10 Questions With… Stephen Talasnik

Stephen Talasnik Shares His Latest Work

Interior Design: How did you first become interested in design?

Stephen Talasnik: I grew up in Philadelphia, surrounded by industrial sites: an oil refinery, the Navy shipyard. When I was eight or nine, I entered a competition sponsored by the Elmer’s glue company. Glue was a new product at the time, we’re talking the early 1960s. The project was to make something creative using Elmer’s glue. I had just visited Hershey Park that past summer, and I decided to build an entire roller coaster out of toothpicks. That was my foray into what could theoretically be sculpture. I went to RISD and got a degree in painting, then went to graduate school in Rome and taught myself to draw more intensively through copying traditional Italian Renaissance architecture and figurative sculpture.

Then I moved back to Philadelphia, curating and maintaining a studio practice and commuting to Japan, where I was teaching at a program at Temple University in Tokyo. While I was there, I would travel through Thailand, China, the Philippine, Malaysia, and Korea, and I learned how to build by hand using natural materials, learning the art of building through massless engineering. The most important component to pull out of that was a real passion for bamboo construction, specifically scaffolding, which reminded me of the roller coasters from when I was a kid. So I became very much fascinated with linear structures—not hard-edged linear structures, just gesture-aligned linear structures. It was engineering that got me interested in sculpture, but what I call fictional engineering.

ID: What do you mean by fictional engineering?

ST: Pioneer, a permanent piece I did in Tippet Rise, Montana, which is a timber frame structure, started out as a model. And the model was born from the assembly of various types of triangles. I was taught in a night school class at Cooper Union that the triangle was the most important geometric component in building, and if you could master the use of it, that’s all you need to know. So for the piece, I relied on single frames, similar in execution to a loaf of bread where each slice is a frame, and then you assemble these frames one at a time and then collectively group them. The ambition is to rely on intuition, and that comes out of drawing things over and over again. It’s fictional in that it is void of any reliance on mathematics. It’s just the reliance on the senses of touch, the tactility of the object. It’s a leap of faith, a belief in your own instincts and self-knowledge to create something which is large.

ID: That was the scale of the piece at Storm King, right?

ST: I was invited to participate in the 50th anniversary exhibition, which was my first opportunity to work large and to work out of doors—and also to work with bamboo. My idea was to create a massive glacier-like structure that was indicative of how a glacier might move. It was not about climate change, but about the power of ice as architecture. So I created a large-scale bamboo structure that relied on geometry and triangulation, and it took over the side of a hill and appeared to be wedged into the land. It was assembled with a group of young artisans and it survived for two years. A hurricane came through the Hudson Valley, the piece was covered in ice, there were wind storms, all kinds of adverse conditions, but it did survive.

ID: Do you enjoy these larger-scale projects?

ST: I’m still enthralled with the capacity of intimacy within a work of art, and the idea of how to take something small with the intimacy of a drawing and then make it large. Keeping it handmade, you are in the position to preserve some of the intimacy but monolithic. I don’t want the viewer to be intimidated. I like the idea of, when they get larger, to make them as transparent or translucent as possible. So I’m using materials that are still linear, that enable you to look through a piece and have access to how the piece is put together. I rarely put skins on pieces, although I’ve just recently started adding skins to some of the models.

ID: Why?

ST: In part, it relates to my interest in anatomy. Skin is reliant on bones to give form.  But I realized I could make infrastructure without having any idea as to what the actual sheathing would be, because it would depend upon the material that would be placed in such a manner that it would conform to the irregularities of the infrastructure. You would start stretching the material over the infrastructure and you would find a new form, without a preliminary idea as to what it’s going to look like. And that’s part of the beauty.

ID: What was the idea behind Floe?

ST: I wanted to create the equivalent of a fictional archeological museum devoted to the excavation of a part of Philadelphia. It’s composed of five different units, with the primary part being the creation of a glacier-like structure out of the materials I’m most familiar with. It’s 12 feet tall, and it occupies a space of about 400 square feet in footprint. Accompanying it is a sort of monolithic wall chart, a blueprint of sorts, which is a fictionalized drawing based on charts by cartographers examining the potential flow of icebergs. Ironically, the primary part of that drawing relates to an aerial drawing I did for the creation of the sculpture at Storm King, so there is a connection between the first large piece and very last large piece that I did.

ID: What else is in the show?

ST: There’s a collection of handmade debris, which is the result of a schooner crushed by an iceberg. And there are individual sections of what could be called glacial architecture, which is the idea of how a sculpture might look if it were designed by a computer—it has all the elements of linear structure, but it doesn’t have the skin of an actual iceberg. So there’s the mapping of ice movements, the digesting of this large-scale wood schooner by an iceberg and the crushing of it, and the debris field left out as as a result of the melting of the ice, and then an examination of how icebergs might be built. There’s no digital component, all done by hand by simple, intuitive movement.

ID: We often think of icebergs as agents of destruction, taking down boats, and their destruction by climate change is also a warning sign. What is interesting to you about them as architectural objects?

ST: We’re making something small-scale with the notion that they could potentially be large-scale. Taking something monolithic and putting it within grasp of your hand. And what’s important is you can see a sense of the hand building them. Even in buildings we see in the skyline, we don’t see the hand as part of it. We see the hand that’s part of the infrastructure, but there’s a skin put on it. So what I try to do is expose the possibility of what the infrastructure of an iceberg might look like, put into a language that is contemporary enough to relate to how we create mathematical systems now.

ID: What’s important about the framework of a fictional museum within the actual museum?

ST: The nature of a museum is to compel people to be restricted to a space and look at things they might not normally have the opportunity to. When you’re seeing something you experience out of doors—a tree or a boulder or a mountain—within the confines and intimacy of a room, there’s a different relationship between the object and the human experiencing it. When it’s out in the open, it’s for all to use. It plays a functional role. When you bring it into a museum, you’re denying its functional role.

Also, I’ve always loved museums that are grounded in science. I’m dealing primarily with natural information, and manipulating it, and this museum is large enough in scale to enable the objects I’m making to create a language that connects the viewer to the object. But underneath that, there is something perhaps that might be possibly optimistic, because optimism resides in the education and awareness. Whether we choose to do anything about it is a much broader issue, but it’s triggering the imagination and means different things to different generations. Do you want to bring your child in and say: Well, this is an iceberg, and icebergs used to be things that inhabited the world? A museum affords this almost irrational sense of time travel, because every object is imbued with a sense of connection to another time and place. We collect artifacts connected to humanity, we’re always living with this fascination that an object is a time traveler in and of itself. The context of a museum is important because it enables people of the present to go back, and it also enables them to project into a future.

ID: What’s in your future beyond this show?

ST: I have a show of 30 selected drawings at the Tayloe Piggott gallery in Jackson Hole, with the common theme of fictional engineering. They are all pencil drawings, made over a twenty-year period. And I’m working on a commission for the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., examining their mission and the architecture of its building, which is celebrating its 100th Anniversary. I’ve spent days at the building doing rubbings of all the low-level bas reliefs, which I’m going to use to create a large piece. My passion is building. A problem exists in that I see engineering, or at least the type of engineering I do, as gestural drawing. And fictional engineering is a way of translating the gestural line into a three-dimensional structure. It all came out of the experimentation of an eight-year-old playing with toothpicks to make roller coasters.