Leah Beeferman draws what buildings think

TTWP offers another glance inside the head of an artist who visited Philadelphia’s shores recently (rivers have shores, and we have two rivers — so there). Leah Beeferman came here to do a show with Brooke Inman at SPACE 1026.

Previously, we spoke to David Kessler.

TTWP: We met face-to-face at your opening in Philadelphia, and you told me about this computer game you used to play. Let’s start there. Tell me about that again. That was pretty cool. It sounded sort of like ZORK. I used to love those games where you had to figure out the right two word command to make anything happen, and you just kept getting “Syntax Error” until you figured out a combination that would make ANYTHING happen. I think what you were doing was a little more advanced than that, though. Tell me about it.

LB: Well, this was called MUSE – and it wasn’t actually a game. If anything, it was probably a much simpler, super low-tech, text-only version of something like Second Life. MUSE stands for Multi-User Simulated Environment, and, basically, it was a virtual “world.”

Rooms existed by having a title, a description, a list of objects contained within that room, and exits to other rooms. As you moved from room to room, you’d be presented with the new information specific to that room. There were characters, too: other people like you with their own rooms and objects. Everyone had a name (a handle), and people would spend time chatting, building rooms and wandering around exploring, or writing little bits of code to make your objects interact with other objects and people. I spent a lot of time doing this between 5th and 8th grade, and, as computer-nerdy as it was, I can’t deny the influence it probably had on me making detailed, factual-fictional, architectural drawings of invented worlds.

TTWP: Talk about space a little bit. Where is some of the best places that you’ve gotten lost? I got lost in Central Pennsylvania on a road trip in college, but it was great because when I thought about it hard enough I could guess my way back to the road I was trying to find. I used to try to get lost in Southeast Kansas, but it’s just one giant grid out there. If you have even the faintest sense of direction, it’s impossible. I used to get lost in the Pennsylvania Capitol Building all the time, though. That place is hard to figure out.

LB: I think my favorite way to be lost is to wander around parts of a city without a map and see where I end up. I really liked doing this in Belgium, where I’ve been lucky enough to have been several times in the last few years. Brussels is a great city to explore because it has so many different parts. Before I moved to Richmond, a friend of mine and I would go exploring on our bikes all throughout New York City - mainly in Brooklyn, but Queens too. We would usually start with a planned route, but would often divert from it at some point, and end up reconnecting to it eventually. Some of the best things we saw were found on those diversions.

But about being lost – there’s this great book by one of my favorite authors, Rebecca Solnit, called A Field Guide to Getting Lost. It talks about being lost in all kinds of ways: being physically lost, but also psychologically lost. That doesn’t do it justice, it makes the book sound cheesy, and it’s not at all. It has amazing essays on all kinds of subjects, ranging from being lost in the mountains out west, to Yves Klein and IKB blue, to white settlers who had been captured by Native Americans in response to the murder of a family member.

Solnit is amazing. She has a really incredible way of mixing personal experience and observation with facts and history, and piecing together these really different topics to make a point. I think her writing has had a really big impact on the way I make my work. Actually, she’s influenced the way I think about space quite a bit. She’s helped me come to an understanding of space (place) as growing out of a constant dialogue between what exists in that place and a variety of personal responses to that place.

TTWP: So what were one or two of the best things you saw on your diversions in European cities?

LB: That’s hard, there were so many amazing things. I love the architecture in Brussels, specifically in this one neighborhood called Foret. There’s a great huge park there, Parc de la Foret … the apartment houses right around the park aren’t actually that architecturally interesting, but I have a strange fondness for them. There’s also a lot of beautiful single family big “row houses” around there that are fantastic.

In Namur (Belgium), there’s this huge citadel that you walk up and around. There’s a whole cavernous underground pathway system to this thing that I didn’t actually get to go in, but it was amazing imagining all these Napoleon-era soldiers tramping around inside, not coming up to ground for several days. There’s an incredible view of a river and two small Belgian cities once you’ve climbed to the top of the citadel.

Taking the train from Brussels to Copenhagen was another one of my favorite moments; the train pulls onto a ferry boat to cross the water between Germany and Denmark, and you can get off the train and go up to the deck on the top of the ferry. When you reach the other side, you just get back on the train and it pulls right off and carries on. I could go on and on and on… I was really lucky to go on a big trip last summer, mostly staying with people that I or my family knows, so I saw a lot of things. The whole trip is pretty well documented on my Flickr site, if anyone is interested. I take a lot of pictures, actually, and I would say that they better represent my “diversions” than I can by describing them.

TTWP: So are you into stuff like 2nd Life? It’s interesting that your work was sort of inspired by an on-line world but it seems like you’re still using real tools, your real hands and all that to make work with. I’m pretty crazy about Facebook and StumbleUpon, but my real time interactions with people are still mostly real world, too.

LB: No, I’m actually not into 2nd Life at all. I think I got all of that stuff out of my system a long time ago. And I wouldn’t quite say that my work was inspired by the on-line world; I’d say that it contributed very early on (even before I even really knew what “making my work” could mean) to a certain way of thinking about space. More than anything else, if I had to call up a specific influence, it would be a class I took in college called “Film Architecture.” We studied the way architecture functions in films, how it becomes a character in the action and not just a container for that action. This way of looking at buildings opened up my imagination to investigating and inventing the stories and symbols intrinsic to all varieties of architecture.

It’s important to me to use real tools. I’ve actually done a lot of work with computers (digital animations, sound composition and editing, and in my former life as a freelance graphic designer) and I love them. I’m on the internet just as much as anybody else. But drawing with these “real tools” and with my “real hands” – in other words, emphasizing texture and materiality – allows this imaginary space to become a tangible one. It’s important to me that the drawings suggest real space, but never actually become real.

TTWP: I first got to see the Internet when I got to college and I went crazy on this thing called L’Hotel Chat for a while, but I seem to be past that now, too. Though I do love the blogs.

OK, let’s say someone is going to give you a building. They just walk up to you one day and say, “Hey, I’ll buy you a building!” Only, they will not buy you an office building, a school, warehouse, an apartment building or anything that’s ever belonged to a University. You have to have a building of some less traditional kind for an artist/designer and your deed will have historic preservation clauses where you can’t change it much. So, you could have all kinds of things. An old police station. An abandoned factory. An old church. A gas station. A J.C. Penney’s. A lab! Anything that wouldn’t be the traditional home of any of the things you traditionally do. The guy just wants some guidance and then he’ll go find one for you. What sort of building would you tell him to go looking for and why?

LB: Right now, if I had that offer, I’d probably say that I’d want an observatory (either space-focused or earth-focused). One that was somehow combined with, or included, a planetarium. I’d want all the technology still functioning, and I’d love some people to come through sometimes to use it and maintain it and teach me about it, but I’d also want a lot of time in there myself to explore and use the big spaces and the small spaces. Interesting building shapes… the symbolic potential… the interaction of science, architecture, exploration, imagination, technology.

TTWP: Did you have dreamworlds growing up? Like, me, I used to imagine my stuffed animals coming alive inside this cabinet I kept them in. My family still refers to that cabinet as “Animal World.” I also used to dream up these elaborate scenarios by which I could become a superhero and start groups of superheroes. I was doing this until embarrassingly late in life (embarrassing because I took it pretty seriously, as if it were do’able).

LB: I like that, “Animal World.” But oh yeah, I totally did. Actually mine had a lot to do with my stuffed animals too. I collected Pound Puppies and their spinoffs for many years. They all had names, of course, but also all were siblings in an ever-growing family called the Coppenwells. The thing was, each puppy played an instrument and they were all in a band together.

My brother Gordon is a composer and he always played piano and wrote music when we were growing up. When he babysat me, we’d write songs for the puppies and I’d perform them and record them on cassette. Each puppy had his or her own song based around his or her instrument and characteristics… the whole thing was quite elaborate.

When I was older, I would also create these ever-growing families that were all athletes playing whatever sport I was getting into at the time (and this was all kinds, because there was baseball, my original passion, but then I sidelined into hockey and other sports, not to mention the Olympic sports….).

The families were invented athlete characters who played the sport I was into. I didn’t use real athletes at all (although I was pretty obsessed with them too). I have a ton of old drawing pads filled up with pencil drawings of these people doing playing whatever sport it was, or in uniform, and on and on. I think I imagined that everyone got along extremely well and were all top athletes in their sport, of course. I mean, why have it any other way?