A New Story Every Day: An Interview Of l'Area's Edouard Chueke

The Center of Le Marais’s Social Scene Is A Mom & Pop Restaurant/Bar Serving Lebanese/Brazilian Fusion & Drinks Until Late

 
 

interview by Abraham Chabon
photographs by Kenna Kroge

L’Area tonight, like every Saturday night, has spilled a crowd of well-dressed twenty-somethings out onto the streets. The rain comes down in a light haze, and smokers rotate in groups out of the doors. Some women’s fur coats are being flattened by the rain that rolls off the edges of their slanted umbrellas. The smokers hug the small, flat green face of l’Area and step away from the windows, from which you can see, behind and around them, a growing crowd inside the bar.

L’Area, during the day, is a quiet restaurant that serves Lebanese and Brazilian food on a side street between Bastille and Le Marais. The food feels home-cooked, comforting; it’s rich curries and shawarma, black rice and pita bread, citrusy ceviche, and a cold glass of white wine. You can’t go to l’Area and order just one thing—a meal at l’Area means a table covered in plates.

But at night, l’Area becomes something else—an overflowing bar where you can start or end your night, a refuge from the rain, good drinks and good music, but also one of the hearts of Paris’ youth scene. L’Area attracts artists, students, musicians, and, during fashion week, half of everyone who’s left their afterparties. It’s designed for conversations, for making connections. At l’Area, you can find a photographer for your brand, a writer for your magazine, or a date for next Saturday.

Inside the bar, the soft light feels as if it could all be from the glow of candles. The walls are mostly covered with thick white paint that thins in some important places and cracks in others. On each wall, there are mirrors, tchotchkes, and photos and paintings in thick and thin frames. The bar’s counter is long and shining and turns at one end to meet the wall.

The wall behind the bar has a splash of blue and green tiles. There are glass shelves covered in glass bottles and aluminum cans and corks and towels and art and busy hands and other things that a bar should or shouldn’t have. And the bar’s counter itself is covered in action and movement, the knocking of glass on the counter, the shifting of elbows under thick coat sleeves.

I move with the crowd as the room thins and then pushes out into the bar’s barely larger backroom, filled with a traffic jam of tables, benches, chairs, and people. You have to step over and squeeze past creaking wooden chairs with skinny iron legs. Boot heels catch on coats, elbows brush against the shoulders of drinkers, and backs press against backs. A small projector sends a faint blue glow—cut through by the shadow of the spinning ceiling fan’s blades—against a screen blocked by pots of flowers, a glittering silver lava lamp, and an enormous glass vase filled with coffee beans. Wine-soaked cushions and a floor sticky with Saint Germain lick the soles of boots and Puma runners.

The restaurant's owner, Edouard, steps into the backroom and lights his cigarette from a candle placed on a countertop. Edouard has silver hair and skin that looks like it has spent most of its life smiling. He wears a sweater knit tight like l’Area’s weave of tables and chairs. It is my first time back in two years; Edouard remembers my name.

There is no l’Area without Edouard. You would be hard-pressed to find a kinder man in Paris, and if you did, he would be nowhere near as cool. Edouard creates the culture of l’Area. When he can find a break between pouring drinks and hugging friends, he will pull you aside to connect you with someone he wants you to know. And all night, until the bar closes, through every backhanded glass, late reservation, and declined card, he keeps smiling.

I caught up with Edouard the next day. I sat at the counter as he paced back and forth behind the bar. I had to follow him with my phone so the recording would stay clear.

EDOUARD CHUEKE: It began with the food. Because of that, it began with Lily. People don’t always know this, but she’s the most important person here.

Lily is Edouard’s wife; they fell in love in Rio.

ABRAHAM CHABON: I haven’t met her yet, but you always say great things about her.

CHUEKE: She is completely essential. She arrives early in the morning and prepares everything—the ceviche, the dishes, all of it. She’s in the kitchen from 7:30 or 8:00 in the morning until 4:00 in the afternoon. And that’s the truth.

CHABON: I think you should probably give yourself more credit. You are so important. If someone loves coming to l’Area, part of that is because they love coming to see you. How do you think you’ve you built these connections? 

CHUEKE: Thank you so much. I try to receive people, make them feel welcome, and friendships will just happen from that. For me, that’s the most important thing. The connection first comes from my love for electronic music, photography, and fashion—my wife too. There are a lot of students who come here, as well as some young fashion designers. They come, we talk, we discuss things. It’s a place for that—to meet, to exchange ideas. 

Edouard lights a cigarette for me. 

CHABON: At a certain point, this bar must feel like a part of your family.

CHUEKE: Yes and no. It’s a real love affair.

I’ve had offers—good offers—to open other places, even in New York or London. But the mentality wasn’t the same. That’s why I decided not to do it. Even here in Paris, I had offers, but it wouldn’t have been the same. I’m happy we have this kind of relationship with the people here.

For me, the best part is that whether you come at night or just for Sunday brunch and a coffee, I’m happy you choose my place for that.

CHABON: You’ve told me before you just want to be a Mensch, what does that mean to you? 

CHUEKE: When I say I want to be a mensch, that’s something my father taught me. It means being clear, being correct with people, being honest. To be as honest as possible. To be kind. And not to be jealous. I don’t care if someone opens a new spot down the street. I say, "Thank God." I do my own thing in my own way.

I have friends in this business who make huge money, even with fewer customers than I have. They serve more expensive food, more expensive drinks. But I don’t care. I’m happy here.

People only see the surface of this place. They don’t see the work behind it, everything we’ve created. My wife and I both know—we’re never going to be rich from this. But we’ll have a good life, filled with good things.

Edouard scoops ice from a silver bucket into my hazy yellow glass of Pastis. 

 
 

CHABON: That honesty is what draws people to this place. And you feel it from the design.  It feels natural like it was put together with the intention of being genuine to who you are. You have family portraits, personal touches. Did you or your wife design it?

CHUEKE: My wife, mostly. Everything on the walls—that’s her. If you stop and really look, you’ll see we have pieces from some of the most important French artists, American photographers, even a Paris Photo Prize winner from five years ago. We wanted to bring that here.

Edouard gestures at the art hung in the room, wafting a cigarette through the air. 

CHABON: How did it start? How did l’Area become what it is?  

CHUEKE: There was a French radio station—Radio Nova. After the first two months, they fell in love with this place. They told all the DJs and musicians about it. And people just started coming. And it has stayed like that, always the right people who care about the same things. 

CHABON: Paris has a long history of bars and cafés being hubs for creatives. Do you feel like you’re continuing that tradition?

CHUEKE: I never really think about it like that. When we bought this space we knew Le Marais was on the rise but also it was an old part of Paris, filled with history. That was important to us. I love Paris, and it’s history, but I don’t think I was creating something only French. I think the connections, the creativity, can happen anywhere. I know we’ll be here for a few more years, but when this place is done, I’ll probably open another one. Maybe in Naples, maybe in New York. A smaller one—just breakfast and lunch. But with good music, good people, the same kind of identity as here, and the same people will come, and it will give people the same thing.

We have to pause our conversation; someone has called Edouard personally to make a reservation. 

CHABON: How do you keep going? Running a bar like this must be exhausting.

CHUEKE: It’s in my blood. Every day is a new day—that’s something my parents taught me. And this place, it feels like a movie to me. A new story every day. New characters, new relationships. That keeps me going. Also, I don’t drink much. I sleep four hours a night. I try to take care of my health, but it’s not easy.

CHABON: Do you ever worry about l’Area losing its identity as it gets more popular?

CHUEKE: Never. Because the people who come here, they become part of it. Even the celebrities—they feel at home. That’s what matters. And they wouldn’t come if they didn’t want to be a part of it, you know? 

 
 

The Los Angeles Confidential: An Interview of Devin Troy Strother

interview by Oliver Kupper

We caught up with Devin Troy Strother on a sunny afternoon right after a bustling LA art week, where his latest exhibition opening had fans overflowing into the street. We chat a few moments before the debut of his first-ever digital commission, which marks the relaunch of Different Leaf, the trailblazing magazine founded by Michael Kuseck, broadening its horizons from cannabis to a new cultural platform encompassing art, music, and fashion.

Strother reaches an even broader, more diverse audience through Coloured Publishing, his independent press that rolls out artist zines, books, and editions that pop up everywhere, from the Printed Matter Art Book Fair to Undefeated. Strother’s publishing work connects him to a lineage of artists who have explored the book as an art form, including Henri Matisse, whose iconic cut-outs began for his own illustrated book, and Ed Ruscha, whose accordion-like photobook Twentysix Gasoline Stations stretched across galleries at MoMA and LACMA during his recent major retrospective. Or Kandis Williams, whose publishing and educational platform, Cassandra Press, took over an entire floor of the 2022 Whitney Biennial. These artists have utilized the medium to extend their visual narratives, blending text and image in innovative ways that challenge and enrich the viewer’s experience—and make their work more accessible. 

In a way, Coloured Publishing doesn’t just broaden his studio’s creative horizons; it lets him and other artists dive deep into more personal, experimental print work. At the center of his latest exhibition, which was on view at Good Mother Gallery, sits a bright green newsstand bursting with zines and prints, surrounded by Strother’s new paintings—a testament to his commitment to making art communal and accessible.

The return of Different Leaf magazine, with its expanded focus on cannabis, art, music, and fashion, embodies a similar spirit. By commissioning Strother for its relaunch, the magazine not only underscores its commitment to artistic exploration but also celebrates the enduring significance and adaptability of boundary-blurring print projects in the digital era, promoting creativity over commerciality amidst a shifting media landscape.

In our discussion, Strother shares insights into his latest artistic and publishing endeavors, the newly reimagined Different Leaf, and how these efforts interweave to foster a community.

OLIVER KUPPER: Hey Devin, it’s good to see you. I overheard a lot of people talking about your new show throughout art fair week. It was undoubtedly the talk of the town! Can you share what drives the themes in your work?

DEVIN TROY STROTHER: (laughs) Thanks. I like to play with a mix of humor and history in my work. It’s about pulling in all these different cultural threads—like snapshots from a big, sprawling narrative—and then adding a bit of my own twist to it. I want people to experience something familiar but also get them thinking about the deeper stories behind what they’re seeing.

KUPPER: Your work often plays with humor, irony, and racial themes in a bold way. How do you balance provocation with playfulness in your art?

STROTHER: It’s a dance trying to balance the two. Trying to find a middle place between making you laugh and making you a little uncomfortable. I think about it like this: if I can get you to laugh first, I’ve got your attention. Humor is the ultimate disarming tool. It’s a way to let people in before they realize they’re already deep in the conversation. And once they’re there, once they’re engaged, that’s when I can start twisting things, pulling them into that space where the playfulness turns into something else, something that lingers.

I don’t force that balance; it’s just how I see things. I grew up on alternative music, cartoons, and stand-up comedy, these spaces where humor and critique are kind of intertwined. I have always tried to navigate the absurdity of racism by flipping it, exaggerating it, and making it so ridiculous that you can’t ignore it. A lot of my work pulls from that tradition. I take imagery that already exists, stereotypes that have been floating around forever, and I push them to the point where they collapse in on themselves. I want you to see how absurd they’ve always been. But instead of presenting them in some heavy-handed, overly academic way, I make them colorful or a little silly because that’s how I process it. That’s how I make sense of it. And honestly, playfulness is its own form of resistance. 

There’s this expectation that if you’re talking about race, history, or identity, it has to be serious and somber. But why? Why should that weight take away the joy? There’s something radical about making people laugh while you’re also making a point. There’s something powerful about turning pain into something that feels like a party. So yeah, I like to play with that tension, but I don’t think of it as a tightrope rope walk. It’s just how I communicate via images, I guess. 

KUPPER: Last year, your show Scenes for Josephine explored deeply personal themes and histories. Can you talk about how memory and personal histories—and also the fabrication of Los Angeles as a city of make-believe—play into your work? 

STROTHER: Oh yeah, Scenes for Josephine was all about memory, my own personal memory, cultural memory, and the way those things get distorted as a result of the memory process; no memory is exact. It’s a memory of a memory that slowly gets remixed and mythologized over time. And finally, it becomes its own myth/history into itself. A lot of my work plays with this idea of history as something both deeply personal and totally fabricated. We take bits and pieces of the past, reframe them, exaggerate them, and suddenly, they become something else that feels foreign but also somewhat familiar simultaneously. 

That’s where Los Angeles comes in. LA is the ultimate city of make-believe. It’s built on a real illusion. The illusion of Hollywood as the dream factory, a place where you can reinvent yourself, write your story, and create an entirely new identity. 

But underneath all the delusions, there’s a real history, a real culture, a real city that gets overlooked in favor of the myth. That tension between the real and the fake, the past and the present, and the way stories get reshaped over time is exactly what I’m interested in. With Scenes for Josephine, I was pulling from my family history and filtering it through the lens of performance, spectacle, and exaggeration.

KUPPER: We have been to many of your shows. You not only show paintings and sculptures, but your work is totally immersive—from wallpaper to sculpture to installations, like a full-scale bar. Why is this immersive quality so important?

STROTHER: I’m happy that you picked up on that part of my practice. For me, it’s about slowly building worlds that exist within different themes, not just showing some paintings on a wall. I want you to step into something, be surrounded, be overwhelmed, and maybe even feel a bit confused by the situation. The paintings and sculptures are one thing to me, but they behave differently when they’re not attached to a larger conversation. One that is being manifested in many different iterations, all unfolding simultaneously for the viewer.

I’m asking and even begging the viewer to engage with the work on a different level. One is that paintings hanging alone in a white cube can only achieve a certain extent, and in some instances, not far enough to truly transport the viewer to different places, both physically and mentally. I think a lot about the context of our current times versus how things exist in space and how they speak to one another.

KUPPER: How does performance fit into your work? 

STROTHER: Performance is a part of any artist’s practice. Whether intentional or subconscious, there’s always a performative aspect in every genre of art. The act of setting up lights, strobes, and composing backgrounds for portraiture is highly performative. It’s not necessarily intentional, but I’m always in awe whenever any kind of shoot or set is being rigged up.

The same goes for painting and sculpture. The act of making is a deeply personal performance that unfolds constantly, whether in the studio or beyond. I guess everything and anything you do in the studio can ultimately be seen as performative in an abstract sense.

KUPPER: Your work not only spans multiple mediums but also bridges communities. How does your role as a publisher with Coloured Publishing influence your art, especially in the context of your new show, The Los Angeles Confidential?

STROTHER: Coloured Publishing is like my playground. It’s where I can experiment and really push the boundaries without having to deal with gallery space or logistics. It influences my art by keeping things fresh and letting me explore more direct, more personal forms of expression. Plus, it’s just really fun to see a book come together. The newsstand installation at Good Mother is a physical manifestation of that idea.

KUPPER: So, let’s talk about that. What inspired the choice of a newsstand?

STROTHER: The newsstand is iconic, right? It’s this old-school symbol of information exchange—a tactile, grab-and-read culture that’s disappearing. By using it as the centerpiece, I’m playing with nostalgia but also commenting on the accessibility of art and literature. In the broader sense, it’s about democratizing art, making sure it’s not just something you see in a gallery or museum, but something you can stumble upon and engage with in everyday life.

I’ve always been interested in how people interact with art in everyday settings. The newsstand is about making art approachable—like, literally bringing it into people’s daily routines. I wanted something that wasn’t just to be looked at from afar but could be touched, flipped through, really engaged with.

KUPPER: Speaking of newsstands, Different Leaf magazine is branching out into areas like art and fashion alongside cannabis; your commission marks a significant part of this new chapter. How do you see this collaboration influencing culture?

STROTHER: I think it’s really cool, especially at a time when a lot of art magazines are folding, and everything is moving towards AI-generated content. Different Leaf is taking a stand for creative risks and putting artists at the forefront. It’s like we’re saying, “Hey, let’s slow down and actually enjoy this.” Art, music, fashion—these are all about experience and emotion, not just consumption. So, this collaboration is a chance to remind people of that and create something tactile and memorable.

KUPPER: In your installation at Good Mother, you engage deeply with themes of media, commerce, and myth-making. How do you think these themes resonate with Different Leaf’s new direction?

STROTHER: There’s a real synergy. Different Leaf delves into the layers of culture that cannabis interacts with, which is similar to how my installation explores the layers of information and how we consume them. Both are about peeling back the surfaces to look at what’s underneath, whether that’s questioning societal norms or celebrating lesser-heard voices. It’s about challenging the viewer or reader to think differently and to question more.

KUPPER: As Different Leaf reimagines its identity, what do you hope readers take away from your commission for its relaunch? 

STROTHER: I hope they see it as an invitation to explore, question, and be part of a community that values creativity over convention. It’s about pushing boundaries, sure, but also about finding joy in the unexpected. Different Leaf is creating a space where these intersections of culture can flourish, and I’m just excited to be part of that conversation.

Suburban Atmospherics: An Interview Of Olivia Erlanger

 
 

interview by Erik Morse

Multimedia artist and filmmaker Olivia Erlanger is a suburbanist in multiple senses of the word: her oeuvre, a combination of sculpture, scale miniatures and shadow boxes, furnishings, short films, performance, as well as vernacular and technical histories of the home, takes its inspiration from American suburban geographies and the domestic interior that form its primary mise en scène. But Erlanger’s work also explores the world of margins, thresholds, and coulisse implicit in the etymology of the sub-urb—a space that, by definition, is beneath or outside of a physical and discursive center. Hers is a work that often eschews the stabilizing components of characterization, materiality, and setting for what, absent a sturdier, more easily translatable, descriptor, might be called a suburban atmospheric.

But what precisely is a suburban atmospheric? Beyond its seeming interest in combining the milieu of the suburb with a study of speculative environments, the term remains labile and fugitive, as atmosphere tends to be. The topic of suburbanism is itself obscured in a certain kind of epistemic veil, enforced by an enduring urban-centric ambivalence toward its historical or cultural import that says indignantly, “I’d prefer not to.” The suburb has long been the subaltern to its urban hegemon. Equally, the notion of an atmosphere is resistant to any center. It is neither material/spatial nor strictly rhetorical or conceptual, but more like an environmental “mood” accompanying these objects or categories. Peter Sloterdijk, the great thinker of atmosphere, describes it as an affective envelope that shelters self, other and world in various existential interiors. Its ur-space is the home, whether hut or tract house, though the feeling of at-homeness is as much an architecture of familiarity as it is materiality. Atmosphere, however, will always retain some essential mystery or exoticism. Appearing in disguise under designations like “the sensorium,” “the spectral,” “interiority,” “microclimate,” and “the nobject,” it haunts the world of people and objects from its dark purlieus, much like the suburb haunts the city and thrives in the nooks and verges.

Erlanger’s works hover in this same elusive topology with its outré images of possessed housewares, adolescent bedrooms in miniature, deteriorating snow globes, manic realty agents, piscine nymphets, and trompe l’œil terraria. Evoking the sort of Gothic unheimlich that emanates from a landscape of empty cul-de-sacs, dead shopping malls, and vacant ranch ramblers, they play in the interstices of the quotidian and the storybook. The result is a spiritist practice that is simultaneously an “anthropology of the near,” in the words of Marc Augé, and a “space of elsewhere,” in those of Gaston Bachelard. And, perhaps, most of all, Erlanger’s works echo Longfellow’s observation in “Haunted Houses” (1858) that “All houses…/Are haunted houses/…The spirit-world around this world of sense/Floats like an atmosphere…”

On the occasion of Erlanger’s new exhibit, Spinoff, at Luhring Augustine Tribeca, the artist spoke on a variety of topics, including the mysteries of the suburb, the pleasures of the miniature, Last Year at Marienbad and the haunted house genre, Nabokov and the “final girl.”  

ERIK MORSE: I wanted to make the centerpiece of our conversation this concept of a suburban atmospheric. I will start with Prime Meridien (2024), which immediately evokes for me the famous engraving from L'atmosphère: météorologie populaire (1888), depicting the traveler who finds, at the end of the Earth, the spherical boundary to the cosmos, which he pierces to glimpse the beyond; it also evokes some of the earliest globes of the Columbian era, which served as both a decorative and metaphysical object, illustrating the dimensional mysteries of the world, where, as Sloterdijk describes, the Earth’s reserve of secrets seemed inexhaustible. What I’m getting at here in both instances is that like Prime Meridien’s miniature suburban globe, the Flammarion engraving and early, modern globes suggested an emotional or mysterious liminality that occur at a spatial margin and yet are preserved by an atmosphere of familiarity—the place of the home. That said, I’m interested to know where this mergence between the geographic space of the suburb and the sensorial mystery of atmosphere became connected through your work, and in what way do you think creative interventions into atmosphere allow you to explore the mysteries of suburban spaces?

OLIVIA ERLANGER: In making art, I feel it is as though, like the traveler in Flammarion’s engraving, I can only ever hope to catch a glimpse of what lies beyond—of what might exist on the far side of the boundary. But, let's be real, I don't think I can unravel the universe's mysteries through examining the invention of suburbia. Perhaps it is a terribly romantic notion, but I do hope to uncover something far more intimate: the contours of my place within it. The myth of the American suburb is filled with mystery—your choice of word is exact. In my work, I trace the edges of this myth, striving to glimpse what lies just beyond the surface. To peer beneath the banality, beneath the oppressive masquerade of “normalcy.” I want to know what is in your garage or stuffed behind a closet door. What lies forgotten at the bottom of your junk drawer, waiting to be uncovered? 

MORSE: Most of the pieces in the new show Spinoff are some version of what one might call a scale miniature or a boxed work.  It’s difficult to look at your miniature Sky series (Blue Sky, Orange Sky, Green Sky) and not to think of Bachelard’s writings on miniatures and daydreams. What initially drew you to miniatures as an artist?  

ERLANGER: I spoke at length with a friend about the show's title, Spinoff and how a spinoff, which, much like a miniature, will always fail in terms of its ability to recreate the essence or atmosphere of an original. There’s something about that failure that I find compelling—an inevitable distortion of the thing it's trying to replicate. And speaking of the show, have you seen the new drawings? I think they really resonate with what you’re describing, especially in the way they condense those compressed images of horror films; there are cinematic references threaded throughout my work. Miniaturization, much like directing a film or building a building, demands control—control over time, scale, narrative. It’s all about containing a world within a space. I recently gave a lecture on my practice. Initially, I thought I’d frame everything around control—but as that idea unfolded, it felt more suited to a therapy session than an auditorium full of students. Instead, I framed it around scale as a way of grappling with the contradiction of seeing the planet as both home and vast, unknowable space.

MORSE: Clearly, there is a deep connection in your work between domesticity/interiority and childhood, all of which appear as recurring themes within the realm of the scale miniature. Do you link it to childhood and rituals of toy playing? Can you elucidate on the pleasure that comes with the act of boxing or creating an atmosphere is? 

ERLANGER: I’m fascinated by the legacies of American craft, especially as we are in the midst of a crisis of content and craft. With the diorama sculptures, I wanted my work to move between the problematic lexicon of a natural history museum and the intimacy of a hobbyist’s world, like a train set built by a father and son. There’s something deeply evocative, bizarre, and sad about that tension. Maybe it’s because, in part, it speaks to how play—or, more specifically, make-believe—is often an attempt to recreate and mimic the structures seen around us. But I should clarify: I’m not interested in childhood itself; it’s adolescence that fascinates me. That specific moment in time when a person is neither fully a child nor fully an adult. I remember it as a time filled with a sense of dread, terror, and excitement. And the figure of the adolescent looms so large in the mythology of suburbia, especially in American pop culture.

MORSE: Adolescence, and particularly girlhood, seems to be present throughout your oeuvre, from sculptures like “Ida” (2017) and “Final Girl (Parallel Object)” (2021), which imagine some appendage of nymphean flesh, and pieces like “Home Is A Body” (2020) and “Shell” (2021), which are more theatrical and feel like the classic miniature tableaux of Narcissa Niblack Thorne or Frances Glessner Lee’s Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, from the 1940s. There is also the recent “Fan Fiction” (2024), whose Lepidoptera-shaped fans suggest Nabokov’s decor for Lolita's suburban bedroom. All of these pieces illustrate a form of absence, whether it be via anatomical mutilation or a scenographic vacancy, that is inherent in the huis clos of domesticity. Something or someone has always disappeared. In what ways are girlhood/adolescence a form of ghosthood in your work?

ERLANGER: I was reading Speak, Memory, Nabokov’s autobiography, while creating those sculptures. Adolescence, in particular, carries a sense of danger—especially due to the sexualization of girlhood, as seen in Lolita, but also in the Nutshell Studies, where at least one of the proposed "victims" is a teenage girl. It’s easy to exploit the young, and even easier when they’re in an environment like suburbia, which is sold to us with the promise of safety. Yet, there is power in transformation. This is evident in the trope of the final girl, which influenced both my film Appliance and my sculpture, which takes its name from the theory. Barbara Creed’s concept of the final girl turns the “last man standing” trope on its head, replacing him with a girl who, though often running and evading, ultimately survives and overcomes the outside antagonist.

Adolescence is haunted by phantasms of the future—dreams shaped by society, our families, and ourselves—but it’s also weighed down by the stark, often banal reality of the present, which for me felt flabby, uncool, and underwhelming. I think both transition and adolescence, as well as horror, can bring forth their own "phantasms" in the mind. The in-between spaces and phases of life are some of the most terrifying things the human psyche has to endure.

MORSE: What also intrigues me about your Sky series is the way in which the various colored light sources create an imagined or artificial atmosphere, which dominates the objects themselves by their very immateriality. They become less about the visible schematic of a landscape and more about the immaterial coloring of the climate in which they are immersed. What results is a literal “climate control,” another theme that crops up throughout your work.

ERLANGER: The architecture of Blue Sky is based on Last Year at Marienbad (1961) and specifically this one shot from one of the gardens at Nymphenburg Palace in Germany. It’s fantastical in so far as the forced perspective warps the ability to truly “know” the location. My original intention with the dioramas was to explore the ways in which we express power through property. Each diorama has a different technology represented in terms of how those lines are drawn. Blue Sky is showing authority through a piece of publicly owned property in which nature is so thoroughly trained it appears alien. Green Sky depicts a speculative cityscape, with a skyline filled with empty apartments—none of which I can afford! In contrast, Orange Sky presents a desolate desert mesa, empty but for a distant, almost unreadable sign—a marker that perhaps this barren land is for sale, but it’s impossible to know for sure.

I chose to title the pieces after the color of their skies because I wanted to engage directly with atmospherics, both literal and metaphorical. The sky, as a shifting environmental cue, offers a form of navigation—we understand the sky’s color as a guide to weather or ecological events: think of the green sky before a tornado or the orange glow from a wildfire. In the same way, I’ve always understood art as a way to navigate the world, to figure out my place in it. In Spinoff, the smaller planet sculptures are named after GPS coordinates, as if offering a direct connection to location itself. Meanwhile, Eros (when night was last dark), the installation of arrow sculptures, is a star map from the night before Edison patented the lightbulb—a map that shifts according to its installation site. It plays with scale—not just the inherent contradiction of a planet being “home,” but also the difference between space (no memory) and place (memory).

MORSE: I’m very happy to see your reference to Last Year at Marienbad, as I had thought of it, as well as the architecture of the suburban petite maison, which is a folly architecture based on urban fantasies of country life. Marienbad has been one of my favorite films for a very long time, and I always associate it with the dark interior fantasies of the suburb, despite it having little visually in common with the iconography of the suburb. I do wonder what it is about the atmosphere of that film, which evokes a particular fantasy of retreat, memory, and mystery that “feels” suburban.  Do you find the phantasmic elements of the film often popping up in your work?

ERLANGER: I’m drawn to Alain Robbe-Grillet’s writing, particularly the chiaroscuro in his descriptions. In Jealousy, harsh sunlight filters through the louvered blinds, and in Last Year at Marienbad, long, dark shadows stretch across the palace grounds. This interplay of light and dark is something that deeply inspires me, and it carries over into my own work. And light is a key element throughout the pieces in Spinoff, from the dioramas to the planet sculptures, even to the date determining the Eros installation.

To your point, I don’t think the film directly evokes a suburban atmosphere, but the narrative of a potential affair does echo a familiar suburban trope: “perfect house, imperfect marriage”—think The Stepford Wives, The Ice Storm, American Beauty.

Film has always been a constant touchstone in my creative life—everything I know, I know through TV and movies. I’m fascinated by how, once a story is told—whether through a book, a TV show, or a film—it doesn’t just introduce new possibilities but often affirms them. I’m not talking about how stories predict the future, like how Neuromancer anticipated the internet. Rather, I’m interested in how stories gesture toward what could be and, in some cases, shepherd reality into existence. There’s something about how a story doesn’t simply reflect reality but begins to shape it, making certain outcomes feel more conceivable, even inevitable. The term conceptual prefiguration doesn’t quite capture this—it’s something deeper at play.

MORSE: Broadly speaking, Marienbad also falls within a haunted house genre that reminds me of your short film Appliance (2024), which takes from the suburban Gothic, body horror, and science-fiction genres. In the film, a homeowner becomes haunted by an old house’s appliances as they produce a coordinated series of radiophonic and biological signals that make the house both a shelter from the dangerous, outside world and an invader from within. It has hints of Freudian unheimlich and Antonioni’s Red Desert but could also be one of those ’80s suburban horror films like Poltergeist or The Changeling. What do you think is this nexus between the suburban interior, specifically, and the pleasurable experiences of the horror film?

ERLANGER: I think everyone is a little afraid of the dark and of empty rooms. My intention with Appliance, both as a book and a film, was to extend the classic metaphor of the home as a body and suggest something a bit different: if home is a body, then the body is an appliance. The film explores the terror of what happens when your appliance—your body—doesn’t function as it’s pre-programmed. In the story, the protagonist, Sophie, is undergoing fertility treatment, and in this context, her unease becomes a doubling of sorts. She’s terrified of the structure of her house, its domestic technologies, and her own body, all of which seem to be malfunctioning. There’s no peace for poor Sophie! But is it all in her head? Or maybe aliens are involved—after all, there’s always the possibility of aliens.

With Appliance, I wanted to delve into something very Freudian, yes, and maybe even suburban—the idea that we can haunt ourselves. Specifically, I wanted to explore how prototypically American aspirations—around homeownership, fertility, and fecundity—can manifest larger into distortions. 

MORSE: With your researched histories from Garage (2017) and The Modern Shower… (2019), you have continued to make a sort of anthropological field site of domestic spaces and technologies. One of the many things I learned when reading through Garage’s history is that Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian home design eliminated ceilings and attics, while its one-story elevation made staircases mostly unnecessary. It also eliminated nooks and strived for the open concept that became the schematic for the midcentury ranch house. To me, what’s so interesting about this is that such a design immediately rejected all the spaces of the home that Bachelard would highlight as the sources of daydreaming and mystery. There are no more “happy spaces” in his words because Wright had substituted a domestic machine for a psychic shell.

ERLANGER: Houses have always reflected the technologies of their time in terms of construction methods, materials, and even their layouts. The space of the home has been a site of labor much longer than leisure, as the concept of “leisure” is a relatively modern social construct. For much of history, homes provided respite primarily as places to sleep. Depending on one's social status, this rest was often limited and infrequent, and even the bedroom itself was primarily designed for heteronormative reproduction.

MORSE: Going back over the long nineteenth century and early twentieth, we see this interesting interplay between the house as a shelter and as a laboratory. For the first time, the home pushes professional labor outside of its walls and becomes a shelter of family, leisure, and privacy. Yet, it also rapidly expands as the site of immersive and atmospheric technologies, from elaborate bedroom furnishings and indoor plumbing/heating/cooling to the earliest communications and electronic media, all of which increasingly recast the house’s atmosphere as that of a laboratory or greenhouse. How do you think this rapid technologization and hyper-interiorization of the home-as-laboratory has transformed our relationship to the house-as-shelter? 

ERLANGER: One of my favorite examples of this evolving relationship between technology and home is The Homes of Tomorrow, an exhibition at the 1933 World’s Fair. It featured early proto-modernist houses, including an all-glass house by George Keck, designed to showcase cutting-edge technologies such as central AC, dishwashers, and iceless refrigerators, as well as an attached garage. This exhibition laid the groundwork for The Town of Tomorrow, which debuted at the 1939 World’s Fair. There, homes were designed around different technological innovations. Notable examples include The Small Brick House of the Sheltered Workshops, a house where the wife performed all the housework while the husband maintained the exterior during his leisure time, and The Electric Home, which promised that electric “servants” would take over time-consuming domestic chores, allowing for a more efficient and less labor-intensive lifestyle. The tagline for the Electric Home was, “In the Electric Home, electric servants have taken over the tasks and time-consuming domestic drudgery of the old order”—an alluring vision indeed! And let’s not forget the “Magic Kitchen” that could move, talk, and tell a timely story—though, alas, it could not sing and dance. These homes and concepts are referenced in my research, particularly in Appliance, but I think they serve as a historical precursor to the modern-day single-family home. So, in summary, the 20th-century single-family home has always been at the intersection of home as both laboratory and symbol—both a financial instrument and a tool for propagating the American Dream.

Olivia Erlanger’s Spinoff is on view through April 19 @ Luhring Augustine Tribeca, 17 White Street New York

Olivia Erlanger
Eros (when night was last dark), 2024
Sixteen aluminum arrows
Dimensions variable
Image courtesy of CAM Houston. Photo: Sean Fleming

Borderlands: An Interview of Hugo Crosthwaite

Hugo Crosthwaite, La Anunciación (The Announcement), 2024
Courtesy of the artist and Luis de Jesus Los Angeles

interview by Karly Quadros

Ex-votos are a form of Mexican folk painting, part prayer, part diary, they are a dedication to the saints and a plea for guidance during difficult times. They’re sometimes crude, sometimes polished, sometimes funny, sometimes heartwrenching. Te pido perdon virgencita pues jugue con fuego (I ask you to forgive me, Virgin, because I played with fire) reads one on a painting of a woman with red skin and devil horns beckoning a man in bed while the Virgen de Guadalupe looks on. Another celebrates two luchadors who met in the ring and found love. Another thanks the Santo Niño de Atocha for surviving a late night encounter with two extraterrestrials.

Inspired by his own close encounter with death, Tijuana and San Diego-based artist Hugo Crosthwaite decided to take on the tradition of ex-votos with a new series of large-scale paintings. The show, Ex-voto, is a series of overlapping snapshots of the city of Tijuana, dense narratives of daily life at the border. Just as in the ex-votos, the physical and spiritual world mingle in scenes of border crossings, street vendors, and women at rest. The Tijuana of Crosthwaite’s paintings is not quite the real one and not quite the sin city of the American imagination. Instead, it is multilayered, a place that we tell stories about and are always returning to across the border fence.

KARLY QUADROS: Can you explain what an ex-voto painting is?

HUGO CROSTHWAITE:  Ex-votos are a tradition that happen here in in Mexico and in Latin America. It's this idea of painting agradecimientos, gratitude, miracles. They're usually painted by families, by common people. They place them on church altars. Usually this happens more in the central and south of Mexico. This doesn't really happen on the border here where I live in Tijuana, so I decided that I wanted to do my version of ex-votos that reference the situation here on the border in Tijuana and San Diego. I wanted to play with the narratives that happen usually in the ex-votos where you see angel characters or saint characters involved with people, the surrealism that's behind that.

Usually when you look at the ex-votos, you're looking at miracles, sometimes with extraterrestrial things or extra-sensory things. I love seeing some ex-votos that say, “Thank God, because I saw these aliens and they tried to abduct me.” They go from very extraordinary, fantastical things to trying to escape an abusive husband or “Thanks to San Virgencita because I was able to not get caught that I had an affair with my best friend's wife.” The narratives range from fantasy to strange things to things that deal with the problems of society in terms of poverty and violence. 

QUADROS: To me, they’re similar to your paintings in two ways. One is that they’re both very narrative – there are stories in your paintings that you feel like you’re dropped into. The other similarity that I see is these paintings include the physical world and the spiritual world, layered on top of each other.

CROSTHWAITE:  For the longest time growing up here in Tijuana, I never really had access to culture in the [Mexican] South. It just happened after 9/11 when they closed the border and this influx of immigration happened. We started seeing culture from Oaxaca and from other places start to appear here in Tijuana because of migrants settling here, hoping to cross into the United States. For example, the Day of the Dead wasn't really celebrated here in Tijuana, but now you see that happening. So, one of the consequences of immigration that has happened with the city of Tijuana is that now we're being exposed to many of the things that usually, when I was growing up here in Tijuana, I wasn't.

Hugo Crosthwaite, Ricos Elotes (Delicious Corn), 2024
Courtesy of the artist and Luis de Jesus Los Angeles

QUADROS: Is that where all the skulls in the paintings come from?

CROSTHWAITE: Yes. Here in Tijuana we're in this area where we're not Mexican enough, but then also we're not American. It’s because Tijuana is the most northern city of Mexico, so there's a lot of cross-culturalization between San Diego and Tijuana, American culture and Mexican culture. 

In my case, I was born in Tijuana and I grew up here. My family is from this area, and I don't remember learning English. It just happened naturally because my father had a curio shop where we sold Mexican items to American tourists. My life was selling stories and selling this idea of a Mexican culture that Americans wanted to see.

I've been an artist for thirty years almost, and all of my work comes from my sketchbook. I just sit in a coffee shop or I sit waiting for the bus, and I draw people.  All of the narratives in all of my work comes from these sketches. I grab a lot of the faces and the environment of Tijuana. It’s not really portraiture because I’m drawing in a very clandestine way. Sometimes people think I’m doing something very suspicious, but then I show them the drawings. That’s the magic of art. Sometimes they share back. I’ve had people sing to me. I’ve had people recite poetry because they feel like you’re presenting something of art and they want to give some art back to me.

It’s not really like taking a picture or documenting something. It’s more being able to grab impressions of the city and expand these into the narratives that go into my paintings.

QUADROS: What are some of your earlier memories of art?

CROSTHWAITE:  All my life I was going to school in the morning and in the evening I was working in the curio shop. I remember growing up with a lot of visual stimuli surrounding me. I would just do drawings to pass the time. It was a way of playing around while I was waiting for an American tourist to come in.

Part of what we did in the curio shop was tell stories, and that was the way of selling things. It was an American tourist expecting to hear a story as part of the interaction. In these paintings, it's also this idea of a transaction that happened, like in the original ex-votos. A miracle happened, so you're obliged to return the favor by painting this ex-voto as a way of making amends or making a payment. As a child, I would sell this notion of Mexico to an American public that was expecting certain stories, something exoticized. I feel like this series of paintings is playing with this idea that Tijuana is selling itself to the United States.

QUADROS: So in your paintings, is it the real version of Tijuana or the exoticized version?

CROSTHWAITE:  It's somewhere in between because it's also playing with the fantasy. There is this notion of Mexico, especially in the city of Tijuana, because, during prohibition in the United States, Tijuana became this hub for bars. It became like a Sin City, like when you think of Las Vegas today. Tijuana was the place to come, have a drink or get divorced.

It developed this reputation, what they call La Leyenda Negra. I wanted to play with this idea of La Leyenda Negra, how Tijuana was seen as this place that's selling itself to the American tourists or what is expected by the American tourists seeing Tijuana.

For example, in the 1930s and ’40s, there were these Tijuana Bibles, which were these little pornographic books that were printed in Chicago. They were little comic books that had, like Mickey Mouse having sex with Donald Duck and that kind of thing, which were sold for five cents or whatever. This was a completely American invention, but they were called Tijuana Bibles. 

Again, it's this idea that they're not from here. They're not from America. They're coming from some other place, from Tijuana, from this lawless border. Going South, there's no law and order.

QUADROS: Some classic American icons like Mickey Mouse show up in your paintings, but there’s also this idea of Americans crossing the border to deposit their own sins. I think of those big liter jugs of Coca-Cola in your paintings, in a sense, reflecting American commerce going over the border to do their dirty work that they wouldn’t do at home.

CROSTHWAITE: Yes, exactly.

QUADROS: I was thinking a lot about commerce when I was looking at your work. The characters sell tickets, they sell fruit, they talk on phones. It’s hard not to see the work in light of these recently implemented tariffs that are, once again, straining the relationship between our two countries. What roles do commerce and trade play in your work and the lives of the characters that you depict?

CROSTHWAITE:  Like I mentioned earlier, Tijuana is a very touristy city. Even now the tourism in Mexico has gone beyond restaurants or shops or beer. Now even medical tourism is very important in Tijuana.

The economies between Tijuana and San Diego are extremely interconnected. In the morning, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans cross over legally to work in the United States, and you see a lot of Americans starting to live in Tijuana because housing in San Diego is becoming too expensive. There's this interconnectivity between both cities. The border serves as an obstruction to this natural flow of people and commerce and ideas and culture. 

QUADROS: There’s a rich history of border art too – art that is sometimes literally on the border wall or fence, or art that is otherwise about the border. Do you see yourself in this tradition? What do you think defines border art?

CROSTHWAITE: I try not to define border art. I’m an artist, for example, that was born in Tijuana but I have American citizenship. I live in both Tijuana and San Diego. So to me, this area has always been this double identity. I grew up with this kind of schizophrenic notion. Both languages are in my head, Spanish and English. Both cultures are in my head.

When I was growing up, I would get to see all the American movies before anybody else in Mexico saw them. These films would travel to Mexico City, and then from there they would get distributed. When Star Wars came out, I saw it first in San Diego. Most of my family from further south wouldn't see it until six months later. 

My work is about this double identity and the struggles. How do you identify yourself when there is this very distinct line of culture that's being placed on the border? My family settled here way before the American border was imposed, way in the 1840s. My great grandfather fought in the Mexican American War on the American side because they were conscripted by the American army. Then he settled in Rosarito, in Tijuana, and then suddenly the border came up so my family, the Crosthwaite name, which is very old here in the Californias, was suddenly divided between Mexico and the United States.

What am I Mexican or American? Those questions of identity and history and memory permeate through the work, this surreal place in between two cultures, two languages. 

QUADROS: Frida Kahlo’s border painting [“Self Portrait Along the Border Line Between Mexico and the United States”] is like that too, right? She’s standing in the middle with America on one side and looking to Mexico on the other, and she’s in neither.

Hugo Crosthwaite, La Linea (The Line), 2024, Acrylic and color pencil on canvas
Courtesy of the artist and Luis de Jesus Los Angeles

CROSTHWAITE: It’s also the notion of the mestizo, the blending of the Spanish and the native.

QUADROS: And it comes back to the ex-votos, folk traditions and more pagan traditions mixing with Catholic imagery and traditions. There’s a few paintings with this imagery like “La Linea” and “The Woman Grabs the Snake.” Can you talk a little bit about Aztec imagery?

CROSTHWAITE:  In “La Linea” it’s the very important figure of Coatlicue, the Aztec goddess, mother of the Aztecs. She's basically the revered mother that gave birth to Huitzilopochtli, who is the god of war. Coatlicue was later replaced by the Virgen de Guadalupe when the missionaries came and tried to sell this idea of Catholicism to the Aztec people.

Even though it's a very strong image with skulls and snakes, to the Aztec people, she represented motherhood. She represented love. She represented birth. She represented all these things that were about life.

QUADROS: It’s similar to what you were saying before where Mexico is vilified or seen as darker and more sinful, but the things that actually seem sinister, like serpents and skulls, are actually very life-affirming and beautiful. And, on the other hand, the American exports that seem very wholesome, like Coca-Cola and Disney, are actually quite insidious.

CROSTHWAITE:  In this painting, you're seeing this idea of this double culture of Mexico and the United States. You're seeing images of Coatlicue on either side and in the center images of Mexican culture and American culture. You see the bottle of Diet Coke. You see Mickey Mouse. You see the cell phone. You see all these things that are an amalgam of culture on the border.

QUADROS: What was your experience like pulling together the show?

CROSTHWAITE: I've been an artist for almost thirty years, and funnily enough, all of my work was always in black and white because I never studied formally how to paint. I've always been making black and white drawings. But a couple of years ago, I was diagnosed with testicular cancer, and I went through chemotherapy. It was a very hard year and I couldn't work. So my sketchbook became the source of all my work, something that I could work on in my bed, small and not a lot of effort.

I had never contemplated doing color in my work. I decided I want to do an ambitious series, large canvases that just explode into color. As I was starting to do this, the idea of the ex-votos came about, giving thanks for regaining my health, being able to work again, being able to work big canvases. It was this gratitude that I felt towards life and towards my career and the people that supported me.


Ex-Votos is on display through April 5 at Luis de Jesus 1110 Mateo St., Los Angeles. Hugo Crosthwaite will be in conversation with Carolina Miranda at the the gallery  on March 22 2-3 PM.

Hugo Crosthwaite, Tijuacolor, 2024, Acrylic and color pencil on canvas
Courtesy of the artist and Luis de Jesus Los Angeles

Color Vision: An Interview of Master Printers Guy Stricherz & Irene Malli

William Eggleston 
Greenwood, Mississippi (red ceiling), 1973

interview by Oliver Kupper

Phillips is set to present Color Vision: Master Prints from Guy Stricherz and Irene Malli, a landmark series of auctions celebrating the unparalleled artistry of the dye transfer process. The first auction, happening on March 18, 2025, will feature the master prints of William Eggleston, including his Los Alamos portfolio and the highly sought-after "Magnificent Seven" large-format dye transfer prints. These works, crafted by Stricherz and Malli at Color Vision Imaging Laboratory, represent the pinnacle of color photography, offering collectors a rare opportunity to acquire the definitive prints from one of the most influential printers of the past four decades. I sat down with Guy and Irene to discuss the rare and fleeting magic of the dye transfer process in anticipation of next Tuesday’s auction at Phillips.

OLIVER KUPPER: When you first started, there was this explosion of color happening in culture from pop art to fashion, photography, cars, manufacturing. All this was happening in a relatively short amount of time, and you were both instrumental in the mastering of dye transfer printing. What do you attribute to this explosion of color and culture?

GUY STRICHERZ: Most of the advertising in magazines — Life, Look, Vogue, Esquire — that was in color. The rest of the editorial was in black and white. Newspapers were all black and white. And in photography, black and white was considered the only way to go as a fine art photographer.

I guess it was color television that brought color. It just exploded in the magazines. Everything was in color: Newsweek, Time, all the magazines. Young photographers like myself graduating from college in 1974, we all knew the history of Stieglitz, Steichen, Adams, Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, all black and white. But people of my generation were all interested in color.

KUPPER: How did you two meet originally?

STRICHERZ: I opened the lab in 1981 with a friend of mine in New York City on Prince Street in Lower Manhattan. We offered limited editions to fine art photographers. I had a partner. He left, so I put an ad out in the New York Times.

IRENE MALLI: I had worked in a commercial dye transfer lab from the time I graduated from college. After two and a half years, I was kind of tired of printing advertising photos and commercial work was already starting to go digital because of digital retouching capabilities. So, I was getting ready to go to graduate school and do something different. My mother talked me into looking in the newspaper one more week for a new job. And there it was: Fine Art Dye Transfer Printer Wanted. And I thought, Well that might be fun. I’ll apply for that job. And here we are, thirty-five years later. So, we did meet in the workplace, and we ended up falling in love.

KUPPER: Who were some of the photographers that you grew up admiring?

MALLI: A lot of them were black and white photographers: Bruce Davidson, of course, Eggleston. My tastes are pretty wide ranging. Nan Goldin was very big when I was in college, but she was never a client. I never did Cibachrome. That was very big in the eighties. Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince were using that a lot.

KUPPER: Can you talk a little bit about the dye transfer process? What makes it so stunning?

STRICHERZ: The process is a color separation and assembly process. So you have a film original and then you make separation negatives. You separate the color of the original transparency in three layers: cyan, magenta, and yellow. You separate them using a red, green, and blue filter. 

The assembly part of it can be for metal plates, for offset lithography, for silkscreen, for gravure, or for intaglio. But in this case, we’re not making a metal plate or a silkscreen, we’re making a matrix. A matrix film is the film made by Kodak for dye transfer. The process is about 150 years old, it's the same process as the Technicolor movie process. That’s why when you see these old Technicolor movies – Gone with the Wind, Wizard of Oz, all the way up through Apocalypse Now – you see that brilliant color that has not faded. You see movies from the ’50s that are Kinemacolor, there’s been a severe fading frequently of the yellow, the magenta. None of the movie processes hold up like Technicolor..

Dye transfer could be lower case ‘d’ and lowercase ‘t,’ but when we’re talking about what we do, we use a capital ‘D’ and a capital ‘T’ because we use all original Kodak dye transfer materials. They stopped making them in 1992. They’re almost gone. We have just a little bit of material left, but we acquired a large stock of materials from Kodak when they stopped manufacturing them and we bought stock from several other labs that had materials left over. So we’ve had a large stockpile over time.

 
 

KUPPER: Is William Eggelston still using your printing services?

STRICHERZ: The last batch that we did was the last show at the David Zwirner Gallery [The Last Dyes, 2024]. 

MALLI: That’s his last project in dye transfer. It had some works from [William Eggelston’s] Guide. And it also had works from other projects, maybe ten or twelve from Outlands.

It’s the only analog color process that’s on fiber-based paper. The paper has no silver in it. It enables the paper to absorb a very large amount of dye, giving you an extremely wide range of tone and an extremely wide color palette. The dyes are not layered like they are in all other color processes – Cibachrome, Type C chromogenic, Ektacolor. It doesn’t matter which one you roll first. It has a lifespan of 500 years in dark storage, the longest of any color process. And it has excellent light stability.

KUPPER: How did you initially meet William Eggleston?

STRICHERZ: Through our friend Rose Shoshana at the Rose Gallery in Santa Monica.

MALLI: Might have been ‘95 or ‘97. The first big project we did was in ’98 for the Hasselblad Foundation when he got that award.

STRICHERZ: I discovered William Eggleston’s Guide book in 1976. I thought it was just tremendous. I had been photographing natural light outside, and the book really impressed me. I loved the way he roamed the world free and captured what was before his eye. 

MALLI: I’ve always appreciated his ability to find beauty in humble surroundings. Beautiful light can fall on anything. His knack for composition is always amazing.

KUPPER: Through this process that you’ve mastered, do you think you’ve allowed photographers to broaden their horizons in terms of what they’re able to achieve with their images?

STRICHERZ: Our goal has always been to assist the photographer in realizing their full vision that they had for that image, whatever that might be, to interpret their work in the way that they want us to interpret it. We always have a very personal relationship with the photographer in regards to what they’re visualizing. It can be very emotional.

MALLI: And it can just be personal taste. Especially if it involves the color red. The color red is the most difficult color to get exactly right. In other processes, you don’t have the same control as in dye transfer to get the exact shade of red that a photographer might want.

STRICHERZ: I will say this about dye transfer: you have an incredible amount of control while you’re making these prints.

KUPPER: I’ve spent time in the dark room. It’s not fun after a while getting things exactly right.

MALLI: You learn to not make mistakes. (laughs)

STRICHERZ: The first big project we did at the CVI in New York was Bruce Davidson’s Subway project. After that, we did some work for Irving Penn. We did quite a bit of work for the photographer Hiro, Evelyn Hofer, Arnold Newman, and Larry Burrows, who’s the greatest photographer of Vietnam. He died in a helicopter crash in Cambodia. We printed the Magnum retrospective in 1989. That was at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris at the International Center of Photography. We’ve worked for over sixty-five photographers. We did over a hundred images for Ernst Haas. Mitch Epstein – we did his project called Recreation. Mark Cohen, Graciela Iturbide, Zoe Leonard. We did a fair amount of work with Annie Leibovitz.

MALLI: Every photographer that we’ve worked with is a different artist with different preferences. It’s rewarding to be able to make a variety of different kinds of dye transfer prints. With Bruce Davidson’s Subway, his idea was to have it very intense, everything printed very dark, very saturated, very contrasting. And Zoe Leonard wanted everything to be very delicately printed with softer colors, except for the reds. Evelyn Hofer wanted a classical look to her work, very refined. It made it interesting over the years to do things a little differently for different photographers.

KUPPER: Do you have a personal favorite of William Eggleston’s?

STRICHERZ: I like the boy with the shopping cart.

 

William Eggleston
Memphis (supermarket boy with carts), 1965

 

KUPPER: That’s his first photograph in color.

MALLI: I like the girl on the grass with the brownie camera [“Untitled” c.1975]. I first saw a very small print of Green Shower [better known as “Memphis,” c.1971] when I was a teenager. I grew up in Connecticut, and I was visiting the Museum of Modern Art and I saw the photograph. That always made an impression on me. I had no clue at the time when I was 15 or 16 years old that someday I’d be printing that image.

KUPPER: The girl in the grass is amazing. Apparently she was zonked out on quaaludes in that image.

MALLI: I don’t think I knew that story until after we printed it. To me, there’s a quality of innocence in that. I don’t know if in today’s world, a young woman would be that open. I relate it to my own childhood of growing up in the country. We had a big field next door and we would go out there and lie on our backs, and look up at the sky, and have these long conversations. So, I view it as a more innocent picture. Someone being zonked out, it almost ruins it.

William Eggleston
Memphis, Tennessee (Marcia Hare), circa 1974

KUPPER: What do you think the future of color is in the digital age?

STRICHERZ: The problem with digital is there’s no veracity there. When you look at a classic photograph made with film you feel that it has captured something in the real world as it was. This is a picture of something from the real world that hasn’t been manipulated. Film photography definitely has a verisimilitude that is deeply embedded into the filmic process. Prior to digital, you didn’t have that many choices. You could have chromogenic type c print like Ektacolor, you could have a Cibachrome made, or you could have a dye transfer made, or maybe a Polaroid. Cibachrome was just too high contrast. It was fine for some people’s work like Cindy Sherman. The plastic base, a substrate, had a very high-gloss surface. It was extremely delicate and the type c chromogenic or Ektacolor print had a more muted tonal range. It was difficult to get a good blue sky and it didn’t have the same lustrous surface as a dye transfer. None of them could really compare to a dye transfer. One will notice a dye transfer side-by-side with a digital print right away. I think photography has changed. I don’t think that we look at photography in the same way that we did in the past.

The dye transfer print has an intrinsic value. It has substance. The paper is heavier than all the papers used for digital inkjet prints. When you pick it up, you can hold it like this. It’s an object of art.

 

Guy Stricherz and Irene Malli, circa 1994

 

Energy From The Underground: An Interview of Mikio Sakabe

Mikio Sakabe is a designer, a teacher, and an experimenter. He runs two labels, MIKIOSAKABE and the footwear brand grounds, creating style that comes to life from Tokyo to the world. He is also a mentor for young Japanese designers, founding MeSchool, a fashion school that provides the same education opportunities in Japan that have been historically limited to Europe. 


interview by Abraham Chabon


In a cold, concrete garage, buried behind metal fences and dusty staircases dimly lit by glowing exit signs, a crowd gathered on thin benches. Gold and silver emergency blankets distributed upon entry caught and refracted the light from camera flashes and the fluorescent whites that beamed from above. With the shrieks of a piano and the hums of a deep bass, the grounds Fall/Winter 25-26 show began.

grounds is known for its avant-garde and vibrant designs. Shoe’s understated uppers burst into large, cloud-like soles — a rejection of expectations and mass-market footwear. Sakabe has said he wants to “defy gravity.” With grounds, this has two meanings: the inflated, bubbling soles let the wearer float above roads and floors, but in fashion, gravity is not only physical, gravity is the pull of trends, the temptation to do what’s expected. Sakabe resists this, breaking new ground.

Sakabe continues his experimentation with his latest collection by taking the brand in a new direction. Previously, grounds could be best described as playful, fantastical. But in that sub-level garage the collection was industrial, festering, wonderfully unconventional, and pushing the limits of footwear. Styled by Betsy Johnson, the models began to march down the runway. The shoes where violently oversized, rubber layered on rubber, shoe melting with shoe, the bulbous clouds signature to grounds’ designs erupted out from under thin socks. Cables hung off from shoes like bungie cords wrapped around luggage. Leg warmers scrunched onto sneakers, and padded high socks wrapped around legs like medieval armor. There where large rubber soles like the treads on a tank, and some toe boxes curled upwards like a jester's boots.

The clothes were just as unconventional. Flowing wide legs spilled onto shoes, shoulder pads jutted dramatically from coats. Leather gloves, stacked belts, and oversized sunglasses adorned models with matted hair. Everything was unusual, dark — a collision of industrial and organic — yet, true to Sakabe’s touch, remarkably fun.

I caught up with Sakabe after the show for an interview.

ABRAHAM CHABON: How do you continue to innovate and push boundaries in an industry that not only constantly changes, but changes so quickly?

MIKIO SAKABE: I never start with the design of the shoes or clothes, I think about what will be the next experience, what's the future of the human being, what can be different, what will become interesting, what will be humor in the future.

CHABON: Previously you experimented with 3D printed shoes and clothes. With this collection, you continue this DNA of experimentation with materials. What draws you to that?

SAKABE: For me, the process of design is experimentation, not only using the existing ways of the making. I want to be an experimenter. If we try new methods then we can make new types of shoes. 

 
 

CHABON: How is the process of designing footwear different from designing clothing? 

SAKABE: I try to put away that relationship. I think I am a little bit of an architect. An architect of fashion, both shoes and clothes.

CHABON: This collection is different from things you've done before. What were your motivations for moving in this direction? 

SAKABE: I want to be always changing. With this, I just wanted to make more. More movement, more power, energy from the underground. That was a new feeling I wanted to try. 

CHABON: How do you balance the things you are working on and continue to put your best effort into everything? 

SAKABE: Even busy people can be more busy. There is much more I want to be busy with. 

CHABON: You talk about learning from others, from Walter Van Bierendock to everyday people you see in the street, how do you find inspiration?

SAKABE: I'm inspired by everything, not only fashion, I am inspired by an ordinary day. 

 
 

CHABON: What role did Betsy Johnson play for you as a collaborator? 

SAKABE: So much, because she has a really different way to design. So, it was very exciting because I cannot be like her. I want surprises, I surprised her, and she would surprise me.

CHABON: At MeSchool you are a teacher and a mentor, do you think you have learned from your students as well?

SAKABE: Yes, so much. It is 50/50. I learn as much as I teach. Young people can show you new ways to look at things, they know the world differently, they can show you new ways to know fashion.

CHABON: Is there anything you want to talk about with this collection, things you want people to know? 

SAKABE: I don't want to tell things. I hope people feel something from it, and then they will know what it means. 

 
 

Marie vs. The Machine: An Interview of Marie Davidson

Photo credit: Nadine Fraczkowski


interview by Karly Quadros

In Foucault’s landmark 1975 book Discipline and Punish, he introduced the metaphor of the ‘panopticon,’ a hypothetical prison in which the prisoners are being surveilled at all times while the guards remain unseen in a central tower. Foucault writes, “The panopticon exemplifies the power dynamics present in modern institutions, where individuals are subjected to surveillance and discipline, leading to self-regulation and conformity.” With the advent of smart phones, social media, the sale of personal data, and large language models, the panopticon has endured as a metaphor for our times when it feels as though nothing is ever truly private.

Marie Davidson is throwing a rave in the panopticon’s tower.

With her new record City of Clowns, out today on Soulwax’s Deewee imprint, Davidson shifts her sardonic satire away from the club and towards Big Tech. Inspired by Shoshana Zuboff’s 2019 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Davidson brings her signature hypnotic deadpan to ten songs skewering tech’s encroachment into our daily lives. 

There’s “Demolition” where she appropriates the voice of tech companies that extract personal data for profit. She sounds like a hungry vampire when she sings, “I’ve got to know you / inside and out” and, more directly, “I don’t want your cash anymore / all I want is you / I want your data, baby.” In “Statistical Modeling,” a robotic drone intones calmly over a cold electro beat. Then there’s “Y.A.A.M.” (that’s short for “your asses are mine” for all those following at home.) Inspired by a condescending email Davidson received regarding the business side of the music industry, she penned the propulsive club track to get it through our thick skulls and stiff bodies that it’s not about a brand or a sponsored post – it’s about the music. “Entrepreneurs and producers and freelancers to managers / the whole wide world of bravados, upset liars, and insiders / Give me passion, give me more, I want your asses on the floor,” she sings.

Picking up where her sweat-it-out anthem and previous Soulwax collaboration “Work It” left off, Davidson’s music is never overwrought or heavy handed. Her writing is terse, the beats tensely coiled. She’s cool headed and funny. The artist, she says, is a “sexy clown,” at once meant to entertain and critique. Perhaps it’s no surprise then that she is ambivalent to technology (Davidson didn’t own a laptop until 2016.) She’s part harbinger, part siren, here to remind us of that most important rule of online life: if you’re getting it for free, you are the product.

KARLY QUADROS: ‘Sexy clown’ is such an evocative concept. I can’t tell if it’s an insult or a compliment. Where did it come from?

MARIE DAVIDSON:  You get the vibe. It's an insult and a compliment at the same time. It portrays how I felt when I was writing the song, and it mirrors my experience of being a woman entertainer. 

QUADROS: So you're the sexy clown. 

DAVIDSON: I'm the sexy clown. But there are other sexy clowns in this world. The clown is the person that stands a bit on the side, on the fringe of society. A person who has the power to question the status quo. The clown is someone that can’t be ridiculed. In Tarot cards, within the position of the clown, you have the trickster. In French, the name of the card is ‘fou,’ It has this double entendre. ‘Are you a fou?’ in French means, ‘Are you crazy?’

QUADROS: It’s like in medieval times the concept of ‘jester’s privilege.’ The jester was the only one who could criticize the king but only because he himself was foolish.

DAVIDSON: And at the risk of getting your head cut off if you were not found funny!  It comes back to the role of an artist these days. It’s to entertain people and question, criticize. But if what you do is not well perceived you'll be left out. 

QUADROS: So who's the king?

DAVIDSON: The king for me is the structures of power, whether it's in branding or in politics, politicians, spokespeople, influencers. The king is ever evolving, but the king is always the money, right? If you want to know who's the king, you have to follow the money. 

QUADROS: That’s often how I see your work. You’re a very funny critic of capitalism, the commercialization of nightlife, and club culture, especially in 2016’s Adieux Au Dancefloor. Do you see this album as a kind of sequel?

DAVIDSON: It’s a continuation, but I wouldn’t say it’s a sequel. It’s in the same journey. With this album, I’m really stepping out of just questioning club culture, and I’m questioning the world we live in, especially technology and politics.

QUADROS: The visuals you have for “Demolition” are fascinating. They incorporate AI, right?

DAVIDSON:  They're made by an artist named Christopher King. He’s a really good musician, but he does AI art under the moniker of Total Emotional Awareness.

Pierre [Guerineau, Davidson’s husband], who is a co-producer on the record, and I worked with Chris a few times in our lives before. He's done a music video for our project called Essai Pas back in 2018 for our album, New Path.

This time we asked him to work with AI because the song “Demolition” talks about Big Tech and surveillance capitalism and what happens with the collection of our data and eventually the analysis of our data to predict behavior and tailor our taste and our will and, in the end, our decision-making in general.

We decided to go for AI art because it showed this very well. In the song the voice I am doing is not Marie. It's the voice of tech and surveillance capitalism. I'm voicing the people who own the AI, the AI itself and the algorithm. I'm voicing the culture of data accumulation. Nothing else could have shown this better than AI art. 

When you use the term ‘art,’ it means that there's a human interaction to it. AI itself cannot do art on its own. It can produce an image, but to make art, it needs an aesthetic decision-maker, which has to be a human. First I gave Chris some keywords that were based on my lyrics, but also my reflections on the world right now, and he gave that to the AI algorithm. Then it gave back something and we said, “Okay, that's interesting, but it's not quite it.” And then we gave some more directions to Chris, so he would feed his algorithm. So it really questions, what is art? Who did it, the AI or the human? It was a nice reversal of what I'm talking about in “Demolition” in which we took control for this moment with the technology to make visuals for our music. 

QUADROS: Did you use AI for the music itself?

DAVIDSON: No, no, not at all. That has to be authentic still.

For me I'm very reluctant to use AI for my music, but I understand why people do it and I'm really not against it. I'm just not interested because we have so much technology everywhere right now. If, in my music making, I can rely only on human decisions, I'm happy. 

QUADROS: As much as you write about technology, you seem to still really hold close to authenticity as an ideal.

DAVIDSON:  I'm not a big tech person in general. Even in my music, I make most of my music on hardware, and then I work with co-producers in Ableton, with Pierre, and then at Deewee with David and Steph working in ProTools.

QUADROS: Is it true that you didn’t get a laptop until 2016?

DAVIDSON: Yeah, it’s true. I’m just a bit old school when it comes to that.

I’m not old school in all spheres of my life, but I’m just not naturally attracted to new technologies. I use Instagram for my career. I dislike it, but I think I use it well.

In 2024, I started a newsletter to come back to the medium of writing long form because I was frustrated with the short form, fast, instant gratification models of social media, especially Meta. I don’t use TikTok, so I don’t really know how it works. I’ve seen it on some friends’ phones. It looks too fast for me. It’s very short, and I’m a long form person.

QUADROS: How’s the newsletter been? Has it changed the way that you write or connect with your audience?

DAVIDSON: It’s improving my writing. I do it because I love writing. And I write in English, which is my second language. There’s an extra challenge there, but it helps me improve my vocabulary. I love language, and it’s really pushing me to look at words in a new way.

QUADROS: Can you tell me about the beginnings of City of Clowns? What is your writing process like?

DAVIDSON: For me, it was not an intent to return to club music, but an intent to return to making electronic music on my own and with other people. There’s only two tracks that can truly be called club tracks: “Contrarian” and “Statistical Modeling,” which is my take on electro. I’d say “Fun Times” and “Sexy Clown” are electronic pop music. They have verses and choruses. The opening [“Validations Weight”] and the closer [“Unknowing”] are much more album-oriented.

QUADROS: When you’re writing, do you start with the music or the words?

DAVIDSON: It goes both ways. When I started, I was reading this book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. I was going back slowly to making my own music. I had a few tracks but no straight direction. I was reading the book on a trip to Europe, vacation not work, and I read a lot on the plane coming back to Montreal. I was like, this is really inspiring. It’s really alarming. It’s a really juicy subject. It’s important that people get more awareness about this. It’s really when I got into reading this book that I had the drive to make an album. 

QUADROS: That book is interesting because it’s not just about what these Big Tech companies and the government do to us, but also how people internalize surveillance and start to surveil each other. That’s something that really comes across in your music – people that are clout chasers or who make art that’s more generic because they want it to be more appealing on social media.

DAVIDSON: “Y.A.A.M.” talks a bit about this. Not only have people internalized this, but a lot of people have not internalized it – it’s just become a part of their lives and they have integrated it without acknowledging it. And it dictates the way they evolve and their decision making, but they’re not even aware. 

We are artists. You’re a writer. You’re probably an artist yourself or in touch with art. We’re in a  portion of society still used to generating our own thinking and being critical. I think there’s a lot of people who aren’t even aware that this has reshaped our society. They’re partaking, like “it’s great! It’s convenient. Google, tell me where to go. Siri, answer my question.”

And it just makes us lazier. There’s this obsession with convenience and progress. Everything’s always justified with progress. And if you’re not partaking, you’re an idiot because you’re just staying backwards. You’re stuck in the past. Well, says who? What is actual progress? It frees us from some specific tasks, but what’s the trade off? If the trade off is actually more expensive than the satisfaction of not doing the task, is it really progress? Are we really progressing as a species or are we getting lazier and losing our ability to reflect and act on our own will?

QUADROS: We get lazier, but we also lose the satisfying parts of our lives and our jobs too. It’s obviously a problem with journalism but with creative fields as well.

DAVIDSON: To be a musician now, you have to be an influencer. You have to be a model, an actress, a comedian, a spokesperson for this cause. Just being a musician nowadays doesn’t work. You’re doing music, so what? What’s your brand? What’s your angle?

QUADROS: How do you deal with that?

DAVIDSON: I’m a creative person, so I don’t mind being a lot of things, but I really hate the branding around it. I hate the feeling that I have to be a content provider. All the entities in the music industry, they will ask you for content, like the music itself is not content anymore. You have to create content if you want your music to be heard.

QUADROS: I think one of the reasons why people continue to pay for Spotify or scroll through TikTok is because they feel trapped by their pleasures. And that seems to be a cycle of modern life that you write into a lot: binge and purge, work and then burnout.

DAVIDSON: They’re trapped by their need for things to be convenient. The culture is promoting a very paternalizing thing, that you need to be taken charge of. People feel very vulnerable to make up their own minds, to be creative and come up with their own ideas of how to entertain themselves and how to fill time.

QUADROS: Do you think you’ve found a way out of this problem?

DAVIDSON: I read a lot and write. After dinner, I don’t look at screens. I still love watching movies, but I’ll watch it before I eat. I might reply to a text message, especially if it’s not about work, like to a friend or my parents or loved ones, but I don’t work after dinner. I don’t partake in screen interactions, so no movies, no scrolling, social media, no emails. If I listen to music, I make the screen black. 

We don’t all have the same needs and the same urgencies, but I think as humankind, we need to decide for ourselves what we want and what we don’t want and cultivate critical thinking. The biggest dangers of social media and the Internet is the polarization and the increasing erasure of facts. Nobody knows what the truth is anymore, which creates a climate of fear, angst, and violence, in which a very small number of powerful people are benefiting and starting to rewrite what democracy is. That’s extremely alarming. So whether you’re into club culture or not, whether you use AI or not, the bottom line is, as humankind, we need to keep nurturing critical thinking.


City of Clowns is out today on Deewee Records.

The Long Journey Home: An Interview of Composer Sbusiso Shozi and Fondation Cartier Artistic Director Isabelle Gaudefroy

Picture © Zivanai Matangi

intro by Karly Quadros
interview by Oliver Kupper

Before judging someone, walk a mile in their shoes.

It’s an age-old adage. Our shoes carry the weight of our daily lives, our stories, our hardships. They represent the wear and tear of our history but also the tenacity and possibilities of new paths forward. 

For writer, composer, and musical director Sbusiso Shozi, shoes are a way to explore the many pathways of the African diaspora. Blending traditional South African musicality, oral tradition, and contemporary instrumentation, he’s mounting a new performance, African Exodus, for the Centre for the Less Good Idea, in collaboration with Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. 

Founded in 2016 in Johannesburg, South Africa, the Centre for the Less Good Idea is an incubator for experimental and cross-disciplinary art. The “less good idea” is the one that is more marginal, more daring and more ripe for invention and discovery. It also has to do with resourcefulness; a Sechuana proverb advises that ‘when a good doctor won’t cure you, find the less good doctor.’ The Centre for the Less Good Idea is the first organization to be hosted in residence by the Fondation Cartier, beginning with a week-long takeover of Fondation Cartier’s performance spaces in Paris in May 2024. African Exodus continues that partnership at the Perelman Performance Center in New York City, running from February 27 to March 2.

Autre editor-in-chief Oliver Kupper sat down with Sbusiso Shozi and Fondation Cartier artistic director Isabelle Gaudefroy to discuss performance and the two organizations’ ongoing partnership.

OLIVER KUPPER: How did you discover The Centre for the Less Good Idea, and how did your partnership come to be?

ISABELLE GAUDEFROY: Melanie Alves de Sousa, performing art curator at the Fondation, went to see a performance from some of the Centre for the Less Good Idea’s artists in Berlin. Later, William Kentridge and Bronwyn Lace, the co-founders of The Centre, came to visit our space and we discussed the possibility of hosting the Centre in residence for a week of performances and workshops at the Fondation in Paris.

I have to say that our trip to Johannesburg, on the occasion of Season 10 at the Centre — celebrating years of collaborative, experimental, and interdisciplinary work – was a life-changing experience. It truly convinced us of the importance of showing the creativity, vitality, and talent of this group of artists. Through the residency in Paris, and now this new step in New York City at the Perelman Performing Arts Center, we hope the public will experience The Centre’s creative process firsthand.

KUPPER: Sbusiso, you explore the intersection of music, language, and culture. How do you approach blending traditional African sounds with contemporary influences?

SBUSISO SHOZI: Blending traditional African sounds with contemporary influence requires one’s understanding of the context where the traditional music is performed. African music performance emphasizes the functionality, language tonality, and instrumentation. I compose music in its purest form, and then I get to explore contemporary influences such as vocal four-part harmonies for decoration. However, it depends on the results of such explorations whether it holds and makes sense or not.

KUPPER: What role does storytelling play in your compositions, and how do you translate narratives into sound?

SHOZI: Storytelling in African music is a tradition that has been in practice for many years and is still partly used in rural areas today. This tradition serves as an educational and entertainment tool in Africa. Grandmothers and grandfathers would be surrounded by their grandchildren and perform their storytelling usually accompanied by songs to keep the listeners entertained or by putting an emphasis on the educational element, which is easily absorbed when there is a song reference. 

My compositions are very much influenced by such songs, and it is through these songs where we receive some sort of an archived music kept in its truest form from older generations. I then sample such sound into my own compositions. I sometimes translate my lyrics into any African language and add indigenous instruments for enhancements. This brings richness in the music and connects people of different ethnicities.

KUPPER: You use shoes as a symbol for migration but also as tools, props, and percussive instruments. Can you talk a little bit about the metaphor of shoes?

SHOZI: Shoes symbolize paths, directions, developments, and collapses in African Exodus. Their percussive usage also symbolizes the journey – people walking in different rhythms and paces throughout the years of human existence. They are soul bearers of the wearer, as they have experienced the hardships, wealth, tears, blood, and sweat of the wearer. All human experiences are carried on the shoes. 

When people migrate they are most likely wearing shoes to protect their feet from the journey. However, in African Exodus, we ask for a deeper connectedness – a performer’s and audience’s introspection about one’s personal life experiences. The Transatlantic slave period has been another form of migration. Some Africans in the diaspora have been trying to connect with their bloodline, but the question is, what happens when research and history fail us? We then need to search from within, and this is what the music and usage of shoes in African Exodus aims to evoke.

KUPPER: What do you think makes South African theater unique on the global stage?

SHOZI: South African theatre has evolved tremendously through the years, and it has reached the point where we’re not only writing fictional stories or true life events, we’re creating work that demands emotional involvement and interpretation from both the performers and the audience. Even musical theatre works somehow break away from the usual Western musical patterns and are more deeply invested in following the emotional and physical movements of an actor, giving the sense that a performer becomes a conductor and the music responds. 

South Africa is a multilingual society, therefore we have a wide range of options for selection in terms of culture and languages during the creative process, leading to a more nuanced, layered performance.

KUPPER: As the Artistic Director of the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain that is part of a French institution, how do you see your responsibility now and in the future? How do you contend with the zeitgeist?

GAUDEFROY: Our purpose is to accompany artists in their project and foster new ideas and initiatives, independently from the zeitgeist. We endeavor to work collaboratively with artists, as we believe they can provide us with new perspectives and outlooks on the world. We rely on their visions to transform specific modes of expression into projects which can be shared widely, enhancing what we have in common rather than what divides us. There is no better tool for this than art. 

KUPPER: Sbusiso, from Durban to international platforms, how has your journey influenced your artistic identity?

SHOZI: I was born in Durban, a city located in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, however, I grew up in rural areas. My father was a prominent member in the community as he was a leader of Amabutho [Regiments/ Warriours], leading them in songs and traditional dance, a position called IGOSA. This upbringing shaped my musical fondness and shaped my taste in more traditional forms of music. My compositions align with tradition, and sometimes I juxtapose them with contemporary influences in order to appeal to international audiences. In African Exodus I went beyond my voice’s comfort zone as its sound transgresses South African borders.

KUPPER: How do you see African music evolving in the next decade, and what role do you want to play in that evolution?

SHOZI: I would like to see the evolution of African music and creativity without hierarchical order, comparisons, superiority and inferiority – music that is understood in its truest form without exotic stereotypes. It’s work like African Exodus that resonates and advocates for better humanity (Ubuntu), work that calls for introspection and healing of the soul. Oral tradition is not enough as some information could be lost through the years. As we live in digital times, I would like to see our works being documented and archived for future reference.

KUPPER: How do you see the relationship between The Centre and the Fondation Cartier continue from here? 

GAUDEFROY: Partnering with the Perelman Performing Arts Center in New York City is a unique opportunity for us to connect with New York’s artists and audiences, all the while supporting independent thought and creative research embodied by The Centre for the Less Good Idea. The North American debut of African Exodus in New York is a continuation of the relationship between the Fondation Cartier and The Centre, following the Centre’s May 2024 residency at the Fondation in Paris.

African Exodus will be performed as the Perelman Performance Center in New York City from February 27 to March 2.

Everything She Touches Turns to Gold: an Interview of Colette Lumiere

interview by Karly Quadros

Fuck art, let’s dance.

It’s the attitude that Colette Lumiere had become known for, immortalized in a mural that she painted on the wall of iconic ’70s downtown New York nightclub and art scene haunt Danceteria. She’s celebrated for her bold personas and expansive multimedia projects from street art to installations to fashion collaborations, yet her later evolutions have received less attention. A new show at Company Gallery, Everything She Touches Turns to Gold, running until March 1, explores the artist’s career in the ’80s as she ventured off to Berlin under the guise of a new persona, the mysterious Mata Hari and the Stolen Potatoes.

Lumiere always had a surprisingly contemporary attitude toward blurring the boundaries between the public and the private, between art and commerce. She began by painting cryptic sigils on the SoHo pavement at night and has shown art everywhere from the MoMA to Fiorucci shop windows to German nunneries to nightclubs. Her longest running piece was a 24/7 installation in her own apartment, stuffed from floor to ceiling with champagne and blush-ruched fabrics, a polymorphous punk rock Versailles. Lumiere took that louche crinkling of fabric from her Living Environment and translated it into harlequin frocks that she wore like a uniform. Her influence reverberates widely from Vivienne Westwood and Madonna’s ragged, spunky takes on period clothing to the elaborately staged personas of Cindy Sherman and Nadia Lee Cohen.

Growing frustrated with the limitations put on a young female artist, in 1978 Lumiere staged her own death in a performance at the Whitney Museum. She emerged a few days later at PS1 Contemporary Art Center, beginning an ongoing dynasty of artistic personas and eras. Everything She Touches Turns to Gold features the artist’s under-celebrated paintings, mostly from the early ’80s, “metaphysical portraits” exploring herself, her friends, and the subconscious. While her ’70s works recall historical reclining nudes including staged photos and durational performances in which she napped in poses modeled after classical paintings such as Manet’s Olympia. Her Berlin period, instead, foregrounded motion. The figures in her portraits wave. They evade. They drift and dream and run away.

I recently met up with Lumiere at Company Gallery to explore the new collection. Now in her  seventies, Lumiere is as true to herself as ever in a ruffled white blouse beneath a hot pink Victorian riding coat. Tunisian-born and French-raised, her accent is caught somewhere between her native French and a dry German lilt. We spoke about Berlin before the wall came down, resisting categorization, and, of course, potatoes.

KARLY QUADROS:  I wanted to focus on the gallery show because it covers this specific period of time: Berlin in the ’80s. Rather than focusing on performances and living spaces, this one is much more concerned with visual art and paintings. A lot of what is written about you concerns a smaller period of time: a lot of your ’70s work, your show at the Whitney where you killed your first persona. But there's still several decades of artwork after that.

COLETTE LUMIERE:  Interesting how people focus on one thing to describe you. They get set.

I really began as a painter. But it wasn't long before I got restless. It was in the air. I was very naïve, and I wasn't coming from Yale or whatever. I was coming from nowhere, actually. It was before street art became popular. There was a bar on Spring Street where I did a lot of my graffiti work. I always had an accomplice, a friend, a girlfriend or somebody helping me out, watching for the police

Simultaneously, I was creating the environments that I lived in. I got intrigued with using space in a different way. This was a time where art changed completely, and unconsciously, I was picking up on that.

I used to go to the nightclubs. It was at Max's Kansas City. No place like it ever again.

The people hanging out there were all famous artists. They were [Colette adopts a macho stance] men, and I was a young girl and I usually had another young girl with me. But one night I met [land artist Robert] Smithson, and we had a long conversation. I said I had learned about him and we were doing the same thing. I think he was rolling his eyes. He had other ideas in mind, but we took him to my place, which was near where he lived and he walked in my environment and then he sobered up. We gave him a cup of coffee, and we talked about art. And from then on, he introduced me to everyone. Richard Serra, Carl Andre. That was my beginning.

QUADROS:  Why did you decide to go to Berlin?

LUMIERE:  Sometimes I just like to give up. Surrender. You always want to plan your life, and then sometimes I find it's best to surrender.

So, I was really at that stage of my life, where my Living Environment had come to an end. I think I was ready to be dismantled. I lived in an artwork that was ongoing. It was very extreme, and I was part of that artwork. And there was another element, which was my landlord, who tried to throw me out from the beginning [laughs]. So it was coming to a climax. And then I get this invitation to go to Berlin. How convenient! 

I don't know why I'm talking about my past again. This is really a problem I've noticed. But this show is Mata Hari. We're talking the ’80s! Berlin was a new beginning. 

QUADROS: Who is Mata Hari the persona?

LUMIERE:  Actually, I didn't know at all about Mata Hari the person when I chose that name. The reason I chose Mata Hari was because I knew she was a spy… You had this image. The Berlin Wall was not that far away.

None of my personas are actually about the name. A lot of people think Olympia, it's Olympia from Manet, Justine, it's de Sade, but none of them are. Of course Mata Hari has something to do with the name, but I had to make something new out of her. So, it became Mata Hari and the Stolen Potatoes. It was the potatoes because it was the food for Germany. Then stolen made it more mysterious, dangerous. That's what I felt Berlin would be like. I would take pictures of myself, running like somebody was going to catch me, like the police or the Gestapo.

I got into [the show’s videos] because it's really old footage. One of them was staged at the opera where I did a music video that was interrupted by the police. I have a tendency to do things I should not do for the sake of art, of course, because I'm obsessed. I had the approval of the director who I had done sets and costumes for at the Berlin Opera.

We were just starting to rehearse. It was a potato song, which is in the show as well. It was called, “Did You Eat?” Well, apparently that was not legal. And everybody came out from the kitchen, from the offices. “What is going on here?” And here I am doing my music video rehearsing. We were just at the beginning, and the police came. And I said, “You're not gonna stop this.” I said to everybody working with the band, “Let's just go. Let's just finish it.” At the end, my wig is like half down. People don't know this when they see the video.

QUADROS: What was the Berlin art community like?

LUMIERE: At the beginning there was a lot of resistance for me, and there usually is. I've noticed this everywhere I go. First of all, I'm a foreigner. And number two, it was the height of the wild painters, the Berlin guys – Lüpertz and Rainer Fetting. It was a whole crew of them. They were very macho, and they ruled the scene. They were very serious, and they drank a lot, and they were very depressed. And here I am, bringing my art to a nightclub. I took a boyfriend's Volkswagen and I painted it and put the potatoes in. I arrived in the Volkswagen, and I did an installation in the nightclub they all went to. It was called, There's a New Girl in Town.

This German art magazine came out with a story that art in the nightclubs is what's happening. In New York, there was Palladium. It was where all the big artists like Schnabel, Clemente, Keith Haring, Basquiat, and Colette [went], but Colette was on her own always. So, it explained how I kind of started that way back before in Danceteria. Then they were respectful. Then I won them over, and they were nice to me.

QUADROS: Can you speak a little about the Silk to Marble series? Many things come up for me: the seductress, a statue of Venus, a nun, decommissioned artwork covered in a sheet, perhaps even a dead body covered in a sheet.

LUMIERE:  Well, you just described it. It's not that I'm against high tech or having a big budget, but usually I don't have either available. So I'm very good at transforming material. It was an evening at home bored and I'm leaving, [so I said] “Let's make some art!” I had this one sheet. It was very organic. Organic is a big word in my work. 

They were first exhibited in Berlin, in the house, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, which was beautiful because it was a nunnery, so it had these oval religious arches, white walls. It was perfect for the series. And then out of nowhere at the opening, I appeared behind one of the columns way up – the ceilings were unbelievably high – and there was special music composed for that performance.

QUADROS: A lot of your performance work is inspired by art history and the canon, often subverting or playing with classical images. But these “metaphysical portraits” seem to come from somewhere else entirely. What can the world of dreaming offer us?

LUMIERE:  My art was trying to reach the invisible, the unknown. That's what I'm reaching out for… I don't care what the trend is… I don't like trends because trends are things that happen and leave, and I'm interested in the eternal. Artists – I guess they’re called visionaries – they follow that line, and they're mystical in a way. I try to stay away from describing myself as that, but that's what interested me from the beginning: the metaphysics, magic, the mystery of life and art. I'm always seeking for another dimension. That's what my soul is looking for, and whatever way I can manifest it, whether it's canvas or performance, that's my goal.

The feminine influence is a big thing too. Now it's much easier for women, but at the time I was doing it, my work was labeled feminine, like it was an insult. Even the women were insulted by me. Like I was an insult. Because I impressed my femininity in my paintings and the way I dressed. I always have fun anyway. That's another thing. Fun is very important. 

QUADROS: You like to build the whole world.  It can't just stay in the gallery. It has to be in the streets, and in the club, and in the bedroom. 

LUMIERE: In the bedroom, yes!

QUADROS: Were you part of the punks?

LUMIERE: Oh yeah, of course. But I also wasn’t. I was never a part of anything is what I’m trying to tell you. In the clubs it was so cool to be mean! [Colette adopts a snarl and a tough pose.] I like punk, but I don’t like it when it goes in a very negative direction. So I created my own thing, which was a contradiction. I added the Victorian look, the soft look, and mixed it up with the tough look because it was only black, black, black.

QUADROS: It’s interesting because Victorian fashion is very confined and restricted, like a corset. But your clothing is much lighter and more playful.

LUMIERE: Well by 1980, I was getting restless to get rid of my Environment, but I wasn’t really ready. So, I started wearing it. It was an experiment in walking architecture. The whole idea was to use space in a different way.

I work very intuitively and later, I get what I meant, you know? I think intuition has its own intelligence. We live in a culture where intellect is so celebrated, not that that doesn’t have its role. For me, it’s always been about the unity of the mind, body, and the emotions. There’s a cerebral part of my work. There’s an emotional quality. I think this show reflects that. 

QUADROS: Do you think you can explore something with painting that you can’t reach with performance or fashion or music?

LUMIERE: I love it and I don’t love it. I’m a loner, really. I like my private life. But it’s a contradiction because I also like to have large audiences and speak to lots of people. Painters are usually by themselves. With fashion and with music and with all of the other parts, I’d probably do a lot more, but I don’t want to because this is my first love. Being who I am and on my own time, that’s me.

QUADROS: I do think you were forward-thinking being so multidisciplinary. Nowadays, it’s so hard for people to make a living doing just one thing. So you see artists that collaborate with fashion designers or build window displays, all the things you used to do.

LUMIERE: I was always interested in pushing that line between art and commerce. And now it’s merged. And I don’t approve of that. But I pushed it.

QUADROS: Do you feel responsible for the people you’ve influenced?

LUMIERE: No, because in the end it’s not me. But it is interesting.


Everything She Touches Turns to Gold is on view through March 1 @ Company Gallery in New York City at 145 Elizabeth St.

The Mythology of the American West: An Interview of Sol Summers

 

Image courtesy of Untitled and Sol Summers.

 


interview by Oliver Kupper
intro by Mia Milosevic


Experimenting with concepts of extremism, Sol Summers manifests the mythology of the American West in a way that refuses to compromise its own convictions. Channeling the human propensity to accept the bizarre without further questioning, Summers fuses synthetic pigments into his work which traditional landscape paintings would fervently exclude. Using the desert as a respite from the entrapments of capitalist requirements–ambition, success, renown–Summers opens up a space for honest introspection and lends a sincere sense of dignity to solitude. His admiration of Russian Realism fuses seamlessly into his appreciation for the cactus–according to Summers, limitation, hardship, and scarcity are truly fertile grounds for creativity. Sol Summers will bring his surrealist manifestations of nature to Untitled Art in Miami this December.

KUPPER: The American West is as instantly iconic as it is mysterious—when did you become interested in these magical landscapes and why?

SUMMERS: Honestly, I just saw something visually interesting in it at first. Looking back, I can trace all these threads that led me to this body of work, but at the time, I probably would’ve just told you it looked interesting to paint. It’s like Agnes Martin said: “From music, people accept pure emotion, but from art, they demand explanation.” I try to resist that need for explanation in my own work. Just trust my instincts, follow what feels exciting to me. Something about the desert just drew me in. I try my best not to overthink that. Of course, I do think about it–a lot–but I know all that thinking is just retroactive justification for some mysterious force that moved me in the first place. So the most honest answer is: I don’t know why. The slightly less honest answer–

I think my fascination with the desert was something that quietly built up over time. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, the desert wasn’t an environment I was really exposed to. But when I was a kid, my grandmother gave me this huge cactus, and it was kind of like my pet. The dog belonged to my brother, but the cactus? That was mine. Later, when my dad moved out to Nevada, I started spending more time there, and it was my first real experience of the desert. Then in 2017, I visited the desert botanical garden at the Huntington Gardens in Los Angeles, and it floored me. I felt like I was seeing nature’s creativity pushed to the edge. The plants were just really visually bizarre in a way that made me feel like I had to try and paint them. It looked like a challenge. As an artist you kind of end up looking at the world that way. Other people might be appreciating a sunset while you just mutter, “Wow that would be a crazy painting” or, “That’s better than anything I could ever paint” or something. 

KUPPER: You have painted notorious cult leaders like Jim Jones and Osama bin Laden. In your mind, is there any thread that connects the mythology of the American west and the circumstances that give rise to men like Jim Jones and Osama bin Laden?

SUMMERS: The American West has always felt like the final frontier of myths—a place of extremes that pulls in visionaries, outcasts, and seekers looking for something at the edge of civilization. The desert is a place that embodies the spirit of self-reliance, introspection, and spiritual refinement—a metaphorical and literal "edge" where beliefs can be honed or distorted. It's interesting that so many of the world’s spiritual traditions originated in deserts, places that strip everything away and force you into a kind of reckoning.

One of the first paintings that truly moved me was Kramskoy’s Christ in the Desert, and that image has stayed with me–a figure alone in an unforgiving landscape, confronting something elemental within himself. To me, that’s what the desert embodies. It’s where the soul is tested, and it’s easy to see how convictions, taken too far, can blur into delusion. That’s what figures like Jim Jones or Bin Laden represent for me–the way that convictions can gradually distort into something dangerous. No one ever thinks they’re the villain; it happens so gradually, each compromise just a bit closer to a line you no longer see.

In these paintings, that’s the thread I’m pulling on—the need for honest introspection, that place where you can listen to the quiet voice of conscience. As an artist, I feel this necessity, too. You start out with certain ideals, but the pressure to survive and succeed can wear down even the strongest convictions. The need to make money, to appease the market, can gradually corrupt your soul. When you're 16 or 17 you might excoriate Koons for having studio assistants make his work. But before you know it, you're 30 and you're printing your paintings on canvas or something. I dunno. I just never want to wake up and realize I’ve compromised my values without even noticing. So the desert is a symbolic place to reconnect with what I believe in.

KUPPER: It is mentioned that you were inspired by the expansive American landscapes of Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Edwin Church—how did you discover their work, and can landscape painting become fresh and new in the 21st century?

SUMMERS: I’ve loved those painters since I was a kid. I’d stand in front of their work in museums, absolutely stunned. Their paintings are beautiful, transcendent, and I lament that somewhere along the way, we seem to have lost that simple aim–to make something beautiful. 

I admire these painters deeply, but you’re right–landscape painting is as old as art itself, and finding ways to make it feel new is a tremendous challenge. But maybe that’s what draws me in- the challenge itself.

There are painters who’ve pushed the boundaries of what a landscape can do and say in the 20th century–Max Ernst and David Hockney come to mind. I also look a lot at Russian Realist painters; they’re so underappreciated. I always go back to this one painting of a tree by Shishkin–it’s one of my favorite paintings ever. I can’t even put my finger on why. It feels like he’s captured the spirit of the tree, like it’s more than just a tree. That painting, to me, is perpetually fresh. It’s the kind of work that reminds me, a painting doesn’t need to be contemporary if it’s timeless.

Of course, if you can’t be timeless, at least be timely, at least do something new. And painting landscapes in a new way feels like one of the most challenging problems you can take on as an artist. I don’t have all the answers yet; it’s something I’m figuring out as I go. But I’ve seen glimpses of it, and that’s what keeps me trying.

 

Sol Summers, Regeneration, 2024.

 

KUPPER: How do phenomena—either natural or unnatural—manifest in your work?

SUMMERS: In my painting I like to play with what defines a “natural” landscape. One of the pieces in the show features a cactus with a lens flare—a distinctly photographic element. It’s not a phenomenon that comes from the human eye but one that’s obviously a product of a camera lens. Objectively, it’s just an orb in the middle of the picture, something that might seem strange or out of place. But we’re so trained to understand the visual language of cameras that we almost overlook it. To me, that makes the painting contemporary, an expression of how our perception has evolved. Show it to someone before the advent of photography, and they’d likely ask, “What is that?”. Something about that really peaks my interest. Elements of the visual field that we become so accustomed to they seem to disappear. For these reasons, I think these paintings will not age gracefully. In a hundred years everyone will ask why there’s a big orb in the middle of the painting. But nobody now will really think twice about it. It’s just a curious thing, what you can hide in plain sight. 

KUPPER: You usually feature the desert at sunrise and sunset—why is this?

SUMMERS: Sunrise and sunset are when the desert’s colors and contrasts hit a surreal extreme, yet somehow, they still read as “natural” to us. It’s a bit like testing the limits–how far I can push something visually without anyone stopping to question it. Recently, I painted a cactus using an entire tube of alizarin crimson–the exact complement of green–and yet, it doesn’t look out of place. It still reads “correctly.” I’m fascinated by how reality works the same way; things can be strange beyond belief, and yet we come to accept them without a second thought.

I also think about the idea of extremes–extreme heat, extreme cold–creating strange adaptations in life. And extreme light, casting things into bizarre forms and colors. Landscape paintings traditionally stick to earth tones, colors that feel rooted, natural. Synthetic pigments like cadmiums, those almost neon reds or yellows, rarely make sense on a landscape palette, let alone straight out of the tube. But there are paintings in this show where I used cadmium red and titanium white straight from the tube…in a landscape. And somehow, it doesn’t look weird. It just doesn’t. It confuses me too.

These transitional times of day also carry a symbolic weight for me. In those moments, the desert itself seems to undergo a shift. There’s a kind of magic in the light at those hours, a reminder of impermanence and transformation that speaks to me. I try to bring that into my work, using color and contrast to show the desert as a place hovering on the fringe of the surreal, yet still familiar.

 

Sol Summers, Daybreak, 2024.

 

KUPPER: Do you spend time in the desert—how close do you get to the landscape when painting your works?

SUMMERS: Yes, spending time in the desert has been essential to creating this show. In fact, this series led me to make my first plein air paintings, something I’m excited to explore further. The whole process has felt very personal, almost like a full-circle spiritual experience. The time I spent in the desert, alone and surrounded by its vastness, complemented the solitude in the studio–the same sense of being tested and refined. It’s an experience that connects you to the landscape in a way that goes beyond observation. 

KUPPER: What is the symbolism or metaphor of the cactus? 

SUMMERS: The cactus symbolizes self-reliance and the idea of thriving on being ignored. In an age where we’re all competing for attention, it’s essential for creative people to surmount that. The cactus, existing in its own space, somehow adapting and flourishing under conditions that would challenge most life forms, seeks no attention. It is content to endure, in solitude. 

KUPPER: How is the desert landscape a metaphor for the human condition?

SUMMERS: I think a lot about creativity–what makes fertile ground for an artist. I keep coming back to something I saw as a kid, a TED Talk I think, about a guy who lost both his arms and started drawing with his feet. His whole point was that creativity is overcoming limitations, that’s what it fundamentally is. Creativity doesn’t thrive in easy conditions; it flourishes when there’s something to fight against.

It makes me think of this William S. Burroughs’ quote, “This is a war universe. War all the time.” Ours is a universe of conflict, clashes of opposites–light and darkness, heat and cold, scarcity and survival. And creativity is born in those spaces of tension. The Russian artists I admire came out of a culture where resources were limited but where that very limitation gave birth to something raw, something that feels both deeply human and deeply spiritual. Scarcity, hardship, isolation: these create the fertile soil for art, for survival, for spirituality.

The desert embodies this principle perfectly. It’s barren, empty, hostile, but it’s also where you find the most creative solutions to survival. Nature itself becomes strange and surreal, a war of adaptations. That’s what I find so fascinating about it–the idea that scarcity isn’t just an obstacle but a catalyst. The desert forces you to adapt, to innovate. Warhol said that business is the best art, I think survival is the best art.

KUPPER: Can you talk a little bit about the works that will be on view at the Untitled Art Fair?

SUMMERS: What will be exhibited at this show are works that I’ve painted over the last eight months. It’s my first solo show in five years. I had a lot of resistance to finishing paintings, showing paintings. It’s been a whole process of self-reflection and growth that’s been tremendously rewarding.

An Interview of OpenAI’s First Artist in Residence, Alexander Reben

first artist in residence of OpenAI

Installation view of Disruptive Reflexivity in the Flux of Becoming (2024) in the Write a convoluted exhibition title for Alexander Reben’s show in the basement of the Charlie James Gallery exhibition. Courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo © 2024 Yubo Dong; photo credit @ofphotostudio Yubo Dong.



interview by Mia Milosevic


MIA MILOSEVIC: Can you talk a little bit about your timeline as an artist and as a scientist, from attending MIT and studying social robotics and applied math to becoming an artist?

ALEXANDER REBEN: I'm not sure there's a point where one becomes an artist, or if it’s just always happening. Certainly, even in research I was doing creative things and my thesis work while in social robotics was also looking at filmmaking and documentaries and how people open up to and respond to technology in different ways. Even as an undergrad I had a couple exhibitions. I'd say it has always been in parallel. All my education was more on the science, engineering, and math side of things, but I’ve always been interested in creativity.

MILOSEVIC: Can you speak on your creative process for your current show at Charlie James Gallery? 

REBEN: The process is quite different for every work. I'm almost as much a process or conceptual-based artist as I am a technology-based artist. It doesn't fit really into any of those camps. I mean, if it was very conceptual, then the object wouldn't matter, it's really just the idea. But to me, the object does still matter. A lot of what I'm talking about is process, because some of what I'm talking about are issues and ideas around automation, which in itself is about how objects are made. Where are the human and the machine coming together? In this show in particular there's quite a wide variety of works through various years.

I think the oldest piece in there is probably Deeply Artificial Trees, the “Deep Dream” video, that I have from back in the day. The newest work is the large metal sculpture I made with the big robots and Machina Labs, Disruptive Reflexivity in the Flux of Becoming. As well as the speaking dental phantom, Artificial Musings of the Null Mind. Some works come because there's an interesting new modality to working with technology. Some of the works come just from random thoughts that I think are interesting, or I think it's something that the public should experience in some way because it could be an upcoming thing that might be changing how folks work with technology.

MILOSEVIC: Did you collaborate with ElevenLabs for Artificial Musings of the Null Mind?

REBEN: I wouldn't call it a collaboration, but they helped me with credits. It was my voice that was trained on ElevenLabs. I had AI generate kind of idle, empty thoughts and musings that the work continuously spurts out. Some of them are quite hilarious and funny. Some of them are poignant and meaningful. Some of them are kind of ridiculous and wrong. (laughs) It's a conglomeration of a bunch of technology, the actual physicality of it is an antique from the 1940s and 50s where they would use these aluminum and steel phantoms to practice dentistry. The ones they have today are plastic and silicone. It speaks to an artificial human simulacrum for scientific use which is being repurposed here.

MILOSEVIC: In your artist bio for Charlie James Gallery, it says you “spent over a decade creating work that probes the inherently human nature of the artificial.” How can we demarcate the difference between the real and artificial? 

REBEN: Part of what I mean in the bio is that technology is inherently human, right? It's very much what we make. It's not like spurting randomly out of nature, it's the way we interface with and modify the world, and we wouldn't be who we are today if we didn't have technology. We probably wouldn't have evolved the way we have without inventing even like, taking a bone back in the day and using it as a tool could be considered a technology, or that's kind of an artificial use of something. It led to being able to hunt better, get more protein, which led to things like inventing science and philosophy and language.

We're fundamentally who we are because of the things that we invent and come up with. I think technology is often seen as a separate thing from us for some reason. We feel like it's a different thing, but to me, it's the physical manifestation of humanity. If you look at it through that lens, I think you can analyze it and appreciate it in different ways and look at how it affects you personally. It’s also something that means very specific things to different folks, and everyone uses technology in different ways. 

 

Alexander Reben
Artificial Musings of the Null Mind
Antique dental phantom, microphone, amplified speaker, truss, electronics
Dimensions variable
2024
Courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo © 2024 Yubo Dong; photo credit @ofphotostudio Yubo Dong.

 

MILOSEVIC: Can you speak on your just experience as being an of the first artist and residence at OpenAI and what still makes you excited about some of the things you worked on there?

REBEN: I have been working with OpenAI and folks internally since about 2019. I got access to GPT Beta back then before it was public, even before Chat GPT was a thing. That's where I made the plungers piece, A Short History of Plungers and Other Things That Go Plunge in the Night. I was getting GPT to write these ridiculous but fun wall labels. It was kind of just a natural shift for my relationship with them. It was just more like, Hey, maybe we should allow Alex to come in and produce some physical work. I think that for OpenAI it was also kind of a trial to have an artist come in and be hands-on like that.

While I was there, I really focused on tool building, because then I could use those later on after the residency. So there were three main things I worked, the first being a way to produce these massive, high-resolution AI images using outpainting. They're super huge works which I print out at like 1200 DPI, so the details are higher than the eye can see. I thought it'd be interesting to create something with AI that was super complex, super detailed, really high-resolution, sort of getting away from the single image, but also doing something that would be near impossible to do by hand just because of the sheer amount of detail in that image.

That was the theme I wanted to continue with the other tools, using AI as a tool to go past what I might be able to do or others might be able to do on their own. The second thing I had worked on and am still working on is this idea of a conceptual camera, so using photography as an interface versus language. I built a little app for myself that has multiple modes and in one mode you can take a picture of a group of objects and it will come up with a wall label to justify that group of objects as an artwork. It'll print out a wall label with all the info you would need to call that thing an artwork.

There's another mode where you can take a picture of something and it will reinterpret that thing as an absurd situation of whatever that thing is, and then print out a Polaroid of that. In another mode you can make a sketch or a drawing and take a picture of it and it will reinterpret that sketch or drawing as a scene. The reason I called it a conceptual camera is because whatever you take a picture of it translates it into another language as it tries to describe that image.

Once you're in that language space, you can change settings of that image with concepts. So you can be like, given this description, make it more absurd. That's something that a camera usually can't do. You can think of it like a physical knob, like you'd have for exposure. Instead it’s a serious-to-absurd scale that you could tweak, which to me was very interesting because it became a camera that doesn't really do what usual cameras do. I'm still playing around with all the different ways to use that, but I think that just kind of speaks to the ways I think AI is gonna be used in the future. It's gonna plug into a lot more of the natural and creative interfaces folks can use beyond just writing text.

The last thing I worked on was using Sora video to create clips of sculptures that would rotate around their center. If you make things that rotate around their center, you can use computational photography, specifically things like NeRF, which is an NVIDIA algorithm, to extract the 3D model from those viewpoints. The interesting thing I found about Sora was that it preserved relationships and 3D outputs, so you actually could pull a 3D model out of the video. I did that for a few sculptures and did a few 3D prints of those. 

This process still needs a human with knowledge of 3D editing to go and turn that into a usable, high-resolution entity. That sculpture was given to Monumental Labs, which does robotic marble carving, and it was turned to a large-scale marble. We're not too far from text-to-object, which I investigated with those big robots and the sheet metal, now on view at Charlie James Gallery

first artist in residence of OpenAI

Alexander Reben
A Short History of Plungers and Other Things That Go Plunge in the Night
Plungers, cotton pigment print, aluminum label holder
Dimensions variable
Edition of 5 and 2 APs
2020
Courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo © 2024 Yubo Dong; photo credit @ofphotostudio Yubo Dong.

MILOSEVIC: I know Sora is expected to be released relatively soon. How do you expect it to be integrated into the global artistic landscape?

REBEN: I know everyone in Hollywood is keeping a strong eye on this. There's still a lot of work to be done in that space in order for it to be used for cinematic, full-length work. But my guess is it's just a matter of time before the tools get good enough for those sorts of things as well.

MILOSEVIC: What would you say AI creates space for more of?

REBEN: There's a lot of resources being put towards this technology. Not everything is gonna make it into the future, but a lot of it probably will. And like the web, it's gonna influence society in a huge way. Similar to the Industrial Revolution, it’s about this automation of thinking. The Industrial Revolution was really about automation of the physical.

The more interesting things revolve around how to expand your own creative practice and your own knowledge. My hope is that it allows people like that to be more creative, to speed up maybe their process, and allow them to do more of what they want to do. I also think on the flip side, folks who don't have artistic backgrounds who might wanna express themselves can use it as a tool to do that. The sketch-to-image mode of the conceptual camera really blows a lot of people's minds because it just doesn't take just the exact sketch you make, it tries to get the idea of what you're trying to express from your sketch and then make an image of that. It's a way for those folks to come up with ways to communicate with others where it might have been hard for them before.

MILOSEVIC: I wanted to go back for a second to A Short History of Plungers and Other Things That Go Plunge in the Night, which I know has received a lot of media coverage. The piece is accompanied by the philosophy of “Plungism” which is defined as when “the mind of an artist is in a state of flux and able to be influenced by all things, even plungers.” I feel like it speaks to a lot of people's fears about the application of AI to art, where maybe artists become too easily susceptible to the mind of some foreign entity.

REBEN: Yeah, that label's funny because that was like GPT-2 Beta before it was out there. And funny enough, the reason it’s a repeated plunger multiple times is a result of a bug they had in the model. So even the little mistakes or dead ends, things in these models create fun outputs—less useful if you're trying to write a resume, more useful if you're trying to do creative writing.

At the end of the day, these systems are like pattern machines. They learn from the internet, right? The question I would pose is: Is the interpretation an AI makes of an artwork any more or less valid than the interpretation a curator or writer makes of a work? And if not, where's the distinction? 

MILOSEVIC: Our most recent issue that has just come out is called Citizen, it's all about citizenship and all what it means to be a citizen right now in the current climate. Could you talk about how AI makes you not only a better artist, but maybe even a better citizen, or what that might look like for people?

REBEN: Because I'm an artist who's always worked with technology, my work is about technology. AI is making me a better artist in so much that it's giving me a new, very interesting thing to dig into and work with. It's more that it's just an extremely fruitful thing to look at and research and think about. I think there's a lot of hype out there right now, so we’re still coming to terms with how it's making me a better citizen. If it's makes people more inquisitive, gets 'em to ask more questions, or allows them to learn or research things better or just become more educated, I feel like that's really a lot of what makes a better citizen.

MILOSEVIC: I think your work has just made a positive correlation between art and these innovations of technology that people have generally found frightening. 

REBEN: I try to stick to the neutral to slightly positive route. I do have work that questions, Do we actually want this thing? Do we want this to be this way? How do you want this to go? My work doesn't look to answer questions specifically, because how you experience technology is a very different thing from how I experience it and what it means in your life is different from what it means in mine. It's a highly personal question. At the end of the day, what do you want from technology? 

Pop Psychology and Picasso: An Interview with Jason Boyd Kinsella On His Artistic Roots

interview by Oliver Kupper
introduction by Chimera Mohammadi

In the furnace of adolescence, Jason Boyd Kinsella’s world fell apart into the neat building blocks of identity that make up the Myers-Briggs personalities. Thirty years later, he’s finding new ways to put the pieces back together again in geometric patterns. In his portraits, smooth, inorganic shapes against flat backgrounds become vivid, abstracted bodies, occupying startling emotional space. The tension between inhuman and intimate is amplified by the contrast between his clear reverence for the Old Masters and his own unique brand of decidedly modern cubism. Kinsella’s exploratory practice responds to the deterioration of visual truth in the Internet era by seeking the psyche of each sitter. Melding cool modernity with rich intuition, Kinsella’s ever-evolving expressions of personhood have enkindled the excitement of an international audience.

OLIVER KUPPER: It would be great to start with your later-in-life career as a fine artist and your 30-year hiatus. How long have you been painting, and what was the initial impetus to leave your previous career and dedicate yourself to fine art full-time?


JASON BOYD KINSELLA: Fine art has always been the primary compass in my life. After graduating from university with my Fine Arts degree, I got a job in advertising, which was a fun way to use my creativity. I sharpened my creative tools across multiple mediums and I got to work with some incredibly talented people who taught me a lot about craft, ideation and creative discipline. In many ways, it was a creative masterclass.
While I was working in advertising, I still painted and drew in my home studio, but I never showed that work. I just created for myself. 
In 2019, my artwork took a very surprising shift. Almost overnight, my painting began to take on a deeper personal meaning and purpose. The intersection between my studies of the Old Masters, my fascination with psychology and MBTI, and my work experience suddenly collided on the canvas. I knew intuitively that something special was happening, so I threw myself into it completely and never looked back.

KUPPER: You describe your works as psychological portraits. What is it about psychology versus physical attributes that interests you more?


KINSELLA: We live in a world where you can’t completely trust what you see or hear. A person’s true likeness can be altered with Photoshop, digital filters, or even plastic surgery. People can hide who they really are behind an augmented version of who they want to be. This is the undependability of a portrait of the flesh. My practice is concerned with discovering the most authentic depiction of the self by way of the psychological portrait, where everything is laid bare.

KUPPER: When did geometry enter the field in your oeuvre of psychological portraits? 


KINSELLA: After university, I developed a deep passion for modern art. Once I discovered artists like Jacques Lipchitz, Henri Laurens, Picasso, and Henry Moore, a light suddenly switched on in my mind. I couldn’t resist the art of subtraction because of its sober directness. I didn’t set out to incorporate geometry into my work, but I guess it makes sense that it would become a central element in my oeuvre. 

KUPPER: You received the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator book as a child, which would have a profound influence on your work—what was it about this book that fascinated you so much and who originally gifted it to you? 


KINSELLA: It’s funny how the mind works. My mother gave me a book when I was a teenager called, Please Understand Me, which was a book about the Myers-Briggs personality indicator. It included a self-test which I took, I quickly learned everything about the building blocks of my personality (INFJ), and it was a startlingly accurate self-portrait. I couldn’t believe that I could be reduced to these psychological building blocks and then assembled into 1 of 16 personality types. I remember feeling a bit disillusioned that there were only 16 different personality types on a planet with billions of people.
From that day forward, I don’t think I thought about people the same way. It took many years for that experience to manifest itself in my artwork, but there’s no question that it had – and continues to have – a profound effect.

KUPPER: What do you think you have brought from the world of advertising to painting and what have you left behind? 


KINSELLA: There is no question that, without my experience in advertising, I couldn’t do what I am doing today. I worked with some incredibly creative people that taught me how to get the most out of my ideas. I also learned a lot about psychology and self-discipline. It was those twenty-five years of preparation that enabled me to get the most out of what I do today. I took some great memories and lessons, and I don’t feel that I left anything behind. It was a very natural and necessary progression into my creative journey. 

KUPPER: Your sculpture is really interesting—what is your approach to sculpture versus painting? 


KINSELLA: Some people are surprised to learn that my sculptures always begin as paintings. I find this to be the most intuitive way to flesh out an idea. I really enjoy the interactivity and exploration that a sculpture offers the viewer. Every vantage point of the sculpture offers new insights into the subject's personality. It’s no surprise to me that some of my biggest influences are sculptors, furniture designers and architects (Moore, Lipchitz, Juhl, and Hadid, Gehry, Picasso, Wegner etc…)

KUPPER: Where do you start with a portrait—is it a jumble of imagined geometry, or do you have specific visages in mind? 


KINSELLA: When I start a portrait, I don’t think visually. I just focus on the feeling about a person and then I let my hand interpret that feeling. The results are always surprising and unexpected.

KUPPER: How do the Old Masters and other influences play into your work? 


KINSELLA: My formative influences have a big range. My schooling was primarily the Old Masters. That’s where I developed a strong affinity with portraiture, especially with the work of Rembrandt, Dürer, Jan van Eyck, Hans Holbein and Caravaggio. Their work was always loaded with mystery and emotion. I also was drawn to the work of Singer Sargent and Anders Zorn – more for the elegance and simplified palettes.

KUPPER: What role does color play in your paintings?


KINSELLA: Color is very important to my work. It is a key element in conveying a sitter’s emotions. 

KUPPER: How do you navigate the tension between creativity as a personal outlet versus art as a means of communication with an audience?


KINSELLA: I am in a quiet conversation with each painting while I make it. It’s a highly personal and intimate process that doesn’t include anyone other than myself and the subject. When I paint I never think about the audience because I am making the work for myself.
But sculpture is different. I definitely consider the audience when I am making a sculpture because I want the work to be accessible for everyone. Things like scale and the point of view are important to consider so as to enable people to interact with the work in the most personal way possible. 
Digital is also different. Often I will think about how people can interact with the work on digital platforms to potentially take ownership over a piece. (Especially on mobile phones).

KUPPER: Your work has been received with enormous positivity—not only amongst an art audience, but also collectors. How has your perception of success in art changed over your career?


KINSELLA: I am deeply grateful that my work resonates with people. That positivity really energizes me. A big part of my life has been spent visiting museums, galleries and reading art books, so it is very fulfilling to see that my work has found a place alongside the people and places that I venerated for so long. It fills me with a lot of joy. I just continue to make the work for myself, while continually pushing into the unknown to see what I can find. 

KUPPER: In your latest exhibition at Perrotin, Emotional Moonscapes, your paintings existed on multiple floors and within multiple mediums—where do you see the future of your paintings? Any unexplored mediums?


KINSELLA: Over the past five years my work has evolved in craft, medium and narrative. It’s hard to say for sure what things will look like in the future, but finding new and relevant ways to express my visual language is central to energizing my practice, and I will continue to lean into that everyday.

saké blue: An Interview of Estelle Hoy

All images courtesy of Estelle Hoy


interview by Oliver Kupper
saké blue is published by After 8 Books
edited by Antonia Carrara


OLIVER KUPPER: Hi Estelle! Congratulations on launching your new book. As I mentioned yesterday, my colleague said of saké blue, “It’s like Clarice Lispector and Curb Your Enthusiasm had a baby.” 

ESTELLE HOY: [laughing] That’s excellent. My favorite review yet. After we launched saké blue in New York with After 8 Books, Lisa Robertson asked some astute questions about satire within a text and its role in politics. Lisa is brilliant, so she doesn’t understand that some of us need time to think. Now that I’ve thought about it for a few weeks, I think satire in a text has a kind of mutant state that reverberates differently with different people. People don’t always like satire; they find it belligerent. Something I’ve maybe observed, at least in my own life, so this is by no means general, is that my least educated friends find me funnier; there’s something in that I think, and I feel artistically safer within the working-class environment I grew up in and a little bit fearful that people with a certain level of post-grad education, who’ve taken grave offense to something I’ve written, will slide into my inbox. And slide they do. I’m generally a bit scared of people. How does this relate to Lisa’s question? Maybe one answer is that satire in my work is simply a way of finding the characteristics of sociology and how to understand social forces and their stratifications. Which demographics respond to the conflicts of satire the most and revile it the most? I should do some empirical research, but I’m not in the mood. 

KUPPER: When we spoke last week, you mentioned your childhood. Has growing up around sign language and non-hearing people highlighted the difference between those who can and those who can’t? 

HOY: My remarks were more about method than deafness. It’s not a relationship of inaccessibility, dependence, filtration, or the progression of hearing to non-hearing entities. My interest in deafness and non-vocalized communication came from the pulsations of sign language that I grew up in, sure, which is very confronting and anything but non-vocalized. In fact, sign language is frequently accompanied by a loud, varying, staccato-type rhythm, which is not the first and most apparent association for people who’ve never been around deaf people. For me, speaking in sign and observing signed language are a few things: 1. There is a challenge to duration; words are freed from regular or irregular measures. Sign language introduces the presence of a multiplicity of heterochronic, non-communicating durations. The metric cadence, oscillations, and the non-retrograde rhythms interest me. 2. AUSLAN and ASL (Australian Sign Language) are markedly different, at least to my mind. For example, the former relies on a two-handed alphabet and ASL one, so there’s radical hermetic incoherency, and communicating across lines is not always possible. (Or desired, but that’s another political story.) Pioneers of indeterminacy and non-standards, like John Cage, with his electroacoustic music and a-typical use of instruments. My art writing methodology relishes these ideas and sensations. I don’t know why people are so hellbent on understanding absolutely everything they read. I appreciate being bamboozled, confused, out-smarted, cheated out of, or left in the dark. It’s fun and maddening. And obviously, I’m deeply concerned about those who can and those who cannot, those who have and those who have not. But it’s also wildly involute.  

KUPPER: I like that you said you appreciate being ‘cheated out of comprehending.’ Can you tell us a little more about that? 

HOY: Hmm, ok lemme think. So, people profit from different sounds or the absence of sound at different times. Those combinations map out the variation that causes an apparent ‘disunity.’ Par example. My partner and neighbor are infuriated by our upstairs neighbor using this weird bird machine that delivers an intensely high-pitched sound that reputedly scares crows and pigeons away. They are driven mad by it, complain endlessly, and even write to the Hausvewaltung and owner. Generally, I can’t hear it; ok, not generally; I can’t hear it. It’s precisely in this case that we can see how the absence of a punishable pulsation of sound molecules can shift beyond making cracks in homogeneity: 1. Function (I can keep working, whereas, for them, it makes thought impossible) 2. Sanity (I’m oblivious and therefore nonplussed) 3. The Organization of Time (The bird machine, in a way, intensifies the length of time. They wrestle with significantly developed audio material, which makes forces that are terminable feel interminable)

It’s a potent variable that descends briefly but elaborates on purported ‘disunity’ because I’m cheated out of something that I cannot hear and, quite frankly, not sure even exists. I’ve dodged comprehending, and I’m pretty chuffed about it. This is a long conversation that could be longer, but I’d need another half hour. 

KUPPER: [laughing] Many of your texts deal with political freedom, neoliberalism, and becoming nothing. Can you talk about this?

HOY: I guess we’re kind of at the end of the acceleration cycle, and extinction is most definitely looming. Our psychical energies have been drained by this pandemic, wars, social injustice, and neoliberal frameworks; this whole recession results from psychological disinvestment. I think my focus on political freedom is an idealized expectation that the future can be better–I’m like a 7th grader who got their hands on Marx too early. I think the task of my writing is to conceptualize ways to free ourselves from the framework of capitalism, the pursuit of ‘useful’ exchange values, and our delusion that pleasure comes from consumption. Though, my new red couch is gorgeous, just quietly. My writing has never been reluctant to castigate those in positions of power or peddle the implication that there’s no alternative to capitalism.

I don’t believe that capitalism is an insurmountable structure, and it’s crystal fucking clear to me that this assumption is bringing us to the brink of extinction. We don’t have to resign ourselves to the concept that this is the sole future that our progeny can expect. Liberation can come from freeing ourselves from our obsession with economic growth. Beyond resource sharing, I’ve come to think more and more that there’s an element that could informally reframe our instinct of accumulation and expansion. It’s a proposition of ‘Mentorship.’ This will speak to the notion of becoming nothing. Stay with me: 

Okay, so I call it ‘mentor-futurism,’ it’s an aggressive aesthetic, as all good political solutions should be. I hope the Greeks, Italians, or Coldplay didn’t think of this first. 

The inimitable writer Chris Kraus has generously offered me mentorship, criticism, and encouragement for the past nine years, dilating my notion of neo-liberal conversion. It’s an activity born of extreme magnanimity requiring extended periods to read work, proffer criticism, and keep artists levitating just above creative defeat. The labor of time and intellectual generosity prevails, growing and expanding others but with zero expectation of return. What could I possibly offer Chris Kraus, an artistic and intellectual heavyweight, professionally? I have some great recipes she couldn’t know. Fiscal sharing and redistribution have been a notion I cherish and am good at, but I have no investment in money, so expanding on this may mean nothing. This ‘Mentor-Futurist’ rant is becoming a manifesto that’s probably already out there, but I’m always 5 to 10 minutes late to artistic-military activities. I spend a lot of time watching inter-species friendships on YouTube. 

KUPPER: You’re frequently referenced as an auto-theorist or part of the New Narrative movement; however, you’ve mentioned identifying as a ficto-critic. Knowing you personally for some time, you come across as fiercely private and elusive, frequently deflecting conversation back onto the other person. Does this miscategorization bother you as an artist? 

HOY: [laughing] Yes! It does. As you say, I’m a private person and, as many have described over the years, a little evasive. It mostly bothers me because the critique I’m trying to make is usurped, and I become the focus. I’m all about ideas and action. The ‘I’ in my work is a platform for examining politics and aesthetics, not a reflection on or exposition of my life. I spend a lot of time jotting down ideas in my iPhone notepad or WhatsApp conversations with friends, and 20 to 30 percent of them are solid. I focus on expanding the 20 percent, which takes an incredible amount of energy, so I’ve little left over. Also, my essay, “I’ve Been Told I’m So-So in Bed,’ doesn’t make me look terrific if people think I’m an auto-theorist. 

KUPPER: [laughing] Do you think being elusive and ‘others’ focused has helped you become so successful?  

HOY: Geez, you have a low bar for success. I’ve not much thought about the role of elusiveness, if that’s a word, but I certainly believe that focusing on and considering others is a way to change your art through empathy and insight. For instance, runners who jog in place at a stoplight just need to chill the fuck out. Stay with me. I mean, what’s going on there? In-place joggers at stoplights have much to say philosophically and politically, non? Hasn’t this answer gone downhill?

KUPPER:  It did, ha! What is the kindest thing anyone has ever done for you? 

HOY:  I have this wildly excellent friend whose spent much time on fishing boats for someone living in Berlin. But that's another story.  She came to my first madhouse apartment in Neukölln in 2014 and sat on the splintered hardwood floors with a gift she'd made me. She was maniacally pulling all these things out of her bag like Mary Poppins on heat, more and more until these little black and white frames were scattered around her. 50, to be precise. I know this because she told me exactly. She'd spent the last several months sitting in the grass at Görlitzer Park in K-berg most afternoons, drinking lukewarm Club-Mate while looking for a four-leaf clover to give to me as a token of luck for my career. It turned out she has a freaky knack for finding them, and she collected 50 individual four-leaf clovers and framed every single one in little mini squares. I made bigger frames for all of them, splitting them into three large artworks hanging on my wall where I work daily, sipping my own Club-Mate with its 400 grams of caffeine. Being wired is a nuisance but also refreshing. Although the clovers browned over the past decade, they're a floating reminder that someone out there believes in my artistic practice, and sometimes, that's all you need. 

KUPPER: Chris Kraus recently interviewed you about saké blue, a mind-blowing collection of texts and a phenomenal read. She asked if you’d ever considered becoming a philosopher, and we’d be interested to hear more. 

HOY: Yeah, she angles questions uniquely. I find a lot of geometry in philosophy, and its quixotic skirmishes are very entertaining. And soothing. This week, I’ve considered what we could learn socially vis-à-vis formication. Formication, the new word I learned, is this weird, imagined sensation people experience where they feel ants crawling under their skin. It’s disturbing for the person, but I like this idea of indirect and triangular things. So you’ve got: 1. The real person 2. The inexistent feeling, and 3. How those crawling feelings synthesize. Stay with me here! [laughing] 

So, I’m thinking of Zionists. You’ve got a human who’s been brainwashed with a creepy-crawly agitation about another set of humans they resultingly deem a colony of insect vermin, which is a reality that doesn’t exist. It’s skin deep, this sensation, but that doesn’t mean the propaganda is superficial in any way. So, what do we have to work with here? How can we synthesize faux-feelings to restore the knowledge that ‘formication’ isn’t real? It’s imagined. It takes a lot of courage to obstruct psycho-somatic manifestations, especially when you’ve been fed this insidiousness indirectly–and directly–all of your life.

This is all very three-dimensional, which again lends to the triangle symbol. What’s fascinating and maybe even promising about a triangle is that no matter what type –Isosceles, Scalene, or whatever–the angles add, every single time, to 180 degrees. Maybe seeing socio-political formication as a triangle is promising because it leaves us with the guarantee of 180, which is another way of saying a complete about-face. We can do a 180 at any moment.      

I in absolutely no way answered your question, did I.     

KUPPER: Estelle, you are a total pleasure. 

Welcome to the Dreamstate: An Interview of Kelly Lee Owens

Kelly Lee Owens for her album Dreamstate, blue sky and green grass with portrait

Album cover for Dreamstate
Image courtesy of Huxley
Photo credit: Samuel Bradley


interview by Mia Milosevic


Dreamstate breathes life into the experience of being human through electronic synths, poetic sonics, and an adeptness to color purportedly infused in our ether. Pioneering the electronic sound alongside revolutionaries such as Björk, Kelly Lee Owens has emerged as a maestra of techno. Tactfully and seamlessly blending drum and bass into a Berlinesque rave set, Owens punches the ceiling of what many understand electronic music to be. Her urge to go higher lays at the core of her latest album, which elementally fuses the concept of air into its resonance. Owens’ embrace of what it truly means to dream underpins the emotive beats which transcend her audience. 

Dreamstate is out on Friday, October 18th via dh2/Dirty Hit.

MIA MILOSEVIC: First of all, congratulations on the upcoming release of your album.

KELLY LEE OWENS: It's still a mad feeling. It doesn't matter how many times you do it, it's like a child and the child's gonna go out into the world by itself for the first time. It's exciting. And it's nerve-racking. Creating something from nothing takes a huge amount of life force energy, as it should.

MILOSEVIC: Tell me about the title of the album, Dreamstate.

LEE OWENS: Well, it's an interesting one because I wrote the songs first, and I came up with the name and the title last, but then I found a photo of me last summer in Wales when I was playing with the Chemical Brothers, sitting on a graffiti wall that says “dreamstate.” So somewhere that must have really gone in. I was a daydreamer, my mom used to call it “Kelly's World.” I didn't know that until recently. It's always been a thing that's potentially deemed as a derogatory term. She's always daydreaming. But actually, it's so important. I just feel we're at this strange time in history with technology, so to be grounded and to dream with oneself is more important than ever. Also, to come into spaces with others and be able to transcend while you're awake is definitely what I'm interested in.

MILOSEVIC: I see that for electronic music, and especially with your music. I love the idea of your work kind of fighting the urban edge of techno, because you bring a lot of humanness to it. 

LEE OWENS: I think it's about accepting both the light and the dark edges of yourself. There's this Murakami quote, which I always butcher, and it just basically says that when you're feeling high and good, go to the highest, furthest point. I often think of this album as the element of air. For me, every single album I have is a different element. But this one elementally is air, so there's lots of themes of higher rise.

MILOSEVIC: What’s your attraction to electronic music over other genres? 

LEE OWENS: It was such a visceral moment when it happened, actually. It was during the Drone Logic sessions with Daniel Avery and I was in this incredible studio called Strong Rooms in Shoreditch, which is still there. I think what's interesting about that place is that lots of different types of music have been made there. The Spice Girls made their first album there. I grew up in the '90s, so I was like, oh my God! They used to practice their moves in the courtyard, apparently. And then there was a little old me, this girl from this village in Wales, witnessing synths and electronic production in action. I very quickly wanted to be a part of it because it was so tangible and visceral and totally an extension of yourself and your soul. I think it's Björk that says if there's no soul in the music, that's because you haven't put it there. Dance music can be cold or emotionless, some of it. I mean, it's so, so vast these days. But for me it was about fusing that emotional nuance and experience in there. I could create a song, but just in a different way than traditionally. I don't come from a traditional background in terms of reading or writing music, so that was never really gonna be a path for me. I just literally fell in love with the frequencies, the resonances, the sounds, the tangibility, and have been literally obsessed ever since.

MILOSEVIC: That's so cool. I do feel like there's a new advent of electronic music where it is becoming more and more emotional. Like with your music, with Fred again’s music, which I feel is blowing up for some of the same reasons, it’s electronic music with a very emotional aspect to it. 

LEE OWENS: Totally. I think that it's people's storytelling. As time moves and electronic music has been around for a while, people can experiment in new ways. There's so much interesting electronic music now. It's not just one thing, which I personally love. I'm not a purist about it, but then there's certain things that will always make me tick—like anything that has an acid synth line on it. 

 

Image courtesy of Huxley
Photo credit: Samuel Bradley

 

MILOSEVIC: Can you talk about the production of Dreamstate? I loved what you said about the making of the album being a collaborative experience, but also about how dreaming is generally synonymous with solitude.

LEE OWENS: It sort of started coming to me in 2022. The feeling comes first, the shapes and the sonic qualities that I think I want. They come early and I have notepads and I just write down the feelings and the colors. And it was actually brat green! This is 2022. So this is the thing, you're never alone in this. It's like we're all tapping into something collective and we all create our own versions of what's needed. I knew it was about a collective experience. And then going on tour with Depeche Mode in 2023 informed me again. I was inspired by the juxtaposition of anthemic moments, and then also super raw, vulnerable, intimate moments that actually Depeche Mode was so good at encapsulating.

MILOSEVIC: It’s crazy that you had the brat green color written down in your notes more than two years ago.

LEE OWENS: It's crazy because it just kept coming to me. I think it's Rick Rubin that says art is all there in the ether. And it’s just about who captures it and in what way. I've seen that recently, where there's this collective consciousness with artists. My cover for Dreamstate, it had to be blue. The amount of covers that have come out that have blue backgrounds! I just see these patterns and it's so interesting to me. I always bring it back to the Yves Klein photograph of him, a leap into the void where he's reaching for the color blue and he’s jumping off a wall to reach for this dream of capturing this perfect blue for the International Klein Blue. He's taking a leap of faith doing it. I found out that there were actually people Photoshopped out of that image who were there to catch him. And that's what every artist and person needs—community. You never do anything alone. It’s about the heights that you have to go to and the dreams that you have to at least try to reach for. 

MILOSEVIC: It's like capturing the dreamstate.

LEE OWENS: That’s a good way of putting it.

MILOSEVIC: So the process is collaborative, but I’m fascinated by the idea of dreaming being something one does in solitude.

LEE OWENS: I did that for like a year and a half before I made a sound. That’s the notepad for me. That was me keeping the channel open and being with myself and being in nature or wherever. If an idea or a thought or texture came to me, I committed to writing that down and figuring out what it was. It's so important to create that space for yourself. Otherwise nothing can come through, no truth can be accessed. I'm talking about a very deep truth of something that's beyond yourself, that is collective. You can't truly know what that is for yourself if you're just on social media being told and sold what your dreams are and what you should do. It's harder than ever to not be literally influenced, as we know.

We're at such a strange point in history where we could easily go down a very dark path. We know that at least in the western world, mental health is a huge issue, and so to be proud of dreaming and daydreaming feels important. So for me, dreaming brings life to this experience of being human. 

MILOSEVIC: I think that’s so interesting in the context of music, since music is this universal thing, but it mostly speaks to individual experience. 

LEE OWENS: I’d say that's the ideal. I remember going to Berghain, I only went once, I played in the cantina next door, did a live show, and then I got escorted into Berghain, which apparently never happens. The guy on door was like, “Kelly?,” and I was like, oh my God, here we go. It was what felt like a cathedral of techno. What I always remember was that there were some groups of people, but a lot of people went alone. So they were alone together. They were in their own world dancing, not even looking up sometimes, for like hours. And yet, they were with their people through sound. That's really what inspired me. That was a long time ago, but it just stuck with me. I think that's a form of the dreamstate as far as I'm concerned.

 

Image courtesy of Huxley
Photo credit: Samuel Bradley

 

MILOSEVIC: I would love to talk about your upcoming tour and what you have planned for the show.

LEE OWENS: We actually get to create a world and build something where people step into a room, it's really gonna be Welcome to the Dreamstate. There's gonna be lots of spoken words and poems that open up the space. I'm really excited to present that world to people creating new visuals, it's still just gonna be me on stage. I still feel like that is where I'm at right now. I think playing with Depeche Mode gave me the confidence to continue to do that. It's gonna be very much a journey with those punctuations of emotive vulnerability, which I've never done before.

MILOSEVIC: I know that you started out working in a cancer treatment hospital. Do you think that your attraction to electronic music is tied to that in a way? I’m just thinking about transcendence in electronic music and the way that you describe it. 

LEE OWENS: I used to think that it was so opposite to have done auxiliary nursing, working in cancer hospitals and also a nursing home before that. Being around death and medicine, and then I go and do music, people were like, “oh God, that's different.” When the pandemic happened, I was getting messaged by doctors and nurses saying how “Inner Song” was helping them through one of the most difficult times of their life. That was a full circle moment for me. What I loved about that job as auxiliary nurse was I could physically help people in the moment, it was an instant exchange of care. After my shift would end I’d sit there with patients who were dying, who had no one—I was 18 at the time. The more I've created music and just as a music fan, as a music lover, as an obsessor of music, I know what it does for people. You hope that your music can affect people in that way. It's not up to you to know if it does or not. Yoko Ono said something about doing good work and how it ripples eternally. It's not for you to determine how good it is or what it will do or not, but your job is to stay open and keep creating.

Playing With Gators and Dying With Dogs: Benjamin Tan and Catherine Hardwicke in Conversation

intro by Chimera Mohammadi
stills from Dog (2024)

In Benjamin Tan’s 2024 short film, Dog, teenage angst sizzles from the screen in a haze of rave-flavored smoke almost thick enough to make you cough. Tan speaks with filmmaker Catherine Hardwicke–who described and shaped generations of adolescent fantasies and fears with movies like Thirteen (2003), Lords of Dogtown (2005), and Twilight (2008)–to identify the strains of terror, rebellion, and self-destruction that combine to infuse the atmospheres of their movies with punch-drunk drama. Dog exists only in tight, black and white images of raves, bedrooms, and cars, which are so myopic that each small scene expands into a massive world, capturing a hedonistic sense of frightening abandon by allowing each moment to become all-consuming. Hardwicke also harnesses deprivation to produce abundance, her coming-of-age stories defined by a similar smallness as limited backdrops make up the vastness of young adult worlds. The limitations of their settings go from comfortingly controlled to claustrophobically constrictive as bacchanalian exploration leads down dark, dead-end roads. Tan and Hardwicke’s films are astonishing for their abilities to capture the unbound possibility of youth culture and keep the camera trained when the carcass of promise begins to rot and fester in its fishnets and kandi bracelets. In conversation, the creators turn their gazes on their own explosive entrances to adulthood, sifting through memories of predators, secrecy, and ecstasy, cataloging the bruises and scars they passed down to their protagonists.

BEN TAN: I watched Thirteen for the first time when I was in middle school. It’s such an honest depiction of teenagers, and it was the first time I watched a film where the characters mirrored my own experiences.  

CATHERINE HARDWICKE: Yeah, that was definitely the idea: to make it feel like you were just living like Nikki Reed was living at the time. I would go over to her house and film, with my little video camera, a war between her and her mom. We hadn't really seen what was really going on with teenage girls and all the stress and struggle and peer pressure and all that crazy shit. I went and volunteered at Nikki’s middle school and I saw wild behavior. I saw the teacher trying to wrangle out-of-control students with cell phones running around and guys calling girls pretty outrageous things right there out loud in class. And I thought, this is a lot to deal with. Do people really understand what's going on in a nice school?  

TAN: Did you have a rebellious childhood?  

HARDWICKE: Everybody kind of has to, a little bit. I grew up in South Texas and it was a very different environment. We would be on the Rio Grande River doing crazy stuff like rope slings.  There would be snakes there. There would be 12ft alligator guards. It was a very rowdy childhood. Like, “We're gonna swim across the river. We're gonna run around in Mexico, illegal entry.”  

TAN: So you were like an adrenaline junkie.  

HARDWICKE: Exactly. If you had bruises on you, you know you had fun. If you didn't, you were a wimp. I guess it’s its own form of rebellion. Rebellion against ordinary life. Boredom.  

TAN: I grew up skateboarding and Jackass was a big influence on my brothers and I. We’d blow shit up on our street or skate off roofs. Just be completely crazy kids. I feel like my destructive childhood formed my creative adulthood.  

HARDWICKE: I kind of feel lucky that I had crazy adventures as a kid. When you make something very specific, which you did in Dog, it's more relatable to people. I was amazed how you had a very complex relationship with the mother and the sister established almost in 30 seconds. And you're curious and it's a mystery. What is going on? We're drawn into it right away. I think it was so fascinating that you created this kind of mystery at the beginning about the sister and then we start to reveal it. Some people might not even realize that she's blind until the touching game.  

TAN: Yeah, I wanted the opening to set things up quickly but be subtle enough, leaving some mystery for the audience to discover the characters.  

HARDWICKE: Well, it helps. You keep leaning in. There's something a little off. You're curious. I want to know more. Keeps you in with the film. I like that. Did you feel like you based these on real people that you knew?  

TAN: I went to raves at a really young age, like 11. I fell in love with the music right away. At a rave, you can have a profound spiritual experience but there's an element of danger just around the corner. It’s not based on anyone in particular, but I wanted to express the anxiety I felt as a teenager. I always felt like something could go wrong at any moment, or worse, my parents would discover my secrets.  

HARDWICKE: It's not the most safe environment.  

TAN: But the older sister is more experienced.  

HARDWICKE: She knows not to drink the voodoo juice. Even if you try to be the best big sister you can be, something else could happen.  

TAN: And when you’re a teenager and something bad happens to you, you don't want to share it with anyone. We default to keeping secrets because we want to protect the people that we love from our own pain. We don’t want to inflict it on anyone else.  

HARDWICKE: Wow. Yeah, that's intense.  

TAN: I think I see a lot of similarities with Thirteen. Tracy pushes away her mother to hide her pain.  

HARDWICKE: She's secretly cutting and doesn’t tell her mother, but that takes great pains to hide it. 

TAN: In my middle school, raver girls would wear kandi bracelets they’d make and they’d say things like “love” and “peace” but underneath they were hiding the scars on their wrists.  

HARDWICKE: There's a lot of irony built into that. Talk to me about the music and how you wove the music and when you chose to use it.  

TAN: Austin Feinstein made the score. I showed him some scenes and he made two demo songs that I placed in the areas where I thought needed music. It worked right away. He tried to convince me to use no score because he thought that the film was stronger without music, but his music really sets the mood.  

HARDWICKE: But you were always going to have it in the rave.  

TAN: That's true. The rave music was a song from a Scottish techno DJ called Franck. I wanted to have authentic techno, so I reached out to him. and he let us use his song.  

HARDWICKE: Oh, that's so cool.  

TAN: When you were shooting Thirteen, did you rearrange the dialogue and edit things on the day? How much did you execute that script by the book?  

HARDWICKE: What we did is, we wrote it standing up. I had been observing, having her friends over at my house all the time for surf and skate camps and slumber parties and going to her house and going to the schools and all that. So I was kind of like taking all this in, absorbing the scenes that I thought were interesting. I'd say, “Let's improv out a scene.  Let’s do a scene where you came home from school and your mom says this. I’ll play your mom, you play yourself.” And then as soon as we finished acting, I would write it up the best we could and put it into the screenplay. But during the rehearsal process, I’d schedule the scenes that I was the most worried about. And I said, let's work on the big confrontational scene. We would try it out. If people felt like their words were clunky or not natural, say it in your own words, inner monologue, what are you really feeling? Say what's in the script now that we've talked through it all and we felt it. Sometimes those inner monologues, those improvs would give a great line that needs to be in. Sometimes it's just an exercise to connect you to the material. Sometimes there's something great that happens. 

TAN: When we shot Dog, Alexis Felix, who plays Summer, was giving her mom a quick rundown of Meisner technique just hours before we shot her scenes. They were changing the script so their argument was in their own words, making it more natural. It definitely sounded better. Her mom had never acted before but I casted her because that chemistry and history is already there and I've witnessed them have a heated debate more than one time.  

HARDWICKE: Which is kind of great because you could feel it. There's this built in tension. There's little trigger points that everybody has. When you made Dog, did you rehearse?  

TAN: We only rehearsed the long scene where Tommy is flirting with Lex, and Summer feels the need to intervene. Tommy is on molly, so he’s not thinking rationally. Also, we don’t fully know Tommy and Summer’s past. One thing we did in the rehearsal process was create a backstory between Summer and Tommy and the relationship that they had. That backstory that we created really guided the nuances of that scene.  

HARDWICKE: I thought it was really effective. Certainly in Thirteen, there's the backstory and all the different things, her mother’s struggle with addiction and what her relationship with the mother's ex-boyfriend was. Even in Twilight, we rehearsed scenes of Bella with her father and her mother when her parents told her, we're getting divorced. We played improv scenes where Bella hung out with her dad at Disneyland when she was 13 years old, and super awkward. None of that is in the movie, of course, or even in the books. Just the fact that the actors had that sense memory. That informs the scene.  

TAN: Wow, yeah, you can definitely feel it. I love your use of color. How Thirteen takes on a blue melancholic tone as the relationships become more conflicted. And how the ending scene with the sunrise resets everything and allows the color back into their life. Was that something that you thought of early on or did you kind of discover that in post?  

HARDWICKE: I was thinking a lot of this movie, 60% or 70%, is going to be in a house and a lot of it's going to be in one bedroom. I thought, how is that going to be interesting? How does the light change? How could the movie stay alive? It's kind of an emotional rollercoaster with the color. It’s normal and bland lighting at the beginning. Then, when Evie comes into her life, it's glowing. We start cranking up the chroma a bit when she starts doing drugs and experimenting. So there's a bit more exaggeration to the colors. When they break up, the color starts draining out. The color goes away back to the blue grays and finally the end when the sun comes up. You made an absolutely beautiful movie in black and white. Why did you choose black and white?  

TAN: I wanted to remove a sense from the audience as a reminder that Lex, the blind character, is missing a sense too. Also, there is the notion that dogs see in black and white. Besides setting a mood quickly, these examples were compelling reasons that I felt motivated the aesthetic. Also, I think that showing it in black and white kind of enhances the imagination of what could be in the setting. When you take the color away, the scale of the rave looks so much bigger.  

HARDWICKE: I think so too. I used to be a production designer, and when I didn't have enough money to control or create the world the way I wanted to, I would often be asking,  “Could we make this in black and white?” I think it's very smart. You created a beautiful, unified look. I thought it worked emotionally. And I thought it was exciting to be in a rave without color because now you have to think about other parts of a rave. You're thinking more about the music, the rhythm, the other elements. 

Scrap: An Interview of Calla Henkel

 
 

interview by Oliver Misraje

Stepping out of the chaos of Santa Monica Blvd and into the New Theater to meet Calla Henkel for our interview about her latest book, Scrap, had the transportative quality of entering a portal; exiting the speedy streets and entering the hermetically sealed darkness of the cool, dark, velvet-lined theater for a different kind of vector. Side-stepping two girls in prom dresses rehearsing a cat fight, Henkel mentions she had just returned from a swim at a public pool a block away, thus explaining her swimwear. She has an incredibly disarming demeanor—a calm, collected amiability rare for Los Angeles, perhaps equal-parts informed by, and resistant of, the twelve years she spent in Berlin running TV, a smorgasbord performance space, nightlife venue and film studio with Max Pitegoff (also co-founder of the New Theater).

The New Theater is something of a nexus for the burgeoning literary scene and (stagnating) gallery-circuit of Los Angeles, buttressing each through its unique hybrid programming. And not unlike the New Theater, her latest novel Scraps is an intersection between Henkel’s understanding of narrative and lived experience within the arts. It’s a lesbian neo-noir trojan-horsing a deeper critique of the gallery system, true crime, and the underbelly of schadenfreude inherent to both.

OLIVER MISRAJE Scrap operates in the incredibly rare space between a commercial thriller and a hyper-localized critique of the art world. What is it about the thriller genre for you that makes it the ideal form for that kind of discourse?

CALLA HENKEL I love thrillers because they provide a really fast engine, and you can strap anything to it. The art world may not be completely interesting when you talk about it in another set of prose or language, but there's something about a thriller that allows me, as a writer, to focus on minutia, sadness and pain, the flaky parts of a universe which would otherwise maybe be annoying, but because it’s a thriller it can still be consumed with violent pleasure.

MISRAJE You can plug into it.

HENKEL Exactly. Photography and theater have an immediacy. And in a funny way, the thriller novel sort of replicates that immediacy. It is like the cocaine of literature. There's a relief and a joy in that for me. For a long time, Max Pitegoff, my artistic collaborator and I were writing plays in Germany, partially in German, partially in English. And I was like, “These are for twelve people.” I wanted to find a format to write in that was more accessible, but still allowed me to exorcize the same questions I’d had when making theater. 

MISRAJE The social dynamics of the art world, especially from the perspective of industry, is so heavily gate kept—I’m curious how you’ve had to tweak the thriller in relation to such a specifically in-grouped context.

HENKEL I think a big problem is that the art world lends itself to such a unique bastion of extreme satire. It’s a total tragicomedy and it’s easy to make fun of it. But it never feels right because the pain is in the detail. You know, it's not in the big funny abstract painting with an insane price, It's the mechanics of the exchange of energy. That is what I think is rarely captured well. I'm really interested in the politics of labor; how works are sold and in turn how they're used to sell an idea of politics or a performance of identity. The art world always looks fake because what’s portrayed is not what it’s really about. But I wrote the book when people I knew were dropping out of the art world. There was a lot of complaining and melodrama at the moment, and my gut reaction was to sort of laugh, and be like, Cool, then do it. Nothing's holding you here. I stole a lot of their rhetoric for the book. I think it’s interesting how people working within the arts pretend like it's a cage that they're stuck in—when in reality they've decided to be there. And I think Esther, the main character, is caught in this thought trap, which is only exacerbated by her obsession with revenge, which disables her from moving forward.

MISRAJE I appreciate the gray morality of Scrap. There’s a nuance to each of the characters that feels very human, regardless of their social and class positioning. The relationship between Esther and Patrick especially stands out.

HENKEL I don't plan my books out in advance. Really, not at all. I’m always surprised by who my characters become throughout the writing process, so none of them end up representing one thing or another. There is never a moral agenda. With Esther, she was a character who reacts linearly, so every time she gets hit with something, she goes ten inches farther than she should each time, which mirrors the logic of true crime. It's invasive but I also think true crime has this propeller engine where they have to get to the bottom of something within the time-span of an episode. But violence is confusing. And those two things together create this type of narrative netting where people are constantly trying to cover violence with something that makes total sense, but it never makes total sense. With Esther, she has this desire for justice that’s really just a desire for a palatable shape. And that's not real.

MISRAJE Was Esther a character you channeled from within or without?

HENKEL I always have this feeling that there's a bar or like an annex in the nightclub in my brain where the characters sit and smoke cigarettes until I finish the story. It can be annoying and kind of disruptive to have them always there, especially with someone like Esther. She was a difficult character to live with in my head. It got quite claustrophobic. It's this thing where you satisfy them with an ending, and till that ending is set they're just blabbing at me all day long. So, I feel like most of my characters usually sort of get what they want. But It's not always the right thing.

MISRAJE It’s a monkey paw situation.

HENKEL Right. It just maybe costs something they weren't willing to pay, but they didn't know that when they made the request. I had this meltdown because I had written this Esther as someone who has nothing to lose which is arguably very difficult narratively speaking. But then I realized, Oh wait, that has to become her power. So, that enabled the ending.

MISRAJE Do you consider yourself a noir writer?

HENKEL It's so funny because I never would've decided for myself that this is what I’d be doing. ButI also really love committing to a form. That’s what I like about the theater we run here, because it’s a form. We could do pop-up Shakespeare in the park or whatever, but instead we have fifty red seats and a bunch of lights. When you commit to a form, you really have to sit inside of it, literally speaking. And that’s also what I am doing with writing. So yeah, I guess I do consider myself a noir writer. 

Each Person Is A Portal: An Interview Of Seffa Klein

 
self-portrait of Seffa Klein standing in front of bismuth painting on woven glass
 

interview by Summer Bowie

The human race has been gazing at the stars with a sense of wonderment since time immemorial. These cogitations have inspired the creation of everything from religious mythologies to monumental earthworks to marine navigation, space navigation and innumerable inventions in between. It is a universal human experience where most of us encounter our first existential ponderings and Seffa Klein is no exception. What is exceptional about her experience is that she comes from a family of artists whose careers have been dedicated to exploring universal truths in the realms of art, science, and spirituality, which has afforded her the unique opportunity to engage with these profound questions further in the light of day rather than extinguishing them. While most of us are told to invest our time and energy in more realistic endeavors, the Klein family is deeply rooted in the belief that this is as real as it gets. Gallerist Jérôme Poggi recognized this unique quality of the Klein family as one of artists who foster each other’s practices rather than competing with one another, which inspired him to curate a solo exhibition of Seffa Klein’s works alongside selected works from Yves Klein, Rotraut, Marie Raymond, and Günther Uecker, who are respectively her grandparents, great-grandparent, and great-uncle.

BOWIE: I want to start with the concept of the exhibition, which brings together a constellation of works from you and your extended family. How were the works of your family members selected and over what duration of time was your selection of works created?

KLEIN: The gallery owner, Jérôme Poggi, sent me some selections of my grandmother's works and Marie Raymond. He has great vision and it was a really collaborative process. It was such a different way to do a show, because the narrative that people have around that kind of thing is one of being in someone's shadow or feeling this pressure that just doesn’t exist in my family. This show made so much sense because on one hand, as my first big solo show, it addresses this question of how I relate to my family. But the question always used to be totally around Yves Klein. And when I started talking to him about the shared interests I have with Yves Klein, I was like, “Also, there's Rotraut and there's Marie Raymond, his mother, and then my parents [Yves Amu Klein & Kathy Klein], and Gunther Uecker. It's not just me and Yves Klein.” It was especially important for me to bring my female ancestors into it. And also to emphasize that my family, both through marriage and through blood, is this distinct alignment of a certain energy. As for my works, those were made from 2018 to now.

BOWIE: So, it covers quite a long span of time. Were the SK Bricks some of your oldest works? 

KLEIN: Yeah, those started in 2017. But these pieces are more recent in the show.

Galerie, Poggi, Seffa Klein, A Family Constellation, 2024 © .Kit

BOWIE: So, your pieces were selected first, and then the curation of your family's pieces was based off of those. It’s interesting to curate a show with the works of an entire family starting from where we are now and then to look back at where some of these roots are exposing themselves in your work.

KLEIN: There's a grace in the way that I feel about having my family in the show. It feels non-competitive. It’s an embodiment of the kind of ideology that I'm pushing forward in my work, which is this interconnected, interdependent, more feminine way of being.

BOWIE: It is very rare because with all artists just on an individual level, there is this oscillation between the actual flow state where you are allowing the work and the ideas to come through you, and the ego that pushes back to question what you’re doing.

KLEIN: It’s like a comet that hits the Earth.

BOWIE: Right. The ego hits and it's already such an issue as an individual to make sure that it's not taking up too much space. That Le Monde feature on the exhibition mentions the way that children of major artists often don't try to become artists themselves, or they choose different media as a way to minimize comparisons. But your family has done this exceptional job of keeping their egos out of the way in support of each other's processes.

KLEIN: Yeah. It's unusual. It's sort of like a top-down building, where the structure starts with our fixation on the stars and other shared concepts. So when a group of people are all shooting inwardly towards these universal ideas and creating from that space, there's almost this secondary quality of the physical where—of course there's overlap—we're all thinking about the stars and universal truths; things that belong to everybody. They don't belong to one artist. And so there's this sense of, if your main inspiration is something that's so much greater than your own ego, that humbling aspect is a part of the inspiration itself. It's more about the devotion to the work than it is about the individual ego. Although, I'm sure there's been a lot of ego that I'm not even aware of because there's isolation for each of us.

 

Seffa Klein
Multiple Displacement (Sun Machine), 2019
Bismuth metal woven glass
76.2 x 61 cm
30 x 24 in

 

BOWIE: Is there any particular member of your family whose work you feel resonates with you most?

KLEIN: I think we're all kind of equally inspired by nature, space, meditation, these universal, larger ideas, than we are by each other. Each person is a portal to a different element or aspect of these universal realities, and throughout my childhood I gazed into these pieces by my family members that I saw as examples of a human being dedicating their life to a pursuit and really achieving a level of mastery with that.

BOWIE: The stars are obviously a major influence on all of you. How exactly do they inform your practice?

KLEIN: My fascination with stars began with growing up in Arizona, watching the meteor showers every year. We would go to Arcosanti, this attempted utopian community out in the desert, and sleep up on these concrete dome roofs. My dad would bring his telescope and we'd go and lay out for the Leonid meteor showers. He always had telescopes and would tell me about the stars. My mom has also always been super into science. And then, when I was ten, we moved to northern Arizona where there’s no light pollution at all. The sky is completely black and you can see the entire Milky Way. That was just my everyday view. We lived in this Earthship. It's a house made of tires and dirt inside a hill and the roof is flush with the top of the hill, so you can just walk up the hill and then go lay on the roof, and you really don't have anything in your periphery. So, you actually feel like you are lost in space. It’s that sense of awe, amazement, truth, and terror. I was super addicted to this combination of feelings like, I'm gonna die, I'm amazed. If this is truth, I can gaze into the mysteries and have this sense of being on the precipice of the believability of my own existence. How did this happen? You're staring out there like, So that's the universe. That's the majority: darkness and stars, and this is my experience right here. It's just so wild that out of anything in the whole world that could have happened, this happened. I would try to have these existential moments as much as possible. 

But yeah, the stars were definitely my first, most powerful and consistent window into those states. It was like an outward reflection of the inward states that I was most interested in having. My work today is still really focused on cultivating inward states. And so my connection to the stars is as much ideological as it is perceptual. And then, I started getting really into astrophysics when I was probably around fifteen. I was studying quantum mechanics and getting into particle physics and since then, it's just been a regular passion. I’ve always been very drawn to understanding the smallest unit of something. I have a hard time believing something just because someone says it. I need to know down to the particle scale how that works, then we can talk about the molecular scale, and then the material scale, and then the social scale, and then I'm with you. It all started with looking up at the stars. A lot of people don't feel that the mysteries of the universe are accessible or useful to ask about. There's this block and I think it's because they don't have those kinds of experiences with the vaguely thin interface between self and infinity.

Seffa Klein
Multiple Displacement (you are hovering between shadow and reflection), 2018
Bismuth and gallium metal on woven glass
101.6 x 142.2 cm
40 x 56 in

BOWIE: The interference of the urban lightscape certainly hinders our ability to tap into that dialogue. What you were saying made me remember learning about the search for the Higgs-Boson, or the God particle when I was in college. It was the hottest topic in particle physics for a couple of decades. That was my first understanding of where science meets spirituality. Can you talk about the way that your work blurs those lines between art, science and spirituality?

KLEIN: Absolutely. The Higgs-Boson and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN has been a big part of my life as well. I was ten or eleven when they first turned that thing on and thought it might open up a black hole and suck up the world. I stayed up until midnight because that was when they were turning it on. I was like, I'm not gonna miss it if a black hole comes and takes everything. I'm not gonna have that happen in my sleep. (laughs) People have this idea that there are separate categories in life and it's so dull. They engage with their constructs around reality rather than reality itself. I'm really interested in engaging with reality itself, and I do that through science, through spirituality, and through art. They're all the same thing. But I think it's this idea of getting close to what is real. 

People have this idea that meditation is metaphysical, science is empirical, and art is creative, and they're all separate. They think you can only interface with art or science if you’re educated accordingly. And you can only truly interface with meditation if you're insane enough to sit still for many hours a day and go to an ashram or something. Everything is accessible and we have the opportunity to engage in all of these fields as different sides of seeking. Meditation is one way in which I seek to understand and comprehend the nature of the universe as are science and art. I think scientists have a deep sense of spirituality, especially particle physicists. I'm attracted to science because I see it as a site for magic as much as I see spirituality or art as a site for magic. Magic is a word I love because it's the first word that gives you wonder as a child. Magic is real and it's science. And so, my practice has evolved into creating work that's very invested in telling the viewer that they have the power to interface with the deepest truths and reality. It's not hubris to want to interface with those things. You can do so with respect and grace, and I believe it's actually what we're here to do.

Seffa Klein
New Stream, 2019
Bismuth metal and Bismuth Eutectic Alloy on woven glass
106.7 x 142.2 cm
42 x 56 in

BOWIE: Right. Seeking those deeper truths is actually a rather humble pursuit.

KLEIN: It's very humble. It's funny because society is set up in a way to make us believe that it's ridiculous, but stifling that urge is actually very destructive for us and the planet. So, I feel a sense of urgency around creating these ontologies that humans could inhabit in order to create a more sustainable future.

BOWIE: At UCLA, you were studying both art and astrophysics and you originally wanted to become an inventor. So, how did you eventually decide that the application of your scientific studies would find their way into your art?

KLEIN: Somehow the rumor got started that I earned a degree in astrophysics, but I didn’t, although I did aspire to becoming an inventor as a child. I don't know if I ever really thought I'd be a scientist. I was getting an art degree at UCLA and wanted to take classes in astrophysics, which is why I went to UCLA and not CalArts. I always knew that I wanted to take science classes as a way of learning information that would eventually go into the art. I've always been an artist first and foremost. 

BOWIE: Bismuth is one of the most prevalent materials that you use, but you manage to almost paint with it, because it appears in many different colors in your works. How does that work?

KLEIN: Essentially, when I apply the metal, it's silver. And so I'm weaving these different layers and then I'm coloring it through a controlled oxidation process that allows me to isolate one of six colors from the metal.

BOWIE: The other material that you work with a lot is gallium, which is interesting as a metal because it's liquid at body temperature, so you can warm it into a liquid state in your hand and it also has the power to dissolve other metals. I love the piece that I saw in your studio, the aluminum ladder that had the rungs broken down the center by gallium. I wanted to ask you more about the significance of this metal in your work.

KLEIN: Gallium was really the first metal I started using. I happened across it through different research that I was doing. To be able to hold metal in your hand and it melts, it feels like holding a living being in your hand. This material has an emotional quality to me. For something to change states in your hand, it's so tender. It's also non-toxic—it's used in body scans, so you can put it into your blood and everything. The only other low-temperature liquid metal I’ve seen is mercury, which is very toxic. So, I sort of fell in love with the human quality of gallium. It has the ability to be disruptive, to seep into other metals and destroy their molecular bonds—it's this very watery, feminine kind of secret power. It can literally destroy a tank just by sitting there and seeping into it. It's so elegant. The ladders that you saw in my studio were called Access Ladders. They emphasize the idea that we have access to all the information, but that the climb is not up, it’s actually through this presence in every moment. That’s the infiltration of reality that gallium represents to me. In those pieces, I put one little drop of gallium on each rung and then left it in the sunshine until I could just crumble the rungs in my hand.

BOWIE: Are there any other metals that you would like to work with in the future?

KLEIN: I definitely have some on my list. Sometimes I use bismuth eutectic alloy. The appearance is kind of like bismuth, but it has a lower melting point of about 120 degrees Fahrenheit, whereas bismuth is about 560 degrees. So, I can use a hair dryer to warm it up and paint with it. In the beginning, with my first paintings, I was using bismuth and gallium. There was this great suspension between the two metals on the surface where if the painting gets too hot, the gallium will drip and destroy it. But at a certain point I realized my collectors don't want gallium on their floor. (laughs) I need to save this for some kind of installation. It just doesn't really work for small paintings that get bought and sold.

 

Seffa Klein
R.Failure > 5, 2019
Bismuth and flowers on woven glass
109.2 x 86.4 cm
43 x 34 in

 

BOWIE: My last question for you has to do with something you had said in a previous interview about how in the future you would like to create “monumental works that have a tangible, positive effect on our ecosystem.” Are there any specific ideas you've been dreaming about or meditating on?

KLEIN: Right now, I'm in the realm of the ideological. My work hasn't really gone into the realm of being completely sustainable or actually being able to mediate environmental issues. But I love the idea of creating works whose function is not only to create a conceptual, pictorial experience for humans, but also to create some sort of experience for nature itself. As humans, we have this pictorial experience that opens our mind and allows us to transform internally because of this openness that happens semiotically through the composition. If I superimpose that process of transformation and openness onto the environment, how could we create that same sort of interface and what would that look like? What would be an experience of art for the environment? I'm sitting with that question first because I think art is not the thing that's going to mediate environmental issues. We need real technologies to do that. At the moment, I'm invested in blurring these lines because I feel like there are so many questions that we haven't asked. I’m in the space as an artist of asking these new questions that don't have to make logical sense, like what is a tangible artwork for the environment? 

BOWIE: That might be the full circle to your original childhood ambitions of being an inventor. Maybe your art practice and your inventions will blur the lines between those two endeavors.

KLEIN: I think so. Inventor is a better word for artist, or maybe inventor is sort of what artists have become. I mean, if you think about it, the pre-Modern definition of the word ‘artist’ was a very different thing.

BOWIE: It was what we would now consider a technician, almost.

KLEIN: Yeah. We never really updated that word. An inventor is a thing that a child wants to be. Most people have more specific jobs, right? So, maybe that's what art is.

BOWIE: Maybe it is.

 
 

Seffa Klein, A Family Constellation is on view through July 13 @ Galerie Poggi 135, Rue Saint-Martin, Paris 4

Athena Is Burning: A Conversation Between Evangeline AdaLioryn and Michael Bailey Gates

portraits by Michael Bailey Gates

Evangeline AdaLioryn: Hey girl, how is Paris?

Michael Bailey Gates: It's so good. I'm just making pasta and staying up late because I have a virtual psychic reading later in Los Angeles, and I totally messed up the timing. But let's not talk about me! Let's talk about you.

Evangeline AdaLioryn: [laughs]

Gates: You, you, you! Your new work, your show!

AdaLioryn: Sorry I'm a little late on the call [rustling sound]. Oh my god, did you hear that? These two bluebirds came to my doorstep and just got in a tussle. I haven't fed them in weeks; I don't know why they keep trying. You know what, I wouldn't give up either. Anyways, yes.

Gates: You're such a Disney princess.

AdaLioryn: I'm serious! I usually feed them peanuts, but I haven't fed them peanuts in so long because I've been so insane. But, oh, Gilda's here too, the garden cat. She always comes by when I can't say hi to her; what a perfect companion.

Gates: Wow, you're painting such a beautiful picture. 

AdaLioryn: Wait, girl—and I'm not kidding about any of this, and I hate that I'm not; I also just gathered 30 red roses from outside the garden because you have to behead them, or they won't keep blooming. All of these red roses are scattered around my work area. They're so pretty.

Gates: I think that you're totally lying, and you're in a 7-Eleven parking lot. 

AdaLioryn: No, I literally would. 

Gates: But I have been there, and I know that is your little world.

AdaLioryn: I'm sending you a photo of the altar with the roses on it right now. I mean, it's shocking that the roses came in so strong this year.

Gates: From your suitors.

AdaLioryn: Yeah.

Gates: You’re always sending me new songs for my little walks, for which I'm so grateful. What are you playing right now?

AdaLioryn: I am listening to the new Zsela singles; they are so good. She's such a force. Also the new Claire Rousay album, I can't! And always Masakatsu Takagi. 

Gates: Okay, let's talk about your show. Living in your little cottage in Los Angeles, you have all these animals around you daily. Your show had a lot of animal themes and, of course, the Labyrinth theme.

AdaLioryn: Throughout history and existence, animals have always been omens, from which we have instilled and traced meaning. I know at different times in my life, different omens find me. For me, especially in the previous few years of my life, when you're in a profound moment of trying to find yourself, especially as a trans person, you start to need to look up and around a lot because you're going so incredibly deep within yourself. 

The Labyrinth, this encapsulating theme of the show, is tied to memory—tracing back these childhood memories, of girlhood, of what could have been. Finding all of these seeds that I had no idea were planted or coming across these phantom gardens almost, these animals were the guides in helping me stay safe through this uncovering and solidifying of my 'lost girlhood' or this found woman. 

This theme of phantom labyrinths that we hold inside ourselves is something I think literally every single trans person has within us. And we don't have much time or space in our community to discuss it. If we do, we are fortunate. So yeah, there's also the reality that to go that deep within yourself, you need to do it by yourself, and these were my guardians to help me in this pilgrimage. Also, while they were looking after me, I needed something to take care of, and birthing these high-intensity, detailed gilded creatures of the netherworld took months at a time. They required the same care that they had given to me. I mean, the Hippocampus sculpture took 2 1/2 months in total, from touching the wet clay to the final luster firing. 

On the topic of memory, the hippocampus was named after this mythical creature with the front legs of a horse and the tail of a dolphin. They were these benevolent helpers of the sea that Poseidon made to seek out people who needed help. The hippocampus is the part of the brain that deals with memory function. And as a trans person, you actually begin to recontextualize yourself, which brings up your past. These studies also relate to awakening our memories to program our future simultaneously. 

Gates: Watching this from the outside and seeing you traversing this labyrinth, it's been really intense to see how much time and how many pieces you made. This is the biggest series of work that you have taken on. Does that feel right to you?

AdaLioryn: Oh gosh, yeah. It's my biggest collection. I always think of my work in terms of collections [laughs]. I'm such a fashion girl. I think of all this work, even these triumphant large emblematic life-sized animals, as part of the design world.  They are made for people's homes and function as guardians and guides for people like they are in the real world. They must function to hold space for someone's sadness, listen to your prayers, or be a reminder of a lesson. The animals are all blind; they are listeners. Yet they know the way and the riddles and the spells needed. 

Gates: I know that you have these rituals and experiences that go into your practice—that you like to give your work before it goes into the kiln or before you cast a ring into gold. Is that right? 

AdaLioryn: I believe in always having a ritual before you ask the kiln gods for help. If you call Earth's spirits and elements, you have to honor them. When we are about to load a really important piece, I'll gather the flowers and herbs. I know that on the Guardian Dog, I had gathered bees that had passed away and laid them on each foot in the kiln. So, there are certain rituals of love and devotion; I mean, these are extremely intense, intricate forms. I lay my hands over the pieces—to put my love into them— hundreds of times; you can ask anyone around me; I looked like an insane person! You really do want to please the kiln gods. I do believe it's always a miracle when they are brought through the cradle of fire. You are asking the Gods of this world to ordain and solidify this clay from the Earth into stone that could last for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. I mean, that's if the tides of fates allow it to be as such.

Gates: I love this visual of entering that realm of fire; everything eventually burns away. The offerings of the bees and flowers are no longer there after the firing happens, right?

AdaLioryn: It's all taken by the fire; it's completely incinerated. When the Hippocampus was firing, I spoke to you about how stressed I was because these took over a month to assemble and dry. And with every single firing, you are wondering if this layer of the fire will allow the form to proceed forward. You're at the will of the fire at this point. It's so moving; I remember I was really worried over the initial firing. I had a dream that they were smoking black in the kiln, and Athena was tipped over in the kiln, and she stood up! She was a statue of Athena, blackened from the smoke, and her eyes were bellowing with flames, but I knew as I woke up that the Hippocampus' had made it through. 

Gates: Ugh, Athena is that girl.

AdaLioryn: Athena is that girl, I know. We need to pray to Athena more; honestly, she's been that bitch, and that nose job? Too good.

Gates: We're Venus girls through and through!

AdaLioryn: We are Venus girls through and through, but listen, I need to just tell the readers that.. you are blonde, and I am not right now, and that hurts me every single day of my life.

Gates: It tortures you, I know.

AdaLioryn: I don't know what I'm going to do about it yet.

Gates: You have spoken to me about the language you use throughout your work. You often talk to me about breakthroughs in sigils, in the language you invent. I was wondering, across all of your work, jewelry, and sculpture, there seems to be this language you have developed.

AdaLioryn: I never take for granted how important it is to make something. We have such an influx and over-saturation of objects on the Earth. Throughout my studies, it started to be, even in the kiln, I was taught to take space in a firing, which is very sacred. You need to be sure of what you are firing. One day, when I was in a museum, I was on mushrooms. I realized every single piece in there was there because of generations and generations of hands that decided it was special enough to keep safe. It was loved. So, inventing new symbols and language that can be used as a map to guide these pieces throughout history is important.

Basically, I am trying to say that I take what I am putting into the world, through the kiln, through the gold pouring, very seriously. In my studies of the world's designers, whether ancient Byzantine gold work or Lalique's spells, we must help bring craft forward with us.

Gates: No, you have always been so inspiring to me in your encyclopedia of knowledge about your mediums, and the different historical references in your work are so strong. Also, you have a secret persona where you bully people on Sotheby’s and Christie's page.

AdaLioryn: [gasps] It's not bullying! It's not bullying, first of all, I used to do that. I don't anymore because I deleted my private account. I have admonished my power of free speech. Certain places in the world need feedback! Okay, okay, I commented 'p3n!5' on one post in 2020, and you won't let it go!

Gates: It's something I have been thinking about a lot; it's a concept that you introduced to me. It is thinking about work in the context of where it lives or can live—making with this idea of living in someone's home. A lot of work you are making here is intended to be in people's spaces, palaces, and temple spaces.

AdaLioryn: Ideally, they would be in temple space, but I also believe we all have to make places of worship in our residential safe spaces. Unfortunately, we haven't yet been able to bring places and spaces of worship into the cultural zeitgeist. It would be incredibly special to help people come together in quiet safety with one another. I mean, I go to temple spaces and churches a few times a week just to sit in a reflective, quiet space. 

Gates: With this level of work, the work is presented with a space in mind. 

AdaLioryn: That is a part of the romance of it; you're inventing these beautiful gilded creatures that will guide specific people throughout their lives. That's really how I think about jewelry: it's one of my biggest, precious acts of devotion and faith when I make jewelry. Whether I am making a one-on-one commission for someone or a piece bursting through the doors, I know it's already calling someone home.  It feels like following this light web, like you're walking on a tightrope. Almost like a lighthouse—like hundreds of lighthouses all beaming into one another throughout time. My lighthouse is shining, and then someone is called to it, or I will send out the ray of light, and we'll meet and converge to make this piece come forth. 

Gates: You're such a cult leader

AdaLioryn: [Laughs] I would be so stressed out if I led a cult. I'd be like, everyone, leave me alone! I can only have so many people with my phone number. 

Gates: It's true, there is such a network of people—the cult following around your jewelry. I will be out or at a friend's place or party, and I will immediately see your ring glinting from across the room. I think it's interesting in the context of your work to have these temple locations in mind. Also, the people who are drawn to your jewelry are of that specific mindset. 

AdaLioryn: Absolutely. Actually, that's how it's been throughout time. I was just in conversation with a friend of mine, Cherry Lazar. We were looking through these old books together; Rene Lalique wouldn't be Lalique without Calouste Gulbenkian or Sarah Bernhardt! It took two people with their hearts open asking for jewels to make this collection of the finest jewelry in the world. It's something that I am learning: that you want to build the right relationships with the right collectors—collectors of beauty. These are pieces that will be gifted hopefully for generations. And I do not take that lightly to earn that honor. And I'm sure this level of 'intensity' is really hard to deal with on a first date. [laughs]

Gates: [laughs] Let me look at my phone and see if I have anything else to ask. I just opened my phone to a beautiful photo of red roses scattered across your room. 

AdaLioryn: See, I'm not a liar! Tell the world: I am not lying.

Gates: You're not lying.

Instinctive Gestures: An Interview of Alexandra Bachzetsis

text by Summer Bowie 

In utero, all of our body’s desires are met by the host body we inhabit. Upon our emergence into the world, we find ourselves still dependent on this body that we cannot yet distinguish as separate from our own. When we suckle our mother’s breast, a hormone called cholecystokinin is released into the intestine, which is responsible for satiety and sleepiness. Without it, we feel a novel, existential pain called hunger. And when its reserves are particularly low, our eyebrows turn red, our fists clench, and finally we discover our voice. Our bodies communicate their desires to our mothers as a mechanism of the survival instinct that we depend upon until we are capable of verbalizing them. This basic, primal lexicon that defies cultural distinctions is one aspect of Bachzetsis’ practice that I find most compelling. Conversely, her investigations into the gendered gaze, the performance of identity, and the appropriation of gesture give the work a fractalized complexity that exponentially opens new windows of inquiry into the kaleidoscope of human impulse.

SUMMER BOWIE You're both a visual and a movement artist. How did you know that both these mediums would be the basis of your career? 

ALEXANDRA BACHZETSIS I have been a dancer since I was a child. It was always my first passion. To respond with the body is super instinctive. It’s what you learn from childhood—even people who are not performing artists respond with their bodies. At the same time, I was starting to draw a lot. I studied visual arts in high school. But dance was always there simultaneously. 

BOWIE And you play a lot with different forms of movement that are not often viewed on the proscenium stage: folk dance, athletic movement, very pedestrian movement. Where did your training get started? 

BACHZETSIS I started with classical ballet at around four years old. I trained a lot in acrobatics, and I went to a physical theater school that was very circus focused. In the beginning, I wasn’t so sure how my career would evolve. But I felt like the contemporary dance field was more open for change than the contemporary circus field at that time. In contemporary dance, I could integrate different themes, physicalities, and body practices. My own practice has been equally situated in the visual art context and the theater context from the beginning. I focus on what the piece is about or where the research of the work leads to. I'm particularly obsessed with where movement comes from—which gestures are inherited versus those trained and learned. I was always interested in the legacies of the radical performance artists from the ’60s and ’70s, such as Yvonne Rainer, Yoko Ono, Trisha Brown, Valie Export, Carolee Schneemann, Simone Forti, Bruce Nauman, and Bob Fosse.

BOWIE Postmodernists like Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti were so adamantly anti-virtuosic—yet you tend to incorporate both virtuosic and pedestrian movement so fluidly.

BACHZETSIS When I started professionally dancing in the mid-90s, most contemporary choreographers and performers worked around the idea of rejecting dance. It was all about thinking before you move. That slightly forced cerebral approach made me realize there were other modes of expression necessary to integrate into a dance practice. I wanted to free myself from the dominant mood of that time. I started to investigate more passionate or lustful journeys of adapting movement, being physical, or thinking of physicality in general. My first solo piece, entitled Perfect, was both an attempt at virtuosity and abandoning virtuosity at the same time. In this piece, I formulate a loop of excessive fitness routines borrowed from gestures belonging to the ballet vocabulary, the fitness studio routines, the kung fu practice, the disco dance floor, the catwalk, and the rehearsal studio. As I repeat each section, the movements evolve and transform slightly, almost an invisible accumulation of gestures and attitudes. In the rigor of things, transformation can take place. In 2001, for Perfect, I was looking at how the virtuosic could be combined with questions of emotionality and physical endurance. But I was also attempting to formulate a score for female empowerment, working through the blood-sweat-and-tears nature of show business and the construction of the perfected image of a body, toward a different, more daily gestured version of self.

BOWIE Your use of repetition, or accumulation, and the connection you draw between automatism and eroticism is really interesting. 

BACHZETSIS I always wonder why certain genres or types of dance are judged inferior. Why is ballet praised while pole dancing, or stripping, is considered vulgar? What I do is try to balance these disparate dance practices by appropriating them, studying them, training in them, repeating them infinitely, and making them my own. So, for instance, the erotic of stripping becomes very physical, almost acrobatic, while the grace of ballet loses its idea of sublime in the gradual deconstruction. 

BOWIE Right, these hierarchies are sort of arbitrary, but they don't come from the movements themselves. 

BACHZETSIS No, they come from the history of Western culture and judgmental Western society.

BOWIE I want to talk about the formation and expression of desire. You talk a lot about the way that our desires are a product of social conditioning. How do we know which aspects of our desires are unique to us as individuals, and which ones are a product of conditioning? 

BACHZETSIS Maybe it's interesting to think about motherhood—when you have to feed a child. We come into the world hungry. The biggest desire is to feed and to survive. At the same time, young children are eager to get in trouble and throw themselves out of windows (laughs). As a mother, you must constantly figure out how to save these humans from killing themselves. So, it's a paradoxical function you undergo as a woman: having your own agency and then having to be there for someone else. And I feel those questions are very much related to the primer of desire: how do I shape codependency and become something for somebody else to exist? My whole performance practice is like that. I can’t perform without an audience, and an audience will receive nothing without me. There is also this feeding on what you need in order to construct this idea of desire. For me, these impulses are instinctive. 

BOWIE You explore this a lot in the piece, Private: Wear a mask when you talk to me, which you did in 2015, before Covid. 

BACHZETSIS That piece I created in dialogue with Paul B. Preciado. We were asking questions about privacy and exposure, the appropriation of other bodies, and the performance of masculinity. It also went into how others see you—not the way you are, but the way they imagine you. The title is also related to intimacy: how can we truly be addressed, or address someone else, maybe not when being exactly oneself, but an idea of the self in the eyes of the other? 

BOWIE You work with a lot of popular music and costumes that harken popular archetypes, but then you establish a sort of individualized dialect with the movement. Would you say that this individualized flourish is our most honest expression of individuality?

BACHZETSIS Context is everything when it comes to the flourish. When something makes sense, it usually has to do with who is listening, who is watching, and who the dialogue partners are. These elements are in a certain dynamic with one and another. I don't feel we can think of ourselves as individuals with a singular pleasure—it's a singular pleasure rehearsed with another individual. 

BOWIE You've worked a lot with Paul B. Preciado. How was that relationship established?

BACHZETSIS Adam Szymczyk, the artistic director of documenta 14 invited Paul to curate the public programs for Athens and Kassel, and Paul was also assigned to me as research curator for the work I was developing for the exhibition in both cities. That’s when we started working on the diptych, Private: Wear a mask when you talk to me, and Private Song. Later, we continued the collaboration for Escape Act. For that piece, Paul offered me a poem as a score entitled Love is a Drone. He generated this poem in dialogue with an artificial intelligence. I used the poem, an excessive pornographic vocabulary culled from the internet, in alphabetic order, to create and rearrange pop songs and rap songs that we reformulated, staged, and performed during the performance. 

BOWIE Escape Act very interestingly addresses identity and the way that we can feel caged by our identities—particularly the way people project an identity onto us. Have you found that this is something you struggle with? Or is that something you feel confined by? 

BACHZETSIS I struggle with a permanent judgment and interpretation by other people of my persona and my background. Growing up with a mixed cultural background has been quite a strange journey of feeling othered because of your origins and looks, and feeling exposed as exotic fetish simultaneously. The fact of being a woman, identifying as such, being super feminine, but also at the same time very athletic and physical in a liberated manner that is conventionally reserved for men, triggers a lot of criticism, sexual patronizing phantasies, and jealous adoration in people.

There are all these conditions of entrapment that society puts on the body. Desire gets commodified in multiple ways. First, it’s the status, the looks and the attitude, then the talent and the knowledge, and finally the function and duty. As a woman who isn’t forever twenty-five, as an artist and as a mother, I do get a lot of irritating comments about my still existing physical practice and my intense stage choreographies. As if one represents a threat to society when enduring a physical practice. In my work, I formulate identity as a playground of possibilities for a different future. A possibility for freedom of expression, freedom of body, freedom to touch.

BOWIE Dorota Sajewska wrote about your work, saying, “The body becomes a physical archive of other bodies.” Do you think that muscle memory is an instinct that functions as a way of archiving that which is most ephemeral? 

BACHZETSIS Yvonne Rainer in her best-known dance, Trio A (1966), explores a simultaneous performance by three dancers that included a difficult series of circular and spiral movements. It was widely adapted and interpreted by other choreographers. Muscle memory, or physical memory, is crucial while dancing. It’s also very interesting how it conditions the movement patterns in relation to an architectural space and how architecture is perceived through the visiting or inhabiting body. Dance happens where bodies remember how to perform in space. If you revisit a space later, your body may not remember, but as soon as you put your body into the space, into the same conditions, and sometimes even the same angle, you immediately understand what it was. So, there is something like body memory for sure, which is intelligent and hidden; we don’t rationally understand it. These are interesting problems that are related to dance. When you train your whole life to remember steps or to remember how to evoke and affect emotion, or how to present a certain repetition of a theme, and those emotional landscapes are not forgotten—you carry them with you. 

BOWIE Can you talk a little bit about the contradiction between intuition and gesture as it was explored in your piece 2020: Obscene?

BACHZETSIS This piece works with explicit language, explicit gestures, explicit violence, explicit erotic tension and beauty, and exaggerated male and female roles. And it asks questions about archetypical behaviors, gestures, and patterns, which are recurring elements in the history of body. The performers in the piece do everything intuitively as themselves, working on specific characteristics as elements of language, not so much on construction of a particular character. It's this game of going in and out of characters that makes the performer intuitively feel what is needed and how much of what to offer. So, it's a very demanding score—you must physically and emotionally engage fully all the time; yet at the same time, you're never playing a role. 

BOWIE Working with those extremes, do you find that you need to establish boundaries, or safe words, with your actors when they work together? Or is there a certain level of trust established? 

BACHZETSIS We did not have safe words, but if people did not feel good about something, we talked about it. If people wanted to leave the project, they were free to do so. A lot of the current dogma of political correctness and having a safe space everywhere you go is a little bit problematic for freedom of artistic practice. Where can we still be physical, or ourselves, or work out tensions that are necessary regarding the expression of extreme states? From the beginning of the research, Dorota Sajewska, the dramaturge and I were very open and transparent with the performers. We told them we were interested in questions of violence and obscenity. As a performer, you need to be determined and know that this is the aim for the performance—that what you do on stage is performative in public, not private, yet you work with your own private access to questions of obscenity and violence. We also looked at obscenity in sculpture, painting and film—for instance in the work of Hans Bellmer, who created a mechanical doll in the shape of a girl, with ball joints in its limbs, as a substitute for the human body that he could use as model in photographs and drawings, performing it and living with it. This was a fascinating part of the research while looking for excessive body practices and how they have been represented. The dialogue on these sensitive topics is important through the experience of staging them, interpreting rather than canceling ideas beforehand. Humans are individuals and each of us has different types of boundaries. There isn’t a rule that works for all of us. It’s important to keep the conversation about taboos and rules open.

BOWIE Many folk dances are embedded with gendered social cues, like Hula, for example—the women are supposed to keep their feet together as a gesture of modesty and the men maintain a wide, powerful stance. On a more contemporary level, it’s not so prescriptive, but it’s there, and you play with this a lot. 

BACHZETSIS I was very fascinated with the research of a German artist and writer Marianne Wex. She was a feminist, social anthropologist of sort, and made an important publication called Let’s Take Back Our Space (1979). It's an amazing anthology of photographs and comments on behavior and gestures in public space. Her intention was to undo the patriarchal structures by showing and presenting male gestures, like manspreading, which take up much more space than female gestures. I use the vocabulary she nailed down often in my work. For instance, what's classically in the male wardrobe and what's in the female wardrobe, and how can we create tension with one or the other? 

BOWIE That's very evident in the scene in Private: Wear a mask when you talk to me where you are in this skin-tight black latex dress with your high ponytail and dramatic makeup dancing to “This Is a Man’s World.” Both the costuming and opening movements are hyper-feminized in accordance with the male gaze. Then, you hike up your dress and start doing pushups, which is so masculine under the male gaze. 

BACHZETSIS When I perform, I focus on my own relationship with the gaze. What's my gaze on the body? What's the female, or the male gaze, and that of the audience watching me? There is often this reversed aggression, or a question of violence, in the construction of the gaze. When we see someone, what do we want to see in this person? What do we want to get out of the person? That's completely what I focus on. Why do we expose ourselves to be observed or create scores on social media for social exposure in a kind of of mental collective stripping?

BOWIE Your piece, An Ideal for Living asks questions about stealing and inventing gestures. Do you feel like you've ever stolen a gesture, or do you feel like you'll ever invent one? 

BACHZETSIS First ideas or gestures are difficult to trace back in the construction of body language. How are they produced or invented? What are your references or how do these references change as time goes by? I think this is a recurring theme: the analysis of the time you live in. And how do you establish a language that you work with—one that becomes your own language? I don’t have the pressure of having to invent something unique as much as I try to create a set of questions that allow for experimentation. There’s an emphasis on practice. I think appropriation is something that happens to all of us all the time. It can become a very political conversation, especially when it comes to cultural appropriation. At the same time, I think all performativity is an appropriation of something that exists, because how can you produce something new if you don’t appropriate what is there? It would mean the complete death of performance if appropriation wasn’t allowed. In order to work on the construction of a new language or different ideas of a future, the historical dimension must be explored first. It’s in evolving through what is established and through what we experience that we can become other.

BOWIE It’s difficult to know where the lines should be drawn in that regard. It often feels like we’re all just following each other's cues on what we find permissible? 

BACHZETSIS It’s important to figure out individual statements and individual language in the present era of political control and internalized habits of self-control. It’s crucial to explore ways of formulating some kind of personal freedom that transgresses collectivity. I feel like it’s necessary to look into particular situations, individual cases, specific questions of appropriation, and how these can become a language—a sensitive language, a common language, an outrageous language that can break walls.

BOWIE It also comes back to why we instinctively feel compelled to appropriate something. Why do we choose various gestures or archetypes to play with?

BACHZETSIS There is always this connecting of elements between differences, or between diverse forms of otherness. What makes people feel other, or why are they excluded because of being other? What's integrating otherness and what's excluding otherness? And I feel appropriation, per se, is not necessarily exclusive. It could also mean making people part of something, together. And at the same time, there is this question of where these elements start to work together or against each other. And that's why I think it's important to stay open there—to maintain a space for interpretation. 

Cheap & Trashy: An Interview of Babymorocco

 
babymorocco, Erika Kamano, y2k, man kneeling, bodybuilding
 

interview by Abraham Chabon
photography by Iris Luz and Erika Kamano

Babymorocco loves beautiful women, cheap purple vodka, Gwen Stefani, and bodybuilding. He hates irony, uninspired people, and boring nights. The London-based recording artist has burst drunk, buff, and confidently into the music scene in the past two years with a distinct sound and an entirely original look. He sings about sex, partying, girls, and his ego over bubbling synths, Drum and Bass hi-hats, pounding 808s, and floating basslines. His subject matter is cheap, trashy, and vain, but it has an authenticity and humor that balance his narcissism with charm. ‘Rocco’ doesn't want you to take him too seriously; his aesthetic reflects that. Babymorocco looks like he belongs just as much on stage in a London warehouse as he does in a strongman porno mag. He makes it hard to tell the two apart. If you've seen Babymorocco live, you've probably seen him with his pants off. Sex appeal has always been important to male musicians, Jim Morrison had his long hair and bursting leather pants, Elvis wore unzipped bedazzled jumpsuits, Babymorocco has short shorts, tight T-shirts, and bulging biceps. He’s like a pitbull on a bender. He took a break from recording his upcoming project in the studio to talk. 

ABRAHAM CHABON: I'm a big fan. I loved your music as soon as I saw the music video for “Everyone.” You have that line, "They'll say I have narcissistic personality disorder, but when I smile, I don't have to pay for my coffee order." I love that. 

BABYMOROCCO: Yeah, that shoot was a good time. I wasn't even meant to do that in New York. We were meant to do it in London, but they flew me out to do it.  It was really fun.  

CHABON: It looked like a good time. 

BABYMOROCCO: Thank you. Genuinely. It was a peak moment for me because it was when things were getting serious, so to make a video about everyone wanting to look like me felt right. 

CHABON: Your whole look is so good, and I think, especially right now, having a look is so important. And I don't know anyone else who has the bodybuilder thing going on. 

BABYMOROCCO: It works. I don't really test my strength, though. I don't utilize my strength. I just want to look like a pornstar. That's it. 

CHABON: Is that how you would describe Babymorocco? 

BABYMOROCCO: Babymorocco is a part of my life, what I'm doing right now. That's how I describe it. It's my music, it's my art. It's a way to channel a side of me. It's totally me, but it's a way to channel a side of me without having to question it. I believe that as people, we have lots of parts to us, versions of ourselves. Babymorocco is a way that I can express myself the way I want; It's the swaggy, confident side of me.  

CHABON: Do you have to turn it on at a concert before you perform?  

BABYMOROCCO: Oh yeah, totally. Yes. 

CHABON: What's the procedure before going on stage? 

BABYMOROCCO: I do press-ups and get wasted. Usually, having sex before performing is really good for me because I look the most flustered; it makes me look sexier. It gets the adrenaline going. 

CHABON: You are surrounded by a lot of talented people. How did you form your community?

BABYMOROCCO: I mean, I love beautiful women, and I love beautiful women who are on their shit. My friend, Echo Seireeni, is an amazing artist. Ikeda is under my label, Phat Boy; she's also an artist. Erika Kamano is a massive photographer. Iris Luz, a creative director and photographer. These are bad bitches, but bad bitches with a mission. My crew is called The Girlfriends. In truth, they make up Babymorocco. They rule my life; they rule my world. They can slap me, shout at me, scream at me, and I'll come back begging for more every time. That's it. 

CHABON: And you live in London?

BABYMOROCCO: I grew up in Bournemouth, in the south of England. It's a little beach town. I live now in London in a swaggy little house. It's a good time. There are four people. There's a jewelry designer, a photographer, a footballer, and a pop star. And some cats. 

CHABON: Do you think your Moroccan identity shows in your music? Does it contribute to your identity as an artist? 

BABYMOROCCO: My family is from Casablanca, but I am from the UK, so Baby is the English side, and Morocco is the Moroccan side. For a while, people thought that because I was Moroccan, I had to make a kind of sound attributed to that, or I had to speak on it all the time. I think I can just be Moroccan and make pop music without being an ode to Morocco. And I'm sure there will be a time when I do, especially when I go back, but not too much yet. But, in “Crazy Cheap,” my most recent song, there are aspects of Moroccan music, drums, and vocals. There's some essence of being Moroccan in it. That's part of my identity, part of who I am, but that's it.

CHABON: Your ethnicity can be important to you and part of who you are, but it doesn't need to be essential to how you express yourself.  

BABYMOROCCO: I just want to be a Moroccan boy who makes it really big. I want to be on the Wikipedia page of notable pop stars from Morocco. I will be. 

CHABON: When did you start making music, and how did you discover your sound? 

BABYMOROCCO: I properly started making music in 2022, but I only started making and releasing the music I wanted to in 2023. That's when I started working with the producers that I liked, people that I respected, I wanted to make proper real music. I need it to be those synths, that sound that I grew up with. I need it to be UK. I want to create that fun, good time, trashy music, almost to the point where it's kind of shit. My influence is lots of French Electro like Yelle. I also love all of the early Space Cowboy stuff produced for Lady Gaga. And, of course, Avicii. Reality Star music from the UK, like Joey Essex. Bass Hunter is one of my biggest inspirations. There are so many. I can just go on and on with inspirations. The most important thing with music, for me, is an artist that can produce music and it's relevant and popping and swag and emotional; it speaks for itself. It's not trying to be anything specific. I hate genre. Don't try to limit yourself to a sound. Don't box yourself in, let other people do that for you.

CHABON: If you could collaborate with any musician, who's the dream?  

BABYMOROCCO: Who is the fucking dream? Gwen Stefani. But there's so many artists at the moment; who I would like to collaborate with? London feels exciting again. 

CHABON: COVID and quarantine put a freeze on things in art and music. It paused a new youth scene from starting and delayed the development of a culture. But stuff has started picking up again, and an identity is starting to be formed. 

BABYMOROCCO: I feel like people just want to have fun again. And not in an ironic way. We want to have an actual good time. I want to turn up; I want to do trashy shit. There was this time when everything with music had to be ironic to be accepted. It had to be a meme and funny. That was lame to me; it was so overdone; it wasn't authentic; it didn't mean anything. People may think I'm doing that with my music because I mention stuff like sex and partying, but that's very authentic to me. I'm a British boy. I would go to Magaluf, and I would go to Ayia Napa. I've been to all those islands. I've been up since I was thirteen years old.

CHABON: Our generation took irony way too far. It was a way to experiment and do the weird things you wanted, but you could justify if they weren't received well by saying it's ironic.   

BABYMOROCCO: You can hear when you listen to some music that it's a joke. There is a difference between not being serious and being a joke.  I'm passionate about partying. I'm passionate about women. I'm passionate about the UK. I'm passionate about beautiful things. I love drinking and partying. That's it. That's me. 

CHABON: On a weekend night in London. Where can the people find Babymorocco?

BABYMOROCCO: My friend Rain runs this night called Genesys, and that's a great time.  

CHABON: Talking about the contemporary scene, whether you're looking at Hyper Pop, or the Indie Sleaze revival, or the rave scene, I think that masculinity isn't really something that's embraced. There is an appreciation of the androgynous, experimenting with sexuality and identity, and breaking through gender roles and gender conformity. But you have a very masculine presence that stands out. Do you think about your masculinity? Is that something that you consider?  

BABYMOROCCO: I'm just doing me. I'm not working out to be a man or be healthy. I want to look sexy, swaggy, like a pornstar. At the gym, I'm turning up because the gym and music go hand in hand. The pump of working out properly gets you in that zone to listen to music. 

CHABON: You have a new tape coming out; what does this project mean to you? 

BABYMOROCCO: We're at the studio right now. I've been working with Dear Cupid, who's all about French Electro, and Frost Children are putting the final touches on it. It's going to be another character. It's going to be a spin-off of Babymorocco. He's called Jean-Paul. 

CHABON: Is it important to you to have a distinct identity with each tape?

BABYMOROCCO: Yes, a thousand percent. In this one, Jean-Paul is a French boy. It's like Babymorocco if he was born in France and lost loads of weight. I'm trying to get to your weight because you've got the cheekbones and stuff; that's what I need to get back again. I have to get skinny. I've been cutting weight recently. It needs to be skinny muscle because Jean-Paul is more mysterious. Morocco was a French colony, so I'm reclaiming it. 

CHABON: Can you say when the project's coming out? 

BABYMOROCCO: It's meant to come out in the summer. Coming soon.

CHABON: And with the record label Phat Boy, what's the idea behind that? Are you looking to sign artists? 

BABYMOROCCO: I love music, and I want to keep going in it, and I want to sign beautiful people to beautiful pop beats. And marry those two together. We have a lot coming up. At the moment, It's more of a collective, but I do want to turn it into a proper label. 

CHABON: Have you ever thought about making it  multimedia?

BABYMOROCCO: I would love to, especially with the live shows. I said the other day that I'm so bored of clubs. I want to perform on the beach, at art shows, and installations. I just want to make it crazy. The crazier, the better for me.

CHABON: If you have to get back to recording now, I can let you go. I'm looking forward to the new project.

BABYMOROCCO: Alright, well, thank you a lot, Abe. I appreciate it. And you're going to like the new stuff; it's a massive step up. It's crazy.