Regina Granne - Dmitry Borshch interview

An excerpt from my interview with artist Regina Granne, recently published by Superstition Review, the literary magazine of Arizona State University:

I met Regina at Brooklyn's A.I.R. Gallery in May of 2009, when her pencil drawings were being exhibited there in a one-person retrospective exhibition called "Increments".  We became friendly and about six months after our first meeting she sent me the questions below.  I rewrote some of my answers after she passed in January of 2013.

I did some research on you, not too much because I was hoping to find an understanding of your art through this conversation.  Are you a "mixed-media artist"?

ULAN, a project of the Getty Research Institute, classifies me as a "mixed-media artist" because I photograph drawings and exhibit these photographs instead of drawings themselves.  They feel the marriage of photography and draughtsmanship justifies such a classification.

Have you done photographic series unrelated to drawing?

Yes, one of them was described thus: "I realized after completing much of the series – "When girls meet, hearts warm!" is an unwitting response to Diane Arbus’s "Girls in matching swimsuits".  The delay is understandable as her picture and mine are not directly connected.  What I hope connects them is a feeling the viewer gets of strong poetic exchange between their subjects’ faces – an interplay of facial movements, heightened by framing and vignetting.  Often a certain ludicrous quality attracts me to one subject or another, expressed in overapplied makeup (the most made up faces are the most revealing, I find), overbleached teeth or hairdos that are ludicrously overdone.  After expanding the series to include males I renamed it "When friends meet, hearts warm!" or "Friend, you are my second self!"  I view these pictures as manipulated found objects, shot with a disposable camera by some "disposable" photographer – me, subjects themselves whom I directed, a bystander..."

Dmitry Borshch