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

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

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
intro 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 with Estelle Hoy
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

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

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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

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

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

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

Seffa Klein
Walk Through Infinity (detail), 2024
Bismuth metal and plaster on woven glass
96.5 x 121.9 cm
38 x 48 in

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.

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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
Pneuma Well, 2018
Bismuth metal on woven glass
86.4 x 71.1 cm
34 x 28 in

Seffa Klein
Multiple Displacement (Peace Machine), 2024
Bismuth metal on woven glass
96.5 x 121.9 cm
38 x 48 in

Seffa Klein
Multiple Displacement (Varity), 2019
Bismuth metal and bismuth eutectic alloy on woven glass
63.5 x 50.8 cm
25 x 20 in

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

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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. 

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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.

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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 with Babymorocco

interview by Abe 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. 

Abe 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.

I’m Not There: A Conversation Between Darius Airo and Jon Pylypchuk

photographs by Josh White

Between the minutia and the mirage of our fragmented contemporary existence, artists Darius Airo and Jon Plypchuk both create work imbued with a humorous and ironic darkness masked by playfulness. An inside joke, a half forgotten dream, a song lyric, abstracted figures caught between the waveforms of television static or the rain-drenched glass of a car windshield—our brains continually try to make sense of the world like an undecoded cypher. In Airo’s recent paintings and pastels, presented in the exhibition Mickey’s Mirror (opening May 25 at Abigail Ogilvy gallery in Los Angeles, curated by Josh White—whitebox.la), making sense of the world requires clever conceptual conceit of internal mirrors and the abstracted visages of iconic cartoon characters. In the following conversation, Airo and Plypchuk discuss how the world around them is absorbed into their work. 

DARIUS AIRO: We talked about the idea of the mirrors being a way for me to enter the work physically or the environment, whether that's an actual individual who shares a public space with me or some graphic commercial thing. That’s kind of merging with me as an individual. 

JON PYLYPCHUK: Josh [White] mentioned this idea of you glancing in a mirror every day and using that quick image of yourself as a partial reference in these works. Then, we talked about your walks through Chicago, absorbing the foliage in the earlier work, and then absorbing characters you see walking by and incorporating them in the new work. I was wondering if that mirror is actually just your subconscious reflecting all of these things. You absorb them, and then you reflect them for everyone else. But because they're not a perfect reflection, anybody can start applying who they see. You know, I see the person walking down a street in Altadena—they're like fixtures of this thing that only exists while I'm driving or walking by, they're almost like forms. 

DARIUS AIRO: Not to depersonalize them, but yes, forms and color. Maybe it’s just the opposite of depersonalization—it’s putting them on a pedestal in the work. It’s about their personality or character. That’s a better way of thinking about it. I rely so much on this kind of intrinsic thing that drives the work—it’s so much about the viscera. And there’s something happening in the work that I have not a lot of say in but a lot of stake in, which makes the work inherently very personal. I can't and I don't necessarily want to step entirely out of the work, but I don't think I am ever engaging in this body of work as a self-portrait. I'm just very willing to embrace that I'm there. Do you get that?

JON PYLYPCHUK: You know, when you just said self-portrait, it made me think of Cindy Sherman—making yourself up into all these people that you've seen on the street. And because your perception or visualization of these people is incomplete, you are actually just drawing yourself. Rather than being a self-portrait, it's a portrait of those people through you. And because they're incomplete, your mind is waking them up, and you're allowing the confidence and strength to just let your arms do what they're supposed to do. When I think about the things that I've done, the individual characters were almost irrelevant to the idea of how they were interacting with one another. In your case, it's the depiction of the character; in my case, it was always the depiction of the action. The words really were the most important part because anybody could sort of apply who's talking to who, but really, it's what they're saying to one another that ends up being the reflection to me. 

DARIUS AIRO: That’s very interesting, what you just said about it not being the characteristics, but about the words, and that is how people can step into them. Because you can recognize the guy walking down the street in LA or Chicago, Your work is almost like statues or monoliths dedicated to those people. 

JON PYLYPCHUK: The more I engage with them, the more I'm starting to see that. Whereas I don't think that I saw it at first. I saw 'em sort of as portraits, but now I'm starting to see aspects of the narrative coming through. And that narrative might not have been generated. It might not even be something that you were thinking about, but because they have this open nature, I'm gonna start applying that. And I think that's a really good indicator of strong work. You're giving people enough information so that they can decide what they see, and you're not telling them what they see.

DARIUS AIRO: Well, I'm figuring it out, too. (laughs) I'm kind of piecing together who, what, or when is stamped onto these images after the fact because they're so immediate and speedy—maybe not far from thoughtless or meticulous. 

JON PYLYPCHUK: I really don't think that thoughtlessness is a bad thing because that place where you realize that you just did ten things and you don't even remember doing them, that subconscious flow state of creation, is the greatest place ever to exist. 

"my own personal sun" 39x25.5in chalk pastel on paper 2024

DARIUS AIRO: I just read this book of Philip Guston interviews and writings called I Paint What I Want to See, and he's talking to Morton Feldman about how he wants to be a victim. And Feldman says he longs to be the victim of a sublime executioner. (laughs) 

JON PYLYPCHUK Now that you mention Guston, it made me start reevaluating my thought that you were actually the love child of Joyce Pensato and ‘90s Karel Appel. Maybe there was a three-way, and Guston was in there somehow. Or maybe it was an immaculate conception. There’s a feeling in the hand of Pensato—the facility with the materials, and then this incredible sense of color that I don't see very often but that I remember in these ’90s paintings by Karel Appel.

DARIUS AIRO: We discussed pastels being this immediate line and lacking fussiness. You have your color made, and you have the line that you're going to make with the edge of the material. So, it's very speedy and kind of shrinks the space between your brain and your hand. Whereas with oil painting, or anything that's a little more involved, it can be so fussy. There's a lot of laboring over the preparation, or you’re immediately thrown into this negotiation with art history. Do you feel that too?

JON PYLYPCHUK: Yeah, definitely. You're in your underwear when you use pastels. When you're painting, you have to sort of plan how your day goes and button up. It’s like the difference between shooting somebody or stabbing somebody; the immediacy of the pastels is that stabbing feeling. There’s such direct contact with the paper. The materials I've used have generally been left strewn about the floor. I’d be lying on the floor, and whatever I could reach, I could use. It changed over time with making larger-scale works, but there was always poetry in using shitty materials to make something poignant because, in a lot of cases, the words were the most important part. I would definitely use things like pastels in some situations if they were necessary, but I'm a little bit more of a blunt-force instrument as far as materials are concerned. I don't have that facility with pastels the way you do. I can draw pretty good lines here and there, but it's almost easier for me to turn something into something. I'll find a scrap of something on the floor that looks like something, and I'll go, oh, that's a cat's head, and I’ll use that as a cat. It was almost ready-made in that somebody wiped their mouth with it and threw it on the ground. They built that form for me, and I used that form to depict whatever character I needed to depict that form.

DARIUS AIRO: That's interesting. I'm charged by the same kind of stuff lying around that grabs you for whatever reason, but there's a filter between the objects. I'm not using ready-mades, but I'm certainly inspired by the objects that I find all the time. They’re just different ways to get to the same place.

JON PYLYPCHUK: I read [Terry] Myers's essay in the book for your exhibition where he quotes de Kooning, who said, “Everything's a face. And if everything's a face, then you have an endless supply to draw from.” 

DARIUS AIRO: Right. It took some people, Terry, amongst some other folks, to keep mentioning de Kooning to me. And I love ’40s/’50s de Kooning, obviously, but I didn't recognize the relationship to these works until after people started bringing them in. It's interesting talking about the isolation that happens in the studio in a place like Chicago. You’re making all this work and then finding months later, oh yeah, de Kooning was in here. 

JON PYLYPCHUK: Yeah, we had a similar climate with minimal natural light during the winter in Winnipeg. Often, people describe Winnipeg as the Chicago of the North. You'll go out and do one thing and then come back, and three days later, you're finished doing what you're doing in the studio because that's all you do. Because it's cold and it's dark at 3:30 PM. So, you start building a narrative for a group of characters that you are maintaining as contact. And if you're seeing them in this mirror you're passing every day, that's your mind going, okay, it's time to talk. I imagine there's probably a longitudinal line of parallel existence for people who all live above that point where it's dark at four o'clock in the afternoon. 

DARIUS AIRO: It’s inherent to the process of the work where there's this trance-like thing where the work just kind of happens, and you're being guided by the sublime execution, and there's only so much you can do to detach from the things that you're interested in, and whether it's environmental or it's the beloved art history that seeps its way into everything, rather than trying to make a painting that looks like a ’50s de Kooning, you’re making a painting and recognizing what it is about these moments in art history that you feel connected to.

JON PYLYPCHUK: The history probably exists within your mind, and you have the opportunity every once in a while to have that subconscious guide your hand. I'm still trying to understand whether I think that jazz improvisation and that space are the same thing. You're relying on the knowledge of art history as a musician, which relies on the knowledge of music theory and a certain facility with the instrument. As a visual artist, you're relying on a facility with your materials, and then the rest is left up to who-knows-what to actually manifest. 

DARIUS AIRO: That makes sense. I think I listened to ten different genres of music while making this body of work. And lots of silence, too. What do you do?

JON PYLYPCHUK: That's not me at all. Sometimes, it's just like the same song over and over again on repeat for three or four hours. Or for like a month at a time listening to the same song. I started doing that around 2015 as a portal. Your brain follows the music, and the rest of everything shuts off, and then you can start making work. I used to lay on the carpet and make drawings and listen to music and listen to full albums at a time. And a lot of the text that was in that work came out of lyrics that I heard. I would write something down, and then I would check the lyrics to make sure that I wasn't plagiarizing. But it's interesting what the brain hears when it wants to hear, or if the brain is in a certain trajectory of like interactions between two characters on a page, and then all of a sudden, you hear different lyrics, and then you look at the lyrics, and you're like, wow, that's totally not what that was. But you heard what you needed to hear to write down. 

DARIUS AIRO: In one of the books of drawings that I made. I wrote a lyric from the Stones’ song “Moonlight Mile” that says, “I'm just living to be lying by your side.” But I heard it as, “I’m just living to be dying by your side.” It's much more bleak, but I like what you said because I can embrace it as my version and let that be okay.

JON PYLYPCHUK: As I understand the visual things, you see about 5% of your visual frame in 20/20. Your eyes are constantly scanning, and then they send that information to your brain, and your brain makes up the rest. So, I think it probably also happens with your ears, and your brain just tells you that that's what happened. You heard it that way because, at that point in time, you needed to hear it that way.

Mickey’s Mirror will be open from May 25 with a vernissage from 6 - 8:30pm

Tits Up: An Interview of Author Sarah Thornton

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Annie Sprinkle "Bosom Ballet" 1990-91, courtesy the artist

interview by Mieke Marple

From the auction house to the titty bar, the art fair to the witches’ retreat, Sarah Thornton has moved her ethnographic eye from the art world to the titty world—and we are all better for it. Tits Up: What Sex Workers, Milk Bankers, Plastic Surgeons, Bra Designers, and Witches Tell Us about Breasts explores what breasts mean to five different breast-experts. The result is an ambitious collage of uplifting sagas (also the original name for Thornton’s book before the publisher asked her to change it). Thornton and I met over Zoom to talk about some of these lived experiences, particularly her own—everything from what inspired her to write the book in the first place to how writing it changed her relationship to her own body. 

MIEKE MARPLE: How are you doing?

SARAH THORNTON: I’m excited. I worked hard on Tits Up and I care deeply about its content and mission. I’m keen on a broad readership. I don't want to just preach to the converted. Yes, it's a feminist book, but it’s also critical of the women's movement’s general disregard of breasts. While researching breasts from different grounded locations — a strip club, a human milk bank, an operating room, a bra design studio, and a pagan witches’ retreat in the redwoods — I realized that each of these social milieux raised issues of historic discomfort to mainstream feminism. The American women’s movement has generally not embraced sex workers, breastfeeding, or beautification, and definitely not plastic surgery. It has historically had a negative relationship to fashion and has been embarrassed by feminist spirituality. 

It feels good to grapple with an elemental body part. All humans have nipples and most of us have a relationship to breasts. But Tits Up is full of surprising information. I hope Tits Up is useful for conscious-raising.

MARPLE: You told me that Tits Up is the best thing you've ever written. How do you know that? Or when did you know that?

THORNTON: I love researching. Every time I write a book, it's like completing another PhD. This is my fourth book and it took me six years. During that time, I had the benefit of twenty-three student apprentices because I was a scholar-in-residence at the University of California, Berkeley. Their library research allowed me to be even more ambitious for the ethnographic part or primary research of the book. 

I also think I'm getting better as a writer. My voice is pretty distinct. It's mine. I'm not apologetic. So, it’s my best book because of the depth of the research and my greater facility at conveying insights in entertaining ways. 

MARPLE: When did you know that this was the book you had to write?

THORNTON: Well, um, I didn't initially know it was a book. I started off by writing an article called “A Brief History of My Boobs.” It then became a therapeutic preamble to a deeper investigation as well as a position statement and declaration of purpose. When you write about a body part, you need to be honest and clear to both your interviewees and your readers about where you're coming from. Then, I started reading everything I could get my hands on. I have bookshelves full of breast-related books, body books, and feminist books. Then, there were hundreds of academic articles, usually very siloed in terms of discipline. But there was not much written that joined it up together.

MARPLE: No holistic view.

THORNTON: Exactly. So, after reading everything I could get my hands on, I realized nobody had written the book that I would write. I realized there was very little about contemporary breasts, especially the in-person real world of living bodies. I've taught media studies, but living breathing experiences (rather than virtual ones) are what give me a buzz. I realized that nobody had done what I felt I could do. And I knew I could do it because I’d written Seven Days in the Art World. I understood early on that a kaleidoscopic perspective on breasts could be rendered as an engaging five days in the titty world.

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Chitra Ganesh "Black Vitruvian Tiger", courtesy the artist

MARPLE: How did you choose those five worlds? And what were some of the other ones you considered?

THORNTON: I started out by interviewing between fifty and seventy possible experts. I interviewed all sorts of people like ballet dancers, breast cancer survivors, gynecologists, feminists, all sorts. And what hit me over the head were five clusters of people who were saying things that I had not heard before — things that blew my mind.

MARPLE: Because they have been largely marginalized from mainstream feminism?

THORNTON: Yes, absolutely. They were the people who had the most interesting things to say about breasts. The number five was not a specific choice. It was just the number of worlds that came up as relevant to the story of breasts in America today. I didn't see another social world or boob environment that I needed to examine in the same way as these ones.

MARPLE: Is there any significance to the order of the worlds, starting with the strip club and ending with the witches’ retreat?

THORNTON: I moved from dominant perceptions of breasts to more obscure ones. The dominant view of breasts in America is that they are erotic playthings. I thought, okay, I'm going to start there, but I'm going to look at it from the sex professional's point of view. The women who make a living from breasts as erotic objects. The second prevailing association, because most women become mothers, is breastfeeding. Even women who don't breastfeed will have had the experience of their boobs get big when they’re pregnant as they prepare to breastfeed and their milk comes in. The most obscure niche culture is the nature-worshiping neo-pagans that came out of the hippie movement. So, the chapters move from perceptions of breasts that are mainstream through to a very small subculture, but the religions I touch on in that chapter are huge: Judaism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism. So, I intersperse the very specific with a pretty grand historical narrative. 

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Loie Hollowell "Milk Fountain," 2020-21, courtesy the artist

MARPLE: And at the witches’ retreat? Was it mostly older people?

THORNTON: Yes! The other trajectory is from young to old because age is super important for the life of our chests. The youngest interviewees are in chapter one, “Hardworking Tits.” Sex work skews young. Then, comes “Lifesaving Jugs,” and motherhood. Between postpartum and menopause, a massive number of breast surgeries happen. Chapter 3, “Treasured Chests,” discusses all the “Mommy Makeovers,” the lifts, trans surgeries, and the plastic surgeries that women have after cancer. The bra chapter, “Active Apexes,” named for the apparel industry term for nipples, is for all ages, but then “Holy Mammaries” focuses on the crones. So, yes, the lifecycle is part of the chapter sequence.

MARPLE: Interesting how the dominant view intersects with youth and the most obscure intersects with age, though that is where the most collective wisdom and grandest insights lay. Of course, that mirrors societal attitudes towards women and the devaluing of them as they get older. Still, I appreciate the youth-to-old-age life span in Tits Up. It gives the book this subtle, epic narrative quality.

THORNTON: Thank you. I aspire to epic. 

MARPLE: So, how did writing the book change you?

THORNTON: Oh, my god. Well, I feel much happier in my body. I actually feel transformed by the experience of researching and writing the book. All of my characters’ experiences and insights have enlightened me and uplifted me. I feel less stressed and shamed by my fake boobs and my aging. I still lament the loss of my original, natural breasts. But then, losing them led me to write a book that I'm really proud of, which I would never have written.

MARPLE: Why not?

THORNTON: I don't think I would have felt like I had the authority. In writing “A Brief History of My Boobs” which appears in the book’s introduction in an abbreviated form as “Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder,” I was like, you know, the gals have chalked up quite a bit of experience. They’ve never done sex work, but they’ve understood from the inside a lot of important narratives – budding womanhood, sexual harassment, breastfeeding, cancer scares, amputation, and reconstruction. Then, I did all the reading, and interviewed over two hundred people, and did all of that on ethnographic on-site fieldwork. So, I'm not a doctor. I don't have the obvious credentials about “breasts,” but I have gathered, synthesized, and thought hard about many women’s perspectives. I know a hell of a lot about tits, jugs, chests, racks, and knockers. 

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photograph by Aya Brackett

An Elegant Solution to the Dusty Cobweb of History: An Interview of Cammie Staros

Image courtesy of the artist and SCAD.

Cammie Staros’ Sunken City featured at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) Museum of Art through June 24 reinvents our relationships to the traditional historical narrative. Referencing antiquities against the expansiveness of time, Staros positions iconic relics as vessels with which to unite history and the present moment. Her aquarium virtines, which house seemingly anthropomorphic vases, are manifested as self-sustaining biomes aptly referencing the nuances of the lifetime. Staros’ exhibition uniquely encapsulates the passage of time, while simultaneously illuminating the role of the object in the context of human systems. Her modernization, yet simultaneous preservation, of the iconic relic speaks to the primal instinctual basis of a commodity-driven culture and the modern conceptualization of value.

Sunken City is organized by SCAD Museum of Art curator Ben Tollefson and presented as part of SCAD deFINE ART 2024.

Mia Milosevic: I wanted to start off with just talking about how you began engaging in the work that you do. I feel like it deviates from the way other people approach art. 

Cammie Staros: Yeah, it deviates from the way I used to approach art. It took me a comically long time to realize that art history is most compelling to me and most related to the reasons I got into making art in the first place. I started looking at Greco-Roman antiquities once I had started to deal with art history as an origin story of Western art history. They're just so iconic. I’m often attracted to things that are very, very iconic and I feel are already omnipresent. I actually think there's room to do new things and find new avenues when there's a little bit of a shared vocabulary, which comes with those iconic images.

MM: The concept of reinventing already iconic imagery is so interesting. 

CS: I'm really interested in conventions of all kinds, you know? I think that comes into the work, like doing conventions of exhibition design and museum display, for example. Or these different kinds of languages that we pick up on often without being very conscious of it. But, that comes from a familiarity which happens once things are iconic or conventional or systematized. Some of it feels like you can get farther because there's already a little bit of a shared language, but also just acknowledging that there is this shared language is interesting to me because it goes unnoticed so often. I feel like there are these moments for humor and insight and finding new things.

MM: I feel like Greco-Roman sculpture in particular is seen as the backbone of art historical narratives. It seems like people really gravitate towards your work so much for that reason.

CS: It is. I just saw a film on the flight here [to Savannah, Georgia] actually, with a scene I didn't expect, of a teacher taking his unwilling student through a Greek wing of the MFA museum and the student being bored of seeing these Athenian black figure vases. I feel like it's very much in line with it being seen as a backbone of art history and especially Western art history. It's dusty and old, and I think that when things feel sort of tired, it's exactly the right time to resuscitate them.

MM: You add these modern elements, like the spiderwebs, as facets of your sculpture. Some reviews of your work describe the spiderwebs as representations of the decay of value in human societies, which I feel is an interesting way to put it.

CS: And they're made out of jewelry material. There's this precious object version of the corrosion of the natural world into our controlled, human spaces. There are signs of decay, there are signs of life, and the repurposing of quote unquote “our objects.” That happens all around us all of the time. I also just see spiders in my studio all the time.

MM: The spiderwebs jumped out at me a lot because it summarizes your work, in a way. There’s this idea of the old becoming new. 

CS: I think all of it is sort of a way of thinking about things. It's like an elegant solution to the dusty cobweb of history. And I think about things like contradiction in nature a lot too. I feel like that's all relevant and wrapped up together.

Image courtesy of the artist and SCAD.

MM: You talk a lot about time in reference to your work. Can you elaborate on what time means to your work or how you think of it?

CS: Part of my other motivation behind referencing antiquities is a way to fathom the unfathomable expansiveness of time. I think it's so hard to put our lives in proportion. I can't speak for other people, but for myself, I think it's fairly imagined to think of things in terms of lifespan or lifetime, and it's so hard to think beyond that. Dealing with references that are 2,500 years old is a way to sort of picture that expansive time and project it forward to imagine what things today might look like when they are relics. I also like introducing stone into my practice, I think it adds not only reference to historical time on top of a lifetime, but also geological time. So you're going from a couple of thousand to a few million years old. That's just something I feel like I'm often trying to wrap my own head around, which is why it continues to be of interest. 

MM: You mentioned that adding figuration to your sculpture is new. 

CS: I definitely spent a long time avoiding it, and part of that is because I really think of the pieces themselves as subjects. I think that referencing the body without making figurative work is impactful. I've pierced the flesh of pots before, I’ve done a sort of patterning that feels like tattooing or clothing, but still not figurative with a capital F. My work has been bodily for a really long time, but it just felt time to move into those explicit depictions of the figure. I think part of it is that the vessels themselves had gotten so distorted from the original forms that it felt like painting those figures would exaggerate that distortion and really work with it, as opposed to feeling like a distraction from the form. It’s a brain teaser every time, and that feels healthy.

MM: Can you tell me a little bit more about the aquarium pieces? 

CS: The aquariums are really set up to look like museums of antiquities that have been flooded and filled with life. I’m thinking about these pieces as sort of fruits of fallen empires, as prescient objects recognizing ourselves, history, and the cyclical nature of society. I’m really thinking about how these empires are full of incredible achievements and also sort of symbolic of the hubris of man. I think those pieces bring all of those ideas to the fore and also do this sort of straddling—referencing different times of the ancient past, its contemporary display, and then positing a version of what the future of today's objects might look like. 

MM: And then there's the reflective aspect too.

CS: In the first ones I did, the ceramics were kind of asymmetrical and became almost zoomorphic in shape. It felt like they were adapting to their watery habitats. I really liked the idea of making the works feel like they had changed in this watery context, and so I thought about the ways that water distorts objects. I really wanted to make that distortion very central. So these are set up like they're a tank with a sort of straight vase and then another inverted, wobbly vase as if it's a reflection of its righted twin.

MM: The aquarium vitrine that you see right when you walk in, Narcissus in Love, aligns perfectly with what you just described.

CS: I mean, I couldn't not reference Narcissus if I was making a sculpture of watery reflection. I was thinking a lot about so-called encyclopedic museums, but also natural history museums with aquarium vitrines and shell pots. I've done a lot of titles that are Latin following a taxonomic structure as if they’re objects that might be found in a natural history museum, but they're funky versions, you know? 

MM: You said something about hubris being a component of your work. That's an interesting idea in relation to Roman sculpture and especially with the story of Narcissus. I'm sure you have a story behind that…do you?

CS: I mean, the history of mankind. There's all of these poetic parallels to Greek mythology, history, and language. So many of those stories are also allegorical for human behavior and different flavors of hubris. The story of Narcissus—he was beloved by all and loved nobody, and then went into a forest glade and saw a boy in a pond and immediately fell in love with his own reflection and refused to move until he eventually died staring at his reflection. That sort of navel-gazing aspect is definitely there. And, not to get too dark, but the things we do to our own detriment are there too. 

Image courtesy of the artist and SCAD.

Two Men Sitting: An Interview of Photographer & Curator Job Piston

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Two Men Sitting, Delfi, 30 x 40 in, lustre print, 2024. 1 AP, Ed. of 3 (option 17 x 22 in, metallic lustre print)

interview by Muna Malik

Muna Malik and Job Piston arrive on a Greek island sprinkled with sunflowers, daisies, and the sight of a tossed olive oil can. The two artists are gazing upon the Aegean Sea stretching out in front of them. They are in Hydra on a bench in the shadow of the Deste Project Space, not far from where they met for the first time to participate in the art and curatorial residency with ARC Athens. An oversized wind spinner with the melancholic face of the Greek god Apollo by Jeff Koons peers down over them. Apollo is often associated with sun and light, representing the illuminations of truth and knowledge. It is a fitting setting for a conversation around photography and metamorphosis, as they discuss the artist and curator Job Piston’s latest Los Angeles solo project Estate Sale.

MUNA MALIK: So, right now we're capturing this moment as best as we can with our iPhones, which is actually a really good segue into talking about your art project. You set out to photograph moments and spaces that are very hard to capture through photography. Talk to me a little bit about how this project originated while you were on your travels.

JOB PISTON: So, for the last year I’ve been going under hypnosis and documenting my sleeping dreams. This came out of a time where I was experiencing grief, which led to an interest in exploring the subconscious mind in relation to the waking dream. Coinciding with that journey, I was reading Langston Hughes’ I Wonder as I Wander, an autobiography exploring not only a deep wanderlust, but an artist travel diary interweaving intimate moments with cultural and social differences while traveling. 

The exhibition takes place in my building, a 1929 Spanish Colonial Revival apartment complex, in Los Angeles. My neighbor Joshua Nixon has a beautiful antique collection that lends itself to a kind of furniture voyeurism. That’s how we came up with the title of the show. 

While looking into the history of my building, Villa Madrid, I found a 1986 photo that peered up into my bedroom window by the photographer Julius Schulman, an architecture photographer who documented midcentury modernist homes. It was unexpected to imagine him creating an entire body of work of Mediterranean-style Los Angeles buildings and go unnoticed. This shift in perspective informed the first installation in the show. 

I selected photographs from the Montjuic Gardens at the 1929 World's Fair site in Spain and a sensuous George Kolbe bronze figurative from the Barcelona Pavilion, a pivotal example of modernist architecture, to create a portal from 1929 Villa Madrid into exploring themes of belonging in unfamiliar spaces and the fleeting nature of memories.

The exhibition touches on modern travel as a form of curiosity, leisure, love, and grief. It features cruising mazes in medieval ruins, time-lapses of nudist beaches, and the ancient Paros marble quarries, believed to be the source of the Venus Di Milo and Hermes sculptures. These elements also introduce themes of desire and photography as gateways to time portals.

MALIK: Expanding on the idea of love and desire, I noticed you also juxtapose spaces that prohibit photography with intimate portraits, a spark of defiance through closeness. Could you discuss this process and how you chose to approach capturing these moments?

PISTON: The project aimed to explore the idea of some spark of truth hidden in plain sight. This led to the creation of a series I informally call Forbidden Photography, focusing on locations and subjects where photography is typically restricted, creating a friction between public and personal space through the picture. 

One example is a series from Liminaki Beach, a naturist spot near Athens, where photography is generally restricted. I took photos discreetly, concentrating on capturing the changing light, landscape, and the dynamic presence and absence of people throughout the day. This series is presented in three parts, each marked by the time of day, showcasing not just the shift in light but also the movement of bodies within the landscape.

Another series centers around the ruins of Mykonos Castle. By day, this site is a tourist destination, housing an exhibition of portraits from the 1950s depicting the lives of Mykonos' locals. My focus was on capturing visitors moving through the ruins, but at night, the same location transforms. By night, the same ruins become a vibrant playground and a cruising area, representing a stark contrast to its daytime sanctity. This dichotomy fascinated me—the different ways people interact with this architectural space from day to night, from sacred to irreverent liberation. 

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Παραλία δίπλα στο Κάμπινγκ, Beach by the Camping (New Construction), Antiparos, 13 x 19 in, exhibition fiber print, 2024. 1 AP, Ed. of 3

MALIK: And what about the portraits? How do you address the limits of photography in your series of intimate portraits? 

PISTON: I frequently explore questions about representation in portraiture and the challenge of photographing the intangible dynamics between the portrait artist and the sitter. 

I also sought to address the linguistic distances between two people, the artist and the lover. I chose to title many images in the first language of the person depicted. This approach is a rethinking of agency in portraiture, acknowledging respecting the sitter’s autonomy, acknowledging their own independent voice, elaborating on an encounter that an image alone cannot convey. Even more significant is that the language of the title often doesn't match the location of the place where the photograph was taken. This discrepancy attempts to recognize how complex identity can be and how limited we’ve become by the power of photography.   

For example, In this series there is a portrait of Sabastian, which I've nicknamed “the ghost.” Normally, an out-of-focus photograph would be thrown out. Balancing on a ledge, I was shaking, which blurred his figure and lines. Yet, somehow the image displays both him and me, my breath, revealing the dual presence in creating the photograph that poetically captured the fear of someone fading away through time.

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მბანავე (The Bather), Saba, Stiges, 22 x 17 in, exhibition fiber print, 2024. 1 AP, Ed of 3

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Młody Flecista (The Fifer), Krystian, Berlin, 19 x 13 in, exhibition fiber print, 2022. 1 AP, Ed. of 3

MALIK: Some of your images go beyond recognizable photographic distortions, bearing unique marks, like highlighter squiggles. 

PISTON: I’ve moved homes so many times, this old film has been dragged across the country by moving trucks and then passing through airport x-ray machines. I’m curious how these could all serve as physical traces of movement across borders and marks of time travel.

MALIK: I see that you use expired film, which social media filters try to replicate digitally. Most of the photographs we encounter nowadays are digital, marking a significant shift in technology within one generation. 

PISTON: I stick to using film cameras for its remarkable ability to remain unpredictable. This includes the use of out of date film. 

It comes from a place in my artistic method to use whatever ordinary materials and a given location’s history to readily ignite your ideas. In this case, including old film stored in my refrigerator at Villa Madrid. This meant embracing the quirks and imperfections of expired film, as well as the architecture of the building. What I enjoy about this is embracing elements of serendipity—those happy accidents and unexpected outcomes, much like one's own journey in life. Often, the plan I had envisioned is not what actually life had in store for me. Can we work with a given set of conditions, and can we produce new meaning out of it? This approach challenges me to persevere through unpredictability, gaining the ability to find comfort in the discomfort. 

These conditions reflect a type of struggle, whether it be with change, difference, grief, crisis, or the uncontrollable circumstances of a given moment. The process reflects on the artist's willingness to overcome unforeseen obstacles. 

Two Boys Wandering, Escaleras a la Fuente Mágica (Stairs to Magic Fountain), Site of 1929 Barcelona World Expo, 17 x 22 in, exhibition fiber print, 2024. 1AP Ed. of 3

Pool Reflection, Neurendorf House, Mallorca, 13 x 19 in, exhibition fiber print, 2024. 1 AP, Ed. of 3

Drought, Monjuïc Waterfall Fountain, 17 x 22, exhibition fiber print, 2024. 1 AP, Ed. of 3

MALIK: It seems a lot of the process in the production of the work came from this place of not having full control, from the actual film to the spaces to where you would be in. Through your studio, you welcome these barriers to create new directions in the work. How would you describe your relationship with transformation and metamorphosis in this project?

PISTON: The camera is an extension of the eyes, but also the artist's mind. Art making is an integral part of metamorphosis, which creates a space to separate from reality and enter a space of reflection. Often transformation is sparked by crucial moments, be it personal experiences or societal change, leading to a shift in how we perceive the world. This change in perception enables us to see the world, though sometimes challenging, through many ways and new dimensions. 

N95 Mask and Jockstrap, inkjet print, 19 x 13 in, exhibition fiber print, 2022. 1 AP, Ed. of 3

Setting the Stage: An Interview of Avery Wheless

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interview by Summer Bowie

Avery Wheless is a Los Angeles-based painter who was born and raised in Petaluma, California. With her mother, a ballet instructor, and her father, an animator for LucasFilms, it’s no wonder she became a painter and video artist with a penchant for the theatrical. Her video works often depict movement artists performing choreography, and her painted portraits often depict everyday people engaging in the unconscious performativity of everyday life. Her current solo exhibition Stage, Presence on view at a private residence in Beverly Hills with BozoMag includes portrayals of the artist and her friends occupying glamorous spaces, caught in moments that subtly reveal the effort that comes with looking at ease. These acts are not celebrated or bemoaned. They just are. One friend reaches into the cocktail dress of another to lift and expose the fullness of her breast in anticipation of reuniting with an ex. Other figures unwittingly become subjects as they applaud an unseen performer or spy pensively on others while sipping martinis. The pageantry of hyper femininity is as vulnerable as it is manicured when you look at it from the right angle and Avery Wheless has a way of depicting it all simultaneously like an emotional lenticular on canvas.

SUMMER BOWIE: So, the title of your show is Stage, Presence and your work almost always relates to performance, but these works address it sort of indirectly. Can you talk about how that plays out in this body of work?

AVERY WHELESS: Well yeah, I like to explore performance in every way that it comes up in my life. My background is in dance and my mom was a ballet teacher, so performance was ingrained throughout my life. I started ballet when I was five and I always loved the make-believe worlds that you create in performance where you can be indulgent or take on another role. When I think of my body of work as a stage, it becomes a safe space for me to explore what it means to be a performer, whether it's in the more traditional sense of making art or just in my daily interactions. In this show, a lot of the images are taken from these in-between moments, whether it's friends getting ready or having intimate moments and conversations. I like capturing those moments when people may not realize they're already in this level of performance.

BOWIE: Right. We were talking a little bit about how your subjects are often captured in those moments when they're not actively performing, but they're preparing for the act.

WHELESS: Yeah. That comes up a lot. It's those moments when people don't realize they're getting ready for something or the stage isn't completely set. I find those moments more interesting and telling.

BOWIE: You often work from images that are taken in your everyday life, but then sometimes the paintings become amalgams of multiple images and memory. Can you talk a little bit about that process?

WHELESS: The images I take are sometimes these random, beautiful captures that I love of my friends when they're not fully aware that they're even being perceived by me. I like finding these softer, intimate moments with people. So I'm constantly hyper aware. It's also a way to process my environments and a feeling of being somewhat removed from a situation. Often when I'm surrounded by people, I feel like a bit of an outsider. So, I'll take those moments that I'm actually in physically and then there's other more emotional elements that come up that I'll adapt within the paintings to better explain where my body is in relation to what’s happening or what I'm thinking. Sometimes it's an object or it could be a motif that just comes out in the paintings naturally. It's a very subconscious kind of thing that just appears.

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BOWIE: What was your early dance training like and what made you decide to paint instead?

WHELESS: Dance was always something I craved doing. My mom and also her mom did dance and they were from the South, so they were involved in a lot of Junior Miss pageants. But my mom didn't let me do ballet until I was five and I loved it. When I was ten, I went through a tomboy phase and did more sports with my brothers, like baseball. I realized that the playing field was also a stage space, just with more of a masculine take. But it was a safe place to get involved very emotionally. After a year of that, I went to see The Nutcracker with my mom and cried because I wasn't in it. So, I went back and was training really intensely. For our summer program, classes would start at nine in the morning and we wouldn't end until six. And I would dance with Moscow Ballet when they were on tour. I loved the ability to be so focused on your own body and how it worked in relation to other people. But then, I got injured. I was dealing with some health stuff, and so I had to stop my training and that's when I really dove into expressing myself on canvas. I just transferred the intense training of ballet into my painting practice, and I think it always comes up for me while I'm painting—this level of movement and physicality when I'm painting bodies and performers.

BOWIE: It’s interesting that your mom and grandmother were involved in actual beauty pageants, but on a more symbolic level, there’s a lot of pageantry in your depicted scenes. They tend to be lavish dining and nightlife spaces, or sometimes your figures are lounging poolside.

WHELESS: Yeah. I think of my paintings as these stages that I set as a sort of director. I like capturing these environments that are a little bit heightened and theatrical. That's just part of what interests me visually and conceptually. There's a dramatic sense of dark and light, or sometimes they're pulled from more of a dreamlike state too.

BOWIE: You also have such a very signature style in your video work, and there's a continuity between the two disciplines, because they also often feature contortionists, pole dancers, and movement artists of many different forms. I'm curious where you find your subjects.

WHELESS: Well, video is always something that I've enjoyed. My dad's in film and animation. So, it was always just fun to capture movers and then explore it more in my paintings. I was doing that very early on. But a lot of my subjects are just friends or other collaborators that I love working with. The dancers that I worked with for my solo exhibition earlier last year were cami [árboles]—who I shot for a designer friend that I was working with—and she had all these dancers that were really excited about performing in front of paintings because pole dancing isn't usually experienced in a gallery space and we were like, let's just play with this. I like having things that are an extension of what I'm thinking and then letting someone else run with it. So, I was like, “This is the score. This is what I have in mind. Now I wanna see how that manifests in your body.” And then, about year later we did a whole other adaptation of it where I projected the video from the exhibition performance and they performed in front of that. So, the video becomes a moving extension of what I've been thinking about and the amazing friends and collaborators I've been lucky enough to have play with me.

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BOWIE: I love that. It’s almost like an exquisite corpse, but it’s not, because it always has the potential of being reborn in a new iteration. Your subjects are pretty invariably feminine. Can you talk about that?

WHELESS: I think most of the subjects in my paintings are women just because I identify as a woman and they are all extensions of how I see myself. It's a processing of how I relate to the other women in my life, like my mom and my sister and my grandmother. Those relationships are really beautiful and complicated. I think that's why I keep coming back to them. Thinking back to my days as a dancer, the corps de ballet is all women, so I was always in this ensemble of female bodies. I mean, I have painted men, but my most intimate moments and the relationships that I find the most complicated and intriguing are usually with other women in my life. So, the paintings are an exploration of that and also how I view myself. I'm not always intentionally doing it, but there is a level of self-portraiture in them.

BOWIE: How you define the female gaze?

WHELESS: I like to think of my paintings as creating a stage where women can be viewed comfortably and are aware of being viewed or engaged in a way that's not coming from a place of judgment or aggression. It's a place where you can be fully exposed and also completely held at the same time.

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BOWIE: Aside from human figures, the show also features two images of horses. I'm curious what inspired you to incorporate them in the show?

WHELESS: Yeah, I wasn't aware of them really until I noticed that they were central to a couple of the paintings. It started with a horse figurine at this restaurant called Delilah in Miami where I was having an intense conversation. There's a breath work exercise I like to do when I want to ground myself if I'm feeling sort of out of my body. I'll look at something in the room and really study it to bring myself back into a present state. I even did this as a kid when I would get reprimanded or if I was in trouble, I would look at a person's face and draw it on my lap with my finger. So, there was this horse figurine right next to me that I was studying while going through this heightened sense of awareness and it just stayed with me visually. And then, my friend sent me a photo of her with her hands around this other horse figurine and it was funny because it had the same color palette and her hands were lit really intensely by the flash. I was wrapping up works for the show and I had this one painting of a sleeping woman that I kind of liked, but I didn't love it. So, I painted over it, but I left the woman's face sort of visible. The horse and the hands are made with this really gestural, vigorous, frenzied mark making. It was almost violent because I was just processing a lot at the time. I was having these anxiety dreams and fever dreams, which happens when I'm stressed out. But yeah, with the horses, one came from a calming exercise, and the other came from a deep state of anxiety.

BOWIE: It's interesting because horses also have this duality of both wildness and bourgeois pageantry. I want to come back to self-portraiture because you talk about the female figures in your works being a form of self-portraiture, but then you also incorporate some direct self-portraiture. There's one in the piece that was adapted from a photo that a friend took of you. What was it about this particular image that made you want to paint it?

WHELESS: It was just a fun snapshot that my friend Bella [Gadsby] took randomly. But it was more about how the perspective of the foot makes it look almost like I'm stomping something out, but it's also playful. I'm relaxing at home with a friend, but my body is pushing forward in the frame and then also receding at the same time. In all of the paintings, there's a tightness, a looseness, and a kind of falling apart. I'll go into certain areas and make them as defined as I want and then the rest of it is this hazy, dreamlike state. But it's all held together by one anchoring point. In most shows, there's always one self-portrait that I end up doing subconsciously. And after it's done, I realize how it ties into the rest of the works.

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BOWIE: Can you tell us about anything that you're painting in the studio right now?

WHELESS: Well, I just got this new studio space, so I'm slowly starting to to dive into some works for NADA Miami, which I'll be doing with Bozo Mag. There's a circus theme I'm exploring, which is just another extension of the stage that I like because it’s really glamorous but also grungy at the same time. So, I've been thinking a lot about that.

Stage, Presence is on view through May 11 at a private residence in Beverly Hills. Contact BozoMag to book an appointment.

Spiritual Iconography: An Interview of Artist Tim Biskup

American visual artist Tim Biskup is a rebellious outlier in the shark-eat-shark ecosystem of the art market. His project space, Face Guts, is a testament to his anti-establishment ethos. Ceremoniously opening on 4/20, his exhibition Spring Collection will include a new suite of paintings and drawings with Biskup’s unique brand of psychedelia—a vision quest of intuitive gestures and symmetrical forms that play with pareidolia through abstraction. It’s an ayahuasca trip chased by a Freudian drip of haunted symbolism that harkens to Cuban artist Wifredo Lam and maybe the brain scans of enlightened butterflies. Along with new art comes the release of a limited edition yearbook. “Face Guts Year Seven” is a 56-page document of exhibitions, installations, and “whatever else catches the artist’s eye.”  

OLIVER KUPPER Before discussing Spring Collection, your new show of works at Face Guts, I want to discuss the space itself. How did it come about? 

TIM BISKUP I opened Face Guts to take a break from showing in galleries. I’d been doing a few exhibitions yearly for twenty years straight and needed something more direct. I needed to take structure out of my practice for a while. I also wanted more in-person interaction with my audience/

KUPPER Running an artist-run gallery can be quite a feat, especially in an ecosystem where larger galleries dominate the collector bases. Could you elaborate on some of your challenges and how you've overcome them? 

BISKUP I started my career by gathering a bunch of artists together and selling directly to collectors via auctions at bars. That was before I ever showed at a gallery, so my relationship with galleries was always a bit strange. I have some loyal collectors who support me. When I started this place, I sold about half as much work every year as I did through galleries before, but I kept all the money, so it was fine. I like meeting people and talking about my work. That’s pretty much the job of a gallerist. If the work is good, it kind of sells itself. That’s my other job. I have to make good work.

KUPPER How would you describe the work in Spring Collection—what are some evolutions from your previous work? 

BISKUP About eight months ago, I started making these symmetrical drawings with a grease pencil on construction paper. There’s something very satisfying about attempting to make a symmetrical drawing without any tools other than your brain and a pencil. It’s very challenging, and I think it distracts me from thinking about what I was actually drawing. The images feel very different from my previous work, although I see a thread through all of it. When I started making paintings, the possibilities became more interesting. Each of the paintings uses different approaches to translating the drawings. Adding texture and working with previous unfinished paintings was very fun. A turning point happened when I started adding eyes to them. Just little pieces of tape at first—they were suddenly totally different images. I moved the tape around, but I had a different thing. I’m playing with pareidolia, but I also see them like a Rorschach test. I’m trying to find ways to make things seem alive with his little nudging as possible. Making prints was a way of giving myself more territory to play. Putting these little dots in different places on every print gives them a different feeling. They even start to have narratives. It’s so much fun.

KUPPER I want to go back to your beginnings—you once mentioned that you wanted to become an artist while visiting the Centre Pompidou while on vacation with your parents in Paris. What was the first work you saw where you had that satori moment? 

BISKUP A big painting by Roberto Matta. It was like a complete universe stretched out on a wall, but I felt like I was floating in it. I think I was 17 or 18. I found out later that he referred to his paintings as “inscapes," an outward projection of his internal universe. It makes sense to me intellectually, but when I was standing there, I felt a pure feeling of engagement with art that I had never felt before.

KUPPER Your work is very psychedelic—it could be placed in many different genres, but how do you describe your work? 

BISKUP I try not to. (laughs) I just show people pictures. I feel like my recent work creates an easy transition into a conversation about artistic process, spirituality and mental health. I’d much rather have those conversations. That’s a big part of my motivation for having Face Guts—the desire to engage on a deeper level. 

KUPPER There is an undulation between extreme color and black and white (in your work). What can you achieve with graphite that you can't achieve with color and vice versa?

BISKUP The way I use graphite is all about creating form. It feels like a sculpture, somewhere between playing with Play-Doh and drawing. Thinking about color occupies a part of my brain that I engaged with very intensely in the earlier part of my career. Graphite gave me a break from that and took me into another dimension. In my last painting show at Sade Gallery, I took graphite drawings and turned them into paintings. Now, I’m figuring out how to re-engage with color. There are so many ways to do that that it’s almost overwhelming. That’s why there’s so much variety in this show. I’m trying a lot of new things. Every painting has some breakthrough in it.

KUPPER Can you talk about the symbolism in the work?

BISKUP I see different things in them, depending on my mood. I wouldn’t say it’s intentional, but a sense of spiritual iconography is happening. Lots of playful, joyful “tree of life” energy but some darkness. There are faces that emerge sometimes. Some of them are really creepy. I see shapes that look like bombs and other weapons. I figure the tension I feel going on in the world is coming through. Abstraction feels like a way of playing with polarization if you get close enough to making figurative work but don’t quite go there. This work goes there, but just barely.

KUPPER As an artist, you've likely had to navigate the intersection of art and commerce, particularly in today's digital age. Could you share your perspective on this dynamic and how it has influenced your work?

BISKUP Earlier in my career, I engaged in that part of the business. I made a lot of stuff with a whole range of brands. I’ve been more reluctant to work with brands over the past ten years or so. I’ve turned down almost everything and made a few zines and prints here and there via Face Guts. Luckily, I’ve been able to pay the bills doing what I enjoy. When I decide to do something with a brand, it’s more of an artistic choice. I’ve got some things in the works that I’m really excited about. Running Face Guts has given me a new understanding of who I am and what I want my art to be.

Just Thinking: An Interview of Paris-Based Artist Ladji Diaby

April 11th marked the opening of Preservation, a group show curated by Paige Silveria and Paul Hameline at CØR Studio in Paris. The exhibition brings together a disparate group of artists (including Ladji Diaby, Alyssa Kazew, Mark Flood, Gogo Graham, Jordan Pallagès, Anthony Fornasari, Bill Taylor, Caos Mote, Ron Baker, Cecile Di Giovanni, Simon Dupety, Gaspar Willmann, Wolfgang Laubersheimer, and the late, great Gaetano Pesce) whose work ranges from photography, collage, video, design, sculpture, and more. These works explore the original purpose of our human intellect before it became aware of itself and started to ask the unknowable. They reflect on a time when the self wasn’t yet conscious and only concerned itself with preservation in the most existential sense of the word. On the occasion of the opening, Paige Silveria spoke with artist Ladji Diaby to learn more about his roots in Mali, his creative process, and his relationship to the art scene in Paris.

PAIGE SILVERIA: Can you give us some background on yourself? Where did you grow up? What were you like as a kid? 

LADJI DIABY: I'm the first born of six children who lived in a communist city named Ivry-sur-Seine in the South of Paris during my entire childhood. When I was a kid, I was very quiet and impulsive. I didn't have many friends and I hardly went out. I was just a nerd who didn't have the money to buy a computer or a console. But I have good memories of this time when my brother and sisters were my true best friends, (they still are), but they would always follow me in my dumbass game ideas.

SILVERIA: What made the city communist? How did communism manifest in your daily life?

DIABY: I don't know, the city has been run by the PCF [French Communist Party] since 1925, the trust is there. (laughs) Above all that, this city has a real respect for the people who populate it and their diversity.

SILVERIA: What did you nerd out on? What were your interests?

DIABY: Manga and video games especially, I was obsessed with the stories they told, I projected myself a lot, that allowed me to tolerate a lot of things.

SILVERIA: (laughs) What dumbass game ideas did you play with your brother and sisters?

DIABY: I had a lot of fun writing new versions of all the fictional narratives that fascinated me, especially the animated ones, it was like writing a play. I would call on them afterwards to give them their roles while explaining the laws of the universe in question and the modifications that I wanted to make, I could be quite tyrannical. (laughs) I was obsessed with that. Nothing made me happier than to project myself into these universes and I thank Allah that my brother and sisters never mocked me for it. Sometimes I tell myself that my practice began at that moment to such a degree that it influenced my entire relationship to reality. I wanted to put my whole life and the other fictions — whether I liked them or not — into this game. I wanted to give a place to everything on this Earth and beyond.

SILVERIA: I read in a press release for a past show of yours that your work is really linked to your family and origins. Tell me about your family and their influence on you and your work. 

DIABY: First of all, I'd like to make it clear that I don't have a subject or theme in my work, it bores me. I only work with what's close to me, what's part of my social reality and what builds me up in my human experience. Most of the time, it's stories we haven't chosen to tell. My family is the closest thing to me and also the most important thing in my life that I didn't choose. I'm the eldest of a family of six children originally from Mali, of Muslim faith, and living in France. So, of course, all of this will come to light. I don't ask myself any questions, I just have the impression that when I execute a gesture with the aim of producing a piece, it's as if my memory were a piece of land and the fact of thinking, of having the will to do something with my hands, ploughs this memory land and brings to the surface stories that are beyond me most of the time. I'm not a very inspired person. In fact, I started collecting objects from the streets or from my family for my productions because the idea of putting money into making “art” made me sick. I needed to set up an attitude, a climate where I could produce no matter what, even if I went broke again.

SILVERIA: You use a large array of materials — like your parents' bed — and processes in your work, can you describe your practice? 

DIABY: When I describe my practice, I often say that going into the studio is like going into a casino; each production is a slot machine. I assemble and I break and I repeat until I find a good combination, a beautiful shape. It's a potential that depends solely on my luck. Slot machines are a potential fortune, my pieces are potential stories. By this I mean that when I use an object I've recovered or an image I've found, I don't actually find it; we meet and they tell me what I can and can't do with them. It's like sampling, you're going to use excerpts from pre-existing samples without understanding the whole story behind them, but your sensibility calls you to a kind of obviousness, I trust this obviousness, which tells me that our history, the actions of me and those I love (family, friends, and heroes) have value and deserve to exist. 

SILVERIA: I love that. The video featured in this show is called “A bird against a window, people see the devil in the clouds.” Can you elaborate on the title and some of the footage you included in it? 

DIABY: I gave it this title because, basically, I don't give a title to my productions. So, I said to myself in an exceptional case I'm going to give it a title that one would never remember, but if we make an effort to remember it, it’s not for nothing. The title simply illustrates my feeling in making this video with images I find that I like and that I know, but once again, I don't understand everything. I remembered myself as a child who understood nothing in English, spending all my time in front of the TV watching rap clips and other African-American visual productions, and trying to project myself, model myself as a young Malian living in France on it — either to dream of a future or to understand a present. The whole point of the video is in this feeling, because gradually I realize that in my work the Ladji emancipate and the Ladji alienate coexist rather well.

SILVERIA: Can you elaborate a bit on “the Ladji emancipate and the Ladji alienate coexist rather well?”

DIABY: When I work, I start from the idea that each thing that is alienating can perhaps, through an error of understanding, become emancipatory; the stories that I can mobilize, voluntarily or not, always begin with a form of alienation — or maybe an unhealthy fascination with say violence and sex as a reason to love and see films. I don't think it's a noble reason that leads me to make art. I remember wanting to do all that to dominate, to become someone, to betray my own social class and those who look like me to join the elites. I wanted to be respected, it was only a feeling, a desire, but I will never forget because in hindsight, I see what I could have become and it makes me laugh as much as it scares me. But it was time to grow up and realize that I could not be a white man, that the art that I make, and how I think about it, my very presence in France, are a consequence of colonization and slavery. It is important for me to remind myself that my work is also the product of an ultra violent story led and told by the dominant white classes and with which I deal.

SILVERIA: What are your thoughts on the art community in Paris? What's your experience of showing work here? 

DIABY: I don't trust them. Honestly, if I thought about the artistic community in Paris every day, I would have stopped working a long time ago. Too many people are afraid of being replaced. If that's not what makes them so closed and competitive it's because they have the devil in them, I don't know. But thank God I was able to meet beautiful people and I remember that I still take great pleasure in producing things with my hands, there is nothing that makes me happier. As for showing my work, I think it's just time I show it to those who look like me.

SILVERIA: Where and how would you ideally show the work? 

DIABY: I don't have the answer yet, but I am sure of one thing: the exhibition model for our work, the white cube, has largely reached its limits. It's become, if it wasn't already like this, a space for political disarming, as if any discourse whatsoever in this space were the same and could only have the impact of a sword in the water. I think the response has to be collective, multi-voiced and open, so that we shift the political question to the question of disseminating our work, which in my opinion, is the real political bias in an artist's work, and no longer in what we can say in our productions.

SILVERIA: You're in Dakar now for four months. What are you up to? Are you working on anything in particular while you're there? 

DIABY: Just thinking.

SILVERIA: That sounds lovely.

Preservation is on view through April 19 @ CØR Studio 28 Rue du Petit Musc, Paris

I Wanna Be Adored: An Interview of Sculptor Holly Silius on the Occasion of Her Solo Exhibition @ Central Server Works in Los Angeles

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Holly Silius. George Clinton, 2023. Stone and gold leaf.

interview by Summer Bowie

“I don’t have to sell my soul, he’s already in me” read the lyrics of The Stone Roses’ groundbreaking hit track “I Wanna Be Adored.” Perfectly salient in their minimal simplicity, they defined a generation who watched their idols on television with a yearning desperation for recognition. Los Angeles-based sculptor Holly Silius was in her youth living in Manchester at the time. It was the end of Thatcher’s era of neoliberal deregulation with its flagrant embrace of conspicuous consumption that made so many of her peers feel a hollow ennui; a listless lack of purpose that left them looking ahead to the next millennium without the slightest clue of where they fit in. Thirty-five years later, Generation X finds itself in an era of social media where everyone can build a virtual platform from which to project their image and ideals. Silius now finds herself adorning and casting the faces and bodies of countless people—some with humble followings, some with household names—studying their every angle to capture the elusive essence that makes them so alluring as subjects.

SUMMER BOWIE: The exhibition takes its title from the 1989 hit by legendary Madchester Shoe Gazeband The Stone Roses. Lead singer Ian Brown was quoted in Clash Magazine saying,“If you want to be adored, it’s like a sin, like lust or gluttony or something like that.” Do you agree, or is the idea of moralizing our desires sort of antiquated?

HOLLY SILIUS: Besides the fact that it is simply a favorite track of mine, it felt apt to name my first solo show I wanna be adored for two reasons: firstly because I like to acknowledge and be patriotic to my roots, I come from Manchester myself, but secondly, because of the relevance the words gave to me when I was putting the pieces together, much further away from Manchester, in LA. Los Angeles is synonymous with a sense of “lust for fame” — it is the land where people go to gain adoration. The works I have made and accumulated over the last few years are all of people that are adored already in some way and they appear to me to desire more and actually deserve more recognition. The works also reflect perhaps a vulnerable side of me too. Maybe it is just that we all want to and should be cherished, noticed, and validated.

BOWIE: Your practice takes inspiration from studies of morphology. What role do linguistics play in your sculptural practice?

SILIUS: My sculptural practice is definitely that of a ‘tangible language’ through the form of the body in whatever way the sitter is casted. Whoever I work with I tend to try to understand their personality before, if I have some time and I have to be flexible with this, I am able to consider how their body communicates with me personally, how I perceive them and I also consider how they are perceived by a wider audience, and what speaks to me to capture them frozen in that body time capsule. This can be over a few years or a day, depending on the opportunity with that person. The piece of Penny Slinger I had been thinking about for a few years but I didn’t know exactly when I would have the platform to demonstrate her in the way I felt she deserved, and as my show was approaching, I felt the urge to make some more bronze pieces. For me, bronze already communicates the dedication behind a piece and the person. I also needed to express more with Penny than using the classic polished bronze, she needed a material as unique as she is, which is where the blow torching came in. That was so much fun, and the unpredictable nature of the chemical reactions within the metal depicted exactly what I wanted to convey.

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Holly Silius. Lio Mehiel, 2021. Stone and steel.

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Holly Silius. Rain Valdez, 2022. Stone and steel.

BOWIE: How do you choose which body parts to cast with your subjects and the materials for each?

SILIUS: When I am working with a person and I have a vision of the final piece and which body parts I will use, it tends to be because I see a way in which they represent themselves to me, and then I talk with the person more and we develop a casting position that is comfortable. Sometimes, I procrastinate on a casting for a long time as its such an intimate experience that I want to really make it into something that is super considered and I take care of people's time and image. The materials I use evolve over time but everything I use feels very heavy and is representative of the statement I am making about my subject. I can't afford to make mistakes, because they are set in stone or something else so definitive. But the finish can be organic and unpredictable, which I enjoy. It balances the heavy nature of the final piece.

BOWIE: Do you have a clear vision of how you’d like to render your subjects going in, or do the details present themselves in the process?

SILIUS: I am quite clear with the vision I have for the final piece but sometimes the mistakes or accidents that occur are the most joyous part of the process and final piece. The details have to be malleable as I don’t know everyone’s body. They are all so unique, so I have to think on the spot how to account and adjust for these occurrences. Also some people are self-conscious about certain aspects of their body so being respectful of this is also important, and I sculpt and stylize certain parts so I and my subjects are happy. It's a collaboration, always.

BOWIE: Aside from making sculpture, you also have a formidable practice as a makeup artist. You even sometimes apply makeup to your sculpture. Do these practices inform one another at all?

SILIUS: I have been working as a makeup artist for twenty years now. I started in prosthetics and special effects, moved into theater, opera, tv, film, and finally into fashion and beauty. For me, the sculpture and applying makeup go in a complementary tandem, as adding makeup onto the bodies and faces is always applied by me in a sculptural way. I will sculpt the body with color or textures like gloss and shadow effects so that sections with a matte finish blend and melt into a dry section. I move around the piece or the person imagining how it will be viewed at every angle. I know faces and bodies quite well and appreciate the individual nuances each one has every time.

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Holly Silius. Mr. Wash, 2022. Bronze and steel.

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Holly Silius. Penny Slinger, 2024. Bronze & blow torch.

BOWIE: As a makeup artist, It’s your job to project a character onto your subjects that they may not immediately see, but that they may have a natural ease in accentuating. Is this something you find easy to do with yourself?

SILIUS: Creating illusions for beauty, to tell a story or to create a character from whoever I am working with is like a fantasy or dress up. People are very concerned with protecting their image, even more so when they have bad taste, so to encourage an idea onto them is sometimes challenging until they trust you. Personally, I don’t create a character for myself, I am just myself and I have evolved like a sculpture can evolve with age, my ideas and taste changes and the way I present myself changes with confidence and with credibility.  

BOWIE: How did this particular body of work come together at Central Server Works?

SILIUS: I met Joshua who owns CSW through a shoot with George Clinton for Autre, he curated George’s show at Jeffrey Deitch gallery. I proposed to cast George’s face for the shoot and Joshua got to know my practice more. The accumulation of faces and bodies in stone, resin, metal and wax from the last few years in my studio led me to making six new bronze pieces to go alongside the older works. Then, I added a couple of new casts with artist friends Langley Fox and Penny Slinger, who we had mutually wanted to cast for a while, but I was waiting for the right moment to capture them for the perfect presentation.

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Holly Silius. Langley Fox, 2024. Bronze & blow torch.

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Holly Silius. Melt me, 2024. Wax, wick, and twig.

BOWIE: What’s next for you?

SILIUS: I have so many ideas of sculptures I want to make, including some 3D-printed body pieces I made in 2021 inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe that I want to dismantle and take molds of, then re-purpose the design with bronze or steal, weld parts together and use the blow torch for an oil slick color effect. I got really into the blowtorching. I also have this idea to make huge, 3D sculptures of environmental figures using ocean waste plastic. I need a sponsor for this one and I already wrote to David Attenborough to see if he wanted to be involved. I’m also thinking of experimenting with AI as a more financially conscious way to explore my ideas, trying to embrace the technology aspect of that.

I Wanna Be Adored is on view by appointment through May 18 @ Central Server Works 517 Victoria Ave Venice, 90291

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Holly Silius. Holly, 2024. Bronze & blow torch.

The Perfect Specimen: An Interview of Lauren Lee McCarthy

Installation view, Lauren Lee McCarthy: Bodily Autonomy at UC San Diego Mandeville Art Gallery. March 2-May 25, 2024. Photo by Pablo Mason. With support from Creative Capital.

interview by Doreen A. Ríos

When asked to read through a long list of terms and conditions before giving consent, most of us have developed a reflexive response of scrolling to the bottom and trudging ahead. There’s a miniature risk/benefit analysis that we all conduct, which includes a completely unknown potential risk in the distant future, and the near future benefit of moving on. Time is such a valuable commodity that we regularly find ourselves sharing everything from personal data, browsing data, biometric data, and more. Oftentimes, there’s no contract at all. You may have thought you were showing all of your friends how your looks changed from 2009 to 2019, but you were really training someone’s private surveillance software. The list of myopic, nefarious applications that we serve by giving ourselves away to faceless data farms in exchange for what often amounts to a forgettable laugh is endless. In Lauren Lee McCarthy’s Bodily Autonomy exhibition at UC San Diego’s Mandeville Art Gallery, she explores two very specific aspects of the way that we engage with science and technology. With “Surrogate,” she created an application where couples and individuals who are interested in hiring her as a surrogate mother are invited to dictate everything from her eating and sleeping habits, to her daily activities, and more. While these requests are not actually fulfilled, the application itself challenges notions of reproduction, genetic selection, and commerce. With “Saliva” she has created a saliva exchange station that is activated every Thursday from 6-8pm where visitors are invited to give and receive samples of their own saliva. Each participant is given agency to label their sample as they prefer and they provide the conditions for what happens to it (scout’s honor). Doreen A. Ríos, a PhD candidate in Art History, Theory, and Criticism at UC San Diego and an independent curator and researcher, spoke with McCarthy to discuss the implications of these technologies and the imperative within the work to embody a more transparent form of participation.

DOREEN A. RÍOS: There's a conversation within your practice about the ways that we’re not able to shape the systems for which we consent to take part, or these systems are obscure enough that we do not really know what our role is. How do you feel these two bodies of work are connected within the show and your own extended practice?

LAUREN LEE McCARTHY: I started by working on the “Surrogate” project, and for me, there were a lot of questions about control—over a birthing person's body and a life before it begins. The idea of having an app that someone could use to control me as I was their surrogate was this metaphor for the ways that we try to intervene in the process of birth, as well as the desire to have that kind of control. 

As I saw these different ways that we could intervene technologically, there were questions for me about the implications of these interventions. Already, we can select features from a sperm donor, like the eye color, or the height or the race; we can screen the embryo in the uterus and decide that we want to terminate the pregnancy if it carries characteristics that aren’t suitable. The question of what is suitable or acceptable was really present for me. It's also about desires for motherhood, surrogacy and labor in that sense, and kin and family. I was speaking specifically about genetic selection, but the questions of who is a suitable person weren’t as central because there were so many different things happening. The “Saliva” project was a way to highlight some of those questions, and to try and do it in a way that was more accessible and interactive. 

Prosthetic Belly Devices, 2021 Silicone, custom electronics. Lauren Lee McCarthy: Bodily Autonomy at UC San Diego Mandeville Art Gallery. March 2-May 25, 2024. Photo by Pablo Mason. With support from Creative Capital.

DOREEN A. RÍOS: This question about what's the perfect specimen really comes back to haunt us in a lot of ways—through eugenics, obviously—but in other notions of understanding what a perfect body is. Both of these projects are very much connected to the fact that they have to be embodied. The conversation that we have regularly in terms of data is the extraction of data from a body, and then this data becoming something else, whereas here it’s almost as if it was the opposite exchange. The provocation works in an embodiment rather than a disembodiment. 

LAUREN LEE McCARTHY: A lot of my work is about trying to embody some of the things that are happening around us. It can often feel very-large scale and opaque, like when we hear about AI, or about other technologies that are shaping our lives, like surveillance. We can hear about it as a concept, and it could feel scary or impressive, but it’s very hard to have a visceral understanding of it.

At the same time, I feel like we should be able to form an opinion about these technologies because they directly impact us in so many different ways. A lot of my work is trying to create situations where we can feel that human impact. I'm trying to create a metaphor for us to be able to engage at a scale that feels more personal. It's really about agency on the part of the viewer to say your opinion is important. 

DOREEN A. RÍOS: There's two very powerful moments of the exhibition when it becomes obvious that agency and governance mean very different things to many different bodies. One is the video piece where you’re doing this psych evaluation with the therapist who is trying to see if you're suitable for becoming a surrogate. There's these very specific competing moments where you ask the question “Well, can I make a decision for my own body? The answer is, “No.” And then, right next to it in the Saliva Retreat video you have an active way of trying to engage with the complexities of that, not through your own body, but through the connections that you can create in this specific setting with multiple bodies at the same time.

LAUREN LEE McCARTHY: One thing that was really important was taking the psych evaluation as a starting point, and taking what I learned going through these different reproductive processes. There's a lot of judgments based on your identity—your gender, race, and class—that are projected onto you as you go through the birth industrial complex. Many decisions that should be yours to make about your own body are taken out of your hands. With the saliva thing, there is a provocation. People are challenged to decide if they want to let go of this biological matter or not, and to whom? The whole experience is designed to walk people through the process of donating their saliva and then selecting someone else's in a way where consent and agency are central. That's in contrast to a lot of the technology that we interact with where there’s a long scroll of terms and you just hit ‘okay,’ and don't really have any idea what's happening.

We worked a lot on the language and the design. When people tag their saliva, they decide how they want to identify themselves, as opposed to other medical processes where it's very invasive—they're asking specific questions, or sometimes they're even giving you specific labels that you might not even agree with. Those shifts were very intentional and I hoped to set these things next to each other—the psych evaluation and the Saliva Retreat—so that you could feel the differences of where you, the viewer or the participant, stood in terms of your own agency.

Installation view, Lauren Lee McCarthy: Bodily Autonomy at UC San Diego Mandeville Art Gallery. March 2-May 25, 2024. Photo by Pablo Mason. With support from Creative Capital.

DOREEN A. RÍOS: Having had the experience to participate in the saliva bar, for me, it also turned into a sense of responsibility when you agree to the whole process. You become responsible for someone else's saliva, and I think the roles shift in a very interesting way where now you're the one who has to fulfill someone else's wishes and limits, and you can actually consciously decide to not follow through with that.

That is also another side of this agency—and governance and privacy and surveillance and consent—that we rarely ever see. I remember coming back home with my saliva bag and the first thing I thought was, Where should I place this? I can’t just go and throw it away and say, “Cool experience, bye!” On the other hand, there are other wishes that I need to fulfill.

LAUREN LEE McCARTHY: I love how you put that. We give our personal data constantly throughout the day and it's very hard to conceptualize what that means. I think of the saliva as a physical representation of that. What will I do? Do I throw it away? Do I put it in my refrigerator? It’s a provocation to deal with it instead of something that's seamlessly moved by a system you're barely aware of. It's about creating some of that friction. 

I really like making things that extend beyond the gallery, or extend beyond the frame of what is an art piece or an art experience. It's funny to have these things that end up in your home or go out into the world and then shift or affect your life outside of that in some way, even if it's very small.

DOREEN A. RÍOS: Conversely, it also makes you consider this layer of systems and networks that we cannot opt out of, because it was never a decision for us to be part of them in the first place. You can't help but think, What is it that you're being part of without the possibility of opting out? 

LAUREN LEE McCARTHY: Yes, there's this theme that we've been addressing with these systems that you either have to opt into without a clear understanding, or you're just in them and you never really opted in. There's another layer that is thinking about human relationships and how we understand the boundaries between ourselves and other people. A large theme in that psych evaluation session was this idea that to be pregnant is so risky; to do that for your own family makes total sense, but to do that for someone that is not your genetic relative is crazy. It doesn't make sense. That was something that I heard a lot from family and friends. It comes back to these questions of family and kin and relatedness. For a lot of people, a genetic nuclear family doesn't function as a support structure, and in queer communities we’ve seen a lot of different types of families being formed. One aim of the work was to raise some of those questions; to complicate that a bit.

It was also a performance happening in my life, as I'm trying to make this thing happen that affects my family and my friends. So, I’m having these conversations that are creating friction, they’re rubbing against their ideas of where my body should end, and where someone else's family or life should begin. That's always been a really interesting question for me: where that line is and also making work that is very participatory. Where are the boundaries? I don't want to be crossing lines that shouldn't be crossed without consent, so I’m trying to understand that.

Installation view, Lauren Lee McCarthy: Bodily Autonomy at UC San Diego Mandeville Art Gallery. March 2-May 25, 2024. Photo by Adrian-Dre Diaz. With support from Creative Capital.

DOREEN A. RÍOS: How do you think about that notion of systems and boundaries with respect to the aesthetic decisions that you make? 

LAUREN LEE McCARTHY: With both the “Surrogate” piece, but especially in the “Saliva” piece, there's a desire to strike this tone that feels like there's clearly a system here, but trying to make it feel somewhat transparent. There's the use of pipes and things that you can see through, like clear curtains, and the bar itself. Similarly, with the Surrogate app, I was trying to make something that feels not super techy, but more like something that we can understand on a human scale.

There's also this desire to capture a feeling that was on one hand, very human and physical, very embodied and visceral. And then, on the other hand, kind of technical. Especially because a lot of that process happened over 2020 and 2021. So, we were doing so much of it over Zoom. It was this very weird dissonance of talking about something that's so physical and embodied, but doing it through screens and apps and forms and emails. I wanted to bring some of that in, but still have the feeling that it was something human that you could touch and hold.

Installation view, Lauren Lee McCarthy: Bodily Autonomy at UC San Diego Mandeville Art Gallery. March 2-May 25, 2024. Photo by Pablo Mason. With support from Creative Capital.

DOREEN A. RÍOS: I definitely think that shows. A couple of years ago, I was collaborating with a group of scientists from the genomic lab at UNAM in Mexico City. They were collaborating with a group of artists to study the ancestry of contemporary Mexicans. There were around 100 participating artists, and they all agreed upon specific contract terms and conditions, because they were donating their DNA samples. The director of the lab was very concerned about the ways in which a lot of these companies like 23andMe started to gain attention. They not only get to create these databases from the people that use their service, but they also charge for it. So, it's the whole opposite thing, right? There is a very interesting connection in terms of why anyone should trust an artist, a scientist, or a random company that is providing a “service” for you to keep your DNA in their lab? That doesn't really cross our minds.

LAUREN LEE McCARTHY: Yeah, totally. Who do we trust, and why? What do you do when you don't necessarily have enough information to make a judgment? I think about those stories of people that donated sperm twenty years ago, thinking this will be anonymous, and then everyone was getting 23andMe, and then they would find cohorts of sperm donor siblings. At the time they thought, Yes, this can remain anonymous. But then, the technology changes and suddenly, you're holding this material, which can have a whole different life. It can transform a relationship or set of relationships. Another part of it was this question about speculation. You're holding someone's saliva or you're giving yours. Right now, you can't do a whole lot with someone’s saliva, but who knows what might be possible in the future? There's also speculation in a value sense: whose saliva might be valuable to be holding, and that was more tongue in cheek. But I’m thinking about this project in a moment of experimentation with other monetary systems, this speculation of which technology or what might you hold that could be valuable in the future?

We should be able to consent and understand the terms of what we're agreeing to, but it's not always possible because of the way time works. And so, how much do you want to spend? How much do we focus on what may or may not happen in the future versus being present right now, or to say it the other way—how much do we just indulge in what's happening right now versus being conscious of what could be coming in the future, and how do we prepare for that?

DOREEN A. RÍOS: It’s really powerful and compelling—the kind of conversation and artistic practice that I believe is very necessary for this moment in time, especially as the systems become more and more obscure, and it seems like we have fewer ways of opting out. 

LAUREN LEE McCARTHY: There's an absurd humor too. When I tell people that there's a saliva exchange happening, people are perplexed. I enjoy engaging with things in that way. These are really difficult conversations and questions, but I’m trying to find a way to also make it playful or silly. 

Bodily Autonomy is on view through May 25 @ UC San Diego’s Mandeville Art Gallery 9655 Scholars Drive North, La Jolla

Installation view, Lauren Lee McCarthy and Casey Reas, Are you the perfect specimen?, 2024, Video (color, silent), Lauren Lee McCarthy: Bodily Autonomy at UC San Diego Mandeville Art Gallery. March 2-May 25, 2024. Photo by Pablo Mason. With support from Creative Capital.