Each Person Is A Portal: An Interview Of Seffa Klein

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

interview by Summer Bowie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

BOWIE: Maybe it is.

 
 

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

Art Of The Divine: A Conversation Between Rikkí Wright & Kilo Kish

Film still from A Song About Love by Rikkí Wright

Film still from A Song About Love by Rikkí Wright

Rikkí Wright and Kilo Kish are two of the eight artists exhibiting in this year’s edition of Womxn in Windows, a socially distant group show that clearly presaged the conditions of our current moment in its first edition last year. Visitors are invited to walk along the storefronts of Chung King Road in Chinatown and watch short films through each window with scores that can be accessed via QR code. Founded and curated by Zehra Ahmed, this year’s artists were invited to exhibit work that examines the intertwined relationships between culture, religion, and society. These films remind us how womxn have relied on faith and on each other as well as on a desire for equality, understanding, and the power to make the right choices for ourselves. In both Wright and Kish’s films one observes an intimate relationship with the spiritual, however from highly contrasting perspectives and with completely unique aesthetics. Wright is a photographer who makes films and ceramics, and whose practice includes explorations of gender and faith in the Black community. Her film, A Song About Love is a spiritual reckoning on the different forms of love in this world, from human to divine. It is a moving collage that combines interviews of Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and bell hooks with the soul and gospel stylings of D.J. Rogers and more. Most notable is the way that she delicately stitches these intellectual and emotional anchors with a personal thread of vulnerable, self love that manifests directly in the undressed body of the artist as it moves languidly to the music. Kish is a singer-songwriter and visual artist who makes films and music videos. Her film, Blessed Assurance: a dream that I had, is presented as a multi-room installation that takes on a new life as six individual visual pieces, each framed in their own windows. It’s a captivating mix of recorded video overlaid with punchy, low-fi graphics, and an animated church reminiscent of a two-bit video game that transports the viewer to their own physical and spiritual dimension, somewhere between the space Kish imagines and the sky above. These varied approaches to understanding the relationship between art and the divine are reflective of their very different backgrounds and core disciplines. The following conversation is an in-depth look at the role of the body in self-portraiture, the effects of the pandemic, uprisings and election that have dominated this year, and the value of tapping into your intuition.

KILO KISH: Do you think it’s possible to fully find yourself as an artist, or is it an ever-fleeting thing? 

RIKKI WRIGHT: I think the latter. I came to photography initially, and then filmmaking. It was kind of by way of exploring and trying to understand who I am and where I came from. My mother passed away when I was two years old, and I didn’t grow up having that figure in my life. I think that once I got to a certain age, I was trying to find parts of my feminine self or the parts of womanhood that a mother gives to her child that I was lacking. But, in the midst of trying to look for photos of my mom and my childhood home, I wasn’t able to find a lot because I think the mother is the person that keeps all of these heirlooms together. That’s what brought me to wanting to create images and knowing how to make tangible evidence of something that happened in a way that just proves that that time existed. So, my work really revolves around trying to fill in that gap, around my family, and the Black family, and there are so many conversations and things that I’m trying to understand in my work constantly. It’s just ever-flowing. 

KISH: Yeah. I kind of felt that after watching your piece. It had that nostalgic quality of opening up a scrapbook, like an old scrapbook at your grandma’s house and being like, “Oh, this is Uncle Joe!” And I agree; I don’t know if you ever fully find yourself as an artist, and if you do, you just kind of move on to the next thing that’s exciting for you. If you do find something–and I attribute this more to making albums–it’s like you’re asking questions and trying to find parts of yourself that you want to explore further, and by the time you actually put the album out, you’re already onto the next thing. 

WRIGHT: That’s what’s so amazing about being an artist and having the ability to express yourself in however you do that—being able to have these conversations through your work, or just working through and processing the questions that you have. Toni Morrison talks about that a lot. All of her books start with a question, and she’s pretty much trying to answer that for herself, and strongly going, I make this work for myself first, and whoever comes to it to connect with it and is able to explore that question within the work, that’s an amazing added bonus. 

KISH: Totally. I was thinking about that a lot recently, because I was nervous in general about social media—it just doesn’t leave that space for questions. You’re presenting yourself in a way that is who this person is, but sometimes that’s tough because we are portraying, and we’re using our bodies, and we’re using figures of ourselves to play a role or explore ideas that we don’t know the answer to yet, and I think a lot of times artists get stuck in this spot where they’re like, that’s who you are! No, I was just using my body in a space. 

WRIGHT: Yeah, yeah, I mean that’s my approach in the self portraiture within my work, and also in the film, I present it as: that body is my body, but not me. It’s a form for all of the Black women who are experiencing, or have experienced this stuff with their sexuality or their spirituality, the suppression or oppression of it. So, I’m using my body to speak on behalf of others sometimes, or to create a character that represents something I’m trying to express. Maybe not even an actual person, just a being.  

KISH: Or even an idea, or a question. 

WRIGHT: Yeah, that is interesting. And also with being on Instagram and social media and having to present yourself as an artist. I started out as a photographer. I always see myself as a storyteller, a visual storyteller. I’m a visual learner. I grew up in a very religious household, so most of the music I know that’s not Catholic music is from watching films. That’s when I realized I want to say more with the images that I’m making. I feel like the moving image could add to what I’m actually trying to say, and I tried not to transition into filmmaker. I feel like there was also a resistance in conversations I was having with people trying to hire me for jobs. They were asking, “So, are you a photographer, or are you a filmmaker?” I do a lot of pottery as well, ceramics, so I’m trying to figure out how to merge all selves as an artist. I feel like sometimes, social media doesn’t allow you to do that. 

KISH: I agree. It’s a very daunting space because it’s centered around branding. What do you do? What is your thing? If you find your thing and just keep doing more of that thing, people will like it and share it, and I think when you’re exploring, it’s difficult. You’re like this is my music, but we’re also having this art show that’s going on right now. Do my fans of my music care about my art show? Maybe. Maybe not. I’m sure someone does, but is that this audience? Having gone to art school, and then jumping into the music industry, it’s such a difference. We’re selling a product in the music industry; we’re not ​selling​ art. As much as you want to think about it like, oh this is my art, the people in charge of it do not think of it that way. They’re thinking, okay, there’s nothing fine about this. We’re selling songs, let them be catchy, and that’s that. That’s not my doctrine at all, so it’s very difficult to try and merge the different parts of yourself, and I think now, after doing it for nine or ten years, just making art and trying to support myself off of the things that I make, I learned that I have to accept the output and stop trying to make myself fit into what people expect. 

WRIGHT: I’ve been reading this book by Saidiya Hartman, called ​Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments,​ and it’s about Black women right after the Reconstruction period. Black women moving over from the South to New York and trying to break out of this role of servitude that’s put forth, like Black women can’t do anything but be in the kitchen. But I think it speaks to the fear and anxiety of trying to do all of these things, or trying to incorporate different mediums into my practice, because I’m trying to tell the same message. I just know that I have different modes, or my body wants to do this instead of take a photo, so I feel like that has really empowered me. People are receptive; there’s an audience for each thing that you do. 

KISH: Yeah, totally. How do you know what to work on from day to day? Do you just feel it? 

WRIGHT: In the past eight months–how long have we been in quarantine? I feel like I was trying to stay on this roll of I need to be doing this, or I need to be doing that. Recently, I’ve been shooting a lot more, feeling inspired to connect with other people and shoot, but I also feel like I’ve just been sitting. I’ve been reading a lot. I’ve been trying to wrap my ideas around the one project that I do want to finish. It’s a documentary I’ve been shooting for the past two years with my grandmother in Alabama, telling the story of the American food race and how certain foods came here. It’s about memory as well. My grandmother is going through the early stages of dementia and what we shared growing up was being in the kitchen together. I could call her, and she could tell me a recipe on the drop of a dime, but that is diminishing slowly, and I’m feeling compelled to document this and to have conversations about intergenerational relationships. In the midst of me prepping for that, I’ve been working on so much self work, so much work within my family, having more open conversations, and relationship growth. I’ve been nurturing the relationships I do have. It’s been beautiful that my work brings me to that type of place because it’s all self work as well. I’m going home to Alabama for a month in December, and I’ll be finishing filming with my grandmother and staying on the farm out there. That work feels good, especially for the moment. It’s me connecting with my family, and that’s so important right now during this pandemic. Things are so unknown–the future, this election coming up. 

 
Self-portrait by Rikkí Wright

Self-portrait by Rikkí Wright

 

KISH: Yeah, I just want to get through this election, and I’ve been having similar things, just working on my relationships here and figuring out where I’m at creatively because this is the longest I’ve sat in one spot, but I’d been burnt out and it feels good to be able to slow down and just be like, so why am I doing this again? I feel like it’s so easy to get in those patterns of getting things done, and you’re working on autopilot, and then you’re like, do I actually feel for this work right now? Is this still a question for me? Because sometimes life just answers questions when you’re in the middle of a work process. That whole problem was just answered by me sitting down for two months. I was working on an album, and it was about American themes, and I got bogged down with this entire quarantine. It was so intense, and I was just like, I don’t know if I really want to...I’m already over it. 

WRIGHT: The priorities shifted as well. There’s an importance for certain work to be out right now and to be seen, and certain conversations to be had. Sometimes it’s time to put that on pause and have it for a different space. I’ve really enjoyed connecting with my family because they’ve shifted into a wider awareness—a wider political awareness as well. Connecting more with the stories and lives of people in my family, it’s like, oh, this is happening because of this larger systemic thing that’s going on. That’s why I love experimental filmmaking: because it allows the freedom to be as open as possible and just put whatever you’re feeling out there. I feel like right now, I’m really into having conversations with people in my life and sitting with that idea of reimagining what our future can look like if we look at what’s been going on. 

KISH: I feel like it would need to be an entire reimagining of the United States, just an entire reimagining of the whole way that it runs. The whole quarantine has helped to reconnect me with a lot of social issues and things that are going on within our community. I tend to isolate in general. I stay home, I do a lot of things alone, I like to live in my own world. I don’t watch that much. If everyone’s in love with a show, I generally don’t watch it. Being forced through a really fucked up thing and then jumping into life with everyone else again, it felt crazy in that moment when we were doing all the protests, and volunteering, and doing petitions, and doing all this work. In a way, I felt more connected to people than I have in a really, really long time. 

WRIGHT: For sure, because there was a collective consciousness, and I feel a shift in the strength that it had. I feel like right now, everything has been put out in the open, so people are more receptive to actually having the conversation. Because actually turning away from things is so frowned upon in this moment, and hopefully forever. I’ve been having conversations with some of my very close friends that I’ve never had before, and I’m just like, wow, very interesting to know this is your experience. That also informs the type of work I want to create. Experimental film is not commercial or high commodity, but I feel like that’s resistance as well. I feel connected to the work that has always been fighting for change. That’s why Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Maya Angelou are people that appear in my piece. They have been guides. It’s very important to make sure that I’m addressing that in the things that I create. Not that it’s my responsibility, because it’s been addressed many times over.

KISH: I agree. Just being able to see all the different industries and all these different Black artists saying how they’ve been affected. In your own self-centered version of your life, you feel like you’re the only one that these things are happening to, and I think that’s part of the divisiveness of the whole thing. You’re supposed to feel like you’re alone in it. Having seen everybody with their different versions of the same story, which was really depressing, I was able to realize that everybody has the same idea of what I’m making—not that it’s necessarily my responsibility, but I feel the need to share these different views and perspectives of what Blackness can be, and about what family can be, or what these different parts of connectedness are. I’ve been doing that, but I didn’t realize I was doing it until this whole thing happened. I feel like there’s all kinds of Black girls, and I want to make alternative music, so I’m just going to do that the whole time. When people were like, “You should only make rap music, always”, I was like, “No, I’m going to keep doing this other stuff.” So, I think there’s always been that rebelliousness when people try to put you in a box of what you’re able to achieve. It also comes down to what you were saying before with wanting to do experimental filmmaking, whereas someone might tell you that you should just direct music videos, or something. 

 
Kilo Kish. Photo courtesy of Andrew Arthur

Kilo Kish. Photo courtesy of Andrew Arthur

 

WRIGHT: Exactly. Yeah. And starting in this space of experimental filmmaking, when I am approached for any type of job, people are open and knowing this is what they could possibly get from me based on what they’ve seen, and usually people are only coming to me if they’re open to being on the same page as me, which I’m really grateful for. 

KISH: It’s nice to be strong enough to–and I think it does take mental fortitude and grit to be that vulnerable with the different practices, because your film from the show was super vulnerable. It’s very powerful in that the body itself is so powerful. What you’re willing to share is a statement in itself. I was going to ask you: how do you not talk yourself out of doing things that you know might be scary for you creatively? 

WRIGHT: The way that I grew up, I always had this need to protect myself. I was just out in the world. Whoever could watch me and my sister would, or we were bounced around from different family members, and so there were a lot of different opinions. I was just like, I’m going to go crazy if I have to adhere or just be what you want me to be. I’m just going to do me, and don’t ask permission, ask forgiveness, and do it. I think I kind of lived by that, and it inevitably is a part of the way I come to art. You have that fear, but in my experience, even having that one person, a friend, or somebody from your family give a critique, that helps me in a way. It was worth it for me to just do it. 

KISH: I feel the same way. I feel like the curiosity of what could happen outweighs the fear that you might have about it. I just want to see what happens, even if it doesn’t do well by other people’s standards. What is the role that spirituality plays with you now because you said that you had a very spiritual upbringing, but I wonder, now, after having grown up in the Church and all that, how do you feel about it? 

WRIGHT: Organized religion is not necessarily where I think I can connect spiritually. I have the experience of losing my mother at the age of two, and in 2017 my father passed away on my birthday, so the people who brought me into this physical life are both in a spiritual realm, and I’ve just felt a spiritual connection, a motherly connection, since I was a child. I have always felt like there’s guardian angels, or I definitely feel connected to my ancestors. That’s just something that’s not even by choice. I know that even in some of the work that I create, it feels like somebody needed that to be done. I don’t know if it was my grandma, or who. So, in that sense, I really am big on remembering our ancestors and making sure that I have altars on my mom’s birthday. Images are also huge for me. Sometimes I can just be transformed or taken back to a place, and that feels almost spiritual as well. There’s a scripture, Do this in remembrance of me (1 Corinthians 11:24), and I think about that often. We’d do communion every first Sunday where everybody drinks the wine and takes a little piece of the cracker in remembrance of Christ’s blood and body. It’s kind of intense actually, but we do it so casually. It’s a very honoring ceremony, remembering Christ’s sacrifice, and I think that’s how I approach remembering my ancestors, and remembering the fight of just being here in this country, or just making it; our survival. 

KISH: Yeah, wow. It’s like a weaving of your experiences and your life, and all the little bits that inform your life. I had a strange upbringing where I was the only Black person in my whole school and I was in a gifted program. I was this little Black girl who was moved around all these different classes, and if I think of my younger self, it definitely informs the way that I approach work now. It’s very in my own world, and it’s in my own space. I have friends in fashion, but I’m not a fashion girl. I do music, but I’m not a music girl. I do art, but I’m not an art girl. I’m always this separate thing that’s in the Venn diagram overlapping everything else. I think everybody’s experiences create how they make work, and I guess spiritually, I believe similarly to what you said–there are things guiding and protecting and moving you in the right path, and if you’re able to tap into intuition, or whatever you want to call it, you kind of know: that doesn’t really feel right for me, I don’t know why, but I’m going to sidestep. I always feel that with all the projects that I do, and I think during COVID, I’ve just not really heard that voice as much. I’ve kind of just been sitting down. 

WRIGHT: I think that the uncertainty of the world has an effect where you feel like you don’t have much control, and that’s why sometimes I’m like I have to stop. I have to get off social media, I have to sit with myself and listen to my own thoughts. There’s so much being thrown at us all day long. It’s really a lot, and I really do think that affects being able to hear yourself. I haven’t done this yet, but a lot of my friends have taken social media breaks for a couple of months during the pandemic and are just working on their own thing, and it’s been great. 

Kilo Kish. Photo courtesy of Andrew Arthur

Kilo Kish. Photo courtesy of Andrew Arthur

This year’s exhibition of Womxn in Windows is on view through November 15 in Chinatown Los Angeles on Chung King Road, as well as New York in partnership with the Wallplay Network - 321 Canal Street, Chinatown London in partnership with Protein Studios - 31 New Inn Yard, and Hackney Shanghai in partnership with Bitter - Jing’an District. Additional films can be viewed by Christine Yuan, Everlane Moraes, Ja’Tovia Gary, Kya Lou, Rémie Akl, and Sylvie Weber—artists whose backgrounds span the United States, Brazil, Lebanon, Taiwan, the Dominican Republic and Germany. Follow @womxninwindows, @rikkwright and @kilokish on instagram.