Seeds and All

Brenda Oelbaum

Interview by L. Valena
October 12, 2023

Can you start by describing the prompt you responded to?

It looked like it was a mixture of a watercolor and a pen-and-ink drawing. I was trying to figure out who the artist behind it was. I’m always a little curious about that. I found it a little… dirty. [laughs] I mean, I don't normally look at a nude and go, “That's dirty,” but there was something about this one that hit me in kind of a funny way. I guess I was responding to that. I felt very strongly that the artist was trying to make something sexy, that it was very sexual. I guess I wanted to respond with my age and my body.

And I wanted to focus on other elements in it. It was floral, and I had been in my yard a lot. A few years ago, my son planted a dye garden, and I haven't really kept it up because I'm not dyeing anything. But one type of flower that I've paid attention to is the orange cosmos. I've been harvesting the seeds to replant because we live in an area where they won't survive the winter. Collecting the seeds became my outside activity. I wanted to do something with that to respond to the floral aspect. Originally, I started to make a little movie, but my phone has too many images on it, so I didn't have the memory to play with my apps. Something that I did a lot of during the pandemic was make digital art using apps on my phone. I did quite a few things.

There is a group in LA that had been doing this call-and-response-type work. You'd be paired with somebody for two weeks and you'd go back and forth each day responding to their work. This was making me feel a little nostalgic for that. I was playing on my phone. Again.

What happened next?

Well, I wanted to use my body, so I took a picture. Then I was doing photo collage with the flowers; I isolated them in a different app and superimposed them. Then I played with it in another app that did funky things to the color. What was interesting was that I looked at my prompt and then just went to work and didn't look at it again. But when I looked at them side-by-side at the end, I was shocked at how similar the colors were. I thought that was really wild. The background is a close-up picture of all the seeds. Orange cosmos have these very weird, sickle-shaped little seeds. I don't know that anybody looking at it would know what they were, but that's where the title came from.

That's cool. I am interested in this line of inquiry about sexuality and the body. It sounds like something that struck you immediately and I'm wondering if we could talk a little bit more about how these things play out in your life or your work.

I'm a fat activist and a lot of my work is about the diet industry. I have used my body in my work before, especially in quick pieces. But I have a little bit of a conflict with things that I see online. There are a lot of people promoting body positivity and I feel like they're sexualizing themselves often. There’s nothing wrong with being a sexual person, but I just wonder if that's necessary. I understand that response, though. Probably one of the first impulses among fatphobic people is to think, “That person is not sexually attractive.” So I understand why fat people want to respond to that notion with, “Yes, I am.” But there's something about it that is triggering to me. I mean, I have been sexual fat and thin, but I just feel that that's not everything. I know sex sells and it's provocative, but that’s not what it’s all about. Maybe it's because I'm getting older, and age does play a role in it.

I’m on a Discord page for fat activism. There are some people who have posted pictures of themselves, and I wrote to one woman immediately and asked, “Can I grab these images? I'm an artist and I want images of fat people that are different from what I'm seeing.” These were pictures of her hiking in the wilderness in the Pacific Northwest, and there was something about her surroundings and her body in space that was just so wholesome. And that alone was very sexy. But not in this “Look at my ass, look at my rolls” way. I don't know how to explain it, but I really found it yummy, and I want to see more images like that.

That’s just my thing. So there's a lot in my work about what I would like to see, and how to poke holes in this premise that thin is sexy. And about that flaunting. I thought that piece that I was responding to was very “Tits up!” [laughs], which was kind of like, “What the fuck?” [both laugh]

Sorry, the prompt chooses the artist!

I was thinking that this person doesn't have this body. They don't know how this body works. And that was kind of strange. I might be completely wrong, but that was my response. That body does not exist. But this body, my body, exists.

It’s so crazy that in this culture we're all holding ourselves up against this ideal that’s impossible for everyone, except for a select few, and that's all they're doing. Yet it's hard not to hold ourselves up to that just because of how things are messaged.

Right.

Do you explore these themes in other media or in other ways in the rest of your work?

In this kind of a challenge, I see that I'm repeating things. Flowers have called to me before and videos and collaging and my body. But I think in my studio practice I'm more conceptual and less playful. Everything is very well thought out and there's a reason for almost everything. I still do that a little in this, and I'm thoughtful about that, but I don't really think there was a message. It was just a response. And I think that's fun sometimes. I think I need a little bit more of that in my life because so much of my work happens in my head. There isn't a practice of creating things every day. It's thinking about things every day, but it's not physically manifesting things every day. I think that’s important, but it’s not a high priority right now, unless I push myself to engage that way.

And I miss it. There are often just pretty things that I see. I remember my grandmother always saying, [in grandmother voice] “Why don't you paint something pretty, honey??” [both laugh] And then I went through a period where that's all I did. I suppose that you can be in the same place, but it doesn't seem that that's been happening in my practice.

I'm glad that this gave you an opportunity to get your hands dirty, and throw some noodles against the wall.

Yes.

Do you have any advice for another artist approaching this project for the first time?

I would say to just have fun and not get too wrapped up in it, which I think might be hard. This kind of project might attract people who don't have a lot of art experience.

It’s a pretty big range in terms of experience.

It's a call that really anybody could respond to; it’s available to a lot of people. And I think people who don't have experience might cramp, and think, “Oh my God, this has to be a masterpiece because other people are going to see it!” I love these types of processes because they're so fanciful and light-hearted and it does not have to be the be-all and end-all. I do that with my own work, but in this situation, it was just like, I'm going away on a retreat tomorrow, it's due blah blah blah, then I dove in and my camera screwed me over... But then I came back to it and thought, “Hurry up, take some pictures, just do it, just play.” And it felt really good. Yes, there’s a deadline, and yes, it had to be done. But it didn’t have to be my opus. I think that’s important for people, even those who are really serious about their work, but maybe just relax!

Call Number: Y117VA | Y119VA.oeSe

Brenda Oelbaum holds a BFA equivalent for the OCAD University in Toronto, Canada; She studied painting in Florence, Italy, under the direction of the late Aba Bayefski and received her MA in Gallery Administration from the State University of New York, F.I.T. campus. She is currently the Michigan representative for the Feminist Art Project, and past president of the National Women’s Caucus for Art.