We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Elin O’Hara Slavick. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with elin o’Hara below.
Elin o’Hara, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. I’m sure there have been days where the challenges of being an artist or creative force you to think about what it would be like to just have a regular job. When’s the last time you felt that way? Did you have any insights from the experience?
Is anyone really happy? At best, we have prolonged moments of joy and euphoria. Our hearts fill with pleasure from love, or we are satisfied by an exquisite meal. I can’t imagine being anything else other than an artist. I am compelled to make things all the time – from daily collages, sometimes paintings and drawings, books, videos, and always photographs. As a photographer trained in the darkroom, I used to carry my cameras with me everywhere I went – all over the world and even to the grocery store. Now, we all have iPhones and social media has become an instant gallery. I have over 57,000 Instagram posts (not that I am necessarily proud of that) that I do in the spirit of making as a generous act of sharing visual pleasure. Instagram and Facebook are also archives, along with my binders of negatives, flat files of countless collages, and my large storage unit full of framed works. I have made, showed, published, exhibited, shared, collaborated on and sold lots of art in my lifetime and this makes me happy – that I have been able to live by what I most want to do and be.
I was a professor of Conceptual Interdisciplinary Studio Art at UNC, Chapel Hill for 27 years. That could be considered a “regular job”, but I do not separate art from life, so everything is always intense. In studio art classes, students make work about their eating disorders, global strife, painful memories of abuse and also, formalist problems, graphic equations and pure process. It was immeasurably satisfying to help students find the best media to visually manifest their ideas and emotions. Ultimately, I think making art can save the world, turning destruction into construction, the negative into the positive.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I am 60 years old and have been making art since childhood. The youngest of seven children, with 3 older artist sisters and an aunt and uncle who were also serious artists, my entire life has been one of political and personal (the personal IS political) expression as a form of critical discourse. I studied poetry, art, and film history at Sarah Lawrence College, an amazing school that lets you shape your education. I spent a year at the Tyler School of Art (Temple University) falling in love with photography, and returned to Sarah Lawrence to work with photographer Joel Sternfeld (with a seemster in Florence, Italy). I received my MFA in Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1992. I lived in NYC for a couple years but in order to pay my student loans, I had to take a tenure-track job at UNC, Chapel, where I taught Body Imaging, Conceptual Photography, Collaborative Strategies, MFA Seminar, Collage, Mixed Media, Drawing, among other courses, for 27 years. I moved to Irvine, CA four years ago because my partner became an Associate Dean at UC, Irvine, where I am the first Artist-in-Residence in the School of Public Health.
I have made work about feminism, the family, the global economy, against war, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, nuclear testing, labor and leisure, travel / tourism, the absurd and much more. Utilizing photography, collage, drawing, painting, video, sculpture, site-specificity, historical material, archives, found materials, knowledge of art history (especially surrealism and the post-modern), my work strives to educate and spark interest in critical issues through subversive beauty.
Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?
Ways of Seeing, John Berger
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Nancy Spector (Guggenheim Museum)
Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes
On Photography and Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag
Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks
I should say that I do not consider myself entrepreneurial in the least bit. To me, art is deeply and fundamentally human and creative and business is about profit.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
Being fully 100% responsible for what I make, do, say, am, share in this world; taking that responsibility seriously.
I am the most rewarded in the process of making art. I often say that my happiest times are when I am maing art. For example, when I am in Hiroshima, Japan, carrying heavy cyanotype paper to make sun-prints in the Sunshine Garden of A-bombed artifacts from the archives at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. I become a mediator between the sun/light, important artifacts, time, and the transformative/alchemical process of image-making. Artists can be magicians.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.elinoharaslavick.com
- Instagram: elinohara
- Facebook: Elin OHara Slavick
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiFUHl2hwnA
Image Credits
elin o’Hara slavick