Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Celeste Voce. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Alright, Celeste thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Do you feel you or your work has ever been misunderstood or mischaracterized? If so, tell us the story and how/why it happened and if there are any interesting learnings or insights you took from the experience?
Working primarily in photography but not making commercial photographs, even as a way of supporting my art practice, is always something that I feel I have to explain to others. My process, though rooted in photography, is more experimental, and any technical aspects are rooted more in rule breaking and pushing the medium than doing things correctly or perfectly. I’m also not someone you’d characterize as making punk kind of works, so my practice exists in this place that people, sometimes including myself, don’t have the vocabulary to understand. I always worry that I come across as pretentious for this, but really I’m just trying to figure out what a photograph is and can be at all times in order to make an image that hasn’t existed in the world until that point.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
Both my parents have backgrounds in art, so I was surrounded by art making and viewing as a child, but the joke in my family is that I’m the only one who can’t draw or paint. Discovering photography as an artistic medium in high school felt revelatory to me. I’d always had these ideas that I wanted to find a way to express, but felt limited by written language and my lack of other artistic skill. Learning more about the history of photo in art made everything click for me. I often quickly sketch out my ideas, but my practice is about realizing these ideas in some sort of actual, physical, 3D way. In some ways it feels more akin to sculpture than 2D art making, even though the result is a work on paper. There’s an alchemy in forcing an abstraction to have at one point been real, if fleetingly, and capturing it on film or on photo paper to immortalize it. Unlike digital photography, any manipulation is still rooted in the actual, but I’m always ruminating on how our brains are always using semiotics, especially when viewing photographs, to make sense of things even when none exists. I think making something beautiful is important, and I strive to make works that people want to look at, but I still want there to be a tension that encourages pondering over passive consumption.
Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?
I may not be the most productive artist, but art making feels essential to the core of my being. Making art is how I understand the world. It’s how I work through ideas. It’s how I challenge myself. I do a lot of social justice work and volunteering, and it at first seems antithetical to the works I produce, however anything I take in from the world comes out somehow through my work. It’s not necessarily the point of the work, or the most immediately visible to anyone but me, but my works are a reflection of my heartbreak, my joy, my frustrations, my helplessness, my love, my guilt, my questions, my memories. Some of my works are motivated by the tiny speck that humans are in the universe, whereas others are influenced by the movements of daily life.
I had an interesting conversation with someone who owns one of my works because it was an abstract work and they wanted to know why I viewed it as having a landscape orientation over a portrait orientation. Some artists might be offended by someone questioning their intent for the work, but instead I was able to ask this person what they got out of the work and how that related to how they would choose to hang it. Despite us not having talked extensively about the work before, the collector totally understood what ideas the work engages with, which were about what was happening in the center of the frame, meaning that the overall orientation was less important. I still feel strongly that aesthetically the work reads better as a landscape, but in some senses, that’s neither here nor there.
These conversations with people who see and/or own my work are so encouraging for me as an artist because I know that I’m connecting with the viewer in the ways I hope to. It can be hard to make art because it can be such an isolated process, so any time I have a chance to talk about it with someone, whether a collector or fellow artist, it feels invigorating.
In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?
Capitalism really gets me down. I don’t make work to make money, but making work costs money, and my ideas and labor are worth money. So, the short answer is to buy work directly from artists as much as possible. A lot of artists who engage with the gallery system don’t have easy online shops, and I don’t want to negate that galleries work for their artists, so sometimes you could/would/should purchase through them, but artists also have contact info on their website for a reason. If you want to show or buy my work, by all means, please reach out.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://www.celestevoce.com
- Instagram: @cmvoce
Image Credits
Celeste Voce