E.T. and Xanax: An Interview with Katherine Bernhardt
The artist spoke to Wallace Ludel about her drive to paint nostalgic objects, pop culture’s obsession with drug use and what it’s like to move back in with her parents.
“Katherine and E.T. have lots in common,” wrote Katherine Bernhardt’s sister Elizabeth, in an essay on the occasion of the artist’s solo show, “Done with Xanax,” which opened last week at Canada Gallery’s new Tribeca location. “Growing up in the suburbs, she immediately identified with E.T., who himself landed in a suburban setting and could not figure out how to get away from it while suffering great existential pain.” In the show, Bernhardt debuted 11 paintings, each of which stars the empathic, titular alien of Spielberg’s 1982 masterpiece. In Bernhardt’s distinctive style, objects like Pac-Mans, telephones and Xanax bars float freely in the singular universe of her canvases. In this world, the extra-terrestrial once again becomes our protagonist. Painted by Bernhardt on the patio of her childhood house, the paintings’ nostalgia grows more poignant. May we all be so lucky as to phone home.
Is it correct that this body of work was made in your childhood home? Yeah, I usually come back here for the summer. I like to work outside in the summertime, so I come here and work out on the patio. I started those paintings last summer and I also moved back into this house.
So you now live in your childhood home again? I have a running joke as a writer that, when I try to write in my childhood home, I'm just pretending I'm not at the source of the traumas that made me a writer in the first place. It's good to be back here to get it all back in my psyche again. And I've painted E.T. before—I painted him at the Art Institute of Chicago as an undergraduate, so I'm coming back around to it again.
Why E.T.? I guess I was seven when the movie came out; it was a huge influence on me and I was totally obsessed with it.
I once likened something in an essay I wrote to the moment of God and David's fingers touching in the Sistine Chapel. My editor suggested I change it to E.T. and Elliot's fingers. It was a great edit. That is really good.
Tell me about the title—"Done with Xanax"? That's another obsession that I've been working through. It’s about how, in popular culture and music, they're all talking about Xanax and drug culture. Everyone's on pills. It's just a popular culture reference.
And is there a significance when the Xanax pills and the E.T. merge in certain paintings? Kind of—well, not really. They're pretty separate. It's my whole thing with the pattern paintings: putting things together that have nothing to do with each other.
Yes, obviously your paintings are full of scattered objects and things. What's your relationship to materiality and thing-ness? I mean, I love things. I love things from the ’80's. I love design.