In the summer of 2023, RMCAD students interviewed our 2022-2024 Resident Artists in their studios. Their video interview of Laura Conway showcases her inspirations, portfolio, and dreams for her residency here at RedLine.
Laura Conway is a Denver-based interdisciplinary artist. She started making art in the Denver DIY scenes, booking underground music shows, hosting art galleries in her punk house, and embarking on “film tours.”
Conway carries the ethos and esthetics she took from underground music into her current practice. Currently she creates politically grounded works that span genre and medium, using surrealism and a sense of play to contemplate life in late stage capitalism.
While she primarily identifies as a filmmaker, her work hybridizes performance art, animation, documentary, music, and dance. Conway’s characters are often part of untold or overlooked histories—whether it is her communist grandparent’s in the McCarthy Era, a queer woman botanist, or a black woman computer programmer in the 1980s.
“I guess the answer to that question, “How do you define dance?” Anything is dance if you say it is. The same way it is for art, it’s more of a lens to view the world, in my opinion. That’s how I see dance. It’s a way of seeing the world through your body and through people’s bodies.”
Watch the video of Laura in her RedLine studio to learn more about her and her practice!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION:
“As far as what inspires me for ideas for videos and performances, my work really has pretty literal subject matter oftentimes. So I'll be inspired by things in the world, texts. Most recently, I was reading these Victorian gardening advice columns, and that was the inspiration for a new dance film, like a satire.
“I think my favorite part of the creative process is probably working with other people. Filmmaking is such a collaborative medium, especially for me. So I love bringing people's expertise together.
“That's what part of casting or part of the producing process is, finding the perfect costume designer who has your style, the dancers whose choreography you love, the musicians who can make a score for you, the lighting designer who has such an interesting view of how light can change stories. And then when all those people are together and you're creating and all these bodies are in a space, it's really fantastic.
“For me, music is probably the easiest part of the creative process. Oftentimes I'll start with music. So is it difficult? No. My life is really meshed in music. My partner is an amazing musician. I DJ as part of my side hustle and creative practice. So my living room right now has a piano, an upright bass, a xylophone, a flute, a saxophone. Just music's everywhere for me, it's a huge part of my creative community. So yeah, music comes easy.
“How I define dance, I think of dance very broadly, and that's probably because of some of the dance practitioners that I've collaborated with a lot, including Michelle Ellsworth, an amazing dancer named Madison Palffy and Brittany Benett.
“All of those dancers really think about movement really broadly, and that's been true since the modern era. Pedestrian movement has become a big part of dance. So that could look like walking or doing a task. I consider all of that dance.
“I guess the answer to that question, "How do you define dance?" Anything is dance if you say it is. The same way it is for art, it's more of a lens to view the world, in my opinion. That's how I see dance. It's a way of seeing the world through your body and through people's bodies.
“I think the reason I incorporate it into my art is probably... I've always been a very physical person and that has looked a lot of ways, sports, wrestling when I was a kid and playing in very physical ways and weightlifting and throughout my whole life, movement has been so important. And so I think finally, over the last half decade I've discovered that I have this way of relating to that and something I call it, which might be dance.
“Some of my favorite pieces I've created in the last few years are a film called The Length of Day, which was a film about my relationship to capitalism and my sadness around the fact that it's hard to imagine the end of capitalism, vis-a-vis my grandparents, my maternal grandparents' history with the Communist Party in the 1940s.
“As far as messages that I want people to take away from my work, I'm interested in... The world can be really mundane and drab. And so I'm very interested in a serious relationship to whimsy and alternative realities and just experiencing a break from this systemic boredom that I feel like can pervade modern life.
“That's one thing. I'm really excited about telling stories of people who haven't been told as much. I think the history of especially cinema, has been mostly told through a rich white male gaze. And so I think that helps people relate mostly to white men.
“Cinema is amazing at making you identify with people. You always identify with the protagonist of a film and think, "Well, I know what they're feeling." And so I think it is really important now to identify with other people and their stories.
“To break it down, contemporary art, that word means what's being made now, right? Just very simply. But it's strange because, well then, will art always be contemporary art for the rest of time if it's always just contemporaneous, meaning what's happening now? So I think we're very bad at knowing, or maybe it's not possible to know the way people will define the present moment.
“Usually have to look back at an art movement to say what were its defining features. So modern art seems to now be this break from representationalism and an interest in abstraction, and maybe also the relationship between art and all of these crazy things that were happening in the world, like industrialization and massive world wars that showed how hugely capable of destruction humans are.
“So what will we think of right now of the art being made right now? And one of the things I think about is this weird relationship to capitalism and how we don't have an alternative to capitalism at the moment. Ever since the fall of the Soviet Union, there really isn't any competing political ideology or system.
“A lot of the work is strangely retro. So you'll see a lot of VHS effects and archaic technology. I'm totally guilty of that. This is a VHS camera I have here, and a lot of my films have used this kind of nostalgic lens, and I think you see it a lot in music too. We're constantly cycling back to previous art eras.
“So I think it's really hard for us to imagine the future, and that's also related to global warming. We just can't really get our minds around what will become of us. And so I think that is where we are in art, basically.
Watch RedLine Resident Artist Laura Conway in her Studio
“I’m really interested in cameras and systems of power within filmmaking. So what is the male gaze and how can we fight that, or what might a female gaze look like?
Surveillance is another interest of mine, so I work with surveillance cameras sometimes trying to kind of combat the way cameras have been used as weapons with absurdity and humor and comedy and eroticism as tools to kind of work against the way cameras have harmed bodies.”
