Atlanta As A Nexus Point: An Interview Of Kevin "Coach K" Lee and Ami Sueki

Atlanta has long been a cultural capital, and few figures have been more central to that rise than Kevin “Coach K” Lee. As co-founder of Quality Control Music, he helped launch the careers of Migos, Lil Yachty, City Girls, and Lil Baby, building one of the most influential music rosters of the past decade. Designer Ami Sueki, through her studio Zoo as Zoo, has worked at the intersection of fashion, art, and design with collaborators ranging from Nike to Coca-Cola.

Together, the two have future plans for EXIT, a new 5,000-square-foot space at Atlanta’s Goat Farm arts campus. Set to be designed by Berlin-based architect Daryan Knoblauch, EXIT will be a flexible, multi-use hub—part gallery, studio, concept shop, and event space—intended to address Atlanta’s lack of artist-first “third spaces.” Programming in its first year will include capsule fashion collections, installations, a twelve-track album released monthly with accompanying films, and an inaugural Nike collaboration sneaker.

Earlier this year, EXIT hosted a residency with London-based Nigerian artist Slawn and Lil Yachty, who produced a full body of work in just two days. That collaboration now extends to New York with an exhibition pop up at The Hole, underscoring the project’s mission: to give Atlanta’s creative community the resources to stay rooted locally while connecting to global networks.

OLIVER KUPPER: Atlanta is this really interesting nexus point in the Venn diagram between New York and Los Angeles. Maybe we could start with Atlanta—what it is, where it is, what the cultural scene is.

KEVIN “COACH K” LEE: I’m from Indianapolis, Indiana, and growing up, sports were my refuge. I was raised in a single-parent household in what you could call the ghetto, and basketball became my escape. I played all through school, and when it came time for college, it was my first love. I went to an HBCU in Raleigh, North Carolina, but the first offer I ever got was from Clark Atlanta University.

I remember visiting Atlanta right after high school, and I was honestly a little nervous. The Atlanta child murders in the early 1980s were still a lingering memory for me—35 kids disappeared over a three-year period—and that always frightened me as a kid. So, I ended up going to school in North Carolina, but I had friends at Morehouse and Clark Atlanta, and I would drive down from Raleigh to visit. It was about a five-hour drive, but whenever I went, I could see the city thriving in a way I’d never experienced before.

This was around the time LA Reid moved to Atlanta and started shaping the music scene with his label, LaFace Records. Freaknik was happening, the culture was vibrant, and it felt like a pot of gumbo—you had locals, “Atlantonians,” who were born and raised there, and then you had students coming from all over the country to the city’s four major HBCUs, bringing with them their subcultures. Every time I came back and forth, I remember thinking, I’ve never seen Black people in this kind of position before.

I remember visiting a friend in West Atlanta—he grew up in Cascade—and the neighborhood was just mansions. And it was almost entirely Black families. I’d never seen anything like it. That’s when I realized Atlanta was special, not just because of its music or culture, but because it had sustained African American leadership for decades, and the city’s infrastructure allowed Black culture to flourish. After the ’96 Olympics, Atlanta became a global city in a real way. Traveling for work now, people ask if I’ll move to LA or New York, but there’s nothing like coming home here. The southern hospitality, the warmth—it’s incomparable. And beyond music, the art scene has really started to bloom over the past twenty years. 

OLIVER KUPPER: But in the past decade, especially with social media and TikTok, Atlanta’s influence has gone global—it’s supercharged.

AMI SUEKI: Absolutely. Even when I traveled a few years ago—I was in Amsterdam at a hotel bar—people asked where I was from. I said Atlanta, and immediately they said, “Oh, that’s where Migos are from!” A few years prior, people didn’t even know where Atlanta was. Trap music from Atlanta now has a global audience, and it really connected with the younger generation.

OLIVER KUPPER: Ami, what brought you to Atlanta originally?

AMI SUEKI: I’m Japanese American. I was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, and grew up in a military town in North Carolina near an Air Force base. 9/11 happened during my formative years, and my everyday life was shaped by conversations about war—my friends and family were serving overseas. I grew up around a very American, very Southern environment. People hunted, drank beer, shopped at Walmart when they still had guns. 

I studied neuroscience and industrial design in Raleigh and Durham, and my first job out of college was at Coca-Cola as an industrial designer. I stayed in Atlanta after three years because I realized how deeply my upbringing connected to Southern culture. People often assume I’m from Tokyo because of how I dress or my interests in art, music, and fashion, but I feel a deep resonance with Atlanta—the language, the slang, the food, the community.

OLIVER KUPPER: And what was your role at Coca-Cola?

AMI SUEKI: I was an industrial designer—working on packaging, vending machines, merchandising, and retail. 

OLIVER KUPPER: And what was it about neuroscience that drew you in?

AMI SUEKI: I was a total math and science nerd growing up. I loved biology and the complexity of the brain—how it shapes movement, perception, and experience. I even worked in a Duke lab studying Alzheimer’s. But lab life wasn’t for me; it was too rigid. Then I discovered design through Surface Magazine at an airport, and that completely shifted my trajectory. I ended up at NC State for industrial design, and from there, I stayed in Atlanta.

OLIVER KUPPER: Kevin, tell me about the start of Quality Control Music.

COACH K: I’d been in the music business for fifteen years before starting QC. At the time, I managed Gucci Mane, and Pierre Thomas, my business partner now, used to travel with us and observe. In 2013, I was ready to start my own label because I realized I had been building brands for other artists but not for myself. Pierre had a studio and wanted out of the business. I convinced him to partner, saying I’d bring talent. A week later, we signed Migos, and that was the beginning.

OLIVER KUPPER: What was the pitch?

COACH K: Honestly, Gucci was about to go to prison, so he passed on signing them. Pierre and I said, “We’ll do it,” and that was it. We didn’t look back.

OLIVER KUPPER: And your focus has always been authenticity, right?

COACH K: Yes. Authenticity and originality. I’m a storyteller at heart, and I need to feel the artist’s story. Voices move me, but authenticity drives me. That’s why when I saw Lil Yachty, I knew he had a lane no one else had—his confidence, his voice, his identity—all authentic. That’s how we brought him to brands like Target, Reebok, and Nike.

OLIVER KUPPER: Ami, how did you and Kevin meet?

AMI SUEKI: At a dinner. I wasn’t in the scene, but my team was doing creative work around the city.

COACH K: We knew of each other but hadn’t met. A mutual friend set up a dinner, and we clicked immediately. The connections were crazy—shared birthdays, hometowns, kids, even shoes. Eventually, we decided to start a company together.

OLIVER KUPPER: Can you talk about Zoo as Zoo?

AMI SUEKI: The name comes from the old idea of a zoo—a place where lions, polar bears, goats, all coexist. We take that approach to creativity: diverse people, diverse disciplines. We focus on people first and let the outcomes emerge naturally. Our team has stayed together for ten years, which is rare, and we invest in curiosity-driven projects, like our Glow-in-the-Dark Ramen pop-up.

OLIVER KUPPER: How does Exit fit into all of this?

AMI SUEKI: Exit is a space for creatives to connect, experiment, and explore. Atlanta loses talent because people leave for global opportunities. Exit allows them to stay, collaborate, and thrive here without leaving.

COACH K: Exactly. From a music perspective, I was tired of artists having to go to LA or New York to be seen. Exit gives creatives a home in Atlanta.

OLIVER KUPPER: The pop-up this Friday—how did it come together?

COACH K: Lil Yachty’s friend SLAWN is a rising artist. We wanted to bring him here for a residency. Slawn created a huge body of work in 48 hours. I called Ami, and we realized it was perfect for Exit. The first Exit event was on her birthday, the second on mine—this one is another milestone.

OLIVER KUPPER: It sounds like you’re merging worlds—music, art, design—outside traditional gallery systems.

SUEKI: Yes. We’re fluid, holistic, and adaptive. Creative industries are in flux, and we embrace that.

COACH K: Physical presence matters. Experiencing art, culture, and people firsthand gives us the insight to tell authentic stories. Social media is fine, but it’s limited.

OLIVER KUPPER: It seems like Atlanta is a laboratory for culture, with both of you as the researchers.

SUEKI: Exactly. Physical interaction is crucial for real cultural development.

COACH K: Whether it’s music, fashion, or art, I need to be there to feel it—to understand the context, the energy, the story.

OLIVER KUPPER: The way you’re approaching this—it feels like you’re building infrastructure for creativity in a city that deserves it.

SUEKI: That’s the goal. To create platforms for collaboration, experimentation, and growth. Atlanta has incredible talent—it just needs the space and support.

COACH K: And it’s happening now. We’re seeing artists, designers, and creators staying here and building globally from Atlanta. That’s what makes this city special.

 Friday, September 12 & Saturday, September 13, 2025. 12PM - 8PM. The Hole Gallery,  312 Bowery, New York

Diane Arbus and the Webs We Weave

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Diane Arbus, Constellation, 2023–2024, The Tower, Main Gallery, LUMA Arles, France. All artworks © The Estate of Diane Arbus Collection Maja Hoffmann/LUMA Foundation. Installation Photo © Adrian Deweerdt

text by Kim Shveka

Diane Arbus’s photography has long unsettled and fascinated viewers, defying easy interpretation. In Constellation, the newly opened exhibition at The Armory, curator Matthieu Humery brings a second life to her work; not to explain or categorize, but to invite quiet, intimate dialogue between the viewer and the photographs. Featuring 454 photographs from the artist’s archive, including many rarely seen, the exhibition defers any chronological or thematic structure, favoring a layout without linear direction, making every encounter entirely unique and unpredictable. The experience is haunting, dissociating the viewer from the fact that they’re in an art show, and instead allowing them to sink into provoked emotions, completely immersed in an entirely human experience, dissolving the distance between audience and the subjects.

In our conversation, Humery shares what it means to curate with restraint, how working with a posthumous body of work introduces both freedom and distance and what it felt like to place each image by hand in the space, listening for their rhythm.

KIM SHVEKA: Arbus’s work has often been misread or misused, sometimes seen as too voyeuristic. How did you approach this complexity in your curation?

MATTHIEU HUMERY: What I really wanted was to find a way to present her entire body of work without interpreting each image individually. I deliberately avoided passing any kind of judgment, neither my own nor anyone else’s. Instead, I wanted to create a system that would allow all 454 images to be seen together, in a way that encourages the viewer to explore freely and draw their own connections.

The structure of the exhibition forces a certain kind of encounter: one where the visitor must navigate the work for themselves, discover things on their own terms, and confront the images through personal experience. That process of self-directed exploration invites a different kind of understanding—intuitive, intimate, open-ended.

In this context, the photographs that are sometimes labeled as voyeuristic may appear in a different light. Rather than being intrusive, they might reveal something more fragile, even tender. Seen within the full constellation of her work, they begin to feel less like transgressions and more like windows into something deeply human. That’s the complexity I wanted to preserve, the sense of a gaze that doesn’t impose meaning, but instead looks back at us.

SHVEKA: You worked with hundreds of unpublished photographs. How did you balance discovery and restraint in your selection? Do you find it easier or more challenging to curate art by a deceased artist? 

HUMERY: I didn’t make any distinction between well-known and previously unseen images. My approach was to dismantle all the usual categories, to mix the series, the themes, the formats, and to avoid any chronological or hierarchical structure. I deliberately sought to blur the boundaries, to let the images coexist freely, regardless of their familiarity, their subject matter, or their scale.

As for working with a deceased artist, I’m not sure whether it’s easier or harder, but it is certainly different. There’s always something that escapes us. Death introduces distance: it forces us to reflect on a body of work that is complete, and yet whose interpretation remains permanently open. In a way, once an artwork has been created, and even more so when the artist is no longer here, it escapes its maker. The work survives, but it does so on its own terms.

SHVEKA: In building this exhibition from Neil Selkirk’s archive of posthumous prints, how did you navigate the tension between honoring Arbus’s artistic autonomy and interpreting her legacy through your own curatorial lens?

HUMERY: As I mentioned before, my intention was never to interpret the work, but rather to create the conditions in which each visitor could encounter the photographs and make sense of them on their own terms. I believe that’s the most respectful approach one can take with an artist’s work, especially with an artist as complex and singular as Diane Arbus.

By resisting a curatorial voice that explains or contextualizes too much, I hoped to preserve her autonomy, to let the photographs speak for themselves, and to allow the viewer the space to look, to feel, to connect, and ultimately to decide. In that sense, the exhibition is less about offering a definitive reading than about opening up a field of possibilities

SHVEKA: The use of mirrored walls behind the photographs creates a powerful effect. Can you speak about the decision to include the viewer in the visual field? What did you want to make visitors feel? 

HUMERY: The viewer becomes part of the fragmented portrait of Diane Arbus reflected in the mirror. They are not only witnesses to the work, they are also participants in it. Within their field of vision, they see the entirety of her oeuvre without ever fully grasping its boundaries. They themselves become one of the elements of the constellation, just like each of the photographs reflected around them.

In that moment, the line between the image and the viewer disappears. The visitor is no longer separate from the work; they are inside it. And I find that idea poetically very powerful.

SHVEKA: The exhibition deliberately avoids a set path or narrative, creating infinite routes with free guidance. (I encountered several women clutching the show’s notes like a treasure map as they were on a scavenger hunt looking for the artist’s self-portrait or her image of Jayne Mansfield.) What was the intention behind it? Were you afraid to intimidate visitors with this “organized chaos” approach to the design?

HUMERY: I deliberately wanted there to be no fixed path through the exhibition. Each visitor should have their own experience that is unique and unrepeatable. It’s a bit like walking through the city: you never know who you’ll come across, and you’ll never encounter the same people in the same way twice. That sense of unpredictability felt essential.

I also wanted to evoke the wandering, the drifting that Diane Arbus herself experienced as she walked the streets of New York, camera in hand. Maybe at first the layout feels disorienting compared to a traditional exhibition, but I think you quickly adapt. You stop trying to “follow” something, and instead, you begin to look. You begin to discover. And that, to me, feels much closer to the spirit of Arbus’s work.

SHVEKA: What responsibilities do you think a curator holds when deliberately designing disorientation, especially with a body of work that potentially unsettles?

HUMERY: I don’t believe it’s necessarily a curator’s job to offer comfort or clarity. Art isn’t meant to reassure, it’s meant to provoke, to raise questions, to unsettle. If a sense of disorientation leads the viewer to truly see, to slow down, to engage differently, then it’s not a risk, it’s a necessity.

Frankly, I find the idea of protecting the public from discomfort more disturbing than any so-called “destabilizing” artwork. We live in a world that is profoundly disorienting, politically, socially, and emotionally. If an exhibition reflects some of that complexity, it’s not a failure of design. It’s a mirror. So no, I wasn’t afraid of disorienting the viewer. I trusted them. And I believe that this kind of experience can be not only challenging but transformative.

SHVEKA: You’ve highlighted showing the “extra-photographic dimension,” that equilibrium beyond the images. How do you see risk, chance, and exploration coming out from the viewer’s movements around the room? 

HUMERY: The relationship between the intra-photographic (what is captured within the frame) and the extra-photographic (what lies outside of it—spatially, socially, temporally) is central to this exhibition. The space is conceived not as a neutral container but as an active field of interaction. The movement of the viewer becomes an extension of the photographic act itself, a continuation of Arbus’s own wanderings.

By eliminating any prescribed path, the exhibition encourages risk: the risk of getting lost, of not understanding, of encountering an image at the “wrong” moment. But it’s precisely through this destabilization that exploration becomes possible. The visitor must engage physically and cognitively, not only looking at the images, but navigating the relations between them, including their own place within that field. 

Wim Wenders visited the exhibition and told me he wished he could come back and photograph the visitors themselves, wandering, looking, hesitating. For him, it was like a mise en abyme: the images looking at the people, the people becoming images. And I think he’s right, that dynamic creates a subtle tension, a kind of living echo between the photographs and those who come to see them.

SHVEKA: Was there a moment while going through the images or installing the exhibition that brought up strong emotions or something unexpected?

HUMERY: Yes. I placed each of the 454 photographs myself, physically, alone, directly onto the walls and structures. I didn’t rely on any digital tools, no simulations or previews. Just the images, the space, and time. For three days, I hesitated, adjusted, stepped back, and moved forward again. And then, quite suddenly, everything aligned. As if the images began speaking to one another (or precisely not speaking to one another but speaking to me), without effort. It was as if the exhibition revealed itself. That moment was almost transcendent. Quiet, yet deeply moving. I felt a kind of communion with the work (with her work) that I hadn’t anticipated. To be so immersed in it, to feel it take shape around me, was a rare kind of privilege. A moment outside of time. And as the rhythm of the images settled into place, one after the other, I found myself thinking, quietly, gratefully, of Marvin Israel.

Diane Arbus: Constellation is on view through August 17 at the Park Avenue Armory.

Artist Karice Mitchell Deconstructs the Black 'Playboy' at Silke Lindner in New York

Karice Mitchell
Paradise (Triptych), 2025
Archival inkjet print, custom frame, sandblasted glass, vinyl

text by Karly Quadros

“I love using familiarity as a way to ask unfamiliar questions,” says Karice Mitchell.

Drawing from Players magazine, often dubbed “the Black Playboy,” Mitchell’s photo-based works explore the no man’s land between exposure and illegibility, frankness and mystery, modesty and obscenity. Through her closely cropped diptychs, triptychs, and modified images sourced from the pages of this landmark magazine of Black erotica, she explores the self-definition, personal expression, and resilience of Black women. Economy of Pleasure, her latest show at Silke Lindner and her first solo exhibition in the U.S., hones in on the early 2000s: the era of the video vixen, digital downloads, and lower back tattoos. Sand blasted over intimate images of a woman’s shoulder, a hoop earring, a pristine pump and a French pedicure are words pulled from the magazine’s pages and models’ nommes de guerre: angel, sensation, paradise.

After a frustrating moment of censorship when she was commissioned to do a public work of art in her native Vancouver, British Columbia in 2023, Mitchell returned more committed than ever to her project exploring the representations of Black women in adult media. While it may seem salacious, the work itself is deeply sensitive and interior. There is recognition between women who have worked to claim their bodies as their own through ink, jewelry, donning clothing, or shedding it. The work is seductive but withholding. Notably missing are the Players models’ faces — rather than exposing these women to judgment and interrogation once again, Mitchell’s work gives the audience only glimpses of a personality and a life lived. Her work is an interrogation, a negotiation, and a reclamation. The rest is on the viewer.

KARLY QUADROS: Can you talk a little bit about yourself, your practice, and how you got here?

KARICE MITCHELL:  I live in Vancouver. I'm an assistant professor full-time at the University of British Columbia. I teach photography there. That work does inform my practice in a lot of ways.

I'm really interested in one publication in particular: Players magazine, which started in the early seventies and stopped in about 2005. It was dubbed as the Black Playboy at the time.

I did my master’s thesis during Covid, which was a terrible, weird time to be making art. I had moved back home, and I didn't have access to camera equipment. I was always a photographer, but the pandemic was a time for me to reassess. What can I do that's readily accessible and within my means? 

I started going to used bookstores, and that's when I found Players magazine. At the time I had no idea what it was, but the images were intriguing to me. So I started making collages with the found imagery, and then after doing some more research for my thesis, I found that it was this really crucial publication for its time in terms of facilitating Black representation. The first editor-in-chief was a Black woman, and she really cemented a particular direction for the publication.

It has a really interesting history that intersects with politics, music, culture, and it was something that was reflective of its time. The women that were in the magazine, that were posing nude, there was a certain kind of allure to them. It felt distinct. It felt cultural, feminine, and very familiar in terms of the women in my family and their rituals of adornment, as well as my own. I was really interested in mining that subtext throughout the images in order to speak to its specific history.

QUADROS: That’s fascinating to hear that the first editor-in-chief was a woman.

MITCHELL:  Especially for that kind of a publication, which we often attribute to facilitating or being simply for the male gaze – which it absolutely is. But something in my practice I'm interested in doing is looking at the images and asking, “What am I picking up on through my engagement and act of looking?”

QUADROS: Have you ever tried to reach out to her?

MITCHELL: She passed away a couple years ago. Her name is Wanda Coleman.  There's one interview that she did. I forget when it was published. It seemed very early 2000s. She talks about the complexities of starting the magazine as a woman, the tensions that were present at the time. But she did also say at the time she had carte blanche to do whatever she wanted. 

It facilitated this very distinct vision for the magazine. She left after a couple of issues, unfortunately. Then the magazine started to go into all of these different directions that I think appeal more to how we understand pornographic visual content today.

But I'm interested in those pivots and in the kind of shifts. With Silke’s show, a lot of the images were from the 2000s, which is seen as being the era that is the most “dirty” or “trashy.” But is there room, maybe, to filter some kind of agency with these images as well?

Engaging with these images from the early 2000s, I see so much of video vixen culture or those modes of representation and femininity – a lot of body modification. There’s this pivot where there’s this very bold risk-taking in terms of the ways in which Black women were adorning themselves. There’s longer nails. There’s a lot of tattoos.

QUADROS: Maybe we can speak a little about adornment – jewelry, acrylics, tattoos – in that era, and how they related to Black women, their bodies, and Black culture more broadly.

MITCHELL:  This is something that I think about all the time, as a Black woman. In a family or a lineage of other Black women, a lot of us are born into these rituals of self adornment. When I was born, the first gift – and this is something that I still have – you get a gold necklace. And it has your initial. It has a stamp affirming who you are. That kind of practice is so familial and feels really precious to me. 

I think about my aunties in the early 2000s, their acrylics and like the sounds that they would make and what they would look like when they were speaking. It's something that I picked up on as a very young child and in a lot of ways has informed the way that I take up space today. 

I think about my mother and corporate settings. She immigrated to Canada from the UK in the ‘90s. One of the things she would say, when she moved to Canada, was that everybody wears sweatpants. “Why don't people dress up when they're outside?” That proclamation of the way she represents herself, especially when she had to navigate the corporate world as a Black woman, was so important to her self-preservation.

Today what we're seeing is a lot of those trends being watered down and bastardized in the context of social media. What does it mean to stake a claim to something that is so authentically true to yourself, and then also watch it be denigrated, but then praised on certain bodies?

QUADROS: There’s this never-ending cycle of cultural innovation and then rejection, often by a white mainstream because that style is “in bad taste” or “too much” or “too Black.” But then  there’s this eventual assimilation that we’re seeing happen now, especially with the early 2000s, in a way that feels very uncritical. 

MITCHELL: I'm in Canada so it's a bit different, but I’ve been witnessing America swing this pendulum into a very sex negative, puritanical, evangelical view and positioning of sex, this anti-pornographic rhetoric. But if we rid pornography, that's not gonna rid us of patriarchy, white supremacy, and misogyny. It's always going to be there. 

I also think about that ongoing rhetoric that is trying to demonize sex but then also permit it only in these weird, codified mainstream ways. It's all of these different contradictory things happening. 

QUADROS: With your artwork, like where do you fall in that?

MITCHELL: In a way, it's complicating. I see my work as interventions to ask questions. I don't ever wanna say that the work is solving all the problems. That's not what I'm gonna do at all. I don't think art should do that. 

When I initially started doing this work, I would have to follow this historical lineage around unearthing the kinds of traumas and violence that had been enacted against the Black female body. That's something that is oftentimes now not being taught in schools: the wars, the transatlantic slave trade and how the Black female body was this vessel of reproduction, labor, and this particular kind of violence that is misogynoir. In a way, I'm sitting with that.

I think my work and my interventions and my interpretations are trying to find the pleasure, find the joy, find the desire and the sexiness and in these subtle suggestions. I think I'm trying to imagine something otherwise. I love using familiarity in a way to ask unfamiliar questions.

QUADROS: This question of the archive and what to glean from it and what to leave, that's something that like Saidiya Hartman writes very clearly about. 

With your work, you're taking us very close. Your work is intimate, almost interior. I find that really interesting because that's the way that sexuality is often expressed: erogenous zones, small touches, little moments like that. The things I love about my body are, for instance, these freckles I have right here on my face or my little tattoo. Your zooming in quality takes away some of the more objectifying quality.

MITCHELL: It’s kind of reorienting, or maybe a different way of looking. In the 2000s era, it was raunchy. It was there for a particular kind of gaze that I'm trying to reject in my own way.

I compared [my work] to when you're at the club, and you're in the girls' bathroom and all the women are like, “Oh my god, your hair, your nails, your outfit. Love it, love to see it.” And that's maybe the kind of approach. It’s like women taking some form of control given the kind of nature around the making of the images. So I love calling attention to those little details.

QUADROS: I love this idea of the girl's bathroom too because it makes me think of the “much-ness” of the work. I don't wanna say “too much-ness.” But there's something where the subjects can't be fully contained in the print. The images are so close. The words are spilling out onto the gallery walls. Could you maybe talk a little bit about how you engage with the frame and the idea of containment? 

MITCHELL: The text has been a new step in the work, and I think it came out of me looking at the covers and seeing the way that on the cover of a magazine, the woman's shoulder would be covering a little bit of the text and like the body on the cover would be like spilling over in these moments. The text is also very particular, and it's very objectifying in a way, but the body is disrupting it. I was really interested in that small moment of disruption of the way this publication is trying to define the body.

It's all text found in the magazines themselves. Some of the pseudonyms of the models – like Angel and Candy and Sweetness – there's this kind of sugary quality to the names that I absolutely fell in love with. I really like this idea of persona and character and the way you represent yourself. What is your character? What is your armor? What do the nails and the hair and the earrings look like? How can I make this spill over into the work in this larger sense? 

QUADROS: Persona comes up a lot in photography with subjects, right? You said you teach photography, so I imagine that's been a large part of your practice for a while.

MITCHELL: It becomes this generative site to determine how you want to represent yourself. I do think more complexly about representation as a whole, especially considering art and the art world, the kinds of representation that are deemed as “good” and then “not good” and feeding into this neoliberal understanding of representation, that just because more Black people are behind the frame, that's a good thing. But are we questioning the kinds of representation we're redeeming as being accessible, as being mainstream?

I think that pornography and committing to this archive in my work, has made a lot of people cautious. Like, why are you walking this line? But Black women were there, and I think that deserves our attention to some degree. That representation is there, so how are you gonna wrestle with it? I'm really interested in the gray area of representation.

QUADROS: Something about representation too is that it’s literally built into or excluded from the technology, right? Cameras originally weren't really constructed with darker skin tones in mind. It's really only been in the past couple decades when we're starting to see directors of photography, cinematographers that can actually handle darker skin tones. Like I just saw Sinners, and it looks spectacular. But it took us a while to get there.

MITCHELL: Oh my God. That movie. It's funny you actually bringing up that movie because I think the use of eroticism in that movie really stuck out to me. Like people assume that couldn't occur given the obviously violent systems in place, but for like sex and eroticism to still bleed out – I love it. It was so good. 

QUADROS: And female pleasure, right?

MITCHELL: That’s right.

QUADROS: I saw that at Brooklyn Academy of Music, which is a little historic movie theater around here, and it was a sold out showing. And that was a crowd that was like hollering laughing. There was a man behind me that was audibly horny. (laughs)

MITCHELL: I love it. Like, we were horny during that time. It's the humanity, right? It's humanizing to acknowledge that was absolutely the scenario and the case.

QUADROS: I guess one thing that I was wondering about though, with your photos, obviously, like they're very closely cropped. There's not a lot of faces. How do you think about anonymity with the source material and your work?

MITCHELL: This is something that I'm still thinking about. I think a lot about other artists’ work like Lorna Simpson or Mickalene Thomas who go to the Ebony archive or the Jet archive. They include the faces of the women in their work. And I do think there is this reason to be specific or to outline that specificity within the archive to show the particular faces of the women that were there. I find that can be a way to humanize the subjects of that particular time or within that era through image making.

My work is about the women in the archive, and it's also about other things. So I think anonymity becomes this way of trying to speak to the other things that I'm interested in. I've played or toyed with the idea of faces, but for me, I think I'm interested in a kind of body politic and maybe that's the draw to then focus on the body, but it's something that I'm still figuring out.

QUADROS: Is there anything you think people fundamentally misunderstand about your work?

MITCHELL: Yeah. People are always like, “Why aren't you behind the camera?” And I'm like, “Girl, it's not about me.” I mean, it is, but it isn't. It's about the images.

There's this constant demand when you're dabbling in terms of this representation to make yourself fully legible, right? To make the subjects fully legible. I think that's why I'm pushing back against this use of the gaze or use of the face because there's this constant expectation that as a Black person, you have to show up in a way that's fully intelligible, oftentimes to a particular kind of white, patriarchal gaze. And in a way, I think this is maybe an exercise of refusal in that. 

The initial hesitation with the work is because it's pornographic. Not to deny the way in which porn does contribute to fetish, contribute to particular kinds of understandings of racial ideologies or gendered ideologies. I think that's where the hesitation does potentially lie. But I don't think the answer is to continue to disregard it or to silence it. 

QUADROS: Do you still take photos? Do you still have your own photography practice?

MITCHELL: I do still take photos. Actually for a public artwork that I did last year, I was behind the camera and I took a picture of myself. Because it was a public installation and it's like in Vancouver, BC, they rejected the work without a reason. It was just a proposal of my hand, satin, and some pearls, which was in reference to the archive. But they rejected it without the possibility of resubmitting.

It felt like a good decision on my part to implicate my own body in that process, rather than the images, because at least then it's a rejection of me. I made the decision to be behind the camera because then I have full control, in a way.

Then after the rejection, I was like, Would it have mattered if it was me or somebody else? I think just the idea of a body there for the sake of itself, is what people just didn't like, because it's a public work. I didn't look very different from any type of ad that uses sex to sell something, to be this capitalist thing. But as soon as it's reclaiming it as something else, it becomes a bit of an issue.

QUADROS: Wow. I'm so sorry you had to deal with that.

MITCHELL: It's okay. We still rose. We still did something. They're operating out of this fear that people are going to say things about the work, and they don't wanna deal with the backlash around that. 

QUADROS: I don't know how it is in Canada, but now in America, you can't even make public art about Blackness or really any marginalized identity without fear of losing your funding. 

MITCHELL: It's crazy that simple visibility is deemed as a threat. It was really eye-opening. I was like, “So this is where we're at.” And, mind you, this is the way that I navigate my day-to-day life. This is how I have to exist, how I have to navigate the world. And somehow in this deeming it as unacceptable – what do you have to say about me and like other people that look like me? What is being subtly suggested there?

Untitled (Angel I), 2025

Archival inkjet print, custom frame, sandblasted glass, vinyl

Sensation (Diptych) , 2025

Archival inkjet print, custom frame, sandblasted glass

Angel (IV) , 2025

Archival inkjet print, custom frame

Angel (II) , 2025

Archival inkjet print, custom frame, vinyl

A Conversation with Amanda McGowan and Mattie Rivkah Barringer of Women's History Museum

Women's History Museum boxing glove shoes (2024)

Image courtesy of Company Gallery

Women's History Museum RX shoes (2024)

Image courtesy of Company Gallery

Women's History Museum vintage stacked heel (2025)

Image courtesy of Company Gallery

Women's History Museum broken hoof heels (2024)

Image courtesy of Company Gallery

Women's History Museum broken glass heels (2023)

Image courtesy of Company Gallery

Women's History Museum leather chopines (2024)

Image courtesy of Company Gallery

text by Karly Quadros

It was February 2024, and one model at the Women’s History Museum show couldn’t stop falling over. Determined, she trundled down the runway only to trip once again. The culprits were obvious: two enormous, cumbersome brown boxing gloves attached to the toes of classic stilettos. “Take them off!” cried members of the audience, a mixture of fashion insiders and queer iconoclasts. Still, the model made it to the end and hoisted the gloves in her hand, triumphant. K.O.

Unlike most New York footwear, the shoes of Women’s History Museum are not designed with functionality as a priority. In a city where pedestrians reign supreme and comfort is a must, the shoes of fashion label/art duo/vintage store curators Amanda McGowan and Mattie Rivkah Barringer are here to tell a story. Whether they’re white wedding heels bedazzled with a clatter of bones and colorful pills or gold boxing slippers rendered into precarious platforms by two wooden pillars, the shoes of Women’s History Museum exist in the sweet spot between strength and softness, power and precarity, barbarity and beauty.

Vintage remains an essential reference point for the duo. They maintain a carefully curated secondhand designer shop on Canal Street, sort of a modern-day SEX, stocked with everything from ‘80s Vivienne Westwood and ‘90s Gaultier to Edwardian furs and linens. In a similar style to early Alexander McQueen, Barringer and McGowan mine fashion references of the past – Victorian riding boots, rocking horse platforms, 70s crocodile skin clogs – for highly stylized fashion performances that entice as much as they reject traditional categories of beauty. The result is something that feels entirely 2025 in all its shredded, everything-out-in-the-open glory. Throughout Women History Museum’s nine staged collections, they return to similar references: animal prints and pelts; competitive sports, particularly boxing; and New York City, with the coins and shattered glass that cover the sidewalks. The clothes bare skin and barb it too.

Shoes, in many ways, remain the ultimate fetish object. They’re exalted, often the most expensive part of an outfit, yet they spend most of the day in contact with the filthy sidewalk. They’re civilizing, often constricting, and conceal the foot, which remains almost as hidden from public life as the body’s most nether regions. Shoes have often been used to control women as with painful and restrictive footbinding practices, yet their erotic potential is undeniable, as with the long, sensuous lines created in the body with a clear plastic pleaser. It’s no wonder that they served as the basis for Women’s History Museum’s latest show at Company Gallery, on display until June 21. Autre caught up with Barringer and McGowan to talk stilettos, surrealism, and the seriously sinister parts of living – and walking – in New York City.

KARLY QUADROS: Can you tell me about the inception of the show?

AMANDA MCGOWAN: We started working with Taylor Trabulus at Company many years ago.  Not very long after we started, she wanted to do a pop-up shop with us.

We were gonna maybe do an art show with her in the city at some other gallery, but there was drama and it didn't work out. Then she got promoted at Gavin Brown where she was working at the time, and basically she out of nowhere gave us this big art show opportunity there in 2018. After Gavin Brown ended [in 2020], she went to Company Gallery and we did another solo show there, and then they signed us on as artists. We've been working with them since Covid, like 2021. 

This show was actually their idea. It was their idea to do an overview of all the shoes that we've done over the past five years because we actually didn't realize how many we have done. There’s a lot and they're all different. Some have been seen in an art context. Some were in fashion shows. But in a way, they work as standalone art objects, so it made sense to show them in that way. 

The displays that we created for the show, those platforms, were actually wall works that we did for the show at Company in 2021. We made all these prints on paper and then we did these collages imitating ads because that show in 2021 was about recreating an abandoned mall space. The panels were to mimic advertising or storefront environments.

QUADROS: The shoe is such a deceptively simple concept, but there’s a lot that emerges when you see them all next to each other like that. At Autre, our last issue just went to press and the theme was ‘desire.’ We actually had Mia Khalifa on the cover wearing your paw shoe.

MCGOWAN: I saw that! We were talking recently – speaking of desire – about how there is such a sexual element to shoes, a sensuality.

QUADROS: They’re the ultimate fetish object.

MCGOWAN: They are. There’s something about seeing the shoe alone too, not on a foot, which is its own fetish.

QUADROS: Can you talk a little bit about how fetish and sexuality play into your design practice here in the show and elsewhere?

MCGOWAN: I feel like clothes have such a relationship to those topics because there’s such a rapport with the human form, with the body. I feel like it’s one of the reasons it’s not considered an art form because it has this feminine and bodily quality to it that makes it segmented away from formal art world consideration for most people.

MATTIE RIVKAH BARRINGER: There’s just so much loaded with fashion mentally for people. Women are expected to be sexually available or sexually pleasing in a patriarchal society, and clothing is such an interesting way to interfere in those types of codes and signals and take ownership over being specimenized in this way as a woman. 

MCGOWAN: Inherently, clothing and shoes are binding the body. There is this kind of BDSM quality to clothing, and shoes specifically – there’s something about a heel controlling the foot, constricting it, the animal claw within the shoe. There’s something very animalic about human feet – this kind of unruly, weird part of the body – and aestheticizing and controlling it with this beautiful shoe. 

We use a lot of animalic references in the shoes as well. There’s something about female sexuality and animal prints, animal symbology that I feel is somehow connected. Specifically in the fashion industry and in art history, the connection between the animal and the sexual and the woman is so saturated in the imagery. It also, I think, has been interpreted in contemporary feminism perhaps as a degrading comparison. We’re interested in that comparison because I feel like there can be a degrading aspect of it, but then there’s also this other countercurrent where it is kind of positive: I think of Jungian psychology, the positive anima where you’re in this positive relationship acknowledging the animal side of yourself as a human animal. Something about that to us is interesting or empowering to think about. 

And yet, at the same time, we’re trying to point out the possibly negative ways that humans can be animals towards each other in a very cruel world. There’s a lot of very dualistic things about the whole animal reference that is interesting to us in our work.

QUADROS: It’s interesting because fashion is one of the major things that separates humans from animals. We adorn our bodies; animals do not. There’s something maybe post-human about it – does that resonate with you?

BARRINGER:  I feel like throughout time, women and animals have been exploited and used in a lot of ways. So there's also that connection where there's something inherently feminine perhaps about animals too.

MCGOWAN: Everybody does participate in adorning themselves whether or not they consider themselves interested in fashion. It's an activity that is distinctly human.

BARRINGER: In its more negative permutations, the actual industry and making of clothing has a cruelty that we could attribute to like the animalistic behavior of just devouring and consumption.

QUADROS: Some of the shoes – for instance the ones with the bent and broken hooves – recall the sculptures of Meret Oppenheim. I also think of the cloven toe of Margiela tabis, which I’ve seen elicit really strong reactions from people who aren’t invested in fashion. Can you talk a little bit about your exploration of abjection, the uncanny, and yuckiness in your work?

MCGOWAN:  There's such a fine line between femininity being beautiful and being abject.  Within the patriarchal reality spectacle, if a woman has too much makeup and you can tell that she's wearing makeup, it's grotesque, but if she's wearing the type of makeup that really makes her look natural or youthful, then she's beautifully feminine.

We’re very interested in this historical time travel – what the codes were at one time that are different from now and how different depictions and ideals of femininity throughout time contradict the ones we have now.

BARRINGER: Also living in New York City is so abject. We’re very close to abjection all the time. There’s something very medieval about being in New York City. When I’m making something that I think is beautiful, it makes sense to have something abject as part of it in a weird way because it feels like that’s the world that I’m in. It feels more true.

QUADROS: Do you guys have any gross or crazy New York stories?

MCGOWAN: My God, where do I begin? The first show that we did that was a big production last February, somebody punched Mattie in the face on the subway, literally going to see the venue.

QUADROS: Oh my God, I’m so sorry.

MCGOWAN: I feel like New York City has gotten so crazy. It’s like an open air institution.

BARRINGER: I’m surprised that I haven’t seen a dead body yet in New York. I feel like the area we’re in feels so charged from a past time. Looking into New York history, that area used to be like the financial district. It was a port because it’s right on the water, and there was crazy stuff happening there throughout time. You can feel that history.

QUADROS: I feel like that’s certainly reflected in New York fashion right now. Your clothes feel really interested in the messiness or the intensity of the city.

MCGOWAN: I think it feels more, like you’re saying, like the reality. We’re in a time where you’re very confronted with reality. There is a need for fantasy as well, which we try to do, but we also need to acknowledge the reality at the same time.

BARRINGER: Fantasy needs to be mitigated with something that feels more honest to us.

QUADROS: New York is so known for its extremely functional shoes – power suits and sneakers, squishy foamy Crocs. They have to be functional since it’s a city ruled by pedestrians. Meanwhile the shoes in the show are distinctly less functional: towering wooden platforms, Victorian-style shin braces. What do you think of when you think of New York footwear? How do your own designs work with or against that?

MCGOWAN: Mattie has always worn platforms since I’ve known her for the past fifteen years.

BARRINGER: I find platforms easy to walk in, but I just have always wanted to be taller. I’m five foot three, so I always wanted to be tall.

MCGOWAN: She always wears Vivienne Westwood rocking horse shoes, which for me, I probably wouldn’t be able to walk around the city in them, but for her, they’re comfortable. 

BARRINGER: I like being above street level when I can ‘cause it feels very beautiful. I feel cleaner somehow.

QUADROS: My dear friend who lived here for a long time told me when I moved here, don’t wear open-toed shoes unless it’s a platform because a rat will run over your feet.

BARRINGER: (laughs) A hundred percent. My husband, he’s from Singapore, so he likes wearing open-toed shoes, and he only wears flats. He’s the only New Yorker that I’ve ever seen who wears sandals on the ground.

MCGOWAN: I do think there’s an obsession. For me, I wouldn’t wear heels all the time in New York. We’re interested in the fantasy of what shoes could be. If I could make a shoe that I could wear every day, not in a practical way, what would it look like? That’s how they also become an art object because they’re not really functional things. These ones have a bit of a defensive quality, like they have a weapon built in basically.

BARRINGER: We felt so enveloped in the New York atmosphere. We were really looking at the buildings and the statues. This post-human thing where you are becoming the city, the metal and the hard building materials felt like something that we were really talking about with the clothes we were doing in the last year.

QUADROS: In many ways, it’s the exact opposite of the ballet flat, which has recently come back.

MCGOWAN: And it’s not comfortable either. I used to wear ballet flats all the time when I was younger, and my feet always hurt.

BARRINGER: There’s no support.

MCGOWAN: I’m always frustrated with shoe options. My whole life, I’m always dissatisfied with what’s available and what is functional but attractive. Even though there’s a lot of shoes, a lot of them are not great in different ways.

QUADROS: What have you settled on now?

MCGOWAN: I wear Marithé Francois Girbaud vintage shoes because there’s something about the split soles, the rubber shoe, it laces up the front. It’s a supportive ankle situation. Something about the way that those shoes are made are so comfortable to me but they’re also attractive. Like they don’t look like grandma.

The boys in New York City will stop me all the time and be like, “Bro, your shoes are so sick.” And I’m just like, “They’re just comfortable.”

QUADROS: When you’re sourcing now, where are you looking in terms of beauty and inspiration?

MCGOWAN: It’s almost like we’re thinking about archaeology or something. Our practice of souring materials and vintage can feel quite archaeological and specific, looking for, I don’t know, maybe a narrative or an untold story. I think for our next collection we’re thinking about archaeology as this search for self and identity through clothing and also thinking of these as artifacts or monumental objects.

I don’t think we’re going to do an actual fashion show. We’re going to do a lookbook in tandem with an art exhibition, so we’re also thinking of clothing that’s going to stand on its own and not really have to be in movement.

BARRINGER: We always think of ourselves as weird time travelers from a time that didn’t exist. Like historical futurism.

QUADROS: The Fifth Element. Spaceships, but also the pyramids.

BARRINGER: Exactly. There’s so much history and so many stories, people’s individuality that we don’t know about throughout time.

QUADROS: So you’re not doing New York Fashion Week then?

MCGOWAN: We are not this year. We might release a lookbook around Fashion Week, but we’re not doing a show until next year. We’re burnt out. We’re very interested in doing more shows in the future. We really want to take time to do a show in Paris in the future. So we just need to regroup and take time. 

Fashion moves so fast, and it’s not always realistic to create things at that level when you’re self-funded. It’s just us and our interns. It’s not like we have a giant team. For us, this has been the most rigorous fashion schedule that we’ve shown on. It’s been three shows within the space of a year.

And doing runway is a lot. It doesn’t look like it’s as much work as doing an art show or an exhibition, but it’s actually so much harder in comparison when you don’t have endless resources to pour into it. It’s one of the hardest types of creation because there’s not only the functionality of the garment, there’s the live element. It’s basically working for six months on something that’s gonna be seen for twenty minutes. You have to have so many relationships and people involved. In New York especially it’s hard to find venues. It’s a whole thing.

QUADROS: Fashion Week is in a weird place right now too. Your show in particular had a lot of buzz, a lot of really positive responses that what you’re doing is something unique.

MCGOWAN: Thank you. And we don’t wanna abandon New York. I think a lot of our inspiration and identity is very linked to this place, but it’s an experiment that we want to show in Paris. We’re also interested in French fashion history and that lineage. So it feels like a personal goal.

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Image courtesy of Company Gallery

It's A Real Carnival at Jeffrey Deitch Right Now

Photo by Genevieve Hanson

text by Karly Quadros

The beginning of May in New York is time for Frieze: time for smart, clipped suits, time for well-to-do collectors, and time to pack into the vaguely dystopian honeycombed behemoth known as The Shed. And then, there was Jeffrey Deitch.

On May 3, a cavalcade of artists, burlesque stars, magicians, drag queens, sword swallowers, latex fetishists, fan dancers, scenesters, and bright young things stepped right up for the night of all nights, the show of all shows, a spectacle to bring even the stodgiest gallerist to their knees: a carnival. Presiding over the whole thing was master of ceremonies/artist Joe Coleman, who curated the group show and contributed a variety of artifacts from his own personal Odditorium of historic circus curios. The gallery was packed tight with art and packed even more tightly with people. A glimmering merry-go-round twirled next to a bulging, fleshy sculpture and ornate Coney Island mermaid costumes. The over forty artists invited to participate ranged from big chip favorites like Anne Imhof and Jane Dickson to cult favorites like Kembra Pfahler and Nadia Lee Cohen to contemporary favorites like Raúl de Nieves and Mickalene Thomas to historic figures like Weegee and Johnny Eck. Coleman, a lifelong devotee of the carnival and performing arts, made a point to include and celebrate the work of circus arts performers that have made up his own found family for decades.

‘Circus’ is a word often used to evoke a sense of chaos and farce — a political circus, a clown show — but the festival of carnival, which is celebrated in more than fifty countries around the world, has a more subversive history. The elaborate masks, headdresses, and costumes that have made carnival celebrations in places like Venice and Rio de Janeiro so iconic were a way of turning the daily socio-political order on its head. Class, gender, sexuality, and power were turned on their heads and marginalized communities, enslaved people and queer people especially, were able to express themselves with more freedom in public.

The American circus tradition is deeply troubled by its own abuses against people of color, disabled people, and animals, but it is undeniable that circuses were also alternative spaces for survival and community for those who couldn’t or weren’t allowed to live freely in mainstream society. In many ways the carnival, with its wild exuberance, unabashed sexuality, hair-raising feats, ramshackle opulence, seedy thrills, and thicker than blood bonds is the ultimate expression of the found family. We caught up with curator Joe Coleman to talk more about the exhibition, flea circuses, Times Square’s sleazy history, roadside attractions, and more.

QUADROS: It's Frieze week right now, so things feel a little more buttoned up, which is why I feel like the show coming out at this point in time was so refreshing.

COLEMAN: Well, these people are like family, so it just comes naturally to me. Some of them, like Jo Weldon produced a work of art for the show, and she had never made a work of art before. Her piece was amazing. People like Bambi the Mermaid have been in the art world for some time. I put some of her costumes in the show because the Carnival is the burlesque house. It's the [Coney Island] Mermaid Parade. It’s Mardi Gras. It's the old Coney Island Wax Museum. It's Times Square back in the day. It encompasses all those things, at least in my imagination. So I wanted to bring everybody on board.

QUADROS: Why Carnival? What is your personal relationship to the circus and who are some of the first artists you reached out to?

COLEMAN: My connection to the carnival dates back to childhood. I was born in Connecticut near Bridgeport, where PT Barnum had a home. As a child, I went to to the Barnum Museum. And when I was very young, I took my first trip to New York, to Times Square where I saw these huge posters of burlesque performers on the street.

QUADROS: Back when it was a little seedy. (laughs)

COLEMAN: Yeah. That's what was fascinating to me, especially as a child. It seemed like those women were eighty feet high on those billboards, plus I got to peek in and see what they were doing. I was also brought to Hubert's Museum where there were sideshow performers and a flea circus. From that day on in my childhood imagination, that was the place I wanted to live. So, when I was in my late teens, I moved to New York, and it’s never disappointed me. I've lectured and performed in Coney Island, and certainly it's been the subject of my paintings. I also have quite a large collection of artifacts dealing with wax museums, sideshows, burlesque and I've included a lot of my archive in the exhibition as well.

Photo by Genevieve Hanson

QUADROS: What inspired you to start collecting?

COLEMAN: It’s really an indescribable urge that you find, or maybe it found me. I didn't find it (laughs). It’s wanting possession of me. Certainly there's a lot of contemporary art that's inspired by the sideshow and by burlesque and even the flea circus people. I have a whole section on miniatures in the exhibition. But aside from the contemporary artists, I wanted the real artifacts and artisans to be appreciated too. There is a real flea circus in the exhibition. There's also works by people that have actually been a part of the carnival. People like Camille 2000 who was an amazing burlesque star from the ’70s ’til the 2000s. There’s one of her great costumes in it. And Liz Renay, also a great burlesque star, author, and filmmaker—she’s in John Waters films, but she also did some B-movies in the late ’50s. Some of her paintings are on view as well. Also, Johnny Eck—have you seen the movie Freaks?

QUADROS: Oh yes.

COLEMAN: He was the Half Man in Freaks who was very charismatic, probably stole the whole movie. He was a fascinating artist himself, so his screen paintings are on exhibit. He was famous for his painted scenes that went into windows and door frames. It was unique folk art. In Baltimore he also made puppets and put on puppet shows. Those and his train are on view. One of the ways he made money was by running this miniature train for children.

QUADROS: That sense of found family is so clear. One of my favorite books is Geek Love by Katherine Dunn. So much of that book is about this deep bond between self-created circus freaks. Can you talk a little bit about that concept and how it manifests in the show?

COLEMAN: Katherine Dunn was a good friend, and I also love that book. I mean, when you find each other, you just get each other. I've seen so many performers rise up in the ranks in Coney Island, and they’re all dear family. Whitney and I have been married for twenty-five years now and our marriage was really a carnival-style marriage. We were married by a ventriloquist dummy named Dutch. He's on exhibit at the gallery as well.

Our wedding was attended by many circus performers and artists. I arrived in a hearse inside of a coffin, and my six groomsmen pulled the coffin out of the hearse after it backed into the barn at the American Visionary Art Museum. They walked a New Orleans-style funeral to the altar, placed the coffin up, and I came out of it and went for Whitney. (laughs) You can also see on display our coffins that were made in Ghana. There's this fantasy coffin tradition, where if your favorite thing is a martini, you can have your coffin made into a martini.

QUADROS: Were there any sort of unexpected additions to the show?

COLEMAN: Walton Ford produced a new work just for the show, which I was thrilled to get. Also, John Dunivant produced a new work for the show, and Mu Pan, and several people that I just reached out to were so sweet to give something to the show, like Robert Williams and Guillermo del Toro. I had pretty much everybody I wanted in the show.

QUADROS: Carnival itself originated in Europe and then was taken to the Caribbean as this tool for political expression. It's a time when common people can wear costumes and speak the language of the ruling class to mock and criticize them. Were you thinking at all about political critique when organizing the show? Or did anyone bring a piece that brought that to life for you?

COLEMAN: Certainly. There's several works that deal with that. One in particular that I was really blown away by is Jo Weldon's piece. She's very well known in the burlesque community, but she's also a sex worker and very unapologetic about it. She made a doll. There's a whole section on dolls in the exhibition that includes Kembra Pfahler’s dolls, but Jo Weldon's doll represents the history of sex work. It's a pretty dramatic and incredibly personal, controversial piece. She's also spoken at the UN about the rights of sex workers. She has such a powerful voice.

QUADROS: Back in the day, the circus really had the power to shock and disgust. People would go to freak shows and pass out in astonishment. These days, I feel like there’s a real sense of over exposure. People are exposed to so much online that they feel calloused, but are there ways that the circus can still shock us? Obviously, you mentioned its power to jostle up people's preconceived notions about sex work, but is there a power to the circus beyond shock value?

COLEMAN: Yes. Obviously there's things beyond shock value, though whether it can change things or not remains to be seen. But it has its effects on people. If you get under people's skin and they take something with them, that's enough. There's all kinds of expression in this show. It’s nice that it could be fun and wild and serious and scary at times. That's what I always liked about carnival. It’s scary and exciting and sometimes it teaches a lesson.

QUADROS: Maybe you're a little repelled by it, but you're also very attracted to it at the same time. It's very frank about some of our deepest desires; the kinds of things we don't want to face.

COLEMAN: There's something wonderful about that—to have a place where you can experience those things.

QUADROS: I'm also interested in the circus as a non-traditional history of America, or the alternate history of the outlaws, the conmen, the thrill seekers. So many of our enduring myths of the country come from the circus, like Barnum and Bailey or Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. What makes that so enduring and timeless?

COLEMAN: It was important to have people that have actually been an active part in some way. Like in the case of John Dunivant—he’s an accomplished artist, and that seems enough reason to have him in the show, but what you may not know is that he created Theatre Bizarre in Detroit, and it's one of the most amazing spectacles of carnival or circus in the past twenty-five years. For many years it's been in this Masonic temple with so many rooms that you get lost. You can't even see the entirety of theater. There’s ghost trains inside, burlesque stages, and art everywhere.

QUADROS: That reminds me of like the House on the Rock or something like that. These American people that just get an idea in their head and create their fantasy world.

COLEMAN: Yeah. And that’s what carnival is all about, really.

QUADROS: Manifesting your dream world.

COLEMAN: Yeah. If there’s something in the world that you always wanted, and it doesn't exist, you have to make it yourself.

QUADROS: But then, there's also the thornier history of carnival. It's always been this haven for the marginalized, but it has also historically been a place where racial stereotypes are reinforced. When you were curating the show, how did you reckon with that?

COLEMAN: There's certainly works of art that deal with it, like Narcissister’s work. She's got one of the most powerful sculptures in the show. Or there’s Derrick Adams’ Ferris Wheel image. I think it's better for them to talk about those works themselves, but it's definitely a part of it. Exploitation has always been a part of the carnival.

QUADROS: In many ways it's part of the art world too. These are ongoing questions about spectacle and viewership.

COLEMAN: Exploitation can certainly be found throughout America in various ways. Really throughout the world.

QUADROS: Do you have an especially unique piece from your own collecting from the historic archives that's in the show that you want to talk about?

COLEMAN: The most unique and rarest one is a ticket to the Tammany Museum, which was the first real dime museum. It predates Barnum; it’s from the late 1700s. Barnum's American Museum eventually took over the Tammany Museum site, so this predates the whole tradition of the dime museum and the sideshow itself in America. And I have an actual ticket to the Tammany Society. You had to become a member in order to see the museum, which consisted of wax figures, taxidermy … you know, what people are making at sideshow museum’s today is pretty much based on what was set up at the Tammany Museum.

QUADROS: What a historic artifact. But then, you also have this flip side, right? People mostly think of the circus as something historically situated with traditions like burlesque that have been around for so long. But you also have some pieces that incorporate new technologies, like the interactive Nadia Lee Cohen piece. Was that something you intended to bring in?

COLEMAN: Yeah, that’s a really great piece. It blew me away when I saw it and interacted with it too. It's one of the most powerful pieces and I think the Carnival would've always wanted to grow with technology, so that does not seem to contradict it at all. When motion pictures became popular, the first places that really started showing them were dime museums and sideshows.

Nadia Lee Cohen, Entitled, 2025
Silicone, sheet metal, and glass

QUADROS: There's something very tactile about that world. Everyone instinctively knows what the aesthetics are.

COLEMAN: Yeah, but Nadia's piece does prove that the technology works really well with the subject.

QUADROS: People think of Carnival as being relegated to the past, but we still get it peeking through into popular culture every now and then. What does Carnival look like in modern times?

COLEMAN: I think it looks like Jeffrey Deitch's gallery right now.

Carnival is on display at Jeffrey Deitch in New York until June 28.

Photo by Genevieve Hanson

Ric Heitzman: A Pee-wee's Playhouse Production Designer on Art, Animation, and Finding the Humor in Anything

text by Karly Quadros
portrait by Joshua White

“Guess who’s at the door, Pee-wee!”

Anyone who was a kid in the late-80s (or a lover of camp, kitsch, and tactile production design in any subsequent decade) knows the phrase well. Emanating from a jolly windowpane, it signaled the entrance of any number of zany characters: a rhinestone cowboy with an animated lasso, a bobbleheaded salesman, a 1950s beehive towering to the ceiling. Every Saturday morning at 10 a.m., the cast and characters of Pee-wee’s Playhouse pogo-sticked around a mid-century, candy-colored dream home, stuffed to the brim with puppets, papier mache, and wallpaper only the 80s could produce. Pee-wee Herman – the impish avatar of host and comedian Paul Reubens who is the center of a new two-part documentary, Pee-Wee As Himself, airing on May 23 – was the clear heart of the show, but it was the world of Pee-wee’s Playhouse that had kids wishing they could live inside their own surrealist bungalow.

Artist Ric Heitzman worked on Pee-wee’s Playhouse as a production designer, puppeteer, and voice actor for characters like Mr. Window, Cool Cat, and the Salesman. Even after the show ended in 1991, Heitzman’s art is packed with a boundless gestural joy and cast of characters straight from Sunday morning cartoons. Working across comics, cartoons, and commercial animation, Heitzman’s Escher-like paintings have a technicolor psychedelia to them, packed densely with explosions of color, hatching, and characters romping their way through their worlds.

Heitzman’s new show, Squiggly Dee, is on display until June 9 at Face Guts, a storefront gallery project from artist and former animator Tim Biskup, in collaboration with White Box LA. The two artists got together to discuss Pee-wee’s Playhouse, recurring dreams, and finding the humor in anything.

TIM BISKUP: What’s your favorite animal to draw?

RIC HEITZMAN: I draw a lot of insectoid characters. The first thing that came to my mind is Triceratops because that’s the animal I like the most, but I don’t draw it very often. I think about it a lot. Everything I draw is a mashup. I noticed I draw a lot of things that look like donkey-giraffe compilations. There’s a lot of insectoid things like centipedes and millipedes, things that look like human heads and insect bodies. That’s been in my head for a long time. It’s probably from playing with bugs as a kid. Kept everything in boxes with wax paper over them.

BISKUP: Of all the Pee-wee’s Playhouse characters, which one was the most like you?

HEITZMAN: Mr. Window. Mr. Window is the most open. Mr. Window [dips into the character’s cadence] is also just my voice. ‘Hey, Peewee, guess who’s at the door!’ That’s basically all I said. ‘It’s the King of Cartoons!’ I liked the character of the window. I liked it because it was really happy. All those characters were happy, but that particular character was big and happy. Plus, I designed it.

BISKUP: Was there one that you didn’t like?

HEITZMAN: No. There was nothing on that show I didn’t like. Even the characters that other people didn’t like, I liked. To me, it was like a sandwich. If you take away something, you don’t know what else would be there anyway. We were recently together as a group, and George McGrath, the writer, said he never liked the salesman character because the exaggerated size of his head always bugged him. But it functioned in the narrative as this irritating thing. It bothered him – it was supposed to bother everybody. That’s the point. 

BISKUP: You’ve told me so many great stories about famous people that you’ve just randomly run into: your James Brown story, the Belushi and Akroyd story is incredible, the Dolly Parton story.

HEITZMAN: I was just in the right place at the right time. A lot of people came to [Pee-wee’s Playhouse]. I met a lot of people, not necessarily through Paul [Reubens], but through my associations with Paul when that show was on.

BISKUP: Can you tell me a random one that you haven’t told me yet? Have you met Liza Minelli?

HEITZMAN: No, I haven’t met Liza Minelli. I did go to a drag show when I first moved to LA and there was a really great Liza Minelli imitator.

BISKUP: Cher?

HEITZMAN: Oh yes, I’ve met Cher. She came to the Playhouse. She was on the Christmas show. That was amazing to meet her because she was really sweet.I don’t know how old she was, but she looked amazing. When people came on that show, either they were fascinated by it, because it was like being in Candyland, everybody walking around with their mouths open, or they were terrified.

She was one that was absolutely terrified. Paul introduced her to us before we did the shot. She admitted to us she was nervous because she always did stuff for adults and she didn’t know how to do this. Paul was like, “Don’t worry about it. Just play it the way you play it. Don’t worry about who it’s for.” It was just funny to see someone who does these giant stage shows and performs all over the world, and they come on set and they’re insecure about it. You wouldn’t think somebody that big would be that vulnerable.

BISKUP: The way that you’re talking about it gives me a great picture of what it was like to work there and the amount of vulnerability it created in people whether they were feeling joy or fear.

HEITZMAN: Most people felt joy. That’s the thing that I can say that I’m proudest of about that show. You were able to convey a pure sense of joy. You do that too. Your stuff has joy in it. To me, that’s the best thing in the world. It’s harder to be funny than it is to be serious.

BISKUP: It’s vulnerable.

HEITZMAN: Comedy has tragedy in it, but it still has to be funny. 

That show afforded us, at least afforded me, a view into this world that I never expected to have. I didn’t come out here to do that. I always just wanted to be an artist. In fact, when we first got an Emmy, I was like, “What is that?” I always heard that term, but I was like, “What is an Emmy really?” I remember when they said, “You won an Emmy,” I was like, “This is great, but could I get a show somewhere? Show my art?” 

That’s what I wanted. In other words, if you’re not going for this stuff, you look at it slightly differently. It was a window into a world that I never thought I’d ever have a window into. I was always like, [ silly voice] “Golly!”

BISKUP: [similar silly voice] “Look at all this cool stuff!”

HEITZMAN: Some of it was cool, but also the personalities! Like you said, I have stories. I literally have seen every kind of behavior on set that could ever happen: tantrums, people punching walls, people throwing themselves down in the middle of a scene crying. It’s a place where people feel comfortable just going to pieces. I’m not talking about people in front of the camera. I’m talking about the director, the costumer, the lighting person, somebody falling out of the rafters, the wardrobe catching on fire. You just go, this is Hollywood, man. This is wild. This is uncharted territory. Something can happen at any minute. I know workplaces can be like that. It’s emotional craziness but also technical craziness, and sometimes it’s both at the same time. People’s emotions are really raw in live action shooting. That’s the great thing about animation. You’re gonna see it through very slowly. 

BISKUP: It’s gonna develop over a long period of time, and you’re gonna be alone.

HEITZMAN: You’re never gonna be patient enough.

BISKUP: When you’re talking to somebody, do you see the cartoon version of them?

HEITZMAN: I see a humorous version of what’s going on very often. It’s exaggerated. I almost see a punchline before it’s coming. Someone can be telling a poignant story, and I don’t mean to make fun of them, but you get ahead of them and you think, is this gonna be a joke? But there’s no joke. But in your mind you imagine the joke.

BISKUP: Do you think about how you would draw them?

HEITZMAN: Now that I’m a seasoned artist, I could translate that at any time. I’m not as ambitious as I used to be because otherwise I get frustrated because some of this stuff passes in a moment. It’s really only at that moment, and it makes me happy. 

The characters get exaggerated, almost like Hee-Haw or some other TV show like Monty Python. It’s the kind of stuff I’ve always been drawn to. Everything just gets exaggerated in my head. I find it very humorous and it puts me in a good mood and happy. It’s a state of mind that I’m in most of the time.

BISKUP: I actively look for funny things that people say. I have a tendency to share my interpretation of what somebody said that was obviously not what they meant to say. I have a way of picking language apart and thinking of different ways to think about something that somebody said that makes it funnier. Does that ever make you feel crazy?

HEITZMAN: I think it's an inner world. I thought about that for a long time because even from an early age it makes you more isolated, developing another world or being able to look at your subconscious. I would say a lot of people are not in touch with their subconscious. Maybe I’m not using the right term.  

I have lots of examples of being somewhere – especially when I was dating women, and even with Lorainne, my wife – and I’ll be sitting somewhere with a really big smile on my face, and she says, “Why are you smiling like that?” And I’m honest. I’ll say, “If you could see what I’m seeing in my head right now, you’d be very happy too.” 

I have a really rich inner world. I could close my eyes right now and just start imaging stuff, and it’s always really entertaining to me, even when it’s dark, just because it’s cool looking [laughs]. You get caught up in your own imagination. That’s what an artist does.

BISKUP: I felt like I was crazy when I was younger, but now…

HEITZMAN: When did you start feeling like that, I wonder?

BISKUP: I was not doing well in school, and my mom was trying to figure out why and she took me to some doctors to get tested. They told her, “He’s really smart!” The translation I made in my head is, Okay, I’m really smart, but I’m not doing well in school, so I must be crazy. I just sat with that idea in my head for most of my life. I explained everything based on that.

HEITZMAN: But you weren’t scared of yourself, were you?

BISKUP: I think this is why I avoided drugs. The one time I smoked weed, it was really existentially terrifying. All the big fears that I didn’t even realize I had came out, and it was just like, Oh God, I cannot do this. I cannot let that stuff out of the bag. I always felt like there was this stockpile of craziness inside of me that I just had to keep a lid on.

HEITZMAN: When were you first conscious of this?

BISKUP: I had terrible nightmares when I was a kid, so I was scared to go to sleep.

HEITZMAN: Were they recurring nightmares?

BISKUP: I don’t think they were recurring until my thirties. Then I started having them, and they helped me get out of a career that I was troubled by and start actually making paintings. 

HEITZMAN: Have they gone away?

BISKUP: Yeah. When I was working in animation, I kept having these dreams that there was a portal inside my house, and on the other side of this portal, there was a whole universe of these characters and it was my responsibility to help these characters escape.

HEITZMAN: That’s a good responsibility. Unless they were characters of ill repute.

BISKUP: No, they were defenseless little guys. And my house was a machine that would help them get into my dimension. Eventually I stopped working in animation and started making paintings and selling them in galleries. And all of those dreams went away.  I had a friend who was having dinner at our house one night and she said, “Those were your paintings. Those were the characters from your paintings.” You got something like that?

HEITZMAN: Oh yeah. Going through the entertainment industry, it’s just a different approach to creativity because it’s creativity on demand, and that’s very different from creativity when you’re just sitting around daydreaming. When I was in the industry, most of what I was doing in my dreams was trying to figure out the jobs that were ahead of me. If I had a storyboard or something, all I could do in my dream was turn it over and over again.

But I had a recurring nightmare when I was really young that went away about the time I was a graduate student in college. A Tyrannosaurus was always coming at me, and I was always running into a room where my mother was. Her back was to me so I never saw her face, then I looked out the window, and it wasn’t the Tyrannosaurus but a tornado coming, and that’s when I woke up.

BISKUP: So the dinosaur wasn’t as scary as the tornado.

HEITZMAN: Yeah, because a tornado was something that would happen in my real life.

BISKUP: It makes me think of the storm drawing from your last show here. You told me some kind of emotional stuff that was wrapped up in that.

HEITZMAN: Most of my drawings address the humor that I feel most of the time. At least, I hope most of those drawings exude a certain humor that’s chaotic and spastic. But sometimes when I’m frustrated, usually about something in my life, some situation that I can’t really do anything about – I can’t spend the money, I can’t fix this, I don’t know the answer, damned if you do, damned if you don’t – I’m just trying to struggle through something. I don’t know what the answer’s going to be so I just try to put it into the drawing, and those drawings tend to be pretty dark, just because of the nature of indecision and lack of control.

There’s a bunch of these drawings that I wouldn’t show anybody. They’re just messed up.  Some of ‘em I painted over. It’s a side of you that you’re not proud of, so you’re not sure how people would interpret seeing them.

BISKUP: Do you think they show clearly that emotional intensity that you’re not comfortable with? Would I see that if I looked at it?

HEITZMAN: I don’t know. I just know how it resonates with me when I look at it. It’s okay. I captured that and put it in the bottle. But I don’t want it out of the bottle.

BISKUP: I have those too.

There’s pieces that I have that I’ve shown that may be dealing with really intense things that I don’t want to talk to people about necessarily, but nobody’s going to get that from looking at it because there’s an abstraction that kind of takes it away. But the energy that it transmits is still really powerful.

HEITZMAN: I tend to just put those things away and go on to something else. The one that you saw, it’s not that I like that one particular drawing and I didn’t like the other drawings. It’s just there’s something revealing, something when I see it that irritates me. It doesn’t make me go, “I want to show that to people.” There’s a lot of stuff in portfolios: it’s the evil portfolio.

BISKUP: Would you show me?

HEITZMAN: Maybe. I’ve shown very few people that just because it really is stuff I should get rid of. There’s also stuff that’s just not politically correct from a long time ago that I’m ashamed of. I’ve destroyed a lot of that. I don’t know why I haven’t destroyed the rest because it really needs to be.

BISKUP: It’s interesting because listening to that new Robert Crumb biography, he talks about flushing his work down the toilet for years. When he finally unleashed those things on the world, that’s when he really achieved fame and fortune.

HEITZMAN: I think that I’d be flogged. I think about that portfolio that I’m talking about, and the reason I haven’t thrown away some of that stuff is because I rendered it very well. It’s an evil thought, but I rendered it really well.

It’s funny because, especially when I had commercial artwork to do, the illustrated kind of design, I clenched a lot. I was really good at the beginning about starting with really loose drawings, but then when I had to formalize it I got really tight. I didn’t like where it went.

It affected my sleep. It affected a bunch of stuff about me. But people don’t know the difference. They say, “It looks great!” and you’re like, “God, it really kills me.” With commercial work, I felt it in my shoulders. My wife, she’s the most honest person. She’d just look over my shoulder and go, “Why did you tighten up?” She knows. After a little stretch, when I got out of [commercial work] and started doing animation, she’d say, “I’m so glad you don’t do that anymore because you don’t tighten up like you used to.” In animation, you don’t have time to tighten up. I was doing storyboards as fast as I could possibly draw them. I didn’t have time to think, This has got to be perfect.

BISKUP: I know some really good storyboard people who draw terribly, but their ideas are so good.

HEITZMAN: You know, I was freaking out when I first got into it. I never thought I was very good at it. When you turn it into a client for the very first time and you’re like, “Are they gonna understand this? Is this gonna make any sense?”

BISKUP: I talked to John Kricfalusi once about storyboarding. I was a background painter at the time. And you know what he said to me? He asked, “How old are you?” And I said, “I’m thirty.” He goes, “Don’t you think it’s a little late to be learning how to draw?”

HEITZMAN: [laughs] Wow. That’s supportive.

BISKUP: He loves to do that. He’s a challenger, man. Let me just say, I never did storyboards. That was me trying to get into storyboards, and that’s what he said. Thanks, John.

HEITZMAN: When I started doing storyboards, which was in Chicago, I realized fairly early on, you might be able to imagine the scenes, but you’re around a lot of people who can’t. In other words, they’re relying on you. 

Now, translating those drawings and being able to make it look like what they want it to look like? They don’t know what they want it to look like, but they know they don’t want it to look like R. Crumb or some funny animal comic. I had a really hard time drawing serious storyboards for serious things. They always looked rubbery. I couldn’t un-exaggerate. 

BISKUP: That is the inherent problem with animation: you’re working with people above you who are essentially going to tell you to make it less good.

HEITZMAN: You start out with a great idea, and you end up with one that’s just been cut to pieces. That’s the way most animation in America is. They say things like, “We have an artist-centric studio,” because they think that’s what they want to have. People love to rag on producers, and I can honestly say that there are producers to be ragged on, lots of ‘em. But I’ve also found producers who were really smart and who really believed in art and were just as good about managing people. But it’s few and far between. There are a lot of stupid people who ask you to do stupid things for stupid reasons.

It’s a hard business. But it’s mostly psychological. It’s not the art as much. It’s the psychology of trying to get all those people at the table to agree on something without too many opinions. Because they all want to have an opinion. 

HEITZMAN: Disney was the worst. I started out as a storyboard artist, and I worked myself all the way up to director. Then I was creative director, which is above the line. I didn’t know what that meant ‘til I was above the line. You’re just this über-head that looks over everything. “Oh, we can’t do it that way. This can’t be done that way.” If somebody’s really weak, you have to step in and say, “This person’s not doing their job.” I have to help them do whatever it is they’re doing or get rid of them.

BISKUP: How many years was that before you got there, above the line?

HEITZMAN: Oh that was a long time. That was way after Pee-wee. At least twenty years before I got to that. And I was just somebody that didn’t know that was a job.

In cartoons, it was not that developed. It was really small at Funny Garbage when I was doing cartoons for Cartoon Network. They wanted me to develop an entire division to make cartoons.

BISKUP: I was at Nickelodeon working at Oh Yeah! Cartoons at the same time. What a trip.

HEITZMAN: That was in ‘99.

BISKUP: I left the industry in 2001.

HEITZMAN: What forced me out of that industry was 9/11. Funny Garbage was very close to the Twin Towers. That was the Monday after I delivered the contract. I did twenty-five one-shot cartoons, three TV series, and a music video. I delivered that contract on Friday, so I was not in a hurry to get to work. I looked out the window of my building and the plane went right into the tower. It was the wildest thing to see. I knew something was wrong.

BISKUP: Whenever I think of leaving  animation, I always think of pulling back a bow string. Like my whole time working in animation was like tightening, tightening, and then all of a sudden I shot into a gallery. Is that what this feels like for you?

HEITZMAN: No, I went too long in that business. I burned myself completely out, and I couldn’t work for a while. I couldn’t really do anything. I took on too much. I couldn’t think funny.

Basically I couldn’t go anywhere unless I pitched something and it sold. I’d directed, I’d produced, I’d co-written things. People expected me to be delivering. Everybody said, “Okay, just bring us a product, and we’ll either do it or not.” I did that for a while, and I just got burned out.

BISKUP: How did you get back?

HEITZMAN: I taught for a while. I thought when I first started teaching that I would have a regular paycheck because I didn’t have one doing those jobs. They were always just up and down. I thought, This will give me some time to think out where I’m at. And it did. 

My whole trajectory with my work outside my art is that I’ll do as best I can until I get really tired of it, and then I’ll just walk away from it completely. This last walk away – which I hope is the last walk away, I hope to just be an artist the rest of my life, that’s what I want to do – I finally got to the point where I walked away from teaching. Even if I do it part-time, my head is going to be so distracted. I can’t make the art I want to make.

When I did that, I looked back and I was like, “God, I’ve had forty-five different careers where I’ve walked away from that career saying, ‘I can’t do this anymore. I have to do my art.’” You were smarter than me.

BISKUP: [laughs]

HEITZMAN: Right after Pee-wee, a lot of people that were close to me decided not to do this anymore. A lot of big artists I knew who were working partially in the industry like you were, they just decided to jettison the whole thing and be artists and make a go of it. I was a little insecure. I felt like I couldn’t.

I know you did what you did, and I have to say to this day, I really admire you for doing it. I admire all my friends who did it because I was insecure and I didn’t do it. And I feel like now I’m doing it.

BISKUP: When I did it, it was far more profitable than animation.

HEITZMAN: That’s the secret I didn’t know.

BISKUP: But only for about four years. And then there’s been fifteen years of barely making it. But having those four years in my head, I know I just gotta survive until there’s another wave. I’ve survived on that idea.

HEITZMAN: You’re good at looking ahead and strategizing. I’ve learned something from you in that world.

BISKUP: I think I really had to break away from the strategic part for a while. That’s what [storefront gallery space] Face Guts was about for me, just seeing how strategic I had been and that it was not working. I had reached a point where I was pushing so hard, and I think I was pretty annoying to most people. I realized that I had to get more loose and play around more and enjoy myself more. Being able to step away from strategy for a while made something energetic that I think was powerful and more true to who I am, so now I can be more strategic again.

HEITZMAN: You have the confidence because you know who you are. I’m a little behind you, but at the same time, I understand. I’m gaining on the confidence side.

BISKUP: I see this work and your last show as such a clear vision of who you are.

I haven’t asked you any of the questions I wrote down!

HEITZMAN: [laughs]

Crumb Hearts: Sonya Sombreuil in conversation with Dan Nadel

Sonya Sombrueil of Come Tees and writer Dan Nadel talk Robert Crumb, Eric Kroll, and watching the dirty old man go from artist to muse.

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Image credit: Eric Kroll

interview by Karly Quadros

For a certain kind of weirdo, R. Crumb is a god. The grandfather of underground comix, his work teems with a highly specific dirty-little-bugger-ness that hit just as 1960s San Francisco counterculture was getting into full swing. He defined a sickly funny visual language that inspired the likes of ‘90s alt comic anti-heroes like Daniel Clowes and Jamie Hewlett as well as painters like Louise Bonnet and Nicole Eisenman. In his cartoons, Crumb depicts himself as a combination of ornery, neurotic, and randy, chasing down (or fleeing in terror from) Catholic schoolgirls with chubby thighs and languorous hippie chicks with their asses hanging out of their bell bottoms. His fetishes are unmistakable; a Crumb girl exists in a category all her own. 

His other character creations share similar cult status. Mr. Natural, a guru with a Santa Claus beard and a priapic nose, was a great dispenser of ‘60s absurdist wisdom, while his relentlessly bootlegged Keep on Truckin’ cartoon fetches prices in the hundreds if you manage to find a vintage t-shirt carrying its image. Perhaps nothing captures Crumb’s signature cocktail of sleazy satire like his comic strip Fritz the Cat about an unrepentantly hedonistic hipster tabby cat. An X-rated film adaptation of the comic strip from cult animator Ralph Bakshi was released in 1972; Crumb was so worked up over creative differences with the filmmakers that he immediately killed off the beloved Fritz, dispatched by a scorned ex-girlfriend who stabbed him in the back of the head with an ice pick.

In recent years, the art world has grown to embrace Crumb’s work a little more. A 1994 documentary by Terry Zweigoff on Crumb brought his work to a larger audience, and he’s now represented by David Zwirner. Crumb’s notebooks, full of obscene jokes and intrusive thoughts, sell for around a million dollars each. On display is his adamant lack of self-censorship but also a technically dense, exuberantly gestural personal style.

Sonya Sombreuil, artist and founder of the LA streetwear brand Come Tees, has found a muse in R. Crumb, inspiring a limited collection of t-shirts, panties, and long sleeves emblazoned with Crumb’s artwork. The collection’s campaign is shot by legendary fetish photographer Eric Kroll who, in addition to his landmark “Sex Objects” series has also shot Robert Mapplethorpe, Grace Jones, Madonna, Kenneth Anger, and Andy Warhol. Sombreuil was joined by Dan Nadel whose biography, Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life, is out April 15. The two discussed Crumb, fetish, photography, and flesh.

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KARLY QUADROS: When did you first encounter Robert Crumb’s work?

SONYA SOMBREUIL: My parents had a TV in their bedroom and underneath their TV there was a dubbed tape that just said CRUMB in big red block letters. As a little kid I was like, oh, that must be for kids. And my dad was like, “Nope, don’t watch that yet.” I grew up immersed in ‘60s, ‘70s counterculture ephemera. So I encountered it really early, and my dad would always get me Crumb for Christmas.

DAN NADEL:  I first found the work because I was at a comic book convention when I was like twelve or thirteen. The dealer asked what I was into and I said “Maus,” so he handed me American Splendor, which had this great Crumb cover and Crumb stories inside. Those were written by Harvey Pekar. They're these amazing tales of working class Cleveland and record collecting and just like quotidian life, and those drawings just totally knocked me out. A year later in a used bookstore, I found a copy of Head Comix. I was with my dad, and he bought it for me. I don't even think he looked inside. That rearranged my head.

It also felt completely normal for some reason. It was very familiar. I knew it was my own little world, but it was completely familiar to me.

SOMBREUIL: It’s funny that he has this corrupting influence.

NADEL: It’s educational, Sonya. How dare you? [laughs]

SOMBREUIL: For me it was! I guess I’m lucky.

NADEL: It’s true.  For a lot of us – I mean, for me – he was part of a gateway to all other art. A real inspiration in that way. It opens up a lot of other interesting doors.

SOMBREUIL: Before I got the subject matter, I knew it was for me.

NADEL: It’s weird when you find things there for you. I felt the same feeling when, like fifteen years later, I first ran across Christopher Forgues and Paper Rad and Fort Thunder. It was like, oh yeah, this was made just for me. It’s a curious thing.

QUADROS: There’s a recognition there. For me, Crumb is the ultimate avatar of the outsider, a helm that was then taken up by the likes of Daniel Clowes and Charles Burns. In the 20th century, there was some edge to the people who embraced or satirized their neurotic preoccupations, but these days it seems like our whole world is ruled by repressed and intrusive thoughts run amok. Is there a danger in identifying too closely with being an outsider?

SOMBREUIL:  No. Crumb’s work, and why it's so important now, is the Charlie Brown phenomenon. Charlie Brown is the anomaly in his universe, but we're all Charlie Brown. And I feel the same way about Crumb's work. It's the recesses of your psyche. That was his content. He portrayed himself as this disgusting, irascible person, but he wasn't lauding those ideas. He was just revealing them. 

I think what's interesting about now is that there's a lot of people feeling offended. But actually, I think that the stigmas that are important to our society are ones that Crumb upheld in this work. And I think some of those stigmas have deteriorated in kind of a messed up way that I'm not sure we've seen the end of. People talk about the idea of decency or something – like obviously his work is indecent, but that's the point.

NADEL:  That's the point. It makes me think of Steve Albini, another avatar of edgelordiness. Before he died, he talked about how he regretted being so edgelordy, that he didn't quite realize that the stuff could be taken the wrong way. But at the same time, he remained this highly moral character with a really strong set of values. And what's so interesting about someone like Crumb is that, yeah, he gave vent to all this misogyny and racism. He also critiqued it, and it was also extremely clear where he stood.

It's still a blinking red warning sign at work. Even though it feels like it's too late for the warnings in some ways, his sense of awareness still feels very important even if we're completely swept up in it, like a tidal wave, swept up in the nastiness. But I think it's still really important. 

The thing about guys like Clowes and or someone like Julie Doucet or Robert, Aline [Kominsky-Crumb, Robert Crumb’s wife who is also a cartoonist], is that no matter where we are, that feeling of being outside is always accompanied by a really deep sense of self-reflection and, in many cases, deep self-loathing that is paired with a real meditative attempt to look inside and understand what it's all about. That, I think, is also a crucial difference between edgelord kinda work because they're really trying to understand. They're not just trying to fuck with you.

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Image credit: Eric Kroll

SOMBREUIL: I’ve been talking about Crumb as a kind of wounded healer. He has these emotional and psychological wounds that he’s vociferous about, and in his own family, [you see] the effect that those wounds could have if they are accompanied by a different set of actions other than artmaking. But paradoxically, he’s healing the society that produces those kinds of wounds. When we shun that kind of work or say it’s a problem, you lose the potential impact of looking at yourself and looking at the world you live in.

NADEL: A s Robert would say, you have to deal with it. He always says “I’m both Mr. Natural and Flakey Foont.” He's the wise man and the fool. As he's gotten older, I think there is this instinct to heal. I think there always was this… wanting to understand and making work that would exercise these demons as much as show them. 

SOMBREUIL:  I heard this expression recently that someone said. They said this is a perverted attempt at healing. And a very literal attempt.

QUADROS: It makes me think a little bit about punk as a subculture. There’s this perverted sense of both reflecting and healing the ills of society. Crumb’s work especially was very integral to developing the aesthetics of punk and zine culture, underground comix.

NADEL: That was one of the fun things about writing this, realizing that influence didn't stop at hippiedom and it didn't stop in comics. One of the things that got me wanting to do it in the first place was knowing that the late Mike Kelley was a huge fan. Punk magazine was in part inspired by Crumb and then made fun of him, in this great judo move. Then people like Mike Kelley or Jim Shaw would take it up and put it through a conceptual blender. 

It just continues to have so many lives right up to the surprise that Sonya was so into it. The surprise that someone outside of my purview would be at all into it and so game was so much fun. It was such a great surprise because you never really know with him. I know that he's not forgotten because there's so much hubbub around the book, but you never know who's reading and who out there that's making art is into his work.

QUADROS: When you were making Come Tees, Sonya, were those some of the aesthetics you were drawing from when you were first beginning that label?

SOMBREUIL: Definitely. He is a looming figure in my personal cosmology.

I realize he’s that for a lot of artists. It’s like being into Jimi Hendrix when you’re into music. But it definitely feels very personal to me, like it’s possible to have a personal relationship with an icon. I tried being various forms of a Crumb girl for Halloween many years in a row. I tried putting cross hatching on my face. Come Tees, especially early Come Tees, had a lot of those qualities, cross hatched figures and speech bubbles, very conventional comic imagery.

NADEL: Did you ever make comics?

SOMBREUIL: I need an artist grant so that I can write my comic. Oh yeah, the least moneyed genre of all time.

NADEL: Maybe it would be worse if you were a poet, but otherwise… [laughs]

SOMBREUIL: In a way I’m a cultural dilettante. Compared to people who are into comic books, I don’t know almost anything. I know Art Spiegelman, the greats, but I’m into them profoundly. I really love the genre that is not fantasy. Did you say the word is prosaic?

NADEL: Nonfiction?

SOMBREUIL: Quotidian.

NADEL: You and me both.

QUADROS: Since you mentioned being a Crumb girl for Halloween, maybe you can talk a bit about the editorial and how you went about trying to capture the essence of the Crumb girl.

SOMBREUIL:  I have been obsessed with Eric Kroll for a few years. I had an amazing epiphany when I actually met him. I thought that I was obsessed with his archive that he posts all the time. But then I realized I was just obsessed with his constant posting, which is similar [to the editorial], totally mundane. No one in my generation could ever post like that. [laughs] It's amazing. He's so funny. I realized that I had misunderstood my interest in him. 

Many years ago, I reached out to him without knowing almost anything about him. I reached out to him to see if he would shoot for me, and he said, “I don't see how I fit into your world.” I was like, maybe we could meet up and talk about it. And he was like, meet me at this diner. But then I realized it was in Tucson. [laughs]

NADEL: Seriously? It was in Tucson?

SOMBREUIL: That’s where he lives! We all flew there.

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NADEL: I always assumed he lived in LA.

SOMBREUIL: I did too. But no, he lives in Tucson.

NADEL: You flew there? Where?

SOMBREUIL: We stayed in a hotel. He offered to put us up, but there’s literally no standing room.  His house was incredible. I had no idea that he had shot the cover of the Zweigoff documentary. He was just like, “Oh yeah, they hated how much I charged them for my Crumb photo.” And I was like, “Oh what was your Crumb photo?” [laughs]

NADEL: That’s incredible.

SOMBREUIL: And then I just have intimate knowledge of what a Crumb girl is.

I had a couple friends who were down, who I knew were like in the archetype. It was an amazing thing because they're artists too. There was this really cool flip where Crumb and Kroll are actually our muses, these two artists who fetishize women.

Everyone knew what the assignment was. We all feel like we gained like a best friend. He just wanted to shoot things on his iPhone. He ended up making all these extravagant requests for different cameras, and I rounded up all of it and then he was like, “I hate these machines!” So he just shot everything with his phone.

NADEL: It’s such an interesting thing, that flip, because I showed Robert the Kroll photos. I explained because he’s still so… Crumb, that he couldn’t get his head around the idea that some young – meaning under the age of 50 – some young artists, particularly young female artists, would be even the slightest bit interested in him. Which, at a certain point, he should get over since young artists of all genders have been interested in him for about sixty years. But I showed him those pictures and he was like, “Oh my God, they really got it. They really understand what it is.”

And he’s self-aware enough to understand that what you got wasn’t just appealing to his kinks, but what you got was a particular way of thinking about the body and of embracing one’s body. I think he even used the term ‘body positivity.’ I was like, “Where did you learn that?” [laughs]

To make somebody like Kroll or Crumb your muses is such a great reversal because it flips the power. And it also lets them relax in a funny sort of way. It’s okay, now somebody else can make the art. There are other people in the game, and that’s good. It’s a good thing that it’s neither slavish imitation nor highfalutin, conceptual stuff. It’s just this other strain. For somebody like Crumb, who’s always been very generous about that, it’s refreshing and cool, especially in this mode, to see your treatment of the graphics. The things you picked were so left field and so interesting. 

It’s just great to have another set of eyes, another mind on this stuff that isn’t usually getting to play with it. Despite how much we love Kroll and Crumb, it’s remained within a fairly circumscribed set of people or a certain aesthetic for decades. It’s so cool to see it broken out of that mode. Nobody else would’ve chosen those images or nobody else would’ve designed things the way you designed them. They’re just completely making it fresh again.

SOMBREUIL:  I rewatched the documentary when you had first contacted me, and I was really moved by it because I felt first of all: the archetype of the outsider, that's still my inner monologue. I resonate with it so much. It's not an adolescent thing. It's eternal. And there's a lot of agony in that. 

It's funny, as a female viewer of his comics, because those comics had his idealized female form and it was like, “Hair? Unimportant. Face? Unimportant. Race? Unimportant. All that matters is they have big muscular thighs.” It felt like it gave me permission. Its soul breaks from the incredibly oppressive standards that are forced upon women. Both angles of it were healing for me. 

I thought a lot about the ways that Kroll and Crumb are the same and the way they're different. The women that they represent, the women in their worlds are almost always playing along on some level. When you think of Aline as a character, she's intelligent and she's bawdy and she is neurotic, and he portrays her so lovingly. It's an important feature in his work. 

NADEL:  I started on the journey of this book seven years ago. I was at an art opening actually. I was at a dinner and I was seated next to this woman named Sarah Lazin, and we got to talking. It turned out that she had moved to San Francisco in the late sixties and went to work for Rolling Stone magazine. She was part of this crew of female editorial workers who banded together in that time to to work together against these, you can imagine, ultimate macho rock assholes of the universe at that time. She's a badass. And she told me, “Crumb gave me permission to feel okay about my body.” And that kind of gave me a way in. Because I then interviewed a lot of women from that era, many of whom said the same thing, that his drawings were the first time that they felt okay about the way they looked.

There's a flip side to that, which can be a little bit like what my friend Naomi texted me the other day. She was joking, but it was partly real. She was like, “Did Crumb used to love bomb?’” There's a little bit of “I understand your body, no one else.”

But if you didn't know him, and you were Sarah, let's say, and it's the era of Twiggy and Peggy Lipton, I think that vision of women was really liberating. Obviously there was a lot about it that was also not so good. But nothing is. We all want things to be black or white, and it's all a big gray. 

SOMBREUIL: But I think the whole point is that women are treated sadistically, and that it’s sympathetic towards them. Like in the same comic I was walking about, he talks about the “sadistic women’s shoe industry.” And he says something like the tragic aspect is that these women have been the subject of ridicule their whole lives and have a negative self-image. It’s so compassionate.

And obviously there’s straight up obscenity, but that’s where humor is involved. Nothing is funny to everybody, and humor depends a little bit on taboos. There’s the funny, fucked up part of it, and then there’s the part of it that I think is incredibly sensitive.

NADEL: I agree. It’s interesting though because, of course, there’s another part of him. There’s a great interview from ‘68 or ‘69 where the interview goes, “You don’t really feel this way about women, do you?” It was about one of the Snatch comics. He says, “Sometimes I hate women.” There is that, that you have to contend with, but it’s part of the package. I guess what I’m saying is that some of it, you can’t even excuse. It’s just gnarly. But it’s part of the greater body of work.

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Image credit: Eric Kroll

SOMBREUIL: You can’t defend it, and I don’t identify with all of it, but I think that the greater effect of it on a person, or at last on myself, was that it’s about objectification itself as a phenomenon. And a lot of it is about how women objectify men.

NADEL: It’s not something that has been written about much actually. It should be more. There’s much more nuance in all that work than he would lead you to believe. He’s often his own worst advocate in that sense.

SOMBREUIL: I think he has said that he doesn’t know where a lot of it comes from.

NADEL: That's right.

SOMBREUIL: It’s like this funny fairytale we have about drugs, that you take them once and you have ego death and then you’re just connected to the collective unconscious. That’s, to me, a funny way of talking about him, but it’s like he connected somewhere to something that’s very dark and twisted and resonant, and he has not taken full responsibility for it in a way that I relate to as an artist.

NADEL: That’s really interesting. There’s no explaining it. Bob Dylan said he didn’t know where the songs came from either. I think it’s the same with Robert. He connected into this larger consciousness, and he stayed with it for a very long time.

He’s still with it. He showed me a comic he’s working on. It’s all about paranoia, and it’s right on the money. It’s so specific to him, but he has this ability to be talking right at the reader, saying things that seem like they’re just the product of his own very particular imagination until you realize he’s talking about all of us, and that we all have this baseline paranoia, or a baseline set of visual cues or languages that we share. Somehow he both keyed into that and then iterated it so that it became his own. It’s highly unusual. You’re right, he doesn’t fully take responsibility for it, and maybe that’s good. Otherwise he’d be a whole other kind of artist. He can’t explain it. He refuses to.

SOMBREUIL: For someone who produced things that piss so many people off, for him to not accept full authorship of it is probably not the best PR.

NADEL: No. Terrible. [laughs]

SOMBREUIL:  But I think what he's saying is very truthful, which is that like he doesn't know where it comes from, and what he is responsible for is his technical ability to relay it. As corny as it is, it's like the artist as a mystic.

QUADROS: In some ways, it makes me think of the word ‘fetish’ and its origins as something religious or mystical, a ‘fetish object.’ It’s not just your kinks, but an object that gains higher meaning, a grander meaning than the sum of its parts. His obsession with it has imbued more inside of it. Not that he’s the first artist to make art about his fetishes, of course.

NADEL: But what he’s doing that’s different is that it’s in comics, so it’s not obscured. It’s so direct because it’s on paper and in a stack of things that you find in the basement or on a tape. The difference between it and, let’s say, Picasso or de Kooning or John Currin making art about their fetishes is that there’s no separation between you and the thing. You don’t have to go anywhere to experience it. The thing that you’re holding is the thing. It becomes a much more direct relationship.

SOMBREUIL: I never thought about that. Like the personability of privacy. It’s like a porno.

NADEL: Totally because you can lay in bed and read it. That was one of the great pleasures of comics in general growing up. It was my own thing. You watch a movie, somebody can walk in. You’re in an art museum or an art gallery, somebody’s going to be on their phone or whatever. But holding that thing… I think that’s one of the reasons why people feel that Crumb is theirs in a way that people don’t normally feel about other artists.

SOMBREUIL: His innovation is another flip, which is that the object of desire is often totally repugnant. You think about a John Currin, and it’s unrelenting. It’s quite sinister.

NADEL: I love those. Not all of them, but I love some of them a lot because they’re so thorough and twisted.

SOMBREUIL: Yeah, but to me the misogyny is much more evident there than in a Crumb comic where everything about it is obscene. Somehow that makes it a little bit easier to understand what he’s talking about. The nuance of it.

NADEL: Painting can be so nuanced, but it exists in a particular structure whereas comics have space to stretch out. And even though it’s maybe a more limited pictorial language with fewer tools – it’s just ink on paper – I think it does allow for a certain amount more nuance, especially in those areas.

[phone chimes]

SOMBREUIL: Would the ‘70s ever have happened if there was an iPhone? Definitely not.

NADEL: No, no. Too much technology in the way.

SOMBREUIL: Kroll was really engrossed in his phone. We were like, “Please use the camera, please.” And he was just like, “That’s not how this works.” But the more I look at the iPhone pics, the more I’m like, they’re incredible.

NADEL: What does he do all day? Does he have an archive?

SOMBREUIL:  He lives in the most incredible temple to erotica and photography in general. There's barely room to snake through all the different rooms. One room is just an island of files where you have to narrowly walk around. It's a relatively small house, but there's photos plastering the ceiling, the bathroom wall. Everything and anything you open up is just filled with photos. He OD'ed on beauty. He just loves photos and women. 

He loves women's clothes. I was thinking about him and Crumb because they both seem to really love dressing women. Crumb informed my personal style so much. I was like, “Yes, this is a flattering way for me to dress.”

When we were hanging out with Kroll, I was like, “Do you think you're just in women's clothes?” And he was like, “I've definitely thought about it.” He has like 10,000 bathing suits. We kept joking about it because he had only so much energy for shooting the photos – at a certain point he was like, “This is boring. I'm gonna take a nap,” – and then the next day he took us thrift shopping, and he had so much energy. He loved taking us shopping.

He’s incredible. Really good company and lovely and not a pervert. You feel comfortable around him. That’s part of his effect.  You feel like you could very easily take off your clothes, but it doesn't actually feel sexy at all. But I think immediately we were all really comfortable with him. But his house is incredible. It's a little bit of a tragedy because I'm not sure that it will ever be adequately archived. He’s a historian of erotica.

In the end, right before we left, he was like, “I have to show you some of the photos. This photographer's really important.” This guy would just go up to women in Washington Square Park and take photos of their hair. He had a hair fetish. I think it was like in the ‘60s. They're all black and white photos, just of someone's bun or someone’s hair as they’re moving by. I think people hated that and yelled at him. I don't think it was common to be photographed then. But they're important because they're anomalous. They're not in any other genre of erotica.

NADEL: I love the idea of those hair pictures. That’s so interesting.

SOMBREUIL: They’re really magical and really weird. They’re somehow about… shyness, like really profound inhibition. Because that’s as far as he could go: snapping a picture of a stranger’s hair.

NADEL: It makes me think of Christina Ramberg. She’s a Chicago painter in the ‘60s and ‘70s who specialized in refashioning women’s bodies but also really focused on hair. There’s also an Italian painter named Dominic Gnoli who did unbelievable paintings of hair. It’s a very particular thing to zoom in on, like with Crumb and shoes. If somebody’s deep into it enough, it’s a whole world basically. It opens up a whole universe of artmaking.

I was talking with Robert about a guy here in New York named J.B. Rund who we’ve all come in contact with in some way because he was an early champion of Eric Stanton. In the ‘70s, he was really responsible for bringing back a lot of the forgotten erotica before Taschen got involved.

It’s not as if there’s much writing about this stuff outside of these particularly obsessed people. And once they’re gone all the information in their heads is gone too. I think about that a lot. It’s not history that’s found its way even into cultural archives. It’s really sixty levels below the subculture. They’re gonna take the information about, like, what guy on 43rd Street sold what magazine to who. All that’s gonna go.

SOMBREUIL: I think there’s a laziness now about these kinds of histories because of the Internet.

Kroll is a national treasure. I think we all were wondering what we were in for, like this could be strange. He’s mercurial and cranky, but he’s also really lovely and sweet. He clearly really loves women.

There’s a lot of these kinds of histories that I wish were recorded. It was a really fun shoot because we got to go from taking photos to just sitting around for an hour while he’s going through boxes and boxes of photos, telling us the stories of everything. It’s interesting because being into erotica puts you super deeply in the margins. He showed us this book of his called the New York Years. It’s photos of Nam June Paik and all his artist friends. Like he wasn’t some obscure, random pornographer.

NADEL: He was around.

SOMBREUIL: I think it’s different now. I don’t think he would be sidelined as much. But that’s also what’s great about the whole precept of underground comics. It’s for the initiate. Even if it’s an enormous audience like with Crumb.

NADEL: It’s for the initiate, but it doesn’t take a password to get in. It’s accessible.

SOMBREUIL: I talk about this because my work is mostly on t-shirts, but you can’t get more democratic than a comic book.

NADEL: And a t-shirt.

SOMBREUIL: My t-shirts are not so democratic, unfortunately.

NADEL: You gotta make a living. That’s why you’re not making comics!

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Suburban Atmospherics: An Interview Of Olivia Erlanger

Olivia Erlanger
Prime Meridien, 2024
Aquaresin, aluminum, LEDs, drivers, cord
59 1/2 x 71 x 36 inches
(151.1 x 180.3 x 91.4 cm)
Image Courtesy of Soft Opening, London. Photo: Daniel Terna

interview by Erik Morse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Olivia Erlanger
Town of Tomorrow, 2025
Graphite on paper
20 x 30 inches (50.8 x 76.2 cm)
© Olivia Erlanger; Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.

Olivia Erlanger
Lux's Room, 2025
Graphite on paper
20 x 30 inches (50.8 x 76.2 cm)
© Olivia Erlanger; Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.

Olivia Erlanger
Laura's Room, 2025
Graphite on paper
20 x 30 inches (50.8 x 76.2 cm)
© Olivia Erlanger; Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.

Olivia Erlanger
Constance's Room, 2025
Graphite on paper
20 x 30 inches (50.8 x 76.2 cm)
© Olivia Erlanger; Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Olivia Erlanger
(detail of) Orange Sky, 2024
Sand, flocking, foam, plaster, acrylic, aluminum, graphite, shoe polish,
LED, plexiglass, driver
50 x 32 x 36 inches
(127 x 81.3 x 91.4 cm)
Image courtesy of CAM Houston. Photo: Sean Fleming

Olivia Erlanger
(detail of) Green Sky, 2024
Balsa wood, resin, snow #15, plaster, foam, acrylic, aluminum, graphite, shoe polish, LED, plexiglass, driver 50 x 32 x 36 inches (127 x 81.3 x 91.4 cm)
Image courtesy of CAM Houston. Photo: Sean Fleming

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Borderlands: An Interview of Hugo Crosthwaite

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

interview by Karly Quadros

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CROSTHWAITE: Yes, exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Picture © Zivanai Matangi

interview by Oliver Kupper

Before judging someone, walk a mile in their shoes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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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? 

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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. 

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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.

Daniel Arsham In Conversation With Andy Warhol Museum Director Patrick Moore

Photographer: Claire Dorn. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin. 

In a globalized world, pop culture transcends dialect to create a language accessible to all. Daniel Arsham’s work taps into this reservoir of collective symbols while cheekily disconnecting them from their cultural niches, sending R2D2 back in time to erode and replacing it with a fresh Venus de Milo. Patrick Moore, the director of the Andy Warhol Museum and an expert judge of the weight our common cultural relics hold, has previously examined Arsham’s work through a lens tinted by Warhol’s campy visual commentary. While Warhol crafted the thrones of monolithic cultural figures, however, Arsham’s work presents the modern deities of culture and especially Americana as decaying relics. Despite this alternative view, his work maintains a celebratory and even reverent attitude toward its subject matter, which has landed him partnerships with Star Wars and Pokémon alongside the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and Perrotin, his gallery of twenty years. This fall, the artist celebrates this two decade partnership with dual exhibitions across Perrotin New York (through October 14) and Paris (through October 7). In honor of this anniversary, Moore and Arsham come together in conversation to explore the bridge between commercialism and fine art where Arsham and Warhol have built their practices.

DANIEL ARSHAM: When I did the press preview in Paris, I was asked what I thought about your essay in comparison to Warhol. Certainly, for me, it's a flattering comparison, but it gets to the heart of people feeling sometimes like what I'm doing is this very novel approach. It's almost like people forgot that Warhol was doing this 40 years ago. I think I told you, Patrick, about the story when I did the first collaboration with Adidas. I was having a conversation with a collector of mine who was like, how are you gonna allow this brand to use your work to sell sneakers? And I said, it's the opposite. I'm using them for their reach and the funding that they're gonna put towards this crazy project that I wanna do. 

PATRICK MOORE: I think that people not only forget about how earth-shattering it was when Warhol was first blurring the lines between the commercial world and the fine art world, but they also forget that Warhol had been largely dismissed at the end of his career. For a large part, I think that there was this backlash at his exploration of the commercial world and of making money as part of his practice. Do you think that still exists in the art world? Or has it become an accepted practice?

ARSHAM: I don't know if it's more accepted, but maybe the artists who are doing it feel more comfortable around it. I'm thinking art of artists like George Condo or Tom Sachs who were already kind of integrating those sorts of elements within their own work, and it didn't matter whether the brand was directly involved with them or not. The context of those brands in their work already existed. So in some cases it's a benefit to maybe have the brand supporting that.

But really, what's the difference between a brand and a collector? The collector is purchasing or supporting. So much of my audience are not the traditional art world audience. And every time that I do an exhibition, when I post about he show, people always ask if they need tickets to come to the gallery. And I'm like, guys, this is the greatest thing ever. You can go to any art gallery and it is 100% free. Here in New York, it's like a huge free museum, and the collectors are the ones who pay for the audience to be able to see it.

MOORE: I was so glad that you and Perrotin asked me to think about this because as I mentioned in the essay, I had been thinking so much about you, and it was really seeing your work in that different setting that you described at Tiffany's in New York that started this. For you, how is it when you walk into that store and you see your work in that context? Does it feel fundamentally different than seeing it in your studio or in the gallery?

ARSHAM: In some ways it feels more natural in that location than seeing it in the gallery. I feel like the gallery, maybe it's a more minimal environment, but it's much more directly about the monetary transaction with the work. And at Tiffany, it's just there for people's pleasure or their inquisitiveness or curiosity. So it was like, the jewelry that was worn in, Breakfast at Tiffany's and other famous pieces that have been worn either in film or on the red carpet and outside of the exhibition. I had done work with Tiffany in the past, and they wanted a large work to be out there to kind of announce what was inside. 

Fractured Idols I , 2023.
Acrylic on canvas. Framed: 91 1/2 x 105 1/2
inch. Photographer: Claire Dorn. Courtesy of
the artist and Perrotin.

MOORE: In my essay about you, I also mentioned this idea of you ruining things to make them more precious or to help us see them new again. What did you think about that idea of ruining things?

ARSHAM: When I first started with that body of work, it was really about this idea of aging them, causing them to appear as if they're from a different era. And so much of the work that I've done from the beginning was always about time dislocation, where we're looking at a painting or an image or a story or a sculpture, and we don't quite know when it is from. Sometimes in the depiction of a painting, we see a landscape and there are these architectural structures within it, but it looks like maybe something ancient or something ultra-futuristic, and we don't really know when we are. And so the idea of decay in the works was really about causing the work to appear as if it's in a state of erosion, like it might be in 10,000 years. And the materiality of it is really important for the further understanding of what the object can be. Like, the crystals tell us something about the idea that a trompe-l’œil version of that would not. Like if I just took a radio, let's say, and I painted it to look old, and maybe the quality of it was sort of visually similar, the knowledge that it's actually made of crystal has this other sort of visceral truth quality about it. It's also very difficult to understand how they're made, which is a magic that I think artists often employ. You just can't understand the object. 

MOORE: When we look at your work, we see an object, but there's actually something that you're hiding underneath that object. In almost everything that you do, it seems like I'm seeing something, but you’re not letting me see what this is really about. 

ARSHAM: I guess that's one way to look at it. The other way is that you're seeing something in the objects, and this is part of the reason why I use things that are very familiar to almost everyone. No matter where they are in the world, it allows them an entrance point into the work. Like, I feel like I know that thing. I'm in. Once you get there, things become more complicated. When is this thing from, why is this wall moving? That use of the everyday object as an entrance point into my work has been consistent and super important for me.

Holiday Inn: Study for Falling Clock, 2023.
Graphite on paper. 10 1/2 x 7 1/4 inch. Graphite
on paper. 8 7/8 x 6 1/8 inch. Photographer:
Guillaume Ziccarelli. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.

MOORE: I want to know a little bit more about how and why you draw. Do you draw every day? Is it a part of your practice every day? Is it something that's associated with projects? 

ARSHAM: It's for different uses. I use it as a way to prepare. I use it as a way to think. Sometimes concentrating on an object or an idea in drawing, when you're not really thinking about language, has a different way of telling you something about it or understanding something about it. And then sometimes drawings are really just like notation. I've been either making drawings in hotels for years. I always take the stationary with me. Some of my favorite ones are like the Holiday Inn from Arkansas or something like that, where it's a really bad graphic. That contrasts with the drawing that I'm doing of an eroded Greek figure or something like that.

MOORE: I had a more glamorous fantasy of you than the Holiday Inn. I was thinking of you in some glamorous hotel in Tokyo at 3:00 AM, jet-lagged out of your mind, like, I'm gonna start drawing. Holiday Inn never occurred to me.

ARSHAM: When I toured with Merce Cunningham, the accommodations were not luxury. It was wherever he could put up the entire dance company. But [in the exhibit] there are drawings from Gritti Palace in Venice or the Amman in Tokyo. It's the whole range.

MOORE: I saw a couple paintings that you were working on in your studio, and I was really, really drawn to them. One thing I was drawn to was the paint itself. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the paint, the matte quality of the paint, the palette that you're working with.

ARSHAM: I'm colorblind, and I think it has always made it very challenging for me to mix and match paint. If I'm working one day, and then I come back the next day, I always found it ultra frustrating to try to remake a color that I had mixed to match something that was already on the canvas. So, I had been working with this company, Golden Paints, to basically make me a complete gradient in the four colors that I wanted to use. They kept sending the sample, and I would say “Add more pigment”. I think that quality that you're describing is this feeling in the paint that it's just so lush and loaded with pigment. It's got like 20 times the amount of pigment that's in a commercial paint.

MOORE: Well, here's a big difference between you and Warhol. I think Andy used the cheapest possible paint he could find (laughs). Let's talk a little bit more about the paintings, because they are such an odd amalgam and it makes them really interesting. What I responded to was this idea of nostalgia and Americana, but I'd love to hear you talk about the paintings and what you were thinking about specifically when you selected those objects, those scenes that you create.

ARSHAM: I had been working for the past couple of years with the Pokémon Company in Japan, and I made a number of sculptures based on some of the Pokémon characters. And we also worked on an animation together that I insisted was hand-drawn. I did a couple paintings at the time that were like a single cell study. This exhibition has a number of works in it that use that anime or manga-type language in them. I'm mocking up most of my paintings from multiple different images–I'm basically doing a collage in Photoshop, and then I'm using that as a reference for the painting. So I'm throwing in references to old Air Jordan ads or vintage Porsche ads. There's cars in them, there's sneakers, there's the BMX bike from the movie ET. And it's all of these Easter eggs that encompass my world. And in the exhibition there, those works also exist in sculpture. So you might see like an R2D2 in a painting in silhouette. And then in the show you're seeing the actual sculpture of it. 

MOORE: Star Wars is a particular focus right now. Was that like a touchstone for you growing up? Does it have a kind of magic resonance for you?

ARSHAM: It's really one of the first movies that I can remember seeing in the cinema with my family. I was probably five, I guess it would've been Empire Strikes Back, and kind of just like something that was always been around. When I was a kid and I would stay home sick from school, there was a VHS that my father had recorded, one of the Star Wars, but he had recorded it from television, so it had all the commercials in it out as well. And so up until I was in high school, I'd be watching commercials from like the eighties mixed in with Star Wars. I wish I still had that VHS ‘cause it probably encompasses like everything that I'm interested in. You know, today I cook advertisements, um, you know, a Super Bowl commercial or like n b a playoffs and the Nike ad and you know, car ad and then Star Wars in between.

MOORE: Star Wars is so fascinating. Business is so much a part of your work – how do you go about working with a franchise like that? How does something like that happen?

ARSHAM: I had been speaking with some people from Lucasfilm in advance of the project in Monaco with Louis Hamilton. George Lucas is a huge F1 fan, and I think he'd been to every Monaco Grand Prix since the seventies. And he was there at the event with his wife [Mellody Hobson], and she says to me, I think we own some of your work. I was like, what? George Lucas has some of my work in his house? What is this? And so I'm like, which work is it? Like, where did you get it from? And she's like, Usher gave it to us as a gift. It was a work from about 15 years ago, a 35 millimeter movie camera that I had cast in volcanic ash. I don't think she knew who the artist was or anything, she just recognized it because of the similarity with the work that I had done for Louis. And so I told her, “by the way, I'm speaking with Lucasfilm about this thing.” And she connected me with the right people. And that's sort of how it came about.

MOORE: Well, it was meant to be then.

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Daniel Arsham 20 Years will be on view at Perrotin New York until October 14, and Perrotin Paris until October 7.

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R2 - D2TM: Quartz CrystallizedFigure , 2023.
Quartz, Selenite, Hydrostone. 48 x 42 1/16 x
42 1/16 inch. Photographer: Guillaume
Ziccarelli. Courtesy Perrotin. © & TM
Lucasfilm Ltd. © 2023 Daniel Arsham, Inc.

A Family Gallery: An Interview Of Sow and Tailor's Karen Galloway

text by Oliver Misraje
portrait by Enio Hernandez

Important things to note about Karen Galloway in no particular order:  Karen is an Aries-Taurus cusp, the name of her gallery, Sow and Tailor, is a zeugma for the space’s origins as a sweatshop in South Central Los Angeles, and, if given the choice of which animal she’d be reincarnated into, she’d choose a cat (her husband and frequent collaborator Greg Ito says he’d be a beaver). 

Sow and Tailor is situated next to a tunnel, under a freeway on Grand Street.  It has elements reminiscent of the urban fantasy genre: It’s a tiny, practically invisible nook, that intermittently  lights up with art and its patrons, both from the neighboring community and art world Westsiders willing to venture east of Western Avenue. Karen’s description of Sow and Tailor as her “little speakeasy” is apt. Greg Ito, has a studio conjoined to the building next door. Their physical proximity reflects a professional dynamic shared between the two: they work and live together, often advising one another, while still possessing firm boundaries between her work and his practice. 

But the naming is more than just a play on words, Sow and Tailor is an ethos firmly posited in nurturing— both as an abstract, moral concept, and a practical strategy towards community and its cultivation.  Take, for example, the gallery’s  trajectory— Karen was seven months pregnant with her daughter Spring when she decided to quit her job as a producer for a notoriously exploitative fast-fashion company: “I had been on set for a shoot with a high-profile rapper since 6 am, while obviously pregnant. I was in pain and still expected to perform manual labor. There was this total disregard for my condition, and after being asked to stay past 2 am, I decided I had enough.” The conception of both her daughter and her gallery were unintentionally, yet symbolically in conjunction with one-another. Karen gave birth to Spring on February 2nd, 2021. Two  months later, Sow and Tailor opened its doors for its inaugural show, Hot Concrete: L.A. Arrangement.

Although initially an outsider to the art-world, Karen credits her mother with nurturing a passion for curation: “I grew up in Pasadena. We were always ballin’ on a budget, but she was a patron for all things culture, especially free, public events, whether that be classical music concerts or Shakespeare in the park. Our mailboxes were constantly stuffed with mail from museums’ or other public works, she knew how to scout out an event.” 

Jaime Muñoz installation

This is all to say Sow and Tailor, as Karen puts it, is “a family affair”, more explicitly expressed in their last show Friends and Family 23’, curated by her nephew, Cairo Pertum.  Karen tells me the concept for the gallery was inspired by Japanese bonsai trees, which translated, means “planted in a container”. At the heart of Sow and Tailor is the question: how can the limitations of physical space help cultivate a flourishing tree? A concept, carried out magnificently, in the ways the gallery, despite its nook-like arrangement, manages to feel more cavernous than its 700 square footing. 

Since its humble beginnings, Sow and Tailor has rapidly cemented itself as a hotspot for emerging artists, receiving institutional recognition usually reserved for legacy galleries—Sow and Tailor is one of the youngest galleries to be accepted into the Armory Collection. But as the gallery continues to grow, its ethos remains firmly planted. Instagram clout doesn’t operate as a currency here, with many of the featured artists being fresh in the embryonic stages of their career. Karen, afterall, is a risk-taker. It takes a certain gusto to abandon your comfy, if ennui-ridden life as a producer to enter the gallery game, just as it takes a bravado to invest in young artists who’ve yet to establish a name for themselves.  

Karen and her gallery tend to keep a busy docket, starting with a solo show featuring the works of Kayla Witt from February 11th until March 25th. Sow and Tailor has also been invited to host a solo presentation of Veronica Fernandez at Frieze LA next week, along with a group booth at Felix, featuring both new and old faces. The gallery will also be holding an off-site curation at the Soho House in West Hollywood for Black History Month, highlighting L.A.’s legacy of African American art.

While the accomplishments, past and future, of Sow and Tailor reflect its growing branches, the roots remain firmly planted. 

Karen Galloway and Greg Ito’s daughter Spring

Casper Brindle: Light, Glyphs and Portals To New And Strange Sensations

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Casper Brindle portrait by Brent Broza, courtesy William Turner Gallery

interview by Oliver Kupper

In Los Angeles, light is often louder than the din of traffic, the sound of crashing waves, or the Santa Ana winds zephyrously careening through the palms. It is prismatic, a mystical hue of blue and amber—a reoccurring character in the cinematic vista of every tragically beautiful sunset. Artist Casper Brindle, who was born in Toronto in 1968 and moved to Los Angeles in 1974, captures this unique, transcendental illumination with his three-dimensional translucent boxes and paintings on linen. With his exhibition Light | Glyphs, which includes two new bodies of work that are on view now at William Turner Gallery in Santa Monica, Brindle has used a colloidal amalgam of acrylic and automotive paint to create supernatural keyholes into a dreamlike cosmos that harken lowriders, the abstracted horizons of Georgia O’Keefe’s Southwestern paradise, and the lush optical decadences of Light and Space artists before him, like Helen Pashgian or Larry Bell. Gradations of color take the viewer on a hallucinatory journey inward, guided by meditative symmetry. Brindle’s acrylic boxes are electric without a source of electricity; a fog of hot pink and cerulean matter—a single blade of an alternate color scheme slices a perfect, spiritual and monolithic wound through the center, like a beaming chakra glowing at the moment of enlightenment.  What comes through is the rage of Lucio Fontana and the Jungian expressionism of Rothko’s color-fields, creating a distinctly California chill, a first-gear zen that drifts upwards like the curl of wild smoke into an id-like eureka of strange new sensations. We got a change to speak with Brindle on the occasion of his exhibition.

OLIVER KUPPER You grew up in Southern California, when did you first make the connection between Los Angeles’ unique atmosphere, and culture, to fine art?

CASPER BRINDLE I was in my early teens when I went to an exhibition at the Temporary Contemporary, now MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary.  It was a show comprised by the pioneers of the light and space movement. I can’t recall the title of the show but I can recall walking down a hallway with tubes of light (which I assume was Robert Irwin) my eyes fluttered with excitement and my ears perked up to listen intently as mysterious sounds were played in different areas of the hallway making you look all around to see where the sounds were coming from. Directing you to look at different parts of the installation at precise times, comprised a detailed sensory experience. I remember connecting strongly with the experience of the exhibition and it opened my mind to what art could be. 

KUPPER Why do you think the light and atmospheric energy of Los Angeles has inspired so many artists working in LA—can this atmosphere only be defined or interpreted through the mysterious language of art—not only fine art, but also movies?

BRINDLE I think there’s something freeing about working in Los Angeles. Maybe it’s the light, the weather, or the vast beauty or the combination. I think atmosphere has a great effect on your physiological preferences. I am attracted to bright, vivid colors. My color palette is like those of a traditional woven Mexican blanket! On the other hand, if it was raining and gray every day, I’m not so sure my choices would be the same or my disposition would be as light. 

KUPPER Can this atmosphere only be defined or interpreted through art?

BRINDLE I think it could be defined as an experience also, living here in real time. A walk on the beach at sunset as a candy-colored low rider drives by with the smell of tanning lotion and indica tickling the senses.  It is all part of the cultural atmosphere that is LA.  

KUPPER What about car culture has inspired you so much—because car culture is synonymous with Los Angeles and there is a deep connection between your work and the Finish Fetishists?

BRINDLE I’m fascinated with materials, and the captivating effects different ones can have. I love the dynamic colors of the automotive paints that I use in so much of my work. The way the pearls and flakes of color refract under heavy clear coats of resin is mesmerizing to me. They have this chameleon-like quality, where the colors shift and change as one views them from different perspectives.

KUPPER You apprenticed with artist Eric Orr, what do you think is the greatest lesson you learned as an artist under his tutelage?

BRINDLE To take your profession seriously and to enjoy the experience of making art. 

KUPPER Your work is definitely connected to the Light and Space—as well as the Finish Fetish movement—but you are removed by a few generations and you have worked within your own genre. If you were to invent a name for that genre, what would it be?

BRINDLE I’m taking suggestions, any thoughts? Seriously though, the artists who we think of as “Light & Space” artists, often had strikingly different styles and approaches, but we think of them together because they all began to do something rather extraordinary—they began to think of their work less as “art objects” and more as a “catalyst” for heightening our perception of the space around us, space that is very often defined by light. 

So, while my work is also unique to my sensibility, it is also very much about engaging the viewer and leading them to a moment of heightened awareness, reflection, and curiosity about what we’re perceiving—all of those things that nature also inspires in us.

KUPPER Your new show exhibits two new bodies of work, Light-Glyphs, which appear almost sculptural, and Portal-Glyphs, which are painted on canvas. How do you think your work has evolved with these two new bodies of work?

BRINDLE They are a slight departure from my past work but they live in the same vein and are all part of the same trajectory over time. The Portal-Glyphs are painted using automotive paint on flat surfaces. With the Light-Glyphs, I’m now creating sculptural vessels for light to become a big part of the medium that interacts with the work internally. Light is a crucial component of the Light-Glyphs, more so than the paintings. 

The new medium allows me to create more depth and use light not only for the surfaces of the paintings but use the space to allow a more dynamic effect. 

KUPPER Can you talk about the colors you use—what comes first: the shape or the colors? 

BRINDLE The shape usually is determined before I start a work. When I’m starting a painting, I like to surround myself with as many colors as possible so I can grab the colors needed as the painting progresses.  Stopping and trying to find a color stops my flow. When the paint is right in front of me it doesn’t obstruct my flow and I can instinctively add and subtract as needed. I use a variety of colors and brands, and like mixing the paint colors, with their pearls and flakes. 

KUPPER What are you hoping to emote with your use of colors—is there a psychological significance to the colors used?

BRINDLE I’m inspired by the infinite variety of color in nature, especially how different densities of atmosphere, diffuse light into a vast spectrum of colors and moods. As I’ve evolved as an artist, painting has become more instinctual for me and they often seem to paint themselves. The choice of colors is also personal and intuitive, sort of an ebb and flow. Hopefully the work evokes an emotion in the viewer, but that’s not a premeditated objective. The works are usually created in a meditative state and hopefully that translates to the viewer. However, I would never ask, or tell, the viewer how to experience my work—it’s always an individual experience. 

KUPPER Can you talk a little bit about the relationship between the art and the viewer—what do you hope occurs through this connection?

BRINDLE I would hope the viewer has some sort of response to the work—that they might have some sort of moment of communion, if not captivation, where they slow down and take in the beauty and preciousness of a moment.  Like I mentioned above, I have no specific agenda for how one views and reacts to my work—but do hope that it does touch, move or inspire some of them. 

 KUPPER Is there a tension between the painting and the three-dimensional works?

BRINDLE I don’t feel there is tension between the paintings and the sculptural work. They’re from the same family but speak through different mediums. The mediums are different so the process is different. The paintings are very intimate and happen with fast decisions. With the wall sculptures, (the Light-Glyphs), the intimate thoughts happen before the construction even begins - and then the logical, problem solving happens as the idea takes form. 

KUPPER Does Los Angeles still inspire you?

BRINDLE It does, and as with most things, some days more than others.

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CASPER BRINDLE LIGHT | GLYPHS WILL BE ON VIEW UNTIL NOVEMBER 5, 2021 at WILLIAM TURNER GALLERY, 2525 Michigan Ave. E-1 Santa Monica, 90404

Omer Arbel and Kulapat Yantrasast Dream Of Biological Concrete

The Vancouver-based designer and founder of Bocci, and LA-based Thai starchitect discuss the violence of architecture, sustainability and evolving in the age of material technology. 

Kulapat Yantrasast: Are you focusing on more installations these days?

 Omer Arbel: I love lighting, but in addition to an installation-based practice, where we do one-offs and very, very large monstrous, gigantic works that mostly have to do with light, I have returned to the architectural practice after a ten-year hiatus. What I am trying to do is cross all the disciplines and knit together a way of working where it doesn’t matter if it’s a commercial item, or a one-off, or a piece of architecture. There is a philosophy that unites all the work. And that is the idea, that a material and its intrinsic properties, chemistry, the mechanics and the physics of a material, are the generating impetus for form.

Yantrasast: So, a form flows from material kind of thing?  

Arbel: No, I just kind of tease or encourage the materials to get formed.  

Yantrasast: Isn’t that what Louis Kahn says, “You say to a brick, 'What do you want, brick?’”

Arbel: Yeah, exactly, but it’s already a brick. But we have to take a step back and think about clay. Or I try to find this transformation on a molecular level, and then try to see if I could allow that transformation to express...  

Yantrasast: Kind of like cooking almost? 

Arbel: Yes, exactly. I am very comfortable with that. Like cooking.  

Yantrasast: So, is concrete a protein?  

Arbel: I read the other day that concrete is the most abundant material on the planet other than water. That is kind of depressing. I have always loved concrete, concrete is the most amazing material, but it’s problematic because it produces almost ten percent of the carbon in the atmosphere. We should all stop using it, we should stop building things out of concrete, but my love for it is too great to stop.  

Yantrasast: Concrete needs a new binding agent.

Arbel: The only thing evil about it is cement. We just need to find replacements for cement. And there are, there are all these companies now using other kinds of binders. I even heard the other day that there is a biological one, like a bacteria, that replaces the cement. Imagine, so your concrete is kind of alive, you have to feed it, water it. (laughs)  

 Yantrasast: Yeah, like some kind of mushroom.

Arbel: It’s super great. We’ll see, but yes, I love concrete. I am finding ways to work with it differently. I have always been depressed by the fact that concrete’s liquidity or plasticity is not expressed in most constructions that you see. Everything is rectangular, and I think that’s dishonest in the highest order to the material’s nature, on the one hand, but also super wasteful, and expensive. So, we have worked with four or five different ways of trying to do that, developing a method of forming that allows the concrete to sort of express itself. And I want to keep going, especially with this whole idea of thinking of it as an animal instead of a liquid stone, a living organism in some sense. Then, what are the formal implications of that?

Yantrasast: It is a very classic ingredient, from Roman times even, but we haven’t evolved much from that in an age when you are 3D-printing buildings. When I saw your house, you seem to long for concrete to collaborate better with other materials. Can you talk about that?

 Arbel: So, the starting point, called 75, is this idea of trying to develop another way of forming concrete. And the thought we had was to pour it into fabrics instead of a wood framework, because fabrics stretch, and it responds to the weight of the material. In the experiments we also discovered that just naturally, because of the way a fabric stretches, it swells in exactly the places that you need it to be thicker from a structural perspective. So there is kind of an intrinsic efficiency. We developed a series of, what we call, the lily pads or the reverse trumpet forms. It is essentially a series of geotextiles, which is a woven tarp stretched between plywood ribs. Everything is organized in a radial pattern that flute up, in some instances as high as 30 ft. tall. Our approach to that architecture is to think of it almost as if they were found objects. As if I had arrived at the site and discovered these ruins of archeological remains that are sort of aggressive.   

Yantrasast: Yeah, in the last ten years, you know, people have dealt with quite a bit of that, because at the end of the day, you need a cavity, and you need the concrete to define that cavity. 

Arbel: The house is on an agricultural field. I was always moved by this Edward Hopper painting, where the field came right up to the edge of the house. So, we thought of the agricultural field almost as if it were a carpet draped over this archeological site.   

Yantrasast: You are known as a lighting designer. Is light material, and if so, what is the DNA of light?

 Arbel: This is a theme that I keep returning to, which is the idea of thickening an atmosphere. When you go to Mexico City, or a city that is very polluted, you see that the sunbeams have to go through so much particulate on the way to your eye. It’s depressing, but it’s also the most beautiful thing, and it captures the nuance of light and texture. And I think that is something I try to do in the architectural projects, but also in my lighting practice. And in the installation work, is this idea of thickening the atmosphere, almost thinking of light as if it were liquid, and trying to place many things in its way. I was thinking of the rooms as if there were giant sponges sucking in light as if it were a liquid. That might come from a childhood spent in the desert environment, where sun was abundant and syrupy, not like here where it is very crisp, a much dustier sort of light.   

Yantrasast: I remember a long time ago, I took Toyo Ito, who is a good friend and someone I admire, I met him in Japan, but we went to Thailand together, he loved Thailand. He was so fascinated by Thai rivers. In Japan, the water is so clear, almost like sake, and maybe because it’s a mountainous country,  the river is flowing quite fast to go to the ocean. Whereas in Thailand it is almost like a very thick soup. It is kind of an alluvial plain and we don’t have a lot of mountains. The water is flowing very slowly to the ocean. Because of the soil and everything, it is very brownish, sticky. And, he was blown away by the fact that even water is so different. Even though his work was sort of all about transparency and clarity, he liked that water can thicken. That also makes us human, that makes us more organic. Of course, you are making something very humane, something that people can live in.

Arbel: Because architecture is violent, I think, when it’s good architecture it has a kind of violence to it.  

Yantrasast: Yeah. 

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Arbel: And to start to think of the idea of domesticity, or even the idea of coziness. These things are at odds with the violence of architecture. The best architecture is able to make the violence comfortable. 

Yantrasast: I thought a lot about that too, which comes back to the subject of order and chaos. I think the art of architecture needs to have a sense of clarity. It is monumental, it is inhumane in scale, and it has to be a manifesto of something that is not alive itself, even though it grew out of life. It has to be surreal. Look at the results of modernism, whether it is Chandigarh or Brasilia. Like you say, it is so violent, it is so out of human sentiment and logic that it’s hostile.  

Arbel: Yes.  

Yantrasast: What are some of your design principles? 

Arbel: It has been to find form in an intrinsic material quality. Like you mentioned, you can 3D print with concrete, you can 3D print with anything. It is true that in the next decade, or next two decades, we will be at a point where anything that can be imagined we will be able to create and produce in perfect fidelity, printed in any kind of material. So, imagine a world where we can make anything. What is worthwhile? What should we make? It becomes a really hard problem and so, for me, the forms on some level are born of a very specific chemical reaction, or mechanical action.

Yantrasast: So, let’s talk about sustainability. It’s a big word. 

Arbel: Yeah, there are two ways to talk about it. One thing that I think about is if we have buildings, or objects, that have a cultural relevance, that are purely made to delight people, then it is less likely to be demolished or replaced. That is the most basic sustainability principle for architecture. The second thing is the trench warfare of being involved in making anything where you have to constantly be aware. I love concrete so much but learned that concrete is just this toxic and evil material that is dumping all this carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. What is the answer? Stop using concrete? No, you need to find ways to work with concrete, find out who is working with new kinds of concrete. We did an analysis on the fabric forming method and found that there is forty percent less embodied energy in these forms. Because fabric is just easier to stretch than wood would be to nail together. Way less materials, they are not thrown away after.  

Yantrasast: I think, when you look at the history of concrete, people were actually efficient before. If you look at someone like Anton García-Abril, who made that chapel, he put the hay in there and he put the concrete over the hay and when it was done he sent a cow to eat the hay. A lot of this really depends on these specific locations. But I love your idea of how we evolve in the age of material technology. What about your new space in Berlin? Is it like a showroom?  

Arbel: No, it’s like an old foundry. It’s enormous; it’s like five buildings. We have been active in Berlin for eight years and at the moment we occupy a courthouse. It was a derelict courthouse when we found it; 150 years old. It has been renovated and it has been, up to now, our showroom where we have been able to exhibit things. I was always thinking of it more as a library for old ideas. All our experiments end up there. We generally don’t respond to opportunities, we just produce work. And then when opportunities come we sort of match the idea to the opportunity. It served as an archive of ideas, and also as a laboratory to explore new pieces before they were ready. 

Yantrasast: Most of the objects are being made in Vancouver?  

Arbel: Yes, everything is made in Vancouver. We have a few small collaborations with glass shops in the Czech Republic, the bohemian glass region of the Czech republic. But most of the work is made in our studio. 

Yantrasast: We just announced a very big opera house in Russia, in which we have a big glass chandelier. I do like the idea of how light is not explored enough in architectural thinking. It’s always an afterthought. I was reading a book this morning about the Light and Space artists in LA. You have someone like James Turrell, you have Peter Alexander, and you have the Venice School. It did not talk about the theory; it did not talk about the execution of it. So, how has the art of Light and Space, which is so prominent in Southern California, never penetrated beyond the surface? A lot of people are now bringing music, bringing colors, and perceptions, and smells, into this fundamental art form. And I feel like that is fundamental, it is architecture. I want light to come in and, like you mentioned, the space would be like a sponge. And how is this sponge absorbing light, not just passively reacting to it? It feels like the art form of the future. Any thoughts on that?   

Arbel: It just sounds great. (laughs)

Yantrasast: Because as an architect you make space, you make objects and material. But as a lighting designer you create objects that illuminate.

Arbel: An object occupies the space. It perhaps has architectural ramifications, but in general is surrounded by empty space. But as an architect you create the outlines of the empty space. So it’s kind of the opposite approach. And I always think that architects make great sculptors or industrial designers but it does not really work the other way around. Industrial designers do a terrible, terrible job when they try to make space. And I think it is because you can’t think of a building as just a big object.

Yantrasast: Yeah, you are absolutely right. Even someone like Sottsass, who had really set a strong language, but when I see some of his houses, I’m like, “Hmmm.” But I think, as you say, this art of space and form as an architect, in a way, we are making space, but we are also making form. The Europeans tend to be better at space because they don’t have a lot of forms to build. The whole thing was already built. The Asians tend to be more form-based because there are a lot of places to build. There is almost a kind of dichotomy. But, more and more, people find difficulty with space, space is not real for most people anymore, because of digital media. Now you zoom in, you zoom out on the computer, and the scale of it is completely odd. You can’t put yourself into it. It is troubling in a sense, but it also gives you a sense of freedom.

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This interview was published in Autre’s Spring/Summer 2020 “Edge Of Chaos” issue. Omer Arbel will present a new solo exhibition of architectural works in progress at Aedes Architekturforum in Berlin. From 28th August until 22nd October, 2020, the show 75, 86, 91, 94 will document a series of major innovations within Arbel’s ongoing experimental practice. Kulapat Yantrasast is a founding partner and Creative Director of wHY. He and his team are working on multiple current projects.

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A Conversation Between Maurizio Cattelan and Sasha Grey

SASHA GREY I first met you on a desert island in the Mediterranean where cell phones only worked at any one of the three restaurants on the island, and the group we were with did everything together. There was no daily plan, we followed only the rhythm of the island, and the house we were in (yours) was minimal to the bone. No Internet, no TV, no modern distractions and the common area was outside, or on the stairs leading to the kitchen. A few friends seemed assaulted by the setup. I guess you could call it a tech detox; it was like hitting a reset button. It really forced people to socialize in a way that used to be normal, only a decade ago. Do you see this as a social experiment?

MAURIZIO CATTELAN Yes. I arrived in Filicudi 30 years ago. There were only donkeys back then, on the island. There was no water, electricity, phone lines or cars. Things started improving 15 years ago when water and electricity finally arrived. This made a huge impact. The island though, was resistant to change. Cellphone reception is still sparse and not easily accessible. Every summer, I wonder why I itch to go back. The sea is all there is. There are no attractions and only a handful of local restaurants and bars. There is no structure on this island. It is deserted and very quiet. The silence is what I like. It slows everything down. It helps me pay attention to the little things. Simplicity runs this island. It sends me back to my childhood, when everything was new and amazing. 

SASHA GREY You left instagram with a final post encouraging people to create something wonderful outside of social media. Much of what you do is a satirical statement to get people to think and reflect, and we are all aware that social media is not always the best tool for that. Did you feel you had a responsibility to step away?

MAURIZIO CATTELAN I started "The Single Post Instagram" page to feature a new story every day, keeping it to just one post on my feed at all times. I don't like the idea of saving posts. It is distracting and it makes me feel vulnerable. I was active for a year and a half. It was not easy but it was fun. I enjoyed engagement through my captions and photos. It was great until I stopped learning from it. That was my end. I prefer to fill my existential anxiety with other things like meeting friends, reading, working and visiting galleries. At this point, I would rather sit and watch a construction site. It is more exciting to me than scrolling through Instagram.

SASHA GREY That being said, Toilet Paper, the magazine you co-founded does have a social media presence and it undoubtedly feels like you. How closely does the Toilet Paper crew work together on each issue? 

MAURIZIO CATTELAN Toilet Paper is my extended family. The magazine is a collaboration with Pierpaolo Ferrari and a very large number of people with many different skill sets. We never know what we are getting into. It is always a surprise. We are like parasites, hunting for anything we can suck on with nothing precise in mind. It is truly magic. 

SASHA GREY Economics have always dictated art in one way or another, and tend to follow class structures. What advice would you give to young artists that don’t come from the top of the hierarchy who struggle with equal representation within these social structures, especially when many young artists struggle to pay the rent?

MAURIZIO CATTELAN I came late into the art world. I had many jobs that taught me how to survive. I had no experience or professional training. It is all about believing in yourself, working and obsessively learning. Do what pleases you and stick to it. My advice is to be humble and generous with your ideas. There is something to learn from everyone/everything. Go out and see as many shows of all types. Good luck will come to you if you are good-hearted and positive. Lastly, never make the same mistake twice, make it five of six times...just to be certain.

SASHA GREY How do you deal with doubt?

MAURIZIO CATTELAN I doubt myself all the time. I consider it a friend of mine. It grounds me and I question myself a lot. In the end, I always go with my gut. I move forward even when I feel like I am skating on thin ice. I have come to find: the thinner the ice, the less I doubt myself.

SASHA GREY Of course, we'd like to know the physical and conceptual process of how “Comedian” came into existence on a wall at Art Basel Miami. I heard that it was something that you have been thinking about for a while, but was installing the sculpture at the fair or using fresh produce impromptu?  

MAURIZIO CATTELAN Up until a certain point. My first attempt was with an eggplant. As you know, it did not work out. This piece took a year. It became an obsession. I produced many replicas, out of different materials. Nothing captures the essence of a banana like a real banana. It’s easier to forge money, I promise you. 

SASHA GREY Were you surprised by the frenzy or do you consider the frenzy part of the art? Is there a relational aesthetic component to the sculpture?  

MAURIZIO CATTELAN  Once a piece is presented, the artist is no longer in charge. It has to talk directly to the public. It has to charm and defend itself. Sometimes there are events that make a piece more interesting. “America” is the perfect example. A fully functional toilet made out of 18-karat solid gold. It attracted thousands of visitors at the Guggenheim and it made an appearance at the White House. It was last seen at the Blenheim Palace, stolen on the opening night of my show. Sort of like an unwritten surreal heist movie.

 SASHA GREY The banana is rife with a lot of symbolism, is there a sociopolitical undertone to sculpture?

MAURIZIO CATTELAN All ideologies have symbols. An elephant, a donkey, a hammer and sickle…. Perhaps it is now time for the banana to find its own republic.

SASHA GREY Someone ate the sculpture as part of a "performance," the gallery seemed visibly upset by this, but were you? 

MAURIZIO CATTELAN No, not at all. It was the right time. The banana was going bad and needed to be replaced.

SASHA GREY What are your feelings about art fairs? 

MAURIZIO CATTELAN Unless to be killed, never take a cow to the slaughter house.

SASHA GREY Autre's new issue deals with some of the prevalent themes of the past decade including the magnified impact of influence in the digital age—whether that's social influence or political influence—how do you think this has affected art and the way that artists approach their work, whether personally or in general?  

MAURIZIO CATTELAN I always wonder what the Renaissance would have been like with the existence of Photoshop and social media. Would The Pieta and Mona Lisa be the same pieces we know today? Each age has its own tools and obsessions. The success of an artist used to be validated by gallery shows and museum appearances. Today the most interesting artists engage directly with the audience. Like selfie-driven installations. Things that are easy to post and understand. Readily available to fill the growing demand of content for the media. I think aesthetics play a huge role when it comes to art. Like any successful model, it’s important to be photogenic, attractive and easily reproducible.

Click here to purchase this interview in print! Comes with a special peel-able banana sticker.

Rebel Debutante: An Interview of Chelsea Mak On Her New Collection Inspired By The Sunlit Sexuality Of Los Angeles

Chelsea Mak is very much a Los Angeles clothing label. It is imbued with the intricate contradictions of a city that is impossible to replicate: diverse and homogeneous, rebellious and formal, old and new money. It’s a city with invasive palm trees and an image invented by outsiders; a glamour perpetrated by movies and popular songs. But only a native Angeleno could dream up a clothing label that plays with these stereotypes. Last week, Chelsea Mak premiered a video, entitled Lost Spirit, for the new SS20 collection at Zebulon in Los Angeles. Inspired by a gorgeously composed song by Paul Dally, and based on the mood of the collection, the video is an idiosyncratic 8mm love letter to a city permanently bathed in a kind of blurring, dissociative sunlight that shines over crystalline swimming pools and wide lane boulevards. We got a chance to ask Chelsea a few questions about her new collection and label. 

 Autre: What was the impetus for starting the Chelsea Mak label?

Chelsea Mak: It was the need for creative expression and having my own voice.  It was honestly also the result of a mental breakdown. I was at a point in my life when I was being pulled into all these different directions professionally and personally that resulted in me hitting the life-reset button hard. I didn't know why at the moment, but there was something 'missing' in my life, and I guess it was this.

Autre: What did you do before fashion?

Mak: I always did fashion!  I had a small stint in fashion PR before doing design, but for the most part I was a designer. I spent the most formative years of my career at Band of Outsiders with Scott Sternberg, who very much shaped who I am as a designer.  I also designed for other LA brands, like Current Elliott, Raquel Allegra and Entireworld before Chelsea Mak.

Autre: Chelsea Mak has really interesting silhouettes in its collections - pattern-wise, how would you define the look of the brand?

Mak: Forgiving and versatile.  So much of womenswear out there is so overtly sexy and form fitting, nipped, tucked and uptight. Or it goes the other way and you're wearing a sack.  The silhouettes speak to the brand’s message, which says you can be elegant/cool, revealing/tasteful, laid back/proper all at the same time.

 Autre: Can you describe the inspiration or mood behind the new collection?

Mak: I was inspired by a few different things, in no particular order: Los Angeles, Sarah Morris’ film 'Abu Dhabi', the 80s, sex, spirituality, and Joel Chen of JF Chen's Instagram.

Because the brand is based here I really wanted to tie the collection back to LA.  I always get such a sense of Los Angeles when driving through Hancock Park and that sorta led me into an obsession with the community and houses there. 

I also watched this amazing film by Sarah Morris called 'Abu Dhabi' while visiting White Cube gallery in Hong Kong last fall. It's very political and I am in no way inspired by that, but the colors in the film are amazing.  There's a lot of driving through the arid deserts of Abu Dhabi - dusty blues, sand tones, the ocean, and then pops of bright colors from commercialism. That piece very much informed the color palette of the collection.

The 80's — I'm always inspired by the 80's. I like to describe the brand’s muse as if Norma Kamali skipped cotillion and went to a punk show. Then the next day had to have dim sum with her godfather before going to an internship in her 80's power suit.

Sex / Spirituality – Everyone seems to be really into spirituality right now — seeking higher meanings, deeper connectivity, finding self.  Maybe it’s LA, or maybe it’s just me, but this year has involved a lot of diving in and doing work on myself. I feel like I've only scratched the surface.  Spirituality, love, sex, self is all one for me.

Autre: You utilize some really interesting fabrics, where do you go to source the materials for your collections? 

Mak: Most of the collection is made from deadstock silks that I find in the local fabric markets in Shanghai.  No one uses silk taffeta and silk shantung nowadays because it seems so dated and old lady but I'm very drawn to it.

Autre: The video you made for the new collection is fantastic, it’s a paean to Los Angeles but also to Hancock Park - is it the architecture, the beauty, the people?

 Mak: Yes! The architecture. I follow JF Chen's Instagram who is a family friend on Instagram and he's always posting these amazing homes in Hancock Park while he goes on neighborhood strolls. Something stuck to me and inspired me.  Also low key obsessed with the people — I'm not sure it's kosher to say I'm obsessed with the Hassidic Jewish community but I'm just fascinated because it's a community I'm not apart of. It feels secret and mystical.

Autre: You mentioned that each piece in the collection is named after a street in Hancock Park. 

Mak: Yes! Each piece is named after a street in Hancock Park. I always name my styles something funny. Last season all the pieces were named after famous Chinese movie stars from the 80's.  It's whatever I want to tie the collection back to.

Autre: The song in the video is great, was it composed exclusively for the video?

Mak: Yes, 'Lost Spirit' was written and composed by Paul Dally exclusively for the collection.  I discovered Paul Dally through Reverberation Radio earlier this year and listened to his album New American on repeat during the inception of this season.  It's very somber and heart wrenching and spoke to me so much, so that I knew I needed to get in touch with the artist and see if he would do a piece together.  

Autre: How did you and Paul Dally communicate the mood for the video? 

Mak: After a brief intro via DM on Instagram, I emailed Paul with the mood board and described this 'journey' I was feeling for the muse, which was the search for love through spirituality. But in doing so, ultimately surrendering and finding herself.  I wanted the song and the film to feel like an emotional wash more than anything and I was really specific about that.

There was a sense of simpatico right off the bat.  He asked me a bunch of questions in return but before I got a chance to answer them he sent a song over and it really hit the nail on the head. The first song he sent me was a 'go’ and the only big edit we really did was to make it more upbeat for the film so the viewer wouldn’t get too sad.  The original edit is pretty melancholy.

Autre: You are a native Angeleno, how does the city reflect in the label?

Mak: I grew up in San Marino, a stone’s throw from LA proper with landmarks like the Huntington Library and the Norton Simon Museum in my backyard so there’s that sort of Old LA, old world, buttoned up style that you can really feel in Chelsea Mak.

My mom and I were in this mother/daughter organization called National Charity League. It’s funny because while this meant we had “made it” into this part of Pasadena society, we were still one of the two Chinese American families and we were very much outsiders. I remember almost missing my debutante tea because I got too stoned the night before and slept in at my boyfriend’s house.  My parents had sent my best friend (one of the cinematographers of “‘Lost Spirit’) to get me the morning of. I remember her speeding down the 110 freeway to get me to the Biltmore Hotel downtown. It’s not a proud moment but informs this rebel debutante vibe that’s very brand, that and being Chinese.

I’m also always super inspired by how all the kids dress at shows like at the Echoplex or warehouse parties when I used to go to them.  And all the skaters you see on the Eastside, maybe more influential in attitude than anything. So there’s really a lot of LA in a lot of different ways.

Autre: Who are some of your ultimate style icons? 

Oh man, this is hard.  Sometimes I wish I could dress more like a man than a woman — Pablo Picasso, Bernard Sumner in the 80s, all the ladies who lunch.

Autre: What kind of advice would you give to young designers starting out in a rapidly evolving retail economy?

Mak: I think the advice I would give is...be authentic to your vision, stay humble and don't be afraid to ask for help.   No matter how much you think you know or think you can do yourself, there's always someone else with more experience, connections or even just more time.  And when it's your turn don't forget to pay it forward.

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Soft Power: An Interview Of Nathaniel Mary Quinn

text and interview by Adam Lehrer
portrait by Kyle Dorosz

In the late artist Mike Kelley’s 1993 essay on visualizations of Freud’s “uncanny,” a term referring to the feeling of confronting something simultaneously alien and yet familiar, he connected manifestations of the sensation to memory. “This sensation is tied to the act of remembering,” wrote Kelley. But Kelley also made the claim that the uncanny sensation is typically one of dread or muted horror. And to be sure, many of the art works that Kelley wrote about in regards to the uncanny and showed in the exhibition he curated based on his text; Hans Bellmer’s anatomical dolls, Cindy Sherman’s photographs of fetish dolls (partially influenced by Bellmer’s constructions), Ron Mueck’s hyper-realist figurative sculpture of a teenage girl in a black swimsuit, etc; are connected by horror. But is it possible for an object, or an art object more specifically, to evoke the uncanny in a positive light? Can an uncanny artwork actually uplift the viewer or make him/her aware of his/her alterity and connection to the universe at the same time? Historically, I would have said no. But that was before I came to know and love the work of New York-based artist Nathaniel Mary Quinn.

Quinn’s work, renderings of bold and psychologically dense painted and drawn portraits, often look like collages upon one-dimensional viewing. Quinn depicts the human face with a network of symbols that often illustrate the humanities and complexities of his subjects infinitely more than a realistic rendering of facial attributes ever could. It is upon closer inspection that these fragmented faces are actually created with oil and pastel paint applied through a highly skillful technique of using certain oils to prevent the component parts of the portrait from bleeding into one another. The result is a very peculiarly uncanny image.

From one perspective, the fragmentations and symbolizations of human faces can feel strange and disorienting. But Quinn’s work is also deeply humanitarian. He himself has lived an incredibly painful life, having lost his mother and been abandoned by his father at a young age, and has emerged at the other end as one of the most important artists of his generation. It’s not that his work suggests anything close to the neoliberal dictum of “pick yourself up by your bootstraps,” on the contrary, it suggests that all humans are connected by our traumas, our sadness, and our pain. But this notion in Quinn’s work isn’t horrific in the sense that the uncanny is usually understood to be. Going back to Kelley’s essay, Quinn’s work does evoke troubling memories but it also addresses the fact that we all are haunted by uncomfortable memories and finds beauty in the universal nature of trauma. Quinn’s work is an uncanny that makes you feel more connected to the world than isolated from it. Perhaps this emotional resonance is what has pushed Quinn’s work beyond the confines of art world insularity and into the spotlight of mass recognition and, evidently, major collector interest. “Even when people look at something that might be alien to them, or even disgusting, abject, uncomfortable to look at,” says Quinn. “They know they are looking at something with a real emotional resonance to it.”

When I last spent time with Quinn in 2017, he was on the cusp of major art world success. And now, after having been signed to Gagosian Gallery in April and about to be the subject of his first Gagosian solo show in Beverly Hills, that success has undeniably arrived. Over the last two years, Quinn has been pushing his practice deeper into an inner psychological space. The work that will be on display at Gagosian plumbs the depths of his psyche. More and more, his work seeks to render his own insecurities and difficult remembrances. The kernels of self-doubt that are omnipresent but often left unspoken are filtered into Quinn’s pictorial space. The aesthetic of the works that will be shown at Gagosian hue closer to abstraction than works made by Quinn in the past, generating a space of empathy and consciousness raising for both artist and viewer alike. “What does it look like to make a work that renders an insecurity?” asks Quinn. “I would say this: empathy and vulnerability are tools in my practice as important as charcoal and pastels. This is what I’m pursuing.” 

Quinn’s first Gagosian solo show, Hollow and Cut, will feature thirty-six works ranging from 16x13 inches to 96x48 inches. Talking to Quinn by telephone, he is equally excited and restless. This is a monumental point in his career: his first solo show with the world’s most profitable gallery.  He understands what the weight of a show at Gagosian, a gallery subject to praise and criticism in equal measure, holds for his future. But he also is filled with an immense sense of pride, and he has earned it: Quinn has emerged as one of the most important contemporary painters in the world. “You want to make sure you come out strong,” he says of the impending opening. “But you can't think about the public when making your work. Your concern has to be your practice and creating.”

ADAM LEHRER: So, last time we were together you were on the cusp of success. Now you're on your first solo show with Gagosian.

NATHANIEL MARY QUINN: The good thing about Gagosian is you can create the bedrock of a career that you want. They have the resources to materialize that for you. Larry, c’mon man, he has relationships with all the museums, the directors, even if they have somewhat of a...

LEHRER: Weary relationship...

QUINN: Yeah, they have to deal with him. He's like the emperor. Gagosian generates up to a billion dollars every year in art sales. David Zwirner is number two and they earn 500 million dollars. I was in a different place the last time we met, I was growing. Now, here we are again, man, with Gagosian Gallery. I can't believe it.

View fullsize

NATHANIEL MARY QUINN
C'mo' And Walk With Me, 2019
Black charcoal, gouache, soft pastel, oil pastel on Coventry Vellum Paper
50 x 38 inches / 127 x 96.5 cm
© Nathaniel Mary Quinn
Photo: Rob McKeever
Courtesy Gagosian

LEHRER: What is the psychological impact of knowing that you are at the top of the art world food chain, so to speak? Is it pressure-inducing or is it freeing to know that so many more people are going to be seeing your work?

QUINN:It is freeing on one hand because of the gallery’s resources. As of five years ago, I had to pack all my own work. I remember [my wife] Donna and I used to ship it all out ourselves. We don't do that shit anymore. That's exciting.

In regards to the pressure, I think it would be fair to say that I feel some pressure. Any time you're making art in the public sphere it will present some pressure. If you're the kind of artist like myself, engaged in the exploration of the self, or finding ways to lay your wounds and memories bare and trying to make that visual, it presents pressure. But that is then coupled with the fact that it's Gagosian Gallery! Now, there are collectors interested in the work for any number of reasons. You start to think, “What would happen if someone finally places my work on public auction?" But you can't worry about it. Some collector is always going to be seduced by the alluring nature of generating a large profit off the work.

With that, I'll tell you, I'm very excited. For me, it's a big deal man. I think it's quite an achievement.

LEHRER: I'm psyched for you. Given these last few years, your work has obviously evolved a bit. What would you say distinguishes the works in this show compared to works of the past?

QUINN: This [show] is very personal. It’s called Hollow and Cut. When you remove whatever you've been taught to believe in, when you have cut and hollowed out all the exterior layers, what remains? This show is a courageous pursuit of excavating my internal self. I have deeply rooted insecurities. I don't talk about it much, but I don't feel worthy sometimes. These works are reflections of my fears and doubts. I did a piece called “How Come Not Me.” It's a small work on paper. When I was in high school, we had a thing called Parents’ Weekend. At that point my family was gone from my life. And I'd think "How Come Not me?” Until this day I struggle with that.

These ideas, these insecurities about my life or my looks, are tied into the actual creation of the work. I'm constantly pushing my practice. For this show I knew that I had to move to that next level in my work, so I used a more abstract approach. Even doing that was very challenging because you go through high school, college, grad school and you are making art the whole way through and then you find yourself making art a certain kind of way. That doesn't mean the work you are making is a real reflection or what you can do; it just means you've been trained or conditioned to make art in a certain way. But to make work that is closer to where you are emotionally in and of itself requires a lot of courage and doggedness. You have to go for it. l. 

LEHRER: Yes, this reminds me of that quote by the great pessimist philosopher Emil Cioran "Chaos is rejecting all you have learned. Chaos is being yourself." In a sense you are tapping into this inner turmoil, or chaos, to boldly visualize your psyche, and push yourself further into the art making process.

QUINN: Yes, that’s perfectly placed. For example, normally in my work I would draw an eye, or a nose would represent a nose, but if I'm trying to articulate these deeply embedded insecurities within me, my fears and my doubts and a sense of unworthiness, then what I am trying to articulate is not actually definitive. It's not a real figure. It's an affectation. How do you visualize that? I'm not saying I achieved that in the show, but I've made progress from work one to work thirty-five. By the time I got to the 35th work, it began to take on the kind of abstraction I had been aiming for. It feels much more palpable to me, much more honest, much more real. Much more free. Most people don't want to be free. They want to comply. And fall in line. Freedom requires real courage. You have to fight to be free.

LEHRER: Despite the often uncanny aesthetic in your work, you have broken out to a mass audience. What do you think it is that enables people who aren’t so versed in the avant-garde to connect with your work?

QUINN: Let’s go to Beyoncé. I love Beyoncé. She makes great songs. She’s a superstar. We all know this. Then you got Mary J. Blige and she can't sing anywhere near as well as Beyoncé. And, although she can't sing that well, she's good! She's not Beyoncé, or Aretha, but what she does is real. Potent. Visceral. You know what she's saying and how she's saying it is honest and pure. But when you present something real, people believe it. 

LEHRER: Is this bravery, this courage to find freedom, something you are constantly looking for in art across all media?

QUINN: I think it's important to understand that you can't grasp the scope of humanity within one tradition of art. You have to look at all of it: comedy, film, poetry, reading essays and books. Public speaking. Not just art but all forms of work and all traditions of creation must be dealt with and confronted or perused at the very least. So I'll look at a Dave Chapelle; this guy works very hard to be free. Because this guy's fighting for his right to speak his mind as a comedian, his first job is to be funny. And in addition to being funny, he's a cultural critic. He observes the culture, and criticizes it, and tries to portray it in a different light. 

I look at the works of artists like Yue Minjun, Adrian Gheni, or Neo Rauch because they have a certain freedom in their work. So many artists are afraid to confront who they are. They continue to feel empty in the face of their achievements. Why is that? [Art] isn’t just technique, skill and rendering, it is an activity in which empathy and vulnerability are necessities. I'm not just moving the needle in my work; I'm moving the needle in me. I'm not a walking Instagram page. I'm not putting up a highlight reel. This is real life. No one is happy all the time. It's impossible. I want to use the work to push back on this era’s values. An era where people are ashamed to be real. 

LEHRER: In your portraits you often shun direct representations in favor of symbolic representations. But these symbols seem to illustrate the depths of you and your subjects’ complexities infinitely more than a direct rendering of physical attributes ever could. Your ability to use symbols to pierce the symbolic order and address the... 

QUINN: Make no mistake, I like to think that every artwork I make has some representational element. But there's still evidence [in this show] of me taking that courageous step forward to push beyond traditional forms of representation. We should shoot for a higher ground. A higher level. The first comedians would walk down the street and slip on a banana peel, and that was funny. That's surface comedy. But deep human comedy is where the fragility of men and women are brought to the surface. That's deep comedy, the kind that Dave Chapelle engages in. That Pryor engaged in. I wanted to make art like that.

Nathaniel Mary Quinn “Hollow And Cut” will be on view until October 19, 2019 at Gagosian Beverly Hills. 456 North Camden Drive Beverly Hills, ca 90210

View fullsize

NATHANIEL MARY QUINN
Jekyll and Hyde, 2019
Oil paint, paint stick, gouache, soft pastel on linen canvas, diptych
14 x 22 inches
35.6 x 55.9 cm
© Nathaniel Mary Quinn
Photo: Rob McKeever
Courtesy Gagosian

Unearthing Embedded Knowledge: An Interview Of Rosha Yaghmai On The Occasion Of Her Exhibition At The Wattis Institute

interview by Summer Bowie
photographs by Oliver Kupper

Walking into Rosha Yaghmai’s studio is a little bit like walking into the laboratory of a junkyard hoarder/mad scientist. There’s a distinctly pleasant organization to the vast collection of Los Angeles detritus that extends from the studio to the backlot outside. The walls are plastered with images from torn magazine pages, postcards, posters, watercolors and collage works. It’s as though you could hold a microscope to any detail in the room and discover a tiny world within. This is especially the case when viewing the centerpiece of her upcoming exhibition Miraclegrow at the Wattis Institute in San Francisco. In the center of the room sits a giant sculpture of a human hair. Pubic? Maybe. This mysterious hair sits on a floor which acts as a pedestal of giant, reflective bathroom tiles. Encapsulating this familiar scene, the walls are covered in large black tiles, effectively wall works that appear to drip with the glistening traces of warm condensation. The hair itself is a sedimentary composite of industrial materials, cleaning products, bathroom products, nail polish, and so much more. Layers and layers of genetic material soaked in personal history. I had the chance to sit down with Yaghmai just a few days before the works made their way up to San Francisco to talk about her upbringing as a tinkering, junk-collecting Angeleno, her work and its relationship to personal heritage, and how she so compellingly defines the cosmic in the microcosmic.

SUMMER BOWIE: I want to start by just talking about your beginning. I understand that you started as a photographer and then transitioned into sculpture. What kind of photography were you making, and why did you lose interest in it?

ROSHA YAGHMAI: I started off making photographs really young. In the sixth and seventh grade. I was really interested in taking photographs. Really quickly, when I went to photo school, I spent most of my time trying to use the chemicals to do things you aren’t supposed to do. So, I never was making straight photographs. I was always altering the image, adding weird color.... I was trying to make the photographs more like paintings, but I think I was just trying to make sculpture. I would combine Xerox’s so there was this approximation of the real that I was really interested in, which seems like a natural link between photography and sculpture. I eventually started making fake diorama-like environments with the photographs, so again, pushing into sculpture. I was at SVA in New York at the time and I ended up transferring to CalArts. As soon as I got into the desert landscape, photography was gone, and I started making sculpture. I haven’t made photographs for a long time.

BOWIE: That is interesting because you often hear of artists coming to LA, discovering its unique light and then naturally pushing into photography.

YAGHMAI: I am also from here, so it was less about that, I just wanted to create environments when I moved here.

BOWIE: The work you presented at Made in L.A., Slide Samples (Lures, Myths) includes projected slides from photographs your father took when he first emigrated to California from Iran. Have you always wanted to work with these images, or did the urge come to you recently?

YAGHMAI: They’ve always been around our house. We had this one print, and I thought it was just an eighties photo, and I didn’t think much about it. My father was interested in photography and that’s how I got into photography. I had all his cameras. etc. and I saw those slides and started making slides, but nothing like that. They [the slides] have always been lingering for years. I finally just asked him about them. I knew he had made them in Berkeley. I knew he used abstract color, they were trying to be psychedelic because of the timing, 1969-72. When I asked him about it, just the process of his thinking, it was very similar to how I was making resin that I was calling slides. He was taking hunks of glass from the Coca Cola Company in Oakland and using different sources of light and filters (light from the television, etc.) to make reflective surfaces. I thought it was an interesting, strange way to connect with a new culture but also realizing there were some similar physical properties with my work: the resin, using lenses and different filters. I think up until the Hammer most of the work that I have made was some sort of screen or a way to alter a site and I linked it with that work once I knew he had made it.

BOWIE: You were born right around the time that the Shah of Iran was overthrown.

RY: He [my father] emigrated here in the mid-60’s and my parents got married and they moved to Iran... and I was actually conceived in Iran and we lived there...then the revolution broke out and we came back to the United States...and I was born.

BOWIE: Growing up in Los Angeles, what was it like being in the wake of these events as a first-generation Iranian-American?

YAGHMAI: I think my dad was so involved with being an American person that we never really talked about that stuff... I didn’t really understand until later but I feel like...I am realizing...how in much of my work there is a subconscious draw to that...or a feeling of wanting to traverse long distances, or different perspectives comes into the work. I am so disconnected from that part of my lineage, and I could ask my family, read more about it, and I do; but, I feel like I am in the process of unearthing some embedded knowledge and I think the misunderstanding and not knowing is really generative for me.

BOWIE: That makes sense. Maybe your dad was seeing America through a lens that is slowly revealing itself to you.

YAGHMAI: He only went back to Iran maybe five or six years ago, maybe because it was so awful and painful. It never really came up.

BOWIE: You said once that you take pleasure in the sort-of trashiness of LA. What aspects of that trashiness appeal to you most?

YAGHMAI: I don’t know if it just being that I am a beach-desert person, and there’s moments in that hair that are in this zone. You know, like a piece of glittering trash like in a desert landscape. Just these little moments of collage really interest me. But in terms of trashiness, I really thrive and enjoy a casual environment. I don’t know if trashiness is the right word, but I feel like (it’s not this way anymore) the feeling of complete freedom here. But now it is not quite like that. I grew up between Alta Dena and by the beach, we would just ride our bikes out, and go to the junkyard and find weird stuff, and my grandfather was a bit of a hoarder and a handyman type. We would just be tinkering. I think that is it. Thrift store shopping and finding some weird historical gem. I also have a real interest in outsider architecture.

BOWIE: I can see the psychedelic influence of your father’s work with those weird remnants of Americana that seem to litter the streets and the junkyards that used to exist. Santa Monica and Venice were very different places back then.

YAGHMAI: It was so wild there when I was growing up and trashy. It was great! The beach towns were abandoned—it was a bunch of old people and skaters. Weird remnants. It was magical, I feel lucky I grew up here during that time.

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“I am realizing how much, basically, “dusk” is my color palette. That is where the light and space of California comes into my work. It is “dusk” but it is city dusk; that moment when the sky has that color and there is the neon turning on. That in-between time...”

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BOWIE: You use a lot of found materials, industrial metals, liquids, resins, do you have any favorites or least favorites?

YAGHMAI: They are all a pain (sighs). I definitely do like working with materials that are liquid to solid. In terms of favorite, detrimental to my market, I just move through and use what I want. I don’t really have the usual approach. So, this show has a completely different approach than the one at the Hammer. I do like working with transparency, like this super clear, very toxic resin. My work relates to light and space because of my history and the physical properties of the work (color and all that), but I feel like for me it is much more about collaging. So, if you have one thing that’s transparent, you're altering what you see behind it, and for me that altering and blending of sight is really important. I also really like using silicone, the type of silicone you make prosthetics out of. Platinum silicon. And that has a translucent quality too but I like using that material as an approximation or stand in for the body, clear resin and that are the two things I go back to.

BOWIE: Your work has a quality about it that invites viewers to temporarily enter a foreign world and quietly meditate there for a moment. Is this an experience you look for when viewing the work of other artists?

YAGHMAI: I think you always fantasize that you make different art. I like going into a full on crazy installation...just something that looks like a playground. So, I am not always drawn to a contemplative space... I think that in my work that kind of emerges because up until very recently I was very stubborn about (sternly, “I make objects, I want to make objects”). Yet, it is teetering on installation because these objects when in relation to one another create this sort of psychological environment and their relation to each other creates an oddity you want to linger with. I feel like this show is the first time in a while that I am making an environment. I mean each object in the show... like the floor is the pedestal for the hair and the panels are paintings and they can be separated so they are still existing as objects kind of coming together for this moment but they are not props and still are works of art, or sculptures. I really think a lot about putting things together that are a bit perplexing or strange that makes one want to linger a bit and figure it out. I think that may be the color palette. I am realizing how much, basically, “dusk” is my color palette. That is where the light and space of California comes into my work. It is “dusk” but it is city dusk; that moment when the sky has that color and there is the neon turning on. That in-between time... which I think is a very contemplative time, when you are driving around that time.

BOWIE:  Always in LA... I think you said that your color choices are kind of the most intuitive part of the process...

YAGHMAI: I made this whole series of silicones for this show in Germany and I realized they are all colors from my childhood wetsuits that were around. It just emerges, oh, of course, that’s why I’m doing that.

BOWIE: In this show, you said you wanted to create an environment that takes on a spider's perspective on the floor of a bathroom. What inspired this particular perspective?

YAGHMAI: I was really torn about what to do for this show. I feel like the Hammer project was sort of the end to a couple years of thinking. So I felt a bit stuck, to be honest, and I was trying to figure out what the next step was. I knew I wanted to make an environment. I was super frustrated, came home to the studio, threw down my jumpsuit, and I noticed (I hate spiders. Sorry, I’m trying to change my perspective on that) a spider trying to crawl into it, so I snatched it away. And the spider kind of stopped, and I was just watching, and thought, “what the hell does that thing think just happened?” So, I had this moment where I thought, if I am trying to make work that alters perspective in a very physical, literal embodied way, why wouldn’t the next step be to try to empathize and project myself into something of which I could never understand what their perspective would be. In terms of psychedelic properties, I think that’s the most honest way to go about it. I just wanted to physically remake it, but in a skewed way.

BOWIE: Has it changed your feelings towards spiders at all?

YAGHMAI: My husband got me this Louise Bourgeois book, and so obviously, she has those big spider sculptures, and she talks about them as a symbol of renewal. So, I’m trying to get into a Louise Bourgeois way of thinking about it, rather than just thinking about them crawling on me at night. So, I think I can empathize with them a little bit more. How scary must it be? I just wanted to make a direct approach to the show.

BOWIE:  There are so many materials that went into that hair sculpture. It has this sort of sedimentary value to it...can you just talk for a moment about the different materials that you used in creating it?

YAGHMAI: I mean... it is the hardest sculpture I ever made, not in a physical way, but just that you’re really fighting the form. Not to be too literal, but your hair is a shedding of some kind of skin, and I knew I wanted to cast my body and incorporate it into the work. Almost like it is carved out of some kind of stone, or I wanted to make it seem like something that happened or something that is really forced. You don’t work on growing your hair, it just happens, but if you think about all the energies that go into making it... I used a lot of materials that I’ve used before, like limestone, graphite, household plastics like shampoo bottles, laundry soap, and shopping bags. I melted those down and put them in. It’s almost like coral where it absorbs anything that is in the environment...I was thinking about that with all the chemicals in the body and how they can all be traced in a single hair. And also, thinking back to my father and my parents, and just thinking about what you absorb in your DNA, what is trapped in there, trapped knowledge that I don’t know about. I wanted to have this sort of spacey, geological tone and I was looking at images of the sand dunes on Mars, which is basically the whole brochure for the show, which is a reach, but it’s cosmic level shit. You know, like you’re sitting here and now our molecules will be tangled forever. Things that are blowing my mind. For me it is kind of fake because it is cast and modified material, but I was trying to be really genuine and putting together a lot of stuff that I’m around on the regular.

BOWIE: There seems a deep desire to capture moments or feelings in your work; to encapsulate and oppose the forces of entropy. Would you agree with that interpretation?

YAGHMAI: I think so...there is so much in my work that is the familiar becoming foreign, and so there's this flip all the time of something so familiar (that maybe you take for granted) turning on you. I feel just that awkwardness—making you aware of your existence, of your body interacting with the object.

BOWIE: You have referred to the desire to freeze time, but is that something you feel like you want to do permanently or temporarily, and if so, for how long, what is that desire to hold things in space?

YAGHMAI: I mean, that’s sculpture. If I had one power, it would be to stop time. You know when you play that game. Just slowing down the process and pointing to that one thing and using force to stop that moment or those moments and to have it on display. Not that my work is usually that figurative, but to slow it down. Having a one-on-one relationship between the object and the viewer.

Rosha Yaghmai's exhibition Miraclegrow opens on January 15th and runs until March 30th at The Wattis Institute. 360 Kansas St, San Francisco, CA 94103

Rough Cuts: An Interview Of Chuck Arnoldi On The Occasion Of His Show At Desert Center Los Angeles

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Some interesting facts about leopards: they are solitary animals that hunt in open terrains, they are difficult to track in the wild, they are extremely adaptable to new environments, and they often leave claw marks on trees to mark their territory. In Chuck Arnoldi’s expansive Venice Beach studio, a dusty, taxidermied leopard is perched, mid-roar, above the kitchen alcove. There is something strangely symbolic about this once ferocious, now inert genus of panthera.  Arnoldi is not a hunter, but he is quick to note that this leopard is one of the best examples of taxidermy in the world. Among the Cool School cohort of artists, like Ed Ruscha, Billy Al Bengston, and Larry Bell, Arnoldi may be the lesser known, but he may also be the most prolific. His chainsaw sculptures – which can be quickly described as chunks of painted wood with blade marks slashed into them – are his most well known, his Girl From Ipanema. They are dangerous and allude to his misfit youth. These hyper-mystical geometries can also be seen in his Machu Picchu paintings, which mimic the mysterious architecture of the ancient Incan citadel. Arnoldi’s latest show at Desert Center, entitled Rough Cuts, includes a number of recent chainsaw paintings made in and around the Yukon. A day after the Woolsey Fire broke out and threatened the artist’s home in Malibu, we sat down at his studio for a chat.

OLIVER KUPPER: First off, I want to talk about the fire because it came very close to your property in Malibu, what did you do to fight off the fires? 

CHUCK ARNOLDI:  We weren’t going to leave because I have so much art in the house--I have a little Warhol I got for nothing...that is worth two million dollars, you know. We felt comfortable, because the house is quite high up there. We knew if the fire came, we could always go to the beach. If you go up to our roof, you could see the stuff coming. They looked like atom bombs, flames a hundred feet tall. I didn’t think my house was going to burn. I took the Calder and the Warhol...I got a lot of stuff, about a hundred-fifty pieces of art at least in the house. I took it all outside and put it in different places. It took me 25,000 steps to take it out and 25,000 steps back to take it back.

KUPPER: The fires tune in to your work in a way, because some of your most well known works deal with using discarded materials or recycled materials, like your stick paintings, which came from a burned down orchard, can you talk a little bit about that?

ARNOLDI: I had an artist friend from Malibu and he told me one day, there is an orchard...and it had oranges and avocados and he told me to go steal some fruit. It was his special little thing…he’s an odd guy. So we were out there stealing oranges and avocados. The perimeter had all these leaves that had burned off, and they looked like charcoal lines. I thought those are beautiful, so I took my sticks back to the studio. The first piece I made, I took four sticks and tied them together at the end and I put two nails and hung it on the wall. It’s really about something being the sum of its parts, gravity.

KUPPER: Is it true that some of your stick paintings have come from your childhood home in Ohio?

ARNOLDI: No, but you see those thorns up on the wall? When I was a little kid growing up, those were from a tree in Ohio. So I made those paintings from thorns. I’ve been avoiding Ohio like the plague. I have a very dysfunctional, bad family. 

KUPPER: What was it like growing up there?

ARNOLDI: Most of my buddies are dead, a lot of them went to prison. I was just in a bad place. I had no art history at all in my childhood. I have an uncle who was a portrait painter, he wore a beret and had a little painting studio. I used to go there and I really liked the smell of oil painting. He was my only exposure to art and at one point I got a modeling job at an art institute. I was broke and they would pay me to pose. One of the directors convinced me to take my clothes off and then he wanted me to get a hard on. This fucking guy, I’d like to meet him today. No fucking way.  

When I was a kid, I made tree houses and forts and if I saw a Tarzan movie, I would make bows and arrows and spears. As I got older I got involved with cars. When I graduated, a teacher told me, “You are the most talented with the least amount of vision of anyone I have ever met,” and it made me feel terrible.... See, when I was growing up, I got attention for doing stuff, I was really good with my hands.

KUPPER: Seems like the whole Venice School came from places like Dayton, the mythical American city, what was it about LA that was such a beacon for you guys? 

ARNOLDI: I was a senior in high school and I had gotten in a little bit of trouble, they were gonna put me in a foster home. My father was living in Southern California with this woman he ran away with and he flew me out to California. I had never seen a freeway. It blew my mind. When I got back to Dayton I wanted to move to California. After I graduated high school, my mother had about six dollars and twenty-eight cents, so she gave me that and I left with four buddies of mine. I had a ‘55 Chevy with a ‘53 engine. We were terrible thieves.

KUPPER: When did you get serious about art?

ARNOLD: While in Los Angeles, it was time for me to go to school. I drove out to Ventura and I chickened out, I just couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t even go to an art history course. It was way over my head. I would just go to the art classes, ceramics for instance. The guy who ran the art department, Mr. Deets, saw my work and he came to see me and said, “You know son, since Picasso, everything is bullshit. You need to be an illustrator. I can make you one if you do what I tell you.” I could draw perfectly. I had the skills.

KUPPER: How did your later experiences at Art Center influence your perspective?

ARNOLDI: I’d be doing a painting and the guy would come and go, “That’s done.” To me, it wasn’t finished, but to them I was ruining it. They would take your work away from you. In painting class the first thing they taught you is that you have to wear a tie and how to wear it so you don’t paint on it. This was all bullshit to me. I’m sitting there thinking this is fucked and I quit.

KUPPER: You seem like a bit of a daredevil – can you talk about your chainsaw sculptures, because those sort of put you on the map in a way?

ARNOLDI: I just liked the way it looked. But one little slip and it’s really bad. I’ve been doing the Machu Picchu thing...these multi-paneled paintings. But the chainsaw sculptures were just one of those things that was on my mind. I don’t like to make sculptures because they are bulky. But these sort of made sense.

KUPPER: Some of the work at your current show was made in the Yukon?

ARNOLDI:  I went up there not expecting to make work, but I was sort of coaxed into it. The guy who owned the property has a gold mine. He asked if we wanted to get to work, so we go down to a river to find some wood. There were these two rough kids – one of them had recently slit a wolf’s neck that tried to attack him. So we are up there and they start to cut down some trees for me to make a sculpture. One kid said, “What do you want me to do?” I tell him to cut five slabs off and to get me some kind of platform. I said, “Kid, you’re good with the chainsaw. I’ll draw the line. You want you to give me this much of an angle.” (makes the vroom, vroom, vroom sound of a chainsaw) I look over and the other kid wants to do it too (vroom...vroom...vroom). We worked for two hours and made a few pieces. By the end, we made nine... and the new chainsaw pieces were painted in red, black and yellow. When I used to make the old chainsaw paintings, there would be splinters all over, so I would torch them away. I went and bought a serious blowtorch and all the kids were so excited.  The kids cut trees down like crazy, and never thought of doing anything beyond that. I bet that within a year these kids would be making furniture and shit out of logs.

OK: Your upcoming show at Desert Center is called Rough Cuts – there is a connection to your work and some of the other Venice artists to music, the improvisational nature could be compared to jazz?

CA:  Somebody once told me something and I felt rather flattered:  “Your chainsaw paintings are the closest thing I can think of to Pollock.” The reason is....Pollock in a sense did a dance, it was spontaneous, you know--he was physically involved. Man, then you start cutting in references and you are making hundreds of decisions a second, but it's a physical thing, you’re actively engaged in it.

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Chuck Arnoldi: Rough Cuts is on view now at Desert Center Los Angeles, 7466 Beverly Blvd. Email for appointments: desertcenterlosangeles@gmail.com. Text and photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper

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