Signifiers of Embodiment: An Interview of Charlotte Edey

 
 


text by Lara Monro
portrait by Brynley Odu Davies


Charlotte Edey is a London-based visual artist who adopts a multidisciplinary practice as a form of personal and political expression. Drawing on a multitude of themes, her work addresses notions of femininity, gender, body politic and mythology. Edey’s tapestry, embroidery and sculptural pieces are extensions of her drawing practice, and her distinct artistic language focuses heavily on symbolism and the investigation of space. Recognized for their surreal dreamscapes and pastel palette, she employs a recurring water motif that takes inspiration from Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” which serves as an investigation of ‘hydrofemininity,’ and the belief that our bodies are fundamentally part of the natural world.  

Edey’s newest body of work, Framework, is currently on view at Ginny on Frederick. In this exhibition, a dialogue between each piece has been created by the artist as she examines various ways to blur the boundary between the real and the represented through the motif of the window and frame. Using these as a point of departure, she explores the notion of transparency to identify and differentiate between interior and exterior, public and private. Her intricately detailed—hand sewn and beaded—tapestry works and larger mirrored pieces are symbolic gateways that gently interrogate interior space, identity, and observation. We spoke on the occasion of Framework’s opening to discuss her development in recent years, as well as her interest in the symbolic interplay between windows, frames, and eyes. 

LARA MONRO: You attended The Drawing Year at the Royal Drawing School from 2021-2022. How instrumental do you think this period was for your development as an artist? 

CHARLOTTE EDEY: Interestingly, I feel like The Drawing Year allowed me to really consider the relationship between drawing and embroidery in my work. Alternating between observational drawing classes and textiles, I was considering the role of mark-making in embroidery. Satin-stitch embroidery has such a direct relationship to hatching and even blending; layering colors to create tone. Similarly, beading feels like a stippling process. Forging this relationship has made me more ambitious with my embroidery and the works really feel like they now inform the other. 

I was studying during the Covid-19 lockdowns, and I think the restrictions of that time leant a real introspection to my experience. I had some wonderful teachers who really pushed me to contextualize my instincts in drawing. I started working primarily in soft pastel as I’m interested in a sort of unnatural light, and pastel is such a generous medium for a glow. As a lot of my subjects are anthropomorphic, I find an uncanny luminosity lends a kind of autonomy, or agency, to subjects that aren’t always explicitly figurative. 

Installation photography by Stephen James. Courtesy the artist and Ginny on Frederick.

MONRO: You have started to work in very interesting ways with frames; both bespoke and found (often antique). Can you tell me about this new artistic line of inquiry?

EDEY: There are recurring motifs in my work of mirrors and windows as portals to these imagined landscapes. The first bespoke frames were made on The Great Women Artists residency curated by Katy Hessel at Palazzo Monti in 2019; a series of tapestries exploring the transcendent image that referenced the altarpieces in the Baroque churches of Brescia. 

I feel like these methods of display provide an immediate context to the works they house by employing the pre-existing narratives of these objects. I really enjoy the collaborative nature of working with found objects. They are their own archetypes which deeply inform the textiles and drawings, and they imbue them with a sense of both location and time. 

MONRO: Your upcoming show at Ginny on Frederick is titled Framework. Can you talk about the importance/relevance of the frames within the context of the exhibition? 

EDEY: I was interested in interrogating the role that framing plays in my practice for this show. Consequently, Framework takes the motif of the window as the point of departure for a series of works exploring the potency of the window as a symbolic portal. The motif of the window by virtue of its transparency, its flat dimensionality and its frame, is predestined like few other motifs for fundamental reflection on the image and the process of seeing.

Installation photography by Stephen James. Courtesy the artist and Ginny on Frederick.

There’s a passage in Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City[: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone] I often revisit where she states that “windows are thought to be analogous to eyes, as both etymology (wind-eye) and function suggests.” This symbolic interplay between windows, frames and eyes seems the perfect avenue through which to create works that explore interior space and identity.

MONRO: It seems you are beginning to adopt a more immersive approach in the way you exhibit your work. Take the window pieces in Framework, for example, which feel more like installations. Is this something you are looking to explore further? 

EDEY: The process of seeing is so integral to the visual symbolism of the window, it felt essential that the works reflect each other, creating an exchange of looking within the space. I was conscious too of responding to the ceramic tiles of Ginny on Frederick. The framework of the grid forms the underlying structure of both the tapestries themselves and of the panel sash windows that house the drawings. The grids recurring and reflecting throughout the show feels immersive and deeply specific to this space.

MONRO: For Framework you have created beautiful woven jacquard tapestries which you have hand sewn with intricate pearls and glass beads. Can you tell me about this process and where your inspiration came from? 

EDEY: I was considering the role of glass within a window frame. In lieu of a sheet of glass, I wanted to cover the surface of the tapestry in a layer of glass through extensive hand-beading, akin to rainwater on glass panes. There are well over ten thousand beads across the tapestries! The beading is most dense in the highlights, with opalescent, transparent and pure white beads and irregular freshwater pearls creating a luster that echoes the bright light of the drawings. I really enjoyed working into the folds with metallic blacks and dark greens, so even the shadows glimmer. 

The exhibition is accompanied by the most magical original text ‘Soft Pastoral’ by poet Ella Frears, which opens with the line: “The beads collected on the surface like condensation.” The connection she draws between the beading and beads of sweat adds a bodily dimension to the works that I just adore. 

MONRO: You are using the tapestry works to examine the window as the point of intersection between interior and exterior space. Can you tell me more about this?

EDEY: Deleuze discusses the transparency of the window as enforcing “a two-way model of visuality: by framing a private view outward—the 'picture' window—and by framing a public view inward—the 'display' window.” The works in the show are divided by these two realms of public and private, exterior and interior. 

The embroidered tapestry works navigate a controlled visibility. In these intimate ‘display windows,’ the curtains are drawn to the public stage, blurring the interior. The glass beads and freshwater pearls cover the surface, further obfuscating the act of seeing. Conversely, the idea of transparency and observation permeates the drawings in the show. Through the corporeal ‘picture windows,’ the sexual symbolism of spatial openings is explored. Signifiers of embodiment—eyes, mouths, loose sheets—wink and whisper across the anthropomorphic landscapes.

MONRO: Where will you be exhibiting next and do you have any plans to make new work? 

EDEY: I will be exhibiting a new series of works alongside Gal Schindler and Alexandra Metcalfe with Ginny on Frederick at NADA, New York in May. After that, I’m very excited to be working towards a two-person exhibition with Azadeh Elmizadeh at Seaview in Los Angeles and an exhibition with Eigen+Art Lab in Berlin later this year.

Framework is on view through April 22 @ Ginny on Frederick 91-93 Charterhouse St, Barbican, London

Installation photography by Stephen James. Courtesy the artist and Ginny on Frederick.

Skunk Hour: Nikki’s Maloof’s New Paintings Are An Existential Crisis On Canvas

Portrait of Nikki Maloof with Dog Roses (2023). Photographer: Guillaume Ziccarelli. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.

interview by Oliver Kupper

Nikki Maloof’s domestic tableaux are startling and at the same time humorous reminders of our own existence. Bright, prismatic, dreamlike, her paintings grapple with unexpectedness—freeze-frames before the tragicomedy unfolds. Fragments of a scream before a murder. A foot descending a staircase, a hawk’s talons moments from clutching a dove, a hand behind a curtain. The uncanniness is haunting and visceral. Maloof’s current exhibition, Skunk Hour, now on view at Perrotin gallery in New York until April 15th, explores a new suite of paintings, many of which feature culinary activity in the home, the title of which is borrowed from a Robert Lowell poem of the same name. “I myself am hell;” he writes, “nobody’s here— / only skunks, that search / in the moonlight for a bite to eat.” The following is a short excerpt from an interview that will be published in Autre’s Spring/Summer 2023 issue. 

OLIVER KUPPER: Where are you based these days?

NIKKI MALOOF: I live in Western Mass[achusetts]. My husband is from this area originally, and we would visit a lot when we were still living in the city. About six years ago, we decided to move. So, this is where we live. 

KUPPER: I love that area. It has a weird, mystical quality.

MALOOF: Very hippie-dominated, kind of arty. But also, the colleges bring a lot of young people, so it's a cool place.

KUPPER: I want to start with your chosen medium, which is still life. I'm curious what first attracted you to the medium? 

MALOOF: Well, I went to Indiana University, and it's a very traditional painting school. So, I really learned how to paint from painting still lifes. When you paint something from life, you turn off your brain and you're just doing it. It’s something I would pepper in with other things that I was doing in the past that had more to do with my imagination, and it's just always been there. But, when it came to this body of work, I retreated more into the home as a setting. I started wanting to treat the spaces in a home like a character and not necessarily paint the people that inhabit them. That lended itself to looking to the objects that we surround ourselves with for ways of conveying meaning. I'm very attracted to houses and the things that we compile. I'm always following a little trail of crumbs and one painting will lead to the next. It started off with animals, but then it slowly became about our interaction with the domestic space. 

KUPPER: I think of the Dutch still life painters and how portraiture completely started dropping out of those paintings in this really surreal way. 

MALOOF: For a long time, that kind of painting would not have been the thing that I related to as a more developed painter. As a young painter, I would always walk past those paintings, and it's been an interesting challenge to try and make a still life catch your attention or convey emotion because they're sort of inert.

KUPPER: Even though those paintings are about objects, each object has this deeply spiritual quality. 

MALOOF: When I started to look deeper at those works, I became aware of a whole language that is lost at first when you just think, oh, like fruit, whatever. I find that really intriguing—that there’s little messages all the time.

Nikki Maloof, Skunk Hour, 2022.
Oil on linen, 74 x 114 inch.
Photograph: Guillaume Ziccarelli.
Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.

KUPPER: Seafood became part of those Dutch still lifes because of their connection to water. In your work, there are also some symbolic notions of seafood. Can you talk a little bit about the symbolism in your work and about some of the different objects that reoccur?

MALOOF: Painting things like seafood began years ago when I was painting a lot of domestic animals—trying to make stand-ins for us. I was thinking about the way that we interact with animals on an everyday basis. One of the biggest ways we interact with animals is by eating them. It's this relationship where we tend to look away really quickly because it can be a weird reckoning, especially when you look at the industry of it. So, I was thinking I should enter the kitchen because that's where we actually interact with animals. I thought it might be a challenge to make a fish seem emotive, and I wanted to borrow from the realm of the Dutch fish paintings, but make it my own by breathing some weird life into them. Fish are such a strange thing, because we don’t feel much for them. Fish ar strange because we feel almost nothing for them, but then they look so alive compared to any other thing that we come in contact with. There's a dark humor there—something that’s kind of ridiculous about it all. Also, painting fish and food is extremely delightful, and I think if something seems weirdly fun, there’s usually some reason that you need to go there. If the desire is there, I usually follow it, and then see if it has any repercussions.

KUPPER: There's also this humorous, dark side to a lot of the work. During the pandemic, and also during the Plague, painting started to become very dark and strange, and people started dealing with their emotions in different ways.

MALOOF: Yeah, I'm really attracted to anything that is on the line. All artforms that are one foot in lightness, one foot in darkness are really intriguing. I feel like that's what it is to be alive. Ideally, you want to be on the light side, but that's an almost impossible place to remain. Being a human, there’s too many factors to grapple with. So, that tone really makes sense to me.

KUPPER: The title of your new show, Skunk Hour, was inspired by a Robert Lowell poem. It’s interesting to hear about an artist’s inspirations outside of painting.

MALOOF: I've been really interested in poetry since grad school. I look to it for answers in a way that I can't with painting. A poem conveys meaning without telling you exactly what the answer is and I found it very freeing when I realized that you don't have to explain everything—that the artwork takes on a life of its own. I like that Robert Lowell poem because you're basically following him as he drives around his town and notices things. He's describing it and slowly coming to terms with his own mind. It goes from being somewhat light to this intense, dark place. And when you're in a space that's so familiar to you, like your home or your neighborhood, those things do occasionally hit you. That’s the whole point of the show: the realization that there's moments in our everyday lives that are so intense, and we notice them, but they’re always in the background, and then we have to move on. Skunk Hour is like nighttime, when we're alone with our thoughts. It’s about the way that we deal with existential experiences in everyday life.

Nikki Maloof, The Cherry Tree,
2022. Oil on linen, 64 x 48 inch.
Photograph: Guillaume Ziccarelli.
Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.

A Family Gallery: An Interview Of Sow and Tailor's Karen Galloway

 
 

text by Oliver Misraje
portrait by Enio Hernandez

Important things to note about Karen Galloway in no particular order:  Karen is an Aries-Taurus cusp, the name of her gallery, Sow and Tailor, is a zeugma for the space’s origins as a sweatshop in South Central Los Angeles, and, if given the choice of which animal she’d be reincarnated into, she’d choose a cat (her husband and frequent collaborator Greg Ito says he’d be a beaver). 

Sow and Tailor is situated next to a tunnel, under a freeway on Grand Street.  It has elements reminiscent of the urban fantasy genre: It’s a tiny, practically invisible nook, that intermittently  lights up with art and its patrons, both from the neighboring community and art world Westsiders willing to venture east of Western Avenue. Karen’s description of Sow and Tailor as her “little speakeasy” is apt. Greg Ito, has a studio conjoined to the building next door. Their physical proximity reflects a professional dynamic shared between the two: they work and live together, often advising one another, while still possessing firm boundaries between her work and his practice. 

But the naming is more than just a play on words, Sow and Tailor is an ethos firmly posited in nurturing— both as an abstract, moral concept, and a practical strategy towards community and its cultivation.  Take, for example, the gallery’s  trajectory— Karen was seven months pregnant with her daughter Spring when she decided to quit her job as a producer for a notoriously exploitative fast-fashion company: “I had been on set for a shoot with a high-profile rapper since 6 am, while obviously pregnant. I was in pain and still expected to perform manual labor. There was this total disregard for my condition, and after being asked to stay past 2 am, I decided I had enough.” The conception of both her daughter and her gallery were unintentionally, yet symbolically in conjunction with one-another. Karen gave birth to Spring on February 2nd, 2021. Two  months later, Sow and Tailor opened its doors for its inaugural show, Hot Concrete: L.A. Arrangement.

Although initially an outsider to the art-world, Karen credits her mother with nurturing a passion for curation: “I grew up in Pasadena. We were always ballin’ on a budget, but she was a patron for all things culture, especially free, public events, whether that be classical music concerts or Shakespeare in the park. Our mailboxes were constantly stuffed with mail from museums’ or other public works, she knew how to scout out an event.” 

Jaime Muñoz installation

This is all to say Sow and Tailor, as Karen puts it, is “a family affair”, more explicitly expressed in their last show Friends and Family 23’, curated by her nephew, Cairo Pertum.  Karen tells me the concept for the gallery was inspired by Japanese bonsai trees, which translated, means “planted in a container”. At the heart of Sow and Tailor is the question: how can the limitations of physical space help cultivate a flourishing tree? A concept, carried out magnificently, in the ways the gallery, despite its nook-like arrangement, manages to feel more cavernous than its 700 square footing. 

Since its humble beginnings, Sow and Tailor has rapidly cemented itself as a hotspot for emerging artists, receiving institutional recognition usually reserved for legacy galleries—Sow and Tailor is one of the youngest galleries to be accepted into the Armory Collection. But as the gallery continues to grow, its ethos remains firmly planted. Instagram clout doesn’t operate as a currency here, with many of the featured artists being fresh in the embryonic stages of their career. Karen, afterall, is a risk-taker. It takes a certain gusto to abandon your comfy, if ennui-ridden life as a producer to enter the gallery game, just as it takes a bravado to invest in young artists who’ve yet to establish a name for themselves.  

Karen and her gallery tend to keep a busy docket, starting with a solo show featuring the works of Kayla Witt from February 11th until March 25th. Sow and Tailor has also been invited to host a solo presentation of Veronica Fernandez at Frieze LA next week, along with a group booth at Felix, featuring both new and old faces. The gallery will also be holding an off-site curation at the Soho House in West Hollywood for Black History Month, highlighting L.A.’s legacy of African American art.

While the accomplishments, past and future, of Sow and Tailor reflect its growing branches, the roots remain firmly planted. 

Karen Galloway and Greg Ito’s daughter Spring

Wish You Were Here: An Interview of Heather Agyepong on Her Exhibition at the Centre for British Photography

 

The Body Remembers, Le Cake-Walk, Wish You Were Here, 2020 © Heather Agyepong

 

interview by Lara Monro
self-portraits by Heather Agyepong

On Thursday 26 January The Centre for British Photography will open for the first time. Founded by the gallerist and philanthropist, James Hyman, the charitable organization will present free, self-generated exhibitions as well as those led by independent curators and organizations championing the work of British photographers. 

Hyman explains: “We hope that through this initial showcase to make a home for British photography we can, in the long run, develop an independent centre that is self-sustaining with a dedicated National Collection and public program.”

There will be two leading exhibitions, organized in partnership with Fast Forward Photography. Headstrong: Women and Empowerment celebrates photographers based in Britain who have made work concerned with how they are represented, what they are dealing with in their everyday lives and what it means to embrace diversities that challenge the conservative order of a patriarchal society. And, Images of the English at Home takes the viewer on a journey from the street, up the front steps, and into the private spaces of the living room, kitchen and bedroom before sending them out into the back garden. 

Alongside the exhibitions, The Centre will spotlight five British photographers as part of an In Focus display; Natasha Caruana, Jo Spence, Andrew Bruce, Anna Fox and Heather Agyepong. 

Autre’s London editor-at-large, Lara Monro, spoke with the multidisciplinary artist, Heather Agyepong, to discuss her body of work, Wish You Were Here. Commissioned by The Hyman Collection in 2019, the series explores the work of Aida Overton Walker, the celebrated African American vaudeville performer who challenged the rigid and problematic narratives of Black performers. 

LARA MONRO: Wish You Were Here pays homage to the work of Aida Overton Walker who was known as the Queen of the Cake-Walk. How and when did you first come across Walker’s work, and can you tell me more about the Cake-Walk?

HEATHER AGYEPONG: I came across the word Cake-Walk in a script I was reading, googled it, and saw a video of this dance with Black performers doing this high-kicked, structured dance but later found out that it was originally to mock slave owners. I thought to myself, there is a project there. A few weeks later, James Hyman wanted to meet to commission me for some work and proceeded to pour out these postcards of cake walk dancers! Some of the depictions were beautiful but a lot were racist and pretty disgusting. We later discovered someone called Aida Overton Walker who reimagined the dance and was celebrated as a Black, female performer who reclaimed the dance and filled it with grace, preciousness, and technicality. She was my anchor into the work, the woman I felt was calling out to me at the time to reclaim and take space.

Anne Mae,  Le Cake-Walk, Wish You Were Here, 2020 © Heather Agyepong

MONRO: Your images are layered with symbolism to illicit a conversation about the boundaries of how we see ourselves both in real and imagined realities. Can you tell me more about this and your specific use of symbolism?

AGYEPONG: A lot of the work is centered around pop culture references, memes, gifs and song lyrics very much present within the Black diasporic experience. For example, the triptych Anne Mae is a reference to the gif of Annalise Keating (played by Viola Davis) where she left a disrespectful conversation by rolling her eyes and taking her bag. For me especially as an actor, seeing a dark-skinned, Black woman know her worth and saying “No” unapologetically felt like something I wanted to channel for myself. The themes of the work focus on ownership, giving oneself grace and acknowledging the challenges of navigating creative spaces as a Black art maker. 

MONRO: As well as concepts of ownership and entitlement, the series explores mental wellbeing. Can you talk me through how you explored these themes through your images?

AGYEPONG: At the time of making the work, I was feeling a little lost and overwhelmed. My first major photographic series did really well (Too Many Blackamoors) but I kept being told to make work about race in a particular way. I was thinking two things: how do I make this career sustainable and survive? but how do I also retain my integrity and my intentions of making work to better understand myself? Overton Walker was the light at that moment; someone who survived and made a mark in an incredibly hostile environment where only limited embodiments of Black bodies were allowed on stage. She subverted, agitated, and pushed the boundaries of her limitations. Without figures like her, I wouldn't be where I am now. So, to honor that, I better damn well use my will as freely as possible.

 

Caucasian Chalk Circle, Le Cake-Walk, Wish You Were Here, 2020 © Heather Agyepong

 

Teresa Baker Weaves Visual Autofiction with Willow, Yarn & AstroTurf

Teresa Baker at Fogo Island Arts Studio, Newfoundland. Photograph by Joshua Jensen, courtesy the artist and de boer, Los Angeles.

interview by Summer Bowie

Raised nomadically along the Northern Plains of the United States, artist Teresa Baker spent her childhood shrouded in tribal storytelling. Although, it wasn’t until recently that she realized how thoroughly steeped her visual work had become in all of these inherited allegories. Working with a wide range of materials, both organic and inorganic, she weaves the fiction and nonfiction of her heritage to create works that reflect the complex nature of American tradition. Referencing artists of the abstract expressionist, cubist, and postminimalist movements in harmony with the topographical territories and utilitarian objects employed by the Indigenous nations who inform her practice, Baker imbues her works with an autonomy that allows them to be singular and timeless. In anticipation of her solo exhibition with de boer, Los Angeles at NADA Miami, I spoke with the artist about her unusual path into artmaking, the influence of her wide-reaching travels abroad, and the delicate balance of becoming a mother while the demand for her work has skyrocketed. 

SUMMER BOWIE: You are from the Mandan & Hidatsa tribes of North Dakota and grew up traveling throughout the national parks of the Northern Plains. How did you come to have such an unusual childhood and how did it inform your work?

TERESA BAKER: My father worked for the National Park Service, and while he held various positions over his thirty-six years there, he held the title of Superintendent when I was growing up. He was Superintendent of Little Bighorn Battlefield, Chickasaw National Recreation Area, Corps of discovery II, and Mt. Rushmore. His mission as the first American Indian Superintendent of a National Park was to bring the Native side of the story back to the parks where he worked—through public programs as well as by making permanent changes to the exhibitions within the parks. He involved the local tribes from wherever we lived. Spending my childhood not only in nature but also in sacred and historical sites, looking at educational exhibits, and listening to storytelling—this all had a major impact on my art and myself.

BOWIE: You grew up with a lot of oral storytelling. Do you see your work as a form of storytelling? 

BAKER: Only recently did I begin to see my work as a form of storytelling. For so long, I thought because my work is abstract, non-linear, non-narrative then it couldn’t be storytelling. But over the last few years, I have come to understand that my work is actually a form of storytelling on a few different levels: formally, in the way shapes, color, and textures work together to create their own language and relationships; and personally, because of my history with place and memory, and how the materials I use represent culture both traditional and contemporary. 

BOWIE: When did you realize that you wanted to go to art school and what made you choose Fordham and then later California College of the Arts for your MFA? 

BAKER: I had no idea I wanted to be an artist when I went to Fordham for undergrad. At the time, my biggest mission was to just get to NYC, and out of Nebraska where I went to high school. It wasn’t until I took an art class in college that something clicked. I then took advantage of an opportunity to study abroad at Gerrit Rietveld Acadamie in Amsterdam, which really solidified my interest in art. Once I returned to Fordham I changed my major to art and ended up working with incredible professors who both challenged and supported my work. After living in NYC for about four years after undergrad, I decided I needed a “proper” art school. As great as Fordham was, it was not an art school, and I wanted to take advantage of the time, facilities, and relationships that art schools offered. I also knew I did not want to stay on the east coast or apply to an east coast MFA program—so I found CCA. I was drawn to its interdisciplinary approach—an approach that resonated with my interests and practice. It ended up being a great experience and time for me and my practice. 

BOWIE: You work a lot with AstroTurf, which references grass and you create shapes that reference both hides and territories. Can you talk a little bit about your use of reference?

BAKER: For a long time, I initially talked publicly only about the formal aspects of my work, but my work has always been so personal to me. The intentions I put into it have always been hopeful, sentimental, searching, and referential. I have found that even though I have an intuitive practice, at the end of the day, I am aiming to capture the place/places where I am from. The lands where I am from and the materials I use represent so much: culture, politics, environment, relationships, and spirituality. 

BOWIE: Your work is very concerned with autonomy and power. How can a work be autonomous and what gives it power?

BAKER: For me, autonomy comes in the form of letting each piece find its own shape and take on its own compositional strategies that may not be directly referenced in the work that comes before or after it. While I stick to the same materials, and they all have the same feeling and certainly are related, I also have a hard time making the same shape over and over. If I do that, it starts to feel like a prescription, and the object doesn’t get to be singular. I can only hope the work has power—that’s the ultimate goal, and part of what keeps me making. I think power comes from a particular balance of maker and materials. And power for me is tied to what is visceral, non-static, and alive. 

 

Baker Basket, 2022
Courtesy the Artist & de boer, Los Angeles
Photograph: Jacob Phillip

 

BOWIE: A few years ago you ventured into freestanding sculpture with your woven willow baskets. Can you talk about ‘burden baskets’ and the role they play in Hidatsa culture?

BAKER: I don’t make traditional burden baskets, but they are certainly the inspiration for the baskets I make now. Burden baskets are used in various ceremonial ways, one of which surrounds harvest, specifically corn ceremonies. Another role they play in our tribe is utilitarian—for hauling produce to and from our gardens. The Mandan and Hidatsa had villages on the upper Missouri River in what is now North Dakota, and we had vast gardens, so the burden baskets made by and used by the women were important within daily and spiritual contexts. 

BOWIE: You’ve also considered exploring some of the clay pottery techniques that are traditional to your Mandan/Hidatsa culture. Is that something you’ve been working on?

BAKER: Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to investigate that yet—it’s a project that is still waiting. 

BOWIE: Your work has taken you all over the United States. You went from the Great Plains to New York, Texas, and California. However, in 2007, you were awarded the Susan Lipani Travel Grant, which brought you to Berlin and more recently you finished a residency at Fogo Island. How have your experiences outside of the United States informed your practice?

BAKER: They have strengthened my attachment and commitment to home, to memory, and to understanding my ties to place and community. I love to travel and explore, but I also recognize the impact of the expanse of the Northern Plains landscape—it’s a vast, quiet, and grounding place that gives a lot. My travels have all been for different reasons, and come at different points in my life. Being in residence on Fogo Island, NL for three months last summer was incredible. The island is beautiful, and living surrounded by water is not something I am used to. At the same time, in its expansiveness and movement, the sea shares a lot in common with the prairie, so I love to be an observer of that. And I love to be an observer of a new place and see how it makes its way into my work. Because my practice is largely intuitive, sometimes I don’t see how the new places come into the work until after I am done working. Oftentimes, the places stay with me for many years. 

BOWIE: You’ll be hosting a talk at NADA Miami this year to discuss how you combine modern aesthetics and materials with natural ones to create abstracted landscapes. Can you tell us how you discovered this process?

BAKER: Many years of playing with formal investigations of paint and various materials has led me to this point. I’ve delved into a variety of materials in the past ten years—like polyurethane foam, felt, wood, canvas and vinyl—always searching for the right one that would be my ground, structure, and support. I accidentally happened upon a piece of bright blue AstroTurf in Beaumont, TX while looking for other supplies, and that was the beginning of working with this unexpected material that checked all the boxes of what I was looking for, but then it also nods towards some of the larger concepts I have always been concerned with—such as land, culture, natural and artificial worlds, and fragility.

BOWIE: Can you talk about the body of work you will be presenting at your solo exhibition with de boer, Los Angeles for NADA Miami?

BAKER: There are a lot of new moments and investigations in this work, which I am excited about, such as new colors I don’t always work with, like red. I am having a little bit of an obsession with red. On Fogo Island there were a lot of deep oranges and reds in the rocks outside my studio, which led me down that color path. I was able to find a very vibrant, red artificial turf that I then had to contend with, excitingly. I loved the challenge of working with such a loud color. I also began working with a long-haired AstroTurf, which doesn’t interact with yarn in the same way as the shorter-haired version, but I began to cut into it to make marks. There are a lot of new subtleties I played around with, like AstroTurf on AstroTurf, and sewing the same piece of AstroTurf back together in different patterns, against its weave, to alter the background. I also collaborated with a furniture designer in Fogo Island, Cody Ramseyer, to make a table for the fair booth. The shape of the tabletop references a shape found in one of my works, and it’s made out of Ash, a species native to Canada.

BOWIE: Finally, your work has been making major waves in the past two years. You received the Joan Mitchell Fellowship, The Whitney just acquired a large piece, you had a solo exhibition at Scottsdale MoCA, and you have upcoming shows at Ballroom Marfa and the Nerman Museum. Has it been difficult to keep up with the demand?

BAKER: It’s really exciting, I am actually energized by it all, and happy my work gets to have a life outside the studio. The interesting and challenging timing of it is that I am also a new mother, and so everything you mention has coincided with me being pregnant and my first year of motherhood. I have had to be very intentional with my priorities, but I am really fortunate to have a supportive partner who goes all in and takes on the parenting and domestic responsibilities when needed. He values my practice and has an artistic background as well, so that has made all the difference because he understands what goes into art making.

Teresa Baker will be speaking about her practice on December 1 @ 3:30 PM @ NADA Miami where her solo exhibition with de boer, Los Angeles is on view through December 3 @ Ice Palace Studios 1400 North Miami Avenue.

Teresa Baker on Fogo Island, Newfoundland
Photograph by Joshua Jensen, courtesy the artist and de boer, Los Angeles.

A Spirit Of Generosity: An Interview Of Art Mentor Ceri Hand

Ceri Hand, Photo by Lorna Milburn


text by Lara Monro


From running a successful commercial art gallery to becoming Associate Director at Simon Lee Gallery and director of programs at Somerset House Trust, London, Ceri Hand, also known as the Artist Mentor, is championing a more holistic support framework for creative practitioners and professionals through her mentoring and coaching services. 

Lara Monro spoke with Hand about how her own experiences in the arts shaped her approach to mentoring and coaching, and why her upbringing instilled a level of responsibility in championing a more inclusive art world.  

Growing up in the Midlands, Hand was introduced to the importance of social justice and the need to support others from a young age. Her mother established and ran women's refuges and her father taught children with learning disabilities. While Hand came from a multi-racial family who combatted racism by achieving great success in business and embracing family, music and dance, she was confronted by the realities of prejudice from a young age:

As I've got older I've realised just how lucky I was to be influenced by my parents and wider extended family. From a young age there was a sense that it wasn't all about me. We would have people coming to stay all the time; my cousins, women from the refuge and their children, and all sorts of lodgers. It is interesting to reflect on my multicultural upbringing, growing up in the Midlands in the ‘70s, where riots and racism have been well documented. My uncle, who came to the UK from Jamaica when he was a kid, tackled racism by becoming a successful businessman. I was around seven when I fully understood what racism was. I was very lucky with my family, we were never made to feel different from one another. I think this also instilled a level of determination for social justice. Then of course, I began my journey into the arts where the disparities in equality and inclusion became very apparent. 

 

The Ghosts of Songs: A Retrospective of The Black Audio Film Collective, 2007, FACT
Curated by Anjali Sagar and Kodwo Eshun, Commissioned by Ceri Hand
Photo Brian Slater, Courtesy of FACT and the artists

 

After completing an Art Foundation course in Shrewsbury and art college in Bradford, Hand co-ran an artist cooperative called Quebec Street Studios before making her way to London where she secured an internship at Make, the magazine of women’s art. It is here that she met and worked with inspirational women such as Heidi Reitmaier, Althea Greenan and Nicky Hodge who shared her enthusiasm for exciting and diverse content; 

Heidi, the editor of Make was from Canada and really wasn't bogged down by the nonsense of the North/South divide or class systems in the UK. Coming from the Midlands, this meant a lot. The team were also amazing in how they championed women artists, such as Alexis Hunter, Maud Sulter and Sonia Boyce, who at the time had not yet been recognized for their incredible talent. Boyce was the first Black woman to represent Britain at the the Venice Biennale, winning the Golden Lion and she was notably represented by Simon Lee Gallery. 

Hand’s determination to showcase talent more representative of modern Britain continued throughout her roles in both the commercial and public art worlds. In 2007, when working as Director of Exhibitions at FACT Liverpool, Hand commissioned The Otolith Group (Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar) to curate the exhibition THE GHOSTS OF SONGS: A Retrospective on the Black Audio Film Collective 1982 - 1998 (touring to Arnolfini Gallery). Designed by David Adjaye of Adjaye Associates, it was the first retrospective to explore the significance of BAFC’s entire body of work exploring the personal and political in a new kind of international, experimental moving image work. 

The Ghosts of Songs: A Retrospective of The Black Audio Film Collective, 2007, FACT
Curated by Anjali Sagar and Kodwo Eshun, Commissioned by Ceri Hand
Photo Brian Slater, Courtesy of FACT and the artists

That exhibition was one of my proudest moments at FACT. Not only was it the first time the seven-person strong collective were given an institutional show, I  also worked with John Akomfrah, Lina Gopaul, and David Lawson on placing several works in the Tate collection, another first for a Black collective. Managing to bring Liverpool University Press on board as a partner to fund the book Ghosts of Songs, beautifully edited by Kodwo and Anjalika, including essays by Jean Fisher, Kobena Mercer and Okwui Enwezor, was also a huge moment in the realignment of understanding how Black archives were essential to readdressing history. At the time, it didn't seem like a major milestone, it felt like an amazing part of the job, but on reflection it was a big deal.  

Hand’s working relationship with the Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC) didn't end there. In 2019, when director of programs at Somerset House, she commissioned Zak Ové to curate the landmark exhibition Get Up Stand Up Now featuring a showreel of pioneering works by BAFC. The exhibition spanned art, film, photography, music, literature, design and fashion, celebrating fifty years of Black creativity in Britain and beyond. Through cultural exchanges and collaborations across the African diaspora, trailblazing creatives such as Armet Francis, Dennis Bovell, Althea McNish and Horace Ové were acknowledged for their commitment to changing the consciousness of British society. These themes extended out from the galleries into the courtyard, through a stand-out Summer Series of performances and Film 4 Summer Screen line-ups. The exhibition was designed by award-winning Yinka Ilori and Horace Ové received an OBE in 2021, for his contribution to film.

The Ghosts of Songs: A Retrospective of The Black Audio Film Collective, 2007, FACT
Curated by Anjali Sagar and Kodwo Eshun, Commissioned by Ceri Hand
Photo Brian Slater, Courtesy of FACT and the artists

While Hand is grateful for the opportunities she has had to work with inspiring creative agents of change, she is also transparent about her personal battles, including the loss of her father, an uncompromising workload and gender prejudice, all of which over time resulted in serious health issues. After much research and exploration into different therapeutic options, Hand is a fervent champion of seeking out help and support at every stage of our lives, from therapy to coaching:

Back when I was pursuing my career, we dealt with the challenges of a heavy workload and daily casual sexism by working even harder and adopting a mask. I now understand what impact these forms of structural racism, sexism and classism had on me, my friends, peers, and my family. Now, I understand how the body keeps the score. It all makes much more sense. On reflection, I didn't get the support I needed. I would get sick so often; the physical side of my trauma presented itself as glandular fever and chronic fatigue syndrome. 

Navigating her varied roles and personal battles whilst working in the arts, Hand began to recognize the lack of support systems available for creative professionals and artists: 

I’d worked so hard, so relentlessly for so many years, then after a major, life-threatening accident in 2019, I suddenly realized I had been working against my nature and was on top of the wrong mountain. Having an understanding of the amazing jobs that so many commercial galleries do for their artists, combined with the support that public commissioning bodies offer, I had a range and depth of insight into the fundamental support that is missing for so many of us in the creative sector.

Since 2020, Hand has supported thousands of creatives through mentoring and coaching services, her free newsletter, Beat the Block, delivering coaching support direct to people's inboxes, free monthly In Conversation events with established creative professionals and her blog, Elevation, aimed at demystifying the arts and lifting others up.

Fresh Trauma, Ceri Hand Gallery, London, 2013, Co-curated with Rebecca Lennon

In December this year, Hand will launch her new self-study digital course, How to Price and Sell Your Work: 5 steps to successful sales, for artists who want to earn a living doing what they love.

And in January, she will launch a new online coaching program and community platform for mid-career artists. For Hand, it is about creating an ecosystem where she can use her expertise and that of her associates to nurture an international community of artists and creatives who feel fully supported as they navigate their journey, be it for creative or professional development purposes:  

I want to encourage a spirit of generosity to combat the market driven meritocracy. I believe that everybody makes an important contribution, so I want to harness the community we’ve already built and champion a holistic approach to supporting creatives. You don't have to ruin yourself mentally and physically to have a successful career. Shifting how we think of ourselves, what we are capable of, and taking time to zoom out to acknowledge our own needs is necessary. I want to work with individuals to help them think about how we can change thought patterns and form new habits. But ultimately, I believe that creatives make the world a better place. We need them now more than ever to help us come up with creative solutions and to help us find joy along the way.

Ceri Hand, Photo by Lorna Milburn

Daniel Richter: A Very Boring Dream Come True

Daniel Richter
Fun de Siecle
2002
Oil on Canvas
115.75 x 151.18 inches (294 x 384 cm)


interview by Oliver Kupper


Artist Daniel Richter cut his teeth designing music posters and album covers in the antifascist, squatter punk scene of Hamburg in the 1980s and ‘90s. Now based in Berlin, the spirit of rebellion is wielded by the knife blade of his paintbrush in works that cross violently across the threshold between abstraction and figuration. With inspiration from early French symbolists, his work holds a mirror to a society pervaded by chaos and perversity. His show, Limbo, which coincides with the 59th Biennale di Venezia, was presented in a palazzo where a Catholic brotherhood once provided spiritual benediction to those sentenced to brutal public executions. Today marks the opening of his solo exhibition, Furor II, at Regen Projects in Los Angeles. We caught up with Richter while he was on vacation in Trieste, Italy where an oligarch’s seized Philippe Starck-designed superyacht was moored just outside his hotel window. 

OLIVER KUPPER: As someone who grew up in a Germany divided by communism and capitalism, can you talk a little bit about this and how it influenced your work?

DANIEL RICHTER: My work is based on only one belief system, and that's the church of painting (laughs). Growing up in Cold War Western Europe in the northern German countryside meant that you were embedded in a welfare system that guaranteed education, a higher level of consumption, social security, pension funds and, at least for the white working class, the promise of leaving its class behind. During the Cold War, the communists had to prove that they were guaranteeing a better, more just life than capitalism, but they didn't. Both are installed narratives, but capitalism has won.  And the culture we all participate in is like a big blob of oil drifting in an ocean of shit, and both are not mingling. The promise of this constant cultural production offers the poor the promise that if they only try hard enough, they’ll make it, they will be able to participate. But that pile of shit, that huge ocean of misery, depression, exploitation, and materialistic promises is not gonna go away just because you finally can afford a Rolex. A very boring dream came not true. The idea or belief that life could be fair and everybody should have the same rights and the same benefits has sadly nearly completely vanished.

KUPPER: In Europe, and around the world, there’s a growing xenophobia just under the surface and I think your paintings started to explore this shortly after 9/11. 

RICHTER: Yes, for sure. Xenophobia, such a noble word for racism! I find it interesting that those nationalists and racists find their counterpart in the Islamists, the same idealization and hatred towards women, that whole idea of a dumb, violent patriarchal system. When 9/11 happened, it could have been way worse if they had been thinking in military terms. They could have bombed atomic power plants. Instead they bombed the Twin Towers as a symbolic castration of the West’s finest power symbols. It’s a war against women, a war against softness or weakness. It’s a war against reason and reflection. It's a war for dumb guys believing in lord penis, in guns and violence, and all that kind of paranoid, fascist, megalomanic power scheisse. And it's always “the nation” or “righteous path” or “the glorious past.” And in a weird way, they won, because you could say that Trump, or Putin, or Bolsanaro are all perverted, Christian versions of these extreme Islamic beliefs. It’s weird, this dialectical hop that the whole thing took in the years after 9/11. Invading Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and then the engagement in Syria—all in the name of democracy and women's rights with the result of not liberating one woman, but incarcerating all of them. I always wonder why nobody talks about the flourishing American economy under the auspice of homeland security. The military machine is an absolutely idiotic, counterproductive system. All these combinations just build up so much anger, frustration, and depression.  

 

Daniel Richter
Amsterdam
2001
Oil on Canvas
88.58 x 57.87 inches (225 x 147 cm)

 

KUPPER: It definitely seems like we're on a path to some kind of collapse.

RICHTER: On the other hand, darkness is huge and your little iPhone lamp is small, but also when night is the deepest, dawn is the nearest. I don't know—how did we get into this topic? Oh yeah, my paintings—my paintings are beautiful and colorful, by the way.

KUPPER: Art is a good way of synthesizing these ideas. Like the work of Francis Bacon, who people compare your work to—the zeitgeist of war, by osmosis, embeds itself into the artist’s psyche. 

RICHTER: I understand why people make that relation to Bacon, but it was accidental. I think it has to do with those images I made that focused on WWI cripples—guys that lost their legs in combat and are on crutches looking like sad insects. And the squeezing and banding of those figures, combined with the flatness of the backdrop, the aggressiveness and the softness of the bodies—the stress and tension somehow forced itself into an architecture superficially similar to Bacon. But his bodies were isolated and under observation in an empty theater. In my work, the space itself pushes the figures. I never really liked Bacon that much, though—not a lot of humor in it. I gained more from late 19th-century French painting because it’s so beautiful and bourgeois, and so distant from my thinking. Before the first World War, art was more optimistic and also already influenced by different cultural and technological sources, from African sculpture to Japanese woodcuts, and from lithography to photography. I think comic books were for me what photography was for them. And then, there was the whole thing about the possibilities and opportunities of the brush and the material of paint itself. These ideas in those days were like promises of an unknown land, that bland is now discovered and mapped, but I like to pretend it’s not. Sounds nostalgic, I know.

KUPPER: Going back to comic books and your upbringing making art for album covers and posters, can you talk a little bit about how you got into working within the music scene?

RICHTER: In the early ‘80s, late ‘70s, when I was young, punk was the way out. So, I moved to Hamburg. Hamburg was a city with lots of squatters and a red light district with a certain underground appeal. I couldn't make music and I didn't want to make music because you have to rehearse with others, which is how I realized I could draw. So, that was the natural role the subculture chose for me. 

© Daniel Richter, Courtesy Regen Projects

© Daniel Richter, Courtesy Regen Projects

KUPPER: What was the visual language that you were pulling from when you were making these album covers?

RICHTER: I would say somewhere between Raymond Pettibon, Charles Burns, and the work Ub Iwerks did for Disney. But also, John Heartfield, George Grosz, that kind of Dada influence. In those days, information was rare, so it was gathered at record stores, in fanzines, and at concerts. And there was also Linder, who designed the Buzzcocks’ seven inch, Orgasm Addict. And all the Crass records—the idea of having an anarchist collective designing a whole identity for a band and accidentally becoming the role model for millions of idiot punk bands afterwards is quite funny. If there was a band I really liked and they appealed to me, I would do artwork for them, and if somebody needed a poster for an antifascist action concert, I would also do that. I have an antifascist background, so I would design posters and t-shirts for demonstrations etc. You just steal from everybody—it’s very simple. 

KUPPER: How did you get involved in the antifascist movement?

RICHTER: There was a  squatting scene in Hamburg in the mid-’80s, but there was also a huge right wing hooligan scene and regular trouble with fascists and skinheads at concerts. Hamburg was also the home of the militant neo-fascist movement in Germany. So, at some point, we had to turn to self-defense. I mean, all over Germany, generally all over the world, every city has its underground where the outcasts hang out, but every city also has this right wing, macho culture that aims their anger at a perceived enemy. Throughout the ‘20s in Germany, there were a lot of working class, self-defense movements against the Nazis, like the Antifaschistische Aktion.  

KUPPER: Did you ever experiment with psychedelics when you were that age?

RICHTER: The only drug I really recommend, also because it does the least harm to mankind and those producing and distributing it, is LSD. I think LSD is a great drug. It’s very fascinating to watch your brain connecting thoughts, feelings and observations, and structuring the world as a constant ornament in very complex layers, and also leaving your body behind, or intensifying its tactility is a life-changing experience. Weird, that even this drug is nowadays used as a self-optimizing tool.

Daniel Richter
Bill
2015
Oil on Canvas
78.74 x 106.3 inches (200 x 270 cm)

KUPPER: People have described your work as psychedelic, would you say that’s correct? 

RICHTER: For some of the work, I think it fits well. Some of the early, non-figurative, abstract work was definitely a way of getting the complexity of psychedelics together with chaos theory and the looming of the world wide web, you could say. Digital tools in the early ‘90s were promising as a means to change the world for the better … but that just transformed into a huge pile of really shitty flyers for techno raves. 

KUPPER: In the early 2000s, you had this really interesting exploration in the figurative works of riots: people in riot gear, sexuality and pornography, the rise of the internet being this primary driver of technology. Can you talk a little bit about these thematic explorations—the rise in tribalism and militarism?

RICHTER: I just got bored doing the psychedelic thing. I had been searching for something and I found it—mission accomplished. The paintings were surprising to me because they tried to elaborate chaotic structures that asked, “When is too much too much? And what kind of structure is underneath? Are there secret patterns that we do not recognize at first glance?” It was about deciphering chaos. Also, it was fun trying to squeeze in everything I could think of. And then, I thought it was interesting to shift into the opposite direction, which was looking at representation, politics, history, and the world that surrounds me. I can claim to be the first artist who focused on Al Qaeda in his work. On the 10th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, I made a painting that looked like a mix of the Passion Of Christ and the fall of the Berlin Wall in the manner of a psychedelic [Emil] Nolde, but was actually based on the Al Qaeda bombing of the American embassy in Nairobi. The circumstances under which it was shown blurred the reception. The fall of the Wall and the crumbling of the Soviet Union are the reason for the reappearance of religions and nationalism haunting us today. So sad.

Daniel Richter
Phienox
2000
Oil on Canvas
99.21 x 144.88 inches (252 x 368 cm)

KUPPER: I want to talk about your show Limbo that was on view in Venice. Can you tell me about the show and the history of the building [Scuola Grande di San Fantin] that the exhibition is in?

RICHTER: It is a building where for a couple hundred years a Catholic fraternity begged God for forgiveness for prisoners sentenced to death. But begging forgiveness did not mean that they would be guaranteed direct access to heaven, or protect you from hell. Once you gave them your money, they would only guarantee that you would end up in in Limbo after death, which is like a waiting room where your fate is not very clear. So, after you got sentenced to death, the fraternity took the sentenced under its wing. On the day of your execution, dressed like the Ku Klux Klan, but in all black, they would wave buckets of ember, sing in praise of the Lord, and beg forgiveness for the poor sinner. At the first stop of that walk, the hands were cut off in public and people would cheer in joy (laughs). And then, a doctor would cauterize the wound to stop the bleeding. After that, they put your hands on a chain and hung them around your neck. Afterwards, they would walk you another 500 meters to cut off your ears and nose, and rip out your tongue—all while you are still alive. And at the end of that long march ending at San Marco, you would either get skinned alive or torn into four pieces by horses. One aristocrat got sentenced to death because he cursed Mother Mary after losing a poker game. He was at the wrong party at the wrong time. So, the mood of the building is somber. And I thought, that's a great place for my work, because my work is also about Limbo, planet Earth is Limbo. All paintings are based on just one postcard of two men that had lost their legs in 1916. I had never done that before, focusing on only one image. But It liberated me from the force to establish a narrative myself, since the inherent drama is already there. It was the absolute naivety of millions of people entering the first World War—really believing it would be over in four weeks. Matter of fact, it lasted four years, and for some it lasted a hundred, and since they didn’t know better, they may have even liked it, but I doubt that. Anyway, I am happily swinging my brush and spatel knife, drifting on and in my little blob of oil, drifting in an ocean of endless opportunities that smells rather rancid.

KUPPER: It's a dark prospect, but true. And the way artists operate on the outside of that is very interesting. 

RICHTER: It sounds bitter, which maybe has to do with the fact that I’m on holiday and I have too much time on my hands. Honestly, a lot of cultural production is really interesting and is one of the pillars that hope can be based on. Aside from mainstream media culture, I think there's a lot of stuff that is very interesting, very honest, very touching. It makes me learn, and think, and consider beliefs, and rethink old habits. How do we get out of the bog? It's easy to be cynical or sound a radical critic of culture—it's much harder to be humanistic. 

KUPPER: Your show at Regen Projects. Can you talk a little bit about that show?

RICHTER: I am just following the trail I laid out. Some of the paintings may be good, some may even be better. We’ll see.

KUPPER: So, you’re in Limbo again. 

Daniel Richter: Furor II is on view through December 23 @ Regen Projects 6750 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles

Daniel Richter
Punktum
2002
Oil on Canvas
78.74 x 118.11 inches (200 x 300 cm)

A Rich, Somber Undercurrent: An Interview Of Alannah Farrell

Alannah Farrell
Alex, Resting
2022
Oil, acrylic, spray paint, and latex on canvas
50 x 78 in

text by Stella Peacock-Berardini

Alannah Farrell — the sexual awakening to colors and hues, to kinks and dreams. This queer, trans-identifying artist from rural New York gracefully depicts the real bodies of their queer scene in atmospheric paintings, the magic of which stems from the shapely emotional nuances of each subject. Here, their struggles are visible, but so are the celebrations. Though currently represented by Harper’s and Anat Ebgi, they've had an enduring journey to their current career, beginning as a child yearning for a creative outlet, from babysitter, to cashier, to model, to dungeon domme, and later, Cooper Union graduate, allowing their art to leap from the confinements of their bedroom to their first show at The Painting Center in New York. With the vibrant bodies and milky pigments enclosed in these works, Farrell expresses the multifaceted layers of their subjects’ queer identities, supporting the normalization of all expressions of beauty and power within the LGBTQI+ community. We see these queer bodies and faces through a lens unfocused on the taboo fascination that society perpetuates. It is one that instead centers the subject and how they wish to be seen and heard. Undoubtedly a New Yorker, Farrell pursues these intimate scenes and perseverances throughout the city with heart. They allow us, the viewers, into these blissful connections. We sat down with Farrell to discuss their expansive ideas surrounding queer identity in art, the fluidity of life, and their newest solo exhibition, I Want to Thank you, at Harper’s Gallery in New York.

STELLA PEACOCK-BERARDINI: Do you feel the queer identity or LGBTQ+ scene within New York differentiates heavily from other culture-heavy cities, like LA, for example, and does your work primarily present these moments in culture through an East Coast perspective? 

ALANNAH FARRELL: I’ve visited but never lived outside New York, so my work is distinctly NYC, based on where I make it and the people I paint. Many different LGBTQIA+ scenes exist here. 

Ultimately, I think painting exists in its world, not limited by geography or physicality — it doesn’t document in the same way photography can. Paintings might attempt a facsimile of reality, but they always deviate and become something else. That being said, I plan on meeting and working with people outside New York for my upcoming shows, and it will be interesting to see how my work changes when made in other places. 

PEACOCK-BERARDINI: What does the fluidity and intimacy of bodies mean to you, and how has that changed throughout your career? 

FARRELL: I find the fluidity of bodies endlessly fascinating, and I wish it were something our society treated with more curiosity, wonder, and celebration. A body’s age, ability, size, and secondary sex markers aren’t fixed. Fluidity, change, and transformation entered my paintings more obviously in the past years, but it’s something I’ve always focused on internally. Doesn’t everyone with a body think of change and transformation? Some specific paintings deal with fluidity and intimacy as a singular image. Another approach is that I have worked with the same people for years over multiple paintings. That is maybe my favorite way to depict fluidity and intimacy. Over time both the sitter and I, and our relationship will change.

 
 

PEACOCK-BERARDINI: The fascinating and intimate depictions of trans bodies appear to be a focus in your work. How did this start for you, and how have your experiences provided a gateway to this success?

FARRELL: The greater public isn’t familiar with a wide range of trans bodies. Trans bodies can be and look like any number of bodies, and they can be binary, non-binary, or fluid. Media pushes these thin, white, androgynous people, highly binary trans people, or low key transmisogynistic stereotypes as trans representation—which is bullshit and doesn’t represent the reality and majority of trans people. Also, not all the people I paint are trans. 

As for my experiences, I’ve had a lifelong toxic relationship with my body. I think it’s an experience many people share. Trans or not, I would guess most people experience body dysphoria at least once in their life. Cis people experience body hatred in numerous ways. And I think they may have more in common with dysphoric trans people than they want to admit. We are stuck in our bodies 24/7, and even as someone who is good at disassociation, it is hard not to be aware of my body. These vessels we are stuck in hold both mental and physical pain, and I am sure my work relates to that on some level. Hopefully, when I paint other people, they experience more joy and wonder than pain in seeing their image come through in painted form. 

PEACOCK-BERARDINI: How do you feel the palette of pastels and hues of blue within your newest exhibition at Harper’s Gallery play a role in your subjects’ bodies, and how do these colors connect throughout the pieces? 

FARRELL: I’ve been attracted to a darker color palette heavy on blacks, greys, and rich deep blues for a long time. Almost comically a depressed person‘s color palette. The oldest painting in I Want To Thank You at Harper‘s is Annasophia At Dusk (Fidi), which I started in 2020. This painting transitions from richer, darker hues into a more pastel and luminescent palette. Annasophia styled herself in this wonderful opalescent dress, full of shimmering pastels. I loved how an epic twilight backlighted it on the evening she came to my studio. She has magical energy, which radiated quite literally that evening. From there, most of the other paintings were started in 2021 and finished in 22. This coincided with when I started HRT [hormone replacement therapy]. It was a tough year of personal upheaval and uncertain living situations. Meeting the wonderful individuals that came and posed in the various places I was living and working in became a healing experience throughout a year of radical changes and instability. And many of these individuals were going through multitudes of trying situations, too. This may be a reductive take, but manipulating light and color towards an airier and pastel direction while keeping a rich, somber undercurrent felt the truest to both individual narratives and my emotional state.

Alannah Farrell
Ari (Downtown Brooklyn)
2022
Oil, acrylic, and latex on canvas
40h x 60w in

PEACOCK-BERARDINI: The ability to translate the experiences of the many queer muses in your artwork is incredible. So many triumphs and hardships can be seen within these models, but do you ever feel overwhelmed by these struggles that you and others face, and do you feel like your artwork ever projects those moments of frustration or fear?

FARRELL: I love this question. Yes, I often feel overwhelmed. I don’t personally know anyone who isn’t feeling overwhelmed at least some of the time. My paintings probably do project frustration, fear, and hopefully other emotions, like love, resistance, solidity, occasional humor or playfulness, and transcendence. I try to be mindful of not harming the people I paint with the images I create. Because these are real people, even if the paintings have fantasy elements. I think about the projected messages and how the model feels about seeing their image while working on any painting.

PEACOCK-BERARDINI: As a trans artist who produces moments of queer vulnerability, do you feel your audience mostly caters to the LGBTQ+ community as a way to provide a safe space for these experiences or as a mixture of something entirely different?  

FARRELL: The art world is majority cisgendered. That’s a fact right now, in 2022. So, whether I like it or not, my audience is not mostly LGBTQIA+, although I hope it caters to us. I question how much power or influence in creating societal change art (that is not propaganda) has. But if seeing my work opens cisgendered and cishet people to learn more about what trans and queer people are going through and maybe empathize, I would feel good about it. As a working trans artist, I hope to contribute to safe places, specifically for those who sit for me. I see the studio as a space to escape the bullshit and just be, whatever that means. Real, messy, evolving, angry, grieving, joyous, and shameless. Sometimes I feel the process of creating paintings and working with others is more important than the result.

PEACOCK-BERARDINI: In the mass media and social networks, big companies often monetize trans or queer trauma; how do you feel about this, and is there a proper balance that can be made between trauma and simply existing as queer within these TV and movie storylines? 

FARRELL: I don’t watch much TV or movies and don’t spend much time on the internet, so I might be the worst person to ask! I think monetizing trauma porn is popular and can be done in different mediums. If individuals or corporations are profiting off trans and queer trauma, or any trauma for that matter, and not giving back to those communities in equal amounts, then it is exploitation. It is something I think about and try to be extra conscious of, even on a small scale. Having people from the actual community on every level, production, writing, funding, etc., lessens the chance that narratives will be flattened into trauma porn. *Hint, the art world, that would be people with money and power: dealers, collectors, and museum directors* 

Someone with lived experience creating work funded by people with lived experience seems like it would lead to more nuanced work, TV, media, and storylines. 

Alannah Farrell
Serene, Sky, and Kaz Bathed in Light (Bushwick)
2022
Oil, acrylic, spray paint, and latex on canvas
70h x 130w in

PEACOCK-BERARDINI: Was there a moment of clarity for you growing up, when you felt seen as you grew into your queer identity? 

FARRELL: Honestly, I’m not sure people saw my gender queerness until adulthood. Regarding internal moments of clarity, around age 9, I knew I was sexually attracted to women and effeminate men. I always felt like an effeminate boy/man. I was in love with (but more deeply wanted to be) Michael Jackson, Prince, Frank N. Furter from RHPS, the classics. Any character that was blatantly and stereotypically homosexual, I identified with (which there was a surprising amount to choose from in the ‘90s cartoons I would watch at my friend's house.) We would role-play in games — elementary school age — and I’d always play as those characters. Growing up, there wasn’t commonly-known language to describe genders outside the binary or transgendered people. Cross-dressing was known. I grew up in a creative household and loved fashion, but I didn't necessarily associate clothing with gender — it was all theatre. Because of the histories of famous creative individuals, society thinks artists, more than other people, have a higher probability of being gay, queer, melodramatic, crazy, or a combo of those. So, even if my family didn't necessarily see my queerness, they labeled me with an “artistic personality” from day one. (I’m pretty sure it was code for moody, pain in the ass.) There were challenges in the conservative working-class area of upstate New York where I grew up, but I'm fortunate my friends and bio-fam didn't directly have an issue with queer people. 

PEACOCK-BERARDINI: How do you feel this newest exhibition allows queerness to transcend the physical realm and disrupt time? What are some experiences in queer social scenes where you witnessed this moment of altering and challenging the norms of time and space? 

FARRELL: Queer nightlife disrupts time and transcends the physical realm. In NYC, I wish queer nightlife workers were protected and paid more. That’s another conversation, ha. I think these paintings in I Want To Thank You are familiar enough to communicate with the past, but I hope the dialogue centers more on the present and future. Ultimately, I view the painting process and studio time as the most transcendent, narcotic, and time-disruptive in both arduous and ecstatic ways. Whatever work I make is and always will be inherently queer. I try to trust that people can feel the love and pain I unashamedly put into a painting and not worry too much about embarrassment. That approach to making paintings feels very queer, timeless, and freeing to me.

Alannah Farrell’s debut solo exhibition I Want to Thank You was on view from June 30 - August 13 2022 @ Harper’s Gallery CHELSEA 534 West 22nd Street

Work Show Grow: The Online Educational Platform Paving the Way for a More Inclusive Art World

interview by Lara Monro

Becoming a successful artist has a reputation for being especially challenging; creating a strong presence online, building a creative network, connecting with galleries and art institutions, placing your work in collections (private and public), and of course making money. The comprehensive Livelihoods of Visual Artists Report from December 2018, for example, showed that artists earn on average as little as £16,150 per annum in the UK, with only 36% of that attributable to income from their practice. Unfortunately, this has not changed over the last four years. Whats more, if we take into consideration the gender pay gap, which in April 2020, was recorded as 15.5%, a female artist’s average annual salary is recorded at an alarming £13,355. 

Natasha Caruana, an award-winning and internationally recognized visual artist, photographer and educator, founded the online educational platform and community, Work Show Grow, as an alternative way of supporting artists in their professional and creative development. 

Frustrated by the traditional framework of art school where grades and deadlines define success, Caruana believes a more collaborative and community focused approach is far more productive. Since 2018 Work Show Grow has championed the progression of its members creative work, demonstrating that this can be achieved through supportive online teaching, in ways that can be fun, untraditional and effective.  

Caruana has organized a Creative Retreat that will take place at Colehayes Estate, South Devon, UK, from September 19 - 23. It will be a unique opportunity for creative practitioners and the art-curious to connect, collaborate and create amongst the twenty hectares of natural landscape —  from woodland, marshland and freshwater habitats of the stream and lake. In between breakfast, lunch, and dinner (cooked by a private chef using local produce) the retreat will offer a diverse range of talks and workshops with well-respected guest speakers and facilitators such as newly appointed National Curator of Contemporary Art Forestry England, Louise Fedotov-Clements and artist Ibrahim Azab.

Since becoming a mother in 2021, Natasha advocates a more accessible art world where artists who are parents and caretakers should be considered. Private viewings, for example, are often held at the same time as bath/bedtime. Perhaps they could be during the day or over weekends? In May, Caruana explored these issues, and how she balances her work/parenting roles, with art critic and author of On Art and Motherhood, Hettie Judah, as part of the (Re) Production: Parenting and the art world online symposium. 

The Creative Retreat at Colehayes is a continuation of Caruana’s support for a more progressive art world as she offers accommodation for up to four families as well as child-friendly activities. Hopefully this can be a useful framework that can be prescribed to more artist residencies and other areas within the arts, to pursue the support of parenting and caretaking artists. 

Caruana shared with Autre her inspiration behind establishing Work Show Grow, as well as some of its biggest challenges and rewards to date and a few of her goals for the platform's future. 

 
 

LARA MONRO: You founded WSG in 2018. What inspired you to start the online educational platform? 

NATASHA CARUANA: I started Work Show Grow very spontaneously as a way to teach more artists a professional practice of how you can set yourself up. There is no road map to success and often art schools don’t properly equip artists with learning about funding, getting their name out there, etc. I’m passionate to support artists at whatever stage they are at on their journey. Traditional art education is based on deadlines and grades, which can often result in competitive environments. I wanted to create a supportive community space in which artists can thrive. 

During the pandemic, with so many exhibitions and opportunities cancelled for my own art practice I threw myself into supporting others and Work Show Grow blossomed. In September 2020, what were initially monthly workshops happening in person in my studio evolved to become the online school which it is today.

MONRO: What have been the biggest challenges and rewards since setting out on your mission with WSG?

CARUANA: Seeing the progress of Work Show Grow artists has been incredible and is a daily reward. Many creatives come to the school with a burning desire to get back to their creative side. Or they have pursued other work and know that there is a future artist in them. The feedback has been fantastic and we have 100 artists from approximately thirty different countries. They are all connected and together support each other in their creative journeys. It's inspiring to watch. 

Now that the world is starting to slowly return to normality, it's definitely a juggle between my own work, Work Show Grow, my academic post, and becoming a new mum. Luckily, I share the running of the school with my husband, Simon, who is a fantastic producer. He keeps everyone on track. We have also made a couple of hires. I really value work life balance so having support in the background is very important, or we could easily end up working every hour of the day! 

MONRO: What three words would you use to best summarize what WSG stands for? 

CARUANA: Community, Creativity, and Support

MONRO: The 2022 Creative Retreat is the second iteration of your WSG annual artist residency. What were the main reasons for starting these annual trips?

CARUANA: I wanted to create an accessible residency program for both artists and the art curious — one that isn't intimidating, or requires a huge application form, or payment. After spending two years online it’s an opportunity to bring people together in a fun and relaxed environment. As an artist myself, I definitely need this for my own creative cup. I want everyone to go back to their corner of the world fulfilled, inspired, and ready to take the next steps in their work. It’s a moment when artists or the art-curious can create, play, and connect outside of their usual day-to-day.

MONRO: This year you have decided to make the retreat accessible to artists who are parents/caretakers. What were your main motivations around doing this? 

CARUANA: Everyone should be playing a role in making the art world more accessible. Offering an environment which welcomes artist parents is my way of contributing to this. I recently took part in an online symposium funded by Arts Council England and produced by one of our Work Show Grow artists, Andrea Allen. I participated in a session with the writer Hettie Judah, who is an incredible advocate for artist parents. This opened my eyes to needing to do more. 

MONRO: What are you most excited about at this year’s retreat? 

CARUANA: I’m so excited to spend a week in twenty hectares of private countryside, which surrounds the stately home that the retreat is taking place in. To be able to stroll to our private lake and take a dip in between workshops is going to be magical! I literally can’t wait! I love to cook so I’m also looking forward to our group dinners and evenings around the fire pit. 

MONRO: What would you say are some of the biggest challenges of being a parent and juggling your creative and professional roles?

CARUANA: The lack of time and headspace is the most challenging juggle so far. It's really hard to peel yourself away from baby cuddles to go and tackle your inbox! I haven't found the answers yet. Each day seems to be different as Suki develops so you need to embrace going with the flow! 

MONRO: Where would you like to see Work Show Grow in the next five years and what do you want your artist residencies to look like?

CARUANA: I would like Work Show Grow to still be supporting artists and for more people to know about our great community. We have big ambitions for an international residency program, a school that has different pathways. And I’d love to put on a Work Show Grow artist event at the Tate! 

MONRO: What would your advice be for new mothers who are also artists and determined to maintain their creative practice? 

CARUANA: I feel forming a community around you is so important. It's common to create a mum community, but I would also say try to add a couple of mum artists in there too. Being an artist parent is so nuanced and difficult for others to understand. At Work Show Grow we have a number of artist parents and it's humbling to see how they can lean on us for support. 

Suspended in Memory: An Interview Of Veronica Fernandez

text and photography by Shelley Holcomb

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 
 

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

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

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

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

Moving Past Giants: An Interview Of Devon DeJardin

text by Stella Peacock-Berardini

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 
 

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

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


interview by Rachel Adams

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transmundane Economies: An Interview Of Theodoulos Polyviou By Carlos Kong

 
 

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

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

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

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


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

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

 
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

FORDJOUR Because they’re limiting? 

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

 

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

 

FORDJOUR This is how you approach… 

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

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

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

 

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

 

FORDJOUR Very much in materiality and the haptic, right? 

DYSON The haptic, yes. 

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

DYSON And pushing against fascism. 

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

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

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

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

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

TORKWASE DYSON Could you talk about your upcoming show? 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

Embodied Resonance: An Interview Of Pop Sensation Mandy Harris Williams

 
 


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

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

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

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

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

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

BOWIE: That's true.

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

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

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

BOWIE: Interesting. Wow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BOWIE: Sure. Who's mining the aluminum?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

interview by Oliver Kupper
portrait by Summer Bowie

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

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

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

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

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

OLIVER KUPPER And your father collected outsider art? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JIM HEDGES: Thousands. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ayako Rokkaku: The Spirit Of The Artist

 
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do contemporary Japanese artists think of Los Angeles? 

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

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


interview by Janna Shaw
photographs courtesy the artist


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SHAW: What else are you painting these days?

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Temporal Vertigo: An Interview Of Nicolas G. Miller

 

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

 

interview by Isabelle Albuquerque
photographs by ofstudio photography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

ALBUQUERQUE: AHHHHHHH Cannot wait for her.