For the first time in what seems like 3 years, I had the pleasure of sitting down and talking with artist Eric Valosin. Eric is a New Jersey based new media artist whose work explores the intersections of religion and postmodernism in the digital age. In our interview we discuss the dislocating, dissociative effects of the pandemic and its impact on artists' post-covid practices and work-life balance.
"I can't believe it's been more than 2 years since we've last spoken" seems like the chorus of a song I've sung with many people over the course of the pandemic. I had gotten used to seeing you and your work fairly regularly, at least over social media prior to the pandemic, but it seems like I haven't seen you around lately. How have you been?
Haha, yes, It's been a while since we've really sat down with each other and chatted. I took a much needed break from social media during the height of the pandemic. Call it escapism or call it detox, but it quickly became apparent to me that I could not successfully shift my attention to what mattered most with the constant chatter of armchair punditry, professional one-upsmanship, and the droning siren song of FOMO setting an uncomfortably anxious foundation for the events of the last several years.
Does that mean you've given up social media entirely?
No, although I've dramatically shifted my relationship to it. Since 2016 I had actually taught social media in my Writing and Editing for Converging Media classes as an adjunct professor. In fact, I helped found a Masters degree program in Social Media Design and Management, now rebranded to Digital Media Design and Marketing. I had a fairly intimate and tumultuous relationship with social media theory and practice as my communications students and I experienced the entirety of the Trump presidency and the pandemic through the lens of multimedia journalism. I experienced the excruciating shift to online/hybrid pedagogy and back, along with everyone else in academia. Through it all, I became more and more acutely aware of the perhaps irreperable ills of social media, and they began to outweigh the many benefits for me. I actually began to feel a bit guilty for perpetuating these ills through my teaching, and ended up shifting my curriculum to deprioritize and recontextualize much of what I had initially, perhaps naively, championed. Now I've begun to come back around to the idea of reengaging with social media for professional purposes, but it's been a necessary and liberating experience taking this social media sabbatical.
Speaking of the pandemic, if I may ask, How did you fare?
As many can probably say, I fared far better than some, but it was certainly not easy. With young children and the privilege of some flexibility, we hunkered down and decided to homeschool for two full years. I never had imagined I'd be homeschooling my children, and I credit them with rising to the occasion and thriving. It was an experience I hope someday to look back upon fondly, but right now I still lack sufficient distance to express much more than exhaustion. Time will tell, but the kids have now integrated back into public school, and so far have been doing very well. I'm thankful we could create an environment that protected our family when Covid was at its most dangerous. How was your experience? I don't want to pretend I'm the only one who can speak to this crazy time.
Thank you. We fared pretty similarly. It strikes me that we're speaking of the pandemic in the past tense when, in actuality, it still rages on. But I suppose we're discovering the limits of societal coping mechanisms. Thankfully for most people it is now no longer as life-threatening or life-altering. But especially for those who are immunocompromised or at higher risk, or who have loved ones who are, the pandemic is still very real. Were you able to continue your artistic practice in the midst of it all?
Well, at the risk of compartmentalizing and creating a false art-life dichotemy, I must admit it's been a real struggle. Now with the kids back in school I'm just starting to pick up the pieces and reclaim consistent studio time. I had to make the decision to put many of my ongoing projects and studio work on the back burner in order to prioritize family and general wellness (a decision that I'm ashamed to say was emotionally more difficult than I want to admit). Some people experienced a quarantine of boredom and loneliness. With young kids and a wife who is a full time pastor, this was not my experience! That's not to say I didn't make any work, but I certainly wasn't maintaining the frenetic exhibition schedule of my pre-pandemic pace. But I think I was also trying to figure out how to do life in a meaningful and sustainable way that did right by my family as the world entered survival-mode.
What sort of work did you make that we might not have seen during that time?
Early on in the pandemic, as my wife, along with many pastors around the world, had to figure out how to move their church congregations online, I felt the need to respond directly to this theological quandry of virtual worship. I exhibited a public video projection piece called "Sacrament and Simulation" as a part of "Pandemic Projections," a guerilla video art series curated by Jeanne Brasille and Gianluca Bianchino. The piece compiled footage of remote communion/eucarist services, begging the question of just how far a virtual blessing can extend through time and (virtual) space, and who becomes the one administering it: the pastor on screen? The artist compiling the footage? The curator projecting it onto the side of the building for all to consume? And what happens to the idea of trans-substantiation when the elements are comprised of pixels?
Around the same time I also had completed the first in a series of illuminated manuscripts entitled "For(Loop) Illumination," where I illuminated the computer code that created my push-button prayer bead installation "For(Loop){Meditations};". I became a medieval scribe, treating the computer code as if it were a sacred text, itself being a record of the logic underpinning an act of creation just as a true sacred text is. That project ended up stuck in an exhibition in Oxford, Mississippi, as the 4 week show turned into a 2.5 month quarantine, largely shut down to the public.
That made me rethink how to allow viewers to experience my work in their own homes. So soon after, I created a free desktop meditation app called "Meditations for the Coronapocalypse." Piggybacking off my prayer bead installation, it too "meditated" on a randomized sacred image taken from art history or various religious traditions, one pixel at a time, offering a new image each day. In the same way that the prayer bead installation filled the room with light the color of each pixel, this app fills your screen with that color. Performed in a dark room or with the help of a projector, one could experience the glow of the "pixels" in a similarly immersive way.
It actually sounds like you've been much busier than you've let on!
A: Well, that was all back when we thought the pandemic would last a few weeks, or a few months at worst. I think a lot of artists were clamboring to respond to the many crises we were experiencing. Once we began to come to terms with the long haul nature of the situation, my artistic sprint naturally shifted to a marathon as home life also shifted accordingly.
What did that shift look like for you?
There was the obvious, trying to care for the kids and retain as much mental health as could be expected. There were a lot of hikes and a lot of Zoom meetings. But I also tried to take it as an opportunity to learn and collect new skills. My son and I took a creative engineering course together led by YouTuber and former NASA/Apple engineer Mark Rober. I learned to cook considerably better. I got really good at fixing broken household appliances (like, REALLY good) when we didn't want to bring a professional into the house during a pandemic. In a very Duchampian turn, I got really deep into studying Chess (like, REALLY deep), and parlayed a newfound love of chess puzzles into a broader addiction to puzzles. I learned to solve a Rubik's cube (so far 1:50 is my personal best). On a serious note, for a while I had a hard time not seeing my art as tone-deaf and siloed in light of current events at the time, so I began researching anti-racism more to educate myself to some of my blindspots, attended BLM marches (the only public outings I afforded myself up to that point in the pandemic), and reformed many of my personal purchasing practices in response to what I learned about mass incarceration and prison labor. I worked with our church to advocate for LGBTQ rights, and tried to support my wife's work with the church and our church's work in the community in any way I could. It's a start, at least.
I became a confirmation mentor and taught Sunday school once we were back in person. I helped with the filming and video editing for our prerecorded worship services. I started and directed a virtual a cappella group cheesily named the Acapostles (we currently have 4 recordings on Youtube, and a couple more still in the hopper). As a result, I learned a ton more about audio engineering and video editing, and boned up considerably on my music theory and ear training. As outdoor group activities began to look safer once more I got back into playing men's softball, scratching the itch of my former life as a collegiate baseball player. In support of that, I undertook a lay study of sports psychology (if only I knew in high school what I know now!), which led me to paying much more attention to my mental health in general. I binge-researched quantum physics and electrical engineering. I sang. I played with the kids a lot. We did some limited traveling to see family as it began to look safe. Maybe my proudest achievement is being able to report that my wife and I do still like each other after being stuck in house together for so long!
I hear many people give lip service to "work-life balance" while still careening off the workaholic cliff. Was this new home-centric approach perhaps a subconscious, pendular response to the pandemic disrupting several work-heavy years prior?
Ha! It sounds like you might know me better than I expected.
Well, maybe not as well as I aught! But I do try to do my due diligence as an interviewer.
It's definitely a possibility. I tried really hard to rediscover the full breadth of my interests. Duchamp saw his chess career as an extension of his art career; I'd like to say it was in hopes that this exploration would feed back into and inform my artistic practice - which it assuredly will - but it was really mostly a desperate, groping attempt to reclaim a sense of wholeness that had been rended from just about everyone during the pandemic. I think the cyber-compartmentalization of Deleuze's dividual seems not to be limited to virtual personae. I think the work-life disruption and Zoom-induced dividualization we all experienced to some degree had some profound dissociative effects. It cleaved the "work" persona from the "life" persona for some, or smashed them together in unexpected ways for others.
For the first year of the pandemic I took a leave of absence from my part time job as a sign artist for Trader Joe's in order to focus on homeschooling and to social distance from the retail environment. I sort of felt the seat of my work-life seesaw land with a thud on the "life" side for a while, so I decided to try my best to embrace that. That said, I did still take on some private commissions - paintings and some graphic design, mostly. I also redesigned our church's choir room, a significant undertaking featuring an 830 square foot mural.
Now as you start to reset your "work" footing, are you finding it difficult to reconnect with your professional self?
Perhaps opportunities like this interview are making it easer! But, I've tried very hard over the years to develop an artistic worldview that is conceptually consistent with my personal worldview, so - perhaps contrary to the implications of this interview - I question whether there ever really was any true dissociation. Rather, just alternative expressions. For most artists worth their salt at least, their artistic worldview is simply an expression of their personal worldview in the first place. Otherwise it quickly becomes disingenuous and, ultimately, exhaustible (arguments can be made against this for the performative personae of the Andy Warhols and Jeff Koonses of the world, but this is a debate for another interview).
That said, it's an odd experience assessing the art world post-Covid. Some of the galleries I had good relationships with didn't survive the pandemic and had to close, relocate, or reconfigure. The whole art market has shifted with the ebb and flow of NFTs into (and back out of?) the mainstream and the role of gallery receptions changing. There's a bit of a feeling of starting from square one, but at the same time I have been able to pick up right where I left off with several projects and relationships. I've been fortunate to have several speaking engagements recently, including leading a workshop on worship and the arts for a massive youth conference called Ignite 2022 through the Greater New Jersey Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church. Crafting these presentations has helped jumpstart my thinking in the studio as well. I'm excited to be experimenting on some new projects and continuing some old ones.
What do you think can be done to help artists and others transition out of the pandemic and back into a new normal?
I think for one, there has to be an acknowledgement that we are not yet actually out of the pandemic, and that "new normal" is not just a colloquialism for choosing between reversion or innovation. We have to remember the "new normal" is a moving target that requires really deep psychological uprooting and involves complex grief for human life, ways of life, and institutions lost or altered by the pandemic. The "new normal" is not a higher plateau to attain and then rest upon, but the uncomfortable Heideggerian strife of making sense of colliding world-views while the very grund beneath us is itself shifting and evolving.
There needs to be room for a personal and communal reckoning with all that's been lost, which at this point is verging on incalculable. My hope is that the art world can not just reformulate new ways to establish a market or churn promising new faces through the system, but provide spaces for healing and optimism for a better future. Art must offer a new grounding for Being as we try to navigate the abyss (abgrund). We have to remain multi-demensional in our views of what art is viable or valuable. And I think we need to allow for artists to be wholly integrated people, glorifying the "normal" artist as much as we do the "eccentric" artist, and glorifying neither in excess. I think this goes for people of any profession seeking a sense of closure and reintegration of their personae.
Thank you for your time, and I wish you the best of luck. I look forward to hopefully working together again in the future!
Thanks, I hope we will!
Jouska
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