https://super-nyc.com super! Wed, 02 Jul 2025 19:51:34 +0000 https://super-nyc.com en https://super-nyc.com/interviews Wed, 02 Jul 2025 19:51:34 +0000 super! https://super-nyc.com/interviews latest: <img width="2000" height="1600" width_o="2000" height_o="1600" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0fec32893261380035a25b29d71903df40f1ed7cd8978df18e43f393762e32f3/Nolan-Simon-2551.jpg" data-mid="235327764" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0fec32893261380035a25b29d71903df40f1ed7cd8978df18e43f393762e32f3/Nolan-Simon-2551.jpg" /> NOLAN SIMON <img width="1500" height="1125" width_o="1500" height_o="1125" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0b46dca702aac267c7e45533339a427ca1f5a455d5600b404a2f4cf40c2ff20d/250412_NW_13.jpg" data-mid="235327722" border="0" data-scale="85" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0b46dca702aac267c7e45533339a427ca1f5a455d5600b404a2f4cf40c2ff20d/250412_NW_13.jpg" />NANA WOLKE <img width="2000" height="1544" width_o="2000" height_o="1544" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a42a4dc05d9fa245b5282b49800ef33cbd3dc6d78f5e08431604e75f51abf224/portrait.jpeg" data-mid="235327587" border="0" data-scale="85" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a42a4dc05d9fa245b5282b49800ef33cbd3dc6d78f5e08431604e75f51abf224/portrait.jpeg" />TOMMY HARRISON <img width="5500" height="4248" width_o="5500" height_o="4248" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/59b56f994ecaf219220674ed0f18d1bd2693f223e54d9106b5fc8f305411edb8/MAIN.jpg" data-mid="235327583" border="0" data-scale="85" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/59b56f994ecaf219220674ed0f18d1bd2693f223e54d9106b5fc8f305411edb8/MAIN.jpg" />DANNY LEYLAND <img width="900" height="691" width_o="900" height_o="691" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b31d51dacdbce36f12bcb37a2434788278793bf2127fc0cae00877970d645f08/MAIN.jpg" data-mid="235327582" border="0" data-scale="85" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/900/i/b31d51dacdbce36f12bcb37a2434788278793bf2127fc0cae00877970d645f08/MAIN.jpg" />JOEL DEAN <img width="966" height="742" width_o="966" height_o="742" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0d1640b0d143e0a8a79fbe5f64cbb7326bffb048fd4a3e6d1326c2d818eb1e5f/The-Party.jpeg" data-mid="235327580" border="0" data-scale="85" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/966/i/0d1640b0d143e0a8a79fbe5f64cbb7326bffb048fd4a3e6d1326c2d818eb1e5f/The-Party.jpeg" />JULIA GARCIA <img width="4954" height="3827" width_o="4954" height_o="3827" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/70c0815fa4bb4d328faf7871ba0eb7cf066d3570d8b2f239561e30b245f5b344/MAIN.jpg" data-mid="235327579" border="0" data-scale="85" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/70c0815fa4bb4d328faf7871ba0eb7cf066d3570d8b2f239561e30b245f5b344/MAIN.jpg" /> FICUS INTERFAITH <img width="2000" height="1600" width_o="2000" height_o="1600" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/afce95dbaba6a9e14964eede117db65960bc5055a48630808ef14387741a318c/Studio-Portrait_Madelyn-Kellum.jpeg" data-mid="235327577" border="0" data-scale="85" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/afce95dbaba6a9e14964eede117db65960bc5055a48630808ef14387741a318c/Studio-Portrait_Madelyn-Kellum.jpeg" />MADELYN KELLUM <img width="3125" height="2500" width_o="3125" height_o="2500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/392e19d0b76e726b678612d4f4f0bcf47b671459e324c6211aceb519ccb09a89/main.jpg" data-mid="235327570" border="0" data-scale="85" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/392e19d0b76e726b678612d4f4f0bcf47b671459e324c6211aceb519ccb09a89/main.jpg" />TURAOLIVEIRA <img width="3125" height="2500" width_o="3125" height_o="2500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/da396fc683930255510c283395f5bc0b8dce63b55750c5c81e6e984a192b411c/main.jpg" data-mid="235327565" border="0" data-scale="85" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/da396fc683930255510c283395f5bc0b8dce63b55750c5c81e6e984a192b411c/main.jpg" />MANUELA BENAIM <img width="3125" height="2500" width_o="3125" height_o="2500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3ee3a8e9efa54f28b9caded7cba4566814b8d73f165a49bcdeff713dcb8f4c02/main.jpg" data-mid="235327563" border="0" data-scale="85" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3ee3a8e9efa54f28b9caded7cba4566814b8d73f165a49bcdeff713dcb8f4c02/main.jpg" />JESSICA WIILLIAMS <img width="3125" height="2500" width_o="3125" height_o="2500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/75803b1c9a4c35a110250f40a1373545fa1b0df4d0fc6147c248e9a17ef1e467/main.jpg" data-mid="235327556" border="0" data-scale="85" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/75803b1c9a4c35a110250f40a1373545fa1b0df4d0fc6147c248e9a17ef1e467/main.jpg" />SHAUN PIERSON <img width="3125" height="2500" width_o="3125" height_o="2500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/91b99d70a062c53e4cae5a835bba3cfa6f18554538a119e0dcf9232dffbe1456/main.jpg" data-mid="235327539" border="0" data-scale="85" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/91b99d70a062c53e4cae5a835bba3cfa6f18554538a119e0dcf9232dffbe1456/main.jpg" />DARBY MILBRATH <img width="3125" height="2500" width_o="3125" height_o="2500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a807ee889fda22fd56954c5d5c4406c424f5d2450b4ee5d3a9344af2589d6556/main.jpg" data-mid="235327550" border="0" data-scale="85" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a807ee889fda22fd56954c5d5c4406c424f5d2450b4ee5d3a9344af2589d6556/main.jpg" /> AK JANSEN <img width="3125" height="2500" width_o="3125" height_o="2500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/64ebb620f2e22d0493e7bdecab8a162f899db85cafcce2fdea76b25a60111688/main.jpg" data-mid="235327544" border="0" data-scale="85" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/64ebb620f2e22d0493e7bdecab8a162f899db85cafcce2fdea76b25a60111688/main.jpg" />NAOMI NAKAZATO <img width="3125" height="2500" width_o="3125" height_o="2500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9243a3446d2e0432a0cb130ceab94e2116b26308f20feea9b1f9820fc3ac4b5d/main.jpg" data-mid="235327533" border="0" data-scale="85" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9243a3446d2e0432a0cb130ceab94e2116b26308f20feea9b1f9820fc3ac4b5d/main.jpg" />CHE LOVELACE <img width="3125" height="2500" width_o="3125" height_o="2500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/29f50e1ed5f78b3e867ad5334314b8355b04204b52eb5451acaa0c509211211b/main-ii.jpg" data-mid="235327532" border="0" data-scale="85" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/29f50e1ed5f78b3e867ad5334314b8355b04204b52eb5451acaa0c509211211b/main-ii.jpg" />TAHIR CARLKARMALI <img width="3125" height="2500" width_o="3125" height_o="2500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d8dac571c7cbd92fb3de7bce2b72fa661c75252d574fb161a4dbcaceba8cc808/main.jpg" data-mid="235327528" border="0" data-scale="85" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d8dac571c7cbd92fb3de7bce2b72fa661c75252d574fb161a4dbcaceba8cc808/main.jpg" />ANTHONYCUDAHY <img width="3125" height="2500" width_o="3125" height_o="2500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/197a51d608b1bd0e5a0906cf0750f4851413c6673bc4af8c1692d19655ae51e0/main.jpg" data-mid="235327524" border="0" data-scale="85" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/197a51d608b1bd0e5a0906cf0750f4851413c6673bc4af8c1692d19655ae51e0/main.jpg" />JESSEMOCKRIN<img width="3125" height="2500" width_o="3125" height_o="2500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4408910c99d58d1902ae87ef55e41812a6e55027e7f864f55fcb48475ed43019/main.jpg" data-mid="235327510" border="0" data-scale="85" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4408910c99d58d1902ae87ef55e41812a6e55027e7f864f55fcb48475ed43019/main.jpg" />MICHAEL STAMM <img width="3125" height="2500" width_o="3125" height_o="2500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b8439daf99c438e2d26f73799f112254fada6d0fabfbe32207bbe1f50ec24547/alt-main.jpg" data-mid="235327502" border="0" data-scale="85" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b8439daf99c438e2d26f73799f112254fada6d0fabfbe32207bbe1f50ec24547/alt-main.jpg" />ROSENESTLER <img width="1492" height="1194" width_o="1492" height_o="1194" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/bbcb2f76bc84cf203b92003ffe477b1347b6a248ed18f2613e8354fadc56f276/main.png" data-mid="235327478" border="0" data-scale="85" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/bbcb2f76bc84cf203b92003ffe477b1347b6a248ed18f2613e8354fadc56f276/main.png" />MAYAYADID&nbsp; &nbsp; <img width="1498" height="1200" width_o="1498" height_o="1200" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/68a006ad81664f46723a983feb0f8420d1ff803c6dfca92cf175c7f23a0d6ea8/lipstick_2020_oil-on-canvas_-22-x-20-inches.jpeg" data-mid="235327430" border="0" data-scale="85" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/68a006ad81664f46723a983feb0f8420d1ff803c6dfca92cf175c7f23a0d6ea8/lipstick_2020_oil-on-canvas_-22-x-20-inches.jpeg" />SARAH SLAPPEY <img width="3125" height="2500" width_o="3125" height_o="2500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/84ac4714287814a2d869a9509b27895c131289ab1c8848fd63c7500713e8043c/main-1.jpg" data-mid="235327340" border="0" data-scale="85" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/84ac4714287814a2d869a9509b27895c131289ab1c8848fd63c7500713e8043c/main-1.jpg" />PETRACORTRIGHT <img width="3125" height="2500" width_o="3125" height_o="2500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2b31c3ed9644c51ae031e0a4b1cd68d42a3db8c32512816a948d0438bdc67408/main.jpg" data-mid="235327338" border="0" data-scale="85" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2b31c3ed9644c51ae031e0a4b1cd68d42a3db8c32512816a948d0438bdc67408/main.jpg" />JOANITREMBLAY <img width="3125" height="2500" width_o="3125" height_o="2500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b26c92b55548072a467eb4aa5d26de5545c6727522b0ec8a0760193f438db0ac/main-image.jpg" data-mid="235327337" border="0" data-scale="85" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b26c92b55548072a467eb4aa5d26de5545c6727522b0ec8a0760193f438db0ac/main-image.jpg" />GRAYWIELEBINSKI <img width="750" height="600" width_o="750" height_o="600" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/194bdec65789cffab3f10b38915d5e49f5031c30df3857530af6e477fde6e64a/main-sr.png" data-mid="235327335" border="0" data-scale="85" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/750/i/194bdec65789cffab3f10b38915d5e49f5031c30df3857530af6e477fde6e64a/main-sr.png" />SARARAHBAR <img width="750" height="600" width_o="750" height_o="600" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/84a3811684c5c0bf2e8b2122e29c89bcf2e6360484194597c00bf6c45687d392/home.jpg" data-mid="235327334" border="0" data-scale="85" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/750/i/84a3811684c5c0bf2e8b2122e29c89bcf2e6360484194597c00bf6c45687d392/home.jpg" />&nbsp; BASEERAKHAN https://super-nyc.com/about Wed, 28 Oct 2020 23:18:22 +0000 super! https://super-nyc.com/about super! is an interview series seeking expansive dialogues with artists through the medium of transcribed, longform discussions. Rather than succinct, press-release-style encapsulations, what we’re after are the problems, solutions, forms, and ways of thinking and feeling that artists work with or against. After starting the project in 2020, we went on a short (few years long) hiatus. We’re excited to share new interviews soon. We hope you enjoy :)Jack + Olivia follow us on instagram to stay up to date with new interviews: @super__nyc https://super-nyc.com/Nolan-Simon-text Tue, 27 May 2025 23:08:38 +0000 super! https://super-nyc.com/Nolan-Simon-text We spoke with artist Nolan Simon about the role that the internet plays in his paintings, Occupy Wall Street, Tumblr, his community of friends and collaborators, the perils of questioning one’s desires, and how all of this has informed his work over the years. Nolan Simon’s most recent exhibition at 47 Canal, Cut off from the World, Attached to One Another, features images of his friends, lovers, and collaborators in closely cropped, paunchy, fleshy, and suggestive scenes. Just below the ironic, sexy surfaces of the paintings, the subjects seem to speak a shared, hushed language, one that viewers catch a glimpse or whisper of. They are mischievous yet earnest and attuned to one another. At one point in our conversation, he recalls a trip he took with a friend to the Barnes Foundation years ago, during which the silent— sometimes silly, and not always benevolent—communication between the Impressionists became legible to him. “It felt like they were doing what we were doing,” he told us. When we spoke with Nolan over Zoom earlier this year, in January, it was amidst a slurry of political and cultural shifts—Trump had just been inaugurated, Twitter was imploding, the imminent ban on TikTok that never really was loomed in the near future, plus, David Lynch had just died. The personal or political relevance of those events is skewed in many directions, but for those active on Twitter, Instagram, or TikTok, users were inundated with hundreds of posts about them, likely without having asked for this deluge in any way. After all, the algorithm is devoid of choice or desire; it is fueled by your dumb attention rather than your thoughtful intention. Nolan doesn’t shy away from the fragmented, chaotic landscape of internet platforms wholesale. With a sprawling and wide breadth of painterly languages at play, his canvases have been populated by art historical references, internet-historical references, and, like in his latest exhibition, intimate scenes of his own offline/online surroundings. This is less a total antidote to the visual culture and language of internet platforms but an incorporation of it in a way that is unlike the tyranny of the Timeline. It is perhaps closer to the internet of yesteryear, when users had at least a bit more agency in what showed up on their Dashboards or News Feeds. <img width="2000" height="1600" width_o="2000" height_o="1600" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/229003263298fdfef2b054f93a75113d3d25d2ed470208d3edf59494ba8c368d/Nolan-Simon-2551.jpg" data-mid="235327824" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/229003263298fdfef2b054f93a75113d3d25d2ed470208d3edf59494ba8c368d/Nolan-Simon-2551.jpg" /> <img width="3564" height="4541" width_o="3564" height_o="4541" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b83ceff919f403ba8acb8b04d93ce0347624becd34bcd2e3c43eab21af2c4b76/Nolan-Simon-2551.jpg" data-mid="235327208" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b83ceff919f403ba8acb8b04d93ce0347624becd34bcd2e3c43eab21af2c4b76/Nolan-Simon-2551.jpg" /> The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian at the Grand Guignol, 2025oil, colored pencil and dye sublimation on linen, stretched over panel in artist’s frame, 28 x 22 inches I'll start with a silly question, but does your Instagram handle [iqwnadjcvnaliuf] mean anything? No. Back in 2011 I was part of a group of artists who tacked ourselves on to Occupy Wall Street as it was developing, and I got tasked with taking care of social media for the group, which at that time meant starting an Instagram and a Tumblr. I had to have an admin account that was separate from the primary account, so I just smashed my hand on a keyboard. I was very skeptical of social media at first, even though I was the only person in the group who used it at the time. So, with a string of random letters I thought I could hide and people wouldn’t find me if they Google my name. It follows me everywhere at this point. Now, every time I run into someone in public and they ask to exchange instagram information, I'm always like, “let me type it in.” It makes for a more interesting social interaction, I guess. That's the silly story. <img width="1200" height="800" width_o="1200" height_o="800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1c4ac019e1b30237fdf99858eb0270a157fde796ca3a2ff7309ebea6f0f5f4e2/portraits_install_2.jpg" data-mid="233810362" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1c4ac019e1b30237fdf99858eb0270a157fde796ca3a2ff7309ebea6f0f5f4e2/portraits_install_2.jpg" /> <img width="1200" height="800" width_o="1200" height_o="800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6477cf8b1c822e16f0aeb84c4ce8e624bcb5548e2ff5289433f0028cc7c4fd5c/portraits_install_1.jpg" data-mid="233810358" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6477cf8b1c822e16f0aeb84c4ce8e624bcb5548e2ff5289433f0028cc7c4fd5c/portraits_install_1.jpg" /> <img width="1200" height="800" width_o="1200" height_o="800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/19ec56e57459e3c6f068fa22ab6a5d45b302f6fcf7f42af533f8b141fde958e6/portraits_install_5.jpg" data-mid="233810377" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/19ec56e57459e3c6f068fa22ab6a5d45b302f6fcf7f42af533f8b141fde958e6/portraits_install_5.jpg" /> Install view, Portraits,47 Canal, New York, 2015 Do you always write your press releases? I noticed a lot of the earlier press releases are written in first person. And then there's also this phrase that you repeat a couple times: “I'm terrible at telling jokes.” [Portraits, 47 Canal, 2015] At first, I was really insistent on doing it myself, mostly because I felt like the gallery voice didn't work for the early exhibitions. They [the paintings] tried to operate on parallel levels, making statements that were plain and straightforward, and having a hidden subtext that an art world audience would pick up on. I always wanted my press releases to address both audiences. In theory, even though I know that the art world is very sequestered and doesn't reach a lay audience, I wanted there to be a language that civilians could pick up on.“I’m terrible at telling jokes” comes from author David Markson who wrote a book called Wittgenstein's Mistress. It’s written in aphoristic first person. Every paragraph is a single statement. There are no chapters, and it just kind of rambles. As the story moves along, you start to notice it contradicts itself. It lays out statements and then says, “well, actually, maybe that statement is incorrect.” But in my case, I had a page to do it, and in Markson's book, it'll happen 20 pages later. I liked that internal incoherence, making statements that feel plain and obvious and then taking them back and saying, “actually, no, that's not quite right.” It kind of jived with my sense of myself as somebody who's always in doubt. It's hard to get this across now, but during those early exhibitions, there were only a handful of people delving into realism with any earnestness. Coming out of that Cologne era of hyper irony and “deskilling” as a primary language, spending more than a day on a painting was really embarrassing. The consensus was, “why would you bother?” In relation to your work with the peaches and the landscapes, you’ve previously talked about finding ways of making really traditional or conservative subjects seem punk. Yeah, that really was the search, looking at John Miller and Jutta (Koether) and these other artists who were tiptoeing into this heavily ironized realism. Less so in Jutta’s case - she had some sincerity there. But I have to really emphasize that sincere painting was seen as philosophically irrational. The peaches exhibition [Paintings for school, Galerie Lars Friedrich, Berlin, 2013] came out of 4Chan before it was a neo Nazi website. (When It was an “ironic” neo Nazi website) One&nbsp; of the things that users on the /b/ (random) board would play around with was posting images that felt like images you weren't supposed to share, which&nbsp; were actually totally fine. One of the things that came out of that was a handful of people posting pictures of white Japanese peaches from Japanese fruit wholesalers. Whoever they hired to photograph their peaches shot them in&nbsp; soft focus and it felt very erotic and strange. Every painting in that exhibition, I think there were 13 in the end, but 10 in the show were based on finding those photos online and appropriating them for the purposes of playing at having them be both banal and highly sexualized at the same time. Actually, a painting of peaches popped back up in the most recent show [Cut off from the World, Attached to One Another,&nbsp;47 Canal, 2024]. <img width="391" height="282" width_o="391" height_o="282" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1f153c05ce8c686e9da9521cebd3137354f085780284897585f9b48d336b2f10/peaches-copy.jpg" data-mid="233810408" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/391/i/1f153c05ce8c686e9da9521cebd3137354f085780284897585f9b48d336b2f10/peaches-copy.jpg" /> <img width="800" height="640" width_o="800" height_o="640" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/497885979664e7e1d3177788d4ebbf1d27ff5a4840c2daaca704d5c2f71635d2/peaches.jpg" data-mid="233810407" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/800/i/497885979664e7e1d3177788d4ebbf1d27ff5a4840c2daaca704d5c2f71635d2/peaches.jpg" /> Basket of Peaches, 2013oil on canvas, 9 x 12 inches This is sounding similar to Jogging, but opposed almost diametrically to that. They went the route of what seems like full irony. Were you conscious of that at the time? I didn't know them. I didn't know Brad. I've met them subsequently, but I was aware of it. Some friends of mine were kind of doing something similar, but on a much, much smaller scale. I'm kind of happy and a little intrigued by you saying “diametrically opposed,” because I feel it, but I don't think that the work is always read that way. They're both definitely part of that “post internet” discourse. But what they were doing felt to me like something that resided in the computer, even when they popped out into the real world. Those early Timur Si-Qin sculptures of swords through Axe body spray felt like they were meant to live on the internet, almost in a modernist way, like it was wrong for the medium. They were trying to get a medium to do something that it wasn't supposed to do. And for me, painting was a way to play with images in a way that was native to the medium I was using. Almost right away it was about the internet, but it was also about history painting and, if you didn't get the internet stuff, it didn't matter. “They were all this way of realizing that appropriation was changing, and figuring out new ways to play in it. Coming into that period of time, with the peaches, it was still very much about the internet being a giant sandbox, and I got to play in it. It took a long time for me to really metabolize what that meant for art, as far as I was concerned.” Do you still feel like you're playing in the sandbox? Oh, yeah, there's still a lot that I get out of it. I've gotten a lot out of developing friendships with people who are online content creators, rather than just kind of randomly wandering around. I feel like I keep bringing up Tumblr, and I have noticed that Tumblr has started to pop off again since Twitter has kind of gone nuts. So, you know, who knows? Maybe there will be a nostalgic return to the Tumblr era? Stylistically with the peaches, you utilize this cross hatching that feels very reminiscent of the late 19th century and Impressionism. But it also almost feeds into the aesthetics of Apple’s Photo Booth and how you could select the crosshatch filter. It feels like it inhabits both territories. I like things that feel like common sense. And by that I mean the first thing that your brain goes to – the first associations you have – because those are the ones that feel the most ideologically robust. Even early Photoshop, people were already trying to figure out ways to make things look like art, and what choices does that bring up? How do they stumble on ways to change images, how much work do they put into being able to break an image up into cross hatches or pixelate things? It was much more about trying to think my way into making paintings that are about the history of painting, and using languages that would be legible to any audience, not just my peers. A lot of that came out of the same time, 2011, 2010, somewhere in there. I've been really close friends with Tobias Kaspar, the Swiss artist, for a long time. We drove out to see the Barnes Collection before it was moved to Philadelphia, so we could see it in its original state. That was a really revelatory experience. I went through a period of time where it felt like being too aware or too much of a fan of painting and art historical forms was for the historians. Like, “that's the dead stuff, and we're doing the live stuff.” All of my friends were hyper-focused on being as aware as you could be of the newest exhibitions, and the newest names. Saying this, l feel like a grandfather, but it was just really important to be contemporaneous and going to the Barnes that first time was the thing that broke me into truly seeing Impressionism. It felt like they were doing what we were doing. They were making fun of each other, they were being ironic and silly and stupid sometimes, and that felt like something I hadn't seen. You&nbsp; could see that they're talking to each other in ways that aren't always just building on each other. Sometimes they are trying to tear each other down. Coming out of that Barnes experience made me start looking for that stuff and trying to find these little references they made to each other. Another thing was noticing that Renoir would paint the same woman for a couple of years, the same person would appear over and over again. Courbet would paint the same woman over and over again. Being able to knit these things together gave it a kind of familiarity that I hadn't experienced before. Doing this cross hatching, trying to make things look somewhere between Cezanne and Wayne Thiebaud, that felt like a fun way to add a level of language I didn't have. I wasn't a painter, I didn't study painting. At the time that I started making those works, I had made works on canvas, but I never thought of them as capital “P” paintings. It was important for me to have a reason to do that learning process in front of all my friends. It was an opportunity for me to try things out and play around and not feel embarrassed that I didn't know what I was doing. <img width="314" height="446" width_o="314" height_o="446" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/99cb4d3479e25118e3bcb9e29b1f8de35b151ab8782108145e5f3589d024a5cc/ns_thewaterfalleva_ns-24-pa-236_web-copy.jpg" data-mid="233810431" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/314/i/99cb4d3479e25118e3bcb9e29b1f8de35b151ab8782108145e5f3589d024a5cc/ns_thewaterfalleva_ns-24-pa-236_web-copy.jpg" /> <img width="1000" height="1200" width_o="1000" height_o="1200" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ee30bc0e993b054d8e36638890a8ce15af6ae0027b92f1b59d7ce1e303a8e2d3/ns_thewaterfalleva_ns-24-pa-236_web.jpg" data-mid="233810430" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ee30bc0e993b054d8e36638890a8ce15af6ae0027b92f1b59d7ce1e303a8e2d3/ns_thewaterfalleva_ns-24-pa-236_web.jpg" /> The Waterfall (Eva), 2024oil and dye sublimation on linen mounted on board, 19 x 15 inches The body of work that utilizes masking tape and trompe l'oeil feels associated with this imagery as well. There’s all of this repetition that seems to hearken back to Tumblr, a platform where images are juxtaposed at random. How did you choose which images to place together? They almost feel like a poem, a bunch of different images that are meant to kind of coalesce into one thing. I worked for years for Alexander and Bonin, who showed Sylvia Plimack Mangold. Back in the 60s and 70s, she did a series of fake tape paintings, which I always thought were the most interesting part of the work. So I stole that. I thought, here's an opportunity for me to create a reference to the grid and to play around. I could make that format over and over again and vary it in minimal ways, and have an opportunity to paint whatever I wanted. I think at the time what was important about it was the incongruity of the images. I was posting those images to my private Tumblr, You could go into the HTML and fuck with the format of your blog. So these Tumblr formatting options were making the choices for me. I was going through the images that I had posted and finding moments when they were doing interesting things next to each other. I would screen grab it, and that would usually be the reason that, say, one was a little higher than the other. Certain choices were taken off my plate, which felt good. Almost immediately after doing that show, the idea of the fake tape paintings felt pretty dead. It was rooted in such a particular period of time that within six or eight months I felt I couldn't keep doing it. <img width="593" height="735" width_o="593" height_o="735" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f2f26cb60d4c11d637f34274d41762d91f5b564b0bec14239b3083af5cd30506/52_spirituallyalivepicturesofluxury_ns-14-pa-062-copy.jpg" data-mid="233810447" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/593/i/f2f26cb60d4c11d637f34274d41762d91f5b564b0bec14239b3083af5cd30506/52_spirituallyalivepicturesofluxury_ns-14-pa-062-copy.jpg" /> <img width="1181" height="1500" width_o="1181" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/68e8738511e844e2bd894635f9ee653f1c51e30a15bb99efb8aa7192f7101e4c/52_spirituallyalivepicturesofluxury_ns-14-pa-062.jpg" data-mid="233810442" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/68e8738511e844e2bd894635f9ee653f1c51e30a15bb99efb8aa7192f7101e4c/52_spirituallyalivepicturesofluxury_ns-14-pa-062.jpg" /> Spiritually Alive Pictures of Luxury, 2014oil and acrylic on canvas, 48 x 36 inches And is that when you moved into using the clothes as a landscape, the surrealism with these robes that have someone reading a paper? I think the chest paintings were pretty early. They might even have pre-existed the Tumblr paintings and then popped back up afterward. Those chest paintings were an opportunity to do very simple, juxtapositions of two kinds of images that had their own contradictory logics. It became a way to deal with minimal depth and deep perspective in the same painting. It might have been the shift of smartphones that precipitated that change. It was about the surface, but also about doing this worldly perspective, which is something I still think about. I think that impulse is universal at this point. There's not really a movement of painters doing landscape painting or cityscapes. We've all internalized the minimal depth of the screen. I did a couple of landscapes around that time, I think I noticed that problem and tried to play with it. I did a painting of the entrance to the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, which was just a dirt road and the tree. Within the fake tape paintings, I copied a Gauguin painting, and then on Google images, I found an image that was a similar perspective of the same mountain, playing around with the fact that you can do a landscape painting from anywhere if you really want to. I was thinking about other ways to use that technology to produce something different. But pretty quickly those close cropped body images took over as a more native language. <img width="857" height="583" width_o="857" height_o="583" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8f121d287d7d23d6dc4360182ede547e5068e9ff6c3b0d39f8f8995e66c87cf5/60_sweaterpainting_ns-12-pa-024-copy.jpg" data-mid="233810470" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/857/i/8f121d287d7d23d6dc4360182ede547e5068e9ff6c3b0d39f8f8995e66c87cf5/60_sweaterpainting_ns-12-pa-024-copy.jpg" /> <img width="1500" height="1267" width_o="1500" height_o="1267" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d68acc874ae215a445446b8893c9c66446f5ee800dd2338e463e62295a3288f1/60_sweaterpainting_ns-12-pa-024.jpg" data-mid="233810467" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d68acc874ae215a445446b8893c9c66446f5ee800dd2338e463e62295a3288f1/60_sweaterpainting_ns-12-pa-024.jpg" /> sweater painting, 2012oil on canvas, 16 x 20 inches You also curated that landscape show [LANDSCAPES, co-curated by&nbsp;Jake Palmert, Marlborough Gallery, 2016]. Yeah. That was weird. It was fun. “what you're calling truthiness is a consistent need to decenter or question my own impulses or my own attractions. That has always been present in the work and my life in general. It’s a fundamental sense of the world that I have.” I want to talk about this idea of “truthiness” that you mention, of authenticity being related to identity which is inherently fluid. This idea of how can a truth about identity or authenticity be a Truth? It feels like one of the things that ties all of these inquiries together is a self acknowledged truthiness, or of their existence as a painting. I was wondering if how you feel “truthiness” applies to your current bodies of work in comparison to the earlier, more overt ways of subverting that. I do feel that, what you're calling truthiness, is a consistent need to decenter or question my own impulses or my own attractions. That has always been present in the work and my life in general. It’s a fundamental sense of the world that I have. I’ve had lots of conversations with my therapist where she'll say, “why do you have such a hard time understanding what you want?” My impulse is always to respond “how does anyone ever feel convinced of what they want?” How do you not immediately think “well, where did that want come from?” Wondering about the origins of desire is the point of therapy, or at least psychoanalysis. Right, that's where we're supposed to do that. On the one hand, that impulse has felt very generative for painting and noticing opportunities to try something or shift interests or shift perspective. But in my personal life, it's daunting. It does congeal into an inability. It's taking me years to decorate my home, because I'm always like, “do I like this? Is this actually something I want?” I will say, one of the places that has been the easiest for me to overcome that doubt is in erotically charged spaces. Things that my body is really drawn towards are easier for me to accept as a “yes.” In the bodies of work that I'm working on now, I try to start with a yes, an intuition. Right now I'm reading Leo Steinberg’s The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Painting and Modern Oblivion, which is basically an extended thesis on why you see Jesus's penis in paintings. You don't see anybody else’s, so why do we see his? It's like noticing in Impressionist paintings when they're poking at each other, it makes some impulses in Renaissance painting feel more native to me. I can enter into how those choices were made or why, which makes me feel like I have a key to unlock this human connection from 500 years ago. And honestly, I do just identify with perverts and weirdos and people who take those stories and images with a little bit of a wry, mischievous quality. I think that impulse to doubt has kind of morphed into an enthusiasm for mischief. I now have a group of friends around me who I work with largely as my models. They're there with me, so they're willing to enter these strange places. We'll take all the parts of something and play around with it in a way that feels like the late stages of a sex party, where you're fooling around and flirting and having fun, and it doesn't have that initial anxiety. Everybody's comfortable around each other. We try to get there and play around with whatever imagery I have in mind. <img width="608" height="413" width_o="608" height_o="413" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6179226c1791a2c65a31ed34b0c99cbc4a44e9aae79a7c44b36d4781c2556102/ns_theilluminatinglightc._ns-24-pa-241_web-copy.jpg" data-mid="233810497" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/608/i/6179226c1791a2c65a31ed34b0c99cbc4a44e9aae79a7c44b36d4781c2556102/ns_theilluminatinglightc._ns-24-pa-241_web-copy.jpg" /> <img width="1003" height="1200" width_o="1003" height_o="1200" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/928b63a93bdc60e6169442c7f106969f943a319508e934cae7a42a5e5644fb89/ns_theilluminatinglightc._ns-24-pa-241_web.jpg" data-mid="233810495" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/928b63a93bdc60e6169442c7f106969f943a319508e934cae7a42a5e5644fb89/ns_theilluminatinglightc._ns-24-pa-241_web.jpg" /> The Illuminating Light (C.), 2024oil and dye sublimation on linen mounted on board, 19 x 15 inches There’s Sontag’s quote in Against Interpretation, “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” You can get caught up in a doom loop of interpreting yourself, but once you lead with eroticism or desire for desire’s sake, decisions are already made. Obviously, everybody is hyper-focused on David Lynch right now, but I was watching his master class yesterday, and he talks a lot about how you get an idea, and what an idea is. I don't tend to jive with those esoteric, woo-woo relationships to inspiration. I much more think of them as triggers of memory or idiosyncratic associations. The way he talked about what you do with intuition felt to me like an erotics of our moment. He talked about fishing – you catch a fish, and then what do you do with it? That part felt the most relevant to me, because it was about the erotic. Those “yes” feelings and that playful stuff, those are all mechanisms for unlocking things in the images. I take for granted that when I'm looking at something, or find myself attracted to an image or idea, I assume, right off the bat, that I don't fully understand what's going on, that there are parts of it that are occluded to me, and that inability to fully enter into something is actually part of what makes it useful to people. If it was too hyper-specific, it wouldn't be useful. I compare it to being invited to a party, and when you show up, everybody's already there and they're all doing some game or ritual that you've never seen before. You know that you're invited to this party, you're supposed to be there, but you have to stand back to watch and pick up on the unspoken rules. That, for me, is how we interpret culture in general. We're thrown into these things, and we do them, or we don't. And you know, when you’re in Milan at the casino [Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II], you put your foot on the bull’s testicles and you spin around, and does it do anything? Do you really understand what's going on? I don't know, but I'm going to do it anyway. One of my embarrassing go-to memories is Slavoj Žižek lectures. When I worked for Alexander and Bonin, I would put them on in the background and make boxes. He tells this anecdote about Niels Bohr working on the Manhattan Project, and a friend comes over and notices that he has an upside down horseshoe above his doorway. The friend says, “Niels, you're a scientist. You're not supposed to believe in that shit.” And he says, “oh, yeah, I don't believe in it. But a friend of mine told me that it works even if you don't believe in it.” That feels analogous to the way that I flow through the history of painting. I'm not an art historian, I'm never gonna know everything about this, but if I'm attracted to it, I know that I can pick it up and I can take it apart and I can use it, and I don't necessarily need to know why I make the connections I make. I just have to trust it. Maybe this is a relevant thing to bring back up, about how spending more than a day on a painting would feel embarrassing. At this point, I can spend months on a painting. Sometimes I delve deep into painting techniques to learn how to build something. It's taken over as something that is interesting to me. This is something I do every day, I might as well get good at it. When I have this kind of erotic attraction to an idea or an image, I go through this process of playing with it, and pulling it apart, and finding places that I still feel confused by. Even in photo shoots with my partners, we'll throw out ideas to see what produces the weirdest or most compelling images. At that point, I still have more than a month ahead of me sitting with that image. So if it starts to die on the vine, if it doesn't have that question mark still lingering in it, this openness in it that I can still enter into and feel confused by – that's the thing that keeps them interesting to me, keeps them open. I have a friend, Amanda, who lives in rural Pennsylvania. She takes these really beautiful photographs of herself, and she's one of the only people who I see consistently producing images that I feel both very attracted to and very confused by in a way that feels generative for me. We've developed a relationship where I'll make a painting a year based on a photo that she's taken. Otherwise I shoot everything, I do all the editing, and collecting of the objects and materials. It's really become this full on theater productions, in addition to all the painting. <img width="495" height="663" width_o="495" height_o="663" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/bd2bfd583c63512306c8a26d6dc4c5f0a89b1467ea6f211e01d210dd08800d0d/ns_marymariaamanda_ns-24-pa-234_web-copy.jpg" data-mid="233810510" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/495/i/bd2bfd583c63512306c8a26d6dc4c5f0a89b1467ea6f211e01d210dd08800d0d/ns_marymariaamanda_ns-24-pa-234_web-copy.jpg" /> <img width="1003" height="1200" width_o="1003" height_o="1200" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/58164e6cacce4eee64e4dc76d74d08b293b6654ad9fdddc1d9a520e0e6a92ad1/ns_marymariaamanda_ns-24-pa-234_web.jpg" data-mid="233810509" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/58164e6cacce4eee64e4dc76d74d08b293b6654ad9fdddc1d9a520e0e6a92ad1/ns_marymariaamanda_ns-24-pa-234_web.jpg" /> Mary Maria (Amanda), 2024oil and dye sublimation on linen mounted on board, 19 x 15 inches You can really see the point where you started creating these images. They became about the body in relationship to objects, or the body's relationship to objecthood. They are a little bit abject, but not quite all the way there. The feet that are cut off, but they're not cut off, they just exist as just a foot in the frame. I was also thinking about the painting you have of the boy's face with painted hands and all the sticky hands [Hands and Prayers, 2022]. It feels like it's poking its nose into the territory of “this is a hand, but it's not.” There was an earlier one where my friend Virginia and I organized this photo shoot in her ceramic studio, and I think we were there for three hours. I didn't know exactly what I wanted. I wanted three people all throwing a vessel at the same time, all these hands kind of interrupting each other and making the process more difficult. In the end, we did get a photo out of it, but it took forever, and that was down to not really knowing what I was looking for. But during a brief interlude we took to eat some food, I snapped a photo on my iPhone of Virginia biting into a clementine to open up the rind, and she still had the slip on her hands. It's about painting, but it’s internal to the scene. It's not interjecting painting into the environment, it's finding painting in the environment. So the colored latex painted hands very much came out of Virginia (2022), as a way of inserting painting into the environment. That's also the painting that I have gotten the most pushback on. Just using a kid's face was freaky. While making the image, if anything, he (Henry, age 11) was bored; but showing that painting, there's a real sensitivity to consent and images of children. It was also not that long after the Balenciaga thing with Michaël Borremans, the images with the teddy bears. It was really interesting to see how that “PizzaGate,” pedo discourse had permeated people's brains. <img width="757" height="800" width_o="757" height_o="800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/866cc3efef202a2e8fabdb0e2a188c0685e84087f2f103ed58caca4ab051464b/16_ns_henrywithhands_ns-22-pa-195-copy.jpg" data-mid="233810516" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/757/i/866cc3efef202a2e8fabdb0e2a188c0685e84087f2f103ed58caca4ab051464b/16_ns_henrywithhands_ns-22-pa-195-copy.jpg" /> <img width="1240" height="1500" width_o="1240" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cf87f9a807e1a0e27061d6ebfcfbe6805c83447a83ba6a2f3ea74c5df20c5eb5/16_ns_henrywithhands_ns-22-pa-195.jpg" data-mid="233810514" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/cf87f9a807e1a0e27061d6ebfcfbe6805c83447a83ba6a2f3ea74c5df20c5eb5/16_ns_henrywithhands_ns-22-pa-195.jpg" /> Hands and Prayers, 2022oil and dye sublimation on linen, 52 x 43 inches And even more recently that Sally Mann show in Texas getting censored. That's been a long-time problem for her since the 90s. This isn’t new pushback, maybe just within the current political and cultural climate. Perhaps with this change in administration, it's starting to rear itself in a similar way again. For sure, that 90’s cultural-social conservatism is back hard. And what comes with it is these Satanic Panic vibes that are brought back to the forefront. In a way, it's interesting to think about what would have happened to Chris Ofili or Sally Mann or Mapplethorpe, if the Internet had existed. “It has a politics in it that’s hard to see if you're not in the middle of an explosive political moment. There is a memory that gets newly enlivened when the politics of the moment matches the politics of the time that an object was made. It feels like a battery that's holding on to energy that’s dormant when the politics aren’t right.” What’s especially troubling is that the Right is more unified in their fear or opposition than the left is in their resistance to that fear, or in defense of art. It's very true. They really have cohered in a frightening way, and it's an international movement. Sorry to keep riffing on this, but when Occupy [Wall Street] was happening, there was this weird moment where all of a sudden, going to museums, the work felt different. Looking at Dada works from the 1910’s and 20’s, it felt like those works were holding on to something that I hadn’t noticed before. It has a politics in it that’s hard to see if you're not in the middle of an explosive political moment. There is a memory that gets newly enlivened when the politics of the moment matches the politics of the time that an object was made. It feels like a battery that's holding on to energy that’s dormant when the politics aren’t right. It's interesting to imagine going forward, now that we're re-entering this fascist era. The last time the Fascists were in power, there were artists there, there were the Futurists. There was Albert Speer, they had an aesthetic, and they were actually pretty good at it. Conservatives nowadays have no aesthetic. All they can do is say that art is bad. I'm really curious to see how that changes. Ten years ago there was a lecture with Odd Nerdrum and British Conservative art historian Roger Scruton. It started off normal enough, it was anti-contemporary and pro-kitsch. Within 45 minutes, especially once they got to audience questions, it was really clear just how Euro white-nationalist that aesthetic ideal was. Outright saying contemporary art is a cosmopolitan thing coming in from outside, and we need to retain our European heritage. It's really nasty stuff. I'm still seeing that stuff metastasize in the background of the art world and now that there's that Peter Thiel / Dime’s Square stuff. You wouldn't think that those two worlds would be connected, but they are. <img width="545" height="730" width_o="545" height_o="730" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/529efe467bd0540511c44b31c89db80e2707fce0c2ea48d8c126ce90f0d06b62/21_ns_potsandpants_ns-21-pa-185-copy.jpg" data-mid="233810918" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/545/i/529efe467bd0540511c44b31c89db80e2707fce0c2ea48d8c126ce90f0d06b62/21_ns_potsandpants_ns-21-pa-185-copy.jpg" /> <img width="1054" height="1500" width_o="1054" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3fec900c9f7bd94eda415e480a785f1f78e5a819433ded16545c7390e1535b9f/21_ns_potsandpants_ns-21-pa-185.jpg" data-mid="233810914" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3fec900c9f7bd94eda415e480a785f1f78e5a819433ded16545c7390e1535b9f/21_ns_potsandpants_ns-21-pa-185.jpg" /> Pots and Pants, 2021oil and dye sublimation on linen, 48 x 33 inches Yeah, and there’s Roger Kimball at the New Criterion who represents that old guard, similar to Scruton. I feel like he's been on this tip for decades now, and it's his time to shine. I do wonder what the left has to counter that, if there’s a cohesive movement on the horizon. You talk about Occupy [Wall Street] a lot, and that was a paradigm moment where there was a semblance of cohesion. It doesn't feel like there's a group anymore, which is scary. For sure. The feeling that all leftist possibilities are foreclosed is deliberate, I will say, from my perspective, and this is just my two cents, I think that politics has to come first. I don't think that artists are making it. I think that from the 1880s through the 1940s, artists were all very politically aware and politically engaged. But I think that they almost couldn't not be, and those political movements had to be there for them to attach themselves to. You know, the Futurists aren't making fascism. Mussolini is making fascism, and the futurists are there. It's like that Milton Friedman quote about the best ideas just laying around. You kind of have to be laying around as an artist. We would be having a very different conversation if Bernie [Sanders] had won in 2016. I don't know that it would have cohered a leftist movement, but it would make the politics of the art being made more clear. I'm a Marxist, and I believe there are issues in the foundations of the economy that are being played out. But there's an incoherence in the art world that follows that incoherence in politics. And I think that it's the idea of a second Trump administration, with him going to Chicago day one, that makes me think that there will be an art that will follow it. But they're starting from very little. Their aesthetic is AI – I don't know that there's anything for them to build on yet.There are clearly people who are trying to figure out how to support a conservative art movement, but all they have is our language. They can’t articulate it outside of the left’s critical language. The things that get promoted are just depoliticized versions of political art from the left, whether it's actively leftist artists, or just people who are casually progressive. That's a frontier that I'm nervous about, especially making the work that I make, let's be honest. I met up with some friends of mine, when my most recent show was most of the way done. We had some drinks and sat around and we talked about this, and I said, “is there a world where 40 years from now I'm being held up as somebody who's important to a nascent conservative painting movement?” They bring up the abjectness and queerness and a sort of sexual perversity that might make that reading difficult, but I'm not convinced that I'm fully out of the woods on that. It's something that I think about a lot. I'm doing what I'm doing because I think it's relevant, but it makes me nervous that it's relevant for bad reasons. I try to talk the talk and make sure that I'm supporting my friends and being a leftist in my everyday life. But what am I leaving out? I think that I'm doing the right thing by picking up those ideas and trying to pervert them and pull them over into this other discourse. But if we've learned anything in the last 10 years, it's that people's media literacy is underwater and they might just not see it. I have no idea. <img width="490" height="674" width_o="490" height_o="674" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4877cf50a145011e6c9a1bdcd5f6bdbacff6b047df8ffdbbbecf5f7a2f93ead1/ns_mariaasmadeleine80e11thst.apt403ashley_ns-24-pa-242_web-copy.jpg" data-mid="233810909" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/490/i/4877cf50a145011e6c9a1bdcd5f6bdbacff6b047df8ffdbbbecf5f7a2f93ead1/ns_mariaasmadeleine80e11thst.apt403ashley_ns-24-pa-242_web-copy.jpg" /> <img width="1004" height="1200" width_o="1004" height_o="1200" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8edbcbeb20ebede208fcf51fd4909e1273bd23f5980e15f50709f60b045a130d/ns_mariaasmadeleine80e11thst.apt403ashley_ns-24-pa-242_web.jpg" data-mid="233810907" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8edbcbeb20ebede208fcf51fd4909e1273bd23f5980e15f50709f60b045a130d/ns_mariaasmadeleine80e11thst.apt403ashley_ns-24-pa-242_web.jpg" /> Maria as Madeleine, 80 E. 11th St. Apt 403 (Ashley), 2024oil, PVA, silver leaf, and dye sublimation on linen mounted on board, 19 x 15 inches <img width="609" height="834" width_o="609" height_o="834" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5cb25d9a22ce31f50e399d9ca20b9ccfa504a3da9de3a96d778ff8cfbe5509dd/5_ns_softreinsfirsttools_ns-23-pa-211-copy.jpg" data-mid="233810702" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/609/i/5cb25d9a22ce31f50e399d9ca20b9ccfa504a3da9de3a96d778ff8cfbe5509dd/5_ns_softreinsfirsttools_ns-23-pa-211-copy.jpg" /> <img width="1265" height="1500" width_o="1265" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/face8836b0f5514acfbfde6f3ee67f7119640c4994a691c6e49c676d1c338cab/5_ns_softreinsfirsttools_ns-23-pa-211.jpg" data-mid="233810701" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/face8836b0f5514acfbfde6f3ee67f7119640c4994a691c6e49c676d1c338cab/5_ns_softreinsfirsttools_ns-23-pa-211.jpg" /> Soft Reins, First Tools, 2023oil and dye sublimation on linen mounted on board, 19 x 15 inches I hope that's not your problem. It is something that I have to stay aware of. I do sometimes not make work because I think it doesn't have enough of that other thing in it that might make it a difficult pill to swallow for somebody whose politics I don't like. It certainly does affect my choices. I think censorship and saying no to art and images is more reactionary than leftist. So by not censoring yourself, I think you're already on the right track. <img width="607" height="804" width_o="607" height_o="804" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/65ac5ae6610c5fb95972e5d3eefaf968a6b2cb7ce41ea98ca64de6a0fa58b45a/2_ns_thevenerationofstagathasbreasts_ns-23-pa-220_1-copy.jpg" data-mid="233810699" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/607/i/65ac5ae6610c5fb95972e5d3eefaf968a6b2cb7ce41ea98ca64de6a0fa58b45a/2_ns_thevenerationofstagathasbreasts_ns-23-pa-220_1-copy.jpg" /> <img width="1261" height="1500" width_o="1261" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/312014b391e0f94a4abae73cca4c9fef3eb5db6b7197c79ebfa1f2af404628a0/2_ns_thevenerationofstagathasbreasts_ns-23-pa-220_1.jpg" data-mid="233810697" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/312014b391e0f94a4abae73cca4c9fef3eb5db6b7197c79ebfa1f2af404628a0/2_ns_thevenerationofstagathasbreasts_ns-23-pa-220_1.jpg" /> The Veneration of St. Agatha’s Breasts, 2023oil and dye sublimation on linen mounted on board, 19 x 15 inches ︎: @iqwnadjcvnaliuf Images courtesy artist and 47 Canal, New York.All images: © Nolan Simon https://super-nyc.com/Nana-Wolke-text Tue, 06 May 2025 23:39:52 +0000 super! https://super-nyc.com/Nana-Wolke-text 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. <img width="1500" height="2000" width_o="1500" height_o="2000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/48749f23d8d12c40b3d201579b5aa1f81f84fc6e240b7bce574444b21c4369e5/250412_NW_14.jpg" data-mid="232873282" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/48749f23d8d12c40b3d201579b5aa1f81f84fc6e240b7bce574444b21c4369e5/250412_NW_14.jpg" /> <img width="2000" height="1500" width_o="2000" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cb69ec59a98df34008a561f2bc23255bf9bbb6c12165ed6181324640e137558d/250412_NW_13.jpg" data-mid="232873281" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/cb69ec59a98df34008a561f2bc23255bf9bbb6c12165ed6181324640e137558d/250412_NW_13.jpg" /> <img width="1500" height="2000" width_o="1500" height_o="2000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/91e1ab219768b0d354938d1b701e75af439b1621a7a2218ab89677c0908a8f55/250412_NW_15.jpg" data-mid="232873283" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/91e1ab219768b0d354938d1b701e75af439b1621a7a2218ab89677c0908a8f55/250412_NW_15.jpg" /> 00:23:20,750 --&gt; 00:37:17,042 (Little sister), 2025 oil and construction sand on linen,&nbsp;122 x 91 cm Courtesy of the artist, Management, New York, and Nicoletti, London. Photography by installshots.art / Inna Svyatksy Is there a central idea behind this body of work? I was really interested in this idea of living on the outskirts, or outside of the center, but being close enough to be in view of New York. For example, when you're upstate or in New Jersey. I grew up on the edge of what is still considered Ljubljana, outside of the highway ring, as Ljubljančani call it . In the body of work shown at Independent I was thinking about that proximity to something that feels greater and grander, especially when you’re transitioning from late stage girlhood into early adulthood, and navigating for example femininity for the first time, figuring out what it means to have this newfound sort of power, but still grappling with a lot of insecurities in that stage. I wanted to work with three characteristically distinct but sister-like girls that you see in two of the paintings to capture some of that confidence, and, at the same time, that brief, in-between period of growing into your own skin. It almost feels like a stage you’re in for a few months, ideally a steamy summer, because eventually in the process of exploration you’ll burn yourself and just have to deal with whatever adulthood actually brings. Oftentimes, in my work, I'm interested in various brief moments of this kind. With painting in particular, capturing time was always an interesting challenge, because it doesn’t immediately lend itself to the question of time as automatically as for example film, it instead feel somewhat unmovable and eternal. Yet it isn't a frozen moment. For example, a photograph represents a split second, but painting has something much more layered built into it around it that's been accumulated over its long history. My way of working begins with film footage shot on&nbsp; set. These sets aren’t made up, they are actual locations that are interesting to me for whatever reason. Oftentimes, either on the outskirts of cities or in this kind of in between zones where maybe the city itself is changing and suddenly joining two very different parts of neighborhoods that normally wouldn't interact, or two different groups of people that don't we wouldn’t necessarily encounter in mainstream culture. So it’s focused on these glitches in the urban environment which become an inspiration for what I record often, in collaboration with people from the community, and then I separate the footage into painting and sound. I’m painting from stills and photographs, and then working with composers and musicians separately on original scores and sound pieces. In a way it’s a standard film process dissected. I always wanted to be a filmmaker, but didn't like all the fuss that went into the making of it, being so dependent on&nbsp; investors, the overwhelming production, it really sucks out immediacy and playfulness. In a lot of ways, you're restricted, you have to be constantly asking for permission, and as soon as you have trucks of clumsy equipment, it’s hindering what you're able to do. I devised a way of working that is very crude, that looks like a joke on the outside. You know, phone cameras, consumer-grade cameras that can be put in a small purse, flashlights. It’s very simple equipment that's actually very good–or sometimes purposefully bad –and so easy to use. That's the moment in technology we have right now. You can find so many things that are tiny and compact and still able to deliver incredible quality, and work with these things, instead of bringing in huge equipment and a massive crew to operate it, because then I can also get my way around permits normally required for a lot of locations, especially Wanda’s [NiCOLETTi, London, 2022] was a show that I couldn't have done in the same way if I had to get permission to shoot in the car park. Even Seinfeld famously had built a set full of mirrors to create the illusion of a&nbsp; car park, it’s just too complicated with all the vehicles and parking fees. <img width="1536" height="1024" width_o="1536" height_o="1024" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c004ec5b1974398273d18b1a039da3c776097705710d6f15b2206870402c1422/Nana-Wolke-Install-12-1536x1024.jpg" data-mid="232873241" border="0" data-scale="94" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c004ec5b1974398273d18b1a039da3c776097705710d6f15b2206870402c1422/Nana-Wolke-Install-12-1536x1024.jpg" /> <img width="1536" height="1024" width_o="1536" height_o="1024" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/886cd1ce704c0023edcd67c6aca1b09a3d280af42b7592ceb31952c0f3152b1e/Nana-Wolke-Install-07-1536x1024.jpg" data-mid="232873238" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/886cd1ce704c0023edcd67c6aca1b09a3d280af42b7592ceb31952c0f3152b1e/Nana-Wolke-Install-07-1536x1024.jpg" /> Install view, Wanda’s, NiCOLETTi, London, 2022-2023 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. <img width="2000" height="1500" width_o="2000" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1f6585130a5e9a9c3f64b26fcb5ee9e0c6f1e6d004dfaac2acdf3a29e0a28805/250412_NW_2.jpg" data-mid="232873261" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1f6585130a5e9a9c3f64b26fcb5ee9e0c6f1e6d004dfaac2acdf3a29e0a28805/250412_NW_2.jpg" /> <img width="2000" height="1500" width_o="2000" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1f0532700993ad4c8a7e25ff25b3d511e03bb1046ae448bf647d2c7a35f81cf7/250412_NW_1.jpg" data-mid="232873260" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1f0532700993ad4c8a7e25ff25b3d511e03bb1046ae448bf647d2c7a35f81cf7/250412_NW_1.jpg" /> <img width="2000" height="1500" width_o="2000" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f68baaf544aaaf59c39ba7c4ecb20364651746fda2801438c8a6c059563c6a45/250412_NW_3.jpg" data-mid="232873263" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f68baaf544aaaf59c39ba7c4ecb20364651746fda2801438c8a6c059563c6a45/250412_NW_3.jpg" /> 00:00:00,000 --&gt; 00:16:41,417 (Great big white world), 2025 oil and construction sand on linen,&nbsp;140 x 200 cm Courtesy of the artist, Management, New York, and Nicoletti, London. Photography by installshots.art / Inna Svyatksy &nbsp; 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&nbsp; 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&nbsp; 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&nbsp; 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&nbsp; 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. <img width="750" height="500" width_o="750" height_o="500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c918d3b6fd7bc1afd2ccf6d6d4a3e95920cd7295f9b322d2596f5a30a6acc1c5/nicolettti-ref-2316-23-750x500.jpg" data-mid="232873365" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/750/i/c918d3b6fd7bc1afd2ccf6d6d4a3e95920cd7295f9b322d2596f5a30a6acc1c5/nicolettti-ref-2316-23-750x500.jpg" /> <img width="750" height="500" width_o="750" height_o="500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/fe593920813a2b9d389b05ff5ceb99d277c8f04135b293e6af48b0a188962eba/nicolettti-ref-2383-6-750x500.jpg" data-mid="232873366" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/750/i/fe593920813a2b9d389b05ff5ceb99d277c8f04135b293e6af48b0a188962eba/nicolettti-ref-2383-6-750x500.jpg" /> <img width="750" height="500" width_o="750" height_o="500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/eb18f01dfdc365f2f6e9007525bd5f251ddafc859e34ad28d0d19989e9ae4e25/nicolettti-ref-2587-81-750x500.jpg" data-mid="232873367" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/750/i/eb18f01dfdc365f2f6e9007525bd5f251ddafc859e34ad28d0d19989e9ae4e25/nicolettti-ref-2587-81-750x500.jpg" /> Installation view, Liste 2024 with NiCOLETTI 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&nbsp; 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&nbsp; 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. <img width="1500" height="2000" width_o="1500" height_o="2000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d48e79c21cc8d9322fa74c0fc9a3e8fa4ed32daa5ec436d1034e85da3076fe6a/250412_NW_17.jpg" data-mid="232873433" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d48e79c21cc8d9322fa74c0fc9a3e8fa4ed32daa5ec436d1034e85da3076fe6a/250412_NW_17.jpg" /> <img width="1500" height="2000" width_o="1500" height_o="2000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ceef31b85dacc1542e455b16df7230f01fd76cbb1915a82669b8bd6dbec21787/250412_NW_16.jpg" data-mid="232873431" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ceef31b85dacc1542e455b16df7230f01fd76cbb1915a82669b8bd6dbec21787/250412_NW_16.jpg" /> <img width="2000" height="1500" width_o="2000" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9784e3c11d045f6f9e6bf442710179f28499b593085fb7d9de8e308165f3e777/250412_NW_18.jpg" data-mid="232873434" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9784e3c11d045f6f9e6bf442710179f28499b593085fb7d9de8e308165f3e777/250412_NW_18.jpg" /> 00:56:00,500 --&gt; 01:21:07,625 (Each time I make my mother cry an angel dies and goes to heaven), 2025 oil and construction sand on linen, 200 x 140 cm Courtesy of the artist, Management, New York, and Nicoletti, London. Photography by installshots.art / Inna Svyatksy “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.” 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&nbsp; 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.” <img width="1397" height="2000" width_o="1397" height_o="2000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5f964ac6d5a3f90bdfca507589fb4cdbd42756fcbadae1e4392becb088c8b2ee/250412_NW_10.jpg" data-mid="232873454" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5f964ac6d5a3f90bdfca507589fb4cdbd42756fcbadae1e4392becb088c8b2ee/250412_NW_10.jpg" /> <img width="6000" height="4500" width_o="6000" height_o="4500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1a48d6239b68949b655063c9b78946de432046f296fdd490b98362b487bcfd51/250412_NW_9.jpg" data-mid="232873452" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1a48d6239b68949b655063c9b78946de432046f296fdd490b98362b487bcfd51/250412_NW_9.jpg" /> <img width="2000" height="1500" width_o="2000" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4ac0fa48b2f878508eb88a618418b578340269b5213a87544de143e3a52e482c/250412_NW_11.jpg" data-mid="232873455" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4ac0fa48b2f878508eb88a618418b578340269b5213a87544de143e3a52e482c/250412_NW_11.jpg" /> 00:24:53,208 --&gt; 00:25:59,750 (Mint julep testosterone), 2025 oil and construction sand on linen,&nbsp;&nbsp;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. &nbsp;&nbsp; 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. <img width="982" height="682" width_o="982" height_o="682" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7683bc21134c25e0a26fb4537991b7ef2e5a28c12895b15cc603738340330830/Its-good-enough-for-Nancy.-Its-good-enough-for-Nancy_2024-1536x1155-copy.jpg" data-mid="232873473" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/982/i/7683bc21134c25e0a26fb4537991b7ef2e5a28c12895b15cc603738340330830/Its-good-enough-for-Nancy.-Its-good-enough-for-Nancy_2024-1536x1155-copy.jpg" /> <img width="1536" height="1155" width_o="1536" height_o="1155" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/906dd2fa4a3f7165e2fbea2f59e3474d210016c874c6d0f1ba8eb1859981a0a7/Its-good-enough-for-Nancy.-Its-good-enough-for-Nancy_2024-1536x1155.jpg" data-mid="232873468" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/906dd2fa4a3f7165e2fbea2f59e3474d210016c874c6d0f1ba8eb1859981a0a7/Its-good-enough-for-Nancy.-Its-good-enough-for-Nancy_2024-1536x1155.jpg" /> 00:00:00,000 - - &gt; 01:36:06,960 (It’s good enough for Nancy. It’s good enough for Nancy), 2024oil and iron filings on linen, 61 × 91.5 cmCourtesy 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,&nbsp; 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. <img width="844" height="701" width_o="844" height_o="701" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7dec2cc01a5a08ff9e271e19f826af12eec4465b8b1399640b7e45dfb6f2fc95/Empire_2023-1536x1152-copy.jpg" data-mid="232873502" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/844/i/7dec2cc01a5a08ff9e271e19f826af12eec4465b8b1399640b7e45dfb6f2fc95/Empire_2023-1536x1152-copy.jpg" /> <img width="1536" height="1152" width_o="1536" height_o="1152" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/fab59195410efbf6f7590a4b5a62525889781436ef4a1b71192faf2a3a915751/Empire_2023-1536x1152.jpg" data-mid="232873476" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/fab59195410efbf6f7590a4b5a62525889781436ef4a1b71192faf2a3a915751/Empire_2023-1536x1152.jpg" /> 00:02:26,417 - - &gt; 00:02:29,010 (Empire), 2024Oil and construction sand on linen, 180 × 240 cm Courtesy of the artist and Management, New York. Photography by installshots.art / Inna Svyatksy “The concept of a gated community is now changing with technology and what's accessible to us... these shows were tapping into the space beyond the gate and offering&nbsp; an exclusive tour of somewhere most would never be able to walk into.” Like a neighborhood watch?&nbsp; 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&nbsp; 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 so inhibited. 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. <img width="875" height="631" width_o="875" height_o="631" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0c40d136630bde1fcb53ed51fc2ab57db3b1bce12d4fc0af831db3bbdce18e49/Ansicht-mit-Rum-Kokos-Kugeln-2-1536x1152-copy.jpg" data-mid="232873548" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/875/i/0c40d136630bde1fcb53ed51fc2ab57db3b1bce12d4fc0af831db3bbdce18e49/Ansicht-mit-Rum-Kokos-Kugeln-2-1536x1152-copy.jpg" /> <img width="1536" height="1152" width_o="1536" height_o="1152" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8248ca7af6b46f240bcf9cc8ee07ce04c8293dcdae44ca9a44d7f4c9509c4125/Ansicht-mit-Rum-Kokos-Kugeln-2-1536x1152.jpg" data-mid="232873535" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8248ca7af6b46f240bcf9cc8ee07ce04c8293dcdae44ca9a44d7f4c9509c4125/Ansicht-mit-Rum-Kokos-Kugeln-2-1536x1152.jpg" /> 00:02:15,300 - - &gt; 00:02:45,800 (Ansicht mit Rum-Kokos Kugeln), 2024 oil and iron filings on linen, 61 x 91.5 cm Courtesy of the artist, Management, New York, and Nicoletti, London. Photography by installshots.art / Inna Svyatksy Yeah, to walk from here to there, you’re mapped on five different intercoms. 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. It's interesting also that you have this link between dogs and cameras. You had a painting in a group show of a little dog [Companion, 2023], and then I saw the same dog on your Instagram. Yeah, that’s the show’s POV, Sassy. She is sassy. <img width="768" height="719" width_o="768" height_o="719" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e733e1d0d04078b3387c6df26ce3893c9beff2e70f6993cb3824f6625705750c/Nana-Wolke_Companion-1_0479_JCLARK-2-copy.jpg" data-mid="232873553" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/768/i/e733e1d0d04078b3387c6df26ce3893c9beff2e70f6993cb3824f6625705750c/Nana-Wolke_Companion-1_0479_JCLARK-2-copy.jpg" /> <img width="1365" height="2048" width_o="1365" height_o="2048" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/93f1e0905ee70025851ce4a680167805b0196a8a8520c3ac080f8c507d49fdde/Nana-Wolke_Companion-1_0479_JCLARK-2.jpg" data-mid="232873550" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/93f1e0905ee70025851ce4a680167805b0196a8a8520c3ac080f8c507d49fdde/Nana-Wolke_Companion-1_0479_JCLARK-2.jpg" /> Companion (2540 S Bayshore Dr, Miami, FL), 2023Aluminum and brass frames, oil and construction sand on linen, AV equipment, original score by Robert Balanas, 109.3 × 145.4 × 40 cm And then in Wanda’s, you were working with the largest dog in London, and in Breed where your video is from the dog's point of view. It’s really funny, my parents do have those cameras, but they have them inside our house too; the entire first floor of my parents house is wired with cameras that they can tap into on their phone, and they actually use them primarily to check in on our dogs when they’re elsewhere. 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&nbsp; 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&nbsp; 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&nbsp; 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&nbsp; 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&nbsp; 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,&nbsp; so you’re focusing on something&nbsp; 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&nbsp; into it. But then, if you suddenly understand that it's a dog’s perspective, it shifts back that dynamic and power balance. <img width="617" height="413" width_o="617" height_o="413" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e85747b4123e5561171473196d2ab89e442d87577d0464c74053b3877799935f/Bildschirmfoto-2024-05-24-um-11.31.55-copy.png" data-mid="232873560" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/617/i/e85747b4123e5561171473196d2ab89e442d87577d0464c74053b3877799935f/Bildschirmfoto-2024-05-24-um-11.31.55-copy.png" /> <img width="1208" height="934" width_o="1208" height_o="934" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a55c08f204998a155decf9f3b67ce766fb3d5563941db9a41feb48c2d53b0228/Bildschirmfoto-2024-05-24-um-11.31.55.png" data-mid="232873557" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a55c08f204998a155decf9f3b67ce766fb3d5563941db9a41feb48c2d53b0228/Bildschirmfoto-2024-05-24-um-11.31.55.png" /> Invoice-284911, 2024Email invitation Leading from the idea of the vet bill, the promotional materials for your shows are always related to the content; it seems they're quite centered in terms of archiving them on your website. It feels like an important part of your world building. Are you doing something similar for this body of work? For an art fair I am taking&nbsp; 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&nbsp; 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&nbsp; makes such a difference, for example&nbsp; 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&nbsp; something else eventually, at times I almost forget what the initial idea was, because it took on&nbsp; 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&nbsp; 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&nbsp; proper money towards a feature length or an elaborate&nbsp; short film.” Then I'd be like, “okay, yeah, let's totally do that.” But that would then be a real&nbsp; feature film, and that’s&nbsp; 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&nbsp; 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&nbsp; 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&nbsp; 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&nbsp; distribution doesn’t guarantee a meaningful return. <img width="1639" height="2048" width_o="1639" height_o="2048" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d01b903018e7bb97e0dcb8b5faa36a9d901e95360cb35ee90d05a1da9dc066e6/Poster-Wanda_s-1639x2048.jpg" data-mid="232873586" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d01b903018e7bb97e0dcb8b5faa36a9d901e95360cb35ee90d05a1da9dc066e6/Poster-Wanda_s-1639x2048.jpg" /> Poster for Wanda’s 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&nbsp; stuck in&nbsp; 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&nbsp; 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&nbsp; 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&nbsp; 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. <img width="2000" height="1500" width_o="2000" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7883363d44c901235bfaea558e627734ff1864d113ac6621522cabdc726bbb42/250412_NW_6.jpg" data-mid="232873618" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7883363d44c901235bfaea558e627734ff1864d113ac6621522cabdc726bbb42/250412_NW_6.jpg" /> <img width="2000" height="1500" width_o="2000" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4f34416bc21114f77bf3b10ce64ed1a17170b61f3593c6d438e9a41b3b8ba745/250412_NW_5.jpg" data-mid="232873616" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4f34416bc21114f77bf3b10ce64ed1a17170b61f3593c6d438e9a41b3b8ba745/250412_NW_5.jpg" /> <img width="1500" height="2000" width_o="1500" height_o="2000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5b627127577020480d7890ea209235178bc7ad4b5af68a3ba67ab18cb5ebf1a1/250412_NW_7.jpg" data-mid="232873620" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5b627127577020480d7890ea209235178bc7ad4b5af68a3ba67ab18cb5ebf1a1/250412_NW_7.jpg" /> 00:00:00,000 --&gt; 00:16:41,417 (Don’t let them throw me away), 2025 oil and construction sand on linen,&nbsp;140 x 200 cm Courtesy of the artist, Management, New York, and Nicoletti, London. Photography by installshots.art / Inna Svyatksy 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&nbsp; 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&nbsp; 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. <img width="750" height="500" width_o="750" height_o="500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6772a9fcd7ffe4764bf32a4a95b55810065657776061a6750adef394d612777d/nana-wolke-install-04-750x500.jpg" data-mid="232873599" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/750/i/6772a9fcd7ffe4764bf32a4a95b55810065657776061a6750adef394d612777d/nana-wolke-install-04-750x500.jpg" /> Install view, Wanda’s, NiCOLETTi, London, 2022-2023 ︎: @nanawolke Images courtesy artist, Management, New York, NiCOLETTI, London.All images: © Nana Wolke https://super-nyc.com/Tommy-Harrison-2 Thu, 01 May 2025 17:45:21 +0000 super! https://super-nyc.com/Tommy-Harrison-2 A portentous hand points out, seemingly to nothing from a cerulean drape. Framed by drawn stage curtains, a toilet peers out from the shadows behind greenish, rusting metal rolling shutters. A headless figure likewise peers out from those acidic metal shutters, dressed in a gown from sometime bygone, and holds a string that crosses horizontally across its midsection. There’s an eerie sense of suggestion to these images—but like the hand, they seem to point directly to something unseen, intangible, a mood. Each element in these paintings by the Manchester based Tommy Harrison, from ominous objects to unlikely settings, from varying brushstroke styles to a profusion of layers of color, is in a state of tension with one another. We spoke with Harrison about his current show Displays at GRIMM in London, and how this holistic sense of tension can be carried across a body of pictures. <img width="2470" height="1809" width_o="2470" height_o="1809" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/86f176e1f0bd5905031fe0b73d44eb311dfe1463ef606f31f016c803f508500a/portrait.jpeg" data-mid="231831096" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/86f176e1f0bd5905031fe0b73d44eb311dfe1463ef606f31f016c803f508500a/portrait.jpeg" />Studio portrait by Timon Benson. So you're calling in from your studio in the Maple Industrial Estate Complex, correct? Yes, I'm here right now. It’s a weird part of town but the studio is a nice size for the money. I was thinking about your background in architecture and how you’ve said that you're interested in the balance of the canvas. Can you speak to the relation of your architecture career and your paintings? I actually studied Landscape Architecture, so I focused heavily on soft materials; plants and trees mostly. I was always very ecologically minded. That comes naturally to me, but I had some great teachers who brought it out further. Nigel Dunnett for example, he designed the Olympic Park in London. Piet Oudolf was a visiting lecturer too, and he designed the High Line park. Sheffield was a great university for Landscape Architecture. I did a lot of bird’s-eye view plans of space, in which you have to consider a design language; the space needs to be unified. I guess you’d ideally avoid having a sharp angle and then a curved line in close succession for example, especially if the space was small. There was always a distribution or balance that you’d be considering. Things need to go in the right place and make a satisfactory whole. Maybe my interest was born from this. <img width="1598" height="1993" width_o="1598" height_o="1993" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/acd0afaf0f68ce585ec51acfd27793593f1c1fbf1f53da22e4e5d096f41b576f/Tommy-Harrison_Display-I--2025_THA25005-copy.jpg" data-mid="231831086" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/acd0afaf0f68ce585ec51acfd27793593f1c1fbf1f53da22e4e5d096f41b576f/Tommy-Harrison_Display-I--2025_THA25005-copy.jpg" /> <img width="4800" height="6000" width_o="4800" height_o="6000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/086699f5b8695bec432ab02e1b1408ea94c2645ef0900ee304b8d52afaed0773/Tommy-Harrison_Display-I--2025_THA25005.jpg" data-mid="231831085" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/086699f5b8695bec432ab02e1b1408ea94c2645ef0900ee304b8d52afaed0773/Tommy-Harrison_Display-I--2025_THA25005.jpg" /> Display I, 2025oil on linen, 200 x 120 cm Photography: Michael Pollard It's interesting what you just said, because in your canvases, you strike this balance between rectilinear and organic forms. How do you consider the balance between ways of handling paint? Some objects have an airbrushed quality versus a very painterly application, like with feathers or fur. Is that also part of the balance aspect? Definitely. That probably has less to do with a systematic placement, and more to do with an intuitive sense. I build paint up in many ways. Sometimes for example, I lightly dab it, so it just catches the teeth of the weave, allowing the layer beneath to shine through. However, if I do that too much, it can be bombastic and then I want something else painted a bit softer or milkier. Equally, if there’s not enough going on, I have to add something with a different temperament, quicker flicks of grass or fluffy plant heads or something, bird feathers too. It's constantly “does this area sit right,” so I have to add or remove things as it progresses. <img width="2843" height="2079" width_o="2843" height_o="2079" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c12083dbdf97ef4691bbb36e70d9310d0feb7345cbb832bb851bbcd9d67dada0/Tommy-Harrison_Twins--2024_TH24001-copy.jpg" data-mid="231831040" border="0" data-scale="96" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c12083dbdf97ef4691bbb36e70d9310d0feb7345cbb832bb851bbcd9d67dada0/Tommy-Harrison_Twins--2024_TH24001-copy.jpg" /> <img width="6000" height="4332" width_o="6000" height_o="4332" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/403a3a52a8425b1de6c582fd7b7b23ba0157522a2ef73ce40b7073843cd9cffc/Tommy-Harrison_Twins--2024_TH24001.jpg" data-mid="231831082" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/403a3a52a8425b1de6c582fd7b7b23ba0157522a2ef73ce40b7073843cd9cffc/Tommy-Harrison_Twins--2024_TH24001.jpg" /> Twins, 2024oil on canvas, 80 x 110 cm Photography: Michael Pollard Has your approach always been to start on the canvas then adjust and move the elements? Did you ever start with a study? How did you figure out that this is the best way to go about it? I started off doing studies a couple of years ago, and I've tried since (as I sometimes feel like it could make my life a lot easier). However, it just doesn't work. I don't know why; I just can't. Firstly, I don’t&nbsp;find it particularly exciting, just transferring a drawing. I also think that the scale shift makes things look wrong, a space can be too big, or an object is too small. I just find it more stimulating to work a the scale of the final painting. I also think it can lead to a more exciting place. If I was to compose on a piece of paper, I feel like I'd get there easier, whereas when it's on the canvas, things have to be removed, and then colour shines through from something painted beneath. There’s more opportunity to find things. The idea of creating problems that then have to be solved can be generative. You’re correct. That’s a good way of putting it. I was also wondering how you arrived at your use of tailor's chalk. I've never really heard of someone using that as an underpainting. I was complaining to my friend about how drawing in pencil would make the paint dirty, and he suggested tailors chalk. I immediately bought some and found that it was perfect, you can remove it with your fingers almost. It just vanishes. <img width="2583" height="1937" width_o="2583" height_o="1937" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c4d00e30efdced6a8b7f2cefbc332cbeba336c6f1c521432aed4b0d0a342f4bc/Tommy-Harrison_Display-II--2025_THA25001-copy.jpg" data-mid="231831044" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c4d00e30efdced6a8b7f2cefbc332cbeba336c6f1c521432aed4b0d0a342f4bc/Tommy-Harrison_Display-II--2025_THA25001-copy.jpg" /> <img width="7499" height="6000" width_o="7499" height_o="6000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/33efd3f49182e1956361d7c84f1008dfe86235a4e4a99c48375aa0b800f7da28/Tommy-Harrison_Display-II--2025_THA25001_floor.jpg" data-mid="231831043" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/33efd3f49182e1956361d7c84f1008dfe86235a4e4a99c48375aa0b800f7da28/Tommy-Harrison_Display-II--2025_THA25001_floor.jpg" /> Display II, 2025 oil on linen, 30 x 40 cm Photography: Michael Pollard &nbsp; So the chalk doesn't have any effect on the paint? No, but the mark is about as thick as a pencil mark. You were also a studio assistant for Louise Giovanelli, who you shared the complex with. I know you did have formal schooling, but I was wondering if there's anything you learned from practicing with an artist that you felt like you wouldn't have otherwise achieved. Definitely. I think materials, for sure, and ambition. I'd learned about materials at school, but she used aluminium stretchers instead of wood, and super high-quality linen, things like that. Just seeing the ambition and the scale of things in her studio, you know, just really committing to it, made me much more ambitious in what I was making. I was working in a restaurant at the same time I was working for her. So buying those materials was financially daunting, but I just did it and took the hit. Her work ethic too is exceptional, I learned a lot from her. What inaugurated that switch from these grander, busier scenes, to something a little bit more honed in? In the shutter paintings I’ve been working on recently, I’m really trying to limit the ‘additions,’ trying to stay purer to the initial idea. I find doing less and holding back much more challenging, so I wanted to test myself. It must be very different to have the work in your studio, this very industrial space, and then to see them in a gallery space. Does that ever have an effect on a body of work? Have you ever considered showing outside of a white cube space? Yes, it is very different. However, I have only ever felt happy when seeing the work in a gallery, I find that good lighting amplifies my colour. The light in this studio has a yellow tinge to it, so they appea duller. I've never had a strong desire to show outside of a white cube space, but I would, if the lighting was good. So what are you working on for your upcoming show with Grimm in April [Displays, 2025]? I can give you a little tour, actually, if you'd care. <img width="6000" height="4500" width_o="6000" height_o="4500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2cb6decc811320d7a3548b24e3d7d33c1e4f3bca04643f7756912cbb97e73dc8/Installation-view_Tommy-Harrison_GRIMM_London-UK--2025_6.jpg" data-mid="231831046" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2cb6decc811320d7a3548b24e3d7d33c1e4f3bca04643f7756912cbb97e73dc8/Installation-view_Tommy-Harrison_GRIMM_London-UK--2025_6.jpg" /> <img width="6000" height="4500" width_o="6000" height_o="4500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1a034536ae7aca2f8e167a32422c236a9da1c3b86c5b9c44b79d3a001fd97717/Installation-view_Tommy-Harrison_GRIMM_London-UK--2025_4.jpg" data-mid="231831045" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1a034536ae7aca2f8e167a32422c236a9da1c3b86c5b9c44b79d3a001fd97717/Installation-view_Tommy-Harrison_GRIMM_London-UK--2025_4.jpg" /> <img width="6000" height="4500" width_o="6000" height_o="4500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2831387175d62aa0574fbf0c09cc2c393c9c272dbb60b19f9f6853bd995b9884/Installation-view_Tommy-Harrison_GRIMM_London-UK--2025_8.jpg" data-mid="231831047" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2831387175d62aa0574fbf0c09cc2c393c9c272dbb60b19f9f6853bd995b9884/Installation-view_Tommy-Harrison_GRIMM_London-UK--2025_8.jpg" /> Installation view, Displays, 2025,GRIMM, London Photography: Stephen White &amp; Co. Definitely. I've been working on a series of shutter paintings over the past year and I'm going to town with them for this show. I haven’t shown these double shutters before; they are wider but still 2m in height. Traditionally I’ve worked with found images- usually from art history- but in this show, photographed elements from my daily life are moving into the work. This car here [Display IV, 2025] is just a crashed-up car from outside my studio, and I have no idea why it's there. It's just been there for years, and no one has any clue what happened to it. Over time I have found it very stimulating, it raises lots of questions. Equally, it’s certainly visual evidence of a pretty harrowing event. I find it eerie. But it marks the first time I’ve worked directly from a photograph that I've taken myself, something which I’ve found exceptionally freeing. So I plan to do more of that going forward. <img width="3823" height="2968" width_o="3823" height_o="2968" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2dcd0a0ae6acc1fc732461541603fa01a739b2a46631da4939c64ffd450881ef/Tommy-Harrison_Display-IV--2025_THA25002-copy.jpg" data-mid="231831049" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2dcd0a0ae6acc1fc732461541603fa01a739b2a46631da4939c64ffd450881ef/Tommy-Harrison_Display-IV--2025_THA25002-copy.jpg" /> <img width="7500" height="6000" width_o="7500" height_o="6000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b0338c73672ae3be64061108435231175868ca098eaef7c01e102fafba23421a/Tommy-Harrison_Display-IV--2025_THA25002.jpg" data-mid="231831048" border="0" data-scale="72" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b0338c73672ae3be64061108435231175868ca098eaef7c01e102fafba23421a/Tommy-Harrison_Display-IV--2025_THA25002.jpg" /> Display IV, 2025 oil on linen, 200 x 270 cm Photography: Michael Pollard In some of your early work, for example the Kafka painting and the hung thief [String Vibrating in the Mist], there's a brief period where you involve the figure, and then there's a period where the figure becomes more of a suggestion than a central point, like with the woman’s arm in Corridor ii [2023]. Now you’ve just done that painting for that self-portrait show at Grimm [Self-Portraits, 2024], is the figure moving slowly back into your work? I’m thinking of that work you have there in the studio, the one of Christ. Yes, I returned to this intentionally, but also whilst maintaining the suggestive quality you mention. The work I made in-between included animals, functioning as figures. I liked this as I stopped questioning myself on who and why? However, in time, I wanted to return to the formal and symbolic force that the figure can provide. I have only ever painted myself as a known human model. Generally, my ‘figures’ are actually just images, mannequins or sculptures within a painting. At most they’re an extended arm or peeping hand. I do this as I want to reduce them to their symbolic and formal functions, without a larger narrative being introduced. <img width="2138" height="3599" width_o="2138" height_o="3599" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0a96adbc2db1110c29914e4a1a64cba393128f2ef52acbc0ccc49b0c8a60ca13/Tommy-Harrison_Corridor-ii--2023_THA23022-copy.jpg" data-mid="231831062" border="0" data-scale="46" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0a96adbc2db1110c29914e4a1a64cba393128f2ef52acbc0ccc49b0c8a60ca13/Tommy-Harrison_Corridor-ii--2023_THA23022-copy.jpg" /> <img width="4286" height="6000" width_o="4286" height_o="6000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7acfc909ad7bbafee64976e60f90692368d8dc70e4932630c447d634e5478aa2/Tommy-Harrison_Corridor-ii--2023_THA23022.jpg" data-mid="231831061" border="0" data-scale="59" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7acfc909ad7bbafee64976e60f90692368d8dc70e4932630c447d634e5478aa2/Tommy-Harrison_Corridor-ii--2023_THA23022.jpg" /> Corridor ii, 2023 oil on linen, 200 x 120 cm Photography: Michael Pollard “I find it absurd (and funny) to have the two elements- both generally used to obscure– directly in front of each other, both failing to fulfill this duty.” I love the combination of the curtains and the shutters in the same painting. The earlier works have a focus on curtains and fabric, and there are works where you're doing a lot of the shutters It seems like there's already a relationship between the two in the way they hold space on the canvas, and the rippling. Do you feel like those interests in texture are related? Definitely. I like how the shutters are horizontal and the curtains are vertical. It's a simple contrast, enhanced by them both having rhythmic modulations in value. I often paint them flat to the plane, creating a threshold through which you can enter the illusionary portal. I find it absurd (and funny) to have the two elements- both generally used to obscure– directly in front of each other, both failing to fulfill this duty. It’s an interesting way to compose a painting, essentially showing you something by painting something which obscures. This balance also heightens tension. I’m glad you said that, tension is all I’m ever trying to achieve, really. However, it’s difficult when you’re balancing such a myriad of formal and conceptual factors: geometry, colour, form, space, mass, surface, line, value, subject, symbol, image, history, religion, politics… How do you balance all of this and have it feel dissonant or tense? For my last show, there were a lot of triangular shapes, all interlocking and overlapping–triangles are really good for creating tension as they can be warped and pushed to extremes, appearing naturally off-balance. However, this show is based around squares. So the balance / off-balance is much simpler and probably more subtle. It’s much more to do with the ratios of mass and space- along with the interaction of smaller elements. This one [Display III, 2025], for example, it just just a toilet, and the pipe is slightly tilting to one side. There’s slight differences in the tassels too. On the left there are two chords on both sides of the knot, on the right, there is only one cord wrapping around the inside of the curtain. So yeah, the tension is more subtle, but it's still the same thing I’ve always tried to do. &nbsp;&nbsp; <img width="7324" height="9000" width_o="7324" height_o="9000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e8389afc36aa6f7f441f139799fb42db87401623d57de461218ca1fc8152a4e9/Tommy-Harrison_Display-III--2025_THA25004.jpg" data-mid="231831054" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e8389afc36aa6f7f441f139799fb42db87401623d57de461218ca1fc8152a4e9/Tommy-Harrison_Display-III--2025_THA25004.jpg" /> <img width="2843" height="4185" width_o="2843" height_o="4185" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e8a9b5dee8dc4f9c2299941b634107b81e37e48dda67cc03370a4e96c221b32f/Tommy-Harrison_Display-III--2025_THA25004-copy.jpg" data-mid="231831055" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e8a9b5dee8dc4f9c2299941b634107b81e37e48dda67cc03370a4e96c221b32f/Tommy-Harrison_Display-III--2025_THA25004-copy.jpg" /> <img width="2464" height="3893" width_o="2464" height_o="3893" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/47156c420796c1a5c53b753f6070457f326206930c8f3880cfcb35e1881b1a07/Tommy-Harrison_Display-III--2025_THA25004-copy-2.jpg" data-mid="231831056" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/47156c420796c1a5c53b753f6070457f326206930c8f3880cfcb35e1881b1a07/Tommy-Harrison_Display-III--2025_THA25004-copy-2.jpg" /> Display III, 2025 oil on linen, 200 x 160 cm Photography: Michael Pollard The inclusion of the toilet is funny too, because in America, I don't know if you guys have this expression, but we call it a porcelain throne. That's what you call a toilet? [laughing] A porcelain throne. It’s fitting to paint it surrounded by these draping curtains, “here's a throne.” Yeah, the grandeur of curtains and the tassels, all to expose a dirty toilet. I find that contrast funny, but also conceptually paradoxical and visually jarring, two things which I guess can be intertwined. Are these related to your paintings where it's just kind of the wall, and then there's what looks like the wall-based apparatus for a toilet [see works for Tone Cluster, Grimm, 2023]. Is that what that is? For sure, this relates to the urinal works. Both come directly from my studio. A lot of things come from here, because I'm a human of strict routine. I get up early and I walk the exact same route across town, arriving at the same building, every day, seven days a week. Doing this, I look at the same things again and again, and with time they start to really interest me, and–in turn–I want to paint them. For instance, the car outside of my studio, the piles of wood, even the shutters. The shutters come from all the abandoned units we have around here in the complex. It’s all from repeated visual exposure. It’s the same when I paint a crucifixion–because I look through art history books constantly–I eventually want to paint them. With time, these contrasting images and ideas merge in my mind, forming a final work I’d like to make. <img width="1524" height="2105" width_o="1524" height_o="2105" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/64be92e508ae4ece637ef2436bed3dc58c77d1ffc564f03a9d4e78cb0e75f11b/Tommy-Harrison_White-Night-ii--2023_THA23006-copy.jpg" data-mid="231831058" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/64be92e508ae4ece637ef2436bed3dc58c77d1ffc564f03a9d4e78cb0e75f11b/Tommy-Harrison_White-Night-ii--2023_THA23006-copy.jpg" /> <img width="1407" height="2068" width_o="1407" height_o="2068" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/86b6a04c9aebda0a4bfab61143472c1a6761442dba8fb7d679fe9ac608486e6b/Tommy-Harrison_White-Night-ii--2023_THA23006_floor.jpg" data-mid="231831057" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/86b6a04c9aebda0a4bfab61143472c1a6761442dba8fb7d679fe9ac608486e6b/Tommy-Harrison_White-Night-ii--2023_THA23006_floor.jpg" /> White Night ii, 2023 oil on canvas, 200 x 120 cm Photography: Michael Pollard Is Manchester an industrial city? It was, but not so much anymore. I guess the Industrial Revolution started here, so Manchester is the seed of the modern world. Where I’m based is exceptionally industrial still though. A lot of the old factories and warehouses in town are flats now. Are you both based in New York? Yeah. I'm sure it's the same there, you know, old industrial areas are really nice now. But where we are, it’s right next to the train tracks, there's people chopping and burning stuff with the sounds of heavy industry in the air. It’s stimulating throughout the day, and eerily desolate at night, but I like it a lot. Regarding your imagery for the compositions that have those stacks of boards and wood, you said previously that you primarily work from source imagery, but I was wondering if there are aspects of your canvas that are fully invented. Yes, there's a lot of things which I invent, that you probably wouldn't even notice. I often invent plants and stones or things on the floor. I just completely drag them from my brain, because I can never find the right image. Equally, I never set up a mound of wood and paint it from life. Sometimes I photograph the details on my phone and collage them together as I go. The wood crept in because I moved studios halfway through making a show. I share this space with Richard Dean Hughes, and we&nbsp;were supposed to build a wall between us but didn’t for months, so there was just piles of wood everywhere, and again, it just crept in with time. I was looking at the title piece for your show at Grimm in Amsterdam, Double Blind [2024]. It seems like the most Surrealist of the competitions that you’ve done. I was wondering where the inspiration for the woman figure comes from. That was my girlfriend. There's a male head, which is Franz Kafka, but I wanted to put her in a painting. She got annoyed because I painted her perfectly in the nude, and then with time, building up the layers, she got more and more obscured by hand prints and grime. She thought I was doing it on purpose, but I had to explain that the painting calls the shots. What do you think this body of work brings forward or changes for you from your last show? This is definitely a step towards working more strictly in a series. Before, each work was quite different, and felt individual, whereas this is a body of work, which I think is a really nice way to paint. I think there's a shift in ambition as well. I feel like I've gotten better, technically, so I think they have a higher degree of detail and finesse to them. <img width="1303" height="2088" width_o="1303" height_o="2088" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/928b6ecf75ff3ed8d5509ff3e2157cdafc65926913833a30b9a0e26fb265b91e/Tommy-Harrison_String-Game--2024_THA24010-copy.jpg" data-mid="231831060" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/928b6ecf75ff3ed8d5509ff3e2157cdafc65926913833a30b9a0e26fb265b91e/Tommy-Harrison_String-Game--2024_THA24010-copy.jpg" /> String Game, 2024 oil on linen, 200 x 120 in Photography: Michael Pollard And that female figure with the dress, is that a specific reference? I actually got the dresses from the Met[ropolitan Museum of Art], in New York. There's another coming up in the London show with Grimm. I took them from mannequins. I like to make anachronistic images, so there can be ancient, Victorian and contemporary subjects, all collaged together and unified by light and atmosphere. The fact that this may appear nonsensical, doesn’t bother me. In the show A Room Hung With Thoughts; British Painting Now, curated by Tom Morton, which is currently on at the Green Family Art Foundation in Dallas, it's a mannequin which I applied flesh tones to the hands, blurring the lines between a human and artificial. It’s hard to tell what they are in the final painting and I prefer it that way. Do you find that people want some narrative from them or ask you what it all means often? Never, nobody’s asked me that, thankfully. Although, thinking about it, maybe my Gran has. I've never had to explain myself, which is nice. My work is never whimsical, and I know what it’s getting at, but I’d hate to have to articulate a narrative. ︎: @tommyharrisonn Images courtesy GRIMM , Amsterdam | London | New York.&nbsp;All images: © Tommy Harrison https://super-nyc.com/Danny-Leyland-2 Wed, 12 Feb 2025 20:09:26 +0000 super! https://super-nyc.com/Danny-Leyland-2 Having lived and worked in Edinburgh, Australia, and, most recently, Portugal, the exact “location” depicted in a painting by Danny Leyland may or may not be immediately recognizable. For a painter concerned as he is with the emanation and accruing of meaning, his experiences sit alongside broader ideas of place. It is the confluence of forces like the physical, historical, archeological, mythological, colonial, or personal contexts that is made visible in the work. In this vein, it is of no small import for Leyland that context extends quite outside of the canvas and towards the history of where, when, and by whom paintings are viewed. When we met with him over Zoom, we pondered together over a conception of artmaking that is not altogether removed from the present, of course, but certainly more expansive and penetrates deeper than the “artworld” at present often leads us to believe is possible. <img width="2500" height="1875" width_o="2500" height_o="1875" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b04732b998c01c6beb57358dac76854ca9edfc29a5307169fc33de032f3bd7b8/2025-01-30-DANNYLEYLAND-02-LR.jpg" data-mid="226493594" border="0" data-scale="94" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b04732b998c01c6beb57358dac76854ca9edfc29a5307169fc33de032f3bd7b8/2025-01-30-DANNYLEYLAND-02-LR.jpg" /> <img width="2935" height="2184" width_o="2935" height_o="2184" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/aa6d632eabf1cffaeccc8c132431f920bf1ed57b21ccce07a418c8bdb9e14227/2025-01-30-DANNYLEYLAND-02-HR-copy-2.jpg" data-mid="226493953" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/aa6d632eabf1cffaeccc8c132431f920bf1ed57b21ccce07a418c8bdb9e14227/2025-01-30-DANNYLEYLAND-02-HR-copy-2.jpg" /> <img width="2844" height="2443" width_o="2844" height_o="2443" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/199b262fb7342e6a8ab078f691c6e9bc8230c49f8f31299005740e7ee7fd6dde/2025-01-30-DANNYLEYLAND-02-HR-copy.jpg" data-mid="226493948" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/199b262fb7342e6a8ab078f691c6e9bc8230c49f8f31299005740e7ee7fd6dde/2025-01-30-DANNYLEYLAND-02-HR-copy.jpg" /> Mistress of Animals, 2025 oil on canvas, 115 x 145 cm Have you been working on a new body of work for your upcoming show? In October I moved into a new studio in London. At first I was in a bit of a funny place. I had come back from this residency at PADA in Barreiro, Portugal, and I wasn't particularly happy with the work I made there. I wasn’t sure how to begin fitting together a body of work for this upcoming project at Mare Karina, Venice. I don't know how to begin talking about the work but perhaps I can show you?&nbsp; I would love to see it; Yeah, definitely. This is the one I've been working on today [Mistress of animals, 2025]. The central image is of a figure embracing this tiger lying down. And then I have this one as well [The art of not being seen, 2025]. This is one of the paintings I began in Barreiro, it’s of two figures sitting in a boat and beneath them there are a number of objects that are aligned in a grid or a sort of cabinet formation. And then I have this one [Gravesend girl, 2025], which is not that developed, actually, but there's a kind of toy train ride at the bottom, and a taxidermy thylacine in the top corner. The taxidermy figure–is that a Tasmanian Tiger? Yeah, it’s the Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine. There are many accounts of people seeing them in the wild even though they're extinct. It’s fascinating that people still feel their ghostly presence in the landscape. It reminds me of the legend of the fen tiger around Cambridge where I used to live. There are these stories of tigers being sighted in the fens, usually by farmers or anglers, and it’s become a sort of modern legend. I think it speaks to some kind of longing for a vanished wilderness. The fens as a landscape doesn’t really exist anymore. The vast wetlands were drained and reclaimed for farming a long time ago. <img width="1875" height="2500" width_o="1875" height_o="2500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/56df3a55c59d161282adbea8c3bad9474c7d007ab430b2f75c59b9079b2cbc78/2025-01-30-DANNYLEYLAND-03-LR.jpg" data-mid="226493985" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/56df3a55c59d161282adbea8c3bad9474c7d007ab430b2f75c59b9079b2cbc78/2025-01-30-DANNYLEYLAND-03-LR.jpg" /> <img width="3259" height="4220" width_o="3259" height_o="4220" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5873a1597726d9dffde17162c2565b9379b2782f0fc0e852a31e7a5058ea2f30/2025-01-30-DANNYLEYLAND-03-HR-copy.jpg" data-mid="226494012" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5873a1597726d9dffde17162c2565b9379b2782f0fc0e852a31e7a5058ea2f30/2025-01-30-DANNYLEYLAND-03-HR-copy.jpg" /> <img width="2436" height="3290" width_o="2436" height_o="3290" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/412ad288415958dbbf2e7cd419a46191bb01956d1003daea7e8592fd67d96b86/2025-01-30-DANNYLEYLAND-03-HR-copy-2.jpg" data-mid="226494021" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/412ad288415958dbbf2e7cd419a46191bb01956d1003daea7e8592fd67d96b86/2025-01-30-DANNYLEYLAND-03-HR-copy-2.jpg" /> Gravesend Girl, 2025 oil on canvas, 130 x 95 cm The painting with the grid of the vases and objects [The art of not being seen, 2025] feels very museological, is that related to your interest in archeology in regards to the idea of the archive and preservation? Yeah, that image came from this photograph of the interior of a storage unit of Jacopo Medici’s collection of illicit, black market looted antiquities. In a way, that's been the sort of central point of interest for the rest of the works. It really hit a chord, because I have quite a personal connection to museums. Museums have always meant a lot to me, but at the same time, I recognize that they play, or have played and continue to play a key role in this colonial exchange of ideas, or transactional way of viewing objects that is also akin to painting. I felt challenged by that on many levels, even on the level of being someone who likes to paint images and things and objects. There is a tradition in oil painting of being able to render the surface of something, of painting as illusion, or being able to capture the essence of an object for a viewer’s pleasure, which is also transactional in a way. The grid of the storage cabinet also seemed to offer a convenient visual device, a way to organise the painting. The grid-like compartments made me think of how images appear on our screens. <img width="1875" height="2500" width_o="1875" height_o="2500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d1e28dc48b95efc62a3615f340aca60b292a2e160de7ccc3aef15c126c0be2bb/2025-01-30-DANNYLEYLAND-01-LR.jpg" data-mid="226494336" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d1e28dc48b95efc62a3615f340aca60b292a2e160de7ccc3aef15c126c0be2bb/2025-01-30-DANNYLEYLAND-01-LR.jpg" /> <img width="3713" height="2993" width_o="3713" height_o="2993" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6b0892ea8c71cc6aff642e82a7164718b95b56acca0fba5af1fa8bb48fd17cbe/2025-01-30-DANNYLEYLAND-01-HR-copy.jpg" data-mid="226494341" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6b0892ea8c71cc6aff642e82a7164718b95b56acca0fba5af1fa8bb48fd17cbe/2025-01-30-DANNYLEYLAND-01-HR-copy.jpg" /> <img width="3086" height="2634" width_o="3086" height_o="2634" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/868d354e306c2a88d66862a778024db96d4299c4020e17d14bf9ab70c5bb9a25/2025-01-30-DANNYLEYLAND-01-HR-copy-2.jpg" data-mid="226494349" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/868d354e306c2a88d66862a778024db96d4299c4020e17d14bf9ab70c5bb9a25/2025-01-30-DANNYLEYLAND-01-HR-copy-2.jpg" /> The art of not being seen, 2025 oil on canvas, 140 x 110 cm You mentioned in another interview the Piero Della Francesca painting, The Baptism of Christ. It was a light bulb moment for me, I feel like I gained an understanding of your work. Knowing that you have a particular interest in archaeology and the ancient and medieval worlds, I began to think about the way that images would or could function then and how it is so wildly different from what images can do now. Images as devotional versus commercial objects on a gallery wall, for example. That's hit so many different points that I'm interested in! The National Gallery in London has two fantastic paintings by Piero Della Francesca, The Baptism of Christ and The Nativity. I think It was the baptism which I felt closest to at first, with its pale, central Christ figure sort of looming out of the painting. It felt so immediate and so close to me, like an encounter with a ghost of someone I knew. Later I watched this video online about the conservation of The Nativity. They pointed out a couple of scorch marks on the painting’s surface that were made by candles. The painting was part of Piero’s own household where candles were placed in front of it, and so it was used in this practical, everyday kind of way, which makes it an object of focus for an incredibly personal kind of interaction. At times I really struggle to find a connection to painting, and when I see work in the world it doesn't necessarily move me. I’m too aware of its materiality, how much space it's taking up, how much money it's worth, these prosaic things. Where you can interrupt that, maybe, is in a domestic or more personal context—when you give a gift of art to a friend, or you receive something, handle an object, or inherit something from a relative, then it creates its own context. That Piero painting, The Nativity, absorbed all of these memories from being in the household over many generations, absorbed the intensity of all that concentrated looking over time. The scorch marks on the surface are a record of that. “...when I see work in the world it doesn't necessarily move me. I’m too aware of its materiality, how much space it's taking up, how much money it's worth, these prosaic things. Where you can interrupt that, maybe, is in a domestic or more personal context—when you give a gift of art to a friend, or you receive something, handle an object, or inherit something from a relative, then it creates its own context.” It’s interesting that you mention inheriting an artwork, because you have that painting [Look to Windward, 2021] with the model of a fishing vessel built by your great-grandfather as a present for your uncle. It’s like you're trying to bring in that sense of the personal, even though you know the work is going to be in a commercial context. In my studio I’ve all these objects lined up on the window sill, things I was given, or picked up in charity shops, or found on the street. This is a ceramic coin that an artist called Jame St. Findlay made. I just have these things and I try to bring them into the work sometimes. It’s a way to create systems of meaning. <img width="1642" height="1191" width_o="1642" height_o="1191" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d7a7f0c1d201d15fd851c252a8c86f44e1fa8598ece971fab64c27a50bff512e/FullSizeRender-copy.jpg" data-mid="226905510" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d7a7f0c1d201d15fd851c252a8c86f44e1fa8598ece971fab64c27a50bff512e/FullSizeRender-copy.jpg" /> <img width="3626" height="2698" width_o="3626" height_o="2698" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8bc4e030f854caa7b4b91eb6fa21dd8a600bd94b84f88edd0eda9688ed1eeb73/FullSizeRender.jpg" data-mid="226905502" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8bc4e030f854caa7b4b91eb6fa21dd8a600bd94b84f88edd0eda9688ed1eeb73/FullSizeRender.jpg" /> Look to Windward, 2021 oil on canvas, 30 x 40 cm &nbsp; It seems like you have this inclination towards almost primordial or elemental representations of fire or smoke or water. What I enjoy looking at and find moving in other people's work is when there's a sort of numinous experience captured through the everyday, or something that is kind of restrained but which, because of that restraint, has a quiet power that comes through. It often feels like a balance between finding a certain image that accrues meaning to itself but which doesn’t insist on meaning something in particular. I’m thinking about the images in Elizabeth Bishop’s poems. That’s had a great influence on me. It seems like time itself is also really central to your practice. You’ve previously talked about trying to tap into the moment just before something happens, and you're also dealing with archeology, which has an element of deep time. Your compositions have these images that are inherently really layered and you find all of these different ways of creating meaning towards the layers which allow for multiple points of entry. I think that comes from the journey I've been on. While studying in Edinburgh I was really interested in mythology, and then a bit later, I became interested in archeology as well. The UK has such a fantastically complex and layered landscape. When you go walking there are these pockets, maybe a stone avenue or a burial mound, where time seems to collapse and you are suddenly amidst a version of space and time that feels quite different. It can be a pretty haunting, powerful experience. I definitely had this sense, this consuming sense, really, that older things were more honest or authentic or pure, that there's this original reality in the ancient world that I could aspire to understand or emulate. A key text for me at the time was The White Goddess by Robert Graves. I read it as if it was all completely true, this wild universal theory about ancient religion, and I tried to apply its morality to my life. I was fully engaged with that urgent Modernist project of trying to find connections between everything (though of course I didn’t understand it in that way). It took me a long time to recover from its effects! Since then I've been able to contextualize that feeling. And realise that there is no such thing as an unbroken link to an unchanging past, a version of Britain that is more original or authentic than any other. That the past contains not one but a multiplicity of narratives. <img width="2234" height="1819" width_o="2234" height_o="1819" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b9d46ec9cadfbb47f7b0b7174414a0f4d4e45802d130f243f96e24cddea07b72/Pearly-King-copy.jpg" data-mid="226905516" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b9d46ec9cadfbb47f7b0b7174414a0f4d4e45802d130f243f96e24cddea07b72/Pearly-King-copy.jpg" /> <img width="3543" height="4603" width_o="3543" height_o="4603" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8648c6cda0a8e36612dfb054118351b26fd1e471d6f092931459378815da80fc/Pearly-King.jpg" data-mid="226905505" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8648c6cda0a8e36612dfb054118351b26fd1e471d6f092931459378815da80fc/Pearly-King.jpg" /> <img width="2088" height="1665" width_o="2088" height_o="1665" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/63db8f7fcf3d64249272ab59c22e5504a124bd4b0da6ec3c00cefa400ddfa7fd/Pearly-King-copy-2.jpg" data-mid="226905517" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/63db8f7fcf3d64249272ab59c22e5504a124bd4b0da6ec3c00cefa400ddfa7fd/Pearly-King-copy-2.jpg" /> A Pearly King, 2021 oil on canvas, 80 x 61 cm “The UK has such a fantastically complex and layered landscape. When you go walking there are these pockets, maybe a stone avenue or a burial mound, where time seems to collapse and you are suddenly amidst a version of space and time that feels quite different.” Speaking of the past, looking at the history of your work, it seems like there's a jump between your Bricolage series and The Burial Paintings in terms of the compositions. You’ve talked about looking down from an airplane and seeing the land as a quilt, and in the early works the composition is almost full of patchwork and patterns. Then in The Burial Paintings, there’s a similar sense of pattern and color, but you’ve really opened up the composition, it's not quite so tightly packed. It feels like you’ve allowed the surface to have more depth and space to breathe. I was wondering what that jump was like for you. I don't know. I made the “burial paintings” around the lockdown, when I was living in a more rural area and generally in a bit of a downer period. They definitely feel quite different. I wish I had gathered more of those works together, and had the chance to develop them as a body of work and perhaps present them together. But I worked on them in quite a scattered way, late at night after teaching, without ever quite realising what I was getting at. The paintings ended up being quite an enigma and perhaps not very successful. Looking back on them they do feel overly tight, and the idiom is weirdly romantic. The way that my practice evolves often strikes me as a bit erratic, and that's something I fret about a bit, actually, as an artist. I wonder if by now I should be able to make more of a cohesive body of work, but every painting I make seems totally different, as if it’s the first painting I’ve ever made. I often look back at my work and I'm like, wow, did I really make that? Or what was I doing there? But then again, I’m pretty allergic to artists who make the same kind of paintings again and again. <img width="975" height="734" width_o="975" height_o="734" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ddf77037873150638f5f820a7e0d024eaf9a2ea268b42762d7b3348b5faecd6c/The-Smith--198-x-121-cm-copy.jpg" data-mid="226905520" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/975/i/ddf77037873150638f5f820a7e0d024eaf9a2ea268b42762d7b3348b5faecd6c/The-Smith--198-x-121-cm-copy.jpg" /> <img width="3454" height="2115" width_o="3454" height_o="2115" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c4d618d6e35f414325e418f673db5f803d05b5bec83f46a9661bc5a239fc0ed3/The-Smith--198-x-121-cm.jpg" data-mid="226905508" border="0" data-scale="96" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c4d618d6e35f414325e418f673db5f803d05b5bec83f46a9661bc5a239fc0ed3/The-Smith--198-x-121-cm.jpg" /> <img width="844" height="618" width_o="844" height_o="618" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cbbd3a5a1497130b7ddceab476b7d1cfb877fa0bbe787803bd976f7025bbd05d/The-Smith--198-x-121-cm-copy-2.jpg" data-mid="226905524" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/844/i/cbbd3a5a1497130b7ddceab476b7d1cfb877fa0bbe787803bd976f7025bbd05d/The-Smith--198-x-121-cm-copy-2.jpg" /> The Smith, 2019oil on canvas, 121 x 198 cm How do you think place influences the body of work that you're making? It comes through in the burial paintings and other work I had made before then. When I moved to Australia in 2021, however, I immediately felt that my practice had to change, because the land there is not mine, it's not part of my history. I don't have any claims over it, nor should I. My perspective had to change quite radically, and I turned to documenting the things that were around me in the most immediate sense. I increasingly used more of a collage-like process, which lent a feeling of displacement to the work; displacement in a visual and spatial sense, created as a result of images from different places and times coming into a single pictorial space. I realised that certain images seemed to fascinate me more than others, and so I worked with them again again, stretching their possibilities. I tried not to question it any more than that. I think that this process has lingered since I've moved back to London, and through my residency in Portugal as well. For example, the toy train was something that I saw in the supermarket in Barreiro. It’s a children's toy train that has this big plastic Native American figure, but it's in the supermarket in Portugal, so it has this character of displacement about its situation. The Native American girl reminded me of the story of Pocahontas, who left her homeland and died in Gravesend on the east coast of England. So there's this narrative of change and just a sort of visual oddity in that. <img width="4032" height="3024" width_o="4032" height_o="3024" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/746388b52f92197ca998c3a4e8e04f8b991478f53ab4ed3c5b363d5fcf6760e5/black-swan.JPG" data-mid="226501882" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/746388b52f92197ca998c3a4e8e04f8b991478f53ab4ed3c5b363d5fcf6760e5/black-swan.JPG" /> <img width="1865" height="1297" width_o="1865" height_o="1297" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/eb81d0ee3566df38737a41c94522183899a15b1dfd9471df73e69335710c16f0/black-swan-copy.JPG" data-mid="226501992" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/eb81d0ee3566df38737a41c94522183899a15b1dfd9471df73e69335710c16f0/black-swan-copy.JPG" /> <img width="1724" height="1435" width_o="1724" height_o="1435" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/def2e95e79e1149512f4af2daf3583a7d801e285119f1ce74f111d9951a077df/black-swan-copy-2.JPG" data-mid="226501995" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/def2e95e79e1149512f4af2daf3583a7d801e285119f1ce74f111d9951a077df/black-swan-copy-2.JPG" /> Hunters of the black swan, 2024 oil on canvas, 90 x 120 cm That feels closely linked to what you're getting at with the other painting of the stolen objects, the movement of objects and their displacement from their context.&nbsp; What do you think lulls, or creative blockages do for you? Do you find them generative? I recall in our email thread, when you were in Portugal, you were not feeling in tune with your practice. I’m interested in how that resolved itself, if it has. It's a really interesting question. It's something that I talk about a lot with my students and teacher-colleagues, this idea of being stuck as a really creative place to be, because it's all about a place of unknowing, and there's a sense of limitless possibility, and you have to somehow deal with that. What do you do next when you can do anything? It can be pretty crippling. I'm not sure painting always has to be fun, I mean no job is always going to be fun, but I sometimes wish it would be a bit more fun. <img width="6473" height="4842" width_o="6473" height_o="4842" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e472e6e496edd72c3504a78fa1731f95e251756f24e7ed873aff0608f33b3d2b/Copy-of-0C3A4582.jpg" data-mid="226501297" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e472e6e496edd72c3504a78fa1731f95e251756f24e7ed873aff0608f33b3d2b/Copy-of-0C3A4582.jpg" /> <img width="2409" height="1814" width_o="2409" height_o="1814" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0c16ce6b556cc6c210bcc6a4bef51c06e31c3b20184058243d1b073d72c4d7fc/Copy-of-0C3A4582-copy.jpg" data-mid="226501309" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0c16ce6b556cc6c210bcc6a4bef51c06e31c3b20184058243d1b073d72c4d7fc/Copy-of-0C3A4582-copy.jpg" /> <img width="2036" height="1477" width_o="2036" height_o="1477" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/49ac00577ee77bbf52f55e7fb6d716f36f91c1500445c709acc909eddd5bda52/Copy-of-0C3A4582-copy-2.jpg" data-mid="226501503" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/49ac00577ee77bbf52f55e7fb6d716f36f91c1500445c709acc909eddd5bda52/Copy-of-0C3A4582-copy-2.jpg" /> A longing for rain, 2024 oil on canvas, 90 x 120 cm How does writing figure into your practice as a painter? You pull from literature and folklore for your paintings, and then you also have a writing practice, and I'm wondering if it buttresses or supports your painting, or if you see them as totally separate? Well they're connected by me and so the interests are shared. I definitely do find it helpful if I have a poem turning over in my brain over the course of a few weeks; the way that it’s slowly chiseled into shape is akin to painting, in the way that they can combine different things, images, perspectives, and then through a sort of distillation they become something completely new, which has its own sort of set of meanings. Do you ever have an audience in your mind when you're working on a painting, or is it really more of a solitary or expressive act? For this project I’m currently working on, a small solo presentation at Mare Karina Gallery in Venice, there's a connection between the work and the context of that place, Venice being this early medieval city that was the center of vast maritime empire, the heart of a nexus of trade routes where artifacts like those in the paintings were accumulated and presented, so it seemed like a sort of natural home to explore these ideas. The right audience with which to have these conversations. <img width="2351" height="3142" width_o="2351" height_o="3142" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/26916e8b064c77af5516388e2b59f68f8831613ed3c992f0a446bffed37666e1/Leyland-01-When_awake_Im_drifting-2023-oil_on_linen-120x90cm-copy.jpg" data-mid="226905530" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/26916e8b064c77af5516388e2b59f68f8831613ed3c992f0a446bffed37666e1/Leyland-01-When_awake_Im_drifting-2023-oil_on_linen-120x90cm-copy.jpg" /> <img width="4583" height="6142" width_o="4583" height_o="6142" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6933f010e182daf431752c48c2f5429aa3690e8926083efe4fd164dae6473925/Leyland-01-When_awake_Im_drifting-2023-oil_on_linen-120x90cm.jpg" data-mid="226905509" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6933f010e182daf431752c48c2f5429aa3690e8926083efe4fd164dae6473925/Leyland-01-When_awake_Im_drifting-2023-oil_on_linen-120x90cm.jpg" /> <img width="1780" height="2475" width_o="1780" height_o="2475" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b53fca698081087439939682c67286385418abe7e2d28908973cd9c90a1506e2/Leyland-01-When_awake_Im_drifting-2023-oil_on_linen-120x90cm-copy-2.jpg" data-mid="226905538" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b53fca698081087439939682c67286385418abe7e2d28908973cd9c90a1506e2/Leyland-01-When_awake_Im_drifting-2023-oil_on_linen-120x90cm-copy-2.jpg" /> When awake I’m just drifting, 2023 oil on linen, 120 x 90 cm You mentioned in an Instagram post the idea of “thin” places. I was wondering if painting for you is a thin place. I feel like there's a lack of that in our world at the moment. That's a mythological motif from Celtic stories, especially associated with water, this idea of the thin places where the other world seems closer. Actually, the painting The Baptism of Christ by Piero Della Francesca we were discussing earlier, that could describe an encounter with one of the thin places. The Christ figure seems to have one foot in reality and one foot in the world of the spirit. The thin river curling across the centre of the painting could be a divisionary curtain between the two worlds. I don’t know, definitely on a good day that's the sort of place that I'm trying to approach when I’m painting. One foot in each world. But we can’t achieve that on a daily basis. Most of painting is probably about plodding on, one step at a time. ︎: @danny_leyland Images courtesy Mare Karina Gallery, Venice, and Arusha Gallery, London. All images: © Danny Leyland https://super-nyc.com/Joel-Text Thu, 03 Oct 2024 16:04:53 +0000 super! https://super-nyc.com/Joel-Text On our visit to Joel Dean’s studio several works, some finished, some still working towards culmination, surrounded us. Our conversation meandered around them as much as their presence did the same with us. We played catch up with the various paintings and objects covering the surfaces of the room, as each slowly began to reveal itself.Joel talks about time both as a determining factor in his life as an artist and as a concept among many that is incorporated into the work itself. Time is something to be broken down and played with, examined as a single thing which is different than the sum of its parts. Imagine isolating a musical crescendo exactly at the moment of its apex. What does a single moment mean and can it be stripped of its surrounding conditions? Or to take another unit whose implications stretch far and wide in life and specifically here in Joel’s body of work: letters. Imagine what image or object a single letter is worth. Can it be dissociated from language? As with other units that Joel deals with in his sculptures and paintings—money, capital, keys on a piano—such questions and their implications unravel. In Joel’s hands, these become elemental tools, like building blocks for an architect. <img width="708" height="578" width_o="708" height_o="578" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/140aadc606d113a15b617cbe574dbcd3732499738ab57600bf6455430504c7ee/4_2021_Joel_Dean_Painting_Bel_Ami_Letter_J-copy.jpg" data-mid="224155765" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/708/i/140aadc606d113a15b617cbe574dbcd3732499738ab57600bf6455430504c7ee/4_2021_Joel_Dean_Painting_Bel_Ami_Letter_J-copy.jpg" /> <img width="1213" height="1440" width_o="1213" height_o="1440" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e274fcb96cb83a2900d7b4577b12c94d3ad2fc348b53f6293c181cd8fb25c294/4_2021_Joel_Dean_Painting_Bel_Ami_Letter_J.jpg" data-mid="224155763" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e274fcb96cb83a2900d7b4577b12c94d3ad2fc348b53f6293c181cd8fb25c294/4_2021_Joel_Dean_Painting_Bel_Ami_Letter_J.jpg" /> Initial J and the Transformative Power of Symbolism in Storytelling, 2021 oil on canvas, 64 x 48 inches When did you start making work? As long as I can remember I wanted to make art. My parents are art school dropouts and have always been very supportive of my being an artist. Although the second I graduated from art school, my dad immediately asked me, “so how are you going to make money?” He’d never pushed me to consider that before. As a teenager, I took courses at Atlanta College of Art. I obviously wouldn’t say I was making work then but I've been oil painting since I was a teenager. I feel very comfortable with the medium, although at this point, after so many years, I have this specific way I do it, and it doesn't always work out. I feel a little cornered in the painting process I’ve created for myself. I went to SAIC in Chicago, and they have this great artist book collection called the Joan Flasch Artist Book Collection. I worked there for most of my time in Chicago.&nbsp; I only took one sculpture course, but I spent so much time around artist books and catalogs about conceptual art that I started to get into that. And then through visual and critical studies classes and art history classes, my interest in that side of the art world grew. It's been difficult reckoning those two things. Having grown up painting, being interested in the history of representational images, while also having the desire to create work that pushes up against or plays with the line between reality and a kind of mediated reality—working to blur that line. Right, you can decontextualize with sculpture, where painting is static. Yeah, it becomes an image, exactly. When I moved to California, I opened up a space with some friends called Important Projects, and I ran that gallery for five years before I moved to New York in 2014. During that time, probably two years into running the space, I basically quit painting completely. I was working retail to make ends meet. And while running the space actually wasn’t that much of a time sacrifice, the job was so taxing that I just couldn’t find the time to paint. Painting requires so much failing, and having the time to fail; or at least the painting that I’m interested in making requires that. I’d been dabbling with sculpture in the years leading up to that moment, but it was settling into an economy of time outside the shelter of academia, that led me to begin thinking about art in a different way. Around this moment is probably when I really started making work? Even if it wasn’t very good. The earliest sculptures I made were ready-made works, made with found objects or store-bought things, and the work, as I was imagining it, was rearranging these objects in specific contexts. When I look back on that earlier work, I was writing about it, but I don’t know how relevant the writing was… it's taken a long time for me to understand what I was doing, not to suggest that I can articulate it perfectly now. <img width="1920" height="1280" width_o="1920" height_o="1280" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5d323131805a93b79d38501e3477498d86bd483e5f437a4b7e1fa1a4568ad3cf/joeldean_4.png" data-mid="224155214" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5d323131805a93b79d38501e3477498d86bd483e5f437a4b7e1fa1a4568ad3cf/joeldean_4.png" /> <img width="1920" height="1280" width_o="1920" height_o="1280" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/abe1cd934b5785de9d5fc00a051357f89521771e2c2a43b83f5596d5a3fecf3a/joeldean_5.png" data-mid="224155215" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/abe1cd934b5785de9d5fc00a051357f89521771e2c2a43b83f5596d5a3fecf3a/joeldean_5.png" /> The Anatomy of Out of Body Experience in Human Capital Organization Systems and Planning Culture after the Age of Discovery, 2017, 160 quarters, 500 dimes, 14200 pennies Are you referring to the stacks of pennies [The Anatomy of Out of Body Experience in Human Capital Organization Systems and Planning Culture after the Age of Discovery, 2017]? Actually, that’s from after I moved to New York in 2014, but yeah I’d consider that to be a part of this earlier body of work.&nbsp; Right before that, in 2013, I had a solo show in LA and that was my first moment of “okay, I’m making sculpture now, fully.” Then I moved to New York. I was a professional driver for a year and a half. Driving 8-12 hours a day… you end up with alot of thinking time. But it also created this weird micro-vascular relationship with the city. I would end up at the base of the World Trade Center multiple times a day, but then I would go out as far as Connecticut. My income was following the rhythm of the nine to five grind. Seeing the city up close and from far away every day, began to feel like a pulse. I also became hyper-aware of where capital was accumulating in the city, and the trail of it. The penny work is related to that experience. The penny also relates to the way I think about the alphabet as this elemental unit of something that can, carry information, and through accumulation and time, transform into something else. One thing I'm always thinking about in my studio is the difference between a grain of sand and the sand dune, and the eventual possibility of an avalanche. Although they are, on their face, both made of silica, the physical properties of a grain of sand are totally different than a pile of sand. There’s this concept of the moment in which you add the grain of sand in which the dune breaks and that's when it becomes physically identifiable as a new body. I think about that in my paintings especially, but over time I realized I was doing that in my sculptures as well. There's always multiples, and the pieces are made of individual aspects that have the potential to transcend their original form, by becoming something larger than themselves together. <img width="1600" height="1113" width_o="1600" height_o="1113" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/22f3cbb949930c52830c9e4be91d6a7ad513fb49693fe393b49754ff14b01fa7/joel_dean_transformativepower.jpg" data-mid="224155296" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/22f3cbb949930c52830c9e4be91d6a7ad513fb49693fe393b49754ff14b01fa7/joel_dean_transformativepower.jpg" /> <img width="1600" height="1077" width_o="1600" height_o="1077" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d67cc2494aa46bf2113d83dd2d7c4513e162fa43acfaa1ce59262c4f034ed186/joel_dean_transformativepower2.jpg" data-mid="224155326" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d67cc2494aa46bf2113d83dd2d7c4513e162fa43acfaa1ce59262c4f034ed186/joel_dean_transformativepower2.jpg" /> The Transformative Power of Symbolism in Storytelling, 2022ostrich egg, alphabet pasta, squid ink Does that concept apply to one of the earlier sculptures, The Transformative Power of Symbolism in Storytelling? Yeah. I see the egg as a recurring symbol in your work, and how that also relates to time. In some of your press releases, you talk about a flatness of time, or the necessity of time to allow things to happen so that everything's not happening at the same time. It kind of feels, maybe cliche, but the idea of the chicken and the egg, but also the egg as this idea of the potential of a chicken. Yeah, I like that. And that title is the same as the paintings in your later series. Yeah…that phrase has been burnt into my mind for a while now, but yes it was originally for the egg piece. And the egg piece was very much meant to be in relationship to the idea of an origin story. Or about that concept. I was interested in the idea that in this sludge of alphabet were the pieces of all possible vocabularies, the potential for every story.&nbsp; The letter paintings are of course connected, but I don’t think about those paintings as “the chicken” to “the egg” so to speak. That would be too neat a narrative. I want to continue the line of inquiry those works carry but perhaps the next time I use the title it will be with the intention of bringing some entropy to the table. “I was interested in the idea that in this sludge of alphabet were the pieces of all possible vocabularies, the potential for every story.” In the press release for the alphabet series [Initials A through Z and The Transformative Power of Symbolism in Storytelling], the idea of the Aleph being the beginning, but also encompassing the entirety and multiplicity of God, was really striking to me. I loved that piece of writing by Gabrielle Jenson. I was lucky to have her bring her thoughts to the paintings. A letter is a picture but also a unit that represents a phonetic sound. I still get stuck on the idea that every letter is just a human-made shape representing some elemental earth frequency that we’ve distilled, named and employed in a play of connections. Like with the onomatopoeia of a lightning strike sounding like the word lightning. I understand, or maybe misunderstand letters in the same way.&nbsp; I’m not sure that the letter paintings deal with this idea concisely but it was part of the inspiration.&nbsp; If every letter is a vessel carrying the narrative of its own evolution, then what can be drawn out by starting with a letter’s structure and intuitively building from its form. As I was working through the alphabet, with each painting I was not only working with the form of the letter but also with all the imagery that’d materialized in the previous paintings. So a language internal to the paintings began to develop, with repeating shapes, images, and recurring characters throughout. <img width="610" height="534" width_o="610" height_o="534" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/db4bd8650cb9d9922dedd343bb041594a13636a96e4976ab3e758882aa828468/JD010-a-copy.jpg" data-mid="224155753" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/610/i/db4bd8650cb9d9922dedd343bb041594a13636a96e4976ab3e758882aa828468/JD010-a-copy.jpg" /> <img width="1131" height="1440" width_o="1131" height_o="1440" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e9df920516b2faab86151f676247772ac3693c1b771eb02d3ec8b47c4b36e65e/JD010-a.jpg" data-mid="224155345" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e9df920516b2faab86151f676247772ac3693c1b771eb02d3ec8b47c4b36e65e/JD010-a.jpg" /> Initial V and the Transformative Power of Symbolism in Storytelling, 2022oil on canvas, 64 x 48 inches Can you talk about these recurring characters within the alphabet series? Yeah, the early characters are the star-heads and the snow people. Talking about this is a little embarrassing—you have to remember, the first letter paintings were made during the period of the shutdown in which everyone was isolating. I was in the studio every day for like six months straight, not seeing anyone. I was here at 7am every day during that time, and all I was doing was painting. The letter series was fundamentally about the idea of a beginning because I was waiting for the world to begin again. It was also a kind of love letter to the world, while the world was not available to us. I was interested in creating a representation or a stand-in for humanity. The star-heads position their viewers on the outside of the night sky looking down into it. It's about the way that, for millennia, humans understood or knew the sky as well as we now know the characters of primetime television. There's this great trilogy by Peter Sloterdijk, it's called The Sphere Trilogy. I was reading Bubbles: Microspherology, the first book in that trilogy at the time. The idea of Earth as a bubble is a recurring theme, and he uses this metaphor to articulate our relationship to the stars in connection to the narrative of the development of civilization. This idea, that everything happened in relation to the stars for millennia, is such common knowledge that it’s almost a faux-pas to bring it up. It’s taken for granted and the fact that the stars have become seemingly completely irrelevant to the way humanity organizes itself now… I think it’s actually difficult for people, myself included to imagine the actual scope of their impact on how we got here.&nbsp; Now our practice of pattern recognition regarding the stars is primarily through pop culture astrology. I follow that as well, for fun, but in the paintings I was thinking more about how the stars were both a clock and a history. The way that through them we can look forward and back at the same time. They carry a calendar, allow seasonal planting schedules, but also more complex information, like stories, through which we pass on intergenerational knowledge. The snow people are meant to be humanity’s paradoxical and ineffectual idea of itself. They’re always melting.&nbsp; At some point the “empty heads” arrived in the paintings, They can be thought of as non-believers, vessels, non-playable characters, humans with no interiority. All these characters are supposed to be archetypal ideas about the human desire for narrative and image-making. Some of the characters have masks… I don't want to dress it up as anything except for what it is, which is just the idea of superficial representation. The world appeared to be ending, and I think I was interested in blindly leaning into these cross-cultural cliches. The letter paintings are more about the potential of narrative through all these symbols than any kind of concrete narrative. <img width="1213" height="1440" width_o="1213" height_o="1440" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/07961d69527d1dacaa957b79503d34a5eabd477b762e828776566daf58bd45d5/6_2021_Joel_Dean_Painting_Bel_Ami_Letter_A-1.jpg" data-mid="224155420" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/07961d69527d1dacaa957b79503d34a5eabd477b762e828776566daf58bd45d5/6_2021_Joel_Dean_Painting_Bel_Ami_Letter_A-1.jpg" /> <img width="425" height="331" width_o="425" height_o="331" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7699eb4c1c43fef38545fd0adc1eae46da6c32b15a1c7ae706f40349e2b07847/6_2021_Joel_Dean_Painting_Bel_Ami_Letter_A.jpg" data-mid="224155744" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/425/i/7699eb4c1c43fef38545fd0adc1eae46da6c32b15a1c7ae706f40349e2b07847/6_2021_Joel_Dean_Painting_Bel_Ami_Letter_A.jpg" /> <img width="484" height="401" width_o="484" height_o="401" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4e032a0afedee06aa00f98137c63d22d91f2ae8f4cd912286cc75bcf81d554bd/6_2021_Joel_Dean_Painting_Bel_Ami_Letter_A-1.jpg" data-mid="224155748" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/484/i/4e032a0afedee06aa00f98137c63d22d91f2ae8f4cd912286cc75bcf81d554bd/6_2021_Joel_Dean_Painting_Bel_Ami_Letter_A-1.jpg" /> Initial A and the Transformative Power of Symbolism in Storytelling, 2021oil on canvas, 64 x 48 inches&nbsp; That makes sense. You can get really familiar with the characters in the works as they relate to each other. What's interesting about it is that it almost gets the ball rolling with a narrative, that moment of a beginning. &nbsp; That's true, they never take off. I feel like that quality puts them in relationship to how Drop Cap initials operated in early print media. They encapsulate “beginning”.. The series is like tarot cards, because each painting has different possibilities of interpretation and meaning. By being in conjunction with each other and placed in relation to one another, they create different kinds of meaning, in the same way that even the alphabet works. I love that. That's kind of how I think about my sculptures as being interchangeable. I think this idea of world-building may be overused in some ways because that’s what any artist is doing. But it does feel present in my work and I think about the sculptures as units within a larger world, and different groupings of them can mean different things. <img width="492" height="386" width_o="492" height_o="386" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f9d417caa7a4f1854a40b857452e6666c710f0e20b94bbd1adc1b593a3071706/JD030-a-3.jpg" data-mid="224155740" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/492/i/f9d417caa7a4f1854a40b857452e6666c710f0e20b94bbd1adc1b593a3071706/JD030-a-3.jpg" /> <img width="1400" height="1101" width_o="1400" height_o="1101" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/49a6b289bf76fa86fe36e824de1e062368602bc138ce809faa26ac235a6b430e/JD030-a-3.jpg" data-mid="224155423" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/49a6b289bf76fa86fe36e824de1e062368602bc138ce809faa26ac235a6b430e/JD030-a-3.jpg" /> Notes on the Fall of Emphasis (All that thinking time...), 2024 oil on canvas, 48 x 63 inches What’s going on with your recent piano paintings? They’re about the relativity of time, but ironically, as paintings, I feel like they don’t belong to this moment. Sometimes I try to look at them through retrospect… or imagine them as being from a specific past, to consider how compelling I might find them. Hopefully, time will be generous to them, but yeah they feel totally out of sync with what seems to be popular in painting right now. There’s a coldness in contemporary painting that feels born in the algorithmic digestion of photographic images. I think about my paintings as objects, in the same universe as my sculpture— within a relationship to technology. I recently had a studio visit with someone who actually pointed out to me—and I hadn't really considered it so directly with pianos—that there's a post-human layer to the imagery. Especially, in the larger piano paintings, the spine becomes the keys of the piano, highlighting that the piano, like all instruments, is a metaphor for the body. <img width="736" height="576" width_o="736" height_o="576" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e6204d0e1f94ef0639e6f0ddaca6d02bc5a61209d1e9a5404da22e4fdac56de5/JD023-a-copy.jpg" data-mid="224155726" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/736/i/e6204d0e1f94ef0639e6f0ddaca6d02bc5a61209d1e9a5404da22e4fdac56de5/JD023-a-copy.jpg" /> <img width="1400" height="1196" width_o="1400" height_o="1196" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/76bee39b25527d0e29c97e255adf5cc8a7547e641f093fc38d8bc0c920d92482/JD023-a.jpg" data-mid="224155431" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/76bee39b25527d0e29c97e255adf5cc8a7547e641f093fc38d8bc0c920d92482/JD023-a.jpg" /> Notes on the Fall of Emphasis (3 key piano), 2023oil on canvas, 20 x 24 inches Even the way an instrument creates sound is similar to vocal cords, the movement of air. Totally. Wind instruments are especially interesting because their sound can be the translation of a single breath. All the piano paintings are titled Notes on the Fall of Emphasis, which is pretty obviously a play on words regarding musical notes. But I also understand the title as describing the paintings as records. Like written notes on how to create emphasis; across surfaces, in different areas of a painting, through color, form, and composition. The title is in homage to a line in a poem by Ben Lerner, from his most recent book&nbsp;The Lights. In the poem he recounts an exchange with his young daughters about rhyming. The poem alludes to rhyming as just one way of emphasis can fall on words. I love this idea of emphasis as a physical force and as a result of surrounding conditions.&nbsp; I wanted to investigate this idea of emphasis being relative, a relation, a relationship, or a moment of relativity between two forms. The paintings of the dabbing Maestro are also about generating emphasis. I could go on and on about the dab as a form, but to break it down on a very basic level, holding one arm up, while hiding the face, down in the other arm, creates a dissonance of attitude, or paradox, that results in emphasis. A simultaneity of high and low in a physical form, like a wave of sound, or light. On another level the “High” of the Maestro against the “Low” of the dab as cultural signifiers, has a similar effect. If you zoom out and consider the Maestro with the pianos, you’ll see they have a similar composition– they rhyme. <img width="806" height="638" width_o="806" height_o="638" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/aa3475337e6448e645837ac2728c283e8d0fd27329b8ce67effc81679aee0e01/JD025-a-copy.jpg" data-mid="224155719" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/806/i/aa3475337e6448e645837ac2728c283e8d0fd27329b8ce67effc81679aee0e01/JD025-a-copy.jpg" /> <img width="1400" height="1196" width_o="1400" height_o="1196" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/66b243173b49e0393dad2a2141da01d8830627aa6ba2294294a28ef371b60c72/JD025-a.jpg" data-mid="224155432" border="0" data-scale="91" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/66b243173b49e0393dad2a2141da01d8830627aa6ba2294294a28ef371b60c72/JD025-a.jpg" /> Maestro (Little Star), 2023 oil on canvas, 20 x 24 inches &nbsp;“I love this idea of emphasis as a physical force and as a result of surrounding conditions.&nbsp; I wanted to investigate this idea of emphasis being relative, a relation, a relationship, or a moment of relativity between two forms.“ The angle of the piano, this emphasis on a triangular shape also feels like the hands of a clock. Yes! Very much so. This was a happy accident, but [referring to the angles in a work in progress] here it feels like the hands of a clock almost ticking and getting smaller as they recede in space. Do you feel like your sculpture carries that same idea of emphasis with the objects that you use? I do think so. In the poem I mentioned, Lerner briefly elaborates on other ways of creating emphasis that are above the level of a second grader. Reading that poem opened me up to the possibility that there are more abstract ways to create emphasis that might go completely&nbsp; unnoticed. Like when you enjoy a novel, and the narrative concludes and creates a feeling that is inexplicably more important that the tying together of the obvious plot points of the story.&nbsp; It would be impossible—and maybe totally pointless—to map the individual passages of text across the book that slowly and subtly built the conditions for the emotional resonance of the conclusion. The ending is impactful because that emotional arc is immediately mappable to us, if that makes sense.&nbsp; The way I'm thinking about the sculpture is within these kinds of relationships between things that can form subtle crescendo together, or maybe at times, the opposite of a crescendo. Like an accumulation? Yeah, of feelings and associative references. Probably the majority of the time, I don't fully comprehend it in a way I can name. I’m creating compositions or a form of rhyming between two forms and I think it's harder for me to name the other ways I'm creating emphasis, or allowing emphasis to fall. One of the ways I write about it, for instance with the piano, is that the piano creates an out-of-body experience because it allows the human to emote in a way that they wouldn't be able to with just their body. I think there's a paradox there.&nbsp; Embedded in that out-of-body experience there’s a subtle disembodiment that occurs, that exists through all technology. I would never want to make art about this, but as an example, it’s related to being hyper-present on your phone. Thinking about the way that technology and images create the potential for an unknowable disembodiment that runs parallel to, or mirrors, the extension of human will—or agency—that technology extends. When you listen to music or you’re on your phone, it's like a willful disembodying. Yeah. You're in the music. It's a willful disembodiment, for sure. But I question the consequence of that. I don't think it's damaging. I actually wouldn't even phrase it in such concrete terms. Maybe that’s why art is important? As the inconclusive record of some investigation. I'm wondering what the long term impact of that is on how humans evolve and how it impacts our relationships and ability to form them. We’re a species of imitation, but now we're constantly interacting with algorithms, these things that we can't even see. Sometimes that really fucks with my head. I’ve been reading a book called “Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism,” [Anna Kornbluh] which talks specifically about the ways in which art writing and even all media is beginning to reflect the way we consume images through our phones, and how there's little to no mediation between us and what we consume anymore because there's a lack of a critic or someone to interpret these ideas or artworks before they make it to us. It goes directly from the creator to the consumer, instead of there being any curation or mediation. I think about Tik Tok, specifically, as being incredibly dangerous because the algorithm isn't thinking, it's not an editor of a newspaper. There’s no filter between you and what's being put in front of you. It's all AI, and the AI isn't saying, “oh, we should feed them more of this.” If you will spend time with a specific kind of content, It will give you more of it. It just wants to keep you there. It's purely working on the mechanism of addiction, whether it’s a positive thing that you're being fed, something triggering you towards negative emotions, or telling you something you want to hear. We don't have that much agency with what we consume. It becomes our responsibility to be aware of what we’re bringing into our heads, but there’s a way in which these images are almost created to be seen and consumed before you can think about them. It's interesting and weird. I've talked to some people about the way the New York art world operated before the internet. When someone had a show, no one would see any images of that show until Artforum came out a month later, usually with just one photograph. Everyone saw the show in person. So there was this story of the show that circulated through the city, and there was a slow digestion that took place over the course of the exhibition that wasn't just everyone seeing like 10 images in a scroll and moving on. It's easy to romanticize that, but I do wonder what it would have been like. I guess I’ll never know. People do still go out and see shows, but there’s this other media, this other layer to it. That’s actually a good tangent to my show at Cordova [Perfectamundo]. The show had these two hand held radios. The radio was picking up a local am station that was announcing news updates in Barcelona, and depending on where you moved in the room, the frequency would go in and out. There were two stools. Viewers were encouraged to move around the show with the radio in hand, and the result was a kind of atmospheric sea of information and static. But this radio can be tuned to a handful of frequencies that are available nationally.&nbsp; Depending on where you are it delivers a mix of local and regional conditions [gestures to an emergency weather radio in the studio]. I like that there’s just information all around us. <img width="8256" height="5504" width_o="8256" height_o="5504" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/37ad471725899698359d70998830eb76deea86623ddff6929b2c67131f08517b/JoelDeanPerfectamundoMEDCORDOVARobertoRuiz17.jpg" data-mid="224155518" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/37ad471725899698359d70998830eb76deea86623ddff6929b2c67131f08517b/JoelDeanPerfectamundoMEDCORDOVARobertoRuiz17.jpg" /> <img width="3000" height="2001" width_o="3000" height_o="2001" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e30d025c264a50655e9b81f57a73ec21a80b169dcba2ce74b39a20b9b4ffd534/first_alert.jpg" data-mid="224155541" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e30d025c264a50655e9b81f57a73ec21a80b169dcba2ce74b39a20b9b4ffd534/first_alert.jpg" /> <img width="5504" height="8256" width_o="5504" height_o="8256" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e11f77edebc7f8ea40ceed5d19e7a6e2bf860d338d9b3299af6b028a4b2e551c/JoelDeanPerfectamundoMEDCORDOVARobertoRuiz51.jpg" data-mid="224748603" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e11f77edebc7f8ea40ceed5d19e7a6e2bf860d338d9b3299af6b028a4b2e551c/JoelDeanPerfectamundoMEDCORDOVARobertoRuiz51.jpg" /> Installation view, Perfectamundo, 2019, Cordova, Barcelona You’re talking about your show Perfectamundo? Yeah, the work I’m referring to included two Marlboro radios. Back then, I guess, cigarette companies were still allowed to produce and sell anything with their branding on it. So they made these portable handheld radios that just looked like cigarette packs. I love this relationship between information and the way we consume information now. And I wouldn't want to say that it was about how information is addicting, but more about information as something that is consumed. Information as a substance. It’s funny that the dynamic of consumption is totally reversed; rather than an ad on the radio, the radio is coming from an ad. Haha I love that. Yeah the radio waves of information kind of functioned as smoke. This reminds me of your alphabet paintings, and many of your paintings, how there’s these accumulations of hearts or bubbles that fill the space, almost like a screen between the painting and the viewer. I almost see them as sound, creating a space or an aura, giving embodiment to the air. Yeah, totally. It's funny, formally, what that layering and breaking of the atmosphere does. My favorites of that series achieve this odd quality of space, where it almost looks like there’s only two feet between the layers of the painting. The image might be of an expansive field, it and the illusion it holds is somewhat convincing, like you can understand that there is distance, but the space actually feels very shallow and compact, because of the way these layers interact. Like separate planes within the painting. Exactly. And that compactness charges the atmosphere of the painting with a resonance. It’s similar to the paintings of the pianos, which are also oddly shallow and squeezed within the frame– how the image resonates. On the way over here, Olivia and I were discussing how coherent and singular your aesthetic voice is in both painting and sculpture. Is that illustrative style of your last few painting bodies of work a new development? Nice to hear you can see a throughline. I was painting representationally all through college, and my use of color and feeling of overload might be consistent but I think these feel much more refined. If you looked at my paintings in college, you would see similarities, it would make sense if you said they're the same person. When I began painting again, towards the end of the shutdown, I started to use layering with more intention. The skin of that ballerina is all yellow underneath, and then there’s a mix of greens and reds on top of that. I'm using a mix of wax and Galkyd, and all these mediums to allow for that translucency. In the alphabet paintings, I was really trying to push that, where the first three layers of the painting were totally opaque, to cut out space, and then I would layer colors over those spaces to bring them towards the same tone. I think a lot of other painters are much more scientific about it; for me it was really intuitive, I have a basic understanding of color theory, and I work with that. The use of semi-translucent layers isn’t something that I was doing when I was younger.&nbsp; It adds to their feeling of atmosphere. My recent paintings appear almost over the top colorful, but if you actually look at specific moments you might question what color it is you’re even looking at… There might be three colors happening at once that aren't actually mixed together. Separately the three colors are nameable, but in the way I layer them, they all kind of flicker in and out. I don't want to get on a soapbox about this, but I do think that right now, in the art world, paintings are being made in a one to one relation to the photograph. I work with photographic reference sometimes, but I'm really conscious of trying to make slower feeling paintings that have moments which aren't photographic and are intentionally painterly. <img width="542" height="494" width_o="542" height_o="494" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/38db5070e5a0e0514c44677d0fe28704527f192f61f30bed41c3a6a5b0589842/5_2021_Joel_Dean_Painting_Bel_Ami_Letter_M-copy.jpg" data-mid="224155693" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/542/i/38db5070e5a0e0514c44677d0fe28704527f192f61f30bed41c3a6a5b0589842/5_2021_Joel_Dean_Painting_Bel_Ami_Letter_M-copy.jpg" /> <img width="1213" height="1440" width_o="1213" height_o="1440" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6088d0192a971ef0f705c51c7858c9a52d3bb0aafa42e5d97c7e73aa41b01e4c/5_2021_Joel_Dean_Painting_Bel_Ami_Letter_M.jpg" data-mid="224155669" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6088d0192a971ef0f705c51c7858c9a52d3bb0aafa42e5d97c7e73aa41b01e4c/5_2021_Joel_Dean_Painting_Bel_Ami_Letter_M.jpg" /> <img width="569" height="726" width_o="569" height_o="726" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/03de3018bcdf1feb6e80aa0feee3f56be430a1ed601bffbf94868d1cac104bc9/5_2021_Joel_Dean_Painting_Bel_Ami_Letter_M-copy-2.jpg" data-mid="224155696" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/569/i/03de3018bcdf1feb6e80aa0feee3f56be430a1ed601bffbf94868d1cac104bc9/5_2021_Joel_Dean_Painting_Bel_Ami_Letter_M-copy-2.jpg" /> Initial M and the Transformative Power of Symbolism in Storytelling, 2021 oil on canvas, 64 x 48 inches I think it's a prevalent mode of production because the art world uses images of paintings through screens, with PDF previews and what not. These images also inform a sense of scale, or lack of a sense of scale. Everything looks the same size on your phone. There's almost like a fast fashion aspect to some of the way in which it works. Right, that's true, it's a product. Did you guys see that New York Times article about the market crashing? It gave me a little bit of hope for New York–maybe people will just want to make art again because no one's buying anything. ︎: @nobodylikesbeing Images courtesy Bel Ami, Derosia, Cordova and Roberto Ruiz. All images: © Joel Dean https://super-nyc.com/Julia-Text Tue, 22 Oct 2024 18:24:50 +0000 super! https://super-nyc.com/Julia-Text Julia Garcia virtually opened the doors of her Minneapolis studio to us one night, where we discussed her recent bodies of work as they relate to one another, as well as desire and the dangers of nostalgia. We got to see a pastel drawing in progress which acted as a kind of background to her webcam image. The source image for the drawing is a tiny 35mm slide photograph taken by an audience member of a children’s performance. That tiny slide had come a long way since its conception: an image of a drawing of an image of a performance that occurred somewhere, at some point, probably a long time ago. For all that might be lacking in the virtual studio visit, the teletechnological feat of that particular image to reach us in New York should be noted, and, more importantly, so should the resonance that its journey has with Garcia’s practice. That is, the image on the screen, which was once a photograph discarded, forgotten about, lost or left behind, has been, by virtue of Julia’s project,&nbsp; stripped of its context and made anew in time and space. During our conversation, I was reminded of a line that Pierre Bonnard wrote in his journal in 1937, which is repeated a few times in Timothy Hyman’s 1998, Bonnard (Thames and Hudson): “let it be felt that a painter was there.” The line highlights Bonnard’s insistence on subjectivity and emotion as an articulation of painting’s possibilities. The types of images that Julia works with are chosen not just because of their compositional or formal value, but because they are representations and iterations of specific desired effects—some familial or personal, some low-brow and commercial, or desire itself. Julia’s work underlines their fallibility by giving them subjectivity, as if she says to them, “let it be felt that there is a painting there.” <img width="966" height="1160" width_o="966" height_o="1160" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/484b598707a565f41ac0e3a81ebbf350868985c2d5b2806c3ebb09e3964a5fa2/The-Party.jpeg" data-mid="220138545" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/966/i/484b598707a565f41ac0e3a81ebbf350868985c2d5b2806c3ebb09e3964a5fa2/The-Party.jpeg" /> The Party, 2023acrylic, ink, and dye on canvas, 48 x 40 inches I saw the study on Instagram, but is that a new painting [Stage Light, 2024]? It is a pastel drawing. I don't know whether to call it a drawing or a painting, it's on canvas. So it's that funny line in between. Since the show in Miami [Poor Dog Bright, KDR Gallery, 2024], I've really wanted to draw and work in dry mediums. I think we talked about that for a second when I saw you in New York. It's felt really nice to be messing around with pastel, drawing can feel much more free and playful sometimes than painting. <img width="672" height="572" width_o="672" height_o="572" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/fa86bd9374c9b2d8e620087b9a430a70c0ff112dbbdd227315219de259297288/Stage-Light_60x72_pastel-on-canvas_2024-copy.jpg" data-mid="220137386" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/672/i/fa86bd9374c9b2d8e620087b9a430a70c0ff112dbbdd227315219de259297288/Stage-Light_60x72_pastel-on-canvas_2024-copy.jpg" /> <img width="1109" height="935" width_o="1109" height_o="935" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/09dec18edc0c9b4df45915092bd7d04748717c8d55ad25bbb3f7e29dc15f0489/Stage-Light_60x72_pastel-on-canvas_2024.jpg" data-mid="220137132" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/09dec18edc0c9b4df45915092bd7d04748717c8d55ad25bbb3f7e29dc15f0489/Stage-Light_60x72_pastel-on-canvas_2024.jpg" /> Stage Light, 2024 pastel on canvas, 60 x 72 inches What attracts you to drawing? It’s a really foundational part of my practice. I think the first thing I did was draw, in terms of an introduction to mediums. Like someone hands you some crayons and paper as a child and you just go for it.&nbsp; It’s something I come back to all the time. What's the source material for this work? This is from a bunch of 35 millimeter slides that I bought on eBay. I've got a light box that I can look at them through. It’s a photo of a performance taken from the audience–a children's play or something like that. I've been drawn recently towards images of the relationship between spectatorship and performance. <img width="878" height="743" width_o="878" height_o="743" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/50345bcc18f72f206a94039fd3ed501214b0039147a905b531340cfebd2fb6bc/Palms_84x77_2023-copy-copy.jpg" data-mid="220137742" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/878/i/50345bcc18f72f206a94039fd3ed501214b0039147a905b531340cfebd2fb6bc/Palms_84x77_2023-copy-copy.jpg" /> <img width="1500" height="1391" width_o="1500" height_o="1391" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/48b5f7ef2bf3e1b10980bc569cb0629c7d5350fa35e62311d190c4fe8114a50c/Palms_84x77_2023-copy.jpg" data-mid="220137576" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/48b5f7ef2bf3e1b10980bc569cb0629c7d5350fa35e62311d190c4fe8114a50c/Palms_84x77_2023-copy.jpg" /> Palms, 2023 acrylic and ink on canvas, 84 x 77 inches The aspect of performativity feels like a continuation of your previous kind of bodies of work. I see the Florida imagery as one body of work, and then these retro family and commercial imageries as its own exploration, but there's a through line of performativity on the surface level that runs through that. Especially the girls wrestling the gators, which is staged as well. Yeah, I'm interested to see where it goes. I definitely feel those through lines as well, but I'm in a strange place in the studio where there’s a lot of not knowing—the mystery of why exactly these things—and the connections they have to the work before, which is always a fun place to be, but it’s also a little bit of a scary place to be. Especially after making a larger body of work there’s a lot of doubt about what comes next. I think the “idea” for a painting I distrust a lot, a thought in painting is its own thing that needs to happen in the act. How did you begin working with found imagery? I don’t remember exactly when it started, when I was young, like an early teen, I would paint from National Geographic. My father is a painter as well, he did reproductions at one point-crops of the Sistine Chapel. I grew up with those hanging in my house. So maybe early on there was this sense that images could be lifted from anywhere when you were painting. Less sense of ownership or boundaries. I've gone through a lot of different moments of what I'm interested in painting. Many times there is some secondary thing as a starting point, even if I don't adhere exactly to it, though I’m also thinking so much about form/color and figure/ground tension recently that working from no source has become really satisfying as well. In terms of the recent bodies of work that we were talking about, I think it’s been a lot of getting lost in different image based platforms. So there's this voyeur element to it as well, like being on a one sided glass, clicking through and finding all of these images, saving them, and then re-examining them, or making connections between them through the act of bringing them into the studio and using them as source material. What image ends up being chosen feels like a split between conceptual concerns that I'm thinking about and what I’m interested in terms of compositional components, kinds of tension. I don't necessarily always feel like paintings are about something, but that there's a way in which the choices that you make to get to a painting can be very much about something. <img width="484" height="642" width_o="484" height_o="642" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/49c2168be8a45a54bd18b83e01b22a90c3fb03d440276cfe4d80049d5ab1113b/Sawgrass_Night-Club-1-copy.jpg" data-mid="220137777" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/484/i/49c2168be8a45a54bd18b83e01b22a90c3fb03d440276cfe4d80049d5ab1113b/Sawgrass_Night-Club-1-copy.jpg" /> <img width="1000" height="1250" width_o="1000" height_o="1250" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1193a8df577bbd849e344c01a206c6d21d9b542deecf7b1fbbb448a7309b7d20/Sawgrass_Night-Club-1.jpg" data-mid="220137775" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1193a8df577bbd849e344c01a206c6d21d9b542deecf7b1fbbb448a7309b7d20/Sawgrass_Night-Club-1.jpg" /> Kiss, 2023 acrylic and ink on canvas, 48 x 38 inches “The image you’re shown isn't necessarily what the subject is, sometimes that exists outside the work. Very Tuymans. There's so many different ways to point to the subject, but the material oftentimes will assert itself as denying both the image and the subject...” There's this Baudrillard quote that I've been a little bit obsessed with lately–“the creative act replicates itself to become nothing more than a sign of its own operation. The true subject of a painter is no longer what he or she paints, but the very fact that he or she paints”– which I thought was perfect and amusing. I love how much he hates painting, but how much devotes himself to the act of describing painting because it feels devotional. It’s like what you’re saying about the act of painting is, in itself, one thing, in contrast with the thing that you're choosing to depict, and then there’s relationship between them. &nbsp; Yeah that’s a key separation to me, between the act and what the act produces. I've been thinking a lot about the relationship between the image, the subject, and the material–those are the points that I end up oscillating between in my experience of painting. The image you’re shown isn't necessarily what the subject is, sometimes that exists outside the work. Very Tuymans. There's so many different ways to point to the subject, but the material oftentimes will assert itself as denying both the image and the subject, and end up having as much say as either of them, because it is still a physical object as well. That tension is interesting to me, keeping it open enough for those things to be at play together. The way that you approach material pulls weight from those other two poles towards it, so that there is this balance, or an emphasis. It lends the material some power to pull at both subject and image into this triad. I'm glad to hear that, because that's where my head is at. You had a specific starting point with the alligator paintings. Does the formal language of those paintings apply to the other bodies of work with found imagery? What was the transition to other images like? For me, the transition felt really fluid. That particular moment of the Florida imagery and that method of working, wet into wet on the ground, meshed together and made this space where I could sit with the whole process for longer. Staying with a certain kind of imagery for a long time is something that I always struggle with. I think because the reference itself is just an excuse to paint.&nbsp; I forced myself to slow down a lot these last couple years, this exercise of keeping a process going for longer, experimenting with it more. How far can I push the sense of control vs accepting that the material is going to do. <img width="1740" height="1160" width_o="1740" height_o="1160" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e3746b707151f2f29e9fe31568c355f0b76fa199995b9a08883d35da4ef2faac/install.-2.jpeg" data-mid="220138315" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e3746b707151f2f29e9fe31568c355f0b76fa199995b9a08883d35da4ef2faac/install.-2.jpeg" /> <img width="1740" height="1160" width_o="1740" height_o="1160" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7e09d75e0f982744655371579e5f7e32e1f782259fc6fd67e31af5cdfb1e3c4b/install.jpeg" data-mid="220138301" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7e09d75e0f982744655371579e5f7e32e1f782259fc6fd67e31af5cdfb1e3c4b/install.jpeg" /> <img width="1740" height="1160" width_o="1740" height_o="1160" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e126524cf268def351d225778937692c1c4a979f062020731518246e4a7a314a/install-3.jpeg" data-mid="220138316" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e126524cf268def351d225778937692c1c4a979f062020731518246e4a7a314a/install-3.jpeg" /> <img width="1740" height="1160" width_o="1740" height_o="1160" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ef3f57cd7a8bdaeba6a9dd24fab035cb95138eba7753fdb1467b9b6a05ac33ec/install-4.jpeg" data-mid="220138317" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ef3f57cd7a8bdaeba6a9dd24fab035cb95138eba7753fdb1467b9b6a05ac33ec/install-4.jpeg" /> <img width="1740" height="1160" width_o="1740" height_o="1160" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7f8c7e7d2038e2499f949621b706a571f69f0d43cc914b2252c0b228d7efef95/install-5.jpeg" data-mid="220138318" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7f8c7e7d2038e2499f949621b706a571f69f0d43cc914b2252c0b228d7efef95/install-5.jpeg" /> Installation view, Slow Burn, 2024, Gaa Gallery, New York, NY There was a technical development between the Florida works and the body of work that you showed at GAA Gallery [Slow Burn, 2024]. There’s also a difference in the subject matter, this imagery of commercialism and classic Americana, wood panel walls and what not. The language still feels like a continuation, but the way that you treated the images seems to have shifted with that body of work. The through line for me was very much about fantasy and desire and images that are meant to propagate or instigate desire. When I went down the rabbit hole of alligator pin up photos, it was through essentially pornographic sites, with paywalled images of people hunting in bikinis and posing with whatever they were catching. The fact of the existence of that imagery kind of presupposes an audience for the imagery. The kind of power dynamics that are at play in how we consume images and who images are made for felt very connected to that, it was very fluid to move into using stock imagery. I was drawn to the kind of images that you would find in advertisements, or when you walk into a gym and there's a big vinyl print on the wall. I was documenting some things myself, but also just collecting those kinds of images online. There was a similar kind of idealism of fantasy, and an aspirational quality, as in the alligator images. They're showing you what to want essentially—the ideal thing. Then when I was going through all of these family photos, a lot of those scenes were very similar to the stock imagery. The quality is different, 35mm has a really particular blown out light. One is creating a feeling of nostalgia for something past, and the other is usually pointing toward a thing that you're being told to want; it leaves you in the middle very split to have them next to each other. But ultimately maybe questioning if either is more than a fantasy. I think in regards to how those were made, I definitely got more comfortable with the method of working, how I layered color and how thick or diluted paint was. I’ve always been interested in what you can withhold while still achieving an image that's readable. It's almost like poetry, it's not about a ton of words, necessarily. It can be an economy of words, or an economy of marks to get to the point. To metaphorically point to something else, it is and it isn’t. Kind of endless. This idea of what can be implied, even without being described, and still feel really present. <img width="529" height="700" width_o="529" height_o="700" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f1978f019c01add71dde6af7a63d903ad2fe20b633f0d44efc16c6aa44137c93/Night_Show_48x60_2023-copy-copy.jpg" data-mid="220138343" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/529/i/f1978f019c01add71dde6af7a63d903ad2fe20b633f0d44efc16c6aa44137c93/Night_Show_48x60_2023-copy-copy.jpg" /> <img width="1000" height="1272" width_o="1000" height_o="1272" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/149208543e827f54af0b69ff347cc598c68b0da20ab0964324cc4ffa03a3ab6d/Night_Show_48x60_2023-copy.jpg" data-mid="220138338" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/149208543e827f54af0b69ff347cc598c68b0da20ab0964324cc4ffa03a3ab6d/Night_Show_48x60_2023-copy.jpg" /> <img width="488" height="629" width_o="488" height_o="629" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a4dc55671d64d606cbdc305e65a6dd1cec67ccaaf9b10a79c68c3d99b99e7cd2/Night_Show_48x60_2023-copy-copy-2.jpg" data-mid="220138344" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/488/i/a4dc55671d64d606cbdc305e65a6dd1cec67ccaaf9b10a79c68c3d99b99e7cd2/Night_Show_48x60_2023-copy-copy-2.jpg" /> Night Show, 2023 acrylic and dye on canvas, 60 x 48 inches “Simultaneously, there’s something similar in how nostalgia works: we take a picture to remember a thing, and it cuts it out of time and removes it from the actual conditions of the situation.” There’s something fascinating about the found family photos in your work juxtaposed with the advertisements. The advertisements are of a very overt purpose–get something, buy something, or want something. The family photos are not that, but the photograph was taken of something for a reason. What makes you attracted to those two kinds of found imagery specifically? That’s a really tricky question for some reason. They're both fascinating in the fact that stock images have an insidious element. It’s a lot about the context it’s used in, they’re so bland almost, meant to be as relatable as possible but also so unrealistically polished that they’re kind of alienating. But yeah, so often it’s serving or propping up some kind of buy in. Like a pharmaceutical ad vibe. Simultaneously, there’s something similar in how nostalgia works: we take a picture to remember a thing, and it cuts it out of time and removes it from the actual conditions of the situation. And then we have this image that becomes an idealization, a point of building a new narrative around. Conditions are able to be smoothed out, eroded almost, so that the quality of missing it, wanting it, is much easier. It becomes this story. <img width="1500" height="1192" width_o="1500" height_o="1192" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/74188b30710218dbb7f0b4ede0f2e9fc0328b8b25f5597195e3c4c2c51625a4b/Parade_60x48_2023_acrylic--ink--and-dye-on-canvas.jpg" data-mid="220138353" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/74188b30710218dbb7f0b4ede0f2e9fc0328b8b25f5597195e3c4c2c51625a4b/Parade_60x48_2023_acrylic--ink--and-dye-on-canvas.jpg" /> <img width="672" height="561" width_o="672" height_o="561" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0205e896a99373d37bc4407de0b12af8fe7431db986416c9c3a9b5fcdb26da51/Parade_60x48_2023_acrylic--ink--and-dye-on-canvas-copy.jpg" data-mid="220138360" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/672/i/0205e896a99373d37bc4407de0b12af8fe7431db986416c9c3a9b5fcdb26da51/Parade_60x48_2023_acrylic--ink--and-dye-on-canvas-copy.jpg" /> <img width="662" height="495" width_o="662" height_o="495" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f7cd88d82e8e8e9379d1fa1253fd7d36a7b1865f9de32de45592692cb2bc8054/Parade_60x48_2023_acrylic--ink--and-dye-on-canvas-copy-2.jpg" data-mid="220138389" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/662/i/f7cd88d82e8e8e9379d1fa1253fd7d36a7b1865f9de32de45592692cb2bc8054/Parade_60x48_2023_acrylic--ink--and-dye-on-canvas-copy-2.jpg" /> Parade, 2023 acrylic, ink, and dye on canvas, 48 x 60 inches It's so precarious. Very precarious. It’s two sides of the same thing in a way, because neither of them really exist. The imagery is looped, we're trying to catch these things. The same image could remind you of many different things, but whatever it does hold is really subjective. There's a tension between what it actually was and what you want it to be. Yeah, and images are so powerful in terms of how we remember, how we contextualize ourselves in history. There's the image, and then our explanation of it. When that veers towards being more idealistic, it’s almost eroding or letting go of the multifacetedness of actual experience. I feel like it can be kind of dangerous. When you paint from an image it’s like you’re disembodying it to create the painting, which becomes almost like a repository for the viewer of the painting to look at and be reminded of their own experiences. What do you see as the relationship between those things? You're taking something that someone experienced and solidified into an image, recreating that image for then another person to project their experience on to or connect with. It's definitely something that I think about. It's hard not to think about, because there's almost a perverted role that I play. With some of the source photos, I'm going through evidence of other people's lives, but I have no context for any of it. I don't know who they are. I don't like to paint people that I know personally. Maybe it's because there's something about this role that’s… ‘violence’ is too strong of a word…&nbsp; but taking an image from somebody else's personal history, and then choosing to represent that, giving it new connotations that other people are going to experience it through. It's a strange role to have. <img width="1437" height="1160" width_o="1437" height_o="1160" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/546376cf937d3c4c40b74f51565d2b0f79e419c494aa0461e7f6940a2b78bf4d/Geography-Lesson.jpeg" data-mid="220138398" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/546376cf937d3c4c40b74f51565d2b0f79e419c494aa0461e7f6940a2b78bf4d/Geography-Lesson.jpeg" /> <img width="648" height="480" width_o="648" height_o="480" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c7997d9c1bf5acd2ca8da4546048d4c2d91f9685ff6fd0e61bbe1bcb10e9845d/Geography-Lesson-copy.jpeg" data-mid="220138406" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/648/i/c7997d9c1bf5acd2ca8da4546048d4c2d91f9685ff6fd0e61bbe1bcb10e9845d/Geography-Lesson-copy.jpeg" /> <img width="660" height="575" width_o="660" height_o="575" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cab64b1b841389791621eadd8397c30f1c7ef3cf068cade1bf7e6a4c8cfac711/Geography-Lesson-copy-2.jpeg" data-mid="220138407" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/660/i/cab64b1b841389791621eadd8397c30f1c7ef3cf068cade1bf7e6a4c8cfac711/Geography-Lesson-copy-2.jpeg" /> Geography Lesson, 2024 acrylic, ink, and dye on canvas, 58 x 72 inches It’s like you're sitting in the middle of this mirror, there's these two images on either side. The original person who created the image, and then your viewer looking at the image that you've created, and you're almost mediating those two. I do have some voice in that mediation in terms of the press release or work title, but there's also this way in which I don't have very much control over how people experience them but I’m pretty okay with that. “not all paintings do this, but I think that ideally, it kind of occupies this third place of resisting time.” Are the works additive to the source material in some way? Or do you find that they're a distillation or a compression? I don't know that they're either additive or distilling, to me paintings really feel like they’re in their own trajectory separate from external referents. I was recently listening to Graham Harman, who talks about object oriented ontology. The famous thing that he describes is the third table. It's this idea of things existing, not necessarily just in a reductive way, a breakdown of components, or a relational way, defining something just through how we interact with it. But that there are withdrawn qualities in the table that are inaccessible. The role of a painting, how it is able to resist time and resist interpretation so that you can have multiple interactions with it,&nbsp; and so that its read can shift and be different for other individuals. This quality of not being able to transcribe it into another state, to summarize it, because parts will always be withheld. That this has something to do with being, with how we exist. I think that ideally, and not all paintings do this, but I think that ideally, it kind of occupies this third place of resisting time. It's a continual question. It asks you to continuously participate and approach, rather than giving you something tied up nicely with a bow on it. Yes, and there's an important part of almost turning away from the imageness, disregarding the image at a certain point, not having fealty to the image. Especially working from photography and found photography, there's a way in which painting can slip into simply transcribing or describing a photo. There's a pivot that it has to make in order to allow itself to foreground its own material, the physicality of making a painting, the pace of the marks that you're making. Sometimes things accumulate really slowly over time. I would say that I work at a faster pace than a lot of people, and that almost resonant energy from the act of making is doing something. <img width="705" height="605" width_o="705" height_o="605" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/dba38e12e3be6738a2742fab6b7d012e65180e3cf6f4d3fb703091b346fcec64/Wonder-copy.jpeg" data-mid="220138528" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/705/i/dba38e12e3be6738a2742fab6b7d012e65180e3cf6f4d3fb703091b346fcec64/Wonder-copy.jpeg" /> <img width="1313" height="1160" width_o="1313" height_o="1160" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/18920e6de1b1fe45604a22a0e71d0d12050506a56f098df9491290b1b94bb0bb/Wonder.jpeg" data-mid="220138509" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/18920e6de1b1fe45604a22a0e71d0d12050506a56f098df9491290b1b94bb0bb/Wonder.jpeg" /> <img width="821" height="600" width_o="821" height_o="600" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/678f5f4e354c01e91cdd1d2acb90264337f33c767569a21f45fa36e5c5e935a2/Wonder-copy-2.jpeg" data-mid="220138536" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/821/i/678f5f4e354c01e91cdd1d2acb90264337f33c767569a21f45fa36e5c5e935a2/Wonder-copy-2.jpeg" /> The Wonder, 2024 acrylic, ink, and dye on canvas, 80 x 90 inches I was reading an interview with Luc Tuymans from 2015 which mentions that each painting from a recent show was done in a day. Given some similarities of your work, do you work at a similar pace? Sometimes. I feel like it's different, this work [Stage Light, 2024] is already quite slow and contemplative compared to other works from when I started. I worked on it a couple of times already. I don’t always do that, but I don’t have such a strict code. It’s more about achieving a state of happening-ness, there should be this lasting effect, not just of going through the motions. I want the painting, and I experience this with lots of artists' work, to feel like maybe it was just finished moments ago before you saw it, maybe something in it is still finishing as you look. Working specifically with the taping process, that structure, and then water, a total lack of structure, the pace goes slow and then it really does go fast.&nbsp; You know before you start a few things, some composition and what things you want to feel bounded, what things you want to start to fuse. It does something to the depth of space, because it really affects the sense of simultaneity. Working wet into wet, you really only have the period of time in which it's evaporating, and without gesso the surface is really a record of all the marks. That water line if you go into something that has dried, where the pigment concentrated on the edge. So those paintings have a lot of developing and honing in on building out the structure first, whether it was in small iterations, drawings, whatever. It's a lot of preparation and building and structure, and then just going for it. It alway ends up being a little bit more hectic and chaotic. You can plan all you want, but it's not actually going to do the things that you thought it was going to do. A lot of the work that was for the show at Gaa and the show at KDR were things that I made in one go, however long it took. <img width="1870" height="2316" width_o="1870" height_o="2316" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c98939abd0d4739f4d763e9bea6cff15b62c5ef994060a20fd84f57edbe91b3e/The-Red-Shield_42x36_acrylic-inand-dye-on-canvas_2024-copy.jpg" data-mid="220138709" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c98939abd0d4739f4d763e9bea6cff15b62c5ef994060a20fd84f57edbe91b3e/The-Red-Shield_42x36_acrylic-inand-dye-on-canvas_2024-copy.jpg" /> <img width="3493" height="4127" width_o="3493" height_o="4127" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/29dd84013912c43da640ff4e7423c700d2dde84572f46f564dc17acab85a897c/The-Red-Shield_42x36_acrylic-inand-dye-on-canvas_2024.jpg" data-mid="220138644" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/29dd84013912c43da640ff4e7423c700d2dde84572f46f564dc17acab85a897c/The-Red-Shield_42x36_acrylic-inand-dye-on-canvas_2024.jpg" /> <img width="1518" height="1839" width_o="1518" height_o="1839" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/bee50b8b0f5c8d7ff0613c459590c237361e54a8fc3a7e7976eced30cd3bfbba/The-Red-Shield_42x36_acrylic-inand-dye-on-canvas_2024-copy-2.jpg" data-mid="220138726" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/bee50b8b0f5c8d7ff0613c459590c237361e54a8fc3a7e7976eced30cd3bfbba/The-Red-Shield_42x36_acrylic-inand-dye-on-canvas_2024-copy-2.jpg" /> The Red Shield, 2024 acrylic, ink, and dye on canvas, 42 x 36 inches I saw the group show at Hair and Nails [Freshly For You, 2024] and then when I was looking at some of your older work I noticed that there was something that I had missed before. That work of someone in armor [The Red Shield, 2024], seems to be singular in terms of its source imagery. That painting is actually from the slides, someone's found photos; I think it was a child's Halloween costume. I feel like images of childhood are very vulnerable because there’s this massive potential for trauma during childhood. Particularly in family dynamics, and in the depiction of these everyday things, it feels psychologically loaded. Some of the old photos that I'll find will be of a baby learning to crawl, and there's one shoe in the frame of someone who's standing, watching. That relationship immediately makes the image feel very heavy, in terms of the vulnerability of this small moment along with an entity that feels much more powerful. A baby kissing a doll, it’s very innocent, but that record, the presence of the photographic eye, it starts to feel uncomfortable. Something evocative, but not explicit. Yeah, it's interesting to think about why that is. What is it about an image? Why this image and not that image is a really tricky question that I ask myself a lot, but I don't have a definitive answer to. <img width="2354" height="3066" width_o="2354" height_o="3066" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9fa5fe4862e7d9f70c9db19e54bd84f26037ca355b8e797e4a7a5db5da120fe7/Flower-Moon_60x72_acrylic-ink-and-dye-on-canvas_2024-copy.jpg" data-mid="220139272" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9fa5fe4862e7d9f70c9db19e54bd84f26037ca355b8e797e4a7a5db5da120fe7/Flower-Moon_60x72_acrylic-ink-and-dye-on-canvas_2024-copy.jpg" /> <img width="2561" height="3050" width_o="2561" height_o="3050" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3d2aec24c6efec245dc0a07207577d8cfe231f5886475604886577838ba468f0/Flower-Moon_60x72_acrylic-ink-and-dye-on-canvas_2024-copy-2.jpg" data-mid="220139270" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3d2aec24c6efec245dc0a07207577d8cfe231f5886475604886577838ba468f0/Flower-Moon_60x72_acrylic-ink-and-dye-on-canvas_2024-copy-2.jpg" /> <img width="4437" height="5316" width_o="4437" height_o="5316" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/71484f80bfcf40348cd0921e69eb64387bc7dbd1c80adef01c64c3055c76989f/Flower-Moon_60x72_acrylic-ink-and-dye-on-canvas_2024.jpg" data-mid="220138936" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/71484f80bfcf40348cd0921e69eb64387bc7dbd1c80adef01c64c3055c76989f/Flower-Moon_60x72_acrylic-ink-and-dye-on-canvas_2024.jpg" /> Flower Moon, 2024 acrylic, ink, and dye on canvas, 72 x 60 inches I can see what you’re talking about with the image behind you [Stage Light, 2024]. It's a bunch of kids putting something on for adults, but they may not even want to be on that stage. It's an incredibly vulnerable place to be. There's layers that feel present in all of the images that you select, multiple entry points to that image, or multiple layers where it's heavily psychologically loaded. That’s something I'm always trying to do, to come at them from a lot of different ways. It’s interesting, because I haven't seen any of the source imagery, but it almost feels like you are bringing a photograph back to fallibility, or looking at it in this way which destabilizes their ‘truth’. If a photograph is allegedly objective, pure information, then you fuck with it in the way that memory also does. Even more so in the kind of condition that we're living in today, where images are taken as objective less and less. It's very easy, with AI, images have definitely lost this sense of&nbsp; document, but I think historically they've had a lot more of that power. They're much more easily cast into doubt now, but it’s still a very satisfying way of relating to the world. Mediating it, bounding the experiences that are essentially edgeless. I like to think about it. <img width="7792" height="5504" width_o="7792" height_o="5504" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/fc8530751e058165adfdd1e3495e24ea7af82b87717818820c4d6051df11ae0a/Supersoaker_Detail-3.jpg" data-mid="220139555" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/fc8530751e058165adfdd1e3495e24ea7af82b87717818820c4d6051df11ae0a/Supersoaker_Detail-3.jpg" /> <img width="5893" height="5066" width_o="5893" height_o="5066" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/48164be0306155087f59209869452580bb14fdd2d2b66b92183aee16c7fd4c6d/Supersoaker_72x90_acrylic-ink-and-dye-on-canvas_2024.jpg" data-mid="220139542" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/48164be0306155087f59209869452580bb14fdd2d2b66b92183aee16c7fd4c6d/Supersoaker_72x90_acrylic-ink-and-dye-on-canvas_2024.jpg" /> Supersoaker, 2024 acrylic, ink, and dye on canvas, 72 x 90 inches It’s interesting to think about the way in which photography and images have lost all superiority or standing as a bearer of fact. We bring this inherent distrust as we move through this different way of digesting imagery. Yeah, lot of what we’ve been speaking about has been photography, the photographic image in particular and how it relates to painting, but image making is much longer than the conversation photography is having, the influence it has. There's so much going on from before photography, which is a more recent influence in terms of the history of painting. Painting is so, so massive. ︎: @__joolz all images: © Julia Garcia https://super-nyc.com/Ficus-Text Thu, 05 Sep 2024 21:25:34 +0000 super! https://super-nyc.com/Ficus-Text An ethos of unification undergirds Ficus Interfaith, made up of artists Ryan Bush and Raphael Cohen. Together, they adhere to a way of thinking, talking about, and making art on a first person plural level. And for the two of them, Ficus Interfaith takes on its own entity, or a third distinct voice. This central factor of their practice extends to their primary medium of terrazzo, itself a composite material which is used in lobbies, public spaces, and homes all over the world. As a vernacular material, there is already implicit meaning in terrazzo’s use as an artwork, and that’s where Ficus Interfaith steps in—to play with and question how certain objects, spaces, words, and histories came to mean what they do. For almost ten years, Ficus Interfaith has been posting to My Brother’s Garden, a shared archive and vault of poems, entire Wikipedia pages copied and pasted, Youtube videos, images, and miscellaneous content from the internet. (An embedded Youtube video of the PS 22 choir performing Katy Perry’s Fireworks is the earliest post, dated December 8, 2014 at 4:21 pm). The site also serves as their artist website in a more conventional sense, where they post past exhibitions, press, and images of their work. Among the probably hundreds of poems on the site is “Miracles” by Walt Whitman, posted on Saturday, May 16, 2015, at 4:03 PM. In typical Whitman fashion, he lists all of these beautiful sights and experiences like wading “with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of / the water.” But it’s not just these things as discrete experiences which make them miracles, it’s that “…These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles, / The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place…” We spoke with Ryan in the duo’s studio in Queens while Raphael called in from his parents house upstate. <img width="3734" height="5197" width_o="3734" height_o="5197" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9e76a17306b5176925417f2bf342f3a5c45c46ccb0cc98df9e8eaa08f6f39234/DeliGallery_FicusInterfaith_GrandfatherClock_003.jpg" data-mid="217988156" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9e76a17306b5176925417f2bf342f3a5c45c46ccb0cc98df9e8eaa08f6f39234/DeliGallery_FicusInterfaith_GrandfatherClock_003.jpg" /> <img width="3446" height="5168" width_o="3446" height_o="5168" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/847d577bde095bb677e5474a01667b53bfa96c0b140cfa3def50b4024f37a6c6/DeliGallery_FicusInterfaith_GrandfatherClock_001.jpg" data-mid="217979546" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/847d577bde095bb677e5474a01667b53bfa96c0b140cfa3def50b4024f37a6c6/DeliGallery_FicusInterfaith_GrandfatherClock_001.jpg" /> <img width="3715" height="5356" width_o="3715" height_o="5356" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7913fd3506c4b85e84f4f0a8868d3473aa79961c974fe2d9a8eb7a9c3b7ede8e/DeliGallery_FicusInterfaith_GrandfatherClock_008.jpg" data-mid="217988162" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7913fd3506c4b85e84f4f0a8868d3473aa79961c974fe2d9a8eb7a9c3b7ede8e/DeliGallery_FicusInterfaith_GrandfatherClock_008.jpg" /> <img width="3313" height="4970" width_o="3313" height_o="4970" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a9fb4ed10b92586b19cd5e2a000c903e48d8501ba21ba793c2887cae187603ff/DeliGallery_FicusInterfaith_GrandfatherClock_004.jpg" data-mid="217988161" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a9fb4ed10b92586b19cd5e2a000c903e48d8501ba21ba793c2887cae187603ff/DeliGallery_FicusInterfaith_GrandfatherClock_004.jpg" /> Grandfather Clock, 2022 cementious terrazzo, deer bones, brass,&nbsp;82.75 × 21 × 1.5 inches Courtesy of Deli Gallery Nice to meet you. How is it up there? It's very nice up here, I just worked in the garden a little bit. There was a frog and two toads. &nbsp; I don’t know if I can tell the difference. Toads are bigger and wartier. Yeah, the frog is slimy and wet, toads are fatter and wartier and dry, Toads don't like water, right? You can see it on them; the frogs are glossy. Warts are associated with toads, because they're all warty. There's an old wives tale that if you touch a toad, that's how you get warts on your fingers. [He proceeds to venture to the garden to find and show everyone the frogs and toads, but gives up before going back to the house] So you met at RISD, and you both received BAs in painting. How did you end up moving on to terrazzo as your main medium? When we started working together, it felt like sculpture was just an easier avenue to do as a collaborative practice, because painting can be so intuitive and most painters operate in a solo pursuit. I think the common thread going through it was trying to find materials that were maybe deemed part of a waste stream in some way, or have an aspect of reuse in the sculpture. We were researching the history of mosaics. We stumbled into terrazzo, which also has a history of reuse and recycled material. And then that was that. Ryan showed us some of your watercolors earlier and he said that with the watercolors, you can see your specific hands in each of them, but then once you’re working in terrazzo, it’s like a third hand. I think that it’s really different from painting. There’s an element of craft that involves many steps, which allows us to lose our hands in a way that's really enjoyable, as opposed to painting which is probably the most immediate way to make art. It's just your hand, your mind, color, and the paint itself. With the terrazzo we've found the process so rewarding, because there's just so many steps that you can share in a way. Do you both always have a hand in each work? We make every creative decision together, which is exhausting, but it's not that hard. We do every single thing ourselves. Physically, there are things we do hand off. Raph’s more precise than me and more of a perfectionist. I rush and I take shortcuts, so Raph always does the colors, because he's better at that, and I do all the emailing. There's certain things that we have figured out. “Most often with craft objects, they’re unattributed or they'll be attributed to a time or a culture. We think that’s fascinating, as opposed to a work of art being the product of a single person's funnel of ‘artistic genius.’ I think that we're interested in that murky space.” I feel like the distinction between art and craft is present and alive, but also not that important. I'm wondering if you see this distinction as something that you are playing with, not necessarily breaking it all down, but having fun with. Yeah, absolutely. One thing that really stands out to us when we go to the museum is the decorative arts versus the fine arts, and how they're categorized and attributed. Most often with craft objects, they’re unattributed or they'll be attributed to a time or a culture. We think that’s fascinating, as opposed to a work of art being the product of a single person's funnel of “artistic genius.” I think that we're interested in that murky space. That's why Ficus Interfaith—naming it—has been really helpful, because it's not an equal part Raph and Ryan and our individual lives and trauma. Of course, those things feed into the art, but it's Ficus making art as Ficus, versus us telling our own stories. A lot of your earlier works had plaques which were attributed to “Ficus Interfaith Research &amp; Properties.” Do you still include those on every work? No—but we should. I don't know why we left that, but we sign each work as Ficus Interfaith, and it doesn't matter who signs it. I haven't thought about those in a while, but I think we were using them when the works that we were making looked more like art. Things like furniture or craft use those plaques as a label or attribution, and that was a way of confusing the kind of product that we were making. Once we started making tables and furniture, it became unnecessary to confuse it more. Or maybe it was more obvious to use a plaque at that point, so then we stopped using it. It wasn't a decision that we made, I think it happened naturally. <img width="2914" height="3052" width_o="2914" height_o="3052" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7492a68ae0470c74c063051672e19ac4a5a53f6a99a96cc40f14740a05c2767c/Plow-detail-Ficus.jpg" data-mid="217783999" border="0" data-scale="43" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7492a68ae0470c74c063051672e19ac4a5a53f6a99a96cc40f14740a05c2767c/Plow-detail-Ficus.jpg" /> Plow (detail), 2017, powder coated steel, custom plaque, dimensions variable Courtesy of Gern en Regalia You’ve described your show Grand Central Tree House [2023] at Deli, as really momentous since it was your 50th exhibition together. Can you talk about what made it feel so important? I don't think the show itself stands out as a marker, so much as it was us checking in with ourselves about what we have done and what we want to do. In terms of the work, that was us pushing the limits on what we could do scale-wise. Those are the largest works we've ever made, and the first time that we've ever made something that just us two couldn't carry. There's a symbology in that, and it speaks to collaboration and what it means to think creatively beyond yourself both physically and mentally. Making art that you literally cannot carry alone–what does that mean? I think it was also the first time we really showed furniture and art together in a gallery space. We wanted terrazzo tables and terrazzo wall works that operate essentially as paintings right next to each other. That's something we're still interested in, because it had become two forks of our practice: one being commission based work that tends to be furniture and flooring, and the other one being artworks that hang on the wall. Part of the terrazzo project is also pushing the material and technique within the format, using branches or oyster shells or fruit pits. It's exploring those alternative techniques in both formats and then seeing how they operate differently or together. There was a lot going on in that show. There was a pushing of the material, and there were also a lot of references—historical references, playful references—with the pool table and the Roman skeleton mosaic. So the title of the show kind of came after all of the works, but I think the overarching idea is in the title of the show itself. It speaks to Grand Central being this big, public historical space, and the tree house being a vernacular, private space, and then what happens when you jam them together. <img width="3024" height="4032" width_o="3024" height_o="4032" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/65b99c741356ecdc49777ddd42c808ed44c2d73f8a4d372d25c395a6c93cf4c7/Popcorn-Curtain.jpg" data-mid="217980432" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/65b99c741356ecdc49777ddd42c808ed44c2d73f8a4d372d25c395a6c93cf4c7/Popcorn-Curtain.jpg" />Popcorn Curtain, 2023 popcorn, brass curtain rod, dimensions variable Courtesy of Deli Gallery And you had the popcorn curtain. Yeah. <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/af89ef22753bca55511de335c327390be14d5a1fcd7698de9f8aed0b28daad76/ficus-2.jpg" data-mid="217988251" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/af89ef22753bca55511de335c327390be14d5a1fcd7698de9f8aed0b28daad76/ficus-2.jpg" /> <img width="1500" height="1000" width_o="1500" height_o="1000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b5f9f8588033dc7caf24bedc8e14505687579274f9415c671c5877b3d022efd2/GCTH-install.jpg" data-mid="217782416" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b5f9f8588033dc7caf24bedc8e14505687579274f9415c671c5877b3d022efd2/GCTH-install.jpg" /> <img width="2000" height="1334" width_o="2000" height_o="1334" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8f7de25ebe0b50238b755d1179a6ba005dd73669739d47373d43f08d420a829c/ficus-3.jpg" data-mid="217988252" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8f7de25ebe0b50238b755d1179a6ba005dd73669739d47373d43f08d420a829c/ficus-3.jpg" /> <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e6ea383663c73846f0f82bcc210f32a4a3153c087dae5dbb35579d118e91c9a4/ficus-4.jpg" data-mid="217988253" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e6ea383663c73846f0f82bcc210f32a4a3153c087dae5dbb35579d118e91c9a4/ficus-4.jpg" /> Installation view, Grand Central Tree House, 2023Deli Gallery, New York, NYCourtesy of Deli Gallery It’s interesting, because it seems like the focus on these ephemeral materials was more prevalent early in your practice, before terrazzo became your main medium. I was wondering what is your interest in the difference between the relative permanence of those materials? &nbsp; I think at this point, it's so refreshing to make art that's not so heavy and permanent. Back to the difference between Grand Central Station and a tree house. A tree house is a place where you play and imagine and everything falls apart. It’s associated with child’s play and pretending, and the popcorn feels part of that camp. Also the work in ferrocement that's literally all falling apart is part of that. My favorite thing is to imagine the terrazzo existing far from now, once our identities become erased in the same way that the popcorn fell apart. I think that's how they're connected. At a time, what was enticing about terrazzo was that it was so permanent. Because, you're right, we had previously worked with such ephemeral materials. I mentioned the interest in mosaics before, one of the things that was interesting about mosaics was its permanence and monumentality, this idea that there's something that you make that outlasts you and can be read in different ways in different time periods, versus something that kind of decomposes or falls apart. Now that we've been using terrazzo so long, it's fun to do things that are compostable. The permanent / impermanent interest marries a lot of the subject matter that you’re engaged with. Between the natural world as subject matter and terrazzo itself being this highly permanent substance. Are you posing any questions or problems about the permanence or impermanence of nature? A lot of the imagery we use comes from the “interfaith” part of comparative mythologies, and a lot of the things we look at for inspiration are very ancient. Through that, there's this material hierarchy of rocks from a geological standpoint. If you're an anthropologist or a geologist, you're both studying rocks essentially because rocks last the longest, so they have the most potent stories. Wood is next, and then maybe fabric. It becomes this linear way of thinking about our relationship to changing nature, where you've carved a rock and that lasts thousands of years, versus making a meal which lasts a day or a moment. That's what we think of as a way of zooming way out, and then zooming way in, and then disrupting it with, say, a Spongebob reference, which doesn’t really relate. <img width="5756" height="4403" width_o="5756" height_o="4403" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/66f193e3e0c95e63d99c9e3f62dc270612688de6c0dea47409f8ea0ac7abb427/Spongebob.jpg" data-mid="217989027" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/66f193e3e0c95e63d99c9e3f62dc270612688de6c0dea47409f8ea0ac7abb427/Spongebob.jpg" /> <img width="8241" height="10357" width_o="8241" height_o="10357" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c3d58130f5bb762a22efb192f6a1551bbc55f7e0c1680944b4b7c7009feaa606/Spongebob.jpg" data-mid="217980481" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c3d58130f5bb762a22efb192f6a1551bbc55f7e0c1680944b4b7c7009feaa606/Spongebob.jpg" /> Spongebob, 2024, cementious terrazzo, 24 x 18 x 1.25 inches,Courtesy of the artists Right, there are a lot of cultural allusions and references too. In Grand Central Tree House, we had Pinocchio (Sentimental Prick), being made of wood and becoming human and then another piece featuring Daphne, a nymph who is turned into a tree. Both subjects have wood chips as terrazzo aggregate, frozen in different moments of humanness. Materially, we're trying to acknowledge responsibility for what types of materials we're using, while also being realistic. I hope that instead of being preachy about the environment or climate change, it's more about responsible ways of interacting in nature, which doesn't necessarily mean preservation all the time. Sometimes work that involves itself with or talks about the environment can have an unrealistic message in terms of how humans can exist.Part of what I like, and that I think we are successful at, is that, yes, there’s natural material, branches, and waste, and things that fold back into the work, but not in a way that deems it like the only option. And there's also playfulness. I think the cultural references are part of that, not everything can be about saving the forest necessarily, but that doesn't mean you have to chop it all down at the same time. Those graffiti remnants from ancient Rome that people just love because they're irreverent, we feel that in the studio—that sense of irreverence and also humility. When we first started making terrazzo, we had this idea that maybe someday we'll make a terrazzo with moon rocks or diamonds. We’re way less interested in that now. It's almost a form of exoticism and we’ve moved onto better things. We talk a lot about the difference between something that's genius and ingenious. And we've thought that an ingenious use of materials, for example, is when you are able to use what you have available, versus arriving at an idea through mental capacity. Not that we're geniuses, but whenever we're getting too smart, we think, “okay, are we being tricky, and for who and why?” regarding our material choices, and what we’re deciding to make. <img width="2847" height="1740" width_o="2847" height_o="1740" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c76fafbe7884b9157b4f7dc5d845bef504dd62c73bbf55cc91471ab140cdaee8/DeliGallery_FicusInterfaith_Daphne_001.jpg" data-mid="217989024" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c76fafbe7884b9157b4f7dc5d845bef504dd62c73bbf55cc91471ab140cdaee8/DeliGallery_FicusInterfaith_Daphne_001.jpg" /> <img width="1500" height="1525" width_o="1500" height_o="1525" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4622955f16d8c5c1e8a566a8bde2612fd7cb40db035d92d9fe9207704e508180/DeliGallery_FicusInterfaith_Daphne_001.jpg" data-mid="217783073" border="0" data-scale="51" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4622955f16d8c5c1e8a566a8bde2612fd7cb40db035d92d9fe9207704e508180/DeliGallery_FicusInterfaith_Daphne_001.jpg" /> Daphne, 2023, cementitious terrazzo, zinc, branches 44 × 44 × 1 1.5 inchesCourtesy of Deli Gallery So your focus is on using what you already have or what's there already? Yeah, trying to use it in a way that no one else thought of, versus “wow, I never thought of that.” It has to do with what's available. There's a certain resourcefulness that is most important to us. The way we operate is that you can make a more beautiful thing with the overlooked material that's already around you, versus the rarest material that you have to import. It may take a little bit more transformation, but it's a more rewarding experience to look at. <img width="1500" height="1821" width_o="1500" height_o="1821" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0fad32fcb23b9a24ac119360d825b89b0c191130a10e67ed9901fcb5c11cb74a/DeliGallery_FicusInterfaith_PearlNecklace_001.jpg" data-mid="217783365" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0fad32fcb23b9a24ac119360d825b89b0c191130a10e67ed9901fcb5c11cb74a/DeliGallery_FicusInterfaith_PearlNecklace_001.jpg" />Pearl Necklace, 2024, cementious terrazzo and pearls in wood vitrine, 25 × 19.75 × 2.25 inchesCourtesy of Deli Gallery You used the word vernacular before to refer to spaces but this relates to materials as well. We're really attracted to when that vernacular gets disrupted, like with the invention of plastic, for example, how dramatically that changed things. Or when cultured pearls became a thing. For thousands of years, only someone like a king would have a pearl, and cultured pearls just dismantled that hierarchy, and when suddenly, anyone could have pearls, and then their perceived value changed. That makes me think of the fact that on Earth we see diamonds as this incredibly rare, valuable material, but if you look at it on a universal scale, it's actually incredibly common in comparison to pearls, which require oysters, which are not everywhere, but we don’t see them as having the same value. I think that's so beautiful. There's this Tiktok (sorry) where they talk about that, how on a universal scale, things like amber and oysters which require carbon based life are infinitely more valuable or rare than diamonds or something that doesn't require life. The value judgment on that is so skewed, it’s culturally informed more than related to the actual conditions of its existence. Yeah. On a cruise ship, the most expensive rooms are at the top, but because it's a boat, you can't use really heavy materials at the top of a boat, so it's inverted. It's like marble versus laminate; things that are heavier are perceived as more valuable. It's an example of where things get messed up in an interesting way, and I feel like that's Ficus-coded. Is there a close relationship between the materials that you use and the content or subject matter of the work? There's the bar piece where you have the peanuts [Los Angeles Bar Top, 2024], which is a more direct connection versus—I noticed the selenite that you have on the table—a spiritual or metaphysical association with what's in the work and what the work represents or is getting at conceptually. I don't think so, because terrazzo is such a haphazard process. We have a collection of wish bones that our friend Max gave to us, and we haven't used them yet because we're scared they’ll get lost in the mix, literally. I think if we had more control over the process, then we could use materials that had value in that way. This [referring to the selenite] was some random thing I got, but it's going to become a candle like in this drawing [referring to a sketch of a birthday cake], but we didn't think of this and then ask “what should the candle be?” I would say 90% of the time it's more about a&nbsp; formal choice than a deeper meaning. But there are times, especially with commissioned works, where we’ll tell people if you have a sentimental collection of rocks or shells we can find a way to fit those in. And I also think about the sunflower pieces that we've done. We made one for my mom, and every petal had a different sort of material meaning. There was coral from Puerto Rico and rocks from upstate, and corn kernels that my childhood friend had grown in her garden. I think there are certain times where we try to zero in on that more than other times. Part of it is that the rocks are plentiful, so it's hard to make them all have a really specific meaning or value. It's more about creating that visual field that makes a bigger image. But when there's an opportunity to, I think it's a nice thing to do. I think it's about legibility too. Because if a client says “can you please put in this precious rock from my honeymoon” or whatever, we’ll say sure, but we don't have control over what part of that rock is going to poke out through the terrazzo. So as long as they’re okay with that legibility. The wishbones, for example, are such a precarious thing because we have one millimeter of error. If you grind it too long, then it's just gone. <img width="10841" height="7444" width_o="10841" height_o="7444" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8e3f331ef3a19fd1b7371835336bf266160c4c0541fa761304ae2d33294535c9/Los-Angeles-Bar-Top-detail.jpg" data-mid="217979561" border="0" data-scale="93" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8e3f331ef3a19fd1b7371835336bf266160c4c0541fa761304ae2d33294535c9/Los-Angeles-Bar-Top-detail.jpg" /> <img width="11102" height="7209" width_o="11102" height_o="7209" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/02e1732487f8cd8d4454641efc846d9c61fee83e34a2a219ccfec1efb02cecc8/Los-Angeles-Bar-Top.jpg" data-mid="217979275" border="0" data-scale="93" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/02e1732487f8cd8d4454641efc846d9c61fee83e34a2a219ccfec1efb02cecc8/Los-Angeles-Bar-Top.jpg" /> Los Angeles Bar Top, 2024, cementious terrazzo, 18 x 90 x 1.5 inches courtesy of the artists What do you find is the conceptual thread, rather than formal or material, that links the tables and the paintings? The ideas for the tables and the wall works come from the same place. But, I don't know, my dream when I die would be to create multiple ways for someone to ask “is that Ficus Interfaith?” whether it's a floor or a painting or whatever. In the same way that something in a museum is attributed to a culture, and it speaks to&nbsp; that culture versus someone's unique vision.I don't think there's a specific conceptual thread, and maybe on purpose. Certain artists work in a really defined way, where they're trying to achieve a goal for the viewer to recognize. I think we've really purposefully tried to make it feel like throwing darts at a world map. I don't know if it's visual, exactly, but there's an ethos. There's something at the core of everything that kind of makes it recognizable as a Ficus Interfaith, and it's not necessarily that it's terrazzo. We have a new body of work that is not terrazzo planned for next year, but, even in that body of work, the patterns that emerge are from a deep research into material and history and a relationship with time and decoration, as well as fine art. When I walk through a museum, it's easier for me to connect to an ancient time when there’s an object that you can use, because it's a lot easier to imagine using it. Whereas a painting of someone is an edited idea versus something that they used or wore. I think as we continue to grow our practice, it’s fun to be like, “how would Ficus make this?” in the same way that we do that with terrazzo, you know, whether it's a different method or material. My dream when I die would be to create multiple ways for someone to ask “is that Ficus Interfaith?” ... in the same way that something in a museum is attributed to a culture, and it speaks to&nbsp; that culture versus someone's unique vision.” It’s interesting to hear you also talk about Ficus as if it is this third person in the room. Do you see it as separate from either of yourselves, or does it feel more like it's just the two of you in a partnership? I think it's a third thing. We have to put on our Ficus goggles and make the art that way, versus, like if one of us had this fully baked idea about say, whales in the Indian Ocean that just has nothing to do with the other. But if we can stop before that and say “this is what is interesting to me, what do you think about this?” then it can move through the next stage. I think it's definitely become a third entity, because there are things that I’m interested in, there are things that Ryan is interested in, and then there's things that Ficus Interfaith is interested in, and it's an ever shifting Venn diagram. Now, we're well versed enough that we can kind of feel it in&nbsp; our brains when we come across an idea that makes sense for the Ficus Interfaith practice. And it’s not in a way that's a brand or a persona. If you think about a performer, it's a very common strategy to create a character as a creative exercise. And then it’s about “what would your alter ego do?” I think all of these works are still very personal, but it's just not about our individual lives. I have a question about My Brother's Garden. Is that also a collaboration between the both of you? I forget how we started that, but the rule was that there are no rules and we're never going to talk about it. So it just turned into what it is, one of us would post, and then someone would respond, or someone wouldn't, and then it became this collaborative exercise. It was also a way to leave notes for each other. Now we just see each other every freaking day, so there's no need for that. It was a way to have a website that didn't function as just a portfolio. I think there's times with artist websites where it's just a portfolio of the work, which isn't so fun to click through. So ours is more of a blog format where there's inspiration and poetry, things you find, things you write, and then also documentation of the work. The primary function was to have fun and to show each other cool stuff, which, at the end of the day, that's what Ficus is still. It’s also nice, because there's a lot of content on there that isn’t available anywhere else. If you go far down your CV, there are exhibitions that you can't find anywhere else online. There’s a lot of poetry and a lot of research, but is any of the writing on the blog your writing? There are a couple of posts where I noticed you didn’t cite an author. Yeah, there is. One of the first things we ever did was write poetry together, which is probably the hardest thing we've ever done. You can draw with someone, whether you're holding the pen together or making an exquisite corpse. But to write a poem with someone… I don't know how songwriters do it. Yeah, we wrote poems together, but we haven't in a long time. It is really challenging to write together, especially in the poetry form, because everything is essentialized, you're trying to get to this essential part of every word, and there’s a different meaning for everybody. &nbsp; “A symbol functions as a way to communicate something, but beyond that, if you don't speak the language, then the visual form is all you're left with.” You have a work that's a vertical list of the months [Calendar Sign, 2021]. For you, does that work function merely as a representation of the words themselves? And how might that be different from the function of a representation of a flower or a figure. We use text quite a lot in our work. Sometimes they operate as poems, but more often it's Ed Ruscha-ish, where the word is a visual and emotional idea in itself. We had a piece that just says “MENU” [2024] or we had a text piece that just said “MATERNITY” [2022]. While we were doing that, we were asking what rocks would make sense with this in the same way that having the word maternity in a certain font, in a certain color can mean certain things. We chose pink and white and mother of pearl… But then sometimes we write poems, and they’re written in the terrazzo. The words that we end up using have either a lot of different interpretations possible, or it took a long time to get to the standard interpretation of it. For the calendar piece [Calendar Sign, 2021], I remember doing research about all the different calendars that people have used throughout history and different cultures. It’s this heap of information that ends with what we use now. Behind the pretty obvious and simple list of months is all this built up usage and culture that we kind of take for granted. The idea is to represent that and let it vibrate. A word as a symbol is a really interesting idea. Kind of like what Jasper John says through signs and symbols. A symbol functions as a way to communicate something, but beyond that, if you don't speak the language, then the visual form is all you're left with. Those are ideas we think of with the word pieces, like an exit sign: if it's above a door, then it's a real exit sign, but just a few inches over or on the opposite wall, everything changes. <img width="1601" height="938" width_o="1601" height_o="938" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/84b08f904b9485c3ad1665fb9585b89cecddd922955960d1a6d6e056de7adba4/FI_CalendarSign.jpeg" data-mid="217989053" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/84b08f904b9485c3ad1665fb9585b89cecddd922955960d1a6d6e056de7adba4/FI_CalendarSign.jpeg" /> <img width="970" height="1700" width_o="970" height_o="1700" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0f3e9a7db7d4ff8f9ddcd1670543582dcc5d52d074a1f9e22d142bcdba9f73d5/FI_CalendarSign-970x1700.jpeg" data-mid="217784123" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/970/i/0f3e9a7db7d4ff8f9ddcd1670543582dcc5d52d074a1f9e22d142bcdba9f73d5/FI_CalendarSign-970x1700.jpeg" /> Calendar Sign, 2023cementious terrazzo in oak frame, 48.75 × 24.75 × 1.25 inchesCourtesy of The Valley <img width="1280" height="915" width_o="1280" height_o="915" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cf87ec4429427a7a1ce21700505fc2459a03ea5b0d2621d7ccb6dd883fc3e389/wist-2.jpg" data-mid="217988329" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/cf87ec4429427a7a1ce21700505fc2459a03ea5b0d2621d7ccb6dd883fc3e389/wist-2.jpg" /> <img width="1280" height="947" width_o="1280" height_o="947" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1dd9d34fc7989d3313db8b525be8209403dc5bcf1e1d3fc8996e5d30473a128b/proxy_ficusinterfaith_jun16_003.jpg" data-mid="217827185" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1dd9d34fc7989d3313db8b525be8209403dc5bcf1e1d3fc8996e5d30473a128b/proxy_ficusinterfaith_jun16_003.jpg" /> <img width="853" height="1280" width_o="853" height_o="1280" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/945dace0c8c7924cdbcb74acfdf6c7837357844a027e70dc6d2e05add198e278/proxy_ficusinterfaith_jun16_030.jpg" data-mid="217827553" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/853/i/945dace0c8c7924cdbcb74acfdf6c7837357844a027e70dc6d2e05add198e278/proxy_ficusinterfaith_jun16_030.jpg" /> <img width="914" height="1280" width_o="914" height_o="1280" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/98353df0675661e615036df6cb66a3b6dbb29c4a60203a9b3c976e24406a713d/w3.jpg" data-mid="217988335" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/914/i/98353df0675661e615036df6cb66a3b6dbb29c4a60203a9b3c976e24406a713d/w3.jpg" /> Installation view, Wysteriasway, 2016, Proxy, New York, NY Those ferrocement stacked swans [Ferrocement Bird Pole, 2017] were a recurrent theme a few years ago, can you talk about those works?&nbsp; With those works, we let the availability steer the direction. We didn't really set out to make those swans. It emerged through what was available at thrift stores, leaning into that randomness, which then becomes super intentional. If there were a bunch of other animals, then that's just what it would have been. That whole project was based on this website that we stumbled across where this guy was making reinforced cement structures with natural fiber material, like bamboo and reed and wicker. His project was for places that don't have a lot of access to construction material, like in order to build permanent structures pretty quickly if a hurricane is coming or you need to store something and you don't have access to a Home Depot. So we took that idea of ferrocement, or reinforced cement with natural materials, and thought the abundance of wicker and rattan furniture that's in Salvation Army’s could be the basis for this type of sculptural work that uses what's at hand. And those bird baskets were Avon giveaways or something. They would put the products in these little swans and doves. But again, it's leaning into what's available, versus “let me meditate and clear my mind and whatever enters my mind is what I make.” It's embracing this post consumerism ideology. It's intentional, and we edit it, but yeah, we love birds, so it was perfect in that way. We just went out looking for wicker objects, and you recognize that these birds are at every store. People are donating them, or throwing them out everywhere, so they're cheap and available, and almost over abundant and so creating a sculpture of that repetition of them became the impulse. There were other things that there were a lot of as well that weren’t as aesthetically striking to us, that we didn't use. I'm imagining Staten Island or New Jersey commissioning you guys to clear out the junk yards for whatever in one big recycling project. We're working on a project&nbsp; for this shop in Chinatown called Wing on Wo. They sell porcelain ceramics, and we're using the broken porcelain as the aggregate. So that's an example of using whatever they have to determine the size and the shapes of all the little rocks. Instead of us setting out to make porcelain terrazzo, this is more fun. <img width="1500" height="1162" width_o="1500" height_o="1162" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/88ba98efdecb12394fd663ae3892c9ce8230783bbad672a6c3af5f4718e2cedd/Exit.jpg" data-mid="217827159" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/88ba98efdecb12394fd663ae3892c9ce8230783bbad672a6c3af5f4718e2cedd/Exit.jpg" />Exit Sign, 2024, cementious terrazzo, 10 x 14 x 1.5 inchesCourtesy of the artists In the blog a lot of the poems felt spiritual, sometimes overtly, like the Flannery O'Connor diary entries where she was writing down prayers to God. I'm wondering if the project is in some way religious or devotional. It's a complicated thing. We're two different people, and neither of us are religious. Raph is Jewish and my mom grew up Catholic and rejected it, so I'm the product of her rejection. Basically I was raised atheist or agnostic I guess. Interfaith started as a way for us to examine the idea that's connected to faith in God, but in more of a narrative art kind of way. And also faith as something connected to the idea of hope, where if you have faith in yourself or in your peers or in the world. That tone is something that we seek to embody with Ficus Interfaith. It invites this grander idea of humans as a small part of a bigger thing. I think this is something similar to what we were talking about with the calendar piece. It's this pyramid of knowledge, where the tip is where we are now, but there's all these different versions of what people have practiced or thought or felt spiritual about that informs the next generation, the next, and the next. When you read about people's thoughts and beliefs about faith and religion, you just accept that you understand what they're talking about. We are all kind of brought up in these different modes, or exposed to different modes of thinking about that. I do think there is an opportunity to look at it as a shared human experience, even if I don't really feel particularly spiritual or religious myself.The connection between art and religion is the biggest, oldest thing ever. For thousands of years, if you were an artist, you worked for the church, and there's still so many remnants of that. We are infinitely fascinated by that, like the way the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul has gone from a church to a mosque. Within Christianity, it's very common to illustrate God as a human, but that's forbidden in Islam, so they covered up all the images of people, and only calligraphy is allowed. The Reformation did something similar. I also think creativity is itself a kind of spiritual act—and you have to believe in something.What you're talking about in Islam is what contributes to all of this amazing pattern work and crafts that use incredible patterns from abstracting icons and language and writing to the point where it's acceptable in those holy spaces. I remember going to Alhambra in Spain, which is this massive complex, and, when you walk through, it starts with more recognizable imagery, and as you move towards the center, it gets abstracted, abstracted, abstracted, until you have what are essentially these incredible math equations through pattern that started as letters and script. So it is really interesting how religion seeps into all these different aspects of visual life, without necessarily being obvious. <img width="2274" height="1506" width_o="2274" height_o="1506" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/80ccfaaf85a9d44235bcd15ebed45b9c60d9a3bfea57b0200ea3c21659eaab64/Screenshot-2024-09-12-at-2.41.36PM.png" data-mid="217988433" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/80ccfaaf85a9d44235bcd15ebed45b9c60d9a3bfea57b0200ea3c21659eaab64/Screenshot-2024-09-12-at-2.41.36PM.png" /> <img width="1494" height="986" width_o="1494" height_o="986" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5e23d4a4527a3d8af76d6b1114f6c3b61da6853d58dde76cfe7c5612eb3eece9/Screenshot-2024-09-10-at-11.32.51AM.png" data-mid="217827989" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5e23d4a4527a3d8af76d6b1114f6c3b61da6853d58dde76cfe7c5612eb3eece9/Screenshot-2024-09-10-at-11.32.51AM.png" /> <img width="1040" height="1558" width_o="1040" height_o="1558" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/501be56642be0333f0a438e39759a2a49545432f73f11ad2b3e9cf56c0a8832c/Screenshot-2024-09-12-at-2.41.45PM.png" data-mid="217988434" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/501be56642be0333f0a438e39759a2a49545432f73f11ad2b3e9cf56c0a8832c/Screenshot-2024-09-12-at-2.41.45PM.png" /> Installation view, Ficus Interfaith, 2019, Jack Chiles, New York, NY The sunflower seems to occupy a very central space in your practice too. It feels very joyful and full of hope or faith, because it has this symbolism of rising towards the sun. And then you have the Allen Ginsberg poem in one of your shows that you referenced.&nbsp; When we were doing that show [Ficus Interfaith, Jack Chiles, 2019], one of the things we came across was that the sunflower is a remediation plant. They have been planted to help clean up radiation from nuclear disasters, including Chernobyl and Fukushima. We realized there's a nice analogy there with the terrazzo, the materiality of the terrazzo being made up of post consumer goods, or recycled goods turned into something beautiful. There's an obvious analogy to that as a symbol. But apart from that, it’s super recognizable. We also consciously chose it as a template. We've made probably 15 in that exact way. When we make gifts for people, it's become “oh, let's make them a sunflower.” We change certain things. That one [referring to a work in the studio] is the bar version, where it has the peanuts, and then all of the petals and the background essentially serve as a legend for all of the other terrazzo works in the show. When we have extra concrete, we just put it in the sunflower. The bar top itself became the background with all those wood chips. For our next show, we’ll make a sunflower, and then it'll be a remediation plant for the process. Like Raph said, he made one for his mom. A few years ago, we each made one and as a creative exercise hid the process from each other. So we made all of the creative decisions alone. And then we had a reveal, like “what does yours look like?” So in our apartments, we have our individual Ryan sunflower and Raph sunflower. In that way, it's a vehicle for experimentation as well. <img width="3645" height="4325" width_o="3645" height_o="4325" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/08249999970dd7016cc68aec116f6b312adf70d8ae628e4c6450bccaa8e97999/Raphael-Sunflower.jpeg" data-mid="217979579" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/08249999970dd7016cc68aec116f6b312adf70d8ae628e4c6450bccaa8e97999/Raphael-Sunflower.jpeg" /> above: Raphael Sunflower, 2021,cementious terrazzo, 24 x 20 x 1.25 inchesbelow: Ryan Sunflower, 2021,cementious terrazzo, 24 x 20 x 1.25 inchesCourtesy of the artists <img width="3705" height="4417" width_o="3705" height_o="4417" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0cc907374252e802fdd56c339b69e82e74a7cbac129eed19b7a3de5c7184af0c/Ryan-Sunflower.jpeg" data-mid="217979593" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0cc907374252e802fdd56c339b69e82e74a7cbac129eed19b7a3de5c7184af0c/Ryan-Sunflower.jpeg" /> Ficus Interfaith is a collaboration between Ryan Bush (b. 1990, Colorado) and Raphael Martinez Cohen (b. 1989, New York City). As a sculptural practice, Ficus Interfaith pursues projects that investigate ingenuity and novelty as it emerges from craft. Their research focuses on historical imagery, language, and symbolism that is ubiquitous to the point of being overlooked or misunderstood. Using terrazzo, a composite material consisting of leftover marble, glass, and other waste used to make decorative floors since antiquity, Ficus Interfaith embraces the spirit of collaboration and reuse while reimagining how craft can enter our lives and affect the spaces we create and inhabit. ︎: @ficusinterfaith all images © Ficus Interfaith https://super-nyc.com/Madelyn-text Thu, 01 Aug 2024 17:39:40 +0000 super! https://super-nyc.com/Madelyn-text As we gathered around the works in Madelyn Kellum’s studio for our first IRL studio visit and interview in a few years, it was apparent that there was sheer reverence for “imagery”—from Rae Sremmurd-in-embrace to Medieval tapestries at the Met Cloisters to the theatricality of My Chemical Romance’s Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge. Kellum’s work approaches what is strange and familiar through an intuitive approach to artmaking that doesn’t exactly resist narrative but sidesteps it. It’s fitting, then, that what Kellum makes in her home and studio in Brooklyn pulls directly from scenes or images in her own life. Whether derived specifically from her native South Florida, New York City, dreams, literature, or what’s seen on our social media feeds, it is unclear and ultimately doesn’t matter much. Peering into Kellum’s canvases reveals that many of the seemingly abstract marks in the paintings are derived by linoleum blocks stamped in gesso or reference images sublimation printed directly onto the canvas, which often function as the formal basis for their representational content. The paintings, sculptures, and drawings are a condensation of images, emotional textures and form—from places and things known and unknown. <img width="2000" height="1600" width_o="2000" height_o="1600" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9c73f6753bd56786511dd6a548dfc8eab2bfcaef7f04eea16d6b8bdeb975f8e0/Studio-Portrait_Madelyn-Kellum.jpeg" data-mid="216407269" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9c73f6753bd56786511dd6a548dfc8eab2bfcaef7f04eea16d6b8bdeb975f8e0/Studio-Portrait_Madelyn-Kellum.jpeg" />Studio portrait by Danka Latorre So this is what you're working on now? Yes, I'm getting ready to finish it. Maybe two more days. &nbsp; You said it's leaving on the 27th? Yeah, I just need to stretch it. It’s going to be part of an apartment show on August 3rd. I’ll send you the details! I noticed you did a couple of shows at a mausoleum in California? These shows were special… Dignity Plus and Continental Breakfast. It's this beautiful mausoleum complex in Altadena, with stained glass windows and marble corridors. It was my first time being part of a show that was thematically attached to the space itself, which was really cool. Did you make specific works for these shows? Yes, these were conscious choices. The painting called Harmonica was about mourning and solitude, and just happened to sync up with the show in a way that I felt was perfect. Saint Michael Slaying the Demon was a year-old piece that I reworked to be shown here, based on Saint Michael with a focus on the demon morphing into two intertwined ones. <img width="5846" height="4793" width_o="5846" height_o="4793" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0ad74017385c130269dc31a8cf712a7e1badb43c87ee920a03dea28ace42a48a/Saint-Michael-Slaying-the-Demon_2024.jpg" data-mid="216411115" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0ad74017385c130269dc31a8cf712a7e1badb43c87ee920a03dea28ace42a48a/Saint-Michael-Slaying-the-Demon_2024.jpg" />St. Michael Slaying the Demon, 2024oil on canvas, 36 x 46 inches Are religious or iconographic figures and themes in your head while you work? It’s all across the board. I have instant visceral responses to images before I know what makes them so special to me. I try to spend enough quality time with one of those images to uncover the truth about it in a patient and thorough way. I’ll have moments of clarity like, “Oh! This says everything to me about my life.” I can finally place this desaturated photo of Dobby’s beach death scene on my personal timeline of emotion. And it holds more weight than a bible story. That can sometimes take a year or two for me to figure out, though. Pictures become muddy after you drag them around with you for so long. While I work, my biggest concern is being present and truthful. That’s my measure of value. It’s intuitive. Yes. What's this all about? [Greyhound Jockey, 2024] I visit the Met Cloisters often, and am so taken by their insane collection of South Netherlandish tapestries. Standing in front of one and being totally consumed by it is an important feeling to me. I want to be the bestower of this feeling—that’s what I was thinking about with the size and format of this. I had also come across these photos of little capuchin monkeys riding greyhounds in Australia in the 30s. A vague image of a bodybuilder riding a greyhound started popping into my head that wanted to be expelled onto something life-size. I'm so into mutated figures, dilated eyes, body builders, reptile shapeshifters. I think I realized this after watching Harmony Korine’s Aggro Dr1ft [2023]. <img width="4211" height="3434" width_o="4211" height_o="3434" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/39a185bee4da24c85a5f327662a317e2f605bfd9bd434437210fa9e283399117/Greyhound-Jockey_2024.jpg" data-mid="216408377" border="0" data-scale="69" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/39a185bee4da24c85a5f327662a317e2f605bfd9bd434437210fa9e283399117/Greyhound-Jockey_2024.jpg" />Greyhound Jockey, 2024oil on canvas, 76 x 66 inches I saw that there’s a painting show of those works up now. That reminds me of your body armor work, which seems to stretch and re-form the limits of the human body. That’s a very real connection. Those silicone pieces are HR Giger inspired, very alien. I have fun making something that can interact with the body and have more physical involvement. Painting is my favorite practice right now, and these sculpture projects inform my paintings.&nbsp; Where is that structure up in the right corner coming from?&nbsp; In my hometown, there is a greyhound track that was just demolished—I used those photos as a reference. When I used to drive past it in the early morning, this silver fog was sometimes spread across the field. It was beautiful, and sinister. When you initially approach a painting, where do you start? Do you have a composition in mind, or are you thinking about the layers? I start by carving delicate natural patterns into linoleum blocks. Then I press those into heavy gesso, pretty freely. You can see, it’s pretty thick right here. I let that random placement guide my composition, and use a giant trowel to move my first layers around. Lots of paint being placed, dug into, and placed again. I usually have a few details that I won’t be satisfied without, but mostly let the painting make its own decisions. Olivia, doesn’t this remind you of the flesh wall in New Mexico? Oh yeah. We went to New Mexico on a road trip and we were staying in this Airbnb ranch with Adobe clay walls. We were all tripping on mushrooms, and at one point it felt like we were in a ship or cavern made out of flesh walls. I wasn’t trying to freak everyone out, so I felt like I couldn’t tell everyone, but I had to tell somebody what was going on.&nbsp; Have you seen Videodrome [1983]? I've never seen it all the way through and I don’t want to, because I have early memories of seeing images from it somehow and those still really scare me. So, in these films the body is an object, or something at an extreme, which I see in relation to that figure of the body builder. Yeah, totally. Sci-fi and fantasy films impact everything I’m working on right now. Although music probably has the biggest influence on me.Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge by My Chemical Romance is my top album of all time, and has probably increased my adrenaline capacity over the years. It’s about fleshing out these artificial worlds with this pulsating conviction. Their war imagery has been on my mind all the time recently. “It’s about fleshing out these artificial worlds with this pulsating conviction.” It’s so theatrical.&nbsp; Yes, that’s a huge part of it. I love over-the-top drama and theatrics in artworks, and usually prefer when it's coming from a peaceful place, if that makes sense. I learned recently that Gerard Way was freestyling a lot of those lyrics. I hold Bladee in high regard for these reasons as well. <img width="2872" height="3590" width_o="2872" height_o="3590" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/79fe51220e3f76d09910baa5d786ba838af6614946a0c2ecc36d70bb44c9f7f4/The-Rime-of-the-Mariner.jpg" data-mid="216408461" border="0" data-scale="57" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/79fe51220e3f76d09910baa5d786ba838af6614946a0c2ecc36d70bb44c9f7f4/The-Rime-of-the-Mariner.jpg" /> The Rime of the Mariner, 2024oil on canvas, 48 x 36 inches Can you describe the elements in the work here a little bit [The Rime of the Mariner, 2024]? There’s something very elemental that you’re getting at with the moodiness of the work, it feels almost like a dreamscape, it’s very visceral and enveloping, like fog. I was reading the poem earlier today. The narrator describes this dense fog that comes along, and how the albatross clears it up—like the Florida fog in [Greyhound Jockey]!&nbsp; I was thinking about loss and consequence, and wanted this hazy, muddy, deep trench feeling to show up in its own ways. Something dense and harrowing. Loosely, it’s a girl at the beach in a bikini, with a hat that doubles as a helmet, and with a gun strapped to her back. I started abstractly with no plan. I was halfway through when I found out about “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and then it fell into place. The texture is important to me in this one. In “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” someone is telling a story about someone telling a story, and the narrative goes back and forth between these states. Do you feel like your work encompasses storytelling? No, not in any super conscious or directed way, I enjoy keeping things open. The narrative changes in my own head, depending on the day. Can we look at the work behind this [Can’t Live With it, Can’t Live Without it (Should’ve Stayed in the Water), 2022]? This is the earliest work I have here. <img src="https://static.wixstatic.com/media/e08081_afa19340f1cb4d29a54a54cb0208ae81~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_1083,h_1353,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/e08081_afa19340f1cb4d29a54a54cb0208ae81~mv2.jpg" width="1083" height="1353" style="width: 301.767px; height: 377px;" data-scale="51">Can't Live With It, Can't Live Without It (Should've Stayed in the Water), 2022oil on wood panel, 50 x 45 inches How do you think your style and approach has changed since this work? With this one, I was learning how to come up with a composition and do everything I wanted to do. After this, I became free. I still really like this painting. It feels like this one maybe has a little bit more specificity than your newer work. It seems that you’ve opened up since; the layers aren't quite as distinct from each other. The alligator is speaking to me.&nbsp; I wanted it to feel like a cursed gas station at night in the Florida Everglades. It’s based on a personal experience. You were in New York when you painted this right? Yeah. Do you feel like you go back to Florida in your head when you’re working? Yes. “My earliest oil paintings were studies from kayaks, or sitting across from the fishermen at the dam…” Growing up near the swamp, do you feel like the environment itself impacted the way that the paintings are not necessarily swampy, but porous? Absolutely, it seeps into everything. These colors and textures come from the rivers and beaches in Florida. My earliest oil paintings were studies from kayaks, or sitting across from the fishermen at the dam… things of that nature. This one's called Apple Shooter [2024]. It's the Rae Sremmurd guys tied to a tree with arrows in their chests and an apple between their heads. This painting over here [Miracle Deer, 2024] came right after it, and I was thinking of this figure as the archer of the previous painting. Are those grommets on the pocket? Yeah, I try to have a few anchor points in the work where you can actually tell what it is. <img width="2224" height="2780" width_o="2224" height_o="2780" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/178fb53f28d4c0e4c61e099a359950732ebbe456f4e5365d42d79ad3afe4ba15/Miracle-Deer_2024.jpg" data-mid="216409531" border="0" data-scale="52" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/178fb53f28d4c0e4c61e099a359950732ebbe456f4e5365d42d79ad3afe4ba15/Miracle-Deer_2024.jpg" />Miracle Deer, 2024oil on canvas, 50 x 38 inches Were you looking at any specific artworks while you were working on this?&nbsp; I was looking at Bonnard. My color ideas came from this sensitive detail of a woman slipping her shoe on. So there’s the Lana del Rey image in one of the paintings [Cece and Rocky and Glory and Shame, 2023], there’s the Mariner painting, and Rae Sremmurd, how do these icons fit into your process as you're building something? These are things that come up as I go. It's important for me to make sure everything is existing in the same world, things that might be abrasive on their own or have a defined visual aesthetic already. I am breaking them down until they are malleable enough for my own purposes. You do it well—it doesn’t feel like it’s direct portraiture, there's something about it that is pulling through. What are these reference images on the wall? I start collecting material for a new project usually when I’m still in the middle of the previous project. These are insect wings from a photo I took at the Natural History Museum, made into a baseball cap. This is a graphite drawing from a column at the Met Cloisters. This is a Photoshop composite I made of five rockabilly guys. Bret Michaels, Criss Angel, Dave Navarro, and I'm forgetting who else.&nbsp; You also made a Kim Kardashian dress. Yes, those were part of my reptile shapeshifter prints. Maybe that will make a comeback soon. That goes back to the conversation about the extremes and limits of the body. Plastic surgery, really, is stretching the limits. Today I was trying to explain Blade Runner [1982] to my roommate, have you seen it? It seems like that transhuman concept really comes in here. Yeah! Best movie and soundtrack ever. Have you been to the Museum of the Moving Image? No. They have the original model of the Tyrell Corporation building. You have to go. The lights don’t work anymore, but you can see all the wiring in the back. Can you talk about what you’re playing with here? [referring to a work in progress] Oh, yeah, that's a part of my process that I haven't talked about. I’ll print patterns with a sublimation printer that I have, and heat transfer them onto the canvas before I start. This one has it [Apple Shooter, 2024]. I made a motif in Photoshop, and then printed it in a sequence across the entire thing. That's how I found the structure. I spaced them out evenly, and then spread gesso on top for texture. <img width="3573" height="3582" width_o="3573" height_o="3582" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9006f2acfd4639dad64ab8df8ecb6a9258b61e6975c54593ef87dce65219da35/Apple-Shooter_2024.jpg" data-mid="216409099" border="0" alt="Apple Shooter, 2024oil on canvas, 50 x 50 inches" data-caption="Apple Shooter, 2024oil on canvas, 50 x 50 inches" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9006f2acfd4639dad64ab8df8ecb6a9258b61e6975c54593ef87dce65219da35/Apple-Shooter_2024.jpg" />Apple Shooter, 2024oil on canvas, 50 x 50 inches Do you still do work like this one, in pencil? [Secret Growing, 2022] I’m about to. You can get detail from pencil in a way you can’t with painting. Last summer, I went to this weird museum in Charlotte, North Carolina, and there's this Beaufort Delaney [Untitled, 1959] that this painting really reminds me of. Yes, oh my gosh, that’s gorgeous. It also reminds me of spiritual painting, like Agatha Wojciechowsky, where a medium works to translate a spirit through them. That’s happened to me one time, and I've been searching for it since. I had been alone for a week, painting, and something took over me. It was a wild experience, I started sobbing. This work feels like it’s about lust. [Cece and Rocky and Glory and Shame, 2023] With this one, I was really thinking about girlhood. I love that the Lana image is just kind of in it, like anything else, among it all. There's a little bit of violence here, with the figures grabbing, melding, and moving through each other, but not necessarily in a scary way. It feels like they’re becoming one. That’s completely it. A mesh hologram fossilized with ancient secrets. Then you get this part that looks almost like roots or lightning. There’s something even fungal about it. Yes, these exposed nerve system wings that aren't actually going to support her weight. What would you say is something that has stayed consistent from your earlier work to now, thematically? Florida landscapes. Your color palette seems to reflect that, there are really natural tones, almost like mud. I’m very drawn to earthy colors. Recently I’ve been listening to this duo Jockstrap, and their music feels so fresh in a way that I can’t describe, and I was like, I need that freshness in my painting. So I tried to push myself with neon yellows and cool grays [Greyhound Jockey, 2024]... which eventually shifted back into my familiar palette. I don’t think it can be helped. Do you have any plans for the coming months, years? I want to keep painting forever. That is so fulfilling to me. I've recently discovered the joys of sharing my work in person as well, which adds a new dimension to it all. I will be staying in New York for the foreseeable future, and showing my work frequently. Visit Madelyn Kellum’s artist page. ︎: @effective___power all images © Madelyn Kellum