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

 

Image courtesy of Untitled and Sol Summers.

 


interview by Oliver Kupper
intro by Mia Milosevic


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Sol Summers, Regeneration, 2024.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Sol Summers, Daybreak, 2024.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

first artist in residence of OpenAI

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



interview by Mia Milosevic


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

first artist in residence of OpenAI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Each Person Is A Portal: An Interview Of Seffa Klein

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

interview by Summer Bowie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

BOWIE: Maybe it is.

 
 

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

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

portraits by Michael Bailey Gates

Evangeline AdaLioryn: Hey girl, how is Paris?

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

Evangeline AdaLioryn: [laughs]

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

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

Gates: You're such a Disney princess.

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

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

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

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

AdaLioryn: No, I literally would. 

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

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

Gates: From your suitors.

AdaLioryn: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gates: Ugh, Athena is that girl.

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

Gates: We're Venus girls through and through!

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

Gates: It tortures you, I know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gates: You're such a cult leader

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

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

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

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

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

Gates: You're not lying.

Instinctive Gestures: An Interview of Alexandra Bachzetsis

text by Summer Bowie 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 
 

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

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. 

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.

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

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. 

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

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.

 
 

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.

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.

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.

 
 

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

 

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

 

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

 

The Perfect Specimen: An Interview of Lauren Lee McCarthy

medical pamphlet with man spitting into vial says "So You've Decided to Exchange Saliva"

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. 

two Prosthetic Belly Devices made from silicone and electronics on clothing hangers

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.

Video installation with three people sitting at a table subtitle says "It's not a video game. It's our baby's life."

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.

three people stand behind saliva bar installation wearing green smocks

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 of Lauren Lee McCarthy's "Bodily Autonomy" with saliva bar and video installation

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

two-channel video installation on exterior of Mandeville Art Gallery shows two women sticking out tongues at UCSD

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.

Watermarks in Savannah: An Interview of Holly Hendry

 

Holly Hendry, Her bones begin to bend, 2024. Image courtesy of SCAD.

 

Holly Hendry’s Watermarks, featured at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) Museum of Art through June 24, is a site-specific oasis which playfully investigates the way water runs through virtually every facet of human life. Situated outside the museum in glass vitrines overlooking Turner Boulevard, Hendry’s four sculptural pieces encounter the world in an unconventional way. The architectural display is situated in the community; students pass it every morning on their way to class. The significance behind the work in this context becomes ever-evolving, effortlessly aligning with the shifting elements of the everyday. Her edifices traverse intricate concepts that range from the expansiveness of architecture, societal conceptions of the female form, to the connectivity of bodies via water. Interestingly balancing the lightness of uplifting artistic figuration with the weight of impending doom as it relates to our not-at-all-ubiquitous freshwater supply, Hendry’s sculptural forms are dynamic manifestations of life on earth.

Watermarks is organized by SCAD Museum of Art chief curator Daniel S. Palmer with assistant curator Haley Clouser and presented as part of SCAD deFINE ART 2024.

Mia Milosevic: I wanted to start off with just talking about your show here at SCAD. Can you walk me through the origins of Watermarks, like how you got your inspiration for this show? 

Holly Hendry: I think my work always starts with building a site or space. It was an exciting moment of thinking about that in the context of the jewel box [glass vitrines on SCAD Museum of Art’s facade] with it being this unique site that interfaces public space and gallery space. That became the starting point of it all before even visiting the space. I was excited about how that could actually act as a point of intersection in a similar way to a diorama—a slice through something. I was interested in that idea of confrontation. The building is almost pushing itself outwards, but has a view inwards at the same time. The work is pushing itself out at you, and so then the glass becomes this moment of intimacy between the two things. 

MM: In all four works you have on display, they’re all different in their own way but you can feel the way the earth’s elements are fused into each of them. 

HH: I spent a while reading and looking at the history of industry along the river and more widely about the role of a port in terms of how a town or city works, and that in relation to bodily systems, plumbing systems, sewage systems, gut systems… I look at industry from the industrial revolution to systems of how we live today. I try to look through a critical lens, but also through something physical and bodily where things aren't so packed away and hidden–they reveal themselves. 

MM: It does feel like a lot of your work, and I'm referencing your previous work too, focuses on the machinery or “behind-the-scenes” of things. 

HH: I think machinery poses quite an interesting challenge for me because it's something so far from felt and organic, same with architecture. I'm trying to pull those things in. I try to pull them into a space where they can be something else.

MM: The idea of water is really interesting in your work here. Especially considering the exhibit’s site-specificity, at Port Savannah. Can you tell me more about how water plays a role in this?

HH: I think water has become, no pun intended, an underlying current in a lot of my practice recently. It’s been really present in the thinking for this work because of Savannah itself. I was fascinated by that fluidity of solid ground, the marshes in Savannah which go underwater sometimes. There's not many places where you have that kind of palpable engagement with something. Savannah being a city that’s shaped by tides and river current was something that I found really interesting from the offset. It was another way to think about bodies and materials in relation to water. It’s about us being beyond these closed-off units, which I found really exciting in relation to the jewel boxes because they are these closed-off units you can see through and into.

There’s the idea of responsibility through something like water where you can think of it as holding a history of bodies and how they've been treated. I think you can't get away from thinking about that in a city like Savannah regarding moments in history that are really painful, like The Weeping Time, which is also about water: tears, the mistreatment of bodies and people. Water became something that was not just about excess or spill, but also about raindrops and teardrops–these things that do connect bodies, really. 

 

Image courtesy of the artist and SCAD.

 

MM: One of your works in the show resembles an ear, which forces you to think about the body very directly. 

HH: I wanted it to be a kind of illogical form of the body as well, where it could be guttering or it could be an ear, or it could be something that references the ear canal. There’s a play of words as well, since the inside of an ear is called a labyrinth. So there's ideas of networks and tunnels within that, but then an ear canal is a reference to water and river systems. I was excited about moments of interplay between those elements. 

MM: There’s a poem that's inspiration for the work, the story of the water nymph Cyane by Ovid. 

HH: I never really used something so poetic or with such direct reference to myth within my work before, but it felt really important to ground this show in something that is watery, body-mingling, elastic and centering on a female body. The very first line that you come across describes how her limbs soften, her bones begin to bend. And it references a female figure. I found that quite interesting to be so direct with that initially. It feels like this poetry is almost rubbing two different art forms together. 

MM: I feel like the idea of flatness comes up a lot in your work, especially referencing Slacker (2019) which features the sculptural synthetic skin you made. 

HH: That work was shown at Yorkshire Sculpture Park and uses the structure of industrial machinery to try and bring it to bring something else. It started from something very physical because I was grinding up plastic objects to then turn flat and make into this silicon tapestry that became a band, which I then rotated around motors. I think this idea of the exquisite corpse and that game of consequences, as some people call it, implies the surrealist idea of chance and moment. It relates a lot to flatness as well. I'm quite interested and excited by that in an architectural sense. You see it in some cities where there's a building that maybe you'd expect to see, and then a kind of intersection of something completely random that throws you into a different interpretation–it becomes a Frankenstein building. It felt like I was doing that with the architecture in Watermarks, through the regularity of brick works interspersed with these moments of color. 

MM: The idea of your work being surrealist sculpture is interesting. The contrast of putting something real into something fake like machinery seems to expose it more.

HH: I think that element is present in the technique of cartoon notification that I try to use. It's like one single line that is trying to express something related to movement or character, which cartoons are so good at. They make one simple movement really embody that movement through just line and color. My work has those ambitions as well, in a way.

MM: Do you draw a lot of inspiration from cartoons? 

HH: I think it's more like a cartoon sensibility. There's moments that I'd reference from like Looney Tunes or Popeye, where there's an elasticity to it. Like in films where you see cartoons aligned with human bodies, but the malleability becomes so extreme and then the human body seems so vulnerable in comparison. There's a lightness to dark subject matter or difficult subject matter that I think cartoons deal with really well. I try to do that within my work as well.

MM: Do you feel like there's dark subject matter in this show?

HH: I don't know if it goes as far as dark subject matter, but I think I'm always dealing with elements of divergent bodily moments. Depending on how you read the work, that could be quite extreme or not, so I think it's always there. There's always ideas of human fragility or death or pain that are very closely tied with humor or awkwardness. It's quite a difficult thing for me to unpick verbally because that's what I feel the purpose of the work is to do physically. And if I could explain it, I would (laughs). 

 

Image courtesy of the artist and SCAD.

 

Dose Of Chaos: An In Interview Of Artist Jim Mooijekind On The Occasion Of His Solo Exhibition In Los Angeles

Balance, a strange beast - 8.25 x 11.25" - Ink and watercolour on paper, 2023

The delightfully fucked up world of Haarlem, Netherlands-based artist Jim Mooijekind is a punk menagerie of psychological and spiritual reference points—but mostly deranged Dutch cartoons from the 90s with full frontal nudity and violence. In his works, figurative, nearly autobiographical avatars make tortured grimaces in a cauldron of pop cultural symbology inspired by Freemasonry. On the occasion of his solo LA exhibition "The Entertainer" at Face Guts, presented by White Box, we asked Mooijekind some questions. 

AUTRE MAGAZINE: How did you get your start as an artist?

JIM MOOIJEKIND: I have always been drawing, but when I went to the art academy I chose to pursue a career in the arts. After graduating, I kept going, and gradually stuff started to happen. It’s cool to see how art can lead you towards all kinds of people and places.

AUTRE MAGAZINE: What led you to the kind of distinct imagery you work with?

JIM MOOIJEKIND: It’s a huge salad of all kinds of things crossing over into each other. A big part of my practice is deconstructing and reconstructing things until I feel it's mine. These elements can be borrowed from art history, counterculture, spiritual symbolism, and symbols that articulate my emotions and unresolved thoughts.

AUTRE MAGAZINE: How has your artistic style evolved with time?

JIM MOOIJEKIND: Before, it was more playful and youthful. And I see it now more as going to a place where I can be more poetic and unapologetically strange.

AUTRE MAGAZINE: What were the cartoons you watched growing up and how have they influenced your work to this day?

JIM MOOIJEKIND: A lot of cartoons on late-night Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon. Weird and creepy shows used to fascinate me. Shows like Ren and Stimpy, Cow and Chicken, and Courage the Cowardly Dog all had this vulgar and strange aura around them. Dutch television used to be crazy as well. We used to have this morning variety show for kids called “Villa Achterwerk.” It had the most insane cartoons with full frontal nudity, very dirty and grim jokes, and crudely made most of the time. I used to love to watch that show. Some of these shows were: Purno de purno, Ffukkie Slim and Eefje Wentelteefje. The combination of all these shows ruined me in a good way.

AUTRE MAGAZINE: Your work mostly centers itself on the autobiographical avatar…can you elaborate more on what this means? What’s the difference between this and a self-portrait?

JIM MOOIJEKIND: Self-portraits in the classical sense focus on the likeness of the artist in the work. The autobiographical element in my work focuses on how I feel. Not how I look.

 

Vision - 9.5 x 6.5" - Ink and watercolour on Paper - 2023

 

AUTRE MAGAZINE: Can you elaborate on the symbolic imagery you use in your work? A lot of it is inspired by the way Freemasons use their symbolism.

JIM MOOIJEKIND: They use quite mundane objects like construction tools. To visualize very deep, spiritual themes. Every different combination of symbols has a different meaning. This way of working with abstract themes to make something figurative speaks to me.

AUTRE MAGAZINE: How does philosophy play a role in your art? Are there any philosophers that you get inspiration from?

JIM MOOIJEKIND: When studying in art school I received a copy of “The Myth of Sisyphus” by French philosopher Albert Camus. Because they saw the absurd element in my work. I then looked a bit more into the French lads of his era. Furthermore, I like the work of Carl Yung, and Manly P Hall. Guys that go nice and wild in the spiritual department.

AUTRE MAGAZINE: How does living in Haarlem influence your work? Especially now as an international artist, do you see yourself incorporating some formal or aesthetic elements native to your home as you approach a bigger audience?

JIM MOOIJEKIND: Stylistically, I’m not very sure what Haarlem brought me. But as a home base, I am very happy with my city. I always call it a village-city hybrid. It allows me to dose the chaos. It’s a bit like Amsterdam without the nonsense.  

AUTRE MAGAZINE: Your work seems very emotional, and incorporates opposing emotions into one piece. For example, your upcoming exhibition “The Entertainer” @ WhiteBox.LA/Face Guts showcases statues “dedicated to the human condition, icons to sadness, love and humor.” Can you elaborate on this?

JIM MOOIJEKIND: Yes, what you are quoting is an excerpt of a cool text fellow artist and friend Darius Airo wrote about my work. He’s talking about the fact that the compositions in my work are pretty dense and straightforward. Like a statue. What these “Statues” symbolize are mostly abstract and poetic. Like the juxtapositions that are found in the human psyche.

AUTRE MAGAZINE: It seems like the beauty of your work is that it is capable of doing more than one thing at a time. It feels like your work pushes your viewers in multiple directions, all at once. How would you describe your work?

JIM MOOIJEKIND: I really like to be a shapeshifter. Fluctuating between positions and thematics in my practice. As I change, my work changes. Keep them guessing!

Jim Mooijekind "The Entertainer" opens March 16 at Face Guts Presented by Whitebox.LA, 4136 Verdugo Road Los Angeles 90065

 
 

Crossing the Infinite: An Interview of Kate Mosher Hall

Kate Mosher Hall, Moon mesh, 2024 
Acrylic on canvas 
80 x 72 inches (203.2 x 182.9 cm) 


interview by Kathleen MacKay


I recently visited Los Angeles born-and-raised painter Kate Mosher Hall at her light-filled studio in a bricky industrial area of Glendale. With the 5 freeway buzzing nearby, she walked me through her complex and unique process, which involves silkscreening light-sensitive emulsion over gessoed canvas using anywhere from eight to thirty screens depending on the particular painting, Photoshopping, layers of collage, and paint. It’s a “choose-your-own adventure” as she says, to get the desired effect. To help organize things, she’s created a lexicon: box paintings, hole or mesh paintings, recursion paintings. Some paintings incorporate elements of all styles. Hall, a punk drummer, worked in silkscreen studios for several years before she began UCLA’s Fine Art MFA program. We talked about Never Odd or Even, Hall’s second solo exhibition at Hannah Hoffman, which is currently on view in Los Angeles and the way that the work employs both good and bad math, challenges modes of looking, and the infinite repetition within binary relationships.

KATHLEEN MACKAY: Let’s talk about paint. The works in Never Odd or Even often have a charcoal wash, right?  

KATE MOSHER HALL: I use charcoal but also flashe, which has that really dry matte look to it. It's really dense, really rich. It's important for me to have matte-ness in the blacks because I work with themes of obfuscation; things that you can't see versus things that you can see. Sometimes I like it when there's like a slip of: is it void or is it obstacle? Matte-ness gives in to that. 

KATHLEEN MACKAY: And you're talking about the "hole” paintings you make? 

KATE MOSHER HALL: Yeah. The "mesh” paintings. Sometimes I'll print paintings backward. I'll do a black background and then I'll print everything inverted with white or with a color. The "recursion” paintings are made reversed actually, so that black matte sets, because those are a two-point perspective receding into space. That matte-ness becomes really important.

KATHLEEN MACKAY: The "recursion paintings"—those are layers of silkscreen on top of each other, the same repeating image over and over until a center point?

KATE MOSHER HALL: It repeats, but it's also in succession of an image. So there's a bit of that repetition. Then, it evolves as it goes in. This idea is about quantity or quantifying an image. I'll take something and when it's spread out into space, it's like the way one experiences time, or something repeated into the abyss, again and again and again. It's a response to seeing images again and again and again. You know, like the deep-fried meme? Like the thing screengrabbed. I’m taking the thing that is already flattened out but expressing it as quantity. 

KATHLEEN MACKAY: The idea of repetition/replication is so great with your work because it’s totally a different experience for me being in the room with those “recursion” paintings versus seeing reproductions of them. 

KATE MOSHER HALL: It's a huge part of it. 

KATHLEEN MACKAY: Especially my favorite 31,556,952 seconds. In person, there's this moiré thing going on that's really trippy and a little bit dizzying that's totally lost in any reproductions. 

KATE MOSHER HALL: I think a lot about the proximity to my work. How it looks up close and far away. Sometimes, when you're really far away, things will start appearing or walking in. And when you're close, they sort of fall apart. What the camera does is compress all of the resolution that I'm playing with in the paintings. So, if things have a smaller or higher resolution next to each other, the camera just makes it all the same resolution. The moiré pattern resists it. It's fun making work that refuses to be photographed—work that's about images and photographs. 

Kate Mosher Hall, 31,556,952 seconds, 2024 
Acrylic and charcoal on canvas 
80 x 72 inches (203.2 x 182.9 cm) 

KATHLEEN MACKAY: It's very rebellious in a way, like, yeah, you had to be there. It's kind of punk. And what you're saying about how the camera wants to put its arms around everything all at once—that's not really how the body experiences something, how the eye takes something in.

KATE MOSHER HALL: Yeah, I was thinking about these ways of seeing in multiplicity. I'll be experiencing a conversation with a friend and check my text messages at the same time, and we're also in the car and I see this billboard. All these rectangles presenting information within the world that I'm interacting with feels like these multiple horizons, which is a wild thing to actually navigate. 

KATHLEEN MACKAY: Layers of screens.

KATE MOSHER HALL: Or even just things out in the world. People. Something on a t-shirt, who knows? There are so many ways things are presented, contained in, shown. One thing I want to say about the title, the [Seconds] recursion painting: that's the number of seconds within a year. And the source image is a one-year-old's birthday cake. 

Kate Mosher Hall, Pull up pull up, 2024 
Acrylic and charcoal on canvas 
Diptych dimensions: 90 x 160 inches (228.6 x 406.4 cm) 

KATHLEEN MACKAY: It seems like you're doing a lot of math in your work. 

KATE MOSHER HALL: I guess I'm interested in math. In the process for sure, when you're working with grids, and dot patterns, and ratios, and stuff like that. There's good math with the screening and then there's bad math, and I engage in both. 

But math does come in a lot in my work. My friend and artist Olivia Mole came to the show, and we were looking at the large diptych, Pull up pull up. It's the most abstract work I’ve ever made. I left it more open conceptually than I usually do. My big focus is modes of looking and the act of looking, how something’s presented, public or private viewing spaces. But with this work, I'm actually kind of letting it go. 

Olivia was like, “How do you feel about math?” She said hyperbole curves are these graphs that go positive/negative, so like 1x1=1, -1x-1=-1, and there's a mirrored curve that happens. Each axis is infinity; it goes on forever. At some point, somewhere in time they make contact. It's like imagining the painting going into the wall, going around into the building, and looping back around and coming through. And then I was like, “Olivia, this is crazy because the title of the show is a palindrome: Never Odd or Even is the same forward and backwards. So is Pull up pull up.” She basically mathematically figured out the thing I had a language relationship to. 

KATHLEEN MACKAY: I was definitely thinking about the concept of the infinite looking at your work. It first came to me in the Seconds painting because there's all these layers going inward, inward, inward. And in the middle, there's a spiral or a Greek key that feels very much like it speaks to the idea of the infinite. Like how humans are obsessed with infinity because our existence is so finite. We know it's out there, we know it's all around us. But everything we have is so physical, so tangible, so finite. 

KATE MOSHER HALL: I also think it's being in the threshold where we are with technology and our bodies navigating this changing landscape of how we access information, the quantity of information that we see. Like, we have to have a talk about Instagram because it's insane. 

KATHLEEN MACKAY: Especially if you're doing box paintings. It's just a million boxes. 

KATE MOSHER HALL: Boxes, yeah. But also like the juxtaposition of those boxes in the content. That scroll is really disorienting. It's confusing. It's also schizophrenic, like, oh, they’re selling me eye cream, and here’s my friend's birthday, an art show, and genocide. Seeing all these things stacked up, the timing of it, how do you respond to that sequence that quickly, and engage?

KATHLEEN MACKAY: And we're told that it's all real and it's all fake. 

KATE MOSHER HALL: And it is. 

Images Courtesy of the artist and Hannah HoffmanGallery, Los Angeles. Photography by Paul Salveson.

KATHLEEN MACKAY: And it's infinite, the scroll. That reminds me, I was thinking about your work and reading Emmanuel Levinas who was talking about humans reaching for infinity—the infinite in the finite—has to do with a desire that can never be satisfied. It's a desire that only arouses. 

KATE MOSHER HALL: I think that was built off of Lacan’s Peek-a-boo. I took this amazing class with Lesley Dick on the death drive. Peek-a-boo with the mother is sex and death. It becomes a part of the pleasure principle. She's covering up her eyes: Mother's gone, she's dead. Her return is a dopamine hit. It's pleasure but then it's related to that feeling of emptiness. And it's like Warhol's car crash paintings; the repeating image, the rubberneckers. Death is also related to the infinite. And then, the finite is related to pleasure. 

KATHLEEN MACKAY: Do you think pleasure is related to the infinite? 

KATE MOSHER HALL: That's the curious part. 

KATHLEEN MACKAY: And death is, of course, related to the finite because—kaput—it's your day. 

KATE MOSHER HALL: I think in any of these binary relationships, it always just goes into repetition, like their relationship with each other becomes infinite because it's inconclusive. 

KATHLEEN MACKAY: And that's lovely with your work, the binary that has to do with photo processing and light and dark, and inversions. I'm curious about the show at Hannah Hoffman, these big, dark paintings that are very affecting to be in a room with, they draw you in, the eye travels over them, one wants to spend a lot of time with them, and there's a kind of moodiness; a darkness and a somber feeling. But some of your earlier work is very playful and lighter. I'm thinking about that painting of the dog running on the beach with the mirror behind it, and the dog is in this really funny dog-shape.

KATE MOSHER HALL: I was feeling really conflicted making the show because I was feeling like, why the fuck am I even making art while genocide is happening? 

KATHLEEN MACKAY: This is happening around October 7th?

KATE MOSHER HALL: Yeah, I thought about canceling. I was feeling really conflicted and really questioning where my energy should go. A lot of artists shared the same sentiment. I think I was confronted by that feeling and being present for it. It’s also connected to the internet, right? Images, access to information. A lot of emotion, but we’re in this chaos market. In astrology, my Virgo sun is in the 12th house, which is the house of death and aliens and drugs. 

KATHLEEN MACKAY: And insanity, prisons, institutions… 

KATE MOSHER HALL: So fitting. Even sometimes if I'm having an analytical approach to making an image, I'll be like, this is how the thing is going to be made, this is how it's functioning. Sometimes it's really strange to me and surprises me with how the creepiness comes in. The moodiness, the darkness is such a shadow side of how I'm making things, sometimes I'm like, what's wrong with me?

Kate Mosher Hall, Squeeze wax, 2024 
Acrylic, flashe, charcoal, and color pencil on canvas 
92 x 84 inches (233.7 x 213.4 cm) 

KATHLEEN MACKAY: Your process seems so physical. Is that part of it? 

KATE MOSHER HALL: I guess so. I've been doing this for so long that I don’t think a lot about all the labor. When I'm not actually making the painting but making the parts that are going into the painting, it’s a nice moment for reflection. 

KATHLEEN MACKAY: You’re a drummer too—also physical. 

KATE MOSHER HALL: I'm actually not really good at drumming, to be honest.  

KATHLEEN MACKAY: Do you have natural rhythm, though? 

KATE MOSHER HALL: I have theories about this. I think I was actually born left-handed because when I snowboard or skateboard or anything like that, I ride goofy. When I first started drumming, I was playing backwards a bit. I really like doing dance beats and the separation between my legs and my arms was really hard to break. Because I think that I'm strangely left. 

KATHLEEN MACKAY: That's nice with your paintings to think about inversions. You were a punk drummer in the DIY scene, and now you're in the art world. What are the similarities between those, or the differences?

KATE MOSHER HALL: Well, they're really different, but there's also similarities. The art world also has so many genres. There are different modes of making in different communities, and different intentions and goals that come out of art making. When I'm in the art world, I'm rubbing up against worlds I never imagined I'd be close to, like working with multiple commercial galleries. When I went to grad school, it was cool, I can teach now because silkscreen and printmaking is kind of a dying art. There's ironically a lot of interest in it as it's disappearing from campuses, this idea of translating digital image into material. I love the collaborative aspect of printmaking. It really keeps me in the community too, in a way. I'm always like, open door, come print something.  Because of that, I feel the art world has opened. And it feels like more of a community. I got here through the support of friends, community, artists, these galleries. So, I try to support others as much as I can. 

KATHLEEN MACKAY: What’s next on this front?

KATE MOSHER HALL: I’m actually really interested right now in taking a break from making paintings and I'm thinking about writing a play. I've been thinking about performance quite a bit and looking to use my studio as sort of a showing space—performance space, video, plays, poetry, literature, whatever. There's this new urgency and thirst in LA for collective engagement and feeling the sense of the present moment being performed and witnessed all together.

Never Odd or Even is on view through March 23 @ Hannah Hoffman 2504 W 7th St, Suite C, Los Angeles

Images Courtesy of the artist and Hannah HoffmanGallery, Los Angeles. Photography by Paul Salveson.

They'll Never Truly Know: An Interview of Painter Jess Valice

 
 

interview by Avery Wheless
portraits by Summer Bowie

Each and every day we observe thousands of faces online and in person. And with each and every one, we reflexively look for clues to determine how they must feel. It is an empathic impulse endemic to us as social creatures. And yet, regardless of our perpetual, involuntary efforts, we can never be sure that we’ve ascertained any level of truth. It’s this mystery that lies at the heart of Jess Valice’s painted figures. The artist’s initial life path, which was headed toward a medical practice, laid the foundation for an approach to painting that leaves the viewer in a state of quizzical study, lost in the gaze of a subject who was never asking to be diagnosed. The predominant demons and desires of her subjects even seem to elude Valice, as she finds herself reworking each of their faces incessantly until she lands on something that feels honest. For her solo exhibition, Mara, opening today at Almine Rech’s Upper East Side gallery in New York, the subjects in question are at various points of overcoming the part of their egos that obstruct the path to enlightenment. According to Valice, “There is this overwhelming sense of fatigue that I think is typifying our generation, the weight of a spectrum of emotional responses that digital space provokes in us every day… It’s all so complex—this is where the science and melancholia come in—the recognition of this blankness as a widespread response. It’s too much to feel.” Fellow painter and confidante Avery Wheless joined Valice in her studio as the paintings were nearly finished to delve into the making of this new body of work and demystify some of the je ne sais quoi embodied by Valice’s disaffected figures.

AVERY WHELESS: I know you're majorly self-taught, but originally you were on a path of studying neuroscience. When did that shift become apparent to you.

JESS VALICE: I guess it was around that time when the work just got too crazy for becoming a doctor and not necessarily knowing if I would enjoy it or be successful at it, or even have a shot at going to medical school, for that matter. I just realized I couldn't stop thinking about painting. So, when the workload got heavy, I just was like, No, that's it. I'm done. I was painting in between all my courses and all my exams. I mean if you're putting all this effort into something that you don't care about and you're actually getting somewhere with it, then imagine the possibilities of what you can do when you actually pursue something you care about that you want to do forever—something you could never live without.

WHELESS: Do you feel there's any crossover with your studies in neuroscience and psychology—anything that's woven itself into the visuals that you paint?

VALICE: I put a lot of emphasis on the gaze because when I look at somebody just out in the world, or someone looking back at me, I feel like I understand and empathize with what may be going on in their head. It's a weird trait to have. I'm just looking at someone and thinking about their brain chemistry. There’s a beauty in knowing that all of it is different, and you can't actually know what’s going on in someone's head. But you could take a good guess. There's something very humbling about not knowing how another person’s brain works. So, this gaze and this lack of emotion, or micro expression in the faces of the people that I create just tell their own story, but also leave mystery. I want people to know that they'll never truly know, but their interpretation might teach them something about themself.

WHELESS: For this body of work, in particular, you shot friends and other artists, and it was so fun to be a part of that process of getting to sit for you.

VALICE: God, your photo, you were in supermodel mode with my high school friend taking photos.

Jess Valice 
Mara, 2024  
Oil on canvas  
182.9 x 152.4 cm  
72 x 60 in  
© Jess Valice - Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech  Photo : Matthew Kroening 

WHELESS: It was fun. I felt like we were all entering Jess's world, and Jess's way of lighting, and shooting, and trying to embody what your paintings already have in them—this sense of staring back at the viewer, but also a strong sensuality. Was there something particular you were looking for in the people that you chose to sit for you?

VALICE: The majority of the people that I chose, including yourself, are people I have an emotional connection to beyond just an acquaintance. You and I have shared personal stories. I've shared personal experiences with some of the people that came, and some are people from childhood or school that I have pushed away, but they have stayed with me. That makes me feel this sense of community. It wasn't necessarily anything that was physical, though some of the photos and some of the people have attributes of the faces that I generally like to paint—very sad-looking eyes—but I chose those people for those reasons.

WHELESS: Was that the first time that you shot direct reference models for the paintings in that way? 

VALICE: Yeah, That was my first time. It was cool. I appreciate the faces that I just create because these faces all look very similar, and yes, they do look similar to me, but they're fully made up. So doing something with people that I recognize was interesting because I'm connected to all those fake people I create, but it’s cool to be tied in with all the real people in my universe that I create.

Jess Valice
Sincere Condolences, 2024
Charcoal on paper
35.6 x 27.9 cm - 14 x 11 in (unframed)
44.5 x 36.8 x 3.8 cm - 17 1/2 x 14 1/2 x 1 1/2 in (framed)
© Jess Valice - Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech
Photo : Thomas Barratt

Jess Valice 
Self Portrait, 2024  
Pencil on paper  
35.6 x 27.9 cm - 14 x 11 in (unframed)  
44.5 x 36.8 x 3.8 cm - 17 1/2 x 14 1/2 x 1 1/2 in (framed) 
© Jess Valice - Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech  
Photo : Thomas Barratt 

WHELESS: I feel like most of the faces that you painted in the past were centralized around this uniform character with big, deep-set eyes, and the facial features were similar to your facial features. As painters, oftentimes we end up painting ourselves just because we are used to seeing our faces all the time. But, maybe you could talk about how all of that ties into the title of your show…

VALICE: Going back to being self taught, it was really just from looking at religious artworks and Caravaggio that brought me into my interests with being a figurative painter. They have those big eyes—it never was supposed to be me—but you can see a strong resemblance if you do a side-by-side of my faces with that of Caravaggio's figures or Artemisia [Gentileschi]. My boyfriend's mom told me I look like the Virgin Mary in a photo that she saw the other day. So, yeah, it was never supposed to be me, but they are. At times, I've referenced my own face for lighting, and generally, I have the same face as the liturgical figures I reference.

But it does come back to Mara. Mara comes from Buddhism, it’s like your self-centered inner thought that says you don't have to learn anymore. You don't have to take anybody's advice. You don't have to take anybody's word for anything. Whatever you know as of right now is set in stone and you're not going to change your mind. I've always hated that perspective. The gaze that these figures make—I'm staring directly at one of them right now and I want to cry—it's like decision-making, it's them thinking. It's them either knowing what they want to do or not knowing, questioning themselves or questioning the people around them, or lack thereof. I like to use color and light, how melancholy or content they look to dictate which direction of Mara (or not) they would be in.

WHELESS: I've been thinking about the title of the show since you told me about it and I think there's so many reasons why that word probably stuck with you on a psychological level, all the different ways that it filters in and out of your work, whether it's in humor, or in symbolism, or in the gaze. Can you talk a little bit about the environments that you put these figures in or some of the props you paint in them?

VALICE: Well, with you being a painter as well, you fully understand that each work you make is a diary entry, or it can be. Some people don't do that. I definitely am someone who does that. No matter who's in the painting, they, unfortunately, have to take on the responsibility of living within the networks of my emotion. So, each painting has its own moment. They each have another experience I have had, or they're living in a world I'd like to be in, or would like to get out of. There's this orange one of this girl just reclining outside, it has a beautiful view of some town, and she just wants to stay inside. There's decision making in that. Does she like where she is? Would she love to go run out there? I think it's beautiful. Personally, I'd love to go run out there in that field. But then, there's this guy reclining, embracing a plank of wood. He could be longing for something. He could be just wanting to hold somebody and I think that in that time, I did feel that way. I did pose him in that way for the photo. They all have their different moments, yet they all come back to Mara. I rarely ever theme a show. I usually make a show and then figure out what was going on in my life at that point or what I was thinking about when I was in here [the studio] for the past year.

WHELESS: What have you learned now as you've been reflecting on this body of work?

VALICE: You learn something new every time. It could be a therapy session for you, or it could be just your growth as a painter, or just skill developing, which is always helpful too. But you take something away with every body of work.

WHELESS: What's your work-life balance like?

VALICE: Work-life balance…. That's the next thing I need to figure out. 

WHELESS: Next project.

VALICE: That's my next project. That's the question of my life. I was talking to Austyn Wiener the other day and she's like, “Jess, just go home and take a fucking bubble bath. Just do it.” I hate baths, so I won't. But she did remind me that I have to make sure that home is as comfortable to me in these times as my studio, because I was expressing to her that I am at the studio more than I am home at this point. Home is really just where I sleep now. I love my home. It's so nice. I mean, it's beautiful. It's a great little spot. But I don't want to be there because I want to be here. But she was helping remind me of the importance of creating that kind of space in order to not lose my mind, which is inevitable with every show, but it could be helpful to fix that side of it. But I'm someone who likes to cold call my friends while I paint, and my family. So, I guess with my social life, it still works out. I love to talk on the phone. So, the work and friendship balance is working out. There's a lot of people I have to text like, Sorry, I'm losing my mind. I'll call you back in a few weeks.

WHELESS: As your friend, I think you do a pretty good job. After making this body of work, or when you think about your paintings in general, once they leave your studio, what is your hope for them, or how do you see them existing?

VALICE: Ghosts 

WHELESS: Ghosts? 

VALICE: They will be ghosts for sure, from here. I mean, I know some people find them staring back at you a little bit spooky, but I do hope that they exist as romantic images and they become special to somebody. To me, they're my children, so my ghost children.

WHELESS: It kind of ties back into your viewing of religious works as a child. What else do you have in the works? 

VALICE: Hmmm, My lobotomy? I'm really looking forward to making new work, so honestly I've been in the studio just constantly. This is the first time in a long time that I've put so much more effort into detail. I'm really excited and looking forward to challenging myself to do things that I haven't done before like I did here like with the landscapes, and just new figures, and understanding color a little bit better. I'm excited to mess around after which I will be jumping right back into painting. Probably when I get back from New York, I'm gonna lose my mind. I have a show next March. 

WHELESS: Where's that?

VALICE: In Paris with Almine.  I'll be doing some fairs in between that so check in on me every once in a while.

 

Jess Valice
The sculptor, 2024
Oil on canvas
182.9 x 152.4 cm
72 x 60 in
© Jess Valice - Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech
Photo : Matthew Kroening

 

WHELESS: Every artist has pieces that they want to keep and others that they’re happy to sell. What makes you feel like something just has to be yours to keep?

VALICE: There are some paintings that nobody can really appreciate as much as I know that I will or I can't necessarily trust that anybody would. There's a lot of people that just buy for investment and that's scary when I put so much of myself into these paintings. It breaks my heart for anyone to neglect the feeling that's in the work. Especially if it's one that's really powerful. I love all of them but there's some that are a little bit more powerful than the others. I've already experienced one of my paintings going to auction that I made after I experienced one of the darkest things i've ever experienced. It was a guy holding a bouquet of dead fish, which is just as beautiful as a flower, flowers have to die for you to have the bouquet. I understand that people have to put things in auction sometimes for whatever reason, that's not what I'm complaining about, but it's a trust thing when you love something so much, and I love creating poetry in that kind of way so much. So that being said, the ones that I feel like I don't trust anybody else with, sometimes I save them for myself.

AVERY: There's always one I feel a connection with in each series and I try to pay attention to that. Usually it's just a no-brainer like, this can't go anymore, it has to stay with me. But in the same vein, I've had ones where I'm like, oh that didn't go to the right place, or it just doesn't feel right and it's an intuition that you have when you're like, this work is important and shouldn't live with anybody but me. Sometimes I won't put a work in a show, or I’ll keep it because I still don't know what I'm supposed to learn from it or I just keep it because it confuses me. I have to keep it in my studio to figure out what it's trying to tell me. It's almost like a research piece. It's not necessarily that it's not done, I just don't know what I was getting at yet, so I should probably hold on to it to learn from it.

VALICE: I love that.

Mara is on view through April 20 @ Almine Rech 39 East 78th Street, 2nd Floor
New York

Temple of Self: An Interview of Pilar Zeta by Gaïa Matisse

text by Gaïa Matisse
all clothing Jean Paul Gaultier

Pilar Zeta, an Argentinian-born multidisciplinary artist, and Gaïa Matisse, a French-American art curator, both found themselves drawn to Mexico City and its rich culture and art scene. Two years ago, unbeknownst to each other, they simultaneously relocated to the city at the same time. With their unconventional styles and unique visions of the art, it was inevitable that their paths would intersect. This encounter occurred at Zona Maco, the city's thriving art fair, in 2021. Pilar and Gaïa connected, and exactly one year later, Pilar conceived the idea of hosting an exhibition of her art within her home. Recognizing the need for a curator to seamlessly bring all aspects of her work together in dialogue, Pilar reached out to Gaïa. Together, they embarked on the collaborative journey that would become "Temple of Self.”

Gaïa Matisse: My love, how are you? 

Pilar Zeta: Hello, super good, excited for this exhibition to finally come to life! 

GM: I know! I was so happy when you asked me if I wanted to curate the exhibit, since  meeting you, I knew it was just a matter of time before we did something together. 

PZ: Totally, and the support of Jean Paul Gaultier is the cherry on top.

GM: Right.. Gaultier is a dream. I mean with our love for vintage and the amount of Gaultier pieces we have in our closets... it makes sense. I think Jean Paul himself would approve of the way we styled the shoot. 

PZ: For sure. 

GM: Okay, enough fashion let’s get to the art. At this point in your career, you have done multiple large-scale installations alongside many super important projects with other artists. What intrigued you to host an art exhibition in your home? 

PZ: For me, the deepest art form is how we live our day-to-day lives. That's why it's super important for me to live in an environment that reflects my inner world. After creating a lot of work for the external world, I wanted to invite people to explore where my vision comes from. My home is an extension of my daily expression; and a big part of how I find inspiration to keep making art. When you enter my house, you will see that every detail somehow is connected, even if at first something might seem unrelated. Once you understand my work you can begin to understand the connection. From my decor to my nerdy tech gadgets, and my books, everything is based on the things I love— the shapes, symbols, and talismans, they all resonate with me. Each object is either a creation of mine or an item that I've found across my life through my travels that represents me, combined with a specific color palette

GM: Yeah, the first time I walked into your apartment I was like woah, this girl has a vision… haha, In the work that we are presenting, you seamlessly blend different mediums like sculpture, tapestries, and paintings. What draws you to each medium and how do they inform each other in your creative process?

PZ: Each medium brings its unique energy to my artwork and has its creative process and emotional attachment. When the original image that I created with AI is woven by artisans into a tapestry, Wool, for instance, carries an organic warmth that connects back to nature. The temples that symbolize a subconscious reverence for sacred spaces, come alive. In the paintings, Oil paint is the medium in which there's a dynamic exchange between the virtual and the physical. This process is about connecting with a higher place through crafting a piece in the moment, created with a specific intention. Even in sculptures, I often utilize materials with reflective surfaces and minimalistic forms that allow for some form of interaction. I also love the imperfections of each material, they become part of the richness and depth of work and the interpretation of who is making it. Meanwhile, functional pieces like furniture become extensions of who I am, but I give them daily use.

GM: Imperfections are key. So tell me more about how you use AI in your work.

PZ: For me, AI has been an incredible tool. All my life, I've been studying a combination of very random subjects and concepts, from metaphysical and occultism to specific architectural styles, obscure sci-fi films, weird conspiracies, or a certain era. This mix of seemingly unrelated ideas forms the basis of my artistic expression. AI helps me shape all these ideas into storytelling and brings them into a visual form. I'm able to make pieces of art that are deeply aligned with my brain and my lucid dreams. It's like bringing something that exists in my head into this dimension… and when I work with artisans it’s bringing the AI version back into the physical world with actual artisans recreating it. As an artist and a human, it's important to embrace technology and be friends with it.

GM: That makes total sense… I’ve tried to use AI before like Midjourney… and let's just say it’s not easy to transcribe your thoughts… you need to be super specific in your prompt, and for that, you need tons of knowledge of the subject you are working on.

PZ: (laughs) Yeah it takes a lot of time and references, to shape the image as you want. 

GM: I’ve noticed that portals and gateways are a recurring theme in your work. Where do you see these portals leading the person in front of them, both physically and conceptually?

PZ: For me, portals are places that harbor a limited space where two things meet, where one starts and the other ends. They're an invitation for mysterious, magical occurrences. A space opening to a new dimension, inviting imagination and transformation. I always ask myself, how do we move from one dimension to another? What if there were a place that existed between dimensions, acting as a hinge between them? Portals are symbols for entry into a new reality. They are gateways that have been used for thousands of years, deeply embedded in our subconscious.

GM: So cool… yeah just preparing for this exhibit and diving into your art, I feel like we have been entering different dimensions. What is the most unexpected object that sparked inspiration for your art?

PZ: I find inspiration in rare, obscure books—mostly occult, metaphysical, and bizarre. I am also very into weird mind machines and all theories on how to manipulate reality, as well as vintage art and architecture books.

GM: Your book collection is insane, it’s been so much fun staying up all night and reading about Ufos and quantum physics. Aside from objects, what life experience do you think had the strongest impact on influencing your work?

PZ: The most unexpected and strongest inspiration for my art came during my time in Egypt. We were doing a tour of the pyramids and I ended up lying down in a Sarcophagus… It was so powerful, that I felt connected directly with the energy of the Pyramids and had this profound sense of creativity stirring within me. I knew, at that moment, that I would create something significant. Ten years later, I found myself placing an artwork at the pyramids of Giza, fulfilling the vision that had been ignited within me all those years ago.

GM: I saw that, what an achievement. Talk about manifesting something into reality! 

PZ: Manifesting is the strongest tool, if you believe in something and have a vision, anything is possible. 

GM: Your work often evokes a sense of the future and time travel. Do you believe we're heading towards a world that resembles your art, or are you simply offering commentary on possible paths?

PZ: Well, there's this concept in quantum physics that suggests we exist in multiple parallel realities simultaneously, and that the universe is a reflection of ourselves. Some theories propose that we live in a universe that is a simulation emphasizing the idea that our external reality mirrors our inner selves. I believe that the more I connect with myself and my art, the more the external world will reflect my changes. I do believe that I am moving into a universe that is more reflective of what I create.

GM: If you could travel through time with one of your sculptures, where would you go?

PZ: I would go back in time when the pyramids were built. This era fascinates me... Perhaps it occurred in a different dimension with technology we cannot even imagine. I would love to interact with the people who built the pyramids and understand their motivations and rituals. 

GM: Okay, can I come with you?

PZ: Well maybe that's actually where we first met.

GM: Imagine your art existing in a utopian future. What role do you think it would play in that society?

PZ: In the future, I feel that my art could connect people with higher realms of consciousness. Like temples of creativity, inviting people to immerse themselves in dreamlike experiences and seek answers, would inspire introspection and ignite the imagination of all who encounter it. It would play a pivotal role in elevating society's collective consciousness and fostering a deeper understanding of ourselves and the universe.

GM: Yeah I feel that it's already happening… I guess we will this week when people enter your Temple. Okay final question, if you could collaborate with any artist, living or dead, who would it be?

PZ: Hmm.. hard to choose one, but I think it would have to be Hilma af Klint. I'm super intrigued by her process of channeling. Learning from her would be fascinating, all the mystical and spiritual aspects of her approach to bringing art to this plane.


Photographer: Amory Choay @yromaamory

HMU: Adrian Gonzalez @adrianglez

Styling: Pilar Zeta @pilar_zeta 

Gaia Matisse @gaia.matisse

Exhibition viewings by appointment only and private opening on Friday Feb 9th in CDMX. 

Things That Are Not Meant to Work: An Interview of Folk Artist Justin Williams on The Occasion of His Solo Exhibition @ Roberts Projects LA

Oil and acrylic painting by Justin Williams. Jade, the artist's wife, reclines on a sofa behind a fortune teller.

Justin Williams
Major Arcana, death watching over Jade (2024)
Acrylic, oil, raw pigment and gold pigment on canvas
77.25 x 84.75 in (196.2 x 215.3 cm)

interview by Chimera Mohammadi

In Justin Williams’s newest exhibition, Synonym, at Roberts Projects, waves of stories collide and crash across timelines, pouring onto the canvas in lush and decadent palettes. Williams creates wormholes between his ancestral memories and the present day. His work carves spaces, ranging from cozy to claustrophobic, in which dead and living strangers coexist in moments of imagined connection. Williams’ world is seen through a kaleidoscope of childhood trinkets, native flora, and mythologized fauna, from goats to dogs to horses. The artist collects moments and mementos alike to collage in these quiet yet fantastical dreamscapes, mining through Westernized memories of suburban Australia and hitting rich veins of ancestral Egyptian aesthetics. Williams embraces the awkwardness of outsider life, and his work embodies the comforting realization that even outsiders create their own exiled community. To mark the occasion of Synonym, he discusses stories and people, which echo throughout his life and strangers whose moments of grief have shaped his work. 

CHIMERA MOHAMMADI: I wanted to start off by asking what a day in your practice looks like.

JUSTIN WILLIAMS: I've tried to level out a lot. I got married, met [my wife] Jade, and I'm kind of trying to be normal in a weird way. It's been really productive, forcing myself to sort of start at 9:00 and work ’til dinnertime or whatever. And that might not be working – I might just sit on the couch and look at a painting and be like, “That looks ridiculous.” It's basically just get up, start making marks, and then from there, I'll kind of lose time.

MOHAMMADI: Your upcoming show at Roberts Projects, which looks gorgeous, is entitled Synonym. Is there a meaning behind that title for you?

WILLIAMS: Titles and names for paintings and things like this, it's a real collage, and an abstract process because I'm super dyslexic. So, I like words in the sense of how they sound, and it could be related to the show. It [Synonym] feels really circular. One painting might be about a weird transitional experience, or a story, or a secondhand story, or cults where I'm from, or these things. I tried to distill it into one thing, thinking that that's like what you're meant to do as an artist, but then I'd rather the painting inform what the show is. So, if one painting’s about this guy I knew growing up called Baba Desi, the Belgrave Wizard — and I love the fact that he was just this weird dude that worked at a post office, really suburban, normal, nice guy, who had a full meltdown and decided he wanted to carve sticks and be a wizard. And I'm like, What the fuck? Where did that point happen? This in-between moment. One painting would lend itself to that, and then the next painting might be a portrait of Jade and all my fears and feelings I didn’t even know I had about normality, coping with that through a painting. They're two very separate topics, and I was always like, Fuck, is it too schizophrenic or not cohesive to show altogether? But it all comes back to self-portraits. Like, Why am I interested in these things? So, it's one topic, but it's split off on a journey. 

 
Oil painting by Justin Williams. Baba Desi, a wizard, stares at a goblet, wearing a coat covered in faces.

Justin Williams
The Belgrave wizard-Baba Desi (2024)
Acrylic, oil and raw pigment on canvas
48 x 36 in (121.9 x 91.4 cm)

 

MOHAMMADI: Do you consider yourself a figure within this sort of mythology of the ordinary that you're creating in your work? Or are you an outside spectator looking in? What's your relationship to it? 

WILLIAMS: I feel like the ones that are more successful, it's like I'm a spectator. Sometimes I know the story, but I always want it to feel like this moment when something weird's happening at a park or a friend's house. It's like, you know what's going on, and you kind of walk past, but you can be drawn in, or you can not go into it, but you know you want to find out about it later. I like those ones where it's this banal jumping off point. And sometimes, when it's to do with stories, as opposed to things that I've experienced, they're really interesting. It's a lot of things through my grandma and her side through Alexandria, [Egypt] and the stories that just seem so normal, the way she says this shit. I made this painting of her, because she got bitten by a scorpion. There's two different types of scorpions. One will kill you and one won't. And she's like, “Oh, we made the nanny suck the poison out of the bite to make sure because it could have killed me or not killed me until the Bedouin doctors arrived.” And I'm like, “Fuck. You just put this poor lady's life in danger, and you got bit by a scorpion, which is crazy for me anyway.” But the way my mind is interpreting that is through a painting, and I've made that painting a couple of different times because I want to think of what my [grandma] Norma was thinking. Also, the experience of this probably 20-year-old lady that's not getting paid that well, sucking poison out of this young girl. Everyone was okay, and it's all fine, but it's this weird magical world.

MOHAMMADI: You've said that your grandparents’ migration from Egypt wasn't really discussed in your family, and it's a very prominent theme in your work. I was curious if the tension between your connection to that culture and your familial distance from that heritage has informed your work?

WILLIAMS: I've wanted to go and do residencies there [in Egypt], but you know when you listen to a song, say you're going through a gnarly breakup and there's a particular song that carries you through it, and you know that in ten years when you listen to it, you're going to think of Simon or some shit? It's precious. You won't put it on all the time. I want to be ready when I go to Egypt and spend time because I'm not a holiday painter either. You’ve got to understand, too, Australia in general, and especially where I was from, is an ancient civilization mixed with a really young culture. If you don't become a builder or a plumber, love surfing and football … it's just happy and dumb in a fucked up way. And I hated football, all that shit, so much that I really thought there was something wrong with me. And then, you mix in my mum's side, going to primary school with a fucking bowl of tabouli and some falafels, I'm like, Fuck that. Give me white bread and a sandwich so no one thinks I'm weird. My dad's side's full of Irish convicts. That’s where the name Williams comes from. And so, I was able to fit in really well with a group of normal Australian people, but secretly, I'm like, Fuck, I love art, and I want to know about Matisse. So, I think being an observer, an outsider, in these kinds of situations, is overall what I feel the work's about.  

MOHAMMADI: What does it mean to be an outsider? 

WILLIAMS: I think everyone is in a certain aspect of the word, but it's like, who fights? You feel more comfortable if you fit into a culture. It makes things seem right. So, if you're in between, or you're listening to what you know is actually legit to yourself, it's a weird friction. For a long time, I felt like I was pretending. Now I'm awkward and the paintings feel awkward and I'm okay with that. If you're at a dinner party or whatever, the people that are cool and boring, they won't really gravitate to the weird, overweight accountant-looking dude or whatever. But that's the guy you want to talk to. He's the best. I'm really fascinated by authenticity, even if it's wrong and misguided. You know, when you've got some cool people coming over, so you're not going to put on the music that you're actually listening to? I want to put on the music that I actually listen to and be pathetic. That's the feeling that I want. And that's okay.

MOHAMMADI: How does this outsider status or culture inform the creation of the fictional communities and moments of togetherness that take center stage in your work? 

WILLIAMS: It goes back to trusting in the work. It's like collage in a way. So, it might be two stories. A good example is one of the paintings, This trap I lay for you, about this guy, Neil. I used to cut up firewood for these bed and breakfast type things in this town called Sassafrass, which is a bit bougie in the hills for glamping kind of couples. Neil was the coolest looking dude. He had this big, massive beard, and this huge goat, which was kind of weird in this area. One day, I was dropping his firewood off, and he's out front, holding an Angora goat. It's this red color and it was dead. Its neck was sagging, and he's bawling out, crying. I was like, "Oh, you okay?" He was like, "Fucking dead. It's dead." The goat had eaten an old gasoline can. He’d had this goat for a really long time. I was like, “Oh, that's really sad. I'm sorry about your goat.” And he's like, “No, you don't understand. It was my late wife's goat. The goat's dead. My brother's dead.” So, I went over there thinking, I'll listen to the bullshit and whatever. But it fucking broke me because he was totally in love with this lady. The way he described it was this beautiful romance. They had an antique shop, which was why his house and backyard was just filled with shit. She died of cancer. The goat was hers because she wanted to make jumpers out of it. It was just this real sense of loss. That was the last straw, this dumb goat that he didn't even like. He hated the fucking goat. But it was a really sad, beautiful moment. I felt like I'd gone into a painting in a way, and he'd given me a gift in that sorrow too. I made that painting a lot of times. So I'll think, I'm going to make that painting from the perspective of Neil. And then aesthetically, it just comes down to something that looks better than something else. I'll have to get rid of Neil, and then another figure that’s in there might look like my dad. And then, the story is suddenly about two random stories coming together that don't mix. They don't make sense. But for me, I know exactly what's going on.

Oil painting by Justin Williams of a man digging in front of a cabin.

Justin Williams
This trap I lay for you (2024)
Acrylic, oil and raw pigment on canvas
76.5 x 86.75 in (194.3 x 220.3 cm)

MOHAMMADI:  I was interested in the prominence of nature in your work because you're a portrait artist and people are the focus of your work. But even your indoor pieces have these little lush pockets of flora and often a dog or a horse, and I was curious about what these natural motifs represent for you. 

WILLIAMS: Most of the work is from where I grew up. When people think of Australia, they'll think of beaches or desert, but where I'm from was prehistoric looking, in a way, and almost more indicative of a European forest. You've got these really old ferns. And my dad's a landscape gardener too, and he's like Google. You can be like, "What the fuck's this plant?" He'd be like, "It's a Pacificus Metallicus. It originates from South Africa and the Roman gypsies brought it in through the desert.” And all this kind of shit that you don't need to know. So, the plant-based stuff is pretty much where I'm from. And being in Santa Fe, the landscape is very different here. Sometimes I'll bring in some of that kind of stuff. Again, it's that collage type of thing. My cameras are filled with really boring things like a fence and a little path. I'll use these little things for reference, but I don't want too much information either. I like to give myself a little bit of an idea of how to do stuff and then not print them off really big and know how to fucking make it work. The shadows are all wrong. They're things that are not meant to work. It helps convey awkwardness within the work. But yeah, a lot of the plants just come from where I'm from. And growing up, too, [my grandparents], they're the first people I'd ever known that had indoor plants. I thought it was crazy. Plants inside the house! It blew my mind. I mean, now it's really normal, but that ’90s thing for Dad was potpourri and dried shit. So, these lush green things were like an art class and over the top. I fucking love it. Mum would be like, “Ah, it's disgusting. Trying to fit in.” 

MOHAMMADI: What role does your ancestry play in your life? Are ancestors guides, reservoirs of material, inspirations, missing persons?

WILLIAMS: As I got older I was like, Fuck, that's pathetic. I should have been embracing this shit and finding out more. It's been a real race for me. Now [my grandma] Norma's ninety-eight. She hasn't really got long to go, and she doesn't really make that much sense anymore. So, I'm just really trying to get as much information from her, and Mum as well, but Mum's like, “No, we're Australian.” That's it. Within my family too, Mum's like, “I don't know where this art shit came from.” It's apologetic almost. But I've accepted that's what I'm doing, and they've accepted, “Okay, if we don't hear from Justin for three months, that's fine.” But I think opening that door—because I was already painting and drawing and doing a lot of things before I really wanted to know where it came from—it helps me accept that artistic side of why I'm interested in these ideas. And because art wasn't really a thing. They just would have a really beautiful ceramic dish that they used for something. It has to be over the top and lavish and beautiful. And so, I liked these little objects, like a lamp with a camel attached to it or some shit. It's tacky and pitch almost, but every object had a weird, over-the-top kind of thing. It stood out a lot more because you're in this beige, suburban, claustrophobic environment. So you can tell, Oh, fuck, that's not from here. You can't get that down at 7-Eleven. That's from somewhere else. So I think it helped me to be like, Okay, it's in my blood, and I really want to make things. 

MOHAMMADI: I wanted to dig into the phrase ‘displaced timeline’ in your bio. In the press release, Synonym was “aiming to transcend sequential timelines.” Could you elaborate on the relationship to time in your work?

WILLIAMS: I think that touches on that collage aspect that I was talking about before. A good example would be, I made this painting last year. I was walking the dog to the dog park, and I had this moment. There's this red fence and there's snow everywhere. And I feel like a newborn giraffe walking in the snow. I'm also like, “Whoa, snow.” All the time. Jade's like, “Who cares? It's annoying.” But I had this moment of me walking through the snow, thinking about Oswaldo, my grandpa. He died never seeing snow. Oswaldo Died Never Seeing Snow was the title of the painting. I painted this big red fence with the snow, and then I painted my grandpa on the horse in the snow because it's like these two timelines. This guy's dead, long gone, and he would have never experienced snow because he came from Alexandria to Australia. He would have never had this human experience that I'm having right now. And the horse, because he was similar to the guy with the goat. That's why I think I really sort of meshed with that story, because he had a horse in a tiny backyard in Melbourne. He was like, "Well, fuck. I can have a horse. We could have him in Alexandria. I want to have a horse.” He'd walk his horse around. The council came in and made him get rid of it. I just like the idea of him in my timeline, the present time, walking past this thing.

Synonym is on view through March 9th at Roberts Projects LA, 442 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles.

Banks Violette Interviewed by Neville Wakefield On The Occasion Of His Commission by Hedi Slimane for CELINE

CELINE Art Project: Banks Violette

Text and interview by Neville Wakefield

Every era has its defining figures, and in the condensed New York artworld of the early aughts, Banks Violette was  foremost amongst them. Of the many currents running through that scene, Violette’s was the darkest and most  stringent. Broken drum-sets, skeletal architectures and vacated stages splintered by shards of white, fluorescent light and set to the subsonic undertow of death metal’s societal angst captured the zeitgeist of an era’s precarious  balance of nihilism and celebration. Drawing from music, art, theater and fashion, Violette’s art took the form of  a barograph, trace recording the pressure that was the slow implosion of everything around it - pressure the artist eventually succumbed to, withdrawing from the world he’d helped define. 

Drawn to the incandescent energy of that moment, Hedi Slimane was both documentarian and participant in this  seminal New York moment. His stark black and white images of the artists perfectly captured the taught masculinity and absolute abandon of his artist peers. In july of 2007, he curated a group show titled “Sweet Bird of Youth”, at Arndt & Partner in Berlin, featuring the works  of artists Dash Snow, Slater Bradley, Mathew Cerletty, Dan Colen, Gardar eide Einarsson, Terence Koh, Douglas Kolk,  Nate Lowman, Ryan Mcginley, Matt Saunders, Steven Shearer, Paul P., and Banks Violette. Later that year, “Young  American” at the Foam Fotografiemuseum in Amsterdam, paid photographic tribute to the same generation of artists.  

After the best part of a decade sequestered in upstate New York, Violette has begun a cautious re-engagement with  the world he left behind. With the indelible legacy of that early period more relevant than ever, Violette’s work  is reappearing in galleries, museums and now in the context of Slimane’s re-imagining of the CELINE flagship stores. The synergy between artist and designer has been longstanding. “The thing that I've always admired about Hedi is that even when the approach is deconstructed, there isn’t any critical remove or detachment. there’s  a genuine sincerity to his investment in the things he admires. as a result, he can transform something that is  permanently framed as ironic into its opposite.”  

The chandelier structures created for the stores are classic Violette. The repeated modular forms take the minimalist frameworks of Dan Flavin or Sol Le Witt and pushes them into a deconstructed state of theatrical  collapse. Viiolette likens them to a figure who has stumbled and fallen. they are an image of overdose, equal parts  narcotic collapse and narcan revival. “I relate to sculpture as this thing that extends itself into the space of a  body so it’s of necessity anthropomorphized – and so autobiographically I was like yeah I know all about that…” The  resulting sculptures perfectly capture the emotional tenor of the times: “It’s as if Aristotle was raised in a warzone  which he probably was, and the poetics of post-traumatic stress disorder meet the aesthetics of boredom.” Add to that fashion and retail, and the meeting is unlike any other. 

NEVILLE WAKEFIELD: I was going to start with the early 2000s, and I realized I can't really remember much, but it would be cool to recall that moment a little bit, even if it's fragmentary, and to talk about how you recollect that scene being shaped. It was certainly an interesting time in which there were multiple conversations between purity and impurity and all these things that art had in some way tried to keep out, whether it's music or fashion. It seemed to be that the floodgate had been opened. And I certainly remember that because I participated in it with the book [Fashion: Photography of the Nineties, 1998], and was thinking about how genres were bending, which all seems now very obvious and straightforward (laughs). 

BANKS VIOLETTE: That's a great way to synopsize it. I really remember very early trying to make a case for why I thought that the music that I was interested in, the performers and the musicians, and the cultural outfit that they were generating was worthwhile. And that it was like, “Oh, I'm not trying to appropriate something. I'm just trying to point a direction towards something that I think is really, really interesting.” And having just an immense amount of resistance towards that as an idea, which, as a sort of cumulative consequence of a number of other people working in a similar kind of fashion, it stopped being an issue relatively quickly. But there was like the beginning of an argument and then the end of an argument.

NW: I remember Dave Hickey talking to me about his interest in the operatic as being an impure art form. And I was wondering whether, in this conversation between purity and impurity and genre, you saw the music that you were listening to at the time, which was probably largely death metal and black metal, as a pure form that you were introducing? Obviously, it is socially impure, and contaminated in all sorts of ways. But as a musical idiom.

BV: I thought they were better creators than I was. (Laughs) Honestly, if you're making something, and it's framed as art, inherently a substantial portion of it is a fiction. You're engaging through the mechanism of it existing as a fiction. You're suspending disbelief, you're engaging in saying this thing has the potential for meaning. And looking at the people who are active as black metal musicians or something like that, they were just better at it than I was. And it was also conditioned generationally. I was a kid in the eighties and liked PMRC and this kind of, “Oh my God, your record collection, if you listen to it backward, it all, you know, invokes it or it'll cause you to commit suicide either way.” The idea that the most gutter-level incarnation of a culture had the potential within it to do this horrendous thing.

NW: It's an architecture borne of fiction. 

BV: It's a vector for faith.

NW: And were you interested in the dramatics of it? And I'm thinking of Lords of Chaos, church burnings, stage antics and that kind of stuff. Was that theatricalization of sound something that you felt fed into the work that you were doing?

BV: The horrible instances or eruptions of criminality were sort of like confirmations of the efficacy of a particular method of communicating. I didn't know a better way of confirming that, holy, shit, this thing is really, really effective, other than like, wow, it resulted in this horrendous real-world thing. And I still kind of struggle for what would be an equivalent affirmation that this thing is effective other than something horrible happening. There's the affirmative quality of the disastrous (laughs). There is something specific to that in those instances, like black metal or church burning, arson, all those kinds of things– horrible as they are, they're affirmative instances of the disastrous, the disastrous being an affirmative gesture.

NW: It makes me also think about this other idea, which seems to have been lost since then, of amateurism and the idea that you could be a successful failure. I remember there was a great [Raymond] Pettibon piece, which had this quote: “Professionalism is a hate crime.”

BV: I think people were deeply attracted to that idea. Not that people weren't careerists, because they certainly were. People obviously wanted to make a living, but within their sort of limited understanding a living would be. But it wasn't like, “Oh yeah, I’m gonna have three cars and a house in the Hamptons because I'm an artist.” 

NW: How did Hedi Slimane come into all this?

BV: One of my favorite interviews from when I was much younger was an interview that I did with him for this Australian fashion magazine. One of the best conversations I ever had. So I'd always gotten along with him.

NW: It's come full circle because he was certainly documenting and to some extent participating in that moment. I'm curious as to how you see the bridge between then and now.

BV: I keep on coming back to this idea that it's an act of devotion. Going back to the affirmative through the disastrous, how do you literalize the devotion? Well, someone's gotta die for you to be truly devoted to something. 

NW: There's no devotion without death.

BV: The commemorative, the allegiance, all these kinds of registers only exist if they coalesce around a tragic instance. That is the thing that coheres the whole around itself. 

NW: There's also an interesting sort of connection there between entropy, collapse, decay, and artists such as [Robert] Smithson, for instance, and Romanticism and Caspar David Friedrich and The Sea of Ice or the Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. I know that there was a work that you made for the show at Barbara Gladstone that directly referenced The Sea of Ice. Do you think about the absent figure as being romantic? We had a conversation about the figure being present in all work in some way.

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818, Oil on canvas, 94.8 cm × 74.8 cm (37.3 in × 29.4 in), Kunsthalle Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

BV: I think so. Romanticism is such a loaded kind of idea. As soon as you start talking about an inherent romantic relationship with a landscape, you start getting into blood and soil. There's an inherent ugliness to those things, no matter how much they're coated as “oh, it's romantic, it's beautiful.” Or with Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, that pictorial convention of positioning the viewer behind somebody who's viewing something. It's like you're creating, in the clumsiest manner possible, the equivalent of a dissociative fugue. So those things are already historically connected to trauma. Pictorially, as a formal device, they're related to trauma. There is a bad thing at the center of all these things.

NW: The traumatic origins or the role of trauma in that dissociation is really interesting. Coming back to the body, thinking about the chandeliers and this idea of a collapsed or absent body, the body – whether it's an empty stage that is inviting or proposing a body or a chandelier – seems to always be there in the sculpture.

BV: It's not that it's a purely anthropomorphized kind of thing. It's not like, “Oh, look at this thing and see a body and see it sort of stagger through space.” The two things I kept on staring at or thinking about a lot were [Martin] Kippenberger’s Street Lamp for Drunks and then [Alberto] Giacometti’s Woman With Her Throat Cut. One thing that's sort of this violent crime scene that's coextensive with real space. It's not on a plinth, it's in your space, and it's a horrible violation, even though it's goofy and biomorphic. And the other one is this thing that presupposes a body and presupposes a condition of the body. It's a streetlamp, but it's not anthropomorphic. It doesn't exist without an understanding of being a drunk in a space. What that feels like and how gravity affects you and all these kinds of things. Long story short, the chandeliers ended up being the Narcaned equivalent of the Kippenberger things. It was sort of like, how would you do that if you were nodding out on heroin? 

Martin Kippenberger’s Street Lamp for Drunks in situ. Bundeskunsthalle

NW: Can you talk a bit about the material language? Because it has both stayed the same and evolved a bit, I think. Obviously, white fluorescent light has been throughout it. Graphite's been throughout it and metal in various forms. Has it changed, and how does it feel going back to that language after a period where you weren't engaged in it?

BV: The CELINE pieces specifically, I would've preferred to have them as fluorescent lights. But they're being phased out, and they're illegal in a lot of areas because they incorporate mercury. So these are sort of like stand-ins for fluorescent tubes. They have the same quality of light, and they have the same sprawled-out wiring and things like that, but they're not quite the same. There's something so specific about the institutional quality of fluorescent tubes. What other lighting element has this kind of idea of institutional alienation and phenomenological ugliness of this big glass cylinder and the implied threat of high voltage running through this thing with this low hum?

NW: I'm interested in exploring this idea of threat or menace as well. I remember having very visceral responses to your work as being deeply threatening in some sense, whether it was in the literal sense of actual fire and, and it possibly blowing my face up and shit like that… 

BV: …Poor craftsmanship. (Laughs)

NW: Or, more metaphorical, perhaps, in these Narcaned sculptures. There is still the potential for danger or menace in there somehow.

BV: [Richard] Serra is sort of like the famous instance of that, where you're like, “Oh my God, I'm next to this thing that is so precarious: The weight, mass, and the physicality, it’s an unavoidable aspect of the piece, right? But there are some sculptures that just have that, like the Calder stabiles. It's a really specific quality that some sculptures that I'm attracted to and have always been attracted to just have. And it's something I respond to. 

NW: Is that manifest in different ways in the chandeliers, do you think? 

BV: I think so. These are in capital R retail spaces. These are in clothing stores. It's like being indifferent to a choking victim at a fancy dinner (laughs). There's this collapsed, violated form in this space that's coextensive with somebody with credit much better than mine shopping, and dressing up their body and performing this, and here's this violated version of that dress up in the same space. 

NW: I was looking at the images and thinking about it in terms of homelessness.

BV: Yeah. The one for Madison Avenue was initially a collapsed form, and it's Madison Avenue in New York City with these giant plate glass windows, and it's got Balenciaga right across the street from it. There’s 3/8s of an inch of glass separating the sidewalk from this thing that initially would've been collapsed and sort of sprawled out. And the first time I got to see that sort of sight, I walked up at like 11 o'clock at night when everything was closed and just saw the lights flooding out. It's pretty much like watching somebody huddle up in the Balenciaga’s doorway at 11 o'clock on a cold night in Manhattan. There is something supremely disorienting about that. 

CELINE Art Project: Banks Violette

NW: I’m curious as to how the move from Brooklyn back to Ithaca, your hometown, and how that change of landscape has affected you.

BV: I'm sympathetic with what Hedi does. He clearly responds to things that people make, like manufactured culture. I get way more from a teenager on a subway who's decorated their backpack than from staring at a bunch of trees, and I'm around a lot of trees now. There isn't the hoarding in front of the building, and it's covered with three layers of wheat-pasted posters, and here's a teenager who's decorated their shoes, or that somebody is blocking out a parking space in front of a construction site, so they took a traffic cone, a two-by-four, a Miller Light can, and made this awesome sculpture. Just all the ephemera that people generate. Instead, these days, I stare at trees. I don't get a lot from them.

NW: And what about drugs? How they've changed or shaped your vision.

BV: Water is great. I really, really like water. I really love coffee. 

NW: Probably not much water past your lips for about a decade, I'd think.

BV: Yeah. Water was this thing that you used to cook up heroin in a spoon (laughs). That was really the sum total of it. Now, fentanyl is such a common thing. People are aware of Narcan kits. It’s weird. It's tragic that it's gotten to the point where people are this conversant with what these things look like. And now that I'm sober and watching that happen and being like, oh shit. I saw a bumper sticker a little while ago that was amazing, legitimately, but it was also really deeply dark: “My Child Narcanned Your Honors Student.” Which was amazing, but also, holy shit. Like 10 years ago, every single part of that would've made zero sense. It would've kind of made sense to me, and now it's like, wow, I've shifted places with the world and heroin jokes are on the back of people's pickup trucks.  

NW: Is drawing still part of your practice? I always loved the drawings and the objecthood that they had, the layering of the graphite and the presence of the hand, and the feeling that they were this accretion of not just material, but sentiment built up into the surface of the paper. Is that something you're still practicing?

BV: Yeah, there's a group show at this young gallery in Chinatown called Francis Irv that's opening on January 21st. I'm actually finishing a drawing for that. It's similar to those earlier ones, black and white, like an X-ray of horses. It's this weird sort of thing with a sort of negative space. It doesn't have heavy scabs of graphite on it. But it does this weird sort of, for lack of a better description, op art with the kind of push-pull kind of thing. It does something kind of bizarre, I think. But yeah, it's something I still do. I kind of resent it because people are like, “Oh yeah, make a drawing,” and you're like, “Yeah, that’s 12 hours a day for a month, it's not the easy thing that it looks like.” It's much harder to do when I'm 50. But it’s something I'm still interested in, as long as it's connected to an exciting opportunity. There's a reason for it other than like, oh, let's just generate more artwork. 

NW: I think what drew me to them, apart from the subject matter, was the sort of manifest struggle between light and darkness, between shading and possibility and all this kind of stuff. Light is obviously a big element in your work, but darkness is as well. Do you see them as opposing forces?

BV: I don't see them as opposing, I see them as contiguous parts of the same argument, or same sentence, or same sentiment or however you wanna describe it. Just the way the sculpture transacts itself in terms of literal concerns like weight, physicality, and mass. Those are sculptural concerns. The drawings were always supposed to have that as well. They were supposed to be coextensive, they were supposed to be sculptures. They're supposed to have mass to them, gravity, weight, and all those things that are like capital F Formal sculptural concerns. But as a way to narrativize something, maybe the sculpture is more abstracted, or maybe the drawing is more abstracted. I always imagine all these things like just curating a show, but you just happen to be manufacturing all the things that you're curating together in a room. 

NW: I always thought about them in terms of erosion and transference. I really like that the graphite was literally being eroded, but then there was this kind of psychological act of transference going on through that erosion.

BV: I like that as a description a lot. There's also that interesting kind of tension that existed between the refined draftsmanship that went into realizing the image itself. Looked at from one angle, this matte graphite surface blended in with this finely rendered thing, and then looked at from another with raking light, and it's this big scab of violent activity on top of this thing. It was just this skin. It was really process-oriented and looked like you knew how this thing was made, and it was about physicality and all these things that had nothing to do with this refined rendered thing. The fact that they could sort of exist in that same space and coexist in that same space without one over the other. Again, that's another concern that I think equally applies to the sculptures.

NW: I always felt the tension between delicacy and brutalism or violence was a very strong thread. 

BV: Ideally, the drawings were kind of like the microcosmic version of what I was trying to accomplish with an installation or a sculpture. Like, if you want to know what's going on with the whole room, just look at the little square piece of paper or the little rectangle. 

NW: What does the day look like these days? 

BV: I wake up at like 3:00 AM and work in the morning just 'cause it's super quiet. So I wake up, do work, usually sort of working on drawings or, you know, recently I've been making foam core models for all the CELINE projects. And then, you know, I have the rest of the day to do whatever I need to do at home, help my wife out and walk dogs. I fly fish a lot. I can get away from people and go stand in very cold water and avoid other human beings. And it's really great. It's not very exciting and I love it.

Banks Violette for CELINE Art Project will on view in CELINE stores through January.