After the Accident

Tannar Veatch

Interview by C. VanWinkle

October 17, 2021

Would you please begin by describing the piece that responded to?

I responded to a golden conch shell bolo tie with an inscription on it that said, “The deepest secrets aren’t secrets at all.”

Do you remember your first impression?

My brother has a collection of them, so I immediately thought of him. Also, right away I thought I was going to have a hard time with it because I wasn’t going to be able to respond to this fashion item in a fashion kind of way. I don’t know anything about wearables, so I wasn’t going to be able to handle this at all. And then, of course, I had to figure out a way to work around that thought. It was a little intimidating because I guess I expected a painting or a song or something. It wasn’t a problem, I was just like, Oh my gosh, where am I going to go with this?

And where did you go with it? What happened next?

The thing that I felt like I could respond to the most was the inscription. So I left the fact that it was a wearable or an accessory behind, and just dealt with what I thought it was trying to say. My first thought was I don’t think that statement is true. I think it’s generally false. But I wondered: in what case is it true, where a piece of information is a secret, but a lot of people know it? I was thinking maybe a national secret or something about aliens. There’s probably some information that is actually confidential, but a lot of people know about the idea, so it’s not really a secret. It’s just common knowledge. Maybe the seed of it is hidden somewhere. Or a sex tape is not really a secret once it gets out. It’s salacious because it’s supposed to be a secret, but then a lot of people know about it. I wasn’t really sure I was going to be able to represent something so big or general.

I really wanted to investigate times when this statement is actually false and how that’s meaningful. I did some research about secrets. I’d never really done that before. I found some interesting studies about how secrets affect people’s mental and emotional health. There was a really interesting study about how a secret can make a bond between people. There were a bunch of participants in a study, and two of them were told to play footsie under the table, while the rest of the participants were doing an activity and didn’t know it was happening. These people did not already know one another. Playing footsie under the table made such a strong connection between those two, that the researchers had to be really careful to hold them back and not let them leave together, because they felt unethical about making a relationship between people who didn’t have one coming in.

That made me think that maybe this statement is a little bit true, even though I was trying to prove that it’s false. A secret actually requires at least two people knowing about it because otherwise it’s just information that someone else doesn’t know. What I ate for lunch is not necessarily a secret. But as soon as I tell someone what I ate and not to tell anyone else, then it’s a secret. That implies that a secret is a little bit of an oxymoron, I guess. It means something that no one knows, but in fact at least two people have to know it.

Did you make this piece about a particular secret?

Yeah. Well it’s not my own secret. It’s a fictitious secret. I felt that if I was going to try to depict an instance of a secret, then I needed to be very specific about it, especially if I wanted to suggest that the inscription is part true and part false. The story is that there’s this woman who runs an antique sale, like a weekend barn sale, where people drive from the city to buy antiques. This guy at the sale gets crushed by an armoire and she feels deeply responsible for his death. The witnesses, their interpretation was that she tried to help him. But her experience was that she could not do anything to get him out from underneath this armoire, so she just wanted to send him to his death, like with one final smile. Everyone thinks that she attempted to be a hero, but she knows inside that she could not do anything.

Another thing that I came across in my research is that people tend to return to a deep secret over time and they think about it a lot. They might say things that allude to it or write it down or tell their therapist, because something big is something they return to over and over in their minds. So she forever has this secret in her mind about how her own inability led her to just wish someone a happy death rather than doing whatever she could do to save him. So that’s the secret. But I don’t think it really ever happened.

Right before I worked on this, I went to an antique sale, but it wasn’t at the forefront of my mind. It was just floating in the background. And then I had this great little prop, like a dresser or cabinet or something, with a light inside of it. It’s such a great little object and it’s the right scale, and I had some other things that were already part of the diorama. So to give it a little more cohesion, I thought about that narrative while I made it.

Is that where the words in there came from? What do they say?

It says, “I could not save him, I waved goodbye.” And then there’s one that circles above the corpse, if you will, that says, “Let me go.” A lot of studies show that if someone is having a mental issue related to the stress of having a secret, it’s usually alleviated by telling someone the secret. So the suggestion is to let the secret go in order to get out of the prison of this environment. So yeah, “I could not save him, I waved goodbye” which is the guilty secret, and then the suggestion for the relief is the letting it go. I hope that the work is something that you can return to a few times and see something different. I want artwork to make me work for it a little bit. So if that is successful here, then that’s great.

What got you into dioramas, anyway? You may be the first dioramist I’ve met.

I made them when I was a kid to play with my toys. Then I started making them again in 2015 as a way to continue my installation art practice in a smaller, more affordable way. I like to build environments, but I couldn’t make them full-scale, so I had to make them so they would fit in my apartment. Over time, I have developed the technique a little bit. They used to be photos that I took as an iPhone panorama. And now I have a track that I designed and built, and I do them in a mirror environment to give them more of a sense of scale. They’re a little bit awe-inspiring when you see that long corridor of reflection. I think that they mess with your sense of perception. I think that art is a lot about how you perceive the world and what you can achieve by tweaking perception a little bit here and there. Diorama allows me to explore those ideas about being in a space and how space feels. They vary in size, and sometimes I take video and sometimes I take photos. What I made for you I needed to give some motion so it would be more engaging. People can scroll past a single photo fast, but if there’s motion maybe it’s more engaging.

The space looks vast, so your mirror trick works.

One thing I have to think about a lot is how to incorporate light inside of the environments. When you have four walls and sometimes a ceiling and a floor that are mirrored, A) there’s no light getting inside, and B) it shows everything. So I always have to disguise the lighting elements. Otherwise, there’s a cord and the head of the light bulb and stuff. The armoire, for instance, is a symbolic element, but it’s also there to backlight the first character. The armoire allows me to hide a light inside of it, so it gives a green glow to the character.

And there is sound. Do usually think about the soundscape of a diorama?

Maybe the last, like, five dioramas. When I transitioned from photo to video, I didn’t have any sound. I felt like they were boring to watch because there was nothing to drive the image. The beginning and the end didn’t have meaning because they just started and then ended when they ran out of track. The very first time I did audio was like a year ago. I tried to layer some stock audio, just some atmospheric noises. It just didn’t have the right feel, and I thought, This isn’t gonna work, I am gonna need to make my own.

For the most recent diorama that I did [“The Break” for Shelter In Place Gallery], I made my own original music. And I’m not a musician. I can maybe kind of do this a little bit, even though it might be awful and shitty and really amateur. I can at least make some kind of noise that’s original content instead of using someone else’s, and then I can control the audio so it matches the length of the video. That’s the most important thing to have a very clear beginning and end. I’d never really written a song, but I tried it for this because I keep going back to it in my mind. In a way, it’s similar to how you would return to a secret. I gave myself the job of doing this inside of my brain for like a week. Then I eventually wrote the “song”, for lack of a better word.

The soundscape is an important part of the piece because it makes it feel more like an immersive environment. Watching it, I wondered if you create environments that you escape into.

Oh yeah, definitely. But the environments don’t really have a lot of practical elements to them. If you could pick any dimension to go to, you would not want one that didn’t have food or a bathroom, you know what I mean? It might not be a magical land with a river of chocolate and you can live there forever in happiness, but it’s not regular everyday reality. Something that I think about a lot is the time someone spends watching it. It gives them even just a moment where they’re a little bit confounded and their day-to-day drops away. They’re looking at something that is a little bit weird and mysterious, and they’re not reminded of their commute or their awful job or their dog that ate their shoe. It is an escape from reality, even though the actual physical space isn’t somewhere you’d want to spend a lot of time. It’s a vast, empty space that’s a little bit depressing. It’s just a void and you’re stuck there with nothing but this awful memory that echoes in all directions.

How does this particular piece relate to the rest of your work?

Well, it’s pretty similar in the format, which I’ve been developing for a while. And some of the material I’ve used before. My studio is just a ton of bags of stuff, so when I want to make something, I go shop the studio. The track is something I’ve been using for years, but I actually cut it up for this piece. Before, the video was always in a continuous circle. I don’t know if you can tell in the video, but you’re on a spiral track moving toward the center. I’d never done that before.

Oh cool! Do you have any advice for someone else who may be approaching this project for the first time?

I guess one barrier that I bumped up against when I’ve done Exquisite Corpse-type things in the past is that people are maybe not as interested as they think they are in letting someone else’s idea guide their work. They say they want to do a collaboration and then they’re really not into it. They really just want to make the thing that they were going to make. So I guess just really be open to letting yourself be guided. Then again, I was going to make a video inside of a diorama no matter what. And I knew the format, but I didn’t know what the final shape was going to be until it was finished. So also, let yourself be okay with an open-ended result.

Call Number: C56VA | C58VA.veaAfte

Tannar Veatch:

Born in Grand Junction, CO, 1988; BFA in Sculpture from Columbia College Chicago, 2015; currently lives and works in San Francisco, CA. Diorama allows me to explore perception, reality and sublime experience through art. Light plays an important role in defining objects and space.