Curious Topographies: An interview with Alyssa Baguss

As you walk into Alyssa Baguss’s studio in the California Building, you walk past two stream tables. One filled with light colored sand and the other with black sand, the tables mimic the process of erosion as water flows through the sand over time. Eventually the sand becomes saturated enough that the water starts running down in a continuous loop. Using them now as an educational tool, Baguss knows she’ll use the stream tables in some fashion in her art work, but she’s just letting their mesmerizing process percolate for a while.

Baguss is at heart someone who draws, but her work sprawls across disciplines. As she explores the intersections of technology and environmental science, her work draws on the natural world. But she also is just someone who has a lot of good ideas. Whether it’s a pep rally for spring during the Super Bowl, a notary public in the middle of the frozen Lake Harriet during the Art Shanty Projects, or an upcoming battle of the marching bands, Baguss is the kind of artist that follows her intuitive sense, wherever it happens to lead.

 

Wish You Were Here, hand-cut wallpaper mural, 150 x 767”, Jerome Emerging Artist Program, Rochester Art Center, 2017

 

Along the side wall of her studio is a detail from an installation Baguss had at the Rochester Art Center in 2017. One layer of the piece features giant wallpaper murals of idyllic landscape photography Baguss ordered from the internet. Popularized in the 1970s and ‘80s, these giant murals can be found in dentist offices, massage studios, and homes. They evoke a feeling of being in a beautiful place while remaining indoors. Baguss overlays these murals with her signature paper cut-outs, which are based on data points of the landscape outside of the Rochester Art Center, appearing as sprawling geodesic patterns.

In other pieces, she uses satellite imagery from Google Earth to create three-dimensional drawings. Though she’s employing advanced level computer software as research, Baguss ultimately creates her work through traditional practices. What starts out as a topographic map results in a pastel drawing, for instance. As a result, her work exists between two worlds, in a liminal space between data points and improvisation.

 

Dead Reckoning, plumb line marking chalk on gallery walls, SooVAC, 2015

 

A recipient of the 2017/2018 Jerome Fellowship grant, Baguss will have two projects showing this fall. She’ll be showing work at MCAD Galleries and will also be creating a collaborative piece at the Belwin Conservancy in Afton, MN, with composer Susan Haugh. The installation will involve creating hunting tree stands in the middle of a pine forest.

In this interview, Baguss talks about being both an arts administrator and an artist, the ways technology can connect us to the natural world, and following her passions.

 

Sheila Regan: You have this dual role of arts administrator and artist. Has that always been the case?

Alyssa Baguss: I have my work work and I have my art work. It’s always been this way but in the last couple of years, I don’t compartmentalize my work and my art work. I think that’s easier for me, but also my work involves so many conceptual threads that I deal with daily at work. I just see it as one big thing that’s kind of a mash-up.

I’ve always been in arts administration. I love organizing people in time, and I love programming in a very community sort of way. I love coming up with big ideas and driving a team. I don’t know if that’s normal, but who cares? I gave up on normal a really long time ago.

For the past 9 years, I’ve been the arts program manager at Silverwood Park [in St. Anthony]. We use art to teach about environmental science. We do about 600 programs a year, and that’s everything from art in the gallery or drop-in craft activity for families.

I have a staff of naturalists and a staff of artists and they work together to create these programs. I’m always by a scientist and biologist. I love these people. I love interdisciplinary work. Before I was at the park, I was doing residencies with Northside middle schools using art to teach about math and science, so it’s kind of how I got into that role.

My artwork is about technology and the environment, how it influences the way we experience the outdoors, how it shapes the expectations of the landscape, and how you never have to leave your home to go anywhere. You have all the information on your phone. I’m working with mapping specialists or GIS specialists and environmental scientists to think about these works conceptually. So it mimics what I do during the day.

 

Course, hand-cut Tyvek, 90 x 360”, Kiehle Visual Arts Center, St. Cloud State University, 2016

 

SR: Do you think your job has influenced your direction as an artist?

AB: Definitely. I’ve always had some of these threads in my work, but I’m just so immersed in it there. I just sort of have this little gem of a space in the city every single day. I feel like I’m in the middle of nowhere, but I’m really in the city. And I have access to conversations with water quality specialists and wild life managers and people who are constantly interpreting what they see outside. And then I have the public coming in and engaging with the park. I’m, at the heart of it, really interested in people’s behavior in the environment. I’m just a behavioral scientist wannnabe.

I am fascinated and so curious. Some people are so comfortable in the outdoors, or the opposite, where we get people who want everything very manicured, viewed from a safe distance. There are people who are overly concerned with things like ticks, or people have sensory issues with grass touching them or [with] silence. I’m never presenting judgement necessarily on this. I just find it really interesting the broad spectrum of levels of comfort and understanding and expectations when people go outdoors.

 

Snowscreen, Silverwood Park, 2018. The artist built a projection screen wall out of snow and hosted a public screening of the film Grumpy Old Men.

 

SR: How does that fuel your work?

AB: The park is such a direct experience for people in this small green space, and I wonder how our lives would be if we didn’t have direct experience with the environment — if we only had this textureless abstraction of experience with the outdoors. I am thinking about it on the opposite spectrum of how machines are seeing and sensing for us. If you don’t have the texture of an experience, if you think touching is believing — what does that mean? I am such a hands-on person, if I can’t see it or touch it, I’m not sure if it’s real. In [my studio] I’m using remote sensing devices and satellite imagery of topography and viewing the landscape from a very comfortable distance out in space… I’m questioning that direct versus abstract experience.

As an introvert, I love viewing from the corner and observing what is going on. I feel like you have that advantage with technology, and then most recently I’ve been thinking about navigation and GPS and how I don’t know how to get places anymore. I feel like I’m losing my sense of direction. I’ve always felt like I was a really solid navigator. I was always the person holding the map in our family. Now I feel like i’m getting more disconnected.

 

SR: Where did you grow up?

AB: I grew up in eastern, Iowa, South of Dubuque. I grew up in a very agricultural area, though I was born a towny. I like wide open spaces and a lot of wide open fields. I need to get out of the city a lot. I just get that itch, I just have to get out of here so I can ground myself a little bit. I have more of an agrarian clock — I see the seasons through what the fields look like.

I couldn’t wait to get away from that. I escaped as quickly as possible. And now I feel like that is such a big part of who I am.

 

SR: Did you ever formerly study technology and science?

AB: That’s such a good question. I’ve always been super interested in the natural sciences. I was a mathlete, and then I liked art. I’ve just followed my heart and things that I love.

I grew up around engineers so I’ve always been interested in how things are put together and built.

That’s how I learned to draw I think, drawing on the back of old blue prints, and building things. In order to understand something, you draw it or you make it, or you figure out how it works by doing, and that’s the way I as an educator and now as someone who manages programing, that’s how we’re thinking all the time, using making to learn.

I’ve never had any formal training in environmental science. I’ve always worked in partnership with an expert. I’m interested in people that are super passionate about what they do. That makes me really happy. People who are flat-out crazy about something. I’m attracted to that.

 

The Notary Shanty, Art Shanty Projects, Lake Harriet, 2018. Photo by MPLSART.

 

SR: So were your parents engineers?

AB: My grandpa was an engineer. I spent a lot of time at their place. And he would ask me on the weekends: “What do you want to make?” I would come up with ideas and wait for the weekend. He had a metal shop, so I had the luxury as a child to have someone who was willing to sit down and make something with me or figure out why it works the way it does. I feel like that’s how I approach everything. I get an idea: ”I’m going to make that.” Whether it goes on the wall, or anybody ever sees it, I don’t care. I have to figure that out, let’s try that. I want to do that, and that’s what make me happy.

Process is really important to me. I get so excited about an idea. I get so excited about research. I tear into it and I disappear and I have coffee with people who know about that and I go to an event and I’m infiltrating weird groups of people that think about these things and figuring out why they love it. Then I’m making things and thinking about a process that relates to that. In the end, I’m like, “Oh yeah, I have to make a thing for the wall.”  It helps for me to have deadlines and responsibilities and exhibitions or people that are counting on me, but that final piece is not what is exciting. I would much rather play.

 

The artist at work inside The Notary Shanty, Art Shanty Projects, Lake Harriet, 2018. Photo credit: Shine On Photos

 

To view more of the artist’s work, visit http://cargocollective.com/alyssabaguss. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.