Seth bauserman

Could you tell us a bit about yourself and your background?

I grew up in the woods outside of Richmond Virginia with my three brothers. We were homeschooled and half feral; we spent most of our days swimming in rivers and exploring nature. 

My parents both worked in mental health. My dad was a therapist. He valued quiet and thoughtful consideration of himself and others. He created space for introspection, which he thought to be necessary to approach others with a kind of openness and a kind of quiet they might speak into. 

My father died while I was working on my BFA, and after that I felt drawn towards that introspective place that he encouraged. I started using my work as a means of exploring and sifting through my lived experience – my grief, my delight, my uncertainty. My work became something more than just the space in which that quiet consideration could happen. I think it became the consideration itself – or at least a means to offer what my words were failing to describe. 

After my BFA, I moved back to Richmond. It is a beautiful city with a hungry and progressive arts community – and a river, and trees and trails that I spend a good bit of time around.

Your paintings often contain partially obscured text. How do you approach the use of language in your work, and what role does ambiguity play in its meaning?

Currently my work draws on found subject matter. I’ve been working from material that’s fairly personal – or at least that’s important to me: my daughter’s drawings, snippets of handwriting of people dear to me. The text anchors the work. It's a reference that might reinforce or undermine what’s happening visually. I use the text to claim a work’s purpose or my intent, but then often obscure it in the layering of the drawings, to fight an obvious surface narrative. Because the paper I use is transparent and pliable I am able to engage a surface and a subsurface, whether through layering or physically tearing away what is covering the information underneath. The different surfaces become representations of inner and outer selves. What we choose to display or conceal, how we fail to show or hide those same things. The text plays with what is said and left unsaid. What is on the surface may be at odds with what is underneath. I see this as a way of thinking about truth. The truth can be hard to parse, and the presentation can also be misleading.

 

 

The way your paintings layer marks, paint, and even physical folds suggests both construction and concealment. How does this process reflect your ideas about identity and self-perception?

I think a lot about how lived experience shapes people. It’s both a strange thing and a deeply normal everyday process that we can learn to see and notice to varying degrees. There are ways that experiences can be ugly or devastating in overwhelming or immediate ways that mark us clearly: death and loss, forms of violence, forms of grief, and so on. There is also joy and beauty that can mark in equal measure. These things can be immediately visible. They can also be less visible, or almost hidden – unless (or until) they come to the surface in unexpected ways. 

Some of these pieces are composed of layers that have been torn apart, trampled on, cast aside, pulled out of the trash pile, reconfigured, considered, and placed back together in careful configurations. There’s something about this that I think mirrors experience. What I mean is that I think that most people are self-conscious in some capacity because, more or less directly, we are all undertaking the same project: assembling our bits of experience in a way that we think or assume makes a clear, compelling surface. And it isn’t that these assemblages are necessarily false or misleading. They can be that; but at some level they are a necessary part of living in the world. We can’t reckon with the depth, the difficulty, and the sheer breadth of even a single experience – even a positive one, I think – in an unmitigated way. It would undo us.

Even talking about this process that a lot of this work is digging toward can feel too abstract to me. The work is a way of making it tactile, which is also at least part of what draws me to the materials I use. Because the paper I work with is so thin, these pieces can have 10-20 layers while still appearing to be a single sheet of paper. Terrible, ugly, marred layers, as well as beautiful ones. I don’t have designs on what or how anyone ‘reads’ the pieces in this way – I don’t have a particular map or story in mind that I’m hoping someone will unlock or uncover in the work. The work is its own invitation to look closer and to try to see the surfaces, whether they’re immediate and evident or whether they’re submerged. The hope is that the quality of attention or reflection it takes to do this is something that we can build for the sake of looking outward and for the sake of looking inward.

In a time where identities are often flattened into labels, your work embraces complexity and contradiction. Do you see your paintings as a form of quiet resistance to oversimplification?

A quiet resistance in the form of an invitation. The work invites introspection and instead of reaction – a visual space to consider the complexity and contradictions. I like to explore the relationship between experiences that we tend to think of as polar opposites. One of the themes that I’ve been working into some of the newer works is the proximity of hope and hopelessness, or wholeness and emptiness. I play with the words so they share a similar structure physically when presented in an 8 letter format. HOLINESS, HOLIMESS, HOLINEST, HOLENESS, wHOLENESS, HOLISHIT, HOLILESS, CARELESS, CARE LESS, HOPELESS. The thing that interests me is the very physical relation between these seeming contrasts. There’s something honest in how close they are visually – something that honors the lived experience of these things. We are all navigating through forms of hope and hopelessness constantly – not only seasonally or episodically, but simultaneously. Our friends or family or work might provide some sense of hope or delight at the same time as we feel despair or terror at things that are happening in our towns, our state, or our country. The dividing line between these things is very thin. I like how the visual of the letters hints at this. Very few characters actually change, but the meaning swings wildly with every little shift. 

What artwork have you seen recently that has resonated with you?

I’ve been loving Eva Dixon’s work recently. I saw her piece “Atlas” that she did while in residency at the Revue Studios in SoHo. I was blown away. The use of nontraditional materials and transparency is incredible. We share a similar affection and proximity to the trade industries, and I think the way she is navigating and unifying the two seemingly separate worlds of industry and art is really effective and exciting.

 

 

Tell us a bit about how you spend your day / studio routine? What is your studio like?

I wake up early. I like opening the windows and enjoying the quiet house before everything gets going. Do some reading. Lots of coffee. Wander around the garden. Pray everything goes well getting the kids ready for school. After we get them situated, I typically walk or bike to my studio. It’s in an old post office in my neighborhood that has been turned into an architecture firm/tattoo parlor/studio space. 

One more cup of coffee when I get there, turn on some music, and spend the first part of the day tidying up and easing in. Music helps me get into the right headspace for working, and generally plays a big role in my studio. I like to listen to a lot of different stuff, but I also get stuck on albums and artists when I am working on certain pieces and I feel like they are connecting to the work in some way. The repetition helps me stay focused and in that same headspace. 

I tend to draw and sketch the first few hours of the day, or do some of the more tedious and technical sides of the process – framing or documentation. After lunch I start working on pieces. Usually I’ll have 3-5 up at once that are simultaneously in progress. I find that having multiple things working at the same time helps me not rush into a solution out of boredom or lack of options. I always leave the studio late because I get hooked on whatever I’m doing and have to race out without cleaning anything.

Is there anything new and exciting in the pipeline you would like to tell us about?

I’ve been really itching to get back into stone work. I had a bad injury when I was in high school and couldn’t play soccer/football for a while, and I think my dad could see how depressed I was without that particular outlet. He bought me a huge block of stone and a set of chisels. I loved the physicality of it and worked that stone hours every day. I think my body and mind have been looking for something similar the past year – something immersive, tactile, solid. I’ve been keeping my eye out for opportunities to explore denser mediums more generally. I think that in some way I’m interested in testing out what happens to some of the processes and themes of my paper works when subjected to a harder, more unyielding medium like stone.