Interview with Mev Luna & Mel Reiff Hill

INTERVIEW WITH MEV LUNA AND MEL REIFF HILL

by Ahna Aorta for Femina Potens

10/5/2011

SAN FRANCISCO, CA

MISSION PIE 12:53 pm

This interview was previously only available to funders of Building Our Own White Picket Fences.  Full text is now public.

Mev Luna and Mel Reiff Hill are two artists working collaboratively to create an installation for Femina Potens’ exhibiton ‘Building Our Own White Picket Fences’.  I met up with them in the Mission to discuss their work for the show and beyond, how they relate to the notion of queer family, and, most importantly, polyamorous dogs.

 

(sound of motorcycle outside)

 

AHNA:  Motorcycle, you’re loud!  (laughing) Okay.  So, hi, thanks for meeting with me.  I’m really excited about the exhibition, especially after seeing your plans.  I saw the sketches recently and they look awesome.

 

MEL:  Thanks!

 

A: I won’t turn this interview into a relationship interrogation, but as the show does focus on the subject of queer relationships, can you tell me a little about how the two of you met and came to be in here in San Francisco together?

 

MEV: Oh, that’s funny.

 

ML:   Sure.  Well, we’re both from Houston, TX originally, and we met there through mutual friends.

 

MV:  But I’ve been living here since 2006, sort of back and forth, living in Texas on occasion, sometimes over the summers.  I was there last fall for a few months.

 

ML: So we did the distance thing for a while and then Mev moved down to Texas for the summer this past summer, and then we were kind of spoiled and didn’t want to do the distance thing again, and I quit my teaching job and we both ended up moving here about a month ago.

 

A:  Did you meet through mutual queer or artistic community?

 

ML:  We met through someone I know through my drag troupe in Houston who was someone Mev knew through a radical queer women’s group when they were 16–

 

MV:  (overlapping) When I was 16– We’d been friends for a long time so anytime I’d come back to town, that’s who I’d stay with.  And I think, over the past year and a half every time I’d come I’d stay at the Marshall House with a bunch of queer folks, where Mel was staying.  But actually I have a big “house booty is bad booty policy” and I don’t think it would have happened if I hadn’t ended up finding– I lived there in September and then went to Australia for a month, then came back and found my own room around the corner at a punk house.  I came over for a, what was it, a “post-”…

 

MV & ML: “Thanksgiving Leftovers”…

 

MV: …And it was the night after a drag show that Mel was in, and yeah, I’m a total faggot so he caught my fancy in drag (laughing) in a way that was really different than you just walking around at home.

 

A:  So we’re talking about queer family; you met through what basically is a queer family, but didn’t want to interact in that way at first, because you’re in the same house?

 

MV: Well not only that, I mean, you had a boyfriend, you were dating someone the first few times we met, so you weren’t available either.  Right?

 

ML:  I guess so.  Probably.  We had known that each other existed before we started dating.  I always thought Mev was like a really cool artist, Californian, too cool for Texas!

 

MV:  Too cool for Texas.  (laughs)

 

(Wild rice & bean salad is brought by barista)

 

ML:  That looks pretty.

 

MV: Yeah!

 

A:  I had a similar experience.  I lived in a small town in Maine for years and people would show up, move there from New York, and I would say “Oh my god, what are you doing in Maine?  Can I come with you?”

 

ML:  Houston is a really great art town.  It’s really big and it’s got it’s own thing going on, but it’s a totally different flavor than the Californian thing.  Mev would show up with their best friend Machete and they were both a totally different feel.

 

A:  That’s a great name, Machete.

 

ML: (laughing) I didn’t know who to crush on when (Mev and Machete) would always show up at the same time!

 

A:  Mel, you’re currently working on a project called ‘The Gender Book’, “a fun and colorful resource…(that) illustrates the beautiful diversity of gender”.  Will you talk about that endeavor?  What is your role in bringing the book to life?

 

ML:  Sure.  I see you’ve done your research!  That’s sort of the main project I’m working on right now; I’m the project artist.  It’s an illustrated book and I do all the illustrations, all the website design, graphic design, flyers and business cards, that type of thing.  Ninety percent of (the work) is illustrating the pages.  My process is I start with pencil drawing, then I ink it, then I color it on the computer, typeset, Photoshop.  That’s not really what my background is, I’ve never taken a class on illustration, it’s not what my “fine art” is; there’s not a big connection for me other than some of the same skills are used.  There’s not a super-big connection, at least aesthetically, between my work as a fine artist and my work as an illustrator except that they use the same skills.  I guess there’s some aesthetic bleed-over.

 

A:  In your work as a fine artist, what do generally you focus on?

 

ML:  Content-wise, or media?

 

A:  Both, anything.

 

ML:  Ok.  Media’s sort of all over the place.  I do digital photography; I don’t know why I said that first ‘cos it’s not the main thing I do, but I do printmaking, drawing, painting, 3D stuff, and I combine them all to installations.  So installation’s my favorite because I use (all the mediums) to make the installation; I’ll have the photo print on the wall which I’ll then splatterpaint on.  So installation’s the way I feel most comfortable working because it’s not boxed in, it’s the least restrictive, I think.  My work usually deals with this sort of conflict between the organic and the– and structures, I don’t want to say artificial, but where man-made right angles and hard edges meet this sort of rusty, moss…like a building that’s falling down and has moss on it is really interesting to me because of that interaction.  My work is kind of that but instead it (uses) pieces of cardboard found on the streets and sometimes I’m actually physically destroying them or grunging them up by using paint or by actually just stepping on it for a couple months.  I like to line my studio floor with paintings I’m working on and they collect things in a bit more organic way.  But then I’ll also go back in if I feel it’s getting too crazy and add more structure back to it, so I like making more of a balance there.  That goes with my sort of life philosophy, trying to find that balance.

 

A:  As well as creating a new educational resource you are also an educator by trade, teaching art to youth in grades 8-12.  Did ‘The Gender Book’ grow out of a need for knowledge on the subject that you recognized in your students?

 

ML:  That’s a good question.  I definitely think it would be useful to my students, but no, it actually came out of a need that I saw in my peers.  What happened was I would hear my lovers complain about having to go pay 100 dollars an hour to educate their therapists about basic stuff that they should have already known but that no one teaches.  Hopefully that’s starting to change.  It’s intended as a guerrilla resource that you could pass out to your grandma, or your partner if you’re coming out to them, or your doctor.  I think there’s a lot of pressure on people who are gender-variant to always be explaining themselves, to always be educating and that’s great, but you’re not up for that every day, 24 hours a day, that’s a big order.  It’s something to help ease those conversations so you’re not always repeating the basics over and over again.  I figure if you can say it once visually, because I’m a visual person, then you can start to have conversations that are more interesting at least.  If you’re going to be educating all the time at least it doesn’t have to be the 101 stuff.  If you can get a foundation laid then you can have words that they’ll understand and know what we’re talking about, a basic vocabulary to agree upon.  So then you can say to your grandma, look, page 3, instead of starting from zero.

 

A:  Would you describe yourself as mainly an educator, illustrator, fine artist, displaced Texan, wild motorcycle beast, etc.?

 

ML:  All of the above!  It depends on when you catch me.  I think I’m defined a lot by my work, so this project is where my focus is right now, but that doesn’t make me any less of a fine artist.  “Fine art” is problematic for me…I also don’t picture myself as any less of an educator because I’m not teaching full time, I mean I sort of am, but in a different way.  So they’re all connected.  The reason that this book project is nice is because it’s a very concrete, obvious connection between educator and artist; I’m illustrating an educational book.  It’s a good intersection to be hanging out in for the moment while I figure out what the next steps are going to be.  So, all of the above.

 

A:  Mev, you’ve been working in video art and are currently running a Kickstarter fundraising campaign under the umbrella of Hir Shit Productions for a video and performance piece called ‘Worse Than Queer’.  Can you tell us about the project?

 

MV: Oh sure.  That project is an international DVD compilation of different video artists who are pushing the boundaries of what queer video looks like.  So, often times when we think of queer videos, or queer aesthetics, we think of bright and shiny dildos, and glitter, and that’s sort of– there are lots of signifiers that we’ve come to associate with what queer means.  I think as we start to consider post-queer, that whole dialogue and discourse, there’s a sort of new aesthetic that emerges where people are using very new signifiers to talk about what it means to be queer.  Most of the artists have very intersectional identities that are both queer and a person of color, or they’re moving through the world in different ways.  I think that originally I had imagined the video compilation to be mostly Bay Area artists, but when I did a call for submissions and went through the chains of various friends what we ended up with were DVD artists from Austria, Iran, Sweden, Chicago, NY, LA, Texas, all over.  It was amazing.  Essentially the DVD is the first stage, and that’s already put together and has shown as part of the National Queer Arts Festival, and was recently shown in Portland as part of the Not Enough DIY Queer Festival.  We’re trying to raise money to make 1,000 DVDs and box kits that could be mailed out to any city in the world.  That project, right now, is a little bit on the backburner for me as I’m working on my thesis show for my BFA, which is in two and a half months.

 

A:  Where do you go to school?

 

MV:  California College of the Arts.  That’s a great school for integrating queer studies with art practice.  I’m actually an individualized major, so I’m combining emphasis on textiles and video.  It’s not so easy to get interdisciplinary and into the meat of it in other schools that I’ve looked into, so I’m really glad to have the Bay Area as a resource.

 

A:  In ‘Worse Than Queer’ you have a video called ‘Feast of the Beast’, and I’m really interested in hearing about that film.

 

MV:   So that’s a piece that I made in the spring of 2010, and the whole ‘Worse Than Queer’ project actually came out doing of that video.  I was working with a professor, Guillermo Galindo, who’s this amazing performance/sound artist who puts on the Pow! Pow! Pow! Action Festival in San Francisco that shows cutting-edge performance.  During the semester, the first half of it, I worked on this video, which was this idea that I’d wanted to do of creating these twelve pronoun cakes; cakes that I had baked, dyed and cut out in the shape of all the different pronouns ze, ko, hir, they, them, he, she.  I decorated them and made this naturally dyed textile suit that was my monster outfit, and ate all of these cakes in one sitting.

 

The back-story is that I had been gluten-free for three months (laughter) up until that point.  I was leaving town for spring break the next day and had one day to get the shoot, so I had to eat them all in one sitting and I had a small crew on-set and the cheapest, easiest way to make the cakes was to make them gluten with really shitty Safeway pre-made cake mix or something.  So really that whole piece was trying to physically make a piece that talks about the process of unraveling gender and starting to think and look at gender as a construct and how that starts to undo you at the same time.   I think it’s very directly from Judith Butler, her book Undoing Gender, about how the process happens both ways.  So that’s what that video’s about.

 

And then, based on that video, I was starting to think more about the abject and grotesque and I co-curated a show with Guillermo at ATA, which is Artists Television Network on Valencia St.  The event there was called ‘Feast of the Beast: Wurst Than Queer’, like bratwurst, ‘cos it was all food-themed, and I made hundreds of vegan bratwurst or something and we had a giant bowl of sauerkraut and everyone could eat that on weird altar.  I curated the night with artists who were pushing the boundaries of what queer meant.  Immediately after that event everyone was like “You need to do this again”, so that’s when the first tinkerings of the ‘Worse Than Queer’ project, where you can mail stuff out and have people have this dialogue wherever, started, with that video.

 

A:  In that project you describe the ‘Worse Than Queer’ films as communicating a ‘post-queer sensibility’, and I’m wondering if you can define ‘post-queer’ for us.

 

MV:  In alignment with other post-identity politics, which is what a lot of current theory is talking about– post-black, etc.– post-queer theory, like in the book by David B. Ruffolo called ‘Post-Queer Politics’, is the idea that identity politics can only take us so far.  So asserting queerness can only take us so far, and it’s not that we need to abandon these signifiers or queer ideas, it’s that– What else can we do?  What can we do to push that further?

 

And for me, as both someone who’s a total theory geek and a visual artist, I was realizing that sometimes art has a way of talking about something that we don’t have words for.  So I wrote a thesis paper on ‘Worse Than Queer’ as a post-queer aesthetics and my choices for all the videos, and I could break those down for you if you want but it’s pretty complex, and why they’re signifiers of an emerging post-queer aesthetic.  But also, I just felt like video was a good medium to talk about that because there are some very clear visual clues for how this is different than what we’re used to seeing, and maybe that can start to articulate what post-queer aesthetic means rather than by writing about it, rather than by saying “A post-queer aesthetic is X, Y, and Z”; it’s not so formulaic.

 

(Compiling the videos) was a really hard decision because a lot of submissions we got were almost there, but they felt too much like the traditional queer aesthetics regardless of how amazing they were as videos.  I think we met three times to thumb through twenty videos, at least, to figure out- where are these distinctions, and what makes it- a lot of it is intuition, it’s a sensibility, like Camp, like Susan Sontag had to write fifty notes on Camp in order to articulate it.  It’s sort of the same with post-queer sensibilities.  So that’s the short-long answer.

 

A:  I love that with having the two of you here together it sounds like, Mel, you’re doing ‘The Gender Book’ which is really setting the foundation for people who don’t know, and then Mev, you’re taking it to the next level and saying okay, for those of us who do know, where can we go from there.

 

ML:  It’s like I’m building foundations for things and then Mev is knocking them down.

 

(laughter)

 

A:  (laughing) How does that function in your relationship?

 

ML:  Oh, I don’t know, but they’re both totally useful and I’m really happy for Mev’s theory background.  We joke that Mev is our clean-up PR person whenever people start to talk shit about us on Tumblr.

 

MV:  I’m officially the Risk Management Position of ‘The Gender Book’.

 

ML: Right, because the folks who are making it are not really gender theorists, I’ve never taken a gender studies class or anything like that, I’m just simply trying to say ‘These are things I would want my grandma to know’, just the first couple most important things, and it’s one hundred percent 101.  If a 301 person looks at the book they’re going to start picking at it, but the fact is it’s not meant for them at the end of the day.

 

A:  It sounds like it’s really speaking to your own experience and the experience of your peers and saying, without any rhetoric around it, ‘This is what our life has been and this is what we want you to understand’.

 

MV:  Yeah, and the amazing thing about the parallel between our projects is that they are community-based.  ‘The Gender Book’ very much says ‘What is everyone’s experience? Submit, submit, answer these survey questions and we’ll pull from that’, and the ‘Worse Than Queer’ project is very much about a larger discourse; how do we bring ‘post-queer’ to the queer community so that we can talk about it in a way that’s tangible?  I wouldn’t say that they’re totally parallel projects by any means, but it seems that for both of us community is really important.

 

ML:  I think that’s really interesting, and I don’t want to collapse gender theory and queer theory.  They’re certainly on slightly different topics and are coming at it from the opposite approaches, like we were saying before.  I think of yours as a 301 level: Okay, we understand what these things mean and we’ve used these things, now what’s next.  Which is probably just because that movement’s been around longer and is more ready for that.

 

MV:  Identity politics in terms of gender theory have been around just as long as queer theory.  In fact, queer theory was birthed through gender theory, so they are very similar in their discourses.  Now, actual sexual identity and gender identity are very different.  I think that the main difference between our projects, if we’re looking at them, is that yours is based very much in identity politics and ‘Worse Than Queer’ is coming from post-identity politics.  And yet, they’re both trying to do the same thing for our community.  That’s the whole point; they don’t have to be one or the other, they can be working with each other to create a better experience for everyone.

 

A: So on the theme of community and queer community, and getting back to the exhibition ‘Building Our Own White Picket Fences’, I’m wondering:  What does queer family looks like?

 

MV:  (laughing) Well we could talk about our family; we just spent the night at our poly dog’s house!

 

ML:  We do have a pretty queer family, with little gaybies and such.  And I think it’s not a nuclear family, also- the energy crosses over, and that’s part of- not necessarily every queer family, but ours for sure.  Like this whole community thing, everything’s linked.  We met through a mutual friend and that’s all part of the same queer family, I think.  I don’t want to say why, with any certainty, but I think so many queer people are disengaged from our family to some extent that we do make our own chosen families.  In Houston I was living in a house with 2/3 of my drag troupe and that was totally normal. We’d fight over who was doing the dishes and stuff.  The idea of a queer family being a chosen one– it’s the people you share a passion with, who are all working for the same goals.  We have our hands in the same art projects a lot of the time.

 

MV:  I think if you think about what our “family” is, too, in our relationship, it’s very queer, or different.  We have a co-parent for our dog who’s in San Francisco who has a dog that’s shared with a boyfriend and his wife.  So that’s very queer, our poly dogs, or whatever, and that’s all family.

 

ML:  Queer families aren’t father-mother-children.  It’s more complicated and more intentional than that.  It could be daddy-boy!  But all the structures that we use have intentionality because there is no set structure.

 

MV: It’s really, really fluid.  It connects to different people in different ways.  It’s all different sorts of things.  It’s like a complicated, extended network is the “queer family”.

 

A:  I’ve had the same experience living with 2/3 of my burlesque troupe in Portland, Maine and all of us dating within the house and ending up living together in certain room.  That really is my family, and now suddenly half of them are moving to San Francisco because we suddenly felt the pull that our family had to travel.

 

MV: Family on location.

 

A: Yeah, exactly.  Getting back to the exhibition, I’m wondering what your process has been like in terms of collaborating not only with each other but with another artist couple as well.  Have there been challenges, or amazing sparks of creative splendor whizzing between all four parties, or both, as you’ve been meeting with Monica Canilao and Harrison Bartlett for this show?

 

ML:  I think definitely there were some sparks at our last meeting.  We all sat down and had some food…vegan pizza…

 

MV:  We had both kinds of pizza.  Vegan and non-vegan pizza!

 

ML:  And we were sort of joking, but a lot of good ideas came out of it.  I think Harrison and I were more silly about it, and then I was like ‘Wait, the plane’s not actually gonna be hot pink, right?’

 

MV: Monica was like ‘Well, I would like something to be neon’.  And then Harrison was like, ‘Yeah but, I really like the texture that the plane already is’.  And I was like, ‘Ok, we really need to draw this out’, so I gave both Harrison and Mel pieces of paper and was like ‘Draw this’.

 

A:  I was wondering when I looked at description…Madison and I were saying ‘Do they have an actual airplane?’  Where did you get it?

 

MV:  Y’know, you’re gonna have to ask Harrison about that.  That’s a to-be-continued.  You need something to keep ‘em listening.

 

A:  I’m meeting with them tomorrow, so I’ll find out more about the plane.

 

ML: They have a box truck, so that means they also have everything in the world that has ever been free.

 

MV: We’re actually going to Scrap in San Francisco after this to get materials for the hammock part of the installation.  And that sort of the came out of– I had been doing digital weaving, I never liked weaving before and then I took a course with Josh Faught, who is this amazing queer craft artist, and fell in love with the TC-1 Jacquard loom, which is a digitized loom.  It actually predates the analytical engine.  Ada Lovelace, who was huge in working on the analytical engine, she wrote extensively about how much the Jacquard loom had influenced her ability to think about software.  But anyway, that’s tangential…

 

So, yeah, my work is about craft and technology.  I’m interested in video and textiles.  Most people would say that those don’t fit together.  So I was working on the loom, trying to think about imagery that would work for our relationship.  I made this repeat pattern of one of my legs and I thought that was interesting in terms of polyamory and having a bunch of legs.  Then we talked about hammocks– I can’t remember how we came up with hammocks, but it ended up being a good metaphor for skin…

 

ML: I think my hammock broke and I was saying I wanted to make myself a new one, functionally, because I had made my sister a hammock last Christmas.  And then we decided to make art hammocks, make a bunch of them.

 

MV: So part of them I’m going to be weaving, the other part we’re going to be either tying the fabric or constructing, and then the weavings will live on the bottom side of the hammock so they can be viewed.  All of the imagery will talk about our relationship in a different way.

 

A: In your description you say that the installation will have ‘anatomical body parts in silk in the hammock’, and I love your write-up that says ‘freak nasty fiber will lick whimpering wet assholes whilst whilting and splooging all over the broken plates’.  I got the impression that the hammocks will be very flesh-like, the source of the ‘splooge’.  Do you think of these as body parts that people can lay in?

 

MV: I don’t think of them as body parts.  I think that the imagery will be taken from that, the silk that I’m using is this natural raw silk that can be dyed easily with plants, so I think that it will refer to skins but not be so literal.

 

ML: They are really abstracted, it’s not like the hammock is going to be in the shape of an elbow.  But these are the spaces that the family members would occupy.  You can step into their roles and look out.  It’s sort of like clothes in that it’s covering but it’s also like support.  I think it’s a nice metaphor; we’re making five of them and there are five little members of our family.

 

A: Is the fifth your dog?

 

ML: One of them is our dog, yes.  Three creatures and two humans.

 

(Here the interviewer has a quiet moment of feeling anthropocentric.)

 

ML: But yeah, just the idea that these roles are ones that we made up ourselves but they are real support even though they’re not traditional family roles.  I think of it almost as a ghost image that you can then step into; it’s not a literal body but it’s the shape where a body could be.  And it’s empty until someone’s inside it, and I think that’s a really nice activating thing to have the audience come in and see what it’s like to look out from this position and see the other ones in your peripheral vision and be in this environment.  I think that’s a nice metaphor for queer family.

 

A:  I love the interactive part of the installation, and I’ve been wondering; is there a plan for a performative element?

 

MV: That’s a logistical thing; it depends on the suspension.  If we can have bodies in the hammocks then there’s room for performance.  I’m really obsessed with synchronized dancing.  I couldn’t figure out why, but I had been in all these queer synchronized dance groups in the Bay like Dance Dance Insurrection, which was a flag and drum core troupe, and I had been in this one called Bootysmacks, so I really love synchronized swimming- (laughs) I mean synchronized dancing- so I have a project called the Stellar Deep Steep, which is a synchronized steeping team.

 

A: Steeping?

MV:  As in tea.  I made tea bag swimsuits for the steeping team.  So one of the things that Monica and I off-handedly talked about is that if we can do performance, I would love to choreograph some synchronized dance moves in the hammock.  I think that I definitely come from a performance background, and Mel does a lot of drag and has relations with performance that way, so for us something could be worked out naturally.  Monica said she’s never really done performance before but is excited about it.  So we haven’t really formed that part as much, I think we need to be working on the physical things– textiles are really labor-intensive, so the actual weaving takes a long time.

 

ML: Talking about audience interaction, yeah I do performance stuff but I’m not– One thing that’s really common in my installations is I like to make my viewers a little bit uncomfortable and help them to interact with my pieces more than they normally would.  I think of my role in that as more of a facilitator, and sometimes it’s something that people aren’t willing to do, and that’s okay.  They’ll walk up to the edge of the installation and see that they have to step on the paintings to actually get through it and they’ll just poke their head in and then not.  And I’m sitting there saying ‘Yes, come in, it’s okay, you can step on them’.  I think it’s going to be a similar situation with the hammocks.  That’s one thing I like about installation art; it does really challenge the viewer and their conception of what they’re supposed to do in an art space.  I think that, personally, I’m not as interested in being a performer but more of a director in that sense: Come in, you get to activate this space.  You can be a part of this too.

 

A: Awesome. Well, we need to wrap up, but in final thoughts: Mel, I’m jealous of your motorcycle.  Mev, I’m just a little mad that you used the title ‘Feast of the Beast’ before I could.  And to both of you- your husky’s heterochromatic eyes make me melt into a pile of slobbering mush.  Thank you so much for taking the time to talk today!

 

MV & ML: (laughing)