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.

Honoring The Murkiness: An Interview Of Estefania Puerta & Abbey Meaker On Curating The Ephemeral

Brian Raymond Tree Hollow Composition, 2021 Maple tree hollow strung with harp strings, processed thru OP1, eh95000, and Sponge Fork Run time: 10:00

Brian Raymond
Tree Hollow Composition, 2021
Maple tree hollow strung with harp strings, processed thru OP1, eh95000, and Sponge Fork
Run time: 10:00

interview by Summer Bowie
photographs by Abbey Meaker

Is it in our nature to make art? Is art inherently ephemeral? Is there a boundary between art and nature? How can we look to nature as a blueprint for the art that we make? These are all questions that come up as I consider Land Chapters, the inaugural exhibition by Artist Field, a platform for projects that respond to and engage with natural environments. Curated by Estefania Puerta and Abbey Meaker, this exploration of the boundary between nature and self is a deep dive into the works of 16 artists split into three chapters. The first chapter is comprised of installation works that can be found deep in the woods of Richmond, Vermont on the Beaver Pond Hill Property. The second chapter comes in the form of a tape with recordings from six different sound artists. And the third chapter is a print publication with text from seven additional artists. All together, these works serve as an attempt to embrace all of the hard-to-pinpoint expressions of art within nature that so often fall under the towering shadow of negated space left by the Land Art movement.

BOWIE: How did the two of you meet and what was the inspiration behind Land Chapters?

MEAKER: ​I can't remember how we met, but I've known of Este and her work for years now. We live in a small community and her work has always stood out to me. We connected more deeply when I interviewed her on the occasion of her first solo show in New York. She talked about 'romancing wounds' and we discovered a shared obsession with psychoanalytic theory, specifically Julia Kristeva's work. More conversations about art and books led us to Land Chapters. She asked if I wanted to co-organize a show on her and her partner's land, and it seemed like the perfect setting for Artist Field's inaugural project. Collaborating with Este on this has been so natural and thrilling. 

PUERTA: I became aware of Abbey through the amazing work she was doing with Overnight Projects. I wasn’t living in Vermont at the time and it was so refreshing and exciting to see independent curatorial projects that Abbey was doing from afar. It gave me hope that maybe Vermont could be a site of contemporary art and critical thinking and not just a place for hermits and landscape painters. 

BOWIE: What can we learn from the Land Art of the 20th century, both positive and negative?

PUERTA: I think the Land Art category is vast and uncontainable in many ways, The overlaps tend to be that it involves earth materials that were traditionally unconventional to the art world at the time, a form of negation to the commercialization of objects and materials via their eventual decay or change in organic composition, exploration of spaces outside the white cube as sites for installations, and a questioning of worth/value in the materials used to produce art. 

From these general standpoints, came so many different approaches. I think the Arte Povera movement paved the way for artists to open up their practice to the kind of multimedia, materially dense, and organically varied forms we see today. It has allowed bigger questions around how we deal with materials that are not meant to be controlled and it has continued the discourse around the boundaries of what we consider art and where we deem it to exist. 

With that said, so many histories have been erased in the categorization of “Land Art,” as though these American men in the ‘60s were the first to create objects, installations, and spaces with earth material. Abbey and I really feel that addressing this kind of erasure and inherent violence to the way that white western art categorizes such a dense history with so many people, so many species, so many territories is a type of critical reckoning to anyone interested in contending with “Land Art” today. I’m not saying that we by any means filled this gaping hole with this exhibition, but rather that we quickly felt that attempting to categorize “land,” “nature,” “human relationship,” was in many ways at the risk of erasing and conflating something that truly feels uncontainable. And we felt it important to honor that murkiness and the wide web that it can create across people, instead of continuing to pretend that Land Art was a movement that mostly centered itself around cis white men performing heroic acts of intervention onto a vast landscape. 

I think it is possible to address this movement and the ways that it subverted the art world, while simultaneously opening up the conversation about the erasure of many people, especially BIPOC, queer people, and women in its history. 

Lily Consuelo Saporta Tagiuri Sun Belly; The Big Star That Feeds Us, 2021 Mixed wood scrap, aluminum, paint, and plaster 1.5 x 3 feet

Lily Consuelo Saporta Tagiuri
Sun Belly; The Big Star That Feeds Us, 2021
Mixed wood scrap, aluminum, paint, and plaster
1.5 x 3 feet

BOWIE: This exhibition takes place on unceded land of the Abenaki Nation. How has their relationship to the land informed your approach to this project? 

PUERTA: It didn’t and nor are we at all any authority to speak on behalf of the Abenaki people and their relationship to the land. We dedicated Land Chapters to the Missiquoi Abenaki in the humbled acknowledgement that they are the original protectors of what we call today, Richmond, VT where the exhibition partly took place. Our acknowledgement of their existence, of the fact that this land had been violently colonized and taken from the Missiquoi Abenaki does not give us any privileged insights or knowledge of their existence and continued ways of living on this land we call Vermont today. What has informed our approach to this project are the ways in which giving space and power to the different names and histories that a land holds feels like a more honest uncovering of the entangled and ultimately complicated relationships any of us have to what we call home, land, nature, history, relationship. 

We look towards the histories here on this piece of land we are standing on as a starting point, as a way to say, “there is so much more here,” but we of course are not the arbiters of any culture and believe in the sovereignty of the Missiquoi Abenaki people to define their own terms and speak for themselves. 

BOWIE: Both of you create work that explores your relationship to nature, but in very different ways. Abbey, can you talk a bit about that relationship and how it’s captured on film? 

MEAKER: My work reflects a deep curiosity about atmospheres, the feeling or intangible qualities of a particular place, its history, the influences that inform it. How these mysterious aspects are connected to my own intangible spaces, memory, and sense of time. Cinema, photography—these are imaginative ways of seeing, of creating a dual sense of place, a feeling that within this world, there is another more illusory place. Curiosity about whether one’s interiority informs the atmosphere of a place and how it is translated visually. I work with film because of its materiality; it becomes a physical record of a time and place, absorbing the light and energy of a particular moment. For me, this primeval phenomenon is experienced most potentantly in the natural world. 

In a more traditional sense, I’m interested in natural compositions found in forests, particularly floodplain forests, which I’ve spent the last year and a half exploring. Each year the rivers flood, and the trees are sculptured and re-sculptured by water, a knowable conducting force that influences the growth of the Silver Maples and Ostrich Ferns. A curiosity about the ways in which we influence and are influenced by ‘the land’ is at the core of my practice and of Land Chapters. 

BOWIE: In contrast, Este, your sculptural works are made from a combination of natural materials and found objects. Can you talk about the role of nature as both subject and medium?

PUERTA: Nature in my work is about questioning what we deem as natural and alien, how our own bodies and earth can be our home and our prison, and all the slippery contradictions that nature holds. How it can heal us and kill us, how it both provides for us and takes us away. Nature has felt like the perfect archetype for the ways in which language fails us because language tries to hold clarity and structure in a way that nature cuts through and becomes excessive and complicated. 

More formally, I am really interested in using that same kind of slipperiness to how we identify and name something and what its purpose can be. I tend to blur elements of nature both in its operations and appearance into body-like structures that also incorporate furniture materials, found objects, as well as more conventional art materials. These forms become proposals of bodies/environments that have evolved from the social ills of our world to become their own self-sustaining, migratory, empowered agents. They become their own worlds just as much as they become their own bodies. Nature is a reminder of how much we can adapt and how much we must protect ourselves. 

BOWIE: What was the curatorial process like?

PUERTA: It was really organic and everything felt like it clicked into place so perfectly! It was a collaboration between Abbey and I, thinking of artists and writers who would lend a unique and important perspective around the curatorial prompt that was basically about addressing their relationship to nature in whatever way each person identified. 

We had very little back and forth with the contributors and made it clear that we had complete trust in what they were making, and wanted to be open to their exploration. In our invitation we were explicit about the ethos behind this project being about a more gentle response and collaboration with the land around them, instead of the historic, heroic interventions and every artist we invited already worked within that ethos. 

Letting go of a certain expectation felt important early on and embracing total trust and availability for conversations is a more natural way that Abbey and I work as curators. Both of us being artists, we intimately know the work and intention that goes into an art practice and the kind of freedom and support that is needed to nourish that practice. 

At the end of the day, we love artists and wanted to make sure our contributors felt that love and support. I think that is important to say, because often a show solely focuses on the type of work an artist makes, or why they make it, but how is that artist doing? Are they feeling supported in their practice? Are they truly being valued? How do we make the curatorial process one of support and not one of extraction for the artist? There are so many behind-the-scenes dynamics, and so often artists are the ones that suffer the brunt of a lot of hustling and feeling slightly demeaned along the way. Our process was slow, deliberate, immensely grateful, and apologetic if we felt a bump on the road. And we feel that that deliberate intention is felt in the project. Of course, every artist and writer contributed something that far exceeded any expectation we could have. 

Enacted prompt from Angus McCullough and Ashlin Dolan Contact Kit, 2021 Birch bark, grape vine, stone, moss, typed instructions in a plywood case 20 x 16 x 6 inches

Enacted prompt from Angus McCullough and Ashlin Dolan
Contact Kit, 2021
Birch bark, grape vine, stone, moss, typed instructions in a plywood case
20 x 16 x 6 inches

BOWIE: There’s such a multi-sensorial aspect to the curation. Works that you can see, hear, smell, and taste. Was the sensory aspect something you were considering in the curatorial process?

MEAKER: There’s something about being outside in a natural setting that attunes our senses to the world around and inside us. We wanted the experience of the work to reflect this. To attempt to communicate that we belong to this place; it doesn’t belong to us. We are part of this vibrant ecosystem, not separate. This is the throughline of Land Chapters. 

PUERTA: And yes! So many senses involved. Lily Consuelo Saporta Tagiuri contributed Sun Belly, a functional solar oven and artwork that beckons us to collaborate with the sun as our main source of heat and cooking potential. Recipes were also contributed by Lily and will be included in the Land Chapters publication. We will be baking sun bread in the oven and offering it to visitors. 

The sound pieces will have their own designated listening spots scattered around the property where you can hear the sounds inside trees, a cabin, in a hole in the ground, and within the ferns.

The writing pieces in the publication also hold many senses. Sonia Louise Davis contributed a score to be performed by anyone anywhere, which is rooted in deep listening and feeling yourself in a space. Honestly, each piece beckons a couple of different senses at once, and I echo what Abbey said about just being in a natural setting; your own body is a heightened orb of senses where the heat of the sun will emphasize the smell of the chanterelles and the echo of a sound piece in a tree feels like a distant howl. 

Jordan Rosenow Four by Eight, 2021 Galvanized corrugated steel, rebar 4 x 8 x 4 foot units (dimensions variable)

Jordan Rosenow
Four by Eight, 2021
Galvanized corrugated steel, rebar
4 x 8 x 4 foot units (dimensions variable)

BOWIE: Abbey, you’ve curated and presented work in a number of untraditional locations. I’m thinking about a former coal plant, a former orphanage, an airstream turned library, a corn field on the cusp of reverting back to a wetland. Why eschew the white cube?

MEAKER: I have nothing against the white cube, per se. It has its place, particularly in a commercial sense. I can appreciate that in this setting the work has a clean platform, visually and conceptually. But I am personally interested in and excited about ephemeral, experiential artworks, when the setting creates a larger context and more holistic experience. 

The first show I ever organized was in the orphanage you mentioned, An Order. I had spent three years exploring and photographing this space, which had sat untouched for 30+ years. My maternal grandfather and his brother lived there in the 1920s. I never met either of them, so the process of being in this space was a way for me to piece together an unknowable history through the act of making pictures. At the end of my time there, I was curious how other artists might respond to this place: what would their line of thinking be if they approached it with more critical distance than I had? 

BOWIE: What are the challenges and benefits that come with presenting work this way, as opposed to hanging a frame on a wall?

MEAKER: In this case, working in the woods, a half mile up an old logging road, we mostly had to contend with the elements; the changing environment informed the timeline and many of our decisions. We started planning this in January when the land was inaccessible with snow, and now, within just a couple of weeks of sun and rain, the ferns have unfurled and everything is wild and lush. One of the most meaningful aspects of Land Chapters has been connecting with this place in such an intimate way, coming to really know and see it change over seasons. 

And the challenges have less to do with location and more to do with the lack of institutional support, especially here. It’s a real hustle to organize a group show like this, to navigate the logistics of a unique site, insurance and liability waivers, fundraising to pay artists, designers, promotion etc. If you don’t have enough support, much of your energy, attention, and resources are going to the mechanics of the exhibition. It becomes more challenging to balance curatorial responsibilities with organizing. I don’t know that I’d have it any other way, though. It allows us a certain freedom, as we are not beholden to donors or collectors. Artists can experiment and push their practice in ways they may not have otherwise. All that said, we have been so lucky to have a tremendous amount of community support. Friends and colleagues have generously donated their time and talent to help with design and aspects of organizing that two people simply can’t manage on their own. It has truly been a collective effort. 

PUERTA: We had to think about nature as our collaborator and saboteur. Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya’s work, for example, has a sculpture that is made of cat bones and we have to be very diligent about when it is installed and when we must bring it back into the cabin because a coyote or other animals would absolutely destroy it. Not to say that Ruben may not be interested in this potential collaboration, but it does become a question of how do we protect the intention and how much do we allow our surroundings to take over, and each work addresses that differently. 

Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya Tres Tristes Gallos pa el caldo de las tres de la tarde, 2021 Yucca husk. All sourced material from the Rio Grande River, in an area that borders; Texas, New Mexico, and Juarez, Mexico.

Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya
Tres Tristes Gallos pa el caldo de las tres de la tarde, 2021
Yucca husk. All sourced material from the Rio Grande River, in an area that borders; Texas, New Mexico, and Juarez, Mexico.

We have another artist, Devin Alejandro-Wilder who uprooted a cacti cluster from Texas and sent it to us to be transplanted in the woods of Vermont. With their piece, it was very much the intention to actually root a non-native plant into the soil of Vermont and see what would happen, see how much care and maintenance it would need, see how it would respond to its new surroundings and how its new surroundings would respond to it. So much of Devin’s piece is about this type of migration and otherness that occurs when introduced to a new space, a new territory that has been historically deemed as “unviable” for you. So, we document their piece often, notice how it changes and adapts, and are mostly humbled by the resiliency of this plant and the symbolism it holds. 

BOWIE: This project is a lot more expansive than just an exhibition. There are installation works on view, a book, and a tape of field recordings. Ultimately, what do you want people to take away from this work?

MEAKER: We see Land Chapters as one exhibition, experienced in three unique spaces, or chapters: installations on the land, the book, in which there are contributions from artists who are not part of the installations, as well as the tape of sound works. They are all connected by the curatorial prompt Este and I provided, but are unique spaces experienced differently, with different senses. For those that are able to experience this project, we hope it finds its way into your own relationship with the world(s) around and within you.

Devin Alejandro Wilder T R A N S P L A N T, 2021 Nopales/ Opuntia engelmannii var. Lindheimeri, soils (native and mixed), pea gravel, rocks, cardboard 36 x 36 x 50 inches

Devin Alejandro Wilder
T R A N S P L A N T, 2021
Nopales/ Opuntia engelmannii var. Lindheimeri, soils (native and mixed), pea gravel, rocks, cardboard
36 x 36 x 50 inches

Land Chapters is on view June 4-6 @ Beaver Pond Hill Property in Richmond, VT. Contributions to the exhibition include installations by Devin Alejandro-Wilder, Angus McCullough, Ashlin Dolan, Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya, Jordan Rosenow, and Lily Consuelo Saporta Tagiuri; recordings by sound artists Wren Kitz, Ivan Forde, Brian Raymond, and Stephanie Wilson; and text by Chief Shirly Hook, Alan Huck, Wes Larios, Travis Klunick, Sonia Louise Davis, and Rachel Vera Steinberg.

California Dreamin': An Interview Of Artist Cole Sternberg On Conceiving The Free Republic Of California

Cole Sternberg the official flag of the free republic of california, 2020 Ink and stitched applique nylon 48” x 72”

Cole Sternberg
the official flag of the free republic of california, 2020
Ink and stitched applique nylon
48” x 72”


interview by Michael Slenske


“The nation is an artwork and we the people are the artists.”
-Susanna Dakin

In 1984, artist and social activist Susanna Dakin set out to prove not only that nation building is an art unto itself, but that we as citizens are more compelled to take part in its creation than we might like to think. Almost four decades after Dakin pounded the pavement from coast to coast as a durational performance art piece, artist Cole Sternberg has applied the lessons he learned in law school to a radical reimagining of California statehood in FREESTATE, his agitprop public movement via exhibition at ESMoA. A variation on the traditional idea of secession, his proposal includes an invitation to all nations and all other states within the US to join. And unlike Dakin’s performance, Sternberg does not place himself in the role of a delegate, but rather a draughtsman, or perhaps a professional dreamer. The project is part constitution, part policy and budget reform, part sculptural installation, part digital revolution, and part public education extension in civics, complete with a sleek visual identity and merch game, all scored to the tune of “California Dreamin’” by the Mamas and the Papas.

SLENSKE: So we walk into the exhibition and it starts with the gift shop.

STERNBERG: Normally a museum is one large room. And the curator and I had this idea to break it up into three. It’s a loose, reverse chronology of the origin story of the Free Republic. This first room looks like a store, or maybe it’s a graphic design office, or a sort of minimalist canvasing office. You don’t really know, and people who have been to the museum are like wait, what happened to the museum? And nothing’s for sale, so it’s just a little confusing, which I like.

SLENSKE: So nothing is for sale.

STERNBERG: No.

SLENSKE: But there is a shop—you can buy stuff, but not here.

STERNBERG: Just online. Online exists as its own art piece, really. This is one component of this broader idea of a Free Republic.

DSC_4897.jpg

SLENSKE: So, this is more like the propaganda room.

STERNBERG: Yes, totally. It’s the propaganda room. Most importantly, it’s meant to engender this idea that something big is about to happen, or is happening. And then on the website, you can download any of this information. The budget’s one of the things that, with coronavirus, got much more dialed in. Originally I thought, I’m going to do a screen print or a painting of a math equation of our new budget surplus, and that’s it. Then the show got postponed, and I was sitting in the studio and I thought, well okay, what could we spend this money on? How much would it really cost for universal healthcare, or higher education for everyone, or for more low-income support, or our own EPA, and all of these different things? And it was shocking to realize how many things we could fit in that budget surplus. And the way we get a budget surplus is we provide all the services that the federal government currently does, but there’s a differential in that money because for every dollar we give the federal government in taxes, we get about 75 cents in so-called services, Kentucky gets $3 for every dollar they spend, so that creates a big surplus. Then, the military budget is so crazy that I thought, do we really need this? If we cut our military budget by three quarters, California would still be in the top fifteen militaries of the world, but that adds another hundred billion annually to our budget, so that pays for everyone to go to public or private higher education of any level, pays for the universal healthcare, pays to over double our low-income support, pays to have an EPA that’s four times as big as the US EPA, and a $60 billion transition fund annually, which would eventually go away once we’ve transitioned. I would like us to not really do that, but to have the number ammo to fight for a more pacifist, less war-mongering existence. It’s about $15-20 billion dollars to pay for the higher education of California. That’s it, and California contributes about $200 billion annually to the US military.

SLENSKE: Tell me about the seal. Why this design scheme?

STERNBERG: The State of California seal is almost the same. Creatively, you want to go more wild, but I wanted it to be confusing and make people think maybe this is real already. I reversed Minerva, the goddess. She’s looking in the other direction. It used to have thirty-one stars, now it only has one. There used to be an unknown building in the Hills that some people think is San Quentin—I don’t think it is, but either way I thought eh, we don’t need it. And then the text. I left “Eureka” because I like the idea of Eureka; it’s not tied to any racism of the first Anglo settlers here. And that’s it. It just exists like that. On the website now, there’s a graphic design high school class that all made their own seals. They could make it all about equality, or all about sustainability—the specific issues of the show.

SLENSKE: There’s kind of this theosophist bent. Have you seen Can’t Get You Out of My Head, that new Adam Curtis documentary? It’s this idea of how, in the last hundred years, any sort of meaningful society has caved under the pressure of capitalism from Mao Zedong, to Putin. So, I think of that and I think: are there any more possibilities right now or no possibilities? What do you think?

STERNBERG: There are possibilities. My aspiration for this is just a little bit of movement in the right direction, you can’t have everyone suffering and have it not crumble, and capitalism seems to just lead back to feudalism. So, it has to go in a different direction. This is the only real document in this room. I mean real like, that is fabricated, that is California joining the Paris agreement, and I really geeked out on these types of documents. Like, if everything happened, they would look like that. I went to the first impeachment hearing, and that was my ticket. I didn’t want to comment about Trump because this isn’t about Trump; it’s about these systemic American issues that we’ve never addressed, or solved, or anything, but I did want to touch a little on that, and impeachment is treated totally differently in my Constitution.

DSC_4947.jpg

SLENSKE: What’s the difference?

STERNBERG: There’s a High Board of Impeachment which is run by a non-partisan body, and the Attorney General plays a big role in it, but the Attorney General is an elected position and not an appointed one. So, I pulled part of the presidential cabinet away from the control of the President because I didn’t see why the head of the EPA should be chosen by the President. I don’t think the President should have that much power, so I pulled a few things back, one being the Department of Justice, and another the EPA and another the State Department.

SLENSKE: You’ve done a lot of different types of experiential work, from dealing with your grandmother’s TV den, to being on this maiden voyage from China to Portland—why do this? Was this in the back of your mind for a while?

COLE STERNBERG: Well, whenever McCain named Palin his running mate, I was living in Budapest with no painting studio. I was mainly painting at the time, and I just thought, America’s really annoying me at the moment. I’m going to write this book about California having a coup d’état. So, it was a stream-of-consciousness thing. It was 350 pages, and then I didn’t read it. I didn’t go back and edit any of it, I just kept writing. I got home here, and read the first ten pages and I was like, god this is horrible, and I put it in a drawer. Then, cut to about two and a half years ago, the curator of this museum who is a good friend, came over and we went through a list of my ideas that had been floating around, and this was one of them. He said, you should pursue that one in this era of the crumbling of democracy. Cut to now—it’s developed into this huge thing where it’s not really about secession. The secession is just a guise to get people to listen to the ideas, really. I went to law school, and I’ve used that knowledge and anger about certain things in the works in certain ways, but I’ve never directly used that in this show. In terms of writing the Constitution, I said, “Oh, I can use what I studied and now I’ll have the confidence to at least draft documents in a way where I know they’re pretty close to the correct thing.”

 
 

SLENSKE: Did you have practicing lawyers go over them?

STERNBERG: Well, I did with the Constitution. I technically had three lawyers. Two just to review it, and another reviewed the Spanish translation, and a dear friend of mine is a Catholic priest who went to the London School of Economics and has four graduate degrees from Cambridge. He’s this super smart, thoughtful person, so I had him review it, too. His was actually the only substantial change.

SLENSKE: What was that? 

STERNBERG: He said, “You should consider adding a public bank, and I didn’t realize this. I knew check cashing organizations are a huge rip-off, but I didn’t know the depth of not having access to banks through our society. North Dakota is the only state with a public bank, ironically for their anti-socialism views, and it’s been around for 90 years, and they love it. The access to a public bank is great ‘cause there’s no drive for profit of that bank, so in the Constitution I added that we’ll have a public bank, when you’re born or become a resident or a citizen, you get an account, you can cancel that account if you want, and if you’re born here you get a savings bond for an amount determined by Congress, and that’ll mature until you’re eighteen, so it gives you access to the banking system that a lot of low-income places don’t have, or have at such a high premium that it’s inaccessible. That was his main change. The lawyers corrected a few typos. They couldn’t find any critical things.

SLENSKE: What’s going on over here with this record player console thing?

STERNBERG: This is the audio centerpiece of the whole show. I wanted to add a couple of sculptural components in general.There’s a bibliography on the website of about sixty books. This one I picked–well, de Tocqueville is obvious, and he mentions everything we’re talking about today. He’s like, “this attempt at democracy is interesting, but I’m not sure if it’ll work given the structure of voting and that it’s founded in slavery.” And then, Joan Didion, her family were some of the first settlers to Sacramento from the East Coast, and she tells about that journey to Hollywood. So, that was sort of a romantic and dark view of California. John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra was his first book about California.

SLENSKE: So, they’re almost like foundational texts to what California is in the mind of folks?

STERNBERG: Totally. And a little bit of nation building, and a little bit of insanity, because Kerouac’s Big Sur doesn’t help with the story of California very much, but in the end, he’s standing on the beach in Big Sur, which is arguably the most beautiful place in California, or the world, speaking gibberish because he’s gone nuts. So, that’s just kind of a joke of mine about me and this whole idea. And then, these are Serpentine rocks, which are the official rock of California.

SLENSKE: There’s all these fictional documents, it’s a construct itself, even though any Constitution is the same way. You made it before this moment, too, but it feels like it was made in this moment.

STERNBERG: That’s the crazy part. It actually makes me feel so proud of certain things like the Constitution, because I was trying to draft something that would be an infrastructure, and then current events come and crash into it, and hopefully it resolves those things properly. I’ve always been doing things simultaneously, and I’ve always been writing. Two years ago, I wrote a letter to Gerhard Richter every day and mailed it to him.

SLENSKE: What happened to that?

STERNBERG: I made three copies of each letter, so I have two copies, and I know it’s the right address for him, they all went to him, he never responded. I created a bunch of rules for myself, too. I never mentioned his art, or my art, geographic location, rarely a proper name. It’s like you jump into the middle of a real friendship when you read it. I think I just make all of this stuff anyway, format-wise, and this just dramatically highlights that part of the practice. 

SLENSKE: That’s amazing. How long did that go on for?

STERNBERG: It was a year. Every day.

SLENSKE: What year?

STERNBERG: Oh, 2017. I picked a lot of generic things, so January first it started, December thirty-first it ended. I made letterhead that was foiled and embossed with my name and everything, but then so was his name and address, and the same with the envelopes, so they could only serve one purpose: to go to him. But very generic looking, not like an artist’s letterhead. I had a portable printer that I carried in my backpack, and my rule was just that it had to be in the mail before midnight. I think I was in seven countries and fifteen states or something during that [project], and for two weeks I was in Berlin, which I just thought was funny because he might be like, oh shit, this guy’s getting close based on these stamps.

I picked Gerhard intentionally, thinking he’ll never write back, I like him as an artist, I know he’s a grumpy old man—like, if I wrote to Jasper Johns, he’s a friendlier guy. At some point someone would have written something back. So it got more and more freeing, too. It was more of a diary; I didn’t care.

SLENSKE: Do you feel like this project here is trying harder to find a response, in a way?

STERNBERG: It does feel like I’m yelling into a tunnel, whereas before, with Gerhard, it was more just talking in a tunnel. I wouldn’t care if the Gerhard letters got out now that I’m done with them. During the process, I don’t know if I would’ve wanted them out.

Cole Sternberg structural assistance, 2020 Ink on paper 13” x 19”

Cole Sternberg
structural assistance, 2020
Ink on paper
13” x 19”

SLENSKE: What’s this? Is this the LA Times?

STERNBERG: Yeah, that was in 1910. The LA Times was bombed. There’s three painted things like this in here where I’m starting to fix damage, but they all deal with multiple issues at once. This one, you think oh, okay, it’s against violence and terrorism and for free speech, but also the bombing was by two union members who were mad that the publisher was anti-union, and that allowed the anti-union movement in California to really push toward not having unions. We have less unions even than other states in America, and this is one of the big marketing things they were able to do to accomplish that, which is a huge bummer.

SLENSKE: Then, what’re these paintings?

STERNBERG: These all work together. These are paintings and screen printing together. You know the water wars are a big thing in California, and with how we’re going to be sustainable, we have to treat water differently than just wasting it all the time. The main reason desalination systems haven’t worked historically is the energy was too expensive to justify doing it, but we’re close to the point where batteries can store solar and wind at a large enough level where theoretically, you put all the solar panels in Death Valley, store it somewhere from there to give to Santa Barbara, take the water in and desalinate it closer to Santa Barbara, so it’s something where we’re really close to that technology.

DSC_4908.jpg

SLENSKE: So, what’s going on in this last room?

STERNBERG: This is more of the beginning. It’s more like a traditional museum or gallery. You can breathe a little easier in here. So, it’s more grandiose thoughts of freedom and escape. It’s also a kind of strange assortment of things. This feels like a very Anglo-American, faux tough-guy, property rights-driven kind of a thing. It’s a gate from a barn, like a ranch. It’s on a little bit of a slant because it was on a road with a slant, and it’s decaying. This gate is easier to move, it’s already being torn apart, so it’s a similar feeling in a way but maybe more motivational because it’s so easy to get around it.

SLENSKE: It also seems like it’s been breached.

STERNBERG: Yeah. This is a piece of a California live oak. I was trying to save the live oak, but it looked like a peace symbol and a slingshot to me. I liked that there were still worms eating away at it. It’s kind of an homage to Pierre Huyghe.

SLENSKE: And then, this is the Turner-esque moment. Are we going out into the sublime or not?

STERNBERG: Exactly, and that’s funny. No one said Turner yet, but I also have never really used this rich of an orange. It feels really Turner-esque in that color palette. Yeah, it’s more romantic.

SLENSKE: Explain the flag real quick.

STERNBERG: I’m not a huge flag person, I don’t care how they’re designed necessarily, but I thought well, we need a flag to highlight how big the dream is. Baby blue is more like peace and the UN and diplomacy, green is the environment, and a darker blue feels to me like the Pacific. The original flag of Mexican California was just a red star in the middle. I like not changing the seal completely. I like that one sort of shoutout. I used to love the verified flag—our California state flag—but the people who designed it weren’t the best people. I didn’t think there was a point in continuing it.

SLENSKE: So basically, the end and the beginning are in this room.

STERNBERG: Yes. We thought about reversing the whole order, but it felt more interesting this way.

SLENSKE: Well, in a certain sense, to start a revolution, you need the marketing. Then, this is the documentation and the meat, and back here it’s sort of, where do we go next? 

STERNBERG: Kind of a reward. This is the nicest feeling room.

SLENSKE: Do you want to present this to California Congress? Do you want the mayor and the governor to see it? The Attorney General?

STERNBERG: Oh, for sure. I’m going to send Gavin Newsom a letter.

SLENSKE: I’m sure he’d welcome that right about now.

STERNBERG: [laughs] I’m going to send him a nice bound version of the budget and the Constitution, and I started to think California could amend its Constitution. It’s not going to have any federal law effect, but why don’t we just do that, just as a statement? I think that’s what I’d propose first to him. So, not seceding or anything, but hey, we have an old, California Constitution that has many of the exact same flaws as the US one; why don’t we just change it? I feel like people kind of forget about the California Constitution.

SLENSKE: I love this idea of reading the US Constitution and then reading this as a comparative analysis. Going back to big money, with issues like universal healthcare, the approval rating is through the roof, but it never happens. It’s the market that’s always going to fight back against these things.

STERNBERG: Healthcare, for instance. We pay the most of any country per person for healthcare, and we’re forty-sixth in the world in life expectancy. You could spend less money, more money goes into the economy, which then duplicates itself. So, you could talk in the language of capitalism even with people’s lives and healthcare in a way that should motivate them to change. I wrote an official letter to the head of Goldman Sachs a couple months ago. It’s this playful thing, like the Richter letters, but then it says, “You have all these clients. You have portfolios; they’re supposed to be diversified, and they call it a diversification quilt. But if you have a quilt and you take out one patch, you can still stay warm, and the one patch you should take out is natural resources.” The historical reason they wouldn’t is it makes clients money and clients don’t give a fuck, but now it doesn’t make money. It’s the worst performing patch in the quilt the last few years, so I can speak to it in the natural, rational way, but also the monetary way. If you had put that into wind and Tesla, you would’ve quadrupled people’s money. Instead, you lost seventy-five percent of people’s money in that quilt, so maybe we can move on from that to everyone’s benefit. Specifically for him, it’s his fiduciary duty. I’m trying to talk in the words of capitalism because it makes sense for capitalists to make these changes.

SLENSKE: Maybe that’s part of the amendments. Money talks.

STERNBERG: I mean, it does, and it’s just crazy when you think of how no one, Biden or Trump, or whoever—we don’t talk about cutting the military budget. Ever. It goes up every year even if we’re not in a war, or if we just finished a war, it still goes up the next year, and we’re seven times the second largest military, which is China, in spending annually.

SLENSKE: The thing about spending so little on health and education outcomes is that you have to have a big gun if you’re undereducated and sick all the time.

STERNBERG: Totally. It’s a barbarian concept of society.

 
for+zoe+leonard+-+Cole+Sternberg+-+2019+(1).jpg
 

FREESTATE is on view through September 18 at ESMoA

Both Sides Of The Street: Jason Stein On The Art Of The Auction

MOTOROLA 50XC Radio 1940 marbleized green and butterscotch catalin height 6 1/2in (16.5cm); width 9 1/2in (24cm); depth 6 1/2in (16.5cm) US$ 5,000 - US$ 7,000 £ 3,600 - £ 5,100 € 4,200 - € 5,900

MOTOROLA
50XC Radio
1940
marbleized green and butterscotch catalin
height 6 1/2in (16.5cm); width 9 1/2in (24cm); depth 6 1/2in (16.5cm)
US$ 5,000 - US$ 7,000
£ 3,600 - £ 5,100
€ 4,200 - € 5,900


interview by Oliver Kupper

 

Jason Stein, Director of Modern Decorative Art and Design at Bonhams, grew up in the world of astrology and birth charts in Los Angeles’ growing New Age scene. His mother was a co-founder of The Aquarius Group, and his father was a department store manager. This amalgam wound up being a perfect formula for his work in the secondary market, first as an intern at Sotheby’s and finally at Bonhams where he is immersed in a universe of rare and beautiful objects that span movements, thoughts, trends, and design history. Ahead of this week’s Modern Design | Art auction, which has a focus on rare Bakelite radios and Mexican surrealist artists, like Leonora Carrington, we spoke to Stein about his fascinating role as design guru at Bonhams, avoiding fakes, and the return of maximalism. 

OLIVER KUPPER Let’s start at the beginning. Your mother was a well-known astrologer and your father sold clothing. Is that right?

JASON STEIN My mom founded this organization with her friends called the Aquarius Workshops. In the ‘50s, my mother and some of her astrologer friends would go up into Laurel Canyon. They were taught astrology by this woman named Kio, who was this incredible personality, and she imparted everything she knew upon this group of women. And then Kio died really young. So, my mother and others carried on the tradition and created this organization that defined the criteria and started vetting for people getting into astrology. They had all sorts of courses. They also had a magazine called Aspects. So, I grew up in this house where until maybe weeks before my mom passed, people would come every Tuesday, and she would assign birth data to work up a chart. People were always around coming for charts. She had so many clients.

KUPPER And this was on the cusp of the New Age scene in Los Angeles.

STEIN It was definitely in line with Bodhi Tree, which was this metaphysical bookstore that was on Melrose. She was one of the people on file there. And my dad was a retailer. He worked his way up to managing these midsized department store chains that are no longer around. So I grew up doing inventory essentially.

KUPPER So, both those things tied into your interest in art and cataloging.

STEIN Yeah, for sure. And, you know, we would go to exhibits when they came out—usually at LACMA. Often it would be some sort of blockbuster that would come through town, or some of my mom's friends were into collecting, and would tell us about openings.

 
LOT 122 WIFREDO LAM (1902-1982) Untitled 1957 watercolor and ink on paper, signed 'Wi Lam' and inscribed 'PARA MI AMIGO LODI/MARACAIBO 1957' lower right sheet 14 x 9 3/4in (35.5 x 24.7cm) US$ 10,000 - 15,000 £ 7,300 - 11,000

LOT 122
WIFREDO LAM (1902-1982)
Untitled
1957
watercolor and ink on paper, signed 'Wi Lam' and inscribed 'PARA MI AMIGO LODI/MARACAIBO 1957' lower right
sheet 14 x 9 3/4in (35.5 x 24.7cm)
US$ 10,000 - 15,000
£ 7,300 - 11,000

 

KUPPER And you knew you wanted to get into the auction world when you went on a trip to the South Pacific?

STEIN I went to Cal State Northridge, and I started off being a radio and television film major, and then switched to speech communication. I wanted to have a broader major in case I didn't stay here or wanted to do something else, but I was not thinking about art or auctions at all. It really was on this trip that all of that happened. We went to Tahiti, and Bora Bora, and Moorea. When we were out on Moorea, among these garden huts, I met this guy who ended up being a very senior specialist from Sotheby's that had just quit his job. He and his wife specialized in Early European Works of Art, porcelain and glass at Sotheby's. So, I would just listen to their stories of the auction business, and after talking to them, I really was in love, and I could not stop thinking about these jobs they were leaving behind. When I got back to Los Angeles, there was a woman named Kathy Watkins and she was the local Sotheby's rep in Beverly Hills. Kathy had amazing energy, grace, presence, and she really radiated. We talked once or twice, she invited me over for a meeting, and I was even more captivated. I had never been in this environment at all, and I just wanted to be there so badly. After the meeting, she invited me to come back and meet the whole office. Kathy was the head of decorative arts, and I interned there for a little under a year. Then I went into contemporary art just to see what that was like, but I really felt more drawn to furniture and decorative arts. Then from going on field trips with Kathy to Butterfield and Butterfield, which became Bonhams, I became an intern here, and that’s how it started.

KUPPER Would you say there's a defining difference between the two auction houses?

STEIN Sotheby's, and really Christie's, both of them were small branch offices in California but were primarily based in New York, whereas Butterfield and Butterfield was a full-scale, fully-operating, local auction house that had no large presence elsewhere. It was an old California auction house from San Francisco that was founded in the 19th century off of Gold Rush era money. It really had options in a myriad of categories, whether it was furniture and decorative arts, or even books and wine.

KUPPER How do you define the difference between decorative art and fine art for someone who might not know the difference?

STEIN So, fine arts I typically think of as paintings, prints, photography, and sculpture. Then in the decorative arts, we would have furniture pieces, objects, textiles, and applied arts that are outside of the fine art worlds. The lines are a little blurry these days because there are certainly designers or makers that I offer in what you might call a modern decorative art and design sale, but also could be sold in a contemporary art auction.

In recent years, there are a lot of people in the ceramics world that go back and forth, like Betty Woodman. We recently had this Betty Woodman triptych in our auction in January and interest really came from both worlds, whether it was design collectors or contemporary art people. And I know when you go to the art fairs, Woodman is shown at Art Basel on one side and Design Miami across the street.

 
LOT 103 GEORGE NELSON (1908-1986) High Action Office Architect's Desk 1964 for Herman Miller, walnut and ash, polished aluminum, chrome-plated steel, laminated plastic, vinyl, with foil circular manufacturer's tag height 44in (112cm); width 65 1/2in (166cm); depth 32in (81.2cm) US$ 2,000 - 3,000 £ 1,500 - 2,200

LOT 103
GEORGE NELSON (1908-1986)
High Action Office Architect's Desk
1964
for Herman Miller, walnut and ash, polished aluminum, chrome-plated steel, laminated plastic, vinyl, with foil circular manufacturer's tag
height 44in (112cm); width 65 1/2in (166cm); depth 32in (81.2cm)
US$ 2,000 - 3,000
£ 1,500 - 2,200

 

KUPPER I've been seeing ceramics cross between those two lines over and over again these days.

STEIN Yes, there are a lot of ceramicists crossing the lines, but there are also makers in other media, like Ruth Asawa and Diego Giacometti that have been embraced by fine art collectors, and the same applies to non-ceramic artists like Ruth Asawa too. Certainly her pieces could easily be offered in a designer sale, but it's firmly in the contemporary art scene at this point. And Giacometti too.

KUPPER So, I want to talk about the appraisal process. Is there a specific formula to the appraisal process? Is it provenance? Is it historical significance? Is there a formula that you have?

STEIN There are so many things that go into evaluating a piece. First, you can look at the artist or maker just as a launching point. And what is it specifically? Is it a piece that is recognizable as being the work of a certain maker, designer, artist, or is it atypical? You're looking to make comparisons based on other examples that have come up in the past. You also look at the condition and authenticity. And, as you mentioned, provenance — the history of owners — is key, especially with certain designers and makers. We ideally would love to know all of the steps from where the piece started. So, it's often a fact-finding mission when tracing the lineage.

Other things that I look at will be the aesthetic quality of a piece. How beautiful is it? Certain pieces in a designer or maker's body of work really will speak to you and collectors more, whether it's a piece of furniture that is carved in a particular way, or has a certain patina. I mean, look at the world of Tiffany lamps. After this, I spend a good portion of my time on various databases doing comparisons and looking at similar examples that have sold in recent years and come up with a value range. If there's a piece that is a particular kind of Tiffany lamp, like a floral Tiffany, I would look at what sort of flower that is, and I can judge based on that and other lamps that have come up internationally on the market over a two-to-three year period. And I look at the color choices, and I'll look at the diameter of the shade, and then sort of plug the data in to see what the presale estimate was, versus what the item ultimately hammered for, and also I keep in mind factors like buyer's premium. So, I look at how close to an auction house's appraisal a piece ultimately sold for. If they've exceeded the estimate, or if it didn't sell, I have to reevaluate an estimate range and come up with a new one.

KUPPER In terms of authenticity, have you dealt with a lot of people trying to offer fakes? And how have you gone about discovering them?

STEIN You know, most people that would have something that is fake, or let's say it looks like there’s a spurious mark, may not know that they actually have something that is a reproduction. The lion's share of those people come to you in good faith. They probably inherited the piece or they acquired it. And in my position, you really have to do the due diligence and evaluate the piece, both internally with our team of specialists that have great collective knowledge, and on occasion, you could seek outside counsel from people who specialize in particular artists or designers. There are vetting committees for particular makers and you just go through the process and let the committee decide, and then we convey that news to our client.

KUPPER Especially with multiples or furniture, it seems like it could be tricky.

STEIN One thing that I specialize in is custom works of interior design—often pieces that came out of a particular commission, whether it was an interior designer doing a full house commission, or an architect that would also design the furniture for that house. That's when lineage is so important. Back in the day, if you were working with a really big interior designer that was doing a custom design scheme, working throughout the house, there were invoices that would list everything out. So, whenever someone comes to me with a piece and one of these invoices from the fifties or sixties, it's amazing because you have what you need. No one is going to challenge it. But sometimes I've seen pieces that are meant to be by a particular person, and sometimes you have a feeling that it's not. Then, you really have to go through, and you're doing lots of comparisons, and looking at the materials, and how something was built, and it's a very different approach than if something doesn't have the backstory.

LOT 17 TIFFANY STUDIOS (1899-1930) Crab Inkwell circa 1902 patinated bronze, shell, with glass liner, stamped 'TIFFANY STUDIOS NEW YORK 23547 L1' with maker's monogram height 3 1/2in (8.8cm); width 8in (20.3cm); depth 8in (20.3cm) US$ 7,000 - 9,000 £ 5,100 - 6,500

LOT 17
TIFFANY STUDIOS (1899-1930)
Crab Inkwell
circa 1902
patinated bronze, shell, with glass liner, stamped 'TIFFANY STUDIOS NEW YORK 23547 L1' with maker's monogram
height 3 1/2in (8.8cm); width 8in (20.3cm); depth 8in (20.3cm)
US$ 7,000 - 9,000
£ 5,100 - 6,500

KUPPER There's been some interesting trends in art and design furniture over the past decade. Mid-Century made a huge comeback and then Memphis. What do you think people are hungry for now?

STEIN Over the last year or so, I am really seeing a return to the Arts and Crafts movement. When I got into the business in Hollywood, there were very big collectors of the Arts and Crafts movement—circa 1908 Craftsman. There were really some of the most important collections. Some of them lived here in California, whether they were from families that inherited them or in the industry, who acquired the best examples. So, like you said, with Mid-Century, they came in, and a lot of people shifted their focus and Mid-Century became the most desirable for several years. It's truly remarkable that recently I've been seeing pieces from Arts and Crafts—furniture or ceramics—bring several times the estimate.

KUPPER Who are some examples in that movement that are making a comeback.

STEIN: Certain types of Grueby [The Grueby Faience Company, founded in 1894, was an American ceramics company that produced distinctive American art pottery vases]. Also, you’re seeing Newcomb Pottery [Newcomb Pottery, also called Newcomb College Pottery, was a brand of American Arts & Crafts pottery produced from 1895 to 1940], things that are rare and unusual. So that is something that has been forming, I'm truly seeing it in the results. And there's definitely a reinvestigation for certain people. We're certainly looking at Art Nouveau and Deco—there is some activity in the early century. And then, all the while, other pieces made by hand, the American Studio Craft Movement—things that are truly hand-worked at the studio, whether it's in ceramics, think like [Otto] Natzler, or in woodworking, California and [Sam] Maloof, East coast, [George] Nakashima, or like Northern California makers, like JB Blunk, like Arthur Espenet Carpenter, or like Jack Rogers Hopkins from San Diego's scene.

KUPPER Yeah. It seems like the Mid-Century thing was overexposed and burned people out a little bit, because there's so much 20th-century decorative arts to explore and there seems to be a return to maximalism in a weird way.

STEIN So, there is the "more is more" sort of aesthetic. I worked on Tony Duquette's estate years ago, until he passed away, and I was in charge of the estate auction that was done at the time. Tony was definitely one of the great maximalists who would incorporate an early 18th-century piece with something 1960s, and for me, that was a great education.

KUPPER In terms of the collectors that come to Bonhams, are they mostly LA collectors or is it global?

STEIN Truly global. In non-COVID times, there are fun, opening night parties and previews that are going on. There's a lot of energy to the environment at the campus because it's a main building and an annex across Curson, and we'll often exhibit together. I'll have my modern design and art set alongside prints and multiples. On opening night, our clients will go back and forth. So you have people that certainly can come from all over LA or Southern California, and people will occasionally fly in from elsewhere. But it is global.

KUPPER How would you define your own personal taste in decorative arts? Do you have an era that you specifically gravitate to?

STEIN When I started, I was much more pure or minimal, and now I think I call it “textured modernist,” because there are pieces that you collect along the way that ultimately I am layering. So, I like to mix, whether it's Scandinavian modern furniture with ceramics or textiles from Mexico. I like silver. I like studio ceramics, whether they're Japanese studio or American studio. I'm pretty open about that. 

KUPPER There's an auction coming up. Is there a specific theme for that lot?

STEIN Well, the title is Modern Design and Art and it includes all of the great modern movements. You'll see Art Nouveau, Arts and Crafts, Art Deco, Art Moderne, Mid-Century Modern, Post-Modern, and Contemporary design. We also have an art component in a sort of 360-degree view, how you put together an environment. This sale is a two-session auction. I also have this capsule collection that came in of radios. It's rare Catalin and Bakelite radios. Bonham's has been the auction house to offer some of the most important collections of rare radios that have come up over the last ten to twenty years. You hardly see things like this, especially coming all together, and the impact is big. For that, I think it’s exciting and unusual. And it would be for someone who is truly a radio collector who wants to add a particular piece to their collection, or someone who wasn’t even part of the radio world and wants to add to what they collect. These radios are largely ‘30s and ‘40s. The most important radios are called Air Kings, and the sale has several in really special colors. They were done in 1933 by a designer named Harold Van Doren. We also have a solid Latin American section in paintings. 

KUPPER I saw the Leonora Carrington Chipmunks. Those are really exciting.

STEIN Yeah, we have Leonora Carrington, and there’s a cool surrealist component to the sale. We do really well in this sale category in offering Latin art. I sold a painting a while back in a sale that is certainly a mix of design and art that broke records for a particular Argentinian artist. We hold the world record for this artist, Romulo Maccio, in modern design and art sales. We love Latin American design and art, and whenever we can, we incorporate it into the auctions.

KUPPER Do you have any advice for people who are thinking about collecting decorative arts?

STEIN Well, it's always, buy what you love first. Buy pieces that really speak to you. Then you can honor that work, and have pride of place, and you can really enjoy it. When you truly have an association with an item, then it just sort of builds from there. And of course, do your research and contact folks that are specialists; people that do what I do. I'm always happy to tell someone who's starting about a piece and how it relates to other items. I'm always happy to be a guide.

Bonhams’ Modern Design | Art Auction will be held tomorrow, March 25, starting at 10:00 PDT with lot 1 and features an important collection of American radios.

The Credible Image: An Interview of Anna Weyant On The Occasion Of Her Solo Exhibition Loose Screw

Anna Weyant Buffet, 2020 Oil on linen 36 x 48 inches (91.4 x 121.9 centimeters) © Anna Weyant, Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo

Anna Weyant
Buffet, 2020
Oil on linen
36 x 48 inches (91.4 x 121.9 centimeters)
© Anna Weyant, Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo

interview by Bill Powers

Falling, living, laughing, touching—the still, subdued, painterly fantasies of Anna Weyant sway to and fro from the warmly resplendent hues of the Dutch Masters, to the madness of Otto Dix, to the gold of an Instagram selfie’s golden hour. The work, much of it created under the shadow of a global pandemic, are prime moments of a zeitgeist suddenly hollowed by the screeching halt of life as we know it: backgrounds are blackened out, clouds obscure, and curtains drape with muted uncertainties. Everything is vague and everything is a warm oblivion, like the sand of an hourglass exploded and the grains took the shape of a world that resembled its former self. But time doesn’t stop on a dime, it lurches, chugs forward with ghostlike animation even when your foot is on the break, which is what makes Weyant’s paintings so exciting—brushstroke by brushstroke, they are full of that potential energy. In the following interview, Bill Powers and Anna Weyant discuss her upcoming show at Blum & Poe in Los Angeles.

BILL POWERS: Tell me about your solo exhibition in Los Angeles.

ANNA WEYANT: The show is called Loose Screw, which is also the name of the first painting I made for it. Some people assume it’s a self-portrait, but I was actually thinking about Ellen Birkenblit’s screaming woman series, that type of silhouette. I liked the title because it’s kind of a joke on me, but when I told my mom she was like, “Honey, don’t ruin your show with such an ugly name.” Sorry, mom.

POWERS: Why are most of your paintings some shade of sepia?

WEYANT: I don’t want to be distracted by color. I prefer a more muted palette.

POWERS: Do you ever worry about being too close in your painting style to John Currin?

WEYANT: I wish. He’s so much better than me. I remember going to a book signing he did at the Marc Jacob’s store on Bleecker Street. When I got to the front of the line, John asked me if I wanted the book inscribed to anyone in particular. I was so starstruck that I just smiled like an idiot and said nothing.

 
 

POWERS: I ask because a painting of yours like “Slumber,” the shape of the figure’s mouth reminds me of the central figure in Currin’s Thanksgiving painting, the oval of the lips.

WEYANT: It’s such a different scenario, though. My painting is of a woman having an orgasm in her sleep. I was nervous it might be too cheesy, so I folded her arms across her chest almost like she’s laying in state, funerary. A little creepiness can save a painting sometimes. And then the gravity of the candle flicker behind her is off which makes you question the reality of the narrative.

POWERS: You have made some paintings of very young girls: one stuffing her bra, another in underwear. Do you worry about the sexualization of children?

WEYANT: I think of it more along the lines of a before and after picture or a Clark Kent vs. Superman situation. I can remember being a little girl and wanting boobs and craving the power of womanhood. I imagined a level of agency and confidence that I would one day inhabit, which—if I’m being honest—eludes me even now. So those paintings are about looking back. And then, sometimes I like to make companion paintings so the girl stuffing her bra might be the same person we see in my painting “Head,” which is heavy on cleavage.

 
Anna Weyant Falling Woman, 2020 Oil on linen 48 x 36 inches (121.9 x 91.4 centimeters) © Anna Weyant, Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo

Anna Weyant
Falling Woman, 2020
Oil on linen
48 x 36 inches (121.9 x 91.4 centimeters)
© Anna Weyant, Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo

 

POWERS: And there was a hot stove composition you made two versions of.

WEYANT: Well, I did a drawing that was almost like a PSA of a young girl’s finger burning on a hot coil. Then, for the painting of the same scene, I made it a woman’s index finger only she’s really pressing down on the hot stove as if to assert it’s her prerogative to hurt herself.

 
Anna Weyant Untitled, 2019 Colored pencil on paper 15 x 11 in. Courtesy of the artist and Half Gallery

Anna Weyant
Untitled, 2019
Colored pencil on paper
15 x 11 in.
Courtesy of the artist and Half Gallery

 

POWERS: Do you always make a study of the painting first?

WEYANT: I make a sketch, but it might not be rendered in great detail. And, of course, the image can change as I develop the narrative. I wanted to make a painting of a woman falling down a flight of stairs. It started with an Edward Gorey picture of a girl tripping down this very grand staircase. In my painting, I dressed the woman in more formal attire and I cropped in tightly. She appears upside down, almost like a Baselitz figure, only the pose is meant to be naturally-occuring, not intentionally flipped as he does. The idea was that artifice can’t prevent you from making a complete fool of yourself. Even in a Balenciaga dress, there’s still a chance you might face-plant down a flight of stairs holding a glass of champagne. I guess embarrassment can be a real equalizer in that way.

POWERS: I loved the still life of flowers you made with a straw sticking out of the bouquet.

WEYANT: I could paint flowers all day long. I thought it was interesting to add a straw like someone was trying to suck the water out of the vase. If you look at that painting as memento mori then the addition of the straw is almost an accelerator to kill the flowers faster. In another still life, I cut all the buds off the top so it’s like a murdered bouquet with just beheaded stems sticking out and a sharp knife resting on the table beside them. Of course, all cut flowers are dead and there’s an inherent violence in how they became so. The first flower painting I ever showed with Blum & Poe was called “JAWS.” It was such a traditional painting that I found it unnerving. And I always liked that line from the movie about there’s something in the water. The sinister can often be masked by beauty or even tranquility.

 
 

POWERS: Your first solo show in 2019 was called Welcome to the Dollhouse. Was that meant to be an overt reference to your own childhood?

WEYANT: I did make a dollhouse painting, but more as an homage to Robert Gober. Memories by nature are a kind of container. And I love when you see dollhouses in murder mysteries or horror movies. They are never used as symbols of comfort. It’s always a bad omen somehow. And it’s weird how when you paint something in miniature it creates a kind of emotional distance that lets you get freakier with the particulars: a set of legs poking out from under a bed.

POWERS: Who would you cite as contemporary influences on your work?

WEYANT: I mean, we already discussed John Currin. I named a painting John once after him, only it was of a little girl with a candelabra. I was referencing a painting he had made called Anna so I thought of it like an inside joke—you know, trading names—even though it’s impossible for anyone but me to get the joke. And even then, it’s not very funny. The other artist I think about a lot is Francesca Woodman, the mood of her photographs and how she captured a woman’s body, the bends and folds against the light.

POWERS: You did a portrait of the painter Cynthia Talmadge for your first solo show as well.

WEYANT: Yes, I worked as her studio assistant one summer and I always thought she had a timeless look about her, like she could have been transported from the 1940s. I love when people have a sensibility about them that reminds you of some bygone era. It’s rare.

POWERS: How do you decide if a work is successful?

WEYANT: I think it needs to feel credible as an image. Often humor is another good indicator. I made a painting of a white pencil snapped in half and called it “Lines” because at first glance it looks like two lines of cocaine. Art is my drug!

Loose Screw is on view by appointment March 23 - May 1 @ Blum & Poe 2727 S. La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles

 
Anna Weyant Stepped on a spider, 2020 Oil on canvas 20 x 16 in. Courtesy of the artist and Half Gallery

Anna Weyant
Stepped on a spider, 2020
Oil on canvas
20 x 16 in.
Courtesy of the artist and Half Gallery

 

Existential Time: An Interview Of Gisela Colón

Gisela Colon.png

interview by Summer Bowie

I conducted this interview with Gisela Colón on November 19, 2020, just after a mysterious obelisk-like structure was discovered in Utah’s Red Rock Country, and just days before the discovery was announced. Exactly when this crudely bolted, John McCracken-like monolith was initially installed is a mystery. That it was found by state employees counting sheep has been described as the most 2020 thing of 2020. Since then, multiple monoliths of varied fashion have been appearing and disappearing around the world, leading to a magnifying force of everything from commercial opportunists, to alien conspiracy theorists, to a Christian military LARPing crusade. Meanwhile, Gisela has been installing her solo exhibition, EXISTENTIAL TIME, Exploring Cosmic Past, Present and Future, of monolith and rectanguloid sculptures created in quarantine from optical acrylics and aerospace carbon fiber. Her unique sculptural language embodies the way that time expands, retracts and collapses. Her two short films express the anxieties that result from isolation and inertness. Her inquiries into the laws of physics address non-linear time flows and they provide the viewer with a sensory and intellectual experience in the grand cosmic sense of time and space. In essence, these “organic minimal” forms inherently attract a diversified coterie of forces that might point toward all the reasons we could be feeling our fragmented world suddenly culled together by a mysterious ping.

SUMMER BOWIE: You studied economics in Puerto Rico, and then you came to Los Angeles to study law, but how exactly did you realize that your career would be at the intersection of art and aerospace technology?

GISELA COLÓN: I grew up in Puerto Rico and I went to University of Puerto Rico, studying economics with a minor in political science, but I was a painter very early on with my mother. We painted for years together, since I was four or five years old. I made paintings of everything around me in Puerto Rico, which is a particularly diverse biological region. So I painted still lifes and landscapes, spent a lot of time hiking in the rainforest, on the beach–I was exposed through my Puerto Rican upbringing to a really vibrant, alive biological world that’s at the root of all of my work. That’s my primal source where I go back to everything. When I graduated from university, I came to Los Angeles to study law, not because I was fascinated by law at all, but because I grew up fairly poor. It was survival mode: if I study law, I will be able to understand society and how society functions, especially as a woman growing up in Puerto Rico. It wasn’t easy, I lost my mother at twelve after she went through a terrible divorce with my father. There was a lot of violence in the men around me, everybody carried guns. So for pragmatic and practical reasons, I studied law in my twenties, but I kept on going back to the painting, and the art, and thinking, this is what I love doing. I created so much art in my youth and I want to continue to do it, and it worked its way into the right time.

BOWIE: Your work draws this very seamless connection between science and art. It seems like you’re constantly fusing the artistic sensibilities of your mother with the scientific ambitions of your father.

COLÓN: You just hit the nail on the head. I was brought up with both science and art very actively because my dad—being a PhD in chemistry—he always had all of these chemistry sets around, and we experimented with crazy things. My Puerto Rican grandmother was a pharmacist, so in her closet she had all of these medicine bottles and syringes lying around. I would grab them and start taking stuff out with the syringes as a kid and go inject the banana leaves, and then take the banana leaves and cook them in a pot. We were always making concoctions and chemistry things, and so it was really a duality of this art and science as a child that now I combine again. 

In fourth grade, I wanted to be a paleontologist and dig up dinosaur bones because it was so fascinating, looking at the rocks and the minerals. I went through that on my own, loving the earth and loving the kind of archaeological vestiges, or past history of our existence on Earth. 

Gisela Colón, Rectanguloid (Quartz Spectrum), 2020. Blow-molded acrylic. 91.25 x 43.5 x 6 in. Courtesy of the artist and GAVLAK Los Angeles / Palm Beach.

Gisela Colón, Rectanguloid (Quartz Spectrum), 2020. Blow-molded acrylic. 91.25 x 43.5 x 6 in. Courtesy of the artist and GAVLAK Los Angeles / Palm Beach.

By fifth grade, I started really studying outer space and science, and I was just fascinated by the moon. I’d spend hours looking up at the moon and the sun and trying to identify the planets at night in the sky, and I said I want to be an astronaut. I remember my mother saying, “You can be whatever you want to be, but if you’re an astronaut, you’re never going to be able to get married and have kids.” It was the traditional woman’s view of the world. That wouldn’t have deterred me per se, but it made me think twice–do I really want to go and do this? Then by sixth grade, I was back onto loving the art. It was just as a child, going through all the different progressions and iterations of your thoughts and your environment. Put it all in a soup pot, and then years later it comes out.

BOWIE: It seems a great many layers of your identity were established at a very early age. A lot of artists emulate other artists early on in their practice, and your earliest works were often compared to many Light and Space artists like Craig Kauffman and Robert Irwin, but was there a defining moment when it felt like your works were really your own?

COLÓN: Oh yeah, absolutely. When I first started painting, my earlier influences were more like the Latin American Op Artists that I had studied in books because I’m self-taught, so I would read about Carlos Cruz-Diez, and Soto, and all the traditional Latin painters, and then I became friends with a lot of the Light and Space contingency of older generation artists. I read all of Robert Irwin’s manifestos on perceptualism, and then I really got into minimalism and started spending a lot of time in Marfa studying Judd and Flavin and Doug Wheeler, John McCracken, and on and on. There was a phase there in the middle, what I call my transitional phase. When I first started working with plastic, I started painting the plastic similar to Kauffman, that was my springboard. Then, within a very few short months, I said, “this is not my thing because I have to pursue something different that has not been done before.” 

That’s when I started experimenting with these new optical materials. There’s no paint involved, and it was like I had this eureka moment where I would form a piece, and then I’d put it on the floor, and I’d put something underneath it, and then I’d form another layer until I struck upon this whole layering of materials, which created a prism. It’s the point of view of a woman and of a Latinx artist, because that’s the other dimensionality. It really pisses me off when people say, “Oh, you’re a second generation space artist.” No, I’m not! Not even fifth generation, for god’s sake. It’s been sixty years. I am a Latin woman in the 21st century using modern materials that had never been used before and creating my own language, my own vocabulary, which I’ve titled organic minimalism. It’s a new and different interpretation from the point of view of somebody who puts life and this whole Latin point of view in their objects.

Gisela Colón, Rectanguloid (Quartz Spectrum), 2020. Blow-molded acrylic. 91.25 x 43.5 x 6 in. Courtesy of the artist and GAVLAK Los Angeles / Palm Beach.

Gisela Colón, Rectanguloid (Quartz Spectrum), 2020. Blow-molded acrylic. 91.25 x 43.5 x 6 in. Courtesy of the artist and GAVLAK Los Angeles / Palm Beach.

BOWIE: Another thing I think that struck me is the way that your works are often considered a feminist take on Finish Fetish, and yet I’d say there’s a rather loud expression of femininity that has gone almost unrecognized in the works of say, Billy Al Bengston or Peter Alexander, et al.

COLÓN: Don’t even get me started on that topic because I’ve written a whole essay on this—not published yet—but have you studied Craig Kauffman’s work? Pink bubbles...think about this, the titles. Bubbles. He made dishes, he made donuts. There were all these things that belong in the kitchen. It was the purview in that era of women, and most of his colors and his glitter—oh, his flowers contain glitter—so if you look at all the titles, flowers, dishes, donuts, loops—you know loops that look like a piece of clothing hanging on the loop? Like on a clothesline? To me, his entire oeuvre, when I look at it, is made by a woman, except that he was a man. 

I’m taking the masculine, like these monoliths, which have destructive references to projectiles, bullets, rockets and missiles, and feminizing it; softening it to the world. I reference Judy Chicago a lot in this process because her atmospheres from the 1970s are precedent. Basically, what she did is she put these colors out into the world that were the feminine impulse and softened things. I’m putting these impulses of women, and you could say femininity, but it’s really more feminist. It’s saying, “I can tackle the purview of men. I can tackle these forms and, as a woman, be fluid in the gender approach to my work. I can do all this and still be strong and create meaningful work.” It’s this fluid gender spectrum that’s embedded in the work, because when you look at some of my more organic forms, they’re vessels for life, like cells or things that generate life.

BOWIE: It’s really interesting because they have a very phallic shape, and yet at the same time, those nuclei are almost like the yolks of an egg.

COLÓN: Well also it could be phallic penetration, or reproduction—some people say they see a womb and the seed of a baby, or life inside. It really fluctuates fluidly between genders. It’s really oscillating between masculine and feminine. I can take anything; I can go from masculine to feminine and back. 

BOWIE: There’s something to be said about the subtlety of such a subversion. At first glance, the works feel anything but political. You’re experiencing them on such a sensational level, moving around them, watching them change, and it takes a while for all of the implications to set in, which is really nice. You have to sit with it for a moment while it all sinks in.

 
Gisela Colón, Rectanguloid (Rubidium Spectrum), 2020. Blow-molded acrylic. 91.25 x 43.5 x 6 in. Courtesy of the artist and GAVLAK Los Angeles / Palm Beach.

Gisela Colón, Rectanguloid (Rubidium Spectrum), 2020. Blow-molded acrylic. 91.25 x 43.5 x 6 in. Courtesy of the artist and GAVLAK Los Angeles / Palm Beach.

 

COLÓN: What you’re getting at is the whole topic of beauty as a concept in art, and beauty is a bad word. You’re not supposed to make beautiful art, or you’re not supposed to make art that is attractive to the eye, but there’s a wide range of artists that are abstractionists that have made beautiful work, like Sam Gilliam. They’re finally getting recognized as people realize it’s okay to make beautiful work with an undertone of political statement that’s not always specifically identified, but it’s there by virtue of its existence. It’s there by virtue of the fact that the artist that is making it is making this kind of work. That’s the political statement.

BOWIE: You make works that change color and form as the viewer moves, and these qualities are highly sensitive to the environment that surrounds them. Are the environmental conditions of the exhibition space something that you consider before or after making the work?

COLÓN: I never considered it before because I make the work knowing that it is a variable and mutable object and that it will alter depending on where you place it and who’s looking at it. Now, I do like presenting it in the proper lighting. Obviously once it gets into the commercial gallery setting or the museum setting, I want to make sure that everything is lit properly so that the viewers can really experience the full spectrum, but the works are alive. It’s kind of like they’re alive and they do things sometimes that you’re not expecting, so they have a life of their own. 

BOWIE: And when people collect the works, do you prescribe the conditions of the environment they’re displayed in at all?

COLÓN: I would prescribe a proper lighting, but it’s really up to them. It’s their work. If they want to experience something a little differently, that’s them. I’ve had collectors who have said to me, “Oh my god, during the day it looks one way, and in the middle of the night, I walked around the living room, everything was turned off, and all of a sudden the thing was glowing at me.” It’s really up to the collector to enjoy it, and that’s part of the perceptual experience that it really is in the eye of the beholder, it’s participatory. The ultimate enjoyer of the work completes the experience.

 
Gisela Colón, Rectanguloid (Gamma Spectrum), 2020. Blow-molded acrylic. 91.25 x 43.5 x 6 in. Courtesy of the artist and GAVLAK Los Angeles / Palm Beach.

Gisela Colón, Rectanguloid (Gamma Spectrum), 2020. Blow-molded acrylic. 91.25 x 43.5 x 6 in. Courtesy of the artist and GAVLAK Los Angeles / Palm Beach.

 

BOWIE: I don’t think your work is ever acknowledged as performance, but there’s a performative aspect to it because the object is always performing in relationship to the viewer and the environment.

COLÓN: It is, but what I think you’re hitting on is the element of time. Performance is time, but in this case what you encounter is a real sense of memory. You can have a memory of an object, and have that picture in your head, and then encounter it at a later time and it changed completely. So, the performative aspect even goes beyond just the moment, but it involves memories and the capturing of ideas that will resurface later on. This whole concept of collapsing time, existential time, is woven into that participatory aspect that you’re talking about.

BOWIE: How has the use of a time-based medium such as film made it easier or more challenging to address the non-linearity of time?

COLÓN: Well in fact, that was the greatest kind of paradox. Here I was talking about this stasis and paralysis and inertia, yet the only way of communicating it effectively was through this time-based medium, which takes you through the feeling quickly. So it was a paradoxical thing, but I enjoyed doing it. I think it’ll be effective.

BOWIE: When you’re making a work that changes with your every movement and that changes with the environment, how do you know that it’s done?

COLÓN: It’s a real visceral feeling. You know how, at some point when life started in the little cesspool of hot water, and there was that initial ray of light that came through the pond, and somehow that first cell started—that primeval, primordial spark of energy? I can feel it because that’s what I look for. That’s what I tap into when I’m making these pieces. When it’s completed is when I finally look down at it and it glows back at me like it’s alive. Then, I have that recognition that we have in ourselves. I say we’re all composed of stardust. We go back eons and eons into the universe, before time, so we have that instinctual knowledge, and a lot people don’t access it, or they don’t tap into it, but I always talk about how you can feel that if you just quiet the noise around you, get off of Instagram, and just really focus for a minute. You’ll feel what it is to be alive because it’s in your cells. I use the elliptical form a lot and that curvature which is present in our cells. Even our DNA strands involve movement, so this whole concept of movement in art is present inside us. We never stop moving; our cells never stop multiplying. I know when a piece is ready because I can feel it in my cells.

BOWIE: We are so used to experiencing time in this way where we take little snapshots of things, and we think of life happening in these blocks, when actually it is this amorphous, constantly moving thing. Looking at it like still images helps us to understand the world around us, but when we can’t give into that deep time, to that cosmic time, we lose our ability to instinctively feel when things are arriving or going.

COLÓN: Absolutely, because you don’t experience the passage of time absent change around you, which is why the quarantine was so nerve-wracking. There wasn’t much moving or changing, yet time was passing, and so yes, it’s that whole tapping into the cosmological realm that I think we really need in this day and age, just to check ourselves. I think a lot of my work, at the core, tries to address that; to bring certain feelings about in the people who view it, to go to that primeval source of life. The cosmological realm just fascinates me. There’s so much out there, the unknown, and I feel like we’re all searching for something, and nobody really talks about it, but it’s right there. All you gotta do is go out at night and look up in the sky, and when you really look at the stars and the moon–I know it sounds kind of superficial, but it’s not. When you really take it all in, it’s magnificent, what’s out there for us to access that we just don’t see every day.

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EXISTENTIAL TIME, Exploring Cosmic Past, Present and Future is on view through January 3 @ GAVLAK Palm Beach 340 Royal Poinciana Way, Suite M334

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

Film still from A Song About Love by Rikkí Wright

Film still from A Song About Love by Rikkí Wright

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KISH: Or even an idea, or a question. 

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

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

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

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

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

 
Self-portrait by Rikkí Wright

Self-portrait by Rikkí Wright

 

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

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

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

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

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

 
Kilo Kish. Photo courtesy of Andrew Arthur

Kilo Kish. Photo courtesy of Andrew Arthur

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kilo Kish. Photo courtesy of Andrew Arthur

Kilo Kish. Photo courtesy of Andrew Arthur

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

Touching Everything & Holding Nothing: An Interview of Artist, Abolitionist & Facilitator Brianna Mims

interview and portraits by Summer Bowie

Brianna Mims is a polymath if I’ve ever seen one. Along with a lifetime of training in myriad dance forms and becoming a multidisciplinary movement artist, she can likely be found speaking publicly on the role of the NAACP and transformational justice in the abolitionist movement, or walking runway at any number of fashion weeks, or developing curriculum for children to feel safe in moving and communicating freely. Then again, she might just be researching the efficacy of our local welfare system, or brushing up on her Arabic. When she’s done with all of it, she takes a step back and acts as a facilitator who intricately creates a neural network of every last disparate interest by assigning it to the appropriate person within her community. She is currently an organizer-in-residence at the Women’s Center For Creative Work, and her current project, Letters from the Etui is an amalgam of art, abolition, education, and support. It is a tender space where the carceral state can be felt, both at home and abroad.

SUMMER BOWIE: You describe yourself as an artist, facilitator, and abolitionist. Do you feel like the order of those labels matters at all, or are you equally all of them?

BRIANNA MIMS: The order of the labels do not matter. They all feed one another. 

BOWIE: You don’t seem to compartmentalize your work at all. Can you talk about the way that you prioritize the balance between art and policy reform?

MIMS: The art that I make that’s overtly political is cultural work. It’s about shifting culture alongside policy so that we are creating sustainable change. Most of the work includes a direct call to action on a policy level. However, it is important to me to create various access points to the conversations because the work isn't merely political. It's personal, interpersonal, cultural, and spiritual. 

BOWIE: How did you personally become connected to the work that you do? On the artistic and political sides?

MIMS: Artistically, when I joined the Justice-LA Creative Action team. I learned how to marry both sides of myself and I had the chance to learn from and build with people while doing so. My work in the policy realm is simply a result of my understanding for the need for change on the policy level. What happens on a policy level and within the abolition theory/scholar space really informs my art.

BOWIE: What is the Sarah’s Foundation?

MIMS: It is a program I started at the Salvation Army in Jacksonville, FL when I was in high school. I used to volunteer at the center with my mom and one day I noticed a lot of new residents that were children. I offered to teach a dance class to the children on Saturdays and it grew into a program that included dance, tutoring, and mentoring. The program continued for a couple of years when I left FL and moved to LA. The dance class that I was teaching developed over time into a movement and self-reflection class; It became a bit more rooted in somatics and conversation. I have taught this class for various time frames in Philadelphia for Resources for Human Development and in LA at Union Rescue Mission, Malabar Elementary, Crete Academy, and Santa Fe Springs Correctional Facility.

BOWIE: That really speaks to your emphasis on creating various access points. There’s a phrase you seem to resonate with about touching everything and holding nothing. Can you explain what that means to you?

MIMS: Yes! Many people have recently been asking me about that exact phrase!!! The quote came from the book Instinct by TD Jakes. I read it when I was in high school and was really moved by it. I attended a talk he had about and he began talking about the keys to his success. If you don’t know, TD Jakes is typically known as a pastor, however, he wears many hats that expand across many different fields and has built an empire. He said the key to his success was his ability to juggle in a multitude of jungles. He said in order for him to do that he had to “touch everything, and hold nothing.” At that time in my life, I only considered myself a dancer and I was defined by what that meant, by what my career was supposed to look like...dance company..or commercial route. When reading the book I began to acknowledge there were parts of myself that I wasn’t nourishing: gifts, skills, talents. So when hearing that quote I committed to not being defined by being a dancer and to nurturing all of my skills, gifts, and talents. At that time, I didn't even know if I had other gifts. For me, that quote has layered meanings. My relationship to it changes by the season. I love to continuously unpack it. Right now, it is a reminder to listen and honor the wisdom of my instincts. It is also a reminder to listen for when to let go. This can be physically letting go of something, but it's also about not holding on to the idea of what I think something is supposed to be; especially in regards to the work I create, or this idea of who I am, or what I’m capable of doing. I often say a lot of the time my work evolves outside of me because once I let what needs to come through me flow, the project is outside of me and I have to let it go and be what it is supposed to be. 

 
 

BOWIE: Speaking of projects, what is the #jailbeddrop series, and how did you get involved?

MIMS: #jailbeddrop was started by Patrisse Cullors and Cecilia Sweet-Coll through Justice-LA. It began as an art series to support the initiatives of the organization. The first one happened in September of 2017. They put 100 jail beds in front of the LA Board of Supervisors office. For the second major drop, fifty artists were given a jail bed. We all created pieces of various mediums and the day before Christmas in 2017 at the same time, we activated different cities within Los Angeles County. I was in Manhattan Beach with my collaborator Jullian Grandberry and we shared a movement meditation piece. After those major drops, there were several smaller drops and I was unconsciously building upon ideas that would later turn into the performance and installation that has been touring LA. For my senior project at USC, I wanted to expand on the movement piece that I had shared in 2017, so I put out an artist call at the university. I knew that I wanted to work with architecture students so I had a friend reach out to them separately. That's how Minh-Han, Georgina, Bindhu, and Adam joined the project. I knew I wanted the architectural installation to be interactive. However, I didn’t know exactly what that looked like… and I think this is where the concept of “touching everything, holding nothing” comes back into play in the way I led. I had to trust all of my collaborators' individual knowledge and skill sets to really contribute what they were supposed to, not merely what I imagined them to do… It’s always interesting to find that balance between letting go of my idea of what I think they are supposed to do and guiding them so that the work is aligned. The first year we did the project we supported Measure R, it was our call to action. The work has grown so much since the first iteration at CAAM and we have shared the work at many places in LA. I’m very grateful.

BOWIE: How was the Letters from the Etui project originally conceived?

MIMS: The last #jailbeddrop, which was the first time the project had an entire gallery space, included a series of workshops. A professor at Cal State LA attended one of the talks and reached out to me afterwards about a video series he curated with his students. The animated shorts that are featured in Letters From the Etui are from a collaboration Professor Kamran Afary led with his students at Lancaster State Prison and animation students at Cal State LA. The videos were supposed to be displayed in a gallery at Cal State LA, but due to COVID, it could no longer happen. So, he handed the videos over to us to present. I didn't know how to present them, so I had them for a while before the concept developed. 

Then, Mandy Harris Williams from the Women's Center for Creative Work reached out to me about an organizer in residency program. She asked if I had any ideas around anything I wanted to create/organize and I had a couple, however, they could only facilitate things that were happening online; so the video series was my only option. Mandy said that we could present them on their own website and that some sort of programming should also happen. Those were my starting points. Once I began to organize the workshops and get the bios from the folks inside, it started to move on its own. It was really hard for us to come up with the name. We sat on the phone for hours brainstorming and nothing was coming up. It wasn’t until I had the idea to create merch to raise money for folks that are currently incarcerated that things began to make sense to me. 

As I was thinking about what we could sell, I was opposed to creating t-shirts and tote bags. We ended up deciding to create and sell envelopes in a very beautiful way. I was thinking about things that were relevant right now and I started thinking about the things people hoarded at the beginning of quarantine and the whole vote by mail drama that was happening. I had a lot of very bizarre ideas like selling eyelashes! After talking with my team, envelopes stuck. I asked Han to draw some sketches for an envelope series and she suggested I reach out to one of the #jailbeddrop artists we’ve worked with in the past. I called Chris and he loved the idea. He told me that when he was incarcerated he used to draw on his envelopes and the folks on the outside would sell the envelopes and send the money back to him. Once the prison found out he was making money this way, they banned him from being able to send out envelopes with drawings on them. That was the moment of confirmation for me. We further discussed the significance of letter writing for incarcerated folks. I took this information back to my team for our name brainstorming process. We finally came across the word Etui via Hans' roommate. An etui is a small box where you keep very small and precious items. The word is derived from its old french root word ‘estui’ which means prison. Again, the work was moving on its own. It gets even better, Dr. Afary referred me to one of his family members to do a workshop, Frieda Afary. She does a lot of abolition work in North Africa and the Middle East. When I got on the phone with her she mentioned that she had been translating letters from Iranian political prisoners into English. As we talked more about the concept of the project and the significance of letter writing to system impacted folks, we thought the letters would bring a very important layer to the conversation of letter writing apropos system impacted folks. 

 
 

BOWIE: We often talk about the effects of incarceration on the incarcerated, but what does it mean to be system impacted?

MIMS: I define system impacted people as folks who are currently incarcerated, formerly incarcerated, and the loved ones of those who are or have been incarcerated.

BOWIE: When you talk about creating a safe and tender space, I can really feel that in the way that tenderness plays a role in the act of letter writing. What is it about this form of communication that is so important?

MIMS: Yes, what you witness in Letters From the Etui is the various ways letter writing is used: to connect with loved ones, to self reflect, to advocate for yourself or others, etc. For incarcerated folks, for a long time, this was their main form of communication. For many folks inside, it still is their main form of communication. It holds a different kind of significance when you have been away from folks for so long and you don’t know when you’ll be able to see them again. For me, letter writing is very precious because you can really take your time and be intentional with your words, it's also easier to communicate hard things because you are not in a live conversation and seeing the other person's immediate reaction, and it is something that you can keep forever. 

BOWIE: The workshop series component to the project also encompasses a lot of different topics, from current propositions on the ballot related to prison reform (J, 17, 20), to #metoo behind bars, to somatics and wellness. On a personal level, which of the workshops are you looking forward to the most, and why?

MIMS: I am personally looking forward to Prentis Hemphill’s workshop and Frieda Afary’s workshop. I am obsessed with Prentis’ work and I have never attended any of their workshops so I am excited to learn from them firsthand. In regards to Frieda’s workshop, I am super excited to learn about the abolition work that is happening in North Africa and the Middle East. In my studies around the carceral state in the US, I have learned about the connections to the carceral system here and the occupation in Palestine. I have been studying the occupation and learning Arabic. I began learning Arabic before I learned about the connections between the systems and have continued to do so. I love finding the cultural, historical, and present through lines between the regions in my studies. 

BOWIE: It seems like the disciplines you explore are limitless. It’s like a kaleidoscopic constellation of connections that you make. Who are some of the artists and activists who inspire the work that you do?

MIMS: d. Sabela Grimes, Patrisse Cullors, Maytha Al Hassen, Jade Curtis, Moncell Durden, Jessica Litwak…these are the people that first come to mind.

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BOWIE: From your vantage point, what are the strengths of the artistic communities within Los Angeles?

MIMS: The fact that a lot of the artistic communities that I am a part of are very communal in the way in which they work. I have and have watched so many other artists get things done with very little resources. The artists here really work as a family. However, artists need funding!!!

BOWIE: Yes! This is essential if we want to keep germinating more ideas and more culture. Are there any other future projects you can talk about in the works?

MIMS: Yes, I have so many ideas right now!! I am finishing up a film that I have been working on with Giselle Bonilla. This project is very different from my previous works. It is really just me doing whatever I want. It’s an experimental film. However, for me, it doesn’t seem disconnected from my work because I really believe we have to include the conversation of play and pleasure into our abolitionist frameworks. Play and pleasure as a guide for strategy… play being the highest form of research. Play and pleasure as a personal guide. I read Pleasure Activism by Adrienne Maree Brown recently and she talks about the knowledge and guidance that comes from leaning into our desires and the erotic. We also have to prioritize play and pleasure as things that are essential to our well-being and not something we have to work tirelessly to deserve. And this film is just me playing and leaning into desires that bring me joy...like setting my tits on fire.

Follow Brianna Mims on instagram @bj_mims and go to lettersfromtheetui.com to learn more about the project. Sign up for their online workshop series: Oct 22, Nov 5, & Nov 21

Romancing A Wound: An Interview of Estefania Puerta 

portrait and interview by Abbey Meaker


Estefania Puerta is a Colombian immigrant womxn whose interdisciplinary art practice transcends genre. Experiential installations featuring sculpture, video, scent, writing, and performance are steeped in layers of psychoanalytic theory, mythology, and profound insights into language, memory, ritual, and time. 

In early fall, after months of trying to connect, Estefania and I caught up on my back porch, listening to the trees, watching the light change. The pandemic made it challenging to get together, but she was also busy in her studio preparing for her upcoming solo exhibition Womb Wound, opening this Sunday, October 11th at Situations in New York. 

Hearing her describe this new body of work and the ideas investigated within it, I knew we had to sit down more formally—a perfect reason to delve more deeply into its transporting complexity. Her work evokes one’s own process of recollection which condenses, displaces, and plummets us abruptly into the forgotten (or misplaced) recesses of our past. 

ABBEY MEAKER: You’ve titled this body of work and your upcoming exhibition Womb Wound. You explained in a recent interview with Rachel Jones that this title represents an extended investigation of healing, of birthing something, being the holder and nurturer that then becomes wounded. This is definitely a universal paradigm: what does it mean to be rejected by a society that relies on those who have been cast out to sustain itself? And what happens when the rejected refuse the parasite?  

ESTEFANIA PUERTA: I’m glad you brought up the extended metaphors of wombs and birth. I am not thinking of the womb as an organ attached to a cis female but rather the womb as a place we all have within us, a place of making selves, of nurture, of “the animal within the animal,” and very much about a holding place and how that slippery sense of “holding” can become a place of containment, detainment, of being trapped. The wound aspect of it is that piece around finding a healing place within the wound and not an escape or sutured repression from it. 

 
“Enrejada” photograph courtesy Lindsey Flicker and Estefania Puerta.

“Enrejada” photograph courtesy Lindsey Flicker and Estefania Puerta.

 

MEAKER: Healing is an ongoing and sometimes unpredictable process, but ‘being healed’ of something implies a fixed state, yet all life forms are in a constant state of becoming. What value do you see in the act of nursing a wound, or ‘romancing a wound’ as you poetically put it, if it can never fully recover but instead continually evolves? 

PUERTA: Many of the ways in which I describe what I’m thinking about in the work just ends up feeling web-like instead of linear. Even thinking about the idea of romancing the wound—what does it mean to ease pain in a way that’s not healing it but enticing it into submission. I think healing is a constant state of becoming empowered in all the complexities that a wound offers, whether it be rage, sadness, pain, forgiveness, empathy, resentment, trauma, acceptance, etc. If healing is a portal into these complicated states then the wound is this fountain, a source, an opening and a flowing sting that keeps us in the simultaneity of being  animals and highly conscientious beings. I find that the wounds that I carry have also become what nurses me; they offer me a space to be truthful in the complexity of my experience being alive. The value I see in romancing a wound is thinking of it as taming a wild beast and knowing how to slow dance with it instead of trying to fight it away. 

MEAKER: You have said that this work is very personal, especially with regard to the family history and mythologies you’re mining. Even within this personal thread, the feeling of disconnect from family and the attempt to piece together fragments of an unknowable history is something I deeply connect with, albeit for very different reasons. 

PUERTA: Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, I feel like it's something that many of us, if not all of us, can relate to: the erasure of our own history and these glimpses we may have: moments of vulnerable truth that are obscured by a murky mystery. In my family there are moments of clarity that I have about the ways in which we exist—the characters in my family and the mystery about who they are, who they were. These histories get erased but manifest in other ways. I romance around these murky mysteries and create different signifiers to dwell with a bit. 

MEAKER: It’s interesting, the function of remembering. Memory has so much to do with one’s sense of self and the forging of their history. If we can’t remember, we create stories, stand-ins. 

PUERTA: Yes, for sure. But I think that’s the thing about the self referential vs the identity politics around it all. That is definitely a part of it and inevitable because we are all political bodies in this society. But I realized a lot of what I was dealing with was a personal, familial connection and the way that has been impacted by politics, but getting more into the heaviness around it. In some ways I feel like dealing with the political was my way of avoiding the familial and realizing that it’s something I actually want to deeply understand. I wanted to find a soothing place within that unknown. I’m always thinking about a family member and each of the pieces I make become homages to them and reflections in this really subtle way. There is a correspondence that I feel like I have with my family. In that they do become these mythological creatures to me that hold powers and different codes to a family history that then becomes a world.

MEAKER: Kind of a way to commune with ancestors.

PUERTA: Yes, but they are usually people that I have known or know. But they do still feel like ancestors to me because of that moment of unknowing them. There’s something about, especially older family members, that feel like they are both here and in some deep past that I don’t have access to. 

 
Detail of “Mija” photograph courtesy Lindsey Flicker and Estefania Puerta.

Detail of “Mija” photograph courtesy Lindsey Flicker and Estefania Puerta.

 

MEAKER: This familiar/unfamiliar quality imbues your work with a sense of the uncanny. The sculpture titled Mija is particularly reminiscent of a body. It has an interior architecture, a bone structure. It has the qualities of an organism in that it’s alive and dying. It has a vibrancy and vitality but also shows signs of decline: dying plants against glowing water, soft and fleshy material edged by muddy mop-heads. Can you talk about these provocative, paradoxical qualities? 

PUERTA: Thinking of the too-muchness of all these materials, the excess in both ways of fleshy softness and the raggedy edges. I think of the mop heads as a filter, both in their material, cultured significance and also as a proposal and simulacra of cilia and other filters that exist in nature. My dad was a janitor for the majority of my life and I have a lot of love and fond connections to this material; riding on the floor buffing machine that felt like a giant, gentle beast as my dad was its tamer, guiding it across the floor. At the same time, I feel that sharpness in how immigrant labor can be almost fetishized in the U.S, how immigrants are seen as the filters, the holders, the purifiers of what others do not want to deal with. How these mops literally hold the muck and grime and how I think of them as tendrils protecting the soft interior of this sculpture. The guiding term I was thinking about for this piece was “creature comfort” and thinking of bodies that need regeneration, that are not just beat down and exhausted but are actually resting, re-generating, feeding themselves, finding comfort. Some referential inspirations are the feminine grotesque and the goddess of fertility, Artemis. 

 
“Mija” photograph courtesy Lindsey Flicker and Estefania Puerta.

“Mija” photograph courtesy Lindsey Flicker and Estefania Puerta.

 

MEAKER: I’m thinking about flowers: they are prized for their external beauty and arousing scent (how they satisfy us); yet once picked, the flower wilts, browns, drops its pedals, leaving only a rotting, stinking tuft that is hastily discarded by its once devoted admirer. 

PUERTA: We remember a beautiful flower but not the decaying flower. I’ve been thinking about the idea of a fruiting body. Fungus as a fruiting body, flowers as a fruiting body, the body having its own potential to fruit in these dark places. The operation of nature within all of that. Not just the appearance of it but what does it actually do and mean and how do we identify with these processes.

MEAKER: Your sculpture Enrejada is similarly dichotomous. Spilling out of a grid-like structure lined with ears made of wax, are tendrils of pink fabric, hair, and a coiled umbilical cord. This feels like a raw, traumatic memory. Bits and pieces disconnected and out of place, trying to find each other. The burden of remembering and forgetting. 

 
Detail of “Enrejada” photograph courtesy Lindsey Flicker and Estefania Puerta.

Detail of “Enrejada” photograph courtesy Lindsey Flicker and Estefania Puerta.

 

PUERTA: Hmm interesting, yeah, as you know, I am really interested in psychoanalysis and its poetic and very real history as it relates to hysteria and women’s experiences. Trauma is described as this type of repetition, a loop that you play over and over again but can never find the ending to it.  I do think this piece plays with that notion of repetition, the over emphasis of something that cannot be forgotten. But perhaps for me, the pain attached to trauma isn’t as present for me, I was thinking more of familial lineages (there is a spice blend in the sacks that my mother uses) and also what it means to be a sentient being. I made the ears during a time when I was in deep turmoil and a creative block. A friend read my tarot and saw an image of a tongue licking flowers and instructed me to get out of my head. I was talking myself in loops and what I needed to do was be present, to listen to the earth around me in a much more embodied way. As she read my tarot, I had this material in my hand with no purpose and instinctively started making ears, they felt beautiful and cathartic in my hands, they felt right and that just led me to other ideas of these pieces typically being seen as their primary sense of existence. We talk a lot about the gaze in a visual way, but what if a sculpture can hear you? What does it mean to have empowerment through another sense? To have auditory sentience and being-ness in the room and offer the act of listening to the “talker,” instead of the “viewer.” In that way, this piece actually feels really therapeutic or healing to me.

MEAKER: What has it been like making this work during a time of incredible tumult, fear, sickness, unknown, radical uprising? So much of what has been hidden has now come to light. 

PUERTA: It has been both my refuge and sanctuary, as well as the sharpest mirror reflecting the darkest parts of my soul. The part I may not have been ready to deal with. Making art always feels like you’re putting your hands into a void and hoping that whatever you’re holding onto or making gives something back to you that is nurturing. It was a hard, weird time to try to define what would be nurturing and whether it was even something worthwhile to define in this moment. And then coming back to the romantic and true feeling around art being its own space that, for better or worse, can keep us grounded in a different reality that isn’t always a hyper-politicized and materially cruel place. I realized that I am a valid person and that I am worthy of existence and expressing my existence. In that aspect, I feel so grateful I had this show to work towards; to have a mirror I had to constantly face, to ask the hard questions and get to the other side of it, where I feel more empowered than before. 

Womb Wound is on view from October 11 - November 15 with a reception on Sunday, October 11, 12-7 PM @ Situations in New York

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It's Not About Me: A Conversation Between Photographer Greg Gorman and Patricia Lanza

 

Andy Warhol, Los Angeles, 1986, copyright Greg Gorman

 

“For me a photograph is most successful when it doesn’t answer all the questions and it leaves something to be desired. I like each picture that I take to be a testament to the individual character of my subject.”–Gorman

Greg Gorman is an iconic Hollywood photographer and master of portraiture. Over his fifty-year career, he has photographed the most recognizable faces from the entertainment industry and music world. This retrospective book, It’s Not About Me, published by teNues, showcases many images never before published, and is a tribute to his long successful career of photographing the famous and the notorious with a distinctive approach and style. From Kirk Douglas, Eartha Kitt, Robert Redford, Marlon Brando, Sophia Loren, Elizabeth Taylor, and Al Pacino to Viggo Mortensen, Diane Lane, Iggy Pop, Christopher Walken, Dennis Hopper, and Liza Minnelli, as well as Mark Wahlberg, Halle Berry, Leonardo DiCaprio, Sharon Stone, Michael Jackson, Brad Pitt, Robert De Niro and Marina Abramović – to name just a few

Patricia Lanza: This will be your 12th book publication. What was the impetus for making this retrospective book, It’s Not About Me.?

Greg Gorman: I felt that I had a lot of work that had never really been explored. I think one of the interesting things, being seventy-one, and having shot portraits for the better part of 50 years, is going back and looking at the work with a different eye, a different point of view. I think it's been quite challenging looking at work that I may have dismissed many years ago and finding pictures that I wouldn't expect. What I was looking for was a comprehensive overview of my career, revisiting and publishing pictures that have never been seen before, including color imagery for the first time.

Lanza: What is the time period for this book and how many images did you edit from your archive?

Gorman: The book covers 50 years of my career. It took me three and a half years to create the book. I did a solid year of editing. I'm an intense person when I start on something- I go full tilt. I had 160 large boxes in cold storage where I probably belonged, and I would bring them home one or two at a time. I set up an editing bay at my desk in my bedroom where I have a beautiful view overlooking the city. I didn’t want to edit in my office. I moved everything upstairs with a light box, slide pages, contact sheets and a grease pencil- something the younger generation are probably not familiar with. I spent the better part of a year working feverishly. When I was in town, I was definitely editing.

Lanza: What was the editing process? How many images did you review?

Gorman: Thousands upon thousands of images at the very least! I narrowed it down to roughly a thousand images; scanning the balance of what I didn't have already scanned That was the film, just looking at my analogue work, not even any of my digital work, which began around the year 2000. For the film work, I settled on about a thousand pictures. I edited for a solid year; taking the next year off thinking about where I wanted to go with this project.

So it was about three and a half years, almost four years before the publication of the book. I really took my time with it. Then it became a question of which images made sense. The irony was that much of the early work showed me how my career had evolved. I reviewed a lot of the early work and regrettably saw a lot of pictures of major players which were not lit in the style for which I became known , however that is the evolution of an artist’s work.

My style began to change around the time of my shoot with Tom Waits in the late 1970’s. My signature style focused more on the relationship between my highlights and shadows. Thanks to my brilliant art director, Gary Johns, we were able to incorporate some of the overly lit early works into creative, interesting photographs by positioning and cropping . He has been a friend of mine since the seventies. He's done a lot of my books, including the campaign for l.a.Eyeworks. 

Lanza: Your book has many portrait pairings. How did you arrive at this?

Gorman: That's the genius again of Gary Johns. I think that he did such a beautiful job editing and of putting pictures together.

In fact, sometimes from a humorous point of view, sometimes from a logistical point of view they paired well together. But I think the pairings make our book kind of fun. Normally you would not see them together, like pairing Barry White and Betty White for example. However many of the portrait pairings have meaning and poignancy. Some of the portraits needed to stand on their own on- deserving a double page.

Lanza: What are some of the most defining moments in your career? What would you say were the big breaks?

Gorman: Certainly early on, getting the likes of Dustin Hoffman on the movie, Tootsie, as the special photographer, was a big break. Barbra Streisand calling me up one day when she was recast in a film called All Night Long at Universal. Knowing that I was the special photographer on set, she wanted to know how I was planning on photographing her. The sign of a true professional. Having these big names in my portfolio early on in my career certainly didn’t hurt. Having David Bowie and Bette Midler, by my side added more credibility as well.

They thought, Oh he's shooting David Bowie… he must be a pretty damn good photographer. I was just lucky enough to have been in the right place at the right time. And certainly a big defining moment in my career. In another arena, my editorial days with Interview Magazine, was a big plus . I think that was a breakout for a lot of photographers that were working around that time. During the period of Robert

Hayes, as the editor in chief of Interview, this was a significant moment. Another defining moment in showcasing my signature lighting style, was the l.a.Eyeworks works campaign. .

For the l.a.Eyeworks campaign I created some of my most iconic portraits. And for sure, my most famous picture of Andy Warhol. He called me up one day after signing a deal with Ford models and asked me if he would be a good candidate for one of their advertisements, since the adverts appeared monthly in Interview Magazine. Shooting the campaign became a challenge for me because this was before celebrities realized the value of a personal endorsement. 

 

David Bowie, Los Angeles, 1987, copyright Greg Gorman

 

Lanza: You have degrees in photojournalism and fine art cinematography. When did your work evolve to portraiture?

Gorman: I have an undergraduate degree in photojournalism and a Master of Fine Arts in filmmaking from the University of Southern California.

I started my career in photography when I borrowed a friend’s camera to shoot  a Jimi Hendrix concert. I fell in love with photography and enrolled in a course at the University of Kansas. The only photography course they offered was a course in Photojournalism. My passion has always been people. I went through the School of Photojournalism at K.U., but then moved to California to finish my degree in film. However, when I graduated from film school, I realized that I would enjoy a career more in still photography than as a film maker in the movie business. I always cherished more that one on one relationship with people.

 Lanza: How did your education in cinematography or filmmaking affect the development of your still photographic style? 

Gorman: That's a great question. And you know, no one's ever really asked me that during an interview. My career in lighting has come full circle. And the answer is when I got out of film school I suddenly didn't have the money to be able to afford buying strobes (electronic flash). So when I first started shooting I used, one K quartz lights and two K quartz soft boxes.

I started out with those continuous lights, but once my career took off, I realized that I needed more power to capture my imagery. I turned to electronic flash which I used for most of my career. You know, I was shooting a lot, and I eventually bought a Six K HMI Arri light, with a ballast for a very modest price of $30,000. It was very heavy and on a huge stand.. So today I've come full circle, and I shoot with LED Rotolights, including the new Titan X2, my favorite light. I like it because not only are the skin tones stunning, but there is enough power to back it up.

In 2000, I started shooting digital. I couldn't believe how well digital saw light in low luminance. BUT you have to understand that at the beginning of digital, I was still shooting with a Hasselblad because digital cameras, were represented by a three–megapixel camera. I turned to digital, and shot with the Canon EOS 35mm cameras, when the file size became larger and the technology became more sophisticated.

Lanza: What is happening with you now, having this long career in photography?

Gorman: In the last nine years, my passion for shooting commercial assignments started to diminish. I have been focusing more on teaching and education. However, just recently my excitement for shooting re-emerged. Not being a fan of medium format since the Hasselblad days ,I always preferred the 35mm digital cameras. 35mm was always a good fit because of how I shoot, with a little bit more spontaneity, and with a high ISO, which you need with the LED lighting. The higher ISO gives you a more film–like quality. Then I started watching NOBECHI Creative Live series online, of which I am a lecturer. I heard about the medium format Fuji GFX100, a 100–megapixel camera. A week ago I was sent the camera to try out. I printed and read the 350–page manual. Justin Stailey of Fuji said that I was probably the first person he knew, that ever read a camera manual. When you have a multitude of choices and settings, I thought it best to read the manual and understand how the camera works before starting to shoot.

Frankly when I started shooting with this camera, I was blown away. The camera, which looks imposing because of its size was not heavy, and with all the controls at your fingertips it was a great match for me! The Fuji lenses are great. I am very excited, as I have a couple of special projects in mind with big prints and back to my classic black and white style. AGAIN, I have come full circle with my camera of choice and gone back to shooting medium format with the Fuji GFX 100 and the Rotolight TITAN X2 by my side! The perfect combination for studio portraiture!!

Lanza: Of all the famous people that are in the book, It’s Not About Me. Who was the most surprising in a photo session? What was one of the most interesting stories?

Gorman: Certainly meeting David Bowie was a big moment. Of course I was anxiety ridden because he was such a hero of mine. He possessed a wicked sense of humor and consequently was fun on set.

Bowie was so smart and sophisticated. He basically knew that photography was a necessary evil as part of the marketing program. When Bowie would have a project coming out, he would call, and we would shoot for two or three days. We made sure we covered all the magazines and press media releases, to help him avoid other photo sessions with other photographers.

Those times have really changed. For example, I shot Tom Waits, for the first time for an album cover for three days in the late 1970’s. I'd start at about seven or eight o'clock in the morning picking him up at the Tropicana Hotel on Santa Monica Blvd. We often shot till midnight–something you would never see today. The last time I shot Tom Waits was well over 10 years ago. He gave me 30 minutes at a Chinese restaurant in Santa Rosa. I took him  out back where there was a railroad track to get the pictures for the required pages for the London Sunday Times. Today with digital, everything's a rush. In some ways, digital has been fantastic, but in other ways, it's been a demise because everybody knows it can happen as quickly as we speak.

Lanza: Let's talk about the book what is happening this year in that regard?

Gorman: The book, published by teNeus, It’s Not About Me, is coming out in July in Europe and August in the States. I have a show coming up this fall with the Fahey/Klein gallery – the actual dates are dependent on the current situation. Most of my European dates orchestrated by Anke Degenhard have been put on hold until we know better the current state of affairs. However my press for the book has been diligently moving forward thanks to my brilliant Press Agent Nadine Dinter. Many of the photographs in this book, stem from original assignments, advertising campaigns, personal shoots and work associated with the motion picture industry.

Often after these assignments, we would separately make our own set of pictures. Our more private moments. Most of the color and black and white images featured in this publication came from that body of work. I put all my energy into the talent and tried to take a back seat, putting their imagery front and center and thus, the title, ‘It’s Not About Me’.

Throughout Greg Gorman’s star-studded portfolio entitled, It's Not About Me, you'll find the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio and Johnny Depp at the beginning of their careers, as well as the iconic posters Gorman created for films such as Scarface and Tootsie, record covers for David Bowie, and magazine covers for Andy Warhol. Foreword by Sir Elton John. Afterword by John Waters. Preorder here.

Patricia Lanza began her career at the National Geographic Society — first as a photo researcher, then as a photography editor, followed by eight years as a contract photographer. She began working for the Annenberg Foundation in 2005, researching an idea and writing an initiative on the uses of photography. In 2009, the Annenberg Space for Photography opened. As the Director of Talent & Content, Lanza is responsible for creating and carrying out Wallis Annenberg’s vision through themed programming and photographic exhibitions.

 
Elizabeth Taylor, Los Angeles, 1989, copyright Greg Gorman

Elizabeth Taylor, Los Angeles, 1989, copyright Greg Gorman

 

Angelic Bodies: Hans Ulrich Obrist Interviews Genesis Breyer P-Orridge

According to Neitzche, everything returns to the wheel of the cosmic process. At the beginning again, and again, you will find “every pain and every pleasure, every friend and every enemy, every hope and every error, every blade of grass and every ray of sunshine once more.” In this eternal cycle, great subversive seers and mystics, like Genesis Breyer P’Orridge, come around rarely. Her pain and her pleasure is a shared agony and ecstasy, which P-Orridge has ameliorated with her epiphany of the pandrogyne, from which the artist has escaped the bounds of either/or binaries into a more angelic, divine gender. Part shaman punk and part hermaphroditic angel, P-Orridge has been led by a series of these outer body visions. From the founding of COUM Transmissions, which challenged British society with blood-soaked performances and general anarchic disruption, to Throbbing Gristle, which brought industrial music into the modern lexicon, to the acid house of Psychic TV, to finally finding love in a dominatrix named Lady Jaye. On the occasion of her first solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist visits Genesis at home in New York, where she is fighting stage IV leukemia, to discuss her many life-altering epiphanies.

HANS ULRICH OBRIST How is your archive organized?

P-ORRIDGE Just over two years ago, I had complete kidney failure. My fiancé [Susana Atkins] is Spanish. She came here with a multiple-visit visa and I got sick just after we met. She looked after me because I had to have somebody with me all the time. The last time she came to New York, she organized all the photographs and put several thousands into sections, subjects, and separate little boxes and drawers. Now I can ring her up in Spain and say, “Where are the pics of Lady Jaye peeing in the street,” and she’s like, “Box #6 in the drawer on the left.” She knows where everything is, she has a totally photographic memory.

OBRIST Is your archive digitized?

P-ORRIDGE No, I don’t have any money to digitize. I don’t take grants; I have no income because I can’t do concerts.

OBRIST Can you tell me about some of your recent gallery shows?

P-ORRIDGE I had a show open last recently in Miami at the Nina Johnson Gallery that’s called Closer As Love. I don’t really take any notice to be honest, I’m more concerned with staying alive. I mean, it’s great that there’s interest. It reminds me of Derek Jarman when he was diagnosed with HIV. He said to me one day when we were sitting in his flat, “You know Gen, once they know you’ve got some kind of terminal illness, they’ll suddenly say they appreciate what you do.” And he said, “I’ve never had offers of money to make films like I’ve had since they knew I was dying.”

And then of course, as soon as everybody heard that I was potentially terminally ill, I get exhibitions and people suddenly say they appreciate my body of work, and I sort of think, “Well, thanks for telling me that forty years too late.”

OBRIST Well, I sort of think there’s some other reason. It has something to do with you anticipating what’s happening now in the world?

P-ORRIDGE [laughs] Yeah, of course. I’m being deliberately cynical. I just thought what Derek said was interesting. When I came back from the hospital last time, my editor­­­­—because I’m writing my autobiography, he said, “You’ll never believe this. While you were in the hospital I got a phone call from the New York Times wanting a quote for their obituary.” And I went, “Really?” He said, “Yeah it’s a bit weird, isn’t it? It’s already written and they’re just updating it whenever you’re sick to make it seem current.” So, they’re all waiting. There’s all these vultures waiting to go, “Oh, what a shame Gen died.” [laughs] It’s strange isn’t it?

OBRIST When did you have the pandrogyny epiphany?

P-ORRIDGE Apparently, in the ‘70s. Jarret [Earnest], who curated the show in Miami, found an old interview where I was talking about panthropology in the ‘70s, so it’s always been there in my mind as an ultimate theme. It was more about logic, observation, and considering human behavior. There seems to be what has sometimes been called original sin. There seems to be a flaw in human behavior. For example, how could there ever be a Second World War? We’ve maimed each other, killed people we love, destroyed things we like. Why would we do that? We could never do it again. That was stupid! But we do it again and again.

OBRIST It’s like Nietzsche’s eternal return.

P-ORRIDGE And so, I wanted to think, how could we change that? If there’s no either/or, there can’t be the other, and that can’t become the enemy because there is no other anymore. So, if the two become one there’s this divine unity.

OBRIST So, then you will have peace?

P-ORRIDGE Yeah.

OBRIST So, it was actually a peace movement in a way?

P-ORRIDGE Sure, I’m a child of the ‘60s.

OBRIST And how did you begin? Because last time we spoke, you told me that it kind of all began when you were fifteen, discovering Max Ernst. 

P-ORRIDGE [laughs] Oh that was just the collages, really. The idea that you could take images of so-called “reality,” and then create one that never existed. This was an incredibly powerful aspect of creativity that sometimes is buried in commerce now. In fact, to me, art has always been spiritual. Always. And ultimately the art that really matters has to lead us towards the salvation of the species, otherwise what’s it telling us?

OBRIST How to fight extinction?

P-ORRIDGE Yeah, so I’m seeing these threads unfold more and more. I can remember when I was about eight or nine, watching my mother brush my sister’s long hair, and thinking, how come I can’t have long hair? And the answer was, because you’re a boy. So, at that point I saw that there was some misfiring in the logic. It was just an inherited, conditioned concept that didn’t make sense. And of course, as the ‘60s unfolded more and more, things that didn’t make sense, that were negative, were revealed and exposed for the insanity that they are. I’ve never changed my utopian view—that we have to work towards the species becoming one organism. No nations. No countries. No tribes. No either/or. No binary. We’re all human beings.

OBRIST So, it’s a very holistic idea?

P-ORRIDGE Absolutely. We truly are an artist who doesn’t just say that life and art are the same. From the very beginning, there has been no separation. That’s why I kept everything. That’s why I have an archive.

OBRIST Besides your autobiography, what books are you doing?

P-ORRIDGE We did a book on Brion Gysin that just came out.

OBRIST Brion Gysin brings things to your beginnings as well, because the other thing that seems so relevant in terms of your practice is this fluidity—painting, poetry, drawing, art, performance, music—you have so many dimensions. Poetry, as you told me last time we spoke, is quite at the beginning. And there are, of course, these two key influences, [William] Burroughs and Brion Gysin in validation of your entire creative and cultural engineering practice. How did you come to poetry, and why Burroughs and Gysin?

P-ORRIDGE I was at one of those horrible English private schools, I had a scholarship. It was called Solihull School. One day in English class, my English teacher said, “Stay behind after class.” And I thought, oh no. What have I done wrong? I must’ve got a bad mark on my essay. Then, he had this piece of paper, and he scribbled on it, “On The Road, Jack Kerouac,” and he said, “I really think you’ll appreciate this book. Try to find it.” My father used to travel a lot with his job, so I said to him, “Could you try and find this book when you’re driving around?” And one day he came home and he had a copy. He found it in a bargain bin on the motorway. And that changed everything again.

OBRIST On The Road was a bestseller then.

P-ORRIDGE It changed a lot of people I know from that era. But when I was reading it, what fascinated me about it was that it’s about real people. Although it’s written almost like a fiction, it’s real people. Who is Dean Moriarty? Who is Old Bull Lee? Who are they? I found out that one of them was William Burroughs. So then, I hitchhiked to London and went around all the old shops. I couldn’t find anything by William Burroughs back in ’65, ‘66. And then, I went to Soho, to the porno shops, and I remember I got Jean Genet and Henry Miller, because they were considered dirty books. And lo and behold they had Naked Lunch, since it had been prosecuted for being obscene. So, I bought the only copy, well actually I stole the only copy that they had. I read that and thought, wow, it’s a bit like Max Ernst. This is someone changing reality again. Reality isn’t linear.  Time isn’t linear. It’s in a state of flux and chaos and again, the creative being has the ability, the right, and the opportunity to change reality. And that’s what I want to do because the reality I’m in isn’t one I enjoy. So, it’s a second liberation. For me, art is always about the big questions.

OBRIST Gerhard Richter says, “Art is the highest form of hope.” What would be your definition?

P-ORRIDGE Did he? Wow. I don’t have one because it’s always changing. I don’t think I’m on record as calling myself an artist or a musician. I have said I’m a writer, and I love to write, but it’s shamanic to me. I always say this to people at lectures, “What’s the first book of the Bible? Genesis. But what’s the other title of that book? The Book of Creation. What does that mean?” The first thing god does is create. That means creation is holy work. So, to be an artist or creator is to be using divine systems to get closer to a purer reality, and a divine perception of existence to go as deep as you can.

OBRIST It’s interesting, your first mentioned public appearance starts with Throbbing Gristle, but you did things long before.

P-ORRIDGE Oh, fuck yeah.

OBRIST So, when was the first public appearance of your work?

P-ORRIGE 1965. It was a street performance. I’m a great believer in not just sitting and complaining, but taking action. So, at this private school, we came up with this idea—I’d discovered Japanese haiku. We wrote lots of different words on cards by hand, and then on a Saturday, with two or three friends, we went around the town, which was a really horrible, sterile, suburban place, and we left them in the gutters, ashtrays, waste bins, just on the floor. We made this beautiful litter, and the idea was that people picked it up thinking, what’s this? They were accidentally writing a poem. It was written about in the local paper, then it got mentioned on BBC radio, and then I was asked to give talks at the local church.

OBRIST It’s interesting that you then became part of collectives of groups. How did COUM begin?

P-ORRIDGE We’d left the Exploding Galaxy, David Medalla’s project, and decided to hitchhike around London. So, I went and saw my parents. They moved to a town near Wales named Shrewsbury and they just started their own business. I said I’d help in the office typing invoices and stuff, and one day I went with them for a drive through Wales. I was in the back of the car and it was a sunny day. I had my head on the window of the car, I closed my eyes, and then all of a sudden, I was next to the car. My consciousness was flying along next to the car. But, it was passing through the hedges, nothing actually blocked me, I could penetrate the physical world. That happened for about twenty minutes, or so. All the while, I was hearing voices, seeing images and symbols, and one of them was ‘Cosmic Organicism of the Universal Molecular,’ and ‘transmission.’ COUM Transmissions. When I got home, I wrote everything I could remember down.

OBRIST These were all written as text?

P-ORRIDGE Scribbled in notebooks. Some of them still exist. One of the words we received was cosmosis.

OBRIST Like cosmos and osmosis.

P-ORRIDGE Exactly, and it was the positive transfer of energy from one being into another, like in a plant, but between beings. That the whole universe was smaller, and smaller, and smaller particles until there were no particles. In a way, it was a precursor to quantum physics, though I didn’t know anything about quantum physics. And so, I felt that not only was it this true epiphany, but that it was my lifelong task, my mission, to proselytize the core ideas of that for the rest of my life.

OBRIST It was like a manifesto?

P-ORRIDGE Yeah.

OBRIST What was the epiphany of Throbbing Gristle?

P-ORRIDGE Oh, there wasn’t one. That was just logic, and observation, and deduction. I was looking at music and thinking, god I haven’t bought any records for two or three years, and why haven’t I? Because it’s not satisfying. It’s not teaching me something I didn’t know. So what am I gonna do? I guess I have to make music that does satisfy me. Because that’s the COUM approach: if it’s not there, then make it.

With music it was: What is music? Music is sounds. There’s no good or bad sounds, there’s just sounds. What is a rhythm? Something that happens at least twice. That’s it, that’s all it is. What do we got that we can make sounds with? We looked around our basement and we had a broken bass guitar, an old violin, and an old drum kit.  We bought a guitar from Woolworth’s for 15 pounds, and Cosey said, “It’s too heavy.” So, we sawed off the extra wood and asked, “How’s that?” and she said, “Much better.” Chris Carter built his own synthesizers, Sleazy was totally into tape recorder experiments à la Burroughs, and I was really into writing lyrics that were based on love stories and rhythm and blues, American rock, and so on. Something that was English and about my experience in post-war Manchester. By process of reduction, you end up with what’s left and go, that’s what we have.

OBRIST The best producer is a reducer.

P-ORRIDGE Yes, of course. When I was once asked to remix “Test Dept,” because they were having real problems, I went and erased all but three tracks and it was fine. Throbbing Gristle was very much conceived in the same structural way. Then, I thought it has to have a name that has nothing to do with the history of rock music. I thought factory because of Andy Warhol, but that’s too obvious. I was talking to my friend Monty and he goes, “Gen you keep saying the word industrial. You keep saying industrial this, and industrial that.” 

OBRIST It’s a very Manchester word.

P-ORRIDGE Yeah, of course. I was talking about the factories in Manchester and all the steam trains being cut up when they were obsolete. So, I went, oh yeah, it’s industrial music. That was September 3, 1975. Then, it was a matter of convincing the rest of the world that what we were doing was a really good idea. [laughs]

OBRIST There was another epiphany in ’81, and that’s Psychic TV.

P-ORRIDGE Yeah, that was towards the end of COUM Transmissions. I’d started having, for lack of a better term, shamanic, out-of-body experiences. I’d been speaking in tongues. I’d been having astral travel where I’d lose my body completely, and I was in other dimensions; as if I’d taken psychedelics, but I hadn’t. It had gotten so intense that I thought, I can’t do this in public anymore, but I do still want to explore this. So, I started to explore those rituals in private. 

OBRIST Rituals are important because Tarkovsky said, “We live in a time bereft of rituals and we need to reintroduce rituals,” and you’ve done that a lot.

P-ORRIDGE Absolutely. They’re always there in my life. From ‘75, when we started Throbbing Gristle, COUM was still going on, but in private. By ‘81, I didn’t want to do Throbbing Gristle anymore and we stopped. I thought we saw it out, proved we could invent a genre of music, and convinced the fucking world that it’s a good idea. So, why do it anymore? What else is there to do? Our fans are really into Throbbing Gristle, and they dress like us, and they write to us, share stories about their life. What would happen if a group took that as raw material? Thinking, we’re like you too, what can we do together? Through conversations with Monte Cazzaza and Sleazy, we developed my idea of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth.

OBRIST Yeah, that’s very relevant because Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth is of course a hybrid. It’s a fan club, a ritual, a cult. Bodily fluids played a role, didn’t they?

P-ORRIDGE [Laughs] Well, we sat there—myself and Sleazy—and said, “We need a ritual.” Through my exploration of Austin Osman Spare and other rituals I’d been doing, I knew that the orgasm was the key. That at the moment of orgasm, all the different layers of consciousness are all linked up for a moment. The juice of orgasm, whether it’s male or female. And then hair. We liked the idea that those are all the things that, normally in magic, you’re not supposed to let anyone else have. So, we got people to send them to us as an act of trust.

OBRIST You also recently went from 2D to 3D. Can you tell me about your shoe sculptures?

P-ORRIDGE Oh, the shoes. Yeah, I love making shoe sculptures. We were making them just for fun. All the shoes belonged to sex workers, strippers, dominatrices, hookers, and topless go-go dancers. In those black boxes are a lot of little materials—we keep them sometimes for twenty years before they have a purpose. The crystals are from the chandelier of Lady Jaye’s grandmother who died. Everything is connected to life.

OBRIST Tomorrow is the tenth anniversary of Lady Jaye’s passing. How did you meet?

P-ORRIDGE We met in a dungeon. A friend of mine, Terrence Sellers, had a dungeon on 23rd Street and a little apartment off to one side. When we came to New York, we would stay there. So, I’d been out with Debbie Harry and Chris Stein at this club called Jackie 60, and I’d done a load of ecstasy. Those were the days when it was still legal, still pure. It was three in the morning and I didn’t want to wake up Terrence, so I went in the dungeon, put a sheet over me, and went to sleep. That’s what Lady Jaye saw when she came to work. She was a dominatrix there. She thought I went back to sleep but I didn’t. I was in the dark. I was watching this doorway and the other room was lit, and she was walking back and forth in what we knew straightaway was a real 60’s outfit and a Brian Jones bob. Then she started to get undressed and put on fetish clothing. Out loud I said, and I felt embarrassed saying it because it so was not like me, but I said, “Dear Universe, if I can be with that woman that’s all I want for the rest of my life.”

OBRIST Oh wow, you knew immediately. She was a nurse too, right?

P-ORRIDGE Yeah, she was a nurse as well. She was fascinated with the human body, it’s limitations, and the fact that it’s really just a lump of meat, of material. She said, “It’s a cheap suitcase that carries around our consciousness.” One of her other great sayings was, “See a cliff, jump off.” She was truly fearless. We’ve never met anyone so truly fearless about everything and anything.

OBRIST When did you decide on the idea of your bodies becoming one? Because it’s so important now, how did this epiphany happen? 

P-ORRIDGE It turns out that it began in the ‘80s, in terms of the theory. It’s the same problem of the either/or, a universe that has an either/or is malfunctioning. And it seems very likely that the whole point of existence is to return to unification, divine union, a realization of similarity. The first thing Lady Jaye did before she took me out was dress me in her clothes, put makeup on me, and decorate my hair with jewels. We said to each other, “I wish I could consume you. I wish I could just literally hold you, and we would melt into each other, and become one.” It was that true, unconditional, infinite desire that is inexplicable but incredible. We thought about why we feel that way, why we’re so desperately in need of becoming each other, or at least becoming one more? We thought of Burroughs and Gysin, as always, and The Third Mind. When they wrote and did cut-ups together, they weren’t by William or Brion, but the product of a third mind, this other being. We thought, what if we cut ourselves up, and became one new being? And that’s the pandrogyne.

OBRIST Lady Jaye had surgery on the chin to match you?

P-ORRIDGE And the nose and under her eyes.

 OBRIST And you took hormones but it didn’t work out?

P-ORRIDGE Yeah. She took male hormones and it made her aggressive, and we took female hormones and it made me cry all the time. [Laughs] We said, “At least we can say now to some degree we do understand the monthly effect of the hormones shifting.” It’s really odd when you suddenly cry over nothing, and feel shattered and upset. So, what we did was shave off all our body hair, so we were newborn babies, and for the first part of that day we wore diapers as well. Hair contains time, and people can take a piece of hair and figure out what drugs you’ve had, and certain things that have happened to you. We wanted to start fresh, so we became babies.

OBRIST Twins.

 P-ORRIDGE Little twins, yes. Then we started looking for confirmation in the myths and cultures of the world.

 OBRIST Because hormones didn’t work, you went into ketamine? Why did ketamine work better than hormones?

 P-ORRIDGE Who knows why it worked for us? Different things work for different people. But over two years, we did it every day. In fact, we would load a needle up and put it at each side of the bed, and whoever woke up first would inject you while you were still asleep, so you would wake up high on ketamine. We would do it all day and we learned how to navigate it. We didn’t do huge amounts so we were completely lost...

 OBRIST Do you have any unrealized projects? Dreams? 

 P-ORRIDGE Yes. We’d really like to set up a COUM collective. Not a commune, but where each person who’s deeply involved has their own yurt, or whatever, and then a main building that’s a resource for archives and technology, workshops and so on. It’s a think tank for alternatives. 

 OBRIST And what’s your advice to a young artist?

 P-ORRIDGE Don’t try to have a career. Be creative. Be a creator. 

 OBRIST The exhibition in Los Angeles was called Pandrogyny 1 and 2?

P-ORRIDGE For two locations. One at Tom of Finland, and the other at Lethal Amounts. At the Tom of Finland house, they keep it as it was when he lived there. When you do an exhibition, what you put there goes amongst all his things, so that one is mainly sculptures. It has things like “Tongue Kiss,” which is two wolf heads, and the tongues have been replaced with knife blades.

 OBRIST It’s crazy that this was your first show in LA. What’s your relationship to the city?

 P-ORRIDGE I never had one really. I would never live there. To me, it has a strange atmosphere. It’s like it has a big cave underneath, with a dark energy in it that you can fall into by mistake. It doesn’t suit me at all. Mainly the art world has tried to ignore us for years. It’s really important for young artists to step away from that and look at examples of mail art and chapbooks.

OBRIST Generosity? 

P-ORRIDGE And generosity. Sharing. Roxy who was just here, a young artist and musician, she said that she’s always amazed how by generous I am, giving things away. And I say, “Well, what am I supposed to do with it, hoard it? To what end?”

OBRIST That’s a very important motto for the new decade.

P-ORRIDGE Sharing and generosity. Absolutely.