Mary Younakof / Art Affairs / Scope NY 2007 / Interview (r2)

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At Scope art fair 2007 the gallery Art Affairs presented an installation by Los Angeles artist Mary Younakof. Mary has worked with a variety of media including photography, sculpture, video and artist books. Her installation at Scope features iconic figures and accouterments of war. We met Mary Younakof at her installation at Scope where she explained her work to us. Scope New York 2007, February 26, 2007.

Transcript

00:00 Hi, my name is Mary Unicoff. I'm an artist from Los Angeles.

00:04 I'm at the Scope Fair in New York, 2007.

00:09 This is my piece. It's called "Rescue Mission."

00:13 The piece is made of all of digital prints or inkjet prints.

00:20 It's made all done in photography with 4x5 imagery.

00:25 A lot of the images that you're looking at are all made with toys.

00:34 A lot of the work that I do is originating from either kitsch objects or dolls.

00:42 In this particular project that I've chosen to do, a special project for the Scope Art Fair,

00:48 I concentrated on using these GI Joe knockoffs, which are army toys

00:56 that have been modeled after the GI Joe figure,

01:00 which is a figure that's popular, a popular doll that was brought out around the time of Barbie

01:07 in the late '50s or so.

01:10 Anyway, these dolls, I have taken the dolls and created a narrative setting.

01:16 In this case, what I was thinking of when I made the work was a lot of the imagery

01:23 and the current state of affairs of the war in Iraq.

01:28 A lot of the imagery we see through newspapers.

01:31 We're seeing a lot of rescues and that kind of thing.

01:34 Also, what we see a lot written about really lately is the government,

01:44 particularly President Bush, trying to send more troops to Iraq.

01:49 These are the real big issues that are really hot right now at the moment.

01:53 Everybody's kind of against him sending more troops, and he's kind of just wanting to send the troops.

01:59 I was feeling that when I was making this project and creating the narrative,

02:04 I created the work in such a way that there is a question being asked, a question being posed.

02:13 What you have is a helicopter, and it's kind of immediately looking to be like a rescue mission.

02:19 But if you kind of look more closely, some of the images you're looking at,

02:24 the helicopter, there are no pilots in the helicopter,

02:28 and they're kind of falling into this vortex that's in the ground.

02:33 So the question comes up is, are they really being rescued,

02:36 or are they falling into this kind of abyss of kind of somewhere that it's going into a place that we can't see?

02:45 It kind of really is a question that poses itself for the viewer to answer,

02:54 and really there is no easy answer. There is no real answer.

03:00 That's what I was trying to establish with the work that I made for the fair.

03:05 It's very strong imagery, and the figures are made.

03:08 They're very small figures, maybe six or seven inches tall,

03:14 and I've made them into life-size figures so that the figures can actually,

03:19 when you kind of walk into the space, that the figures actually,

03:22 you forget that you're looking at dolls and toys,

03:26 that you're actually, it's kind of embracing you as though it's the real thing.

03:31 One of the things that I found really interesting in making this particular project was

03:37 that the detail of these toy weapons, I found these toys,

03:43 and most of these toys ended up having maybe about 50 weapons that they came with,

03:48 and the weapons were so highly detailed that when I blew them up to life-size,

03:53 they really looked like the real thing, and I found that to be another layer of interest for me,

03:59 that these toys that children are playing with, they aren't so innocent.

04:05 They have a lot of detail, and I think kids are walking away today

04:08 with much more information about what these weapons look like.

04:12 I mean, before, when I think technology wasn't so refined,

04:20 manufacturing could make these so detailed now,

04:22 but before that, when technology wasn't so refined,

04:25 toys were made and they were very generalized.

04:28 A gun kind of looked like a gun, but if you blew it up, it looked less like a gun than it ever would,

04:33 and in this case, what I found that was really fascinating was

04:36 when I blew things up to life-size, they became more real,

04:40 and that was really a new development in the body of work that I made here at the Scope Fair.

04:47 Thank you.

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