1. Name: Monica Gunderson
2. Medium: Whatever fits my idea best or whatever is available, meaning free.
3. What would you say your subject matter is?
Words and thoughts mostly, or challenging things.
4. What is your desired outcome from your work and what do you want to evoke from your audience?
It's gotta make you smirk. I like to make things that make me laugh or that I enjoy making. I don't have an audience yet.
5. Favorite artists? Aritsts you look to for inspiration?
Right now, Lawrence Weiner, Tony Oursler, Joseph Bueys, Andrea Fraser, Bruce Nauman, Barbara Kruger, Stan Brackage, blah blah blah.
6. In your work does form follow function? Do you choose a medium to follow an idea or visa versa?
Yes, most of the time, but when I paint it lacks that, which is frustrating. I think that is why I have so much trouble always finding just painting alone enough for what I want to accomplish. My mediums are usually chosen after my ideas are first developed.
6. How has Dallas influenced your work? Does place influence your work in general? Similar to form follow function?
Dallas has definitely influenced a lot of the things I am currently working on and made me reconsider some of my unrealized ideas. For me, place or environment is really important for stimulating ideas. I like new places. The things that are challenging for me and that I don't quite understand about them are what I respond to most. Being content doesn't get me anywhere except pretty pictures. When there is nothing pushing me one way or the other and forcing me to fight back I become lazy/make things that I only enjoy to look at but are not satisfying conceptually. Being in Dallas has been productive so far, there are a lot of things here that I don't understand and that seem to disagree with me.
7. Text is used a lot in your work, what does a picture not give that text does?
Text is already a 2-D picture.
8. How do you see your role in the artmaking/viewing process?
I make things that are sometimes good and sometimes boring but either way would not exist without me wasting my time.
9. What is the role of process (and the purpose of it being projected back to the audience) in your work?
Process to me is fundamental because it is how a certain respected piece of art was made and how that very esteemed artist made it. Of course, the end product is still usually valued the most, but I am still not sure which is more important to me. I like both parts too much to decide. Process, participation (mental or physical), performance and also the final tangible form of a painting or sculpture. That is why a lot of my pieces have the theme of continuous-making and performance while still being a square that hangs on a wall. I did a whole series of paintings that had a line drawn down the middle. Some representing my want to blend all these things together and some simply acknowledging a disconnect. Does the artist make the piece or the piece make the artist?
10. What are you reading right now?
The Bell Jar, ha, which is suggestive in negative ways that Dallas does not help! Stories of God, poetry and Seneca: Letters From a Stoic.
11. Favorite thing to do on a summer afternoon?
Fall off roofs.
