A Captivating Conversation with Emily Hass
photo credit: Stephen Kent Johnson
Emily Hass lives and works in New York City. In 2019 she was a Howard Foundation Fellow and has been awarded the McCloy Fellowship in Art and grants from the Gottlieb Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Hass holds graduate degrees in psychology and design from Harvard University and has received residencies at MacDowell, La Maison Dora Maar, and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. A monograph of Hass’ Exiles series (available at 192 Books) was published in 2021.
UZOMAH: How does having graduate degrees intersect with your overall artistic statement?
EMILY: I was in graduate school when I had the idea to merge my interest in psychology and architecture. That was also when I took my first painting class. So I would say the experience of graduate school inextricably intersected with my artistic statement, but not necessarily the graduate degrees themselves.
Emily Hass installing Template 48_1, 2015 vintage paper, gouache, nails 76 x 76 inches
photo credit: Myriam Babin
U: How do you use architecture to explore identity and culture artistically?
E: As the child of someone who fled a war and became a refugee, I wanted a way to address the relationship between identity and place in my work and settled on the language of architecture. I have done this in direct ways in my series Exiles using original floorplans of the former Berlin homes of Jews and persecuted artists and intellectuals (beginning with my father’s childhood home).
Kurfürstendamm, 211—Konstanzerstraße, 14 Geometric, 2013 gouache and ink on vintage paper 16 x 22 inches
Made using the archival architectural records of Kurfürstendamm, 21, the former location of Studio Dorland, Herbert Bayer's advertising agency and Konstanzerstraße, 14, the former location of Johannes Itten's art and architecture school
photo credit: Myriam Babin
After a decade, I found my project connected to a contemporary crisis: Berlin had become a place of refuge rather than a place to flee. I began meeting with displaced people, largely from Syria and making work related to the losses they had experienced. I was introduced to Ajo from Aleppo, who had joined the group Journalists in Exile, and was beginning to work again as a journalist in Berlin. Having been told I was interested in photographs of the homes of refugees, Ajo explained through our translator that he had taken videos of his home – both interior and exterior – in Aleppo City, Syria. In the words of our translator, “ … the home is for sorrow destroyed.” A few weeks after I returned to New York I received Ajo’s videos by email. I watched them over and over, riveted by the horror and destruction they encapsulated, and the sculptural quality of the ruins. Pieces of the house, even whole rooms, were encased in plaster dust. Stone bricks were stacked (had they been walls, or were they stacked as part of the clean-up process?). The roof of the house was gone and the sun filtered into the rooms through the remaining beams, creating geometries of light on the walls and casting deep black shadows where windows had been. Only the stairs were intact, alone, and out of place.
Studio Wall, 2018 house paint, plaster-soaked canvas, nails 8 x 14 feet
photo credit: Stephen Kent Johnson
This video became the heart of a series in which I used architecture in a more oblique way. I began experimenting with building materials to convey the concrete-ness of the destruction of home and place, and at the same time the resilience of the people who had survived that destruction. My main material was canvas soaked in plaster, canvas as sculpture, rather than a substrate for painting, using it to evoke remnants of buildings and first-aid bandages, conveying displacement, fragmentation, and strength.
U: How does a building change by using a group of people from the design it was created for? How do you explore that through your art?
E: Your question makes me think of a conversation I had with a young Syrian woman in Berlin named Solara. After her brother had been killed in Latakia, Solara came to Germany on an architecture scholarship. I asked her about her home in Syria, where her parents were still living. She spoke fondly about “hope antennae”: rebar that extends beyond the height of the house in anticipation of future additional stories. Sitting in a café in Neukölln, we discussed the poetry of the extra flights of stairs that extended beyond the roof of her family’s home – stairs up into the air, into the sky. I’ve thought about Solara many times, imagining what kind of buildings she might be designing, whether her family is still in Syria, whether, if she is able to return, she would add another floor on to the house. The images Solara evoked have stayed with me. I may not have attempted to represent them directly, but they inform my artwork.
U: How can a building structure explain a group of people's societal cultural and even moral values?
E: I’m not sure whether structures can explain values, but I think often about the values embodied in the idea of “home.” When I asked him, “What is home?” Hussein, a journalist from Rmelan, Syria, told me, “Home is what I hear, what I smell, what I taste. Home is an activity, it is gathering together. Home is a Syrian accent.” Adnan who escaped from Damascus after having been imprisoned, said about the bombings: “Assad destroyed buildings, culture, future, dreams. He stole the houses.”
Plaster-soaked canvas works in process, 2018
photo credit: Stephen Kent Johnson
U: What does taking risks mean in your creative process?
E: The past few years have been full of risks, and that sense of risk made its way into my art practice. In March 2020, as Covid-19 emerged, I left my home in New York City to stay with my father, who is in his eighties, in rural Massachusetts. I created an ad-hoc studio to work while we sheltered in place. When the weather allowed, I also worked outside. The shifts in my practice and my work reflected the fractured and uncertain times. The circumstances forced me to give up my usual studio practice and use my temporary home as a laboratory. The uncertainty pushed me to create a new vocabulary and explore new ways of working, new materials, and media. I began making work that interacted with forces in nature and therefore was out of my control. As I engaged with these uncontrollable elements – light and shadow, tidal currents, wind – I embraced uncertainty as content.
Water Shapes Canvas video still, 2021
photo credit: Emily Hass
U: What is the first thing you do when a concept or idea first comes to mind? How do you bring it out artistically?
E: The first thing I do is write it down: as a phone note; on my computer; or on an index card, which I date stamp and tape into a studio notebook. Depending on what it is, I may start on it immediately. I’ll make a study drawing on plain paper or cardstock, or if it’s 3D, a small version to figure out the mechanics. If I feel good about it, I’ll make it full-scale. But if it’s something that requires new materials, a larger space, or has a collaborative element, I’ll put it to the side in the studio, sort of in queue, while I get everything lined up.
I also have a list of ideas and dream projects yet to be realized. Like printmaking, which has been on my list for years. I just have to start.
U: What artist or person you studied with would you like to have dinner with and interview and why?
E: I took a sculpture class in graduate school with Barry Le Va when he was a visiting professor. He said something that stayed with me: artists often look at art quickly. That it’s okay not to read all the wall text, and that artists may have fast metabolisms when it comes to taking in art. He wasn’t saying it was bad to spend longer amounts of time looking at artwork, but he gave us permission to engage for as long or short a time as we felt. A short viewing wasn’t any less deep a connection. I was sad to learn that he had died. I wish I had a chance to ask him questions about his own life and practice.
If I’m allowed to list two people here, it would be a dream to have a conversation with Eva Hesse. Her work is a great inspiration. I’d like to ask how her family history informed her decisions and process. She was born the same year as my mother and died the year I was born. When I went to Hamburg, the first thing I did was visit her former home.
U: Can you name some of your biggest influences outside the art world on your work and why?
E: I’ve just realized this question may refer to a person or people. Initially, perhaps mistakenly, I interpreted it as a thing. But I will stay with my answer because it was my first response.
Architecture, especially unconventional or converted structures like shacks, garages, and warehouses.
Old, found, or repurposed objects: salvaged wood, net bags, aged or sun-bleached paper, an ordinary can.
Nature. Specifically, sunlight and the shadow and the accidental drawings they create. And the unexpected and unpredictable ways wind can engage with materials and create patterns through movement.
These elements have influenced my work, especially since I have been working outdoors during Covid. During the pandemic, I’ve also found a solace in nature, something I’ve needed more than ever.
For more information about Emily’s work, please visit her website, and also follow her on Instagram.
