Courtesy Austin Eichelberger
Depending upon whom you ask, you might get a completely different idea of who Santa Fe’s Austin Eichelberger is. Ask a student of liberal arts at the Santa Fe Community College, and you’ll learn Eichelberger is an experienced professor. Ask someone in the local writing scene, and you’ll likely learn he’s the fiction editor for the annual Santa Fe Literary Review, a yearly journal published by SFCC. Eichelberger’s work extends beyond the literary to the visual, too, and has been shown at the Center for Contemporary Arts and the Santa Fe Community Gallery multiple times—including this year’s Queer Magnetism show. Eichelberger seeks to explore the experiences of minority groups—especially Queer communities—and with that topic being more relevant than ever in America today, it felt appropriate to hear a bit about Austin’s work. This interview has been edited for clarity and concision. (Callie Elkins)
Your work was recently featured at the Queer Magnetism event in Santa Fe. How has your experience with that event been?
It’s my second time showing work in the Community Gallery. The first time was years ago with the [curation group] Strangers Collective, so it’s nice to be back in that familiar space and it’s been interesting for me to see how my work has grown. It’s been really wonderful. The opening was huge. Over 400 people came, and I know the mayor was there and it has been great to have that Queer community in the middle of Santa Fe, which isn’t always quite as accessible as people like to claim it is. My pieces, Stars are Holes Shot In the Sky, are actually a triptych from a larger series, all of which are about gun violence in the United States, all of which are like my pieces in honor of minorities who have been affected by gun violence in the US. So they mean a lot to me.
What has your experience been as a professor in writing and English at SFCC?
I mean, we have such a great creative community here. We have so many driven and creative students. It’s been wonderful. I also really like SFCC, because I feel like I’m making a really tangible impact on people’s lives. Because we do have so many people who are learning English as a second language, or who grew up in mixed language communities so they don’t have as strong of a background in English as they might want to have. And so being here, as opposed to [where I grew up] in Virginia, I’m able to see the effects much more easily. And I love the online classes, I like that increase in accessibility. I sort of prefer teaching online in certain ways. While I do love the student interaction and being in the classroom, I like how organized and sort of regimented it is online. I really prefer it for accessibility issues. Since I have a learning disability, I appreciate that the online component can help a lot of people who have trouble with the classroom to succeed.
What do you explore in your work?
Generally, I explore themes of loss. That’s just what I tend to look at in writing and in art—loss. And then those spaces left behind by loss, and how we try to fill those or deal with those. I’ve been trying to insert some more celebratory aspects into my work, and it has been working very well.
I think I’m a little bit more of a shadow artist. I primarily create collage and photography, but recently I’ve also been working on some mixed media sculptures. My creative work tends to focus on ideas of loss and layers. In photography, I love double exposure, and in collage, I explore how different combinations of images can evoke or sum up my feelings and thoughts about the world and its people. Because I see visual art as a way to speak through abstraction, I try not to define the narrative of my visual art too much, but I’ve come to see that my collages explore my queer perspective partially by freeing men in vintage gay muscle magazines from pages on the fringes of society so I can reposition and elevate them. I see these men as a lineage of mine who risked danger and ridicule to reveal a vulnerable part of themselves very publicly, and whose bravery we still have to fiercely defend as queer people and rights are threatened daily by political regimes across the world. While many images I collage are not from this vintage media, I create stencils from figures in these aging magazines that help me focus the conversation on my queer lineage and the issues that unite queer people as a single community, regardless of the images I choose to layer.
