Welcome to Introducing…A column where we introduce Artists we think you should know about. Tell us who you’d like us to cover in the comments!

The original Mortal Kombat film was first released in 1995, when film franchises had yet to fully cash in on the multi-film epics lifted from video games, comic books, and toys. As she would commute to work, the artist Huma Bhabha would notice the posters for the movie all around town. Having graduated from Columbia’s MFA program just a few years prior, specializing in painting, and now inspired by Mortal Kombat as much as David Cronenberg, Bhabha sought to create sculptural portraits of warriors, “or perhaps traveling warriors.” The resulting portraits from the mid-90s are gory and glistening with movie prop wetness. They’re rife with cuts and orifices, tubes filled with blood, and bizarre reformulations of the human face that meld the animal, the inorganic, and the horrific.

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In the following decade of her sculptural and painterly output, it’s as though these early heads and busts became caked in dust, rust, clay, and the collected detritus of millennia. Almost nothing glistens, as if dried and wearied by time. Heads have grown bodies and their posture is remarkably classical - like kouroi made of leftover styrofoam and broken chicken coops. Tupac Amaru, from 2010, is a standing figure made of stacked styrofoam, clay, wood, steel, wire, horn, and seed pods. It is a historical contamination, commingling the organic and inorganic into a ragged architecture of a figure. As you move around the sculpture, many faces emerge, either in the process of becoming or degrading. Bhabha comments on this shift towards the non-linear: “My process had always had a beginning, middle and end. Now, I realized, I could just stop when I noticed something interesting. This discovery changed my work—by leaving things more open and raw, I was leaving more places for the viewer to enter.”

Bhabha grew up in Karachi, Pakistan, a few decades after Partition, where both India and Pakistan suffered from the long shadow of colonization. She is clear that while she is never illustrating a specific historical narrative or performing a particular identity within her sculptures, traces of place and circumstance remain and invite a variety of questions. “When I got back to New York [post 9/11], I bought some clay for myself, and experimented. Eventually, I decided to make a reclining figure. I was working on a table, and began with the hands, keeping the rest of the clay covered—and moist—under a black plastic garbage bag […] I was trying to figure out the torso, when it suddenly dawned on me that the black garbage bag was itself a sculptural element. The war in Afghanistan had just begun, so the resemblance to a body bag—or to a Muslim praying—seemed undeniable.”

The work, Untitled, 2006, was initially created to be installed and deinstalled in different landscapes and subsequently photographed. Akin to a sculptural rendition of Cindy Sherman’s famous film stills, the works would invite multiple narratives that shift between specificity and generality. That this prostrate body could find its way into so many landscapes testifies to the ways Bhabha sees larger thematics moving within her work. Myth, devotion, surrender, decay, and dissolution are central to any culture - in any place - but the detritus of each determines a culture’s own peculiar flavor of annihilation.

Bhabha’s flavor might be feet. Drawn into landscapes in her Reconstructions series, or poised on their own as singular sculptures, the foot remains. When asked why so many feet feature in her work, she answered:

Three images come immediately to mind: the advancing feet of kouroi, a simple step that signified movement and a major advance for figurative sculpture; the painting of van Gogh’s shoes, which I’ve loved and tried to emulate since I was young; and a memory of a movie from years ago, in which one of the characters was blown up, leaving only a pair of sneakers with little bits of bloody bones sticking out.

The images braid many common themes in Bhabha’s work: art history, the funerary, the comic, and the visceral body. It’s through materials that her work speaks loudest. From cracking clay, to burnt plastics and foam, to her signature scarified cork - Bhabha’s materials carry much of the weight of telling the sculpture’s story. And these stories are more like tales of surviving disaster.

Her sculptures, however protean, began to stabilize to three primary materials, foam board, cork, and clay, and their verticality more pronounced. Columnar and nearing abstraction, they hold the weight and presence of Ancient Assyria through the eyes of a future scavenger. Bhabha accordions time with form so successfully that whereas sometimes in contemporary sculpture, forms can feel like they live in a state of mimicry, hers feel altogether different. They are alien in the truest sense - not made, not born, but visiting and present, like oracles.

What better place to herald this sensibility than the rooftop of the Metropolitan Museum? Commissioned in 2018 to create an installation for the Met Rooftop, Bhabha likened the roof to a stage for sculptural actors, or visitors from somewhere else having landed. Below reside thousands of years of human culture, while sitting atop, as beacons, as giants, as watchers, are two massive figurative sculptures - one an enlarged recreation of Untitled, 2006, this time named Benaam, which translated from Urdu means “nameless.” Directly across from this prostrate figure is a upright giant with four faces, entitled We Come in Peace. It is also the title of the installation as a whole, echoing the alien from “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” Seeing these figures atop the Met, you might also believe the Earth froze. Her figures look arrested, either by their materials, their weight, or by their symbolic heft. Some sculptures court movement and dynamism. Huma’s sculptures trade in a different dynamism, one that’s internal - all potential energy, none kinetic.

This stillness isn’t just in the posture or materiality of the figures, it’s also in their gaze. With all the many heads in Bhabha’s practice, both drawn and sculpted, the eyes in either do not look. They do not search, or quiver with life. Nevertheless, they are windows into the soul of Bhabha’s practice, just not in the typical sense. These eyes are not pools of color, nor do they announce any kind of familiar humanity. They are flat, anonymous, and rough hewn; they don’t peer into or out to anything in particular but rather - they behold. And this is the key to her practice. Whatever stories must be told, whatever wreckage must be saved, it is not to spell out or account for human iniquities. The work beholds us, and we are left wondering who we are in its midst.

Initially, changing their name to American Artist was meant as a kind of digital camouflage. But not only were they throwing a wrench into the surveilling systems of digital capture, they also wanted to redefine what the nation-bound term could mean as a young black artist. Now, after nearly a decade of exhibition-making, residencies, writing, and press, they’ve made strides in accomplishing the latter, but the trade off has been that “American Artist” is easier to find. Their work is multifaceted, complex but not obscure, sharp but not academic. Despite routinely dealing with technology, surveillance, and anti Blackness, their work never feels dour or tragic.

There’s always a silver vein of hope that sometimes takes shape as evasion, sometimes humor, and sometimes it feels like they’re giving their viewer keys to pick a lock. Their most recent magnum opus, which recently opened at Pioneer Works, is titled “Shaper of God”, inspired by the life of Octavia Butler as well as her most famous book, Parable of the Sower. The exhibition blends biography and fiction in ways that feel like a new pathway for the artist. In our conversation, we’ll talk about the importance of Octavia Butler, how technology can be a vehicle for change or domination, and whether there’s a way for art to change the future rather than mourning the present.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• Renaming as camouflage and conceptual strategy

• Family collaboration and research-based practice

• Moving from graphic design into fine art

• Surveillance, race, and digital space

• Interface design and racial bias

• The myth of technological neutrality

• Capitalism, obsolescence, and hidden infrastructures

• Amiri Baraka’s influence on technological critique

• Rewriting computing history through sculpture

• Policing, pedagogy, and institutional authority

• Predictive policing and My Blue Window

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View the full episode on YouTube.

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American Artist makes thought experiments that mine the history of technology, race, and knowledge production, beginning with their legal name change in 2013. Artist’s artwork primarily takes the form of sculpture, software, and video. They are a 2022 Creative Capital and United States Artists Fellow, and a 2021 LACMA Art & Tech Lab Grantee. They are a former resident of Smack Mellon, Red Bull Arts Detroit, Abrons Art Center, Recess, Eyebeam, Pioneer Works, and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. They have exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art; MoMA PS1; Studio Museum in Harlem; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; and Nam June Paik Center, Seoul. Their work has been featured in The New York Times, Cultured, Artforum, and Art in America. Artist is a co-director of the School for Poetic Computation and a full-time faculty member at Yale.

About The Forum
The Forum is NewCrits’ ongoing public talk series, presented in partnership with WSA/WSBS. Talks take place live every second Tuesday at WSA. Join us for our next conversation here.

Explore NewCrits’ offerings, including crits, courses, and mentorship programs at www.newcrits.studio.

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Full Transcript

Ajay Kurian: Everybody, I'd like to welcome American Artist. How are you doing?

American Artist: I'm good. That was a beautiful introduction.

Ajay Kurian: Oh, good. Thank you for the music, that was a nice way to start. This is a playlist of yours?

American Artist: That's a selection of NTS mixes that I like.

Ajay Kurian: I wanted to start with “A Refusal” because it's an email to your mom. You guys can read it, but I'll read alongside with you.

I hope this isn't awkward. Hey mom, I saw your comment on my new blue profile photo. I'm doing an art piece about the present state of social media in our lives, and how the feed that we subscribe to dictates our experience in the world. And though a lot of us forget, this representation is not our reality.

There are also bigger issues about who is really gaining from the labor we put into sustaining our online selves, and whether we really have a choice to refuse to participate in constructing this image. I'm calling the artwork a refusal, in reference to an article I read where care work and the stakes of social media refusal.

Instead of posting images, as I usually do, each image will be replaced with a blank blue rectangle. An obvious reference to my essay about how this shade of blue has the potential to produce an image and can represent the state prior to revolution. Each of these images will be printed out like a regular film photo and archived in a photo album.

These will be the only copies of the photos. In order for someone to see the photos, they must actually meet me and see them firsthand from my album. Next time I come visit, I will definitely bring this album with me. I realize you're one of the few people who will be emotionally affected by my refusal of social media.

So let's make sure to keep in touch more often and Skype more often. And rely less on distant and removed images from my public feed. Love you. Smiley face.

American Artist: I forgot about Skype.

Ajay Kurian: I mean, they fucked up. They could have had it all. What is your relationship with your family and their understanding of what you do as an artist?

American Artist: Well, at this point, my mom and my sister are the people I'm most close to from my family. My dad passed away a few years ago, but they come to a lot of my shows and things. I brought them here last year to see the Guggenheim show. My mom and sister are very invested at this point in what I'm doing like they're excited. In the beginning when I wanted to go to New York and go to a school for Art, they're were like what the hell are you thinking?

American Artist: Which I think is many parents’ response but over time it’s been a way for us to connect. I’ve also started to involve my family in some of the process sometimes, with the Octavia Butler works. I had my mom and my sister do some research for me.

It was another way of connecting. I guess for that project, I wanted my mom to understand her relationship to Octavia Butler, because they were almost the same age, she moved to Los Angeles in the 1970s, and so they were sort of contemporaries. So just wanting for her to also have an appreciation of Butler.

Ajay Kurian: You said that when you told them you wanted to go to art school, it wasn’t understood then. So I'm curious, what was that moment when you felt like art was a possibility? And what were you looking at? What were you thinking about back then? Why did you think that art was viable?

American Artist: I didn’t. I didn't know art was a career until I was already in grad school and I saw examples of what that looked like. I mean, I knew I wanted to be an artist — I've been an artist my whole life. When I was younger, it was more just drawing characters and stuff, but you know, it got more elaborate as I got older. I've always been very passionate about art.

I went to college for graphic design, which is art. It's creative, but it's not the same as fine art necessarily. After that, I was like, no, I really want to do art-making. I don't know what I wanted to make, but I didn't want to do corporate graphic design. Somehow I got it in my head that grad school, that's what people do when they want to be in the arts. Which is like a pervasive, I don't want to say myth because people do that, but it's a pervasive trope that you should go to grad school if you want to be in the arts.

I had no formal education related to fine arts, I had no access to that realm, and I just didn't know how it worked. My decision to move to New York for grad school on one hand was about wanting to be in New York, but it was also about wanting to find my way into this art thing. And so, communicating that to my mom, she’s just like, I don't get it, that sounds extremely risky for no reason. But yeah, I moved and I've been here since then.

Ajay Kurian: The lens in which you work from, which is looking at technologies and essentially going from slavery to Jim Crow to a kind of digital version of that. Was that formed in grad school, or was that something that took place after? How did that gestation happen?

American Artist: Well, I've always been interested in the internet, digital technology particularly through the internet, and what it means to socialize online. I think that interest started in the MySpace days, when I was in high school or middle school. That's kind of how I got into coding. Which was part of my work from a very long time ago. Then when I got into grad school, I was really thinking about the social and political space of the internet. I was really into this idea of the internet providing another way to experience art that sort of breaks out of this highly institutionalized museum context.

In grad school, I was really interested in media, the reproduction of the image, and dissemination of the image digitally, that was kind of my focus. Then after grad school, I started sort of studying digital labor. It was when I started to study the history of computer design, the transition from the black screen to the white screen, and who was responsible for a lot of the decisions and digital interfaces — that’s really when I started to think about the racial dynamic of technology and surveillance. From there I just dug deeper into that concept.

Ajay Kurian: It's called the graphic user interface, correct? And that's sort of the birth of the Black Gooey Universe for you. So, I'm actually curious, what was the first computer that you had?

American Artist: Oh I don't know, well, I think the software was MS-DOS. That was like the operating system.

Ajay Kurian: So you remember a green or a dark screen though?

American Artist: I think it had color by then.

Ajay Kurian: I am older than you.

American Artist: I was 90s, so I think by then, if you had a computer in your house, there was color on it unless you reset it or something.

Ajay Kurian: Can you lead us into what the Black Gooey Universe became for you? It starts with interface, but it becomes something that's almost ontological.

American Artist: I started to research the history of computer interfaces and just hearing about the development of Silicon Valley, computer design, through Apple, Xerox PARC and Stanford Research Institute. It was a lot of cis straight white guys that, you know, fantasized about office space and wanted to make a nerdy toy to, I don't know, take over the world.

It's like the triumph of the nerds era. That's what was guiding the ethos of computer design in that certain era. Thinking about that, the values that were placed into these early computer interfaces being something that is carried into all iterations after that and perpetuated across the world. I sort of wanted to flip that on its head and think about what other possible values could have been represented within the space of interfaces or computers. And I got really fixated on this anecdotal moment with very early computers — they were on a black screen.

I remember that it wasn’t practical to make an all white interface because it used a lot of energy to do that. But then Apple were the ones that popularized this white background interface. Thinking of that as this moment of them saying, whiteness is the neutral background of virtual creation. When you make anything on a computer, it's gonna be on a white backdrop. And seeing that as a sort of erasure of blackness is the origin point.

Alongside with what's happening in the space of building these devices, you know, there's not a lot of black people in the design process or building of the things. A lot of the people building the devices are neither white nor black people. Thinking about the sort of like social political landscape that’s behind a lot of these ideas that are being presented to the public and made normative.

Ajay Kurian: It felt like the development of the digital space and computers was all about streamlining, efficiency, clarity, and neutrality. It’s giving you all the information that you need as cleanly and clearly as possible. What this project kind of signified to me was that there's a way to understand, one, that's not a neutral process, and two, can we slow this down to understand how there are certain fissures or breaks that need to come to the surface. That slowness felt important, too.

American Artist: I was sort of identifying what the values of technology are that we see today. It's constantly making something obsolete. It needs to be, as you said, clean. It needs to work as fast as possible. It needs to be this perfect clean glass interface.

All these things that are about a sort of capitalist wastefulness, and also an image of neutrality or simplicity that doesn't reflect reality. Because in order for the softwares to function the way they do, there's actually a lot more happening on a deeper level of the machine that we just don't have access to.

Ajay Kurian: When I was researching your work, there was a moment in this essay or very short piece by Amiri Baraka on technology and ethics, where it is just so clear that this is a particular invention with particular values, and the way that we're understanding it could have been anything.

The fact that it becomes the typewriter or the computer, that this is the interface that's chosen. I have to paraphrase here, but he's saying that if we're translating how we communicate, it would have been completely three dimensional and it would have involved more senses. So why would it turn into this? It's one of those thoughts where you're once you hear it, you can't unhear it and it sort of colors everything.

American Artist: It is literally a flipping of everything you understand about it. That essay, which I highly recommend reading if you haven't, Technology and Ethos, is almost like a poem. I found it in this book of poems that he wrote. It's somewhere between an essay and a poem, which is also beautiful. But I read that after I had written the Black Gooey Universe essay, and I was like, oh, he's saying what I was trying to say, but way more direct. I feel it's a little more evocative the way he writes it.

Ajay Kurian: It is evocative and it does give a space for also thinking differently. Like you said, it’s between poem and essay that's analytic as well. Your essay definitely does have more of an academic sheen to it, and it almost feels like you're using certain academic tools in order to turn over the ones that we're more familiar with. That felt appropriate to form as well.

I want to go back to the first piece here [Mother of All Demos II, 2021]. This is what made me ask, what was your first computer? Can you talk about this particular computer and what this, what it sort of signifies in terms of the sculpture?

American Artist: This sculpture is based off of an Apple II computer, which was the last commercial personal computer that exclusively used the black interface. That's why I chose it. I wanted to make a computer that represented these values that I was getting at in the essay. Something that came out of a space of blackness.

It didn't feel like what we know of computers, it's sort of messy, it's made of materials that aren't like highly polished, it looks like something that you wouldn't necessarily want to use. But it is being used by someone, therefore it's usable, it's functional, but it sort of goes against everything you understand about functionality. That’s kind of the idea. So it's a functional computer, it has this black interface with the white characters on it, and it has this black goo that's dripping out of it.

Ajay Kurian: The handprints in particular makes it feel like evidence, or that there's some act, I don't want to say vandalism, cause it also feels like a disappearance. That kind of made me stall, where it's unclear whether the user themselves has been absorbed or liquefied or just made absence.

American Artist: No, that's cool. I just wanted it to show that it was in use but there’s no person there. I think that is something that happens in a lot of my works where a lot of them are referencing things that are meant to be used by a body but there's no body. So you're sort of forced to imagine, who might occupy that space.

Ajay Kurian: That takes us to the next exhibition. There's always been a relationship that you've had between the colors black and blue. There's certainly historical pedigree in jazz and art. For example, David Hammons’ Concerto in Black and Blue, which I think actually opens tonight at Hauser and Wirth.

They're doing a re-showing of that piece. If you all don't know it, it's a piece by David Hammons where the gallery's completely empty and he provides small blue flashlights to everybody that's going through the gallery. And so, when you see anything that happens to be in the space, it has this blue tinge to it.

It's a haunting piece that's mostly only known through stories. I've never seen it, I've never experienced it. But it is one of those pieces that gets referenced in a way that feels almost like talking about Marcel Duchamp or something.

American Artist: I think it was first shown in 2004.

Ajay Kurian: Yeah, it was a long time ago. What's interesting about the way that you take black and blue, specifically after Black Lives Matter, kind of with the rise of Blue Lives Matter, and the sort of crisis that happens between those two things where a police state is trying to identify itself in some weird, fucked up way.

It has all these resonances and I've never seen them married until seeing this particular show. So in this show I’m Blue (If I Was █████ I Would Die) [Koenig & Clinton, Brooklyn, 2019], we have furniture where you can imagine a body. These are school desks that are outfitted with essentially riot gear, right?Did you have these fabricated or is this like a police sale or something?

American Artist: You can buy police gear on the internet. I upholstered them with this blue fabric. But they're plastic ballistic shields.

Ajay Kurian: It's the real deal.

This show, kind of knocked me down a little bit. It was so minimal and there was such a uniformity in so many different ways. It's the blue. It's the diagonal line. It's the monitor. There's so many different ways that you kind of instantiate authority. It was a deep feeling, and then the video itself is weirdly funny in a way.

The character itself is a little fucked up, which I'm going to let you explain.

American Artist: I think this show was my most — what’s his name from It's Always Sunny where he's like making the conspiracy?

Ajay Kurian: Yeah, Charlie Day at the chalkboard.

American Artist: This is my most that moment. I feel like I could go say a lot about this show.

Ajay Kurian: Let's go there.

American Artist: So I had read this essay that was talking about Blue Lives Matter and how the police are essentially wanting to embody blueness as a social or racial identity. They put laws into place that would protect them. They would work in the same way as hate crime laws. So, if you were to attack a police officer, it would be considered a hate crime because they are a group. The way the essay spoke about it, it imagines this blue figure that the police are trying to occupy.

It's like a mystical blue figure. So it was very fantastical in that way. And then I was trying to imagine, who would this blue figure be? I was thinking about Dr. Manhattan from The Watchmen because he's this all powerful being who is essentially co-opted by the government to be a weapon of the state. He actually sort of refuses and that's why he goes to Mars because he doesn't want to be a weapon. He essentially has this moment of a refusal.

The other reference point was Christopher Dorner who was an ex LAPD officer. He was a black man who was fired from the police, because he reported his fellow officers for using unnecessary violence. He tried to appeal to get back on the force and they wouldn't do it and he was someone that dedicated his whole life to the police. He was in the military and the police. So when this happened, he had a turning point and he writes this manifesto where he calls out the racism and violence within the LAPD, and specific people that he was gonna come after. Then he goes on a hunt to try and kill specific police officers. All of Los Angeles is trying to find him. They're using insane amounts of resources to try and find him. Eventually, the police kill him. That happened in 2013, so it was kind of when Black Lives Matter was just starting.

So at this point in 2019, I was thinking about Christopher Dorner, because I felt he was someone who was at this cusp of blue life and black life, but sort of unable to reconcile those realities and had this breaking point.

He was also an expert gunman and so thinking of him as this powerful weapon of the state, trained by the state, who has this moment of I actually don't believe in this anymore, has a turning point and a similar trajectory as Dr. Manhattan.

And so, the character in the film is a merger of these two people. The character is talking to this audience, which presumably would be police officers, and he's like, why do you want to be blue? He's sort of talking eerily about what it means to be blue, and sort of calling out the police for trying to be blue.

Ajay Kurian: There's an interesting conflation in the video, between blueness and blackness, and then teasing out the impossibility of those two things being the same as well. At what point does the classroom become a vital element of the exhibition?

American Artist: The classroom, for me, was not explicitly about a school setting. It was more so about a space where an ideology is transferred onto someone. These desks are meant to be a place where police officers are meant to learn something, but they have this defensive shield that actually prevents them from hearing anything. That was, you know, an analogy for the police who refuse to change their opinion on anything, or who are very defensive. They have this sort of fraternalistic quality to the culture of policing.

There's books on the desks, which are real books, but they're things that someone who believes in Blue Lives Matter might read, “I love a cop”, “Cop under fire”. The one on top is like a daily religious affirmation related to policing. The one on the bottom is this right wing, really intense book about how Black Lives Matter is fake and cops are the victim. It's just really wild stuff, but I was just trying to create this atmosphere of what would be like the blue lives matter?

There's one more piece on the wall which is like a chalkboard but it just has the blue police fabric. It's kind of like the surface you go to learn from but it’s just blue.

Ajay Kurian: I'm curious, there have been moments in my work when I go deep into 4chan, 8chan, and just the utter depths of digital hell. It takes a toll on your spirit. I'm curious, after doing a project like this, and going to the next one where there's a further understanding of pre-policing or understanding how criminalization happens in a future tense. This is a dark space to be in as a black man. How do you survive that? Or how do you stay afloat and also have distance and are able to make things from this space?

American Artist: Yeah, I was working on these for a year and a half or so, and after the next project I was feeling burnt out because I felt like I was sort of trying to inhabit the mind space of the police in order to understand them. And not towards any end like it could keep going forever. It was deep for me, but for the police it's not deep. They just hate you and like it's not that deep for them. So they're sort of resilient in that way, whereas for me it was like really demoralizing to ingest that stuff, so by the end of that period, you know, I wanted to do something that felt like it gave me something back, you know.

Ajay Kurian: Yeah, in my experience, so my cousin grew up in Staten Island and married a Staten Island cop. I remember in the very beginning, him joining the force, and he was like, look, I'm just doing this for the pension, I'm just doing this because I need a steady job and I want to start a family.

The transformation that happened from that moment of "this is a job, and it stays a job”, fast forward to the wake of her father's funeral, that he's extremely late for. No shade to him because he was very good to her father. But he showed up late because two cops were killed, and he had to go to their funeral.

He didn't know these cops. They were in a completely different precinct. And he came back in full cop regalia, and he had a Blue Lives Matter bracelet around his arm. And I was like, oh, this is the last time I'm gonna see you. Sure enough, it was. They got divorced soon after that. He was a real sweetheart, but that transformation was predicated on him just being easy prey.

Ajay Kurian: So the following work that we were just referencing is My Blue Window, which was originally at the Queen's Museum. This is another work where there's such a quiet, sinister energy to this piece. My first question is, how has this piece aged for you?

American Artist: Well, I guess I have a couple ways to answer that. For me personally, when I made it, I wasn't sure how I felt about it. For a lot of reasons, the production process could have been better and as a video, it's kind of hard to watch. Over time, it's grown on me, now that it's sort of just a thing.

I actually think it's pretty effective at what it's meant to talk about. Socially or politically, it's interesting because, in a way, the conversation around predictive policing is where it was when I made the piece, which is weird. This piece is meant to appear like something out of the future, but it's talking about a technology that had already been around for almost a decade.

So it was sort of trying to show that contradiction in our perception of what the police are doing. In a way I feel like predictive policing is just one niche of the police force and the prison industrial complex. It's one particular topic, but it's not everything.

Ajay Kurian: You can get like a little bit of a taste of what's happening, but the interface that you see across the sort of live feed, so to speak, is essentially saying where potential crimes are about to be committed. This is one of those things that's so close to the present that it felt all the more insidious because when I first watched it, it felt somewhat futuristic and now it feels perfectly banal.

It tells me something about my own psyche, what I expect and what I understand of the police state. The sonic assault of it feels very like you just take it all for granted. It's so matter of fact that it takes a while to actually unpack the fuckery of it. That is what makes it a piece that is valuable, because over time, when you see an artwork, there's a deep intentionality to it. So if it feels matter of fact, what are the invisible things that you're trying to bring to light?

And that sonic assault of sirens and how that already means threat and violence. There's so many things that get clocked in just that sound. There's so many things in just seeing a cop car with flashing lights zoom by. All of that happens in the span of this video. Where it's just another day. Everything's very ordinary. And that ordinariness is it's so damning, because it tells us more about ourselves than what's going to be, or how horrible it's going to be. This is just what it is.

American Artist: Yeah, I think that a lot of the things I wanted to convey are subtle in the sense of, essentially, predictive policing doesn't work very well. Many new technologies don't work well, but that's not the narrative that we understand about them. We're like, oh, it's shiny, it's new, it's perfect. In actuality, they usually aren't very good and predictive policing is no exception.

There's many different companies that have made them, and I think for the people that were making these softwares, they could say it was working no matter what happened. If a cop shows up and no one's there, they say they prevented a crime. If someone is there, they say they knew that was gonna happen. So no matter what happens, they can say this is great, and then they can get different police departments across the country to buy the software. And the police departments are buying AI technology because they're saying, we don't have the money for cops, so we're gonna get software.

That's gonna determine whether people live or die, you know? I guess, in the video, I'm trying to show some of the stupidity of it. I mean, in this scene, they just drive through, you hear the siren and then at the end the screen says crime deterred. And it’s like why — because your siren was on you prevented a crime? That’s the level of like ridiculousness.

I think that also plays in the ominous nature of it and that's kind of how we don't really know what the police are doing. Or if they do something horrible, they can cover it up.

Ajay Kurian: Yeah, it's so invisible and it's the fact that it's in this cloaked blue room and there's this stadium seating. It's a spectacle that's not a spectacle. You’re all gathering around to see something and it's just sort of, this is just everyday.

American Artist: Yeah, there’s nothing spectacular in the video. It's very, like you said, kind of banal. I wanted to exaggerate that with the seating. It’s meant to point towards the perspective of the police, which is predatory. The seats gives it this voyeuristic quality. You’re about to watch something happen, but what you actually see is very subtle.

Ajay Kurian: There's two moments. The fact that you have the bleachers, and then the kind of verbiage of the press release of the prior show where you can't tell the difference between exploiting grief and understanding grief. There's these hinges in the work of bringing someone to the spectacle and then there is no spectacle.

Or having this guy, Christopher Dorner, merged into this character that becomes fantastical, but also, this is a severely damaged person. That became a lightning rod for so many different issues and to be able to actually say, there's possibly a level of exploitation here. There's a way in which you expose your complicity to how these are very complicated things. And I really appreciated that because it helps people into the work and understand that these are not simple issues, and they can't be resolved in some easy, moralistic fashion. Even though, there are very clear delineations of how unbelievably fucked up certain parts of it are. Is that just how you sort of think about your practice as a whole?

American Artist: Yeah, I think about always having a multivalence of emotional registers. I mean, I don’t feel like there's any joy there, but there's a grief, there's a fear, maybe there's an excitement or something, there's a banality, there's an unknowing, there's many things to be felt. And I feel like that's sort of the nature of grief as well, especially as we experience it as a society, it's sort of a perpetual thing. I don't know if I'm explaining as well, but it's not black and white.

Moments of joy and pain, it's all the things all the time, is kind of how I feel about it. We're always being exposed to really tragic moments, whether it's political, economic, or environmental. And we have to carry those while we do everything else in our life. Not pretending that you can just push it to the side, I think is important. Actually holding it and saying, this is the world that we're in and contending with that. I guess that's what I'm trying to do with the work. I mean, these were made before 2020 Black Lives Matter, and these are conversations that have been going on forever, you know? It's not a momentary thing, it's always relevant because it's always happening.

Ajay Kurian: Is this what led you to dive into Octavia Butler’s work?

American Artist: There's a few things. One, as I mentioned, feeling kind of burnt out and wanting to not do work about the police, or not as explicitly. I think the police are still relevant, but less explicitly. I started working on the Butler stuff during COVID. I had learned that she went to the same high school I did and I knew she was from Pasadena. Learning that she had gone to the same high school was what really made me want to dive even deeper and understand not just her writing but her whole life.

It was quarantine time, I was also wanting to feel connected to where I grew up as well. And in response to the police work, I was thinking about abolition, thinking about speculative fiction as a method of abolition, or thinking about other possibilities for how the world could be organized. Also, wanting to deal more directly with science fiction, or learn about, what was Octavia Butler's process for creating it. So there was a lot of factors. I also felt like it would be more life affirming to engage with some of the same themes, but through her work. Those were all of the things I was feeling at the time.

Ajay Kurian: I mean Octavia Butler is definitely a writer who knows how to hold. It's called Dystopia and Utopia Together, and that's not always an easy thing to do. It felt like a breath of fresh air in terms of seeing the project that you were working on, where it's not jettisoning all the things that you had been doing, but it was reframing it in a way that felt like there might be new possibility.

This iteration was at Red Cat in Los Angeles, and now there's a new iteration at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, and it's up for quite some time.

So I think you, you have plenty of time to see it. [00:49:00] but it, the whole, the show as a whole, Even though there were,

There are elements that feel dystopic or fascistic, but the backdrop is almost that there's a larger thing that's breathing, if that makes sense.

Ajay Kurian: so let's start with the video of Christopher Donner. Cause I have some questions about this video too. Do you want to give some background before I play it?

American Artist: Yeah, well just cause it's confusing. So this is Christopher Donner. The earlier project referenced Christopher Dorner, who was the real person. Christopher Donner is a fictional character in Octavia Butler's novel.

Ajay Kurian: Oh my god. Really? I just thought you were doing like a callback to an earlier piece.

American Artist: He's the front running presidential candidate in Parable of the Sower.

Ajay Kurian: That's crazy. Wow. This really mapped out quite nicely. I mean, horribly, but nicely. Okay we'll start there.

[Watch the video on our YouTube Channel]

Ajay Kurian: Okay, so I have a theory about the voice of this person.

American Artist: Let's hear it.

Ajay Kurian: To me it felt like almost a blend between Obama and Kanye. That could be totally off base, but there was like the dreamer and the fascist that is both Kanye.

When I first started watching the video, I'm like suspicious. Then he starts talking about things, and I started to feel a little uplifted. Then he's talking about the things that I felt like, okay, where is this going? Then it turns where it's “You should believe in me! More than anybody! And it feels like, oh, it's that guy.

There's all these turns in the video where, again, it feels very invisible. The rhetorical strategies and the ways in which you're thinking about how populism, fascism, racial identity, and racial histories can commingle in a way that still produces the same dude. It was a troubling thing to watch in like a living room setting at Pioneer Works.

American Artist: That's pretty good. Well, so the character in the book, they don't describe like what he looks like or anything. They just kind of describe his values, which are somewhere between conservative and populist. He's for the people, but it sort of makes you uncomfortable. If you're a poor person who's trying not to get killed, like you might go for this person. Lauren Olamina, who's the main character in the book, her father's going to vote for him or he's thinking about it.

That's kind of all you know about him. And mind you, the book begins in 2024, so it's right now. So just based on that, I was trying to imagine who in society right now feels like that, and I thought of Kanye West.

Ajay Kurian: Okay, so I wasn't off about that.

American Artist: No, you were right about that. This is actually heavily inspired by his 2020 campaign video. The language that this character is speaking, some of it is something I wrote and some of it is based on what Kanye has said. I was imagining this black guy who's an entrepreneur, but you're not really sure what he does, but he can supposedly do anything.

In some ways it sounds like his ideals align with yours and then somehow they sound fascist. It's kind of all about him. But if you feel swayed by the optics of it, you might go for him. So in that sense, it was like wanting to actually conflate our lived reality with what's going on in the novel.

Ajay Kurian: Which is kind of, in a lot of ways, how science fiction tends to function. Of course, things are set in the future, but it's always a way of imagining our present circumstance, or a way of projecting what will be because of what is.

In thinking about this exhibition and also starting to see some commonalities, I started to think about the idea of tracing. On the table here, these are all documents from the Octavia Butler archive, but you sort of redrew them. The reason I bring that is, there’s a lot of moments where I feel like there's a tracing happening. There was a project that that I didn't talk about here, but Sandy Speaks, which is a reference to Sandra Bland and kind of taking on a chat bot that is in the adjacent voice of Sandy who's conceptually related to Sandra. There’s all these moments in which you’re tracing outlines of other people that aren't there or other things that aren't present.

I'm curious about that invisibility. There's a part of me that reads you as very low key. But you also know how to make an entrance. You're like low key Leo energy. Because you have star power and there's a real presence. But there's something very quiet and low key about the operations. But then when you start looking at it, there's more.

Even with this show, I think for a while I was going through there was a lot for me to process. For instance, even the piece with the rocket, you can see these tanks and the sandbags. And this rocket is then displayed in the two channel video piece behind this wall as well. When I first saw it and just digested it on face value; it’s a group of all black people that are in the desert in California and they are sort of figuring out whether or not this rocket is going to work and their eyes are set on the stars. It felt like a piece inspired by Parallel World Sower. We need to get off the planet or find a way to understand ourselves outside of the earthly realm. And then realizing that this is actually almost a reenactment of something that had happened in 1936 in California. That shifted how I understood the way that you were working through memory and future tense.

So if you could talk about the event in 36, and kind of how you started mapping these things in almost geographically. How did that map start?

American Artist: The premise of the show is I grew up in Altadena and Pasadena. Once I knew of Butler's relationship to that place, I started to think about what that must have been like and what was her relationship to all of these various institutions and communities. Cause there's a pretty significant rocket science history in Pasadena and there's a substantial science fiction community in Los Angeles. There's also sort of an enclave of Black people that live in Pasadena and Altadena, many of whom are artists.

For me growing up, I had this idea that going to Caltech was the thing to do, or that's the most important thing you could do or something, right? And so, thinking about what it must have been like for her being in this context. I know that while she was alive, she didn't have too much of a direct relationship to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. But I wanted to think about if this area of rocket science had been directly impacted by her work or if there was a way to bring these histories together.

American Artist: I thought that could be interesting. And so, this was a rocket test that was done in the 1930s, to test liquid rocket fuel. It doesn't take off from the ground. It's just a jet engine that's sitting on a stand and it has fuel going into it. When it ignites, it shoots up a little blaze of fire and you can track how much pressure it's getting.

This was done in an area called the Arroyo Seco Canyon, which is close to where I grew up and where Octavia Butler lived. It was done by a group of like engineering students and rocket hobbyists. It was not official really. But when it was successful, that led to the founding of that chapter of NASA in Pasadena.

Ajay Kurian: Oh, wow.

American Artist: So I wanted to think about this moment. It's almost DIY a little bit. This moment of these guys coming together and doing this test. In the Parable of the Sower novel, you have this religious community who aspires to go to the stars. Not for colonial reasons, but more like we can't survive, like we need to go somewhere. Then in the sequel to that novel, you sort of see in the future when people have already gone to space. But you don't really see the early stages of how they do it.

So I kind of imagined this moment in the near future when they do their own rocket test. And as this group of people that don't have many resources, they're kind of figuring it out. Maybe it would have looked like that 1930s test. It’s about 100 years later, and so in the film you see the religious community doing this test on this rocket which was a functional replica of that original rocket.

Ajay Kurian: There was meant to be a third part to the Parable series, right? That was called Parable of the Trickster. The tricksters definitely on my mind. Is it on yours? Is this a project that you see continuing into a further speculative realm?

American Artist: I'm not planning to. I feel like I could stay in this space forever. I mean, when I first started this work, I didn't think it would focus so heavily on that book. I thought it would be about all the books. But then there was just so much in that one book. I kind of got stuck there. So I feel like I could really keep going, and even though so many people are familiar with Butler, so many people aren’t. It feels like in some ways, people have trouble accessing the work. So I don't know, I wanna do something else now.

Ajay Kurian: Do you have a sense of where your head is at after a project like this? Do you just need to release and do you need to take some time to see how this is received in New York? Or are you already thinking, okay, I know what's next?

American Artist: I have a general idea. I'm trying to make work in a different way than I have in the past, which is not in response to something. So it's a new terrain.

Ajay Kurian: This is a new little section that we are starting in these talks called Fave Right Now. Your favorite book right now?

American Artist: I'm gonna choose Raving by Mackenzie Work. I mean I just started reading it like two days ago, but I'm just gonna go with that.

Ajay Kurian: Favorite album right now?

American Artist: I don't remember the name of the album I'm thinking of. It's it's this kind of psychedelic, but low key, ambient, jazzy album that I had heard. I was listening to NTS, and I was like, I feel like this would be great, if you're like, tripping, and you just need to be in the feels.

Ajay Kurian: Favorite song right now?

American Artist: It's by a young band called Stickin a Gout.

Ajay Kurian: Favorite visual artist or favorite show right now?

American Artist: Well, I haven't seen a lot of shows lately, but the one that stuck in my mind is the Colleen Smith show that she had at 52 Walker. It was hyper sensory and really beautiful. It was a great show.

Ajay Kurian: Favorite food right now?

American Artist: I've been making a tuna salad that I'm pretty proud of.

Ajay Kurian: Are we talking olive oil or are we talking mayo?

American Artist: Mayo.

Ajay Kurian: Favorite movie right now?

American Artist: I saw Anora recently. I liked it.

Ajay Kurian: Favorite TV show right now.

American Artist: Love is Blind.

Ajay Kurian: I'm going to open it up to the audience if there are any questions out there.

Audience Member: You mentioned how working in response can be a start for your works and I wonder how that works with time. Do you every feel as an artist that you have to move quicker to respond to something that is currently happening?

American Artist: I don't usually find myself responding to events that are happening. I try and avoid that. I'd like to think that the things that I'm dealing with or processing are things that are sort of always relevant, for better or for worse. For me, a lot of that response has been sort of institutional obligation, if there's a show and I need to finish this work. That's what I'm really trying to move away from.

But I think as far as feeling an attachment to this temporal processing of social events, this sort of cycle that we're always on, I think I try and avoid that as much as I can.

Audience Member: In the cop video, was that the real software or did you build it to make it look like a video game? There was also some side text with projected dates and I was just curious about that process.

American Artist: I'm glad you asked. I meant to talk about that. That's not how the interface actually looks. This was based on a software called PredPol, which is short for predictive policing. It kind of looks like a Google map with red squares on it which is where crime is likely to take place.

The reason I chose this display design was to place it somewhere in the future, even though the software itself had already been in use for quite some time. So it is a fictional interface that you're seeing. And then, the dates that you noticed, that is based on something called CompStat which is what the police used prior to predictive policing. I think it's been around since like the 90s. CompStat stands for comparative statistics, so they basically keep track of a number of crimes of a certain type and compare it week by week to anticipate what's going to happen. And so, in the video, I wanted to make a reference to something that is a sort of predictive policing, but that was done manually, that existed prior to the digital predictive policing.

Audience Member: You expressed an ability to stay in the work. When do you decide that you’re done or that you’re ready to move on? How does that happen for you?

American Artist: Well, in the past, I would make one show and then be done. With the Octavia Butler work, this is sort of the longest time I've spent with something, which has felt really generative. I’m trying not to move on just because the deadline was met. Because I realized, in previous bodies of work, there was a lot more that I was still thinking about that I just didn't process. So I am trying to work in a different way now.

Right now I'm not trying to have such a thematic and specific focus in the work, so that the works can breathe a little bit more and it feels less like I'm writing the chapter of something.

Ajay Kurian: I want to thank American Artists for being here tonight and being so generous with this time. If we can give a round of applause. Thanks everybody for coming, we really appreciate it. I know it's just it's horribly cold outside, so I appreciate everybody being here and spending time with us.

The fact that Aaron Gilbert’s studio is off Broadway in Brooklyn makes perfect sense. Broadway sits under old and monumental subway tracks that obscure light and, at almost all times, ring out like banshees because of the trains above. They could be beautiful, if some context were removed, but they’re monstrous and dystopian if it’s your lived reality. I see this kind of balance in a handful of Aaron’s new paintings, the deep blues and purples of a street that has refused the sun in favor of neon and LEDs instead, where repurposed storefronts and vestigial signs act as a kind of late-Capitalist symbolism.

Aaron has two spaces, each quite modest, with thin floor boards that have been painted so many times you wonder whether there’s any wood left. The light is peaceful, the scent is meditative, and Aaron looks weary, like the figures that populate many of his paintings. His figures are elegantly hunched, with expressions so subtle that resentment, love, tenderness, hope, and misery all feel like less than a fraction of a line apart. Aaron is a less severe version of this. He’s friendly and his eyes have more of a spark of immediate kindness. He shuffles through the studio telling me about what he’s been working on and where his mental state is. He shows me little drawings of SpongeBob, drawn dutifully and effortlessly, but where SpongeBob’s normally cracked-out eyes and bucktooth smile would be are instead the world wearied eyes that Aaron tends to favor. This is SpongeBob coming home from work. This is SpongeBob eating ass. This is Spongebob indulging his foot fetish. They are erotic and banal drawings that are both hilarious and oddly moving. They have the pathos I know from Gilbert’s larger paintings, but their speed and simplicity make sure you don’t belabor it. Spongebob needs to get his, just like everybody else.

We go over into the other room of the studio where there are a few paintings on the wall. One is so big he has it hung horizontally. He explains to me how he made it in here, which I half understand. On another wall is Pearls (blue mercury), a painting with a family walking past an AT&T store. The little boy hangs off his father’s shoulders with a near mannerist forearm touching his father’s face. The mother is pregnant and has her hand open faced, almost touching the father’s. Her bicep is noticeable. In her other hand is a folded up stroller. They all look like they’ve been up for six days straight. Their mouths are closed and their eyes are shot. It’s Beckett, but it’s material instead of existential; a group instead of singular. They can’t go on, they’ll go on. It’s bigger than philosophy - persistence is deeper than that.

In the back, at the threshold of the store is a being whose head is arched and approaching horror. A ghost, an apparition, a spirit - call it what you want, it’s not a terribly friendly presence. It looks like it wants to play, we just don’t know how it likes to.

Another painting, The Dream Before, is an interior domestic scene where a man is hunched over the sink, attempting to unclog it with a straightened clothes hanger. A woman showers next to him behind a translucent curtain. We can see her face twice in the three panel bathroom mirror. Her gaze appears different from the two angled mirrors. And the third is the one behind the curtain, where she is absorbed in her own being, looking at her hands. The three panel motif reminds me of religious paintings and feels intentional, as if to say - you can find the spirit here, in a bathroom, with a clogged sink, and a plastic shower curtain. The woman feels anointed. She’s incandescent behind the curtain, where it’s an explosion of painterly play that lights up the figure, but more importantly, there’s a lot of drawing. We can make just enough of her body out to follow the curves of her lips, nose, and buttocks. The lines are charged, erotic. It makes me want more of this line, more of that speed in paintings that are otherwise able to slow anything down. Gilbert’s paintings are profoundly slow, like watching light move in a medium where we can see it moving - where people travel through domesticity and through aeons of history at once.

Aaron tells me he’s been reading Walter Benjamin and thinking about the angel of history. I look for references to Klee, but don’t notice any besides maybe the palette of yellow green glows. But despite thinking about revolution, history, and myth, what I find so strangely confounding about Gilbert’s paintings is their ability to hold hardness and tenderness at once. It is easy to harden a painting - to push people out. But to walk the tightrope, to follow contradictory instructions, this is a specific kind of poetry, one that is historical, philosophical, and genuinely beautiful to look at.

The paintings I saw felt like big swings. They feel mythic and everyday, tableaus of life where people bathe, braid, cook and create. In 8 keys 9 seeds, The ancestors of tomorrow commingle with the spirits of yesterday to make the categories of devotional painting and history painting merge. In • g • o • p • u • f • f •, we see an opening, a break in what feels like a wall of inscriptions, spirits, and past beings. A ghostly Adidas symbol is interrupted by a figure that looks alien, hovering between inscription and depiction. On the opposite side of the opening is a procession of faceless humans while another, who faces them, holds a child. Dim sparkles of the outlines of snakes coil throughout the wall. Everything feels both ominous and magical, portending what lies waiting. Through this opening we see what feels like the present: washed out, cloudy, as if in a haze of atmospheric distraction, with a “go puff” sign for a storefront.

Here, the life of the spirit and the life of history are not separate courses, but one in the same. 8 keys 9 seeds and • g • o • p • u • f • f • both stand as a testaments to Benjamin’s understanding of Messianic time, which was not a conventionally religious temporality in which we are saved by God, but where history redeems itself through revolution, through the past finding its way into the present and made to live again. The resoluteness of the paintings and the figures themselves tell me that this isn’t just a hope, it is simply what is the case - a viewer just needs to believe. After leaving Aaron’s studio, I think I do.

all images courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery

A bomb disposal technician, a suspicious bag, a soldier, two security dogs, a suicide bomber, his wife in wheelchair and his daughter have to cross a river. They have discovered a small boat. The small boat can carry only two people or one person and one dog or item at a time. The suspicious bag can not be left with anybody unless the bomb disposal technician is present. The suicide bomber can not be left with any of the dogs unless the soldier is present. The soldier can not be left with any of the suicide bomber’s family members unless the suicide bomber is present. Only the soldier, suicide bomber, and bomb disposal technician know how to use the boat. How would they cross the river?

This is a piece by Ahmet Öğüt from 2010 called River Crossing Puzzle. The piece comprises a wall text that I just read along with movable 2-D life size figures corresponding to the puzzle, drawn in a style that feels like a realistic comic. It’s kind of a fucked up piece. It’s funny, and sad, and strange, and real in ways that are somewhat confounding because it doesn’t really give you a single way to resolve it, even if there is a way to “solve” it. Ahmet has been making work for over twenty years now, and in spending some time with his output, these two words stick out from a variety of interviews: sabotage and continuation. Ahmet cites the impulse to sabotage from the philosopher Gayatri Spivak’s term, “affirmative sabotage”, where the impulse is not necessarily to “destroy but to repurpose and use tools for something else.”

In many of Ahmet’s earlier works, this desire to sabotage is both funny, raw, and politically sensitive. A work that gets shown often is “ Somebody Else’s Car”, where it’s two projectors moving through images of the artist taking parked vehicles and applying sheets of colored paper to them to transform their appearance into into taxi cabs or police cars. He then disappears. A part of me can’t help but imagine this work redone in 2023 in the age of TikTok and how it would function.

Another car based piece is a work called Across the Slope (2008), where two models of the Fiat 131 Mirafiori are welded together and painted black, like a stretch limo. The comically long car is stranded on a four foot hump rising from the gallery floor, seesawing in the air. The car was in many ways a symbol of modernity and the middle class in Turkey, where it became quite common for people to customize the vehicle. It also became a symbol of international production and manufacturing, as it was imported into many foreign markets but assembled locally. The elongation references Western luxury cars and it’s stranding might suggest an individual who has given up their nimbleness in an infrastructure that requires it. Without it, you’re literally stranded.

Sabotage as a form of nimbleness, as a way of rerouting the rules to not remain stranded.

In Exploded City, a work begun in 2009 and ongoing, Ahmet recreates buildings that have been destroyed by terrorist attacks as moquettes. They are often buildings that are not remarked about in the media but are distinctly remembered by local populations. The buildings have come from all over, Belfast, London, Madrid, Mostar, Mumbai, Oklahoma, and others. When it was first displayed in the Museum Villa Stuck in Munich, there was an added element to the exhibition design, where the ceiling of the museum was lowered to the point where visitors had to hunch over to circulate throughout. There is the obvious sense that to shift one’s posture gives one a new orientation, a new way of looking, but there is also something more absurd about the gesture. Something that insists that the darkness and gravity of the work remain in conflict with our way of being around it. Imagine everyone in a room, hunched over, their heads consistently hitting the ceiling, inconvenienced. There is a mercurial vein of absurdity in many of Ahmet’s earlier works that strikes a tone that permits a smirk, where an appraisal and commitment to memory and memorial is coupled with an acknowledgement of the insanity that these are the things that we need to remember.

I’m dwelling on these early works to give you a sense of the kinds of provocations and forms of sabotage that were of interest to Ahmet and how that transformed into a dialectic of sabotage and continuation with his projects to come.

It was in 2012 that Ahmet founded The Silent University. The roots of its name date back to 1873, when the writer and educator Anna Eliot Ticknor founded the Society to Encourage studies at Home. This was a Boston-based network of women teaching women by mail that the literary scholar Harriet F Bergmann recently dubbed, The Silent University. Ahmet’s University is a solidarity based knowledge exchange platform by displaced people and forced migrants. (Note that he does not use the word “refugee”). It is led by a group of lecturers, consultants and research fellows. It is an educational platform outside of the restrictions of migration laws, language limitations and other bureaucratic obstacles. Since 2012 the Silent University has involved those that have had a professional life and academic training in their home countries, but are unable to use their skills or professional training due to a variety of reasons related to their status. Working together, the participants have developed lectures, discussions, events, resource archives and publications. The Silent University started initially in London in 2012 in collaboration with Delfina Foundation and Tate and later hosted by The Showroom.

It now has offshoots in Sweden, Hamburg, Amman-Jordan, and Athens. Quoting from their website: The Silent University aims to address and reactivate the knowledge of the participants and make the exchange process mutually beneficial by inventing alternative currencies, in place of money or free voluntary service. The Silent University’s aim is to challenge the idea of silence as a passive state, and explore its powerful potential through performance, writing, and group reflection. These explorations attempt to make apparent the systemic failure and the loss of skills and knowledge experienced through the silencing process of people seeking asylum.

The profundity of this project can’t be understated. This is a generous way to think about collaboration, to think about affirmative sabotage alongside continuity, and even a way to understand dependency as necessity as we have learned from Park, Jason, and Tina. I quote Ahmet here:

“From the very beginning, we immediately started writing down practical and ideological principles to make collaboration easier. We knew that institutions do not radically change over the course of a meeting. They cannot change their structure, but what they can do is collaborate with an institution that practices these principles; by working with us, they are slowly transformed. Each time we partnered with institutions we saw immediate changes for those involved. For those involved in the University, visa and citizenship application processes all got faster. Legal obstacles are ways of sabotaging knowledge. The years pass and knowledge disappears. The other obstacle is language and training. Even if you have all your legal documents, it can take years to retrain. What happens to that knowledge in the meantime? It’s not about colonial or decolonize discussions, unlearning or learning; it’s about offering an immediate recognition of individuals, rather than waiting for their knowledge to receive official authorization.”

We can learn a lot from Ahmet’s ways of thinking, ways of making, and ways of creating. We are all beginning to think about what life will be after Skowhegan, and I think it’s absolutely fitting that Ahmet is here with us now at this particular juncture where we are all getting a little stir crazy and perhaps even start thinking about sabotage. I hope that when those thoughts start to linger, we think of how to anchor them in a longer politics, where we dwell on what we want to break or shift, or cull, in the present alongside what we want to build, remake and cultivate.

I was thinking about the importance of Venus being in retrograde right now and what that means for artists and creatives and how it’s not necessarily a time where things are out of whack, or where we can’t find our artistic way, but instead a moment to rewind, retrace, remember why we do what we do - to reappraise. We are in a moment where we can think about affirmative sabotage for ourselves, for our ways of being and making as well as how we want to redraw the structures of our time.

Ahmet really believes in the power that art has, largely because he knows when to let art go and wear a different hat. There was a self-conscious transformation from a prankster into an initiator, interventionist, negotiator, and mediator (alongside so many other roles.)… I hope we all take note in how our urges, our impulses, and desires to fuck shit up, can be cultivated in ways that believe in a different future.

In sitting with all the projects and exhibitions, and texts and campaigns that Ahmet has been a part of, fostered, led, and/or created, I see a genuine hope for utopia followed or alongside the impulse to look at the world as it is and to say, this is fucking stupid. What’s so profoundly inspiring though, is that it feels like he’s able to laugh, cry, grieve, side eye, speak, and find silence, but then finally and without fail - get to work. It isn’t enough to question or criticize the symbolic and lived structures of our world, we must change them, and in his work, he shows us how.

*** Your Flowers is a column where artists write about people who have changed the course of their creative life that are still living. Your Flowers is our way of creating an archive of giving thanks to those who paved the way for us, and are still here to receive it. Over time, both the people we thank and the people that wrote it will pass, but we will have an archive where we know that this mutuality once existed. ***

I met Judy in 1979. She was installing her installation “Reinventing the Wheel” at the Neuberger Museum where I had a work fellowship. Irving Sandler, who taught at Purchase, brought ten young artists who had shown at Artist’s Space up to the museum where we got to work with Judy, Jonathan Borofsky, Laurie Anderson, Scott Burden and others. Judy’s piece was an explosion of contact paper, styrofoam, aluminum and fluorescent colored plexiglas stick figures that predated the figurative work of Joel Shapiro and Antony Gormley. Soon after that exhibition I moved to the city to attend the Whitney ISP Program. Judy had hired my friend and classmate, Julius Koslowski, as a studio assistant and I was frequently at her loft in Tribeca or her studio next to the stinky sewage treatment plant in Greenpoint. Judy said she didn’t mind it because she had no sense of smell. She was beyond generous--introducing us to her art world friends and bringing us to parties at John Torreano’s and Dennis Oppenheim’s downtown lofts or to Holly and Horace Solomon’s uptown apartment. Although I like to say that I was never an artist’s assistant, the truth is I did work for Judy for one day when she was installing “Deepwater” at Holly’s gallery in SoHo. I remember it like it was yesterday even though it was 44 years ago. She handed me a paint roller dripping with purple paint and told me to do “something” over in the corner. I froze, unable to create another artist’s work. After that I stuck to house painting, construction, and a bizarre job I had as a fix-it man in a midtown brothel for my money jobs.

Watching Judy work was thrilling. Besides my classmates at Purchase, I had never seen an artist at work. We all know about action painting, but Judy was an action sculptor. The freedom she allowed herself was exhilarating. It was as if she had six arms—welding, pouring, painting, bending, and breaking. The manipulation and transformation of raw materials was magical. She was fearless and taught me to trust muscle memory and intuition. Sections of large works were made in the studio, but her installations were extremely improvisational. She would literally sculpt the space and made many of her decisions on the spot. Her use and alteration of found objects was a huge influence on me. She was a sucker for kitsch, glitter, fluorescent colors, fake flowers, and real tree trunks. Judy has been an enormous influence on younger artists and I don’t think she gets proper credit for that. It's hard to imagine the careers of Sarah Sze or Jessica Stockholder without a Judy Pfaff, or even late Frank Stella. I’m indebted to her for introducing me to Ursula von Rydingsvard, another art god, who shared a studio building with Judy for years.

In 1994 my daughter Juliette was born, and my practical Capricorn side thought it would be a good idea to find a steady job with benefits such as health insurance. Although I had never held a position, I believed I might be good at teaching. As fate would have it, I ran into Judy driving her little flat bed pick-up truck down West Broadway. I asked her if she knew of any teaching gigs and she said “Yeah, mine. I just quit my job at Columbia.” I applied and miraculously got the job. Three decades later, I’m still there. So, on top of being one of my art heroes, I owe Judy for helping me put food on the table for all these years.

About Jon Kessler:

Born in 1957 in Yonkers, NY, Jon Kessler is an artist best known for his kinetic sculptures made with lights, motors and found objects. He has been showing his work regularly in the US and abroad since his first exhibition at Artist’s Space in 1983. In 2005, his immersive installation The Palace at 4 AM was exhibited at MoMA PS1 and is permanently installed at the Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburg. His newest sculptures are “balancing acts” that address the fragility of our planet. Bronze, brass, ceramics, stainless steel, and found porcelain figurines combine to form works which comment on ecological collapse and environmental precariousness. He is a Professor of Art at Columbia University where he has taught since 1994. He plays guitar in several art bands.

Park and Jason met in 2014 at Yale Union, which was an art space in Portland, Oregon. As a way to introduce them, I’d like to stage a series of encounters between their respective exhibitions since then.

At the end of 2013, Jason presented the exhibition “Optium LH-3M” at The Frye Art Museum in Seattle, Washington. White melamine sheets covered the floor producing an all white exhibition space - the beloved and dreaded “white cube”. On the floor, in the center of the room were four LCD TV monitors lined in a row, inches apart. Videos ranging from clips of Miyazaki’s 1992 animated film Porco Rosso, to semi-instructional videos on how to operate high end lenses circulated consecutively from screen to screen, one after the other, eventually reaching the outer screen and fully viewable, creating a snake-like flow of moving images. Two speakers, also in a line, were adjacent to the televisions, and next to those were two security floodlights pointed at the floor, looking like illuminated visors suggesting that perhaps the space of white light and white walls be thought of through the lens of surveillance, security, and property. Lining the walls were paintings from the collection hung salon style as they normally are. Hirata’s intervention harkened back to the so-called invention of the white cube at the Munich Secession in 1893, where, in contrast to the salon style exhibitions in variously colored and patterned spaces, their first exhibition had lightly colored walls and sparsely hung paintings. It became the grandfather of what we might call “optimal viewing conditions.”

Perhaps Jason was attempting to shift what feels like a necessary condition into a questionable one. The landscapes in Porco Rosso have been commented on in such a way that suggests that the European landscapes depicted were here meant to feel distant, as if through the lens of a tourist. Miyazaki was arguably trying to provincialize the European landscape, making it quaint and contingent, rather than the necessary backdrop for serious art as it might often be thought as. Likewise, Jason might be rightly trying to provincialize the white cube and the circumstances it manufactured.

In 2014, Park McArthur presented her exhibition, Ramps, at Essex Street Gallery. Against the black floor of the gallery were twenty wheel chair ramps previously used for galleries or residencies, many of which were made specifically for her. The effect was unsettling and quiet. It took a moment to realize what this near anthropological survey was marking. Some ramps were completely intact, grip tape strips and all. Others were literally crumbling and battered remnants of ramps past. It was the kind of exhibition where you might quickly read, look, and leave, unaware of how the exhibition was about to affect you

.I remember seeing that exhibition, unsure how long to stay, and finally walking out, unable to fully satisfy the feeling of how to do right by the exhibition. How long is long enough? It didn’t matter, Park’s exhibition has stayed with me to this very day. Since then I’ve thought about Park’s ability to access spaces, art spaces, any spaces. I’ve thought about the spaces that included her and inadvertently or intentionally excluded her. I’ve thought about Minimalism’s supposed autonomy and the exclusions afforded and necessitated.

High above the ramps was an evenly spaced line of empty blue signs, the same scale as one that appeared out front the exhibition, noting “Ramp Access Located at Essex Street”. Without information, the signs became a rhythm of blue monochromes, like windows, reminiscent of Robert Gober’s windows but with no bars. Here was an emotional contradiction bound by political and visual knots - without text, the signs were just about useless, pointing to a kind of political futility. The freedom of the open window, insists - to where? For whom? Bars or no bars, accessibility remains an open question. The condition of autonomy, of the optimal body or a universal subject are not heroic here - they are neoliberal pathologies.

In 2016, Jason presented The Brink at The Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, Washington, and Park presented Poly at Chisenhale Gallery in London. Whereas before their exhibitions spoke to local conditions that unfold as global and philosophical problematics, these appeared to examine the global conditions in order to reach intimate ones.

At Chisenhale, Park installed three massive black polyurethane foam blocks in the corner, each roughly eight feet tall. Riffing off the sedate autonomy of Minimalist sculpture, Park’s appropriated ready-made chunks of polyurethane appeared much more bodily - wonky, uneven, and soft. As a material, they are meant to absorb sound and impact for various domestic and industrial purposes. In another series of sculptures, entitled “Contact”, Park looked to how differentiated plastics of all kinds are used to absorb, contain, and distribute liquids and substances across bodily borders. Stacked high on top of metal surgical trays were “dental dams, catheters, condoms, surgical masks, heel pads, baby oil, barrier cream, latex gloves, cannulas, and tissues,” as Colby Chamberlain indexed in Artforum. Chamberlain goes on to note that although these objects may perhaps be metonymic stand ins for Park as their “disabled author,” “identity is particularly unstable in the context of disability, since as Eva Feder Kittay observes, the realities of accidents, diagnoses, and old age ensure that everyone is only ever ‘temporarily-abled.’

If the guiding metaphor and reality of Park’s exhibition was absorption, Jason’s at The Henry Art Gallery might be consumption. How do we consume and how are we consumed in a global economy that is only thinking about how to optimize labor output without thinking of the living cost of such a transaction. Sutured together are two disparate sources with nearly two centuries between them: Goya’s Disasters of War and a 1981 speech by Jack Welch, the CEO of GE at the time. I excerpt the gallery’s text here:

“In one gallery are Hirata’s oil pastel drawings recreating Goya’s scene of desperation, and an industrial light fixture that partially illuminates the room, inviting questions about what power structures make visible and what they hide. Another gallery installed with box fans, air filters, and word drawings referred to as “restaurant specials”—Chicken Tikka Masala Pizza and Plumpy’Nut, for example—Hirata makes palpable the forces of our globalized economy and networked society. Plumpy’Nut, a therapeutic food used to combat malnutrition in famine and disaster stricken areas, is manufactured by a French company that strictly defends its patent and restricts the licensing of this life-saving remedy, even though it is unable to meet demand—limiting access to potential beneficiaries.”

Seen altogether, Jason’s attempts to bring to light the grotesque reality of bio-power as formulated by Michel Foucault where sovereignty shifted from “to make die and let live” into “to make live and let die.” Speaking from London to Seattle, Park and Jason’s exhibitions each harness their own means of elaborating this contemporary immiseration.

I’d like to note a final pair of exhibitions, Park’s at the Kunsthalle Bern in 2020 and Jason’s, presented in 2022 at the New York gallery, Ulrik. At the Kunsthalle Bern, Park’s audio guide for the exhibition was in many ways the work itself. It gives insight into the way disability communities were already ahead of Covid mandates, understanding the value and importance of remote access well before the world was forced to. Park’s exhibition was titled: Kunsthalle_guests Gaeste.Netz.5456, after the name and password of the wireless router for the museum. The signal for this router was boosted at Park’s request so it now reached the entire institution’s footprint. The audio guide announces early on the role and purpose of Park’s work:

“Kunsthalle_guests Gaeste.Netz.5456 is a series of visual and material descriptions of the interior and exterior spaces of Kunsthalle Bern as well as the artworks installed therein. It moves through the Kunsthalle’s seven galleries, the building’s elevator, courtyard, and nearby transportation stop. The exhibition reflects McArthur’s inquiries concerning the venue’s existing conditions, the people linked to it, the building and its history. More broadly it explores various possibilities for sharing and experiencing an art exhibition.

One of the infrastructures that this particular exhibition relies upon is the building’s wireless network. McArthur asked to permanently expand the building’s existing wifi so that the network reaches all of the seven galleries as well as its courtyard, bar, and adjacent park. Park McArthur named the exhibition after the existing Kunsthalle_guests network and its Gaeste.Netz.5456 passcode.

The exhibition was realized with great intimacy as McArthur did not travel to Bern, Switzerland in order to make or install it. The exhibition comes from questions raised about the particular possibilities that distance provides. After all, Kunsthalle Bern’s audience has always included people who do not travel to Bern, Switzerland. This exhibition’s approach to such a constellation of individual and social realities might be understood as an invitation to reflect upon the confrontation of presence, and upon whom presence relies, wherever one might be. What is presence if not a response to what and who is not there, to the objects and objectivities that are absent and may to a limited extent be our influence.

Welcome to Kunsthalle_guests Gaeste.Netz.5456. The guests are here. The guests are online and in the galleries. The guests are at Kunsthalle Bern. The guests are elsewhere.”

Like a shared shadow, Jason’s exhibition at Ulrik felt like a subtle meditation on guests being both present and elsewhere, transforming the everyday gallery goer into a ghost of themselves. Photographs of candles whose flames cast shadows were caught in a field of real shadows cast by those in the room. Jason had deinstalled the overhead lighting and instead plugged in bulbs into the wall outlets, again using light as both a surveilling affect as well as in this case, creating a host of shadows that enabled viewers to find the relation between their flickering shadows and those of the candle’s. After documentation, these shadows are arrested and the ghosts of so many become present. Never one to shy away from the intimate and the corporate, the show was aptly titled: MINUTES.

As I close, I’m reminded of Elena Ferrante’s brilliant series of Neapolitan Novels because they reformulated what a Bildungroman, a philosophical coming of age story, could look and feel like. By and large, I had considered it the territory of the singular white man, achieving greatness through his apparent autonomy. Lenu and Lila were best friends, constantly chasing after one another, orbiting the greatness one saw in the other, believing that qualities of one another were both seizable and out of reach. Their orbit created a new way of approaching the Bildungsroman for me, where it was not the singular growth of an artist, but two. This “two” allowed for a totally different kind of capaciousness, where you knew it was always others that made you, always others that carried and kept you, always others that you would need to hold in order to make this life in any way meaningful. That our story is never our own but of so many orbits of care.

Jason and Park’s ongoing conversation and relationship belies the larger condition of their respective bodies of work - that they have always been working and thinking with many, of the many. They have never been singular, in fact they refuse it. When they write, when they think, when they love, and live, it is always with one another and with others. Together they are helping us devise new ways of being for one another and to route out the awful and alienating sense that we are meant to do this alone.

I’d like to end with a quote from a text co-written by Park and Constantina Zavitsanos, a frequent collaborator with Park:

“In our conditions we aren’t alone: both in the ways that our conditions form solitaires around what might be called shared experience, and also in the ways that our conditions necessitate being together. These needs constitute the we - the depending, deep-ending parabolic droop, bottomed in the catenary, merged in the swerve, and singing:

If there’s a cure for this

I don’t want it

(Don’t want it)

If there’s a remedy

I’ll run from it

(From it)

***There are moments when I use an emoji or two because sometimes I think it’s worth conveying the sentiment in that way.

*************. *****.

Ajay Kurian:

Does the void space scare you or attract you?

Stella Zhong:

Attract me, yeah.

Ajay Kurian:

The physicists who won the Nobel Prize this year for creating laser light pulses within the rate of an attosecond. So an attosecond is one quintillionth of one second. To give you some perspective, there are as many attoseconds in one second as there are seconds in the entire history of the universe. And so that's the tininess of what we're talking about. So it's the first time they can actually almost photograph electrons.

So before this, there was the problem of momentum and position, where if you try to find the position of electron, it's moved. Just in trying to see it, you’ve changed its position. But being able to get a kind of “stop motion animation” of the electrons movement might open up this whole new world of the super tiny, which made me think of you. I was like, Oh, this is that tiny space where we're going to find out new strange things about particles. And eventually there’ll be a Pixar movie about electrons, because they have feelings and thoughts and like this whole universe.

Stella Zhong:

They're so cute.

Ajay Kurian:

I'm sure they're super cute. That's obviously something I wanted to talk about with you. The relationship to the cold and the cute. Or to phrase it a different way, something like, anonymity and personality. There's something very anonymous in the spaces that you make. And then there's all these little material gestures that are, for the lack of a better word, cute. And I just wanted to know what is your relationship to the cute? Also, just to say, I take the cute very seriously. It's not it's not a pejorative thing.

Stella Zhong:

Yeah I think that every time there's a crisis that happened in the world that gets noticed, particularly in this part of the world, we have this renewed shock and we're like, oh my God, the world is fucked right now. And I feel like the world has been fucked for a really long time. I feel like the world has been fucked since humans decided that we're in the center of the world.

In many places in the world, like even where I grew up I feel like it's quite bleak all the time, and that humor is something that really takes in that feeling of dread and kicks it off in a direction that is maybe not backwards or forwards. It's just another direction. And I think that my brand of humor is cuteness. I love cute. I think Asians would agree that we've used cuteness to cope for a long time. Squishy things, soft things, little cute round things that are so annoying. I love throwing a ball of dough on a surface because it makes no sound. You can poke at it, you can scream at it, you can do anything to it - it doesn't fight, it just bounces back. So there's something so helpless and purposeless about cute things, but so resilient too. The helplessness is also so contagious. You look at something cute and you're like, oh I'm soft, too.

And I feel helpless all the time. I feel like we forget to feel helpless sometimes. And I feel like a little ball all the time. And I feel a little heehee is so absorbent. It takes all emotions, questions, problems and I'm just squished into a heehee. And you figure out there's no answer, there's no solution, it keeps rolling. That’s how I feel about cuteness.

Ajay Kurian:

That's great. Yeah, like a squishy cartoon character is indestructible. You can deform it however you want; you can explode it; you can set it on fire; you can smash it with a hammer. It's still going to have these big, droopy eyes looking back at you and it still garners the same feeling, which is the inability to use hardness to counter softness and there’s an inherent power there.

Stella Zhong:

Yeah, I think a lot of the spaces that I build are pretty cold and slick. There's not much to hold onto. And the cute little guys are - they’re my friends. They could be your friends too. But they won't help you. You have to still figure it out.

Ajay Kurian:

Can you talk about this installation you made in Milan? So I'm seeing these stairs here that go up and then you descend into this pit where all of the sculptures are. Did you create this architecture or is this how it was beforehand? And could you enter that or is it something that you look above like a swimming pool?

Stella Zhong:

Yeah. So I designed the structure. It was this space that has super high ceilings. I wanted it to feel like you had access to this space, but still have no access. So you could stand at the top on a platform and look in, but not be close to any of the work.

In all the shows I’ve seen of yours, there's a relationship to not being able to see the whole thing, or that even just the thought or question of accessibility takes on a different sensibility, where it's yeah, it may not be for you. That's just the end of that sentence.

There are parts of it that would be really inaccessible to you even. There are things that are too tall and are completely out of your purview. It makes me go back to thinking about images and sculpture and how you could take multiple photos but you can't just apprehend the whole thing at once. Is it about thwarting that desire?

Stella Zhong:

I think I'm pretty selfish. I think I make work mostly for myself. And so the things that I hide will be hidden from me too. And the things that are out of reach will be out of reach for me too. I love the feeling of not being able to touch something. I still feel like we're amongst it and right next to it. And to have that distance built in. I think about how the universe is mostly empty and everything is quite far away. Even within our bodies everything is really far away. If we're talking on the scale of what you were talking about (attoseconds), then everything is really far away and all the bits that makes us are quite alone in a sense. I always want to enlarge that distance.

Ajay Kurian:

It tows like a really fine line because there is a lot of solitude and isolation, but it also feels like things travel in packs. There's modularity, there's repetition. There’s a little gaggle of stuff, and like a little flock of these, and there's these little populations of things that we just have no apprehension of. In your installations, everything is both really anonymous but then also has all these details that gives them they’re own, “face” in a way, their own particularity.

A lot of the things that you seem to be thinking about and working from, are coming from the sciences, but you've spent like your entire life in art school. I I don't even know many people that have gone from an art high school to a college art school to an MFA art school. I would think that would be very stifling, to be in that space all the time. What was that experience like? And what did it do to your understanding of what art could be?

Stella Zhong:

Yeah, I was surprised that I went to art school four times. I feel like it might have to do with how I was introduced to art and my early experience in art. I feel like art was always something that I carved out to do that gave me this exterior identity of an artist, but it's also at the same time super private.

I started to paint, like going to art lessons, as early as I can remember. Every weekend I would be going to painting class. And then in school I somehow just became that art person that would decorate all the bulletin boards and make signs for everything. And I was like that art kid. I definitely liked doing it, but I think I liked it most because it helped me go around authority. I was quite naughty in school. I would talk back to teachers, I vandalized things, I liked to skip class. But then I was never like truly punished, like the boys, because I was like an artist. Art was really helpful for me. I could skip all the P. E. classes, and I could skip nap time.

Ajay Kurian:

How long did you have a nap time?

Stella Zhong:

Yeah, in China in school, everybody naps after lunch. Like we have bedrooms in school that the entire school would go into and nap.

Ajay Kurian:

Wow.

Stella Zhong:

So I would make up these projects to do. This is actually really important to me. Okay, maybe I won't talk about it…But I would make up these projects to do. So important. Tomorrow, there's a race. must make the poster. So I would, apply to not go to nap and and I could! That was so amazing to me.

I would just be running around school by myself, little Stella, alone, completely silent. There's nobody in the school or everybody's sleeping and I would be looking at hallways after hallways, rooms after rooms, empty. And I'll be giggling. I'd be so excited. I’d be so happy, but also I'm alone, and it's so bleak. It's aloneness, but at the same time, joy and excitement. And I feel like that is like what you were saying. I feel like that is the undertone of maybe all of my work today.

Ajay Kurian:

That feels so crazy formative. That feels like it laces everything.

Stella Zhong:

Oh my God. There was this traumatizing experience [she says with a smile]. I went in the Science Office storage room…Oh my God, it was so scary. There's these jars of things that they never show us for some reason…And wheels. Because we were learning about friction. And I discovered this bag of mung beans. So I stole a little handful of the mung beans. And of course I have to plant them.

Ajay Kurian:

Sure.

Stella Zhong:

I decided out of everywhere in the school, I would plant them in the center of the court school ground. There’s like the soccer field and the basketball court, and between them, there's this really beautifully maintained lawn and some round bushes. Perfectly maintained. And in the dead center of it, I decided to plant my mung beans. And I planted them, and a few rains after, they sprouted. How incredible is that? Imagine, just the campus, the acres of campus, and the center of that school…there’s five bean sprouts. And I was so happy about it. I would go check on it all the time.

Maybe it was just like a single day - I don't remember - but it feels like a long time. And then one of the class breaks I went and - Oh my God - they're chopped down. It looked like the gardener had came with this flat saw and just went in and didn’t even see the sprouts! And you can just imagine that they went with no sound.

And I was traumatized. I feel like it was such a violent image that's squished in my head. I think about it all the time. I think about those sprouts all the time. That violence that's so soundless and consequence-less.

Nothing happened after that. I didn't eat the sprouts. I don't remember what happened. And that was it.

Ajay Kurian:

The memory ends there.

Stella Zhong:

Yeah and I was thinking how there's something that recurs in a lot of my work that's like these mochis are sliced in half and stuck back together and this like silent violence that produces no consequences and nothing happened before it, nothing will happen after it that's feels so helpless. And no one would care anyway but it just, it happens in every moment of our life, these soundless violences that are so still, so clean.

Ajay Kurian:

Yeah.

Stella Zhong:

Why am I talking about this?

Ajay Kurian:

No, it feels so pertinent! It made me think of your show at Chapter Gallery.

When you were talking about that kind of silent violence, it makes me think of inlay. When you see inlay, it's all one uniform surface of multiple things put together that were all routed out. There's all these forms of activity and violence that go into making something that looks sexy and flat and so seeing a show like this, where you walk in and you don't see anything besides this towering thing that feels isolated and silent in itself. But then little by little you start seeing these little holes that are cut out in the floor and the things that inhabit them that are crouched inside and fit accordingly but also feel cramped. It makes me think that this is a similar kind of violence, where it's silent and completely forgettable, but still very present and part of the mystery of how we understand anything.

Stella Zhong:

Yeah, and they hurt.

Ajay Kurian:

The pieces inside?

Stella Zhong:

No, those little moments.

Ajay Kurian:

The moments hurt.

Stella Zhong:

Yeah.

Oh my god, I realized we were talking about school.

Ajay Kurian:

That's true. I totally forgot. It does go back to that moment of everybody napping too. Do you think part of the reason why you could feel that joy is that you also knew that everybody's coming back? It's not like they're dead. Just have to you have temporary dominion, to explore and make a game out of a world that treats you as completely inconsequential.

Stella Zhong:

Yeah.

Ajay Kurian:

And then, you go back to the other game.

Stella Zhong:

Yeah.

I can't access what I was thinking at that time, really.

Ajay Kurian:

Your memory about it is still there.

Stella Zhong:

I remember very specific things. But I feel like I don't think I ever developed the trust or the concept that whatever they teach in school is what the world is. Maybe because of my experiences with art, or just something that a lot of people weren’t doing. And maybe that's like how I dealt with school my whole life. Like I would be okay. I would be pretty good at school, but I feel like we always had different goals. And I don't know what my goal was. I don't know what my goal is. But I feel like it's different from from the school's goal.

Ajay Kurian:

Sure. So that was like, growing up into high school. And then, you clearly decided you wanted to pursue art? Did you know that this is what you wanted to do?

Stella Zhong:

Yeah.

Ajay Kurian:

And so then your parents were cool with it? it's just very foreign to me with South Asian parents.

Stella Zhong:

My parents are really weird. They're musicians and they've been really supportive. I’m like this because of my parents. Cause I would do wacky shit in school, call my parents and be like, so what? All my life. And yeah, I decided to do art. It's not like a big decision. It felt natural. It wasn't like super intentional. I went to Beijing to the Central Academy. And it was really wild. Like we would be painting a still life set up with 40 people with easels painting the same still life. And at the time I thought, What the fuck? This is so annoying. But then now that I think about it, it's incredible, actually. I remember the image of just walking around the classroom and everybody had the same understanding of what good painting is, or what the perfect painting would be. But everybody's painting is different. Even though we were going for the same painting.

Ajay Kurian:

In terms of just realism, or?

Stella Zhong:

Yeah, but with a certain style.

Ajay Kurian:

Sure. Did you have a style then?

Stella Zhong:

Probably? Yeah.

Ajay Kurian:

So when did you start moving into sculpture?

Stella Zhong:

So I was in Beijing doing the traditional training, and then I was so tired of it, so I left, and then I went to the UK, and then I suddenly decided I want to do architecture.

Stella Zhong: I like architecture, I still do. I think I do architecture in my own way now, but I wanted to study architecture. When I went to college, I thought I would major in architecture, but I didn’t, because I couldn’t. I was not interested in function. I feel like I couldn't think about making people comfortable.

Ajay Kurian:

Or like where the bathroom goes. Yeah.

Stella Zhong:

The project of human convenience is not my project. So no, I couldn't do architecture. And then I picked glass.

Ajay Kurian:

You studied glass?

Stella Zhong:

I studied glass as an undergrad. Why? Because it's so random. It was truly so random. It was a major that promised no prospect. Like you can study painting, be a painter; study architecture and be architect; study glass. I don't know. I thought it was so weird and so like random. So I studied glass. It's so cool. And that's when I started making sculpture.

Ajay Kurian:

From what I've seen, I haven't seen any glass in your work.

Stella Zhong:

I don't use glass currently.

Ajay Kurian:

That's super weird. You would think after having that skill set it would find its way into the work. You seem like someone that can take in a lot of information from a lot of different places and then synthesize it in an unexpected way. So you could have a really old school skill set of realist painting, but the way that you paint is not going to be like that. So to me, it's I'm surprised that I haven't seen little glass mochis and other things that populate your work, especially considering the kind of bizarre physics of glass.

Stella Zhong:

Yeah, I think the physics is still in me. And I think being for example, glassblowing you're part of the process as you work with gravity. You don't think and act, you act and then maybe you think. You're always inside of the material. I think it helped me develop how I work today, I just don't use the material right now. I don't know why. I think there's also maybe scale limitations that I never really figured out.

Ajay Kurian:

I remember in an interview you were talking about how you feel like you work with the material and the immaterial and I was wondering…

Stella Zhong:

It sounds like art talk…:P

Ajay Kurian:

I know it sounds like art talk. But I'm sure you're going to take it somewhere else.

Stella Zhong: Okay… :)

Ajay Kurian:

Like, how do you think about the things that aren't present? What does that conjure for you? Someone who thinks with material. If you're thinking with “stuff” and then think past stuff, what does that mean for you? What does that mean for consciousness and stuff?

Stella Zhong:

I feel like I'm a little tipsy. Maybe I have to talk about playing with food.

Ajay Kurian:

Let's do that.

Stella Zhong:

Do you play with food?

Ajay Kurian:

I have been known to play with food.

Stella Zhong: [whispers] That’s why we're friends! So when you play with food…

Ajay Kurian:

I had a piece of spaghetti on my wall for a long time.

Stella Zhong:

I love playing with food. And when you play with food you have this limited space, like the table, or your cutting board, or your bowl. You're eating, there's like a few options. And the adults are talking. They're talking about life, work, politics, whatever they're talking about. And you're eating. And then suddenly the bowl is a mountain. And then there's a pea…that’s deciding if it wants to jump off or not. Dun dun dun!

Playing with food is so cinematic, because it always ends and it ends in my mouth. [laughter] And so however consistent, logical, or inconsistent the story is, whatever you're playing with in front of your face it's already always in me, already always in you - like it will be part of me and it will leave and be part of the world again. And I think that's how I think about me making my objects, that it's always half digested or in the perspective of the next substance, not quite formed. Like, a little bit poopy looking.

And I think in that way, I want to eat my ideas. I want to eat whatever I'm listening about going on in the world. I want to eat all of it. Words, numbers, food, feelings, they're all gonna merge into poops. They're gonna come out. And that's how I feel about like my object making and how I think about substance.

Things have to become…substance.

Ajay Kurian:

And also become halfway you.

Stella Zhong:

Halfway, yeah.

Ajay Kurian:

That also again, it takes me back to transparency in membranes, because everything in your work has a density of surface, either a chalkiness or like a impenetrability in terms of its color. And the way you're talking about material and it being halfway you, I wonder what that membrane is for you. Because as much as there is these globs and blobs and things like that, it's also really clean.

The way the way that I think about food in my work is that there's something culinary in terms of, like, how I “plate” things. And In thinking about plating there's a right way and a wrong way, and then fucking with that sort of logic of what works, what makes sense, and how you can play with scale. I see that sometimes in your work, where there's the way that things populate. On the one hand, it reminds me of zooming in and seeing how parasites or little things exist kind of bunched and spread out. And that's how that the show in Milan looked, where there are these three things over on one wall and then all these little things against the wall and it felt so biological As if there wasn't an artist agency But like the things themselves had a kind of agency to find where they were going to land. All this to say, that there's like a clarity and a life to the things that you make that it's interesting to hear about them being somewhat digested through you. I can see it and I can also see how they feel like really separate from you and really like alive in their own way.

Stella Zhong:

Yeah. To be really honest, when I try to access how I make my decisions and how I work - like what happens in my brain in the studio - I don’t really know. I don't know. I don't feel like there are people or humans in my studio. I'm just a ball and I work with these other balls and we figure it out. There's a clear logic, but I'm not quite able to access it. Logic is so weird. I feel like logic is illogical by nature. Sometimes I feel like the things that I make are acting in unpredictable ways, which is so weird, because I was there when they were born, and somehow I just don't know what they're doing.

Ajay Kurian:

That's a great feeling, I imagine. I feel like if I'm in the studio and something happens that feels outside of me, that’s like best case scenario.

Stella Zhong:

I think I work like playing house.

Ajay Kurian:

Who's in the house?

Stella Zhong:

Me and my friends. Not human friends. I gather all these things from your real house and you build a shed, and like a fake kitchen, and there's stuffed animals, and then you have to make this switch in your head where you leave the house and you come back, and you're like, oh my god, there's a house, and there's a kitchen, let's cook. It requires faithful forgetting.

The works that I like after I make them are the ones that I still want to play in.

Ajay Kurian:

That makes me almost feel like there's like a material…habit that happens in the work. It's like you have to forget human habits to be a part of it, to not drive yourself crazy and ask yourself what the fuck am I doing every second of the day. You have to forget. And when I see your populations of things, they have their own habits, their own ways of being.

Stella Zhong:

Yeah. And, in a way, in order for me to play with them, I have to also not know them.

Ajay Kurian: Like a novelist. I have a really direct question about this. So the Title of these like individual larger works is “Object of High Inertia”, right?

Stella Zhong:

Yeah…sure.

Ajay Kurian: Okay. [laughs] That's what I've read. This is the only time I'm gonna do any sort of interpretive work. I promise. But when I was thinking of an object of high inertia, I think of things that are hard to move. And that made me think of bodies. The work itself covers its interior almost like a rib or a wing. Then inside Is this what, to me, looked very similar to the design of a quantum computer. And so it felt like thinking about consciousness and the body Thinking about consciousness as like a quantum state…Is this at all remotely connected to what you were thinking about?

Stella Zhong:

Okay so I just realized this group of works weren't titled “Objects of High Inertia.”, they were titled, “Those Immovable Inertial Beings.”

Ajay Kurian:

I see, okay.

Stella Zhong:

But this, yeah, I think at the time I was looking at a lot of quantum computers.

Ajay Kurian:

They're beautiful.

Stella Zhong:

Yeah. And I have seen a lot of the machines physicist use in lab visits, not specifically quantum computers though. They're so precise, and orderly, and structured - so much complexity and repetition in these machines. And I've asked them how they make their decisions of what shapes they choose. And I promise you, they're quite random. They’re quite aesthetic decisions. Obviously sometimes it's like this tube is a certain length because it’s the shortest distance (for instance), but why does it have to be round? Some dude just decided to look cool.

Ajay Kurian: Does it have to do with heat heat dispersion?

Stella Zhong:

Maybe a little bit, but they definitely make a lot of decisions that are aesthetic or arbitrary. I was interested in how this like hyper precision and structure that feel like it's so necessary to contain and deal with something so elusive. To catch a wave where there might be a particle in there, we have to have this like “gel” to contain them. I was interested in that. And I think this work came from a little bit of, And and the individual works are part of the ongoing process.

I basically bend an almost two dimensional plane to something that holds multiple dimensions and to me it feels like whatever is inside that multiply linked dimension - anything flies. I think about how it provides a locality for something that could be so unhinged. The inside feels like it’s maybe bigger than if you were to measure how many cubic inches it is.

Ajay Kurian:

My last question before turning it over to all of you. This was something that was really funny and puzzling to me in doing visits at Yale, particularly in the sculpture department. Sculptors had a really hard time with color. Everybody was always wrestling with it. They were so hesitant about adding color to materials. If it's steel, they’d worry about painting the steel.

Just fucking paint it. Who cares? Just make it whatever color you want. I think it comes from a place of rigor, to be true to materials and “honest” about them. But why? It depends on the practice.

You're very bold and intentional with color. It makes it sense to me. I don't have questions about it, I’m just curious what gave you confidence with color?

Stella Zhong:

I'm a painter [laughter]. That’s why. I’ve never shaken because of color. It’s so intuitive for me.

Ajay Kurian:

Yeah, it makes so much sense. It also develops your sculptural language really beautifully. And it was nice to always see that in your work.

Stella Zhong:

Yeah, I feel like I get asked this a lot. Like, why is it this color?

And I've never really thought about that until somebody asked me.

Ajay Kurian:

I never thought about it until almost all the sculptors at Yale were belaboring the question, and I was like, I've never thought it I didn't know that people wrestled with this.

Stella Zhong:

Yeah, I know. I feel like color is part of it. Again, I'm a painter, so I feel like color is my material and it is something that I use to create scale or create a place and it just has to be there.

“7 Days with…” is a column where artists journal with us for a week, marking their time and thoughts as the days pass on by.

Monday April 6

I chose to primarily document my week through photos; saved, screenshots, or personally taken. I began my week in New Orleans, at my garden. I’ve been on a 5 year journey to fulfill a dream I had as a child, to grow a garden where my great grandmother once lived, whose house floated away during hurricane Katrina. I wanted to be there as the sun rose to see the land from a different perspective, and what messages she had to tell me. I saw a Mississippi kite who waved to me as I got out of my car, and picked wildflowers. I sat for two hours in the center of 8 wooden skeletons soon to be mounds. I burned incense, and I prayed. I grieved for the precious Palestinian people, I see my struggle to access this land parallel to that of the enduring Nakba I witness daily. May they be protected, may the occupation fall soon and completely, may all the land’s children return home. I dressed in orange and yellow like the sun, and veiled my hair as the sky grew large under her light. Something about the sky in Louisiana feels bigger than in other places. Maybe it’s because we sit below the sea that we are engulfed by the atmosphere. I wonder if they feel the same way and Bangladesh….

Tuesday April 7 - Wednesday April 8

I spent my next three days in Mississippi, I’ve been taking a bartending and hospitality industry training/immersion alongside 14 other brilliant Black and Brown folks in New Orleans. We took a field trip to Cathead distillery in Jackson, where we learned more about how spirits go from fruit, grain, gift, to spirit. We tasted vodkas, gins, whiskeys, and I was converted from being a gin hater, to gin lover. Apparently you can barrel age gin, and I bought a bottle that tasted like offerings from a temple.

After I drove to Byram, MS to visit my great aunt Bettye, where I was greeted by the most beautiful, smiley man. I was here for my aunt, but the fantasy of having a Shonda Rhimes moment at the senior home was in the back of mind the whole time. My aunt, is recovering from a fall and stroke. We sat and watched the game show network as we always do. America Says, People Puzzler, Chain Reaction, 25 Words or Less, while she comments about how slow everyone on these shows are. She was giving the people a hard time about the food, since she’s an amazing cook. I learned my ways around the kitchen partly due to her. It’s hard to watch her not be able to eat the foods she would fix herself. She slurped down orange sherbet, and rejected the rest of her plate, and then asked me when I was going home. Of course I blew kisses to my nurse boyfriend on my way out.

I then drove to Columbia, MS to visit my Paw Paw. He’s gotten forgetful, when I came in he told me I could get shot coming into houses like that…. (In other words, I forgot you were coming home). I washed my clothes and we watched the news and westerns. Gunsmoke on 80 volume, as if we’re sitting in the middle of a Texas stampede. He asked me 50 questions about what I was going to eat, but you should know he has enough food in his freezer to feed all 5,000 people in Columbia. I tried to buy his hunting rifle off him, but he had already to sold it to someone else. We FaceTimed with my granny who is currently with my aunt, and cousins in Texas. Her memory is getting bad, I can’t FaceTime her anymore because she gets in dementia spirals wondering who that random girl is at her mans house. I get it. But it was sweet to see them holler to one another through the glass rectangles, and not really understand what the other said. Im just the mystery granddaughter off screen.

Thursday April 9

I left the next morning back to New Orleans, and was sure to pack my keffiyeh I forgot on my last visit. I put my clothes away, i’m trying to start new habits (not working.) Then I went to studio, where I’m working on some paintings and sculptures for a show in New Orleans this summer. I’m thinking alot about forms of resistance to an occupying power, self determination, what is means to be a descendant of displaced survivors of a genocide, what it means to witness one, what our lands will be like after empire, how to survive empire.

Long story short I’m most excited to be working with clay. It comes so natural to me, my granny owned a ceramics shop in Columbia that now sits vacant. I feel like her mom worked with clay too. I fell in love with it this past summer at Skowhegan, and now cant stop. I love these sculptures I’ve made, I pray they survive the kiln. My dad says the giant head looks like me, I thought it looked like him, though it also kinda looks like my friend Amir. Anyways I just wanted to make a big ass head of a fine man to lay offerings too. kiss kiss. Sometime I be hugging on him as he dries. (He shattered days later, as I cried on my knees over his fragments). It was so cinematic. He was too big for the kiln anyways, i’ll have to fire the pieces and make a new one.

Friday April 10 -Sunday April 12

The rest of my days I spent at work bartending, and in studio. Im thinking about temples, what a place for spirit would look like without interruption. Or, embracing new land based traditions as a people, or newly forming people who love their lands, and whose lands love them. A step I’m taking is learning my ancestral language Kouri-Vini or Louisiana Creole. I hope to bring it into my work somehow. Below is my crack at a caption in my tongue, and translation of an Arabic poem by Al-Shareef Al-Radhiy. (the Black woman on a turtle shell, bleeding heart, weilding a Kris sword, two Palestinian flags, an oil lantern, a bouquet of flowers) :

My strange compilation of images that didn’t make the cut are a peek into what occupies the most space in my mind day in, and out. Thoughts of anti imperial resistance, stingrays, rural women, girly memes, esoteric memes, sex jokes, land, temples, flowers, Black womanhood, language, South asian mythology, South Asian adornments, boys I think are hot, professional athletes I think would fall in love with me, creating new mythologies, and femininity. The sun, the fruit, the flowers, the leaves, the roots, the marsh, the swamp, and the sea

Utē Petit (b. 1995, Southfield, Michigan) is a New Orleans-based artist whose work explores Black-Indigenous land-based traditions and the creation of 'Ailanthaland,' a free Black nation of heavenly beings conceptualized using charcoal and graphite drawings, quilts, installations, farming, and cooking.

Utē specializes in textile practices, incorporating woven, quilted, and hand-printed fabrics, along with drawing, painting, and collage. Her practice partners with the Earth, incorporating land stewardship into the process. Utē's ancestry as a quilter, educator, and farmer informs her work, as does her upbringing on farms across the globe. She is currently stewarding her great-grandmother's and three neighbors' lots in New Orleans as part of her quest to rematriate family land stolen by the state of Louisiana. Through her work, Utē seeks to represent a nation divested from white-imposed societal constructs and committed to the self-determination of all beings.

She was the winner of the third annual Illuminations Grant for Black Trans Women Visual Artists (2022) and recipient of the Marsha P. Johnson Starlight Fellowship (2023). She received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (Providence) in 2018. Her work has been included in exhibitions at New Orleans African American Museum (New Orleans), Oakland Avenue Urban Farm (Detroit), and Library Street Collective (Detroit). Loyal Gallery, Swivel Gallery. She’s represented by Swivel Gallery.

Steve Shaheen is a artist trained in marble carving, belonging to a small club of sculptors who are able to profoundly manipulate stone.  He uses his skills to multiple ends, not chained to his craft but using it as a runway for his ideas on Empire, Deep Time, and the intersections between the geological and the living to take flight. He’s also a talented writer. His Journals read better than most people’s published writings. I can attest to him actually writing like this. It’s kind of wild.

Monday, April 8, 2024

Stopped at Phil’s this morning and wandered around the weathered old bones of marble off cuts, funerary blanks and architectural remnants.  There was a dirt-stained slab of Tennessee pink with the right length and depth that I need for a commission, but it was short on the width by about four inches.  Not a lot of time for window shopping today as we had to push north for the eclipse.

Around 2:30 we stopped on an unkempt hillside above the brick middle school, distant mountains dusted with the last April snow.  The air grew progressively weirder.   People scattered across the grass were relaxed in form, anxious in content.  The light grew anemic; the breeze cooled.

When it happened, it was like turning down a multi-sensory dimmer.  The azure sky shifted to indigo, streaks of cirrus crispening against it, the air sinking to nighttime cold, and sound muting as insects and animals and people and cars went silent.

It is an assumption-shattering experience, because it at once dismantles your epistemology of the passage of time as tethered to natural phenomena (the sky should grow dark over thirty minutes, not three seconds), and your taking for granted this unflinching fortress above, which suddenly become a portal to magic and mysticism and endless children’s days lost in tales sat under violet skies.  

It was like dying, like plunging backward into an abyss of oblivion and looking far up at the circular wire of light of the surface, behind this manhole covering, the world of color and warmth and birdsong and language; here, instead, is the underworld, where everything is turned upside down, even our reason.  It’s the underworld, it’s insanity, it’s a dark veiled vault of enigma with a puncture wound to reality, to the comfort of blindingly bright illusions suffered under worship of Apollo.  

The eclipse is like sex, it’s like losing yourself suddenly and inexplicably.  It’s a black hole of meaning; it’s a question unanswered.  It’s loss, it’s absence.  Eclisse, ekleipsis.  The drain Persephone was sucked down.

It’s a DeChirico painting.

And if all of this sounds irrational, it is because such is the eclipse.  And how perfect that it should be the biggest communal ritual we have.

By contrast, the slog back to Connecticut felt especially mundane.  The tediousness of traffic, the long, monochrome river of taillights: a purgatory that seemed requisite passage to return to the world.

Tuesday, April 7, 2024

Having coffee on the back deck, in the sunlight, late morning, houseflies and wasps alighting on the weathered, lichenous railing.  The flies cluster, like scattered seeds, many immobile, as if recharging in the sun.  I am reminded of a stanza in Nanao Sakaki’s Future Knows:

At a department store in Kyoto

One of my friends bought a beetle

For his son, seven-years-old. A few hours later

The boy brought his dead bug

To a hardware store, asking “Change battery, please?”

A wasp explores my coffee mug then probes the folds of lichen.  He brushes his antenna with his forearm and raises his thorax, appearing to nestle in: a brief repose from the exigencies of survival.

“The arytenoid physical movements are subtle but can be felt.”  Reading about the cartilage involved in singing.

Today felt shambling and awkward, no sense of time, day turning to night marked only by the pecking of birds against the suet feeders.  A few pabulum digital chores, walking the dog in the sun across the rain-soaked fields.  The ticks are bad this year: I intercepted two meandering up my bare legs.  Still feeling ambivalent about the risks of potentially exposing Scilla to tick-borne disease, versus chronically flooding her system with pesticidal compounds that basically toxify her blood to parasites.  How is it possible that we paid two billion dollars to one hundred and thirty thousand scientists to split an atom and kill masses of people, and we still haven’t figured this out?

Wednesday, April 10, 2024

Day 2 after the Eclipse.  Low slung clouds like silver-blue mackerel slide behind the hills.  The air is mild.  Scilla gambols among the matted, winter-dried marsh grasses below the willow tree, undoubtedly picking up ticks.  Now she chases after a vulture, for acres, and I am grateful for every day here.  I told myself over and over again in Brooklyn that someday I would wake up to birdsong, and although it occurs regrettably early, this has come to pass.  

I went to Mark’s studio today.  It felt good to get some work down outside.  There’s not a lot of usable indoor space there, and it’s been a long winter.  Mark is rough shaping abstract forms in granite using massive, 16” cutting discs and an oxygen torch, so dexterity isn’t a priority, but my fingers only serve me when it’s above the mid-40’s.

I spent the first half hour working on an old axe I’ve been rehabilitating.  I picked it up in a flea market, chipped and pitted and loose on its handle.  It was ostensibly to split firewood, and didn’t need to win any beauty competitions, yet I was pained to see it rusted and neglected.  My obsessiveness ran amok and compelled me to resurface the crusty steel head, grind flat the mushroomed poll and darken the whole thing again with gun bluing.

As with sculpture, I’m not patient enough to do everything by hand if there’s a power tool that can assist without overly compromising the result.  I do think that most forms of mechanical mediation between the hand and the material sacrifice degrees of nuance and consideration that accompany a more attenuated, deliberate realization process.  But I’m OK with a less-than-perfect axe

I sanded some battle scars out of the hickory handle, then soaked it with raw linseed oil before turning to a couple of welded steel armatures destined for two, hollow marble tables I’m making.  I have to prep these cages for placement under the stone, where they will receive pinned legs.  I spent my remaining time hand-pointing texture into one of these, a peach-hued Portuguese marble, mapping my chisel-marks in real time as if alla prima painting - but a little scarier.  You only get one, irreversible shot at this.  If experience confers anything, it’s trusting my gut on these things.  And it comes.

Thursday, April 11, 2024

Some days just fly by, and it’s hard to account for the time. How does that happen?  Life felt seventy-five percent less hectic at age twenty-three.  Feeding the dog, brushing the teeth, cleaning the house, sending the texts, sending the emails, having the coffee, maybe eating, maybe getting some movement?  Finding time to create while awash in a river of quotidian demands feels like half the battle these days.

I find myself blaming the dog often.  Scilla is an easy scapedoggo: she’s a highly intelligent and energetic mix of working breeds, with a basketful of sass.  Scilla has been known to start chasing chipmunks on camping trips around 5:45 am, and will still be rolling her ball into the campfire light at midnight. 

The winter sun shot through the black trees

I told myself it was all something in her

But as we drove I knew it was something in me

- Highway 29, Bruce Springsteen

It’s so easy to blame the dog, the toothbrushing, the fatigue, the emails, the hunger.  There are a million ways we sabotage ourselves, planting cartoon banana peels between us and what Gary Snyder calls “the real work:” what is to be done.   

And by the way, would my love for Scilla not be reason enough - as Rilke recommends - to change my life?

Is there anything more intuitively familiar yet epistemologically alien than a dog?  When a dog looks into your eyes with intelligence, her cognition is at once intimately relatable and forever unknowable.  Her sensory experiences are largely beyond my ken.  What would it be like to smell twice as well, let alone fifty thousand times?  There is no door of speech we can open between the walls of our perceptions.

But then how does language size up to other modes of communication?  We think speech grants us greater insight into another human than, say, a dog.  Yet obfuscation - deliberate and not - always contaminates human speech, when there are no veils cloaking the body language of a dog.  We operate under presumptions of trust when interpreting the words of another person, and they must pass the filters of our subjective psyches, but with dogs there is no need for translation and inference.  Human speech is more nuanced, yet less direct than limbic communication. And while we have no idea what a dog is truly thinking, we just suppose we do with humans. 

I go into the bathroom to start nighttime rituals, and through the open windows hear the plangent, choral peeps of spring frogs in the darkness, out in the marsh where deer are grazing on the first tender cordgrasses, and I realize the obscenity of my earbuds in this moment and rip them out.

Friday, April 12, 2024

A seagull drifts across the misty, sputtering sky that smothers the New Jersey Turnpike this morning. I drive past my favorite spot, the painfully ugly and strangely beautiful jumble of oil tanks and refinery towers in Elizabeth, reputedly the cancer capital of New Jersey.  This stretch always makes me think of Spingsteen’s wretched end to the ironic hymn, Born in the USA, narrated by a war veteran:

Down in the shadow of the penitentiary

Out by the gas fires of the refinery

I'm ten years burning down the road

Nowhere to run, ain't got nowhere to go

I think he’s referencing Rahway State Prison, which is a few miles from the petroleum plants and part of this greater wasteland.  I grew up in the wake of the generation devastated by Vietnam.  My father’s generation.  My father who, after his number was called up and his army-issue duffel packed, learned the week before deployment that the war had ended.  Some of my friends’ fathers were not so lucky.  I remember them having anger issues.  But they were alive.

On my way to see my family, including my father, who squandered his healthy, war-spared body, avoiding necessary hernia and hip surgeries and who must now sleep in a chair downstairs and use a walker to get around.  He’s difficult.  But he’s my father, and I don’t know how much more time we have.

I’ll have to leave the dog on the porch, because when he uses the walker she thinks he’s a quadruped and wants to herd him.

Saturday, April 13, 2024

Cold water surfing is not for the lazy.  Even though it’s April, it’s still a winter ocean: temps in the 40’s, the tenebrous waters humorless and brooding.  Everything feels heavier. I went out for the first time in weeks, between two jetties near a massive dredging pipe planted like a rusted stent in the beach.  At first I was surprised to see no one else there enjoying the enticing waves, but then I remembered a friend’s recent commentary that winter surfing is, in fact, “exotic.”

What is it like to surf in the winter?  

You step into the ocean, you are waist deep in water.  Wrapped in 5mm neoprene, save for an ovoid of exposed flesh from lower lip to eyebrows.  The offshore wind pushes you forward, but there is an impulse to turn back.  The ocean is a graphite mass cut by rows of sizzling white lines rushing toward shore, and beyond, ominous walls obscuring the horizon.  

You make your best estimate of the intervals, wait for a break, jump on your board, and begin swimming.  The paddle out can range from a pleasant warmup to a near-drowning, cardio nightmare.  You are almost always confronted by waves and whitewater, under which you must “duck dive” with your board.  You continue this way, over and under, over and under, gasping until you mercifully pass the impact zone, arriving at the lineup, the correct nexus of longitude and latitude - determined by physics and ascertained largely by experience - which allows you to optimally attempt to catch a wave.  Here you collect yourself.

I think what I appreciate most about surfing is its raw honesty.  It’s just you and a small flotation device, helpless in a massive wilderness, interacting with natural forces, with energy that has been generated hundreds of miles away by wind and, traveling toward land, manifests itself in water the way a “hump” moves through a blanket snapped while flat.  There are infinite contingencies that come to bear on any given moment you find yourself in the sea during a swell event.  The direction of the wave energy, its size, the period between its peaks, the direction and strength of the wind, the tide, your physical ability, your capacity to read the ocean, the size and shape of your board, the dimensions and configuration of fins you’re using, your mood, the crowds, and on and on.  Every day is different, every wave is different.  It is such a dynamic experience I hesitate to call it a “sport.”  It is more like a rite, with every session an unpredictable audience with the gods.

Riding a wave is indescribable, but winter wipeouts are stark.  A wave is approaching.  You start to paddle, and are lifted up its face.  You pump your arms to keep up, the bottom of the wave drops out below you, droplets blown from the lip pelt your face like hail.  You commit, and drop in.  As you rise to your feet, you realize there is actually no wave to greet your board; it is too steep.  You fall through the air, trying to twist away from landing on the fiberglass.  Then dark, cold gravitational disorder laced with panic, tumbling blind, arms overhead bracing to be pile-driven into the bottom, you don’t touch bottom, you flap your inky arms toward what you think is up, open eyes, slightly lighter upward, swim up through freezing chaotic swarms of bubbles hoping head will break surface, water shifting from olive to amber, mouth now out into mucous-hued foam and then, finally, air.  

You grab hold of your board.  The ocean smells floral in the wake of its detonation.  You notice a tiny, aphid-looking creature shiny against your black glove, alive through all of this.  It bunches like an inchworm.  You climb back on your board.  You are upright again, panting.  The sea-aphid is gone.  The water is a muddy taupe over which diasporas of bubbles form archipelagos and disperse.  You now notice the icy bright blue overcast sky of the horizon, with cotton ball clouds floating like small prayers.  Gulls wheel.  There is no leviathan approaching.  For now. 

Sunday, April 14, 2024

Warmed up on the bass this morning for my 11am lesson.  What is sexier than the upright bass, except for maybe a dobro?  The bass is jazz, it’s classical, it’s bossanova and bluegrass.  Bass is taken for granted, in the background, and that upon which all else depends, the skeletal system without which the viscera of melody would flop to the ground.  The upright bass is analog; electric bass is like a physical controller for mediated sounds.  With acoustic bass, there are endless customizations based on variables such as posture, finger pressure, arm force, your body’s proximity and contact with the instrument, its age, size, woods used, design and construction, type of strings, action and setup.  The wood bass is a sensitive but finicky lover, reacting badly to weather that is either too humid or too dry.  You can feel its resonance through your own body, and making sounds emerge is a haptic immersion, as there are no frets, and notes are located by muscle memory, with a precision that needs to be within millimeters to sound right.  You literally feel your way through a song; to play double bass at a high level, you quite literally need to become one with your instrument.  

A goal that feels light years away.  After a humbling lesson, I take the dog down to the beach.  The sea is relaxed this morning. This briny smell of slick jetty rocks is synonymous with home.  Black silhouettes of fishermen flicker against the sparking water. I grew up in the ocean.  Does that explain my draw to it?  Or is it the inexorable pull of the sea back into itself?  Our blood is strikingly similar to marine water in salinity and ions.  The sea is both alien and, profoundly, home.

Spindrift gathers in the roiling border between mare e terra, and I’m thinking how I prefer Italian terms of the sea.  Not foam, but schiuma.  La schiuma rolls and falls over itself, like some non-Newtonian substance, unable to merge with the beach, gliding back over the wet cheek of sand to collect and spread and shapeshift as it mediates the intercourse of sea and land.

I look at Scilla, crouched nearby and unperturbed by the milky froth approaching her.  I think I will always be deciphering the confluence of her breeds, which have produced a very quirky canine.  She stares at me, the ball between us. Her focus is terrifying.  She has forced me out of Lorenzo’s throne into Giuliano’s: the life of action over that of contemplation. Her little bat ears flutter in the salty air.

I find it hard to journal.  I stand up to retrieve the ball, with background awareness that I am  fulfilling her collie’s genetic expectation that her stare compel me to move.  I throw the ball into the surf so she won’t chew sand and erode her teeth.  She lunges for it, a wave breaks around her.  Pulling her sopping body from the undertow like a calf emerging from the suction of her mother, Scilla blossoms from the sea as if she never belonged to land.  She is named aptly: Scilla, ShÄ“’-lÉ™, the Italian version of Skylla, sea creature who is maiden above and monstrous dog below.

I find an enormous driftwood stump, at least two feet across and maybe fifty pounds, the grains wrapping over sea-tumbled curves in unevenly eroded, parallel rows.  It already looks like a chair.  I lug it haltingly across long stretches of sand back to the car

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Making art and thinking about art isn’t always about…Art. Sometimes its about bills, laundry, your family, your anxieties, your boyfriend, your girlfriend, your kids, your other job, or even your back pain. It’s about all the thoughts that happen in between an exhibition, or between the studio and home.

What do artists think about all day? I feel like sometimes people might believe that they are off in a different world entirely, which is certainly true sometimes, but very often it means we’re trying to figure out how to make our lives and our art work together. Sometimes this induces an existential crisis. Sometimes it can get you to the next milestone in your creative life.

As we are thinking about Thoughtful Making this Quarter, we have invited a series of Artists who are hands-on makers to journal with us for a week, marking their time and thoughts as the days pass on by. We’ll be hearing from

Stephen Shaheen

Utē Petit

Sam Anderson

Pallavi Sen

and more!

We hope you keep up with these mini-journeys and see what artists are thinking about.

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It would be Karl Connolly. A professional artist and professor at MICA would be coming in to teach a bunch of private school boys about art.  I wasn’t sure what that would mean for us, but in the two years that I had Karl, my life irrevocably changed.  Art had been a place where I excelled through ability and technique, but through Karl, I started to understand that art could be a place for ideas to materialize, for a person to investigate the world they live in with purpose, pleasure, and criticality.  

Karl is Irish - he came to America on his own when he was sixteen.  His Irish accent lingers so many years later - we would relish the moments he would say “Wedn’s day” or a handful of other words in order to mimic and playfully mock his pronunciation.  He was trained like an old master - his surfaces were well prepared and slick and he could develop chiaroscuro reminiscent of Caravaggio.  His paintings from that time were largely allegorical, layering in various philosophical discourses into the image and push a kind of skepticism towards a painting practice that nevertheless looked like it believed.  Suffice to say he had our attention.  At that age, we could still be wowed by technical ability, and it was really the bait for everything else we were about to learn.  Most people took Art Class because they wanted an easy A or just some time to goof off.  There were always a few of us that had higher aspirations, but many had no real desire to engage and were more “future frat bro” than artist.  Nevertheless, Karl was always able to slow us down, to have us look closely at whatever it was we were meant to pay attention to, and challenge us to understand what we see.  Every semester, he would take a group of kids who had various aptitudes for art and show them all that they could in fact draw, could in fact treat it as a skill that one could get better at, and in the process give them a sense that their intellectual world could be expanded too.  By the age of 17, I had read Arthur Danto’s “After the End of Art”, devoured Gerhard Richter’s journals, contemplated the strangeness of Sigmar Polke, and marveled at the impossible difficulty of Gilles Deleuze’s book on Francis Bacon.  I was also learning how to really draw and paint for the first time.  

Karl called the Art Room, the “No Nurture Zone”, which is funny because it was anything but that.  I could never tell if it was another kind of “bait” to coerce a rowdy group of testosterone fueled boys into thinking about apples and pears and landscapes, light, feeling, and thought, and the way you move charcoal over paper to develop a mark that matched the terrain we hoped to evoke.  He was frank, direct, and funny and this made him endearing.  He never preached his ideas, he leveled with us in order to show why he cared so fucking much.  He cursed quite a bit and didn’t mind when we joined him.  He knew that maintaining order and authority had nothing to do with the basic school rules, but everything to do with how we treated one another, and how he shared himself, his knowledge, and his thoughts.  We trusted him because he trusted us.  And when we broke that trust he would let us know directly and clearly that we messed up and we have to make it right. 

He heard the problems of many students without ever asking them to share.  He simply sat at his desk, and the couch that abutted it became a kind of therapist’s couch where we would all take a turn eventually. After 9/11, I went to the art room and told him that I’m basically screwed now.  I’m now going to be treated as if I could be a terrorist.  I don’t remember what he said to me, but I do remember that I had the space to say these things, and I really needed it. I could talk about almost anything in the art room, and Karl would usually listen and hold space.  I didn’t have the language back then to understand what that meant or how it would imprint my ideas of leadership, kindness, and authority.  Karl made me take art seriously, and he believed in me.  When he saw people who wanted to push themselves, he gave them more space and more resources to do so.  And when he saw people needed a break, he would give them that too.  

Back then, when he came to our school, he said he would be there for two years tops and then he’d get out.  When I tell you that he is still there, I mean it as a sign of his greatest success rather than as any kind of failure.  He is a fixture of that school, and has made so many generations of young men that much more ready for thinking through a world that is so difficult to process.  I don’t know if I would have taken the path I did were it not for him.  He showed us how cool it could be to care about how we see.  Here are his flowers.