Suspended in Memory: An Interview Of Veronica Fernandez

text and photography by Shelley Holcomb

Standing in front of Los Angeles-based artist Veronica Fernandez’s paintings you may start to feel as if you’re part of a fever dream or someone else’s past life regression. They are raw and autobiographical, a place where the viewer is invited to float through fragments of extremely personal memories while being entertained by the various textures and materials Fernandez has thoughtfully arranged in each work. There are painterly aspects that divide you from reality, yet it still feels as if you're walking into someone else's actual space and you’re welcome to stay as long as you’d like. 

The paintings are in essence a mapping of her family lineage, their struggles and their persistence captured through the lens of old photographs passed down from her grandmother. Through these photographs, Fernandez is navigating her own identity as it relates to her childhood and her closeness to family. She manipulates these images to tell a story of adolescence that most of us couldn’t comprehend and yet she finds strength in these memories, weaving them into a narrative about what it means to call somewhere home and to make a place for yourself. 

I visited Fernandez in her studio as she put the final touches on her first solo exhibition entitled When you hold onto my spirit, will you let your spirit grow?  at Sow & Tailor in Los Angeles.

SHELLEY HOLCOMB: To begin, can you give a bit more about your family background? And in what ways do you think it influences your work? 

VERONICA FERNANDEZ: My father is Dominican and Puerto Rican, and my mother is Bolivian, but I was raised by my father and I connect more with that side of myself most of the time. Although I grew up primarily in Jersey, I was also raised in Miami, where the majority of my family is from. A lot of the time, the vibrant colors of Miami can come through in my work, I think, from that tropical environment down there. I also think a lot about my grandma's garden, the wood and textured objects from her house, the fruits she grows, and the objects she has that have been passed down from different generations. My grandmother is a strong, proud Dominican woman, who taught me core values she learned from her mother as well. The narrative for the exhibition begins with my great-grandmother as a matriarch, it shows my grandma and my father as a child, to set up the start of my father’s upbringing, and then because we’re his offspring, we also see my cousins that all came from his family. 

A lot of my photographs from childhood take place in Miami, Jersey, or Virginia, where I was born in a naval hospital. There are objects that pop up in my work, for example, the Malta Goyas in the installation, a beverage my father was always drinking in the house, that is directly inspired by him, his family, and my upbringing. Throughout my work, there are hints at my identity trying to navigate itself and find pieces that were lost through that separation caused by us moving around so much.

HOLCOMB: At first glance, you seem to be juggling a lot of references and stringing together multiple narratives in this exhibition, can you tell me how it came to fruition for you? 

FERNANDEZ: This is one of the first paintings that inspired the show called “Take Shelter” and it’s of my own personal story, my family, and the many obstacles that we faced. It’s based on a photo of my family while we were living in a shelter, that was one of the things in my life that helped me to perceive how people are, their backgrounds, and the layers that can exist in everyone's lives. I wanted to make this painting that examines how people take up space and what makes the foundation for a home. The home becomes what it's made of and not the actual physical space.

The whole theme for all of them is about the specific ways in which people adapt to the experiences that they go through. My work is about people and how they engage with their environment, their experiences and their memories of them, and how they perceive them over time. My grandma gave me these photographs of her in her childhood, her mother, and my father when he was younger. Because I was raised by a single father, I saw firsthand the experience of someone struggling over time and having to adapt to their environment due to unfortunate circumstances and obstacles that they went through, so I wanted to use that kind of story.

HOLCOMB: We see your dad referenced a lot in these works, would you say he is the protagonist? 

FERNANDEZ: My dad is the thread that keeps the show together. In some of the scenes that don’t involve him, his spirit is still within the painting or the spirit of those that changed a generation. Hence the name of the show: When you hold onto my spirit, will you let your spirit grow? And I refer to that by proposing the question of when you come into this space and you are immersed in all of these spirits that live in the paintings, like my father’s or my experience and what I’ve gone through, the emotions that carry through that, will you carry something with you? And I took the title from a bit of poetry I wrote, It talks about how people can just actually see each other, you know when you first meet someone you don’t really know the layers of what actually made them the person they are today and so it talks about that exchange of each other’s struggles, this clear understanding of where you came from. The writing started when I was creating the show and it’s me having this imaginary conversation with a person about what it would be like to actually see someone, not just existing in these spaces, but actually being seen and heard and understood. And I think when you’re going through obstacles like I had to in my life, you really just want to be understood. 

HOLCOMB: Images of children and the portrayal of adolescence seems to be a common motif you’re working with, what is your connection to this imagery? What do they signify to you?

FERNANDEZ: Children for me are very unpredictable and just naturally curious about the world. I think everyone who comes across a child and sees their actions, or the way they conduct themselves, imagines the type of person they might become or even reminisce about their own childhood, a time when they didn't think about the future, living only in the moment. I think a lot about how that time of our lives is such a fundamental aspect that starts paving the way to how we perceive the world around us and what shoes we eventually are meant to fill. I think about my own upbringing and seeing firsthand how difficult living can be, in general, growing up and having moments where even though you're at an age of a promising future, you kind of have these early negative feelings about the world and you have to push yourself to get past them, sometimes it can feel never-ending. I was lucky that despite all I've gone through I had my father constantly instilling in me that I was more than what we were going through. I think it weighs on me to think about those that didn't have that guidance or have been swallowed by the hurtful factors of their environments. When I think about children in my work they really reflect the unforeseeable future of people.

There’s a painting in the show called “Watch A Leader Cry” that hits the nail on the head when it comes to talking about young people having to take on roles they’re not prepared for. As I said, my father raised us as a single parent, there were many times that my siblings and I, when we were growing up, saw him down because of different situations. This particular instance references a memory I have of losing everything on a bus seat, the bus driving away, and seeing him crying, chasing it down. In that moment, you’re left standing there like okay, I guess I need to take on this new role of the leader because he’s withered down. It’s exaggerated by the flipped umbrella and all the groceries and him clearly being upset. That’s one of the paintings that’s very specific when it comes to those emotions of having to adapt, and children having to utilize what they have in order to help their parental figure. Those older siblings who always had to take the brunt of something that happened. 

 
 

HOLCOMB: The painting that stands out the most where children are featured prominently is in the work “Trust Fall”. There’s also the glaring red figure, which we see come up a lot in your work, what’s that about?

FERNANDEZ: Yes, this is where we see the chaos of all of the cousins together because everyone thinks they are the one that has control. All the kids are naively thinking they can catch this figure and it talks about the way that they take on roles they aren’t prepared for, they’re not necessarily even sure that they’re able to handle. There’s no one there guiding them, there’s a baby here wanting to jump, thinking he can participate as well, it circles in a broken Coca-Cola bottle, emphasizing danger and how there are all these kids in this one space naively thinking that they’re prepared to carry this weight. They all have their own different expressions and their own roles, some of them are impacted by the situation that’s happening and some of them are oblivious. 

For this painting, I wanted to emphasize that these red figures are people that stem from other generations and they’re navigating themselves, how to go about their lives, and exist in these spaces they’ve been put in. When I paint these red figures they’re signifying they are transformative figures in the works that get impacted, their futures get altered dramatically. Kind of like on a plane when there’s turbulence, those are what the red figures are, out of control and you don’t know what’s going to happen, they’re very unpredictable.

HOLCOMB: Something else I see a lot in this show and in previous work is the recurring image of bread, what does it symbolize in your work?

FERNANDEZ: Bread was something that I noticed at a young age was always so cheap, which meant you would have an abundance of it, whether it be those 3 for $1 rolls or a loaf of Wonderbread, it was always a sweet deal! When my family only had a few dollars we always bought bread or eggs. It was something we could manipulate to make different meals when we didn't have much. My dad used to make syrup or butter sandwiches, or toast as a snack. Bread, as mundane as it is, was an object that kept us full, notably when we lived in areas where we were living off the corner store and didn't have a car that could take us across town to get fruits or veggies. It wasn't necessarily the healthiest option but not everyone is given that choice. In many ways, human beings use whatever options they have and make the most out of it, especially when times are just hard.

HOLCOMB: We also see a lot of sports iconography in your work, the Yankee cap or the Jeter shirt, can you elaborate on your connection to sports and its importance in your work? 

FERNANDEZ: I always incorporate sports in my work in one way or another. I think, because I was raised by my father, the essence of boyhood is always present. My father put us in sports when he could, we were all always terrible, like the worst, but he was always there, being all passionate on the sidelines. My household was always sports and video games, I remember my father would play all his Yankee and Giants games really loud throughout the house, screaming at the TV. We used to gather in the living room every Monday and Friday for wrestling and it was our bonding time. We became obsessed with WWE and my sister and I would get all excited when women wrestlers came out! There are a few pieces in the show where you’ll see figures wearing jerseys or Yankee symbols. In my installation, I included these cutout baseballs under the chair legs to protect the feet of it, as you would see on elementary school desks, and related it to how that aspect of sports was a protective or nurturing outlet for our family. The older Panasonic TV plays a loop of three Yankee game clips from the years my siblings and I were born. My father told us those years were extra special because the Yankees had won the World Series all three of those years. I thought it was sweet when he chose those clips. To him, it was luck from us being brought into this world. The essence of my father's love for sports is very special to me, it makes me feel at home.

HOLCOMB: When you’re crafting the compositions for the paintings, is it the direct photo, or do you collage them together from different references? 

FERNANDEZ: Some of the pieces in the show are either from my memory, some of them are directly from old photographs and I just alter them. The paintings that I pull from my family photos are very authentic, it’s important to me to have a photo of these particular experiences. The paintings are very fluid in that way, they’re not something that’s concrete, like the photo exactly, they're all kind of head-spacey paintings. I tend to create spaces where the more you look at them, they just don't really come together. Like, it will never actually make sense and that comes from reflecting on these memories I’ve retained. We never see the experience the same way as we get older—they never stay the same. Memories can change and over time we perceive them differently. 

I wanted to make a show based on older photographs I had and have it chronologically start off with my grandma and the photos she gave me, those backstories of where I came from. So the paintings feature my grandmother and my great grandmother, then down the line, it goes into the story of my father, and then us, showing these different generations and the different roles they take on and how they find their place in each of these individual environments. How are they adapting to these spaces? How are they not just existing, but also living in the spaces? I want the viewers to have the feeling that these people are really living in these paintings. Sometimes people would think "Aw, those people that go through things like that, they must be so emotional,” but they are just everyday people who live their lives and they aren't as fortunate. They don't see their lives as sad all the time. I want people to feel like, these are just their experiences, they're not always miserable. 

 
 

HOLCOMB: I feel like you’ve brought a lot of sculptural elements into this show, is sculpture a new practice for you? What do these different objects mean to you? 

FERNANDEZ: It’s a brand new thing I’m doing. In the show we see these laundry carts, you know the ones, you see them everywhere. I wanted to have something that was very universal. I feel like everybody has seen these at one point or another. I also wanted to add items that would touch people in a familiar way, like throw blankets with Mickey Mouse on them, Winnie the Pooh, like pop culture figures that everyone can relate to. These kinds of everyday objects you can associate with childhood or a domestic setting. I have this one memory of when we had to walk all the way across town to get to the laundromat just to do laundry. We would have to walk all the way there and all the way back with loads of laundry, so I just associate them with a form of labor. 

A lot of the sculptures I have in the show have a sense of human touch and human labor behind them. Like, for example, the sculpture "For Bread and Eggs," it's a stocking getting twisted in order to make a design to make this garnished item, to make yourself at home. There's that human touch and this work that's put into making and creating these items. The entire design on that chair in the installation was made by hand. I was originally going to get a chair that was the same design as the one I saw in an old photograph that I had, it was a striped satin chair, but then I decided to make the pattern by hand because I feel, much like the paintings, that I want to have this presence of the artist there. This body of work means a lot to me, so, I'm just really excited to show it.

When you hold onto my spirit, will you let your spirit grow? is on view through Jul 17 at Sow & Tailor 3027 S Grand Ave

Moving Past Giants: An Interview Of Devon DeJardin

text by Stella Peacock-Berardini

Devon Dejardin’s exploration of art may have started from the humble encouragement of a sugar daddy psychic, but it has grown into a journey of healing and reflection that continues to drive his success in the art world. Within his cubist-influenced style of work, Devon Dejardin, an LA-based painter, processes through the elements of life demanding answers to all of its most urgent lingering questions. Dejardin employs his work as a way to unpack and understand the entropic nature of the universe through his lens of belonging, going deeper into the storms he's faced that brought him to the clear sky of his creation. This 29-year-old, self-taught artist originating from Portland juggles depression and anxiety within the creative realm and expresses his gratitude for the therapeutic release his art supplies to himself and its viewers. His newest project, Giants dives into this preconceived idea of spirituality and shifts its narrative to his ideas surrounding the guardians of the world, those that protect, aid, and grow in strength and vulnerability within the boundaries of our world. His art, huge in size, mimics the ideas of giants and how they are commonly perceived, yet it develops further than that. These feelings, or challenges in life, such as sadness or grief materialize as giants, but represent the deception life can have on us all. We sat down with this artist to explore his influences, conceptions around his work as a whole, and his first New York solo exhibition at Albertz Benda.  

AUTRE: We live in an age of anxiety and uncertainty—you are an artist who found refuge in painting, how has your adolescent experience with anxiety and now as a painter prepared you for our current zeitgeist? 

DEVON DEJARDIN: It taught me that sometimes we need to go to dark places in our life to gain a better understanding of ourselves and our place in this world. Anxiety and painting both can create times of uncertainty. However, if you continue to push and wrestle with what is in front of you, oftentimes beauty is birthed. I almost feel times of anxiety have become a guardian for me. It slows me down, humbles me and redirects me … very similar to the process of creating a painting.

AUTRE: Are you hopeful about the future or is there a sense of pessimism? 

DEJARDIN: Always hopeful. Pessimists are depressing to be around. Even in the worst of things there is so much good. So much of life has to do with perspective and looking at situations from all different angles.

AUTRE: Your work utilizes a lot of abstract forms, it’s almost cubist, but also extremely reflective of our 21st-century digital age, how would you describe these forms?

DEJARDIN: So much of our current physical reality is constructed by a few simple shapes that are altered and manipulated to form structures. We see these shapes in architecture, art, design, nature etc. When approaching this series of work I wanted to use these simple shapes to create something powerful. To show how the manipulation of simple constructs can form something that speaks and carries weight. The idea that simplistic forms can carry a complex identity.

AUTRE: Do you feel like the forms in your paintings are ominous or do you see them more as benevolent entities? 

DEJARDIN: I think that if you look at history much of the benevolent entities we have learned about are described to be quite ominous. To answer the question, I see both. Many religious texts speak on the idea of an entity saying “fear not” before they reveal themselves. Why? I think encountering any sort of spiritual being … light or dark … would be pretty intimidating.

AUTRE: Do you dream about unrealized paintings or imagine them before the paintbrush hits the canvas, or is it an intuitive experience?

DEJARDIN: Yes and no. There are many times where it is a free flow battle aimlessly moving paint until a picture appears. However, I tend to lean more towards a controlled intuitive process. A process where sketching, creating studies, and spending time thinking give way to a much more intimate painting. I find myself lately really enjoying the process of drawing before painting. Reimaging the same painting multiple ways.

AUTRE: Your new work that will be on view at Albertz Benda is inspired by spiritual allegory, when and why did you become interested in this subject matter? 

DEJARDIN: From a young age I was always interested in the concepts of “where did we come from?” and “what is next?” Spirituality or religion are primary disciplines for investigating the boundary questions of life and death, of love and hate, that characterize the human condition. All persons crave for self-transcendence in one mode or another. Religious Studies provides the opportunity to understand, with depth and nuance, the many beliefs and rituals that move persons to appreciate the alternative world of reality. I think it is important to have a strong understanding of the major concepts humans use as a framework to exist…

AUTRE: Can you talk a little bit about the parable of David and Goliath and how that fits into your new work? 

DEJARDIN: Much of this exhibition stems from Malcolm Gladwell’s 2013 book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants. This book was an investigation into the relationship between underdogs and giants.

In the book, Gladwell discusses a story from the Bible about David and Goliath. The Israelites were in war with the Philistines, but they were at a disadvantage to win because of the champion, Goliath. Goliath suffered from acromegaly which made him a physical giant and no one wanted to fight him. However, David stepped up to fight him even though he didn’t think he could defeat Goliath. We learn that due to Goliath's growth disorder he suffered from many physical ailments such as vision impairment, lack of coordination etc. making David, a slinger, a much more evenly matched opponent. David was easily able to defeat Golith even though the odds seemed to be against him. The simple lesson is that often these “Giants” in our lives often are not as “big” as they seem. The work in this exhibition tells the story of pushing through and ultimately moving past “Giants” in our lives. 

AUTRE: You are displaying some large sculptures at the new show—can you talk a little more about these sculptures and the materiality, and what has the experience been going from two dimensions to three? 

DEJARDIN: I've always wanted my work to be able to be seen in all different kinds of settings and landscapes. Painting is limited to primarily being able to be indoors but I think there's so much power in allowing work to be placed in all different types of environments. These sculptures created for the show are made of bronze and will be able to live in earth's elements for hundreds of years. 

The experience going from 2D to 3D is something that I'm still learning. I'm being mentored and taught. I'm working alongside people that are far more experienced than I am at sculpting and it is a process that takes many hands. The process goes from taking an original sketch, making it into a painting, and then I bring it into a 3D format on the computer to envision what these paintings would look like from all angles. For me, that's the tricky part because all of my paintings and portraits are forward-facing. Taking on a side angle or the back angle and creating balance within that has been the most time-consuming part of it.

AUTRE: When you are working in the studio, do you have something that jump-starts the creative process—do you listen to music, is it a solitary experience or do you like to have a lot of activity? 

DEJARDIN: For four years I painted alone and most of the time without music. I found solitude to be a form of therapy and the time alone helped me start to better understand my place in this world. It allowed me to gain a better sense of my voice. Now, I enjoy the communal aspect of having people in and out of the studio. I like to bounce ideas and break up my thought patterns in hope that more ideas will come forth. I think we as humans are designed to be in community with one another and I'm starting to see a much more healthy balance with how I approach my work.

AUTRE: A lot of your new show explores misrepresentations, but what about you as an artist—are there things that people get wrong about your work or you as an artist? 

DEJARDIN: I am sure there are many misrepresentations about me and my work floating out there. It is not something that I need to focus on. My work is a reflection of my truth and my identity. I am responding to an innate pull to create and to share ideas with the world. If people want to twist, pick, and misinterpret … all are welcome. 

 
 

Devon DeJardin: Giants is on view June 30 - August 5 @ Albertz Benda 515 W 26th Street New York

How Do You See The Now: 4 Questions For Artist Jillian Mayer About Reacting To The Current World Through Art


interview by Rachel Adams

RACHEL ADAMS: When I think about your work, I often see objects that provide assistance. Slumpies help your body adjust to the onslaught of technological devices, sculptures that become flotation devices, and the works in our show TIMESHARE were prototypes for living in a future where you couldn’t go outside–a fountain that doubles as a hydroponic garden, blueprints for life underground, etc. How do you see this new glasswork fitting into the idea of assistance?

JILLIAN MAYER: I have always loved the appeal of any object that does more than one thing. Whether it be a mop that can convert to a broom, a reversible clothing item, or anything else that fits into the  “Well that’s not all…” rhetoric. I love to think of these items as suggestive and simultaneously insecure and self-aware of their limit if they could only be one thing … that objects have to try to justify their existence as well as place amongst your other objects. Along with pressure for us to perform many tasks, our items are not excused from this weight. There is only so much room in our lives so these objects plead the case for their acceptance.

Much of my work has been interlaced with various roles and tasks; often a conceptual rooting with some type of design element that provides a type of function (ex: the Slumpie sculptures that support one’s physical body while journeying online). By interlaying the artworks with a performative element, it helps me justify adding something to this very full world. Also, the tasks that my work usually performs will face an eventual obsolescence. Then, the works can just be art and no longer have a job they will have to perform. Planned obsolescence is key to moreness.

Also, it makes me think about a project I made in collaboration with the Miami Airport called STILL LIFE SCANS. I used the security machines as an art tool. I only functioned in my arrangements of the items but renders were produced by the machines. Even when I am not physically present in the work I show, I feel my work is still performative. Usually, it's the offered tasks that become the performance and I look at the audience as passive performers the minute they engage with the work.

But about your question … I think of functionality as being so inherent to our common experience with glass, I am really letting it exist as collages here. The sole job of these new glassworks is that they get to be glass. Perhaps they feature a text or manipulate light, but my materials have a day off here. In our day-to-day, glass does so much service. Much of our reality is not experienced directly, but is mediated through glass, via corrective eyewear, windows, windshields, camera lenses, televisions, phones, and computer screens. 

ADAMS: Much of your work has treaded the line between art object, design/decorative object, and furniture. Glass is an ultimate material when it comes to architecture and design. Do you see expanding your practice with this material in a more architectural way? I’m thinking about glass pavilions … what might that look like to you?

MAYER: Whenever I get to use a new material, I think about how and what I can get the medium to do—and ultimately what it can get from me. It’s sort of a dance or a conversation between both of our breaking limits. Will the glass shatter with this amount of pressure? Will my hands be able to create this line with this tool? What are the bounds of possibility and what will just not work are questions I have to sort through. What can I get away with? At what temperature does this burn into ashes and ruin?

As for the question about architectural expansions, I feel like I am constantly trying to make spaces—so yes. Over the last two years, I have spent many hours with friends building a sculptural tiny-home (artist residency) inside of a mobile car hauler called LOW RES. The interior aesthetic leans toward my sculptural work and has many features that allow several days to be spent inside of the installation that is inspired by prepper and survivalist culture.

One of my truly favorite architectural spaces involving glass is at the YoungArts Campus which was formerly the Bacardi Properties in Miami, Florida when it comes to impressive glass. There are no exterior walls, just stained glass. I think about that space often.

I don’t think it is possible to ignore the transformative way that a space full of glasswork or hand-crafted tiles/ceramic work affects the body. The tactility is a gesture of time. I think that the texture communicates differently to the soul in a more enhanced way than any machine-produced drywall or concrete slab. It just does. Is that because it makes us feel more human? More than we understand that it took human effort and some system of values and care? Or, do we understand that perfection (that a machine can make) is boring? I personally love to know that a human works towards beauty to make something for others.

 

Glassy Privacy Screen 001, 2022
steel and glass
78 x 72 x 1 inches
(3 hinged panels each 78 x 24 inches)

 

ADAMS: Can you expand on your ideas for the mobile art residency? I know that came about around the same time we were working on TIMESHARE back in 2018 - 2019. It is interesting to think about it now, during pandemic times, and how it could be even more helpful in a sense. 

MAYER: My interest has shifted from exploring technologically intertwined living to imagining its absence. This idea of a mobile, sustainable residency is born out of my research into self-proclaimed survivalists and apocalypse preppers. Living in Miami, climate disaster looms large in the collective consciousness, even as development on the coast continues at an untenable pace. Political, environmental, and infrastructural collapses will plague every human on Earth at one point or another. How does one prepare? I am interested in how survivalists prepare for disaster, and how the objects they create betray universal anxieties and fantasies around an unstable future. As land is being compromised and continually redefined by nature and political entities, how and where does an artist go to make art? Where is a safe, non-biased place to brainstorm?

While researching for LOW RES, I have been learning about prepper and survivalist culture and attended conferences and expos. Below are pictures from PREPPER CAMP in 2020 in North Carolina. 

ADAMS: What are your top three favorite things you are spending time with right now that have influenced this work? 

MAYER: My backyard in Florida continually influences my color palette. South Florida is one of the regions that is having a severe moment of reflection in terms of sea-level rise. Our weather in the Miami ecosystem continually reminds us of impermanence. A magical surrealism swamp is hard to ignore where plants push through all concrete and tropical storms do whatever they want, whenever they want. My 1.4-year-old puppy reminds me of beauty in chaos. I have been thinking a lot about EMP blasts lately and how our digital lives may render us to appear as a generation of illiterates to people in the future because there will be very few records of handwritten notes. I have just been thinking about obsolescence in new ways which has been a bit mind-bending.

Rachel Adams is the Chief Curator and Director of Programs at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. Her areas of interest are varied but focus on creating meaningful connections for artists. Projects tend to include the crossover between contemporary art and architecture, performance and video and new media practices. Past curatorial appointments include Senior Curator at UB Art Galleries, Curator-in-Residence at Disjecta Contemporary Art Center and Associate Curator at Arthouse at the Jones Center (now The Contemporary Austin). Adams holds an MA in Exhibition and Museum Studies from SFAI and a BFA from SAIC. Select exhibitions include Maya Dunietz: Root of Two, All Together, Amongst Many: Reflections on Empathy, Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Drop Scene, Claudia Wieser: Generations (co-curated), Alison O’Daniel: Heavy Air, Jillian Mayer: TIMESHARE, The Language of Objects, Wanderlust: Actions, Traces, Journeys 1967-2017 and Introducing Tony Conrad: A Retrospective (co-curated). Forthcoming projects include exhibitions with Jennifer Ling Datchuk, Raven Halfmoon and the group exhibition Presence in the Pause: Interiority and its Radical Immanence.

Transmundane Economies: An Interview Of Theodoulos Polyviou By Carlos Kong

 
 

interview by Carlos Kong
portraits by Burak Isseven
styling by Hakan Solak (all looks GmbH)

Theodoulos Polyviou is an artist whose practice explores the multilayered spaces where queerness, spirituality, and cultural heritage overlap across physical and digital worlds. Often utilizing virtual reality (VR) technology, Theo’s work also features architectural and sculptural elements, text, and sound, resulting in installations that are at once intellectually deep and sensuous to experience. He has participated in numerous exhibitions and residencies throughout Europe, and has a forthcoming project in Lecce, Italy, later this year. I met Theo on the occasion of his recent exhibition Transmundane Economies at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, where he has pursued a long-term artist residency. As an art critic, I’m usually hesitant and skeptical regarding the experience of art in virtual reality. But I found how Theo uses VR in Transmundane Economies to construct a “ritual space” that conjoins queerness, religion, and Cypriot cultural heritage to be profound and compelling. So I’ve met with him again to find out more.

CARLOS KONG: How would you describe yourself? Who is the real Theo?!

THEODOULOS POLYVIOU: I am inherently lost, or maybe by choice—I don’t know. But for me, being lost allows me to dig into subversive and irrational ways of navigating life, and this informs my practice. It gives me the freedom to partake in rituals of collective disorientation and becoming.


KONG: We met at your recent exhibition Transmundane Economies at Künstlerhaus, Bethanien in Berlin, where you’ve been an artist-in-residence since December 2020. Tell us a bit about your show.

POLYVIOU: My latest exhibition is one of many chapters that constitute Transmundane Economies, an ongoing project that deals with Cypriot cultural heritage in relation to virtual reality. It explores the complexity of immersive media—its experiential, epistemic, social, and economic dimensions—in relation to cultural, historical, and educational practices. I investigate how media-augmented renderings of history encounter the physical premises of museums and institutions. The figurations between cultural heritage and virtual reality generate information through their clashes and compatibilities.

 
 

KONG: In Transmundane Economies, you use virtual reality (VR) to digitally reconstruct Bellapais Abbey, the ruin of a 13th-century monastery in present-day Northern Cyprus. What drew you to this site?

POLYVIOU: Bellapais Abbey is a relic of many lives. Following the different colonial periods of Cyprus, the monastery went through various architectural and cultural changes, which continually altered its organization and operation. Transmundane Economies takes Bellapais Abbey as a site of inquiry. In collaboration with the architect Dakis Panayiotou, we’ve recreated part of the monastery using virtual reality and transposed it within the premises of Künstlerhaus Bethanien, extending its long-lasting and shape-shifting history. By immersing physical bodies in our virtually-invented trajectories, the project proposes alternative ways of inhabiting the monastery’s ruins. The project’s virtual orientation system disrupts the traces of previous ways of navigating the site left behind by former colonial interventions.

KONG: In both your latest exhibition and throughout your practice, you’ve recreated specific architectures in virtual reality. How have you come to use VR, and what are its advantages?

POLYVIOU: VR allows me to create spaces of ephemeral nature. Using VR, I construct temporary spaces, free from usual structures. I think of them as ludic social spaces or as secular chapels. They are nonetheless reminiscent of actual chapels I’ve seen in Cyprus, which connect segregated communities and towns of deregulated planning on the island. The psychological dimensions of the spaces I create become ‘materialized’ through VR, and the immersive experiences of VR are a participatory process. In doing so, VR allows me to extrapolate how the practices and ceremonial expressions born in my work could potentially acquire social meaning in the future.

KONG: When I experienced your exhibition Transmundane Economies, I couldn’t help but think of the act of queer cruising—the back-and-forth energy of potential erotic encounters—as I circled through the dim corners of Bellapais Abbey in virtual reality. Some would view queer spaces as the opposite of religious spaces, but you’ve mentioned to me that both are structured by rituals. What interests you most about “ritual spaces”? How are queerness, religion, and cultural heritage connected in the context of Cyprus and within your work?

POLYVIOU: Indeed, my work addresses spaces of ritual, but it departs from museological approaches to religion that are bound to material objects. Instead, I use virtual reality to address the limits of storing religious objects within museums, opening new potentials for spirituality to be designed and experienced in the digital age. I’m most interested in ritualized performances as a social strategy; the construction of memory and space through both queer rituals like cruising, as well as religious rituals; and the emergence of new social identities and queer spaces through digital collectivity. The new identities produced in ritual spaces provide access to history, ancestry, and spirituality in ways that challenge the distribution of material wealth and the status of borders and territories. With regards to queerness and religion, institutionalized religion has had a strong influence on the political affairs of Cyprus by instrumentalizing a sense of national collectivity. The queer community on the whole island is not only subjected to marginalization based on their sexuality but also due to number of processes of identity formation and discrimination. My work is an offer to discuss mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, and to consider how any place can transcend its own physicality to escape its embodied, ideological power.

 
 

KONG: Many of your works are made through collaboration. You produced Transmundane Economies with the architect Dakis Panayiotou, who you have been collaborating with since 2018 and with whom you contributed work to the Cyprus Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennial in 2021 as part of the group exhibition anachoresis: upon inhabiting distance. How do you work with your collaborators?

POLYVIOU: My work is of a collaborative nature indeed. Amalgamating different voices in my practice removes the focus from individual creativity and provides an opportunity to devise a ‘hybridic’ mode of production. I employ processes of dialogue and collaboration across different disciplines, including spatial design, architecture, sound, and even scent-making. My long-lasting friendship with Dakis Panayiotou has stretched out a collaboration that has traversed projects and residencies over the past four years. I believe the two of us find harmony in contradiction. Our differences complement each other and our collaborations become mechanisms to explore the potential dynamics of collective failure. I’m also interested in engaging with open forms of audience participation. This too is a form of collaboration, crucial to the completion of the work. The process of consciously involving visitors transmutes the exhibition space into a place of ritual, where they can connect with the transcendental world in a process of self-identification as spiritual beings.

KONG: You will soon be an artist-in-residence at Kora Contemporary Arts Center in Lecce, Italy. What will you be working on there? What’s next for you?

POLYVIOU: I was invited for an artist residency at Kora Contemporary Arts Center in Lecce, Italy, where I’ll be working site-specifically during April and May in Il Palazzo Baronale de Gualtieris, a 13th - century castle in the town Castrignano de’ Greci. The work will be then presented as part of a group show running from July 2022 through June 2023. From May 10-14, 2022, Akademie Schloss Solitude will organize the festival “Fragile Solidarity/Fragile Connections,” where I’ll give a talk in conversation with writer Jazmina Figueora. I’ll also be premiering a video on Kunst-tv, curated by Daniela Arriado and Vanina Saracino later this spring. More to come after September, but I can’t disclose the specifics :)

Transmundane Economies, Theodoulos Polyviou and Dakis Panayiotou, Künstlerhaus Bethanien.

longsleeve: Theo’s own, trousers & boots: GmbH

Acrobatics Over Beats: A Conversation Between Torkwase Dyson and Derek Fordjour 

TORKWASE DYSON In your work, there are so many different movements. I’ll say acrobatics. To quote Brand Nubian a little bit, “acrobatics over beats.” 

DEREK FORDJOUR I really like the notion of the acrobatic. As you talk about the dexterity of bodies and being pushed, I think about the presence and absence of bodies in your work. This is really a big part of my attraction to your thinking and your work as it relates to mine, is the absence of the depiction of the body, but your keen awareness of bodies in space. I wanted to know from you: where is the body centered in your thinking absent from depiction of the body?  

DYSON Well, I understand consciousness to be experienced through the body, in this form as a human, right? As a human, sentient being, consciousness exists because of the body. And then the history of consciousness, liberation, Black liberation specifically, I understand that the brain and the mind are doing things that the body then follows, or catches up with, or responds to. What that does is that puts into ways of thinking and moving around instinct, around perception, around ideas of logic. I was thinking the other day about the differentiation between perspective and space. For me they’re indelibly tied; there’s no absence of the body ever. So, when the work is functioning, when I’m really functioning at a high level in the studio, when I’m drawing, when I’m painting, when I’m making sculpture, I am aware that the body is a place for my consciousness, and my consciousness is a place to understand past, present, and future, and that Blackness, in particular, is a condition of consciousness first for me. 

FORDJOUR And consciousness is a product of the mind it seems. When you think about the brain versus the mind, and for you, does Blackness also exist in this realm? 

DYSON Consciousness is something that happens between the brain and the mind in the human form. So you have the brain, which produces a consciousness. The brain, to a degree, is measurable. The consciousness is something that is indeterminable, that is formless. When we’re thinking about Blackness and being, and understanding those things, our experiences with body and mind are inextricably tied to the history of becoming Black, becoming human, becoming present. So, these things aren’t separate. 

FORDJOUR I love the idea that there is never an absence of the body, that the body is always present. I was thinking about how drawing, to me, is very connected to thinking. It’s almost a form of thought mapping. I think drawing in your practice plays a significant role, whether it’s the drawn line or actual mapping/graphing. I thought about the fact that I use lots of charcoal—that’s how the work begins ... the drawn line, which is a form of consciousness as well. When you talk about the expansiveness of consciousness and how it is ultimately indeterminable, the vastness of potential at the beginning of a drawing, the openness of possibility, is what we are attracted to...potentiality. I really think alot about the role of drawing. I am aware of your practice of making a multitude of small studies and expanding the possibilities of line—I’m now thinking about that gesture as evidence of thought, and a kind of stream of consciousness. Do you think about drawing related to consciousness or thought? 

 

Torkwase Dyson
Distance, Distance (1919: Black Water), 2019
Acrylic, metal, ink, and gouache on wood
(diameter 98 inches/ 248.9 cm)
©Torkwase Dyson.

 

DYSON Remember when we were at the Graham Foundation and you participated in the drawing workshop, and you were drawing with chairs, and you were putting chair legs through pieces of paper, and you were making marks on them? Drawing in the expanded field is that kind of action where mindfulness, thought, improvisation, thinking through equation takes place. The act of the brain thinking one plus two equals three is different than just thinking of the number three, right? Those kinds of ways in which the mind and brain are capable of both linear thought, and instinct, and expression around knowing are always operational when drawing. When you’re in the studio, and you’re making, you can set yourself up for both. You can set yourself up to understand an equational theory. You can understand a kind of mathematical abstraction with geometry. You can set yourself up to understand the curvilinear and the rectilinear in an equation. You can also set yourself up for improvisation. You can set yourself up for ways of knowing through the body in a kind of immediacy. These capabilities are, if we think about understanding as a dialectical experience, then everything kind of goes. It’s those kinds of ways of working that put you in a position to exhaust the possibility of a form. 

FORDJOUR As you talk about the possibilities of setting up a kind of calculus in the studio, I think about your legend of shapes (box, bell, curve, etc.) I really loved that you not only had this legend, but you made it available for viewers. This could have remained limited to process or part of your enigmatic thought restricted to the studio, but you also made it available in the wall text. Was the creation of this legend, the genus of the work? Did you start with those elements, or did you react to the works and sort of discern patterns and then extract this legend? Did you ever have any concern about how people might apply it to reading the work in that it could become possibly reductive? 

DYSON Well, I don’t know if it works like that. First and foremost, I’m interested in, as a reductive kind of phrase, environmental liberation—the future of it, the past of it, and the history of it. I needed to, in my studio, create, I’ll call it a Black and eloquent equation to think about the strategies and the methodologies behind those futures. Because I believe it is the essence of those liberating acts in combination with the reality of indigenism that is going to save our future. The work is only about me thinking through that and making objects so that I can be in that conversation consistently and insistently, there is a level of comprehension around those possibilities that make me feel alive, and that regard all those histories as living histories, and regard the future of the human race as something that is unfixed and constantly changing, and for more improved living conditions. One doesn’t come before the other, I don’t think. I’m just trying to get at these things. Maybe they came at the same time, I don’t know, but what I landed on for that show is a solitary form. The curve, the triangle, and the 90º angle is where I started years ago, and now I’ve created a single form that I believe is my own. The trapezoid in relationship to the circle creates a trapezoidal prism and a volume. When I was, rightfully so, using the history of Black liberation politics to discover myself in the world and have conversations, I now landed on a form that, in itself, I can insert things in. Do you know what I mean? 

FORDJOUR Oh, absolutely. I want to go back to a point in an exchange we had this past summer. I asked you about Afrofuturism, and you gave a flat rejection of the presence of that kind of aspiration in your work. We don’t have to talk specifically about Afrofuturism, but this notion of futurity as something optimistic and hopeful. There’s always this kind of vacillation between historical precedent and events and also a sense of propositions for the future in your work. I would like to know whether your understanding of the idea of futurity, particularly how it emerges in your work, whether questioning or even conjuring it—is optimistic? 

DYSON I don’t work in those terms, I guess another flat rejection. I recognize them as ideas—propositions that other people use to move forward, but I think about ideas of impermanence, creativity, invention, and advancement. When I meditate, I think about change, and I think about advancement, I think about ancestors, I think about the specter, I think about horror, I think about peace—I think about these things, so I don’t use those phrases because...I don’t know why. 

FORDJOUR Because they’re limiting? 

DYSON Maybe not. Maybe they’re not limiting. I just entered this idea of the future through a different door. I entered a door through someone like Roscoe Mitchell, so when I see Roscoe Mitchell set up, ready to go, I don’t think about hope. I think about preparation, I think about skill, I think about risk, I think about transformation, and it gives me a feeling of velocity, and I know that things are always moving and expanding. 

 

DEREK FORDJOUR
STRWMN, 2020
Acrylic, charcoal, cardboard, oil pastel and foil on newspaper mounted on canvas
85 x 65 inches (215.9 x 165.1 cm)"
Image courtesy of the artist and Petzel Gallery

 

FORDJOUR This is how you approach… 

DYSON That conversation about Afrofuturism. Thinking about your work—I want to know what you think about imagination, and invention, and aspiration, and collective being. How do those things operate in your work?

FORDJOUR I really think about how inventiveness is a necessary aspect of the Black condition. To be an under resourced, largely oppressed people, or at least, people navigating the conditions of oppression, invention becomes a strategy for survival. As it pertains to my work, there is some degree of an element that might be read as whimsy, or a hint of the preternatural or the magical, the carnivalesque, which kind of pushes toward a kind of spiritual dimension. I’m really aiming at that sense of wonder around invention, and it happens for me in very practical terms when I encounter systems of oppression. Even prisons for example, how there’s an ecosystem within that system of oppression that can create all this contraband of many sorts that then has an economy. But then when I go to South Africa and go through a township and find out that there’s some sort of drug that’s been created by rubber in a lantern, and this other thing that creates another sub economy. I’m really interested in how—around the world, in order to thrive under oppressive conditions, people become inventive. We must become educated bodies, Black bodies in institutions, and still interested in liberation, and negotiating all the things that come with that. I think in this body of work, to more or lesser degrees, that sense of whimsy is reaching for that inventiveness that is a magical dimension that I associate with Black culture. 

DYSON Just thinking about the installation that I’ve seen of yours—I’ll bring up the specter again—where there’s an amalgamation of the meta, the exact, the specter, the in-between, the acrobatic, the practical, the mystical, but also this idea of the indeterminable, and a real sense of time in your work as well. I was thinking about one of your animatronic devices that circles, spins, and lights and moves, and the sense of time that it takes and steadiness that it takes to create a genius movement, to create something that’s at the edge of its absolute possibility. There’s something about your work that happens in that space without leaving behind the history and the terror of the carnivalesque—Black history specifically, and global history more generally. I’m really, really fascinated with each of your projects, how you continue and have a fidelity to the mechanistic while holding onto the quotidian. I know that in a few short years you’ve made these leaps and bounds. I’m super excited to see where it all continues to grow. The rigor in your practice really shows within experimentation, and invention, and materiality.  

 

Torkwase Dyson
I Am Everything That Will Save Me (Bird and Lava), 2020
acrylic and string on wood
36'' diameter
© Torkwase Dyson, courtesy Pace Gallery
Photography by Kris Graves

 

FORDJOUR Very much in materiality and the haptic, right? 

DYSON The haptic, yes. 

FORDJOUR The haptic as a way in. I think that the paintings now are much more active, that the figures are more animated. I haven’t really depicted much action, but I really wanted to respond to this sort of social action moment in which we currently live--this moment of activation around election, responding to death, and images of them, and all of the excitement even in young people around addressing the Black condition in a way that I have not seen in my lifetime--this convergence of social action. And there’s always been liberation work, there’s always been work toward revolution, but this sort of crystallizing moment where it’s at the fore and goes beyond the bounds of our community conversations, and now there seems to be a world community that’s motivated around Black liberation and seeing these things come to the fore. There’s an activation, and I really have wanted to have work that felt invigorated and that would probably explain the move toward the acrobatic. 

DYSON And pushing against fascism. 

FORDJOUR Certainly. Listen, absolutely. Honestly Torkwase, fascism was a theoretical idea or far off political concept for most of my life. It was something I accessed through  literature and learning. It was merely another form of government, but to experience that, to live it, to understand it, and to feel the anxiety around danger for bodies in a governmental system and that kind of thing—this is the first time I’ve really experienced that so keenly. The acrobatic—which is a great way to describe some of the physicality and the gesturing that happens with my figuration. It is the acrobatic toward a kind of discomfort and a contortion, a contorting within, thinking about the edges of the picture plane and activating portraiture or bodies. Some moments, of course, are very still, but I have moments that go in the direction of action, and I think it is informed by our moment of political action and awareness. One of the things I really appreciate about you as an artist, but also as an educator is your vast knowledge and appreciation of a multiplicity of practices. You are not an abstract painter. It is far too reductive for you. You are able to really plug into practices of a variety of modes, and your understanding of what’s happening in figurative work, my work, and my deep understanding of what’s happening in your work, but we fall into different categories, the objective and unobjective—I want to know about your relationship to figuration. You started from the mechanics of drawing, originally. You really refused this splintering that happens around figuration and abstraction. But I wanted to just hear you talk about your relationship with the figurative. 

DYSON In this moment of activation, and as you talk about witnessing firsthand, or being in close proximity to fascist, racist violence, brings us to a different kind of kinship of systems of global oppression. In thinking about the exhibition Freedom Principles, these are the principles which I am operating under, where there’s nothing too far, there’s nothing too distant, we’re all in this condition of the relational, and we’re all in this condition of consciousness together. Now there are registers of closeness, like my closeness to immediate death and violence. Am I far from what it means to have my child kidnapped from me and then held in cages? The politics of the human body are never without question, whether we’re talking about figuration or non-representation, or kinds of concrete abstraction, or didactic abstraction, all of these things are in consideration in terms of the way that I think about artmaking between the mind and the body. 

FORDJOUR I’m so happy you have a piece, by the way. 

DYSON Yeah, it’s right over there. You see it? 

FORDJOUR That’s like the first sculpture I ever made. 

TORKWASE DYSON Could you talk about your upcoming show? 

DEREK FORDJOUR I had a year knowing that I was going to do this show. I spent a long time thinking about it before actually doing anything. There’s a collaboration where I’m working with a puppeteer, Nick Lehane, so that required lots of meetings. I was also learning about the art form of puppetry, which I enjoy. And then there were sculptural elements that are happening in different places, due to Covid, which required thinking, fabrication, and various processes. I waited until those things were happening before the painting began. I found that the aspects of learning and the collaborative work helped activate many of the ideas I had been processing before. I had this list of painting ideas that was constantly evolving, but it wasn’t until I had these other things to react to that I really found an entry point. I probably work best extemporaneously, so maybe I was just creating the conditions for that kind of energy. 

 

Torkwase Dyson
Space as Form: Movement 1 (Bird and Lava), 2020
acrylic on canvas
40-1/4" x 48" (102.2 cm x 121.9 cm)
© Torkwase Dyson, courtesy Pace Gallery
Photography by Kris Graves

 

DYSON Can you talk about the title Self Must Die? I want to talk about code, I want to talk about autonomy, and I want to talk about presentation. Can you talk about the title? 

FORDJOUR Two things really brought this about. One, I was thinking a lot about death this year because I have been so proximate to it, just people struggling with how to pull off a funeral at this time, so there is the literal loss of life, people actually dying, this year. I also have a close relative who is dealing with a terminal illness, I have a son who is a twenty-two-year-old college student in Atlanta that was in the streets when protests were happening, and I watched two young people from the college he attends get dragged out of a car and tased violently by a mob of officers in riot gear, so thinking about his vulnerabilities as a young Black man at twenty-two years old. Also my father is in his mid-seventies, so as we think of end-of-life issues, I kind of sought safety in the middle, but then I realized that I am the same age as George Floyd at the time of his vicious murder. So I’ve been thinking about death in all these ways—the funerary, the absence of the funerary, living in the wake of death and also a very necessary ego death. 

 

DEREK FORDJOUR
Pall Bearers, 2020
Acrylic, charcoal, cardboard, oil pastel and foil on newspaper mounted on canvas
100 x 72 inches (254 x 182.9 cm)
Image courtesy of the artist and Petzel Gallery

 

Embodied Resonance: An Interview Of Pop Sensation Mandy Harris Williams

 
 


interview by Summer Bowie
creative direction & photography by Dana Boulos
styled by Janet Gomez (all looks No Sesso)
makeup by Yasmin Istanbouli
photography assisted by Bono Melendrez
produced by BRAINFREEZE Productions
special thanks to Alldayeveryday

Mandy Harris Williams is a renaissance woman working across more media than one could reasonably hyphenate. On social media, in her monthly #brownupyourfeed radio hour on NTS, and with her myriad published essays, she challenges us to consider critical theories on race, gender, sexuality, and above all, privilege. She dares us to meet the most divisive aspects of our charged political culture with a caring ethic that prioritizes those most deprived of our love and compassion. Offline, her DJ sets are like a blast of Naloxone to the automatic nervous system with the power to reanimate the rhythm in even the shyest of wallflowers. After studying the history of the African diaspora at Harvard and receiving a masters of urban education at Loyola Marymount, Harris spent seven years as an educator in low-income communities. From there, she expanded her educational modalities to include a conceptual art practice, musical production informed by years of vocal training, and a lecture format of her own dialectic design. These “edutainment” experiences are one part college seminar, one part church sermon, and one part late-night talk show with a heavy dose of consensual roasting. It’s a Friar’s Club for an intellectual, intersectional, and internet-savvy generation. These performances draw us in with their vibey bass lines and hooks before they throw us under the quietly segregated bus that we’re still struggling to rectify. Mandy and I sat by the fire one lovely winter night in Los Angeles to talk about the contours of fascism, algorithmic injustice, her latest film for the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, and her upcoming residency at MoMa PS1.

SUMMER BOWIE: How do you think that anti-Blackness expresses itself differently in Black communities versus non-Black communities?

MANDY HARRIS WILLIAMS: I think you have the categories of it, and then you have the contours of it, and the contour is more the West African phenotype. It's less viable in a lot of ways for things like respect, and esteem, for love, and largely for interpersonal value. It doesn't matter whether you're Black or not Black, you know, because there are so many phenotypes in the world of people who identify as Black. And so it's very easy to do the same shit, especially when you're trying to justify yourself in a world that feels a little bit affronting. Everybody has their shit that they're going through, and so everybody, no matter what their race is, wants to feel oppressed (laughs) and everybody, no matter what their race is, is also racist. (laughs)

BOWIE: Arthur Jafa talks about subject position a lot and the way that we're so accustomed to putting ourselves in white, male subject positions because we're so used to seeing narratives where they play the protagonists, which is why they feel so entitled to our empathy. But the same goes for the types of Black protagonists we're accustomed to seeing. There are the phenotypes that we have become accustomed to empathizing with and then there are the ones that tend to play the supporting roles.

WILLIAMS: I did a lecture and I said something about how the movie Sideways is the pinnacle of that art form when it comes to those entitlements between both race and gender. (laughs) I'm not going to say something bodyist about whether this man [Paul Giamotti] has value as a sexual object to others. But, what I will say is that I'm not going to deny that there is a market wherein “body” has real material consequences. So, holding both of those positions, there's still nothing lovable about him.

BOWIE: That's true.

WILLIAMS: And he is with these amazing women, right? And he gets the girl at the end, after doing...

BOWIE: ...Nothing for it. (laughs) The body economy has also become hyper-mobilized in the social media sphere. I'm curious how you see our algorithms working to enforce racial bias, gender bias, and ultimately white supremacy?

WILLIAMS: That's a very big question. I'll say there's a programmer bias. There's a moderation bias. There was this issue where you couldn't write like, men are trash on Facebook [without being shadow banned], but meanwhile, they just came out with this MIT research article about how Facebook was sponsoring misinformation forums—like actively aiding them.

BOWIE: Interesting. Wow.

WILLIAMS: Yeah. That's a doozy that came out in the Facebook Papers, which we haven't noticed because these motherfuckers control the way that we access information. And so, you have the issue regarding who has the resources to put up this internet space.

BOWIE: When did you start #brownupyourfeed and where did that come from?

WILLIAMS: That came from me looking at people's feeds and not seeing a lot of Brown people. You know, everybody’s talking about Black Lives Matter, and maybe they do have Black people in their life, but in this place where people are engaging in an autodiaristic practice, it’s not something that most of them are documenting or addressing. So, it does provide some sort of statement about the way you think other people value you. It would just surprise me. I would look through people's stuff and I'd be like, "Huh? Am I the only Black person getting around?"

BOWIE: You did a great lecture on nose privilege, which is something that’s often overlooked. We rarely acknowledge the role that our noses play in the doors that get opened or closed. I have one of those beauty apps on my phone that I like to use for caricaturing people’s faces, and one of the strangest things about it is the nose modifier. There's not an option to make the nose wider, only thinner. It makes you wonder where this perception comes from—that there's this one-way path to improvement?

WILLIAMS: (laughs) Right. I think it's white supremacy.

BOWIE: As a Black woman, what are some of the algorithmic biases that you have to push through on Instagram? And what are some of the ways that you employ it in order to spread your message?

WILLIAMS: I mean, I don't wanna speak too much about my particular experience, because you can never know what would've happened in your life with a different visage. So, I try to consider the general contours of what is taking place and how I might be subject to that. Or how I might not be subject to that. This gets back into that thing of everybody wanting to be oppressed and everyone being racist all at once. There is a canonical unwanted, and a canonical desired, and I don't think I'm too close to either side of the spectrum. For example, I have some privileges as far as where I'm from, how I speak, the institutions I've attended, the way I look, everything. The way I like to approach it is like, in this stream of technology and communication, has there ever been a time when oppression or bias was broken? Because we know for sure that slavery was a tool of social control. So the question is: when did that right itself? Because what really grinds the gears of fearful white people is that feeling that you're just picking it out of the sky. So, I could say I'm oppressed because of this or that, but the question I have is: when did that stop, in what stage of technology, in what economic sense? In what romantic sense? In what political power sense? You look at our run of presidents, and I guess we have had our first Black woman president for seven minutes while Biden was under, but we've never elected one.

BOWIE: What's interesting about this phenomenon of everyone denying their internalized racist tendencies is that they’re usually very quick to acknowledge the oppression or adversity they’ve had to overcome personally. Where could all this struggle be coming from if everyone were so respectful of one another?

WILLIAMS: I mean, intersectionality is the best bet, and then you have to tell the truth about the other stuff between those two things. Like a care that responds to the reality of how intense white supremacy has been and how much it has gone unbroken to this day. And then, you have to balance that with a care ethic. It's both critique and care. So, I'm gonna take care of this more, because I know historically it has been subject to more oppression and less care, and those tend to go together. One means of oppression is to not care for people, to position them as unlovable, or just invisible.

BOWIE: Right, often when people say things like, "Nobody can take a joke anymore," they don't ask who is being cast as the butt of the joke and how frequently they're cast in that role. Back in the ‘90s, bell hooks talked about the term ‘PC’ and how it was improperly framed as a way of policing rhetoric, rather than a call toward respectful sensitivity. There's this strange backlash where people are honestly asking why they need to care and why they can't willfully deny that we as humans are sensitive.

WILLIAMS: I don't even feel like backlash is harsh enough. It's just the contour of fascism. And this is a cycle. Every time there is some measure of civil rights or liberation achieved, it's followed by this backlash, so to speak, but it's happened so many times that we can see it's just a way by which the conservative powers that be can reclaim their positionality and expand it.

BOWIE: How do you feel now that it's been almost two years since the initial uprisings of 2020. We're seeing major changes in some regards, and then business as usual in others. Did it all go down the way you had expected?

WILLIAMS: The challenge of not being jaded is trying to actually believe that change is possible. I would like it a lot if there were continued emphasis on progress and change. The response has been very dispersed. Some people are staying the course, some people are tuned out and over it. Some people don't want Black people to be the center of attention anymore, or they're annoyed—just immature shit. And I don't know if I expected it to go any particular way. I tried to strike while the iron was hot, and I also feel like I've been doing it for a long time. So, it's good to have some more eyes on the things you're talking about, or people starting to be like, "Huh? Okay. Maybe there's something to those words that are intense, or harsh, or implicate me, or that I have to make some sort of change. Maybe I don't have that much spiritual or material security around my behavior.” What has really happened, though, is a lot of people have just checked out.

BOWIE: A lot of people felt like they were being asked to do a lot of extra things in their life, rather than just asking what they could immediately stop doing. Your work really teases out the very subtle ways that people express their anti-Blackness and how egregious these subtleties prove to be over time. Do you feel like you've always seen the world through this lens?

WILLIAMS: Being a Black child on the Upper West Side at this strange, progressive institution as a kid, we were always talking about social issues and civil rights. This is what people fear when we talk about critical race theory in the classroom. I had enough theoretical buckets and language to understand some of the weirdness that would happen with me. I was always like, Why am I different? What did that mean? What makes me different from most of the kids at my school? What makes me different from other people in my family? What makes me different from other Black and Brown kids? I felt different in a lot of ways. I don't think that every person with a mixed cultural experience necessarily has this pattern of thoughts, but I do think it puts you in a place where you have to deal with marginality in a way that gives it a real multi-applicable texture. It's a seasoning, like salt. 

BOWIE: It's just in everything. How do you combine the aesthetics and the politics of what you do through your art?

WILLIAMS: I like to look at the ways that fascism creates climates of anti-intellectualism. So, I made this film for dis and I shared it at the Centre d'Art Contemporain in Geneva, and for me, the container of intellectualism is also one of these things. Being a Black woman, or being fuller-bodied, or being intellectual are all ways in which fascism wraps itself around my experience. So for that, I worked with this Edward Said essay, Representations of the Intellectual. It was a series of lectures he did in 1993 at Oxford where he talks about the definition and the role of an intellectual: how it’s a persona of a bygone era, and how industry and specialization encouraged those who demonstrate intellectual prowess to become marketing geniuses or programmers. It talks about the ways in which anti-intellectualism is encouraged by fascism and how not having an intellectual culture enables certain phenomena—like dog whistles—that reinforce structural racism and genderism. The film itself doesn't have a racial component to it, which is really funny. It's implied by offering myself as the filmic image, and it also talks about intentionality with the subjects we choose to address in media.

BOWIE: How did the concept of the film come about and how did you go about making it?

WILLIAMS: We were in the uprising period, maybe a little bit post, and people were looking to Palestinian scholars because of the violence against Palestinians overseas. Those two moments were nesting on one another such that you could look at an entire—not racially or ethically-specific—politic of the subaltern, or the “other.” In that moment, lots of people were looking to theorists like Said, because of his ability to express this general condition of politically marginalized people. But I gravitated to one of his lesser explored works and I was using that as a means to understand how critical thinking, writing, theorizing—intellectualism, generally speaking, is a part of a protest and liberation tradition. I took a lot of solace in understanding what my position was. It sounds a little bit arrogant to say you're an intellectual, but part of my process with listening to this work was trying to understand where I fit into all of this. I'm not out on the streets. I'm not organizing in a traditional sense. Why is my voice important? Is this navel-gazing? Is it selfish? Is it bourgeoisie? And I felt really validated. It also gave me a roadmap for what sorts of interventions are important for me to make. Things like talking about intellectualism in an era when it's so clear that critical race theory has become the maligning of woke, which is ultimately about Black enlightenment. And I can see how those things being maligned has this particular contour that allows for fascism to pervade, and anti-Blackness to take place in a time when it's really needed by some people. They are clinging to it, and to circle back, you can see it play out as a form of algorithmic injustice. You hear about these Facebook Papers and how they're actually farming misinformation. It's a pretty damning look at how all of these systems are working together to control the way information is distributed. So the film is a protest gesture, located at a corner of the work against fascism as I see it right now.

BOWIE: You recently did a performance lecture at Oxy Arts, which is a public art space rooted in social justice. This was for the closing of their Encoding Futures exhibition where artists that work in AI and AR proposed more just visions for the future. Do you see any immediate ways that we can improve technology to make it less fascist?

WILLIAMS: That's a great question. In order to make anything less fascist, we really have to—on some level—become less fascist, right? For example, this soda can [points to La Croix], we don't know who the manufacturers are, or where the factory is, who owns those means of can-making, who's profiting most off of the can makers' labor? And then, what's the likelihood of those can makers being X, Y, or Z ethnicity, versus other tiers of the can industry?

BOWIE: Sure. Who's mining the aluminum?

WILLIAMS: Right. The thing that keeps me encouraged, or not terribly depressed, is that I can be athletic and a little scatterbrained about whatever my intervention is gonna be. Because I'm not gonna state the same thing over and over again. I refuse. So, broadly calling myself a conceptual artist or believing in myself as that, or believing in the interventions that come of that is based on trying to come at it from many different angles. In the way that a teacher has to come through many different modalities. You have a phonics song, and then you have phonics movements, and then you have phonics posters. I don't really want to specialize. I could get a PhD, and I'm not saying that wouldn't be fun at some point in time, but there's also this increasing jargon the more you get specialized. So, I like to use media like film and music. I've been really great at writing music recently, and it's exciting, but the music comes really easily and I like the idea of the container of the rock star, or the pop star. It's an entertainment class whereby Black people have far more esteem or prestige than in other spaces. Tons of influence. Nikita Gale, is an artist who I had the pleasure and privilege of talking with in a couple of structured formats, and she talks about how performance inspires her work, but she's interested in playing with how performance can be not of the body. And my takes are all very bodily. There's always this very embodied measure of my spoken word. It's always a lyrical didactic, and that's the prism that everything's going through. So, whether it's film, documentary, or maybe you have some voiceover, or essay, or music, I really just enjoy using my voice. I don't think there's a category for it, but I sometimes call myself a vocal artist, because it's all about this embodied resonance.

BOWIE: That’s a perfect way to put it. Your lectures really do transcend the standard format in a very unique way. A critical theory may be expressed in all seriousness, or it may be done comically in a way that just comes out and bites you (laughs), or it becomes a song and dance. It hits our bodies in different ways, it hits our feelings in different ways, and it's a communal experience. You're almost like a preacher, but the experience is this cross between church, a talk show, and a college lecture. So, what else do you have in the works this coming year?

WILLIAMS: I’m really excited to release more music this year and play with the format of musical performance, and recording. I’ll be working with my long-time dance music family, A Club Called Rhonda, for those releases, and that music is a text that will fold into the performative lectures, as the Oxy lecture did. I have a residency at MoMA PS1 from February to May, and what I'm really excited to do is take the format of that Oxy lecture and expand on it, because as I was creating it, I was like, "Oh wow. This is the pocket." This is a place I could stay and move the focus ever so slightly to make a repeating series of work. My best friend, Paul Whang was the production designer, my sister Yves B. Golden was the DJ, and I just really loved making it with my friends. It's real bliss work. I'm also touched by Audre Lorde's essay, Uses of the Erotic, because at the crosshatch of the lecture that I performed at Oxy and what I'll be expanding upon for the PS1 residency is the spiral of how the critical and the erotic feed one another as a source of wisdom. Part of the reason I talk so much about the right to be loved or considered beautiful is because while they might seem less important than something like civil rights or economic equality, there are these soft rights that through social design become instantiated as rules regarding who should earn what based on how they look, and then how they might be loved or cherished.

BOWIE: I think that essay should be required reading for all high schoolers. There's a lot to be said about the systemic repression of the erotic, particularly in women, and even more for women of color, because of the power that it holds. Likewise, it speaks to what you were saying about it sounding arrogant to say you're an intellectual. Regardless of one’s gender, we’re often made to feel shame for embracing what feels like the fullest expression of ourselves. Can you tell us a little more about what those lectures will explore?

WILLIAMS: I'm going to be working on a suite of music and lectures that deconstruct the blues origin story. The first, I think, is about sonic Blackface, the second is about the lightening and depoliticizing of the blues mama archetype in film and music, and I don't know what this third lecture is about, but I think  it's called Dances with Dolezal. (laughs) 

BOWIE: I mean, Billie Eilish needs choreography to accompany her tunes, doesn't she?

WILLIAMS: Yeah. The note under that is “gestural/auditory Blackface.”

BOWIE: It's as though we need to give certain white celebrities the permission to take on these contours you refer to of the Black persona so that we can give ourselves the permission to continue appropriating as well.

WILLIAMS: Yeah. That's what @idealblackfemale is about. It's a reclamation of me taking on a persona. I like to think of it as assholery a little bit. The nomenclature of the whole thing is meant to be a little bratty, you know?

BOWIE: It feels like a very clear response to the way that Black women are discouraged from being as cheeky as they wanna be, or as salty as they wanna be for fear of sounding bitter. And why? White men get to bitch and moan about every little inconvenience.

WILLIAMS: Yeah, there's this funny debate about the term incel and which community it really comes from. There's a line of argument and study that says it actually comes from Black women who are among the least married populations in the US—along with Asian men—and are both structurally and desirability-oppressed.

BOWIE: Right. They like to claim that the violence of the incel comes from the fact that he's not getting laid, which is his “natural right,” but are young, white men the least laid people?

WILLIAMS: (laughs) There are a lot of other populations that are structurally less laid.

Collector Jim Hedges Is A Gatekeeper To A Secret Trove Of Andy Warhol Photographs

interview by Oliver Kupper
portrait by Summer Bowie

Jim Hedges is a debonnaire Southern gentleman with a Yankee sophistication who just so happens to have the largest private collection of Andy Warhol photographs. Many the world has never been seen before. A seasoned art collector, Hedges has become a historian, a scholar, and a gatekeeper to the bromide crystal cave of Warhol’s photographic imagination—as a body of thousands of images, the oeuvre is an x-ray of 20th century contemporary popular art. Behind the high-priced auction block megaworks that include the bright iconographic visages of Elvis and Marilyn, Warhol’s photographs exist just beneath the surface like an iceberg—polaroids, 35-millimeter, and photobooth strips are honest, true, hypervivid, erotic, pornographic and awash with the deep microscopic ribonucleic acid of Warhol the artist and documentarian of a louche, and sexually liberated, pharmaceutical zeitgeist.  On view at Hotel Bel Air, Hedges will be showing a selection of Warhol photographs in dialogue with the work of Maripol, whose polaroid documentation of the late-disco and New Wave-era offered a complimentary, but equally electric, gaze to the Downtown New York glam-era. We caught up with Jim Hedges to discuss his collection. 

OLIVER KUPPER You grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee and discovered Andy Warhol's work through Interview Magazine—how did Interview enter your life?

JIM HEDGES Back in those days you could go into a magazine store and spend an entire afternoon looking at things. I found a magazine store that had Interview and I got a subscription when I was 12-years-old. It was my gateway drug. It was my entry point to things, not in Warhol's world, but the cult of celebrity and what was happening in Downtown New York, which in the late seventies, early eighties, was a spectacular and exciting time. And then as I got older and started collecting art, I decided that Warhol's work was something that I was super interested in. After years and years of collecting and getting educated about the landscape, I started to buy photos by Warhol. But I had also been in the investment business for 18 years. As I started to transition out of that, I realized that art collecting was sort of like a misunderstood asset. 15 years later, it's my full time job. 

OLIVER KUPPER So, at 12-years-old you wanted to move to New York? 

JIM HEDGES My mom is actually a Yankee. And my dad is from Tennessee. So, I had cousins in New York. 

OLIVER KUPPER And your father collected outsider art? 

JIM HEDGES As a teenager, my dad started doing wood carving. Over the course of time, he started doing more and more large-scale, ambitious projects. And then he started meeting other Appalachian wood carvers. He was diving into the folk, outsider art landscape. Then he fell in love with self-taught African American artists. And he became a big supporter of theirs. He had a collection of over 2,400 works of art when he died. He was definitely a collector, but he would never define himself as a collector. But he was an incredible advocate in terms of placing the work with museums and getting big curators from New York and elsewhere to meet the artists. It's a totally different channel than what I've done, but it's definitely in the blood. 

OLIVER KUPPER What did your father do, and what did your mother do?  

JIM HEDGES My dad actually ran our family's charitable foundation and was an artist. My mom was an interior designer. And you know, my great-grandmother started the museum in our hometown. My grandmother was a docent. Everybody was around art. 

OLIVER KUPPER With Warhol, did you start collecting his photographs first, or was it his primary works? 

JIM HEDGES It was primary works first. I bought some Warhol paintings. I bought some Warhol works on paper—all sort of without strategy. I would purchase things I was very attracted to. And then I got more familiar with the breadth of the Polaroid body of work. And I understood that they were used to make the silkscreens. It became much more deep as a pursuit. But you know, he had a dark room in his parents' basement when he was nine years old. He grew up as a photographer. And he photographed virtually every day of his adult life. But what’s interesting is that all the iconic paintings, like Marilyn Monroe, were from film stills or newspaper articles. And to avoid getting sued, he started using his own source material, his own photographs.

OLIVER KUPPER Warhol existed in this very strange world between pop art and fine art photography, and it is something people appreciate more now as opposed to back then. 

JIM HEDGES There are very specific reasons why it hasn't been elevated until recently. The last exhibit of Warhol’s life was a photography exhibit. If you rewind to the eighties, artists like Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman were thinking about photography in different ways, but photography never had the sanctity that painting has. But photography was going to be Warhol’s next big push. Six weeks after the show, he was dead. And when he died, there were tens of thousands of photographs in his estate. And his estate became the Warhol Foundation. The Warhol Foundation is in business to give away money to contemporary artists—it’s the largest donor to contemporary artists in the world. So, are you going to sell one of 56,000 photographs or are you gonna sell an Elvis painting that will bring in millions? The values were low with photography and it was never a priority. Then the foundation gave half of all the photographs away to collecting museums, because they wanted people to be able to study the photos. Which was genius because it solidified the curatorial study, but it also hatched the market. But then, they are left with 20,000 photographs. That’s when I started collecting them. 

OLIVER KUPPER: So how many pieces are currently in your collection? 

JIM HEDGES: Thousands. 

OLIVER KUPPER: And those include Polaroids, 35-millimeter, the stitched photographs…

JIM HEDGES Warhol used six photographic mediums. He made 16-millimeter films. I have the only eight that are in private hands. And he also made photobooth portraits in Times Square. Those are interesting because of the serial repetition of the image. Then in 1977, Thomas Ammannn, who was a big Zurich art dealer, gave Andy a 35-millimeter Minox camera. In ‘77  Warhol stopped carrying a Polaroid. He only used the Polaroid BigShot in the Factory, in the studio, to do formal portrait settings. Then he was carrying the 35-millimeter around. So the final decade of his life was all 35-millimeter photos, unique silver gelatin prints. Then in 1979, he started sewing them together. Warhol would take a black and white 35-millimeter picture, he would print the contact sheets, and circle the images that he liked. And then he would print those 8 by 10. But if he really loved the image, then he would then blow it up to 11 by 14 inches and do grids. Again, going back to the photo booth. Those were the contents of the last show that he did at Robert Miller Gallery. Those were the most rare of everything because he only made 500 of them. And of the 500 that he made, about 300 are in institutions. I've got about 60 of them. At the end of the day, the stitched photos with the sewing machine, the serial repetition, harkens back to the 16-millimeter filmmaking in 1963. 

Grace Jones and Andre Leon Talley at Studio 54, ca. 1980. by Andy Warhol

OLIVER KUPPER I didn't realize that he had a dark room as a nine year old. I know the Warhola family was religious and they would go to church, and the iconography of the saints in the stained glass really translated into his pop iconography—celebrities as saints. But I didn’t realize how deep the photographic process was to him. 

JIM HEDGES You know, it's funny, at the end of the day, his photographs didn't really have an advocate before I came along. Which is not to say that lots of people didn't do things to elevate his work. But in terms of consistently positioning, educating people, getting the photos seen, doing the press, I'm the only person who has done that in the past 15 years. It's been great because what has grown out of it is my own education. I've had incredible amounts of fun with the subjects. I have met scores of the subjects—whether it's Calvin Klein, Bianca Jagger, Barbara Allen, or Debbie, Harry, the list goes on. In addition, for the people that collect Warhol's work, the photographs are fairly inexpensive—most things are between $18,000 to $48,000. On the far outside is like $150,000. I have one client who bought Tom Ford’s 96-inch purple Warhol fright wig self-portrait, which is like 8 feet by 8 feet. It sold for 60 million to my client and they have it in their dining room. At the exact opposite end of the dining room is the actual Polaroid that was used as the source image. 

OLIVER KUPPER So it completes the story of the primary work. 

JIM HEDGES I would even go so far as to say the Polaroid and the painting are equal. 

OLIVER KUPPER It’s interesting, the evolution of how the photographs started off as artifacts of process in a sense to being elevated to a fine art status in of themselves. 

JIM HEDGES Well, I've never liked the idea of the photographs as process material. They were made in the process, or in the service of making art, but they have always been part of the artwork.

OLIVER KUPPER I think what I mean is—in the realm of paintings—the photographs become artifacts. 

JIM HEDGES It’s funny because to take it one step further, I have a collection of acetates. The material used to make the silkscreens. They're very powerful images. They're ghostly. Because it's either a negative or positive. I believe that people will view them as art because again sure, even though it's a process project, the artist touched it. 

OLIVER KUPPER Maybe we can talk about your current show at Bel Air Hotel and how Maripol fits into the curation? 

JIM HEDGES I met Maripol thanks to you, quite literally, and I was enchanted by her. She's smart as a whip. She's a genius. She’s a hustler. She's just all sorts of things that I find really appealing. So when I met her, it was an instant connection. And I’ve spent hours looking at material with her and not just photographs, but also jewelry and various designs and sketches. She has a very important story to tell. There aren’t a lot of women from those days here to tell the story. Going through the Polaroids, the degree of overlap is extraordinary—there are so many people she photographed that Andy photographed. There are just some blockbuster images. I want to elevate the work, juxtapose it with Warhol within the same era. So. I selected seven images and printed them very large in an edition of three. They are going to be crowd pleasers. 

OLIVER KUPPER Maripol seems like a missing link when it comes to the documentation of the early 1980s club and nightlife cultures. 

JIM HEDGES Well, what I like about her is that she's a truth teller. She doesn’t embellish. There's a whole host of people who basically have their own stories that they dine out on, or get paid five grand to talk about at a conference, but the stories are all myths. Maripol, she's the source. 

OLIVER KUPPER She is the master of calling bullshit. She'll tell you if someone was lying or if a story is apocryphal. It’s amazing to debunk these things because that era was so full of myth. 

JIM HEDGES I'm also impressed by how modest she is. She is super respectful. 

OLIVER KUPPER My last question is about the Sex Parts and Torso series. How, how did you discover that work? 

JIM HEDGES I almost have to talk about it concurrently with the Ladies And Gentlemen series, which are the drag queens. Andy enlisted Victor Hugo, set dresser and Halston’s boyfriend, to go out to the sex clubs in the Meat Packing district and recruit boys to come back to the Factory to take pictures of them having sex. And to give them bottles of beer so that they could make piss paintings. The Ladies And Gentlemen, that was Bob Colacello. He recruited those people from a bar in Times Square. But these two complimentary bodies of work are so endlessly fascinating. With Ladies And Gentleman, most of them were successful performers, like Marsha P. Johnson, who was credited with throwing the first brick through the window at Stonewall. Whereas the Sex Parts And Torsos people are anonymous, and unfortunately probably dead from AIDS. 

OLIVER KUPPER Is the Warhol Foundation nervous about these works being presented? 

JIM HEDGES No, I think they were just really happy to find somebody that wanted to buy hundreds of them. It's homoerotic work, but you'd be so surprised if who buys the work. It is not always wealthy, middle aged, gay men 

OLIVER KUPPER So is there anything that people haven't seen yet? 

JIM HEDGES Honestly, there's lots of stuff people haven't seen. For example, in May 1969 Warhol was hired by Esquire magazine to document the Downtown New York performance arts scene. So he went out with this Polaroid camera and he took pictures of some of the most outrageous performance art happenings. I've got 27 Polaroids that he made of a particular performance, which was this performance from a German artist where he is naked and covered in blood. I can’t really show that Hotel Bel Air. And I have some sexually explicit stitch photos, and nobody's ever seen those. I have a lot of stuff under the mattress, and when the time is right, I’ll show them.

Hotel Bel-Air welcomes a selection from the Jim Hedges Collection of Andy Warhol Photographs in its lobby from 14 February - 14 April 2022.

Maripol, Vincent Gallo, "In the Loft" - NYC, 1983

Ayako Rokkaku: The Spirit Of The Artist

 
 

interview by AUTRE
photographs by Roman Maerz. Courtesy of the artist and KÖNIG GALERIE, Berlin, London, Seoul and Vienna.

The large, expressive eyes peering out from Ayako Rokkaku’s paintings seem to mirror the viewer, as her work inevitably evokes a sense of wonder and joy that beckons the gaze. The self-taught artist paints using her bare fingers and hands to layer the figurative and the abstract in clouds of color, resulting in dynamic, imaginative imagery that draws from impressionism, abstract expressionism, and the kawaii aesthetic of Japanese manga. We spoke with Rokkaku about her inspirations, her practice, childhood, and her new works which will be shown at Frieze LA, presented by König Galerie.

As a self-taught artist, when did you realize that working with your fingers and hands helped you produce your painterly, impressionistic visions on canvas? 

When I was 20 years old and when I hadn't got my style yet, I participated in an event in Tokyo for amateur artists for the first time. I did live painting there. I prepared some materials (brush, pen, crayon, paper, etc) and tried some methods of painting. I was painting on the used cardboard on the floor with acrylic paint on my hand and it came to me. I felt that I was able to leave a trace of something like an improvisational and primitive impulse on the cardboard and it fit me well.

Your paintings are fully realized and mature, but there is a very childlike freedom to them. Did you paint when you were a child and what did you paint or draw? 

I liked drawing when I was a child, and I remember I liked putting colors more.

It feels fun when the paper gets vivid and lively as I put more colors on it. But it was after I grew up when I started to look carefully and think more about children’s drawing. I’m trying to keep the impression of pureness and freedom like children’s drawing in my works.

Who are some Japanese or international artists that inspired you growing up?

I’m impressed by Cy Twombly, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning. I also like Monet, Klee, Matisse, etc…

There has been a tradition of artists painting as performance. For instance, Yves Klein — is there a particular difference between painting in front of a crowd versus the solitary environment of a studio? 

I'm happy to be able to share the time and process when a painting is born, not only a finished work with the people there. It makes me feel like I'm drawing with the energy of the people there. And it is fun for me, by continuing to paint without thinking too much and without fear of failure in a limited time, sometimes unexpected techniques and motifs are born. On the other hand, when painting alone in the studio, it feels like playing — catching the energy ball between the canvas and myself.

Do you see yourself following in a similar trajectory as the Superflat artists of post-war Japan, or do you categorize your work in a totally separate arena? 

I've never been conscious about it. Maybe I’m in the trajectory, but personally, I don’t feel I’m in any group.

 
 

What have artists like Takashi Murakami taught you about painting. Is there a particular lesson that sticks with you? 

When I was 24 years old, Takashi Murakami invited me to join the Kaikaikiki booth in the Volta art fair in Basel. At that time he taught me that just liking painting is not enough to survive in the contemporary art world, and how he is fighting so hard with keeping the spirit of the artist. He never taught me about any technical things, but without him I might not have chosen to continue as an artist.

Do you see your work changing over the years—becoming more or less impressionistic, or abstract, or have the colors evolved?

It is getting less improvised, part graffiti-like, and the number of colors and layers has been increasing. Before, concrete figures such as girls and abstract parts were often more clearly separated. Nowadays, sometimes there is a girl behind the abstract layer, or the skirt or hair are directly continuing to the flow of clouds, so the border between abstract and object is becoming less. I think that the intention to create upward and free energy in the works has not changed.

How has Japanese anime and manga inspired your work? You have recurring symbols, like clouds and childlike figures. What do these figures represent?

It was not uncommon that anime, manga, and something cute (kawaii in Japanese) were more or less blended into daily life throughout my childhood in Japan. Cute characters, or characters with a strong and gentle heart, can be close to any person's heart. We can synchronize with them and they will lead to various new worlds. I maybe want to make the girl, the clouds, or abstract shapes as a way of expanding the imagination.

You also make sculpture. Is there a different approach that you take with the three-dimensional? 

I have less experience in sculpture than in painting, but like my painting, I don't make a plan for what it will be in the beginning. It´s like the shape is gradually decided while I enjoy the feeling of the material, such as wool, cray etc, and searching for a wired but cute, and interesting shape.

What do you think is the most understood thing about Japanese artists from an international perspective? 

I’m not sure. A tendency to cherish subtle emotions, atmosphere, and transitions?

Has the pandemic changed the way you make art or think about art?

It hasn’t changed, but re-recognized, it is important for me that people can see and feel the art works directly. 

As a young, creative person—with all the political and climate uncertainty in the world—does the anxiety of the zeitgeist creep into your work at all? 

I don’t use specific political or climate issues directly as my concept, but I believe in any age, childlike pureness or the kinds of questions we have as children, are necessary for keeping ourselves together psychologically. I hope my work serves as a reminder of that.

Your new series represented at Frieze, can you talk about them a little bit - is there a specific correlation or connection between them? 

I will show six paintings that are continuing to each other. There are girls, each are in the different layers — one is in the very front, or one is almost hiding behind clouds, or between. And also, each color is in different motifs in the other canvas, so object and abstract changes in different canvas. So, people may get a feeling of floating in the clouds in the layer outside of canvas.

What do contemporary Japanese artists think of Los Angeles? 

I like the city where I can easily go walking or take a bicycle around small streets, Los Angeles is so huge for me! But also it is nice to get inspired by its vastness of scale.

Bedtime Stories in a Mental Asylum: In Bed with Tobias Spichtig


interview by Janna Shaw
photographs courtesy the artist


When was the last time you stood up on a mattress, off-kiltered, aware of your balance, or lack thereof?  When was the last time you jumped on a bed with friends? When was the last time you jumped on a bed with strangers?  When was the last time you played childhood games? Cuddled in a group clad in coats and cloaks? Watched a couple kissing horizontally? Were read a bedtime story late into the evening, with snow falling gently outside?  

The KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin is hosting Die Matratzen, a week-long exhibit by Tobias Spichtig, with a nightly changing cast of poets and text-based artists reading their works aloud to an audience perched upon mattresses and sheets, sourced from friends and various collaborators of the artist.

Over the course of Spichtig’s installation, the mattresses are lived in and take on new forms, shifting from their original placement, absorbing the shapes and sounds of their dwellers and run-uponers. In one corner of a mattress, a tiny faded blood stain. Next to it, a rip from a Balenciaga heel, courtesy of that evening’s impromptu game of Tag. The sheets themselves have a collective abstract quality to them, marred with scuffs, prints, and static marks of movement. On view from above, the blocks of foam and springs morph into a perfectly assembled jigsaw puzzle, spanning the full space in its entirety, corner to corner. From here, one can clearly see that the work does not consist of objects in a room, it is the presence and experience of the guests that are on top of them that complete the work. It is an interactive performance.

Janna Shaw spoke with Tobias Spichtig on his opening night of Die Matratzen after a kickoff reading with Karl Holmqvist. 

JANNA SHAW: I say this with a sense of peculiar intrigue: you seem a bit of a hoarder. Other exhibits of yours have also included immense amounts of furniture and appliances: tables, fridges, empty bottles of beer, etc. Is this habit of collecting (and later presenting) a form of personal sentimentality, or is it a questioning of use, and of our own existential placement? 

TOBIAS SPICHTIG: I like images and objects. I would love to be both them all the time myself. The mattresses in particular are quite loaded and empty at the same time. It’s really abstract and it’s not at the same time. It’s always something more personal than any abstract level can translate. This is what I think objects have as their unique quality. 

SHAW: What led you to the concept of archiving objects of rest, rather than curtains of privacy, or cigarette butts of habit? 

SPICHTIG: These assemblages kind of stem from wandering through my own apartment during sleepless nights. When I get up and go to the fridge. When I sit at the desk. When I go back to the couch. The places I go when I’m thinking about things. 

SHAW: You are a painter as well as a conceptual artist. How would this installation translate onto your canvas? What might that look like?

SPICHTIG: I think all painting is conceptual, and I think works of art are sooner or later about painting. The mattresses are something in between painting and sculpture. It looks like a painting once one looks at it from above or once it is photographed. There is a parallel that runs between objects in real life and painted objects—that parallel is quite abstract, but also where one imagines things. I recently did a series of paintings depicting sunglasses, and now I am working on abstract oil paintings that look a bit like ornaments. I am also doing some portraits.

SHAW: What else are you painting these days?

I recently did a series of paintings depicting sunglasses, and now I am working on abstract oil paintings that look a bit like ornaments. I am also doing some portraits.

SHAW: Do you place importance on sleep and dreaming, or is it simply a necessary function? What is your ideal bed situation? I’m talking look, feel, time, place, activities, smells…

SPICHTIG: I don’t like to go to bed. But then, I also hate getting up. I dream a lot. Sometimes I even sing during sleeping. Is there a medical term for this?

SHAW: There is a whiff here to the opening paragraph of Guy Debord’s 1967 The Society of the Spectacle:

“The whole life of a society in which modern conditions of production prevail, presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacle. All that was directly lived has become mere representation. Commodities are now all that there is to see.”


There is something rather rebellious to the constructed situation of various mattresses on the ground, placed there for the simple purpose of observing others deriving pleasure. Do you think our society has lost touch with its primal pleasures in our pursuit of greater accumulation and distraction? Or does this world of influx only make us crave our instinctual joys more? 

SPICHTIG: To be present with both body and mind, to be more without a screen than with, has become a huge luxury. I love that. I guess everyone craves to be IRL more and more. Reality is the biggest spectacle.

Click here to learn more about Die Matratzen, including it’s late night accompanied live reading program. https://www.kw-berlin.de/en/pause-tobias-spichtig/

Installation images courtesy the artist and Jan Kaps, Cologne; Photos: Tobias Spichtig

Temporal Vertigo: An Interview Of Nicolas G. Miller

 

Everett Sloane in Yohji Yamamoto S/S 2000
photograph courtesy ofstudio photography

 

interview by Isabelle Albuquerque
photographs by ofstudio photography

If you look up close and if you have an exceptional memory for Old Hollywood character actors, you will clearly make out the distinctive face of Everett Sloane with his signature wide-set eyes and crooked nose. Known primarily for his roles in The Twilight Zone, The Andy Griffith Show, and Citizen Kane, the actor, songwriter, and theatre director took his life by way of barbiturate overdose in 1965 at the age of 55. Here, he is immortalized and miniaturized by artist Nicolas G. Miller in the form of a bronze statuette. He appears to move with a brisk, yet cool stride walking down an imaginary runway wearing Yohji Yamamoto S/S 2000. In the following interview, Isabelle Albuquerque sits down with Miller to discuss the temporality of fashion, the process of sculpting in bronze, and the act of breathing life into the deceased.

Isabelle Albuquerque: How did art first come into your life?

Nicolas G. Miller: My first memorable experiences with art were of the work of my maternal great-grandfather, Orville J. Hanchey. He was a painter, educator, and all-around bon vivant. When I was very young, I was lucky enough to visit Orville at his home. He was already quite old when I visited and had retired from his post as Professor of Art at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana. He lived in a small house that was stuffed with his paintings and all manner of marvelous objects. Orville's paintings are delicately rendered watercolors of flower arrangements. There were two that hung in my childhood home. I recall staring at them often and wondering how he was able to make the petals of lilies look so beautifully diaphanous. And, to be honest, I still don’t know how he did it!

ALBUQUERQUE: Oh how beautiful. Thinking of the petals of his lilies makes me think also of the draping of the Yohji pants in your sculpture Everett Sloane in Yohji Yamamoto S/S 2000. I’m obsessed with how they fall. How the fuck did you do that?

MILLER: Thank you very much, Isabelle! The trickiest thing about sculpting my statuette was the clothing. The majority of examples I’ve seen of sculpted clothing are from classical art. In other words, it is all tunics. Not pants, lugged sandals, button-up shirts or high heels. I knew in this piece, since it was Yohji, the pants would be the main attraction. I aimed to keep the viewer entranced as their gaze glides along the surface of the sculpture. There is a technique developed in the 1990s by the automobile designer Chris Bangle when he worked for BMW called “flame surfacing”. The idea was to use compound curves to mimic the form of flames on the exterior of sports cars. The 2003 BMW Z4 stands as a good example. When a flame-surfaced automobile drives by at night, pools of light form along the compound curves creating a pleasing visual effect similar to watching a log burn in a fireplace. I was hoping to achieve this effect, but at the scale and speed of sculpture, particularly the Yohji pants.

ALBUQUERQUE: Of course, you flame-surfaced them. Ha! When did fashion first begin to emerge in your art?

MILLER: That is a very interesting question. I am a sculptor and sculpture is generally preoccupied with questions of space (scale, proportion, site, etc). Fashion, on the other hand, seems bound up with questions of time (seasonal releases, the cyclical recurrence of styles, etc). I have always been drawn to works of art that attempt to present contradictory terms. Fashion entered into my sculptural vocabulary as a way of asking questions about time and temporality within sculpture.

ALBUQUERQUE: Yes, exactly. And the way you connect to particular seasons and collections in fashion allows the work to both act as a time travel object and also have a discrete connection to a specific moment in time. Speaking of a specific moment in time—what are you wearing right now?

MILLER: I am at home and am wearing a black cotton sweatshirt. On the sweatshirt is a white screen print of an image of downtown Los Angeles. Two impossibly large palm trees are superimposed on top of the cityscape, and just above the palm trees are the words "Los Angeles, California." It is the sort of sweatshirt you buy as a souvenir on Hollywood Blvd., which is precisely where I bought it. Below that I am wearing black polyester athletic shorts manufactured by Kappa and designed for Napoli SSC, a professional soccer team based in Naples, Italy. It is the kind of outfit I put on without thinking too much.

ALBUQUERQUE: Ah! Yes! Superimposed palm trees forever.  I love Hollywood Blvd and visit its souvenir shops often. Jon and I used to make posters for our music shows on top of old signed glamour shots from unknown actors. There is so much longing and loss in those images. What made you decide to work with actors who are no longer living in clothes made decades after their deaths?

MILLER: This piece is one in a series of sculptures of old Hollywood actors dressed in new clothes. Each of the actors were well known in the first half of the twentieth century. In their sculpted form they will all be wearing runway looks from the year 2000. It is important to me that the clothes were designed after the actors had passed away. This structure has an internal logic that reminds me of the logic of fashion, wherein two disparate moments are brought in close proximity to one another. I hope the impossibility of these combinations gives the viewer a sense of temporal vertigo. Vertigo is frequently associated with a sensation of spatial imbalance. It is often described as "the world around you spinning." Recently, I have the sense that the world around me is spinning, but through time rather than space.

ALBUQUERQUE: Yes. I know exactly what you mean. How does bronze hold time for you? 

MILLER: As with so many materials the more I look into bronze the less clearly it signifies. On its surface bronze is meant to imply permanence. Yet the history of bronze sculpture in Europe is one of constant change and impermanence. Large, bronze public statues were erected to symbolize new world orders, but were often melted down to make weapons to fight wars. Despite the common sense that bronze implies permanence, it is far more plastic than one would first think. 

In the act of making this piece at a foundry I was struck by a sense of eternal return. In the lost-wax process of producing a bronze sculpture, first the sculptor makes a maquette. The maquette is then destroyed in the process of making a silicone mold. Then the silicone mold is used to produce a wax version of the maquette. This wax version is encased in an investment mold (a hard concrete-like substance). Then the wax is melted out and bronze is poured into the investment mold. Finally the investment mold is destroyed in order to reveal the bronze. At each step of the process, the objects created in the previous step are destroyed. This gives the final product the effect of permanence, which reminds me of the logic of seasons and the return of styles in fashion. 

I imagine the final resting place for my statuettes to be a domestic setting. Perhaps atop a mantel. Another common object that sits on a mantel is a clock. As time passes, the outfits sculpted into the bronze statuettes, and perhaps the actors too, will go in and out of fashion, not dissimilar to the way that the hands on a clock go round and round.

ALBUQUERQUE: Wow. Yes. I love thinking about the impermanence of bronze and the lost wax casting process. Even in the name of the process we have the word, lost. With the last few years in lockdown, I think we’ve all been thinking about lost time and life. The hands on the clock going round and round for real. How do you breathe time and life into people who are no longer with us? Since these actors were alive before scanning technology, do you work from photographs/film stills/collective memory?

MILLER: I sculpt in a 3D software called ZBrush. This software was developed to give the feeling of sculpting in digital clay. I learned a technique for sculpting portraits in ZBrush from a digital sculptor who worked at Industrial Light & Magic. When it came time to choose a subject, all of the other students in his course selected contemporary Hollywood actors. At first I thought this was simply in keeping with the general culture of "digital art," but there is a much more practical element to it. In order to sculpt a portrait properly in ZBrush, you need a great number of reference images. Preferably images taken from many angles.

At first, I thought I would sculpt one of the Fayum portraits from the 1st century AD. The Fayum Portraits were painted on wood and buried with upper class mummies from Roman Egypt. The depictions are truly haunting. Since the paintings were intended to be buried with their subjects, neither the painter nor the sitter imagined a future where the pictures would be seen by posterity. This idea of an image without a future feels so foreign to me. I quickly realized that sculpting from these images was too difficult and that the Fayum portraits are probably best left as paintings. 

I then began working with old Hollywood actors. I make large collections of promotional photographs and film stills of each actor before I begin sculpting. What I realized when I started to manipulate the digital clay is how very different a face can look when shot under different lighting and with an assortment of camera lenses. My statuettes end up as montages of the faces of bygone actors—many moments condensed into one.

 

Everett Sloane in Yohji Yamamoto S/S 2000
photograph courtesy ofstudio photography

 

ALBUQUERQUE: Yes! You can really feel that in the work. Is there significance in the sculpture’s smaller-than-life scale?

MILLER: The scale is of utmost importance to me! In France, during the Art Deco period, there was a preponderance of small figurative sculptures—also known as statuettes. Many bronze foundries opened in order to keep up with the demand from the rising bourgeois class for bronze art. These statuettes were anywhere from sixteen to twenty-two inches and intended for domestic display. The economic structure of companies such as Susse Frères or LN Paris JL is very interesting to me. They both had foundries in the countryside and exhibition spaces in the city. Both foundries supported a large network of figurative sculptors by commissioning maquettes that they would sell in editions. 

This moment was also ripe with promises of grand technological advancement. There was growing optimism around electroplating, which claimed to provide a thin seamless layer of precious metal atop any sculpted form. The fantasy was that it would remove much of the need for human labor from the process of making a fine metal sculpture. When I came across this moment in the history of European sculpture I was deeply struck by the similarities to our time, in particular the promises of 3D technologies and their applications in sculpture.

Susse Frères would produce beautiful catalogs for customers filled with photographs of their statuettes. I am making advertisements for posters and magazines of my statuettes as a way of drawing out similarities between the moment of Art Deco statuettes and my own work. I also want to allude to the possibilities for sculpture in a model like Susse Frères.

ALBUQUERQUE: Very cool. Now that you have released the little man into the wild, what are you working on next?

MILLER: Lupe Vélez in Hussein Chalayan S/S 2000.

ALBUQUERQUE: AHHHHHHH Cannot wait for her.

AKEEM SMITH: No Gyal Can Test

interview KATJA HORVAT
images courtesy AKEEM SMITH
originally published in Autre’s Doppelgänger Issue (Spring 2021)

Akeem Smith maintains a pivotal role in preserving and archiving the visual aspect of dancehall culture. Smith, a Kingston-born, New York-based stylist, designer, consultant, and artist, is the scion, godson, and nephew of Paula Ouch, founder of House of Ouch—one of the most infamous and respected designers inside and outside the dancehall community. Smith started researching and documenting the depths of dancehall roughly fifteen years ago. His interest is primarily the role of women within the culture, and how their contributions stand at the very center of the movement’s legacy. Compiling a vast selection of images, combining documentary footage, found footage, flyers, garments, architectural artifacts, Smith created No Gyal Can Test, an ongoing project of exhibitions, installations, sculpture, photography and videos that unite his observations. They explore past and present representations of the community, issues of racism, political oppression, and gender identity. Smith often says this show/research project is made for the future; for other generations to tap into the legacy of dancehall. Akeem Smith's first European solo show, Queens Street opens November 18th, 2021 at Heidi, Kurfürstenstraße 145, Berlin.

KATJA HORVAT: Let’s just go in right away. My first recollection of "No Gyal Can Test" goes way back to 2012, I can't fully remember what it was, was it a party? But I do know Shayne [Oliver, founder and creative director of Hood By Air] DJed.

AKEEM SMITH: It was Shayne, yes, and Venus X, and DJ Physical Therapy. That was my first and only fundraiser. I just needed some money to go to Jamaica and start collecting the materials.

HORVAT: Buy your way in! 

SMITH: Jamaica is very economically driven. Even though I didn't make that much money that time, I made enough, and I wanted the people to see the value in their archive—that I wasn't trying to swindle them, and that I thought what they had and their story was worth a lot. On the Island, they're constantly reminded that dancehall is sort of this negative thing.

HORVAT: Even after all these years?

SMITH: Even after all these years, for sure. A hundred thousand percent, even more now, to be honest. 

HORVAT: It’s insane that it has had such an indelible influence on music and culture at large, but where it actually comes from, its legacy goes unappreciated.

SMITH: I think dancehall has given the country a lot of cultural currency that's allowed them to be respected globally—other than the Olympics. It's just a shame that it's still seen as a negative thing, but in my art and practice it is not my mission to sway anyone’s points of view.

HORVAT: Do you think religion and let’s say some socially “acceptable” norms have anything to do with it? 

SMITH: Yes and no. Dancehall is a nocturnal economy, so it's become a scapegoat for certain arguments.

HORVAT: Portrayal of women is also a sensitive topic when it comes to dancehall—not necessarily on the ground but more so when it comes to what others think of it: a whole degrading debacle. 

SMITH: Globalization is a thing, and some site specific culture customs aren't for everyone. I think it's super relative. People on the outside make assumptions. I see the dancehall space as this primal space, equivalent to nature, some behaviors are a mating call. The video piece in Soursop  honors that. The women in the videos are performing acts, self-caressing; they are appreciating their bodies.

HORVAT: You've been working on this project for fifteen years now? Has researching dancehall, the women in it, fashion, etc., influenced the way you work as a stylist and a designer? 

SMITH: I've never tried to bring dancehall to fashion or anything like that, so no. 

HORVAT: Okay, a lot has been written about where the name [of the show] comes from, but I want to know why you even went with it in the first place? 

SMITH: The name/saying was written behind a photo that my dad had. It was just a normal photo of one of his ex-lovers sitting in her bed. As to why this name, it was not even my idea to go with it, to be honest, it was Shayne’s, and this goes back to 2009. I liked No Gyal Can Test, but I wasn't confident in it. And he was like, Oh my god girl, you should just name it this, it's like already here. My motto, though, has always been to not look too hard for inspiration. I think it's always right in front of you. I don't feel you have to dig too hard to be inspired.

HORVAT: A big thread through No Gyal is House of Ouch. You grew up with them, Paula [Ouch] is your aunt and godmother, did their/her world shape yours?   

SMITH: Not in a way you would think. What did shape me was how they came up with ideas. When I was a kid, I really wanted to be a broadcaster. Dancehall, for me at that time, I thought it was cool, but I never thought it was something I wanted to do. With some dancehall people, you would see them and they would look like a million bucks at a party, and then you see them like two days later, you wouldn't believe that it's that same person. So, it always felt like a mirage, and I wanted something more, something that felt like real wealth.

HORVAT: That reminds me of drag balls; the ball fit versus real life. 

SMITH: I guess you can draw the comparison but I would compare it more to RuPaul's Drag Race. And I'm talking about men and women. They made such an effort. I think it had a countereffect on me, because now I want to look like a bum, but a bum with money. That's how dancehall affected me, it shaped my taste but not my world. It also shaped how I view women. 

HORVAT: Has it shaped how you dress women?

SMITH: No. When I do styling work, I think, what would I dress like if I looked like you. That's more of how I like to approach styling. Like, what would I wear if I had your body?

HORVAT: So, to go back to dancehall. Who was more celebrated in this on the ground, men or women? Because through the research that I was doing, I could find a bunch of stuff on people like Bogle or Colo Colo but not so much on women specifically. I mean, there are Queens like Carlene or Patra, Lady Saw, etc., but the representation just somehow lingers more on the man's side. 

SMITH: I don't know the exact answer for that but I assume that it's just so patriarchal here. I think men acted more as the spokesperson for dancehall back then, but maybe that's going to change. Let's see.

HORVAT: You think there's still time?

SMITH: Well maybe, a lot of the men that used to party in dancehall in the era that I highlight have transitioned [died]. Maybe something changes as far as knowing who was giving these unknown subjects of Black history a space. Whenever there's an opportunity for the dancehall patrons to speak, I give them that opportunity—to talk about how they feel, to be seen. I’d rather continue having them be a part of the speaking engagements.

HORVAT: Everything is always better when it comes from the source. 

SMITH: Exactly. It's better if it comes from them, rather than me saying how this is affecting me, or them, or whoever that may be. And I'm also not the dancehall academia like that—I like the anthropological part most. 

HORVAT: What about the whole anthropological system of it interests you the most?

SMITH: You know, we always look at old pictures, especially working as a design consultant/stylist. You're always researching images of people, places, things and a part of the job is world-building, so our imaginations run wild. There aren't a lot of first-person narratives when it comes to Black history and that is really important to me. It is about direct representation, not a representation of a representation. 

HORVAT: It can get tricky, though, as you don't always have the privilege to access the source. So, when it comes to that, you are holding onto a narrative that comes from some other narrative. I studied cultural anthropology and there were moments when I wanted to cover something, but I felt like an imposter, as it was not my story to tell, or even touch sometimes. 

SMITH: I get that, but you also gotta let it go. I don't mind looking like an imposter. With the dancehall stuff, people have wondered how I've gotten all this stuff and information; people have indirectly asked me if I'm code switching, it's been really funny. In translation, some think I'm acting straight, because dancehall is so homophobic, to acquire things...But I would never, ever do that. 

HORVAT: Homophobia and the macho perception in dancehall, dominance, what males should be, etc., is a whole other conversation. One would think things would change over time, but no. 

SMITH: Nothing has really changed. It is all so deeply rooted in the political system. It is not just that, though. Dancehall is also used profoundly as an excuse for any violence happening. With COVID right now, in Jamaica—there's been more than a hundred murders since January this year—and they don't have dancehall to blame it on, as there are no events obviously. 

HORVAT: In the ‘90’s your godmother [Paula Ouch], also moved to NYC because of all the violence and looting she experienced, right!? 

SMITH: Correct. Basically, the mafia started to tax their business. If you want to continue operating your business in Jamaica, you need to pay for your own protection. 

HORVAT: Was that post or pre-Belly (1998)? 

SMITH: Pre-Belly.

HORVAT: And then for Belly, she came back to Jamaica. What was her role exactly? 

SMITH: She played Chiquita, who was an assassin.

HORVAT: So apart from fashion being pivotal in No Gyal Can Test through Ouch, you also brought a fresh element in collaboration with Grace Wales Bonner. You guys worked on the uniforms for the staff. How did that come about? 

SMITH: With Grace, we always wanted to do something together, but there was never a right moment until now. Apart from her being absolutely right for this collaboration on its own, she is also personally connected to Jamaica; her mom is English and her dad is Jamaican. So her trajectory and story are a big part of the investigation into the Caribbean diaspora that's taking place inside No Gyal, not her family specifically, but many like it. 

HORVAT: There are a lot of moving parts to this show and everything is very well rounded. From the uniforms with Grace, to the mannequin collaboration with Jessi Reaves, to the mock-up housing that was built from the stuff you collected on the island. That said, the videos are really central. 

SMITH: The two main videos are, Social Cohesiveness and Memory. Then there was the Reconstruction Act, that's embedded in the sculpture, and then there is Influenza. Then, one was called Queen Street… 

HORVAT: Is the latter the one that feels like a dream? 

SMITH Queen Street documents the first fashion show that I went to—it was my family's fashion show. The way it’s edited is sort of how I remember it. It's one of my first memories. So, it's a little bit hazy, and yes, can feel like a dream. You know, memory in general is something very weird because I feel like half of it is what actually happened and then the other half is made up in your head, and I mean that in regards to just about anything, not just this show. 

HORVAT Walk me through the editing process. 

SMITH To be completely honest, editing came from the curatorial team. I am the maker, that said, there were elements I specifically wanted to highlight, to show the duality of the dancehall world. I wanted to accentuate, to some extent, how the Eurocentric version of beauty is still very much present and is so specifically dancehall; the blonde hair, the blue contacts…. So I was more on that, but the show was brought together and mapped out by curators. 

HORVAT So one show is behind you, one is about to open. To think about the story you are trying to tell, what is one thing you want people to get out of it? 

SMITH I hope they can somehow connect what they are seeing to something in their lives. You don't have to come from this world to connect or feel things. I would love for people to see value in something that maybe they didn't deem as valuable before.

HORVAT I think you are onto something. It’s definitely not the type of show that leaves you dry. Anyhow, if you could pick one song that would serve as the soundtrack to your life, which one would it be?

SMITH Oh, Peaches "Fuck The Pain Away."

HORVAT If you could be any character from a film or a TV series, which one would you be?

SMITH I think Scooby Doo because he never actually spoke. He hasn't said a word yet he is still such an icon. 

HORVAT He's a mute protagonist. [laughs] 

SMITH Doesn't say a word yet he leads it all. Everyone seems to like this character for a reason they don't actually know. And I see myself in that way. I think people like me for reasons they don't even know.

HORVAT If you could only watch one movie for the rest of your life, which one would it be?

SMITH If I could just continue watching dancehall parties from the ‘70s to now, that would be good.

HORVAT What's your favorite memory as a child from Jamaica?

SMITH In my family, we're all part of different socioeconomic pockets, and I used to love being in the ghetto because that's where all the excitement was. There was always something going on. You never had a moment to yourself, but I loved that. I miss when that didn't bother me. Now, it kind of does, but there was a point in time when all the drama was fun.

HORVAT What's your favorite memory from New York?

SMITH I haven't had it yet. It's coming.

HORVAT What do you want to be twenty years from now? Where do you see yourself?

SMITH Hopefully just healthy and still working.

HORVAT Do you want to live in Jamaica, New York, or do you see yourself somewhere else?

SMITH  No, hell no. I don't know where I'm going to live, but hopefully I'm not bound to a place.

HORVAT What's your favorite flavor?

SMITH I like Great Nut Ice Cream.

HORVAT What's your favorite song from Lee "Scratch" Perry?

SMITH  Anything that he claims Bob Marley has ripped off.

HORVAT What do you fear?

SMITH  I fear being older, and reminiscing, and regretting not having as much fun as I would like.

HORVAT Where do you get your energy for work and for life?

SMITH Reality television.

HORVAT What's the best life advice that someone has ever given to you?

SMITH I don't know—keep on going. Don't stop.

HORVAT Do you ever want to retire?

SMITH No, I'm going to be like Cicely Tyson for sure. Like a thousand percent. She died three or four days after she did the Kelly Ripa interview. Still dolled up. Two weeks prior she was on set filming something. Yeah, that's my hope. Oh, I guess my goal is also to not be jaded.

Katja Horvat:  Are you scared of that?

SMITH Yeah, I'm scared of being jaded. I don't think I'm gonna be, though because I make an effort to not be.

originally published in Autre’s Doppelgänger (Spring 2021) with an accompanying conversation between Akeem Smith and Lee “Scratch” Perry. Purchase here. Akeem Smith “Queen Street” opens at Heidi Gallery in Berlin on November 18.

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

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.

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

Will Sheldon: My Small Super Star

Untitled (Red Eyes) 2021 Acrylic on canvas 72 x 55 inches (182.88 x 139.7 cm)

by Katja Horvat

Imagery Courtesy of Will Sheldon and Heidi 
Photos of paintings Thomas Müller



“I will be whatever you want me to be,” kind of sums up the ‘My Small Super Star’ series and the first European solo exhibition by artist Will Sheldon. Sheldon’s latest work takes on ball-jointed dolls and brings them, or more so, strips them of any preconception one could have, allowing the viewer to perceive the dolls in a completely authentic way. 

Sheldon’s inspiration for this series is a full circle moment over his obsession with German artist Hans Bellmer, who built a mannequin back in 1933 using ball joints, and used her as a model for his photography. Bellmer’s doll was completely manipulated and perversely grotesque. His work, and the dolls, at the time, were not well received by the Nazi’s, which prompted Bellmer’s move to Paris, where surrealists completely embraced him. Later on he published a book of over 100 BJD photographs that he took between the years 1936 to 1938, a book that started a whole (sub)culture of collecting and making dolls, with its biggest craze coming from Japan. 

These days, a website called legenddoll.net is what got Sheldon’s attention and inspired the series the most. Legend Doll is a retailer where you can buy a completely set up doll or you could do a build-up, in which case joints are sold separately. The latter is where Sheldon got his inspiration for ‘My Small Super Star,’ as his dolls mostly have no hair, no eyes and appear with very visible joints. The eyes caught Sheldon’s attention the most as the empty socket mixed with the lightning used to photograph the dolls creates an empty yet radiating gaze, which is something Sheldon brings to notice in his paintings.  

The dolls range in set up as much as they range in what they trigger and mean to people. From Agalmatophilia (sexual attraction to dolls) to Pediophobia (fear of dolls). From complete comfort to discomfort, and anxiety. Dolls simply cannot exist in a neutral middle and the same goes for Sheldon’s paintings. ‘My Small Super Star’ will definitely make you feel something, but it’s up to your psyche to determine where on the spectrum you are, and what you end up getting out of it. 

KATJA HORVAT: Let’s start at the beginning. Why BJD? 

WILL SHELDON: It all clicked when I started to go through a website that sells them. I was looking through these images and how people that are selling these dolls take pictures of them… It all really reminded me of being in college and doing still life in drawing classes—dolls were lit in the same way. I don’t know, there was just something about it that felt different, and also these dolls are basically the dolls that Hans Bellmer helped create. It all comes from him and I’ve been a big fan of his since I can remember; he is a big inspiration for how I draw and what I draw. 

There is so much to the dolls, and it has been explored before—it’s not new, but I just became completely enamoured by the photos that people were taking of the dolls, to the point I ended up buying it and now painting it. 

HORVAT: Show is called “My Small Super Star” which in a way already has a sexual innuendo on its own, but then the dolls itself could also easily be perceived as sexual very fast. Is there more to this or is it just the human perception and how we were almost taught to think and parcel things?

SHELDON: I think that the dolls can represent many things; one of them is perfection, and that specifically can be controversial for a lot of reasons. And also, simply put, people do sexualize perfection. That being said, when I look at them, I don’t think of them as sexual beings. I just like painting them. If they were real people, it would have been totally different. 

There is this documentary I watched, “Married to the Eiffel Tower” where the protagonist, as said in the title, marries the tower. And I don’t know, through that doc you see there is an array of people who get more from the objects that we could ever think of. They just establish a different type of connection, and I think this whole thing is really interesting to see and tap into. 

Also, what I found through following people that collect these specific BJDs I am drawing, is that they give them power and help them overcome certain issues. People place their own imagination through them and project their wishes onto them; for some it’s sexual but for many it’s just emotional connection and sense of comfort and care.

HORVAT: Dolls itself are not an easy subject, and people are usually very opinionated when it comes to them. Prior to making the work, did you ever think about the narrative it will be placed in? 

SHELDON: I think some people will like it and some people really won’t, as the work is rather specific. There is a whole different range of emotions that paintings and the dolls can exude but that’s the point, that’s basically what the dolls are, they are a vessel that makes you feel a very specific way which connects to your own personal sense of being. 

And as long as my work is a jumping off point and a lens for people to feel a certain way, good or bad, that’s great! However, people want to read into them, it's basically what the dolls should be doing. 

Also, collecting real or BJD dolls is mostly deemed anti-social behavior, and that is a scary thing to many, not the doll itself, but more so what it represents and who these collectors supposedly are. There is a norm and then there are people projecting these normative ideals onto anything and everything. 

Untitled (Blue Corner) 2021 Acrylic on canvas 72 x 55 inches (182.88 x 139.7cm)

HORVAT: Correct. To me the doll collecting most heavily connects to loneliness, which is a disease. Obviously the obsession ranges, but at the end of the day, all these people who are collecting either dolls or whatever type of objects, they are filling up a certain void, a certain pain in their life. 

SHELDON: Exactly, and the more you feel lonely, the more you alienate yourself, unconsciously almost, but you are just so in your head that you go into this vortex that is really hard to get out of. And I would think it’s easier to fill a void with something that comes to you blank, with no real emotions and personality, as that gives you the freedom to project and make up whatever you need and are feeling at that moment. 

HORVAT: One thing I really like is that most of your dolls are not named—paintings are untitled. As soon as you put a name on something, you create a certain narrative, and I think it’s very smart to leave that door open so each viewer can create a story that works for them. 

SHELDON: I usually have a lot of fun naming my work, and at first I wanted to name them, but then I just thought that would take too much away from them, and it would bring too much of me into them. I want other people to feel any way that they want to about them, and if they had a name, they would immediately give the audience direction to go in.  

HORVAT: The dolls tap into the hyperreality of this world. They exist in fantasy as much as they do exist in real life. It is hard to explain as there is this realism to them, but then again, the projection and how we place them and what they represent is more so a fantasy. Where do these Stars live in your world? 

SHELDON: I think they live right where you placed them too—somewhere between fantasy and reality. I feel like the perfection ideals and how these dolls look creates a certain murkiness around them...

I mean, at the end of the day, the dolls are a fantasy. They are a vessel for your imagination to go wild. But they are also a lens, whether dark or not, a lens for something that exists in reality and it’s part of us now. 

HORVAT: When making work, do you ever think about where the work may end up and who is the person who will live with it? 

SHELDON: I do, but I try to keep that notion of where and how as open as possible, so I don’t put any expectations on myself or work. I would like to think that if you collect the dolls, you can also collect my paintings—I hope they speak to the same audience in some sort of way. 

That being said, I don’t have a specific way I would want them to live or travel. I try to think that whatever happens will be the best for them. I kind of make things and figure the rest of the stuff later. I have a basic idea as to why I am interested in these things, but most of my work I truly only get years after I do it. 

HORVAT: I mean, it’s just like everything else in life. Time is perspective—we act on impulse and then, after some time, it really hits you how some things were perceived or communicated. 

SHELDON: Spot on! And I do get the interest thing and why I tap into a specific element or react in a certain way or maybe how I go about it, but sometimes it just takes me months or years to realize what a specific work actually represents for me/about me, and why it came out when it did. 

HORVAT: The more you try to make it make sense, the more you get caught up in it. It is what it is, and sometimes that’s good enough. For the most part, it’s just hard to realize that when you are in it. 

SHELDON: It used to scare me to not have the immediate understanding or trajectory, but now I just accepted the fact that it will probably take years for me to realize why I am doing it, so for the moment, my emotions are what’s guiding me and the reasoning part will come when it comes. 

HORVAT: Most people know you as a tattoo artist. Does the work feel different when you are putting it on canvas versus putting in on a body? Would you tattoo someone with the doll imagery? 

SHELDON: I would if someone asked, but it’s also not something I thought much about. But to me, everything I do stems from pure excitement, so somewhere along the way the two meet and there is not much difference to where the imagery is being placed. I am so excited that tattooing exists and we can stain our bodies. I am so excited that the dolls exist and people can make up for what they mean. So yeah, to bring it back, no to the first part, yes to the last. (laughs) 

HORVAT: Lasty, what were you into as a kid? What do you think shaped your taste the most? 

SHELDON: I think one of the main things for me as a kid, and what was most inspiring are the Guinea Pig films, which all feel like they were done by artists as they are just so creative and imaginative. The special effects and prosthetics used in the films are beyond, so much so that Charlie Sheen got Guinea Pig 2: Flower of Flesh and Blood banned in America. He was given a copy, and after he watched it, he was convinced it was a snuff film and totally real. He called the FBI, who then investigated the movie and the story behind it. The investigation was dropped once they saw a documentary about how the movie was made. But yeah, I would watch these movies all the time, and my mom would pass the TV and I would turn it off, and when she left, turn it back on, as you know, those movies are just something you can only do/have for yourself.  

My Small Super Star is on view at Heidi, Kurfürstenstraße 145, Berlin until October 30, 2021. 

WILL SHELDON 
Artist 
Born 1990, Hong Kong 
Lives and works in New York, NY 

Untitled (Pink) 2021Acrylic on canvas 28x22inches (71 x56cm)

Her Data: An Interview Of Maria Mavropoulou On Algorithmic Gender Bias

Maria Movrapoulou installation image, courtesy of the artist.

Maria Movrapoulou installation image, courtesy of the artist.

interview by Lara Monro

“Have you ever wondered why Siri, Alexa and Cortana are given female voices and names? How do machines see women? Can machines perceive diversity?” 

Women currently occupy a minority of positions in the tech field. As a result of this, there is growing evidence that the gender imbalance affecting the tech sector extends to data science and AI. Gender and racial biases found in AI training data sets, algorithms, and devices have the tendency to reinforce harmful stereotypes that stigmatize and marginalize women on a global scale. With the increasing ubiquity of AI in our societies, such biases put women at risk of being left behind in all realms of economic, political and social life. Her Data is a group exhibition currently on view at Romantso, Athens that explores the role of data and algorithms in the current age of artificial intelligence through the female perspective, and focuses on how technologies used daily might affect our identities and ways of thinking. Curated by Katerina Gkoutziouli & Foteini Vergidou, the show includes the work of 4 female artists, Eli Cortiñas, Maria Mavropoulou, Mimi Ọnụọha, and Paola Palavidi. Each artist highlights the need for inclusive technologies due to the various ways that dominant technological narratives influence our experienced identities through social media, search engines and AI applications. Together these works raise questions about the tech industry and its collection and distribution of our data. They invite us to look deeper at the design of current technological systems, exposing how they work and the world views that they propagate. We spoke with Greek artist Maria Mavropoulou to learn more about her involvement in the show and how she investigates the algorithmic classifications of women according to race, gender, and age through the use of personalized ads. 

LARA MONRO: Can you give me some background into your creative practice as an artist, painter, and photographer? 

MARIA MAVROPOULOU: Well, it’s always difficult for me to describe my practice, since I always treat every idea I have in a different way. Even if photography is the main medium that I use, I constantly look for new ways to utilize it. During my studies at Athens School of Fine Arts I was trained as a painter before I switched to photography, so “starting from a blank canvas” is a problem I have to solve every time I start a new work. This means that I always try to find the most suitable medium and technique to express an idea, no matter if I’ll have to get out of my comfort zone. For example, the series Family Portraits was made as an interactive virtual tour, creating an experience for the viewer totally constructed out of still photographs. Another work that depicted loaders, titled “ Typology of Waiting'' was painted on canvases with thick layers of paint, and my latest series A Hollow Garden consists of screenshots and 3D scans.

Eli Cortiñas video installation. Photograph by Maria Mavropoulou

Eli Cortiñas video installation. Photograph by Maria Mavropoulou

MONRO: Have you always explored the relationship between women and technology in your work?

MAVROPOULOU: As the connectible devices through which we access the internet started playing a more and more important role in our lives, I started exploring our relationship with them. As a user of these technologies as well, I felt it was an urgent need for me to contemplate deeper about this new landscape of possibilities they offer, as well as the darker parts of it. Since my MFA years, in 2017 the interaction of people with the devices they use to access the internet is the main theme of my work and I try to explore it from different points of view. The question, How do machines see women?, which is the subject of the exhibition, made me look at this condition even more closely from the female side and speculate further on the way that the algorithms discriminate users based on their sex.

MONRO: Can you explain how your contribution to the show examines this idea of how dominant technological narratives affect the way we experience our identities and the world through social media, search engines, and artificial intelligence applications?

MAVROPOULOU: Starting with the fact that machines do not "see" but are trained to "see" by their programmers, who are mostly white men, the work I am presenting, entitled “Through His Eyes” is essentially trying to reconstruct the image that the algorithm creates for me through the ads it presents to me. Observing the mosaic of sponsored posts forms an image that essentially reproduces (I would even say that it strengthens) the well-known female stereotypes, ultimately perpetuating the male gaze even through these new technologies. The female portrait with hidden features at the center of this composition [“The Average of Everything”] is a different approach to the same subject. How do algorithms view women? What exactly do they see? The fact is that the algorithms see an image of us that consists of numbers, preferences—demographics which are evaluated based on the statistics that the algorithm has accumulated from all its users, but also how it is ultimately trained to create a portrait of us to which we have no access—neither to the elements it holds for us, nor to the way in which it is formed.

Paola Palavidi

Paola Palavidi

MONRO: How do you navigate social media: do you feel you have a healthy relationship to it? 

MAVROPOULOU: Maintaining a pretty successful account takes some time, effort and planning, but I see it as a part of my job as an artist to share the ideas I’m working on with my audience, and I really enjoy the communication and the feedback I get. I do spend some time online, but I feel that it’s not crossing what I would call healthy limits since it doesn’t put any pressure on me and I don’t bother being offline some days. Although, I admit that I enjoy browsing around for a while and discovering some interesting and inspiring stuff.

Video work by Mimi Onuoha. Photograph by Maria Mavropoulou

Video work by Mimi Onuoha. Photograph by Maria Mavropoulou

Created with the support of NEON, BIOS ROMANTSO, and organised & produced by VEKTOR Athens, Her Data is on view through October 14 @ Romantso, Anaxagora 3 in Athens

Tomorrow's Anxieties: An Interview of Jillian Mayer

 
Courtesy of SECCA and David Castillo Gallery photograph by Maximilian Lecki

Courtesy of SECCA and David Castillo Gallery
photograph by Maximilian Lecki

 


interview by Kelly Loudenberg


Jillian Mayer gets stuck in your head. I still find myself randomly humming the tune to her pop song, “Mega Mega Upload,” even though it’s been ten years since I first saw the video she made for it. Her short, catchy video “I am your Grandma” has a cult following on YouTube and TikTok and is so delightfully bizarre that it’s bound to be discovered by youngsters for decades to come. Her Slumpies, sculptural furniture designed to help people use their smartphones, are found in airports by travelers who don’t know her, only that her art helps them maintain comfort while staring into Instagram. 

Her latest show, TIMESHARE at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, likewise wedges its way into your psyche. It leaves me feeling unsettled, yet inspired. It feels urgent but timeless as it examines the impending collapse of society as climate change throws our functional-enough world into chaos and turmoil. Her in-progress mobile bunker recalls the highbrow living spaces of Buckminster Fuller and Andrea Zittell, but also elicits the vibe of the RVs and trailer parks—the most economical but low-brow living spaces of the American landscape.

Who’s to say if the world ends, that you can’t take a shower in a shiny resin tub, covered in shimmer and pastels, and thereby maintain a bit of the soul-affirming glamour of the pre-end-times era? Her floating sculptures—functional in a world where all the ice-caps have melted—could literally save lives. I’ve been to prepper school myself, but I prefer Jillian’s whimsical, yet functional lo-fi take on how to survive with artistic flair once the shit hits the fan.

KELLY LOUDENBERG: Can you tell us about the art you’re making now and what led up to the work in your traveling exhibition, TIMESHARE?

JILLIAN MAYER: I explore how technology affects our lives, bodies, and identities by processing how our physical world and bodies are impacted and reshaped by our participation in various landscapes. My work used to focus more on digital and social media technologies, but I have expanded that to any technology that helps us adapt to our future selves. 

In the simplest terms, my artwork generally describes tomorrow's anxieties. I tend to look at contemporary issues, like internet existence for the past ten years and the looming ecological and infrastructural collapse of the last four years. I do offer solutions and environments, and often function as some type of a "host" in my work, trying to shed new ideas for adaptive living. I tend to make artwork that has a consistent thread, which models how to subvert capital-driven modes of technological innovation, calling into focus ideas of value, dependency, adaptation, and communication. 

After years of making work, I’ve been thinking about the real future, not our current understanding of the future, but rather beyond that; beyond the sleek aluminum and titanium.  I am more drawn to the dystopias that have the grass that creeps over your broken solar-powered cars, the wild boars walking into your smart house with Siri telling them the hot weather, and rats festering in a pile of iphones on your self-disinfecting, hypoallergenic sofa.

I work in a lot of different mediums simultaneously. Videos, sculptures, online experiences, photography, installations—they are all fair game. It’s whatever will convey the idea and the serotonin boost best. 

Courtesy of SECCA and David Castillo Gallery photograph by Cliff Dossel

Courtesy of SECCA and David Castillo Gallery
photograph by Cliff Dossel

LOUDENBERG: Your show TIMESHARE and the floating LAKE SCULPTURE comes from a long history of you exploring survival and prepper cultures. Where did this come from?

MAYER: I am from Miami and it’s one of the major cities that will be wiped out first by sea level rise. With our location and coastal nature, my life was defined by tropical storms and hurricanes. Floridians and many coastal residents are aware of the upcoming hurricane seasons as well as the predictions for our future based on weather patterns. We know the names of past hurricanes like former classmates we recall from school. We are familiar with cone-shaped predictions and color-coded emergency threats from nature. I grew up in South Florida with an immigrant father (by way of Cuba to Miami Beach) with most of his family already murdered in the Holocaust. So, there were always plenty of idioms available to me as a child about making plans and the weather or god laughing in your face. I think there is a relentless humor in much of my work and general point of view.

LOUDENBERG: When did you become so obsessed with weather? Was it through making art?

MAYER: In 2019, Hurricane Irma was predicted to crush South Florida and it became a Mandatory Evacuation Zone. As I was moving lawn furniture inside and strapping things down, I took a hard look at my body of Slumpie Sculptures.

My sculptures often live outdoors and are pretty large. So, I sort of just ride it out when it comes to natural disasters making landfall with the capacity of destroying my physical works. I can talk all day about hurricane feelings but I am trying to answer your question. Instead of relocating my sculptures, I just tied them to a tree. My landlord told me to write my name and phone number on them in case they fly away and land a few blocks down the road. I realized due to their foam core, they are more likely to float than sink.

I started thinking about all the people with money who were able to prepare for upcoming disasters, able to leave the state to another location.  Around that time, a study had been done that stated that 40% of Americans do not have an extra $400.00 to cope with an emergency expense. As many South Floridians loaded up their gas tanks, boarded their homes, and filled up their cars with items from the store, I thought about all the people that just had to sit around and hope the storm would spare them. 

I thought about all those who lived through Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and sat on their roofs waiting for FEMA to rescue them. I thought about the six feet of mud and salt water that made my childhood home unable to be entered. The roof provided safety, whether it was connected to a one hundred thousand dollar house or a $4 million house. The value was in the chance for survival in desperate times.

It led me to considering how in times of emergency, something like a Louise Bourgeois “Spider”—a canonical history and worth around $35 million—may save your life the same way that a broken down pickup truck can when the storm waters come flooding in. Value is in opportunity and chance.

LOUDENBERG: Have you taken survivalist courses? If so, what are some things you learned? Can you start a fire without a match? 

MAYER: I went to Prepper Camp in Fall of 2020 in North Carolina. I was recording my talks with people while I asked them about the core essence of being prepared. Aside from practical survivalist info and homesteading rituals, I learned a lot about their community. The coordinators yelled at me to stop recording because they thought I was a dubious person but I kept trying to let them know I am an artist just doing research. They asked me “what kind of art?” and I said “mostly abstract sculpture.”  They didn’t mean to scare me, they are just protective over their community. The only iffy thing is it seemed to be a Trump-heavy crowd.

LOUDENBERG: Do you think the problem is now at a scale that it can't be addressed?

MAYER: Here is the part where I won't pretend to be an environmental scientist, because I am an artist. But I do boast being an optimist. No doubt, humans create massive problems everywhere we go (ex: space junk) but nature redesigns itself, mutates, and carries on for various organisms … as it is the nature of nature.

I do tend to occupy a fatalistic nihilism position in my views. I think humans are on Earth until we are not. That might be from pollution leading to increased carbon loads and temperature issues, or a comet just smashing us to star bits. 

Ultimately, humans are getting a chance at Earth. Earth will be around longer than humans. Earth will be fine and it's important not to get obsessed with an anthropocentric approach to existence. It is hard, and I get that, and I constantly have to check myself. But we are here, doing our silly human things, for a collection of decades, if we are lucky. Nonetheless, we are here for now and we, as the human race, try to figure out ways to survive. I am really happy I am alive and trying to make the most of it. Just wishing kindness and equality was in greater practice and I try to be a better human every day.

LOUDENBERG: Do you see humor and art as effective forms of change?

MAYER: Humor has always been an entry point for dialogue in my work and life. Hard and uncomfortable topics aren’t usually inviting, so if I can use a joke or any other device to wedge a beat and open up a conversation, I will. It's hard for us humans to face our mortality in a personal way. I do hope I die by way of mother Earth, rather than a car crash or something like that. I might be off topic.

LOUDENBERG: How and why do you choose your materials to construct your larger sculptures?

MAYER: I lean towards industrial materials that have associated functions. I describe my Slumpie sculptures as boats or surfboards in a material sense. Fiberglass, epoxy, foam. I get all of my foam donated and derail it from its single-use journey to the landfill. The foam I use was previously lining crates of boxes used for transporting art. I like that my artwork springs out of the circle of art detritus.

LOUDENBERG: What’s Next?

MAYER: Also informed by preparedness and survival is a Mobile Bunker Artist Residency I have been building with friends called “LOW RES.” Built from a converted twenty-foot trailer, the bunker is designed to be reliant on as few outside services as possible. It's a functional, off-grid, tiny home that feels like an art installation. Ideally, it is both a low-impact, off-grid artist residency and a mobile hub of anonymous, untraceable space for organizers and communities in need. The design of the structure draws inspiration from the tiny-house movement and survivalist bunkers. 

To learn more about Jillian Mayer, follow her on instagram @jillian_mayer_

Courtesy of SECCA and David Castillo Gallery photograph by Cliff Dossel

Courtesy of SECCA and David Castillo Gallery
photograph by Cliff Dossel

A Momentary Surrender: An Interview Of Artist Zoe Chait On Her Solo Exhibition @ Ramiken In Brooklyn

Zoe Chait
projection reflected, 2017-2020
Projections on aluminum panels
9:18

text by Summer Bowie

Capturing Sophie, the late, hyperkinetic pop sensation whose tragic and untimely death shocked and saddened millions around the globe, is like photographing the flight of a butterfly. The prodigious and pioneering musician and producer of avant garde electronic music began her career anonymously making cosmic waves with singles like “Bigg” (2013) and “Lemonade” (2014), worked closely with a number of artists from the notorious PC Music label, and in 2017 came out as a trans woman. Developing an intimate connection with Sophie at such an inflection point was the genesis of Zoe Chait’s Noise, a solo exhibition of portraits that capture an individual who has just emerged from the cocoon with a new and fleeting lease on life. Here and gone in a flash, two artists forge a bond under painfully short exposure. A loving elegy, besotted with adoration. Chait bears witness to the weight of the sublime and the value of the present moment.

You have extensive documentation of Sophie working, creating, living life. When did you first meet Sophie and how did this show come about?

I first met Sophie at the Women's March in LA, right after Trump was sworn in, in January 2017. I remember, she was wearing this big, pink puffer jacket and glasses. She was quiet and her eyes had a curious gaze. We didn't speak much, but walked through the crowd together with another friend, silently processing.

We really came to know each other later that year, when we became neighbours. I rented a room in a very special compound where she lived and worked at the time. It was a wild and beautiful home in the hills. We became close and I began to photograph her. 

Mike [Egan], the founder of Ramiken, lived in the house as well while opening a gallery in LA. We shared a kitchen for many months and hiked the backroads of the canyon almost every morning. Over the years, we’d meet up when in the same city and reminisce about our times in that house. I would catch him up on my adventures living with different people and show him the photographs and films I was working on.  At the beginning of the pandemic he called to ask if I wanted to do a show and we eventually landed on a group of portraits of Sophie. 

What was it like collaborating with someone so intimately on a show like this?

With portraiture, no matter how close I am to the person in the photos or film, I’ve found it’s necessary for the subject to maintain distance from the final piece being created, especially during the edit.

No matter how real I want it to be or how honestly I want to portray the truth of a person, it ultimately becomes my experience of that person when I frame it.

Sophie was encouraging and understood the importance of letting go of the outcome. Her loyalty was to art, whatever it may be. I felt that from her in relation to this work. Even with the material so tied to her as a person, where naturally there could be self-consciousness and the instinct to edit, she supported what I wanted to do and appreciated the gravity of it. There was a lot of trust there, and I feel that how I saw her was one of the ways in which she wanted to be seen.

Can you talk about some of your inspirations?

Vulnerability is the most inspiring thing to me. Sometimes I feel we are living in a simulation of honesty and a performance of openness. When I’m able to witness a kind of raw truth in people and how they move through the world I want to follow that and learn from it. 

Can you talk about some of the mediums that you played around with for these images; is there any connection there to Sophie herself? 

Several of the images in the show are stills from video, for which the process of capturing the material is a different experience than the process of making the object. Sometimes the camera is very present in the interaction, and is a tool to go deeper, inviting the subject to share something that otherwise might remain interior. Other times watching through a frame requires a level of detachment with reality. I’m in an in-between state, physically there, but somewhat unnoticeable. I zoom into and meditate on micro vignettes playing out in a louder scene, searching for the intimacy I’d find in a private setting.

In the editing there is marinating and processing and translating the experience with materials that can come closer to representing the moment than a purely photographic documentation does. 

For example, Touch is made with a delicate, tissue-like organza stretched over a heavy iron frame, which sets its surface away from the wall, revealing its transparency. The feeling is of something I can never fully grasp: held by a strong, heavy support but in essence soft, fragile, fleeting, elusive.

I also printed on aluminum with dye sublimation, playing with the way different surfaces reflect or absorb light. All the choices are in connection to recreating the feeling of the given moment.

 
 

Do you remember Sophie’s coming out in 2018, because that was sort of a milestone moment?

In 2017, when “It’s Okay to Cry” came out we sat on her bed and cried, reading all the tweets of support, encouragement, virtual tears that had been looking for a release. I realized the impact of what she was making and how much the world needed it. 

What did you learn from Sophie over the years? 

She definitely taught me to push things to the edge and pursue what I believe in. Also, to constantly question the reality imposed by the structures outside, and instead listen deeply to what comes up inside; even if it’s soft and quiet, honor it, and live from there. Test the limits. 

In her passing, these lessons have become part of me and redirected me in some way.

Can you say what you learned about yourself?

In the process of grief I’ve felt overwhelmed by the concept of life itself. I’m reminded of how delicate and fragile it all is. It’s essential to honor the impulse we have to create, to be the way that makes us who we want to be, to live in love and to support in any way we can. 

Do you have a memory of Sophie that would describe her well?

I vividly remember a trip I took from my sister’s in Connecticut to visit Sophie at her Airbnb in New York for a few hours in 2018. We hardly spoke but everything was said. A momentary surrender. A new comfort in her body, nude beyond the skin. Breasts illuminated in soft afternoon light diffused by tall buildings. A lime green shirt with cherries on it, discarded on the floor along with a pack of Capri’s. A cigarette inside with Ben. Siblings holding hands. The case of the missing Juul, solved.

Noise is on view through July 24 @ Ramiken 154 Scott Avenue, Brooklyn

Transgenesis: An Interview Of Agnes? Following Her Transition Cum Durational Performance

photograph by Henri Kisielewski

photograph by Henri Kisielewski

interview by Lara Monro

Agnes? has made waves in London with her most recent exhibition, Transgenesis. Spending twenty-three consecutive days in the abandoned Belsize Park leisure centre, performing for eight hours straight, Agnes? has welcomed visitors to watch in awe as we see her transform into a larger-than-life, human-octopus creature, a form that symbolizes both life and death. Transgenesis, meaning one or more DNA sequences from another species being introduced by artificial means, is explored by Agnes? through her experience of transitioning from male to female. Since beginning her transition, Agnes? has explored the symbolic connotations behind water and its relationship to her experiences of ‘mutating’ from one being to another, using the liquid to wash down her hormone drugs, an action that is simultaneously transformative and destructive all in one swallow. 

Agnes? takes the viewer on an immersive tour of their brilliant mind, sound-tracked by the sinister yet serene sound design of Portamento. As if walking into an abandoned leisure centre off a quaint residential street isn’t exciting enough, she leads you down a womb-like tunnel with fetal sculptures lining the silicon path into a room laden with white sand, beautiful, sea-creature-esque sculptures, and a large sculptural water feature that looks as if it could be Poseidon’s crown. From here you pass the changing and spa treatment rooms up to the next level where Agnes? is suspended, genderless — half-human, half sea creature — above the empty swimming pool, breathing meditatively with arms moving gently and instinctively. A visual and sound overload, it is a powerful work of art as we observe Agnes? embracing perpetual self-transformation. 

The exhibition was organized by Arturo Passacantando, Tommasso de Benedictis (The Orange Garden) & Charlie Mills, in partnership with Harlsden High Street. 

LARA MONRO: Did you have a process when entering into your transformative state for the eight-hour-a-day performance?

AGNES?: My performance began when I let Agnes? live through me. To become is a constant process of construction and deconstruction. I had to accept destruction in my life in order to embrace the creation of a new being. When I arrived in London, I decided to start my hormone therapy to feel the transformation in my own body. I was ready for the performance. I knew I was going through a process of self-destruction and pain that would lead me to a new life.

My routine started with a destruction: anti-androgen. I would wake up and take a pill to block the production of testosterone. Then liquid breakfast, stretching, and pilates. I remember feeling like a kid not wanting to go to school, but had no other choice. Getting ready for the performance, entering in the costume, sticking my microphone with super glue, wearing my mask, gloves and ready for 8 hours of holding my breath. In and out, inhale and exhale and my testosterone was being blocked. While the audience experienced the creation of a hybrid post-human creature, my body was physically experiencing a real change.

My routine ended with a creation. Right before going to bed, I would take estrogens to induce female traits into my body. And repeat for twenty-three days.

 
 

MONRO: Are there any viewer responses to your performance that really stood out over the twenty-three days?

AGNES?: One of the most beautiful things about my performance was the connection I created with each viewer. I stood and shared a moment with them, and everyone was so different. I received almost four thousand visitors through the twenty-three days, the show went viral on social media. Some days the room was filled with people, all quiet, all connected with me, holding breath, being mesmerized and shocked by the divine creature in front of them. Other times, the room was empty and I would feel the emptiness inside. The energy of the room really changed according to the visitors, they were a fundamental part of the performance. I also had special visitors that I would see repeatedly and with whom I made a special connection. One man came almost every day. He would stand in front of me and dance for hours. It was sweet, it felt like he wanted to give me strength. 

Someone cried, someone laughed, someone looked at me for one second and then left, others came for one picture or believed I was a robot.

MONRO: Can you tell me more about the importance of water for your creative practice?

AGNES?: Water is an element of becoming, of infinite possibilities, and transformation. It is an element that changes and mutates, that creates and destroys. Human beings have a very controversial relationship with it. We learn to swim before walking, we gestate in amniotic liquid, and share all our interaction through liquid movements. Everything and everyone is regulated by watery mutation. Water is the element that connects us all and allows us to become whatever we want.

I grew up by the sea, in my father’s boat. He is a sailor who navigated the world. I always had his image in my mind. However, I am still afraid of the sea and its mystery. I never had the control of it like my father does. When I dive underwater I feel in my own habitat, it brings me back to the womb. This is the experience I try to recreate with my installations and performances, the same experience of being inside the mother’s womb. In the amnios everything is possible, we are genderless, hybrid creatures yet to come.

MONRO: Do you feel the performance has been important for you and your transition/transformation into a new being?

AGNES?: To take hormones was a tough choice and was for me an organic process. I didn’t know I would do it until a few weeks before installing my show. When Covid happened, after a long self-analysis and catharsis, I realized I was Agnes? and suddenly had an urgent feeling and instinct to let her live. So I started to transform and change myself, my appearance, my behaviors, my way of talking. I was questioning what would Agnes? say? How would she dress? What would she do? Slowly I became Agnes?. Together with this change and break from my past I also had a strong break with my practice. I needed a transformation, so I dropped what I was doing and took a completely different direction. From ceramic I went to latex and wax, from creating plants, I started to create tentacular creatures. The octopus was the symbol of my transformation, a fluid genderless creature that has the great capability of transforming and adapting. 

I started to create a laboratory where scientific experiments on hybrid creatures were going on. I was questioning my own origin. While I was going to the doctor to know more about hormones and transitioning I was also reading about octopuses and their self-destructive behaviors. Everything was so deeply connected that I felt powerful. My work was leading my life and my life was leading my work. Everything made sense. One day, I looked at myself in the mirror and I knew I was ready to transition. So, I went to buy the medicines, but I waited until coming to London to start the therapy. It was important to me to arrive in London because it has always been my gestational place. 

The day I arrived, I introduced myself for the first time as Agnes?. Hearing that name felt empowering. I realized not only was I Agnes? as an artist but also as a human being.

Positions Of Power: A Conversation Between Ferrari Sheppard & Michèle Lamy

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photographs by Amanda Demme


Ferrari Sheppard is an enigmatic, multi-disciplinary artist whose practice defies classification, and lives firmly at the center of a three-dimensional venn diagram. Likewise, the work of Michèle Lamy is as fluid and instinctive as it is crystallized in her unmistakable and ever-expansive character. She is not just a maven of fashion, design, and art, or an innovator of music and former restaurateur. She is a cultivator of community and expression. Sheppard is not just a painter, writer, photographer and music producer. He is an activist who has worked to provide relief aid in Haiti, shape economic policy and development in South Africa, and shine light on the Israel-Palestine conflict. It makes perfect sense that the two of them would fortuitously meet at Mr. Chow’s while stepping outside for a cigarette. Sheppard’s recent solo exhibition of paintings, Positions of Power, at UTA Artist Space is a testament to the mistreatment of a generation for profit by the criminal justice system. They are love letters to those who carried the weight of the “war on drugs” and risked it all in pursuit of freedom in the United States. Their structural composition is the result of an almost unconscious, improvised dance. A process that the artist refers to as “walking while painting.” The figures are laid heavy with dark brown and black pigments that visibly absorb light, and are gilded with a reflective gold trim, creating a balance that feels harmonious and befitting. At the center of the gallery’s main space lies a brutalist, three-pronged elmwood bench of mythical giant proportions. A place to put everything down and spend some time with the work. A creation that could only come from the collective minds of Michèle Lamy and Rick Owens. And the perfect place for these two chameleonic masters of material, sound, and ceremony to discuss their work.

MICHELE LAMY: I just wanted to start with one thing because your show made me think of this Matthew Stone saying, “Optimism is the new cultural revolution.” We talked a lot when we were smoking at Mr. Chow outside, but I think it’s interesting because we never met before that. When did you start this?

FERRARI SHEPPARD: Oh yeah, what was it, like six years ago, I was travelling around Africa, different countries, we were in Marrakech, and all Addis Ababa and Yasiin Bey could talk about was “oh, Michèle, Michèle, Michèle.” He loves you. When he and I met, he didn’t even know I made music. I was a general artist, and I did photography, I was writing—I did all of the arts, and he was a fan of that, and obviously I was a fan of him, and he discovered my music by accident because he heard me playing it one day. That’s kinda how I prefer my relationships. Any serious relationship that I’m in, be it creative or whatever, I want it to happen organically. I never really push to know anybody because I feel like if you are meant to know them, and they are meant to be in your life, then they will come. Like you. It happens naturally.

LAMY: Yeah, like this bench that we’re sitting on. It wasn’t really planned. It was just sort of a surprise and it happened.

SHEPPARD: Yeah, but that’s the whole thing—I obviously know your work, and it’s truly impactful and powerful. So, when I heard we’re gonna be doing something—you could’ve never planned this in a million years, but it works, and I think that that is part of the cosmic connection between artists. When you were making this bench, it lived in so many homes, it already had a show, so I just think that’s interesting.

LAMY: Yeah because it’s very now, what you are painting. When I was talking about this optimism, you have this dark background, but then there is that touch of gold on top of it. You might call this a reference to power, but it makes you think about what is underneath, and that’s why I was thinking of that optimism. I don’t know if you think power and optimism go together, but I think it goes.

SHEPPARD: In life, we go through stages. So, you have your childhood, and you have your teenagehood—that moment right before you become an adult, some people call it teenage angst. You look at the world and you want to make it better, and a lot of my world is almost crystallized in that moment because I think that there is some truth in that angst and in that discomfort. With the work, I’m always searching for that balance between something that is extremely legible and also just teetering on the edge of honesty, and like you’re saying, optimism is just bursting full of passion.

LAMY: That’s how we think of you.

SHEPPARD: I do this thing—I don’t have a name for it other than I would describe it as walking while painting. There’s been different artists who have done action painting, and I guess this is my version, where I literally have the music playing, and I’ll just walk past really fast, make a gesture and walk away without thinking, because I know that brings forth the truest expression of myself. It’s almost like reading someone’s subconscious, like this is what’s really there because I didn’t have time to form it, or to overthink, or anything; it’s just a moment.

 
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LAMY: But you have so much to say, which is why I was so excited when you said you were doing a solo, because already you have so much in there. And we miss the music because I’m sure there is something that calls for it even if all those moments you flash them on the wall, but then we know, and I think we have to express it, because you are a young artist and you have so much more to say.

SHEPPARD: I just think that subject matter is a really interesting thing for me because I look at some of my predecessors, like Matisse and Picasso, and I think that scholarship was built around their work. Sometimes, I think being an artist from my culture, there is always something deeper to be said about where all of this is coming from. Really, I always had a desire to make what I was experiencing with hip hop, and life, and the crack epidemic. When I was young, I grew up at the apex of the crack epidemic, so we had the police knocking down our door, tearing apart our sofa, looking for drugs. Next morning, I had to go to school, and that’s what I thought was normal until I went to college, and started talking to different people from different backgrounds. I’ve been shot at five times in my life—and this is nothing to be celebrated—it’s really amazing that I made it through all of that, but I feel I have a duty to tell a story, and not always in a stereotypical type of way. My experiences are fine art; they can be translated into fine art in the same way as Picasso’s stance on the Franco regime leading up to World War II.

LAMY: Do you think you are going to make them move with some kind of video? I want to see them moving. Do you think you are getting there, or you have an instant and you flash it on the canvas? 

SHEPPARD: It is, and you asked about the medium, like you know, video. I felt so much like an infant in this where I’m just discovering my hands and my legs where I’m like, oh, I can do that, and I can do this. Even with the installation piece, this is my first installation. I was always intimidated by installation. I never tried it because I was always, “the paintings, the paintings!”

LAMY: It’s very clean, in a way. I’m sure your second or your third installations are going to be a little more chaotic.

SHEPPARD: I want to try different things, and it just dawned on me that once an artist gets out of what I guess you would call the starving artist period, which is really hard, you can experiment. Now you have resources. Every day, I wake up and I’ll wonder if I could do this, and how much does that cost, and it’s okay because I can pay for it now. Being this emerging artist, that is one of the few things I find enjoyable about it.

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LAMY: So, how did you come here, to such an institution for your first solo show?

SHEPPARD: This is actually my third solo show. I know some of your readers might read this and feel a way, but I’ll say the truth. For me, I don’t like group shows. I did a few group shows, but what they have turned into today is something that I’m just not really interested in. I see that the focus is not so much on the art anymore; it’s on the curator. There have been shows where I don’t even know the other artists’ names. I’ll just know the curator.

LAMY: Yeah, but aren’t you pleased to be part of something with other people even if you do not know all of them?

SHEPPARD: For me, it would have to be something really special. I’m working on a project right now; I can’t talk about it too much, but I will say it’s with Interscope Records for their 30th anniversary. They have come and asked some of the most influential artists to come in and reinterpret their catalog for their covers, so that’s a good group show.

LAMY: Exactly. But we see you, you are big there in the mix. 

SHEPPARD: I have to first respect the artist, and not to say that I don’t respect any of the artists doing group shows, but I can stretch my wings more when I do a solo show. There’s a responsibility that you don’t have with a group show or art fair. You may have a little booth, and you do two things, but with solo shows, you have to have a narrative, and it has to come together. Even if it’s chaotic, or through feeling, you are creating a whole experience.

LAMY: I understand. It’s like the runway shows are important for designers, and when you think about the people, the commercial thing is important always, but there is the thing that you have to put in a few space or image, and everything you have together that time. I understand this feeling, and I understand the thing with your solo show.

 
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SHEPPARD: You have really blended fine art and fashion, would you agree?

LAMY: We have Rick Owens, who is a designer and also starting we did furniture for our house, as you said, I took it for a while but it’s very much in a spirit that we have created together and I’m placing it, first more mingling with people…

SHEPPARD: You’re the liaison.

LAMY: I’m a liaison, because I want to see that we are always interacting with people, and I always wanted to be savvy and figure out how it all works, because this is how I see us moving forward. So, something like this bench is a gesture—it’s not a collaboration. 

SHEPPARD: It’s beautiful. This bench brought the show to another level. We were going crazy. I wanted this sofa that was long, and you don’t want it to look cheesy, and here, it was the perfect fit.

LAMY: When they asked me of course, three days before the opening, I was really scrambling to figure out what we could do, and then we found this crazy guy who drove to the storage unit in upstate New York to get this big part, but for some reason, the two heads were in the Rick Owens booth at Saks Fifth Avenue. So, he had to get all the pieces together and then drive them here in two days.

SHEPPARD: Thank you. This is so beautiful. I didn’t know that.

LAMY: Are you planning to do something around your name? Ferrari Sheppard is such a combination of words.

SHEPPARD: I always say that my name fits me, but it is a contradiction. You got the Ferrari, but my middle name is Elite, so Ferrari Elite Sheppard. I always joke that I probably couldn’t become a janitor because I had to live up to my name. 

LAMY: What was your mother thinking?

SHEPPARD: My father named me, but my mother had some strange ideas. She wanted to name me Rashid something, and my father said, “No, this is going to be a different kid.” So, he came up with Ferrari Elite Sheppard, and somehow it flows.

LAMY: When you came in, you told me that you wanted to look like Jim Morrison today. Where does that come from?

SHEPPARD: I love Jim Morrison in terms of style, because I’ve made clothes before, like when I was living in Zanzibar, I started to make clothes. Zanzibar is a beautiful island, it’s a mixture of so many cultures: Swahili, French, Portuguese,etc. And they have what’s called Kitenge cloth. That’s for the men, and it’s just beautiful patterns, and sometimes they have letters or messages in Swahili across it, but I started taking these things and making designs with overlapping collars and different leisure suits from the ‘70s, and stuff like that.

LAMY: My friend Jamaal was in Zanzibar and brought back a fantastic gift, those shoes that are made from old tires. So, I had those tire shoes and they’re great for running in the sand. So then, Virgil said they have this Nike workshop in London where they choose designers to modify the Air Jordan. So, they asked me what kinds of material I needed. I said, “I need tires, I need inner tubes, and I need somebody to cut them because I don’t want those guys to sue.” So, anyway, we changed the sole of the Air Jordan. Of course, nobody at Nike picked up on it, but Virgil sent me one of his books and there was a picture abstract of it.

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SHEPPARD: Just to circle back to what you were talking about with the optimism I have. On a day-to-day basis, I might fuss about anything, like this is wrong, oh my god, blah blah blah.

LAMY: But that is optimism. It’s not that you think nothing is going to happen. You push it out.

SHEPPARD: I think I need that. I need little moments of doubt to overcome. The scary part about our personalities as artists is that we need adversity. If everything went right for me, I wouldn’t know what to do. I need a problem because then I can solve it.

LAMY: There is optimism, but there is also revolution. We don’t want the revolution when people should be celebrating. We want to push our spirit, and this is what is going to change people’s minds. Already, we are going into a world where we should talk about the positive, and especially for the little things, when people talk about the vaccine, it’s just to say what’s bad about this thing. Don’t you think that we should celebrate that there has been a vaccine in one year? That’s what I’m talking about, and it’s what I feel with you. We have to push it and express it in a way that will show hope and beauty.

SHEPPARD: I definitely agree. I used to be on Twitter, and it’s like this black hole of fucking negativity. You get caught up in this shit, so I killed my Twitter last year, and it was the best.

LAMY: So, be on Instagram. Even better.

SHEPPARD: But Instagram, you put a little caption; it’s more of the photos. 

LAMY: Yeah, it’s nice to put a photo and a sentence.

SHEPPARD: And be done with it. You don’t have to argue with it. The last ten years were very interesting because we saw different social media revolutions like the Arab Spring, Me Too, Black Lives Matter. Unfortunately, it’s the nature of the beast where they end, and they move, and we just move out and announce the next thing. I think that we’re approaching a time when we are going to use social media as a tool, but we’re going to step away from it and actually bring in material aspects. What I mean by that is, when I think of James Baldwin, he did numerous interviews and he broke different grounds, but there are physical books to show his work, you understand? 

LAMY: Yeah.

SHEPPARD: There’s physical manifestations of Michèle Lamy and Rick Owens, so I think it’s important for younger people, and I’ll always tell younger people: make stuff, do stuff in the real world. 

LAMY: But, of course. The text and image is a way of communicating something that you see out in the world, but that should push you to do more.

SHEPPARD: Yeah, but I have to be honest, being a Renaissance man didn’t work out well for me initially, and I don’t know why. In my mind, you have to be honest with yourself. I said, “Ferrari, out of all the things that you do, what do you feel that you are the best at? This was before I broke through, and I been painting since I was about two, three years old, so my first show—this is ridiculous—my first actual show was in kindergarten. I’m not lying, you could ask my mother, it was selected to be in the Art Institute of Chicago Children’s Exhibit. My mother still has this picture, and it’s funny, it was a man in a skirt. I was a little baby, and I was like, this man should have a skirt on. I support my digital artists out there and everything, but I think there is something majestic about a painting that lives with you. Right there, and if you have this in your home, you have my DNA. My actual skin cells are being transferred if I touch the painting. I’m living with the painting. That’s beautiful to me. If I was to get a Degas, I would say he lived with this, he touched it. That’s tactile, and I enjoy things like that. 

LAMY: You think that your paintings are going to evolve to be more abstract?

SHEPPARD: My ultimate goal is that—I went from figurative realism in the natural world, to rejecting that completely, to absolute abstraction. The first works that I ever sold in my life were abstract. I sold to this guy, Yusaku Maezawa, who bought the $110 million Basquiat. He started to buy my work, and he liked it. It was abstract, and I had no idea that I was going to go back to three-dimensions.

LAMY: Okay, where did you meet this guy?

SHEPPARD: He was just on Instagram.

LAMY: You see?

SHEPPARD: I was so inexperienced that I didn’t know how to price my work. I had a friend that was friends with Julie Mehretu and she said twenty-five thousand. I was like, “You sure?” And she was like, “Yeah.” And he bought three pieces. That helped build my studio. Art is the only place I’m safe, and that’s why I always run towards art. No matter what type of day I’m having, I can go, and I can say this is where I’m safe. When I was coming up, it was the worst time, all my friends were dying, and we were in the city barely surviving, but on weekdays, I got to go to my art class and I would just escape. My teacher, her name was Ms. Sokoloff, shout her out, she would put on the Beatles, Bob Dylan, or whatever, and free paint. Just go crazy.

LAMY: Fantastic story.

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The Parapsychic Sculptor: An Interview Of Corin Johnson

 
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interview by Lara Monro
photographs by Mattea Perrotta

Artist Corin Johnson has spent over thirty years traversing the art world with his exceptional stonemasonry and wood carving craftsmanship. Corin has collaborated with some of the world's most renowned visual artists including Paul Noble, as well as focusing on his own practice (which includes drawing, modeling, and unique stone, marble, and wood carvings), the work is varied with a unique and colorful story behind each piece. Recently, he has found himself locked down in his studio with the musically-acclaimed Nick Cave. They met in the ‘90s when the musician reached out having seen a bust of himself created by Johnson; a commission by a Cave fanatic. During lockdown, the duo have formed a creative bond and partnership. 

Confident with his craft, there aren't many materials Johnson hasn't mastered; marble, resin, wood, and ceramics, to name a few. His creations range in both size and style as do his commissions: from large-scale marble portraits and restoration projects that include the Clarkson Memorial, a celebration of Thomas Clarkson, a central figure in the campaign against the slave trade in the British Empire, to salvaging intricate antique tiles. His own projects include kitsch porcelain bird sculptures and a wood carving of his beautifully large and shaggy sheepdog, Charlie. 

Growing up, Corin was introduced to the Spiritualist Church through his Grandmother. His interaction with mediums was informative as he recalls members of the congregation foreseeing his future working as a sculptor. While he no longer follows the Church, his fascination with Parapsychology has been hugely informative in both his personal and professional life. Regular Zoom meetings with mediums and guided meditations leave him with strong symbolic imagery, which help to harness his spiritual and creative growth. Johnson’s effortless eccentricity is encapsulated by all of his unique philosophies and ideologies, and perhaps exaggerated by his love for different stones and the varying qualities and powers they hold (he often finds different types in his jacket pockets).  

Situated in South London’s Camberwell, Corin’s home and studio, both within a 5 minute walk of one another, are evident displays of his personality. Inviting Autre to document both, we explored the art works sporadically placed in his pink entrance hallway, blue sitting room with solitary piano and kitchen, where opera music plays and tea mugs with cold coffee from yesterday are set amongst Mexican Masks he picked up on his travels in Oaxaca. Every now and then, faint sounds of the painter decorator upstairs are heard over the radio as Corin speaks about his relatively unknown practice and love for collaboration with others. To accompany the interview, Autre partnered with the American visual artist, Mattea Perrotta, who documented the interview with her film camera. 

LARA MONRO: Did you jump straight into sculpting and stone carving from school? 

CORIN JOHNSON: I left school and didn't want to do an arts foundation course. I wanted to learn the skills and not just the theory; to understand how to be a good draftsman and how to create sculpture. I actually went to a career centre and they said to me that someone had been looking for sculptor apprentices. They set up a meeting and I went to work for them. I still use them to source my materials today. It is here that I met Faith Tolkien, the granddaughter of J. R.R Tolkien. While I already had a bit of experience with stone carving, she taught me so much more. The sculptor, Michael Black introduced me to Faith. He also became a mentor of sorts when it came to my sculpting career. He created the big empress head sculptures around the Bodleian Library and worked with lots of weird and wonderful metals. One of my first sculpture jobs was working with a woman called Rachel Shorter. She had transitioned from a man to a woman. Before she went through the change, Rachel had been a stone carver. She had a huge amount of knowledge around the craft. It was hard back then to be taught the sculpture skills. She really showed me the ropes. She had a basement where she made dresses for dolls. It was a pretty niche and unique experience. She would occasionally lace my food with a bit of magic mushroom. 

MONRO: How long have you been in London?

JOHNSON: I've been here for a long time, about thirty years — mainly in the South. I used to be in Kennington. My first place was in Russell Square, a nice squat. It's all very posh now but it was more rough and ready then. Near Great Ormond Street. I went to art college in Kennington. 

MONRO: Who did you start out working with when you took on stone masonry and artist collaborations?

JOHNSON: I used to work with a guy called John Buckley who did these mad sharks coming out of roofs — he does mad pieces. Skellington lovers is one of his new ones: a smashed up old barn in the middle of the countryside. It is a cool thing to come across. 

MONRO: You seem to work with a number of varied materials. Which is the main one you find yourself regularly returning to?

JOHNSON: I always seem to return to stone. 

MONRO: You work with a lot of other artists. How do you separate your practice with the collaborations? 

JOHNSON: I find it organic. I love working with different people and ideas. I find it a bit boring having one idea. I like the collaboration and how it provokes and develops ideas and visions. Each project is my project too — I always put my heart and soul into it. I’ve worked with Paul Noble on a number of series. His turds, for example, were for the Turner Prize. He came to me with the idea and had made some maquettes that we changed and developed a little bit. I work with clay, wood, resin, anything really — a bit of bronze here and there. I see it as a form, rather than the material. I do love stone and marble. I enjoy natural materials and wax. I do quite a lot of mold making as well. 

MONRO: Do you find it difficult going between mediums say stone and marble and then wax or wood? Do you have to switch your brain to different modes for the varied materials you work with?

JOHNSON: A little bit. It takes a while to get into the flow of working with a certain medium, I guess. To get good at it, it takes a day or two sometimes to get back into the flow. I find that with stone — you work away at it and suddenly the flow is there. It just clicks and almost feels like it does the work itself. 

MONRO: Do you find it a cathartic process?

JOHNSON: Yes, but like anything, it has its highs and lows. 

MONRO: Over the years you have worked on an abundance of projects and collaborated with a number of artists and institutions. Can you tell me a bit about where your work has taken you and who you have worked with? 

JOHNSON: I spent time on Indian reservations, worked and lived with sculptors in Africa, California, taught at a sculpture school in China and London, and worked amongst some of the best Italian marble sculptors in Italy (Pietra Santa) to produce sculptures with Paul Noble. The project with Paul was for Gagosian Gallery and nominated for the Turner prize. I also worked to make a huge limewood meditation tree for Ibrahim El-Salahi for Somerset House a couple of years back. I also used to work with the top letter carver / calligrapher called Richard Kindersley. What I learnt with him stuck and I ended up doing the memorial for the Labour prime minister, Harold Wilson, for Westminster Abbey and worked as part of a team of three on Lady Diana’s memorials at Althorp. I have worked very successfully with the Architect Peter Inskip on very classical projects for many wonderful grand houses. I have done quite a few animal projects, a huge, red stone fox outside a museum near Lewis, a pair of Ounces in Country Derry and a pair of Yale’s for St John’s College Cambridge (I also did a series of about 8 gargoyles for them).

I have also worked with Nick Cave. I designed and sculpted the infamous Nick Cave Warracknabeal Equestrian Monument Marquette. This was meant to be placed in his hometown. It was shown in a few exhibitions. 

MONRO: How do the collaborations come about? They seem very organic.

JOHNSON: With Ibrahim El-Salahi, I was showing with Vigo Gallery, doing a series of kitsch granny statues of birds in block marble. They knew I was in an exhibition with Marcus Harvey — he was curating a show and asked me to do a piece, at Kings Place, so I did a massive wood carving for that and they saw the work and asked if I’d work with Ibrahim. With Paul Noble, he put the word around for marble sculptures and came to my studio. Then Nick came about because a guy I was living with asked me to do a wooden head of Nick. He was growing weed and his best mate was a huge Cave fan. He commissioned me to do this head and somehow Nick saw it. He found my dad's number, called him, put me in touch, and we met. 

MONRO: I read that you and Nick met in a club?

JOHNSON: I met him one night in a club. I was with a girlfriend and we had had a bit of a tiff. This guy came up behind me and said, “Corin, do you want a drink?” He invited us to his table and that’s when he first talked about doing the horse sculpture. 

MONRO: You have been working with Nick at your studio over lockdown?

JOHNSON: Yes, on a ceramics project! He first came to the studio to make work for his online store, Cave Things, then we started experimenting, and our creative collaboration began to grow organically. 

MONRO: Where do you get your material from?

JOHNSON: From all over! Sometimes I buy the wood green or at timbre yards, or other sculptors will give me material. The one with the couple was given to me. The marble I use is from Italy, usually. The ones I did with Paul were from there — we travelled together to Italy and chose the pink stone. I’m doing another big pink marble piece at the moment actually. Made a cat for Susie Cave recently for her fashion label. 

MONRO: Your house is filled with beautiful art and trinkets. Can you tell me a bit about where they have come from? 

JOHNSON: I was lucky enough to meet an artist called Peter Snow when I moved to London. He was a painter, professor of art at the Slade, and a set designer for theatre: he did the first Waiting for Godot with Beckett and he introduced me to lots of wonderful artists including Craigie Aitchison, who I collaborated with. I have drawings by Euan Uglow, Georgina Starr, Paul Noble, paintings by James Johnston (ex bad seeds musician), Harry Pye, Rudolph Valentino, and John Buckley. 

 
 

MONRO: What do you think of the art world? 

JOHNSON: Generally, I don't find it that easy to be a part of. There seems to be a lot of politics, but I can't complain too much. I have worked with some of the biggest blue chip Galleries and it has always been enjoyable. The collaborations have been good, but your talent isn't necessarily nurtured unless you are selling. The money-driven, commercial side is quite tough. I would be keen to work within the arts more, if I can, as my own entity! It would be nice to dip my toe in!

MONRO: You were introduced to the Spiritualist Church by your Grandmother. Would you say that your interaction with this alternative faith has influenced your work? 

JOHNSON: Yes, I definitely think I have taken much from Spiritualism and that it has influenced my work, kind of like the healer sculpture. However, I wouldn’t call myself a Spiritualist. More accurately I would say I have always been interested in Parapsychology; always looking into different faiths such as Buddhism, Sufism and reading about different esoteric teachers like Gurdjieff, Paramahansa Yogananda, Paul Brunton, as well as reading about things like cases of people remembering a previous incarnation or learning about tribal beliefs about things like ‘Dreamtime’ exploring and ancestor spirits, such as American-Indian beliefs. 

I think the more moral (following the teachings of Jesus) side of being brought up with Spiritualism might have encouraged me and fed into some of my public work, like the statue of St. Andrew for Exeter College Oxford, the two statues of Christian martyrs on the front of Westminster Abbey, and the panel for Wisbech of Thomas Clarkson. 

MONRO: What are you working on at the moment? 

JOHNSON: I am currently working on several projects, including another collaboration with Edmund de Waal and am assisting Nick on the ceramic sculpture project I mentioned before. I have also done six studies of Grace Jones that are in her private collection. I am a judge for QEST that is the Queen’s charity for supporting artists, makers and people who want support starting up with interesting careers. I recently produced a series of multi-colored marble birds (including a pair of budgies, a goldfinch and a magpie with an egg) that were inspired by old-fashioned granny ceramics (Beswick birds). These were mainly shown with Vigo Gallery. I also recently created a limestone hare, which is currently with Messums Gallery.

 
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Queer Blood America: An Interview Of Artist Jordan Eagles Who Is Battling Blood Inequality

 
Queer Blood America, 2021 10.75” x 8” x 2.75” in. original 1982 Captain America, blood of queer man, collection tube, blue nitrile gloves, plexiglass, UV resin

Queer Blood America, 2021
10.75” x 8” x 2.75” in.
original 1982 Captain America, blood of queer man, collection tube, blue nitrile gloves, plexiglass, UV resin

 

interview by Oliver Kupper

In the face of a national blood shortage due to the COVID 19 pandemic, the FDA still continues its discriminatory policy that place limitations on gay and bisexual men from donating their blood. In 1983—at the dawn of the AIDS crisis—a lifetime ban was implemented. In 2016, the policy was updated to allow gay and bisexual men to donate blood only if they have been celibate for a year. In 2020, in the face of a dire blood shortage, the policy was updated to three months. There are currently no celibacy requirements for heterosexual blood donors. For artist Jordan Eagles, blood is a source of fascination, power, spirituality, and a source of life—particularly queer blood. Incidentally, blood is also a medium in a practice that amplifies the call for blood equality. On the occasion of Pride Month and ahead of World Blood Donor Day, New Discretions presents QUEER BLOOD AMERICA, a continuation of Eagle’s body of work that juxtaposes American superhero comic books and vials of queer blood. In his newest work, the artist places a vial of queer blood into a laser cut section of an early AIDS era Captain America where the hero "Battles Baron Blood!" with the blood of a queer donor. The work has been digitized into two unique NFTs, which are available now on Foundation. In the following interview we talk to Eagles about his exploration of blood and blood equality.

Oliver Kupper: At the heart of your practice is the amplification of the idea of blood equality, and at the same time, blood inequality. When did you become so fascinated with blood? 

I like that you use the word “fascinated” because there is, without a doubt, unique properties and energy in blood that is captivating. I can remember, even as a young child, always being wide eyed at the doctor’s office watching the blood move through the tube. It was, and still can be, so mesmerizing and beautiful. I began working with blood in 1998 as a way to explore the connection between the body and the spirit. It was a very philosophical journey trying to better understand where inside my body the soul lived and what part of me was purely flesh, or if it was all actually connected? These early works raised a lot of questions about existence and preservation. The concepts behind the queer blood works, specifically addressing discriminatory blood donation policy and blood equality began in 2013.

When did you first align the idea of using blood in your work with the iconography of comic books, particularly the role of the super hero?

February 14, 2018. It was the night of the Parkland shootings. A few days before that I had received from eBay an original copy of an Action Comics from 1971 were Superman is getting a blood transfusion from the citizens of metropolis. I did not buy the book with any intention of making art with it. I just was attracted to the cover of Superman vulnerably laying eye closed and lifeless with massive tubes in his arms and with what seems like an infinite line of people willing to try and save the hero. But the night of that shooting, maybe because it was also in Florida, it brought back many emotions from the Orlando massacre from only a couple years prior where in addition to the horror and tragic loss of life, so many LGBTQ individuals couldn’t even donate blood to help save lives in their own community.

That night it just came to me in a momentary flash that I should enlarge the comic book cover to be larger than life-size, turn it grayscale and splatter it with blood and not use any resin, no preservation, just let the blood seep into the paper and dry. I didn’t realize at the time that this initial work would spawn a new series of appropriating other pop-culture and historical documents, each with a unique narrative relating to blood donation and HIV/AIDS, and pairing them with blood from particular LGBTQ+ donors would create new entry points for policy conversations.

So often communities come together during tragedies and heal together through the selfless act of blood donation. Heroes save lives of people they often don’t even know. And this is so true with blood donation. Sharing your blood with somebody in need, someone you probably will never meet, is a selfless and heroic act. 

One of the editors of the Superman plot, Dorothy Woolfolk, stated that kryptonite was introduced into the storyline because she felt that Superman’s invulnerability was becoming boring—why do you think comic books have taken on these strange reflections of society? 

Generally speaking, there is something very appealing about mystical superpowers and how heroes usually triumph over the evil villain. Because comics are created by artists and writers (and editors) and are often dealing with the issues of their time, even when it is very subtle or intentionally subversive. I am most interested in how an image or storyline, paired with a certain donor’s blood, can serve as a prompt to reexamine history and consider the current moment.

The celibacy requirements for blood donations are astonishing, that even in the face of a national crisis and blood shortage, the FDA is essentially saying that they would rather let people die instead of accepting queer blood—while at the same time forcing queer men to essential divulge their sexual activity—what does this say about the politics of human rights?

The FDA’s blood donation policy has always been discriminatory. Even when they changed the policy in 2016, from a lifetime ban to one year of celibacy, it had no basis in science. Even with further modifications during the most recent pandemic, the changes are still not rooted in science. It is clear that there is such an inherent fear of queer bodies and our fluids, that the stigma and illogical terror clouds scientific judgment.

Speaking of politics, the current head of the FDA, Janet Woodcock, was in charge of a lot of the early trials for an AIDs vaccines, but it seems like there were tons of regulatory roadblocks and barriers with their trials, particularly politically motivated regulatory barriers, do you have hope in her leadership when it comes to blood equality and the hopes of finding an AIDS vaccine?

It will be amazing when an HIV/AIDS vaccine is fully developed. It is fantastic that there is treatment and preventative measures available such as PrEP, but a vaccine will be amazing. I am particularly encouraged that Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, who is a blood donor in the Blood Mirror sculpture, was recently appointed as the CDC’s Director of the Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention. He is a visionary in this field.

What is your advice for people who want to take an active effort in breaking down the stigmas around blood donation, especially blood donated by gay and bisexual men?

Is there blood being donated by gay and bisexual men? I think the policy, for all its recent change, is completely designed actually to NOT have gay blood enter the supply but to make it seem more accommodating.

Understanding some elements of science is important, such as someone who is HIV+ and undetectable cannot transmit HIV through sex. A lot of people don’t understand what that’s all about. Breaking down the stigma around HIV/AIDS is a good start. Ultimately, looking at person as an individual and recognizing our common humanity is crucial.

Can you talk a little bit about the NFT, is this the first time you have created an NFT—what do you think about the future of digital art and the blockchain, especially in regards to activism?

QUEER BLOOD AMERICA (PRIDE) and QUEER BLOOD AMERICA (Black/Red) are my first animation and NFTs. They are based off a new  work in which a Captain America, from 1982, is laser-cut to hold a tube of queer blood preserved in resin. With animation, I’m excited that I can represent blood in a new way, that I can’t do with my physical works, yet the source is real blood. It is also interesting to me to work with something so organic in a digital universe. I’m very intrigued by this very particular cultural moment and connecting it to a social justice as a way to open more dialogue about these crucial health and equality issues. This is all unfolding rapidly and it has great potential, beyond being another way to express oneself, but to connect with organizations and an international community.

Click here to explore QUEER BLOOD AMERICA.