‘A Common Occurrence of Time’

Barry, Viator seek stillness, meaning in chaotic world

Kailee Viator’s tenant space at The Art Studio looks chaotic. The area is filled with moss, twigs, paint, discarded bug shells and a plethora of found objects. On this particular day, her friend Amanda Barry is working on an object in the back corner, which only adds to the cramped, chaotic scene.

But out of chaos comes order.

The two friends laugh as they show off various works in progress for “A Common Occurrence of Time,” a joint exhibition on display Feb. 1-28 at TASI. While the pair share the overarching theme, each collection of work has its own title — Viator’s is “Yellowing” and Barry’s is “Quiescence.”

The show’s title is an amalgam of ideas.

“Common, because we share the same concept,” Viator said. “She lives in Houston; I live here. We don’t see each other a lot, but somehow our art really like reflects each other.”

Barry said the pair decided to do a show after Viator visited Barry at Houston Baptist University where she was getting a master’s in sculpture.

“We hadn’t talked about our art,” she said. “We hadn’t shown each other our art and, like, I had some birdcage things going on. And she was like, “Holy shit.” 

“Well, we had the same story about a dead bird,” Viator said.

“Oh, that’s right, we did,” Barry said. “A bird died my hand….”

“And I had a bird die in my hand,” Viator said. “So we’ve always, incidentally, shared the same concepts. And both of our bodies of work for the show have a lot to do with time as the main conceptual consideration. So it’s a ‘Common Occurrence of Time.’”

The pair met in a Drawing I class at Lamar University where they earned their undergraduate art degrees. Over time they became close friends as well as artistic soul mates.

The pair met in a Drawing I class at Lamar University where they earned their undergraduate art degrees. Over time they became close friends as well as artistic soul mates.

“We would be married if we liked women,” Barry said.

“And if we wanted to have a very awful relationship,” Viator said. “I don’t think two artists shouldn’t be together.” 

“Not like us,” Barry said. “We’re too crazy, and we’re always too busy.”

Listening to the pair in conversation is like listening to a well-oiled double act, banter flying and sharp observations feeding each other’s comments. But their playful nature does not obscure the seriousness of their thoughts about the work.

Barry said her work is meditative.

“Since my life is so chaotic with all the different things that I do, I do things in repetition that can make my brain go into a zen state,” she said. “So that’s really the only time that I allow my brain to rest. There’s a lot of different iterations of time within my own work.”

Viator chipped in.

“So yours would be like the whole metamorphosis like the transitional, like growth, (and) mine would be more kind of looking at how much people waste time,” she said. “The installation portion is very much like a living room setting, and there’s a figure in the installation that’s just staring at this television. And then all this moss overgrowth coming up onto the TV, the chair, the lamp — kind of Earth reclaiming your surroundings while you sit idle.”

“We both can’t stand like people that just don’t do anything with their life — that waste of time,” Barry said. “Life is so precious, and they just waste away. Mine relates to that in a way not conceptually, but I have remains left behind, like empty shells and empty cicada exoskeletons, empty turtle shells….”

Neither artist is including the actual creature, only their shells­­, rather than actual life, they are keen to point out. 

“All of the shells that we both have in both of our series are all empty,” Viator said. “The thing has passed on, the shell remains. I’ve also been thinking about how objects retain memory.”

“We talked about that,” Barry said. “I said I am more connected to the shell, to the memory that is left behind — Yeah, we’re weird. 

“Whenever we planned the show, we knew that we had this connection, and we like told each other, ‘We’re not going to talk about our work. We’re not going to show each other until maybe six months before.’”

“So that way everything was pretty organically naturally done,” Viator said. “And then, of course, we already knew it would be fun. We don’t have to say, ‘OK, this is the overarching concept.’ You do you, I do me — you know, we already had it.”

The two artists will display work that is mixed-media based, but for all their shared philosophy, their works are different.

“I would never call myself like a sculptor,” Viator said. “You know every now and then there may be some ceramic pieces involved in what I do, but (Barry teaches) ceramics. I’m just attention deficit and can’t stick to a media for anything, which is fine. It’s fine.”

Barry considers herself a mixed-media artist, although her master’s is in sculpture and ceramics, and she teaches ceramics at Galveston College.

“A lot of my sculptures are primarily ceramic, but they have a lot of different materials added with them,” she said. “Actually, some of my installation pieces will be primarily found (objects) with just a little bit of ceramic added to them.”

Viator’s degree is in painting, but now she defines the concept of mixed-media artist.

“There were always things attached to (the paintings),” she said. “I’m mixing different things into the paint. And I can’t bring myself to just put paint on something with a brush. Who uses brushes? Cut out the middleman, use your hand.”

Looking at the two bodies of work, one gets the feeling that the media they’ve chosen is simply a foundation from which the work creeps out to encompass other things, to take up other spaces,

“I guess painting would be my foundation for what I do, ceramics is your foundation,” Viator said to Barry. “While maybe something is mainly a ceramic piece or maybe I actually did something on canvas, it’s like at some point it ceases to be a painting (or) it ceases to be just ceramic work.”

Barry said her subtitle came from her master’s thesis.

“I was talking about a chrysalis, and the definition of a chrysalis is a quiessent pupa,” she said. “So, I looked into like the word quiessence more, and it essentially teaches us about mindfulness, being one with the time that you’re in, being still. So me doing work like that could teach others the same thing. Which kind of goes hand in hand with not wasting time.”

Viator interjects one of the rare contrasts between their work.

“I feel yours is like a passive thing and mine’s an aggressive thing,” she said. “We’re talking about the same concept but from different perspectives.”

“But,” Barry said, “we’re still wanting people to be aware of time in all forms — the preciousness of time. Not wasting life watching TV, which is terrible.”

Television is OK, the pair said, but like most things, moderation is the key.

“I just can’t personally sit in one place stare at one thing, and my brain just turn off,” Viator said. “It tells me what to think. That’s what my installation is about.”

The subtitle “Yellowing” is about degradation, Viator said. It comes from an Alice in Chains lyric, “Yellowing and green with mold.” 

“I love it,” she said. “It’s from ‘Heaven Beside You’ — ‘It’s like pictures in a box at home yellowing and green with mold.’ I love Alice in Chains. They’re my favorite grunge band.”

Viator said her work involves recycling other people’s old stuff. 

“Miranda gave me that chair,” she said. “Barry gave me his grandma’s old TV stand. The lamp was in my house. The grandfather clock was in my trailer when we were redoing it — the people that lived in it before left it. The mirror was left by another tenant of my dad’s.”

Viator said that when she worked as a radiology tech, her lab would print films for certain law firms, and sometimes they would print wrong. 

“My boss let me keep the ones that were printed incorrectly as long as I cut patient information,” she said. “So I have stacks of chest X-rays, CT scans, MRIs. I have some mammograms. I’m including them in, I guess you’d call them collages — like within shadow boxes, there’s X-ray films, found objects, little drawings that actually show that I can do very tight detail drawings still when I put my mind to it. Like, I’m am academically trained. There are also some tattoo drawings in the collages.”

Barry said she collects her objects on walks with her geologist partner.

“We go on a lot of trips together, so we’ll hunt for arrowheads and trying to find arrowheads will find bones and rocks,” she said. “As a ceramicist, I mix my own glazes. So I’m very into geology because that’s essentially what ceramics is. It’s like geology and chemistry, you know, fused on the clay, basically. That was actually one of the first things we bonded over. 

“So he’s a collector of objects and so on. He collected bugs growing up, which was really cool. That man knows everything about bugs and nature. I’ve taken some of the bugs that he’s collected and sculpted them there in the show.”

Viator said she uses actual bug shells in her work, whereas Barry will typically sculpt the shells in her work using the real shells as inspiration.

“But there are objects that are glued in, like a lot of like the wood pieces,” Barry said. “I don’t think it makes any sense to make wood out of clay. Wood’s already beautiful on its own. So I usually will take the wood that we find. There will be like inclusions of little minerals here and there like of the actual object — I have no right making a mineral.”

Ultimately, for all of the conversation and laughter, the work is centered on a sense of stillness. Barry said this body of work is probably the most quiet, minimal work she’s done, even though there is a lot of time involved. 

“A lot of it is repetitious things, like I said, to enter that zen state,” she said. “I crave that because we’re so crazy. Our brains are loud, and our brains are fighting and need to rest.”

However, it takes a lot of work to be minimal. Viator said her installation has “thousands of hours” making it and ripping it apart and remaking it, she said, laughing. She turns to Barry.

“(These are) simple, but you had to make those big complex things to know how to do simple but effective work.”

“A Common Occurrence of Time” promises to be a visual feast that captures the shared personalities of these vibrant artists — so take a quiet moment and find the zen buried in the chaos of the world.

For more information, visit www.artstudio.org, or call 409-838-5393.

Story by Andy Coughlan, ISSUE editor