INTERVIEW WITH THE ARTIST

The following questions were posed to Jane Terzis by Ken DeRoux, Curator of Museum Services at the Alaska State Museum. The dialogue was by e-mail and occurred in November 2005. The content has been slightly edited for ease of reading.

KDR:  I always like to ask a few basic questions about the artist’s background: Where were you raised? How did you become interested in art, and how long have you lived in Alaska? Does Alaska have any special relationship to your art?

JT:  New Jersey. I went to college in Ohio and graduate school in San Francisco. I've been interested in art as long as I can remember. Growing up in New Jersey gave me access to museums and galleries in New York City before I started grade school. My grandmother, with whom I shared a bedroom, painted, and I loved watching her paint. I even loved the smell of her oil paints. I was amazed that she could make something so great out of tubes of color.

I moved to Juneau in 1979. While the Alaskan landscape is important to me, I don't think that it has informed my artwork - but I have felt a strong bond with artists in Alaska and I find the community of artists here to be uniquely friendly, interested and supportive.

KDR: The title, “Prayer for the Protection of All Beings,” indicates a spiritual dimension to the exhibit. What is your own spiritual background and practice, and how does it affect your work? 

JT: I've been practicing a form of Zen Buddhism for the past fifteen years. I was raised Catholic and have always been oriented toward a spiritual practice. I find that the simplicity and clarity of Buddhist practice, which is based on direct experience, works for me. That simplicity resounds in the simplicity and clarity that is important in creative  work. My work is informed and affected by my experiences, so whatever is up for me in a particular period tends to show up in my work. I try to communicate in a clear enough artistic language to make sense to others. I realize that the artwork that I do sometimes has a limited audience.

KDR:  The arrangement of the 52 drawings and corresponding soap shelves creates a repetition that could imply ritual. (I can imagine a candle instead of soap for instance.) And religious ceremony is frequently repetitious.

JT: If what you mean by "ritual" is repetition, then, yes. These drawings are all the same size, same materials, same face. I think of the soap shelves as altars and the soaps as sacred offerings. The soaps are intimate gifts - some were solicited, some were donated anonymously. I was in the gallery space with someone who said that she could smell the people who had donated the soaps. I loved that comment. We usually associate smelling someone's body as repellent. These soaps smell fresh, fragrant and deeply personal.

KDR:  What the exhibit viewer is aware of, before anything else, I think, is the repetition of the face that has what you call the “head flaps.” And of course the face is transplanted onto a variety of bodies in many different contexts. My own reading has always been that there is a sinister aspect to this character, who I see as more male than female, because the flaps recall horns, which relate to the devil. Are you making this connection?

JT: I think that the head flaps can suggest horns because of our experience with seeing the devil as a being from another world who is responsible for evil and pain in this world. I have no intention to conjure, represent, or celebrate the devil. If I, as I say I do, have all of the capacities that I list in this exhibit, then the devil is intrinsic, not just in those bad people, over there. When people react fearfully to this figure (which is fictional and exists only in the context of artwork) they might be reacting to a fear of the unfamiliar, the deformed. I am  fascinated that some recoil in horror at, for example, the drawing that is titled I Have the Capacity to Kill,  knowing that these drawing titles were randomly assigned. They may be misreading this as I Am a Killer. I kill every time I eat and I can imagine killing another person if, for example, I was thrust into warfare, or had to defend my family.

KDR: The drawings have a nice sense of line and texture. There is also a feeling of bright sunlight in many of the images, partly due to the highlights on the above-mentioned face, and partly to the whiteness of the heavily-textured paper that comes through. Also, many of the drawings seem to refer to images one might find in a family photo album, vacation snapshots, and to advertising illustrations from the 1950s. Thus there is a sense of a bright, idealized world that is maybe not so idyllic after all. Comment?

JT: The bright world that I present has more to do with the bright light on the face that I'm using, than on any symbolism regarding idealized life in the 50s. These images are derived from a variety of scenarios which suggest the 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s, and up to the present day.

END