May 2023 AIR: Kale Serrato Doyen
We are excited to share the work of our May Artist in Residence Kale Serrato Doyen
Q & A
Q: Hi Kale, we’re so excited to have you joining us for May! As a Chicagoan that attended college in Michigan, I can attest to the fact that Michiganders use their hands as a map. I find it really interesting that you make that connection between the hand as a map and the hand as an extension of a camera. What do you think makes the rust belt unique to explore in photographs over other parts of the country?
The overlaying of images happened as a result of my desire to arrange the past, present, and what could possibly be the future in one image. I’ve always appreciated what collage and overlaying provided as far as collapsing and depicting different things within the same frame. I find it very satisfying to overlay images that were made during different times, places, or contexts and conjoin them in the present. It allows me to play with the non-linearity of time and how we might arrange our own memories of a feeling or a moment - this is how i process my own memories and subjectivity. It’s really exciting to play with and arrange photographs in a way that’s not typically encouraged or taught. With film photography especially, it adds that additional layer of multidimensionality and afterlife to the image, and how it can be read, or felt. the arrangements i create feel poetic in a way to me, because they’re rooted in an emotional sensitivity i have to spaces, places, and people. It’s gotten to a point where I’m constantly obsessing and mapping out ways to apply this to various projects, and even in my video work. As I evolve i want to continuously challenge myself with what it means to “make” an image and what becomes of it’s afterlife - the ways it shows up in the world, and how.
Q: As an analog photographer, I immediately notice that you really capture moments in time that feel like unique standstills of silence in the midwest. Do you seek this out or think it naturally occurs?
Most of my photographs are happenstance—when something happens to catch my eye and I happen to have my camera (because sometimes I don’t!). When I do seek places out, it is in recollection of a memory, and I calculate when to visit that place based on the position of the sun. I use my grandpa’s Canon FX, and he has told me to take of picture of something immediately because that lighting will never be the same again. I think his words also apply to the temporality of the Rust Belt landscape, as I’ve seen many places rot or get torn down. I also like to think that my images are cinematic. Film photography and even our phones are much more accessible mediums than cinematography. Even though many of my images are a matter of happenstance, I look back on them and feel like I’m watching a movie about my life. They often form sequences, rhythms, and motifs.
Q: I love that you have a background in art history and you use that alongside digital mapping to inform your practice. Was that a natural progression from the analytical research side of art into creating your own art? What was that experience like?
For me, the interest in art came first—as a kid I wanted to be an artist and I began making my own photographs at an early age. Art history allows me to be creative in multiple ways—researching, writing, mapping, and I even sometimes include my own photographs in my research. I often wonder how different artists would be if they had to get a PhD in art history first! I often see my own creative stakes sneaking into my research, and vice versa. Although I didn’t begin mapping photographs for art historical arguments until grad school, I can see how my own images are a map of my personal history, and I weave personal histories of photographers by mapping their works.
Q: You find comfort in the tangibility of film but a lot of analog photography becomes digital archives. How have you navigated that in your art practice?
I think that we all experience some kind of anxiety around technology especially in the digital age. We put faith in computers and the internet but fear that they will crash and lose files, which are intangible. That is why this residency is important to me, because much of my art practice currently only exists as a digital archive and, therefore, doesn’t feel real! When I was a kid, my mom saved all of our family photos and made many scrap books. Now that I study art history and work in museums, I place a significant weight on the “real” object versus its online record. Having a source object is important to me for historic preservation—although it is true that even tangible things cannot last forever, just like our digital files.
Q: The New Topographics movement has influenced your practice as a photographer. How are you actively trying to change that history?
I have spent years thinking about this question! There is no doubt that New Topographics has influenced my own photographs, but at the same time I am working to reframe how we have historically thought of that movement. In that exhibition, ten white and predominantly male photographers had viewed the 1970s American landscape as “banal” and “deadpan.” In her critique of this exhibition, Deborah Bright has asked: what do women think of American landscape? In my own research, I’m asking what artists of color and queer artists of color thought of this New Topographics-era landscape, a time of vehement civil rights advocacy amidst nationwide structural inequality. Historically, white, land-owning men have been the ones to generate landscape representations in maps and art, typically in the advancement of a universalizing science or ideologies of the Enlightenment. For me, a landless, queer woman of color living with the remnants of this history, as we all do, the stakes are different. I, and many other artists of color who evoke landscape, do so to reify a presence that has not been accounted for in this representational history. We photograph the landscape to document, critique, and remember.
KALE SERRATO DOYEN
Kale Serrato Doyen (she/her) is an emerging art historian and analog photographer. She is a third-generation Mexican American from Saginaw, Michigan. She graduated from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2020 with a B.A. in Art History and Museum Studies minor. Kale has completed curatorial internships at the National Museum of Mexican Art, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, and was a 2018-2020 Mellon Undergraduate Curatorial Fellow at the Art Institute of Chicago. In the 2020-2021 academic year, Kale was a Hot Metal Bridge Post-Baccalaureate Fellow of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, and has matriculated into the Ph.D. program. Kale studies modern and contemporary art history of the United States with a focus on representations of landscape by Black and Latinx artists. By engaging with Digital Humanities curriculum, she employs digital mapping in her research to add spatial context to art historical analysis. At Pitt, she was a graduate intern for Digital Scholarship Services and the Visual Media Workshop laboratory. She has maintained a landscape photography practice since 2019, primarily using her grandpa’s 35mm camera. With an interest in fashion, Kale also turns her photographs into wearable art and manages an online vintage clothing shop.