THOMAS COLE’S JOURNEY: TRANSATLANTIC CROSSING AT THE MET

The Mountain Ford, 1846, Image Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Text by: Rishabh Manocha
All artwork by Thomas Cole, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Last month (Jan 30, 2018) witnessed the opening of an unprecedented exhibition, celebrating the life and legacy of English-born American artist Thomas Cole. The title Transatlantic Crossings signifies his immigrant status to the fledgling new country – the United States.

It is also reflective of embarking on a purposeful journey. The latter years would reveal Cole’s significant contribution to American art.

Cole’s forte of landscape painting is sublime, romantic and deeply piercing. The beauty of the American wilderness is a predominant theme of his work. But, what lies beneath that unfettered beauty is truly penetrating. From purely lyrical depictions of the landscape, of which he was a pioneer in the new continent, much of his critical work comprised of incremental narratives, often dichotomous in nature. These narratives talk about man’s penchant of incessant desires. Born in the heyday of industrialization, Cole witnessed first hand the shocking effects of mass production on the ecological cycle. The soot ridden valleys and smoke of chimneys indeed played a pivotal role in shaping his understanding of man’s relationship to nature.

One of Cole’s most acclaimed works, The Course of Empire depicts mankind’s emergence, prosperity, and eventual diminishment. From the reeds of landscape, to the material pomp and glory of man, and finally to the disappearance into the same enigma of landscape, Cole depicts the course of so-called “civilization”. It is almost as if the series depicts the course of empire, but pays ode to the permanence of landscape.

Yet another exemplary work is The Oxbow. Here, Cole depicts the tamed nature of landscape in juxtaposition to the lush and rampant existence of nature. The cropped fields of Massachusetts set against the northwestern forests depict American landscape as a panoramic refreshment.

As one looks at Cole’s work and himself as the patron of the Hudson River School, one begins to delve deeper into the subject of dichotomy. It is apparent in his first generational roots as an immigrant, having founded the first institution of its kind in the United States. It is apparent in his usage of landscape as means to distinguish the contrived and the natural. And, it is apparent in his choice of human depictions in composition, most times either sparse or plenty.

The exhibition also includes direct comparisons between his work, and the work of his contemporaries JMW Turner and John Constable. The influence is indeed apparent, but the perspective is rather anew. It isn’t though his work isn’t impressionistic in technique like Turner’s or largely painterly like Constable’s. However, his work is more than just the interplay of paint and canvas. It is but an assessment that’s made through each landscape. The exhibition runs through May 13, 2018.

Landscape with Tower (from McGuire Scrapbook), Image Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow, 1836, Image Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Titan’s Goblet, 1833, Image Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

For more information regarding this exhibition and more, please visit www.metmuseum.org

TRACEY EMIN

Once called the “enfant terrible” of the Young British Artists, Tracey Emin’s confessional, autobiographical work fearlessly intimates that the artist is here to stay.

Portrait and Studio Photography by Oli Kearon | Interview by Sarah Nicole Prickett

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In a beautiful new compendium entitled TRACEY EMIN: WORKS 2007-2017 by: Jonathan Jones, published by Rizzoli International Publications, we can view a decade’s worth of work of the prolific and inimitable Tracey Emin. Compiled in close collaboration with the artist and unprecedented in its scope, this definitive book collects ten years of Tracey Emin’s drawings, paintings, sculptures, appliques and embroideries, neons, video stills, and installations. A multimedia artist whose intensely personal work blurs the boundaries between art and life, Emin remains one of the most highly publicized contemporary British artists and continues to stir as much controversy as she has acclaim. A multimedia artist whose intensely personal work blurs the boundaries between art and life, Emin remains one of the most highly publicized contemporary British artists and continues to stir as much controversy as she has acclaim.

Moving chronologically through a prolific decade of work–from major public installations to recent reflective paintings and sculptures–this book shows a coherent vision that defies the idiosyncrasies of Emin’s evolution as an artist. The same mixture of anger, hope, curiosity, and vulnerability that informs her delicate drawings and handwritten neon works can be felt in the darker tones of recent monoprints and the weight of later bronze pieces.

Written by Jonathan Jones, whose text places Emin’s work in a broad art-historical context and sees this recent decade of her artwork as an entry point to examining her full career, this is a beautiful monograph on one of the world’s most influential living artists.

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She is, for enough of us, the first famous, knowable, and wealthy living artist to be a woman. She is the first we could name before we knew quite what art was. Because of this, she has helped decide what we think art is: the outrageous act of doing something because you can, which means that you should. Her sensibilities make crucial sense to the most desirous young artists and writers, mostly young women, but not always. Imitated by dozens, her style has become memetic, which makes it seem more original. It is original as she is. Tracey Emin is permanent.

That’s what she says. The words–here to stay–are stitched in capital letters on one of the blankets she liked to make, in acerbic pastels, from the early 1990s on. This one, titled The Simple Truth, was made in 1994 for the Gramercy Park Hotel Art Fair, where a thirty-year-old Emin slept and showed her work in the same small room and did not feel welcome. I saw it in a book of Emin’s pictures, My Photo Album, which I had not opened since buying it four years ago. Oddly the picture of the blanket took me by surprise. Odd because the ambiguity of “Here to stay,” the provisional, limited idiom of the sojourn turning into a journey’s broad conclusion, is blatantly Emin; and because the early work that is still her most widely known also concerns a bed, namely her bed; and because I had seen pictures of the blankets before and had apparently found this one forgettable. This time its freshness and its near-vulnerability was alarming. I imagined it making people want to cuddle her.

Emin is not generally thought of as an artist whose work keeps one warm at night. The title work in her most recent show, The Memory of Your Touch, is a self-portrait (1997—2016) on another hotel bed, taken from behind as she lies prostrate in red thigh-high stockings. Other works include sculptures, more naked and headless or faceless bodies in jaggy plaster or bronze; paintings that leak cold blood and cloud with the nacreous greys of frozen breath over dysmorphic outlines of the body in chalky blacks; and her signature hand-scrawled pleas in popsicle-pink, slinky tubes of light. Her idols are dead, untouchable, macho like Rodin and Schiele, and we see their relentless impressions on her figures. In her “neons” she is most obviously, saleably herself, and these have become fixtures in expansive hotel lobbies from London to Miami, New York to Istanbul. Most spell out more of her words: You Should Have Loved Me. I Followed You to the Sun. I Dream of Sleep. One, at a hotel in Oslo, traces a humanoid figure, bloated with withering limbs, made and titled in homage to Emin’s favorite painting: Munch’s The Scream. It seems made to induce the nightmare of your life.

Good Red Love, 2014 © Tracey Emin. Photo: Ben Westoby. Courtesy: White Cube

Hers is like a Cinderella story stuck at a minute to twelve. Born like Kate Moss, in Croydon, South London, Emin spent her childhood in the rough-edged seaside town of Margate, where her mother ran a hotel her father owned. At thirteen she was, as she told us in her lacerating memoir, Strangeland, raped in an alley behind a tavern. At twenty-seven she had her first abortion, carrying the killed fetus home in the back of a taxi. Nearing thirty, with a degree from the Royal Academy in London but practically nothing to her name, she burned all the fine little lithographs she used to sign “Miss T.K. Emin” and started over as Tracey qua Tracey. She made five-minute films that looked like very unfunny home videos, like the one titled Why I Never Became a Dancer, which loops through her thwarted adolescence as images of Margate unspool: “The reason why these men wanted to fuck me, a girl of 14, was because they weren’t men. They were less. Less than human. They were pathetic.” It was 1993.

Sick, delicious egoism, paired with ironies that were a bit rich, was all the rage in Emin’s milieu, which included Sarah Lucas, Damien Hirst, and Anya Gallacio (it was in Artforum’s 1992 cover story on Gallacio that Michael Corris coined the term YBAs, for Young British Artists). Emin and Lucas opened a shop in Brick Lane, painted the walls pink instead of white, and sold t-shirts with “slogans” like Have you wanked me yet? Emin titled her first solo show, facetiously but not self-deprecatingly, My Major Retrospective (1993). Corris called her Sandra Bernhard and Beuys in one body. “Emin’s persona,” he said with emphasis, “is designed to look as though it can take everything life can throw at her.” Messiness, of course, accommodates more mess. When the mess becomes massive it looks like a cover-up, where the crime is ambition; and it’s hard to be sure that ambition is not per se criminal. Only, it’s apparent that when a woman reaches success before losing her sex appeal, her talents are perceived to be strategic, not divine. Emin’s rise inspired some of the art world’s hottest debates over craft, narcissism, and intent. Enviable, she could not be beloved.

In the six years between her “retrospective” and her first (and last) nomination, with My Bed (1999), for the Turner Prize, Emin made a brand out of getting blackout drunk and saying unbelievable things in the press. When she claimed, like she did after one particularly wild televised incident in 1997, to not even remember she’d been on television, the press insinuated she not only remembered but intended doing it–anything for a headline, as if she were both headless and single-minded, or strategically mental. The persona stuck to her work. Colm Toíbín, in a review for British Esquire of Emin’s 20 Years retrospective, about summed it up, saying, “her drawings have a starkness and an aura of desperate loneliness attached to them. Her nudes are drawn with merciless care; they manage to achieve an effect which is spare and plaintive.” He notes the effort in making My Bed “so unglamorous, all tossed, with knickers stained with menstrual blood, among other things, on the floor beside it, the last place you would lie down to rest.”

Emin has been soberish, meaning she drinks wine but not spirits, for eighteen years, and it is no longer her fault that she forgets things. She tries to remember. She is trying to be remembered–as what? Enormous. Great. A vast power. Her work becomes vaguer and vaguer, even as it solidifies and gains mass. Primal scenes dissipate into other people’s myths, words blow up and fuzz into lyricism. Something was lost when she shed the itchy habit of the first-person, shameful confession, when she stopped calling her pieces my that and my this and started saying your, yours, you. It became unclear what she loved. Something, some meaning. I cannot remember either what the meaning is.

Studio Photography by Oli Kearon

My lips moved across your face, 2015 © Tracey Emin. Photo: HV-studio, Brussels. Courtesy Xavier Hufkens

I call Tracey Emin at her studio after lunch, her time. There is the just-caught breath. There is the click of a lighter. Her voice, never mind all the cigarettes, retains the softness of Egyptian cotton. It’s possible, somehow, to hear the ‘e’ in Tracey, the barest flutter of vowel.

She gives a sigh of displeasure at telling me what her days are like, or how they are not alike. Last week she was in Paris, Brussels, Rome. Today she and her team are renovating Emin’s studio, which is over eight thousand feet of former factory space in Spitalfields, East London, with a swimming pool in the basement so she can do laps in the space of a smoke break. Next year the operations will relocate a new, larger space in Margate, where she can swim in the sea. London is “too noisy,” says Emin, “and too full of shopping.” She will wait until night to make, say, the molds for her sculptures, working from one o’clock in the morning until three o’clock, seven o’clock, eight. Then the emails start: “I don’t even know how many emails I get, too many to count, every day. One demand after another. And all these questions.”

Emin has a propensity to feel questioned. She listens badly and is quicker to hate a question than to hear it, perhaps because she assumes her interlocutors think the worst. When I say that she got famous by not sleeping, by seeming to party all night while actually staying up to work, what she hears is the accusation echoed: “I was working then and I’m working now. I don’t like to go out. I never did.” When I ask whether her works begin with shapes or notions or, perhaps, with their titles, which are memorable and seem so definitive, she says: “No, you’re wrong.” Then she considers. “The title is the subject,” she says. “The title or the subject is a loose net that catches things, and whatever fits inside the net stays, if that’s not too pretentious.” Emin has never seemed pretentious. Her most-used words, in conversation, are different forms of work. “All the wildness is in the work,” she says. And, “there is a calmness in me when I am working.” And, “the work is working toward the crescendo of the subject.” When she says that the subject is often a question, it becomes tempting, though unwise, to ask a question containing the word tautological.

Yet Emin must delight in being questionable. A few hours after she hangs up the phone, she says, she will be going out, but only to dinner, and only then to see her friend Mike Bloomberg. Bloomberg, the billionaire exmayor of New York, is Emin’s idea of a man who should be leading the free world. She asks, when I express my doubts, whether I prefer having Trump. She says that my not voting in the election was smart, even if it wasn’t a choice but a consequence of being Canadian. She thinks Mark Carney, a Canadian economist who currently serves as Governor of the Bank of England, would make another good President of the United States. There seems to be no useful reply. It occurs to me that Tracey Emin is a Conservative. It occurs to me, in particular, that I once read a story in the Telegraph saying that Tracey Emin feels abused by other artists for voting Tory. “Anyway,” says Emin, “I am going to dinner tonight as a representative of–of myself, not as myself, but as a famous international woman artist.”

Studio Photography by Oli Kearon

When the artist was younger, she did not think of representation, or of being represented. She did not go around calling herself a feminist, and whether she was one is irrelevant to the fact that, as Emin herself has said, she experienced sexism at the hands of institutions and critics. But then, the word feminist was more a term of art than the marketing term it can be today, and it is today that the term sticks more easily to work signed “Tracey Emin.” She is aware that female artists who are younger, prettier, and better off than she was at the start of her career are prone to copping her style: Petra Collins, the photographer, artist, and model who was born in Toronto the year Emin showed her first piece in London, has done a number of pieces spelling out Rihanna lyrics and late-night iMessages in Barbie-pink neons. Emin-lite, I might call it. Emin doesn’t mind. She is not, as a woman, threatened by girl power.

“I don’t mind being imitated when the artist who’s doing it is really young,” she says, not naming names. “It’s natural for young artists to pay homage and even to copy. What annoys me is when people my age who are just copying and trying to make a name off my ideas.” Emin is possessed of a congenital, gentle smirk, which often appears in flash photographs to be something meaner, or darker, like a scowl. It is easy to picture her scowling now. “Number one,” she continues italically, “they’re not going to heaven. Number two, they’re not even artists, they’re a sort of designer. And number three, how can they get any satisfaction out of it? They can’t.”

Emin believes that art is not a task but a vocation. She utters the phrase “doing what you love” as if it’s never been said. She says, as she has said in most recent interviews, that her work is getting better as she ages. Better how? “Stronger.” How does she know? “Because of the pleasure and understanding I find in it.” Have there been any changes to elicit new strength, or understanding? “No, I am the same person.” A breath. Then: “My mother died last year, which changed a lot about how I feel, how I am in the world.” What was the biggest change? “My mother was alive,” says Emin, “and now she’s not.”

Neon and Mirror/Diabond Installation view: The More Of You The More I Love You, Art Basel Unlimited, Basel, 2016 © Tracey Emin. Photo: Sébastien Bozon. Courtesy the artist, Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong, White Cube and Xavier Hufkens

She uses the word “my,” and even the word “me,” more seldomly now. In lieu of a diary, which makes her aware of living posthumously and inspires self-censorship, she writes and sends letters to her friends. “I’m the last person in England using the post office,” says Emin, who also believes, despite what the government says, that “they are starting to take the post boxes away.” In the titles of her recent exhibitions, as in her more private writings, the first-person possessive has given way to direct address: “Love is What You Want,” “You Saved Me,” “I Followed You to the Sun.” She got “The Memory of Your Touch” from a moment in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a husband dead and a widow anguished, missing “the touch of him.” Emin, a desirous reader who’s usually too tired to read, has a different book open at every bedside: a biography of Nabokov, whose author she can’t recall; I Love Dick by Chris Kraus; Provence by Lawrence Durrell. The last book she read cover to cover, almost six months ago, she sighs, was the wonderful novel Horse Crazy by Gary Indiana. She remembers a bit near the end, when a woman artist, suffering from myopia, thinks she sees a cute, brooding guy in a tavern; but when she gets close, he turns out to be a stain on the wall.

Her beds are various, scattered between her studio, her home in London, her other home in the South of France, her old family home in Margate. It’s in France where Emin is “self-sufficient, or somewhat self-sufficient.” She has peppers, tomatoes, and courgettes in her garden, and recently she grew her first pumpkins, though they were “not very good.” There are no good restaurants around, so she cooks. I ask for a recipe. She can’t think of one, and then she doesn’t want to. “I thought we were going to talk about my art,” says Emin. “I am not interested in these questions, and by the sounds of it,” referring to the dilatory sound of my voice, “you aren’t either.” I laugh. She laughs less.

We talk about art, and it is nearly the same conversation. She lists the materials in her studio, starting with the Dionysian bronze she loves for its “machoness.” She makes declarations of increasing dependence on herself. She means a “true” self. She also means a “real” self. “Total isolation, surrounded by nature,” says Emin, “is what I need to really work.” Never lonely in the studio, she continues to feel a longing in bed. Whether the longing is for a man is unclear. Not every you is the you of a very romantic pop song. Quieter, larger, is the you of a prayer.

We talk about her husband Stone, who is literally a stone, a piece of rock, and whom she married last spring in the garden in France where she found him. Stone and Emin “are having a nice relationship,” she says, “although long-distance is always tricky.” It occurs to me that I once read a story in the Telegraph saying that Georgia O’Keeffe left her unfaithful husband for a mountain. “God told me,” said O’Keeffe, “that if I painted it enough I could have it.” Emin, when I tell her this, softly repeats: have it. There is a word loved by the master self-portraitist, and painter of flora and fauna, Albrecht Dürer. The word is Konterfei, which means an exact likeness and signified to him the making of something exactly like. “Yes,” says Emin. “Yes.” She exhales at length. “You asked what I’m working on now. That’s what I’m working on. The thing. The thing that it is. That’s the end of the interview.”

Studio Photography by Oli Kearon

STUDIO VISITS – CHLOE WISE

Chloe Wise is the New York artist capturing a 21st century zeitgeist through dark humor and fake food, dripping alfredo sauce over gluten-free ideas, the artist’s work offers an at-times scathing critique on capitalism that challenges our obsession with health, beauty, and luxury in modern America.

Portrait Photography by Tiffany Nicholson Interview by Ashleigh Kane
Dress (worn as a blouse) by Marc Jacobs, trousers, hat, and shoes artist’s own

“I can’t remember a time where art wasn’t the focus of my life. Even as I’m speaking to you now, I’m drawing. It’s just what my hand is always doing.” Chloe Wise is speaking over the phone from her studio in Alphabet City, New York, reminiscing about growing up in an energetically creative household. The 26-year-old artist recalls being a child and sitting in restaurants with her mom and drawing portraits of one-another on the paper table cloths. Born in Montreal, Canada, Wise says that she’s been making art since she was six or seven-years-old. She laughs when she realizes her style is essentially the same, two decades on. Always encouraged to pursue what she “obviously showed an interest in”, Wise moved to New York in the midst of graduating high school in 2013 and completed the remainder of her classes online. Once there, she began to work as an assistant to Brad Troemel, one of the artists behind the Jogging, a tumblr blog which tapped into the viral possibilities of art on the internet.

In late 2014, friend and fellow artist India Salvör Menuez wore one of Wise’s sculptures to an event – a life-like cream cheese bagel bag adorned with a Chanel logo. The internet went into meltdown. It didn’t take fashion sleuths long to realize that the bag wasn’t from the French fashion house but was instead created by a then-little-known artist named, Chloe Wise. It was her moment, but it’s also a milestone in her career that she doesn’t want to talk about, explaining, “If you want to copy and paste everything I have said before, you have my permission to do that.” But it’s for no reason other than she’d rather tell you about her latest work. Her most recent exhibition was hosted by Paris’s Almine Rech Gallery. Titled Of false beaches and butter money, it was a witty takedown of wellness culture that included oil paintings and sculpture, and contained the elements that have thus far been key to Wise’s success: great aesthetics and even better humour, the latter which she says she uses as an “access point” to draw people in. Come a little closer and you’ll quickly realize that Wise’s work is about more than a punchline, and below she let’s us in on the joke.

Lactose Tolerance, 2017

Inceste de Citron, 2017

Can you talk about your first experiences making art?

I was making video art when I was six or seven-years-old. One time I made a fake brand which was a combination of Sprite and some other found liquid in the fridge and I made a commercial for it.

When I was 13, 14, I had a webcam and I would take it off of the computer and bring it with me to school or to Florida. I made this film about lettuce being the essence of beauty which was a parody of Zoolander where water was the essence of wetness. Everyone is just holding pieces of lettuce and it has a Sigur Rós song in the background, but it’s pretty funny. It makes me think I have the same sense of humour now that I had when I was 14.

At the time did you realize that what you were making was art?

It wasn’t so thought out but growing up all my notebooks were always covered in drawings. I was always creating something. I guess I was making work with the tools that were available to me. There was no awareness of what that meant or what it would come to signify. I think it was mostly just a reflex to the muscles that were growing as the internet started to gain popularity.

When do you think you really began to embark on your career as an artist?

I don’t think I knew I was doing that, I was just making stuff. After I started assisting Brad, I began to be in group shows with friends, and that felt like a very natural thing. We were all supporting each other, putting on shows, and working together in whatever capacity. I got offered a solo show, and that’s when I stopped working for other artists and started taking my art seriously as a full-time job. The show was in Montreal and it was called Pissing, shmoozing and looking away (2015). I was also offered another solo show which would exhibit later that year called, That’s something else, my sweet (2015). During the process of making those, the bread bag thing happened. It was like this whirlwind, and from then on it was very clear to me that there would be nothing else except for the continual creation of the things that I felt like I had to make.

Was that sudden glare of a spotlight scary?

No. I’ve never been someone who has been shy, self-conscious, or freaked out about an overwhelming amount of involvement. I am best under pressure, and I’m always under pressure. It was funny, exciting, overwhelming – but in a nice way.

Food has always been present in your work. Why are you drawn to food?

It’s not that I’m drawn to food. Food has always been apart of this conversation with art history, or with us just communicating our Zeitgeist, or our moment in time. Aside from the landscape, it’s one of the most obvious subjects in traditional painting, and I think my work is traditional in that way. Regarding food now, we have such abundance and availability in terms of variation. Walking into a store decades ago would’ve looked a lot different than it does now. There’s this idea around the way that things are marketed to individuals, and how the more that we seek to be individuals, the less we assimilate.

My use of food also talks about other parts of humanity and human experience, such as desire and mortality. The human body comes into this beautiful full form and then it decays and dies, and that’s reality – and that’s the same conversation we can have about food.

Your titles are always brilliant. Tell us about the meaning behind the title of your last show, Of false beaches and butter money?

The ‘false beaches’ part is from Picasso, who, in three different poems he wrote ‘false as a beach’. It kept running through my head, and I realized that this false beach is like a Corona ad; an idyllic paradise image with a blue sky and a yellow umbrella. I was thinking about that falseness and the contrived nature of some utopian ideas and to me, that was a really interesting segue into how my work is about real versus fake. I

t’s a real sculpture, but it also looks like the real thing it’s based on so there is this line between how you even define what real is and what fake is. At what point would the real thing become less valuable? Because the real thing would be a piece of lettuce or something.

The other half, ‘butter money’, is a french idiom that goes, ‘Vouloir le beurre, l’argent du beurre et le cul de la crémière’, which means, ‘you want the butter, the butter money and the milk maid’s ass’. It has the same meaning as ‘you want to have your cake and eat it too.’ It’s about this human desire to be doing the right thing, even though we are just truly ruining the entire planet.

For example, you think that choosing quinoa is the healthy choice, but quinoa completely deforests South America, and is making it completely unsustainable for anybody living there to even come close to meeting their needs. They can’t even eat their own quinoa because they can’t even afford their own quinoa because you’ve priced them out. There’s no real right thing to do, so we’re constantly settling for what we think is an okay decision in a vast array of bad decisions.

There’s no real moral thing and if we spiral too deep into that then we realize everything sucks. It’s hard to not partake in a Capitalist society because we all have a part in it. As humans, we are flawed and we are critical of our decision making processes, and that’s what my show is really about. The ‘want to have your cake and eat it too’ idea is a very distilled version of this desire that we have to be congratulated, or at least to be excused from the conversation because we did our part and now we can stop trying.

Dress (worn as a blouse) by Marc Jacobs, trousers and shoes artist’s own

You would have been a castle for a moment, 2016

You’ll Go Blind Looking For It, 2017

Your works over the years have explored different issues and politics, have the issues you explore over the years changed?

I think everyone has become a lot more politicized in the sense that it’s become urgent, and it’s not a luxury anymore. Politics is something that we have to speak about. The difference between my politics then and now is my sense of responsibility, because I have a bigger platform. I’m not perfect; I don’t understand exactly what needs to be done or how I will go forward. I’m inconsistent like every human is, but I think that’s what all my art is about; human inconsistency. But I’m figuring it out and learning to share. It’s very natural for me to share what I’m thinking about.

The content of my work is the same, I’m just thinking of other ways of being critical of consumerism and capitalism. As well as trying to exist within it, and benefit from it. Then realising at the same time, that benefiting from it is a problem. So it’s this weird place that we’re in as consumers. As Americans, every single thing that we do is utilised for the benefit of the big brands. Every single thing we do is “Big-Brothered”, in a sense.

There’s something cynical about thinking about this and there is also something very important in acknowledging it. I was acknowledging that on a smaller scale at different times in my life; when I was vegetarian, or when I was making the tampons (Irregular Tampons, 2014). It’s always been the same voice, it’s just a matter of how and what is coming to the table.

You’ve worked widely across various mediums, do you find yourself gravitating towards one in particular now?

It’s just based on what I have to do at a certain time. I like to construct because I’m so all over the place and multifaceted that I need something to give me direction. The mediums are all interconnected and they all inform each other, but painting seems to have a lot of commercial demand, so that’s something I’m focusing on.

Can you talk about the way you use humor? On first glance, people might think of your works as ‘funny’ but looking deeper and hearing you speak about them, it’s clear that they are not just ‘funny’.

I think you can say that they’re funny because when it comes down to the obviously dark and depressing aspects of the works, I don’t think that is what you read when you first see them. It would be cool if it was but then maybe the work wouldn’t have the same impact. I think that satire and comedy have long been the way that we can negotiate, unpack, and work through life’s most unfunny cruelties. That’s how we handle getting through this conversation without dying of a broken heart. That’s part of the human need to create art in general – or create anything – by re-negotiating it, or re-representing it in a way that could be funny, beautiful, moving or sad. Being ‘too real’ doesn’t necessarily get the job done, so I think calling it funny is not a disservice. Humour is my cheap trick and I use it as an access point, but it would not be the final destination.

What advice would you give to someone who needed it?

Don’t question yourself.

Hair by Austin Burns using Oribe, Makeup by Tonya Riner using NARS cosmetics, Art Direction by Louis Liu, Editor Marc Sifuentes, Production by Benjamin Price.

All Artwork © Chloe Wise / Photo Rebecca Fanuele / Courtesy Chloe Wise and Almine Rech Gallery

For more information visit chloewise.com

STUDIO VISITS – ERIC N. MACK

Eric N. Mack is the rule-breaking artist creating large-scale paintings from unexpected materials and forms into soft-sculpture, expansive figures in space.

Portrait photography by Tiffany Nicholson | Interview by Ashleigh Kane
Coat by Versace, Hat, Shirt, Trousers and Shoes Artist’s Own

Eric N. Mack’s future as an artist was decided at birth, when his mom Lisa Scott and his dad Miller Mack honoured him with the middle name National, after Washington D.C.’s National Gallery of Art. It was there, in the 80’s, that his parents met while his dad worked at the gallery as a plexiglass specialist, building and maintaining the vitrines. A young Eric often went along for the ride, getting to know works by artists such as Vincent Van Gogh in the process. Admittedly, he wanted to “study everything” in order to allow himself to naturally grow inclined to whatever felt right. Eventually he chose to major in sculpture and painting at Yale University School of Art – an institution that artists such as Brice Marden, Chuck Close, and Richard Serra attended, and all of whom Mack admires greatly. He is also a huge fan of Robert Rauschenberg and had the pleasure of working in the late artist’s studio in Florida earlier this year.

Like Rauschenberg, Mack’s own works toy with context and ideas of re-use in order to create new forms – large-scale works that he calls paintings. Constructed from a patchwork of materials and surfaces that push silk, frill, or even an old t-shirt, into new frontiers, Mack forgoes painting’s rectilinear relationship with canvas for infinite new possibilities of presentation. Inspiration comes from his adopted city of New York, which he’s lived in for over a decade, as well as fashion – his dad once owned a clothing store – and art history – a recent fascination is the 1970s French art group Supports/Surfaces. He also places great emphasis on building knowledge.

Beneath the draping, swooping and layering of the surfaces that shape Mack’s canvases, is a melting pot of art academia and consideration for the important contributions of artists who came before him. Even in his spare time, he’s never not looking to build upon his own awareness of New York’s art legacy. Below, he let’s us pick his brain.

A Lesson in Perspective, 2017

Can you talk to us about your studies. What were you interested in?

I wanted to study everything and I had a real interest in the different principles of art; photography, sculpture and painting. I went to an arts high school in Maryland so in college I wanted to continue without having to choose one or the other, and I wanted to be able to develop a natural relationship to art. Immediately when I got to (The Cooper Union) I took all three of those courses. It was really liberating. That school was super important because it was about thought and innovation, and not so much about restriction. By the time I had graduated, painting had become a lot more serious to me in terms of the history and its conceptual concerns. It became a space that was meaningful for me to continue to question, and the results that I came up with made me want to think more in depth about it.

When did you realize that you could make a career out of being an artist?

When I came to New York, I had so many questions. I was so excited to be here because it was my dream place. I interned at a gallery called Rivington Arms in the Lower East Side which was representing Dash Snow at that time and a number of other artists. I wanted to better understand the workings of a gallery, the relationship between an artist and a gallerist, and how an artist could be supported in that way. I was looking at it, not from an artist’s vantage point, but from an administrative aspect. From there, I ended up getting a job in Garth Weiser artist’s studio, and I learned a lot from him. By seeing his process, I learned that people could earn a living from making work, and that if I worked hard enough, it could be a possibility for me as well.

You took a lot of time to develop your foundations as an artist – through art school, research, interning, working for artists, even on the admin side. Why was that important for you to gain that experience?

I think there are times when it’s important that an artwork has academic context, and that the artist is informed and generous about the place that the work comes from, in relationship to art or the history of painting, or a relationship to a previous zeitgeist. People such as Brice Marden, Chuck Close, Richard Serra all came from Yale, and are monumental figures that I look up to.

They went through that training and education and I feel like it was really important for me to do that and make sure that I was here for the long haul and not just being frivolous or superficial.

Previously you’ve referenced Robert Rauschenberg and Sam Gilliam as influences – do they still inspire you or does that lessen as you come into your own as an artist?

I really appreciate art and that’s how I’ve come to be an artist. Rauschenberg is somebody I’ve thought about for a long time and even more so this year because I did a residency at the Rauschenberg Foundation in Captiva, Florida. I got to work in his studio and that was monumental for me. That kind of closeness, to be able to examine the space… it was compelling to be able to see what his brand of innovation afforded him. I gave myself permission to actively think about his legacy after that. But there are others; Basquiat, of course. I would say he is somebody I’ve thought about. He died the year after I was born. I’ve also been thinking of Richard Tuttle – people that have been around for a long time that have served their practices in really strong ways.

Why do you identify specifically as a painter?

It has to do with the lineage that I feel like the work has come from. I see painting as a lot of things, but mostly there’s a relationship to surface and material. I’ve been thinking about the canvas and how painting that revolves around framing contexts that mostly have to do with a rectilinear relationship. I’ve also been thinking about the tools with which we identity as existing with the history of painting. I feel like there hasn’t been much advancement in terms of the apparatus involved with painting, or that any advancement ends up being forgotten in history.

I’ve also been thinking about this movement in Paris called Supports/ Surfaces where painters dealt with space and structure, including surface. Many of these painters are being shown a lot more now, and I see that the work they did as having a part in advancing the technology of painting – in breaking it out of its reductive frame for it to become more tangible and to speak more directly to histories of materiality.

Did you immediately begin working in large scale or was that something you worked up to over time? Was it intimidating to make paintings that large?

I think what I regard as large has changed over time. One of the things I started thinking about after grad school was how to push the identity of the work. One of the biggest moves I made was doing away with the wooden stretcher bar convention that painting has had for a long time. I began moving towards the space in the center of the room.

I’ve long been thinking about monumentality, or about a relationship to a monument, and the challenge for me would be to be able to maintain the kind of detail, care and attitude that the work possesses. So it’s been a constant, very careful, thought process for the work to physically expand. But it feels very natural to the concerns of the work.

You impact the meaning of everyday materials – where do you source or find what you use in your work?

It’s definitely a combination of things because I don’t want there to be one space that could dictate the work’s meaning due to where it comes from. There are times when I buy things from a store, a home goods interior store, or I’ll go to a clothing shop, but mostly it’s thinking about daily tasks and finding something that would be challenging to use as a material. Or something that continues the process of questioning surface and materiality.

So it’s not planned, as in, you don’t go out with an object in mind to bring back?

I go out looking for certain forms. Right now, I’m kind of obsessed with frill – like gathering, ruching – so I’ve been going out looking for it because it ends up having a nice finish. And there’s this relationship with elegance, a kind of frivolity, excess, like Rococo or Baroque. There’s also a supposed coldness to the rigid white wall that often comes with the gallery context, so I’ve been thinking about what would be a really active contradiction of the space.

Palms on Cotton, 2017

Implied Reebok or Desire for the Northeast Groover, 2016

Are you aware of what the painting’s meaning is before you begin or do you add meaning as you go?

It’s nice to have epiphanies while the piece is developing, but I like to be aware. I think the titles end up dictating a starting point that brings people closer to the work or maybe the titles make it more complex. For me, they end up being a finalizing gesture.

How does New York inspire you and your work?

I live in Harlem and I work in the Bronx, so my daily commute to the studio ends up being really influential. I take note of things or I take little snapshots on my phone. It’s nice to think about the city as a space of inspiration.

What do you do when you’re not creating art?

Even the hobbies that I have can end up relating to the work or end up being really nice points in which I can mine certain aspects from.

Can you talk about the importance of abstraction in your work?

I see abstraction as a strategy. I feel like it has social relationships and also aesthetic relationships. Abstraction ends up being a stand in or a symbol for a more complex idea, or to make something more tangible. An abstraction can be present, but it can also obscure and hide – hide information or hide physicality – and there’s definitely that in my work.

I think a lot about abstraction in relationship to a kind of fragmentation, where I think about pieces and parts that have really explicit origins. This is in relationship to what we were talking about before. Like, where does the work come from? Where does fabric, or whatever it is, come from? It’s mostly about how the fragment reads, how the fragments communicate, and how that can be unified to mean something collectively different, or to communicate some kind of emotional complexity.

Do you think your work comments on the value of art, in that you reuse materials and fabrics and give them new meaning through context?

I think if something can be salvaged and reused and seen in a context that is beautiful or expresses some kind of meaning, then that can be very transformative for the viewer or the maker.

Hair by Austin Burns using Oribe, Makeup by Agata Helena @agatahelena using NARS cosmetics, Art Direction by Louis Liu, Editor in Chief – Marc Sifuentes, Production by Benjamin Price

For more information visit ericmack.com

STUDIO VISITS – TALI LENNOX

Away from her newly adopted home of Los Angeles, multidisciplinary artist Tali Lennox takes us inside her New York loft to share her daring, emotional paintings and collages that capture the fleeting nature of memories.

Dress by Burberry
Portrait Photography by Tiffany Nicholson | Interview by Anna Furman

In Tali Lennox’s self portraits, her face is often obscured by charcoal-black facial masks or distorted by bulging eyes and drooly, menacing expressions. When she paints figures, their identities are kept hidden and their facial features are imbued with an abstract, spectral quality. The British-born artist, daughter of singer Annie Lennox and film producer/ director Uri Fruchtmann, has made a name for herself in art and in fashion. At the age of seventeen, Tali began walking runway shows for the likes of Miu Miu and Roberto Cavalli (most recently, she starred in the lingerie brand Agent Provocateur’s tastefully noir-inspired campaign as well as the international campaign for David Webb shot by Inez and Vinoodh).

In 2015, she spent a month in residency at New York’s Catherine Ahnell Gallery, and the following year, mounted an exhibit inside the storied Chelsea Hotel. Both shows explored Western attitudes toward aging and the role memory plays in our collective conscience. She represented grooming habits as odd, culturally specific acts, and took a close look at ordinary gestures (holding a glass, washing one’s face)–encouraging viewers to reexamine their own everyday lives. Elements of Lennox’s portraiture–unusual head-to-body proportions, sanguine facial expressions–invite comparisons to celebrated American painter Alice Neel.

After tragically losing her boyfriend to a kayak accident two years ago, Lennox moved across the country to start a new chapter of her twenties in East Los Angeles. IRIS Covet Book sat down with Tali to chat about maintaining a bicoastal lifestyle, painting in solitude, and our shared admiration for the artist Tracey Emin.

Nose Bleed, 2017

‘Inhale the Oasis’ collage, 2016

‘Mood Swings’ Collage, 2016

Hi! How’s your morning been?

Very quiet. My roommates are both away right now so it’s just me in our treehouse-y home. My favorite hours to paint are either first thing in the morning or late at night so that’s what I did. I’ve had a full day of painting reclusiveness.

What are you painting right now?

I’m working on a painting of my friend Lili. It involves blood, tan lines, and pink silk. I’ve been curious about what it is to be a woman capturing other women. I want to gently challenge the viewer’s own awareness of sexuality. I love to paint nudes, skin, boobs… it interests me to figure out how my perspective differs from that of a man’s, which can come from such an objectified angle.

I’ve had a morbid curiosity since I was a child. I’m fascinated with gore and ghosts. I like to add in elements like blood and drool to my recent portraits, to explore the lines of attraction and repulsion. Recently, I posted a picture of spilled red ink on a mattress and it wound up in the newspaper because people thought it was period blood. Men and women were commenting on it–calling it disgusting. I wasn’t even trying to suggest or make a point about period blood when I took the photograph, but it did get me thinking. It’s a little absurd that women have been having periods since the beginning of humanity and yet people still find it so outrageous.

You relocated to Los Angeles from New York, but you still live in both cities. Why did you decide to move?

I’m in Silver Lake mostly. I love having trees outside my window, and the sense of vast space in LA gives my ideas a certain expansiveness. LA is weird and faded. It’s hard to grasp reality here, which I find so inspiring. I go to New York City every couple of months and it’s always just a big slice of cake–in a wonderful and somewhat overwhelming sense.

Dress by Burberry

What do you miss most about NY when you’re away?

Chinatown, the movie theaters, Serendipity, 24-hour delis, the Met, exchanging a hello with a man who looks like Santa Claus who sits outside my building every morning, the raging desire for a strong coffee in the morning.

Your Instagram bio says that you’re a painter slash jellyfish breeder. Jellyfish? Breeder? Please elaborate.

Really the jellyfish breeder thing is just to be silly. I mean, social media should never be taken too seriously. I do have a fascination with sea creatures though. It stems from childhood. I remember being completely hypnotized by fishmongers when I was probably four years old. I loved looking at the fish scales and the variety of colors, and experiencing the strange smells. I would secretly touch the dead fish when no one was looking. I’ve always been curious about the things others might find gross.

Do you have a regular routine for your creative work? Where is your studio?

I have a rough routine, without regular hours. Right now I paint most often from my room, which I like because I can paint at any hour. Sometimes I like to work late into the night. A lot of people like separating themselves from their work, but I find that working where I live heightens my relationship to the paintings. I mean, I literally wake up and fall asleep seeing it, so I really need to like what I’m doing because there’s no escaping it.

Do you listen to music while you’re working or do you prefer silence?

I like to listen to a lot of film soundtracks. Hitchcock soundtracks are great. Jonny Greenwood, Disney scores, Alan Watts and Ram Dass are great when you don’t want to feel like you’re falling down a vortex of isolation. And when I need a little energy, I’ll put on the Fat White Family’s Champagne Holocaust album.

What are you reading right now? Either book or magazine-wise or just a lingering link in your browser tabs?

I’m about to finish Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami–it’s utterly beautiful. For a quick bedtime chapter or two, I’ll read Anaïs Nin.

Tell me about when you first started painting.

I’ve been drawing and painting forever, or at least since I was very young. I was the kind of kid to stay in the art room at school during break time. When I was nineteen, I moved to New York and started to develop my work with oil painting. I had been modeling full time since I was seventeen. I guess I was looking for a sense of identity outside of that world. Painting builds such a private relationship with oneself. It’s lonely and frustrating–but wonderful.

Kaya, 2017

You were raised by world-famous parents– Scottish singer Annie Lennox and producer Uri Fruchtmann – in the UK. Can you tell me a bit about your childhood?

I grew up between north and west London and went to a pretty liberal school called King Alfred’s, where it was encouraged to be open minded and independent. Honestly, I didn’t feel like there was a difference between my mum and anyone else’s. I was raised with pretty strong values.

How has your mom’s creative work influenced your approach to art-making?

My mum came up with all the visual concepts for her videos and took a lot of risks. She has always been unafraid to express herself, which has encouraged me to keep exploring and experimenting.

I love how you painted terry cloth in that series of self-portraits where you’re wearing a bathrobe and charcoal face masks–what other textures or surfaces are you drawn to painting?

I absolutely love painting breasts. Nipples though can take a very, very long time to get right.

You’ve talked about how your painting practice helped you cope with the loss of your boyfriend, who died in 2015 after a tragic kayak accident. Have you found other practices to be helpful for emotional processing and healing?

I talk a LOT. I’m very open with people I trust. I’ve also explored a lot of energy practices, mindfulness, being able to truly sit with one’s emotion, being present with what comes up. I’m all for feeling fully, releasing, and clearing the way.

What visual artists do you look to for inspiration?

It changes all the time, but lately I love looking at Gerald Brockhurst’s paintings. His paintings are eerie and bold and often have an unsettling quality. I love paintings of the past, before so much technology existed, with female subjects. From the Pre-Raphaelite period, John William Waterhouse and from Baroque times, the painter Georges de La Tour. From the Renaissance, Sandro Botticelli. Their technical skill and level of imagination is simply mind blowing.

Do you have any upcoming shows or creative projects?

I would love to do video and performance art pieces. And curate experiential art shows. My last show was throughout The Chelsea Hotel, and my aim was to alter the viewer’s perspective of reality. So I’d love to continue mind-bending experiments in obscure locations.

Do you have a dream collaborator? Any particular artist or designer, dead or alive?

I would love to connect with Tracey Emin. I have so much admiration for the vulnerable honesty in her work. Gustav Klimt for his imagination and mad technical skill. And Hieronymus Bosch because he created vast realms, centuries before there was even electricity, and that fucking blows my mind.

Dress by Burberry

Hair by Austin Burns using Oribe, Makeup by Tonya Riner using NARS cosmetics, Art Direction by Louis Liu, Editor Marc Sifuentes, Production by Benjamin Price

All artwork © Tali Lennox, images courtesy of the artist

STUDIO VISITS – IVANA BASIC

Equipped with a deftly analytical mind full of dark poetry and a taste for flesh, steel, wax, and bone, Serbian sculptor Ivana Bašić explores the fragility of the human condition and invites you to contemplate life’s end — if only you’re willing.

Portrait Photography by Tiffany Nicholson | Interview by Haley Weiss
Unisex Jacket and Pants by Vivienne Westwood, Shoes Artist’s Own

Our bodies will fail us. We carry that knowledge as they carry us through life. This corporeal contradiction looms in artist Ivana Bašić’s disquieting, stunning work. The 31-year-old suggests the specter of death, whether through figurative sculptures like Stay inside or perish (2016) — which seems to have a force within it that tried to break free, bruising her fragile yet solid physical form — or a performative project like SOMA (ongoing), in which her body is meticulously documented for the creation of a virtual avatar and purchasable 3D model. She ascribes the science fiction bent viewers see in pieces like these to their own fear and avoidance of life’s end, because to her, they’re simply reality. “People have different thresholds of how much they are capable of bearing, at which point they need to go into self-preservation,” explains Bašić. “I think that’s okay. The easiest way for people to digest something is to put it into a narrative, to make a fable out of it. They make up a character, and by making one up they’re announcing that they’re not that character.”

For Bašić, who moved from Belgrade, Serbia to New York in 2010, these works are also deeply personal. She funnels her energy and trauma — much of which can be attributed to her youth spent in a country at war — into her art, pushing herself and her materials to their limits. “I have to fully become them in order to make them, otherwise they wouldn’t feel the way they do,” she explains of the wounded, partial bodies she so often constructs. “It is a lot to become.” Since her June 2017 solo show at New York’s Marlborough Contemporary, titled Through the hum of black velvet sleep, Basic has been in “hibernation mode,” resting her mind after enduring a physically and psychologically punishing production schedule. She worked on the show for six months while maintaining her day job as a designer, and among the material feats she accomplished was suspending her painted wax figures in stainless steel, incubator-like structures, with glass orbs drooping from their necks, for I will lull and rock the ailing light in my marble arms (2017). Now, after recovery and months away from her practice — which by its nature begs draining questions — she is working again, on a new piece for the show titled CRASH TEST, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud and opening in Montpellier, France in February. “I’ve gathered my strength to dive back in slowly and carefully,” she tells us at her Brooklyn studio. In 2018 she will be showing her work back home in Belgrade for the first time. “I want that more than anything, really, because the work is fully saturated by my reality there, and I know the audience will feel it and relate to it,” she says. “It would be meaningful to see that something beautiful can come out of it.”

I will lull and rock my ailing light in my marble arms #1, 2017

Population of phantoms resembling me #1, 2016

The difficulty of your material process seems in line conceptually with some of what’s in the work, like this physical bruising or injury on the bodies. Does the production process deepen your conceptual understanding of what you’re doing?

It doesn’t in a way deepen it, it’s just that’s exactly what it is: the pain that I go through is there in the work, it’s a direct translation. The process is extremely difficult since I work with very fragile materials and with time you realize that matter always resists. It resists becoming. It’s like fractals, where my quest for somehow stretching the limits of the body, or pushing back the end of it, needs to become the truth of each of the elements I work with in order for work to come to life. It’s this really complex breakage that happens in your mind, because in order to see the flesh in stone, and in order to see the world in dust — for those things to actually become that — it’s not just pure verbal translation, it is an actual transformation of the matter, which is a really complex process. Inevitably, I think the pieces become everything I am.

How do they become everything you are?

Once, many years ago, I was still really caught up into theory and trying to argue my reasons for why I’m doing things, because I felt like I had to justify them. It’s the initial insecurities that I think any artist goes through; you feel like you have to support everything with pre-existing theories that are all self-referential and don’t really bring much.

I feel like I have come to a point where it all somehow translates into one sentence I was told, which is basically, there is no need to be asserting anything, since the work, like everything that comes out of your hands, will already carry everything that is in you, and it can’t not. It will become what you are, so there is no need to fear. It’s very direct. For my last show I literally didn’t see my sculptures until I installed them into the gallery, and then it was a shock; even though I was making them and lived with them for months I didn’t see them, because I couldn’t step out of myself and look because I was in. And also there was no need to, since they became everything that was in me so much more than I could have ever tried to insert myself, and more than I was even aware of.

If the work is ultimately a reflection of you — you and the work are one and the same on a certain level — tell me how you see your life in your work. How has being in New York affected your work? How did growing up in Serbia affect your work?

None of those things translate directly for me. I don’t make work that is reactive to the outside in any way. I think that for a lot of artists, this body of work is inspired by this, and that body is inspired by that. With me, it’s not like that. I have always been on a singular quest.

If I was to articulate one or another [environment], obviously my whole life and my most formative years were back home in Belgrade, which is also where my whole family is. Living there I have always felt a reality of existential fear, the reality of death, which is really something you never experience here [in New York], ever. I feel like the most realistic experience that people have of death here is through TV. It’s a simulation at best, and so there is no gravity to life and to everything else consequently, because that builds a whole system of values around it. Really, really early on I understood that the fragility of [life] is something that you can’t un-know once you know it.

Unisex Suit and Sweater by Vivienne Westwood

In what ways did you come to understand that fragility?

I feel like while I was growing up in Serbia life had been reduced to its barest existence, of people just trying to survive. It was about survival more than anything; happiness felt like a privilege. And there was a lot of bare time. That’s on top of the entire political instability — enemies from the outside, and from the inside of our own government. The [1999 NATO] bombing while I was in Belgrade, sitting in shelters for three months and being bombed several times a day… yet still, it’s not the specific events of it; it’s that you understand what life really is when everything else is taken away.

I think that that has established who I am, and moving away from that and coming here has really propelled some of my fears [about being] able to normalize, as the reality of Belgrade and New York are so extremely different. Here I started to feel the most intense version of all of my fears because on top of the city being as it is, filled with anxiety, there’s the underlying solitude of it, which is undeniable.

The relationship that my mind makes is that death is the ultimate solitude, and so the city only exaggerates all the fears, because even though economically, socially in New York it feels like there is all of this cushioned reality around you, I feel like I’m always in this state of pending the apocalypse of that reality. (laughs)

Would you consider yourself an optimist or a pessimist?

I think both. I often encounter in my life strange situations because of my own naiveté, or some kind of idealism if you will, but then I have enormous capacity to construct the absolute worst scenario that can come out of every situation if my fears kick in. It depends — it’s a balance.

Stay inside or perish, 2016

(foreground) I will lull and rock my ailing light in my marble arms #2, 2017
(background) A thousand years ago 10 seconds of breath were 40 grams of dust #1, 2017

I want to talk about text as well, because you have these really evocative, poetic titles for most of the works. But often when you’re showing work, the title isn’t going to be directly next to it. So in your mind, what role does that text play?

There are two things: there is the voice of the pieces, and then there is my voice over them. At both my show in London, [Throat wanders down the blade at Annka Kultys Gallery,] and the one at Marlborough [Contemporary, Through the hum of black velvet sleep], I worked on a written piece, which was presented as the voice of the sculptures. In my mind, they are not art. They are fully real for me, and giving them voices is just another way to materialize that.

As far as the titles go, that is sort of my farewell poem to them. It always somehow ends up being something that I had felt when I had dreamt them in my mind, and then I went on this entire quest throughout the universe to find them, and when I found them they were exactly how I imagined them. That name is almost that first moment when I thought of them. I think all the names fit perfectly with the pieces, and naming comes as a last thing in my process because I can’t know the name until I have gone to find them.

What does making art do you for you? Why do you make art, if you were to put it simply?

It was not my conscious choice, as until a couple of years ago I didn’t really even understand what being an artist means and what it entails. Also coming to New York I had realized that for many people it’s a lifestyle. People are just doing it because they can, because they want to make something, because it’s cool, because they don’t know what else to do.

Growing up in Belgrade I had practically no exposure to arts whatsoever, as there was no art scene or market there. Our museums have been closed for 20 years. People were really only trying to put food on their table and didn’t care much about art, so for me art felt like a privilege of rich societies. The fact that this, what I’m doing, belongs in “art,” is because it was the only context in which this thing that I can’t stop doing finally makes sense. I don’t like to call it that. When you call it art, you’ve killed it, as you have announced that it is not reality. And for me it is reality. I do it because I don’t know what to do with myself otherwise. I think fear and pain are the two things that are contained in your body, and they’re pretty much incommunicable; this is my way to try to let others witness them. It makes it a bit easier for me to cope. I think that my fears are not anything special. I think they’re the reality of all of us, so I am just expelling them out and allowing them to be visible. It brings a lot of awareness and brief moments of relief for me. You have to dive so deep in and pull out these things into the light, and then once you do, you have found all these truths, and that changes you. If you make something and it doesn’t change you, it means you haven’t really done anything. It’s my way to understand and be at peace with my own mortality.

Unisex Suit and Sweater by Vivienne Westwood, Shoes Artist’s Own

Hair and Makeup by Agata Helena @ agatahelena using NARS cosmetics, Art Direction by Louis Liu, Editor Marc Sifuentes, Production by Benjamin Price

Artwork images from installation in June 2017 at Marlborough Contemporary
For more information visit ivanabasic.com

STUDIO VISITS – RACHEL ROSSIN

Exploring the fine line between reality and our digital avatars, coder-turned-artist Rachel Rossin pulls us into her virtual worlds before ejecting us back out. In the disorientation of the experience we are left to wonder — what is reality?

Portrait Photography by Tiffany Nicholson | Interview by Haley Weiss
Sweater and Shirt by Versace, Skort, Socks and Shoes Artist’s Own

While Rachel Rossin was growing up in West Palm Beach, Florida, like many American children of the late ‘90s and early aughts, she read Harry Potter books, cared for her virtual creatures on Neopets, and repeatedly played SkiFree, a game on her mother’s Windows ’95 computer — even though she knew its likely end: “death by yeti.” However, unlike many of her peers, she could code by age eight, although she didn’t yet define it using that term; picking apart websites and hacking video games were simply fun and ordinary activities. “It felt natural, probably in the same way that three year olds now are intuitively using iPhones,” the 30-year-old recalls. “Escapism is natural for some people. Without a lot of access to culture, especially where I grew up, I felt pretty isolated, and so this was my community.”

Years later, after running her own web design company, playing her fair share of Call of Duty, and furthering her technology tool-kit at university, she began translating her digital experiments into art. When she moved to New York in 2010, she was already making “crude” VR (virtual reality) videos using 3D modeling software. By the time of her first-ever solo show, n=7 / The Wake In Heat of Collapse at SIGNAL in 2015, viewers could experience her VR work on an Oculus Rift headset, making their way through the fragmented digital world she created. She also started painting; for her 2015 show LOSSY at Zieher Smith & Horton, she showed a VR piece alongside canvases that recreated scenes from that virtual space. She’s continued to push the medium’s boundaries, showing her work at institutions like The New Museum, where she was a Virtual Reality Fellow.

For her second, recent solo show at SIGNAL, Peak Performance, she thought about body awareness; after building virtual world after virtual world, she felt disembodied, and wanted to work with VR in a way that would allow her to be in touch with her emotions. She modeled 3D environments, as she has in the past, but with an acute awareness of what she was experiencing. Throughout the process she asked: “What does my body feel like in this moment?” From the VR models that resulted, she made paintings, plexiglass sculptures, and aquarium-like tanks — all of which were shown without the original VR experience. Rossin’s work summons the question of where reality lies: on the headset or in person, online or offline, or — the more nebulous, likely conclusion — somewhere in-between.

Mirror Milk, 2015 Lossy, Zieher Smith & Horton, New York, NY Courtesy of Zieher Smith & Horton and the Artist

After, Horizon with Oranges, 2017 Peak Performance, Signal Gallery, New York, NY Photo courtesy of Signal Gallery

Obviously the reality within VR is disorienting, but the moments you put the headset on and take it off are equally as disruptive to your sense of the world. I wonder if you’ve watched people experience your VR projects, and what registers with them that you’ve found interesting?

It’s funny you ask that. The way I tackled this for the SIGNAL show, which was the first time I did a VR show and that was in 2015, is there were things in the VR space that were also art objects in the physical space. Then what people were seeing was also projected up on the wall, so when you exited, which is a pretty sensitive and disorienting time or transition, I had things that were registration points that left a feeling or a residue of what you had experienced in my VR piece. And then with my show LOSSY, those were paintings that were made from the VR piece, so you had an acquaintance with the paintings when you first entered the room, and then after you left the VR piece, you saw that same reference material but now as static windows that you just experienced or felt. That’s always been interesting, because there’s something about the gradient of reality, for lack of a better word, where right now these things are very polar. That’ll probably change, but they’re very binary: you have the virtual world and the physical world. There’s a moment that you can get into very, very quickly that’s in-between those two worlds when you’re making physical objects, and if it’s a show that’s not so much about programming, if it’s a show about that disparity, then that’s what I try to find.

Then there are the pieces that are about programming, like the piece that’s at Kiasma [Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Alembic Cache Passes (Time-snark) (2016)], where it’s time moving. It’s a piece that I’ve been working on for a while. There’s a type of VR where you can map time; I found a way to map time to where a person is in a room, so the piece is aware of where the person is, and that’s sort of the human scrubber of time, and so two-dimensional time becomes three-dimensional time. With that piece, the floor is the same in both worlds. That’s another way I think of trying to find registration points. It’s like putting people through the uncanny valley, squishing them through the uncanny valley. Sometimes, the uncanny valley, the disparity [between the virtual and physical], is pretty brief.

In art it does seem like it’s a binary; something is either multimedia and tech-based or it’s not. But in daily life, that’s not how we experience technology. Our digital and real memories are all intertwined, so I wonder why it is that there’s such a gap in art.

I always think about the advent of the cursor as a parallel to this, because part of that consideration is that it’s natural. You have the advent of the cursor — everything is command line before this moment — and then there’s the advent of the operating system, the advent of GUI, Graphical User Interface. We didn’t have a way to really put ourselves in VR, put ourselves in the digital space, until the cursor was invented. And then, at that moment, there was a representation of our hands that was on the screen that you could use, which is pretty interesting if you think about what’s coming next for us. I really hate making predictions about what’s going to happen in the future because it seems so frivolous, but it does seem like, if I had a gut instinct or a hunch about that, it’ll probably shrink — that disparity, that feeling will naturally shrink with time. I don’t know if that’s fortunately or unfortunately.

Our emotional lives, especially our superego, can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not because it still hurts when whatever slight happens on the Internet, or if there’s a threat made on the Internet, my god, my reptilian brain certainly reacts to that. But our bodies definitely can tell the difference. My body can follow my reptilian brain, but it still feels pretty separate in this sphere, while our emotional lives, our primitive brain and our pheromone brains — our more primal or animal instincts — live in technology pretty seamlessly. That’s kind of incredible because we assume that it’s not like that, but it is. If you just take a temperature of your body in real time, [the reaction to something taking place virtually] is completely the same as in real life, if not increased — the fear is increased, it seems like. I find that to be enchanting in a dark way.

Sweater and Shirt by Versace

For your second show at SIGNAL you don’t have any VR headsets. But the plexiglass pieces, do they follow the same process as the paintings where it begins as a photo, is put into a program, and then is made physical again? What’s the process behind these works?

Not everything starts as a photo. Sometimes it does, but I use almost every tool available, and sometimes it starts with me purely modeling things in 3D. Sometimes I use a VR sculpting program. Sometimes it’s me ripping stuff, like for the Call of Duty piece, Man Mask [(2016)], it’s me literally hacking Call of Duty figures out of their little shells and texturing them. So depending what the body of work is, it’s always going to be different. But for these plexiglass pieces, what they are is VR. I have paintings and then the plexiglass pieces and then there are these strange tanks. The paintings and the plexiglass pieces are made from the same seed, the VR space; we’re using VR as a loose term to talk about 3D microcosms that have their own physics and their own light. What I’m doing is I’m using the same scene [for both the paintings and the plexiglass pieces]. I paint from that microcosm or that VR world that I’ve sculpted, I’m [physically] making paintings of that space, and then I’m printing them out on plexiglass — it’s almost like they’re part three of this gradient. Then I wanted them to begin with the body and then end with the body, so what I did for the plexiglass ones is they’re then blow-torched while I’m nestling in them for as long as I can take it. If it gets too hot I have to leave. But it gets pretty soft, and I sort of hug them around me.

In your mind, how do the aquarium-like sculptures play into this? Because visually they seem like a departure, but there’s something weird going on there that seems similar in a lot of ways to the VR works, like, what’s the original piece, what’s the “real” part of it? How are you thinking about these?

Something about building computers and building machines feels very intimate, like building worlds or building microcosms; they feel like building cities or VR worlds. That’s something that, before I was even coding [as a kid], I was breaking stuff and trying to see how computers worked — bless you, Mom. So I’ve been building computers for a long time, and then I became fascinated with the idea of the show and going back to the body. Of course there’s a little bit of a knee-jerk response in the idea of water combined with some sort of technology; that’s the part of it that’s amusing or silly. But they feel like vivariums or like geological core samples of a VR space.

All of the screens in those tanks are literally the VR spaces; you see them through these very pixelated LED screens. I wanted to make something that very much felt like the body, sort of crudely self-contained, that wasn’t VR, that felt that there was a way of describing the landscape, as aquariums do, really — here’s a slice of the ocean.

Timescrubbing, Maquette, 2017 ALT FACTS, Postmasters Gallery, New York, NY Photo courtesy of Brooke Nicholas

Safe Apron, Safe Cape, 2016 My Little Green Leaf at Art In General and Kim, Riga, Latvia Photo by Ansis Starks, Kim and Art in General

You talking about body awareness and the act of forming these plexiglass pieces around your own body is interesting, because it grounds VR in the human form literally. How did you start thinking about body awareness and what made you want to physically cocoon yourself in these pieces to make them more human?

When I was growing up, being online was a safe place despite the perverts. It was this place that I felt like was pretty necessary, like my community was there. There was an adventure. It could be because I’m getting older, but I felt in light of… I don’t know if it was a response to technology or politics, that’s what I’m trying to figure out. I think I was wanting to make work that was more introspective, that was simpler and less about technology and less about process, and more, “These are the tools I have right now.” I wanted to strip it down to something very literal. I’ve been making a lot of VR work and I’ve been existing in VR and in digital spaces because I had back-to-back museum shows, which was amazing, but they were all VR installations. I was existing kind of without a body and then not making anything physically.

I think it was a response internally, and it was also a response to the fact that any time I went on social media or went on to where I thought I had community, it was chaos. Because it was chaos and, frankly, pretty stressful, I started thinking, “What is my response? How do I feel right now as I’m reading this horrific news story or my aunt’s Facebook posts? Right now I just feel like a pile of lungs.” One of the paintings is kind of about that. It was about using fear responses or technology as the prompt for that type of body awareness exercise: I have a fear response, and it’s in a space where I don’t have a body, so what is my body doing? But the baseline of what we’re talking about is that I wanted to make something where the work wasn’t serving technology, technology was serving the work.

Sweater and Shirt by Versace, Skort Artist’s Own

Hair by Austin Burns using Oribe, Makeup by Agata Helena @agatahelena using NARS cosmetics, Art Direction by Louis Liu, Editor Marc Sifuentes, Production by Benjamin Price

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STUDIO VISITS – SAM MCKINNISS

In 2016, Brooklyn-based artist Sam McKinniss made waves in the art world with his sophomore solo show, Egyptian Violet, which featured a memorable, moody portrait of the late musical phenomenon Prince. Known for his signature romantic and sometimes campy color-saturated paintings of baby animals and pop stars, McKinniss walks the line between high and low-brow culture.

Sweater and Pants by Coach, Shoes and Socks Artist’s Own
Portrait Photography by Tiffany Nicholson | Interview by Anna Furman

Thirty-one-year-old painter Sam McKinniss grew up in a small town in central Connecticut where, as he told me, “there’s an apple orchard and a lot of golf courses and trees and lakes to jump in.” The now Brooklyn-based artist oscillates between sincere admiration for his subjects and a gleeful, ironic take on pop culture–blurring the lines between low and high cultural signs. Disney characters, B-level celebrities, ’80s pop stars, and true-crime characters filter into his work through careful brushstrokes and lush color palettes. In the studio, he listens to baroque opera and pop music (Rostam, SZA, St. Vincent), exclusively.

McKinniss speaks with a sort of world-weary droll, but comes off as anything but–he is attentive to his subjects, and treats each portrait with measured thoughtfulness. On a balmy day in late September, I spoke with McKinniss about his collaboration with singer/songwriter Lorde, the far-reaching influence of late ’60s hippie subcultures, and his upcoming show Daisy Chain in Venice Beach.

Michael Jackson, 2017

Prince (Under the Cherry Moon), 2016

Hi! What are you working on today?

I just started a painting of a lamb smelling some flowers. It’s kind of cute. I recently finished a portrait of JonBenét Ramsey, which might have led me to paint this lamb. She just seems too young to be that made up and that glamorous. She looks so innocent and now she’s so dead–a lamb seems like it would be a nice contrast to her figure.

Maybe generic pictures of cute animals on the internet offset some of the darker, meaner subjects out there or give us some sort of emotional retreat from more violent material.

Tell me about your studio practice.

I like to work every day and I like having a set work day schedule, so I try and start between 10 and 11 and leave by 6 or 7. That way I have time to draw or think out problems, and then look hard at the paintings and decide how they need to be fixed. If I’m going to paint, I need at least four uninterrupted hours. Lately, I’ve been trying to slow down. I want to be a little more thoughtful and courteous to the material. For a couple of years, I would whip through paintings, sometimes finishing one small piece a day. But I’m happier when I take my time and the paint looks better.

What do you mean by “better”?

I mean it in terms of mark-making. Composition–how you design, how you set a picture inside of a rectangle– definitely benefits from taking more time. Every time I hit the canvas with a brush loaded with paint, it’s a succinct moment in real space and time. It can be just one, you know, flick of the wrist. If it’s done exactly right, it looks effortless and the paint can articulate a physical attribute. I’ve noticed that when I’m more patient with a painting, I experience those moments more often. I can touch the canvas with the brush and it sets up gorgeously and it looks like it was just breathed on there. And the paint looks good! It’s important to me that the paint looks good–I want it to be seductive. I want the paint to call attention to itself, almost in an amorous or erotic way. I want the paint to be desired; it has to attract people. It’s sexy when it looks good.

You painted Lorde for her Melodrama album cover. How did that cover project come about?

Last year, a mutual friend put us in touch and she wrote me an email asking if she and I could get together to talk about the album she was working on. She came and visited my studio, saw the work I was making for Egyptian Violet and then described her vision for Melodrama, for which she had total creative control. I agreed to do the cover, which was sincerely a lot of fun for me. The process turned into a very meaningful collaboration.

Sweater and Pants by Coach, Shoes and Socks Artist’s Own

If you were to create an album cover image for another musician, dead or alive, who would you choose?

Prince. But what I’d really like is for someone to soundtrack one of my exhibitions. I won’t say who.

You have an upcoming show at Team Gallery in Venice Beach, opening this winter. It’s called Daisy Chain. Where did that name come from?

Well, I like it as a cliché. Poetically or melodically or something, it appeals to me. Also, in Lana Del Rey’s song ”Summer Bummer”, the lyric is wrap you up in my daisy chain. It just seems violent, but also sweet, which basically equals erotic. That album came out in July, which was right when I was getting serious about the focus of this show. Daisy Chain just leapt out at me. It seemed appropriate for the kind of pictures that I wanted to look at and make paintings about.

What are the paintings in Daisy Chain about? Are they mostly portraits?

There’s a double-portrait of Lana Del Rey kissing A$AP Rocky that I took from the “National Anthem” music video. There’s a portrait of Drew Barrymore from the mid ’90s, when she posed nude for Rolling Stone magazine. She’s wearing a pixie cut and her hair is decorated with a daisy chain–like, literally a string of daisies. There’s also a portrait of Joan Didion wearing chic, oversized sunglasses–she looks sort of old, severe, and mature. It’s a recent photo, not from the ’60s. And there’s a portrait of Beck taken from the Sea Change album cover, which was made by the artist Jeremy Blake. Oh, I also made a portrait of one of the kids from Lord of the Flies, taken from a paperback book cover re-released in the late ’80s. It was the cover I had when I was in middle school. It’s one of the kids from the island, and he’s wearing a crown of palm leaves or ferns or something.

Did you tailor the subjects of these paintings to fit into a California narrative or did the location of the show affect which subjects you chose to include?

For sure. I was trying to get closer to a California mood. I reread Joan Didion’s The White Album recently and have been listening to a lot of Lana Del Rey’s Lust for Life album. I read Helter Skelter, the true crime book about Charles Manson’s trial, and thought about how some of the murders were committed in Venice. I’ve been thinking about violent crime, mass murder, and how we’re living through such a violent era right now. I don’t know if it’s more or less violent than 1967, 1968, or 1969, but I am trying to organize a group of pictures that could be said to reference 1969. I’m looking for elements of the youth culture that have impressed itself upon my consciousness. I want to invoke–in a vague or nebulous way, which is my way–style signifiers derived from a hippie subculture. I’m wondering if there is a counter-culture and if there are alternatives to our dominant political discourse. Can pop culture have a positive impact on political change? Like, does style equal progress, or can it? I don’t have any answers, but the direction that I’m focused on is one that asks if these celebrated figures affect more than just our understanding of style.

Lana & Rocky, 2017

JonBenét, 2017

In your 2016 show Egyptian Violet, the portrait of Prince was understood to be the focal point of the collection. Is there a painting in Daisy Chain that is comparable – as in the rest of the show hinges around it?

I don’t know if that’s for me to say. I knew the painting of Prince was going to create a stir and that people were going to remember it, but I didn’t know that critics or members of the art world were going to decide that it was the focal point of the show. It has been meaningful, for lack of a better word, to try and conceive of a new show after Egyptian Violet. Egyptian Violet was a darker palette and definitely more of a nighttime art show, whereas Daisy Chain is a little sunnier and a bit more daytime. The floral motif marches through work in both and a daisy is certainly a nice contrast to a violet.

I read that you used to work in a floral shop. Can you tell me about the first three jobs you had?

I worked for a florist for a long time when I was in college, and that was really fun. I did a lot of the dumb gay retail shit that gay guys often get trapped doing, especially if they have a creative degree like a BFA. I also worked at a used and antiquarian book store for a while. That was a good job, I read a lot of books on my lunch break.

Do you paint certain photos as practice? Are there exercises you do to stay nimble before diving into another work?

I took a lot of time off this summer and got out of New York City. I was in East Hampton for two weeks and made, like, 4 or 5 drawings a day. It helped me get thematically and conceptually organized so that when it’s time to go back to work, when I walk into the studio, I know what kind of work I want to make. I like to reacquaint myself with drawing and remind myself that it’s a worthwhile and enjoyable activity. It’s good for my hand, my eye, my brain. Also, I go to The Met a lot to study the paintings. I look at the same works over and over again to try and learn them. To be intimate with them.

Do you remember the last thing you took a screengrab of?

Yesterday I screen-grabbed an image from the New York Times front page of video coverage of the Las Vegas shooting. Horrific. Like a frontier scene by Frederic Remington. Awful. I rarely use photojournalism for my work but I admire it quite a lot.

Have there been any words used to describe your paintings that you either disagree with or were surprised by?

To be fair, no. I think all criticism is fair. I don’t think that an artist totally owns a work after he or she puts the work out into a public arena. Some people understand my work to be about nostalgia. That’s fine. There’s totally an argument for that, but I don’t relate to it. I don’t feel nostalgic for when I was a teenager or for any other time in my life, and it’s certainly not why I make paintings. All the images are taken from some moment that I remember, but I don’t know that memory is the same thing as nostalgia.

Is there a subject that you are interested in making work, but haven’t quite figured out how to approach yet? In other words, what subject is next?

Sure. I do a lot of image-gathering and these images kick around in computer folders. Sometimes I print them out and they sit in literal, physical folders on my studio desk. I shuffle through them periodically. I really want to do a painting of Arnold Schwarzenegger from Terminator 2. It just seems really gross and of the moment–in terms of popular celebrity culture making a parlay into national politics. I’ve been thinking about it for at least two years because it seems loaded, even though it’s kind of a cute movie. It just seems really loaded to paint the former Republican governor of California as The Terminator. Or, Maria Shriver’s ex-husband.

That would be a good title for the piece. “Maria Shriver’s Ex-Husband.”

Yeah (laughs)

Sweater by Coach

Hair by Austin Burns using Oribe, Makeup by Agata Helena @agatahelena using NARS Cosmetics, Art Direction by Louis Liu, Editor Marc Sifuentes, Production by Benjamin Price

STUDIO VISITS – CAMILLA ENGSTROM

Swedish-born painter Camilla Engström’s work explores autobiographical issues through her lens of humor and figurative expression. With a third solo show that opened earlier this year at Brooklyn’s Cooler Gallery, Engström opens up about processing her anger through phallic symbols, her cartoon-like characters, and her quest for inspiration.

Portrait Photography by Tiffany Nicholson | Interview by Haley Weiss
Dress and shoes by J.W. Anderson

If Camilla Engström were to make a self-portrait, she would draw a rollercoaster. That’s not to say the 28-year-old artist from Örebro, Sweden is out of control; in fact, she’s in tune with her emotions — the ups, downs, and contortions in-between. From moving to New York in 2011 to study at the Fashion Institute of Technology, to dropping out in 2013 to pursue a broader art practice, trusting her creative impulses has given her the freedom to build a body of work that includes drawings, paintings, apparel design, and sculpture. In recent months, it’s also meant accepting that she doesn’t know what she’ll do next; when we visit her Brooklyn studio this fall, for example, she says that she’s simply been “releasing pressure” by painting.

“I don’t even know what I’m making,” she admits, assessing the colorful canvases that fill her wall, although there’s one obvious commonality. “It’s just a lot of sausages,” she adds with a laugh. One painting features a long and artfully twisted sausage, while another shows a sausage being stepped on by multiple feet. This new subject is unsurprising given Engström’s history of irreverent, humorous compositions. She explores sexuality, consumption, and the banal (e.g. bathing, cats) with a wink. It began with her roguish alter ego, Husa, the curvy pink figure who’s appeared in Engström’s pieces since she was first sketched years ago. Husa has many activities, including reading or drinking wine while naked on a picnic blanket, and sitting in a reclining chair, drooling, with food resting on her lap. And she, like her creator, is also capable of change; in 2016, at what Engström describes as a “zen” time in her life, she depicted Husa as a contemplative figure. The result was Faces, Engström’s first-ever solo show at Deli Gallery in Queens, in which Husa appears in various states of undress, transforming beneath a sun-like orb. In one painting from that series, Husa disappears entirely, leaving her dress suspended in mid-air, as though she’s transcended the bodies and cultural norms Engström so often points to in her work. It turns out that with an open approach like Engström’s, one recurring figure can address both the commonplace and the ecstatic.

Big Bear, 2017

You’ve described drawing in the past as not actively thinking; you’re just letting it out. Are you surprised by what you make?

Yes, sometimes. I like to start small because that’s less intimidating. That’s usually when I’m like, “Whoa, what’s going on in my head?” For the last few months, I’ve been kind of controlled in the way I’ve been painting. Now I want to be a little bit looser I think, which is frustrating because I wish I could paint the same way and stick to it. I just can’t.

When you’re painting and you’re stricter, does that happen naturally or is it a conscious decision?

It also happens naturally. I think more before I make the painting. Whereas these messy ones, [gestures to sausage paintings] I don’t really think at all, which is nice. I like both ways. With the more controlled ones, I definitely feel like I’m more relaxed, and even though I’m thinking more beforehand, I’m just focused, getting the paint in there. Whereas painting the messy ones, I feel sweaty afterwards; it’s almost like an exercise. I try to make them really quick and I try to make many of them.

Why do you think sausages are reappearing, if you were to do some self-analysis?

Before I used to paint dicks a lot. [Engström published A Book of Dicks in 2016.] I wanted to make a new dick book. I feel like I have so many dicks in my brain; I need to get them out there. I like to turn them into sausages because I feel like I can’t paint the dick. I’m just so mad at dicks right now. Sausages are easier for me to handle. They’re less intimidating.

You said you’re mad at dicks. Could you elaborate on that? Is that a cultural frustration, one with politics, or—

I think it’s politics to be honest. When every hurricane, every disaster happens, I’m just playing with a dick [in my work]. I feel like if we backtrack, it’s all the dicks’ fault. I was just reading about Harvey Weinstein and I want to destroy him. Now he’s destroying himself. How could he do that for so many years? It makes me want to cry but it also makes me so mad. It’s all of that coming to me at the same time.

It also makes me think about when I’ve been sexually harassed by men, and it makes me think about my sister, who’s 10 years younger than me. I just realized, I never said to her, “You have to say no.” I never had the conversation with her: “This is how you deal with a bossy guy.” She’s almost 20 now, and she’s in college and she studies international finance. There are a lot of men there, and they drink and they party all the time.

I was watching her Snapchat almost having a heart attack. That’s when most of that shit happened to me. You’re drunk, you’re with guys, and you feel pressure to be accommodating, and then it all goes downhill. I just texted her today: “We need to have this conversation. You are the boss over your own body and I see how you’re with guys all the time. I’m sure most of them are nice, but even the nicest guy, if he wants something from you and your body, you need to be able to say no.” I wish that our mom had told me that because I feel like maybe I would have been more brave and not so terrified every time. I’m definitely frustrated with the dick this year. I’m hoping next year it will all be about the beautiful vagina.

Do you remember your first drawing of Husa?

Yes. I remember I was looking at a lot on Pinterest at the time — because that’s what you do when you work in fashion, you sit on Pinterest all day (laughs) — and I was looking at all of these sculptures. I wanted to paint a round figure because I had been painting so many fashion illustrations — I was also very influenced by Picasso. Then I started to paint a round figure but it was very serious. It just didn’t feel like me. I was painting her over and over and over again. Then finally I just gave her a face, and it made me giggle, because I could see it come to life. It just all came together and I was like, “Okay, this is my friend that I’m going to paint for a long time.”

Hairier and Hairier, 2017

Dress and shoes by J.W. Anderson

When you moved from fashion to being an “artist,” what was that decision like? Were you tired of fashion; was there a certain attitude you wanted to get away from; what was it?

I was frustrated with fashion. I felt like I was so creative — a typical millennial kid that’s just like, “I deserve more attention.” I wasn’t good at dealing with technical stuff. I could create things, but no one wants the creative person because they already have that. I felt like I was going to explode because I had so much to give but I couldn’t. There was never an opportunity. Then the tasks they gave me were easy but so unfulfilling.

I still love fashion and I love clothes. I think I have like a healthier relationship to fashion now. I feel more relaxed about it. When I left fashion, I didn’t want to leave completely. I still love working with textiles and I did this little embroidery thing with the Swedish brand called Monki; we did a clothing collaboration. I’m sure there are some artists that really don’t want to see their work on clothes, but it makes me so happy.

I know a lot of people won’t be able to buy my work — I could never buy my work — but they could buy a T-shirt. It makes me so happy to see someone wear my T-shirt or tote bag.

What are you inspired by at the moment? Is there anything you’re reading, listening to, seeing?

I took a break for two weeks; I went to Japan. I just got back. I felt like going to Japan was going to change my life and that I was going to come back and be like, “This is what I want to paint now.” It was definitely inspiring to be there, but it just made me more confused.

Had you been there before?

No, it was the first time. I love Yayoi Kusama so I wanted to go there and see her work and see what kind of environment or culture she grew up around. I wanted to experience it. I came back and I was like, “I don’t even know what I want to make anymore.” Sometimes I’ll go see a show and I’ll be so inspired to make something, so it was super frustrating. I’m still inspired by Kusama a lot but it’s almost like I looked at her work too much. I think I need to step back a little bit.

I went to MoMA; I looked at the Louise Bourgeois exhibition. I tried to feel something and I just didn’t. Then I picked up ArtForum; I went through it and I just thought, “Fuck.” You know when you’re inspired, it’s just this feeling, and I haven’t had that feeling yet. I’m going to push myself and try to be inspired by myself. I hope it comes soon because I really need to work — to work with a confidence.

Hairier and Hairier, 2017

Food Coma, 2017

When you say you need to work, you need to as in you have to be making things?

I feel maybe like a guy that hasn’t had sex in a long time; I feel like the energy’s there, the need is there. I’m so frustrated. I feel like I can’t create, like something’s missing. I’ll get there. I reach this point probably like five times a year. I’m okay with it.

Do you force yourself to paint every day? What does your day-to-day life look like?

Yes, I force myself because I feel like I have the energy. If I don’t have the energy, I don’t even try. I just stay at home and cuddle with my cat. But now, because I have all this amped up energy to paint, I force myself because I feel like maybe I’m thinking too much. Maybe I just need to paint and then it will click, and that’s where I’m at right now. I’m hoping that maybe tomorrow or the next day something’s going to happen. We’ll see.

When was the first time you can encountered a work of art while you were growing up?

I grew up with this huge painting that disturbed me so much.

In your house?

Actually it was in my grandfather’s house. It was so big, it had to be the centerpiece. It was dark blue and it was a forest at night and there were animals running away. I remember at night I would always run past that painting, because there was this owl sitting in the middle with its bright yellow eyes staring at me. But then during the day, it was right next to the couch and I had to deal with that painting. When my grandfather died, it moved into our house in the same spot towards the couch. It was really bizarre.

I knew there was something special about that painting, that it wasn’t just a painting or a picture on the wall. It was something that really, really bothered me. It made me feel something, and knowing that a piece of art could make me feel something, that was the first time I understood that it was art, and it was important. Being around that painting for so many years, even the scale of it… It’s always going to be with me.

Dress and shoes by J.W. Anderson

Hair and Makeup by Agata Helena @ agatahelena using NARS cosmetics, Art Direction by Louis Liu, Editor Marc Sifuentes, Production by Benjamin Price

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RICHARD AVEDON: NOTHING PERSONAL

New York—Pace Gallery and Pace/MacGill Gallery are honored to announce their representation of The Richard Avedon Foundation with an exhibition of Richard Avedon’s photographs and extensive archival materials drawn from Nothing Personal, Avedon’s 1964 collaboration with James Baldwin. This will be the first comprehensive presentation of this period of Avedon’s work and will be on view at 537 West 24th Street from November 17, 2017 through January 13, 2018. To coincide with the occasion, TASCHEN will republish a facsimile edition of Nothing Personal with an accompanying booklet containing a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Hilton Als and rare and unpublished Avedon photographs.Native New Yorkers Richard Avedon (1923-2004) and James Baldwin (1924-1987) met as students at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx in the late 1930s. They became friends while writing for and editing The Magpie, the school’s literary magazine. Even as teenagers, they, in their writing, dealt with profound issues of race, mortality, and, as Avedon wrote, “the future of humanity” as World War II closed in on them.

In January of 1963, Avedon photographed Baldwin for a magazine assignment and suggested that they work on a book about life in America. Baldwin readily agreed. “This book,” said Baldwin at the time, “examines some national and contemporary phenomena in an attempt to discover why we live the way we do. We are afflicted by an ignorance of our natures vaster and more dangerous than our ignorance of life on Mars.”

Corresponding frequently with Baldwin, Avedon traveled extensively in 1963 and 1964 photographing portraits for the book while Baldwin wrote the essay. They met up periodically to share and discuss their progress. The collaboration resulted in some of Avedon’s most pivotal portraiture of his middle career, from civil rights icons (Malcolm X) to staunch segregationists (George Wallace); to aging stars (Joe Louis) and young fame seekers (Fabian); to powerful politicians (Adam Clayton Powell) and ordinary citizens; to young idealists (Julian Bond) and elderly pacifists (Norman Thomas); to patients committed to a mental institution who seek love, comfort, and some semblance of consideration.

At the core of the photographs – almost all of which will be on view at Pace Gallery – is the question of how Americans understand race relations and their own identities, and, by extension, the identities and civil rights of others.

“Both Avedon and Baldwin cared deeply about what was (or was not) going on in America in the early 1960s. It was an explosive time, not unlike the one we live in today. The events enveloping our country provoked Avedon’s careful reflection and examination of the place and its people. There is a lot to learn from looking at this prophetic work and considering the very profound statement it makes.”—Peter MacGill

Nothing Personal was originally designed by Marvin Israel and published by Atheneum in November of 1964 under the aegis of legendary editor Simon Michael Bessie. Though denounced at the time of publication, Nothing Personal is now recognized as a masterwork whose powerful message of a confused and often compromised society seeking fleeting moments of joy, grace and occasional redemption remains equally relevant more than a half-century later.

Richard Avedon (1932–was born in New York City in 1923 and joined the Young Men’s Hebrew Association camera club at the age of 12. After serving as a Photographer’s Mate Second Class in the U.S. Merchant Marine during World War II, he began working as a freelance photographer, primarily for Harper’s Bazaar, in 1944. Under the tutelage of Alexey Brodovitch, Avedon quickly became the magazine’s lead photographer, while also creating formal portraits for many other sources, including his own portfolio.

First showcased in Edward Steichen’s Family of Man exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in 1955, Avedon’s work has appeared in numerous exhibitions worldwide. His first retrospective was held at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington,

D.C. in 1962 and was followed by solo exhibitions at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (1970), The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1974), the Amon Carter Museum of American Art (1985), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (1994), among others. Avedon was the first living photographer to receive two shows at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (1978 and 2002).

Avedon died while working on an assignment called “Democracy” for The New Yorker during the 2004 presidential election. During his lifetime, he established The Richard Avedon Foundation in New York City, which now houses his archive and works with curators and collectors around the world.

Pace/MacGill, one of the world’s leading photography galleries has been dedicated to advancing fine art photography for over 30 years. Known for discovering artists, representinv masters, and placing important collections and archives into major public institutions, Pace/MacGill has presented some 200 exhibitions and published numerous catalogues on modern and contemporary photography. Founded in 1983 by Peter MacGill, in collaboration with Arne Glimcher of Pace and Richard Solomon of Pace Editions, Pace/MacGill is located at 32 East 57th Street in New York City.

Pace is a leading contemporary art gallery representing many of the most significant international artists and estates of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Founded by Arne Glimcher in Boston in 1960 and currently led by Marc Glimcher, Pace has been a constant, vital force in the art world and has introduced many renowned artists’ work to the public for the first time. Pace has mounted more than 900 exhibitions, including scholarly shows that have subsequently traveled to museums, and published over 450 exhibition catalogues. Today, Pace has nine locations worldwide: three galleries in New York; one in London; one in Palo Alto, California; one in Beijing; and spaces in Hong Kong, Paris, and Seoul. In 2016, the gallery launched Pace Art + Technology, a new program dedicated to showcasing interdisciplinary art groups, collectives and studios whose works explore the confluence of art and technology.

Members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, March 1963 Photograph by Richard Avedon © The Richard Avedon Foundation