Bespeckled with sand and iron filings, the surfaces of Nana Wolke’s paintings are grainy, replicating the effect of the lo-fi video equipment Wolke uses in the short films that she writes and casts. The films are almost never shown—made by Wolke with the sole purpose to paint from, the paintings are themselves the films, or, of course, the films are the paintings. Either way you’ll have it, Wolke acts as a mediator between what is seen—and by who (a dog, an intercom, a cameraman?)—in order to reveal not answers about where the images are from exactly, but affects of shame, desire, closeness, and distance.

Wolke’s site-specific projects reflect her diverse interests, such as the outskirts of urban centers, the transition from girlhood to early adulthood, and Oscar Wilde’s escapades, utilizing these frameworks to explore the tension between public and private spaces, companionship, and forms of surveillance.

We spoke with Nana in her Long Island City Studio just weeks before she was to exhibit a new set of paintings at Independent Art Fair. We talked over the paintings as they sat with us in the sun soaked room, and about the limits of art fairs, girlhood, and the sorry state of Hollywood.

Without getting too deep into the production side of it, do you kind of just bring friends along, or do you do casting calls?

Oftentimes I work with casting scouts, and I love Backstage in the States, because it's not entirely professional.

Like Craigslist kinda?

Yeah. It's a bit better than that. It has people that maybe didn’t have as have many opportunities so far, but they're interested in getting more exposure. You can find really interesting characters. And I’ve met some fabulous people. It’s honestly been great, so I always try a little bit of both. I also do street casting, if I find someone interesting. That happens a bit less often, but I'm trying to be a bit more open to that without being too self-conscious about it, it can feel a bit freaky. In terms of the crew, I’ll use lighting assistants, especially for these newer works, there's a lot of different sources of light, different color light, different intensity, and so on.

How did you find the subjects for this body of work?

They were half scouted from Backstage and half through a casting agent in New York, because I wanted to have some girls who were maybe a bit more “downtown New York scene” and then like a mix of girls that maybe don't have any interaction with it whatsoever, but the important thing for me was that they felt like sisters, similair to the vibe in The Virgin Suicides.

Where was the location?

Upstate New York, in Callicoon.

Oh, I've been there, It’s pretty far out, on the Delaware River.

Part of it was shot a while ago, actually, about two years ago. It's like a mish-mash of different moments. It wasn't shot over several consecutive days, like I normally shoot. I was mixing and matching different things that felt like they fit together. Sometimes, you start something when you're working on a project, and it opens up a new thing, but it doesn't really belong in whatever body of work you're working on at the moment. So you say, okay, I'm gonna leave that somewhere, eventually it's gonna be a piece in a puzzle that fits. This show feels a lot like that. There were several things that were waiting around and came together in the perfect moment. So the girls were the final missing piece.

Not to have a press release speak for you, but in the press release for High Seat [Castor Gallery, London, 2022], there's like a quote that says the work can be seen as one, prolonged moment. Is that applicable to this body of work?

For that show, I think I was trying to create a small body of work that felt more like a one liner. The show was just one painting, with a concrete wall, and a sculpture that looks like a trash bag. So it was an attempt to consolidate  this one moment. When I'm working on several pieces, especially with paintings and sound, it's more like editing a film, with different sequences and so on. This exhibition is more like a stretch of time rather than one moment. That show was very particular, in a sense, because it felt good to distill a very precise thing.

There’s a site specificity to some of your previous exhibitions, especially Wanda’s, with the two different floors relating to the football field and the car park. Is there a specific way you're thinking about the space at Independent?

The booth at  Independent is rather small but in a way it lends itself perfectly for this selection of three pieces. Two landscapes on each side that are leaning a bit more into abstraction and expand on the atmosphere, and one central moment from the interiority of one of the houses that feels like a charged climactic moment. It's very simple in that sense.

Is there a sound component to this presentation?

I don't think we're going to include sound, because in fairs, it's difficult to get that across fully. We did that in Basel last year at Liste [with NiCOLETTi, 2024], but it was a whole big gate installation. It was visually pulling people in. It was interesting, because I feel like then people were so focused on that gate piece and it overshadowed the paintings.

For me, it was meant to be the background, or an element, but it was really drawing people close to it, I suppose because of its size, and because you could hear something coming from it, which was of course intended but the effect was still interesting. As a whole it  was more about this granular, rough noise adding something to the atmosphere. I like things that are kind of crude and easy, like the simplicity of a conversation recorded via intercom. So that worked for Liste, especially because the installation immediately travelled to a museum show in Slovenia, where it was on view for additional three months. I think Independent might also be  a bit of a different fair. I've never done it though. Last year I was just too drained after a whole week of Frieze-related activities.

How long have you been in this studio?

Since 2023, I luckily came across it two weeks after I returned back to New York. The listing didn’t have any photos or a proper description, but the price was almost too good to be true for the size, so I thought I should at least go see it. I was subletting from a wonderful lady for a year and a half for that  incredible price, and then I took over the lease in autumn last year. It's the best studio that I’ve ever had, to be honest, I absolutely love it.

Long Island City feels like an “in-between” space as well. There's a lot of industrial space around here. Although it is on the periphery.

I remember coming here for the first time in 2017 and half of these buildings weren’t there.

They do it really fast, yeah.

They're constantly building something, you can hear it now, it's right in the middle of that change. There's still a lot of artist studios around here  though, I hope it stays that way.

You talk a lot about the relationship between shame and desire, and I'm curious how that plays into this group of paintings.

When I first graduated, this push and pull between the two was the driving force for a lot of what I was looking at. But in a way, this body of work, because of the intrinsic nature of the whole girlhood period, is once again attached to that. Just this whole feeling around how we're embodied as young girls, testing boundaries and really testing the limits of the power that's accessible for the first time, which is also kind of frightening. That also comes with shame, because it’s easy to get shamed for being too outwardly sexual, or expressing any sort of bold attitude as a young woman.

This work is a bit suggestive and sexual, almost, but still innocent and playful, just like the dynamic between sisters. I wanted to have a bit of that shared tenderness and vulnerability while at the same time pushing into a bit of eroticism. On one level, it's this girly, or like even feminine struggle with sexuality, let's say, and on the other hand, there’s also this feeling of not being adequate because you're not in the right place where everything's happening and where you could truly express yourself. When I was growing up in Slovenia, shortly after the fall of Yugoslavia, we didn't have a lot of the stuff that you would see on TV, like MAC cosmetics, which was huge in the 00s and early 10s. And, you know, it felt like we were missing out.

You're on the periphery of the center of the world.

It’s very much a second world vibe. The switch from socialism that my parents' generation experienced, where everything was made in Yugoslavia and branded for that market, and popular Western brands had to be smuggled through the border , to my own childhood experience, where we had access to certain things, but we were actively informed via media that we were still behind, both in timing and selection. Everything that we were obsessing over, made its way to our market 5 to 10 years later, creating this fantasy idea of the world behind the screen. So there's that element of shame, in a sense, where you feel like you can’t sit with the West. Or like I said with New York. New Jersey is just over the bridge, but it can feel really far away. I just had a gallerist  over at the studio a few days ago, and she was like, “Yeah, I totally got that vibe. I grew up in New Jersey, it’s so close, but it felt so inaccessible.”

00:24:53,208 --> 00:25:59,750 (Mint julep testosterone), 2025
oil and construction sand on linen,  120 x 160 cm

Courtesy of the artist, Management, New York, and Nicoletti, London. Photography by installshots.art / Inna Svyatksy

I also grew up in New Jersey.

It’s interesting, because it almost doesn't matter how far away you are to have that sort of feeling.
  

There's a writer I like a lot named Ross Barkan who interprets Donald Trump through an “outer borough” pathology. He wanted so badly to be in the Manhattan circles, so his whole mindset is about him clawing his way in and above them. We all have an outer borough mindset.

It's a real thing. He had to go right in the center of Manhattan to prove it.

00:00:00,000 - - > 01:36:06,960 (It’s good enough for Nancy. It’s good enough for Nancy), 2024
oil and iron filings on linen, 61 × 91.5 cm

Courtesy of the artist and Management, New York.
Photography by installshots.art / Inna Svyatksy

That makes me think of the private and public relationship as well. I was looking at your work and thinking about what you’ve made about places in Europe versus work made about places in the US, it seems like there’s a different focus on private space here [New York] versus public space there [Europe].

The tension between public and private with the Breed [Management, New York, 2024] show, is all set inside the Upper East Side apartment, but it's so much about the access point. The landscape of UES is distinctly clean and beige, punctuated by all these doormen, and you can't really just walk into an apartment building unless you’re visiting someone. You're just absolutely not welcome. They’re always peeking by the side of the glass door,  you can’t even stop for a second in the wrong place. The the doorman building is also such an iconic Gossip Girl-era reference.

It was interesting to think about that in terms of security in general today, which was what the Liste show was tapping into a bit more with the Ring cameras. All the footage was taken from intercoms, which is something that maybe 20 years ago, was only accessible to a certain class of people, a security system at home was pretty advanced in a sense, it was there because you were protecting valuables. Now it's an app on your phone. You can get a Ring camera for $100 from Amazon in a day, and you just install it. You're already creating a gated community within that app system, or in a group chat with neighbors. I'm still in neighbourhood WhatsApp groups from when I lived in London because I’m secretly curious who double parked.

Like a neighborhood watch? 

Yeah, they often send a photo of a suspicious car, or something embarrassingly banal like trying to figure out whose smoke detector is causing a ruckus, or whatever. But the idea behind that became kind of interesting, the concept of a gated community is now changing with technology and what's accessible to us. So the two shows were related on the topic of access. Breed was more about this moment in the early 2000s with the onset of reality TV, like Big Brother or Cribs, or before that, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. These shows were tapping into the space beyond the gate and offering  an exclusive tour of somewhere most would never be able to walk into.

It felt mischievous and fun to get inside this space on the Upper East Side, a very beautiful and classic apartment, but like through a POV of a tiny, Upper East Side dog, which is such a staple of the area. Everyone has one of those lap dogs. But the view itself, because they're close to the ground, is not very revealing of what we’d actually want to get a glimpse of.

It’s about the hierarchy of the view, but at the same time, in the family hierarchy, they’re very much high up on the ladder. They're maybe like someone’s child. I mean, you see them in restaurants on chairs eating sashimi and stuff like that. They're treated as humans. But just because of their size, and their vantage point, I was almost making a joke out of the curiosity of being in that space, but also building a tension where you're almost getting a sense of what's inside, but not actually, that was the driving force.

And then the Liste show was more about all these intercom cameras, the Ring and so on, that we never second guess. We think of them as active only when we engage with them, but the reality is that oftentimes, in police investigation, they tap into the footage that was just like recording all along, even when nobody was pressing the buzzer . So I thought about how most of the streets are mapped out and tracked consistently. It's not about the proper security cameras that are easily noticable on corners of buildings and in subway systems, somewhere that we think about, but more about these tiny ones that we put out ourselves for our own protection. But actually now your neighbor is tracking you.

You can also tap into hacked streams. I guess people break into the system, and then link the footage online to certain specialized websites where you can watch a random camera on the Upper West Side or whatever. It's weird. I mean it's not very interesting, necessarily, but that's the whole point. You never know when something is gonna get interesting.

I guess there's a bit of interest in that companionship with the dog. I'm not a huge dog person, but they keep popping up. I'm not actively sitting here thinking about dogs, but when I was on the Upper East Side it was plainly obvious that if you want to use an animal to get this point across, it’s definitely a small dog. It's not directly equal to a human experience, but it's so close to the lives that so many of these people live, and it's an expression of what people in that environment are willing and able to do for their canine companion. So many people in the States don't have health insurance or access to a lot of basic services. And on the other hand, you have these dogs that are really pampered. As  part of the research, I went to almost every single vet's office on the Upper East Side. I asked them what are the most common treatments for dogs, not intense surgeries or serious health conditions, but what are the wellness aspects of services that they offer that are very popular. I got reports from a lot of different businesses that matched, because a lot of these dogs travel a lot as well. They get all the vaccines and passports and health checkups and different baths and pedicures. An example of a not so uncommon yet totally obnoxious invoice  became the invitation to the show.

I really think of everything I do in terms of world building. Not just entering this point of view through a dog and a  gamified perspective through this character, but also building an expectation before the show ever opens. I find that to be a great opportunity to also mislead. To start hinting at a bigger topic or something that's maybe not as obvious once you enter the show. The invoice is  not exactly directly related to what you see in the show, but it does say something about the price tag of life in that neighborhood, and what it means to be able to be in that space as a puppy. As humans when we walk into a show and look at the work, the first point of reference is always our perspective. There was no specific indicator in the show at Management of the dog’s perspective, unless you read about it.

I guess that brings me  back to the idea of shame, because maybe you're uncomfortable in this kind of space, and you're not used to sitting on a couch that feels like nobody ever sat on, and the host is intimidating you, and now you’re overthinking how you're holding and setting down a cup of tea,  so you’re focusing on something  at the ground, and you're not able to sit upright and be confident in your own body. From a human perspective, a bit of that discomfort folds  into it. But then, if you suddenly understand that it's a dog’s perspective, it shifts back that dynamic and power balance.

Invoice-284911, 2024
Email invitation

For an art fair I am taking  a bit of a different approach. First of all, it's just a few days, so it almost reminds me of an MFA show. It's not really a group show, but it doesn’t feel like a solo show all the way. You're showing an aspect of your work in a bit of a strange half-opened box, and there's so much to see to the left and right of it  that, for me, the main goal when I'm in that environment is always to make a statement. I'm giving you something that's visually intriguing, that will make you want to ask about the work or tap into the world, but it doesn't really make sense to get into extensive procedure involving invitations because, you know, it's not really a show that people are meant to properly sit with.

The space is so mediated. I like what you were saying about promotional material, it's like you have control over the lens which with people are walking up to the show or encountering it, as well as the actual lens of what's shown on the walls. That's so dispersed at an art fair, you can't get a handle on anything in the same way there, really.

It's really about figuring out what the most important thing is with each setting. Overall context  makes such a difference, for example  showing in a different city. When I'm thinking about the London show that I'm doing in September I am immediately conceiving the show with a different approach, each context has its own rules that you have to respond to.

For me, it's fun to spend some time with that and strategize the most fun and untested way of spreading information and drawing attention. That’s just what I find interesting. The great thing with art is that once it's out of your studio, or the bad thing in the same way, is that you can lose control of all of that. Whatever I was thinking about kind of goes out of the door. If someone's interested, they'll ask or read about it, but the truly fascinating part is also to see what people actually get from it. What is that translation? That's why I think it's so amazing to have opportunities to show in new places. Saying something with a show then becomes a dialog, and the work morphes into  something else eventually, at times I almost forget what the initial idea was, because it took on  a new life. If it weren't for that communication, it would just be keeping the work in the studio for myself.

What happens with the film? Because I see a lot of communication between mediums too, the content of the film and the painting. What happens to the footage?

It’s for my own personal archive. The only time we actually showed a film, and not entirely, actually, was Wanda’s. It was funny, because that was the one time we were actually using proper cameras, and a film set with a sizable crew and everything that I say that I don't want. I just wanted to test it out and kind of see what happens if we actually have a proper recording and keep it as a part of the show, almost as a soundscape.

But then when people are asked to be in front of a camera and they know that it's been recorded, they start asking  when are we going to show the film. And then you have to kind of explain, “we're actually not going to show it, because the paintings are the film,” right? And the sound is the film. So I thought it wouldn’t be too much of a compromise to screen it only once on the last day of the show. Once in a lifetime, you could see the actual film. It was a nice way to bring people to the last day of the show and close it out. That was fun, and it just made sense.

But long term, I'm not that interested in doing that again, necessarily, unless at some point, someone's like, “we have a couple of investors that want to put  proper money towards a feature length or an elaborate  short film.” Then I'd be like, “okay, yeah, let's totally do that.” But that would then be a real  feature film, and that’s  something else, an opportunity to get really into the narrative.

That would be interesting at some point, but only under conditions where I'm not wasting half of my time reaching out to people schmoozing  for money. Because that's really draining and its own job. I see a lot of people in New York doing great things. Film work is so insane and so intense. I have massive respect for the process and all the filmmakers in New York realizing ambitious projects, but I feel like it's very difficult nowadays to actually tap work within this indie scene. It seems like a lot of films  are screened once in Brooklyn for your friends, and then you're kind of like, “okay, thumbs up.” Now it's a reference to get a job on set but to properly continue  beyond that, it's difficult to make it work financially. It's often people that have means from home to put towards a film that even get a chance to try something out.

Doing gallery shows, at least you basically have a product that can bring a return. So I can do the next round, support myself and my work and get to explore and fund something more conceptually challenging that is better suited for an institutional context. But with film, I might shoot this whole thing for however many thousands, and at the end of the day, nobody's getting properly paid, and the film's not making any money because even securing  distribution doesn’t guarantee a meaningful return.

And everything’s on streaming, so no one's making any money anyways.

I think a lot of people are speaking to that in different ways and trying to find new ways of engaging with it, like Harmony Korine. Obviously there are a lot of new voices experimenting with the format, but I find his approach and dedication to this problem relevant. It seems like film is  stuck in  a specific moment where people have to find new ways of making it work, both in terms of viewing and the production itself. That being said, I love the old school cinema, sitting  with my popcorn and Diet Coke in the dark room, that's the magic of the screen. A fantastic artist and filmmaker I adore Rosa Barba just opened a show at MoMA, and she has more of an artist’s and researcher’s perspective on cinema and its construction of time, space and narrative. And she's deeply invested in what it means to work with celluloid and the materiality of film. It's really particular, and she's incredibly poetic in her approach. I’m hoping for more tender yet bold narratives on the big stage continuing the recent incredible success of Sean Baker, we’re all experiencing sequel exhaustion at this point.

What else are you working on, beyond what’s here in the studio now?

There’s an upcoming exhibition that I'm working on. It will be my second London solo show with Nicoletti in their new space in Shoreditch opening at the end of September. One thing that's shifted for me recently that you can maybe sense is that my the working process evolved quite a bit. It's a lot more about a kind of meditation, finding the right moment, even when to approach the painting itself. Inevitably I’m thinking a lot about time. That’s been so important to me, like what you said with the timestamp from the Vienna show, and you know, this particular moment in girlhood, for example with the current show. There’s also a less obvious time element of working on a painting, which I guess, is one of the elements that makes it so special and so particular and enduring through history. This idea that there’s this hand, laboring on the surface. So it really brought me to thinking about something very basic and almost a bit banal and cheesy, but, in a lot of ways, I feel that throughout history there was a motivation to spend time with the sitter, from an artist perspective, both in terms of, like, as a lover  wanting to depict and in turn immortalize the beloved, but It's about that moment that you're with them—before it starts—or like when you're setting it up, and then all the time that you get to spend while you're working on a piece. That's kind of the very simple but still big and important idea that I want to focus on for the London show.

I'm not entirely sure where it's going to be set yet, but I'm quite into the whole idea of Oscar Wilde and his escapades, because he was someone who notoriously had all these affairs with guys when it was definitely not acceptable or lawful, across numerous iconic locations in London like the Savoy hote. And all of these buildings still exist, and in some cases have dedicated rooms to where he was having drinks and entertaining. I want to see if I can use that as the starting point or primer  for something that I'm interested in, but from this perspective of time and love and painting as this final object with a potential to become something that will last far beyond our time.

I'm actually going to London for four months, so I'm leaving right after Independent, and I'm spending all of summer there until the show opens on the 18 for 25th of September. I’m coming back to New York for the autumn.

One last question. You stole that parking sign for Wanda’s, and you said in an interview that you were gonna make them a new one….

You know, we have all these ideas for all the work  that we are going to get into after the show, and then once you do the show, you're like, “Okay, I can't be bothered.” Okay… I did return it because obviously that was  the right thing to do. But I lost the pre-show steam in making a new one. When I left London I was in a bit of a weird state of mind, because I was waiting for my green card for so long, which is such a nightmare, the whole waiting game, moving around, not knowing what's going on, just like the logistics of it was beyond unpleasant. Now I'm coming back to London in a better state of mind, and maybe I can, you know, tie some of these loose ends.