Jill, I know one of the first things that people say when they come in is, ‘how do these two things—the

paintings and the installation—relate, and where does the fascination with the sun come from?’

Jill Daves: They relate in the sense that both the paintings and the installation are really about the sun,

and about marking time. The sun creates the wood, and it creates the wood grain as the tree grows

every year. And in a sense, it’s a marking of time. In the wood grain it’s a marking of years, since each

new line represents a year of life for the tree, and then whatever happens that we’re unaware of in that

year is represented by the space between the grain. And in the site-specific piece, it’s so transient that

those shadows will never happen again, and even while I’m making them they are changing. So they are

both kind of about this romantic loss, of trying to capture the unattainable.

DKM: One of the other things I’ve been seeing is that people come in and immediately see these

paintings as a very organic and intuitive, about this natural process of moving with nature, and relating

to natural patterns. In talking to you, I know that this is definitely true, but you also talk about the work

as having this obsessive and controlled quality to it. Could you talk about the process a bit, and then

talk a bit about the conversation and tension between those two aspects?

JD: Well, with the paintings it’s about finding a structure and deciding how many times I’m going to

repeat it. And it’s usually based loosely on how far apart the sections of manufactured wood grain are

(since the wood I paint on is not what occurs in nature, but is pieced together by a manufacturing

company to a desired width). Different kinds of wood have their grains farther apart, or more subtle

grain patterns in between. And then I start following that grain…And if I decide to more than just the

first pattern I chose it’s because I think it’s not working. [laughs] It’s sort of really intuitive, and so I

don’t know really how to explain why…

DKM: I guess what I’m asking is how you choose which path or part of the grain to follow? It seems

clear in some of the paintings that you followed the strongest elements of the grain, but in others not as

structurally obvious, and I’m wondering how you chose?

JD: I think I intuitively choose the parts that speak most strongly to me. And what happens is when you

do things where it repeats like that, the pattern overlaps itself and it just becomes thicker where the

different sections join and they got smashed together.

DKM: It’s interesting, in relation to what you’ve told me before, that because the manufactured

elements of the wood grain join together and your lines become more prominent there, it almost looks

as if you are trying to erase that mechanical nature of the manufacturing process…

JD: Right. But it also makes it more pronounced.

DKM: Yes! Moving on to the site-specific installation, could you tell us a little bit about how you began

that process, beginning with what happened when you first came to watch the way the sun moved in

the space?

JD: When I start, I really have to come in to the space to see where the sun goes and how it moves

throughout the day. When I came in here, I realized that from the beginning of the day until about

11:30am, the sun rises and moves. But then it hits the awning around 11:30 and from then on it’s just

gone. So, it’s an interesting endeavor, because all morning I’m chasing the shapes of the sun against

the windows and this one wall over here [pointing to the West wall of the gallery], and if there is a car

parked in one of the spaces in front of the building it blocks it.

The afternoon is

reflections from

when

cars are parked here at the stop light, so I’d have to sit there and wait for them to stop at the stoplight

and then run around with the ladder and try to catch them before they moved again. So in some places

you can see that the line just stops because they drove away before I could get there.

DKM: I remember coming in and loving that you had this little—actually, not so little—container, filled

with a zillion different shades of colored pencil. How does the installation process for you work with

those colors? Do you just grab whatever you grab, or do you choose…?

JD: No, I don’t have time to choose. It was really hard given how fast I had to move, I just had a handful

of them and you could hear them dropping all of the time. I just grabbed one of them and started going,

because I had to go so fast.

What was interesting was all that time I was sitting there waiting for the cars at the stoplight I would

look at what I had done already and think, ‘Oh, I should fix this’ and then I would say, ‘No, I can’t fix this!’

Because that’s not what this is about, it’s not about fixing anything. I just had to sit there and wait.

[laughing]

DKM: So, if it isn’t about fixing anything, what do you feel like it is about?

JD: Well, for me it really is about the beauty of the endeavor to try to capture something that is not

capturable, that’s not noticed very often. To see what people don’t look at or ignore—the wallflowers of

the world. Stuff that just is a marking of what’s been there, but it’s not ever going to change really. Does

that make sense?

DKM: That makes perfect sense. It also makes me think about this subtle element of surprise in the

experience of that room. One of the things I loved at the opening was that people who came in a bit

later—when it was dark outside and the contrast with the interior lights was stronger—seemed to walk

into that room thinking that they were coming into an empty space, that we had for some reason just

not put any art up in that room, and then they slowly discovered your drawings. I love the subtlety of

that experience, which I think is a hard thing to capture in a site-specific installation.

Something else I remember is that before the opening we talked about the possibility that people

stepping on drawing on the floor, and that was something you really didn’t want to happen. Can you talk

about that a little bit?

DKM: Right! But there were actually a couple of times where people came in and said that sort of thing

about your paintings, but in a very different way. More along the lines of, “Oh, I can tell that this was a

real process.” That they could see and recognize that there was an act of waiting and time involved.

Audience member: It’s also that it seems like a different part of the process is revealed …

JD: When I do these paintings, or any kind of painting or drawing, I think of them not in a gallery space

but in the house that they end up in. I always want these to be something that you would look at for

years and see something different. Just the interactions are so complex, which does have to take time.

DKM: Since you brought up grad school, I’m going to ask you talk a little bit about where you went to

grad school, and what that process was like for you.

JD: I went to grad school at the University of Illinois at Champagne

-Urbana

, and that was the smallest

place I’d ever lived. It’s in

Champagne- Urbana

, and if anyone doesn’t know where that is, it’s tiny. And I

went

there from

undergrad with more of a self-focus, much more interested in how you define yourself.

I started out doing things like paintings of earwax or my belly button fuzz and blowing them up really

big. I’d make paintings of microscopic things, like skin or whatever. So then I got pigeonholed in this

whole ‘girl trying to be…’ So then I went into more of these atmospheric, crazy pieces. Who is that guy,

Casper…who did all of those crazy sunsets? It would be like a European scene and everything would be

sort of plain and there would be cows or whatever, but the sky was just intense. It would be just about

the sky, with colors all meshing in together. And so my thesis show was all of these crazy color field

paintings, and I would take what was left on my brush and make these plaid paintings out of that, the

leftover paint. They were my leftover paint paintings. My thesis show was like this salon style show with

25 paintings, and the top would be these fields and then the bottom would be all of this plaid. It turned

out pretty funky.

DKM: And then when you left did that work carry with you?

JD: It did. I didn’t do the plaid paintings anymore, but I did these large paintings, all on canvas, that

became very geometric. They looked like the Hubble telescope, the way it looks when you look through.

Then I got pregnant and couldn’t paint with oil paint, and I hate acrylic paint, so I started doing these

tiny little obsessive tic mark drawings.

DKM: Are those the ones you call “Sweep Drawings”?

JD: Yes. Actually, I call them drawings, but they’re really tiny watercolor and gouache, with a lot of

negative space. Marking time.

DKM: Even when you talk about the plaid paintings, you get the idea that you are cataloguing and

referencing the constructed along with the natural, and the way those two things meet.

JD: Yeah. Well, I like the inability to be perfect. I like that a person can’t draw a perfect circle, can’t cut a

straight line, that kind of thing. I like the fact that you can’t, and that trying to do it, when you fail… That

is more interesting to me–the way that you fail.

DKM: Kind of entering into imperfection, instead of overriding it…

JD: Yes, that the beauty is in the imperfection, and the effort to be perfect.

Audience member: Do the titles of the paintings have a significance, a meaning?

JD: They are all just named Wood Grain, and the number that follows is how many times I repeat the

line. So this is Wood Grain 7, because I repeat the pattern seven times.

Audience member: So there isn’t any deeper meaning?

JD: No, I don’t really name them an idea. I would have been a writer if I wanted to tell people how to

think about them. [laughs] I’d rather have people come to their own conclusions, and bring their own

meaning. Because it’s sort of about the process more than how I feel about them.

Audience member: How many of this kind of site-specific installations have you done? What was the

first one that you did, and how did that come about?

JD: Well, the first thing I ever did was called Divots and Bumps, and that’s where I took the

imperfections in the wall and circled them repeatedly. That started in Pittsburgh. I had been thinking

about seeing things that mostly went unnoticed but were constantly around, so I started wondering

what I could do that was about the imperfections of everything. Because you think this perfect white

wall is a perfect white wall, but it’s not. So that’s where it started, and then right before we moved here I

had another opportunity. Pittsburgh is a place where they have a lot of funding for the arts and they

also have a lot of empty buildings. So friends of ours were architecture

professors

at Carnegie Melon,

but they were moving into a new spatial relationship. So they proposed a show in which they would take

over empty buildings and do shows there. They got this building that was downtown and it was in the

midst of being rehabbed, and it had all of this new drywall, but no electricity or anything like that. So I’m

thinking, what can I do? It’s brand new drywall, it doesn’t have any imperfections, there’s nothing wrong

with it! [laughing] So I couldn’t do the Divots and Bumps.

We had moved to LA already by that time, and it’s amazing because the sun here is fifty thousand times

brighter here than it is there. You know, my hair is five shades lighter than it was. [laughing]. I started

thinking about just watching in my house how the sun affects so much. Things get faded here so much

faster. So, they were asking me what I wanted to do, so I asked them which way the shadows went and

started to piece together that I wanted to follow the movement of the sun on the walls.

So that was 2007? And then I did a show here at Haus Gallery in Pasadena, which you know is actually

a house. And all of the imperfections of a gallery that used to be a house was perfect for me. And I did

the Chasing the Sun elements in the bathroom there. They had frosted glass windows and there was a

tree just outside so the sun would move through and onto the windows.

DKM: So often artists, even those who are doing work considered more experimental or installation

oriented, are doing things that are not ephemeral. Or even if they are meant to break down and

decompose over time, there is still usually a long amount of time in which that gets to happen. So do

you have a sense of loss or fear, or sadness about creating something that is not just meant to fade

over time, but to actually be painted over?

JD: You know, I don’t. I always knew that it was going to be that way. It’s about only existing for a certain

time anyway.

DKM: When I watched you doing it, it seemed like it was really liberating…

JD: Oh yeah, I had a great time doing it. It wears me out. After I’m done, I’m exhausted. But during it, it’s

a lot of fun.

DKM: I think that’s interesting too, that you wouldn’t know from looking at the installation that how

physical it is as an activity of creation. You were exhausted after five days. I remember you came in after

day three saying, “Every muscle in my body hurts!”

JD: [laughing] Well, it was those four hours in the morning that really got me, because I was really just

running around with a ladder for those four hours.

DKM: It’s so interesting to me that that physical exertion doesn’t show itself in that sense of hecticness

in the work, and it ends up having such a calm feeling to it, which makes me feel like you really are

capturing something that is pre-existing in the space, instead of imposing yourself on the space. I think

so often site-specific installation is about taking a space and putting something into it that completely

changes it and makes it something else. Here, it seems like you took what was there and brought it out.

JD: I just noticed it. [laughing]

DKM: [laughing] Does anyone else have any questions?

Noah Young (Jill’s husband): I was wondering if you can talk a little bit about how you always put

something in the drawings that no one is ever going to see…

JD: Yep, on the back of one of the columns in this installation, I drew on the outside, so you can only see

the drawing from the outside of the gallery.

Noah Young: So how does that fit in? Because in almost everything you do there’s something hidden

like that, so it seems as if it must be conscious.

JD: Well, in this case, that’s just where the sun was. But I also know that people will only see and notice

so much in a room. And knowing it’s still under there, and that someone might sand down the wall

someday and find these things, these little bits of drawings almost like artifacts, is kind of great.

DKM: I like that, too. If you talk about capturing things that most people don’t notice, I like that you are

bringing things out that might also accidentally be left behind. You know, when we are repainting that

room, and there’s some drawing in a hard to notice piece of a column, we might miss it and not paint

over it. I like the idea that there might be a little bit of Jill Daves in there hiding during the next show, and

the one after that.