Cy Gavin

I think like not always, but I think I look at something period.

I don't know who made it just like for what I can see it to be.

And you can sort of infer intention without knowing it.

And I think that's why outsider art or whatever the language is for calling that now is so meaningful to people because it's made with intention and has value to the maker and

And that is very immediately recognizable to me.

What is harder is whenever the value is in the person funding the making.

And then I usually just kind of appreciate it as a construction.

And also, I think, but it adds complexity to appreciate the societal situation that produced that thing.

I think a person who jumps to mind is like Goya or Velazquez, who were court painters, but also artists.

Creating images of society, of people that were not able to buy their work, but they were also making very political, very intense personal statements, for lack of a better word, in what they were making while still painting the Duke of Wellington or whoever.

I don't think there's a truth to any place.

And I don't think of landscape as being distinguished from even the built environment, to be totally real.

I think I was really thinking a lot about this for the show and for this conversation, what nature means to me.

And it's really not like a thing outside of myself.

It's not.

I didn't move upstate to like find Arcadia.

I'd move there because it was like the only, actually it was very close and it was very, it allowed me to work without certain constraints that I felt impeded me.

Specifically like being observed and also or having to come up with enough money to afford places that I would be working in.

And for that need to sell stuff to afford the place that I'm working in.

But having gone there, I recognized, as you do anywhere, that there are politics of a place that shape it, that shape conversations, that shape your treatment in the place, that exist everywhere.