Two Men Sitting: An Interview of Photographer & Curator Job Piston

Two Men Sitting, Delfi, 30 x 40 in, lustre print, 2024. 1 AP, Ed. of 3 (option 17 x 22 in, metallic lustre print)


interview by Muna Malik


Muna Malik and Job Piston arrive on a Greek island sprinkled with sunflowers, daisies, and the sight of a tossed olive oil can. The two artists are gazing upon the Aegean Sea stretching out in front of them. They are in Hydra on a bench in the shadow of the Deste Project Space, not far from where they met for the first time to participate in the art and curatorial residency with ARC Athens. An oversized wind spinner with the melancholic face of the Greek god Apollo by Jeff Koons peers down over them. Apollo is often associated with sun and light, representing the illuminations of truth and knowledge. It is a fitting setting for a conversation around photography and metamorphosis, as they discuss the artist and curator Job Piston’s latest Los Angeles solo project Estate Sale.

MUNA MALIK: So, right now we're capturing this moment as best as we can with our iPhones, which is actually a really good segue into talking about your art project. You set out to photograph moments and spaces that are very hard to capture through photography. Talk to me a little bit about how this project originated while you were on your travels.

JOB PISTON: So, for the last year I’ve been going under hypnosis and documenting my sleeping dreams. This came out of a time where I was experiencing grief, which led to an interest in exploring the subconscious mind in relation to the waking dream. Coinciding with that journey, I was reading Langston Hughes’ I Wonder as I Wander, an autobiography exploring not only a deep wanderlust, but an artist travel diary interweaving intimate moments with cultural and social differences while traveling. 

The exhibition takes place in my building, a 1929 Spanish Colonial Revival apartment complex, in Los Angeles. My neighbor Joshua Nixon has a beautiful antique collection that lends itself to a kind of furniture voyeurism. That’s how we came up with the title of the show. 

While looking into the history of my building, Villa Madrid, I found a 1986 photo that peered up into my bedroom window by the photographer Julius Schulman, an architecture photographer who documented midcentury modernist homes. It was unexpected to imagine him creating an entire body of work of Mediterranean-style Los Angeles buildings and go unnoticed. This shift in perspective informed the first installation in the show. 

I selected photographs from the Montjuic Gardens at the 1929 World's Fair site in Spain and a sensuous George Kolbe bronze figurative from the Barcelona Pavilion, a pivotal example of modernist architecture, to create a portal from 1929 Villa Madrid into exploring themes of belonging in unfamiliar spaces and the fleeting nature of memories.

The exhibition touches on modern travel as a form of curiosity, leisure, love, and grief. It features cruising mazes in medieval ruins, time-lapses of nudist beaches, and the ancient Paros marble quarries, believed to be the source of the Venus Di Milo and Hermes sculptures. These elements also introduce themes of desire and photography as gateways to time portals.

MALIK: Expanding on the idea of love and desire, I noticed you also juxtapose spaces that prohibit photography with intimate portraits, a spark of defiance through closeness. Could you discuss this process and how you chose to approach capturing these moments?

PISTON: The project aimed to explore the idea of some spark of truth hidden in plain sight. This led to the creation of a series I informally call Forbidden Photography, focusing on locations and subjects where photography is typically restricted, creating a friction between public and personal space through the picture. 

One example is a series from Liminaki Beach, a naturist spot near Athens, where photography is generally restricted. I took photos discreetly, concentrating on capturing the changing light, landscape, and the dynamic presence and absence of people throughout the day. This series is presented in three parts, each marked by the time of day, showcasing not just the shift in light but also the movement of bodies within the landscape.

Another series centers around the ruins of Mykonos Castle. By day, this site is a tourist destination, housing an exhibition of portraits from the 1950s depicting the lives of Mykonos' locals. My focus was on capturing visitors moving through the ruins, but at night, the same location transforms. By night, the same ruins become a vibrant playground and a cruising area, representing a stark contrast to its daytime sanctity. This dichotomy fascinated me—the different ways people interact with this architectural space from day to night, from sacred to irreverent liberation. 

Παραλία δίπλα στο Κάμπινγκ, Beach by the Camping (New Construction), Antiparos, 13 x 19 in, exhibition fiber print, 2024. 1 AP, Ed. of 3

MALIK: And what about the portraits? How do you address the limits of photography in your series of intimate portraits? 

PISTON: I frequently explore questions about representation in portraiture and the challenge of photographing the intangible dynamics between the portrait artist and the sitter. 

I also sought to address the linguistic distances between two people, the artist and the lover. I chose to title many images in the first language of the person depicted. This approach is a rethinking of agency in portraiture, acknowledging respecting the sitter’s autonomy, acknowledging their own independent voice, elaborating on an encounter that an image alone cannot convey. Even more significant is that the language of the title often doesn't match the location of the place where the photograph was taken. This discrepancy attempts to recognize how complex identity can be and how limited we’ve become by the power of photography.   

For example, In this series there is a portrait of Sabastian, which I've nicknamed “the ghost.” Normally, an out-of-focus photograph would be thrown out. Balancing on a ledge, I was shaking, which blurred his figure and lines. Yet, somehow the image displays both him and me, my breath, revealing the dual presence in creating the photograph that poetically captured the fear of someone fading away through time.

მბანავე (The Bather), Saba, Stiges, 22 x 17 in, exhibition fiber print, 2024. 1 AP, Ed of 3

Młody Flecista (The Fifer), Krystian, Berlin, 19 x 13 in, exhibition fiber print, 2022. 1 AP, Ed. of 3

MALIK: Some of your images go beyond recognizable photographic distortions, bearing unique marks, like highlighter squiggles. 

PISTON: I’ve moved homes so many times, this old film has been dragged across the country by moving trucks and then passing through airport x-ray machines. I’m curious how these could all serve as physical traces of movement across borders and marks of time travel.

MALIK: I see that you use expired film, which social media filters try to replicate digitally. Most of the photographs we encounter nowadays are digital, marking a significant shift in technology within one generation. 

PISTON: I stick to using film cameras for its remarkable ability to remain unpredictable. This includes the use of out of date film. 

It comes from a place in my artistic method to use whatever ordinary materials and a given location’s history to readily ignite your ideas. In this case, including old film stored in my refrigerator at Villa Madrid. This meant embracing the quirks and imperfections of expired film, as well as the architecture of the building. What I enjoy about this is embracing elements of serendipity—those happy accidents and unexpected outcomes, much like one's own journey in life. Often, the plan I had envisioned is not what actually life had in store for me. Can we work with a given set of conditions, and can we produce new meaning out of it? This approach challenges me to persevere through unpredictability, gaining the ability to find comfort in the discomfort. 

These conditions reflect a type of struggle, whether it be with change, difference, grief, crisis, or the uncontrollable circumstances of a given moment. The process reflects on the artist's willingness to overcome unforeseen obstacles. 

MALIK: It seems a lot of the process in the production of the work came from this place of not having full control, from the actual film to the spaces to where you would be in. Through your studio, you welcome these barriers to create new directions in the work. How would you describe your relationship with transformation and metamorphosis in this project?

PISTON: The camera is an extension of the eyes, but also the artist's mind. Art making is an integral part of metamorphosis, which creates a space to separate from reality and enter a space of reflection. Often transformation is sparked by crucial moments, be it personal experiences or societal change, leading to a shift in how we perceive the world. This change in perception enables us to see the world, though sometimes challenging, through many ways and new dimensions. 

 

N95 Mask and Jockstrap, inkjet print, 19 x 13 in, exhibition fiber print, 2022. 1 AP, Ed. of 3

 

Setting the Stage: An Interview of Avery Wheless

interview by Summer Bowie

Avery Wheless is a Los Angeles-based painter who was born and raised in Petaluma, California. With her mother, a ballet instructor, and her father, an animator for LucasFilms, it’s no wonder she became a painter and video artist with a penchant for the theatrical. Her video works often depict movement artists performing choreography, and her painted portraits often depict everyday people engaging in the unconscious performativity of everyday life. Her current solo exhibition Stage, Presence on view at a private residence in Beverly Hills with BozoMag includes portrayals of the artist and her friends occupying glamorous spaces, caught in moments that subtly reveal the effort that comes with looking at ease. These acts are not celebrated or bemoaned. They just are. One friend reaches into the cocktail dress of another to lift and expose the fullness of her breast in anticipation of reuniting with an ex. Other figures unwittingly become subjects as they applaud an unseen performer or spy pensively on others while sipping martinis. The pageantry of hyper femininity is as vulnerable as it is manicured when you look at it from the right angle and Avery Wheless has a way of depicting it all simultaneously like an emotional lenticular on canvas.

SUMMER BOWIE: So, the title of your show is Stage, Presence and your work almost always relates to performance, but these works address it sort of indirectly. Can you talk about how that plays out in this body of work?

AVERY WHELESS: Well yeah, I like to explore performance in every way that it comes up in my life. My background is in dance and my mom was a ballet teacher, so performance was ingrained throughout my life. I started ballet when I was five and I always loved the make-believe worlds that you create in performance where you can be indulgent or take on another role. When I think of my body of work as a stage, it becomes a safe space for me to explore what it means to be a performer, whether it's in the more traditional sense of making art or just in my daily interactions. In this show, a lot of the images are taken from these in-between moments, whether it's friends getting ready or having intimate moments and conversations. I like capturing those moments when people may not realize they're already in this level of performance.

BOWIE: Right. We were talking a little bit about how your subjects are often captured in those moments when they're not actively performing, but they're preparing for the act.

WHELESS: Yeah. That comes up a lot. It's those moments when people don't realize they're getting ready for something or the stage isn't completely set. I find those moments more interesting and telling.

BOWIE: You often work from images that are taken in your everyday life, but then sometimes the paintings become amalgams of multiple images and memory. Can you talk a little bit about that process?

WHELESS: The images I take are sometimes these random, beautiful captures that I love of my friends when they're not fully aware that they're even being perceived by me. I like finding these softer, intimate moments with people. So I'm constantly hyper aware. It's also a way to process my environments and a feeling of being somewhat removed from a situation. Often when I'm surrounded by people, I feel like a bit of an outsider. So, I'll take those moments that I'm actually in physically and then there's other more emotional elements that come up that I'll adapt within the paintings to better explain where my body is in relation to what’s happening or what I'm thinking. Sometimes it's an object or it could be a motif that just comes out in the paintings naturally. It's a very subconscious kind of thing that just appears.

 
 

BOWIE: What was your early dance training like and what made you decide to paint instead?

WHELESS: Dance was always something I craved doing. My mom and also her mom did dance and they were from the South, so they were involved in a lot of Junior Miss pageants. But my mom didn't let me do ballet until I was five and I loved it. When I was ten, I went through a tomboy phase and did more sports with my brothers, like baseball. I realized that the playing field was also a stage space, just with more of a masculine take. But it was a safe place to get involved very emotionally. After a year of that, I went to see The Nutcracker with my mom and cried because I wasn't in it. So, I went back and was training really intensely. For our summer program, classes would start at nine in the morning and we wouldn't end until six. And I would dance with Moscow Ballet when they were on tour. I loved the ability to be so focused on your own body and how it worked in relation to other people. But then, I got injured. I was dealing with some health stuff, and so I had to stop my training and that's when I really dove into expressing myself on canvas. I just transferred the intense training of ballet into my painting practice, and I think it always comes up for me while I'm painting—this level of movement and physicality when I'm painting bodies and performers.

BOWIE: It’s interesting that your mom and grandmother were involved in actual beauty pageants, but on a more symbolic level, there’s a lot of pageantry in your depicted scenes. They tend to be lavish dining and nightlife spaces, or sometimes your figures are lounging poolside.

WHELESS: Yeah. I think of my paintings as these stages that I set as a sort of director. I like capturing these environments that are a little bit heightened and theatrical. That's just part of what interests me visually and conceptually. There's a dramatic sense of dark and light, or sometimes they're pulled from more of a dreamlike state too.

BOWIE: You also have such a very signature style in your video work, and there's a continuity between the two disciplines, because they also often feature contortionists, pole dancers, and movement artists of many different forms. I'm curious where you find your subjects.

WHELESS: Well, video is always something that I've enjoyed. My dad's in film and animation. So, it was always just fun to capture movers and then explore it more in my paintings. I was doing that very early on. But a lot of my subjects are just friends or other collaborators that I love working with. The dancers that I worked with for my solo exhibition earlier last year were cami [árboles]—who I shot for a designer friend that I was working with—and she had all these dancers that were really excited about performing in front of paintings because pole dancing isn't usually experienced in a gallery space and we were like, let's just play with this. I like having things that are an extension of what I'm thinking and then letting someone else run with it. So, I was like, “This is the score. This is what I have in mind. Now I wanna see how that manifests in your body.” And then, about year later we did a whole other adaptation of it where I projected the video from the exhibition performance and they performed in front of that. So, the video becomes a moving extension of what I've been thinking about and the amazing friends and collaborators I've been lucky enough to have play with me.

BOWIE: I love that. It’s almost like an exquisite corpse, but it’s not, because it always has the potential of being reborn in a new iteration. Your subjects are pretty invariably feminine. Can you talk about that?

WHELESS: I think most of the subjects in my paintings are women just because I identify as a woman and they are all extensions of how I see myself. It's a processing of how I relate to the other women in my life, like my mom and my sister and my grandmother. Those relationships are really beautiful and complicated. I think that's why I keep coming back to them. Thinking back to my days as a dancer, the corps de ballet is all women, so I was always in this ensemble of female bodies. I mean, I have painted men, but my most intimate moments and the relationships that I find the most complicated and intriguing are usually with other women in my life. So, the paintings are an exploration of that and also how I view myself. I'm not always intentionally doing it, but there is a level of self-portraiture in them.

BOWIE: How you define the female gaze?

WHELESS: I like to think of my paintings as creating a stage where women can be viewed comfortably and are aware of being viewed or engaged in a way that's not coming from a place of judgment or aggression. It's a place where you can be fully exposed and also completely held at the same time.

BOWIE: Aside from human figures, the show also features two images of horses. I'm curious what inspired you to incorporate them in the show?

WHELESS: Yeah, I wasn't aware of them really until I noticed that they were central to a couple of the paintings. It started with a horse figurine at this restaurant called Delilah in Miami where I was having an intense conversation. There's a breath work exercise I like to do when I want to ground myself if I'm feeling sort of out of my body. I'll look at something in the room and really study it to bring myself back into a present state. I even did this as a kid when I would get reprimanded or if I was in trouble, I would look at a person's face and draw it on my lap with my finger. So, there was this horse figurine right next to me that I was studying while going through this heightened sense of awareness and it just stayed with me visually. And then, my friend sent me a photo of her with her hands around this other horse figurine and it was funny because it had the same color palette and her hands were lit really intensely by the flash. I was wrapping up works for the show and I had this one painting of a sleeping woman that I kind of liked, but I didn't love it. So, I painted over it, but I left the woman's face sort of visible. The horse and the hands are made with this really gestural, vigorous, frenzied mark making. It was almost violent because I was just processing a lot at the time. I was having these anxiety dreams and fever dreams, which happens when I'm stressed out. But yeah, with the horses, one came from a calming exercise, and the other came from a deep state of anxiety.

BOWIE: It's interesting because horses also have this duality of both wildness and bourgeois pageantry. I want to come back to self-portraiture because you talk about the female figures in your works being a form of self-portraiture, but then you also incorporate some direct self-portraiture. There's one in the piece that was adapted from a photo that a friend took of you. What was it about this particular image that made you want to paint it?

WHELESS: It was just a fun snapshot that my friend Bella [Gadsby] took randomly. But it was more about how the perspective of the foot makes it look almost like I'm stomping something out, but it's also playful. I'm relaxing at home with a friend, but my body is pushing forward in the frame and then also receding at the same time. In all of the paintings, there's a tightness, a looseness, and a kind of falling apart. I'll go into certain areas and make them as defined as I want and then the rest of it is this hazy, dreamlike state. But it's all held together by one anchoring point. In most shows, there's always one self-portrait that I end up doing subconsciously. And after it's done, I realize how it ties into the rest of the works.

 
 

BOWIE: Can you tell us about anything that you're painting in the studio right now?

WHELESS: Well, I just got this new studio space, so I'm slowly starting to to dive into some works for NADA Miami, which I'll be doing with Bozo Mag. There's a circus theme I'm exploring, which is just another extension of the stage that I like because it’s really glamorous but also grungy at the same time. So, I've been thinking a lot about that.

Stage, Presence is on view through May 11 at a private residence in Beverly Hills. Contact BozoMag to book an appointment.

 
 

Spiritual Iconography: An Interview of Artist Tim Biskup

 
 

American visual artist Tim Biskup is a rebellious outlier in the shark-eat-shark ecosystem of the art market. His project space, Face Guts, is a testament to his anti-establishment ethos. Ceremoniously opening on 4/20, his exhibition Spring Collection will include a new suite of paintings and drawings with Biskup’s unique brand of psychedelia—a vision quest of intuitive gestures and symmetrical forms that play with pareidolia through abstraction. It’s an ayahuasca trip chased by a Freudian drip of haunted symbolism that harkens to Cuban artist Wifredo Lam and maybe the brain scans of enlightened butterflies. Along with new art comes the release of a limited edition yearbook. “Face Guts Year Seven” is a 56-page document of exhibitions, installations, and “whatever else catches the artist’s eye.”  

OLIVER KUPPER Before discussing Spring Collection, your new show of works at Face Guts, I want to discuss the space itself. How did it come about? 

TIM BISKUP I opened Face Guts to take a break from showing in galleries. I’d been doing a few exhibitions yearly for twenty years straight and needed something more direct. I needed to take structure out of my practice for a while. I also wanted more in-person interaction with my audience/

KUPPER Running an artist-run gallery can be quite a feat, especially in an ecosystem where larger galleries dominate the collector bases. Could you elaborate on some of your challenges and how you've overcome them? 

BISKUP I started my career by gathering a bunch of artists together and selling directly to collectors via auctions at bars. That was before I ever showed at a gallery, so my relationship with galleries was always a bit strange. I have some loyal collectors who support me. When I started this place, I sold about half as much work every year as I did through galleries before, but I kept all the money, so it was fine. I like meeting people and talking about my work. That’s pretty much the job of a gallerist. If the work is good, it kind of sells itself. That’s my other job. I have to make good work.

KUPPER How would you describe the work in Spring Collection—what are some evolutions from your previous work? 

BISKUP About eight months ago, I started making these symmetrical drawings with a grease pencil on construction paper. There’s something very satisfying about attempting to make a symmetrical drawing without any tools other than your brain and a pencil. It’s very challenging, and I think it distracts me from thinking about what I was actually drawing. The images feel very different from my previous work, although I see a thread through all of it. When I started making paintings, the possibilities became more interesting. Each of the paintings uses different approaches to translating the drawings. Adding texture and working with previous unfinished paintings was very fun. A turning point happened when I started adding eyes to them. Just little pieces of tape at first—they were suddenly totally different images. I moved the tape around, but I had a different thing. I’m playing with pareidolia, but I also see them like a Rorschach test. I’m trying to find ways to make things seem alive with his little nudging as possible. Making prints was a way of giving myself more territory to play. Putting these little dots in different places on every print gives them a different feeling. They even start to have narratives. It’s so much fun.

KUPPER I want to go back to your beginnings—you once mentioned that you wanted to become an artist while visiting the Centre Pompidou while on vacation with your parents in Paris. What was the first work you saw where you had that satori moment? 

BISKUP A big painting by Roberto Matta. It was like a complete universe stretched out on a wall, but I felt like I was floating in it. I think I was 17 or 18. I found out later that he referred to his paintings as “inscapes," an outward projection of his internal universe. It makes sense to me intellectually, but when I was standing there, I felt a pure feeling of engagement with art that I had never felt before.

KUPPER Your work is very psychedelic—it could be placed in many different genres, but how do you describe your work? 

BISKUP I try not to. (laughs) I just show people pictures. I feel like my recent work creates an easy transition into a conversation about artistic process, spirituality and mental health. I’d much rather have those conversations. That’s a big part of my motivation for having Face Guts—the desire to engage on a deeper level. 

KUPPER There is an undulation between extreme color and black and white (in your work). What can you achieve with graphite that you can't achieve with color and vice versa?

BISKUP The way I use graphite is all about creating form. It feels like a sculpture, somewhere between playing with Play-Doh and drawing. Thinking about color occupies a part of my brain that I engaged with very intensely in the earlier part of my career. Graphite gave me a break from that and took me into another dimension. In my last painting show at Sade Gallery, I took graphite drawings and turned them into paintings. Now, I’m figuring out how to re-engage with color. There are so many ways to do that that it’s almost overwhelming. That’s why there’s so much variety in this show. I’m trying a lot of new things. Every painting has some breakthrough in it.

KUPPER Can you talk about the symbolism in the work?

BISKUP I see different things in them, depending on my mood. I wouldn’t say it’s intentional, but a sense of spiritual iconography is happening. Lots of playful, joyful “tree of life” energy but some darkness. There are faces that emerge sometimes. Some of them are really creepy. I see shapes that look like bombs and other weapons. I figure the tension I feel going on in the world is coming through. Abstraction feels like a way of playing with polarization if you get close enough to making figurative work but don’t quite go there. This work goes there, but just barely.

KUPPER As an artist, you've likely had to navigate the intersection of art and commerce, particularly in today's digital age. Could you share your perspective on this dynamic and how it has influenced your work?

BISKUP Earlier in my career, I engaged in that part of the business. I made a lot of stuff with a whole range of brands. I’ve been more reluctant to work with brands over the past ten years or so. I’ve turned down almost everything and made a few zines and prints here and there via Face Guts. Luckily, I’ve been able to pay the bills doing what I enjoy. When I decide to do something with a brand, it’s more of an artistic choice. I’ve got some things in the works that I’m really excited about. Running Face Guts has given me a new understanding of who I am and what I want my art to be.

 
 

Just Thinking: An Interview of Paris-Based Artist Ladji Diaby

 
 


April 11th marked the opening of Preservation, a group show curated by Paige Silveria and Paul Hameline at CØR Studio in Paris. The exhibition brings together a disparate group of artists (including Ladji Diaby, Alyssa Kazew, Mark Flood, Gogo Graham, Jordan Pallagès, Anthony Fornasari, Bill Taylor, Caos Mote, Ron Baker, Cecile Di Giovanni, Simon Dupety, Gaspar Willmann, Wolfgang Laubersheimer, and the late, great Gaetano Pesce) whose work ranges from photography, collage, video, design, sculpture, and more. These works explore the original purpose of our human intellect before it became aware of itself and started to ask the unknowable. They reflect on a time when the self wasn’t yet conscious and only concerned itself with preservation in the most existential sense of the word. On the occasion of the opening, Paige Silveria spoke with artist Ladji Diaby to learn more about his roots in Mali, his creative process, and his relationship to the art scene in Paris.

PAIGE SILVERIA: Can you give us some background on yourself? Where did you grow up? What were you like as a kid? 

LADJI DIABY: I'm the first born of six children who lived in a communist city named Ivry-sur-Seine in the South of Paris during my entire childhood. When I was a kid, I was very quiet and impulsive. I didn't have many friends and I hardly went out. I was just a nerd who didn't have the money to buy a computer or a console. But I have good memories of this time when my brother and sisters were my true best friends, (they still are), but they would always follow me in my dumbass game ideas.

SILVERIA: What made the city communist? How did communism manifest in your daily life?

DIABY: I don't know, the city has been run by the PCF [French Communist Party] since 1925, the trust is there. (laughs) Above all that, this city has a real respect for the people who populate it and their diversity.

SILVERIA: What did you nerd out on? What were your interests?

DIABY: Manga and video games especially, I was obsessed with the stories they told, I projected myself a lot, that allowed me to tolerate a lot of things.

SILVERIA: (laughs) What dumbass game ideas did you play with your brother and sisters?

DIABY: I had a lot of fun writing new versions of all the fictional narratives that fascinated me, especially the animated ones, it was like writing a play. I would call on them afterwards to give them their roles while explaining the laws of the universe in question and the modifications that I wanted to make, I could be quite tyrannical. (laughs) I was obsessed with that. Nothing made me happier than to project myself into these universes and I thank Allah that my brother and sisters never mocked me for it. Sometimes I tell myself that my practice began at that moment to such a degree that it influenced my entire relationship to reality. I wanted to put my whole life and the other fictions — whether I liked them or not — into this game. I wanted to give a place to everything on this Earth and beyond.

SILVERIA: I read in a press release for a past show of yours that your work is really linked to your family and origins. Tell me about your family and their influence on you and your work. 

DIABY: First of all, I'd like to make it clear that I don't have a subject or theme in my work, it bores me. I only work with what's close to me, what's part of my social reality and what builds me up in my human experience. Most of the time, it's stories we haven't chosen to tell. My family is the closest thing to me and also the most important thing in my life that I didn't choose. I'm the eldest of a family of six children originally from Mali, of Muslim faith, and living in France. So, of course, all of this will come to light. I don't ask myself any questions, I just have the impression that when I execute a gesture with the aim of producing a piece, it's as if my memory were a piece of land and the fact of thinking, of having the will to do something with my hands, ploughs this memory land and brings to the surface stories that are beyond me most of the time. I'm not a very inspired person. In fact, I started collecting objects from the streets or from my family for my productions because the idea of putting money into making “art” made me sick. I needed to set up an attitude, a climate where I could produce no matter what, even if I went broke again.

SILVERIA: You use a large array of materials — like your parents' bed — and processes in your work, can you describe your practice? 

DIABY: When I describe my practice, I often say that going into the studio is like going into a casino; each production is a slot machine. I assemble and I break and I repeat until I find a good combination, a beautiful shape. It's a potential that depends solely on my luck. Slot machines are a potential fortune, my pieces are potential stories. By this I mean that when I use an object I've recovered or an image I've found, I don't actually find it; we meet and they tell me what I can and can't do with them. It's like sampling, you're going to use excerpts from pre-existing samples without understanding the whole story behind them, but your sensibility calls you to a kind of obviousness, I trust this obviousness, which tells me that our history, the actions of me and those I love (family, friends, and heroes) have value and deserve to exist. 

SILVERIA: I love that. The video featured in this show is called “A bird against a window, people see the devil in the clouds.” Can you elaborate on the title and some of the footage you included in it? 

DIABY: I gave it this title because, basically, I don't give a title to my productions. So, I said to myself in an exceptional case I'm going to give it a title that one would never remember, but if we make an effort to remember it, it’s not for nothing. The title simply illustrates my feeling in making this video with images I find that I like and that I know, but once again, I don't understand everything. I remembered myself as a child who understood nothing in English, spending all my time in front of the TV watching rap clips and other African-American visual productions, and trying to project myself, model myself as a young Malian living in France on it — either to dream of a future or to understand a present. The whole point of the video is in this feeling, because gradually I realize that in my work the Ladji emancipate and the Ladji alienate coexist rather well.

SILVERIA: Can you elaborate a bit on “the Ladji emancipate and the Ladji alienate coexist rather well?”

DIABY: When I work, I start from the idea that each thing that is alienating can perhaps, through an error of understanding, become emancipatory; the stories that I can mobilize, voluntarily or not, always begin with a form of alienation — or maybe an unhealthy fascination with say violence and sex as a reason to love and see films. I don't think it's a noble reason that leads me to make art. I remember wanting to do all that to dominate, to become someone, to betray my own social class and those who look like me to join the elites. I wanted to be respected, it was only a feeling, a desire, but I will never forget because in hindsight, I see what I could have become and it makes me laugh as much as it scares me. But it was time to grow up and realize that I could not be a white man, that the art that I make, and how I think about it, my very presence in France, are a consequence of colonization and slavery. It is important for me to remind myself that my work is also the product of an ultra violent story led and told by the dominant white classes and with which I deal.

SILVERIA: What are your thoughts on the art community in Paris? What's your experience of showing work here? 

DIABY: I don't trust them. Honestly, if I thought about the artistic community in Paris every day, I would have stopped working a long time ago. Too many people are afraid of being replaced. If that's not what makes them so closed and competitive it's because they have the devil in them, I don't know. But thank God I was able to meet beautiful people and I remember that I still take great pleasure in producing things with my hands, there is nothing that makes me happier. As for showing my work, I think it's just time I show it to those who look like me.

SILVERIA: Where and how would you ideally show the work? 

DIABY: I don't have the answer yet, but I am sure of one thing: the exhibition model for our work, the white cube, has largely reached its limits. It's become, if it wasn't already like this, a space for political disarming, as if any discourse whatsoever in this space were the same and could only have the impact of a sword in the water. I think the response has to be collective, multi-voiced and open, so that we shift the political question to the question of disseminating our work, which in my opinion, is the real political bias in an artist's work, and no longer in what we can say in our productions.

SILVERIA: You're in Dakar now for four months. What are you up to? Are you working on anything in particular while you're there? 

DIABY: Just thinking.

SILVERIA: That sounds lovely.

Preservation is on view through April 19 @ CØR Studio 28 Rue du Petit Musc, Paris

 
 

I Wanna Be Adored: An Interview of Sculptor Holly Silius on the Occasion of Her Solo Exhibition @ Central Server Works in Los Angeles

 

Holly Silius. George Clinton, 2023. Stone and gold leaf.

 

interview by Summer Bowie

“I don’t have to sell my soul, he’s already in me” read the lyrics of The Stone Roses’ groundbreaking hit track “I Wanna Be Adored.” Perfectly salient in their minimal simplicity, they defined a generation who watched their idols on television with a yearning desperation for recognition. Los Angeles-based sculptor Holly Silius was in her youth living in Manchester at the time. It was the end of Thatcher’s era of neoliberal deregulation with its flagrant embrace of conspicuous consumption that made so many of her peers feel a hollow ennui; a listless lack of purpose that left them looking ahead to the next millennium without the slightest clue of where they fit in. Thirty-five years later, Generation X finds itself in an era of social media where everyone can build a virtual platform from which to project their image and ideals. Silius now finds herself adorning and casting the faces and bodies of countless people—some with humble followings, some with household names—studying their every angle to capture the elusive essence that makes them so alluring as subjects.

SUMMER BOWIE: The exhibition takes its title from the 1989 hit by legendary Madchester Shoe Gazeband The Stone Roses. Lead singer Ian Brown was quoted in Clash Magazine saying,“If you want to be adored, it’s like a sin, like lust or gluttony or something like that.” Do you agree, or is the idea of moralizing our desires sort of antiquated?

HOLLY SILIUS: Besides the fact that it is simply a favorite track of mine, it felt apt to name my first solo show I wanna be adored for two reasons: firstly because I like to acknowledge and be patriotic to my roots, I come from Manchester myself, but secondly, because of the relevance the words gave to me when I was putting the pieces together, much further away from Manchester, in LA. Los Angeles is synonymous with a sense of “lust for fame” — it is the land where people go to gain adoration. The works I have made and accumulated over the last few years are all of people that are adored already in some way and they appear to me to desire more and actually deserve more recognition. The works also reflect perhaps a vulnerable side of me too. Maybe it is just that we all want to and should be cherished, noticed, and validated.

BOWIE: Your practice takes inspiration from studies of morphology. What role do linguistics play in your sculptural practice?

SILIUS: My sculptural practice is definitely that of a ‘tangible language’ through the form of the body in whatever way the sitter is casted. Whoever I work with I tend to try to understand their personality before, if I have some time and I have to be flexible with this, I am able to consider how their body communicates with me personally, how I perceive them and I also consider how they are perceived by a wider audience, and what speaks to me to capture them frozen in that body time capsule. This can be over a few years or a day, depending on the opportunity with that person. The piece of Penny Slinger I had been thinking about for a few years but I didn’t know exactly when I would have the platform to demonstrate her in the way I felt she deserved, and as my show was approaching, I felt the urge to make some more bronze pieces. For me, bronze already communicates the dedication behind a piece and the person. I also needed to express more with Penny than using the classic polished bronze, she needed a material as unique as she is, which is where the blow torching came in. That was so much fun, and the unpredictable nature of the chemical reactions within the metal depicted exactly what I wanted to convey.

Holly Silius. Lio Mehiel, 2021. Stone and steel.

Holly Silius. Rain Valdez, 2022. Stone and steel.

BOWIE: How do you choose which body parts to cast with your subjects and the materials for each?

SILIUS: When I am working with a person and I have a vision of the final piece and which body parts I will use, it tends to be because I see a way in which they represent themselves to me, and then I talk with the person more and we develop a casting position that is comfortable. Sometimes, I procrastinate on a casting for a long time as its such an intimate experience that I want to really make it into something that is super considered and I take care of people's time and image. The materials I use evolve over time but everything I use feels very heavy and is representative of the statement I am making about my subject. I can't afford to make mistakes, because they are set in stone or something else so definitive. But the finish can be organic and unpredictable, which I enjoy. It balances the heavy nature of the final piece.

BOWIE: Do you have a clear vision of how you’d like to render your subjects going in, or do the details present themselves in the process?

SILIUS: I am quite clear with the vision I have for the final piece but sometimes the mistakes or accidents that occur are the most joyous part of the process and final piece. The details have to be malleable as I don’t know everyone’s body. They are all so unique, so I have to think on the spot how to account and adjust for these occurrences. Also some people are self-conscious about certain aspects of their body so being respectful of this is also important, and I sculpt and stylize certain parts so I and my subjects are happy. It's a collaboration, always.

BOWIE: Aside from making sculpture, you also have a formidable practice as a makeup artist. You even sometimes apply makeup to your sculpture. Do these practices inform one another at all?

SILIUS: I have been working as a makeup artist for twenty years now. I started in prosthetics and special effects, moved into theater, opera, tv, film, and finally into fashion and beauty. For me, the sculpture and applying makeup go in a complementary tandem, as adding makeup onto the bodies and faces is always applied by me in a sculptural way. I will sculpt the body with color or textures like gloss and shadow effects so that sections with a matte finish blend and melt into a dry section. I move around the piece or the person imagining how it will be viewed at every angle. I know faces and bodies quite well and appreciate the individual nuances each one has every time.

Holly Silius. Mr. Wash, 2022. Bronze and steel.

Holly Silius. Penny Slinger, 2024. Bronze & blow torch.

BOWIE: As a makeup artist, It’s your job to project a character onto your subjects that they may not immediately see, but that they may have a natural ease in accentuating. Is this something you find easy to do with yourself?

SILIUS: Creating illusions for beauty, to tell a story or to create a character from whoever I am working with is like a fantasy or dress up. People are very concerned with protecting their image, even more so when they have bad taste, so to encourage an idea onto them is sometimes challenging until they trust you. Personally, I don’t create a character for myself, I am just myself and I have evolved like a sculpture can evolve with age, my ideas and taste changes and the way I present myself changes with confidence and with credibility.  

BOWIE: How did this particular body of work come together at Central Server Works?

SILIUS: I met Joshua who owns CSW through a shoot with George Clinton for Autre, he curated George’s show at Jeffrey Deitch gallery. I proposed to cast George’s face for the shoot and Joshua got to know my practice more. The accumulation of faces and bodies in stone, resin, metal and wax from the last few years in my studio led me to making six new bronze pieces to go alongside the older works. Then, I added a couple of new casts with artist friends Langley Fox and Penny Slinger, who we had mutually wanted to cast for a while, but I was waiting for the right moment to capture them for the perfect presentation.

Holly Silius. Langley Fox, 2024. Bronze & blow torch.

Holly Silius. Melt me, 2024. Wax, wick, and twig.

BOWIE: What’s next for you?

SILIUS: I have so many ideas of sculptures I want to make, including some 3D-printed body pieces I made in 2021 inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe that I want to dismantle and take molds of, then re-purpose the design with bronze or steal, weld parts together and use the blow torch for an oil slick color effect. I got really into the blowtorching. I also have this idea to make huge, 3D sculptures of environmental figures using ocean waste plastic. I need a sponsor for this one and I already wrote to David Attenborough to see if he wanted to be involved. I’m also thinking of experimenting with AI as a more financially conscious way to explore my ideas, trying to embrace the technology aspect of that.

I Wanna Be Adored is on view by appointment through May 18 @ Central Server Works 517 Victoria Ave Venice, 90291

 

Holly Silius. Holly, 2024. Bronze & blow torch.

 

The Perfect Specimen: An Interview of Lauren Lee McCarthy

medical pamphlet with man spitting into vial says "So You've Decided to Exchange Saliva"

Installation view, Lauren Lee McCarthy: Bodily Autonomy at UC San Diego Mandeville Art Gallery. March 2-May 25, 2024. Photo by Pablo Mason. With support from Creative Capital.

interview by Doreen A. Ríos

When asked to read through a long list of terms and conditions before giving consent, most of us have developed a reflexive response of scrolling to the bottom and trudging ahead. There’s a miniature risk/benefit analysis that we all conduct, which includes a completely unknown potential risk in the distant future, and the near future benefit of moving on. Time is such a valuable commodity that we regularly find ourselves sharing everything from personal data, browsing data, biometric data, and more. Oftentimes, there’s no contract at all. You may have thought you were showing all of your friends how your looks changed from 2009 to 2019, but you were really training someone’s private surveillance software. The list of myopic, nefarious applications that we serve by giving ourselves away to faceless data farms in exchange for what often amounts to a forgettable laugh is endless. In Lauren Lee McCarthy’s Bodily Autonomy exhibition at UC San Diego’s Mandeville Art Gallery, she explores two very specific aspects of the way that we engage with science and technology. With “Surrogate,” she created an application where couples and individuals who are interested in hiring her as a surrogate mother are invited to dictate everything from her eating and sleeping habits, to her daily activities, and more. While these requests are not actually fulfilled, the application itself challenges notions of reproduction, genetic selection, and commerce. With “Saliva” she has created a saliva exchange station that is activated every Thursday from 6-8pm where visitors are invited to give and receive samples of their own saliva. Each participant is given agency to label their sample as they prefer and they provide the conditions for what happens to it (scout’s honor). Doreen A. Ríos, a PhD candidate in Art History, Theory, and Criticism at UC San Diego and an independent curator and researcher, spoke with McCarthy to discuss the implications of these technologies and the imperative within the work to embody a more transparent form of participation.

DOREEN A. RÍOS: There's a conversation within your practice about the ways that we’re not able to shape the systems for which we consent to take part, or these systems are obscure enough that we do not really know what our role is. How do you feel these two bodies of work are connected within the show and your own extended practice?

LAUREN LEE McCARTHY: I started by working on the “Surrogate” project, and for me, there were a lot of questions about control—over a birthing person's body and a life before it begins. The idea of having an app that someone could use to control me as I was their surrogate was this metaphor for the ways that we try to intervene in the process of birth, as well as the desire to have that kind of control. 

As I saw these different ways that we could intervene technologically, there were questions for me about the implications of these interventions. Already, we can select features from a sperm donor, like the eye color, or the height or the race; we can screen the embryo in the uterus and decide that we want to terminate the pregnancy if it carries characteristics that aren’t suitable. The question of what is suitable or acceptable was really present for me. It's also about desires for motherhood, surrogacy and labor in that sense, and kin and family. I was speaking specifically about genetic selection, but the questions of who is a suitable person weren’t as central because there were so many different things happening. The “Saliva” project was a way to highlight some of those questions, and to try and do it in a way that was more accessible and interactive. 

two Prosthetic Belly Devices made from silicone and electronics on clothing hangers

Prosthetic Belly Devices, 2021 Silicone, custom electronics. Lauren Lee McCarthy: Bodily Autonomy at UC San Diego Mandeville Art Gallery. March 2-May 25, 2024. Photo by Pablo Mason. With support from Creative Capital.

DOREEN A. RÍOS: This question about what's the perfect specimen really comes back to haunt us in a lot of ways—through eugenics, obviously—but in other notions of understanding what a perfect body is. Both of these projects are very much connected to the fact that they have to be embodied. The conversation that we have regularly in terms of data is the extraction of data from a body, and then this data becoming something else, whereas here it’s almost as if it was the opposite exchange. The provocation works in an embodiment rather than a disembodiment. 

LAUREN LEE McCARTHY: A lot of my work is about trying to embody some of the things that are happening around us. It can often feel very-large scale and opaque, like when we hear about AI, or about other technologies that are shaping our lives, like surveillance. We can hear about it as a concept, and it could feel scary or impressive, but it’s very hard to have a visceral understanding of it.

At the same time, I feel like we should be able to form an opinion about these technologies because they directly impact us in so many different ways. A lot of my work is trying to create situations where we can feel that human impact. I'm trying to create a metaphor for us to be able to engage at a scale that feels more personal. It's really about agency on the part of the viewer to say your opinion is important. 

DOREEN A. RÍOS: There's two very powerful moments of the exhibition when it becomes obvious that agency and governance mean very different things to many different bodies. One is the video piece where you’re doing this psych evaluation with the therapist who is trying to see if you're suitable for becoming a surrogate. There's these very specific competing moments where you ask the question “Well, can I make a decision for my own body? The answer is, “No.” And then, right next to it in the Saliva Retreat video you have an active way of trying to engage with the complexities of that, not through your own body, but through the connections that you can create in this specific setting with multiple bodies at the same time.

LAUREN LEE McCARTHY: One thing that was really important was taking the psych evaluation as a starting point, and taking what I learned going through these different reproductive processes. There's a lot of judgments based on your identity—your gender, race, and class—that are projected onto you as you go through the birth industrial complex. Many decisions that should be yours to make about your own body are taken out of your hands. With the saliva thing, there is a provocation. People are challenged to decide if they want to let go of this biological matter or not, and to whom? The whole experience is designed to walk people through the process of donating their saliva and then selecting someone else's in a way where consent and agency are central. That's in contrast to a lot of the technology that we interact with where there’s a long scroll of terms and you just hit ‘okay,’ and don't really have any idea what's happening.

We worked a lot on the language and the design. When people tag their saliva, they decide how they want to identify themselves, as opposed to other medical processes where it's very invasive—they're asking specific questions, or sometimes they're even giving you specific labels that you might not even agree with. Those shifts were very intentional and I hoped to set these things next to each other—the psych evaluation and the Saliva Retreat—so that you could feel the differences of where you, the viewer or the participant, stood in terms of your own agency.

Video installation with three people sitting at a table subtitle says "It's not a video game. It's our baby's life."

Installation view, Lauren Lee McCarthy: Bodily Autonomy at UC San Diego Mandeville Art Gallery. March 2-May 25, 2024. Photo by Pablo Mason. With support from Creative Capital.

DOREEN A. RÍOS: Having had the experience to participate in the saliva bar, for me, it also turned into a sense of responsibility when you agree to the whole process. You become responsible for someone else's saliva, and I think the roles shift in a very interesting way where now you're the one who has to fulfill someone else's wishes and limits, and you can actually consciously decide to not follow through with that.

That is also another side of this agency—and governance and privacy and surveillance and consent—that we rarely ever see. I remember coming back home with my saliva bag and the first thing I thought was, Where should I place this? I can’t just go and throw it away and say, “Cool experience, bye!” On the other hand, there are other wishes that I need to fulfill.

LAUREN LEE McCARTHY: I love how you put that. We give our personal data constantly throughout the day and it's very hard to conceptualize what that means. I think of the saliva as a physical representation of that. What will I do? Do I throw it away? Do I put it in my refrigerator? It’s a provocation to deal with it instead of something that's seamlessly moved by a system you're barely aware of. It's about creating some of that friction. 

I really like making things that extend beyond the gallery, or extend beyond the frame of what is an art piece or an art experience. It's funny to have these things that end up in your home or go out into the world and then shift or affect your life outside of that in some way, even if it's very small.

DOREEN A. RÍOS: Conversely, it also makes you consider this layer of systems and networks that we cannot opt out of, because it was never a decision for us to be part of them in the first place. You can't help but think, What is it that you're being part of without the possibility of opting out? 

LAUREN LEE McCARTHY: Yes, there's this theme that we've been addressing with these systems that you either have to opt into without a clear understanding, or you're just in them and you never really opted in. There's another layer that is thinking about human relationships and how we understand the boundaries between ourselves and other people. A large theme in that psych evaluation session was this idea that to be pregnant is so risky; to do that for your own family makes total sense, but to do that for someone that is not your genetic relative is crazy. It doesn't make sense. That was something that I heard a lot from family and friends. It comes back to these questions of family and kin and relatedness. For a lot of people, a genetic nuclear family doesn't function as a support structure, and in queer communities we’ve seen a lot of different types of families being formed. One aim of the work was to raise some of those questions; to complicate that a bit.

It was also a performance happening in my life, as I'm trying to make this thing happen that affects my family and my friends. So, I’m having these conversations that are creating friction, they’re rubbing against their ideas of where my body should end, and where someone else's family or life should begin. That's always been a really interesting question for me: where that line is and also making work that is very participatory. Where are the boundaries? I don't want to be crossing lines that shouldn't be crossed without consent, so I’m trying to understand that.

three people stand behind saliva bar installation wearing green smocks

Installation view, Lauren Lee McCarthy: Bodily Autonomy at UC San Diego Mandeville Art Gallery. March 2-May 25, 2024. Photo by Adrian-Dre Diaz. With support from Creative Capital.

DOREEN A. RÍOS: How do you think about that notion of systems and boundaries with respect to the aesthetic decisions that you make? 

LAUREN LEE McCARTHY: With both the “Surrogate” piece, but especially in the “Saliva” piece, there's a desire to strike this tone that feels like there's clearly a system here, but trying to make it feel somewhat transparent. There's the use of pipes and things that you can see through, like clear curtains, and the bar itself. Similarly, with the Surrogate app, I was trying to make something that feels not super techy, but more like something that we can understand on a human scale.

There's also this desire to capture a feeling that was on one hand, very human and physical, very embodied and visceral. And then, on the other hand, kind of technical. Especially because a lot of that process happened over 2020 and 2021. So, we were doing so much of it over Zoom. It was this very weird dissonance of talking about something that's so physical and embodied, but doing it through screens and apps and forms and emails. I wanted to bring some of that in, but still have the feeling that it was something human that you could touch and hold.

installation view of Lauren Lee McCarthy's "Bodily Autonomy" with saliva bar and video installation

Installation view, Lauren Lee McCarthy: Bodily Autonomy at UC San Diego Mandeville Art Gallery. March 2-May 25, 2024. Photo by Pablo Mason. With support from Creative Capital.

DOREEN A. RÍOS: I definitely think that shows. A couple of years ago, I was collaborating with a group of scientists from the genomic lab at UNAM in Mexico City. They were collaborating with a group of artists to study the ancestry of contemporary Mexicans. There were around 100 participating artists, and they all agreed upon specific contract terms and conditions, because they were donating their DNA samples. The director of the lab was very concerned about the ways in which a lot of these companies like 23andMe started to gain attention. They not only get to create these databases from the people that use their service, but they also charge for it. So, it's the whole opposite thing, right? There is a very interesting connection in terms of why anyone should trust an artist, a scientist, or a random company that is providing a “service” for you to keep your DNA in their lab? That doesn't really cross our minds.

LAUREN LEE McCARTHY: Yeah, totally. Who do we trust, and why? What do you do when you don't necessarily have enough information to make a judgment? I think about those stories of people that donated sperm twenty years ago, thinking this will be anonymous, and then everyone was getting 23andMe, and then they would find cohorts of sperm donor siblings. At the time they thought, Yes, this can remain anonymous. But then, the technology changes and suddenly, you're holding this material, which can have a whole different life. It can transform a relationship or set of relationships. Another part of it was this question about speculation. You're holding someone's saliva or you're giving yours. Right now, you can't do a whole lot with someone’s saliva, but who knows what might be possible in the future? There's also speculation in a value sense: whose saliva might be valuable to be holding, and that was more tongue in cheek. But I’m thinking about this project in a moment of experimentation with other monetary systems, this speculation of which technology or what might you hold that could be valuable in the future?

We should be able to consent and understand the terms of what we're agreeing to, but it's not always possible because of the way time works. And so, how much do you want to spend? How much do we focus on what may or may not happen in the future versus being present right now, or to say it the other way—how much do we just indulge in what's happening right now versus being conscious of what could be coming in the future, and how do we prepare for that?

DOREEN A. RÍOS: It’s really powerful and compelling—the kind of conversation and artistic practice that I believe is very necessary for this moment in time, especially as the systems become more and more obscure, and it seems like we have fewer ways of opting out. 

LAUREN LEE McCARTHY: There's an absurd humor too. When I tell people that there's a saliva exchange happening, people are perplexed. I enjoy engaging with things in that way. These are really difficult conversations and questions, but I’m trying to find a way to also make it playful or silly. 

Bodily Autonomy is on view through May 25 @ UC San Diego’s Mandeville Art Gallery 9655 Scholars Drive North, La Jolla

two-channel video installation on exterior of Mandeville Art Gallery shows two women sticking out tongues at UCSD

Installation view, Lauren Lee McCarthy and Casey Reas, Are you the perfect specimen?, 2024, Video (color, silent), Lauren Lee McCarthy: Bodily Autonomy at UC San Diego Mandeville Art Gallery. March 2-May 25, 2024. Photo by Pablo Mason. With support from Creative Capital.

Watermarks in Savannah: An Interview of Holly Hendry

 

Holly Hendry, Her bones begin to bend, 2024. Image courtesy of SCAD.

 

Holly Hendry’s Watermarks, featured at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) Museum of Art through June 24, is a site-specific oasis which playfully investigates the way water runs through virtually every facet of human life. Situated outside the museum in glass vitrines overlooking Turner Boulevard, Hendry’s four sculptural pieces encounter the world in an unconventional way. The architectural display is situated in the community; students pass it every morning on their way to class. The significance behind the work in this context becomes ever-evolving, effortlessly aligning with the shifting elements of the everyday. Her edifices traverse intricate concepts that range from the expansiveness of architecture, societal conceptions of the female form, to the connectivity of bodies via water. Interestingly balancing the lightness of uplifting artistic figuration with the weight of impending doom as it relates to our not-at-all-ubiquitous freshwater supply, Hendry’s sculptural forms are dynamic manifestations of life on earth.

Watermarks is organized by SCAD Museum of Art chief curator Daniel S. Palmer with assistant curator Haley Clouser and presented as part of SCAD deFINE ART 2024.

Mia Milosevic: I wanted to start off with just talking about your show here at SCAD. Can you walk me through the origins of Watermarks, like how you got your inspiration for this show? 

Holly Hendry: I think my work always starts with building a site or space. It was an exciting moment of thinking about that in the context of the jewel box [glass vitrines on SCAD Museum of Art’s facade] with it being this unique site that interfaces public space and gallery space. That became the starting point of it all before even visiting the space. I was excited about how that could actually act as a point of intersection in a similar way to a diorama—a slice through something. I was interested in that idea of confrontation. The building is almost pushing itself outwards, but has a view inwards at the same time. The work is pushing itself out at you, and so then the glass becomes this moment of intimacy between the two things. 

MM: In all four works you have on display, they’re all different in their own way but you can feel the way the earth’s elements are fused into each of them. 

HH: I spent a while reading and looking at the history of industry along the river and more widely about the role of a port in terms of how a town or city works, and that in relation to bodily systems, plumbing systems, sewage systems, gut systems… I look at industry from the industrial revolution to systems of how we live today. I try to look through a critical lens, but also through something physical and bodily where things aren't so packed away and hidden–they reveal themselves. 

MM: It does feel like a lot of your work, and I'm referencing your previous work too, focuses on the machinery or “behind-the-scenes” of things. 

HH: I think machinery poses quite an interesting challenge for me because it's something so far from felt and organic, same with architecture. I'm trying to pull those things in. I try to pull them into a space where they can be something else.

MM: The idea of water is really interesting in your work here. Especially considering the exhibit’s site-specificity, at Port Savannah. Can you tell me more about how water plays a role in this?

HH: I think water has become, no pun intended, an underlying current in a lot of my practice recently. It’s been really present in the thinking for this work because of Savannah itself. I was fascinated by that fluidity of solid ground, the marshes in Savannah which go underwater sometimes. There's not many places where you have that kind of palpable engagement with something. Savannah being a city that’s shaped by tides and river current was something that I found really interesting from the offset. It was another way to think about bodies and materials in relation to water. It’s about us being beyond these closed-off units, which I found really exciting in relation to the jewel boxes because they are these closed-off units you can see through and into.

There’s the idea of responsibility through something like water where you can think of it as holding a history of bodies and how they've been treated. I think you can't get away from thinking about that in a city like Savannah regarding moments in history that are really painful, like The Weeping Time, which is also about water: tears, the mistreatment of bodies and people. Water became something that was not just about excess or spill, but also about raindrops and teardrops–these things that do connect bodies, really. 

 

Image courtesy of the artist and SCAD.

 

MM: One of your works in the show resembles an ear, which forces you to think about the body very directly. 

HH: I wanted it to be a kind of illogical form of the body as well, where it could be guttering or it could be an ear, or it could be something that references the ear canal. There’s a play of words as well, since the inside of an ear is called a labyrinth. So there's ideas of networks and tunnels within that, but then an ear canal is a reference to water and river systems. I was excited about moments of interplay between those elements. 

MM: There’s a poem that's inspiration for the work, the story of the water nymph Cyane by Ovid. 

HH: I never really used something so poetic or with such direct reference to myth within my work before, but it felt really important to ground this show in something that is watery, body-mingling, elastic and centering on a female body. The very first line that you come across describes how her limbs soften, her bones begin to bend. And it references a female figure. I found that quite interesting to be so direct with that initially. It feels like this poetry is almost rubbing two different art forms together. 

MM: I feel like the idea of flatness comes up a lot in your work, especially referencing Slacker (2019) which features the sculptural synthetic skin you made. 

HH: That work was shown at Yorkshire Sculpture Park and uses the structure of industrial machinery to try and bring it to bring something else. It started from something very physical because I was grinding up plastic objects to then turn flat and make into this silicon tapestry that became a band, which I then rotated around motors. I think this idea of the exquisite corpse and that game of consequences, as some people call it, implies the surrealist idea of chance and moment. It relates a lot to flatness as well. I'm quite interested and excited by that in an architectural sense. You see it in some cities where there's a building that maybe you'd expect to see, and then a kind of intersection of something completely random that throws you into a different interpretation–it becomes a Frankenstein building. It felt like I was doing that with the architecture in Watermarks, through the regularity of brick works interspersed with these moments of color. 

MM: The idea of your work being surrealist sculpture is interesting. The contrast of putting something real into something fake like machinery seems to expose it more.

HH: I think that element is present in the technique of cartoon notification that I try to use. It's like one single line that is trying to express something related to movement or character, which cartoons are so good at. They make one simple movement really embody that movement through just line and color. My work has those ambitions as well, in a way.

MM: Do you draw a lot of inspiration from cartoons? 

HH: I think it's more like a cartoon sensibility. There's moments that I'd reference from like Looney Tunes or Popeye, where there's an elasticity to it. Like in films where you see cartoons aligned with human bodies, but the malleability becomes so extreme and then the human body seems so vulnerable in comparison. There's a lightness to dark subject matter or difficult subject matter that I think cartoons deal with really well. I try to do that within my work as well.

MM: Do you feel like there's dark subject matter in this show?

HH: I don't know if it goes as far as dark subject matter, but I think I'm always dealing with elements of divergent bodily moments. Depending on how you read the work, that could be quite extreme or not, so I think it's always there. There's always ideas of human fragility or death or pain that are very closely tied with humor or awkwardness. It's quite a difficult thing for me to unpick verbally because that's what I feel the purpose of the work is to do physically. And if I could explain it, I would (laughs). 

 

Image courtesy of the artist and SCAD.

 

Dose Of Chaos: An In Interview Of Artist Jim Mooijekind On The Occasion Of His Solo Exhibition In Los Angeles

Balance, a strange beast - 8.25 x 11.25" - Ink and watercolour on paper, 2023

The delightfully fucked up world of Haarlem, Netherlands-based artist Jim Mooijekind is a punk menagerie of psychological and spiritual reference points—but mostly deranged Dutch cartoons from the 90s with full frontal nudity and violence. In his works, figurative, nearly autobiographical avatars make tortured grimaces in a cauldron of pop cultural symbology inspired by Freemasonry. On the occasion of his solo LA exhibition "The Entertainer" at Face Guts, presented by White Box, we asked Mooijekind some questions. 

AUTRE MAGAZINE: How did you get your start as an artist?

JIM MOOIJEKIND: I have always been drawing, but when I went to the art academy I chose to pursue a career in the arts. After graduating, I kept going, and gradually stuff started to happen. It’s cool to see how art can lead you towards all kinds of people and places.

AUTRE MAGAZINE: What led you to the kind of distinct imagery you work with?

JIM MOOIJEKIND: It’s a huge salad of all kinds of things crossing over into each other. A big part of my practice is deconstructing and reconstructing things until I feel it's mine. These elements can be borrowed from art history, counterculture, spiritual symbolism, and symbols that articulate my emotions and unresolved thoughts.

AUTRE MAGAZINE: How has your artistic style evolved with time?

JIM MOOIJEKIND: Before, it was more playful and youthful. And I see it now more as going to a place where I can be more poetic and unapologetically strange.

AUTRE MAGAZINE: What were the cartoons you watched growing up and how have they influenced your work to this day?

JIM MOOIJEKIND: A lot of cartoons on late-night Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon. Weird and creepy shows used to fascinate me. Shows like Ren and Stimpy, Cow and Chicken, and Courage the Cowardly Dog all had this vulgar and strange aura around them. Dutch television used to be crazy as well. We used to have this morning variety show for kids called “Villa Achterwerk.” It had the most insane cartoons with full frontal nudity, very dirty and grim jokes, and crudely made most of the time. I used to love to watch that show. Some of these shows were: Purno de purno, Ffukkie Slim and Eefje Wentelteefje. The combination of all these shows ruined me in a good way.

AUTRE MAGAZINE: Your work mostly centers itself on the autobiographical avatar…can you elaborate more on what this means? What’s the difference between this and a self-portrait?

JIM MOOIJEKIND: Self-portraits in the classical sense focus on the likeness of the artist in the work. The autobiographical element in my work focuses on how I feel. Not how I look.

 

Vision - 9.5 x 6.5" - Ink and watercolour on Paper - 2023

 

AUTRE MAGAZINE: Can you elaborate on the symbolic imagery you use in your work? A lot of it is inspired by the way Freemasons use their symbolism.

JIM MOOIJEKIND: They use quite mundane objects like construction tools. To visualize very deep, spiritual themes. Every different combination of symbols has a different meaning. This way of working with abstract themes to make something figurative speaks to me.

AUTRE MAGAZINE: How does philosophy play a role in your art? Are there any philosophers that you get inspiration from?

JIM MOOIJEKIND: When studying in art school I received a copy of “The Myth of Sisyphus” by French philosopher Albert Camus. Because they saw the absurd element in my work. I then looked a bit more into the French lads of his era. Furthermore, I like the work of Carl Yung, and Manly P Hall. Guys that go nice and wild in the spiritual department.

AUTRE MAGAZINE: How does living in Haarlem influence your work? Especially now as an international artist, do you see yourself incorporating some formal or aesthetic elements native to your home as you approach a bigger audience?

JIM MOOIJEKIND: Stylistically, I’m not very sure what Haarlem brought me. But as a home base, I am very happy with my city. I always call it a village-city hybrid. It allows me to dose the chaos. It’s a bit like Amsterdam without the nonsense.  

AUTRE MAGAZINE: Your work seems very emotional, and incorporates opposing emotions into one piece. For example, your upcoming exhibition “The Entertainer” @ WhiteBox.LA/Face Guts showcases statues “dedicated to the human condition, icons to sadness, love and humor.” Can you elaborate on this?

JIM MOOIJEKIND: Yes, what you are quoting is an excerpt of a cool text fellow artist and friend Darius Airo wrote about my work. He’s talking about the fact that the compositions in my work are pretty dense and straightforward. Like a statue. What these “Statues” symbolize are mostly abstract and poetic. Like the juxtapositions that are found in the human psyche.

AUTRE MAGAZINE: It seems like the beauty of your work is that it is capable of doing more than one thing at a time. It feels like your work pushes your viewers in multiple directions, all at once. How would you describe your work?

JIM MOOIJEKIND: I really like to be a shapeshifter. Fluctuating between positions and thematics in my practice. As I change, my work changes. Keep them guessing!

Jim Mooijekind "The Entertainer" opens March 16 at Face Guts Presented by Whitebox.LA, 4136 Verdugo Road Los Angeles 90065

 
 

Crossing the Infinite: An Interview of Kate Mosher Hall

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

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

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

 
 

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

 

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

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

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

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

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.

Installation view courtesy of Fernberger Gallery.

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

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. 

CELINE Art Project: Banks Violette

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

 

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.

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. 

trousers by Piero D’Angelo

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

Jacket: Lou de Bètoly


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.

 

Jacket: Lou de Bètoly

 

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...

Full Look: Vintage Levi’s

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.

Full Look: No Faith Studios

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.

Full Look: GmbH

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.

 

Jacket: No Faith Studios

 

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

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. 

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.

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. 

 

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


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)

full look: Gucci


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.

full look: Acne Studios

dress: Kritika Manchanda

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.

cape: Amen

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

photograph by Alexander Rotonodo

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.