Interview with Mike Stenta, Artists and Authors, 2010

Interview by Stephanie Summers
Artists and Authors, Episode 267
Charter CTV14 Community Access TV
Recorded December 17th, 2010

Transcript:

Stephanie Summers: Mike Stenta, today we have someone with a unique art form, or you said it’s not totally original in its pieces but putting it together it’s a really interesting thing. You’re from Sterling?

Mike Stenta: Yes I live in Sterling, Connecticut right now.

SS: Do you want to tell us about “constructed negatives”?

(showing double, 2010 negative hand-held)

MS: Sure, yea so what I’ve done is kind of taken a couple of different materials and methods and merged them together. It’s kind of a mix of mosaic work and photographic work. What it actually is is the 35mm film, 120 film, slides, and negatives, cut up and pieced back together and sandwiched between two pieces of glass, basically. And then with this I can then treat it as a large format negative. So what I can do is put it into an 8x10 enlarger and project it down onto a piece of enlarging paper and get a big print off of it. So this ends up being the negative, and the print that I get is the positive.

SS: So with the positive, what kinds of colors will come from that? Can you even predict?

MS: It usually is pretty hard to predict. As I’m piecing it together, generally if it’s color I’ll be looking at some contact prints that I’ve made beforehand to get a rough idea of what the colors are. But if you’ve ever looked at color film before, it’s got that orange cast to it. So when you’re actually looking at the film it’s very hard to tell what color you’re working with. So it is kind of a surprise when you print it out in the end.

SS: That’s cool.

MS: Most times that I’ve printed it out I’m usually a little bit disappointed because I’ve gotten so used to looking at it as a negative as I’m building it, but I usually get used to it after a little bit.

SS: Well we have a lot we’re going to do today. We’re going to show some of your artwork and then we’re going to show some videos of how you put this together, which really fills in the blanks, because it’s kind of hard to understand what it is otherwise. So thank you for bring those in.

MS: Yea, sure.

SS: I was wondering, can you talk a little about your background as an artist, and how this idea came to you?

MS: Sure. Well, so, I didn’t really take too many art classes in high school. My mom and dad definitely pushed a lot of art on me when I was younger. I took some drawing classes as a kid and I loved art classes in middle school and elementary school. In high school I hung out in the art room a lot but I never actually took any art classes. And then when I went to college, I wanted to take a photography class, because I wanted to use the darkroom. When I was in high school, I actually built a little darkroom in my basement of my parents house. So when I went to college I actually went as a computer science major, entered into the program, and then went and checked out the art building, and checked out the photo center that they had there. And one of the requirements for taking a photo class was to take Drawing 1, which is kind of the introductory class at UConn. So I took that, and met a bunch of great people in that class, and the goal of that class is to put together a portfolio that you can then use to apply to the School of Art. So when I was there, I was like what the heck, I’ll put together a portfolio too and see if I get in, and I got accepted and ended up changing my major entirely. I was thinking about double majoring for a little while, but I just decided to go with art.

SS: And now you have a Bachelors of Fine Art from UConn.

MS: That’s right. With a concentration in photography.

SS: Great. Let’s go right to your images because we have several, and then we can talk about the process after that. And also talk about your ideas for what you’re, you know, the idea for what you were putting together.

(showing accumulation, 2007 on screen)

MS: Okay. So this was actually, I think the first couple that I’m going to show here were the senior project that I did in college. So this one was called “accumulation”. And basically what it is, the materials that I used, you can see kind of those building structures down on the bottom, that’s actually black and white film. And they’re all black and white photographs that I took while I was in Boston one day. So it’s just pictures of different buildings that I liked and I had a bunch of film of that so I cut those up and kind of assembled them into these buildings that were sort of… accumulating, building up. It’s kind of hard to say what, you know, the exact idea is going into all of these. It’s always a mesh of whatever things are kind of going through my mind at the time. One thing I should say: so the film on the bottom, those buildings, is black and white film. The kind of swoop that’s going across the top there, that’s actually slides, and those are microscope slides of different cells that I actually came across a large quantity of these, so I’ve been using them as a material for a while now. And then the rest of the negatives is actually color film. So because I’m putting this into a color enlarger to project it, the color comes out normally, but the black and white comes out orange. Because when you’re printing color you have to adjust for the orange, because the color film, color negatives, have that orange cast to them. So you’re basically pumping more orange through it, which makes the color come out right, but the black and white turns orange in the process. So throughout the next couple you’ll see the difference between those.

(showing accumulation, 2007 negative on screen)

MS: So this is what it actually looks like as a negative.

SS: Oh cool yea.

MS: You can see the black and white film down on the bottom, the rest of it with all that orange cast, that’s all the color film. And then you can see what I was saying about the swoop, how that’s slides. So that’s what those slides actually look like when you’re looking at them.

(showing city in the middle, 2007 on screen)

MS: So this is another one I did for my senior project. I call this one, “city in the middle”. This was kind of inspired by one evening that I was up on top of a hill, looking out over a kind of populated area, and the moon was full, directly overhead, and it almost felt like the moon was pulling the city out of the ground and into existence, and that’s kind of what the inspiration was for this. It also kind of has a few things to do with some ideas that I’ve thought about with layers, and the way that complexity seems to develop in the middle area, between more spread out and generalized areas.

(showing city in the middle, 2007 negative on screen)

MS: And again, this is what the actual negative looks like. So you can see, in the middle, those are actually all black and white. The city is black and white. And those negatives, they’re actually not pictures of buildings, they’re actually cut up from one medium format photograph of tree bark that I had. So that’s another kind of thing that I enjoy kind of exploring is the different subject matter of the negatives themselves, and how that can relate to what I’m actually putting together as the whole image. So it becomes, really, a lot about the small details, but also what it looks like as a whole.

SS: The art within the art.

MS: So this one, you can see the orange cast is the color film. And then there’s another layer of cells there on the bottom, kind of like two layers up.

(showing seed, 2007 on screen)

MS: This is another one that I did for my senior project. I call this one “seed”. So this was kind of a mix of concepts that I found to be related, as kind of pertaining to growth and branching effects that you see in nature, as well as in the brain, with neurons, and the way things kind of start with a little nugget of information, and from that branch outwards to become this much larger concept or entity.

SS: Right.

(showing seed, 2007 negative on screen)

MS: And this is the negative of that. So this one was a little bit less planned out when I was doing it. As I’m creating these, I’ll generally take two approaches. Either I’ll just jump right in and put a piece in, and then put another piece in, and then another piece, and see how it builds out from there. And that kind of worked for the idea of this one, too, or that’s kind of why I did it that way with this one, because that’s sort of what the idea was about. But they have much different outcomes, I notice, in the end. Those first two were sketched out a little bit more beforehand, and you’ll see that in the video, when we play it. I’ll basically have an idea for the overall view that I want to achieve and I’ll just kind of mark out some general areas, and sort of start building off of that. But it always evolves as I’m going, too.

(showing untitled 1, 2006 on screen)

MS: So this was actually the first one that I put together. It doesn’t really have a title. I made this one when I was living in Ashford, Connecticut, at a house on a lake. The person there is actually two different people. It’s my good friend Matt and his girlfriend Angie. I had them pose and I took a couple of black and white shots of them and then pieced them together so they were kind of a merged person. I wasn’t really trying to mean anything by that.

SS: (laughs) [You weren’t trying to] make a statement. That’s neat.

MS: So this was kind of one of the first experiments I did in this kind of medium. So that’s actually all black and white. I didn’t start incorporating slides or color until later.

(showing figure/tree, 2006 on screen)

MS: Right, so this is a diptych that I made. I think I’ve referred to it in the past as the “figure/tree” diptych. So it’s just two different negatives that I created. Both of them were 5x5 negatives. So these are the ones that I created kind of after that one that we just showed. And it was a bit of a learning experience because I made them 5x5, which meant that I could no longer put them into a 4x5 enlarger. The first one that I made was actually 4 by 4 inches, and you can put that into a 4x5 enlarger, because a 4x5 can take a 4x5 negative, basically, so it can that or anything less.

SS: Okay.

MS: But as soon as you put a 5x5 in, which does fit, it fits into the enlarger, but you end up getting a lot of vignetting around the edges, so it darkens off on the corners there. So with these ones I think the way that I kind of ended up achieving this is just by doing a contact print at first, to get an idea of what it looked like, and then I just started using a large-format enlarger to print it. So just to fill in a little bit on, for people who aren’t familiar with enlargers and the way that they work, most film is 35mm. That’s what you shoot when you’re shooting with a point and shoot camera or with an SLR camera. And that’s about an inch tall by a little bit more than an inch wide.

SS: Yea.

MS: So that’s the kind of small format, or regular format, that most people use. Medium format is 4x5 inches, so that’s bigger. And what that means is there’s just more room for information. So when you take a photograph, you can blow it up bigger, because there’s more information in that space.

SS: Okay.

MS: So then an 8x10 is even bigger. And that’s what, like, Ansel Adams and a lot of the, you know you see the people and they throw the cloth over their head and are looking through the ground glass.

SS: Right. Right.

MS: They’re actually looking at something that will end up being an 8x10 negative. So there’s a lot of detail in that, and that’s how they’re able to achieve such crisp images. So when I was starting to do this, that was kind of part of the reason, or part of the reason that I thought to do this was, I wanted to try out using some large format negatives. I wanted to make some big prints. And that’s one of the things that one of my professors at UConn really pushed, was big prints. Go big. As big as you can.

SS: That’s neat.

MS: And the bigger you want to go, the more information you need in that photograph. But 8x10 cameras can be pretty expensive. So I decided to just kind of put together my own negatives, rather than creating them as one piece.

SS: I see.

(showing ice, 2006 on screen)

MS: So this is another, this was kind of the first foray into color that I was experimenting with. And this is a mix of color and black and white. This is before I started using the slides, though, too. This is actually part of a set of three that I created. This one is called “ice”, I believe. And yea, I mean, there’s some ideas behind it, all pretty abstract, I would say. I think with this series I was kind of going for a sort of timeline approach to the development of things. And of ideas, and matter. So this has kind of an atomic feel to it for me.

SS: Yea.

MS: A very small form. And yea, that’s kind of where that starts.

(showing grass, 2006 on screen)

MS: So this was the second piece in that series. And this one was called “grass”. And kind of what I wanted to achieve here was sort of the next step in development, in which communication sort of starts to happen between two entities. So you can see there’s sort of two worlds here. And if you look very very closely, kind of like standing right there on the surface of each one of those, there’s a little person. Which was, I basically just took a picture, one day, of someone walking across a hilltop in the distance, and used that there.

SS: Oh neat, yea. (laughs)

MS: So what I was kind of trying to achieve with this is like that, very subtle, you can’t really see it unless you look for it, but, the communication and interaction between these two, these two worlds.

SS: And by the way, if people wanted to see some of your work close up, they could go to Cafémantic in Willimantic.

MS: Well, so they’re not up in Cafémantic right now. There are a couple of pieces up at Silver Circle Studio in Putnam, Connecticut.

SS: And you’ve been in some UConn shows, right?

MS: Yes, I was in the BFA show, which is the, you know, the end, when you graduate you have your stuff in a show.

SS: Neat. And Jorgensen? Were you in the gallery over there?

MS: Yea I had a couple of other shows. Not all of them were of constructed negatives. I had some other photo projects that I was doing at the time, too.

SS: Okay.

(showing brick, 2006 on screen)

MS: So this was the last one in the series. And this, this kind of, to me was sort of the next step after that communication happens, in which the exchange of ideas causes new ideas to be born. And that’s sort of what I was trying to have happen in this. It’s a bit of a figure form, you know there’s sort of a head there, and sprouting out of it is this photograph of a flower that I found. I was also starting to play with the scale of the backgrounds and the different textures that I could get with that, as well as a bit of symmetry here and there. Every one of these is an experiment.

SS: There’s a lot going on.

MS: Yea it always develops as I go along, too, so it’s a lot of different ideas. Because they take a long time to put together. Some of the 8x10s can take more than 12 hours each, of time. So there’s a lot of time to think about things while I’m working on it, which is part of it.

SS: Yea, should we get through these so we can go to the video, in time.

(showing lens, 2008 on screen)

MS: Okay. So this was one that I put together after college, when I was living on a farm out in Washington.

SS: Washington, Connecticut?

MS: No, Washington state, actually.

SS: Oh really, okay.

MS: Yep. So these, all of these negatives, there’s some cells around the outside there, but all of these negatives are pictures that I took on a road trip across the country with three of my friends that I went on. So you can see up in the top left there’s some city there…

SS: Yea I saw that.

MS: That’s actually Chicago. Chicago has one of these, has this great, these two buildings outside with faces projected on them, facing each other, and they’re video. It’s really cool. So I took a picture of that, and put that up there. And you might not be able to see it here, because it’s so small, but down in the bottom right corner is a number of different images of my friend Andy running across a field that we got to after a big thunderstorm, I think.

SS: Oh neat.

MS: I was sort of going for an enclosed world in this. Like, kind of the opposite of the regular world, where, you know, the Earth is in the middle, and the sky is on the outside, and everything’s on the surface. This is kind of, the sky is in the middle, Earth is on the outside, and you’re running around on the inside of it, sort of.

(showing lens, 2008 negative on screen)

MS: And that’s the negative. So this, you can see, involved mostly color film. And this one was also a lot more… not really planned out. I knew that I wanted the circle, but the interior sort of developed as I went.

(showing lens, 2009 on screen)

MS: This is another one similar to that one, that I actually put together for a friend, using his negatives.

SS: Nice idea.

(showing niche, 2009 on screen)

MS: This is one of the latest ones that I’ve made, called “niche”. And it’s a four piece negatives. Each one is 4 by 4 inches. And it uses just black and white and color film. Black and white on the bottom and color on the top.

(showing niche, 2009 negative on screen)

MS: And there’s the negative version of that. So this was kind of fun…

SS: Neat. I don’t know which one I like better. (laughs)

MS: Yea, I know, they both have an… element.

SS: They have their own… yea. So when you do a show, do you show both the negative and the positive form?

MS: Originally I wasn’t. I didn’t really have much documentation of the actual negatives themselves. I hadn’t photographed them or anything like that. But when I had a show in Cafémantic, I did actually photograph and print them out as little images that I put underneath, and I think that kind of helped some people to understand what it was.

SS: And speaking of, you definitely have documentation in the video about how this all comes together.

MS: Yea we should take a look at that.

SS: Let’s put that up.

(showing timelapse of negative construction process on screen)

MS: So this is a timelapse video I created of the process of actually making them. I try to do this every time that I’m working on something, just so that I have that documentation and can go look back at it, and kind of relive the thoughts that I was having at the time.

SS: Oh really. Neat. You mean it doesn’t go this fast normally? (laughs)

MS: No, no. (laughs) I think I had it set up so that it would take a frame every five seconds. But this was even more sped up than that because I compressed it down to one minute, just to have some one minute clips of it.

(showing persistence, 2011 negative construction timelapse on screen)

MS: So this is one that I’m actually working on currently. It’s not finished yet, but it kind of gives you an idea of, sort of, you see the outline that I sort of start with on this one, and work off of.

SS: So you have the pieces of film underneath your sort of tracer paper? Is that how you are… what is it?

MS: Well, so basically what it is is I’ll cut out a, see that black piece of…

SS: Yes.

MS: That’s basically a piece of cardboard that I just cut a square out of. And then I’ll stick that onto a piece of clear contact paper. And then that is what I’ll actually use to hold all of the negatives in place.

SS: Neat.

MS: So I’ll cut them up and stick them onto that contact paper.

(showing lens, 2008 negative construction timelapse on screen)

MS: So this is that one of my friend and I on that road trip that I was telling you about.

SS: Yea. (laughs) It’s really fun to watch it take form.

MS: Yea I enjoy watching it too. Like I said, it kind of lets me relive the process and think about it even more.

SS: It’s like putting together an intricate puzzle.

MS: Yea, yea, growing up I… I have thought about that. Growing up a lot of my aunts, and my grandma and grandpa, always had a puzzle out, on the table nearby. So I’m sure that that had an effect in my interest in piecing things together.

SS: Had an effect. Isn’t that cool? And you use an X-Acto blade? Tweezers?

MS: Yep, I usually have, basically three things I’m using, most of the time: tweezers, an X-Acto blade, and a little pair of scissors. That works pretty well.

(showing lens, 2009 negative construction timelapse on screen)

MS: I kind of see them as a bit of a reflection of the way that our own experiences and memories are formed and come together. We, you know, we kind of experience things one at a time, moment by moment, as they come in, and our mind works by piecing them together into a whole in our own brain. And that kind of forms what our worldview is. So everyone’s worldview can be dramatically different just based on the experiences that they’ve had. And that’s kind of how these evolve, because they actually are on… each one of those negatives is an individual piece of time and space.

SS: That’s a very cool observation. And you could have the same experiences, not that you would, but two people can have the same experiences, but the piecing together would be very different.

MS: Right.

(showing niche, 2009 negative construction timelapse on screen)

MS: So this is assembling “niche”, which is that four piece mountain, kind of landscape one.

SS: So this film always has image on it, or sometimes is it just… film?

MS: Yea, well I’ll…

SS: Unexposed film?

MS: Well, never really unexposed film because that’ll just come out…

SS: Black.

MS: I’ll just go right through, it’ll just come out black, yep. And that’s why you see the black lines in between all of the negatives, is because the light is going directly through it and exposing the paper, and that just turns it black. But it’s the film that will block some of that light, and block certain colors of that light, so that the paper only receives certain colors.

SS: Very neat. Thanks for bringing that. And how did you make that video?

MS: I have a webcam and a piece of software that just takes, you can set how many seconds you want in between each shot, and it will string it all together for you.

SS: Wow and you just keep it trained on your work table? And it captures your history.

MS: Yea I’ll usually put on some music and set the video going.

SS: I imagine you in some gallery that has great video too, and just sort of have that as a piece to the exhibit. That would be neat.

MS: Yea that would be nice.

SS Yea. So what are you working on now? Are you staying in this form because it’s still fascinating you like crazy, right?

MS: Yea, yea I’m still doing it here and there. Lately I’ve had very little time to work on stuff because I’ve been a little overwhelmed with work and other responsibilities, but whenever I get a chance.

SS: What’s your day job?

MS: I actually do web development. I’m a freelancer. So I work with a couple of different clients. Other than that, I work on these whenever I can. And I mean, art in general, I think, is such a crucial part of life. The process involved, and the thought that goes into it. So even if I don’t do these forever, I’m sure I’ll continue making visual things.

SS: Well when you get out of the studio and away from the computer what do you like to do most?

MS: I actually really enjoy farming and growing things, tending to crops and other plants. My friend Andy and I, who I mentioned before, we’re actually going to be working on putting together a CSA farm on the property that we’re living on now. So we’ll see how that goes.

SS: Neat. That stands for… ?

MS: Community Supported Agriculture. So it’s a model in which you basically sell shares of the farm to people who are interested in getting a box of vegetables every week during the season.

SS: That’s so cool. And would you do that down in Sterling? Or somewhere else?

MS: Yep, that’s where we’re planning on doing it. We’ll see how it goes.

SS: Great.

MS: It’s an experiment just like anything else, I guess.

SS: Yea. That sounds like a good combination, though, of pursuits in life, you know? Something that’s very focused… (laughs)

MS: Yea I like balancing the… staring at one thing for a long time, and then going out and working on something more physical.

SS: Yea, give your eyes a little chance to look at the horizon?

MS: Yea, yep. (laughs)

SS: Now the photography part, can you talk a little bit about that? You head out with your camera, and do you just use film that you photographed anyway, just freeform, or do you go out trying to photograph certain things that you know is going to end up in art?

MS: Yea, it’s a mix of things. When I went on that road trip with my friends, I brought 80 rolls of film with me, and burned through all of them. Basically every nice horizon we would come to, or you know like, good colors, basically just building a palette. I would just sweep across the horizon and go snap, snap, snap, snap, snap. And I actually some art pieces based on those, too, because the contact prints that I was able to get just from the negatives looked really neat. Like you would have a long plateau image, going across multiple negatives, with a little bit of overlap on each one. So it’s kind of cool.

SS: Oh that’s neat. Almost like the old panoramic film when it started.

MS: But then also, when I was in school, I set up a little box in the darkroom, because I worked in the darkroom there at the time, too, for people to contribute negatives. So if they had negatives that they didn’t want anymore, or after they had taken a class, they could put them in the box, and I’ve been using them ever since. I’ve got a lot of black and white negatives from people. And they’re incorporated into a lot of those pieces.

SS: Well that’s something I was going to ask you about. Is there a chance that you’re going to run out of materials, since the digital camera is dominating?

MS: Probably not. Like I said, I’ve got a whole bunch of slides right now to work with, and I’ve got still a lot of film myself, and film that other people have given me.

SS: Great. And there are enough people who still love, you know, the regular film and not digital.

MS: Yep. There’s a lot of people getting rid of their film these days, too, so…

SS: Well, Mike Stenta, so great to have you, and have you describe this unusual art form for us, and good luck to you.

MS: Great to be here. Thank you.