Jean Seestadt
Brooklyn, NY
Interview by Danielle Walter
As an artist, what is your primary medium?
I do mostly paper cutting though I am branching out into different materials. Also, the video and photo documentation of the work has become part of the process. I was a painter until just a couple of years ago. I made the switch because I felt really confined by paint and painting’s limits. I am uninterested in making work that hangs on a wall for a gallery.
Describe your work and your approach.
I see my work as whimsical, ethereal, hopeful, and ridiculous. I create walls and clouds that I know will fail, but suggest the possibility that they will survive. I spend hours meticulously cutting paper and leaving it on the street for people to destroy. In some ways the artworks are really idiotic. Each time I complete an installation, I hope for a moment that it will somehow last, or something amazing will happen, but ultimately each artwork always ends up in the garbage. Part of my creation is the hopeful moment that precedes the destruction. My work is not intended to be a metaphor for anything in particular. I just want to create these specific interactions, which only a few viewers will be able to experience. I want my viewers to witness and consider these impossible relationships, the kind of unstable balancing acts that we wish will work and sometimes we believe might work. It may seem naive, and perhaps it is, but it is really no different than a million other interactions we hope will last in our daily lives.
Explain your process for creating these installations?
I spend a frustrating amount of time trying to figure out what my project is going to be. My instinct is to push through an idea and see how it works out, so I have to really focus on trying to conceptually make the piece all the way through before physically making it. Once I have the ideas all ironed out I make the materials (cutting paper) in the studio and then bring it to the location to install.
Rogue installation in public space can be risky. Have you ever had a dangerous experience?
Honestly, I am lucky that I am a well dressed white girl, I doubt it would go so smoothly for any other demographic. I have been threatened to have the cops called on me and I made several people very angry with the installations I did on the subways… But the amazing thing is how kind and excited most people are about the work!
Are there any new tactics you are hoping to try in the coming year? Any new ideas you are hoping to address?
I am opening up to the idea of new materials. What I enjoy most about my work is the ridiculous hopelessness of it, so I want to expand on that as a concept. Each work I install with the ideal that they last, that they function, knowing that in the end they will become trash-an artwork without the commodity. So I want to push that idea.
Tell me about the path that led you to live and work in Brooklyn.
I grew up in Minneapolis, MN and I went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for my BFA. I knew then that I wanted to come out here to see what the New York art scene was all about after spending so much time studying it. After graduating and a year of dilly dallying in England I moved out here and started working in galleries in Chelsea. A couple of years later I started graduate school at Hunter College and I am about half way through the MFA program.
What are some of your favorite spots in New York?
I love my neighborhood, Crown Heights. I have never been such a part of a community and it has been a really wonderful 4 years here. I also live very close to Prospect Park (Brooklyn’s superior Central Park) which is great for frisbee, badminton, running, etc. You really need some breathing space like that out here.
What do you like to do when you’re not in your studio or hanging paper around the city?
I spend a good portion of my days running. I get the same high from that as I do from the meticulousness of cutting paper. It is really meditative and allows me to brainstorm about my work without distractions. Just an hour a day to think. It is a luxury most people don’t have or make time for.
