Crossing the Infinite: An Interview of Kate Mosher Hall

March 15, 2024

Kate Mosher Hall, *Moon mesh*, 2024
Acrylic on canvas
80 x 72 inches (203.2 x 182.9 cm)

interview by Kathleen MacKay

I recently visited Los Angeles born-and-raised painter Kate Mosher Hall at her light-filled studio in a bricky industrial area of Glendale. With the 5 freeway buzzing nearby, she walked me through her complex and unique process, which involves silkscreening light-sensitive emulsion over gessoed canvas using anywhere from eight to thirty screens depending on the particular painting, Photoshopping, layers of collage, and paint. It’s a “choose-your-own adventure” as she says, to get the desired effect. To help organize things, she’s created a lexicon: box paintings, hole or mesh paintings, recursion paintings. Some paintings incorporate elements of all styles. Hall, a punk drummer, worked in silkscreen studios for several years before she began UCLA’s Fine Art MFA program. We talked about Never Odd or Even, Hall’s second solo exhibition at Hannah Hoffman, which is currently on view in Los Angeles and the way that the work employs both good and bad math, challenges modes of looking, and the infinite repetition within binary relationships.

KATHLEEN MACKAY: Let’s talk about paint. The works in Never Odd or Even often have a charcoal wash, right?

KATE MOSHER HALL: I use charcoal but also flashe, which has that really dry matte look to it. It's really dense, really rich. It's important for me to have matte-ness in the blacks because I work with themes of obfuscation; things that you can't see versus things that you can see. Sometimes I like it when there's like a slip of: is it void or is it obstacle? Matte-ness gives in to that.

KATHLEEN MACKAY: And you're talking about the "hole” paintings you make?

KATE MOSHER HALL: Yeah. The "mesh” paintings. Sometimes I'll print paintings backward. I'll do a black background and then I'll print everything inverted with white or with a color. The "recursion” paintings are made reversed actually, so that black matte sets, because those are a two-point perspective receding into space. That matte-ness becomes really important.

KATHLEEN MACKAY: The "recursion paintings"—those are layers of silkscreen on top of each other, the same repeating image over and over until a center point?

KATE MOSHER HALL: It repeats, but it's also in succession of an image. So there's a bit of that repetition. Then, it evolves as it goes in. This idea is about quantity or quantifying an image. I'll take something and when it's spread out into space, it's like the way one experiences time, or something repeated into the abyss, again and again and again. It's a response to seeing images again and again and again. You know, like the deep-fried meme? Like the thing screengrabbed. I’m taking the thing that is already flattened out but expressing it as quantity.

KATHLEEN MACKAY: The idea of repetition/replication is so great with your work because it’s totally a different experience for me being in the room with those “recursion” paintings versus seeing reproductions of them.

KATE MOSHER HALL: It's a huge part of it.

KATHLEEN MACKAY: Especially my favorite 31,556,952 seconds. In person, there's this moiré thing going on that's really trippy and a little bit dizzying that's totally lost in any reproductions.

KATE MOSHER HALL: I think a lot about the proximity to my work. How it looks up close and far away. Sometimes, when you're really far away, things will start appearing or walking in. And when you're close, they sort of fall apart. What the camera does is compress all of the resolution that I'm playing with in the paintings. So, if things have a smaller or higher resolution next to each other, the camera just makes it all the same resolution. The moiré pattern resists it. It's fun making work that refuses to be photographed—work that's about images and photographs.

Kate Mosher Hall, *31,556,952 seconds*, 2024
Acrylic and charcoal on canvas
80 x 72 inches (203.2 x 182.9 cm)

KATHLEEN MACKAY: It's very rebellious in a way, like, yeah, you had to be there. It's kind of punk. And what you're saying about how the camera wants to put its arms around everything all at once—that's not really how the body experiences something, how the eye takes something in.

KATE MOSHER HALL: Yeah, I was thinking about these ways of seeing in multiplicity. I'll be experiencing a conversation with a friend and check my text messages at the same time, and we're also in the car and I see this billboard. All these rectangles presenting information within the world that I'm interacting with feels like these multiple horizons, which is a wild thing to actually navigate.

KATHLEEN MACKAY: Layers of screens.

KATE MOSHER HALL: Or even just things out in the world. People. Something on a t-shirt, who knows? There are so many ways things are presented, contained in, shown. One thing I want to say about the title, the [Seconds] recursion painting: that's the number of seconds within a year. And the source image is a one-year-old's birthday cake.

Kate Mosher Hall, *Pull up pull up*, 2024
Acrylic and charcoal on canvas
Diptych dimensions: 90 x 160 inches (228.6 x 406.4 cm)

KATHLEEN MACKAY: It seems like you're doing a lot of math in your work.

KATE MOSHER HALL: I guess I'm interested in math. In the process for sure, when you're working with grids, and dot patterns, and ratios, and stuff like that. There's good math with the screening and then there's bad math, and I engage in both.

But math does come in a lot in my work. My friend and artist Olivia Mole came to the show, and we were looking at the large diptych, Pull up pull up. It's the most abstract work I’ve ever made. I left it more open conceptually than I usually do. My big focus is modes of looking and the act of looking, how something’s presented, public or private viewing spaces. But with this work, I'm actually kind of letting it go.

Olivia was like, “How do you feel about math?” She said hyperbole curves are these graphs that go positive/negative, so like 1x1=1, -1x-1=-1, and there's a mirrored curve that happens. Each axis is infinity; it goes on forever. At some point, somewhere in time they make contact. It's like imagining the painting going into the wall, going around into the building, and looping back around and coming through. And then I was like, “Olivia, this is crazy because the title of the show is a palindrome: Never Odd or Even is the same forward and backwards. So is Pull up pull up.” She basically mathematically figured out the thing I had a language relationship to.

KATHLEEN MACKAY: I was definitely thinking about the concept of the infinite looking at your work. It first came to me in the Seconds painting because there's all these layers going inward, inward, inward. And in the middle, there's a spiral or a Greek key that feels very much like it speaks to the idea of the infinite. Like how humans are obsessed with infinity because our existence is so finite. We know it's out there, we know it's all around us. But everything we have is so physical, so tangible, so finite.

KATE MOSHER HALL: I also think it's being in the threshold where we are with technology and our bodies navigating this changing landscape of how we access information, the quantity of information that we see. Like, we have to have a talk about Instagram because it's insane.

KATHLEEN MACKAY: Especially if you're doing box paintings. It's just a million boxes.

KATE MOSHER HALL: Boxes, yeah. But also like the juxtaposition of those boxes in the content. That scroll is really disorienting. It's confusing. It's also schizophrenic, like, oh, they’re selling me eye cream, and here’s my friend's birthday, an art show, and genocide. Seeing all these things stacked up, the timing of it, how do you respond to that sequence that quickly, and engage?

KATHLEEN MACKAY: And we're told that it's all real and it's all fake.

KATE MOSHER HALL: And it is.

Images Courtesy of the artist and Hannah HoffmanGallery, Los Angeles. Photography by Paul Salveson.

KATHLEEN MACKAY: And it's infinite, the scroll. That reminds me, I was thinking about your work and reading Emmanuel Levinas who was talking about humans reaching for infinity—the infinite in the finite—has to do with a desire that can never be satisfied. It's a desire that only arouses.

KATE MOSHER HALL: I think that was built off of Lacan’s Peek-a-boo. I took this amazing class with Lesley Dick on the death drive. Peek-a-boo with the mother is sex and death. It becomes a part of the pleasure principle. She's covering up her eyes: Mother's gone, she's dead. Her return is a dopamine hit. It's pleasure but then it's related to that feeling of emptiness. And it's like Warhol's car crash paintings; the repeating image, the rubberneckers. Death is also related to the infinite. And then, the finite is related to pleasure.

KATHLEEN MACKAY: Do you think pleasure is related to the infinite?

KATE MOSHER HALL: That's the curious part.

KATHLEEN MACKAY: And death is, of course, related to the finite because—kaput—it's your day.

KATE MOSHER HALL: I think in any of these binary relationships, it always just goes into repetition, like their relationship with each other becomes infinite because it's inconclusive.

KATHLEEN MACKAY: And that's lovely with your work, the binary that has to do with photo processing and light and dark, and inversions. I'm curious about the show at Hannah Hoffman, these big, dark paintings that are very affecting to be in a room with, they draw you in, the eye travels over them, one wants to spend a lot of time with them, and there's a kind of moodiness; a darkness and a somber feeling. But some of your earlier work is very playful and lighter. I'm thinking about that painting of the dog running on the beach with the mirror behind it, and the dog is in this really funny dog-shape.

KATE MOSHER HALL: I was feeling really conflicted making the show because I was feeling like, why the fuck am I even making art while genocide is happening?

KATHLEEN MACKAY: This is happening around October 7th?

KATE MOSHER HALL: Yeah, I thought about canceling. I was feeling really conflicted and really questioning where my energy should go. A lot of artists shared the same sentiment. I think I was confronted by that feeling and being present for it. It’s also connected to the internet, right? Images, access to information. A lot of emotion, but we’re in this chaos market. In astrology, my Virgo sun is in the 12th house, which is the house of death and aliens and drugs.

KATHLEEN MACKAY: And insanity, prisons, institutions…

KATE MOSHER HALL: So fitting. Even sometimes if I'm having an analytical approach to making an image, I'll be like, this is how the thing is going to be made, this is how it's functioning. Sometimes it's really strange to me and surprises me with how the creepiness comes in. The moodiness, the darkness is such a shadow side of how I'm making things, sometimes I'm like, what's wrong with me?

Kate Mosher Hall, *Squeeze wax*, 2024
Acrylic, flashe, charcoal, and color pencil on canvas
92 x 84 inches (233.7 x 213.4 cm)

KATHLEEN MACKAY: Your process seems so physical. Is that part of it?

KATE MOSHER HALL: I guess so. I've been doing this for so long that I don’t think a lot about all the labor. When I'm not actually making the painting but making the parts that are going into the painting, it’s a nice moment for reflection.

KATHLEEN MACKAY: You’re a drummer too—also physical.

KATE MOSHER HALL: I'm actually not really good at drumming, to be honest.

KATHLEEN MACKAY: Do you have natural rhythm, though?

KATE MOSHER HALL: I have theories about this. I think I was actually born left-handed because when I snowboard or skateboard or anything like that, I ride goofy. When I first started drumming, I was playing backwards a bit. I really like doing dance beats and the separation between my legs and my arms was really hard to break. Because I think that I'm strangely left.

KATHLEEN MACKAY: That's nice with your paintings to think about inversions. You were a punk drummer in the DIY scene, and now you're in the art world. What are the similarities between those, or the differences?

KATE MOSHER HALL: Well, they're really different, but there's also similarities. The art world also has so many genres. There are different modes of making in different communities, and different intentions and goals that come out of art making. When I'm in the art world, I'm rubbing up against worlds I never imagined I'd be close to, like working with multiple commercial galleries. When I went to grad school, it was cool, I can teach now because silkscreen and printmaking is kind of a dying art. There's ironically a lot of interest in it as it's disappearing from campuses, this idea of translating digital image into material. I love the collaborative aspect of printmaking. It really keeps me in the community too, in a way. I'm always like, open door, come print something. Because of that, I feel the art world has opened. And it feels like more of a community. I got here through the support of friends, community, artists, these galleries. So, I try to support others as much as I can.

KATHLEEN MACKAY: What’s next on this front?

KATE MOSHER HALL: I’m actually really interested right now in taking a break from making paintings and I'm thinking about writing a play. I've been thinking about performance quite a bit and looking to use my studio as sort of a showing space—performance space, video, plays, poetry, literature, whatever. There's this new urgency and thirst in LA for collective engagement and feeling the sense of the present moment being performed and witnessed all together.

Never Odd or Even is on view through March 23 @ Hannah Hoffman 2504 W 7th St, Suite C, Los Angeles

They'll Never Truly Know: An Interview of Painter Jess Valice

March 7, 2024

portrait of Jess Valice from behind painting a man's face

interview by Avery Wheless
portraits by Summer Bowie

Each and every day we observe thousands of faces online and in person. And with each and every one, we reflexively look for clues to determine how they must feel. It is an empathic impulse endemic to us as social creatures. And yet, regardless of our perpetual, involuntary efforts, we can never be sure that we’ve ascertained any level of truth. It’s this mystery that lies at the heart of Jess Valice’s painted figures. The artist’s initial life path, which was headed toward a medical practice, laid the foundation for an approach to painting that leaves the viewer in a state of quizzical study, lost in the gaze of a subject who was never asking to be diagnosed. The predominant demons and desires of her subjects even seem to elude Valice, as she finds herself reworking each of their faces incessantly until she lands on something that feels honest. For her solo exhibition, Mara, opening today at Almine Rech’s Upper East Side gallery in New York, the subjects in question are at various points of overcoming the part of their egos that obstruct the path to enlightenment. According to Valice, “There is this overwhelming sense of fatigue that I think is typifying our generation, the weight of a spectrum of emotional responses that digital space provokes in us every day… It’s all so complex—this is where the science and melancholia come in—the recognition of this blankness as a widespread response. It’s too much to feel.” Fellow painter and confidante Avery Wheless joined Valice in her studio as the paintings were nearly finished to delve into the making of this new body of work and demystify some of the je ne sais quoi embodied by Valice’s disaffected figures.

AVERY WHELESS: I know you're majorly self-taught, but originally you were on a path of studying neuroscience. When did that shift become apparent to you.

JESS VALICE: I guess it was around that time when the work just got too crazy for becoming a doctor and not necessarily knowing if I would enjoy it or be successful at it, or even have a shot at going to medical school, for that matter. I just realized I couldn't stop thinking about painting. So, when the workload got heavy, I just was like, No, that's it. I'm done. I was painting in between all my courses and all my exams. I mean if you're putting all this effort into something that you don't care about and you're actually getting somewhere with it, then imagine the possibilities of what you can do when you actually pursue something you care about that you want to do forever—something you could never live without.

WHELESS: Do you feel there's any crossover with your studies in neuroscience and psychology—anything that's woven itself into the visuals that you paint?

VALICE: I put a lot of emphasis on the gaze because when I look at somebody just out in the world, or someone looking back at me, I feel like I understand and empathize with what may be going on in their head. It's a weird trait to have. I'm just looking at someone and thinking about their brain chemistry. There’s a beauty in knowing that all of it is different, and you can't actually know what’s going on in someone's head. But you could take a good guess. There's something very humbling about not knowing how another person’s brain works. So, this gaze and this lack of emotion, or micro expression in the faces of the people that I create just tell their own story, but also leave mystery. I want people to know that they'll never truly know, but their interpretation might teach them something about themself.

WHELESS: For this body of work, in particular, you shot friends and other artists, and it was so fun to be a part of that process of getting to sit for you.

VALICE: God, your photo, you were in supermodel mode with my high school friend taking photos.

portrait of Avery Wheless and Jess Valice standing in painting studio

Painting of a woman sitting on a bed holding a fishbowl — **Jess Valice**
*Mara*, 2024
Oil on canvas
182.9 x 152.4 cm
72 x 60 in
© Jess Valice - Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech Photo : Matthew Kroening

WHELESS: It was fun. I felt like we were all entering Jess's world, and Jess's way of lighting, and shooting, and trying to embody what your paintings already have in them—this sense of staring back at the viewer, but also a strong sensuality. Was there something particular you were looking for in the people that you chose to sit for you?

VALICE: The majority of the people that I chose, including yourself, are people I have an emotional connection to beyond just an acquaintance. You and I have shared personal stories. I've shared personal experiences with some of the people that came, and some are people from childhood or school that I have pushed away, but they have stayed with me. That makes me feel this sense of community. It wasn't necessarily anything that was physical, though some of the photos and some of the people have attributes of the faces that I generally like to paint—very sad-looking eyes—but I chose those people for those reasons.

WHELESS: Was that the first time that you shot direct reference models for the paintings in that way?

VALICE: Yeah, That was my first time. It was cool. I appreciate the faces that I just create because these faces all look very similar, and yes, they do look similar to me, but they're fully made up. So doing something with people that I recognize was interesting because I'm connected to all those fake people I create, but it’s cool to be tied in with all the real people in my universe that I create.

charcoal drawing of a man looking sad — **Jess Valice**
*Sincere Condolences*, 2024
Charcoal on paper
35.6 x 27.9 cm - 14 x 11 in (unframed)
44.5 x 36.8 x 3.8 cm - 17 1/2 x 14 1/2 x 1 1/2 in (framed)
© Jess Valice - Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech
Photo : Thomas Barratt

self portrait drawn by Jess Valice sitting in a chair wearing baggy shorts — **Jess Valice**
*Self Portrait*, 2024
Pencil on paper
35.6 x 27.9 cm - 14 x 11 in (unframed)
44.5 x 36.8 x 3.8 cm - 17 1/2 x 14 1/2 x 1 1/2 in (framed)
© Jess Valice - Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech
Photo : Thomas Barratt

WHELESS: I feel like most of the faces that you painted in the past were centralized around this uniform character with big, deep-set eyes, and the facial features were similar to your facial features. As painters, oftentimes we end up painting ourselves just because we are used to seeing our faces all the time. But, maybe you could talk about how all of that ties into the title of your show…

VALICE: Going back to being self taught, it was really just from looking at religious artworks and Caravaggio that brought me into my interests with being a figurative painter. They have those big eyes—it never was supposed to be me—but you can see a strong resemblance if you do a side-by-side of my faces with that of Caravaggio's figures or Artemisia [Gentileschi]. My boyfriend's mom told me I look like the Virgin Mary in a photo that she saw the other day. So, yeah, it was never supposed to be me, but they are. At times, I've referenced my own face for lighting, and generally, I have the same face as the liturgical figures I reference.

But it does come back to Mara. Mara comes from Buddhism, it’s like your self-centered inner thought that says you don't have to learn anymore. You don't have to take anybody's advice. You don't have to take anybody's word for anything. Whatever you know as of right now is set in stone and you're not going to change your mind. I've always hated that perspective. The gaze that these figures make—I'm staring directly at one of them right now and I want to cry—it's like decision-making, it's them thinking. It's them either knowing what they want to do or not knowing, questioning themselves or questioning the people around them, or lack thereof. I like to use color and light, how melancholy or content they look to dictate which direction of Mara (or not) they would be in.

WHELESS: I've been thinking about the title of the show since you told me about it and I think there's so many reasons why that word probably stuck with you on a psychological level, all the different ways that it filters in and out of your work, whether it's in humor, or in symbolism, or in the gaze. Can you talk a little bit about the environments that you put these figures in or some of the props you paint in them?

VALICE: Well, with you being a painter as well, you fully understand that each work you make is a diary entry, or it can be. Some people don't do that. I definitely am someone who does that. No matter who's in the painting, they, unfortunately, have to take on the responsibility of living within the networks of my emotion. So, each painting has its own moment. They each have another experience I have had, or they're living in a world I'd like to be in, or would like to get out of. There's this orange one of this girl just reclining outside, it has a beautiful view of some town, and she just wants to stay inside. There's decision making in that. Does she like where she is? Would she love to go run out there? I think it's beautiful. Personally, I'd love to go run out there in that field. But then, there's this guy reclining, embracing a plank of wood. He could be longing for something. He could be just wanting to hold somebody and I think that in that time, I did feel that way. I did pose him in that way for the photo. They all have their different moments, yet they all come back to Mara. I rarely ever theme a show. I usually make a show and then figure out what was going on in my life at that point or what I was thinking about when I was in here [the studio] for the past year.

Jess Valice's studio with figurative paintings leaning against the wall

WHELESS: What have you learned now as you've been reflecting on this body of work?

VALICE: You learn something new every time. It could be a therapy session for you, or it could be just your growth as a painter, or just skill developing, which is always helpful too. But you take something away with every body of work.

WHELESS: What's your work-life balance like?

VALICE: Work-life balance…. That's the next thing I need to figure out.

WHELESS: Next project.

VALICE: That's my next project. That's the question of my life. I was talking to Austyn Wiener the other day and she's like, “Jess, just go home and take a fucking bubble bath. Just do it.” I hate baths, so I won't. But she did remind me that I have to make sure that home is as comfortable to me in these times as my studio, because I was expressing to her that I am at the studio more than I am home at this point. Home is really just where I sleep now. I love my home. It's so nice. I mean, it's beautiful. It's a great little spot. But I don't want to be there because I want to be here. But she was helping remind me of the importance of creating that kind of space in order to not lose my mind, which is inevitable with every show, but it could be helpful to fix that side of it. But I'm someone who likes to cold call my friends while I paint, and my family. So, I guess with my social life, it still works out. I love to talk on the phone. So, the work and friendship balance is working out. There's a lot of people I have to text like, Sorry, I'm losing my mind. I'll call you back in a few weeks.

WHELESS: As your friend, I think you do a pretty good job. After making this body of work, or when you think about your paintings in general, once they leave your studio, what is your hope for them, or how do you see them existing?

VALICE: Ghosts

WHELESS: Ghosts?

VALICE: They will be ghosts for sure, from here. I mean, I know some people find them staring back at you a little bit spooky, but I do hope that they exist as romantic images and they become special to somebody. To me, they're my children, so my ghost children.

WHELESS: It kind of ties back into your viewing of religious works as a child. What else do you have in the works?

VALICE: Hmmm, My lobotomy? I'm really looking forward to making new work, so honestly I've been in the studio just constantly. This is the first time in a long time that I've put so much more effort into detail. I'm really excited and looking forward to challenging myself to do things that I haven't done before like I did here like with the landscapes, and just new figures, and understanding color a little bit better. I'm excited to mess around after which I will be jumping right back into painting. Probably when I get back from New York, I'm gonna lose my mind. I have a show next March.

WHELESS: Where's that?

VALICE: In Paris with Almine. I'll be doing some fairs in between that so check in on me every once in a while.

Painting by Jess Valice of a man sculpting a leg — **Jess Valice**
*The sculptor*, 2024
Oil on canvas
182.9 x 152.4 cm
72 x 60 in
© Jess Valice - Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech
Photo : Matthew Kroening

WHELESS: Every artist has pieces that they want to keep and others that they’re happy to sell. What makes you feel like something just has to be yours to keep?

VALICE: There are some paintings that nobody can really appreciate as much as I know that I will or I can't necessarily trust that anybody would. There's a lot of people that just buy for investment and that's scary when I put so much of myself into these paintings. It breaks my heart for anyone to neglect the feeling that's in the work. Especially if it's one that's really powerful. I love all of them but there's some that are a little bit more powerful than the others. I've already experienced one of my paintings going to auction that I made after I experienced one of the darkest things i've ever experienced. It was a guy holding a bouquet of dead fish, which is just as beautiful as a flower, flowers have to die for you to have the bouquet. I understand that people have to put things in auction sometimes for whatever reason, that's not what I'm complaining about, but it's a trust thing when you love something so much, and I love creating poetry in that kind of way so much. So that being said, the ones that I feel like I don't trust anybody else with, sometimes I save them for myself.

AVERY: There's always one I feel a connection with in each series and I try to pay attention to that. Usually it's just a no-brainer like, this can't go anymore, it has to stay with me. But in the same vein, I've had ones where I'm like, oh that didn't go to the right place, or it just doesn't feel right and it's an intuition that you have when you're like, this work is important and shouldn't live with anybody but me. Sometimes I won't put a work in a show, or I’ll keep it because I still don't know what I'm supposed to learn from it or I just keep it because it confuses me. I have to keep it in my studio to figure out what it's trying to tell me. It's almost like a research piece. It's not necessarily that it's not done, I just don't know what I was getting at yet, so I should probably hold on to it to learn from it.

VALICE: I love that.

Mara is on view through April 20 @ Almine Rech 39 East 78th Street, 2nd Floor
New York

Jess Valice and Avery Wheless sitting on a blue couch in front of paintings

Temple of Self: An Interview of Pilar Zeta by Gaïa Matisse

February 7, 2024

text by Gaïa Matisse
all clothing Jean Paul Gaultier

Pilar Zeta, an Argentinian-born multidisciplinary artist, and Gaïa Matisse, a French-American art curator, both found themselves drawn to Mexico City and its rich culture and art scene. Two years ago, unbeknownst to each other, they simultaneously relocated to the city at the same time. With their unconventional styles and unique visions of the art, it was inevitable that their paths would intersect. This encounter occurred at Zona Maco, the city's thriving art fair, in 2021. Pilar and Gaïa connected, and exactly one year later, Pilar conceived the idea of hosting an exhibition of her art within her home. Recognizing the need for a curator to seamlessly bring all aspects of her work together in dialogue, Pilar reached out to Gaïa. Together, they embarked on the collaborative journey that would become "Temple of Self.”

Gaïa Matisse: My love, how are you?

Pilar Zeta: Hello, super good, excited for this exhibition to finally come to life!

GM: I know! I was so happy when you asked me if I wanted to curate the exhibit, since meeting you, I knew it was just a matter of time before we did something together.

PZ: Totally, and the support of Jean Paul Gaultier is the cherry on top.

GM: Right.. Gaultier is a dream. I mean with our love for vintage and the amount of Gaultier pieces we have in our closets... it makes sense. I think Jean Paul himself would approve of the way we styled the shoot.

PZ: For sure.

GM: Okay, enough fashion let’s get to the art. At this point in your career, you have done multiple large-scale installations alongside many super important projects with other artists. What intrigued you to host an art exhibition in your home?

PZ: For me, the deepest art form is how we live our day-to-day lives. That's why it's super important for me to live in an environment that reflects my inner world. After creating a lot of work for the external world, I wanted to invite people to explore where my vision comes from. My home is an extension of my daily expression; and a big part of how I find inspiration to keep making art. When you enter my house, you will see that every detail somehow is connected, even if at first something might seem unrelated. Once you understand my work you can begin to understand the connection. From my decor to my nerdy tech gadgets, and my books, everything is based on the things I love— the shapes, symbols, and talismans, they all resonate with me. Each object is either a creation of mine or an item that I've found across my life through my travels that represents me, combined with a specific color palette

GM: Yeah, the first time I walked into your apartment I was like woah, this girl has a vision… haha, In the work that we are presenting, you seamlessly blend different mediums like sculpture, tapestries, and paintings. What draws you to each medium and how do they inform each other in your creative process?

PZ: Each medium brings its unique energy to my artwork and has its creative process and emotional attachment. When the original image that I created with AI is woven by artisans into a tapestry, Wool, for instance, carries an organic warmth that connects back to nature. The temples that symbolize a subconscious reverence for sacred spaces, come alive. In the paintings, Oil paint is the medium in which there's a dynamic exchange between the virtual and the physical. This process is about connecting with a higher place through crafting a piece in the moment, created with a specific intention. Even in sculptures, I often utilize materials with reflective surfaces and minimalistic forms that allow for some form of interaction. I also love the imperfections of each material, they become part of the richness and depth of work and the interpretation of who is making it. Meanwhile, functional pieces like furniture become extensions of who I am, but I give them daily use.

GM: Imperfections are key. So tell me more about how you use AI in your work.

PZ: For me, AI has been an incredible tool. All my life, I've been studying a combination of very random subjects and concepts, from metaphysical and occultism to specific architectural styles, obscure sci-fi films, weird conspiracies, or a certain era. This mix of seemingly unrelated ideas forms the basis of my artistic expression. AI helps me shape all these ideas into storytelling and brings them into a visual form. I'm able to make pieces of art that are deeply aligned with my brain and my lucid dreams. It's like bringing something that exists in my head into this dimension… and when I work with artisans it’s bringing the AI version back into the physical world with actual artisans recreating it. As an artist and a human, it's important to embrace technology and be friends with it.

GM: That makes total sense… I’ve tried to use AI before like Midjourney… and let's just say it’s not easy to transcribe your thoughts… you need to be super specific in your prompt, and for that, you need tons of knowledge of the subject you are working on.

PZ: (laughs) Yeah it takes a lot of time and references, to shape the image as you want.

GM: I’ve noticed that portals and gateways are a recurring theme in your work. Where do you see these portals leading the person in front of them, both physically and conceptually?

PZ: For me, portals are places that harbor a limited space where two things meet, where one starts and the other ends. They're an invitation for mysterious, magical occurrences. A space opening to a new dimension, inviting imagination and transformation. I always ask myself, how do we move from one dimension to another? What if there were a place that existed between dimensions, acting as a hinge between them? Portals are symbols for entry into a new reality. They are gateways that have been used for thousands of years, deeply embedded in our subconscious.

GM: So cool… yeah just preparing for this exhibit and diving into your art, I feel like we have been entering different dimensions. What is the most unexpected object that sparked inspiration for your art?

PZ: I find inspiration in rare, obscure books—mostly occult, metaphysical, and bizarre. I am also very into weird mind machines and all theories on how to manipulate reality, as well as vintage art and architecture books.

GM: Your book collection is insane, it’s been so much fun staying up all night and reading about Ufos and quantum physics. Aside from objects, what life experience do you think had the strongest impact on influencing your work?

PZ: The most unexpected and strongest inspiration for my art came during my time in Egypt. We were doing a tour of the pyramids and I ended up lying down in a Sarcophagus… It was so powerful, that I felt connected directly with the energy of the Pyramids and had this profound sense of creativity stirring within me. I knew, at that moment, that I would create something significant. Ten years later, I found myself placing an artwork at the pyramids of Giza, fulfilling the vision that had been ignited within me all those years ago.

GM: I saw that, what an achievement. Talk about manifesting something into reality!

PZ: Manifesting is the strongest tool, if you believe in something and have a vision, anything is possible.

GM: Your work often evokes a sense of the future and time travel. Do you believe we're heading towards a world that resembles your art, or are you simply offering commentary on possible paths?

PZ: Well, there's this concept in quantum physics that suggests we exist in multiple parallel realities simultaneously, and that the universe is a reflection of ourselves. Some theories propose that we live in a universe that is a simulation emphasizing the idea that our external reality mirrors our inner selves. I believe that the more I connect with myself and my art, the more the external world will reflect my changes. I do believe that I am moving into a universe that is more reflective of what I create.

GM: If you could travel through time with one of your sculptures, where would you go?

PZ: I would go back in time when the pyramids were built. This era fascinates me... Perhaps it occurred in a different dimension with technology we cannot even imagine. I would love to interact with the people who built the pyramids and understand their motivations and rituals.

GM: Okay, can I come with you?

PZ: Well maybe that's actually where we first met.

GM: Imagine your art existing in a utopian future. What role do you think it would play in that society?

PZ: In the future, I feel that my art could connect people with higher realms of consciousness. Like temples of creativity, inviting people to immerse themselves in dreamlike experiences and seek answers, would inspire introspection and ignite the imagination of all who encounter it. It would play a pivotal role in elevating society's collective consciousness and fostering a deeper understanding of ourselves and the universe.

GM: Yeah I feel that it's already happening… I guess we will this week when people enter your Temple. Okay final question, if you could collaborate with any artist, living or dead, who would it be?

PZ: Hmm.. hard to choose one, but I think it would have to be Hilma af Klint. I'm super intrigued by her process of channeling. Learning from her would be fascinating, all the mystical and spiritual aspects of her approach to bringing art to this plane.

Photographer: Amory Choay @yromaamory

HMU: Adrian Gonzalez @adrianglez

Styling: Pilar Zeta @pilar_zeta

Gaia Matisse @gaia.matisse

Exhibition viewings by appointment only and private opening on Friday Feb 9th in CDMX.

Things That Are Not Meant to Work: An Interview of Folk Artist Justin Williams on The Occasion of His Solo Exhibition @ Roberts Projects LA

January 31, 2024

Oil and acrylic painting by Justin Williams. Jade, the artist's wife, reclines on a sofa behind a fortune teller. — Justin Williams
*Major Arcana, death watching over Jade* (2024)
Acrylic, oil, raw pigment and gold pigment on canvas
77.25 x 84.75 in (196.2 x 215.3 cm)

interview by Chimera Mohammadi

In Justin Williams’s newest exhibition, Synonym, at Roberts Projects, waves of stories collide and crash across timelines, pouring onto the canvas in lush and decadent palettes. Williams creates wormholes between his ancestral memories and the present day. His work carves spaces, ranging from cozy to claustrophobic, in which dead and living strangers coexist in moments of imagined connection. Williams’ world is seen through a kaleidoscope of childhood trinkets, native flora, and mythologized fauna, from goats to dogs to horses. The artist collects moments and mementos alike to collage in these quiet yet fantastical dreamscapes, mining through Westernized memories of suburban Australia and hitting rich veins of ancestral Egyptian aesthetics. Williams embraces the awkwardness of outsider life, and his work embodies the comforting realization that even outsiders create their own exiled community. To mark the occasion of Synonym, he discusses stories and people, which echo throughout his life and strangers whose moments of grief have shaped his work.

CHIMERA MOHAMMADI: I wanted to start off by asking what a day in your practice looks like.

JUSTIN WILLIAMS: I've tried to level out a lot. I got married, met [my wife] Jade, and I'm kind of trying to be normal in a weird way. It's been really productive, forcing myself to sort of start at 9:00 and work ’til dinnertime or whatever. And that might not be working – I might just sit on the couch and look at a painting and be like, “That looks ridiculous.” It's basically just get up, start making marks, and then from there, I'll kind of lose time.

MOHAMMADI: Your upcoming show at Roberts Projects, which looks gorgeous, is entitled Synonym. Is there a meaning behind that title for you?

WILLIAMS: Titles and names for paintings and things like this, it's a real collage, and an abstract process because I'm super dyslexic. So, I like words in the sense of how they sound, and it could be related to the show. It [Synonym] feels really circular. One painting might be about a weird transitional experience, or a story, or a secondhand story, or cults where I'm from, or these things. I tried to distill it into one thing, thinking that that's like what you're meant to do as an artist, but then I'd rather the painting inform what the show is. So, if one painting’s about this guy I knew growing up called Baba Desi, the Belgrave Wizard — and I love the fact that he was just this weird dude that worked at a post office, really suburban, normal, nice guy, who had a full meltdown and decided he wanted to carve sticks and be a wizard. And I'm like, What the fuck? Where did that point happen? This in-between moment. One painting would lend itself to that, and then the next painting might be a portrait of Jade and all my fears and feelings I didn’t even know I had about normality, coping with that through a painting. They're two very separate topics, and I was always like, Fuck, is it too schizophrenic or not cohesive to show altogether? But it all comes back to self-portraits. Like, Why am I interested in these things? So, it's one topic, but it's split off on a journey.

Oil painting by Justin Williams. Baba Desi, a wizard, stares at a goblet, wearing a coat covered in faces. — Justin Williams
*The Belgrave wizard-Baba Desi* (2024)
Acrylic, oil and raw pigment on canvas
48 x 36 in (121.9 x 91.4 cm)

MOHAMMADI: Do you consider yourself a figure within this sort of mythology of the ordinary that you're creating in your work? Or are you an outside spectator looking in? What's your relationship to it?

WILLIAMS: I feel like the ones that are more successful, it's like I'm a spectator. Sometimes I know the story, but I always want it to feel like this moment when something weird's happening at a park or a friend's house. It's like, you know what's going on, and you kind of walk past, but you can be drawn in, or you can not go into it, but you know you want to find out about it later. I like those ones where it's this banal jumping off point. And sometimes, when it's to do with stories, as opposed to things that I've experienced, they're really interesting. It's a lot of things through my grandma and her side through Alexandria, [Egypt] and the stories that just seem so normal, the way she says this shit. I made this painting of her, because she got bitten by a scorpion. There's two different types of scorpions. One will kill you and one won't. And she's like, “Oh, we made the nanny suck the poison out of the bite to make sure because it could have killed me or not killed me until the Bedouin doctors arrived.” And I'm like, “Fuck. You just put this poor lady's life in danger, and you got bit by a scorpion, which is crazy for me anyway.” But the way my mind is interpreting that is through a painting, and I've made that painting a couple of different times because I want to think of what my [grandma] Norma was thinking. Also, the experience of this probably 20-year-old lady that's not getting paid that well, sucking poison out of this young girl. Everyone was okay, and it's all fine, but it's this weird magical world.

MOHAMMADI: You've said that your grandparents’ migration from Egypt wasn't really discussed in your family, and it's a very prominent theme in your work. I was curious if the tension between your connection to that culture and your familial distance from that heritage has informed your work?

WILLIAMS: I've wanted to go and do residencies there [in Egypt], but you know when you listen to a song, say you're going through a gnarly breakup and there's a particular song that carries you through it, and you know that in ten years when you listen to it, you're going to think of Simon or some shit? It's precious. You won't put it on all the time. I want to be ready when I go to Egypt and spend time because I'm not a holiday painter either. You’ve got to understand, too, Australia in general, and especially where I was from, is an ancient civilization mixed with a really young culture. If you don't become a builder or a plumber, love surfing and football … it's just happy and dumb in a fucked up way. And I hated football, all that shit, so much that I really thought there was something wrong with me. And then, you mix in my mum's side, going to primary school with a fucking bowl of tabouli and some falafels, I'm like, Fuck that. Give me white bread and a sandwich so no one thinks I'm weird. My dad's side's full of Irish convicts. That’s where the name Williams comes from. And so, I was able to fit in really well with a group of normal Australian people, but secretly, I'm like, Fuck, I love art, and I want to know about Matisse. So, I think being an observer, an outsider, in these kinds of situations, is overall what I feel the work's about.

MOHAMMADI: What does it mean to be an outsider?

WILLIAMS: I think everyone is in a certain aspect of the word, but it's like, who fights? You feel more comfortable if you fit into a culture. It makes things seem right. So, if you're in between, or you're listening to what you know is actually legit to yourself, it's a weird friction. For a long time, I felt like I was pretending. Now I'm awkward and the paintings feel awkward and I'm okay with that. If you're at a dinner party or whatever, the people that are cool and boring, they won't really gravitate to the weird, overweight accountant-looking dude or whatever. But that's the guy you want to talk to. He's the best. I'm really fascinated by authenticity, even if it's wrong and misguided. You know, when you've got some cool people coming over, so you're not going to put on the music that you're actually listening to? I want to put on the music that I actually listen to and be pathetic. That's the feeling that I want. And that's okay.

MOHAMMADI: How does this outsider status or culture inform the creation of the fictional communities and moments of togetherness that take center stage in your work?

WILLIAMS: It goes back to trusting in the work. It's like collage in a way. So, it might be two stories. A good example is one of the paintings, This trap I lay for you, about this guy, Neil. I used to cut up firewood for these bed and breakfast type things in this town called Sassafrass, which is a bit bougie in the hills for glamping kind of couples. Neil was the coolest looking dude. He had this big, massive beard, and this huge goat, which was kind of weird in this area. One day, I was dropping his firewood off, and he's out front, holding an Angora goat. It's this red color and it was dead. Its neck was sagging, and he's bawling out, crying. I was like, "Oh, you okay?" He was like, "Fucking dead. It's dead." The goat had eaten an old gasoline can. He’d had this goat for a really long time. I was like, “Oh, that's really sad. I'm sorry about your goat.” And he's like, “No, you don't understand. It was my late wife's goat. The goat's dead. My brother's dead.” So, I went over there thinking, I'll listen to the bullshit and whatever. But it fucking broke me because he was totally in love with this lady. The way he described it was this beautiful romance. They had an antique shop, which was why his house and backyard was just filled with shit. She died of cancer. The goat was hers because she wanted to make jumpers out of it. It was just this real sense of loss. That was the last straw, this dumb goat that he didn't even like. He hated the fucking goat. But it was a really sad, beautiful moment. I felt like I'd gone into a painting in a way, and he'd given me a gift in that sorrow too. I made that painting a lot of times. So I'll think, I'm going to make that painting from the perspective of Neil. And then aesthetically, it just comes down to something that looks better than something else. I'll have to get rid of Neil, and then another figure that’s in there might look like my dad. And then, the story is suddenly about two random stories coming together that don't mix. They don't make sense. But for me, I know exactly what's going on.

Oil painting by Justin Williams of a man digging in front of a cabin. — Justin Williams
*This trap I lay for you* (2024)
Acrylic, oil and raw pigment on canvas
76.5 x 86.75 in (194.3 x 220.3 cm)

MOHAMMADI: I was interested in the prominence of nature in your work because you're a portrait artist and people are the focus of your work. But even your indoor pieces have these little lush pockets of flora and often a dog or a horse, and I was curious about what these natural motifs represent for you.

WILLIAMS: Most of the work is from where I grew up. When people think of Australia, they'll think of beaches or desert, but where I'm from was prehistoric looking, in a way, and almost more indicative of a European forest. You've got these really old ferns. And my dad's a landscape gardener too, and he's like Google. You can be like, "What the fuck's this plant?" He'd be like, "It's a Pacificus Metallicus. It originates from South Africa and the Roman gypsies brought it in through the desert.” And all this kind of shit that you don't need to know. So, the plant-based stuff is pretty much where I'm from. And being in Santa Fe, the landscape is very different here. Sometimes I'll bring in some of that kind of stuff. Again, it's that collage type of thing. My cameras are filled with really boring things like a fence and a little path. I'll use these little things for reference, but I don't want too much information either. I like to give myself a little bit of an idea of how to do stuff and then not print them off really big and know how to fucking make it work. The shadows are all wrong. They're things that are not meant to work. It helps convey awkwardness within the work. But yeah, a lot of the plants just come from where I'm from. And growing up, too, [my grandparents], they're the first people I'd ever known that had indoor plants. I thought it was crazy. Plants inside the house! It blew my mind. I mean, now it's really normal, but that ’90s thing for Dad was potpourri and dried shit. So, these lush green things were like an art class and over the top. I fucking love it. Mum would be like, “Ah, it's disgusting. Trying to fit in.”

MOHAMMADI: What role does your ancestry play in your life? Are ancestors guides, reservoirs of material, inspirations, missing persons?

WILLIAMS: As I got older I was like, Fuck, that's pathetic. I should have been embracing this shit and finding out more. It's been a real race for me. Now [my grandma] Norma's ninety-eight. She hasn't really got long to go, and she doesn't really make that much sense anymore. So, I'm just really trying to get as much information from her, and Mum as well, but Mum's like, “No, we're Australian.” That's it. Within my family too, Mum's like, “I don't know where this art shit came from.” It's apologetic almost. But I've accepted that's what I'm doing, and they've accepted, “Okay, if we don't hear from Justin for three months, that's fine.” But I think opening that door—because I was already painting and drawing and doing a lot of things before I really wanted to know where it came from—it helps me accept that artistic side of why I'm interested in these ideas. And because art wasn't really a thing. They just would have a really beautiful ceramic dish that they used for something. It has to be over the top and lavish and beautiful. And so, I liked these little objects, like a lamp with a camel attached to it or some shit. It's tacky and pitch almost, but every object had a weird, over-the-top kind of thing. It stood out a lot more because you're in this beige, suburban, claustrophobic environment. So you can tell, Oh, fuck, that's not from here. You can't get that down at 7-Eleven. That's from somewhere else. So I think it helped me to be like, Okay, it's in my blood, and I really want to make things.

MOHAMMADI: I wanted to dig into the phrase ‘displaced timeline’ in your bio. In the press release, Synonym was “aiming to transcend sequential timelines.” Could you elaborate on the relationship to time in your work?

WILLIAMS: I think that touches on that collage aspect that I was talking about before. A good example would be, I made this painting last year. I was walking the dog to the dog park, and I had this moment. There's this red fence and there's snow everywhere. And I feel like a newborn giraffe walking in the snow. I'm also like, “Whoa, snow.” All the time. Jade's like, “Who cares? It's annoying.” But I had this moment of me walking through the snow, thinking about Oswaldo, my grandpa. He died never seeing snow. Oswaldo Died Never Seeing Snow was the title of the painting. I painted this big red fence with the snow, and then I painted my grandpa on the horse in the snow because it's like these two timelines. This guy's dead, long gone, and he would have never experienced snow because he came from Alexandria to Australia. He would have never had this human experience that I'm having right now. And the horse, because he was similar to the guy with the goat. That's why I think I really sort of meshed with that story, because he had a horse in a tiny backyard in Melbourne. He was like, "Well, fuck. I can have a horse. We could have him in Alexandria. I want to have a horse.” He'd walk his horse around. The council came in and made him get rid of it. I just like the idea of him in my timeline, the present time, walking past this thing.

Synonym is on view through March 9th at Roberts Projects LA, 442 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles.

Uncompromising Space and Riotous Color: An Interview of Nicole Wittenberg

January 26, 2024

Nicole Wittenberg, *Midsummer Morning 3*, 2023. Image courtesy of Fernberger Gallery.

Garnering inspiration from riotous Fauvist material, Nicole Wittenberg intertwined herself with the world of art from the moment she saw Matisse’s Woman with a Hat. Rooted very confidently in her own intuition, Wittenberg has pursued interests related to her own gestural forms without much hesitation. Her artistic philosophy can be summarized by the kind of unbending compromise that turns heads and makes the world worth looking at. Imbued with synesthetic coloration, the work she portrays is embedded in its own unquantifiable emotional scale. She fearlessly plays with the kind of aggressive coloration that’s capable of conveying its own story, and her viewers get to reap the benefits. Nicole Wittenberg’s Jumpin’ at the Woodside is on view at Fernberger Gallery, a new gallery in Los Angeles. Well known for her erotica work, Wittenberg has garnered well-deserved attention for her experimentation with the body in space. After a shift in interest from figural forms to the entity that houses them, her focus turned to the landscape art we get to witness in Jumpin’ at the Woodside.

MIA MILOSEVIC: Let’s start with the opening of your debut solo exhibition in Los Angeles at Fernberger Gallery, Jumpin’ at the Woodside.

NICOLE WITTENBERG: Well…I'm really thrilled. I grew up in Northern California, I went to school at the San Francisco Art Institute, and spent a lot of time in Los Angeles in the early 2000’s. I would go down to a little apartment in West Hollywood three to four days a week and bring the artwork I did there to San Francisco. When I finished art school, I went to Italy and worked with glass sculpture in Venice for a year. I went back to California and decided to move to New York. And it wasn't for the weather! I got a job working for an artist out there. Over the course of 14 years, I started paying a lot of attention to my home state and became really interested in seeing people's attention in LA become more diverse outside of film. I would say that film has always had a huge importance for me as an artist. I spent a lot of time watching movies, writing about movies, thinking about movies, and the history of movies. I'm super excited to have my very first show in my home state in LA. It's a dream come true for me.

MM: It feels like a full circle kind of moment for you. Do you see yourself channeling your interest in cinema in this show?

NW: I have a very favorite director of photography named Michael Ballhaus, who was the DP for [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder in Germany. When Fassbinder passed away quite young, he came to LA and he shot Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), The Age of Innocence (1993) and a whole bunch of other great movies. I was interested in his work because he looked at painting for inspiration. If you go through his films, you see the way that every shot relates to a painting. I think the cinematic space is one where you have an immediate impact, and it deals with the constraints and scale in a way where it presents itself all at once. That’s the way I seek to construct a painting. Even if you just see a painting for 10 seconds, my goal is for the viewer to receive a whole and complete experience. Because film is about moving images, the image for me is much more important than the narrative. The image defines the narrative and not the other way around. The narrative is oftentimes personal in film, like we could all go to see the same movie and leave with different ideas about what that narrative means. That's because we all have a different kind of experience with images.

MM: Tell me more about the title of the show, Jumpin’ at the Woodside. Did you choose the name?

NW: I did. It's a Count Basie song. I really love jazz. I love the way it moves us through things, and it doesn't sit still. I think that's a really nice way to think about images because, even though paintings are static and films are in motion, paintings can have just as much motion as cinema. Jazz also positions itself towards motion, momentum, and a clear feeling. I felt like all these things are in conversation with one another in this show.

MM: The press release for the show quotes Pierre Bernard in its description of your work, stating that “Color has just as strong a logic as form. It's a matter of never giving up before one has managed to recreate the first impression.” What do you think of color having as much logic as form?

NW: I would say color creates an overall tone, which conveys a sensation, and the feeling is the thing that the image carries. Depending on what kind of painter you are and how you want to use color, it tells you a lot. In abstract painting, color conveys an image and a form even when it has been separated out from its descriptive form.

MM: The idea of color is very relevant to your upcoming show. How did you think about color in this selection of work?

NW: For the show I was really thinking about the vibrancy and chroma as the colors being distinctly of themselves, and how you could get high chroma, high velocity color to push against its neighboring colors to create a more aggressive and fast-coming image.

Installation view courtesy of Fernberger Gallery.

MM: What were some of your earlier interests? What brought you to painting?

NW: I would say as a youngster, I was really attracted to painting. The paintings that have my first memories of them are at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. We have early Matisse paintings that are my first memories of seeing paintings in real life. They're the early Fauvist paintings, and they were the birth of the Fauvist movement. San Francisco holds the Woman with a Hat (1905), which I think may have been the first really definitive Fauvist picture. Matisse created a painting where the content of the painting really was color. It's not really a portrait, it's more of a conveyance of riotous color. I was able to see that painting at a young age and it was the thing that I was most attracted to at that age. It was the most interesting thing I'd ever seen. It never really left my memory. I was younger than 10 when I first saw that picture and I just wanted to go back and see it again and again. It never got boring.

MM: And there was a progression from then, to painting, to art school, to your career now.

NW: When I was 16, I had back surgery and I had to spend a year in bed. I spent a lot of time in bed copying classical drawings because I didn’t have much mobility and that was something I could do. I spent a long time drawing, and drawing is a really important activity for me. I spent a long time copying old masters. I had a couple of books of etchings, Rembrandt's and Goya's. I spent a long time copying those etchings and making drawings of them. When I was in art school, I needed another back surgery. It was another year in bed and lots of looking at images, lots of looking at drawings, and the copying of classical drawings continued. When I was living in Venice after art school, I had a really great opportunity to spend a lot of time with my three favorite painters, which I would say are Venetian painters: Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese. I had a lot of off time and I didn't really know anyone in that city, so I would go and make copies of those works and spend time with works that really dealt with color, scale, and motion.

MM: It seems like you're known for reinventing realism, your name is often in the same sentence as the reinvention of something new or original. It's interesting for me to hear you say that a lot of your process started with copying.

NW: I would say it's more like stepping into a feeling rather than copying an image. When I'm looking at something, I get a feeling for it. That feeling dictates what the image becomes, and it's not really a depiction of exactly what I'm looking at. If you were to see a photograph of the image, like the places where I was when I was working on the studies, I don't know if you would see anything close to what the paintings look like. There's big jumps between what I see and what I feel when I'm looking at it. I want the paintings to be a depiction of the feeling, not of nature necessarily. I'd say a big part of that has to do with what you put in and what you leave out. I'm always trying to convey a feeling of being in that moment, and that feeling of being in that moment is something that's fleeting. The image coming forth all at once has to do with the fact that the feeling disappears as quickly as it arrived. It's a flash.

Nicole Wittenberg, *Strawberry Moon*, 2023. Image courtesy of Fernberger Gallery.

MM: The Elle Magazine article by John H. Richardson which reviews you and your work cites Judith Bernstein, who said that “women who work with sexual imagery are often lumped together when in essence their aesthetic and message are very different.” What are your thoughts on that?

NW: I would say that it may be a cultural fascination to see women, who have oftentimes been the subject matter, to be able to pick up that same subject matter as the historical subject. Judith Bernstein is a fabulous artist, but she's a very political artist. She uses sexualized imagery as a way of talking about power structures in the world and pushing back on those power structures. I'm not really interested in politics at all. Erotica paintings for me started in a really funny way where I was watching a lot of movies, and I was talking to my friend in LA, and I was saying that I felt like I'd run out of movies to watch. Like, I don't know what's going on. I'm just bored with everything. And he was laughing. He was like, “you know, porn is like 80% of the internet.” And I was like, “what?” And he's like, “yeah, it's like 80% of the internet.” And I was like, “stop.” He's like, “yeah, go to Pornhub.” And I was like, “okay.” I go into the internet and I look up Pornhub and I get all this really boring porn and I'm just like, this is really boring. I end up discovering amateur porn, which turns out to be a very interesting part of porn for me. I was like, wow, this is kind of fantastic, because I couldn't really figure out why it existed. The people who made it weren't getting paid for it. What are they doing? What is the draw here to this? I couldn't really figure it out. And then I started putting in really weird search terms like “sunsets” or “back to nature”, or for the piece that John [H. Richardson] wrote about, I had put in the words “Laura Ashley”, and came up with images of teenage boys jerking off in their mother's bedrooms. I was like, wow, this is totally insane.

MM: It sounds insane.

NW: I ended up taking a bunch of screenshots and then just watching them and drawing, because I can draw pretty quickly. I was just watching things and pulling pieces of stuff together and collaging it and creating imagery based on queries in amateur porn. That's how the erotica really came about. A lot of it is set in nature, which is what pushed me towards landscape painting.

MM: It’s interesting how porn is usually represented indoors, or it would be weird for it to be outside, but then you make this transition to outside…

NW: I was totally interested in the outside part. I was looking mostly at international porn, so I was looking at a lot of German porn shot in forests, some beaches, some hiking trails, some old porn from the 70’s shot on mountaintops. It became interesting, and then suddenly the figuration fell out and I just started looking at the stuff around which became just as interesting to me as the people.

MM: Some descriptions of your work note the “awkwardness of bodies”. This is an interesting contrast to nature which doesn’t seem to be capable of awkwardness?

NW: Nature has a lot of awkwardness, too. There is an awkwardness to porn, but it's more about the awkwardness of the camera than the awkwardness of the body. I tried doing the erotica images with models and it became a little too weird. The landscape work came out of having more autonomy with putting together firsthand experiences.

MM: A lot of the erotica work that you do is cited as something controversial or innovative because you’re a woman representing sexualized male bodies. There seems to be a recurring narrative about it being controversial. What do you think?

NW: I was using men and women, but there was a lot of male imagery because there's so much of it in porn. It was also really fun to turn the tables. If the male gaze is such a dominant viewer of the female form, why can't the female gaze be a dominant viewer of the male? Now we've entered an era where male and female can be self-declarative. Where there is no longer this border, this edging out of what is male and what is female. What we get to decide in 2024 is what pronoun we'd like to associate with ourselves. I could be a man because I say I'm a man, not because of how I was genetically assigned at birth. We've moved into an era of fluidity, of gender that didn't exist 20 years ago. If it did exist, it was as fringe culture. It's the pushing of boundaries that allowed for that fringe culture to be part of the language of our dominant culture.

MM: Now there are more than two gazes.

NW: Yeah, and now we can decide which gaze we would like to have. The one most natural to us.

MM: That touches on your rejection of identity art.

NW: It does because we have more voice in being able to describe and portray our own identity. It expands the notion that we must stick to a singular identity, the identity that we must portray in our everyday lives–in our art, writing, voice and participation. There’s more gray area.

MM: And more room for creativity in art.

NW: More room. I think art has always asked culture to give it more room. And how much room are we allowed to have? It allows us to push back on the constraints of identity.

MM: How much room can be assigned to one person?

NW: How much room? How many little boxes can we check? We're all presented with these little boxes, and we’re meant to occupy these boxes fully, but we're not meant to expand to the adjacent boxes.

MM: On the topic of gendering things, you've talked about some of your techniques being dominated by a “big muscular brush stroke.” I love this in the context of what you have painted, like sexualized males and whatnot. But then it's also interesting to think about how it relates to your landscapes.

NW: I think that just comes down to who we are as people and how we like to communicate, because we all have such different styles of communicating and the way we paint, or the way we write, or the way we talk. It’s all so specific to who we are. I'm a direct, all at once, big gesture kind of person. The interesting thing about painting is how much we reveal about who we are when we're doing what we're doing. We can't really hide in that.

MM: The choice is inevitable. Do you see a similarity between your erotica art and these current landscape paintings? Do you feel they fuse together at all?

NW: I see them as cohesively part of one body of work. I was a less experienced painter when I was making the erotica work. I started making it 12 years ago. I probably worked on that body of work for 5 years and learned quite a bit about how to put images and paintings together at that time. The current work is a synthesis of all that experience. We learn things as we go. Ideally, we get better at what we do. I actually have been making erotica paintings quietly in the studio. They're more interesting than the other ones because I know more about how to paint and how to use the materials. My ideas are slightly different–things develop and change.

MM: It seems like you have a knack for titles… “after school special”, “grassy knoll”, “back to nature”…

NW: They are all, for the most part, representative of queries I put into amateur porn sites that I got the images from. The “grassy knoll” is obviously the big question mark of how Kennedy was shot. “Back to nature” came up because I was sick at home from work and I had a box of oatmeal that said “back to nature” on it. I started laughing, plugged the words in, and came up with these hilarious videos from Germany of women rubbing their bodies against rocks and trees and fence posts. Everything came up in a very organic way.

MM: David Salle called you a “rare bird” and cited you as an artist who has reinvented realism in a way that both predecessors and contemporaries have not. How’d you receive this?

NW: That’s humbling. I mean, it's something I think we all aspire to…to live in the world, and to share our world with the world at the same time. I think that's nice. I should write that down.

MM: You should write that down.

NW: As a culture, we're constantly defining what's real. I watched a movie that was 10 years old yesterday and it looked so old to me. I have all these friends who are obsessed with this TV show called The Curse, and it has this really different aesthetic to it. It’s a different kind of light, a different kind of way of portraying people. People themselves haven't changed that much in the past 100 years in terms of how we look and how we are, but our portrayal of people has really changed and our way of looking has really changed. I'd say that our culture is constantly defining and redefining how we look and what we are.

MM: I think so too. It’s about ways of seeing.

NW: Ways of seeing and ways of portraying what we see and what we make.

MM: The ways of wanting to be seen have changed drastically too.

NW: Completely. Hopefully that gives more space.

Nicole Wittenberg, *Pieces 2,* 2024. Image courtesy of Fernberger Gallery.

MM: What are your aspirations for the future? Do you see yourself working in film or getting into that down the line?

NW: I've always been really interested in filmmaking. After art school I made a bunch of short films. I've been equally afraid of things that rely on collaboration for final output. And also things that rely on huge budgets. I feel like anything made in committee just requires so much compromise, and I'm not compromising. I don't like compromise and I don't think art is meant to compromise. I think the best examples of film in our culture have been when we had people with a strong viewpoint who were given a means to express that viewpoint with autonomy and authority, without having to compromise for budgetary reasons or other people's needs. I have a love of wanting to do film and I have a total fear of film.

MM: Painting reigns supreme in that sense. It’s a place you don't have to compromise.

NW: I don't have to compromise and I'm the only one in the room with the brush. I can take as long or as short as I want to, and it's done when I say it's done. That makes it incredibly scary but also incredibly powerful. Compromise leads to weaker things. When we get to see one strong viewpoint from a singular perspective, we can have a deeper and richer life experience that creates more space.

Jumpin’ at the Woodside is on view through March 16 @ Fernberger Gallery, 747 N Western Avenue, Los Angeles

Banks Violette Interviewed by Neville Wakefield On The Occasion Of His Commission by Hedi Slimane for CELINE

January 12, 2024

***CELINE Art Project: Banks Violette***

Text and interview by Neville Wakefield

Every era has its defining figures, and in the condensed New York artworld of the early aughts, Banks Violette was foremost amongst them. Of the many currents running through that scene, Violette’s was the darkest and most stringent. Broken drum-sets, skeletal architectures and vacated stages splintered by shards of white, fluorescent light and set to the subsonic undertow of death metal’s societal angst captured the zeitgeist of an era’s precarious balance of nihilism and celebration. Drawing from music, art, theater and fashion, Violette’s art took the form of a barograph, trace recording the pressure that was the slow implosion of everything around it - pressure the artist eventually succumbed to, withdrawing from the world he’d helped define.

Drawn to the incandescent energy of that moment, Hedi Slimane was both documentarian and participant in this seminal New York moment. His stark black and white images of the artists perfectly captured the taught masculinity and absolute abandon of his artist peers. In july of 2007, he curated a group show titled “Sweet Bird of Youth”, at Arndt & Partner in Berlin, featuring the works of artists Dash Snow, Slater Bradley, Mathew Cerletty, Dan Colen, Gardar eide Einarsson, Terence Koh, Douglas Kolk, Nate Lowman, Ryan Mcginley, Matt Saunders, Steven Shearer, Paul P., and Banks Violette. Later that year, “Young American” at the Foam Fotografiemuseum in Amsterdam, paid photographic tribute to the same generation of artists.

After the best part of a decade sequestered in upstate New York, Violette has begun a cautious re-engagement with the world he left behind. With the indelible legacy of that early period more relevant than ever, Violette’s work is reappearing in galleries, museums and now in the context of Slimane’s re-imagining of the CELINE flagship stores. The synergy between artist and designer has been longstanding. “The thing that I've always admired about Hedi is that even when the approach is deconstructed, there isn’t any critical remove or detachment. there’s a genuine sincerity to his investment in the things he admires. as a result, he can transform something that is permanently framed as ironic into its opposite.”

The chandelier structures created for the stores are classic Violette. The repeated modular forms take the minimalist frameworks of Dan Flavin or Sol Le Witt and pushes them into a deconstructed state of theatrical collapse. Viiolette likens them to a figure who has stumbled and fallen. they are an image of overdose, equal parts narcotic collapse and narcan revival. “I relate to sculpture as this thing that extends itself into the space of a body so it’s of necessity anthropomorphized – and so autobiographically I was like yeah I know all about that…” The resulting sculptures perfectly capture the emotional tenor of the times: “It’s as if Aristotle was raised in a warzone which he probably was, and the poetics of post-traumatic stress disorder meet the aesthetics of boredom.” Add to that fashion and retail, and the meeting is unlike any other.

NEVILLE WAKEFIELD: I was going to start with the early 2000s, and I realized I can't really remember much, but it would be cool to recall that moment a little bit, even if it's fragmentary, and to talk about how you recollect that scene being shaped. It was certainly an interesting time in which there were multiple conversations between purity and impurity and all these things that art had in some way tried to keep out, whether it's music or fashion. It seemed to be that the floodgate had been opened. And I certainly remember that because I participated in it with the book [Fashion: Photography of the Nineties, 1998], and was thinking about how genres were bending, which all seems now very obvious and straightforward (laughs).

BANKS VIOLETTE: That's a great way to synopsize it. I really remember very early trying to make a case for why I thought that the music that I was interested in, the performers and the musicians, and the cultural outfit that they were generating was worthwhile. And that it was like, “Oh, I'm not trying to appropriate something. I'm just trying to point a direction towards something that I think is really, really interesting.” And having just an immense amount of resistance towards that as an idea, which, as a sort of cumulative consequence of a number of other people working in a similar kind of fashion, it stopped being an issue relatively quickly. But there was like the beginning of an argument and then the end of an argument.

NW: I remember Dave Hickey talking to me about his interest in the operatic as being an impure art form. And I was wondering whether, in this conversation between purity and impurity and genre, you saw the music that you were listening to at the time, which was probably largely death metal and black metal, as a pure form that you were introducing? Obviously, it is socially impure, and contaminated in all sorts of ways. But as a musical idiom.

BV: I thought they were better creators than I was. (Laughs) Honestly, if you're making something, and it's framed as art, inherently a substantial portion of it is a fiction. You're engaging through the mechanism of it existing as a fiction. You're suspending disbelief, you're engaging in saying this thing has the potential for meaning. And looking at the people who are active as black metal musicians or something like that, they were just better at it than I was. And it was also conditioned generationally. I was a kid in the eighties and liked PMRC and this kind of, “Oh my God, your record collection, if you listen to it backward, it all, you know, invokes it or it'll cause you to commit suicide either way.” The idea that the most gutter-level incarnation of a culture had the potential within it to do this horrendous thing.

NW: It's an architecture borne of fiction.

BV: It's a vector for faith.

NW: And were you interested in the dramatics of it? And I'm thinking of Lords of Chaos, church burnings, stage antics and that kind of stuff. Was that theatricalization of sound something that you felt fed into the work that you were doing?

BV: The horrible instances or eruptions of criminality were sort of like confirmations of the efficacy of a particular method of communicating. I didn't know a better way of confirming that, holy, shit, this thing is really, really effective, other than like, wow, it resulted in this horrendous real-world thing. And I still kind of struggle for what would be an equivalent affirmation that this thing is effective other than something horrible happening. There's the affirmative quality of the disastrous (laughs). There is something specific to that in those instances, like black metal or church burning, arson, all those kinds of things– horrible as they are, they're affirmative instances of the disastrous, the disastrous being an affirmative gesture.

NW: It makes me also think about this other idea, which seems to have been lost since then, of amateurism and the idea that you could be a successful failure. I remember there was a great [Raymond] Pettibon piece, which had this quote: “Professionalism is a hate crime.”

BV: I think people were deeply attracted to that idea. Not that people weren't careerists, because they certainly were. People obviously wanted to make a living, but within their sort of limited understanding a living would be. But it wasn't like, “Oh yeah, I’m gonna have three cars and a house in the Hamptons because I'm an artist.”

NW: How did Hedi Slimane come into all this?

BV: One of my favorite interviews from when I was much younger was an interview that I did with him for this Australian fashion magazine. One of the best conversations I ever had. So I'd always gotten along with him.

NW: It's come full circle because he was certainly documenting and to some extent participating in that moment. I'm curious as to how you see the bridge between then and now.

BV: I keep on coming back to this idea that it's an act of devotion. Going back to the affirmative through the disastrous, how do you literalize the devotion? Well, someone's gotta die for you to be truly devoted to something.

NW: There's no devotion without death.

BV: The commemorative, the allegiance, all these kinds of registers only exist if they coalesce around a tragic instance. That is the thing that coheres the whole around itself.

NW: There's also an interesting sort of connection there between entropy, collapse, decay, and artists such as [Robert] Smithson, for instance, and Romanticism and Caspar David Friedrich and The Sea of Ice or the Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. I know that there was a work that you made for the show at Barbara Gladstone that directly referenced The Sea of Ice. Do you think about the absent figure as being romantic? We had a conversation about the figure being present in all work in some way.

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818, Oil on canvas, 94.8 cm × 74.8 cm (37.3 in × 29.4 in), Kunsthalle Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

BV: I think so. Romanticism is such a loaded kind of idea. As soon as you start talking about an inherent romantic relationship with a landscape, you start getting into blood and soil. There's an inherent ugliness to those things, no matter how much they're coated as “oh, it's romantic, it's beautiful.” Or with Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, that pictorial convention of positioning the viewer behind somebody who's viewing something. It's like you're creating, in the clumsiest manner possible, the equivalent of a dissociative fugue. So those things are already historically connected to trauma. Pictorially, as a formal device, they're related to trauma. There is a bad thing at the center of all these things.

NW: The traumatic origins or the role of trauma in that dissociation is really interesting. Coming back to the body, thinking about the chandeliers and this idea of a collapsed or absent body, the body – whether it's an empty stage that is inviting or proposing a body or a chandelier – seems to always be there in the sculpture.

BV: It's not that it's a purely anthropomorphized kind of thing. It's not like, “Oh, look at this thing and see a body and see it sort of stagger through space.” The two things I kept on staring at or thinking about a lot were [Martin] Kippenberger’s Street Lamp for Drunks and then [Alberto] Giacometti’s Woman With Her Throat Cut. One thing that's sort of this violent crime scene that's coextensive with real space. It's not on a plinth, it's in your space, and it's a horrible violation, even though it's goofy and biomorphic. And the other one is this thing that presupposes a body and presupposes a condition of the body. It's a streetlamp, but it's not anthropomorphic. It doesn't exist without an understanding of being a drunk in a space. What that feels like and how gravity affects you and all these kinds of things. Long story short, the chandeliers ended up being the Narcaned equivalent of the Kippenberger things. It was sort of like, how would you do that if you were nodding out on heroin?

Martin Kippenberger’s *Street Lamp for Drunks* in situ. Bundeskunsthalle

NW: Can you talk a bit about the material language? Because it has both stayed the same and evolved a bit, I think. Obviously, white fluorescent light has been throughout it. Graphite's been throughout it and metal in various forms. Has it changed, and how does it feel going back to that language after a period where you weren't engaged in it?

BV: The CELINE pieces specifically, I would've preferred to have them as fluorescent lights. But they're being phased out, and they're illegal in a lot of areas because they incorporate mercury. So these are sort of like stand-ins for fluorescent tubes. They have the same quality of light, and they have the same sprawled-out wiring and things like that, but they're not quite the same. There's something so specific about the institutional quality of fluorescent tubes. What other lighting element has this kind of idea of institutional alienation and phenomenological ugliness of this big glass cylinder and the implied threat of high voltage running through this thing with this low hum?

NW: I'm interested in exploring this idea of threat or menace as well. I remember having very visceral responses to your work as being deeply threatening in some sense, whether it was in the literal sense of actual fire and, and it possibly blowing my face up and shit like that…

BV: …Poor craftsmanship. (Laughs)

NW: Or, more metaphorical, perhaps, in these Narcaned sculptures. There is still the potential for danger or menace in there somehow.

BV: [Richard] Serra is sort of like the famous instance of that, where you're like, “Oh my God, I'm next to this thing that is so precarious: The weight, mass, and the physicality, it’s an unavoidable aspect of the piece, right? But there are some sculptures that just have that, like the Calder stabiles. It's a really specific quality that some sculptures that I'm attracted to and have always been attracted to just have. And it's something I respond to.

NW: Is that manifest in different ways in the chandeliers, do you think?

BV: I think so. These are in capital R retail spaces. These are in clothing stores. It's like being indifferent to a choking victim at a fancy dinner (laughs). There's this collapsed, violated form in this space that's coextensive with somebody with credit much better than mine shopping, and dressing up their body and performing this, and here's this violated version of that dress up in the same space.

NW: I was looking at the images and thinking about it in terms of homelessness.

BV: Yeah. The one for Madison Avenue was initially a collapsed form, and it's Madison Avenue in New York City with these giant plate glass windows, and it's got Balenciaga right across the street from it. There’s 3/8s of an inch of glass separating the sidewalk from this thing that initially would've been collapsed and sort of sprawled out. And the first time I got to see that sort of sight, I walked up at like 11 o'clock at night when everything was closed and just saw the lights flooding out. It's pretty much like watching somebody huddle up in the Balenciaga’s doorway at 11 o'clock on a cold night in Manhattan. There is something supremely disorienting about that.

NW: I’m curious as to how the move from Brooklyn back to Ithaca, your hometown, and how that change of landscape has affected you.

BV: I'm sympathetic with what Hedi does. He clearly responds to things that people make, like manufactured culture. I get way more from a teenager on a subway who's decorated their backpack than from staring at a bunch of trees, and I'm around a lot of trees now. There isn't the hoarding in front of the building, and it's covered with three layers of wheat-pasted posters, and here's a teenager who's decorated their shoes, or that somebody is blocking out a parking space in front of a construction site, so they took a traffic cone, a two-by-four, a Miller Light can, and made this awesome sculpture. Just all the ephemera that people generate. Instead, these days, I stare at trees. I don't get a lot from them.

NW: And what about drugs? How they've changed or shaped your vision.

BV: Water is great. I really, really like water. I really love coffee.

NW: Probably not much water past your lips for about a decade, I'd think.

BV: Yeah. Water was this thing that you used to cook up heroin in a spoon (laughs). That was really the sum total of it. Now, fentanyl is such a common thing. People are aware of Narcan kits. It’s weird. It's tragic that it's gotten to the point where people are this conversant with what these things look like. And now that I'm sober and watching that happen and being like, oh shit. I saw a bumper sticker a little while ago that was amazing, legitimately, but it was also really deeply dark: “My Child Narcanned Your Honors Student.” Which was amazing, but also, holy shit. Like 10 years ago, every single part of that would've made zero sense. It would've kind of made sense to me, and now it's like, wow, I've shifted places with the world and heroin jokes are on the back of people's pickup trucks.

NW: Is drawing still part of your practice? I always loved the drawings and the objecthood that they had, the layering of the graphite and the presence of the hand, and the feeling that they were this accretion of not just material, but sentiment built up into the surface of the paper. Is that something you're still practicing?

BV: Yeah, there's a group show at this young gallery in Chinatown called Francis Irv that's opening on January 21st. I'm actually finishing a drawing for that. It's similar to those earlier ones, black and white, like an X-ray of horses. It's this weird sort of thing with a sort of negative space. It doesn't have heavy scabs of graphite on it. But it does this weird sort of, for lack of a better description, op art with the kind of push-pull kind of thing. It does something kind of bizarre, I think. But yeah, it's something I still do. I kind of resent it because people are like, “Oh yeah, make a drawing,” and you're like, “Yeah, that’s 12 hours a day for a month, it's not the easy thing that it looks like.” It's much harder to do when I'm 50. But it’s something I'm still interested in, as long as it's connected to an exciting opportunity. There's a reason for it other than like, oh, let's just generate more artwork.

NW: I think what drew me to them, apart from the subject matter, was the sort of manifest struggle between light and darkness, between shading and possibility and all this kind of stuff. Light is obviously a big element in your work, but darkness is as well. Do you see them as opposing forces?

BV: I don't see them as opposing, I see them as contiguous parts of the same argument, or same sentence, or same sentiment or however you wanna describe it. Just the way the sculpture transacts itself in terms of literal concerns like weight, physicality, and mass. Those are sculptural concerns. The drawings were always supposed to have that as well. They were supposed to be coextensive, they were supposed to be sculptures. They're supposed to have mass to them, gravity, weight, and all those things that are like capital F Formal sculptural concerns. But as a way to narrativize something, maybe the sculpture is more abstracted, or maybe the drawing is more abstracted. I always imagine all these things like just curating a show, but you just happen to be manufacturing all the things that you're curating together in a room.

NW: I always thought about them in terms of erosion and transference. I really like that the graphite was literally being eroded, but then there was this kind of psychological act of transference going on through that erosion.

BV: I like that as a description a lot. There's also that interesting kind of tension that existed between the refined draftsmanship that went into realizing the image itself. Looked at from one angle, this matte graphite surface blended in with this finely rendered thing, and then looked at from another with raking light, and it's this big scab of violent activity on top of this thing. It was just this skin. It was really process-oriented and looked like you knew how this thing was made, and it was about physicality and all these things that had nothing to do with this refined rendered thing. The fact that they could sort of exist in that same space and coexist in that same space without one over the other. Again, that's another concern that I think equally applies to the sculptures.

NW: I always felt the tension between delicacy and brutalism or violence was a very strong thread.

BV: Ideally, the drawings were kind of like the microcosmic version of what I was trying to accomplish with an installation or a sculpture. Like, if you want to know what's going on with the whole room, just look at the little square piece of paper or the little rectangle.

NW: What does the day look like these days?

BV: I wake up at like 3:00 AM and work in the morning just 'cause it's super quiet. So I wake up, do work, usually sort of working on drawings or, you know, recently I've been making foam core models for all the CELINE projects. And then, you know, I have the rest of the day to do whatever I need to do at home, help my wife out and walk dogs. I fly fish a lot. I can get away from people and go stand in very cold water and avoid other human beings. And it's really great. It's not very exciting and I love it.

Banks Violette for CELINE Art Project will on view in CELINE stores through January.

I See Music As A Refuge: An Interview of Marina Herlop

January 12, 2024

woman with long dark hair seated in white fuzzy top — top by Gabriel For Sach

interview by Caroline Whiteley
photography by Celine Paradis
styling by Maia González

Catalan musician Marina Herlop’s fourth album Nekkuja starts with a bang. On its opening track “Busa,” deep synths pierce through a bouquet of harp strings, choral arrangements and giggling voices. “I always want to include this surprise factor,” she says. “It’s like when you go on a trip, you always need something unexpected to happen, you need to go on a little adventure.” When speaking of the record, Marina often invokes metaphors, comparing the process of making music to architecture, gardening or even playing video games. While her melodies are mysterious and playful, combining elements of devotional and folk music with contemporary electronics, her lyrics are nonsensical, a deliberate choice to allow for the music to speak for itself (Nekkuja is a word she made up). “I don't want to talk about my life, I want to make music that feels aesthetically interesting,” she says. The artist, who counts Björk among her fans, is nonchalant about her recent success. “I know that this has come and this might go at some point, because people might get tired of it or because there's another project that feels hotter at the moment. But the effort I’ve put into music, that growth, never goes away.” We spoke to Marina Herlop about the spiritual nature of creating art, music as a refuge, and trusting her instincts.

CAROLINE WHITELEY: Marina, firstly, I want to thank you for making this album, because it’s so energetic and fierce. Listening to Nekkuja, I felt this sense of catharsis, and it really helped me process difficult emotions.

MARINA HERLOP: I’m so happy that you said that, because it has been a very challenging year for me too. I'm sure a lot of people in the crowd and in their homes are going through some tough moments too. They say music heals and while I never started doing music for that, I'm realizing that this happens.

WHITELEY: When you come up with these unexpected musical moments that are present throughout the record, are they also unexpected to you in the process of composing them?

HERLOP: Most of the time, it's a combination of sounds that I find interesting. But, for me, it's very important that there's this surprise factor. If music is too predictable, and the listening process is too pleasant, too soft, then it can be boring. It's like when you go on a trip, you always need something to happen, like your car ran out of gas, you need to go on a little adventure. Otherwise, it's just this relaxing trip, and you're going to probably enjoy it more if it has some difficulty or some challenge. As a music maker, you are your own listener, so you are looking for that while you make the music.

WHITELEY: You’ve talked about how you don't necessarily feel attached to lyrics in your music because the music itself has an inherent meaning.

HERLOP: If I'm interested in the story, I might read a book or poem or something. For me, the musical component is way more relevant, it’s always at the front. That doesn't mean I never listen to music with lyrics, but I see [my own] music as a refuge, or some art that is self-sufficient. It doesn't need our human dramas and stories to exist.

Whereas other art forms like painting or films, they’re drawn from our stories and our personal experiences in a very direct and explicit way, music doesn't need to do that. I don't want to talk about my life, I want to make music that feels aesthetically interesting. As I'm feeling a certain way, or going through certain stuff, that might reflect on it, but that's not my goal at all.

woman with long dark hair seated in yellow and grey crinkly tank top — top by Piero D’Angelo

WHITELEY: I sense a rejection of tying a specific concept or inspiration to a project like an album from you. Can you talk about where that stems from?

HERLOP: For me, the relation between music and an image or a concept is very vague. Like, when I close my eyes and listen to music, I don't see anything. Even my dreams are not very visual. My music is not descriptive. I have never experienced music that way. In classical music, there are two traditions that are very well-known. There’s pure music and descriptive music. You can find music that is talking about stuff like a river or a carnival, or animals or whatever, and there's music that is just like Bach or Chopin. It's just a sonata, it’s not meant to mean anything. I'm more interested in pure music, because sound is totally self-sufficient. So, even though this album has some sounds from nature, they’re not there to express any particular sentiment.

WHITELEY: I like the loose concept of the garden because it implies the physical, time-based limitations you have, which are the same in composing a piece of music as they are in tending to a plant.

HERLOP: I'm realizing that on my third album, Pripyat, my ambition was quite big, and the detailing was huge, so that's why it was a very torturous process, whereas with Nekkuja I had more of a plan. You could also compare it to a building. The bigger you want the building to be, the more constraints and rules and indications you need, and the more precise the blueprint needs to be. Because if you don’t have this, it's going to be a pure mess. I reduced the amount of elements and organized them better so that the process would be more bearable. It's like, if you don't have a plan, you can write a poem, but you won't be able to write a novel.

WHITELEY: To me, some of your melodies have this almost animalistic quality, like this interplay between predator and prey.

HERLOP: This game is present in nature so much. Our brains also work this way, because we are animals.

WHITELEY: You’ve described your music as an offering to the gods. Are you a spiritual person?

HERLOP: Maybe I'm a bit contradictory. On the one hand, I'm quite a rational person, and I'm very analytical. I wouldn't say that I'm a very religious person, but through music—studying it quite profoundly and feeling devoted to it—I’ve understood that we are insignificant and that our craft and nature are vastly superior to us as individuals. When I say that the album is an offering to the gods, I mean that it’s like an inner deal.

You want to give it to people and you want people to listen to it, but the applause, or the criticism that you're going to receive is another dimension. It has nothing to do with the act of making music and making the best out of it. You put in all your effort, and when you're done it’s like, “Okay, this might not be perfect, but this is the best I was able to do. And I'm happy with it, because it feels honest.” Of course, you are a person with some level of vanity, and you want people to enjoy your work, to be accepted by your friends and family. But for me, this work is honest and I know the angle from where it was made, so I'm at peace. I’m grateful for all the appreciation that might come and people have received it very well. So I'm happy for that.

WHITELEY: It’s a good attitude to have because it’s so easy to get caught up with the expectations of others and the comparison of others.

HERLOP: I think it's because I'm not super young, I'm thirty-one. I wasn't having any success for a long time, so I sort of understood that [being successful and being creatively satisfied] it's two different roads.

If you focus on the internal side of it, it already pays off in a way. If you put a lot of energy and effort into music, music is going to give it back to you. The gratification of learning how to play an instrument, the pleasure that you get when you play an instrument, the dopamine that you get when you finish a song. This is very rewarding.

Now, there's a hype and it's getting some attention from outside. This feels huge because I had nothing before. I know that people might get tired of it or find another project that feels hotter in the moment. But the effort I’ve put into music, that growth, never goes away. When I was a teacher to my piano students, I used to tell them don't drop it, because it only gets better. If you have fun now, in three years time, you're gonna have ten times more fun.

WHITELEY: That kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier, where people find strength in your music to overcome difficult times and remember that whatever moment they are in right now will not be forever. There will be another time, and I think that your music connects to that very well.

HERLOP: Totally, and now I’m getting ready, because the tour is coming to an end and my lifestyle will change a lot. I will go from being in the airport all the time, meeting people, and feeling like a rock star, to being at home on my own and trying to gain my focus back to make music.

marina herlop musician lays on floor wearing white tank and black torn pants — trousers by Piero D’Angelo

Hell is Rising, Blessed are the Fallen: An Interview of Golpe Civil’s Loucifer

December 4, 2023

photography by Joseph Kadow
photography assistance by Oskar Ott
styling by Hakan Solak
hair & makeup by Lee Hyangsoon
talent Anarchist Sound System
interview by Janna Shaw

In an exclusive interview and photoshoot for Autre, Anarchist Sound System a.k.a. Lou Desamaison-Cognet, musician and founder of Golpe Civil, unveils the complexities of modern society, critiquing a world immersed in electroslavery. Lou a.k.a. Loucifer shares insights into his own psyche as well as inspirations for his collective: from his collection of Nietzsche texts and the occult, to the visceral impact of recent love, loss, and sobriety.

It was a rather mysterious assignment: could I interview a Satanic musician, producer, multi-disciplinarian artist and activist railing against a new world order? “His name is Louicifer, he’s into blood, pain, and beauty.” It was an immediate “Yes” from me. From our first correspondence, I knew Lou was a character from up my own winding back alley. It wasn’t so much the initial introductory greeting, it was the introductory email’s sign-off. Instead of the normal accolades, salutations, or questionable bisous, it was a pointed manifesto of meat: elegantly and adamantly, unabashedly transcribed, coming from not one place above, rather emanating from deep below:

“In a society governed by judgment and the elimination of acceptance, GOLPE CIVIL aims to reveal the most hidden secrets and flaws of this dirty, hypocritical, self-centered system.… We are the underworld: opponents who preach a new world, free of submission; clarity, culture for all, and rebellion. We are not only a record label, we are an experimental project created to fight corruption, false doctrines, and global manipulation.”

Who is Golpe Civil? It’s an Anarchist Sound System. It’s hell’s privately broadcast radio station. It’s a collective group of artists, primarily musicians, railing together to express their insides, no matter how unsettling it may be to the inhabitants of our planetary purgatory. But for the residents who find themselves living in their own version of hell, the rather frightening sounds of Anarchist Sound System may come across as rather benevolent.

Back to Loucifer (or Loucy as they endearingly allow their friends and demon-empathizers to summon them): the music they are creating for A.S.S. is not all electronic manipulation with high intensity BPM. Satan incarnate has side projects, of course. BLASPHEMIA is an experimental noise project based upon an apotheosis mindset, created alongside their girlfriend Darken (more on that dynamic later). NO INJURIES navigates a more delicate soundscape, featuring grand pianos with lots of Amen breaks. Satan has style and a flair for the dramatic, no surprise there.

One late & rainy night in Berlin, we exchange Telegram handles. Fallen angels prefer not to be cellularly traced, but at least they’re open to written communication. I half expect our interview to be conducted through bloody ciphers, of which, with Lou, I was admittedly not necessarily all that opposed...

JANNA SHAW: Good evening Liege Loucy, you’ve been expecting me. I write to you from a very rainy, very dark Berlin. I’m listening to BLASPHEMIA, getting acquainted with you. What are you up to?

LOUCIFER: I imagine Berlin exactly the way you just described it. That’s the Berlin I love so much. The melancholy reflects onto the city during this time of year. There’s a cold, mysterious atmosphere, which I find very inspiring. Every day I am missing Berlin. My family came into Sao Paulo today, so I spent the day with them. They just left.

SHAW: I much prefer Berlin when it’s cold and grey. The Brutalist architecture makes more sense, and so does the general German attitude. Summer is too hot and happy. No one knows what to do with it. How was time with your family? Do they listen to your music?

LOUCIFER: Time with my family was very nice. We went to a restaurant and talked about how things will become December as I will leave Sao Paulo. In February, I am planning to move back to Berlin, so I have a lot of things to organize. My mother hates my music—she simply doesn’t understand it—but my father loved my music. He was always very atypical about his world perception. He pushed me hard in my music experimentation journey. Both of my parents have, actually. They are very nerdy, philosophy lovers. They understand the unconventional as long as it’s harmless. I admire them for unplugging me from a strict, basic vision.

SHAW: What do you think you’ll miss about Sao Paulo? I hear there’s a good underground scene. With your move to Berlin, you’ll be going from one underground to the next. Which do you prefer?

LOUCIFER: The scene in Brazil is really another dimension. It feels like it’s stuck in the ’90s, but in a very good way. There aren’t many clubs here—especially not techno clubs. The scene is all about illegal raves, finding the best abandoned warehouse, placing huge sound systems, and just destroying people’s minds. Berlin is a very structured scene. The underground has been feeding the city for years and years, attracting millions of tourists every day creating evolution for itself. Berlin is an established home for independent artists, businesses, clubs, agencies, etc., while Brazil is a newborn baby in comparison. It still has its innocence, but also a boldness to explore what has not been. It’s a wild country, and Sao Paulo is the center of it.

SHAW: What else is on your mind?

LOUCIFER: Tonight, I’m working on BLASPHEMIA music videos. We are going to release the project at the start of December. It’s a lot of work, but we are super happy with how it’s going. My girlfriend Darken (my BLASPHEMIA counterpart) and I broke up recently, but BLASPHEMIA is our baby, and we will continue to work on this project. Our love is infinite, but the reality is we need to split in different ways to finally meet and be together again. We are not at the same checkpoints, and we want to follow up on some of our own personal goals and projects independently.

SHAW: From the snippets I’ve seen of your project together, the Dark Arts are most certainly at play in BLASPHEMIA...

LOUCIFER: Yes, for the visual inspiration, the source comes from our BDSM background. Darken and I are both tattoo artists and art lovers. She brings the elegance and the sharpness, and I bring the raw, maniacal support to the visuals. We love to think as one, and we managed to fuse into BLASPHEMIA together instantly. We do everything together. It’s the first time in my life I’m editing/cutting videos, playing around with VFX, syncing... I’m in love with it. It’s exactly like Ableton: a bunch of rectangular clips and automations, a lot of time structure, visual guidances and so on. It’s a plug-and-play intuition. I am neurodivergent and when I get excited about something, I have an unstoppable necessity to understand every single detail of anything in the realm of my new chosen interest.

SHAW: Were there certain books, movies, artists, characters that led you to explore the notion of Satanism?

LOUCIFER: I first got into Satanism because of my name and birthday: I was born 09/06/96, my name is Lou Desamaison-Cognet, which translates to “Lou from the Broken House.” I lost my father when I was 21 years old, and my world felt apart. We had a really horrible time. He was diagnosed with bulbar sclerosis, the hardest one. I flew from Berlin to Zurich to help my mother care for him. He was a difficult man, but a warrior that refused to be defeated by anything. This led him to refuse help from the hospital until the last few days of his life. At that point, he had to, because of the euthanasia process. Watching someone you truly admire for four months, dying rapidly... This was his worst nightmare, being a prisoner of his own body. After watching that closely, everything changed for me. I had always been the kid with “no filter” but when this happened, filters quite literally did not exist. Nothing existed for me, except my creative bursts. Growing up, Nietzsche was everywhere in my life. Spinoza was my father’s favorite and Sartre is my mom’s crush. So, I had the privilege of growing up out of the box and experiencing life in my way. My friends always called me the Devil, because of my hyperactivity. But one day, I looked up Satanism on Google and found the [The Eleven Satanic] Rules of the Earth. I read them and identified with everything written in it. I live my life according to them. The interest grew bigger and bigger. I began to reread all my Nietzsche and Machiavelli books, and found an author called Michael W. Ford, which complemented the ‘Self’ section of my brain. My favorite artist of all time is a genius, Satanist, and huge AIDS activist: Diamanda Galás. She was and is ahead of any generation, in terms of music and artistic talent. She has had the most important impact on my actual music vision.

SHAW: I find that we are currently in a world devoid of all ritual, sacrifice, and purpose. I think Diamanda would agree that we are collectively straying from religion, yet I think a lot of our human experience is lost when we totally ignore our desire and need for some kind of worship.

LOUCIFER: I can’t disagree with you. Today’s world has become a very lost civilization. The electroslavery is getting out of control. People are struggling to believe in their own lives; they’re choking from it. How can we be satisfied if everything created these days is made to keep us exactly where we are? Today’s worship is Instagram, TikTok, and all that bullshit. It’s far easier to create an online avatar than craft every day a new, expanded version of yourself. Everything is accessible by sight. Too many options to choose from. We have created a void that is very hard to fulfill.

SHAW: What led you to create the Golpe Civil collective?

LOUCIFER: I’ve been three times to rehab, back and forth. I had to lose so much to finally be where I am today. Sober and satisfied with my life, I’m giving every particle of my being to myself and my art. I realized that nobody will give a shit about you, let alone love, trust, or respect you if you can’t first do that for yourself. I wrote my Rehab EP in rehab, and created Golpe Civil there too.

SHAW: In your Rehab EP, you penned it as a call to dismantle the notion that drug usage is liberation. What does the reality of sobriety feel like for you?

LOUCIFER: Being sober gives me indescribable access into my own database. It is the most beautiful gift I could have given myself. When enslaved by substance abuse, you tend to settle for the convenient. Even if just subconsciously, you look for every alternative: excuses you can find to justify poor decisions, dismal behaviors, lack of goodwill, and a limitless amount of self-destructive patterns. You eventually accept this, and it is tattooed in your brain as truth. I’ve lived amongst the agonizing torture of that which is habit constantly fighting to take over flesh and bones.

When you explore your consciousness with the bias of a certain molecule creating new neuronal connections, firing up certain parts of your brain and enhancing perception, touch, sensibility, performance, and all of the other aspects and allures of drugs, sooner or later, you will still be faced with yourself. And that self will reclaim every single bit of time that you took from it.

At a certain glimpse of the past, I chose to only see as far as my shadow would go. I leaned into it and left myself in disorder. I am an artist. My aim is to craft my essence, allow my soul to project frustrations, my hate, my passions, my broken heart, my analysis of what I represent and feel onto my sound canvases. And for that I have to live life fully. Art is discipline.

SHAW: Is it more inspiring for you to dream of & reflect on the past, or do you garner more by following forward motion?

LOUCIFER: I dream constantly. I feel like a clock’s needle bouncing between left and right. I would rather live in a limbo between both illusions of time. I implement nostalgia in my tracks. I myself am often in need of that. But nostalgic fragments are always submerged by the novelty experienced during my creative process. I am a Past romanticizer who finds counterbalance in passion for endless wave-shapes of the future.

SHAW: What is tattooed upon your eyes?

LOUCIFER: Golpe Civil. A civilian coup d’état.

Interreality Modalities: A Conversation with Artist Mieke Marple on Bridging the Digital and Traditional Worlds

November 18, 2023

large black screen with white text in cursive — Alida Sun, *Southern Gothic Love Letters to My NSA Agent*, 2023, courtesy of the artist, bitforms gallery, and PR for Artists. Image by Joshua White

interview by Coco Dolle

NFT Tuesday LA co-founder and former Night Gallery co-owner, Mieke Marple is a Los Angeles-based artist and writer determined to navigate what she calls the “insurmountable chasm” between the physical and digital art worlds.

In her passionate mission to reconcile both the analog and the digital, Mieke has recently curated an impressive exhibition titled Interreality, showcasing 35 artists from the pioneering digital space mixed in with traditional established artists. Produced by Steve Sacks, founder of bitforms gallery and Aubrie Wienholt, founder of PR for Artists, Interreality is simply a tour de force.

A kindred spirit and peer curator, I was thrilled to interview Mieke to speak about the exhibition as we tackled notions of provenance, embodied experiences, collecting art and feminism.

COCO DOLLE: The recent groundbreaking exhibition at LACMA, Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age was enlightening on the symbiotic formation of tech and art. Tell us how your curation took inspiration from this show and about how it led to the making of Interreality.

MIEKE MARPLE: This exhibition was such an important moment in the digital art community, with the legacies of computer-based art, which had always been on the fringe before, finally getting canonized. These thematic, institutional shows are really important, but they can make artists feel sectioned off from the larger conversation and that's what I really wanted to do with this show. To have digital art be more seamlessly integrated with the larger, more mainstream conversation.

DOLLE: Artists reacting to the world they're living in integrating new technologies with new tools. There was really no equivalent to this show in New York. Two years ago, MoMA had a drawing exhibition titled Degree Zero, illuminating new visual languages in midcentury art. I was extremely pleased to see works by Vera Molnar along with Louise Bourgeois. And what about your choice of venue, a 15,000-square-foot space strategically located near LACMA. Was it a raw space when you found it?

MARPLE: Yes, it’s a hundred-year-old building. The owners recently gutted and retrofitted it and that's why it was available. It wasn't even rental ready. It didn't have outlets, or even real walls, or anything like that. But it's interesting to hear you say that this discourse with digital or computer-based art is further along in LA than New York. LACMA has definitely helped pave the way there.

Interreality Installation view, courtesy of bitforms gallery, and PR for Artists. Image by Joshua White

Jen Stark, Believer, 2011, courtesy of the artist, bitforms gallery, and PR for Artists. Image by Joshua White

Luna Ikuta, Laputa, California Poppy, and Distilled Essence - Flora, 2023, courtesy of the artist, bitforms gallery, and PR for Artists. Image by Joshua White

Aya, Sanokfa Seas and Chromatic Reflections, 2023, courtesy of the artist, bitforms gallery, and PR for Artists. Image by Joshua White

Interreality Installation view, courtesy of bitforms gallery, and PR for Artists

DOLLE: Yes they also hosted Paris Hilton spearheading a digital artwork fund by LACMA supporting women artists last year.

MARPLE: Yeah, totally. The other thing about this show is that I really wanted it to have a feminist umbrella, and besides just having feminist artists in the show, which is one way of doing that, I wanted to tell this story about artists from different generations who’ve influenced each other in a very non-linear and intuitive way.

DOLLE: So, who are you considering feminist artists in Interreality? Even if they don’t proclaim themselves as such, I believe the work of Oona is triggering deep conversations on body politics and the perception of women in society.

MARPLE: Alida Sun, I would say for sure. Connie Bakshi. I would say I'm a feminist artist. Jen Stark, Aya, Mark Flood, Cindy Phoenix identifies as a feminist artist. Ellie Pritz, of course, and Lindsey Price. Christine Wang, obviously. Aureia Harvey. I would say almost all of them.

DOLLE: What about Claudia Hart?

MARPLE: Oh, yeah, of course, Claudia Hart!

DOLLE: I love that it has this underlying statement, a feminist show in disguise.

MARPLE: I wanted it to be a feminist show, but I didn't want to do a show that's just women and non-binary artists. I did that already at Vellum LA when I co-curated Artists Who Code. I wanted to do a show that's just more inclusive.

DOLLE: How did you bring all these artists together? From a curatorial standpoint, I work with artists I feel close to, their aesthetics and the conversation they engage with. It seems that you were also looking for a sort of balance.

MARPLE: I worked closely with Steve Sacks of bitforms gallery and Aubrie Wienholt of PR for Artists, who produced the show together. They brought a lot of artists they knew to the curatorial table. Even Savannah who works for Aubrie recommended a lot of artists that I ended up including. But yeah, I wanted there to be as many traditional artists as digital artists, as many women and/or non-binary artists as men. I wanted to pair artists with big social media followings like Jen Stark or Parker Day with artists that aren’t as well known. I wanted artists that were more established with more emerging artists. Abstraction with figuration. Slick with punk. Dry with wet and juicy. I feel like that's the main concept of the show: just a kind of harmony of modalities where nothing is super dominant over anything else.

DOLLE: What about embodied experience? You are showing artists engaged with new technologies and with a sensibility of the physical space but we're also looking at screens. So how do you put this together as experiential?

MARPLE: I would go to NFT shows and I would see all this work on the same size screen, the same orientation at the same height, and it would just homogenize the work. And then I would go to traditional art world shows, and there'd just be paintings. Just hung on the wall, and I would be like, does this really reflect reality? Is this really talking about the world I live in today? Because it doesn't feel like it. I think art's job is to be a sort of mirror to the world we live in so that we can have critical discussions about it. And then, having come from Night Gallery and putting on like a hundred shows and having worked with amazing artists like Samara Golden, who really knows how to create an experience in space, I wanted to put on a show where the installation was an art piece in and of itself.

DOLLE: I love that.

MARPLE: The show itself is an artwork. And then, there's artworks inside that larger artwork.

tiger face with green text says don't ask why — Mieke Marple, *Dn't Ask Why*, 2023, courtesy of the artist, bitforms gallery, and PR for Artists. Image by Joshua White

upside down iridescent purple heart sculpture wrapped in pink rope — Adam Parker Smith, *Shibari Heart*, 2022, courtesy of the artist, bitforms gallery, and PR for Artists. Image by Joshua White

DOLLE: It’s so important to be creative with the physical space when exhibiting digital works. I feel particularly NFT galleries need to be less linear and more creative with their presentation and aesthetics. Looking at screens in a white wall gallery space isn’t at all mesmerizing.

MARPLE: Just to explain that further, when I say the show itself is an artwork I mean that I want there to be something magical and seductive about every part of it. And also for every part of it to have a critical underpinning. For example, we used metal studs to create see-through walls and it's almost impossible to look at one work by itself. Whenever you're looking at a work, you're also looking through the wall and seeing the back of another work and some other works just feet away. It's emphasizing just how connected we are; how all the works are.

DOLLE: It sounds like a collage when we speak about it like that!

MARPLE: Yeah, it's almost like a collage in a space made of multiple artworks. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, right? These artworks are almost literally overlapping each other in space and creating surprising moments and connections, and that’s really exciting.

DOLLE: Are all the pieces for sale?

MARPLE: Oh, yes. (laughs) It's a selling show. But you know, it is interesting that my partner, after he saw the show, he told me that it really felt like a biennial, which I thought was interesting. Maybe that's just the scale, but I think there's more to it than that. What’s interesting about survey shows is the concept is usually very, very broad if there is one, but basically it's just a kind of temperature taking. What kind of art are people making right now? And, I think that's what this show is too. It's taking the temperature of the art landscape … and not just in LA. There are some artists in New York, Chicago, Miami, in London, in Berlin, Shanghai, Mexico City, and Rome. So, it's pretty international.

DOLLE: What was the audience’s response? Was it a super LA scene? A more digital art scene? Any noticeable criticisms from the traditional art world?

MARPLE: At the opening, I would say there was more people from the digital art world than the traditional art world, which is definitely something that I want to change because I feel like the traditional art world is who could benefit most from exposure to this show. The other thing I noticed was, like, a lot of the work is more interactive. My pieces have AR. So does Lindsey Price’s, and you have to scan a QR code and use your phone to activate it. OONA’s was participatory. Alida Sun’s had a live digital sensor. So, there was a lot of participatory work, which goes hand in hand with the Web3 ethos, you know, where the line between artist and collector can get blurry, and co-creating is a very popular idea.

DOLLE: Artists and collectors are more hand in hand in web3, indeed. I have recently collected more works in web3 than in contemporary arts.

MARPLE: Right, but I noticed that a lot of people were hesitant. There wasn't as much participation as I hoped. I was talking to Alida Sun after the opening and I just realized that people are so trained to have this passive relationship to art.

So many people expect art to behave like a painting, right? It hangs there. You sort of appreciate it and then you move on. There's not a lot of interaction, or co-creation, or anything. I just realized there has to be a lot more education around this, that art is more than paintings, and an audience’s relationship to art can be more than just a passive one. Alida reminded me that this is a movement, you know. It’s bigger than me or this show.

DOLLE: Yes, the human impulse. You understand the collector's psychology and its attachment to the uniqueness of non fungibility. With NFTs, digital art could finally have the same one-of-a-kindness as a painting. What about traditional art collectors?

MARPLE: I think a lot of traditional art collectors are intimidated or wary of collecting digital art. I wanted to take away some of the intimidation factor by showing all the different kinds of work seamlessly side by side. I wanted to show where there was something for everybody. Like, maybe you would come in as a painting lover, but you would leave having seen your first painting with AR or digital work made with AI and that would expand your ideas about art.

iridescent blue and orange rock on plywood box with circular screen on side — Auriea Harvey, *Gray Matter III*, 2023, courtesy of the artist, bitforms gallery, and PR for Artists. Image by Joshua White

Interreality, curated by Mieke Marple, is on view through November 25 @ The Desmond Tower 5500 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles with a special performance event, today, November 18 from 6-9 pm.

Wombs Beyond Bodies: Katharina Kaminski and Hanne Gaby Odiele on Intersex Creative Power

November 8, 2023

LEFT Katharina Kaminski
Telescopio (2022)
Clay + raw concrete
160 x 45 x 18 cm
RIGHT Image courtesy of Hanne Gaby Odiele
Photography by Anthony Ferrara

LEFT Katharina Kaminski
Telescopio Invertido (2023)
Bronze + marble
60 x 40 x 160 cm
RIGHT Image courtesy of Hanne Gaby Odiele
Photography by Anthony Ferrara

LEFT Katharina Kaminski
Sacral (2023)
Clay + fire
65 x 30 x 60 cm
RIGHT Image courtesy of Hanne Gaby Odiele
Photography by Anthony Ferrara

interview by Chimera Mohammadi

The iconography of fertility holds a timeless power over us. Our paleolithic Venuses defined this obsession, encapsulating fertility as a powerful force of creation, rooted in the divine feminine while remaining paradoxically universal. Intersex artist Katharina Kaminski expands upon this understanding in her new show, Womb, which embraces our individual potentials for transformation and innovation while interrogating our gendered ideas about fertility. As we find ourselves in the throes of a gender revolution, Kaminski reckons with the intersection of gender and creation in her abstractions of the womb: soft vessels fill the Sainte Anne Gallery, distilling the Venus to its core sense of creation and transformation. In recognition of National Intersex Awareness Day, Katharina comes together with intersex model and activist Hanne Gaby Odiele to discuss creating while Queer, finding community, and claiming ownership of the self in the wake of bodily alienation.

MOHAMMADI: How did you two learn about each other? What influence has your mutual discovery had upon each of you?

Katharina Kaminski: I met Hanne at a party in New York. Back then, I already knew that I didn't have a womb and ovaries because I had no period, had gone through surgery at fourteen years old, and had been under hormone replacement therapy since then. But I wasn't informed at all about my ‘condition’ and I thought something was wrong with me—that I was the only one. I felt victimized because doctors encouraged me to hide the truth about my body and didn't feel there was someone who understood enough to speak about it. I had been following Hanne on Instagram before personally meeting her. I read about her activism on intersexuality and I started suspecting, maybe I am intersex too! I started studying about it and all I was reading matched with me. So, I introduced myself to Hanne and said, “I think I might be intersex too!” A couple of weeks later, I went to do a blood test and solved years of uncertainty when I received the results that I have XY chromosomes. Thanks to Hanne, not only did I learn what it means to be intersex, and that there is a beautiful community of outspoken intersex people in the world, but she also inspired me to be proud of it. She gave me the information to understand and the inspiration to speak.

Hanne Gaby Odiele: We met randomly at that party years ago. I think Katharina already messaged me before on social media right after my disclosure. After that, we kept in touch, and we met again when Katharina was spending some time in New York. We not only bonded over our intersex journey, but she also shared with me her passion for art and her newfound love for her sculptures.

MOHAMMADI: Do you consider yourselves activists?

KAMINSKI: I don't consider myself exactly an activist, but as an artist, there is a strong connection between my sculptures, the body and gender, which are issues that have been focal points in my life. If I have the chance to speak to many (like now), and there is someone else who can benefit from that, as I benefitted from Hanne being open about it, then I feel I have the responsibility to do so.

ODIELE: I’ve done a lot of activism in the past, since it was important to me to tell my story and bring to light the irreversible, unnecessary, non-consensual surgeries that intersex children can be subjected to. I also wanted to point out that intersex bodies are beautiful and perfect just the way they are. Since my disclosure I’ve seen a lot of new intersex activists emerge. I’ve been focusing less on activism myself. For me, it’s also important that being intersex is just a small part of who I am: it doesn’t have to be a big deal.

MOHAMMADI: Kate Bornstein opens their radical 1994 book Gender Outlaw with the phrase “My identity becomes my body, which becomes my fashion...” Has modeling informed your relationships with gender presentation, identity, and the way that many trans/genderqueer people’s feelings about their bodies range from mournful to celebratory? Odiele especially has spoken at length on their anger toward the medical policing of non-binary bodies. Has this complex emotional spectrum in relation to the body been a theme in your respective creative work?

KAMINSKI: Definitely! My sculptures have these alternative corporealities and I started doing that totally unintentionally. I feel my work is supercharged with that deep complex emotional spectrum. That's why I actually decided to present myself as intersex in connection to my work. Even though it doesn't define me, it is really present in who I am and in my art.

MOHAMMADI: In Man and His Symbols [1968], Jung describes the necessity of “the symbolic mood of death from which may spring the symbolic mood of rebirth.” Did you experience the discovery of your intersex identities as a death and subsequent (re)birth? How did claiming your identities place the act of creation into your own hands?

KAMINSKI: More than discovering my intersex identity, what felt like a rebirth for me was allowing myself to feel fertile and whole.

MOHAMMADI: Does Womb anthropomorphize the womb or render it inanimate? Or might it do both?

KAMINSKI: I am more interested in the ‘womb’ as this energetic center where life and creativity are born, rather than its physicality. It's kind of ironic, because as a sculptor, you normally want to make your subject material, give it a form. In this case, I think because I’ve been going through the process of disconnecting from the feeling of lacking my physical womb, and connecting with my fertility beyond the matter of an actual organ, I wanted to explore deeper understandings of the embodiment of a womb. The exhibition at Sainte Anne Gallery has two floors: on the first floor I am presenting my sculptures for the first time in new mediums: marble and bronze. It’s a more brutalist side of my work and the biggest scale in which I have ever worked. On the second floor, after you walk up the stairs, you enter the Womb: a Light and Darkness installation with ten Light Sculpture Beings in different types of clay. It feels like being inside a sanctuary, or in the ‘womb’ of your mother.

Katharina Kaminski
*The Womb* (2023)
Clay + fire installation
200 x 180 x 150 cm

MOHAMMADI: Womb forges a non-biological definition for fertility. How does this understanding of fertility feed your creative instincts?

KAMINSKI: Fertility is not only about creating human life, it is about creating. The title of my exhibition is a metaphor for the inner plot twist I allowed myself. From feeling absent and infertile to a sense of abundance and fecundity.

MOHAMMADI: I was very interested in the term “surrealist body language” in Womb’s press release. Can you elaborate on what that means to you?

KAMINSKI: I'm very interested in the mysticism of creating. Through my creative process, I seek to connect with the unconscious. Like a womb, I offer myself as a portal from the spiritual to the physical and I allow the sculptures to become alive. I think the concept of ‘surrealist automatism’ resonates a lot with my way of creating. I find it unnatural to start a sculpture from a thought in the mind, wanting to predict and control a result. I find it uncomfortable and boring. The mind is limited. I'm more interested in going beyond that, where emotions are raw and free and the mind can't comprehend. So for me, creating is a ritual, or a dance between me and the clay that allows the sculptures to become alive in their own unique enigmatic corporealities.

MOHAMMADI: What media exploring non-binary identity do you find particularly meaningful?

ODIELE: I love the art of drag and performance. I think it has helped me accept many contradictions and perceptions I had about gender. Like a wise queen likes to say, “We’re all born naked and the rest is drag.”

Womb is on view through December 20th at Sainte Anne Gallery, 44 rue Saint Anne, 75002, Paris.

Nothing New: An Interview of Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo)

October 26, 2023

interview by Vivian Crockett
photography by Hadi Mourad
creative direction by Alec Charlip
styling by Jamie Ortega
makeup by Tayler Treadwell
hair by Rachel Polycarpe
florals by Christina Allen
production: BORN Artists

Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo, known by the pseudonym Puppies Puppies, is revolutionizing trans and Indigenous visibility through her critically-acclaimed conceptual works of sculpture and performance art. Despite a very genuine and personal embodiment within the work, an air of mystery once shrouded her identity as she initially insisted on a level of anonymity rarely exhibited by artists, particularly of her generation. In late 2017, however, this shifted with the very first reference to the artist’s gender transition taking place in her Green (Ghosts) installation at Overduin & Co. in Los Angeles. Kuriki-Olivo and her then-boyfriend lived in the gallery during the hours it was closed, leaving only traces of their existence during the hours it was open. Here, she taped two estrogen pills to the wall, pointing toward her gender-affirming course of hormone therapy—a subtle gesture that gently opened the door of visibility. Employing the mundane, everyday objects that surround her life is a hallmark of Puppies Puppies’ practice and readymades are one of her favorite ways to reference the art historical canon. An initial easter egg of visibility has since swung the door open to a state of consensual voyeurism in Nothing New, her current solo exhibition at the New Museum where the artist is occupying the Lobby Gallery with nearly constant access to her comings and goings via video surveillance, live stream access, and glass walls overlooking a recreation of her bedroom. Puppies Puppies also points to elements of her multi-ethnic indigeneity—Taíno on her father’s side and Japanese on her mother’s—with the inclusion of objects and spiritual practices that connect her disparate lineages in a form of what the exhibition’s curator, Vivian Crockett, refers to as a memoryscape. Crockett got cozy in bed for her interview of Puppies Puppies on the eve of the exhibition’s inauguration to discuss their creative collaboration.

VIVIAN CROCKETT: What were you were thinking through when you proposed this name for the show?

PUPPIES PUPPIES: There's definitely layers to it. One major aspect of the discussion around trans identity is that many people think it's something that's very new, it's something that society has to get used to, but it's not. If we look at Indigenous cultures all over the world, there are all kinds of terms for people that weren't in the binary or were considered trans. I come from an art history background, so I'm really interested in homages, but also being critical of artwork. It was a very white cis art history that I learned. So, I really also play off that, which extends to different aspects of living too. The accentuation of certain things can have a cornucopia of meaning. I'm thinking about a lot of works throughout art history. Sometimes the criticism of the work that I do is, "this has been done before," but this is the criticism of a lot of work. A discourse happens when people reference other music within their music. There's a way of thinking about these things that go beyond originality or authenticity.

CROCKETT: There's a lot about this project that feels very much in line with work you’ve done in the past, but there's elements that relate to more recent years of medically transitioning.

PUPPIES PUPPIES: With older performances, I was more concealing myself and hiding. Hiding my body, hiding any way of recognizing me. I've started to attribute more of it to body dysmorphia. It kept me from wanting to be seen. But it was also a part of my personality. Things just kind of blend together sometimes and it's hard to distinguish one from the other. As I started to transition, I was working at Trans Latin@ in Los Angeles, and spent that year really focusing on that. I felt like distancing myself from art in a way. But then, I was like, what if this is actually just an extension of my practice? And that was really exciting to me because you don't have to negotiate what you want to get out of life just because you haven't seen it in art. This exhibition really combines almost every different way that I've been working over the years, which is not easy. I often feel like painting is an observation of life, sculpture an observation of the body, or different aspects of existence. And this is very much related to observation through a performative lens.

CROCKETT: I love curating the Lobby Gallery because it's at the ground level. It's the first space that people engage with and it was originally conceived as a free space in the institution. It's a space you see from the outside and you're taking the very framework of that space as a prompt for playing with hyper visibility. Why the recreation of your bedroom? What do the various layers of that particular space mean to you in the context of your work?

PUPPIES PUPPIES: This concept has evolved over the years. The first iteration that I presented at Overduin & Co. in Los Angeles was called Green (Ghosts). Me and my partner at the time moved all of the contents of our apartment into a gallery—including our bed and everything—and we lived with our dog in the space. We slept there, but then, as soon as the gallery opened, we left. So, no one really saw the same exhibition. So, that was one iteration. And then, this iteration is actually being there, present in front of people, and there is a device to change the opacity of the glass. At any time, I can decide whether it's more of a private or public moment. The bedroom has always been something that I've focused on. Anything that I’ve lived in constant proximity to somehow becomes incorporated into the work. As a trans woman, there are certain things that make me want to not go outside. I want to stay in and dream about what could be. I think there's an aspect of that to this by putting it on display as an artwork.

dress: Ferragamo
headpiece: Piers Atkinson

dress: Puppets and Puppets
earring: Area
shoes: stylist’s own

CROCKETT: In the bedroom part of the space, instead of emptying out the contents of your apartment, we are duplicating what's in your room. I like that it's not one-to-one. We're not trying to make it exactly the same, but we're trying to replicate the feeling of it. Earlier, we were talking about this idea of Nothing New, and how there is so much of an art historical precedent to your work, I want to emphasize that this project is very much in dialogue with different artists who have recreated their living environments, or have brought that into an institutional space. But there's also the way in which you reframe a potentially hetero-masculinist idea of a post-minimalist practice. This is a different kind of iteration of site/non-site. We've talked a lot about how Félix Gonzàlez-Torres was one of our patron saints and your work is very much in that lineage. However, there’s a new connotation to the various kinds of conceptual maneuvers that your work does. For example, the way that the physical space of your bedroom is flanked by these two other vignettes that are inside your brain, like a memoryscape, part of which reference a real place too. You are not literally trying to recreate the [Ryōan-ji] garden; it's the feeling of that garden and what it represents to you. The torii gate and the garden help delineate the threshold of the sacred space of your bedroom. And then on the other side, we are not just witnessing; we are literally looking inside your brain with reproductions of the MRI scans.

PUPPIES PUPPIES: Yeah, that was spot on. With the bedroom being sandwiched between the rock garden and the CBD garden, the torii gate is a way of signifying that you're entering a sacred space based off the Shinto religion, which is the Indigenous religion of Japan. I'm very much drawn to Shintoism because animism is a part of it. There's this praising of nature and sacred places. There are torii gates in the middle of the sea, or in the middle of the forest just to show that this is a sacred place.

CROCKETT: Green has been a central “readymade” color in your practice for many years. I love that green is simultaneously this naturally occurring thing in the world in so many different forms but then also we have green money and green screens. Can you speak a little on the significance of this color to you?

PUPPIES PUPPIES: Sometimes, when something is so ubiquitous, it can resonate with people in totally different ways, which makes it highly accessible. I went with green because it's the color of plants, of what people think of as nature. My dad grew up in the rainforest in Puerto Rico, so a lot of the pictures he has given me were pure green images from his childhood, and so it had this resonance. But I thought about it also as the mixing of blue and yellow, which have natural connotations with the sky and the sun and the sand. Later on, I got diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and so I was thinking about this kind of literalism with sadness and happiness between those colors and about these moods intersecting.

CROCKETT: This other piece that the show addresses is the ways that we integrate different modes of being on display—not only the IRL display but also the ways that we exist on the internet. There's an increased pressure for us to be available to others online and through our most intimate moments. I have a private Instagram account and I'm constantly navigating who I feel like giving access to the space because it is, in many ways, a professional platform. It is part of how my identity circulates in the world. But then, there's this level of self-censorship that happens. There are different codes of respectability that we are supposed to perform. So, there’s the practice of seeing your day-to-day activities through the glass as a screen, and the fact that it'll be fogged out at times. But then, there’s the surveillance cameras filming you in the space and the fact that someone in the museum might be able to watch you in real-time, and then also be looking at you through a monitor simultaneously, and then there’s a potential third loop if you activate the live stream from your computer at home or on your cell phone. Which one is more real, or which one do they consume first, or can they do all three (or even four) simultaneously? What gets lost? What gets amplified in that mise en abyme?

PUPPIES PUPPIES: I think about that with social media because it’s mostly about trying to show your accomplishments, which I definitely participated in and was excited to participate in. You're sharing with people you love, as well as people you don't know, the things that you're doing and that you care about and what you're putting your life towards. But a part of me was like, what if I showed the boring, or the monotonous, or the in-between, or my worst? I was interested in showing all the different facets of existence, which is replicated in the show as well. There's going to be cameras within the bedroom of the museum, within my bedroom at home, and there'll be a camera recording what's going on out in the world when I go to an appointment or something that I can't miss. So, that accessibility is something that you sometimes grant to people who follow you—they know what you're doing, they can see where you're at. Nothing New is trying to get closer and closer to conveying as much as I can about daily existence, even while trying to pretend like I'm not being watched. But, you can only keep it up so long. Eventually, you're like, okay … I'm being watched, so, don't do anything embarrassing. But I think at some point, I'll have to surrender to the fact that it's constantly happening and that it'll be going on for months. It'll be harder and harder to treat it as a performance and I’ll have to lean into the idea that I'm alone as much as I can.

CROCKETT: One thing that I wanted to also mention in the context of this is that I really cherish the way that we first met. I’m on social media, but I don't follow artists just because I like their work. I don't follow celebrities. So, I often don't know what some artists look like. We met in this larger, elite space, and something drew me to you. You felt like a person I could connect with. It was like a green situation emanating from you. (laughs) But something about how we were first able to connect as people who felt an affinity that goes beyond that artist-curator dichotomy was so nice.

PUPPIES PUPPIES: Yeah, I feel the same way. It's nice when you're working on something and you also just feel a connection as two people. With something so personal, it meant so much to me to be able to collaborate with a friend that I also call a sister.

Subconscious Creation and Mythical Preservation: An Interview of Nina Hartmann by Leo

October 4, 2023

Nina Hartmann navigates a diverse array of artistic mediums, seamlessly weaving her connection to music into her creative endeavors. Her work serves as a bridge, melting the divide between mysticism and critical thought. Within her conceptual pursuits, one encounters a unique blend of archival imagery, elusive symbols, screen prints, and Xerox collages. It’s in these varied forms of media that the synergy between visual artistry and musical expression effortlessly unfold. Employing deliberate restraint, Hartmann eschews superfluous elaboration about her work. She entrusts the observer with discovering the magical quality which resides in the gap between the art and viewer. Hartmann treats the output of her mind as an algorithm; it becomes a framework for further artistic computation. Her work delves into the depths of the subconscious, revealing concepts characterized by their infinitude. Her perspective extends to the creatively unconventional, where she intriguingly regards conspiracy theories as societal relics worthy of study—an open-mindedness which enunciates her versatility as an artist. A fusion of the modern mythological emerges, as Hartmann recycles recurring themes that persist in our collective consciousness. Through her exploration of spiritual phenomena, she invites us to delve into the enigmatic, prompting us to seek understanding in realms beyond the real. On the occasion of Hartmann’s exhibition, Soft Power, at Silke Lindner in New York, Leo Cocar investigates the artist's signs and symbols.

Leo: Hi Nina! It’d be great to start this off with a bit of insight into your background. People who pay attention to your practice have probably picked-up that there's some sort of connection to music-oriented communities and subcultures. The Xeroxed imagery in particular calls to mind aesthetic histories tied to death metal and hardcore, among other genres, and some of the conceptual material you work with also alludes to these ties. I was doing some digging into your background, and Discogs brought up a collaboration you did with Drew McDowell from Coil.

Nina: I grew up going to punk, noise, and experimental music shows in South Florida. I actually learned how to make compositions by creating flyers and album art for my friends. I've played a bit of music, but it's never really been my main thing, so my way of collaborating has always been visually. A lot of my process has been influenced by subcultural music scenes, especially using recontextualized imagery through collage. Because I began creating compositions for flyers, it laid some groundwork for thinking about methods of disseminating information in general. Working with Drew was amazing. When he asked me to do his album art, it meant a lot to me because Coil was a big influence, especially some of their methodologies about ritualistic art making.

Leo: I can see the link, since for the most part, your world doesn’t really entail any drawing or drafting…it's mostly re-appropriated or quotational, the sculptural element of your practice.

Nina: Totally. I do paint in both the resin and encaustic pieces, but I wouldn’t say it’s the primary focus of my practice. My mom is a painter and her dad was a painter, both traditionally trained. I grew up surrounded by their work, as well as other art my mom exposed me to. I felt creatively inclined at an early age, but I remember being in art class, maybe in middle school, trying to paint a realistic landscape for an assignment and having so much trouble. I had this early psychic break about representation and got really frustrated by my inability to paint the way that was expected in school. I had to find my own way to make paintings without much of an adeptness to do so in a traditional way.

Leo: Would you say that the kind of background, the specific genres and scenes that you're working with, conceptually informed your current work? I feel like the folding in of esoterica and mysticism feels like part and parcel of the background you came from.

Nina: Yeah, absolutely. Honestly, I didn't realize how unsettling my work can be to some people until starting the MFA program. Going to grad school made me confront and question some of the underlying reasons why I work the way I do, and why darkness has always been such a natural language to me. It’s never really made sense to simply say, “I think this is bad,” when critiquing power structures and investigating the darker phenomenon of human existence. I wanted to explore ways to reveal some of the more complex and contradictory layers of this subject matter. I’m interested in finding ways to engage effect by opening up spaces in which the viewer can project contents from their own psyche onto a piece and assess their own biases and opinions…kind of like a Rorschach test.

Going back to the influence that punk and experimental music had on me, there’s a certain mode of critique learned in those spaces. It almost approaches the sublime. I think a lot about Reagan-era punk bands and how they would use photos of politicians or policemen on the covers of their albums. The simple recontextualization of the image creates a new critical function. There’s a unique experience that has to do with the body and the senses through the effect of imagery, as well as live shows.

Nina Hartmann
Networked Cross (Closing the Circle), 2023
Encaustic medium, inkjet print on wood panel
60 x 42 x 1 inches

Leo: It’s ironic that your work gets read as spooky. It feels like a recursion of 1980s Satanic Panic sort of thing where a lot of thematics or concepts that you engage with in your work aren't dark at all, but the mainstream understanding of these visual or aesthetic traditions are still closely linked with a clean-cut notion of evil. In reality, it's a lot like radical community-oriented politics and consciousness expansion, or just troubling the zeitgeist at large.

Nina: I agree. It makes sense to me to want to understand systems of power by exploring and deconstructing them in parts or specific events. We’re surrounded by these intentionally opaque systems that have existed since the beginning of time to control us. A big part of my research method is trying to acquire knowledge bit-by-bit to understand these systems, since it’s so daunting to take on such a large task.

Leo: On that note, could you speak a little bit more about modes of critique?

Nina: People often want a clear stance from me, politically or morally, and I think that withholding some of that is an important part of the work. It’s not a way to evade responsibility, I just think it can sometimes limit the work. The artist holds an inherent power by choosing to withhold and refuse.

I’m really interested in the body of work mimicking the systems that it’s exploring. I’ve been referencing a list of historical propaganda tactics when thinking about how the work functions as a whole and how I can subliminally harness them. Some of the ones I’ve been most interested in are repetition, allure, mysticism, redaction, suppression, and disinformation. Like how does a beautiful and seductive object affect your consideration of its legitimacy or authority? What about its composition, the quality of the photo, the colors, its level of obfuscation, and the quality of the object? The body of work starts to function as its own unique system.

Leo: I feel like ambiguity or withholding is generative within any artistic practice. No matter how direct or clear you make the message of your work, there'll always be some sort of gap between the author and viewer. Work can become more generative when you lean into the expansion of the gap between these two figures. In turn, this is why your work is so compelling—you leave a slight trail of meaning or recognizability for the viewer, just enough for something to latch onto without overdetermination. That's to say the magic or poetic quality of the artwork is in the gap, the ambiguity or the act of withholding.

Nina: It’s a delicate balance and a constant re-negotiation for a lot of artists. I like the idea of harnessing “the gap” as a tool. You want to supply enough information so the work can have meaning and people can access it, but also leave enough ambiguity so there’s room for subjective interpretation. There’s an element to the work where I take on the role of an unreliable narrator, maybe somewhat of a playful or trickster spirit. I used AI to alter a lot of the photos for this new work, either by colorizing black-and-white photos or generating new content. There’s a spirit of distrust that I’m interested in, where the work can move between truth and fiction, belief and fact, and it’s just an exploration of all these things.

I like to supply clues that act as breadcrumbs, often in the title or even as text within the paintings—it’s up to the viewer if they want to start their own line of research. I think the ambiguity creates room to take on larger themes. I’m always looking for ways that photographs can transform into contemporary iconography or symbols.

Nina Hartmann
Tools for Psychic Warfare, 2023
Resin, Acrylic, Pigment, Inkjet Print
22.5 x 26 x 3/4 inches

Leo: How important are the specific narratives, histories, and moments evoked by your work? I've always thought about your work in relationship to the unknown—this is particularly present with histories of conspiracy theories in the sense that their grip on the cultural or national psyche isn't necessarily about the particular qualities of a given conspiracy narrative, but rather that they gesture towards a vast, overwhelming, and ungraspable body of knowledge that is always inaccessible. In this way, the particular conspiracy theory acts as one of the few points of visibility in this subterranean network of intelligence. I think your interest in Jung often functions in the same way—you’re not necessarily interested in the particular qualities of a given archetype, but rather that they mark one of the few nodes of recognizability in the morass that is the structure of the human psyche.

Nina: It's trying to tap into these collective anxieties, fears, and desires that have existed in humans since the beginning of time and how they manifest in cultural phenomena or historical events. Conspiracy theories have been a great way of exploring these ideas for me because, even though they can be silly or outlandish at times, they come from a place of questioning and subversion, and also imagination. They’re very much the modern mythological. They’re almost always these recycled myths or reoccurring themes in society that have existed forever.

I’m also really drawn to the spirit of questioning and the role of the self-appointed detective. It is in part a result of a deep skepticism and mistrust, because so many people are tired of being lied to by politicians and such.

Leo: So, the use of—or interest in—Jungian psychology and conspiracy theories act as a tool to think about primordial anxieties or modes found in the human psychological condition? It’s something similar to fear or paranoia, but that might be a little blunt.

Nina: Absolutely. It's very much a manifestation of collective fears and anxieties that gain momentum. There's a reason that people, including myself, relate to them [conspiracy theories] and become so consumed. And a lot of people are grasping for personal power within a world where we’re manipulated by the misinformation we're given so often, and trying to reclaim the narrative.

We keep seeing this phenomenon of conspiracy theories proving to be true. We’ve seen it with all of these stranger-than-fiction moments that seem almost unbelievable until new declassified information becomes available. Things like MK-Ultra, Project Stargate, all of the UFO hearings happening right now. Our realities can collapse at any moment, and these events serve as a kind of memento mori of reality—they remind us that everything we're taught is a potential farce. It speaks to the fragility of accepted knowledge, and all of the problems with documented history. All recorded history is layered with subjectivity and biases, and our understanding of scientific knowledge or “facts” is constantly changing and evolving.

Leo: The use of conspiracy theories have a weirdly sublime quality to them. Individual narratives such as that of the mentalist Uri Geller, whose purported psychic abilities eventually lead to a CIA collaboration. There's a sublimity to conspiracy theories that gestures towards this huge, overwhelming network of information that's unstable, but also withheld all the time. It’s kind of like the rhizome network underneath the mushroom’s fruiting body.

Nina: There are these little bits of outlandish information that can provoke a reevaluation of our accepted knowledge. I did a show at this gallery Gern en Regalia in 2020, where I worked almost exclusively from the Project Stargate archive in the Freedom of Information Act, which, if people don't know, is this project where the CIA tried to harness peoples’ psychic abilities to spy on Russia using remote viewing, kind of like astral projection. I very much view the moments of knowledge acquisition I had while gathering research as a form of mind expansion. My practice began through researching subject matter I'm just interested in, honestly.

Nina Hartmann
Chaos Map (Balance Diagram), 2023
Encaustic medium, inkjet print, pigment on wood panel
64 x 59.5 x 1 inches

Leo: Which is kind of funny because, in a way, your work has this funny dialectic where there’s an act of withholding and then the histories that you're drawing from hinge on revelation or disclosure. These secret operations or conspiracy theories you draw upon, despite gesturing towards the unknown, almost require the act of disclosure. I mean, if Project Stargate was never disclosed, its relationship to the vast corpus of state secrets and the unknown would obviously be invisible. In a sense, without disclosure, conspiracy theories and the like would be, well, nothing.

Nina: I think the way the work functions is constantly changing, as well as my desires and intentions. There will always be contradictions because the world is contradictory in nature. There’s a logic involved in the work’s creation, but there’s also a sort of non-logic that exists. I think this also speaks to my interest in mysticism and spirituality. It’s an exploration of the way that belief exists through a subjective logic, where rules can be broken at any time. People sometimes ask me if the work is a case study or something, maybe because I'm interested in critical theory, and cite inspiration from post-structuralist and sociology texts, but this work is not meant to be anthropological. It's partially about my own experience researching in these spaces. The way my own mental health fluctuates through the process is layered in the work.

Leo: You’ve talked about the relationship between the citational or re-appropriated imagery used in your practice and its relationship to your music background. What about some of the current techniques you use? Namely, the suspension of imagery in encaustic or resin and the recurring motif of marking your works with shapes evocative of divine geometry.

Nina: The resin pieces were largely inspired by DIY plaques or memorials on the walls of dive bars. I grew up in Miami and going to bars is a big part of the culture there. There’s this restaurant called Flanigan’s that is covered wall-to-wall with photos of people proudly holding their caught fish, and there’s this one photo of a “square grouper”, which is slang for a big brick of discarded marijuana found floating in the ocean. I think about that photo a lot [laughs]. When people cut out newspaper articles about bar regulars or employees and seal them into a cut-out piece of wood with table-top resin—I really like these moments of forging personal histories and creating objects to commemorate events that aren’t usually given space, but are important to that particular place. I became interested in how the characteristics of those forms give them importance, their shape or composition, which evoke other monument-like objects. Also the gesture of encapsulating and preserving something in resin, and how the desire to protect it against weathering gives it a quality of recorded history.

I’m drawn to materials with an alchemical quality to them. Materials like encaustic and resin that activate the work like a potion. The heat, the mixing, the chemical interaction—it all ties into my interests of esoteric knowledge and alchemy as well.

Leo: Could you also talk a little bit about how and where you source your imagery?

Nina: I gathered a lot of these images from leaflets, pamphlets, and press packets that different sectors of the US military and government released as gestures of transparency, usually as a response to controversial events. One of the main ones I sourced from was a book that the Air Force released that basically tried to disprove the 1940’s UFO sightings in Roswell. The book contains a collection of photographs documenting tests that involved throwing human sized dummies out of planes to test balloon technology, thereby offering an explanation for the alleged sightings. The way in which these booklets attempt to control and orchestrate the narrative really struck me, especially how they rely on the photograph as indisputable proof. I was also working with these Department of Energy Packets that were released in response to the environmental and health damage caused by nuclear testing done during the Manhattan Project. It’s funny, it feels so topical because of Oppenheimer.

Leo: In the new series of work being shown at Silke Lindner, there's a fairly generic image of a lamb in one of your works. Correct me if I’m wrong—I’m guessing this image isn’t from a secret government operation. So, how do you choose your imagery?, because there seems to be a mix of images directly relating to the histories engaged by any given number of your works as well as seemingly unrelated images.

Nina: That's a really good question. I'm interested in the juxtaposition of various source materials and how they interact with each other in their recontextualization. For instance, having images from an official CIA archive existing on the same wall as images from a more subterranean source, like page 57 of a conspiracy theory message board about the pope’s ties to the satanic church. The scrambling breaks down the hierarchies of information, giving it a new rhizomatic manifestation. I want to deconstruct the ways we assign legitimacy to content based on its characteristics and the context, or lack thereof, that it's delivered in. The lack of context breaks the image down into a more symbolic function.

Leo: Your work also possesses a flickering quality, which I think has to do with an engagement with temporality. For example, in the 20th century Air Force book you just talked about, photography was used as a way of assigning objectivity or truth to a given event. But now, it's come full circle: no imagery is trusted in our post-truth era. This isn’t only due to the advancement of photo editing software, but also AI capabilities. It’s almost as if the possibility of the camera or image being objective has entirely gone out the window.

Nina: Photography’s function as evidence or data feels so topical right now with all that’s happening with the advancement of artificial intelligence. A big conceptual inspiration for the show was the idea of the operational image, which Harun Farocki talks about in Phantom Images. Basically, it’s an image that exists for a function, like a still from a drone camera containing GPS coordinates and a crosshair, or a sonogram image. The concept sparked a line of inquiry for me about images that hold authority through their technological characteristics and qualities. Operational images contain some sort of objective truth value because of their function of measurement and task. I tried to employ some of the compositional characteristics commonly recognized in these images to make paintings.

Leo: These images are legitimized not through their ability to reproduce a view of the world as it's seen by the human eye, but through their ability to penetrate this form of vision, which is then further legitimized by their role within a larger operation of knowledge accruement. I think this is formally mirrored in your work in the way your sculptures are reminiscent of cosmograms, of charts and diagrams that show the world as it is beyond the pale of the mundane. Your practice seems to almost fall into the category of a research-based practice—just without the designer-furniture-and-text installation format.

Nina: Yeah, you know one of my professors said to me during a crit that my work is trying to do what Hans Haacke does but in the opposite way, and I kind of loved that.

Leo: I think it's a huge compliment to be honest. It’s a conversation I’ve had with several people but the problem with a lot of these practices (not Haacke’s, obviously) is that I’m not about to spend sixteen hours reading in a gallery.

Nina: I have this vast archive of documents and images, but I always try to find a way to synthesize them into more digestible forms and engage the senses in an exciting way, because at the end of the day we live in a super fast-paced world with a short attention span, and I also want that to be part of the work. Kind of mimicking the ways images become iconographic in social media, which we’ve all gotten used to. As I mentioned, allure or seduction through material is a part of the work. People always come up to me and are like, “I want to lick the resin”.

Leo: So why the recurring turn to specifically military-centric special operations and conspiracy theories?

Nina: My dad's father and his three brothers were all in the US Army or Navy during World War II. My grandfather was a Pearl Harbor survivor and a decorated Navy captain. On the contrary, my father was successful in dodging the Vietnam draft multiple times. They tried to draft him, I think, three times. He learned this yoga technique from his friend which involved clenching his sphincter muscle for extended periods of time to heighten his blood pressure. His blood pressure was so high every time he would go in for his draft physical the doctors were like, this makes no sense, you’re in perfect health but your blood pressure is through the roof. Once, they sent him to the hospital to be monitored for 72 hours because they assumed he was on drugs. But it worked every time! Anyways I can’t find any information about this technique on the internet, but I love the story. Maybe these two facts can speak to some of the poetics of my inclination.

Leo: [laughs] I think this family history of where yogic practice and warfare meet feels appropriate for contextualizing your work. Can you talk a little bit more about the role of psychology in your practice? We’ve talked about how Carl Jung’s ideas have been influential for you and even in this conversation you’ve mentioned fear, anxiety, and paranoia.

Nina: I’ve mentioned this to you before, but I have my own issues with mild paranoia in my personal life. Or maybe it isn't really paranoia, just a result of all the things I've experienced. I suffer from OCD and it feeds a lot of my compulsions to collect and organize, but I don't view the main mode of the work as being biographic or anything. I mentioned before that I do try to pick up on universal frequencies through letting go of control and creating methods or constraints for the collection process. Sometimes I rely on algorithms to reveal the next subject, like a form of divination. For this new work, I tried to treat my brain like a processor of information in order to create some of the shapes. On some days, I would take in curated information for several hours, and then have a drawing and collage session afterwards. For instance, I might look at early alchemical diagrams, a collection of fractal geometries, and early panopticon architecture to an exhaustive point, and then try to create something while in a disassociate state after I’ve subconsciously absorbed the content. It’s somewhat like a form of automatic drawing. It’s a way of letting go, as well as attempting to tap into the power of the subconscious.

Leo: Is this a consistent way of working in your practice or is this something you developed or turned towards in your new show with Silke Lindner?

Nina: In some ways, it just became more fine-tuned and intentional recently.

Leo: I think your interest in both diagrams and psychology makes a lot of sense. I’m thinking now of Lacan’s graph of desire, and the attempt to visualize in the simplest form a titanic, ungraspable force in the world. In the context of psychoanalysis, clinical case studies—with their lived human experiences and specificities—are really the only way of thinking about such overwhelming forces, like desire. You can’t picture desire as a whole but you can think of it through small points of visibility, like with the subject talking through a traumatic event at the clinic. I think your images and work operate in much of the same way.

Nina: Yeah, it’s like trying to grasp and organize little moments within an infinite network that feels impossible to see or understand as a whole, but there are instances of understanding found in these little moments of revelation. At the end of the day, it’s an exercise in reality manipulation.

Soft Power will be on view at Silke Lindner until October 7th.

Microdosing Poetry and Over-seasoning the Artistic Process: An Interview of Artist Darius Airo

September 29, 2023

Installation view of *Casual Banter* @ Face Guts. Courtesy of Darius Airo and Joshua White.

Interview by Mia Milosevic

Heavily intertwined with the work of the Chicago Imagists, artist Darius Airo has derived a decent amount of his contemporary style from the group of representational artists. Imbued with the quintessential imagery and pop iconography of the Imagists, Airo’s work fuses these art historical trends with his own inclination for surrealist imagery and the grotesquerie. His romanticization of public space is influenced by these same artistic roots, but is guided by the poetry he writes. Airo interweaves the quotidian with the romantic through his poetic approach to painting and drawing, unintentionally highlighting the exceptional in the mundane.

Airo has two shows happening concurrently in Los Angeles. His show Dense at Central Server Works is a collaboration between him and Jim Mooijekind. The respective artists’ work operates in tandem; the paintings are in conversation with one another, all generally characterized by the abstracted figure and its gaze. Casual Banter at Face Guts is a sort of retrospective of Airo’s drawings from the last ten years, curated by photographer Joshua White. The drawings are filled with kinetic figural forms seemingly capable of conversing amongst themselves.

MIA MILOSEVIC: Maybe we can start with you telling me about yourself…as an artist, how you got your start, your inspirations.

DARIUS AIRO: I’m from Chicago, I was born there. I’ve been there my whole life. I went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) for undergrad, which helped me get a better grasp on my career, as undergrad does. I did some studio assistant work early on for an artist named Tony Fitzpatrick. It was instrumental to how I piece together images and navigate the business. My father is an artist as well. He’s worked as an illustrator, sculptor, and animator.

MILOSEVIC: I heard that you are “absolutely endowed in the work of the Chicago Imagists.”

AIRO: Oh yeah, for sure. They're huge in Chicago. Most of them taught at SAIC. A handful of them while I was there. I felt they were excited about the same imagery and pop iconography that I am, like drawing in a really romantic way. Upon graduating, I was in a group show in New York that was a bunch of emerging Chicago artists and a bunch of work with the Imagists, which was so rad to have work hanging next to artists that I love. I carried this–I don’t know if I’m supposed to say it–but we got this really expensive Jim Nutt drawing, and so I was carrying this Jim Nutt drawing on the fucking train across the bridge from Manhattan to Brooklyn, and it was horrifying. It was really scary. Like it was facing me, I’m guarding it with my life.

MILOSEVIC: You’re really connected to the Chicago Imagists. I know they incorporate a lot of surrealist technique and I see a lot of that in your work. Do you have any inspiration you draw specifically from surrealist artists?

AIRO: I think about Gertrude Abercrombie–that’s the surrealism that I like, but that might be pushing it. They’re pretty mellow. Or, Yves Tanguy I love, but also kind of pushing it. You know, the surrealist quality of the Imagists work is about the absurd or kind of grotesque cartoon figuration and a much more pop sensibility, whereas the surrealism I’m into or how I engage with it feels like a different vein of art history.

MILOSEVIC: I notice the absurd or grotesque in your work. What are you drawn to about those specific things?

AIRO: Yeah it’s like making art and being invested in it is a silly thing to do in the grand scheme of the world. It’s inherently abject when you’re making work that’s a reflection of you, and I think you have to laugh at everything so you don’t freak out and be miserable 24/7. You have to laugh at yourself and embrace the abject, so that’s really where it comes from. It’s a reflection of myself through an abject lens…but also I love myself too.

MILOSEVIC: They go together.

AIRO: Yeah, for sure. Love and hate are not opposites, you know?

MILOSEVIC: Or if you’re allowed to be abject about yourself, then that’s self-love?

AIRO: Yes, totally. Self-acceptance, right?

MILOSEVIC: I really wanted to talk to you about your upcoming shows in Los Angeles, one of them being Dense with Jim Moojiekind, opening in Venice at Central Server Works.

AIRO: Jim and I have been connected for years through Instagram, and developed a friendship at the beginning of the pandemic. We were sending each other some work and followed each other’s practice a bit. It was both of our instincts to see if we could open a show that would put our work in conversation. We’re excited about so much of the same stuff formally, sharing the same branches of the art history tree. It made sense that the work would go together. I don’t think he or I made work to accommodate the other, it was about making what made sense with the collaboration in mind, and then finding those connections afterwards. Something really beautiful happened there, where his work is incredibly reflective of him–it’s super personal and there are all these icon-figures that are stand-ins for pieces of him–and the work I made is very much about the viewer, about a person looking at something. My work is kind of looking at his work, and I like that relationship, where one is showing and one is looking.

MILOSEVIC: So the collaboration really begins as a conversation between the two of you.

AIRO: Those conversations were integral to understanding what was going on in each other’s lives. I would see stages, he would see stages, but it was so much more about just kind of taking each other’s temperatures. It was pretty blind.

MILOSEVIC: In the press-release for Dense, it talks about how both you and Jim’s work is characterized by the “abstraction of the figure as a way of exploring psychologically charged subject matter.” I love the idea of abstraction as a form of storytelling…can you tell me more about how this plays a role in your work?

AIRO: I have a pretty particular process in making these works, and they’re based on a poem that’s formatted as a list of instructions on how to make one of the paintings. I think I’m the only one that can follow the instructions…like I don’t think they’re universal. But the poem is about going for a walk as I leave the studio and I’m walking and I’m looking at everybody and looking at everything and every once in a while–whenever it happens–there’s someone, and I look at them and they’re probably looking at me and maybe they’re not, but there’s a moment where I know they’re the person that I need to paint next and I run home as fast as I can–put the jets on, hit the Buck 50–and go paint them in one sitting. It’s so much about memory and reckoning with the public. Meeting eyes with someone in a public space, there’s like a million different versions of that. A lot of the time it’s really frightening, the public is super scary, but there’s also these moments that are really easy to romanticize or kinda funny. All the work is environmentally responsive and I think that I’m so charged by the people that share spaces with me and if I can find the energy of space through looking at someone, that’s the goal. That’s how I know I found the right person and can run home after staring at them like a crazy person.

MILOSEVIC: I love what you said about how you and Jim’s shared realities come together in this show. You’re taking your walk on the street, and bringing it to Jim’s walk on the street.

AIRO: Well, I think the work is about him walking down the street and largely mine is too, but he’s the one painting himself.

MILOSEVIC: He’s the subject.

AIRO: Yes, I think they’re mostly self-portraits, maybe he’d be mad at me saying that but I don’t think so. They’re incredibly honest and abject in this beautiful, funny way which romanticizes the things that we’re conditioned to feel really strange about in our own bodies. Every painting in the show is a close-up of a figure, and they have a gaze, and it’s very much about their gaze. I feel like that moment where I share that gaze with a person, it’s being transcribed as a gaze onto his work.

MILOSEVIC: The title of the show is Dense. I feel like I can assume this might have something to do with the public, your work on the street, or the density of your environment…

AIRO: Jim picked the title. But I think that makes a lot of sense, that’s why I was cool with it. It makes sense in his work because he’s unpacking a lot. And it’s kinda funny too, dense like dumb. It’s abject.

MILOSEVIC: Right. Jim must love himself too.

AIRO: Oh, must. We wouldn’t be here together if he didn’t.

MILOSEVIC: I was hoping to also talk about Casual Banter, your solo-show at Face Guts which is curated by Joshua White. I love the name of the exhibition first of all, I feel like I’m already gonna like the work when I hear the name, it almost doesn’t matter what it is.

AIRO: I make a ton of drawings. “Casual banter” was written on one of the drawings I sent to Josh, and he picked the title. There are little moments of poetry or quotes from other people–it’s scattered on my drawings, it’s the most liberated part of my practice, and writing is a tremendous part of that. I didn’t know what we were gonna title the show. I ended up sending him like 70 drawings, all from the last ten years, so that drawing is years old and it was the one that stuck out to him, I think for the same reason. There’s a lot of figures–figural forms–that I think are all talking to each other, especially with the way this show is installed, it makes a lot of sense.

MILOSEVIC: You incorporate a lot of your poetry into your work…you’re a poet?

AIRO: No…but I guess so. I’ll avoid the title. I like being a painter, or somebody who makes drawings more. I think making some poetic work is important, well it’s about romanticizing everything around me, so that’s kind of poetic-sounding, right? But the drawings, because they’re more liberated and free and less pressurized, I feel a little more comfortable sharing writing. I’m soft-dropping poetry with this drawing show, you know? A microdose.

MILOSEVIC: Nice. Does your writing make a feature in both Casual Banter and Dense?

AIRO: In Casual Banter there are drawings with small blurbs of poems and stanzas and shit all over the place. The work I made for Dense is all based on a poem I wrote that served as a mode of operation for making them. It’s what I was saying about going on the street and going for that walk, so that’s formatted as an instructional poem.

MILOSEVIC: How does Casual Banter incorporate some of the abject we were talking about earlier?

AIRO: I think it’s probably more forward in the drawings than it is in the paintings. Or a lot closer to a formal conversation with the Imagists and Leon Golub and all of these Chicago artists that I really love. And a lot of cartoon stuff too which is kind of the same thing. [Theodor] Adorno hated cartoons–because you’re laughing at something getting hurt and it’s okay because it’s not a human form. I think about that a bunch.

MILOSEVIC: Are you more drawn to working on paper than other mediums?

AIRO: I wouldn’t say I’m more drawn to it. I feel like when I’m drawing, I’m drawing a lot. When I’m painting, I’m not really drawing, but I’m painting and writing a lot. Drawing feels like a necessary thing I love that I’ll always be connected to, and painting is the same, but painting I feel like I have to take more seriously. Or it has to be more challenging. I can make a stack of drawings that aren’t for anyone but me, that are on computer paper or with a pen I stole from a hotel, and I can love them and they can be doing a lot for me. It’s like a therapeutic practice, like sprinting, drawing a bunch of drawings. But the paintings–I love taking them seriously and being nerdy and romantic about them, and wanting them to fight me and wanting them to be the best objects that I can make. So they’re a lot harder for me to make. Because I force them to be.

MILOSEVIC: Something about painting on a canvas, it feels like if it’s not good, you wasted a canvas. But there’s a dispensability to the paper–

AIRO: Yes, it’s like how do you get as far away from that as possible. I made a book, I called it Lucky Drawings, and I was taking stacks of computer paper and just leaving them on my kitchen counter and the studio. I’d put a stack in my back-pocket for a long walk or a trip, and I made a couple hundred in a few months, and they made me really happy. They were maybe the most forward presentation of my poetry and really honest moments from conversations I would have while I made them. They were my favorite things I ever made but they’re on the worst paper ever and that’s exactly why. They were so liberated from material and so liberated from any pressure that I would put on the seriousness of making an art object in a commercial setting. So I printed them into a book, and it makes me super happy to see them forever, that way.

MILOSEVIC: I wanted to go back to your seriousness around the canvas. What helps you get over this kind of thing? It feels like when you take something really seriously, it’s hard to do anything.

AIRO: I think fearlessness is really important when you’re trying to make something. Like finding a really wonderful moment in a painting that still isn’t a final object, but then not being afraid to ruin those moments. Being willing to scrape off the whole painting because if you did it once and you ruin it then you can do it again, maybe just better. You learn something. I make a lot of stuff and edit it down, always. And destroy lots of work that I don’t like. But I don’t have a huge issue with getting stuck or feeling like I don’t know where to go, which I feel very fortunate for.

MILOSEVIC: One of your books is titled An American Manic and one article written about you actually refers to you as “an American manic.” Did you give yourself that title?

AIRO: Yes, I gave it to myself. I don’t know if I’d call myself an American manic, but they sure did. It was really eclectic source material. I was 22 or 23 when I made that book and really reveling in being an angry early twenty-something. Maybe not angry but just moody, all over the place, maybe a little manic? It was poetry and digital images and drawings that I would tinker with. It was haphazardly put together on Photoshop and the last thing I made in undergrad at SAIC to accompany my first solo-show in Chicago.

MILOSEVIC: I saw this article today from “Art in America” while I was reading through some of your work…it’s titled “Ugly painting in New York is getting uglier, and that’s good news.” I thought you’d definitely have an opinion on this…

AIRO: I don’t think any of those ugly paintings are very ugly. They’re all pretty beautiful, which is funny. I think making an ugly art object is always gonna be beautiful. I don’t know. You made a thing that you love that just exists with other art. How is that gonna be ugly? I think being kinda tongue-in-cheek and silly about “breaking the rules” is giving MFA. That’s what you do in a studio program, like grad school you stop doing all the shit you did in undergrad. Ugly stuff is beautiful too, I guess that’s my opinion.

MILOSEVIC: That seems like the consensus for a lot of people. It’s trending. In one other interview I read, you described your work as “an over-seasoned sauce made of everything you look at and interact with”…I feel like that idea of the “over-seasoned” is really interesting and could be something that definitely sets you apart from other artists?

AIRO: I think that’s in tandem with the hyper-romanticization of the practice. Jumping into it and attacking this thing, being really physical with an object and having that corny battle with a painting. I think that's how you’re over-seasoned. You know, you get an artist who makes really beautiful photoshopped documents and then projects them and takes a long time and they’re very meticulous, it’s really careful–they followed the recipe. I don’t think I do that and I think that’s an integral part of my practice. Even having an image in mind or the person that I saw walking down the street, sometimes they come out really fast and I’ll finish one of them in a week or sometimes I’m fighting the same surface for months.

Casual Banter is on view through October 7 @ Face Guts, 4134 Verdugo Road, Los Angeles, 90065

Dense is on view through November 18 @ Central Server Works, 517 Victoria Avenue, Venice, 90291

Daniel Arsham In Conversation With Andy Warhol Museum Director Patrick Moore

September 19, 2023

***Photographer: Claire Dorn. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.***

In a globalized world, pop culture transcends dialect to create a language accessible to all. Daniel Arsham’s work taps into this reservoir of collective symbols while cheekily disconnecting them from their cultural niches, sending R2D2 back in time to erode and replacing it with a fresh Venus de Milo. Patrick Moore, the director of the Andy Warhol Museum and an expert judge of the weight our common cultural relics hold, has previously examined Arsham’s work through a lens tinted by Warhol’s campy visual commentary. While Warhol crafted the thrones of monolithic cultural figures, however, Arsham’s work presents the modern deities of culture and especially Americana as decaying relics. Despite this alternative view, his work maintains a celebratory and even reverent attitude toward its subject matter, which has landed him partnerships with Star Wars and Pokémon alongside the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and Perrotin, his gallery of twenty years. This fall, the artist celebrates this two decade partnership with dual exhibitions across Perrotin New York (through October 14) and Paris (through October 7). In honor of this anniversary, Moore and Arsham come together in conversation to explore the bridge between commercialism and fine art where Arsham and Warhol have built their practices.

DANIEL ARSHAM: When I did the press preview in Paris, I was asked what I thought about your essay in comparison to Warhol. Certainly, for me, it's a flattering comparison, but it gets to the heart of people feeling sometimes like what I'm doing is this very novel approach. It's almost like people forgot that Warhol was doing this 40 years ago. I think I told you, Patrick, about the story when I did the first collaboration with Adidas. I was having a conversation with a collector of mine who was like, how are you gonna allow this brand to use your work to sell sneakers? And I said, it's the opposite. I'm using them for their reach and the funding that they're gonna put towards this crazy project that I wanna do.

PATRICK MOORE: I think that people not only forget about how earth-shattering it was when Warhol was first blurring the lines between the commercial world and the fine art world, but they also forget that Warhol had been largely dismissed at the end of his career. For a large part, I think that there was this backlash at his exploration of the commercial world and of making money as part of his practice. Do you think that still exists in the art world? Or has it become an accepted practice?

ARSHAM: I don't know if it's more accepted, but maybe the artists who are doing it feel more comfortable around it. I'm thinking art of artists like George Condo or Tom Sachs who were already kind of integrating those sorts of elements within their own work, and it didn't matter whether the brand was directly involved with them or not. The context of those brands in their work already existed. So in some cases it's a benefit to maybe have the brand supporting that.

But really, what's the difference between a brand and a collector? The collector is purchasing or supporting. So much of my audience are not the traditional art world audience. And every time that I do an exhibition, when I post about he show, people always ask if they need tickets to come to the gallery. And I'm like, guys, this is the greatest thing ever. You can go to any art gallery and it is 100% free. Here in New York, it's like a huge free museum, and the collectors are the ones who pay for the audience to be able to see it.

MOORE: I was so glad that you and Perrotin asked me to think about this because as I mentioned in the essay, I had been thinking so much about you, and it was really seeing your work in that different setting that you described at Tiffany's in New York that started this. For you, how is it when you walk into that store and you see your work in that context? Does it feel fundamentally different than seeing it in your studio or in the gallery?

ARSHAM: In some ways it feels more natural in that location than seeing it in the gallery. I feel like the gallery, maybe it's a more minimal environment, but it's much more directly about the monetary transaction with the work. And at Tiffany, it's just there for people's pleasure or their inquisitiveness or curiosity. So it was like, the jewelry that was worn in, Breakfast at Tiffany's and other famous pieces that have been worn either in film or on the red carpet and outside of the exhibition. I had done work with Tiffany in the past, and they wanted a large work to be out there to kind of announce what was inside.

Fractured Idols I , 2023.
Acrylic on canvas. Framed: 91 1/2 x 105 1/2
inch. Photographer: Claire Dorn. Courtesy of
the artist and Perrotin.

MOORE: In my essay about you, I also mentioned this idea of you ruining things to make them more precious or to help us see them new again. What did you think about that idea of ruining things?

ARSHAM: When I first started with that body of work, it was really about this idea of aging them, causing them to appear as if they're from a different era. And so much of the work that I've done from the beginning was always about time dislocation, where we're looking at a painting or an image or a story or a sculpture, and we don't quite know when it is from. Sometimes in the depiction of a painting, we see a landscape and there are these architectural structures within it, but it looks like maybe something ancient or something ultra-futuristic, and we don't really know when we are. And so the idea of decay in the works was really about causing the work to appear as if it's in a state of erosion, like it might be in 10,000 years. And the materiality of it is really important for the further understanding of what the object can be. Like, the crystals tell us something about the idea that a trompe-l’œil version of that would not. Like if I just took a radio, let's say, and I painted it to look old, and maybe the quality of it was sort of visually similar, the knowledge that it's actually made of crystal has this other sort of visceral truth quality about it. It's also very difficult to understand how they're made, which is a magic that I think artists often employ. You just can't understand the object.

MOORE: When we look at your work, we see an object, but there's actually something that you're hiding underneath that object. In almost everything that you do, it seems like I'm seeing something, but you’re not letting me see what this is really about.

ARSHAM: I guess that's one way to look at it. The other way is that you're seeing something in the objects, and this is part of the reason why I use things that are very familiar to almost everyone. No matter where they are in the world, it allows them an entrance point into the work. Like, I feel like I know that thing. I'm in. Once you get there, things become more complicated. When is this thing from, why is this wall moving? That use of the everyday object as an entrance point into my work has been consistent and super important for me.

Holiday Inn: Study for Falling Clock, 2023.
Graphite on paper. 10 1/2 x 7 1/4 inch. Graphite
on paper. 8 7/8 x 6 1/8 inch. Photographer:
Guillaume Ziccarelli. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.

MOORE: I want to know a little bit more about how and why you draw. Do you draw every day? Is it a part of your practice every day? Is it something that's associated with projects?

ARSHAM: It's for different uses. I use it as a way to prepare. I use it as a way to think. Sometimes concentrating on an object or an idea in drawing, when you're not really thinking about language, has a different way of telling you something about it or understanding something about it. And then sometimes drawings are really just like notation. I've been either making drawings in hotels for years. I always take the stationary with me. Some of my favorite ones are like the Holiday Inn from Arkansas or something like that, where it's a really bad graphic. That contrasts with the drawing that I'm doing of an eroded Greek figure or something like that.

MOORE: I had a more glamorous fantasy of you than the Holiday Inn. I was thinking of you in some glamorous hotel in Tokyo at 3:00 AM, jet-lagged out of your mind, like, I'm gonna start drawing. Holiday Inn never occurred to me.

ARSHAM: When I toured with Merce Cunningham, the accommodations were not luxury. It was wherever he could put up the entire dance company. But [in the exhibit] there are drawings from Gritti Palace in Venice or the Amman in Tokyo. It's the whole range.

MOORE: I saw a couple paintings that you were working on in your studio, and I was really, really drawn to them. One thing I was drawn to was the paint itself. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the paint, the matte quality of the paint, the palette that you're working with.

ARSHAM: I'm colorblind, and I think it has always made it very challenging for me to mix and match paint. If I'm working one day, and then I come back the next day, I always found it ultra frustrating to try to remake a color that I had mixed to match something that was already on the canvas. So, I had been working with this company, Golden Paints, to basically make me a complete gradient in the four colors that I wanted to use. They kept sending the sample, and I would say “Add more pigment”. I think that quality that you're describing is this feeling in the paint that it's just so lush and loaded with pigment. It's got like 20 times the amount of pigment that's in a commercial paint.

MOORE: Well, here's a big difference between you and Warhol. I think Andy used the cheapest possible paint he could find (laughs). Let's talk a little bit more about the paintings, because they are such an odd amalgam and it makes them really interesting. What I responded to was this idea of nostalgia and Americana, but I'd love to hear you talk about the paintings and what you were thinking about specifically when you selected those objects, those scenes that you create.

ARSHAM: I had been working for the past couple of years with the Pokémon Company in Japan, and I made a number of sculptures based on some of the Pokémon characters. And we also worked on an animation together that I insisted was hand-drawn. I did a couple paintings at the time that were like a single cell study. This exhibition has a number of works in it that use that anime or manga-type language in them. I'm mocking up most of my paintings from multiple different images–I'm basically doing a collage in Photoshop, and then I'm using that as a reference for the painting. So I'm throwing in references to old Air Jordan ads or vintage Porsche ads. There's cars in them, there's sneakers, there's the BMX bike from the movie ET. And it's all of these Easter eggs that encompass my world. And in the exhibition there, those works also exist in sculpture. So you might see like an R2D2 in a painting in silhouette. And then in the show you're seeing the actual sculpture of it.

MOORE: Star Wars is a particular focus right now. Was that like a touchstone for you growing up? Does it have a kind of magic resonance for you?

ARSHAM: It's really one of the first movies that I can remember seeing in the cinema with my family. I was probably five, I guess it would've been Empire Strikes Back, and kind of just like something that was always been around. When I was a kid and I would stay home sick from school, there was a VHS that my father had recorded, one of the Star Wars, but he had recorded it from television, so it had all the commercials in it out as well. And so up until I was in high school, I'd be watching commercials from like the eighties mixed in with Star Wars. I wish I still had that VHS ‘cause it probably encompasses like everything that I'm interested in. You know, today I cook advertisements, um, you know, a Super Bowl commercial or like n b a playoffs and the Nike ad and you know, car ad and then Star Wars in between.

MOORE: Star Wars is so fascinating. Business is so much a part of your work – how do you go about working with a franchise like that? How does something like that happen?

ARSHAM: I had been speaking with some people from Lucasfilm in advance of the project in Monaco with Louis Hamilton. George Lucas is a huge F1 fan, and I think he'd been to every Monaco Grand Prix since the seventies. And he was there at the event with his wife [Mellody Hobson], and she says to me, I think we own some of your work. I was like, what? George Lucas has some of my work in his house? What is this? And so I'm like, which work is it? Like, where did you get it from? And she's like, Usher gave it to us as a gift. It was a work from about 15 years ago, a 35 millimeter movie camera that I had cast in volcanic ash. I don't think she knew who the artist was or anything, she just recognized it because of the similarity with the work that I had done for Louis. And so I told her, “by the way, I'm speaking with Lucasfilm about this thing.” And she connected me with the right people. And that's sort of how it came about.

MOORE: Well, it was meant to be then.

Daniel Arsham 20 Years will be on view at Perrotin New York until October 14, and Perrotin Paris until October 7.

R2 - D2TM: Quartz CrystallizedFigure , 2023.
Quartz, Selenite, Hydrostone. 48 x 42 1/16 x
42 1/16 inch. Photographer: Guillaume
Ziccarelli. Courtesy Perrotin. © & TM
Lucasfilm Ltd. © 2023 Daniel Arsham, Inc.

Theater, Fear, and Fairy Tales: An Interview of Artist Emma Webster

September 5, 2023

Emma Webster
*The Rehearsal (Harvest Moon)* (2023)
60 x 84 in
Oil on linen

interview by Chimera Mohammadi

How does one go about staging a stage? Emma Webster’s upcoming exhibition, Intermission at Jeffrey Deitch, answers this question by erasing the line between prop and (back)stage. This boundary erasure is nothing new for Webster, whose work combines the supernatural, unnatural, and natural realms, merging this paradoxical triad into a cohesive, uncanny space that reflects the inescapable presence of human viewership on nature and art. Her landscapes exist in a variety of intermediary spaces: between heaven and horror, nature and technology, fiction and reality, and theater and visual art. In Intermission, she gives physicality to these liminalities while highlighting previously behind-the-scenes sculptural stages of her process, creating an environment of borderless voyeurism that invites us, the viewers, into her creative world, while reminding us of our separation from it, reinforcing our roles as witnesses.

MOHAMMADI: In your artist talk at Perrotin Tokyo, there were a few people asking, “where are the humans?” Which I thought was kind of funny because all your landscapes are very human, in my opinion. What human stories can be found in your work?

WEBSTER: Maybe an Edenic origin story. I've heard many recently talk about the golem myth (or Pinocchio) with respect to AI. Maybe the creation of man, and the animation of this golem, relates to landscapes too because we associate nature is a womb-place. Everything from the Earth.

MOHAMMADI: Your work has been described as otherworldly, supernatural, liminal—does it occupy a fairy tale or folktale niche?

WEBSTER: If we're presented with a backdrop and a stage, it begs the question of what's unfolding. And I'm interested in theater because it's another way, like fairy tales, of creating a suspension of disbelief. Whenever we go into a theater, we're expecting to be surprised.

MOHAMMADI: Do you want to talk a little more about the expanding presence of theater and theatricality in your work?

WEBSTER: The paintings come from staged dioramas in the computer. Usually, the stage is a real device we engage to see an unreal thing. But here, even the theater is a prop in and of itself. It's not a real theater. There’s levels of immersion: the experience of sculpting the source material in the VR, and you also have the immersive experience of being in the black box where you can be transported anywhere. But on top of that, you have to meander through the installation maze of wings, props, and equipment in order to see the paintings. I'm hoping that even the props that make fantasy are still fantasy here.

MOHAMMADI: You’ve talked about dolmens in your work and how you stumbled upon that type of structure accidentally. They kind of double as theaters in your work. Was that combination of theater with these very primal structures conscious?

WEBSTER: That linkage between theater, vitrine, shelter, is all rooted in ‘the box.’ And the dolmens tripped me out when I began to think about the architecture that holds fantasy. It's a place to witness. You can't have theater unless you have spectatorship.

MOHAMMADI: Someone said that “each finished work is a window into your virtual world.” Does each piece feel like a window into one world or are they sort of separate?

WEBSTER: I typically think about them as distinct worlds because each source sculpture is different. However I also like to think about the Jungian subconscious as a physical subterranean root system. When I consider that sort of framing device, it's fascinating to think these places are from one world. An ecosystem that allows for many kinds of life.

MOHAMMADI: You've discussed the universality of beauty and utopian ideals, and you touched on this earlier when you were talking about representing both the Garden of Eden and the fairytale nightmarescape. Do you paint utopias?

WEBSTER: I don't think utopias contain action. My knee-jerk response is “Well, utopia is peace, right? Utopian spaces, the grass is greener, the water's chill.” Anytime there's action, it's like, what the fuck is going to happen? So, maybe they're transforming into utopias or away from utopias, but there's too much tension in my paintings.

MOHAMMADI: Also in the Perrotin talk, people kept asking you about the violence in your paintings, which I thought was interesting because I never got violence from them.

WEBSTER: People read violence when there's an unknown. Violence is a response to fear. I’m coming to terms with our inability to anticipate reality. So much of our world is dramatically transforming right now. John Martin is one of my all-time favorite painters. I still don’t know how he painted the end of the world when the apocalypse, the spirit kingdom crashing into the Earth, is so abstract. How the hell do you make that painting, right? I want to bring that quality of solidifying something that we can't fathom.

MOHAMMADI: There's always fear with new technology, but there's a threat of replacement [with AI] that wasn't there with previous technology.

WEBSTER: Totally. I've been thinking a lot about the show title, Intermission, because it’s a break where you go back to the real world, you're unsure, you've just been exposed to the primary conflict, when the curtain suddenly comes down. You're just waiting. You don't know what you're meant to do. Painting is all about frozen time too. And with developments in AI, we’re waiting for resolution. We're all just waiting for an answer.

MOHAMMADI: You’ve been compared to everyone from Bierstadt to Dr. Seuss, and you've cited Blake and Bosch as among your influences. What were some inspirations for your upcoming show?

WEBSTER: Adolphe Appia, old theater productions, and silent movies, for simple lighting compositions. In this show, I’m presenting landscape as prop. Some of the artists that you brought up, Blake, John Martin, or Turner, I'm fascinated with how they inject spirit into structured scene. This is also where I’m at mentally, existentially, in this place where spirituality and science merge.

MOHAMMADI: Will theater become a stronger theme in your work?

WEBSTER: Yeah, I mean, everything is theater in its own way. It's a simulation. And it's linked to still life in that way. This is the first show that I've done something this immersive. It's one thing to engage with sculpture. It's another thing entirely to show the behind-the-scenes, literally have people stumble behind the scenes, and have points of reference for the paintings that have previously been secret.

Intermission is on view through October 21st at Jeffrey Deitch, 7000 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles.

Pee-wee & Nadia's Playhouse

July 31, 2023

*Autre Magazine*, Vol. 2 Iss. 15 F/W 2022: Losing My Religion

photographs by Nadia Lee Cohen
(director of photography Andrew Goeser)
photo assistance by Gustavo Soriano
styling by Chloe & Chenelle
tailoring by Oxana Sumenko
makeup by Ve Neill (for Paul Reubens)
& Lilly Keys @ A-Frame Agency (for Nadia Lee Cohen)
hair by Sami Knight @ A-Frame Agency
special thanks to Allison Berry, David Owen, Dream Factory Studios, Edge EQ Rentals, and Uncle Paulie’s Deli

Paul Reubens is one of the most brilliant comedic talents of our era. His character, Pee-wee Herman, a maniacal man child with a famous red bowtie, hypernasality, and a predilection for mischief, is a Saturday morning cartoon come to life. Invented on the stage of The Groundlings, Pee-wee Herman is equally iconic and archetypal as Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp. Socially defective with the decency to wear a suit, both characters are rife with hilarious contradictions, and both characters are perfect representations of their respective zeitgeists. Whereas the Tramp was a silent and prophetic emblem of the forthcoming economic devastation of two global wars, Pee-wee may as well have been a louder-than-bombs manifestation of the late-capitalistic dreamscape of the 1980s. Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (Tim Burton’s directorial debut) and later Pee-wee’s Playhouse, which aired on CBS and saw an average of ten million viewers per episode, was a fantasy of talking furniture in a supersaturated world that harkened back to 1950s diners and primetime dance competitions, a satirization of Post-War Americana as a frenzied pastiche. This pastiche was a siren call for rising artist and photographer Nadia Lee Cohen, who also trades in the currency of alter egos and the milieu of consumerist reverie through the lens of humor. Raised in the English countryside, a self-professed wild child, the technicolor stagecraft of Hollywood had an irresistible allure. Her solo exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, which was an unabashed sensation, included two large bodies of work from two sold out monographs published by IDEA Books. Women includes over 100 portraits of a diverse cast of female characters fictionalized by Cohen, at work and at play, all under the banner of Los Angeles’ disparate socio-economic milieu. Reminiscent of movie stills, the images are freeze frames in moments of action, repose, or seductive enchantment. In her most recent series,  HELLO, My Name Is, Nadia utilizes extensive prosthetics and makeup to embody a vast array of characters inspired by found corporate name tags—each character has an invented story, thoughts, dreams, and desires. It is a Hitchcockian character study of self-portraiture. Jean Baudrillard talked about this escape from the self in an age of simulation and hyperreality: "Never to be oneself, but never to be alienated: to enter from the outside into the form of the other." Both Paul Reubens and Nadia Lee Cohen take immense pleasure in this metamorphosis. Currently in production is a two-part HBO documentary on the life of Paul Reubens, directed by Matt Wolf (Spaceship Earth) and produced by the Safdie Brothers. In a time of shapeshifting realities and alternative facts, a time when we don’t even recognize the reflection in our mirrors, what can two masters of disguise teach us about who we really are?

PAUL REUBENS Should we talk a little bit about how we met?

NADIA LEE COHEN I knew you way before you knew anything about me. I used to do your Tequila dance for relatives when they came over.

PAUL REUBENS I remember seeing you on Instagram. The more I saw, the more I was like, I have to know who this person is. And then, didn't I write you a note on Instagram?

NADIA LEE COHEN Yes, you did. You shared something of mine and I thought it was a mistake. Tell me about growing up in Sarasota, [Florida] I Googled it last night. When did your fantasy world begin?

PAUL REUBENS Well, my fantasy world began way before Sarasota because we moved there when I was in fourth grade. I was already obsessed with show business and wanted to be an actor when I was just a little kid. But I also watched a lot of television. That’s what really made me want to become an actor. I watched a lot of American shows like the Mickey Mouse Club, and there was a marionette named Howdy Doody that I loved so much. And then I Love Lucy. Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. Somehow, I just recognized, without knowing it, what a clown she was.

NADIA LEE COHEN People always ask about the connection of where I grew up in relation to why I’m inspired by what I’m inspired by. I really have to rack my brain for answers. Having that question repeated made me realize there’s a chance I've been lying all this time and only recently realized it’s probably just down to the color palette, which is a mass of wet green and muddy brown. That's all I saw for maybe fifteen years, and I think that caused me to become excited by things like signage and food packaging; which eventually led me to America and all things American.

PAUL REUBENS That makes sense to me too. As an infant—or almost an infant—I remember being obsessed by wallpaper, my blanket, and patterns. For me, it was patterns.

NADIA LEE COHEN  Patterns or color. I watched cartoons like Tom and Jerry or Ren and Stimpy, things like that. And a British show called Bill and Ben. When I think back to those, I remember the pattern and color rather than the narrative.

PAUL REUBENS  Sarasota, Florida was the winter headquarters of the Ringling Brothers Circus. So, when you would go to the grocery store, you could tell who all the circus people were. They were just dressed differently.

NADIA LEE COHEN I'm imagining the fat lady and the bearded lady buying eggs.

PAUL REUBENS There was an adjacent community where all the sideshow people lived.

NADIA LEE COHEN Why? Because they were outcasts?

PAUL REUBENS Yeah. They lived in a different community.

NADIA LEE COHEN  So, who were you seeing?

PAUL REUBENS This is a long time ago, and this wouldn't be that uncommon now, but you would see somebody with dyed red hair or fishnet stockings. You would go, oh, wow, there's a circus performer. That seemed like show business. That's the closest I had been to real show business. We would see them all over town. And we lived near some circus people. So, for a while I just thought, maybe this is my calling.

NADIA LEE COHEN I was a tomboy, didn't brush my hair and was always covered in mud, cuts, and bruises. The farm we grew up in was kind of a building site, my dad was slowly doing it up. I had this little quad bike and I'd just roam around everywhere saving animals till the sun went down. There was this nasty disease the rabbits got in England called myxomatosis. It would make them go blind and mangey. So, I used to go around collecting them which is probably pretty unhygienic. They'd all eventually die, so sad but probably taught me a lot about death. There were also these cages around the fields where pheasants were trapped for the local gentry to shoot on the weekend. I used to free them too. One day the gamekeeper knocked at the door and told my dad “If your daughter keeps this shit up I’ll shoot her.”

PAUL REUBENS I was waiting for you to bring up your dad. I wanted to talk about dads for one minute, because I feel like our dads have a bit in common and probably had a lot to do with how we turned out. You posted some pictures of your dad and he looked so amazing. He was on a motorcycle and he looked like a rebel. And my father was really like that too.

NADIA LEE COHEN Tell me about him.

PAUL REUBENS Well, my father and four other Americans started the Israeli Air Force in 1947. There’s a documentary about it. But I grew up not really having very much context for his stories and feeling like they were all exaggerated. I didn't realize it was him and just four other people. I just thought it was a whole big thing with lots of people. And so my father was like Indiana Jones. And I got this vibe that your dad was like that too.

NADIA LEE COHEN That’s incredible, I think I knew parts of that but I also didn’t realize it was just him and four other guys. My dad doesn’t like rules and I think I inherited that. My mom was married to somebody in the band Supertramp before I was born, they split and she fled to a kibbutz in Israel, which is apparently what the majority of 18-to-30-year-olds were doing in the 1970s. That’s where she met my dad. He just rode up to her on his motorbike, smoking with a red hoodie on. He was a rebel and always in trouble. He couldn't speak any English, so they couldn't actually converse for years. She brought him back to England and they're still together.

PAUL REUBENS Every detail of that sounds fantastic.

NADIA LEE COHEN  And the best thing is it’s recorded. My dad has such amazing documentation of his childhood, teens, and early manhood. He and his friends all chipped in to buy a camera when they were really young. Which was a big deal as they were dirt poor—like stealing-eggs-from-the-neighbors kind of poor.

PAUL REUBENS  Going back to rules, and I have a feeling that we had this in common—I think one of many things I got from my dad was, do not tell me no about something. If you tell me that something can't be done, that's like a challenge to me. I'm like, oh I will figure that out. Don't you have that?

NADIA LEE COHEN  Oh, 100%. Definitely. My mom says I have that, and maybe I got it from her. Her dad told her to ‘never call anyone sir’ which I love as a life sentiment. I wanted to ask about your father building a stage for you?

PAUL REUBENS  I'm so happy you brought that up because I know that your father also built you a stage. When I was a kid, we lived in upstate New York—this was before we moved to Florida, so I must have been like five or six years old. One day my father came in and said that he would build something in the basement for both my sister and I—whatever we wanted. My sister wanted a pirate ship, so he built her a pirate ship. And I wanted a stage, so he built me a stage. I would do the craziest stuff on the stage. I became very popular in our neighborhood with older kids who would use me to get to the stage. They would put on shows and give me a bit part. One of them was a sci-fi play where I got pushed offstage into a vat of acid—that was my whole part. My father and I would go to these novelty stores in New York City and I would get to choose one thing to buy, and I would always buy something for my stage. One time, I bought this fake grass mat, very small.  I would put that on the stage and sit with my legs to the side, like a fawn, and I would turn on the blue light. It was like a tableau, like I was in the woods and I was some kind of animal in repose.

Nadia wears *CELINE*
Paul wears *TOM FORD*

NADIA LEE COHEN  Was there an audience?

PAUL REUBENS  No, I would do it by myself (laughs). I was pretty young to be like, let me just be as weird as I can be today, but that's kind of what it was.

NADIA LEE COHEN My stage was above the garage. It was a time when I was really obsessed with the reverse dream sequence in Twin Peaks. You know with the zigzag floor and red curtain? I asked my parents to help me make it, and one day I came home from school and they’d made it. My dad had put up the curtain and built the stage and my mom hand-painted the zigzags. It’s still there, only now my parents have a Polish lodger who lives in the flat above the garage and works out in the Twin Peaks area (laughs). I feel like David Lynch would be very into the visual of a buff little Polish guy lifting weights in that set.

PAUL REUBENS Another obvious thing that we have in common is that we both deal in alter egos. That's where we overlap. But, I only really have one alter ego. I mean, being an actor in movies, you get to play an alter ego, but it's a scripted thing. You're co-creating something that somebody else wrote and conceived. Whereas you just go from scratch.

NADIA LEE COHEN  Do you find you're less self-conscious when dressed as somebody else? I find I have this freedom in not caring what I look like because they don't care about what they look like. Character gives me a certain confidence I don't have as Nadia.

PAUL REUBENS  Absolutely. That’s part of the allure and the glamor of alter egos. You hide behind them or disappear into them.

NADIA LEE COHEN  I wonder if it has something to do with being insecure in yourself. Did you have a difficult upbringing with any bullying?

PAUL REUBENS I didn't really. I mean, I was an oddball kid, but it didn't really affect me that much. I remember my first day of school, when we moved to Florida, I showed up in a full beachcomber outfit. I had cutoff pirate pants and a rope belt. My mother took us shopping and we got to pick out whatever we wanted. I have to give it to my parents. They were never like, “Are you kidding? Are you crazy? No, you can't wear that.” She'd be like, “Go ahead.” So I showed up in the craziest outfits and the kids in school were all like, “What the hell are you supposed to be?”

NADIA LEE COHEN  Were they into it?

PAUL REUBENS No, they weren't at all. They made fun of me. But instead of saying to myself, “Oh my God, I've made a huge mistake.” I was more like, “What part of this don't you guys get? I'm a Beachcomber. We're in Florida. Are you insane?” And the next day I went to school in the same outfit—just different color pirate pants and shirt.

NADIA LEE COHEN On my first day of high school I decided to have two Princess Leia buns. My skirt was extremely long whilst everybody else's was very short. And I had these shoes that my mom bought because they came with a free watch. They were big and clunky. So I turned up looking like a real target. And also, at eleven, I was the height I am now—I used to stand with my hip dropped down to make myself shorter. Around a month into school I piled on makeup, tanned my skin terracotta and bleached my hair and eyebrows in order to successfully morph into the ‘Essex Girl’ I noticed was popular. I fully went for it.

PAUL REUBENS So, was it an early alter ego do you think?

NADIA LEE COHEN: I guess so. It was quite extreme. It probably lasted the duration of school. As soon as I went to college I dropped it.

PAUL REUBENS Speaking of college, where did you get the skills that you have now? Did you go to art school?

NADIA LEE COHEN  I went to London College of Fashion for no reason other than fashion and art interested me. I took a course, which was basically a bit of everything: design, textiles, photography, styling, and whatever else is fashion related. And then, they whittled it down. The teacher would say, “You're shit at that, you’re good at that,” until you’re left with two things. Which for me was styling and photography. And they said “pick one,” so I picked photography. Did you go to school for art?

PAUL REUBENS I dropped out of school in fourth grade. No, I'm kidding (both laugh). I came out here to attend the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) that was founded and endowed by Walt Disney. He conceptualized it, but died before it was actually built. There was a film school, a theater school, an art school, a writing school, a dance school, a music school—all the visual and performing arts under one roof. It was very avant garde when it started. I had gone to a school that was the opposite of that to start and thought, oh no, I want real crazy, avant garde. And that’s exactly what it was.

NADIA LEE COHEN  How long were you there?

PAUL REUBENS  I was there for, I think six, years. I never wound up getting a degree, but the one thing that I did that was the smartest thing, or maybe dumb luck a little bit—because I always felt I was so interested in so many things—I just went: do not question what interests you. Just follow whatever interests you. At some point down the line, it's gonna all get mixed together and the meaning will be revealed in some dramatic way. I was so lucky, because when Pee-wee came along, I was present enough to go, this is it, this is the thing—this is what all of that stuff meant.

NADIA LEE COHEN  Do you think you'd been building Pee-wee for years, unconsciously?

PAUL REUBENS  Yes, because he’s a whole bunch of different things that all came together. Once I had become Pee-wee Herman, there was an American show called  The Dating Game, which would have three bachelors, and a woman would pick one date. So, I put on my Pee-wee suit and auditioned to be a contestant. This was the first time I had ever gone out into the world as Pee-wee Herman. Prior to that, I'd just been in this little theater group. The second I walked into this audition, I could tell that the people running it were like, oh my god. They were all just trying to not lose their shit. And same with all the guys that were in there. When I filled out an application that asked about hobbies, I answered, cleaning my room—just weird stuff. When I left the audition, I thought to myself, I'm gonna be on this show. I just had this definite confidence that they were going to put me on the show. When I left the audition and walked outside down the street, people were practically walking into the sides of buildings and hitting lampposts. I just went, Do not ignore this. This is real. This is something. This is power.

NADIA LEE COHEN Did you have the voice developed already?

PAUL REUBENS  Yes. The voice was from a play I did long before that. I just mixed a bunch of stuff. You know, similar to what you said earlier, I've had to answer: how did I create Pee-wee? And where did the voice come from? You would think after this many years I would have a better story or I would at least make up a lie that would be interesting. But I don't. When you do these things, you’re just creating something that becomes something later on.  

NADIA LEE COHEN Yeah, it just takes form—kind of like a snowball, which rolls until eventually it stops and looks exactly like Pee-wee. Does Pee-wee like anything that you don't like?

PAUL REUBENS  Oh, I think probably a lot of things. Yeah. I think that if you're hiding behind the character, then there's at least something. I've been doing it for so long that there was a point when I decided I was going to have to change the rules for Pee-wee and allow him to do things and be things he wasn't originally, just because it started to get a little stale for me, and there were other things I wanted to do. Early on, I was in a comedy group and I had lots of other characters. I had about ten alter egos before Pee-wee.

NADIA LEE COHEN Did they all have looks?

PAUL REUBENS They were all very detailed, but really different from Pee-wee, and nothing like the kind of impact that Pee-wee had. I feel like what was going on in art school in the ‘70s was performance art and conceptual art. So for me, Pee-wee Herman was always like conceptual art and performance art. And the conceptual part of it, the performance art part of it was my secret—that I wasn't really that person. Because I tried really hard to make it seem like he was a real person.

NADIA LEE COHEN If you were invited to something, would they expect you to come as Pee-wee?

PAUL REUBENS Well, the point was that no one even knew who Paul was. No one. For example, when Pee-wee's Big Adventure premiered and my credit came up as a screenwriter, nobody knew who that was. No one knew Paul Reubens had anything to do with Pee-wee Herman because I spent a lot of energy never doing anything out of character. I just thought that if people thought I was an actor, they'd be like, oh yeah, whatever. There was a guy that inspired me in a conceptual way named Tiny Tim. He was a freak, but you never went, oh, that's an act. People were like,  oh my god, he's a freaky person. There was also an act on the Ed Sullivan show who had an alter ego. This is when I was four or five years old. His name was Bill Dana and he would come out with this character named Jose Jimenez who was a Bolivian astronaut. It was very, very similar to Andy Kaufman’s foreign man character. And the third or fourth time watching I realized, wait a minute, this is all made up. He's not really this guy. And I never thought about that again on a conscious level until I met him years later at an autograph show.

NADIA LEE COHEN I’m trying to think of the British equivalent. Which would probably be Alan Partridge or Alistair McGowan’s Big Impression. I remember being mesmerized at the concept of a person morphing their physicalities, mannerisms, and voice in order to become someone else.

PAUL REUBENS Did it influence what you do now?

NADIA LEE COHEN It must have, along with Catherine Tate, or Little Britain. England had a lot of impressionist shows.

PAUL REUBENS One thing that is happening today culturally, is that it's harder and harder to set yourself apart.

NADIA LEE COHEN Because we’re over saturated.

PAUL REUBENS  Just to be cliche for a moment—Andy Warhol said, “in the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes.” And we live in a culture, at least in the United States, where lots of people seek fame, and social media is full of people who are trying to become known, and leave their mark. I think it's human nature to wanna leave your mark in some way.

NADIA LEE COHEN  Did you see the Andy Warhol documentary where they used AI to remake his voice? Would you want that ever, because your fifteen minutes would be forever?

PAUL REUBENS I'm hoping that I can, at some point, sell or lease my IP. And part of the lure of that is that it would include my digital scans so that you could make a Pee-wee movie long after I'm gone. And when I say that, people always ask about the voice, but by the time they can cheaply churn out an image of me that looks real, they’ll be able to figure out the voice as well.

NADIA LEE COHEN But we all have so much more ability to create characters now. On the internet you can just pretend that you're living whatever life that you want to live and sell that to whoever's buying it.

PAUL REUBENS So, how does art even fit into a time when things are so rotten, and horrible, and crazy, and weird, and mixed up? Who has the nerve to be an artist? You have to have some nerve to be an artist. And how do you, even in the art world, set yourself apart? You have set yourself apart completely.

NADIA LEE COHEN I think it's the confrontation—you absorb what's going on, confront it, turn it into something comical and entertaining, and then show it to people.

PAUL REUBENS  You know, I hadn't really considered how much in the comedy realm you are. Because in my opinion, most art doesn't include comedy. When you mix a little comedy into art, it makes a whole different thing.

NADIA LEE COHEN Yes. Take Jordan Wolfson's work. I think he falls into the category of creating comical, dark, and probably quite offensive art to certain people. That’s right up my alley.

PAUL REUBENS  But your work also transcends so many things. It encompasses so many things. Some of those alter egos are dark and some of them, you can ask, what's their socioeconomic background? Some of those people seem like they could be down on their luck. It’s all over the map.

NADIA LEE COHEN  They’re a ‘Mr Potato Head’ hybrid of personal relationships or people I’ve seen down the shops. There’s one that's really representative of my uncle Terry, and he’s called Terry. There’s a continuous undercurrent of comedy with my family, my parents are always taking the piss out of each other and cracking jokes. My brother's a comic as well.

PAUL REUBENS And your parents are funny?

NADIA LEE COHEN  Yeah. My dad to laugh at and my mom to laugh with.  

PAUL REUBENS How lucky is that? I think it’s so incredibly lucky that my parents were funny— that I grew up with this real intense sense of humor, or irony, or both.

NADIA LEE COHEN  Yes we are, I find that kind of irony rare in Los Angeles. I also have a lot of gay and camp influence. Are ‘camp’ or ‘kitsch’ annoying buzzwords to you?

PAUL REUBENS I hate the word kitsch. It’s such an ugly word. I also appreciate that if you say kitsch to certain people, they're like, oh, I get it. I know what you mean.

NADIA LEE COHEN Maybe we feel like we're above kitsch.

PAUL REUBENS Not maybe—definitely. There's a sort of snobbery that I have to admit I do have in certain areas. In other areas, I feel just the opposite of that—like everyman kind of qualities, but I definitely feel snobbish about kitsch.

NADIA LEE COHEN What's the literal definition of kitsch? I’m curious. Should we look it up? ‘Hey Siri what does Kitsch mean?’

SIRI Noun. Kitsch means art objects designed or considered to be in poor taste because of excessive garishness or sentimentality, but sometimes appreciated in an ironic or knowing way.

NADIA LEE COHEN It basically describes exactly what we do.

PAUL REUBENS So, therein lies why we don’t like it, because it’s so insulting. (laughs)

NADIA LEE COHEN It's so accurate, though. (laughs)

PAUL REUBENS Maybe this is more a comment than a question. But it’s shocking how young you are. I guess I was around your age when I already had Pee-wee—I was thirty-two when I made Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and I had already been Pee-Wee for five years, but it’s admirable, and interesting, and amazing that you got it going on like this. I not only really appreciated the hell out of what you were doing at your exhibition, but it just raises all these possibilities of where you're going to go. To be young, and have your whole career ahead of you, and to be where you are right now, it's just staggering.

NADIA LEE COHEN I wish little me doing the Tequila dance could hear what you just said now—thank you that really means a lot.  But back to you … can you tell me a little bit about playing Michael Jackson’s stunt double? Because I don’t know anything about this.

PAUL REUBENS The answer to that is you'll have to wait until either my documentary comes out, or my memoir.

NADIA LEE COHEN  Oh, that's such a great end-of-interview plug. You’ve done this before. (both laugh). I want to pretend that I was somebody’s stunt double too, but I'm not sure who it could be.

Paul Reubens (né Rubenfeld was born on August 27, 1952 in Peekskill, New York. He privately fought cancer for several years before passing on July 30, 2023 in Los Angeles, CA. He is cherished and missed by fans of all ages from around the world and his work will continue to inspire for many generations.

Making and Claiming Space: An Interview of Gallerist Jonathan Carver Moore

July 28, 2023

interview by Chimera Mohammadi

Sanibonani is a Zulu greeting used to welcome or address a group. The word crawls up the wall of the Jonathan Carver Moore Gallery, the title of the current show featuring Zanele Muholi and various students from their art institute. In Jonathan Carver Moore’s SF Gallery, Sanibonani embodies pride: an unconditional, celebratory welcome. Self-portraits of Black, Queer, South African artists line the walls. Monochromatic San Francisco sun streams through the floor-to-ceiling windows that occupy one wall, matching the grays in the mostly black-and-white images, adding a cool cast to the large, bronze bust of Muholi. Moore’s Gallery is in the Tenderloin, a neighborhood in the world’s first Transgender District. The location makes sense: Moore has a clear passion for highlighting unheard voices and unseen perspectives, and since the gallery’s premier exhibition, The Weight of Souls, with artist Kacy Jung in March, his gallery has developed a reputation for doing just that. I sat down with Moore to talk about his experiences as the first Black, gay, man to own a gallery in the SF Bay Area, the intersection of marginalization and creativity, and the artists with whom he’s worked.

CHIMERA MOHAMMADI: Do you consider your space and your focus radical?

JONATHAN CARVER MOORE: I consider it radical in that there’s not someone operating from the same viewpoint as me. I love California, I love San Francisco, I love the art that you see on the walls of the galleries, institutions, museums, organizations, but what’s missing is someone like me, someone like the artists that are behind the scenes. These are often things that are curated and collected by someone who doesn’t necessarily share those exact similar experiences as you, but what about the people who work in those spaces? Shouldn’t they have a say in the story being told, and in the curation and the images that you see, the images that you would like to see? I just don’t see that. It’s radical in that I’m the only openly gay Black man who owns a gallery in the Bay Area. I think that’s radical.

Installation view, *Sanibonani* (2023)
Images courtesy of Jonathan Carver Moore Gallery

MOHAMMADI: How has your work and your gallery been received? Are you happy with the response it’s gotten?

MOORE: I’m very happy. Of course, you know, you always want more people to come and view the works, see the gallery and the space, and see what I focus on, but I am quite happy. I think that the grand opening of nearly 400 people showing up in March showing up to see Kacy Jung’s The Weight of Souls, that was Kacy’s debut solo exhibition. Kacy is born and raised in Taiwan, immigrated to the US to go to school for science, it was a PhD program, and completely pivoted to become an artist. So, to see people come out that evening for Kacy, was a delight, because it shows that we already have an arts community here, but then to have an arts community for an artist that people may not be as familiar with – granted, Kacy has had incredible residencies at Headlands, and is an artist in residence at Root Division, so people know her. But to see that amount of people show up for her first solo was amazing, so I think it’s been very well received. Anyone can resonate with The Weight of Souls because it’s really taking us on this journey of assimilation, wanting to be part of a culture that sometimes, pushes and pulls you in many different directions. For her, that was being a woman, an Asian woman, an Asian woman who is an immigrant studying science but really wanting to be in the art space, an Asian immigrant who’s going against her parents’ wishes because they wanted her to get her PhD. So, it was a show that anyone could walk into, because we’ve all been at some point in our lives in a situation where we had to assimilate, to change a little bit who we are.

MOHAMMADI: You’ve spoken before on the alienation of visiting museums and galleries and having to insert yourself mentally in the space. How would it have impacted you to visit the space you’ve created now when you were younger?

MOORE: That’s an emotional question, one I’ve definitely thought about. Even when I go into the gallery sometimes, and I see the space that I have, I think about how I never thought that that was a possibility. That’s so strange to say, because it’s not like I’m someone who’s been around during the Jim Crow era and segregation, but I think because being Black and gay together, I never saw someone like me in those spaces. Not just the art space, any space. I didn’t have anyone to look up to, to say, “Ok, that’s who I could be like when I grow up.” The first memory I have of seeing a gay man doing something positive was Will, on Will and Grace. And that’s sad. So that’s what I think about. What can I do for someone else? It doesn’t have to be in the art world, but this location was something really important to me. People are always talking about this neighborhood and who's out on the streets, but the reality is, this neighborhood has the biggest, most dense population of children, and that’s exactly why I wanted this to be here. The Tenderloin has the highest number of children and biggest immigrant population. I want people to walk by those big windows that I have to see that there’s a Black person who works there. And if you know me, you know that there’s a Black gay person who owns it, so there’s a way for someone to see themself in my story and this thing I’ve built.

MOHAMMADI: Your location in the Transgender District has been widely noted. Do you want to talk a bit more on bringing art to underserved communities?

MOORE: I would be silly to think that I’m part of a community that’s only focused on gay men or lesbians. We are a huge community, and not at all a monolith. Trans people in the Trans District, these are people and this district needs to be recognized with the history that exists here. Also, the Transgender District has been very supportive of me being a gallery here. When I wanted to open, they were the ones who gave me a grant to open a gallery in San Francisco, and to be in the Transgender District. The support of such a big organization means a lot to me. So, any way that I can support trans people and the non-profit and the neighborhood is what I’m going to do at any given time.

MOHAMMADI: bell hooks famously defined Queer as the self that “has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live”. Do you feel this intersection of Queerness and creativity in your works?

MOORE: How else would I be doing that without bell hooks? It is a space where we can speak and live and thrive, not just the community itself in the Transgender District, but my physical space in the gallery. It’s one where all are welcome to be whoever they are, whoever they want to be that day or whoever they feel they are the next day. I feel that all of that is necessary, and my space truly embodies that.

MOHAMMADI: Roger Wilkins said that the greatest power of White oppression is to define Black reality and to shape culture to reinforce that reality. With that in mind, do you want to speak on the importance of Black self-determination, especially with your current Muholi exhibition?

MOORE: I was at an event with Fredrika Newton [the wife of Black Panther leader Huey Newton] a few months ago, and one of the guest speakers said: “My Black entrepreneurship is not based on your white acceptance.” I feel like I’m reminded of that so often. It’s something that’s been beaten into all of us, that it’s only going to be successful if this person wants to acquire it, or if this person writes about it, or if this person says yes or go. The reality is, as much as I would love to take in everyone’s opinions, you’ve got to own and accept who you are yourself and be happy where you are in your life. Having this Muholi show, this show that cements and solidifies Black Queer existence in South Africa, and having it exist here in San Francisco, that is the exact opposite of someone being able to oppress us. Because no matter what, whether or not someone is acquiring those works, you now know those images you saw on those walls, and the bronze [bust of Muholi] in that Black-owned gallery, that lives in your mind and exists, which means it can’t be erased. Muholi has done such a good job at instilling that in me as a gallerist, as a friend, as a collector, and mentoring me. Don’t wait for anybody else to show you the way, to do it first, to give you the go ahead, you’ve got to be in charge of it yourself, and you’ve got to make sure that you’re making space for yourself, and not just taking up space, but claiming space. And that’s exactly what you see in 966 Market St. and for sure in that show.

MOHAMMADI: What are you hopeful for in your future and the future of the gallery?

MOORE: I’m hopeful for a lot. (laughs) I’ve mentioned before that I care so much about community, and having the opportunity for so many people to be seen that may not have been seen. I’m looking forward to seeing that on a more global platform. Like, it’s great in San Francisco - I love San Francisco, SF has a great arts community, and we show up for each other, like has been done for the openings that I’ve had so far, but I want to see that on a global level.

Sanibonani is on view through August 4th at Jonathan Carver Moore Gallery, 966 Market St., San Francisco. Moore will also be organizing a special screening of Kokomo City at the Roxie Theater on August 4th.

Deconstructing Genesis: An Interview of Wynnie Mynerva

June 28, 2023

interview by Jesus Nebreda Galindez
creative direction by Alec Charlip
photography by Andrés Jaña
styling by Abby Bencie
makeup by Marco Castro
hair by Luisa Popović
production by BORN Artists

The question of original sin has no relevance in Lima-based artist Wynnie Mynerva’s Book of Genesis. For their inaugural American solo exhibition curated by Bernardo Mosqueira, the artist will be presenting The Original Riot, opening tomorrow (June 29) at the New Museum with a site-specific installation that constitutes the largest painting ever to be presented by the institution, as well as a sculptural element that was surgically removed from the artist’s own body. The readaptation of both mythology and anatomy is central to Mynerva’s quintessentially plastic life and practice; one that finds itself in a constant state of radical change. Painting and performance are a fluent oscillation of being as demonstrated in their 2021 exhibition Closing to Open at Ginsberg Gallery in Madrid when the artist had their vagina sutured three quarters of the way shut, allowing only for the flow of their bodily fluids to function as necessary. The corporeal roles of masculine and feminine are constantly being subverted and abstracted in works that bleed, scratch, beguile, and thrust their way through the patriarchal canon with an air of wanton ecstasy. The binary creation myth was recently addressed in Mynerva’s first UK solo exhibition Bone of My Bones Flesh of My Flesh at Gathering London earlier this year, introducing many for the first time to the role of Lilith in Judaic and Mesopotamian folklore as Adam’s first wife who was created from the same clay (equal in nature) as her husband. Her pitiable fate varies from one myth to the next, but the creation of a second wife (Eve) from his rib remains consistent. The artist’s decision to remove Adam’s body from their own for The Original Riot demonstrates the power to readapt our personal realities at will. It is a reflection of the agency that we unwittingly deny ourselves when we allow allegory to shape our internalized perspectives. The following interview was conducted in Spanish and is presented here in its original form, followed by its English translation.

JESUS NEBREDA GALINDEZ: Quiero empezar con cómo te convertiste en artista. ¿Hubo un punto de inflexión en tu vida que te llevó a elegir este camino?

WYNNIE MYNERVA: Creo que la inclinación por hacer arte solo fluyó. Siempre he sido una persona con necesidad inventiva e inquieta. Algo que fue determinante y por la cual me acerqué al arte, fue la sensación de no sentirme dentro de mi cuerpo. Recuerdo desde niña verme como “otro ser” que me miraba desde lejos, esa sensación aún me persigue y se ha convertido en un espacio, y dentro de ese espacio estoy ejecutando diferentes simulaciones y constantemente deconstruyéndome en imágenes. Es por eso que mi trabajo toca temas íntimos pero también universales, la existencia, el disfrute, el dolor, el cuerpo, la carne, la sexualidad. El arte está plagado de pequeños milagros porque no existe una forma fija de creación, y esa idea me seduce.

GALINDEZ: Los tonos rosas, rojos, marrones y piel de melocotón dominan su trabajo anterior. ¿Puedes hablar sobre tu paleta de colores y cómo llegaste a su desarrollo?

MYNERVA: El color para un pintor es como una bocanada de aire, puede medir la temperatura que atraviesan las emociones y la atmosfera de su tiempo. Trabajo en rojos, marrones y rosas, pero también he vuelto a utilizar el negro que lo había casi había desaparecido de mi obra, siento en general una sensación de retornar a tonos más oscuros. Luego que por sorpresa dentro de la pandemia mis colores estallarán en luz por pasar tanto tiempo observando todo desde lo digital y las redes sociales.

GALINDEZ: ¿Cómo se siente estar exhibiendo su trabajo en el New Museum? ¿Crees que sigue siendo relevante el hablar de centro y periferia dentro de la escena artística? ¿O por el contrario, la era de internet ha roto para siempre estas históricas barreras geográficas?

MYNERVA: Estoy un poco nerviose. Definitivamente. Especialmente trabajando por primera vez con un museo y uno tan importante como es el New Museum en Nueva York. Siento que es una acumulación de placer y trabajo por mis convicciones lo que hizo que yo esté aquí ahora. Pienso que es relevante no solo que estoy aquí, sino con quiénes estoy, y con esto quiero responder a tu pregunta sobre centro y periferia. Es importante a quiénes he nombrado en mis proyectos y quiénes me han llevado a pensar de esta manera y no de otra. Siento que es fundamental aún hacer referencia a los sistemas sociales, políticos y económicos que nos condensan. La era del internet no ha roto estas barreras, ha generado una sensación placebo para aliviar la impresión de desigualdad en la escena artística.

GALINDEZ: Estarás montando la pintura más grande que el museo ha presentado en su historia. ¿Por qué la escala de esta pieza fue tan importante para ti?

MYNERVA: El espacio de exhibición es para mí como un escenario. Las pinturas se convierten en el paisaje, y me interesa abarcarlo todo con la escala, los espectadores dan inicio a la función con sus cuerpos. La pintura es el marco arquitectónico que ofrezco al público. Es la propia obra que induce al cuerpo a recorrerla. La escala te envuelve y está diseñada de forma específica, no es trasladable, por tanto es una experiencia singular. La pintura deja de ser un objeto coleccionable para convertirse en geografía.

GALINDEZ: Tu maravillosa exposición Bone of My Bones, Flesh of my Flesh en el Gathering de Londres abordaba no solo la historia de Adán y Eva sino que se adentraba en territorios mucho más desconocidos, hablamos del mito de Lilith. Tu nueva obra, The Original Riot—dios me encanta el título—reinterpreta y se sumerge en esta inquietante alegoría. ¿Puedes contarnos cómo fue el proceso de quitarte una costilla y por qué cobra tanta significación en esta obra?

MYNERVA: Me enteré de la oportunidad de exhibir en el New Museum en medio de la preparación de Bone of My Bones, Flesh of My Flesh en Londres, y supe que este sería el espacio para desenlace de este proyecto: la extracción de mi costilla de Adán. Ha sido un proceso largo y estoy tratando de mantener un buen equilibrio, que un proyecto no se mueva demasiado rápido o demasiado lento, pensar como en el cine, que el tiempo es un elemento, y el tiempo de recuperación de mi cuerpo también tiene belleza.

En The Original Riot hay más de una historia revuelta. Parto de la mitología del génesis de Adán y Eva, Eva creada a partir de la costilla de Adán para servirle. Antes que Eva existió otra figura femenina de nombre Lilith que desafiaría a Adán y se negaría a reproducirse, por lo cual Dios la castigaría convirtiendo su vagina en una llama azul eterna y la expulsaría del paraíso hacia el infierno. En The Original Riot que es la segunda entrega de mi versión de esta historia, las dos primeras figuras femeninas se conocen y pactan una alianza. Como prueba de esa alianza, Eva se quita la costilla de Adán y se la entrega a Lilith. Esta costilla estará presente en la exhibición a modo de reliquia, que es la presencia materializada de un hecho sagrado. La extracción de mi propia costilla y su uso para esta exhibición es brindar mi cuerpo como parte de esta revuelta. Sacar el cuerpo del otro de mi propio cuerpo.

GALINDEZ: Siento curiosidad por la íntima relación entre tu cuerpo y tu arte. Esta no es la primera vez que realiza modificaciones en su cuerpo como parte de su práctica. Cuando se trata de tu cuerpo y tu práctica, ¿dónde comienza uno y termina el otro?

MYNERVA: Puedo visualizarme como una persona que ha aprendido a vivir con un cuerpo herido, en una sociedad agitada. Siempre regreso desde el arte a buscar esas señales, no como turista de mis propias experiencias, ni para nombrar mis desastres personales, sino buscando herramientas que tengan la capacidad de sanar. Pienso que trabajar en el cuerpo de hoy es trabajar en el cuerpo del futuro. Y es así como veo mis proyectos, conectando a través de lo real, la materialidad y su red de significados en la historia del arte y la humanidad. El arte tiene sentido si incide en la vida y es aplicable para una transformación social. Mi vida y mi trabajo tienen una dinámica fluida.

GALINDEZ: Tu obra está cargada de corporeidad y es cierto que los rituales del cuerpo hablan de una manera intrínseca y sin engaños de nuestras herencias culturales y sistemas sociales heredados. ¿Qué es para ti la moda? ¿Crees que es una forma de disfrazarse, o quizás ser la forma más alta y representativa de representación personal?

MYNERVA: La moda es juego encantador, pero también es una cárcel. A mí me gusta la moda del desafío, aquello que es difícil de usar, el taconazo, las plataformas y hacer malabares con los pies. Hay algo masoquista en usar corset apretado y látex en verano. Verme falsa y producida. Hay que divertirse pienso o si no se convierte en un conjunto de reglas elitistas, se puede sufrir mucho en las cárceles de las marcas y el buen vestir. Como siempre, lo correcto se apodera del placer, y salen a las calles los policías de la moda. Yo en la moda no tengo más compromiso a levantar miradas, me encanta.

GALINDEZ: ¿Cómo te sientes representada por los medios? ¿Algo qué alegar que haya sido malinterpretado?

MYNERVA: Siempre soy una persona completamente diferente presentándome. Todos estamos en constante cambio, una transición hasta la hora de la muerte. Pero luego también estoy empujando de forma abstracta mi cuerpo hacia afuera y mi entorno, de forma imperfecta y defectuosa. Muchas veces se ha entendido mi obra solo como provocadora, y la verdad solo se me ocurren soluciones radicales para cambios radicales.

GALINDEZ: En ese caso, ¿dónde vamos a ver a Wynnie Mynerva en el futuro?

MYNERVA: Me encantaría lanzar una productora de porno, ¿te imaginas?

top and earrings: Heaven by Marc Jacobs
skirt and leg piece: Sarah Aphrodite
bangles: Dinosaur Designs
shoes: stylist’s own

JESUS NEBREDA GALINDEZ: I want to start with how you became an artist? Was there a tipping point in your life that led to you choosing this path?

MYNERVA: I think the urge to make art just flowed. I have always been a person with an inventive and restless need. The determining thing that drew me to art was the sensation of not feeling inside my body. I remember since I was a child seeing myself as "another being" who was looking at me from afar. That feeling still haunts me. It has become a space within which I am running different simulations and constantly deconstructing myself into images. That is why my work touches on the intimate, but also other universal themes: existence, enjoyment, pain, the body, flesh, sexuality. Art is full of small miracles because there is no fixed form of creation, and that idea seduces me.

GALINDEZ: Pinks, reds, browns, and peachy flesh tones dominate your previous work. Can you talk about your color palette and how you came about its development?

MYNERVA: Color for a painter is like a gust of air. It can measure the temperature of their emotions and the atmosphere of their time. I work in reds, browns and pinks, but I have also gone back to using the black that had almost disappeared from my work. In general, I feel a sensation of returning to darker tones. Then, by surprise, in the pandemic, my colors burst into light because I was spending so much time observing everything from digital and social networks.

GALINDEZ: How does it feel to present your work at the New Museum? Is it still relevant to talk about the art scene as having a center and a periphery, or on the contrary, has the internet finally broken the constraints of geographical significance?

MYNERVA: I'm a little nervous. Definitely. Especially working with a museum for the first time and one as important as the New Museum in New York. I feel that it is an accumulation of pleasure and work for my convictions that has brought me here now. I think it is relevant not only that I am here, but who I am here with, and with this I want to answer your question about center and periphery. It is important to those who I have named in my projects and who have led me to think this way and not another. I feel that it is still fundamental to acknowledge the social, political and economic systems that condense us. The internet age has not broken these barriers, it has generated a placebo sensation to alleviate the impression of inequality in the art scene.

dress and shoes: Loewe
bangles: Dinosaur Designs

GALINDEZ: You will be mounting the largest painting that the museum has ever presented in its history. Why was the scale of this piece so important to you?

MYNERVA: The exhibition space is like a stage for me. The paintings become the landscape, and I am interested in encompassing everything with the scale. The spectators start the performance with their bodies. Painting is the architectural framework that I offer to the public. It is the work itself that induces the body to go through it. The scale surrounds you and is specifically designed, it is not portable, therefore it is a unique experience. It ceases to be a collectible object in order to become geography.

GALINDEZ: Your wonderful exhibition Bone of My Bones, Flesh of my Flesh at Gathering in London addressed not only the story of Adam and Eve but also delved into much more unknown territory, the myth of Lilith. Your new work, The Original Riot—God, I love the title—reinterprets and plunges into this disturbing allegory. Can you tell us about the process of removing a rib and why it has such significance in this work?

MYNERVA: I heard about the opportunity to exhibit at the New Museum in the midst of preparing Bone of My Bones, Flesh of My Flesh in London, and knew that this would be the space for the dénouement of this project: the removal of my Adam's rib. It has been a long process, and I am trying to maintain a good balance so that the project does not move too quickly or too slowly, to think like in the cinema, that time is an element, and my body’s time of recovery also holds beauty.

In The Original Riot, there is more than one scrambled story. I start with the mythology from Genesis of Adam and Eve, when Eve was created from Adam's rib to serve him. Before Eve, there was another female figure named Lilith who would defy Adam and refuse to reproduce, for which God punished her by turning her vagina into an eternal blue flame and expelling her from paradise to hell. In The Original Riot, which is the second installment of my version of this story, the first two female figures meet and agree to an alliance. As proof of that alliance, Eve removes Adam's rib and gives it to Lilith. This rib will be present in the exhibition as a relic, which is the materialized presence of a sacred fact. The removal of my own rib and its use for this exhibition is to offer my body as part of this revolt. It’s a removal of the other's body from my own body.

GALINDEZ: I’m curious about the intimate relationship between your body and your art. This isn’t the first time that you’ve made modifications to your body as a part of your practice. When it comes to your body and your practice, where does one start and the other end?

MYNERVA: I can visualize myself as a person who has learned to live with a wounded body in a troubled society. I always return from art to look for those signs, not as a tourist of my own experiences, nor to name my personal disasters, but looking for tools that have the ability to heal. I think that working on the body of today is working on the body of the future. And this is how I see my projects, connecting through reality, materiality and its network of meanings in the history of art and humanity. Art makes sense if it affects life and is applicable for a social transformation. My life and my work have a fluid dynamic.

GALINDEZ: Your work is charged with corporeality and the way that our bodily rituals relate to our respective cultural heritages and social systems. Can you talk about the role of fashion and the body? Do you think it is a form of disguise, or might it be the highest and most representative form of personal representation?

MYNERVA: Fashion is a charming game, but it is also a prison. I like fashion’s challenges, things that are difficult to wear, like heels, platforms, and juggling with your feet. There's something masochistic about wearing a tight corset and latex in the summer. To see me fake and produced. You have to have fun, or else it becomes a set of elitist rules. You can suffer a lot in the prisons of brands and good dressing. As always, the right thing takes over pleasure, and the fashion police take to the streets. In fashion, I have no commitment to draw eyes. I love it.

GALINDEZ: Would you say there are any misconceptions about you as a person or about your art that you feel the need to correct, or do you feel properly represented by the media thus far?

MYNERVA: I'm always introducing myself as a completely different person. We are all in constant change, a transition until the hour of death. But then, I am also abstractly pushing my body and my environment outward, imperfectly and defectively. My work has often been understood only as provocative, and the truth is that I can only come up with radical solutions for radical changes.

GALINDEZ: In that case, where are we going to see Wynnie Mynerva in the future?

MYNERVA: I would love to launch a porn production company. Can you imagine?

Wynnie Mynerva: The Original Riot is on view through September 17 @ New Museum 235 Bowery, New York

Sexual Pleasure to Death: An Interview of Fawn Rogers on Her Series "The World is Your Oyster"

June 2, 2023

interview by Millen Brown-Ewens
hair by Justin Inman
makeup by Niohuru X
all images copyright Fawn Rogers

MILLEN BROWN-EWENS: Could you start by telling me a little bit about the paintings in your upcoming solo exhibition Burn, Gleam, Shine in Beijing with Galerie Marguo in July.

FAWN ROGERS: The work is from a series called The World is Your Oyster. The paintings are larger-than-life representations of sea personalities, which invite the viewer to dwell on the unbuilt world, death, and sex. Photorealistic from afar, at a closer view they are composed of painterly shapes and forms. They are seductive, erotic paintings that celebrate female sexuality. But I hope people will consider their wider resonances too. Human intervention in their cultivation has changed the primary process of their creation and relationships. Eroticism in this time is fraught with scary implications. We are so atomized as a species and removed from our origins that placing sexuality alongside environmental destruction almost feels forbidden, but I like things that feel forbidden.

BROWN-EWENS: What is the significance of the erotic and ostentatious image of the oyster in your paintings and how do you think this offers a critique of anthropocentrism?

ROGERS: I can’t help but to dismantle anthropocentrism in my work. At times it feels like a burden I was born with, it’s my reality, but essentially, I’m trying to find harmony through my work. The World is Your Oyster pays homage to these idiosyncratic and complex forms, inviting viewers to consider life, sex, and death simultaneously. While oysters are commonly considered luxurious rarities forged by nature, like many things, we have subverted the organic process of their creation. The oysters are harvested and pearls cultivated. An excision made to the oyster's flesh assaults the viewers' senses; ultimately this work is both violent and sensual, and at the center of these contradictions, the oyster is a symbol of lust, pleasure, opulence, and indulgence, all-consuming and offered up for consumption, a literal embodiment of the anthropocentric.

Oysters are both very fragile and highly sensual. It’s so easy to forget about the suffering of other lifeforms, they all want to live just as much as we do. The spider in the shower, let it live or kill it? I’m trying to place the human in patchworks of vibrant ecologies. I want to feel the delicacy and complexity of the tangled tension and vulnerable webs of life that surround us. This is connected to pleasure too. Our society represses sexuality, especially female sexuality, at the same time as it regards other life forms as unimportant. It is the same violent and disregarding gesture. It’s ostentatious to even be alive. Human existence is really a volatile party at the expense of all other life. Our role is both hilariously small and frighteningly disastrous. I try to call attention to expanding empathy for all life and not give up—dark humor helps.

BROWN-EWENS: Can you describe the conflicts between human nature and the natural world that arise in your practice?

ROGERS: It’s not just my practice, it’s my internal conflict because it’s how I view our world. I am trying to be present in a world that is being destroyed and full of suffering, and I am part of that destruction. When I paint a massive clam floating on a brightly colored, monochromatic background with its plump tongue sticking out, it’s darkly funny to me. It’s both sexy and gross to look at, and I have to kill it, consciously or unconsciously, to survive. We are supposed to have a conscience, and you’d think we would use it for creating a better world, but we don’t. Instead, let's go to Mars. It’s grimly ironic.

A good example from my practice is a work entitled R.I.P., a re-envisioning of the game of chess with chessmen depicted as sculptures of recently extinct animals. Black and white patina bronze on an oversized faux fur board, the animals are presented with regal dignity and personality. Each sculpture has material weight and nobility. Chess is a game of triumph, but triumph is a corollary of conquest. It is an enduring artifact of strategy, competition, domination, and has long been admired as a bastion of logic and order, but it is, at its core, a game of war, predicated on machinations of violence and obliteration. The game’s colonial history is traceable from ancient India, to the Muslim world, to imperial civilizations in Europe and northern Asia. Coupled with an emphasis on dominance, chess finds fresh implications in the contemporary subjugation of the natural world. Even the historical styles of chess—Romantic, Scientific, Hypermodern, and New Dynamism—allude to shifting cultural values and power structures, concluding, perhaps, with the game’s association with technology and artificial intelligence.

Chess has also long held a place of fascination for artists. Matisse, Man Ray, Duchamp, Paul Klee, Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst and Rachel Whiteread have all engaged with the game of chess. Jake and Dinos Chapman in their 2003, Chess Set, give resonant form to pre-adolescent male obsessions with fantasy forms of conflict, violence, and mutation. I wanted to repurpose a familiar form. In its prescient entanglements of order and chaos, civility and savagery, R.I.P. presses past a playful exploration of anthro-ecological history and evades purely dogmatic, observational, or elegiac orientations. The viewer becomes a player, autonomous yet complicit: a participant in the Anthropocene, at once a witness and contributor to a legacy of humanity, immortalization, and extinction.

Fawn Rogers
*Free of God,* 2021
oil on canvas
65 x 85 inches

BROWN-EWENS: What is ecofeminism and why is it important to distinguish?

ROGERS: I believe that the forces of patriarchy and everyone that support it oppress female-identifying and non-binary people, and they also exploit the natural world. At the same time, though, I feel that all people hold responsibility for our huge, sad state. For me, my work is liberatory. It makes me aware of the powers that emerge between people, and the world’s ecosystems. I am interested in a future evolution of humanity with empathy, less repression and destruction. In this geological era, our planet is a giant crime scene and we are all implicated. I am interested in finding ways to unleash emancipatory and sensual possibilities that may embed us more deeply in actuality.

BROWN-EWENS: Evocative titles add an additional layer to these pieces, calling on historical and pop cultural imagery such as Our Lady of Guadalupe for symbolic imagery. Could you talk a little bit about this piece in particular and its narrative within the series?

ROGERS: I find the concept of the Virgin Mary to be repressive. The idea of virginity as sacred and virtuous is a denial of the power of sexuality. I was interested in embracing Mary as utterly human. I wanted to free her from oppressive ideas that are antithetical to human equality. In this painting, you are looking at Mary’s giant sex. But it is not a desecration. I see it as a celebration of reality, a way of honoring life. I wanted to subvert the myths that have been written by men and supported by women, myths that have oppressed women across history. Poor Eve. Poor you, poor me! Ultimately, these ideas oppress everyone.

BROWN-EWENS: Your style incorporates hyperrealism with conceptualism to create these pillowy, silky scenes. Could you tell me a little bit about the interaction of these styles and practically how you set about depicting them?

ROGERS: I like the interplay between the representational qualities of painting and scale. My paintings of oysters teeter between realism and abstraction, depending on your point of view. They are my mandalas with a prayer, but I’m not religious. Before these paintings, however, I created a body of works called Eat You Eat Me, a two-channel video, The World is Your Oyster, then another series called Poisonous Harmony—all flirting with ideas that would come together in these current paintings. It was at this point when I found myself wanting to create these giant, sexy, wet, gooey oysters and through that deep dive arrived at wanting to have a visceral experience up close and personal with their forms. After painting them in a realistic way, I found the process a bit boring and decided to go back over each of them to take a closer look, and that’s how I ended up with this representational interplay that highlights the oyster’s many complicated and confounding qualities. They can harbor deadly bacteria while being a delicacy and perhaps an aphrodisiac. Plus, there are so many fertile concepts that attach to oysters. The expression “the world is your oyster” is said to young people embarking on life, but it comes from a Shakespeare play, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and there is an undertone of violence in how it is used. Dutch historical paintings of feasts often depict oysters and their symbolism for morality or sensuality. During the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1919, oyster beds were raided because they were thought to help prevent the disease. Oysters span everything from sexual pleasure to death, environmental violence and luxury consumption to femininity. They are even being used to build storm barriers in New York.

Fawn Rogers
*Comet Tail #3*, 2022
oil on canvas
14 x 11 inches

BROWN-EWENS: I’m intrigued by your photo series which you have described as exploring your Cherokee heritage. Do you think your ancestry has influenced your dedication and attentiveness to the natural world?

ROGERS: These photographic images were the start of my exploration into my Cherokee heritage. It is an oppressive history and is connected with a violent removal from the unbuilt world. My Cherokee ancestors walked the Trail of Tears to a reservation in Oklahoma. They became cotton pickers and also collected venomous water moccasin to survive. My great-grandmother was removed from her mother and placed in a home with European settlers. Her daughter, my grandmother, eventually made her way to the Oregon coast, where oysters were and still are harvested. To be free of the shame they lived with, because they hid their history, I chose to be naked in these images, and the photos contain symbolic details: horses, eagle feathers, pearls, handprints. If there is a single symbol for humanity it is the image of the human handprint. It can be seen on every continent and across all ages. The pearls are also fascinating. Everything from the history of the pearl with First Nations people to the way they are formed from irritants to gems.

BROWN-EWENS: What do you hope people take from this work?

ROGERS: I don’t expect any particular response. Maybe I hope people might react to this series in a way that is visceral. I want the paintings to draw you in and spit you back out. I do hope the collection will trigger thoughts about the fragility of life and the equality of all people. The splendor of sex. The beauty of the pussy!

BROWN-EWENS: I understand you’re set to have a busy year. What else have you got coming up?

ROGERS: June 24th, I’m excited to be included in the group show, Beach, at Nino Mier in New York. I just finished five group shows across Asia, the US, and Europe, including a Sotheby’s benefit auction curated by Nadya Tolokonnikova, who cofounded Pussy Riot. I also have an exhibition with Penske Projects curated by Sophia Penske at Phillips, which just closed in LA along with Boil, Toil & Trouble in Chicago curated by Zoe Lukov. In Beijing with Galerie Marguo, coming up July 13th is a solo exhibition titled Burn, Gleam, Shine. I have another solo in September titled GODOG in Los Angeles with sculpture, paintings and neon curated by Michael Slenske at Lauren Powell Projects. I’m also working on a new body of work, going from surf to turf and will be showing video, paintings, and sculpture with Galerie Marguo for a solo exhibition in Paris in October titled Come Ruin or Rapture. So we’ll see what happens after that!

Nothing Is Fixed: An Interview of Edoardo Monti on His Artist Residency in Brescia, Italy

May 30, 2023

interview by Lara Monro

Edoardo Monti is the force of nature behind the Artist Residency, Palazzo Monti. You will find the historical 13th-century palazzo in the Northern Lombardy Region of Italy, in the city of Brescia, halfway between Milan and Verona. Adorned with frescoes from 1750, the palazzo is a unique, utopian space that was purchased by Edoardo’s grandfather in the 1960s. It brings to mind a real life master’s painting, emulating Baroque grandeur paired with a splash of contemporary design and artistic influence.

Monti’s penchant for collecting art began at the ripe age of fourteen. With a modest budget and keen eye, he began making connections in the Italian art world, initially with local galleries and artists. This passion has continued to evolve, as has his taste. In 2017, after a decade of working in fashion for Stella McCartney, Monti turned his dream vision into a reality: an artist residency, which captures the imagination of a new generation of artists and champions a dialogue between the past, present, and future.

Every year, Monti invites three international artists to stay for 4 - 6 weeks at a time. Since 2017, over 200 artists, including Cristina BanBan, Somaya Critchlow, Charlotte Edey, and Henry Hussey have attended Palazzo Monti.

As the residency’s reputation continues to grow within the international contemporary art world, so does the fierce competition for places, with over 400 applications per month; not to mention the impressive board members and honorary directors, which includes the founder of Great Women Artists Katy Hessel.

The palazzo’s aesthetic, its connection to Italy’s Renaissance and the desirable location are enough to convince us that it is the preeminent utopia when it comes to artist residencies. I spoke with Edoardo to learn more about his journey with the palazzo and to understand in more detail his personal definition of utopia, and how he connects this to the palazzo Monti Artist Residency.

LARA MONRO: Do you see the Palazzo Monti Residency as a utopia?

EDOARDO MONTI: I know that I live in a beautiful and lavish palazzo, but I am a very down to earth person! What really interests me is the production aspect, what's behind a piece of art, which can be quite complex, but also very rewarding once you become aware of the whole process. The reason why I'm saying this is because a couple of years ago I curated a show in Brussels called Hétérotopie. This is a term coined by the French writer and philosopher Michel Foucault. It is an alternative model of utopia defined by the spaces that we live in. It describes certain cultural, institutional and discursive spaces that are somehow 'other': disturbing, intense, incompatible, contradictory or transforming.

I like this approach to defining utopia as I feel it is more down to earth. It highlights spaces within the world that we exist in yet these spaces have different rules that you can only make sense of if you live within the spaces. I would like to insert this concept to the residency, and in particular, parts of the palazzo to this style of utopia—a physical utopian space.

That said, in some ways, the palazzo also carries traditional connotations of being a utopia. It's not a dream world that I aspire to live in, but I have the luck to be present in this particular utopian world every day. It's a building that's been around for 800 years that has decorated and adapted over the centuries with style, passion, and love. Think of all the families who have been here and the memories that have been made. It has a very positive energy. Apart from a hotel, who houses creatives for a month at a time? It fits this notion of being a very special world with its own rules. There's rooms for sleeping, there's rooms for working, there's communal areas, there's a communal kitchen. The balance that's created throughout the palazzo changes every month because the residency is built on a program that allows for artists, to check in, connect creatively, and then check out. And then it happens, again and again, over and over. For me, this idea of utopia is directed towards making this physical project the best it can be—continuing to grow it and offer a positive environment where creatives can flourish.

MONRO: Can you tell me about your artist selection process?

MONTI: We have an executive board and also an honorary board of directors. The executives are based in London, New York, Paris and Korea. Between us, we go through a selection process. This includes meeting artists in person or traveling. As a team we speak almost on a daily basis. We do lots of research. Every three months, we meet online to go through the applications. We have a very hands-on approach.

In 2021, we established an honorary board of directors. We looked into the archetypes of the main figures that feature in the creative world; the collector, the curator, the gallery professional, designers. The role of the honorary director is to mentor one artist of their choice per year. It's a great opportunity for the artists to ask questions about the market, curatorial direction, and so on.

MONRO: You want to provide the artist with a sense of liberty in the way you curate the palazzo’s interior. Can you tell us a bit more about this?

MONTI: There are three main design strands; my grandparents pieces; I’m sitting at my grandfather’s desk as we speak and the bar that we have, a corner bar, is also from my grandparents. So, we have items that come from the family. Then, we have pieces that were simply acquired out of need; lighting features or tables, beds, and so on. The third strand is either commissions from resident designers or artists creating something specifically for the space. Because of this, the palazzo has been evolving over the years. Nothing is fixed—we are flexible and able to move most things around in the palazzo which gives a great sense of freedom for the artists who want to create something here. It is a very dynamic space.

MONRO: Are there are any common threads that run through the work of the residents?

MONTI: I mean, we intentionally promote complete liberty for the artist to either continue their practice or explore new mediums, or continue with their existing medium but in a new/different way. I think that's part of the beauty because we don't sell the works, we're not a gallery or a museum. So, this leaves complete, free reign for the artists to fully delve into and express their creativity. There are a few recurring elements. I’ve had a dog for the past three years and sometimes she pops up in the paintings. I myself sometimes appear in works also. The sky is definitely a great influence. All of the studios are facing west, which is where the sun sets. There's a lot of beautiful sunset colors in many of the paintings and sculptures. So, without anything being forced, there is definitely a lot of inspiration coming from the palazzo and surrounding areas.

MONRO: You began collecting art at the age of fourteen, what sort of art were you interested in then, and do you still have a similar taste now?

MONTI: I was very young and I had a very small budget, so I would acquire small prints or various small paintings. Owning multiple small works taught me a lot. Having a chance to see and appreciate the works you have acquired on your wall is priceless. I don't come from a family of collectors. I was the first one to start this passion/obsession. I was doing small jobs while at high school to earn some money, which allowed me to create a relationship with some local galleries and artists. I would say I was consistent in my taste in that I always went for figurative sculpture and I think this has somewhat stayed the same as I am still fascinated by the human figure. It's very cute looking back at what I collected at the beginning and comparing it to what I've been collecting over the past years. It’s interesting, and hugely personal to see how my eye and interests have evolved.

CATEGORIES: ART / CULTURE / MUSIC / FILM PROSE / DESIGN / FASHION

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portraits by Summer Bowie

text by Gaïa Matisse
all clothing Jean Paul Gaultier

interview by Caroline Whiteley
photography by Celine Paradis
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photography assistance by Oskar Ott
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photography by Hadi Mourad
creative direction by Alec Charlip
styling by Jamie Ortega
makeup by Tayler Treadwell
hair by Rachel Polycarpe
florals by Christina Allen
production: BORN Artists

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creative direction by Alec Charlip
photography by Andrés Jaña
styling by Abby Bencie
makeup by Marco Castro
hair by Luisa Popović
production by BORN Artists

interview by Millen Brown-Ewens
hair by Justin Inman
makeup by Niohuru X
all images copyright Fawn Rogers