Wendy Kveck

Interview by Justin Favela

Wendy Kveck and Justin Favela have known each other for years through the art community in Las Vegas where they're both based. Last month, the two artists got together at Kveck's home to talk about her work as an artist, feminist and advocate, the relationship between her paintings, performances and community, and much more. This conversation gives us a close look at Kveck's bold multidisciplinary practice in which she takes a magnifying glass to cultural signifiers and examines behavioral issues of gender and identity through the mediums of painting, drawing, collage, and performance. We’re excited to share a condensed version of the interview here, and you can listen to the full conversation on Favela’s podcast, The Art People.

Justin Favela (JF): I want to get into how you got here, how you got to Vegas? Where you're from. Where did you come from?

Wendy Kveck (WK): I’m from the Midwest. I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, and I went to the University of Iowa in Iowa City for my undergraduate art degree. I was the first person in my family to go to college. I lived in Atlanta for about five years, shortly after graduation, doing visual merchandising, then moved to Las Vegas in 1999 with my husband to help friends open a restaurant off the Strip. Moving to Vegas allowed me to reconnect with my art practice; shortly after our move here, I decided to apply to graduate school.

JF: What was your early art experience, how did you know you wanted to become an artist?

WK: My mother drew with me when I was young. She recognized that I was creative, that I loved to draw and make things. She searched and found an artist who was teaching private art lessons out of her home studio in Elk Grove Village, where I grew up; so I learned oil painting when I was twelve or thirteen. That was an important experience, I realize now, not only the art lessons, but my first experience of being part of a community that was intergenerational, outside of my family. I was making art with a group of women who were in their thirties and forties, talking about our paintings and families. I continued my lessons with lessons through high school, where I took art classes, but also experimented with theater and dance. I was drawn to those activities, in part, because they were out of my comfort zone, but I ultimately knew that visual art was the language and experience I was most interested in pursuing in college.

JF: Did you get a degree in painting? I met you when you were a graduate student. What was your undergraduate experience like?

WK: Yes I did my BFA in painting and drawing at the University of Iowa’s School of Art and Art History. I was making figurative paintings and drawings from family photos, trying to express my fear of intimacy, my anxiety and discomfort in my body at the time. I had a studio for two years, and I had to produce a solo exhibition my senior year. I had a work study scholarship, so I worked for a Dada scholar and for Estera Milman, who founded the archive project Alternative Traditions in Contemporary Arts, doing data entry on the Fluxus archives. That in-depth introduction to Dada and Fluxus was formative. So was my Art Since 1945 class, as it is for most art students.

JF: Yeah. It's interesting what sticks from those art history classes because it's like one day, one lesson or one art movement that really affects you, just depending on what's happening or the people around you.

WK: Yes! That was my introduction to feminist artists, performance and body art: Hannah Wilke, Carolee Schneeman, Adrian Piper, Ana Mendieta, who was an alumna of the Art Department there. That was huge for me. Donna, a co-worker at the Deadwood, the hippie bar where I worked, loaned me her copy of Susan Faludi’s Backlash. My art education before college was very traditional, without much history or contemporary context. The program at Iowa is more progressive than people would think (Iowa stereotypes), Hans Breder developed the Intermedia Program. I took an Intermedia class, and it was my first experience doing any sort of performance or new media work. The female graduate painters treated me like colleagues, and I worked closely with two very important female faculty mentors; one was Deborah Boardman who the art community lost in 2015.

Couched, 2014

Oil on Arches oil paper

50 x 40 in.

JF: You started the program at the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) in 2004. That's where I met you. I think it was 2006, maybe. It was the first art class—official art class—that I've ever taken, and I always wanted to do art, but I wasn't encouraged to do it. I can't even imagine having my mom pay for art lessons. She would always be like, "Stop doing that, go outside like the regular boys." You know?!

WK: I know, I’m grateful for that!

JF: Let's get into your early work because I definitely see the influence of your oil painting. In graduate school you were using frosting at the time and just making these really colorful, rich paintings. Then you were also working interdisciplinary—you were making videos, you were using photography. Can you talk about what you were doing?

WK: When I started grad school, I was making paintings from found or staged images. I’ve always worked from images. Early stage directions included copying, or re-posing images from fashion advertising and posing as brides-to-be and bachelorettes by acting out female rituals (opening bridal shower gifts, eating cake, drinking). . .I think that came out of my own experience as a bride, but also working for Crate and Barrel as a designer merchandising for and interacting with brides as consumers.

The other thing I was doing alongside the photoshoots was interviewing the models, friends and acquaintances who agreed to participate. At that time, I was having conversations with them about body image. That process continued through graduate school, that was the foundation of my practice: staging, collaborating with other women, and painting.

In the early paintings, I was interested in the photos that captured the awkward moments where someone's eyes were closed, or their mouth was open mid-sentence. For me those images were more visually interesting to paint because they were these strange in-between moments that didn't look staged and suggested a next moment, a shift.

I had a breakthrough with materials my second semester when I made a small painting (Her) in a few hours one night. I was experimenting with oil sticks that are used for cattle marking, inexpensive oil sticks another artist gave me to try. That painting experience was kind of transformational, an entry point into a way of working more intuitively with materials and image that allowed the painting to reveal itself. I didn’t impose an idea or form on the painting; the figure’s form and psyche emerged through touch and sight and thought. I had a studio visit with a professor the next day who said, “You made that last night?” I said “Yeah,” and knew I was finally getting somewhere. Remembering this makes me think of Rebecca Morris writing about painting, “You can feel the thinking.”

JF: I remember that painting. Can you talk about your early work with the figure?

WK: While I was making these female figurative paintings, I was interested in further abstracting the figure to discover the content of the images I was referencing. In 2006 I attended Art New York, a one-week artist residency program through the New School. It was an amazing experience to have as an art student, we visited studios of artists including Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pepe and had a shared studio space to use. I had the instinct to buy meat at a New York deli for a new photo shoot with a theater student I had connected with. I styled her like an Arcimboldo painting; I cut and sculpted strips of meat over her face and fanned Romaine lettuce and lemon slices beneath her head as backdrop. She was prone for the photo shoot, which was a recurring motif and idea, referencing the reclining female in art history and contemporary media. The meat looked like a mask, or a face under construction. It was very surgical. I found out she was a vegetarian shortly before the project!

JF: It's extra grotesque for her right!?

WK: It was.

JF: Not only visually but ... the smell.

WK: I was very aware of the dynamic of artist/model. We talked through it at the beginning and I continuously asked her, "Are you okay?" as I cut bologna and salami to shape over her nose and around her mouth, careful not to cover her breathing passages. It was an intimate connection with another human being I had just met, through touch and trust. Once she was styled, I gave her some prompts - open your eyes, close your eyes, look left, look right, open your mouth, close your mouth. It was also absurd, I’m so glad she was game!

After the photoshoot, I had images and video from that project, the meateater series. The initial intention was to paint from those photos, but I never really loved the paintings that I made working from those images. I did realize that the meateater photos related to the images I was collecting from Las Vegas magazines, ads for restaurants: a woman wearing a tangerine slice as a skirt in a nightclub ad, a blonde being fed sushi while blindfolded, a woman in a bikini standing over a cut of beef with a steak knife. Eventually I began collaging the faces from the meateater series over the bodies in found images to subvert or disrupt these hyper-objectified representations of women, presenting women as consumers and the consumed. Sometimes I would show those collages as discrete works and other times I would paint from them as hybrid figures.

"Eventually I began collaging the faces from the meateater series over the bodies in found images to subvert or disrupt these hyper-objectified representations of women, presenting women as consumers and the consumed."

JF: I mean, it makes so much sense now. Your experience, visual merchandising as they say. Is that the correct term?

WK: Yeah.

JF: Then making that the art, but then also using that imagery as reference for paintings. It's a very classic way of thinking of it. And then you are reclaiming the female body, but also exposing it at the same time. Everything that women are thinking about when they're seeing or participating in those photo shoots you know? Yeah. Then you did the Good Eaters series? How did that project develop?

WK: Yes, following New York and meateater, I continued to explore food as material and added sugar into the mix. I experimented with frosting masks in performances which were very painterly (I was thinking about Fragonard’s buttery surfaces). I continued to stage these photo and video shoots with different female models and friends.

Backing up a bit, I had made a piece for my Midway exhibition, Menu. I invited people at the reception into a small enclosed dining space I created that was visible to the audience through a glass window, like a storefront. My mother and aunt were in town for my show and they came over and baked sweets with me for the project. Guests were given menus with prompts asking people to eat specific foods on the table; most had personal references and meaning, peanut M&M's were an option because they were my grandmother's favorite. One of the prompts was to eat a head of lettuce, which has its history in a girlfriend's story; as a teenager she’d starved herself all day, then eat an entire head of lettuce after school. I’ve had so many of these conversations with women, in particular, who share stories about eating disorders or body dysmorphia, really frightening food histories. I have my own, but the lettuce story really resonated with me.

So I borrowed that imagery and I asked Danielle Kelly, one of my peers and friends who had a theater background and liked to ham it up, to participate. The menu prompt was to eat an entire head of iceberg lettuce, and she proceeded to take a big chomp out of the lettuce and then tear it apart, piece by piece, saving a bit to wear as a cap or a crown while she devoured the rest.

I used the video stills from her performance and created a collage, then a painting, Lettuce Eater: The Devouration. Sometimes it gets complicated for me to break down what I do; my female figures move through several iterations: performance, collage, painting. The work is self-generating; Lettuce Eater was the first instance of that evolution which really shaped my practice.

To get back to your question about the Good Eaters! It was a performance I staged in my dining room a few months before my Thesis exhibition. Good Eaters is a midwestern expression. My grandfather used to call me a good eater after I would clean my plate. I struggled with an eating disorder on and off for ten years and hated that expression. It’s meant as a compliment, but it made me feel shame. So the Good Eater is a recurring persona in my work, she’s insatiable, but also self-edits. In the performance, I wanted these characters like meateater and Lettuce Eater to be activated and to interact. So I created rather crude masks and headpieces using salami, marshmallows, cheetos and lettuce. You assisted with that project, with props and styling. The four Good Eaters were asked to perform a series of eating and drinking rituals while working around their masks which were super uncomfortable and difficult to eat and see in.

JF: Can I say - you are the master of getting people to volunteer to do the most uncomfortable shit.

WK: Ha! I really do try to approach the experience of collaborating with other people as a way to get to know people while we're working on a project, to have meaningful conversation and fun doing something ridiculous together.

JF: Your paintings are also super saturated in color. Had they always been that? I wonder how your move to Vegas affected the work visually. Your work is about food, but then Vegas also is about the hospitality industry and then being from the Midwest, what does it mean to be hospitable? Then what is your role as an artist? You're pointing at all these things within your work visually.

WK: Color has always been used as an expressive or signifying formal component in my work. In graduate school in Las Vegas, I was thinking a lot about oversaturation- excess, sensory stimulation, the heat, sunburn and SPF. I was also thinking about color in relation to food, saccharine, contagion, color taking over a painting.

In graduate school, I was identified as the “hostess” maybe that’s from the Midwest, or my family or the restaurant business. So I incorporated that into the work. Spending so much time with our friends who were chefs brought another layer into the work - thinking about food as an ephemeral experience, whether it’s cooking a meal together, cooking for friends, or going out to eat together. After using food for costumes and props and as imagery, it eventually found its way into the paintings as a material for a period.

Studies for Wounder Woman, 2019

Still, GIF as Video file

WW: Nadine Daley

Photo: Joanna E. Wallace

JF: Yes, I remember your food props. When I worked with you on The Good Eaters and you asked me to help make a meat cake as a prop (bologna, frosting, canned cherry pie topping over tiered a cardboard sculpture), I was expecting you to be more controlling of what I was doing, but you just said, "Here, just make something from this." I asked "But how do you want it?" and you showed me how to begin and left me to figure out the rest. I saw that you let things happen.

WK: Right. You made a beautiful meat cake!

JF: You’ve kind of taken inspiration from what happens within that group setting. It just adds more to the work in that way, to make it more of “this just happened”. Every time I do an installation and it's a community effort, I always learn something from somebody who’s assisting me because I realize, "I never thought of doing it in that way." It definitely informs your next performance or your next painting from the previous work, doesn’t it?

WK: Yes. I do find that the performance work is about control, and letting go. I create a loose structure going in, but I always learn from my co-collaborators and the unexpected. This approach to the performances informs my painting process.

Another aspect of the performances I’m interested in is how they reveal the learned behavior of the pose and the movement between the social presentation of gender and how we reveal our own personal body language, how comfortable we are or aren't in our bodies. I so appreciate that other women let me be part of those moments of vulnerability in the performances. I’ve observed how easy it is to strike a pose, to recreate poses from popular culture, the red carpet, fashion, etc. I see it in younger women, but also friends closer to my age on facebook and instagram.

JF: It’s such a reflection of how we consume media, which is constantly shifting. I just heard this expression today, “the front-facing camera generation” to describe how kids are so used to selfies and having a front-facing camera instead of actually photographing other people. How is that going to affect visual art or how we think visually?

WK: Interesting. Oh my god.

JF: It's wild, right?

WK: Yes! You're looking at that experience through your phone because you're shooting a video, or you're at a concert and you're watching the concert through your phone, so you always have this layer of the screen versus just that direct encounter. How is that going to impact art making?

JF: Going back to some of your earlier work, you mentioned those awkward poses, and you did a series of paintings I want to ask about. You took all these paparazzi images, basically, Hollywood celebrity socialites at the time, I remember Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears. You did these very beautiful and grotesque paintings. I liked how that tied your work to pop culture and what we were consuming on the internet at the time, because at that time, 2008, 2007, that was the heyday of perezhilton.com, and all of these men online really shaming women just for partying and having fun, which it's like, that's the content you want, don't you, to keep your website going?

WK: In grad school I was looking at and thinking about Girls Gone Wild culture and collecting copies of Us Weekly and In Touch magazines. The media was tracking and commenting on the lives of Britney, Jennifer Anniston; I was interested in how they were presented and having conversations with my peers about how little of our early twenties existed as photos, let alone online.

Those paintings were in a 2012 show I had at Kleven Contemporary, The Party’s Over, the Drunken Portrait series. When I’m approaching a transition, I gravitate to found images as research. The paintings were from found images of intoxicated celebrities. I was experimenting with form and content thinking about excess, control, self-editing.

I started a portrait painting of Amy Winehouse but I never finished it. I was going to cover her face with a big frosted paint smear because I wanted to protect her face/identity. but I just put it away. I was thinking about addiction and the experience or idea of being in or out of control of our own lives, not only as women, but as human beings. And also how images and stories of the “fallen” or “flawed” women are distributed and consumed for sport. We could extend this conversation to women in politics today. For that show, I ended up including an old photograph of myself from my 21st birthday passed out on a sofa, and I covered my face in the photo with a pink paint smear.

"When I’m approaching a transition, I gravitate to found images as research. The paintings were from found images of intoxicated celebrities. I was experimenting with form and content thinking about excess, control, self-editing."

JF: It's interesting to think about that because I never actually think I've thought about that, when women in Hollywood have those moments, they hardly ever bounce back. You see Lindsay Lohan, you see Britney Spears today, and they never really, truly came back to their original fame and glory.

WK: Yes, it’s brutal. I was interested in inserting myself, my shame, with those images. I didn't want the work to suggest I was judging the women who were in those paintings. I was more interested in the ideas of what those images represented or signified, and I wanted to incorporate my own experience and body into that exhibition.

After that, I continued to look for and collect images of drunken women from Google searches. It's a very disturbing kind of research to do, there are so many images and the online commentary can be extremely misogynist. I made a series of collages with those images, always covering the women’s faces. I was and remain conflicted about that work because - though it was coming from a place where I was thinking about the commodification of women by others and ourselves, the disruption of the male gaze, ideas of active and passive, excess and control - I always considered who took the photo and was it online with or without consent from the woman? That unknown was uncomfortable for me. I wasn’t interested in showing the collage work in a commercial gallery, I didn’t like the idea of them being framed in a commercial context. I’ve only shown them a couple of times.

JF: Let's fast forward and talk about what you're working on and thinking about now.

WK: A shift in my work occured when I started making blind contour drawings from my collages and performance documentation; a drunken line of sorts that loosens up the image. The lines suggested an armature, a structure to adhere to or to deviate from in the paintings. The drawings have created this entirely new problem for me to solve in the studio: how do painted marks, gesture and materiality, interface with the blind contour line drawing that I start with?

When we're teaching blind contour in a beginning drawing class, we’re teaching students to draw from observation, to slow down look more closely. I love teaching blind contour for that reason, and I relate it to the idea of looking more closely at images, at visual culture and the world in general.
I did a lecture a couple of years ago that helped me identify the three recurring female personas in my work: the first is the Good Eater, who I described earlier, she eats and drinks with abandon. She is ravenous, insatiable, but also filled with guilt and regret.

The second is the Princess, which came out of my niece’s princess phase and princess culture: dress-up, coloring books, movies… her drawings of princesses informed a series of work formally and conceptually, but the imagery came out of the drinking photos I was mining and staging in performances. The Princess persona is about performing femininity, heroines and victims.

The third is “I Love Blood,” who goes by the acronym ILB. She’s based on an exquisite corpse children’t drawing of a girl. She has curly-q hair with a bow and long eyelashes, wears a plaid dress that says “I Love Blood” and has bulging legs, one with a tattoo that reads “I Suck.” ILB has materialized as a powerful force in my work. She is fierce and fearless, vulnerable and self-deprecating, and moves between active and passive states.

I’ve been revisiting these personas in new iterations.

JF: Tell me a little bit about your recent residency and performance at Soaring Gardens.

WK: I did an artist residency at Soaring Gardens, which is a residency funded by the Ora Lerman Foundation. She was a painter and sculptor. This residency is in her studio space and home, in this really beautiful rural part of eastern Pennsylvania.

I wanted to take advantage of the gardens. They have these beautiful grounds and I hadn't yet staged anything outdoors, so I created scripts for four different characters and the plan was to just work through lots of ideas. I was still interested in working with the frosting because it’s still an important material and signifier in the work, a messy interiority, a decorative mask, makeup. . . I also wanted to have more time to work with choreography, thinking ahead to future video works. It was the first performance I had staged since the 2016 elections. I was working with color more strategically, using pink as a color of resistance, and I was working the color green, thinking about sickness, too.

I was playing with all of that, and a new figure, Wounder Woman. She was inspired by a drawing that my niece did of Wonder Woman and she misspelled the title and added a “u”. I have this recent history of borrowing from my niece and nephew’s drawings from when they were seven and ten years old, pulling imagery, ideas or approaches to mark-making and color that resonate with me. I loved Wounder Woman as a contemporary superhero, and thought of her as empowered by the wound, an empath. So I made a painting and then staged a performance with three different women who all performed the character in these makeshift costumes that I pulled together thrifting in Laceyville, Pennsylvania. I asked them to perform a series of actions that were related to what we might associate with Wonder Woman, the superhero: the transformation spin, a power march of strength, wielding the lasso of truth as a weapon.

Documentation from the *Undone performance series*, 2015

Photo: Amy Bornalo

JF: When you do these performances, they're basically for you, right? Or for the people doing them? Because I've seen your performances, and I think only one has been a public performance. A lot of times when you do them, it almost feels like you're walking in on something you shouldn't be. I'm thinking of the photo shoots you've staged downtown, for example, where you have all these women performing in bright costumes and frosting faces. You feel like you're a voyeur, and it's not entirely inviting. I felt like I was in the way, which I think is awesome because it implies, "This is not for you. This is for us." The women are performing for one another, not for men, not for an audience. But you are directing, so there is that dynamic, too.

WK: Right. That's an important point because other than the collaboration I did with Jennifer Henry at Vast Space Projects, I haven’t made these performances public. I’ve been thinking about what that means. The projects seem to create this space for women, a female space to act out these absurd rituals together. The lead up to the performance, the styling, often ends up taking longer than the performance itself, its own performance. It always takes so much time and effort to get in character: body painting, helping models into strange costumes, hair and makeup. This first step is very collaborative, everyone helps. When I finally apply the frosting it’s very beautiful and fresh, young. Then once the stage directions begin, very quickly, everything starts to dissolve into a hot mess. The frosting melts and drips all over the place, the figures become undone.

JF: Yeah. It’s always fun to watch this before and after. I think now, in the age of YouTube tutorials, I think a lot of people are more interested in process, like how to apply makeup a certain way, or I have actually been addicted to watching drag queens do wig tutorials. How do you tease a wig? How do you make these...

WK: You have to be my wig stylist.

JF: I will. Let's do it. I'm collaborating with you. I'm making wigs for you!

WK: Okay!

JF: I can't wait. I love your work, Wendy, and I love how you do include a lot of people in your work, and I just want to thank you for being such a community activist here. I know that after the 2016 election, we were all super bummed in the downtown arts community here in Las Vegas. After that, there was really this movement to keep everybody informed, and active here. Speaking of community and being an arts advocate, you also started, years ago, settlersandnomads.art. Settlers + Nomads is an archive of people that are working artists here in Las Vegas, and then people that also have been through Vegas, maybe went to school here or did a residency here, and were part of the community, and have influenced us here. What made you start that project?

WK: I started the website at the end of 2015 as a way to create more visibility for the Las Vegas art community, to have more of a web presence for Vegas artists. We had several galleries that had closed within the past two years, and so there really wasn't much online representation of artists through Las Vegas based galleries. Then I also liked it as a way to connect with artists who had lived in and worked in Las Vegas and then relocated, to reconnect with those artists through reaching out and finding out what people were working on to share on the site. So that was the initial starting point for the website. It had a blog component featuring art writing and photo essays by artists, then it evolved into trying to create some sort of in-person experience at least once a year. We did a performance/video event in LA one year, and an Artist As Culture Producer panel here in Vegas that you participated on with Sharon Louden. Last year it was a group exhibition of feminist artist’s works… it’s become important to have some in-person component every year, even though it’s primarily web-based..

JF: Maybe now when you Google “Vegas art,”it won't be an olive dancing in a martini glass. It'll be one of the artists that you've curated onto your website.

WK: Yes. Exactly. That was definitely part of the motivation, too: to connect Las Vegas artists to those interested in contemporary art in Las Vegas! And as far as the community activism, I have to say that I'm just learning from others, there are so many amazing female organizers in this community, including my co-organizer at the time, Elizabeth Colón Nelson. 2017 was definitely an important moment when a lot of Las Vegas artists came together and decided to be more involved in local politics; people across the country are focusing on the local. In Las Vegas, we focused on the state legislative session, and how to get more involved, how to be more aware of the issues, and how we can make some impact, possibly the most impact, by participating in local and state government.

JF: I think it's all-important to hold that space and create a safe space. I think that's what you were all about creating, which is really important, too.

WK: Yes, and voting!

JF: Wendy, thank you so much for your time, and I'm so excited. I'm looking forward to all your work going forward!

WK: Thank you, Justin! This was fun, and I’m so honored to be invited.

Justin Favela

Based in Las Vegas, Nevada, and known for large-scale installations and sculptures that engage American pop culture and the Latinx experience, Justin Favela has exhibited his work internationally and across the US, including commissions by the Denver Art Museum, Colorado and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Arkansas. His latest major project, Puente Nuevo, is on view in Fort Worth, Texas, at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, through June 2020. He is the recipient of the 2018 Alan Turing LGTBIQ Award for International Artists. Favela hosts two culture-oriented podcasts, “Latinos Who Lunch” and “The Art People Podcast.” He holds a BFA in fine art from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.