’s a way of protecting the people inside of these images — of giving just enough to the viewer to understand what they're looking at and understand that there was another image before this one, but without giving them everything.
I mean, the best way I could think about it right now is, like: a person wearing lingerie is sexier than a naked person. You know? Concealing is a big part of that, especially since Black people are over-surveilled, and people feel entitled to use our images and use our lives as fodder for their own lives. I’m trying to play with withholding whatever it is that people desire.
How are the Ebony Reprinted pieces made, process-wise?
First, I find a page from Ebony magazine that I like. It's usually a portrait or an advertisement. Then I put a piece of clear transparency over that image, color in the image with corresponding colors of paint, take the plastic off, and use it like a stamp. I press it on to a wood panel, and when I pull it away the painting is done.
It doesn't take a lot of time to do. It's not like I'm making these huge Kehinde Wiley paintings. They’re these funny prints, showing that a portrait doesn't have to be that serious, you know?
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity from two conversations.
As a contrast, can you talk about your Love: American Style series of collages, too? I became introduced to your work a few years ago when we showed some of those pieces in our 2019 summer show, Ad Astra Per Aspera.
In the Ebony magazines, I would see a lot of different advertisements with men and women where, you know, it's this light-skinned woman and this dark-skinned guy, and they're both around the same age, and they're sprawled out on some shag carpet drinking Seagram’s Gin or something. It's bizarre to see those images, because they're very unrealistic, but it's also very clear that this is something that I should want. So in that series, I was cutting up these images to try to understand what place this has in the world for people that don't necessarily identify as wanting to be in a relationship like this.
That was part of it, and then another part was just talking about the everyday parts of what being in love with somebody is. A relationship sometimes is sprawling out on the shag carpet drinking gin, but sometimes it's washing dishes and yelling at each other. [Laughs.]
How do you think of working with negative space in your collages? I feel like a lot of collage artists go for density above all, but one of the things that I really love about your collages is that they leave a lot of room to breathe.
Yeah. I don't like density.
Why?
‘Cause I think it’s unnecessary to fill up a space. It's hard to see what is actually going on in it if it's really dense.
And also, when I make work, I try to make something that I haven't seen before. I don't see people make collages the way that I make collages. I think of them more as paintings. I started adding collage pieces into my paintings because I'd make a mistake sometimes, and then I'd be like, Oh, I can just cover this with a piece of collage. It just transformed from there into me using a lot of different elements in one piece of work. It’s like throwing a bunch of stuff into the air, and then the collage is it floating just before it falls back down.
This is sort of a weird pivot, but I wanted to ask about one of your old series, Royal Blue. It's different from a lot of your other work in that it focuses on white people's idealistic visions of their world. Can you talk about that series in particular, and if thinking about that particular vision of beauty or what life should be has informed the rest of your work?
I’d say Royal Blue was an experiment. I found this old art book, and I wanted to cut up different images of these things that we’re taught to desire: white skin, royal blues, things that signal sophistication. So I wanted to break down those images that we unconsciously — or consciously — aspire to be into their more basic elements to ask: What do they really mean? What do we have when everything is disjointed and fractured? What is whiteness? Why is this something that we want? Is this something that anybody really has in the way that it’s displayed in these pictures? I have these questions, and I'm trying to create answers through art.
What's a question that you've been asking yourself in the studio recently?
That’s a good question. Hm. [Pause.] Maybe the question that I'm asking myself is: How can I make my work more accessible while still asking difficult questions?
Do you feel like it wasn't accessible before?
I think it was accessible before, but sometimes I feel like it's floating in a direction where the people that I want to be able to access my work won’t have the ability to.
Access monetarily or visually?
Visually.
What have some initial answers to that question looked like? Maybe it's too early to say.
I mean, honestly, it makes me think about children's shows like Mr. Rogers. I was watching one episode where he was talking about how some children in the world don't have enough to eat, so it's really nice if you share your food. Trying to explain these very difficult concepts in a way that is generous and open is something that I want to do more.
Yeah. And earlier you were talking about how you want to show that a portrait doesn't have to be so serious.
Exactly. Maybe that's the question I’m asking myself: How can I make my work more fun? Because, I mean, I'm making art, and that's cool. And people are buying it, and that's cool. But it feels like maybe things are getting a little bit serious, and it really doesn't have to be that serious.
There’s another interview with you where you talk about how you're “still trying to process what the works are about,” too. That after making them, they still retain this mystery to you.
Yeah. A lot of the times when I make work, I look at it as: I made this thing, but it exists apart from me. So I don't exactly know what the work is about sometimes, and when I do figure out what it could be about, sometimes those things are contradictory. That doesn't mean that it's wrong, it just means that it means a lot of different things.
That’s part of it, and then another part of it is I want other people to be able to have ownership over the piece. I want them to be able to see themselves in it and relate to it in their own way. You know, so many people say, “Oh, I don't really go to galleries or museums because I don't know what I'm looking at. I don't know what it's about. I don't understand it.” There's nothing to really understand with my work. It's just there. There's no right answer, and if somebody sees something in it that I don't necessarily see, I'm not offended. It’s nice that it’s kind of a mystery to everybody. It's what you want.
Dana Robinson is a multidisciplinary artist who combines, reproduces and deconstructs, vintage materials, found objects, and paint to address the topics of youth, black female identity, ownership and nostalgia. Robinson's work has been written about in NY Mag’s Vulture, VICE, and Ain’t Bad. She has recently shown work in a virtual reality environment at Untitled Art Online with LatchKey Gallery and Selena’s Mountain, and will soon show work at the Standard Space in Connecticut. She graduated from the School of Visual Arts with an MFA in Fine Art in 2019, and works in Brooklyn.
