Interreality Modalities: A Conversation with Artist Mieke Marple on Bridging the Digital and Traditional Worlds

Alida Sun, Southern Gothic Love Letters to My NSA Agent, 2023, courtesy of the artist, bitforms gallery, and PR for Artists. Image by Joshua White


interview by Coco Dolle

NFT Tuesday LA co-founder and former Night Gallery co-owner, Mieke Marple is a Los Angeles-based artist and writer determined to navigate what she calls the “insurmountable chasm” between the physical and digital art worlds. 

In her passionate mission to reconcile both the analog and the digital, Mieke has recently curated an impressive exhibition titled Interreality, showcasing 35 artists from the pioneering digital space mixed in with traditional established artists. Produced by Steve Sacks, founder of bitforms gallery and Aubrie Wienholt, founder of PR for Artists, Interreality is simply a tour de force. 

A kindred spirit and peer curator, I was thrilled to interview Mieke to speak about the exhibition as we tackled notions of provenance, embodied experiences, collecting art and feminism. 

COCO DOLLE: The recent groundbreaking exhibition at LACMA, Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age was enlightening on the symbiotic formation of tech and art. Tell us how your curation took inspiration from this show and about how it led to the making of Interreality.

MIEKE MARPLE: This exhibition was such an important moment in the digital art community, with the legacies of computer-based art, which had always been on the fringe before, finally getting canonized. These thematic, institutional shows are really important, but they can make artists feel sectioned off from the larger conversation and that's what I really wanted to do with this show. To have digital art be more seamlessly integrated with the larger, more mainstream conversation. 

DOLLE: Artists reacting to the world they're living in integrating new technologies with new tools. There was really no equivalent to this show in New York. Two years ago, MoMA had a drawing exhibition titled Degree Zero, illuminating new visual languages in midcentury art. I was extremely pleased to see works by Vera Molnar along with Louise Bourgeois. And what about your choice of venue, a 15,000-square-foot space strategically located near LACMA. Was it a raw space when you found it?  

MARPLE: Yes, it’s a hundred-year-old building. The owners recently gutted and retrofitted it and that's why it was available. It wasn't even rental ready. It didn't have outlets, or even real walls, or anything like that. But it's interesting to hear you say that this discourse with digital or computer-based art is further along in LA than New York. LACMA has definitely helped pave the way there. 

DOLLE: Yes they also hosted Paris Hilton spearheading a digital artwork fund by LACMA supporting women artists last year.

MARPLE: Yeah, totally. The other thing about this show is that I really wanted it to have a feminist umbrella, and besides just having feminist artists in the show, which is one way of doing that, I wanted to tell this story about artists from different generations who’ve influenced each other in a very non-linear and intuitive way.

DOLLE: So, who are you considering feminist artists in Interreality? Even if they don’t proclaim themselves as such, I believe the work of Oona is triggering deep conversations on body politics and the perception of women in society.

MARPLE: Alida Sun, I would say for sure. Connie Bakshi. I would say I'm a feminist artist. Jen Stark, Aya, Mark Flood, Cindy Phoenix identifies as a feminist artist. Ellie Pritz, of course, and Lindsey Price. Christine Wang, obviously. Aureia Harvey. I would say almost all of them. 

DOLLE: What about Claudia Hart?

MARPLE: Oh, yeah, of course, Claudia Hart!  

DOLLE: I love that it has this underlying statement, a feminist show in disguise.

MARPLE: I wanted it to be a feminist show, but I didn't want to do a show that's just women and non-binary artists. I did that already at Vellum LA when I co-curated Artists Who Code. I wanted to do a show that's just more inclusive. 

DOLLE: How did you bring all these artists together? From a curatorial standpoint, I work with artists I feel close to, their aesthetics and the conversation they engage with. It seems that you were also looking for a sort of balance.

MARPLE: I worked closely with Steve Sacks of bitforms gallery and Aubrie Wienholt of PR for Artists, who produced the show together. They brought a lot of artists they knew to the curatorial table. Even Savannah who works for Aubrie recommended a lot of artists that I ended up including. But yeah, I wanted there to be as many traditional artists as digital artists, as many women and/or non-binary artists as men. I wanted to pair artists with big social media followings like Jen Stark or Parker Day with artists that aren’t as well known. I wanted artists that were more established with more emerging artists. Abstraction with figuration. Slick with punk. Dry with wet and juicy. I feel like that's the main concept of the show: just a kind of harmony of modalities where nothing is super dominant over anything else.

DOLLE: What about embodied experience? You are showing artists engaged with new technologies and with a sensibility of the physical space but we're also looking at screens. So how do you put this together as experiential?

MARPLE: I would go to NFT shows and I would see all this work on the same size screen, the same orientation at the same height, and it would just homogenize the work. And then I would go to traditional art world shows, and there'd just be paintings. Just hung on the wall, and I would be like, does this really reflect reality? Is this really talking about the world I live in today? Because it doesn't feel like it. I think art's job is to be a sort of mirror to the world we live in so that we can have critical discussions about it. And then, having come from Night Gallery and putting on like a hundred shows and having worked with amazing artists like Samara Golden, who really knows how to create an experience in space, I wanted to put on a show where the installation was an art piece in and of itself.  

DOLLE: I love that. 

MARPLE: The show itself is an artwork. And then, there's artworks inside that larger artwork.

Mieke Marple, Dn't Ask Why, 2023, courtesy of the artist, bitforms gallery, and PR for Artists. Image by Joshua White

upside down iridescent purple heart sculpture wrapped in pink rope

Adam Parker Smith, Shibari Heart, 2022, courtesy of the artist, bitforms gallery, and PR for Artists. Image by Joshua White

DOLLE: It’s so important to be creative with the physical space when exhibiting digital works. I feel particularly NFT galleries need to be less linear and more creative with their presentation and aesthetics. Looking at screens in a white wall gallery space isn’t at all mesmerizing.

MARPLE: Just to explain that further, when I say the show itself is an artwork I mean that I want there to be something magical and seductive about every part of it. And also for every part of it to have a critical underpinning. For example, we used metal studs to create see-through walls and it's almost impossible to look at one work by itself. Whenever you're looking at a work, you're also looking through the wall and seeing the back of another work and some other works just feet away. It's emphasizing just how connected we are; how all the works are.

DOLLE: It sounds like a collage when we speak about it like that! 

MARPLE: Yeah, it's almost like a collage in a space made of multiple artworks. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, right?  These artworks are almost literally overlapping each other in space and creating surprising moments and connections, and that’s really exciting. 

DOLLE: Are all the pieces for sale? 

MARPLE: Oh, yes. (laughs) It's a selling show. But you know, it is interesting that my partner, after he saw the show, he told me that it really felt like a biennial, which I thought was interesting. Maybe that's just the scale, but I think there's more to it than that. What’s interesting about survey shows is the concept is usually very, very broad if there is one, but basically it's just a kind of temperature taking. What kind of art are people making right now? And, I think that's what this show is too. It's taking the temperature of the art landscape … and not just in LA. There are some artists in New York, Chicago, Miami, in London, in Berlin, Shanghai, Mexico City, and Rome. So, it's pretty international.

DOLLE: What was the audience’s response? Was it a super LA scene? A more digital art scene? Any noticeable criticisms from the traditional art world?

MARPLE: At the opening, I would say there was more people from the digital art world than the traditional art world, which is definitely something that I want to change because I feel like the traditional art world is who could benefit most from exposure to this show. The other thing I noticed was, like, a lot of the work is more interactive. My pieces have AR. So does Lindsey Price’s, and you have to scan a QR code and use your phone to activate it. OONA’s was participatory. Alida Sun’s had a live digital sensor. So, there was a lot of participatory work, which goes hand in hand with the Web3 ethos, you know, where the line between artist and collector can get blurry, and co-creating is a very popular idea.

DOLLE: Artists and collectors are more hand in hand in web3, indeed. I have recently collected more works in web3 than in contemporary arts. 

MARPLE: Right, but I noticed that a lot of people were hesitant. There wasn't as much participation as I hoped. I was talking to Alida Sun after the opening and I just realized that people are so trained to have this passive relationship to art.

So many people expect art to behave like a painting, right? It hangs there. You sort of appreciate it and then you move on. There's not a lot of interaction, or co-creation, or anything. I just realized there has to be a lot more education around this, that art is more than paintings, and an audience’s relationship to art can be more than just a passive one. Alida reminded me that this is a movement, you know. It’s bigger than me or this show.

DOLLE: Yes, the human impulse. You understand the collector's psychology and its attachment to the uniqueness of non fungibility. With NFTs, digital art could finally have the same one-of-a-kindness as a painting. What about traditional art collectors? 

MARPLE: I think a lot of traditional art collectors are intimidated or wary of collecting digital art. I wanted to take away some of the intimidation factor by showing all the different kinds of work seamlessly side by side. I wanted to show where there was something for everybody. Like, maybe you would come in as a painting lover, but you would leave having seen your first painting with AR or digital work made with AI and that would expand your ideas about art. 

 

Auriea Harvey, Gray Matter III, 2023, courtesy of the artist, bitforms gallery, and PR for Artists. Image by Joshua White

 

Interreality, curated by Mieke Marple, is on view through November 25 @ The Desmond Tower 5500 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles with a special performance event, today, November 18 from 6-9 pm.

Fighting For Love: An Interview Of New Media Artist, Young Polemicist And Kemetic Yogi, Tabita Rezaire

 

text by Keely Shinners

images by Tabita Rezaire

 

Tabita Rezaire could call herself many things––a Berlin-Biennale-exhibiting new media artist, a young polemicist, a Kemetic yoga teacher. Instead, Rezaire prefers to call herself a “healer-warrior.” Walking into her Yeoville flat, high on a sacred hill on the eastern side of Johannesburg, she offers me tea from her impressive apothecary of herbs, spices, and dried flowers. We sit down on her straight-from-2002 pink fuzzy love seat, chatting, listening to the new Frank Ocean album. She offers me Carmex for my chapped lips (Johannesburg is drying out my skin), and when she begins to talk about her artistic process as a process of healing, that powerful word, “healer,” lives up to the artist who utters it. Not in the exotifying sense of the "benevolent medicine woman," but clever, powerful, and without exoneration.

As we converse, Tabita is paying attention to my every word. She calls me out when I ask about “postcolonial digital space,” the flippant amnesia of such a loaded prefix. She questions why I would call her work “futuristic,” as if passing over the history and the cultural exigence that informs her art towards some vague, utopian “imagination of the future.” And she’s right. She’s a warrior. “You have to fight, fight, fight…” she insists, in order to “spread love and light.”

She says, “My work is a diagnostic.” Rezaire is in the business of identifying sicknesses we carry within us everywhere we go—our histories, our implicit and explicit prejudices, our language. She is able to see through the veils of the “free, open Internet” to its capitalist underbellies, using the very tools of the Internet to undermine it. Rezaire is calling us out on the spread of colonial viruses—on our computers, in our history books, in our words.

KEELY SHINNERS: So the info on your website says you are a “new media artist, intersectional preacher, health practitioner, tech-politics researcher, and Kemetic/Kundalini Yoga teacher. Can you tell me more about those practices and how they relate to each other?

TABITA REZAIRE: They are just different tools to serve the same mission on different plains: emotional, mental, spiritual, historical, political and technological. My work/life/purpose is searching for technologies to help us thrive and walk towards a state of soundness. It’s about healing.

SHINNERS: So you would say you’re more of a healer than an artist?

REZAIRE: That’s the same for me (maybe not in general). Both deal with feelings as raw material: their own, those of their people and those of their times. For a healer must be able to go through the wounds, their own first, and from that place surface with the powerful knowledge of pain, and grow out of/from it, then guide others to do so. It is transforming a state of unbalance into a more sustainable place, or maybe finding balance in discomfort. Both move energy, and can be truly transformative if the person, community, and times are ready. Ready to do the work it demands. I’ve used the term “healer-warrior,” cause healing is a battle with yourself and the world, you have to fight, fight, fight, to be able to love, love, love. Love yourself unconditionally and fight all that keeps you from loving yourself.  Once you love yourself you can start loving, respecting and caring for people, for communities, for life.

SHINNERS: On the question of health, do you see art as healing? In what way? Is it therapeutic for you, the audience, or both?

REZAIRE: To be honest, it sometimes gives me more anxiety than anything else. I guess that’s because of the industry, not the practice itself. My art practice is about sharing my own healing journey, spiritually and politically; trying to figure out shit or why I feel like shit. To heal, you first need to understand where it hurts and why. How to carry what must be carried. I guess that’s what I’m interested in. As you heal yourself, you heal generations before you and generations to come.

SHINNERS: So it stems from an illness?

REZAIRE: We are all dis-eased, and rightly so, as we’re children of toxic environments.

 

 

SHINNERS: What is E-Colonialism? Colonialism is centuries, centuries old, but the Internet is a whole new realm of possibility. How do the temporalities and functions of colonialism and the Internet overlap?

REZAIRE: I don’t think it is different temporalities. If we’re not living under colonialism per se, we’re living in its legacies, which are still omnipresent. The politics and architecture of the Internet came from the same heart; it’s the same narrative of exploitation being written over and over again, with the same people being exploited and the same people benefiting from it all. There’s this quote I love from Sardar who said back in 1995 “The West desperately needs new places to conquer. When they do not actually exist, they must be created. Enter cyberspace.” That‘s so deep. It’s not a domination based on land – which still exist for all the people whose lands are still occupied and plundered – but one based on people’s dependency and conditioning through the use of digital technologies. The Internet is molding us into global subjects, which reads to me as a newly designed colonial subject.

SHINNERS: Or a capitalist subject.

REZAIRE: Same story, the colonial enterprise is a capitalist one. E-colonialism controls our minds through our consumerist desires. We don’t realize we’re being manipulated, controlled, watched, monitored and exploited. We’ve become so trustful of demonic powers. Even if we know, we don’t care - or not enough to let go of the comfort and benefits it grants us (some of us). We accept, and worse, enjoy an abusive framework they’ve created for us. It’s scary.

SHINNERS: If you could rid of those powers, the Internet as a means of communicating globally could be a useful tool. Do you see a possibility of postcolonial digital space?

REZAIRE: I’m still waiting for that postcolonial life, as postcolonial societies have integrated ‘colonial’ hierarchies into their orders. Maybe the term decolonial offers more space, it’s a different practice, one that tries to unlink and disengage from Western authority. It asks: how do you become your own center? as opposed to existing within a “minority,” “periphery,” or “3rd world” rhetoric.

Decolonial Internet? I don’t know. The Internet is built on violence, literally. I’m currently making a work on the relationship between undersea cable layouts and colonial shipping routes. The history of our connectivity is entrenched in colonial history.

SHINNERS: There’s so much entrenchment.

REZAIRE: Yeah. Under the sea, lie so many traumas. It’s like a graveyard for so much history and loss, yet water is healing. The Internet is reproducing that duality, of erasing non-Western people and histories while providing space and tools for remembrance and celebration.

SHINNERS: How does spirituality relate to your art and healing practice?

REZAIRE: Spirituality is about connection. It’s about remembering how connected we were, we are, and how connected we can be. It nurtures a connection to yourself, your spiritual beings and ancestors, to the earth and the universe and helps build connections to each other in a meaningful way. That’s what spirituality is for me. That’s why it’s related to technology. Digital technology wants to connect us, but it doesn’t do it very well, because it comes from this Western anguish. We had the powers to connect (some still do), through telepathy, communicating with plants and ancestors, and channeling information through dreams or meditation. We have access to everything that has been and everything that will be. But we just shut down because of the way we live, think and feel or have been forced to. We’re disconnected. That’s the diagnostic. That’s the contradiction we live in, disconnection in our ultra-connected world. So, I strive for connection in my spirituality.

SHINNERS: Why do you use self-portraiture in a lot of your work?

REZAIRE: That’s not what I’m doing. Yes I use myself, but I’m just a channel to communicate and share information; a messenger. I’m working on a self-portrait series though…

SHINNERS: I’m really interested in the images you use in your work, like gifs of unicorns and galaxies and shit.

REZAIRE: I never used a unicorn.

SHINNERS: [Laughs.] You’re like, “Oh no, I would never do that.” You pair these images with what I think are really abstract concepts of decolonizing digital space, reimagination new space, architectures of power. Is your aesthetic a means of making your content more accessible?

REZAIRE: These might be abstract concepts for you, but they're very real. In terms of aesthetic, popular culture is also what I consume, so it feeds my imaginary, Im also interested in its function and power. People often ask me if it’s ironic. It’s not, but humorous yes.  Well I guess I use the language of the Internet to speak about the Internet so the content led to the form somehow.

SHINNERS: Looking at your stuff online, at first glance, you think, “Oh, this looks dope.” That’s superficial, obviously, but it draws you in. Then you start reading and you’re like, “Ok, now I have to confront my whiteness, my Westerness, here we go.” I didn’t feel like it was ironic. It was pulling you in.

REZAIRE: It’s a strategy, for sure.

SHINNERS: I was introduced to your work by reading A WHITE INSTITUTION’S GUIDE. I showed it to my friend this morning and she said it was like “guerrilla girls but less stale.” It seems like you’re doing the same thing, calling out the art world on its foundation of white heteropatriarchal bullshit. I’m interested in this because you’ve seen a lot of success, being in the Berlin Biennial this year, exhibiting in solo and group shows all over the world. How do you navigate being in that space all the time? Would you call yourself a “guerilla artist,” trying to subvert the institution?

REZAIRE: It’s hard. But I’m trying to move away from that inner conflict of constantly questioning what it means for me to be a part of an industry I despise? Or that despises me even more. Am I selling out? Am I a hypocrite? Does my work become meaningless? Is my mission co-opted? All those questions. At the same time, I need and want to sustain a practice. That’s very real.

SHINNERS: You have to survive.

REZAIRE: Yes, but beyond this, what I want to do and keep doing is making work. That’s my purpose. So, it’s about finding ways to sustain my practice. How will I be able to do what I want to do? Yes, the art world can help. Yes, white-centered institutions can help. Being part of an industry that is problematic as fuck helps me making work that I believe in, that’s the contradiction. For now, it’s about making it work for me, within boundaries that work for me. I spend too much time and energy being like, “I’m not making sense”… no I am making sense, I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing.

Claudia Rankine, said something I liked about institutional recognition, although I may not fully agree with her: “it’s also for me the culture saying: We have an investment in dismantling white dominance in our culture. If you’re trying to do that, we’re going to help you. And that, to me, is encouraging.”

SHINNERS: A lot of your work seems futuristic. Is imagining a future something you’re thinking about in your work?

REZAIRE: What makes you say my work is futuristic?

SHINNERS: That’s a good question. I guess I fall into my own trap of saying that.

REZAIRE: I guess you think of the use of the Internet, but it’s super contemporary, entrenched in our everyday lives. So it’s not futuristic.

I’m working in the present for the restoration of our past, which will guide our future. My work is not about the future, I don’t believe in this type of temporal linearity anyway. The past, present and future are arbitrary; they can be remodeled, repeated, discarded.  I’m however interested in the way our past has been constructed and the effects of this construction on our collective consciousness. Similarly, what effects can the rewriting of our past have on our present and futures? The now is fundamental yet irrelevant, it’s always a negotiation between what has/might have/could have been and what could/may/will be? The now is frightening. How do you exist in the world? How can we deal now? How can we love each other now? How can we love ourselves now?

I’m definitely working for a shift that is constantly (re)occurring over and over. I’m part of a wide community of seed planters, I might not see the fruits of my work but the seeds will sprout, maybe not in this lifetime but that’s ok. Planting seeds, that’s what I’m about.