SFBG It makes sense to me that Colter Jacobsen is involved in “Postcards & Calendars,” because I see kinship between some of your art in the show and his “memory drawings.”
MK I saw Colter’s contribution to the [“Exhibition Formerly Known as”] “Passengers” show [at CCA Wattis Institute], and I loved those drawings. I’d known some of his work before. We met shortly thereafter through a mutual friend, Matt Wolf, who is from San Jose.
I approached Colter to ask if he’d consider turning his drawings for the “Passengers” show into a calendar, and it was a perfect situation -- he said the Wattis had discussed doing just that, but it didn’t get to happen. We started working together to make the poster calendar, and when I named the show “Postcards & Calendars,” he then told me that his images had emanated from a postcard.

SFBG For “Postcards & Calendars,” Altman Siegel’s walls are painted 31 shades of white. How did the idea of painting the gallery’s walls come about?
MK That was the first idea I had for the show. Before I was certain about what I was going to exhibit, I wanted to address all the newness that was happening: Claudia’s [Altman-Siegel’s] gallery being a new space; that my show was connected to living in this city for the first time; and, on a much larger scale, the first 100 days of the Obama administration.
I needed to address the new administration, and I thought painting the walls would be a nice way to physically map time. Also, with the subtle gradation, and because of the amazing windows, I think the majority of people who visit the gallery don’t even notice. It’s contingent on the time of day -- in the late afternoon you can see the differentiation more clearly. Originally, I thought I’d like to paint the gallery in 120 shades [of white], reflecting the 100 days plus the first 20 before he was inaugurated. I’m glad I didn’t pursue that -- they might still be painting the gallery today.

From Matt Keegan's "Postcards & Calendars"

SFBG The most evocative and in some ways enigmatic aspect of “Postcards & Calendars” might be the series of 31 untitled images along one wall in the room that also displays the calendars. Can you explain the process that went into creating those images?
MK I knew I wanted to take a lot of photographs while I was here in the Bay Area, so I used a 35mm point-and-shoot camera to take snapshots. I knew I wanted to do something with them, and for a while thought they might generate a small-edition Xerox book.
But then I decided I wanted to make tracings of the photos. The way that they are made, the 4 inch by 6 inch prints are traced, using graphite on tracing paper. Then they are scanned, inverted, outputted on acetate, and the acetate is put on photo paper to make a contact print.
After a tracing was generated from the Obama newspaper piece [in “Postcards & Calendars”], I was interested in the meticulous revisiting of such an image. For the Obama piece, it didn’t make sense to turn the tracing into a photo, I wanted the tracing to be documented. But for the series of smaller images, I didn’t want the graphite rendering to be their final phase -- when they were inverted and then output to make contact prints, they almost became etchings. In relationship to the newspaper and old modes of imaging, that made sense to me. They felt precious, but also because of their size and sheen, they have the look of mass-produced, offset printed postcards. All of those aspects are synthesized in the way they are made.

SFBG Of course I have to ask you about using newspapers as material.
MK The dying form!

SFBG In a gallery next door to Altman Siegel, last year an artist did a series of New York Times-related pieces in which she sewed through select parts or pages of the paper. How did you choose the particular front page you photographed?
MK I knew the Seattle Post-Intelligencer was going to run its final print edition, so I chose the Times that ran the cover story about its last run. Because I’m from New York, it seems like such an impossiblity for the New York Times to no longer physically exist -- exist in print.

SFBG Do you have a strong connection to or fascination with these things -- postcards, calendars, newspapers -- that dates back to childhood?
MK I am 33, and I’m part of that last generation which was not indoctrinated at an early age into the digital. I did not use a computer on a regular basis until college, I didn’t know what email was until college, and I didn’t actively use it until after college. I feel very connected to a zine tradition, though I didn’t actively participate in it.

From Matt Keegan's "Postcards & Calendars"

SFBG I came out of that tradition. The writing of letters was central to it, and I remember the period in the mid-‘90s when correspondence changed to email, and it utterly changed the ways in which relationships functioned -- or were made manifest, or not -- in those indie and zine communities. I generally don’t print out emails unless they need them for reference. Yet I know people who write emails that could be excellent letters -- they treat it as an epistolary form.
MK But to what end? I had an opportunity to interview Susan Goldstein, and talk with her about what it entails to be the archivist [at the San Francisco Public Library] for the city -- in particular, what it’s like to be at this critical juncture of translation from physical to digital. What gets lost?
I’m not interested in any of the work being viewed or discussed through a nostalgic filter. I’m not nostalgic about any of these changes, but do find their physical from to be completely interesting and rich in historical value.
Correspondence is obviously a component of my show’s nod to postcards. It’s a basic form: you have the date, the location, the sender, and the recipient. All of that information is compelling, before you even engage with the content of the correspondence.
If you lose the newspaper, or postcards, or calendars, there’s a displacement of the basic record of your day-to-day or month-to-month existence.
Also, I’m here as a visiting artist at CCA {California College of the Arts], and in the photo department. You can’t talk about photography without talking about the transition to the digital. There’s a ton of writing in recent years about what gets lost with the absence of the physical aspect of photography.
The larger archival conversations are really interesting to me. I co-founded a project called North Drive Press, an artists’ run project and annual arts publication that features artist-to-artist interviews and multiples made by mainly emerging artists. I’ve been working on that since 2003, and the first issue came out in 2004.

SFBG Does that have any connection to your Printed Matter book AMERICAMERICA?
MK They’re separate but they both prioritize interviews, and the Printed Matter book highlights periodicals. There are definitely some parallels between them.

Cover of Matt Keegan's AMERICAMERICA

SFBG The pieces in “Postcards & Calendars” where color photography is foregrounded in some cases seem more overtly autobiographical, or examples of a personal record of your time here. Is that right?
MK I would say the color C-prints purport to be a document of January, of February, and so on. But when you look at them, that isn’t the case. There is no way to make an image that is January or an image that is February. Or, applying that similar logic, to create an image of a Tuesday, or a Sunday.
The smaller black-and-white photographs aren’t personal, but they’re contingent on my experience as the person who took the original photos. Some of them are of friends, but the tracing and the scanning and the output hopefully removes it from the space of a personal snapshot.

SFBG Your focus on interviews in a project such as “Postcards & Calendars” and AMERICAMERICA definitely has some connection to the work Matt [Wolf] did in Wild Combination, his documentary about Arthur Russell. One of the things that distinguishes his movie from the many music documentaries of recent years is the power of the interviews that he does with Russell’s parents and boyfriend.
MK The parents, especially. Of course they were so funny and relaxed with Matt, because he’s so good at interviewing. I hope that we will work on something together -- I think it would be fun.

SFBG I do think there is a bit of a generational movement of sorts -- a bracket of artists who are drawn towards historical and research-based work, after a gap in which recent history wasn’t discussed. I talked about this with Lypsinka a year or two ago, and she was saying that in the wake of AIDS, that kind of discourse was devastated, and perhaps it required a younger generation to look back.
MK When I was an undergraduate [at Carnegie-Mellon], the work I was looking at and being exposed to was from the ‘90s. Group Material, Fred Wilson, reading Coco Fusco, looking at Andrea Fraser, I studied with Steve Kurtz, I studied with Faith Wilding. My complete understanding or artmaking was through a filter that art and social history were not separate -- that you could not make work without thinking about a particular sociopolitical context.

From Matt Keegan's "Postcards & Calendars"

SFBG Did the way in which you used the GLBT Historical Society aspects of the show add something to how the people at the GLBT view those materials?
MK When Rebekah, who is relatively new to the Historical Society, was at the opening, she said that when she was going through the calendars she realized how varied and interesting they all are. There have been a lot of different -- moving, not fixed -- responses to the calendars. People don’t look at the calendars and only think about AIDS, or look at them and only think about protest. I tried to curate the selection of calendars so you couldn’t be reductive.

SFBG Would you say your time in San Francisco has influenced you?
MK I’ve lived in New York for over ten years, so I can’t answer that without saying that to me, a big part of being here is [taking] a break from New York. I’ve had amazing conversations with Rick Prelinger, with Chris Carlsson, with Susan Goldstein, with Gerard, and Rebekah -- they make me want to seek out those types of conversations when I return to New York. I can’t look at New York as a tourist, but I’m eager to look at it in a different way.