Artist Interview: Rejin Leys
Rejin Leys is a Brooklyn-born mixed-media book artist and art educator of Haitian descent, currently residing in New York. She has exhibited in museums and galleries internationally and has been featured in such publications as Small Axe, Boutures, and the Bread & Roses Cultural Project Social Justice Calendar. Her work encompasses fine art traditions and political themes.
She exhibited 20 drawings from her “100 Drawings” series in Disillusions. They are executed on various types of paper, including ruled steno paper, heavy drawing pad paper, and the underside of mailing envelopes with the plastic return address window intact. A precedent for this body of work is the artist’s book, Important Information Enclosed (April 2011), which features drawings of rice, insects, a plastic grocery bag, and the silhouetted cameo of the head of a hen, such as those made popular in the early nineteenth-century by the physiognotrace machine and by artists like Moses Williams who cut profiles of middle-class patrons. Similarly, Leys’ hen is endowed with a persona. Reiterations of these images are duplicated to various degrees throughout the “100 Drawings” series. There are hens, stars (think chicken and stars soup), beans, insects, purses, bones, skeletons, and batteries as stock images. They are endowed with a malleability that transcends cultures, time, and space. Rather than a tautological summary of images, one finds in these drawings the delicacy of line and shape and a tender approach to the medium and to the act of drawing as meditation.
In one composition of rice, insects, and beans, Leys layers the images with the actual paper from a fortune cookie that sagely states, “out of confusion comes new patterns.” Leys informs me of the cognitive practice of systems thinking – that is, how everything affects everything. For example, she ruminates on how the sustenance on your plate is affected by NAFTA, global trade, diplomacy, oil, and other social and political interjections. She mentions the toxicity of foods contaminated with pesticides, herbicides, and hormones saying, “We are eating a cocktail of chemicals.”
This reflective consciousness streamlines into discussing other imagery from her “100 Drawings” series, especially the rice. In the interview, Leys discusses the physicality of drawing rice as a meditative act, slowing down the body and quieting the mind. Since these drawings were conducted almost daily, the drawing of rice became a daily meditation. The impetus to make the same mark thousands of times over, paired with the simplicity of the design of rice as mini-ellipses, creates the space for a transcendental experiment.
Tashima Thomas: Rejin, I really like the piece you wrote in your art journal on chicken and rice. Is it okay if I share those thoughts here?
Rejin Leys: Of course. I had been drawing just rice and remembering the origin of this drawing project in the 2008 food shortages and protests. The idea grew when I began to think about what eats what, evolution, and the connections between all living things. Some of the imagery that went into the drawings was new material for me, and some was a reworking of old favorites. Was it just a coincidence that searching through my collection of collage materials yielded that page of pictures of different breeds of hens? Had I thought about hunger in past projects, or were the hens collected for a different reference? Until today, I haven’t cared for the idea that artists should keep all kinds of junk that we will one day use in our work. But now I have this image of myself traveling through life with an archive of paper. Bits and pieces come out that are coincidentally relevant. Periodically, I dip into the archive and whatever emerges will influence how I frame the issues of the day.
TT: You’ve made reference to your work before as being an internal dialogue. Would you mind sharing some of that dialogue? For example, I remember your mentioning the physicality of drawing rice as a meditative act, quieting the mind – could you share your thoughts on some of this kind of internal dialogue?
RL: I know that I’ve spent a year drawing rice as way to quiet my mind and settle myself down – it was very meditative. But it’s also a symbolic contribution to world hunger and to focus on that issue and other people’s needs. I drew a lot of rice last year.
TT: Did you connect with any world hunger organizations?
RL: Originally, the idea grew out of a project called “Seeds for Haiti.” “Seeds for Haiti” is an organization which raises money in order to give farmers the amount of rice and beans that they would need to plant their crops, and from the harvest they would bank their seeds for themselves and for their neighbors. They were required to save their seeds in the group’s food bank so the whole community would benefit. So many people in different parts of the world relate to rice – it is part of so many different cultures and communities.
TT: Because, as you say, rice is part of so many cultures and globally affecting so many lives, do you find that people often share their rice stories with you?
RL: Well, I find it just mainly in the way people immediately respond to the work. I have a friend whose family is Vietnamese who told me how much he relates to the work because rice is so much of a staple in their diet. I also know of an artist using mounds of rice in which each mound represents a statistic on world hunger like how many people go hungry in different countries. Rice is often represented as the food people grew up on and as their main sustenance, but it can also be used to tell stories.
TT: Would you consider yourself a storyteller?
RL: I never saw myself as a storyteller in a narrative way. I think my work is very ambiguous. I don’t think it tells only one particular kind of story. It’s open-ended enough so that people can bring their own stories to it. I don’t know to what degree it’s true, but I’d like to think that rather than dictating the story, I’m more of a facilitator. I like the idea of the viewer being active.
TT: Speaking of viewers, what are some of the responses you’ve received to your work in Disillusions?
RL: I had some good questions during the symposium. One of them was about the purse I used in the drawing because it appears in the earlier works where I was just focusing on food in the hunger series. Now I see that it is part of a different story. The hen is also telling her own story. Because I’m a vegetarian, I don’t think of her as food but as a character in her own story.
TT: You had mentioned before that you don’t think of chicken as food, “It’s a character.” These characters in your work are related to what you referred to as systems thinking. Could you explain a little more about how these characters are connected? What do they have in common?
RL: Most of the time our thinking on all kinds of issues assumes everything is separate, whether they’re things that are personal or things that are happening way out there. We don’t really think of the connections with and between things. We can’t solve something unless we’re thinking of the big picture. The way we think of hens as food creates a hierarchy, but we think of other animals as pets because of the same hierarchy. We create hierarchies everywhere. Take for example how CEOs earn big salaries, and street sweepers don’t. If we look at the way resources are allocated, the way some histories are marginalized, then everything we can look at and talk about we can look at in relation to hierarchies. What determines hunger shortages in one place and the way food is allocated in another? The farmers are part of a system that facilitates taking a surplus of food here and selling it to other countries. We want to have a positive trade balance so we turn other countries into markets for our trade products. We’ve manipulated their economies to become buyers. It’s all about determining whose goals are important. We create this hierarchy so that we are the winner in our own game. There are winners, and there are losers.
TT: So then, in a way, the hen is the loser as a commodity in the hierarchy?
RL: I have one piece called Emerging Superpowers. Politically, the term superpowers refers to countries with military and economic power. In Emerging Superpowers, the hen is depicted surrounded by a force field. She is developing superpowers for herself. For once, she’s going to be the winner – representing all of the people in the global narrative. She represents in this political moment, the 99% of the population who are not in control of their destinies. The hen in the coop – she thinks it’s her own life, but the outcome has already been decided for her. I’m not saying people are chickens, but there is a certain parallel.
TT: What you have said resonates with this political moment and with movements like Occupy Wall Street and other global occupation demonstrations.
RL: The manipulation of the 99% works best if the people being manipulated don’t realize they are being manipulated. Then, when people find out, maybe something can be done about it.
TT: We talked earlier about your appreciation for shapes. Could you share ideas about this appreciation?
RL: I do find that if I draw a picture of a dog, it can only be a dog. If I draw an oval, it could be an oval, or a grain of rice, a bug, an eye, etc. There’s something about a mutable form. By drawing a circle over and over again, I can tell so many stories simultaneously because it could be the sun, or the moon, or a hole in the ground. The shape can go from being a grain of rice to a bean. I appreciate the simplicity of shapes in that way. I’ve taught the visual arts and have heard for so many years from people how they wish they could draw. But, if you can draw an oval, you can tell so many stories. And it’s also very contemporary, now you can be a great artist without having to draw the dog.
TT: Are you still working towards completing the “100 Drawings” series?
RL: I have to get to a point where I feel I’ve done 100. When I began the project, the idea was to draw quickly to see what would happen. But I’ve become more conscious of the direction the drawings are going in now, which changes and slows down the process.
TT: So, do you see the story going in a different direction?
RL: The latest ones have less to do with the superpowers, although often the hen is telling the story. I’ve been interested in making more artists’ books. I feel like I’m doing a book where the book is an image in the drawing. It’s starting to look like a hen who is writing her own book.
TT: Will the artist book be considered part of the “100 Drawings?”
RL: So far, the book is an image in the drawing itself. It’s among the 100 drawings, but I would like to work on a book toward the end of the project. I believe it could sum up the project.
TT: Many of your drawings are committed to notebook paper, ripped from a steno. How did that happen? In other words, how did you decide to draw on steno paper? Did it happen organically?
RL: It did. It began when I was working with the images from the archive. I was working with the material at hand and using what I already had as a resource. In actually making the drawings, I wanted to do the same. I didn’t go out and buy paper; I used what I had on hand. My husband, who was an archivist and community organizer, passed away last year. He had dozens of steno notebooks, many of them with only the first few pages used. Before donating some of his papers to the Schomburg Center, I removed all of the blank pages from his notebooks, so I have all of this blank paper which I’ve been using in various ways. I also liked the idea of building a sheet of paper out of different papers. I like building or assembling the papers into a larger sheet. I’m very paper oriented. I’ve never painted on canvas or been attracted to painting on canvas. In fact, there’s a whole series I made of hand - made notebooks at some point where I was cutting and painting out of the handmade journals.
TT: The medium, shapes, and images all have very purposeful components.
RL: I have an artist friend whose work is beautiful—beautiful textures, colors and layering, beautiful images—and very political. He once suggested that if you want to talk about serious issues using images of a fist, blood, or violence, he said, you have to make the work beautiful to get the audience to actually look at it. It’s organic too. It’s not about how I am going to hide the issues. The issues are very clear, for example, like working on the “Seeds for Haiti” project. But once the images are chosen, once I have chosen the images from the archives, during the pre-production stage, once you have this vocabulary of images, I’m not constructing a story out of each piece. Art is about play as well. The drawings take on a life of their own and go in their own direction.
This interview was conducted in 2011 and was published in the exhibition catalog for the show, “Disillusions: Gendered Visions of the Caribbean and its Diasporas,” curated by Tatiana Flores. For more information, please see the link below.
http://arcthemagazine.com/arc/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/disillusions-FINALx.pdf
Also, for more information about Rejin Leys’s work check out her website:
