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Interview with the Artist
Marcella Hackbardt’s exhibition
True Confessionals
will
be on view in LUMA’s Works on Paper Gallery until
January 8, 2017.
What is your artistic background? In brief, give a short
biography about your career as an artist.
I started in art as a painter when I was 18 and studied art
history. When I was 24, my husband lent me a camera and I
never gave it back. At the time I worked for the University of
Alaska Anchorage in the vice chancellor’s office and started
to take art classes, one-by-one every semester. After eight
years, I received my degree in Studio Art from UAA. At
that point, I decided I wanted to be serious about becoming
a fine artist, so I applied to grad school and went to the
University of New Mexico.
Although UNM has a well-known photography program,
my MFA is not specific to photography, it’s in studio
art. I consider myself a studio artist that primarily uses
photography, but I’ve done sculpture and performance
based events as well.
Any particular early projects of yours that you are
especially proud of?
My first projects in grad school coincided with the birth of
my son, so I started to work with issues of domesticity and
motherhood, with all of the complexities and complications
surrounding them. I still look back at that work with
fondness; I really think it was powerful work that addressed
a theme that hadn’t been approached before in a very
conceptual manner. At that time other artists were starting
to make work that explored this life experience, so it was
part of a larger movement or genre. I think it had a lot of
successful aspects to it.
What particular movements were an inspiration to this
series of photographs?
True Confessionals
is very much a documentary project at
its heart. In fact, it is one of my first documentary projects-
the only other documentary project I have done is on boy
dancers in Ohio called
All Boy.
My larger bodies of work
are much more conceptually-based, dealing with the Earth
or ideas of knowledge. One of my largest bodies of work
is called
Story of Knowledges
, which was an image-based
meditation on knowledge and the pursuit of knowledge.
Instead of showing suffering or violence, the photographs
show the actual pursuit of knowledge as a kind of social
platform.
I’ve had to defend how
True Confessionals
segues with my
other work. I believe that it is because of the intentional but
complicated symbolism of the confessional. I was instantly
drawn to them as objects that suggest a multitude of ideas.
They offer, within the faith of Catholicism, the chance for
relieving oneself of sin and moving forward to rejoin the
community. However, on a very basic level, it functions as
a metaphor for self-perception and responsibility. That idea
of admitting to oneself, “I have done something wrong, and
now I need to discuss it so I can move forward from that as
a part of the community.” Of course, there are skeptics that
aren’t part of the faith. They might view the confessional as
an empty promise, or a place that is not entirely genuine.
So I think it’s a complicated site.
Would you describe this as one of your longer-term or
shorter-term projects?
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Intern Ryan Tracy talks with Artist Marcella Hackbardt