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


interview by Rachel Adams

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fucklore: An Interview Of Krista Papista By Elena Parpa

photography by Isotta Giulia Acquati
styling & art direction by Hakan Solak
concept & direction by Krista Papista
hair by  Dushan Petrovich
make-up by Lee Hyangsoon
set design by Jillian Van Koutrik
styling assisting by Aleix Llussà Lòpez
production by Laura Howes 
interviewed by Elena Parpa

“Fucklore delves into the pockets of anarchy, mourning and exuberance in traditional styles, sounds and ceremonies that survive on the edge between the existentially worn-out and the ferociously alive.”

Dress & Boots: Alexander McQueen, Socks. Falke

Top: Dolce & Gabbana (Nightboutique Berlin), Fishnet-tights, stockings, Socks: Falke, Boots: Abra

“Sonnenallee” is one of the thirteen tracks in Fucklore, Krista Papista’s new album to be released on July 22, 2022. Its material is the sonic environment of a place at a particular moment: A street in Berlin (Sonnenallee avenue) that is the heart of the city’s Middle Eastern community beating to the sound of dabke music blasted from cars after the Ramadan. Krista Papista lives nearby. She composed the song in response to the street’s soundscape, using fm and analogue synthesizers, asking her friend Kiki Moorse, one of the founding members of Chicks on Speed, to write the lyrics. In the album, the song is part of a musical and conceptual re-interpretation of notions of the folklore. It is also indicative of how the artist works: in relation to places and in defiance of the mainstream, queering traditions and customs, which she seeks to re-invent often in a collaborative spirit. Of “Sonnenallee” Krista Papista says that it functions as a shit-show that mixes Middle Eastern and Greek music (sirtaki most prominently) with contemporary electronic rabbit holes. I relate to what she means, when I play the album in my car driving in Nicosia (Cyprus), testing the way her songs perforate the soundscape of her city of origin. The intentional disharmonic blend of sounds and musical references is dizzying, built on tensions between known folk tunes and the electronic. As for the lyrics, they oscillate between the poetic, the absurd and the sexually explicit, sometimes functioning as reflections on our current moment of (political, financial, cultural, and environmental) collapse, melding the personal with the political. In the album’s track list, a song on five hours of period cramps follows a song on the murders of migrant women by an army officer in Cyprus. Their story is most hauntingly evoked in the album’s cover that pictures the dark red waters of a dam that punctuates the landscape like a gigantic open wound. With this in mind, Fucklore is not just an attempt to re-imagine the possibilities of folk music. It is also a protest against tactics of oppression, discrimination and marginalization that is carried out with forthrightness, unapologetic self-determination and a dildo between the legs.

Polo & Shoes: Abra, Dress: Sportmax, Stockings & Fishnnet: Falke

Dress: Marni, Boots: Stylists own

ELENA PARPA: “Livia, Elena, Maricar, Mary Rose, Sierra, Arian, Asmita” is the song in Fucklore dedicated to the five migrant women and their two daughters, who were brutally murdered in Cyprus in 2019. Can you talk a bit about the reasons you have decided to pay tribute to these women?

KRISTA PAPISTA: I have always felt concerned and disgusted by the racist and inhumane way the Cypriots treat migrant workers. As a white Cypriot girl, it’s not my position to talk for them, but the tragic story of the lives of Livia, Elena, Maricar, Mary Rose, Sierra, Arian, and Asmita should be carved in history. I chose to write songs to pay a tribute to their lives and to declare the anger we have felt for their loss. The album cover is a photo I took of the contaminated orange lake near a mining area in Cyprus, where the women’s bodies were thrown inside suitcases. I invited my friend, artist Alfatih to do an intervention and we created this image which is a precise portrayal, I would say, of the Mediterranean cultural amalgam I grew up in and know.

PARPA: This observation links somewhat to my next question. You live in Berlin but your work is informed by references and ideas drawn from your region of origin, the Mediterranean and Cyprus in particular. In what ways has living in a city like Berlin helped you reconnect with where you come from?

PAPISTA: Reflecting and drawing ideas from my background, or from the culture I grew up in, happens instinctually, then more in depth when I research, speculating on my ideas and concerns. In the process of creating my own narrative through my art and life, examining and re-imagining the history of my culture functions as a spring board for my creative thinking. There are endless issues unresolved in the Mediterranean, in Cyprus especially, and I am here to address them and talk about some of them in my work. At the same time, living in a place like Berlin, I have the luxury to disconnect from my country’s bullshit, exploring my creative, philosophical, psychological, and sexual curiosities. When you have lived away from your country for over a decade as I have, you start to re-imagine it, queer it and take the wisdom, the aesthetics, the philosophies, and the rituals that you think are the ones worth taking and embodying. In the process, you create your own culture, your own religion, your own country. That’s what I’m doing with my work.

Dress & Shoes: Marni, Tights & Fishnet: Falke

PARPA: What do you mean with the term ‘queer’ in this instance? Do you understand it as a strategy, an attitude, or a way of being?

PAPISTA: The way I see it, I am a queer woman, living an openly queer life, and in my work you will see and feel that. It is not a strategy or an attitude. In fact, it’s simply a way of being. 

PARPA: I have connected to Fucklore as an electrifying musical experiment that eclectically mixes electronic soundscapes with hip-hop, post-industrial, psychedelic beats and folk influences from the Balkans, the Mediterranean and the Middle East. I also relate to it as an abrasive statement and a protest against essentialist uses and conceptualizations of the folklore in nationalist projects, especially in places marked by ethno-political division and colonialism, such as Cyprus. How do you hope to remix and re-think the concept of folklore in this album?

PAPISTA: That is a precise description of some of the conceptual intentions behind the album. By naming the album Fucklore, I am declaring a contemporary, more self-aware version of folklore. Fucklore explores sounds from Anatolia, the Middle East and the Balkans, focusing on the harrowing treatment and murder of migrant women in the Mediterranean; the dark and prevalent subject-matter counteracting my reimagining of the traditional folklore of these areas. Fucklore opposes the way that modern nationalist projects made use of notions of the folklore in order to fabricate a romanticized, falsified and cleansed narrative of the nation in patriarchal identitarian terms. Fucklore rejects the implicit nationalist presuppositions that define the study of folklore. It delves, instead, into the pockets of anarchy, mourning and exuberance in traditional styles, sounds and ceremonies that survive on the edge between the existentially worn-out and the ferociously alive. Fucklore channels, collages and queers them, embodying the many voices that are spoken, including a voice that is unmistakably mine.

Dress: Sportmax, Tights & Socks: Falke, Boots: Abra

Catsuit: Alisia Wood, Shoes: Stylist’s own

PARPA: Can you share some insights into your processes of composing? In what kind of atmosphere do you feel most creative? What objects, images and sounds accompany you when putting things together?   

PAPISTA: I have a studio in my home, where I keep the surroundings fairly minimal; there’s just a bunch of equipment, instruments, books and plants. There’s a lot of intensity, chaos, and curiosities during the process of making work, so it helps if my physical, waking surrounding is kind of in order. The process of seeking inspiration is a different story. I have a diary where I write ideas, lyrics, and texts. I also record a lot of melodies I come up with on my phone, and when I begin working, I just start collaging things together for days until I have something.

PARPA: Your albums are accompanied by videos and images, which are distinguished by an energetic, fierce sexuality. Would you say that shock and disruption are tactics you like to apply? 

PAPISTA: Not really, I don’t find my art shocking at all…

PARPA: In the years that I have followed your work, you have experimented across different fields, including music and poetry, the visual and performing arts. How do you identify yourself?

PAPISTA: It’s really not that complicated; I’m an artist. Sometimes I make music, sometimes I draw, sometimes I make visuals, sometimes I perform, sometimes I write, sometimes I do nothing.

Body: Stylists own, Fishnet: Falke, Boots: Balenciaga (Nightboutique Berlin)

Memphy in Paris: An Interview Of Designer Sintra Martins


photography by James Emmerman 
styled by Sintra Martins
makeup by Mical
modeled by Memphis Murphy
interview by Camille Pailler

Sintra Martins may be from Los Angeles, but her designs are quintessentially New York and they are taking the city by storm. The recent Parsons graduate interned for Thom Browne and Wiederhoeft before launching Saint Sintra in 2020, presenting her first collection at NYFW in 2021, and her sophomore FW22 collection was just presented at NYFW earlier this year. In the last two years, her sculptural designs have walked the line between costume and ready-to-wear with S-curved horsehair filaments, sheer maxi skirts, colored feathers, English shetland tweeds, sparkles and bows, and so much more. Not only has she established herself as a master of disparate materials who takes inspiration from far and wide, but her designs have become instant favorites to everyone from Olivia Rodrigo, to Sydney Sweeney, Willow, Cali Uchis, and Kim Petras. We asked Martins to style model Memphis Murphy for a special editorial and sat down to ask the emerging designer a few questions about her process.

CAMILLE PAILLER: Can you talk about the way that you incorporate absurdism in your design?

SINTRA MARTINS: Absurdism is really at the core of the brand’s identity. It starts on the boards, collaging imagery until I recognize traces of the dissonance that arises when I lose track of what I’m trying to say. I think the best work exists just beyond the edge of familiarity, like a cartoon cliffhanger. 

PAILLER: You went to Florence and fell in love with the city. How did this experience influence your latest collection?

MARTINS: Florence is heaven on Earth, a Disneyland for Renaissance art history nerds, and home to some of the most incredible artisans in the world.

Our FW22 collection was more directly inspired by armor, I’m really interested in the engineering of articulation, and how a material so rigid and inflexible as metal can take on the human form in all its complexities. It was also fascinating to see the legacy of the Medici family in person. I’m really interested in the idea of feudalism as it mirrors to our current political landscape, and how beautiful it can look despite all its humanitarian shortcomings.

So often I ask myself, what is the purpose and meaning of fashion? I think Europe has a rich cultural and anthropological legacy of fashion, which is evident in their culture in a way that I really admire and value. Spending a few weeks in Paris and then Florence was a refreshing reminder of the importance of fashion in a cultural sense, not just as a niche hobby, or content fodder as it can sometimes feel here in New York.

PAILLER: You worked in the Parsons archives. I’m curious if you have a favorite period in fashion history?

MARTINS: Favorite questions are so hard. There’s something nostalgic about anything that was ever fashionable. I do love to see exposed stitches on an antique garment, it’s a beautiful reminder of the labor and love that went into making it. If I had to choose I’d say the transitional period between what’s considered Edwardian and Deco, though I’m not sure it has a name.

PAILLER: You're fresh out of school and have hit the ground running. Who influenced you most as a designer while you were in school?

MARTINS: I take inspiration from some cliché amalgamation of McQueen, Galliano, Marc Jacobs, Westwood, and more contemporary designers that have managed to break through the post-graduate slump. 

PAILLER: The beaded dress Memphy is wearing has a very precise cut and ornamentation. Can you tell me more about the manufacturing process and the reference for this dress?

MARTINS: The Memphy dress was inspired by a Cardin carwash dress I saw in a vintage shop, and I thought how cool would this be if it were sparkly? Ultimately it looked horrible, and I had to scramble to fix it, so I decided to sew the strips into tubes, and my assistant and I played around with it until it didn’t look so horrible. Ultimately I think it came out much better than I’d imagined, but totally different. Like I mentioned earlier, innovation is just outside the comfort zone.

PAILLER: Can you tell us anything about what to expect from the upcoming collection?

SINTRA: No! Top secret.

Transmundane Economies: An Interview Of Theodoulos Polyviou By Carlos Kong

 
 

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

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

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

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


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

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

 
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

FORDJOUR Because they’re limiting? 

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

 

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

 

FORDJOUR This is how you approach… 

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

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

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

 

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

 

FORDJOUR Very much in materiality and the haptic, right? 

DYSON The haptic, yes. 

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

DYSON And pushing against fascism. 

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

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

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

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

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

TORKWASE DYSON Could you talk about your upcoming show? 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

Embodied Resonance: An Interview Of Pop Sensation Mandy Harris Williams

 
 


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

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

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

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

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

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

BOWIE: That's true.

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

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

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

BOWIE: Interesting. Wow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BOWIE: Sure. Who's mining the aluminum?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tactile With The World: An Interview of Photographer & Filmmaker Lewis Khan

 
 


interview by Lara Monro
photographs by Lewis Khan

British Photographer and filmmaker, Lewis Khan, uses London as one of his many creative resources. The city has great sentimental importance to the native South Londoner, who has lived on Bonnington Square for most of his life. Tucked away behind the traffic of Vauxhall, the square is one of 300+ housing cooperatives in London, owned and run by its tenants. It has a unique and fascinating history that owes much to the squatters who moved in during the ‘80s as a preventative measure to avoid demolition of the residential buildings. The community set up a whole foods shop and vegetarian café, which is still there to this day. 

Unsurprisingly, Khan draws much influence from the solid foundations of his local community. As a result, his interests focus heavily on the study of emotions, relationships and belonging. Working with stills and moving image, his achievements include Theatre, a photo series documenting the realities of medical professionals over a period of four years at the Chelsea & Westminster Hospital and West Middlesex Hospital in London and It’ll Soon Be Nighttime (2021). This filmic work focuses on a long-standing friendship with the 58-year-old George, who Khan met at the age of fifteen. 

Khan adopts the collaborative and inclusive mentality of Bonnington Square within his creative practice, which prompts a personal and insightful approach to his work. He spoke with Autre to discuss why he is drawn to photography and film, his recent trip to the States, and why he enjoys finding beauty in the small things. 

LARA MONRO: Can you tell me a bit about your creative practice and your journey with it? When did it begin?

LEWIS KHAN: I’m a photographic artist from south London. I work with stills and moving image, and my work is a  study of emotion, relationships, and belonging. I’m interested in the experiences that the pursuit of taking pictures opens up, particularly portraits. Taking photos for me is a way of being tactile with the world. I enjoy finding beauty in the overlooked, and using the medium as a means to form connections with people and places.  

What do you seek to uncover through your work and what are some of your biggest achievements to date?

There have been some amazing milestones for sure; early on having my graduate work Georgetown exhibited at the Photographers Gallery, having Theatre published as a limited-edition photo book in 2020, being represented by At Trayler. But to be honest, I’m just so grateful that I get to do something I love full time. I realized it the first few shoots back after everything had been off for so long with the pandemic. I’d never taken a moment to pause before then. I guess l was always wrapped up in trying to do this, and that, and the next thing.

MONRO: London is one of your most important creative resources. What is it about the city that  you find so intriguing/inspiring? 

KHAN: London is home, it’s where I grew up and have always lived. I feel like a product of it and that doesn’t feel like a negative thing. I see it as a foundational place, a base. Familiar and well trodden.

MONRO: Can you tell me about your community in Bonnington Square and what it means to you? 

KHAN: Bonnington Square is a deeply special place to me. It’s an ex-squatting, now housing co-operative, community in Vauxhall in South London. It’s where I grew up along with a lot of my closest friends.  What’s really amazing is that because of the housing co-operative we’re all still able to live there as adults. Everyone moves houses around the street quite a bit and a lot of our parents still live there. A lot of our generation are there too, and now even some of our generation have kids, so there is the next generation living on the Square. Everyone knows everyone on the street, it’s kind of village life. Eastenders tucked away next to the massive traffic junction in zone 1 London. I feel really lucky to have grown up in that environment, the sense of community, wider family. Growing up here definitely shaped my outlook on things.

MONRO: You have worked with film when documenting your community of friends and family. Your most recent work: It’ll Soon Be Night Time, follows one specific character, George. Can you  tell me about him and your relationship? 

KHAN: George was someone I met as a teenager, after he moved into a flat on Bonnington Square. It’s a super social street, everyone knows each other, and there always used to be a big bunch of us out skateboarding, playing football in the road, hanging out smoking on the benches, etc. George used to blast music and sing, walk with his radio and flags, so it didn’t take long before he got to know everyone.  

As we got more acquainted we would chat in the street, and George would often talk with heart about his past. Certain names and places would come up again and again, and I started noticing those same names written on lamp posts and pavements around the area too. I didn’t really understand George’s story in full, but I felt the emotional weight of what he was telling me.  

In 2013, I made a short film entitled Georgetown about him. The process ended up being a way for me to better understand George’s story more substantially. The act of “doing the film” gave license for us both to speak on things more deeply, and reason to spend extended periods of time hanging out. This is a good example of what I meant by the experiences that the pursuit of taking pictures opens up.

Since making Georgetown, George and myself have remained close. We see each other a lot and speak often on the phone. During the various Covid-19 lockdowns and being isolated indoors, we were speaking on the phone a lot, and I started to see a specialness in the ordinary chit chat of the phone calls I hadn’t noticed before. I bought a recording device for my phone and started to record the calls we were having. I liked that the words were now tangible things, not lost to the air. I think because we were all living so isolated from one another, the value in these fairly ordinary exchanges felt increased. I didn’t see George much over that period but heard his voice a lot and  started to find our phone call space unique. These recordings then became the motivation and the basis for the video piece It’ll Soon Be Night Time. 

screen capture from It’ll Soon Be Night Time by Lewis Khan

MONRO: What have you found most informative about working with film and photography? 

KHAN: Probably the number of different experiences, places, people, settings that I’ve had time with through film and photography. It’s a privileged position of getting to live all these different snippets of different ways of life.  

MONRO: Why do you think you are drawn to film and photography as your main mediums? 

KHAN: I enjoy their foundation in the real world, and how they enable me to have a specific type of interaction with people and my environment.

MONRO: You are currently travelling around New Mexico. Can you tell me about the trip and what you hope to gain from it? 

KHAN: Yeah that’s right, I’m out here at the moment. The reasons for coming here were a mixture of things. For the last couple of years I’ve been working on projects where I’m either exploring something personal or I’m working with someone, or a place that is close to me emotionally. This was in part due to the pandemic; that much more isolated life caused me to focus on making work that was more introspective. My practice is largely documentary-based so the work needs to be "of" something. Sometimes with an idea or concept that isn’t immediately so straightforward to represent through documentary photography or video, that figuring out process can be quite lengthy and at times I can get quite bogged down mentally. Having finished those pieces of work I found myself needing a switch up in process, a palette cleanser to cut through some of that previous mental clogginess. I wanted some time to travel, which is  something I haven’t done since pre-pandemic, just some focused time to make work in an intuitive way. I’ve always been fascinated by the desert, the plants and the tufts that grow there, the concept of an ‘oasis’ I find interesting. How humans are interacting with that terrain I also find interesting. These points along with my overarching interests in belonging and human experience made me take this trip.

MONRO: What is next for you? Do you have anything in the pipeline, any creative goals? 

KHAN: One of the pieces of work mentioned above I’m yet to put out, It’ll Soon Be Night Time. It’s a video piece made of phone recordings between me and George during the pandemic and then video  footage mainly of times before that when we were going places and doing things, Vauxhall/ Bonnington Square and people-focused mainly. It’s a very personal piece of work so it’s always interesting to see how that will be received, but I'm really looking forward to giving it an audience.

Rave Review Is Diversifying The Metaverse With Upcycled Digital Cryptopanties

In 2017, Beckmans College of Design graduates Josephine Bergqvist and Livia Schück realized that they shared the same interest in sustainable fashion and thus was born their Stockholm-based label, Rave Review. After qualifying as a semifinalist for the LVMH Prize at Paris Fashion Week, receiving the Rising Star Prize by the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Stockholm Prize by Nöjesguiden, the Bernadotte Art Award, and participating in the Gucci Film Festival, the label has established itself as a tour de force among a new crop of designers perfecting the art of transforming home textiles into desirable garments. Autre spoke with the vanguard design duo about their innovative design process, the role of digital fashion, and promoting sustainability on the blockchain.

AUTRE: What’s your personal favorite type of underwear?

LIVIA: I’ve been wearing tangs since I was thirteen years old. That’s what’s comfortable for me.

JOSEPHINE: Tangs and pushup bras were the thing until I was around seventeen, then all of my friends and I changed to soft bras and hipster panties. I’m not sure why it happened. Nowadays I wear all types.

AUTRE: How can brands and customers benefit from the digital fashion movement and how can digital fashion liberate itself from anthropomorphism?

RAVE REVIEW: We believe fashion is about more than just physical garments worn by humans. It’s not limited to just clothes. It’s about creating worlds where people want to belong. We live in an age when the digital and physical worlds are merged. We see so many possibilities with combining tech and fashion that goes well beyond creating NTFs. There’s many digital layers to fashion.

 

Livia Schück (left), Josephine Bergqvist (right). Photograph courtesy of Rave Review.

 

AUTRE: Why do you use CGIs as NFTs instead of trading physical garments as NFTs via ETH(etherium)?

RAVE REVIEW: We liked the concept of creating CGIs from something physical. The panties were first made in our studio from upcycled materials. From there, the materials were scanned and the whole panty generated. One of the ideas with the NFT drop is for us to enter the digital space, and hopefully in the future we can use the panties for something else, on avatars, in games, or whatever this bespoke “metaverse” will bring. We would never consider releasing anything on ETH for environmental reasons.

AUTRE: Since cryptocurrency is responsible for huge amounts of emissions, what alternatives are you approaching to offset the carbon footprint?

RAVE REVIEW: We have been curious about creating NFTs for a while, but have been waiting for a more sustainable and resource-efficient way of doing it. Our NFT is on the Solana blockchain. A Solana transaction takes the same amount of energy as two Google searches. The main reason for us to enter the digital world is the possibility of making even more sustainable fashion — to combine working with vintage/deadstock fabrics and digital garments. Producing digital garments requires less dead energy and transportation than physical garments. A lot of people these days are only dressing up for Instagram. Why not use a digital garment, then?

AUTRE: What are you most excited about life right now?

RAVE REVIEW: This NFT project, of course! No, that’s just one of many very exciting things happening. Josephine will get married this summer. We will very soon release a new collection and website that we’re very proud of.

AUTRE: Three key words about your upcoming collection?

RAVE REVIEW: Rave, punk, fun.

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

interview by Oliver Kupper
portrait by Summer Bowie

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

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

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

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

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

OLIVER KUPPER And your father collected outsider art? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JIM HEDGES: Thousands. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ayako Rokkaku: The Spirit Of The Artist

 
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do contemporary Japanese artists think of Los Angeles? 

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

Nocturnal Pilgrimage: An Interview of Designer Luca Magliano

 
 

interview by Janna Shaw
photographs by Pavel Golik

I once dreamt of Luca Magliano. I had no idea what he looked like; he appeared veiled but in no way sinister. In one of Magliano’s earlier video presentations, a poem is recited, a sonnet with lines dedicated to each garment displayed.

“Out of Saint Teresa of Avila’s Chanel coat I stole one dollar to gift to my golden Wagner jacket.” After this display of romance, I wandered about my own closet, singing praises sweetly and theatrically to my own favorite pieces. Something poignant to this act. 

Luca Magliano’s self-titled fashion brand is described as “Quintessentially Italian” and “An Emotional Anthropology”. Since its establishment in 2016, the brand’s collections have unfolded as a personal reflection of the vast imagination of Magliano, who derives inspiration from the works of artists and filmmakers such as Luchino Visconti, as well as his own emotions, encounters, curiosities, and experiences. We spoke with the emerging designer about his FW 22/23 collection and his celebration of solitude and melancholia. We speak about his love for Italy and my love for Italians, we discuss sleep and what follows it. We don’t talk much about clothes. We decide to let those speak for themselves. 

JANNA SHAW: I'd like to start this off right by jumping straight into your zodiac sign. What is it and what does it say about you?

LUCA MAGLIANO: Capricorn, a goat with the tail of a fish, equally attracted by altitude and abyss. Totally me.

SHAW: Your current F/W 22 collection was staged with beds: dark, lonely, quiet. It seems you derive inspiration from the subconscious state. Has the course of your life thus far been fairly solitary and shadowy, or is this a newfound stage of life that you’re exploring?

MAGLIANO: Melancholy has been a good half of my nature since forever, now I feel some kind of urge to celebrate it. These last years I have experienced a very precise kind of loneliness that could be contained only in a sort of perpetual nocturnal pilgrimage. That’s something I wanted to talk about in this show, because I think it’s something that affects many people. Someone said that the clothes in this show have a sort of curative action on those who wear them, as to protect them from a curse. I think this is very true. Design has to do with method, Magliano’s method is analogical.

 
 

SHAW: Do you have a bedtime routine? What about morning?

MAGLIANO: I love the moment when I go to bed and I hate to wake up in the morning. Every awakening is long and traumatic, while falling asleep is sweet and immediate. The first thing that I do in the morning is light up a cigarette, I know it’s gross. At night in bed, I usually read, sometimes a lot, sometimes a few words. I force myself not to look at the time because it stresses me out. If falling asleep becomes hard because there is something that scares me about the day after, I listen to audio books: someone reading to you is the most beautiful thing.

SHAW: When I mention ‘fantasy,’ where do your thoughts first go?

MAGLIANO: Sex.

SHAW: You are very proud of your Italian heritage, and find great inspiration from Italy (specifically your hometown of Bologna) for your collections. I dated an Italian from neighboring Modena. Best lover of my life and the greatest taste in food. What parts of being Italian really resonate with you? Does this shift with time? What is your favorite Italian dish?

MAGLIANO: When I was younger I would have done anything not to belong where I was. Part of that feeling came from curiosity for sure, but part of it was because I was in a big hurry to flee from unfinished business. My love for Italy has matured over time, and simultaneously with my love for myself, for my family, and its roots. The thing that I love the most about being Italian is the sense of exaggeration which is the quintessence of the anti-bourgeois ethos. My favorite Italian dish is cinema. Of course food is good but cinema is better. In Bologna every summer there is this incredible open air cinema that gives great classics and beautiful new d’essay releases, and it’s free for everyone. It’s always packed. While I’m writing this, I’m grieving the loss of the most brilliant Italian actress ever, Monica Vitti.

SHAW: What books and artworks are you currently diving into? Feel free to include any other things that have been sparking your delight as well.

MAGLIANO: Near to The Wild Heart and Agua Viva by Clarice Lispector, The Faggots And Their Friend Between The Revolution by Larry Mitchell. An essay by the Bolognese intellectual and activist Helena Velena called “Dal Cybercex Al Transgender”.

SHAW: What are you like in love? Dare I ask how you are in heartache?

MAGLIANO: Joyfully spiteful in the first case, silently edgy in the latter.

 
 

SHAW: Shapes or fabrics?

MAGLIANO: There is no shape without fabric, so I would say the latter. But nudity is the best because it does not involve any of those heavy burdens.

SHAW: Pragmatism or romance?

MAGLIANO: Either, as long as it is heroic and driven by bravery.

SHAW: Favorite flower?

MAGLIANO: Poppy.

SHAW: What is the last thing you were gifted?

MAGLIANO: A little bag made out of can tabs.

SHAW: What was your last handwritten note?

MAGLIANO: “Ricorda di chiedere scusa a Rafa” (Remember to apologize to Rafa).

SHAW: May I be so bold as to request a line of poetry? It can be your own, or a line that sticks in your mind.

MAGLIANO: I choose this one by Sandro Penna, an extraordinary poet and gay hero:

Io vivere vorrei addormentato

entro il dolce rumore della vita.

( I would like to live asleep

within the sweet noise of life. )

Unique To The Unison: An Interview Of Entrepreneur & Taboo Founder Kenny Eshinlokun

 

Photograph by Agustín Farías

 

In the fall of 2020, Kenny Eshinlokun launched her creative agency, Taboo, to create world class projects that transcend audiences and industry borders. After working for a decade in the marketing and music industries, she saw the need for artists to build meaningful, long-term partnerships with brands that truly care about their creative endeavors. Through Taboo, she has built a global cohort of creatives and brands that are committed to giving back to their communities and building relationships that are rooted in genuinely shared visions. Autre caught up with the Eshinlokun to talk about the inspiration for starting her own agency, the meaning of true inclusivity, and the future of Taboo.

AUTRE: What was the creative scene like for you growing up in London—how did you connect to the subculture? 

KENNY ESHINLOKUN: My background in London lay heavily in the music industry. The industry is really hard to break into but once you’re in, you’re pretty much in, and I quickly found the industry super small. My connection to subculture and my career had always been separate when I was young, I had a lot of friends who studied fashion and knew a few people working at Supreme and Lazy Oaf during their rise, which was really interesting to watch. 

Generally, street style was always extremely special in London and encompassed influences from all over the world, which also meant influences from many subcultures, like grime, the rave kids, skaters, punks, b-boys. I myself used to dance, which was a scene that had so many layers, and I loved being a part of this bubble the most. Dancers are the funniest, most energetic and craziest people you'll ever meet. It's a scene that really made me understand what community and second family was and really drove my connection to music through movement.

AUTRE: What kind of music did you listen to growing up? 

ESHINLOKUN: As a kid I listened to a lot of R&B, hip hop, and pop music sprinkled with the tiniest bit of emo, punk rock, and as I got into my teenage years I discovered classical, house, and techno music. Mainly because singing along to Destiny’s Child whilst studying for my exams was too distracting, so I needed music without too many lyrics.

AUTRE: What made you want to start your own agency? 

ESHINLOKUN: I mainly started because I couldn't find a job in the role that I wanted and a good friend of mine, Peter, who had started several companies himself, encouraged me to go for it. I wanted to create a space for people in the industry who looked like me and cater for an audience that was more inclusive.

AUTRE: What is Taboo? Can you describe the agency and what its core objectives are? 

ESHINLOKUN: Taboo is a brand-partnerships company that has a soul, I guess. We try to add meaning to everything we do and pride ourselves on the relationships we keep with not only our artists, but also the individual's who work for each of the brands with which we partner. We want to create bespoke, authentic partnerships that go a little further and give back to the community in some way, small or big. We want to provide opportunities for musicians to express themselves and share who they are. We want to encourage brands to see artists as more than just a face, and for musicians to see the brand as more than just a dollar sign. We want to create long-lasting partnerships that turn into strong relationships.

AUTRE: What does true inclusivity mean to you—is there something the media or people are missing in their message of bringing disparate communities together? 

ESHINLOKUN: Inclusivity means making things accessible for everyone, regardless of whether they’re in the audience or not. You never know who might be a part of your audience, so accounting for everyone is true inclusivity to me.

AUTRE: In an age of multiple virus variants and lockdowns, can you talk a little bit about the challenges of bringing a community together during a time of social distancing? 

ESHINLOKUN: It’s been very hard, since at Taboo we love a good party ,and have tried to bring together many parts of our community to celebrate and enjoy each other's company, but lockdown really hinders this.

AUTRE: What does subculture mean in a time when everything is on Instagram and TikTok—can a subculture thrive in a digitized, globalized world? 

ESHINLOKUN: Subcultures to me can not truly exist in a digital sphere and thus the most amazing thing is to experience them in real life…

AUTRE: What does the word ally mean to you—how do we develop meaningful allyships in an age of wild division? 

ESHINLOKUN: An Ally is someone who has your back when no one is looking.

AUTRE: What kind of brands or partnerships are you looking for—is there a magic word that they usually say where you know that they are the right partner? 

ESHINLOKUN: Partnerships that leave an imprint of unison, something that really feels like both parties sprinkled some of themselves and it couldn't be replicated by anyone else as it's completely unique to the unison.

AUTRE: Where do we go from here—what are your grand plans for Taboo? 

ESHINLOKUN: I want to do more clothing/fashion collaborations. In general, those are the most interesting for me and hopefully Taboo as a brand can also develop some collab rotations of its own.

AUTRE: As a leader in the community, do you have advice for those who want to take charge and help amplify voices? 

ESHINLOKUN: Make sure you know why you are speaking up, as when people try to put you down, you'll be able to brush it off because you know, at the very least, you truly believe in what you are saying.

Follow Taboo on Instagram to learn more.

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


interview by Janna Shaw
photographs courtesy the artist


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SHAW: What else are you painting these days?

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Drowning In Black Gold: An Interview of Evita Manji

 

shirt: Sportmax
top: Matoguo
glasses: Gentle Monster
necklace: Chanel via Vestiaire Collective

 

interview by Caroline Whiteley
photography by Matias Alfonzo  
styling by Camille Pailler 
set design by Matt Bianchi 
casting by Alter Casting 
hair by Tina Pachta 
makeup by Nikolas Paroutis 
nails by Camilla Inge

Evita Manji is an Athens-based artist and vocalist who implements their carefully constructed practice of sound design into live shows and productions. In addition to founding the independent music label, myxoxym, they have collaborated with numerous artists across various media. Their most recent release is a compilation of international artists with all proceeds going to ANIMA, a non-profit association active in the field of natural environment, with its main activity being the nursing and rehabilitation of wild animals in their natural environment. One of their more recent singles, OIL/TOO MUCH addresses the toxic effects of crude oil extraction on the planet and all its inhabitants as well as the exploitation of its laborers. A process akin to drowning and being burned alive simultaneously.

CAROLINE WHITELY: You are primarily known as an artist and vocalist, but what are some of your other chosen mediums?

EVITA MANJI: I'm doing 3D and graphic design on the side, and I really enjoy making bags and clothes. I generally love experimenting with all kinds of mediums and acquiring new skills. My latest obsession has been crocheting.

hoodie and jumper: Givenchy
leggings: After Work Studio
shoes: Abra

cap: Givenchy
shirt: Valentino
glasses: Gentle Monster

full look: Prada
hat: Evita Manji
earrings: Panconesi

WHITELEY: You designed the cover for BABYNYMPH and BAYLI's Clown Shit cover. How important is collaboration in your practice?

MANJI: Even though collaborating with others is not very easy for me, I really love doing it when it's with the right people and our visions complement each other.

WHITELEY: Why did you decide to start your label myxoxym?

MANJI: I started myxoxym because releasing my music through my own label and having total control over it made the most sense to me. It is incredible how accessible and easy it is to publish your own music nowadays, but it's not something that works for everyone! I'm not reluctant to release projects on another label in the future, maybe when a good opportunity comes my way, but I don't see myself compromising on my music and following instructions on how my music should be. Apart from releasing my own music, I wanted to use myxoxym in meaningful ways and support environmental causes that I felt didn't receive enough attention.

WHITELEY: What motivated you to put your charity compilation together?

MANJI: I was in Athens last summer during the wildfires, and the atmosphere was simply unbearable. There were ashes in the air for days, the sky was red because of the fires, and you just couldn't breathe. We weren't even allowed to leave our houses for days because of the toxic air condition. The devastation I felt inspired me to write my song “EYES/NOT ENOUGH”, and that's when we started putting togetherPLASMODIUM I. I always cared about animals the most and during the fires in Greece, I felt like it was the right time to start putting myxoxym's first charity compilation together to support the affected wildlife.

 

hat: Evita Manji
t-shirt & socks: Motoguo
skirt: Givenchy
shoes: Moon Boot

 

LEFT
necklace: Tétier Bijoux
dress: Yulia Kjellson

RIGHT
hat: stylist’s own
necklace: Bimbo y Lola
knit vest & skirt: Valentino
tights: Givenchy
shoes: CAMPERLAB

 

WHITELEY: You’re based in Athens. What would you say are some of the biggest challenges in the city's creative scene?

MANJI: There are certainly issues that artists are facing in the local scene. I would say the main ones are, first and foremost, a lack of interest and support from the government and the inability of the scene to sustain itself financially, which is also a result of the economy.

WHITELEY: Last year, you performed alongside Eartheater at Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center and Boiler Room. Would you say there's been an increased interest in the young underground scene in Athens at the moment?

MANJI: I don't consider myself an underground artist, and I believe none of my peers does, either. It's just the natural way things happen. You start small, and increasingly, people get to know and appreciate your work, and you end up playing bigger shows.

earrings: Panconesi
t-shirt: Christian Dior via Vestiaire Collective
denim: Richert Beil
shoes & bag: Abra

WHITELEY: Who are some local artists you're digging right now that should deserve more attention?

MANJI: My favourite ones are ice_eyes, (their sound design is just incredible), and of course, my extremely talented friends XOT33, BABYNYMPH, Raed Raees and FlokosH.

Temporal Vertigo: An Interview Of Nicolas G. Miller

 

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

 

interview by Isabelle Albuquerque
photographs by ofstudio photography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

ALBUQUERQUE: AHHHHHHH Cannot wait for her.

Thought Girl Winter: An Interview Of Nada Alic


interview by Annabel Graham
portraits by Paige Strabala


I first met Nada Alic in the fall of 2019, in New York, at a literary reading held at the Nolita headquarters of a women’s sleepwear brand. The small storefront was packed, and readers perched on the edge of a gigantic feather bed in the center of the room. Most of the guests were there to see a certain Instagram poet with an especially rabid fan base—I witnessed actual tears of joy when said poet opened her mouth—but it was Alic who captured my attention. Radiating her trademark blend of confidence, self-deprecation, and deadpan humor, she read from a short story in progress. In it, an anxious, painfully cerebral young woman questions “this whole business of being alive,” pursues an obsessive friendship with a woman named Mona, and considers the pros and cons of lightly grazing her hand across a stranger’s penis. At a cocktail party with her husband’s business associates, Alic’s narrator muses: “They all looked so vulnerable, so up for grabs; concealed only by a thin layer of fabric. I imagined them as windchimes waiting to be struck. The impulse wasn’t sexual, it was destructive. I just stood there, not touching anyone’s penis, quietly frightened by who I was and what I was capable of.” Suffice it to say that I was riveted.

Alic and I struck up a conversation after the reading, exchanged email addresses, and made loose plans to get together for a coffee next time I was in Los Angeles, where she lives. What followed almost immediately was a global pandemic, a government-imposed lockdown, and a 19th-century sort of pen-pal correspondence conducted over the entire year of 2020. Alic’s emails are just as surprising and enjoyable as her short fiction—witty, dark, vulnerable, sharp-edged; weird in all the best ways. The story she read that night in New York (featuring the penis-windchime simile that’s eternally burned into my brain) is now entitled “My New Life”—this past year, it was published in the literary journal No Tokens, where I serve as fiction editor. You can read it here.

2021 was a landmark year for Alic—she married her partner (Ryan Hahn, of the indie band Local Natives), and sold her short story collection, Bad Thoughts, to Knopf, in a two-book deal (her second book, a novel, is slated for release in 2023). The title Bad Thoughts stems from the eponymous Instagram series Alic created in 2020 during quarantine, wherein she posted bimonthly lists of Tweet-like aphorisms that were at once wildly humorous, razor-sharp, and deeply relatable. The stories in the collection—which will be published in July 2022—are brash and heady, breaking established rules of narrative and form. Like the Instagram series, they’re also delightfully funny. In one, the spirit of an unborn child hovers over the bodies of its future parents, willing them to copulate and bring it into embodied existence. In another, a woman’s musician boyfriend goes on tour, leaving her alone in their home for the first time ever; she proceeds to question all of her life choices and tumble down a frighteningly familiar Internet rabbit hole; chaos and body dysmorphia ensue. Alic is well-versed in the awkward, writing into our most neurotic, shameful habits and thought patterns with an unparalleled acuity.

For Autre, I sat down with Alic in her Mount Washington living room to talk about the holiness of humor, becoming an artist with no formal training, and the archetype of the eternal child-god. We’re real-life friends now—a true privilege!—but sometimes I miss our extremely long emails.  

ANNABEL GRAHAM: What was your path to becoming a writer?

NADA ALIC: I came up in the 2008ish blogging era; a famously naïve and earnest era of the internet that had yet to be colonized by brands and pathological cynicism. I wrote about music, mostly. I loved music in such a pure and unselfconscious way. I had no ambition to become a writer; I just wanted to support my friends, go to shows, be in that world. Writing was my way in. It wasn’t until my late twenties that I started writing fiction. I would send short stories to my friend Andrea [Nakhla, who is a painter and illustrator], and she would visually interpret them with paintings and drawings, and we made zines together, for fun. Making zines feels incredibly wholesome and old-timey now—I recently had the humbling experience of explaining what a zine was to a 22-year-old. I continued writing short stories from then on, but I never thought of myself as a Writer, and didn’t until about five minutes ago. This was due to my core wound of not having an MFA and never once having lived in New York. I tried compensating for this by reading Twitter, submitting to literary mags, and attending a writing workshop in abandoned strip mall in North Hollywood. Each experience was like passing a test, and I’d emerge with a tiny crumb of belief in myself. 

The paradigm shift towards becoming a writer was very slow; it was largely internal, but also required some external factors to align: getting an artist visa, saving up money, quitting my job, getting my own health insurance, finding freelance work to support me through the transition. Just a lot of boring, admin stuff. I felt like I had so much to prove. I still do. But the benefit of feeling like an outsider in the literary world is that it motivated me to work really hard. I felt like there was so much I didn’t know, so I had to seriously commit to the work and forge my own path in the absence of any formal infrastructure or connections or community.

GRAHAM: Did you read a lot as a kid? 

ALIC: I enjoyed reading as a kid, but I didn’t grow up in a super intellectual environment. My parents were working class Croatian immigrants; they didn’t have the time for literature and art. That’s not to say they weren’t smart; they were and are far more competent than me in almost every way; they can build a house from scratch, hunt and prepare meat, keep children alive, etc. They could easily survive the apocalypse, whereas I will die within hours of losing my contacts. What they did give me was lots of free time to play, imagine, dance, terrorize my sister, etc. I didn’t start reading for pleasure until my early twenties; mostly just books I’d find in thrift stores. I remember performatively reading guys like Steinbeck, Bukowski and David Foster Wallace because pretentious boys in beanies kept referencing them. It wasn’t until I discovered contemporary fiction writers like Sheila Heti and Tao Lin that I realized what writing could be. Those writers made writing feel accessible and real and exciting to me.     

GRAHAM: How are you finding the process of working on a novel? What are you encountering that’s more or less challenging than writing short stories?

ALIC: The story for the novel came to me fully-formed. I felt like I had to pay attention to it, because none of my short stories had come out that way. Writing the story collection was like feeling my way around in the dark. In a lot of ways, I was learning how to write through the process of writing the collection. I didn’t really have a plan or a vision other than “keep going” and “don’t be bad.” My biggest challenge has been sustaining the potency of the short story within a longer form. I don’t want to lose that; I still want every moment to feel funny and alive.

GRAHAM: How do ideas for stories usually come to you? Do you start with a particular element? An image, question, atmosphere, or character?

ALIC: I keep a notes document for random thoughts, ideas, dreams, etc. Often it’ll be about a humiliating or painful encounter that I’ve either observed or experienced, and I’ll want to diffuse it of its power over me. Then I’ll take that idea and stretch it out beyond its limits into absurdity. Like with “The Intruder,” for example, that came from a real experience I had mistaking a friend’s boyfriend for an intruder breaking into my apartment. I was really tired and overworked and somehow forgot I had [house]guests. I woke up in the middle of the night and saw a dark shadowy figure and panicked. I basically jumped out of bed and tried to defend myself before realizing what was happening. It was one of the most embarrassing experiences of my life. In the story, the protagonist doubles down on her paranoia and submits to the fantasy that someone really is out there, watching her, waiting. Submitting to her delusions paradoxically gives her some semblance of control. Most of my characters suffer from some form of delusional thinking, and there’s a lot of humor in that. Humor is a useful device for confronting and overcoming shame, which is my life’s purpose.   

GRAHAM: What’s your writing process like? Do you have any routines?

ALIC: I sort of cringe when people talk about their process as if they’re the ultimate authority on it. I remember early on, after I quit my job and committed myself to writing full time, I read a lot about what other people had to say about their creative processes and it really affected me. It just set me up to fail. It was a lot of like, “I wake up at 5am and write till noon, then I eat a cracker and stretch and keep writing till dinner…” I’m very suspicious of that kind of self-mythologizing. Most people who say they write every day are full of shit. Even if they do, who cares? Keep it to yourself! Stop bullying us! Process has very little to do with good art. Reading about how prolific a writer is has never once compelled me to write. I don’t know, maybe it helps other people? 

I still don’t really have a routine. I make space for solitude and work every day, but sometimes life gets in the way and I try to forgive myself. The hardest thing for me was unlearning a lot of capitalist programming that had been burned into my brain from years of working in the corporate world. I had to learn to be okay with “wasting time” and letting go of my obsession with productivity. I’m very slow and inconsistent, but I also have this very dogged, Slavic commitment to the work in a bigger, cosmic sense. I feel like larger forces are at work, guiding me. Or haunting me, actually. I can’t really explain it.  

GRAHAM: You write about the Internet a lot, and you started an Instagram series entitled Bad Thoughts. What’s your relationship to the Internet like?

ALIC: The internet is so seductive and shiny and infinite, so I have to take mini-breaks or block certain sites for a while in order to spiritually recalibrate. Sometimes I really do confuse it for reality and forget that I’m located in space and time, contained inside a body, etc. That’s when I need to just get up and pee and go for a little human walk outside, feel my blood move. 

For Bad Thoughts (the Instagram series), I just had a lot of fear and I wanted to get over myself. When you’re working on something in private for a long time, it can start to feel too precious. I needed to break the spell and stop overthinking it. I just started sharing random thoughts that came to me in a quick and unpolished way. I knew I was going to feel embarrassed, but that was the point. I comforted myself by thinking, whatever, this isn’t my real work. But once I started doing it, it was like this portal opened up in my mind and ideas started pouring in. Not to be a witch or whatever, but I do feel like I was tapping into a spiritual plane through my subconscious mind. It was an interesting experiment. But like with anything, once I started taking it too seriously, or cared too much about what people thought, I knew I had to stop because I didn’t want it to become another “thing” that I did. The ego will identify with anything, even if that thing is meant to set you free. It’s like what Ram Dass says: “all methods are traps.” I might do it again when I’m a little more enlightened, who knows. 

GRAHAM: What do you like, or not like, about living in Los Angeles as a writer and artist?

ALIC: I worked really hard to be able to move to LA and stay here, so I have this immigrant humility and gratitude that colors my entire experience of being here. Even my worst days offer this consolation of, “at least I’m in Los Angeles.” When you grow up in Canada, America is this mythic place that only celebrities and millionaires can move to. You’d take a day trip to Niagara Falls and be like, wow, I’m in America. It’s been eight years and I’m still walking around like, wow, I’m in America! So cool! Figuring out how to live here on my own gave me the confidence to pursue bigger things.

Most of my friends [here] are musicians and visual artists, and being surrounded by them helped accelerate my own creative ambitions. There was a safety to not being in the [center of the] literary world, too. I didn’t know any other writers, so I could just do my own thing. I had the freedom to experiment [with writing] without the pressure of turning it into a career. Writing professionally hadn’t even occurred to me; I was still driving three hours a day to and from my shitty office job and writing on the weekends. I think if I lived in New York, I would have been too affected by the competitive energy. Whenever I’m there I feel exhausted and out of place and I don’t know what anyone is talking about. I need to go home and sit in a dark room alone for a while to recover.

GRAHAM: Since the pandemic, my reading habits have changed so much—I have a much shorter attention span and much less patience, and I won’t stick with something for more than about fifty pages if I don’t find it compelling. I’ve found it a bit more difficult during this time to find books that grip me throughout, but yours did. It is literary and cerebral, but it’s also incredibly fun, and funny, and uplifting, which feels like the best kind of medicine right now.

ALIC: Thank you so much. I try not to ever take myself too seriously, and I knew I wanted to write something light and fun and enjoyable. A lot of people conflate Serious Art with trauma and darkness, and there is a lot of great art that emerges from pain, but humor and silliness feel just as holy to me. Life can be so brutal, and humor can really soften the blow. I can see how it can be a defense mechanism too—my inability to be purely earnest without adding a little wink to everything. I admire people who have to courage to write honestly about their lives. I know some people say art is not entertainment, but I really tried to entertain. I really considered the reader’s experience, and I wanted it to be joyful.    

GRAHAM: Would you say there’s an idea or theme that’s emerged in your work, or something you keep circling around?

ALIC: Broadly speaking, Bad Thoughts deals with women who are sort of stagnating at the precipice of a threshold, stuck in their own thoughts, feeling estranged from themselves and the world. I recently read this book called Puer Aeternus (Latin for “eternal child-god) by the Jungian analyst Marie-Louise von Franz, who coined the term “Peter Pan Syndrome.” She mostly writes about men, but briefly mentions the female version of this archetype, which is called a “Puella.” These women resist crossing over various thresholds to adulthood, namely the more heteronormative milestones of marriage and motherhood. This represents a bigger resistance to confronting their own mortality. Especially with motherhood, which is the ultimate death for a Puella. As much as it is expansive and generative, it reduces a woman to her earthbound body. Her body undergoes a transformation, and she emerges changed. She becomes a new person with a new life. But who will she become? What is that life? I’m not making any moral judgements for or against, I’m more exploring the anxiety that comes with this human experience. 

That anxiety has been amplified by the fact that we now conduct a large part of our lives online, on screens—it allows for this more disembodied experience of reality. We can happily live in the domain of the mind and of our online personas. There are many valid reasons for feeling stunted, or even disenchanted with the prospect of “growing up.” There’s a pervasive nihilism and hopelessness [when it comes to thinking about] the future; [sometimes even] an inability to imagine a future. I think a lot of people assume that only men grapple with [this], and women are just waiting around for them to get their shit together and give them a baby—but women struggle, too. Taking anything from the realm of the imagination or spirit into the material world is scary and limiting—like putting out a book. It’s a kind of baby. I can’t control what will become of it, and maybe that’ll be good for me. 

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.

COCOBUNNY Founder Renée Parkhurst Shoots Petite Meller and Talks Bucket Hats

 
 

Photography Renée Parkhurst
Talent Petite Meller
Interview Oliver Kupper

OLIVER KUPPER Your main gig is photography, so naturally you spend a lot of time around stylists and the fashion world. How long have you been thinking about starting your own accessories brand?

RENÉE PARKHURST The idea for launching a brand has been cultivating in my mind for quite a while now. During the slowed down pace of 2020, the brand came into view as a high end bucket hat collection.  With photography as my main gig over the past eleven years, I have been helping build other brands, magazines, and everything in between—so to use that knowledge and experience towards my own project has been so incredibly fascinating and really so much fun. All the tools being right in front of me and having the downtime during lockdown seemed the best time to put my head down and focus on COCOBUNNY. 

KUPPER There is a long tradition of hat makers in fashion, why did you gravitate to making hats and who are some of your favorite milliners or hat makers?

PARKHURST I feel that hats are such a versatile and expressive aspect of style, and I’d realized that the bucket hat specifically has such an underutilized youthful and wistful silhouette that could also be worn up in a stylistic evening wear setting as well, the missing ingredients were singularity of design and the highest grade materials. Of course, almost every high end label has a high quality bucket hat, but I saw a wide open space in the market to focus primarily on these beloved pieces. I beyond love what Philip Treacy created with Alexander McQueen, all of those runway pieces blow my mind.

KUPPER The bucket hat is such a staple of 90s and 2000s fashion, what about the aesthetics and style of that era inspire you?

PARKHURST Those decades are without a doubt my go to. My first fondest memories are the early 90s era and my early teens in the 2000s.  

KUPPER Where did you grow up and who were your earliest style inspirations? 

PARKHURST I was born in LA and grew up in San Clemente.  I think growing up in the midst of MTV music video culture really inspired me. Taking in daily at a young age what musicians of that era were wearing had a longstanding impression. 

KUPPER What was the material sourcing like, you use materials like silk and faux fur, can you talk a little bit about the journey of crafting the perfect bucket hat.

PARKHURST Right now we have two faux fur pieces, two leather pieces, and two cotton pieces. Using the absolute top quality materials is extremely important and is what defines the brand, it puts it at the highest caliber. Our plush faux furs are from Italy, our leathers are the highest quality and texture, our cotton is all domestically grown, and all the bucket hats are lined with 100% black charmeuse.  We’ve created immaculate sizing, and having the highest quality on top of that really makes it the perfect bucket hat. 

KUPPER Where did the name of the brand come from?

PARKHURST COCOBUNNY came from a nickname of mine. 

KUPPER One of the great things about bucket hats is their universality and democratic power. Who did you see wearing your hats and do you see them paired with a more relaxed look, formal look, or both? 

PARKHURST Absolutely, I’ve seen from older men, women to children styling a bucket hat. I’m always noticing anyone in public with one on and it’s incredible to pay attention to this in every city. Anyone and everyone with a strong sense of identity I’d love to see in COCOBUNNY, wearing it in their own individual way. It can be completely styled into a relaxed look as it naturally has been, but I really envisioned it as a formal evening wear accessory, being an elevated key element of the look. 

KUPPER Can you talk about the seasonality of the hats, will there be a seasonal collection cycle or will you make drops when you are ready to release a new collection? 

PARKHURST  I really opted out of the idea of seasonal collections from the beginning with COCOBUNNY. The pieces to me are timeless, and are in no way following trend patterns or seasons. Especially living in a place that has no change in seasons, I’ve forgotten what that concept is. Kidding, but I think it’s more valuable in my mind to keep them all as one ongoing archive. Aligned with the modality of music releases, I launched the brand with a small capsule collection of six similar to an “EP,” will continue to release “singles,” and then will later follow with a larger collection “LP.” I’m really allowing a no rules kind of approach to it all. 

KUPPER What does fall 2021 hold for Cocobunny?

PARKHURST Currently I’m working on new designs at the moment that I’m extremely excited about. I’ve got a list of incredible talent I’ll be shooting in the meantime, and planning a few pop ups in LA and looking at Paris and Mexico City as well. 

KUPPER What is your ultimate advice for young people to break into photography or to start their own brand? 

PARKHURST To just start with any means that you’re able to, and don’t ever compare your work with anyone else’s. Avoid trends and create these things with the intention of something to keep for you, your story.  Authenticity in it all will let it blossom. 

CLICK HERE TO SHOP COCOBUNNY

Photography Renée Parkhurst
Talent Petite Meller
Stylist - Shalev Lavan
Hair - Virginie Pineda
Make Up - Gabrielle Alvarez
Production - Eyal Wand

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)