DARYA DEMIDENKO: Could you, please, tell a little bit about your background and how you started as an artist?

AMY BASSIN: I was raised in a middle-class suburb of NYC. While I had all the comforts of a lovely home, and loving parents, tragedy hit my family when I was a toddler and one of my sisters, who at six years old, died of cancer.

Growing up within the traumatic shadow of the death of my sister, I think has to have been the main impetus to becoming an artist. Without language to understand, I dealt with it at the time all in an intuitive way, which is a driving force in making my work.

In all probability, I have noticed if you look at the lives of most artists, you will uncover some trauma in their childhood, which they turned to the arts to work out.

On a lighter note, when I was in kindergarten, I was brought late one day and the other children were cleaning up after making red fire engines out of paper. I felt so disappointed I missed out; I remember that was the exact moment I decided to spend my life creating my version of “little red fire engines.”

DD: How did your parents react to your decision to become an artist?

AB: I grew up in a liberal family. My parents were first generation immigrants from Russia and Poland, so they started at the bottom and their parents stressed education and becoming a professional. The three options you had were a doctor, lawyer, or a teacher. So, when I wanted to go to art school, they were not happy; it was not something one did. One has a profession and can do their art on the side, but it’s not a real profession. I had to rebel against that and I had to fight. I went to study pre-med, but I dropped out after two years and went to art school. I felt really guilty and then I dropped out of art school. I wasn’t ready to make such a big shift. I came to NYC, and from there, I ended up going back to art school. My parents were supportive of my getting a degree. My mother asked me if I was going to live on the streets. Eventually, I got tired of having a job to pay the rent and doing my artwork, so I decided to go into one career that was creative. Then, five years ago, I got the opportunity to focus on my work full time and it’s been great. Now, my mom is 94, but at 91, she started drawing obsessively and I got her into a virtual art show through a museum in Long Island. Both my parents always had this artistic streak in them that they had to suppress based on what their families had told them.

DD: One of the key topics of your artworks seems to be images of women and femininity. What are the driving forces that inspire you to investigate this theme?

AB: Well, I am female and still live in a male-dominated world that objectifies women.

A project through which I directly investigated women battling against the oppression of women was a series of handmade artist books that were in the controversial exhibition The 1st Feminnale of Contemporary Art at the National Museum of Fine Arts, Kyrgyzstan, December 2019. As soon as the exhibition was opened, extreme fundamentalists protested and demanded that the Kyrgystani government censor and remove eight of the most provocative artworks. The director of the museum and the curators, Altyn Kapalova and Zhanna Araeva, endured hate mail and death threats for months. This sparked a worldwide outpouring of support from the UN with press in The New York Times and ArtNet.

It was so eye-opening to the degree and depth of censorship regarding sexual abuse and oppression towards women in that part of the world.

Altyn Kapalova was devastated for months, but she’s not giving up. She’s planning a second Feminnale.

DD: Some of your photo projects studying women are built on the physicality of the interaction between the main characters and the materials covering them. What is the connection you are making between female identity and suffocation?

AB: This imagery emerged after Trump was elected and I was fearing his administration would destroy democracy in the US. So, in part, it reflects a dystopian totalitarian future where it is possible that women are stripped of ALL their rights. I was watching “The Handmaid’s Tale” (Hulu’s original series based on Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel) at the time as well, which also was an influence.

DD: What is your opinion on how the multimedia art (that utilizes image, texture, and text) differs from the artworks that use only one medium in terms of the effect they produce on the audience?

AB: Firstly, I can’t really speak about the effect my work has on others.

As far as making a decision to use image and text, or just image, most of the time I believe content dictates form.

Specifically, some of my work published in ANGIME, Altared Truth Prayer Cards, was created to raise awareness of widespread sexual abuse of children in the Catholic Church. I altered the front images on Catholic prayer cards and redacted the prayers on the backs of the cards to create erasure poetry to express my perception of victims’ prayers and their pleas for help.

DD: Could you, please, explain the essence of the technique "décollage” that you also use?

AB: Décollage, in art, is the opposite of collage; instead of an image being built up of all or parts of images, a décollage it is created by cutting, or tearing away pieces of an original image, or in my case, cutting and tearing objects instead of images. I incorporated this technique in a recent series, In Praise of Strong Spines. I was feeling ripped to sheds by the Trump administration, and started to cut up a book about Trump in response. Initially, the destructive act of cutting became an outlet for my anger but the obsessiveness of this process turned meditative. When done, I put the books on the wall, and saw the book was totally transformed into sculpture. Although I used the décollage technique of cutting and tearing, I refer to these pieces as sculptural.

DD: How do you choose the techniques to implement your ideas? For example, among the later artworks, there seem to be more collages.

AB: For the Altared Truth Prayer Cards, because I was thinking about the victims’ point of view, I wanted to use household materials that were probably available to a child or a teenager who might be experiencing that abuse. So, I was using nail polish, thin, colored tape, I was scratching as an act of destruction... all of my materials were selected as form to support the content. Twanted to draw on materials that you find not in an art store, but in your house.

DD: How do you establish a relationship with the materials that you work with while creating the artworks?

AB: I wrote a poem describing my process in my art practice:

cut, tear, hammer, collage, glue.
scream, ream, dream.
fry, cry, sigh and fly.
bead, read.
shrink, drink, wink, think.
see, be.
claw, thaw, straw, draw.
saint, taint, paint.
pray, play.
run, fun, done.

DD: Do you consider art production more as a meditative act or as a way to receive the end product?

AB: Both.

With the start of the global pandemic, being in lockdown, the political, social, and racial unrest in the US, my work became increasingly more and more meditative. I was able to find so much relief and distraction in creating art.

DD: As an artist who works cross-nationally, how do you manage to find your audience?

AB: In 2009, I was feeling isolated as an artist and sought out artistic communities online. I was working long, stressful hours in interactive advertising, which was creative but corporate, and I just wanted to reconnect to my tribe of artists.

In 2009, before Facebook, I met an amazing, brilliant Brazilian artist, Sonia Gil, on a now-defunct online artistic community website called ArtMesh. We started to collaborate virtually as well as provide one another support for our own artistic pursuits. It was so fun, productive, and profound we decided to reach out to other artists worldwide, form a global art collective, and collaborate virtually.

Soon we co-founded Urban Dialogues (UD) with a group of ten artists from five continents, different cities and cultures, experimenting with collaborations which bridge our global diversity and artistic similarities. The group included Sonia, who is from Rio de Janeiro, I am from NYC, and additional members from Belgium, Czech Republic, Spain, Tokyo, Nigeria, and India.

It is now 11 years later, and I am still amazed at what we accomplished. I have traveled internationally, created art, found a supportive artistic community, and formed deep, long-lasting friendships.

In 2011, the Belgian artist Frie J. Jacobs curated the first UD exhibition, DIFFERENCES?/SIMILARITIES! At other times, I participated with UD members in an art residency in Slovakia, and in 2018, Sonia Gil and my art partner in NYC, Mark Blickley, co-curated an art residency and exhibition in Lisbon, Portugal. A few of us met in Berlin to check out the art scene there. Last year we started to discuss finding a residency together in Shanghai, but discussions are on hold until after the pandemic.

DD: We are really interested in your relationship to the "book" in the last series, as well as in the other projects of yours. What is occupying you here?

AB: My work is definitely influenced by my love for reading and my awe for writers.

When I read, I am always visualizing writers’ words and live with the characters in my head. I love how books can compress time, memory, and history, and free my imagination. And that happens in this small object, the book.

I was speaking to Angime Art Editor Patricia Coleman recently and she made the connection between my work with books with a quote by the French poet, Stéphane Mallarmé:
“Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.”

DD: How does your work in this series function as a response to the work you have done with poetry, specifically with the poet Mark Blickley?

AB: The writer Mark Blickley has been an incredibly positive influence on my work and life. I owe so many of my most recent art accomplishments to his help and support. He helped me combine my intuitive nature with more conceptual ideas rooted in current events and social injustice.