As a four-year-old living in Lenoir, South Carolina, Stephen Eichhorn refused to learn how to read. While everyone else in his class was singing their ABCs, he’d stubbornly deemed it unnecessary — he already knew he was destined to be an artist, communicating through images rather than words. “People asked me, how are you going to read your show cards or write press releases?” Eichhorn recalls. “My answer was, I’m going to marry someone who knows how to read! The resistance was so heavy they put me in a special ed class.” His protest didn’t last more than a few months, luckily, but his uncanny commitment to his future career did: At 14, for example, he interned for a group of Star Wars toymakers who taught him freehand drafting and craft techniques, and at 17 he attended a summer art program at SAIC before enrolling there a year later. Since graduating in 2006 he’s been living the dream instead of planning for it, working independently from a studio he shares with his wife in Chicago.
If there was one moment when Eichhorn wavered, it was during college, when he suddenly became obsessed with the idea of being an architect, and working with a completely different sense of space and scale. But instead he funneled those impulses back into his sculpture practice, using model-making materials to produce pieces that were “almost like drawing in space with white girders,” he says. The intricate collages he’s become known for lately also carry evidence of those interests: “I’m looking at plant forms as architectural elements, as recurring structures that mimic something manmade,” he says. “It’s about the complex harmony between the natural and the manmade.” To make them, he applies his laser-focusing skills in a more literal sense, spending 8 to 10 monotonous hours each day snipping out tiny plant and flower parts, with Arrested Development playing in the background to keep him from getting too lost in the process.
That’s where SU’s newest contributor Debbie Carlos found him this past spring when she visited his studio for our mini-series on Windy City artists (stay tuned for part two tomorrow). See what she saw in the slideshow below, then be sure to visit her own site to see all the other past studio visits she’s done with talents like Ellen Van Dusen, Laura Lombardi, and Doug Johnston.
One of Eichhorn’s signature plant collages, which he layers piece by tiny piece from images he’s painstakingly cut out of books and magazines. “Initiatlly the subject matter for these wasn’t plants, but in working with my source material I quickly honed in on that,” he says. “In the past few years I’ve moved from green foliage, to orchids, to now cacti and succulents,” with each collage focusing mainly on one plant family.
This one, made for a solo show last year at the Elmhurst Art Museum, is mostly orchids, underscored with bursts of wheatgrass. To make a piece like this, Eichhorn will lay down a loose initial arrangement, then add pieces organically here and there as he glues the arrangement down to the canvas with archival photo mount spray. “It’s like a paper puzzle,” he says.
He spends most of his time cutting these tiny components out, and stores mounds of them in flat files around his studio. These drawers contain flowers, grass, and fine orchid pieces, all in separate piles. “The first 2-3 collages I made came from National Geographic, but it was hard to reduce those images into something almost stock,” Eichhorn says. “So I opened it up anything. Now my images range from relatively vintage to brand new, as long as I can pull them from their original source enough to where they aren’t tethered to that other context. Every collage has multiple sources, sometimes across multiple years.”
Eichhorn organizes his cuttings by size, from tiny bits of foliage to large orchids. These files contain smaller image plates he’s saved for future cutting. “I have a huge cactus backlog, and a mushroom backlog too,” he notes.
When our photographer, Debbie Carlos, visited Eichhorn last spring, he was hard at work on a 4×6-foot orchid collage (the largest panel he can get up and down the stairs). Pictured are the stacks of orchid books he used to source the pieces for it, in the foreground. “I have piles of books everywhere,” he says. “My studio is only 500 square feet, so it can get hard to maneuver.”
Another pile: “Like 3.5 years of trash-paper scrap,” Eichhorn laughs. “After I remove my collage components, I cut the backgrounds into tiny leaves. For a minute I was doing bootleg Mike Mills leaf bursts, then I decided to just incorporate them into a kind of studio object. It’s been this really odd extra ritual within what’s already a pretty ritualistic practice.”
For awhile, Eichhorn had another side ritual putting cat faces on plants, which helped him gain early notoriety on the blogosphere. “When I would take studio breaks, I’d be like let’s make a stupid cat collage; I didn’t show them to anyone until I thought to put them on tumblr,” he recalls. “I stopped making them a couple years ago, but people still ask for them, and I still have a folder full of hundreds of thousands of weird, awful, and creepy cat portraits from the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s.”
Some of Eichhorn’s recent pieces are more deconstructed than the plant collages, like this panel featuring image plates of cactuses and plants, some underlaid with wallpaper or dotted with holes. “It’s pulling together some of the different imagery that’s existed in the studio for the past few years,” he says.
The newest are mounted on polished brass. “I made a couple of these panels that almost read like boards, that relate to some of my other collages and objects and are starting to nod towards narrative,” says Eichhorn. “It’s creating a loose story around this kind of cult of plants where some of my forms and objects are coming from. My last show at Ebersmoore gallery in Chicago (since closed) envisioned this cult and what it would do with some of these plants.”
An inspiration wall in the studio contains found images, small collages, and photos Eichhorn took of his wife.
Eichhorn posing with a textile piece he created for a show with Drag City Records at a weird Polish soccer bar in Chicago. He wanted to make some kind of takeaway for visitors who couldn’t buy his primary works, so he sent images to a digital loom in North Carolina and got back a series of these blankets. “It was a fun, informal way of letting my collages take on a different life.”
Another quilt in the series, with Eichhorn’s then-in-progress 4×6 orchid panel visible in the foreground. He was also, at the time, preparing to start a piece for the Chicago Transit Authority which finally launched last week, part of a series of artist commissions to be hung at the Damen L-train station.
Long before he began making collages, Eichhorn specialized in drawing and scuplture, and he still does plenty of the latter. This piece is from a collaboration he did two years ago with the fashion designers Creatures of the Wind, for whom he designed textile patterns and then created headpieces and visuals for the runway show made from black plastic flowers. Pictured here are one of six panels that were originally shown as one “black floral void,” but that he reclaimed, separated, and coated in black graphite to become new pieces in their own right.
Wall hangings from the same Creatures of the Wind show, made from plastic flowers, wood, and jewelry components, have evolved into newer pieces like this, which see the coated flowers and jewelry components dripping from brass discs….
His tool wall is pretty basic, containing pliers, blades, framing tools, a saw, and a black metal Olfa knife he bought in San Francisco a few years ago that he uses for collage cutting almost exclusively. “My wife works for Mcmaster-Carr, so that’s where some of the raw-er materials I use have come in,” he says. “I can also get bulk X-Acto blades and cutting mats, too.”
A collection of good luck charms, including old nails, railway pennies, $2 bills, World Trade Center matches, and flowered bullets from a shooting range. Not that Eichhorn needs much luck at this point: While his website is being updated, follow his up-and-coming career on Twitter, and stay tuned for our second Chicago artist’s studio visit shot by Debbie Carlos, launching on the site tomorrow.
Portland is a place where, so the saying goes, the ’90s are alive and well. And it may very well be the only place that could have spawned an artist like Emily Counts, who deals with the self-reflective nostalgia of outdated technological innovations once found in her childhood home: dial-up telephones sculpted in porcelain and stoneware, a life-size fax machine, an interactive Mac SE computer made from walnut, casting epoxy, glass, porcelain, copper, and electrical wiring that acts as a two-way mirror after a button is pressed on the keyboard, lighting up the sculpture’s interior. “I’m interested in the mystery of these inventions that we seem to take for granted in our everyday life,” says the 35-year-old Seattle native, who we first spotted on photographer Carlie Armstrong’s blog Work.Place. “For me, there’s a thin line between technology and magic.”
It’s not every day that one of our subjects answers the phone by giddily announcing she’s just opened the mail to find the Legend soundtrack she ordered and proclaiming that 1985 Tom Cruise fantasy flick to be her favorite movie. But then San Francisco artist Sarah Applebaum has always tended to march to the beat of her own drum: Paying no mind when her work meanders back and forth between craft and art, she mostly uses dime-store materials like yarn, papier mâché, and felt. Unlike most crafters, she often turns those materials into three-dimensional symbols plucked from her subconscious.
It’s a wonder that Jim Drain isn’t a hoarder of epic, A&E-worthy proportions. Sure, nearly every corner of the 3,000-square-foot Miami studio he shares with fellow artist and girlfriend Naomi Fisher is crammed full of stuff — chains, knitted fabric scraps, yarns, paint cans, talismen, toilet tops, costumes, books, prints, past works, and parts of past works that have been dismembered, all jockeying for attention. But considering Drain has worked with 10 times that many mediums in his nearly 15 years of making art, fashion, and furniture — often incorporating junk found in thrift stores and back alleys — hey, it could be a lot worse. “My dad will find something and go, I got this weird thing I think you’ll like, and my friends do it too, and I’m like, I’m not a trash collector!” he insists.
