The News

Chase Palmer

Interview by L. Valena

First, can you tell me what you responded to?

It was a picture of somebody like yelling and their head was thrown back. It was a photograph with gray outlines and sort of stress lines and stuff like that. It was pretty cool, and I really appreciated the emotion of it.

What did you draw from that?

I was looking at it, and I love the gray scale and the emotion of it. I was thinking that I would make something in gray scale and with the same sort of anguish. And I was thinking: what gets people really upset? Like, what are people upset about now? The answer I was thinking at the time was- a lot. There's a lot to be upset about. All around us, there's all kinds of different headlines and stuff like that that are just always like bearing down. I was thinking the news is definitely a sort of source of that sort of anguish, and I just really wanted to, to capture that.

What happened next?

Right now I work at a pizza chain in a small town community. I went in there and I asked everybody, "Hey, what matters to you in the news?” It was a funny process because every single person would throw out something like the Wall- something that everybody hears about. But then they would pause and say. “You know, actually this matters to me: there was a shooting at my campus”. Or, you know, a dog gave birth and it was a really cool news story or something. A hundred different things that they all thought were nice, or sad, or important to them in some way. I wrote them all down, and I left the notepad out there for people to add things as they were bringing in deliveries and stuff.

Then I just started gathering headlines, just looking them up- mostly on Google news. But I went out of my way to go to a few other places. I started cropping headlines and manipulating them a little bit. A lot of the backgrounds is headlines that I've cropped out and then taking pictures of my screen. A lot of people share news that way. The news often doesn't get shared in full. I tried to capture that essence- that we're just constantly being bombarded with the quickest sentence that gets across the biggest stories of our times. Then from there, a lot of it was just composition. I wanted there to be an actor in the scene where somebody is yelling. So I said, why not me? So I made that pose myself and I got Kelly (who's my fiance and the love of my life) to take a picture of me making the pose, like yelling in the living room. And I just started going in with outlines. Doing a real rough job of it- not really going back over my work. The actual pieces inside of the yelling man- me, I guess- were different historical pieces. The Titanic, the declaration of war from America's entry to a World War II, stuff like that.

I remember hitting a roadblock. I wanted the speech bubble to be like news forming. My initial reading that I was trying to put out was that there's news all around you. You can only take in so much- what do you say back? That's sort of a positive reading, I guess. Because it's like a call to action. But then there's like a negative reading: if all of this news is surrounding you, what matters? You know, it doesn't matter that much. And so, you know, somewhere between those two, I think is where it actually is.

To represent news being formed, I was stuck. I thought about using a typewriter, but that's played out and boring. So I kind of leaned back in my chair and yelled to Kelly "Where does the news start, if you're a person?” And she just said, "Twitter,” as if it was no question at all to her. From Twitter, I went to Facebook, which literally prompts "What's on your mind?"

I think it's so interesting- this kind of comment about the news and social media, and our role in, in making that narrative that keeps kind of spinning and developing. There's like also an echo chamber element in the world. If somebody says something, and even if it's just a rumor, if enough people say it back...

Or you get only pieces of the picture, right?

Yeah.

And in it's up to you to kind of strike a direct path through that. It's interesting how everybody comes to that.

The way that we try to handle the information. I mean, the information age is extremely taxing on our brains. We're constantly bombarded with all of this information, and we're just trying to figure out what it means, how it actually affects our lives. It's really interesting and complicated.

There's no pause for the news. Of course, when asked what matters to them in the news, there's always going to be the person that's like, "nothing- the the news doesn't matter to me." Even a person like that still, just by cultural osmosis, gets so much of of what's happening. And they still do have to, if not grapple with it, at least interact with it in some way.

Yeah. And it's interesting. And how much time we spend at the news. I personally am somebody who probably spends less time than I should with the news, just because it upsets me so much. Sometimes, I just can't handle it. And it's crazy that that's a thing- that the news is so upsetting that I can't always read it. It's not good.

Right-what does it say? What does it say when those that inform us are also the ones that scare us the most? That's fucked up in a lot of ways. While doing this piece, it's such a weird thing. I had to do a thing where I would just see a headline that would be deeply upsetting if I read the whole piece, but I had to take it as just another building block to this thing I'm doing. But in reality, everything deserves the fair shake that it should get from people. It deserves a thorough reading.

This isn't a detailed call to action. Perhaps just saying something about the news, even on a small level... Everybody says armchair activism doesn't help and blah, blah, blah. At least you're saying something. At least you're making your points made, even it's throwing the smallest pebble into the biggest bin of rocks, at least you did it. Everybody has a voice no matter how small it is.

That's very positive. It is interesting how the internet has kind of democratized those voices to some extent- or at least we have we have that perception.

Yeah, I believe that to be very true.

Tell me some more about how this relates to the rest of your work.

Oh, sure. It's actually kind of interesting. I rarely get to make art for art. I don't get to just sit down and decide to make something artful. Usually I'm making something for someone. They tell me their vision, they tell me what they do. I'm a designer. That's pretty much the way I want to make money. Like really, I'm not making much money given that I work at pizza shop, but still, hopefully that changes with the move. Sometimes I'll make stuff for something I'm doing- like for a podcast or a video series or something. That will be for me, but it won't be for art's sake. This is one of the few times I think, period, that this has just been art for itself. I don't have to apply this to something. This is just something that I think speaks for itself and was pretty liberating as a result. I really enjoyed it.

I think an open ended prompt is a nice invitation to that. It's definitely different from design for sure.

Honestly, I'm the worst about lighting my own fire. I'm the worst about just making myself do a thing. Bait/Switch has helped me out so much, because I had a date and a time that I had to get this done by. Even if I was doing periphery work of just asking people what they're thinking was important to them, at least I felt like I was getting something done.

I love that you sort of crowdsourced the material for this and involved your community.

That is core to what I want out of whenever I make stuff. Even if it's just for one person, I still want to make something that's reflective of the time and place. I don't know what matters to everybody. I can't positively know. I am the small bubble of speech in the middle of the sea of all that stuff. Getting a big range of voices was important to me.

Do you have any advice for someone else doing this?

Just make a thing! No matter what it is, even if it's a bad thing, just make it. One of my favorite things to say is that something can be bad, but I can still love it. So make a bad thing that you love! Make something that isn't technically perfect and just appreciate it for what you love about it. If you carry that with you, then it's always going to be good and you're going to keep getting better because you love it. Just make the thing. Make that sandwich. Make that art. Make that whatever.

Call Number: M21VA | M25VA.paNe

Hey I'm Chase, a graphic designer and artist from Chattanooga, currently in Virginia. I edit things, I love my future wife Kelly, our two cats, and
I'm writing this at 6 AM after driving for basically ten hours with my future wife and two cats. That picture is from earlier that day where I did wedding photography, so I was a mess! Basically, I love doing everything and always wanna keep encouraging everyone around me to try everything too. <3

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