Arts Agenda - Paper or plastic?

Though she’s only been living in Atlanta for two years, photographer/sculptor Gretchen Hupfel has already become one of the most visible and prolific artists on the local scene, currently featured in two shows: Do It at the Atlanta College of Art Gallery and The Future of Now at City Gallery East.
A graduate of Brown University, where her classmates included filmmaker Todd Haynes and singer Jon Spencer, Hupfel has recently moved from her distinctively elegant, cool black-and-white photography of the ubiquitous architecture of radio towers and Hartsfield-bound airplanes to create engaging new sculptural work, which debuted in last year’s Nexus Biennial. With its impossibly lilliputian railroad model people engaged in allegorical quandaries, the sculptures featured a tiny nun seated calmly at the center of a moving orb, or a germ-sized couple making out on a radio tower.
Hupfel’s work is deceptively simple but imbued with a psychological resonance as her bitty people illustrate states of alienation, the perils of gravity and the precariousness of life on Earth. Her photographs of towers spewing invisible radio waves and miraculously airborne jets seem to also treat a world where invisible forces are at work, and chaos lurks at the edge of calm.
FF: Where are you from?
GH: I’m originally from Delaware but I tell people Philadelphia because nobody knows where Delaware is.
What are you teaching at UGA?
I teach 3-D design. It’s supposed to be more general than a sculpture class. So I start them out with material. Before they can make a form they have to understand the atoms; how wood behaves, for example, when you hit it with a hammer or you sand it.
I think it’s wonderful you’re using our valuable local resource of Hartsfield Airport ...
Oh, it’s so awesome. If you get under the landing path, they come in very low. They feel like the Hindenburg hovering over you. It’s very loud — sets off all the car alarms. That’s what I do on weekends. Every Sunday. It’s like church kinda.
Do you see a link between your photography and sculpture?
They’re both a little cautionary. I think of them as being allegorical, telling a story, showing a predicament.
What’s the best thing about being an artist in Atlanta?
There’s a lot of local support. I’ve been here for two years now. And even though I don’t have a gallery here, I have opportunities all over the place.
The worst thing?
That there’s no alternative [gallery] situation except for Eyedrum.
If you could pick a musical equivalent for your artwork — say if Tracey Emin is Hole and Jeff Koons is Esquivel, who would be you?
Lou Rawls. His voice is like butter. Simple and kind of clean and pure.
What did you want to be when you grew up?
I wanted to be a New Yorker cartoonist. And actually, when I was about 10, I sent in a bunch of little drawings.
Paper or plastic?
Plastic.
Mustard or mayo?
Mustard.
What actress would you like to play you in The Gretchen Hupfel Story?
I would love it to be someone like Audrey Hepburn, but probably it would end up being Ally Sheedy who played that tragic drug addict in High Art.
Do you think that there’s some characteristic that you share with other artists?
Recently I’ve been feeling very much in line with other artists emerging now that don’t have any particular allegiances to a discipline. What comes first is the concept, and then the material comes next.
Your work has shown quite a bit in New York. Do you see New York galleries taking a different approach to your work than Atlanta or other outlying galleries?
New York galleries are interested in my work!