Interview by Jennifer Remenchik
Multi-media artist Buckley uses hard, dynamic lines and large swathes of color to fix the viewer’s eye directly on her artworks, a slew of which are currently on display in her solo presentation ‘Macro Dynamics’ at the newly-minted gallery ParisTexasLA. We sat down with Buckley to ask her a few questions about her process and visual philosophy.

Your work spans across several media — painting, sculpture, dance — to name a few. When you have an idea for an artwork how do you decide which physical form it will take in the world?
Buckley: There are different occasions for each medium. I generally create to suit a project, whether that be a self-assigned experiment or a commissioned work, I tend to use the parameters, concept and intended effect to help me select a medium. It is not uncommon that I envision the work in a medium that I’ve never used and have no knowledge of, and I have to reverse engineer the idea to try and work out how to produce it.
The sculpture in my current exhibition is a great example of this. I knew that I had a large space and a specific theme. For that theme, I wanted to be sure to represent the concept in 3D so the audience could confront it in space. But I did not know how to create work to the scale or with the specs I saw in my original vision. It took me several months and tons of failed experiments to land on the process and materials I used to create those works. And even in completing them, I will likely never use that process again, because the process itself revealed to me exactly how I will approach sculpture moving forward.
As an autodidact, I would say that my work across varied mediums is the result of a tangential conversation of compounded discoveries that I find in the process of learning how to bring to life what I see in my mind.

In your visual philosophy you put a strong emphasis on the concept of the universal, could you extrapolate on that? Where do differences (cultural, personal, etc) fit into this philosophy?
B: Exploring notions of our universal experience does not aim to erase our differences, but bridge them, giving us access to the opportunity of building a pluralistic society, which is far more advantageous than a society in resistance to/in the domination of one another. The simplest answer all boiled down, is that we need to learn to respect ourselves, each other, and this incredible miracle which is our home planet, because living collaboratively is a way better version of existence which every living being deserves to experience, and of which we’ve been robbed for far too long.
In college, I studied Social Work and then dropped out of school to take a job in politics. But what guided me away from Social Work and Politics was the way both fields simplified people into demographics and diagnoses. I saw emotion as a universal language which we each have access to. Provided that we offer our interest in another’s perspective, we have the opportunity to go beyond this categorical thinking to explore deeper understandings of the “who” someone is, versus the one-dimensional thinking of the “what” they are.
Seeking overlap in the Venn-diagrams of personhood, seeing our commonalities as a species, exploring endless volumes of mythology and philosophy, and mapping my own personal constellation of life-experience, fears, hopes, traumas, have all found their way into the narrative and mission of my work, all firming up into a greater purpose of accentuating new ways to unite that the current hegemony has not embraced.
In my practice, the quest to discover what is universal stems from a deep desire to find common ground with our individual differences intact. In a time of relentless media geared at triggering our amygdala through divisive messaging, I use my work towards undoing the fear associated with our differences, by creating visual reminders of the universal truths for what it is to be inside a human body; no matter what age, what year on the calendar, or where one is situated on our shared planet. This is not to dismiss our cultural and personal differences, but rather invite the celebration of them through the knowledge that nature is fundamentally both diverse AND deeply interrelated.

Your titles, such as Confluence, Coefficient, On Purpose, have specific meanings and larger connotations in the world. How do you go about choosing them? Do you make your artworks with a word or phrase in mind?
B: I title my work after it is made, my instinct is to wait to search for the meaning of something once I have seen it both through process and in completion. First, I consider what I was contemplating in the creative process and assess what the final result elicits. Then I explore words and themes related to what’s coming up in the image.
Sometimes that is an etymological wormhole, where I trace the initial words to their origins and find fascinating intersections with their meanings and that of the imagery. The names often have some relationship to science, namely physics, because I find an incredible amount of overlap in the emotional/intangible journey of Self and the physical laws which govern the universe.
Other times, I simply think of titles as a one-line poem that activate or affirm a specific action occurring in the image. It all depends how instantly I feel aligned with the initial words that come to mind, and sometimes, it takes quite a bit of voyaging to land on a final “yes, that’s it” title.

Across many of the mediums you employ your color palette remains largely consistent. How did you arrive at it?
B: This question leads me back to the first moment I started adding color to my line drawings. I was gifted a complete 150-count set of illustration markers and found myself overwhelmed by the endless options of an entire spectrum at my fingertips. So, I sorted them by color into several jars and gave myself an assignment to make one large-scale drawing per jar, being sure to use every color.
I felt the effect of Red as a “state” rather than a color. And, by using every hue in isolation, I really experienced each one. I remember Red gave me the most horrific time and although I enjoyed the process of working with Green, I wasn’t able to enjoy the final product. Blue felt tranquil and transcendent and I composed the image very differently, with much more negative space. At the end of the experiment, I had a really solid sense of the way each color uniquely affected my psyche. As a reflection of that assignment, I created a new jar of the tones from each hue that gave me the most pleasurable experience to work with. To this day, that palette continues to play its way through the work.
When I finally started painting, I mixed my own colors for a few years, in a similar way, slowly discovering what tended to work well together and satisfy the forms and feelings I aimed to create. Making murals from digital sketches lead me to do a massive study on paint codes because color matching is an incredibly nuanced process where something on a swatch or a screen took-on a completely different character on a huge wall. So early in 2019, I gave myself another assignment, to go through my digital color libraries of tones I frequently used in projects, and find my exact matches rather than trying different paint codes for each project.
The series I showcased at PTLA was a direct product of that experiment and has also resulted in so much clarity for the way I approach designing murals, and now, the paint colors I have on hand in the studio as my go-to library. New colors are always finding their way in as well, usually when I see something in nature or in architecture, or even the overall tone of a city I visit, where the lighting hits things differently based on time of day and creates inspiring suggestions for thoughtful approaches to new color combinations.

Your work is largely centered around interpretations of the human body — in your paintings, sculptures, and, of course, your dance work. Where does your focus on the body come from?
B: Again, you’ve got me at square one, only this time it is way back to my childhood. As a pre-pubescent girl, I was fascinated by growing, aging, developing, changing. I think I had a fear of death playing into my obsession with getting older as if it were imperative that I “get there in time” … I felt very impatient about becoming a woman. Being a woman represented a new form of freedom, mystery, and fierce grace which I couldn’t wait to embody. Partially due to this future-obsessive mentality, I felt a lot of shame in my body, like it wasn’t good enough, and it took me until college to finally learn to accept myself as I was.
While studying social work, I accepted a job as a figure model and that changed everything. Being naked for hours at a time, alone on a stage in front of strangers, and being drawn/sculpted/painted from so many different perspectives, I finally found being a body to be something quite normal, and released my obsession with it being “right or wrong” to be this or that shape, size, or age. The professor explained how to see me as lines and contours and the presence or absence of light, and through this, I learned to be objectified in a whole different context, where I simply became Object and all of the connotations of womanhood, culturally accepted beauty and insecurity in my skin, fell away. These were also the only art classes I’ve ever taken.
So years later, when I began my own art practice, all this stayed deeply cooked into my subconscious, and the amalgamated result of my youthful obsessions of body and my early-adulthood inquiries into emotional well-being and humanistic philosophy were automatic drawings of the feminine in quest of Self-discovery and connection to Other. The body remains to be a metaphor and effective symbol for discussing these topics, both through my visual work and the work I physicalize through embodiment practices like dance and cultivation of community. The bodies in my work are simply representations of what I wish to see more of in the world.

Buckley’s Macro Dynamics is on view at PARISTEXISLA through November 9th. ( All images courtesy the artist and ParisTexasLA)
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