Rachel E Dohner

The Cow Jumps Over the Moon

I’ve always been deeply into the concept of cultivating and growing artist communities, and for the last couple years I’ve also been really into the idea of communal living. Along with this I’ve also been really excited about revitalizing/transforming old buildings into new things––leaving the original building as intact as possible, while transforming it into some new kind of creative space. I love working with my hands, and I love building things, and the idea of transforming a space completely is so exciting to me. I follow an Instagram account that posts cheap old house listings (@cheapoldhouses) and when I saw one of the posts, I got super excited and had to show it to my friends. The post was of the 12-bedroom O’Leary mansion (yes, you’re right––it was built by the son of the woman whose cow supposedly knocked over a lantern that started the Chicago fire...How did you know?), built in the 1880s in an insanely intricate style, on the market for only 475k. This house became a kind of lore between us all, and one day, while I was eating lunch with my friends Amy and Amy in Amy P.'s painting studio, we started talking about the house and about how incredible it would be to make it into an artist co-op. “Twelve bedrooms, so we need twelve people, so that’s only like 40k each,” we figured, joking but also so earnest. I think for a lot of gen Zers, specifically artists, the idea of buying a home feels completely impossible. Even the idea of having 40k to buy a home feels impossible––not completely so, but still impossible. I think we go around looking for spaces to make ours wherever we go, for places we can individually personalize and customize but still inhabit collectively. I think that’s why those luxury communal “loft” style apartments are so popular, but those always feel hollow to me, thirsty for income and promising a lifestyle that is quirky and bohemian but also somehow pristine in a sanitary way. I think we want something with more character, more spirit. To build a place ourselves, a place that cares for us and for the community around us. We talked about what rooms we would turn into studios and gallery spaces and a shop, about how we could have rotating artist residencies and communal gardens and pet chickens. The ideas came fast and piled up on one another; it was not the first time any of us had talked about this. I’ve talked about the idea of rescuing an old building to transform into an artist co-op to so many of my friends. I think we need this. Not just me or my friends, but all the young artists who yearn for community, and yearn to put down roots in a place that is as much theirs as it is everyone else’s in the community. To just cohabitate and make things, to make everything around us. I want this to be the basis for my final project––this idea of transforming the mansion into an imagined artist community space. When I was about eight I was very into making giant taped together drawings of houses, depicted in a cut-away fashion, like you were looking into a dollhouse. I would fold up the drawings into a bundle and take them with me everywhere to keep adding more pieces of paper, to keep drawing more rooms. I’m thinking of coming back to this form, either approaching it in a collaged, drawn, or quilted way, or something that combines all these forms.

Artist Statement

I always want to make things that can be held. Things that have personality, that push the boundaries of reality and stretch the world against their shape as they become physical. I love to play with the limits of everyday life––to make small things big, to make the ordinary bright and funny, to make the intangible tangible. The goal of my work is to fully immerse my viewers, to bring them to a place that is imaginary but incredibly real. A place where anything can happen, a place of safety, a place of embrace. Much of my work is meant to call in queer people, to give us a space to be frustrated and to laugh and to take ownership of our identities by reformulating the media that takes such power from us. It asks, how do we discover our emerging queerness with material that is meant for the antithesis of us? This is asked through shades of pink, through felt, through bedazzled surfaces, and clashing patterns, all pulled together.

I want them to keep one foot in my world, to pull it along with them as they move on. So I try to make it memorable. I always want my work to be vibrant and playful, even if the subject matter isn’t, and I selfishly do this because it’s what I respond to myself. I do this primarily through contrasting colors and textures. I use bright colors and wiggly lines, shiny satin and painted wood. Using my hands is essential––it’s why I love quilting, felting, tufting, sculpting, making furniture or paper, or working with plaster gauze and clay. No matter the medium, I center the physicality of the piece, so that even if people can’t interact with it in person, they can imagine what it would feel like. I’m inspired by Niki de Saint Phalle, Friedrich Hundertwasser, Marisol Escobar, Lucy Sparrow, Tierra Whack, Claes Oldenburg, Harriet Powers, and Ana Mendieta. These artists are all incredibly different, but they have in common the ability to build up a world with their work, to create a language out of their hands and materials which seamlessly translates their ideas, a concept that I am always reaching towards with my work. Physicality and interaction are central to the artwork that I make about the internet. The slowness of labor-intensive practices like quilting directly contrasts the sickening speed of online life, and these techniques are often from the “craft” realm, which has often been eschewed by the art world because many craft techniques were considered “women’s work” and not real art. My internet work is rooted in this concept, as much of it focuses on the way that queer women are falsely depicted in pornography. Quilting is “women’s work,” just as sexually gratifying men is, regardless of individual sexual identities.

I believe in creating community for queer people to exist in without explanation. I believe in making work that is educational but not only educational, work that’s informative but does not solely exist to teach an uninformed viewer. Above all, I believe in making art accessible to everyone from a young age, especially identity-based and unconventional art. Work like this can have such a strong impact on young people who are working through their own identities and discovering who they are. I wish I had access to art like this when I was younger, or even known that I wanted access to it. This sense of longing is something I’ve been exploring in my work––longing to go back, to have the support I have now, to be a young queer person without shame. To feel the softness and brightness of a world that held me not in spite of who I was, but because of it. I hope my work can bring people to this place.

Artist Bio

Rachel Dohner is a Chicago-born artist currently studying at the School of the Art Institute Chicago. Her work springs from intricate stories, thorough research, and the uncontrollable urge to make her inner world tangible. She is deeply interested in making the digital world unapologetically tactile, of pulling electronics into a strangely soft and mechanical place, and this sense of touch and physicality runs through every piece. She wants people to engage with her work wholly––to see it, to touch it, and to remember it randomly three months later. Inspired by childhood, camp, and queer life, Rachel can’t help but imagine a planet with more color, more felt, and more bedazzled rhinestones. She uses every tool at her disposal to reach for this imaginary place, slowly but surely making it a reality. Along the way, she loves collecting vintage Pink Panther and Garfield memorabilia.

racheldohner.com

@feltgirlworld