BN: The frequently recurring characters in your embroidery works are the hooded male figures, immediately suggestive for most people of the Ku Klux Klan, but also thieves, rebels, and of course ghosts. Where do these aggressive, scary characters come from, and how do you differentiate between them?
KH: The suicide bombers of the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, also known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelama, originally inspired the characters. The members of this group would parade around Sri Lanka promoting their struggle for independence while wearing hoods and masks with one wide opening for both eyes. They masked themselves as they were demonstrating their will to die for the cause. After embroidering the Tamil Tigers, I started making hooded figures using white thread and two separate eyeholes to depict ghosts or KKK members. The addition of a mouth to these two eyes made the character resemble a robber in a ski mask or even a medieval executioner. The variations and locations of the holes began to distinguish and differentiate the characters. I then started to alter the color of these hoods, and skin tones, to show that masking and violence is cross-cultural. Each of the figures act as trickster characters in my work, as though they are referencing aggressive cultural deviants — or heroes — while the narratives they are engaging in are merely meddlesome.
BN: Meddlesome? These images can’t help but generate all sorts of associations with kidnapping, interrogation, torture, execution, and any number of psycho-sexual scenarios — all of which have a real resonance for current events, as well as for historical horrors. The violence that registers in your work is not only cross-cultural; we also find ourselves time traveling from the mayhem and murder of one period to the next. In our time, violent disorder has become a part of the everyday.
KH: Yeah, that’s very true. I do think a violent disorder has been a
constant for many cultures, be it the Knights Templar traveling around in armor promoting Christianity, the Lakota Sioux wearing spirit shirts into war, or the suicide bombers in Iraq. In these scenarios the masked characters act as martyrs within their own culture by promoting the interests of their people, yet resulting in murder and turmoil for others. As I allude to these characters in my work, the situations they engage in are more whimsical as they interact among children gaming, ladies of leisure, and various livestock sporting boners. I steer away from a strict, didactic depiction of war, terror, and rape within my work, rather integrating these characters into the false utopias of printed fabrics; wherein lies the irony in my work.
BN: You overlay past and present, innocence and violence, horror and absurdity, the comic and the tragic, high culture and low — as if ----------the only way that we can make sense of anything that’s otherwise unfathomable is to frame it in complete relief. You’ve said that you want to mix history, fantasy, and reality. This seems an apt way of describing the world in which we find ourselves today.
KH: Well, one way to describe the structure of the world is through the dualism, or in my work the integration of fantasy and reality. I think the way in which we deal with today’s events aren’t very different from how people have dealt with those of the past, and will perhaps continue to in the future. Fantasy or religion becomes an escape tool, or defense mechanism, which helps us view the world differently in order to deal with the reality happening around us. Some people believe so much in the paradise of the afterlife for their suicide bombing that they are able to cope with mass killings and bombings. When one’s image becomes masked, one can pretend to be whatever or whomever one wants, and can act and behave in a manner that isn’t normal. When these abnormal behaviors become common we have social breakdowns — like using children as soldiers in war. Such absurdity often becomes reality and reality is often absurd.
BN: Some might characterize the more politically-oriented art of the 80s and 90s as a form of preaching to the converted. The work that you and other artists are doing today seems to avail itself of various strategies to seduce the viewer. Toile and embroidery, for example, is a fairly unique use of material given the motivations behind your work, your subject matter, and concerns.
KH: The materials I use, typically embroidery on printed fabric and/or linen, are more traditional in nature and lend a sense of naiveté to my work. The texture of the stitched surfaces allows for an immediate connection with the audience, as there is direct familiarity associated with this medium. By incorporating a dark narrative upon these textiles, I employ the duality of my concepts in a playful and undemanding way. It is through the subversive imagery that more complex ideas emerge, whether they are social or political. It can be said that all art is political on some level, whether intentional or not, but it’s up to the artist and viewer as to how much value is placed upon it.
BN: In addition to the familiarity of the embroidery, we also associate this work with women. This is decorative woman's work. You can easily imagine that it's someone’s kindly grandmother who's responsible for this bucolic scene, but then suddenly you wonder: Why is a man hanging from that tree? The subject matter and what carries it can't help but collide with our idea of the feminine, and the feminine, in this context at least, is read as passive. The storytelling in your work, however, can be blunt and brutal.
KH: Not only is it women's work, but there is also a prudish sensibility attached to it, an alien-element in today's contemporary fine art. The first embroidery works I rendered were really quite small, 4 × 4 and 6 × 6 inch works, and were personal studies, exclusively for my own reference. Later these studies developed into larger works with twisted narratives, and from there went on to become realized into full installations. I actually started as a painter, but became turned off by its grand gesture, preferring the simple anti-academic qualities of the mediums I now use. Too often a false sense of culture or intellectualism masquerade in painting, whereas I much prefer to use a discarded or non-contemporary form of expression. The nonconformity of my medium lends an absurdist quality to my work as violent narratives, hooded figures, lynching, bestiality, and other fantastical events, are introduced through such a delicate, traditional means. I find the mixing of the harsh. brutal sadism of human events with the intricate, decorative, familial medium of embroidery is a way to riff on the reality in which we live, drawing attention to the passiveness that others feel for the atrocities in our world, when they are not directly theirs to deal with.
BN: There are many sources for the imagery in your work, from the art historical to the vernacular, and they are often thrown into opposition with or played against one another. You also time travel — from the distant to the recent past — in the same piece. Can you talk about your sources and how you intermingle them?
KH: The figures and landscapes that I employ in my new work are appropriated from random sources, such as historical volumes, old newspapers, children’s books, or even French prints from the time of the Musketeers. The Mexican artist Jose Guadalupe Posada, Albrect Durer, Mercer Mayer, and Max Ernst are some of the artists I constantly refer to. I keep an archive of these images that I use as type of memory bank of past events, which I continually build upon and cull from in creating my own histories and narratives. As much as I combine imagery from opposing eras, I also try to create a broader dialogue by focusing on the interplay between both high and low culture. I’m interested in constructing a discourse or new history by taking bits and pieces to create an enduring narrative or non-history. I think of it as form of memory recollection or memory re-arrangement. In the same way that a person collects or keeps random experiences as memory, and mixes them up in their mind, I take random images and mix and re-arrange them on a single canvas. It’s more of a caricature or a hyper reality. On their own, the images are insignificant or relatively trivial, but combined with others a paradigm is formed.
BN: That term “fabricated histories” linked to what you're referring to as “memory recollection” leads inevitably to the idea of recovered memory syndrome. This is always associated with painful experiences that are repressed — and this can be for many years — experiences that are often related to sexual abuse. Of course, there have been instances of individuals recovering memories of events that never actually happened. Many of the overtly disturbing images in your work can be read as psycho-sexual: the servitude, bondage, whipping, and lynchings associated with slavery. These are of course the only acceptable ways for a white Master to engage in “sexual” relations with the black man. But there is what we might call a psycho-sexual undertow with the seemingly benign imagery as well.
KH: I do think that there is a psycho-sexual undertow in my imagery that is reflected through these fetishistic, otherworldly-like vignettes. However, for me these stories represent more of a sense of yearning and desire than they do strict memory recollections. The narratives allude to the ethical and moral boundaries of pleasure and the parallels between gratification and pain. Everyone has differing thresholds and needs to satisfy; some like tying people up in their basements while wearing their mother’s clothing, others find satisfaction in having sexual relations with animals. My earlier work on the toile fabric most strongly depicts these conflicts between domination/submission and command/obedience. The idea of dominating objects of desire, which have historically been women, boys, and slaves, becomes jumbled into psychotic delusions, where sheep dominate young boys and women wearing masks control each other.
BN: Women wearing masks. Your Victorian dominatrix ladies make me wonder how important humor is to you, even if it is of a fairly black variety.
KH: Humor does play a major role in my work and is a tool that I utilize in the storytelling. There is an absurdist quality attached to my imagery, as boys become cloaked as hooded executioners or young girls dance and play with ghosts while they themselves are bound. At first glance these scenarios appear to be completely inappropriate and preposterous, but upon further scrutiny they can allude to psychological games and/or individual power struggles. For me, it‘s important for people to understand the sense of irony or black humor in my work as they translate these stories for themselves.
BN: The piece you had in “The Gold Standard” was the first time you incorporated text, and with this particular image —a native man being torn apart by wild dogs as white men stand idly by — the text amplified an already disturbing scene. It read: “Here in the road was lying a dead body, mangled and scalped, which the dogs were eating.” What's the literary source you’re quoting from? And are you planning other text pieces? I suppose what I'm really wondering is, you have a very large cast of characters, they “perform” all sorts of banal and bestial acts, and can continue to do so in infinite and perverse combinations, so where do you go from here?
KH: Both the text and image for this particular piece are appropriated from an issue of American Heritage from the late ’50s, a magazine that typically explores American history through it’s heroes, scoundrels, and popular culture. As with this piece, I’ve also integrated text into several other works and have either written the lines myself or gathered them from historical sources, such as passages borrowed from the diary of a girl living in Nazi, Germany, or other literary sources such as Alfred Jarry’s “Ubu Roi.” A lot of the imagery and texts are violent and deal with cultural conflicts, in many cases between Native Americans and early settlers. I think of it as a Theatre of Cruelty where separate images and texts can be combined to create a new certainty, a new vision between an actual event and a general mental volatility that surrounds us.