Episode 181 | Henry Gepfer

Published March 14, 2023

TRANSCRIPT

Miranda Metcalf  00:23

Hello, print friends, and welcome. I'm your host, Miranda Metcalf. This is a bilingual podcast. So if you subscribe to us, you'll be getting episodes in English with me, as well as in Spanish with Reinaldo Gil Zambrano. Together, we speak to people from around the globe about their practice and passions in the fields of print media and multiples. Hello, Print Friend is brought to you by Speedball Art Products, who have been offering a diverse range of high quality products to your practice since 1997. If you're looking to add some pizzazz to your practice, check out their new line of additive glitter. Add a sprinkle of their additive glitter to any Speedball fabric screenprinting ink to bring a touch of shimmer to your next design. This additive glitter can be used in nearly any ratio. Whether your sparkling vision is more subtle or dripping with scintillating shine, check out the link in the show notes. My guest this week is Henry Gepfer, an artist, curator, and educator based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. We talk about the joy and the pain of performance art, the effects of the pandemic on all of our self worth, the performance of masculinity, and how printmaking fits into all of this. So without further ado, sit back, relax, and prepare to clown around with Henry Gepfer. Hi, Henry. How's it going?

Henry Gepfer  01:45

It's going. How are you doing, Miranda?

Miranda Metcalf  01:47

It's good. It's good. Thank you for joining me and for deciding that my email wasn't a scam when I asked you on.

Henry Gepfer  01:55

Yeah, now and then, it's good to take a leap of faith.

Miranda Metcalf  01:58

Exactly. Exactly. Do you get the 'Oh, I was looking over my wife's shoulder at her laptop, and her birthday is coming up.' I don't know if you've gotten that one, but that's a classic. I've gotten that one several times throughout the years. 

Henry Gepfer  02:11

Yeah, yes, I've gotten that one.

Miranda Metcalf  02:13

'And she wanted you to come on this podcast!' Yeah, that's what the laptop said. Well, I've known your work at least through - I met you briefly at SGCI when you were doing a little performance piece there, I heard you on the Newsprint podcast, and I just really think what you're doing is interesting and different. And I'm excited to get a chance to learn more about you and what you do.

Henry Gepfer  02:41

Awesome. I'm really excited to be here and to tell you about it.

Miranda Metcalf  02:45

Cool. Well, before we get into all the questions, would you introduce yourself by way of letting people know who you are, where you are, what you do?

Henry Gepfer  02:55

Oh, yeah, I'm Henry Gepfer. I'm out of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I work as an educator here. So I'm a printmaker, but I'm teaching across four different schools locally. And I also work as a press operator for Risolve Studio. We make Riso prints. Periodically, I work as a curator, I formerly belonged to an artist-run space in Philadelphia called Little Berlin, and I've helped to organize and curate exhibitions for the Lancaster Printers' Fair. So I have my hand in a lot of stuff.

Miranda Metcalf  03:26

Yeah. Keeping busy. Like many of us in the arts, yeah. Keeping afloat with many different rafts, like, all strapped together precariously. 

Henry Gepfer  03:41

Yeah. 

Miranda Metcalf  03:43

So where did you grow up? And what role did art play in that part of your life?

Henry Gepfer  03:49

I grew up in rural Lancaster County, outside of a small town called Elizabethtown. I drew compulsively when I was a kid, it was just - I don't know if it was just that it was something that I was good at, or the lack of things to do where I was at. I mean, I spent plenty of time outside, but a lot of my memories from growing up are just planted on the floor in front of the TV, just drawing for hours. So I came to art through drawing, and it just is a thing that stuck with me, like all the different phases of my life, art has been a concrete part of that. Up to, including, when I was in middle school, my parents signed me up for drawing lessons so I could actually learn how to do things with some sense of formal quality. And then art is what I ended up going to school for. So it's been like the one real mainstay of my life. Along with television, of course.

Miranda Metcalf  04:46

Oh, yeah, beautiful television. 

Henry Gepfer  04:48

Yeah, absolutely. 

Miranda Metcalf  04:50

Yeah. It's funny you should say that, that particular image of being in front of the TV and drawing, and I realized how much I did that as a kid. And watching cartoons, and trying to draw the cartoon characters, and doing all of that. And how it just... pre-internet, pre-social media, there was such a finite amount of things you could do to entertain yourself. And for me, a lot of it was, I didn't even really like what was on the television. But it's what was on the television. You didn't really have a choice. It was, you could watch reruns of some poorly drawn, poorly written cartoon, or - I was in the Seattle area - or you could go outside and be freezing and wet, or you could stare at the wall. There isn't, like, a lot going on.

Henry Gepfer  05:38

Yeah, I completely identify with that. Because it was like, the TV was always on. And I'd either be drawing or reading Mad Magazine. So like, it's just constant stimulation, on a sensory end, from day one. I don't know what that says about me, that I'm not comfortable with just the quiet of my own thoughts.

Miranda Metcalf  05:59

I think you and a lot of people, that it's just like, anything but just me and my brain. That's the enemy.

Henry Gepfer  06:08

Yeah. That's how the trouble starts.

Miranda Metcalf  06:10

Exactly. And so you said you ended up going to school for art, where was that?

Henry Gepfer  06:16

I went to Millersville University, I went to school for art education, and graduated with an art education degree. I thought I was going to go into teaching K to 12. And I learned a lot of really great stuff there. Just unfortunately, I graduated right after the 2008 financial issues. And finding a job was not easy. So it ended up being a thing where I took this thing that I was passionate about - I always knew I wanted to teach, for one reason or another, it was just always what I thought I would do, because I never assumed that I would make any money off of my art. So I always knew I'd need another way to do that. And teaching is something I've always enjoyed. I've always enjoyed working with people and helping to facilitate that kind of growth. So yeah, the teaching... the degree I went for, it ended up being kind of useless, because I couldn't find a job outside of - I did a lot of sub work, substitute teaching around the area. And some experiences were really good, but I just got really tired of being cursed at by the teenagers for being the person that's not their actual teacher. 

Miranda Metcalf  07:21

Oh no!

Henry Gepfer  07:23

So yeah, that kind of got old real quick.

Miranda Metcalf  07:26

I graduated in 2008 as well, as my undergrad, but my degree was in philosophy. So if you want an even less hireable degree, an undergrad in philosophy in 2008 was possibly the least valuable thing you could have had. Yeah. So for me, I decided to go to graduate school. Because I just was like, I need to lie low someplace until this whole machine kind of gets back online. Did you end up going to graduate school? Or did you just kind of stick with the substituting?

Henry Gepfer  08:01

No, I did go to graduate school. But there was a couple year break. I ended up graduating in the spring of 2010. And by the time I was graduating, I kind of had a gut feeling that I didn't want to end up teaching the K to 12 age group like I thought I was going to. I still went into substitute teaching, I still applied for jobs, but I was working substitute teaching as well as working as a temp in a chocolate factory mopping floors. Which is a really great gig. And working in custom framing.

Miranda Metcalf  08:32

That's, like, very Jeffrey Dahmer vibes, you know?

Henry Gepfer  08:37

He did work in one of those, but thankfully, I never developed the urge to kill. So that's a real net positive in my life.

Miranda Metcalf  08:47

Yeah. So we're learning that chocolate factory work and homicidal tendencies are non-corollary.

Henry Gepfer  08:53

Yeah, no, no, it's not a true one-to-one. 

Miranda Metcalf  08:57

Yeah. 

Henry Gepfer  08:59

No, I ended up working a bunch of different jobs, and I applied to grad schools. I think even when I was younger, my work was a rough sell. I applied a couple of different times to graduate schools, and for various reasons, it didn't work out. So I ended up going to graduate school in 2014. I went to, it used to be called Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, it's now called Penn West Edinboro. Pennsylvania state schools have recently kind of undergone a merger, in which some of their lower enrollment schools have merged into a larger group identity. I don't know if it's good or bad at this point. But yeah, so graduate school ended up being the aim, because I liked some of the experiences I had teaching as a substitute. But I realized that there's a definite limit to the sophistication level of work that you can discuss, and I'm always more drawn to the conceptual end of things, and I love the art that gets weird, and often nude, and uses the body in weird ways. And like, you just can't talk to teenagers about that without things going downhill quick. So I kind of had the realization that I definitely want to teach, but it's probably going to be at the adult level. And I wanted a way to continue to expand my practice, because once I got out of undergrad, my interest in printmaking was cemented, but I became really interested in expanding into sculpture. And I hadn't really thought about performance, but there wasn't a lot that I was closed off to. And so was it in undergrad that you got your first introduction to printmaking? It was. I did a little bit of linocut in high school, but my prints sucked. In fact, I found it over the pandemic, and I remembered how terrible that experience was. But I had a teacher named Brant Schuller when I was an undergrad, and he taught Drawing 2. And we bonded over some common interests. And he identified some stuff in my work that felt instinctual to me, but he was able to point out the ways in which it falls into the formal elements and principles. And after working together for a semester, he was like, 'You should take this printmaking class.' And then I did, and I really fell in love with it. So I ended up, after working with him the first time, I took two sections of screenprint. And I think what really held my interest with that is like, printmaking is a thing that's often really technically invested. And that's never really been my bag, per se. But as a professor, he was introducing us to all of the technical masters of printing, but he was also really invested in the conceptual end of things. So during crit, he would introduce us to artists who are working in any medium, who had some sort of tangential relation to the kinds of things that we were dealing with thematically in our work. So my interest in art and art history grew from taking those classes, and I kind of think that he's the reason that I'm doing any of this now. Because like, he was just a really great teacher, he was super well rounded. His technical ability was on point. But he always had the conceptual and thematic things that he could talk about as well, that weren't limited to the world of print. And he was working - he made a lot of sculptural prints. So then it became this expansive view of, like, oh, well, you can just do anything with this. You don't have to just make two dimensional work. And that really kind of jived with my mindset. So yeah.

Miranda Metcalf  12:28

Yeah. And so already at that time, were you making or engaging with printmaking sort of beyond maybe what we think of [as] the traditional... "It's a matrix, I transfer it, I edition it, it's done." Or did the elements of your practice now that are more performance, or more engaged with the body, did that come later?

Henry Gepfer  12:53

That came a little bit later. I was making prints on paper, I wasn't like... it wasn't until after I got out of school and I rented my first studio space with friends that I started making that kind of stuff and really experimenting outside the box. And I mean, at first, I think I was just making baby Brant work. So it was not very good. But once I was out of school and started going to shows, my wife and I - after we graduated in undergrad, because we met in the print studio, actually - we both had a deep interest in seeing art. So we would go every weekend, just about, to Philadelphia or DC or Baltimore to see stuff. And just seeing the landscape of what was happening at the time, whether it was in museums or artist-run spaces, it was clear that there's a hybridity to the work that's out there that's really engaging. And it's part of the landscape of now. So the idea of just making prints on paper felt less relevant to my interests, especially as I dug into the conceptual end of trying to deal with gender and sexuality in my work early on. I don't really feel like a hard and fast definition of my identity, so I didn't necessarily want to imply a hard and fast definition of what it is I'm doing in my work. Any sense of allegiance to one particular medium or another - although, I would say that I'm, as an artist, definitely grounded in print. Which might bum some people out, given the way that work looks.

Miranda Metcalf  14:25

Wait, can you say more about that? Just because you do have, let's say... challenging visuals, or sometimes you've got, maybe, off-putting visuals. Do you think that people would not like printmaking to be anywhere near that, or what do you mean? That's such an interesting idea.

Henry Gepfer  14:46

No, I just think like, I'm pretty foolish in the way that I use print, and I use it in a pretty... I'm more attracted to the way that we have a cultural identification with print than necessarily really digging into the deep, like, technical rigor of a lot of the stuff. So a lot of my work is referring back to print in very, like, shallow ways. And I think there's a much deeper conversation to have about the way that print has been used historically that maybe - I don't know. Nobody's thinking about this. So it's just my anxiety.

Miranda Metcalf  15:20

No, I think I could definitely see what you mean, though, because I think that there are corners of the print world that are quite rigid, and almost overly defensive about what print is and what it should be. And they have, within their mind, really strict boundaries of the definition of the medium. And can get a little bit prickly when people sort of push around the outskirts of those boundaries. So I do hear what you're saying, that makes sense now. You know, the kind of people who are just like, it is definitely this, and it's definitely not that. It's definitely stone litho, it's never plate litho. It's definitely screenprint, but I call it a seriograph. And, you know, it's never riso. I've met people like that. So yeah, I see what you mean.

Henry Gepfer  16:16

I definitely want to hear what those people have to say after they've had a couple of drinks at a bar, because that's entertaining to hear. But then I'm gonna go back to making the frivolous nonsense that I make.

Miranda Metcalf  16:26

Yeah. And like all defensiveness, it definitely, I assume, comes from a place of fear. Of this idea that, I need to somehow defend the identity of this medium for some reason. You know, whether that's because I perceive that it's not considered as legitimate as it should be, or that the way I've only had success within the medium is within these strict definitions, so I need to protect the strict definitions. But it's never from a place of openness and expansion and exploration. It's always, I think, a bit of a fear-based protectiveness. Yeah, yeah. So what were some of your early explorations like? So when you're just first starting out and you're thinking, okay, I'm not going to work within the boundaries we were just speaking of, and I'm going to put in a performance element, I'm going to put in a conceptual element. How did you start making your way out into that side of art making?

Henry Gepfer  17:29

It was just recognizing, I think, connections with other things. One of the pieces that sticks out in my mind as a successful endeavor into that was more sculptural, and it's called - I think it's probably buried somewhere on my website still - "Can You Hear Me, Now?" I made a print of a tin can. And then I framed the print and mounted it side by side with the matrix and connected them with a string. So you had two tin cans connected with string. Because I'm really interested in this way that printmaking is a really indirect process. And I think this kind of feeds into what eventually would become my enjoyment of performance-based notions, which is that like, we do all this work to a matrix. And then what we're really trying to capture in the finished print is the work that we put into the matrix. And some people will be like, 'Well, I'm cutting out the middle man entirely, I'm just going to make this a drawing or a painting.' But we're interested in the reproducibility of the thing. So I'm really interested in that exchange of trying to reproduce something through indirect means, because it means that we can get to the reproducibility of the thing. And... I think I'm losing myself on a tangent here, but my work, starting out dealing with sculpture or eventually performance, just came from noticing these ideas in print that connect with things that I'm always thinking about. Because I think communication, at the end of the day, is really at the heart of my work. And it's always through idiosyncratic means, because I've gone through my entire life never feeling fully understood. And I don't mean that in the way of like, 'Oh, woe is me, nobody understands me,' but more of like, we're all bound through language. And yet, it's funny that we can do our best to communicate through this common ground and yet still feel like we're not quite getting a full translation across. So that's where some of the original ideas came in dealing with that work. I certainly made some screen prints on, like, flat wood and cut them out into shapes and incorporated that into other pieces. And that's what I would say kind of just apes my undergrad mentor in form. I think the ideas were more aligned with what I'm into. Like, I took some of that work into grad school, and that was my second year show, called "Make Me." I made this - I did a lot of screen prints on flat plywood pieces and made what essentially amounts to a full body that you can spin all the pieces. Why am I blanking on the name of this drawing game?

Miranda Metcalf  20:00

Exquisite Corpse?

Henry Gepfer  20:01

That's the one. Yeah, I made a large Exquisite Corpse sculpture that you could spin in a gallery space, but it was just flat screen prints on plywood.

Miranda Metcalf  20:08

Oh, I see. So people could choose what side was matched up with what side? Uh huh. Yeah.

Henry Gepfer  20:14

And it was all rooted in this idea of masculinity and how masculinity has no real hard and fast definition. Like, it can be anything that it needs to be, because it's a made up concept. So I had taken and screenprinted everything from like, Hank Hill's legs from King of the Hill to portions of a Man Ray photograph of... anyway, it doesn't matter. I was taking all these different, like, cultural touch points that made a complete joke of masculinity. And the whole point was that you can do whatever you need to do. And we can all exist comfortably under this umbrella of masculinity, because it's whatever we make it.

Miranda Metcalf  20:53

Oh, I love that. Yeah. Were they life size, the corpses?

Henry Gepfer  20:59

Yep.

Miranda Metcalf  21:00

Okay, wow. So you could truly build a man with these different ways of presenting masculine. I love that idea. Yeah.

Henry Gepfer  21:09

I wanted it to have that life size imposing nature, because to flip through something that's tiny - I did make a small book version of it - but I like the fact that it becomes a real person, so to speak, in the space with you. And I would say that piece was part and parcel... the core of what I was trying to get at was this ability to morph an image in real time. And that's what a lot of the work in that show and some of my earlier investigations into print outside of just two dimensions was wrapped up in.

Miranda Metcalf  21:45

And at what point did you yourself, as a performer, make your way into the practice interacting with print?

Henry Gepfer  21:57

It was later on in grad school. So I made the work for that show, and then was trying to figure out my way forward towards thesis. And my work has been embroiled in gender. I realized at some point in there that I just don't really identify with the idea of being a man or being a woman. And it just has nothing to do with my day-to-day life, those kind of identifications. Like, I don't think in terms of those kinds of allegiances. So then I was thinking about the way that gender is an ongoing performance. And whether you're trying to express your personal interest through the clothing you wear, or you're dressing conservatively to perform a version of yourself that is not going to get beat up at the truckstop, like, all of these things, day in and day out, are performances that are writ large over every facet of our lives. So it made sense to me to start bringing performance into the mix. Having a print background, I made these - one of the first things I made that was performative in grad school was a piece called "Dandelion." I had this alter ego that was a clown called Dandelion, and I painted my face up as the clown, and I had 16 handkerchiefs, and I would be wiping my face off. And when you're making prints, and then you're looking at, like, Warhol, and they're noted as "paintings," and Yves Klein's body prints are "paintings," I thought I was doing painting. And then my studio mate at the time was like, 'Yeah, you're just making monoprints.' I was like, 'Goddamn it! I thought I was getting out of print!'

Miranda Metcalf  23:27

Everything is print! You can't get away!

Henry Gepfer  23:31

So then it was like, okay, well, if I'm just gonna end up making prints anyway, then I'm gonna dive into this. So my interest in performance, this comes from dealing with gender in my work, but the more time I spent doing it, the more kind of similarities I felt between performance and print. Especially because, at baseline, I think there's a way in which performance makes sense with print. Because print, in a large sense, in the cultural sense, is really at the crossroads of everything culturally. It's the mediator for all information to be disseminated, and has been since before... well, since Gutenberg, but we've been dealing with print in varied ways since well before that. I think it makes sense to deal with print through performance, at least for me, because it's such a huge commonality across cultures and across timeframes in our world. So my final show for my thesis, I don't think... there was one singular print on paper. Everything else was like, residual from performances that had been done prior.

Miranda Metcalf  24:38

I can't help but think about the fact of the way printmaking interacts now with the digital sphere, and how, if you look at all of the algorithms and everything that people get rewarded for through Instagram or Tiktok, it's always this making... like, sped up very, very quickly. So all the effort condensed into seven seconds. But it's carving, inking, printing. And the actual finished object, at least in the way people I've seen interact with it in the digital sphere, seems to be the performance leading up to it. And you might get half a second of the actual finished piece. Yeah.

Henry Gepfer  25:24

Oh, absolutely, we're not... I mean, we've already talked about how our attention spans have never been singularly focused on anything. But it's just heightened to absurd degrees at this point, where making a finished print isn't enough, because Instagram is no longer satiated just by your images. You have to be like... you have to have your space cleaned and curated to be photographable, and you have to be presentable, and you have to make sure you have all the sounds to satisfy people's ASMR. There's such a wild theatricality to the time that we're living, that it's hard to ignore. And I mean, like I talked about on Newsprint, I think there's a lot of ways in which that digital sphere is really aping print culture. And there's no surprises there. Like, I'm sure somebody else has dealt with this in much more articulate terms than I can. But like, even just looking at the visual language in which social media exists, when stories came about and they had all those blendy, colored gradient backgrounds that you just put text over, I just thought about how that just relates right back to broadside and letterpress and self-publishing. We're just, to borrow a phrase, we're just remaking the same things over and over again, but for a different era and a different medium.

Miranda Metcalf  26:53

Yeah. When you started to embody the work, when you started to use your own body in the work, was that a difficult jump to make? Was there a level of discomfort that you sort of had to get over? Or did you worry that you were sort of stepping through the looking glass and you'd never be able to go back, that this is going to forever change the way people see your work? Or did it just feel really natural, and like this was what was supposed to happen next?

Henry Gepfer  27:27

I wish that I could tell you that I was concerned that this would change the way people see my work, but I'm just satisfied if like three people see it. So that's never a concern in my mind. No, I mean, it's terrifying to perform in front of people. Because if you make a piece of two dimensional work, or a sculpture, and put it in a gallery space, certainly it stings when it doesn't get heavy critical appraisal. But if you're performing in space and somebody looks bored, or somebody is bummed about what you're doing, that hits a real core of like, I don't want to get out of bed for the next week. I can't do this. It's a more instantaneous route to like, 'Oh, God, I'm a failure!' Than it is if somebody doesn't like - because you can put your work in front of somebody and be like, 'Well, they just don't get it.' But in the moment, if you're bombing, it's terrible! Sorry. Can I ask you what the question was again? I think I'm going on a tangent here.

Miranda Metcalf  28:27

Yeah. No, I think you really answered it. It was that... I'm just trying to get the actual experience of using your body as part of making, you know, in part because I don't talk to a lot of people who do it. But it seems like this sort of conundrum to me where it is so intensely vulnerable, like so vulnerable, as you were just speaking to, that for me, I'm like, I don't know why someone would choose to do that. You know, that sounds so emotionally taxing and potentially dangerous. And so - but clearly, there was something that, despite that, you were like, no, this is what has to be done.

Henry Gepfer  29:09

Oh, yeah. I think it speaks more to the places that I've been taking influence than anything else. I have an interest in that kind of theatricality and drama because of my sister when I was young. She was a clown, and did parties and blew up balloon animals. But she was also heavily involved with a musical theater in Lancaster County called Sight and Sound. They do religious musicals and such. So like, I had that early example. But I was never a person that was dramatic or in plays or anything, and putting myself in front of a crowd is is still terrifying, but was way more terrifying to a younger me. But I've also been really interested in work... like, there's an artist named Kate Gilmore who works through performance and deals with sculptural installation, but also ceramic, and considering performative notions of those and how they deal with considerations of gender. And I really love the work of Mary Reid Kelly, who's taking the language of her drawings and paintings and making video work and performing for a camera. And then seeing the work of David Hammons for the first time, and thinking about how theatrical those body prints are, and how it's impossible to separate the person from the thing made, because he is the work. 

Miranda Metcalf  30:28

Yeah.

Henry Gepfer  30:29

I was looking at that stuff and thinking about the impact that it had on me. And I wanted to figure out a way to utilize some of these kinds of body strategies. So it just became clear that like, okay, we're just going to use my body, because this is a way to take this very indirect process and make it very direct, and also uncomfortable. Not just for a viewer, I'm sure some of my work is uncomfortable for a viewer for a variety of reasons. But like, I'm a big proponent of like, you need to do the thing that scares you. Within reason. We want to keep certain boundaries. But like, if there's something that you feel is uncomfortable, it's worth exploring, because that's where you experience growth. And I think as an artist, that's crucial. Because if you just keep making the same things that are safe, and dealing with the same ideas, then there's no real path forward. And for some people, that works awesome. And that's super great. Glad. It just doesn't work for me. And I think it's because I have a very short attention span. So this is a way to keep myself invested, is to just keep finding the things that make me uncomfortable and dealing with them in whatever way, for better or for worse, because there has been better and there has been worse.

Miranda Metcalf  31:51

Yeah. I definitely connect to what you're saying about how it's sort of through the discomfort that we grow. Because I think I've heard someone describe it, that if your - truly, your mind and your body recognizes the feeling of discomfort, and it doesn't know the difference between standing naked in a gallery and being attacked by a saber-toothed tiger. Your body is going to is going to react in the same way. But it means that in those moments, everything is heightened. Like, you're fully in a place to observe, to learn, to get new information, because it's all systems go. Because it's these ancient systems that start working, because your body's like, 'We might die now.' Even though all you're doing is breaking a social taboo, it doesn't know the difference. And I could see that the process of putting yourself in situations that are challenging, but you know, ultimately pretty safe in terms of bodily safety, mental safety, that kind of thing, really could be a super rewarding feedback. Just as a person, in personal growth, and artistic growth. So I connect with what you said there. Yeah.

Henry Gepfer  33:26

It's been interesting to try to learn from those experiences. Because like, when they're successful, you feel amazing. Like, when people respond to performance pieces, it's awesome. I made a performance piece over the pandemic called "I Like Myself," and I broadcast it out over Instagram. And I got a lot of really awesome feedback on that. And it felt really great. Even for like, some of the things that went wrong with it... I forgot to record - or I didn't forget to record the sound, the sound recording failed on the first version - so I had to re-perform it a second time, which went better. But I got a lot of really great feedback out of that. And just the fact of having to re-perform the thing was really instructional. Because I pay attention to a lot of comedians, and artists who perform in comedic ways, who might identify as clowns. And just thinking about how they go out and they are performing and are really vulnerable in front of a crowd, but are trying things on a routine basis. And when something doesn't work, they're tweaking it and trying it again. And my experience in performing, and I think some artists would agree with this, is that sometimes you get one shot to do something. And if it works, awesome, if it doesn't work, well, you may or may not ever get a chance to do it again. The experience of doing that piece over a second time, and then eventually performing it live in a gallery in Philadelphia a third time, I learned so much from just having to put myself in that situation again and again. It really helped the way that I think about how a crowd is going to deal with certain actions or the words that I'm putting into a performance. So I'm trying to take every opportunity to perform as many times as possible. Because I was at a residency in Wassaic, at The Wassaic Project, a couple of years ago. And I wrote a performance while I was there and did it. And it did not go over really well, which was terrible at the time. I had some decent conversations about it. But like, I left that feeling really deflated. Because I thought I messed up. And I was like, oh, man, it didn't land, and I don't want to do this anymore. So if you only get the one opportunity to do the thing, and you have no potential to try it out again, it can skew not just the way you view the work, but the way you view yourself as an artist. So I think it's huge for artists who are interested in performing, and I'm sure people probably already know this, and I'm just very late to the game. But like, considering the way your audience is going to take the things that you are doing is crucial, because they are like, the foundation for whether or not the work works. And when you're making two dimensional art, it's easier to ignore that, or it has been for me. Because it's just like, I'm going to do this thing and then move on to the next thing. And there's relative safety in the fact that I know that, unless I'm putting something absolutely blasphemous in here, it's not gonna blow up my life in the same way that bombing in front of an audience does. Because that's not a good feeling.

Miranda Metcalf  36:42

Yeah. That's such an important and interesting distinction about... that really comes down to, of course, that separation, right? Like, I make something two dimensional, I can put it in a gallery... or even, the way it works in this day and age, a lot of the time I just send it to a gallery. I got an invitational, or I applied for a juried show and got in. And the whole reception is completely divorced from you, you're not a viewer, you're not a fly on the wall, or anything for how the work is received. But when you're performing, the reception is just raw, right in front of you, in real time. I'm curious hearing you describe it, how do you know when a piece is landing or a piece is bombing? What do you look for in the reception of the audience to give you that feedback?

Henry Gepfer  37:38

Oh, you're totally reading their cues. Like, if they're looking at their phone, or if they're staring at you like you have three heads, that's not a good thing. But when they're really engaged and they're... like, you can see it in their faces, when they're paying attention to the things that you're doing. If you have a comedic moment that you're planting, if you get a laugh as a response, that's a great cue. If the work is meant to be more subtle, just the engagement of eye contact is huge. But if they're off in some other place, or they're laughing at a place where you didn't think you were making a joke, that's not...

Miranda Metcalf  38:16

Right. 

Henry Gepfer  38:18

So learning to read a crowd is a thing that I'm still trying to figure out. Because it's germane to the whole premise of what I'm doing at this point. It can be really scary to figure out, but once you have a little bit of experience doing it, it can be fun to play with. 

Miranda Metcalf  38:37

Yeah. 

Henry Gepfer  38:38

Because then you can really play with their expectations once you know what they're gonna respond to. And I think that's hugely powerful.

Miranda Metcalf  38:45

And that reminds me a bit more about what you were talking about earlier, about comedians and clowns. And how I think some of the most brilliant comedic acts I've ever seen are people who are just playing the audience like an instrument. Leading them down this road, and they know what the reaction is going to be, and then twisting it in a way that it becomes surprise and delight, or surprise and horror, but I'm still laughing. Speaking of TV, have you watched the Tig Notaro documentary that's on Netflix? That's out right now?

Henry Gepfer  39:21

I don't know if I've seen that one. I have seen plenty of Tig's work, but I'm not sure if I've seen the documentary. What does it focus on?

Miranda Metcalf  39:28

Yeah, I just found it the other day. So I don't know if it's new or if it's just [that] the algorithm spit it out to me recently. But, you know, Tig had that absolutely insanely perfect work of art, which was her stand up set about having cancer. 

Henry Gepfer  39:47

Oh, yeah. "Live."

Miranda Metcalf  39:48

Yeah, yeah. And it just - if anyone hasn't listened to it, you can find it online, I'm sure, and it's just a remarkable thing to be witness to. And [the documentary] is kind of about her life after this, and how she had this moment where she was skyrocketed into all this fame and fortune and attention with this set that she could never do again. And her creative practice around almost rehabbing herself for, 'What do I look like on the other side of this?' And so it just reminded me of what you were saying about this, being able to try things again and again, and then getting better at them. And if that sort of exploration is interesting to you, I think that documentary might be really interesting. Because it's the question of, what if you had the highest, most successful moment of your career that you could never replicate? As a performer, what do you do? And where do you go from there? Yeah. And she's someone who just is brilliant at just playing the audience like a violin, too. She's a genius at that as well. Yeah.

Henry Gepfer  41:03

That whole set that you're talking about, the jokes were really, really great and raw, and her ability to process all of that stuff in real time was amazing. But just the way that she played the crowd in that show, like, that whole exchange of like, 'No, no, it's okay. I have cancer. You're gonna be fine.' That was like, that was amazing. 

Miranda Metcalf  41:28

Yeah!

Henry Gepfer  41:29

That's the kind of thing where I... it's brilliant, and it's so funny, but I felt terrible laughing at it. And I know that's the point, but... yeah, I'm sure she has way more articulate, better things to say about it than I do. But I also think that in that - hopefully, this speaks to what she's saying - but like, I think your creativity is not like a well that runs dry. So you have that watershed moment, and then you just move on to do the next thing. Hopefully. I don't know, I've never had that experience.

Miranda Metcalf  42:02

Yeah, it definitely is... and her story is complicated by the fact that she then, of course, went through all this treatment and couldn't perform for a while, and that sort of thing. But she talks about it like a muscle that she then had to retrain, and that she had to do some sets that weren't up to her standards before she got to come back and do a show that she really felt like was her. So it's a real fascinating look at that process that I think is something that artists who are, as we say, just making two dimensional work with that kind of being divorced from the reception of it, they're not taking those risks, and they're not riding the emotional roller coaster. But it seems like in a way, it's a bit of missing out of an element of making, is not to get the live feedback. And I could see really getting attached to it and really wanting more of it once you get a taste for it. Yeah. And I'd love to talk a little bit about this idea of what your experience was like, in the deep darkness of the COVID pandemic, and responding to it in real time. So you did "Death Dream," and then you also had "I Like Myself," that were both direct responses to this. And maybe just sort of talk about what it was like for you to make work and put it out there in that really unsure time.

Henry Gepfer  43:53

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, obviously, the pandemic was awful for hundreds of reasons. But the pandemic was like the first focused time that I had to myself in a while. I was, prior to the pandemic, I had been working in teaching. I'd been organizing and curating. I had a show at Little Berlin that I curated that was up the month before everything went into lockdown. And I was still working as a riso operator. So my time was pretty heavily split between all these other things. I didn't really have time for a studio practice. And it had been since probably the time I was at Wassaic in the spring of 2018 that I had really made anything very serious. So the experience of having time again was this double sided coin, because on one hand, you have all the time in the world to read the news and see rising death tolls and everything horrible that was happening in the world. And on the other hand, it was like being a kid again, because I had time. I was just sitting in my bedroom and... like, I also had the experience of, my sister was cleaning out her garage and she dropped off boxes of my stuff that I thought she had gotten rid of. It was stuff that had been packed up when my parents had to move out of their house years ago, and I told them, 'Just throw in the dumpster.' But my sister had saved it. So just this moment of, everything outside is terrible, now everything inside is very reflective, and suddenly, I have creative energy again. During the pandemic, my wife and I would take walks over our lunch break, because she was working from home and I, thankfully, I was teaching from home, and Risolve found projects that I could do just in my house. Like bone folding press sheets, or making riso ink tube koozies. But over our lunch break, we would take a walk, a couple blocks up, there's a cemetery near us. And as the news was all terrible, and talking about people needlessly dying, and we're walking through a cemetery in April or May, and it just made me think of the prior year, we'd had the privilege of being on vacation in Paris. And we walked through Pere Lachaise, and we'd walked through the cemetery at Montparnasse, to visit famous people that were there. And during our visit there, I had a one-off joke that I told my wife that when I die, I want my mausoleum to be a working photobooth. Because I think there's something really funny about making a participatory art project out of your death in which the memento you get is nothing to do with the person that's dead, you just get a picture of yourself. So one of the days, we were taking a walk during the pandemic, and we're walking through the cemetery, I was like, 'Oh, you know what? I'm going to make a video out of that idea.' It's like, the germ of an idea. So I took some time, and I sat and wrote the monologue of it, and then decided to deal with it through still frame photography. Because one of my favorite things is Chris Marker's "La Jetee." It's just like, really beautiful, black and white, everything is still image - I think there's maybe like one or two small moments of movement, but it's all like, monologue over still image, and it tells this really terrifying story. Anyway, so this was rattling through my head when everything was terrifying. So I made "Death Dream" kind of in the midst of that, just to respond in real time to our situation of just being surrounded by death at every turn. And you have almost no other recourse but to consider your own mortality, because any trip to the grocery store could have been one in which you get really ill because this is before we had any vaccination or any kind of real course correct for things going awful. So it was always a possibility that something really bad could happen. So I made the piece thinking that like, at the very least, it would be something to get my creative juices flowing again. 

Miranda Metcalf  47:51

Yeah. 

Henry Gepfer  47:52

And it did that. And hopefully, it gave some other folks some pause to reflect about their own existence, as well. And then "I Like Myself" came from very similar thoughts about, like, now we have a vaccine, now we're reentering society, but what kind of damage has already been done to us even if we didn't get sick? Even if our lives are gonna not have changed that wildly? Like, we've been lacking in human contact except for through our phone or our computer, and seeking validation through those means. So the idea of, like, we've been at home spending time with ourselves, and yet - I don't wanna speak for everybody - but a lot of my time was spent on the computer just seeking validation of like, 'Oh, God, everything's terrible outside! I feel really bad! I should post this so some people like it, and then I'll feel good about myself.' Like, maybe that's not a good thing. And it just, there was a lot of - and there still is - a lot of weird hucksterism on social media where attractive people are selling you on these weird miracle cures and homeopathy and like, I don't... it all just sounds terrible. Before we went into the pandemic, we had shot this video called "Tenderness." And I had this idea of dealing with a tiny screen, because we're always dealing with tiny screens. So I worked with a machine shop to weld a tiny screenprinting frame at the same, like, size and aspect ratio of a phone. Figuring that I would eventually do something with it, because fortunately or not, most of my ideas come as this, like, 'Oh, that would be a funny object, so what is the scenario that makes sense to use this?" And then I had sat on it for two years and kind of was losing faith in my ability to come up with a way to deal with it, and then it was just like, oh, no, wait, no. We're going to use this to screenprint on a T-shirt, and it's going to be about this idea of human contact, and trying to get right with yourself and feel good about yourself without social media, but it's going to be just as uncomfortable and damaging. In fact, maybe more so. So I mounted it as a performance on Instagram Live and invited whoever to show up and gently encouraged my friends to help me not bomb by participating. Because I really, I love art that engages an audience. And I like when people are able to participate, because I think people want to be part of something, even if it's uncomfortable and real stupid. And it was uncomfortable and real stupid. In part, because that's just the way my mind works. So I always want those things to be involved. I feel uncomfortable all the time. Right now, then, tomorrow: discomfort.

Miranda Metcalf  50:49

You're like, 'Let's share the experience!' Yeah.

Henry Gepfer  50:56

Yeah. And also uncomfortable, because there's a learning curve in technology, because I failed to record the sound on the first one. But it ended up being for the best, because the more time I spent with that thing, the better it got. Unfortunately, I don't have a good recording of the third version. But I think that was the best one. By that time, I knew the script in and out. And the idea of performing this for a virtual audience was no longer terrifying. I wasn't like, shivering in anticipation. It just went off - and I felt comfortable in my skin, or as comfortable as I get in my skin. And it just really worked. I think the second time works really well, which is the recording that's online, although I see all the mistakes in it. So I don't watch it anymore.

Miranda Metcalf  51:47

Yeah. It's amazing how quickly we can adapt. You know, as you said, it just took two iterations to get you prepped for an iteration where you felt at home in it. It's kind of amazing. Yeah.

Henry Gepfer  51:59

But that's... like, "Death Dream" you can still watch now. And that could be in a gallery space, and it's still relevant. But "I Like Myself," unfortunately, the time for it, I think, was in the moment. While people were still stuck inside, or even as some people were venturing back out. I don't know how well that would play now. I would have to rewrite that thing considerably to make that play for an audience now, because I think we're all lacking in that kind of shared experience that made it work.

Miranda Metcalf  52:29

Yeah. Although I do think that trying to find ways to like yourself through your phone is perennial.

Henry Gepfer  52:41

Yeah, I'm starting to think that maybe the answer is not in the phone. But that's just me.

Miranda Metcalf  52:48

Well, do you have any projects on the horizon that you want people to know about, or anything that you want to shout out that people could even participate in?

Henry Gepfer  52:57

Sure. So I'm collaborating with a fabulous artist named Kitt MacNeil. They're a Canadian artist - or they're an artist from the US living in Canada. We've been collaborating on developing performance series for printmaking, called "Fine Print" or "No Fine Print." We just did our first iteration live at MAPC in the fall, and we're looking for opportunities to kind of restage it. We're looking at virtual options, since the opportunities for us to come together as printmakers, and especially the even smaller contingent of printmakers who are interested in performance, are kind of rare. They usually occur at the conference level. We're thinking about virtual options for live performance, or even developing a reading series to help share ideas around performance art, to help folks that are like, 'I don't get why this makes sense.' We can share some stuff that'll give you a look into our brain. 

Miranda Metcalf  53:53

Yeah.

Henry Gepfer  53:54

But also maybe function as a support group for weirdos existing in print who have an idea and they want to bounce it off other people, just to see if we all think it'll play. So you can find us there, @no_fineprint. That's really the project that I have on the horizon that I'm excited about. We've been working together for the last year trying to find a way to collaborate in a way that we thought would make the most sense. And we've been applying for other things. And my wife and I listened to this one comedy podcast. And one of the days that I was dreading, like, 'I don't know, nobody gets what we're doing...' She had listened to an episode of Good One that was talking to the comedian Chris Redd, he was talking about moving to a new city, and he was like, 'Yeah, I moved to a new city and I didn't really find a place that I was at home at. And then it just dawned on me, like, I got to just do my own thing and build it. And then people will come together around my sensibility.' So for better or worse, we decided to use the same idea and create a space for people that have the same kind of aesthetic leanings that we have, which is a pretty broad umbrella, I think. So that's a project that is always perpetually on the horizon that's uncertain. But yeah, so that's what I'm working on.

Miranda Metcalf  53:59

Yeah. And then where can people find you and follow you and affirm you through social media?

Henry Gepfer  55:16

You can find me at www.henrygepfer.com. And I'm also on Instagram @henrygepfer.

Miranda Metcalf  55:23

Beautiful. Well, thank you so much, Henry, for taking an hour out of your morning. I love the way you think about things and that you're in our print community. I think we're definitely better for it.

Henry Gepfer  55:36

Awesome. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.

Miranda Metcalf  55:39

If you liked today's episode, we have a Patreon where you can help us keep the lights on and get bonus content, like Shoptalk Shorts, where our editor Timothy Pauszek digs deep on materials, processes, and techniques with past guests. Also, if monetary support isn't in the cards right now, you can leave a review for us on your podcast listening app of choice, or buy something from one of our sponsors and tell them Hello, Print Friend sent you. But as always, the very very best thing you can do to support this podcast is by listening and sharing with your fellow print friends around the world. And that's our show for this week. Join me again next week when my guests are Melissa and JW from the Little Friends of Printmaking. We talk about getting professional gig poster commissions while still in graduate school, drawing on inspiration from our art world heroes, never running out of ideas, and feeling out of place. You won't want to miss it. This episode, like all episodes, was written and produced by me, Miranda Metcalf, with editing by Timothy Pauszek and music by Joshua Webber. I'll see you next week.