Seeing Invisible Systems: Connor Dolan in conversation with Molly M. Pearson
Based in South Florida, Connor Dolan is an artist whose sculptural works often incorporate hazardous and highly regulated materials. Sitting down with Molly M. Pearson, member of the What Would an HIV Doula Do? (WWHIVDD) collective, Dolan discussed how his work explores the complexities of materials, making the invisible visible, and the evolution of artwork about HIV and AIDS.
Molly M. Pearson
Could you introduce yourself?
Connor Dolan
My name is Connor Dolan. I’m 25, based in Miami, Florida, and a visual artist who works in painting and sculpture. On the sculpting side, I tend to work with difficult-to-obtain materials—materials that are regulated, things with red tape around them. I like taking a bit of that and expanding outward to see how things connect in order to spin a web of materials and concepts.
MP
You are in Florida now, but we first met when you were based here in St. Louis, where you earned your BFA at Washington University. I was lucky to see your first solo show at Monaco [an artist-owned cooperative in St. Louis that operates as an alternative to the traditional gallery model] titled Three Cubic Feet of Stone, Blood, and Meat. What did it feel like to walk into the gallery and see it full of your work?
CD
It was certainly an emotional process. Originally, I was in a project space and then, as things happen, an artist canceled, so I was brought into the whole space and was able to put together this show on short notice. There was so much learning to be done. It was an amazing experience to do so, and especially with the people at Monaco, like Marina May and Nick Schleicher, who made it such a wonderful process.
I was still doing my undergrad, so much of the work presented in that show was made in school. Each of the pieces in the show was a discrete idea or investigation. There was a lot of ground that got covered in that show. It was a joy to see how the works did interact, and how maybe they didn’t interact. It was wonderful to use that exhibition as an experience to distill what I wanted to put out as an artist.
MP
As a viewer walking in, there was a bit of discreteness between the themes that each piece addressed. One thing that unified all the work was the nature of the materials that you use, as well as the feeling of seeing toxic or a difficult-to-obtain materials beautifully brought together. In your artist statement, you described these materials as sometimes misunderstood, with negative connotations, like radiation, pharmaceuticals, petroleum, germs, GMOs, and narcotics. This situates the materials in a place of political tension and nuance. How do you identify these difficult-to-obtain materials and prepare yourself to engage with them? What are some of the lengths you’ve had to go to obtain some of them?
CD
A pretty effective barometer for the materials I’m interested in using is the question, “Can you get it on Amazon?” If the answer is no, then my interest is piqued. From contacting petroleum research labs in Texas in order to obtain crude oil, as well as sourcing from illicit shops on AliExpress that sell hormones, and physically going to a site contaminated with radioactive waste in order to distill clay from that soil, I enjoy tracking down these materials as well as discovering ways to safely bring them into my studio.
I’ve cultured bacteria from my hands and groin as a sort of self-portrait, using my own bacterial profile as the medium. If I shook your hand today, you would touch everything that was in that Petri dish. But being able to see that bacteria in front of you is a different experience than just looking at a hand and knowing there's bacteria there. My approach includes everything from sourcing hard-to-obtain materials to making invisible things visible in order to see things that are overlooked.
MP
Through that process of making the invisible visible, you are also touching on the complexity and nuance of these invisible things. In your artist statement for that exhibition, you mention that a lot of the materials you work with are often considered outright dangerous, but that you aim to present them with complexity as tools that can be used to accomplish both evil and good. What is it about that tension you want to explore?
CD
Radiation, for example, can be used to treat and cure cancer, but it can also be used to annihilate populations. It is up to people how they want to use the technology. Take crude oil as another example. We use crude oil to make aspirin and various medical devices that are vital in performing surgeries. Crude oil is also burned and, thus, contributes to warming our atmosphere. The uses of crude oil are bad and good at the same time. I’m interested in playing around the relationships and contexts of a material by eliminating the binary of “good” and “evil.”
MP
Your work invites viewers to consider nuance and to think differently about a material they may have never seen before. But then, when presented with it in front of them, [they’re] able to think about it differently.
I noticed this nuance when we first met at a local screening of We Found Love in a Hopeless Place, a selection of films that were originally commissioned by Visual AIDS and curated by the collective that I’m a part of, What Would an HIV Doula Do? During the post-screening discussion, I remember [seeing] a show of hands among attendees [indicating] that most people in the room were entirely unfamiliar with the state of HIV treatment today.
That led the conversation to the sociopolitical problems and injustices around access to HIV treatment. You chimed in and you said something to the effect of, “These issues are all true, but I think it’s important to remember that we have medication that saves people’s lives.” That moment was important to the conversation and reflected the nuance and complexity around materials and substances found in your work. More specifically, your work titled I’m in a mutually parasitic relationship with Gilead Sciences for the rest of my life and I don’t want to be. has a nuanced personal and political tension. How did you come to use materials in that work?
CD
That work is really close to my heart. I don’t often make work about myself and my life, but with that piece, there’s only a couple elements. The main material is hair that I lost due to cost-related issues with medication nonadherence from HIV treatment. The treatment costs upward of $7,000 a month as billed by Gilead Sciences. It costs far less to produce, but because of insurance issues that lasted about a month, I couldn’t get medication through my provider. Due to this, about a quarter of my hair fell out because of the infection coming back. I kept the hair as I would brush it out and it would fall out of my head. That felt important.
I kept the hair in a little baggie and wanted to make this piece, which acted like a system that depended on stasis but required so much attending. The hair is frozen into a block of ice that rests on top of an anti-griddle, which is what they use at ice cream parlors to flash freeze and make ice cream. The hair and ice rest atop an anti-griddle, which keeps the bottom part of the ice cold while the top part of the ice melts, causing the hair to begin to stick out. Eventually, the melting reaches a stasis where the bottom part of the ice is cold enough to stop any more melting to occur. However, this machine only runs on two-hour cycles, so the work requires someone to push the button every two hours to maintain this frozen sort-of stasis. That requirement of regular work to maintain the stasis is a direct allegory to me having to go to the doctor twice every three months to get blood work done to be re-prescribed my medication.
If I don’t get re-prescribed this medication, then I don’t take it. If I don’t go elsewhere, have resources to find another provider, or understand the system well enough to know that I’m entitled to this medication, then I can’t have access to my medication. That alters my own stasis.
I lost weight, lost hair, and my viral load shot way up. This can lead to mutations in the virus and, thus, make it harder to treat. The more this happens, the more chances the virus has to develop a mutation that works against me. The three elements in this artwork—ice, hair, and anti-griddle—sit together in this little high-maintenance system.
MP
I love how the title uses the phrase “mutually parasitic relationship” because it is an interesting way to frame the relationship between someone living with HIV and a big pharmaceutical company. The company needs the person who is taking their medications to maintain their systems and way of operating within capitalism, but you need them to survive.
The work also is an example of the evolution of art about HIV and AIDS. Often, when people think of art that engages with themes of HIV and AIDS, they might think of Keith Haring, as well as calls for the government to do something, anything. However, the world is different now than it was in the 1980s. We now have HIV-related policies and systems in place. I love that this piece is interrogating those systems and how they impact real people.
Since you often don’t draw from your life and lived experience in your work, I was curious what it means to you when you do. For instance, your senior thesis is titled Pain is a Low-Hanging Fruit, and you discuss in it that art that touches on trauma and pain should actively promote emotional healing and improvement of well-being. It should not simply rehash the event and its consequences for the sake of eliciting a response from a viewer. That artwork should be more than the sum of one’s wounds.
With that in mind, I was curious what you want to see from both artists and the art world when it comes to care and stewardship of marginalized artists and their work.
CD
That is a wonderful and a terrible sort of issue within the art world. Everybody wants to, at least on the surface, be a champion of this person or group who have been marginalized and discriminated against. But if there is not action behind these intentions, it is an empty gesture. That makes the attendees of, say, an exhibition rooted in pain, voyeurs into the lives of these artists. There is deeply meaningful work made about pain by people in pain, but I find that they so rarely inspire actual empathy. It’s a sort of passing interest, as like, “Wow, that situation is awful.” You imagine yourself in that situation for maybe a couple of seconds before moving on. The pain and awful experiences that people have had should be more than something to gaze at. It shouldn’t just be trauma porn.
MP
Trauma porn tends to be associated with social media—topics going viral with videos of people’s pain being shared over and over and over again. What is interesting about you considering this in the art world is that galleries are not produced by an algorithm. The experience of interacting with the work and its themes takes place within the walls of institutions. It is something that happens within ourselves when we feel pressure about what we need to be saying about ourselves to get someone to care. Your thoughts around this are reflective of that moment at the screening when you raised your hand and said, “Wait, all these terrible things are true, but we also need to celebrate that people are alive.”
CD
Art is so good at holding the pain and anguish that people need to express. We can still have that outlet while also saying, “Maybe it isn’t super productive for this art experience based on pain and trauma to be billed as entertainment.”▪︎