Curtis Gannon
Is there an era, a cutoff point for an era of comics that interest you from which you tend to work?
Good question. Primarily the ’60s and the ’70s, I guess even the ’50s. What they would call the “Golden Age” is kind of ’50s, ’60s, and the “Silver Age” is primarily ’70s. They’ve been making reprints for quite a bit of these comics for about 10–15 years, and I make my work from these reprints. I love the colors they use. I love the way they were drawn back then, the simplicity of the printing… now, with digital, they’re almost photographic they’re so well printed. Plus, there’s something about the comics from that day and age. You know, you always knew the good guy was gonna win, no one ever really got killed, there was no cussing, there was no… a very latent sexuality – and comics today, it’s pretty much like cable television. They’re pretty over the top. So I like that innocence, you know?
Did you grow up reading comics actively? Were you really into it?
Oh, definitely. I grew up in a small South Texas oil town with nothing going on… little Alice, Texas. No one’s ever even heard of it unless you broke down there or got relatives. And I just ran into this guy down the street who had boxes of comics and before I knew it, I had a couple of boxes of my own and… I don’t know, I just read comics all the time. I just loved it. Always tried to find people who had stashes of them, would always try to go to garage sales and for a while even thought about being a comic book artist.
There’s something about comics that can’t be reproduced in film, etc. People either get comics or they don’t, but it’s difficult to explain that ‘it’ that comics has, isn’t it?
Definitely. It’s interesting you mention film, because film and comics are probably two of the closest-related medias.
Because of the panels.
Yeah, and the sense of… the first panel on the left is going to be the first scene, and then the next, and there’s this kind of sequence of events and time… it just happens a lot faster in film. Those images are going by very quickly. Where in comics, it’s all still moments with time in between, and you know, the gutters are a very big element in my work – the white lines that separate the panels on a page – and from one panel to another; it can be the time of a breath or it could be literally a million years. The first panel could be dinosaurs fighting, and the next one could be a guy getting into a spaceship. Anything can happen. Time and space … you know, you can start on Earth, you can end up on Mars in the second panel. Anything can happen, and that sense of this perpetual time machine, almost, with limitless possibilities between panels is something that’s very attractive to me. I’m always kind of rediscovering that tool of this media.
Your work is sort of a commentary on how everything is being reappropriated these days – especially in digital form. How do you feel about that versus what you do, which is very physical, very craftlike with the material?
It’s so easy to walk that line between what is appropriating, what is using something legally and what is stealing it or misusing it, which is the worst of all possibilities. And that question always comes up about my work, and there’re two things: one, I’m actually using the comics books, which – they’re public property. Everything I use, you could go to Barnes & Noble or to Third Planet Comics, and find the exact same thing, and I like that about it. And also, these things are very much kind of an homage to these artists and writers of this time. I love Jack Kirby; I love Stan Lee. Stan Lee is my Mark Twain. And so these pieces are very much just kind of a nerdy, fanboy love of this material.
Is your Plexiglas stuff going to be in the show
coming up?
I’ve got a couple for this show, and this will be the first time these have been shown in an exhibition, the Plexi pieces. I’m also making some new pieces that have never been shown that I call “page mosaics,” where I’m cutting all the pages out of a comic… the first layer is just pages, and then I put layers in front of that that are the pages with the windows, overlapping and overlapping. But they’re just pinned to the walls, pinned over and over … so every time I reinstall the piece, it’s a new piece. I’m trying to break out of this rigidness of the system, and making something organic that I have to reinterpret every time. And then I’m also making these pieces that I’m calling “plot weaves,” where I’m cutting the comics into strips, and then I’m weaving the pages back together, and making almost like these little mats. It’s totally goofy. I just thought about simple childhood projects and what you do with paper. The projects you would have done in Sunday School or even the second grade. I try to keep my hands in multiple formats. I find that interesting. You go to an art show and you see one piece and they all look the same, just different sizes. And I try to keep reinterpreting it. It keeps me sharp, and I think it keeps the viewers interested.
“and everything in between.” is on view through March 2, and will also be open to the public on Saturday, February 11, from 2 to 5pm, in conjunction with Winter Street Studios Second Saturday Open Studios. Closing reception on Friday, March 2, 6-8pm.
Spacetaker ARC Gallery
2101 Winter Street, B11
Houston, TX 77007
www.spacetaker.org
Interview by Lance Scott Walker
Photography by Cody Bess
