This is what critical care for the arts sounds like. Meaningful conversations on creative practice and the conditions shaping artistic life today.
Tune in on the second Thursday of every month for SPENT with Ajay Kurian, our series on creative burnout and breakthrough, and on the fourth Thursday for The Forum, our recorded artist talks.
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The Forum 04 | Steve Locke: Personal Pain Isn’t Art
Saison 1 · Épisode 4
mercredi 8 mai 2024 • Durée 01:16:45
I met Steve last summer at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, where we were both resident faculty members. I quickly fell in love with his wit (biting), his work (also biting), and his tenderness (much less biting). In our conversation here, we cover his first experience with an artwork, his relationship to portraiture, and the origins of Modernism in the auction block.
He’s unabashed in his distaste for prioritizing personal hardship to make art. In his own words, “This idea that we’re going to get together and have a party for our pain, and somehow art is gonna come out of that..? No, baby, you better go to an observational drawing class.” Regardless of whether you agree with Steve’s perspectives, listening to him tell it is thoroughly enjoyable.
In this conversation, we discuss:
* Early encounters with art and the emotional force of seeing Van Gogh
* Art as both repression and a space for self-discovery
* The role of gesture and ambiguity in figurative work
* Studio practice, community, and artistic solitude
* Grief, loss, and the logic of the grid paintings
* Public art as social intervention
* Modernism, slavery, and cultural inheritance
* Pain, performance, and artistic expression
Timestamps(0:00) Introduction and Background: Mass MoCA and Early Context(2:00) Early Influences: Detroit Institute of Arts and Van Gogh(6:00) Art School and the Turn to Portrait Painting(10:00) Art as Repression and Safe Space(27:00) Artistic Community: Skowhegan and Boston(30:00) Craft, Memory, and Sculptural Expansion(36:00) Grief, Communication, and the Grid Paintings(47:00) Public Art: “Three Deliberate Grays for Freddie”(50:00) “Homage to the Auction Block” and Modernism (55:00) Pain, Performance, and Shared Experience (1:04:00) Audience Q&A
Watch the conversationView the full episode on YouTube.
Follow Stevehttps://www.stevelocke.com/https://www.instagram.com/svlocke/?hl=enSteve Locke (b.1963, Cleveland, OH) lives and works in the Hudson Valley, NY. He received his MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2001. Spanning painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation, Locke’s practice critically engages with the Western canon to muse on the connections between desire, identity, and violence. Locke’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Moss Arts Center at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg (2022); The Gallatin Galleries, New York University, NY (2019); Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA (2018); among others. He has participated in group exhibitions at the Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, TX (2023); MassArt Art Museum (MAAM), Boston, MA (2023); Jack Shainman Gallery, Kinderhook, NY (2021); Fitchburg Art Museum, MA (2020); Fruitlands Museum, Harvard, MA (2020); Boston Center for the Arts, MA (2018); Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (2018); among many others.
About The ForumThe 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.
The Forum 03 | Jamian Juliano-Villani: Artistic Autonomy and Collaboration - Stay Freaky
Saison 1 · Épisode 3
mardi 9 avril 2024 • Durée 39:46
Jamian Juliano-Villani was born in 1987 in Newark, New Jersey, and lives and works in New York. As the daughter of commercial silkscreen printers, she spent time as a child working in her parents’ factory, folding more than four thousand Pope John Paul II T-shirts in ninety-seven-degree heat while absorbing the influence of 1990s and 2000s mass-market print design. She attended the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, New Jersey, graduating with a BFA. While there, she was influenced by the institution’s historic ties to Fluxus, her studies with John Yau and Raphael Ortiz, and the Zimmerli Art Museum’s collection of 1970s Soviet conceptual painting.
She’s in the collection of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and the Louis Vuitton Foundation, among others.
In this conversation, we discuss:
* Growing up in a family rooted in advertising and printing, and how that shaped but did not determine her artistic path
* Painting as a series of formal problems to solve, grounded in decision-making and restraint
* Collaboration as an ongoing negotiation, including disagreement, silence, and repair
* The relationship between politics and art, and the limits of political messaging in painting
* Influences, including Ralph Bakshi and Christian Ludwig Attersee, and how past experiences inform her current work
* The role of community and collective projects like The Patriot
Timestamps(12:26) Family and Artistic Influence(19:16) Problem-Solving and Formal Challenges(25:00) Collaboration and Dialogue in Art(31:00) Political Messages in Artwork and Creative Freedoms(38:00) Collaboration and Community
Watch the conversationView the full episode on YouTube.
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The Forum 01 | Elliot Jerome Brown Jr.: Identity, Racial Cliche, and the Difficult Image
Saison 1 · Épisode 1
mardi 23 janvier 2024 • Durée 01:01:39
Elliott Jerome Brown Jr is an artist who uses photography to explore representation through privacy and fiction. Sometimes his images work towards the mysteries a person can hold. Other times, they might explore the tension created through juxtapositions, or wisps of narrative and context, leaning further into abstraction. Altogether, his work foregrounds the possibilities and problems of photography today. In this conversation, we discuss:
* Elvis Costello's "Green Shirt" and "emotional fascism"
* Negotiating Identity in Photography
* Collaborations with Solange and Telfar
* Going for the "difficult" image instead of the "iconic" one
* Abstraction through rupturing representation
* Moving past racial cliches, even the new ones!
Timestamps(0:00) Introduction and Song Selection: Elvis Costello’s Song “Green Shirt”(8:00) Shift in Artistic Perspective(11:45) Religion and Photography(20:00) Titles, Photography, and Collaboration(28:00) The “Dummy Image”(31:00) Navigating Internal Resistances in Photography Assignments(37:46) Representation vs. Abstraction in Photography(42:56) Influence of Deana Lawson and Critiques of Curatorial Frameworks(55:53) Audience Questions and Further Discussion
Watch the conversationView the full episode on YouTube.
Follow Elliothttps://elliottjeromebrownjr.com/@elliottjeromebrownjrElliott Jerome Brown Jr. (b. 1993) lives and works in New York. He received his BFA in Photography from the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. He has had solo exhibitions at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York (2022, 2019); Staple Goods, New Orleans (2019) and Baxter St. at the Camera Club of New York (2019). Recent group exhibitions include Swiss Institute, New York (2021); RISD Museum of Art, Providence (2021); The Arts Club of Chicago (2020); New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans (2020); Public Art Fund, New York (2020); The MAC, Belfast (2019); PPOW, New York (2019); Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2018); Yossi Milo Gallery, New York (2018); Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York (2018); We Buy Gold, New York (2018), among others. Recent museum acquisitions include the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.
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The Forum 02 | Ser Serpas: Trash, Ruined Objects, and Horror
Saison 1 · Épisode 2
lundi 1 avril 2024 • Durée 01:03:57
Ser Serpas was born in 1995 in Los Angeles, California and lives and works in New York. Primarily interested in death and legacy, her work is preoccupied with its own urgency in the face of fossilization. At present, she’s taken to sequestering the mundane. Serpas’ work takes the form of unstable assemblages of found objects in which painting, sculpture, drawing, and text bring together personal memories and traces of everyday life. She mashes bits of her life, both real and imagined, into anti-portraits. Some of which she deems fit to share within the context of exhibitions and performances. Precarious assemblages of disparate objects found in the street, which bear the mark of their uses, constitute her most well-known series to date. More recently, she has taken to using photos shot on her iPhone during college as source material for intimate views on unstretched canvas, wood panel, and paper. The unique way she reframes the body and tension in both her sculptural and text-based installations, which distort components of our shared architecture, carries into her atypically cropped portions of stolen archetypical intimacy.
In this conversation, we discuss:
* Urgency, fossilization, and building work from ruin rather than permanence
* Waste as imprint and the ethics of collecting discarded objects
* Horror and discomfort as formal strategies
* The aesthetics of survival
* Training AI to hallucinate bodies
* Control, labor, autonomy, and designing your life
Timestamps(02:22) “Monakhos” and the ghosts inside the frame(07:30) The Collector: absence, imprint, and waste(15:51) Confidence is knowing when to stop(17:46) Training AI to hallucinate bodies(30:38) Ruined objects, ruined selves(35:00) The aesthetics of survival(48:20) Horror, unreason, and the art of discomfort(55:00) Control, labor, and designing your life
Watch the conversationView the full episode on YouTube.
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The Forum 07 | Elaine Cameron-Weir: Blasphemy, Objects, and Politics
Saison 2 · Épisode 7
vendredi 31 janvier 2025 • Durée 01:15:45
A BDSM dungeon for alchemist Bitcoin investors. A druid hideaway in the abandoned Palo Alto headquarters of the corporation Theranos. A crossover between Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones where Walter White cooks meth for White Walkers. These are some of the images that Elaine’s work conjures up for people. In this case, the writer and art historian Colby Chamberlain. I like to look at Elaine’s work thinking about the shifts in difference between visual prose and visual poetry. There are narratives, ideas, concepts, but there’s also evocations, atmospherics, and rhythms that key you in as well. spite the notable iciness from some of the work, you can still sense a beating heart. It’s the reason I return to the work and get excited for new shows of hers. There’s a feeling of the post apocalyptic, a sense of dread, there’s violence and the vestiges of religion, but from the way these works come together and how each show operates, I get the sense that this is a person wrestling with belief, not someone who’s already sworn it off. And it’s those struggles that I’m interested in. Why do any of us fight the fights we do? And what does it say about us?
In this conversation, we discuss:
* Early post-art school experimentation and resourcefulness
* Technical training in metal, glass, and ceramics
* Moving to New York and formative professional relationships
* Brass, aluminum, and the scientific aura of materials
* Religion, ritual, and the outsider gaze
* Modularity and impermanence in installation
* Military artifacts and the aesthetics of violence
* Cultural archetypes and embodied identity
* Writing as a parallel conceptual practice
* Readymades, relics, and inherited material memory
* The artist as conduit and critic
(0:00) Introduction and Framing the Conversation(5:00) Early Career and Technical Training in Alberta(14:00) Moving to New York and Early Gallery Relationships(19:00) Material Exploration: Brass, Aluminum, and Process(25:00) Ritual, Religion, and Cultural Observation(31:00) Modularity and Impermanent Installation(39:00) Military Artifacts, Violence, and Political Aesthetics(45:00) Archetypes, Identity, and Cultural Tropes(52:00) Writing, Language, and Reflection(57:00) Readymades, Relics, and Object Memory(1:00:00) Conduit vs. Critique: Final Reflections
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The Forum 05 | Sagarika Sundaram: Expanding Textiles as Sculpture
jeudi 27 février 2025 • Durée 01:08:22
Sagarika Sundaram creates sculpture, relief works, and installation using raw natural fiber and dyes. Drawing on botanical imagery and material process, her work meditates on the impossibility of separating the human from the natural. Layered, tactile, and immersive, her practice moves between structure and spontaneity, craft and conceptual inquiry, Western and Eastern frameworks.
In this conversation, we discuss:
Early training in Batik and formative art education
Leaving art for graphic design and returning through craft
Balancing spontaneity with formal structure
“Sabotage” as a strategy to avoid repetition
Dyeing practices, sustainability, and systemic responsibility
Developing artistic identity over time
Rasa theory, disgust, and cross-cultural frameworks
Timestamps
(0:00) Introduction and Background: Exhibitions and Current Projects(1:00) Early Art Education: Batik and Formative Influences(7:00) Graphic Design and the Return to Art(14:00) Felt-Making and Textile Practice(24:00) Artistic Sabotage and Breaking Repetition(27:00) Dyeing Practices and Sustainability(31:00) Artistic Identity and Refinement(34:00) Expanding into Video and Rhythm(43:00) Rasa Theory, Disgust, and Cultural Frameworks(58:00) Audience Q&A
Watch the conversationView the full episode on YouTube.
Sagarika Sundaram creates sculpture, relief works, and installation using raw natural fiber and dyes. Drawing on natural imagery, the work meditates on the impossibility of separating the human from the natural, suggesting the intertwined nature of reality. Sundaram’s work has exhibited at the Bronx Museum of the Art, NY; Al Held Foundation with River Valley Arts Collective, Boiceville NY; the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, Houston, TX; British Textile Biennial, Liverpool, UK; the Chicago Architecture Biennial and Manitoga / The Russel Wright Design Center, Garrison, NY. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times (Roberta Smith, Martha Schwendener) ARTnews (Alex Greenberger) and has been featured by Artnet and Juxtapoz Magazine and PBS. Sundaram graduated with an MFA in Textiles from Parsons / The New School, NY. She studied at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, and at MICA in Baltimore. She is currently Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute. Sundaram lives and works in New York City.
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The Forum 10 | Aaron Gilbert: Emotional Realism and the Architecture of Feeling
Saison 2 · Épisode 11
lundi 5 mai 2025 • Durée 01:16:39
He paints exhaustion, desire, and the ghosts of modern life—Aaron Gilbert on how to stay human in a fractured world.
Aaron Gilbert is a painter whose work bridges the mythic and the domestic, capturing moments of intimacy under the weight of spiritual, political, and economic pressure. He’s exhibited internationally and is currently represented by Gladstone Gallery. His paintings are both tender and prophetic, filled with symbolic ruptures, spectral presences, and radiant color.
In this conversation, we discuss:
* Growing up in a creative family and abandoning a career in engineering to pursue painting, while becoming a father.
* Why he doesn’t chase “great art,” but instead builds images that hold his full self—flawed, contradictory, and reaching.
* Painting not to reflect the moment, but to prophesize what lies beyond our broken stories.
* The struggle to maintain mystery, emotional precision, and resistance within large-scale work.
* How brand logos become talismans, color becomes spirit, and art becomes a tear in the fabric of what we think is real.
(00:00) Welcome to NewCrits(01:06) “People still seem to fuck—and that’s a good thing.”(04:07) “I wanted to make the worst WPA paintings ever.”(05:01) Intimacy vs. Monumentality(10:14) Painting the workplace: a shape-shifting host(14:20) Becoming a father and an artist, simultaneously(20:00) Too private to paint?(24:01) The artist as prophet(30:39) What’s missing in art school? Elders.(37:08) SpongeBob as an exhausted adult(42:45) The levity of “Hot Moms”(50:00) Spectral figures and ghostly presences(56:16) Logos as spiritual metaphors—enter Adidas(01:03:15) Against the heroic posture in painting(01:14:10) Consciousness, rupture, and looped time
Watch the conversationView the full episode on YouTube.
The Forum 09 | Salome Asega: Culture Gardening and Counter-Futures
Saison 2 · Épisode 10
lundi 14 avril 2025 • Durée 01:13:37
In this dynamic conversation, artist Salome Asega sits down with Ajay Kurian to explore the intersections of art, technology, and collective imagination. Salome shares how her upbringing in a family of engineers shaped her collaborative approach to creativity, setting aside the notion of the singular artistic genius in favor of nurturing ecosystems of innovation. From her early encounters with art in Las Vegas to leading New Inc. she discusses how artists can challenge dominant narratives, reclaim agency in technological futures, and build more equitable infrastructures. Throughout the talk, Salome and Ajay dive into the metaphors of gardening vs. architecture, the power of speculative design, and the importance of care, community, and radical inclusion in the creative world. Whether you’re an artist, technologist, or simply curious about the future of culture, this conversation is full of insights and inspiration.
In this conversation, we discuss:
* The “architect vs. gardener” metaphor in artistic practice
* Growing up in Las Vegas and early encounters with art
* Engineering culture and collaborative thinking
* Silicon Valley and reclaiming agency in tech futures
* Powrplnt and the Iyapo Repository
* Leading New Inc. and museum-based incubation
* Care as methodology and long-term sustainability
* Collaboration over singular genius
* Institutional equity and structural critique
* Expanding the definition of artistic practice
* Accessibility and audience participation
* Family influence and personal foundation
* Speculative design and counter-futures
Timestamps(0:00) Introduction and Framing: The “Culture Gardener”(2:00) Architect vs. Gardener(9:00) Growing Up in Las Vegas and Cultural Capital(12:00) Technology and Collective Imagination(16:00) Powrplant and Iyapo Repository(20:00) Directing New Inc.(25:00) Care as Artistic Method(30:00) Collaboration vs. Individualism(35:00) Challenges in Art and Technology(40:00) Expanding Artistic Practice(45:00) Audience Engagement and Accessibility(50:00) Family Influence and Background(55:00) Speculative Futures and Counter-Narratives(1:02:00) Audience Q&A
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The Forum 15 | Eric N. Mack: On Tender Assembly and the Politics of Display
vendredi 7 novembre 2025 • Durée 54:04
He builds with fabric, scaffolding, and light — Eric N. Mack on tenderness as structure and the unseen labor that makes art visible.
Eric N. Mack works between painting, installation, and fashion, reimagining how material, care, and collaboration shape contemporary image-making. His large-scale assemblages drape and lean, collapsing distinctions between surface and structure, styling and architecture, autonomy and support. His practice reveals how beauty, fragility, and display coexist within shared spaces of labor and care.
He explains:
* How gestures of rupture, cutting, and collage become ways to think through care, not violence.
* Why stylists, curators, and unseen collaborators form the hidden architectures of art.
* How fabric behaves as both image and body — draped, suspended, and alive to air and time.
* What scaffolding, transparency, and light teach about the precarity of presence.
* How tenderness and structure coexist as the real politics of display.
* Why every act of making is also an act of attention — a choreography of support between maker, viewer, and space.
(0:00) Welcome + Intro(01:00) Rupture, Reflection, and the Studio as World(05:00) Grace Jones and the Clarified Aesthetic(10:00) The Unseen Hand and the Architect of the Image(15:00) Collaboration, Care, and the Space of Display(20:00) Fabric, Fragrance, and the Politics of Form(30:00) Craft, Styling, and the Education of Looking(33:00) Art School, Value, and the Work of Belief(40:00) Draping Architecture and Breathing Structures(47:00) Fragility, Care, and the Social Life of Objects
Watch the conversationView the full episode on YouTube.
Eric N. Mack (b. 1987, Columbia, MD) is a painter who radically reconsiders the medium’s traditional conventions. By utilizing found materials, Mack creates richly textured compositions that investigate painting in an expanded field and formal concerns of the practice.
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The Forum 14 | Raúl de Nieves: Saints, Stained Glass, and the Work of Belief
vendredi 10 octobre 2025 • Durée 01:02:15
He builds worlds from devotion, labor, and light. Raúl de Nieves on myth, death, and the joy of transformation.
Raúl de Nieves is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans sculpture, performance, stained glass, and music. His work merges ancestral craft with queer exuberance, creating ecstatic spaces where life, death, and rebirth coexist. Known for his intricate beaded sculptures and radiant installations, de Nieves transforms discarded materials into devotional objects that question permanence, value, and faith.
He reflects on:
* Why failure and fear are essential teachers
* How myth, labor, and ritual shape his understanding of transformation
* The link between spirituality and psychedelia in his creative process
* The politics of beauty, excess, and craft
* How performance and collaboration sustain his practice
* The tension between art and commerce—and what it means to say yes
* Why joy, respect, and self-love remain his most radical tools
(0:00) Welcome + Intro(1:00) The Origin of “St. George and the Dragon”(10:00) Death, Culture, and Safety(21:00) Excess, Labor, and the Ephemeral(31:00) The Whitney Window(35:00) The Carousel and the Brand(43:00) Pact with the Devil(47:00) Celebration and Decay(53:00) Belief and Legacy(56:00) Joy, Respect, and The Smashing Pumpkins
Watch the conversationView the full episode on YouTube.
Raúl de Nieves is a multimedia artist, performer, and musician whose wide-ranging practice investigates notions of beauty and transformation. De Nieves’ visual symbolism draws on both classical Catholic and Mexican vernacular motifs to create his own unique mythology. Through processes of accumulation and adornment, the artist transforms readily available materials into spectacular objects, which he then integrates into immersive narrative environments.Recent solo institutional exhibitions include at Pioneer Works, Redhook, NY (2025), , Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD (2023); , Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA (2023); ICA Boston, Boston, MA (2021); Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Miami, FL (2021); and SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA (2020). He has participated in numerous group exhibitions including those at Prospect New Orleans, Hauser & Wirth, The Highline, MoMA PS1, the 2017 Whitney Biennial, K11 Foundation, Documenta 14, Performa 13, ICA Philadelphia, The Watermill Center, The Kitchen, Artist’s Space, and numerous other venues. His work is included in public collections at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. De Nieves was born in 1983, in Michoacán, Mexico, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
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Juliano-Villani was born in 1987 in Newark, New Jersey, and lives and works in New York. As the daughter of commercial silkscreen printers, she spent time as a child working in her parents’ factory, folding more than four thousand Pope John Paul II T-shirts in ninety-seven-degree heat while absorbing the influence of 1990s and 2000s mass-market print design. She attended the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, New Jersey, graduating with a BFA. While there, she was influenced by the institution’s historic ties to Fluxus, her studies with John Yau and Raphael Ortiz, and the Zimmerli Art Museum’s collection of 1970s Soviet conceptual painting.
In 2013, Juliano-Villani presented her first solo exhibition, Me, Myself and Jah, at Rawson Projects, New York, showing paintings that incorporate characters from Ralph Bakshi’s film Cool World (1992). These works explore themes of race, identity, appropriation, and—in canvases such as Heat Wave (2013)—the collapsing of painterly hierarchies, while revealing the artist’s burgeoning admiration for the democratic nature of cartoons.
About The ForumThe 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.
About The ForumThe 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.—
Follow Serhttps://maxwellgraham.biz/artists/ser.@ser_seraSer Serpas (b. 1995, Los Angeles, CA, USA, lives and works in Paris) Primarily interested in death and legacy, her work is preoccupied with its own urgency in the face of fossilization. At the present, she’s taken to sequestering the mundane while freely quoting art history in its full depth, paying little heed to the latter. Ser Serpa works take the from of unstable assemblages of found objects, in which painting, sculpture, drawing, and texts bring together personal memories and traces of everyday life. She mashes bits of her life, both real and imagined, into anti portraits, some of which she deems fit to share within the contexts of exhibitions and performances. Precarious assemblages of disparate objects found in the street, which bear the mark of their uses, constitute her most well known series to date. More recently she has taken to using photos shot on her iPhone during college as source material for intimate views on unstretched canvas, wood panel and paper. The unique way she reframes the body in tension, in both her sculptural and text based installations which distort components of our shared architecture, carries into her atypically cropped portions of stolen archetypal intimacy.
About The ForumThe 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.
Elaine Cameron-Weir was born in 1985 in Red Deer, Alberta, Canada; she lives and works in New York. Past solo exhibitions at institutions include: Dressing for Windows (Exploded View), SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, USA (2022); STAR CLUB REDEMPTION BOOTH, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, USA (2021); exhibit from a dripping personal collection, Dortmunder Kunstverein, Dortmund, Germany (2018); Outlooks, Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, USA (2018) and viscera has questions about itself, New Museum, New York, USA (2017). Her work has featured in major group exhibitions including The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani at the 59th Venice Biennale, Italy (2022); New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century, BAMPFA, Berkeley, USA (2021); Present Tense, Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA (2019), as well as the Belgrade Biennale, Serbia (2021); the Montreal Biennial, Canada (2017) and the Fellbach Triennial of Small-Scale Sculpture, Germany (2016).
About The ForumThe 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: I've always loved your work, and there was a specific moment in 2014, at Ramiken Crucible, where I was genuinely floored.
It was so quiet in there. It was so beautiful and eerie. The scent in the air, everything about it felt meticulous but also carefree. It wasn't overly theatrical or overdone.
And I just want to start from the beginning, because there's an arc of the visual poetry that you start making and it would be interesting for me to understand how certain things started to congeal, how certain sculptural forms started to congeal for you. This is the first show that you did at Ramekin Crucible in 2011 called “without true bazaars”. Do you even remember this show?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: Yeah, it's interesting to see it. It was so long ago.
Ajay Kurian: Fourteen years.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: When I see these images, I immediately think about how I had no money, and was really just working with what I could get my hands on.
But, you know, that wasn't an obstacle at the time. It was normal. But looking back, the simplicity of what I was doing and the type of materials…I mean, it doesn't feel like student work, but because I was just out of school, I was so young, and I wasn't fully formed, it still feels transitional. But it was a such an opportunity to learn about what I was doing in public, and it could have gone
Ajay Kurian: I feel like first solo shows, it's like you have nothing to lose. So it's just like, fuck it, do what you want to do.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: And limited resources, so you can't just go crazy - you’re contained.
Ajay Kurian: What was before this? Were you in art school
Elaine Cameron-Weir: Yes. I'm from Canada and I grew up in Alberta. It's like the Texas of Canada, if you're not familiar. Yeah. above Montana, but I went to Art School right out of high school. It's way less of a commitment there because it's so cheap. It's not like a fraught decision. Like should I spend all this money to go to art school? It's like, try it.
Ajay Kurian: So that was a BFA program?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: Yes, at the Alberta College of Art. They had amazing, world class facilities. So I actually learned how to do very niche metalworking. They had a glass blowing shop, ceramics; you could cast bronze there. So I got a really technical education. I was in the drawing department, and we had to go draw cadavers at the hospital. But then there were really good instructors as well where it was really their mission to teach and they were really good at making you think about what you're doing.
And then I graduated from there and I didn't really know what to do. I was working at American Apparel and the rents were getting jacked up in Calgary where the school was because there was an oil boom going on. I had to leave. So I moved back in with my dad And I turned his garage into a studio.
And I hated it there so much. It's the small city that I went to high school in. so I immediately applied to grad school in New York without knowing anything about any school in New York. I just did a quick search and I was like, okay, we're going to just apply to all of these and get out of here.
And that's how I ended up in New York. I went to NYU. I graduated in 2010.
Ajay Kurian: Okay. when did you meet Mike? Mike is the owner of Ramekin Crucible.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: I don't know what year, probably 2010 or 11, at a party. At the Jane Hotel.
Ajay Kurian: It's so interesting to hear about those early conversations with your first gallerist because there's so much history that happens in that moment and then looking back on it retrospectively you're like wow what was that?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: I think we were both learning a lot, you know? And we took a chance on each other. It sounds crazy now, like we met at a party, but that's how you used to meet people. And we had mutual friends, like Borden, Capalino. So we met at this party, and we got to talking and then a studio visit with him and Blaize (Lehane, former director at Ramiken Crucible). The building I was living in had just caught fire right before the visit. A lot was going on for me personally, but it ended up working out really well because I didn't have to pay rent for like six months, which is one of the reasons I could stay in New York. The work I was making, was similar to what I made for that first show.
I think I made this piece actually in school, that long stick thing. it's just a piece of MDF, or maybe it's actual wood. It was coated in a pouch of rolling tobacco. I think that piece was in my grad show at NYU.
Ajay Kurian: I'm gonna skip to the next show. This is the first time, you start using brass in the work. It sounds like you already had a decent understanding of, how to make almost anything based on your education. These brass leaves - did you make those yourself? Was that outsourced? How did that happen?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: No, I made it all. Except the piece of those, cast aluminum things at the top. You can't tell what they are, but I made those with my dad in Canada.
Ajay Kurian: What are they? I remember seeing, there's been a couple of iterations of them. I remember seeing them here. I remember seeing them at an art fair where the whole booth was filled with almost like a rhythm of these, for the lack of a better word, “blanks.” Do you consider them kind of blanks or what are they made out of?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: Yeah, I was kind of thinking about an ingot, which is like a cast piece of metal And a photographic plate or a blank. I used to go, I still go to the NYU library and they had amazing books from NASA there. They had this great atlas of photographs of the moon, like before they went to the moon. the photographic technique is done in scans, so it's kind of like stripes. the book is large and you can flip it.
And each page - I was kind of thinking each as sort of like a page from that book - it was like plotting something in the round into a flatness.
Ajay Kurian: Scale-wise, they’re almost like a oversized book.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: Yeah, that's the reason for the scale, something that you could potentially hold. And then they're on this rail, because they don't actually hang on the wall. They're always meant to sit on something and lean. So they're like an object, they don't have a thing on the back that you can stick them on the wall.
Ajay Kurian: Yeah, they feel like tablets.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: Yeah.
Ajay Kurian: Which, as you'll see as we progress, there's this sense of religiosity or ritual or the transcendental. It goes through very specific vocabulary.
This was the show that I fell in love with. This is Venus Anodyamine. These are large clamshells. Were you able to find the two halves of each of them?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: No, I later on made a piece where I did find one whole one, and then I stopped making them because I was like, I found a whole one. So no, they're just the halves.
Ajay Kurian: So, there's this long piece of brass that falls into the clamshell where a piece of paper-thin mica is suspended, and then there's frankincense on top of the mica. and a flame underneath it, so you can smell frankincense throughout the room.
And it was so beautiful. I grew up religious. My parents are from South India, so Christianity is big. a lot of those scents, a lot of that ritual. just gets imparted in you. The ways that I think about space and how I move through it are defined in a lot of ways by those early forms of ritual.
And to me, it felt like that might've been the case with you, too. Maybe it was more distant, but I'm really curious because there are all these moments in which I see you pulling from the wealth of iconography in Western Christianity - symbols, and so on. Did you grow up with that?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: No. I grew up in a small place, a small town, and then moved to a small city. Most people around us were religious. If I slept over at a friend's house on Saturday, we had to go to church. Some families were very strict, but my mom was very anti-religion.
Ajay Kurian: Really?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: Yeah. Not in a discriminatory way, but she was just like, we're not having that. You're not doing that. You're not baptized. My parents weren't married until later on, like when I was a teenager. And I grew up thinking they were married because everyone else's parents were. I remember one day I asked my mom, like, Where are all the wedding pictures of you and dad? She looks at me. She's like, we're not married.
I was shocked because at eight or nine, I just assumed, you know. But I was always interested, maybe because of that and it being around me and it was something I observed. I watched people speak in tongues through this little window thing when I was a kid, so I would observe these things as an outsider.
Yeah. It really made me dig into it in a different way, I guess. But it was still around me.
Ajay Kurian: That feels like a healthier relationship. Because I had to unpack my relationship to it. But it's good if you can be a spectator of it, I think there are some things of value in terms of community and so on. It’s not like I think religion is wholesale bad. But it's nice to have some distance so you can be like, Oh, okay, this is maybe interesting. What is that connected to and what's the deeper psyche there?
And that's kind of the sense that I get from the ways in which you work. It's like you're using a symbol or mythology to interrogate something deeper. There's a show at Rodolphe Janssen next year called Medusa. So there's Venus Anodyamine, like Venus rising from the clamshell. And then the following show is called Medusa, I think it was the same year. Were you working on these bodies of workin tandem? how did they come together? Or did they feel separate in your head?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: They did. right before I did the clamshell show, I got my own studio. Previous to that I was sharing. And I realized it was driving me insane, and it was really detrimental to my work. I realized, if I'm gonna try making this work as an artist, I have to take some kind of risk and just go out on my own so I can concentrate. That's how I made those clamshell works. It was really just that I had no distractions.
I also made these alone in my studio. I made them all myself. This came out of some writing that I was doing that has nothing to do with appreciating the work. It was just a way to store some ideas that I was thinking about as a collage of different snippets of writing. It was about this theoretical weapon called the Medusa that freezes people.
And in it, this character gets lost in a kind of dream jungle. So that's how I, started making the work, but it doesn't matter to me that someone would know that.
But what you can't see in these images is in the details of these works, everything's adjustable. They’re filled with small screws - all the hardware is visible.
The curved branches are found lamp parts. Everything else I made - I made the leaves, made the hardware, the rods.
The rock is marble. The holes that are already in it are from when they blast it out of the quarry, they drill holes, put explosives in, and it cleaves like perforated paper. The holes dictated the shape of where the rods went. So it was working with that.
I traced the plant leaves off a plant that I had, and still have, a Monstera. My point is, you can see all of that in the work. it's much rougher than they look in these photos. They’re dirty, there’s sharp edges and there's a lot of flaws in them.
I wanted to do something similar to the clamshell, something you could tune to some kind of message, like a kind of receiver or transmitter. And there's this idea of also packing it away, like taking everything apart. That will become more important to me.
Ajay Kurian: Of modularity?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: Modularity and something that maybe could never be put back together the same way. Like, when these are shipped, they come apart, and then you could try to get it exact, but it's not really the point.
Ajay Kurian: So it's like there's a recipe that you follow, but it's not like it comes out the same way every time. There are parameters that are set and then the piece exists within those parameters, right?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: If you're imagining doing fieldwork as someone in the army, the military, or a biologist, you have to set up a camp.
We have to set up equipment. It's always going to be adapted to the scenario and the terrain.
Ajay Kurian: Is there something you're looking for in terms of how it responds to site?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: No, just that it doesn't look wrong. Everyone has a sense of beauty. I also want it to look like it wasn't just thrown together, so it kind of asks a lot of someone putting it together if I'm not there. But I like that. Not to demand a lot, but that it's like — what do you think looks good? Like when you buy some flowers and they put them in the vase, you arrange them how you want them.
Ajay Kurian: That's interesting. I know that different artists have different levels of meticulousness when it comes to installation instructions.
For instance Josh Kline has books for his installations. Every single thing is spelled out, like how a part is replaced or how everything needs to interact. So that it can be done exactly the same way. This is a level of freedom where if you're not around and a hundred years from now, if this piece is being put together and there's no parameters and someone thinks putting all of them at the bottom and all of them at the top is awesome — is that still the piece?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: Well, there is a built in fail safe thing. The rods are graduated and there's two sizes of sliding hardware. So here's a limit. They can't all be at the top. So it's kind of within reason.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: I am very picky and particular, but I'm really bad at administrative stuff. There are loose guidelines for these things and they get numbered so it's not a total free for all.
Ajay Kurian: Yeah. The title is, ‘so whatever impressions this unconscious inference leads to, they strike "our consciousness as a foreign and overpowering force of nature”’. That last part is a quotation. I'm sure you can't remember where that's from, but is it part of the story?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: Lots of the titles in my work come from my writing so that would be from that.
Ajay Kurian: This one almost feels more narratively driven. I can follow the pacing of it and understand where it's going. The titles that continue are slightly more abstract and there's no punctuation usually. That means the beginnings and endings of thoughts blur together and there's a moment where you take that mental pause and say, this is where I'm going to bracket that part of it and try to make sense of that.
Ajay Kurian: After the Venus show, did this give you the sense that, okay, now I know some of the things that I'm working with. Because initially from those first shows that we see, there's a spareness, there's a specificity with materials. There's something about towers or maybe the body that feels like it's playing a role but then there’s a shift. There's a different organicism and a realm in which we're now in. Could you feel that coming together in that moment?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: Yeah, I did feel like I was oh, this is the artist that I am or the start of it, you know? That's an amazing feeling. That show felt so good. I think you picked up on it, because you were like, this seems different. It did come out of me getting my own studio and I actually quit my job the day after the second show at Ramekin that you showed. So I had time and space, and I made a show that caught me up to where I wanted to be. It felt like I was not done with what I was doing, but I was like, okay, this feels like the most realized show that I've made so far, which is still 10 years ago.
Ajay Kurian: I felt like, and correct me if I'm wrong, that there was a Canadian contingency that came to New York at one time. Was that real or made up? Did it just so happen that you guys were Canadian? Or did you guys know each other?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: It's our secret shame. Well, I was the only person in that group that you're referring to I think. Maybe there's one other guy from Alberta. Most people were from either Vancouver or Toronto area, and maybe one or two from Montreal. But somehow we were just all attracted to each other and ended up at parties. It's like, you're Canadian, you're Canadian, you're Canadian. Then we just hung out for a few years. I'm still friends with lots of them.
Ajay Kurian: That's wild. I just assumed we all emigrated together.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: I met them here. It’s weird.
Ajay Kurian: It’s really blowing my mind. This entire time I thought, they met and then they were like, let’s take over New York. But that's not it at all. Interesting.
Let's go to the show Hannah Hoffman, this is probably another favorite show of mine.
Where I think a lot of other concerns kind of come to the fore. I'm just going to cycle through some of these images so you guys can see the show. The title of the show, ‘when waveform walks the earth’.
Can I tell you my interpretation of that? I was thinking about the instantiation of Christ, like God becoming a body. There was something about it that felt similar, where it was like, there's a choice that's made, and it becomes a wave, and it's here in the world. Before that, it's potential and it's something that doesn't exist, it's not with us in the world. And then as soon as that choice is made, it's like a thing in the world. Does that at all resonate?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: Yeah, you got it, that’s a very good way of putting it. I wrote something again for this show that was the press release. It deals with the things you were talking about, like mirror imaging and wave being like a bell that can't be unrung and marching in step. Like a bunch of people creating a vibration, marching like an army that shakes apart this bridge to the world.
I write a lot for myself, without intention. When I do show it, it's always like a draft. I'm never like, this is a genius piece of writing. 'm just kind of like, these are some thoughts. But I started writing in this style of more in reference to the titles, without punctuation or as much, weird capitalization and abbreviations.
I would run things sometimes through a translator and back to English. Multiple times, multiple different languages and sections and then collage things together. I started to try to not talk in my voice. Try to get out of a narrative in that sense.
I feel like this is the first time where, there's an actual cast of a body. I think beyond that, it's the garments of the body, and the residue of the body, or something that might suggest it, but isn't it.
Ajay Kurian: There's so much about this that feels connected to religion, sexuality, violence and the larger structures that govern us. It was something written about your work where they say that but I don't remember how they phrase it.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: That idea came a little later from outside.
Ajay Kurian: How does an external idea like that resonate with you? Does it feel like this is just now the common interpretation of my work and it's approximate, or does it feel like, oh, I'm being seen?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: In that instance, it felt correct. Like I was being seen a little more because I was an emerging artist. People don't want to make proclamations or it's hard to tell what someone's actually doing and maybe it still is. But sometimes it was like I was getting placed in beautiful things or fashion, which I love but that has nothing to do with anything else. It is very bankrupt to think that way.
But I think it started kind of around this time. I mean, there's a literal gas mask in this show and that rubber jacket is an old policemen's overcoat maybe from the fifties or sixties. For me, a gas mask instantly evokes war and high altitude flight.
It's an ongoing series with parachutes from world war two that were used in the war, and there’s an animal, like one singular animal hide around this laboratory. It's called a lattice. They use it in chem labs to put hardware on with beakers and stuff. I think having something with an aura like that, from World War II, you can't really ignore the message anymore.
Ajay Kurian: I mean, it really tries, because it is such a beautiful object. There's something so ecstatic about it. I remember reading that somebody was making a connection to Bernini and the kind of ecstasy in one of his pieces, how it was almost too sexual and that felt kind of right.
Even though it's still kind of pared down, the sexuality of it is also related to the BDSM vibe of it, but it's such an overflow. The folds just keep pushing and pushing and pushing. That bodily intonation comes first and then it's kind of a brainfuck afterwards to think it's a World War II parachute, and I still don't have any reconciliation for it.
There's a lot of pieces, a lot of things that I can say what the parts are, but it doesn't give me a sense of what the whole is. The whole is much bigger than the parts. To me, that's essentially a successful artwork. If the whole is more than the parts and it doesn't resolve into a conceptual strategy.
It's not like, this is her take on violence and sexuality and war. they happen to be with one another and you have to figure out how that feels to you. It's not really about the sculpture when you address those feelings either. It was an interesting thing to play out when I was looking at the work and when I was sitting with it.
It was like, this is clearly more about me than the work. The work is very separate and it has a self contained quality. I can't help but think of the spectatorship of how you're seeing religion take place. You're seeing someone speak in tongues. Your ability to observe and make in a self contained way feels like part of that process.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: There's no question there. I was thinking of the word perverted while you were talking. That is the right word. It's kind of perverse to take something so serious as a World War II artifact that someone used, jumped out of a plane and make it into something that looks like a drapery. It's a little blasphemous, and blasphemy is perverted usually, right?
You saying that as an observer and I've always felt like that. I'm always kind of feel like I'm watching something unfold. How you felt as the audience member, I kind of feel like that myself, a little alienated, but not disconnected, my grandfather fought in World War II, for example.
But there's something about, watching them have PTSD and, watching the effects of things on people. Growing up with that, I think it definitely has given me, that natural disposition to almost be, in some ways, we’re like an audience.
Ajay Kurian: Yeah I mean, sometimes it comes naturally to artists and then for others you really have to cultivate that in order to become your best critic. Cause if you're so deep in your work and you just love everything that you do and you can't find distance from it, you can kind of tell when an artist is there. You can tell, like you need some alienation from yourself.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: You need to hate yourself a little more.
Ajay Kurian: It's just so you can be an observer of yourself, like how you said.
I think it's really hard.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: It's not impossible to be an observer, but objectivity and subjectivity is something I'm really interested in. Obviously, a lot of people are, but in terms of science some kind of neutral position that no one can have, which comes with some kind of authority that is fraudulent.
If you think of God, it’s like this ultimate omnipotent and omnipresent being, an observer or a steward without judgment, but that's not really the case. There's morality in all religions, and in science a sort of the quest for truth in different methods of inquiry.
Ajay Kurian: It's interesting that you bring up God in that regard, because it's a viewpoint from everywhere and nowhere. There is no subject, there is no object, there is no observation, it just, it's all. That's sort of a transcendental that has almost no bearing on what our operations are.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: It's like psychedelic. It doesn't make any sense.
Ajay Kurian: Yeah. It's like an impossible thing to understand.
But I feel like that divide or that inquiry into science and art as both methods of inquiry felt really profound in your Storm King installation. From what I remember, it's a cage for motorcyclists?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: There's a couple of families that own these cages and it's like a family business that they travel with. So we kind of just copied a pared down version and there's a trap door. It's about 20 feet tall 20 feet wide.
Ajay Kurian: Then on the side, the kind of pairing of objects here, that's a military bunker, correct? That's been turned upside down?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: It's like a communication station that fits in the back of a pickup truck. So it's a mobile unit. Then we dug a little hole so it could sit at a tilt like it was looking up at the sphere. It looks tiny, but that's human size, so if you walk up to it it feels like you could open the door and go in. Inside there's all these dials and screens and stuff.
Ajay Kurian: Can you see that from like looking through the window of anything or is it completely sealed off?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: It was too dangerous to have people go in there.
Ajay Kurian: Oh, for sure. I totally understand that. I think I like it more this way.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: A mystery.
Ajay Kurian: This piece like sums up a lot. It's really hard to make good public art. It has to weather the elements, it has to weather anybody who's trying to destroy it, which Americans love to destroy public art.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: People climbed this.
Ajay Kurian: I guarantee, they'll try to do anything they can to it. I'm sure people tried to flip that, structure. They'll do whatever which is another thing altogether.
There's something about this celestial sphere that feels almost platonic, even though it is just wrought steel next to this object for observation. It feels very human and human scale. You can enter it and it has all the accoutrements of a human made thing it feels more like an object because it's been flung down it's upside down and it's in this pit it is anthropomorphized looking at the sphere that combination feels like it spells out a lot of concerns that happen in multiple bodies of work.
Do you feel like having the limitations of it being an outdoor work streamlined how you were thinking about how things could be done?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: Yes. It's actually interesting seeing my older work, which I haven't looked at in a long time now. Thinking about that brass cage thing, that was an elongated birdcage.
At that time, I had been making work using bird shit. Like parrots shitting on a moon landing newspaper. I found someone that had parrots. I was interested in cages and what we just talked about with being, feeling like an observer and thinking about my audience.
I think about audience all the time because I'm part of it, you know, this was pared down in a similar way in terms of that brass thing. I don't know how to explain it now 'cause I'm just realizing it, but there's something that connects that for me.
Ajay Kurian: It's a great project. This was 2018, I think.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: I don't remember.
Ajay Kurian: I feel confident.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: I'm really bad with dates and how things go in time. Pre pandemic for sure.
Ajay Kurian: There's something I wanted to bring up before, like the idea of narration and a story. I think there’s characters that appear in different ways that are kind of always represented through clothing or a garment. So it'll be a trench coat or, a cowboy, or the leather jacket, the kind of punk leather jacket. I think it's been sort of codified, there’s the dandy, the cowboy, and the punk in your work. Do you see those as actual characters that populate the work? Are they part of the stories that you're making in these exhibitions?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: Yes and no. Not in so much as I'm imagining a character and what they would do.
Ajay Kurian: Is it an embodiment?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: It's like a trope. The dandy character I've always been very fascinated by just because of some of my favorite poetry and literature. Like Baudelaire, Rimbaud, those kinds of guys. I like this idea of being a flaneur, kind of like window shopping but it being a subversive position to take. Now when we call someone a dandy, it's doesn't have the same, I mean, maybe it does in a way.
Ajay Kurian: It feels more frivolous now. Like when you use the word dandy, I feel like it doesn't have as much subversion. It's more like, oh, they have the freedom to do whatever.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: Right, which is not the original thing. So you said dandy, cowboy, and punk, right? For this show, that got picked out because of the signifiers you just said, like the accoutrement and the uniforms of those types. But the only literal uniform in the show is military uniforms. Those leather jackets are all horse leather that are stuffed inside one another, but there's no military person in that cosmology of characters.
Ajay Kurian: That's true.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: So I was thinking of uniforms in a way that is fashion, but not simply fashion and not only fashion. Like how commodifying like this piece says, my life, my way.
Ajay Kurian: So kind of like commodifying some idea of rebellion. I think all of those characters kind of have that. Maybe what connects all of them is a rebellious sort of outside of a subculture figure, and that it's purchasable.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: I mean, it also literally is purchasable, and I'm aware of that. I'm not pretending it's not for sale. I'm not cynical and I don't want to be like art shouldn't be for sale. I more want to implicate myself in this, maybe become less of an observer for the first time.
And maybe I'm the clown, I don't know. But I am commodifying myself in a way. You know, my life, my way. It's not your life, your way that I'm talking about. I am really talking about myself in this work for the first time, I think, in that way. But it's also referencing other experiences of that.
Ajay Kurian: It felt personally driven and then I also couldn't help but think of it as a character because there's like a snottiness to saying like my life my way, and I think just like with the font and the way that it exists It's not fully serious. It's like you're poking fun at it too.
I think the thing I maybe want to end on is asking you about the difference between being a conduit for work that gets made — how you think about critique because like critique is taking a step back and conduit is just being. I see both of those things in your work. I see like there's a sense of channeling something but then there's also very clear moments where the narration here is is self conscious. I have to be careful about what I put on you as the maker, it's not like this is autobiographical, but it's also not, not autobiographical. Conduit and critique, how do those things sit with you?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: It's a complex question, but I think I always feel like I am opposed to things. So I always feel like, without cynicism, that I have a natural inclination to critique. But as an artist, I don't want to simplify my position to just critiquing, because then you imply this moral cleanliness that is not interesting to me.
Complexity and self awareness in your implication in the things that you don't like is like, you know, so both I think is my goal. It might be too and then you become like a mystic sage.
Ajay Kurian: It's too much.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: Yeah, but if you just critique then you might become a hypocrite because you can't just stay. You know what I mean?
Ajay Kurian: In a sense it's the worst kind of observer. You don't stand outside of this. there's a fair space to critique, and artworks do it constantly, yours as well. But if the critique is so clean and high and mighty, where it doesn't apply to me, it might not be the richest space for an artwork. It might be rich for writing and thinking about a particular idea or history, but for art it feels messier.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: Yeah, but I think to be purely in one category of conduit or critique is really, really hard and why would you want to be? In either one you are kind of missing out on what the other one can bring to it. And I don't think it's weakening critique either or being a conduit to overlap those things, you know?
There's a lot of really complicated, messy people that critique things and are seen as absolute conduits. Like William Blake, who you mentioned.
Ajay Kurian: Blake is a great example.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: I don't think you have to choose one or the other.
Ajay Kurian: Yeah. I also think your route sort of chooses you in a way. We were talking about this in the studio, it's not like you read someone's biography to map out who they are, but there is a resonance of a person that feels available when you look at someone's work with your work, there's a distance and a curiosity and a skepticism, but you want to go in, It's not like you're fully on the outside.
It's funny. That's like how I felt the first time I had any interaction with anything about you was that newspaper with the bird shit on it, which was the piece you had in Puerto Rico. I'd never met you, but I'd heard about you and I'd seen some of your work. And they're putting all this stuff in the cave. This cave was insane. Rose Marcus was in that show too. It was the actual newspaper of the moon landing and it was covered in bird shit. I was like, oh my god. It goes back to blasphemy. It goes back to like a perversion there. Where it was something like going to the stars.
And it was the most like base thing that you could put on it and that was the only thing that you had it was just like a newspaper that got sent to Puerto Rico.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: They gave it back to me. It was in like a little case.
Ajay Kurian: They just put it on a rock and I was like who is this person. While I try to find that photo, if you guys have questions, if you have anything that you want to ask Elaine, this is a good moment.
Audience Member 1: Yeah, I have a question. Elaine, I've loved your work for so long, like I learned it on Tumblr when I was in art school. I was gonna ask you about your relationship to the ready made, like Aja was talking about. I feel like I'm influenced by this idea of the religiosity of these things where they're held in reverence.
But I'm now thinking about the idea of the ruin, you know, where it's like there are these things like a lot of these ready made aspects in your work that are like relics or something, I thought it was kind of like interesting what you're saying.
This idea of the flaneur or something where they're not really fully participating in conspicuous consumption, but they're a witness to all of this. So, I don't know if that's a question.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: Yeah, we didn't talk about the ready made, and I think it's exactly what you said, there is an aura with things, and I like things that are used in my whole life. All my clothes, my furniture, everything I own is used basically, cause I like the patina of use and then it being decommissioned. I mean, that doesn't apply to clothes if I wear them, but I'm talking about my work right now, repurposing them and giving them a new function or just ending their function and and that absence is maybe related to absence of the body.
It's like the job that this thing is supposed to do. I think that implies repurposing and change. It’s a common, theme in apocalyptic sci fi where steampunk, retro, Mad Max, like retrofitted things that aren't supposed to make something out of nothing or make do.
I'm naturally inclined to do that. It has to do with all the reasons you said, but it's also just a natural position. Like I grew up with my dad who made a lot of stuff and my parents and the way we had an income was they owned this greenhouse, they grew plants and they built the structures themselves. We went sold some at the farmer's market and my dad had like a junkyard. where he would just get scrap and it was like old washing machines and he'd cut them apart and make little like robot things. He was a farm guy but he was always making stuff so there was always junk around. I’m like a junk fan.
I think also observing it as a kid and being like what the fuck is this thing for not understanding it but like just being attracted to it I don't know if that answers what you said.
Audience Member 1: No, I totally agree with you. more times people touch something, I think you infuse it…
Elaine Cameron-Weir: …With power or something. Yeah. Magic. And it has a history in the world already outside of me. My dad made those lenses in the middle. he doesn't consider himself an artist, but he's making these homemade lenses to make a telescope. The glass is from the abandoned Prairie house that he grew up in. It's like the windows that he melted down. It's so poetic, but he just was like, that's the cheapest glass and it was around so I used it. And these ones didn't work out, so he gave them to me for the show at JTT.
Audience Member 2: In terms of representing things that are relics or degraded, does that harken back to the cadaver that you drew in art school, and do you still have a relationship to drawing?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: I think it's interesting. Maybe does go back to the cadaver, or certainly death, or being put to rest, or no longer useful. The idea of art having to have a use, like it's always something on my mind, like what defines art for some people is that it's useless, you know, or, do we demand our art to be a productive member of society and have a job or whatever. Did that answer your question?
Audience Member 2: Yes, but the second part was, do you still have a drawing practice when it comes to planning and building these forms?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: Weirdly, no. I don't really draw at all anymore. I make a lot outside of stuff here and there, occasionally I'll get help in my studio, but I make a lot of stuff myself wherever I can because I like the control. But I don't draw, really.
Ajay Kurian: Do you, sketch out sculptures at all?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: No.
Audience Member 2: Do you make smaller facsimiles, or do you just work with the raw material?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: I can picture it in my head, so I don't. I'll sometimes have to write down measurements, so I can trace something. If I want to make it symmetrical, but I don't draw.
Ajay Kurian: That's wild. It's wild that you can just visualize and start making.
Elaine Cameron-Weir: Mostly. I mean, I'll write stuff down or a list of the materials which kind of remind myself, and sometimes, yes, I will draw a little squiggly thing, but I don't start with drawing.
Audience Member 3: So what does the writing software mean to you? Is it a very personal recording of a journey kind of thing? Is it like a journal? Or is this like a book that you want to write that's completely private to you?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: It depends, it's very private and it’s not like a confessional thing. It’s highly edited. It's meant to seem like maybe it's just like stream of consciousness or like a jumble, but it's very particular.
I have pages and pages of Google Doc, which is kind of like a journal, because I can go back through it and kind of remember the time period and then it helps in a way confirm my own. Like is this thing I'm thinking about now totally out of the blue or crazy? I pick from it to put the occasional thing out in the world, and I also keep it very personal.
Audience Member 3: Would you ever show it?
Elaine Cameron-Weir: I made a book for this show in Germany, in Dortmund, where I put out a long piece of writing. I'll leave this on the table after, so if people want to page through just be delicate, please. This is my personal copy. And I have a PDF of it, if anyone's actually interested in it.
Ajay Kurian: If you are interested, you can write the NewCrits account and we'll send it. I just want to thank Elaine again for coming out tonight in the freezing cold. Even though she doesn't like public speaking, this was great. I really appreciate it. So, thanks Elaine.
There's probably still wine and some snacks. If you guys want to hang out, feel free to hang out for a little bit. Thanks for coming!
About The ForumThe 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.
Aaron Gilbert is a painter whose work depicts symbolic and psychological narratives. Gilbert’s work focuses on the transformative potential of individuals and love as a transcending force amidst personal loss, and societal crisis. His pictorial style draws formally from early Italian (trecento and quattrocento) painting, Mexican Retablos, and multiple traditions of miniature painting. The architecture is often stylized to emphasize ways that public and institutional space enforces ideology, and sets boundaries to how figures within the paintings have agency. In many paintings, the work may focus on a scene from a private or individual life, but simultaneously invoke the presence of institutional forces. Aaron was a father before becoming an artist, and his ethnicity is mixed White and Latino and his work often examines how external historical forces impact private and intimate interactions, and exert an influence that goes beyond the intentions of the figures themselves.
Gilbert has exhibited at PPOW Gallery, Sant’Andrea de Scaphis in Rome, Chris Sharp Gallery, Lyles and King, and Deitch Projects. He is a 2022 Colene Brown Art Prize recipient and 2015 Louis Comfort Tiffany Award recipient, and has been awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Letters as the 2010 ‘’Young American Painter of Distinction.’‘ His work is currently in the permanent collections of The Hammer Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Whitney Museum, Columbus Museum of Art, The High Museum, the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the RISD Museum. Residencies include 2013 Fountainhead Residency, 2012 Yaddo, 2008 LMCC Workspace Residency as well as a 2008 Affiliate Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. Aaron holds an MFA in painting from Yale, and a BFA in painting from RISD.
About The ForumThe 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: Hi everybody, I want to thank you all for coming. This is the 19th NewCrits Talk. NewCrits is a global platform for studio mentorship, we have 16 artists on our platform that you can meet with directly, and we offer studio mentorship, professional mentorship, portfolio reviews and contract coaching. It really is a platform to democratize our education.
The one thing that we do in person are these talks. But we're also starting to offer classes. Our first class starts tomorrow, which is called New Identities for Dangerous Times. We'll be offering three more courses in the fall with some more artists that will all be announced soon. Okay, that's it for NewCrits.
We are worn out psychologically, physically, financially, ecologically, spiritually. We've suffered injuries and lost loved ones, limbs and homes. We've struck out and played on lost love and conjured hope. Ours is an age of exhaustion, and Aaron Gilbert paints the exhausted of the earth. The figures in Aaron's paintings are weary, beyond weary, but nevertheless, we see them on dates playing with their children, buying one another with desire and holding one another with heat for all the exhaustion.
People still seem to fuck. And that's a good thing because in a way that erotic charge is hope. A hope for a new tomorrow, for new life, and for survival. Now with all that I saw in Aaron's work, it would still be enough. But what compels me to stay longer is a strange sort of enchanting that many of the paintings hold.
They're pictures that hold their own ruptures in very subtle and sometimes secretive ways. They're paintings of modern life with wormholes to other moments, other feelings, and other spirits. We're not just in the present. We are with the ghosts of many moments and I can't help but think that they're there to help us find redemption. And in the moment we find ourselves in, I welcome all the redemption I can. Please welcome Aaron Gilbert.
Aaron Gilbert: Thank you. That was really beautiful, actually.
Ajay Kurian: How are you feeling?
Aaron Gilbert: I'm good. It's nice to see everyone here.
Ajay Kurian: You got your tequila.
Aaron Gilbert: Yeah, and a room full of people that I'm really happy to have a conversation with. So this is great.
Ajay Kurian: Aaron has a show up at Gladstone Gallery right now. It's up until April 19th and I thought we should just start there. The first thing that crosses my mind, especially looking at older work and now looking at the new show, is that a lot of these paintings feel like history paintings in their own way. How does that sit with you? What do you think about the space of history painting?
Aaron Gilbert: That's really something I was trying to contend with in a very different way. Probably about six years ago, seeing Diego Rivera's murals at the National Palace in Mexico City for the first time. I was really knocked over by the scope and the scale of that project. It felt like a lifelong undertaking. In a way, it felt like a visual form of Howard Zinn’s A People's History of the United States, and it just made me think that there was a much further reach I could do.
There was a much bigger set of questions that I could go for more directly. I think this show was a beginning to me trying to ask and respond to those questions. In a way, I wanted to make like the worst WPA paintings ever made. Not that they're bad paintings, but that they kind of hit at how I feel viscerally about the world that we're living through in relation to what it should be.
Ajay Kurian: When you say the worst WPA paintings, I'm trying to see what energy that conjures in the work, because to me, you tow the line between finding something that feels structural but also extremely intimate. And when I think about murals, intimacy is not the first thing that comes to mind.
Aaron Gilbert: That's where I take issue with a lot of history painting, or where I have maybe a different way of approaching it. I think mine's kind of an inverse, you know? So if you think of a classic history painting; it's like a top down telling of history. Here are archetypes of the workers and here is this historical figure. But for me, what I'm engaged with is this idea of how can I, as someone knowing all these contradictory and all these facets of myself and my life that are pulling in different directions and that are compromised in different ways.
How can I still in some way find a way to be transformative in this world? How do we start with the lives that we actually inhabit and figure out how to move outwards and address these larger societal, historical forces? So it's kind of a reverse process, but with the same set of concerns.
Ajay Kurian: In this painting here, there's so many things going on and so many places to start, but in terms of thinking about particularity first, do you find that structure helps you to then start orienting these stories? Or how does a painting of this vast kind of start coming together in the questions that you're trying to tackle?
Aaron Gilbert: Yeah, so this is a painting I didn't know how to do before I did it, and I just kind of knew that was going to be the case. The way I approach it is I start making drawings and there's a full size work on paper that's the same scale as this drawing. Initially, the painting started with this very small sketch of the mother, and the daughters staying on the tub, braiding her hair. And I liked that gesture. Then I was thinking the mother would be looking out the window and I didn't know where yet, but maybe there's a courtyard. So initially she was ground level. And then because I'm working on paper, I started to think it was a lot more interesting in terms of the power dynamic of her gaze, for her to be higher up and looking down at someone or something outside. Because it was a work on paper, I was able to cut it and move it up.
This was gradually built piece by piece. And the only way I knew to approach it was to start with these small and intimate vignettes, begin to tie them together and think about how to build a full constellation within a piece.
Ajay Kurian: That makes a lot of sense. As soon as I see that scene or focus in on it, I'm like, oh yeah, that's an Aaron Gilbert painting right there. But then to see that become a story that unfolds into other stories and then has a larger constellation within it, is something that structurally makes sense to me. In the early work that I had seen of yours, there's an intimacy that's based in a single room.
Aaron Gilbert: Right, right. It is a very close, self-contained, tight composition.
Ajay Kurian: Yeah, and then in a lot of these paintings, there's something that's happening where there's a zoom-out, there’s different things happening in the same picture, and there’s different gatherings of how people are organizing themselves in different related stories.
Aaron Gilbert: With those earlier works, I was always thinking that the power of this work is if I can have this palpable feeling of larger societal and historical forces. So it might just be a couple in the kitchen preparing food or it could be very self-contained, seemingly. But how can I deliver in a way where you feel these larger social forces and you feel that the figures themselves might have one set of intentions, but then the full weight and gravity of what was happening and what they were doing within the scene was a lot more complex.
Ajay Kurian: This is a painting that comes to mind, largely because there's so many moments where when I see figures interacting, I understand the intimacy. It is one of the paintings that actually was harder for me to figure out the immediate dynamics. There's something about what's going on between them and what's going on as they function within a system that felt compelling, but also there's a different energy here that I thought was kind of curious.
Aaron Gilbert: In a way, this work was part of a bridge from work that I had been making for at least a decade until this recent show. I'd kind of hit a point where I wanted to broaden the scope of domestic intimacy and find equally intimate scenes. The workplace became an interesting place for me. I wanted to bring it more into the public sphere. When you're working with people five days a week for 8 to 12 hours a day, that’s an incredibly locked in scenario where you really get to know each other and your energies rub off on each other.
So with this painting; I've been working at a fabrication shop for about five years and I was always really interested in how machines and huge pallets of raw materials would get moved around. In a way, the inside of the warehouse was this shape shifting thing that you're living inside of. If you're wearing safety gear, then the patterns and colors of the safety gear are a continuation of the building itself. All the reflective tape to guide people through the building. So it felt kind of like this parasitic host type of relationship. And I wanted to try to just play with that a little bit.
Ajay Kurian: When you started making paintings, what place of thinking did it start with? Did you always have all of these ideas of thinking about how you wanted to make a picture or did it slowly develop? Where did picture making and where did the love of art initially come from?
Aaron Gilbert: It's been a gradual development. I'd say everyone in my immediate family is very creative, so I was kind of the last to dip into visual art in a way. I was studying mechanical engineering and I was working towards an associate degree in engineering technology. I was really not in love with it. The culture of it really didn't sit right with me and I just felt like whatever I'd be making would be a part of a larger destructive machine.
It just felt really against my spirit in the deepest way in terms of what I'd be participating in. But I definitely would not have been bold enough to be an artist without having something that felt like a stable way to make money or support a family. So I started taking art classes when I was studying towards the engineering degree, and then it was a long four year process from when I started taking art classes to when I finally was able to go to art school. And during that time, my son was born. So I also began painting seriously at the same time that I was beginning fatherhood.
Also, the first couple years when I was in art school, I was working multiple jobs. I was getting some time in the studio, but really having to balance it with these different jobs out in the world, was really physically taxing but also kind of really interesting.
Maybe one more thing I'll say that was really important is, because of being a father also, I knew I couldn't try everything that I was interested in. I felt right away that I had one shot at this. I have to find something that feels like I can really run with it and I have to go as fast and far as I can with that.
Ajay Kurian: And at that moment you thought, I can be a painter?
Aaron Gilbert: At that moment, I thought these three years I was at Rhode Island School of Design might be the only time I make paintings. You know, like 15 years later I might be pulling my paintings out from under the bed to show my kids to say this is what I did. So I wanted to really love what I did, and I wanted to really believe it. I wanted it to matter to me, and I wanted there to be enough of me in it. I mean, honestly, I didn't think that people made careers out of this.
Ajay Kurian: Taking those initial art classes, I can understand that to have been a way for you to find an outlet for something, or a way to see, okay, what is it that I want to do? But the fact that it really became the beating heart of your creative life — that’s a profound thing. What were those initial art classes?
Aaron Gilbert: Oh, it was just like a beginning drawing type of art class. Like a lot of artists, I'm pretty socially awkward and reclusive. I don't like small talk or chatter and like I didn’t want to make artwork that was this doorway to being able to have conversations with somebody out there about things that were rolling around in my head. I just wanted to put something else up for people to sink their teeth into.
Ajay Kurian: For one, I think when you're talking about you painting your life and the physical circumstances of everything around you, you never seem to have a problem with putting really personal things into your work. People ask comedians this a lot: where’s the line? What's something that you wouldn't make a joke about? And I was looking at your work and I was wondering if there's something that's too private for Aaron to make a painting about.
Aaron Gilbert: I mean, there's many things that are too private. It's also the spirit of how it's made. I mean, I love being alive and I love people. I feel like if there's something I can make that has a meaningful connection with someone else, and I don't even need to meet them, but if I feel this gravity drawing me towards the making of it then I try to honor and follow that.
I've definitely had moments more so with music where it felt like a song saved my life, you know? Where it was just like I was in this place of being really alone and something just hit me and there was someone else there with me. I've never been interested in being like an edge lord with my work. It's just not what I'm concerned with. I think there is kind of an openness that I'm maybe not even that self-conscious of a lot of times.
Ajay Kurian: I think it's one thing that stood out when you were talking about that was the way that the energy or the spirit in which you paint these seemingly private things, or just feeling the intimacy of a moment. I think what you balance really well is something that feels very quiet, personal and intimate, but there's also something that feels almost mythological about it. That the characters in the paintings are both themselves and the stand-ins. That they're who they are, but they're also maybe shells.
Aaron Gilbert: I think there's a lot in that statement. To pull back for a second, there’s this kind of this larger thing I've been thinking about a lot. This idea of what storytelling is and that it's kind of this concept that we don't live in. We live in our narrative of what the universe is and what the world is. It's kind of like living in a tent within a larger universe. And narrative is how we describe the contours of that to each other and the horizon of what's possible. Then I look at mythology or spirituality as an overlaying of meaning onto that.
So to have this dual thing between, this is a painting of a specific person I might know, or maybe of two or three people who've been combined into one hybrid character. But then maybe painting moves it towards the symbolic or the mythological. What's in the room is partly the individual and then partly this greater thing playing out that has to do with how they're participating in something that is a mystery, that is cosmic, that is beyond what our daily cultural scene is.
Ajay Kurian: Were you the philosopher of the family?
Aaron Gilbert: Oh man, no, no, no. I'd say very different ways. Both sides of the family.
Ajay Kurian: So that was like the milieu, like you’re surrounded by people thinking about grander ideas?
Aaron Gilbert: Grander and worse ideas. When I was in my first semester in undergrad at RISD, I don't even remember what I brought to class, but my work was very rightly being criticized. The teacher was basically saying, I don't see anything of right now in this painting. It feels like you're kind of stuck trying to make something that looks like art, but nothing of this moment is in the painting.
I was talking to my mother on the phone after, and she said an artist's job isn't to reflect the moment. She said the purpose of or one major part of a calling of an artist is the prophetic. I think that was something that's really stuck with me in terms of the work that was with anybody.
Ajay Kurian: My mother has not said that to me.
Aaron Gilbert: And yet here you are. So yeah, similar stories.
Ajay Kurian: Of course, mothers are your first coach, confidant, teacher, all of these things. So I'm sure there's something there. But to establish the prophetic so early in the work and in how you understand the calling of an artist, this is purely for my own curiosity, how does one cultivate the prophetic?
Aaron Gilbert: I've been thinking about it in different ways lately, but maybe to get back to that conversation of not living in the full universe, we're inside this moment and this age within some room that's been built out of a shared and very flawed story. And I feel like whenever we hit the poetic is where there's a terror in the logic.
Because if something's poetic, a linear explanation doesn't really reveal its power. But we feel that some truth has been revealed. It’s something that we can circle around, but the language we have right now doesn't fully deliver what it's delivering. It's this potential. I feel like maybe that's some kind of tear from the other side, penetrating and calling to us to move into a different fuller stage. So I link that to the prophetic in a way.
Ajay Kurian: Do you think that those tears always stay open or that they're historically contingent? Jackson Pollock was somebody that I'd seen in every poster in every college dorm, and I was just like, this is so dead to me. Then much later in life, I remember going to the Met and standing in front of a Pollock and I was like, holy shit. It felt like it tore open again. This is a very sort of modest example but it's happened many times. For some reason that occurs to me right now and there's moments when I feel like a particular artwork has opened, and a particular artwork has closed, and that there's almost an aperture towards another place.
Aaron Gilbert: Yeah, I can see that. That's what you mean by historically contingent. I don't know that I have an answer to that, but I believe it.
Ajay Kurian: Just in terms of your experience, I know that ancient artworks have been really important for you to see how they can stay present for you. Are there times when art feels like it's not living for you that way anymore?
Aaron Gilbert: I think I need to think about that, but maybe what's most generative for me to think about right now is the carrying and passing on of a flame and that we're participating in a continuum. I was just looking at Jack Witten's work today at MoMA, and there was no show I could think of that's less timely than that.
We're here for a very short amount of time, each of us. And something I think about, also with raising children, is seeing the generation before me begin to pass and die. So we need to grab and hold onto the things that they carried to us and reorganize them and deliver them forward into the future. So I guess I think about that more and I don't worry too much about where something feels. I'm just looking for magic where it is and trying to keep those embers.
Ajay Kurian: I remember when I was in your studio that was, I was telling you that I was asking people what they think is missing from art school? And the first thing that came up for you was the fact that we don't really hear from our elders in art school. That it's more like, what's happening now? What's happening here and what's the presence?
Being around older artists where there's a different understanding of what present is, felt really important. I never really thought about that. Of course you have older professors when you're in school, but I didn't think about it in terms of a larger continuum of what is being passed on, what's being preserved, what's being understood, and it's a beautiful thing.
Aaron Gilbert: Well, I think there's something terrible that happens when you're isolated from generations, both younger than you and older than you. That happens in academia and I don't think that's that healthy. In the arts, the relevance of your work is so connected to a sensitivity and read of the societal moment and by only being around your age, the band of what you're receiving becomes narrowed so much that there's a loss of wisdom. I think that something is sacrificed by that.
Ajay Kurian: In thinking about this show, was it in any way different than how you've thought about shows in the past or how you're constructing this story? Because you're thinking about the universe that we live in and that we're just seeing a fraction of the story. Which is almost a way to unpack different stories or narratives that are kind of lying latent. Is that the place in which a show comes from, or is that the place in which the work comes from?
Aaron Gilbert: It's kind of hard to decide what came first. When I was making the work, I really wanted it to be this cohesive thing. And I mean, I haven't done a lot of shows, you know, so this was a great opportunity where all of a sudden I had more than a year to work through and develop a full body of work.
I didn't know what those images would look like. I knew some things that would be in it. And I knew there was an unknown that I really, really, really wanted to move towards. I had no idea what that was or how I'd get there or what it would look like. But then I would just go into the studio and I would need to make something. So I'd be starting with making a painting or making drawings towards a painting. But I had the benefit of having that time to be able to reject something because it might be a nice path, but I don't think it's the right branch to take. There was definitely a lot of testing different things in that sense.
Ajay Kurian: I guess this is the case with every artist, but it's the process of sharpening your deeper intuitions towards a path that consistently feels true and whatever that truth is for you. That’s the basis of so many bodies of work. But seeing this show come together and seeing how both labored and free these paintings feel. They feel extremely precise, but not like there was such a specific plan. Like when I see these kinds of crescent moons up here, there’s a joy there that doesn't feel like it was premeditated. It was just like this image started coming together and then moons were floating and there's nothing left. There's nothing else to explain about that besides the fact that it needs to happen. There's a necessity in the picture.
Aaron Gilbert: I think you're hitting the nail on the head. There are a lot of stages that are really developed and worked through. But if something doesn't surprise me by the end of it, then I feel like the painting was kind of dead on arrival. That I must have slept through the making of it and not really been present.
Ajay Kurian: How much do you get rid of? Do you destroy work?
Aaron Gilbert: I don't usually destroy paintings. There's definitely a lot of unfinished ones. There's a number of ones that probably won't be finished. And I make as many drawings as I can.
Ajay Kurian: You have these drawings of SpongeBob in your studio that were so fucking good. Imagine SpongeBob with the weariness of one of Aaron's figures where they're tired, they’re just so tired. Man, I think about it probably once a week. There’s just something that's so accurate about what I feel like everyone is feeling, paired with the manic personality of SpongeBob.
That's like what you have to do in the world and sometimes I feel like everybody has to be a laughing idiot just to make it through, and then to come home and the depletion in him in those drawings is, it hit me really hard and I can't stop thinking about it.
Aaron Gilbert: One thing I've been thinking about with SpongeBob, like after the fact, is how children are very excited about life and the magic of this world is rejuvenated by the presence of children. They're these messengers from the stars and to them, life should be magical and we should be present and it should be fun. I feel like SpongeBob kind of is all those things. When he arrives at work to flip patties, there's nothing he'd rather be doing, you know?
I’m not saying that's how you should feel about your job, but it's just that excitement about being present. I think with the drawings that we're speaking of, it's more like what happens when you’re in your mid forties and that person is in there somewhere, but there's a lot of miles between them. There's kind of a larger project that it’s a part of, and I really can't wait to share with people.
Ajay Kurian: The fact that it's part of a larger project now, I'm there. I'll fly wherever it's going. When you're talking about children being messengers of the stars, it made me think of this painting and when I first saw it, put me in the strangest place. I think when I initially saw it, or I initially saw an image, and it was as if the child was like an inflatable or there was something so disembodied about the body. The more time I've spent with it, and I guess it also helps that I've heard you talk about it, but this coming from another place and that there is this alien sense of a messenger from somewhere else.
My partner has a son who I've known since he was five, and that was a great time to meet him because there were still these like vapors of other places that you could still kind of be in touch with. And I've heard this from other parents. There's a curator who I was talking to about a show that I'm thinking about, and to the wrong person it would've sounded like a little woo woo. I just didn't know this curator that well yet, so I was just testing it. I was like, this is what it's about, this is what it is, take it or leave it. And she was like, I would've thought that's a little out there, but I have a 3-year-old now and he has had a fully prior life before this, and he’ll tell me about the people he used to meet on his walks home. She was like, I have no explanation, but it is a thorough trip down a series of memories that she can't explain.
Aaron Gilbert: That's incredible.
Ajay Kurian: She was like, that changed everything. There's these moments where life upends all the rules that you know, and you have to obey the enchantment of that.
Aaron Gilbert: That's a wonderful thing though, to have these things that take us from a place that feels tired and constant and predictable into something that reinvents life.
Ajay Kurian: It's the funny place that I also see your work sitting in, where there's a lot of really heavy things in this show alone. We can run the gamut and see everything that life has to offer in a sense. I mean, I feel like I don't even need words for this. There's such a weight, and yet I also feel there's still some kind of levity. There's still the fact that this painting is called Hot Moms.
It's a good way to orient it. It's a good way to sit with it. There's a slowness to everything about it. There's a slowness in how even time itself is making itself manifest in the painting. But it also gives you permission. The title Hot Moms gives you permission to treat it as both super heavy and super light. And I really like that 'cause I, in a sense I feel like, if you don't know how to be dumb, then I don't know how smart you really can be either. You gotta have both. You gotta be able to just fucking be dumb. And I mean that not in a pejorative sense.
Aaron Gilbert: Yeah, I feel you. With this painting, the beginning to me was a small drawing I did of the male figure seated from behind. In my head he was like this older version of myself and I was like, I'll have long, beautiful hair. You know, every morning I'll be looking at myself in the mirror. I'll still have game. I just really want to enjoy this playful and full of vitality vision of a future version of myself. You know, like you have those locks, working on it, and so that was how this started. I just thought it was funny and interesting, but I had no idea what that would lead to.
Ajay Kurian: So that's where it started. I mean, it went a lot of places. Where do the floating balaclavas come in?
Aaron Gilbert: I thought it was interesting how they kind of look like Pacman heads. They could be containers and I liked that they could double as something else, that could be entered, and I just let it take me there.
Then there's parts that to me, were very, very serious. Like the child who's next to the mother. That's a very specific relationship between a child and a mother that's protective and very much, you know, this is my home, this is my world, this is my universe.
In my head, it never was settled and I wanted it to stay open. Whether he was seeing himself as a child, if he was looking at a real child, or if he's looking at a child but not seeing the child, and seeing his younger self instead. And I think all those things can be true at the same time.
Ajay Kurian: There’s a spectral quality there. I feel like there’s a number of ways in which you use the ghost or the specter of something that either has happened or is yet to happen. There's a haunting that happens and it doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing. We exist with many kinds of beings and it's fascinating to see how that plays out. Because sometimes it's like an actual figure.
There's one painting where there are two circles next to the person's head and it orients you in this way that you lock into that feeling. But it's not explicable as a specific narrative. It's the same way that sometimes color can lock you in. Like seeing that kind of green turquoise of the roller skate wheels, it knocks in a specific feeling, especially since it's one of the coolest tones or it’s so pronounced in a painting of largely warm yellow greens, reds and pinks.
You just see those wheels and you're like, those wheels are here to tell me something because of that color orientation. There’s such a fluidity in the way that that happens in a lot of these paintings where it can be the way that something's painted, that it's here and not here. Or it can be the pronunciation of color that just knocks it into place. It's almost like the symbology is medieval.
Aaron Gilbert: I think a lot of the painting that I've really been influenced by, in terms of the western cannon, is from Giotto and earlier. So I look at a painter like Giotto, which was this moment of a doorway between two worldviews. One was coming from this world being a place that was still inhabited with magic, where the sacred was still present in living and non-living things.
Basically an enchanted world where there is mystery and forces in the presence of the sacred, kind of with this Cartesian philosophy where all matter, all plants, animals, and even humans are raw material meant to be extracted and carved out in service of industry and for profit accumulation.
That philosophy was kind of a necessary underpinning if you look at the larger catastrophes of colonialism and a lot of the things that we're looking at now. The oncoming ecological crisis is also a result. It required this very degenerate narrative or story to be sold.
And I look at a painter like Giotto as someone who’s, whether he realized it or not, work embodies this doorway between those two moments. Historically, a quote that I talk about a lot is when Mark Fisher was writing on ontology and he states that, when we've hit this terminal point in history where we're no longer able to visualize some positive possible version of a future, we need to look back to these past relics for echoes of other possible futures. So I think there are ways that I'm kind of really looking at and riffing off of moves that were in different traditions of paintings that predate. We've hit this wall, so where are there new doorways to find so we can actually move into something different?
Ajay Kurian: In thinking about doorways and symbols, there's ways in which you're using extremely well-known corporate symbols, but I as a viewer believe that there's something more through the painting. And again, just on a personal level, I'm curious if you believe that the corporate symbol, even though it is couched in a capitalist vocabulary in its inception, can transcend that or can become something else?
Aaron Gilbert: There's a couple parts to that. Firstly, when I'm using these logos, it's because I think they are something more than what their awareness or intention is. I've been thinking a lot about how commodity fetishism is the metaphysics of our moment now. I'm not more interested in Adidas than any other company, but that logo really hit and struck me. I was walking past the storefront at night, I saw it and I was just really drawn in. It felt so seductive, cold, and it vibrated. It's kind of like a lotus and it's definitely pulling from these conscious and unconscious archetypes deep within our psyche.
Secondly, my interest in continuing to play with it is I'm interested in what happens when you read it in the same way you read the religious archetypal image, or religious iconographic symbols. If you look at Catholic paintings, where there's a crucifix or maybe it's 30 other things. When this is placed next to it, I'm interested in what happens.
There’s another Mark Fisher quote where he was talking about the National Gallery in London or something like that. If some visiting extraterrestrials were to see all these things laid out, all the different things that humans believe, but we don't believe in any of them. And he was kind of saying that's the power of capitalism as it can consume everything. But it also doesn't believe in it. It kind of kills the belief in that thing.
So what happens when you put these logos that are the face of commodity fetish, this is the thing that's supposed to draw us in. Like, if you think about angler fish, where it's got that light. That’s what that logo is, in a way. In my mind, that’s that thing that draws me in to participating in something that's gonna devour you. Devour me and devour everything. But can we take that and then bend it and then what? What does it become?
Ajay Kurian: Because I think the bending is really successful. This feels like an aperture to something else. It doesn't feel like an aperture to rapacious capitalism. It feels like it's a window into the conditions of what kind of privation capitalism creates. But it doesn't feel like it lives and dies there, it feels otherworldly too. The fact that you made me believe in the mystical possibility of the Adidas symbol, that's where I was like, well, shit, I guess I like the Adidas symbol.
That's not the takeaway though. But this is the angler fish. I'm thinking about the Adidas symbol in a different realm and it adjusted what plane I'm thinking about it on. That's the success for me.
Ajay Kurian: I feel like now might be a good time to open this up to some questions.
Audience Member: You already talked about this a little bit, but leaning a little bit more into how these spirits or emissaries function. These ghost-like figures appear in so many of your paintings and I'm so drawn to them. Do they function as that terror in the fabric of normal reality that's inviting you to see the world differently and mystical? Do you see them as entities that are coexisting with us? I’d just love to hear how these beings function in your universe.
Aaron Gilbert: I think at the heart of it, there's ways that we're all bridges between what we're aware of, what we know and then things that are a mystery to us. I don't know if it's an either or, in terms of a figure being solid or not. Maybe there's a slipperiness between when the same figure is fully in the room and then also being an opening to something that’s outside.
Audience Member: The way I see your art pieces, especially the one that you created at the beginning which are so beautiful, are on so many stories all together that to me kind of looks like a cabbage. But if we’re talking about your new upcoming project, is that gonna be a bigger universe with the same intense intimacy, or are you gonna keep the bad that you’re leading towards too at the moment? How is that gonna be in the picture?
Aaron Gilbert: I don't know totally yet. I hope there's something in it. I have to grow into making, and I hope that process isn't too painful. But I really believe in the creative act and I think it's something that requires you to let go of what you know to some degree and let go of what you brought into the room to some degree, when you engage with it. The work and the process should guide you into expanding what you’re considering with that piece. I love the cabbage metaphor. It's the first time I've heard that.
Audience Member: I really appreciate the way you've spoken about this vigilance you have or heroic posture when it comes to history painting and the things you inherit through painting that you like don't fuck with.
My question is about what kind of formal or internal questions you bring to your work. Especially in this body of work, where you’ve scaled up and there's a lot of bigger swings that come closer to the ambition, scale and heroism of some of the pain we were talking about before. I'm wondering how you negotiated that. Is it a matter of keeping room for improvisation while not planning too much? When it comes to making sure you keep your paintings from falling into this heroic posture that you don't want?
Aaron Gilbert: What do you mean by heroic posture?
Audience Member: I sort of arrived at that language through the way you're talking about murals and how you want it to be a blank or a bad WPA mural, and what you said about keeping close to your life and the domestic sphere helps you stay away from this archetype painting.
Aaron Gilbert: I mean, I don't know the context of this piece well enough to speak about it directly, but I feel archetypes lack something. When it comes to the very particular thing that I'm trying to accomplish with the work, and what I'm really concerned with, is this question as a human — how can I actually participate in this world right now in a way that's substantial and meaningful and potent and has a positive impact?
I'm really concerned about what is this world that's being passed on to the next generation and what's my role to play in that? So just like tactically speaking, it's important to have the flaws and compromised realities of the characters be foregrounded. Not just flaws, but also the really complex range of who we all are. We aren't these one dimensional like executions of an idea, you know? We have all these different layers to us. So I'm always trying to think of how to develop each character within the image so that, as a viewer, you might walk into it first seeing that figure one way but then also see these other nuances that actually kind of change something about that figure and or change your read of it.
So to get back to the first thing about having the presence of imperfections, it's because I think we can't be so fragile that if our own imperfections become visible, we shatter and no longer are capable of realizing our full potential.
Just this kind of insistence that whatever is absurd about me when I look in the mirror in the morning, and just being able to see that. To look myself in the face and be like, yes, I see that there's all these things that if I could, I would wish differently, but that doesn't have the final say.
And I have this potential to do something that is profound and that's going to be what defines me, whatever my divine cosmic destiny is. Nothing anyone says has a power over that. And I can activate that and articulate that in the world. When I think of the standard social realist artwork, it feels like it's a template that doesn't have the capacity to do that unless these other things are introduced. And so my question is, what are those other things that need to be introduced?
Ajay Kurian: It felt like this has come up before where you were talking about George Tooker’s, and the institution overwhelming the individual. I think we've all seen in Aaron's paintings that there’s a real struggle there that is not completely subsumed. There's still something alive in the individual or in that kind of human intimacy.
Aaron Gilbert: Tooker is a painter who I'm really indebted to. When I started to build what my work could look like, that was like a major influence. Tooker also has this breadth of energy in one painting to the next. But I think overall, the architecture is showing this crushing societal force in the beautiful artworks. I'm always interested in when I find someone who's influencing my work, how do I define how I'm indebted to them? And then how do I define the ways that I'm the antithesis of what they're doing?
Audience Member: Could you talk a little bit about the use of color and your color influence?
Aaron Gilbert: I think about having the light be chromatic, like having there be a color made of the light and atmosphere and a temperature that's palpable or a heat or coolness. I want the light and the atmosphere to actually be like a major character. I want there to be like a frequency that you feel, you know, 'cause I'm not making future JPEGs. I'm making objects and I'm really interested in this idea of a painting as an object that is singular in the world. It's like this instrument or this bell that rings out and when you're in front of it, it alters the frequency of the room. Color is this place beyond language, and that just seems to be everything that a painting is or can be about.
With some of the paintings I made this past year and a half, I didn't know how to make a painting without having that presence of some of the pain that I was experiencing by witnessing the changes that are happening. Color was a way to try to do that.
That's not the only thing, but there's a couple paintings where I point to where it's trying to reduce this palette into something that felt almost like the world had been scraped away from the inside. When I talk about the worst WPA painting, it's like this thing that had been eviscerated and there was a shell that was left.
Ajay Kurian: That's a nice place to end. We're back to where we started with the eviscerated WPA paintings.
I want to end on this just 'cause it felt potent. I know that you've read Carlo Ravelli and have been thinking about time and quantum physics in that regard. I just wanted to know if you had read about this theory on white holes as opposed to black holes.
If there's any physicists out here, please don't quote me on any of this. It's been thought that when things go into a black hole, they are crushed into a singularity and it's gone. Their theory suggests that actually it's more of a bounce that happens and that what gets pulled into the black hole emerges from the white hole in a completely different time. So the white hole is essentially the opposite. Nothing can enter the white hole, only things can exit it. Hmm. And it kind of felt like an interesting conduit to think about how the paintings are sort of pushing out these different tears or like making apparent different tears.
Aaron Gilbert: That's so poetic. Which book was that?
Ajay Kurian: I think it's called White Holes, it’s a relatively new book by Carlo Ravelli.
Aaron Gilbert: What Ajay is referring to also is that when he visited my studio, I talked about this book called The Order of Time by Carlo Ravelli. That is really about the way we commonly think of time breaks when you get at the quantum level and that we're left with something much stranger, and how it quickly enters this conversation of the mystery about human consciousness. So I would love to read that.
Ajay Kurian: You have five more days to see the mysteries of human consciousness in Aaron's work. So I really suggest you go see these objects, these paintings, these real things in person. And I just wanna thank Aaron again tonight. A round of applause for Aaron.
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Salome Asega is the Deputy Director of Strategy and Innovation and Director of NEW INC, the New Museum’s cultural incubator for creative practitioners working across art, design, and technology. Asega is also an artist, researcher, and educator working between participatory design and emerging technologies. Prior to joining NEW INC in 2021, Asega was the inaugural New Media Art Research Fellow for Creativity and Free Expression at the Ford Foundation, where she supported artists and organizations in the new media arts ecosystem. She is also a cofounder of POWRPLNT, a digital art collaboratory based in Brooklyn that offers free and sliding-scale workshops run by established media artists. Since 2015, Asega has been teaching studio and design methodology courses in the MFA Design and Technology program at Parsons School of Design.
About The ForumThe 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: I've been trying to think of a way to aptly describe what it is that Salome Asega does because the way she's thinking about a practice, artistic and otherwise is something that is hard to recognize if we maintain the terms of our discernment into what an art practice is meant to look like. But once you see what she's up to, you can't unsee it and you start to see how this paradigm is one we need to cultivate. With that in mind. The phrase I've come to is that Salome is a culture gardener. She knows which introductions to make, which bee needs what flower, and she gets that the ecosystems are stronger than individuals, more nimble, less brittle. She also understands that in her words, inclusion ain't shit. What she's after is equity, and that means understanding that specific and specialized needs are met. Like which plants need more shade and which ones need more light? What does it take to create the conditions for genuine growth? And how do we grow together?
The growth we're accustomed to is the growth of capital, and that's the world we usually live in. To quote her again, right now, there's a group of cis hat white men in Silicon Valley that are actively working to build a future for us. Without our consent, we are living in their imagination, and I'm very interested in leveraging the power of collective imagination to present counter futures.
She's done this in projects ranging from Powrplnt to the Iyapo Repository under appointment as an art and tech fellow at the Ford Foundation. Currently, she's the director of New Inc. The New Museum's Own and First Museum led cultural incubator. And with it, she's planting her largest garden yet.
Please give it up for Salome Asega.
Salome Asega: That was really nice – thank you. I think you did the artist talk for me.
Ajay Kurian: Yeah, we can just drink now. No, it came to me today when you sent me the radio show. But I think, maybe my first question is how does that term feel to you? How does it feel to try that on?
Salome Asega: I don't know if I've ever asked you this question, but at New Inc I like to ask people if they're an architect or a gardener.
Ajay Kurian: No shit.
Salome Asega: Have I asked you this question? Oh my God. Maybe it's a thing we started after you, but are you an architect or a gardener?
Ajay Kurian: I'm definitely a gardener.
Salome Asega: Why? What's the difference for you?
Ajay Kurian: Okay. Actually, I said that impulsively. The reason I said it impulsively is that the very first show that I ever did in New York, was making a kind of garden as the exhibition. The thrust of the show was to almost think ontologically that everything has a dual status as both garden and gardener, so we have the ability to tend to other things, but we also are a thing that can be tended too. That's been foundational in how I think about a lot of things that I do and also how I see the world moving. It's not as totalizing. I think back then, I was a young artist trying to look for the answer. But I'm really curious, now you have me thinking, what is that difference and what does that mean to you?
Salome Asega: I always answered that I thought I was an architect because I was more interested in creating the infrastructure for things to exist. But then people would read me as a gardener. They said, for the same reason that you just gave, that I was in a habit and practice of tending to and caring for, right? Letting people grow in the ways that felt natural to them.
Ajay Kurian: I think a lot of people have this idea of what architect means, which is this singular genius that feels very male. It feels like it has all this baggage with it. Whereas, considering how you grew up and with all the computer engineers in your background, did it give you a different sense of what architect meant?
Salome Asega: For sure. One of our family activities was taking a computer apart and putting it back together again. Engineering, architecture, all these hard skills were never done singularly, they were always done as a group. You'd want to share this with someone you love, right? So I think that's always been part of my practice. I did my MFA in design and technology at Parsons and I learned all these things around physical computing. Then I would take out all these microprocessors and server motors through the back door, and run the workshops that ended up becoming part of Powrplnt, the Iyapo Repository and a lot of the projects I worked on. But it was never about becoming like a singular genius, coder, programmer on my own.
Ajay Kurian: What was your first relationship to art?
Salome Asega: That's hard to answer because I grew up in a city that didn't have cultural institutions in the way that we have in New York. And so I would count some of my first experiences with art as like my uncles coming over to family gatherings and playing music.
And art is just woven through our culture. I also have another uncle who painted a mural for a local Ethiopian restaurant in Vegas. Having to sit there and do my homework while he's painting – these are some of my early experiences with art. But then in terms of capital A art, I remember in high school learning that there was a James Turrell Installation in the Prada store in the Caesars Palace Casino.
Ajay Kurian: Amazing.
Salome Asega: The performance of going to the strip parking lot, my Toyota Corolla at 16, going through the casino, having the confidence to walk into the Prada store knowing I don't have any money, going to the back and just like sitting there to experience that James Turrell exhibit. And then walking back out through the casino, and being like “I saw art today”.
Ajay Kurian: James Turrell was in your orbit at 16? James Turrell was not in my orbit at 16. How did that happen?
Salome Asega: I had really good teachers in high school, one of which was Mr. Brewster, who ran the AV club. I don't know if you knew this about me, but I used to write and produce a daily 10 minute show for my high school.
Ajay Kurian: Yeah, that adds up.
Salome Asega: So I had many late nights where I'd be editing the show with friends and Mr. Brewster would put us onto music. I remember the first album he gave me was a MIA mixtape and he would just feed us art books, so that's how I learned about James Turrell. He also put me onto Marilyn Minter when she did her Las Vegas Billboard project. That’s another experience of getting in the Toyota Carillo and driving down the strip and being like that’s a Marilyn Minter billboard.
Ajay Kurian: Did that feel like it had a different kind of cultural capital to you than what you were familiar with before?
Salome Asega: It read as New York. If I was to go back to my teenage mind, this felt like validated art because it came from a big city.
Ajay Kurian: And you didn't think of Las Vegas as a big city?
Salome Asega: No. No. I was alive for our centennial celebration. I was living there at a time where the city was expanding so quickly around me. We lived on what was considered the edge of town, and now if you look at a map, we're like squarely at the center. We'd have scorpions in our backyard. We no longer have that.
Ajay Kurian: The only thing I'm genuinely intensely afraid of is scorpions.
Salome Asega: They’re so cute.
Ajay Kurian: Yeah, we're gonna skip it.
Salome Asega: Okay. Okay.
Ajay Kurian: The other thing that comes to mind, I remember going to Vegas when I was really young, probably actually around 15 or 16, and I don’t remember why exactly. But I went to a very fancy private school, and to get shit on in so many different ways for so many different reasons and also being brown in a school that was largely white; there was something that I couldn't fully articulate yet, but I felt small in a lot of different ways. And clothing was one of the ways where it was like, even if I can't buy these clothes, I want to be able to walk into these stores and take up space. So I remember Vegas being the first time where I got to see if I could flex that. And my family's just like - what is wrong with you? Why does this even matter to you, you're not buying anything? I haven't thought about this in a very long time. I completely forgot that Vegas was the first time that happened. But you see all those stores, all these spaces, and all these things that don't feel like they're for you, but in Vegas it does. Because it's so glitzy.
I'm wondering like. Was that also a place where you were like, okay, I just want permission for all of these spaces?
Salome Asega: Yeah, Vegas very much is a playground. I think for that reason it’s a place that is studied by designers and architects, because the city's design allows for this kind of performance and fantasy. You can be whoever you want there and the architecture encourages that actually. So I think combining that strip design with the kind of fantasy of the desert itself, the spiritual aspect of the desert, which is also a place where you can metamorphosize. You can be whoever you wanna be. I think I was encouraged by design to experiment and play, based on where I grew up.
Ajay Kurian: That, in a sense, makes it feel like it's possible to integrate the spiritual and the material.
Salome Asega: I feel like I know what you're gonna pull up.
Ajay Kurian: This project came to mind. One, because it's treating technology in such a different way, which feels foundational to the way that I see you treating technology routinely. Disembodiment towards embodiment, it's always to take you back to your body in a different way. It's always to extend yourself, but it's in a way that feels generative that I don't know if people always think about it that way. Could you talk about how this project started to come about and where this came from?
Salome Asega: I think I started these VR sketches called possession when I was in grad school and I was given one of the first Oculus headsets, like it was a dev kit and it didn't even have a fancy name yet. It wasn't on the market, it was meant for artists to just play and experiment with.
Ajay Kurian: How did that happen?
Salome Asega: I got it through Parsons because I was a student there and taught there, so I would just play with it.
Ajay Kurian: That's amazing.
Salome Asega: No one was using it, so I was like, let's see what this does. Then I started developing these underwater scenes that were thinking about what Mami Wata’s home would look like. Mami Wata is an Orisha that shows up in Caribbean and West African spiritual traditions like Santeria and Yoruba. And when I was looking at possession sculptures around Mami Wata, there were all these figures that had this kind of blobby Orisha, like over a figurative human head. It was as if the orisha was mounting the person like the same way that you would put on a VR headset.
So that's why I started working on these sketches that were thinking about the headset as an Orisha that you put on and then it takes you to whatever realm of the spirit. This ended up being part of a show that the curator Ali Rosa-Salas, who runs Abrons Art Center now organized at Knockdown Center, but it's since grown. So these images are just sketches, but there's a full VR film where I interviewed spiritual practitioners who've had experiences of being possessed by Mami Wata herself. In the film they recount their experience, what it felt like and where they were. Many of them were near bodies of water, and that's where they felt her spirit and felt called to the water. Two of the practitioners in particular said that they felt lured underwater to her palace and were promised attractiveness and great wealth. So yeah, it goes through that narrative with them.
Ajay Kurian: Wow. That feels like Vegas too.
Salome Asega: Yeah, that's true, very slot machine.
Ajay Kurian: That there's a pull and it takes you somewhere that feels like it will make you more.
Salome Asega: Then I worked with a musician, Dani Des, to score the film. You hear one of their beats and it's very undulating and wavelike, and then feels like it's pulling you under the water.
Ajay Kurian: So this takes shape when you're at Parsons.
Salome Asega: Yeah, when I was an instructor. Especially in the early years, I was just like, what can I get out of this program? I think that's why many artists who work with technologies continue to teach, because that's where you get access to all the emerging tools. So I stuck around for five, six years.
Ajay Kurian: It's interesting that you went through an MFA program. That's unexpected for me in understanding how your practice has developed since then, and how distributed it is. Because the MFA is something that normally consolidates an artist's output. Yeah. And turns it into a kind of product sometimes, for better or for worse. But you've avoided that and it doesn't even seem like it crossed your mind that's what you needed to do.
Salome Asega: No, but I did a very untraditional MFA program. I did design and technology at Parsons.
Ajay Kurian: So you weren't in the art program?
Salome Asega: No, but there was a crossover and some instructors who taught between two programs. That was pretty common at Parsons for there to be some overlap between all the programs within the school.
Ajay Kurian: When you were making this, did you make a distinction between Art with a capital A or cultural production?
Salome Asega: No, I was thinking about audience, but I wasn't thinking about how this will be a job, if that makes sense. I was just having fun following my nose, driven by total curiosity and was like thinking – how can I ask stronger questions? I'm looking at American Artist because we both taught in that program for a while too. It's unusual for that program because most people go in there with commercial endeavors. Like they want to work for the big studios. But there’s like a handful of us that are like, we are freaky and we wanna do artsy things.
Ajay Kurian: Yeah. I felt The New School, that was where I met more of the misfits. And the history of that school is unbelievably polluted at this point. But it starts with people that are fleeing and they're the intellectuals of Europe that are making The New School for social research. That felt vital. Was that the community or was it really just the design nerds and the people that were like, okay, we wanna do something different.
Salome Asega: Yeah, I think it was more design nerds and then again, a small handful of us. But some incredible artists have come out of that program. That's how I met Elise Smith. She was a year ahead of me in that program. And we were both like, what are we doing here and let's talk about our work and create a smaller community within this program.
Ajay Kurian: Okay, so you're not thinking about jobs. But when you graduate, what's your first job?
Salome Asega: I'm still not thinking about jobs. What did I do to make money? I hustled. Because I had all these coding skills, I started working with different music venues to design stages and wearables for musicians. Weird, weird stuff. If you go deep on a YouTube search, you can find these propeller hats I made for a band. Do you know L’Rain?
Ajay Kurian: Yeah.
Salome Asega: So before Taja Cheek started L’Rain, she was in a band called Throw Vision. I would do set visuals for her and make wearables, and I would create interactive apps for attendees and party goers to control the stage lighting and the visuals behind them. I would spend so much time doing this and barely was able to pay rent, but I was like, I'm hustling. It's the New York thing. I was also part of the team that put together that lighting grid in the back of Baby’s Alright. That was all made on processing, like open source free software. I'm sure it's crazy advanced now, but in 2014, if you peeked behind, you'd be like, this is not safe.
Ajay Kurian: So you really do follow your nose. It really is a generative place where this leads to this and this is exciting. So what's the next thing? How does that start to translate into the next project for you?
Salome Asega: At that point, I was working on a few small projects and then I started collaborating with an artist named Ayodamola Okunseinde.
He also came out of Parsons and we spent a summer doing research, throwing ideas back and forth, came up with Iyapo Repository, applied to a residency program with Eyebeam and did that for a year. That residency came with significant support, and from that I was able to hop around fellowships and residencies with this project.
Ajay Kurian: This is a project that particularly grabbed my attention, specifically this artifact. So if you can just give some background of what the Iyapo Repository is and then we can get into this particular project.
Salome Asega: Totally. So Iyapo Repository is a resource library that exists in a non-descript future. It houses a collection of art and artifacts made by and for people of African descent and how we design and develop those artifacts. It happens through a part series of participatory workshops where we invite people to think about the future in different domains. So we developed this card game, with PJ who works at New Inc now. He ran a wonderful print studio called Endless Editions, which still exists, and you should print things there. But we developed this game where we would give people these cards and then they'd have to determine artifacts. If you were given this set of cards, you'd have to come up with a revolutionary tool, an educational tool that somehow incorporates a motor. So you have a design direction, right? A domain you're designing for, and then some physical quality the object must have.
It was always so fun doing this with kids because they'd be like “I don't know”. And then they'd come up with the wildest ideas. So you sketch your artifact design on this manuscript sheet, you describe it, you sign it, and then we collected all these papers and archive them in what we call the manuscript division. There are over 600 of them at this point. We've traveled all over the country and some international places doing this
.
This in itself was such an exciting part of the project for me. The ones that we can materially realize, we work with people to build out. Like that suit you saw sketched out, someone was thinking about their personal and historical relationship to water. She wanted to build a sensory suit that gives you the calming sensation of being underwater. She's thinking about the transatlantic slave trade experience. She's thinking about a lot of things. So then we built the suit to her standards. It’s fully functioning, there's motors at each one of these cuffs that are tied to tidal patterns of the Atlantic Ocean. So you get this nice undulating vibration on your body. There are these pipes that are whirled around your limbs and you can actually hear the water whirring. Then we make films with all of the artifacts because when you see them in exhibition context, they just sit still.
Ajay Kurian: I watched that film and on the one hand it was magnificent to see that drawing come to life. The other thing that felt interesting and perplexing was to think about the transatlantic slave trade and then to have a design suit that also feels like shackles. It felt like a really charged, complicated work where the thing that's giving you life and giving you peace, also has this shadow of something that's much darker.
Salome Asega: Totally. These are all things that come up in our workshop conversations. Once we draw these artifacts, we talk about them. And for her, she didn't see them as shackles. She saw them as almost like seaweed, like getting trapped in like coral and seaweed. But I hear you, there's so many ways to read this image.
Ajay Kurian: There’s a complexity to it. It doesn't fulfill what we think about design objects or like design artifacts, which is it has a purpose, and it serves it. This is loaded and layered and maybe contradictory. Maybe it does have the sense of something wrapping around you and envelops you, but also what else can that mean and what are the histories that are applied here. What part was more interesting to you? The conversations or the object coming to life?
Salome Asega: The conversations by far. These objects are a nice output of what transpired over the course of weeks and sometimes months with a group of people. But this is a conversation starter for me. You see this, and then I'm like, let's do the workshop together. Let's play the game and see what you come up with. I was never really interested in just touring the objects. They needed all the context. And actually oftentimes when these were in exhibitions, there was always a table for people to continue to contribute to the manuscripts.
Ajay Kurian: Oh, wow. The card game itself is a very specific thing. To understand how to create openness and create parameters that allow for that openness to be generative. A lot of times, especially in interview context, people ask things of artists and they're like, what do you think about AI? Like where do we start? It stops the conversation. It ends openness because it's just too vast. But giving parameters and giving a sense like of where you really want to go and what that can spark, that's a really specific skillset.
Salome Asega: There's a term in design for this, it's called scaffolding. You can't just throw people into the deep end, but you really need to create some kind of structure that guides people to a place where they feel safe enough to then be explorative.
Ajay Kurian: That makes a lot of sense. I'm glad I now know that word. So does Powrplnt grow out of these kinds of projects?
Salome Asega: Yeah, absolutely. The first year I did this, I gave a talk at New Inc before it was officially New Inc. And that's where I met Angelina Dreem and Anibal Luque. They were in early conversations about starting Powrplnt, which is a community computer lab. At some point we were calling it a digital art collaboratory. Do you remember when collaboratory was like “the” word?
Ajay Kurian: I don't remember that ever being the word. I'll take your word for it.
Salome Asega: There are these words that start to trend in education and then it's the year for collaboratory. You're like fully in this space now so you'll start to hear it. You're gonna start catching the trends, the words that trend in arts education.
Ajay Kurian: All I can think of now is phonics.
Salome Asega: Inquiry-based learning is another one.
Ajay Kurian: I probably heard that before. I should probably know more of these.
Salome Asega: So the thesis with Powrplnt was how can we hire our friends, or mid-career, or established digital artists to teach the next generation of artists who were coming up in New York so that they didn't have to make the same kinds of mistakes we were making. We were starting to document how an artist sustains their career. We ran workshops that were everything from professional development, legal basics for young artists to deliverable based technology workshops. A really popular one we did was how to make a logo and it was a way to trick young people into learning Illustrator.
Ajay Kurian: Oh wow.
Salome Asega: It was sick because all these people would come out with logos and some of which turned into short-lived brands. So I'd be wearing this shirt or hat that says like hottie. We also ran a really popular music series called Ableton Live, where we would partner with local DJs and musicians to teach the Ableton interface to young people. As part of that, we would sync a bunch of computers and we'd route them through the same mixer. It became an electronic drum circle, all building collectively on one beat. Then we'd strategically place different producers into the circle so they'd hop around and build this beat together with you.
Ajay Kurian: I can't tell if it's because you're in the mix or do you attract that energy?
Salome Asega: What energy?
Ajay Kurian: The energy of doing things together and no one's left out. That there's a way to do this that's fun and exciting, where everyone's included. That's an ethic that even if you're starting a project, even if you're starting an organization and say that's the ethos of what they do. It doesn't always come through, but I feel like every project with you, it always comes through that.
Salome Asega: That's nice to hear.
Ajay Kurian: I mean, it goes with that saying I think anybody in this audience would be like, duh. But I guess the pointed question would be, were you the one saying we should do this, or do these things just bubble up because that's the energy?
Salome Asega: I think it goes both ways. I think as a team at Powrplnt specifically, we were really good about hearing from our neighbors through constant serving and polling, talking with friends, serving them, and creating a program that was responsive to what we were hearing. But also, I think I also have a “let's just try this” energy. Let's just go and throw spaghetti at the wall. It doesn't hurt to try things. And I don't like to do things alone. It's just more fun to test things with friends or co-conspirators.
Ajay Kurian: I was talking to a friend of mine, and she'll be doing a talk with us at some point, Tamika Wood. She considers herself a cultural anthropologist of sorts. Something that she’s had a hard time with is when spaces are too collaborative and there's no leadership at all.
We're all just contributing, but we're not, so what are we contributing to and where's the vision? That's another thing that I think you handle really deftly. There's a vision of what is meant to happen. But when to take a backseat or when to guide. How do you figure out the balance of how to step in and when to step in?
Salome Asega: Yeah, I have a personal anxiety around wasting people's time. I'm just like, it's the New York Minute, everyone's hustling, they're grinding.
Ajay Kurian: I love this small town fantasy of what New Yorkers are doing. Can't waste their time.
Salome Asega: Oh my God, I've been here for 18 years and I still feel that. Or maybe it's 'cause I'm precious about my time. I know how much time I have to do things, right? I think for that reason, I come to potential collaborations with some scaffolding. An idea, some goals, some potential other collaborators. And this can all be edited, but I just wanted to get us started. I think that's important to building cooperative structures. Having some clear goals and targets in mind ahead of just getting people in a room. And then knowing that all of those things can be reworked as people develop trust and get to know each other and the world changes. There are all these external factors that can continue to shape a project, but you need to come in with some sense of why we're gathering.
Ajay Kurian: In that sense, do you feel like you have a relationship with music producers? Like when I hear Rick Rubin talk about the way that he thinks about production, he's a specialist in nothing, and you've talked about being a generalist. What he sees is the essence of a project and then how to shepherd that towards the end goal. I always wonder, why aren't there more? Why isn't there more of that vibe in the art world? I've seen plenty of bloated shows where I'm like if only there was just a place to workshop that show before it comes out. And in the projects that you do, that's the role that you seem to have.
Salome Asega: There's so many things I wanna respond to in what you just said. Do I have a relationship to music producers? I wish I had more. I feel like they're all in their studios, they're working, it's hard and it's a very solitary practice. But I do think that there is something about the way musicians collaborate generally.
I'm thinking about the kind of orchestral experience where you need everyone to make the song. There's a term in jazz called comping that has actually stayed with me since I was just a student at Parsons. Comping is this tradition in jazz where when you start to feel one person in the band slow down or they're slacking, the other musicians will fall back. They'll do that to give that person more space to get their groove going again. And so they'll give them the solo. I think that's how I'm interested in working. I don't need to be the solo all the time. I'm okay with falling back to make sure that the whole band sounds good.
Ajay Kurian: That's amazing. I love all the new terms I'm learning tonight.
Salome Asega: Let’s make a little dictionary,
Ajay Kurian:Takeaways from Salome’s talk. Normally we are in positions where people are pressuring us to speed up, and that in a condition where someone is slowing down, they're either cut or pushed. To give someone space is such an act of love and it allows for such a different kind of creativity to happen. I can't imagine a better way to describe how you create this process. That's really beautiful.
Salome Asega: Thank you. But now you'll notice this. When you go to a jazz show, you'll see they don't even have to say anything to each other. They don't even have to look at each other. The musicians will just slow down. They'll get quiet to allow for someone else to get loud. It's an encouragement. It's your turn.
Ajay Kurian: I really do love that in jazz where the sense between collective and individual is not a contradiction. It's one that's always in motion. So you give that person their solo and then they move back into the collective. And then somebody else has a solo and they move back into the collective. It's a way of thinking, like how is it wrong to shine? There's a way that it can happen where it's still collective energy.
So you're building these things with Powrplnt, it seems like you're still not making distinctions. There's musicians coming in, but also visual artists, and there are people that are thinking about graphic design. That's the space that you're beginning to foster. But then you're also thinking about professional development, which feels like it's more for what we would understand as a professional development for all kinds of artists.
Salome Asega: For anyone. I think when we were all younger, we'd probably tell people, “when I grow up” or “I wanna be”. The beautiful thing about Powrplnt was that a young person would come in and wouldn't say, I aspire to be X, Y, Z. They would very firmly declare “I am a fashion designer, I am here to build my brand – Can you help me take some photos?” I'd be like, yes, here's the camera. For that reason, I think it was easy to support young people 'cause they were so clear about what they wanted to do. It encouraged us to think with latitude about how to make sure that they were gonna make this sustainable.
Even if they didn't wanna go to college or pursue some kind of professional program on their own. Because they were so clear that there were ways for them to easily access the education they needed to make this thing a viable business for real. If that's like getting in touch with an IP expert, a lawyer, we got you. If it's about setting up an LLC, we got you. We can teach you how to do all these things. You don't need to go into debt or go into school if you don't need to. This can be the alternative.
Ajay Kurian: And this is still functioning without you, it’s completely independent?
Salome Asega: Totally. I've been away for probably six years at this point and there's a whole new group of young people who run it and do all the programming.
Ajay Kurian: I want to get to NEW INC, but I feel like the Ford Foundation also plays a role in terms of how you developed, how you understood how art and technology can cohabitate and the space that you can build and foster for people that are thinking in that space.
Salome Asega: Working at Ford was a wild experience. Did I ever tell you about how I got tapped to work there?
Ajay Kurian: I think you were working on a project or was it a consulting thing?
Salome Asega: It was a consulting thing. So I had just given a talk about Iyapo Repository at the Walker. And this person came up to me after my talk named Jenny Toomey, who I know is a really awesome punk musician and was fully in the Riot girl scene. So I'm like, oh my God, it's Jenny Toomey. And she was like, hi, I work at Ford Foundation, I'm a funder, I work on tech and society. And I'm like, what? Okay, maybe it's not who I thought it was. But we connect and we do the email exchange. Then I learned later that it was that Jenny Toomey. There's actually a really strong history of nineties punk musicians working and transitioning into tech policy work, because punk subculture was always invested in decentralized systems. And of course, tech policy is also invested in decentralization.
Ajay Kurian: This is such a touched story. You happened to meet the people that really just sprinkle this perfect magic dust for the next thing. It's so nice, like energy meets energy. But what are the fucking odds?
Salome Asega: I know, I was fangirling the whole time and I was like, what does the Ford Foundation really do? So she wanted me to do a very small consulting project with them. Like I want you to write a two page report on the landscape of art and technology, because we're thinking about how the arts and culture work can start to support artists working in these ways. I overdeliver and write almost a six, eight page memo. She like, it's great, but it was two pages for a reason because people would not read anything longer than that. So I'm like, okay got it.
Ajay Kurian: This is before the New York minute understanding.
Salome Asega: Exactly. So I sent it back and she's like great, now I want you to present it to the director of the Arts and Culture Department. Who at that time was Elizabeth Alexander, another one of my heroes – an incredible poet. I presented and they're like, this is fascinating, we didn't know people were working in these ways, we should be more invested. Then they reach out a couple weeks later and if I want to work there full time as a fellow? And I was like, let me think about it 'cause I was really worried about leaving a studio practice and becoming a funder. I didn't know what that would mean for me and how people would read me in that work.
Ajay Kurian: But what was your studio practice at that point? What did it mean to have a studio practice then?
Salome Asega: At that point I was bouncing around residences, I was giving talks, I was teaching, and I had cobbled together this life that felt to me creative and it was on my terms. As opposed to commuting to Midtown every day.
So I fully blew off the deadline to apply and then Jenny is back in my phone and talked through it a bit more and she was like, I'm an artist and Elizabeth's an artist. Of course you can do this work. So I took the role and it was an incredible four years where I was able to do research with other foundations, the NEA, and help build a landscape study around how artists are making with emerging media. We launched all these incredible grant programs for, for artists directly, but also for arts organizations run by people of color who are experimenting with technology.
Ajay Kurian: Wow, I feel like that's probably when we met, like right around then? It was this round table on cultural appropriation that we were on together. It was you, me, Homi Bhabha, Jacolby Satterwhite, Michelle Kuo, Gregg Bordowitz, and Joan Kee. It was quite the lineup.
Salome Asega: It was a good group of people.
Ajay Kurian: I was reading through it a little bit and it's a fascinating conversation. It's interesting to hear people's perspectives.
Salome Asega: You read it recently?
Ajay Kurian: Today.
Salome Asega: Does it hold up?
Ajay Kurian: There's some interesting problematics that are introduced. I don't even think this made it into the round table, but Greg said something that I still say to this day. He's been an educator for so long and he said that artists come in with their habits and then we turn those habits into a practice. It's just such a beautifully succinct way to talk about how you can really listen to someone and how you can really see what they're up to. So I remember that staying with me. But anyways, that's when we met.
I'm thinking about POWRPLNT to Ford to NEW INC. It feels like almost everything has prepared you to take on a role like this and to really start being the architect. The thing that I'm really interested in here and something that I don't think it's addressed enough is that we are training artists to be stars and not architects. And the star kind of can be manipulated by the architecture. But if we have architects, we can actually build something to develop a whole new idea of what stars look like and what the solo looks like for the collective. I feel like that's what you're interested in and I don't meet that many people that really are interested in that.
For instance, like when I started NewCrits, I was talking to EJ Hill a lot. He was the first person that I was talking to a lot and he loved where it was going. He was totally in and totally on board. I said we can do this together but he said he couldn’t do that. He didn't want to be a part of that structure because he didn't have the bandwidth and that's fine, I'm not putting anything on him. But it became more and more apparent that most artists don't have the bandwidth or that's not the energy that they're looking for. So I'm curious how you've continued to surround yourself with people that are looking for this energy, that want to create these futures differently?
Salome Asega: I don't know. I feel like I've been to these sites where people who are interested in this mode of thinking already gravitate toward.
Being a faculty member at Parsons, the students are there to think about new ways of making, doing, and existing. Then at POWRPLNT, young people bring such optimism and ambition to an idea that it gives me a new perspective. It gives me fuel and fire to think about the world in a new way. And then at New Inc, people are there because they are doing the most courageous thing, which is saying “the thing I care about, the thing I'm passionate about, I want to be my life's work”. I get so emotional at work. My team would tell you, I get weepy all the time 'cause it’s so cool that this person is digging their heels into this project or initiative or business. They're doing it for real and they believe that it should exist. It needs to be birthed into the world and we're here to support them. I'm a little spoiled because I have found the pockets where people are already gravitating towards that.
Ajay Kurian: We were talking about the Laundromat Project. For people who don't know, the Laundromat Project is an incredible organization. One of the people of the organization was telling me that they do bridge loans for artists now, which is unbelievable.
The way he was talking about it brought tears to my eyes just because there's so many artists that have money coming; $3,000 is coming at the end of the month, but for that month there's no fucking money at all. So what do you do? How do you make this work? And so they give a bridge loan. They just give you the $3000, no interest. Once you get the money, you pay it back and they have a zero default rate. It's like those structures where it actually changes the game completely. Like all of these hugely precarious projects can happen. People are thinking, okay, if the system doesn't do this for us, can we just make it? That's the people that I wanna be around. I want to be in rooms with those people. I want to talk to those people. I wanna learn from those people.
Salome Asega: Yeah, it's happening. I feel like that community of people is growing and it's growing very quickly. I think there are a lot of people who are doing work to make sure that artists are involved in larger movement organizing around labor and the economy. I think we're all feeling the pressure and we're all finding each other slowly, but that Laundromat Project example is so good. Those are the kinds of risks and experiments we need Arts organizations to take right now.
Ajay Kurian: Once, they went to a financial institution and they were like, none of this is viable. But they were like, it's our money, so we're just gonna do it. Taking that leap of faith and then realizing, if we love on our artists, the artists will love on us, and we don't have to worry about this. And that feels like a new system.
Salome Asega: Are there other things you're seeing that you're like, this is exciting, like other structures for support?
Ajay Kurian: This is, in a way, a plug, but the Ruth Arts Foundation. I think they’re setting a bar for what foundations can do and how they do it. The level of hospitality and understanding it's not just about throwing a lot of money at somebody and being like, we've supported them and like we can put them on our roster.
Now it's beginning to end. You are a part of a community now. It's the only time where, if I'm ever asked to do something – One, I'm super excited to go 'cause I know I'm gonna be so happy to meet everybody and there's not gonna be one shitty person there. Which is like impossible most of the time.
And the other part of it is that they always pay. There's never a time where you're not compensated for the intellectual labor that you're putting into it. There's just such a grace to it. They'll pay for your travel, they'll pay for your hotel, and then there's a stipend. Everything is considered. There's transport – how you get from A to B, how you get from B to C, how you understand the day, who's there to lead you through, what is the onboarding? All of those things matter. And it's not just perfunctory, I think it's aesthetic too.
It's a practice in itself. That's part of why I was so excited to talk to you is that you exemplify all these things. Like this is your practice and I think people have a hard time understanding what box to put you in or what your practice is. But looking at how New Inc has grown, what it's turned into, and every part of how it functions. It's so fucking hard to do that. It's so hard.
Salome Asega: Oh, that's so nice.
Ajay Kurian: The level that you're doing it at, you are setting another bar and it means a lot to everybody. They don't know how much it means yet. It is an undiscovered entity that is coming into existence. And so what's happening around it is, you're growing, you're sprinkling the dust, you're participating in this kind of longer stream of what's to come.
This is the reason why I wanted to share what Salome shared with me.
Salome Asega: This is how our New Inc brain works.
[Unfortunately we could only show this in person, but imagine a visual board of information that maps out the year through events, travel, initiatives, onboarding, and more.]
Ajay Kurian: Because these flows are like a customer journey. Maybe you have a better way of describing this, but when you're thinking about how somebody enters your organization, like if you're making a show, how does someone enter that show? What does that feel like? Is the floor different? Is the light this way? What is the first thing that they're seeing? All of that is what people who are running organizations think about, especially if they're doing it at the level that Salome is doing it at, where every part of that is considered. There's a real practitioner, there's a real thinker, there's a real artist behind what's happening here. That's why I wanted to show this.
Salome Asega: That's really sweet. This is a really fun, collaborative exercise to do as a team where we think about what the full year looks like. Actually last year we did this just around the corner on this floor. We took over an office space for three days and just mapped out the year.
We call this a program arc. So when New Inc members kick off with us, we do a week-long intensive called camp, where they get a feel for all of our program offerings. And then, in the fall, we go through some foundations of our program and specifically our professional development and mentorships. The thematics of the year are drawn up based on member enrollment information and what people say they wanna focus on during their year with us. And in this example here, the New Inc members wanted to focus on business foundations and ecologies of care.
And then there's a cultivating connect track, which is thinking about how to deepen audience connections or marketing digital strategy. So we do all of the foundations in the fall and then by spring you can focus on one area.
That's when all the programming starts to splinter and you can focus on the one thing you really wanna achieve. Throughout their moments for strategic planning, you can get one-on-one co consultation. This year we brought Sheetal Prajapati, she's a consultant who's helped all kinds of organizations in big moments of transition.
She's worked at Pioneer Works and Eyebeam and, but anyway, it's nice to have access to someone who's built a strategic plan for organizations that are like 10x what you're about to start.
Ajay Kurian: These are things that I think about now. We're trying to figure out systems for ourselves and to construct the institutions of tomorrow. Because yes, it is one thing to create in a way where you're either making objects or installations, and that's a beautiful way to practice. But I am highlighting it because I feel like people don't understand this as a practice and they don't understand that artists should be thinking about this. That this is a space where you can continue the practice, continue the things that you make, but we can also participate in other ways that will put us more in control of what tomorrow looks like, so that it's not run by cis white dudes that have a limited imagination.
Salome Asega: Totally. I did a residency at Project Row Houses in 2017, and at that point I was just starting Powrplnt. I was able to live in one of the row houses in Third Ward and every morning to get stronger wifi, I'd bop down the street to the official Project Row House's office. I'd see Rick Lowe bike into work every morning and I'd get his feedback about starting things like Powrplnt and get his advice on how you balance having a personal creative practice with running an organization. Something that really sunk in for me was that he didn't see Project Row Houses as dissimilar or separate from his creative practice, and that everything fed into each other.
I appreciate what you said about New Inc being part of my work in a deep way. Because it doesn't feel like the job I go to as a nine to five, it’s part of my artistic expression.
Ajay Kurian: There's the outward facing element of it, which is job. But it's almost like Clark Kent being Superman. You have to just be both. There's a way in which that's just cover for what's actually happening. But maybe what I'm trying to do, and what I hope that we're getting out of this conversation is that you don't have to think of them as strict jobs in this way.
There's a different way to think about it and let's actually just reformulate all of it. Let's find a way to actually do it. These are the systems that are eating us alive, so how do we make them so that they work for us? And what do we have to learn to make them work for us? And I'm really glad you're doing that work.
Salome Asega: I'm having fun with it. If you zoom out and go all the way to the left, there's like a pink mural board. I think. You gotta two fingers pinch out. Yeah. And if you go to the left,
This is where it gets wild. This is everyone who's in the program this year. We map out what they do and what they've told us that they care about doing during their year with us. Then we start to build pods of what kind of learning these people need.
Ajay Kurian: This feels like Skowhegan. Sarah Workneh does a similar thing where everything is so beautifully orchestrated that you have these uncanny moments where it's wow, they knew.
Salome Asega: It's about building a culture of hospitality and care, right? We are so lucky that you've chosen to spend a year with us. We have to take that seriously.
Ajay Kurian: Pay attention everyone. I want to open it up. This feels like a good moment to see if there are questions?
Audience Member: Can you tell us more about what New Inc is?
Salome Asega: Totally. We didn't do that. I'm still learning what it is too. but New Inc is a cultural incubator that was founded by the New Museum a little over 10 years ago, and we support about a hundred people annually in launching ambitious projects, nonprofit organizations, and businesses through a robust professional development mentorship program that also includes community events and a shared workspace. We throw an annual festival called Demo that takes place each June, and that's like the culmination of a year with us, where you get to see what people have been working on alongside other creative practitioners.
Audience Member: Is it similar to the Whitney ISP program?
Salome Asega: You've the Whitney ISP, American. What happens there?
American Artist: It’s a lot of reading and lectures, so it’s a little different.
Audience Member: So at New Inc, do you have an idea and a facilitator that will help you?
Salome Asega: Yeah, totally. You get to work one-on-one with a dedicated mentor. You're also assigned to a track of other projects who are doing similar things to you, and you convene once a month to do monthly crits. Then you have access to a pool of 80 to 90 mentors that you can call on for 30 minute appointments to get targeted feedback on something. You get access to seasonal professional development workshops that function more like working groups or more lecture style. In the lead up to Demo, the festival, there's a whole preparation program that helps members get stage ready and media trained.
Audience Member: I love what you said about young people coming to Powrplnt, and I was wondering if you follow the alumni of that program?
Salome Asega: Yeah. Actually I just checked in with the team a couple months ago 'cause they are trying to plan an anniversary moment. And someone we identified that I think is so cool is Mike, you know, the rapper? He used to be in the lab making beats, when we were a popup at Red Bull Studios, but would use our computers for Ableton and would also like film stuff. Yeah, I love Mike.
Ajay Kurian: He's great. He's from Brownsville, right?
Salome Asega: He used to come from Uptown, but maybe he's from Brownsville.
Audience Member: So you have businesses that are part of the events program as well?
Salome Asega: Yeah, we have a mix of people intentionally because that's how we think the network gets stronger. So I actually incubated Powrplnt at New Inc in the third year. Inception.
We needed a logo and some kind of brand identity, and there was a graphic design studio next to us and we were like, can we do a work trade? And so they helped us build our first website and dev designed our first logo so that they could put that in their portfolio to pitch. They were developing a portfolio, so they needed us too and that's the kind of stuff that can happen when people are de-siloed, right?
Ajay Kurian: I think people don't even know that they can ask for things like that. Ithink artists know that they can trade work, but doing a work trade where it's – you need this, I need this. Can we figure something out where we can figure out different rules? That opens up a lot of doors 'cause people don't have the money to do that. There's other ways.
Salome Asega: I think that was what made New Inc so special is that you were in a community of people who were like, this is my grind year. I wanna get all these things done and how can we grow together and accomplish all of our dreams together.
Audience Member: S I’d love to get a peak into the future, as the New Museum enters a new chapter, everything that you’ve learned so far at New Inc, and personally, what are some ideas that you are excited about?
Salome Asega: We’ll just have so much more space in the expanded museum. So I'm thinking about other kinds of programming I can do, even outside of the New Inc sphere. I wanna introduce a regular music series. I wanna do some screenings in our theater. I wanna start bringing in, like this past year, I've been doing studio visits with a bunch of emerging furniture designers. There's a whole scene of design galleries that collect and support furniture designers, but there aren't institutions to show or present this work. There's some curators around the city that do a good job with this. Alexandra Cunningham at Cooper Hewitt does this. Because our museum has been so invested in architecture and design through the expression of the buildings, I wanna see if we can start to be a home for that kind of exhibition making. So maybe some design salons.
Ajay Kurian: I love that, that it's always a thing that's in between, or always the thing that doesn't fit the perfect category.
Audience Member: I was curious about the image on the invitation, could you tell us about that?
Salome Asega: Yeah. So I started doing research when I was at Ford, where I was interviewing black tech policy writers. I was asking them about risk assessment and these newly formed algorithms that cities were purchasing to make all kinds of decisions around social service deliveries. So things from your probation, sentencing, to your welfare benefits, to your public housing subsidies. We’re all being determined, either fully or co-determined by algorithms. And as you can imagine, there are all kinds of very obvious biases. There was this funny term that kept coming up when I was interviewing people where they'd call risk assessment tools rats, because they're these pesky things that have infiltrated risk and social service delivery. So I drew this rat. I first built it in AR. I'd have it propped up in different places and it would play a soundscape of interviews I was doing with those researchers. And then the city of Toronto commissioned me to materialize it, to make it for real. So I spent six months going back and forth to Toronto and making it.
I met with some truck drivers, which was really cool. I learned that the most expensive part of building a monster truck is actually the engine. So it's not drivable, it's more sculptural. But it is forever in Toronto until I can afford to add an engine.
It was so funny because it was parked on the street for a weekend and then we moved it to a plaza area for a month. It has these red beady eyes and you turn the corner and you're like, what is that? Is that a monster truck? And then you start to sit in the plaza and you hear the conversations and I would immediately see people's body language shift, 'cause what they were hearing felt like the wildest podcast.
Ajay Kurian: What made you settle on the monster talk truck as the form?
Salome Asega: Because it was coming fast. Cities were adopting these instruments with lightning speed because it was cheap. We're seeing this now, this year already, the way federal employees are getting cut. And tech policy folks were nervous about how quickly certain departments were shrinking and how people were being replaced with these tools.
Ajay Kurian: And you saw Monster truck shows when you were growing up?
Salome Asega: Yeah. I have a really good photo I should have sent you of my dad and I at a monster jam in middle school. He worked for the MGM Grand Arena, and so it was his responsibility to pick me up from school and then I'd have to hang out at the MGM until my mom got off of work. So I would see the arena turn over for all kinds of things like Janet Jackson concert one night, and then Monster trucks the next.
Ajay Kurian: You grew up in a flex space and now you just keep building up.
Audience Member: good I’m curious, as a multihyphenate, how do you decide what to do next, what to commit to and when to move on?
Ajay Kurian: That's a good question.
Salome Asega: Oof, I'm not good at it. But I think that I am now in a position where I need to say no, but I say yes to things that my friends invite me to do. That feels like the most fun and most rewarding to me right now. Ajay said come through and I said, okay.
Salome Asega: But I wish I had a better answer. I'm just like, do what feels good. Go to places where you feel love. I just think right now, we need to do things that feel healing. We need to be moved by spirit right now.
Ajay Kurian: I don't even know if this is true, so don't quote me on this 'cause this is from Instagram, but apparently a cat's purr is a frequency that helps with bone regeneration. So when your cat's just purring on your body, it's healing you.
Salome Asega: Whoa. I hate cats. But that makes me wanna give them a chance.
Ajay Kurian: I'm not a cat person either, but I'm like, one of the people in New Inc will make a purring machine.
Salome Asega: True. Next application cycle we'll put that in there.
Ajay Kurian: This has been wonderful. I wanna thank everybody for coming! I want to thank Salome so much for doing this. It always means the world to have people that are engaged and interested and want to have these conversations. I always feel lucky to be in conversation with great artists. So thanks again.
In 2025, Mack presented a one-person exhibition and site-specific installation at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH, as well as a solo exhibition of new works at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York.
Mack attended The Cooper Union, NY (BFA) and Yale University, CT (MFA) and is the recipient of prestigious awards and residencies including the Chinati Foundation’s Artists in Residence Program (2023); the Rome Prize (2021-2022); the inaugural BALTIC Artists’ Award (2017); the Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva Island (2017); the Delfina Foundation Residency (2017) and the Studio Museum in Harlem Residency (2014-2015).
One-person exhibitions include Eric N. Mack, Paula Cooper Gallery (2023); Scampolo!, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin (2022); Lemme walk across the room, Brooklyn Museum, NY (2019); NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, FL (2021); and In austerity, stripped from its support and worn as a sarong, The Power Station, Dallas, TX (2019). Major group exhibitions include Chronorama Redux, Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2023); Whitney Biennial 2019, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; and Greater New York, MoMA PS1, NY (2015). Work by Mack is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Brooklyn Museum; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; and the Montreal Museum of Fine Art. Mack lives and works in New York.
About The ForumThe 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.—
Full Transcript
Ajay Kurian: When you’re putting together a show, I know you’ve talked about art being present for the world’s brutalities, but how do you conjugate that or stay present in the work with that? It’s not even saying that you have to, because it’s not your responsibility to do so. It’s more so, I see glimmers and I see the way that you think about how things come together and how they kind of fall apart.
Eric N. Mack: Yeah. I have a lot of epiphanies that sit in the studio, that come from the studio that end up allowing me to think about the external world from the happenstances in the studio, and from coordinated or measured gestures of rupture. And those ruptures could have implications of or sit alongside what folks could regard as kind of a material violence, or violence to a material, or decomposition, or collage, or something for the work to feel chopped like the ingredients are chopped up.
I love a good metaphor, like a good salad, it’s aromatic with all the ingredients. Nothing overpowers one another, but it’s transformative. It holds meaning, sustenance, and maybe a level of a counterpoint, maybe the sunflower seed gets stuck in your teeth or something like that, you know?
Ajay Kurian: You gave us a lot to chew on, even in the press release. At the end of that, there’s literally seven hyperlinks to run through. We had The Clark Sisters, Nina Simone, a trailer for the Unzipped documentary about Isaac Mizrahi, the Harlem Restaurant of which the show was named after, Sinners movie tickets.
Eric N. Mack: Why not?
Ajay Kurian: And Grace Jones on an Italian talk show or an Italian show.
Eric N. Mack: A talk show, I think. It could have been Eurovision.
Ajay Kurian: But that was serious. She was really in her pocket.
Eric N. Mack: Yeah, it’s intense, ‘cause she’s in drag in a way. You know, she’s wearing this wig and I was like, the wig is architecture and the wig is like a hat. She’s architecture. If you’re watching the YouTube video or seeing the performance at the end, this camera pans out and she leans back and someone catches her as she falls and snatches her wig. Then she becomes this doll, this kind of copy of herself, this quotidian, you know the things that she would process with Jean Paul. She’s always around and I always think about her. She’s an interesting marker, because she’s such a clarified aesthetic. She’s a sound, she’s a voice and she also possesses her own tension. There’s incredible softness and vulnerability, but she’s also a tank, you know? The thing is, these images are also ones that she’s used herself. I just think that she will always be relevant.
Ajay Kurian: There’s an ownership over the image too. There’s a way in which she’s self representing and it feels beautiful and antagonistic, but also really generous. To be both aggressive and generous at the same time isn’t an easy thing to do.
Ajay Kurian: But I feel like, for her embodiment to be a black woman who is beautifully angular and masculine and feminine at the same time, it’s a lot to have to deal with, specifically in that moment of pop culture too.
Eric N. Mack: Yeah. She’s an artwork. She’s her own artwork. There was an exhibition I did in London and I kind of couldn’t stop thinking about Misa Hylton. I couldn’t stop thinking about her. She was a stylist for Lil’ Kim and Mary J. Blige. So she was a part of this kind of bad boy regime, but she was a part of their visual representation. She’s an iconic stylist. Everybody takes notes from her in New York.
Ajay Kurian: Really? It’s so interesting ‘cause I think you’re the first artist that I’ve talked to that holds stylists in this regard. That the grooming of an image, the understanding of what it takes to put together a scene, an idea, a world building essentially, that it’s happening completely behind the scenes. You’re really picking out these people to be like, you’ve changed this whole scene.
Eric N. Mack: I mean, it’s what we do as artists. It’s just asking questions like, okay, what’s in the byline? Who did this? Who’s the architect? She called herself the architect, and I respect that. There was an awareness and a renewed understanding of her importance as these looks became more prominent again.
The nineties in general as a kind of nostalgic, bygone era, that we were there for. So it also is an interesting thing to think about, who made the thing that sits in your heart or that sits with you, that rests in your references, and that you connect with? Who made that? Obviously, I mean, that’s what we do. That’s research.
Maybe people don’t look at the production of the image as much as, you know, there’s a lot of romanticism around the fashion designer and who made the garment, but you won’t see the garment without seeing how it was put together and how it was aligned. The tension.
Thinking about my good friend, Haley Wollens who has been working for a long time. I think more recently she’s done Dsquared, she’s done Au Claire, she’s done all of these important brands that end up being reconstituted, recomposed by this unseen hand.
Ajay Kurian: That’s the thing. It’s a level of research that is fascinating to me because I think everybody gets caught up in the director and the designer. Even when you’re a kid, you watch the movie and you like the movie.Then there’s the kid that finds out who the director is. Then there’s the kid who finds out who the producer is. That’s a different kid.
Eric N. Mack: It is a different kid. But you know, sometimes it’s meant to be that way. It may be structured for folks to be completely enamored with the superstar, with the actress or the actor. It was designed that way, you know?
Ajay Kurian: Now I want to see behind that.
Eric N. Mack: That’s what I do. I mean, that’s what I’m interested in. Questioning wasn’t enough, and was never enough. Like thinking about Amanda Harlech, she’s an incredible stylist who was a big part of the way that we experienced the early days of John Galliano and some of the more important days of Karl Lagerfeld. I mean, she’s established, but she’s a visionary and at a certain point she kind of sought Galliano out when he was finishing his degree at CSM. So there was a premise that was going around between them. They were collaborators. There’s something about the unseen magic in between these figures and some of the social qualities of discourse between two people that end up generating meaning for so many.
Ajay Kurian: So what’s the plural for you? Do you feel like there’s similar relationships that you have in your practice? Of course, I know that you actually work with stylists and designers. There’s plenty of collaborative things that you’ve done. But when I think about the kind of classic idea of a painter, for instance. You have a studio practice, you go to the studio, you work, you come home and that’s potentially a very solitary thing.
Eric N. Mack: I mean, it’s up to me, and it’s up to artists to be able to question that, to reposition that. Sometimes that works, and the main collaborator at this point is the curator.
Eric N. Mack: So for this exhibition, shout out to everybody at Arts and Letters, Jenny Chasky, Nick and Juan — these are really important people in actualizing the exhibition. It was through conversation and also acknowledging that everybody, they got eyes and it matters like that we are all seeing. And I’m not afraid to ask what people are seeing right in the room. Sometimes people think that just means I don’t have vision myself and that’s stupid. But I think also with time, it’s also a practice for me, to see what I get from that.
Ultimately, I’ll make my own decisions about these things. But it’s really important for me to be able to reflect from people who are familiar with the space that I’m working in currently. You know, I’m scratching my head, I’ve been here all day, why is this not working? There’s people who have been up on the lift and been able to see what the space looks like from all these different vantage points. The material that the walls are made from are all significant aspects of architecture that many of us can take for granted.
Ajay Kurian: I’ve been lingering on this picture, because it’s kind of the first thing that you encounter when you walk into the space. There is a piece suspended from, and kind of draping, in the wind. And it was a really cloudy, somewhat rainy day. Just seeing that floating above does inaugurate an experience and what you’re about to move into. Your work, maybe more recently too, has felt like a collaged brush stroke.
I think a lot of people might think of the brush stroke as a unit of expression. And what I really like about how you’re using the bolt of fabric is that it becomes both brushstroke as an expressive entity, but also, it kind of carries all the social weight of the ready-made as well. They happen simultaneously. It’s just this kind of non-binary thing where you’re not choosing between one or the other in particular moments. They just happen to exist at the same time. So you just see this streak across the sky of a variety of fabrics, and you can feel what each of them does to you without being able to place it. It’s a nice thing because then you walk in and it almost felt more like portraiture to me.
These are all just like iPhone pictures that I took because I was too late in asking arts and letters for pictures, so that’s all me. But they’re not bad pictures. Then you get into this kind of diaphanous space and it just completely opens up. The whole space just has this air of levity and there’s brushstrokes in the sky and it feels like a realm of possibility. I know I’m waxing poetic a little bit, but I just really enjoyed the show. This is one of those moments where just seeing materials come together was such a nice moment.
Eric N. Mack: I took this picture too. When you sent it to me, I was like, oh good. Because when we got the documentation of the show or I was talking to the photographer, I was like, get this, and I wanted that shape, that jagged shape where the scarf enters the picture and how it’s held together and being able to see the other side of the room through that. It’s framing, but it’s also the implication of the transparency and opacity kind of playing. I mean, for me, this one’s such a chopped salad. you know?
The beauty isn’t its presence and almost shies away from image or something, like a fragrance. I’m thinking about a fragrance. I’m thinking about how one experiences layers of scent and how transformative that is no matter where you are. You know, that’s abstraction.
Ajay Kurian: Then what title do you think of when you think of the perfume notes of the show?
Eric N. Mack: I mean, sometimes it’s just literal, like one is called On vetiver.
Ajay Kurian: Okay, so it takes you there too. It’s direct.
Eric N. Mack: So I’m imagining, a little vial of oil, that would just be something that the fabric could be dipped in, you know, imagining it being like drenched in oil or the lived life of the fabric being like worn.
Ajay Kurian: There’s the presence of a body. It’s interesting the way you’re talking about visuality when it comes to a scent. Because it, and you can correct me if I’m wrong, but the way you’re talking about it, it sounds like you’re able to imagine something without a picture. That it’s almost a posture with no body, or there’s something that gives an evocation of presence.
And there’s a fragrance, this fragrance portrait of a lady that like, now I smell it everywhere. It’s everywhere. There was a moment when you could just pick it out of a room. As soon as I walked in, I’d have a picture, but it didn’t matter if it was the person or not, or if I matched it up. It was a different kind of picture.
Eric N. Mack: I like that. Because it also is just about a material. It’s about like a plant or something. But it doesn’t give itself away and it doesn’t tell you about what it does or what it can do.The center figure is called bod. I thought that was really funny. But also thinking about bod cologne and just like a shorthand and thinking about the figure. Just trying to get there so it can carry notions of the viewer. There’s a lot I could say in terms of that work in relationship to the armatures.
Ajay Kurian: The armatures are kind of new. I feel like there’s been kind of ready-made armatures in older works, but these are fabricated and then also kind of anonymous. There’s anonymity to them, to me, where it’s almost bureaucratic. It’s Subway poles and there’s this kind of brushed anodyne aluminum and it’s a highly specific form. It’s cantilevered and counterbalanced. There’s a lot of specific things, but then it also feels like a particular kind of architecture that’s city based. And then to have it have this delicate form draped on it. I’m curious about how these forms are continuing to develop, how you’re starting to understand them for yourself.
Eric N. Mack: These were made really thinking about this space, the kind of variedness and wanting there to be an almost figurative element that would lean on the wall. Maybe the sculpture could be holding up the wall like a buttress or some kind of architectural element. Also, the kind of premise of scaffolding, and just thinking about how scaffolding is used as a structure for support. I mean this fabric, I’ve been carrying around for probably maybe eight years.
Ajay Kurian: Wow. That was actually a question I had, do you have an archive of fabrics?
Eric N. Mack: Absolutely. I love the properties of a pleated fabric and how, you know, thinking about structure and support, the fact that it could be almost self-imposed. It’s imposed on the surface. It’s like the structure comes from within, and it’s held through heat. I mean, that’s how pleats are made. And as the fabric contracts and then expands again. The form is communicated through that.
Ajay Kurian: It’s really beautiful. It made me think of Matisse. Because it felt like a color study where this much red means something and this much red means something. And like then when you add dimension to it and light and all these other things, here is where the pleats stop and you can see a different orientation of color. It really is a different experience. It was a nice feeling to not have immediate vocabulary for what I was experiencing.
Eric N. Mack: I think I was trying to describe an experience of looking at a painting and being like, how does this operate and why is it this specific form that’s significant? You know what I mean? And you look at it kind of pissed off. You’re just like, what? How does this do that? And why is it just one color that does it?
Ajay Kurian: The first person that comes to my mind is Sam Gilliam and what that experience was like when first encountering that work. What was the first work of art that you can remember that pissed you off? Or that you had an adversarial relationship with? Sometimes things piss me off ‘cause they’re so good.
Eric N. Mack: I’m trying to, I don’t know. I know there’s a lot. You can get angry at all the art out there, but really it is those gestures where you look at the side of the painting and be like, what? Oh, you painted that or you finished the edge like that or just these finalizing gestures that are about the craftsmanship of the work. It communicates to people who are craftsmen. I can’t think of anything that really pissed me off right now.
Ajay Kurian: It’s good that you mentioned that moment of looking at the edge of a painting. To me, it’s something that I think about with your work where the line between craft and styling is completely blurred. So for instance, if you’re. Stretching Belgian linen and you’re building up a surface and then you’re applying oil medium. We know what that surface looks and feels like when it’s done right. And when it’s not, when it’s okay. The preciousness of when it really feels like luxury.
With your work, there’s almost a slightly different motivation. That’s why it’s so cool to me that you can rattle off the most important stylist here, because to me, you understand that as a craft. You understand that as a world and how precise it needs to be. To think about styling and craft in the same conversation is very interesting to me because I hadn’t thought about it like that. I was thinking about how we both grew up on the Style channel.
Eric N. Mack: That’s true.
Ajay Kurian: That was a formative moment for me, the style channel and being able to see runway shows in high school. I started to think about why things look the way they look and got obsessed with a certain level of craftsmanship. I didn’t get into the styling part of it and I think that’s why I’m so intrigued by it. I’m curious, what was that early experience like for you? You were around a lot of clothes and your father had a clothing store, right?
Eric N. Mack: Yeah, he did. My dad had a brick and mortar clothing store on the border of DC and Maryland. I don’t remember how many years, but he eventually renovated a moving truck and turned that moving truck into a popup. That’s the language now. But it was a clothing store in the back of a white moving truck. He put wood paneling, very nineties, and hangers and clothing racks and places where you could fold the jeans and put them in the drawers. Because sometimes you would hit a speed bump and the clothes would fall on the ground and me and my brother would have to go back there and fix everything before the light turned green.
Ajay Kurian: And that’s when you noticed the silhouette of fallen clothes.
Eric N. Mack: My room is like that, respectfully. But, I think I’ve always been interested in self styling or the things that you choose are emblematic and idiosyncratic. You know, you speak through them, they’re really important. Maybe it did start in my teenage years alongside of when I started drawing really seriously. I mean, we’re kids of the nineties, so it really was all about what you chose and how you speak through that. We know it now as like crazy psycho consumerist culture, but that was really tailored to us, you know?
Ajay Kurian: I wonder what that felt like for you. Because in the beginning, art for me was just, I was good at drawing. And then there was a moment where it opened up into a conversation that was like, oh, you can create things that embody and live an idea and that there was a different kind of gesture that happens there and a different way that those things could live and challenge what already was.
I’m curious because clothing, styling, and then also a real foundational understanding of drawing, painting. You went to art school and got an MFA at Yale, you did all those things and you had this kind of super foundation of art. But then you didn’t let go of the things that were kind of left out of that conversation. Did that happen? Does that happen naturally? Do you have to recover things along the way? Were there things that you felt like you had to push out of your life and then bring it back? Or did it all just kind of keep moving with you?
Eric N. Mack: I think they were always together. I thought they were always important and I didn’t believe anybody that told me otherwise. You know, fashion for me was personal and it was something that invested time and interest.
It was an interest of mine and it still is. I’m definitely an artist and there’s no carrot on a stick that could convince me to compromise that.
Ajay Kurian: So your definition of an artist is far-reaching.
Eric N. Mack: I’m also thinking about art as the viewership of art. I think the art audience deserves a lot more than what we’re seeing. I felt like a responsibility for the work to be drenched in exactly what I felt was most important. That’s why the work is so much about value. For you to see something is for you to see the significance of its presence. I wanted you to be able to look at a work and not be able to take away what’s there. It’s made concrete, it’s made manifest.
Ajay Kurian: It’s almost like reorganizing the commonplace gives it a different scent.
Eric N. Mack: I also will just say going to art school, I really believed that it was a place of invention. I was gonna be a part of a conversation about something that’s contemporary and new. I’m gonna go to get my MFA at Yale where we could be, I don’t know, flying paintings around. You know, just something that dealt with technology and it’s what we are not seeing now. There’s something about a futurist notion of innovation. I was looking for invention.
Ajay Kurian: I feel like there was a particular moment, around that time that you would be in art school then, everything else was saying that painting’s dead and old. There was this kind of fire to be, no, it’s not dead. There’s other ways to reinvent it.
Eric N. Mack: Right. Or it’s in plain sight. It’s in everything you see. There was a time where I told somebody I was a painter and they assumed that I was like a wall painter. And that’s an honest living.
Ajay Kurian: I mean, if I told somebody in my extended family that I was a painter, they’d think I was a wall painter or house painter. They wouldn’t be like De Kooning.
Eric N. Mack: Maybe they’d be like Picasso.
Ajay Kurian: If you said artists, they’d say Picasso. You say artist and they don’t even think of anything besides palette. And there’s so many levels to it. There’s the thing that we think is gonna happen, which is we’re in the 21st century and it’s gonna be flying paintings, and then there’s people that are outside of that and they’re still in the 1600s.
Eric N. Mack: There’s a lot of ways that people experience art and it is a part of the way that people think about beauty, decoration and decor, their interior spaces and I think that is also really important.
Ajay Kurian: Yeah, and in fact, I think it’s more vital because the conversation about art with a big A is one that feels very dead to me. But I know that everybody who’s alive has a beating heart that tells them the things that excite them the most and they just haven’t connected the fact that’s art.
Whatever your niche is, whatever you get most excited about, you can go into that infinity. I have no boundary about what that can be. What bothers me is that there’s still so much connective work that I feel discursively we have to do. Just let people admire the things that they admire.
Eric N. Mack: I know. I think some of that stuff is not art though, to be honest. I’m disgusted about some of the things that people call art to be honest.
Because I think people do give themselves a lot of permission in certain arenas, and I think art is one of them. But I do think that there is something about a kind of urgency. I think there’s something about a larger message. I think there’s something about being able to see an individual voice in a larger conversation that deals with a question of beauty. It is something about the tension of Contemporary reality, be that political, social, cultural. I think that there is something about the friction that art in itself is supposed to kind of possess these things.
Ajay Kurian: Yeah. I see that and I can feel that. There’s things that are design, for sure. And I accept that as well. This is not Eric’s work, this is Petra Blaisse, who has her own firm called Inside Outside. I know that this person has been an influence on you and it sounds sort of like a stylist of spaces.
Eric N. Mack: Absolutely.
Ajay Kurian: This was so fascinating to me, to see the realms in which she works and then seeing this project in particular. It reminded me of your Desert X project.
Eric N. Mack: Really?
Ajay Kurian: Not that it’s the same thing, but just thinking about how to drape an architecture and thinking about what it means to give a space a halter towel. What do you think of someone like Petra, is that an art practice? Does it need to be called that? Does it matter? Is that just like somebody that you see working in the intersection of things?
Eric N. Mack: I think there is someone working in between so much, but I see it as interior architecture in a way. Her firm is called Inside Outside, and I love the urgency to it and also the dexterity of it as a comment on the domestic and on the lived space. As architecture it would possibly be defined as dexterity in the built environment. Or as an imposition or a question on the built environment. There’s something advanced about this for me that feels so futuristic. The way that it would respond to the elements. You see how it billows and moves and the wall would be able to breathe.
It reminds me, I used to live in this crazy loft in Bushwick, when I first moved to New York with my Cooper friends. I guess we just didn’t have enough money to build walls, so we ended up just putting up curtains for a while. They went up to the ceiling and it really wasn’t a productive way to live, but it looked great. And I was like, yes, this is painting. It was like a cotton duck kind of a canvas.
Ajay Kurian: You really were drenched in it. When you say drenched…
Eric N. Mack: It’s about recognizing it. This is what that is. I’m gonna make meaning out of this. Let me use it later. Taking note, you know? We were just 19, so it was still kind of early in references in terms of trying things out. That was a good thing about being in school. Let’s try out this way of living
This was all about the structure, being able to breathe. Using the gas station structure, the canopy as a structural form. That was gonna be the unshakeable structure. And I didn’t want to completely obscure it, so there’s this kind of translucency of the knit fabric which is mostly made outta Smithsonian. Any kind of pattern you would see on this is Smithsonian Luxury Fabric. That was a really nice opportunity and probably my first engagement with a major brand.
Ajay Kurian: So it was a conversation with them to understand this is what we have access to. You wanted that relationship to happen.
Eric N. Mack: The way things happened for me again, is about a lived experience. I was doing a residency in Milan and I met one of the creative directors of Misson at a dinner and we chopped it up. But also, there was a tension and intensity around developing this large project. My curator at this time was Amanda Hunt, and she was just like, think big baby. I was like, oh, I just wanna hang some fabrics up and she’s like, think big. You know, you can do this. We have the support to do this. So I was like, okay, great. Then I was thinking about this conversation that I had and Milan and how amazing it would be to have this vestige of an experience be so expansive in this other moment.
That conversation kind of led to this collaboration. It was very simple and direct. I chose from the PDF, and then to see them in person, it was just like, really?
Ajay Kurian: You ordered the paints online and then you got the paint?
Eric N. Mack: Right. This was a lot of fabric, probably the most fabric I’ve ever seen at that time. This was 2019.
Ajay Kurian: I feel like there’s this conversation around art, that it needs to be purposeless. And in the ways that you install your work and the ways that it kind of suggests so many different things, it almost feels like the opposite, where it’s like an excess of purpose. And that maybe that’s the space in which art really starts to affect people. Where there’s the space of design that has a purpose. It’s beautiful and there’s artistic merit to it. But I think maybe what pushes art into a different category is that it not only has those purposes, it has other ones and as you get older, it has other ones. And as you move with it, it has other ones. It just keeps giving you new purposes. That it’s never purposeless. It’s an excess.
Eric N. Mack: I’m thinking about the kind of nuance around it. There’s intent. There’s aspects about beauty that shift and develop through the experience of making, but it’s intent, like at least being a point where its presence can’t be denied. Because it’s intent in being there. Do you know what I mean? Its relationship to the support of this building. I want it to feel like the fabric needs it, so it’s clinging to it. And it ends up being compositionally reconstituted and there’s things that you get from that are unexpected. Like the way that the fabric billowed, but then also the way that it caught air and the movement ended up being its own kind of choreography. The rope is the same kind of rope that I used uptown at Arts and Letters. It’s like a canyon diving rope that I bought from REI. I talked to this guy at REI and he was like, this is tough as steel. This is gonna just survive everything, but it’s not gonna survive a knife cut. It could hold our weight or whatever, but it’s not indestructible, which is the way he sold it to me.
Ajay Kurian: I always sense fragility and in everything that you make, every stitch, everything. That’s the kind of funny thing about super well tailored clothing. It falls on your body so beautifully, but also you can break it real easily too. It’s a very delicate, beautiful, gorgeous thing. When I see the work, there’s a precarity that feels like a social precarity. It feels like there’s clashing things coming together and holding. But if there’s a little too much rain, it might not be there tomorrow.
Eric N. Mack: I mean, I think that’s a part of the concept. I think there’s some things that acknowledge presence, right? It’s the intention in being there at that moment that you see it. I like to think about fragility as a subject. So I want people to be able to regard it as part of the meaning and the content of the work. Thinking about the definition of sculpture, thinking about a dimensional object that has a condition, there’s a real world condition or social political condition that this object goes under. Having fragility on top of that, communicates in such a tense and interesting way, an importance of care. That’s when care comes in for sure. That’s when you know the importance of the architecture. That’s when you know the curator. That’s when all of these points of consideration that are seen and unseen are intentional and needed.
A Window to the See, a Spirit Star Chiming in the Wind of Wonder…
The Treasure House of Memory,
Eternal Return & the Obsidian Heart,
Reemerge the Zero Begins Your Life, Eternal is Your Light,
About The ForumThe 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: Hi everybody, thank you all for being here. Welcome to our NewCrits Talk with Raúl de Nieves! I’m gonna give you some background as to what NewCrits is, I’m gonna give you a little introduction to Raúl, and then we’re gonna get into the conversation.
NewCrits is a global platform rooted in aesthetic education. We’re committed to fostering critical care, rigorous inquiry, and artist-to-artist dialogue. We offer mentorship and courses that challenge the assumptions of traditional art institutions while honoring the intensity of their best methods. We have crits, but we don’t think about crits as a way to tear you down to build you up. That’s trauma we don’t need anymore. Our offerings are designed for artists at any stage, especially those seeking meaningful critique, rooted in trust, discernment, and deep attention. These talks are an instantiation of that.
The way that I think about art will be on display. This kind of conversation is the kind of conversations that we have in crits. It’s one where we’re building together.
Now let’s get to the main event, which is Raúl here.
Raúl de Nieves: Hello everyone.
Ajay Kurian: All right, we’re gonna start with this image. I’ve known Raúl for some time now, but we really got to know each other better during the 2017 Whitney Biennial, which we were both in. We were both also part of the five artists that were asked to collaborate with Tiffany and Company.
So we were spending a lot of time together and it was really nice. Raúl is one of those artists where you can’t tell if the art is an extension of him, or he’s an extension of the art. There’s a purity and transparency to who he is as a person and an artist, that feels free of shame and free of hiding.
You’ll see the dark and the light. He’s joy and sparkle at times, but he can access a banshee scream and speak from unknown deaths as he does in his band Hairbone. Dark and light, life and death, are not seen as mere opposites in his work. They are a faded coupling, archetypes, and fantasma characters emerge throughout his sculptures as if enacting scenes from forgotten religious books, rituals, and beat through much of the work in ways that give them new life. There’s plenty of art that looks to religions, but few works of art inject a new spirit into that old fist to open it up.
Raúl has a new exhibition at Pioneer Works that just recently opened. The space is wide and gleaming with colors pouring through the windows. He’s created new stained glass works for the windows of the entire building. They’re modestly made with tape and colored plastic, but the effect is regal. The colors almost tune a frequency that makes you smile. So when you see texts that might be darker, more bodily, even a little gross, you accept this as part of the light too. Nothing’s left out. Everything feels redeemed.
After spending so much time seeing how Raúl creates, thinks and cares, I was and am convinced that this person is a star. Not a star in the sense of celebrity, although there is that, but in the sense that he radiates with an unflinching and holistic energy as if he simply is a star. I think it’s easy for us to see someone like Raúl whose light shines brightly and think that’s just who he is, that it’s not the result of enormous amounts of work and discipline of the ability to bring death to an old self in order to birth a new one and find joy again and again.
A person like that right now is worth talking to and hearing their stories. So please help me welcome Raúl.
Raúl de Nieves: Thank you. That was very nice.
Ajay Kurian: How are you feeling?
Raúl de Nieves: I feel great. Today was a lovely day and being here is so nice. To be able to talk to you and share a moment of my life and just some of the things that mattered to me. So thank you for having me.
Ajay Kurian: It’s really a pleasure. It’s an honor. I have loved your work, I’ve loved seeing it and I love learning more about it. This image was one that came up when I was reading about the work. I’ve seen this story told many times in your work, but this is from 2003 to 2005. This is a story of St. George and the Dragon, and I wanted to start here ‘cause I think there’s a lot of things that are formative in this particular image, the story itself and how you saw that story.
Raúl de Nieves: I moved to San Francisco in 2002 to attend the CCA college. And unfortunately, I wasn’t able to take into the school because of the financial situation that I was in. So it’s really nice to know that you are providing mentorship to students, because there wasn’t anything like that in 2002. The internet was just starting and moving to San Francisco was such a dream of mine and I made it happen even though I didn’t end up going to the school. For me, the bridge of San Francisco, which always shined so much to a forgotten soul or this idea of the hippie, the queers, gay culture. It really attracted me to this idea of knowledge. But once I couldn’t attend the school, I had to find my own mentorships, and I saw that through my friends.
The image of St. George and the dragon appeared to me through a woman who was selling embroidery at the store that I was working at. I ended up buying the embroidery off her and I started to really think about how I grew up in a religious household that spoke about angels and the defeat of the self. But in a more Catholic way, where you have to repent your sins and think about what it means to not follow the status quo of a normal way of thinking because heaven is the ultimate power of our existence. St. George, to me, became this mantra. I started to really ask myself who I was in the picture, and I decided to think that I was all aspects of this fable.
The fable talks about a dragon that houses itself next to a water well, and the town is in fear that this dragon is gonna drink all their water. So they must gather their beans into a sacrifice because the dragon ate all the animals. As if the dragon shouldn’t eat the animals because the humans are eating the animals. I don’t think that the saint really exists in the image because that is up to the future to decide.
So in a sense, I thought about some of the people in my life that I felt had that idea of themselves. Not going to school gave me an opportunity to seek these kinds of icons or lessons through things that appeared to me and I frantically started painting this painting over and over and over again. My goal was to paint 50 of them. I still haven’t painted 50, but once I moved to New York, it’s almost like the image faded away somehow. But it’s something I constantly go back to, and when I recognize it through my journeys, it reminds me of finding things to reflect on.
Ajay Kurian: The part where you say that you can be every single character in the fable is what stands out to me because there’s the dragon or the snake, there’s St. George, and then there’s the townspeople that are afraid. There’s this sense that St. George is banishing the dragon, and there’s a sense that people think it’s a dragon but really it’s just this snake and it’s not that big of a deal. They’re afraid of this thing that maybe they shouldn’t be afraid of. To be able to embody the people that are violent and fearful, to embody the saint who comes to save the day, and then to embody this dragon figure is a lot to think about, especially right now.
I wonder, can you still embody all those positions or do you feel like you have a different kind of sense of self right now?
Raúl de Nieves: I definitely can. I think fear is man’s best friend as they say, and sometimes we really have to get to know our fears in order to understand what they look like.
It’s one of the hardest things that we can allow ourselves to communicate with. Because sometimes that comes with a tragic death, addiction, or just being alive. I thought about this and the fact that this dragon was portrayed as the entity of the end of life. A dragon is essentially a mythical creature, so this idea of the myth or the flamboyant also became what I was thinking about. I was like, oh there is a fear of the other side of the human being that maybe we aren’t allowed to or we shouldn’t exercise. Which is our inner divas, our inner goddess, or our inner demons. But I still relate to each character because not every day is so jolly. One of the things that I’ve been trying to continue to exercise within myself is how to let go and what does that mean? When letting go, is it an idea or is it part of the past?
Ajay Kurian: When was the first time that you felt like you befriended your fears?
Raúl de Nieves: Definitely being in San Francisco. Knowing that there was a part of failure because I decided not to take on the academic route through the school. I felt afraid of debt. I just felt afraid that some of the things that I was working towards had an end there.
But I think being afraid is what gave me this exercise to really think about what that looked like. It gave me an opportunity to grow and to start experimenting with what it felt like or what I thought an artist would do in school. What conversations would you have with your peers? Or what was a critique? Who was gonna tell me that this was right or wrong? I can be a masochist and that’s part of one of my best traits because I put myself through hell. But to me, hell is not the hell we live in. To me, hell is the entrance to the subconscious, the unknown and the act of finding what the dragon really looks like.
Ajay Kurian: I refuse to believe that it happened. Like debt is such a primal thing and it’s just so hard. I’m thinking of my mother, for instance, and confronting her fears feels impossible. It feels like it’s never gonna happen. There’s incremental things that happen. But what I’ve seen in your work, how you continue to confront new challenges, how you reduce these binaries between life and death, open that passageway.
There’s a part of me that’s so hungry to understand how you became friends with death, how you were able to really be okay with those moments of spiking fear, and to welcome this and understand that the dragon is really a snake.
Raúl de Nieves: I guess it’s because I grew up in a house full of death, as they say. Essentially, I grew up knowing that death was a reality. I have two brothers and we’re all two years apart. My little brother who was six years old when our father died, has no memory of him. So for us to grow up looking up at the sky, and my mom being like, if you see an airplane, wave to the airplane, ‘cause that’s where your dad is.
It was this sense of comfort because when growing up in Mexico, we didn’t see many planes flying over my small little city. So it was a rarity to find some sort of connection through an idea that my mom was planting on us. The celebration of death in my culture is one of the most beautiful things that we have. It’s such a rich and beautiful act of nature to embody this idea of the ephemeral aspect of life and how people are the closest things to us when it comes to a memory. Not having that person next to you creates an idea of sorrow. But for me personally, it has created an idea of safety.
That’s why this aspect of life becomes so important. I have really intense conversations with my mom where I’m like, I’m gonna die first, and she’s like no, me, and I’m like, me. And then we’re like, oh my god, we’re so weird. But it’s funny, like I obviously don’t want my mom to die or me, but I’ve thought about death. What would happen if I died tomorrow? Would anyone even care? I don’t have children. I have a family, and I have a lot of friends. We’re seeing so much death every day, and it’s almost a normality. But it’s not celebrated, like we aren’t celebrating the death of people right now.
We’re trying to understand the reality of why it is so easy to access this fear now. It’s almost like the fear is gone because it’s prominent and nobody’s celebrating it. We’re just really thinking about what tomorrow brings because it’s far away from us right now, but it can get close any moment. I think that’s when you have to start to really gravitate towards what would this look like if it really happened to me?
Ajay Kurian: I was just thinking about this today, so bear with me if I don’t have a full thought here, but there’s this anime called Demon Slay. I’ve been watching it and it’s really brutal. The beginning of the story is really brutal and terribly sad. This new movie came out and apparently it’s like the biggest selling anime film ever. I was just thinking about why that would necessarily be the case? There’s a part of me that thinks exactly what you’re saying about this possibility of celebrating death. Understanding grief as a part of living and being alive. Because that brutality is so present, it almost allows you to sink your teeth into life and really experience something that feels more real and more charged.
When I go to your exhibitions, I get the sense that life is charged, that you don’t fuck around. This is real, this is happening, this is important, and it’s joyful and there’s such a spectrum of emotions. This show El Rio, now several years ago, 2016, I just remember being floored by this one character in particular. The body language and behind all the pearls are bullets streaming down the fabric. I was actually shaken. It was such a beautiful, coy, strange sculpture that was in the press release. It alludes to saint or assassin. And I was like, Jesus Christ, this is a lot but it’s really beautiful. So you are left with — what do I do with all of this?
Raúl de Nieves: As you can see, this character is wearing a military suit and it is covered in fake pearls, but it also drapes these bullets. You can’t see his eyes, but you can see their smile or their grim. That’s what reminds me that sometimes a saint can’t be a saint without the act of defeat, death, and renewal. So in a way, it is a double-sided image of the self. Not just of the person that decides to take on that role, but the reality of our personal selves and how we have the capacity to flip.
It’s one of the scariest things to imagine because you can’t help it. Sometimes you question people’s actions and it’s hard to understand what it is that people are going through when they can’t communicate. This object was a really interesting thing to bring into this exhibition called El Rio, which to me, was work that just accumulated in my studio.
It all related back to the idea of St. George and the Dragon, and how the fable really just became my ultimate teacher. I wanted it to teach me something. And it taught me a lot because it’s made me believe in the past. It’s made me understand that by thinking of something that once was here, or an idea or a memory; what would it be like if those memories weren’t here or if those people couldn’t tell you about their future or their stories. So it’s a sense of understanding that our lives come with so many stories from the past, and they usually relate to other people’s lives.
Ajay Kurian: This is the next version of St. George and the Dragon. It’s such an insane piece. You really do have something masochistic in you, but it also feels so multidimensional. When you’re talking about the past, it does feel like time is folded on itself over and over again in the drawing itself. All of these things are related, but it’s not like it’s far away or near, it’s like all of the things at the same time. It’s 11 dimensions instead of three.
Raúl de Nieves: Yeah. I think for me, spirituality is psychedelia. When you really reach that level of trust and belief and it comes with other people’s practices or ways of thinking, you can tap into something that just takes you there.
And as you can see, the image of St. George is so fragmented and now it’s almost like a computer chip. But that was the whole point of using and abusing that image over and over. So that I could access more of myself through this idea of wanting to see the double-sided picture of the self.
Ajay Kurian: Were you at all influenced by underground comics when you were growing up?
Raúl de Nieves: No, I never was. I think Mario was the only thing we had access to in Mexico when we were little, but I never got into comics. I think I made this when I moved to New York and I learned about this artist, Augustin Lesage, who I believe was a mailman (coal miner). They would get home and make these very intense drawings. The influence of this idea of the self going into hibernation and hallucinating, or using your work ethics as a form to access the subconscious and this idea of psychedelia became so real. I don’t know if it was because I was living in a city that is fragmented by buildings and people, and it’s really moving forward like every day is fast. This became a reflection of landing here and understanding what my idea of wanting to adapt myself into this place felt like.
Ajay Kurian: I feel like you’ve probably talked about this a million times, but shoes have been such an important part of your practice. And these are the encrusted results of where the shoe goes? Or are these still part of that series?
Raúl de Nieves: Yeah, everything is about the discarded and the shoe became the momentum. It broke down and it was time to throw it away, but instead of throwing it away, I started doing the bead work in a repetitive form and then I was like, whoa, this repetitive notion can really create an organic form of creation.
The shoe allowed me to think about structure. I guess shoes do give us some sort of structure, but the discarded object was something that I felt so connected to. It’s so hard to throw away a pair of shoes sometimes, or your favorite underwear or a piece of clothing. It was an accident to start working on the shoes. Before they were decorated with beads, they were just covered in tape or yarn, and a curator was like, that’s a sculpture. And I was like, it’s trash. And they were like, it’s a sculpture. They put it on a white pedestal and I was like, oh my God, it is a sculpture. This is the fun part about taking the advice of others and just believing that maybe you should give it a second chance.
Ajay Kurian: I like that it’s a pair. I like that it feels almost pedagogical in a way where there’s these dualities that are meant to undo that duality, whether it’s life or death or whether it’s the artist and curator. That person seeing that work and being like, oh, I think this is something to think about and something to make out of that there’s this doubling that routinely happens and continues on. To see how encrusted and how insane they can get.
As much as you’re influenced by the heritage of ancestral traditions in Mexico, there’s also queer and drag culture. So much of that feels like it’s about going over the top and choosing excess almost as a spiritual path.
Raúl de Nieves: For sure. I think it is one of my favorite pastime activities. Like you can call me an alcoholic, a drug addict, an overachiever, masochist, a good friend, all of it at once. But I think it was the towering effect of trying to put these things together and believing that these materials were not meant to work together. So it is the duality of the yes and the no. It’s the yin yang. It’s like the Wabi-sabi of life and it became so prominent that this was a direction I needed to go in order to exercise this idea of the making and finding these materials, like throwaway castaway shoes, plastic, inexpensive beads, and hot glue.
But when I think about the main material or thought, it’s labor. Labor is something that we forget is so important. I think people undervalue labor and especially when it’s in a sense of a craft. I saw so many artisans growing up in Mexico, and they work on the streets. It’s like their studios and their freedom seems so relatable. But then you can buy these things that are so easily accessible. I wanted to emphasize that into my work. I would think about some of the people that I saw as a child that didn’t exist in the United States. So in a way it was almost like putting a remembrance to something that I knew existed.
These things can take forever. The most annoying thing is that yes, as you get a little bit more well known, some collector will buy it and they’ll be like, a bead fell off, or I didn’t know this was made out of hot glue. But it is, and you don’t even have hot glue in life and it’s falling apart.
But I think it’s just so beautiful to remember that even art is an ephemeral aspect of life and we get the opportunity to feel important and to have people take care of our objects. But in reality, nothing’s here forever. So I think that’s why, when I look at these works, they exude beauty because beauty can’t exist on an everyday basis.
One of my favorite aspects of life is nature. It’s beautiful and it always falls apart, but it comes back stronger. So in a way, the shoes also reference this idea of the tower. If it doesn’t fall apart, it’s not important because in order to understand what life can look like, you have to see the cracks in it and the failure that it comes with, and you only get to learn more from those experiences than having this pristine aspect of the self.
Ajay Kurian: There’s a part of that I’m so happy to hear. And then the other part is like, alright, so what are the collectors saying about all this?
Raúl de Nieves: I think they’re very happy. They put ‘em in like plexi boxes and it just freezes the work. Now I add resin so that it can have a long lasting life, but I don’t make this kind of work that often anymore, specifically the shoes. It was happening at a time in my life where it was the only thing I could really make. I didn’t have a studio big enough to make a grandiose sculpture or 10 foot stained glass windows. So working in my room or in this tiny space in New York gave me the opportunity to exercise that value.
I think that’s something that following my own journey as an artist has been one of the greatest things I could have given myself. Maybe at that moment, not choosing the academic world. The desire to believe in this moment and that I could exercise something just through the simplicity of going to Michael’s and buying $50 worth of beads and taking my dirty shoes and putting beads on it for four months, was incredible. Yeah, never give up. That’s something that I try to always exercise is even if you hit that wall, there’s always tomorrow.
Ajay Kurian: So all of that labor, modesty, and working in that small studio then results in having an opportunity that puts a highlight, a spotlight really, on your work that propels other major projects that continue and are continuing right now at Pioneer Works.
But this felt like the first major moment where you had the window. You had these figurative sculptures that were telling a loose story and to see someone believe in the practice. What does that feel like and what were the things that you had to break through to find something like this?
Raúl de Nieves: It is very emotional to look at this photo because I think it’s a dream of any artist to be asked in these prestigious exhibitions. When I was asked to do this show, my studio was literally the size of a hallway and somehow it was an artist-run space called Secret Project Robot in Bushwick. It had moved several times and they were ending their lease. So I had gotten the opportunity and then my friend Gage, started this club called The Spectrum, and then that closed and we had the Dream House.
I was able to make the window for the Whitney Biennial in a basement, so there was no light coming into that basement and it was like thinking backwards. I never really was meant to make these windows. Somehow they were such an afterthought to an exhibition where I would just see a window in an exhibition.
In the El Rio show, Company gallery had four little sets of windows, and I put these paper tape trashy windows up. Chris and Mia looked at the work and they were like, why do you do this? And I bullshitted the story by saying it’s a reaction to architecture, but now I realize it is. When they gave me the opportunity, they brought me to the museum and were staring at a vast window and they’re mainly talking about my practice as something that they really saw living in the outside of the museum and having a greater relationship to its community out there than inside the institution.
So they really wanted to bring that into the space and have the dual reflection from the street within the space. I was like, I must have won the lottery, because whatever I’m doing is a form of respect and when I close my eyes and make a wish, it’s the only thing I can ask for because I feel like respect really comes with everything that we can imagine.
All this work was made, except for the window, at the old Secret Project Robot. And I am so curious to understand how this work is doing, because at that point, the way that I was building these things was so different than what I can do now because I’ve done this so many times now that I understand exactly how the materials will react and what will stop them from having a form of decay.
But I also love the idea that maybe this is slowly disintegrating and that’s the beauty of this testament of time. The piece is called “Beginning & the end neither & the otherwise betwixt & between the end is the beginning & the end, so it’s a repetition of time.
Ajay Kurian: Do you have a writing practice? Because your titles always sound like they’re from longer poems.
Raúl de Nieves: I feel like my writing practice comes a lot with my collaboration with Jesse and Hairbone. My performance practice, specifically the band, allows me to improvise. And I’ve realized I’m really good at improvisation. When it comes to giving a speech, I can give the speech of a lifetime. But it comes from the heart, so when I sit down and really exercise the act of writing, I can get in a really beautiful space. I don’t do it often because I find that it’s such an amazing thing to access at points. I don’t wanna overdo it. Sometimes making art has become such a struggle to want to continue and it’s emotionally draining. So I think finding time to exercise this moment of creating a title or a verse is something that we have to access at that point.
Ajay Kurian: I want to go to another project that was really forward facing, this carousel piece. We can see your vocabulary here, but it’s also a ready made form and who you’re collaborating with. There’s so many components to this and the piece turned out and it’s insane. It makes perfect sense.
Raúl de Nieves: This defines that I’m crazy. I don’t know. I’m like fucking crazy sometimes and I’m like, stop me. I got asked by our production fund to submit a proposal for a collaboration with Bulgari. I love jewelry and I love the idea of the unattainable, like object of desire, which sometimes is money and status.
I was making this in 2018, and it’s so funny to think about where we are now and how art and commerce are best friends and museums want to have relationships. You don’t even have to be an artist. You want the recognition of these entities. And actually, because I’ve had several of them, I realize that they are the modern patrons. They treat you with so much respect and allow you to dream big. They’re almost the only ones that can help you access this crazy form of making. The carousel was such an easy thing to propose. When this brand is talking about legacy, the only thing that came to mind was a carousel and the cycles of life that we go through. Just knowing that this object is something that we all rode as kids. And as you get older, maybe you have the opportunity to do that if you have a child, but the remembrance of time is in a spinning circle.
As you can see here, the dragon is once again an aspect of the image. It was almost like the fear itself of saying yes to something so big. I was told not to do this so many times. They were like, nobody’s gonna take you seriously because you’re working with this brand. And I was like, I don’t give a fuck. I wanna take myself seriously and understand what it means to be offered this kind of experience. If it comes with saying goodbye to a traditional way of thinking, then I’ll learn from that. But I think we’ve all left relationships and moved on from things that hold us back. And to me at that moment, I had to listen to my instincts and just believe that this is an opportunity because the world wants you to exercise this idea of the opportunist. But we aren’t opportunists, we are seekers.
In a way, this was something that was brought to my attention and I didn’t even take it seriously. And maybe not taking it so serious is what gave me the opportunity to exercise this form of magic. Now I look back at this and it is a monster of its own. The beauty of this thing is that it does exist and these galleries have helped take care of it and it’s been shown throughout the United States in so many different places. So it comes back into my perspective at different times in my life. It is showing me the cycles of time and it still reminds me of that kind of baby self that I had to grow into as an adult. It makes me feel really proud that time has given me this opportunity to exercise some of the craziest things that we can think about.
Ajay Kurian: Was that a moment that showed you the limited thinking of a past art world? I don’t actually think the art world is really in that place anymore. Now they welcome any fucking partnership in the world. But I think back then, the idea of selling out and the idea of not being taken seriously was so pertinent and on so many people’s minds. Did it give you license to be like, I know the division that I have?
Raúl de Nieves: For us being in the Whitney and being asked by Tiffany to collaborate, was really crazy. It made me believe that people really do care about the arts and people care about people. There is a sense of abundance and this abundance does come with saying yes to things that might make you feel uncomfortable. Especially with fashion and commerce.
But we are all part of the cycle. That’s where it’s really interesting to see how much they’re dancing together now and everyone wants to be at the party and everyone wants to have the experience of sitting on that table. And it is a pleasure. It is something that I think should be exercised in many different forms. It also goes back to believing that these things come when they’re supposed to be there.
Ajay Kurian: I think that this collaboration worked out beautifully and I actually was really surprised at how well the Tiffany collaboration went.
But do you have any hesitance about the ways in which commerce and art have joined forces? I don’t know. You put it so beautifully when you were talking about the difference between being an opportunist and a seeker. I think from the artist level, that’s a beautiful way to put it. It’s very centering and grounding to say that’s the reason why you move towards certain things and not other things. But when you zoom out and look at art, fashion, commerce and all these things, do you feel like we’re okay?
Raúl de Nieves: I would definitely say we made a pact with the devil somehow. Behind the scenes, we don’t know where a lot of this money’s coming from and what it can do to a person. But I think from my knowledge and my experience, it’s been a very caring aspect of my relationships and it’s helped me grow.
It’s made me take myself a little bit more seriously, which is sometimes hard to get to. But I don’t know. We’ve done so many exhibitions and institutions, and you need to exercise the idea of asking for financial help because we can’t do these things without a sense of capital.
It’s so interesting because everyone then thinks that you must be rich or something, but you’re still connected to this idea and network of trust. I’m really happy that people get to exercise these forms of thinking. I think it gives more of these opportunities being awarded and feeling like that is an important gift. The award becomes a self appreciation and most of the time you’re either applying for the award or just secretly being told that you won. I’m just so thankful for the experience that I’ve had with these moments of time.
Ajay Kurian: This really stands out to me as one of my favorite exhibitions of yours and of that year. I thought this was one of the best exhibitions that I even saw in images. I’m speechless. I was jealous at how great it was. Thinking about how many people need to come together for something like this.
I actually am really curious about the gallery and museum involvement, all of these different parts, how does that come together? You’re giving me a face now — I’m trying to decipher.
Raúl de Nieves: These conversations and these visions are so hard to execute. Specifically, this was so intense. I get myself in a lot of trouble by saying I’m gonna do something because then I end up having to do it. It was the same thing for the carousel. Doing this show at the Henry was the same thing where they’re like, oh my God, what do you wanna do? And I said, I want to build skylights with these stained glass windows. And then I was like, shit.
But the installation aspect became so natural. The idea of looking up became so important and finding a way for people to connect to the space architecturally. Then I was like, okay, I’ve tapped into something and just from thinking about sites that I visited, like the pyramids in Mexico and how they’re stationed, I wanted to embody that kind of energy. Obviously on a very slow scale. Everything here looks so expensive, but it’s made out of paper tape and paper, and these benches were made out of plywood. The most expensive thing is probably the carpet. But I think it’s the labor of time that you really get to experience in a simple way.
The three sculptures that are in the exhibition are works that I’ve had in my life for so many years. This broken sculpture is a portrait of my mother. It was one of the first things I made when I thought I could make a sculpture. I casted my friend in tape and thought I could glue beads on top of the tape and that it wouldn’t fall apart. But guess what? It fell apart. And now I get to show the sculpture over and over again and add something to the piece. So it’s not a work that is for collection, it’s a work that just continues to travel in my life.
Ajay Kurian: Oh, that’s beautiful.
Raúl de Nieves: It’s called Celebration. So it’s a celebration of time and most of these beads that you see on the platform are either sweepings from my studio or just accumulated trash, if you want to call it that.
This is where collaborative thinking really comes to mind, because in reality, this is a work that is made in relationship to the institution. And everyone gets really excited about what it is that you are bringing to the table. So the exhibition courier will be like, let’s do this and let’s focus on making this really beautiful. A lot of these things are other people’s ideas coming into the perspective. So it is a collective mind.
This work here, I think it’s called the deaths of every day, was putting so much effort into something and just seeing it collapse and finding that there’s other ways of bringing things back into motion, which is having support. So this is that star that we think we can all become.
Ajay Kurian: I want to get to your exhibition at Pioneer Works. You keep saying you get yourself into situations. This feels like another situation. This is a lot of windows.
Raúl de Nieves: It’s 50 of them.
Ajay Kurian: My stomach sank, just hearing that.
Raúl de Nieves: I’m gonna take a shot for this. Pioneer Works is this amazing place. They gave Hairbone and I our first residency and we got to experience having space as a band. We recorded some songs there, we got to play with Psychic tv, and Gabriel has been in my life for 15 years. When he offered me the exhibition, it was his dream to see Pioneer Works as a sacred space. So he was like, please do this for me. And I was like, I gotta do this for me too.
Once I said yes, I really felt fucked. I wasn’t getting fucked, but I was just fucking myself over, but in a really beautiful way because I knew what I had said yes to. I was just complaining before this started and someone quoted me saying that this is the last time I’ll do this. In reality it’s not the last time I’ll do this. I’ll maybe consider the labor a little bit more because as you’re making these things, there is a sense of, like help.
But once again thinking about labor, they don’t pay an artist to work. They think that whatever you make turns into gold, which it can’t. But making these works, I really wanted to reflect on this idea of the ideology of conversations and symbolism, the past, present, and future, and what that has looked like in my life. The first aspect of the project was asking a question and maybe not having an answer. So the tarot became a very iconography use of language. I’ve got my cards read maybe three times in my life, and the three times that I’ve had the readings, they’ve been quite tragic.
I was thinking about why I felt a sense of unluck. Someone wants to tell you that your tower is gonna fall and the card of death is here. Then you as a person, you’re like, it’s over. I think reflecting on seeing these symbols of the end became so important. It gave me more to exercise to the beginning. I do want to see an end to something that allows me to continue again, because that’s what we do every day. In a way paying homage to my life in the times that I’ve been able to experience here in this world is something of beauty.
I do use more text that’s a little bit more direct that could be used as a mantra. Like happiness runs in the form of circular motions, close your eyes and manifest the future dream. There is the name of a single person, and it’s Felix Gonzalez Torres. I was thinking so much about what it means to be an artist and who is gonna take care of our legacy afterwards, if that’s even a possibility. And if so, how do we exercise this experience in different forms of making? When I thought about his art and how it is an ephemeral practice and it comes with instructions, it just clicked. I was like, wow, anything is possible as long as you create that knowledge of belief. It really made me feel a sense of comfort to be able to have this space as my latest exhibition because I have seen such beautiful times in New York City in that space.
Pioneer Works is a place of community. It’s exercised in that way. So when Gabriel’s dream was to see that space be this, I was like, I can make your dream come true, but you’re also gonna make my dream come true. So we’re both in it together. So yeah, I hope you go and experience this exhibition. It’s up for many months and it has so many beautiful times of day that you can access it. In reality it is gonna be a space that is filled with bodies. I think that’s been one of the most beautiful things to experience — this catharsis of people reacting to the simplicity of a space being filled with light.
Ajay Kurian: I feel like a common thread throughout so much of what we’ve talked about today, which is that with belief, whether it be in the self or in the world, can come joy. And that’s what essentially banishes fear.
Raúl de Nieves: Yeah, I think for me, self-love is what respect brings you, and that is just one of the best gifts I’ve been able to give myself. Appreciating not just my body, but my consciousness. In a way it really reacts to a form of being a happy person and acknowledging joy as a gift of life.
Ajay Kurian: This is a funny thing to bring up now, but in talking about being a happy and joyful person, what is it about the smashing pumpkins that you love so much?
Raúl de Nieves: Oh man. When I was a teenager and wanted to be cool, that band was like wearing eyeliner and silver pants and James Iha looked like he was like a girl. And I was just like, I need to be that. They gave me this beauty of exercise, of believing in the magic of the hero. They were my ultimate heroes and they paved the days for me to exercise that form of performance and music. They were like my angels coming down and saying, the world is a vampire.
Ajay Kurian: I can’t and I’m not gonna add anything to that. This is a great time for questions.
