Emily Seiler Interview
This is Oliver Endahl, one of the members of the Pigeonholed Art Collective. Today I am interviewing my fellow Pigeonholed artist, Emily Seiler.
I am always compelled and impressed by Emily’s creativity and artistic vision. I came up with a couple questions surrounding her process, and I am happy to share her answers with you all today.
A portrait of Emily Seiler.
Let’s start with an introduction:
“My name is Emily Seiler and I am a fine art and fashion photographer based out of Albuquerque. I grew up in Taos, New Mexico, a small little hippie town in the northern part of the state, where I grew up with quite alternative parents who built their house with their hands and homeschooled my sisters and I.
I have been a photographer for 15 years, working in portraiture, weddings, head shots, basically you name it, I've shot it. Lately I've been focusing more on a project called FoodSex. In this set, I work with still Lives with inappropriate subject matter. This has been a fun and cheeky expression of a kind of creativity I don't get to use a lot when working with brands.
I also work in documentary photography trying to document and solidify the wild times that we’re in and that's where “Signs Of The Times” has kind of flourished.”
An image from “Signs of the times” by Emily Seiler.
What made you start the “Signs of the Times” project?
“I was driving in Albuquerque in April 2020 when I saw a sign on someone's front lawn that said “I support our front line workers”. I stopped and took a picture of this just as a way to document it for myself. After looking around my city for the next few weeks I saw hundreds of different kinds of yard signs. Some pledging allegiance to various political parties, supporting frontline workers, supporting groups like the ACLU or Planned Parenthood, or there could be a "Don't Tread On Me” sign. I found all of these signs in front yards and I started to think there's something really happening here.I spent the rest of 2020 driving around looking for yard signs.
Over about 10 months I collected pictures of around 400 unique yard signs. This entire project was shot on 35MM film and I felt that the film was an important part of this project because it just felt very historical and like it could be something that generations who didn't experience the pandemic would be interested in seeing, and that felt like something that should be shot on film. I would consider myself the leading expert on Albuquerque yard signs, I don't think anybody else could know more about them. For example, I know the political leaning of every neighborhood in the city, I know the artistic parts of the town that made their own signs versus the parts of the town that were buying official signs, I know the humor that only Albuquerque would understand in so few words and the humor that could speak to everyone.
This project got the attention of a few local reporters, and I ended up on the front page of the Albuquerque journal thanks to Jolene Gutierrez, who was the chief editor at the time. The lead curator at the Albuquerque Museum saw the article and reached out to me and asked me if I would be interested in submitting this project to be in the historical archives of the Albuquerque Museum, which I jumped at the chance to have.
To this day I still consider this my most successful and most impactful project I've ever done. Even without the accolades and the bragging rights, this project kept me sane during 2020. As a portraitist, I had to take a step back from my normal work and I needed to find some way to continue my photographic journey and this project gave me that opportunity.”
An image from “Signs of the times” by Emily Seiler.
An image from “Signs of the times” by Emily Seiler.
What would you say is your biggest obstacle in creating work at this point in your life and has that obstacle changed overtime?
“I would say that my biggest obstacle in creating right now would be time. I have no lack of inspiration or ideas that I need to shoot all the time, my biggest problem is between work and paid shoots and emails and dishes I find myself having to deliberately carve out time to do creative works.
As for the obstacles changing, I think they've changed a lot. My main problem used to be funding. I may have an amazing idea that lights my soul on fire, but if it needed something that I didn't have and I'd have to go buy it, that stopped me in quite a few different shoots I tried over the years. These days I have a lot easier time of putting money aside to do the photoshoots I want to do, although I do still sometimes find myself needing better planning for that, now that I have the funds more often than not, I find myself lacking the time. When I was younger I had all the time in the world to create but none of the funds which I feel like is a common problem for young artists.”
An image from “Signs of the times” by Emily Seiler.
What's something people might be surprised to know about you?
“I think there's a lot of things that could be surprising about me, I've had kind of a unique childhood and unique upbringing, and I find myself maybe holding back some of those things until people know me better because a lot of the time I feel like they could be misconstrued as lies or maybe exaggerations. For example being raised in the woods in an Adobe house that my parents built with their hands, with no running water and no electricity. I grew up with a gas lamp for light, which not a lot of people in modern-day America can say.
I also left home at 15, this leads a lot of people to wonder how such a young person can live. To that I say precariously and with little caution. One of my favorite weird facts about myself is that I've only ever done six years of school. I was homeschooled until third grade. Most of that was learning how to build houses and dig wells and make Adobe bricks and not necessarily focused on math or writing, So when I got to school I was very behind, but really excited to be in school so I excelled quickly. Then I dropped out of school after ninth grade, when I moved out of my parent’s house at 15. So I only had six years of any kind of formal education, which luckily for me, surprises people. So I've had kind of a wild ride up until about my mid 20s, and now I'm old and boring.”
An image from “Signs of the times” by Emily Seiler.
What do you hope people will take away from experiencing your work?
“I hope that this work, “Signs Of The Times” is shown in 100 years to show the like, view of an everyday person during the Covid pandemic. One of my favorite parts about the project was the idea that when people can't get together and people can't talk to each other or see each other, we will reach out and find a way to communicate no matter what. Communication happens innately. That's why this project could exist and then also why this project struck me. Because to me, every photo is somebody yelling out to the world, to the ether, their opinions and their feelings on the absolutely insane situation we all were in during that year. Not only was 2020 the Covid ‘19 pandemic but it was also one of the most contentious political years in living memory and that could be felt even in the empty streets and I wanted to document that and show that.”
An image from “Signs of the times” by Emily Seiler.
What is your relationship like between the connection of art and politics?
“This is a relationship for me that is just completely intertwined. Not only because of my personal belief that A: everything is political, and B: everything is artistic. But I am also a very politically active person and I happen to make art.
The “Signs of the times” project was intrinsically connected to politics because it was an election year and we were all under quarantine by the government and we were looking at vaccinations and we were looking at unemployment numbers and we were looking at food stamps and social safety nets. And all of this is inherent to politics.
In my FoodSex project the reason I started it was seeing burgeoning criticisms and censorship of art and of sexual art and inappropriate art and I was like “I am definitely adding my name to that list of artist that are gonna try and push the bounds into something weird and unsettling”.
An image from “FoodSex” by Emily Seiler.
When I tried to show this work in an art show in a local coffee shop I was censored for the fear of children seeing these artworks and although I try to push the bounds, none of them are ever explicitly nude; there is no genitalia, there are no drugs. They may be suggestive of sex and drugs and inappropriate subject matter but not explicitly. So although it was a bummer to be censored for this show, I also wear it as a badge of honor because it means that I'm doing something that's pushing some kind of a button, some kind of a boundary and I think that that's a really important place for artists to live artistically.”
You can keep up with Emily and see more of her work on her social media and website;