Truth&Rights recently visited Denver-based artist and gallery owner, Erik Isaac of The Fu Collective. His most recent work, an ambitious installation in an empty warehouse near Denver’s Santa Fe Arts District, is both driven by his love for humor and also a need to commentate on the economic worries felt by the American public over the past 12 months.
T&R: The first night that we visited the warehouse space and took a long look at your installation, “In This Economy,” we were floored by it’s intention. Can you take us through the concept? Was it the idea that came first or the space?
Erik Isaac: I do site-specific installations and non site-specific installations. As far as my work, I do conceptual pieces. I always have about 7 different projects that I want to be doing, sort of either in an actual notebook or at least in my mind and I always have ideas that I want to do. When the space was presented to me, I started going through the list of things that were intriguing. Also the site itself is this in between-space where it’s completely empty and cleaned – they sandblasted the entire upper infrastructure and the walls so it’s empty and development hasn’t started. Immediately, you have this huge volume, and the ceiling is so striking and such a contrast to the rest of it and so striking that those elements needed to be worked with. That’s why I went with the ceiling piece because I wanted you to be looking up. I’ve been wanting to do a piece about the economy for a while and it was just a really good fit because it’s so overwhelming and huge and scary and all these things that are hard to control.
T&R: From start to finish, how long did it take to get things to the point where we see it now?
Erik Isaac: I was told that the space was open about 6 weeks before the First Friday Event that you saw in May. The first two weeks was spent trying to figure out what to do: The space inspires people to do interesting things and for me it was a lot of running around inside and trying to absorb every angle and get as much into my head as I could. Also during the first two weeks I was so stressed out that on three occasions, in order to go to sleep, I decided I was going to quit the project and not do anything. Then I would wake up in the morning and immediately get back to work on what it was going to be. From there it was 3 solid weeks of putting it together. I had 9 volunteers helping me with the project and we had an inconsistent schedule where different amounts of them would show up and then we would get working. Essentially, with that kind of thing we just got more and more efficient and at this stage we could really crank out the hanging dollar bills on the ceiling. Probably at this stage we are the most efficient group to hang dollar bills on the ceiling in the world. So should anybody need that service, I have just the crew…
T&R: When we talk about the concept, what was it that inspired you to tackle, thematically speaking, this idea of the economy?
Erik Isaac: I think we were just bombarded with the economy on the daily news and we hear it all the time. The name of the piece is ‘In This Economy,’ and I wanted to use that because in the media, that introduction is always followed by some excuse to do something horrible and it just rotates. It’s like ‘in this economy, we’re going to have to fire you.’ It’s like, because of the elevated threat conditions, we’re going to have to take away your liberties. It’s always this fill-in-the-blank mentality – you can just go through history and it’s been a non-stop, “we’re going to have to do this because of this.” Money is either looked at as one thing or the other – it’s either the goal of life or the source of all evil. I wanted to show it in its role as a neutral tool. One of the ideas behind it is that the money can’t do anything on it’s own, its just a tool to organize people to work together. In that capacity, the judgment around it is totally dependent on what you believe in with the project, what your relationship to money is, how much you have and so on. But the money is just an organizational tool.
T&R: You realize when you walk in the room that the currency is just out of reach. Was that intentional?
Erik Isaac: I hung it specifically an inch above my jump height. One of the most important things for me in any piece of art is to include some jokes and have a sense of humor with it. I love the idea that it’s a literal cliché come true and when people are inside the installation… It’s literally hanging above everybody’s heads. Also it’s hung in such a way so that the picture of George Washington is always looking down on you. Even though it’s an incredibly abstract piece, when you look up at it because you see a roof of floating dollar bills amidst the infrastructure, with the patterns and the recession lines that it makes, the perspective lines – it creates a tangible experience. All of those things are very geometrical and abstract, yet you’re also making contact with the human face. To be able to include that, I felt allowed me to tie it in from something abstract to something basic.
T&R: When we talk about the Fu Collective, can you explain what that is, how it supports your art, and what you bring to that specific group of individuals?
Erik Isaac: I’m the owner and the director of the Fu Collective and Gallery. It’s a hybrid between a traditional gallery and a co-op. Really the idea behind the gallery is all about the permanent members paying dues to have the financial stability for the space itself. I wanted to have it that way so that we weren’t dependent upon sales or commissions - I wanted to let that be up to the artist if it was money-based. The idea is that the gallery is a place for artists to do the work that they do for themselves, or the experimental work if you will. If you look at art from the point of view of a hobby, you do all this work by yourself but it’s just as important to have it on a wall and to have the public see it and see their reactions. Most of the artists have been there for the whole year that we’ve been open. It’s amazing to see the friendships that have formed and how the art has influenced each other and to see the evolution of the artists – those are the general ideas behind it. Which are all really important elements to the process. Period.
