Sleep Takes More and More of Us
Mini-interview with Philip Lindsey & Matt McBride
HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as collaborators (or continues to)?
PL: Matt and I met in my studio one evening over a couple of beers to talk about ideas, art, and a way into the project. I think that conversation helped us find some common ground and provided a foundation of dialog that allowed us to build a framework for the collaboration.
MM: One hard thing about working at a college is that you are surrounded by very intelligent, creative people but you often end up complaining about the demands of the job instead of talking about the pursuits that define you. Phil and I worked together for years, but we’d only interacted during meetings or events on campus. I was really honored when Phil asked me to meet in his studio as it was an opportunity to connect with Phil as an artist.
HFR: What are you reading?
PL: A colleague just donated a collection of books to the art department at Wilson. I plundered two books on Cezanne and have been enjoying both. Landscape to Art by Pavel Machotka, and an exhibition catalog from the Musée du Luxembourg from 2011-12, Cezanne and Paris.
MM: I recently finished Marni Ludwig’s Pinwheel. Her poems are surreal and inventive, but the strangeness and the surprise never feel like they exist in the poems as ends to themselves. There’s a very affective portrayal of struggling with illness behind them.
HFR: Can you tell us what prompted “Sleep Takes More and More of Us”?
PL: The piece grew out of a series of paintings exploring anxiety, grief, and loss that comes with navigating a parent’s illness. It is the second work in our collaboration and is closely aligned with its earlier counterpart. Both works employ floral imagery, phone book pages, and no color.
There must have been a Yellow Jacket nest in my studio ceiling, or perhaps in the window air conditioning unit. Every day, throughout the fall of 2022, I would enter the studio to find 5-10 dead Yellow Jackets on the windowsill and floor. I threw them away at first, but as the pattern continued, I thought maybe I should collect the bees and use them in some way. I asked Matt what he thought about incorporating them into the piece we were working on, and he thought the idea had possibility. He had done some work on bees a number of years earlier and saw a connection between the dead bees and the work we were exploring. We talked about ways to incorporate them and what they might mean, and Matt figured out how to build text over the tops of their bodies. He then crafted language integrating the bees with his ideas.
HFR: What’s next? Are you working on another collaboration?
PL: We are not currently working together, but a colleague suggested that we collaborate again this summer when our graduate students are in residence. I’m down with that if Matt has interest.
MM: I would definitely be game. I really enjoyed the opportunity to work in Phil’s studio. As a poet, you don’t make material objects in the ways other artists do. It’s interesting to create a work that carries my physical mark.
The MFA at Wilson College is focused on interdisciplinary collaboration, and working with Phil has been a good way to honor the type of work our students do by doing it ourselves. Collaboration also helps push your work somewhere it wouldn’t normally go.
HFR: Take the floor. Be political. Be fanatical. Be anything. What do you want to share?
MM: Make an effort to talk to your co-workers about anything other than work. I remember one day I stopped by Phil’s office to work in the studio and he was telling me about the painter Brice Marden. I love hearing Phil talk about painting. At some point in the conversation there was a pause, and I filled it by talking about work. I was so frustrated with myself. While I speaking, I started to tune myself out. Why, when I could be talking about abstract art, with a painter, was I droning on about the fact that 20-year-olds aren’t great at turning in homework? What would either of us learn from that observation? What kind of response does that comment invite other than a repetition or another complaint? Work has bleed into so much of our lives. Don’t be a coworker when you can be a human being instead.
Philip Lindsey’s work as a painter is divided into two distinct bodies; one, a formalist language of expressive gestural abstraction, the other a journey into personal narrative through metaphor and allegory. Philip Lindsey’s work has been selected by major museum curators for national and international juried exhibitions. Lowery Stokes Simms (Museum of Modern Art, and Museum of Arts and Design), Kathryn Calley Galitz (Metropolitan Museum ofArt), Ann Prentice Wagner (Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Arkansas Art Center), and Yvette Lee (Whitney Museum of American Art) are among curators who have selected his paintings and drawings for exhibition. Lindsey is a Professor of Fine Arts at Wilson College, where he teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs. He also serves as curator for Wilson’s Bogigian Art Gallery.
Matt McBride’s work has recently appeared in The Banyan Review, The Cortland Review, Figure 1, Impossible Task, Guernica, The Rupture, Rust & Moth, and Zone 3, among others. He is the author of one full-length poetry collection, City of Incandescent Light, published by Black Lawrence Press in 2018, and four chapbooks. His most recent, Prerecorded Weather, co-written with Noah Falck, won the 2022 James Tate Prize and is available at SuVision books. He is the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Grant, an Elliston Poetry Scholarship, and a Writers in the Heartland residency. He holds an MFA from Bowling Green State University and a PhD from the University of Cincinnati. Currently, he is an assistant professor at Wilson College, where he teaches in the English program as well as the college’s interdisciplinary MFA. He can be found online at mattmcbridepoetry.com, @matthewdmcbride (Twitter), and at_the_mercy_of_the_flies (Instagram).
Check out HFR’s book catalog, publicity list, submission manager, and buy merch from our Spring store. Follow us on Instagram and YouTube. Disclosure: HFR is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and we will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Sales from Bookshop.org help support independent bookstores and small presses.
Heavy Feather Review 