Interview date: April 2005
Interviewed by Ka-Man Tse
LMCC: So tell me about your process. How do you
work?
Raissa: I find the space that I’m interested
in playing with or investigating further, and I shoot it on film, medium
format, high saturation color film. I cut up the contact sheets
and make either one collage or multiple sketches on a small scale,
and then I go from there. If I decide that there’s something
worth pursuing further, there’s potential, then I’ll scan
in those negatives and work in Photoshop for a long time. It’s
more like painting at that point. The film is my paint, so to
speak, and then it takes on a whole other life of its own from there.
And the final image is seamless.
LMCC: Is it important that the image is seamless?
Raissa: Yeah, definitely.
LMCC: When did you start working in digital?
Raissa: 2001.
LMCC: What influences your work, what sources
do you draw from the most? Any interdisciplary influences?
Raissa: I would say sculpture and architecture,
and the sense of being in a three-dimensional space and what the
effect that is on your perception— not just visual perception,
but your whole sensory experience.
LMCC: What spaces do you photograph the most?
Interiors?
Raissa: Interior spaces. I started out
with more domestic and it’s moving to more public.
LMCC: Tell me about your most recent work. Which
one is your most recent?
Raissa: This one and those over there, the more
office-y types things. But I did shoot elevators early on, and those are
public, but they’re very intimate.
LMCC: Is that a hotel room, or a bed and breakfast?
Raissa: No. All my rooms are privately owned.
LMCC: How do you describe your style?
Raissa: Historically, somewhat surreal cubist. Expressionistic
in a way. [laughs]
LMCC: How has this studio space and working in
this specific area of Manhattan being the financial district influenced
your work if so at all?
Raissa: One, I’m more aware of the natural elements
here, surprisingly. The wind and just being surrounded by water,
and sky. At the same time, there are all these man-made structures. I
have a desire to do some more outdoor scenes, using the buildings as
an enclosure. I’m also influenced by its historical presence. The
historical presence is influencing me. I’m interested in
shooting the things that relate to a historical context, as opposed
to just an individual’s history. How about, [being more
aware of -thinking about- dealing with] socially historical context.
LMCC: How has you work changed? What were
you working on before this residency? Were you working on more
individual….
Raissa: This one here, it’s the first one that
I started. It’s of a building uptown on 86th street. I
started it before I came here, but it made me think that it might be
a good place for me to work. I have other projects
that I had wanted to do which I put on hold, another staircase, an
apartment building, a boxing ring, an Econoline van. Those are
very personal pieces, not social.
LMCC: Are you a boxer?
Raissa: I use to spar in boxing.… It’s
not historical. It’s not grandiose. It’s more
individual, and a lot of people don’t relate to boxing at all.
LMCC: Can you talk more about painting. You
liken your process to painting….
Raissa: Yes, or construction or sculpture. I
started out as a sculptor. I also made a lot of drawings and
studied a lot of painters, looking at a lot of books and going to museums.
LMCC: Who’s are some of your favorite painters?
Raissa: I like Egon Schiele. I
like the Renaissance, the early Renaissance and the Dutch Painters
a lot. The 20th century German Painters. .. and Matisse, and especially
his rooms. And the famous American painter who did the diner
scenes…Hopper.
LMCC: So how long does it take to make one of these?
Raissa: It ranges. A very simple one that doesn’t
have a lot of detail would take a week. This one, it takes a
solid few months working on it. It’s more complicated. This
one had 60 negatives. I probably could have finished in a few
months if that’s all I did. But I start new projects….
LMCC: Is 60 negatives average? What’s
the range?
Raissa: The smallest one was four negatives, up to
60.
LMCC: And when do you know it’s all done,
it’s complete?
Raissa: You don’t really know. Usually
cause I have a deadline. [laughs]
LMCC: That’s what everybody’s been
saying. [laughs]
Raissa: I don’t know. Because I have gone
back to pieces. I don’t change them after I’ve made
them into an edition. But in the past, I’ve thought I’ve
finished one, and I had a show and I pulled the file out to check it
and realized there was something wrong with it, or they’ve never
settled with me. So two of the images, I’ve actually gone
back to three years later and changed something. And it’s
[the image] much better, and then the edition is produced. I
guess when nothing bothers me any more, and it’s totally cleaned
up….
LMCC: Do you feel settled? When you’re done
with a body of work, do you say, “This is it.” Or do you
still think about it?
Raissa: I see my work changing, but I don’t
feel that it’s a clear, closed body of work. Some people
work like ok, this is the series I’m doing right now on this
subject. Mine is more organic and interwoven that I don’t
think I’ve ever finished a body of work really. When I
started this project I knew I’d finished something in 2000, but
I’m not that old that I’ve gone through bodies of work,
I’m only 27. [laughs]
LMCC: There was that artist who had a show somewhere
in a museum, the painting was decades old, and he had went back when
he saw it and he was like, “no!” And he actually tries
to fix it right there and all of the guards stop him, and he’s
like “This is my piece. I’m the artist! Let me fix it!” It’s
an example that, literally decades later, it’s still open…
Raissa: Well I enjoy letting it go though. It’s
so nerve wracking. The more you look at it, you’re like, “Oh.” The
more you look at it, the more you want to do something to it. [Especially]
with digital, you can do anything. You can just keep going and
going, so I enjoy being able to say to myself, that’s over and
I never want to touch it again.
LMCC: Do you ever go back to the darkroom?
Raissa: Not really. I print occasionally, I
print color prints. I don’t have time right now to do my
contacts so I get them done. When I have a little more time I’ll
do them myself. I do, it’s fun going in the darkroom.
LMCC: What are you thinking about doing next?
Raissa: To answer your question about the body of
work thing. Even though I’m moving on in a different direction,
I still have pieces in a subtly different, older direction that I want
to shoot and carry out.
As I was saying when I got this residency so I kind of put those on
hold. And
I’m doing this because I got the opportunity now.
LMCC: What was it that was on hold?
Raissa: My boxing ring. I thought about shooting one
of those tanning booths, a really small space filled with light, kind of reminds
me of the elevator ceiling. And the van.
LMCC: What are some goals, what you are trying to achieve
in your work?
Raissa: One of my main goals is to have the viewer
feel, to have a visceral reaction to my pieces and really have it mean
something to them. Whether it’s personally or whatever in any other way. I
want them to enjoy it. I want to enjoy my work too, so that’s one
[of the] criteria. It’s not the main one, but it’s definitely necessary. Also,
these spaces I choose sometimes for very obvious reasons, or just for the feeling
I get in them. I want to convey that to a degree, a psychological feeling,
or something that’s just not worldly; the presence of a place, it’s
life, whatever that is. That’s basically it. Of
course, it depends on what piece you’re looking at too. They all
do different things. They relate, but there are very individual pieces. With
this one, [referring to the building on 86th street], the main thing is the
unstableness of the building, how we rely on this massive old structure and
we think that it’s going to be standing. When we start tearing
out the insides of it, then what will happen? They all have an underlying
instability to them that I’m touching on.
LMCC: Some of them look paranoid too.
Raissa: Yeah, it’s definitely questioning what’s
real, what’s going to hold up and what’s going to come out at you
and turn on you. They’re worried and they’re anxious, but
they’re not completely that [paranoid]. I feel that there’s
a warmth to them. They’re not sterile.
LMCC: What CD or song are you listening to the
most or way too much?
Raissa: I make compilations all the time as I’m
working. So I change them at least once a week. I’m
listening to Midnight Express, today and yesterday.
LMCC: Favorite website?
Raissa: Gmail.
LMCC: What else do you pursue? You work
at SVA?
Raissa: I just quit. I’m leaving in June. I’m
a gardner, and I do boxing, and I like to bicycle.
LMCC: Oddest job you’ve ever had?
Raissa: None of them have been that odd. I’ve
never done anything that wild. Working for my brother?
LMCC: How do you find your locations?
Raissa: I just come across them in my life.
LMCC: Why do you think seamlessness is important
in your work?
Raissa: Because I don’t want you to stop on
the process of it. I really want you to suspend the disbelief
and get into it and let yourself feel that that’s happening and
let yourself relate to the experience and photography does that. Saying
that someone else saw it and here it is. I just want you to be
able to peruse all the details and not the lines. Unless the
seams work in a way that actually enhances the subject or the feelings
I am trying to convey. Sometimes that happens. I did one,
you could see the floorboards still, I let the seams of the negatives
of the floorboards raise and lower the different boards.
LMCC: Act as cracks in the board?
Raissa: Actually more sort of sliding underneath it,
caving in.
LMCC: For me, photography is all about artifice.
I’m a photographer myself and it’s something I’m
always struggling with. For me sometimes it’s just all
lies.
Raissa: I’m not denying it. That’s
the other amusing side, to me, is that the artifice is definitely there
and I’m presenting it as close to life-size as possible, so … it’s
just a piece of paper on the wall, it’s like mock furniture. [laughs]
LMCC: Mock furniture? [laughs] You mean
like paper furniture?
Raissa: Yes, basically. I had a really empty
apartment and I’ve never had a lot of furniture. So when
I hang my [photographs] I usually place things so the place is bigger,
and there’s my “bed” over there.
LMCC: Collapsible furniture?
Raissa: People that have bought my bed pictures
like to put them over their beds. It’s like this underlying
humor thing, that going on, but it’s not my main goal. The
whole thing about photography being an artificiality, or the artifice,
I’m not denying it, I’m incorporating it. Most people
don’t believe in photography anymore as the truth at all. We
still can’t forget that it once was. It’s [the belief]
still in us. But if [the photographs] still had seams, the person
would think the seams first. It would be more like David Hockney,
and it would just be re-doing what he did. There’s no point
in doing that for me. But it’s not my goal either, that
effect.
LMCC: So how do you see these being presented
for your final exhibition? What’s the ideal size if you
could print anything?
Raissa: The first thing that you reached in the piece,
it would be life size.
LMCC: Finally, how do you personally get rid of
the hiccups?
Raissa: I don’t have a method. They
usually go away pretty quickly.
