Blackout

“I’ve done the hotel shows about six or seven times but never in the dark,” Willesee says. “The idea with Blackout came from thinking about a lot of the photographers that come to my shows. They come again and again and I just wanted to give them something different. It was inspired by a show we did where we tin-foiled a whole room and turned the lights off and as you walked past and saw the installation from just the flashes of the cameras, it was a really unique experience. I wanted to turn that over into an entire in-the-dark show.”

Willesee has always tried to push the boundaries of performance and installation art and has endured his fair share of criticism. “I don’t mind criticism at all, and I often know with a certain idea that there will be criticism, but the ideas that are the most interesting are the ones that people are the most undecided about,” he says.

The default comment seems to be that what he does “isn’t art”, but that lazy commentary has been thrown at the work of so many artists it’s pretty well lost all meaning. Furthermore, Willesee isn’t intentionally divisive, he simply works hard at not being boring. “I didn’t know what I was doing in the beginning, but I just knew I had to be doing it even if there was hardly anyone there,” he says. “Slowly I got better at it and I just really think there’s nothing more important than getting out there and doing as much as you can. I would say about the first ten shows that I put on didn’t really work. In the beginning I made art that I thought was very, well, like a lot of art that was around. I’d do some sketches and paintings, I took some pictures, and I remember being really excited about what I was doing but that didn’t come across in the shows. People would come in and no one would really say much. That really depressed me because I thought I was boring these people because I wasn’t doing anything different.”

In Willesee’s mind, the key to success – or at the very least the key to making an impact – is to get the audience involved. “[Those early shows] showed me that I wanted to be really interactive so that the people who were there didn’t just feel involved, they were involved,” he says. “I was trying to think about things I hadn’t seen as well as thinking about what I would like to do as an audience member. I mean, I go to other people’s art shows as well and I just stand around and do the same thing. So I tried to think about if I went and saw something, what would make me react and be more interested? With Blackout, people get to make their own art as well. People like having something to do and it helps people feel as though they belong to what they’re seeing.”

BY KRISSI WEISS