Inside the Artist's Studio: R. Justin Stewart in Bed-Stuy
by Benjamin SuttonPage 4 of 6
Your work, especially your installations, seems to be so concerned with information, communication and networks; how did that subject come about?
Up to the point I was making my first fleece piece I hadn't really been thinking about networks. But this rope network just happened through the creation of the piece itself, and it became a really powerful aspect of it. And that really started me down this road of thinking about networks and systems and those kinds of structures. Because up to that point I was really thinking about the stretching of these pods and making this fabric form rigid and that sort of thing. The ropes and how they formed without me really thinking about it—I just wanted to get these things to hang in the air—was a result of that. There are a couple underlying aspects to my work that I notice, and I have some ideas of where they come from, but they seem to pop up without my even trying. Like when I make sculpture, it always looks like organic things. Always. I would love to make geometric sculpture; I think I really want to make geometric sculpture. If you look at my drawings, I feel like that is how my brain wants to be, but my sculpture is how I am. I can really control because you don't have gravity and you don't have physics, but the sculptures just always end up having some kind of organic creature quality to them that I just can't stop. It just happens, and I've come to deal with it, that's just the way it goes.
I was recently talking to Risa [Shoup, curator of the exhibition at Invisible Dog] about my grandfather. When he died we found that he had taken all of these orange juice containers, the square vertical ones, and he folded plastic bags up into perfect squares, and then placed them in the dried out orange juice containers and stacked them up. So he had hundreds of these bags and maybe a dozen of these orange juice container boxes piled up with plastic bags inside them perfectly folded so they fit perfectly in that square. And I was talking about him to Risa, and saying how absurd that was, and Risa was like, "Have you looked at your own work? You don't think there's some kind of connection there? Ok."
