by Soap Khan
CPJ: Could you please give us some background on who you are as an artist?
Avian: I grew up always wanting to do art but not really finding art that I wanted to do and that I
could do, especially in traditional youth education is very much, like, you do painting or you do
drawing and if you’re not good at those things, then you’re not an artist … I realized that I
wanted to do filmmaking. I pursued filmmaking and I took film production classes and I studied
film at SPSCC, but I didn’t really consider myself an artist. I would definitely say that
filmmakers are artists, but it’s still a very different space … So then I got to Evergreen and I met
a variety of professors who introduced me to a lot of new ideas, like Hogan Seidel and Devon
Damonte and Julia Zay, that I can make art that speaks to me through these mediums I didn’t
even know existed like direct animation on film, or phytography, or photograms, or cyanotypes,
and all these experimental processes that involve film, I just really love working with them.
CPJ: What first inspired you to go the direction of investigating film photography? What about it
do you find unique?
Avian: … I took the Photoland proficiency course on how to develop your own film and I
realized that you need to shoot film to get the proficiency. So, I got a camera from Media Loan
and I got some old film from my dad’s garage that he hadn’t shot through yet and I just went out
and shot. The camera had an automatic setting so that I could get started, and after I did that for a
while I was shooting all these black-and-white pictures of my friends, of the Evergreen woods,
and it was really wonderful and I just completely fell in love with it and I was making so many
prints in the darkroom.
CPJ: You were saying that you took a lot of photos of your friends and the Evergreen forest. I
was wondering if you see a lot of your work as rooted in these senses of place, or a sense of
place in general?
Avian: … I like to focus on this idea of documentation of places or people and I think that
especially when I get into marginalized communities that I am a part of then I want to document
them in a way that feels authentic to me especially because history has tried so hard to erase us
and in film photography you are creating a physical, archival object of a memory that can’t be
lost in a digital space. That is undeniable. I don’t want to subscribe to this idea of photography as
truth, but I still think it is important to capture these things in a way that feels authentic.
CPJ: How would you say that you inject authenticity into your work? What different techniques
do you use to get this across?
Avian: I think that the problem with a lot of photography is the idea of fetishizing and
objectifying the ‘other’. So in my own work I try to not photograph people that I’m not really in
community with … But in the queer communities that I am in and with my friends, I know them
very well and I know to a certain extent how they want to be seen and, often, how the world
denies them the right to be seen in this way … For me, photographing community is really about
this sense of authenticity with the documentation through really getting to know people
personally and understanding how they want to be seen.
CPJ: I noticed that with a lot of the pieces that you showed me that there were a lot of motifs,
like a lot of work with certain colors and I particularly noticed water as very present in your
work. What does water mean to you?
Avian: I have an underwater collection of photos that I shot on an underwater film camera. There
were a lot of trials and tribulations to that! But I think it’s some of my best work, honestly,
because I’m so in love with the water that not only comes with my love of nature and the fact
that I grew up sailing. I sailed competitively … and now I work as a coach for a sailing team so I
still am spending at least 3 days a week out on the water most of the time … A lot of my work
relates to the idea of queer ecology, which is this idea of connecting nature and queerness in spite
of how systemically they have been pushed apart. Nature has historically been looked at through
a logical scientific lense to put down queerness, and there is this challenge to looking at nature
without projecting upon it, we see that there’s all these other beautiful types of queerness in all of
these different ways … water is very transient in its nature. You have the water cycle and then
you have water that’s constantly moving with the tides or moving with the rivers … My
underwater collection was kind of a peak of all of those things coming together. I went to Lake
Cushman with my friend and we paddled around on paddleboards and I went and took
underwater photos and we just spent the day together in the sun.
CPJ: You were talking about your underwater collection. Do you often create many of your
pieces with the thought of a through-line between them in sets?
Avian: Yeah, I would say I often focus on creating collections … sometimes from an idea but
most often they’re from different rolls of film. The underwater collection is taken from one or
two rolls of film that I shot underwater on that camera … I [have] this other collection of photos
that I took at my partner’s childhood house, and those photos were exploring this idea of
memory and what it means to come back to this place that was a home that is no longer a home,
and the nostalgia surrounding it in complicated ways… I often shoot reactionarily where I have
an idea and the idea will be very vague …I look at the photos [from the underwater collection]
and think, “What are these representing about me and about the day and what of my work can I
tie them into, what formal qualities are coming out in them?” It’s the same with the collection
about my partner’s house. I had the idea to do these photos about his house and did some
different techniques while I was processing, like solarizing the negatives so they’re a mix of
positive and negative black-and-white images and I was like, “Wow! I think this idea of
solarization ties into the idea of dual memory because the negatives are neither positives or
negatives completely.”
CPJ: Thank you so much for the interview! Thank you so much for saying some really cool stuff,
now I just wanna actually make art, inspiring.
