Cliff Tresner is a frenetic maker. His studio spreads across three rooms and two buildings, which can hardly contain everything he has made. Wood, paint, steel, 3D models; these are the barebones of his materials. The walls of his studio are painted a light gray, and he hangs his work on each available space to watch how they interact with each other and the space they inhabit. For this body of work, totem-like shapes and pastel colors reoccur across canvas and sculpture, inhabiting the same appendage despite material and spatial contrast.

There is an unfinished piece he wants to include in the show. It is lined at the borders to be cut, but he liked the way it looked unfinished, like a drawing still in process. A large heap of shapes that reoccur in his sculpture sit piled in the middle amongst teddy bears: his sculptures begin to look familiar to me after this, like the toys of my childhood abstracted by time, or age, maybe. I understand that making art is both work and play. Each piece is built with its own shelf, even the canvases. One of these shelves is an eight-feet long slab that Cliff has constructed to hold an assortment of his steel sculptures. He is worried about how we will transport it because he is not as young as he used to be, and his truck is in the shop. Kassie and I are certain we can use our van and get it in there ourselves, but he doesn’t really seem to trust us.

I understand that all of the works for the show are still in process, and it will still feel like it's in process even when it’s hanging up on the walls: all of his work is an installation. The whole time, I am trying to figure out what he needs from me. At one point, he mutters that it would be helpful if I told him what he should leave out, so he doesn’t have to finish all this. He can’t possibly finish all of this unless I tell him what I want or don’t want. The thing is, I don’t really want him to stop making the work he hasn’t finished. Everything I’m seeing deserves an inclusion. Finally, after Kassie leaves, I tell him if he needs me to give him some direction, here are my suggestions. I tell him we can nix two of the giant wooden pedestals he’s made to hold more sculptures, and keep one. I do the same thing with the pink and blue thought-bubbles made out of wood that are hanging on the walls. The most finished work and the work he likes most is what I suggest. After all, we’re opening in three weeks. He is grateful that he can stop working on the others to focus on the ones we both like.

We plan out the next three weeks. The school semester starts on the 21st, but he’ll be pretty free until he absolutely has to take a pause from installation to teach something. He says he is tired of going to school in the fall. He’s been going to school since 1984, teaching here since 1997. He is flabbergasted when I tell him that was the year I was born. I am once again reminded of my youth, my inexperience, and the faith I have in him as an artist to guide me through this process. It is encouraging that he has expressed exactly what he needs, and that he listened to me when I made suggestions. Younger artists I’ve worked with don’t know how to do this, and I, a younger curator, have not known how to force it. No good work comes from stagnant collaboration. He tells me he is ready to give the work to somebody else and let them deal with the labor and the play behind the installation.

I hope I’m starting to understand Cliff better than I did, even though I felt like I understood him pretty well the first time I visited his three-pronged studio outlet. I saw the classroom when students were still attending during the semester. I think it was early spring, March or April. Around the same time, I’d visited another college in the area and seen their facilities. Cliff had compared his own university’s to theirs. He wished he could teach there, but he was here. That day, he was not in a very good mood, but he was kind to me. Towards the end of our conversation, he asked me if I had brought anybody with me, if I had met any friends, how I was liking my new post at the museum. I was surprised. The question was overly familiar, but his manner was not. He asked directly, inquisitively, gently, like he wanted to know, and cared about the answer.

We’ve been putting this show together in the space for about two weeks now. I’m happy it’s going well. It feels very open and relaxed. I ask him directly for his feedback and input. I want it. He knows his own work intimately. It does not surprise me when I find out he grew up on a Midwestern farm with a strong personality of a father. He treats his work like a farmer would tend to his flock. I suspect his own talent and ideas surprised his parents. I bet they don’t know what to make of his work.

I probably shouldn’t think about such things, but I do. In his statement, he criticizes the stuffy air of art academics. I relate to this feeling. My concept of professionalism in art spheres is not very corporate or refined, though I’ve been around those kinds of personalities. I don’t respond well to regime or rules or dissection or even social cues, if I don’t feel like it. Cliff and I are the same in this.

My usual process of curation has not changed much. I don’t settle any decision until Cliff has seen it. We’ve spent a couple hours in a particular gallery that always acts as the problem child. The doorways are weird and the walls aren’t even. It effects the work that’s hung and the sculptures that people have to walk around. I’ve overcrowded it in there and left it too bereft. At a certain point, I’ll get fed up because it’s never going to be perfect. I’ll stick with whatever works.

Cliff sends me a brief audio message about his work one afternoon. He says he is happy to collaborate with me on this. I want to write something about it, but I don’t know what. He borrows from Cy Twombly, and I think I knew that. I wrote a thesis on Cy Twombly and I saw familiar mark-making in Cliff’s work. These are ghosts of Cy’s marks, the same marks that once drove me crazy for two years. I could write something academic-sounding about Cliff and Cy and labor and art. In the audio note, Cliff, while driving, relays that he approaches all of the objects in this exhibition as problems that require organization, compartmentalization, and inquisition to solve. He gathers tools across the three rooms he uses for his studio. Exiting and entering allows him to move through processes. In these rooms, he takes his work apart and puts it back together again. He borrows from furniture construction and warps a sturdy object into an unusable, beautiful piece of art. Work tables, made out of steel and a squared slab of wood, sit in the middle of two galleries. They display an arrangement of steel and PLA and 3D printed and wood sculptures. Most are cast in bronze. It appears to be the work table of a mad carpenter or an alien inventor.

I watch him with Kassie while she hangs the largest paintings. Cliff interrupts to give suggestions. He teases and jokes with her. When I playfully ask him why he’s distracting my preparator, he says he slipped back into teaching. I get it. He was her teacher for four years. He likes working with our college-age intern, too. He gives both of them a task and supervises a project one day I get to the musuem a little late. The museum has become an extension of his classroom. He shows up once at 9am and again at 3:30pm unexpectedly, informing no one. He sets up in an open office to work, and I sit down in the director’s chair to talk to him. He asks me if I will contribute to a piece he wants to add to the show. Something written on a carefully cut cardboard notecard he will put into a small wooden box embedded near the ceramic in the work. I am touched by this suggestion. I understand that he’s trying to pull my central creative focus out of me—he knows I’m into words, text, writing, and I’m in curation because I think it’s all the same language, just different styles of speech. Cliff has no way of knowing this, but I need this support right now. I am in a period where I want to throw everything I’ve ever written away and start over. Or, I could just never try again. I’m lucky to have a job that requires creativity and direct engagement with art objects, because that is fulfilling in a different way. After this exchange, I know he is a really good teacher, because I will take this little cardboard shape with me to the Indian Mounds in Natchez and write something on it. I’m not even sure it’s going to make it into the show, but I want to add something to the ritual.

We’re crawling nearer to the end of install. All in all, it’s taken about two weeks. I’m getting closer to building a statement to put on the wall. I need to sit down and dedicate a proper couple of hours or so to it. I want to do Cliff a service by writing well about his art. First, I have to make sure I understand it, and I think I do. Here is what I’ve picked up:

Harmony of Materials — Harmony of Colors — Balance and Lines

• variety of materials used: wood, steel, oil paint influenced by Ab-Ex, 3D PLA printed sculptures.

• furniture design: local artisan jack gates was his teacher

• harmony in colors, and shapes: sculptures reshape themselves from three-dimensional spaces to one-dimensional canvases

• background in furniture making, functional objects become art objects through same process of making, refining, remaking, reprocessing

• Together we traced a horizontal line across the large paintings in lower north gallery

• building work and taking it apart. he likes it when he makes it but not when he remakes it, usually

• kids love his work. he likes to watch them interact with it

• “Walking the line between content and form”

• constructional: industrial vs. natural, abstract painting vs. refined sculpture

• three studios: one room to another allows him to move from one process to another

• my curation in galleries reflect this, i think

• Execute concept —> solve problem

• teaching art while being taught by art: using your own process to instruct students

• clfif once described to me “scooting along in the grass on my back on the farm,” pretending like he’s swimming while staring at the sky, boredom led to creativity

• Process —> (inspiration stage) inquisition, curiosity, creativity, imagination —> (assessment stage) organization, collection, note-taking, consideration —> (making stage) improvisation, testing, managing, teaching, refining

At what point do you find yourself, in your usual process, going back to take an object apart or cut a painting up? What motivates you to do this? (Possible answer: seeing how things work)

sort of like an inventor in a laboratory: that’s why the work tables are so profound to me.

frenetic maker. His studio spreads across three rooms and two buildings Wood, paintings, steel, 3D models; to watch how they interact with each other and the space they inhabit. totem-like shapes and pastel colors reoccur across canvas and sculpture, inhabiting the same appendage despite material and spatial contrast. still in process. sculptures begin to look familiar to me after this, like the toys of my childhood abstracted by time, or age, maybe art is both work and play, and all of the works for the show are still in process, and it will still feel like it's in process even when it’s hanging up on the walls: all of his work is an installation

He’s been going to school since 1984, teaching at ULM since 1997.

He grew up on a Midwestern farm with a strong personality of a father. He treats his work like a farmer would tend to his flock. he criticizes the stuffy air of art academics

borrows from Cy Twombly, Rauschenberg, mark-making in Cliff’s work

Cliff and Ab-ex and labor and art and masculinity. he approaches all of the objects in this exhibition as problems that require organization, compartmentalization, and inquisition to solve

Exiting and entering rooms allows him to move through processes. he takes his work apart and puts it back together again.

He borrows from furniture construction and warps a sturdy object into an unusable, beautiful piece of art.

Work tables, made out of steel and a squared slab of wood, sit in the middle of two galleries. They display an arrangement of steel and PLA and 3D printed and wood sculptures. Most are cast in bronze. while co-curating, he slipped back into teaching. the museum becomes an extension of his classroom. his work is used as diagrammatic example to learn and teach both himself and student from.