For Super Dutchess’ first show of 2021, “Dissecting the Cyborgian Swamp Thang” curator Andrew Woolbright included a video piece by artist Emmett Metier to act as a virtual component to the show. Woolbright has interviewed Metier to talk more about the artist’s work and practice.

AW: I was introduced to your work through the Pratt MFA show and I was really impressed with your creative process. It’s rare to encounter work that is as investigative and conceptually evolved as yours is, while also being so visually impactful. Could you give a bit of a personal history as to how you’ve arrived at this work? How have your experiences and education shaped your practice up to this point? 

EM: The body of work I have at this moment is rooted in from my senior year of college at The University of Iowa in 2015.  I grew up in a very rural and conservative environment and don’t reflect on my childhood and adolescence fondly.  Dealing with the fallout of my childhood, having untreated ADHD, and being in an environment where I was not comfortable in self-actualizing my feelings of being queer and transgender, left a host of problems in my mental health and executive functions. 

I was dealing with constant anxiety attacks, bouts of depression and dissociation. I spent time looking at different medical images such as MRI scans, microbiological slides, and chemical compounds.  I wanted to express my feelings of lack of autonomy over my mind and body, I began painting on flat panels with watered down squeeze bottles of acrylic paint, drawing out biological motifs, building layers of color and depth.  In using the watered paint, I allowed the pigment to flow but did my best to control it, I felt it was symbolic of my struggle to have control in my own life.  I struggled representing myself in figurative painting, so was able to represent my form in the bits and pieces of biological composition.

AW: I’m really interested in new figurative art practices that really define the terms of the body, that narrows the field of it or vivisects it into more manageable and productive components to build off of. I feel like dealing with the entire body, especially wrestling over its interpretations of beauty standards, is so conventional and realized at this point. Was there anywhere where you felt an ability to explore the body on your terms?

I think my work can be summarized on exploring the body in alternative experiences and conceptions.  I started off that point in college by using biological and chemical imagery as an allegory for my struggle with mental health, but I can relate it now as utilizing psychiatric medicine as an altered experience.  Around that time I was exposed to post-net art, and started thinking of my relationship to the digital world and my artmaking.  During that time I was using my practice as a tool to work through childhood trauma, and thought about the joy and comfort I found in playing The Sims.

 It was a point of escapism and fantasy, building a world I wanted when I was unhappy in my own, it was also the only place I was able to explore homosexuality when I was younger.  I still use The Sims as an escapism method during difficult periods of my life, I played it obsessively during the early weeks of the pandemic.  There’s a certain comfort in detaching from the natural environment and immersing yourself in the digital realm. 

AW: It’s incredible that you could use virtual space in such a meaningful way- that the Sims could be a platform for enjoyment and play but also a practice space to visualize desire. Did you find that this early virtual escape led into an aesthetic philosophy? Or a theory? 

Yes!  I was introduced to post-human theory, most notably Donna Harraway’s Cyborg Manifesto and Paul Preciado’s Testo Junkie.  It gave me a path to move from my practice as a therapeutic tool to a conceptual framework, to create work that is representative of Harraway’s proposal of a cyborgian other, a hybridization of man and machine to resist Western hegemonic conventions.  Preciado takes Harraway’s proposition a step further, and in Testo Junkie wrote an autotheory, drawing upon the regulation of sex and gender in the modern era to be constructed of and regulated by capitalism, pornography and the pharmaceutical industry.  He proposes an idea of creating gender to be “synthetic, malleable, variable, open to transformation, and imitable, as well as produced and reproduced technically.”  While conducting research, he conducts an experiment of taking testosterone (at the time of writing he was assigned and identified as female) to not correct and change his gender, but “hack the bio-codes of the body.”  

My introduction to these writings coincided with my moving to NYC in 2017, for the first time I was away from my known environment, the cultural pressures and restrictions and felt I had a fresh slate.  Preciado’s narrative of transsexualism was my first exposure to a narrative I could relate to, and allowed me to confront gender in a new paradigm. 

AW: Post-humanist theory is such a beautiful hack in itself. You start to question every perceived cultural boundary. The universe becomes more fluid and exciting. You can embrace the glitching of your everyday identity rather than trying to totalize or form it into something “authentic” or “consistent.” It’s really impressive how much of your work has come from an auto-didactic learning and finding what works for you, but has formal education played a role in your development as an artist?  

I enrolled in Pratt’s MFA program with a painting portfolio, but the program was not restrictive by medium, rather encouraging us to explore our practice based around a conceptual groundwork.   I spent my first semester still painting my biological motifs, trying to narrate a cyborgian body with absolute failure.  I believe in contemplating embodiment in such a complex, abstract way, I had to find a way to have actual physical embodiment.

At the end of my first semester, Preciado’s 2000 essay Countersexual Manifesto was translated and published in English.  

“Gender is not simply and purely performative … Gender is first and foremost prosthetic.  That is, it does not occur except in the materiality of the body.  It is entirely constructed, and, at the same time, it is purely organic.  … Gender resembles the dildo.  Both surpass imitation.  Their carnal plasticity destabilizes the distinction between the imitated and the imitator, between the truth and the representation of the truth, between the reference and the referent, between nature and artifice, between sexual organs and sexual practices.”

It was an absolute epiphany for me.  As someone who uses dildos as the centerpoint of their sexuality, it was clear I had to use dildos in my art.  I began making my biological motifs as silicone casts, still thinking as a painter and making them as flat objects, and was still unable to communicate my point.  One day I was washing the casts in a large bucket and noticed how interesting the silicone looked moving in the water.  I bought a large tub, painted the inside green, placed my phone inside, recorded the movement and experimented in editing the footage.  It looked very intramuscular, endoscopic, grotesque yet sexual.

AW: That’s incredible. I paint a lot of dildos myself. I often think that if an alien were to see our world that they might see the rich architecture and design of glass dildos as incredibly beautiful. There seems to actually be the appropriate financial backing within the dildo industry to push innovation in design. I also imagine that if you have any education in glass blowing or silicone mold making at this point, that the likelihood of going into work for some kind of dildo market in some form is probably more likely than not.  

Making molds in a dildo factory sounds like an amazing side gig, I’ve tried to shoot my shot a few places but haven’t found luck yet! Like I said before, my work is at the core, a reflection of altered bodily experiences and conceptions.  While I was in grad school exploring silicone casting and video work, I was simultaneously taking steps to medically transition.  I was navigating the New York State medicaid system on my own, started hormone therapy, and underwent top surgery.  At the same time, I was grounding myself in BDSM and came to understand my transseexuality intertwined with kink.  The body of work I ended grad school with was a physical representation of my body narrative during the period, a hybridization of organic, plasticity, and carnality.

AW: I think there is a strong relationship between making art and BDSM. There are symmetries there between aesthetics, control, and trust. It makes sense that artists usually explore and manifest both. Do you view your art practice as a form of kink as well? Are any of the aesthetics directly pulled from power exchange for instance? 

I think there is correlation in developing a serious art practice is not something to be taken casually.  There must be serious discipline with yourself as an artist, setting guidelines for a project but not anticipating a certain formula or success for the outcome.  I really avoid being literal with anything I put into my work, and find nuance a much more impactful tool.  That being said, I find BDSM to have much nuance in interpretation and experience of sex.  The sexual and kink aesethics I’ve used in my work is using silicone, lube, sounds of moans and squishing movements, and subtle nudity tucked in with visceral abstraction.  I don’t want to be incredibly vulnerable or revealing in my work, and I find the methods I’ve used to express sexuality more comfortable as an artist than using more explicit and literal representations.

AW: I think part of the liberation of the theories of Preciado or Halberstam is an embrace of testing, practice, and failure. I feel like queer and post-humanist theory avoids literalness, polemics, and work that tries to illustrate or depict ideas. That being said is there a sense that you get from the sculptures you make, and the videos you create from them? Do you find them, personally, to be sublime, or abject, or beautiful? Is there an affective note that you are thinking about while you make them or are you focused on the process and letting them step into the world on their own terms? 

I strongly agree with what you’ve said, which is why I’m so drawn to these frameworks when making my work.  I sometimes have issues paying so much mind to post-modernist theories in not having politically direct action on a larger scale.  At the same time, it offers a form of escapism and fantasy, which can lend itself to personal liberation.  It was really impactful for me to use these theories as a tool while I used my art as a method to narrate transitioning, for exactly that, avoid literalness.  I never wanted to fit a certain language or box around myself in terms of sex and gender, and in the work I made I wanted to avoid any certainty, but to leave interpretation to the viewer of the work or whoever passes me in the street.  With my work and my body, I play with the tools and materials I have, and through experimentation allow the direction to organically develop.  That being said, I have the abject in mind when I create, but I find the end product incredibly sublime.  It’s so comforting to be able to have an euphoric, fantastical escape when a piece has come to completion.