As a four-year-old living in Lenoir, South Carolina, Stephen Eichhorn refused to learn how to read. While everyone else in his class was singing their ABCs, he’d stubbornly deemed it unnecessary — he already knew he was destined to be an artist, communicating through images rather than words. “People asked me, how are you going to read your show cards or write press releases?” Eichhorn recalls. “My answer was, I’m going to marry someone who knows how to read! The resistance was so heavy they put me in a special ed class.” His protest didn’t last more than a few months, luckily, but his uncanny commitment to his future career did: At 14, for example, he interned for a group of Star Wars toymakers who taught him freehand drafting and craft techniques, and at 17 he attended a summer art program at SAIC before enrolling there a year later. Since graduating in 2006 he’s been living the dream instead of planning for it, working independently from a studio he shares with his wife in Chicago.
If there was one moment when Eichhorn wavered, it was during college, when he suddenly became obsessed with the idea of being an architect, and working with a completely different sense of space and scale. But instead he funneled those impulses back into his sculpture practice, using model-making materials to produce pieces that were “almost like drawing in space with white girders,” he says. The intricate collages he’s become known for lately also carry evidence of those interests: “I’m looking at plant forms as architectural elements, as recurring structures that mimic something manmade,” he says. “It’s about the complex harmony between the natural and the manmade.” To make them, he applies his laser-focusing skills in a more literal sense, spending 8 to 10 monotonous hours each day snipping out tiny plant and flower parts, with Arrested Development playing in the background to keep him from getting too lost in the process.
That’s where SU’s newest contributor Debbie Carlos found him this past spring when she visited his studio for our mini-series on Windy City artists (stay tuned for part two tomorrow). See what she saw in the slideshow below, then be sure to visit her own site to see all the other past studio visits she’s done with talents like Ellen Van Dusen, Laura Lombardi, and Doug Johnston.
One of Eichhorn’s signature plant collages, which he layers piece by tiny piece from images he’s painstakingly cut out of books and magazines. “Initiatlly the subject matter for these wasn’t plants, but in working with my source material I quickly honed in on that,” he says. “In the past few years I’ve moved from green foliage, to orchids, to now cacti and succulents,” with each collage focusing mainly on one plant family.
This one, made for a solo show last year at the Elmhurst Art Museum, is mostly orchids, underscored with bursts of wheatgrass. To make a piece like this, Eichhorn will lay down a loose initial arrangement, then add pieces organically here and there as he glues the arrangement down to the canvas with archival photo mount spray. “It’s like a paper puzzle,” he says.
He spends most of his time cutting these tiny components out, and stores mounds of them in flat files around his studio. These drawers contain flowers, grass, and fine orchid pieces, all in separate piles. “The first 2-3 collages I made came from National Geographic, but it was hard to reduce those images into something almost stock,” Eichhorn says. “So I opened it up anything. Now my images range from relatively vintage to brand new, as long as I can pull them from their original source enough to where they aren’t tethered to that other context. Every collage has multiple sources, sometimes across multiple years.”
Eichhorn organizes his cuttings by size, from tiny bits of foliage to large orchids. These files contain smaller image plates he’s saved for future cutting. “I have a huge cactus backlog, and a mushroom backlog too,” he notes.
When our photographer, Debbie Carlos, visited Eichhorn last spring, he was hard at work on a 4×6-foot orchid collage (the largest panel he can get up and down the stairs). Pictured are the stacks of orchid books he used to source the pieces for it, in the foreground. “I have piles of books everywhere,” he says. “My studio is only 500 square feet, so it can get hard to maneuver.”
Another pile: “Like 3.5 years of trash-paper scrap,” Eichhorn laughs. “After I remove my collage components, I cut the backgrounds into tiny leaves. For a minute I was doing bootleg Mike Mills leaf bursts, then I decided to just incorporate them into a kind of studio object. It’s been this really odd extra ritual within what’s already a pretty ritualistic practice.”
For awhile, Eichhorn had another side ritual putting cat faces on plants, which helped him gain early notoriety on the blogosphere. “When I would take studio breaks, I’d be like let’s make a stupid cat collage; I didn’t show them to anyone until I thought to put them on tumblr,” he recalls. “I stopped making them a couple years ago, but people still ask for them, and I still have a folder full of hundreds of thousands of weird, awful, and creepy cat portraits from the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s.”
Some of Eichhorn’s recent pieces are more deconstructed than the plant collages, like this panel featuring image plates of cactuses and plants, some underlaid with wallpaper or dotted with holes. “It’s pulling together some of the different imagery that’s existed in the studio for the past few years,” he says.
The newest are mounted on polished brass. “I made a couple of these panels that almost read like boards, that relate to some of my other collages and objects and are starting to nod towards narrative,” says Eichhorn. “It’s creating a loose story around this kind of cult of plants where some of my forms and objects are coming from. My last show at Ebersmoore gallery in Chicago (since closed) envisioned this cult and what it would do with some of these plants.”
An inspiration wall in the studio contains found images, small collages, and photos Eichhorn took of his wife.
Eichhorn posing with a textile piece he created for a show with Drag City Records at a weird Polish soccer bar in Chicago. He wanted to make some kind of takeaway for visitors who couldn’t buy his primary works, so he sent images to a digital loom in North Carolina and got back a series of these blankets. “It was a fun, informal way of letting my collages take on a different life.”
Another quilt in the series, with Eichhorn’s then-in-progress 4×6 orchid panel visible in the foreground. He was also, at the time, preparing to start a piece for the Chicago Transit Authority which finally launched last week, part of a series of artist commissions to be hung at the Damen L-train station.
Long before he began making collages, Eichhorn specialized in drawing and scuplture, and he still does plenty of the latter. This piece is from a collaboration he did two years ago with the fashion designers Creatures of the Wind, for whom he designed textile patterns and then created headpieces and visuals for the runway show made from black plastic flowers. Pictured here are one of six panels that were originally shown as one “black floral void,” but that he reclaimed, separated, and coated in black graphite to become new pieces in their own right.
Wall hangings from the same Creatures of the Wind show, made from plastic flowers, wood, and jewelry components, have evolved into newer pieces like this, which see the coated flowers and jewelry components dripping from brass discs….
His tool wall is pretty basic, containing pliers, blades, framing tools, a saw, and a black metal Olfa knife he bought in San Francisco a few years ago that he uses for collage cutting almost exclusively. “My wife works for Mcmaster-Carr, so that’s where some of the raw-er materials I use have come in,” he says. “I can also get bulk X-Acto blades and cutting mats, too.”
A collection of good luck charms, including old nails, railway pennies, $2 bills, World Trade Center matches, and flowered bullets from a shooting range. Not that Eichhorn needs much luck at this point: While his website is being updated, follow his up-and-coming career on Twitter, and stay tuned for our second Chicago artist’s studio visit shot by Debbie Carlos, launching on the site tomorrow.
When asked if the mountainous landscape of his native Norway influences his art, 24-year-old graphics artist Andreas Ervik suggests it’s actually the opposite: Growing up in Aalesund, a small city of about 40,000 inhabitants, he says, Norway’s cold, dark climate is what kept him indoors playing on his computer, surfing the net, and perfecting his craft — a mix of distorted prints and digital collages in which geological representations form an overarching motif. In fact, the internet has played such an integral role in the development of his aesthetic that Ervik admits he’s developed carpal tunnel syndrome in his wrists. Like a true millennial, he says, “I feel like I’m always connected. If not with hands to keyboard or touchscreen, I’m there online in spirit.”
When we first began hearing rumblings a few years back about Terrain, the garden center/home store/plant nirvana/farm-to-table café/dreamy wedding venue located 40 minutes outside of Philadelphia, we had no idea that the place was founded and operated by Urban Outfitters. Wouldn’t it be nice, we thought, to do a profile one day on the sweet couple who must own the place? But don’t laugh at our cluelessness just yet. Though its flagship campus is huge — nearly a dozen buildings spread out over five acres — Terrain has the intimate vibe and the quirkily curated stock of a much smaller operation. Credit for projecting that cozy vibe, despite being part of one of the biggest retail conglomerates in the country, goes in large part to Terrain’s visual team — the buyers, merchandisers, and creatives who stock the place with mason jars, ticking stripe aprons, vintage planters, sea salt soaps, bocce ball sets, and terrariums.
Designers around the world owe Johanna Agerman Ross a drink, or perhaps even a hug: Her new project, the biannual magazine Disegno, is devoted to letting their work breathe. “I always found it frustrating working for a monthly, because I couldn’t give a subject enough time or space to make it worthwhile,” says the former Icon editor. “For a project that took 10 or 15 years to make, it felt bizarre to represent it in one image, or four pages.” Founded by her and produced with the help of creative director Daren Ellis, Disegno takes some of the visual tropes of fashion magazines — long pictorial features, single-photo spreads, conceptual photography — and marries them with the format of a textbook* and the investigative-reporting ambitions of The New Yorker. The story about Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec which we’ve excerpted here, for example, fills 22 pages of the new issue and runs to nearly 3,000 words; it’s accompanied by images captured over two full days the photographer spent with the brothers, one in their studio and one at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, where they were installing their latest retrospective, “Bivouac.” And articles on Martin Szekely, Azzedine Alaïa, and Issey Miyake’s Yoshiyuki Miyamae are set either over lunch, or in the subject’s living room. The focus, says Agerman Ross, is on proper storytelling. “The people behind the project, the process of making something, even the process of the writer finding out about the story — that’s all part of it,” she says. “It’s the new journalism.” Obviously, we couldn’t agree more.
