Creating Taulkinham: An Interview

An conjunction with the 2011 Flannery O'Connor Symposium, Startling Figures: A Celebration of the Legacy of Flannery O'Connor, Georgia College Museum presented the exhibition Taulkinham, which featured over one hundred collaborative works by contemporary artists Chris Lawson and Joe DeCamillis, 26 Jan.-16 May 2011. Shannon Morris, Curator of the Georgia College Museum, interviewed the artists, whose inspiration drew heavily upon the writings and correspondence of Flannery O'Connor.SM: The two of you began this body of work as artists inspired by the stories of O'Connor. When you arrived in Milledgeville two years later, you continued to gather objects and to use them to create work that would become part of the exhibition Taulkinham. How did being present in Milledgeville continue to inspire your work? Did it change, challenge, or confirm your expectations of place as imagined through your readings?CL: I first read O'Connor as an English major in college my freshman year of 1978, and since then I have spent many, many hours imagining and visualizing Milledgeville. Both Milledgevilles, really, if you consider one literary and another one somehow "real." The confirmation and convergence of those imaginings was powerful and palpable in ways I'm still revisiting and considering, having now been there. Having now been there on some relatively serious business, I might add. O'Connor stated-and I'm paraphrasing-the genteel atmosphere of the women's college was only one aspect of Milledgeville, and the state hospital and prison kind of tempered and completed an understanding of that certain place that is Milledgeville. I've made a lot of site-specific work in places with so-called charged histories: Cambodia, Haiti, Birmingham, Warsaw, Varanasi, Ground Zero. Speaking as an empathie and intuitive artist and individual, I can resolutely confirm: Milledgeville broadcasts at a frequency all its own.SM: Each work of art in the exhibition is signed Lawson DeCamillis, which alludes to the possibility that through the work on this project an additional "creative" emerged through your collaboration. Did this merging of ideas, interests, and work patterns create an artistic presence that was greater than Chris Lawson or Joe DeCamillis?JD: We talked about collaborating for five years prior to 2008, always from the approach of conceptualizing big ideas, themes, or structures with which to begin. It was all talk, no action. In the summer of 2008, we began having "Studio Nights," alternating spending time at each other's studio to create solo work while watching great films and interesting television as curated by Lawson. Near the end of the summer, I was leaving one such session when Chris pulled out a large collaged canvas featuring a big close-up of a bloody thorn-pierced Jesus. It was a piece he had begun during his artist residency in Jacmel, Haiti, working with the Haitian Mardi-Gras mask makers. He said, "Do you feel like doing something to this one?" When I took it home, the floodgates opened. From there, the collaboration evolved quickly and organically with little effort or deliberation. We simply increased the frequency of "Studio Nights." We share an overabundance of common ground with uncannily similar interests, ages, and backgrounds. Our shared excitement for working with each other manages to keep ego from eroding the fabric of our creative mesh. Equally, our well-established solo careers save us from falling prey to a power struggle within the collaboration.Early on in the collaboration, a new artistic presence definitely emerged. Whether this Lawson-DeCamillis entity is greater than the sum of its parts is not relevant to its lifespan nor its value in our individual creative lives. At this point, the possibilities still remain unlimited, and that is exciting, while our solo careers continue to thrive. As a footnote, our original collaborative piece, the Haitian Jesus, eventually became the large Hazel Motes mixed-media portrait featured as one of the centerpieces of the Taulkinham exhibition. …