[{"id":"73331","title":"Saj Issa: The Action Painter","alias":"saj-issa-the-action-painter","catid":"30","published":"1","introtext":"I have been thinking a lot about the origins of the concept of a utopia. War and political turmoil can force us to wish for something more ideal, a situation where the living world can live together <\/span><\/span>","fulltext":"
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Saj Issa<\/h1>\r\n

The Action Painter<\/h2>\r\n

Interview by Evan Pricco \/\/ Portrait by Kholood Eid<\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/header><\/div>\r\n

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I have been thinking a lot about the origins of the concept of a utopia. War and political turmoil can force us to wish for something more ideal, a situation where the living world can live together in what we could call social harmony. The idea of utopia also leads to wondering about land and how to share it. French painter Andr\u00e9 Derain once wrote, \u201cThere is only one kind of painting: landscape. It is the most difficult. It has also, I believe, the most simple kind of composition. Because no one can stop us from imagining the world in the way that pleases us most.\u201d It\u2019s the latter part of this quote that struck a chord, as I consider such social reform\u2014this imaginary society where exemplary qualities may be relative to the dreamer but universal in their aims. It was the great architect Buckminster Fuller who said, \u201cThe world is now too dangerous for anything less than Utopia.\u201d In a sense, both Fuller and Derain seem to say, \u201cThe world as we want it to be is imagined, and probably never actually lived.\u201d <\/div>\r\n
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Prior to my conversation with Saj Issa this past summer in Los Angeles, I had just returned from a trip to Aberdeen, Scotland, where the topic among colleagues was centered around the idea that art created or placed in public was inherently political. It seemed so well timed that I would be speaking to Issa right then, just as the St. Louis-based, Palestinian-American artist graced the cover of Artforum with a now iconic photo of her painting on a hillside in the West Bank, overlooking an Israeli settlement while on her family\u2019s land. For Issa, the intent of returning to her family home near Ramallah after graduating from UCLA\u2019s MFA program was supposed to be a time to explore the romantic essence of painting: think Matisse\u2019s Landscape at Collioure. Then, on October 7, Issa was forced to change course and re-examine the intention of her art. Or maybe, instinctively, her art just changed.<\/div>\r\n

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Plein Air Performance, 2024. Video, 4:35 minutes (color, sound).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/section>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
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Over the past year, Issa has become a lot of things she didn\u2019t expect to be: an activist artist, a spokesperson for Palestinian independence, and a resource regarding the conflict as many  Americans come to understand the war and Palestine\u2019s demand for sovereignty. But speaking to Saj this summer, she reiterated how this was never her goal, and upon returning to the West Bank in late spring 2024, she found purpose in the action she intended in her year abroad prior to October 7th: to paint the landscape. Over the course of our one-hour conversation, we spoke about painting the land and the desire to record this place, a landscape in turmoil and physically altered with an utopian dream of calmer days ahead. And in this act of painting the land, she enriches the story of how to speak about the present. <\/div>\r\n
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Evan Pricco<\/i>: A lot has happened since we last talked. We\u2019ll get into the political environment, but let\u2019s start with how it feels to be out of the academic world and making work outside of that context? Do you miss it, or are you happy that graduation is in the past and you can confront the world the way you want without grades and that sort of critique? <\/b><\/div>\r\n
Saj Issa<\/i>: It does feel nice to work alone and not hear people's opinions before I even have a chance to process them myself. I haven't heard any artists say that it's taken a turn for the worse working alone right now. So it kind of feels nice that I have my own routine and am not meeting a deadline, whether it be something school-related or even gallery-related, too. I'm able to just experiment more, and it feels very liberating.<\/div>\r\n
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It's so fascinating to think about being critiqued before you\u2019ve given yourself a chance to consider what you\u2019ve made. I guess this is life in a nutshell. <\/b><\/div>\r\n
I think that there's something that artists are in denial about in academia, that is, making something to impress others. When you are alone, you don't have to show any of those things  you don't want to. But in school, you are required to share what's in your studio, what you are working on right at that moment, and also have to show your drafts. It was UCLA, so you have a critique, and Rodney McMillian is about to come to your studio in five minutes! You have to ask yourself, \u201cWhat do I feel comfortable showing him?\u201d You feel like you need to tell people the parameters for which to see your work, and then when you get feedback, there are things you don\u2019t want to hear quite yet! Alone, you can set those rules as opposed to explaining the rules. <\/div>\r\n

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Land Grab, Oil on linen, 14\" x 11\u201d, 2024<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/section>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
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Is it more stressful to discuss art with an instructor or a gallerist? <\/b><\/div>\r\n
The teacher. You can bullshit way more with the business hat on, in my opinion. You can begin the conversation with credit rather than intelligence when it comes to business. When a lot of my mentors talk about meeting with galleries, they always use dating as a reference. They're, like, you have to date your gallerists. Not literally, but it's the same approach when it comes to dating. Some dates in my studio were more fruitful with my instructors, and some were better with the gallerists. There\u2019s a lot more wordiness, or inaccessibility, when you talk to an instructor. Galleries just talk about the right now, the right here.<\/div>\r\n
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Oh, I get it. An instructor wants to know what, where, why, and when, and sometimes a gallerist will be more blunt: \u201cThis is what works; this is why; this is where.\u201d<\/b><\/div>\r\n
Correct. And it's not necessarily just commercial conversations that I was having. It could be something a lot more casual about what kind of experiences you have that influenced this work. Whereas meeting with my instructors was more, \"What artists, social issues, or literature is your work in conversation with?\" Academia really strives to uphold a level of integrity with art, apart from the market. <\/div>\r\n
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I keep wondering if you were prepared for this moment. At your MFA show, you made deliberate, beautifully photoreal paintings and ceramics that were about the heritage and legacy of the West Bank. Within those, there was a tradition of Palestinian iconography with a disruption of Western logos and culture. And now, you have been such a pivotal voice since October 7, 2023, which runs parallel to a pivot in your work. You are painting  the emotion and motion of the current moment, not so much looking back but facing time and culture directly. So were you prepared for this change, and is this the right question? <\/b><\/div>\r\n
No. I think that's a great question, and absolutely, I was not prepared. I\u2019m used to making work and then sitting with it for a minute to digest. Now it kind of feels like my work is being talked about immediately. I'm very flattered by it, honestly. But at the same time, it's kind of daunting to know I didn't have a full year after school yet to even gather myself to fully do the work I was wanting or expecting to do.<\/div>\r\n
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My expectation, this timeline that I set prior to October 2023, was that I was going to make a body of work for a year, experiment, and see what came out of that before I\u2019d even show it to anyone. And because everything was just so immediately unfolding, I began to work from a more impromptu, immediate approach, and as a result, my art changed a lot. Whereas in the past, I was able to make premeditated artworks, making drafts. Now it's just like, go, go, go\u2026 literally, start working as an action painter.<\/div>\r\n
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So that is something you consciously understand that you have done. <\/b><\/div>\r\n
Yes, and I was really scared because I thought, \u201cWill I be taken seriously?\u201d Because you set these rules whenever you're working and create a habit, and that was kind of the rule that I was following when I went to the West Bank before October 7th, to take my time and develop. And now it's like I have really nothing to lose.<\/div>\r\n

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Poppy Painting, 2024. Oil on canvas, 8 x 6 feet.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/section>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
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\u201cAnd now it's like I have really nothing to lose.\u201d<\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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I was speaking to our mutual friend, Addam Yekutieli, about the changing landscape of creating art during war. I was thinking of Picasso's painting, Guernica, which was done in reflection of the April 1937 bombing of a town in the Basque Country by the Nazis and Italian fascists. The painting itself was unveiled to an audience in July 1937 in the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris International Exposition, where the Nazis also had a huge pavilion. That was pretty damn immediate\u2014a masterwork as an action painting, so to speak. But now, artists are almost asked to go faster, to articulate major moments, and to reflect in real-time. It\u2019s a beautiful responsibility, but a challenge to reflect history as it's happening. <\/b><\/div>\r\n
I think it's kind of in parallel with how fast technology is growing\u2014just the speed at which it's being innovative. That's the line where I see art being consumed and made today. It is becoming a lot faster. Contemporary art and technology are on the same parallel path. <\/div>\r\n
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What was your goal when you left UCLA?  <\/b><\/div>\r\n
I moved my practice to Palestine and wanted to have a more conservative, European approach to art-making. My studio is still there, on the first floor of my parent\u2019s house on the outskirts of Ramallah. I had a much more romantic approach to art-making in mind, kind of what I imagined Picasso or Matisse would have done. It's like a luxury type of lifestyle, just like picking fruit from your garden, making these paintings, and really directly responding to the landscape rather than time. It was immediate in that sense, but it was more representational paintings that I was making, as well as sketches and drawings.<\/div>\r\n

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They've Changed the Signs, Oil on wood panel and ceramic, 45\u201d x 60\u201d, 2023<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/section>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
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That was your intention\u2014to get away from LA and St. Louis, then just paint for a year and experiment?<\/b><\/div>\r\n
Well, I didn't have access to a ceramic studio at the time. There were just all these road restrictions that were a barricade to me in physically getting to the ceramic studio that I intended to work out of in Hebron. And so I said to myself, \u201cYou know what? Let's take it back to the basics of just painting and drawing.\u201d I began to really investigate types of rural architecture, investigating and reflecting on how we live with old things, but particularly, architecture and these gorgeous kinds of landscapes.<\/div>\r\n
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But there is a thread from what you were doing in the past, this blend of architecture with logos and how that affects the landscape. You were touching on that at UCLA. <\/b><\/div>\r\n
Yes, my work was, I don't want to say controlled, but just almost photographic. Photoreal. When I got the studio in the West Bank, I wanted to make a sketch of my commute around the West Bank. I'd take photos along the way. And what I have to say is that a lot of the experiences I was having were... look, the best way to say it is that there's no time for leisure. Leisure is not an option when you are walking the streets of the West Bank. If you are Palestinian, you have to have a specific action and keep going. So I'd take these photos and use my camera as a tool of documentation, so I could then go back and have leisure time in my studio and approach creating landscape drawings and paintings. And then that evolved post-October 7th.<\/div>\r\n
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Since you were near Ramallah before October 7, 2023, are you describing the months leading up to this? <\/b><\/div>\r\n
Correct. There was this increasing animosity and hostility growing in the air. I just felt like I couldn't be here and that a war was about to break out. I didn't want to be there for that. <\/div>\r\n
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I think this is part of understanding why your voice became so important in the art and greater social world, because you were there. You also had the opportunity to communicate in a way Americans could understand because you were born in America and knew the vernacular for explaining the conflict in ways that audiences could understand more clearly. Does that seem to reflect what you were doing?<\/b><\/div>\r\n
Yeah, I never really thought about it that way. I think that when it comes to a voice taken seriously, it's not only the language but also the physical appearance. Just being racially and religiously ambiguous. I mean, a lot of people are surprised whenever I tell them I\u2019m Palestinian. It's really unfortunate the way that they're able to humanize me and take what I say seriously just because of an indeterminate appearance or because I have an approach they weren't expecting.<\/div>\r\n
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In reference to the work you were making during what was supposed to be a long stay of leisure, how did it feel when you brought it back to the States? Did the meaning of the work change from its original intent? <\/b><\/div>\r\n
Yes, completely. Alongside those architectural ruin paintings, I was working on floral botanical paintings that were very representational as well. The reasoning was to paint something that was just very apolitical, and that was literally my approach\u2014to be Matisse and make very romanticized paintings.<\/div>\r\n

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Saj's St Louis Studio, 2024<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/section>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
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The idea of going to paint apolitical things in a very, very volatile place in the world feels quite profoundly political and, actually, quite subversive. <\/b><\/div>\r\n
Well, indeed. So I come home and continue painting these ruins and flora. I just kept working simultaneously on those two things. All I could think of was that I wanted to paint the Palestinian landscape. So that was my only goal.<\/div>\r\n
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I was working here in my St. Louis studio for several months and just feeling hopeless. I went to a protest with my friend, and part of me was thinking, \u201cThis has happened to Palestinians throughout our lives; I don't think that a protest is the approach that I want to have. I\u2019m not going to make a slogan protest poster.\u201d She's like, \u201cCome on, what are you working on?\u201d At the time, I was making these poppy paintings, and because I didn\u2019t want to make a poster, I thought, \u201cYou know what? I'm just going to carry this painting with me.\u201d Growing up, whenever you're walking the streets and you're holding a poster, especially during a demonstration, you're walking past people who are dining at restaurants, who are looking out the windows, and they'll make a stumped face at you. But from the reactions that I got when I held the painting, I was able to hold their gaze a lot longer than a poster.<\/div>\r\n
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That\u2019s incredible. Without any text on it, right?<\/b><\/div>\r\n
Without any text. The colors weren't symbolic of a flag or anything, either, so it was just extremely inscrutable. When I was alongside other people who were holding flags and posters that had words on them, I would hold my painting. The reaction I got was just that people didn't know if they should curse at me or look away, which people usually do if you hold a sign with a phrase on it in their face. With the painting, they were just kind of confused, as if they didn\u2019t know how they should feel.<\/div>\r\n
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This is the beauty of good interventionist art, in how it can surprise and confound  expectations of what art can be and where it should be. You were basically doing a walking intervention.<\/b><\/div>\r\n
And again, it was an approach where I'm hopeless, walking around with an ego that I have nothing to lose. It was a social experiment for myself and this inner troll in me that I posses..<\/div>\r\n
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Having interviewed you numerous times over the last 18 months, I feel that you have a really subtle but good sense of humor. <\/b><\/div>\r\n
I just like to do things to make myself laugh. And the world's pretty absurd right now, so there's an opportunity to sort of do the biggest eye roll possible about everything.<\/div>\r\n
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What has surprised you about the way the world has reacted in the last, let\u2019s say, year by the time this comes out? Not just about your art, but toward Palestine and greater conversations about war and occupation?<\/b><\/div>\r\n
The amount of advocacy is absolutely astonishing, in places where you would least expect it. Let me give you an example: You're shopping for a new car and think to yourself that you are getting this particular car, but then you find yourself driving on the street and seeing that car everywhere\u2014in exactly the color you wanted. It's just like this car and color are everywhere, and you say, \u201cWow, how many people have this thing?!\u201d That's what being Palestinian feels like now. It's so personal, and it's who I am, so I can't tell if everyone's actually talking about this or if it's coming to the forefront of my consciousness because I'm paying attention to it a lot more than other people. But what I have noticed, and it has surprised me, is that I definitely think people are talking about it a lot more.<\/div>\r\n

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Protest in St Louis, March 2024<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/section>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
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Are you able to talk about the relationship the art world has had with this war, or is it something that you aren\u2019t ready to speak about? <\/b><\/div>\r\n
Don\u2019t force me to say it. <\/div>\r\n
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Let\u2019s talk about when you go back to the West Bank after October 7, in the spring of 2024. Did you go back with a sense of purpose that you wouldn't normally have? I\u2019m thinking about a series of works that were made there, especially the photo of you painting the landscape of Palestine that was on the cover of Artforum recently. <\/b><\/div>\r\n
I had a very specific purpose for going there. I was under immense stress because my grandfather was going through it with his health. The trip was extremely abrupt and really kind of crazy to book a plane ticket within 12 hours of traveling internationally into a war zone. And I understood that I was so privileged to be able to pick up where I left off in my studio there so that I could begin my mornings the same way I did every day with a stroll around the village. And I thought, because there are so many travel restraints at the moment, who is to say I can't paint on this hillside right now? The leisure restraint I'd mentioned earlier is always a challenge, but my parents own that particular plot of land where I made a painting. That land has a zone restriction placed on it by Israel to prevent anyone from building anything on the land. The reason being is because there's a road specifically accessible to Israelis to drive on in the West Bank that's close to my parents' land. I thought, Let me just paint en plein air and enjoy my morning tea, and treat this space as something very domestic\u2014the land my parents own, overlooking the village and this apartheid road. It was so nice to have that type of leisure there, in that moment and morning. Everything is so fast-paced in the West Bank that you have to always be on a specific mission. It was nice to sit there, embrace the moment, and be mesmerized by the abundant beauty of the landscape, truly. Even though I'm directly looking out onto a settlement across from my family's village and I'm aware of how much havoc the violence that comes from the settlement wreaks, mesmerized is really the only word I can use.<\/div>\r\n
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Everything was just so gorgeous; I almost would've forgotten that I was in a war zone if I hadn't seen spirals of smoke in the sky. That was the thing that kind of brought me to the forefront of just being in this space and then remembering what this is. <\/div>\r\n
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I think, circling back to your question regarding the conversation about this and the art world, the reason why I wanted to have such a conservative approach as opposed to being very specific about making protest work was because I felt like this was also an act of resistance on its own, to just make a plein air painting. If I'm able to make this plein air painting, that's very fundamental and goes back to the foundations of pictorial painting. Why can't we talk about it? And if you add that extra context of where it is and at what time in history, then whatever animosity or whatever hostility that you have in response is clearly a reflection of your own nature.<\/div>\r\n

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Preservation, Oil on linen, 8\u201d x 12\u201d, 2024<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/section>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
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So, do you consider yourself a political artist?<\/b><\/div>\r\n
That's a good question. No. I have met political artists in the past, and what I was able to learn from them is the way they work from history and art history. I think that's a practice of its own. But really, I think that if I were of a different ethnicity, making work about my personal upbringing and my environment, which is not so much at the forefront of contemporary news and politics right now, I wouldn't be seen as political. Like, if I were an Australian artist who was responding to the landscape of Australia, would that be seen as political?<\/div>\r\n
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Saj Issa<\/a> will take part in the Great Rivers Biennial<\/a> alongside Basil Kincaid and Ronald Young at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis through February 9, 2025. This interview was originally published in the FALL 2024 Print Quarterly<\/a> edition and conducted at \"I'd Love To See You: A Juxtapoz Magazine Story at 30\" on view at Rusha & Co this summer. <\/i><\/b><\/div>\r\n

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I have been thinking a lot about the origins of the concept of a utopia. War and political turmoil can force us to wish for something more ideal, a situation where the living world can live together in what we could call social harmony. The idea of utopia also leads to wondering about land and how to share it. French painter Andr\u00e9 Derain once wrote, \u201cThere is only one kind of painting: landscape. It is the most difficult. It has also, I believe, the most simple kind of composition. Because no one can stop us from imagining the world in the way that pleases us most.\u201d It\u2019s the latter part of this quote that struck a chord, as I consider such social reform\u2014this imaginary society where exemplary qualities may be relative to the dreamer but universal in their aims. It was the great architect Buckminster Fuller who said, \u201cThe world is now too dangerous for anything less than Utopia.\u201d In a sense, both Fuller and Derain seem to say, \u201cThe world as we want it to be is imagined, and probably never actually lived.\u201d<\/p>","event":{"BeforeDisplay":"","AfterDisplay":"","AfterDisplayTitle":"","BeforeDisplayContent":"","AfterDisplayContent":"","K2BeforeDisplay":"","K2AfterDisplay":"","K2AfterDisplayTitle":"","K2BeforeDisplayContent":"","K2AfterDisplayContent":""},"jcfields":[],"videoClass":false,"twitter_introtext":""},{"id":"73314","title":"A New Global Conversation: A Spotlight on the Contemporary Art Movement in Mexico","alias":"a-new-global-conversation-a-spotlight-on-the-contemporary-art-movement-in-mexico","catid":"24","published":"1","introtext":"When did Mexico become one of the world\u2019s hottest art destinations? The Mexican capital, in particular, known for Aztec architecture and storied murals, is thriving in a dynamic creative scene as a<\/span><\/span>","fulltext":"

The latest wave of artists is forging their own paths in a country where art has long played a role in history and culture, tracing back to the origins of Mexican art in pre-Columbian civilizations, the arrival of the Spanish, and the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s. In the 20th century, iconic artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera achieved iconic status\u2014but what does contemporary art look like in Mexico today? And how have the arts chronicled the country? These questions are integral to understanding the works of Fernanda Canales, Bosco Sodi, and other architects and artists in Mexico.
\"FernandaCanales
\"FernandaCanales


Let\u2019s first examine the history of art in Latin America. The earliest Mexican paintings were completed millennia in the past, with Mayan, Aztec, and Incan civilizations initially focusing on architecture and sculpture. Painting on ceramics dates back to the Purron agricultural phase from 2300 to 1500 B.C. Codices, or old book-like publications, featured pictures rather than written text, and readers will note that colors were often used symbolically in these ancient works. The yellow hue of corn symbolized food, for example, while black implied weaponry and red indicated blood. Common themes of religion and politics are reflected in the Olmec civilization, which crafted a series of large-scale sculpted heads featuring unique facial expressions, each wearing a helmet. Though the precise reason these heads were constructed remains unclear, some believe the works were sculpted to highlight the Olmec rulers\u2019 geopolitical power between 1200 and 400 B.C. Researchers claim the sculptures were eventually moved up to 60 miles from where they were first constructed, likely for political reasons during the Middle Formative Period from 900 to 300 B.C., a transition phase from smaller architectural villages to denser towns. Mexican culture evolved significantly during this time, with Olmec influences extending to Oaxaca, Chiapas, Guatemala, El Salvador, and the Valley of Mexico. Subsequently, the Late Formative Period from 300 B.C. to 100 A.D. featured the spread of more complex societies, with hieroglyphics and calendrical calculations taking shape; this timeframe is associated with Tres Zapotes, Izapan, and early Oaxacan artistic styles. The most famous pyramid in Latin America, the Pyramid of the Sun, at a staggering 200 feet tall, was erected in Teotihuac\u00e1n during this period between 1 and 250 A.D. Meanwhile, the Aztec Calendar Stone, or Sun Stone, depicts the Aztec sun god Tonatiuh surrounded by symbols that comprise the Aztec calendar, now housed in Mexico City\u2019s National Museum of Anthropology and among the nation\u2019s best-known pre-Columbian works of art.

How might the Spanish have influenced Mexican art history? Moving on to the Colonial Era, during the Spanish rule of Mexico from approximately 1521 to 1821 A.D., the country\u2019s art scene experienced a drastic shift. Notably, the arrival of Christianity led to the construction of new churches with European d\u00e9cor and depictions of the Virgin Mary, Jesus, and the cross. Despite the resulting artistic shockwaves, native techniques to Mexico like feather art\u2014popular before the Spanish arrived in Latin America\u2014remained popular and were often used alongside more traditional Christian decorations. Mexican artists continued to forge unique artistic identities while the Spaniards were in power, a trend that continued when Mexico regained independence in 1821. Here again, artists set out to separate their home country from its colonial past.

Nearly a century later, the Mexican Revolution produced new works of art celebrating triumph in the face of hardship. In 1911, the Mexican people overthrew Porfirio D\u00edaz, a dictator who only supported artists of European descent during his rule. During the revolution, art prioritized self-expression steeped in introspection, as works shed light on anti-authoritarian and pro-democratic thinking and as egalitarian and utopian schools of thought transcended the country\u2019s pervading political militance. A muralist movement began to take shape as well, with artists embracing themes like the human condition, the significance of struggle, and Mexican life and identity. These socio political issues are still prevalent today, apparent in paintings and sculpture, folk art and photography, and even in Mexican cinema. In 2024, contemporary Mexican artists will continue to innovate, blending history and modernity into something entirely new, as in estudio muro, also the brainchild of Jos\u00e9 Casta\u00f1eda Lepov, who specializes in the design, painting, and installation of modern murals throughout Mexico City.

One might argue that contemporary Mexican art is founded on the use of local materials. For Fernando Laposse (b. 1988, Paris), a designer born in France to Mexican parents, material sourcing and cultural context are critical. The artist, who divides his time between London and Mexico City, collaborates extensively with the Tonahuixtla community, a group of Mixtec farmers in southern Mexico. With their input, he develops techniques that help residents repurpose, and ultimately regenerate, traditional agricultural practices. Specifically, Laposse transforms materials like corn husks into refined pieces, all while speaking to the importance of environmental activism and cultural sensitivity. The artist sheds light on complex topics like climate change, migration, and indigenous rights in his intricate designs, in many ways helping to counter the nation\u2019s colonial past. Like Laposse, Aliza Nisenbaum (b. 1977, Mexico City) leverages her Mexican heritage to elevate themes like visibility and representation. Based in New York, the Columbia University professor paints colorful portraits that humanize underserved global communities, offering an intimate look at diverse cultures and relationships. Through an often political lens, Nisenbaum gravitates toward the popular aesthetics of Mexico, such as the intricate textures, patterns, and bright colors of her upbringing. No identity is homogeneous, she notes, and this viewpoint is apparent in the artist\u2019s paintings. Nisenbaum\u2019s works showcase the plurality of humanity, our traditions, and micro-differences, with an emphasis on solidarity, sensitivity, and access.

\"Aliza

Architect Fernanda Canales (b. 1974, Mexico City), who celebrates a similar sense of place,  studied in Spain before returning to her native Mexico, where she has received international acclaim as one of the world\u2019s leading architects. Growing up in the northern Monterey section of Mexico, the sun and the mountains factored extensively into her identity. While she and her family embraced the sun\u2019s heat, Canales noticed that outsiders would often reject it, pulling the shades or turning up the air conditioning, and only rarely leaning into their environment. Marrying stunning interiors with the exterior landscape, the architect has made a career of inventing seamless minimalist spaces with the aim of inspiring others to connect with their surroundings. This unification of interior and exterior environments is also prevalent in the works of Bosco Sodi (b. 1970, Mexico City). Drawn to Zen philosophy, the artist has embraced the crudeness of raw materials such as ground chalk, sand, and dirt to bring his large-scale paintings and sculptures to life. Sodi believes all materials have their own souls and that by removing any preconceived notions beyond each work\u2019s immediate existence, he can make art influenced by the local climate. Inspired by his own lived experience in Mexico and Japan, Sodi remembers visiting Mayan ruins with his mother as a child, and acknowledges how these trips fueled his appreciation of raw materials. His current Harvard Art Museums site-specific installation Origen, on view through June 2024, features a series of untitled terracotta spheres that examine the earth\u2019s most basic forms, blending traditions like sculpture with contemporary minimalism, employing Zapotec techniques, and using clay sourced from Oaxacan artisans. Like Canales, Sodi relies on his surroundings to create these works of contemporary art. Perla Krauze (b. 1953, Mexico City) is similarly inspired by ruins and archaeology, working with a range of materials to craft three-dimensional pieces influenced by volcanoes, fossils, mountains, and other artifacts and landscapes inherent to Mexico. Erasure and memory are central to Krauze\u2019s process, whose work relies heavily on Mexican history and topography.

And what about politics? Gonzalo Garcia (b. 1988, Puebla) is intrigued by Mexican violence, often in reference to the progression of the nation\u2019s middle class from the 1970s onward. Focusing on film and painting, the artist\u2019s work is founded on eroticism and ambivalence. His recent works are more explicit, especially the pastel florals and the overgrown bouquets representing human flesh, past stomach problems, and loss of physical control. Often through the lens of being queer in Mexico, he explores the nuances of violence and death. By referencing Mexico\u2019s student protests from the late 1960s, Garcia blends past and present, combining his personal experience and Mexican history into pink, purple, and cream-colored works that contextualize the body in intimate spaces. Other artists steer clear of politics,  emphasizing the mind over the temporal. Nicol\u00e1s Guzm\u00e1n (b. 1983, Xalapa) has infused painting, sculpture, performance, printmaking, installation, photography, and video into his practice, taking a multimedia approach to examine art, the role of materials, and the limits of representation. Focusing on color, matter, and space, he views art as an exercise of thought, finding inspiration in the philosophies of Michel Foucault and Arthur Schopenhauer. His film The Dream of the Tordo (a black bird similar to a raven), which prioritizes the imagination over political activism, has a tentative release date of 2025.

Looking forward, stakeholders believe Mexican artists and thought leaders will continue to make an impact that transcends borders. Curator and art historian Amanda de la Garza (b. 1981, Monclova), the current director of the University Museum of Contemporary Art (MUAC) in Mexico City, will soon leave her post to serve as the Artistic Deputy Director of the world-renowned National Museum and Art Center Reina Sof\u00eda (MNCARS) in Madrid, Spain. Multimedia artist Erika Harrsch (b. 1970, Mexico City) reinforces this international trajectory with her Passport project and accompanying book Borderless \u2013 United States of North America (2009), which highlights the porosity of geopolitical boundaries in the context of a single realm composed of the U.S., Canada, and Mexico (members of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA). Harrsch\u2019s interactive installation includes an original passport seal combining symbols of the three countries; at the center, a monarch butterfly symbolizes hope, change, and the future of human rights. The artist, who has lived and worked all over North America and Europe, notes that we have more freedom than immigration policies might suggest and that Mexican artists will continue to gain notoriety in a global context. \u2014Charles Moore<\/strong><\/em>

<\/p>\r\n

Readers can learn more about Mexico\u2019s growing contemporary art movement from many resources, including the forthcoming book Global Conversations: Mexico, which will include detailed interviews with the artists highlighted in this essay. This text was originally published in our FALL 2024 Quarterly <\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>","video":null,"gallery":"{gallery}73314{\/gallery}","extra_fields":"[{\"id\":\"13\",\"value\":\"\"},{\"id\":\"11\",\"value\":\"\"},{\"id\":\"4\",\"value\":\"\"},{\"id\":\"6\",\"value\":\"\"},{\"id\":\"3\",\"value\":\"\"},{\"id\":\"8\",\"value\":\"\"},{\"id\":\"1\",\"value\":\"\"},{\"id\":\"2\",\"value\":\"\"},{\"id\":\"10\",\"value\":\"\"},{\"id\":\"9\",\"value\":\"\"},{\"id\":\"7\",\"value\":\"\"},{\"id\":\"5\",\"value\":\"\"},{\"id\":\"12\",\"value\":\"\"},{\"id\":\"14\",\"value\":\"\"},{\"id\":\"15\",\"value\":\"\"},{\"id\":\"16\",\"value\":\"\"},{\"id\":\"17\",\"value\":\"\"}]","extra_fields_search":" ","created":"September 11, 2024","created_by":"18541","created_by_alias":"","checked_out":"0","checked_out_time":"0000-00-00 00:00:00","modified":"2024-09-08 19:55:22","modified_by":"18541","publish_up":"2024-09-11 08:40:11","publish_down":"0000-00-00 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2024","published":"1","link":"\/fall-2024\/"}],"imageXSmall":"\/media\/k2\/items\/cache\/445699d26289ef481ffa9a0eef6c3acc_XS.jpg?t=1725825322","imageSmall":"\/media\/k2\/items\/cache\/445699d26289ef481ffa9a0eef6c3acc_S.jpg?t=1725825322","imageMedium":"\/media\/k2\/items\/cache\/445699d26289ef481ffa9a0eef6c3acc_M.jpg?t=1725825322","imageLarge":"\/media\/k2\/items\/cache\/445699d26289ef481ffa9a0eef6c3acc_L.jpg?t=1725825322","imageXLarge":"\/media\/k2\/items\/cache\/445699d26289ef481ffa9a0eef6c3acc_XL.jpg?t=1725825322","imageGeneric":"\/media\/k2\/items\/cache\/445699d26289ef481ffa9a0eef6c3acc_Generic.jpg?t=1725825322","cleanTitle":"A New Global Conversation: A Spotlight on the Contemporary Art Movement in Mexico","numOfComments":"0","text":"

When did Mexico become one of the world\u2019s hottest art destinations? The Mexican capital, in particular, known for Aztec architecture and storied murals, is thriving in a dynamic creative scene as artists like Perla Krauze, Gonzalo Garcia, and Fernando Laposse make their mark in cultural conversations. Today, audiences and stakeholders are flocking to Mexico, or alternatively, sharing works inspired by the nation\u2019s history with global audiences at some of the world\u2019s most frequented international galleries and museums; simultaneously, thought leaders are launching artist-run spaces like the Uni\u00f3n Residency program, a lab offering personalized mentorship for narrative-based creators (founded by artist, collector, and curator Jos\u00e9 Casta\u00f1eda Lepov), and experimental pop-up shows with the goal of nurturing local artists. <\/p>","event":{"BeforeDisplay":"","AfterDisplay":"","AfterDisplayTitle":"","BeforeDisplayContent":"","AfterDisplayContent":"","K2BeforeDisplay":"","K2AfterDisplay":"","K2AfterDisplayTitle":"","K2BeforeDisplayContent":"","K2AfterDisplayContent":""},"jcfields":[],"videoClass":false,"twitter_introtext":""},{"id":"73310","title":"Elizabeth Glaessner: The In-Between","alias":"elizabeth-glaessner-the-in-between","catid":"30","published":"1","introtext":"There are a lot of things I\u2019ve felt looking at the work of Elizabeth Glaessner, but I\u2019m not sure any of those feelings are correct after spending a morning taking in her every word. When we spoke<\/span><\/span>\n ;<\/span><\/span>","fulltext":"

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Elizabeth Glaessner<\/h1>\r\n

The In-Between<\/h2>\r\n

Interview by Shaquille Heath \/\/ Portrait by Bryan Derballa<\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/header><\/div>\r\n

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 <\/p>\r\n

There are a lot of things I\u2019ve felt looking at the work of Elizabeth Glaessner, but I\u2019m not sure any of those feelings are correct after spending a morning taking in her every word. When we spoke, she was in France completing the second part of a residency as she tottered around on a small stool while talking me through her color theory and experimenting with scale and the dissonance we all encounter between our bodies and faces. Like a phantom on the terrace of Glaessner\u2019s bookish mind, I came to the realization that the dreamy nature of her artwork is just as mutable as the subjects she's compelled to paint. There\u2019s really not a concrete answer for it all, for the lore and legends she references in conversation that inspire some of her canvases. The best parts live not in the answers but in the existential questions that these kinds of stories bring forth. How they mutate and change upon any day, like the weather or a gust of wind that ushers a collapse between what we're willing to see and what we\u2019re willing to believe. Glaessner\u2019s art sits on the threshold that clenches us in this in-between: the water\u2019s surface, to dive or observe,  consciousness or sedation, holding still upon the fencepost for as long as gravitational balance will hold. It\u2019s a revelatory place to be.<\/div>\r\n

 <\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/section>\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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Under Toe, 2024, oil on linen,  84 x 74 ins,  Courtesy of Elizabeth Glaessner and P\u00b7P\u00b7O\u00b7W, New York Photo: JSP Art Photography<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/section>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
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 <\/p>\r\n

Shaquille Heath<\/i>: You\u2019re in Paris right now!<\/b><\/div>\r\n
Elizabeth Glaessner<\/i>: I am! I just took a train in from Marseille, where I\u2019m doing a residency. It\u2019s a cool city, and I\u2019m excited to get back. The residency is organized by Olivier Zahm with Purple magazine and sponsored by Chanel, which had its Cruise show at the end of April. I was there then, and I'm back to make more work.<\/div>\r\n
 <\/div>\r\n
What have you been working on during this time?<\/b><\/div>\r\n
The residency is in the Cit\u00e9 Radieuse, which is a modernist housing development designed by Le Corbusier. The unit that I\u2019m in is a studio and living space in one. He came up with this modular system of measurement, which is based on a six foot man with his arm raised, so he combines these measurements, which I think were based on a six foot tall policeman, with the golden ratio, and I believe the Fibonacci sequence, to come up with this scale of proportions. Every element in the building is designed according to that. It's been incredible to live and work in the space and in Marseille. I mean, he\u2019s a polarizing figure because of his political associations, and living and working in this building, you feel like you\u2019re in someone else\u2019s very obsessive vision. The spaces are immaculate; all furniture, windows, and built-ins are designed according to this scale of proportions, so you\u2019re fully enveloped.<\/div>\r\n
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The show takes place in this very narrow hallway, which was built through the space. So I was working within a lot of parameters, like the tiny hallway and being in a Corbusier building\u2014a kind of situation I wouldn\u2019t otherwise be in. It's such a specific experience to be looking at art in a space where you can\u2019t step back to see; it\u2019s very intimate. You have to get right up next to the painting. I don't know if you saw Abramovi\u0107\u2019s retrospective a while back at the MoMA, but the naked doorway piece was on display, with the man and woman that you had to squeeze between to get to the next room. This tiny hallway makes you aware of your own body in that way, so I wanted the paintings to sort of play off of that. I did very tiny works on paper, with the ratio of the surfaces based on the modular system. Then I used the colors of the building, which were also specified by Corbusier. He developed his own rules for color\u2014almost his own color theory\u2014which has all been interesting to learn about. <\/div>\r\n
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Now I\u2019m spending a lot of time outside, going to the beach, running along the coast, and going on hikes in the Calanques. So the paintings I\u2019ve been making during this second part of the residency are actually more about the landscape. I really love it here.  <\/div>\r\n

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Green Ribbon, 2022, oil on linen, 50 x 44 ins, Courtesy of Elizabeth Glaessner and P\u00b7P\u00b7O\u00b7W, New York Photo: JSP Art Photography<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/section>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
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I\u2019ve been looking at your Instagram, and I feel so jealous. It looks like heaven!  I feel like your work has such a surreal and phantasmic nature. The way the paint sorts, ebbs, flows, and disappears, it feels like you often need the distance to really take in the form you're seeing. <\/span><\/b><\/div>\r\n
Yeah, you're right about needing distance. In my studio, I spend so much time just walking back and forth between my paintings. Like there's a trail on the ground with whatever dominant color I\u2019m using in a particular painting. I just had a show with Fran\u00e7ois Ghebaly back in April. The space is so vast, and there's so much room to stand back and see large paintings. So this tiny hallway was kind of the opposite experience. Because I knew the space in LA was so open and large, all I made were big paintings for that show. And then, a month later, I'm kind of doing the opposite. So it definitely is a shift. But I do kind of tend to either work really small or really large. I think it's the in-between that's tricky for me.<\/div>\r\n
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It's interesting that it\u2019s the source of the challenge. Not to be a therapist about it\u2026<\/b><\/div>\r\n
I love therapy!<\/div>\r\n
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Haha, me too! Okay, great, so to be a therapist about it, have you thought about why that is tricky for you?<\/b><\/div>\r\n
Yeah, I have. I think when I paint large, the figures are always over life size. And when I paint small, it really feels like I'm painting a miniature large painting, if that makes sense, as if they inhabit their own world with their own logic. And when it's in-between and the figures are just under life size, it starts to feel almost more like fantasy because there\u2019s something delicate and saccharine about the figures at that scale that doesn\u2019t always resonate. <\/div>\r\n
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And this is totally a personal battle, haha! Because when I see other people do it, like today in the Moreau Museum with these giant paintings, the figures are always just under life size. I love those paintings, they're incredible. It's not a rule, but just a scale that\u2019s tricky for me and so easy to slip into territory that I\u2019m probably trying to avoid at the moment. It makes more sense to me right now if the figures are sort of oversized, taking up a lot of space, more confrontational, maybe where you're seeing the world through this inverse microscope.<\/div>\r\n

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Girl with Arms, 2023, oil on linen with extra fine melamine and diatomaceous earth, 50 x 44 ins, Courtesy of Elizabeth Glaessner and P\u00b7P\u00b7O\u00b7W, New York Photo: JSP Art Photography<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/section>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
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Actually, I think that makes a lot of sense. I know that some of the figures are based on stories or folklore, and there\u2019s something about that essence\u2014how we share stories and pass them around\u2014that might not easily fit on a wall.<\/b><\/div>\r\n
Yeah, so also, when I'm painting large, it\u2019s a very physical thing, right? I tend to want to make these really large, sweeping marks and forms. I think that's also part of it. And then, when I paint small, it's just a completely different experience, maybe more playful. I'm usually, at some point, sitting on the ground. I never sit when I paint large; I\u2019m standing, moving around! I just finished a show that is going to open in Tokyo at Perrotin in July. And all of those paintings are small paintings, except for two. So that'll be the first time that I do a solo show of pretty much all small works, which I think is going to be really interesting. When I'm doing those, I'm mostly working from my head, not using a ton of references. I'm working out ideas and compositions, figuring out color and technique, and developing meaning.<\/div>\r\n
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Tell me more about Tokyo.<\/b><\/div>\r\n
The Tokyo show is exciting for me. There are 15 small paintings, and then two large ones. I think of the paintings in relation to each other, so the way they\u2019re hung will influence how they\u2019re read. I made most of the small works before the LA show, so when I was making that show, I used a scale model of the gallery to plan and used images of the small paintings as stand ins. Then I made the large paintings, using the small works as references or studies. And now the small paintings, some of which have larger versions, will be displayed.<\/div>\r\n
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What do you think changes the most between the creation of the small versions and the larger versions? <\/b><\/div>\r\n
A lot. Like, maybe for a small painting, if it works on a small scale and is saying everything I wanted to say, then I'll just try it big and won't make a lot of changes. But usually, when I shift scale, it doesn't work that way. And I do scale up my brushes when I'm working large to try to get that sort of direct mark. But, yeah, sometimes when they're blown up, and when you're confronted with them, they just don't work. So I'll rework the painting, which is a lot more physically demanding on a large scale. For one of the large paintings in the show in LA, I probably changed the pose of the figure like 15 times, and that becomes part of the painting. The paint builds up on the surface, which becomes an important part. There\u2019s so much embedded in a surface: time, physicality, feeling\u2014it's all communicating. That can also happen on a small scale. Sometimes I'll get it quickly, and I won't have to rework things, so the surface may show that ease. But when it doesn\u2019t come as easily, you know, I'll just keep painting over it. Sometimes there'll be a bunch of paintings underneath, and you'll kind of see that on the surface. <\/div>\r\n

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Red Coral, 2023, oil on linen, 70 x 90 ins, Courtesy of Elizabeth Glaessner and P\u00b7P\u00b7O\u00b7W, New York, Photo: JSP Art Photography<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/section>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
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They all come with their own little past lives.<\/b><\/div>\r\n
Yeah, definitely. And sometimes it's more visible, although where it really is visible is on the sides of the painting. Because maybe I start with a blue pour, and then it ends up being a red painting, you know, you'll see where it started. <\/div>\r\n
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That's the tip\u2014make sure you truly look from all angles! <\/b><\/div>\r\n
Yeah, I always think of the sides as a key.<\/div>\r\n
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Going back, I want to talk more about your inspirations and the stories that you pull from\u2026 What captures your attention the most right now?<\/b><\/div>\r\n
I\u2019ve been circling back to several stories or themes for a while now, and I think each time I come back to one, I bend it in another direction, which keeps it fresh enough to explore. In the last year, I came back to a series of reflection paintings. I think I made the first ones maybe 8 or 9 years ago? They\u2019re based on the story of Echo and Narcissus from Ovid\u2019s Metamorphoses, but I was making paintings about Echo confronting her reflection after Narcissus dies. In some cases, her reflection is multiplied. In these more recent paintings, I was curious about what the desire to merge with the reflection might mean. I think about the reflection as a psychological space. Georg Trakl wrote about moments of transition in the mirror-pool, where the reflection of the sky with its weft is more real than the sky itself. In \u201cHellbrunn,\u201d he wrote about wanting to bleed to death on a sphinx face reflected by the moon. I\u2019m interested in this dissonance between what\u2019s seen and what\u2019s felt\u2014and how the collapse of what we perceive as real can create openings for new ideas. Throughout Metamorphoses, there are lots of mostly female characters who undergo some type of transformation in order to overcome trauma usually inflicted by a male.<\/div>\r\n
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In some recent underwater paintings, I reference the Egyptian deity, Nwt. She\u2019s called the \u201ccoverer of the sky\u201d because she\u2019s positioned on all fours, arched over the visible sky, so when we look up, we\u2019re actually seeing her body, and at night, we see the stars reflected on her body, which shields us from the open sky. I think this relates in a way to the sky that Trakl sees reflected in the mirror pool. Seeing the same thing can lead to many different interpretations. In these underwater paintings, the waterline separates what\u2019s seen from what\u2019s felt, or the conscious from the subconscious. Below is a psychological space, similar to the reflection. 

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Another story that I\u2019ve come back to recently is Pygmalion and Galatea, but in these paintings there\u2019s a third smaller figure watching, so it becomes less about this particular myth and more about a process of purging material and then creating something with it, which also relates to the studio paintings. As I paint, I like to keep the stories ambiguous since there are multiple reasons or ways I got there\u2014so there have to be multiple ways out.<\/div>\r\n
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What kind of stories do you find yourself most attracted to? Does there happen to be a theme?<\/b><\/div>\r\n
Usually, it\u2019s the collision of several stories that sparks an idea or form. Like the crawling figure- which is a recurring sort of archetypal figure\u2014an animal-human creature that encompasses polarizing characteristics: a baby and someone close to death, the erotic and grotesque, liberated and subjugated, desperate and free. Blake\u2019s Nebuchadnezzar, Cranach\u2019s Phyllis and Aristotle, Kafka\u2019s Gregor Samsa, Degas\u2019 women in brothels, and also the boy in Young Spartans Exercising. Without getting too specific, because there are too many great examples in poetry and literature, I think I\u2019m drawn to stories and authors that linger in the in-between, that explore characters that contain multitudes, monsters that elicit empathy, that make the familiar strange, and that really consider and dissect language. Consider the power that words imbue. I recently finished Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh, a contemporary author that I think does this really well. <\/div>\r\n

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Becoming a Lake, 2024, oil on linen, 84 x 50 ins, Courtesy of Elizabeth Glaessner and P\u00b7P\u00b7O\u00b7W, New York, Photo: JSP Art Photography<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/section>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
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I was walking down the street the other day, and I saw a place doing aura photographs, and it reminded me a lot of the mood and colors of your works. I was wondering where your color inclinations came from.<\/b><\/div>\r\n
I think it\u2019s constantly changing, but I know what you mean. I think we all have tendencies towards certain color combinations or palettes, whether that's innate or learned. I look around a lot and think about color and where it's coming from, whether nature, a screen, or a book. I look at paintings and think about how I could repurpose something. Maybe there's a specific green in a painting, and I can't stop thinking about it, so I\u2019ll make a painting using the green as a starting point and then kind of build from there. But color is all relative, so it\u2019s really about what\u2019s next to it. <\/div>\r\n
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I don't want to say it's completely intuitive because it's more than that. I never took color theory in school, but I\u2019ve read Albers, Itten, and Goethe\u2014you can really go down a wormhole, it\u2019s all so interesting. But yeah, there\u2019s an element of intuition, and over time, I\u2019ve developed different associations with specific colors, so there\u2019s a sort of symbolic undertone. Often, what happens is that I'll be working on a painting and have a visceral reaction, and then I have to kind of manipulate and make changes until it feels right. It's hard to explain what that is because I think it\u2019s different for each painting. And it usually has to do with the mood or the content of the piece. Like, does that color palette work with that idea? What is it contributing? Painting has its own language, and color is one of the elements. So the color should contribute as much as the content or the idea. I think things happen when I start pouring color. Sometimes one color will overlap with another, and that'll create a color that maybe I wouldn't have thought of. So I\u2019ll get ideas from doing things like that.<\/div>\r\n
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Have you found that there's any particular thing that gets you kind of stuck?<\/b><\/div>\r\n
It's a good question. Not always, but I would say faces are tricky because I actually think of the body as expressing the mood, the feeling, or the sort of underlying psychology of the figure. I don't always want the face to further that feeling. Sometimes I want the face to be in conflict with the body, or sometimes I want the face to be dead so that the body speaks. It's a delicate balance. So I can get tripped up on the expression, and then, like, how much of the expression do I want to be communicated through the actual face versus the forms? Or the color too. So yeah, that's a place where, if it's not working, the painting won't work until it's right.<\/div>\r\n
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Oh interesting! I mean, even within life, it is often your body that gives away what you\u2019re truly feeling. Often they can't be in sync, but it feels like you have more control over the face than you do over your actual body.<\/b><\/div>\r\n
Yeah, I think you're totally right. It\u2019s interesting to think about that because there's also societal pressure to do certain things with your face. Smile and put other people at ease, even though it may conflict with what you're thinking. I guess that's a form of masking, which gets really exhausting.<\/div>\r\n
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I just finished this book about how trauma manifests in the body over time. When I was younger, I had these intense episodes of dissociation\u2014or what I later learned was depersonalization or derealization\u2014where I felt disconnected from my body, as though I were floating above it, watching everything that was happening from an impossible perspective. When it was happening, I couldn\u2019t talk because I couldn\u2019t make sense of anything I was hearing or seeing; it was all fuzzy and distant. I\u2019d have no idea what my face was doing, and I\u2019d get nervous if it happened at school or in public, so I learned to mask. And I think this dissonance is something that I play with in my work.<\/div>\r\n
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But about the body specifically, I think there\u2019s a lot of power in positioning your body in specific ways. I teach figure drawing, and one of the things that I usually ask the students at some point in the class\u2014and there's always some resistance from someone-but when the model takes the pose, I ask them to imitate the pose before they start drawing. Because when you move your body in a specific way, you can feel the weight. It can change what you're thinking about, or feeling, even just slightly. You might think, Oh, this feels free, and then maybe that freedom is expressed in the drawing. The body is always communicating something. <\/div>\r\n

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Bodyguard, 2024, oil on linen, 80 x 65 ins, Courtesy of Elizabeth Glaessner and P\u00b7P\u00b7O\u00b7W, New York, Photo: Paul Salveson<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/section>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
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The depersonalization is so mysterious. Do you think that is why water is also prominent in your work? I\u2019m just thinking about the way it also distorts our reality, almost making us feel like two versions of ourselves\u2026 <\/b><\/div>\r\n
I think of the waterline\u2014and sometimes horizon lines\u2014as a way to divide conscious thought from the subconscious. So underwater is chaotic, non rational, sort of intoxicated\u2014a space for exploration, primordial, deep, and hidden. I think about the placement of the head and body within this logic. Limbs mutate or double under water; human forms slip into animal forms; there\u2019s no place for shame; everything is fluid. In some cases, the decision to submerge the head is to submit to the unknown, to exist in murky territory, as opposed to conforming to someone else\u2019s idea of what is known or rational.<\/div>\r\n
 <\/div>\r\n
Follow Elizabeth at @eglaessn<\/a> \/\/ This interview was originally published in our FALL 2024 Quarterly <\/a><\/b><\/i><\/div>\r\n
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glaessner","published":"1","link":"\/tag\/elizabeth-glaessner\/"},{"id":"28661","name":"fall 2024","published":"1","link":"\/fall-2024\/"}],"imageXSmall":"\/media\/k2\/items\/cache\/dee62a4978380fca0ee792c1395370ab_XS.jpg?t=1725822384","imageSmall":"\/media\/k2\/items\/cache\/dee62a4978380fca0ee792c1395370ab_S.jpg?t=1725822384","imageMedium":"\/media\/k2\/items\/cache\/dee62a4978380fca0ee792c1395370ab_M.jpg?t=1725822384","imageLarge":"\/media\/k2\/items\/cache\/dee62a4978380fca0ee792c1395370ab_L.jpg?t=1725822384","imageXLarge":"\/media\/k2\/items\/cache\/dee62a4978380fca0ee792c1395370ab_XL.jpg?t=1725822384","imageGeneric":"\/media\/k2\/items\/cache\/dee62a4978380fca0ee792c1395370ab_Generic.jpg?t=1725822384","cleanTitle":"Elizabeth Glaessner: The In-Between","numOfComments":"0","text":"

There are a lot of things I\u2019ve felt looking at the work of Elizabeth Glaessner, but I\u2019m not sure any of those feelings are correct after spending a morning taking in her every word. When we spoke, she was in France completing the second part of a residency as she tottered around on a small stool while talking me through her color theory and experimenting with scale and the dissonance we all encounter between our bodies and faces. Like a phantom on the terrace of Glaessner\u2019s bookish mind, I came to the realization that the dreamy nature of her artwork is just as mutable as the subjects she's compelled to paint. There\u2019s really not a concrete answer for it all, for the lore and legends she references in conversation that inspire some of her canvases. The best parts live not in the answers but in the existential questions that these kinds of stories bring forth. How they mutate and change upon any day, like the weather or a gust of wind that ushers a collapse between what we're willing to see and what we\u2019re willing to believe. Glaessner\u2019s art sits on the threshold that clenches us in this in-between: the water\u2019s surface, to dive or observe, consciousness or sedation, holding still upon the fencepost for as long as gravitational balance will hold. It\u2019s a revelatory place to be.<\/p>\r\n

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Damiani Books, damianibooks.com

<\/a>This review was originally published in our FALL 2024 Quarterly.<\/a> <\/strong><\/em><\/p>","video":null,"gallery":"{gallery}73306{\/gallery}","extra_fields":"[{\"id\":\"13\",\"value\":\"\"},{\"id\":\"11\",\"value\":\"\"},{\"id\":\"4\",\"value\":\"\"},{\"id\":\"6\",\"value\":\"\"},{\"id\":\"3\",\"value\":\"\"},{\"id\":\"8\",\"value\":\"\"},{\"id\":\"1\",\"value\":\"\"},{\"id\":\"2\",\"value\":\"\"},{\"id\":\"10\",\"value\":\"\"},{\"id\":\"9\",\"value\":\"\"},{\"id\":\"7\",\"value\":\"\"},{\"id\":\"5\",\"value\":\"\"},{\"id\":\"12\",\"value\":\"\"},{\"id\":\"14\",\"value\":\"\"},{\"id\":\"15\",\"value\":\"\"},{\"id\":\"16\",\"value\":\"\"},{\"id\":\"17\",\"value\":\"\"}]","extra_fields_search":" ","created":"September 06, 2024","created_by":"18541","created_by_alias":"","checked_out":"0","checked_out_time":"0000-00-00 00:00:00","modified":"2024-09-06 15:01:36","modified_by":"18541","publish_up":"2024-09-06 14:54:56","publish_down":"0000-00-00 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":"28661","name":"fall 2024","published":"1","link":"\/fall-2024\/"},{"id":"19064","name":"Neal Slavin","published":"1","link":"\/tag\/neal-slavin\/"}],"imageXSmall":"\/media\/k2\/items\/cache\/9a33024f139a29bed36e678dcecd204a_XS.jpg?t=1725634896","imageSmall":"\/media\/k2\/items\/cache\/9a33024f139a29bed36e678dcecd204a_S.jpg?t=1725634896","imageMedium":"\/media\/k2\/items\/cache\/9a33024f139a29bed36e678dcecd204a_M.jpg?t=1725634896","imageLarge":"\/media\/k2\/items\/cache\/9a33024f139a29bed36e678dcecd204a_L.jpg?t=1725634896","imageXLarge":"\/media\/k2\/items\/cache\/9a33024f139a29bed36e678dcecd204a_XL.jpg?t=1725634896","imageGeneric":"\/media\/k2\/items\/cache\/9a33024f139a29bed36e678dcecd204a_Generic.jpg?t=1725634896","cleanTitle":"Neal Slavin's \"When Two or More Are Gathered Together\" Captures a Special Angle of the 1970s","numOfComments":"0","text":"

A hook and ladder company, gravediggers and bingo enthusiasts are some of the eye-popping denizens truly celebrated by film director and photographer Neal Slavin in the expanded golden anniversary edition of When Two or More are Gathered Together.<\/em><\/a> Years ago, his group portrait of a boy-scout troop, all shiny medals, reds and tans, faces freckled or milky white, inspired a life-long allegiance to color and a fascination with groups. \u201cI want my work to affirm our self-identity within our public persona; to affirm the joy of being together rather than being apart.\u201d My, how tribes have changed.<\/p>","event":{"BeforeDisplay":"","AfterDisplay":"","AfterDisplayTitle":"","BeforeDisplayContent":"","AfterDisplayContent":"","K2BeforeDisplay":"","K2AfterDisplay":"","K2AfterDisplayTitle":"","K2BeforeDisplayContent":"","K2AfterDisplayContent":""},"jcfields":[],"videoClass":false,"twitter_introtext":""},{"id":"73295","title":"Isaac Psalm Escoto: But He\u2019s Still Sickid","alias":"isaac-psalm-escoto-but-he-s-still-sickid","catid":"30","published":"1","introtext":"Isaac Psalm Escoto strikes an interesting balance between futurism and parody. His paintings perceive a city that is broken and, therefore, a very intriguing place in which to play. Most of us first <\/span><\/span>","fulltext":"

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Isaac Psalm Escoto<\/h1>\r\n

But He's Still SICKID<\/h2>\r\n

Interview by Evan Pricco \/\/ Portrait by Carlos Jaramillo<\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/header><\/div>\r\n

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Isaac Psalm Escoto strikes an interesting balance between futurism and parody. His paintings perceive a city that is broken and, therefore, a very intriguing place in which to play. Most of us first encountered Isaac as SICKID, the prolific, bold graffiti writer who notoriously painted billboards around Los Angeles. His work felt distanced from the trope of graffiti as vandalism and far more connected to the concept that a playground could be many things in many places. He painted as if to say, \u201cWell, if the city isn\u2019t working for me, I\u2019ll just see what I can do to make it work.\u201d It wasn\u2019t about making it better but more flexible. As a kid influenced by the sci-fi utopianism of anime and the dystopian vision of The Matrix, his version of Los Angeles wasn\u2019t an expansive Ed Ruscha meets Baldessari vista of the West, but a portrayal of congestion, over-population and rundown freeways, a world where the frontier of America ends at the pile of dirty clothes on an East Hollywood bedroom floor. <\/div>\r\n
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This past summer, Escoto enjoyed a raucous opening and rave reviews for his solo show, Gas Station Dinner, at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in Los Angeles. Sneaking in through the backdoor on opening night (I can\u2019t remember the last time I had to sneak into an art show with crowds spilling out from all entrances and exits), the show had the energy of a pre-social media Event. There was an avid buzz of love and community, an excitement of something new in the midst of what is already a bit of a Renaissance in California art. I had visited Escoto at Tlaloc Studios in South Central LA a few weeks prior at a new space his friend Ozzie Juarez gifted him to prepare for the show. A spatial leap from the walk-in closet studio at his mother\u2019s house, it brimmed with the frantic buzz of creation. The paintings depicted what Escoto would call the broken dreams and the reality of first generation immigration, but also the irony of living in the shadow of the Hollywood sign.<\/div>\r\n

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All images from Gas Station Dinner<\/i>, Photos by Josh White.\r\n
Courtesy of the artist and Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles.<\/div>\r\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/section>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
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When I left his studio and walked into the opening, and well into the days following when we met at Deitch for the interview, I kept thinking about the idea of the \u201cGas Station Dinner.\u201d I realized it was a name of collaboration and friendship, a wink to the reality of what the city really does offer its denizens\u2014a city on the brink of extinction while simultaneously being more alive than ever. For years, SICKID roamed about LA, painting billboards with a view of the breaking, bustling, and overwrought businesses and apartments below. Now he looks at what\u2019s happening inside. <\/div>\r\n
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Evan Pricco<\/i>: The opening of Gas Station Dinner had that sort of old-school energy that I remember from the best openings almost 20 years ago. Your friends helped out with the show, I assume, because of the scale of Jeffrey Deitch\u2019s space. It\u2019s almost like you need to have your friends and your community there to help because it would feel so lonely to make this ambitious vault by yourself.<\/b><\/div>\r\n
Isaac Psalm Escoto<\/i>: I was definitely smooth-brained during the whole installation. I finished the mural at around 4:30 the morning of the opening. That big wrestling painting, I finished that morning, too. But luckily the homies were able to help out: Guillaume Ollivier, Ozzie Juarez, and Natalia Lopez, all really talented painters. It's extremely lucky to have people who are down, you know what I mean? It's a gnarly thing putting together this type of show, trying to put out a body of work that's such a big deal to me. Doing it alone wouldn\u2019t have worked.

For previous shows I\u2019ve done, I was just popping Adderalls like a motherfucker\u2014just like boom, boom, boom. For real, like M&Ms. And so this time around, I was just a bit more direct, and, although chaotic, the homies helped me so much. No gnawing of the jaw, which, personally, I'm very happy with.<\/div>\r\n
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I know you came and thought about how other people approached the space. It's high visibility; it's Deitch; it\u2019s a grand space. For a graffiti writer who does billboards, I know you can navigate an area and place, but as a painter, this is different. <\/b><\/div>\r\n
I spent a lot of time going to shows and then to bookstores just to learn how artists use space. I felt like I needed a little bit of education on how to use a space to its fullest, and within the amount of time I had to do it. I had some room for play and experimentation, and I think that is why I did that huge mural, which seemed like a good idea until the 4 a.m. thing\u2026  <\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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I have a theory.<\/b><\/div>\r\n
I can\u2019t wait to hear it\u2026 <\/div>\r\n
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You have all these paintings that are all facing the mural, which, to me, has this perspective of you being up on a billboard looking out to the LA landscape, and that\u2019s part of your life, all your experiences. The paintings behind you are like where you came from and who you became, and the mural is as if you are taking those experiences to a new vantage point. SICKID, known for his billboard graffiti, is looking over the city with his autobiographical paintings behind him, so it\u2019s like a circular perspective of your life. That's how I see it.<\/b><\/div>\r\n
It wasn\u2019t until I started to sketch the mural out the week of install that it dawned on me, \"Oh, this feels like a billboard.\u201d And I wanted to use techniques that are a little bit more unique to me, like how I use rollers, and how I use gesture in painting. If this were to be a billboard, I wouldn't be able to use a ladder to go up and spray paint, so I made this with spray paint only at ground level and then roller up top to just convey the idea of distance. I wanted it to be authentic as to how I would do this illegally. <\/div>\r\n
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And I think you are right. The show, but really this mural, is about my relationship to the city and what it means to be the child of immigrants in such a culturally vast place. I think that is at the heart of all my work\u2014that and the relationship that I have to pop-culture and taking in stuff from 1980 and 90\u2019s animation and video games\u2014but all through that lens of being in LA as a child of immigrants. I was really into Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and The Matrix\u2014a lot of that cyber futurism that was in at that time. <\/div>\r\n
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Being the child of immigrants, there\u2019s very much the multiplicity of many different cultures. And I think, maybe, you even questioned yourself as an adolescent, as in, \u201cWhat am I? What am I supposed to be?\u201d And here I was obsessed with Japanese culture and skateboarding. Like, what is it? Holding the telescope backwards a little bit, maybe this mural's a little bit of what it is to be American.<\/div>\r\n
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I\u2019ve always seen your work as a sort of sci-fi dystopia, where the city is crumbling but also futuristic at the same time. You mention being first generation, so where are your parents from originally? <\/b><\/div>\r\n
My dad's from Guadalajara, Mexico. And my mom's from Guatemala City, Guatemala. They met here in LA in the 1970s. My dad was a retired pro boxer, but he needed to help his family and came to the States to work for a higher wage to send back. He met my mom at a shoe factory down the street from where they lived, our childhood home in East Hollywood.<\/div>\r\n

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Mural painted for Gas Station Dinner, Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, 2024<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/section>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
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I feel like a lot of your paintings are the reality of trying to make sense of the American Dream, but more in the sense of \u201cHey, wait, when does the dream start?\"<\/b><\/div>\r\n
I also took in a lot of the adult animation boom of the 1990s, like \u201cThe Simpsons,\u201d \u201cKing of the Hill,\u201d and \u201cBeavis and Butt-Head\u201d which are really satires of the American suburban dream. A parody of America, really. A lot of characters in my paintings are from that vantage point, a parody of American life and a spoof on reality. But I do it through the lens of biography. These characters are real in a sense. They are critiquing the whole idea of what it's like to \"Make it.\" My work is really about the trials and tribulations of late American capitalism. And I create these underbelly-esque characters and scenarios that critique the whole idea of \u201cwork until you live the dream.\u201d<\/div>\r\n
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What does Gas Station Dinner mean to you? <\/b><\/div>\r\n
There was a long list of names, but I feel like that one stuck out to me and my friends. They know me best, and maybe they thought it was authentic to me. In a way, a gas station dinner is  the fuel for the show. It\u2019s that idea, and the reality, of just going to the liquor store around the block from the studio and multiple 7-Elevens and not spending a lot of money on food or not a lot of care in meal preparation, and how that becomes your de facto fuel for creativity. On the move, not thinking about much else. It\u2019s about that camaraderie with your friends when you are making a show like this because we're doing it in the studio and we're surviving off of $8 meals every day.<\/div>\r\n
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It's also a play on the American context of dinner being so important and culturally significant. The idea that you sit with your family for dinner, or you go on dinner dates, or you have a dinner party with friends. That's a very intimate thing where people get to know each other, and it's something that I\u2019m playing with in the title. A gas station dinner is something that is a little less romantic or a little less glorified. To have that as the name is a little bit of an ode to my friends and an ode to those times when you're down bad.<\/div>\r\n
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When did graffiti become part of your life? And did it make sense to you right away that this was a good way for you to find yourself?<\/b><\/div>\r\n
I think just being a kid in a big city, you're prone to seeing and doing graffiti. I think it's just inevitable that you would come up with a tag. To me, it was just a part of the whole \u201cdysfunction as hobby\u201d part of childhood. You do kind of reckless stuff to keep from being bored\u2014more about being \u201cbad\u201d than it was about going further into the world\u2014that was graffiti. It was mostly to take up time, and it wasn\u2019t about some sort of path I was on. <\/div>\r\n
 <\/div>\r\n
You were the youngest of five kids. Did you grow up in a creative family?<\/b><\/div>\r\n
We come from an artistic family, maybe not in the traditional sense, but I think my dad used art and drawing, not so much as expression but as a tool of draftsmanship and getting ideas across. I think my mom is the one with the good eye. My mom is the one who kind of has the taste in my family. She can curate anything and make it look good\u2014a kitchen, the whole house. And she has this amazing skill where she knows good movies from bad movies. That might seem funny to say, but I think that is a skill, and not a lot of people can do that. So it was all sort of there for me, in its own way. <\/div>\r\n
 <\/div>\r\n
I have three sisters and an older brother, and he grew up during the early 90\u2019s comic book boom. That influenced me just by looking at the drawings, like The Crow and Spawn. And my sisters did a really good job of showing me early gateways into art. LA had a lot of places that weren't necessarily high-end. They weren\u2019t necessarily on the radar of interest for my sisters or me, but there were a lot of places that could offer art to a wide crowd that were this gateway drug to art. If you wanted to go deeper, those places were good places. I\u2019m thinking of Meltdown Comics, or Golden Apple Comics, these are the places that made me want to do art. <\/div>\r\n

 <\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/section>\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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 <\/p>\r\n

And you went to art school, right? <\/b><\/div>\r\n
I went to the Ram\u00f3n C. Cortines School of Visual and Performing Arts (VAPA) for high school, which was a public high school that really catered to the arts. And afafterwards, went to Art Center in Pasadena. If you want to just deep-dive into the technique and the education of mark making, it\u2019s absolutely the place to go. But I was 19 and perhaps not quite ready for it.<\/div>\r\n
 <\/div>\r\n
Did Sickid go to Art Center or did Isaac go to Art Center?<\/b><\/div>\r\n
That\u2019s a great question. I think Sickid went to Art Center. I\u2019ve never heard it worded like that, but I was just 19, and I think I got frustrated being told what to do. <\/div>\r\n
 <\/div>\r\n
We have interviewed you as Sickid before, but since the beginning of 2023, you have been using Isaac Escoto as your art name. Did that come with a feeling of relief, or do you miss the moniker?<\/b><\/div>\r\n
The painting is putting some confidence in me to put myself out there more, and maybe that's a scary thing, but the two do feed each other. Doing illegal work still keeps me sharp, but I think it also keeps me informed on the content of the paintings. I'm not necessarily relieved, but I think there is a little bit of me that is following in the footsteps of people who have done it this way in the past. They do the two, and they're not so held to their graffiti name or ashamed of it. And they don't really divide. There is a world where they could be a Barry McGee and a TWIST, and that works. <\/div>\r\n
 <\/div>\r\n
It was EARSNOT who said that \u201cGraffiti artists pride themselves on being these Zorro guys, but really no one cares. You hide your face, but really, no one outside of this bubble gives a shit.\" That calmed me down. It made me feel like, \u201cThis is my tag. This is me. I'm here in this city. I'm fucking shit up. I'm tagging. This is my face, whatever.\" That was really liberating to hear and feel. <\/div>\r\n
 <\/div>\r\n
Look, the cops are going to get you if they want to get you. You're not a terrorist who's bombing buildings. You know what I mean? You're just throwing paint around. So I think someone like EARSNOT saying that made me feel so less in my head. Show my face, be both SICKKID and  Isaac. <\/div>\r\n

 <\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/section>\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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\u201cLook, the cops are going to get you if they want to get you. You're not a terrorist who's bombing buildings. You know what I mean? You're just throwing paint around. .\u201d<\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n

\r\n

 <\/p>\r\n

Do you feel like you are part of this sort of Renaissance moment in Los Angeles? And do you have a sense of why you think it\u2019s happening? <\/b><\/div>\r\n
I do. I think mostly there's a lot of collaboration and there's a lot of different genres and mediums at play, all these different people advocating for and with each other. It isn\u2019t just artists, but video artists, photographers, filmmakers, musicians, DJs, highbrow, lowbrow, backyard, blue chip\u2014it\u2019s all these things. You may be a great painter, but who is going to play music at the opening? Who is going to film it? Who is going to create a sick fucking flyer? There is so much to consider, and people are sharing and doing it with and for each other. There are definitely multiple notions of people advocating for this one thing. That is how Gas Station Dinner was made. <\/div>\r\n

 <\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/section>\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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 <\/p>\r\n

So in that spirit, what is Isaac\u2019s ideal dinner, gas station or not? <\/b><\/div>\r\n
Oh, I just stole this sandwich from Erewhon; do you want to share it?<\/div>\r\n
 <\/div>\r\n
Gas Station Dinner was on view at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery<\/a> in Los Angeles this past summer. Follow Escoto at @sickid1<\/a> \/\/ This interview was originally published in our FALL 2024 Quarterly<\/a> and conducted in late summer 2024. <\/i><\/b><\/div>\r\n

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psalm escoto","published":"1","link":"\/tag\/isaac-psalm-escoto\/"},{"id":"28661","name":"fall 2024","published":"1","link":"\/fall-2024\/"},{"id":"755","name":"magazine","published":"1","link":"\/tag\/magazine\/"}],"imageXSmall":"\/media\/k2\/items\/cache\/a990e9fe8bef385e3c7c7fddd0029ae3_XS.jpg?t=1725296773","imageSmall":"\/media\/k2\/items\/cache\/a990e9fe8bef385e3c7c7fddd0029ae3_S.jpg?t=1725296773","imageMedium":"\/media\/k2\/items\/cache\/a990e9fe8bef385e3c7c7fddd0029ae3_M.jpg?t=1725296773","imageLarge":"\/media\/k2\/items\/cache\/a990e9fe8bef385e3c7c7fddd0029ae3_L.jpg?t=1725296773","imageXLarge":"\/media\/k2\/items\/cache\/a990e9fe8bef385e3c7c7fddd0029ae3_XL.jpg?t=1725296773","imageGeneric":"\/media\/k2\/items\/cache\/a990e9fe8bef385e3c7c7fddd0029ae3_Generic.jpg?t=1725296773","cleanTitle":"Isaac Psalm Escoto: But He\u2019s Still Sickid","numOfComments":"0","text":"

Isaac Psalm Escoto strikes an interesting balance between futurism and parody. His paintings perceive a city that is broken and, therefore, a very intriguing place in which to play. Most of us first encountered Isaac as SICKID, the prolific, bold graffiti writer who notoriously painted billboards around Los Angeles. His work felt distanced from the trope of graffiti as vandalism and far more connected to the concept that a playground could be many things in many places. He painted as if to say, \u201cWell, if the city isn\u2019t working for me, I\u2019ll just see what I can do to make it work.\u201d It wasn\u2019t about making it better but more flexible. As a kid influenced by the sci-fi utopianism of anime and the dystopian vision of The Matrix, his version of Los Angeles wasn\u2019t an expansive Ed Ruscha meets Baldessari vista of the West, but a portrayal of congestion, over-population and rundown freeways, a world where the frontier of America ends at the pile of dirty clothes on an East Hollywood bedroom floor.<\/p>","event":{"BeforeDisplay":"","AfterDisplay":"","AfterDisplayTitle":"","BeforeDisplayContent":"","AfterDisplayContent":"","K2BeforeDisplay":"","K2AfterDisplay":"","K2AfterDisplayTitle":"","K2BeforeDisplayContent":"","K2AfterDisplayContent":""},"jcfields":[],"videoClass":false,"twitter_introtext":""},{"id":"73274","title":"The Fall Cover Story: Koak and the Journey to Lake Margrethe","alias":"the-fall-cover-story-koak-and-the-journey-to-lake-margrethe","catid":"30","published":"1","introtext":"Humor me, Koak. I like to imagine that you are a Pisces, the water sign seductively symbolized by two fish swimming in opposite directions, a fluid hula of fantasy and reality, a healer, feminine, in<\/span><\/span>","fulltext":"

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Koak<\/h1>\r\n

The Journey To Lake Margrethe<\/h2>\r\n

Interview by Gwynned Vitello \/\/  Portrait by Koak<\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/header><\/div>\r\n

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Humor me, Koak<\/a>. I like to imagine that you are a Pisces, the water sign seductively symbolized by two fish swimming in opposite directions, a fluid hula of fantasy and reality, a healer, feminine, intuitive, and obviously, creative. In abstracting your mesmerizing figures, a universal language is delivered as you imbue each thoughtful subject with a dignified singularity. Fine, spare lines speak directly with the economy of a master cartoonist, while windows, roads and mirrors invite viewers to peer through layered curtains and filtering leaves. And the colors, how deliberately they\u2019re summoned, mixed into hues that suffuse the paintings with an ocean of depth. So if not the sun, maybe an ascending or moon in Pisces, definitely the Zodiak\u2019s favorite artist. We met for a clearly illuminating chat in the Dogpatch area warehouse studio she shares with her gallerist-husband, Kevin Krueger, owner of San Francisco\u2019s Alter Space. <\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/section>\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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Carmine<\/i>, 2023-2024, Flashe and acrylic on linen, 59\" x 74\"<\/div>\r\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/section>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
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Gwynned Vitello: You\u2019ve often referenced a childhood illness that confined you to bed as a kind of opportunity to spend time making art, and I realized that several artists I\u2019ve interviewed have had the same experience. So I wonder if that is familiar to you, and does that interiority invite an early exploration of the body, the self, and the outside world?<\/b><\/div>\r\n
Koak: Absolutely. Illness can force you to feel the boundaries of your body more acutely, heightening your connection with the interior, both physically and mentally. Feverish dreams, boredom, and social isolation are fertile grounds for imagination. These experiences shaped my understanding of art as a tool for exploring what it is to be human and as an outlet for self expression and communication with the outside world. The loneliness of illness almost feels like a dream about how our interior world interacts with people and places that feel distant. <\/div>\r\n
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How was the transition from growing up in Michigan to moving to Santa Cruz, California? Was it an adjustment, and did making art help with that?<\/b><\/div>\r\n
I was shy and somewhat introspective, so the cross-country move was an adjustment. Art was already my outlet, but it became more urgent as I entered adolescence. I struggled with OCD and was drawn to people and ideas that challenged the constructs of what didn\u2019t always feel like a stable world. By high school, many of my friends were struggling with addiction, and I actually lost several to suicide. It was overwhelming and terrifying, so I needed to feel like I had a voice to express what otherwise felt inexpressible.<\/div>\r\n
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I was so fortunate to have an amazing art teacher at Santa Cruz High, which, in retrospect, now feels like such a gift given how public art programs have been cut. She had a brilliant way of obliterating normalcy, which you need at an age when so much is in upheaval. With her encouragement, I started doing art shows at local coffee shops and making zines, which gave me a voice and put me in conversation with people who had similar experiences.<\/div>\r\n

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Scenes from Koak's studio in San Francisco, 2024<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/section>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
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Was it a given that you\u2019d attend art school, and was it satisfying? If so, what classes elevated your skills and purview?<\/b><\/div>\r\n
My art was so intertwined with the personal that it felt vulnerable and intimidating to consider art school. I was accepted to CalArts right out of high school, but I opted to stay with a friend in England and travel with her through Europe. Intuitively, I needed that space to percolate the previous years and process what I wanted to do before committing to a formal environment. I ended up at Cal Arts but became disillusioned with the collective understanding of what it meant to be an artist. Others have had different experiences, but I felt that art was being treated as a performative lifestyle rather than an urgent need. I ended up going to the California College of the Arts, where I found much more clarity and perspective. I was able to craft a program through their Individualized Major that incorporated painting, writing, printmaking, sculpture, electronics, and, of course, comics, for which I later received a Masters through their Comics MFA program.<\/div>\r\n
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Do you conceive your women from a kind of amalgam, or are you occasionally drawn to a specific character from history or mythology?<\/b><\/div>\r\n
Yes, but it\u2019s a bit deeper in that the reason for creating them is often driven by the desire to present an amalgamation\u2014which feels truer to what it means to be human. We\u2019re all combinations of our different parts\u2014parts that are fully ours, parts that are driven by societal constructs or archetypes we\u2019ve internalized\u2014none of us is succinct. Rarely will figures in my work come from a specific source. I\u2019ve done a small drawing and print that was based on the story of \u201cLeda and the Swan,\u201d and I\u2019ve made several works of my mother. But even when I create something from a singular figure or person, a large part of my process is in layering that figure with additional nuance, convergent emotions, and elements that tie into larger social narratives. <\/div>\r\n

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The Beholden<\/i>, 2024, Flashe, acrylic, and liquid charcoal on linen, 68 3\/4 \" x 86\". <\/span>Courtesy the Artist and Perrotin.<\/span><\/div>\r\n
Image: Chris Grunder<\/div>\r\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/section>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
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How would you describe your painting practice? Do you start with an idea, with research, and with a line drawing that eventually becomes your completed process? Your method of accentuating the drawn lines in some of your work is like a magic trick that adds subtle but powerful emphasis. Who would guess that pencil shavings would play a part (and what number pencil)?<\/b><\/div>\r\n
There\u2019s never a single path. For smaller works or drawings, sometimes it\u2019s as simple as moving the pencil until an image surfaces. But with larger works, the process has been more varied for the past few months. I\u2019ve been in the early stages of planning an upcoming exhibition at Charleston in Lewes, which has come from years of interest in the history of the Bloomsbury Group, but at the moment it exists only in my head as a foggy collection of colors and the idea that the paintings should feel like movement through a busy household. Simultaneously, I\u2019m preparing a painting for Frieze London based on a smaller drawing that I just finished and feel could be explored further in a larger format. I\u2019m also sketching a digital draft for landscape painting that will show at the Kemper Museum this fall. All this to say, each work or body of work has different needs in terms of its beginnings and progression. Some take painfully long to sketch, some are drafted by hand, others digitally, and some feel like a puzzle that doesn't fit until thoroughly explored. The one constant with larger works is that there\u2019s generally a long period of drafting, projecting, nudging lines, and revisions before I start physically working on a piece.<\/div>\r\n
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As far as material, line is always a key element in my work, but its treatment varies with each painting. If a piece needs to feel tender, I leave areas of the linen exposed or lightly dyed, as in the patterning in Nancy in Blue. For visually layered pieces, where I want to present two images as an overlay and create the sense of coexisting thoughts, I\u2019ll build up the lines by sifting wood from my pencil shavings and mixing it into a paint that\u2019s then sculpted off the canvas in order to create distance between the lined image and the painted background, as in The Shell and Magritte\u2019s Door. It\u2019s important to me that my process reflects the essence of each work, and over time, my techniques have evolved to support this.<\/div>\r\n
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How long does this take, or do you maybe work on several paintings that become a larger opus?<\/b><\/div>\r\n
Generally, I\u2019ll work on a body of work collectively so that each piece informs the others. There might be one that acts as an initial catalyst, but it\u2019s always quickly followed by works that I feel have to exist in tandem. It\u2019s like the first piece operates as a question, and the following works are answers, but at the same time, they are all iterations trying to say the same thought or mood in a different tone. For example, the first work for an upcoming show at Perrotin was Margrethe Summer, a painting of a wide-eyed woman sitting at a table, tongue out, and ready to receive a raspberry from an equally wide eyed bird. The work reflects both my childhood in Michigan and an idyllic connection with nature, though there\u2019s always an underpinning of feverish worry. The sketches for the following works build on this in the form of repeating imagery: nature represented as shadows and silhouettes; doorways or windows as portals between the world of the interior and nature; and spirals symbolizing both loss of control, internal safety, and retreat, like a shell. <\/div>\r\n

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Below Here a Deep Well<\/i>, 2022, Flashe, acrylic, charcoal, and chalk on linen mounted to panel, 66.5\" x 50\". Courtesy the Artist and Altman Siegel. Image: Chris Grunder<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/section>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
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How has your color palette changed, and do you have favorite colors or one at the moment? Are there colors that hold a personal resonance or that feel representational of time, place, or mood?<\/b><\/div>\r\n
The show I\u2019m currently working on began as a ruination on the color green, which historically in art has captured both life and death within its range\u2014from green fields to the sick bed. I thought it would be interesting to do for a Parisian show, considering the history of Paris Green, a paint developed in the 18th century that, despite containing arsenic, gained wild popularity during the industrial age as people sought nature amid the era\u2019s grayness. It was used in paintings and household wares, such as wallpaper and fake foliage, and ultimately led to much illness and even death. The story of arsenic green captures the absurdity of human nature. The duality of the color also reminds me of my grandmother, who passed away over a decade ago, and of the tenuous balance she navigated between her life and illness. This brought back memories of my childhood in Michigan, where green encapsulates both the vibrant woods around my grandfather\u2019s log cabin and the green waters of Lake Margarethe, where we swam each summer, unaware it was poisoned by runoff from the nearby military base. <\/span> <\/div>\r\n
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Expanding on this, I noticed during my studio visit that each of the paintings in progress were dominated by a particular hue? Did you have that in mind at the start, and how does it tell the story of the show?<\/b><\/div>\r\n
It comes back to the idea of not being able to untether the works from one another, and the sense that individual paintings come from a collective work, with each one altering the pace or emotional impact within the show. But it\u2019s also about pushing the boundaries of that color. When you\u2019re working at something that's predominantly monotone, the hues within want to escape. Light pinks and water green become white when they\u2019re surrounded solely by their counterparts. In an entirely green painting, viridian mixed with white becomes pale blue, and spring green reads as an acid yellow. It\u2019s a practice in creating boundaries to see nuance; trying to find subtle ways for something limited, when given time, can feel expansive. Similarly, I\u2019m always looking for nuance in the movement or curl of the line work and in how those subtle changes affect impact. Limiting color gives me more control in harnessing the emotional impression, making subtle shifts in tone to subvert that meaning into something new. <\/div>\r\n

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California Landscape #2<\/i>, 2023, Flashe, acrylic, and charcoal from the California fires on linen, 104\" x 70\". Courtesy the Artist and Altman Siegel. Image: Chris Grunder<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/section>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
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As someone who loves zines and comics, and from what I\u2019ve seen, a master of figuration. Has it always been your choice? Have you ever dabbled in abstraction?<\/b><\/div>\r\n
I\u2019ve always worked with the figure, something I\u2019ve gravitated towards as my most direct mode of connecting with the viewer. That said, abstraction plays an important, though not always apparent, role in my work. My primary language of interest is emotion, and balancing the play between realism, surrealism, and abstraction is maybe the easiest way to portray a more subtle emotional impact.<\/div>\r\n
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And you also create sculptures. Of course, it\u2019s a very different process, but how do the concepts that start and end a piece share methods and concepts? Do you feel that sculpture can communicate an idea in a different perceptual way than painting?<\/b><\/div>\r\n
Sculpture has always been a part of my practice, but it wasn\u2019t until the last six years that I had the opportunity to work in traditional materials like bronze or wood. I do feel that it encourages the viewer to engage with the work in a more physical and immediate way. It can also provide a direct reference to specific cultural objects that have deeply ingrained meanings. I\u2019ve made several works under the title Modesty, which plays on and subverts the utility of the traditional dressing screen. Instead of concealing the body, the sculpture celebrates it by presenting twenty-one drawings of nudes suspended in translucent plexi. <\/div>\r\n
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Fall 2024 Juxtapoz<\/i> Quarterly Print Edition, featuring cover art by Koak<\/figcaption><\/figure>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/section>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
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Simply put, if we agree that art is an expression that creates a reaction, what has a life in art meant for you? A message, a gateway for the viewer, a reference to revisit, or something else you can define?<\/b><\/div>\r\n
It\u2019s all of these things and more; by nature, it's not easily defined. Art is a deeply essential and ongoing conversation between the artists, the viewer, and the work. Paradoxically, my life as an artist and the process of creating work have also been very isolating, with hours spent in the studio not interacting with the outside world. Ultimately, it\u2019s about connection and communication, with the intention of making something personal that resonates on a universal level and is made personal again by you, the viewer. <\/div>\r\n
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Koak\u2019s solo show, Lake Margrethe, will be on view at Perrotin in Paris<\/a> from August 31\u2014October 5, 2024 \/\/ This interview was originally published in the Juxtapoz FALL 2024 Quarterly<\/a> print edition. <\/i><\/b><\/div>\r\n
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Humor me, Koak. I like to imagine that you are a Pisces, the water sign seductively symbolized by two fish swimming in opposite directions, a fluid hula of fantasy and reality, a healer, feminine, intuitive, and obviously, creative. In abstracting your mesmerizing figures, a universal language is delivered as you imbue each thoughtful subject with a dignified singularity. Fine, spare lines speak directly with the economy of a master cartoonist, while windows, roads and mirrors invite viewers to peer through layered curtains and filtering leaves. And the colors, how deliberately they\u2019re summoned, mixed into hues that suffuse the paintings with an ocean of depth. So if not the sun, maybe an ascending or moon in Pisces, definitely the Zodiak\u2019s favorite artist. We met for a clearly illuminating chat in the Dogpatch area warehouse studio she shares with her gallerist-husband, Kevin Krueger, owner of San Francisco\u2019s Alter Space.<\/p>","event":{"BeforeDisplay":"","AfterDisplay":"","AfterDisplayTitle":"","BeforeDisplayContent":"","AfterDisplayContent":"","K2BeforeDisplay":"","K2AfterDisplay":"","K2AfterDisplayTitle":"","K2BeforeDisplayContent":"","K2AfterDisplayContent":""},"jcfields":[],"videoClass":false,"twitter_introtext":""},{"id":"73251","title":"FALL 2024 Quarterly Preview: Koak, Sickid, Wendy Red Star, Mars-1, Saj Issa and More","alias":"fall-2024-quarterly-preview-koak-sickid-wendy-red-star-mars-1-saj-issa-and-more","catid":"24","published":"1","introtext":"

\u201cI paint what I like, when I like and where I like, with occasional nostalgic journeys.\u201d\u2014David Hockney, 1962<\/strong><\/em><\/p>","fulltext":"

How brash was Hockney, full of that youthful zeal and self-confidence shared by countless artists with a similar aspiration to set the world afire with their talent and energy. For Hockney, it was about seeing meaning in everything, seeing art everywhere. On a flight home from Aberdeen, Scotland, this past June, I was thinking of the confluence of topics that were taking shape  for the Fall Quarterly, a mixture of artists on the precipice of career-altering solo shows, along with deeper discussions of cultural heritage, war, climate change, communication, fascism, and by the end of the summer, perhaps a renewed sense of community and purpose.

The quote from Hockney felt appropriate for this issue in terms of the idea of painting what you like and where you like it. The Nuart Festival in Aberdeen this year, curated under the relevant topic of \u201cliving heritage,\u201d addressed the dynamism of cultural heritage in its continuous transformation and interpretations as it is shaped and transmitted from generation to generation. The ephemeral nature of street art versus the archival nature of the museum's role was a central discussion as well. What I love about Nuart is that both completely possess their own merit, as they serve a role in our society. We need the intangibility of street art and the preservation of the museum, and they do work together in harmony. There should be no fear in asking our museum's to be privy to our public discussion of how much cultural heritage  evolves, just as the streets should be welcome to a museum\u2019s ability to interpret and archive our culture.

These different voices and avenues come to mind when composing a quarterly: where we find art, the aesthetics that seem to resonate, the subjects that move us. How do we achieve balance? It\u2019s about giving space and importance to each moment, assuring all discussions are open to new possibilities of how and where art emerges. Fall Quarterly <\/a>cover artist Koak<\/a> perfectly capsulized this with her observation that, \u201cUltimately, it\u2019s about connection and communication, with the intention of making something personal that resonates on a universal level and is made personal again by you, the viewer.\u201d
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This issue takes seriously conversations about respect and appreciation for cultural heritage. There are conversations about the politics of landscape painting in the West Bank with Palestinian-American painter Saj Issa<\/a>. Sickid<\/a> explores graffiti and first-generation immigrant heritage. Wendy Red Star<\/a> dedicates her practice to the Aps\u00e1alooke in southern Montana, Glasgow\u2019s Hannah Wilson<\/a> thinks in the subtle, cinematic imagery, and Abram Jackson explains how museums embody these concepts. In the spirit of this issue, we learn the real life experience and perspective of Canadian painter Natia Lemay<\/a>, who first entered a gallery space when she was 33 years old.

This may end up being a pivotal fall for many of us, and as Juxtapoz ends its 30th year, we are reminded that the artists speak not only from a personal perspective but with a reverence for what is beautifully universal. Perfect harmony. \u2014Evan Pricco, Juxtapoz editor<\/em>

Subscribe or Buy FALL 2024 here<\/a>. <\/strong><\/em><\/p>\r\n

Featured artists in FALL 2024 include Koak, Sickid, Hannah Wilson, Wendy Red Star, Elizabeth Glaessner, Saj Issa, Joseph Olisaemeka Wilson, Meegan Barnes, Mars-1, Natia Lemay, Pia Paulina Guilmoth, a spotlight on the contemporary art movement in Mexico, the history of color at Winsor & Newton, and a conversation with the Director of Interpretation at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Abram 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\u201cI paint what I like, when I like and where I like, with occasional nostalgic journeys.\u201d\u2014David Hockney, 1962<\/strong><\/em><\/p>","event":{"BeforeDisplay":"","AfterDisplay":"","AfterDisplayTitle":"","BeforeDisplayContent":"","AfterDisplayContent":"","K2BeforeDisplay":"","K2AfterDisplay":"","K2AfterDisplayTitle":"","K2BeforeDisplayContent":"","K2AfterDisplayContent":""},"jcfields":[],"videoClass":false,"twitter_introtext":""},{"id":"73252","title":"Radio Juxtapoz, ep 146: What's Absolutely Necessary with Hannah Wilson","alias":"radio-juxtapoz-ep-146-what-s-absolutely-necessary-with-hannah-wilson","catid":"24","published":"1","introtext":"When you open up the Fall 2024 Juxtapoz Quarterly, our colleague Kristin Farr brings up a caveat when looking (or hearing) about the works of Hannah Wilson. \"Embedded in this interview is a required <\/span><\/span>","fulltext":"