Ester Partegàs: Building Blocks

Billboard at 510 Oak

Ester Partegàs: Building Blocks 

On View: February through April, 2025 at 510 Oak Street, Eugene, OR 97401

Visiting Artist Lecture “A Sun in my Pocket“: Thursday, February 6 at 4:00 p.m. in Lawrence Hall, Room 115, 1190 Franklin Boulevard, Eugene, OR 97403

A Conversation with Artist Ester Partegàs and CFAR Director Tannaz Farsi

Tannaz: So, thank you so much for this work.

Ester: We don’t need to be formal, right?

Tannaz: I do want to thank you for this work because I really love seeing it at this scale and in public. One of the first things that got me curious about it was your decision not to use any text.

Ester: Yes.

Tannaz: And because it is a billboard and immediately that is the mode that we imagine. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Ester: I still don’t have any perspective on what I’ve done because it happened so fast in a way. I was traveling, and it was Christmas break. And, you know, when you have a family you really..

Tannaz:  Work in disjointed way

Ester: Exactly, so it’s been fast, but this process has brought up my past me and my present me because there was a decision some time ago to work differently. You invited me to do a public artwork, a banner, and that spoke so much of my past work that dealt with public space. I did so many things on the street – the street has been a huge inspiration for 20 years or more. I loved giving back to the street by putting art outside. I did this in guerrilla or freestyle and sometimes as a commissioned project. My first thought was to continue this type of previous work, I did some tests and it just didn’t feel completely honest. My real desire was to focus on my current drawings and turn them into something that could hold public space. I think the interesting thing about billboards is that you don’t know if someone is trying to sell you something or not. So not having words makes it more mysterious or even suspicious — what is this image and why are they not trying to tell me or sell me something directly. It became important to leave that kind of mystery there. I have to credit my husband, Stephan, who is an artist too, really pushed me into figuring out a translation of the drawing at this scale and in public space, because at first, I thought it would be untranslatable. I appreciate this, especially when you have a deadline, because maybe a safe direction would have been to go back to do what I already knew would work.

Tannaz: I love that the idea itself becomes a process and opens up the potential direction of the work, particularly considering the starting point was drawings of bread. I am curious about the different processes in play between the drawn and the photographic image.

Ester: The drawing wouldn’t have worked because it needs to be appreciated in close proximity where you can see all the detail and understand its slowness an intimate experience. That’s hardly possible in a parking lot high up where a lot of people will see the image while driving, so it wouldn’t be the right context for a drawing. It’s not really the language of the street.

Tannaz:  The photograph becomes architectural in some way and poses an immediacy to us even though there is nothing immediate about it – you bake the bread, you cut the bread, you assemble – through this mediation, it enters an imaginative space versus a real space.

Ester: Exactly. This bread brick had to be close to the real brick that’s holding this banner, so it can be associated as part of the wall. I’m imagining not a different wall but proposing a continuation for the wall.

Tannaz: A permeable structure versus a finite structure.

Ester: Yes, a porous quality to the wall.

Tannaz: You also mentioned care as a theme for this work and it’s a larger topic that you’ve been working with. Could you talk a little bit about what that means?

Ester: Some of it is obvious, like nutrition, and that’s a part of the original drawings of having bread behave like stone as a building block of society. We see the bread, strawberry, tangerine, and the spoon fit into this category. Then I wanted other elements, such as the pencil and the eraser, items from the studio for drawing or taking notes that speak of the creative aspects of care, but also of erasing things that may be understood to be a bit more negative. The silver foil is kind of this little garbage from a sandwich that is left over similar to the battery that is always around waiting to be put away. I didn’t want to overthink the objects and get granular on the meaning of each. I was interested in gathering whatever I had around. Some of the objects are easily readable and others less prominent and take much longer to see. I think the most hidden is the wine bottle cork.

Tannaz: The color is really similar to the background.

Ester: Yes, and the matchbox also matches the brick. Maybe somebody comes here every day, parks the car and only after five weeks realizes there are two more objects than they first noticed. In this way, I introduced a little bit of different speeds of reading to the image. I like the battery. We run on batteries, and it means energy and negative/positive. Each object is charged with a lot of meaning, and it’s for everyone, right? Everyone has a relationship with these objects.

Tannaz: Absolutely, I love this about the work, that we all have a physical relationship with all of these objects. Maybe not all on a daily basis, but we still understand the form and have held many of them in our hand.  The space of the hand becomes important and the idea of holding creates a relationship to care.  There is also magic in the scale, in that even though these objects are really large in the photograph, we still understand them in relation to our hand. This is such a sculptural way of thinking about scale, of object to body to site, and you’ve been able relay it through the two-dimensional plane of the photograph.

Ester: Thank you. Yeah. I will say that an act of care is also when you’re at home and you spend all this amount of time picking up shit, like you know the coin, the battery, the wrapper, that drives me crazy and you don’t need to be a parent to understand this. 

Tannaz: Things are never in their place.

Ester: Never. And it’s always these little things.They are everywhere all the time. And maybe they are important or not important. But, you know, you have that loose battery that you don’t know what to do with always around.

Tannaz: I have four sitting on my counter right now.

Ester: Yeah. To me, these little objects that are around all the time, and they never quite disappear. You organize them and two days later they are back. I don’t want to use the word virus, but they are unavoidable and hold psychic space. The things that you want to get rid of and you can never get rid of.  Does the constant presence of little things make them big things? If it always stays around maybe it’s bigger than you think. It brings me to these philosophical questions. These things are also irritating. They signal care but also point to something irritating or unmanageable. What do you do when the pencil becomes too small but can still function. I don’t know. I mean, these are little things and not.

Tannaz: Absolutely. It reminds me, I just listened to a short video of you discussing the double-sided qualities of an object through George Perec’s idea of infra-ordinary. Seems a bit similar to Duchamp’s, Infrathin, where one can detect minute differences between mass-produced objects, or understand a trace of previous use of an object, inherently changing our relation to it and understanding of it.

Ester: These objects are so below ordinary because they are invisible and fall to the bottom of the hierarchy of value. They are anonymous. You buy a potato; you buy another potato or things that are massed produced like plastic spoons. You go through many in life and there is always another potato or plastic spoon. They go even below this infra-ordinary layer.

Tannaz:  So, this is a whole other category of objects.

Ester: I think so.

Tannaz: This category of object fits within commodity fetishism- for us, the users, devoid of its production but perhaps filled with a history of use in relation to our life. Because it’s a baby spoon, and it’s in your baby’s mouth, it becomes invested with a particular time and emotion even though it’s not the exact spoon, not the same color, etc. but still becomes a portal into these memory spaces of a particular time in life. This struck me as I was walking to pick you up and I saw a little kid at the daycare next door to our building. I had forgotten that there is a daycare next door and parents park in this lot, where the banner hangs, to pick up their child and they will have a whole other relationship with the image. It’s intriguing to me that it presents this specific feeling related to domestic space and directs me to a very particular time in my life as a mother.

Ester: Where all you do is pick up this spoon and you know peel oranges and cut strawberries. Of course, I didn’t know, there was a daycare next door and we never consider parents rushing to get the kid out of the car seat as an audience. It’s a very specific period of a few years that you might have to cut the beans into these small bites.

Tannaz:  I also really love the foil because it is a flat surface but then you can make so many things with it. It opens the imaginative potential of these objects.

Ester: The thread too. The thread is nothing by itself, it is there to serve a bigger project.

Tannaz: Part of the whole yet not the whole itself is an interesting way of imagining the function for these objects.

Ester: I see them as commodities that belong to the dollar store. I don’t want to get too political, but they represent a lot of anonymous labor that we don’t consider. I’ve always identified with these objects and aspects of these objects I relate to the invisibility of women’s labor. I like to use the verb rescuing – I rescue these objects and try to give them a voice or try to listen to their story or even invent a story for them, giving them a voice that we are not supposed to have. My work has changed and taken different forms over the years, but the presence of this kind of cheap commodity has always been central. I don’t know where that comes from, but the fact that I’m a Catalan woman and I grew up feeling very voiceless says something about how I think through invisibility. Putting them permanently on a wall is to say these belong to the building blocks of our society. They are building the everyday, they are building care and affection as actions that go on throughout each day and they build our society.

Tannaz: Yeah, that they each have a place in the structure. The question of visibility becomes embedded in these objects precisely because they do not belong on a giant banner, and it pinpoints the invisible labor around the production and circulation of these objects in relation to bodies, from the land, the home and the factory.

Ester: Exactly. The objects that I choose to work with always ride the limit of value. In the span of 10 seconds, they can become garbage. It’s like this constant borderline that the battery embodies, we throw it out without thinking, right? So, to me, that can translate into people when we talk politics.

Tannaz: Who becomes disposable. Yeah, it’s not just a battery, it’s the maker of that battery that goes along with it.

Ester: It becomes very obvious that we become disposable.

Tannaz: How do you imagine the bread in this set of relations?

Ester: In the drawings I was comparing the bread with stone or brick. Unlike brick, bread is ephemeral, consumed daily and through its disappearance it becomes a part of us. The brick remains, so it capitalizes visually and politically. It has this supposedly solid look, and it can last centuries which relates it to the monumental or the architectural. But, bread, bread is actually monumental without taking up much space. It is produced massively across the world every day; it has always been around and has sustained us and built culture in a very invisible way.

Tannaz: Thank you so much. It is so great we have this work unfold these ideas for many different viewers in a public space.