Patchwork: An Interview with Annie Arnold

The following is an edited and condensed conversation between Austin-based artist Annie Arnold and I about her spring show at the Galveston Arts Center, Tourist, Tour-est, and her other recent endeavors. The exhibition featured needlepoint patches based on photos found on social media, which were adhered to canvas. The works appear diploma and certificate-like but are made with raw, unstretched canvas and trim that references varsity letter jackets. In an adjacent room, social media photographs were screened like an old home video. Tourist, Tour-est explored the way people exhibit and commodify their travel online as if for merit. Annie and I discussed the exhibitionism of social media and what draws a person to take advantage of it.

Lauren Shults (LS): How long have you been creating these patches and embroidering?

Annie Arnold (AA): I started patches in 2012. I started sewing because when I had kids, I couldn’t paint anymore. I was originally trained as an oil painter, and that’s what I love to do. If you have babies, you can’t have toxic stuff on your hands because you’re always touching their skin, their mouth, their eyes, all that stuff. Plus, I didn’t know when I was going to be in the studio again. I could get 30 minutes, but then it could be six days before I even had time to think about art again, so everything would dry out. You just start over with your palette and materials. It got really frustrating, and it didn’t work anymore. Somehow my younger sister and I ended up sewing. My grandmother would teach us some sewing stuff and crochet when we would go and stay with her. She lived out in the country; we would cross-stitch with her, and she could make anything. I became interested in sewing just from the exposure.

Conceptually, sewing came back into my mind as a way to deal with social media. It fits my lifestyle, because now I can take my sewing anywhere. If I’m sitting in the car line, if I’m at baseball practice, it’s just very portable. I don’t stress out over not being able to be in the studio because I can start and stop it at any time. I can work on it for as long as I have. It was a lifestyle decision. Conceptually, things just aligned in a way that was exciting. I’ve been doing it for a long time. The patches are kind of expensive to produce sometimes because I’m buying so few at a time that I have to space them out. In a perfect world, I would make them a lot faster. When I first started out, it was one or two a year, just trying to get my concept together and figure out what exactly I was trying to do. For the Galveston project, I worked with the tourism department; they commissioned me to make these patches. I was able to make seven at a time. It was really fun.

LS: Tell me about how you went about choosing images for the Galveston project.

AA: Dennis Nance, the curator at Galveston Art Center, saw my work in Fort Worth and offered me a show.  When I told him I wanted to make work about travel and tourism, he connected me with Visit Galveston.  Visit Galveston asked me to make patches that would help promote tourism to the island. They were very open to letting me explore that mission within the context of the patches I was already making.  I made a few mock-ups based on an Instagram search I did of Galveston landmarks.  But when I presented those patches, Visit Galveston felt those weren’t the right images or the right landmarks.  They shared with me the kinds of experiences they wanted to feature and I got on Instagram and started searching new hashtags and new location tags, looking for pictures that spoke to me but related better to what they had in mind.

LS: When did you first begin using images from social media? Was it an organic process?

AA: In graduate school, I was interested in tabloid culture and celebrities who are “just like us.” I was exploring why we cared so much about what they were wearing and doing. When social media took off and we became the celebrity, my interest transitioned into this narcissism. I grew up in a world where it was impolite to talk about yourself all the time. We were discouraged from doing that. Now it’s a life skill, and so I am thinking about how that shift has been made culturally. As a geriatric millennial it still feels very strange to put your whole life out there. Some people have adapted fine, and it fits their personality. But for me, it still feels very foreign. I understand the appeal. In some cases, it’s necessary. There are so many people who love it and are so interested in it. I’m interested in how when you have this many images of people taking pictures of themselves, some people are really good at it, and some are really bad at it. There’s a desperation if it’s trying to be famous. Is that still the way we would categorize it?

For the patches, I started thinking that if you’re bragging online, that’s essentially what you’re feeding us, right? You’re bragging about who you’re with or where you’re going. I really liked clothes and self-display, things of that nature. For some reason, letter jackets came to mind. That’s a way that traditionally we’ve bragged about what we’ve been able to accomplish. What if you take these digital things that are very throw away, very disposable, and you make them more permanent and more physical. There’s an absurdity that happens, and that’s what I’m interested in. These things seem throw-away, but we’re spending so much time on them that they add up to something substantial. The screen time report on your iPhone: you average four hours a day on your phone. When you add it up, it becomes much more meaningful. It’s a wake-up call. These images aren’t individually that significant, but when you make it a (physical) thing, then it feels more real. When you put it on your physical person and attach it to your visible identity, it changes the things that you want to talk about. I think there’s something about putting it on the body that amuses me. 

Letter jackets are fascinating to me because they have a shelf life. It’s only socially acceptable for you to wear that for the four years you’re in high school. If your dad were still wearing his letter jacket around, it would feel strange. Tote bags serve the same purpose. “I went to this library, I went to Absolute, I read The New Yorker, I have one for Bon Appetit that I carry around — that cooking magazine.” I feel people spend more time with a letter jacket because you have to order it and you have to buy the patches. They’re very personalized with your dates and your stats.

LS: When I went to your show and saw everything on canvas, the first thing I thought was tote bags. We get a tote bag when we go to a convention or get one for whatever subscription we have. It says more than just “The New Yorker.” It’s what kind of person I am to subscribe to this place or put my money into this thing and go to this event.

AA: It’s kind of loaded. The canvas, too, is part of my relationship to painting. I do love canvas as a painter. I think canvas has a certain gravitas because it is connected to painting and history. It gives the work a little bit of rapport with the viewer. It’s a way that you can know what that material is, what it’s supposed to do, and why it’s in this gallery.

LS:  It creates a bridge from painting to embroidery. Something that has not always been in the gallery space. What impact do you want to make?

AA: Mindfulness, maybe, entertainment, for sure. There is a humor to them that I am very interested in. I enjoy humorous art. I like that it feels like I’m telling a joke or a one-liner punch line. It’s also the sheer volume of these types of images. I hope to continue making a million patches. The sheer volume means that they’re very serious. This is how we are spending our time. It shows our values. It feels disposable, but it’s not because we’ve made a significant investment in this direction.

It’s interesting that people’s responses to some are, “Oh, I know that guy,” or “I know that girl,” or “that’s me.” People relate to them. I had a critique with one artist who said, “I don’t get it. I would never self-identify with any of these people.” There was this sense of “I’m better than this,” which I thought was a really fascinating response. 

LS: Would you walk me through some of these patches and how they came to be?

AA: For the Galveston patches, I enjoyed working with a theme. For another project, I was chosen as an artist to collaborate with a brewery. I could design the beer and then make the packaging for it. I love the idea of Michelob Ultra: You can have it all, you can be really skinny and fit, and you can drink like a fish. For that project, I made these patches of people working out and drinking beer. Then I did a show where I made a few pieces about Texas. I made a few patches for that. I made other ones for a show about travel. 

I’ve learned a lot along the way about how to adjust these images so that they translate. In 2008, when I was leaving graduate school, I was already interested in the images that people would post — and this was back when people were scanning in disposable camera pictures just to have something on their social media profile. You had to really go to extra lengths. I started these folders on my computer of people on couches, people taking a picture of themselves taking a picture, etc. This was before selfie was a word. Why is everyone artfully taking a picture of themselves with their camera? I was scanning all these pages of friends, friends of friends, whoever, looking for similarities: people drinking something, people eating something, people copying a statue pose. And I found these made up categories with images that fit into them. 

Some of these are images that I collected a long time ago that still resonate with me in some way. Some of them are responses to quotes — sometimes I’ll be scrolling, see something, and it triggers an idea. Then I’ll save that image and look for a quote that somehow supports it or relates to it. I don’t like them to be too matchy matchy, but I like them to at least talk to each other. I’m also interested in how they can be rearranged. They’re almost like characteristics. I use them as tools. I pick images that speak to me or that I feel are particularly interesting or entertaining. 

LS: Tell me about how you came up with the title, Tourist, Tour-est.

AA: Because the show was in Galveston and it was over spring break, it felt like I needed to do something with the vacation. Travel is all over social media all the time. Someone’s always going on a better trip than you are, or they had a more exclusive experience, or somehow their pictures are better. Travel is a huge part of what people post about. That felt like a really easy connection to me. I was thinking about being a tourist. Travel magazine writing is so pretentious, which I really love. I had a nice time reading through all these articles about where we should be going and what we should be doing. There were so many good questions to choose from, and then I paired those quotes with patches or pictures that I had already found. It’s sort of a back-and-forth process. 

LS: They definitely go hand in hand. The idea of influencers has changed, of course.

AA: What’s interesting is that “influencer” became a negative term. Now, we’re content creators. People want to have more of the artistic or professional aspect of it. The influencer has been overused, or it’s passe. When I was in graduate school, and I was starting to think about these things — the word influencer didn’t exist yet. So in my artist statement, I talked about being an exemplar and a purveyor of good taste. It’s been fun to be on the front lines and to watch it happen. 

LS: What do you think about the name changing over time? 

AA: I think it’s related to trends and how conformity is good to a point. Then there is the stuff I’m making, what I’m calling the shame of being ordinary. When “influencer” becomes a saturated term, how do you stand out? We’re obsessed with the idea of novelty and innovation. So many people are wearing skinny jeans, and now the pendulum swings back the other way, and you have the wide-leg jeans because that’s how you stand out. That’s how you can show that you’re paying attention, because you saw it shifting, and you jumped on board. How can we get noticed if we’re all doing the same things? That’s part of the patches, too, that they’re multiples. We’re told that we’re special snowflakes, but the human experience can only include so many types of experiences. We can only communicate those in so many ways. The pursuit of novelty and uniqueness is not a bad thing, but it’s not as important as we make it out to be. 

LS: This brings me back to your art. A slideshow in the show played photos of pyramids. Tell me a little more about the photographs.

AA: I did it based on what people were displaying. There were people in Paris, Egypt, Moody Gardens, Mexico, and the huge Bass Pro Shop in Kentucky. For some reason, everyone in front of a pyramid wants to put one hand behind their head. It’s funny to have them all lined up like people on different sides of the globe. They all have the same impulse, or that’s what they saw on social media, somebody looking cool. And they’re like, “Well, I’m just going to replicate that pose.” It’s interesting that then those poses become really important in order for us to talk about where we’ve been. There’s a documentary [Fake Famous] in which somebody from Vanity Fair basically creates three influencers from the ground up. The just picked three random people, like had auditions or whatever, and created their social media accounts and basically made them fake famous. It’s a really interesting documentary. At the beginning of the movie, they talk about how everyone who travels to LA has to take a picture in front of that pink wall. Of all the things in LA to see and do, it is just a pink wall, but it means the most because it has the most online credibility. If you post yourself in front of that pink wall, everyone knows that you were at that place doing that thing.

LS: That’s similar to the green “I love you so much” wall in Austin.

AA: You can’t be a tourist in Austin without going there. Those kinds of things are interesting to me. How did that become the important thing? In the slideshow, it’s kind of the same thing. No matter where you are in the world, those kinds of poses have somehow entered into the canon. If you’re traveling, these are the kinds of pictures you need to take. We used to dread watching people’s slideshows in the 60s, 70s or 80s. Now we do it voluntarily on our phones. I don’t even know this person that went to Bali, but somehow I’ve spent two hours before I go to bed worrying about their trip.

LS: Did you always have a fixation on what we photograph during travel, collecting documents of various moments, and images?

AA: My interest has been in the things that come to the surface, somehow tapping into whatever zeitgeist and however that changes. When you’re scrolling, there are certain things that are trends or micro trends. Things that are in the collective consciousness that everyone wants to play around with at the same time. So it’s not always necessarily travel. For a while, I felt like everything on my Instagram feed was someone washing their face. Why are we all needing to wash our faces online? That’s where some of the patches come from. Why is this a thing? Avocado toast was a whole thing for a year. 

It’s funny; these random things become really important. Right now, I’m really interested in the debate over ankle socks versus crew socks and how it is becoming a huge marker of your age. If you’re in camp ankle socks, here’s how you can style them and still look modern or hip. These are the right crew socks to buy because you can’t buy just any. I like to take those things that I think are interesting or amusing and then make art about it. I’m like, “Why does that matter? With everything going on in the world?” Not in a judgmental way, but in a genuinely curious way. How do I feel about it? I like both kinds of socks, honestly.

LS: You often use direct pronouns in the text you choose. Is it a conscious decision to do so, rather than telling the viewer “you” do this?

AA: “I” is more inclusive. It makes the viewer relate to the work, whereas “you” sounds like I’m condemning or pointing the finger like I’m making a judgment. “I” is like a jacket or crew socks: you can try it out for yourself and decide. It’s a way to play around with your own relationship to the text. From a practical standpoint, a lot of the books that I find have people talking about themselves or a writer speaking from a first-person experience. Maybe I just connect with the “I” statements more. You’re saying something about yourself. That is more interesting than someone saying something about someone else. Since I’m talking so much about identity and personhood, the “I” feels more congruent with that approach.

LS: This reminds me of iconography to express individuality. You recently embroidered a Loewe full-length coat in collaboration with other artists. Tell me a little bit about your interest in fashion.

AA: I’ve always been interested in clothes and how we express ourselves with fashion. I’m not a good enough seamstress to actually make clothes. A lot of the work that I make references clothes because I like the presence of the body. It relates to identity and personhood. That’s where that came from — thinking about letter jackets and the kinds of things we brag about.

The coat was a project of a friend of mine who’s an artist, Sean Ripple. He had a community garment project where he found this coat and purchased it. For $20, you get a turn with the coat, and you can embellish it in any way you want. You can get a week with it. It’s like Rent the Runway but more personal. We all bought in, and I embroidered that on there because, literally, the coat is taking turns.

LS: It’s like “Sisterhood of the Traveling Coat.”

AA: Yes, exactly. People would post what they were doing with the coat. Some people just hung it in their closet for a week and then gave it back. It was just kind of fun to see what it was doing, where it was going. 

LS: Are there any other projects that you’re really itching to do?

AA: These patches can get bigger — they can be twelve inches, essentially the size of a record. I gotta find something and figure out what the theme would be. What ridiculousness is happening in the world that a twelve-inch patch would perfectly commemorate? A couple of weeks ago, Austin Creative Reuse did a fashion show. I got to send some of my like fake clothes down the runway. I’d like to do more than that.

LS: Tell me about the garments you embellish with your patches.

AA: I’m interested in this idea that things come off the wall and can fit on a body. They are activated in a way that is different than a gallery space, but then maybe they go back onto the wall. I think both of those contexts are really important to the concept that I’m interested in. It was super fun to take these things that are kind of garment-ish and then adjust them so that they could be worn; the words do take on different meanings and feel different when you see them moving through space. With some of these quotes and patches, I imagine standing behind somebody in Walgreens or at the grocery store where you’re just looking around for something to read or do, and someone has this big long diatribe on their back where they’re bragging about how they go to the library more than you.

I think just being on the body is interesting, but I also think the art context is important. Can these things that were made for the wall be adapted and then go back onto the wall space. At some point, I would really love to have an art show where the models walk, take things off the wall, put them on, and then physically hang them back on the wall, so you can see both things. The performance part of it is in a performance atmosphere, as opposed to just reading about the performance. 

There’s so much material. I felt like if I made a patch a day, I wouldn’t even scratch the surface. So much good stuff is happening.

LS: Have you ever worked with any archival photographs?

AA: No, not really. I’ve collected some things from as far back as 2003. That feels like a lifetime ago in terms of online living. There is a marked difference in the things that we used to take pictures of. In those days, you took a picture to go in your photo album, or to show your friends, or for your own documentation. It never went out into the world unless you were graduating high school and they needed something for a slideshow. Those are very different pictures than the pictures we take now. There’s much more of a consideration for the audience. These are for someone else. I don’t think people would take pictures like duck lips. Those pictures wouldn’t exist if they were just for yourself.

LS: Was it an easy decision for you not to take the route of finger-wagging? You said your work can help us take ourselves less seriously. Was that an easy choice for you, or did you spend some time discovering that?

AA: I had a professor say nobody likes to be made fun of, which seems like an obvious thought. Because I tend to be a more sarcastic person, naturally, it’s something I think about a lot. Trying to have people think critically is a hard line to walk. I also want to include myself in the work or implicate myself because I am wrestling with these ideas and these tendencies and temptations myself. This is something we’re going through as a culture. I don’t want to put myself in a place where I’m better than or looking down on someone. Being a mom, I spend so many hours of the day nagging and interacting. I don’t want to do that in my artistic life as well. Nobody wants to listen to it, and I feel like the humor helps with that a little bit.

LS: Do you see yourself returning to do more oil painting in the future?

AA: I feel like I have momentum right now with this particular body of work, so I’m just gonna keep doing that for now. I’m not quite ready. There’s also the insecurity of not even remembering how to paint. I think if and when I return to painting, it will all come together in a way, and then I’ll reinvent processes in more interesting ways than I did before. There’s something about the presence of a painting that I love so much. I really miss finishing a painting and sitting in front of it. There’s something about that feeling I don’t always get from these embroidered works. I still have a special nostalgic connection.

LS: You talked about the thought and embodiment of virtual messaging and signaling, and you said the meaning, tone, and significance change. How does it change further when it becomes a garment or when you incorporate it?

AA: In a virtual world, you post something, and then people encounter it in their own way, on their own time. They have their own private interaction with it. By making an environment, I’m interested in the idea that maybe there’s potential for a more synchronous response where, if you’re bragging about something, and it’s on your body, then maybe you’re having a conversation about it in real-time. People feel so much power in anonymity. If you’re gonna leave a negative comment, or you’re gonna say something just really conceited, it’s easier to do that in a virtual space because you’re not having to answer for that. You can ignore comments, or you could block people. If you put these ideas on your clothes, then you can’t necessarily avoid a conversation or confrontation about what they’re saying. 

LS: Would you like to see them on a runway again?

AA: Absolutely. I already have 10 new ideas.  Now that I feel like it can work, I’m interested in producing a body of work especially for that. My methods for making things are most effective when they’re in all these different contexts. I think the challenge for me is to make them more interesting than just a text-image relationship.