When Ben Venom was a kid, his mom used to tell his sister and him, "use it or lose it." Venom, a San Francisco-based textile artist, has taken that message to heart.
His exhibit "Use it or Lose It" is on display at the Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum through mid-January. It features several quilts he’s made, as well as a jacket and tote bag. Many of the designs include pieces of his or his family’s clothes and they depict images you don’t often see on quilts.
Venom says he’s interested in pushing the idea of art and functionality. Venom joined The Show to discuss how he got started making quilts.
Full conversation
BEN VENOM: So I went to graduate school at the San Francisco Art Institute and around that time I was doing some sewing. I was making these large flags and banners, but then in 2006 there was an exhibition at the DeYoung Museum, which is a museum in San Francisco, and it was the Quilts of Gee's Bend, and I went and saw that show and was totally blown away by the work that these amazing women have done for many, many, many years.
I'm originally from Georgia, so you might hear a little bit of a Southern drawl. So I was living in San Francisco, as I was saying, going to grad school. I see this exhibition at the Young Museum that's Quilts of Gee’s Ben. They're from a rural part of Alabama. It just all clicked for me.
Then fast-forward about two years to 2008, and I was asked to be in a really big exhibition in Berlin, Germany, and I wanted to do something that was like beyond what I've ever done before. I wanted to like really push myself, so I decided to make a quilt.
So I bought a book called Quilting Basics 101, and the reason why I bought that book is because I had a lot of photographs because I had no idea what I was doing, so I taught myself how to make a quilt. And I used a lot of my old band t-shirts that I had since I was a teenager to make this first quilt in 2008.
Folded it up, put it on the plane, flew to Berlin, Germany, went through customs. They're like, do you have anything to declare? Because that's how they talk. And then I was like no, walk right through customs, went to the gallery. It was like one of the larger pieces of an exhibition because I just unfolded it and then from then on I was like, oh this is pretty interesting. And that's since 2008 I've primarily been working within the medium of textiles.
MARK BRODIE: So I want to go back to how you basically taught yourself how to quilt by reading a book and looking at photos in that book. That doesn't seem typical.
VENOM: Maybe, maybe not, but like a former undergrad teacher of mine, Craig Doganowski, was like said, always follow your dumb ideas, and it just so happens that I have a lot of dumb ideas. One of those was being like, oh, I can figure out how to make a quilt, which if you were to go back and look at that quilt that I made in 2008, there's a million mistakes on it. I'm not going to point them out to you. But they're there.
I would like to think that the quilts in the show here have no mistakes, but you can point them out and you let me know. So I've definitely, the point being is I've learned a lot since 2008 and I'm still trying to push myself to learn more techniques, more ways to do things like they could be an easier way to do it or just the correct way to do it.
BRODIE: Well, so how do you come up with the designs, because I mean I've, I've not seen a million quilts in my life, but these don't seem like the typical subject matter for the kinds of quilts you might either see in a art show or let's say on top of somebody's bed, right?
VENOM: So I draw my inspiration from what I'm, what I'm interested in. I grew up in the Atlanta punk rock scene of the ‘90s. I grew up skateboarding. I grew up playing soccer. I, I listen to heavy metal music, all these kind of like disparate elements I kind of take together and then I collide into the form of a functional piece of artwork, typically a quilt. So everything you see here in this exhibition is something that I, I'm personally interested in.
BRODIE: It's so interesting because I would imagine like in the virtual Venn diagram of people who are into heavy metal, skateboarding, that kind of thing, and the people who are into quilting, like you might be the only person in the middle of that.
VENOM: There's probably a few that might be lying around, but yeah, I don't think there's like a huge group of us. But that's OK because like you know I came to the medium of medium of textiles in a little bit of a roundabout way like. That's OK because like for me one of the main reasons I came to textiles is that DeYoung show, the Quilts of Gee’s Bend, but also this idea of art and functionality. So even if you don't like what you see here, it still shows a distinct purpose in the world.
BRODIE: Well, you mentioned that that first quilt you used some of your old like band t-shirts and stuff. Do you continue to use your own items, articles of clothing, other things you have sort of around the house in your work?
VENOM: Oh, absolutely. I just, I just made a quilt for an exhibition at Hashimoto Contemporary that opened about a month ago, and it was fabric from my wife's jeans and our daughter's clothing when she was an infant. And then the back of it was a blanket or like that we used to swaddle her. And she's now 6, so this is when she's a little bit younger. And yes, I did ask my wife if I could use the fabric first before I started cutting it up.
And so that was like a medium-sized piece and that's stuff we've had and we have lying around. And then a lot of this work here, some of their some of my clothing is in this, but a lot of the work that's in this exhibition here today at the Mesa Contemporary Museum is, is from, it's commission-based work, so it'll be like fabric from that particular person that commissioned it.
BRODIE: Do you feel extra pressure to not make a mistake when you're using like your daughter's baby clothes or your favorite like band t-shirts from from when you were a kid? Like if it were me, I'd be so terrified because you can't just go get more of it.
VENOM: That's a great question and you just made my anxiety level go up about to level 10, so thanks.
BRODIE: Sorry!
VENOM: [LAUGHS] Yes, I mean that's all you always run that risk, but like. With sewing it is a little bit forgiving where I can just take a seam ripper and undo the stitches and pull it back up. It's not like when I use that piece of fabric I can never reuse it, so I have that in the back of my mind when I'm sewing over that, you know, piece of fabric that was a sweatshirt that my daughter loved that she wasn't too stoked on seeing in the quilt, and I was like I better not mess this one up, you know, she's gonna get upset, but it came out OK. We're all good for now.
BRODIE: For now, right? So let's look at this piece in the back here, because this is a basically floor to ceiling quilt. And there's some pyramids at the bottom and some, you know, sort of looks like maybe snakes that you've created in the middle there.
VENOM: So it's basically like a skull Medusa head with a bunch of snakes coming out of it within this like large circle, some lightning bolts at the top and like these kind of like mystical pyramids at the bottom. The quilt is roughly 15 feet tall, 13 feet wide. It's made from over 125 different band t-shirts, and it took about roughly 5 months to make and it's kind of, kind of playing on this, you know, cutty imagery, but yet it's a large quilt.
BRODIE: Do you try to use the fabric to help you figure out how you're going to design it? Like did, did the Medusa head to the snakes, the pyramids, was that inspired by what was on the fabric or was that separate?
VENOM: And it was, it was inspired by imagery that I'm, that I'm interested in like skateboarding graphics,, band t-shirts, album covers, etc. so yes, but this particular piece like so I had to design and I had a pile of shirts and then I would figure out what shirt I wanted to go within that particular part of the design. So one way to look at this is like a giant puzzle.
BRODIE: It's almost like you can look at these quilts and it's almost like a where's Waldo like look at the different pieces that are in there that you might not be able to see until you get really close up.
VENOM: No, I think that's a great way to look at it and one another way to look at it is like. I look at it as like it's a collection of memories because I use a lot of primarily I use recycled and or donated fabrics, so everyone, everything has like a history to it.
So like your shirt, your pants, whatever you may wear has a piece of you literally on it and it might have, like something pivotal in your life might have happened when you were wearing that shirt or those pants, but maybe they get to a point where you can't wear them anymore.
You can give them to me. I'll cut them up and they have a second life. They live on as a piece of artwork that's functional. So now a piece of you is in the work. It's not just mine, it's ours. So it's like, where's Waldo, but where's, where's Mark's? Where's Ben's, where's, you know, Beatrice's piece, right? It's all of ours.
